• About

doubtfulsea

~ adventure fantasy

Category Archives: Literary History

Light on Their Feet

02 Wednesday Oct 2019

Posted by Ollamh in Literary History, Military History

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Alfred Tennyson, Austrian, Balaclava, British Cavalry, chasseurs a cheval, Crimean War, Errol Flynn, Flashman, French, Gallic, gendarmes, George Macdonald Fraser, Heavy Brigade, Hungarian, Hussars, jinetes, lancers, Light Brigade, Light Dragoons, Napoleonic, North Africans, Olivia deHavilland, Renaissance cavalry, Romans, Russian Artillery, Spanish, St Helena, The Charge of the Light Brigade, Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown's School Days

As ever, dear readers, welcome.

Recently, someone asked us about the Light Brigade—that is, the collection of regiments of British cavalry who fought in the Crimean War (1854-56).

image1ltbrig.jpg

These are the troopers who mistakenly charged Russian artillery in the series of battles fought on 25 October, 1854, called, collectively, Balaclava.

image2simkin.jpg

The question was, “Why was it called ‘the Light Brigade’?  Were the soldiers thin?  And was there a Heavy Brigade, where they were all fat?”

It seemed to us a very reasonable question and our answer began, “Over many centuries, cavalry has had a number of uses, but they could probably be broken down into two groups by those uses:  1. raids, skirmishes, scouting, and pursuit; 2. attacking enemy cavalry and infantry formations—and pursuit.  The former (#1) is the job of light cavalry, the latter (#2) of heavy cavalry.”

The Romans, who themselves only produced cavalry early in their history, quickly preferring to hire the job out, might, for example, use North Africans as light cavalry.

image3nub.jpg

If heavy cavalry were needed, then the task might go to Spanish or Gallic soldiers.

image4gallic.jpg

 

And this would be true throughout military history—Renaissance cavalry might have heavily-armored gendarmes

image5gendarme.jpg

to break up an enemy unit (or more) with the weight of its charge, but would also use lightly-armed jinetes

image6jinete

 

to find out the enemy’s positions, or attack their supply routes.

In the 18th century, most cavalry were heavy—although armor had almost disappeared.

image7heavy.jpg

The Austrians and then the French added to those heavies light cavalry originally from the Hungarian world, hussars.

image8bercheny.jpg

Not to be outdone, the English fleshed out their heavy cavalry

image9drag.jpg

not with hussars, but something they called “light dragoons”.

image10ld.jpg

Dragoons had originally been mounted infantrymen, who rode to battle on horseback, then dismounted to fight,

image11okey.jpg

but, by the mid-18th century, dragoons were just heavy cavalry—bigger men on bigger horses—and light dragoons were smaller men on smaller horses, with mostly different functions.

By the end of the century and just beyond, during the Napoleonic era, the French, in particular, had developed a whole series of light cavalry types—hussars,

image12hussars.jpg

chasseurs a cheval (literally, “hunters on horseback”),

image13chasseurs.jpg

and lancers, as well.

image14lancers.jpg

The English, to match the French, converted some regiments to hussars,

image15hussars.jpg

but only after 1820, when Napoleon was in his second and final exile on St. Helena, did they convert several other regiments to lancers.

image16lancer.jpg

(You can see that they borrowed their style of dress from that of Polish lancers in Napoleon’s armies.)

image17lancer.jpg

These lancers

image18lancers.jpg

along with hussars

image19hussars.jpg

and light dragoons

image20ld.jpg

made up the famous Light Brigade of Alfred Tennyson’s (1809-1892)

image21at

 

1854 poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade”.

image22charge.png

This, in turn, inspired one of our favorite adventure movies, the 1936 The Charge of the Light Brigade.

image23charge.jpg

(We wonder how different children must have been in 1936—we loved that movie as kids!)

And this film, in turn, inspired a 20th-century adventure writer, George Macdonald Fraser (1925-2008),

image24gmf.jpg

who wrote a series of 12 books detailing the life of one Harry Flashman, beginning with Flashman (1969).

image25flashman.jpg

In part, these are a parody of the life of a typical Victorian officer, who eventually becomes General Sir Harry Flashman.  He appears at many of the famous military events in mid-Victorian British history, from the First Afghan War (1839-1842) to the Zulu War (1879), along with appearances at later events, including a cameo appearance at the British declaration of war against Germany on 4 August, 1914.  The joke is, although he wins all sorts of honors, including that knighthood, he is, in fact, a complete coward and it’s only amazing luck that he manages to survive as long and as well as he does.  And there is a second joke within the first:  Flashman is actually the school bully in a very famous earlier novel, Tom Brown’s School Days (1857),

image26tbrown.PNG

by Thomas Hughes (1822-1896), a book which is the ancestor not only of many later such novels and short stories, but also of the Harry Potter books.

image27hughes.jpg

The fourth novel in the Flashman series, entitled Flashman at the Charge (1973),

image28charge.jpg

gives us Fraser’s hero as actually leading that famous attack by accident, an accident which leads to his capture by the Russians—and many further adventures.

So, our answer to the original question is:  “No.  The Light Brigade wasn’t skinny, but was called that because it was smaller men on smaller horses with very specific jobs which required rapid movement and greater flexibility than heavy cavalry.”

And, with that answer, we say thank you for reading and

MTCIDC

CD

ps

There was, in fact, a Heavy Brigade,

image29heavy.jpg

who made their own equally-heroic, but more successful, attack on the same day as the more famous Light Brigade charge.  Bigger men on bigger horses, they drove advancing Russian cavalry out of the Heavy Brigade camp.

image30charge.jpg

Nodding Off

18 Wednesday Sep 2019

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Fairy Tales and Myths, Literary History

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

A Child's Garden of Verses, Charles Robinson, Child Ballad, Eugene Field, Fairy Tale, Into the Woods, Little Red Riding Hood, Maxfield Parrish, Poems of Childhood, Port na bPucai, Robert Burns, Robert Louis Stevenson, Song of the Pooka, Steven Sondheim, The Land of Nod, The Scots Musical Museum

Welcome, dear readers, as ever.

In our last, we began with a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson

image1rls.jpg

from his 1885 collection, A Child’s Garden of Verses.

image2garden.jpg

There’s another poem from that collection which has haunted us for years—here it is:

THE LAND OF NOD

From breakfast on through all the day

At home among my friends I stay,

But every night I go abroad

Afar into the Land of Nod.

 

All by myself I have to go,

With none to tell me what to do—

All alone beside the streams

And up the mountain-side of dreams.

 

The strangest things are there for me,

Both things to eat and things to see,

And many frightening sights abroad

Till morning in the Land of Nod.

 

Try as I like to find the way,

I never can get back by day,

Nor can remember plain and clear

The curious music that I hear.

As a poem for children, it seems to contain a certain amount of menace:  “All by myself I have to go”, “many frightening sights”.  At the same time, there is a certain fascination—after all, the speaker seems to want to return there.  In other words, it’s a weird, but somehow interesting place, which reminds us of Little Red Riding Hood’s song from Stephen Sondheim’s modern fairy tale musical, Into the Woods (1987), in which she describes her experience with the wolf:

Mother said,
“Straight ahead,
Not to delay
or be misled.”
I should have heeded
Her advice…
But he seemed so nice.
And he showed me things
Many beautiful things,
That I hadn’t thought to explore.
They were off my path,
So I never had dared.
I had been so careful,
I never had cared
And he made me feel excited-
Well, excited and scared.
When he said, “Come in!”
With that sickening grin,
How could I know what was in store?
Once his teeth were bared,
Though, I really got scared-
Well, excited and scared-
But he drew me close
And he swallowed me down,
Down a dark slimy path
Where lie secrets that I never want to know
And when everything familiar seems to disappear forever
At the end of the path was granny once again
So we lay in the dark till you came and set us free
And you brought us to the light
And we’re back at the start

And I know things now,
Many valuable things,
That I hadn’t known before:
Do not put your faith
In a cape and a hood,
They will not protect you
The way that they should.
And take extra care with strangers,
Even flowers have their dangers.
And though scary is exciting,
Nice is different than good.
Now I know:
Don’t be scared.
Granny is right,
Just be prepared.
Isn’t it nice to know a lot!
And a little bit…not.”

image3lrrh.png

Perhaps it’s that “curious music that I hear” which lures the speaker back?  For us, we’re immediately reminded of the Otherworld music which calls mortals into Faerie in Celtic folk literature.  Here’s a well-known tune with a lyric in Irish and English, which is the lament of a mortal woman who has been pulled into that world against her will, entitled Port na bPucai, “Song of the Pooka” (a kind of Otherworld spirit who plays malevolent tricks on mortals), which can illustrate the kind of music humans believed the Otherworlders used:

Is bean ón slua sí mé, do tháinig thar toinn

I am a woman from the fairy host who traveled over the seas

Is do goideadh san oíche me tamall thar lear

I was stolen in the night and taken beyond the sea

Is go bhfuilim as ríocht seo fé gheas’ mná sídhe

And I am held hostage in the kingdom by the fairy women

Is ní bheidh ar an saol seo ach go nglaofaidh an coileach

And I can only be in this world until the moment the cock crows

Is caitheadsa féin tabhairt fá’n deis isteach

I know I have tasks to do here

Ni thaithneamh liom é ach caithfead tabhairt fé

Which I do not like but must comply with

Is caitheadsa féin tabhairt fén lios isteach

I must return to the fort and do not have anything to do

Is ná déinig aon ní leis an dream thíos sa leas

With this body of fairy people down in the fairy mound.

