Welcome, as ever, dear readers.

Unlike The Hobbit’s narrator’s description of the mouth of the River Running with its “every now and then a black and ominous crow”, I like crows. Perhaps it’s because of their elegant, almost regal, look–

and recent scientific studies have turned the crow from one of a noisy gang of scavengers

to something more than a birdbrain. 

(This is a late rag—1959—by Joseph Lamb—1887-1960

and here’s a recording so that you can hear how Lamb conveyed the idea:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYlPM0TJ9XY    For me, Lamb is one of the best among the many ragtime composers and “Nightingale Rag”, 1915, performed here by William Oegmundson, is perhaps my favorite of his rags:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnzoBXDL0Qw  –just to keep the bird theme which is developing here. )

Instead, crows are extremely intelligent.  Just look at this from the BBC series “Inside the Animal Mind”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbSu2PXOTOc

For Tolkien—at least for Tolkien’s dwarves in The Hobbit—even if crows showed avian genius, however, they were not the preferred bird:

“ ‘I only wish he was a raven!’ said Balin.

‘I thought that you did not like them!  You seemed very shy of them, when we came this way before.’

‘Those were crows!  And nasty suspicious-looking creatures at that, and rude as well.  You must have heard the ugly names they were calling after us.  But the ravens are different.’ “ (The Hobbit, Chapter 15, “The Gathering of the Clouds”)

Ravens are physically different to some degree from crows (size, feathering, calls, flying methods, basically),

but there is also one strong similarity:  they both talk, as do birds throughout The Hobbit.

In succession, there are the Lord of the Eagles,

(one of my favorite Michael Hague illustrations)

and the eagle who carries Bilbo to the Carrock,

(a Ted Nasmith)

the thrush who not only signals the moment when the keyhole to the backdoor of Erebor will appear, but

(an Alan Lee)

who also told the archer, Bard, about Smaug’s weak spot,

(one version of Tolkien’s well-known drawing)

the ancient raven Roac, the son of Carc,

(another Alan Lee)

and, finally, the unnamed ravens who provide information on affairs outside the Lonely Mountain to the dwarves.

All of these feathery folk speak the Common Speech but one, the Thrush, and here it’s interesting to see that there is a linguistic tie between thrushes and the men of the now long-ruined Dale, as Bard discovers:

“Suddenly out of the dark something fluttered to his shoulder.  He started—but it was only an old thrush.  Unafraid it perched by his ear and it brought him news.  Marveling he found he could understand his tongue, for he was of the race of Dale.”  (The Hobbit, Chapter 14, “Fire and Water”)

If you read this blog with any regularity, you know that I’m always interested in where JRRT’s ideas come from.  Sometimes, as in the theft of the cup from Smaug in The Hobbit, it’s obvious:  Beowulf, 2278-2306.  (If you’d like to see this in the original Old English, along with a more literal translation, visit:  https://heorot.dk/beo-intro-rede.html   For another very interesting translation into modern English, see:  https://oldenglishpoetry.camden.rutgers.edu/beowulf/  This is an excellent site for reading Old English texts in translation, of which the site has a wide selection.)

In Bard’s understanding of the Thrush’s speech, I’m immediately reminded of something from Andrew Lang’s (1844-1912) The Red Fairy Book (1890).

(If you don’t own a copy, here it is:  https://www.gutenberg.org/files/540/540-h/540-h.htm )

From the title of a story early in the volume, “Soria Moria Castle”, some have believed—and I’m among them—that JRRT had either read this book or had it read to him as a child, but it seems that there’s much more evidence from “The Story of Sigurd” for both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, including a broken sword whose pieces, collected, can be reforged (although it’s not called “Narsil”, “Firey Flame”, or “Anduril”, “Flame of the West”, but Gram, “grief/sorrow”), a sensitive ring  (it changes temperature with dawn), as well as a ring with a curse on it, a horse “swift as the wind” (descended from Sleipnir, Odin’s horse, as Shadowfax was one of the chiefs of the Mearas, horses brought to Middle-earth by Orome, a Vala), a warrior maiden, and a human, who gaining the speech of birds, is then given a warning.

