Mirror Image

03 Wednesday Jan 2018

Posted by lebedusya1 in Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Narrative Methods

Tags

ancient mirrors, Bag End, chiaroscuro, Claude Debussy, Egyptians, Etruscans, Georges de la Tour, Greeks, hall stand, Headington, Magic mirror, Maurice Ravel, Medieval, Miroirs, mirror, North Oxford, Parmigianino, Portrait of the Money-Lender and His Wife, Quentin Matsys, Reflections in the Water, Reflets dans L'eau, Renaissance, Romans, Snow White, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Victorian

Welcome, as ever, dear readers.

In English, we have the expression “upon reflection”, meaning something like “I’ve looked back at something and have considered (or reconsidered)”. When we look at the word “reflection”, we see its Latin origin, re “back/again” and flection, from the verb flecto, flectere, flexi, flexum “to bend/turn/bow” (we show all four of what are called the “principal parts” of the verb so that you can see where words like “flexible”—and, together with that re—“reflex” come from) and can imagine that, originally, it was almost a physical act—as if a person were believed literally to have turned back to a thought, event, action, to think about it again.

But that made us wonder about a reflection in a different sense—when an image is repeated, in water, say.

(And here we provide a YouTube LINK for a beautiful piece of music “Reflets dans L’eau”—“Reflections in the Water” by Claude Debussy—1862-1918, from the set entitled, Images, Book One—1905.)

Or in a mirror.

(This haunting painting is by Georges de la Tour, 1593-1652—known for his chiaroscuro—shadow-versus-light effects—style.)

Fancifully, we might ask: does a “reflection” in this sense suggest that the image in the mirror was turning back to look at the viewer? More realistically, we might say that the image is bent/turned back upon the viewer—but we also wonder if the Latin word from which our word mirror comes might give a certain flavor of the uncanny about it. Miror, mirari, miratus sum in Latin means “to wonder/be amazed at something” (Put the Latin preposition ad– on the front of this and you’re looking at English “admire”—originally “to wonder at something”—our modern sense of this has lost something of the wide-eyed nature implied in the original, but that’s how language works—sharp things, like knives, become dull with use. In Spanish, for example, mirar comes to mean “to look at/watch/observe”.)

Certainly, folktales and folk customs once preserved something eerie about mirrors. Think of the wicked queen’s magic mirror in Snow White.

If you know the Disney version of Snow White, you probably expected us to show this image.

But this so creeped us out as children that it was not our first choice!

In various western European countries, looking into a mirror on New Year’s Eve (lots of extra things to do: while combing hair, eating an apple, taking a bath first so that the mirror is steamy) will show you the image of your intended spouse. And breaking a mirror can mean seven years of bad luck.

For Egyptians,

Greeks,

Etruscans,

Romans,

and western Medieval people, as well,

mirrors were not very breakable, however, being commonly made of a piece of polished bronze (although there were attempts, apparently, from late classical times on to do something with glass and a metal backing). Artists in the classical world, rarely missing a chance to do something more, used the backs of mirrors as surfaces for decoration, as well. Here’s a very interesting Etruscan mirror back, including an inscription (it’s the story of Icarus and Daedalus).

Mirrors with a silvered back and glass cover, the direct ancestors of modern mirrors, appeared during the Renaissance.

This is a little joke—a self-portrait of the painter—which has been included in Quentin Matsys’ (1466-1530) painting “Portrait of the Money-Lender and His Wife” (1514).

(And, speaking of Renaissance paintings with mirrors, we couldn’t resist including this famous little painting by Parmigianino (1503-1540), a self-portrait painted on a mirror-shaped convex panel.)

If silver-backed, glass-covered mirrors only appeared in the Renaissance, however, what can we say about this object on the left house wall in this picture?

We can tell it’s meant to be a mirror as, looking closely, you can just make out the reflection of a tree which is outside to the right of the open door on its surface. And is that another mirror, on the piece of furniture in the foreground on the left? If so, it fits the kind of thing called a “hall stand” which one might see in a later-Victorian house—like this piece from the 1870s.

This makes us wonder once again: how much of this entryway depicts a Middle-earth based not upon the Middle Ages, but upon the memory of houses JRRT grew up in or perhaps furnishings from his own homes in North Oxford or Headington as an adult?

But we’ll save what appears to be a Gothic Revival chair there on the right for another day…

In the meantime, thanks, as ever, for reading!

MTCIDC

We would like to take a moment and turn to the west to thank the Valar for the full recovery of our dear friend and fellow Tolkien enthusiast, EMH, from a serious operation. Get even well-er soon!

Caspar_David_Friedrich_-_Woman_before_the_Rising_Sun_(Woman_before_the_Setting_Sun)_-_WGA08253.jpg

PPS

If you enjoyed the Debussy in the link above, perhaps you might also enjoy Maurice Ravel’s (1875-1937) Miroirs (1906)—here’s a LINK.

Orcked

22 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by lebedusya1 in Economics in Middle-earth, Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Narrative Methods

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Arthur Rackham, Bosch, Brueghel, counterfeit, creation, Elves, Ents, Fangorn, Goblins, John Bauer, mockery, Orcs, Saruman, Sauron, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Treebeard, trolls, US Treasury Department, Weimar Republic

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

In our last, we discussed less familiar characters in The Lord of the Rings, the Corsairs of Umbar, and what we imagine they could look like.

In this posting, we want to look at much more familiar characters, Orcs—but from the viewpoint of Fangorn.

He says of them:

“Maybe you have heard of Trolls? They are mighty strong. But Trolls are only counterfeits, made by the Enemy in the Great Darkness, in mockery of Ents, as Orcs were of Elves.” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 4, “Treebeard”)

We’ve always been a bit puzzled by this. “Counterfeit” makes us think, immediately, of counterfeit money. Here are a pair of US 10-dollar bills: can you tell the counterfeit (from Old French via a Latin compound, contra, “against” + facere, “make/do”—in Medieval Latin a contrafactio is a thing put against another, something in contrast, thus “imitation”)?

To be a successful counterfeit, normally, it’s necessary that the imitation be as close to the original as possible, as in the case of these two tens. The US Treasury Department goes to a lot of time and expense to make counterfeiting as difficult as possible

image3anticounterfeit

but, if a counterfeiter is successful, he stands to make (in two senses) a lot of money. He can also cause a great deal of financial damage, breeding distrust in a government’s ability to coin money and to stand behind it. The more counterfeit money in the system, the more money the government has to back, which, in time, could lead to what is called hyperinflation and can bring a currency to collapse. When a government does this itself it can cause havoc with a country’s economy, as happened in the Weimar Republic in 1921-1924. At that time, for complex reasons having to do with paying off the German Empire’s war debts, the government began producing too much paper money and too rapidly. This caused the money to lose value very quickly, rendering it almost worthless.

image4weimarmoney

It’s no wonder that the penalty for counterfeiting was usually the most severe possible.

image5tyburn

Treebeard’s use of the word “counterfeit”, then, would suggest that what Sauron was doing was trying to make nearly-exact copies of something, either Ents or Elves, in his creation of Trolls and Orcs. So what do we find when we first see a description of Orcs?

“There were four goblin-soldiers of greater stature, swart, slant-eyed, with thick legs and large hands.”

