Category Archives: Literary History

Green and Quiet.1

05 Wednesday Sep 2018

Posted by in Economics in Middle-earth, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History

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As always, dear readers, welcome.

We’ve always loved the lines

“By some curious chance one morning long ago in the quiet of the world, when there was less noise and more green…”

which open the paragraph in which Gandalf first appears in The Hobbit and the story actually begins.

For JRRT, green and quiet are the ideal, but things have clearly changed—as this sentence implies, now there is more noise and less quiet.  In our time—and even before Tolkien’s childhood in the late 19th century—the green and quiet were and are going thanks to the Industrial Revolution.  Or so we thought.  Reading Tolkien, however, we begin to believe that it’s goblins:

“Now goblins are cruel, wicked, and bad-hearted.  They make no beautiful things, but they make many clever ones.  They can tunnel and mine as well as any but the most skilled dwarves, when they take the trouble, though they are usually untidy and dirty.  Hammers, axes, swords, daggers, pickaxes, tongs, and also instruments of torture, they make very well, or get other people to do the work to make to their design, prisoners and slaves that have to work till they die for want of air and light.  It is not unlikely that they have invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them, and also not working with their own hands more than they could help; but in those days and those wild parts they had not advanced (as it is called) so far.”  (The Hobbit, Chapter Four, “Over Hill and Under Hill”)

In our last posting, we had linked this passage with the invention of poison gases by German scientists and their use first by German soldiers and then by the Allies in the Great War, but we would like to add to that idea that this may be in reality a larger indictment, of the Industrial Revolution and the effects it had had upon the English countryside.

This revolution had begun in the 18th century, in Britain, when the country was first becoming a major mercantile and colonial power and the demand for British goods—especially British wool and cloth—was growing.  A succession of inventions from the 1760s on had turned a (literal) “cottage industry” of clothing-making—

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into something which produced thread and cloth on a massive scale in early factories.

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These factories, often called “mills” because of their original use of waterpower,

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as was done in the small factories which, all the way back to Roman times, had ground grain into flour,

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could also, in time, be run by steam power.

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Mills of this sort soon became prototypes for factories built to mass-produce anything

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and soon the air around cities was thick with smoke and industrial waste.

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With no laws to stop them, mill/factory owners bought up land, employed people (many of them ex-cottage workers thrown out of work by the very factories they now sought work in) in near-slave conditions—including children–and polluted water and air with no fear of punishment.  Here is Charles Dickens’ description of a town filled such places, from his 1854 novel, Hard Times:

“It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.”

Set this next to Gandalf’s description of what had happened to Isengard and you can see what we mean about goblins (here, Saruman and his orcs—but JRRT sometimes uses goblin and orc interchangeably) as what has destroyed the quiet and green:

“I looked on it and saw that, whereas it had once been green and fair, it was now filled with pits and forges…Over all his works a dark smoke hung and wrapped itself about the sides of Orthanc.”  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 3, “The Council of Elrond”)

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In 1895, Tolkien’s mother, Mabel,

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who had been living in South Africa with her husband, brought her two sons, JRRT and Hilary, to the Birmingham area of England for a visit to relatives.

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Unfortunately, while they were gone, Tolkien’s father died of rheumatic fever.  Mabel decided to stay in England and found a place for her sons and herself at Sarehole, southeast of Birmingham itself.

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Birmingham was a booming product of that Industrial Revolution, which we’re sure is why Mabel chose a tiny village several miles away.

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Birmingham was also an ancient settlement, (here’s a LINK to a minitour of the medieval town) but had mushroomed, both in factories and population even at the beginning of the 19th century, as this verse from a music hall song from 1828 by James Dobbs depicts:

‘I remember one John Growse,
Who buckles made in Brummagem,
He built himself a country house,
To be out of the smoke of Brummagem
But though John’s country house stands still,
The town itself has walked up hill,
Now he lives beside a smoky mill,
In the middle of the streets of   Brummagem.”

(James Dobbs (1781-1837), “I Can’t Find Brummagem”.  Brummagem is an old local nickname for Birmingham.  Here’s a LINK so that you can see the whole song and its tune, which we know as “Duncan Grey”.  If you go to the link, you’ll notice we’ve made a few editorial additions, which we knew from another version of the song and which help the words to better fit the tune.)

And yet, although Sarehole had an old mill, it was not like those in Birmingham or even in Dickens,

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and, in later years, in fact, Tolkien saw the little village beyond it as a kind of paradise, as he said in an interview:

‘It was a kind of lost paradise,’ he said. ‘There was an old mill that really did grind corn with two millers, a great big pond with swans on it, a sandpit, a wonderful dell with flowers, a few old-fashioned village houses and, further away, a stream with another mill. I always knew it would go – and it did.’

(This is taken from an article by John Ezard in The Guardian for 28 December, 1991—here’s a LINK so that you can read all of it.)

This strong contrast between green and quiet and its opposites, as seen in Sarehole versus Birmingham, early in Tolkien’s life, and the two stages of Isengard, will appear again in the Shire as Saruman/Sharkey has planned.  The green and quiet is literally uprooted and even Sandyman’s old mill is a victim of the goblinesque work as Farmer Cotton says:

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“But since Sharkey came they don’t grind no more corn at all.  They’re always a-hammering and a-letting out a smoke and stench, and there’s no peace even at night in Hobbiton.  And they pour out filth a purpose; they’ve fouled all the lower Water, and it’s getting down into Brandywine.”

(The Return of the King,  Book Six, Chapter 8, “The Scouring of the Shire”)

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Those who work for Sharkey are men, but, as you can see, under his influence, they act very much like those destructive goblins with which we began.   For all that he rode in automobiles and trains and used telephones and typewriters, JRRT was never quite happy in the modern world and, considering that the goblins seemed always poised to ruin more green and produce more noise at the command of a modern-day Saruman, it’s perhaps not surprising.  It’s also not surprising, we would add, that his favorite creatures, trees, are the ones who destroy Saruman’s handiwork at Isengard and return it to a leafy park.

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Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

 

ps

In our next, we want to talk about another aspect of quiet which had changed from Tolkien’s childhood and may be a reason why there are Rohirrim and why JRRT himself enlisted in the volunteer cavalry…

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Gobs and Hobs.2

29 Wednesday Aug 2018

Posted by in Artists and Illustrators, Fairy Tales and Myths, J.R.R. Tolkien, Language, Literary History

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As always, dear Readers, welcome!

In our last, we were talking about JRRT’s 1915 poem, “Goblin Feet” its origins, original publication, and context.

In this, we want to think out loud a bit about the idea of goblins in general.

Although the poem was entitled “Goblin Feet”, Tolkien seemed not to focus so much on goblins—there are also other creatures from the Otherworld, including fairies and gnomes and even leprechauns (not to mention bats—called by their old country name “flitter-mice”—and beetles and coneys).

In this posting, however, we’re going to stick to goblins—well, and hobgoblins—but more about those later.

We first encountered goblins as very small children when a teacher read us a poem by the American poet, James Whitcomb Riley (1849-1916).

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(We can’t resist a second picture.  This is by one of our favorite late-19th-early-20th-c. American Painters, John Singer Sargent—1856-1925.)

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This poem, first entitled “Elf Child”, originally appeared in a newspaper in 1885.  After that, it was meant to be “Little Orphan Allie”, but, owing to a typsetter’s error, it gained its present title, which it’s had ever since.

Little Orphant Annie – Poem by James Whitcomb Riley

To all the little children: — The happy ones; and sad ones;
The sober and the silent ones; the boisterous and glad ones;
The good ones — Yes, the good ones, too; and all the lovely bad ones.

