Helm (but not deep)

28 Wednesday Aug 2019

Posted by Ollamh in J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History

Tags

British, Constantinople, French, Great War, Helmet, Julius Caesar, kepi, Medieval, Neo-Assyrians, pickelhalben, Plevna, Port Arthur, Prussians, Sebastien Le Prestre de Vauban, sieges, Tolkien, uniforms, WWI

Welcome once more, dear readers.

In our last, we talked about Tolkien as a very junior officer in 1916-17.

We discussed much of the detail of his kit, including this very important item, first introduced to the British army on the Western Front in 1916.

The war had begun in 1914, however, and the British soldiers of 1914

although they had shed their red coats for anything but parades,

having learned in many colonial wars that khaki was more practical on campaign,

were still, at heart, ready for the kind of open-battlefield fighting which their ancestors had practiced at Waterloo, a century before.

Infantry might not fight in long solid lines any longer,

And might even seize upon temporary cover,

but battle would still be a sort of stand-up affair with artillery in support

and cavalry ready to charge even enemy artillery,

just as they had at Balaclava, 60 years before.

The British were not alone in imagining modern war as being like this. Across the Channel, the French were still wearing the same red trousers they had first put on in the 1830s, while discussing attacks made solely with the bayonet.

And the Germans, although more sensibly dressed in grey, could still see themselves as pounding across the battlefield like medieval knights, lances lowered.

Unfortunately for such dreams, weapons technology in 1914 had far outstripped fashion and tradition, with machine guns having firing rates of as much as 600 rounds per minute

and increasingly heavy artillery.

Soldiers on both sides, therefore, instinctively began to seek more shelter.

And more shelter.

What happened next was a kind of military retrograde motion: what was planned as open-field warfare turned into a giant, 500-mile-long siege.

There had, of course, been sieges forever. The ancient Neo-Assyrians were fierce proponents.

In 332bc, Alexander the Great, frustrated by the defiance of the city of Tyre, conducted a famous siege across open water to make the Tyrians submit.

Julius Caesar had crushed Celtic power in Gaul in part by besieging their major settlement at Alesia in 52bc.

During the western Middle Ages, sieges were more common than pitched battles.

By the 14^th century, however, big siege weapons, like the massive stone-throwing trebuchet,

were fated to be replaced by a new and more effective weapon, the bombard, or cannon.

And, with the expansion of the use of artillery to pound enemy defenses, siege warfare became that much more deadly—as in the relatively short time (53 days) it took for the guns of Mehmet II to knock holes in the ancient but massive walls of Constantinople in 1453.

Over time, the practice of siege craft became an art, as did that of fortification, and, for western armies, the theoretician was Louis XIV’s military engineer, Sebastien Le Prestre de Vauban (1633-1707).

Vauban designed fortresses to resist sieges, but he also said that every fortress could be taken in time and proved it by directing methodical attacks upon a number of them. Step one was to gradually move trenches—and guns—closer and closer to the enemy fortress or town, attempting to make a hole in its walls. Then, when the hole was judged big enough to provide entry into that town or fortress, infantry would be sent in to try to break through.

Vauban’s method, with its lines of moving trenches and gun emplacements, became the standard and older soldiers in 1914 and those who read military history would have seen that method in the later 19^th century, when the Prussians and their allies besieged Paris in late 1870,

or when the Russians laid siege to the Turkish garrison of Plevna in 1877,

or, more recently, when the Japanese besieged the Russians at Port Arthur in 1904-5.

Thus, there was a long tradition for such things for the armies of western Europe to follow in 1914, but the difference lay in those modern weapons, which made the life of besiegers—and, in this war, both sides were really besieging each other simultaneously—that much more dangerous. If the basis of that tradition was bombardment followed by a successful infantry assault, then the generals of 1914 would follow that pattern.

If the enemy used machine guns and heavy artillery to stop the attackers,

it took some time before those generals realized that old-fashioned methods usually produced huge numbers of casualties

and little success.

Change took time, but one element was to improve soldiers’ chances to survive in the trenches and that meant reviving something from the medieval world, the metal helmet.

The French were the first to replace the soldiers’ kepi

with a metal helmet, in 1915.

(The kepi picture, by the way, isn’t colorized, but is an actual early color photograph, using what was called “autochrome”.)

The Germans replaced their leather helmets, called pickelhalben,

image40pickelhaube

with their own version of a steel helmet, in 1916.

Also, in 1916, the British replaced the service dress cap

with the very piece of kit with which JRRT would have been equipped, and with which we began.