 

And here’s a LINK so that you can hear that music sung.

On one level, then, this Land of Nod is simply the land of dreams—and here that land is, disturbingly illustrated by Charles Robinson for an 1895 edition of A Child’s Garden of Verses.

image4robinson.jpg

And we see this again in another late-19th-century poem, by the American poet, Eugene Field (1850-1895), where Nod has become a character who, along with two boating friends (Wynken and Blynken), personifies a child going to sleep:

Dutch Lullabye

Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night
sailed off in a wooden shoe —
Sailed on a river of crystal light,
into a sea of dew.
“Where are you going, and what do you wish?”
the old moon asked the three.
“We have come to fish for the herring fish
that live in this beautiful sea;
Nets of silver and gold have we!”
said Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.

The old moon laughed and sang a song,
as they rocked in the wooden shoe,
And the wind that sped them all night long
ruffled the waves of dew.
The little stars were the herring fish
that lived in that beautiful sea —
“Now cast your nets wherever you wish —
never afraid are we”;
So cried the stars to the fishermen three:
Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.

All night long their nets they threw
to the stars in the twinkling foam —
Then down from the skies came the wooden shoe,
bringing the fishermen home;
‘Twas all so pretty a sail, it seemed
as if it could not be,
And some folks thought ’twas a dream they’d dreamed
of sailing that beautiful sea —
But I shall name you the fishermen three:
Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.

Wynken and Blynken are two little eyes,
and Nod is a little head,
And the wooden shoe that sailed the skies
is a wee one’s trundle-bed.
So shut your eyes while Mother sings
of wonderful sights that be,
And you shall see the beautiful things
as you rock in the misty sea,
Where the old shoe rocked the fishermen three:
Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.

For a 1904 edition of a selection of Field’s poems, Poems of Childhood, Maxfield Parrish provided the following illustration—

image5parrish.jpg

(A “trundle bed”, by the way, is a low bed built to slide out from under a taller one and commonly was used in the past to accommodate children.  Here’s an image of one.)

image6trundle.jpg

 

On another level, the reference to music might remind us of the Celtic Otherworld, to which unsuspecting humans are lured away.

image7tl.jpg

This is an illustration of Child Ballad 39A, “Tam Lin”.  Tam (Tom) is a mortal who has been taken by the elves (another name here for fairies) and is eventually rescued by a mortal woman.  Here’s a LINK to more on the ballad.

We have one more possibility for the Land of Nod—perhaps that which inspired Stevenson initially.  “To nod off” is an expression meaning “to fall asleep”, as we see in a traditional Scots song, “We’re a’ nodding”.  Here’s the first verse and the chorus as edited by Robert Burns and published in Volume 6 of The Scots Musical Museum (1803):

Gudeen to you kimmer
And how do you do?
Hiccup, quo’ kimmer,
The better that I’m fou.

Chorus:
We’re a’ noddin, nid nid nodding,
We’re a’ nodding at our house at hame,
We’re a’ noddin, nid nid nodding,
We’re a’ nodding at our house at hame.

(Translation:

“Good evening to you, old gossip,

And how are you?

Hiccup! Said the old gossip,

Much better because I’m full. [a local usage, meaning “drunk”]

Chorus:

We’re all nodding, nid, nid, nodding,

We’re all nodding at our house at home.

We’re all nodding, nid, nid, nodding,

We’re all nodding at our house at home.”)

But, besides this meaning, there is also, from “Genesis” in the Hebrew Bible, the story of the twin sons of Adam and Eve, Cain and Able.  After Cain murders Able:

“And Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden.” (“Genesis”, Chapter 4, Verse 16)

image8canda.jpg

A little research suggests that the name “Nod” comes from a Hebrew root for the verb “to wander”, so Cain, we may be being told, was a wanderer.  That brings us back to our original Stevenson poem, where the speaker tells us that

“…every night I go abroad

Afar into the Land of Nod.

 

All by myself I have to go,

With none to tell me what to do—

All alone beside the streams

And up the mountain-side of dreams.”

 

Pleasant—or pleasanter—dreams, dear readers, and

 

MTCIDC

 

CD

 

ps

Our information on the Hebrew Land of Nod comes from this LINK.

Shadowy

11 Wednesday Sep 2019

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

A Child's Garden of Verses, Adelbert von Chamisso, Andrew Lang, Ausgabe des Fortunatus, Charles Perrault, Fortunatus' fortune-bag, Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passe, J.M. Barrie, Le Petit Poucet, Lord Dunsany, Peter Pan, Peter Schlemihl, Peter Schlemihls Wundersame Geschichte, Robert Louis Stevenson, seven-league boots, Shadow, Siglo de Oro, Sortes Tolkienses, The Charwoman's Shadow, The Grey Fairy Book, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

We were practicing our sortes tolkienses (one way of finding a topic—by simply slipping a finger into The Lord of the Rings and opening it at that page—it’s not 100% useful, but sometimes…) and came upon the title of Chapter 2 of Book One of The Fellowship of the Ring:  “The Shadow of the Past”.

In the context of the chapter, we see that that shadow is cast by the history of the Ring itself and also by its maker, Sauron.  That, in turn, set us off on thinking about literary shadows…

In 1885, Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)

image1rls.jpg

published a collection of poems.

image2achilds.jpg

Poem #19 (if you count the dedication, which is, in fact, a poem) begins:

“I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,

And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.”

[If you would like your own copy of this volume, follow this LINK.]

In fact, in literature, its use is both visible—and invisible.

In psychology, the shadow is metaphorical, being used to symbolize an unconscious part of the personality.  [For more on this, see this LINK.]

And, visibly—but also invisibly—the shadow as physical object can represent something more, as we find in perhaps the first modern literary use of the shadow in Adelbert von Chamisso’s (1781-1838)

image3avonc.jpg

novella (a short novel), Peter Schlemihls Wundersame Geschichte (1814), “Peter Schlemihl’s Amazing Story”.

image4ps.jpg

Here’s the first English translation, from 1824.

image5firsteng.jpg

In the story, the protagonist, Peter Schlemihl, meets a strange man, who can pull anything out of his pocket—and we mean anything.  As Schlemihl reports:

“If my mind was confused, nay terrified, with these proceedings, how was I overpowered when the next-breathed wish brought from his pocket three riding horses.  I tell you, three great and noble steeds, with saddles and appurtenances!  Imagine for a moment, I pray you, three saddled horses from the same pocket which had before produced a pocket-book, a telescope, an ornamented carpet twenty paces long and ten broad, a pleasure-tent of the same size, with bars and iron-work!”

(This is from the 3rd edition (1861) of that first English translation.)

Impressed, Schlemihl is quickly persuaded to make a trade.  The strange man offers him a magic purse, which he calls “Fortunatus’ fortune-bag”.  This object is based on an old story which seems to appear for the first time in 1509 as Ausgabe des Fortunatus (the “Edition/Issue of Fortunatus”?), in which Fortunatus (as you’ll probably guess, the name means “Lucky”) has both a wishing cap and this bag.  Here’s the title page of that first edition.

image6fort

 

[If you would like to read one version of the Fortunatus story, here is a link to it from Andrew Lang’s The Grey Fairy Book (1900).]

The purse will always produce ten gold coins when one puts a hand inside, guaranteeing a steady means of wealth for the owner.  In return for this, Schlemihl hands over–his shadow.

image7ps.jpg

This seems an odd trade, but having a magic bag which acts as an endless bank account is certainly no less strange.  Not to be too literal-minded, but beyond the idea that a shadow is a tradable item, it makes us wonder, however:  what could a shadow be made of that it can be removed and collected?

