Lamentable

23 Wednesday Mar 2016

Posted by Ollamh in Fairy Tales and Myths, Heroes, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Narrative Methods, Poetry

Tags

Adventure, Ballads, Boromir, Child Ballad, Doune Castle, Earl of Huntly, Eglinton Tournament, Ewan MacColl, Francis James Child, James Stewart, Lallands, Lament for Boromir, Laments, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Outlander, Scots, The Earl of Morray, The Lady of Mondegreen, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien

Dear readers, welcome, as always.

“Ye Hielands and ye Lowlands,

O, whaur hae ye been?

They hae slain the Earl o’ Moray,

And laid him on the green.”

So begins a version of Child Ballad #181. As we are lucky enough to have readers from around the world (and thank you, every one of you, for visiting!), we might explain that a Child Ballad is not a nursery rhyme, but a distinctive type of traditional song from the massive collection of 305 such songs made by Francis James Child, a professor at Harvard, and published in five volumes between 1882 and 1898 under the title The English and Scottish Popular Ballads.

Ballads are verse narratives, sometimes based upon folk tales, sometimes based upon actual historical events. This particular ballad is historically-based and concerns a murder in 16^th-century Scotland. For our purposes, its actual historicity doesn’t matter, however, because what we’re really interested in is the fact that this is a lament for the murdered man, James Stewart, the Earl of Moray (pronounced “Murray”). We also have this posthumous painting, commissioned by his mother, to draw attention to the crime, but it doesn’t appear to have made much difference.

There are a number of different versions of this ballad, but the one which we heard first and with which we are most familiar (and from which we originally learned a tune—there’s more than one) was recorded by the famous Scots folksinger, Ewan MacColl, and is still available on the Smithsonian/Folkways CD FW03509/FG3509, “The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Vol.1”.

As we said, it’s a lament—just like that for Boromir in the chapter entitled “The Departure of Boromir”–and that’s really where we began to think about laments, especially a lament for a prominent person. And, as ever, we looked for a useful parallel between our world and that of Middle Earth. In this case, the murdered man in the ballad was an earl—a high-level nobleman—but he was also the son of the Regent (the temporary ruler) of Scotland and so we might see him as on about the same social level as Boromir the son of the Steward of Gondor.

Here’s how the lament for Boromir begins.

“Through Rohan over fen and field where the long grass grows

The West Wind comes walking, and about the walls it goes.

‘What news from the West, O wandering wind, do you bring to me tonight?

Have you seen Boromir the Tall by moon or by starlight?’ ”

You can see a similarity between this and the ballad already. The ballad begins by addressing all of Scotland. The lament begins by addressing the West Wind. Both appeal to something more than a listener, or even a group of listeners, as if speaking to simple mourners wouldn’t be enough: bigger forces must be involved. In the case of the ballad, the speaker (unknown—but clearly well aware of the facts) asks where the country has been. In the lament, Aragorn (as he is the initial mourner) has a more specific addressee and a more specific question: West Wind, have you seen Boromir?

The ballad then goes right to the point:

“They hae slain the Earl of Moray

And laid him on the green.”

[A footnote here. That last line became famous because of an essay by Sylvia Wright in the November, 1954 issue of the American publication, Harper’s Magazine entitled “The Death of Lady Mondegreen”. In the essay, Wright explains that, as a child, she misheard “and laid him on the green” as “Lady Mondegreen” and imagined that Stewart had been murdered along with a female companion. The word “mondegreen” has become a technical term in language studies for a misheard word which produces a new meaning.]

The next part of Aragorn’s lament is unspecific: Boromir is simply missing.

“ ‘I saw him ride over seven streams, over waters wide and grey;

I saw him walk in empty lands, until he passed away

Into the shadows of the North. I saw him then no more.

The North Wind may have heard the horn of the son of Denethor.’

‘O Boromir! From the high walls westward I looked afar,

But you came not from the empty lands where no men are.’”

The ballad then tells us something about the quality of the dead man.

“He was a braw gallant,

And he rade at the ring,

And the bonny Earl o’ Moray,

He might have been a king.”

This might need a little translation. The ballad is written in Lallans, the English—and we might really say the wonderfully rich English—originally of southern Scotland (Lallans= “Lowlands”). In general, the grammar and syntax are recognizably English, but the expressions and vocabulary are sometimes different—and sometimes very different!

So, here (so far):

Braw = “fine/splendid”

Gallant = “young man” (can also be spelled “callant”)

But the next expression is actually from medieval jousting. This was a game in which a knight would be required to ride at a ring, suspended in mid-air, and spear it on the end of his lance. Here’s an illustration from the 1839 Victorian tournament revival at Eglinton, in Scotland.

Although we might normally imagine that tournaments died out with the Middle Ages,

Elizabethans and their successors, the Jacobeans, still jousted, as a kind of expensive archaic sport. Here’s Nicholas Hilliard’s c1590 portrait of George Clifford, 3^rd Earl of Cumberland, dressed for a tournament as the Queen’s Champion.

So, we know that the speaker believes that James Stewart was a fine young man, and able at tournaments. We also know that Stewart was able enough—as far as the speaker is concerned—to be a king. As his father had been the Regent for the infant James VI, perhaps this is a quiet suggestion that James junior might have done better on the throne than James.

In contrast, all we know at the moment about Boromir was that he was tall and that his father’s name was Denethor, with the suggestion that he was on an errand or quest in some deserted land.

But then we find out more about James Stewart.

“O lang will his lady

Lok frae the Castle Doune

Ere she see the Earl o’ Moray

Come soundin’ through the toun.”

He had a wife or mistress and we see something about where he lived: in a castle. If you just heard this ballad, rather than reading it, and you came to the next word, “Doune”, you might be confused, since you can hear “doune”, meaning “down” in Lallans. This gives you a picture of a lady standing on the castle wall, waiting for Stewart to return, which is fine, but Doune is also the name of a castle owned by James Stewart.

If you’ve seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail, you will recognize this place.

Or, if you watch Outlander.

As for the last line, we imagine that the Earl has a trumpeter ride in front of him, to clear the way.

Will we learn more about Boromir from the second stanza, which Legolas sings?

“From the mouths of the Sea the South Wind flies, from the sandhills and the stones;

The wailing of the gulls it bears, and at the gate it moans.

‘What news from the South, O sighing wind, do you bring to me at eve?

Where now is Boromir the Fair? He tarries and I grieve.’ “

With the idea that the speaker is appealing to nature for answers, we see Legolas address a second wind, but, so far, all we have added to our store of knowledge is that Boromir was good-looking (“the Fair”—and, in English, this can also mean “light-skinned/light-haired”)—and the anxiety at his absence continues.

In the ballad, we move farther into the crime, the actual murderer being spoken to.

“Now wae be to ye, Huntly,

And wherefore did ye sae?

I bade ye bring him wi’ ye,

And forbade ye him to slay.”

A little glossing first.

Wae be to ye= “may you be sad/sorrowful” (wae is Lallans for “woe”)

Bade= “ordered”

Forbade= “forbid/prohibited” (and should be pronounced “for-BAHD”)

Here we are presented—a bit obliquely—with the identity of the speaker of the ballad. He is one who gives order to lords—hence, he’s the king, meaning, historically, James VI of Scotland (soon—1603—to be James I of England, as well).

If we only go by the verse, he has ordered “Huntly” (historically, the Earl of Huntly, ordered by James VI to arrest Stewart) to bring the Earl of Moray to the king’s court. In real life, he murdered Stewart when Stewart tried to escape, and here we see that, literarily, the same thing is suggested.

At this point, we have three characters: king, Huntly, Moray, and a murder, supposedly against the king’s orders. What more does Legolas’ lament have to tell us?

“ ‘Ask not of me where he doth dwell—so many bones there lie

On the white shores and the dark shores under the stormy sky;

So many have passed down Anduin to find the flowing Sea.

Ask of the North Wind news of them the North Wind sends to me!’

‘O Boromir! Beyond the gate the seaward road runs south,

But you came not with the wailing gulls from the grey sea’s mouth.’ ”

Nothing is said directly here, but that first line’s mention of “so many bones” might be seen to reveal what has happened to Boromir. The South Wind tells the speaker to ask the North Wind, but will that make a difference?

[Another footnote, this one about verse structure. Did JRRT have W.B. Yeats’ early (1888) “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” in the back of his mind with that last line?

Here’s the last stanza of Yeats’ poem:

“I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.”