Thanks, as ever, for reading

and

MTCIDC,

Holding Place

21 Wednesday Aug 2019

Posted by Ollamh in Heroes, J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Bath star, colours, ensign, First Boer War, Great War, Laing's Neck, lieutenant, Maciejowski Bible, Mike Chappell, Officer Training Corps, OTC, Oxford, second lieutenant, the Lancashire Fusiliers, Tolkien, Uniform and Weapons Supply, West Yorkshire Regiment, white feather, WWI

Welcome, as ever, dear readers.

Our title is actually a translation of a French compound, lieutenant, which, by itself, is an adjective, but, if you add a definite (le) or indefinite (un) article, you have a noun—and a military rank, a rank which Tolkien held in 1916. Anyone who knows anything about JRRT is aware of this and has probably seen this photo of a very serious young officer. In this posting, we’d like to take a closer look at this photo and what it once represented—and, as you’ll see, there’s a great deal!

In 1914, JRRT had made a difficult decision: to finish his degree and not to join up along with the passionate thousands who did

and, a young man still in civilian dress, to risk the public humiliation of having a young woman—or group of young women—come up to him in the street and offer him a white feather as a marker of his cowardice in not enlisting immediately.

While finishing, he had been a member of the OTC, the Officer Training Corps at Oxford,

which had helped him to gain a (temporary—for the duration of the war) commission as a second lieutenant in the British Army in July, 1915.

The title of second lieutenant was relatively new in 1915, having only been introduced in 1877, as a permanent replacement for the much older title of “ensign” (“cornet” in the cavalry). Originally, an ensign’s job had been to carry an ensign—that is, a flag—

which could be a very hazardous job, as a flag (a “colour”, in the infantry, a “standard” in the cavalry), was not only a rallying point, but also the equivalent of a very large sign shouting “Shoot this one first!”

By 1915, British units hadn’t carried their colours into battle for about 35 years (the last known instance being at Laing’s Neck, during the First Boer War, in 1881),

so a second lieutenant would be given other roles in the regiment to which he belonged, such as commanding a platoon, a smaller part of a larger company, or in JRRT’s case, being in charge of communications—a subject which we’ve discussed in a previous posting.

Although enlisted men were issued uniforms, equipment, and weapons,

(This wonderfully-detailed illustration is by Mike Chappell, one of our favorite modern illustrators of the British Army.)

officers, as “gentlemen”, were expected to supply everything themselves.

This included not only uniform,

but revolver (this is JRRT’s actual .455 Webley, now in the Imperial War Museum collections)

and sword,

along with the belts on which to carry them,

plus all the other necessary items to join an army on campaign.

Taken altogether, it would have been very expensive for a new graduate, like JRRT, and so the government began issuing a stipend to help “temporary officers” (the Army sometimes had uglier terms for them) to kit themselves out like this.

And we’ve forgotten one essential, by 1916, something no soldier in the front lines would ever have been without—and here’s why.

As people always interested in the medieval, we can say that we’ve seen this pattern before—here are examples from the 13^th-century Maciejowski Bible,

where such a thing might have been called a “kettle helm”.

With all of the above in mind, let’s return for a moment to a larger version of that very familiar picture of JRRT in uniform.

First off, you can see that, for this rather formal portrait, although he’s in uniform, he is wearing neither revolver nor sword, but he is wearing the distinctive belting (named after the general who invented the pattern a “Sam Browne”). As well, if you look at his left cuff, you can see the mark of his second-lieutenancy, what soldiers commonly called a “pip”, but which formally was called a “Bath star”. One of these on each cuff indicated the rank of second lieutenant. When Tolkien was promoted, in January, 1918, to First Lieutenant, he would have added a second star. Here’s a table of rank markers to help you.

If the image were as clear as that of this reenactor, we could see that his uniform bore more than his rank—older regiments, in particular, had special, distinctive markings

Note the badges on this reenactor’s cap and on his collar tabs. These are the markings of the West Yorkshire Regiment.

Tolkien belonged to the Lancashire Fusiliers, whose badge looked like this:

You’ll see that the outer layer is the image of a flaming bomb or grenade. This was an old symbol for fusiliers in general in the British Army. In the 17^th-century, soldiers with firearms used mainly matchlock weapons.

This was fired by applying a piece of specially-prepared cord to gunpowder. If you wanted a guard for your artillery or powder supply, burning cord was the last thing you would want so, instead, such guards were armed with much safer flintlock fusils—hence the term fusilier.

