As ever, dear readers, welcome.

This posting is a kind of P.S. to the previous belated-Valentine’s Day piece.

After using a Valentine quotation from Chaucer’s The Parlement of Foules (c.1380), I had thought that I would move on to a Renaissance reference, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (c.1600).  The posting was a fairly jolly one, however, and the quotation I was going to use was certainly not.  In modern editions, it’s from Act IV, Scene 5, when Ophelia drifts in

and talks and sings in a strange mixture, but, through it all, makes some very pointed references to the death of her father and to her BF, Hamlet’s, treatment of her, as in:

“To morrow is saint Valentines day,

All in the morning betime,

And a maide at your window,

To be your Valentine:

The yong man rose, and dan’d his clothes,

And dupt the chamber doore,

Let in the maide, that out a maide

Neuer departed more.

Nay I pray marke now,

By gisse, and by saint Charitie,

Away, and fie for shame:

Yong men will doo’t when they come too’t

By cocke they are too blame.

Quoth she, before you tumbled me,

You promised me to wed.

So would I a done, by yonder Sunne,

If thou hadst not come to my bed.”

(Hamlet, 1^ST Quarto, modern lines 2790-2804)

Because I prefer Elizabethan spelling, I’ve chosen to use the 1^st Quarto, the first publication of the play, from 1603.

This is also the so-called “Bad Quarto”, named that because, in contrast to the 2^nd Quarto, of 1604, and the Folio, of 1623, it is not only shorter, but has all sorts of quirks, including Polonius being renamed “Corambis”, and a rather different version of Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy, beginning:

“To be, or not to be, I there’s the point,

To Die, to sleepe, is that all?  I all.”

I find it a very interesting text in its changes (Hamlet’s mother becomes convinced that her new husband is a murderer, for instance), as much as it’s fun to watch scholars muster arguments this way and that, many of them quite ingenious, about what, exactly, this Quarto is:  an early draft?  the equivalent of a bootleg?  the victim of a mad printer’s devil?

If the latter, then it certainly fits with Ophelia’s behavior—but then Hamlet himself pretends to be mad—

and, as the story progresses, he certainly seems, at times, to be skating at the edge of less-than-calmly-sane reactions himself.  In fact, if it weren’t that others had also seen the ghost of Hamlet’s murdered father at the play’s opening,

I’ve sometimes thought about a different play, one in which Hamlet, upset at his father’s sudden death and his mother’s somewhat hasty remarriage to her brother-in-law, has imagined the whole thing and, in his madness, has caused all of the calamities which then happen:  the deaths of Ophelia, her father, and her brother and of his uncle and mother, not to mention that of the real stars of the show, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern–

and of Hamlet, himself, of course.

Ophelia’s behavior has been parodied, perhaps most famously by W.S Gilbert (1836-1911)

of Gilbert & Sullivan fame,

in the person of “Mad Margaret”

in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore (originally Ruddygore) of 1887.

She, like Ophelia, has been driven mad through misfortune and her strange dress is matched by her odd speech:

“MAR. You pity me? Then be my mother! The squirrel had a mother; but she drank and the squirrel fled! Hush! They sing a brave song in our parts – it runs somewhat thus: (sings)“The cat and the dog and the little puppee Sat down in a – down in a – in a –” I forget what they sat down in, but so the song goes!”

 (WS Gilbert, Ruddigore, Act I)

(If you don’t know this operetta, you’ll be happy to learn that, after a startling revelation at the end of Act I, she is reunited with the man who jilted her and the two become sober members of society—with certain zany lapses on her part.  If you would like to read the text, here’s a LINK:   https://gsarchive.net/ruddigore/libretto.pdf   )

As Ophelia appears to have an overabundance of flowers, (each with its own significance, as she points out) as a sign of her distracted state—and which, in fact, will lead to her death,

so one element of Margaret’s dress—the straws sticking out of her hair—

Is supposed to suggest that, in her madness, she’s been a wanderer in body, as in mind.  Those straws as a mark of mental instability are, in fact, older than Ruddigore.  In 1865, 22 years before the operetta, we see them mixed in with the hair—of a hare.