Even The Red Fairy Book might remind us of The Red Book of Westmarch, from which The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are supposedly translated, but I want to go back to the human, the hero of the story, Sigurd, and his acquired ability to understand birds.  He does so inadvertently, having sucked on a finger burnt while roasting the heart of Fafnir, a dragon he has killed.  (This is, in fact, cousin to an Old Irish story, in which Fionn Mac Cumhaill—that’s “FEEN mac COO-vuhl” in Old Irish—after burning his thumb while cooking a salmon, sucks it and begins to gain all of the knowledge in the world.  Here’s a quick reference for that story– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon_of_Knowledge  and some other parallels, as well.)

As Sigurd has gained his comprehension through his burned fingers, Bard has his understanding  of the Thrush because , as Thorin tells Bilbo:

“The thrushes are good and friendly…They were a long-lived and magical race…The Men of Dale used to have the trick of understanding their language, and used them for messengers to fly to the Men of the Lake and elsewhere.”  (The Hobbit, Chapter 12, “Inside Information”)

In an earlier posting, I’ve suggested that Tolkien had been influenced not only by The Red Fairy Book, but also by its predecessor, The Blue Fairy Book (1889),

(Find your copy at:  https://www.gutenberg.org/files/503/503-h/503-h.htm#link2H_4_0017 )

citing, for example, the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (called only “The Forty Thieves” here) and the fact that it requires a worded command to open a thieves’ cave, just as it requires the word “Mellon”, “Friend”, to enter the west gate to the Mines of Moria.

(a lovely Ted Nasmith)

On the subject of bird speech, as well, there are two main examples.  In both cases, as with many of the birds in The Hobbit, the birds in these two stories can be understood and prove helpful to a major character.

In “Trusty John”, the John of the title saves the king and his queen three times, after he overhears three passing ravens discussing magic snares laid for them.  In a second story, “The Water Lily” (also called “The Gold-Spinners”) the heroine, the third of three enchanted princesses,  is able to employ a raven to help her to escape because “as a child she had learned to understand the speech of birds”.  The raven, in turn, flies to a palace where the prince, her would-be rescuer, lives, and there finds “a wind wizard’s son in the palace garden, who understood the speech of birds”.  Later in the story, it seems that, either some birds have acquired human speech, or the prince has somehow gained knowledge of theirs as he now understands and converses with a thrush, a magpie, a swallow, an eagle, and a crow, the latter reminding the prince that, having rescued the third princess, he must also rescue the other two princesses, whom he appears to have forgotten.

One hopes from this that at least one fairy tale figure admires crows as much as I do and does not regard them as Balin does, as “nasty, suspicious-looking creatures”.

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

Stay well,

Think about holding a conversation with that interesting bird outside your window,

And remember that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

 ps

In case you’re still confused between crows and ravens, have a look at this:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9-wTnqIidY

pps

“Trusty John” comes to Lang from the Grimms, but “The Water Lily” is derived from a somewhat obscure source, an Estonian story, which you can read in English here:  https://www.gutenberg.org/files/503/503-h/503-h.htm#link2H_4_0017  It’s in a two-volume collection called The Hero of Esthonia, published by W.F. Kirby in 1895, where it appears in Vol. 1, pages 208-236, under its alternate title, “The Gold-Spinners”.  My reference for this comes from a very helpful site on the Lang fairy books:  https://langsfairyblog.wordpress.com/  which annotates many of the stories from the various volumes.

ppps

That last bird image is from Ukiyo-e, the world of Japanese block prints.   If you love them as much as I do, and you don’t know this site, I recommend:  https://ukiyo-e.org/

Welcome, as ever, dear readers.

I might blame this posting on Madame D’Aulnoy (1650-1705).

After all, she wrote “Le Nain Jaune” (“The Yellow Dwarf”) and included it in her 1697/8 collection, Les Contes des Fees, (Stories of the Fairies—from which our expression “fairy tales” appears to come—oh, and Fees, although it looks like English“fees”, is actually French “FAY”).

Of course, I’m to blame, too, as I’ve launched into this long-term project of reading all twelve of Andrew Lang’s fairy books in more-or-less chronological order.

(I say more or less because I had already read the Red Fairy Book for an earlier posting—and I’ll be writing about it again soon.)

Madame D’Aulnoy appeared through the translation of the aforementioned “The Yellow Dwarf” in Lang’s first volume, The Blue Fairy Book (1889).

(Here’s a copy for you:  https://archive.org/details/bluefairybook00langiala )

This was a fairy tale I wasn’t familiar with, but seemed at first like something which I’d read before:  princess raised to be spoiled by over-doting mother rejects all suitors.   Then, however, it involved an unusual turn.  That mother, attempting to consult a fairy in an effort to un-spoil the princess, falls into the hands of a loathsome dwarf,

and, in turn, so does her daughter, the mother, to save her own life, promising her daughter to the dwarf, and the daughter, in turn, swearing that she’ll marry the dwarf.  In the midst of all of this is the dwarf’s powerful friend, the Fairy of the Desert.

