As ever, dear readers, welcome.

It was that sad moment:  I’d come to the last page of an enjoyable book:  Terry Pratchett’s Feet of Clay, 1996.

But there was a sadder moment:  I’d finally read the entire “Disc World” series, all 41 novels. 

I came late to the work of (Sir) Terry Pratchett (1948-2015)

and Disc World, which he came clearly on time to, in 1983, with the first in the long series, The Colour of Magic.

It has been through numerous reprintings since, with all sorts of covers, but this is the first edition and the cover is significant, being a depiction of just what Disc World looks like:

1. at base, a monstrous turtle, Great A’Tuin, who is swimming through space

2. mounted on Great A’Tuin are four elephants—Berilia, Tubul, Great T’Phon, and Jerakeen

3. and, placed atop the pachyderms is Disc World itself, which is a couple of continents, a scattering of islands, and seas, always with the danger of being swept off at the edge

And on the surface lie the towns and cities, a major one being Ankh-Morpork, the scene of numerous volumes in the series,

an ancient conurbation dissected by a river, the Ankh, which is, at best, mostly slow-flowing sludge.  On one bank lie the affluent, on the other, the effluent, as Pratchett might say, all under the direction of the Patrician, an unelected replacement for a line of increasingly difficult kings and his modest force of  peace-keepers, the Watch, directed, in time, by Samuel Vimes, who not only becomes Sir in the course of the books, but is also discovered to be directly descended from the reason Ankh-Morpork no longer suffers under difficult kings—oh, and he marries a duchess, who, among other things, is involved in a dragon-adoption charity.

(Which painting bears a faint resemblance to a certain lesser-known work by the obscure Dutch painter, Rembrandt)

As you can see from the chart above, there is a certain method in what could easily appear to be madness:  a series of series-within-series, based upon sets of characters:  wizards, witches, Tiffany Aching (and her sometime-allies the Nac Mac Feegle), Death, the City Watch, and Moist von Lipwig.  Wizards, the City Watch, and Moist Von Lipwig are all associated (sometimes rather loosely) with Ankh-Morpork.  Witches andTiffany are more or less country people and Death (who ALWAYS SPEAKS IN CAPITAL LETTERS) is, as in real life, alas, everywhere.

As you can tell, Pratchett is given to rather bizarre names, and it was with one of these, Moist Von Lipwig, that I began my Pratchettry in the first novel in which he appears, Going Postal, 2004.

You can also see that book titles can vary from the mystical I Shall Wear Midnight to suggestive plays on words, like Equal Rites and the present Going Postal, which, although it doesn’t include homicidal mail workers, does have to do with Ankh-Morpork’s postal system and how the ingenious conman, Moist Von Lipwig, saves it with the help of everyone from another charity worker (and chain-smoker) Adora Belle to a Golem, Mr. Pump.

(Footnote on “golem”:  if you’re not acquainted with this term, it comes from Jewish religious and folklore:  a creature made, commonly, from earth (clay, mud) and given animation, if not life, often for a specific task.  For more—lots more—see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem .  I first met a golem in a still from the 1915 horror film, Der Golem, which, unfortunately, doesn’t survive complete. 

You can see a fragment here:  https://archive.org/details/silent-der-golem-aka-the-golem  This was actually eventually a trilogy, along with The Golem and the Dancing Girl, 1917, which is lost, and the 1920 The Golem and How He Came Into the World which you can see complete here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmSoAq80HcM If you’re not familiar with silent film, dialogue is conveyed by printed cards and by (for us) rather exaggerated acting, and there was music commonly played—just like a modern soundtrack—during the film.  This music was live, from an improviser at piano or organ to, in the case of rather grand films, a score especially written for the film and played by an orchestra, like that for D.W. Griffith’s 1916 Intolerance.

And you can see Griffith’s film here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lv6u3d99SKk  Again, if you’re not used to silent film, it might take a while to get used to, often being sentimental to the point of being soppy, by our standards, but it’s a wonderful art form, coming directly from the late Victorian stage, and certainly worth your time. )

Golems are only one form of supernatural to appear regularly in Pratchett’s work.  There are also vampires (many who have taken “the pledge” and no longer drink human blood) and werewolves and entire complex communities of dwarves, as well.

What I especially have enjoyed in these novels, besides the very thoughtful way in which Pratchett constructs characters—often people—even vampires—with worries and doubts, is the humor—much of it appearing in footnotes—and the occasional philosophic moments.  Tiffany Aching’s Nac Mac Feegle—first seen in The Wee Free Men, 2003, for example,

tiny, feisty creatures who speak a kind of Lallans—that is, Scots English—and are fantastically brave, primarily because they have made the decision to believe, unlike people in this world in general, that, rather than being alive and fearing death, they are already dead and that, consequently, anything goes (and usually does). 

