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Monthly Archives: July 2016

What’s In a Name?

27 Wednesday Jul 2016

Posted by Ollamh in Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Narrative Methods

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Adventure, akaletes, Baggins, Bilbo, Chico, cyclops, Gollum, Groucho, Marx Brothers, Odysseus, Polyphemus, Riddles in the Dark, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Odyssey, Tolkien, trolls, xenia

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

In this posting, we are interested in the use and danger of using names in the history of the Ring, as well as looking at a possible parallel from an earlier heroic story.  How dangerous can a name be?

In Chapter 5 of The Hobbit, Bilbo makes what is almost a fatal mistake—not for himself so much as for Frodo, and not at the time, so much as some 77 years later.

Confronted by the curious Gollum deep under the Misty Mountains, Bilbo has responded to Gollum’s, “What iss he, my preciouss?” with, “I am Mr. Bilbo Baggins.”

The Riddle Game

First, of course, he hasn’t answered the question. He was asked what, not who. And, from Gollum’s viewpoint, in which seemingly all animate things are potentially at least a snack, if not a full meal (“I guess it’s a choice feast; at least a tasty morsel it’d make us, gollum!” The Hobbit, Chapter 5, “Riddles in the Dark”), “What is it?” is the more appropriate question.

Second, depending on the culture, names can have a much greater significance than simply being social identifiers. If your culture has a strong belief in magic, then your personal name is a point of vulnerability: someone who wishes to control you can use it in summoning spells. This is probably why, for example, Circe, in Book 10 of the Odyssey, when she can’t turn Odysseus into a pig, as she had already done with part of his crew, says that he’s akaletes—literally, “uncallable by name”. Although the story as we have it doesn’t say so, we can presume that, as he does in another circumstance—which we’re about to discuss—he gives the enchantress a false name and therefore escapes her magic.

This is not the first time Bilbo has slipped, however. William, the troll, has already asked, “What are yer?” And Bilbo has replied, “Bilbo Baggins, a bur-a hobbit.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 2, “Roast Mutton”)

TN-Trolls_colour_sketch

(By one of our favorite Tolkien artists, Ted Nasmith)

Again, Bilbo has given the wrong answer (reminding us of a scene in the Marx Brothers movie, Horsefeathers, 1932, where Chico, as Baravelli, the doorkeeper of a speakeasy, demands of Groucho, “Who are you?” to which Groucho replies, “I’m fine, thanks. Who are you?”).

Password Scene

He has also complicated matters by almost saying “burglar” (he’s just tried to steal William’s purse, after all, which has, in fact, asked him “’Ere, ‘oo are you?”), but, by changing it at the last moment, he’s then created a new confusion, as the trolls simultaneously ask, “A burrahobbit?” and William adds, “What’s a burrahobbit got to do with my pocket, anyways?”

(We also ask, is there a very mild joke here—“burra” could easily sound like “burrow” and, since hobbits traditionally lived in tunnels…?)

Gandalf and daylight take care of the trolls,

img__Art-The_Three_Trolls_are_Turned_to_Stone,_by_JRRT

but Gollum is another matter. Bilbo, caught off guard, gives him his name. This, in turn, under torture, is passed on to Sauron, now aware that the Ring has (literally) resurfaced on Middle-earth. And, somehow, the names “hobbits” and “Shire” have been added to Bilbo’s name, as Gandalf tells Frodo (The Fellowship of the Ring, Chapter 2, “The Shadow of the Past”). To find out more, Sauron sends out his search team, the Nazgul, and the danger begins…

ellenkurkinazgul

(A wonderfully atmospheric watercolor by Ella Kurki)

Odysseus, whom we mentioned earlier, has also been involved with a large and menacing creature, Polyphemus, the Cyclops, in Book 9 of the Odyssey.

Head-of-Polyphemos-Captmondo-wikimedia-commons

Having a little more experience of danger and living in a world where magic may be anywhere, he is more wary, however, than Bilbo and, when asked his name, replies “Ootis”, which is Greek for “Nobody”.