(The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 1, “The Departure of Boromir”)

That’s not much to go on:

“greater stature” would suggest that most Orcs were short
“swart” means “dark-complexioned” (a term Sam uses to describe men from Harad, whom he calls “Swertings”—The Two Towers, Book Four, Chapter 3, “The Black Gate is Closed”)
“slant-eyed”—for contemporary people this is a tricky term, even a racial slur, but JRRT probably meant no more than that these Orcs had epicanthic folds to their eyelids, which is not uncommon among many of the world’s peoples.

image6epicanth

“with thick legs and large hands” suggests very stocky builds—like the “Trolls turned to stone” in JRRT’s illustration of the scene in The Hobbit.

image7stonetrolls

This is a start, but will our next view help? Pippin and Merry are the prisoners of the Orcs and Pippin is listening to a quarrel between those of Saruman and those of Sauron:

“In the twilight he saw a large black Orc, probably Ugluk, standing facing Grishnakh, a short crook-legged creature, very broad and with long arms that hung almost to the ground.” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 3. “The Uruk-hai”)

Counterfeit Elves? Of course we know—also from Fangorn—that perhaps Saruman was up to something more, as Fangorn says of him:

“He has taken up with foul folk, with the Orcs. Brm, hoom! Worse than that: he has been doing something to them; something dangerous. For these Isengarders are more like wicked Men. It is a mark of evil things that came in the Great Darkness that they cannot abide the Sun; but Saruman’s Orcs can endure it, even if they hate it. I wonder what he has done? Are they Men he has ruined, or has he blended the races of Orcs and Men? That would be a black evil!” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 4, “Treebeard”)

This might account for the size of the Uruk-hai, as well as for their ability to endure daylight, but what about the crook-leggedness and “long arms that hung almost to the ground”?

Perhaps here we should remember the end of Fangorn’s description: “…in mockery of Ents, as Orcs were of Elves.”

Hmm. Trolls certainly don’t look much like Ents—

Is this the “mockery”? It’s certainly not counterfeiting in the usual sense!

Should we understand the same for Orcs vs Elves? Here are illustrations of Galadriel and Legolas (both by the Hildebrandts):

Set those against any modern artist’s view of Orcs and, again, it’s not counterfeiting, in the strictest sense, so we suppose that we have to assume “mockery”—but with the added assumption that Sauron had a very twisted sense of humor. (There’s also that nasty half-suggestion of Fangorn’s that, since Saruman’s Orcs are behaving more like men, Saruman has been performing genetic experiments, something even Fangorn doesn’t want to think about.)

Looking at all of these illustrations, by the way, we were struck by where we’d seen creatures like this before. Could it be in the works of those strange Flemish/Dutch painters like Brueghel and Bosch?

Or Arthur Rackham?

Or the early 20^th-century Swedish painter, John Bauer, who, in his depiction of forests was an influence upon JRRT?

And, more recently, considering P. Jackson’s Orcs,

their skin color and general look: is there a suggestion here of the so-called “Bog People” (about whom we wrote a posting some time ago)—a whole series of bodies, at least one dating from the 4^th century bc

who have been discovered buried in peat bogs (a great preservative) in northern Europe?

And, in their color and oozy look–not to mention that they seem to move in scuttly groups–is there something cockroachy about them?

But, just as there is a place Fangorn doesn’t want to go, it’s true for us as well!

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

You probably spotted this (we have very intelligent readers), but it’s the top 10-dollar bill which is the counterfeit.

PPS

It has also occurred to us that JRRT more than once discussed the fact that Sauron, as a lesser deity-figure, could never originate, only copy and “subcreate”—perhaps suggesting another reason for making “mockeries”: his anger at his inability to do original work?

A Pirate’s Life…

15 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by lebedusya1 in Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Maps, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, Narrative Methods, Villains

≈ 1 Comment

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Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud ben Mohammed Anoun, Algiers, Anduin, Barbary Coast, buccaneer, corsair barbary, Corsairs, draught, dromon, dromunds, galley, Harad, Haradrim, Harlond, Helm's Deep, Legatus Regis Barbariae, Pelennor, Pirates, Ramas Echor, Southrons, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Turkish galley, Umbar, US Navy WW2 fighter

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

In a previous posting, we mentioned the Corsairs of Umbar.

If you google “corsair” in images, the first thing which appears is this:

It’s a US Navy WW2 fighter—but hardly what was sweeping to attack the south coast of Gondor in Sauron’s massive campaign.

Change that to “corsair pirate” and you see things like

image2piratecostume

which is definitely a bit better, but he looks so 18^th-century. As we have discussed in many of our postings, Middle-earth is Middle Ages (more or less), even if it mixes High Medieval (things like the plate armor of the Prince of Dol Amroth) with Anglo-Saxon (the Rohirrim). So “corsair pirate” is too late in time. Another word (with a much-discussed origin) for “pirate” is “buccaneer”, so, how about “corsair buccaneer”?

image3trailer

Ooops! Okay—clearly that doesn’t work!

So what will—and what are we really looking for? Well, what do these corsairs look like according to JRRT?

They have black sails:

For Anduin, from the bend at the Harlond, so flowed that[,]from the City[,] men could look down it lengthwise for some leagues, and the far-sighted could see any ships that approached. And looking thither they cried in dismay; for black against the glittering stream they beheld a fleet borne up on the wind: dromunds, and ships of great draught with many oars, and with black sails bellying in the breeze.

‘The Corsairs of Umbar!’ men shouted. (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 6, “The Battle of the Pelennor Fields”)

Anything more?

In The Lord of the Rings, unfortunately not.

Umbar is in Harad,

however, and there is a little about the Haradrim. Our first view of them is Sam’s:

Then suddenly straight over the rim of their sheltering bank, a man fell, crashing through the slender trees, nearly on top of them. He came to rest in the fern a few feet away, face downward, green arrow-feathers sticking from his neck below a golden collar. His scarlet robes were tattered, his corselet of overlapping brazen plates was rent and hewn, his black plaits of hair braided with gold were drenched with blood. His brown hand still clutched the hilt of a broken sword. (The Two Towers, Book Four, Chapter 4, “Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit”)

Other details?

Just before Sam speaks, Gollum has reported seeing:

‘Dark faces. We have not seen Men like these before, no, Smeagol has not. They are fierce. They have black eyes, and long black hair, and gold rings in their ears; yes, lots of beautiful gold. And some have red paint on their cheeks, and red cloaks; and their flags are red, and the tips of their spears; and they have found shields, yellow and black with big spikes. Not nice; very cruel wicked Men they look. Almost as bad as Orcs, and much bigger.’ (The Two Towers, Book Four, Chapter 3, “The Black Gate is Closed.”)

“cruel and tall” (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 4, “The Siege of Gondor”)

They have cavalry and they are armed with scimitars. (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 6, “The Battle of the Pelennor Fields”)

These would seem to be people from Near Harad (that is, near to Gondor). The men to the south of them differ:

“…Southrons [men from Near Harad] in scarlet and out of Far Harad black men like half-trolls with white eyes and red tongues.” (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 6, “The Battle of the Pelennor Fields”)

But all of this to us suggested a model from our own world (as always): the Barbary Pirates. So how about the search terms “corsair barbary”?

Ah. That’s a bit more like it, we think. He has to lose his gunpowder weapons, though—the only gunpowder in Middle-earth appears to be something in the hands of Saruman and Sauron’s orcs, as we see at Helm’s Deep

and the wall of the Pelennor, the Ramas Echor.

We would imagine those corsairs, then, as looking like the infamous “Barbary Pirates”.

They certainly fill the bill geographically—they’re southern (at least in relation to JRRT’s England)–their hangouts being on the coast of North Africa

and, if you wanted a big port city, as Umbar was supposed to be, here’s Algiers.

What about ships—that is, “dromunds and ships of great draught with many oars”?

“Dromund” is a medieval form of the Byzantine Greek dromon, literally a “runner”—a word you’d recognize from the English word “hippodrome”—the “place where horses run”. This was the common larger Byzantine warship.

Here’s a Renaissance-era engraving of a Turkish galley.

There’s a difficulty with “ships of great draft with many oars”, however. Draught (also spelled “draft”) is the distance between the waterline and the bottom of the keel, as in this diagram.

Ships with many oars are, commonly, galleys,

and galleys commonly have a shallow draft—both to allow for maneuver in shallow waters and to allow for the oars to do their job most efficiently. So, we presume that all of the Corsairs’ vessels were actually galleys of various sizes.

Jackson’s Corsair ships have something of the look of JRRT’s description, but his

depiction of the Corsairs, unlike that of Rohan and the Rohirrim, is not even close to the little we have learned so far from the text.