The Lancashire Fusiliers claimed such a unit as ancestors and, as one of the units which had served in the British force which had captured Egypt from the French in 1801 (as the 20^th Foot—meaning “infantry regiment”),

they had been entitled to add “Egypt” to their regimental colours and to their badges.

JRRT’s collar tabs and buttons would have been slightly different, displaying the sphinx inside a laurel wreath.

Contemplating this carefully-combed and trimmed young man in his formal uniform,

it might be difficult to imagine him as the man who, in time, could create Mordor and all within it—until you contrast it with images like these, the sorts of things which he would have seen daily in summer and early fall, 1916–

and, suddenly, orcs

are no surprise.

Thanks, as always, for reading and

MTCIDC

May we recommend to you this excellent book, if you would like to know more about Tolkien and his experiences, 1914-1918?

Never That Willow

14 Wednesday Aug 2019

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Barrow-downs, Barrow-wights, Hamlet, humours, Melancholy, Old Man Willow, Ophelia, Othello, Robert Burton, The Lord of the Rings, The National Library of Scotland, Thomas D'Urfey, Timothy Bright, Tolkien, Tom Bombadil, William Shakespeare, Willow Tree

As always, dear readers, welcome.

In our last post, we had:

begun with a willow tree

moved to the English Renaissance association between willows and melancholy

and, in particular, the play Hamlet (1599-1601), in which a disturbed girl, Ophelia, falls from a willow into a stream and drowns

as well as Desdemona, in Shakespeare’s Othello (1604), who sings a song with “Willow” as a kind of lamenting chorus—just before she’s murdered by her jealous (and misled) husband.

Melancholy comes from an imbalance of the humors, so medieval and Renaissance people thought, from those substances which control the body and its moods.

Too much black bile and you might be plunged into a depression.

(Although his posture suggests that he’s grieving, this young man’s armor says that he’s involved in a medieval sport that certain Tudor noblemen still engaged in, jousting. Perhaps he just lost?)

As this was considered a serious problem, English Renaissance authors created texts which analyzed the condition, like Timothy Bright, a physician, who published his treatise in 1586,

(if you’d like to see what was believed medically in 1586, here’s a LINK to the work.)

or Robert Burton, a philosopher, who published his in 1621.

One way of dealing with that imbalance was by bleeding—the idea being that, since the humors influenced the blood, by opening up a blood vessel and letting some of the blood pour out it might act as a kind of safety valve.

Another treatment was playing or listening to music.

This therapeutic idea led to the title of one of the first great collections of Renaissance and post-Renaissance lyrics and tunes, Thomas D’Urfey’s, Wit and Mirthe, or Pills to Purge Melancholy (1698-1720).

(The National Library of Scotland has a complete edition of all six volumes of this. Here’s a LINK, so that you can download them for yourself.)

Melancholy and willows became even more bound together in the early 19^th century, when the tree, along with other images, such as urns, was used as a symbol of mourning on tombstones.

Willows, then, have moved from being associated with an Elizabethan ailment to an expression of grief at the death of a loved one, which could certainly bring on melancholy.

For us, willows have another association, however, but one which includes death–and the Elizabethan use of music as a cure. In The Lord of the Rings, when Frodo and his friends try to cut through the Old Forest to escape the pursuing Nazgul,

they are confused by the hostile wood and eventually brought to the bank of the Withywindle, where Old Man Willow

sings a spell:

“They shut their eyes, and then it seemed that they could almost hear words, cool words, saying something about water and sleep. They gave themselves up to the spell and fell fast asleep at the foot of the great grey willow.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 6, “The Old Forest”)

This was more than just a sleepy-spell, however, as the tree attempts to drown Frodo, swallows Pippin, and half-swallows Merry (his upper half).

When Sam and Frodo (whom Sam has rescued) threaten the tree with fire, it threatens to kill Merry and Pippin and it looks like a standoff until Frodo simply runs off, shouting for help, and the very odd figure of Tom Bombadil appears.

He has a very distinctive look—

“there appeared above the reeds an old battered hat with a tall crown and a long blue feather stuck to the band…there came into view a man…stumping along with great yellow boots…He had a blue coat and a long brown beard; his eyes were blue and bright, and his face was red as a ripe apple, but creased into a hundred wrinkles of laughter.”

As well, he has distinctive speech and this is where music as cure reappears. Commonly, Tom’s speech is either actual song or short declarative sentences, which fall into a metrical pattern reminiscent of song:

“What’s the matter here then? Do you know who I am? I’m Tom Bombadil. Tell me what’s your trouble!”

