“Why she was invaluable to me! Who taught me to curl myself inside a buttercup? Iolanthe! Who taught me to swing upon a cobweb? Iolanthe! Who taught me to dive into a dewdrop—to nestle in a nutshell—to gambol upon gossamer? Iolanthe!”  (WS Gilbert, Iolanthe, Act I)

As ever, dear readers, welcome.

In 1882, dramatist W.S. Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan

produced what they called “An Entirely Original Fairy Opera In Two Acts Entitled Iolanthe; or The Peer and the Peri”.

The “Peer” in this case, is the Lord Chancellor,

described in the Wiki article as “the highest-ranking among the Great Officers of State who are appointed regularly in the United Kingdom, nominally outranking the Prime Minister”. 

The “Peri”—from the Persian word “pari”, a kind of angelic being and standing in here (for alliterative purposes) for “fairy”—is the title character, Iolanthe.

The person speaking about her in the quotation above is the Queen of the Fairies,

(looking suspiciously like someone escaped from Wagner’s Der Ring Des Nibelungen)

who has banished Iolanthe years before for the crime of marrying a mortal (in fact the man who will become the Lord Chancellor).  A running joke in the play is that, although the fairies are meant to be tiny—as in the description above of the activities of the Queen of the Fairies—on stage, they are the same size as the mortals. And this is still true today, of course, when you see a revival.

 A second joke is that the Queen, beginning with the original actress, Alice Barnett (in the photograph above), has a deep voice, being a contralto, and is of ample size (Barnett was 5 feet 10 inches—177cm tall).

Gilbert, who was a very subtle man, chose to draw no direct attention to the potential problem of difference in scale, but, to any Victorian who considered it, the joke would have been obvious, as fairies had been thought of as tiny beings since at least Shakespeare’s time, when, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titania, that Queen of the Fairies’, attendants are named “Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustardseed”. 

(And perhaps even earlier than Shakespeare, if the 12^th-century priest, Giraldus Cambrensis’ , story of the boyhood adventure of the Welsh priest, Elidorus, in his The Itinerary and Description of Wales—it’s in Book I of the Itinerarium Kambriae, in Chapter 8– is referring to fairies.  For an English translation of the relevant passage, see:                                                            

https://archive.org/details/itinerarythroug00girauoft/page/68/mode/2up )

This tiny tradition was carried on into the 17^th century by Michael Drayton (1563-1631)

in his poem, Nymphidia (1627), with passages such as this (lines 41-48, describing the fairy palace):

“The walls of spiders’ legs are made

Well mortised and finely laid;

He was the master of his trade

     It curiously had builded;

The windows of the eyes of cats,

And for a roof, instead of slats,

Is covered with the skin of bats,

     With moonshine that are gilded.”

(for more, see:  http://www.luminarium.org/editions/nymphidia.htm )

In the essay “On Fairy Stories” (1939/1947), Tolkien expresses his intense dislike of this sort of thing:

“Drayton’s Nymphidia is one ancestor of that long line of flower-fairies and fluttering sprites with antennae that I so disliked as a child, and which my children in turn detested.” 

And, citing the above passage in particular, he continues:

“Drayton’s Nymphidia is, considered as a fairy-story (a story about fairies), one of the worst ever written.”

JRRT’s very negative reaction comes at the end of a long tradition of the miniaturized world he disliked. The Elizabethan/Jacobean fancies of Shakespeare and Drayton inspired 19^th-century English artists from Landseer (1802-1873),

Richard Dadd (1817-1886),

 and Robert Huskisson (1820-1861),

to Richard Doyle (1824-1883)—perhaps the most famous fairy painter–

and Arthur Rackham (1867-1939).

And then there were the photographs.

In The Strand Christmas issue for December, 1920, there appeared these two very odd pictures–

Here are larger versions:

These were followed, in time, by three more—

To our 21^st century eyes, these look impossibly faked.  The children are three-dimensional, but the “fairies” in four of the photos and the “gnome” in the other have the appearance of colored cardboard cut-outs—which is exactly what they are, some actually modeled upon an illustration in a popular book of the period, Princess Mary’s Gift Book (1914).

(Here’s a LINK so that you can have your own copy:  https://archive.org/details/princessmarysgif00mary

The illustration, one of several, accompanies a poem, “A Spell for a Fairy” by the once well-known poet, Alfred Noyes (1880-1958) and can be seen on page 102.  This is actually quite a remarkable book, seeming to have contributions by every prominent author of the period, in particular adventure writers like the Baroness Orczy and H. Rider Haggard, and even a poem by Rudyard Kipling.)

“Spirit photography” had been around since the 1860s, when a Boston photographer, William Mumler (1832-1884) began to add faint extra exposures to actual portrait photos.  If you’re at all familiar with this kind of cheap trickery, you’ll recognize this of Mary Todd Lincoln, the widow of Abraham Lincoln, with a ghostly (literally) President Lincoln behind her.

