As ever, dear readers, welcome.

Tolkien was never shy, in his correspondence, to state his position in relation to government.  As he says in the draft to an undated letter to Joanna de Bortadano:

“I am not a ‘democrat’ only because ‘humility’ and equality are spiritual principles corrupted by the attempt to mechanize and formalize them, with the result that we get not universal smallness and humility, but universal greatness and pride, till some Orc gets hold of a ring of power—and then we get and are getting slavery.  (Letters, 246, dated by Carpenter as “April 1956”)

If not democracy, then, what form of government would he have preferred?  In 1943, he wrote to his son, Christopher, then in training in Manchester for the RAF:

“Give me a king whose chief interest in life is stamps, railways, or race-horses; and has the power to sack his Vizier (or whatever you care to call him) if he does not like the cut of his trousers.”  (to Christopher Tolkien, 29 November, 1943, Letters, 62)

So JRRT was a monarchist?

At the beginning of the same letter, however, he had written:

“My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs)–

or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy.”

By this latter phrase, I’m presuming that he meant he would have preferred the absolutist government which Charles I represented,

whose rigid ideas of kingship had much to do with the coming of the English Civil War,

and Charles own eventual trial for treason and execution, in January, 1649.

His two sons, Charles and James,

in turn, when the monarchy returned in 1660, although they didn’t go quite so far as their father, were hardly liberal rulers, the second, James II, appearing so to hark back to his father’s ideas that he was literally chased from the country and replaced by his daughter, Mary, and her Dutch husband, William.

To become the rulers of England, however, William and Mary were required to agree to a list of Parliamentary conditions, the “Bill of Rights”, which limited their power as the first “Constitutional Monarchs”.  Parliament had clearly learned its lesson from the behavior of a century of Stuarts and weren’t about to allow the government to fall back into the hands of absolutists. 

And yet—in that same letter, Tolkien adds:

“There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations;  I hope that, encouraged now as ‘patriotism’, may remain a habit!”

Tolkien means, of course, this being 1943, not the attacks of “whiskered men with bombs”, but the sabotage of Nazi industrialism—and yet, there is that final wish that such sabotage may continue, after the war!

If all of this might seem a little confused, there is a theme which runs through it:  even though JRRT lived in a world of increasing electric conveniences, employed a typewriter on a regular basis, used the railways and, for a few years, owned a motor car or two, the past—the pre-industrial past in particular—was to be preferred to the present.

And what would this look like and be like?  We can begin with those words from the first chapter of The Hobbit:  “…in the quiet of the world, when there was less noise and more green” (The Hobbit, Chapter 1, “An Unexpected Party”)

And we have Tolkien’s own image—

I’ve looked at this picture for a long time, admiring its neatness and detail, but working on this posting and on JRRT’s ideas about government, I found myself seeing something new in it—perhaps an unconscious model from Tolkien’s own medieval experience?

The Shire is Tolkien’s creation of what must have appeared to him to be a nearly-idyllic English countryside of an earlier time— but what time?  It’s clearly pre-industrial—when it is in the process of becoming industrial  in “The Scouring of the Shire”, industrialism is depicted as Saruman’s revenge upon the hobbits who had helped in his downfall:

“You made me laugh, you hobbit-lordlings, riding along with all those great people, so secure and so pleased with your little selves.  You thought you had done very well out of it all, and could now just amble back and have a nice quiet time in the country.  Saruman’s home could be all wrecked, and he could be turned out, but no one could touch yours…if they’re such fools, I will get ahead of them and teach them a lesson.  One ill turn deserves another.  It would have been a sharper lesson, if only you had given me a little more time and more Men.  Still I have already done much that you will find it hard to mend or undo in your lives.  And it will be pleasant to think of that and set it against my injuries.”  (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 8, “The Scouring of the Shire”)

(an Alan Lee)

Let’s look a little more deeply into the image of Hobbiton with which Tolkien presents us.

In the foreground is a mill, with its power source, a stream, rushing over a weir to the left and then down to power the wheel, which appears to be either of the breast shot or the undershot variety (the water strikes the middle of the wheel or passes  below the wheel to drive it).

Beyond the mill, we follow an unpaved road past a number of what appear to be farm houses, including, on the left, something which appears like the walled farms found along the Franco-Belgian border which Tolkien would have seen during his time in that area in 1916, the most famous being La Haye Sainte, a landmark (and Allied strongpoint) during the battle of Waterloo.

(a modern diorama of one of the French assaults)

That same farm has, in its farmyard, a dovecote, as, like chickens—and there appears to be a henhouse on the right, just beyond the mill—doves are a source of protein.

