Welcome, as ever, dear readers.

Years ago, CD (the forerunner to the present creator of this blog), uploaded a posting with the same title, (see “Knowledge, Rule, Order”, 6 January, 2016 at Doubtfulsea.com), but in the intervening seven years, I’ve continued to wonder about just what those three words might mean, both consciously and unconsciously, for the original speaker of them:  are they simply abstract?  Or might they possibly mean something different from what that speaker intended?

That original speaker was Saruman, who uses those three terms in his more than a little slippery attempt to persuade Gandalf into helping him to replace Sauron.

“A new Power is rising…We may join with that Power.  It would be wise, Gandalf.  There is hope that way…As the Power grows, its proved friends will also grow; and the Wise, such as you and I, may with patience come at last to direct its courses, to control it.  We can bide our time…deploring maybe 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…There need not be, there would not be, any real change in our designs, only in our means.”  (The Fellowship of the Rings, Book Two, Chapter 2, “The Council of Elrond”)

Gandalf will have none of this:

“Saruman…I have heard speeches of this kind before, but only in the mouths of emissaries sent from Mordor to deceive the ignorant.” 

For me, this is one of the most revealing speeches in The Lord of the Rings, not only for how thoroughly it shows us the corrupted Saruman, but also for how it reflects the period when Tolkien began to write the novel, when such grand, but intentionally vague, themes or some very much like them, were in the air.

(“Work, Freedom, Bread”—for the National Socialist Party in 1928)

When Hitler became head of the German state in 1933,

he had learned from experience that open attempts to seize power were iffy at best, his first try, in 1923, ending in failure and an all-too-brief time in prison for him.

Subsequently, he turned to becoming a statesman, using such themes as “rebuilding Germany” to cover his real purposes. 

Violence was never ruled out, as we know too well, but politicking and political pressure appeared to gain him more, spawning followers and friends all over the world, as well as imitators, like the British Sir Oswald Mosley,

mocked by the comic novelist, P.G. Wodehouse (1881-1975) as Roderick Spode,

and once described by one of Wodehouse’s characters as “the amateur dictator”.  Such people had definitely heard “speeches…in the mouths of emissaries sent from Mordor to deceive the ignorant” but, unlike Gandalf, had believed them and worked towards their fulfillment. 

I want to begin with that first “high and ultimate purpose”:  “Knowledge”.

As is well-known, Saruman’s name suggests that he was, in fact, formed to be knowing:  Old English searu, upon which the name is based, means “skill/craft/cleverness”  + mann, “man”, so “man of craft”.

But what is this “Knowledge” which Saruman claims has been a major goal of the Istari, the Maiar sent to Middle-earth? 

Saruman himself doesn’t clarify what he means by this, which is, in this context, not surprising, but Gandalf tells us something about his past:

“…Saruman has long studied the arts of the Enemy himself, and thus we have often been able to forestall him.  It was by the devices of Saruman that we drove him from Dol Guldur.” 

We might also understand that he has been collecting information about Middle-earth itself, knowledge which he gathers from folk like Treebeard:

“I used to talk to him.  There was a time when he was always walking about my woods.  He was polite in those days, always asking my leave (at least when he met me); and always eager to listen.  I told him many things that he would never have found out by himself…”

We can imagine, then, that all of Saruman’s knowledge once had been for the task for which he and the other Istari have been sent to Middle-earth:  to protect it and its peoples from Sauron.

Old English searu has another meaning, however:  “plot/trick/deceit”, so searumann potentially means not only “man of craft”, but also “man of deceit”.  And something which Treebeard adds suggests that Saruman’s knowledge-gathering had, at some point, taken a different turn:

“…but he never repaid me in like kind.  I cannot remember that he ever told me anything.  And he got more and more like that; his face, as I remember it—I have not seen it for many a day—became like windows in a stone wall:  windows with shutters inside.”  (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 4, “Treebeard”)

This simile of a stone wall might remind us of something which Treebeard said just prior to this:

“He gave up wandering about and minding the affairs of Men and Elves, some time ago—you would call it a very long time ago, and he settled down at Angrenost, or Isengard as the Men of Rohan call it.”

(the Hildebrandts)

Of the five Istari,

(? I haven’t found the artist for this useful illustration.)

two disappeared to the south, leaving us with almost no information about them.  The other three, Saruman, Gandalf, and Radagast, must initially have been wanderers across the north of Middle-earth, perhaps acting like the Rangers, as patrolling protectors.

