Welcome, as always, dear readers.

I’m teaching Dracula again,

Bram  Stoker’s  (1847 -1912)

wonderfully-imagined novel of 1897,  and, as always when I teach a work more than once, something new pops out at me.   This time it was a passage from Chapter II.  Jonathan Harker, clerk for Peter Hawkins, a solicitor, who has an office in Exeter, in southwest England, has been sent by his employer  across Europe to Transylvania (now part of Romania), to help  the new owner of an English estate with the necessary paperwork.  This owner is a nobleman of the region and lives in a semi-ruined castle.  At first, he seems a charming host, saying to Jonathan:

“You may go anywhere you wish in the castle, except where the doors are locked, where of course you will not wish to go. There is reason that all things are as they are, and did you see with my eyes and know with my knowledge, you would perhaps better understand.”

And this is what caught my attention.  Where had I read something like this before?  And then Andrew Lang’s The Blue Fairy Book (1889)

fell off the shelf, opening to this:

“Here,” said he, “are the keys of the two great wardrobes, wherein I have my best furniture; these are of my silver and gold plate, which is not every day in use; these open my strong boxes, which hold my money, both gold and silver; these my caskets of jewels; and this is the master-key to all my apartments. But for this little one here, it is the key of the closet at the end of the great gallery on the ground floor. Open them all; go into all and every one of them, except that little closet, which I forbid you, and forbid it in such a manner that, if you happen to open it, there’s nothing but what you may expect from my just anger and resentment.” 

The speaker here is rather unusual in appearance, in regard to his facial hair.

So—Stoker also knew Blue Beard. 

Although the story has earlier antecedents, including folktales, the modern form first appears in Charles Perrault’s (1628-1703)

Histoires ou Contes de Temps Passe avec des Moralites (“Stories or Fairy Tales of Time Past with Some  Moral Lessons”) with a subtitle:  Les Contes de ma Mere L’Oye (“The Fairy Tales of My Mother Goose”)

If you’re unfamiliar with the story, the main points are:

1. a wealthy nobleman tries to marry one of two sisters, who are put off by his beard and by the fact that, although the nobleman is known to have been married before—and more than once–no one seems to know what happened to those former wives.

2. eventually, the younger of the two, having seen the nobleman’s lavish life style, is persuaded to accept him.

3. after the wedding, he tells her that he must leave for a time, on business, entrusting her with a set of keys for various rooms in his castle.

4. he tells her that she may use any key to enter any room but one—and then sets off on his trip.

5. she invites female relatives, including her sister, Anne, to visit and see what luxury she now commands—but can’t stop thinking about that one room.

6. she slips away from her relatives, key in hand, opens the door, and steps into a room the floor of which is covered in congealed blood and at the walls are the bodies of those previous wives.

7. In her surprise and terror, she drops the key and it’s immediately coated with blood.  She desperately tries to clean it, but it’s a magic key and, when the nobleman returns and demands his keys, he discovers the blood and says that she must now join the other wives.

8. she begs for a few moments of prayer with her sister, which he reluctantly grants, and is rescued at the very last moment by the arrival of her two brothers,

who kill the nobleman, leaving her a widow with a large fortune—and a back room in need of a drastic cleaning.

It’s interesting that Stoker, having, it seems, made use of the idea of locked rooms in Chapter II, continues the idea of danger in forbidden rooms in Chapter III, where he warns Jonathan:

“ ‘Let me advise you, my dear young friend—nay, let me warn you with all seriousness, that should you leave these rooms you will not by any chance go to sleep in any other part of the castle. It is old, and has many memories, and there are bad dreams for those who sleep unwisely. Be warned! Should sleep now or ever overcome you, or be like to do, then haste to your own chamber or to these rooms, for your rest will then be safe. But if you be not careful in this respect, then’—He finished his speech in a gruesome way, for he motioned with his hands as if he were washing them.”

Needless to say, Jonathan goes exploring, forces a door which is not actually locked, spends time in the room within, and—but perhaps, like Stoker, I should maintain the suspense and we’ll continue this in our next post…

Thanks, as always, for reading,

Stay well,

Avoid temptation, when possible,

And know that, as ever, there’s

MTCIDC

O

PS

(If you’d like to see Perrault’s original French text, here it is:  https://fr.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Histoires_ou_Contes_du_temps_pass%C3%A9_(1697)/Original/La_Barbe_bleue    Here’s the Blue Fairy Book, as well:   https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/503    )

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

Although Tolkien maintained that there was religion—and monotheistic religion—under the surface of The Lord of the Rings, saying to one correspondent:

“The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.”

yet he added:

“That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like ‘religion’, to cults or practices, in the imaginary world.”