(These two illustrations are from Walter Crane’s  (1845-1915) The Yellow Dwarf , 1875, which you can have your own copy of here:  https://ia801205.us.archive.org/5/items/yellowdwarf00Cran/yellowdwarf00Cran.pdf )

A king (the King of the Gold Mines) is involved, who attempts to rescue the princess, and here there is an even darker turn:  he doesn’t.  Instead, there’s this:

“ ‘ Now,’ said the Dwarf, ‘ I am master of my rival’s fate, but I

will give him his life and permission to depart unharmed if you,

Princess, will consent to marry me.’

‘ Let me die a thousand times rather,’ cried the unhappy

King.

‘ Alas !

‘ cried the Princess, ‘ must you die ? Could anything be

more terrible ‘?

‘ That you should marry that little wretch would be far more

terrible,’ answered the King.

‘ At least,’ continued she, ‘ let us die together.’

‘ Let rne have the satisfaction of dying for you, my Princess,’

said he.

‘ Oh, no, no!’ she cried, turning to the Dwarf; ‘rather than

that I will do as you wish.’

‘ Cruel Princess !

‘ said the King, ‘ would you make my life

horrible to me by marrying another before my eyes ? ‘

‘ Not so,’ replied the Yellow Dwarf; ‘ you are a rival of whom I

am too much afraid : you shall not see our marriage.’ So saying,

in spite of Bellissima’s tears and cries, he stabbed the King to the

heart with the diamond sword.

The poor Princess, seeing her lover lying dead at her feet, could

no longer live without him ; she sank down by him and died of a

broken heart.”  (“The Yellow Dwarf” from The Blue Fairy Book, 49)

In Crane’s version, this has been changed to a happy ending (although the princess has her original D’Aulnoy name, “Toute-Belle”, literally “Completely Beautiful”, returned to her):

“The Princess uttered a loud shriek, which luckily caused

the King to turn suddenly round, just in time to snatch up the sword.

With one blow he slew the wicked Dwarf, and then conducted the

Princess to the sea-shore, where the friendly Syren was waiting to convey them to the Queen. On their arrival at the palace, the wedding took place, and Toutebelle, cured of her vanity, lived happily

with the King of the Gold Mines.”  (Crane, The Yellow Dwarf, 6)

(If you’d like to see the original French—although in an edition from 1878, which also includes the stories of Perrault and others—see https://ia600901.us.archive.org/32/items/bnf-bpt6k65671811/bnf-bpt6k65671811.pdf  pages 277-296 )

I can see why Crane changed the story—the evil Dwarf won?  Even though I’ve long been aware of the darkness possible in older collections like the original Kinder- und Haus-Maerchen (“Children’s and Domestic Wonder Tales”) of the Grimm brothers  (Jacob 1785-1863, Wilhelm 1786-1859),

(first edition, 1812, but ballooning in size in subsequent editions)

it was still disturbing.  

From childhood, I had lived with all of those Disney versions, after all, where wicked witches and their ilk were suitably punished

and heroine and prince rode happily off.

This ideal was crystallized for me in a lament from one of my favorite musicals, Once Upon a Mattress (1959).

This is based (somewhat loosely) upon Hans Christian Andersen’s (1805-1875)

“Prinsessen paa Aerten” (“The Princess Upon the Pea”) from his 1835 collection Eventyr, fortalte for Born (“Fairy Tales Told for Children”).

(a slightly later printing)

In this retelling, Princess Winnifred the Woebegone

 has come to the castle of King Sextimus and Queen Aggravain in search of a prince, but, worried that things don’t seem to be going as she hoped, she sings this (after finishing reading aloud a fairy tale in which the usual happens):

