As ever, dear readers, welcome.

Although Tolkien often protested that The Lord of the Rings was never meant to be allegorical (allegory being something he didn’t care for), yet:

“That there is no allegory does not, of course, say there is no applicability.  There always is.  And since I have not made the struggle unequivocal…there is I suppose applicability in my story to present times.”  (from a letter to Herbert Schiro, 17 November, 1957, Letters, 262)

As a case in point, let me cite for you Lotho Sackville-Baggins.

The title of this posting, although it may appear to be the acronym for some large, anonymous corporation, is actually a piece of shorthand adapted from one of Tolkien’s letters:

“We knew Hitler was a vulgar and ignorant little cad, in addition to any other defects (or the source of them)…” (letter to Christopher Tolkien, 23-25 September, 1944, Letters, 93)

That Tolkien had no love for Hitler, his view of him he makes very clear in an earlier letter written to his second son, Michael:

“Anyway, I have in this War a burning private grudge—which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22:  against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler…”  (letter to Michael Tolkien, 9 June, 1941, Letters, 55)

Tolkien goes on in that later letter, however:

… but there seem to be many v. and i.l. cads who don’t speak German…”

and this leads us in a very interesting direction:

“…and who given the same chance would show most of the other Hitlerian characteristics.”

This, in turn, is what leads me to think immediately of Lotho, the son of Otho and Lobelia Sackville-Baggins, whom we first see in the last chapter of The Hobbit, where, having believed that Bilbo was dead, they seem to have hoped to inherit Bag End, appearing at the auction of its contents and, to Bilbo’s mind, intent upon acquiring more than the real estate:

“Many of his silver spoons mysteriously disappeared and were never accounted for.  Personally he suspected the Sackville-Bagginses.”

They were clearly personally affronted that Bilbo survived his adventure:

“On their side they never admitted that the returned Baggins was genuine, and they were not on friendly terms with Bilbo ever after.  They really had wanted to live in his nice hobbit-hole so very much.”  (The Hobbit, Chapter 19, “The Last Stage”)

Although not on friendly terms, perhaps, they were invited to Bilbo’s birthday party, but they presumed upon this, when Bilbo had disappeared, to confront Frodo:

“The Sackville-Bagginses were rather offensive.  They began by offering him bad bargain-bargain prices (as between friends) for various valuable and unlabelled things.  When Frodo replied that the only things specially directed by Bilbo were being given away, they said the whole affair was very fishy.

‘Only one thing is clear to me,’ said Otho, ‘and that is that you are doing exceedingly well out of it.  I insist on seeing the will.”

And now we see what has been festering since that moment, sixty years before, when Bilbo had reappeared to stop the auction:

“Otho would have been Bilbo’s heir, but for the adoption of Frodo.”

He reads the will, finds it ironclad, and is more than disappointed:

“ ‘Foiled again!’ he said to his wife.  ‘And after waiting sixty years.  Spoons?  Fiddlesticks!’  He snapped his fingers under Frodo’s nose and stumped off.  But Lobelia was not so easily got rid of.  A little later Frodo came out of the study to see how things were getting on, and found her still about the place, investigating nooks and corners, and tapping the floors.  He escorted her firmly off the premises, after he relieved her of several small (but rather valuable) articles that had somehow fallen inside her umbrella.”

(Otho might have been waiting for sixty years to gain Bag End, but Bilbo had not forgotten his suspicion of the Sackville-Bagginses’ earlier behavior, leaving a gift for her:

“For LOBELIA SACKVILLE-BAGGINS, as a PRESENT on a case of silver spoons.”  The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 1, “A Long-expected Party”)

Although Otho had died in the interim, Lobelia survived to buy—not inherit—Bag End, and it was still in her—, or rather, her son, Lotho’s—hands when Saruman, aka “Sharkey”, arrived to continue his plan either to convert the Shire into an early industrial center or to ruin it (Tolkien might have said, “Both”, considering his aversion to what the Industrial Revolution had done to his beloved countryside).  

(Denis Gordeev—for an interesting article on Soviet artists’ attempts to bring Tolkien to Russia, see:  https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/07/24/soviet-union-tolkien-art-dissidents/  )

In the meantime, Lotho—the son of rather less than decent folk, his own popularity in the Shire gauged by his nickname, “Pimple”—has somehow done very well for himself:

“ ‘It all began with Pimple, as we call him,’ said Farmer Cotton; ‘and it began as soon as you’d gone off, Mr. Frodo.  He’d funny ideas, had Pimple.  Seems he wanted to own everything himself, and then order other folk about.  It soon came out that he already did own a sight more than was good for him; and he was always grabbing more, though where he got the money was a mystery:  mills and malt-houses and inns, and farms, and leaf-plantations.  He’d already bought Sandyman’s mill before he came to Bag End, seemingly.’ “

Things quickly went from bad to worse, as:

“ ‘A lot of Men, ruffians mostly, came with great wagons, some to carry off the goods south-away, and others to stay.  And more came.  And before we knew where we were they were planted here and there all over the Shire, and were felling trees and digging and building themselves sheds and houses just as they liked.  At first goods and damage was paid for by Pimple; but soon they began lording it around and taking what they wanted.

