The title may seem a little mysterious, being the French word for “duck”.
In English, it has a secondary meaning, something like “baseless story/ rumor”, with a supposed explanation about an old French anecdote about “selling half a duck”. Of course, the minute I asked myself “Why a duck?” an entire Marx brothers routine appeared. It’s from their 1929 film, The Cocoanuts
and, in it, Groucho (called “Mr Hammer” here) is trying to explain a map to Chico and, as always when the two hold what appears to be a dialogue, they often seem to be doing so from different dimensions—
“Hammer: (pause) … Now, here is a little peninsula, and, uh, here is a viaduct leading over to the mainland.
Chico: Why a duck?
Hammer: I’m alright, how are you? I say, here is a little peninsula, and here is a viaduct leading over to the mainland.
Chico: Alright, why a duck?
Hammer: (pause) I’m not playing “Ask Me Another,” I say that’s a viaduct.
Chico: Alright! Why a duck? Why that…why a duck? Why a no chicken?
Hammer: Well, I don’t know why a no chicken; I’m a stranger here myself. All I know is that it’s a viaduct. You try to cross over there a chicken and you’ll find out why a duck.
Chico: When I go someplace I just…
Hammer: (interrupts) It’s…It’s deep water, that’s why a duck. It’s deep water.
Chico: That’s why a duck…
Hammer: Look…look, suppose you were out horseback riding and you came to that stream and you wanted to ford over…You couldn’t make it, it’s too deep!
Chico: Well, why do you want with a Ford if you gotta horse?
Hammer: Well, I’m sorry the matter ever came up. All I know is that it’s a viaduct.
Chico: Now look, alright, I catch ona why a horse, why a chicken, why a this, why a that…I no catch ona why a duck.
Hammer: I was only fooling…I was only fooling. They’re gonna build a tunnel there in the morning. Now is that clear to you?
But—not to duck the subject—“duck” came up because I had, in my last, mentioned Ben Solo in his persona as “Kylo Ren”,
and his mask has always struck me as looking like a duck.
His master, Snoke,
has actually mocked it and ordered him to take it off, which Ben does, and then begins violently attacking it, as if he had just discovered that it looked like a duck.
It’s clear that Ben has a thing about masks, having somehow (it’s never explained how) rescued his grandfather, Darth Vader’s, helmet and turned it into a shrine of evil,
seeming either to ignore or not to know that his grandfather had died just after turning away from the Dark Side through his extermination of Emperor Palpatine (or not, as we find out in 9).
(I must also admit to being a bit puzzled as to how that helmet has remained, since Vader/Anakin, had been cremated in it and I can’t see why his body would have been disposed of in that way if his armor would survive.)
I’m presuming that the goal of the writers in choosing this variation on Vader/Anakin’s wardrobe meant to imply both that Ben considered himself in some way a padawan of his grandfather, as well as suggesting that, by his costume, he was the equivalent of a kind of anti-jedi.
Vader’s helmet, however,
along with his armor,
was, in fact, a kind of prosthetic device, allowing him to function more or less normally after the horrible wounds he had suffered in his defeat by Obi Wan on Mustafar.
Of course, there was also a deal of menace involved, part of it, I would say, coming from that helmet, with its dead eyes and lower face grill, suggesting predatory teeth,
and the bowl, suggestive of the more threatening samurai helmets, which we know influenced the design.
(For more on the design, see Brandon Alinger’s Star Wars Costumes: The Original Trilogy, which has a discussion of the costume’s development, along with a series of images of concept and details.)
So why a duck?
Considering that Ben Solo has a shrine to a grandfather who was his very opposite at the end of his life, and that he’s wearing a mask which even his master thinks is dumb, perhaps we can redefine canard slightly, not as a “baseless story” told to someone else, but as one which Ben persists in telling himself, only to realize, at the very end of his life that the only person he’s been deceiving is himself.
There is a common expression in writing classes, attributed to William Faulkner (1897-1962)
but the origin of which comes from a much lesser-known figure, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863-1944).
Sir Arthur, if known at all today, is as the editor for the once-famous The Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1900,
and for being called something like “the rag and bone man of English poetry”
by the American poet, Ezra Pound (1885-1972).
Pound was, of course, trying to redefine the cannon—and insert himself into it–and Sir Arthur was a far more important man in the Victorian/Edwardian literary world than the equivalent of a recycling truck, but what Faulkner is quoted as saying is: “In writing, you must kill all your darlings.”