Scholars have argued for a very long time as to why Polyphemus, who has a Greek name (“The Much-Spoken-Of”) and speaks perfectly good Greek, can be so easily taken in by such a transparent trick and there are lots of theories to explain it. Perhaps, however, the answer is simply to point to Bilbo’s trolls, whom Tolkien describes as “slow in the uptake”—that is, they are not very quick to assess a new situation. Is this the case with Polyphemus? Or, being as big as he is, and not fearing the gods (as he informs Odysseus), perhaps he ignores Odysseus’ reply as simply part of the guest ritual known as xenia, in which, it is clear from his behavior, he does not believe anyway?

Over and over again, in the Odyssey, we see this social pattern, called xenia, which means something like “guest-friendship”, enacted   In this pattern, a person comes to another’s house in need of food and shelter. There is then a ritual, in which:

  1. the potential guest appeals to the householder
  2. the householder fulfills that person’s wants
  3. in return the person tells his name and his story
  1. the host gives the person guest-gifts and sends him on his way
  2. should he—or anyone to whom he’s related—be in the guest’s territory in the future, he can claim the same hospitality from the guest—and this can be passed down through generations

In the case of Polyphemus, Odysseus and his men have come to Polyphemus’ cave and helped themselves to his food while he was absent, therefore immediately disturbing the pattern. When the Cyclops comes home, his response is to kill and eat two of Odysseus’ men, a grim parody of the custom, in which he should be feeding them, not feeding on them. The situation escalates, with more men eaten, until Odysseus formulates an escape plan which includes getting the Cyclops drunk

Cyclops-Homer

and putting out his eye,

cyclops2

then using a flock of sheep as an escape vehicle.

FrCyclopsEscape

In the meantime, however, Polyphemus has asked for Odysseus’ name, gotten the “Nobody” answer, and offered a guest-gift in return: the Cyclops will eat Odysseus last. The plan works, Odysseus and his surviving men escape (with the sheep), and get back to their ship, but then things go wrong again. Even blind, Polyphemus pursues them and, tossing mountain tops, almost brings them back to shore.

cyclops3

They do manage to row out of range, however, but then Odysseus, seeming to destroy completely his earlier “Nobody” trick, and much to his crew’s horror, shouts out to the Cyclops not only who he really is, but where he lives, as well. What’s going on here?

polyphemos

Bilbo has twice, inadvertently, provided others with his name, if not his address.  Although Odysseus may be more able when it comes to thinking quickly in a dangerous situation than Bilbo, he also belongs to what is called a “face culture”. This means that who you are is a public thing. You only gain credit if you do things publically and your name is attached to what you do. In Odysseus’ case, he has bested a monster and avenged the deaths of his crewmen and it is important that that monster knows who did it. Unfortunately, that monster is the son of the sea god, Poseidon, to whom he prays for revenge and, knowing Odysseus’ name and address, this is a bit more pinpointed than simply saying, “Get that guy who put out my eye, dad!”

poseidon.jpg

Bilbo blundered into the territory of Gollum and, through inexperience and surprise, brought trouble, in time, to Frodo. Odysseus, having concealed his identity successfully, then exposed himself because his society and his position in that society required it. In turn, he returns home alone and on someone else’s ship, having brought trouble on himself and his crew.  In answer to our initial question, “How dangerous can a name be?”  The answer appears to be, “Very.”

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

 

Terrifyingly Funny? (Part 2)

20 Wednesday Jul 2016

Posted by Ollamh in J.R.R. Tolkien, Language, Narrative Methods, Villains

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Andy Serkis, Ben Gunn, Bilbo, Deagol, Gollum, Received Standard English, Riddles in the Dark, Smeagol, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Treasure Island

Dear Readers, welcome, as always.

In the first part of this posting, we began to think out loud about the idea of characters in Tolkien who might combine menace and comedy. Our first idea had been to consider Gollum—

Gollum_Render.png

but not the Lord of the Rings Gollum, at least not at first glance.