The Barbary Pirates, to us, not only match point of origin and vessels, but are much more exotic and colorful, whereas those in the film look to us more like dingy Vikings.

And here’s a portrait

of the Moroccan ambassador to the court of Queen Elizabeth I (notice that, in the caption he’s called Legatus Regis Barbariae, “deputy of the King of Barbary”—a splendid figure with a splendid name: Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud ben Mohammed Anoun—imagine him facing Aragorn from the deck of a galley—we think that the Oath-breakers would have had little fear for him, even as they overwhelmed him and his crew.

So, as always, we ask you, readers, what do you think?

And thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

Just a thought, but, if Sauron, as one of the Maiar, was virtually immortal and had the kind of power which is displayed in the forging of the Ring, why did he need vast fortresses and armies and fleets? Something to think about in a future posting!

Sugar and Oliphaunts

08 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by lebedusya1 in Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Narrative Methods

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Africa, Bag End, Bodleian Library, Boromir, Chanson de Roland, creative misreading, Elephants, Greenway, Harad, horn, Mumakil, Oliphaunt, Oliphaunts, Savanna, sugar cane, sugar loaf, Sunlands, Swanfleet, Swertings, Tharbad, Tolkien, tropical, Umbar, war-horn

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

In our last posting, through a piece of “creative misreading” we saw a hat on Bilbo’s hallway table as a sugar loaf

image2sugarloaf

and, before you knew it, we were thinking about where the sugar behind the cakes, seed cakes, and tarts in his pantry came from.

Sugar cane is a tropical plant

image3sugarcanefield

so, logically, we began to consider where, on the Middle-earth maps we have, tropical might be.

image4memap

In our world, that would be south, of course, and, looking as far south as we can go, we reach Harad, a name which actually means “south” in Sindarin. It consists of two big regions, Near Harad and Far Harad.

As far as we can find, JRRT has left us no detailed geographic information about this region. On page 413 of The War of the Ring, we are given the clue that, when the Corsairs of Umbar are driven back,

“all the enemy that were not slain or drowned were gone flying over the [?borders] into the desert that lies north of Harad.”

This would suggest that at least Near (as in “near to Gondor”, as we presume that our cartographers were Gondorians) Harad might be imagined as being like our world’s North Africa—

image5northafrica

with some fertile coastline, backed by the Sahara. And we can’t resist including this view of the Sahara from space here.

image6saharafromspace

And, just as in our world, the whole south can’t be desert, since people from Harad are associated with elephants—or “oliphaunts”, as Sam says:

“But I’ve heard tales of the big folk down away in the Sunlands. Swertings we call ‘em in our tales; and they ride on oliphaunts backs and all, and the oliphaunts throw rocks and trees at one another.” (The Two Towers, Book Four, Chapter 3, “The Black Gate is Closed”)

The Mûmak of Harad, by Ted Nasmith

This would suggest more fertile land south of the northern desert, a savanna, or region of great, grassy plains. Such an area forms one of two habitats for elephants in our Africa.

image8savanna

South of the African savanna lies the rain forest—the other African elephant habitat.

image9rainforestelephants

Sugar cane, a little research tells us, can grow in savanna lands

image10caneinsavanna

as well as in rain forest (which, in our world, is being destroyed to provide more space for growing it—here’s a LINK about that). Thus, we imagine that this must be the point of origin for Bilbo’s sugar. From its growing and processing point (for something about those things in our world, please see the previous posting), it might then be shipped to the city of Umbar and from there to Gondor.

As to how it reaches Bilbo, well, we know that there must have been some trade up and down the old North-South Road/Greenway, as Saruman has a supply of pipe-weed from the South Farthing, with “the Hornblower brandmarks on the barrels” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 9, “Flotsam and Jetsam”), which takes us as far as Isengard. From Gondor to Isengard? Packhorse up the Greenway to Bree? Butterbur tells Frodo & Co that “”There’s a party that came up the Greenway from down South last night” (Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 9, “At the Sign of the Prancing Pony”)—though he then says that “that was strange enough to begin with”.

As we said in our last, this is all based upon a “creative misreading”, so we admit that there are some gaps here and there–just as there is a gap in the North-South Road at the Swanfleet, where the great bridge at Tharbad is down, but that’s what we get with such a “creative misreading” of a hat!

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

But another thought—not based upon a “misreading”, but rather upon The Lord of the Rings, so, at the posting’s end we can have at least something a little less speculative.

There is another medieval spelling of “oliphaunt”—“Olifant/oliphant”, with its own specific meaning: a horn made from an elephant’s tusk, like this one, which is just over a thousand years old and is in the treasury of York Minster.

KIPPA MATTHEWS - COPYRIGHT NOTICE

image12york

This is a drinking horn, but such horns could also be used for signaling, the most famous being that of Roland, the hero of the later-11^th-century Old French epic poem, the Chanson de Roland. Here is a page from the oldest known ms, now in the Bodleian Library at Oxford.

image13chanson

(Here are links to two translations in English, one in prose, one in verse.) If you don’t know the poem, its main action is a rear guard defense of a pass by a group of Carolingian soldiers commanded by Roland. He has an olifant and can use it to call for help, but refuses to do so until the last moment because, in his view, asking for reinforcements would be cowardly. As a consequence, the Carolingians, including Roland, do not survive the battle, as Roland blows the horn only at the last moment (and blows it so hard that he bursts his brains in the process—there would be those who might argue that someone who sacrifices his troops on a point of honor doesn’t have much in the way of brains to begin with!).

image14roland

Warriors and horn-blowing immediately make us think of Boromir.

Tolkien, Nasmith, painting, illustration, Lord of the Rings, Silmarillion, Hobbit, Middle-earth

His horn is just called a “war-horn” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 3, “The Ring Goes South”), with no further description, but, as medieval horns in our world can be made of elephant tusk, why mightn’t Boromir’s be made of the equivalent, mumak tusk?

image16oliphant

Are You Sitting Down.1?

04 Wednesday Oct 2017

Posted by lebedusya1 in Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Narrative Methods

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19th Century, An Introduction to Old Norse, Bag End, Beorn, Charles Dodgson, E.V. Gordon, Edwardian, Elvenking, Furniture, Goblins, Hildebrandts, House, Iron Age Farmhouse, Lewis Carroll, Listen with Mother, Master of Laketown, Monty Python, Norse house, Sackville-Bagginses, The Hobbit, Through the Looking-Glass, Tolkien, Victorians

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

Several times, Monty Python skits included the pattern, “Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.”

It was clear, when we first heard it, that, like so much of Python material, it was one of those references which an audience in Britain in the early 1970s would have understood immediately and chuckled at, but it was only with the advent of the all-knowing Wikipedia that the reference came clear to us. (Here’s a LINK, so that, if you don’t know it already, you, too, can be suitably enlightened.)

But it made us think—not everything does, we promise!—of Tolkien and what must sound like a very odd subject—furniture.

Furniture?

Consider Bilbo’s Bag End:

“The Door opened on to a tube-shape hall like a tunnel: a very comfortable tunnel without smoke, with paneled walls, and floors tiled and carpeted, provided with polished chairs, and lots and lots of pegs for hats and coats…The tunnel wound on and on, going fairly but not quite straight into the side of the hill—The Hill, as all the people for many miles round called it—and many little round doors opened out of it, first on one side and then on another. No going upstairs for the hobbit: bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries (lots of these), wardrobes (he had whole rooms devoted to clothes), kitchens, dining-rooms, all on the same floor, and indeed on the same passage…” (The Annotated Hobbit, Chapter 1, “An Unexpected Party”)

Here is JRRT’s version of the entryway–with Bilbo—or is that JRRT himself? There appears to be a strong resemblance…

As the narrator tells us, “This hobbit was a very well-to-do hobbit…”, but, at the same time, we could easily see this description (ignoring the fact that it’s about a hole, albeit “not a nasty, dirty, wet hole…nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole…it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort”) applied to the kinds of late-Victorian/Edwardian interiors with which Tolkien was familiar.

