Welcome, dear readers, as ever.

Unlike The Hobbit, which is written in a chatty modern style, much of The Lord of the Rings is written in what we now might see as an elevated tone, with lines like

“ ‘Nay, Gandalf!’ said the King.  ‘You do not know your own skill in healing.  It shall not be so.  I myself will go to war, to fall in the front of the battle, if it must be.  Thus shall I sleep better.’ “

 Such language in a novel published in the 1950s, could be called “Wardour Street English”, after an area of London known  in the 19^th century for its antique dealers,

and, to some, it reeked of old-fashioned melodrama, with high emotions spoken in archaic language, full of “Thou villain!” and  “Seek ye to do scath?”

As one who weighed practically every word of the many drafts of the book, Tolkienreplied to criticism of the lines above by writing:

“For a king who spoke in a modern style would not really think in such terms at all, and any reference to sleeping quietly in the grave would be a deliberate archaism of expression on his part (however worded) far more bogus than the actual ‘archaic’ English that I have used.”  (draft of unsent letter to Hugh Brogan, September, 1955—Letters, 226)

We can accept his reasoning or not, but JRRT’s literary medievalism already had a relatively long history.  Beyond the deliberate Elizabethan archaizing of Edmund Spencer’s ( 1552-1599)                

The Faerie Queene (1590-1596),

real  sustained interest in the medieval past—as people of the time understood it– began to appear in the 18^th century with everything from Bishop Percy’s (1729-1811)

Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765)

(an early edition)

to  Horace Walpole’s (1717-1797)

“gothique” novel—the first of its kind—The Castle of Otranto (1765),

 to Walpole’s own “castle”, Strawberry Hill (seen in the background of his portrait),

which still survives (it’s a wonderfully wacky building, full of architectural surprises).

The “Middle Ages” became an abiding fascination in Britain, extending through the 19^th century.  Here, not content to read those novels of Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832),

like Ivanhoe (1819) and The Talisman (1825), which were set in the medieval past, there were those who were imaginative enough (and wealthy enough) who wanted to relive a bit of that long-ago time by holding a joust, like the one described at Ashby-de-la-Zouch in Ivanhoe.  This was the famous Eglinton Tournament of 1839.

(This is a color plate from the 1843 commemorative book—you can have your own copy from the Internet Archive by going to:  https://archive.org/details/eglintontourname00rich/page/n41/mode/2up  –and don’t forget to contribute—many of the LINKS I’ve included in doubfulsea postings over the years have all come from this really important site.)

By mid-century, Alfred, Lord Tennyson  (1809-1892)

was producing, under the omnibus title Idylls of the King (1859-1885),

a long series of poems about King Arthur and his court.  For modern readers, I suspect that they would appear heavy and sometimes overly-moralistic—Guinevere, for example, instead of being nearly burnt at the stake, but rescued just in time by Lancelot, 

as she is in Mallory’s Morte d’Arthur, one of Tennyson’s main sources, repents her adultery, is forgiven by Arthur, and dies in a convent. 

There is a wealth of Arthurian illustration from this period and, should you want to see many examples, I recommend that you visit the University of Rochester (New York)’s Camelot Project at:  https://d.lib.rochester.edu/camelot-project  This is a comprehensive site for Arthurian subjects and full of things to read and look at.

There is an alternative view of that near-burning, however, by a very important source for medievalism in later-Victorian Britain, as well as a powerful influence upon Tolkien, William Morris (1834-1896).

In 1858, Morris published The Defence of Guinevere and Other Poems .

