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Monthly Archives: August 2018

Gobs and Hobs.2

29 Wednesday Aug 2018

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

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A Midsummer Night's Dream, Arthur Rackham, Christina Rossetti, Elf Child, Fairies, Fairy Tale, George Macdonald, Goblin Feet, Goblin Market, Goblins, Historia Ecclesiastica, Hobgoblin, James Whitcomb Riley, John Garth, John Singer Sargent, King Edward's Horse, Little Orphan Annie, Orderic Vitalis, Pat Walsh, Psalm 91, Robin Goodfellow, The Crowfield Curse, The Crowfield Demon, The Hob and the Deerman, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Princess and the Goblin, Tolkien, Tolkien and the Great War, Tolkien at Exeter College

As always, dear Readers, welcome!

In our last, we were talking about JRRT’s 1915 poem, “Goblin Feet” its origins, original publication, and context.

In this, we want to think out loud a bit about the idea of goblins in general.

Although the poem was entitled “Goblin Feet”, Tolkien seemed not to focus so much on goblins—there are also other creatures from the Otherworld, including fairies and gnomes and even leprechauns (not to mention bats—called by their old country name “flitter-mice”—and beetles and coneys).

In this posting, however, we’re going to stick to goblins—well, and hobgoblins—but more about those later.

We first encountered goblins as very small children when a teacher read us a poem by the American poet, James Whitcomb Riley (1849-1916).

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(We can’t resist a second picture.  This is by one of our favorite late-19th-early-20th-c. American Painters, John Singer Sargent—1856-1925.)

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This poem, first entitled “Elf Child”, originally appeared in a newspaper in 1885.  After that, it was meant to be “Little Orphan Allie”, but, owing to a typsetter’s error, it gained its present title, which it’s had ever since.

Little Orphant Annie – Poem by James Whitcomb Riley

To all the little children: — The happy ones; and sad ones;
The sober and the silent ones; the boisterous and glad ones;
The good ones — Yes, the good ones, too; and all the lovely bad ones.

Little Orphant Annie’s come to our house to stay,
An’ wash the cups an’ saucers up, an’ brush the crumbs away,
An’ shoo the chickens off the porch, an’ dust the hearth, an’ sweep,
An’ make the fire, an’ bake the bread, an’ earn her board-an’-keep;
An’ all us other childern, when the supper-things is done,
We set around the kitchen fire an’ has the mostest fun
A-list’nin’ to the witch-tales ‘at Annie tells about,
An’ the Gobble-uns ‘ll git you
Ef you
Don’t
Watch
Out!

Wunst they wuz a little boy wouldn’t say his prayers,–
An’ when he went to bed at night, away up-stairs,
His Mammy heerd him holler, an’ his Daddy heerd him bawl,
An’ when they turn’t the kivvers down, he wuzn’t there at all!
An’ they seeked him in the rafter-room, an’ cubby-hole, an’ press,
An’ seeked him up the chimbly-flue, an’ ever’-wheres, I guess;
But all they ever found wuz jist his pants an’ roundabout:–
An’ the Gobble-uns ‘ll git you
Ef you
Don’t
Watch
Out!

An’ one time a little girl ‘ud allus laugh an’ grin,
An’ make fun of ever’ one, an’ all her blood-an’-kin;
An’ wunst, when they was ‘company,’ an’ ole folks wuz there,
She mocked ’em an’ shocked ’em, an’ said she didn’t care!
An’ jist as she kicked her heels, an’ turn’t to run an’ hide,
They wuz two great big Black Things a-standin’ by her side,
An’ they snatched her through the ceilin’ ‘fore she knowed what she’s about!
An’ the Gobble-uns ‘ll git you
Ef you
Don’t
Watch
Out!

