Welcome, dear readers, as always.

I suppose that we might blame Henry Ford (1863-1947) for this.

In 1908, he began to produce a standard car (only one color:  black) at what he believed was an affordable price for the growing number of middle class Americans, the Model T.

As he put it in a later memoir:

“I will build a motor car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one – and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God’s great open spaces.”  (Henry Ford, assisted by Samuel Crowther, My Life and Work, 1922, p.73—if you’d like see more of Mr. Ford’s life and thoughts as he saw them, here’s a LINK to the work:  https://ia800709.us.archive.org/3/items/mylifeandwork00crowgoog/mylifeandwork00crowgoog.pdf )

Earlier automobiles, especially the earliest, were very expensive toys, available only to the very wealthy.

As Ford says, his goal was to change that.  And he was fantastically successful.   By the time the Model T ceased production, in 1927, over 15,000,000 had been built.

Others, of course, seeing such success, wanted to imitate Ford.  In Britain, Sir Herbert Austin (1866-1941)

produced the Austin 7 in 1923

and William Morris (1877-1963 later, 1^st Viscount Nuffield),

had been producing less expensive models as early as 1915, often under the name “Morris Cowley” (after the location of the factory).

This was inexpensive enough that, in 1932, a rather poverty-stricken Oxford professor, with a wife and four children

invested in one.

What happened next seems rather surprising, as Humphrey Carpenter tells it:

“After learning to drive he took the entire family by car to visit his brother Hilary at his Evesham fruit farm.  At various times during the journey ‘Jo’ [the car’s name, after the first two letters on the license plate] sustained two punctures and knocked down part of a dry-stone wall  near Chipping Norton with the result that Edith refused to travel in the car again until some months later…” (Carpenter, Tolkien, 177)

And it only gets worse:

“…Tolkien’s driving was daring rather than skilful.  When accelerating headlong across a busy main road in Oxford in order to get into a side-street, he would ignore all other  vehicles  and cry ‘Charge ‘em and they scatter!’—and scatter they did.” (Carpenter, Tolkien, 177)

A favorite Tolkien family book was Kenneth Grahame’s (1859-1932)  

1908 The Wind in the Willows.

A major—and extremely dubious—character in that book is J. Thaddeus Toad.

Toad is a wealthy man, er, toad, who is running through his fortune with expensive hobbies, the major one being the new world, in 1908, of motor cars,

which, like a certain professor, he drives with daring, if not with skill, as his three friends, Badger, Ratty, and Mole discuss:

“Another smash-up only last week, and a bad one. You see, he

will insist on driving himself, and he’s hopelessly incapable. If

he’d only employ a decent, steady, well-trained animal, pay

him good wages, and leave everything to him, he’d get on all

right. But no; he’s convinced he’s a heaven-born driver, and

nobody can teach him anything; and all the rest follows.”

“How many has he had?” inquired the Badger gloomily.

“Smashes, or machines?” asked the Rat. “Oh, well, after all,

it’s the same thing—with Toad. This is the seventh. As for the

others—you know that coach-house of his? Well, it’s piled up

—literally piled up to the roof—with fragments of motor-cars,

none of them bigger than your hat! That accounts for the

other six—so far as they can be accounted for.”

“He’s been in hospital three times,” put in the Mole; “and as

for the fines he’s had to pay, it’s simply awful to think of.”

“Yes, and that’s part of the trouble,” continued the Rat.

“Toad’s rich, we all know; but he’s not a millionaire. And he’s a

hopelessly bad driver, and quite regardless of law and order.

Killed or ruined—it’s got to be one of the two things, sooner or

later. (p.65)

At first, they try to reason with Toad,

but eventually are forced to lock him in his room,

from  which Toad happily escapes and nearly ruins himself and his fortune before his final rescue by his loyal friends, which includes a prison break

and a battle with weasels.

So, reading about this other side of JRRT, I wonder whether, as we imagine him in his study, Gandalf-like, deep in his literary and scholarly roles,

there always lay, just below the surface,  another Tolkien—or do I mean J. Thaddeus Toad?–

ready to push the electric starter on the Morris

 and roar off through the countryside, the terror of pedestrians and on-coming traffic, crying, “Charge ‘em and they scatter!”,

a Theoden in a boxy motor car.