Mumler was exposed as a fraudster in 1869, but that didn’t stop some from continuing to believe that the spirit world was desperate for a “Kodak moment” with the living.  And among those was a surprising figure, the creator of the original sceptical detective,

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930).  His name was on that 1920 Strand article and, soon after, Sir Arthur published both The Coming of the Fairies

and The Case for Spirit Photography in 1922.  (If you’re interested, here are LINKS to both: 

https://archive.org/details/comingoffairies00doylrich

and 

https://archive.org/details/1923DoyleTheCaseForSpiritPhotography  )

Conan Doyle was already in the “Spiritualist” movement.  As early as 1887, he had published an article on a séance (a meeting in which a “medium”—that is, a person supposedly sensitive to the spirit world—and a group of interested people attempt to contact the dead) he had attended.  And, in 1917, he delivered his first public lecture on the subject. 

He was predisposed, then, to believe what he saw, almost as if he were hearing Holmes, in his head, saying, “Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth.” (The Sign of the Four, 1890)

In fact, considering what was the truth, he should have been hearing:

“Let me run over the principal steps. We approached the case, you remember, with an absolutely blank mind, which is always an advantage. We had formed no theories. We were simply there to observe and to draw inferences from our observations.”  (The Adventure of the Cardboard Box, 1893)

But perhaps the same spirit—no pun intended—which keeps us from thinking too hard about the scale of the characters in Iolanthe was behind Conan Doyle’s firm assertion of the veracity of those photographs.

Or, perhaps it was the same impulse which makes us clap when, in the play Peter Pan, Tinkerbell is dying and our clapping will bring her back:  a basic need, even for the creator of Sherlock Holmes, to believe in fairies?

Thanks, as always, for reading,

Stay well,

And remember, as always, that there’s

MTCIDC,

O

ps

In 1908, Arthur Rackham illustrated perhaps the most beautiful and certainly the most creatively constructed edition of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  Here’s a LINK so that you can have your own copy of this impressive work:

https://archive.org/details/midsummernightsd00shak

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

Back in June, 2017, CD published “Hoards of the Things”, a posting mostly about dragons and their hoards, but, thinking a little further, the title—which was meant to be a pun—reminded me that, for years, I had trouble remembering how to spell an English word meaning “a large number of something”.

Was it h-o-a-r-d?  or h-o-r-d-e?

When I thought of “horde”, what came to mind was a swarm of invaders—the so-called “Golden Horde” of Mongols and Turkic peoples who marched west in the mid-13^th century to overcome much of what would become Russia and the Ukraine,

destroying western armies in battle,

besieging and conquering cities.

Masses of sword-swinging, bow-shooting tribal warriors were “hordes”, then.

But there was that troubling other spelling, “hoard”.

While resisting rushing to the Oxford English Dictionary—or the quick and useful fix of Etymonline, a kind of OED digest– it occurred to me that my puzzlement came, in part, from the fact that, every few years, someone somewhere in the UK, using some sort of metal detector,

discovers a mass of ancient coins or similarly valuable things and the find is called something like “the Bakerloo Hoard”.

This is the “Frome Hoard”, discovered in a field in southwest England in 2010.  (The nearby town’s name is said “Frume”, by the way.)  In a very large ceramic jar were 52,503 Roman coins.  And this is by no means the only such find.  There are over 1200 known at present—and that’s only from the Romano-British period.  Add in everything from the Neolithic to Later Medieval and Post-Medieval and you have an enormous number—a horde/hoard, in fact, of such hoards/hordes.  (If you’d like to know more about Romano-British deposits, here’s a LINK: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_hoards_in_Great_Britain  For a more general view, see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hoards_in_Great_Britain )

“Hoard” in this context, then, could certainly entail the idea of lots of something, but, also, in this context, maybe it was more specialized, applying not to collections of warriors, say, but to a collection of an inanimate something of value, like pots of coins.  

But what about “hoarders”? 

This is a broad term which covers everything from World War 2 attempts to get around food-rationing

to a serious mental disorder, in which people obsessively acquire and keep things far beyond their use or need, but in which they, if not others, see some value.

As someone who spends a good deal of time in the world of adventure, this image of piles of things quickly brought me to dragons.  Smaug, in The Hobbit,

and an important model for Smaug, the unnamed dragon of Beowulf,

are both in possession of very large collections of valuable things, and yet, as monsters, the only profit they can seem to make of them is to own them—and to be violent at the disturbance of even a single item, as in the cup which an escaped slave steals from the hoard of the dragon in Beowulf (an action  imitated by Bilbo in The Hobbit).