“They all live happily, happily, happily ever after.
The couple is happily leaving the chapel eternally tied.
As the curtain descends, there is nothing but loving and laughter.
When the fairy tale ends the heroine’s always a bride.
Ella, the girl of the cinders did the wash and the walls and the winders.
But she landed a prince who was brawny and blue-eyed and blond.
Still, I honestly doubt that she could ever have done it
without that crazy lady with the wand.
Cinderella had outside help!
I have no one but me? Fairy godmother, godmother, godmother!
Where can you be? I haven’t got a fairy godmother.
I haven’t got a godmother. I have a mother?
a plain, ordinary woman!
Snow white was so pretty they tell us
that the queen was insulted and jealous
when the mirror declared that snow white was the fairest of all.
She was dumped on the border but was saved by some men who adored ‘er;
Oh, I grant you, they were small.
But there were seven of them!
Practically a regiment!
I’m alone in the night.
By myself, not a dwarf, not an elf, not a goblin in sight!
That girl had seven determined little men working day and night just for her!
Oh sure! The queen gave her a poisoned apple.
Even so she lived happily, happily, happily every after!
A magical kiss counteracted the apple eventually?
Though I know I’m not clever I’ll do what they tell me I hafta!
I want some happily ever after to happen to me!
Winnifred maid of the mire, has one simple human desire
Oh, I ask for no more than two shoes on the floor next to mine.
Oh? Someone to fly and to float with
to swim in the marsh and the moat with as for this one?
Well, he’d be fine.
But now it’s all up to me?
And I’m burning to bring it about.
If I don’t I’ll be stuck with goodbye and good luck and get out!
But I don’t wanna get out! I wanna get in!
I want to get into some happily, happily ever after.
I want to walk happily out of the chapel eternally tied.
For I know that I’ll never live happily ever after ’til after I’m a bride!
And then I’ll be happily happy,
Yes, Happily happy!
And thoroughly satisfied!
Satisfied! Satisfied!
Oh Yeah!”

(Here’s the original Winnifred, Carol Burnett, singing a slightly different version:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7q_wgLa2AQ  

Trained by Disney, as well as by all of the Bowdlerized fairy tales read to me before I could read them for myself, could an ending like that  of  “The Yellow Dwarf”  ever be as satisfying for me as being married would be for Princess Winnifred?

This brings me back to remembering finishing The Lord of the Rings for the first time. 

If you’re a Tolkien reader—and I imagine that most, if not all of those who regularly visit this blog are—perhaps this was your experience, as well.  Bilbo, at the end of The Hobbit, is able to return home, continue to have adventures (stuff for fan fiction here), but to lead a comfortable domestic life for many years.

(an illustration by Alan Lee)

Frodo, however, comes home and never settles, is ill and haunted, and finally, joining elves and Gandalf to sail west from the Grey Havens,

says, in reply to Sam’s:

“ ‘I thought you were going to enjoy the Shire, too, for years and years, after all you have done.’

‘So I thought too, once.  But I have been too deeply hurt, Sam.  I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me.  It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger:  some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.’ “ (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 9, “The Grey Havens”)

And so I was as shocked as Sam.  As he says to Frodo, to leave so soon “after all you have done”, which includes everything from narrowly escaping a Nazgul in Book One to nearly being consumed by Mt Doom in Book Six, was, well, disturbing, like the death of the King of the Gold Mines at the hands of the Yellow Dwarf. 

I suppose that part of that disquiet comes from the fact that, at the conclusion of The Return of the King, there is no human—or dwarf—to remove Frodo with a stab as happened to the King of the Gold Mines.

He was once stabbed, by a Nazgul, on Weathertop, of course.

(An interesting image, suggesting not only hobbit versus human scale, but also perhaps the larger-than-life feel confronting such a figure must have had for Frodo.)

And this stabbing, although saved from its consequences by Elrond, does seem to have had some later effect upon Frodo:

“One evening Sam came into the study and found his master looking very strange.  He was very pale and his eyes seemed to see things far away.

‘What’s the matter, Mr. Frodo?’ said Sam.

‘I am wounded,’ he answered, ‘wounded; it will never really heal.’

But then he got up, and the turn seemed to pass, and he was quite himself the next day.  It was not until afterwards that Sam recalled that the date was October the sixth.  Two years before on that day it was dark in the dell under Weathertop.”

And yet Frodo did get up and was “quite himself the next day”.

Could it be that, in a sense, Frodo is the last victim of the Ring?  After all,

“On the thirteenth of that month [in 1420] Farmer Cotton found Frodo lying on his bed; he was clutching a white gem that hung on a chain about his neck and he seemed half in a dream.