(A stirring image by Tulikoura—a talented artist at:  https://www.deviantart.com/tulikoura )

Thanks for reading,

Stay well,

Sound horn at crossings,

And know that there’s always

MTCIDC,

O

PS

Although Grahame’s book was published in 1908 and I always prefer first or early editions, my favorite edition is that of 1931, illustrated by E.H. Shepard.  Here’s the LINK so that you can enjoy Shepard’s illustrations along with Grahame’s gentle comedy:  https://archive.org/details/the-wind-in-the-willows-grahame-kenneth-1859-1932-sh  .

As ever, dear readers, welcome.

In late 1951, I imagine that Tolkien

must have been a man with very ambivalent feelings.  He was parting from Allen & Unwin, who had been his publisher since The Hobbit, in 1937, over the matter of The Silmarillion, which Tolkien wanted to be published with The Lord of the Rings.  When Allen & Unwin rejected that combination, Tolkien tried his luck with a new publisher, Collins.  To provide an idea of what he had created, and why the two should be published together, he sent, at the publisher’s suggestion, a letter with a very extensive description of his work to them and, in it, was this:

“In the south Gondor rises to a peak of power, almost reflecting Numenor, and then fades slowly to decayed Middle Age, a kind of proud, venerable, but increasingly impotent Byzantium.” (to Milton Waldman, “probably written late in 1951”, Letters, 157)

Byzantium had originally been a Greek colony on the European side of the Bosphorus.

In 324AD, the emperor Constantine I ( c.272-337AD)

renamed it “New Rome” and made it the eastern capital of the Roman Empire, which, with his work and that of his successors, turned it into a large and elegant city

at the heart of an extensive empire, the Byzantine Empire.

(You’ll note, by the way, for all that Constantine may have renamed Byzantium  New Rome, everybody actually called it “the city of Constantine”—Constantinople.)

Like all empires, it gradually faded, being reduced, just before the capital fell in 1453, to the up-and-coming Ottoman Empire, to Constantinople and a few weak enclaves.

(And you can see, in this illustration, one reason for the capture of the capital:  the Ottoman Sultan, Mehmet II, was a very forward-thinking man and employed an Hungarian gun-founder to cast a series of early cannon to shake the sturdy, but ancient, walls.)

It’s easy, then, to understand what JRRT means about Gondor, but I think we might add that there’s something  not only Byzantine about Gondor, but Roman, as well.  Below, I make a few suggestions, but,  the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve realized that this might be the topic for a much longer piece, or even a short series.

Rome had been all around Tolkien during his growing up.  Britain itself, after all, had been in Roman hands from more or less the end of the first century AD, after the emperor Claudius’ ( 10BC-54AD),    

 invasion in 43AD,

being divided into two provinces at the end of the 3^rd century AD and, by the later 4^th century, into five.

By the time of Tolkien’s birth, in 1892, most of what might survive after the Roman government’s abandonment of the provinces in the early 5^th century lay below the surface, but certain things popped through—bits of Roman road

and the stumps of Hadrian’s wall,

for example.  And here we might see the ancestor of the Greenway, as well, perhaps, as the Rammas Echor, the great wall which surrounded the fields of the Pelennor  (and was in need of repair, at least along its northern end).

Although various Victorians had poked at the remains of Roman occupation, this was before the creation of modern archaeological techniques, so they generally dug, extracted artifacts, then reburied sites, only a few, it seems, being very careful to chart where and what they had excavated.

Still, the Classical Studies, for which he was originally intended, had given the young Tolkien Julius Caesar (100-54BC)

and his account of his brief invasion of southern Britain in 55-54BC,

Suetonius’ (c.69-122AD) biography of Claudius with its account of the second invasion

(with an elephant, no less),

and Tacitus’ (c.56-120AD) continuation of the invasion, including the revolt, in 60-61AD, of a portion of the population under the guidance of the queen of the Iceni tribe, Boudicca.

