As ever, welcome, dear readers.

In my last, I said that I was always interested in the sources of inspiration for the almost 400 essays posted so far on this site.  In the case of this posting, it’s easy to trace:  it’s this image, sent to me a few weeks ago by my dear friend, Erik, and it got me to thinking…

(A wonderful painting by Matthew Stewart.  Here’s his website so that you can see more:   https://www.matthew-stewart.com/ )

We know that Tolkien was a life-long pipe smoker—

and so it would be natural that at least some of his characters might have a similar habit.  After all, the first time we see Bilbo—and Gandalf—Bilbo

“…was standing in his door after breakfast smoking an enormous long wooden pipe that reached nearly down to his woolly toes…” (The Hobbit, Chapter One, “An Unexpected Party”)

Such a long pipe—well, not that long—is probably what is called in our era of Middle-earth a “churchwarden”.  This has a very long stem which, smokers say, helps to cool the smoke.

We’re not told what Bilbo is smoking, but, from the section of the Prologue of The Lord of the Rings entitled “Concerning Pipe-weed”, we can suppose that:

1. it’s a member of the tobacco family (Nicotiana)

2. it comes from the Longbottom area of the Shire

(That’s in the lower right hand area, in a curve of the Brandywine, just below the Old Forest)

3. it may be one of the “best home-grown…varieties now known as Longbottom Leaf, Old Toby, and Southern Star”

4. the custom of smoking it is, in hobbit terms, extremely old and a hobbit-invention

(See The Lord of the Rings, Prologue 2, Concerning Pipe-weed for more details.)

Tobold Hornblower, who was believed to have introduced the plant to the Shire, never betrayed its origins, but, in our era of Middle-earth, tobacco was a New World plant

long employed there by various Native Americans for religious, ceremonial, medicinal, and leisure occasions.  It was introduced to Europe in the early 16^th century and was available in Tolkien’s England by the 1570s.  Seemingly the first image of an Englishman with pipe in hand is this, from Anthony Chute’s 1595 Tabaco.

This is a pamphlet in praise of smoking and it was something taken up enthusiastically in England by the late 16^th century—but condemned by King James I himself in 1604 with A Counterblaste to Tobacco.

(You can read Chute’s defense here:     https://ia800203.us.archive.org/7/items/tabacco00chutgoog/tabacco00chutgoog.pdf       And James’ attack here:  https://ia800201.us.archive.org/14/items/acounterblastet00englgoog/acounterblastet00englgoog.pdf )

Tobacco smoking—or “drinking”, which was a term used at first–

was, initially, an expensive hobby, so that pipes like Bilbo’s would have been unlikely.  Instead, they would have been much more moderate in size, like this one,

of which this is a useful  scale reproduction.

Tobacco was so popular that it soon became both a big business in the New World

and much cheaper abroad, so that all classes but the lowest could indulge and smoking became simply a common pastime—or something more, in the case of Sherlock Holmes, who used it to stimulate his thinking.

Here we see the incomparable Jeremy Brett, smoking a churchwarden, perhaps in The Red-Headed League, in which he refers to the case as a “three pipe problem”.  (And, if you don’t know the story, here it is as it first appeared in The Strand Magazine in 1891:  https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Strand_Magazine/Volume_2/The_Red-Headed_League )

I suspect that this may be a source for Gandalf’s use of it, in fact, and I was reminded of that possibility by Erik, who included this quotation with the image:

“Actually Gandalf was awake, though lying still and silent.  He was deep in thought, trying to recall every memory of his former journey in the Mines…’I know what is the matter with me,’ he muttered, as he sat down by the door.  ‘I need smoke!  I have not tasted it since the meeting before the snowstorm.’

The last thing that Pippin saw, as sleep took him, was a dark glimpse of the old wizard huddled on the floor, shielding a glowing chip in his gnarled hands between his knees.  The flicker for a moment showed his sharp nose, and the puff of smoke.”  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 4, “A Journey in the Dark”)

Merry Brandybuck, who is quoted in”Concerning Pipe-weed”, suggested that it was the hobbits of Bree who actually invented the habit and:

“…certainly it was from Bree that the art of smoking the genuine weed spread in recent centuries among Dwarves and such other folk, Rangers, Wizards, or wanderers…”

And one of those wizards, besides Gandalf, who enjoys “the genuine weed” lives far to the south, along the ancient Greenway,

as we learn from two other smokers,

 contentedly enjoying a shipment which must have stood in one of his storerooms before the original owner made the mistake of annoying the Ents.