In this poem, Yeats weights the end of each stanza both by using a shorter line and by ending with a series of one-syllable words, which slow things to a stop: deep…heart’s…core. JRRT does the same thing with one-syllable words here: grey…sea’s…mouth.]

The next part of the ballad stanza repeats, in a variation, the earlier motif: what a wonderful person the murdered earl was.

“He was a braw gallant,

And he played at the glove;

And the bonny Earl of Murray,

He was the Queen’s true love.”

A final piece of glossing. Elizabethans used gloves as a love-present,

suggesting that the last two lines have more than a rhetorical meaning. Historically, James VI’s queen was Anne of Denmark—

was this the real reason why the historical James didn’t seem to be interested in punishing Huntly?

We then have a repetition of the earlier lines:

“O lang will his lady

Lok frae the Castle Doune

Ere she see the Earl o’ Moray

Come soundin’ through the toun.”

And, with these, the ballad ends, our last image being that of the lady on the castle wall, looking for someone who will never return. This same image, in the form of an inanimate object, waits for Boromir.

“From the Gate of Kings the North Wind rides, and past the roaring falls;

And clear and cold about the tower its loud horn calls.

‘What news from the North, O mighty wind, do you bring to me today?

What news of Boromir the Bold? For he is long away.’

‘Beneath Amon Hen I heard his cry. There many foes he fought,

His cloven shield, his broken sword, they to the water brought.

His head so proud, his face so fair, his limbs they laid to rest;

And Rauros, golden Rauros, bore him upon its breast.’

‘O Boromir! The Tower of Guard shall ever northward gaze

To Rauros, golden Rauros-falls, until the end of days.’ “

Putting the various elements together, we might see this kind of lament as going something like this:

a speaker appeals to a mass audience of some sort (Scotland/Winds)
that speaker reveals that something is wrong (Stewart is dead/Boromir is missing)
he/she can then describe what that is in some way (Stewart was murdered/Boromir has died fighting)
speaker may describe the fine qualities of the person lamented (Stewart as jouster, lover, kingly/Boromir as tall, fair, died fighting)
those who lament cannot be consoled—or perhaps refuse to be (lady on wall of Doune/Tower of Guard=Minas Tirith)

Using this suggested model, can you think of other laments, both in Tolkien or otherwhere which match it?

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

The Ring in Question

02 Wednesday Mar 2016

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Fairy Tales and Myths, Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Narrative Methods

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Alan Lee, Allen and Unwin, Angus McBride, casting, forging, Home Alone, literary belief, literary theory, The Lord of the Rings, The One Ring, Tolkien

Dear Readers,

Recently, one of us came up with an interesting question about our friend JRRT and the One Ring: how would such a small thing with such power have been made? In The Silmarillion, Tolkien, as he so often does, has an answer for this:

“And much of the strength and will of Sauron passed into that One Ring… and Sauron forged it in the Mountain of Fire in the Land of Shadow” (The Silmarillion, 287-288).

In the histories of Middle-earth, Sauron is said to have “made” and “forged” the One Ring—JRRT uses both words more than once in his letters, LOTR, and The Silmarillion, and this has led us to another question: how would the Ring have been forged? We did a little research, and found that the typical process of forging is (according to the ever-useful wiki page on the subject) a manufacturing process using compressive forces, such as a hammer, to shape metal in a particular way. If Sauron “forged” the One Ring in the fires of Mount Doom, it’s safe to assume that he used the process of “hot forging”, where the metal is heated in a forge (or in this case, very hot fires of a volcano). The last two items of wiki’s “commonly forged” list are weapons and jewelry—both on the list of Middle-earth’s most wanted Christmas gifts of 3018—and we’ve seen weapon-forging before:

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But rings are usually cast, using a mold and molten metal. Peter Jackson’s prologue to The Fellowship of the Ring acknowledges this, although the Ring is still said to have been “forged”:

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But, in the illustrations of Tolkien illustrators Alan Lee

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And Angus McBride

180px-Angus_McBride_-_Celebrimbor

This detail—perhaps even an error on Tolkien’s part—has been overlooked. Is it that the artists have made the same error, or are they simply letting it go in favor of the story?

From here, we can ask several questions: what material was the Ring made of? Where did he get the material? How did Sauron make it a magic ring? How did he get the Black Speech/Elvish inscription onto the Ring?

While there may be one or several answers to these questions, we wonder just how far into detail we’re meant to go—and how far JRRT means for us to go. He created a world so intricate that his work has been named a “legendarium”, and in several previous postings, we’ve discussed details of Middle-earth, such as trade and coinage. Could the man who took such care to design Middle-earth’s moon phases have answers to these questions—or should he?

(And here, for those who know the movie Home Alone, we hope not to sound like the little boy from across the street who asks the van driver endless, empty questions!)

The concept of the One Ring begins in Gollum’s cave in The Hobbit. At that point, it was only a magic ring, serving the purpose of a plot device: JRRT had not yet planned a sequel to The Hobbit. In fact, the magic ring was not yet the One Ring in Tolkien’s stories until after JRRT published the book.

Tolkien said himself of the matter in his Letters:

“The Hobbit… was quite independently conceived: I did not know as I began it that it belonged.”(Letters, 145)

And, of the Ring:

“Rayner has, of course, spotted a weakness (inevitable): the linking. … But I don’t feel worried by the discovery that the ring was more serious than appeared… the weakness is Gollum, and his action in offering the ring as a present.” (Letters, 121)

This was a response to publishers Allen and Unwin; Rayner (Unwin’s son) had read the story and commented to the author:

“…. Converting the original Ring into this new and powerful instrument takes some explaining away and Gandalf is hard put to it to find reasons for many of the original Hobbit’s actions…” (letters, 120)

Nowhere in his criticism does Rayner ask what the Ring was made of, how Sauron had made the Elvish script, or how it would have been either forged or cast, and neither does JRRT in his answer; their focus is placed upon converting the magic ring into the One Ring, and using the Ring as a crucial plot element in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien writes in another letter:

“The magic ring was the one obvious thing in The Hobbit that could be connected with my mythology. To be the burden of a large story it had to be of supreme importance. I then linked it with the (originally) quite casual reference to the Necromancer…” (Letters, 346)

Although Tolkien’s work provides a great richness of material to discuss, question, and write about, we suppose that we can forgive JRRT for this small detail. Then again, when JRRT gives us so much, when should we stop asking questions or expecting answers? As we’ve found in writing these postings, JRRT seems to have an inexhaustible amount of material, although even he sets limits to the interpretation of his work; in fact, these “hidden meanings” annoyed him:

“I am honoured by the interest that many readers have taken in the nomenclature of The Lord of the Rings… But I remain puzzled, and indeed sometimes irritated, by many of the guesses at the ‘sources’ of the nomenclature, and theories or fancies concerning hidden meanings… many of them seem to show ignorance or disregard of the clues and information which are provided in notes, renderings, and in the Appendices” (Letters, 379-380).

We don’t believe that this was meant to be a discouragement. Instead, it is a pointing by the author towards the extra material meant to help his readers to understand and study what Tolkien says he wishes he’s achieved: “the ‘literary belief’ in the story as historical” (Letters, 279).

But this leaves us at another crossroads.

If the answers aren’t to be found there, however, should we stop? We’ve said that we’re haunted by the image from Home Alone: if we persist, should we be cast in Home Alone 4 as two kids, pestering the English academic with “So how was this Ring really made, mister? Is it really made of gold? Is it really powerful? How powerful? For how long?”

Or should we leave those details about the Ring as they are, accepting that it’s a magic ring forged in the fires of Mount Doom by Sauron—without interrupting JRRT to ask too many questions about details which aren’t essential to the story, believing that it is more important that he masterfully took a simple plot element—a magic ring—and focused on converting it into the crucial element of Frodo’s quest in The Lord of the Rings.

As always, we ask: what do you think, Dear Readers?

Thanks for reading,

MTCIDC,

Strange as News from Bree

03 Wednesday Feb 2016

Posted by Ollamh in Fairy Tales and Myths, J.R.R. Tolkien, Language, Literary History, Narrative Methods

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acta, Barad-Dur, Barliman Butterbur, Bree, Bronte, copyists, Dwarves, English coaching inn, Forum Romanum, Frodo Baggins, Gandalf, Gondor, Gutenberg, Haworth, Johann Carolus, Literacy, manuscripts, Medieval, Minas Tirith, Orality, Peter Jackson, pre-print, press, printing press, Romans, royal archives, Sauron, scriptoria, Story, The Lord of the Rings, The Prancing Pony, The Red Book of Westmarch, The Shire, Tolkien, War of the Ring, word-of-mouth, Yorkshire

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

After the last couple of postings, full of war, this is a rather peaceful one. We want to put forward a scheme for a larger project, all about orality versus literacy in Middle Earth, of which this is one small step, our initial question for the project being, “What is written and how and what is only spoken and remembered?”

