Author Archives: Ollamh

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

Dos Mackaneeks

26 Wednesday Jun 2024

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Welcome, as always, dear readers.

Star Wars:  the Phantom Menace

certainly begins with a bang:  a Jedi and his padawan, sent on a peace mission to the planet Naboo, are attacked by poisoned gas and droids

(reminding me at once of those lines from Weird Al Jankovic’s song:

“But their response, it didn’t thrill us

They locked the doors and tried to kill us”

If you don’t know “The Saga Begins”, you can watch it here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEcjgJSqSRU )

but escape to the surface only to be almost squashed in an invasion of droid armor

before they rescue an unlikely helper (right out of Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature B350-B390, “Grateful Animals”),

who takes them to an underwater city where they come before Boss Nass, who blames upperworlders for the invasion

and responds to their warning that, after they finish with the upperworlders, the invaders will be coming for those below the water:

“Dos mackaneeks no comen here.  Dey not know of usen.”

The Gungans (which is what these people call themselves) are sophisticated technologically enough to have an underwater city

and self-propelled transport,

and they even can produce an energy shield,

but faced with the armament of the invading droid army—

and its hordes of infantry,

their use of energy balls (“boomas”)

and shields

which bear a faint resemblance to Celtic shields in some clear material

show them to be really no match for the droids and their technology.  Only luck from the outside saves them.

The Gungans are brave and their weapons can cause some damage, but it’s obvious that they’re outclassed technologically, which makes me think of the Aztecs, the center of whose capital, Tenochtitlan, built in the middle of a lake, was a series of sophisticated and elegant stone buildings (complete with an aqueduct),

but who, unfortunately for them, were a late Neolithic culture who, with no metal with which to work, made their weapons using volcanic glass, obsidian, which was sharp,

(this and the next by Angus McBride)

but no match for the conquistadores’ steel weapons, armor, and early firearms.

And this brings me to a “what if”.

When Helm’s Deep is attacked,

(JRRT)

the orcs’ original method is perhaps the worst in the repertoire:  escalade—that is, putting ladders up against a wall, then climbing up them.  You can imagine why I call it the worst—

the attackers are visible all the way up the ladders and:

1. they can be pushed off

2. the ladders can be pushed off

3. people can whack you when you reach the top

4. people can shoot you on the way up

5. people can drop things on you on the way up

(In several historical assaults, ladders were found to be too short, adding an extra difficulty.)

Such attacks usually only succeed if:

1. they are a surprise  (this happened at the terrible siege of Badajoz in 1812—the French garrison was too focused in one direction and some of the British attackers climbed up the back of the fortress–)

2. the attackers can pin down enough of the defenders with archery/gunfire to allow the climbers to reach the top—and an attack can still fail if those at the top aren’t supported by others coming up behind them—Alexander the Great almost died when he was isolated after scaling an enemy wall (reinforcements overburdened the ladders and they broke—see Arrian The Anabasis of Alexander, Book VI, Sections 9-10—which you can read in translation here:  https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/46976/pg46976-images.html#Page_329  )

The orcs, however, are concealing a secret weapon—

“Even as they spoke there came a blare of trumpets.  Then there was a crash and a flash of flame and smoke.  The waters of the Deeping-stream poured out hissing and foaming:  they were choked no longer, a gaping hole was blasted in the wall.  A host of dark shapes poured in.

‘Devilry of Saruman!’ cried Aragorn.  ‘They have crept in the culvert again, while we talked, and they have lit the fire of Orthanc beneath our feet.’ “  (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 7, “Helm’s Deep”)

And it’s not just Saruman’s “Devilry”—

“The bells of day had scarcely rung out again, a mockery in the unlightened dark, when far away he saw fires spring up, across in the dim spaces where the walls of the Pelennor stood.  The watchmen cried aloud, and all men in the City stood to arms.  Now ever and anon there was a red flash, and slowly through the heavy air dull rumbles could be heard.