‘It is gone for ever,’ he said, ‘and now all is dark and empty.’ “

When Frodo tries to explain to Sam about sacrifice for others, however, I just didn’t find that especially convincing.  Elrond had healed Frodo and the Ring was an ancient evil and its disposal was the salvation of all of Middle-earth from the potential tyranny of Sauron.  Frodo had certainly felt the terrible effect of it, to the point where he refused to destroy it, requiring the mad and vengeful Gollum to  bring about its end,

but he had survived, even if maimed in a echo of what Isildur had done to Sauron many centuries before.  And he had come home, just as Bilbo had, many years before, although to the mischievous destruction of the Shire brought about by Saruman,

which must have been even more traumatic than Bilbo finding himself declared legally dead and his house and possessions being auctioned off, but the Shire was being healed, much of it thanks to the work of Sam, much changed from the timid assistant gardener of only a year or two before.

My initial reaction to the conclusion of The Lord of the Rings, although revived for a recent moment by a sinister Yellow Dwarf, was some time ago:  just today I reread “The Grey Havens” once more:  am I still uneasy?

Since that first reading, much more information has come to us about the author, and here I’m thinking especially of John Garth’s Tolkien and the Great War.

After that war, the UK was seemingly filled with monuments commemorating the dead

and Tolkien

himself had lost two of his three dearest school friends,

 Gilson and Smith, in the fighting.  Gilson was killed on the first day of the vast and terrible Battle of the Somme, 1 July, 1916, a battle in which JRRT’s unit was also involved.  Smith died from a wound in early December, 1916, and, since my original reading of The Lord of the Rings, I’ve come to wonder whether, when Tolkien had Frodo say

“It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger:  some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.”

it was his way of trying to explain his own understanding of what had happened to those friends and maybe why.  “Survivor’s guilt” is a common term these days, and, though I’ve seen no evidence in what we have in the way of Tolkien autobiographical material so far, I also wonder whether he bore his own scars from the War and, although a devout Christian, part of him hoped, with the fatally-wounded Frodo, to experience

“…a sweet fragrance on the air and…the sound of singing that came over the water.  And then it seemed to him that…the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.”

If that were so, I could live with Frodo’s end, even if the Yellow Dwarf has still spoiled the ending for Toute-Belle and the King.

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

Stay well,

Be aware that all dwarves are not like Gimli,

And know that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

ps

Here’s a LINK to the second edition of J.R. Planche’s version of Mme D’Aulnoy’s fairy tales (1856):   https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Fairy_Tales_by_the_Countess_d%27Aulnoy   This includes not only those stories in Les Contes des Fees, but also those from her second collection, Contes Nouveaux ou Les Fees a la Mode (“New Fairy Tales or The Fairies in Fashion”) of 1698.  Planche himself is worth knowing more about.  To get a start, see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Planch%C3%A9

pps

If you’re not familiar with that adjective “Bowdlerized”, it refers to Dr Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825), who, with his sisters, produced in 1807 (with several subsequent editions) The Family Shakspeare [sic].

This removed or changed anything which they thought might offend female and child readers (basically, for them, both in the same category), so that the works might be read aloud at family gatherings.  From this initial work, the term came to mean any tampering with or censoring of a text. 

As ever, dear readers, welcome.

We all know just how perilous that Ring of Power is—

Gandalf

won’t take it:

“Do not tempt me!  For I do not wish to become like the Dark Lord himself…Do not tempt me!  I dare not take it, not even to keep it safe, unused.”  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 2, “The Shadow of the Past”)

Galadriel,

offered it, like Gandalf, is aware of its seductive strength, regretfully declines it–

“I pass the test…I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.”  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 7, “The Mirror of Galadriel”)

Faramir,

who only has a dim understanding of it, won’t touch it:

“Not if I found it on the highway would I take it I said.  Even if I were such a man as to desire this thing, and even though I knew not clearly what this thing was when I spoke, still I should take those words as a vow, and be held by them.”  (The Two Towers, Book Four, Chapter 5, “The Window on the West”)

There are others, however, with a different view—and it corrupts them:

“ ‘And why not, Gandalf?’ he whispered. ‘Why not?  The Ruling Ring?  If we could command that, then the Power would pass to us.”  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 2, “The Council of Elrond”)

And that power has its effect, as well, on the author himself.

I don’t mean, of course, that Tolkien turned into Saruman or even Gollum,

(by Alan Lee)

but the Ring had its influence over him, as I discovered when reading, for the first time, the 1937 Hobbit.

and, in particular, the original Chapter 5, “Riddles in the Dark”.  I had read the sections quoted in the margins of Douglas Anderson’s The Annotated Hobbit,

which I can’t recommend highly enough, if you’re interested in more than just Tolkien’s story, but it was only in reading the whole chapter in the reprinted facsimile edition that I was struck by what a different book, potentially, it was.