Then there was a bit of trouble, but not enough.  Old Will the Mayor set off for Bag End to protest, but he never got there.  Ruffians laid hands on him and took and locked him up in a hole in Michel Delving, and there he is now.  And after that, it would be after New Year, there wasn’t no more Mayor, and Pimple called himself Chief Shirriff, or just Chief, and did as he liked…’ “ (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 8, “The Scouring of the Shire”)

So, from being simply the son of greedy, self-important hobbits, Lotho (and, yes, that has to be a joke on “Loathe-0”) has become, at least until Saruman appears, the dictator of the Shire:

“ ‘…and if anyone got “uppish” as they called it, they followed Will.’ “

Earlier in this same letter to Christopher, Tolkien had written:

“There was a solemn article in the local paper seriously advocating systematic exterminating of the entire German nation as the only proper course after military victory:  because, if you please, they are rattlesnakes, and don’t know the difference between good and evil!”

Tolkien, who was a decent and extremely fair-minded man, refuted that, saying:

“The Germans have just as much right to declare the Poles and Jews exterminable vermin, subhuman, as we have to select the Germans:  in other words, no right, whatever they have done.”

At the same time, he was well aware that those who may appear ordinary, but who harbor such terrible ideas, may, in time come into positions of control, like Lotho:

“The Vulgar and Ignorant Cad is not yet a boss with power; but he is a very great deal nearer to becoming one in this green and pleasant isle than he was.”

And, if such thinking weren’t wicked enough in itself, there is the added danger:

“You can’t fight the Enemy with his own Ring without turning into an Enemy; but unfortunately Gandalf’s wisdom seems long ago to have passed with him into the True West…”

This seems too much, even for Tolkien, horrified that letters which sound like Nazi propaganda translated into English should appear in the public press and has already written to Christopher that:

“Still you’re not the only one who want to let off steam or bust, sometimes; and I could make steam, if I opened the throttle, compared with which (as the Queen said to Alice) this would be only a scent-spray.”

(a half-quotation from Through the Looking Glass, 1871, where, in Chapter 2, Alice has a conversation with the Red Queen in which the Queen several times uses the expression, “I’ve seen/heard…compared with which…”)

But perhaps there is some consolation in the ultimate fate of Lotho and of his master, Saruman?  “Where is that miserable Lotho hiding?” Merry had asked and Saruman later answered:

“ ‘But did I hear someone ask where poor Lotho is hiding?  You know, don’t you, Worm?  Will you tell them?’

Wormtongue cowered down and whimpered:  ‘No, no!’

‘Then I will,’ said Saruman.  ‘Worm killed your Chief, poor little fellow, you nice little Boss.  Didn’t you, Worm?  Stabbed him in his sleep, I believe.  Buried him, I hope; though Worm has been very hungry lately…”

This is too much, even for Grima/Wormtongue:

“…suddenly Wormtongue rose up, drawing a hidden knife, and with a snarl like a dog he sprang on Saruman’s back, jerked his head back, cut his throat, and with a yell ran off down the lane.” 

In 1944, Tolkien had no idea what would happen to Hitler and his allies by 1945, but one wonders what he might have said about applicability then?

Thanks for reading, as always.

Stay well,

Beware of the self-righteous,

And remember that there’s always

MTCIDC

O

As always, welcome, dear readers.

In his own field, Tolkien was, not surprisingly, a very well-read scholar, and, in certain areas beyond his field, like Celtic Studies, he was informed, if not expert. 

Oronzo Cilli’s wonderfully detailed work, Tolkien’s Library,  An Annotated Checklist,

using a variety of sources, from correspondence, to the comments of his friends, to books surviving in university collections, to sale catalogues, to library books recorded to have been checked out by him, supplies us with hundreds of titles owned or consulted by Tolkien.

For a person who often wrote that he was overwhelmed with academic work year-round, however, Tolkien appears to have enough leisure to accumulate and read quite a number of non-scholarly works, as well, and leafing through the pages of Cilli’s book, one finds everything from Owen Barfield’s The Silver Trumpet

to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake

(although Cilli misspells it with an apostrophe, which Joyce intentionally didn’t employ)

to E.A. Wyke-Smith’s The Marvellous Land of Snergs.