The idea then took us backwards to the large, rather dim trolls of The Hobbit, who certainly seemed to display that combination.

trolls.jpg

And The Hobbit brings us back to Gollum.

All Tolkien readers must know, we imagine, that the book which JRRT published in 1937 was a very different kind of book from what gradually grew up around it. Here, for example, is the beginning of the reader’s introduction to Smeagol (a name never used in The Hobbit, of course):

“Deep down here by the dark water lived old Gollum…” (The Hobbit, Chapter 5, “Riddles in the Dark”)

To us, this sounds like it could easily begin, “Once upon a time, deep down by the dark water, lived Old Gollum”, as if it were the opening of a fairy tale and The Hobbit was, of course, originally conceived of and written as a children’s book.

“Old Gollum”, by that name, might have been a cantankerous but lovable geezer—but the line continues, “a small slimy creature”. “Slimy” then leads to “dark as darkness, except for two big round pale eyes in his thin face…He liked meat too. Goblin he thought good, when he could get it; but he took care they never found him out. He just throttled them from behind…” And then, presumably, he ate them raw (as he does fish in The Hobbit and he would coneys in The Lord of the Rings), as Gollum’s level of civilization seems to begin and end with the little boat which he has—although where the materials came from for that is never explained. (Gandalf, in “The Shadow of the Past”, says that the Stoors and Fallowhides, to whom Gollum/Smeagol belonged, made boats out of reeds.)

In our last posting, we pointed to the speech of the trolls in The Hobbit as one possible source of humor.

THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY

Unlike the main characters, who spoke a Middle-earth version of RSE (Received Standard English), they displayed a number of the linguistic elements of lower-class London which are often used to show class—or even species?–difference (think of the orcs who carry off Merry and Pippin, for example) in Tolkien. If this is combined with the topics of their conversation—mainly about food, some of it sheep, but also both humans and dwarves—we then have what we set out to find, menace and humor.

As for Gollum, he certainly has a very distinctive form of speech. First, there’s his habit of carrying on a conversation with himself even in the presence of others. It reminds us of the talk of Ben Gunn,

bengunn

who was marooned by Captain Flint in Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1881-2; 1883) and has clearly developed a similar habit:

“If you was sent by Long John,” said he, “I’m as good as pork and I know it. But where was you, do you suppose?” (Treasure Island, Chapter XV, “The Man of the Island”)

There are four other distinctive elements of Gollum’s speech. First, there is that gollum. The narrator says of it:

“And when he said gollum he made a horrible swallowing noise in his throat.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 5, “Riddles in the Dark”)

Andy Serkis, who is the voice (and movement) of Gollum in the Jackson films, has, in interviews, said that the noise he makes is modeled upon his cat throwing up a hairball. As Tolkien has called it “a horrible swallowing noise”, it would seem that this is, in fact, the opposite sound from what is wanted. So what should it sound like—that is, and still sound like “gollum”? The word has two syllables—perhaps we might think that the noise would depend upon which syllable bore the primary accent: GOL-lum or gol-LUM. To us, accenting the first has more of a choky feel to it and the second more of a froggy. (We also wonder, knowing Gandalf’s later explanation of how Smeagol acquired the Ring, whether, in fact, Smeagol is actually imitating the noise Deagol made as he struggled for breath.)

A second element is his incessant referring—in the 1937 edition—to himself as “my precious”. In the 1951 revision, and beyond, Gollum can call both himself and the Ring by the term, and we are of two minds about the change. On the one hand, the 1937 version reflects what interests us: a word of tender endearment mixed with a murderous intent, all within Gollum. On the other, the post-1951 version’s double usage presents us with a picture of a creature so enslaved to the Ring that he uses that term of endearment (and we also know, from Gandalf’s later explanation, that the Ring does not return the affection, making it even more horrible). As well, others touched by the Ring can be seen as infected by its power when they use the expression.

bilbowithring

Third—and more potentially comic—is Gollum’s actual language. There are the odd expressions, sometimes based on actual older English expressions—“Bless us and save us” becomes “Bless us and splash us”, example.   As well, there are the non-standard words like “bitsy” (a kind of diminutive) and plurals—“handses”, “eggses”, “pocketses”.