It’s not that the Ring is different—it’s still just the little circle of gold with the power to make one disappear which Bilbo picks up and puts into his pocket at the beginning of the chapter—it’s that Gollum is different. 

So much is just the same, riddles and all, but note the initial conditions of the contest:

“ ‘Does it guess easy?  It must have a competition with us, my preciouss!  If precious asks, and it doesn’t answer, we eats it, my preciousss.  If it asks us, and we doesn’t answer, we gives it a present, gollum!’ ”  (“Riddles in the Dark”, 1937, 85)

Then the contest proceeds, including “What have I got in my pocket?” and Gollum’s attempt to cheat with two guesses, but then things go in a completely different direction:

“ ‘Both wrong,’ cried Bilbo very much relieved; and he jumped at once to his feet, put his back to the nearest wall, and held out his little sword.  But funnily enough he need not have been alarmed.  For one thing Gollum had learned long long ago was never, never, to cheat at the riddle-game, which is a sacred one and of immense antiquity.  Also there was the sword.  He simply sat and whispered.” (91)

In the later, 1951, edition, the condition if Gollum lost was that he was then obliged to guide Bilbo out of the goblin tunnels and, while actually thinking to use the Ring to come back, avoid that sword, and kill and presumably then eat Bilbo, he says that he has to go to his island “…[to] go and get some things first, yes, things to help us.”

In 1937, Gollum has, surprisingly, a fragment of a conscience, saying to himself:

“ ‘Must we give it the thing, preciouss?  Yess, we must!  We must fetch it, preciouss, and give it the present we promised.’ ” (91)

He finds the Ring gone, of course, and he is upset, but it seems that his emotional disturbance is more about not being able to fulfill the conditions of the contest than the loss of the Ring itself:

“I don’t know how many times Gollum begged Bilbo’s pardon.  He kept on saying:  ‘We are ssorry; we didn’t mean to cheat, we meant to give it our only only present, if it won the competition.’  He even offered to catch Bilbo some nice juicy fish to eat as a consolation.” (92)

Bilbo declines the fish, and, instead, requests that Gollum guide him out of the tunnels—but that tone of abject apology now has an undertone which reminds us of the later Gollum:

“Now Gollum had to agree to this, if he was not to cheat.  He still very much wanted just to try what the stranger tasted like; but now he had to give up all idea of it.  Still there was that little sword; and the stranger was wide awake and on the look out, not unsuspecting as Gollum like to have the things which he attacked.  So perhaps it was best after all.” (93)

Gollum then leads him through a complex pattern of lefts and rights until:

“So Bilbo slipped under the arch, and said good-bye to the nasty miserable creature; and very glad he was.  He did not feel comfortable until he felt quite sure it was gone, and he kept his head out in the main tunnel listening until the flip-flap of Gollum going back to the boat died away in the darkness.” (94)

This is a far cry, of course, from that moment in the later version, when the frightened Bilbo, invisible and sword in hand, thinks:

“He must get away, out of this horrible darkness, while he had any strength left.  He must fight.  He must stab the foul thing, put its eyes out, kill it.” (1951)

We know that Tolkien rewrote whole sections of this chapter as early as 1944 and “sent [them] to Allen & Unwin in 1947 as a way to bring the earlier book into harmony with its sequel…” (Rateliff, The History of the Hobbit, “The 1947 Hobbit”, 731—this whole section of Rateliffe’s book, 731-762, is worth careful study to understand how, as he was deep in The Lord of the Rings, JRRT was thinking how to create a greater whole, using the earlier work.)  And, if you grew up reading the later version of the story (as well as Bilbo’s falsifications as noted in “The Shadow of the Past”), it’s a shock to see Tolkien’s original version, but it’s a good shock, as it shows so clearly not only the growth of the story, but JRRT’s growth as a writer, as well.  The Gollum of 1937 is small and spiteful and, for one chapter, dangerous, but, aside from providing the Ring which Bilbo uses again and again in his role as “burglar”, he is more the agent for providing that Ring than a major character.  In the revised version, perhaps his most important role is to provoke the inherent—and saving—humanity first of Bilbo and then, in turn, of Frodo.  When, wearing the Ring, Bilbo fleeing Gollum, has the opportunity to do away with his pursuer, this comes into Bilbo’s mind:

“No, not a fair fight.  He was invisible now.  Gollum had no sword.  Gollum had not actually threatened to kill him, or tried to yet.  And he was miserable, alone, lost.  A sudden understanding, a pity mixed with horror, welled up in Bilbo’s heart:  a glimpse of endless unmarked days without light or hope of betterment, hard stone, cold fish, sneaking and whispering.  All of these thoughts passed in a flash of a second.  He trembled.”  (1951)

And, instead, he leaps over Gollum’s head and is on his way to escape—perhaps in more ways than one.

