As ever, dear readers, welcome.

In the commentary included in a reply to Charlotte and Denis Plimmer of 8 February, 1967, Tolkien says that “the passages that now move me most” from The Lord of the Rings are:

“…the end of the chapter Lothlorien (I 365-7), and the horns of the Rohirrim at cockcrow.” (Letters, 376)

For me, it’s that second passage, just as it is the depiction of the Rohirrim in general  which I find the most satisfying parts of Jackson’s film adaptation of the books.

As he based his depiction upon his native New Zealand, Jackson was faced with a geographical difficulty, however:  Rohan is, basically, a great, grassy plain,

probably something like this—

which was the sort of place upon which ancient peoples from our Middle-earth, like the Skythians,

lived and bred their herds.    The problem is that there is no area like that on New Zealand’s two main islands, but, with some very intelligent and creative location and camera work (as well as a huge construction project), we are given the look of Rohan, even without those missing plains.

I’m afraid that I don’t find the armor of the Rohirrim quite so convincing–

as in this image of Theoden, who appears to be wearing an awkward combination of plate armor and lamellar of leather (lamellar consists of small, overlapping pieces of metal or leather and is a very old method of armoring, being used, for example, by New Kingdom Egyptians—see this useful excerpt from a Nova special entitled “Building Pharaoh’s Chariot”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFxkYmqIX1w  and here’s the whole excellent documentary:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Loti-WBK_k ).  To me, it appears much more like something from Frank Frazetta

than the Rohirrim described by Tolkien:

“The styles of the Bayeux Tapestry…fit them well enough, if one remembers that the kind of tennis-nets [the] soldiers seem to have on are only a clumsy conventional sign for chain-mail of small rings.” (letter to Rhona Beare, 14 October, 1958, Letters, 281)

Here’s what JRRT was thinking of—

and here’s a modern reconstruction by Christopher Rothero—

(The skirts are split to make it easier to wear while riding a horse.)  So this is probably more like what Tolkien imagined–

(Could that Frazetta illustration have suggested the mode of conveyance of Jadis, the White Witch, in the 2005 film of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe?)

But then we hear the horns at cockcrow and we see the Rohirrim line up to charge and even if the armor looks off, the mass of horsemen certainly don’t.

(And here’s the scene if you don’t have it handy:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmTz7EAYLrs  Although missing the cockcrow, it seems.)

And mass is what we see, as in this overhead shot—

or do we?

Looking more closely at this image, there’s more order here than would first appear, and we have a clue to this from JRRT via Eomer, and two glosses:

1. when Eomer wants to speak to Aragorn alone, he tells his lieutenant, Eothain, he tells him:  ‘Tell the eored to assemble on the path…” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 2, “The Riders of Rohan)

2. the 1966 Index:  “a troop of Riders of Rohan (Index, 1154)

3. a note by Tolkien himself:  “a ‘full eored’ in battle order was reckoned to contain not less than 120 men (including the Captain)” (“In a note to Cirion and Eorl and the Friendship of Gondor and Rohan” quoted in Hammond and Scull, The Lord of the Rings:  A Reader’s Companion, 369)

This suggests that the Rohirrim cavalry were divided into distinct units, like Roman cavalry alae, which could then number 16 or 24 turmae, a turma having about 32 troopers.

Taking it that the Rohirrim were formed into eored (one of JRRT’s many Rohirric borrowings from Old English, the word meaning, among other things, “cavalry troop”), look again at the image of the massed horsemen from the film.

First, notice that the riders are actually in ranks.  Next, notice that there seem to be divisions between blocks of mounted men.  Then notice that those men are then divided into two larger units, the one following the other, with a gap between.  What we’re seeing here, then, isn’t just a mob (although, once crashing into orc ranks it will become much more like one), but, instead, a series of units, one group forming the initial attacking force, the second its reserves—and, if you see it this way, you can then imagine that there’s more discipline here, like the famous (and near-fatal) charge of the British Light Brigade at the battle of Balaclava in October, 1854, where the Brigade was in three lines, as you can see from the image, so that the second and third lines could support the first. 

This is, as I said, an image from the Jackson film, but JRRT had, himself, once been a cavalryman, if only briefly, in King Edward’s Horse.  (Carpenter, Tolkien, 65)

He would have been well aware of the kind of training and discipline which went into being a trooper, although, at the beginning of the 20^th century,  when he was in his unit, there was considerable argument among military men about the role of cavalry.  Some believed that, with the advent of weapons like the machine gun,

cavalry, if it continued at all, should be used as mounted infantry,

employing their horses for riding to a fight, then dismounting for combat.  Others—often older officers–still believed that there was a role for the traditional mounted charge—in the right circumstances.

