When I was young,
I had not given a penny for a song
Did not the poet Sing it with such airs
That one believed he had a sword upstairs…

WB Yeats “All Things Can Tempt Me” from Responsibilities and Other Poems (1916)

Welcome, dear readers, as always.  In this posting, we want to think out loud about swords—actually, about one in particular, as named by Bilbo Baggins in Chapter Eight of The Hobbit (“Flies and Spiders”), when having killed a giant spider, he says to it “I will give you a name…and I shall call you Sting.”  As it appears in The Hobbit, and then in The Lord of the Rings, we wondered whether we might see its use or abandonment as somehow symbolic of stages of growth in the lives of its owners, defining or redefining those who wield it.

From his childhood and beyond, Tolkien would have been familiar with swords, as they appear in virtually every fairy tale and heroic story he had ever read:  what heroic character would be without one?

There’s the sword “made by giants” which Beowulf pulls down from a wall in Grendel’s lair to put an end to Grendel’s mother.

There’s the sword which Arthur pulled out of a stone/anvil and the very pulling of which proved his right to rule England.

(See here TH White’s wonderful 1938 novel about the young Arthur, The Sword in the Stone,

which, adapted, would later form part of his longer volume The Once and Future King (1958).  There’s also a Disney animated feature based upon the book, but we’ve never found it so good as the book itself.)

 

 

And there’s the second Arthurian sword, Excalibur, which comes from a lake and must be returned at Arthur’s death.

(For another view of Arthur’s heritage and power, revealed by his sword, see this LINK, in which characters from another version of the Arthur story have something to say:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2c-X8HiBng )

Then there is the sword Gram, which appears in the story of Sigurd and the dragon, Fafnir, a story which Tolkien probably first encountered in Andrew Lang’s The Red Fairy Book (1890), which we know that he read as a child.

You can have your own copy of this book—from which Tolkien may also have unconsciously gotten the name “Moria”, as well—at this LINK:  https://www.gutenberg.org/files/540/540-h/540-h.htm.

As a medievalist, Tolkien could hardly have escaped the story of Tristan and Isolde, in which Tristan wounds an Irish knight and is identified later in the story by the fact that a piece of Tristan’s blade has remained in the knight.

(There are a number of early versions of the Tristan and Isolde story, but a familiar one would be that in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485), Volume I, Book VIII.  Here’s a LINK:  http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1251/1251-h/1251-h.htm)

Even into the age of gunpowder, there are still swords everywhere in literature—in Shakespeare (this is from Romeo and Juliet, c.1595)

and in 19^th-century fiction, like The Three Musketeers (1844-45).

and Kidnapped (1886).

Although they were by then antiquated (and then prohibited by regulation from the battlefield), even British Army officers were still required to purchase them in the Great War—this is the model 1897 with which Tolkien in 1916

would have had to outfit himself

so that he would have looked like these officers.

Bilbo’s Sting was acquired in a much more casual way.  After the trolls had been tricked by Gandalf to expose themselves to sunlight and therefore were turned to stone,

Gandalf prodded the dwarves into locating the trolls’ hideout.  Inside, among other things, they found:

“…several swords of various makes, shapes, and sizes…Gandalf and Thorin each took one of these, and Bilbo took a knife in a leather sheath.  It would have made only a tiny pocket-knife for a troll, but it was as good as a short sword for the hobbit.”  (The Hobbit, Chapter Two, “Roast Mutton”)

There is more to this knife, as Bilbo discovers when, after being left behind in the hollows under the mountains, he draws it:

“It shone pale and dim before his eyes.  ‘So it is an elvish blade, too,’ he thought.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 5, “Riddles in the Dark”)

As the story continues, Bilbo finds more uses for it—to keep Gollum at a distance

and to deal with the giant spiders of Mirkwood,

and it’s here that we see Bilbo at his boldest physically—which makes it an appropriate moment to give his little sword a fierce little name.