Those “practically all references” usually pointed to are:

1. when attacked by a mumak, Damrod the ranger of South Ithilien calls upon the Valar (The Two Towers, Book Four, Chapter 4, “Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit”)

(by Alan Lee)

2. when Faramir and his men, before eating, face west in silence (The Two Towers, Book Four, Chapter 5, “The Window on the West”)

(a Ted Nasmith)

3. mentions of the Vala Varda (Elbereth), to whom the Elves seem to feel especially devoted, and to whom Sam almost instinctively appeals when he battles Shelob (The Two Towers, Book Four, Chapter 10, “The Choices of Master Samwise”)

(the Hildebrandts)

Tolkien goes on to explain:

“For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.” (letter to Robert Murray, SJ, 2 December, 1955, Letters 172)

Because this is what the author tells us, we must, of course, accept it and, although he claims that “that is very clumsily put”, behind that explanation is JRRT’s wariness of overt religion appearing in stories like The Lord of the Rings, as he writes:

“For reasons which I will not elaborate, that seems to me fatal.  Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary “real” world.”  (The Silmarillion, xii)

To emphasize this “in solution” method of setting religion into Middle-earth, as Tolkien explained in a footnote to a draft of a letter to Peter Hastings from 1954:

“There are thus no temples or ‘churches’ or fanes in this ‘world’ among ‘good’ people.” (draft of letter to Peter Hastings, September, 1954, Letters, 193)

Again, the author makes his intentions clear—and yet I am always haunted by the remains of previous ages still apparent on the surface in the Third Age.  There are the East Road and its bridge over the Brandywine, which the King of Arnor has charged the hobbits to maintain (The Lord of the Rings, Prologue, I, Concerning Hobbits),

(This is the Pont Julien, a surviving Roman bridge in France—I always imagine that Numenorean structures in Middle-earth had an imperial look to them),

there’s the Greenway,

(a bit of Roman road)

and Weathertop,

(an Alan Lee)

and Amon Hen,

(not sure of the artist here—Scott Peery?)

and, grandest of all, the Argonath.

(the Hildebrandts—although I could easily have picked others, this being a subject which has inspired a good number of excellent artists)

So, if for a moment we might put aside JRRT’s remarks, why might we not see at least the remains of temples or fanes (another word for “temple” or “shrine” from Latin fanum) in Middle-earth?

In our world, Greco-Roman temples survive, either as now remote ruins, like the temple of Apollo at Bassae, in Greece,

or as a fragment, like this corner of  the “ temple of Iupiter Tonans” (actually the one surviving piece of a temple dedicated to the emperor Vespasian and his older son, Titus) in the Roman Forum.

(Abandoned for centuries, the Forum had gradually become so silted up and overgrown that it had become known as the “cow pasture” (Campo Vaccino ).  This is how the temple looked in the 18^th century, long before the beginnings of the official excavation of the Forum in 1898.  Here’s what it looks like today–)

Other shrines had been repurposed as Christian churches, like this temple originally dedicated to the Roman emperor Antoninus Pius and his wife, Faustina, but now the Chiesa di San Lorenzo in Miranda, also in the Forum,

or the temple at the edge of the Agora in Athens, originally a temple of Hephaistos, but, in later times, dedicated to Saint George, which is why it has survived so beautifully.

After the Ottoman conquest in 1453, most Christian churches in Constantinople were converted to mosques, like that dedicated originally to Saints Sergius and Bacchus,

or the grand Church of Holy Wisdom (Hagia Sophia).

It’s a nice fantasy, then, and would go very well with the genuine fallen monuments of Middle-earth,

(a favorite Ted Nasmith)

but, realistically, we have to accept the author at his word, when he talks about the later peoples of Middle-earth:

“They had little or no ‘religion’ in the sense of worship.  For help they may call upon a Vala (as Elbereth), as a Catholic might on a Saint, though no doubt knowing in theory as well as he that the power of the Vala was limited and derivative.  But this is a ‘primitive age’ and these folk may be said to view the Valar as children view their parents or immediate adult superiors, and though they know they are subjects of the King he does not live in their country nor have there any dwelling.”  (draft of letter to Peter Hastings, September, 1954, Letters, 193)

As ever, thanks for reading.