At the beginning of Peter Pan (1904), Peter has lost his shadow and Wendy reattaches it by sewing it on, as if it were simply mobile black cloth and perhaps this is how we might think about it as a physical object, at least for shadow stories.

image8asewing.jpg

Although he is pleased with the money, Schlemihl soon realizes the real price he has paid:  when people see that he has no shadow, they avoid him in anything from disgust to horror, which ruins his ability to live anywhere and even to marry the girl he wishes.  The shadow, then, is more than cloth:  it is part of a person’s identity.  If you cast no shadow, you are not quite human.  The real price of the shadow is even higher, however, as Schlemihl learns when the strange man (who is obviously Satan in human form) returns to offer a second bargain:  the Devil will return his shadow in return for his soul.

It’s clear that here Schlemihl has learned his lesson, refusing this offer several times and finally throwing away the “fortune-bag”.  Although he may believe that he is done with magic, magic is not yet done with him, however.  With some of the few coins remaining to him, by accident (or so it seems), he buys a pair of seven-league boots.  (A “league”, classically, is about three miles, so, when he puts them on, each step he takes is at least twenty-one miles.)

image8seven

 

This element of the story, in turn, is also based on something in another older story, which appears in Charles Perrault’s (1628-1703)

image9perrault.jpg

1697 collection, Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passe,

image10histoires.jpg

“Le Petit Poucet” (maybe “Thumblet”?).  In this story, a character steals a pair of these boots from a pursuing ogre, allowing the thief to cover great distances with every stride.

[If you’d like to read this story, here’s a LINK from a 1901 translation.]

With these boots, Schlemihl never regains his shadow, but eventually gains a peaceful existence studying the natural world (which, in fact, von Chamisso did, as well, becoming a well-known naturalist later in life).

[Here’s a LINK to a translation of the story by Michael Haldane.]

More than a century later, the early modern fantasy writer, Lord Dunsany (1878-1957)

image11ld.jpg

reused the idea of buying or trading shadows in his 1926 novel, The Charwoman’s Shadow.

image12char.jpg

A charwoman, or, simply, “char” (“char” is the same as “chore”, meaning “a task”), in the UK means a kind of cleaning woman.

image13chars.jpg

When it comes to fantasies, the idea that this may be about the shadow not of a princess, or at least a lady in distress, but of an ordinary cleaning lady, is immediately intriguing, but the charwoman isn’t really the main character.  That’s Ramon, the son of an impoverished Spanish nobleman.

To earn money for his sister’s dowry, as well as to find a profession, Ramon apprentices himself to a wizard who deals, among other things, in shadows.  As payment for his learning, Ramon uses his shadow—but, just like Peter Schlemihl before him, quickly comes to regret it.  The charwoman works in the wizard’s house and, as Ramon slowly learns spells, he also learns her story and what has happened to her since she traded away her shadow long before.

In a moment of chivalry (the story takes place in Spain in what’s called the Siglo de Oro, the “Golden Century”—the early 16th to the later 17th centuries–when wealth from the New World made Spain a world power, as well as a leader in the arts), Ramon promises to rescue the Charwoman’s shadow for her.  In the house of a wizard, you can imagine that this won’t be easy, but, eventually, and through ingenuity, he does so, only to discover that—but you should really read the story for yourself.

[Unfortunately, as this book was published in 1926, it’s still under copyright here in the US, so we can’t offer our usual LINK, but we can offer you Peter and Wendy (1911), the novel version of Barrie’s 1904 play—LINK.]

In contrast to shadows which can be traded or lost, what’s interesting to us about Sauron’s shadow is that it’s no more than a suggestion of the appearance of its owner, who, although he casts that shadow over all of Middle-earth, never appears physically in the novel.  The Nazgul—shadowy figures themselves—represent him, but Sauron himself is never more than a shadow and, in fact, when he is eventually destroyed, it’s his shadow we see broken and swept away:

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

That “little shadow”, then, certainly has more uses than the child in Stevenson’s poem will ever see.

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

Never That Willow

14 Wednesday Aug 2019

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Barrow-downs, Barrow-wights, Hamlet, humours, Melancholy, Old Man Willow, Ophelia, Othello, Robert Burton, The Lord of the Rings, The National Library of Scotland, Thomas D'Urfey, Timothy Bright, Tolkien, Tom Bombadil, William Shakespeare, Willow Tree

As always, dear readers, welcome.

In our last post, we had:

  1. begun with a willow tree

image1willow.jpg

  1. moved to the English Renaissance association between willows and melancholy

image2renmel.jpg

  1. and, in particular, the play Hamlet (1599-1601), in which a disturbed girl, Ophelia, falls from a willow into a stream and drowns

image3ophelia.jpg

  1. as well as Desdemona, in Shakespeare’s Othello (1604), who sings a song with “Willow” as a kind of lamenting chorus—just before she’s murdered by her jealous (and misled) husband.

image4desd.jpg

Melancholy comes from an imbalance of the humors, so medieval and Renaissance people thought, from those substances which control the body and its moods.

image5humors.png

Too much black bile and you might be plunged into a depression.

image6adepression.jpg

(Although his posture suggests that he’s grieving, this young man’s armor says that he’s involved in a medieval sport that certain Tudor noblemen still engaged in, jousting.  Perhaps he just lost?)

As this was considered a serious problem, English Renaissance authors created texts which analyzed the condition, like Timothy Bright, a physician, who published his treatise in 1586,

image6treatise.jpg

(if you’d like to see what was believed medically in 1586, here’s a LINK to the work.)

or Robert Burton, a philosopher, who published his in 1621.

image7burton.jpg

One way of dealing with that imbalance was by bleeding—the idea being that, since the humors influenced the blood, by opening up a blood vessel and letting some of the blood pour out it might act as a kind of safety valve.

image8bleeding.jpg

Another treatment was playing or listening to music.

image9lutenist.png

This therapeutic idea led to the title of one of the first great collections of Renaissance and post-Renaissance lyrics and tunes, Thomas D’Urfey’s, Wit and Mirthe, or Pills to Purge Melancholy (1698-1720).

image10wit.png

(The National Library of Scotland has a complete edition of all six volumes of this.  Here’s a LINK, so that you can download them for yourself.)

Melancholy and willows became even more bound together in the early 19th century, when the tree, along with other images, such as urns, was used as a symbol of mourning on tombstones.

image11tomb.jpg

Willows, then, have moved from being associated with an Elizabethan ailment to an expression of grief at the death of a loved one, which could certainly bring on melancholy.

image12awillow.jpg

For us, willows have another association, however, but one which includes death–and the Elizabethan use of music as a cure.  In The Lord of the Rings, when Frodo and his friends try to cut through the Old Forest to escape the pursuing Nazgul,

image12naz.jpg

they are confused by the hostile wood and eventually brought to the bank of the Withywindle, where Old Man Willow

image13omw.png

sings a spell:

“They shut their eyes, and then it seemed that they could almost hear words, cool words, saying something about water and sleep.  They gave themselves up to the spell and fell fast asleep at the foot of the great grey willow.”  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 6, “The Old Forest”)

This was more than just a sleepy-spell, however, as the tree attempts to drown Frodo, swallows Pippin, and half-swallows Merry (his upper half).

When Sam and Frodo (whom Sam has rescued) threaten the tree with fire, it threatens to kill Merry and Pippin and it looks like a standoff until Frodo simply runs off, shouting for help, and the very odd figure of Tom Bombadil appears.

image14tb.jpg

He has a very distinctive look—

“there appeared above the reeds an old battered hat with a tall crown and a long blue feather stuck to the band…there came into view a man…stumping along with great yellow boots…He had a blue coat and a long brown beard; his eyes were blue and bright, and his face was red as a ripe apple, but creased into a hundred wrinkles of laughter.”

As well, he has distinctive speech and this is where music as cure reappears.  Commonly, Tom’s speech is either actual song or short declarative sentences, which fall into a metrical pattern reminiscent of song:

“What’s the matter here then?  Do you know who I am?  I’m Tom Bombadil.  Tell me what’s your trouble!”

DUM-tee-DUM-tee-DUM-DUM.  DUM-tee-DUM-tee-DUM-DUM.  DUM-DUM-DUM-tee-DUM.  DUM-tee-DUM-tee-DUM-DUM.

He shows no fear of the fearsome willow, breaking off one of its branches and smacking the tree with it while employing this characteristic chanting—

“You let them out again, Old Man Willow!…What be you a-thinking of?  You should not be waking.  Eat earth!  Dig deep!  Drink water!  Go to sleep!  Bombadil is talking!”