Bilbo has an heroic moment with his weapon in his struggle with the spiders, rescuing the dwarves, but it’s clear that, although heroes in literature traditionally have swords, swords do not make heroes.  In the Battle of the Five Armies, Bilbo makes a disappearance, rather than an appearance, and we hear no more of Sting in The Hobbit until, in the last chapter of the book, we learn that, finally returning to Bag End, “His sword he hung over the mantelpiece.” (The Hobbit, Chapter Nineteen, “The Last Stage”)

This is not the end of the story of Sting, however, which will have a second—really third life, as it appears to have been made in Gondolin for the Goblin Wars many years before, since it is associated with Thorin’s (and Gandalf’s) sword, which “had killed hundreds of goblins in its time, when the fair elves of Gondolin hunted them in the hills or did battle before their walls.” (The Hobbit, Chapter Four, “Over Hill and Under Hill”)

(Gondolin by Kenneth Sofia)

This third life, in the hands of Frodo, parallels, to a degree, Bilbo’s experience, but the little sword’s ultimate fate is more complex than the act of simply being hung up at the story’s end.

It begins this life, however, with its previous owner, Bilbo, about to depart from the Shire after his notorious birthday party vanishing act:

“Then he put on quickly some old untidy garments, and fastened round his waist a worn leather belt  On it he hung a short sword in a battered black-leather scabbard.”  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter One, “A Long-Expected Party”)

Sting, then, will travel to Rivendell with Bilbo, but not remain there.  As the new Fellowship is about to leave Rivendell years later, Bilbo:

“…took from the box a small sword in an old shabby leathern scabbard.  Then he drew it, and its polished and well-tended blade glittered suddenly, cold and bright.  ‘This is Sting,’ he said, and thrust it with little effort deep into a wooden beam.  ‘Take it, if you like.  I shan’t want it again, I expect.’

Frodo accepted it gratefully.”  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 3, “The Ring Goes South”)

Although he has gladly accepted it, Frodo, like Bilbo before him, will not be a very active fighter with Sting.  He will stab a goblin in the foot (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 5, “The Bridge of Khazad-Dum”), but, otherwise, it will be Sam who will employ it, temporarily defeating and driving off Shelob with it, (The Two Towers, Book Four, Chapter 10, “The Choices of Master Samwise”) then wounding an orc named Snaga, who falls through an open trapdoor to his death. (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 1, “The Tower of Cirith Ungol”)

Sam continues to carry Sting all the way to Mt Doom, but something has happened to Frodo during that long journey and it reveals itself in “The Scouring of the Shire”, the next-to-last chapter in the story.  Things in the Shire have not gone well in the year Frodo and his friends have been away.  It has been taken over by what Pippin calls “half-orcs and ruffians”, who owe allegiance to someone they call “Sharkey” and all seem bent on turning the place into a miniature fascist state.  And yet, when Pippin says that they’ll have to be fought, Frodo replies:

“Fight?…Well, I suppose it may come to that.  But remember:  there is to be no slaying of hobbits, not even if they have gone over to the other side.  Really gone over, I mean; not just obeying ruffians’ orders because they are frightened.  No hobbit has ever killed another on purpose in the Shire, and it is not to begin now.  And nobody is to be killed at all, if it can be helped.”  (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 8, “The Scouring of the Shire”)

Frodo persists in this approach to violence even after “Sharkey” turns out to be Saruman, who then attempts to knife Frodo.  Saruman is thrown to the ground and Sam, drawing his sword (perhaps Sting?  it never appears that he returns it to Frodo), seems to be about to stop him from trying again when Frodo says:

“No, Sam!…Do not kill him even now.  For he has not hurt me.  And in any case I do not wish him to be slain in this evil mood.  He was great once, of a noble kind that we should not dare to raise our hands against.  He is fallen, and his cure is beyond us; but I would still spare him, in the hope that he may find it.”