Little Orphant Annie’s come to our house to stay,
An’ wash the cups an’ saucers up, an’ brush the crumbs away,
An’ shoo the chickens off the porch, an’ dust the hearth, an’ sweep,
An’ make the fire, an’ bake the bread, an’ earn her board-an’-keep;
An’ all us other childern, when the supper-things is done,
We set around the kitchen fire an’ has the mostest fun
A-list’nin’ to the witch-tales ‘at Annie tells about,
An’ the Gobble-uns ‘ll git you
Ef you
Don’t
Watch
Out!

Wunst they wuz a little boy wouldn’t say his prayers,–
An’ when he went to bed at night, away up-stairs,
His Mammy heerd him holler, an’ his Daddy heerd him bawl,
An’ when they turn’t the kivvers down, he wuzn’t there at all!
An’ they seeked him in the rafter-room, an’ cubby-hole, an’ press,
An’ seeked him up the chimbly-flue, an’ ever’-wheres, I guess;
But all they ever found wuz jist his pants an’ roundabout:–
An’ the Gobble-uns ‘ll git you
Ef you
Don’t
Watch
Out!

An’ one time a little girl ‘ud allus laugh an’ grin,
An’ make fun of ever’ one, an’ all her blood-an’-kin;
An’ wunst, when they was ‘company,’ an’ ole folks wuz there,
She mocked ’em an’ shocked ’em, an’ said she didn’t care!
An’ jist as she kicked her heels, an’ turn’t to run an’ hide,
They wuz two great big Black Things a-standin’ by her side,
An’ they snatched her through the ceilin’ ‘fore she knowed what she’s about!
An’ the Gobble-uns ‘ll git you
Ef you
Don’t
Watch
Out!

An’ little Orphant Annie says, when the blaze is blue,
An’ the lamp-wick sputters, an’ the wind goes woo-oo!
An’ you hear the crickets quit, an’ the moon is gray,
An’ the lightnin’-bugs in dew is all squenched away,–
You better mind yer parunts, an’ yer teachurs fond an’ dear,
An’ churish them ‘as loves you, an’ dry the orphant’s tear,
An’ he’p the pore an’ needy ones ‘at clusters all about,
Er the Gobble-uns ‘ll git you
Ef you
Don’t
Watch
Out!

In some ways, this is a typical Victorian moral poem:  children better behave, or…  But, instead of being in “proper” English, it’s been told in the dialect of the US state of Indiana and this was something for which Riley was well-known, having written numbers of poems in the so-called “Hoosier” dialect.  (This includes what looks like a misprint for the proper spelling “orphan”.)

Our acquaintance with goblins has continued to be literary, from Christina Rossetti’s (1830-1894)

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Goblin Market (1862)

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to George Macdonald’s (1824-1905)

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1872 fantasy novel, The Princess and the Goblin.

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Our biggest—and longest—exposure, of course, was in The Hobbit (1937).

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Goblins turn up from the moment Bilbo and the dwarves fall into their hands in Chapter 4, “Over Hill and Under Hill” and we see them again in their pursuit of the party once they’ve escaped the goblin stronghold and finally at the Battle of the Five Armies.  At their first appearance, they are described as “great ugly-looking goblins” and, unlike the nimble-footed creatures of Tolkien’s 1915 poem, these have flat feet and flap them as they move.  They live in a monarchy, ruled (for the moment) by a king described as “a tremendous goblin with a huge head”.

So far, we might see that as traditional nightmarish beings, like the “great big Black Things” in stanza 3 of Riley’s poem, but JRRT does something further and very interesting with them.  This first novel was written in the 1930s, only twenty years after the Great War which had ruined much of western Europe and killed all but one of Tolkien’s oldest friends, and the emotional scar was still fresh, it seems.  He was too humane (and too wise) to blame Germany for what had happened, but it’s clear that he wouldn’t excuse the Industrial Revolution and the goblins become a stand-in for all the worse of it:

“Hammers, axes, swords, daggers, pickaxes, tongs, and also instruments of torture, they make very well, or get other people to make to their designs, prisoners and slaves that have to work till they die for want of air and light.  It is not unlikely that they invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them, and also not working with their own hands more than they could help; but in those days and those wild parts they had not advanced (so it is called) so far.”  (The Hobbit, Chapter 4, “Over Hill and Under Hill”)

The word “goblin” has a rather mysterious etymological history and, like so many early words, that history is a murky one, full of guesses and suggestions.  A little research produces the explanation that the word first seems to appear in Latin, in Orderic Vitalis’ (1075-c1142) Historia Ecclesiastica, Book 5, Chapter 7, in which, while reviewing the life of the early French saint, Taurinus, (lived c.400AD), Orderic mentions a demon whom the saint has vanquished, but which still haunted the area around the town of Evreux in Normandy, a demon the locals called “gobelinus”.

A century later, in the long Old French poem on the Third Crusade (1189-1192) of Ambroise of Normandy (who lived at the end of the 12th century), a noted figure in the actual history of the period, Balian d’ Ibelin, is referred to as being “more false than a gobelin” (L’Histoire de la Guerre Sainte, line 8710), with no explanation, suggesting that readers would be aware of what a gobelin was (and that he wasn’t trustworthy).

The word first appears in English in John Wycliffe’s translation of the Bible in the late 14th century, in Psalm 91, in which a God-fearing person will never be afraid of various things, including

“of a gobelyn goyng in derknisses”.

If 14th-century people knew what this creature was, we wonder whether it was still clear to people two centuries later—the older standard English translation (the so-called “King James Bible”, 1611) translates this as

“the pestilence that walks in darkness”

(which actually is close to the Hebrew original, as best as we can make out, as we don’t, unfortunately, read Hebrew—see this LINK to read for yourself.)

In the preface to the 1951 second edition of The Hobbit, Tolkien gives his own gloss, based upon the word he will employ almost entirely in The Lord of the Rings for such creatures:

“Orc is not an English word.  It occurs in one or two places but is usually translated goblin (or hobgoblin for the larger kinds).  Orc is the hobbits’ form of the name given at that time to these creatures…)

thus blending villains from 1937 with those readers would soon see in his new work, The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955).

“Hobgoblin” brings us to our conclusion, however.  As in the case of “goblin”, things get murky here, too, with some stating that, as “Hob” is an old nickname for “Robert” (compare “Hodge” as an old nickname for “Roger”), so a hobgoblin is related to “Robin Goodfellow”, (“Robin” being another nickname for “Robert”) aka the Puck we see in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595-96?).

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(This image is from Arthur Rackham’s (1865-1939) 1933 version of the play.)

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Hobgoblins sometimes appear as prickly household helpers (rather like Dobby in the Harry Potter books), and those who want to associate the “hob” of “hobgoblin” with the “hob” (earlier “hubbe”), “the side of a fireplace” see that prefix as suggesting that “hobgoblins” might be a subset of “goblins” in general.

For us, however, a “hob” is a character in an on-going series we recommend to our readers.  These are novels set in and around a decaying medieval monastery in 1347 and the haunted world around it, written by Pat Walsh, an archaeologist/fantasy author.

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The first two in the series are The Crowfield Curse (2010) and The Crowfield Demon (2011)

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In this series, the hero, Will, an orphan, discovers a wounded creature and brings it back to the monastery.  It’s a hob—and will be a major character as the series develops.  In 2014, Walsh began a new series with The Hob and the Deerman.

