Terrifyingly Funny? (Part 1)

13 Wednesday Jul 2016

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

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Adventure, Among Gnomes and Trolls, Bilbo, comic, Gandalf, Gollum, humor, John Bauer, Middle-earth, Pēro & Pōdex, Roast Mutton, Stone Trolls, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Through the Looking-Glass, Tolkien, Tommies, trolls, Victorian Drawing Room

Dear Readers, welcome, as always.

This is going to be a two-part posting because– well, it began as one thing, and then became another. We were thinking about Gollum, not as the grim and tormented figure we know from The Lord of the Rings, but rather as the muttering, riddling cave-dweller of The Hobbit. We were wondering if we could see Gollum not only as menacing, but as comic, as well.

Then, however, we began to think about other such figures, and one of us said to the other, “What about the trolls in The Hobbit?”. The other replied, “we see them before we see Gollum. Maybe we should start with them.”

And so we shall.

It’s clear where Tolkien got his trolls– they’re all over the fairy tales he had been reading since childhood, and they form a component of the traditional Scandinavian literature in which he had been interested for nearly as long. They are commonly large, and not terrifically bright, and often possess an anxiety about daylight. One of our favorite illustrators of such creatures is John Bauer (1882-1918), who, among other works, contributed illustrations to an ongoing series of volumes appropriately titled Among Gnomes and Trolls. Here, for example, is one of his depictions of the latter.

And, because we can’t resist– can we ever? Here are a couple more illustrations by Bauer.

Even before The Hobbit, however, Tolkien had produced a literary troll. In 1926, he wrote the first version of a poem to be sung to the folk song “The Fox Went Out”, called “Pēro & Pōdex”(“Boot and Bottom”). It survives in a later version in chapter 12 of Book 1 of The Lord of the Rings, beginning “Troll sat alone on his seat of stone”.

In The Hobbit, the trolls are grouped around a fire, drinking and eating and immediately recognizable:

“But they were trolls. Obviously trolls. Even Bilbo, in spite of his sheltered life, could see that: from the great heavy faces of them, and their size, and the shape of their legs, not to mention their language, which was not drawing-room fashion at all, at all.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 2, “Roast Mutton”)

Douglas Anderson, in his invaluable The Annotated Hobbit, says that “Tolkien presents the Trolls’ speech in a comic, lower-class dialect” (70). In fact, we wonder whether, as in the case of the later orcs in The Lord of the Rings, we are not seeing a reflection of the speech of some of the Tommies whom Tolkien had commanded in the Great War.

” ‘Mutton yesterday, mutton today, and blimey, if it don’t look like mutton again tomorrer,’ said one of the trolls.

‘Never a blinking bit of manflesh have we had for long enough,’ said a second. ‘What the ‘ell William was a-thinkin; of to bring us into these parts at all, beats me – and the drink runnin’ short, what’s more,’ he said jogging the elbow of William, who was taking a pull at his jug” (The Hobbit, Chapter 2, “Roast Mutton”).

Besides what sounds like a reference to a line in Through the Looking-Glass (1871), “The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday – but never jam to-day,” with their “blimey” and “blinking”, the trolls are immediately labeled by their speech as lower-class, potentially thuggish, and certainly not people invited to a formal drawing room like this–

Of course, we might ask ourselves, why should trolls talk like that anyway? And we might then reply, because Tolkien is mixing language for comic effect. Bilbo, Gandalf, and the dwarves speak in non-dialect standard English. Therefore, there’s an especially strong contrast here. As well, what the trolls are saying can be funny in itself, as when William says to the discontented other trolls,

” ‘Yer can’t expect folk to stop here for ever just to be et by you and Bert. You’ve et a village and a half between yer, since we come down from the mountains. What more d’yer want?’ ” (The Hobbit, Chapter 2, “Roast Mutton”).

Here, we have comic exaggeration combined with the frustrated defensiveness of a leader whose tactics are being questioned by subordinates.