‘They have taken the wall!’ men cried.  ‘They are blasting breaches in it.  They are coming!’ “ (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 4, “The Siege of Gondor”)

I think that we can assume that “the fire of Orthanc” is, in fact, gunpowder.

In our Western world, the first known mention of it was by Friar Roger Bacon in the mid-13th century,

and the first known depiction of a gunpowder weapon dates from the early 14th century.

The only uses in The Lord of the Rings are for what would be called, in later times, “mines”.  In our Middle-earth, medieval technology further developed the use of gunpowder into bigger, deadlier forms—early cannon, called “bombards”

and miniaturized them as “handgonnes”.

(Liliane and Fred Funcken)

What if Saruman—and Sauron—had had time to develop their “fire of Orthanc”?

This is how we usually see orcs and their armament—all medieval—spears, swords, bows.

(Alan Lee)

Suppose, however, that there had been further armament.  Imagine orcs with handgonnes, for example.

And, instead of massive stone-throwers employed to break down the walls of Minas Tirith—also a medieval weapon—

giant bombards.

It was weapons like these, in 1453, which broke holes in the ancient walls of Constantinople,

allowing the Turkish besiegers to enter a place which only once before, in its 1000 year plus history, had been broken into.

And why stop there? 

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)

was born only the year before the fall of Constantinople, just at the very end of the Western Middle Ages.  In 1487, he sketched this—

which, in terms of much of its technology, was possible in 1487, although it would have been more than a little crowded inside with all of those guns, especially when they jerked backwards in the recoil which would have come with firing them.  Fortunately for the West, da Vinci doesn’t appear to have figured out a useful way of propelling his invention

and it was only in the early 20th century that the internal combustion engine could be employed to move such a metal monster.

Consider, however, if the opponents of the West in the later Third Age had developed what clearly they had begun.  Seeing such approaching, on foot or, worse, in an armored vehicle, what could Rohirrim or Gondorians have done beyond believing what Qui Gon had tried to warn Boss Nass about:

Dos Mackaneeks!

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Stay well,

Remember the places where tanks are vulnerable,

and remember, as well, that there’s always

MTCIDC

O

Soul Divided

19 Wednesday Jun 2024

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As always, dear readers, welcome.

Although I’ve never reread any but the first of them, I enjoyed the “Harry Potter” books when they were originally published, beginning in 1997.

My favorite was that first,

or, by its US title.

I prefer the original British title because it suggests something magical.  “Sorcerer’s Stone” was a make-shift replacement, with no resonance.  The “philosopher’s stone”, however, was a real (or at least hoped-for) thing, being thought of as a kind of alchemical tool which could turn substances into precious metals, and which seemed very appropriate for a book set mostly in a boarding school for witches and wizards.  (You can read more about it here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosopher’s_stone   Illustrating the article is a wonderful painting by Joseph Wright of Derby, 1734-1797,

which, although entitled–in short form—the full title is practically a brief lecture–“The Alchymist, in Search of the Philosopher’s Stone…”, has always struck me as potentially being a very useful portrait of Merlin.  If you know T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, you might imagine that that’s the young Wart—aka Arthur—in the background.)

When the series continued, I wondered how far the author would take what was, initially, a clever takeoff on a literary type:  the school story, which dates at least as far back as Thomas Hughes’ 1857 Tom Brown’s School Days and which you can read here:  https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1480/pg1480-images.html