Early in Chapter 9 of The Fellowship of the Ring (“At the Sign of the Prancing Pony”), we encounter this passage:

“For Bree stood at an old meeting of ways; another ancient road crossed the East Road just outside the dike at the western end of the village, and in former days Men and other folk of various sorts had travelled much on it. Strange as News from Bree was still a saying in the East Farthing, descending from those days, when news from North, South, and East could be heard in the inn, and when the Shire-hobbits used to go more often to hear it.”

Bree, of course, is the little town to which Frodo and his companions travel once they have gotten free of the Barrow Downs.

The little town is described as being surrounded by a dike—a wide ditch, the inner side topped with a thick hedge—perhaps something like this—

And consisting of “some hundred stone houses of the Big Folk, mostly above the Road…”. Without knowing the kind of stone, we have imagined it as looking rather like Haworth, in Yorkshire, the home of the Bronte family (without the modern touristy stuff, of course).

(And we note, by the way, that its depiction in the Jackson films doesn’t appear to reflect JRRT’s description that the houses were made of stone: rather, it appears to be filled with half-timbered, plaster and lath constructions.)

Here, the Hobbits stay at the Prancing Pony.

Tolkien describes it as

“a meeting place for the idle, talkative, and inquisitive among the inhabitants, large and small…”

To our minds, it probably looked like one of those very old English coaching inns.

And we begin our research inside.

Before we do, let’s spend a moment thinking about that word “news”, as in “Strange as news from Bree”.

In pre-print days, for most people in most places, information about events was circulated only by word-of-mouth. There were a few exceptions: the government in Rome produced hand-written circulars, called acta which were put up in the Forum Romanum from the middle of the last century BC through to the 3^rd century AD. These would obviously have had a very limited circulation, however, and we can imagine that the contents would still have been passed on mouth-to-mouth for most people in Rome.

To gain greater circulation really demanded print. Although Gutenberg produced the first press and movable lead type by 1440,

the earliest surviving printed newspaper known at present dates from 1609, produced in Germany. (It appears that the publisher, Johann Carolus, had actually begun printing, rather than hand-copying, in 1605.)

As far as we can tell, true to the general image of Middle Earth as a medieval world, printing presses have yet to appear (unless Sauron is producing very limited editions at the Barad-dur Press and circulation consists of exactly one copy). This means that we are still in the preprint world of hand-copying, when it comes to documents. In the western European world, on which places like Gondor are modeled, this means scriptoria—copy centers—mainly in monasteries and in royal courts where the copyists had probably been trained in monastic scriptoria.

Because there are no religious foundations or even schools of any sort mentioned in Middle Earth, we don’t know how or where documents were written or copied or even how and where anyone learned to read and write (except Sam, who was taught his letters by Frodo), but literacy turns up all over the place, from the Red Book of Westmarch to the runes of the dwarves to the writings Gandalf says he searched through in the archives of Minas Tirith.

All of this is, in a sense, commemorative—it’s history, really, whether a dwarvish map or tomb inscription, or an account of the War of the Ring. What about other things, however—word of daily events, or even entertainment forms, like songs and poems, things which may some day become part of history but, at the present, seem much more ephemeral? That’s what we’ve come to Bree to find out—and we’re quickly helped in our investigation by the host of the Prancing Pony, Barliman Butterbur, who says to Frodo and the others:

“ ‘I don’t know whether you would care to join the company…Perhaps you would rather go to your beds. Still the company would be very pleased to welcome you, if you had a mind. We don’t get Outsiders—travelers from the Shire, I should say, begging your pardon—often; and we like to hear a bit of news, or any story or song you may have in mind…’ “

And there’s that emphasis on the oral: “we like to hear”. You, readers, have a world of electronic devices to turn to for “a bit of news, or any story or song”, as well as, in the case of news, actual newspapers, not to mention bookstores, libraries, and the wonderful resources of Gutenberg and the Internet Archive. None of that in any form is available to carry or preserve information in Middle Earth. What books there are—and they are manuscripts, remember, things which look like this—

or, if you are rich, this—

are either in royal archives, as in the case of those which Gandalf consults in Minas Tirith, or in the hands of families, as is the fate of The Red Book of Westmarch and other such items in the Shire. And so people are, on the one hand, eager for news and entertainment, but, on the other, forced either to make it for themselves or to wait for willing strangers to add to their meager store.

It’s natural, then, that “As soon as the Shire-hobbits entered, there was a chorus of welcome from the Bree-landers.” The first local reaction to Frodo’s attempts to create an explanation for why he and his companions are traveling is also natural:

“He gave out that he was interested in history and geography (at which there was much wagging of heads, although neither of these words were [sic] much used in the Bree-dialect). He said he was thinking of writing a book (at which there was silent astonishment), and that he and his friends wanted to collect information about hobbits living outside the Shire, especially in the eastern lands.”

In the nearly-oral world of Bree (there must be some literacy—the Prancing Pony has a sign with an inscription and Barliman seems to know what a letter is), the next reaction is also natural:

“At this a chorus of voices broke out. If Frodo had really wanted to write a book, and had had many ears, he would have learned enough for several chapters in a few minutes. And if that was not enough, he was given a whole list of names, beginning with ‘Old Barliman here’, to whom he could go for further information.”

These would all be so-called “oral informants”—not one mention of manuscripts or documents to suggest that information is conveyed and recorded in writing—and so the Breelanders’ third and final reaction is also natural:

“But after a time, as Frodo did not show any sign of writing a book on the spot, the hobbits returned to their questions about doings in the Shire.”

It’s obvious then, that books, like the words “history” and “geography”, are almost alien to these people and so their interest is in the spoken—or sung—word, which is why, when Frodo breaks into Bilbo’s “There is an inn…” to distract the audience from Pippin’s indiscreet recounting of the birthday party, his stratagem almost works—until he overdoes it and—

But even in the aftermath, although it leads to more trouble for Frodo and his companions, Butterbur can imagine that, in time, that surprising event, like all of the others in this near-oral world, will subside into word-of-mouth.

“He reckoned, very probably, that his house would be full again on many future nights, until the present mystery had been thoroughly discussed.”

And then it would become just another piece of strange news from Bree.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

Feudal Array 2

27 Wednesday Jan 2016

Posted by Ollamh in Economics in Middle-earth, Fairy Tales and Myths, Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth

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14th century, 15th century, Adventure, Agincourt, Anglo-Saxon, armor, Bayeux Tapestry, feudalism, Fyrd, Gerry Embleton, Huscarl, Luttrell Psalter, Middle-earth, N.C. Wyeth, tapestry, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien

Welcome, as always.

In this posting, we want to conclude what has turned out to be a kind of mini-series on Feudalism in Middle Earth. Two postings ago, we used the 14^th-century Luttrell Psalter to illustrate what working the plowland behind the Rammas Echor might have looked like. In our last, we used the Bayeux Tapestry to offer another possible visual influence on Tolkien’s depiction of the Rohirrim: the conquering Normans. In this final posting, we will look at the forces of Rohan’s ally, Gondor and will use a number of sources, both medieval and modern.

In the Jackson movies, there is a kind of regularity, from Osgiliath to Minas Tirith in what we are shown.

This is not surprising if the cue for costuming has come primarily from one description:

“The Guards of the gate were robed in black, and their helms were of strange shape, high-crowned, with long cheek-guards close-fitting to the face, and above the cheek-guards were set the white wings of sea-birds; but the helms gleamed with a flame of silver, for they were indeed wrought of mithril, heirlooms from the glory of old days. Upon the black surcoats were embroidered in white a tree blossoming like snow beneath a silver crown and many-pointed stars. This was the livery of the heirs of Elendil, and none wore it now in all Gondor, save the Guards of the Citadel before the Court of the Fountain where the White Tree once had grown.” (The Return of the King, Chapter 1, “Minas Tirith”)

We have no wish to criticize—in this respect, at least—the creators of the films for taking what might appear to be an easy out: uniformity being cheaper than individuality, since it’s clear that, when it came to dramatic effects in the films in general, the old theatrical advertising line, “No Expense Was Spared To…” is really true. Instead, we want employ our former method of consulting medieval manuscripts, as well as another passage from the same chapter, to offer another possible view, one which might have influenced the author in his depiction of the defenders of Gondor.