The tension grows as the scene progresses. Bilbo appears, is nabbed by a purse which sounds like the Trolls, the Trolls fall to fisticuffs while arguing over Bilbo and then over the dwarves whom they capture, and Gandalf, imitating various Troll voices, so stirs the pot that the Trolls never notice when the first beam of sunlight cuts across their clearing and they are petrified.

So, if we consider what the Trolls have been doing previously–“Never a blinking bit of manflesh have we had for long enough…” says one, as well as what they discuss doing not only to Bilbo, but to the whole of Thorin & Co., these could seem to be grim figures, indeed. Then again, they sound like comic cockneys, they have ludicrously-large appetites, and they are dim enough to be taken in very easily by Gandalf’s ventriloquism. So, grim and funny at the same time.

On the whole, humor is more an element in The Hobbit than in The Lord of the Rings, but we believe that perhaps because of his initial appearance in The Hobbit, Gollum may have both the menace and the humor, at times , of these gormless Trolls, as we hope to show in Part 2.

Thanks, as always, for reading,

MTCIDC,

Ambiguity in Oz

06 Wednesday Jul 2016

Posted by Ollamh in Films and Music, Literary History, Narrative Methods, Theatre and Performance, Villains

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Adventure, Aldus Manutius, Captain Cyril Turner, condensation trail, Epsom Downs, James Pollard, Let's eat grandma, Oz, punctuation, skywriting, Surrender Dorothy, The Wizard of Oz, the Wright brothers, Wicked Witch

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always.

It was a bright, breezy morning yesterday and we were looking up at a contrail (short for “con(densation) trail”)

which brought to mind this message:

from the 1939 movie, The Wizard of Oz. At this moment in the movie, the four friends (and Toto),

seemingly welcome in the Emerald City, have been enjoying their welcome when the happy music stops at a shriek, and they look up to see the Wicked Witch of the West skywriting.

In the US in 1939, artificial flying objects would hardly have been a surprise. After 1903,

and certainly after the Great War

aircraft were increasingly common—even up to massive dirigibles.

Skywriting—

is said to have been first commercially employed in 1922 at Epsom Downs, in England,

where Captain Cyril Turner wrote “Daily Mail” over the race track.

(This is a painting by James Pollard from 1835, but we couldn’t resist its detail.)

It appeared over New York City for the first time shortly afterward.

In Oz, however, the usual airborne objects appear to have been:

crows

witches

monkeys

(To which we might add 4. balloons—although there is only one and it’s not a native product.)

Thus, a thing like a flying house

would have been more than a little disturbing (and still is, here in this world)—especially when it landed on a major political figure.

As well, although witches fly in Oz, as far as we know, they are not given to delivering messages by air.

(This message, by the way, was:

made by using a hypodermic needle filled with black ink to write on the bottom of a glass tank filled with colored water
originally longer—here is what it first said:

)

Equally disturbing to us, however, is the ambiguous (from Latin amb-, “both” and ag- “to drive”—hence, “to go in two directions”) nature of the message—all due to a (potentially) missing comma.

Modern western punctuation took several centuries to appear and mature, beginning with the work of the early printer, Aldus Manutius (the Elder—1449-1515) in the later 15^th century.

On the whole, modern native English-speakers tend to use the same practices, although an inverted prepositional phrase in American English, for example, has a comma, where British English does not.

Uninverted: There were about twenty fresh crabs in the sink.

Inverted (US): In the sink, there were about twenty fresh crabs.

Inverted (UK): In the sink there were about twenty fresh crabs.

When this is spoken by any native-speaker, there is a slight pause after “sink” and the point of the comma (a point which goes back to 16^th-century rhetorical texts, in which punctuation is intended to be used like rests in music, as a series of directional signals as to pauses) is to signal that natural pause.

There is no ambiguity either way in the model sentence, but what about in the Witch’s command?

As it stands, “Surrender Dorothy”, without a comma, is a kind of general imperative—it could perhaps be addressed to all of Oz—and thus easily explained in a longer construction, like “Oz! Surrender Dorothy”—perhaps with the original conclusion “or Die!”