 As Gandalf replies when Frodo says “…I do not feel any pity for Gollum” and that “He deserves death.”—

“ ‘Deserves it!  I daresay he does.  Many that live deserve death.  And some that die deserve life.  Can you give it to them?  Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.  For even the very wise cannot see all ends.   I have not much hope that Gollum can be cured before he dies, but there is a chance of it.  And he is bound up with the fate of the Ring.  My heart tells me that he has some part to play yet, for good or ill, before the end; and when that comes, the pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many—yours not least.”  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 2, “The Shadow of the Past”)

Besides that humanity, what would have happened if Gollum had remained that small agent when  Frodo, in the depths of Mount Doom, had been allowed to go through with his terrible statement:

“  I have come…But I do not choose now to do what I came to do.  I will not do this deed.  The Ring is mine!” ?  (The Return of the King, Book 6, Chapter 3, “Mount Doom”)

Thanks, as always, for reading,

Stay well,

Look –and think—before you leap,

And know that there’s always

MTCIDC

O

ps

For a very useful side-by-side comparison of 1937 and 1951 , see:  https://www.ringgame.net/riddles.html

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

In my last, I had noticed that Bram Stoker (1847-1912)

appeared to have been influenced by the fairy tale of Blue Beard in certain details of his novel, Dracula (1897).

In that fairy tale, a young woman, newly married to a very odd man, is given a key she’s not supposed to use for a room she’s not supposed to enter. 

She does use it and almost loses her life because of it.

In Stoker’s novel, a young man, staying as a guest in a ruined castle is cautioned about doors and even more about sleeping in strange rooms:

“ ‘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.” (Dracula, Chapter III)

Like the young woman, the young man disobeys, falls asleep in a room he should never have entered, and is nearly attacked by three voluptuous female vampires.

From these details, I would suggest that Stoker knew the story, but, remembering Stoker’s background, it may not have been that he had read either the original source—Charles Perrault’s  (1628-1703)

Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passe avec des Moralites (“Stories or Fairy Tales of Time Past with Some Moral Lessons”) of 1697,

or its first appearance in English, in 1719,

or its many later publications or republications, including one Tolkien might have read, in Andrew Lang’s The Blue Fairy Book (1889).

(It’s clear, from certain references, that, as a boy, JRRT had read, or had  had read to him, The Red Fairy Book, its sequel,

and, in a previous posting—“Roll Out the Barrel”, Wednesday, 13 April, 2022—I suggested a possible link between his work and the earlier Lang volume.)

Stoker had been interested in the theatre from his student days in Dublin and later became  the business manager of Sir Henry Irving, one of the most distinguished English actors,

at his theatre, the Lyceum.

There had been theatrical productions of the Blue Beard story from at least 1789, when Andre Gretry (1741-1813)

presented his opera, Raoul Barbe Bleue in Paris, just on the eve of the Revolution.  Gretry billed it as a comedy, and, though later successful, initially it appears that critics had had a very mixed view, at least one suggesting that such a story was hardly a subject for joking.  (For an interesting, but not always quite accurate, essay on the subject, see:  https://repertoire-explorer.musikmph.de/prefaces/2116.html  And you can hear the overture with its what I think rather creepy opening, here:  https://repertoire-explorer.musikmph.de/prefaces/2116.html  

In England, it was a subject for joking, in the form of pantomime, a traditional entertainment often based upon popular fairy tales.  As early as 1791—just 2 years after Gretry’s comedy—Karl Friedrich Baumgarten  (c.1740-1824) premiered Bluebeard, or The Flight of Harlequin at Covent Garden.

(For more on pantomime, see:   https://sites.google.com/site/ibworldtheatreresearch/english-pantomime )

And, throughout the 19^th century, Bluebeard became a common subject for such entertainment.

The French, in the form of Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880),

even returned to the comic side of Bluebeard with Barbe-bleue in 1866. 