In the title poem, Guinevere’s defence isn’t an act of penitence, as she is, in fact, not in the least concerned with Tennyson’s Victorian morality, but a way of stalling her sentence until Lancelot appears to rescue her.   From its opening stanza, this is a very different approach to the Arthur story and, if you’d like to read it for yourself, here’s a LINK:  https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.45751

Morris takes us late into this medieval revival, but I want to conclude by going back to the beginning of the 19^th century, to one of my favorite examples of such literature, Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”, written, it seems, in a single draft in 1819. We have two different versions, however, one published in 1820, during the poet’s lifetime, and a second, which is, if you know the poem, more likely the version you are acquainted with.  Although this was published in 1848, long after Keats’ death in Rome in 1821,  it appears, in fact, to be the first version of the text.  (Here’s a LINK so that you can compare the versions:   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Belle_Dame_sans_Merci  )

The poem itself belongs to a specific story type, that of someone who is taken by people from another world—perhaps, in contemporary terms, it would be “alien abduction”—

but, to earlier creators and their audiences, this would be “taken to Faerie”,  a theme as early as Irish and Welsh myth, and which appears in a number of later ballads—a major source for Keats—like “Tam Lin” (Child Ballad #39—here’s  a LINK to one—among a number of versions:  http://www.tam-lin.org/versions/39A.html )

and  “Thomas Rymer” (Child #37—and a LINK:  https://sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/child/ch037.htm  ).

In such ballads—and in older stories—a mortal is either invited to, carried off to, or seduced to go to, another world, sometimes by an enchanting (literally) woman, as in the Keats poem.  Often, the mortal has either to be rescued, or returns to this world only to find that time, as in the case of Narnia, isn’t measured in the same way, and it’s hundreds of years later, as in WB Yeats’  (1865-1939) early long poem

“The Wanderings of Oisin” (1885) (OH-sheen).

Here’s the 1848 text of the Keats poem—

There’s a striking setting of this by Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924)

and here’s a LINK to a beautiful performance by the mezzo-soprano Kitty Whately:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNa-3zuSrY4

The English satirist, Michael Flanders (1922-1975),

once translated Keats’ title as “the beautiful lady who never says thank you” and, rereading the poem, perhaps you’d agree?

Thanks for reading, as always,

Stay well,

Decline invitations by unknown (but seductive) persons,

And know that there’s always

MTCIDC

O

As always, dear readers, welcome.

In 1516, an English intellectual and sometime diplomat, Sir Thomas More (1477-1535),

published a book with the easy-to-remember title:  De Optimo Rei Publicae Statu Deque Nova Insula Utopia Libellus Vere Aureus, Nec Minus Salutaris Quam Festivus

(This is from the Basel publication of 1518.)

“Concerning the Best Situation of a State and About the New Island ‘Utopia’, A Little Book Not Only Golden [But] No Less Beneficial Than Witty”

which was, in time, not surprisingly shortened to Utopia.

(This is from the second English translation, by Bishop Burnet, in 1684.)

It claimed to be a kind of travel tale, in which More cleverly uses the background of the account of Amerigo Vespucci’s (1451-1512),

(from a posthumous portrait)

voyages to the New World, published in 1505,

(It says in Italian: “A Letter of Amerigo Vespucci about the islands new discovered in his four voyages”.)

to present a fictional participant, Raphael Hythlodaeus, who is not the “mariner” (nauclerus) More at first takes him to be, but someone “not unlearned in Latin and extremely adept in Greek” (linguae latinae non indoctus, et graecae doctissimus), being a philosopher, rather than a sailor.

In the text which follows, Hythlodaeus describes to More in great detail a newly-discovered island, Utopia, which has an idealized communal state.

The word “utopia” could be read two ways:

1. a Latinized version of Greek eutopia, “a fine place”

2. a Latinized version of Greek outopia, “no place”

In fact, as More’s original Latin name for it was Nusquama, from Latin nusquam, meaning, among other things “nowhere”, and adding to this Raphael’s last name, “Hythlodaeus”, from the Greek word [h]uthlos, “nonsense”, we can see that More intends us to see this place as something to be discussed, but not believed.

From the same ending, -topia, we can also find a much darker possibility, a dystopia, literally a “bad place” and this term, as the very useful Etymonline informs us, which began as a medical term for “internal organ out of place”, had become, by the 1860s, the opposite of the other possible meaning of utopia as “good place”. 

When I think about dystopias in terms of literary history, I immediately think first of the future world depicted by HG Wells (1866-1946)

in his 1895 short novel, The Time Machine.