Stay well,

Revere the Valar,

And remember that there’s always

MTCIDC

O

PS

That image of the temple of Vespasian and Titus is by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) and one of a long series of striking engravings of Rome which he made through his later creative years.  If you would like to see more of them, here’s a LINK to a useful collection from 1779:   https://ia803406.us.archive.org/7/items/piranesi-vedvte-di-roma-t.-1-2-1779/Piranesi%2C%20Vedvte%20di%20Roma%2C%20t.1-2%2C%201779%2B.pdf   

 A mild warning:   Piranesi often does things like distort perspective, shrinking people and swelling buildings in order to make his depictions more dramatic.  In fact, they could be so dramatic that 18^th-century tourists, having first seen his engravings, sometimes found themselves a little disappointed that the real sites weren’t quite so impressive as Piranesi’s views of them! 

“Roll out the barrel, we'll have a barrel of fun.
Roll out the barrel, we've got the blues on the run.
Zing boom tararrel, ring out a song of good cheer.
Now's the time to roll the barrel, for the gang's all here.”

(Melody:  Jaromir Vejvoda; English lyrics:  Lew Brown, Vladimir Timm—perhaps the first famous US performance was by the Andrews Sisters 

in 1939—here’s a recording:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KRc-ceWE2E )

As ever, welcome, dear readers.

This is the 400th posting of doubtfulsea.com and perhaps a small rolling out of barrels is due, but “barrels” has immediately made me think of another kind of barrel rolling—

and, as always, I wonder about sources:  where might the idea of escape by barrel have come from?

It seems certain that Tolkien had had read to him or had read to himself Andrew Lang’s Red Fairy Book (1890),

which has in it “Storia Moria Castle” and the dragon which was probably the one which sparked his imagination as he recounted in his long, rich letter to W. H. Auden of 7 June, 1955 (see Letters, 214).  Had he also encountered the first book in Lang’s long series of colored fairy books,

 the Blue Fairy Book (1889),

he would have heard the story “The Forty Thieves”, probably known to you as to me as “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves”.

 If you’re unfamiliar with this story, in brief (very brief—the story is a bit more complicated than this) it goes like this:

1. Ali Baba works as a wood cutter for a living.

2. one day, he hears horsemen approaching where he’s working and he climbs into a tree to watch.

3. they approach and he watches one, seemingly the chief, dismount, step to a cliff face, and murmur “Open Sesame!”

4. a door opens and the chief goes inside, followed by his other—39—Ali Baba counts them—men.

And yes, this does have the echo of something else, doesn’t it?  (See The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 4, “A Journey in the Dark”)  Perhaps this might be evidence that JRRT did know Lang’s volume?

5. after the 40 leave, Ali Baba slips down, tries the password, and finds himself in a cave stuffed with riches.

6. loading up his mules with treasure, he takes home a selection of what he found in the cave.

7.  in time, the chief realizes that the cave has been looted and that Ali Baba did it and, disguised as an oil merchant, he gains access to Ali Baba’s house, his men concealed in a cargo of oil jars.

 8. unfortunately for his men, Ali Baba has a clever slave named Morgiana, who discovers what’s in the jars and fills them with burning oil, thereby removing the chief’s band.

And so we see that those jars might someday turn into barrels.

(an Alan Lee illustration)

As I’ve written before, Tolkien began his academic life intending to become a Classicist, and so another rather unusual escape story might also have been in the back of his mind.

Odysseus and his men are in terrible trouble, trapped in a cave with a one-eyed giant, a Cyclops, who, over about two days, has eaten six of those men.

They can’t kill him and escape because the Cyclops seals the door with an enormous boulder, which only he can push out of the way.  In a flash of the genius which makes him “polymetis”, “manyplans”, as he’s called in the Odyssey, Odysseus gets the Cyclops drunk, and, when he collapses in a stupor, blinds him.

The Cyclops is a herder of sheep and goats and, in the morning, he is due to let them out out of his cave so that they can proceed to graze.  Odysseus realizes this and binds his men under six of the biggest sheep (figuring that, if the Cyclops searches for escaping men, he’ll pass his hands across the sheeps’ backs), then clings to the underside of a big ram and follows them out (after a hairy moment when the Cyclops stops the ram—his favorite, it turns out—and has a brief chat with it). 

Although using neither pots nor barrels, might we see a familiar pattern here, rescuer sending the rescued ahead, then, clinging to something, tagging behind? 

Thanks, for reading, as ever, and

Stay well,

Have an escape route,

And remember that there’s always

MTCIDC

O

ps

Here’s your copy of the first edition of the Blue Fairy Book: https://archive.org/details/bluefairybook00langiala/mode/2up  “The Forty Thieves” is on pages 242-250. 

pps
My apologies for the weird typeface and the spacing.  As I move on to #401, I assure you that I'm not making a change!  I have no idea what's happened--perhaps it's that mention of the Andrews sisters?  Certainly, this type makes the posting look like it dates from 1939.