But the power of modern weapons won out and, throughout most of the Great War on the Western Front, cavalry either spent time in the rear, waiting for their big chance, or were converted to infantry.  (For a stylized view of what might happen to cavalry should they attack machine guns, see this clip from the  2011 film War Horse:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geXxBueyR_A )

The Rohirrim, whom Tolkien once called “heroic ‘Homeric’ horsement” (letter to Milton Waldman, “probably written late in 1951”, Letters, 159) come from a time and place where bows were the most powerful missile weapons, however, and their own weapons would be, like Tolkien’s Normans on the Bayeux Tapestry, lances (or spears) and swords.

If we begin with the idea that the Rohirrim were grouped into units, like Roman cavalry, might they have been drilled like Roman cavalry and even fought like them?   There seems to be evidence in The Lord of the  Rings to suggest something like that and,  in the second part of this posting, I want to consider what we might learn from a little close reading.

And, speaking of reading, thanks for doing so, as ever.

Stay well,

Use your spear underhand to deal with fleeing orcs,

(This very well done image is by Darren Tan, whose other work, much of it fantasy/sf, can be found at:  https://www.deviantart.com/wraithdt )

And remember that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

“I am not the type to faint
When things are odd or things are quaint
But seeing things you know that ain’t
Can certainly give you an awful fright!
What a sight!”

(Dumbo, 1941)

Dumbo the elephant and his friend, Timothy, the mouse, are having a rather bad moment,

being haunted by a vision of PINK ELEPHANTS.

(Here’s the surrealistic scene from the Disney film, in case you haven’t seen it:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcZUPDMXzJ8 )

They can blame this on the fact that they have accidentally been imbibing.

(Proofpudding)

What kind of explanation, however, can you produce when there appears to be no valid reason for seeing something which, in your country, officially, doesn’t even exist?

We’re not talking about Area 51 and its secrets,

but about events which took place in Stalinist Moscow sometime in the late 1920s, early 1930s,

when the Communist government insisted upon an atheistic state and worked energetically to eradicate both churches and clergy.    

  

(For a short but useful article on Stalinist aggressive atheism, see:  https://www.history.com/news/joseph-stalin-religion-atheism-ussr )

But then Satan appears,

with some very destructive assistants,

including a cat with a taste for vodka.

 

(And perhaps this gives a new meaning to the German word for “hangover”:   Katzenjammer—“the wailing of cats”.)

What can be the official line when non-existent Satan and those assistants turn Moscow upside down?

What I’m describing here is, in fact, not history, but Soviet-era fiction, in Mikhail Bulgakov’s (1891-1940)

The Master and Margarita (1928-1940).

It’s a very strange and entertaining book which, unfortunately, as least for the near future, I’m doomed to read in any number of English translations, beginning with the first, Mirra Ginsburg’s,

then Michael Glenny’s,

and, just recently, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s.

(For an excellent article comparing translations, see:  https://welovetranslations.com/2022/10/31/whats-the-best-translation-of-the-master-and-margarita/ )

It’s also a very complex book, in which, although Satan (calling himself “Woland”) is a major worker within the plot, that plot also includes:

1. the (otherwise unnamed) Master, a novelist, who has written a novel about Pontius Pilate and character called “Yeshua” but who, suffering from despair, destroys the manuscript and ends up in a Moscow asylum,

2. the dealings of Pilate with Yeshua—and with Yeshua’s disciple, Matthew Levi,

3. the Master’s heroic mistress, Margarita,

4. the poet, Ivan Homeless, who has had an early encounter with Woland and appears in the same Moscow asylum as the Master

5. a large cast of minor characters, many of them from the Moscow theatrical world, who become entangled in the story through Satan/Woland’s one-night appearance at a Moscow theatre

For a plot summary and much more, see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_Margarita

Although we see the Soviet state incapable of dealing realistically with Satan and his mischief, it did its usual—short of Gulag or execution—with Bulgakov, a venereologist turned novelist/dramatist, insuring that very little of his work ever reached publication or the stage.  In fact, Bulgakov became so desperate that he actually wrote to the head of all state persecutors, Stalin, asking to be allowed to emigrate, as he couldn’t work as a writer in his own country.  (The inevitable answer was, of course, no.)  Oddly, that same persecutor continued to spare Bulgakov, having loved one of his few literary pieces to appear, his play The Days of the Turbins (1926), reportedly seeing it at least 15 times.