So, reasoning from there, if someone (or thing, in the case of Smaug and the Beowulf dragon?) holds onto large amounts of something she/he/it has accumulated, but can’t use, then that large amount is a “hoard” (although I wouldn’t go so far as to attempt to analyze a dragon’s motive for doing so).   Perhaps, in view of those dragons, and of those whose deposits are located by metal detectorists, however, this needs a bit of modification.

First, In the case of the dragons, they themselves don’t appear to have accumulated what they guard:

1. the Beowulf dragon found his treasure already buried in a mound

2. Smaug, at best, has only added from inside the Lonely Mountain to the wealth already there:  “Behind him where the walls were nearest could dimly be seen coats of mail, helms and axes, swords and spears hanging; and there in rows stood great jars and vessels filled with a wealth that could not be guessed.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 12, “Inside Information”)

Second, in the case of all of those treasures discovered by metal detectorists and others, it’s generally believed that such things, with rare exceptions, weren’t gathered and stored merely to be gathered and stored, but were only meant to be hidden for a time, and then, for unknown reasons, were never retrieved.  In contrast to the dragons, then, such people, according to my running definition above, weren’t “hoarders”, even though their pots and other storage containers held what is called a “hoard”.

Perhaps, then, some other aspect than simple accumulation might be the defining factor?  Even if their collections were meant to be recovered, they were, initially and with intent, concealed.  It might be stretching a point, but Smaug and the Beowulf dragon sit on underground deposits.  World War 2 hoarders were accused of stashing away food.  Could the basic meaning of “hoard”  then be “something of value (at least to the owners) which is hidden”?  (Hoarders of the more obsessive variety might be said, at least, to store up things in numbers, even if they don’t keep them concealed—although sometimes the objects are in such large amounts that they begin to conceal the accumulators.)

If so, then, to keep “hoard” from “horde”, we might look once more at those dragons.

From my experience of them (not personal, which is probably just as well, although I would very much like to meet the poetical beast of Kenneth Grahame’s “The Reluctant Dragon” ),

though Thorin says that “I know where Mirkwood is, and the Withered Heath where the great dragons bred.” (The Hobbit, Chapter One, “An Unexpected Party”)

dragons seem to be solitary creatures—certainly the Beowulf dragon appears to have no kin, nor does Smaug (nor, for that matter,  does another of Smaug’s models, the dragon which the Danish king, Frotho I, kills in Book 2 of Saxo Grammaticus’ early 13^th-century Gesta Danorum, “Deeds of the Danes”).  In contrast, dragons in the East may flock—see this wonderful 13^th-century painting by Chen Rong, “The Scroll of the Nine Dragons”—

and, on the model of the Mongols, appear in hordes, but western dragons always seem to appear by themselves, never in hordes, but sitting obsessively on their hoards.

As ever, thanks for reading,

Stay well, and be sure that there’s

MTCIDC

O

ps

Several years ago, CD recommended a quiet comic series about metal-detecting in England, The Detectorists (2014-2017), written and directed by the brilliant Mackenzie Crook.  This is set in and around the imaginary English village of “Danebury”, where we see two rather bumbly but hopeful men with metal detectors search for what they’re convinced will be a hoard.  Since then, the series has been completed and I now want to re-recommend it as a whole.

To find out more, see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detectorists

pps

Although discovery by metal detector is common, other finds are simply accidents, often at building sites, like the Fishpool Hoard, found in 1966 (see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fishpool_Hoard ) or even by someone simply plowing, as in the case of the Mildenhall Treasure, turned up in a field in 1942 (see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mildenhall_Treasure –this is Mildenhall, in Suffolk, and, just to make things complicated, there is another Mildenhall—said MY-al by the locals—in Wiltshire, all the way across southern England, where another treasure was found in 1978—see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cunetio_Hoard ).

ppps

If you, too, would like to meet the poetical beast of Grahame’s story, follow this LINK:  https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1288/1288-h/1288-h.htm

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

The other day, I was making pesto.  Because readers of this blog come from all over the globe, perhaps I should explain. 

Pesto is this:

It can be made with a number of different ingredients, but this recipe uses basil leaves, olive oil, and a touch of garlic.  You can mix it with any number of different things, but a favorite is with pasta and chicken.  It may originally be Italian, as certainly the word is, being a contraction of pestato, “crushed”, indicating how it’s made.  And, since we’re talking etymology, here’s a word you may know, from the same Latin root—pins- — “to grind/crush”.  Move from that to the crushing tool in Latin, pistillum, then through Old French to English and you get “pestle”—which goes with the object in which you grind things, a “mortar”—

and, because it’s impossible not to make the association, this is also the preferred flying vehicle for the Russian witch, Babayaga.