(missing its definite article in Cilli)

Among his listings are these:

Busman’s Honeymoon,

Clouds of Witness,

The Five Red Herrings,

(also missing its definite article in Cilli)

Gaudy Night,

Have His Carcase,

Murder Must Advertise,

Strong Poison,

The Nine Tailors,

The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club,

and Whose Body?,

all detective novels by Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957).

In these novels, the detective is a wealthy, titled man, Lord Peter Wimsey,

who has a kind of Watson in his personal valet, Bunter (a sergeant in his regiment in the Great War, who rescued him on the battlefield), and who eventually marries—of all people—a young mystery writer, Harriet Vane, after he rescues her from the gallows in Strong Poison (1930)–although not immediately.  In a very believable rejection, Harriet refuses him at first because she doesn’t believe that gratitude is enough of a basis for a lasting relationship.  It takes two more adventures—Have His Carcase, 1932, and Gaudy Night, 1935, before she finally agrees.  And, in Sayers’ last Wimsey novel, Busman’s Honeymoon, 1937, we see them just after their marriage.

Besides being a successful mystery writer, Sayers was also a dramatist, essayist, and translator, her major work being her highly-annotated translation of the first two parts of Dante’s Commedia (the third part, unfinished at her death, was completed by Barbara Reynolds). 

Both Tolkien and C.S. Lewis knew and liked her, as Humphrey Carpenter tells us (see The Inklings, 189), and, among her works, her series of Christian radio plays, The Man Born to Be King (1941-42), impressed them, but Lewis tried Gaudy Night and didn’t enjoy it, and Tolkien, who appears to have owned and read almost all of her novels (only missing from the list is Unnatural Death, 1927) ultimately wrote this:

“I could not stand Gaudy Night,  I followed P. Wimsey from his attractive beginnings so far, by which time I conceived a loathing for him (and his creatix) not surpassed by any other character in literature known to me, unless by his Harriet.  The honeymoon one (Busman’s H.?) was worse.  I was sick.”  (airgraph to Christopher Tolkien, 25 May 1944, Letters, 82)

What had gone wrong?  Gaudy Night (1935) is set at a reunion of Harriet Vane’s imaginary Oxford college, “Shrewsbury College”, based upon Sayers’ actual college, Somerville, and concerns mysterious acts of anti-feminist vandalism which come to border on open violence.  The college head invites Harriet, as a former member of the college, to investigate, which she does against rather significant opposition from some of the faculty.  The plot also concerns Peter Wimsey, who, although off on a diplomatic mission for the British government at the beginning of the story, returns in time to participate in the detecting of the guilty party and her motive later in the novel.  We don’t know why this turned Tolkien off—perhaps Lewis’ reaction?  Perhaps the love story and Harriet’s ultimate agreement to marry Peter?  (He did say that he’d come to loathe her, but doesn’t mention her appearance in two earlier novels.)  And what had happened to his liking for Sayers herself?  Such extreme reactions seem as mysterious as Sayers’ novels and perhaps it would take a literary detective of the quality of Peter Wimsey himself to unravel it.

Thanks for reading, as always.

Stay well,

The science of deduction or induction—which does Holmes practice really?

And know that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC,

O

PS

Unlike Tolkien, I’ve always enjoyed Sayers’ novels, Harriet Vane being a particular favorite character—I wish that Sayers had written at least one book in which she solves a mystery on her own—and, if you’d like to know more about her and her work, try:  https://www.sayers.org.uk/  If Peter Wimsey interests you, besides the books, there are two very good and very different television series available:

1. Ian Carmichael played the character in a series created in the 1970s

2. Edward Petherbridge was Wimsey in a briefer series in the late 1980s

There are partisans for each.  I enjoy both, Carmichael having the kind of bounce and flair with quotation which makes Wimsey appealing, and Petherbridge displays the inherent melancholy which is Wimsey’s other side (he still has nightmares about the Great War).

Welcome, as ever, dear readers.

Although Tolkien never wanted readers to see The Lord of the Rings as allegory about his own time—writing to Joanna de Bortadano that “my story is not an allegory of Atomic power” (letter to Joanna de Bortadano, April, 1956, Letters, 246), he also wrote to Rhona Beare that, “I have, I suppose, constructed an imaginary time, but kept my feet on my own mother-earth for place” (letter to Rhona Beare, 14 October, 1958, Letters, 283) and, in the years in which he was writing the novel, it would have been difficult not to have felt some influence from what was going on around him in that place.