We have seen a progression in the life of Sting, from its initial finding by the timid Bilbo, who then becomes the battler of spiders, even if later, involved in an actual battle, he chooses to be less a participant than an observer.  He passes the sword on to Frodo, who uses it aggressively only once, before it comes into the hands of Sam for the rest of the story.  And we can understand that, even offered it, Frodo will never touch it again.  Instead, he will be as Saruman then says:

“You have grown, Halfling…Yes, you have grown very much.  You are wise—” but Saruman goes on to add “and cruel” and this shows how little Saruman himself has grown.  “You have robbed my revenge of sweetness, and now I must go hence in bitterness in debt to your mercy.  I hate it and you!”

Saruman’s bitterness is not long-lasting, however, as, a moment later, his now-lackey, Grima Wormtongue, uses another blade to cut his throat, dying a moment later himself, pierced by several hobbit arrows.

From what we can tell, at this final stage, unless it’s in Sam’s hands—and even if it is–Sting has completely disappeared from the story.  Considering how Frodo has changed into the wiser, non-violent, person whom Saruman recognizes, we suppose that it’s not surprising that it has.  And, with Sauron—and his Ring– gone and the King reestablishing control over much of western Middle-earth, we expect that there will no longer be any need for such weapons.

Then again, Sauron has been defeated before and returned…

Thanks, as always, for reading and

MTCIDC

CD

Welcome, as ever, dear readers.  In this posting, we are taking a break from fictions about wars among the stars to look at wars a little closer to home…

In 1871, there was a new power in western Europe:  the first German Empire.

Until 1871, this had been the Kingdom of Prussia and its allies, a series of small and large German states.  In the late summer and fall of 1870, this coalition had plowed through the armies of Napoleon III’s France, forcing Napoleon to abdicate and capturing Paris.

Such a near-sudden change in the world and especially the rapid defeat of what had been considered one of the major players in western European politics alarmed the rest of Europe:  what would this new German Empire do next?

A fictional answer came almost immediately in a serial first published in the same year in Blackwood’s Magazine.  Written by a British Army Engineer officer, Captain George Tomkyns Chesney (1830-1895)

and entitled “The Battle of Dorking”, it was so popular that it soon appeared in pamphlet form

and then as a novel.

Dorking is a town to the south of London

and, in the story, the site of the climactic battle in which Britain is defeated by those same Germans who had so quickly defeated France.

This never happened, of course, and Britain had suffered invasion jitters before—during the Napoleonic Wars, when the soldiers of Napoleon I sat at Boulogne and the emperor planned an attack

and at the beginning of the 1860s, when there was a fear that Napoleon III, nephew of Napoleon I, might be about to try his own version of his uncle’s plan.

Somehow, however, the idea of a German invasion caught on and persisted, spawning a whole generation of such books, such as this, from 1897—

Not everyone believed in this, as this 1910 cartoon suggests—

(Once the Victorian train network was in place, people went crazy for seaside visits in summer, but, for the more modest, that craziness did not extend to exposing themselves to public view while dipping in the sea.  The invention to save people’s modesty was this, a “bathing-machine”, as they were called.

You climbed into this fully clothed at one end, changed into bathing attire (still ridiculously overmodest by modern standards), then, when attendants had rolled the device into the water, you stepped out into the water (presumably up to your neck, to continue to preserve your modesty), splashed about, then climbed back in, were rolled back onto the beach while drying off and redressing, then stepped out again with, at most, damp hair to show that you’d been in the sea at all.  The obvious joke here is that the German invaders would be landed somehow in the ocean already in bathing dress, then climb into bathing machines to disguise the attack they would then launch on the beach.  This cartoon is by W. Heath Robinson (1872-1944), who was popular then and beyond for the wackily improbable inventions he regularly contributed to the press.)