Originally published as a series in The New Review, it describes, among other spots on his trip into the future, the unnamed protagonist’s time in the England of 802,701ad.  Here, the landscape is populated by the Eloi, who live above ground and seem like the ultimate ideal of Arcadians:  simple, childlike people, like Victorian aristocrats, who consume but don’t produce, and, as the time-traveler soon discovers, the Morlocks, who live below ground and are, it seems, the descendants of all the millions of lower-class people who were the actual workers and producers in Victorian times.  The Eloi, it turns out, only exist because of the Morlocks, but, in return, the Morlocks exist because they feed upon the Eloi.

More’s Utopia was clearly meant as a commentary upon early 16^th-century society and, in the stratification of the English population into only two groups, one idle, but harmless, the other diligent but malevolent (besides consuming the Eloi, they steal the time machine and attempt to capture the traveler), we can easily imagine that Wells is suggesting that all is not well in late-Victorian society.  Other, later dystopian works, like Aldous Huxley’s 1932 Brave New World,

in which a society is ruled by those who control its genetics, and Orwell’s 1984

where we see what appears to be a worn-out post-WW2 Britain as a kind of regimented and fear-ridden Stalinist state, provide much more detailed versions of a grim future (but such fun to read about) and my most recent experience is clearly an even more elaborate version of such a future.

I’ve just finished the first volume of Philip Reeve’s

series, Mortal Engines,

and its setting—a bleak far future, in which many of the world’s cities, the initial focus being on London, are now mounted on huge treads and roam the empty countryside, gobbling up smaller cities.

The word “steampunk” has been attached to this future by some critics, and I can see why, it being a sort of alternate history in which elements of many centuries are all mixed together—electricity with airships,

(a wonderful image, by David Wyatt)

firearms with swords, but it’s also a dystopia, the London depicted

 in particular being a kind of monstrous exaggeration of current London, with the workers of the city being divided into guilds and social stratification being extreme, the richest and most powerful living at the top, the poor majority residing in the lowest tiers, and technology, in the form of the Engineering Guild, being the dominant.

It’s perhaps a sign of the present day, however, in that, for all that I can think of more dystopias in modern fiction, I’m stumped to think of utopias in the sense of “good places”—perhaps the best we can hope for, then, as that all of these dark places are and will remain utopias in Thomas More’s sense.

Stay well,

Learn Newspeak (just in case),

And know that there is always

MTCIDC,

O

ps

In 1909, E.M Forster (1879-1970), whom you might know as the author of A Room with a View, A Passage to India, and my favorite, Howards End, published a really creepy—because it’s so prescient—short science fiction story, “The Machine Stops”.  I won’t say anything more about it, except that it’s, for the present, an especially striking example of a dystopia:  http://www.visbox.com/prajlich/forster.html

As ever, welcome, dear readers.

I imagine that you, like me, read something, then have a bit of it pop up in your mind when you least expect it.  Here’s what recently popped up in mine:

“They shot well with the bow, for they were keen-eyed and sure at the mark.  Not only with bows and arrows.  If any Hobbit stooped for a stone, it was well to get quickly under cover, as all trespassing beasts knew very well.” (The Lord of the Rings, Prologue, I, “Concerning Hobbits”)

When I thought further about this, it seemed like an odd detail:  Hobbit archers turn up in the Prologue when it is said that:  “To the last battle at Fornost with the Witch-lord of Angmar they sent some bowmen to the aid of the king, or so they maintained…” and, in “The Scouring of the Shire”, there are definitely bows at work:  after Grima murders Saruman, “Before Frodo could recover or speak a word, three hobbit bows twanged and Wormtongue fell dead.” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 8, “The Scouring of the Shire”).  But does any Hobbit ever prove his prowess with a stone in the novel?  I thought not—until I was reminded by a friend that, if not a stone, someone expertly used the missile to hand—

“Sam turned quickly.  ‘And you, Ferny,’ he said, ‘put your ugly face out of sight, or it will get hurt.’  With a sudden flick, quick as lightning, an apple left his hand and hit Bill square on the nose.  He ducked too late, and curses came from behind the hedge.  ‘Waste of a good apple,’ said Sam regretfully, and strode on.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 11, “A Knife in the Dark”)

This launching of missiles—other than arrows—at heads then brought back something from my last posting, which was about how to wear—or not to wear—helmets.  Among my images was one of Goliath, in which he was (literally) being cut down to size by David.