This certainly applies, I would suggest, when it comes to the words of the Mouth of Sauron,

(Douglas Beekman)

dictating terms to Gandalf:

“The rabble of Gondor and its deluded allies shall withdraw at once beyond the Anduin, first taking oaths never again to assail Sauron the Great in arms, open or secret.  All lands east of the Anduin shall be Sauron’s for ever, solely.  West of the Anduin as far as the Misty Mountains and the Gap of Rohan shall be tributary to Mordor, and men there shall bear no weapons, but shall have leave to govern their own affairs.  But they shall help to rebuild Isengard which they have wantonly destroyed, and that shall be Sauron’s, and there his lieutenant shall dwell:  not Saruman, but one more worthy of trust.”  (The Return of  the King, Book Five, Chapter 10, “The Black Gate Opens”)

Although it would lead to a permanent cessation of combat, the armistice of 11 November, 1918, agreed upon in a railway car in Compiegne in northern France,

was not a surrender on the part of the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, Turkey), but only an agreement to cease active engagement with the Allies.  As fighting stopped, more or less, at that time, at least on the Western Front, people in the West, especially soldiers, certainly rejoiced as if the Great War/World War I had actually ended.

The real surrender occurred the next June, however, in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, outside Paris.

As might be expected from a large gathering of disparate powers, there was a great deal of wrangling, of pushing various agendas, and argument over how Germany, which was almost universally blamed for the outbreak of war in 1914, was to be dealt with.  The final form of the treaty was complex, but here are some of the main points:

Reading through these points, and many more, it’s hard not to think that Lieutenant Tolkien

would not have also read through them with interest—note things like:

1. disarmament

2. loss of territory

3. to which we might add outside control of territory, in that the Allies gave themselves the right to occupy the heavy industrial areas called the Rhineland and the Ruhr valley until 1934 (the occupation, in fact, was ended in 1930),

as well as returning to France territory which she had lost to German troops in the War of 1870-1, Alsace and Lorraine.

The severe terms of this treaty, it has often been written, were a major reason for the rise of Hitler and the rearmament of Germany in the 1930s

and even a reason for a new war, even longer than the first, from 1939 to 1945, as Hitler worked his way west, in what was called a Blitzkrieg, or “lightning war”, which, in late spring, 1940, rolled over Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, and moved into France, where it rapidly defeated both a British expeditionary force and the French army.

The majority of the British, along with a number of Belgian and French soldiers, were rescued at Dunkirk,

but the majority of the French were forced south and then became part of a general armistice, the terms of which would seem familiar to those who remembered the Treaty of Versailles:

“The 1940 Armistice agreement comprised 24 articles, notably: :

n°1 : The French army must immediately lay down its arms

n°2 : The German occupation of a large portion of France.

n°4 : The demobilization of the French army.

n°6 : The heavy armaments of the free French zone are to be delivered in good condition to the Germans. 

n°8 : The French navy is to be demobilized and disarmed.

n°11: Commercial boats must remain in port.

n°12: All planes are grounded.

n°19: Designated German nationals must be handed over to Germany.

n°20: French prisoners of war are to remain in Germany. 

n°24: The armistice agreement remains valid until the signing of a peace treaty”

(from the website Memorial Armistice here:  https://armistice-museum.com/ )

This occupation also sounds much like Sauron’s terms, France initially looking like this—

(for more on the occupation, see an extensive article here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vichy_France#Bibliography )

The terms of the Versailles Treaty were harsh, but their ultimate goal was—or at least some of those involved hoped so—to prevent such horrendous wars in the future (see this detailed article for more:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Versailles ).  The Nazi terms for an armistice were, on the one hand, Hitler’s sneering response to the Treaty of Versailles (he even had it arranged that the terms would be presented and agreed to in the same location—see more at:  https://armistice-museum.com/  ), but, on the other, simply a method to gain control of all of France, its industries, and even its labor force, in time—the condition that the armistice terms would hold until a peace treaty was signed proved totally false, as there was never a treaty.  That artificially-determined border was erased and the Nazis occupied all of France, as this map sequence shows.

And this is in line with something which the narrator tells us of the reaction of Gandalf and his companions to the words of the Mouth of Sauron:

“Looking in the Messenger’s eyes, they read his thought.  He was to be that lieutenant, and gather all that remained of the West under his sway; he would be their tyrant and they his slaves.”

Tolkien, a reluctant civilian during that second war (see his letter to Michael Tolkien of 9 June, 1941, Letters, 55), was always clearly well aware of current events, especially to do with that war (there are over 100 citations to war-related items in Letters alone) and, although he might model Sauron’s terms on what he might have read in 1919 or 1940, I can imagine that it was the terms of the 1940 armistice and their ultimate veracity which was in his mind when he wrote Gandalf’s words in response to the demands of Sauron and his Mouth:

“But as for your terms, we reject them utterly.  Get you gone, for your embassy is over and death is near to you.  We did not come here to waste words in treating with Sauron, faithless and accursed; still less with one of his slaves.  Begone!”