In that same year of 1897, however, one author took the idea of invasion in a somewhat different direction.  First appearing that year in serial form in Pearson’s Magazine,

this is the first book printing (1898) of HG Wells’ (1866-1946)

The War of the Worlds.

The idea that Mars might be able to support life—or had supported life—was popularized with advances in the development of telescopes, brought about in part by a mistranslation.  In 1877, the Italian astronomer, Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835-1910),

had observed on Mars what he believed to be canali.  What he meant by this was “channels”, but, when the word appeared in English, it was soon (mistakenly) understood to be “canals” and, once one has canals, the next step is canal builders,

which quickly leads to the idea of civilizations and soon there were all sorts of speculation—including detailed maps—of who—or what—might inhabit the Red Planet.

In his novel, Wells took this one step farther:  suppose those canals were drying up—what would a sophisticated civilization do?  One answer—and we can suppose that the rapid expansion of the still-new German empire, now attempting to become an international power,

along with what was now a quarter-century of invasion fiction (this is Louis Tracy’s 1896 novel on the subject—you can get your own copy at:  https://archive.org/details/finalwar00tracgoog/page/n13/mode/2up)

might have supplied some of his inspiration—was the invasion and conquest of a nearby planet, in this case, Earth.

Although Britain in 1897 was at its peak as a world manufacturing power, when confronted with the Martians and their array of machines,

heat rays,

and “black smoke” (clearly a forerunner of the Great War’s poison gases),

it appears that the Martians will be victorious—until they are suddenly defeated, not by armies and their weapons, but by our diseases, of which they have no knowledge and to which they have no immunity.

(This is an illustration by Henrique Correa from a 1906 French translation of the novel.)

This is hardly the end of invasion fiction, which will continue to be published and popular up to the Great War, one of the most popular works being William Le Queux’s (1864-1927) The Invasion of 1910 (1906).  (And here’s the LINK for your copy:  https://www.gutenberg.org/files/51905/51905-h/51905-h.htm)

If we consider that all of this may have started at least in part because of the success of the Prussians and their allies in 1870, it doesn’t surprise us that Wells’ story should gain a new level of, if not popularity, then at least notoriety, in 1938.

Throughout the later 1930s, Hitler’s Germany, brought back from its total defeat in the Great War, was beginning to stir again on the international stage.  On March, 12, 1938, its Eighth Army invaded Austria

and, on March 15, its Third Army invaded Czechoslovakia.

Although some of the Western allies had signed a kind of peace agreement with Hitler at the end of September, 1938, one can only believe that the uneasiness was still strong:  could Hitler be trusted when he seemed determined to acquire more and more of central Europe?

Then, on October 30, 1938, at 8PM (Eastern Standard Time), the CBS broadcast network put on a version of The War of the Worlds dramatized for radio by another Wells, the young actor/director, Orson Wells.

In his dramatization, Wells had updated the story to 1938, setting it around New York City, and turning it into an ordinary radio program interrupted by a series of bulletins about some sort of strange landings and subsequent events in nearby New Jersey.  Anyone who had tuned in at the opening knew, of course, that this was simply fiction.  Anyone who came in later—and seemingly many people did—had no idea and took it for the real thing:  an invasion, of the US, not by a European power, but by those Martians who had nearly conquered Britain in 1897—in fiction.  Needless to say, even in a pre-internet age, this turned into mad rumors and spread through the telephone network, frightening people across the entire country.

Calm returned fairly quickly, but it made us wonder:  with worldwide communication so much faster and easier in 2020, and in a world so prone to violence (alas!), what would happen now, should the fiction of HG Wells return in some new form to disturb us once more?

Thanks, as always, for reading and—barring a Martian invasion—

MTCIDC

CD

ps

For your own copy of The Battle of Dorking, go to:  https://archive.org/details/battleofdorking00chesrich/page/n8/mode/2up

For a first-class website on such things as early invasion fiction, there’s:  http://www.theriddleofthesands.com/the-historical-background/

As always, dear readers, welcome.