But is this the Witch’s intention? Insert the comma and you have a command directed specifically—and solely–to Dorothy: “Surrender, Dorothy!” (As we learn when Dorothy is in the hands of the Witch, the deleted part of the message “Or Die” is not quite accurate—the Witch wants the Ruby Slippers, but can’t get them without killing the wearer, so that the real message should be “Surrender, Dorothy—and Die!”—which is hardly likely to be persuasive!)

There is a cartoon about English punctuation which has circulated for some years:

In the version without the comma, it’s an invitation to eat grandma. With the comma, it’s an invitation to eat with grandma. In the case of the Witch’s message, what do you think: is it a command to Oz, or to Dorothy?

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

Winter is Coming

29 Wednesday Jun 2016

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

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C.S. Lewis, Frozen, Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin, Hadrian's Wall, Hans Christian Andersen, Kay, Middle-earth, Mile castle, Puddleglum, Queen Elsa, Rammas Echor, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe, The Lord of the Rings, The Night Watch, the Pevensies, The Snow Queen, The White Witch, Tolkien, Westeros, White Walkers, Winter is Coming

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as ever.

We were playing Sortes Tolkienses yesterday. That’s the game where we close our eyes, open The Lord of the Rings to any page, then put our finger on a line to see if we can write about it.

On page 1042 of our edition, our finger fell upon:

“…you may stay here till the Witch-king goes home. For in the summer his power wanes, but now his breath is deadly, and his cold arm is long.” (The Lord of the Rings, Appendix A)

The Witch-king? Oh, we thought—that Witch-king.

He has a very long history in Middle-earth, being “probably (like the Lieutenant of Barad-dur) of Numenorean descent” (from Hammond and Scull, The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion, 20, Note 5) and, in the quoted context rules Angmar

with a command to destroy the northern Numenorean kingdom of Arnor.

What caught our attention, however, was that idea of a “cold arm”. This might be metaphorical—except for that “in summer his power wanes”, suggesting that, if he can’t control the weather, he can at least use it to his advantage. And this set us thinking about stories in which winter was either controlled by someone or was, itself, the antagonist.

First, there is Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen (1845). Although this shares a title with a 2013 Disney film, there is really nothing else to link them. The Disney film has, of course, the Princess Elsa, whose enchanted hands can turn the world into winter (perhaps like the Witch-king?).

Andersen’s long fairy tale (in seven parts, or “stories”, historier, in Danish) is about the abduction of a boy and his rescue by his friend, a girl. The boy is being held by the Snow Queen, who lives in a far-off palace made of snow, the windows and doors of icy wind, lit by the Northern Lights.

What particularly caught our attention here was the manner by which the boy, Kay, was stolen. He hitched his sled to the back of a sleigh, only to find that it was driven by the Snow Queen, who takes him under her robe.

Liz Bobzin, “The Snow Queen and Kay”

This took us to the White Witch of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), the first of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books.

TheLionWitchWardrobe(1stEd).jpg

She picks up one of the Pevensie children, Edmund, in her sleigh and, while she doesn’t abduct him physically, she corrupts him by playing upon his greed and vanity.

This is an illustration of the Witch from the original 1950 book, and here are two later interpretations—the first is from the 1988 BBC production

the second from the 2005 film.

(We like both versions—we don’t mind the Steiff Aslan in the BBC production

502613_l__13430.1384493387.1280.1280.jpg

and who could ever be a better Puddleglum than Tom Baker, the fourth incarnation of Dr. Who, in the BBC The Silver Chair, 1990?

We do worry a bit, however, about the changes made to the film versions of Prince Caspian, 2008, and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, 2010. They’re not so drastic as those we’ve come to expect from P. Jackson’s writers, but, especially in Prince Caspian, there is a tendency to change things for what appear to be marketing reasons…)

As in what appears to be the case of the Witch-king, the White Witch can control the weather and has imprisoned all of Narnia

in snow and ice for a century—“always winter, never Christmas”.