In that year, an odd book appeared, entitled Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

In Chapter VII, the Alice of the title happens upon a peculiar outdoor tea party, whose hosts are this hare and a man in an oversized hat. 

She has already had them identified by, of all things, a talking cat

who seems to be able to appear and disappear at will,

and who says of the two:

“In that direction…lives a Hatter:  and in that direction lives a March Hare.”

(Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter VI)

Alice is aware of the folk belief that, in March, hares are supposed to be mad (something to do with the mating season, it was thought), saying:

“I’ve seen hatters before…the March Hare will be much the more interesting, and perhaps, as this is May, it wo’n’t be raving mad—at least not so mad as it was in March.” 

It’s clear, however, that she doesn’t know that the mercury used in the preparation of hats, when inhaled, as it would have been in workshops in 1865, had terrible effects upon those working there, including everything from delirium to personality change and memory loss.  From such reactions, the expression “mad as a hatter” had entered the language—and the story.  (As usual, by the way, there is argument over the real derivation of the expression, but it appears to me that there may be a confusion over the word “mad”, with its secondary meaning of “angry”.  For a rather confused article on the subject, see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_as_a_hatter )

When she arrives at the party, it’s evident that this is not a standard Victorian tea,

and, by the end of it, as Alice slips away, the hare and the hatter appear to be trying to drown another guest, a dormouse, in the pot. 

Perhaps Alice would have been wise to have listened more carefully to all of what the talking cat had said about her hosts:

“ ‘Visit either you like:  they’re both mad.’

‘But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ Alice remarked.

‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the Cat:  we’re all mad here.  I’m mad.  You’re mad.’

‘How do you know I’m mad?’ said Alice.

‘You must be,’ said the Cat, ‘or you wouldn’t have come here.’ “

It’s a pity no one had said that to Ophelia.

So, as always, thanks for reading.

Stay well and avoid men with oversized hats and poor table manners

And know that, as ever, there’s

MTCIDC

O

ps

In case you’d like to read that rather different Hamlet, here’s a LINK:  https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/Ham_Q1/scene/1/

pps

And here’s an Alice text with the original Tenniel illustrations in place:  https://www.alice-in-wonderland.net/wp-content/uploads/alice-in-wonderland.pdf

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

Although the title of this posting refers to Valentine’s Day messages (this is a belated Valentine for you, readers),

the words remind me of something which, if you grew up watching US children’s television from 1966 to 2001 (and from 1964, if you lived in Canada), you would have heard sung every week:

It’s a beautiful day in this neighborhood,
A beautiful day for a neighbor,
Would you be mine?
Could you be mine?

source: https://www.lyricsondemand.com/tvthemes/mrrogersneighborhoodlyrics.html

This was the theme song for “Mr Rogers’ Neighborhood”, starring—surprise!—Mr Rogers.

If you don’t know it, here’s a link:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jqzgaL3n_c  If you do know it, take a moment to admire his neat use of enjambment (a poetic term meaning running the meaning of one line into the next) in his first rhyme:

It’s a beautiful day in this neighborhood,

A beautiful day for a neighbor

Would you be mine?

Notice, also, that, instead of using the simple indicative—“will you”, he’s employed the past tense of “will”–“would”–which, in English, has a potential conditional feeling, as if he wants you to, but he’s leaving it up to you (and that “could” in the next line makes it even tentative—“is it physically possible?” which, as Mr Rogers was behind a television screen, wasn’t possible, except metaphorically—or, as Mr R might have put it, spiritually)

Although not a major poet, Mr Rogers has become a sort of secular saint, which is not surprising, given his gentle, but persistent message encouraging children to be kind to and tolerant of all those around them.

And this brings up back to St Valentine.  And his day.  Or not.

As I began this posting, I thought that I had remembered that the Vatican had had a kind of purge of the liturgical calendar in 1969, and popular saints, like St Christopher

and St Valentine

were removed because there simply was so little evidence about them.  In fact, they weren’t actually removed, permanently, but, rather, they were gently nudged to one side and their feast days could still be celebrated, St Valentine’s being 14 February.  So far, so good, but then, when one plunges into the backstory, well, the Vatican was right:  not only so little evidence, but much of it based upon conjecture and myth-making.