Who this figure is, is only ever explained in the vaguest way.  His companion, Goldberry,

image15goldberry.jpg

says of him simply, “Tom Bombadil is master.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 7, “In the House of Tom Bombadil”)  And, when he receives the Ring from Frodo, even when he puts it on, it has no effect upon him.

image16ring.jpg

As a character in the book, he has proved awkward both for audio adapters and P Jackson and his writers, virtually all of whom have tended, over the years, simply to leave him out of their versions of the story.  This leaves a gap, of course, especially when it comes to Tom’s second rescue of the hobbits, from a barrow-wight (illustration by one of our favorite Tolkien artists, Ted Nasmith),

image17bw.jpg

not only because it’s a wonderfully spooky part of the story, but because Tom ransacks the barrow and gives the hobbits short swords “forged long years ago by Men of Westernesse:  they were foes of the Dark Lord, but they were overcome by the evil king of Carn Dum in the Land of Angmar”” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 8, “Fog on the Barrow-Downs”).   With one of these swords, because of where and when it’s from, Merry is able to wound the chief of the Nazgul who is, in fact, that evil king of Angmar mentioned by Tom Bombadil, allowing Eowyn to finish him off.

Tolkien himself was less than concrete in his explanation of Tom, writing to Naomi Mitchison in April, 1954:

“Tom Bombadil is not an important person—to the narrative.  I suppose he has some importance as a ‘comment’.  I mean, I do not really write like that:  he is just an invention (who first appeared in the Oxford Magazine about 1933 [1934]), and represents something that I feel important, though I would not be prepared to analyze the feeling precisely.” (Letters, 178)

Considering our theme of melancholy and, later, death, associated with willows, as well as the Elizabethan idea that music might cure or at least ameliorate that melancholy, our feeling is that Tom, in the first book of The Lord of the Rings, is a counterbalance, with his singing and chanting, to all of the darkness we’re gradually being shown.  As JRRT says in that same paragraph to Naomi Mitchison:

“I would not, however, have left him in, if he did not have some kind of function.  I might put it this way.  The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side…”

Tom, then, in our view, is not only on the good side, but the antidote to the bad, twice, dealing not only with a living tree, but with a dead and murderous wight.  In both cases, he uses song, making him rather like an Elizabethan cure for the melancholy associated with willows—and, in the 19th-century, willows associated with death–brought to life.  It’s no wonder that, when Sauron is defeated and Middle-earth is beginning to heal, Gandalf tells the hobbits:

“…I am turning aside soon.  I am going to have a long talk with Bombadil:  such a talk as I have not had in all my time.” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 7, “Homeward Bound”)

For Gandalf, Tom is the humors back in balance.

As ever, thanks for reading and

MTCIDC

CD

ps

For another willow, you might try George Lucas’ fantasy film, Willow (1988).  It has a complicated plot, all about an abducted infant who will fulfill a prophecy, a valiant dwarf, white and black magic, and a rather ragged warrior.  Here’s the LINK for the first trailer (there’s a second, as well).

Although not quite, for us, of the same level as The Princess Bride, being perhaps more like Labyrinth or The Dark Crystal or Time Bandits, like all of those, it has its moments of fun.

 

Never a Willow

07 Wednesday Aug 2019

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Babylon, Baltimore Consort, Chludov Psaltery, Dennis Moore, Desdemona, Euphrates, Hamlet, Highwaymen, humours, Israelites, JE Millais, Melancholy, Monty Python, Old Man Willow, Ophelia, Othello, Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, The Carman's Whistle, The Lord of the Rings, The Old Forest, Tigris, Tolkien, Tom Bombadil, William Shakespeare, Willow

As always, dear readers, welcome.

In our last posting, although we were talking about 18th-century highwaymen, somehow—we blame the “Dennis Moore” sketch—

image1dennismoore.jpg

we included mention of a willow.

image2willow.jpg

 

In Anglo-American culture, the willow has long suggested melancholy, perhaps being somehow linked with Psalm 137, which laments the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in 586BC and the so-called “Babylonian captivity” of the Israelites?

“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.

We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.

For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.

How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”

Under all of that heavy-handed Babylonian mockery is the simple fact that willows are water-lovers, so it would be natural that they would grow near the Euphrates and Tigris, the two major rivers of Babylon.

image3babylon.jpg

If the Israelites are no longer singing, we would guess that parking their harps on the willows would be as good a place as any.  Certainly medieval manuscript illustrators had no trouble envisioning it.  This is from the 9th-century Chludov Psaltery (a collection of psalms).

image4harps.jpg

“Melancholy”, medieval/Renaissance people believed,

image5aaduerer.jpg

came from an imbalance of the four “humours” which ran the body and its emotions and people in Shakespeare’s day and beyond appear to have so suffered from it that they consulted a famous and popular text, Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up.  That this was a pressing matter for the people of this age is clear from the length of the first edition of 1621—it’s nearly 900 pages—and later editions, which appeared within the next few years, were even longer.  This is the frontispiece of the 1638 edition–

image5amelancholy.jpg

A common treatment for the problem (too much black bile in the system—the “melan-“ part is Greek for “black”—the “-choly” is the “choler”, or bile) was to listen to music, but clearly not all music was soothing, as we see in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1599-1601) , where Hamlet’s girlfriend, Ophelia, goes mad and spends her time drifting around the castle singing bits of unhappy songs and handing out flowers with significant meanings.  As music can be involved with melancholy, so, as we said, can willows and the two come together when Ophelia trusts a willow–

“There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them:
There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element: but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.”  (Hamlet, Act IV, Sc 7)

image5ophelia.jpg

(This is a painting by JE Millais, 1851/2.  That “dead men’s fingers” should have been enough, we think!)

The melancholy continues in Shakspeare’s Othello (1604), Act IV, Scene 3, where the soon-to-be-murdered-by-the-title-character Desdemona sings a sad little song, beginning:

“The poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree,
Sing all a green willow;
Her hand on her bosom, her head on her knee,(45)
Sing willow, willow, willow.
The fresh streams ran by her, and murmur’d her moans;
Sing willow, willow, willow;
Her salt tears fell from her, and soften’d the stones”—

(It seems like this posting can’t escape including even more trees.  Sycamores are another water-loving tree,

image6sycamore.jpg

but the emphasis here is upon that willow and we’ll stick with it.)

Perhaps it’s the slumping shape, which might suggest despair, or at least grief, but the willow began to appear on tombstones here in the US at the beginning of the 19th century, sometimes by itself,

image7willow.JPG

sometimes shading other symbols of mourning, like an urn.

image8willow.jpg

It could appear in other funerary art, as well—as in pictures

image9art.jpg

and even as part of another funerary—and life—custom of the time, the giving/exchanging of locks of hair.  In this mourning brooch, one can see a willow made from such a lock.

image10hair.jpg

With such a grim history, it shouldn’t be surprising, then, that a willow familiar to readers of The Lord of the Rings might have a sinister purpose.

image11oldmanwillow.jpg

He’s not alone in being hostile foliage.  As Merry tells Frodo, Sam, and Pippin:

“But the Forest is queer.  Everything in it is very much more alive, more aware of what is going on, so to speak, than things are in the Shire.  And the trees do not like strangers.  They watch you.  They are usually content merely to watch you, as long as daylight lasts, and don’t do much.  Occasionally the most unfriendly ones may drop a branch, or stick a root out, or grasp at you with a long trailer.  But at night things can be most alarming…  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 6, “The Old Forest”)

Their journey through the Forest, intended to put some space between them and the danger of the Nazgul, provides its own dangers, as the place seems to move about of its own accord, confusing travelers—or worse:

“Suddenly Frodo himself felt sleep overwhelming him.  His head swam.  There now seemed hardly a sound in the air.  The flies had stopped buzzing.  Only a gentle noise on the edge of hearing, a soft fluttering as of a song half whispered, seemed to stir in the boughs above.  He lifted his heavy eyes and saw leaning over him a huge willow-tree, old and hoary.  Enormous it looked, its sprawling branches going up like reaching arms with many long-fingered hands, its knotted and twisted trunk gaping in wide fissures that creaked faintly as the boughs moved…”

We are a far cry from Monty Python here.  The willow then tries to drown Frodo, swallows Pippin completely, and the upper half of Merry, and, were it not for the appearance of perhaps the oddest character in The Lord of the Rings, it is difficult to imagine what would have happened next.

image12tbombadil.jpg

What will happen in our next posting, however, you will see next week (hint:  the posting is entitled, “Never This Willow”).  In the meantime,

Thanks, as always, for reading and

MTCIDC

CD

ps

To treat any melancholy you might feel from reading this posting, please see below for a very merry Elizabethan song ably performed by the Baltimore Consort.