Summarizing a Pratchett novel is possible—see, for example:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going_Postal –but, to me, this seems like the sort of thing he would mock—probably in a footnote, and it’s better to try one out for yourself.  I have a number of favorites I would recommend, starting with Going Postal, to which I would add Interesting Times, The Wee Free Men, and Small Gods.  There is a very good film adaptation of Going Postal, which I would also recommend. 

But—in very much a Pratchetty situation—I’ve just looked back at that chart and realized that—I’ve somehow miscounted.   Where did The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, 2001, come from?

Somehow, I’ve managed to miss this and so have only read 40 of 41 novels.  I suppose that this is what Tolkien calls a “eucatastrophe”—that is, a situation in which things look glum, but then suddenly turn out for the best, something which I think Pratchett would approve of (with an ironic footnote, however).

Thanks, as ever, for reading,

Stay well,

Consider adopting the philosophic position of the Nac Mac Feegle,

And know that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

As always, dear readers, welcome.

Looking back on nearly 500 postings, I see that names have popped up as a subject more than once.  As far back as 26 August, 2015, there was “What’s In a Name?”, a title which turned up again on 27 July, 2016.  Then there was “In a Name”, 2 March, 2022, and “Name of the Game, Game of the Name”, 10 May 2023.

And here is that theme again, the title coming from an old British Army expression, “No Names No Pack Drill”.  A pack drill was a fairly mild form of punishment, in which the offender was assigned a certain number of hours of sentry-go while wearing a pack which had been especially heavily-weighted (bricks being one possibility). 

(Imagine wearing this, loaded with bricks, and marching back and forth with it on your back for hours)

Thus, if the sergeant in charge of discipline had no name reported to him, the offender escaped.

It’s clear, however, that I can’t escape names, something which I find students struggling with when we read the Odyssey and suddenly they’re confronted with Agamemnon

(about to become “the late Agamemnon”, murdered by his wife and her BF)

and the suitors of Penelope, with names like Antinoos (an-TI-noe-os) and Eurymachos (eh-oo-RUH-mahk-os—that is, an-TIH-noe-os and eu-RIH-makh-os, in English),

(and more mayhem—about to become “former suitors” thanks to Odysseus and his son, Telemachos—teh-LEH-makh-os)

or Beowulf, with names which look quite unpronounceable, like that of Beowulf’s father, Ecgtheow (EDGE-theh-oh).

(Not Ecgtheow, but Beowulf himself, when he first encounters a Danish coast guard—this is from the era of illustration when anyone vaguely Norse was required to wear a helmet decorated with wings or horns)

Tolkien had become accustomed to those Greek names when still a school boy, writing to Robert Murray, SJ, in a letter of 2 December, 1953:  “I was brought up in the Classics, and first discovered the sensation of literary pleasure in Homer.”  (Letters, 258)

Names in Homer can sometimes seem very appropriate—Antinoos, one of the leaders of Penelope’s suitors and a definite villain, has one that can mean “he who sets his mind in opposition” and the ocean-going magical people who finally send Odysseus back home, the Phaiakians, often have names like Pontonoos, “he whose mind is on the sea” or Nausithoos, “Swift-ship”.   Sometimes they seem puzzling:  why is the other leader of the suitors called Eurymachos, “he who fights broadly/widely” when he has, as far as we know, never done any fighting at all?  And why is that Cyclops called Polyphemos, “the very-well known”?  If he were, why would Odysseus have visited him, lost six of his crew to the Cyclops’ voracious appetite, and barely escaped by hiding under a sheep?

Although Tolkien, as an undergraduate at Oxford, was seduced away from Classics, as he tells us in a letter to W.H. Auden of 7 June, 1955 (see Letters, 312-313) by other languages (Welsh, Finnish), a process begun even earlier with Anglo-Saxon and Gothic, I would suggest that his early association with Homer and the possibilities which names might present, both as to character and to language, endured. As he says in the same letter:

“All this only as background to the stories, though languages and names are for me inextricable from the stories.  They are and were so to speak an attempt to give a background or a world in which my expressions of linguistic taste could have a function.  The stories were comparatively late in coming.” 