In the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings, JRRT tells us that “All Hobbits had originally lived in holes in the ground…”  but, having been granted the Shire, “…suitable sites for these large and ramifying tunnels…were not everywhere to be found; and in the flats and low-lying districts the Hobbits, as they multiplied, began to build above ground…even in the hilly regions and the older villages..there were now many house of wood, brick, or stone.” (The Lord of the Rings, Prologue, I, “Concerning Hobbits”)

Although the mill appears to be built of stone blocks, with a tiled roof, the houses beyond seem to be plastered and white-washed, so it’s impossible to tell what they’re built from, but, as we follow the road beyond those houses, the countryside widens out and we can see a series of colored strips of land and, rising above them, The Hill, as it’s called in The Hobbit, into which a number of hobbit homes have been built, and, above them, by itself, is what must be Bag End, constructed by Bilbo’s father, Bungo, for his bride, Belladonna, nee Took. (The Hobbit, Chapter 1, “An Unexpected Party”)

So far, then, we have a mill, farmhouses along a road, fields beyond, rising to a hill, on top of which is Bag End, home of the very wealthy Mr Baggins.  So what was it that all of this reminded me of?

The Normans, when they came to England, brutally appropriated the countryside, constructing very early castles, called motte and baileys, to dominate the landscape.

The motte (from the later Latin mota, “mound”) was raised from the surrounding countryside by the enslaved locals, and it became the headquarters and living quarters for the invading Normans, with the lower enclosed yard, the bailey, for their soldiers, attendants, and livestock.  Beyond this could be open ground (better for defense) and beyond that would begin the farmland which the Normans turned to their own use, seizing it from its previous owners, the Anglo-Saxons. 

In time, the motte and bailey became the castle, often using the same site, simply turning earth and wood into stone.

(This is Launceston, originally a motte and bailey built post 1068, and gradually rebuilt into its present form.)

Also in time, this occupation developed into the feudal system, in which a military hierarchy evolved into a social system, where those at the bottom (the great majority of people) were dominated by those above them in succession.

For this system to work, the Norman king parceled out land to his senior lords, the barons, who then gave out the land to lesser nobles down to the individual estate, the manor.  In return, the various levels of nobles would provide troops and taxes up the chain of control to the king.

A typical manor, often a self-supporting community, with the manor house of the lord, its own mill and church and even blacksmith, would look something like this—

Although all land eventually belonged to the lord of the manor, it was parceled out in distinctive ways.  First, it became common practice to divide land into three parts, two to be planted each season, a third to be allowed to regenerate itself by being left uncultivated, or fallow.  Some of the land was worked directly for the lord (all tenants had an obligation to farm for him), then there might be freemen, who owned a certain amount of land—as long as they paid a tax to the lord.  Below them were peasants, who were free (as much as anyone was below the level of the nobility), but owned no land and worked for others.  And, below them, were serfs, who were more or less slaves, people who were as much a part of the estate as the land itself.  As well as being divided into three, each of those three was divided in turn, as you can see from the diagram above, into strips, each controlled by the lord or various community members.

Put this diagram now, against that picture Tolkien painted of Hobbiton. 

There is no church or blacksmith, but there’s the mill, the village street, the strips of cultivated land, and, above, there’s the hill—or is that a motte? 

Thanks for reading, as ever.

Stay well,

Remember to pay your tithe– or arrange a secret meeting with John Ball (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ball_(priest) ),

And remember, as well, that there’s always

MTCIDC

O

ps

I note, by the way, from what appear to be flowering horse chestnut trees (they have cone-shaped white flowers)

that it’s May in Hobbiton.

As always, dear readers, welcome.

This posting began with a question from my friend Erik, who was currently reading Dracula and had come upon this:

“Then we walked home with some, or rather many, stoppages to rest, and with our hearts full of a constant dread of wild bulls. Lucy was really tired, and we intended to creep off to bed as soon as we could. The young curate came in, however, and Mrs. Westenra asked him to stay for supper. Lucy and I had both a fight for it with the dusty miller; I know it was a hard fight on my part, and I am quite heroic. I think that some day the bishops must get together and see about breeding up a new class of curates, who don’t take supper, no matter how they may be pressed to, and who will know when girls are tired.”   (Dracula, Chapter VIII)            

“What’s a ‘dusty miller?’ he wrote, knowing that I’d taught the novel a number of times.  (And, if you haven’t read it, here it is in its original 1897 American first edition:   https://gutenberg.org/files/345/345-h/345-h.htm    )

 He then went on to mention a plant by that name, of which there are a number of varieties, like this one (senecio bicolor cineraria)

but that hardly fit the context of Dracula—unless it were related to garlic.