Just what does JRRT have in mind when he says “The Thain was the master of the Shire-moot, and the captain of the Shire-muster and the Hobbitry-in-arms”?

The “Thain” had appeared in the Shire as a title at a time of political upheaval, when the last king in the North, Arvedui, had been lost and the hobbits “chose a Thain to take the place of the King”.  (The Lord of the Rings, Appendix A, Section I, Part iii)  Tolkien derived the title from the Old English word thegn, a kind of lesser nobleman, perhaps—and this is a guess we’ve seen elsewhere–with the idea that the Thain would act as a kind of stand-in for the missing monarch.

The “shire-moot” is another Old English term for a kind of assembly held in a shire, a kind of province or county (from Old English scir).  “To muster” is “to gather together” and can be used either as an intransitive verb, meaning it doesn’t need a direct object:  one can say “the Shire mustered”; or as a transitive verb, one which takes a direct object, as in “they mustered all of the armed hobbits.”  And the adjective “armed” is appropriate since, commonly, the verb is used in a military sense.  This leads us to the last term, “Hobbitry-in-arms”.

In the period before the Norman conquest in 1066,

the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms could, by law, call out freemen (as opposed to slaves of various sorts) for a temporary army.  This was called the fyrd (say the y like the u in French tu).

The Normans brought the beginnings of feudalism to England.  Feudalism was all about control, with the armed, mounted man in charge, just below the king, the nobles in this chart being mostly armed, mounted men, as well,

 

but, to fill out his backup, that man could call on those who lived on his land, freemen and peasants/villeins, to serve for a time.

By the Elizabethan period, these part-timers were required to serve in towns and counties as militia.

This was a tradition carried on in their North American colonies, as well,

and, at the beginning of the American Revolution, these were the first men to face the soldiers sent by the government in London.

At the end of the 18^th century, there were fears that the Revolutionary French planned to invade Britain, and many volunteer units were raised to flesh out the small number of professional army units available in the UK.  The cavalry regiments of these volunteers were called “yeomanry” and we imagine that Tolkien derived his “hobbitry” from those “yeomanry”.

For a time after 1815, when Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo, some units were retained and used as a kind of police force, mostly to put down the unrest which came from poor labor conditions and the general lack of political power for most people.  The most infamous act of suppression was the so-called “Peterloo” massacre of 1819, when some demonstrators were killed and many more wounded by a yeomanry unit which made a charge into a peaceful crowd.

Yeomanry units remained part of the volunteer establishment throughout the 19^th century, gaining a new prominence with the raising of the Imperial Yeomanry in 1900,

part of the eventually very large armed forces sent by Britain to defeat the Boers

in the Second Boer War (1899-1902).

Tolkien, who had been a cadet at King Edward’s School,

joined a yeomanry unit, King Edward’s Horse, when he reached Oxford in 1911,

before eventually being commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers, in 1915.

But what was the “Hobbitry-in-arms”?

And now we step into complete guess-work.

If it resembled the yeomanry, it was an organization of volunteers, raised to defend the Shire against invasion.  We know that something like this must once have existed, as we have several mentions of armed groups of hobbits, the archers who were sent off to aid the last king of the North Kingdom, Arvedui (The Lord of the Rings, Appendix A, Section I, Part iii), as well as those who fought at the Battle of Greenfields “In which Bandobras Took routed an invasion of Orcs.” (The Lord of the Rings, Prologue, I, “Concerning Hobbits”)

From the very beginning, British yeomanry units were uniformed and uniformly armed, often being patronized by upper class gentlemen, who then became the senior officers of the units.

The only uniformity we have any knowledge of in the Shire comes from this:

“The Shirriffs was the name that the Hobbit gave to their police, or the nearest equivalent that they possessed.  They had, of course, no uniforms (such things being quite unknown), only a feather in their caps…” (The Lord of the Rings, Prologue, Section 3)

As for weapons, as that same section of the Prologue says:

“So, though there was still some store of weapons in the Shire, these were used mostly as trophies, hanging above hearths or on walls, or gathered into the museum at Michel Delving.”