(This is Thomas Thornycroft’s statuary group, which, although he began it in 1856, wasn’t completed and erected till 1902—just across the road from Parliament.  Every time Tolkien would have crossed Westminster Bridge, walking towards Parliament, he would have seen it to his right.)

History aside, there was also the mythological aspect.  Rome was said to have been founded by descendants of refugees from fallen Troy, led by the Trojan prince, Aeneas,

as Tolkien would have read in Vergil’s (70-21BC)

unfinished Latin epic, the Aeneid.

It’s no stretch, I think, to see that this would have been in the back of his mind when he wrote, in that letter to Milton Waldman:

“Elendil…flees before the overwhelming storm of the wrath of the West, and is borne high upon the towering waves that bring ruin to the west of the Middle-earth.  He and his folk are cast away as exiles on the shores.  There they establish the Numenorean kingdoms of Arnor in the north…and Gondor…further south.”  (Letters 156-157)

As JRRT moved from Classics to the study of Old and Middle English literature, the Roman world would still never be far away.  The late 12^th-early 13^th-century poem by the priest, Layamon, standardly called Layamon’s Brut, is a history of Britain, but it begins with the story of Aeneas’ great-grandson, who, with his followers, sails west to an island of giants, whom they defeat before colonizing the island under a new name, “Britain”, from the name of their leader (in a rather corrupt form).  And, finally, even older, there is the Old English poem from the Exeter Book (c.950AD)

called “The Ruin”, which many scholars—and, though no Old English scholar, I would agree—believe describes the remains of the Roman town of Bath (Aquae Sulis,”[the] Water of Sulis” who was a local goddess) in the 8^th or 9^th century, AD.

(It’s important to note that, although Roman Bath was gone, the hot springs which gave it its name continued to be popular and, as you can see from this picture, were the subject of much newer construction in later times.  The Roman portion of the baths stops at the bases of the columns.)

Here’s a translation, along with the original, of the full—but fragmentary–text:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ruin .  It’s a beautiful work, but, for today’s posting, I would only point out that, although the poem probably is about a nearly-lost Roman town,  that Roman town is described as “the work of giants”, which, in Old English, is enta geweorc  and, in this phrase, we see that some of the oldest beings on Middle-earth, though described in another language, also have a strong Roman connection—although, at their most dramatic, they’re destroyers, not builders…

(One more splendid Ted Nasmith.)

As ever, thanks for reading.

Stay well,

Remember that Rome isn’t dead, but immortal,

And know that there’s always

MTCIDC

O

As always, dear readers, welcome.

When it comes to Indiana Jones movies, I’m always torn between #1

and #3.

Raiders of the Lost Ark has a freshness to it that always keeps it new for me, no matter how many times I’ve seen it, while The Last Crusade has the byplay between Indiana and his father, which adds a whole additional level, both of comedy and emotion, to the story.

One of Henry Jones Senior’s remarks to his son, in fact, has inspired this posting.  Indiana has made the mistake of retaining his father’s “Grail Diary”,

which then falls into enemy hands.

Disgusted with “Junior” as he calls him, Henry Senior says, “I should have mailed it to the Marx Brothers!”

It’s a funny line—after all, just look at Groucho, Chico, and Harpo.

Do these look like people you would trust with the sensitive matter of the Holy Grail?

(It’s “CHICK-oh”, by the way, as in “one who goes after girls”, rather than the Spanish word meaning “little” or “boy” or “dude” or even “boyfriend”.)

After I wrote the first draft of this posting, it occurred to me that perhaps not everyone among my readers would know who these people were.

The Marx Brothers were, as you’d expect, a group of brothers named Marx

although Karl was not among them.

Originally four in number, they had been stage entertainers and not very successful ones until they almost fell into comedy and then they quickly became increasingly successful, first on stage, and then in film, under the names “Groucho”, “Chico”, “Harpo”, and “Zeppo”.  (Zeppo—he’s the one in the upper left hand corner–hoped for a singing career and gradually faded from the picture, literally.)

