Monthly Archives: July 2024

Aging Documents

31 Wednesday Jul 2024

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As ever, dear readers, welcome.

Sometimes, for all of his hard work, something which Tolkien planned simply never appeared, at least in his lifetime.

The biggest and most obvious of these is The Silmarillion,

with which he struggled for years, even flirting with an American publisher, Collins, when his Hobbit publisher, Allen & Unwin, agreeable to The Lord of the Rings, proved unwilling to publish it along with that work, which only appeared, edited by Christopher Tolkien, in 1977.

An earlier disappointment had been a smaller one, but JRRT put the same amount of creative energy and effort into it which he applied to much grander works:

“There were many recesses cut in the rock of the walls, and in them were large iron-bound chests of wood.  All had been broken and plundered; but beside the shattered lid of one there lay the remains of a book.  It had been slashed and stabbed and partly burned, and it was so stained with black and other dark marks like old blood that little of it could be read.  Gandalf lifted it carefully, but the leaves cracked and broke as he laid it on the slab.  He pored over it for some time without speaking.  Frodo and Gimli standing at his side could see, as he gingerly turned the leaves, that they were written by many different hands, in runes, both of Moria and of Dale, and here and there in Elvish script.”  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 5, “The Bridge of Khazad-dum”)

This is the “Book of Mazarbul”, which Gandalf describes as “a record of the fortunes of Balin’s folk”—that is, of the dwarves who followed Balin to repopulate the mines of Moria about 30 years before the beginning of the final adventure of The Ring.  This is a story with an unhappy ending, of course, as Balin and all of his people were eventually killed by orcs who themselves came to repopulate Moria and it ends with those terrible words, “they are coming”.

Had he had the time, I wouldn’t be in the least surprised to find that Tolkien would have reconstructed the entire book, but, in a fit of realism, he confined himself to three pages, including that final page,

hoping to include them among the illustrations (maps, the Hollin gate of Moria, and the lettering on Balin’s tomb).  This page shows his efforts, which including burning the pages with his pipe, punching holes in the margin to indicate where the pages would have been stitched to the binding, and staining them with red (I presume water color) to simulate blood.  For all those efforts, however, the publisher informed him that including them in color would have been too expensive and so, like The Silmarillion, they only appeared after Tolkien’s death.  (For images of all three pages—in color—and more details, see pages 348-9 of the highly informative Catherine McIlwaine Tolkien Maker of Middle-earth, published in 2018 by the Bodleian Library.)

For someone who worked in Early English literature, models for his pages would have been easy to come by.  Here’s the first page of his beloved Beowulf, from the manuscript called “Cotton Vitellius A XV”.

Though not “slashed and stabbed”, it was certainly “partly burned” in a great fire in 1731 which not only damaged this manuscript, but destroyed a number of others.  (For more on the manuscript and on the poem, see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nowell_Codex and         https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf#External_links  This is our only manuscript of the poem and I shake my head at the thought that, had the fire gone a little farther, we would have lost this wonderful piece of English poetry forever.)

So often, these postings are explorations of some of the many various sources which influenced and stimulated Tolkien, but I’ve recently come upon what I suspect might be the opposite.

In 2010, the director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, narrated a 100-part series on BBC Radio 4 entitled, A History of the World in 100 Objects, all drawn from the Museum’s vast collections.  That same year, a companion book appeared.

It was a very clever idea (although it takes a moment to imagine how these objects were, initially, unseen, but only described) and soon there were a number of imitations, including this—

which recently came into my hands.  What’s marvelous about this is that, in contrast to the British Museum book, which uses actual historical artifacts, everything in this book, beginning with the idea of Star Wars itself, is something creatively imagined, even if based on things from our own galaxy.  It was, like the MacGregor, a fun read, but my attention was particularly caught by these—

“[Objects Number] 76 Ancient Jedi Texts”. 