An’ little Orphant Annie says, when the blaze is blue,
An’ the lamp-wick sputters, an’ the wind goes woo-oo!
An’ you hear the crickets quit, an’ the moon is gray,
An’ the lightnin’-bugs in dew is all squenched away,–
You better mind yer parunts, an’ yer teachurs fond an’ dear,
An’ churish them ‘as loves you, an’ dry the orphant’s tear,
An’ he’p the pore an’ needy ones ‘at clusters all about,
Er the Gobble-uns ‘ll git you
Ef you
Don’t
Watch
Out!

In some ways, this is a typical Victorian moral poem:  children better behave, or…  But, instead of being in “proper” English, it’s been told in the dialect of the US state of Indiana and this was something for which Riley was well-known, having written numbers of poems in the so-called “Hoosier” dialect.  (This includes what looks like a misprint for the proper spelling “orphan”.)

Our acquaintance with goblins has continued to be literary, from Christina Rossetti’s (1830-1894)

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Goblin Market (1862)

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to George Macdonald’s (1824-1905)

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1872 fantasy novel, The Princess and the Goblin.

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Our biggest—and longest—exposure, of course, was in The Hobbit (1937).

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Goblins turn up from the moment Bilbo and the dwarves fall into their hands in Chapter 4, “Over Hill and Under Hill” and we see them again in their pursuit of the party once they’ve escaped the goblin stronghold and finally at the Battle of the Five Armies.  At their first appearance, they are described as “great ugly-looking goblins” and, unlike the nimble-footed creatures of Tolkien’s 1915 poem, these have flat feet and flap them as they move.  They live in a monarchy, ruled (for the moment) by a king described as “a tremendous goblin with a huge head”.

So far, we might see that as traditional nightmarish beings, like the “great big Black Things” in stanza 3 of Riley’s poem, but JRRT does something further and very interesting with them.  This first novel was written in the 1930s, only twenty years after the Great War which had ruined much of western Europe and killed all but one of Tolkien’s oldest friends, and the emotional scar was still fresh, it seems.  He was too humane (and too wise) to blame Germany for what had happened, but it’s clear that he wouldn’t excuse the Industrial Revolution and the goblins become a stand-in for all the worse of it:

“Hammers, axes, swords, daggers, pickaxes, tongs, and also instruments of torture, they make very well, or get other people to make to their designs, prisoners and slaves that have to work till they die for want of air and light.  It is not unlikely that they invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them, and also not working with their own hands more than they could help; but in those days and those wild parts they had not advanced (so it is called) so far.”  (The Hobbit, Chapter 4, “Over Hill and Under Hill”)

The word “goblin” has a rather mysterious etymological history and, like so many early words, that history is a murky one, full of guesses and suggestions.  A little research produces the explanation that the word first seems to appear in Latin, in Orderic Vitalis’ (1075-c1142) Historia Ecclesiastica, Book 5, Chapter 7, in which, while reviewing the life of the early French saint, Taurinus, (lived c.400AD), Orderic mentions a demon whom the saint has vanquished, but which still haunted the area around the town of Evreux in Normandy, a demon the locals called “gobelinus”.

A century later, in the long Old French poem on the Third Crusade (1189-1192) of Ambroise of Normandy (who lived at the end of the 12th century), a noted figure in the actual history of the period, Balian d’ Ibelin, is referred to as being “more false than a gobelin” (L’Histoire de la Guerre Sainte, line 8710), with no explanation, suggesting that readers would be aware of what a gobelin was (and that he wasn’t trustworthy).

The word first appears in English in John Wycliffe’s translation of the Bible in the late 14th century, in Psalm 91, in which a God-fearing person will never be afraid of various things, including

“of a gobelyn goyng in derknisses”.

If 14th-century people knew what this creature was, we wonder whether it was still clear to people two centuries later—the older standard English translation (the so-called “King James Bible”, 1611) translates this as

“the pestilence that walks in darkness”

(which actually is close to the Hebrew original, as best as we can make out, as we don’t, unfortunately, read Hebrew—see this LINK to read for yourself.)