(We also remember that Bilbo had sent his mithril coat to “a museum”, which we presume was this one.  The Hobbit, Chapter 19, “The Last Stage”.)

With no uniformity of dress or arms, what’s left of our definition is the idea of volunteers raised to defend the Shire against invasion.  And, thus, as in “The Scouring of the Shire”, we see the hobbits in two battles defeating Sharkey’s “big men” , we imagine that this must have been what JRRT had in mind when he created the “Hobbitry-in-arms”:

“When Sam got back he found the whole village roused.  Already, apart from many younger lads, more than a hundred sturdy hobbits were assembled with axes, and heavy hammers, and long knives, and stout staves; and a few had hunting-bows.” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 8, “The Scouring of the Shire”)

Thanks, as ever, for reading, and, of course,

MTCIDC

CD

 

Wait—isn’t that “Halloween”—or, as it used to be spelled “Hallow E’en”, rather old-fashioned English for “Holy Evening”?

And a second wait–isn’t this a little late–or a little early?  When we realized that this 2019 Halloween edition was never posted, we wondered where we should put it.  With a slip of the keyboard, we had posted the last part of our review of Star Wars IX for last Friday, rather than this Wednesday, so we took that as a nudge from the Force and are (temporarily) declaring an early Halloween, 2020 and posting this.  We hope you enjoyed last Halloween and this will add to your happy memories!

And yes, dear readers, “Holloween” is not the correct spelling, but it’s a common US (mis)pronunciation.  And an inspiring one, too, as we thought about it.

It’s a “Holy Evening” because it’s the night before November 1^st, All Saints Day in the western Christian calendar.

But, for us, it’s also hollow—because, in the calendar of an older religion,

it marked the end of SAM, “summer”, and the beginning of GAM, “winter”—an emptying of one season before the beginning of the other.

If you lived in a Neolithic

to Iron Age farm

in the Celtic world, now–late October–meant crops were already gathered and now it was time to bring in the herds, especially of pigs (who were allowed to roam forests full of nut trees in the late summer),

choose a few to continue the herd, and slaughter the rest, smoking or salting the meat for the winter.

Because the summer was dying along with the herds, somehow the belief arose that this was a time when the wall between the living and the dead, and between this world and the Otherworld, was so thin that it could no longer act as a barrier.  The spirits of the dead might come to visit the living—

 

and the Aes Sidhe (AH-es SHEE-thyeh), the people of the Otherworld,

might leave their dwellings and enter our world through the portals of “fairy mounds” (actually tumuli—graves–from earlier peoples)

in later belief, or simply step through the open doorways of the time of the feast of SAMHAIN (SA-vuhn, in older pronunciation) in the older stories.

These are the people who, already miniaturized in Shakespeare’s time, became a staple of children’s book illustrations and sentimental paintings in the Victorian era.

In older times, however, they were seen as looking just like the humans they could move among,  powerful, even menacing, stealing children, enticing away girls and young men who, if they ever returned, would come back hundreds of years later, but think that they’d only been gone a night, as in the story of Oisin (OH-sheen) in the Land of Youth (the basis of WB Yeats’ early “The Wanderings of Oisin”, 1889).

Here, we see Oisin in one version of the story, having returned and turned into the ancient man he really is, talking with St Patrick.

The Scots ballad of “Tam Lin” shows us a young man rescued by a young woman from his ultimate fate:  abducted earlier, he is to be the victim in a sacrifice to Satan.

It being a time between worlds, it seems like a good moment for those who can see between times—which brings us to witches, who are very much part of Halloween.

Well, not this one.

Or these—somehow we can’t imagine witches having afternoon tea—unless there is eye of newt for dessert.

