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Category Archives: Medieval Russia

In a Pukel

09 Wednesday May 2018

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Fairy Tales and Myths, J.R.R. Tolkien, Maps, Medieval Russia, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, The Rohirrim

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balbal, Carnac Stones, Cherna, Denis Gordeev, Druadan Forest, Dunharrow, Easter Island, Eored, Ghan-buri-Ghan, Gondor, menhirs, moai, Pukel-men, Rapa Nui, Rohan, Rohirrim, Stonewain Valley, Ted Nasmith, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Unfinished Tales, Vsadniki, Woses

Welcome, dear readers, as ever.

After their mustering and rapid journey to the aid of Gondor, the Rohirrim

image1rohirrim.jpg

have been stopped:

“Scouts had been sent ahead.  Some had not returned.  Others hastening back had reported that the road was held in force against them.  A host of the enemy was encamped upon it, three [4.8km]] miles west of Amon Din, and some strength of men was already thrusting along the road and was not more than three leagues [about 9 miles/14.5km] away.”  (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 5, “The Ride of the Rohirrim”)

image2map.jpg

And so they are camped temporarily in the murk which has fallen over the West—a sign of Sauron on the move.

As they remain there, Merry gradually hears a sound like distant drums and, when Elfhelm, the Marshal of the eored [Rohirrim unit of horsemen] in which Merry and his mysterious companion, Dernhelm, are riding, stumbles over him, Merry asks if it’s the enemy:

“Are those their drums?”

Elfhelm replies:

“You hear the Woses, the Wild Men of the Woods…They still haunt Druadan Foest, it is said…But they have offered their services to Theoden.  Even now one of their headmen is being taken to the king.”

Merry follows Elfhelm and soon sees:

“A large lantern, covered above, was hanging from a bough and cast a pale circle of light below.  There sat Theoden and Eomer, and before them on the ground sat a strange squat shape of a man, gnarled as an old stone, and the hairs of his scanty beard straggled on his lumpy chin like dry moss.  He was short-legged and fat-armed, thick and stumpy, and clad only with grass about his waist.”

This, we find out, is Ghan-buri-Ghan, leader of the Wild Men, who, as Elfhelm has said, has come to offer his and his people’s aid to Theoden.

image3ghanburighan.jpg

(We note, by the way, that this Hildebrandt illustration has taken certain liberties with the scene as described in the book:  it appears to be daylight—no lantern—if Eomer is there, he isn’t seated, and there is more than one Wild Man–oh, and the Wild Man’s beard has suddenly sprouted.)

What Ghan-buri-Ghan offers Theoden is a long-forgotten road which would provide a way around the soldiers of Sauron who are blocking the direct route to Minas Tirith:   the path through the Stonewain Valley.

image4stonewainfalley.jpg

What caught our attention here was the connection Merry made between Ghan-buri-Ghan and something he’d encountered only recently:

“Merry felt that he had seen him before somewhere, and suddenly he remembered the Pukel-men of Dunharrow.  Here was one of those old images brought to life, or maybe a creature descended in true line through endless years from the models used by the forgotten craftsmen long ago.”

Dunharrow

image5dunharrowjrrt.jpg

was a mysterious place—

“…the work of long-forgotten men.  Their name was lost and no song or legend remembered it.  For what purpose they had made this place, as a town or secret temple or a tomb of kings, none in Rohan could say.  Here they labored in the Dark Years, before ever a ship came to the western shores, or Gondor of the Dunedain was built; and now they had vanished, and only the old Pukel-men were left, still sitting at the turnings of the road.

Merry stared at the lines of marching stones:  they were worn and black; some were leaning, some were fallen, some cracked or broken; they looked like rows of old and hungry teeth.” (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 3, “The Muster of Rohan”)

For a moment, this description reminded us of something one sees in Brittany, on the west coast of France, the so-called “Carnac Stones”, a vast field of Neolithic upright stones, now called menhirs (Breton for “long stone”) in long lines in and around the village of Carnac.

image6carnac1.jpg

image7carnacstones2.jpg

And, just as the use or meaning of Dunharrow is lost, so is that of the elaborate construction of the Carnac Stones.