In the preface to the 1951 second edition of The Hobbit, Tolkien gives his own gloss, based upon the word he will employ almost entirely in The Lord of the Rings for such creatures:

“Orc is not an English word.  It occurs in one or two places but is usually translated goblin (or hobgoblin for the larger kinds).  Orc is the hobbits’ form of the name given at that time to these creatures…)

thus blending villains from 1937 with those readers would soon see in his new work, The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955).

“Hobgoblin” brings us to our conclusion, however.  As in the case of “goblin”, things get murky here, too, with some stating that, as “Hob” is an old nickname for “Robert” (compare “Hodge” as an old nickname for “Roger”), so a hobgoblin is related to “Robin Goodfellow”, (“Robin” being another nickname for “Robert”) aka the Puck we see in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595-96?).

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(This image is from Arthur Rackham’s (1865-1939) 1933 version of the play.)

https://pictures.abebooks.com/BLAEU/md/md20625435733.jpg

Hobgoblins sometimes appear as prickly household helpers (rather like Dobby in the Harry Potter books), and those who want to associate the “hob” of “hobgoblin” with the “hob” (earlier “hubbe”), “the side of a fireplace” see that prefix as suggesting that “hobgoblins” might be a subset of “goblins” in general.

For us, however, a “hob” is a character in an on-going series we recommend to our readers.  These are novels set in and around a decaying medieval monastery in 1347 and the haunted world around it, written by Pat Walsh, an archaeologist/fantasy author.

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The first two in the series are The Crowfield Curse (2010) and The Crowfield Demon (2011)

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In this series, the hero, Will, an orphan, discovers a wounded creature and brings it back to the monastery.  It’s a hob—and will be a major character as the series develops.  In 2014, Walsh began a new series with The Hob and the Deerman.

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Walsh has promised a third book in the Crowfield series, Crowfield Rising, but it has yet to appear—unlike our next posting, which will appear (provided that there is no space alien invasion or implementation of Order 66 or Sauron producing a new ring), next week.

Till then, thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

PS

In our last, we mistakenly identified a photo of JRRT in a uniform which we thought belonged to a unit at his alma mater, King Edward’s School, as the caption with it said “1907”.   It seemed odd to us, however, because it had the look of a cavalry unit (the bandoleer across the chest was common during the period for cavalry and for artillerymen) and, for all that he writes admiringly of horses, we had no sense that he himself was ever a horseman.  This nagged at us until we did a little research and realized our mistake:  the uniform was for King Edward’s Horse, the equivalent of a national guard/volunteer unit raised before the Great War.  Tolkien was a member of this at the beginning of his Oxford career in 1911, but later resigned.  John Garth’s two really useful books, Tolkien at Exeter College and Tolkien and the Great War, set us straight.

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PPS

If you read us regularly, you know that we have a special love for early, silent film  While researching this posting, we learned that, in 1918, a film was made based upon “Little Orphant Annie” and that a copy of it has survived for us to see.  Here’s a poster and a still.

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Gobs and Hobs (1)

22 Wednesday Aug 2018

Posted by Ollamh in Fairy Tales and Myths, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Military History

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Tags

A E Mason, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Brunhilde, cadet, cockfighting, Edith Bratt, Exeter College, Faeries, Fairies, Gilbert and Sullivan, Goblin Feet, Iolanthe, Oxford Poetry, Richard Doyle, Richard Wagner, The Four Feathers, The Great War, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, white feather, William Shakespeare, World War I, Yeats

As always, dear readers, welcome.

In 1915, Tolkien was

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scrambling to finish his BA at Exeter College

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before he was swept up into the war which was gradually devouring the younger male populations of much of western Europe

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and would soon swallow him, as well.

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Although he had been a cadet in his earlier days,

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he resisted the societal pressure to join up and that must have been difficult, as it was not uncommon in 1915 for young men not in uniform to be stopped in the street by civilians, particularly women, and asked why they hadn’t enlisted yet before being presented with a white feather as a symbol of cowardice.

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The use of a white feather appears to have been derived from the old sport of cockfighting, in which it was believed that a rooster with a white tail feather would be a poor combatant.

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For us, the image is directly related to a famous 1902 adventure novel, The Four Feathers

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by A E Mason (1865-1948).