The idea of a world of winter then brought us to George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, both the novels and the impressive (and addicting) television series. In the world of Thrones, the large island of Westeros—

and the whole world, for that matter, has once suffered a winter which lasted for a generation and the fear of its return always casts a shadow over the present. During that time, the creatures known as the White Walkers appeared from the north, with armies of animated dead, and were only driven back at great cost. To prevent their return, the surviving humans built an immense wall, 700 feet high, 300 miles long, which effectively blocks entry to the lower two thirds of Westeros.

In an earlier posting, we discussed the Rammas Echor, the outer boundary wall which protects the Pelennor and Minas Tirith, and what we believe to be a major influence upon Tolkien’s idea, Hadrian’s Wall, which divides England from the lands to the north.

Roman.Britain.roads.jpg

Unlike The Wall in Thrones, it is under a hundred miles long, was never more than 16 to 20 feet high, and was built of turf, timber, and stone, not solid ice. It was, however, a complex construction, with 17 forts behind it

and a smaller fort (now called a “mile castle”) at the end of each mile,

with small towers set in between the mile castles.

It was garrisoned with thousands of soldiers over its years of occupation (begun 122AD, finally abandoned in the 5^th century).

In Thrones, this job has been taken on by The Night Watch, a rather haphazard collection of volunteers and conscripts.

And, south of them, the lands of the Stark family, Wardens of the North, whose motto—a warning of the dreaded future—forms the title of this posting.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

Evil Twin?

22 Wednesday Jun 2016

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

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Bilbo, Deagol, Edgar Allen Poe, Frodo, Gandalf, Gollum, Isildur, Lon Chaney Sr., London After Midnight, Peter Jackson, Pity, Smeagol, The Lord of the Rings, The One Ring, The Phantom of the Opera, The Shadow of the Past, Tolkien, twins, William Wilson

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always.

In Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, “William Wilson”, (1839) the protagonist is haunted by a double—not a genetic twin, but a kind of look-alike opposite—who acts upon the behavior of the debauched original. (He eventually murders the “twin”, only to discover that, in a sense, he’s murdered himself.)

In this posting, we want to think about a relationship which, born in The Hobbit, grows over time until it, too, appears almost to be a pair of mirror opposites—who sometimes exchange their roles…

” ‘Gollum!’ cried Frodo. ‘Gollum? Do you mean that this is the very Gollum-creature that Bilbo met? How loathsome!’ ” (The Lord of the Rings, Book 1, The Fellowship of the Ring, Chapter Two, “The Shadow of the Past”).

This is the moment in which Gandalf is beginning to explain the history of the Ring, first to Frodo, and then, in more detail, in the Council of Elrond.

When Gandalf reveals that a major force in that history has been Gollum, Frodo is both surprised and appalled.

Gandalf is not. In fact, he shows a kind of sympathy for Gollum which flickers throughout the whole of The Lord of the Rings and which might be best described as pity. When later in this chapter Frodo exclaims, “What a pity that Bilbo did not stab the creature when he had the chance”, Gandalf replies:

” ‘Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need. And he has been well rewarded, Frodo. Be sure that he took so little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because he began his ownership of the Ring so. With Pity.’ ” (The Lord of the Rings, Book 1, The Fellowship of the Ring, Chapter Two, “The Shadow of the Past”).

This, of course, is in contrast to what happened when Gollum found the Ring– because, in fact, he didn’t, and he murdered his friend Deagol, who did.

Sauron, we are told, has put much of his power—and himself—into the Ring. That power is often talked about in The Lord of the Rings, but it seems abstract—power to do what? One aspect of Sauron’s personality—a deep greed—is easily seen, however, reflected in how the Ring brings out that same feeling in others, even to the point of violence. Yet, as Gandalf says:

” ‘The murder of Deagol haunted Gollum, and he had made up a defence, repeating it to his “Precious” over and over again, as he gnawed bones in the dark, until he almost believed it.’ ” (The Lord of the Rings, Book 1, The Fellowship of the Ring, Chapter Two, “The Shadow of the Past”).

[Is there a hint of cannibalism here? When we first meet Gollum, the narrator says of him: “He liked meat too. Goblin he thought good, when he could get it…” (The Hobbit, “Riddles in the Dark”) Whose bones might Smeagol have gnawed first?

