As ever, dear readers, welcome.

Although Tolkien enjoyed a fast-paced production of Hamlet in July, 1944, (letter to Christopher, 28 July, 1944, Letters, 88), one gets the general impression that he was not a big fan of W. Shakespeare.  Certainly his school-days experience had not been a happy one, (letter to W.H. Auden, 7 June, 1955, Letters, 213), but his frustration with the Bard (an archaic Celtic term perhaps first used of Shakespeare in  David Garrick’s “The Ode, Dedicating the Town Hall, and Erecting a Statue to Shakespeare”, of 1769, in which Garrick calls him “Sweetest bard that ever sung”—if you’d like to read more, follow this LINK:  https://ia800207.us.archive.org/4/items/historyantiquiti00whel/historyantiquiti00whel.pdf to Robert Bell Wheler’s History and Antiquities of Stratford-upon-Avon, 1806, and see pages 175-185) did produce two positive results:

1. his annoyance at Shakespeare’s treatment of Birnam Wood spurred him (eventually)  to create the march of the Ents upon Isengard (see JRRT’s footnote to his letter to W.H. Auden, 7 June, 1955, Letters, 212)

(a favorite Ted Nasmith)

2. his equal annoyance over Shakespeare’s treatment of elves

(a Victorian illustration by Richard Doyle, 1824-1883, depicting the stormy meeting of Oberon and Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 2, Scene 1—you can read the first printing from the First Quarto, 1600, here:  https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/MND_Q1/scene/2.1/index.html  )

brought him to the borders of Faerie, which he understood to be a very different place from that miniaturized world imagined by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. 

In his writings, Tolkien sees fairies and elves as basically the same (“Fairy, as a noun more or less equivalent to elf”, “On Fairy-Stories”):   beings of a different order from humans, but not supernatural ones.  As he writes:

“Supernatural  is a dangerous and difficult word in any of its senses, looser or stricter.  But to fairies it can hardly be applied…For it is man who is, in contrast to fairies, supernatural (and often of diminutive stature);  whereas they are natural, far more natural than he.  Such is their doom.” (“On Fairy-Stories”, 110 in The Monsters and the Critics)

Tolkien’s elves, as we see them particularly in The Lord of the Rings, are far from small and not at all magical as in Shakespeare, but they do seem doomed.  Even in the Prologue, they are depicted as already something about to pass from the scene of the story–“For the Elves of the High Kindred had not yet forsaken Middle-earth” –and this melancholy tone persists throughout the text, not only to be found in groups of elves moving westwards to the Grey Havens, like that which Frodo and his companions meet in their journey eastwards towards Crickhollow (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 3, “Three is Company”), but also in statements like Galadriel’s, when she has refused the Ring:

“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”)

to the affecting scene in the last chapter of all, when Galadriel and Elrond, along with Frodo and Gandalf, take ship for the West. (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 9, “The Grey Havens”)

(another beautiful Ted Nasmith)

But why do the elves want to—or have to–leave Middle-earth?

There are various explanations, with citations to The Silmarillion and to passages in the volume of JRRT’s manuscripts called Morgoth’s Ring, but I would suggest another influence, which actually takes us back to that time which Tolkien blames for the other diminishment of the elves:

“Yet I suspect that this flower-and-butterfly minuteness was also a product of ‘rationalisation’, which transformed the glamour of Elf-land into mere finesse, and invisibility into a fragility that could hide in a cowslip or shrink behind a blade of grass…it was largely a literary business in which William Shakespeare and Michael Drayton played a part.”  (“On Fairy-Stories”, 111)

The title of this posting comes (in its unedited form) from a short story collection by Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936).

Published in 1910, Rewards and Fairies

(You can have a copy here:  https://archive.org/details/rewardsfairie00kipl/page/n5/mode/2up )

was a sequel to Kipling’s previous collection (1906), Puck of Pook’s Hill.

(Here are two copies for you with very different illustrations:  the first American edition of 1906, with illustrations by Arthur Rackham:  https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26027/26027-h/26027-h.html   ; or a British reprint of 1911 of the original 1906 British edition, illustrated by H.R. Millar:  https://www.gutenberg.org/files/15976/15976-h/15976-h.htm )

The title of this book is derived from the first line of a poem, “The Fairies’ Farewell” by Richard Corbet,  (1582-1635)—

Or, as it is actually entitled:  “A proper new Ballad entitled The Faereys Farewell”.  Here’s the first stanza:

“FAREWELL, rewards and fairies,
Good housewives now may say,
For now foul sluts in dairies
Do fare as well as they.
And though they sweep their hearths no less
Than maids were wont to do,
Yet who of late for cleanness
Finds sixpence in her shoe?”