(a favorite Ted Nasmith)

As Merry tells it:

“It was Pippin who found two small barrels, washed up out of some cellar or store-house, I suppose.  When we opened them, we found they were filled with this:  as fine a pipe-weed as you could wish for, and quite upspoilt…it is Longbottom Leaf!  There were the Hornblower brandmarks on the barrels, as plain as plain.  How it came here, I can’t imagine.  For Saruman’s private use, I fancy.  I never knew that it went so far abroad…”  (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 9, “Flotsam and Jetsam”)

We know, from things which Saruman lets drop when he is attempting to persuade Gandalf to join him, that he has more dealings with the Shire than might, at least at first, be expected, so it may not be surprising that, among those dealings, there is the acquisition of what Merry calls “this dainty”.  I only wonder, if it helps Gandalf to think, what does it do for Saruman?

Thanks, as always for reading.

Stay well,

Keep your matches in a dry place,

And know that, as ever, there’s

MTCIDC

O

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

Looking back, I’m always interested in where the ideas for postings come from.  Sometimes, it’s from something I’ve read, a line in a Tolkien letter, something CS Lewis wrote in an essay.  Sometimes, it’s from something I’ve seen, a fantasy or science fiction film, or an illustration which really caught my attention.  Sometimes it just seems to come out of the air.

This posting began with a surprise remark, a song , and a nursery rhyme.

The song is one that I’ve had in my head for years.  It’s from 1909 and first appeared in an early musical, The Midnight Sons.  Here’s a sheet music cover for it—

The song is called “I’ve Got Rings on My Fingers” and was popularized by a period entertainer named, appropriately enough, Blanche Ring (1871-1961).

In the song, an Irishman, Jim O’Shea, is shipwrecked on an “Indian isle” and proves so popular with the locals that he’s soon “the nabob of them all”.  He explains this to his sweetheart from home, Rose McGee, in a letter and the chorus sums it up:

“Sure, I’ve got rings on my fingers,

Bells on my toes.

Elephants to ride upon,

My little Irish rose.

Come to your nabob

And on next Patrick’s Day

Be Mistress Mumbo Jumbo Jijiboo J. O’Shea.”

Warning:  it’s a very catchy chorus and it’s no wonder that the song was originally a hit.

So that you can have it stuck in your head, here’s a modern performance (1974), by the American mezzo-soprano, Joan Morris (accompanied by the distinguished composer—and her husband—William Bolcolm)–

And here’s Blanche Ring’s original from 1909–

That “Rings on my fingers/bells on my toes” is obviously a link to something much earlier, a version of which you may know.  It’s from a nursery rhyme, the lyrics of which have a certain number of variants.  I learned it as:

“Ride a cock horse

To Banbury Cross

To see a fine lady

Upon a white horse.

Rings on her fingers,

Bells on her toes,

She shall have music

Wherever she goes.”

To see various variants, follow this LINK:   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ride_a_cock_horse_to_Banbury_Cross

There has been scholarly discussion about the origins of this rhyme, as with so many nursery rhymes:  why Banbury (a town about 30 miles north of Oxford)?  It has a lovely statue of the lady, by the way, made in 2005—

Just who is the lady?  And where/why is she riding?

Bells—on the horse, rather than the lady–made me think first of the description of the horse of the Green Knight in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in whose mane

195þer mony bellez ful bry₃t of brende golde rungen

“where many very bright bells of refined gold rang”

(I took my text from the Representative Poetry Online—RPO—site at:  https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/content/sir-gawain-and-green-knight  which has the Middle English text along with interspersed modern English translations.  For the Tolkien/Gordon Middle English text, see:   http://www.maldura.unipd.it/dllags/brunetti/ME/index_gaw.php?poe=gaw&lingua=eng )

And then of the elf lady who carries off Thomas Rhymer in Child Ballad #37:

At ilka tett of her horse’s mane

                    Hung fifty silver bells and nine.

“At every tuft of her horse’s mane

Hung fifty-nine silver bells.”