What little that can be said of him is that:

a. there may be two of him

   1. Valentinus of Rome

   2. Valentinus of Terni (Roman Interamna)

(there is a ghostly third Valentinus, but he doesn’t appear to be in the running)

b. someone named Valentinus was supposedly martyred in Rome in the 3^rd century AD during the administration of an emperor named “Claudius”—there being a problem with this in that the only 3^rd-century emperor of that name

was a soldier who spent almost the entirety of his short reign (268-270AD) defending the borders of the empire, far from Rome

c. he was buried by the Flaminian gate, on the north side of Rome

and a church, holding his relics, including his skull

was built upon the spot—which seems to have disappeared, and that skull is actually in an 8^th-12th-century Byzantine church, Santa Maria in Cosmedin, in another part of Rome.  (How it got there and why it’s identified with Valentine is its own mystery.  There are relics of this blurry saint in other locations, in fact, even in Dublin.)

d. he may have cured someone of blindness and someone else of an odd crippling condition, although these stories are fairly common, it seems, in the history of saints in general (called hagiography)

e. he doesn’t appear in the earliest list of Christian martyrs, the Chronography of 354, but makes an appearance in the Martyrologium Hieronymianum, put together between 460 and 544AD, reportedly drawn from earlier sources

All pretty shaky, I’m afraid.  But what about his association with lovers, which is the basis of a whole candy, flowers, card industry?  Again—it appears to be myth-making, some of it possibly the work of one G Chaucer (c1340s-1400),

a bit more of a poet than Mr F Rogers. In his 699-line “dream vision”, The Parlement of Foules” (c.1380?), the poet moves from reading Cicero’s “Dream of Scipio” (Somnium Scipionis, a philosophic dialogue by the Roman orator, Cicero, 106-43BC) to a dream world which includes this:

“And in a launde, upon an hille of floures,
Was set this noble goddesse Nature;
Of braunches were hir halles and hir boures,
Y-wrought after hir craft and hir mesure;
Ne ther nas foul that cometh of engendrure,
That they ne were prest in hir presence,
To take hir doom and yeve hir audience.

For this was on seynt Valentynes day,
Whan every foul cometh ther to chese his make,
Of every kinde, that men thenke may;”

(The Parlement of Foules, 302-311)

That is:

“And in a land was set upon a hill of flowers

The noble goddess, Nature.  Her halls and bowers

Were made of branches, fashioned after their craft

  and dimensions.

There was no bird which exists

That wasn’t pressed to attend her,

To take her judgment and listen to her.

For this was on Saint Valentine’s Day,

When every bird of every kind that men think there is

Comes there to choose his mate.”

(My translation—and forgive me, Chaucer scholars for giving it a little modern color here and there.  For a very useful Middle English text with glossing, see:   http://www.librarius.com/parliamentfs.htm   )

Chaucer’s lines have been used to explain the saint’s connection with lovers, associating bird mating with (potential) human mating and reminding me of these lines from Cole Porter’s song, from his 1928 musical, Paris, “Let’s Do It”:

“And that’s why birds do it, bees do it,

Even educated fleas do it

Let’s do it, let’s fall in love.”

(Here’s Cole Porter himself singing it, to his own accompaniment:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMk4a3uUVv0 )

So, with almost no actual saint, what are we to make of this day?  We began with a song, so perhaps it’s best to end as Chaucer does, with another song, to St Valentine, as sung by the birds:

“Saynt Valentyn, that art ful hy on-lofte

Thus singen smale foules for thy sake—

Now welcome somer, with thy sonne sonne,

That hast this wintres weders over-shake.”

(The Parlement of Foules, 683-686)

Thanks, as always for reading,

Stay warm while we wait for Chaucer’s somer,

And know that, as ever, there will be

MTCIDC

O

ps

I imagine that the birds’ song is clear, but, if not:

“Saint Valentine, you who are high above,

Little birds sing like this for your sake—

Now welcome, summer, with your sunny sun,

Which has overthrown this winter’s weather.”