 

 

And here’s a LINK to a set of lyrics c. 1590 so that you can follow along.  You’ll notice that it includes melancholy, trees, and music, all in one.

 

 

Smugglers, or Pub Crawl 2

24 Wednesday Jul 2019

Posted by Ollamh in Films and Music, Literary History

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Anne, Church of St Peter and St Paul, Clegg, Disney, Doctor Syn, Doctor Syntax, Dymchurch, Fairfield, French Revolution, George Arliss, George I, George II, George III, inn, Kent, King John, Louis XIV, Louis XV, Louis XVI, Napoleon, Navy, Oxford, Patrick McGoohan, pub, Romney Marsh, Russell Thorndike, Ship Inn, Smuggler, St Tomas a Becket, The Scarecrow, William and Mary, William Combe

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

In our last, we were talking about inns and pubs, both in Middle-earth and in 1930s Oxford and we thought we had finished with the subject until there arrived in the mail/post a book from our good friend, Michael, in England.

image1kent.jpg

Pubs anywhere are, we believe, immediately understandable, but why Kent and smugglers?

Since the royal government, under King John at the beginning of the 1200s, had begun to tax exports and imports, the best way around those taxes was either to smuggle or to deal, at some level, with smugglers.

Although such dealings had gone on for centuries, it appears that things intensified by the late 17th century and France was the reason.

From the late 17th-century, throughout the 18th century, and into the early 19th, England was at war with France, on land and sea.  In governmental terms, this meant that this warfare went through the reigns of Louis XIV,

image2louie14.jpg

Louis XV,

image3louie15

 

Louis XVI,

image4louie16

 

the French Revolution and its multiple governments,

image5deadlouie.jpg

and Napoleon.

image6nappy.PNG

In English terms, this meant William and Mary, Anne, and Georges I, II, and III, basically from 1690 to 1815.

During each one of those wars, there were laws in England about the importation of goods from the enemy.  That being the case, if those with the money to pay for such things wanted prohibited goods, they would have to rely upon the same smuggling used in peacetime, which they did.

Although the south coast of England in general had its smugglers, a map will show us why Kent would have been a very good place for such smuggling to go on.

image7map.gif

As you can see, Dover, here, is only about 25 miles from the coast of France—a very easy trip and one not requiring large merchant ships to do it.

image8merchant.jpg

Smaller local boats, called luggers, could do the job and were also handy for offloading goods from larger English or foreign vessels, as well.

image9lugger.jpg

The government, seeing not only its laws violated, but revenue lost to the treasury from all the taxes not collected, tried to stop smuggling, using the navy

image10raid.jpg

and occasional army units.

image11dragoons.jpg

Success was very uncertain, however, as the officers of the law and their assistants were usually vastly outnumbered by the locals, whether smugglers or the many people in the area somehow complicit in smuggling operations.  Because pubs were social meeting places, they were obviously useful as headquarters for smugglers.

In 1915, Russell Thorndike (1885-1972),

image12rt

 

an English actor and writer, published the first of a series of books about the adventures of a leader of one gang of smugglers, “Dr Syn”, in Doctor Syn, A Smuggling Tale of the Romney March.

image13firsted.jpg

(If you’d like to read a first edition, here’s a LINK.)

“Dr. Syn” looks like an easy joke on “sin”, but it may also be inspired by a figure from early-19th-century English comic literature, “Dr. Syntax”, a clergyman whose rhymed adventures, began with The Tour of Dr. Syntax:  In Search of the Picturesque, published in 1812 and written by William Combe.

 

image14drsyntax

The smuggler, “Dr. Syn” is actually a retired pirate, named Clegg, who masquerades as an Anglican priest, which is what “Dr. Syntax” actually is.  As well, we might imagine that “Dr. Syn” the smuggler, finds it a sin to pay the import taxes the government charges and has therefore joined the local smugglers.

If Clegg is masquerading as a clergyman by day, by night he takes on another mask:  as the leader of the gang which is based in Dymchurch, he becomes “The Scarecrow”.  Dymchurch is at the edge of Romney Marsh.  Here’s a map of the Marsh to give you an idea of its location and extent.

image15romney

And, to give you an idea of the Marsh itself, here’s an image of a church on the Marsh, St. Thomas a Becket, which was originally in the village of Fairfield.  The village has disappeared, but the church remains.  (You can see it depicted on the left-hand side of the map of the Marsh.)

image16stt.jpg

Thorndike’s character has appeared several times in films, the first time in 1937, where Dr. Syn was played by a famous character actor of the time, George Arliss.

image17poster

 

If you would like to see this film, here are two links.  The first LINK is to the Internet Archive version.

The second LINK is to that on YouTube.

In 1963, the Walt Disney studio released their own version, Dr. Syn,

image18drsdisney.jpg

starring Patrick McGoohan as “The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh” and we think he’s pretty creepy in his mask.

image19pm

image20scarecrow.jpg

Both movies are worth seeing, the Disney, in color, is full of Marsh and red coated dragoons, but the earlier film has a Dr. Syn who has the original pirate just below the surface—not so much hero, perhaps, as trickster.

But, you may be asking by this point, what about the pub?  To which we answer, here it is—the Ship Inn, in Dymchurch, headquarters for “The Scarecrow” and his gang.

image21ship.jpg

And, right across the way, is the Church of St Peter and St Paul, where, in his other disguise, the ex-pirate, Clegg, appeared each Sunday as “Dr. Syn”.

image22stspandp.jpg

Thanks, as ever, for reading and

MTCIDC

CD

 

Pub Crawl

17 Wednesday Jul 2019

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

CS Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, Eagles, Green Dragon Inn, Hutchinson Family Singers, inn, pub, Smaug, The Eagle and Child, The Green Dragon, The Hobbit, The Inklings, The Ivy Bush, The King's Arms, The Lord of the Rings, The Mitre, The Prancing Pony, The Vulture of the Alps, The White Horse, Tolkien

As ever, dear readers, welcome.

After a very disturbing evening with a group of vengeful and determined dwarves,

image1banddwarves.jpg

Bilbo wakes to a wreck of breakfast dishes and, soon after, the appearance of Gandalf, who prompts him to see that he has a note from Thorin (& Co.).  It makes an appointment for 11am that morning at the Green Dragon Inn, in Bywater.

image2bywatermap.jpg

With Gandalf harrying him, Bilbo barely makes it, but, a moment later, the journey eastward of The Hobbit begins.

It is ironic, of course, that a trip which focuses upon removing a dragon

image3smaug.jpeg

should commence with a place named after one, but, judging by the number of Green Dragon pubs in Britain one might find by googling right now, it may be nothing more than a common name—

image4pubsign.jpg

image5greendragsign.jpg

image6greendrag.jpg

image7greendrag.jpg

although, as Douglas Anderson points out in The Annotated Hobbit, 61, we know that JRRT had been interested in dragons, especially green ones, from childhood, as he wrote to WH Auden:

“I first tried to write a story when I was about seven.  It was about a dragon.  I remember nothing about it except a philological fact.  My mother said nothing about the dragon, but pointed out out one could not say ‘a green great dragon,’ but had to say, ‘a great green dragon.’  I wondered why, and still do.” (Letters, 214, 7 June, 1955)

The countryside east of the Shire and the story itself are empty of pubs (short for “public houses”, originally meaning simply a place open to the general public, but, in time, it came to mean a place licensed by the government to sell alcoholic beverages) after this, but, until we reach Bree, there are a certain number mentioned in The Lord of the Rings.  We meet the first, The Ivy Bush, in The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 1, “An Unexpected Party”, where we see a group of hobbits gossiping about Bilbo and Frodo.  In the next chapter,  “The Shadow of the Past”, The Green Dragon makes its second appearance in Tolkien when Sam Gamgee has a verbal tussle with Ted Sandyman on the subject of things seen and unseen, as well as on the sanity, or lack of it, of Bilbo and Frodo, there.

The Ivy Bush will only appear once more, linked with The Green Dragon, in the succeeding chapter, “Three Is Company”, but we will see The Green Dragon (mentioned by Sam in hopes that The Prancing Pony in Bree will measure up to it in Chapter 8, “Fog on the Barrow-Downs”) close to the end of The Lord of the Rings.  In The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 8, “The Scouring of the Shire”, it appears as an emblem of the endless ruin by Sharkey and gang of the old ways of the Shire:  “When they reached The Green Dragon, the last house on the Hobbiton side [of the Water], now lifeless and with broken windows…”

This is in great contrast to The Prancing Pony Sam worried about earlier

image8prancingpony.jpg

as we see it in The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 9, “At the Sign of the Prancing Pony”.  At first, the place seems menacing, especially to Sam, who:

“…stared up at the inn with its three storeys and many windows, and felt his heart sink.”