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In this book, the main character, Harry Feversham, is thought to be a coward by his brother officers and by his fiancé and goes to heroic lengths to prove otherwise (here’s a LINK so that you can enjoy the book for yourself, if you would like).

As well as the book, there have been a number of films made from it, including the one which we believe to be the best, from 1939.

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During this scramble to finish, Tolkien wrote a poem in late April for his wife-to-be, Edith Bratt (1889-1971).

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Called “Goblin Feet”, it was first published in Oxford Poetry 1915.  (Here’s a LINK so that you may have your own copy of the book.)

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Here’s the text:

I am off down the road
Where the fairy lanterns glowed
And the little pretty flitter-mice are flying;
A slender band of gray
It runs creepily away
And the hedges and the grasses are a-sighing.
The air is full of wings,
And of blundery beetle-things
That warn you with their whirring and their humming.
O! I hear the tiny horns
Of enchanted leprechauns
And the padded feet of many gnomes a-coming!
O! the lights! O! the gleams! O! the little twinkly sounds!
O! the rustle of their noiseless little robes!
O! the echo of their feet — of their happy little feet!
O! the swinging lamps in the starlit globes.

I must follow in their train
Down the crooked fairy lane
Where the coney-rabbits long ago have gone.
And where silvery they sing
In a moving moonlit ring
All a twinkle with the jewels they have on.
They are fading round the turn
Where the glow worms palely burn
And the echo of their padding feet is dying!
O! it’s knocking at my heart—

Let me go! let me start!
For the little magic hours are all a-flying.

O! the warmth! O! the hum! O! the colors in the dark!
O! the gauzy wings of golden honey-flies!
O! the music of their feet — of their dancing goblin feet!
O! the magic! O! the sorrow when it dies.

Two things strike us immediately about this text.  First, its tone of subdued longing for Otherness—“I must follow”, “O! it’s knocking at my heart”, “O! the sorrow when it dies”.  This reminded us of WB Yeats’  (1865-1939) “The Hosting of the Sidhe” (from the volume The Wind Among the Reeds, 1899)

The host is riding from Knocknarea
And over the grave of Clooth-na-Bare;
Caoilte tossing his burning hair,
And Niamh calling Away, come away:
Empty your heart of its mortal dream.
The winds awaken, the leaves whirl round,
Our cheeks are pale, our hair is unbound,
Our breasts are heaving, our eyes are agleam,
Our arms are waving, our lips are apart;
And if any gaze on our rushing band,
We come between him and the deed of his hand,
We come between him and the hope of his heart.
The host is rushing ‘twixt night and day,
And where is there hope or deed as fair?
Caoilte tossing his burning hair,
And Niamh calling Away, come away.

(Here, by the way, is the cover to the first edition of the volume, artwork by Yeats’ friend, Althea Giles.

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And here’s a LINK to the earliest edition we can find on the internet—it’s the 4th, from 1903.)

Yeats, in this part of his creative life, was just leaving the late-Victorian era called the “Celtic Twilight”, in which Irish artists of all sorts were attempting to create a new art, independent of British art and literature and based upon what they conceived were “Old Irish models”.  To someone of late-Romantic temperament, like Tolkien, the attraction must have been very strong—note that leprechauns have somehow gotten mixed with the goblins!

This mixing of all kinds of beings from Faerie—goblins, fairies, leprechauns, gnomes—and their diminutive size—note five uses of “little” and one “tiny” –is the second thing which strikes us. The shrinking of otherworld beings in English literature can be traced at least as far back as Shakespeare and A Midsummer Night’s Dream,

STC 22302, title page

 

but really catches hold in the 19th century, with the pictorial work of artists like Richard Doyle

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and which is parodied by WS Gilbert (1836-1911), in Iolanthe (1882), in which the human-sized (and often played by a stout woman) Queen of the Fairies talks all about curling “myself inside a buttercup”, all the while being costumed to look like a Valkyrie from Wagner’s operas—an extra visual joke (which is, in our Gilbert and Sullivan experience, no longer employed—a pity!).