It’s revealing, then, that Treebeard expresses that occupation of Isengard as giving up “wandering about and minding the affairs of Men and Elves” as those appear to have been the very things the Valar had sent him to Middle-earth to do and which suggests that, by the time he took charge of Isengard, about 250 years before the present story, Saruman was already on his way to the corruption so evident in his appeal to Gandalf. 

We don’t really know when the moral rot first set in, but we can certainly understand what pushed it along:  the “Orthanc-stone”, one of the palantiri, the so-called “seeing-stones”, of which one was established at Isengard and came into the hands of Saruman, much to his ruin.

(a second Hildebrandts)

The stone provided a direct connection to Sauron, and so, if nothing else, this must have sped that corruption.  We have only to hear Sauron’s direction to Pippin, however:

“Tell Saruman that this dainty is not for him.  I will send for it at once.  Do you understand?  Say just that!” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 11, “The Palantir”)

to understand that, if Saruman believes, as he assures Gandalf, that they—really he—can control Sauron, he is completely deceived.  Sauron is so much the master that he doesn’t even bother dealing with Saruman directly, ordering someone he clearly believes to be a nonentity to pass a message on.

In this way we see that Saruman’s learning the ways of the Enemy has brought him too close to that very enemy, allowing the enemy to gain a knowledge of which Saruman appears to be completely unaware:  a knowledge of Saruman’s own weakness—vanity, which makes him believe that only he is a “man of craft”—or, as he puts it, “the Wise”—and powerful enough to deal with Sauron.  Even so, he needs help, and here we see where his quest for knowledge has ultimately taken him:

“Why not?  The Ruling Ring?  If we could command that, then the Power would pass to us.  That is why I brought you here.  For I have many eyes in my service, and I believe that you know where this precious thing now lies.  Or why do the Nine ask for the Shire, and what is your business there?”

From being, as Gandalf has said, “the greatest of my order”, who had gathered great learning for the goal of countering the evil which has come into Middle-earth, he is now one who, swollen with arrogance, believes that he can use his knowledge not for the good for which he had originally employed it, but as a tool to help him to replace one form of evil with another, all the while never realizing that he has become no more than a tool himself. 

As ever, thanks for reading.

Stay well,

Don’t just do no evil, but, as Gandalf would encourage us, do positive good,

And know that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

“An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless…”

(W.B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium”)

As ever, welcome, dear readers.

“I dislike Allegory—the conscious and intentional allegory…” Tolkien once wrote in a letter to Milton Waldman of the publisher Collins (see letter to Milton Waldman, “late in 1951” in Letters, 145) so, although he was flattered by being included in the company of Spenser (see letter to Rayner Unwin, 13 May, 1954, Letters, 181), I wonder what he might have said about how this posting originated.  (I also wonder how he felt about his friend, C.S. Lewis’

1936 volume, The Allegory of Love.)

I have been slowly making my way through Edmund Spenser’s (1552-1599)

The Faerie Queene.

(This is the original 3-book publication of 1590—he then published a second 6-book edition in 1596, but never succeeded in completing his original 12-book plan.)

To say that it’s allegorical is about as understated as saying that Hamlet is about indecision or that Macbeth is about ambition gone wrong.  Spenser himself cheerfully described his work as “cloudily enwrapped in Allegoricall devises”, the whole purpose being “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline” by embodying “the image of a brave knight, perfected in the twelve private morall vertues, as Aristotle hath devised…” (This is all extracted from his dedicatory letter to Sir Walter Raleigh).  His heroes are faced by figures with names like “Disdayne”, in books with subtitles like “The Legend of Sir Guyon.  Or Of Temperance”, suggesting that, whereas the volume as a whole is “cloudily enwrapped”, the episodes themselves are clearly all about testing various virtues.

I’ve just finished Book Two (that’s about 340 pages in—this is not a short work, even if only half-finished) and have followed the adventures of Sir Guyon and his adviser, called “the Palmer”

—that is, the pilgrim, as medieval pilgrims sometimes brought back souvenir palms from their arduous trip to the Holy Land.

Pilgrims could pick up other such souvenirs at various shrines, such as this badge, depicting the shrine of St Thomas a Becket, from Canterbury. 

Also characteristic of palmers/pilgrims was the staff, which could be used for everything from aiding in long hikes to chasing off potential robbers,

and it was this object which caught my attention.  At the end of Book Two, Sir Guyon finally defeats Acrasia (something like “Moralweakness”), an enchantress who embodies seduction and sensual pleasure and whose power turns men into beasts.  When Guyon destroys her bower, the Palmer uses his staff to turn such men back into themselves:

“Streight way he with his vertuous staffe them stroke,

And straight of beasts they comely men became…”

(The Faerie Queene, Book Two, Canto XII, Stanza 86—earlier in the Canto, the Palmer calmed the sea and its monsters with his staff)

This immediately reminded me, as I’m sure Spenser wanted me to be, of Odyssey, Book 10, where Circe had used a magical potion and her rhabdos, which commonly means a staff in Greek, like the staff which rhapsodes used to beat time when they recited epic, like the Odyssey,

to enchant Odysseus’ men.