We’ll begin with the passage:

“Leading the line there came walking a big thick-limbed horse, and on it sat a man of wide shoulders and huge girth, but old and grey-bearded, yet mail-clad and black-helmed and bearing a long heavy spear. Behind him marched proudly a dusty line of men, well-armed and bearing great battle-axes; grim-faced they were and shorter and somewhat swarthier than any men that Pippin had yet seen in Gondor…

And so the companies came…The men of Ringlo Vale…from the uplands of Morthond…five hundred bowmen…From the Anfalas…a long line of men of many sorts, hunters and herdsmen and men of little villages, scantily equipped save for the household of Golasgil their lord. From Lamedon, a few grim hillmen…Fisher-folk of the Ethir…Hirluin the Fair…with three hundreds of gallant green-clad men. Imrahil…with gilded banners bearing his token of the Ship and the Silver Swan, 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.”

There is actually not a lot of detail here, but there are a few hints. First off, there are those “great battle-axes”. Here are two images from the Bayeux Tapestry of the Anglo-Saxon king, Harold’s, bodyguards, his huscarl, armed with their characteristic long-handled axes.

And here is a modern reconstruction.

Next, we have those five hundred bowmen from Morthond. The Tapestry can provide a useful image of those,

but perhaps what JRRT really was thinking of were the famous longbowmen of Crecy and Poitiers and Agincourt, whose skill and courage knocked down whole waves of equally brave French knights. Here are a pair of modern images by the brilliant historical illustrator, Gerry Embleton, himself a medieval reenactor.

Besides the huscarl, King Harold’s army was made up of the fyrd, a kind of militia drawn from the freemen of the countryside, who had to provide their own weapons and equipment and were only required to serve for limited periods—they would have been farmers, most of them, after all, and couldn’t be off the farm for too long without threatening their own livelihoods. Perhaps these could suggest that “long line of men of many sorts”. Here’s an image from the Tapestry of what appears to be the fyrd fending off a mounted Norman attack. You’ll notice the lack of defensive armor.

“gallant, green-clad men” is rather vague, but, suddenly, all we could see is Robin Hood and his Merry Men. And so we can’t resist including some of our favorite N.C. Wyeth illustrations.

rhood1 rhood2

And these could easily provide the model for the rangers in South Ithilien, couldn’t they?

Last, there is that “company of knights in full harness”. This presents a real problem. Knights from which period? The armor available at the time of the Bayeux Tapestry in the mid-11^th century

and which, we suggested in our last, might be good for the Rohirrim, was very different from that of later times. Here’s the armor of the days of Sir Geoffrey Luttrell,

in the early 14^th century—

and here’s what the English archers would have faced as worn by their valiant French opponents at Agincourt, in 1415.

This handy chart can give you a diachronic (through-time) view of changes in medieval armor.

If we look at something produced through the workshop of William Morris, that strong influence upon JRRT, we find this group of knights from a set of tapestries produced in the 1890s.

Holy_Grail_Tapestry_-The_Arming_and_Departure_of_the_Kniights.jpg

The armor is pretty vague (the systematic study of the history of armor was still in its childhood then—if you’re interested in the early days, google Sir Samuel Rush Meyrick to learn about its first great scholar), but one of the helmets—the one to the far left in the background, looks like a visored sallet, which could date what we see in the tapestry to the later 15^th century.

Sallet_helmet,_Southern_Germany,_1480-1490_-_Higgins_Armory_Museum_-_DSC05461.JPG

(Sharp-eyed readers who are Star Wars fans—we are—will recognize this general pattern from the technical people on the Death Star—

We might add that Morris and his friends were strongly influenced by pre-Renaissance and early Renaissance painters, so perhaps this picture, one of a set of 3 by Paolo Uccello from the middle of the 15^th century, might also provide a possible model (and we’re glad to show you the whole set because we think that they’re just magical).

Öèôðîâàÿ ðåïðîäóêöèÿ íàõîäèòñÿ â èíòåðíåò-ìóçåå Gallerix.ru

Uccello_Battle_of_San_Romano_Uffizi

Taken all together, these produce a very different image from the films, don’t they? Much more individual, often much less well-equipped, more actual medieval, as we would imagine the author had had in mind. So—contrast this

with this:

Which do you prefer, dear readers?

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

Feudal Array 1

20 Wednesday Jan 2016

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Economics in Middle-earth, Fairy Tales and Myths, Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, Narrative Methods

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Anglo-Saxon, Bayeux Tapestry, Embroidery, feudalism, Medieval, Middle-earth, Normandy, Peter Jackson, Rohirrim, tapestry, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

In this posting, we would like to continue what we began in “Behind the Rammas Echor”. In that posting, we talked about using the illustrations from medieval English psalters (the wonderful 14^th-century Luttrell Psalter in particular) to try to visualize the feudal world suggested by certain aspects of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

In that posting, we said that feudalism could be broken down into two big categories, land and troops, and there we spent time looking at basic agricultural life, to imagine the look of the feudal world of Middle Earth.

Now we move on to troops. And, as much as we can, we would like to continue to use medieval images to help us.

In previous posts, we’ve praised Jackson’s depiction of the Rohirrim, both the architecture and the people. Edoras and Meduseld within it just look right—and, when you watch the material on constructing them in the extended version box set, we can only be absolutely bowled over by the care taken there, for all that we have difficulties with certain other parts of the films, both in look and in the changes to the text.

In one previous post, we suggested the kinds of models we both know and imagine Tolkien used to create the Rohirrim. These were primarily Anglo-Saxon, but combined with a horse people (which the Anglo-Saxons were not) of some sort, possibly Scythian (an Indo-European-speaking horse folk from north of the Black Sea).

As we’ve thought more about it (one, for us, of the great pleasures of solid adventure literature, new and old—is that you not only want to think more about it, but, as you do, you find more in it), we began to imagine that Tolkien might have had another visual source, based upon another famous set of medieval illustrations, the Bayeux Tapestry.

This is a roll of linen, some 230 feet (that’s about 70 metres) long and 20 inches (50 centimetres) high, into which are woven three bands of designs. The center is a long (very long!) series of adjoining panels covered in human figures, which have been stitched on with various colored woolen threads. Above and below the central band are two narrower ones which combine abstract figures (commonly on the upper panel) with human activities (on the lower one). Across the top of the central band are a series of captions in very simple Latin, describing what is happening below.

The caption here reads: “Here Harold the king has been killed.”

As it’s not through-woven, like this—

this isn’t really a tapestry, but an embroidery, in fact.

It’s linked to the cathedral at Bayeux, in Normandy, where it has been for at least 6 centuries. On the map, find Le Havre and look left and you’ll see Bayeux.

Where it really came from and who made it are two of those mysteries that it’s been fun to follow the scholarship of, but, as of 2015, there are lots of theories, some of them more convincing than others, but that’s all there are: theories. If you’d like to know more about them, go to: www.bayeux-tapestry.org.uk/whomadethetapestry.htm.

The tapestry is housed in an impressive museum in Bayeux, where its entire length is ingeniously displayed in a sort of wrap-around way.

We’ve given you lots of facts, but the one thing we haven’t mentioned is the subject of such an immense work. It is, in fact, a lengthy piece of propaganda justifying the Norman invasion and conquest of England in 1066AD. We know, then, one definite thing about it: it certainly wasn’t embroidered for the Anglo-Saxons! (Although there is at least one theory that it was made by them.)

As much as we are interested in the subject, what has caught our attention now is the look—here are soldiers from the same period as the Anglo-Saxon model for the Rohirrim, after all, but, although archers are depicted on the Norman side, and a few infantry, the Normans are mainly shown as horsemen.

WebPage-ImageF.00070.jpeg

Here is our first sight of the Rohirrim in The Two Towers, Chapter 2, “The Riders of Rohan”:

“Their horses were of great stature, strong and clean-limbed; their grey coats glistened, their long tails flowed in the wind, their manes were braided on their proud necks. The Men that rode them matched them well: tall and long-limbed; their hair, flaxen-pale, flowed under their light helms, and streamed in long braids behind them; their faces were stern and keen. In their hands were tall spears of ash, painted shields were slung at their backs, long swords were at their belts, their burnished shirts of mail hung down upon their knees.”

Minus the grey horses and the braids, what do you think, dear readers?

As ever, thanks for reading.

MTCIDC

That MTC will be Feudal Array.2, in which we consider the other forces opposing Mordor…

Feudal-Earth?