As always, thanks for reading.

Stay well,

Never trust an emissary with his own agenda,

And remember, that, as ever, there is

MTCIDC,

O

Dear Readers, welcome, as always.

This is the 469th posting of Doubtfulsea.com and, with it, this blog enters its tenth year.

This calls for a little rejoicing,

(no peacock, however)

but there’s another reason for rejoicing, as will present itself—or, rather, himself–later.

As I’ve discussed in earlier postings, lthough, in later life, Tolkien enjoyed at least one Shakespeare performance (see a letter to Christopher Tolkien, 28 July, 1944, Letters, 88), as a schoolboy,

(in 1905, with his younger brother, Hilary)

he disliked Shakespeare “cordially” (see letter to W.H. Auden, 7 June, 1955, Letters, 213).  His ire was directed towards two plays in particular:

1. Macbeth, because, as he tells us, he was disappointed that Birnam Wood wasn’t an actual wood which marched on Macbeth’s stronghold, but merely camouflage for Macduff’s soldiers (see  JRRT’s own footnote to his letter to W.H. Auden of 7 June, 1955, Letters, 212)

(modern camouflage, but you get the idea)

2. A Midsummer Night’s Dream because of the miniaturization of the fairies (see his footnote to a letter to Milton Waldman, “late 1951”, Letters, 143, where he remarks:  “…a murrain [plague] on Will Shakespeare and his damned cobwebs”  )

I don’t mind Tolkien’s disappointment about Birnam Wood because it gave us Treebeard and the Ents, to me one of his most marvelous creations,

(Alan Lee)

but, although the “cutsie” aspect of Victorian depictions of fairies, which clearly Tolkien had seen and disliked, as the descendants of Shakespeare’s fairies, I find more than a little disturbing—like this depiction, by Richard “Dicky” Doyle (1824-1883), famous for his fairy illustrations–

it has never stopped me from loving the play and, if you, like me, have Shakespeare in your head (it can get a little crowded in there, I admit, so I exclude dubious things like Henry VIII), you’ll recognize the title of this posting as based upon the opening line of the meeting of the Fairy King and Queen

in Act II of A Midsommer nights dreame, as the First Quarto (1600) spells it.

“Ob. Ill met by moonelight, proud Tytania.

Qu. What, Iealous Oberon? Fairy skippe hence.

I haue forsworne his bedde, and company.

Ob. Tarry, rash wanton. Am not I thy Lord?”

(I really prefer Elizabethan/Jacobean spelling, myself, so, if you’d like to read the play in that edition:  https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/MND_Q1/scene/2.1/index.html  A very mild caution:  if you’re used to modern editions and haven’t used the earliest publications, this Quarto may surprise you, as it has no line numbers, scene or act markers, but just rolls along with no breaks.  It’s actually perfectly easy to read, however, as you’ll see.)

The King of the Fairies is Oberon, a name which is believed to be derived from a Germanic form “alf-rih”, “elf-king/ruler” (you can see the same construction in the name of the Ostrogothic king, Theodoric, which is actually “theuda-reiks”, “people ruler”), but which first appears in the early 13^th century chanson de geste (a kind of heroic poem) of Les Prouesses et faitz du noble Huon de Bourdeaux as Auberon.  (For more on this see :  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huon_of_Bordeaux )Shakespeare may have picked up the name from the early 16th-century  translation by John Bouchier, Lord Berners, The Boke of Duke Huon of Burdeux (printed about 1534—you can read the Early English Text Society edition of 1882 here :  https://ia600502.us.archive.org/35/items/TheBokeOfDukeHuonOfBurdeux1/The_Boke_of_Duke_Huon_of_Burdeux_1.pdf or an 1895 retelling, in the style of William Morris here :  https://archive.org/details/huonofbordeauxdo00bernuoft/page/n9/mode/2up ) It’s interesting that Auberon is diminutive, but handsome, in the Huon story, so perhaps Shakespeare scaled down the rest of the fairies to fit him ?  (Other Elizabethan/Jacobean authors also depict the fairies as tiny—see, for example,  Michael Drayton’s Nymphidia, 1627, which Tolkien hated—On Fairy Stories–and which you can read here :  https://archive.org/details/selectionfrompoe00dani/page/124/mode/2up ) 

If you know the play, you probably also know the incidental music which Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) composed for a performance in of it in Berlin in 1842, having written an overture years before, in 1826, when he was 17 (I almost put an exclamation point there).  So you can hear something of what audiences in 1826 would have heard, here’s a really beautiful performance of that overture on instruments of the period, conducted by Franz Brueggen :  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxC17tNhN7c

At about the same time, another Romantic composer, Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826),

(This is sometimes cited as the first illustration of a conductor using the equivalent of a baton to conduct.)

was in London, creating an opera based upon a libretto loosely founded upon that 13th century French poem of Huon.  That libretto was written by a man often thought of as the forerunner to W.S. Gilbert in English comic operetta, James Robinson Planche (1796-1880),

but who was actually a dynamo of the Georgian and early Victorian theatre in general, being involved in everything from authentic historical costuming to introducing vampires to the English stage in 1820.