I replied that I’d always assumed that said Miller was a close relative of the Sandman.

(No image unless you want to see Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman or Neil Gaiman himself.  For a much earlier and very creepy Sandman story, see E.T.A. Hoffmann’s (1776-1822) 1817 Der Sandmann, in the collection Night Pieces—Nachtstuecke—

which you can read in translation here:  https://www.ux1.eiu.edu/~rlbeebe/sandman.pdf )

And so Lucy and Mina, after their long day out along the coast, were struggling to stay awake.

Millers were dusty, of course, because they worked all day with flour, which could easily cover them as in this very atmospheric painting by Paula McHugh.

Ms McHugh has a very interesting approach:  she bases her paintings on the titles of folksongs and you can see more of her work–and her at work–(and hear her banjo) at:   https://www.paulamchugh.com/

The song by which she must have been inspired  is this:

Hey, the dusty Miller,
And his dusty coat,
He will win a shilling,
Or he spend a groat:
Dusty was the coat,
Dusty was the colour,
Dusty was the kiss
That I gat frae the Miller.

Hey, the dusty Miller,
And his dusty sack;
Leeze me on the calling
Fills the dusty peck:
Fills the dusty peck,
Brings the dusty siller;
I wad gie my coatie
For the dusty Miller.

(Robert Burns, 1759-1796)

(Burns was a competent poet in the standard English of his time, but a brilliant poet in Lallans, his own Scots–“win” here means “to gain” and “leeze me” is a corruption of “lief is me”—“dear is to me”  See:  https://dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/lief for more–this is from The Scottish National Dictionary at:  https://dsl.ac.uk/ )

The miller in this song (you can hear a lively version sung by Rod Paterson here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AB1wZ6Oi6YA ) appears somewhat flirtatious, but, in another mill song we see—

“The maid gaed to the mill by nicht,
Hey, hey, sae wanton!
The maid gaed to the mill by nicht,
Hey, sae wanton she!
She swore by a’ the stars sae bricht
That she should hae her corn ground,
She should hae her corn ground
Mill and multure free

Then oot and cam’ the miller’s man,
Hey, hey, sae wanton!
Oot and cam’ the miller’s man,
Hey, sae wanton he!
He swore he’d do the best he can
For to get her corn ground,
For to get her corn ground
Mill and multure free

He put his hand about her neck,
Hey, hey, sae wanton!
He put his hand about her neck,
Hey, sae wanton he!
He threw her doon upon a sack
And there she got her corn ground,
There she got her corn ground
Mill and multure free.

When other maids gaed oot to play,
Hey, hey, sae wanton!
Other maids gaed oot to play,
Hey, sae wantonly!
She sighed and sobbed and wouldna stay
Because she’d got her corn ground,
Because she’d got her corn ground
Mill and multure free.

When forty weeks were past and gane,
Hey, hey, sae wanton!
When forty weeks were past and gane,
Hey, sae wantonly!
This lassie had a braw lad bairn
Because she got her corn ground,
Because she got her corn ground
Mill and multure free.

Her mither bid her cast it oot,
Hey, hey, sae wanton!
Her mither bid her cast it oot,
Hey, sae wantonly!
It was the miller’s dusty clout
For getting’ a’ her corn ground,
Gettin’ a’ her corn ground
Mill and multure free.

Her faither bade her keep it in,
Hey, hey, sae wanton!
Her faither bade her keep it in,
Hey, sae wantonly!
It was the chief o’ a’ her kin
Because she’d got her corn ground,
Because she’d got her corn ground
Mill and multure free.”

(Here’s one version of the tune used—this by Ewan MacColl  and Peggy Seeger:    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7SZbzz7o1s    “multure” is a fee paid to the miller for grinding the grain)

We can see millers having a bad reputation  in English literature all the way back to Chaucer’s (c.1340-1400) Canterbury Tales, in that called “The Reeve’s Tale”,

(from the early 15^th-century Ellesmere Manuscript of Chaucer—a reeve was, in Chaucer’s time, a kind of estate manager)

in which Symkyn the miller is shown to be a cheat—and it’s easy to see how suspicion of millers arose just by looking at the structure of the mill.

Someone would bring bags of grain to the mill to deliver to the miller.  He—or an assistant—would pour the grain in at the top, it would be ground in the mechanism, and come out as flour at the bottom. 