13 Wednesday Jan 2016

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Economics in Middle-earth, Fairy Tales and Myths, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, Narrative Methods

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Bayeux Tapestry, feudalism, Gondor, Medieval, Prince Valiant, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien

Welcome, dear readers, as always!

In this posting, we want to think out loud about something which has puzzled us for some time. Regular readers must know by this time that, along with literature of various times and places, we’re also very much interested in world history, from its human beginnings all the way up to the present. As those of you who have read past postings know, we have sometimes tried to apply our interest (and, we hope our knowledge) to the works of one of our favorite fantasy authors, JRR Tolkien. In our last posting, for example, we have spent a little time considering the 20^th-century world of dictators and how they might have influenced JRRT’s depiction of Sauron and his plans.

In this posting, we want to look at something we’ve touched upon some time in the past, the economic/social structure of Middle Earth (or Middle-earth as it sometimes seems to appear). After all, kingdoms don’t just magically appear and survive: or, in Middle Earth, do they? For fun, we wondered what we might find in The Lord of the Rings which would remind us of our own Middle Ages.

In our world, particularly in western Europe , this is the period which appears physically similar to the end of the Third Age (minus Elves, etc), and, in this period, we find a social/economic structure called feudalism. There has been a great deal of scholarly discussion as to where the base word, feud comes from, but the structure is pretty basic and goes like this (with apologies to all actual medievalists for the gross simplification):

At base, it’s all about two things: land and soldiers.

At the top—the very top—is God, who owns everything. He chooses a king (this comes down to us under the heading of “the divine right of kings” and is similar to “the mandate of heaven” in Chinese history). The king then claims that, because of his position as the Chosen One, he owns all of the land in the country. This land, however, he divides, keeping some for himself, but giving large portions to his chief nobles (the Church also owns a large chunk, but, as religion is rather subterranean in Middle Earth, we’ll leave it at that). They, in turn, divide it among lesser nobles (family members and/or those loyal to them), who, in turn, divide it among the lowest level of nobility (often knights). The simplest parcel is a manor and a knight may hold just one or more than one and this is true all the way up the chain.

Each manor, in turn, has various grades of inhabitants, from freeholders, who own land but pay taxes on it, to peasants who are free, but are landless and have to work for others, and serfs, who are nothing more than slaves and considered part of the property. Even freemen might still owe an obligation in the form of labor to the lord of the manor.

In return for a manor or for many manors, the nobles at every level owed the king military service.

This was necessary, since, with the exception of a certain number of household troops or bodyguards, kings couldn’t afford to keep standing armies on their own.

When we began wondering if we could find traces of feudalism in Middle Earth, we thought first about titles. As we said, there are kings, so could we add to them “sirs”, “knights”, “lords”, and such? The densest patch of those would seem to be in The Return of the King, Chapter 1, “Minas Tirith”. Almost at the end of the chapter, Pippin and Beregond’s son, Bergil, watch reinforcements march into the city. Here we can list leaders, almost every one seeming to be a major landowner, judging by the number of his military followers, and all but one called “lord” : Forlong, Dervorin (“son of their lord”), Golasgil, and last and most feudal-like, Imrahil, Prince of Dol Amroth, who comes with “a company of knights in full harness”.

This last reminded us of an earlier posting, when we wondered whether JRRT had ever seen the Prince Valiant comic strip, which occasionally had scenes like this:

Our other thought was this sounded rather like a combination of men entering the Alamo and a gathering of the clans.

raising-the-standard-at-glenfinnan-1745-jacobite-rebellion.jpg

To gain a portion of land, all levels of nobles swore oaths of loyalty (called fealty, from Latin fidelitas, through Old French, the legal language of England after the Norman conquest) to those who gave them that land and that oath was commonly done publically and was legally binding.

There were different ways of confirming the earnestness of the person swearing. An altar or saint’s reliquary might be used, as seems to be the case from this scene on the “Bayeaux Tapestry”, in which Harold swears a sacramentum (a “sacred oath”, so Norman propaganda would afterwards claim) to be the vassal (sworn man) of Duke William of Normandy.

Bayeux_Tapestry_scene23_Harold_sacramentum_fecit_Willelmo_duci.jpg

Oaths might take the form of the receiver placing his hands between those of the giver and swearing.

1274514-miniature-depicting-a-knight-receiving-his-sword-from-the-king-guillaume-dorange.jpeg

An extremely useful site (www.dragonbear.com) provides a number of examples of the oath, which, while varying greatly through time and place, can be encapsulated in this version, from “The Laws of Alfred, Guthrum, and Edward the Elder”:

“Thus shall a man swear fealty oaths.

By the Lord, before whom this relic is holy, I will be to ____ faithful and true, and love all that he loves, and shun all that he shuns, according to God’s law, and according to the world’s principles, and never, by will nor by force, by word nor by work, do ought of what is loathful to him; on condition that he keep me as I am willing to deserve, and all that fulfil that our agreement was, when I to him submitted and chose his will.”

Compare this with Pippin’s oath to Denethor, after Pippin offers his sword to him:

“Here do I swear fealty and service to Gondor, and to the Lord and Steward of the realm, to speak and to be silent, to do and to let be, to come and to go, in need or plenty, in peace or war, in living or dying, from this hour henceforth, until my lord release me, or death take me, or the world end. So say I, Peregrin son of Paladin of the Shire of the Halflings.” (The Return of the King, Chapter 1, “Minas Tirith”)

There is no transfer of land involved here, but certainly there is military service.

JRRT, for all of the amazing detail which he put into Middle Earth, was content, it would seem, to leave it at that: there are kings to whom oaths are sworn, and that idea comes from feudal oaths. There are knights and lords—who else would be in charge of this quasi-medieval world (except, of course, among the non-men—elves, dwarves, and hobbits)? At the same time, this is a huge and wonderfully entertaining adventure, not a disguised treatise on the economic and social substructure of a mirror of the western Middle Ages, as interesting as, if anyone, Tolkien, could have made even that. It is fun, however, to spend a moment imagining what, given another ten years and several more drafts, Middle Earth might have looked like… As always, we ask: what do you think?

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

Knowledge, Rule, Order

06 Wednesday Jan 2016

Posted by Ollamh in Fairy Tales and Myths, Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, Narrative Methods

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Adolf Hitler, Anduin, Benedict Cumberbatch, Benito Mussolini, British Government, Charlie Chaplin, dictatorships, England, Gandalf, George V, Germany, Gondor, gothic script, Government, History, India, Isengard, Kaiser Willhelm II, Lenin, Mehmed VI, Middle-earth, monarchs, Mordor, Nazis, newsreel, Numenor, Ottoman Empire, Oz, Peter Jackson, Queen Mary, Queen Victoria, Rohan, Saruman, Sauron, Scott, Smaug, Stalin, Stock Market Crash of 1929, Sultan, The Great Dictator, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Treaty of Versailles, Valar, Victoria Louise, Weimar Republic, William Morris, Writing

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always.

Have you ever wondered what Middle Earth would have been like if the Fourth Age had begun on a calendar written by Sauron?

That of the Third Age was hardly a democratic paradise: a king rules Rohan, a stand-in for king rules Gondor. Elrond and Celeborn/Galadriel behave and are treated like royalty and Thranduil, as we learn from The Hobbit, is the king of Mirkwood. The dwarves have hereditary rulers. Only the outliers—communities like Bree and the Shire and the earlier inhabitants like Tom Bombadil and Fangorn—appear to be completely independent. (The Shire even has elections and a mayor, although the actual government, except for the shire reeves, appears to bemostly token—you wonder who’s running their seemingly-efficient postal service.)

This is not surprising, not only for an author born during the later years of Victoria,

but also for someone powerfully influenced by the medievalist interests of everyone from Scott

Sir_William_Allan_-_Sir_Walter_Scott,_1771_-_1832._Novelist_and_poet_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

to William Morris.

(We might add that the world of fairy tales, full of princes and princesses, queens and kings, was also a powerful influence at the time—and not only on story-tellers born in monarchies—after all, even Oz is ruled by a queen—

Yet, after Smaug—who could better be a medieval fantasy villain (especially with the voice of the incomparable Benedict Cumberbatch attached)?

—something changed in Tolkien’s world. In fact, something changed in the whole outside world. With the end of World War One, monarchs toppled all over Europe and beyond, from:

Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany

to Mehmed VI, last Sultan of the Ottoman Empire.