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Walsh has promised a third book in the Crowfield series, Crowfield Rising, but it has yet to appear—unlike our next posting, which will appear (provided that there is no space alien invasion or implementation of Order 66 or Sauron producing a new ring), next week.

Till then, thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

PS

In our last, we mistakenly identified a photo of JRRT in a uniform which we thought belonged to a unit at his alma mater, King Edward’s School, as the caption with it said “1907”.   It seemed odd to us, however, because it had the look of a cavalry unit (the bandoleer across the chest was common during the period for cavalry and for artillerymen) and, for all that he writes admiringly of horses, we had no sense that he himself was ever a horseman.  This nagged at us until we did a little research and realized our mistake:  the uniform was for King Edward’s Horse, the equivalent of a national guard/volunteer unit raised before the Great War.  Tolkien was a member of this at the beginning of his Oxford career in 1911, but later resigned.  John Garth’s two really useful books, Tolkien at Exeter College and Tolkien and the Great War, set us straight.

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PPS

If you read us regularly, you know that we have a special love for early, silent film  While researching this posting, we learned that, in 1918, a film was made based upon “Little Orphant Annie” and that a copy of it has survived for us to see.  Here’s a poster and a still.

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Gobs and Hobs (1)

22 Wednesday Aug 2018

Posted by in Fairy Tales and Myths, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Military History

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As always, dear readers, welcome.

In 1915, Tolkien was

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scrambling to finish his BA at Exeter College

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before he was swept up into the war which was gradually devouring the younger male populations of much of western Europe

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and would soon swallow him, as well.

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Although he had been a cadet in his earlier days,

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he resisted the societal pressure to join up and that must have been difficult, as it was not uncommon in 1915 for young men not in uniform to be stopped in the street by civilians, particularly women, and asked why they hadn’t enlisted yet before being presented with a white feather as a symbol of cowardice.

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The use of a white feather appears to have been derived from the old sport of cockfighting, in which it was believed that a rooster with a white tail feather would be a poor combatant.

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For us, the image is directly related to a famous 1902 adventure novel, The Four Feathers

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by A E Mason (1865-1948).

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In this book, the main character, Harry Feversham, is thought to be a coward by his brother officers and by his fiancé and goes to heroic lengths to prove otherwise (here’s a LINK so that you can enjoy the book for yourself, if you would like).

As well as the book, there have been a number of films made from it, including the one which we believe to be the best, from 1939.

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During this scramble to finish, Tolkien wrote a poem in late April for his wife-to-be, Edith Bratt (1889-1971).

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Called “Goblin Feet”, it was first published in Oxford Poetry 1915.  (Here’s a LINK so that you may have your own copy of the book.)

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Here’s the text:

I am off down the road
Where the fairy lanterns glowed
And the little pretty flitter-mice are flying;
A slender band of gray
It runs creepily away
And the hedges and the grasses are a-sighing.
The air is full of wings,
And of blundery beetle-things
That warn you with their whirring and their humming.
O! I hear the tiny horns
Of enchanted leprechauns
And the padded feet of many gnomes a-coming!
O! the lights! O! the gleams! O! the little twinkly sounds!
O! the rustle of their noiseless little robes!
O! the echo of their feet — of their happy little feet!
O! the swinging lamps in the starlit globes.

I must follow in their train
Down the crooked fairy lane
Where the coney-rabbits long ago have gone.
And where silvery they sing
In a moving moonlit ring
All a twinkle with the jewels they have on.
They are fading round the turn
Where the glow worms palely burn
And the echo of their padding feet is dying!
O! it’s knocking at my heart—

Let me go! let me start!
For the little magic hours are all a-flying.

O! the warmth! O! the hum! O! the colors in the dark!
O! the gauzy wings of golden honey-flies!
O! the music of their feet — of their dancing goblin feet!
O! the magic! O! the sorrow when it dies.

Two things strike us immediately about this text.  First, its tone of subdued longing for Otherness—“I must follow”, “O! it’s knocking at my heart”, “O! the sorrow when it dies”.  This reminded us of WB Yeats’  (1865-1939) “The Hosting of the Sidhe” (from the volume The Wind Among the Reeds, 1899)

The host is riding from Knocknarea
And over the grave of Clooth-na-Bare;
Caoilte tossing his burning hair,
And Niamh calling Away, come away:
Empty your heart of its mortal dream.
The winds awaken, the leaves whirl round,
Our cheeks are pale, our hair is unbound,
Our breasts are heaving, our eyes are agleam,
Our arms are waving, our lips are apart;
And if any gaze on our rushing band,
We come between him and the deed of his hand,
We come between him and the hope of his heart.
The host is rushing ‘twixt night and day,
And where is there hope or deed as fair?
Caoilte tossing his burning hair,
And Niamh calling Away, come away.

(Here, by the way, is the cover to the first edition of the volume, artwork by Yeats’ friend, Althea Giles.

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And here’s a LINK to the earliest edition we can find on the internet—it’s the 4th, from 1903.)

Yeats, in this part of his creative life, was just leaving the late-Victorian era called the “Celtic Twilight”, in which Irish artists of all sorts were attempting to create a new art, independent of British art and literature and based upon what they conceived were “Old Irish models”.  To someone of late-Romantic temperament, like Tolkien, the attraction must have been very strong—note that leprechauns have somehow gotten mixed with the goblins!

This mixing of all kinds of beings from Faerie—goblins, fairies, leprechauns, gnomes—and their diminutive size—note five uses of “little” and one “tiny” –is the second thing which strikes us. The shrinking of otherworld beings in English literature can be traced at least as far back as Shakespeare and A Midsummer Night’s Dream,

STC 22302, title page

 

but really catches hold in the 19th century, with the pictorial work of artists like Richard Doyle

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and which is parodied by WS Gilbert (1836-1911), in Iolanthe (1882), in which the human-sized (and often played by a stout woman) Queen of the Fairies talks all about curling “myself inside a buttercup”, all the while being costumed to look like a Valkyrie from Wagner’s operas—an extra visual joke (which is, in our Gilbert and Sullivan experience, no longer employed—a pity!).

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(Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900), who was the composer of Iolanthe, has left us a very beautiful overture for it.  Here’s a LINK so that you can hear it.)

JRRT seems, at the very beginning of his literary life, to have been caught up in this mixture of Shakespeare and Victoriana and Yeats’ “Celtic Twilight” mood and it’s perhaps for that reason that, later in life, looking back on it, he said of this early poem:

“I wish the unhappy little thing, representing all that I came (so soon after) to fervently dislike, could be buried forever.” (The Book of Lost Tales Part One, “The Cottage of Lost Play”, 32)

Was he embarrassed at his own youthful influences?  And there have certainly been later critics who have been hard upon the poem.

If we put it into the context of 1915, however, this longing to be anywhere but in wartime 1915 makes perfect sense, especially for a young, sensitive, highly-intelligent man deeply in love with a girl he’d worked so hard to be with. The real horrific violence of the Great War was kept hidden from the people of the UK by the Government.  Newspapers and magazines were censored, soldiers’ letters were censored (Tolkien and Edith developed a secret code in his letters to get around that censorship), soldiers were not allowed to keep diaries or have cameras (only official photographers were permitted to work at the Front—and their work was closely watched), but word still got back, mainly, we suspect, from those on leave, often wounded, who had experienced events which turned out like this—

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Is it any wonder, with what he knew about and dreaded being part of, that JRRT would have wished to be on the road to Fairyland?