This has been sometimes taken to mean, “Murder your characters”, and that’s how I understood it long ago, when I had only read that quotation from Faulkner, but what Sir Arthur really said, in a lecture at Cambridge in 1913-14 on literary style was this:
“…if you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it —whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.‘ “ (On the Art of Writing, 1916—it’s in the chapter entitled “On Style” and here’s a LINK so that you can read it for yourself: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/17470/pg17470.html )
So his meaning was that fine writing for the sake of fine writing was a mistake—but, for the sake of this posting, I’m returning to what I had originally thought Faulkner had meant—murder your characters—and, in my recent reading and viewing experience, there has been mayhem everywhere, which has made me wonder about darlings.
Recently, I rewatched Star Wars 7, 8, 9 and, this time, I was more pained than before by the death of Han Solo in 7.
Harrison Ford, in interviews, had long said that he had wanted Han removed back in the days of Star Wars 4, 5, and 6, but I’ve always thought that Han was really at the center of those films: a cheerfully arrogant cynic who brought a certain satiric balance to the otherwise potentially too-serious story of the Force. Although he might wish Luke “May the Force be with you” just before the attack on the first Death Star,
he was still capable of lines like: ” A…Jedi Knight? I–I’m out of it for a little while, everybody gets delusions of grandeur.” (The Return of the Jedi, 1983)
When he and Chewie first appeared in The Force Awakens (2015),
I was hoping that we would see something of this in 7-9, but I was quickly disappointed. It seems, if I understand the plot correctly, that what was intended by Han’s murder was to illustrate graphically just how far down the road to the Dark Side, his son, Ben, in his persona of “Kylo Ren”,
had gone, but, instead, I saw what, for me, was the end of that quietly ironic viewpoint and therefore of part of what gave a special life to the original trilogy.
Polishing off major characters, however, can make a strong dramatic point. Consider the fate of the decent Ned Stark, played by Sean Bean in A Game of Thrones.
The king’s right-hand man, because of his honesty, is removed from office, charged with treason, forced to lie publically that he committed that treason, and then suddenly beheaded, after being told that, with his confession, his life would be spared.
Coming at the end of the first series, his murder sets off a major element of the plot-to-come: the efforts by his family to gain revenge,
as well as underlining the increasingly-sadistic nature of the new king, Joffrey.
(Notice, by the way, that Joffrey’s crown is both too small and often worn at an odd angle, as if to suggest, visually, just how unfit and unbalanced he is mentally.)
George RR Martin and the script-writers, only begin with Ned Stark, however, and, by the end of the final series, large numbers of major characters, both sympathetic and not, have encountered poison,
being shot with a crossbow,
and being pushed from a great height,
among other grisly ends.
At the series’ base is the English “Wars of the Roses” (1455-1485), fought by two large factions, Lancastrians and Yorkists—and, yes, that’s “Lannisters” and “Starks”, isn’t it?
Although lacking in the various religions, cultures, magic, and dragons of A Game of Thrones, it certainly has the violence, particularly in the way major figures, when captured on the battlefield, are simply beheaded there and then, without the bother of trials.
At the same time, we can almost imagine, in A Game of Thrones, that so many of the characters, positive and negative, are like fuel to the plot’s engine: their deaths spurring that engine onward.
In contrast, we come to Tolkien and, in particular, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
If we don’t count goblin kings,
Wargs,
and spiders,
and, of course, the destruction of Lake-town,
the only death of a major character is that of Thorin,
but, because of its serious nature, The Lord of the Rings suffers more serious losses among its protagonists, beginning with, it seems, Gandalf,
and including Boromir,
and Theoden,
as well as the mad Denethor.
For a serious book, these are serious deaths: fighting a balrog, overwhelmed by orcs, falling to the chief of the Nazgul, being consumed in a pyre. On the other hand, although we see Sauron as a great shadow passing away,
the only major deaths among the antagonists are those of Gollum, through clumsiness, really,
and Saruman, who, as his spirit is swept away by the wind, like his master, seems to crumble to nothing.
In contrast to the deaths of the protagonists, then, these seem small, almost sordid: a victory dance too close to the lava, a throat cut by a traitorous servant. And, rather than spurring the plot, these deaths put an end to certain strands: the question of whether the Ring will be destroyed and Sharkey’s revenge upon the Shire.
Some darlings, it seems, need to be killed.