In fact, although the series progressed with the main protagonists continuing their magical education, it became increasingly entangled with the villain, Voldemort, and a world folktale, classified in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as “The Giant (Ogre) who had no heart in his body” (ATU302).  In this story, of which at least 250 versions exist, the Giant (or his equivalent), to protect himself, removes his heart and conceals it where (he hopes) it cannot be found.   The protagonist (along with helpers) must find that location and destroy the heart—or at least use it as leverage.  (You can read the translation of a Norwegian version of it here, under the title “Cinder-Lad and His Six Brothers”:  https://archive.org/details/fairystoriesmych00shim/page/n7/mode/2up   And you can read more about the tale here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Giant_Who_Had_No_Heart_in_His_Body )  In the Harry Potter books, it’s not one piece of his heart–here, his soul–but 7, all hidden in what are called “Horcruxes”, and it takes Harry and his friends (along with the headmaster, at one point) to locate and destroy the set, providing for a major plot element beginning with the second book Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.  (For more, see: https://fortheloveofharry.com/list-of-horcruxes/  )

When all of the Horcruxes are gone, so is Voldemort and this brings to mind another complex story.

“The Enemy still lacks one thing to give him strength and knowledge to beat down all resistance, break the last defences, and cover all the lands in a second darkness.  He lacks the One Ring…

…the Nine he has gathered to himself; the Seven also, or else they are destroyed.  The Three are hidden still.  But that no longer troubles him.  He only needs the One; for he made that Ring himself, it is his, and he let a great part of his own former power pass into it, so that he could rule all the others.  If he recovers it, then he will command them all again, wherever they be, even the Three, and all that has been wrought with them will be laid bare, and he will be stronger than ever.”  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 2, “The Shadow of the Past”)

If this Ring is so crucial, it would be easy to wonder why Sauron hasn’t been more aggressive in finding it, but Gandalf answers that next:

“…He believed that the One had perished, that the Elves had destroyed it, as should have been done.  But he knows now that it has not perished, that it has been found.  So he is seeking it, seeking it, and all his thought is bent on it…”

In the Norwegian version of “The Giant (Ogre) who had no heart in his body”, the Giant’s heart was concealed in an egg and, when the egg was broken, “the giant burst to pieces”.

When the last Horcrux is gone, Voldemort seems to melt away,

rather like the demise of the Wicked Witch of the West when she is doused with water.

When the Ring is destroyed, the end is a bit more dramatic:

“And even as he spoke the earth rocked beneath their feet.  Then rising swiftly up, far above the Towers of the Black Gate, high above the mountains, a vast soaring darkness sprang into the sky, flickering with fire.  The earth groaned and quaked.  The Towers of the Teeth swayed, tottered, and fell down; the mighty rampart crumbled; the Black Gate was hurled in ruin; and from far away, now dim, now growing, now mounting to the clouds,  there came a drumming rumble, a roar, a long echoing roll of ruinous noise.

…And as the Captains gazed south to the Land of Mordor, it seemed to them that, black against the pall of cloud, there rose a huge shape of shadow, impenetrable, lightning-crowned, filling all the sky.  Enormous it reared above the world, and stretched out towards them a vast threatening hand, terrible but impotent:  for even as it leaned over them, a great wind took it, and it was all blown away, and passed; and then a hush fell.” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 4, “The Field of Cormallen”)

(An amazing illustration by Ted Nasmith)

Somehow, in contrast, for all that his end brings a dramatic conclusion to the Harry Potter series, the melting of Voldemort seems more like the melting of Vole de Mort, in comparison.

(by Exifia at Deviant Art—I’m sorry that I can’t say more, but Deviant Art’s website appears to be unavailable at present)

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

Stay well,

When it comes to hiding things, see E.A. Poe, “The Purloined Letter” here:  https://poestories.com/read/purloined

And remember that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

PS

Looking at Vole de Mort, I’m reminded of one of my (many) favorite Terry Pratchett characters,  The Death of Rats (“aka ‘The Grim Squeaker’ “).  Put a black robe on him and perhaps a resemblance?

(credited to Paul Southard)

For more, see:  https://wiki.lspace.org/Death_of_Rats

Istanbul, not…

12 Wednesday Jun 2024

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Welcome, dear readers, as always. Last’s weeks visit to Harry Turtledove’s Videssos (aka Byzantium) brought a certain song to mind and so the title of this posting comes from a 1953 pop hit by a Canadian vocal group called “The Four Lads”.