Welcome, as ever, dear readers.

At the beginning of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe, some fairies are discussing the banishment of one of their number, Iolanthe,

when they are interrupted by the Queen of the fairies,

 who explains:

Queen.  No, because your Queen, who loved her with a surpassing love, commuted her sentence to penal servitude for life, on condition that she left her husband and never communicated with him again!

Leila.  That sentence of penal servitude she is now working out, on her head, at the bottom of that stream!

Queen.  Yes, but when I banished her, I gave her all the pleasant places of the earth to dwell in.  I’m sure I never intended that she should go and live at the bottom of a stream!  It makes me perfectly wretched to think of the discomfort she must have undergone!

Leila.  Think of the damp!  And her chest was always delicate.

Queen.  And the frogs!  Ugh!  I never shall enjoy any peace of mind until I know why Iolanthe went to live among the frogs!   (W.S. Gilbert, Iolanthe, Act I)

This piece of dialogue made me wonder about damp living conditions in a few literary works, and, because I’ve recently taught Beowulf, I immediately thought of Grendel and his mother,

(An Alan Lee illustration.)

whose habitation was in a pool, in the midst of a moor.   The poem describes Grendel:

“wæs se grimma gaést      Grendel háten		this ghastly demon was      named Grendel,
maére mearcstapa      sé þe móras héold		infamous stalker in the marches,      he who held the moors,
fen ond fæsten·      fífelcynnes eard		fen and desolate strong-hold;      the land of marsh-monsters,
wonsaélí wer      weardode hwíle	10	the wretched creature      ruled for a time”

I would normally try to translate this myself, but, this time, I want to use this passage to point to a really useful site:https://heorot.dk/beowulf-rede-text.html  which, as you can see, has both the original text and a translation, plus extensive notes.  There are several Beowulf translations on-line and, along with this one, I would recommend that by Dick Ringler, which you can find at:  https://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/Literature/Literature-idx?type=header&id=Literature.RinglBeowulf&pview=hide 

Ringler’s translation, which, like the above, has lots of useful background information, is designed for oral delivery, and so has a very up-to-date feel to it. 

If you thought that Grendel’s neighborhood was bad, the pool in which he and his mother live was so terrifying that, as the text says:

“ofer þaém hongiað      hrímge bearwas·	1363	over it hangs      frost-covered groves,
wudu wyrtum fæst      wæter oferhelmað·		tree held fast by its roots      overshadows the water;
þaér mæg nihta gehwaém      níðwundor séon		there one may every night      a horrible marvel see:
fýr on flóde·      nó þæs fród leofað		fire on the water;      not even the wise of them lives,
gumena bearna      þæt þone grund wite.		of men’s sons,      that knows the bottom.
Ðéah þe haéðstapa      hundum geswenced	1368	Though the heath-stepper      harrassed by hounds,
heorot hornum trum      holtwudu séce		the hart with strong horns,      seeks the forest,
feorran geflýmed·      aér hé feorh seleð		put to flight from far,      first he will give up his life,
aldor on ófre      aér hé in wille		existence on the shore,      before he will (leap) in
hafelan helan·      nis þæt héoru stów·		to hide his head;      it is not a pleasant place;”

Iolanthe’s place of exile brought on thoughts of Beowulf.  In turn, the half-line fyr on flode, “fire upon water”, will remind The Lord of the Ring readers of:

“Presently it grew altogether dark:  the air itself seemed black and heavy to breathe.  When lights appeared Sam rubbed his eyes:  he thought his head was going queer  He first saw one with the corner of his left eye, a wisp of pale sheen that faded away; but others appeared soon after:  some like dimly shining smoke, some like misty flames flickering slowly above unseen candles; here and there they twisted like ghostly sheets unfurled by hidden hands…

At last Sam could bear it no longer.  ‘What’s all this, Gollum?’ he said in a whisper.  ‘These lights?  They’re all round us now.  Are we trapped?  Who are they?’