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(Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900), who was the composer of Iolanthe, has left us a very beautiful overture for it.  Here’s a LINK so that you can hear it.)

JRRT seems, at the very beginning of his literary life, to have been caught up in this mixture of Shakespeare and Victoriana and Yeats’ “Celtic Twilight” mood and it’s perhaps for that reason that, later in life, looking back on it, he said of this early poem:

“I wish the unhappy little thing, representing all that I came (so soon after) to fervently dislike, could be buried forever.” (The Book of Lost Tales Part One, “The Cottage of Lost Play”, 32)

Was he embarrassed at his own youthful influences?  And there have certainly been later critics who have been hard upon the poem.

If we put it into the context of 1915, however, this longing to be anywhere but in wartime 1915 makes perfect sense, especially for a young, sensitive, highly-intelligent man deeply in love with a girl he’d worked so hard to be with. The real horrific violence of the Great War was kept hidden from the people of the UK by the Government.  Newspapers and magazines were censored, soldiers’ letters were censored (Tolkien and Edith developed a secret code in his letters to get around that censorship), soldiers were not allowed to keep diaries or have cameras (only official photographers were permitted to work at the Front—and their work was closely watched), but word still got back, mainly, we suspect, from those on leave, often wounded, who had experienced events which turned out like this—

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Is it any wonder, with what he knew about and dreaded being part of, that JRRT would have wished to be on the road to Fairyland?

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

ps

In our next, we want to think out loud a bit about the goblins whose feet JRRT wants so much to follow…

In Depth

15 Wednesday Aug 2018

Posted by Ollamh in J.R.R. Tolkien, Language, Literary History

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Beowulf, Canterbury Tales, Chaucer, Christopher Tolkien, conlang, Danian, David J Peterson, Dothraki, Elvish, English, Game of Thrones, Hamlet, Ilkorin, James Joyce, Jane Austen, language, Noldorin, Pride and Prejudice, Qenya, Shakespeare, Star Wars, Telerin, The Art of Language Invention, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Ulysses

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

In 1977, the more observant viewers and critics commented upon the look and feel of a new film.  Instead of a world in which everything appeared newly-produced and sparkling, this was one in which it was clear that people had lived for a long time and many different peoples, at that.

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Even their vehicles had a scratched and dusty look.

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We had been told, of course, in the very opening sequence that this was an old place—

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but actually seeing its used look was that much more convincing

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as was seeing—and hearing—its peoples,

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who sometimes even required subtitles, as if the audience were watching a foreign film.

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In time, as the success of this film produced not only more films, but mountains of other material, from novels to graphic novels to spin-off series to toys and t-shirts and kitchen ware,

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a whole literature appeared about this world—or, we should say, worlds. Its geography and even its extremely-varied animal life.

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And, along with all of the other material, information about its languages began to appear.

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What prompted this posting, however, was something odd about one of those languages, that spoken by a character in what would, in time, become the sixth in the series.

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This was pointed out to us by David J. Peterson

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in his 2015 book, The Art of Language Invention.

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As a child, what had puzzled Peterson was that the character (who is subtitled), says only “Yate, yate, yoto, ei, yato, cha”—in total, only six different words, but they are translated as everything from “I have come for the bounty on this Wookiee” to “50,000, no less”.  (This is quoted and discussed on pages 3 to 5 of Peterson’s book—which is, by the way, one we would recommend, if you’re as interested in languages as we are.)

How could so few words mean so many different things?  As an adult, looking back, Peterson had his doubts and we would agree—especially when reading about the world in which Peterson lives, the world of “conlang”, which is short for “constructed languages”.  Peterson is the creator of Dothraki, the language of the nomadic Dothraki people,

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one of the numerous races which inhabit the landscape of George R R Martin’s Game of Thrones, first novels, then a huge, elaborate, and engrossing television series.