(a photo from the original production)

The play was based upon Bulgakov’s 1925 novel, The White Guard,

which, ironically and like so much of Bulgakov’s work, never achieved publication in Russia in his lifetime.  It was begun serially in a magazine (Rossiya), which was closed down before more than the first two parts of the novel could appear.  (The title page above is from an edition published in Riga in 1927.)

In a way, it was Bulgakov’s own fault that he remained in publishing limbo.  Considering that The White Guard makes heroes of the Whites—that is, the anti-Bolsheviks at the time of the Russian Civil War (1917-1923)—

a second unpublished work from 1925, The Heart of a Dog,

(the first English translation)

details the adventures of a stray mutt initially called Sharik, who is turned into a brutal Soviet citizen, Poligraph Poligrafovich Sharikov, and The Master and Margarita shows in outline both the tangled bureaucracy of the new Russia, as well as the police state always just out of sight, but always present, it’s not surprising that Stalin’s literary henchmen would block Bulgakov’s attempts to bring his work to the reading public. 

I find these wonderful, crazy works, but I can also imagine the Soviet censors, faced with such elegant, imaginative criticism, and unable to offer any believable counter-criticism, would behave just as the lyric of that song with which I began puts it, shouting:

“What a sight!

Chase ‘em away!  Chase ‘em away!”

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Stay well,

If you encounter those elephants, best just to close your eyes,

And know that, as ever, there’s

MTCIDC

O

As ever, dear readers, welcome.

I suspect that every reader of The Lord of the Rings comes to “The Grey Havens” chapter

with that same sense of sadness, having seen Frodo’s gradual decline, and then reads this:

“ ‘Where are you going, Master?’ cried Sam, though at last he understood what was happening.

‘To the Havens, Sam’ said Frodo.

‘And I can’t come.’

‘No, Sam.  Not yet anyway, not further than the Havens…’

‘But,’ said Sam, and tears started in his eyes, ‘I thought that 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.’ “ (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 9, “The Grey Havens”)

We can feel both for Frodo and for Sam and it’s easy to do so, after we had followed their adventures so far, from leaving the Shire, to their long journey with Gollum,

(by Nacho Castro)

to that terrible last crawl to Mt Doom

(a wonderful Ted Nasmith)

and that moment when the Ringbearer, almost becomes the Ringwearer until Gollum reenters the picture.

(another great Nasmith)

For me, there is another possible such moment in The Lord of the Rings, perhaps a very surprising one, I think, but one I had been prepared for by another work entirely, Bram Stoker’s (1847-1912) Dracula (1897), which I’ve just finished teaching once more.

No one in the novel has more reason to hate Dracula and want him dead than Mina Harker.

(by Robert M. Place)

Throughout the novel, she has had her best friend, Lucy Westenra, turn into a vampire, her husband-to-be, Jonathan, held prisoner, then almost turned into a vampire, and she herself initiated into vampirism, all by the evil count.

(by Tony Harris—this image, in my opinion, is so much closer to what Bram Stoker described that I wish that Harris had done an entire illustrated edition of the book)

And yet, she can say this to that same Jonathan, now part of a group determined to eradicate him:

“ ‘Jonathan,’  she said, and the word sounded like music on her lips it was so full of love and tenderness, ‘Jonathan dear, and you all my true, true friends, I want you to bear something in mind through all this dreadful time. I know that you must fight—that you must destroy even as you destroyed the false Lucy so that the true Lucy might live hereafter; but it is not a work of hate. That poor soul who has wrought all this misery is the saddest case of all. Just think what will be his joy when he, too, is destroyed in his worser part that his better part may have spiritual immortality. You must be pitiful to him, too, though it may not hold your hands from his destruction.’ ”  (Dracula, Chapter XXIII)

Pity for a monster?  And this isn’t the end.  In the concluding chapter of the book, just as she sees Dracula turning from Undead to dead, she writes:

“But, on the instant, came the sweep and flash of Jonathan’s great knife. I shrieked as I saw it shear through the throat; whilst at the same moment Mr. Morris’s bowie knife plunged into the heart.

It was like a miracle; but before our very eyes, and almost in the drawing of a breath, the whole body crumbled into dust and passed from our sight.