Gollum looked up.  A dark water was before him, and he was crawling on the ground, this way and that, doubtful of the way.  ‘The tricksy lights.  Candles of corpses, yes, yes.  Don’t you heed them!  Don’t look!  Don’t follow them!”  (The Two Towers, Book Four, Chapter 2, “The Passage of the Marshes”)

I’ve always found this one of the most unsettling moments in Frodo and Sam’s long journey to Mt Doom, I think because of this:

“Hurrying forward again, Sam tripped, catching his foot in some old root or tussock.  He fell and came heavily on his hands, which sank deep into sticky ooze, so that his face was brought close to the surface of the dark mere.  There was a faint hss, a noisome smell went up, the lights flickered and danced and swirled.  For a moment the water below him looked like some window, glazed with grimy glass, through which he was peering.  Wrenching his hands out of the bog, he sprang back with a cry.  ‘There are dead things, dead faces in the water,’ he said with horror.  ‘Dead faces!’”   

In a letter to Prof L.W. Forster, 31 December, 1960, JRRT suggested an inspiration for such a place:

“The Dead Marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme.” (Letters, 303)

As the Great War progressed, the landscape of northern France/southern Belgium became permanently pock-marked from the endless fall of artillery shells.

As you can see, whenever it rained, these shell-holes filled with water and, during attacks, it was possible for advancing soldiers to fall in and drown.  I think that this is what Tolkien is suggesting was one idea behind the Dead Marshes.

Iolanthe is pardoned by the Fairy Queen

and leaves the stream for good, but I can do better than that.  In the musical Once Upon a Mattress,

Princess Winifred (her nickname?  “Fred”), while waiting to see what Queen Agravaine has in store for her in the way of a contest, (as in the original Andersen fairy tale, the princess must pass a test to gain the prince, Dauntless—but it’s his mother she has to satisfy, not the prince), she is asked by her (temporary, as far as the queen’s concerned) maids to describe her homeland, which she does:

Winnifred: I come from the land of the foggy, foggy dew ooh-ooh-ooh!
Ooh-ooh-ooh! Ooh-ooh-ooh!
Where walking through the meadow in the morning is like walking through glue!
The swamps of home are brushed with green and gold at break of day.

Dauntless: At break of day.
Winnifred: The swamps of home are lovely to behold from far away.
Dauntless: From far away.
Winnifred: In my soul is the beauty of the bog, in my memory the magic of the mud.
I know that blood is thicker than water but the swamps of home are thicker than blood.
Dauntless: Blo-o-od!
Winnifred: Where e’er I roam my heart grows dank and cold,
my face grows gray when shadows fall and I hear the call…
of the swamps of home.
Ladies: Ah…
Winnifred: I hear them calling me now, calling me back, calling me Winnifred,
Winnifred, Winnifred, Winnifred, who do you think you are?
Girl of the swamp,
Ladies: Winnifred, Winnifred
Winnifred: You’ve gone to far!
Maid of the marshland, give up the struggle!
Listen to the voice of the swamp;
gluggle-uggle-uggle.
Ladies: gluggle-uggle-uggle.
Winnifred: Where e’er I roam. The whips of fate may smart, but deep down in my heart
Ladies: ooh…
Winnifred: One thought will abide and will ne’er be forgotten,
though I search far and wide there is no land as rotten…
Ladies: Rotten, rotten, rotten, Rotten, rotten, rotten, Rotten, rotten, rotten…
Winnifred: As the swamps of home.
Winnifred, Dauntless & Ladies: The swamps of home!

(source: https://www.lyricsondemand.com/soundtracks/o/onceuponamattresslyrics/swampsofhomelyrics.html )

Carol Burnett was the original Princess Fred

and you can hear her singing about her sort-of-happy homeland here:

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

I normally end by saying “Stay well”, these days, but perhaps it would be more appropriate to say

Stay dry,

And remember that there is always

MTCIDC

O

ps

“Bog-trotter” is thought to have originally been a slur on Irish country people.  As some of my ancestors were probably the very people slurred, I use the term to show that it can suggest something other than Celtic swamp monsters.

pps

I apologize for the weird bracketing around the quotations from Beowulf. I don’t know what produces them, but I suspect that it might be connected to the magic spells which the poem says protect Grendel from weapons!