People of this world—middle-class England—seem to have loved to live among piles of possessions—heavy furniture, thick carpets, heavy drapes, and knickknacks galore.

(Oh–and swords, apparently.)

To us, this has a slightly claustrophobic effect—and we imagine that it may be why Alice in Through the Looking-Glass (1871) attempts to escape it–

only to find herself in a distorted version of the same room on the other side of the mirror.

[Here’s the actual mirror, from the childhood home of the real Alice, which is said to have inspired Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll to write a sequel to the first Alice book.]

What about other Middle-earth interiors, beginning in The Hobbit?

Surprisingly, there is really nothing before the Dwarves and Co. reach Beorn’s house. There is no description of any inside in Rivendell and, beyond that, the only “indoors” we see before Beorn is the main cave of the goblins and the only “furniture” is this:

“There in the shadows on a large flat stone sat a tremendous goblin…” (The Hobbit, Chapter 4. “Over Hill and Under Hill”)

Beorn’s house, as we see in Anderson’s The Annotated Hobbit (170-171), appears to be based upon an illustration to be found in E.V. Gordon’s An Introduction to Old Norse (1927) (with an older history yet—see Anderson, 171).

The Hildebrandts saw Beorn’s house as rather like a giant log cabin,

but we imagine the outside of Beorn’s house to look rather more like this view of an Iron Age farmhouse

And here’s a reconstruction of a Norse house interior which is a little more “lived-in”, to give you the idea of what Beorn’s house might look like day-to-day (without the magic animals, unfortunately).

As Tolkien’s illustration shows, however, this is hardly based upon a Victorian parlor! As the narrator describes it (with magic animals as the kitchen staff):

“Quickly they got out boards and trestles from the side walls and set them up near the fire…Beside them a pony pushed two low-seated benches with wide rush-bottoms and little short thick legs for Gandalf and Thorin, while at the far end he put Beorn’s big black chair of the same sort…These were all the chairs he had in his hall…What did the rest sit on?…The other ponies came in rolling round drum-shaped sections of logs, smoothed and polished, and low enough even for Bilbo…” (The Hobbit, Chapter 7, “Queer Lodgings”)

Beyond Beorn’s house, there is mention that the Elvenking sat “on a chair of carven wood” (The Hobbit, Chapter 9, “Barrels Out of Bond”) and the Master of Laketown has a “great chair” (The Hobbit, Chapter 10, “A Warm Welcome”), but we have come deeper into the Middle-earth/medieval world, it seems, where furniture (at least in the narrator’s view) is sparse and we will only begin to see more abundance, at least in a general way, when we return to the Shire and the unwelcome event of the auction of Bilbo’s possessions on June 22^nd:

“The legal bother, indeed, lasted for years…and in the end to save time Bilbo had to buy back quite a lot of his own furniture.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 19, “The Last Stage”)

“Furniture” is, unfortunately, a vague word, mentioned just previously in relation to the Sackville-Bagginses who were “busy measuring his [Bilbo’s] rooms to see if their own furniture would fit.” We’ll have to make do here with our original idea of Bilbo the Middle-earth Victorian’s house,

but, in our next, we’ll have a look at households (and palaces) in The Lord of the Rings, to see what we may find (and we have a hunch the inventory will include a quantity of thrones…)

Thanks, as ever, for reading!

MTCIDC

Re: Tree

23 Wednesday Aug 2017

Posted by lebedusya1 in Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Narrative Methods, Poetry

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Alfred Tennyson, Dreamflower, Fangorn Forest, Galadriel, Gondor, Helm's Deep, Isengard, Laurelindorenan, Lothlorien, Lotus-eaters, mallorn, Minas Tirith, Mirkwood, Old Forest, Old Man Willow, Palantir, Rath Dinen, Samwise Gamgee, Saruman, The Lord of the Rings, The Odyssey, Tolkien, Treebeard, trees, White Tree of Gondor

Welcome, as always, dear readers.
image1ajrrttree
The inspirations for our postings come from many places: from something we’re reading or have just watched/seen, from a connection between two texts, or between Tolkien’s world—the real or Middle-earth—and something from the history of this world. Sometimes ideas come from the Sortes Tolkienses—our take on an ancient fortune-telling method, in which one posed a question, then opened a copy of an important text like The Bible or Vergil’s Aeneid, closed one’s eyes, and pointed and the text where the finger landed was believed, through interpretation, to contain an answer to that question. In our case, should we require inspiration, we sometimes use our 50th Anniversary hardbound of The Lord of the Rings to do this and, surprisingly often, what we find gives us an idea about what to write.
In the case of this posting, however, it was more of a “we were working on something else entirely and then there it was.” The “it” here is the White Tree of Gondor.
image1treeofgondor
(We confess, by the way, that we have iphone cases with the image—and we are often complimented on them.)
image2phonecase
We had, in fact, been thinking about another post, this one about corruption through technology, as represented by the palantiri, and had been reading references to Denethor. This had led us to his fiery death in Rath Dinen, “Silent Street”, which led to the tombs of the kings and stewards of Gondor. Besides the rulers of Gondor, however, the street had another occupant, the old White Tree, long dead,

but which, when a new sapling

was found in the mountains by Gandalf and Aragorn, was still treated with ceremony:
“Then the withered tree was uprooted, but with reverence; and they did not burn it, but laid it to rest in the silence of Rath Dinen.” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 5, “The Steward and the King”)
This seemed a rather odd thing to do to a tree and this led us, finally, to consider one function of trees in The Lord of the Rings: just as the White Tree is buried, as human rulers were, could trees act as a mirror for the condition of the human world at what would be the end of the Third Age? And can they also act as a mirror of change for the better?
Consider, for example, the dead White Tree as a symbol for the withering of Gondor itself, as Minas Tirith is described:
Pippin gazed in growing wonder “at the great stone city, vaster and more splendid than anything that he had dreamed of; greater and stronger than Isengard, and far more beautiful. Yet it was in truth falling year by year into decay; and already it lacked half the men that could have dwelt at ease there…(The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 1, “Minas Tirith”)
And this decay of city and tree appears to be echoed in the natural world of Middle-earth in general, as Treebeard says of Lothlorien:

“Do not risk getting entangled in the woods of Laurelindorenan! That is what the Elves used to call it, but now they make the name shorter: Lothlorien they call it. Perhaps they are right: maybe it is fading, not growing. Land of the Valley of Singing Gold, that was it, once upon a time. Now it is the Dreamflower.”
[Just a quick footnote here. “Dreamflower” immediately takes us to Odyssey, Book 9, 82-105, where a small party of Odysseus’ men, set ashore to explore, meet up with the Lotus-eaters, who give them the mysterious lotus to eat and that “whoever might eat of the sweet fruit of the lotus, no longer wished to bring word back or to return home/but wanted, feeding on lotus, to remain in the very same place with the lotus-eating men and to forget about home-going.” (94-97, our translation). This certainly could describe at least some of the Fellowship’s reaction to Lothlorien. Here’s an illustration from a cartoon-version:

Alfred Tennyson wrote a poem on the same subject—here’s a LINK, in case you would like to read his 1832 (revised 1842) interpretation.]
Beyond Lothlorien, other parts of the tree-covered natural world seem more menacing–there’s the Old Forest,

and Mirkwood,

described by Haldir:
“ ‘There lies the fastness of Southern Mirkwood…It is clad in a forest of dark fir, where the trees strive against one another and their branches rot and wither.’ “ (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 6, “Lothlorien”)
It wouldn’t take much imagination to replace “where the trees strive” with “where the humans strive against one another and their kind rots and withers”!
There is the sentient, malevolent Old Man Willow,

and even Treebeard and his forest do not at first offer the kind of invitation one hears in the first verse of this song, from Shakespeare’s As You Like It:
Under the greenwood tree
Who loves to lie with me
And tune his merry note,
Unto the sweet bird’s throat,
Come hither, come hither, come hither:
Here shall he see
No enemy
Than winter and rough weather.