With names like “Aionomica” and “Rammahgon” (which immediately reminded me of that magical Indian epic, the Ramayana,

a story of a kidnapping, a demon king, and a rescue–an easy introduction would be this–)

they were, as the book’s text informs us: “Far from those exciting stories of lightsaber adventures…” but, instead, were meant “…to preserve the sacred knowledge of those most in tune with the nature of the galaxy.” 

Interestingly, however, the “Rammahgon”

“…contains four origin stories of the cosmos and the Force…Recovered from the world of Ossus, the pressed red clay cover represents an omniscient eye referenced in a poem within.  But between the wordplay and talk of battling gods, there lies real, indisputable knowledge that saved the galaxy from the Sith Eternal.”

The look of ancient wear and tear of these texts imitates manuscripts the study of which occupied Tolkien’s scholarly work for most of his life

and presented a model for his own imitation of pages from the “Book of Mazarbul”.  Could it, in turn, have provided an inspiration for the creators of the “Jedi Sacred Texts”?  And, considering the kinds of material found in the Silmarillion—foundation and stories of struggles between lesser gods and would-be greater ones and evil as great as the Sith–could we see another bit of earlier Tolkien influencing later Star Wars? 

As always, thanks for reading.

Stay well,

Consider which texts you find sacred,

And remember that, as ever, there’s

MTCIDC

O

PS

If Neil MacGregor’s original series interests you, you can see/hear it here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/about/british-museum-objects/

Troll the Ancient

24 Wednesday Jul 2024

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Welcome, dear readers, as always.

When I was very little, many things puzzled me.  Among them was this from a Christmas carol:

“Don we now our gay apparel.

(assorted tra-la-las)

Troll the ancient Yuletide carol.”

(further fa-la-las, etc)

(“Deck the Halls”—for its interesting and fairly recent—1862—history, see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deck_the_Halls )

I suppose I wondered who “Don” was (which I heard as Don Wenow, possibly a Spanish grandee?), but what really confused me was what trolls had to do with Christmas.

I had first met a troll here—

in a “Little Golden Book”—a small children’s book with, as you can see, a single story.  Although I didn’t understand that word “Gruff”, I liked the story which, if you don’t know it, is a simple folktale:

1. three goats of increasing size lived in a meadow by a stream

2. across the stream was a lusher meadow, the stream being crossed by a bridge

3. under the bridge lived a troll

(from the Rolozo Tolkien site—no artist listed—and be careful if you go looking for trolls on the internet or you might end up with this–)

4. the smallest/youngest goat attempts to cross the bridge but is threatened by the troll.  The goat says wait for my brother—he’s larger and therefore will provide a better meal.  The troll agrees, the second goat appears, says the same thing, and the troll—who has yet to catch on, but that’s trolls for you—agrees again.  And, even if you don’t know this story, you being one of my readers (unless, of course, you’re a troll, in which case, although you’re certainly welcome to join us, take notes!) will guess right away that the third, and largest, goat butts the troll into the stream, where he drowns.

But what is a troll, other than a rather dim creature with a taste for goats and a damp residence?

I’ve always assumed that they were Scandinavian and, consulting my Old Norse dictionary (Cleaseby and Gudbrand Vigfusson, 1874—here’s a copy for you here:  https://cleasby-vigfusson-dictionary.vercel.app/ ), I find “A giant, fiend, demon, a generic term”, along with all sorts of expressions, compounds, and place names associated with them, adding this:  “a werewolf, one possessed by demons”.

Giants, fiends, and demons are found everywhere in old stories (in my long-term reading of the whole of The Thousand and One Nights, I meet them on a regular basis), but the ancestry of this particular tale certainly places at least one troll squarely in Norway, as it first appeared in Asbjornsen and Moe’s Norske Folkeeventyr (1841-44)—“Norwegian Folktales”.

(This is the second edition of 1852.)

In turn, selections from this were translated by George Webbe Dasent (1817-1896) as Popular Tales from the Norse (1859)—here’s a copy for you:  https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/8933/pg8933-images.html

And here, as Number XXXVII, we find the story. 