(If you’d like to know more about this really interesting folktale character—“witch” is only one possibility of what she is—you can read about her in this 1916 English translation of Afanasyev’s  Russian Folk Tales:

https://archive.org/details/russianfolktales00afan_0/page/n15/mode/2up   

 Just one interesting detail about her:  she lives in a house on chicken legs, and it’s always moving so that it’s very difficult for anyone to get inside without her permission.)

But the difficulty with pesto using basil

is that it takes a lot of leaves to make a decent batch

and it’s more than a little time-consuming to pluck enough leaves, after you’ve uprooted the stalks.

So—lest you think that you’ve fallen into a cooking website by one of those strange left turns search engines sometimes make– I was plucking the leaves, but, at the same time, I was thinking about animal helpers in folktales and wishing that I had some of my own.  Animals in folktales can act as guides and interpreters and protectors, but what I really needed was someone interested in tiny detail work.  The first who came to mind were from a weird but really interesting literary work from the 2^nd century AD, Apuleius’

(There’s no actual known portrait—this is an idealized 3^rd-century medallion)

 novel (sort of) The Metamorphoses.

(This is the 1639 edition of Richard Adlington’s 1566 English translation.  Unusually, I haven’t been able to locate an image of any earlier printing.)

I wrote “sort of” novel because it’s almost more a kind of short story collection with the stories embedded in a loose narrative of the adventures of one Lucius, who, in attempting to practice magic to turn himself into a bird, ends up as a donkey,

and spends a good deal of time in that shape before finally being turned back into a man through the aid of the goddess Isis.

Among the short stories embedded, is a long one about a human woman, Psyche, who falls in love with Eros/Cupid, the son of the goddess Venus.

Venus is not pleased with this and assigns Psyche a series of impossible tasks to punish her for daring to love her son.  For her first task, Venus dumps in front of her a huge pile of mixed legumes and seeds—as the Latin says:   “et hordeo et milio et papavere et cicere et lente et faba commixtisque acervatim confusis in unum grumulum”—“both barley and millet and poppy seed and chick pea and lentil and broad bean and mixed every which way poured together into one little hill”. 

Psyche has until the evening to complete the task.  It’s impossible, of course, just like spinning straw into gold in the story of “Rumpelstiltskin”.

Or—closer to home—a similar task from the other version of “Cinderella”—not the Perrault one, in the 1697 Histoires or Contes du temps passe,

but from Kinder und Hausmaerchen (1812) of the Grimms, where the girl is known as “Aschenputtel”.

Here, before she can even think of going to the ball with her stepmother and her evil stepsisters,

her stepmother tells her:  “Da habe ich dir eine Schüssel Linsen in die Asche geschüttet, wenn du die Linsen in zwei Stunden wieder ausgelesen hast, so sollst du mitgehen.”—“I have spilled a bowl of lentils into the ashes for you.  If, in two hours, you have sorted out the lentils again, then you shall go with us.”

The same impossible task—although perhaps a little easier, without all of those mixed beans!  Then again, ash can be grey—and so can lentils.

Aschenputtel is fortunate, however, in that she has the aid of, first, two white doves, then turtledoves, then birds of all kinds who flock in to help her.

Luckily, they follow her directions (which, in a little couplet, sound almost like a magic spell):

“Die guten ins Töpfchen,

Die schlechten ins Kröpfchen.”

“The good ones in the little pot,

The poor ones in the little crop.”

(the crop being part of a bird’s throat).

Aschenputtel (with a little feathered assistance) then finishes the job—but, as we all know, is still not allowed to go to the ball.  And the same disappointment will happen to Psyche.  Her helpers, however, are much smaller—and generally more organized—than birds—

The formiculae—“tiny ants/antlets” come rushing in waves:  “summoque studio singulae granatim totum digerunt acervum separatimque distributis dissitisque generibus e conspectu perniciter abeunt.”

“and, with the greatest eagerness, each separated the whole heap grain by grain and, when the kinds were divided and arranged separately, they quickly disappeared from sight.”

Which leaves me to ponder two possibilities:

a. can I attract some eager ants for myself?  (usually, not difficult—but how do you convince them to “e conspectu perniciter abire” (“to quickly disappear from sight”) afterwards?)

b. or is there still time before dinner to go to the store and invest in a jar of this–

Thanks, as always, for reading,

Stay well,

Bon appetit,

And know that, as ever, there’s

MTCIDC

O

ps

If you are regular readers, you will have noticed a slight change in format.  The D of CD having gone on to other projects, the C remains, under his own title, Ollamh, to entertain you, he hopes, as CD did for so long.

pps

If you are interested in reading more about Cinderella, back in June/July of 2018, CD did a 5-part series on Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty through many different forms.  The series was called “Theme and Variations” and we recommend it (modestly) to you for your enjoyment.