In place of the former, there appeared the always-troubled Weimar Republic, full of good intentions, but badly crippled, not only by the war which had sapped its manpower and resources, but by all kinds of social unrest and then by the Crash of 1929, which notoriously destroyed the value of its currency.

weimar currency.jpg

As early as 1919, there had been clashes among the forces of different ideologies—

CombatesEnBerlín19190903.jpg

And, amidst all of the unrest, there was a failed coup attempt in 1923 by the man in the overcoat in this picture.

Bundesarchiv_Bild_102-00344A,_München,_nach_Hitler-Ludendorff_Prozess.jpg

He, of course, was only following the footsteps of this man, who had pushed his way into power the year before—

to be followed, in turn, by the man on the left, from the mid-1920s.

That first man, having failed at obvious violence, tried again through more complicated means (although still employing violence, if it suited his purposes) and succeeded in 1933.

He was, so we are told, a riveting public speaker, but, if the newsreels we’ve seen are evidence, we guess you would have had to have been there.

Some people thought the style exaggerated in the 1930s and caricatured it even then.

He had a definite social agenda, which he outlined at length and often, although concealing certain of the most horrible aspects. And he liked big words and big concepts, like:

It would have been impossible for someone as intelligent and generally well-informed as Tolkien not to have been very much aware of this man and all of the other like men, busy oppressing as much of the world as they could. And this would have been especially true in a time when radio and film were changing how people received news—and how those interested in influencing others might shape what people saw. As early as 1911, the British government was using newsreel film to show the might and reach of its empire (2/5 of the globe was in their hands) when the king, George V, and his wife, Queen Mary, visited India.

Delhi_Durbar,_1911.jpg

Not to be outdone, Kaiser Wilhelm II encouraged a grand—and filmed–event in 1913, for the wedding of his daughter, Victoria Louise—and some of the film was even in color.

The Marriage of Victoria Louise Color Film

It would be easy to imagine, then, that the weight of such public figures might have influenced Tolkien in his depiction of late-3^rd-Age villains. We can see it in Saruman’s unsuccessful attempt to persuade Gandalf to join him:

“ ‘He drew himself up then and began to declaim, as if he were making a speech long rehearsed. ‘The Elder Days are gone. The Middle Days are passing. The Younger Days are beginning. The time of the Elves is over, but our time is at hand: the world of Men, which we must rule. But we must have power, power to order all things as we will, for that good which only the Wise can see.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Chapter 2, “The Council of Elrond”)

Thus, unlike the script of Jackson’s version, there is no plan to wipe out men and replace them with orcs. Instead, men are to survive: to be ruled—perhaps under what definitely sounds like it should be a translation from something written in Fraktur—the fake Gothic script favored by the Nazis–

die-schöne-deutsche-Schrift-detail1.jpg

“ ‘We can bide our time,’” says Saruman, “ ‘we can keep our thoughts in our hearts, deploring maybe evils done by the way, but approving the high and ultimate purpose: Knowledge, Rule, Order; all the things that we have so far striven in vain to accomplish…’ ”

Such abstract, but somehow menacing, words sound like a translation of something from Hitler’s Germany: Kenntnisse, Herrschaft, Ordnung. They do not sound in the least like Gandalf’s goals, ever, and he, in fact, replies by implying that not only are they not really Saruman’s words, but that Saruman is foolish for believing them:

“ ‘Saruman,’ I said, ‘I have heard speeches of this kind before, but only in the mouths of emissaries sent from Mordor to deceive the ignorant.’ “

As really the words of Sauron, however, they give us an idea of what to expect in a world under his control. Knowledge would be for Sauron alone, we suppose, perhaps after regaining his lost ring? Certainly he wouldn’t share it with Saruman, whom, it will become clear, he never trusted. As for Rule and Order, the world would be a place full of rules and those watching that they be obeyed. And here we can remember Sharkey’s Shire, with its “by order of the Chief” signs—and its gangs of human enforcers. As well, we can think of its grey, industrial character, as we’ve discussed in a previous post, a universal Mordor, devoted to production. To this, we can add the Mouth of Sauron’s recitation of surrender conditions, delivered to the allies before the Morannon:

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

In keeping with the influence of current events in this world, we might see this as being a parallel with the 1919 Versailles Treaty, in which Germany was to be forced to make huge territorial concessions, to disarm almost entirely, and to pay massive amounts in reparation to the victorious allies.

Treaty_of_Versailles,_English_version.jpg

The Treaty of Versailles– Wiki Article

Such terms as Sauron offers would also destroy Rohan as an ally and set up a permanent garrison between it and the north. We might also expect the restored Isengard to be a staging area for an assault upon Fangorn and the ents, to their ultimate destruction. As well, “west of the Anduin” is a very vague expression—does it include Gondor, as well as Rohan?

Religion in The Lord of the Rings has always been the subject of debate: how much or how little? Of what kind? Tolkien is quoted as saying that it was monotheistic, although, when attacked by the Mumak, Faramir’s men called on the (plural) Valar. There is no mention, in what is often extremely detailed landscape description, of any kind of temple or shrine, however. Nevertheless, we would like to conclude with an eerie thought about religion in this alternative Fourth Age. The Mouth of Sauron, aka, The Lieutenant of the Tower of Barad-dur, is described as:

“…a renegade, who came of the race of those that are named the Black Numenoreans; for they established their dwellings in Middle-earth during the years of Sauron’s domination, and they worshipped him, being enamoured of evil knowledge.”

Could we imagine that, in this other Fourth Age, a new and horrible religion might have appeared, one dedicated to the worship of Sauron—and to that Knowledge which Saruman finds so important? What do you think, dear readers?

As always, thanks for reading.

MTCIDC

Plot or Blot?

23 Wednesday Dec 2015

Posted by Ollamh in Fairy Tales and Myths, Films and Music, J.R.R. Tolkien, Narrative Methods, Uncategorized

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Adventure, An Unexpected Journey, Eagles, Gandalf, Gwaihir, His Dark Materials, Iofur Rakinson, Isengard, Manwe, Middle-earth, Mirkwood, Moth, Ornthanc, Peter Jackson, Philip Pullman, Radagast, Rohirrim, Saruman, Svalbard, The Battle of the Five Armies, The Council of Elrond, The eagles are coming, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Golden Compass, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King, Tolkien, Wizard

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always.

This posting is about a puzzle. Recently, while visiting Orthanc to write about Saruman, we bumped into the problem of how Gandalf escaped from there. Our memory was a little unclear about this—we knew that Gwaihir swooped down to rescue him, but why was Gwaihir there in the first place?

Eagles had appeared twice before in our experience of Gandalf, first when they rescued him and his companions from the goblins and Wargs in Chapter 6 of The Hobbit, “Out of the Frying-Pan into the Fire”. Here, the Lord of the Eagles hears the commotion as the Wargs struggle to overcome Gandalf’s fire magic and, gathering up some of his people, flies down to investigate.

Something similar happens at the Battle of the Five Armies, explained in Chapter 18, “The Return Journey”:

“The Eagles had long had suspicion of the goblins’ mustering; from their watchfulness the movements in the mountains could not be altogether hid.” Thus, they appear self-bid, but, as they are ancient creatures, first made by Manwe and given the role of watchers from the time of the First Age, it’s not surprising that they would act as they did.

Battle of the Five Armies_Final Complete.jpg

In Jackson’s An Unexpected Journey and, again, in his The Fellowship of the Ring, an eagle appears after Gandalf has had a heart-to-heart with a moth.

Gandalf+moth.png

With a moth? We asked ourselves. We scratched our heads and wondered: does JRRT use a moth? And, if so, where did the moth come from?

In fact, what really happens is a very neatly constructed piece of plotting on the part of the author, all of which is very nicely laid out in a couple of pages of “The Council of Elrond” during Gandalf’s long narrative.

Gandalf meets Radagast—who is identified, among other talents, as one for whom “birds are especially his friends”—and who says that, if Gandalf needs help with the Black Riders, he needs to apply to Saruman immediately.
In return, Gandalf says to Radagast, “We shall need your help, and the help of all things that will give it. Send out messages to all the beasts and birds that are your friends. Tell them to bring news of anything that bears on this matter to Saruman and Gandalf. Let messages be sent to Orthanc.”
Gandalf goes to Orthanc and, rejecting Saruman’s offer, is imprisoned at its top.
Then, that which was set up in 1 and 2 comes to fruition:

“That was the undoing of Saruman’s plot. For Radagast knew no reason why he should not do as I asked; and he rode away towards Mirkwood where he had many friends of old. And the Eagles of the Mountains went far and wide, and they saw many things…And they sent a messenger to bring these tidings to me.