Once the Carnac Stones—and others like them, both in France and in Great Britain—came into our heads, we were whirled away to Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and all of those puzzling outsized heads on less-developed torsos, the moai.

image8moai.jpg

It was not the size or placement of those figures like “rows of old and hungry teeth” however, which made us think further about Ghan-buri-Ghan and his stony cousins, but how the figures were carved:

“At each turn of the road there were great standing stones that had been carved in the likeness of men, huge and clumsy-limbed, squatting cross-legged with their stumpy arms folded on fat bellies.  Some in the wearing of the years had lost all features save the dark holes of their eyes that still stared sadly at the passers-by.  The Riders hardly glanced at them.  The Pukel-men they called them, and heeded them little…”

As the Rohirrim are translated as speaking among themselves a sort of Tolkien-adapted Old English, so “pukel” appears to be derived from “pucel” = “goblin/demon”, which suggests perhaps a quasi-religious or magical use, but, if they once represented spirits, they are now spiritless, with no ability to frighten.  Rather, as the narrator tells us:

“…no power or terror was left in them; but Merry gazed at them with wonder and a feeling almost of pity, as they loomed up mournfully in the dusk.”

The narrator’s elaboration then reminded us of something else:  balbal.

image9balbal.jpg

image9bbalbal.jpg

These are carved stone figures with a history probably as long as that of the Pukel-men.  They appear to be the product of Turkic peoples in Central Asia—with even older relatives, perhaps, to the west, as well.  Some may have been tomb guardians or monuments themselves—as with the Pukel-men, their origins and use/s are lost to us.  We ourselves have stolen them for use in our series of novels based in an imaginary medieval fairy tale Russia, called Cherna, “The Black Land”—but please don’t think “Mordor?”  In our case, the reason it’s named that is that it is steppe country with extremely fertile black soil.  So rich, especially as pasture-land, that it’s worth invading and fighting over, which is what the villains of our trilogy, the Vsadniki, modeled on the Mongols, do.

image10mongols.jpg

Unlike Pukel-men and menhirs and moai, however, there is no mystery about what the Vsadniki are up to with their stones:  every time they conquer a new land, they set such stones up at their new far-western border to say not only “what’s behind these is ours”, but also “and we’re looking at your lands next”.

image11balbal.jpeg

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

ps

In the Tolkien volume Unfinished Tales, we find further connections between the Wild Men/Woses and carvings.  We use a paperback edition and this has somewhat different pagination from the hardbound, but, should you be interested, you can find it in either form in Part Four, I The Druedain.

pps

Here is a drawing of Ghan-buri-Ghan by Denis Gordeev, who has done a good deal of work illustrating a wide selection of JRRT’s fiction, rather as Ted Nasmith has, along with many other classics as well as modern fantasy fiction.

image11gbg.jpg

Gordeev has clearly been trained/trained himself in drawing as people did in that golden age of children’s writing and illustration, the 1880s to 1920s, and, once you get used to his very distinctive style, you may come to like it as we do.  Here’s Gandalf arriving in Hobbiton, fireworks and all, just to give you a taste.

image12gandalf.jpg

More Russian Favorites

10 Tuesday Feb 2015

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Fairy Tales and Myths, Medieval Russia

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Adventure, Epic, Fairytale Illustrators, Fantasy, Heroic, Medieval, Russia, Song

Dear Reader,

Welcome, as always.

We are very visual people. A picture in a museum, an illustration in a book, something in a film, will always catch our eye and sometimes inspire our writing.

This was certainly the case in our first book, Across the Doubtful Sea, where the drawings and paintings from the three Cook expeditions to the South Seas (1768-1779) filled us with a combination of wonder and curiosity. Although they were sometimes strongly influenced by period ideas of the sublime, here were images as close to historical photos as we would ever see.

Hodges,_Resolution_and_Adventure_in_Matavai_Bay

In the case of our second book, The Good King’s Daughter, however, because it was set in a world based loosely upon the medieval Russia of fairy tales, we looked to other sources, particularly those later-19th and 20th-century Russian artists who illustrated moments from the Russian heroic songs (byliny) and from the fairy and folktales themselves.

In our last, we showed you a few images from the work of perhaps the most famous (outside Russia, at least) illustrator, Ivan Bilibin (1876-1942). Pictures like “The Island of Buyan” (1905):

Ivanbilibin

In this posting, we would add two more artists, Victor Vasnetsov (1848-1926—not to be confused with his equally-talented brother, Apollinary 1856-1923) and the more recent Nikolai Kochergin (1897-1974).

As you can see from the pictures below, Vasnetsov can move from the grandly (and grimly) heroic world of the byliny and its bogatyr (epic hero) to a more fanciful world of fairy tales like The Firebird (but still rather grim and grand).