(This appears to be an illustration from a late-Renaissance French illustration of the Odyssey and I love the caption:  “Companions of Ulysses in Piggly Form”.)

Odysseus himself was saved from this enchantment in part by the counsel of Hermes (his Roman name Mercury),

who carries his own staff, the kerykion (called by the Romans caduceus), and it’s surely no coincidence that Spenser tells us:

“Of that same wood it fram’d was cunningly,

Of which Caduceus whilome was made,

Caduceus the rod of Mercury,

With which he wonts the Stygian realms inuade,

Through ghastly horrour, and eternall shade;

Th’infernall feends with it he can asswage,

And Orcus tame, whom nothing can perswade,

And rule the Furyes, when they most do rage:

Such virtue in his staffe had eke this Palmer sage.”

(The Faerie Queene, Book Two, Canto XII, Stanza 41)

And these staves (the plural of staff) of power reminded me of another staff, of which its owner once said:

“I am old.  If I may not lean on my stick as I go, then I will sit out here, until it pleases Theoden to hobble out himself to speak with me.”

(The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 6, “The King of the Golden Hall”)

This is Gandalf, of course, who has been associated with that “stick” since we first saw him in Chapter One of The Hobbit.

(the Hildebrandts)

Hama, the doorwarden, was, of course, correct in saying, “The staff in the hand of a wizard may be more than a prop for age…”  as Gandalf has previously broken the bridge of Khazan-dum in Moria with that very staff,

(the Hildebrandts)

and will knock Grima, Theoden’s treacherous counselor, flat with it.

(Alan Lee)

And, as Gandalf is aware of what lies in his staff, he knows the power and authority in Saruman’s staff, and so Gandalf will snap it, ruining Saruman’s ability to continue to work the evil he has planned.

(?  I don’t know the artist for this, alas!)

Seeing all of these staves, which are more than they appear at first, we might then complete Yeats’ lines like this:

“An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A ragged coat upon a stick, unless

That stick has something of a magic sting

Which only palmers—wizards, too—possess.”

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

Stay well,

If a palmer offers to guide you, stick with him,

And know that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

As always, dear readers, welcome.

We know that Tolkien had an interest in dragons from an early age.  In a letter to W.H. Auden of 7 June, 1955, he explains:

“I first tried to write a story when I was about seven.  It was about a dragon.  I remember nothing about it except a philological fact.  My mother said nothing about the dragon, but pointed out that one could not say ‘a green great dragon’, but had to say ‘a great green dragon’.  I wondered why, and still do.” (letter to W.H. Auden, 7 June, 1955, Letters, 214).

I suspect that this interest had been sparked by a book which we know was available to him in childhood:  Andrew Lang’s (1844-1912) The Red Fairy Book (1890),

the last tale being “The Story of Sigurd”, in which the title character lies in ambush and kills a dragon, Fafnir.

Fafnir has a trait which would be familiar to anyone who has read The Hobbit and remembers Smaug (could you forget him?):  he lies on a hoard.

This would also be familiar, of course, to anyone who knows Beowulf and, as JRRT tells us, that Old English poem was “among my most valued sources” for The Hobbit (see Letters,31).  It’s interesting to note, however, that Beowulf’s dragon, though fire-breathing  and covetous, like Smaug, is, in fact, mute, whereas Smaug is all-too-eloquent—as is, in fact, Fafnir, although his dialogue is limited to cursing his killer and putting a curse on his hoard, speech suggesting a further influence of The Red Fairy Book, perhaps.  (Here, by the way, is a copy of The Red Fairy Book for you:  https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Red_Fairy_Book )

Unlike, JRRT, I’ve never had much interest in dragons and the reason may lie in my reaction to the statement I once read somewhere that “all kids love dinosaurs”.  I am constitutionally averse to any statement which says things like “all x loves—or hates—y” in general, but, in this case, it’s more personal:  I was one kid who never loved dinosaurs.

When small, I was taken to museums where very large and bony examples were on display

and yes, I would agree with whoever took me that they were very large.

(I love the original name of this one:  “Albertosaurus”, which makes me imagine an Irish member of the family—“Albert O’Saurus”)

At the same time, dinosaurs seemed to me to be pretty much just that:  large. 