DUM-tee-DUM-tee-DUM-DUM. DUM-tee-DUM-tee-DUM-DUM. DUM-DUM-DUM-tee-DUM. DUM-tee-DUM-tee-DUM-DUM.

He shows no fear of the fearsome willow, breaking off one of its branches and smacking the tree with it while employing this characteristic chanting—

“You let them out again, Old Man Willow!…What be you a-thinking of? You should not be waking. Eat earth! Dig deep! Drink water! Go to sleep! Bombadil is talking!”

Who this figure is, is only ever explained in the vaguest way. His companion, Goldberry,

says of him simply, “Tom Bombadil is master.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 7, “In the House of Tom Bombadil”) And, when he receives the Ring from Frodo, even when he puts it on, it has no effect upon him.

As a character in the book, he has proved awkward both for audio adapters and P Jackson and his writers, virtually all of whom have tended, over the years, simply to leave him out of their versions of the story. This leaves a gap, of course, especially when it comes to Tom’s second rescue of the hobbits, from a barrow-wight (illustration by one of our favorite Tolkien artists, Ted Nasmith),

not only because it’s a wonderfully spooky part of the story, but because Tom ransacks the barrow and gives the hobbits short swords “forged long years ago by Men of Westernesse: they were foes of the Dark Lord, but they were overcome by the evil king of Carn Dum in the Land of Angmar”” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 8, “Fog on the Barrow-Downs”). With one of these swords, because of where and when it’s from, Merry is able to wound the chief of the Nazgul who is, in fact, that evil king of Angmar mentioned by Tom Bombadil, allowing Eowyn to finish him off.

Tolkien himself was less than concrete in his explanation of Tom, writing to Naomi Mitchison in April, 1954:

“Tom Bombadil is not an important person—to the narrative. I suppose he has some importance as a ‘comment’. I mean, I do not really write like that: he is just an invention (who first appeared in the Oxford Magazine about 1933 [1934]), and represents something that I feel important, though I would not be prepared to analyze the feeling precisely.” (Letters, 178)

Considering our theme of melancholy and, later, death, associated with willows, as well as the Elizabethan idea that music might cure or at least ameliorate that melancholy, our feeling is that Tom, in the first book of The Lord of the Rings, is a counterbalance, with his singing and chanting, to all of the darkness we’re gradually being shown. As JRRT says in that same paragraph to Naomi Mitchison:

“I would not, however, have left him in, if he did not have some kind of function. I might put it this way. The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side…”

Tom, then, in our view, is not only on the good side, but the antidote to the bad, twice, dealing not only with a living tree, but with a dead and murderous wight. In both cases, he uses song, making him rather like an Elizabethan cure for the melancholy associated with willows—and, in the 19^th-century, willows associated with death–brought to life. It’s no wonder that, when Sauron is defeated and Middle-earth is beginning to heal, Gandalf tells the hobbits:

“…I am turning aside soon. I am going to have a long talk with Bombadil: such a talk as I have not had in all my time.” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 7, “Homeward Bound”)

For Gandalf, Tom is the humors back in balance.

As ever, thanks for reading and

MTCIDC

For another willow, you might try George Lucas’ fantasy film, Willow (1988). It has a complicated plot, all about an abducted infant who will fulfill a prophecy, a valiant dwarf, white and black magic, and a rather ragged warrior. Here’s the LINK for the first trailer (there’s a second, as well).

Although not quite, for us, of the same level as The Princess Bride, being perhaps more like Labyrinth or The Dark Crystal or Time Bandits, like all of those, it has its moments of fun.

Never a Willow

07 Wednesday Aug 2019

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Babylon, Baltimore Consort, Chludov Psaltery, Dennis Moore, Desdemona, Euphrates, Hamlet, Highwaymen, humours, Israelites, JE Millais, Melancholy, Monty Python, Old Man Willow, Ophelia, Othello, Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, The Carman's Whistle, The Lord of the Rings, The Old Forest, Tigris, Tolkien, Tom Bombadil, William Shakespeare, Willow

As always, dear readers, welcome.

In our last posting, although we were talking about 18^th-century highwaymen, somehow—we blame the “Dennis Moore” sketch—

we included mention of a willow.

In Anglo-American culture, the willow has long suggested melancholy, perhaps being somehow linked with Psalm 137, which laments the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in 586BC and the so-called “Babylonian captivity” of the Israelites?

“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.

We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.

For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.

How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”

Under all of that heavy-handed Babylonian mockery is the simple fact that willows are water-lovers, so it would be natural that they would grow near the Euphrates and Tigris, the two major rivers of Babylon.

