Welcome, dear readers, as ever.

As I’ve written before, one reason why I return to Tolkien again and again is that his richness provides so many subjects to write about.  Often they are episodes or characters, but, occasionally, they are simply phrases and, in teaching The Hobbit this time, one phrase I’d never thought about before suddenly stood out and puzzled me with its odd, rather over-the-top exclamation.

When I was growing up, I lived in a valley which was shaped rather like an elongated bowl.  It had that shape because it was the bed of an ancient lake, whose legacy to farmers and gardeners who lived and worked there was, below a thin layer of soil, a much deeper layer of sheets of petrified mud—shale.

There are places where shale contains oil, which would make it of some value in this fossil-fuel world (which JRRT so disliked) in which we live.

Ours, fortunately or unfortunately, was just very old, very hard, mud and a curse to dig through.

Because of the shape of the valley, it was also an attracter of lingering thunderstorms,

which, especially in midsummer, could sit over the valley for hours.  We, therefore, had a lightning rod attached to our chimney,

which was actually once struck, when there was a tremendous BANG! but the rod did its job, guiding the lightning to the ground and our house didn’t burst into flame.

(This reminds me of Ray Bradbury’s wonderful novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes, 1962,

with its character, Tom Fury, the lightning rod salesman, which you can read a summary of here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Something_Wicked_This_Way_Comes_(novel)#Plot_summary   There’s also a very good, if very different, treatment of the story in the 1983 Disney film of the same name.)

Having had some real-life experience, then, of lightning, it’s not surprising that, in school, I was struck (pun intended) by this image in an old school book–

It was identified as Benjamin Franklin, and he seemed to be out of his mind—flying a kite in an electrical storm?

It turns out, of course, that this was part of a science project, by which Franklin wanted to prove that what shot out of the clouds was, in fact, electricity.  You can read more about his experimentation and theories here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kite_experiment   And you can read Franklin’s first report of this particular—and ground-breaking—experiment from Franklin’s own The Pennsylvania Gazette for 19 October, 1752, here:  http://www.benjamin-franklin-history.org/kite-experiment/  .  His personal experience with lightning also made Franklin perhaps the first to suggest, in 1753, that one might, using an iron rod and a wire, divert lightning from buildings and even ships.  Franklin’s suggestion is quoted in this same article as that which quotes his report of his experiment.  (You’ll note, by the way, that the artist for that school book image doesn’t seem to have read the 1752 article, as Franklin stresses that the holder of the kite string needs to be indoors and Franklin himself was standing in a barn when he performed this experiment.)

Franklin’s experiment was part of a trend, beginning in the 1740s, towards better understanding lightning, as part of the general strong interest in science which was part of the Enlightenment.  Earlier people in the West had a very different view, however, which often tied thunder and lightning to divinities.  Ancient Greek stories include that of Asclepius, the son of Apollo and a brilliant physician,

who, when he began to restore the dead, was struck down by a “thunderbolt”,

the weapon of choice of his own grandfather, Zeus.

This belief in Zeus’ electric power was shared by the Romans, in their version of Zeus, Jupiter,

as we can see in Ovid’s (43bc-17/18ad) treatment of the story of Semele, in Book 3 of his Metamorphoses, where he repeats the Greek myth of Semele, a sometime-gf of Jupiter, who was tricked by Juno into asking him to show her his real form,

with its drastic consequences:

est aliud levius fulmen, cui dextra cyclopum               305
saevitiae flammaeque minus, minus addidit irae:
tela secunda vocant superi; capit illa domumque
intrat Agenoream. corpus mortale tumultus
non tulit aetherios donisque iugalibus arsit.

“There is another, lighter thunderbolt, to which the right hand of the Cyclopses

Has added less of ferocity and flame, less of fury:

They call these the secondary weapons of the god.  Those he takes and enters

The Agenorean house.  The human body did not endure

The divine tumult and blazed with the husbandly gifts.”

(Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 3, lines 305-309, my translation—Agenor was Semele’s grandfather)

(There is a very lush opera on the subject by George Frederick Haendel (1685-1759) from 1744 which goes into extended detail about events.  There’s a summary of the plot here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semele_(Handel) and a performance here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FibDMWk0i5k , and, as well, you can hear probably the most famous aria from this opera, “Where E’er You Walk” (sung by Jupiter to Semele in Act 2, Scene 2) sung by one of my favorite tenors, John Mark Ainsley, here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYOZnwQQV18 )

All of this brings me back to the what seemed an odd turn of phrase in Chapter 1, “An Unexpected Party” of The Hobbit.  After much food and some moody music,

Thorin has been talking quite frankly about the expedition to the Lonely Mountain, but the real gravity has only struck Bilbo—

“Poor Bilbo couldn’t bear it any longer.  At may never return he began to feel a shriek coming up inside, and very soon it burst out like the whistle of an engine coming out of a tunnel.  All the dwarves sprang up, knocking over the table.  Gandalf struck a blue light on the end of his magic staff, and in its firework glare the poor little hobbit could be seen kneeling on the hearth-rug, shaking like a jelly that was melting.  Then he fell flat on the floor, and kept on calling out ‘struck by lightning, struck by lightning!’ over and over again; and that was all they could get out of him for a long time.”  (The Hobbit, Chapter 1, “An Unexpected Party”)

What is going on here?  Why such an extreme reaction?  Bilbo’s attitude towards the dwarves and their plan has fluctuated during their stay:  he has been appalled by their aggressive behavior as guests and seduced by their haunting song, but, when Thorin has begun to unroll the actual facts of their scheme, he has been moved to a new level of resistance as the truth of what they’re planning comes clearer—

“Gandalf, dwarves and Mr. Baggins!  We are met together in the house of our friend and fellow conspirator, this most excellent and audacious hobbit—‘…He paused for breath and for a polite remark from the hobbit, but the compliments were quite lost on poor Bilbo Baggins, who was wagging his mouth in protest at being called audacious and worst of all fellow conspirator, though no noise came out, he was so flummoxed.”

Is what Bilbo actually experiencing and expressing, an English expression, “a bolt out of the blue”?  A useful website, “The Phrase Finder”, says that this expression appears to be rather comparatively recent, first traced to Thomas Carlyle’s (1795-1881) The French Revolution, 1837, (oddly exactly a century before the initial publication of The Hobbit) where there is found:

“Arrestment, sudden really as a bolt out of the Blue, has hit strange victims.”

The meaning is “a sudden unexpected event” and the website then takes it back I think quite believably  to Horace (65-8bc) and an ode, Number 34 in Book 1.  This begins with the idea that the speaker has been lax in his religious observances, but, thanks to a sudden meteorological occurrence, he is changing his ways:

…namque Diespiter               5
igni corusco nubila dividens
     plerumque, per purum tonantis
     egit equos volucremque currum,

“for Father Jupiter,

Generally splitting the clouds with flashing fire,

Drove his thundering horses and his winged chariot

Through [a] clear sky…”

(Horace, Odes, Book 1, Number 34, lines 5-8, my translation)

As Horace has been unpleasantly surprised by Jupiter, might we then imagine Bilbo, coming close to being brought into the dwarves’ plan, then suddenly caught by Thorin’s grim “may never return” have suffered a similar epiphany, almost as if he, too, had almost been “Struck by lightning, struck by lightning!”?   Considering all that is about to happen to him in the course of The Hobbit, perhaps Bilbo’s outburst isn’t so over-the-top after all.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Stay well,

Keep making sacrifices to Jupiter,

And remember that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

One of the reasons I so often write about the work of Tolkien is that it is just so full of things to write about.  Sometimes these are moments or people in texts to comment upon, sometimes they are things to be inspired by.  From the title, this posting might appear to be sparked by Smeagol/Gollum who, in a brilliant piece of psychology on the author’s part, refers to the Ring, which he actually acquired on a long-ago birthday, as “his birthday present”, when, in fact, he gained it by murdering Deagol, his friend, the discoverer of the long-lost creation of Sauron, as we learn from Gandalf:

“ ‘Give us that, Deagol, my love,’ said Smeagol, over his friend’s shoulder.

‘Why?’ said Deagol.

‘Because it’s my birthday, my love, and I wants it,’ said Smeagol.

‘I don’t care,’ said Deagol.  ‘I have given you a present already, more than I could afford.  I found this, and I’m going to keep it.’

‘Oh, are you indeed, my love,’ said Smeagol; and he caught Deagol by the throat and strangled him, because the gold looked so bright and beautiful.  Then he put the ring on his finger.”  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 2, “The Shadow of the Past”)

(I don’t have an artist for this, unfortunately.)

This posting isn’t about Gollum and his birthday, however, and it was inspired by another moment in The Lord of the Rings altogether.