But then—

“As they [the hobbits] hesitated outside in the gloom, someone began singing a merry song inside, and many cheerful voices joined loudly in the chorus.  They listened to this encouraging sound for a moment and then got off their ponies.  The song ended and there was a burst of laughter and clapping.”

Pubs, and their upscale cousins, inns, would have been vital to people traveling before motels, hotels, and b&bs, as we can see in Book One of The Fellowship, and, for most of the rest of the novel, with the exceptions of Rivendell, Lorien, Edoras, and Minas Tirith, accommodation for the night would have meant a blanket on the ground.  For Tolkien and his friends in the writers’ group called The Inklings,

image9inklings.jpg

they were vital meeting points—not for the reading of new work, which appears to have been done in one member, C.S. Lewis’, rooms at Oxford,

image10csl.jpg

but for socializing and discussion, which was equally important for such a group of intelligent, educated, and highly-creative men.  (No women, alas!  One of our favorite mystery novelists and Dante-translator, Dorothy Sayers, 1893-1957, was friends with several members but, with the short-sightedness of the 1930s-50s, was never invited to join.)

image11dls.jpg

They met during the week not only at the best-known of their watering holes, the Eagle and Child,

image12bird.jpg

but at The Mitre,

image13mitre.jpg

The King’s Arms,

image14kingsarms.JPG

and at The White Horse.

image15whitehorse

The one which caught our eye in particular is the first, which, as we said, is probably the one most closely associated with Tolkien and his friends.  Here’s its sign—

image16bird.jpg

The explanation of the pub’s name is, to us, a bit murky, supposedly coming from an element of the crest of the Stanley family which portrays an infant stolen by an eagle,

image17crest.jpg

but found alive and unharmed.  (Here’s a LINK so that you can judge for yourself.)

For ourselves, the idea of a child stolen by a raptor makes us think of a really awful 19th-century song, “The Vulture of the Alps”, a poem set to music about 1842 by a famous American vocal group of the 1840s-1870s, the Hutchinson Family Singers.  The title pretty much says it all.

image18hutch.jpg

If you’d like to know more, here’s a LINK.

When we think of eagles and Tolkien, however, we remember them as rescuers—of Gandalf, the dwarves, and Bilbo from the goblins and Wargs

image19rescue.jpg

and as providers of air assault in The Hobbit.

image20battle.jpg

And, in The Lord of the Rings, rescuer of Gandalf from Saruman,

image21rescue

 

as allies of the West at the battle at the Morannon,

image22black.jpg

and as saviors of Frodo and Sam on Mt Doom.

image23savior.jpg

And it may be a crazy idea, but it makes us wonder—although Tolkien had abandoned The Hobbit unfinished in the early 1930s, he had picked it up again in 1936, just about the time the Inklings were meeting regularly (the first documented mention of them, apparently, is in a 1936 letter from CS Lewis to the novelist, Charles Williams, inviting him to join—see The Collected Letters of CS Lewis, Vol.2, 183—in a letter to William Luther White 9/11/67, JRRT dates the origins of the Inklings as “probably mid-thirties”—Letters, 387).  Could he have found his inspiration for these heroic birds and their habit of picking people up from the name of his pub?

As ever, thanks for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

ps

If you haven’t read CS Lewis’ wonderful essay, “On Three Ways of Writing for Children”, here’s a LINK.

pps

We have no illustration of Tolkien’s Green Dragon, but here’s a Tudor example from Wymondham in Norfolk which we think would do quite well.

image24green.jpg

Water Which?

12 Wednesday Jun 2019

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

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Alaric Hall, Alberich, Antonin Dvorak, Apollonius, Argonautica, Arthur Rackham, Elves, ETA Hoffmann, Friedrich de la Motte Fouque, Hans Christian Andersen, Heinemann, Heracles, Hylas, Jason and the Golden Fleece, John William Waterhouse, Judy Collins, mermaids, naiads, Nemean Lion, Old English Poems, Rhine Maidens, Richard Wagner, Rusalka, selkies, silkies, sirens, swan-maidens, The Great Silkie of Sul Skerry, The Little Mermaid, Tommy Makem, Undine, waeteraelfadl, Water Elf Sickness

Welcome, as ever, dear readers.

Just today, our English friend, Michael, sent us an interesting CD set, “Old English Poems, Prose & Lessons”.  We turned the jewel box over and our eye was immediately caught by #12 of the listings on the back, “Charm Against Waterelf Sickness”.

In Old English, “waterelf sickness” is a compound which can be read two ways:  “waeteraelf-adl” (“water-elf sickness”) or “waeter-aelfadl” (something like “watery elf-sickness”).  Alaric Hall, in his extremely informative dissertation, “The Meaning of Elf, and Elves, in Medieval England” (2005), 116, leans towards the second possibility, but, with our western classical background, we immediately imagined a “water elf” and, from there, we thought of naiads—female water spirits–in fresh water, like streams and pools.  (If you would like a comprehensive listing of all the subvarieties of such spirits, here’s a LINK to an article on the subject.)

Probably the most famous story about such creatures appears in Apollonius of Rhodes’ 3rd-c. BC, Argonautica, the story of Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece.

image1gf.jpg

Two of Jason’s crew on the Argo are Heracles (seen here dealing with the Nemean Lion)

image2herc

and his companion, Hylas (seen here about to get into trouble).

image3hy.jpg

Ancient travel in the Mediterranean often meant coasting, with frequent stops for water, and, in Apollonius’ story, Hylas had gone ashore and found a pool, but was ambushed by a group of naiads, who pulled him under.

image4water.jpg

(This is John William Waterhouse’s famous 1896 painting of the scene.)

We meet woman waterfolk in much of western folk tradition—and this is excluding those on salt water, including mermaids,

image6merm.jpg

selkies/silkies (who are shape-changers, between seals and humans),

image7selkie.jpg

and even sirens.

image5sirens.jpg

For fresh water, we had those naiads, but also swan-maidens, often enchanted into water bird forms.

image8swanmaidens.jpg

(Here’s a LINK to a whole little collection of stories about such creatures.)

As well, we have the Rhine Maidens,

image9rhine.jpg

who, in Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, guard the Rhine gold, deep under the river, but who lose it to the craftsman dwarf, Alberich, with whom they flirted—with evil consequences.

image10alb.jpg

We mentioned mermaids as salt water creatures and, in Hans Christian Andersen’s (1805-1875)

image11dulac.jpg

“The Little Mermaid” (1837), we have the story of the mermaid who falls in love with a handsome prince and trades her voice for human form.

image11hca.jpg

image12ms.jpg

(This is the first page of Andersen’s original manuscript.)

There had been an earlier Romantic version of the water spirit and the human (in this case, a knight) in Friedrich de la Motte Fouque’s (1777-1843) novella, Undine (1811).

image13fred.jpg

image14undine.jpg

This, in turn, became an early Romantic opera, Undine (1816), the text by the author, the music by another famous Romantic author, E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822).

image15etah.jpg

image16oveerture.jpg

The theme which runs through all of these meetings of water spirit and human is the uneasy relationship which seems the only possibility for them, virtually always leading to unhappiness, and this is true of our last water spirit, Rusalka, the subject of an opera, Rusalka, (1901) by the Czech composer, Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904)

image17ad.jpg

Like Andersen’s Little Mermaid, the water spirit (“rusalka” can mean “water spirit” in Czech) falls in love with a prince, trading her immortality for human love.

image18orig.jpg

(This is an image of the original Rusalka, Ruzena Maturova.)

If we said “leading to unhappiness” is the usual conclusion to such romances, Rusalka is even worse.  When she is betrayed by the prince, Rusalka becomes a water demon, luring people to their deaths in her pool—a far cry from the happy ending of the Disney movie!

image19lm.jpg

So, what about our charm against waeteraelfadl?  Here’s a translation:

“If a man is in the water elf disease [waeter aelfadle], then the nails of his hand are dark and the eyes teary, and he will look down. Give him this as medicine [laecedome]: everthroat, hassock, the lower part of fane, yewberry, lupin, helenium, marshmallow head, fen mint, dill, lily, attorlathe, pulegium, marrubium, dock, elder, fel terre, wormwood, strawberry leaves, consolde. Soak with ale; add holy water to it. Sing this gealdor over it thrice:

I have bound on the wounds the best of war bandages, so the wounds neither burn nor burst, nor go further, nor spread, nor jump, nor the wounds increase [waco sian?], nor sores deepen. But may he himself keep in a healthy way [halewaege?]. May it not ache you more than it aches earth in ear [eare?].