If the Israelites are no longer singing, we would guess that parking their harps on the willows would be as good a place as any. Certainly medieval manuscript illustrators had no trouble envisioning it. This is from the 9^th-century Chludov Psaltery (a collection of psalms).

“Melancholy”, medieval/Renaissance people believed,

came from an imbalance of the four “humours” which ran the body and its emotions and people in Shakespeare’s day and beyond appear to have so suffered from it that they consulted a famous and popular text, Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up. That this was a pressing matter for the people of this age is clear from the length of the first edition of 1621—it’s nearly 900 pages—and later editions, which appeared within the next few years, were even longer. This is the frontispiece of the 1638 edition–

A common treatment for the problem (too much black bile in the system—the “melan-“ part is Greek for “black”—the “-choly” is the “choler”, or bile) was to listen to music, but clearly not all music was soothing, as we see in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1599-1601) , where Hamlet’s girlfriend, Ophelia, goes mad and spends her time drifting around the castle singing bits of unhappy songs and handing out flowers with significant meanings. As music can be involved with melancholy, so, as we said, can willows and the two come together when Ophelia trusts a willow–

“There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them:
There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element: but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.” (Hamlet, Act IV, Sc 7)

(This is a painting by JE Millais, 1851/2. That “dead men’s fingers” should have been enough, we think!)

The melancholy continues in Shakspeare’s Othello (1604), Act IV, Scene 3, where the soon-to-be-murdered-by-the-title-character Desdemona sings a sad little song, beginning:

“The poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree,
Sing all a green willow;
Her hand on her bosom, her head on her knee,(45)
Sing willow, willow, willow.
The fresh streams ran by her, and murmur’d her moans;
Sing willow, willow, willow;
Her salt tears fell from her, and soften’d the stones”—

(It seems like this posting can’t escape including even more trees. Sycamores are another water-loving tree,

but the emphasis here is upon that willow and we’ll stick with it.)

Perhaps it’s the slumping shape, which might suggest despair, or at least grief, but the willow began to appear on tombstones here in the US at the beginning of the 19^th century, sometimes by itself,

sometimes shading other symbols of mourning, like an urn.

It could appear in other funerary art, as well—as in pictures

and even as part of another funerary—and life—custom of the time, the giving/exchanging of locks of hair. In this mourning brooch, one can see a willow made from such a lock.

With such a grim history, it shouldn’t be surprising, then, that a willow familiar to readers of The Lord of the Rings might have a sinister purpose.

He’s not alone in being hostile foliage. As Merry tells Frodo, Sam, and Pippin:

“But the Forest is queer. Everything in it is very much more alive, more aware of what is going on, so to speak, than things are in the Shire. And the trees do not like strangers. They watch you. They are usually content merely to watch you, as long as daylight lasts, and don’t do much. Occasionally the most unfriendly ones may drop a branch, or stick a root out, or grasp at you with a long trailer. But at night things can be most alarming… (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 6, “The Old Forest”)

Their journey through the Forest, intended to put some space between them and the danger of the Nazgul, provides its own dangers, as the place seems to move about of its own accord, confusing travelers—or worse:

“Suddenly Frodo himself felt sleep overwhelming him. His head swam. There now seemed hardly a sound in the air. The flies had stopped buzzing. Only a gentle noise on the edge of hearing, a soft fluttering as of a song half whispered, seemed to stir in the boughs above. He lifted his heavy eyes and saw leaning over him a huge willow-tree, old and hoary. Enormous it looked, its sprawling branches going up like reaching arms with many long-fingered hands, its knotted and twisted trunk gaping in wide fissures that creaked faintly as the boughs moved…”

We are a far cry from Monty Python here. The willow then tries to drown Frodo, swallows Pippin completely, and the upper half of Merry, and, were it not for the appearance of perhaps the oddest character in The Lord of the Rings, it is difficult to imagine what would have happened next.

What will happen in our next posting, however, you will see next week (hint: the posting is entitled, “Never This Willow”). In the meantime,

Thanks, as always, for reading and

MTCIDC

To treat any melancholy you might feel from reading this posting, please see below for a very merry Elizabethan song ably performed by the Baltimore Consort.

And here’s a LINK to a set of lyrics c. 1590 so that you can follow along. You’ll notice that it includes melancholy, trees, and music, all in one.

doubtfulsea

~ adventure fantasy

Monthly Archives: August 2019

Helm (but not deep)

Holding Place

Never That Willow

Never a Willow