You can see the whole poem in Octavius Gilchrist’s 4^th edition (1807) of the poems of Richard Corbet here on pages 213-217:  https://archive.org/details/poemsofrichardco00corbiala/page/n3/mode/2up  (This is based upon the original printings of 1647, 1648, and 1672—the last till Gilchrist.  Some modern editions have removed the final three stanzas.)

 Corbet wrote that this could be sung to “Meadow Brow” or to “Fortune My Foe”—here’s Ged Fox, who sings all of the verses in Gilchrist to “Meadow Brow”:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMj7O9LZpU8  If you’d like to hear “Fortune My Foe:  here’s version with the original lyric:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZkFUSUZH8Y 

It is, in fact, a lament, and the tunes to which it is to be sung very much underline that tone.   The point of the lament is explained by the Puck

of Kipling’s previous book:

“The People of the Hills have all left. I saw them come into Old England and I saw them go. Giants, trolls, kelpies, brownies, goblins, imps; wood, tree, mound, and water spirits; heath-people, hill-watchers, treasure-guards, good people, little people, pishogues, leprechauns, night-riders, pixies, nixies, gnomes, and the rest—gone, all gone! I came into England with Oak, Ash and Thorn, and when Oak, Ash and Thorn are gone I shall go too.”  (“Weland’s Hill”, the first part of Puck of Pook’s Hill)

Corbet, in his poem, offers an explanation why:

“Witness those rings and roundelays

of theirs, which yet remain,

Were footed in Queen Mary’s days

On many a grassy plain;

But since of late, Elizabeth,

And later, James came in,

They never danced on any heath

As when the time hath been.

By which we note the Fairies

were of the old Profession.

Their songs were ‘Ave Mary’s’,

Their dances were Procession.

But now, alas, they all are dead;

Or gone beyond the seas;

Or farther for Religion fled;

Or else they take their ease.”

In 1534, Henry VIII  (1491-1547)

had himself made head of the Church of England and created a new Protestant domination, the Church of England, which was perpetuated by his son, Edward VI (1537-1553),

but which Henry’s elder daughter, Mary (1516-1558),

tried to restore to its previous, pre-Henry form.  It was only after her death, in 1558, when Henry’s younger daughter, Elizabeth (1533-1603),

took the throne that Henry’s version of Protestantism became the state church once more and which continued under the reign of her successor, James I (1566-1625),

as mentioned in Corbet’s poem.  The fairies, then, in Corbet’s playful explanation, were followers of pre-Henrican English Catholicism, driven away in the change to the new Protestantism—and we know that it was meant to be playful, as the author, in his later years, was a senior clergyman of that Protestantism, being first Bishop of Oxford, then Bishop of Norwich.

 There is no mention of Corbet or his poem in Carpenter’s biography or Tolkien’s letters, nor any reference even to Kipling, but might I suggest that this explanation by a contemporary of Shakespeare the Shrinker as to why the band of what Puck calls “the People of the Hills” had departed  might have appealed to a someone who once wrote that The Lord of the Rings “is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision…” (letter to Robert Murray, SJ, 2 December, 1953, Letters, 172) and thus added to his own thinking about the Doom which he said belonged not only the fairies, but to his own later elves, as well?

Thanks, as ever, for reading,

Stay well,

Leave a bowl of milk out for the Good Folk,

And remember, as well, that there’s always

MTCIDC

O

PS

If you read those verses of the Corbet which have been deleted in some printings, the explanation for the reference to “William Chourne” may be found in “Letter Six” of Sir Walter Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft… (1830)  to be read at this LINK:  https://www.faculty.umb.edu/gary_zabel/Courses/Phil%20281b/Philosophy%20of%20Magic/Arcana/Witchcraft%20and%20Grimoires/scott/lodw06.htm

Welcome, dear readers, as ever.