I’m rewatching the Jackson LotR for the first time in some years and I’ve come to the moment in The Fellowship of the Ring where the Fellowship is blocked from crossing the Misty Mountains at the Redhorn Gate—

“They went on.  But before long the snow was falling fast, filling all the air, and swirling into Frodo’s eyes.  The dark bent shapes of Gandalf and Aragorn only a pace or two ahead could hardly be seen.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 3, “The Ring Goes South”)

It’s very convincingly done in the film, the snow thick, the mountains menacing, and, as this is December, as in the book, and we’ve just had our first snowfall, I was reminded of this wonderful and playful poem–

“It sifts from Leaden Sieves —
It powders all the Wood.
It fills with Alabaster Wool
The Wrinkles of the Road —

It makes an Even Face
Of Mountain, and of Plain —
Unbroken Forehead from the East
Unto the East again —

It reaches to the Fence —
It wraps it Rail by Rail
Till it is lost in Fleeces —
It deals Celestial Vail

To Stump, and Stack — and Stem —
A Summer’s empty Room —
Acres of Joints, where Harvests were,
Recordless, but for them–

It Ruffles Wrists of Posts
As Ankles of a Queen —
Then stills its Artisans — like Ghosts —
Denying they have been —“

(Amherst College MS 78)

It was written by Emily Dickinson (1830-1885)

and, as I write this, it’s her 193^rd birthday—10 December, 2023.

Her imagery and its links are always surprising, sometimes domestic, sometimes almost surreal, and always thought—and imagination—provoking.

This poem begins with an image taken from something the poet herself did a great deal of in the Dickinson household:  baking.

The one doing the sieving isn’t the baker, however, but the dull-grey snowclouds overhead.

Alabaster is a soft, white stone, often used for carving,

but there’s an interesting contrast here between the heaviness of stone and the lightness of wool, and where that stone/wool has fallen reminds us that Dickinson lived in a country town, where the roads would not have been paved—and very rutted, especially in winter.

Those wrinkles covered in snow lead us to the next image:  the landscape whose face has had its cracks and ruts smoothed out by the blanket of white.  And then we’re taken from the kitchen and a mirror to the fields which stretched beyond her town of Amherst (and still do, mainly to the south) to clear-cut (“stumps”) and hay (“stacks”) and harvested plants (“stems”) and the remains of corn fields (“acres of joints”, where the bottoms of the corn stalks resemble the points between bones).

From the fields, we’re suddenly whisked away to a palace and the boudoir of a queen, where we see the ruffles at the bottom of an intimate garment—

and the poem ends when “It”—the subject of all of the poem’s verbs—sifts, powders, fills, makes, reaches, wraps, is lost, ruffles—“stills its Artisans”—that is, its craftsmen—those who have done everything from powdering to wrapping—and they disappear—presumably as the clouds pass, leaving a world transformed from roads and mountains and fields with their fences into snowy sculpture.

Tolkien has informed us on the subject of hobbits and birthdays:

“Hobbits give presents to other people on their own birthdays.  Not very expensive ones, as a rule, and not so lavishly as on this occasion; but it was not a bad system.  Actually in Hobbiton and Bywater every day in the year was somebody’s birthday, so that every hobbit in those parts had a fair chance of at least one present at least once a week.  But they never got tired of them.”  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 1, “A Long-expected Party”)

And so, on Emily Dickinson’s birthday, I make a present of this lovely poem to you.

Stay well,

Don’t worry about sending her a card,

And remember that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

PS

As you might know or imagine, Dickinson was a constant and voracious reader, and it’s clear that, for this poem, she was influenced by another poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), who published, in his 1847 volume, Poems, of which she owned a copy, his own beautiful poem, “The Snow -Storm”.  Read it on page 65 here:  https://archive.org/details/poems1847emer/page/4/mode/2up  

Welcome, as ever, dear readers.

Occasionally, I’ve done a film review, but they’ve commonly been of Star Wars or Tolkien-themed shows.  Yesterday, however, I went to see the new Napoleon film and I want to think aloud a bit about it.