I shall be glad as long as I live that even in that moment of final dissolution, there was in the face a look of peace, such as I never could have imagined might have rested there.” (Dracula, Chapter XXVII)

Mina’s friend, Lucy, has been a Victorian novelist’s standard victim:  young, beautiful, helpless.  In contrast, Mina has been energetic, enterprising, organized, and courageous, her spirit being behind the destruction of Dracula, practically at every turn.  At the same time, she has something which makes her even more remarkable:  she is able to see beyond Dracula’s current evil, to understand him as being as much a victim of vampirism as he has made Lucy and plans to make her and so can feel what might be seen as a surprising compassion.

This brings me to that other moment.

Saruman, along with the 4 other Istari (Gandalf, Radagast, and the two “Blue Wizards”) has been sent to Middle-earth to counter Sauron.

(the Hildebrandts)

It appears that Saruman, initially, as leader of the Order (as Gandalf calls it), did his job, but, at some point, he became more and more like the very enemy he was supposed to oppose, in part, at least, because he had acquired a palantir, and

this had connected him directly with Sauron, who has clearly turned his mind to the point that he could say to Gandalf:

“ ‘A new Power is rising…We may join with that Power.  It would be wise, Gandalf…We can bide our time, we can keep our thoughts in our hearts, deploring maybe the evils done by the way, but approving the high and ultimate purpose:  Knowledge, Rule, Order; all the things that we have so far striven in vain to accomplish…’ “  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 2, “The Council of Elrond”)

This leads eventually, as we know, to his ruin, his home, Isengard, devasted by the Ents,

(another Nasmith)

his power removed by Gandalf,

(?  I’m not sure whose work this is)

and himself reduced to being what appears at first to be a wandering beggar on the road, followed by his sole servant, Grima.

(and another Nasmith—whose work I highly value, not only for its own qualities, but for his wide range—he often picks scenes no one else has, not only from The Lord of the Rings, but from the Silmarillion)

He’s not really wandering, however, but on his way to the Shire to continue, in a petty way, the work of his departed master, Sauron, turning the hobbits’ homeland into an early industrial wasteland.  When confronted, stopped, and, in an attempt at vengeance, draws a dagger, Frodo says something which might remind us of Mina:

“ ‘No, Sam!’ said Frodo.  ‘Do not kill him even now.  For he has not hurt me.  And in any case I do not wish him to be slain in this evil mood.  He was great once, of a noble kind that we should not dare to raise our hands against.  He is fallen, and his cure is beyond us, but I would still spare him, in the hope that he may find it.’ ”  (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 8, “The Scouring of the Shire”)

(Inger Edelfeldt)

Saruman wants no cure, but before he can even leave the scene of this mercy, Grima stabs him and here, to me, is the surprising sadness:

“To the dismay of those that stood by, about the body of Saruman a grey mist gathered, and rising slowly to a great height like smoke from a fire, as a pale shrouded figure it loomed over the Hill.  For a moment it wavered, looking to the West; but out of the West came a cold wind, and it bent away, and with a sigh dissolved into nothing.”

(J Wyatt)

Because Saruman was one of the Maiar, what we might think of as lesser angels, we would expect that bodily destruction was temporary, as it was after Gandalf had met and defeated the Balrog,

(the Hildebrandts)

and, presumably, Saruman, by turning westward, was appealing to the Valar, the Maiar’s superiors, or perhaps even to Eru, the supreme god, but “out of the West came a cold wind” and:

“Frodo looked down at the body with pity and horror for as he looked it seemed that long years of death were suddenly revealed in it, and it shrank, and the shrivelled face became rags of skin upon a hideous skull.  Lifting up the skirt of the dirty cloak that sprawled beside it, he covered it over, and turned away.”

Might this be an echo of Dracula?

“It was like a miracle; but before our very eyes, and almost in the drawing of a breath, the whole body crumbled into dust and passed from our sight.”

(And, loving Tangled, how could I not think of Mother Gothel’s end?)

It’s that “with a sigh” which has always affected me, as it suggests that, although Saruman rejects Frodo’s mercy, he is still aware of what he has now lost by betraying the trust of those who had originally sent him to Middle-earth.

And there’s an interesting contrast here with one more moment, at least visually related to Saruman’s end, which occurs to another powerful figure. 