It’s perhaps an “ear worm”, based pretty much on the rhythm IS-tan-BUL, not CON-stan-ti-NOP-le, repeated throughout, so parental caution.  Here’s the whole lyric—

“Istanbul was Constantinople
Now it’s Istanbul, not Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
Now it’s Turkish delight on a moonlit night

Every gal in Constantinople
Lives in Istanbul, not Constantinople
So if you’ve a date in Constantinople
She’ll be waiting in Istanbul

Even old New York was once New Amsterdam
Why they changed it I can’t say
People just liked it better that way

So, take me back to Constantinople
No, you can’t go back to Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
Why did Constantinople get the works?
That’s nobody’s business but the Turks

Istanbul, Istanbul

Istanbul, Istanbul

Even old New York was once New Amsterdam
Why they changed it I can’t say
People just liked it better that way

Istanbul was Constantinople
Now it’s Istanbul, not Constantinople
Been a long time gone, oh Constantinople
Why did Constantinople get the works?
That’s nobody’s business but the Turks

So, take me back to Constantinople
No, you can’t go back to Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
Why did Constantinople get the works?
That’s nobody’s business but the Turks

Istanbul!”

(from a site called “Songfacts”—although they credit it to the 1990 cover by They Might Be Giants.  You can hear the original here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wcze7EGorOk )

“Constantinople” was originally “Byzantium”,  meaning of the name unknown.  It was a 7th-century BC Greek settlement based upon an earlier Thracian one.

In 330AD, the Roman emperor whom we call Constantine I (c272-337AD),

to be closer not only to the goods and raw materials which came from the Black Sea region, but also to keep an eye on the Empire’s latest eastern threat, the Sassanids.

Constantine, clearly intending to indicate the continuity of his choice of capital, even if it was far from the old heartland of Italy, called it Nova Roma, but the inhabitants tended to call it “the city of Constantine” or “Constantinoupolis”—or, for short, simply “the city” “he polis” (say “he” as “hay”—it’s the definite article “the”—and the custom of shortening can even be seen here in the US:  people who live around New York City never call it “New York City”, but always “the City”). 

As if Constantine’s name for it had a charm, this “new Rome”, successfully weathered the changes which turned the western empire, with its ancient capital of “old Rome”, into a series of Germanic kingdoms, surviving into the mid-15th century AD.  By its later years, however, its territory, like its power, shrank and shrank

to a couple of small enclaves and the City itself.  

And this is what Tolkien was thinking of when he wrote

“In the south Gondor rises to a peak of power, almost reflecting Numenor, and then fades slowly to decayed Middle Age, a kind of proud, venerable, but increasingly impotent Byzantium.”  (from a letter to Milton Waldman, “probably written late in 1951”, Letters, 219)

This impotence finally came to an end, at least for “New Rome”, on 29 May, 1453, when a huge Ottoman army, under Mehmet II,

using that very modern weapon, the bombard,

broke into the city and captured it.

In earlier postings, I went into a comparison of the two, Byzantium and Minas Tirith, their look and their sieges, in some detail (see “The Fall of Two Cities?”, 9 March, 2016, and “A Kind of Proud, Venerable, But Increasingly Impotent Byzantium”, 1 June, 2016), but as JRRT himself went to some lengths in more than one letter to discuss toponymy (place names and their study) and the proper translation of place names (see, for instance, the letter to Rayner Unwin, 3 July, 1956, Letters, 359-361), I find it interesting to see what happened to Byzantium/New Rome/Constantinople.

The song says that it’s “Istanbul, not Constantinople”, but, surprisingly, this isn’t an Ottoman Turkish name and here we see that, although the Ottoman Sultan may have captured the city, he somehow never captured what it was called.  As I wrote above, the locals had called it “Constantinoupolis”, or simply “he Polis”.  Thus, when someone might ask, “Where are you going?” you might reply, “Eis ten Polin”—“to/towards the City” and that form, spoken casually, probably became “Is-tan-bul”, thus retaining part of its ancient Byzantine nomenclature—which it retains to this day, the name being legalized as the name in 1930.