(For a number of texts with variant lines of this, see:   https://sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/child/ch037.htm    To hear one variant—a favorite of mine—sung by Ewan MacColl, see:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYyJ8pRdfYs  )

And those bells, in turn, led to the scene in The Fellowship of the Ring, where Strider and the rest of the company freeze in place when they hear what they believe is an unwelcome sound:  “the noise of hoofs behind them” , but:

“Then faintly, as if it was blown away from them by the breeze, they seemed to catch a dim ringing, as of small bells tinkling.”  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 12, “Flight to the Ford”)

Instead of the Nazgul they were fearing, however, it was the Elf-lord Glorfindel, sent to find them. 

But it’s those rings, of course, which really caught my attention—after all, there were once:

“Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne,
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.”  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 2, “The Shadow of the Past”)

The use of those bells, from Sir Gawaine to “Thomas Rhymer” to Glorfindel, just like the slave’s theft of a golden cup from the unnamed dragon’s hoard in Beowulf,

which reappears in Bilbo’s theft of a similar cup from Smaug,

reminds us that JRRT’s mind was full of echoes from earlier literature, whether he actively borrowed, which must be the case with the cup, or simply had something float up.  He could be quite defensive about this, if not downright prickly, as in the case of Moria and the fairy tale “Soria Moria Castle” (see the draft of a letter to a “Mr. Rang”, Letters, 384). 

In the same draft, however, he has the very opposite reaction and this, to me, rather surprising statement formed part of the inspiration for this posting: 

“nazg:  the word for ‘ring’ in the Black Speech…Though actual congruences (of form + sense) occur in unrelated real languages, and it is impossible in constructing imaginary languages from a limited number of component sounds to avoid such resemblances (if one tries to—I do not), it remains remarkable that nasc is the word for ring in Gaelic (Irish:  in Scottish usually written nasg)…I have no liking at all for Gaelic from Old Irish downwards…[but] I have at various times studied it…It is thus probable that nazg is actually derived from it…”

When I think of rings in Old Irish (“Irish” is now used for the Celtic language of Ireland and “Gaelic” is used for its Scots descendant) stories, that which stands out for me is the ordnasc, that is, “thumb ring”, in the Tain Bo Fraich (The Cattle Raid of Froech). 

It is given to the hero, Froech, by Findabair, the daughter of the Queen of the province of Connacht, Medb, and her husband, Ailill.  Although initially Medb (the real power in Connacht, Ailill being a bit like Menelaus in the Helen story) looks upon him with favor, she then changes her mind.  Not wanting him to marry Findabair, at the first opportunity, Ailill steals the ring and tosses it into a river where a salmon swallows it.  The salmon is eventually retrieved, opened, and the ring reappears.  The story is actually much more complicated, full of vivid description which, with rhythmic and sound patterns in Irish, must have been a treat for the imagination and the ear.  English translations will at least give you the plot, however, and here’s a 1905 one, by A.H. Leahy, with which to start:  https://www.maryjones.us/ctexts/fraech.html

(This is from the second volume of Leahy’s Heroic Romances of Ireland and, if you’d like to read more, here’s a LINK to the book:   https://archive.org/details/heroicromancesof02leah/page/n5/mode/2up )

A ring which disappears into water and a fish is involved?  This is what is called, by folklorists, a “Tale Type” and this particular type, in the standard work by Aarne-Thompson-Uther, is catalogued as ATU736A, under the title “Polycrates’ Ring”.  The pattern of the story is apparently common, but Polycrates himself was a real person, the ruler of the island of Samos in the 6^th century BC.  Much of what we know of him comes from the 5^th-century historian, Herodotus.

Herodotus can sometimes employ what appear to be folk tales as if they were reality in his history and his story about the ring certainly sounds like it.

In brief, it goes like this:

1. Polycrates has a close friend, the Egyptian pharaoh, Ahmose II (reigned 570-526BC—called “Amasis” in the Greek text).

2. Ahmose is worried about Polycrates’ seeming constant good luck and advises him to choose the most valuable thing he owns and get rid of it for good (because the gods might become jealous—best never to be too fortunate!).

3. Polycrates decides that it’s a ring and he has himself rowed out into the sea, then throws it overboard, breathing a sigh of relief.

4. Then, one day, a fisherman brings him the biggest fish he’s ever caught.

5. I think that you can guess the rest:  yes, the fish is cut open and, well, eventually Polycrates does not end well, being crucified by the Persians, who have already seized the mainland.