On stage, they were known for their zany unpredictability:  what you might see one night might be completely different the next.  In film, their quick movement from slapstick to verbal humor and back still suggested that sense that it was all improvised and just this side of cheerful chaos.  Here’s  Groucho singing “Lydia the Tattooed Lady” from their 1934 film, At the Circus, as an example:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO9xXk5qUtg

And so I’m not so sure that Henry Jones Senior isn’t saying more than he means .

Consider dictators of the period in which the film takes place:

One feature which gave these men power was their basic humorlessness.   Everything they did publicly was meant to be taken dead seriously.  Even a shared smile was like an historic occasion.

If we can detach them from their behavior and its consequences for the world, however, everything from Mussolini’s shaved head to Hitler’s baggy trousers (actually jodhpurs—riding britches–though I can’t imagine him on a horse, even though he owned a fancy racehorse named Nordlicht–

was this is actually a horse mannequin?)

could easily fall into comedy, as it did in Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 The Great Dictator,

where we see Hitler and Mussolini as “Adenoid Hynkel” and “Benzino Napaloni”.

If the Marx Brothers had one major target, it was pomposity in people and events.  In A Night at the Opera  (1935) alone,

they take on rich society ladies

and toadying people from the arts,

knock out an up-and-coming Italian tenor,

mock the complicated language of legal contracts,

stow away on an ocean liner,

pretend to be famous Italian aviators,

destroy a public ceremony honoring those aviators,

[Here’s the scene, if you don’t know it, or just want to see it again:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38N5OcZx3ko ]

and, ultimately, ruin a performance of Verdi’s Il Trovatore,

having previously sent a symphony orchestra out to sea, still playing Wagner, in Day at the Circus (1934).

Even the possibly “posh” pronunciation of a common word could be a target when, in Day at the Circus, Groucho, having just pronounced the word “aunt” to rhyme with “taunt”, turns to the screen audience and comments:

“I usually say aunt [rhyming with American “can’t”], but I’m showing off on account of the monkeys.”

(This is a circus, after all.)

Imagine that scene, then, in The Last Crusade, when Indiana, clutching the recovered “Grail Diary”, comes face to face with Hitler.

The original scene has its own ironic comedy, as Hitler thinks that Indiana is a fan and wants an autograph, but what would have been the case if Groucho, backed by Chico and Harpo, had suddenly been confronted with the dictator?

As always, thanks for reading.

Stay well,

Remember that the password is “Swordfish”  (see:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yT0-HGqy_8c  ),

And know that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

When your mind BOGGLES! at something, what’s really going on?

Imagine that you’re on a horse, trotting quietly along a country lane when, suddenly, the horse rears as if it had seen something—but what?

It once happened to me—in a stable—and suddenly I was on the ground and the horse was standing some distance away, perfectly quiet.  Clearly, he (a dark bay, named “Seaworthy”),

(not the actual horse, but just to give you a general idea)

 had thought that he’d  seen a bogle, that is, a kind of ghost or spirit. 

And, since that meant DANGER!  to him, he took appropriate action, being definitely a “flight” (vs a “fight”) animal, for all that he weighed about half-a-ton (450kg).

And this is, supposedly, what happens when you come up against something previously unseen and therefore unexpected:   your brain’s reaction, just like Seaworthy’s, is to…boggle, that is, to react as if you’d seen a bogle.

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

If you’re a regular reader—and I hope that you are—you will remember that I’ve been talking about inspirations for posts.  Last week’s was a picture of Gandalf, smoking, and that of the week before was a popular song from 1909, “I’ve got Rings on My Fingers”. 

This week’s began with another popular song, but from the year before.  The song is called “The Yama Yama Man” and appeared in a New York show with the odd title of Three Twins.

Here’s the first verse and the chorus:

“Ev’ry little tot at night,
Is afraid of the dark you know.
Some big Yama man they see,
When off to bed they go.

Refrain:

Yama, Yama, the Yama man,

Terrible eyes and a face of tan.

If you don’t watch out he’ll get you without a doubt,

If he can.

Maybe he’s hiding behind the chair,

Ready to spring out at you unaware.

Run to your mama,

For here comes the Yama Yama man.”