Fourth is the stressed sssssssssssssssssssssibilance. JRRT himself points to this in a letter to Rayner Unwin in a correction to the 1937 edition: “Not that Gollum would miss the chance of a sibilant.” (cited in Anderson, The Annotated Hobbit, 120, note 9)

Taken altogether, this makes for a very distinctive—and very different speaker from any other in The Hobbit (or The Lord of the Rings, for that matter) and this is clear from the very start of the conversation between Gollum and Bilbo:

“What iss he, my preciouss?”…

“I am Mr. Bilbo Baggins. I have lost the dwarves and I have lost the wizard, and I don’t know where I am and I don’t want to know, if only I can get away.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 5, “Riddles in the Dark”)

The menace is there in Gollum, from the very beginning:

“Bless us and splash us, my precioussss! I guess it’s a choice feast; at least a tasty morsel it’d make us, gollum!” (The Hobbit, Chapter 5, “Riddles in the Dark”)

And we would suggest that the humor is there, too, in the very same speech: the twisted expression, the self-address, the use of “my precioussss”, and the hissy sibilance. Tolkien, though personally drily witty, was not—nor intended to be—a comic writer. What he could do well, we suggest, is use that which interested him deeply—language and its expression—combine it, for contrast, with a certain darkness of theme, as here, and allow the reader to feel a kind of grim amusement in the balance–or imbalance–between what’s being said and how.

What do you think, dear readers?

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

Allons, enfants!

14 Thursday Jul 2016

Posted by Ollamh in Literary History, Military History

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Across the Doubtful Sea, Alexandre Dumas, Bastille, Bastille Day, Bastille Day parade, Beau Geste, Bernard Cornwell, Brigadier Gerard, C.S. Forester, CD, Charles X, Conan Doyle, Cyrano de Bergerac, de Bougainville, Edmond Rostand, Eugene Leliepvre, French Foreign Legion, French Royal Navy, Hornblower, King's French Guard, Louis Philippe, Marquis de Montcalm, Napoleon, Place de la Bastille, Place Henri Galli, Sharpe, South Pacific, The Three Musketeers

Dear readers, chers lecteurs,

Welcome/bienvenue as always/comme toujours. This is a special extra posting for our faithful French readers, but really for all of our readers who love adventure and history—and that, as far as we can tell, is everyone who regularly reads us.

When we were thinking about this special Bastille Day extra, we wondered what we should write about.

We could, of course, write about the original Bastille day, 14 July, 1789, when a crowd of brave and angry Parisians, aided by some members of the King’s French Guard, attacked the 14th-century fortress-turned-state-prison, and forced its surrender.

Bastille_1715

l'attaquesurlabastille(We can’t resist a visual footnote– you’ll notice the people to the right in dark blue with the fuzzy hats. These are members of a grenadier company of the French Guard. Here’s a larger and more modern illustration of these Guards by one of our favorite French military artists, Eugene Leliepvre.)

leliepvregardefrancaise

Not satisfied with capturing the place, the revolutionaries soon tore it down, and it’s now the Place de la Bastille, with a column, erected in 1840, commemorating the revolution of 1830, in which the last member of the Bourbon monarchy, Charles X, was overthrown and was replaced by his cousin, Louis Philippe.

demolitiondelabastille

Place_de_la_Bastille,_1878

In 1899, a small section of one of the Bastille’s towers was discovered during metro excavations and is now on display in the Place Henri Galli, not far from its original site.

la-bastille1Paris4_SquareHenriGalli_VestigesBastille_Nov09

The Revolution which followed the fall of the Bastille brought on the era of Napoleon and, for those of us interested in adventure and who read English, at sea, C.S. Forester’s “Hornblower” series, among others, and, on land, Bernard Cornwell’s “Sharpe” series and, long before that, the “Brigadier Gerard” stories of Conan Doyle. Hornblower and others have appeared in some of our earlier postings, when we discussed sources for our first novel, Across the Doubtful Sea, set in an imaginary South Pacific in the 18th century,