(I’m aware that there were very small ones, too, but the ones I was being shown were pointed out for their size and potential fierceness—and just look at those teeth!)

In fact, when it came to past beasts, my childhood favorite was the wooly mammoth

and once I even entered one in my school science fair, “frozen in ice” (it was an elephant model that I’d covered in glued-on hair and encased in a cardboard box covered in plastic sheeting—it didn’t win).

And maybe that’s why I’ve never been taken with dragons.  (I’m probably one of the few readers/viewers of A Game of Thrones, for example, who found Daenerys’ beasts less interesting than the fencing master, Syrio Forel—who was killed much too soon.)

The first dragon I actually met was probably one which my childhood hero, Prince Valiant,

once fought

and, of course, this put him squarely into the St George and the dragon tradition,

(by Vittore Carpaccio, c.1465-1525)

but which is, in fact a tradition which goes all the way back to Perseus rescuing Andromeda from a sea monster

(by Piero di Cosimo, 1462-1521)

and Jason stealing the Golden Fleece from the Sleepless Dragon.

(from an Apulian krater—wine-mixing bowl—c.300BC)

All of which stories tended to make me think in terms of:

1. dragons hoard hoards and will fight to defend them

2. dragons may consume princesses or other unlucky damsels (a variant—or perhaps a commentary on a dragon’s regular diet?)

3. among their other jobs, heroes may be required to rescue princesses and exterminate said dragons, or at least steal something from them

And that was my view—or almost my view—with one exception, a short story by Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932), from his collection Dream Days (1898).

This is entitled “The Reluctant Dragon” and it concerns a boy, St. George, and a creature far from Greek mythology or Beowulf.  If, like Smaug, he talks, he has no hoard, shows no desire for fire-breathing or edible royalty and is, in fact, a peaceable poet, and not in the least interested in heroes or heroics.

(If you’re a reader of The Wind in the Willows or Pooh, you’ll recognize at once that this is an illustration by E.H. Shepard.  And here’s a copy of the book for you, although this is an earlier edition, with pictures by another wonderful illustrator, Maxfield Parrish:  https://www.gutenberg.org/files/35187/35187-h/35187-h.htm )

This creature (nameless, in the story, which would make his publishing his poetry rather difficult, unless he was willing to be “Anon.”) has always suggested to me that there was the possibility that my limited view of dragons might be modified, given the right dragon.

Then, a few weeks ago, I was given this by one of my graduate student teaching assistants—

If you read this blog regularly, you’ve probably picked up that, among other kinds of adventure stories I read, I enjoy those set in the Napoleonic era, like the novels of Bernard Cornwell, which follow the career of an infantryman, Richard Sharpe,

or those of C.S. Forester, whose hero is Horatio Hornblower, a British naval officer.

Like Hornblower, the hero of this series, Will Laurence, is a naval officer, but his life takes a sudden shift when his ship attacks and captures a French ship carrying a very large egg:  a dragon’s egg, in fact.  And suddenly, we’re in an alternate Napoleonic world in which Britain, as in our history, is at war with Bonaparte, and much of the fighting takes place at sea, but there is another element:  both sides have not only armies and fleets, but squadrons of dragons, and the series (there are 9 novels so far, along with a volume of short stories) follows Laurence and his dragon, Temeraire (named after a famous warship, HMS Temeraire) through a wide variety of adventures.

(A marvelous painting by Geoff Hunt—here’s his gallery—https://www.scrimshawgallery.com/product-category/prints/geoff-hunt/  )

I’ve just finished the first volume, which is mostly introductory in nature, but provides the reader with a sense of military dragons—how they’re trained, equipped, and how they’re used in aerial combat.  That’s a lot to cover in one book, but the author has thought out and carefully described everything in such a way as to make this alternate almost believable—including, at the book’s conclusion, an excerpt from a late-18^th century naturalist’s treatise on dragons.

So here are different dragons:  non-hoarders, not hungry for the nobility, sentient and talkative, and involved in a global war between Napoleon and the nascent British Empire.  I may have to rethink my feelings about dragons—but not dinosaurs.

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

Stay well,

Keep away from tar pits,

And remember that there’s always

MTCIDC

O

Welcome, dear readers, to what I suspect is going to be a rather odd posting—being a sort of footnote to one I uploaded two weeks ago.

That posting was called “Phobe”, but I’ve consistently misread it myself as “Phoebe”.  Phoebe?

Phoebes can be birds.  Here in eastern North America we have the Eastern Phoebe (Sayornis phoebe)

and, in western North America, there’s the Western Phoebe (Sayornis nigricans).