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The difference between “yate”, etc and Dothraki is that those few words are there to suggest that someone is speaking in a language different from the language spoken by the majority of the characters—which is the method employed throughout not only this film, but its two immediate successors.

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What Peterson set out to do was to create the shape of an entire language (something he has done more than once).  Here’s a LINK to the Wiki site, which, as usual, leads to other sites, which lead to other sites, which lead… if you’d like to learn more.

As worn-looking buildings and vehicles, different peoples and flora and fauna, and at least the suggestion of other languages create a bigger, deeper picture of the setting of an adventure, so, too, does the suggestion of great age.  Over time, the huge pile of material for the film series we first mentioned showed, in detail, that what we were seeing was, in fact, only the latest phase in a whole galaxy of civilizations over many centuries—after all, “For over a thousand generations, the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic”.

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Another way to suggest that great age is a much less dramatic one—perhaps even a nearly-invisible one–practiced by one of our favorite authors and the subject of innumerable postings, and here is one of his efforts.

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What we’re seeing here is JRRT working out the history of sounds throughout a series of Elf languages, Qenya, Telerin, Noldorin, Ilkorin, and Danian, part of his immense and immensely-detailed work on the tongues of Middle-earth.   All languages change through time, of course—here’s a rough version of the succession of periods of English—

Old English (the opening lines of Beowulf, 700-1000AD,

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Middle English (the opening of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, c.1400AD),

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Early Modern English (the beginning of the first scene of Shakepeare’s Hamlet, 1603),

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early 19th-century English (the first lines of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, 1813),

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and early 20th-century English (the opening of James Joyce’s Ulysses, 1922).

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And Joyce even attempted to suggest the procession of those periods in Chapter 14 of Ulysses, “The Oxen of the Sun”, where the story is told through paragraphs which sound like earlier versions of the language gradually moving towards modern English.  (The novelist Nabokov, who played with language constantly, actually found this chapter boring, perhaps because it seemed to him like a one-off, not really in aid of the plot and its characters in general, but rather just a piece of private fun by and for the author?)

JRRT, however, goes one better.  Like other creators of big adventures, he used lots of means to deepen his story, from an extensive and detailed map

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to describing the remains of earlier times still standing in the landscape of Middle-earth of the present,

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to adding detailed historical appendices and chronologies (and his valiant son, Christopher, has added many volumes more),

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but using intricate sound changes and their logical development takes the idea of depth into new regions, especially because it would probably go unnoticed by most readers—there’s an awful lot of detail in those appendices—but whose meticulous creation is not in the least surprising for someone who once wrote, “The ‘stories’ were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse.” (Letters, 219)

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

 

ps

Ah yes—the nearly-inevitable post scriptum—if the normal world/s of the films we first mentioned are “scruffy-looking” (to quote a character about another character), we notice that the world of the villains—the soldiers of the Empire and their surroundings—are hard and clean and shiny—which makes us feel a little better when we wonder when we may last have shined our shoes.

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Dayless Dawn

08 Wednesday Aug 2018

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Heroes, J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth

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Battle of the Somme, British Expeditionary Force, chemical warfare, Fritz Haber, Gas warfare, Great War, John Singer Sargent, maxim gun, mustard gas, tear gas, The Lord of the Rings, The Siege of Gondor, Tolkien, trench warfare, trenches, Vale of Anduin, WWI, Young Indiana Jones

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

In this, the last year of the centennial of the Great War, we are often reminded not only of that conflict, but also that Second Lieutenant J R R Tolkien took part in it.

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By the time he had reached the Front, in July, 1916, the latest round of blood-letting, the infamous Somme, was already in progress.

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“Blood-letting” is an understatement:  on the first day of the battle, 1 July, 1916, there had been nearly 60,000 British casualties and attacks would continue till November.  The problems faced were mainly those of 1914.  The well-equipped, well-trained professional soldier of the British Expeditionary Force

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met the Maxim Gun

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and took heavy casualties.  These casualties were multiplied by the number and range of German artillery.

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To defend themselves against these modern weapons, soldiers went to ground as soon as they could.