(This interest in naming could also lead him to be critical of another fantasy writer, E.R. Eddison, 1882-1945,

of whom he wrote “I read his works with great enjoyment for their sheer literary merit…Incidentally, I though his nomenclature slipshod and often inept.”  From a letter to Caroline Everett, 24 June, 1957, Letters, 372.  You can see what you think about Eddison’s way with names by reading The Worm Ouroboros, 1922, here:  https://ia801304.us.archive.org/10/items/1924EddisonTheWormOuroborus/1924__eddison___the_worm_ouroborus.pdf )

For JRRT, then, names were as crucial to the text as the plot and, as a long-time reader of his work and as someone who has spent an equally long time studying and teaching languages, I find that my admiration for his care and patience in developing them has grown with my reading.  It’s no wonder, for example, that he is so up in arms at the Dutch translator of The Lord of the Rings, who thought not only to translate the text, but the toponyms (place names) as well:

“In principal I object as strongly as is possible to the ‘translation’ of the nomenclature at all (even by a competent person).  I wonder why a translator should think himself called on or entitled to do any such thing.  That this is an ‘imaginary’ world does not give him any right to remodel it according to his fancy, even if he could in a few months create a new coherent structure which it took me years to work out.”  (letter to Rayner Unwin, 3 July, 1956, Letters, 359)

And there, in that phrase, “coherent structure”, you see what Tolkien was always aiming for:  his names, both of places and people, had to be consistent not only with the language they spoke, but also with the culture in which they lived—horse people like the Rohirrim can have names like Eowyn, perhaps ”delight in horses” and Eomer, “famous for horses”—and the history in which they lived.  (And, as JRRT pretended that his Middle-earth work was translated, he then had the added fun of turning original names he had invented, like those of Banazir and Ranugad, into what he said were their English equivalents, “Samwise” and “Hamfast”—Sam and the Gaffer.  See “Banazir and Ranugad”, 11 November, 2020 for more.)

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you probably will remember that, some time last spring, I decided that my knowledge of the history of science fiction was not what I would like it to be, and so I began a long-term project of going at least back to Jules Verne (1828-1905)

and reading—or rereading—as widely as I could, including translations from other languages, to give myself as wide an experience as I could.  So far, I’ve added about three dozen books and a number of short stories to my ongoing bibliography with an uncounted number to go, but I admit that I’m not systematically chronological and recently, I decided to reread Frank Herbert’s (1920-1986)

original Dune trilogy (1965-1976).

I’ve only begun, and I’m finding it as complex and interesting as I remembered it, but, trained by JRRT, I was struck by what seemed like a very odd soup of names—Bene Gesserit, Muad’Dib, Shaddam IV, Atreides, Paul, Duke Leto, Jessica, Mother Gaius Helen, Thufir Hawat, and, strangest-sounding to me of all, Duncan Idaho—all within the first 30 or so pages.  Some of the names were very familiar—Atreides is “the family of Atreus”, which includes the ill-fated Agamemnon and his less-than-distinguished younger brother, Menelaus.  Leto, to me, isn’t a duke, but the mother of Apollo and his twin sister, Artemis.  Gaius (also spelled Caius) is a common male Roman praenomen, that is, first name, as in Caius Iulius Caesar, or the emperor we commonly call by his childhood nickname, Caligula, who was another C/Gaius.  Muad’Dib, with its glottal stop marker, suggests Arabic and Shaddam makes me think Persian (especially as he’s called Padishah, Persian “master king”  so “king of kings”).  Duncan Idaho?  Duncan is an Anglicized version of Irish/Gaelic Donnchadh, about which there is scholarly disagreement (see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_(given_name) )  Idaho—well, see this:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idaho   And then there’s Bene Gesserit.  Bene is a Latin adverb, “well”.  Gesserit is either the 3^rd person singular, future perfect active indicative, or third person singular, perfect active subjunctive of the verb gero, with a variety of meanings around the idea of managing something, as in the standard phrase bellum gerere, “to wage war”.  Thus, as a phrase, it should mean either “he/she/it will have managed well” or “she/he/it would have managed well”. 

Tolkien was a science fiction reader himself (see Letters, 530 and “Sci-Fi”, 22 September, 2021), so I wonder, knowing how he felt about a certain creative lack in Eddison, what he would have said about this soup?

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

Stay well,

Manage things well,

And remember that there’s always

MTCIDC

O

PS

For more on names in Homer, Tolkien, and elsewhere, see “In a Name”, 2 March, 2022, here:   https://doubtfulsea.com//?s=whats+in+a+name&search=Go

As always, dear readers, welcome.