Dear readers, welcome, as ever.

You probably recognize the illustration above, Hokusai’s (1760-1849)

“Great Wave Off Kanagawa” from “Thirty-Six Views of Mt Fuji”, (c.1830-1833).  It seemed a very appropriate illustration for this posting, which is about very high tides and worse.  The posting itself began when I reread this:

“At length Ar-Pharazon listened to this counsel, for he felt the waning of his days and was besotted by the fear of Death.  He prepared then the greatest armament that the world had seen, and when all was ready he sounded his trumpets and set sail; and he broke the Ban of the Valar, going up with war to wrest everlasting life from the Lords of the West.  But when Ar-Pharazon set foot upon the shores of Aman the Blessed, the Valar laid down their Guardianship and called upon the One, and the world was changed.  Numenor

was thrown down and swallowed in the Sea,

and the Undying Lands were removed for ever from the circles of the world.  So ended the glory of Numenor.”  (The Lord of the Rings, Appendix A, I “The Numenorean Kings”)

I’m always interested in where Tolkien’s ideas come from and, although he himself related this to the myth of Atlantis (see the letter to Naomi Mitchison, 25 September, 1954, Letters (197-198), If you’ve grown up in the sort of culture, both religious and general, in which Tolkien grew up (and so did I, for that matter) probably your first thought is:  “Hey—it’s Genesis, Chapters 6-8!  The story of Noah’s Ark and the flood!”

(a Victorian children’s toy—pious people thought that somehow play was like work and so children were not allowed to play with their usual toys on Sunday—instead, this toy was brought out)

which is wonderfully illustrated in a series of mosaics in the late 12^th-century cathedral of Monreale in Palermo, Sicily.  Here’s Noah and family building the Ark

and Noah gathering the animals

and, hoping that the flood is finally over, Noah is sending out a dove as a scout—and the dove returns.  The Latin text, expanded, reads:  “Noah sent a dove and it returned with the branch of an olive.”  (This is actually rushing things a bit—Noah sent the dove out twice and it was only on the second trip that it came back with the twig.)

(We can also note the gross realism of including several drowned people in the scene.)

I think, however, that we can see two more potential influences upon JRRT which might lie behind this story of a flooded world. 

First, JRRT began his academic life as an aspiring Classicist, which means that, probably fairly early on in his training, he had encountered Ovid’s (43BC-17AD) story of the only survivors of a Greco-Roman flood, to be found in Book I, lines 163-415 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

(This is Arthur Golding’s translation of 1567, which was the one which Shakespeare must have thumbed through, looking for usable poetic material.)

 Jupiter, disgusted with the Age of Bronze (and with the particularly loathsome Lycaon—for more on him see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycaon_(king_of_Arcadia) ),

floods the earth, leaving only two humans, Pyrrha and Deucalion. 

(Noah and family’s repopulating the now-drying earth is well-known, being done by more or less human—and animal—means, but what happened to recreate the people of Ovid’s world is so surprising that it seemed to me worth a little detour here.

Despairing that they will be the last of their race, Pyrrha and Deucalion consult the goddess Themis (whose temple has survived, although more than a little worse for wear) and she tells them (381-382):

 “discedite templo
et velate caput cinctasque resolvite vestes
ossaque post tergum magnae iactate parentis!”

“Leave the temple

And cover your heads and loose your bound robes

And throw behind you the bones of your great mother!”

(Parens can be masculine or feminine, but the adjective modifying it is feminine, so clearly the goddess here means “mother”.)

Or, if you’d prefer Arthur Golding’s version:

“Depart you hence: Go hide your heads, and let your garmentes slake,
And both of you your Graundames bones behind your shoulders cast.”

(If you’d like your own copy of Golding, here’s W.H.D. Rouse’s 1904 facsimile for you:  https://sourcetext.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/golding_ovid.pdf )

At first, the two are stumped:  disturbing a parent’s bones is a form of sacrilege and these are pious people (which is why they’ve survived).  Then it occurs to Deucalion that Themis is speaking in metaphors (393-394): 

“magna parens terra est: lapides in corpore terrae
ossa reor dici; iacere hos post terga iubemur.”

“Our great mother is the earth:  I think that the stones of the earth

Are meant to be [her] bones; we are bid to throw those behind us.”

Or

“I take our Graundame for the earth, the stones within hir hid
I take for bones, these are the bones the which are meaned heere.”