But suppose the miller didn’t dump in all of the grain—how would you know?  And how could you be sure that the flour which the miller kept was indeed the proper multure (1/16 of the total was a common measure) when the whole business was overseen by the miller?

As for the licentious side of millers, my guess is that:

a. unlike most men, who worked outside all day, millers worked within the closed structure of a building, meaning that they had a kind of  daytime privacy others didn’t

b. should a girl or woman come to a mill with a sack of grain—well, the songs above—and there are more—suggest that there could be all sorts of goings-on

Whether the cheating or other things were true, we can imagine that rumors spread, as rumors will and Chaucer’s story has a parallel in Boccacio’s Decamerone  IX, 6, among other sources, suggesting that England—and Scotland, whence the songs above come—were not the only places where millers were suspect. 

And this brings me to a suspect miller in the Shire, Ted Sandyman,

whom we meet in the very first chapter of The Lord of the Rings, where, replying to the Gaffer’s story about the tragic death of Frodo’s parents in a boating accident on the Brandywine,  says:  “And I heard she pushed him in, and he pulled her in after him.”  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 1, “A Long-expected Party”)

Already he’s an unsavory character, with this cynical remark.

I had always assumed that Tolkien had taken against Sandyman because of his own experience with the millers of Sarehole, just south of Birmingham, where he had spent part of his childhood.

As Humphrey Carpenter tells it:

“There were two millers, father and son.  The old man had a black beard, but it was the son who frightened the boys with his white dusty clothes and his sharp-eyed face.  Ronald named him ‘the White Ogre’ .”  (Carpenter, Tolkien, 22)

But perhaps  there’s another influence here.  In 1931, JRRT presented a paper to the Philological Society in Oxford on dialects in “The Reeve’s Tale” (published 1934—Carpenter, 154) and, in 1939, he had impersonated Chaucer,

(a second illustration from the Ellesmere Manuscript—there are no actual portraits of Chaucer)

reciting an edited version of “The Reeves’ Tale” at the Oxford “Summer Diversions”.  (Carpenter, 242)

(This is from the ever-helpful  Tolkien Gateway)

Could Tolkien not only be imitating Chaucer himself, telling the Reeves’ story, but perhaps imitating an attitude which Chaucer repeats in that story about dusty millers and what they’re up to?

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Stay well,

If you’ve got grain, consider investing in a quern (your multure will then always be free),

And remember that there’s always

MTCIDC

O

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

In Part One of this two-parter,  I began by thinking aloud about “both tinkering with something already available and how one might fit it into something more”, to immodestly quote myself.

I was prompted to this by seeing the new Star Wars series, Obi-Wan Kenobi.  The more I thought about it, however, the more I realized that what I was really doing was beginning a review of this new series.

I began by going back through what we’ve seen of Obi-Wan up to this point.  In Part Two, I want to consider the program itself.

As I did when I wrote a series of posts which covered all of Star Wars from I to IX, (“Three Times Three”, beginning on 8 January, 2020), I intend to react not by attacking what I may not have liked or agreed with, but by trying to understand what it was that the director/writers wanted me to see and understand. 

If you visit this blog regularly, you know that I dislike the very negative—sometimes downright vicious—kinds of reactions one can read on the internet and I’ve always tried to avoid writing such criticism myself, which quickly closes down more flexible thinking when it comes to what we see or read.  On the whole, I begin with the premise that those who created whatever I’m reviewing were honest artists, devoted to their work, and determined to provide their audience with the best which they could produce. 

I also tend to avoid other reviews, good or bad, preferring to have my own reactions to what I see.  In the case of Obi-Wan Kenobi, however, after I finished the series, I was puzzled enough as to what I had just seen that  I made an exception, reading first a number of positive reviews, then a number of negative ones, as well as watching the series a second time and consulting the very helpful  WIKI article, with its summary of the 6 episodes —which you can read, too, here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obi-Wan_Kenobi_(TV_series) .

And, as I don’t read reviews, I also avoid the comments of directors/writers as, before a film is created, they tend to be very vague and full of promise, and, afterwards, when responses to their work aren’t all positive, they tend to be very defensive.

In this case, the positive reviews were a mixed lot, from those which suggested that the production had quality, but also might lack something, to others, which were such raves that they sounded like they had been written by the promotional department of the film company, rather than by independent reviewers.  Praise was generally accorded to three categories:   the story, the acting, and the look of things.