If you read this blog regularly, you know that I really dislike the levels of hatred and abuse which can be found on every level of the internet and, when such is applied to film, a review which employs them is, to me, useless.  It might tell me what the reviewer didn’t enjoy, but it doesn’t really enlighten me as to the film itself.  In my reviews, I try to understand what the creators were attempting to do and, in my opinion, whether they succeeded. In the case of this new film, much of the anger, etc., has been directed at its lack of historical accuracy and that’s true.  The four battle scenes:  Toulon (1793), Austerlitz (1805), Borodino (1812), and Waterloo (1815), although given the correct date on the screen, have virtually nothing to do with the actual events.  Instead, they seem like fables about the brutal violence behind Napoleon’s “glory” and, though this isn’t underlined in the film, it’s clear that Napoleon’s rise is just as this period caricature shows it to be—

Still, in a film which goes to such lengths to look like the time in which it takes place (the costume designers should definitely be handed awards, and the sets are impressive), history does have a place.  Napoleon’s self-coronation, for instance, really captures something of the grandeur which David created in his depiction of it.

(Napoleon, instead of being crowned by Pope Pius VII, crowned himself, then turned and crowned Josephine, as in the painting.  What wasn’t in David’s original sketches was the Pope raising his hand in a traditional blessing.  Napoleon, as usual, micromanaging, saw that the Pope’s right hand was in his lap and told David to redraw it.)

But, for me, the real problem lies in the title of this posting, which is a term by which the English, who feared and hated Napoleon at the same time, sometimes referred to him.

(There are dozens and dozens of different English caricatures of Napoleon throughout his entire life and career, depicting him as everything from a dwarfish sword-waver to a crocodile.  Here’s an illustrated article on the subject—with a mild parental guidance warning:  https://www.danceshistoricalmiscellany.com/corsican-monster-british-caricature/ )

By “monster”, the British meant a kind of demonic figure, sometimes, in caricatures, linked with Satan,

but, when it has come to film-making, it seems that his active career, which we might see as from his victory at Toulon in 1793

(by Edouard Detaille—one of my favorite late 19^th-early-20^th century military artists)

to his second and final exile on St. Helena, where he died in 1821,

was so full of events, that the Monster was, in fact, a monstrosity, an almost impossible thing to capture on film—although not for want of trying.  An incomplete list of films—fictional, not including things like documentaries—set in, or about, the Napoleonic era in general on WIKI runs from 1912 to 2018 and has several hundred (I stopped counting in 1950, when there are already over one hundred) entries.  (Here’s the link—see how far you get:   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Napoleonic_Wars_films )

As for films about Napoleon himself, this is a complex picture, part of it covered by this article:  https://www.vulture.com/article/napoleon-movies-history.html , but just a quick pass through the material underlines my point:  the difficulty of somehow compressing a life full of events into something which won’t give an audience what Ridley Scott, in an interview, called “bum ache”. 

The first known film in which Napoleon appears certainly wouldn’t have afflicted anyone, being a short, by Louis Lumiere, in 1897 (42 seconds).  After that there followed, in 1908-9, two films from the same studio, Vitagraph, “Napoleon, the Man of Destiny” and “The Life Drama of Napoleon Bonaparte and Empress Josephine of France”, which appear to have been combined into one, “Incidents in the Life of Napoleon and Josephine”—here’s the YouTube version:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmnHQbrh3KY (This is from the site of the very knowledgeable Clark Holloway.)  “Incidents” it is, being only about 25 minutes long.

After this comes Abel Gance’s (1889-1981) Napoleon, 1927, whose production history illustrates my point. 

Gance intended a full-scale film biography in 6 parts.  The director’s definitive cut of the first part lasted for 9 hours and 40 minutes.  No other parts were ever made and the film languished mostly in notoriety until the product of a process of reconstruction in 1979 produced a 4-hour version, then a 5-hour version.  (You can read the fascinating history of the whole project, from Gance’s original, here:  https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/monumental-reckoning-how-abel-gances-napoleon-was-restored-full-glory )  And Gance’s first part went no further than Napoleon’s first reaching Italy, in 1796.

Although there were further attempts at the big picture, like Sasha Guitry’s Napoleon, 1955, (you can see it here in the US dubbed version:  https://archive.org/details/Napoleon_ )–at two hours, you can imagine how little that big picture was—

film-makers also tried other approaches, much smaller and more domestic, such as the 1937 Conquest, about Napoleon’s affair with the Polish countess and nationalist, Maria Walewska (1786-1817).