This is where I first met a troll—could that have been true for Tolkien, as well?  Let’s have a look at the possibility.

When we think of trolls and JRRT, I imagine the first thing which comes into readers’ minds is the near-disaster of Bilbo and the dwarves with William, Bert, and Tom in a glade—

(JRRT)

“But they were trolls.  Obviously trolls.  Even Bilbo, in spite of his sheltered life, could see that:  from the great heavy faces of them, and their size, and the shape of their legs, not to mention their language, which was not drawing-room fashion at all, at all.”  (The Hobbit, Chapter 2, “Roast Mutton”)

That language was described by Douglas Anderson in his The Annotated Hobbit as “comic, lower-class speech”—but, more specifically, it’s the language of music hall comics, commonly lower-class Londoners, cockneys—

(This is Harry Champion, 1865-1942, a well-known performer in music halls, and, with that expression, half-way to becoming a troll himself.)

which is hardly what we’d expect of creatures William describes as “come down from the mountains”, where we might hear them speaking the kind of rural English you hear in Sean Astin’s Sam in Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings,

based upon southwestern speech, but generalized to a degree and called “mummershire” in England.

Tolkien once described himself as having “a very simple sense of humour (which even my appreciative critics find tiresome)” (from a letter to Deborah Webster, 25 October, 1958, Letters, 412), which might be true in general, but I find the juxtaposition of creatures from Norse mythology doing a kind of music hall routine a wonderfully grimly comic combination, particularly as, during that routine, they were about to kill and eat the dwarves—and Bilbo, too.  (I especially like William’s specific detail that “You’ve et a village and a half between yer, since we come down from the mountains.”)

Sometimes it’s clear that Tolkien’s very early experiences with stories has influenced his later writing—as much as he can be prickly on the subject—as in the case of Moria and “Soria Moria Castle”, of which he says:

“It was there, as I remember, a casual ‘echo’ of Soria Moria Castle in one of the Scandinavian tales translated by Dasent.  (The tale had no interest for me:  I had already forgotten it and have never since looked at it.  It was thus merely the source of the sound-sequence moria, which might have been found or composed elsewhere.)  I liked the sound-sequence; it alliterated with ‘mines’, and it connected itself with the MOR element in my linguistic construction.”  (drafts for a letter to ‘Mr. Rang’, August, 1967, Letters, 541)

For us, however, the important phrase here is “one of the Scandinavian tales translated by Dasent”.  And here, as well, we have a small problem.  A volume we know must have formed part of Tolkien’s reading experience was Andrew Lang’s 1890 The Red Fairy Book,

and “Soria Moria Castle” appears there as the third story in the volume.  (Here’s a copy for you of the first edition:  https://archive.org/details/redfairybook00langiala/redfairybook00langiala/page/n15/mode/2up )  Although, in his introduction, Lang credits the translators of other tales, he doesn’t credit Dasent for this story.  Instead, at the story’s end, there’s a footnote citing “P.C. Asbjornsen”, who, along with Moe, was the source for Dasent’s work.   And yet, when one compares the text in Lang with that in Dasent, although the basic story is the same, there are differences, beginning with the first sentence.

In Lang, it reads:

“There was once upon a time a couple of folks who had a son called Halvor.”

And, in Dasent, that reads:

“Once on a time there was a poor couple who had a son whose name was Halvor.”

What’s going on here?  My guess is that there’s been some editing by Lang or by his wife, who, in reality, quietly took over the series, almost from the beginning, as Lang acknowledges in the introduction to The Lilac Fairy Book, 1910 (for more on this see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lang%27s_Fairy_Books ). 

Reading on, we see that Halvor comes face to face (to face to face to face to face, as the troll has three heads) with a troll—in fact, there are several trolls—the next with six heads and a third with 9,

but these are not in the least like William, Bert, and Tom, being more like the giant in “Jack and the Beanstalk” with his “Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman”, saying, “Hutetu!  It smells of a Christian man’s blood here!”