(This is from the “Huntingfield Psalter”, dated to 1212-1220ad.)

I grew up with Judeo-Christian Bible stories and the story of Goliath’s defeat was always a favorite, but, when I was little, I was a little unclear as to how David actually did it:  after all, did he have a slingshot like mine?  (Or a catapult, as my English friends call it.)

And Goliath was huge and covered in armor—wouldn’t a stone from a slingshot just bounce off?

(This is an engraving by Robert Cruickshank, 1789-1856, which I include because, although Goliath looks like he’s dressed to play someone in an early-Victorian revival of a Greek tragedy, the artist had read his Bible carefully and included Goliath’s armiger, or armor-bearer, who is usually left out of other versions of the illustration.)

For a better understanding of just what happened, I turned to the late 4^h-century AD Latin translation of the First Book of Samuel from the so-called “Vulgate” by St Jerome (c.342-420ad).  I chose this because it was the translation from which the medieval artist of the scene in the Huntingfield Psalter would have learned the story (all translations are mine).

So let’s start with Goliath.

4 Et egressus est vir spurius de castris Philisthinorum nomine Goliath, de Geth, altitudinis sex cubitorum et palmi:

5 et cassis ærea super caput ejus, et lorica squamata induebatur. Porro pondus loricæ ejus, quinque millia siclorum æris erat:

6 et ocreas æreas habebat in cruribus: et clypeus æreus tegebat humeros ejus.

7 Hastile autem hastæ ejus erat quasi liciatorium texentium: ipsum autem ferrum hastæ ejus sexcentos siclos habebat ferri: et armiger ejus antecedebat eum.

(First Samuel, Chapter 17)

“4 And there came out of the camp of the Philistines a bastard, by name Goliath from Geth, in height six cubits and a palm.  (Cubit is an ancient measurement with lots of possible variation, but, roughly, this makes him about 9 feet—about 2.75 metres—tall.)

5 And [there was) upon his head a bronze helmet and he was dressed in a breastplate of scale—moreover, the weight of his breastplate was 5000 bronze shekels.  (Shekel is a Biblical weight—5000 would equal about 125 pounds—about 57 kilograms.)

6 And bronze greaves he had on his shins and a bronze shield was covering his shoulders.

7 As well, the shaft of his spear was like a weaver’s beam—the iron [head] itself, moreover, of his spear  weighed 600 shekels of iron and his armor-bearer used to march in front of him.”  (A weaver’s beam was the top support of an upright loom, the sort used in the ancient world—here’s an illustration–

meaning that, like everything else about Goliath, it was much larger than normal.  600 shekels equals 15 pounds—that’s almost 7 kilograms—

and remember:  this is just the head of his spear.)

With all of this in mind, what is Goliath supposed to look like?  There is an immediate problem:  words like “cassis” and “clypeus” are more generic than technical, although “cassis” usually means a metal helmet and “clypeus” a round bronze shield.  There is a great deal of argument over the date—or dates—of the writing of Samuel, and armor and weapons change over time, so perhaps what we’re seeing here is a composite—or even a fantasy:  after all, Goliath is supposed to be 9 feet tall!

A quick inventory shows Goliath with:

1. a bronze helmet

2. bronze scale (lamellar) armor (in fact, the text uses the word lorica, which usually means a breastplate, but seems to be used here to mean a coat of scales)

3. bronze greaves

4. a bronze shield

5. an immense, iron-tipped spear

We’ll come back to that helmet, but lamellar armor is made up of layers of small, overlapping plates (lamellae) of leather, bronze, or, eventually, iron,sewn to a leather or cloth backing.  Here’s an Egyptian example from the 14^th century BC, the lamellae being made of leather,

and here’s a section of Neo-Assyrian lamellae (900-600bc) from Nimrud.