In the previous posting, JRRT was quoted as saying of Tom Bombadil that he was:  “the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside”  (letter to Stanley Unwin, 16 December, 1937, Letters, 26)

In that last posting, I was employing that phrase with the emphasis upon “spirit”, attempting to show  how JRRT was using Tom in The Lord of the Rings to add greater depth to the story.  Within the narrative, we might be shown the ruins of ancient buildings, like Weathertop,

(Alan Lee)

built by Elendil after the founding of Arnor in SA 3320, but Bombadil

(the Hildebrandts)

was far older, saying to the hobbits that:

“Eldest, that’s what I am.  Mark my words, my friends:  Tom was here before the river and the trees; Tom remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn.  He made paths before the Big people, and saw the little People arriving.”  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 7, “In the House of Tom Bombadil”)

Ruins were mute testimony to Middle-earth’s ancient past.  Tom was the living witness to that past—almost the spirit of Middle-earth itself–and beyond it, practically to its creation.

In that posting, I suggested that there was a second living witness in the text and, in this posting, I want to think out loud about him—but let’s begin with the rest of that first phrase:  “the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside.”

In 1892, Tolkien was born into what we might think of as the second wave of the Industrial Revolution.  The first, the foundational wave, had begun in the 1760s, in northern England, where the pressure of the increased demand for British wool products had inspired men like James Hargreaves (1720-1778) and Richard Arkwright (1732-1792)

to invent new machinery to speed up production.  Water and then steam were applied to the increasingly sophisticated machinery and spinning and weaving factories began to spring up in various parts of England.

By the mid-Victorian period, a second wave was converting entire towns into factories,

and not just those which produced woolen or cotton materials—virtually anything could be made, in large quantities, in all kinds of factories.

Birmingham, when JRRT was a boy, was just such a place

and even the then-rural village, Sarehole, just south of Birmingham, where he spent part of that boyhood, had a mill with an auxiliary steam engine.

By the turn of the 19^th century, Britain was laced with railways—by 1914, there were 20,000 miles (32,000km) of track.

Trains, and their urban cousins, street cars and metros, spread people out beyond the old centers of towns, producing larger and larger urban/exurban areas.

After the Great War (1914-1918), automobiles began to appear in ever-greater numbers, adding to that spread, as well as crowding lanes made for carts and wagons.

For Tolkien, this was the end of “the quiet of the world, when there was less noise and more green…” (The Hobbit, Chapter One, “An Unexpected Party”)

when the world, in his mind, looked more like this.

But Britain had been moving towards less green for a very long time.

It had been Neolithic farmers, in fact,

perhaps about 1000BC,

who had begun the shift, cutting down large numbers of trees not only for building, but to clear acreage for their crops and pastureland for their animals.

This began the deforestation of Britain—and you can see it here as a general European trend.

(To watch someone very efficiently using a stone axe

to cut down a tree, see:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BN-34JfUrHY )

And we might see this deforestation mirrored in the behavior of the invading Numenoreans, suggesting that even Middle-earth had become less green than it had once been:

“The fellings had at first been along both banks of the Gwathlo…but now the Numenoreans drove great tracks and roads into the forests northwards and southwards from the Gwathlo…” (Unfinished Tales, “The History of Galadriel and Celeborn”, Appendix D, “The Port of Lond Daer”)

As someone with a strong attachment to trees,

JRRT could express his feelings quite passionately, as in this letter to The Daily Telegraph of 30 June, 1972:

“It would be unfair to compare the Forestry Commission with Sauron because as you observe it is capable of repentance; but nothing it has done that is stupid compares with the destruction, torture and murder of trees perpetuated by private individuals and minor official bodies.  The savage sound of the electric saw is never silent wherever trees are still found growing.”  (Letters, 420)

Those words, “destruction, torture and murder of trees”, can easily sound like an echo of this second living witness as he speaks about Saruman and his orcs:

“Curse him, root and branch!  Many of those trees were my friends, creatures I had known from nut and acorn; many had voices of their own that are lost for ever now.  And there are wastes of stump and bramble where once there were singing groves.  I have been idle.  I have let things slip.  It must stop!”  (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 4, “Treebeard”)

This is Treebeard, of course, even if it almost seems to echo the author and his letter to the editor.