But this brings me to an interesting point.  Minas Tirith, “the Tower of Guard” (formerly Minas Anor, “the Tower of the Sun”—even in Middle-earth names move around, depending upon historical circumstance) survived Sauron’s attack, which Byzantium/New Rome/Constantinople did not—and yet its name survived.

(Ted Nasmith)

When Sauron’s forces captured Minas Tirith/Anor’s matching fortress, Minas Ithil (“the Tower of the Moon”), its name was changed to the grim-sounding Minas Morgul (“the Tower of Dark Sorcery”).

(and another Ted Nasmith)

Had Minas Tirith fallen to Sauron, what might have happened to its name—or is that nobody’s business but the orcs’?

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

Stay well,

Imagine what maps and signposts would look like in the Black Speech (“One Road to Rule Them All, One Road to Lose Them”?).

And remember that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

PS

Reading about “Istanbul” by the Four Lads, I noted that a jazz critic suggested that it was actually written in reply to a 1928 song, “Constantinople”, which you can listen to (warning:  it’s catchy) here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFDdPT9H_dQ

And He Sent Out a (Turtle) Dove

05 Wednesday Jun 2024

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Welcome, dear readers, as always.

“cumque transissent quadraginta dies aperiens Noe fenestram arcae quam fecerat dimisit corvumqui egrediebatur et revertebatur donec siccarentur aquae super terram emisit quoque columbam post eum ut videret si iam cessassent aquae super faciem terraequae cum non invenisset ubi requiesceret pes eius reversa est ad eum in arcam aquae enim erant super universam terram extenditque manum et adprehensam intulit in arcamexpectatis autem ultra septem diebus aliis rursum dimisit columbam ex arcaat illa venit ad eum ad vesperam portans ramum olivae virentibus foliis in ore suo intellexit ergo Noe quod cessassent aquae super terramexpectavitque nihilominus septem alios dies et emisit columbam quae non est reversa ultra ad eum”

“And when forty days had passed, Noah, opening a window of the ark which he had made, sent out a raven, who was going out and returning while the waters were drying up over the earth.  He sent out as well a dove after him so that he might see if now the waters had gone down [literally, “ceased”] over the surface of the earth who, when she had not found where she might rest her foot, returned into the ark to him (for the waters were still over the whole earth) and he stretched out [his] hand and brought the captured [bird] into the ark.  However, when a further seven days had been waited out, he again sent out the dove from the ark, but it came to him at evening carrying in its mouth an olive branch with growing leaves and so Noah understood that the waters had receded over the earth and he waited no more than seven more days and sent out the dove which did not return again to him.”

(Genesis 8.6-12—my translation.  The text is from Jerome’s translation, which you can read more of here, both in Latin and English, in Genesis 6-8:  https://vulgate.org/ot/genesis_6.htm    )

The story of the Flood stretches out, like its waters, over much of early Western human history, not only in the Judeo-Christian Bible, and in the story of Pyrrha and Deucalion in Ovid’s  Metamorphoses (for more on Pyrrha, Deucalion, and floods, see “Flooded Out”, 6 April, 2022), but even in Tolkien, with the destruction of Numenor, but, for me, it’s both a wonderful story, and inspired some of my favorite medieval mosaics, those in the cathedral at Monreale, in Sicily.

Inside this amazingly colorful space, almost hallucinogenic, on one wall, are a series of images illustrating the story of Noah and his Ark.