Instead, when Treebeard

overhears Pippin say:
“This shaggy old forest looked so different in the sunlight. I almost felt I liked the place.” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 4, “Treebeard”)
he says, “ ‘Almost felt you liked the Forest!’ That’s good! That’s uncommonly kind of you…Turn round and let me have a look at your faces. I almost feel that I dislike you both…”
Treebeard’s hostility towards Pippin and Merry actually springs from another source—Saruman:
“He and his foul folk are making havoc now. Down on the borders they are felling trees—good trees. Some of the trees they just cut down and leave to rot—orc-mischief that; but most are hewn up and carried off to feed the fires of Orthanc.”
Treebeard’s growing anger, however, then marks a turn in the behavior of the natural world: somehow the appearance of Pippin and Merry acts as a catalyst:
“Curse him, root and branch! Many of those trees were my friends, creatures I had known from nut and acorn; many had voices of their own that are lost for ever now. And there are wastes of stump and bramble where once there were singing groves. I have been idle. I have let things slip. It must stop!”
And it’s not simply the Revenge of the Ents. Treebeard has a larger strategy, saying to the two hobbits:
“You may be able to help me. You will be helping your own friends that way, too; for if Saruman is not checked Rohan and Gondor will have an enemy behind as well as in front.”
As we know, Treebeard convinces the other Ents to help and, in a short time, they not only destroy Isengard

but also the orcs at Helm’s Deep,

effectively removing Saruman from the story except as an empty threat—and a final, petty Sauron, ruining the Shire, which included cutting down numbers of trees—among them the famous Party Tree. And here we see one more symbol, perhaps. Long before, Galadriel had given Sam a gift which, in her wisdom (and perhaps in her foresight?) seemed almost perfect for a gardener:
“She put into his hand a little box of plain grey wood, unadorned save for a single silver rune on the lid….’In this box there is earth from my orchard, and such blessing as Galadriel has still to bestow is upon it…Though you should find all barren and laid waste, there will be few gardens in Middle-earth that will bloom like your garden, if you sprinkle this earth there.’ “ (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 8, “Farewell to Lorien”)
Once the Shire has been scoured of Saruman’s final evil, Sam remembers this present and uses it, spreading the earth across the Shire:
“So Sam planted saplings in all the places where specially beautiful or beloved trees had been destroyed, and he put a grain of the precious dust in the soil at the root of each.” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 9, “The Grey Havens”)
And his plan succeeds:
“His trees began to sprout and grow, as if time was in a hurry and wished to make one year do for twenty.”
In midst of such fertility, there is an extra favor. Sam had found within Galadriel’s box “a seed, like a small nut with a silver shale [shell or husk].”
Sam planted this in the Party Field, where the tree had once stood, and, in the spring:
“In the Party Field a beautiful young sapling leaped up: it had silver bark and long leaves and burst into golden flowers in April. It was indeed a mallorn [the golden tree specific only to Lothlorien], and it was the wonder of the neighborhood.”
Just as the human world of Middle-earth, stunted by Sauron and his minions, is now free, so is the natural world free once more—no more orcs to abuse its forests, no malevolent will to taint its woods, and the reflowering of the Shire and, at its center, the mallorn, may stand as a symbol for that rebirth—and even be twinned with the new White Tree of Gondor, far to the south.

[With thanks to Britta Siemen’s blog, where we found this image—LINK here]
Thanks, as ever, for reading!
MTCIDC
CD

Dancing with the Elves

09 Wednesday Aug 2017

Posted by lebedusya1 in Fairy Tales and Myths, Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Narrative Methods

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19th Century, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Anglo-Saxon, Arthur Rackham, Beren and Luthien, dance, Dicky Doyle, Elbereth Gilthoniel, elf ring, Elves, Fairy, fairy ring, Fairy Tale, Folklore, In Fairyland, Kenneth Grahame, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, Song, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Victorian, William Shakespeare

Dear readers,

Welcome, as always.

In The Lord of the Rings, Elves are powerful, human-like figures– immortal, skilled, and revered as counselors. In Tolkien’s work, however, they have not always been this way– early drafts suggest a sort of Victorian confusion, as if Tolkien’s elves have ancestral ties to both the tall, beautiful elves of the Anglo-Saxons, and to the jovial, delicate elves and fay of the mid- to late- 19th century.

In the beginning of June this year, Christopher Tolkien published an edited version of his father JRRT’s story, “Beren and Luthien”, which was originally published as a part of The Silmarillion, a history of the Elves.

Within this book are previously unpublished earlier drafts and versions of the story, and in the introduction to them, Christopher Tolkien comments upon them: Beren was originally a gnome (which he was quick to explain meant an immortal figure– not what we would find in gardens),

and then an elf, before his final incarnation as a mortal man. Luthien, the immortal Elven princess, is referred to by Tevildo, Prince of Cats, as “Princess of Fairies”. After being ordered to dance before him by the dark lord Melkor, Luthien began

“Such a dance as neither she nor any other sprite or fay or elf danced every before or has done since… magically beautiful as only Tinuviel ever was… and Ainu Melko for all his power and majesty succumbed to the magic of that Elf-maid, and indeed even the eyelids of Lorien had grown heavy had he been there to see” (76).

What we found curious here was JRRT’s uses of “Elf” and “Fairy” as seemingly synonymous with each other, when, depending on to which story an Elf or Fairy belongs, they may be quite different. Being people who spend a good deal of time in the Victorian world, when we think of dancing fairies, what is more likely to come to mind are the tiny winged figures who appear in Kenneth Grahame’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906), with illustrations by Arthur Rackham.

We might also be reminded of the little people who inhabit Dicky Doyle’s In Fairyland (1869)

What we see in the Victorian sense of fairies and elves in images and stories is a revival of Elizabethan fairy-stories, which focus on little people: much like the fairies of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example, the fairies in Kensington are light-footed, winged beings who wear flowing garments, and they fancy calling themselves “dancey” rather than “happy”.

Dicky Doyle’s In Fairyland finds Elves in the “Elf World” to be the same sort of creatures. The picture below gives us an idea of the jovial nature of Victorian Elves, and is captioned, “The little Elves would cross over the border, and come into the King’s fields and gardens.”:

J.R.R. Tolkien was born in 1896, at the end of the Victorian period. It would be understood if the Victorian sense was residual in his work– after all, he was a child when Arthur Rackham’s illustrations met the height of their popularity, at the beginning of the 20th century, and he mentions in his letters having seen them.

In his Middle-earth, however, we see a very different kind of Elf. Tolkien describes how he imagined them in a letter to Naomi Richardson on 25 April 1954:

” ‘Elves’ is a translation, not perhaps now very suitable, but originally good enough, of Quendi. They are represented as a race similar in appearance (and more so further back) to Men, and in former days of the same stature… [they] are in fact in these histories very little akin to the Elves and Fairies of Europe; and if I were pressed to rationalize, I should say that they represent really Men with greatly enhanced aethetic and creative features, greater beauty and longer life, and nobility…” (Letters, 176).

Below are a few artists’ renditions of what these Elves might look like, and they’re very different from the imaginations of Arthur Rackham and Dicky Doyle.

And some images from Peter Jackson’s films, as well:

When JRRT refers to “the former days”, we can assume that he means two things:

The former days of Middle-earth, such as in The Silmarillion
The former days of our world–specifically, Anglo-Saxon Elves, which resemble the Elves of Middle-earth in their stature and beauty. Thus, the “former days” refer to a former rendition of Elves– one which, belonging to the Anglo-Saxons, would be familiar to JRRT.

(Attached here is a very useful book on this subject by Alaric Hall, which provides an in-depth look at pre-Elizabethan and pre-Victorian Elves.)

These Elves are almost the polar opposite of the Elfin and Fay creatures of the Victorians, and we found it curious that they would have anything in common. As demonstrated by Rackham’s “dancey” fairies and Luthien in Beren and Luthien, however, we found one thing: a love for song and dance.