“No one ever found out what had become of Deagol; he was murdered far from home, and his body was cunningly hidden.” ]

We might wonder, thinking of “William Wilson”, if Smeagol and Deagol were, in a sense, twins?

“He had a friend called Deagol, of similar sort, sharper-eyed but not so quick and strong.” (The Lord of the Rings, Book 1, The Fellowship of the Ring, Chapter Two, “The Shadow of the Past”)

And Smeagol’s torment has as much to do with the symbolic killing of the “good” self as it does the murder of a friend?

Smeagol and Deagol by Williweissfuss

There may be a moral element here, as well, and it’s interesting to think that, although infected with Sauron’s greed, this potential for knowing right from wrong remains, at least temporarily, in Gollum, making him lie to himself and to others about how he acquired the ring. Bilbo must have felt this, too, even if he gained the Ring through non-violent means, this need for self-justification. And so he lies, but, to someone with a deeper knowledge, such behavior is all-too-transparent, as Gandalf says:

“Then I heard Bilbo’s strange story of how he had ‘won’ it, and I could not believe it. When I at last got the truth out of him, I saw at once that he had been trying to put his claim to the ring beyond doubt. Much like Gollum with his ‘birthday-present’. The lies were too much alike for my comfort.” (The Lord of the Rings, Book 1, The Fellowship of the Ring, Chapter Two, “The Shadow of the Past”).

Gandalf has seen the lie, but he has also seen something else, a kind of pattern in that lying and a worrying link between the liars, which he expresses in his response to Frodo’s disgust at the thought of Gollum with the Ring:

“ ‘I think that it is a sad story,’ said the wizard, ‘and it might have happened to others, even to some hobbits that I have known.’ “ (The Lord of the Rings, Book 1, The Fellowship of the Ring, Chapter 2, “The Shadow of the Past”)

Gandalf has also seen a deeper similarity between the two. When Frodo says that he can’t believe that Gollum has any connection with hobbits, Gandalf says:

“ ‘It is true all the same…About their origins, at any rate, I know more than hobbits do themselves. And even Bilbo’s story suggests the kinship. There was a great deal in the background of their minds and memories that was very similar. They understood one another remarkably well, very much better than a hobbit would understand, say, a Dwarf, or an Orc, or even an Elf. Think of the riddles they both knew, for one thing.’ “ (The Lord of the Rings, Book 1, The Fellowship of the Ring, Chapter 2, “The Shadow of the Past”)

Alan Lee - The Hobbit - 19 - Riddles in the dark.jpg

Alan Lee, “Riddles in the Dark”

This connection is not just with Bilbo—Frodo, too, appears to share it, as we see later in the story:

“For a moment it appeared to Sam that his master had grown and Gollum had shrunk: a tall stern shadow, a mighty lord who hid his brightness in grey cloud, and at his feet a little whining dog. Yet the two were in some way akin and not alien: they could reach one another’s minds.” (The Lord of the Rings, Book 4, The Two Towers, Chapter 1, “The Taming of Smeagol”)

But this is the behavior of a hobbit as the “good” twin, when he has the Ring and believes himself in control. Below it always lurks Sauron’s greed, and it can bring the “bad” twin to the surface very easily, as Frodo imagines when Bilbo says:

“ ‘Have you got it here?’ he asked in a whisper. ‘I can’t help feeling curious, you know, after all I’ve heard. I should very much like just to peep at it again.’

‘Yes, I’ve got it,’ answered Frodo, feeling a strange reluctance. ‘It looks just the same as it ever did.’

‘Well, I should just like to see it for a moment,’ said Bilbo.