Thanks, as always, for reading,
Stay well—and well back from the edge of volcanoes—
And know that, as ever, there’s
MTCIDC
O
ps
In my looking about for illustrations, I happened upon this very interesting view of the death of Theoden—
which was clearly inspired by this scene from one of my favorite medieval pictorial sources, the so-called “Bayeux Tapestry”, which depicts the death of the Anglo-Saxon king, Harold, at the battle of Hastings.
When economic circumstances forced the reluctant Tolkien to break The Lord of the Rings into three volumes, he entitled the third The Return of the King
and, of course, Strider/Aragorn becomes that king by the end of the volume.
The last king before Aragorn was Earnur, who had disappeared into Mordor in TA2050, leaving the Stewards to rule until the death of Denethor in TA 3019.
In modern Western history, I can think of two royal restorations, of both of which I’m sure that JRRT was aware:
1. that of the Restoration of 1660, when Charles II was restored to the throne of England
after the execution of his father, in 1649,
and that of Louis XVIII in 1814,
after the execution of his older brother, Louis XVI, in 1793 (although Louis XVI had gradually been losing his royal powers since the Revolution began in 1789).
In the first case, this would have been a span of 11 years and, in the second, of 21.
In the case of the Kings of Gondor, it would have been a span of nearly a 1000. After such an immense stretch of time, why would anyone want the king back?
In the Shire, there still existed a kind of ghost of kings:
“There remained, of course, the ancient tradition concerning the high king at Fornost, or Norbury, as they called it, away north of the Shire. But there had been no king for nearly a thousand years…Yet the Hobbits still said of wild folk and wicked things (such as trolls) that they had not heard of the king. For they attributed to the king of old all their essential laws and usually they kept the laws of free will, because they were The Rules (as they said), both ancient and just.” (The Lord of the Rings, Prologue 3, “Of the Ordering of the Shire”)
But why do we readers—or at least I, reader–accept this return, especially as someone who lives in a country which hasn’t had a monarch over it for not quite so long as Gondor, but since 1776, which is 245 years?
Perhaps it has something to do with the traditional story culture we grew up in. Think of fairy tales: how many of them are set in kingdoms, with kings and queens
and often marriageable princesses—sometimes in need of rescuing.
Open what was perhaps Tolkien’s first fairy tale book, Andrew Lang’s The Red Fairy Book (1890)
and you’ll see that the first story is called “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” and the second story, “Princess Maybloom” begins:
“ONCE upon a time there lived a King and Queen whose children had all died, first one and then another, until at last only one little daughter remained, and the Queen was at her wits’ end to know where to find a really good nurse who would take care of her, and bring her up.”
For JRRT the medievalist, there was also all the world of Arthurian legend, with earlier stories, dating back to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 12th-century Historia Regum Britanniae (“History of the Kings of Britain”)
to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late 14th century)
of which Tolkien and his colleague, E.V. Gordon, published a scholarly edition in 1925
and of which Tolkien himself made a translation, published posthumously by his son, Christopher, in 1975.
Then there is the later Le Morte d’Arthur, Sir Thomas Malory’s collection of Arthurian material, first published by William Caxton (c.1422-c.1491) in 1485.
And, for a late Victorian/Edwardian like Tolkien, there was the poetical work, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s (1809-1892)
The Idylls of the King (1859-1885)
At the center, of course, is Arthur himself, a man born to be king, but who had no idea that that was his fate until he found himself in front of a stone upon which rested an anvil with a sword embedded in it, a story first appearing, it seems, in Robert de Boron’s Merlin, c.1200.
This is sometimes confused in early tellings with Excalibur, Arthur’s other sword, which, in some versions, was given to him by the “Lady of the Lake”.
This confusion is then employed, to wicked effect, in Monty Python’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
where it is used to question the very idea of kingship which I’m puzzling my way through here.
Soon to be on his quest for the Holy Grail, King Arthur approaches some peasants who are grubbing in a muddy field.
“ARTHUR: How do you do, good lady? I am Arthur, King of the Britons. Whose castle is that?
WOMAN: King of the who?
ARTHUR: The Britons.
WOMAN: Who are the Britons?
ARTHUR: Well, we all are. We are all Britons, and I am your king.
WOMAN: I didn’t know we had a king. I thought we were an autonomous collective.”
This is clearly not going to go well
and soon Arthur is shouting:
“ARTHUR: Be quiet! I order you to be quiet!
WOMAN: Order, eh? Who does he think he is? Heh.
ARTHUR: I am your king!
WOMAN: Well, I didn’t vote for you.