Sing this many times, “May earth bear on you with all her might and main.” These galdor a man may sing over a wound.”

(translation from Karen Louise Jolly, Popular Religion in Late Saxon England: Elf Charms in Context (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996)

Unfortunately, this looks more like a cure for a skin disease than for an ill-fated affair between water spirit and human!

Thanks, as always, for reading and, also as always,

MTCIDC

CD

ps

You can find Alaric Hall’s dissertation (now a book) at:  http://www.alarichall.org.uk/phd.php.

pps

Child Ballad 113, “The Great Silkie of Sul Skerry” is about the male version of such a creature.  For a haunting performance of this, with a modern tune, sung by Judy Collins (with Tommy Makem on pennywhistle), here’s a LINK.

ppps

The most famous aria from Dvorak’s opera is a song sung to the moon by Rusalka, “Měsíčku na nebi hlubokém“, and we find it one of the most beautiful arias we know.  Here’s a LINK so that you can hear it, too.

pppps (we think that this is a record, even for us)

In 1909, the publisher Heinemann released a translation of de la Motte Fouque’s Undine with illustrations by Arthur Rackham.  Here’s a LINK so that you can download it and add it to your library.

image20rack.jpg

Tamsin

05 Wednesday Jun 2019

Posted by Ollamh in Literary History, Military History, Narrative Methods

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Algernon Blackwood, billyblind, boggart, Captain Blood, cat, Catherine of Braganza, Charles I, Charles II, Dorchester, Dorset, Errol Flynn, George Jeffreys, ghost, Glastonbury Abbey, Glastonbury Tor, James, King Arthur, Lucy Walter, M.R. James, Maiden Castle, Monmouth, Nell Gwynn, Peter Beagle, rebellion, Sedgemoor, Somerset, Tamsin, Two Men in a Trench

If you had never seen a ghost and probably didn’t believe in them, what would convince you?  How about a ghost cat?

image1ghostcat.jpg

In Peter Beagle’s

image2pb.jpg

Tamsin (1999),

image3tamsin.jpg

13-year-old Jenny Gluckstein encounters one and it’s only the beginning of a wonderfully rich and, this being a novel by Peter Beagle, a little melancholy, ghost story.

We don’t do spoilers, but what we’d like to do—oh, and, by the way, Welcome, dear readers, as ever!—is, first, to recommend this novel, which begins in New York City, but is mainly set in Dorset,

image4dorset.jpg

in the southwest of England.  If you’re interested in spooks and spirits of all kinds, England is a wonderful place to explore, and the southwest is especially haunted (if you believe in such things—we’re neutral, ourselves, but love a good ghost story).  Just look at this massive Iron Age hill fort near Dorchester, called locally, “Maiden Castle”—what lives there at night?

image5maidencastle.jpg

[And speaking of good ghost stories, some of our favorites are by M.R. James (1862-1936) and Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951).  Click on the names to access the links so that you can sample their work for yourself, if you don’t know them already.]

Jenny is transplanted from New York to Dorset because her mother’s second husband is an English agricultural specialist who is hired to rebuild a 350-year-old farm in Dorset.  Jenny is, initially, very unhappy with the move—especially when her closest friend, Mr. Cat, must spend 6 months quarantined before being allowed into England.  Things slowly begin to change, however, as she makes friends with her two new stepbrothers and finds that the ancient house holds more than her new family, including a boggart, the billyblind, and four ghosts (including that cat).

The ghosts are ectoplasmic survivors of a tragic period in the history of southwest England which all begins with Charles II (1630-1685).

image6chas2.jpg

After his father, Charles I, had been executed in London in January, 1649,

image7chas1.jpg

his son, Charles, had led an exile’s life until, in 1660, he was invited to return to Britain and reign as Charles II.

image8chas2.jpg

Unfortunately for the country, although Charles was married to the Portuguese princess, Catherine of Braganza (1638-1705),

image9catty.jpg

they produced no heirs.  Charles also had a long string of mistresses, including the most famous, Nell Gwynn (1650-1687),

image10nell.jpg

and one of them, Lucy Walter (c1630-1658)

image11lucywalter.jpg

gave him a son, James (1649-1685),

image12monmouthboy.jpg

whom Charles not only acknowledged, but made, among other things, the Duke of Monmouth.

image13jimmy.jpg

This James had somehow come to believe that his father, Charles, had secretly married his mother, thereby making him the legitimate heir to the throne of England.  His uncle, also named James (1633-1701),

image14jas.jpg

asserting that his older brother, Charles, appeared to have no legitimate heir, claimed the throne for himself upon his brother’s death.  This did not please the Duke of Monmouth, who, believing that he had support in the southwest of England, raised a rebellion there against his uncle.  He had only very limited resources, and much of his little army was armed with improvised weapons, many of them repurposed farm equipment.

image15scythemen.jpg

Opposing these was a detachment of the Royal Army,

image16redcoats.jpg

trained professional soldiers.  The only battle of this brief campaign occurred not in Dorset, but in the shire to the northwest, Somerset,

image17somerset.jpg

which, in itself is a rather spooky place.  After all, in the 12th century, the monks of Glastonbury Abbey claimed that they had happened upon the grave of King Arthur

image18arthur.jpg

and they had a lead cross (from the coffin) to prove it.

image19cross.jpg

Even if it’s not spooky, Glastonbury is an impressive place—just look at Glastonbury Tor, with the remains of the 14th-century church of St Michael atop it.

image20tor.jpg

Monmouth knew that, to have any chance of raising more support, he would have to deal with that detachment of redcoats sent to stop him, but, with his own army’s limitations, the best way to even the odds was to attempt a night attack, one of the most difficult maneuvers possible.  Unfortunately, although the Royal Army was initially surprised, the mist which covered the battlefield, along with an uncertain knowledge of the terrain, and the lack of discipline among Monmouth’s troops,

image21troops.jpg

as well as the steadiness of the King’s soldiers,

image22redcoats.jpg

led to a complete defeat of Monmouth’s army, which immediately disintegrated, while Monmouth and his chief followers fled for their lives.

Monmouth was soon captured and brought before his uncle, James, who was less than avuncular in his reaction

image23jasandjas.jpg

and, very soon afterward, Monmouth was beheaded.

image24exec.jpeg

Not content with ending the rebellion, James sent a five-man commission of judges to the region to rout out all opposition to his reign.  This commission was headed by the Lord Chief Justice, George Jeffreys, First Baron Jeffreys (1645-1689).

image25jeffreys.jpg

Jeffreys, from the records, was a very thorough man, but a very biased one, as well, and several hundred people across the region were executed after brief trials,

image26.png

others being shipped as virtual slaves to the Caribbean.  (The swashbuckling adventure film, Captain Blood (1935), with Errol Flynn, is about one of the latter—a doctor who helps a wounded escapee from Sedgemoor and suffers for it.)

image27blood.jpg

Jeffreys then becomes the villain of Tamsin, having developed a passion for Tamsin Willoughby, whose family farm is the one which Jenny’s stepfather is hired to restore, during the period now known as the “Bloody Assizes”.  Tamsin and Jeffreys and Tamsin’s lover, Edric, are trapped in a kind of terrible time warp and it’s Jenny who—but wait—we said no spoilers, and we mean it!

This is a book to read and reread and now, with a little historical background from us, we hope you enjoy it as much as we have.

MTCIDC

CD

ps

If you would like to know more about the Battle of Sedgemoor, the Two Men in a Trench team of Tony Pollard and Neil Oliver have a fun battlefield archaeology program on it.  Here’s the LINK.

 

Pieces of Eight!

29 Wednesday May 2019

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Literary History, Maps, Villains

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Blackbeard, Captain George North, Captain Kidd, coins, Doubloon, Edward Teach, Elizabeth I, Hernan Cortez, Inca, Long John Silver, Mexico, Muppet Treasure Island, N.C. Wyeth, Parrot, Pieces of Eight, Pirates, Privateer, reales, Robert Louis Stevenson, Robert Newton, San Luis Potosi, Sir Francis Drake, South America, Spain, Treasure Island, Young Folks

As ever, dear readers, welcome.