One form of “Soria Moria Castle”, even with a differing text, occurs both in Dasent and Lang, but “Three Billy Goats Gruff” only appears in Dasent, leaving us with a puzzle:  did Tolkien read (or have read to him by his loving mother) “Soria Moria Castle” in Lang, in which case his trolls may come from that story, or did he have a copy of Dasent available and the trolls appeared, not only from “Soria Moria Castle”, but might also have done so (in a dimmer form) in “Three Billy Goats Gruff”?

And what about that other troll, the one in

“Troll the ancient Yuletide carol.”?

If we can believe the anti-Christian view of trolls in “Soria Moria Castle”, it’s doubtful that they would be associated with Christmas.  Etymonline says (along with a brief discussion of the use of the word in fishing, which doesn’t seem apropos), “sing in a full, rolling voice”, although one can picture very large trolls with large voices, I wonder what they’d sing?  (See the song of the goblins in Chapter 4 of The Hobbit, “Over Hill and Under Hill” for a possible model?) 

Now all I have to wonder about is who Don Wenow was and how he might be related to Christmas.

As ever, thanks for reading.

Stay well,

If you sing carols, you might consider the identity of Round John Virgin,

And remember that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

PS

As you’ll recall, William, Bert, and Tom soon have an early morning experience with Gandalf which leaves them petrified.  Have a look at this important contribution to what happens to them and why:  https://hatchjs.com/why-do-trolls-turn-to-stone/

Praeteritio, or, Paraleipsis, Trailer, or Just Teasing?

17 Wednesday Jul 2024

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As ever, dear readers, welcome.

This posting came about because I was rereading Kipling’s Just So Stories (1902).  In the last of the stories, at the beginning, I found this:

“There are three hundred and fifty-five stories about Suleiman-bin-Daoud:  but this is not one of them.  It is not the story of the Lapwing who found the Water; or the Hoopoe who shaded Sulieman-bin-Daoud from the heat.  It is not the story of the Glass Pavement, or the Ruby with the Crooked Hole, or the Gold Bars of Balkis.  It is the story of the Butterfly that Stamped.” (Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories, “The Butterfly That Stamped”  You can read the story here:  https://archive.org/details/justsostories00kipl/page/n9/mode/2up in a 1912 American edition.  A word of caution, however:  sometimes Kipling’s language seems, to our ears, casually racist, but that was 1912 and, to my mind, doesn’t mar the stories in general, although, in 2024, it does stand out in an unpleasant way.)

It’s a trick I’ll bet you can spot immediately:  a politician speaking about a rival, will say, “But I will not mention my opponent’s _________”—and you can fill in the blank with anything negative which might come to mind.  It’s a very old rhetorical trick—so old that the Greeks used it (hence that “paraleipsis”, from the verb paraleipein, “to leave aside”) and the Romans, who were careful students of Greek rhetoric, employed it in turn (hence “praeteritio”, from praeter, “beside” and ire, “to go”).

This mentioning, but then withholding information, has a cousin in a form of this trick used by story-tellers in the West since the Greeks and clearly still in use in Victorian/Edwardian times by Kipling.   Consider, for example, Book 11 of the Odyssey.  Here, Odysseus, at the court of Alkinoos, (that’s al-KIH-noe-os),

is relating his visit to the Otherworld

and, at one point, lists a whole series of famous women he sees there, from Tyro, who slept with Poseidon and produced Pelias and Neleus—Pelias being the evil uncle who sends Jason off after the Golden Fleece—

(a wall painting from Pompeii—this is the moment when Pelias recognizes Jason by a prophecy which has warned him to beware of a visitor wearing only one sandal)

to Alkmene, mother of Herakles,

(a South Italian comic pot, in which Zeus, aided by Hermes, is trying to get into Alkmene’s window)

to Ariadne, daughter of Minos, who helped Theseus against the Minotaur in the Labyrinth.