(If you’d like to read this story for yourself, here’s a LINK to Herodotus’ Histories, Book Three, Sections 40 and following:  https://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/hh/hh3040.htm )

The title of this posting comes from a literary concept in which material somehow circles back on itself, making a ring, like the ouroboros, the snake biting its own tail (or, in this case, tale) in alchemy, among other sources.

So how will we circle back? 

I said that Tolkien’s surprise remark, that Black Speech nazg was derived from Irish nasc , was part of the initial inspiration for this posting, and that nasc made me think of an Old Irish story in which such a nasc—and a fish—played an important role.  There is another story with a ring and a fish, however:

“…but Deagol sat in the boat and fished.  Suddenly a great fish took his hook, and before he knew where he was, he was dragged out and down into the water, to the bottom.  Then he let go of his line, for he thought he saw something shining in the river-bed; and holding his breath he grabbed at it.”  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 2, “The Shadow of the Past”)

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

Stay well,

Beware of strange Rings:  they may be fishy,

And know that, as always,

There’s

MTCIDC

O

As ever, dear readers, welcome.

If you read/watch fantasy, you won’t have escaped some version of this meme—

(It’s interesting, by the way, to read something about the speech behind this, which is from the film, but doesn’t exist in the text of The Fellowship of the Ring:   https://www.newsweek.com/lord-rings-meme-boromir-one-does-not-simply-walk-mordor-fellowship-sean-bean-1507844#:~:text=%22One%20does%20not%20simply%20walk,great%20eye%20is%20ever%20watchful. )

In this posting, I intend to walk briefly into the place, not to drop off a Ring,

but to try to understand something beyond its geography.  Is there something more which adds menace to the place beyond that geography?

It’s not as if the geography isn’t menacing, of course. 

(This is from Karen Wynn Fonstad’s wonderful  The Atlas of Middle-earth 1981/1991

From the Ered Lithui across the plateau of Gorgoroth to the Ephel Duath, this is depicted as a kind of volcanic landscape,

with, in fact, an active volcano, Orodruin, which seems to be smoking most of the time, like a Middle-earth Etna,

set just above the center of that plateau,

(This is a Tolkien sketch.)

its northern entrance blocked by elaborate gates, the Morannon,

its western entrance by Minas Morgul and the Tower of Cirith Ungol,

and, rising just below the volcano, the capital of the place, the Barad-dur, the Dark Tower.

Although I called the Barad-dur a “capital”, it might be better termed a command center, as the northern part of Mordor isn’t really a land with farms and villages, as we see in Gondor and even in Rohan, but a vast military installation, agriculture being located to the south—“great slave-worked farms away south in this wide realm, beyond the fumes of the Mountain by the dark sad waters of Lake Nurnen”.   Instead, as Tolkien describes it through the eyes of Frodo and Sam:

“As far as their eyes could reach, along the skirts of the Morgai and away southward, there were camps, some of tents,

some ordered like small towns.  One of the largest of these was right below them.  Barely a mile out into the plain it clustered like some huge nest of insects, with straight dreary streets of huts and long low drab buildings.”  (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 2, “The Land of Shadow”)

(These illustrations are of army camps from the Great War and here I agree with John Garth’s suggestion, in his latest book, The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien,

that JRRT was probably thinking of the camps he himself had stayed in during his military service in France in 1916.)

Such camps—along with the “mines and forges” mentioned by the narrator as located in that region—would have produced an endless smog of cooking and industrial fires

to which would have been added volcanic leaks from the ground itself:  “There smokes trailed on the ground and lurked in hollows, and fumes leaked from fissures in the earth.”

(I suspect that, for JRRT, this image would have been a combination of his understanding of the instability of land around an active volcano

and his memories of Great War poison gasses, some of which were heavier than air and would, once loosed towards the enemy, linger in trenches and shell holes, still dangerous to the unwary.)

If the actual air is poisonous, so is the emotional atmosphere of Mordor.  Although the plain itself may be barren, except for the area just below the Ephel Duath, called the Morgai, the area around the camp below Frodo and Sam is teaming with life:

“About it the ground was busy with folk going to and fro; a wide road ran from it south-east to join the Morgul-way, and along it many lines of small black shapes were hurrying.”