In 1881-1882, a new serial appeared in the British children’s newspaper, Young Folks.  Its author was Captain George North and the story was entitled, “Treasure Island or, the Mutiny of the Hispaniola”.  In 1883, Cassell and Company published this in book form

image1first

as Treasure Island, and its author’s name was right below the title:  Robert Louis Stevenson.

image2rls

The story had come about because Stevenson had seen his stepson, Lloyd, drawing a map.  Stevenson joined him and that map became the map.

image3map.jpg

The book became a number of movies over the years, including one by the Muppets (1996),

image4mup

but our favorite is that made by the Disney studio in 1950.

00000tmp

This version has Robert Newton as Long John Silver, the man whose twitches and vocal mannerisms have been passed down now as “the way pirates talk” (including—and especially on—“International Talk Like a Pirate Day”, September 19).

MBDTRIS EC018

image6newton

You’ll notice that parrot (as far as we know, there’s no “International Talk Like a Parrot Day”, unfortunately) on his shoulder.  We can trace this back to the original novel and identify him as “Captain Flint”, Silver’s pet.  Here he is in a picture from our favorite illustrated version, that of NC Wyeth, from 1911.

image7newton.jpg

(If you’d like your own early edition, with Wyeth’s illustrations—not his only pirate pictures, by the way—here’s a LINK to the 1913 printing.)

Among other parrotings, Captain Flint is given to calling “pieces of eight!” and, when we were little, we wondered “pieces of eight what?” and perhaps you did, too.  The story begins much earlier than the novel—about 1500.  It starts with this early Spanish silver coin called a “real” (14th century).

image8real

About 1500, a new coin appeared, worth 8 reales,

image9piece

and this is a “piece of eight”.

It shouldn’t be confused with another coin Captain Flint might have exclaimed over, the doubloon.

10adoubloon

The doubloon (from Spanish  “doblon”—“double”) was gold, rather than silver, and was probably called “double” because it was worth two of the coins below, an escudo.

image10bescudo

Spanish silver supplies mushroomed after 1519, when a small expedition, led by Hernan Cortez (1485-1547)

image10cortez

landed on the coast of Mexico.  The expedition was armed with European weapons and armor of the period.

image11conq

As they marched inland, they found an empire, with a capital set in the middle of a lake, with public buildings made of stone blocks.

image12tenoch

image13tenoch

They also found that the local warriors were still living in the Neolithic Era and, though they were fierce, were no match for modern (early 16th-century) weapons.

image14aztecs

Farther south, other Spanish invaders found the same thing along the west coast of South America,

image15incas

image16aincas

and soon, they had enslaved the local populations and turned them to work in the silver mines, like that at San Luis Potosi, in Mexico.

image16bmap

image16abslaves

image17san

Their labor then produced vast quantities of precious metal, which was left in bars, or turned into coins—pieces of eight and others.  This was loaded on ships and sent back to Spain.

image18galleon

Such riches didn’t escape the attention of Spain’s enemies, however, and soon such ships had to travel in convoys, with merchant ships being shepherded by warships.

image19fleet

This didn’t prevent attacks completely, a famous leader of those attacks being Sir Francis Drake, from the days of Elizabeth I.

image20drake

Although the Spanish referred to Drake as a “pirate”, while England was at war with Spain (as it was for much of Drake’s later lifetime), to the English he was a “privateer”—a private naval commander holding a kind of license from Elizabeth I, which permitted him to attack enemy shipping at will (and to share the profits with the Queen’s government).  Because he wasn’t one of the government’s official officers, this created a kind of grey area, one which many sailors from western nations, as late as the Napoleonic wars, would take advantage of, slipping between government service and something which, even with that license, could look like piracy.  Such men included the notorious, like Captain Kidd

image21kidd

(of whom there is no portrait—we inserted this just for fun)

and Edward Teach, “Blackbeard”.

image22blackbeard

(His beard isn’t really on fire, by the way.  He wove bits of matchcord—used to fire ships’ guns and touch off handgrenades—into it to give himself a fiendish aspect.)

image23gun

image24grenado

Rather than sharing it with governments, both men were said to have taken much of their loot ashore and buried it in now-lost locations—

image25treasure

which brings us back to the map and Captain Flint squawking, “Pieces of eight!”

image26map

D31MWE Long John Silver. Image shot 1954. Exact date unknown.

Thanks, as always, for reading, and definitely

MTCIDC (matey!)

CD

ps

The most famous of Blackbeard’s ships, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, has been located off the coast of North Carolina, here in the US.  Here’s a LINK to the site which talks all about the discovery and the ongoing archaeology.

← Older posts

The Doubtful Sea Series Facebook Page

The Doubtful Sea Series Facebook Page

  • Ollamh

Categories

  • Artists and Illustrators
  • Economics in Middle-earth
  • Fairy Tales and Myths
  • Films and Music
  • Games
  • Heroes
  • Imaginary History
  • J.R.R. Tolkien
  • Language
  • Literary History
  • Maps
  • Medieval Russia
  • Military History
  • Military History of Middle-earth
  • Narnia
  • Narrative Methods
  • Poetry
  • Research
  • Star Wars
  • Terra Australis
  • The Rohirrim
  • Theatre and Performance
  • Tolkien
  • Uncategorized
  • Villains
  • Writing as Collaborators
Follow doubtfulsea on WordPress.com

Across the Doubtful Sea

Recent Postings

  • Horning In (2) February 1, 2023
  • Horning In (1) January 25, 2023
  •  Things You/They Know That Ain’t January 18, 2023
  • Sympathy for a Devil? January 11, 2023
  • Trumpeting January 4, 2023
  • Seating December 28, 2022
  • Yule? December 21, 2022
  • Sequels and Prequel December 14, 2022
  • Rascals December 7, 2022

Blog Statistics

  • 69,219 Views

Posting Archive

  • February 2023 (1)
  • January 2023 (4)
  • December 2022 (4)
  • November 2022 (5)
  • October 2022 (4)
  • September 2022 (4)
  • August 2022 (5)
  • July 2022 (4)
  • June 2022 (5)
  • May 2022 (4)
  • April 2022 (4)
  • March 2022 (5)
  • February 2022 (4)
  • January 2022 (4)
  • December 2021 (5)
  • November 2021 (4)
  • October 2021 (4)
  • September 2021 (5)
  • August 2021 (4)
  • July 2021 (4)
  • June 2021 (5)
  • May 2021 (4)
  • April 2021 (4)
  • March 2021 (5)
  • February 2021 (4)
  • January 2021 (4)
  • December 2020 (5)
  • November 2020 (4)
  • October 2020 (4)
  • September 2020 (5)
  • August 2020 (4)
  • July 2020 (5)
  • June 2020 (4)
  • May 2020 (4)
  • April 2020 (5)
  • March 2020 (4)
  • February 2020 (4)
  • January 2020 (6)
  • December 2019 (4)
  • November 2019 (4)
  • October 2019 (5)
  • September 2019 (4)
  • August 2019 (4)
  • July 2019 (5)
  • June 2019 (4)
  • May 2019 (5)
  • April 2019 (4)
  • March 2019 (4)
  • February 2019 (4)
  • January 2019 (5)
  • December 2018 (4)
  • November 2018 (4)
  • October 2018 (5)
  • September 2018 (4)
  • August 2018 (5)
  • July 2018 (4)
  • June 2018 (4)
  • May 2018 (5)
  • April 2018 (4)
  • March 2018 (4)
  • February 2018 (4)
  • January 2018 (5)
  • December 2017 (4)
  • November 2017 (4)
  • October 2017 (4)
  • September 2017 (4)
  • August 2017 (5)
  • July 2017 (4)
  • June 2017 (4)
  • May 2017 (5)
  • April 2017 (4)
  • March 2017 (5)
  • February 2017 (4)
  • January 2017 (4)
  • December 2016 (4)
  • November 2016 (5)
  • October 2016 (6)
  • September 2016 (5)
  • August 2016 (5)
  • July 2016 (5)
  • June 2016 (5)
  • May 2016 (4)
  • April 2016 (4)
  • March 2016 (5)
  • February 2016 (4)
  • January 2016 (4)
  • December 2015 (5)
  • November 2015 (5)
  • October 2015 (4)
  • September 2015 (5)
  • August 2015 (4)
  • July 2015 (5)
  • June 2015 (5)
  • May 2015 (4)
  • April 2015 (3)
  • March 2015 (4)
  • February 2015 (4)
  • January 2015 (4)
  • December 2014 (5)
  • November 2014 (4)
  • October 2014 (6)
  • September 2014 (1)

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • doubtfulsea
    • Join 68 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • doubtfulsea
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...