1898_Vasnetsov_Bogatyrs_anagoria Igorsvyat Vasnetsov_samolet Viktor%20Vasnetsov-526879

hero

a-knight-at-the-crossroads-1878

Kochergin strikes us as more like Bilibin—brightly-colored, folk-influenced.

4f463a868cf7b31a66ad1c87e00 9f97a52394ba8269194a869df52 berendei-palace nicolai-kochergin_the-wooden-eagle

tumblr_mxjgrquVKF1rz5qxqo1_500

nicolai-kochergin_seven-simeons-seven-workers

tumblr_ndw64pRZCk1rgcyvso2_500

What inspires us in these pictures? To a degree, it’s what attracts us to the fairy/folktales: the strange scenes (even when you know the story), the swirl of color, that suggestion of a complex world of patterns from a different time and place, one in which there were yagas and firebirds and heroes who could be helped by wise animals.

And you, reader, do these pictures inspire you?

Thanks for reading!

MTCIDC

CD

PS

If you would like to know more about Russian heroic song—and for free—you might try:

Hapgood, Isabel Florence, The Epic Songs of Russia (1916)

Harrison, Marion Chilton, Byliny Book: Hero Tales of Russia (1915)

at archive.org. They are clearly older books, but, for those on a budget, they can provide a starting place into a rich world worth visiting.

Picturing Wonder

02 Monday Feb 2015

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Medieval Russia

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Fairytale Illustrators, Ivan Bilibin, Russian Fairy Tales

Dear Readers,

Welcome!

In our last, we mentioned that we have a second book in the works. It’s part of a series whose titles (and elements) are based upon this mysterious nursery rhyme:

“Grey goose and gander,

Waft your wings together

To carry the good king’s daughter

Over the one-strand river.”

The second book in the series, The Good King’s Daughter, is now a complete draft and is currently being given its first editorial run-through. Then it will be checked, rewritten where necessary, then formatted and published, like Across the Doubtful Sea, on Amazon and Kindle, we hope by early March. In the meantime, work goes on for the first in the series, Grey Goose and Gander, as well as on our sequel to Across, Empire of the Isles.

The Grey Goose series takes place in an imaginary medieval Russia, with yagas, talking animals, warriors, invaders like the historical Mongols, magic, saints, singers, and a young woman warrior, Unegen. The story is original, although there are elements from Russian history, as well as from folk tales.

We also mentioned in our last our favorite Russian fairy tale illustrator, Ivan Bilibin (1876-1942).

1901._Portrait_of_Ivan_Bilibin_by_B._Kustodiev

If you look him up on-line, you’ll find out that he was strongly influenced by his exposure to traditional Russian folk art and architecture. Like these:

russianwoodenbuilding TiledStoveCropt 0_10731_92b7363f_L russiancostumescentral

There is scholarly argument over how authentic this sort of thing was by Bilibin’s time: by 1700, Peter the Great was actively westernizing Russia. This lead to everything from laws about dress to regulations about beards (Peter taxed them—but so had Henry VIII, who had one, and Elizabeth I, who did not).

russianbeardcutting

Beard_token

(The second picture is of a government token to show anyone who would ask that you’ve paid the beard tax.)

And here we come to that fork in the road where “strictly accurate” may get in the way of creativity. Anyone who has read The Lord of the Rings knows that Rohan has wide, grassy plains. There are no such plains in New Zealand, so Peter Jackson did what he could to give at least the rolling effect. It’s not grassy, as JRRT described, but we have yet to meet anyone who has complained about the look of Jackson’s Edoras or the Rohirrim (one of our all-time favorite parts of the films, in fact).

Bilibin was inspired by something, no doubt. He wrote about it in Folk Arts of the Russian North (1904). And he produced illustrations like these—

bilibin3_saltan bilibinbrdrs-1024x710 Ivan_Bilibin_024_variation Ivan_Bilibin_028 Ivan_Bilibin_247 Ivan-Bilibin-Baba-Yaga IvanBilibin11 PR_RU--12--big PR_RU--13--big ruske-bajke-ivan-bilibin-4 ruske-bajke-ivan-bilibin-6 Vasilisa

We hope you enjoy them as much as we do and imagine that, in our world of Grey Goose, Bilibin would feel right at home.

Thanks for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

PS

Amazon carries Golynets’ Ivan Bilibin, but if you would like to see the illustrator in his natural habitat, you can download Wheeler’s 1912 Russian Wonder Tales (in a 1917 reprinting) with Bilibin’s illustrations at Archive.org for free.

PPS

We’ve just discovered a very interesting site at Textualities.net. It’s full of images and interesting ideas.

 

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