In general,  I would agree to the acting—Ewan McGregor, in particular,

who, in the title role, has to bear the most weight, does a wonderful job, from portraying the beaten-down ex-Jedi in the opening scenes to someone once more committed to Jedi ideals by the end of the last episode.  The range of his reactions, from a kind of sad tenderness to fierce determination, would, in my opinion, recommend this series in itself.

I would also agree with praise for the settings, something which Star Wars has gotten right all the way back to Star Wars I, in 1977.

(Although those who praised Daiyu without noticing that it owes something to Blade Runner’s depiction of  Los Angeles in 2019—the film originally came out in 1982, so 2019 then seemed far in the future—should perhaps reconsider and write a second draft.)

This leaves the story.

The title by itself really tells us nothing other than that the story will presumably be about Obi-Wan Kenobi, but Obi-Wan when?   Doing what?  With whom?   In the previous posting, I suggested that it could be about any point in Obi-Wan’s life, my own preference being either for his days as a padawan before Star Wars I,

or for his later romance with Duchess Satine of Mandalore, a powerful character in her own right, as we see in several seasons of The Clone Wars until her murder by Darth Maul in Season Five (Episode 16 “The Lawless”).

Instead, the opening, although the place is initially not identified, is Tatooine,

Specifically, Anchorhead and its environs (far lower right on this map).

With this choice, I immediately assumed that we were going to be shown something beyond that moment when Obi-Wan has turned the new-born Luke over to Owen Lars and his wife, Beru.

This brought to mind six questions about what we were to be shown:

1. what has happened to Obi-Wan after he’s taken Luke to Tatooine?

2. remembering the trauma of that duel with Anakin, what is Obi-Wan’s mental state?

3. also remembering what Yoda has told him at the end of Star Wars III, how has his training with Qui-Gon gone?

4. what is the state of the world beyond?—we know that, as this is in the years between 3 and 4, the Empire is growing, although the final stroke only comes in Star Wars IV with the announcement that the Senate has been dissolved and that regional governors, like Grand Moff Tarkin,

will now control things, employing the new Death Star as an enforcer.

5. that being the case,  what has happened to Darth Vader?  As Darth Sidious’ padawan-equivalent, what’s he been doing all of this time?

6. and there is the question of  Leia, now in the custody of Senator Bail Organa and his wife, Breha,

 on the eventually-doomed planet of Alderaan,

the assumption about her being  that, as the adopted child of the Organas, she’s safe—hidden in plain sight like the letter in Edgar Allen Poe’s 1844 short story, “The Purloined Letter”.   (If you don’t know this early detective story, here it is:  https://poestories.com/read/purloined )

(Before I go on, I’m assuming that SPOILER ALERTS are unnecessary as, by this time, probably all of the devoted, and even the curious, have seen the series, and maybe more than once, as I did.)

The answers to these questions form the basis of the context of the series and provide certain elements of the plot, so let’s tackle them first.  This is, in fact, a synthesis, as none of this is laid out in a straightforward fashion, like those crawlers at the beginnings of the 9 films.

1. After the bleak opening on Tatooine, we’re shown Obi-Wan working at what seems to be a fish-processing plant, cutting up the remains of something which we must presume dates from the days when the planet had oceans.  I don’t have an image from the series, so the closest I can come at present is this—

which comes from a fascinating  but short-lived site, “Sketchfolio” at:  https://trevorsart.blogspot.com/2012/09/prehistoric-fish.html

The proprietor is Trevor Crandall, an extremely talented 3D artist.  You can see much more of his work at:  https://www.artstation.com/t_crandall   In the blog, he says that he was making a kind of combination of Coccosteus and Dunkleosteus.  To see more on such creatures, go to:  https://www.thoughtco.com/prehistoric-fish-pictures-and-profiles-4043340  I wonder, by the way, if this fish is thousands of years old, why the meat which Obi-Wan slices continues to be as pink as fresh salmon.

Beyond his gritty day job, he lives in a cave which appears to be not far from the farm of Owen Lars, where he keeps his distance, but also keeps watch over the now 10-year-old Luke (we’re not told Luke’s age directly, but it can be inferred from Obi-Wan’s explanation, at one point, that it’s been ten years since he’s seen action and the fact that Leia tells him that she’s ten). 

2. Obi-Wan’s mental state is precarious.  He is haunted both by dreams and visions of his relationship to Anakin Skywalker, much of the content being  based upon their last encounter, when he left Anakin for dead on Mustafar.