(Ariadne gave Theseus a ball of string to help him get back from the maze.  You can read the whole list here:  Odyssey, Book 11, lines 235-330–https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0136%3Abook%3D11  )

Each time, there’s a mention, but no story is ever gone into in detail.

Each of the women is given a kind of mini-biography (mostly about how the majority of them slept with Zeus), with a little detail, and the whole list resembles a well-known, now-fragmentary work once attributed to the early Greek poet, Hesiod, called “The Catalogue of Women”, also known by the first word of each entry in the catalogue as Eoiai, which we can translate as “[or] her like”.  (You can read an extensive article about this here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalogue_of_Women  and you can read the collected fragments here:  https://www.theoi.com/Text/HesiodCatalogues.html  )

Assembling and preserving the past became an important feature of the later Greco-Roman world, but, thinking about the mini-catalogue in the Odyssey, and the fact the poem itself is a compilation of the works of earlier oral singers, I wonder if what we’re seeing here doesn’t have other purposes, first, the survival of a kind of boast on the part of those early singers—“Look what other cool stories I know”—and, second, a tease—“and wouldn’t you like to hear those next?” as if what we’re reading now wasn’t a sort of “trailer”, like those we still see in movie theatres, as well as on-line.  (As one easy example, here’s the original trailer for Star Wars:  A New Hope, from 1977:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1g3_CFmnU7k   If you haven’t seen this, you’ll be amazed at how “crude” it now seems when, in 1977, it was the beginning of a new age of technological adventure-telling which is still with us, the carefully-built and filmed tiny models of then now replaced by often-astounding CGI now.)

(You’ll notice, by the way, that this poster was designed by the same Hildebrandt brothers who also gave us so many wonderful Tolkien images.)

“The Butterfly That Stamped and the two catalogues from the Greek past brought another “here are stories—but I’m not going to tell you” to mind:

“   One winter’s night, as we sat together by the fire, I ventured to
suggest to him that as he had finished pasting extracts into his
commonplace book, he might employ the next two hours in making
our room a little more habitable. He could not deny the justice of
my request, so with a rather rueful face he went off to his bedroom,
from which he returned presently pulling a large tin box behind him.
This he placed in the middle of the floor, and squatting down upon
a stool in front of it he threw back the lid. I could see that it was
already a third full of bundles of paper tied up with red tape into
separate packages.
   ‘There are cases enough here, Watson,’ said he, looking at me
with mischievous eyes.  ‘ I think that if you knew all that I have in
this box you would ask me to pull some out instead of putting
others in.’
   ‘These are the records of your early work, then?’  I asked.  ‘ I
have often wished that I had notes of those cases.’
   ‘Yes, my boy; these were all done prematurely, before my
biographer had come to glorify me.’  He lifted bundle after bundle,
in a tender, caressing sort of way.
    ‘They are not all successes, Watson,’  said he, ‘but there are some pretty little problems among
them.  Here’s the record of the Tarleton murders, and the case of
Vamberry the wine merchant, and the adventure of the old
Russian woman, and the singular affair of the aluminium crutch,
as well as a full account of Ricoletti of the club foot and his
abominable wife. And here—ah, now ! this really is something a
little recherché.’  “  (Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Musgrave Ritual”—one of my all-time favorite Holmes stories, collected in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, 1894, which you can read in the 1894 edition, with the original illustrations, here:  https://ia801306.us.archive.org/27/items/memoirsofsherloc00doylrich/memoirsofsherloc00doylrich.pdf )

(one of those original illustrations by Sidney Paget)

And here we see again the same trick—and this is only one of a number of occasions in the Sherlock Holmes stories when a subject is mentioned—but there is no story to be found to follow it.  (See for much more:  https://www.ihearofsherlock.com/2016/01/the-unpublished-cases-of-sherlock-holmes.html )