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

ps

In our next, we want to think out loud a bit about the goblins whose feet JRRT wants so much to follow…

In Depth

15 Wednesday Aug 2018

Posted by in J.R.R. Tolkien, Language, Literary History

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Welcome, as always, dear readers.

In 1977, the more observant viewers and critics commented upon the look and feel of a new film.  Instead of a world in which everything appeared newly-produced and sparkling, this was one in which it was clear that people had lived for a long time and many different peoples, at that.

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Even their vehicles had a scratched and dusty look.

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We had been told, of course, in the very opening sequence that this was an old place—

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but actually seeing its used look was that much more convincing

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as was seeing—and hearing—its peoples,

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who sometimes even required subtitles, as if the audience were watching a foreign film.

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In time, as the success of this film produced not only more films, but mountains of other material, from novels to graphic novels to spin-off series to toys and t-shirts and kitchen ware,

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a whole literature appeared about this world—or, we should say, worlds. Its geography and even its extremely-varied animal life.

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And, along with all of the other material, information about its languages began to appear.

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What prompted this posting, however, was something odd about one of those languages, that spoken by a character in what would, in time, become the sixth in the series.

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This was pointed out to us by David J. Peterson

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in his 2015 book, The Art of Language Invention.

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As a child, what had puzzled Peterson was that the character (who is subtitled), says only “Yate, yate, yoto, ei, yato, cha”—in total, only six different words, but they are translated as everything from “I have come for the bounty on this Wookiee” to “50,000, no less”.  (This is quoted and discussed on pages 3 to 5 of Peterson’s book—which is, by the way, one we would recommend, if you’re as interested in languages as we are.)

How could so few words mean so many different things?  As an adult, looking back, Peterson had his doubts and we would agree—especially when reading about the world in which Peterson lives, the world of “conlang”, which is short for “constructed languages”.  Peterson is the creator of Dothraki, the language of the nomadic Dothraki people,

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one of the numerous races which inhabit the landscape of George R R Martin’s Game of Thrones, first novels, then a huge, elaborate, and engrossing television series.

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The difference between “yate”, etc and Dothraki is that those few words are there to suggest that someone is speaking in a language different from the language spoken by the majority of the characters—which is the method employed throughout not only this film, but its two immediate successors.

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What Peterson set out to do was to create the shape of an entire language (something he has done more than once).  Here’s a LINK to the Wiki site, which, as usual, leads to other sites, which lead to other sites, which lead… if you’d like to learn more.

As worn-looking buildings and vehicles, different peoples and flora and fauna, and at least the suggestion of other languages create a bigger, deeper picture of the setting of an adventure, so, too, does the suggestion of great age.  Over time, the huge pile of material for the film series we first mentioned showed, in detail, that what we were seeing was, in fact, only the latest phase in a whole galaxy of civilizations over many centuries—after all, “For over a thousand generations, the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic”.

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Another way to suggest that great age is a much less dramatic one—perhaps even a nearly-invisible one–practiced by one of our favorite authors and the subject of innumerable postings, and here is one of his efforts.

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What we’re seeing here is JRRT working out the history of sounds throughout a series of Elf languages, Qenya, Telerin, Noldorin, Ilkorin, and Danian, part of his immense and immensely-detailed work on the tongues of Middle-earth.   All languages change through time, of course—here’s a rough version of the succession of periods of English—

Old English (the opening lines of Beowulf, 700-1000AD,

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Middle English (the opening of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, c.1400AD),

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Early Modern English (the beginning of the first scene of Shakepeare’s Hamlet, 1603),

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early 19th-century English (the first lines of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, 1813),

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and early 20th-century English (the opening of James Joyce’s Ulysses, 1922).

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And Joyce even attempted to suggest the procession of those periods in Chapter 14 of Ulysses, “The Oxen of the Sun”, where the story is told through paragraphs which sound like earlier versions of the language gradually moving towards modern English.  (The novelist Nabokov, who played with language constantly, actually found this chapter boring, perhaps because it seemed to him like a one-off, not really in aid of the plot and its characters in general, but rather just a piece of private fun by and for the author?)

JRRT, however, goes one better.  Like other creators of big adventures, he used lots of means to deepen his story, from an extensive and detailed map

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to describing the remains of earlier times still standing in the landscape of Middle-earth of the present,

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to adding detailed historical appendices and chronologies (and his valiant son, Christopher, has added many volumes more),

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but using intricate sound changes and their logical development takes the idea of depth into new regions, especially because it would probably go unnoticed by most readers—there’s an awful lot of detail in those appendices—but whose meticulous creation is not in the least surprising for someone who once wrote, “The ‘stories’ were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse.” (Letters, 219)

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

 

ps

Ah yes—the nearly-inevitable post scriptum—if the normal world/s of the films we first mentioned are “scruffy-looking” (to quote a character about another character), we notice that the world of the villains—the soldiers of the Empire and their surroundings—are hard and clean and shiny—which makes us feel a little better when we wonder when we may last have shined our shoes.

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Theme and Variations.5

18 Wednesday Jul 2018

Posted by in Artists and Illustrators, Fairy Tales and Myths, Films and Music, Literary History, Theatre and Performance

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Welcome, as always, dear readers.

In this post, we come to the end of our series on other ways of presenting fairy tales, in which we have taken two by the author who is usually cited as beginning the modern Western tradition, Charles Perrault (1628-1703).

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In 1697, Perrault had published this,

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entitled Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passe (“Stories or Tales of/from Past Time”), with a kind of subtitle, Contes de Ma Mere L’Oye (“Tales of My Mother Goose”).

The volume contained only 8 stories, with two being “La Belle au Bois Dormant” (“The Beautiful Girl in the Sleeping Wood”)

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and “Cendrillon” (“Cinderella”), which we chose to be the basis of our posts.

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So far in these posts, we’ve looked at “Sleeping Beauty” in everything from ballet to Disney and “Cinderella” in early operas and silent films.  In this final post of the series, we want to begin by saying, as we did in our first post, that “Cinderella” exists in two basic forms, that of Perrault, from 1697, and that of the Brothers Grimm,

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from 1812.

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In this version of the story, the fairy godmother is removed and replaced by birds seemingly sent by Cinderella’s dead mother.

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We mention this because this is the version followed by our next creator, Charlotte (Lotte) Reiniger (1899-1981)

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in her 1922 film, Aschenputtel (“Cinderella”)

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This is a silent film in which delicately-cut paper figures through stop-motion photography are manipulated to tell the story.

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Here’s a LINK so that you can enjoy the short (about 13 minutes) film.  And, if you enjoy that, there are more of Reiniger’s works on YouTube for you to see.

To us, her work very much resembles wayang kulit, the traditional shadow plays of Bali,

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as well as the Ombres Chinoises, (“Chinese Shadows”—Chinese shadow puppets) brought to France in the 18th century.

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It also closely resembles two works illustrated by Arthur Rackham (1867-1939),

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his Cinderella (1919)

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and The Sleeping Beauty (1920).

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In each of these, Rackham employs silhouettes to tell the story (in versions by CS Evans), giving both the look of stories told by moonlight.

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We could easily show you all of the illustrations, marveling at them right here, but, instead, we give you a LINK to an on-line version of The Sleeping Beauty (with apologies for not being able to locate an on-line Cinderella).

In one of our previous posts in the series, we discussed Tchaikovsky’s ballet, Sleeping Beauty, now we add to this Cinderella (Zolushka) by the Russian composer, Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953),

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premiered in 1945.  Here’s a LINK to a suite of music from it, along with two sheets of costume designs from the original production, suggesting what a sumptuous spectacle it must have been.