When he had dressed, Frodo found that while he slept the Ring had been hung about his neck on a new chain, light but strong. Slowly he drew it out. Bilbo put out his hand. But Frodo quickly drew back the Ring. To his distress and amazement he found that he was no longer looking at Bilbo; a shadow seemed to have fallen between them, and through it he found himself eyeing a little wrinkled creature with a hungry face and bony groping hands. He felt a desire to strike him.” (The Lord of the Rings, Book 2, The Fellowship of the Ring, Chapter 1, “Many Meetings”)

[Here we have included a second image which is, to our eyes, strikingly like the first. This is a picture of Lon Chaney, Sr., as Inspector Edward C. Burke of Scotland Yard, in the lost 1927 silent film London After Midnight. Chaney was a remarkable frightening presence on-screen, doing his own make-up, as in the 1925 The Phantom of the Opera, based upon Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel of the same title—]

ChaneyPhantomoftheOpera

Of course, one might ask here, was this really Bilbo Frodo was seeing through that shadow, or was it Sauron’s greed, distorting Frodo’s vision? Certainly, this happens again, when in “The Tower of Cirith Ungol”, Sam offers to carry the Ring and Frodo thought that:

“Sam had changed before his very eyes into an orc again, leering and pawing at his treasure, a foul little creature with greedy eyes and slobbering mouth.” (The Lord of the Rings, Book 6, The Return of the King, Chapter One, “The Tower of Cirith Ungol”)

And then, just at the moment before the Ring’s final destruction, it’s Frodo who changes before Sam’s eyes:

“Then Frodo stirred and spoke in a clear voice, indeed with a voice clearer and more powerful than Sam had ever heard him use, and it rose above the throb and turmoil of Mount Doom, ringing in the roof and walls.

‘I have come,’ he said. ‘But I do not choose now to do what I came to do. I will not do this deed. The Ring is mine!’ “ (The Lord of the Rings, Book 6, The Return of the King, Chapter Three, “Mount Doom”)

At this moment, it seems horribly appropriate that he put on the Ring and disappear, as the Frodo who has gone through such terrible hardship has disappeared, replaced not by Gollum as twin, but, it seems, by Isildur, who, when urged by Cirdan and Elrond, that the Ring “should have been cast then into Orodruin’s fire nigh at hand where it was made”, refused, saying “This I will have as weregild for my father, and my brother…” (The Lord of the Rings, Book 2, The Fellowship of the Ring, Chapter Two, “The Council of Elrond”)

But Gollum does appear and fulfills Gandalf’s near-prophecy to Frodo of long before:

“…he is bound up with the fate of the Ring. My heart tells me that he has some part to play yet, for good or ill, before the end; and when that comes, the pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many—yours not least.” (The Lord of the Rings, Book 1, The Fellowship of the Ring, Chapter Two, “The Shadow of the Past”)

Removing the Ring by removing the finger, Gollum continues the image of Isildur, who had done the same to Sauron to gain the Ring, and, at the same time, he releases Frodo from its spell, even as he falls to his death in the fires of Mount Doom. At the same time, Gollum also breaks the image of twins—and, unlike William Wilson, with the Ring gone and the bond, Frodo is maimed, but whole—and alone.

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

Rare Good Ballast

15 Wednesday Jun 2016

Posted by Ollamh in J.R.R. Tolkien, Narrative Methods

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Ballast, Chunu, Coney, Cuzco, Fish and Chips, Gollum, Green Eggs and Ham, Inca Empire, King James I, Machu Picchu, Potatoes, Sir Walter Raleigh, Smeagol, Spanish Explorers, Taters, Tea, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Tobacco, Tobias Hume, Tolkien

Welcome, dear readers, to our latest posting. This one is based upon a word, but that word leads us to an interesting question: when you make a new world, do you intend to include anything from your own? Or do things just sort of slip in?

The word is “taters”, as in “I’d give a lot for a half dozen taters.” (The Lord of the Rings, Book 4, Chapter 4, “Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit”)

(And a footnote–if you’re an American, you say that “erbs”, but, if you’re from the UK, you say it “Herbs”.)

It’s Sam, of course, trying to create a little domesticity while he and Frodo live rough on the trek south from the Morannon.

Gollum+Frode+Sam.jpg

At Sam’s request, Gollum has gone hunting and has returned with a pair of wild (European) rabbits, or coneys. (“Coney” is a worn-down form of the Latin word cuniculus, “rabbit”, through Old French, the source of so many Latin-based English words.)