So it was that when summer waned, there came a night of moon, and Gwaihir the Windlord, swiftest of the Great Eagles, came unlooked-for to Orthanc; and he found me standing on the pinnacle. Then I spoke to him and he bore me away, before Saruman was aware.”

Although we have solved the puzzle of Gandalf’s escape, we have no answer to why this natural and even elegant piece of plotting wasn’t used in the film any more than we understand why Radagast is turned into the horrible, clownish figure he is in the Hobbit films, having been described in “The Council of Elrond” simply as “a worthy Wizard, a master of shapes and changes of hue; and he has much lore of herbs and beasts, and birds are especially his friends.” And someone who could never be corrupted by Saruman, which is really, we think, why Saruman calls him a fool.

In an earlier posting, we suggested that Saruman, in his desire to ape Sauron, had created, in Isenguard, a mini-Mordor, just as Iofur Raknison, in Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, has turned Svalbard into a shabby ursine mockery of a human palace.

We also suggested that the creators of the Tolkien-derived films, when they began to veer as far from the text as they appeared increasingly to do in the Hobbit films, had become a bit like Saruman themselves, and, like his master, “cannot make real new things of [their] own…” We hesitate to add this, but, could it be that, as in the case of the orcs, they “only ruined them and twisted them…”? (The Return of the King, “The Stairs of Cirith Ungol”). After all, instead of easy plot lines, we have moths, and, in place of worthy, incorruptible wizards, we have gross clowns.

We are reluctant to end on a negative note, however. After all, just as there are the Rohirrim in The Lord of the Rings films, there are those wonderful eagles at the end of An Unexpected Journey, so why not end with them?

taking-fan-theories-to-a-next-level-the-eagles-are-coming-434375.jpg

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

If you don’t know Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, we very much recommend them—but with this proviso: in the first and second volumes (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife), Pullman’s antagonism towards organized religion is channeled into the “Magisterium”, a believable villainous organization in the world which he has so meticulously and powerfully created. In the third volume (The Amber Spyglass), we feel that that antagonism becomes all-too-apparent and it causes that volume—in our opinion—to lack the more human element and focus of the first two volumes. The first volume can certainly be read on its own and perhaps it says something about the trilogy as a whole that a planned project for filming all three books was eventually cut to a single film of the first book. We recommend this film, as well, but suggest that you read The Golden Compass before you see it.

Smoke and Mirror?

16 Wednesday Dec 2015

Posted by Ollamh in Fairy Tales and Myths, Films and Music, J.R.R. Tolkien, Narrative Methods, Villains

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"Slave of the Mirror", acting, actor, Adventure, Aladdin, classical drama, classics, clowns, comedy, Commedia dell'Arte, Disney, drama, Evil Stepmother, Fiction, Galadriel, Genie, Hellenistic, histrio, Jumanji, Magic, Magic mirror, masks, Middle-earth, Moroni Olsen, persona, pretending, Snow White, The Lord of the Rings, theatre, Tolkien, tragedy

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always.

In our last posting, we thought about Galadriel’s mirror.

We began with the mirror in Disney’s 1937 Snow White, and it occurred to us that we have no backstory for this. Where did it come from? How did it know anything? And, perhaps more important for the story, why did the stepmother believe it?

We know how wary we would have been– that Snow White mirror freaked us out as children.

Reconsidering it, we thought it was partially that smoke. But it was also that face. There was a real face behind that mirror, that of the actor Moroni Olsen (1889-1954).

There is also a history behind that face, which appears to be based upon the conventional mask of tragedy, which is often seen paired with that of comedy.

comedy_and_tragedy_masks_symbols_plays_hd-wallpaper-1888436.jpg

These masks might have come down to us most recently through the Italian Commedia dell’Arte, in which all the comic characters were masked.

The masks are much older, however, coming to us from ancient classical drama. The masks we usually see are later Roman versions,

of which there are seemingly many surviving in several media. Older yet are the Greek masks, the images of which survive in many fewer images, mostly on pots.

These Greeks masks suggest that the original idea was to make lifelike, if stylized, representations. Later ones– Hellenistic and Roman– are often much more distorted-looking, and it has been suggested that the masks were shaped as the equivalent of megaphones and resonators, and certainly the later ones at least suggest that possibility.

Certainly, theatres got bigger and more complex after having begun as simple hillsides.

2007-05-10_Epidauros,_Greece_5.jpg

But we wonder as well about Romans, and earlier non-dramatic uses of masks, perhaps for religious purposes?

The Romans got at least some of their religion from their neighbors to the north, the Etruscans. They may have gotten some elements of their drama from them, as well. A Roman word for actor, histrio, they believed was an Etruscan word, as was the word for mask, persona.

In their religion, the Romans practiced ancestor worship and used images of their ancestors as part of their ceremonies, perhaps even using masks to impersonate them.

And there’s that word persona again, and perhaps that’s what masks are all about: impersonation, pretending to be someone you aren’t.

So, what’s spooky about that mask?

First, there are those empty eyes. Then, there’s that expression, if not fixed, at least limited.

This makes us think about clowns.

We were frightened by clowns as children– maybe still are.

tvi061ab_wide-185b74c3460d303bcf13ff50d8db7d58e194c07c-s900-c85.jpg Why are they so scary? Well, for one thing, the clothing is bright and festive, but the face is dead-white and corpse-like, therefore giving a mixed signal of merriment and death at the same time. Perhaps these contradictions should have made the stepmother less trusting (it certainly made us less trusting as children).

After all, this is an empty face– not even eyes behind it.

Why should it be telling the truth any more than a clown?

In the Disney movie, the face is referred to as the “slave of the mirror” and we can imagine that this was an attempt indirectly to suggest why the stepmother trusted the mirror. Presumably, it was like Aladdin’s genie–

in control, at least temporarily, of its possessor– it’s a slave, after all.

Roman comedy, however, and Greek comedy before it, is full of tricky slaves out for their own profit…

What might it be like, we wonder, if the mirror, although saying “Madame Queen”, was actually stage managing the whole thing for his own sinister purposes? After all, the Snow White story always ends with the death of the stepmother. Does her death free the mirror?

Or, as was once the custom, does a palace servant cover the mirror after the stepmother’s death, and, like Jumanji,

must it lie on the wall, waiting for its next victim?

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC,

Mirror, Mirror

09 Wednesday Dec 2015

Posted by Ollamh in Fairy Tales and Myths, J.R.R. Tolkien, Narrative Methods

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A Christmas Carol, Denethor, Dickens, Disney, Evil Stepmother, Fates, Fiction, Folktale, Frodo, Galadriel, Gandalf, Gondor, Grimm Brothers, Istari, Kinder und Hausmaerchen, Lothlorien, Magic mirror, Maiar, Middle-earth, mirror, Mordor, Muses, Norns, Norse Mythology, Numenor, Ornthanc, Palantir, Saruman, Sauron, Schneewittchen, Scrooge, scrying stone, Snow White, Story, The Lord of the Rings, The Theogony, Tolkien, Urtharbrunnr, Valar, Yggdrasil

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always.

This is the second of two postings which, as we said in our last, was originally just one. That earlier draft linked the Palantiri with Galadriel’s mirror, but, on reconsideration, we believed—at least at first–that, in fact, they weren’t so close as we thought and so we separated them.

In our last, we discussed the Palantiri and what might have been a possible inspiration for them. In this posting, we propose to look a little more closely at Galadriel’s mirror (but we promise not to touch the water).

When we speak of mirrors—and, in this case, magic ones—the first one which pops into our mind is from childhood—the mirror in Snow White and the particularly creepy mirror in the 1937 Disney animated film.

In the original Schneewittchen, first published in the Grimm brothers’ Kinder und Hausmaerchen in the original edition of 1812,

the mirror belongs to Snow White’s stepmother, of whom the story says (in our translation):

“She was a very beautiful woman, but she was proud and arrogant and couldn’t allow that anyone would surpass her in beauty.”

She monitored her position by means of that mirror:

“She had a wonderful mirror. When she stepped before it and looked at herself within it, she said:

Little mirror, little mirror, on the wall,

Who is the most beautiful in the whole land?

The mirror answered thus:

Madame Queen, you are the most beautiful in the land.”

Franz_Jüttner_Schneewittchen_1.jpg

This makes us wonder about the stepmother. Was she like so many of the people we see around us every day (and not “everyday”, which is a compound adjective, meaning “commonly” as in “everyday usage does not necessarily equal correct usage in language”), compulsively fiddling with their electronic devices? How often did she go to that mirror and ask that question? As it was attached to the wall, she wasn’t carrying it in her back pocket, so, can we picture her making excuses to the king, to the prime minister, to her ladies in waiting, just so that she could go back to visit it? The text only says that she did—it’s a folktale, after all, and therefore old and so before current addictions were available, but she seems so obsessed—and familiar.