It quickly became a big hit–in 1908 terms, that meant that people:

1. who lived near New York went to see it performed, sometimes more than once

2. they and others bought the sheet music

3. and/or the record

The original singer was Bessie McCoy (1888-1931)

who appeared in a black Pierrot costume with oversized gloves, which must have made her hands look more like claws,

and sang and danced the song in a wild, acrobatic fashion against a background of people in triangular outfits.

(There doesn’t appear to be a surviving recording of McCoy singing it, but Ada Jones, 1873-1922,

had a hit with the song in 1909 and here’s a LINK:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1YVCIkIc6E      If you’d like a more modern version, here’s Joan Morris  (1974): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSOjADO1MoI     The song is at 16:04   And, because this is actually a rag—that is, a very early form of jazz—I’ll include a piano version which really brings out the raggyness of the song:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTN3TJDz_AY    As for those triangular costumes, I’ve yet to find an production image, but, in 1909, Grace Duffie Boylan published Yama Yama Land, which was inspired by the song.  Here’s the cover and a color plate, suggesting something of the 3-cornered nature of those Yama Yamians—)

Who is this creature?   Where does he come from?  We’re not told, but we know one thing:  he’s out there, like “Pennywise”, the “It”  in the Stephen King novel,

and he’s out to get you—at least if you’re a nervous child.  Beyond that fact, the menace in this song is that, like being boggled, it’s what you don’t see which frightens you—“maybe he’s hiding behind the chair”– and here I’ve been thinking about something which Grishnakh says to Ugluk:

“ ‘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,’ he said.”  (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 3, “The Uruk-hai”)

If we consider the Nazgul for a moment, what is it that Grishnakh is afraid of? 

The only person in the story who actually sees them as themselves is Frodo, and only when wearing the Ring:

“Immediately, though everything else remained as before, dim and dark, the shapes became terribly clear.  He was able to see beneath their black wrappings.  There were five tall figures:  two standing on the lip of the dell, three advancing.  In their white faces burned keen and merciless eyes; under their mantles were long grey robes; upon their grey hairs were helms of silver; in their haggard hands were swords of steel.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 11, “A Knife in the Dark”)

They are, in fact, otherwise oddly disembodied:  even when fully clothed (and, being disembodied, how do they do this?), they are invisible, as in the case of their chief:

“…a shape, black-mantled, huge and threatening.  A crown of steel he bore, but between rim and robe naught was there to see, save only a deadly gleam of eyes…” (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 6, “The Battle of the Pelennor Fields”)

Even in what I’d guess is death—or at least dissolution—they remain unseen:

“The crown rolled away with a clang.  Eowyn fell forward upon her fallen foe.  But lo! the mantle and hauberk were empty.  Shapeless they lay now on the ground, torn and tumbled…”

Which reminds me, of course, of—

So, I’d suggest, it’s not what he sees, so much as what he doesn’t, which makes Grishnakh anxious.  And Gorbag expresses a similar feeling:

“Grr!  Those Nazgul give me the creeps.  And they skin the body off you as soon as look at you, and leave you all cold in the dark on the other side.”  (The Two Towers, Book Four, Chapter 10, “The Choices of Master Samwise”)

Having seen the Nazgul in the flesh (so to speak), Frodo asks Gandalf a very interesting question:

“…But why could we all see their horses?”

To which Gandalf replies:

“Because they are real horses; just as the black robes are real robes that they wear to give shape to their nothingness when they have dealings with the living.”

To which Frodo has a further question—and Gandalf an answer.

“ ‘Then why do these black horses endure such riders?  All other animals are terrified when they draw near, even the elf-horse of Glorfindel.  The dogs howl  and the geese scream at them.’

‘Because these horses are born and bred to the service of the Dark Lord in Mordor.’ “ (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 1, “Many Meetings”)

Not being bred to such service, could Seaworthy have spotted a Nazgul and boggled?

(Alan Lee does it again)

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

Stay well,

Keep to the western side of the Loudwater,

And know that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

PS

Dictionaries of the Scottish Language has an extra form of “bogle” which I really like:  “tattie-bogle”—“ragged ghost”—that is, “scare crow”.