Across Cover

but we’ve never looked at Gerard or Sharpe. And we would be glad if our French readers would offer comparable books in French for this period (one of us grew up in a Francophile household and reads French). One reason why heroes in our first novel are members of the French Royal Navy is that the period from 1750 to 1800 is filled with adventure, both in exploration and in war, and that navy is constantly involved, something of which English readers have no knowledge.

img_9168

(Another color plate by Leliepvre.)

One has only to remember de Bougainville (1729-1811),

Louis_Antoine_de_Bougainville_-_Portrait_par_Jean-Pierre_Franquel

who began his career as an aide to the Marquis de Montcalm, the daring and resourceful commander of French regular forces in New France, 1756-1759.

The_Victory_of_Montcalms_Troops_at_Carillon_by_Henry_Alexander_Ogden

In the 1780s, however, he had become a naval commander, leading an exploratory expedition to the South Pacific.

51_Pacific_02-419x600

Throughout the later 17th and 18th centuries, the French Navy formed a large part of the French struggle for commercial supremacy across the world.

Quibcardinaux2

Or then again, as we’ve done once before, we could go back to the 17th century and write about Alexandre Dumas and his famous musketeers, who first appeared in The Three Musketeers (1844).

alexandre-dumas-3TheThreeMusketeers099

Or there is the wonderful play Cyrano de Bergerac (1897) by Edmond Rostand, set about 1640. We could easily write a posting about the amazing scene in the first act alone, where, at the Hotel de Bourgogne, Cyrano fights a duel and composes a ballade at the same time.

Edmond_Rostand_en_habit_vert_01

cyrano_acte1

What else? Hmm. How about the French Foreign Legion of one of our favorite old adventure movies, Beau Geste (1939)?

beaugeste1939

And then a final then again, perhaps it’s best just to wish everyone a happy Bastille Day and end with some dramatic views from a previous parade…

defile114 Juillet 2013defile3

Merci, nos lecteurs/thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

Terrifyingly Funny? (Part 1)

13 Wednesday Jul 2016

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Fairy Tales and Myths, Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Language, Literary History, Narrative Methods, Villains

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Adventure, Among Gnomes and Trolls, Bilbo, comic, Gandalf, Gollum, humor, John Bauer, Middle-earth, Pēro & Pōdex, Roast Mutton, Stone Trolls, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Through the Looking-Glass, Tolkien, Tommies, trolls, Victorian Drawing Room

Dear Readers, welcome, as always.

This is going to be a two-part posting because– well, it began as one thing, and then became another. We were thinking about Gollum, not as the grim and tormented figure we know from The Lord of the Rings, but rather as the muttering, riddling cave-dweller of The Hobbit. We were wondering if we could see Gollum not only as menacing, but as comic, as well.

Gollum_Render.png

Then, however, we began to think about other such figures, and one of us said to the other, “What about the trolls in The Hobbit?”. The other replied, “we see them before we see Gollum. Maybe we should start with them.”

And so we shall.

It’s clear where Tolkien got his trolls– they’re all over the fairy tales he had been reading since childhood, and they form a component of the traditional Scandinavian literature in which he had been interested for nearly as long. They are commonly large, and not terrifically bright, and often possess an anxiety about daylight. One of our favorite illustrators of such creatures is John Bauer (1882-1918), who, among other works, contributed illustrations to an ongoing series of volumes appropriately titled Among Gnomes and Trolls. Here, for example, is one of his depictions of the latter.

John_Bauer_1915.jpg

And, because we can’t resist– can we ever? Here are a couple more illustrations by Bauer.

bauer5.jpgJohn_Bauer07.jpg

Even before The Hobbit, however, Tolkien had produced a literary troll. In 1926, he wrote the first version of a poem to be sung to the folk song “The Fox Went Out”, called “Pēro & Pōdex”(“Boot and Bottom”). It survives  in a later version in chapter 12 of Book 1 of The Lord of the Rings, beginning “Troll sat alone on his seat of stone”.