While looking through Jack Zipes’ collected anthology of Victorian Fairy Tales, The Revolt of Fairies and Elves, we came across an example of this in “Charlie Among the Elves”, in which the protagonist, a young boy who finds himself, by some sort of magic or dream, in the world of fairies and elves. The elves invite him in and greet him with a song:

“…they struck up a melody which Charlie thought was the very sweetest music which he had ever heard in the whole course of his life, and thus ran the song of the Elves:

In the waning summer light

Which the hearts of mortals love

’Tis the hour for elfin sprite

Through the flow’ry mead to rove.

Mortal eyes the spot may scan,

Yet our forms they ne’er descry;

Though so near the haunts of man,

Merrily our trade we ply.”

In some folklore, there is also the danger of dance. Fairy rings, also called elf rings, are supernatural places created by the dancing of either fairies, elves, or witches. They have been considered hazardous by much of Western folklore to those outside of the fairy world; in these stories, mortals who have stepped inside have been cursed, trapped, or simply disappear.

Charlie was lucky that he had come across benevolent creatures, and this reminded us of another instance when an adventurer was greeted by Elves through song: in The Hobbit, which is where Tolkien first introduced Elves, before he later understood them. Before The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, Bilbo, Thorin, and Company are greeted by Elf-song in Rivendell:

” ‘Hmmm! it smells like elves!’ thought Bilbo, and he looked up at the stars. They were burning bright and blue. Just then there came a burst of song like laughter in the trees:

‘O! What are you doing,

And where are you going?

Your ponies need shoeing!

The river is flowing!

O! tra-la-la-lally,

here down in the valley!’ ”

As the Elves in both “Charlie Among the Elves” and The Hobbit are jovial and playful in their music, we might think that Tolkien had not completely abandoned the Victorian Elfin world, after all; of course, in The Lord of the Rings and in The Silmarillion, the Elves, just as much as the stories, take a more serious turn. Playful tunes are replaced with much more serious poetry, and in their native tongue, such as the Hymn to Elbereth Gilthoniel:

“A Elbereth Gilthoniel
Silivren penna miriel
A menel aglar elennath
Na chaered palandiriel.
O Galadhremmin ennorath
Fanuilos, le linnathon
Nef aer, si nef aeron!
A Elbereth Gilthoniel!
We still remember,
We who dwell
In the lands beneath the trees
Thy starlight on the western seas.”

When trying to reconcile these sorts of Elves and Fairies, rather than assessing them through their physical and behavioral qualities, we may look at them through something just as important in understanding them: music. The Silmarillion explains that the Elves, as well as the world and everything in it, including good and evil, originated from song.

But just as Elven music changes from The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings, so the Elves have changed– they are human-sized, but also perhaps more serious and melancholy, as a parallel to the world Tolkien had created, which was much more complex than he originally realized.

The songs in The Lord of the Rings, and the later versions of Luthien, which present her as an Elf princess– a beautiful being which Beren falls in love with as soon as he sees her dance– express that melancholy. As the tale of Beren and Luthien reflects the way Tolkien wishes us to see Elven folklore– romantic, adventurous, and, ultimately, sorrowful– perhaps we can conclude that JRRT’s Elves are really fairies grown up.

And what do you think, dear readers?

MTCIDC,

Prizes

26 Wednesday Jul 2017

Posted by lebedusya1 in Fairy Tales and Myths, Heroes, Imaginary History, Literary History, Narrative Methods

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A Tale of Two Cities, Achilles, Admetus, Alcestis, Ancient Greece, Aphrodite, Archery, Atalanta, Baroness Orczy, chariots, Charles Dickens, Constantinople, contests, footrace, French Revolution, Greek, Heracles, Hippomenes, Icarius, Jacques-Louis David, King Oenomaus, King of Pherae, Lord Leighton Frederick, Odysseus, Olympia, Pelops, Penelope, The Death of Marat, The Odyssey, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Trojan War, Zeus

Welcome, as always, dear readers.
In our last posting, our second about archers, we talked about the archery contest which Penelope

arranged, as a way of finally ridding her house of a gang of mooching suitors. It was, in reality, a two-part contest:
1. the contestants were required to string Odysseus’ bow
2. then fire an arrow through—but the story as told in the Odyssey is a little confusing here—through a series of axe heads? Through the rings on the axe heads? Through rings on the shafts of the axes? The following illustrations will show you that there are all sorts of possibilities!

Odysseus, disguised as an old beggar, is the only one who can string the bow and fire it,

and then goes on to begin picking off Penelope’s obnoxious suitors with it.

Prizes and women seem to be a not-uncommon theme in Greek mythology. When we were discussing Penelope and the archery contest, we also mentioned that there was an ancient story that Odysseus had actually won Penelope from her father, Icarius, in a footrace.
In general, Odysseus was regarded in Greece as neither a bowman nor a runner, but as the supreme trickster (he even has his own adjective, in fact polumetis, which we might translate “multiplotter”) but he is recorded in Book 23 of the Iliad as a runner, when he competes (and wins) in a footrace as part of the funeral games for Achilles’ beloved companion, Patroclus.

(This amazing piece, from 1778, is by the “painter of the French Revolution”, Jacques-Louis David, 1748-1825. In his earlier career, David had painted grand, florid things like this, often with a classical theme. When the Revolution came, David became an enthusiast, as well as one of its visual recorders, his most dramatic painting being “The Death of Marat”, commemorating the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat, a major revolutionary, killed in his bath in 1793.

The era of the French Revolution has been a favorite of ours for years, probably originally because we grew up with Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, 1859,

and the Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel, 1903-05.

We plan to write about the Pimpernel in a later posting—he’s a very important figure for 20th-century images of heroes with double-identities, being, it would seem, the original.)
It is worth wondering whether, in the choice of the bow and the archery contest, Penelope was actually indicating that she already knew the identity of the beggar. Certainly it put a deadly weapon into the hands of someone who immediately used it to rid her of the suitors. If that’s true, then offering herself as a prize was not a kind of passive surrender, but the beginning of an attack on the occupiers. This would give us a Penelope who was the very opposite of the girl offered as a prize in her father’s footrace. But that footrace reminded us of an earlier one, in which the prize stated the terms—and then enforced them.
Several generations before the Trojan War, Atalanta was a princess and huntress,

who was pressed by her father to marry. She agreed—but only on the condition that a suitor would have to join in a footrace with her and, if she beat him, she would kill him. A number of suitors tried and failed and paid the price before Hippomenes, brighter than the rest, knowing that he couldn’t outrace her, outthought her, praying to Aphrodite for help. The goddess gave him three golden apples and, as the two raced and Hippomenes was being outrun, he tossed one of the apples to the side. Atalanta was distracted and thus slowed until, after the third apple, Hippomenes won the race—and Atalanta.

The pattern of winning brides by races is repeated not only on foot, however. In another pre-Trojan-War story, King Oenomaus took fright from a prophecy that he would be killed by his son-in-law. When suitors came for his daughter, Hippodamia, he demanded that they join him in a chariot contest: they would race, but it was more a race for life than a sport, as, if Oenomaus caught up with the suitor, he would kill him.
So far, Oenomaus had managed to polish off eighteen suitors before Pelops, son of King Tantalus, appeared. Like Hippomenes, he was not the most scrupulous of competitors. (In one version of the story, Oenomaus displayed the heads of the unsuccessful suitors on the pillars of his palace—this might have proved a strong incentive to cheat!) In Pelops’ case, he persuaded Oenomaus’ charioteer to replace the bronze lynchpins (the pins which hold the chariot wheels on the axles) with ones made of wax and, in the (literal) heat of the contest, they melted and Oenomaus was dragged to his death. (And so the death-by-son-in-law prophecy came true!) Pelops then betrayed and murdered the charioteer, who, dying, put a curse upon Pelops and his descendants.