We mean those three witches who surprise Macbeth with a greeting, that, although he doesn’t know it, he is already Thane of Cawdor and, even more astonishing, he will be “king hereafter”.

In an earlier posting, we suggested that the witches are three in number because they might represent the Celtic figure of the Badb (BAHTH-V), who appears in three forms, including a crow,

 

 

and who was drawn to fighting and to battlefields, the very place where Macbeth and his comrade Banquo, have just been.

In early stories, she was the mortal enemy of Cuchulain, the great Irish hero, and caused his death by tricking him into undoing the magical spells which protected him.  In this famous sculpture (in the old General Post Office in Dublin), there she is, sitting on the dying Cuchulain’s shoulder.

As well as the Badb, we could see them as the ancient Greek Fates, the Moirai, each having a role in an image based upon likening life to the making of cloth:  Clotho, who spins a person’s life thread, Lachesis, who marks out the length, and Atropos, who cuts that thread.

And here we see a set of three magical figures, like Macbeth’s witches, all associated with time (we’ll come back to that), to which we would add another possibility, which takes us to a different form of Greek goddess, the Muses, inspirers of art.  They are three times three in number, and, when they first appear to the ancient Greek poet, Hesiod, to announce to him that he will be a poet,

 

it is said of them that they speak of “the things [now] being, the things about to be, and the things being before” (Hesiod, Theogony, line 38—our translation).  So, they are also associated with time.

 

 

To which we add a third possibility, the Norns, Germanic figures rather like the Moirai.

 

In the Voluspa, the first poem in the Icelandic Poetic Edda (10^th century?), there are three of these, with names which appear to indicate, like the Muses, their link to time:  Urd (Old Norse “urdr”, “the past”), Verdandi (Old Norse “verdandi”, “the present”), and Skuld (Old Norse “skuld”, “it will be”).

Imagine, then, that Macbeth’s witches are three in number because, speaking as they do, they, like the Moirai, the Muses, and the Norns, all represent time.  And, like the Muses and Norns, the witches are the stages of time:  one witch is Macbeth’s past (he’s already the Thane of Glamis—said “GLAHMS”), a second is his present (he doesn’t know it yet, but the king, Duncan, has made him Thane of Cawdor to replace the rebel thane, just defeated), and the third is his future, that he will be king of Scotland.  (See Macbeth, Act I, Scene 3)  [Here’s the LINK for the First Folio, the first printing of the play, in 1623.]

Hallow E’en, then, is the perfect moment for witches to appear.  After sunset, we are in the hollow of the old Celtic year:  summer is done, winter will begin tomorrow, but now, being in neither, is a good time to think of what’s happened in the year past, where we are currently, and where we will be in the next year.  If three witches appear to us and hail us as future kings, however, we’ll try to remember another quotation from Shakespeare, from Richard II, Act 3, Scene 2 (again, from the First Folio), in which that word “hollow” is a warning:

For Heauens sake let vs sit vpon the ground,

And tell sad stories of the death of Kings:

How some haue been depos’d, some slaine in warre,

Some haunted by the Ghosts they haue depos’d,

Some poyson’d by their Wiues, some sleeping kill’d,

All murther’d. For within the hollow Crowne

That rounds the mortall Temples of a King,

Keepes Death his Court, and there the Antique sits

Scoffing his State, and grinning at his Pompe,

Allowing him a breath, a little Scene,

To Monarchize, be fear’d, and kill with lookes,

Infusing him with selfe and vaine conceit,

As if this Flesh, which walls about our Life,

Were Brasse impregnable: and humor’d thus,

Comes at the last, and with a little Pinne

Bores through his Castle Walls, and farwell King.

And so perhaps it’s best if we stick to a witch we can melt with a pail of water before we begin to think too hard about her vision of our future.

Happy Hollow—Halloween.  The candy corn is on us

and MTCIDC

CD

 

ps

This was just too spooky—and inventive—not to add!