ARTHUR: You don’t vote for kings.
WOMAN: Well, how did you become King, then?”
“ARTHUR: The Lady of the Lake,…
[angels sing]
…her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water signifying by Divine Providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur.
[singing stops]
That is why I am your king!”
A second peasant’s response suggests that this is not quite so convincing as Arthur would have them believe:
“DENNIS: Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.”
(Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Scene 3: “Repression is Nine Tenths of the Law?”)
Arthur’s argument is that he is the rightful king because he was appointed by a spiritual power and this easily ties in with justifications of kingship under the idea of “the divine right of kings”, in which a monarch claimed that he was there because God had appointed him to his position. It also suggested that, in that position, he was answerable to no one but God—an idea which got Charles the First
of England not only into a civil war, but carried him all the way to his execution, as his opponents asserted that Charles was not himself a kind of god (an idea with which his father, James the First, had actually played in his The True Law of Free Monarchies, 1598, and Basilikon Doron, 1599), but a man responsible to his people and, when, by his actions, he betrayed them, he was as liable as any of his subjects to a charge of treason.
For the medieval Arthur, however, there was a fatal wounding on the battlefield,
or perhaps a kind of rescue by a group of mysterious women, who take him off to “the Isle of Avalon”
where, in some versions of the story, he is to be healed and there await the appropriate moment to sail back to retake his kingdom—the original Return of the King.
This, of course, brings us back to my original question: why accept that that return is an appropriate part of the ending of The Lord of the Rings?
I think that we can begin with the remark about hobbits, that
“they attributed to the king of old all their essential laws and usually they kept the laws of free will, because they were The Rules (as they said), both ancient and just.”
If we look at Middle-earth in TA 3018, much of it is in desperate need of laws which are “both ancient and just”, as
1. Sauron is active in Mordor, raising armies, including those from his alliance with Harad, and sending the Nazgul, his creatures, abroad
2. Saruman, now in the service of Sauron, although believing himself independent, is also building armies and infringing upon Rohan
3. Gondor is gradually growing weaker, its main city, Minas Tirith, largely depopulated, and its steward, Denethor, is being emotionally manipulated by Sauron through his unwise use of a palantir
4. Theoden, king of Rohan, has been taken over by Saruman’s spy, Grima
5. whole areas beyond the Anduin are, at best, unsafe
6. Moria is in the hands of orcs—and worse, in the form of a balrog
(and 7.—to come—the Shire itself will fall into the vengeful hands of the deposed Saruman, now called “Sharkey”, to be turned into a kind of fake socialist industrial state)
With a background in fairy tales and Arthurian legend, it would have seemed natural to JRRT to see this as a world out of balance and in need of a savior—or, in the case of The Lord of the Rings, two: Frodo and Aragorn.
And there appears to be a kind of divine sanction for both of these in these words which both Boromir and Faramir had heard in dreams, as Boromir tells the Council of Elrond:
“For on the eve of the sudden assault a dream came to my brother in a troubled sleep; and afterwards a like dream came oft to him again, and once to me.
In that dream I thought the eastern sky grew dark and there was a growing thunder, but in the West a pale light lingered, and out of it I heard a voice, remote but clear, crying:
Seek for the Sword that was broken:
In Imladris it dwells;
There shall be counsels taken
Stronger than Morgul-spells.
There shall be shown a token
That Doom is near at hand,
For Isildur’s Bane shall waken,
And the Halfling forth shall stand.”
(The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 2, “The Council of Elrond”)
The “Sword that was broken” is in the hands of Aragorn, its rightful owner as the direct descendant of its original owner, Elendil, as Gandalf explains to Boromir:
“For the Sword that was Broken is the Sword of Elendil that broke beneath him when he fell. It has been treasured by his heirs when all other heirlooms were lost; for it was spoken of old among us that it should be made again when the Ring, Isildur’s Bane, was found.”
But then Gandalf continues:
“Now you have seen the sword that you have sought, what would you ask? Do you wish for the House of Elendil to return to the Land of Gondor?”
Boromir has his doubts, however:
“I was not sent to beg any boon, but to seek only the meaning of a riddle…Yet we are hard pressed, and the Sword of Elendil would be a help beyond our hope—if such a thing could indeed return out of the shadows of the past.”
Aragorn replies—and here we begin to see his street cred:
“If Gondor, Boromir, has been a stalwart tower, we [his people, the Dunedain] have played another part. Many evil things there are that your strong walls and bright swords do not stay…Peace and freedom, do you say? The North would have known them little but for us. Fear would have destroyed them. But when dark things come from the houseless hills, or creep from sunless woods, they fly from us.”