Supposedly, the chariot race which formed a central part of the Olympic games in later centuries

was either in commemoration of the death of Oenomaus or a celebration of the victory of Pelops. In fact, we have, on the eastern pediment (that’s the big triangular bit just below the roof) of the temple of Zeus at Olympia

the main characters in the story depicted.

This was a very grand temple and contained one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, a giant seated statue of Zeus, made of ivory and gold.

The statue didn’t survive the eastern Roman government’s attacks on pre-Christian culture, however, either being destroyed in a fire in the temple in 426AD, or in a fire at the eastern capital of Constantinople in 475AD.
In fact, the temple at Olympia itself was badly damaged in that fire of 426 and its whole structure was tumbled in earthquakes in 551 and 552AD, its columns collapsing onto the ground into lines of column drums like piles of stacked coins.

Seeing that fallen building, we wonder whether Oenomaus’ charioteer’s curse extended to the site of the famous (and deadly) race!
To all of this mayhem around women as prizes at athletic events, we would add one happy occasion. Among the stories about Heracles, there was that of his wrestling match with death. This was not done to win a prize for himself, but to rescue Alcestis, the heroic wife of Admetus, King of Pherae, who had given her life to save her husband. (In fact, Admetus had won Alcestis in a challenge—but that’s a story for another posting!) Having brought her back, Heracles, to tease Admetus, says, truthfully, that Alcestis was a woman he had won in a contest—but neglects to say with whom he’d wrestled!

(This, by the way, is a painting by Frederick, Lord Leighton, 1830-1896, who built much of his reputation on his reconstructions of the Greek classical and mythological world. We plan a future posting on him and on other classical myth-painters—among whom, in fact, was David, whom we mentioned above.)
Thanks, as ever, for reading.
MTCIDC
CD

A Longer Stretch

19 Wednesday Jul 2017

Posted by lebedusya1 in Fairy Tales and Myths, Heroes, Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Narrative Methods

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Achilles, Angelica Kauffmann, Athena, Bard the Bowman, Circe, cyclops, Dora Wheeler, English Longbowmen, Errol Flynn, Greek, Henry VIII, Heracles, His Dark Materials, John William Waterhouse, Laertes, Lord Asriel, N.C. Wyeth, Odysseus, Paris, Patroclus, Penelope, Philip Pullman, Philoctetes, Portsmouth, Priam, Robin Hood, Sparta, Stelmaria, Telemachus, The Amber Spyglass, The Golden Compass, The Illiad, The Mary Rose, The Odyssey, The Subtle Knife, Tolkien, Troy

Welcome, dear readers, as always.
In our last posting, our central focus was upon Bard the Bowman and what he might have looked like.

As we do so often, we tried to use something from the history of our world to help us to flesh out JRRT’s description. In this case, we looked at Henry VIII’s battleship (a carrack, in the vocabulary of the period), the Mary Rose, which sank during a naval battle with the French on 19 July, 1545.

The ship was raised in 1982 (you can see the large surviving section of the hull in the Mary Rose museum, in Portsmouth, England).

It was full of artifacts—and of crew.
Because she sank so suddenly—and in the middle of a battle—almost none of the crew of 400 and more escaped. One of those trapped was this man.

His was among the roughly 90 skeletons well-enough preserved to allow for forensic exploration. That exploration, and the subsequent brilliant reconstruction, brought back to life a man about 6 feet (182cm) tall, with a powerfully-developed upper body. His build, certain characteristic marks of stress, and the fact that over 130 longbows and several thousand arrows were found in the wreck, led the archaeologists to see this man as an archer. We, in turn, then used him as the body-model for Bard.
But “bowman/archer” to us, who are crazy for adventure, immediately brought back Robin Hood, first in what we believe to be his best 20th-century incarnation, Erroll Flynn,

in the classic 1938 film.

To which we would add N.C. Wyeth’s illustrations

for the 1917 Robin Hood.

Thinking about bowmen in adventure stories then took us back to the first big adventure story in western literature, the Odyssey, and its hero, Odysseus, who has two associations with bows, but who, oddly enough, is never depicted as an archer, but rather as a trickster, who uses his brains to escape everything from a one-eyed giant

to an enchantress, Circe, who has already turned a good number of his crewmen into ham-on-the-hoof.

One of our favorite illustrations of Circe is by John William Waterhouse, which he worked on from 1911 to 1915.

The leopards in this version of the painting (in another, apparently, they are bears) reminded us of the snow leopard which is Lord Asriel’s demon, Stelmaria,

in Philip Pullman’s trilogy

His Dark Materials, the three books being The Golden Compass (in the British edition, Northern Lights), 1995, The Subtle Knife, 1997, and The Amber Spyglass, 2000.

These are remarkable books—full of vivid characters and places-other-than-here-and-now, and we have read and reread them since they first appeared. If you haven’t read them, we would add only one proviso: there is a strong anti-religious theme throughout and some devout readers might have difficulty with Pullman’s views. If you are willing to imagine that this is a critique of beliefs in other worlds than our own, however, we would unqualifiably recommend them. (Our favorite characters are Lyra, the fierce and fearless heroine, and Iorek Byrnison, a panserbjorn, or armored bear. There is a film version, released in 2007, based upon The Golden Compass, which we enjoy, although it has simplified and changed certain elements in the original story.)

But back to Odysseus the archer…
In the story of Troy, the famous archer is Paris, the son of Priam, the king of Troy, who uses his skill to kill Achilles, the most famous and powerful hero on the Greek side (in this pot illustration, almost by accident!).

Paris, according to some accounts (there are a number of them and they can differ in all sorts of details), is then killed by Philoctetes, who has inherited Heracles’ bow. A prophecy lies behind that bow: it seems that it is a necessary element in the conquest of Troy.

When Heracles is suffering from a poisoned shirt, and builds a pyre to cremate himself

it is Philoctetes who is willing to light it and, in return, he receives Heracles’ bow. On the way to Troy, however, Philoctetes is bitten by a snake and left behind on an island.

In some versions of the story (including Sophocles’ play), Odysseus acts as the main agent for, initially, bringing the bow to Troy, and then for bringing Philoctetes himself. So far, that is Odysseus’ only connection with archery. He is depicted as clever—being part of a successful scouting expedition in which a Trojan ally is killed and possibly the creator of the wooden horse—but, otherwise, his main accomplishments lie in beating up a trouble-maker at a public meeting and, at the funeral games which Achilles holds at the end of the Iliad for his companion, Patroclus, winning a footrace.
This footrace, however, leads us from Troy westward, as well as backward in time.
For all that there are these two huge things called the Iliad and the Odyssey, they are not all of the Troy story. They themselves are just collections of smaller stories stitched onto a plot outline. In the case of the Iliad, that outline is very basic: a. Achilles leaves war; b. Greeks substitute other warriors for Achilles; c. Achilles returns to war. The Odyssey is actually even more basic: man tries to find a way to sail home from Troy. Along with these, there are fragments from other parts of the tradition and lots of separate tales which often act as back-stories, probably invented when the popularity of the Troy tale in general caused a demand for singers to supply more material—the ancient equivalent of fan fiction!
One of these back-stories explains why Odysseus wins at the funeral games: he must already have been a famous foot racer, as he wins his bride, Penelope, from her father, the king of Sparta, in a footrace.

Not long after that, having gotten Penelope pregnant, he is off to Troy and won’t return for twenty years.
In the meantime, Penelope gives birth to a son, Telemachus, who grows up fatherless and in a household increasingly besieged by young men who claim that Odysseus must be dead and demand that Penelope must marry again.

To delay being forced to accept one of these obnoxious toads, Penelope (our favorite in the story, along with Athena) claims that, before she can choose, she has to finish a shroud she is weaving for Odysseus’ father, Laertes. (That’s Telemachus, on the left.)

In fact, although she weaves by day, she un-weaves by night and continues to do so for three years before one of her maids tells the suitors what’s going on.

(This is a remarkable piece of work designed by the painter/designer, Dora Wheeler, 1856-1940.