As Conan Doyle came to dislike Holmes and even tried to kill him off in 1893 (see “The Final Problem” in the same volume as “The Musgrave Ritual”)

(another Sidney Paget)

it’s puzzling that he would do this to his readers—why would he suggest more stories to come?–but then, in 1901, he brought Holmes back in The Hound of the Baskervilles (originally published in The Strand Magazine, but you can read it in its 1902 book form here:  https://gutenberg.org/files/2852/2852-h/2852-h.htm ),

so, for all of his mixed feelings about his detective, perhaps that earlier quotation from “The Musgrave Ritual” is appropriate: 

   ‘There are cases enough here, Watson,’ said he, looking at me
with mischievous eyes.  ‘ I think that if you knew all that I have in
this box you would ask me to pull some out instead of putting
others in.’

And, as Conan Doyle’s last Holmes story appeared in 1927 (“The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place” collected in The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, and you can read it here:  https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/69700/pg69700-images.html#chap11 ) perhaps, even to Conan Doyle, there was always the chance for more.

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

Stay well,

For lack of space, I admit that I’ve left out such works as Filbert L. Gosnold’s “The Mystery of the Exploding Pants” as well as many other examples,

But remember that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

PS

In closing, I have what might be a final example, of which there is, alas, no chance of more, as teasing as the initial mention is:

“He is surer of finding the way home in a blind night than were the cats of Queen Beruthiel.”  (The Lord of the Rings, Book Two, Chapter 4, “A Journey in the Dark”)

Although Tolkien never mentioned those felines again in print, we know a little more about the Queen and her cats from what Christopher Tolkien calls “a very ‘primitive’ outline, in one part illegible” (see Unfinished Tales, page 419), including “She had nine black cats and one white…setting them to discover all the dark secrets of Gondor”, but, as the author himself wrote, in a letter to W.H. Auden:

“I have yet to learn anything about the cats of Queen Beruthiel.”

having prefaced that with, “These rhymes and names will crop up; but they do not always explain themselves.”  (letter to W.H. Auden, 7 June, 1955, Letters, 419)

Or is this like Conan Doyle, using Sherlock Holmes to drop a teasing hint of more to come—which never did?

PPS

If you have access to it, you might enjoy this lively BBC series by the English historian, Lucy Worsley, on Conan Doyle’s love/hate relationship with Sherlock Holmes–

Grocer or Burglar?

11 Thursday Jul 2024

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As always, dear readers, welcome.

For Bilbo Baggins, what promised to be an easy morning suddenly turned dark with the arrival of “an unexpected party” (this is a Tolkien pun:  “party” in Victorian English could mean “person” as well as “event”—and it’s still available in legal English, as in “the party of the first part”—which turns up in an hilarious scene from the Marx Brothers’ Night at the Opera, 1935—

in which Groucho, a shyster lawyer named “Otis P. Driftwood”, makes an agreement with the manager, played by Chico (say that “CHICK-oh” as he was supposedly always after girls), of an Italian tenor,

the agreement consists of mock legalese and—well, here, see it for yourselves:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_Sy6oiJbEk ).

This party is Gandalf

(the Hildebrandts)

and his arrival leads to that second party—the one with all of the dwarves—

(another Hildebrandts)

and the map

(JRRT—with the later addition of the moon letters)

and Bilbo’s reaction to the danger involved in joining the dwarves as a “burglar”:

“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…Then he fell flat on the floor, and kept calling out ‘struck by lightning, struck by lightning!’ over and over again…”  (The Hobbit, Chapter One, “An Unexpected Party”)

Needless to say, this did not leave a very good impression upon the dwarves, leading Bilbo to overhearing Gloin say:

“It is all very well for Gandalf to talk about this hobbit being fierce, but one shriek like that in a moment of excitement would be enough to wake the dragon and all his relatives, and kill the lot of us.  I think it sounded more like fright than excitement!  In fact, if it had not been for the sign on the door, I should have been sure we had come to the wrong house.  As soon as I clapped eyes on the little fellow bobbing and puffing on the mat, I had my doubts.  He looks more like a grocer than a burglar!”