Aragorn is uneasy. 

“Flocks of birds, flying at great speed, were wheeling and circling, and traversing all the land as if they were searching for something; and they were steadily drawing nearer…

‘Lie flat and still!’ hissed Aragorn, pulling Sam down into the shade of a holly-bush; for a whole regiment of birds had broken away suddenly from the main host, and came, flying low, straight towards the ridge…

Not until they had dwindled into the distance, north and west, and the sky was again clear would Aragorn rise.  Then he sprang up and went and wakened Gandalf.

‘Regiments of black crows are flying over all the land between the Mountains and the Greyflood…I think that they are spying out the land.”  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 3, “The Ring Goes South”)

As always, welcome, dear readers.  I’ve often written about the relation between Tolkien’s experiences in our world and events in Middle-earth and, in this posting, instead of looking at the earth, we’ll be looking up, as Aragorn did and as Second Lieutenant Tolkien

 would have done in 1916, scanning the clouds for German scouts.

Both sides had begun to include aircraft in their practice warfare—maneuvers—from 1911 on.  The British had employed both airplanes and airships,

and, in the first weeks of war in 1914, it had been British scouting planes

which had spotted the masses of German troops

marching to outflank the British and French armies in what was called the Schlieffen Plan,

allowing the relatively small British Expeditionary Force to escape the trap set for them, although it took hard fighting

and hard marching to do it.

What gave the British the advantage in 1914 was something which had been imagined and wished for for centuries, at least from the days in which Leonardo da Vinci, as early as the 1490s, made intricate drawings of flying machines.

Nothing came of this until the late 18^th century, when the Montgolfier brothers

first demonstrated their hot-air balloon in 1783. 

When the Revolution came and French armies were pressed to deal with a huge coalition of hostile European powers, a French balloon surveyed the scene at the Battle of Fleurus, 26 June, 1794

and served at a few other actions before being disbanded in 1799.

It doesn’t appear that much of anything military was done with what, if nothing else, would provide a superior (in more than one sense) observation platform until the American Civil War, where Thaddeus Lowe

a balloon enthusiast, took the Intrepid along on McClellan’s 1862 attempt to capture Richmond.

Although McClellan’s nerve failed him and the attempt in turn failed, Lowe’s balloon allowed observers to see what his army never did:  Richmond.

Lowe’s balloon saw very little service after the failed expedition and military ballooning seems to have been, with very limited exceptions, put on hold until the turn of the century, when the US Army took a balloon along on its expedition to Cuba, in the summer of 1898.

Although it did some service in observing the Spanish lines outside Santiago, it produced an unfortunate side-effect:  the balloon clearly indicated the presence of US troops and Spanish artillery shells quickly began to burst around its position.

And here we see a real difficulty with such balloons.  They may have made good observation posts, but they were immobile, once raised, and, even as they spied on the enemy, they could reveal their own army’s position at the same time. 

It was only with the advent of the airplane, at the very beginning of the 20^th century,

that a more flexible method of spying from the air came to be employed and, with the movements of massive armies and then the construction of nearly 500 miles of trenches, from Switzerland to the North Sea in late 1914, into 1915,

it became imperative to have better ways of surveying those movements, as well as the many lines of fortifications both sides rapidly constructed.  The demands of a vast war accelerated creation and employment of such ways and soon aircraft were crisscrossing the sky, their cameras photographing everything on the ground below.

From such photos

elaborate maps were made,

allowing attack plans to be more sophisticated than ever before.  This, in fact, is the Schwaben Feste, the Schwaben Redoubt, which Tolkien’s own unit, the 11^th Lancashire Fusiliers attacked during the terrible battle of the Somme, at the beginning of July, 1916. 

Flights of enemy aircraft overhead, then, might signal reconnaissance which would lead to attack. 

Suspecting that “regiments of crows”, as Aragorn says to Gandalf, are “spying out the land”, convinced Gandalf that they must be more careful in their movements:  we can be sure that hearing the sound of enemy aircraft overhead must have done the same for Second Lieutenant Tolkien.

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

Stay well,

Keep your heads down,

And know that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O