Thus, Aragorn suggests that he’s not only the possessor of an ancient sword which signifies his heritage, but he’s also an experienced soldier, who has continued has family’s role as protectors of the North. As the story proceeds, Aragorn continues to show proofs of his kingship, laying claim to a palantir and using it to turn the tables on Sauron (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 2, “The Passing of the Grey Company”), traveling the Paths of the Dead to call upon the Oathbreakers finally to fulfil their oath (“The Passing of the Grey Company”), and in his ability to heal those near-death, as Gandalf says:
“ ‘Let us not stay at the door, for the time is urgent. Let us enter! For it is only in the coming of Aragorn that any hope remains for the sick that lie in the House. Thus spake Ioreth, the wise-woman of Gondor: “The hands of the king are the hands of a healer, and so shall the rightful king be known.” ‘ “ (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 8, “The Houses of Healing”)
And we should note two things here:
1. it is Gandalf who quotes Ioreth and who is Gandalf? One of the 5 Istari, lesser spirits sent by the Valar to counter Sauron in Middle-earth (Unfinished Tales, Part Four, II. The Istari)
2. not “a rightful king”, but “the rightful king”—Gandalf may be thought, then, to be speaking for the Valar to say that Aragorn is, indeed, the King Who Returns
All this may convey a kind of justification for Gandalf’s earlier identification of Aragorn as “Aragorn son of Arathorn, the heir of Kings” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 6, “The King of the Golden Hall”), although it skates very close to that divine right of kings which got Charles the First into trouble, but it is only when all of the menace in the list above has been dissipated, much of it by the efforts of others, that we see the true nature of the Return of the King:
“In his time the City was made more fair than it had ever been, even in the days of its first glory; and it was filled with trees and with fountains, and its gates were wrought of mithril and steel, and its streets paved with white marble, and the Folk of the Mountain and the Folk of the Wood rejoiced to come there; and all was healed and made good, and the houses were filled with men and women and the laughter of children, and no window was blind nor any courtyard empty; and after the ending of the Third Age of the world into the new age it preserved the memory and the glory of the years that were gone.” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 5, “The Steward and the King”)
And it’s not just the sick and the City which Aragorn heals, but a great portion of Middle-earth:
“And embassies came from many lands and peoples, from the East and the South, and from the borders of Mirkwood, and from Dunland in the west. And the King pardoned the Easterlings that had given themselves up, and sent them away free, and he made peace with the peoples of Harad; and the slaves of Mordor he released and gave them all the lands about Lake Nurnen to be their own.”
I’ve wondered whether being conditioned by fairy tales has had something to do with my acceptance of the Return, and this seems to be a giant fairy tale ending, including the marriage with Arwen (“The Steward and the King”)-
but JRRT is a better story-teller than to take such an easy way out. The Return of the King has brought peace and will bring prosperity to a world much in need of both, but it isn’t a happy world for everyone.
When Frodo and his friends return to the Shire, they find destruction, both to the landscape and to the social fabric and it takes the deaths, not only of men, but of hobbits and even of one of the Istari, Saruman, to begin the healing there. (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 8, “The Scouring of the Shire”)
And there is another sadness as well: the departure of Frodo and Bilbo and Gandalf from Middle-earth (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 9, “The Grey Havens”).
(A real beauty by Ted Nasmith)
So perhaps, beyond fairy tales and the Once and Future King of Arthur, it’s this mixture of joy and sorrow which persuades me to believe in The Return of the King.
Thanks, as ever, for reading.
Stay well,
Hope for wizards in our world (but not so ambitious and self-deceiving as Saruman)
And know that, as always, there’s
MTCIDC
O
ps
Near the beginning of this piece, there is an illustration of a king and queen which I drew from one of Ernest Shepard’s illustrations for one of my favorite A.A. Milne’s poems, “The King’s Breakfast”. Here’s a LINK, if you don’t know it: https://wonderingminstrels.blogspot.com/2000/09/king-breakfast-a-milne.html WARNING: this has such an infectious rhythm that you will find yourself memorizing it without knowing it!
This is posting number 351 and, if you are a regular follower of the blog, you know that, in over 350+ postings, a huge number of images have appeared. Usually, the writing of the posting inspires the choice of images, but, in this one, it was the other way around, as you’ll see…
The Romans were proud of their state, the Res Publica, “The Business of the People”.