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Digging in moved from a simple scrape of the earth into 500 miles (from Switzerland to the North Sea) of often very elaborate earthworks.

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Equip these with machine guns

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and spread acres of barbed wire in front

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and you can think that you’re safe from attack.

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So, the problem then was:  how to break through?  And this is where the German chemical industry

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and its brilliant chemist, Fritz Haber,

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(who will share the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1918) came in.

Haber, famous for creating artificial fertilizer—his positive side—was also a captain in the Kaiser’s army (hence the uniform in our illustration), intensely convinced that Germany was justified in waging war on Europe, and began to develop a reply to elaborate fortifications:  poison gases—Haber’s dark side.

Nearly twenty years before, in 1900, many of the world’s nations, including Germany, had signed an agreement at the Hague that, among other things, they wouldn’t employ such a weapon, but, clearly, the temptation was too great, and not only for Germany.  After the first major attack, 22 April, 1915, in which the Germans had killed or driven a large number of French troops from their trenches, the British and French began their own development programs.

Over time, the gases varied as experiments showed scientists and military men what worked and what didn’t.  There were simple tear gases, which incapacitated soldiers by blinding them with their own tears and disturbed their breathing, to much deadlier blister agents—but here’s a chart to lay out the effects.

image15gaschart.jpg

Delivery systems varied.  Gas might be released from canisters, allowing the prevailing wind to carry it to the enemy.

image16gas.jpg

The difficulty here was the variability of winds—should the direction change, the releasers of gas might—and sometimes did—find themselves the victims.

Gas packed into artillery shells was more dependable.

image17gas.jpg

Shells were marked to identify which gas was inside, as in this illustration.

In time, the British developed a method of projecting gas bombs in large numbers with what were called “Livens projectors”.

image18gasbomb.jpg

image19livens.jpg

This simple mechanism could be used in banks to blanket the enemy line with poisonous air.

image20projectors.jpg

Initially, there had been no defense against this weapon, but, in time, both sides developed gas masks.

image21masks.jpg

And, of course, something had to be done for the hundreds of thousands of horses both depended upon.

image22amask.jpeg

Here’s how the later, more efficient ones worked.

image22mask.jpg

They might have prevented suffocation, but they were uncomfortable and, worse, the lenses soon fogged over, making it difficult to see the enemy in their masks advancing through the clouds of gas.

image23advance.jpg

image24combat.jpg

In the television series about young Indiana Jones of some years ago, there was a very graphic depiction of this—and here’s a LINK so that you can see for yourself.  (We very much recommend this series, by the way.  On the whole, it has many episodes which not only fill in Indie’s past, but are good adventure stories in themselves.)

We can imagine, then, what might have been going on in JRRT’s mind when he wrote:

“It was dark and dim all day.  From the sunless dawn until evening the heavy shadow had deepened, and all hearts in the City were oppressed.  Far above a great cloud streamed slowly westward from the Black Land, devouring light, borne upon a wind of war; but below the air was still and breathless, as if all the Vale of Anduin waited for the onset of a ruinous storm.”  (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 4, “The Siege of Gondor”)

image25gondor.jpg

Were those orcs approaching, or the Kaiser’s infantry?

image26gas.jpg

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

ps

The horrific effects of chemical warfare have, to us, never been more powerfully depicted than in John Singer Sargent’s (1856-1925)  Gassed (1919), based upon Sargent’s visit to the Western Front in July, 1918.

image27gassed.jpg

pps

But, you know us—if we can add a little something more, we always will and, in this case, we want to end not with just this image, horrible and moving as it is, but with something from another of Sargent’s works.  Along with being a society painter, he was one of the greatest American watercolorists and has left us a collection of beautiful, atmospheric works from Europe, the US, and the Caribbean.  We want to end, then, with these very different clouds–

image28sargent.jpg

Charge!