(an Alan Lee)

And we might see a small puzzle here between what Tom Bombadil says of himself:

“Eldest, that’s what I am…Tom was here before the river and the trees; Tom remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn.”

and what Gandalf says of Treebeard:

“Treebeard is Fangorn, the guardian of the forest; he is the oldest of the Ents, the oldest living thing that still walks beneath the Sun upon this Middle-earth.” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 5, “The White Rider”)

Even if this suggests a small contradiction, reinforced when Celeborn, parting from Treebeard, calls him, “Eldest” ( The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 6, “Many Partings”), we might understand Tom and Treebeard, in fact, as a complementary pair:  Tom is the witness for humans over all the ages of Middle-earth, while Treebeard stands (and walks) as witness for the land itself.

It is, perhaps, a sad thought then that, with Sauron gone, there appears to be no threat to Bombadil, but, without the Entwives, there is only extinction ahead for Treebeard and his kind, when that land will lose its final witness and no one will remember the Willow-meads of Tasarinan.

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

Stay well,

Be thankful for trees,

And know that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

ps

You can listen to JRRT himself remembering those Willow-meads here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO7QRVqLv40

And you can hear Donald Swan’s well-known setting (sung by the appropriately-named William Elvin) here (at 28:25):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5cN7R2-wQI

Welcome as always, dear readers.

One of the reasons I’ve read and reread The Lord of the Rings has to do with its depth.  The story itself is set in a present time:  TA3018-19, but, of course just writing “TA” immediately places it in a greater context:  this is the Third Age of registered time and we’re now in the 31^st century of it.  That’s 3,000 years of history right there and back 3000 years of history in our Middle Earth would put us, for example, in the Egyptian 21^st Dynasty, when artisans could still create this

 or during the so-called Greek “Dark Ages”, when Mycenaean civilization had mysteriously collapsed after creating things as beautiful and sophisticated as this–

If we walked the landscape of Middle-earth with the hobbits, however, as described in The Lord of the Rings, we could be struck again and again by the monuments of its past.  Weathertop dates to the time of Elendil, in the Second Age, who, himself, was born in SA3119.

(Alan Lee)

When the hobbits reach Rivendell, they enter a place which had been founded even earlier, in SA1697,

(JRRT)

and, coming to the west gate of Moria,

(Alan Lee)

they approach a structure which dated somewhere post SA750, which led them into mines in which the dwarves had been laboring since before the First Age.

(Alan Lee)

Further on their travels, they encounter Amon Hen, built perhaps in the 14^th century of the Third Age,

(by Scott Perry)

as was the Argonath.

(the Hildebrandts)

And yet JRRT has created something even older, providing us not just with physical monuments, but with two actual survivors.

Recently, I’ve been enjoying a re-listening to the 1981 BBC radio series of The Lord of the Rings.

It’s compact, of course—certain moments disappear, usually minor details, but there is one major one casualty:  no Tom Bombadil.

He’s an odd character, certainly.  According to Humphrey Carpenter, he was originally inspired by “a Dutch doll that belonged to Michael”.  That inspiration almost vanished from history when John, who didn’t like it, “one day stuffed it down the lavatory.”  (Biography, 181—in case you’re worried, the doll was rescued in time).  The inspiration for his name is also a mystery, various suggestions include

1. Captain Bobadilla, a braggart soldier, in Ben Jonson’s (1572-1637) 1598 play, Every Man in His Humour

(This is from the 1616 Workes, published by Jonson himself, which, as you can imagine with such a title, got him mocked at the time.  Here’s the play:  https://archive.org/details/everymaninhishum030338mbp/page/n5/mode/2up )

2.  Boabdil, the last ruler of Moorish Granada—actually Abu ‘abd  Allah Muhammad XII (1460-1533)—that “Boabdil” is the Spanish corruption of his name—

(A grand Spanish historical painting by F.P. Ortiz, from 1882:  “The Surrender of Granada”—as there doesn’t appear to be an authenticated portrait of Abu ‘abd Allah Muhammad, this is an imaginary one.)

I understand that JRRT might have come across Bobadilla in his education, but Boabdil? 

In Anglo-American literature, he turns up in John Dryden’s (1631-1700) 1672 The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards,

where he is called “Mahomet Boabdelin”.   Here’s Volume IV of Sir Walter Scott’s edition from 1808 (the play being retitled “Almanzor and Almahide”—Almanzor is the play’s hero and Almahide the heroine):    https://archive.org/details/worksofjohndryde04dryduoft/page/n9/mode/2up    As there is caveat emptor!, “Let the buyer beware!”, I would add my own “caveat lector”, “Let the reader beware!”  The play is actually 2 plays, totaling over 200 pages and is in rhymed couplets in, as Victorians might say, a rather florid style.  Dryden was aware that this might be attacked (it was) and ended the play with an epilogue critical of the plays of Shakespeare and Jonson’s time, then followed that with a 17-page “Defence of the Epilogue”. 