They begin picking up stones and tossing them and, very soon, humans are back. 

Probably this is understood as a form of religious magic and Pyrrha and Deucalion are not supposed to see it at work, which is why:

1. they cover their heads, which is what Romans do at religious ceremonies

2. they throw the stones over their shoulders, rather than toss them in front of them.  In a way, it reminds me both of the story of Cadmus and the dragon’s teeth, by which he acquired help in founding Thebes, and Aeetes’ challenge to Jason to sow dragon’s teeth which turned into warriors which Jason was then supposed to fight, both stories appearing, among other places, in the latter part of Apollonius’ Argonautica, Book 3.

(This is a 1908 illustration by Maxfield Parrish, 1870-1966, and depicts Cadmus at work.)

As for loosing their garments, perhaps it is related to birthing customs?  When Hera wants to delay the birth of Herakles, Lucina, a childbirth goddess, sits with her legs and fingers crossed to stop the process (Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 9, lines297-300).  So might loosing what was bound on Pyrrha and Deucalion allow for the free “birth” of people from the stones?)

Beyond Classics, and back to our main topic, we know that Tolkien had an abiding affection for Welsh (“I did not learn any Welsh till I was an undergraduate, and found in it an abiding linguistic-aesthetic satisfaction…” he wrote to W. H. Auden in June, 1955—Letters, 213) and there’s a medieval Welsh legend, involving two characters, named Dwyfan and Dwyfach, who survive their own flood, when a lake monster, the Afanc, inundates the world and the two, along with two of each species of animal which they’ve loaded into a boat (the boat being called Nefyd Naf Neifion—“Celestial Lord Neptune”?), are the only survivors.  The story appears in a medieval collection called Trioedd Ynys Prydain, “The Triads of the Island of Britain”, printed and translated by William Probert as an appendix to his The Ancient Laws of Cambria, 1823.

“13.  There were three awful events in the Isle of Britain.  The first was the bursting of the Lake of Floods, and the rushing of an inundation over all the lands, until all persons were destroyed except Dwyvan and Dwyvach who escaped in an open vessel; and from them the Isle of Britain was re-peopled.” (The Ancient Laws of Cambria, page 379)

This should be read in conjunction with part of Number 97:

“the ship of Nwydd Nav Neivion, which brought in it a male and a female of all living things when the lake of floods burst forth…” (page 466)

(For your own copy of the text:  https://archive.org/details/ancientlawscamb01probgoog )

Latin or Welsh were two languages with which Tolkien had significant experience, but is there yet another possible influence?  In 1873, the Assyriologist George Smith (1840-1876)

published an essay in Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology (here it is:  https://sacred-texts.com/ane/chad/chad.htm ) which later formed part of book  which caused a great deal of controversy at the time.  Entitled “The Chaldean Account of the Deluge”, it included a translation of this cuneiform tablet–

The tablet was dated to the 7^th century BC  and formed part of the story of the ancient Mesopotamian  hero, Gilgamesh.  This particular tablet carried a text which described a Noah-like figure, the boat he built, his collecting of animals to stock the boat, and the flood which that boat then survived. 

(Here’s a copy of the very book for you:  https://ia800900.us.archive.org/27/items/chaldeanaccounto00smit/chaldeanaccounto00smit.pdf  If you want to look at the translation of material relevant to the flood, see pages 263- 273.   The tablet itself is in the British Museum and you can read more about it at:  https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/W_K-3375 )

That controversy was in the Victorian world, almost 20 years before Tolkien’s birth, but as an active scholar—and active Bible-reader (there are 19 references to it in Letters and JRRT was even once involved in the production of the Jerusalem Bible—see his self-deprecating comment to Charlotte and Denis Plimmer, February, 1967, Letters, 378), perhaps it wouldn’t seem surprising if he were aware of an ancient Near Eastern parallel to the familiar story of Noah—although from his reactions in his correspondence, which ranged from the frustrated to the downright hostile, to some of the parallels readers and critics attempted to draw between his work and other matters, I will not suggest that there might be any connection between the questing hero of a Sumerian text and certain hobbits…

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

Stay well,

Consider what creatures you might leave off your ark,

And remember that there’s always

MTCIDC

O

ps

If you enjoy the Hokusai, you might also enjoy Henri Riviere’s (1864-1951) turn-of-the-century “36 Views of the Eiffel Tower” which was obviously influenced by the earlier Japanese work.  A useful website is:  https://armstrongfineart.com/blogs/news/henri-riviere-the-thirty-six-views-of-the-eiffel-tower  And here is one of the set—