Those lines are hurrying because they are columns of troops and it seems that they are being spurred on not by a passionate loyalty to Sauron, but by other means, as Sam and Frodo encounter it:

“The leading orcs came loping along, panting, holding their heads down.  They were a gang of the smaller breeds being driven unwilling to their Dark Lord’s wars; all they cared for was to get the march over and escape the whip.  Beside them, running up and down the line, went two of the large fierce uruks, cracking lashes and shouting.” 

This appears to be the norm in Mordor, as we see again and again reflected in the behavior of its many servants.  Emotionally, Mordor is immersed in an atmosphere of fear, in which everyone is constantly watching everyone else for reportable misbehavior and possible dire punishment, as Grishnakh threatens Ugluk in their attempt to escape the Rohirrim and bring Merry and Pippin to Isengard:

“ You have spoken more than enough, Ugluk…I wonder how they would like it in Lugburz.  They might think that Ugluk’s shoulders need relieving of a swollen head.  They might ask where his strange ideas came from.  Did they come from Saruman, perhaps?” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 3, “The Uruk-hai”)

This is struggle between two leaders, but this attitude extends down to the common foot soldiers.  Frodo and Sam ducked behind a bush and overheard this conversation between two of them, a soldier and a tracker:

“  ‘You come back,’ shouted the soldier, ‘or I’ll report you!’

‘Who to?  Not to your precious Shagrat.  He won’t be captain any more.’

‘I’ll give your name and number to the Nazgul,’ said the soldier, lowering his voice to a hiss.  ‘One of them’s in charge at the Tower now.’ “  (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 2, “The Land of Shadow”)

(“Name and number” sound like another of JRRT’s memories of the Great War.  All British soldiers were issue with regimental service numbers when they joined the army and Tolkien would have worn around his neck something like this:  two identity discs with his name, that number, the title of his unit, and his religion.  On a grim note, if he had been killed and his body recovered—many bodies on both sides never were—the red tag would have been collected by his recoverers, the green tag would have been left for the burial party.)

Above the soldiery—sometimes literally—were those Nazgul and, by Grishnakh’s reaction, in talking with Ugluk, they contributed one more element to this generally fear-filled world:

“ ‘Nazgul, Nazgul,’ said Grishnakh, shivering and licking his lips, as if the word had a foul taste that he savoured painfully.  ‘You speak of what is deep beyond the reach of your muddy dreams, Ugluk…’ “(The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 3, “The Uruk-hai”)

I’ve never really believed in the original film text of the remark the meme captures:

“One does not simply walk into Mordor. Its black gates are guarded by more than just orcs. There is evil there that does not sleep. The great eye is ever watchful. It is a barren wasteland, riddled with fire, ash, and dust. The very air you breathe is a poisonous fume. Not with ten thousand men could you do this. It is folly.”

This, to me, doesn’t sound in the least like Boromir, the Captain of Gondor, who dies valiantly cutting down squads of orcs,

but more like a script-writer’s attempt to add tension to the long scene in the film derived from “The Council of Elrond”, foreshadowing the actual place which Frodo and Sam eventually confront and putting it into the mouth of someone we later know does not believe in Frodo’s mission.  The description certainly covers the physical situation, and even mentions Sauron obliquely, but upon this unstable landscape of “fire, ash, and dust” lies an entire world of unstable servants, fearful creatures who constantl y mutter and squabble amongst themselves and must be held to their tasks by whips and the threat of being reported to something which gives even orc chieftains the shivers.  I don’t know if any script writer could capture this in a single speech, but, when we walk into Mordor, we should be well aware that there is more unsleeping evil there than Boromir can tell.

As ever, thanks for reading,

Stay well,

Keep one eye out for Nazgul in flight,

And know that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

Welcome, as ever, dear readers.

Perhaps I’m of what Victorians might call “a morbid disposition”, but I can never watch the Star Wars films, especially IV-VI, without seeing storm trooper helmets

as having the suggestion of a skull about them.

 This, in turn, has led me to pay closer attention, in Star Wars VI,

to the Ewok xylophone we see there.