But what does a burglar look like?  I’ve always presumed that Tolkien, if not Gloin, had in mind someone like this—

which certainly differs from Bilbo in every way.

If he doesn’t look like that, does he resemble a grocer?  What does a grocer look like?

In Tolkien’s England, except for a big city, like London, which had department stores like Whiteley’s,

people bought their necessities along certain streets (sometimes called “the high”), where there were shops for anything and everything (also true in middle and lower class neighborhoods even in big cities).

Thus, for example, you went to the butcher shop for meat,

the bakery for bread,

the fruiterer for fruit,

and the greengrocer for vegetables.

(This can still be the case today—I’ve certainly walked down such streets in recent years in what are commonly called “market towns”—

even when, just outside town, there are supermarkets with large parking lots—

Sainsbury’s itself began as a single shop in London in 1869—)

Such shops, and many others, including department stores, as they began to appear in the 1870s and beyond, were not self-service, as most stores are now, but were staffed with clerks, whose job was to take orders from customers, acting as in-store middlemen, like this fellow—

or these

and there could be a kind of obsequiousness to their behavior (where “the customer is always right” must have come from) which is, I think, what JRRT had in mind when he has Gloin say “more like a grocer”, “puffing and blowing”.

That Bilbo was a well-off individual, living in a rather luxurious dwelling, to begin with,

(JRRT)

and then being called “a shop assistant” or the equivalent, we can see why:

“The Took side had won.  He suddenly felt he would go without bed and breakfast to be thought fierce.  As for little fellow bobbing on the mat it almost made him really fierce.”

And so Bilbo was on his way to becoming the burglar Gandalf had advertized him to be. 

(Alan Lee)

Thanks for reading, as ever.

Stay well,

Be wary of eavesdropping on dwarves,

And remember that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

PS

If you’d like to read about a completely different burglar, (someone Tolkien could easily have read about), you might try A.J. Raffles, an “amateur cracksman”—that is, a gentleman burglar–created by E.W. Hornung (1866-1921), the brother-in-law of Arthur Conan Doyle—with The Amateur Cracksman, 1899, here:  https://archive.org/details/amateurcracksma03horngoog/page/n9/mode/2up

Feudal

03 Wednesday Jul 2024

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As always, dear readers, welcome.

As Gondor prepares to meet Sauron’s massive assault, it calls in troops from the south:

“And so the companies came and were hailed and cheered through the Gate, men of the Outlands marching to defend the City of Gondor in a dark hour…The men of Ringlo Vale behind the son of their lord, Dervorin striding on foot:  three hundreds…From the Anfalas, the Langstrand far away, a long line of men of many sorts…scantily equipped save for the household of Golasgil their lord…” (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 1, “Minas Tirith”)

When the text repeatedly says, “their lord”, what, precisely, does that mean?

Although born in 1892, during the last years of the reign of Victoria (1819-1901),

Tolkien was not a convinced monarchist, writing to his son, Christopher:

“Give me a king whose chief interest in life is stamps, railways, or race-horses; and who has the power to sack his Vizier (or whatever you care to call him) if he does not like the cut of his trousers.”  (letter to Christopher Tolkien, 29 November, 1943, Letters, 90)

At the same time, he was not a passionate democrat, either, referring to the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill (1874-1965),

in the same letter as ‘Winston and his gang’,

having said that his own “…political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs)”.

And yet, in creating Middle-earth, he shows a preference for a medieval world, and, for his homeland, England, this means the form of government from which the Victorian government descended, feudalism.

Feudalism comes from Anglo-Norman French fe, which, at base, means “trust/faith”, and, in a secondary meaning, is the basis for “fief”—that is, an estate, a parcel of land given in trust.  (For more on meanings and forms, see the extremely useful Anglo-Norman French dictionary here:  https://anglo-norman.net/entry/fe ) 

It comes from Anglo-Norman because it was the Normans under Duke William of Normandy (c.1028-1087)

who introduced the concept to their newly-conquered country after 1066AD. 