“And as the Captains gazed south to the Land of Mordor, it seemed to them that, black against the pall of cloud, there rose a huge shape of shadow, impenetrable, lightning-crowned, filling all the sky.  Enormous it reared above the world, and stretched out towards them a vast threatening hand, terrible but impotent:  for even as it leaned over them, a great wind took it, and it was all blown away, and passed; and then a hush fell.”  (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 4, “The Field of Cormallen”)

(a final Nasmith)

No one in the book ever speaks of him as “of a noble kind”, yet Sauron was also once one of the Maiar, and there’s this passage in one of Tolkien’s letters which made me wonder, at least briefly, about his end:

“In my story I do not deal in Absolute Evil.  I do not think there is such a thing, since that is Zero.  I do not think that at any rate any ‘rational being’ is wholly evil…In my story Sauron represents as near an approach to the wholly evil will as is possible.  He had gone the way of all tyrants:  beginning well, at least at the level that while desiring to order things according to his own wisdom he still at first considered the (economic) well-being of other inhabitants of the Earth…” (Response to W.H. Auden’s review of The Return of the King, from some time in 1956, Letters, 243)

And we have this in a letter from 1954:

“Sauron was of course not ‘evil’ in origin.  He was a ‘spirit’ corrupted by the Prime Dark Lord (the Prime sub-creative Rebel) Morgoth.  He was given an opportunity of repentance, when Morgoth was overcome, but could not face the humiliation of recantation, and suing for pardon; and so his temporary turn to good and ‘benevolence’ ended in a greater relapse…But at the beginning of the Second Age he was still beautiful to look at…and was not indeed wholly evil, not unless all ‘reformers’ who want to hurry up with ‘reconstruction’ and ‘reorganization’ are wholly evil, even before pride and lust to exert their will eat them up…” (letter to Peter Hastings, September, 1954, Letters, 190)

But here there’s no sigh—if anything, there’s that threatening hand, impotent, but we can imagine an expression of that “pride and lust to exert [his] will” which Tolkien mentions and if we continue reading down the page in Tolkien’s response quoted above we find:

“Sauron desired to be a God-King, and was held to be this by his servants; if he had been victorious he would have demanded divine honour from all rational creatures and absolute temporal power over the whole world.”

Saruman, sent to Middle-earth to do good (and not for “Rule, Knowledge, Order”—more likely Sauron’s words, simply parroted by Saruman), was corrupted by Sauron, just as Sauron had been corrupted by Morgoth.  His nobility was lost, but at least, at the end, he understood what he had lost.  Sauron, broken, had nothing but regret—but regret only for power lost for good.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Stay well,

Beware of rushing reformers,

And know that, as ever, there’s

MTCIDC

O

PS

If you don’t have your own copy of that remarkable Victorian novel, Dracula, here’s the original US publication of 1897 for you, thanks to Gutenberg:   https://www.gutenberg.org/files/345/345-h/345-h.htm )

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

In a letter of 28 June, 1936, C.S. Lewis wrote to the author that his book had “scored a direct hit” with the children of a friend.

The book was The Silver Trumpet,

its author was Owen Barfield (1898-1997),

and that friend was Tolkien.

If you read this blog regularly, you know that I’m always interested in reading things which JRRT read, from The Red Fairy Book (1890)

to The Marvellous Land of Snergs (1927)

to the novels of Mary Renault, such as The King Must Die (1958).

The Silver Trumpet is available on-line (https://archive.org/details/silvertrumpet –but without its illustrations), so, now that the Holidays have provided a break, I’ve read it—twice.

Barfield was a long-time friend of Lewis’, the two having met at Oxford sometime just after the Great War.  Barfield met Tolkien for the first time sometime from 1926 on and Barfield’s much later description of that first meeting is interesting reading:

“We dined together at the Eastgate Hotel, nearly opposite Magdalen College, Oxford. In those days there was as yet no Hobbit, no Lord of the Rings, no Screwtape, no Inklings even. For some reason Tolkien was in a ridiculously combative mood and seemed to me to contradict nearly everything I said—or more often what he (wrongly) assumed I was just going to say—before I had even got as far as saying it. But although Lewis actually apologised for him when we were alone afterwards, there was no occasion for it. The whole conversation was so entirely good-humoured and enjoyable; and his random belligerence had only made me laugh. That together with Tolkien’s hurried, low-pitched and sometimes almost inaudible utterance, is what I best remember. I have never had a conversation quite like it before or since.” (quoted from “Was Owen Barfield an Inkling?” by Bradley J. Birzer in The Imaginative Conservative, 25 July, 2019.  Tolkien was aware that he could speak quickly and perhaps even occasionally mumble—see his very gentle letter to Charlotte and Denis Plimmer, 8 February, 1967, Letters, 372)

In time, they became friends (JRRT later even going on a walking tour with him and Lewis) and Tolkien later testified to Barfield’s influence on Tolkien’s ideas of language (see Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings, 42), but The Silver Trumpet came before all of that.