As far as I can currently tell, greaves—metal shin guards—only appear with the Greeks, making them later perhaps than some other parts of this kit.  Here’s a pair from the 6^th-2^nd century BC (note the holes at the top of the left-hand one:  like helmets, greaves were lined to provide both an extra layer of protection and to prevent chafing of bronze on skin).

(From my experience in museums, by the way, it appears that, at least early Greek greaves were simply flexed to fit around the legs—no straps or buckles—and some of those I’ve seen show severe stress along the front, as if, with use, they began to wear out.)

We’re not told anything more about the clypeus, except that it’s bronze and covers the shoulders.  I’m presuming, by this, that the author/s mean that it was commonly carried on the back when out of combat—or not being lugged by Goliath’s armiger.

(This image comes from Hurstwic, which is a living-history group devoted to the Vikings.  There’s always something of interest to be found there at:  http://www.hurstwic.com/history/text/history.htm )

If we go by Greek examples, such shields weren’t just bronze, but were actually made of layers of wood, then covered with a sheet of bronze on the outer surface.  We are fortunate to have a late 5^th-century BC example, from the Athenian Agora (a combination market/state buildings site)—

As for the spear, we are given nothing more than it’s large and has an iron head, but I want to return now to the helmet.  We know that it’s bronze, but a further detail gives us a little more.  In 17.49, it is said that David’s sling stone:

“percussit Philistheum in fronte et infixus est lapis in fronte eius et cecidit in faciem suam super terram”

“struck the Philistine in the forehead and the stone was stuck in his forehead and he fell onto his face on the ground”

From this, we can see that, although Goliath was wearing a bronze helmet, it was of an open-faced variety, which provided no protection for his forehead.

As I’ve said, taking all of this together, we may have only a fantasy figure, or a composite, but, to me, the closest I can imagine is perhaps an Assyrian, like this, reconstructed by Angus McBride—

Here, in both the left-hand and central figures, we see the open-faced helmet, the lamellar armor, the bronze-faced shield—there’s even a spear, if not a gigantic one.  The only items missing are the greaves.

 Reconstructing David is a much easier matter:  although King Saul attempts to arm him in somewhat of the same style as Goliath (17.38-39), after trying it on, David declines, saying that he’s a shepherd and most comfortable wearing his normal working clothes.  Thus, he takes with him to meet the giant Philistine only his staff (baculus—or baculum, since the noun seems to have both masculine and neuter genders) and his sling (funda—17.40)—and here was my childhood confusion.  A sling looks like this—

and is thus very different from my slingshot—

It’s not just the obvious difference in look.  What propelled the stone from my slingshot was a very large rubber band (“elastic”, if you’re in the UK) and such things didn’t come into being until the 19^th century (AD).  What propelled the stone from David’s sling was the effect of his swinging the sling in several different possible ways (this is only one of them).

Although it looks like such a simple thing, a sling can be really deadly, the stones (or cast lead bullets, which both Greeks and Romans used) moving at anywhere from 60 to 100 miles per hour (97-160kmh).   Here’s a somewhat lurid but useful article from The Daily Mail on the subject: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4541318/Roman-sling-bullets-deadly-44-Magnum.html

And here’s a very convincing demonstration of what a sling and its stone can do:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0a_IHHcw6do

It’s no wonder that David’s stone stuck in Goliath’s forehead.

In Samuel, Goliath doesn’t seem to notice David’s sling, only his staff, shouting sarcastically:  “numquid ego canis sum quod tu venis ad me cum baculo?!” (17.43)

“You don’t think that I’m a dog that you come at me with a staff?”

But, rather than attempting to mock his (to him) diminutive opponent, Goliath should, as in the case of trespassing beasts and Hobbits, have headed for cover when he saw that David “elegit sibi quinque limpidissimos lapides de torrente et misit eos in peram pastoralem quam habebat secum et fundam manu tulit et processit adversum Philistheum” (17.40)—

“[David] picked out for himself five of the smoothest stones from the stream and put them into the shepherd’s pouch which he used to have with him and took [his] sling in hand and made his way towards the Philistine…”

Thanks for reading, as always,

Stay well,

Stay low,

And remember that, as ever, there’s

MTCIDC

O