As well, he has become convinced that the Jedi cause is lost, refusing to help a young Jedi on the run, telling him to bury his light saber and blend in—which is impossible, as he’s already experienced a run-in with pursuers and will soon appear as a display of what the Empire does to Jedi.  This also presents an inconsistency, and inconsistencies are one of the main points of criticism in the more thoughtful negative reviews:  although Obi-Wan has become a defeatist, he still insists to Owen Lars that Luke should go through Jedi training.  At best, I suppose that we are to assume that old habits die hard and that, as Obi-Wan was entrusted with Luke as a Jedi’s child, part of him still works under his previous promise to Yoda.

3. Obi-Wan appears never to have made contact with Qui-Gon and, at various moments, mostly of desperation, he appeals for help to his old master, receiving no reply.

4. The Empire has been spreading throughout the galaxy and seems to have garrisons everywhere, but, 10 years into its existence, it still doesn’t exert control everywhere, as a woman who should have kept quiet points out to an Imperial—and loses her hand as a consequence in the opening episode of this series.

5.  Darth Vader, assisted by the Inquisitors (which sounds a bit like an old backup group)

(Here some of them are in their previous incarnation in Star Wars Rebels.)

looks to have become over-focused on dealing with the last of the Jedi and Obi-Wan in particular, something for which the Emperor surprisingly mildly chides him later in the series.

6.Finally, we see Leia as a somewhat feckless child on Alderaan, intelligent and active, but worried, at some level, that she’s not really what she seems to be.

With all of that background, we have, potentially, two main characters, just as at the end of Star Wars III:   a dutiful but tormented Obi-Wan, living a grim life on a grim planet; an equally tormented Anakin/Vader who is obsessed with finding and destroying his old master.  The writers’/director’s job, then, will be to bring them together somehow.

And here they have set themselves two problems, both brought about by what we already know from Star Wars IV and that brings us back to my original question about inserting something into what already exists.  First, because, in another ten years, these two will face each other again, on the Death Star,

there can be no neat ending to this series.  If they do meet now, that meeting can only be inconclusive and somehow Obi-Wan must return to his current anonymity—for another ten years.  Secondly, if Obi-Wan has dealings with either Luke or Leia now, this will potentially interfere with what we know of their contact at the end of those ten years.  After all, in Star Wars IV, Luke displays no knowledge of Obi-Wan—as Obi-Wan– when talking with his uncle:

“You know, I think that R2 unit we bought

might have been stolen.

What makes you think that?

Well, I stumbled across a recording

while I was cleaning him.

He says he belongs to someone

called Obi-Wan Kenobi.

I thought he might have meant old Ben.

Do you know what he's talking about?

Mm-mm.

I wonder if he's related to Ben.

That wizard's just a crazy old man.

Tomorrow, I want you to take that R2 unit

to Anchorhead and have its memory erased.

That'll be the end of it.

It belongs to us now.

But what if this Obi-Wan

comes looking for him?

He won't.

I don't think he exists anymore.

He died about the same time

as your father.

He knew my father?

I told you to forget it.”

Here, Owen is intentionally trying to muddle things, separating Obi-Wan from Ben, then removing Obi-Wan entirely.  It’s suggested from the words above that Luke is aware of a Ben Kenobi, and, at their  later meeting  in the Jundland Wastes , it becomes clear that Luke actually knows him—

“Ben?

Ben Kenobi?

Boy, am I glad to see you.”

 If Luke had had an adventure with Obi-Wan at ten, he certainly wouldn’t be wondering if Ben and Obi-Wan were related.

 The same would be true for Leia.  Anything complicated with Obi-Wan now and her rather formal appeal to him via R2D2 ten years later will seem odd:

 “General Kenobi, years ago

you served my father in the Clone Wars.

Now he begs you to help him

in his struggle against the Empire.”

(And it is odd, of course, after their time spent together in this series, which has led some critics to suggest that he’s used an old Jedi mind trick to erase her memory.)

The bringing together happens through a third party, a newish Inquisitor named Reva,

who has a secret:  she is the sole survivor of the Younglings massacred by Anakin and his troops at the Jedi Temple late in Star Wars III,

who has now spent years working her way up through the Imperial ranks just so that she can take revenge upon Anakin in his incarnation as Darth Vader.  To do this:

1. she discovers a connection between Obi-Wan and Bail Organa “through the archives”

2. and then decides to kidnap Leia under the supposition that Organa will call Obi-Wan for help

3.  when he responds, she will  capture him, informing Vader

4. Vader will then come to pick up Obi-Wan, which will give her the chance to kill Vader

And here I think that the story line falters a bit. 

To begin with, we might ask:

1.  why Vader,  who, as Anakin, would have fought through those same wars with Obi-Wan, wouldn’t already know about that connection?