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Prokofiev and his collaborators followed Perrault and the fairy godmother was back.  Here’s the pumpkin coach from a more modern—but still Russian—production.

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And this coach brings us to our next and next-to-last item.

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We grew up with this image of the story in our heads, as well as its music.

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This is the 1950 Disney version, which stuck fairly closely to the Perrault, but, along with the fairy godmother, kept the helpful birds (changing their color)

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and added a gang of equally helpful mice.

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To which we add our final piece.  In 1957, the well-known composer/lyricist team of Rodgers and Hammerstein created a first, a made-for-television musical production of Perrault’s version, starring someone who was already becoming a star by appearing as Eliza Doolittle in Lerner and Lowe’s My Fair Lady, Julie Andrews.

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In five postings, we’ve traveled from 1697 to 1957 and visited a number of places in between, all of which was based upon two traditional stories recreated in new tellings by Charles Perrault.  Is it any wonder, then, that in 1910, this bust was erected to his memory in the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris?

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Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

Theme and Variations.4

11 Wednesday Jul 2018

Posted by in Artists and Illustrators, Fairy Tales and Myths, Films and Music, Literary History, Narrative Methods

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Welcome, dear readers, as ever.

This is the next-to-last in a little series on several of the fairy tales of Charles Perrault (1628-1703) from his 1697 collection, Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passe (“Stories or Tales of Past Time”), better known by a kind of subtitle, Contes de Ma Mere L’Oye (“Tales of My Mother Goose”).

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So far, we’ve devoted two posts to “Sleeping Beauty” (actually called by Perrault “La Belle au Bois Dormant”—“The Beautiful Girl in the Sleeping Wood”), covering everything from 19th-century theatrical performances to book illustrations to Disney.

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In the third post, we began to look at “Cinderella”, more specifically in opera, from Isouard’s 1810 Cendrillon to Viardot’s 1904 Cendrillon.

Now, in this post, we want to look at “Cinderella” in film, beginning with the 1899 work of Georges Melies (1861-1938)

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whom you may know from the 2011 film Hugo

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based upon Brian Selznick’s 2007 wonderfully inventive novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

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Even if you aren’t familiar with Melies, you may recognize his work in this image

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from his 1902 science fiction film, Le Voyage dans La Lune (“The Trip to the Moon”), thought by scholars to be the first science fiction film (or at least first surviving such film.  Silent film historians estimate that only about 10% of all silent films made are still available to us.  Here’s a LINK to the film so that you can enjoy it for yourself).

Cendrillon was Melies’ most elaborate film to date and was a commercial success, even though only just under 6 minutes long—which says something for the expectations of the movie-going public of 1899.

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As it is so short, it has only a couple of scenes—the kitchen in Cinderella’s house, the palace ballroom, Cinderella’s room, and what appears to be the outside of the palace—and very much depends upon the viewer already knowing the basic story (it begins, for example, with a very fancily-dressed woman leaving the kitchen and the sudden appearance of the Fairy Godmother, with no introduction at all).  Its greatest strength, for us, is in its transformation scenes (a Melies’ specialty), particularly the change of rats/mice into coachmen and footmen. (And here’s a LINK to the film, see if you agree with the 1899 audience.)

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Our second film is from 1911 and is nearly 15 minutes long, meaning that it actually has time to tell the story, if not in a leisurely fashion, at least in a more complete one than the Melies.  This is a US version of the story, starring an early popular favorite, Florence La Badie (or Labadie).

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Forgotten except by silent film enthusiasts, La Badie was a hardworking dare-devil, appearing in nearly 200 films between 1909 and her death in 1917, and doing most of her own stunts.  She was also someone who personified a new look for young women in the years leading up to the Great War—as this portrait (and there are more like it) shows.

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If you follow this LINK, you can see not only the actress, but a “Cinderella” which has almost everything we would expect from the Perrault original.

Florence La Badie had gotten into films through the suggestion of an acting friend, Mary Pickford,

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who starred in our next Cinderella, in 1914.

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Two things strike us about this:

  1. it’s over 50 minutes long—a great advance from the 1911 15 minutes
  2. the advertising seems to suggest that the audience of 1914 was expected to visit the theatre to see Mary Pickford in Cinderella, rather than Cinderella in which Mary Pickford plays the title role. For us, this foreshadows the obsession with film celebrities which is still with us today.

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This version, with its almost luxurious length, has plenty of time not only to tell the Perrault story, but to makes two additions to the plot:  Cinderella actually meets the prince before the ball, near her home and they fall in love—but are then separated; the stepsisters visit a fortune-teller, who informs them cryptically that one of their family will be successful at the ball.  (Here’s a LINK so that you can enjoy this more elaborate version.)

In the midst of these US versions, Georges Melies issued a second one himself.  At about 24 minutes long, it is much grander than his 1899 production, spending nearly a quarter of its length on the transformation of Cinderella from kitchen maid to grand lady alone.  The contrast between the 1899 pumpkin coach and the 1913 one illustrates this nicely.

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It did not enjoy the success of the 1899 original, perhaps because, the weight of production values was simply too heavy for the little story inside, which was smothered by all of the plumed hats and sweeping bows.  We admit that we find this version a little slow, but the creation of the pumpkin coach is still as impressive to us as it must have been in 1913.  Here’s a LINK so that you can judge for yourself. It’s dated 1912, by the way, when the film was made, but it premiered in 1913, so we are sticking to the later date.

It has been suggested that Melies, in the look of this later take on the story, was influenced by the work of Gustave Dore (Do-RAY) (1832-1883).

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In 1867, Dore—a well-known illustrator–among other things–published Les Contes de Perrault, dessins par Gustave Dore. image15contes

Here’s one of the three illustrations done for the story.

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To us, however, Melies thinks of the story taking place in the time of Louis XIII (reigned 1610-1643), when Dumas’ “Musketeers” novels are set (with a little 18th-century addition here and there).

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Dore would appear to be setting it earlier, in the time of Louis’ father, Henri IV (reigned 1589-1610).

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One of our very favorite illustrators, Arthur Rackham (1867-1939),

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tackled both “Cinderella” in 1919 and “Sleeping Beauty” in 1920, with retellings by Charles S. Evans.  Always original and surprising in his approach, Rackham here has produced what we believe to be two of his most inspired works—we’ll talk about them, as well as more versions of “Cinderella”, in our next.

But we’ll finish this post with one more image—as a teaser…

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And thank you, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

Theme and Variations.3

04 Wednesday Jul 2018

Posted by in Fairy Tales and Myths, Films and Music, Literary History, Narrative Methods

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As always, dear readers, welcome!

In this posting, we’re continuing the little series we began on the fairy tales of Charles Perrault and what other creators have done with those stories over the centuries.

In 1697, Perrault (1628-1703) published Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passe (“Stories or Tales of Past Time”).

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This little collection (which also came to be known by a secondary title as Contes de Ma Mere L’Oye–“Tales of My Mother Goose”)–contained, among other stories, “Sleeping Beauty”—which we’ve discussed in the first two posts of this series—and “Cinderella”.  (The original 1697 version is available from the BnF—the Bibliotheque nationale de France—here’s a LINK.)

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If you’d like to read the closest one might get to Perrault’s late-17th-century French, you might try the translation by James Robinson Planche, the dramatist/costume-designer/etcetc, whom we mentioned in the first post in this series.  He had conscientiously searched for a first edition of Perrault’s collection, but had to make do with a second, as he tells us, but he strove to recreate in his English the feel of the French original.  Here’s a LINK to Planche’s 1858 Four and Twenty Fairy Tales.  Selected from Those of Perrault, and Other Popular Artists.