Rome hadn’t begun as a people’s business, however. Instead, it had been farmers
and shepherds
who had lived in thatched huts
in little villages on 7 hills, overlooking the Tiber River.
In time, they had come under the control of their northern neighbors, the wealthy and sophisticated Etruscans,
and an Etruscan king, a lucumo, had ruled them.
Then, in 509BC, the Romans overthrew the king and established a new kind of state, that Res Publica. They retained the former kings’ council of elders, which they called the Senate, after the Latin root sen-, “old”, but, instead of a king, the Romans yearly elected two state officers, the consuls. Here are the two consuls in a session with the Senate.
Roman society had two big social classes, the Patricians and the Plebeians,
and, for the first century-and-a-half, consuls were always elected from the Patricians, until, in 367BC, a new law was passed, decreeing that one of the two consuls should be a Plebeian.
Consuls held a great deal of power, including acting as generals in time of war, but all of this came to an end when Augustus (63BC-14AD),
the grand-nephew of Julius Caesar (100-44BC),
having won a final civil war, became the sole ruler of Rome and the consuls became more holders of positions of prestige than of power. They were, at least initially, still elected, but they were nominated by the emperors, who sometimes even nominated themselves. Because the office had almost 500 years of tradition behind it, however, becoming a consul was to have achieved a lofty position in the state and certain senior state positions were only available to those who had held it.
By late imperial times, however, the office had lost its power and had become ceremonial, which included, at the consul’s installation, a massive celebration, including the Greco-Roman world’s favorite sport, chariot-racing.
Along with elaborate celebrations, there could be the distribution of commemorative gifts, one of which might look like this—
It is called a “consular diptych” (Greek di—“two/double” + ptukhe, “fold”) and consists of two panels, which could be made of wood, ivory, or metal. This particular one, seemingly the oldest surviving, dates from 406AD, and depicts the late western emperor, Honorius (384-423AD)—who had been consul once, himself—at the age of 2—and was dedicated to him by Anicius Petronius Probus, who was consul in 406. It’s a very graphic contrast to the power of the consuls of the old Republic that Probus describes himself as the famulus, “household slave” of Honorius.
The form of the diptych descends from a much less exalted object, the usual Roman notebook,
which consisted of two hollow wooden halves, into which wax was poured to form a surface.
The writer then used an instrument called a stilus, which had two functions: the pointy end was used to write on the wax, the other end was a kind of eraser, with which the writer could smooth the wax over what she/he’d written, thus erasing it.
By the first century AD, these apparently could also be used to hold letters of appointment, which I presume is how they became associated with consuls.
As you can see from the one dedicated to Honorius, the carvings on the outside of these can be wonderfully elaborate, my favorite being this,
which, although it’s a diptych, isn’t actually a consular one, its purpose being unknown. It has the names of two prominent late Roman families, the Symmachi and the Nichomachi, along the top, however, suggesting that, whatever it was for, it somehow involved them and, in particular, two women of the families, who appear to be acting as religious figures. (The left-hand panel was badly damaged in a fire, unfortunately.)
This posting came about because, as usual, I was looking for images to illustrate an earlier posting and came across the work of Tom Buggey, and this wood panel of Galadriel—does this form look familiar?
As Dr. Buggey explains, he is an admirer of a pair of my favorite Tolkien illustrators, the Hildebrandts, and this is clearly based upon one of their depictions of the Lady of the Golden Wood.
Although I enjoy Dr. B’s Tolkien work, I also find his other work impressive, as in this
of which I quote his description:
“This is an original composition based on a children’s story I was hoping to write illustrated with a series of carvings – If only I had the time. This carving measures 31″ x 15″. The story goes something like this. Long ago the woodsmen of the north were aided by the city dwellers of the south. The woodsman vowed to aid the city dwellers if ever they were in need. To secure this promise a spell was placed on a series of songs that would awaken future generations to the promise of aid. This carving represents a princess (of course) of the besieged city’s king who travels north with the court musician to garner the assistance of the woodsmen. The first songs are being sung.” (from the website, lightly edited by me)
There are a number of other carvings at his site: https://buggeycarve.com/ For myself, I hope that, since he wrote the above, he has continued both the story and the panels, maintaining a sculpting tradition which goes back far beyond consular diptychs, but which includes such wonderful pieces as this—
Thanks, as always, for reading,
Stay well—be careful—those carving tools are sharp!