It’s a row of Imperial storm trooper helmets, of course,

and, considering that the Ewoks have just won a major victory over their wearers,

perhaps it’s a sort of trophy, of the sort soldiers have always displayed when they triumph over their enemies.   When the British 14^th Light Dragoons , for example,

captured the carriage of Napoleon’s brother, Joseph (1768-1844),

at the battle of Vittoria, in 1813,

among the loot was his silver chamber pot–

a thoughtful gift from his brother, the Emperor Napoleon.  It’s been a proud possession of the regiment—and its  descendants–ever since.

A detail from earlier in the film hints at something else, however.   When Han, Luke, and Chewbacca are captured by a party of Ewoks,

it’s clear that they are not just prisoners, but will form part of an Ewok feast.

That being the case, perhaps that helmet xylophone is meant to suggest another fate for its former wearers?

Certainly, western adventure stories have included the consumption of humans by others from the very beginning.  In Book 9 of the Odyssey, Odysseus and a dozen of his crew face the giant Cyclops, Polyphemus,

and only half of those men (plus Odysseus, of course) survive the Cyclops’ appetite, and, in Book 10, the Laistrygonians destroy eleven of Odysseus’ twelve ships and their crews clearly disappear into the pantries—and stomachs—of the Laistrygonians.

In Beowulf, the monster, Grendel, spends twelve years snacking on the subjects of the Danish king, Hrothgar, before Beowulf  arrives to put an end to his midnight picnicking.

My first encounter with such behavior in literature must have been in Robinson Crusoe (1719),

where I read:

“When I was come down the hill to the shore, as I said above, being the SW. point of the island, I was perfectly confounded and amazed; nor is it possible for me to express the horror of my mind at seeing the shore spread with skulls, hands, feet, and other bones of human bodies; and particularly I observed a place where there had been a fire made, and a circle dug in the earth, like a cockpit, where I supposed the savage wretches had sat down to their human feastings upon the bodies of their fellow-creatures. “ (Robinson Crusoe, Chapter XII, “A Cave Retreat”—if you haven’t read the book, here’s a LINK:                      https://www.gutenberg.org/files/521/521-h/521-h.htm  It’s an amazing story, so full of wonderful details that its original audience believed it to be a true account and some were not pleased to discover that it was a very vivid fictional narrative.)

Real cannibal behavior had appeared in modern western literature as early as 1557, in Hans Staden’s (c.1525-c.1576) comprehensively titled:   Warhaftige Historia und beschreibung eyner Landtschafft der Wilden Nacketen, Grimmigen Menschfresser-Leuthen in der Newenwelt America gelegen ([A] True History and Description of a Country of Wild, Naked, Fierce Cannibals Situated in the New World, America).

Staden, after being shipwrecked, like R. Crusoe, had been taken captive by the Tupinamba of Brazil and spent time among them, combining observation of their occasional diet

with striving to keep himself from becoming part of it. (If you’d like to read about this for yourself, here’s the LINK to a later Victorian translation:  https://archive.org/details/captivityhansst00burtgoog )

Such behavior turns up in more recent literature in two places extremely familiar here.  In the first of these, the protagonist finds himself deep under a mountain, facing a peculiar character who speaks his language and even recognizes certain of his customs,

but who has plans to eat said protagonist, even while promising to maintain the social norms understood in his agreement to abide by the rules of a riddling game:

“Gollum did mean to come back.  He was angry now and hungry.  And he was a miserable wicked creature, and already he had a plan…He had a ring, a golden ring, a precious ring…He wanted it because it was a ring of power, and if you slipped that ring on your finger, you were invisible…’Quite safe, yes,’ he whispered to himself.  ‘It won’t see us, and its nassty little sword will be useless, yes quite.’ “  (The Hobbit, Chapter 5, “Riddles in the Dark”)

And then there’s this from The Lord of the Rings:

“We are the fighting Uruk-hai!   We slew the great warrior.  We took the prisoners.  We are the servants of Saruman the Wise, the White Hand:  the Hand that gives us man’s-flesh to eat.”  (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 3, “The Uruk-hai”)

It’s no wonder, then, that, even though starving, Pippin has this reaction:

“An Orc stooped over him, and flung him some bread and a strip of raw dried flesh.  He ate the stale grey bread hungrily, but not the meat.  He was famished but not yet so famished as to eat flesh flung to him by an Orc…”

As ever, thanks for reading,

Stay well,

When buying luncheon meat, always read the label carefully,

And remember that, as ever, there’s

MTCIDC

O