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This is an illustration for that story by Edmund Dulac (1882-1953)

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from Edmund Dulac’s Picture-Book for the French Red Cross (1916)—with a LINK to it here.  (It’s an especially interesting book, not only for the beautiful illustrations, but also for the wide range of stories, including a version of the famous Persian/Arabic story of “Majnun and Layla”.)

“Cinderella” has been a favorite subject for opera composers, at least back to 1810, when Nicolo Isouard’s (1773-1818)

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version, Cendrillon, was a  hit in Paris—and then internationally.  Here’s a LINK to a recording of its overture so you can see what pleased Europe in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars.

Isouard’s opera’s popularity was quickly overtaken by Giacomo Rossini’s (1792-1868)

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version in 1817, La Cenerentola.  Here’s an early Italian playbill for it.

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And here’s a LINK to the overture. (If you like it, there is at least one complete performance available on YouTube—you can easily find it when you follow this link.)

What’s interesting about these versions is that the Fairy Godmother of the original story has been replaced by a human—in Isouard’s version, with some magical powers, in Rossini’s, with native wit.  There’s no explanation for this—it’s simply the case and, for us, it somehow diminishes the story.  It’s like the Troy movie of 2004, from which the gods had been removed.

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Perhaps we’ve always wanted a fairy godmother?

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(An image by William Henry Margetson, 1861-1940.)

Our third opera comes from the very end of the 19th century:  Jules Massenet’s (1842-1912)

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Cendrillon.

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Unlike Isouard and Rossini, the fairy godmother, plus assorted fairies, are present and active in this very elaborate telling.  Here’s a LINK to some of the ballet music to give you an idea of the sound of the opera.

Our last opera is the very opposite of Massenet’s, being a chamber opera with only a piano for an orchestra.  It is by a woman composer who began her career as a famous mezzo-soprano, Pauline Viardot (1821-1910).

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Not only was she a brilliant singer, with an enormous range, but she was also a pianist so good that she regularly played duets with her friend, Frederic Chopin,

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as well as speaking half-a-dozen languages fluently.  When her voice began to fail her, she moved to teaching and composition, as well as keeping a salon in which many of the most famous and influential creators of the second half of the 19th century spent their evenings.

Her version of the Cinderella story, Cendrillon, was first performed in 1904.

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As we suggested, it’s the very opposite of the very sumptuous Massenet opera:  7 singers, no chorus, piano for accompaniment, but it’s musically very rich—and includes the fairy godmother—and the pumpkin, etc., although these are all off-stage.  It is not often performed—there’s one recording—

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which we heartily recommend, as it’s beautifully sung.  And here’s a LINK to a production on YouTube, if you’d like to see it.

We’re going to close this posting, take a deep breath, and start writing the last in this little series:  Cinderella on film, beginning, in a surprisingly-early (if brief) version by Georges Melies—from 1899.

But thanks, as always, for reading and definitely

MTCIDC

CD

ps

If you read us, you know us—we can never resist a PS—and this is just a visual.  In our survey of Cinderella images, we found this.  Need we say more?

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Theme and Variations.2

27 Wednesday Jun 2018

Posted by in Artists and Illustrators, Fairy Tales and Myths, Films and Music, Literary History, Military History

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Welcome, as ever, dear readers.
In our last, we began talking about the fairy tales of Charles Perrault (1628-1703), originally published under the rather vague title, Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passe, (“Stories or Tales of the Past”) in 1697.
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Among his stories was one entitled “La Belle au Bois Dormant”—literally “The Beautiful Girl in the Sleeping Woods”, which we English-speakers call “Sleeping Beauty”. We had said that we thought it would be interesting to look at various treatments of that story over time and, so far, we’ve discussed James Robinson Planche’s (plawn-SHAY) two works, an 1840 “extravaganza” (a kind of very early musical comedy) and his 1868 story-in-verse version (here’s the first edition).
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Planche could read the French original, but those whose knowledge of French was confined to menus could find English translations dating all the way back to the first, that of Robert Samber, in 1729.
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(This image, by the way, explains not only why English-speakers call this story “Sleeping Beauty”, but also why we call the stories as a group “Mother Goose Tales/Stories”. Please see our previous posting for where Mother Goose came from in Perrault.)
In the early 19th-century, a competitor to Perrault appeared. In 1812, two German scholars, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (1785-1863, 1786-1859,)
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began publication of a work which they would enlarge numerous times through the first half of the 19th century, Kinder und Hausmaerchen (something like “Children’s and Domestic Wondertales”), the first volume of which first appeared in 1812.
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“Sleeping Beauty” appears as #50, under the title Dornroeschen, “Little Briar-Rose”. This is like the Perrault story, but not the same, providing an alternate version of the tale. For those without German, an English translation was published in 1823.
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Although their names aren’t on the title page, this is a collaboration between Edgar Taylor (1793-1839), translator,
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and George Cruikshank (1792-1878), illustrator.
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Of the two, Cruikshank is the better-known. Originally, he was famous as what we now call an “editorial cartoonist”, creating images critical of politicians and political events of his time. Here is his 1823 caricature of Louis XVIII of France (reigned 1814-1824 with a little gap in 1815 when Napoleon came back briefly from exile on Elba).
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His public relations people wanted Louis to look like this:
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to remind them that he was the direct descendant of Louis XIV, the famous “Sun King”, a grand and heroic figure in recent French history.
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In reality, Louis was old and fat and looked more like this—
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It wasn’t about Louis per se, weak and temporary monarch though he was, so much as the long-standing English/French rivalry/hostility, which went back for centuries and which had intensified during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, stretching almost without a break from 1792 to 1815. Napoleon, as representative of what the English of the time saw as revolution-which-led-to-chaos-and-worse, was a regular target from the later 1790s on and Cruikshank certainly aimed his pen and brush at him—as in this mocking depiction of the fate of Bonaparte after his first abdication in April, 1814.
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Political commentary aside, Cruikshank, as we see in his illustrations for the Brothers Grimm (and isn’t it odd that we never say, in English “the Grimm Brothers”—which sounds either like a menacing secret society or perhaps an old, established firm of teakwood importers), was involved in all sorts of illustrating, including a second volume of the Grimms, in 1826. This is the 1868 reprint which the editor says duplicates in one volume the text and illustrations of the original two. (We include a LINK so that you can download your own copy.)
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As well, he illustrated the original serialized version of Charles Dickens’ (1812-1870) Oliver Twist (1837-1839). This is a famous scene near the end of the novel, where the main villain, Fagin, is in the condemned cell, awaiting dawn and his execution. Dickens was famous for his performance of this.
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On a more cheerful note, here’s Cruikshank’s sketch of Dickens himself from 1836.
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The Grimms’ version of the “Sleeping Beauty” story is combined with that of Perrault in our next example. It’s the 1920 The Sleeping Beauty,
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text by Charles S. Evans (1883-1944), of whom we have found no picture, and Arthur Rackham (1867-1939) of whom this may be our favorite picture.
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The year before, Evans and Rackham had collaborated on a version of Perrault’s “Cinderella”—and we’ll talk about that in our next. The Sleeping Beauty is anything but sleepy—its illustrations practically dance off the page. (Here’s a LINK for your own copy.)
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And dance itself is the basis of our last example.
In 1888, Pyotr/Peter Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