But then comes the day when the answer is:

“Madame Queen, you’re the most beautiful here,

But Snow White is a thousand times more beautiful than you.”

And the story goes on from there to places we don’t intend to follow. It is interesting, however, that the mirror itself appears to do the talking, not a visible spirit within it, as in the Disney movie, and there is a certain logic to this. After all, normally, a mirror is only a reflecting device: it shows the person who is looking into it, as we see the stepmother doing. Then again, having someone—or something—looking out when you look in raises all sorts of interesting questions: who is it? Where is it? How does it know what it knows and how to speak? Does it have limits?

We might imagine, from her single, repeated question that the woman does. She never, for example, asks “Was there anyone as beautiful before me?” or “Will I always be the most beautiful?” She seems trapped in the moment and, without a greater context, the mirror’s last reply will be that much more shocking.

In contrast, Galadriel’s mirror, is neither on a wall, nor portable. In fact, it’s not really a mirror in the conventional sense at all.

“With water from the stream Galadriel filled the basin to the brim, and breathed on it, and when the water was still again she spoke. ‘Here is the Mirror of Galadriel,’ she said. ‘I have brought you here so that you may look in it, if you will.’ “ (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 2, “The Mirror of Galadriel”)

When Frodo asks what might be seen therein, Galadriel replies:

‘Many things I can command the Mirror to reveal,’ she answered, ‘and to some I can show what they desire to see. But the Mirror will also show things unbidden, and those are often stranger and more profitable than things which we wish to behold. What you will see if you leave the Mirror free to work, I cannot tell. For it shows things that were, and things that are, and things that yet may be. But which is it that he sees, even the wisest cannot always tell.’ (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 2, “The Mirror of Galadriel”)

There appear to be several possible influences here. In the ancient Greek poem, The Theogony, the Muses are described as knowing past, present, and future (Theogony 380), as they choose the shepherd, Hesiod, to become a poet.

Others have suggested that an influence upon the author here was the Urtharbrunnr, the well of fate, as it may be translated, from Norse mythology, which lies at the foot of the tree called Yggdrasil. Here the Norns, or Fates in Norse tradition, sit to do their work.

Another possibility yet might be the three Christmases who visit Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and an advantage to pointing to them is that Christmas Yet to Come, although mute, shows Scrooge what turn out to be only “things that yet may be”, as Scrooge, by his change in behavior, diverts fate.

The_Last_of_the_Spirits-John_Leech,_1843.jpg

That sense of potentiality about the future is clearly a very important feature of Galadriel’s Mirror. Lorien is not only a haven from Orcish pursuit,

but also a testing ground, where the surviving members of the Fellowship are probed by the Lady of the Wood, even as she herself is inadvertently tested when Frodo offers her the Ring. Sam may suffer the most from this, being shown what appears to be the destruction of the Shire and the destitution of his own grandfather.

And yet, as Galadriel says,

‘But the Mirror will also show things unbidden, and those are often stranger and more profitable than things which we wish to behold.’ (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 2, “The Mirror of Galadriel”)

What Sam sees shakes him for a moment to the point of stepping back from the basin, saying (almost shouting, as the sentence ends with an exclamation point), “I must go home!” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 2, “The Mirror of Galadriel”) He recovers immediately, however, resolving, “ ‘No, I’ll go home by the long road with Mr. Frodo, or not at all.’” And thus he, like Galadriel, passes the test and perhaps that’s what the odd word “profitable” means in her explanation. Sam is confronted with what must have been that which he subconsciously dreaded most, but his new resolution ultimately proves the salvation of Middle Earth, on the one hand, and the healing of the Shire by means of Galadriel’s gift of a little Lorien, on the other. And, considering that Sam first appears in the story as an eaves-dropping gardener and hardly a giant elf-warrior, that other adjective, “stranger” may be appropriate, too.

So far, the Mirror has nothing in common with a Palantir, which was clearly designed not as a “scrying stone”, but as a communication device. And yet there is Galadriel’s remark,

“ ‘Many things I can command the Mirror to reveal,’ she answered, ‘and to some I can show what they desire to see.’ “

This strikes us as an ambiguous statement—and probably meant to be. Does Galadriel mean:

people come to ask her, for example, to see their future—implication being that she shows them that, and nothing more
people come, ask, and she shows them what they want to see—implication being that what they see is not necessarily what is real?

When Frodo looks into Mirror, he sees the very last thing he would want to see, however:

“But suddenly the Mirror went altogether dark, as dark as if a hole had opened in the world of sight, and Frodo looked into emptiness. In the black abyss there appeared a single Eye that slowly grew, until it filled nearly all the mirror. So terrible was it that Frodo stood rooted, unable to cry out or to withdraw his gaze. The Eye was rimmed with fire, but was itself glazed, yellow as a cat’s, watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil opened on a pit, a window into nothing.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 2, “The Mirror of Galadriel”)

This is especially true in that:

“Then the Eye began to rove, searching this way and that; and Frodo knew with certainty and horror that among the many things that it sought he himself was one.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 2, “The Mirror of Galadriel”)

This is clearly not the past or the future, as Frodo sees it, but the all-too-realistic present. And this is not just a present to be viewed. Like the figure in the mirror in the old Disney Snow White, this is someone who would respond directly to what he sees, if he could. And Frodo is aware of this:

“But he also knew that it could not see him—not yet, not unless he willed it.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 2, “The Mirror of Galadriel”)

Does the Mirror have more potential, then? Can it be used as a communication device, like a Palantir? If it can combine the functions of “magic mirror” and Palantir, might the Palantir be able to combine functions, as well?

Certainly Sauron does something which ruins Denethor’s ability to resist Sauron’s view of the future to the point where he attempts to commit flaming suicide along with his one surviving son, having abandoned his city to its fate.

Denethor, though, is just a human, and rather a vain one, at that.

How would Sauron do the same with one of the Maiar, those beings sent by the Valar to protect Middle Earth from the danger which Sauron represents? Certainly we know that Sauron has communicated with Saruman through the Palantir.

There may be a clue in Gandalf’s reply to Saruman, just before he is held captive in Orthanc:

“I have heard speeches of this kind before, but only in the mouths of emissaries sent from Mordor to deceive the ignorant.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 2, “The Council of Elrond”)

What Gandalf is responding to is:

“A new Power is rising. Against it the old allies and policies will not avail us at all. There is no hope left in Elves or dying Numenor. This then is one choice before you, before us. We may join with that Power. It would be wise, Gandalf. There is hope that way. Its victory is at hand; and there will be rich reward for those that aided it. As the Power grows, its proved friends will also grow; and the Wise, such as you and I, may with patience come at last to direct its courses, to control it. We can bide our time, we can keep our thoughts in our hearts, deploring maybe evils done by the way, but approving the high and ultimate purpose: Knowledge, Rule, Order; all the things that we have so far striven in vain to accomplish,,hindered rather than helped by our weak or idle friends. There need not be, there would not be, any real change in our designs, only in our means.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 1, “The Council of Elrond”)

“Knowledge, Rule, Order”? It’s no wonder that Gandalf replies as he does. Such words sound more like the slogan of a totalitarian state—exactly what Mordor has become under its lidless-eyed master–than those of one of the Istari.

And how did Saruman come to have such a distorted vision of the future? Just as Denethor, bitter over his son’s death and the loss to Gandalf—he thinks—of his younger son, has been shown what must have been an increasingly-bleak picture of Gondor and its fate, so can we imagine that Sauron, sensing a latent arrogance and desire for power in Saruman, has given Saruman the second possible understanding of Galadriel’s statement. He has shown Saruman what Saruman secretly wishes for and, in doing so, he cunningly paints for Saruman, who is just wise enough to know that he will never be Sauron, a picture of an alliance which will grant him his wish. Why does Saruman, who is himself an extremely powerful figure, fall for this? Perhaps he’s like Snow White’s stepmother and limited to one question: “Little globe, little globe, who is the (second most) powerful in Middle Earth?”

What do you think, dear readers?

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

doubtfulsea

~ adventure fantasy

Category Archives: Fairy Tales and Myths

Lamentable

The Ring in Question

Strange as News from Bree

Feudal Array 2

Feudal Array 1

Feudal-Earth?

Knowledge, Rule, Order

Plot or Blot?

Smoke and Mirror?

Mirror, Mirror