In Washington Irving’s  (1783-1859) Tales of the Alhambra (1832), he is “Boabdil”, where he makes several appearances, including “Mementos of Boabdil”, which you can find in this 1910 reprint of the revised 1851 edition on page 124 here:  https://www.gutenberg.org/files/49947/49947-h/49947-h.htm   

As there is no trace of Dryden or Irving in Carpenter or in Letters, however, the origin of Tom’s last name will remain a mystery, pending further research.  (Hammond and Scull even suggest that “it may have been one of the Tolkien sons or daughter who chose its name rather than Tolkien himself…”  The Lord of the Rings:  A Reader’s Companion, 124)

Tolkien once described Tom as an “enigma” (Letters, 174) and as “the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside” (Letters, 26), and, in an earlier posting here, it was pointed out that, without him, there would be no Barrow-wight

(Ted Nasmith)

and so no ancient sword which had the power to pierce and begin the destruction of the chief of the Nazgul,

(Angus McBride)

a fact which has to be glossed over in any production which avoids him—in the Jackson film, he disappears entirely, taking the Barrow -wight with him, and Aragorn just hands around swords at Weathertop with no explanation of where they came from (The Fellowship of the Ring, Scene 19).  And, in the BBC 1981 radio version, the hobbits are in Frodo’s new home in Buckland at one moment, and in Bree, the next, and the swords don’t appear at all.

And yet, considering that the chief of the Nazgul still falls, both in the old BBC radio version and in the Jackson film, this is clearly not a major plot point and therefore no major justification for the keeping of Tom in a story which has been stripped to what the script writers believed to be the most dramatic elements.  (Jackson is quoted as saying almost exactly that.)

In the many pages of The Lord of the Rings, however, although Tom rescues the hobbits twice, I think that his real role is what I began with:  to provide depth—and not just the depth of monuments or Ages as they display Middle-earth’s history.  He, in a sense, is Middle-earth’s history, having been living witness from before its very beginnings.  As he tells the hobbits:

“Eldest, that’s what I am.  Mark my words, my friends:  Tom was here before the river and the trees; Tom remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn.  He made paths before the Big People, and saw the little People arriving.  He was here before the Kings and the graves and the Barrow-wights.  When the Elves passed westward, Tom was here already, before the seas were bent.  He knew the dark under the stars when it was fearless—before the Dark Lord came from Outside.”  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 7, “In the House of Tom Bombadil”)

As Goldberry says, “Tom Bombadil is the Master.”—of time and memory in Middle-earth.  But, as the ghostly voice of Obi-Wan says to Yoda, “There is another”—whom we’ll see in Part 2 of this posting.

Thanks for reading, as ever.

Stay well,

Think, if the past is another country, where can you find its maps?

And remember that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

Dear readers, welcome, as always.

There is an odd little anecdote in the essay  “On Science Fiction” in the posthumous collection of C.S. Lewis’ (1898-1963)

essays and short fiction, Of Other Worlds—

“A lady…had been talking about a dreariness which seemed to be creeping over her life, the drying up in her of the power to feel pleasure, the aridity of her mental landscape.  Drawing a bow at a venture, I asked, ‘Have you any taste for fantasies and fairy tales?’ I shall never forget how her muscles tightened, her hands clenched themselves, her eyes started as with horror, and her voice changed, as she hissed out, ‘I loathe them.’ “

Lewis then goes on to suggest that “we here have to do not with a critical opinion but with something like a phobia” and such a violent reaction certainly suggests to me that there is something in the woman’s reaction which goes beyond a simple polite reply, like “They’ve never interested me.”