In The Hobbit, the trolls are grouped around a fire, drinking and eating and immediately recognizable:

“But they were trolls.  Obviously trolls.  Even Bilbo, in spite of his sheltered life, could see that:  from the great heavy faces of them, and their size, and the shape of their legs, not to mention their language, which was not drawing-room fashion at all, at all.”  (The Hobbit, Chapter 2, “Roast Mutton”)

tumblr_m6wyygQDLc1ru50yro1_1280.jpg

Douglas Anderson, in his invaluable The Annotated Hobbit, says that “Tolkien presents the Trolls’ speech in a comic, lower-class dialect” (70). In fact, we wonder whether, as in the case of the later orcs in The Lord of the Rings, we are not seeing a reflection of the speech of some of the Tommies whom Tolkien had commanded in the Great War.

roads_bef1914.jpg

” ‘Mutton yesterday, mutton today, and blimey, if it don’t look like mutton again tomorrer,’ said one of the trolls.

‘Never a blinking bit of manflesh have we had for long enough,’ said a second. ‘What the ‘ell William was a-thinkin; of to bring us into these parts at all, beats me – and the drink runnin’ short, what’s more,’ he said jogging the elbow of William, who was taking a pull at his jug” (The Hobbit, Chapter 2, “Roast Mutton”).

Besides what sounds like a reference to a line in Through the Looking-Glass (1871), “The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday – but never jam to-day,” with their “blimey” and “blinking”, the trolls are immediately labeled by their speech as lower-class, potentially thuggish, and certainly not people invited to a formal drawing room like this–

drawingroom1890ssmall.JPG

Of course, we might ask ourselves, why should trolls talk like that anyway? And we might then reply, because Tolkien is mixing language for comic effect. Bilbo, Gandalf, and the dwarves speak in non-dialect standard English. Therefore, there’s an especially strong contrast here. As well, what the trolls are saying can be funny in itself, as when William says to the discontented other trolls,

” ‘Yer can’t expect folk to stop here for ever just to be et by you and Bert. You’ve et a village and a half between yer, since we come down from the mountains. What more d’yer want?’ ” (The Hobbit, Chapter 2, “Roast Mutton”).

Here, we have comic exaggeration combined with the frustrated defensiveness of a leader whose tactics are being questioned by subordinates.

The tension grows as the scene progresses.  Bilbo appears, is nabbed by a purse which sounds like the Trolls, the Trolls fall to fisticuffs while arguing over Bilbo and then over the dwarves whom they capture, and Gandalf, imitating various Troll voices, so stirs the pot that the Trolls never notice when the first beam of sunlight cuts across their clearing and they are petrified.

jrrt_14.jpg

So, if we consider what the Trolls have been doing previously–“Never a blinking bit of manflesh have we had for long enough…” says one, as well as what they discuss doing not only to Bilbo, but to the whole of Thorin & Co., these could seem to be grim figures, indeed.  Then again, they sound like comic cockneys, they have ludicrously-large appetites, and they are dim enough to be taken in very easily by Gandalf’s ventriloquism.   So, grim and funny at the same time.

On the whole, humor is more an element in The Hobbit than in The Lord of the Rings, but we believe that perhaps because of his initial appearance in The Hobbit, Gollum may have both the menace and the humor, at times , of these gormless Trolls, as we hope to show in Part 2.

Thanks, as always, for reading,

MTCIDC,

CD

Ambiguity in Oz

06 Wednesday Jul 2016

Posted by Ollamh in Films and Music, Literary History, Narrative Methods, Theatre and Performance, Villains

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Adventure, Aldus Manutius, Captain Cyril Turner, condensation trail, Epsom Downs, James Pollard, Let's eat grandma, Oz, punctuation, skywriting, Surrender Dorothy, The Wizard of Oz, the Wright brothers, Wicked Witch

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always.