I love the whole series (here it is:  https://www.christianiconography.info/sicily/noahMonreale.html ), but, if I had to choose among them, it would be the building of the Ark

and the one which illustrates the title of this posting which I love most—

The construction of the building began in the reign of William II (1167-1189),

the Norman ruler of this part of Sicily.  Here, he’s presenting the (in his time unfinished) structure to the Virgin Mary.  Although, unfortunately, we don’t know the names of the artists who created such wonderful images, they presumably were either Byzantines or were trained in the Byzantine style of mosaic-making (for more see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monreale_Cathedral_mosaics ) and this makes another Tolkien connection for me, remembering his remark, in a letter to Milton Waldman, that

“In the south Gondor rises to a peak of power, almost reflecting Numenor, and then fades slowly to decayed Middle Age, a kind of proud, venerable, but increasingly impotent Byzantium.”  (letter to Milton Waldman, “probably written in late 1951”, Letters, 203)

And “dove” and “Byzantium” bring me to the main subject of this posting, the science fiction/fantasy author, Harry Turtledove (1949-and may he live to be a 100 and more).

Turtledove, a lifelong Californian, got his PhD in Byzantine history from UCLA in 1977 with a dissertation entitled “The Immediate Successors of Justinian: A Study of the Persian Problem and of Continuity and Change in Internal Secular Affairs in the Later Roman Empire During the Reigns of Justin II and Tiberius II Constantine (AD 565–582) and this also fits into this posting—although Turtledove himself never fit into the academic world (too few jobs for Byzantinists, alas!) and, instead, became an astonishingly prolific author, with approximately 111 books by 2023 (not counting collaborations, short stories, edited collections and the fact that my eyes crossed after I counted 100—you can see a list in chronological order by series here:  https://www.bookseriesinorder.com/harry-turtledove/ ).  For a comparison, there’s Anthony Trollope (1815-1882),

a Victorian novelist known in his own time for his prolificacy, but who only turned out about 60 novels between 1847 and 1882.  (For a list, see:  https://www.orderofbooks.com/authors/anthony-trollope/  If you enjoy long, complex social novels written by someone with an eye for character and detail, and you don’t know his work, I would recommend starting with The Warden, 1855, which you can read here in an 1862 American reprint:   https://archive.org/details/warden02trolgoog/page/n4/mode/2up )

I had first met Turtledove’s work in a “what if” novel, The Guns of the South (1992),

in which time-travelers provide Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia with AK47s in 1863, with consequences which you might image for the Union Army of the Potomac and beyond.  It was a good, gripping read and I was curious to see what else this man had written. My further connection with Turtledove was not “what if”, but fantasy–based upon the real Byzantium–and which began with a recommendation of his “Videssos” series by a friend who had once had seen him appear as a substitute for her regular professor in a class at UCLA.   He lectured for over an hour without notes and, if she didn’t use the word “spell-binding”, she certainly gave me the impression that this was a born story-teller. 

And so I came to “Videssos”, which is, in fact, Byzantium by another name, as the map which appears in the various series immediately indicates—

in which the world of the Mediterranean has been (roughly) reversed.

There are three series in all, plus one extra novel, The Bridge of the Separator (2005), a kind of “prequel” to the series published first (or perhaps to the whole series–I’m not quite clear on this), but which was not in the ultimate chronological structure of the whole.

The series first published (all in 1987) is that sometimes called “The Videssos Cycle”—

 but which actually takes place at the end of the era which the total collection portrays.  Next, moving backward, comes “The Time of Troubles”—

and finally comes the “Krispos” series.

Unlike Turtledove, I’m not a Byzantinist, but it’s possible to recognize certain elements immediately.  The “Makuraners”, for instance, appear to be based upon the fierce Sassanid Persians, with their heavily-armored cavalry,

(Angus McBride)

of which we actually have a period image from a sgraffito on a wall in Dura-Europos, which fell to the Sassanid king, Shapur I, in 257AD (Dura-Europos is a fascinating place in itself:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dura-Europos#Looting_by_ISIS )

The capital of Videssos, sometimes called “Videssos the City”, has a number of elements which make it an easy match for Byzantium at its height.