Gollum, who has long forgotten about cooking (although one presumes that, in his distant life among his fellow proto-Hobbits, he wore clothes, lived in a house—or a hobbit hole–and ate bread), is convinced that Sam is going to ruin his catch.

“ ‘Stew the rabbits!’ squealed Gollum in dismay. ‘Spoil beautiful meat Smeagol saved for you, poor hungry Smeagol! What for? What for, silly hobbit? They are young, they are tender, they are nice. Eat them, eat them!’ “

(And here we can hear Sam-I-am from Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham, “Would you? Could you/In a car?/Eat them! Eat them!/Here they are.”)

GEH

Along with the coneys, Sam would like something more, “taters”, much to Gollum’s puzzlement:

“Smeagol won’t grub for roots and carrotses and—taters. What’s taters, precious, eh, what’s taters?”

And Sam spells it out:

“Po-ta-toes…The Gaffer’s delight, and rare good ballast for an empty belly. But you won’t find any, so you needn’t look.”

Most readers would know immediately what Sam meant when he said, “Po-ta-toes”, but how about “ballast?”

In a way, it may be odd that Sam would know this word, as it comes from the world of ocean-going ships and Sam has never been closer to bigger water than the Brandywine—and that only near the beginning of The Lord of the Rings.

Ballast is the weight put into the deepest hold of a ship to keep it balanced in the water—especially when it’s empty of cargo. It’s commonly stone and it’s very useful now for underwater archaeologists, since the stone, if it remains in place after a ship sinks, can show the outline of a hull.

ships-stone-ballasts

ballastinsitu

So “rare good ballast for an empty belly” gives us the image of a Gaffer kept upright and balanced, moving with potatoes inside him.

Sam has also said, “But you won’t find any, so you needn’t look”: why not?

In our world, before the 16^th century, potatoes were only available in South America, in particular in the Inca empire.

This was an elaborate patchwork of smaller peoples controlled by a military group with a capital at Cuzco.

Inca_MainMap3_sg

A Neolithic civilization, they were master architects, as may be seen in the remains of the Temple of the Sun, in the capital—

qoricancha

and in what is believed to be a summer palace, at Machu Picchu.

fondo-machu-picchu

With a king and an army

incanwarriors

they controlled much of the west coast of South America from 1438 to 1533, when Spanish invaders destroyed them and their world.

conquestofincas

A major food source was potatoes and there were many varieties available—and there still are, more than 1000—

Potatoes_Peruvian_varieties

In fact, the Inca even learned how to freeze-dry them to preserve them, a method called chunu.

Chunu

No one knows for sure when potatoes first came to Europe. It is imagined that Spaniards coming back from the New World would have brought them. In the English tradition, it was Sir Walter Raleigh who introduced them.

SirWalterRaleigh

They were then cultivated and rapidly became a major European food source, but they are not a native species and don’t grow wild—leading us to imagine that that’s what Sam is saying: Sam and Frodo and Gollum are in the wilderness and potatoes only grow where they’re planted—suggesting that, in Middle-earth, they are also an import—but from where?

(This reminds us of that moment in the Jackson film, where Sam and Frodo bump into Merry and Pippin in a corn—that is, maize–field. JRRT never mentions maize which, in European history, is also a New World import. This only makes us further wonder what the script writers thought they were doing in removing Pippin and Merry from their proper place in the story…)

There is more of this sort of thing, of course—Hobbits have teatime—we can suppose that it’s something herbal, but real teatime only appeared in England after the regular importation of tea to England from China in the mid-17^th century. (For those familiar with it, there is a funny Horrible Histories episode which shows the introduction of tea in Stuart times when, according to the story, people had been refreshing themselves previously with cups of hot water.)

6a00d8341c84c753ef0147e02eab6c970b-300wi

And then there’s tobacco. It’s called that in The Hobbit, but it’s “pipe weed” in The Lord of the Rings. Tobacco is one more import in our world—brought to Europe in the 16^th century. Here’s the first known image of someone actually smoking (from 1595).