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was offered a commission for a ballet. Originally, the subject was to be a famous early German Romantic novella, Undine (un-DEE-neh), written by the Baron Friedrich de la Motte Fouque (foo-KAY) (1777-1843),
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and published in 1811. It’s the story of a knight and a water spirit and shares the basic plot of HC Andersen’s later “The Little Mermaid”. Here’s an illustration from Rackham’s 1909 version.
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As things developed, however, this story was replaced by the Perrault/Grimms’ “The Sleeping Beauty”, which first appeared at the Mariinski Theatre
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in St Petersburg in January, 1890. We are lucky to have a number of photos of the original production and cast.
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And here’s a LINK to a suite (selection) of music from the ballet—but the full ballet is available on YouTube and we hope that you like this suite so much that you’ll try the whole thing.
In our next, we’ll move on to a second Perrault story, “Cinderella”.
Thanks, as always, for reading.
MTCIDC
CD
ps
If you’re a regular reader, you’ll know that we can rarely resist adding something more. In fact, in this ps, we add two somethings more.
First, before Undine was proposed for a ballet, it was the subject of an opera by the strange and wonderful German Romantic author and composer ETA Hoffmann (1776-1822).
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Here’s a LINK to the overture. In a future post, we’ll have more to say about Hoffmann…
Second, as people who grew up on Disney, we can’t close without mentioning Disney’s 1959 Sleeping Beauty, with its attempt at a new style of visual presentation—as well as its use of Tchaikovsky’s music as the basis of its score. If you haven’t seen it, we certainly recommend it, especially for its combination of elements of the older look of such films as Cinderella (1950) with a newer, simplified one.
image30disney

Theme and Variations.1

20 Wednesday Jun 2018

Posted by in Artists and Illustrators, Fairy Tales and Myths, Literary History, Narrative Methods, Theatre and Performance

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Welcome, as always, dear readers.

For a current writing project, we’ve gone back into our fairy tale collection (we recommend, by the way, the wonderful Sur La Lune site to help you to build yours—here’s a LINK) to reread the fairy tales of Charles Perrault (1628-1703)–

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although he wasn’t the person who first called them that—that was his contemporary, Madame d’Aulnoy (1650/1-1705),

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who called her stories contes des fees—“stories of fairies”.

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In 1695, Perrault had circulated an illustrated manuscript of such tales, calling it Contes de ma Mere l’Oye—“Tales of My Mother Goose”.

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In  February, 1696, he published one of them, “La Belle au Bois Dormant”—“The Beautiful Girl in the Sleeping Wood” in an early magazine, the Mercure Galant (maybe in English something like “The Courier of Style”).

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(If you’d like to read the story in French as it was first published, here’s a LINK to the BnF, the Bibliotheque nationale Francaise, where it is available on-line, which we think is just magical.)

Then, the following year, the collection was published under the title Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passe (“Stories or Tales from the Past”).

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The term “contes de ma mere l’Oye” appears to have been known in literary circles from at least the 1650s and indicated rustic/countryside stories—in a sense, folktales—and Perrault had used traditional material, some of which had first appeared in print in Italian in the 16th century and could be found in the folktale collections of people like Gianfrancesco Straparola (1485?—1558) and Giambattista Basile (1566-1632).

Perrault’s stories, which include what we call “Sleeping Beauty” (you can see that that’s a mistranslation) and “Cinderella”, first appeared in English in London in 1729, translated by Robert Samber, its title being identical with the 1697 French.

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In this post and (at least) two following, we thought that we would choose two of these fairy tales and see in what different forms they’ve been presented since first appearing in 1697.

Because it was the first to be published, we’ll begin with “Sleeping Beauty.  (This is a Pre-Raphaelite version by Edward Burne-Jones, 1833-1898.  It is one of a set of four and has a very interesting history—here’s a LINK so that you may found out more, if you wish.)

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Our first work, entitled surprisingly enough, The Sleeping Beauty, is what its author, James Robinson Planche (plahn-SHAY), 1796-1880,

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would call an “extravaganza”, meaning, in this case, something like a modern musical comedy.  First produced in 1840, it combined dialogue in rhyming iambic (more or less) couplets with songs set to already existing tunes.   Based upon Perrault, it used spectacle, everyday references which a London audience would have immediately picked up on, and gentle political/cultural satire to entertain.  Unfortunately we don’t have any images of this production, but here’s a LINK to volume 2 of Planche’s “extravaganzas” so that you can form your own impression.  If you know the works of the Victorian dramatist/composer team of WS Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, you will see that Planche is their direct ancestor.

For many years, beginning in the early 1800s and continuing into the 1860s, Planche was Mr Theatre, in London, writing or co-writing at least 175 shows of various sorts.  These works, like Planche himself, have faded away, but he did leave one mark.  In 1823, Planche had had a conversation with a famous actor, Charles Kemble (1775-1854),

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in which he suggested that, whereas money was always being spent in the theatre on spectacles, almost nothing was done for the plays of Shakespeare.   In fact, Shakespeare’s plays had always been costumed in the clothing of the period of the actors, rather than the dress of the time of the events.  Here’s a print of the well-known 18th-century actor, David Garrick (1717-1779) in four of the roles for which he was famous:  Lear, Macbeth, Richard III, and Hamlet—by dress and props alone, perhaps we could guess that the actor with the two daggers was someone playing Macbeth (or perhaps an assassin from the 1760 version of Game of Thrones), but otherwise?

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Kemble, in turn, told Planche that he would willingly put on an historically-accurate production of several Shakespeare plays, beginning with King John, if Planche would do the necessary research and design.  Planche agreed and here’s a playbill of the result.

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Reading the fine print, it’s even possible to see that Planche cited at least some of his sources—everything from funerary statuary to manuscript illustrations.  Whereas we don’t, unfortunately, have any illustrations to show for The Sleeping Beauty, we can show you what a difference Planche made to attempting to make Shakespeare appear in period dress.  Here’s Kemble playing Faulconbridge, a major character in King John, in 1819.

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The historical John lived from 1166 to 1216—why would he be dressed as a sort of cosplay Roman legionnaire?  And here is an engraving made from Planche’s 1823 design, with Kemble again in the role of Faulconbridge.

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The Kemble/Planche look caught on—and is with us, in some form, to this day.   (The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, owns a set of the 1823 colored engravings—here’s a LINK so that you can see other costumes for the production.)

Even as his life in the dramatic world was fading, Planche continued to be a literary figure—as well as a literary recycler.  In 1868, he collaborated with a prominent British illustrator, Richard “Dicky” Doyle (1824-1883),

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on a verse version of “Sleeping Beauty”:  An Old Fairy Tale The Sleeping Beauty.

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Doyle was, in fact, a very versatile artist, having, for instance, worked for the satirical magazine Punch,  but his lasting fame lies in his fairy/fairy tale illustrations.

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Doyle’s work was prized, but his work ethic was, apparently not:  commissions came and went, sometimes filled, sometimes not, and it seems that he never quite completed the illustrations to the Planche, (perhaps why Planche’s introduction is dated 1865 and the publication date is 1868?), but here’s a sample to show what he could do, when focused.  (And here’s a LINK to the book, so that you can see all of the illustrations for yourself, as well as read Planche’s text.)

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So as not to overwhelm you, dear readers, we’re going to pause here, but we’ll continue in our next by looking at other forms—opera, ballet, and animated feature—which Perrault’s story has inspired, taking our story from 1890 to 1959.

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

MTCIDC

CD

Do What I Say, Not What I Speak

13 Wednesday Jun 2018

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

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Welcome, dear readers, as always.