2.  if the archives mention such a connection, surely there should also be archives on the Jedi , including detailed information about Younglings?  That being the case, how has Reva so concealed herself—she clearly has Jedi-like powers—that Vader wouldn’t at least wonder about her?  (She is, after all, a member of a tiny organization run by Vader himself.)  And, in fact, Vader later reveals that he’s known what she’s been up to all along and that he’s used her to get to Obi-Wan. 

Once Leia is kidnapped, however, the moment when Obi-Wan and Vader are to meet is set in motion. 

In fact, there are two such meetings.  In the first, Obi-Wan is quickly defeated by Vader’s superior strength and, in fact, is briefly tortured by Vader by being plunged into fire, as Anakin had been, 10 years before.

In the second, Obi-Wan, now revived, defeats Vader, even after being buried  alive by his opponent.  This leads to a scene which Anakin has been longing for and Obi-Wan dreading, in which, rather than simply slugging it out once more—and inconclusively, at that—they talk.  The result is that Anakin admits that, in becoming Vader, he has destroyed his former self and, Obi-Wan, admitting—not for the first time—that he has failed Anakin, but seeming to understand that there’s nothing he could do, at least at the moment, then exits—but the series isn’t quite over.

Reva has failed in her plan—as I wrote above, Vader had known her intent all along and has simply allowed her to carry it out in order that he might lay hands on his old master.   She has clearly overestimated her powers and, in a brief combat, has easily been bested and run through by her opponent.

Being run through by a light saber has been the end of Qui-Gon,

but doesn’t seem to have the same effect here.  (Earlier, Reva had apparently run her boss, the Grand Inquisitor, through with her light saber, but he makes a cheerful reappearance after her defeat.)  Reva seems to survive this and makes for Tatooine.

And here we see a definite problem with the story, something I call “plot by fiat”.

Fiat (not to be confused with the legendarily undependable Italian car) is Latin for “let it come into being” as in Jerome’s translation of Genesis 1,3:  “dixitque Deus fiat lux et facta est lux”—“and God said, Let light come into being and light was made”.   It is a danger for script writers—you want something to happen in order that something else may happen and, if you can’t find a way to create this, you simply have that something else occur without the necessary link.

This has happened before in the series.  After Darth Vader has plunged Obi-Wan into flames at the end of their first combat, Obi-Wan is easily rescued and Vader, rather than stop the rescue or even pursue, simply stands, gazing into the fire, as if his battery has run down.  The writers wanted Obi-Wan to escape and so simply made a fiat.

And this happens again here.  Why does Reva, who, if the death of Qui-Gon is anything to go by, should already have perished anyway, go to Tatooine?

If she thinks of Leia as the (adopted) daughter of Bail Organa, why would she then assume that there is a Luke and how would she know where he might be?  And,, if she was traumatized by her experience at the massacre of the Younglings, as we’ve been shown, why would she possibly want to kill children herself?

But it seems that Reva must be redeemed (more than one very cynical critic has already suggested that there is a Reva Sevander spin-off series tentatively planned but, if it’s an account of how she got to her recent position, I would certainly  want to watch it) and another fiat—two, in fact, make it so:

1. she isn’t killed

2. she plans to kill Luke, but then relents and rescues him, instead, from a convenient tumble

And the series ends with Leia restored to her family, a visit by Obi-Wan, now looking younger and refreshed, and another visit, to the Lars farm, where Owen allows him to greet Luke before Obi-Wan trots off into the Wastes, where Qui-Gon greets him, asking “What took you so long?”

An impatient critic might perhaps ask the same of the series, but, it seems to me that, although the plot suffers here and there (there are more questionable details which I haven’t mentioned), what we have been given, especially through the fine acting, is a convincing portrayal of Obi-Wan as a man who begins the story a ruin, believing himself a failure in a cause which is lost, but who gradually gains strength and a confidence in himself, while being brought to the bitter truth that the Anakin he believes he has failed has, in fact, failed himself. 

Thanks, as always, for reading,

Stay well,

Believe in the Force—but only if you remain active in it,

And know that, as ever, there’s

MTCIDC

O

ps

For a comic but very cynical review, see:    the “Honest Trailer” here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DblSA-T_C-I 

As always, dear readers, welcome.

When Tolkien was in the midst of the composition of The Lord of the Rings,

he began to have second thoughts about Gollum.

(an Alan Lee)

He revised the chapter in The Hobbit entitled “Riddles in the Dark” and sent the new version to his publisher, whereupon it seemed to disappear for years—and then turned up in the proofs for the 1951 edition of the book.