Unlike The Hobbit, the title object is not the object of the story, although it does appear several times.  Instead, this is a kind of generational fairy tale, which begins with twin sisters, named Violetta and Gambetta, who are so alike that their father, the King, appoints an official, the Lord High Teller of the Other from Which, whose job it is to tell them apart.  He immediately decides that their names are too similar and shortens the one to Violet and the other to Gamboy (although why to “Gamboy” is never explained).  At their christening, Miss Thomson, who is a stand-in for the fairies who appear at Sleeping Beauty’s christening, and who “was growing a sort of witchery woman in her old age”, gives them two magical gifts:

1. identity (a bit puzzling, this, as they are twins, after all)

2. the seemingly-cryptic “As long as you both live, you shall love each other more than all else in the world. As long as one of you is living, both shall be.”

As much as they look alike, the princesses are diametrically opposed in behavior, Violet being sweet and Gamboy being sour and always critical. 

Then the prince of the first generation arrives:  Prince Courtesy, who is the original bringer of the silver trumpet of the title.  It is, clearly, a magic horn, as everyone who hears it is immediately charmed—and even Gamboy becomes positively dreamy.

(This is an illustration from the 1968 second edition, by Betty Beeby, but the trumpet seems more like it’s been slapped together from a plumber’s toolkit than like the enchanted instrument in the book—here’s a close-up–)

Other than being a hornist, Courtesy is the usual fairy tale prince come in search of a princess for a bride and he’s helped by an odd little character, a dwarf called “Little Fat Podger”.  (I’m guessing that this name is, in fact, a tautology, as a “podge”, in British English, is a short, fat person.  Perhaps Barfield picked it for the rhythm?)

Little Fat Podger is the court jester, and his speech—and behavior—are peppered with what appear to be dance moves, like “Up—up—up—and again!”  He is devoted to Violet and is delighted when she is taken with Courtesy.

Needless to say, then, Prince Courtesy, in time, becomes King Courtesy, having married Violet, and the second generation appears in the form of Princess Lily, but two things go badly wrong:

1. Princess Gamboy, even more sour than before, and jealous of her sister’s happiness, attempts, in disguise, to stir up trouble among the common people against the throne

2. a famine overtakes the kingdom, making Gamboy’s job easier, as she suggests that the royals have no problems with starvation

This revolt falls apart, however, when, for a reason I’m not going to explain, Queen Violet suddenly dies, leaving King Courtesy with the baby Princess.

Over the next few years, the King and his daughter become very close, much to the displeasure of Gamboy, who eventually figures out a way to isolate the Princess (again—I’m not going to explain, leave it that it has to do with toads…)

(And yes, it’s clear that Barfield has fun with “The Frog-Prince”—“Der Froschkoenig”—actually, in German, “The Frog King” and the full title is “Der Froschkoenig oder der eisener Heinrich”– which is the first tale in the Grimms’ original Kinder- und Hausmaerchen of 1812—for a translation, see:  https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/175/grimms-fairy-tales/3066/the-frog-prince/ )

Gamboy then proceeds to bewitch the King into marrying her—but then Prince #2, Prince Peerio, turns up, who, having seen a portrait of Princess Lily, travels the world (a little confusedly, having no map, but only a compass) in search of her.  This being a fairy tale, there are more complications, someone returns from the dead—in fact, two someones—and the story ends—do we need a SPOILER ALERT?—happily.

It’s a lovely book—Barfield, always with fairy tale conventions in mind, as well as story-telling patterns—keeps the narrative moving along and I particularly liked Little Fat Podger and Prince Peerio, who is perfectly prepared to put aside being a prince to find and win Princess Lily.  The second reading was as much fun as the first and I can readily understand why, in his diary, C.S. Lewis wrote of the book (then in manuscript), “nothing in its kind can be imagined better”.  (20 October, 1923—found at:  https://www.owenbarfield.org/read-online/the-silver-trumpet/ )

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Stay well,

Be prepared to pucker up to a toad if it’s your duty,

And remember that, as ever, there’s

MTCIDC

O