It is not a painting, but, in fact, an embroidery—silk stitched into silk cloth—and a remarkable artifact—and, unfortunately, the only surviving one of its kind.)
In year 19, Odysseus comes home—disguised by Athena as an old beggar, to keep him safe until he can plot his revenge and gather allies. In the meantime, Penelope (who, to us, is as quick-witted as her wandering husband) announces an archery contest, the winner to—win her. Besides the trickiness of the target (having something to do with shooting through axes—scholars have argued over just how that works for years), there is the bow: it has such a pull that only her husband, she says, has ever been able to string it.

(This illustration is by another wonderful woman artist, Angelica Kauffmann, 1741-1807. Here’s a self-portrait.)

Needless to say, the suitors are unable to do it, but that dirty old beggarman can—and does—and then, with a little help from Telemachus and a servant or two—not to mention Athena—proceeds to slaughter the suitors and clean house.

So, remembering the Mary Rose archer (as well as Bard), can we now imagine Odysseus’ build? And, for that matter, Robin Hood’s?

Thanks, as ever, for reading!
MTCIDC
CD

Hoards of the Things

28 Wednesday Jun 2017

Posted by lebedusya1 in Fairy Tales and Myths, Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Narrative Methods

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A Christmas Carol, A Visit to William Blake's Inn, Aeetes, Alexander Deruchenko, Alice and Martin Provensen, Argo, Barrow-downs, Barrow-wights, Beowulf, Bilbo, Charles Dickens, Cinderella's Dress, Colchis, Collyer Brothers, David Gwillim, dragon-sickness, Dragons, Dwarves, Ebenezer Scrooge, Eurystheus, Hera, Heracles, Hoard, hordweard, Jack Gwillim, Jane Dyer, Jason and the Argonauts, Jason and the Golden Fleece, Kinder und Hausmaerchen, Ladon, Lonely Mountain, magpie, Nancy Willard, Neolithic, Scrooge McDuck, Scythians, Ted Nasmith, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Treasure

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

Recently, we’ve had a couple of posts on dragons and hoards, but, having done a certain amount of research and thinking and writing, we’ve come back once again to the subject, with the question: why would a dragon want a hoard to begin with?

The earliest Western European stories we know in which dragons (or serpents—the Greek word can apply to either) are associated with valuables are:

the 11^th labor of Heracles, in which his cousin, Eurystheus, demands that Heracles bring him the Golden Apples of the Hesperides (“children of the evening star”)—which are on an island guarded by a 100-headed (in some versions of the story) dragon/serpent called Ladon

the story of Jason and the Argo, in which Jason must bring back to Greece the Golden Fleece, also guarded by a dragon/serpent (a sleepless one this time)

In both of these stories, the dragon is the agent for someone else—Hera, in the case of the Golden Apples,

and Aeetes, the king of Colchis, in that of the Golden Fleece.

(We’ve always loved the curly beard of Jack Gwillim in Jason and the Argonauts—1963. His son, David, by the way, was a perfect Prince Hal and Henry V in BBC productions from 1979—if you can find them, we highly recommend them.)

After these, we see the dragon of Beowulf.

In his case, although he’s called hordweard, “hoard guardian/watchman”, we are told that he has come upon a treasure in a barrow, piled in for safe-keeping several hundred years before. Europeans in the Neolithic Period and long beyond buried high-status people in such places—like this, in Denmark.

As it was the custom for high-status people to be buried with at least some of their riches, it’s easy to see how singers might be inspired to create a barrow like that of the Beowulf dragon. Some of our favorite grave goods come from the Scythians, a horse-people who once lived north of the Black Sea, and who had buried them in grave mounds with their dead.

(A wonderfully atmospheric picture by Alexander Deruchenko.)

The Beowulf dragon is not the proper owner of the hoard: rather, he has taken possession (the poem may even be suggesting that dragons—or this dragon, at least– have a special affection for barrows (2270-2278), rather as the barrow wights have taken over the tumuli on the Barrow Downs, both places being much older and long-abandoned. You may remember this striking image by one of our favorite Tolkien artists, Ted Nasmith–

In contrast, Smaug has taken possession of the Lonely Mountain by force, burning out the rightful owners.

In both cases, however, the latest owner is very sensitive about his new property: the removal of one object, as Beowulf and Bilbo find out.

(And we can’t resist this item—it’s copy of a cup used in the 2007 Beowulf film. We don’t see that it would be very useful for drinking from, but it’s certainly fun to look at!)

It’s one thing if it’s your job to guard gold: you’re like a sheepdog with a flock. (Here’s a Maremma, in fact, with a flock.)

It’s another if you are occupying, seized or not, someone else’s gold. In the latter case, however, we are still left with our initial question: why is this important to a dragon?

Perhaps they just like the look of it. After all, Smaug seems quite proud of what he sees as a waistcoat of precious things. When Bilbo says: “What a magnificence to possess a waistcoat of fine diamonds!” Smaug replies “Yes, it is rare and wonderful, indeed.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 12, “Inside Information”) Yet there is the darker side:

“To say that Bilbo’s breath was taken away is no description at all. There are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful. Bilbo had heard tell and sing of dragon-hoards before, but the splendor, the lust, the glory of such treasure had never yet come home to him. His heart was filled and pierced with enchantment and with the desire of dwarves; and he gazed motionless, almost forgetting the frightful guardian, at the gold beyond price and count.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 12, “Inside Information”)

Just seeing such wealth brought on “lust” and “the desire of dwarves” and it’s clear that this is what infects Thorin after Smaug’s death and eventually brings on the “dragon-sickness” which leads to the end of the Master of Laketown (The Hobbit, Chapter 19, “The Last Stage”). As this “lust” for beautiful, valuable things seems inherent in the dwarves, it strikes us that we might imagine dragons as somehow enablers or carriers—like anopheles mosquitoes and malaria—

rather than originators of the disease and that the name is derived from that combination of acquisitiveness and sensitivity we noted earlier and which so clearly disturbs Thorin’s judgement.

But perhaps there is something in the idea of hoarding itself. In our world, “hoarding” has come to have a different meaning, being a kind of psychological condition in which a person acquires and acquires and has lost the ability to discard anything for complex internal reasons. In literature, one might imagine that misers have something of this—think of Ebenezer Scrooge, in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843).

Or, Uncle Scrooge McDuck, from Walt Disney comics. Who, as you can see, takes this to an extreme even Dickens’ Scrooge might find a bit excessive.

Underneath this, however, is the sad side: those who become imprisoned by their possessions, a famous case being that of the Collyer brothers in New York, whose apartment, after their joint deaths in 1947, was a subject both of curiosity and of mild horror in the New York newspapers of the time.

Is it possible that the Beowulf dragon and Smaug both suffer from this condition? Is that why the theft of a single piece from an uncountable hoard seems to mean so much?

We never want to shy away from serious subjects—after all, all of the best fantasy/adventure writers never did—but it’s an early summer day where we live—just after Midsummer’s Day, in fact, and so we’d like to end with another kind of acquisitor—the magpie.

Traditionally, magpies are famous for being attracted to—and collecting—shiny objects. Our favorite magpie story, however, isn’t about obsession, but about generosity. It’s a beautiful children’s book by Nancy Willard and Jane Dyer, entitled Cinderella’s Dress.

image21cind'sdress.jpg

In this book, told in light, easy verse, we see a magpie couple as fairy godparents for Cinderella, using their cache of shiny things to—but we’ll leave that to you to discover (although the title is a bit of a give-away). Here’s another page to tease you…

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

Another Nancy Willard book you might enjoy is A Visit to William Blake’s Inn (1981), illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen.

doubtfulsea

~ adventure romance fantasy

Category Archives: Imaginary History

Mirror Image

Orcked

A Pirate’s Life…

Sugar and Oliphaunts

Are You Sitting Down.1?

Re: Tree

Dancing with the Elves

Prizes

A Longer Stretch

Hoards of the Things