As much as Tolkien, with justification, I think, denied external, historical influences on his work (and especially so, when, for example, it was suggested to him that the Ring was a stand-in for the atomic bomb—although he makes a grim reference to that possibility in a letter of 24 October, 1952, to Rayner Unwin—see Letters, 239), still, he was a highly intelligent, thoughtful, and sensitive man in a very complex era, one haunted, in part, by the disaster of 1914-1918, with its approximate 30,000,000 casualties,

(Tyne Cot Cemetery in southern Belgium, a heart-breaking place with 11,965 graves, of which 8,369 are of soldiers never identified)

and the understandable fear of another such which would bring as much, if not more, ruin, as that war had brought about even more destructive weapons than the later-19^th-century machine gun—war in the air, including the first hint of terror bombing

and the extensive use of chemical weapons.  (For more detail, see:  https://www.britannica.com/story/the-great-war-infographic-of-deaths-and-milestones )

(The brilliant society and landscape painter, John Singer Sargent’s“Gassed”, 1919)

Thus, when I recently re-read this passage, it set me to thinking:

“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”)

The seemingly-doomed expedition to confront Sauron has marched out of the ruined Minas Tirith

and north, to the Morannon, the Black Gate,

(the Hildebrandts)

where it meets an emissary, the Mouth of Sauron.

(by Douglas Beekman. This scene is badly mismanaged in the Jackson film, with the emissary being struck down, which is a gross violation of the chivalry which stated that such emissaries were protected by custom—of which the Mouth of Sauron, flinching, reminds Aragorn–and is far from what JRRT wrote.)

The Mouth of Sauron believes he has shaken Gandalf and his allies when he has presented them with what appears to be Frodo’s “Dwarf-coat, elf-cloak, blade of the downfallen West” and he suggests that the owner will be in torment for years unless they yield to Sauron’s terms—which Gandalf, after seeming to waver, then rejects, saying to Sauron’s emissary, “Get you gone, for your embassy is over and death is near to you.”

In the course of their brief dialogue, however, Gandalf has raised a point which made me think of an historical bargaining session, something Tolkien would have read about in the newspapers and seen in newsreels in the cinema, a meeting in late September, 1938, in Munich, Germany, among Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Edouard Daladier, and Neville Chamberlain.

Hitler had already assimilated Austria in March, 1938, during the event called the Anschluss (AHN-shluss, literally, in German, a “connection”)

and was now aiming to do the same to the young state of Czechoslovakia.  That lurking fear of another war was behind the West’s scramble to do something to stop a new conflict brought about that meeting, as well as the so-called “Munich Agreement”, then signed by the four representatives, which, basically, handed Hitler much of Czechoslovakia, while signaling that the Western allies weren’t willing to fight to keep him from grabbing the rest.  

And here we see a difference between Sauron and Hitler.  When Gandalf says to the Mouth of Sauron:

“And if indeed we rated the prisoner so high, what surety have we that Sauron, the Base Master of Treachery, will keep his part?”

The reply is:

“Do not bandy words in your insolence with the Mouth of Sauron!…Surety you crave!  Sauron gives none.  If you sue for clemency you must first do his bidding.  These are his terms.  Take them or leave them.”

Hitler had said that he would be satisfied and even signed an agreement, separate from the Munich Agreement, with Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, which included these words:

“” … We regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again”. 

And Chamberlain took this back to London, waving it over his head at the airport in a famous gesture as he addressed a crowd.

You can hear Chamberlain address that crowd here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMtG38ZKf3U

(As you can imagine, this is an extremely simplified version of events.  If you would like to have a much more detailed version, see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_Agreement )

The worth of Hitler’s words came quickly:  in March, 1939, he invaded the remaining portion of Czechoslovakia.

In September, 1939, he invaded Poland and World War II, which the West had compromised itself to avoid, would begin.

Looking at the map of Middle-earth,

we can see that Sauron’s terms would have:

1. reduced Rohan and Gondor to puppet states, to be ruled over by Sauron’s viceroy

2. stripped them of all future power to resist whatever that viceroy (meaning Sauron, of course) would have demanded, for all that the terms said that they could rule themselves.

What happened in Munich in September, 1938, rather than stopping a coming war, simply told the one who would pursue that war that the West was willing to sacrifice a great deal—even another country—to keep the peace.  Was Tolkien at least marginally influenced by all of this?  And, in a terrible “What If?” can we imagine a West had Gandalf and his allies given in to Sauron’s terms? Would Sauron have been content?

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

Stay well,

Beware the promises of dictators,

And know that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

PS

As this is the first posting of the new year, as gloomy as this is, I don’t want it to suggest an omen.  I’ve written that John Singer Sargent was, along with being a society painter, a landscape painter, usually in water colors, so here’s one of my favorites as, I hope, a more cheerful theme for the year to come—“Palms”, 1917