And here we see the idea of Napoleon the romantic (if not womanizer, which was probably closer to the truth), which forms one half of the plot of Scott’s Napoleon.  As the screenwriter, David Scarpa, explains:

“So [Ridley] wants to know what you’re going to bring to it, what your point of view on it is. It was an almost impossible story to tell just in terms of the sheer sprawl of what Napoleon had done and his influence on European history and 45 battles fought and essentially writing the Code Napoleon, which is the basis of much of continental European society. So it would be almost impossible to tell the definitive version of that story within two and a half hours. And what I found myself most intrigued by was this little vignette in the book about his relationship with Josephine, his wife.”  (You can read the whole interview here:  https://www.msn.com/en-us/movies/news/ridley-scotts-napoleon-writer-david-scarpa-explains-whats-true-and-false/ar-AA1kTqd1 )

So, in two-and-a-half hours, we’re shown, in very brief form, Napoleon’s life, from 1793 (although the first date shown is 1789, along with the execution of Marie Antoinette, which actually took place on the 16^th of October, 1793),

to his death on St. Helena in 1821, intertwined with his complex relationship with Josephine.  He first meets Josephine at a party, after his success at Toulon, in 1793, where he stares at her until she comes up and inquires as to why he’s staring, which he fumblingly first denies, then admits.  And the story goes on from there.  It seems to me that there are two big dangers here:

1. the relationship story will overwhelm the biography and the real title of the film should be “Josephine—and Napoleon”

2. the appeal of this relationship relies upon the two principal characters—are they at least believable, if not likeable?

To the first, I would say that this was more-or-less successful, in my opinion.  There was a balance between the two and I rarely felt that Napoleon’s private life was overwhelming his public life—although the idea that Napoleon abandoned his 1798 Egyptian campaign to return to France just because it was rumored that Josephine was having an affair is stretching things a bit.

To the second, I admit that I wasn’t convinced.

Part of the problem, for me, was that Joaquin Phoenix, Napoleon, seemed to me to be miscast, playing the role as if he were a sometimes rather pathetic middle-aged Mafia boss (it didn’t help that his flat American accent and delivery were surrounded mostly by British actors, including the woman who played Josephine—and there was a laugh in the theatre when he turned on the British ambassador and shouted in that flat accent, “You think you’re so great, ‘cause you got boats!”).  As well, for much of the movie, he was simply physically too old, Napoleon at the time of his success at Toulon in 1793 was in his early 20s, having been born in 1769.  One has only to see David’s unfinished portrait of him from about 1797 to see what he must really have looked like at the time.

versus

Phoenix never seems to be young and as daring and lively as the real man must have been in his first years, but is already simply stodgy, even at times with Josephine.  It’s no wonder that, initially, she seems to be thinking about him as a kind of social investment, rather than as a potential BF and, in their physical encounters, she continues to be detached, even when we’re being told that this has become a powerful, if complex relationship.  I’m aware that the script writer wanted to show what might be a paradox:  the active, intense general/statesman, on the one hand, but the clumsy and mostly unromantic husband on the other:

“the idea of a man who is profoundly capable and competent in the realm of battle, and yet profoundly incapable and incompetent in the realm of love, in the realm of human relationships, and how those two things play off of one another.”

The difficulty for me is that we seem to be told, at the same time, that there was passion at the base of this, but, apart from a couple of tearful moments, I don’t feel that I was ever shown that in a meaningful way.   She seemed too passive and he too bullish.

So, would I recommend this film?  Without hedging, I guess that I would say the following:

1. if you’re a military history buff and know something about this period, you probably will spend a certain amount of time shaking your head (wondering, for instance, why the British and French are fighting from entrenchments at Waterloo and why the Prussians appear on the battlefield from the wrong direction)

2. if you want to see another side of a World Conqueror, this is definitely a start, but don’t expect too much—behind this film are letters exchanged between Napoleon and Josephine and they have their passionate moments, but, as read in a flat voice by an off-screen Phoenix, I kept wishing that this is what the writer and director would have shown me, rather than narrated at me.

At the same time, as always, I would say that viewers, like reviewers, often have very different opinions and, if anything I’ve written sparks your interest, go see it for yourself.

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

Stay well,

Avoid Waterloo at all costs,

And know that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

PS

While I might have mixed reactions to this film, I whole-heartedly recommend Ridley Scott’s much earlier (1977) Napoleonic film, The Duellists, which is a little jewel.

 It’s based upon a short story by Joseph Conrad, “The Duel”, which you can read here:  https://archive.org/details/asetsix00conrgoog/page/n6/mode/2up