The foundation of the concept is that:

1. all the land in a kingdom belongs to the king—who has received it from God

2. he then parcels the land out to his chief followers, who then

3. parcel it out to their main followers

In return, all the followers in #3 owe military service to those in #2, who, in turn, owe military service to #1.  This creates a kind of pyramid, like this–

(correct the spelling of “fife” to “fief”)

Those in #3 would then collect those below them to form the units they would bring with them when their overlords, at the king’s demand, would gather forces for whatever the king had in mind.

(by Eugene Leliepvre, one of my favorite 20th century French military illustrators)

You’ll notice, of course, that those at the bottom of the pyramid—the 99% in modern terms—had no say in any of this:  when called, they were forced to go.

This was because they were the conquered.  When the Normans invaded and defeated the previous government, in the form of the death of the Anglo-Saxon king, Harold Godwinson,

they then spread out across the landscape, ousting the previous Anglo-Saxon owners and setting up forts, called “motte and baileys”,

to control the land and the locals, who, at first at least, were simply possessions.  (Feudalism became much more complicated over time, including grades of the 99%, who could be freemen, but who still had feudal obligations.)

The same idea of conquest, in some sense, must have been true of the ancestors of the men of Gondor, who were not indigenous to Middle-earth, but had come from the wreckage of Numenor and who gradually came to dominate the western lands, driving the older peoples—the Dunlendings and the Woses–

(the Hildebrandts)

into exile in mountain and forest, rather than enslaving them, as the Normans did the Anglo-Saxons.

From those words “their lord”, however, it’s clear that lesser Gondorians had become part of a similar socio-economic system.

In a letter to Naomi Mitchison, JRRT has this to say about such:

“I am not incapable of or unaware of economic thought; and I think as far as the ‘mortals’ go, Men, Hobbits, and Dwarfs, that the situations are so devised that economic likelihood is there and could be worked out:  Gondor has sufficient ‘townlands’ and fiefs with a good water and road approach to provide for its population…”  (letter to Naomi Mitchison, 25 September, 1954, Letters, 292)

And there’s that word “fief”and all that it implies about rulers and ruled, both in Norman England and Gondor:  a comfortable life for those at the top,

but endless hard work, taxes, and military service for those—the great majority—at the bottom.

The British troops who surrounded Tolkien in the trenches in 1916

were, in a sense, the descendants of that feudal 99% and, although, when called upon, could be fearsomely brave, they were also well aware that they were still peasants to many of those in charge and so had songs with lyrics like:

“If you want to find the colonel,

I know where he is.

If you want to find the colonel,

I know where he is.

He’s sitting in comfort, stuffing his bloody gut.

I saw him.  I saw him,

Sitting in comfort, stuffing his bloody gut.”

(from “Hanging on the Old Barbed Wire”—you can hear a recording of some of the many mocking verses to this by the English group “Chumbawamba” here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZhzV68U48w )

So, although Tolkien describes

“…Imrahil, Prince of Dol Amroth…and a company of knights in full harness riding grey horses; and behind them seven hundreds of men at arms, tall as lords, grey-eyed, dark-haired, singing as they came.”

we might wonder if JRRT, self-described as leaning “more and more to Anarchy”, could still hear the privates of 1916, and, if so, just what those men slogging along on foot behind “knights in full harness riding grey horses”  might actually have been singing?  Could it have been something as subversive as “Hanging on the Old Barbed Wire”, or maybe this couplet from an actual English peasant revolt in 1381:

“When Adam delved [dug]

And Eve span [spun],

Who was then

The gentleman?” 

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

Stay well,

Remember the Golden Rule,

(from the comic strip “The Wizard of Id”)

And remember, as well, that there’s

MTCIDC

O