(For more on phoebes, see:

https://www.audubon.org/field-guide/bird/eastern-phoebe

https://www.audubon.org/field-guide/bird/black-phoebe )

If you hear the distinctive call of the phoebe, you’ll understand where the name came from: 

As you can hear, it’s like a little quiet moan:   “Phoe-be, Phoe-be”.

My first acquaintance with the name, in the masculine form, however, was not from ornithology, but from Victor Hugo (1802-1885),

and his 1831 historical novel Notre Dame de Paris, 1482,

better known in English as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, probably after the title of its first English translation, by Frederick Shoberl (1775-1853) in 1833.

(And here’s what I suspect is the first American edition, from 1834:  https://archive.org/details/hunchbacknotred00shobgoog/page/n6/mode/2up  For a free, more modern translation, see the 1888 version by the remarkable Isabel Hapgood:  https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2610/2610-h/2610-h.htm )

If you’re familiar with the 1996 Disney film,

you’ll have very little idea of the dark and tragic novel which is Hugo’s work, but you will recognize Captain Phoebus–

although this Phoebus is not Hugo’s, Hugo’s being arrogant and self-centered and a social-climber, as well.

This is the first Phoebus I knew, however, from a Classics Illustrated I had as a child.

As I grew up and studied Classical literature, I soon learned that Phoebus was one of the Greco-Roman god, Apollo’s,

titles, “bright/shining”, which he shares with his twin sister, Artemis, as Phoebe,

perhaps because of their relationship with sun and moon.

Other than the divinities, however, it seems that I have rather a sad collection of Phoebus/Phoebe.

The first is “Cousin Phoebe”, a young relative of the last descendants of the ancient Salem Pyncheon family, who comes to live with them in that haunted place, the House of the Seven Gables,

scene of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s (1804-1864) 1851 novel of the same name.

The house was built on ground stolen from its original owner, who, accused of witchcraft by the very judge (an early Pyncheon) who coveted the ground, was hanged—but just before he died, pointed to the judge and declared “God will give him blood to drink”, cursing the judge and his descendants and, in the process, the house itself, in which the judge soon dies mysteriously, just after it’s built.  It’s my favorite Hawthorne novel and you can read the original 1851 publication here:  https://archive.org/details/housesevengable02hawtgoog/page/n10/mode/2up

Phoebe herself is rather a sunray in such a gloomy place, but the story with its curse and its haunted descendants is still a dark story for a sunbeam.

My second is Phoebe Meryll

(the original actress, Jessie Bond)

to be found in Gilbert (1836-1911) and Sullivan’s (1842-1900) 1888 operetta The Yeomen of the Guard.

(a rather grim poster from the 1897 revival)

Gilbert and Sullivan operettas usually open with a jolly chorus of happy sailors

or even happier pirates (they’ve been passing around the sherry)

or even Japanese court gentlemen,

but the serious chord of Yeomen is struck in the very opening, where Phoebe appears by herself on stage, spinning like Gretchen, in Goethe’s Faust, and singing of the unhappiness of love.  (You can hear a beautifully-sung version of this by Abigail Coy of the Gilbert and Sullivan Society of Houston here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OE634hUVhwE&list=RDOE634hUVhwE&start_radio=1 )

This sets the scene where, eventually, to save the lives of her father and brother, and even her own life, she agrees to marry the loathsome Wilfred Shadbolt, the darkest character in the story.

But I have one more phoebe, which brings us back to the opening of this posting.  It’s a poem by Robert Frost (1874-1963), “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things”, the last poem in his 1923 collection, New Hampshire—

Image17:  frost

“The house had gone to bring again
To the midnight sky a sunset glow.
Now the chimney was all of the house that stood,
Like a pistil after the petals go.

The barn opposed across the way,
That would have joined the house in flame
Had it been the will of the wind, was left
To bear forsaken the place’s name.

No more it opened with all one end
For teams that came by the stony road
To drum on the floor with scurrying hoofs
And brush the mow with the summer load.

The birds that came to it through the air
At broken windows flew out and in,
Their murmur more like the sigh we sigh
From too much dwelling on what has been.

Yet for them the lilac renewed its leaf,
And the aged elm, though touched with fire;
And the dry pump flung up an awkward arm;
And the fence post carried a strand of wire.

For them there was really nothing sad.
But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept,
One had to be versed in country things
Not to believe the phoebes wept.”

Well, I said that this was going to be a rather odd posting, didn’t I?

Thanks for reading, as ever.

Stay well,

Remember to put lightning rods on your barn roof,

And know that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

PS

If you enjoyed the Frost poem, here’s the whole volume for you—in a first edition:  https://www.gutenberg.org/files/58611/58611-h/58611-h.htm