(For more parallels, see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videssos_cycle )

It’s not, however, the parallels which have interested me so much as the complexity of the world which these books provide.  Like that of The Lord of the Rings, this is an ancient world, with a complicated history, ruled by dynasties which can be overthrown, all of it entangled with religion (much of it based upon ancient Zoroastrianism) and the most intelligent understanding—and depiction—of magic which I’ve read in fantasy novels.  My friend’s depiction of Turtledove was clearly extremely accurate and, if you enjoy these, that’s only about a dozen books out of over a hundred.  For years there’s been a game in which you’re asked, “If you could only take ________ with you to a desert island, what would you take?”  Certainly, if I had to spend the (about) 370 days on the Ark with Noah, his family, and their vast collection of animals in 2s and 7s, I’d think seriously about answering, “How about the whole Turtledove opus?”

As ever, thanks for reading.

Stay well,

Try to remember just how long a cubit is,

And remember that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

How Stands the Glass Around?

29 Wednesday May 2024

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As always, dear readers, welcome.

I admit that the title of this posting, upon further reading, may seem a little deceptive.  It’s the title of a (perhaps) early 18th-century English song, sometimes called “General Wolfe’s Song” because, somehow, a story appeared that General James Wolfe (1727-1759)

(by George Townshend, 1724-1807, one of Wolfe’s senior officers, who disliked him, but did this little watercolor which, to me, looks much more like the real man than the formal portraits we normally see)

sang it before his death (and victory) at Quebec, in 1759.  (This appears to have had no basis in fact, but has been repeated more than once, in various books about English popular song.)

(by Edward Penny, 1763?—this, one of several versions of the picture by the painter, is in the Fort Ligonier museum in Ligonier, Pennsylvania)

The tune, at least, appears to be some years older, the first citation I can find is to a song from Thomas Odell’s (1691-1749) ballad opera The Patron (1729), where the tune for the lyric is given as that of “Why, Soldiers, Why”, which is the beginning of the second verse.  (For the first two verses, see:  https://tunearch.org/wiki/Annotation:Why_Soldiers_Why%3F    The tune may be older yet, as there’s a 1712 broadside entitled “The Duke of Marlborough’s Delight” set “to a new tune” which has similar lyrics—see the text here:  http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/static/images/sheets/20000/16153.gif  You can hear the tune to “Why, Soldiers, Why” here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VxlkhsOcRI )

The glass I want to talk about is, in fact, both related to the lyric, with its “Let mirth and wine abound”, and another kind of glass entirely.

When the dwarves overwhelm Bilbo’s house, in the first chapter of The Hobbit (“An Unexpected Party”—which is, in fact, a pun—JRRT admits, in a letter to Deborah Webster 25 October, 1958,  Letters,    to having a simple, hobbit sense of humor—not only is a party a festivity—although this one, for Bilbo was far from it—but, in older English, “party” can also mean “a person”—so that “unexpected party/person is presumably Gandalf, as it’s in the singular),

(Alan Lee)                                                                                                                          

they mock his discomfort in a clean-up song which begins:

“Chip the glasses and crack the plates!”

and this made me wonder:  The Hobbit, like The Lord of the Rings, is set in a pre-industrial—really, medieval—world:  what kind of glasses might these be?

Glass, as a material, is much older than the western Middle Ages.  As you might expect from something which may have originated in the middle of the 3rd millennium BC (2500BC?—there’s lots of on-line discussion, but see, for example:  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/a-brief-scientific-history-of-glass-180979117/  ), there has been much scholarly debate on the subject, but let’s go with that rough date for the present.

A combination of silica sand,

lime,

(powdered, of course)

and sodium carbonate,

(plus lots of other elements for various additional properties—see for more:  http://www.historyofglass.com/glass-making-process/glass-ingredients/ )

when heated to about 2400 degrees Fahrenheit (about 1315C), produces a moldable, shapeable liquid.