01 Wednesday Aug 2018

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Films and Music, J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, The Rohirrim

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

16th Lancers, Aliwal, Australian Light Horse, Australians, Balaclava, Beersheba, Cavalry, Charges, Great War, Light Brigade, Palestine, Rohirrim, Scots Greys, The Lighthorsemen, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Turks, Warhorse, Waterloo

As always, dear readers, welcome.

In an addition to an entry in Letters, the main portion of which has rather a murky history (see 217-218), but which the editor dates as “presumably written circa 1966”, Tolkien says that several features of The Lord of the Rings “still move me very powerfully”.  These features include being “most stirred by the sound of the horses of the Rohirrim at cockcrow”.

As this is one of our favorite parts of the book,

 

image1

we would absolutely agree, but, as is so often the case, both with JRRT and with ourselves, we wondered why.

The easiest answer is that it’s a highly-dramatic moment:  the main gate of Minas Tirith is giving way under the blows of Grond, the orcs are about to pour in, and it looks like Aragorn and his companions won’t appear in time to save the situation.

image2grond.png

We have been following the Rohirrim, of course, from their muster to their march

image3roh.jpg

to their meeting with Ghan-buri-Ghan,

image4ghan.jpg

so the build is two-fold:  the attack, which is completely focused on breaking in, and the approach of the Rohirrim.  Thus, when it looks darkest, the charge is like sunlight breaking through heavy cloud.

image5charge.jpg

This is a beginning, we thought, to why, but could there have been another reason for JRRT?

When Tolkien, growing up, thought of cavalry charges, he probably saw, in his mind’s eye, the glorious mounted attacks of Britain’s past, like the Scots Greys at Waterloo

 

image6scot

or the 16th Lancers at Aliwal

image7aliwal.jpg

or the Light Brigade at Balaclava.

image8balaclava.jpg

In all of these, soldiers in bright-colored coats waved swords and lancers and dashed fearlessly against the enemy.  Even his toy soldiers would have had that same devil-may-care look

image9britains.jpg

as did the real cavalry of his childhood,

image10aqueenslancers.jpg

but, when 1914 and the Great War came, soldiers put away those bright colors and put on khaki.

image10twentyfirst.jpg

But did that wild courage have to be put away, as well?  In 1914, there were a few moments when even mud-colored mounted men had a moment of glory.

image11attack.jpg

This wasn’t to last—at least on the Western Front and a major reason was this—

image12maxim.jpg

(Here’s a LINK to a clip from the film Warhorse, which shows the effect in rather a symbolic way, thank goodness!  We love horses and mourn their terrible losses through all of world history—they never asked to be part of human violence and, so often, their fate was to die because of it.  We also think that it’s just as well that the commander of this imaginary attack didn’t survive it—it’s absolutely inept, both in conception and its carrying-out and he would deserve to have been court-martialed.)

So, instead, those men dismounted and became infantry, fighting from hole in the ground to hole in the ground.

image13trench.jpg

This was the world which JRRT

image14ajrrt.jpg

knew:  heavy guns, gas, and the rattle of machine guns, no place for wide double ranks of sabre-wavers.

image14charge.jpg

There was at least one bright moment, but not on the Western Front.  Instead, it was in far-off Palestine, where, on 31 October, 1917, Australians and their horses swept over a line of Turkish trenches  at Beersheba in a charge very reminiscent of the 19th -century world.

image15beersheba.jpg

Ironically, these were not cavalry at all, but Australian Light Horse—mounted infantry—who, lacking swords or sabres or lances, attacked using their long bayonets, instead.

image16alh.jpg

(You can see this charge reenacted wonderfully in the 1987 Australian movie, The Lighthorsemen, one of our very favorite films of the Great War.

image17poster.jpg

Here’s a LINK to the charge scene, before you see the whole film—but we recommend that you see that charge in context.)

On the whole, however, modern war had become one big, bloody ditch,

image18trench.jpg

and victory came in mud-color and mass industrial slaughter.  Perhaps it was a relief to imagine another world, where brave men in armor, mounted on flying horses, still had a place?

image19ro.jpg

As always, thanks for reading!

MTCIDC

CD

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