This was a very different Gollum from the 1937 cringing, apologetic character of the earlier text, setting up the Gollum so entangled with the Ring, even to its—and his–destruction in the later work.

(a Ted Nasmith)

I’ve just finished watching the new Star Wars series, Obi-Wan Kenobi

and I found myself thinking about questions both of tinkering with something already available and how one might fit it into something more.

For Tolkien, this would have been relatively easy (and, remembering all of the drafts behind everything JRRT wrote, let me stress that word relatively):  the point wasn’t to remove or replace Gollum, but rather to bring him into line with the later vengeful, but tormented, character Tolkien now imagined.

As Star Wars followers, we’ve been watching Obi-Wan for a long time and, in a rather curious way, as, if we follow the film series as it originally appeared,  we see his end before his beginning.  When the original series began, he was already an older man,

mysteriously secluded on a bleak planet at the very edge of a galaxy.

(To find Tattoine, locate Corellia, then head due south till you come to the bottom of the map—and you can see why Luke says of his home world, “Well, if there’s a bright center to the universe…you’re on the planet that it’s farthest from.”)

We will then see him meet his end at the hands of his one-time padawan, Anakin Skywalker, now become the fearsome Darth Vader.

In Star Wars I, we’re then sent back in time to when Obi-Wan himself is the padawan to his master, Qui-Gon Jinn.

In Star Wars II, Obi-Wan has his own padawan, Anakin Skywalker,

and we then see him as a grownup fighting in two animated series about the Clone Wars, often accompanied by the character who will become his ex-padawan, Anakin,

with his own padawan, Ahsoka Tano (one of my favorite characters in all of the various series).

In Star Wars III, we see Anakin as a kind of post-graduate, but then gradually lured into the Dark Side of the Force by “Chancellor Palpatine”,

who is, in reality, the center of the disturbance in the Force, Darth Sidious, the Dark Lord of the Sith.

While the Clone Wars seem to be playing themselves out with success for the Republic, Chancellor Palpatine has been revealed as Darth Sidious and the complexity of his plot to overthrow the government and make himself emperor has him initiate Order 66, which entails the destruction of the Jedi, even down to the youngest—this part of the plan being carried out by the now-corrupt Anakin.

By the film’s end, Anakin Skywalker, defeated in a duel with Obi-Wan,

and badly mutilated, will reappear as the helmeted Darth Vader, the follower of Darth Sidious.

In the meantime, Anakin’s secret wife, Padme Amidala,

dies after giving birth to twins, who, to be protected from the now-monstrous Vader, are separated, the daughter, Leia, given to a sympathetic senator, Bail Organa,

the son, Luke, taken by Obi-War to Tattoine, to the home of Anakin’s mother’s husband,  Clegg Lars, where he’ll be raised by Clegg’s son, Owen, and his wife, Beru.

Before I go on, I admit that my knowledge, such as it is, is derived entirely from the films and the animated features.  I’m aware of the mass of other material, in the form of novels, comic books, and graphic novels, but, as I began with the films, I’ve preferred to stay there.  If you, being more knowledgeable than I (likely), read this and shake your head, please forgive me—and read on.

When I first heard about this new series, I was immediately intrigued:  what would it be about?  My first hope was that it would be set on Mandalore

(look just above and to the right of “Inner Rim” to find Mandalore)

 and be about something I only know as a rumor:  the romance between the Duchess Satine

 and Obi-Wan that almost made him quit the Jedi order.

Or perhaps it could be about Obi-Wan’s beginnings—who is he?  From where?  How did he become Qui-Gon’s padawan?  Did they have earlier adventures before they are nearly killed by the Trade Federation off Naboo?

(And this event always brings back Weird Al Yankovic’s song, “The Saga Begins” with these lines:   “A long, long time ago/In a galaxy far away/Naboo was under an attack/And I thought me and Qui-Gon Jinn/Could talk the Federation into/Maybe cutting them a little slack/But their response, it didn’t thrill us/They locked the doors and tried to kill us…”  To see/hear this, go to:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEcjgJSqSRU )

And then there was that preview, which clearly suggested that what we would see would be set in that 20 year gap between Star Wars III and Star Wars IV and that preview, like all good previews, had an energy and menace which made me ready for that possibility.  (Here it is:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Yh_6_zItPU )

I very much looked forward, then, to what we were about to see.   And I hope that you’ll be looking forward to what I write in Part 2.

Thanks , as always, for reading,

Stay well,

Don’t attempt to contact Qui-Gon at the moment,

And remember that, as ever, there’s

MTCIDC

O