The libretto combines spoken dialogue with music, the kind of opera which the French call an opera comique, like Bizet’s (1838-1875) Carmen, 1875, as opposed to an opera completely sung, opera lyrique, or grand opera, and the plot probably would seem pretty weak to us (you can read a summary here :  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon_(Weber) ), but it was an immediate success in 1826,

although von Weber died in London shortly afterwards.  Here’s the overture to it, again with period instruments, conducted by John Eliot Gardiner : //www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHI7Yc66SFk

so that you can hear a little of what excited London theatre-goers.

Now, you are probably wondering, how does all of this, as interesting as I hope you find it, tie in with that idea of festivity?

Back in May, I posted a piece which ended on the sad note that my 9-year-old Bernese Mountain Dog, Bellerophon, had left us (see Beato Te, 31 May, 2023).

A month or so ago, a new Berner appeared, a 2-month-old puppy, named—I’ll bet you’ll guess this already–Oberon.

At 3 months, he’s curious, lively, and promises, if not to be a powerful fairy king, like his namesake, certainly to provide as much delight as the Shakespeare play from which his name comes.

As always, thanks for reading.

Stay well,

Beware the Puck,

And remember that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

PS

If you liked the image of Puck and the meeting of Oberon and Tytania earlier in the posting, you might have a look at Arthur Rackham’s 1908 illustrated version of Shakepeare’s play here:  https://ia902806.us.archive.org/33/items/midsummernightsd00shakrich/midsummernightsd00shakrich.pdf

Dear readers, welcome, as always.

In my last, I was beginning a review of the new Indiana Jones film.

In that last, I began with background on just what that film was based upon and now I want to discuss the film itself.  (And, considering how much of it is revealed here, I suppose that I should shout SPOILER ALERT!!! in case you haven’t seen it.  If you haven’t, go, and I hope that, afterwards, you’ll find my two postings useful in your own thoughts about the film.)

It had been long known that this would be the final Indiana Jones film.  The lead, after all, is now 80 (though, in the Indiana Jones chronology, he was born 1 July, 1899, meaning that, at the time of this film, he’s actually supposed to be 70) and, though clearly a tough old bird, as he adlibbed in Raiders, “It’s not the years:  it’s the mileage”. 

The questions facing the creators then, must have been things like:

1. how can we end the series in a memorable way?

2. what will be the goal?

3. who will be the villains?

4. when will it take place?

We’ll begin in reverse order. 

There was already a certain time-frame established within the series, the first three films taking place in the 1930s (The Temple of Doom in 1935, Raiders in 1936, and The Last Crusade in 1938).

The next film, Crystal Skull, takes place in 1957—so it would be natural, then, that the action of this final film might happen beyond that time.  And, in fact, it is set in 1969, the year of the first moon landing. 

(After 1969, although there won’t be any further adventures, Dr. Jones survives perhaps another 25 years, as the made-for-television “The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles”, shows him alive in the early 1990s.  See this article for a useful chronology:  https://www.looper.com/763148/the-entire-indiana-jones-timeline-explained/ )

Once we’ve established the time, then choosing the villains may be a little easier:  in the 1930s, the Nazis were a ready possibility—although Temple chose, instead, a sinister prime minister of a small Indian hill state.  In 1957, we’re in the middle of the Cold War, so Soviet agents make sense in Skull.  In 1969, it could still have been the Soviets, but the writers, in a sense, returned to the time of the first films, and so the villain is, in fact, a one-time Nazi scientist—and a particular kind of scientist, of a sort which both the East and the West were grabbing up at the end of the war:  those with a specialty in rocketry, like Wernher von Braun (1912-1977).

It’s not surprising, then, that this one-time Nazi scientist is involved in the “space race” of the period, in the pay of the US Government (which is about to award him a medal).  Past villains in the series appear to have had state funding for their evil projects–the Nazis for Raiders and Crusade, the Soviets for Skull, and even that sinister prime minister in Temple would presumably have had the wealth of his rajah to back him:  are we to believe that this evil-doer will be backed in his wickedness by the US?  Although he has CIA minders in the film’s beginning, he “goes rogue” later in the film and even hints to Jones that he has become independent—but clearly has the resources to build (or at least rent) his own air base and uniform its personnel in German WW2 uniforms.  And this, to me, hints at where I believe the plot begins to show cracks, but let’s continue.