Lewis himself had a very different reaction to fairy tales, as expressed in “On Three Ways of Writing for Children” in the same volume and his view is involved with what I feel is a wonderful way to think about growing up :

“When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so.  Now that I am fifty I read them openly.  When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

The modern view seems to me to involve a false conception of growth.  They accuse us of arrested development because we have not lost a taste we had in childhood.  But surely arrested development consists not in refusing to lose old things but in failing to add new things?  I now like hock, [an old term for German white wine] which I am sure I should not have liked as a child.  But I still like lemon-squash. [a kind of lemonade-ish thing—here’s a recipe:  https://pennysrecipes.com/3528/fresh-lemon-squash ]  I call this growth or development because I have been enriched:  where I formerly had only one pleasure, I now have two.  But if I had to lose the taste for lemon-squash before I acquired the taste for hock, that would not be growth but simple change.  I now enjoy Tolstoy and Jane Austen and Trollope as well as fairy tales and I call that growth:  if I had had to lose the fairy tales in order to acquire the novelists, I would not say that I had grown but only that I had changed.  A tree grows because it adds rings:  a train doesn’t grow by leaving one station behind and puffing on to the next.  In reality, the case is stronger and more complicated than this.  I think my growth is just as apparent when I now read the fairy tales as when I read the novelists , for I now enjoy the fairy tales better than I did in childhood:  being now able to put more in, of course I get more out.”  (This is a very rich essay and, if you’d like to read it in full, see:  https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=9117 )

For the very beginning of this blog, back in 2014, a goal for it was always that it would not be like so much of the material to be found on the internet:  harsh, even negative to the point of gushing hatred.  And we all see the effects of that sort of material all too often.  Over almost eight years, the blog has offered positive views and praise and, on only a handful of occasions, has it taken a negative turn, in part, I would say, because it has always tried to be based upon something which Lewis said in another essay, “On Science Fiction”, discussing negative reviews of early 20^th-century science fiction:

“…many were by people who clearly hated the kind they wrote about.  It is very dangerous to write about a kind you hate.  Hatred obscures all distinctions.  I don’t like detective stories and therefore all detective stories look much alike to me:  if I wrote about them I should therefore infallibly write drivel.”

I enjoy detective stories myself, having grown up on Sherlock Holmes, but Lewis’ point has been a guide:  don’t write about things you don’t enjoy.

Fairy tales, whether of the Western or Eastern varieties (and they often blend) were some of the very first stories which caught my attention as a child, really memorable ones being those from “The Arabian Nights” of Aladdin and Ali Baba, as well as those familiar from the Grimms, Perrault, Mesdames D’Aulnoy and Leprince de Beaumont, and Andersen.  In my current project of reading all twelve of Andrew Lang’s fairy books,

I have rediscovered many old friends and some new ones, but then there was “The Master-Maid” in The Blue Fairy Book (1889)

and, in this story, I found something which, for me, could explain that seemingly-disturbed woman’s reaction to such tales—and here bear with me while I make a brief descent into the negative.

The story originally comes from a collection entitled, Norske folkeeventyr (“Norwegian Folktales”), first published in 1841, with subsequent editions through 1852,

(a much later edition—1914—but, at the moment, I’m having trouble finding a first edition)

by Asbjornsen and Moe (Peter Christen Asbjornsen, 1812-1885; Jorgen Engebretsen Moe, 1813-1882), two folktale collectors who became the Grimm brothers of Norway.

But if I’ve loved fairy tales since childhood, what is there about this one which—momentarily, I hasten to add—alienated my affection?

In the words of a modern fairy tale character, however, I would have to say:

The story begins with the youngest son of a king, who sets off to make his fortune in the world.  He gains employment with a giant:

1. who sets him tasks, but tells him not to look into any rooms except the one in which he slept

2. of course, he looks into 3 rooms, each with a boiling cauldron, the contents of which cover anything dipped into them with copper, silver, or gold, in succession (never mentioned again)

3. in room number 4 is a beautiful young woman (the title’s “Master-Maid”) with a never-explained knowledge of how to fulfill all of the giant’s obviously impossible tasks:

  a. a stable which can’t be cleaned unless you use the other end of the dung fork

  b. a fire-breathing horse, who can only be tamed with a certain bridle

  c. some sort of troll who has to pay the giant’s tax (the prince needs a special club to knock on the troll’s cave door)

4. the giant then decides to kill the prince and orders the young woman to make him into soup

5. Instead:

   a. the young woman takes all sorts of household waste and plops that into the pot

   b. she draws three drops of the prince’s blood to fall upon a stool

  c. then she gathers up:

   1. a chest of gold dust

   2. a lump of salt

   3. a water flask

   4. a golden apple

   5. two golden chickens

 d. and escapes with the prince

6. they somehow obtain a ship—and even the story says, “but where they got the ship

from I have never been able to learn” and sail off, the giant soon in hot pursuit (he’s been delayed because, having napped while the prince soup was cooking, he would wake briefly to ask if it were ready, only to be told–by talking blood drops–that it was still in the process—and when he finally fully awakes, he quickly discovers that the soup was definitely not worth waiting for)