Ever since we heard the story of “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” in childhood, we’ve been interested in doors and passwords.

Near the story’s beginning, Ali Baba, a poor woodcutter, happens to observe a group of bandits returning to their cave from a raid.  As he watches, the head of the bandits uses a secret phrase, “Open, sesame!” which opens the cave’s secret door.

[We include a LINK here to the whole story, if you don’t know it.]

Since then, we believe that we’ve had three major examples of the pattern:  door as barrier passed with difficulty.

The first was on a very different level altogether from “Ali Baba”.

After the US passed a law against alcohol just after the Great War, the tumultuous era called Prohibition began.

(The date is 1919 on the newspaper, but the law came into force in 1920.)

For all that the legislatures of various states approved it (“ratified” is the formal word), there were many who did not approve of it.

Because it was national law, however, police everywhere were required to enforce it.

To get around the law, secret bars began to appear.  These received the nickname “speakeasy” because it was a place to relax and drink in (what was hoped would be) safety and privacy.

Such places were made anonymous as possible:  a blank door—with a peephole.

To get in, a potential drinker had to be known—or know the secret password.

This went on until 1933, when the new president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, worked to have the law repealed.

In 1932, the comedy team of the Marx Brothers

included a speakeasy scene in their latest film, Horse Feathers.

This is an almost indescribable scene in which one of the Marx Brothers (Chico—said “CHIK-o”) is on the inside and another (Groucho) is on the outside and then the fun begins—here’s a LINK so you can watch it for yourself.

The upshot (sorry for the spoiler!)—as you’ll see—is that both end up on the outside.  (We told you that this was on a different level!)

Our next example had no secret password, but, instead, it had a door guard and a very silly one, too!

In 1939, MGM released The Wizard of Oz,

based upon L. Frank Baum’s 1900 The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

We doubt that we have to explain the plot to anyone who would read our blog, so we’ll just remind you of the moment when Dorothy and her friends—Scarecrow, Tin Woodsman, Lion—and Toto, too—have reached the Emerald City and have come to the door of the Wizard.

The guard (who bears a suspicious resemblance to certain other characters in the film) at first refuses them entry, saying the now-famous line that the Wizard won’t see:  “Not nobody!  Not nohow!” but eventually crumbles when Dorothy explains her quest and he begins to sympathize with her, finally allowing her and her friends to enter—although what they learn there is not the best news.

Finally, there is this door.

And, with this door, we are back to “Ali Baba”, it seems (if not to Horse Feathers).  When Gandalf and the Fellowship arrive, however, there appears to be no door there at all, just a pair of immense holly trees (probably English holly, ilex aquifolium), overshadowing a blank wall.

As the narrator describes them:

“But close under the cliff there stood, still strong and living, two tall trees, larger than any trees of hilly that Frodo had ever seen or imagined.  Their great roots spread from the wall to the water.  Under the looming cliffs they had looked like mere bushes, when seen far off from the top of the Stair; but now they towered overhead, stiff, dark, and silent, throwing deep night-shadows about their feet, standing like sentinel pillars at the end of the road.”  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 4, “A Journey in the Dark”)

It is only when Gandalf puts his hands on the rock face and murmurs what appears to be some sort of summoning spell that the doors appear:

“The Moon now shone upon the grey face of the rock; but they could see nothing else for a while.  Then slowly on the surface, where the wizard’s hands had passed, faint lines appeared, like slender veins of silver running in the stone.  At first, they were no more than pale gossamer-threads, so fine that they only twinkled fitfully where the Moon caught them, but steadily they grew broader and clearer, until their design could be guessed.”

As the pattern becomes more visible, so, too, becomes an inscription which reads, in part:

“The Doors of Durin, Lord of Moria.  Speak, friend, and enter.”

And trying to make sense of what it means now turns into a very awkward scene in which Gandalf struggles to find the password he believes is requested in that inscription, while the rest of the company gradually becomes more and more impatient (and it doesn’t help that wolves begin to howl in the distance and that there is something about a pool standing opposite the gate which makes them increasingly uneasy).

Finally, Gandalf realizes that what has stopped him depends upon his understanding of a single word in Elvish, a word which clearly has two meanings—and a little more punctuation might have helped!

As it’s inscribed, the vital part of the wording is:

Pedo Mellon a Minno.

As Gandalf originally translated this, it was “Speak, friend, and enter.”  After a good deal of frustration, Gandalf realizes that he has not only mistranslated—slightly—but mispunctuated—or, rather, overpunctuated– as well.  “Speak” and “say” in English are closely related, but there is a difference—for instance, one can “speak English”, but, idiomatically, one would never “say English”.  Thus, no one would ever give the command to someone else, “Say English”, but, rather would say to someone “Speak English”.  The same must be true in Elvish, where, in fact, it appears that “speak/say” is potentially one verb, whose singular imperative (command) is pedo. At first, Gandalf thought that he was being directed to “speak”—but what he was being told to speak he thought was somehow lost or forgotten.  This caused him to overpunctuate:  “Speak, friend, and enter”, where what he was actually being told was “Say [the word] ‘friend’ and enter”.  He finally does so, and the gates open.

In the case of Ali Baba, inside the thieves’ cave are riches, with some of which he quietly makes off.  Groucho and Chico eventually get into the speakeasy and Dorothy and her friends see the Wizard, all of them leaving the problematic entryway behind.  In the case of the doors to Moria, however, what is left behind refuses to stay that way:

“Frodo felt something seize him by the ankle, and he fell with a cry…Out from the water a long, sinuous tentacle had crawled; it was pale-green and luminous and wet…Twenty other arms came rippling out.  The dark water boiled, and there was a hideous stench.”

And this reminded us of something and made us wonder if JRRT had once read the same book we had (there’s nothing in the Letters, unfortunately).  In 1873, the first English translation of a novel by the French science fiction author, Jules Verne (1828-1905),

appeared, slightly mistitled Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

Like the title, the rest of the book was filled with mistranslations (it should be Seas) and big cuts.  We hope, in fact, that, if Tolkien read the book (and we would be surprised if he hadn’t, it being the typical Victorian “boys’ adventure tale” of the period), we hope that he read the 1892 version, which cleaned up the errors.

If you haven’t read it, it’s the story of a French scientist who is invited by the US government to investigate a sea monster who is attacking world shipping in the later 1860s.  As the professor discovers, this isn’t a monster at all, but an early submarine, the Nautilus, invented and piloted by a man who calls himself “Captain Nemo” (nemo being Latin for “no one”) and who has a grudge against the imperialist nations of the world, against which he uses his submarine.  The professor, his assistant, and a third man, a harpooner, Ned Land, are taken aboard the Nautilus and, at one point, are involved in a combat against a pack of giant squid—each with 8 arms and two longer tentacles, one of which almost drags Nemo to his death until he’s saved by Ned.  Sounds a little familiar, doesn’t it?

Our favorite version of the story is that done by Disney in 1954.

There is only one squid here, but, as the poster shows, that seems plenty!  It’s a well-told version (simplified, but not too much so) and has a really splendid Nautilus in a high-Victorian design (steampunk long before steampunk?).

As we began this post with an opening, it seems appropriate to end with a closing:

“Gandalf turned and paused.  If he was considering what word would close the gate again from within, there was no need.  Many coiling arms seized the doors on either side, and with horrible strength, swung them round.  With a shattering echo they slammed, and all light was lost.  A noise of rending and crashing came dully through the ponderous stone.”

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

ps

Can you, our readers, think of other doors and passwords?  We’ve intentionally left one out here, although, when the thrush knocks…