In a number of past films, Jones has been on a quest:  to find the Ark of the Covenant,

to find the Holy Grail,

and, less clearly, in terms of the plot, to locate the Shankara Stone

and a crystal skull.

As I said in the last posting, each of these may be fictional or not, depending upon what one chooses to believe, but Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is based upon an actual device dredged up from the floor of the Mediterranean, the so-called Antikythera Mechanism.

For more on this, please see the last posting.  For now, we’ll go with the film’s premise, that this was:

1. invented by Archimedes, the 3^rd century BC Greek (Syracusan) mathematician, inventor, scientist

2. originally built to investigate/predict “weather anomalies” (? even after seeing the film twice, I’m not absolutely clear about this), Archimedes discovers that it can also do something similar with time—even allowing someone to pass through it

We now step back to 1944, where, somehow, this former Nazi scientist has become aware of what Archimedes had ascertained and briefly has his hands on the mechanism—or, actually, only half of it—before losing it to Indiana Jones on a speeding train filled with looted antiquities.  These include the so-called “spear of Longinus” (which has its own complicated history—see this article for more:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Lance ) which Jones and his colleague, Basil Shaw, are shown to be after—only to discover that it’s a modern fake, which the Nazi scientist had already realized.  Whole earlier films had been dedicated to finding early religious symbols for Hitler, but here, what might have been the basis of the plot, is rapidly discarded in favor of something else, about which Jones and Shaw clearly have no real knowledge—and which Shaw, so the subsequent film informs us, studies obsessively for years until Jones, concerned for Shaw’s apparent declining mental health because of his studies, arrives at his Oxford residence to carry off—and then, although promising to destroy it, simply caches in the archives of his college, where it sits for some years.

But the ex-Nazi has the CIA to help him locate it—through Shaw’s daughter, Helena, who is, without any explanation, called “Wombat” by Jones, and who, with a degree in archaeology and a DPhil (the equivalent of a PhD in the US) project about the mechanism (or so she says, she turning out to be much shiftier than she first appears), has come to Jones for help.

And, so far, we have three unexplained items:

1. how the ex-Nazi funds his plan

2. how he is already aware, in 1944, of what the mechanism can do (something which takes Basil Shaw years of research and perhaps his sanity to understand)

3. why “Wombat” (a minor detail, but, still, why?  Here’s a picture of an actual wombat—and of Helena—is there a resemblance I don’t see?)

And then we have an inconsistency:  although we’re told that Helena has watched her father work on the mechanism for years, she’s memorized her father’s notes, and, at twelve has seen Jones remove it from her father’s house, she comes to him with the story that it still remains in the river where her father and Jones jumped to escape the antiquities train.  The DPhil project appears to be a lie—we subsequently find out that she’s an underground antiquities dealer and wants the mechanism to auction off—but this river story appears to be her actual belief, all the evidence I’ve cited above to the contrary.

At this stage, the indomitable villain, using the CIA, appears to seize the half-mechanism, only to be thwarted by Helena who snatches it and makes off across the rooftops of New York City, leaving Jones to the ex-Nazi and his CIA allies–but, of course, Jones escapes on a stolen police horse and, with the help of his old friend, Sallah, now a New York taxi driver, sets off to Tangiers, where Helena is set to auction off the stolen gadget.  And so the plot is now not about finding a lost and precious object, but recovering it (as becomes the goal in Raiders).

There is another complication—in fact, two—here:

1. as I mentioned above, this is really only half of the mechanism.  We are, at one point, told that Archimedes, fearing that the Romans might steal and employ it, has broken it into two parts, concealing one half (somehow—we’re not told how—the Romans seem to have obtained the other half)

2. the clue to finding that other half lies with something called “the graphikos”, which Basil Shaw’s notes reveal is on the very ship on which the one half the Romans had acquired was discovered—only farther down the underwater slope than the half which held the mechanism, indicating that the Romans had already gotten their hands on the clue

And here we have more unexplained items:

1. how the Romans obtained the gadget

2. how they acquired the “graphikos”

3. and, more important, how the Romans, whose technological expertise stretched only as far as the multiple watermill,

might understand and employ the device even if they had solved the clue and located the other half of it.

Needless to say, the ex-Nazi appears in Tangiers and makes off with the half-mechanism, but Jones and Helena pursue—she knows the location of the “graphikos” (Jones providing a ship and divers), the “graphikos” changes hands, Jones and Helena obtain it once more and it leads them to Syracuse, the home of Archimedes and his tomb, which is, for the sake of the plot, lost completely.  (In fact, the real Archimedes was buried in Syracuse and the last-century BC orator and author, Cicero, records that, not only had he located the site, but restored it.  See:  https://math.nyu.edu/~crorres/Archimedes/Tomb/Cicero.html  This is part of a much larger website which I recommend, if the real Archimedes interests you.) 