This is my favorite of the various treatments, in part because Bluebeard is, for all that he’s a bloodthirsty serial killer (or so he thinks), such a cheerful fellow, as one can see in the first verse of his introductory song.  Here’s that verse in French and then my prose translation, which gives no sense of the merriment in the song, although  Bluebeard’s carefree attitude about the disappearance of those to whom he was presumably attached comes through—I hope!

Bluebeard enters with some of his troops and addresses them in a kind of lament–

Encore une, soldats, belle parmi les belles !
Pourquoi donc le destin les mets-il sur mes
pas,
Ces femmes qu’aussitôt des morts accidentel-

les
Arrachent de mes bras !

but then breaks into a very cheerful tune.

              Ma première femme est morte,

Et que le diable m’emporte,

Si j’ai jamais su comment !

La deuxième et la troisième,

Ainsi que la quatrième,

Je les pleure également.

La cinquième m’était chère,

Mais, la semaine dernière,

À mon grand étonnement,

Sans aucun motif plausible,

Les trois Parques, c’est horrible !

L’ont cueillie en un moment…

Je suis Barbe-Bleue, ô gué !

Jamais veuf ne fut plus gai !

Once again, soldiers, a beauty among the beauties!

Why then does Destiny put them in my way,

These women whom soon some accidental deaths

Tear from my arms!

My first wife is dead

And devil take me

If  I’ve ever known how!

The second and the third

As well as the fourth

I wept for equally.

The fifth was dear to me

But, last week,

To my great astonishment,

Without any plausible cause,

The three Fates—it’s horrible!—

Have plucked her in a moment…

I’m Blue Beard, hooray!

Never was a widower more merry!

Here’s my second translation which tries to stick to the French rhythm, if not to every French word:

My first wife was quickly hist’ry,

But how she died’s a myst’ry—

Devil take me if I see!

Then the second and the third one

And  then the fourth was soon done–

I mourned them equally!

The fifth to me was just as charming,

But, just last week there came alarming

News—no cause at all to see–

That the Fates—it’s horrifying—

In a moment she was dying—

Had plucked that wife from me!

I am that Blue Beard—hooray!

No widower more merry today!

And here’s a performance, so that you can hear both the French and the jolly tune to which it’s set.

Offenbach’s operetta was first performed in England within the same year as its premiere in Paris, and, as pantomimes and that 19^th-century English dramatic art form called the “burlesque”—here’s F.C. Burnand’s 1883 “Blue Beard or the Hazard of the Dye”—

continued to employ the Blue Beard plot throughout the later 19^th century,  I think that it can be easily seen that, surrounded as he was by so many theatrical treatments, even if he had never read a page of the French or an English translation, the story, in some form, must have been readily available to Stoker. 

(For more on 19^th-century English burlesque, see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_burlesque    W.S. Gilbert got his start writing such things, the first being Dulcamara, or the Little Duck and the Great Quack, 1866.  In one of those odd coincidences which sometimes turn up in these postings, Henry Irving, Bram Stoker’s boss at the Lyceum, was the stage director for this early Gilbert effort.)

Blue Beard as a subject lived beyond its possible influence upon Stoker’s novel and even beyond pantomime and burlesque, moving into the 20^th century and film, his first appearance  being in a short film by the Lumiere Brothers in 1897-8.

I can’t give you a link to that, but here’s Georges Melies’ (1861-1938)

nearly 11-minute-long version from 1901: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uMctQFV3JI ,t

just over 20 years before the first Dracula film, F.W. Murnau’s (1888-1931)

wonderfully creepy Nosferatu of 1922.

(And here’s a LINK to it:  https://archive.org/details/Nosferatu1922 )

And there are more films, including Charlie Chaplin’s 1947 Monsieur Verdoux,

as well as more operas beyond Gretry’s—Paul Dukas’ Ariane et Barbe-bleue (1907)

and Bela Bartok’s Blue Beard’s Castle (1918),

but, it appears that I could talk till I’m blue in the face on the subject, doesn’t it?

(This is from Gustave Dore’s 1862 illustrated edition of Perrault.  So far, I’ve only been able to locate a 1921 German translation with Dore’s pictures, but, even if you can’t read German, the stories are so familiar that you can simply follow the illustrations:  https://www.gutenberg.org/files/42900/42900-h/42900-h.htm )

Stay well,

Avoid locked room mysteries,

And know that, as ever, there’s

MTCIDC

O