(For an experiment on making early glass, see:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lg7kZpTVoms This is from a YouTube series called “How to Make Everything” and, if you’re like me, interested in all early technologies, definitely recommended.  There’s an interesting suggestion there, as well, that glass may have been an accidental byproduct of early metal-working.) 

The first surviving glass seems to be beads–

these are Mesopotamian, but found in a grave in Denmark, showing just how extensive early trade networks were.

The Egyptians went into the glass business at some point,

and, eventually, the later Assyrians even produced the first known glass-making manual in the reign of King Ashurbanipal (reigned 669-631BC)—you can read about it here:  https://historyofknowledge.net/2018/12/05/you-us-and-them-glass-and-procedural-knowledge-in-cuneiform-cultures/  and read a translation of the cuneiform tablets on which it was written here:  https://www.nemequ.com/texts )

The Romans produced some rather amazing creations in glass,

as well as the first window glass.

(For how Romans made window glass, see:  http://www.theglassmakers.co.uk/archiveromanglassmakers/articles.htm#No  This is actually a small collection of interesting articles.  Scroll to the last to see the specific piece about window glass.)

Even after the change in the western Roman empire from imperial rule to Germanic kingdoms and their later successors, the art of glass-making was never lost, but it appears that the older method of making larger panes may have been, since medieval domestic windows used smaller pieces of glass framed in metal, called “mullioning”—

and this was only for the very wealthy.  This leads me to wonder about:

“The best rooms were all on the left-hand side (going in), for these were the only ones to have windows, deep-set round windows looking over his garden, and meadows beyond, sloping down to the river.”  (The Hobbit, Chapter One, “An Unexpected Party”)

(JRRT)

Is this hobbit mullioning?  Other buildings in the Shire look to have had ordinary glass windows, as in—

“…some new houses had been built:  two-storeyed with narrow straight-sided windows, bare and dimly lit, all very gloomy and un-Shirelike.”

and

“The Shirriff-house at Frogmorton was as bad as the Bridge-house.  It had only one storey, but it had the same narrow windows…”

I suspect that what Tolkien had in mind was something like these Victorian railway workers’ houses,

as mentioned earlier:

“Worse, there was a whole line of the ugly new houses all along Pool Side…”

(All of these grim quotations are from The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 8, “The Scouring of the Shire”)

Clearly, “Shirelike” means windows of an entirely different design—and that means round, as Tolkien’s own view towards Bag End shows us—

(JRRT)

(Although you can see, by the way, in this earlier sketch, that Tolkien had not originally decided upon the window-shape consistency of the later illustration, or on the true meaning of “Shirelike”.)

But, though a window plays an important part in recruiting a crucial member of the Fellowship of the Ring:

“Suddenly he stopped as if listening.  Frodo became aware that all was very quiet, inside and outside.  Gandalf crept to one side of the window.  Then with a dart he sprang to the sill, and thrust a long arm out and downwards.  There was a squawk, and up came Sam Gamgee’s curly head hauled by one ear.”  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 2, “The Shadow of the Past”)

(Artist?  I’m always glad to credit one, but I’m stumped here.)

the glasses which the dwarves threaten to chip are clearly of the drinking variety. 

I imagine that the glasses in the Tolkien household looked like this

or, for more formal occasions, like this

and what JRRT drank from at The Eagle and Child (aka “The Bird and Baby”) or The Lamb and Flag would have been something like this–

But that’s the first half of the 20th century. 

Could we see this actual medieval glass as a model?

It seems awfully dainty and, remembering the dwarves’ demands for what seems like endless rounds of food and drink, however, perhaps it wasn’t chipped glasses which Bilbo should worry about at all, but dented tankards!

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

Stay well,

When necessary, sing quietly to yourself, “Ho, ho, ho, To the bottle I go…”,

And remember that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

PS

As you can tell, the history of glass—and windows—is long and complicated.

See this for more on glass:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_glass

And this on windows:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window