It was a bright, breezy morning yesterday and we were looking up at a contrail (short for “con(densation) trail”)

Contrail.jpg

which brought to mind this message:

surrender2.jpg

from the 1939 movie, The Wizard of Oz. At this moment in the movie, the four friends (and Toto),

dorothyandfriends.jpg

seemingly welcome in the Emerald City, have been enjoying their welcome when the happy music stops at a shriek, and they look up to see the Wicked Witch of the West skywriting.

In the US in 1939, artificial flying objects would hardly have been a surprise. After 1903,

First_flight2.jpg

and certainly after the Great War

dogfight

aircraft were increasingly common—even up to massive dirigibles.

Hindenburg_over_New_York_1937

Skywriting—

aerialadvertising1930s

is said to have been first commercially employed in 1922 at Epsom Downs, in England,

horace-walter-nicholls-crowds-on-derby-day-epsom-downs-surre

where Captain Cyril Turner wrote “Daily Mail” over the race track.

James_Pollard_-_Epsom_Races-_The_Race_Over1835.jpg

(This is a painting by James Pollard from 1835, but we couldn’t resist its detail.)

It appeared over New York City for the first time shortly afterward.

In Oz, however, the usual airborne objects appear to have been:

  1. crows

crowsinoz

  1. witcheswitchflying

Glinda-Wizard-Oz

  1. monkeys

flyingmonkey1gifflyingmonkeys

(To which we might add 4. balloons—although there is only one and it’s not a native product.)

ballooninwizard

Thus, a thing like a flying house

Tornado-with-house

would have been more than a little disturbing (and still is, here in this world)—especially when it landed on a major political figure.

houseonwitch

As well, although witches fly in Oz, as far as we know, they are not given to delivering messages by air.

(This message, by the way, was:

  1. made by using a hypodermic needle filled with black ink to write on the bottom of a glass tank filled with colored water
  2. originally longer—here is what it first said:

extendedwwwskywriting)

Equally disturbing to us, however, is the ambiguous (from Latin amb-, “both” and ag- “to drive”—hence, “to go in two directions”) nature of the message—all due to a (potentially) missing comma.

Modern western punctuation took several centuries to appear and mature, beginning with the work of the early printer, Aldus Manutius (the Elder—1449-1515) in the later 15th century.

Aldus_ManutiusAldo_Manuzio_Aristotele

On the whole, modern native English-speakers tend to use the same practices, although an inverted prepositional phrase in American English, for example, has a comma, where British English does not.

Uninverted: There were about twenty fresh crabs in the sink.

Inverted (US): In the sink, there were about twenty fresh crabs.

Inverted (UK): In the sink there were about twenty fresh crabs.

When this is spoken by any native-speaker, there is a slight pause after “sink” and the point of the comma (a point which goes back to 16th-century rhetorical texts, in which punctuation is intended to be used like rests in music, as a series of directional signals as to pauses) is to signal that natural pause.

There is no ambiguity either way in the model sentence, but what about in the Witch’s command?

As it stands, “Surrender Dorothy”, without a comma, is a kind of general imperative—it could perhaps be addressed to all of Oz—and thus easily explained in a longer construction, like “Oz! Surrender Dorothy”—perhaps with the original conclusion “or Die!”

But is this the Witch’s intention? Insert the comma and you have a command directed specifically—and solely–to Dorothy: “Surrender, Dorothy!”   (As we learn when Dorothy is in the hands of the Witch, the deleted part of the message “Or Die” is not quite accurate—the Witch wants the Ruby Slippers, but can’t get them without killing the wearer, so that the real message should be “Surrender, Dorothy—and Die!”—which is hardly likely to be persuasive!)

There is a cartoon about English punctuation which has circulated for some years:

letseatgrandmacorrection

In the version without the comma, it’s an invitation to eat grandma. With the comma, it’s an invitation to eat with grandma. In the case of the Witch’s message, what do you think: is it a command to Oz, or to Dorothy?

surrenderpartialview

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

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