7.  arriving at the sea, the giant produces

   a.  a “river-sucker” to lower the sea so that he can spot the escaping couple, but he is foiled when the young woman uses the lump of salt to swell up to such size that “river-sucker” can’t lower the sea any further and the giant can no longer spot them or approach them—the text is a little foggy here

   b. a “hill-borer” to put a hole in the salt barrier so that the “river-sucker” can go back to work, but the young woman then tips out a couple of drops from the water flask (remember that?) and suddenly the sea is so full that the “river-sucker” doesn’t have another chance to slurp before the couple has finally reached dry land

And that’s only the first half of the story.  To sum up even farther, the prince abandons the young woman at the seashore, promising to return, but is tricked into forgetting her (a magic apple—one bite and…), she then lives briefly with a crone/troll, escapes three suitors, sees elements in the crone’s hut employed to repair the coach in which the forgetful prince is traveling to his wedding, finally gets to the palace, and uses that golden apple and the gilded chickens (you’d almost forgotten those in all the excitement, hadn’t you?)  to bring back the prince’s memory and they live happily ever after (although the person who supplied that apple of memory lapse is torn apart by horses, so probably doesn’t enjoy the ending as much as the others).

C.S. Lewis is once quoted as saying, “You can’t get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”  (from a transcript of a lecture given by Lewis’ sometime editor and biographer, Walter Hooper—here’s the whole piece:  https://www.historyspage.com/post/cs-lewis-inklings-memories-walter-hooper )

That this seems rather a long story for a fairy tale—pages 120-135 in The Blue Fairy Book—is hardly a drawback.  “The Yellow Dwarf”, of which I’ve written in an earlier posting, and which is in the same volume, is even longer (30-51), and I’ve certainly read things infinitely longer and more than once—

And it’s not that some things, like the young woman’s knowledge of the solutions to the giant’s tests, are unexplained—part, I would say, of what makes a fairy tale a fairy tale is that some things will simply be…inexplicable.

Rather, I think it’s that, as with Inigo Montoya’s attempt to explain past events to Westley, there is simply too much:  too many boiling cauldrons, too many ready solutions to tricky problems, too many magic objects, too many suitors, all in one story.  It’s as if the teller were trying to cram 20 stories into one, which, for me, perhaps paradoxically thins the telling and I find myself wearily trudging from one incident to the next, which is, I think, hardly what Lewis would have wanted his enormous cup of tea for,

and makes me wonder just what books of fairy tales that angry woman had read?

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

Stay well,

Consider the dangers of an overflowing cup,

And remember that there’s always

MTCIDC

O

ps

The translator of “Master-Maid” was said by Andrew Lang to be “Mrs Alfred Hunt”, a very interesting woman in her own right.  The author of “Lang’s Fairy Blog”, who seems to have done a good deal of research on the series, suggests that, although she was proficient in German (consult this page to see why he/she says so:  https://langsfairyblog.wordpress.com/2017/12/26/mrs-alfred-hunt/ ), she probably translated it from a German source.  If you’d like to have a look at the German text she may have used, see:  http://www.zeno.org/M%C3%A4rchen/M/Norwegen/P.+%5BC.%5D+Asbj%C3%B8rnsen+und+J%C3%B6rgen+Moe%3A+Norwegische+Volksm%C3%A4rchen/Die+Meisterjungfer  –this is from volume 2 of Friedrich Bresemann’s Norwegische Volksmaerchen, 1847.  The first English translation of Asbjornsen and Moe’s collection was by Sir George Dasent, as Popular Tales from the Norse, in 1858.  Comparing the Hunt with Dasent and the German translation, it seems to me that Hunt may first have read the Dasent, but used the German as the basis of her version.  Here’s the Dasent, if you’d like to compare:  https://archive.org/details/populartalesfrom00daseuoft –this is a later edition, from 1904.  For a very early review of Dasent’s work, see this, from The Atlantic for September, 1859:  https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/archives/1859/09/4-23/131866450.pdf   (A brief comparison of the opening of the original Norwegian version of the story with Dasent’s translation, by the way, suggests that Dasent was rather a casual translator, aiming less for perfect accuracy than for the general feel of the story.)