The villain arrives, picks up the other half of the mechanism, adds a kind of key found in the tomb, but not mentioned anywhere before (another unexplained item), and sets off with it—and with Jones.  (Unexplained why he’s taken, except that this is an Indiana Jones film.  In a more realistic film, Jones would have been done away with here, probably with a line like, “Archimedes’ tomb, Jones, a good last resting place for a relic like you”.)

And now we finally find out the ex-Nazi’s plan:

1. he asserts that Hitler, not Germany, lost the war

2. that he intends to go back to 1939 to do away with Hitler and, presumably, run the war more effectively himself (although, considering the ambitious monsters around Hitler, one wonders why he wouldn’t have been immediately arrested and executed, while Hitler’s ministers struggled to succeed der Fuehrer)

3. for reasons never explained, the way to do this is to use the mechanism while flying into the midst of a wild thunderstorm (a weather anomaly of the sort the device was originally intended to investigate?), somehow using map coordinates to guide the airplane to Berlin at the right time—through time

Logically, this makes one wonder:  even if Archimedes had discovered that his gadget could do something about time, without 20^th century technology, how was he to be able to fly up into such a storm, as the villain intended?  (One might also wonder about the Romans, less scientifically advanced than Archimedes.)

This doesn’t work—supposedly because of something which Jones shouts out to the villain about “continental drift” which would mean that the map coordinates would be off—because Archimedes, not being aware of continental drift, would have employed incorrect figures.  And here, adapting something which a former student of mine used to say when he no longer understood something, the film “fell off the sled”.

1. in Archimedes’ time, the concepts of latitude and longitude were thought about, but were very hazy and were certainly not charted (for the complicated history of longitude alone see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_longitude )

2. continental drift is exceedingly slow and, over the period from the 3^rd century BC Archimedes to 1969AD would have been so minimal as not to make a difference (see this clever video map of shifts over long periods:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGdPqpzYD4o )

But, in the film, the villain—and Jones—find themselves flying into a war zone:  Syracuse, 214-12BC, when the Romans were besieging it and Archimedes (see the previous posting) was a major part of the defense.  The plane crashes, killing the ex-Nazi (a rather tame ending for such an evil sort) and allowing Jones—and Helena, who had stolen aboard—to meet Archimedes himself and to speak to him in rather strange Greek (as a Corinthian, Archimedes spoke Doric, a very different dialect from their combination of pseudo-Attic and modern Greek which, even so, Archimedes seems to understand) and it transpires that—and, again, after seeing the film twice, I’m not really clear about this—Archimedes has invented the device to bring help from the future to his besieged home city.  How he would have known where to look and how the device would have done this are also left unexplained.  (In fact, the city was captured in 212BC and Archimedes was murdered by a Roman soldier in the aftermath.)

It’s assumed that Jones and Helena return through time as the final scene in the film shows Jones’ shabby apartment with him in bed, bandaged from an earlier wound and, next to the bed, the complete mechanism, which brings us back to my #1 above:  how can we end the series in a memorable way? Jones lying in bed in his shirt and underwear, even with the device (and Helena) nearby seems even lower key that the joke of the Ark of the Covenant being rolled into a vast government warehouse, or Jones father and son riding into the sunset, but, just as 5 follows 4 chronologically, so it follows it sentimentally:  4 ends with the wedding of Jones and Marion, the estranged Marion appears at the end of 5 and they reenact the (almost) romantic scene in 1, where they come very close to a passionate moment and, for me, this works better than many earlier moments in the film, as hectic as they can be.

As for the rest of the film, as you can see from my comments above, I find that much of the plot is based upon elements which must be taken for granted, which, to me, is a very sloppy or lazy way to create a film, not one in which the plot is carefully built up (as, for instance, in Raiders), especially one which has a rather convoluted plot, which, done well as in Crusade, can take us from Jones’ childhood through Venice to Nazi Germany to the Near East without a lot of nagging why’s.  So, to the question:  have the creators succeeded in making a memorable last film for a very memorable series?  I would say, reluctantly, that, for all of the action scenes along the way, the film seems to me to suffer so much from insufficiently-based plotting (see everything from the villain’s early knowledge of the power of the mechanism through that continental drift idea) that it doesn’t, to my mind, rate as highly as my favorites,  Raiders and Crusade and, remembering the conclusion of Crusade, we might turn back that “dial of destiny” and conclude the series with that final scene—

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

Stay well,

Think how satisfying it was to see Jones and Marion finally kissing,

And remember that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O