Chute_tobacco.1595

It quickly became so popular that controversy over it, ranging from Tobias Hume’s ( 1579?-1645 ) love song to it, “Tobacco, Tobacco, sing sweetly for Tobacco” (from The First Part of Ayres or the Musicall Humours, No. 3, 1605—you can see the text and score if you Google “Tobias Hume” at IMSLP) to James the First’s condemnation of it, A Counterblaste to Tobacco (1604), which you can actually read if you Google “A Counterblaste to Tobacco”.

When JRRT was revising The Hobbit for its republication in 1966, he made a number of changes to the text, but some things remained, such as teatime, and even the image of a railroad train—“At may never return he began to feel a shriek coming up inside, and very soon it burst out like the whistle of an engine coming out of a tunnel.”

Douglas Anderson argues, in Note 35 of Chapter 1 of The Annotated Hobbit, that, in the case of the railroad, “This usage need not be viewed as an anachronism, for Tolkien as narrator was telling this story to his children in the early 1930s, and they lived in a world where railway trains were an important feature of life.” (The Annotated Hobbit, 47-48.) This is never really stated, in fact, in the Hobbit text, but the tone of the narration—which JRRT came to dislike—would suggest something of the sort. As for The Lord of the Rings, we have no explanation. Some items are never explained, they’re just there.

And, of course, there’s this:

“I’ll cook you some taters one of these days. I will: fried fish and chips served by S. Gamgee.”

fish-and-chips

FishAndChips

Perhaps this is in Hobbiton? Bywater? Michel Delving?

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

Paying No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain

08 Wednesday Jun 2016

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

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Beowulf, Cloacina, Connacht, Grendel, Heorot, Horatius, King of Leinster, Lembas, Lord Chesterfield, Mac Da Tho, Mordor, Odysseus, Penelope, Tamora Pierce, The Lord of the Rings, The Odyssey, The Wizard of Oz, Tolkien, Ulster

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always, to our blog. In this posting, we want to consider something usually invisible, but, at the same time, for reader/listeners, always there in adventure stories.

Think for a moment about your day. And how filled it is with requirements of the body, from sleep to washing to eating to—yes, you see where we’re going.

(And we can’t see this 18^th century outhouse—sometimes called a “necessary” or a “privy” then—without thinking of part of a letter by the famous 18^th-century essayist/letter-writer Lord Chesterfield (1694-1773).

Philip_Stanhope,_4th_Earl_of_Chesterfield.PNG

Who wrote a series of affectionate and very worldly-wise letters to his illegitimate son. In one of them he had the following advice—

“I knew a gentleman who was so good a manager of his time that he would not even lose that small portion of it which the calls of nature obliged him to pass in the necessary-house; but gradually went through all the Latin poets in those moments. He bought, for example, a common edition of Horace, of which he tore off gradually a couple of pages, carried them with him to that necessary place, read them first, and then sent them down as a sacrifice to Cloacina: this was so much time fairly gained, and I recommend you to follow his example…. Books of science and of a grave sort must be read with continuity; but there are very many, and even very useful ones, which may be read with advantage by snatches and unconnectedly: such are all the good Latin poets, except Virgil in his Æneid, and such are most of the modern poets, in which you will find many pieces worth reading that will not take up above seven or eight minutes.”

Cloacina was the patron goddess of the ancient main drain of Rome. Here’s an image of her shrine—

and here’s her drain

But, as we were starting to say, things of the body, ordinary things, are almost entirely ignored both in traditional adventure and in modern versions. In fact, it’s a bit of a shock to see, in some of Tamora Pierce’s YA novels (a big favorite of ours), that people actually use a latrine.

When we look at JRRT, for example, whose works we’ve often tried to set into a medieval context, we never see what one would have seen in such a context, whether behind a farmhouse

or in some place grand.

Garderobe,_Peveril_Castle,_Derbyshire.jpg

We began with the least common possibility, but this is as true for other functions—usually taken for granted, except for specific reasons. Sleep, for example, is very often employed simply as a way to show the passage of time during an adventure—and, in worlds without googlemaps, Siri, and perhaps even signposts

it’s a very natural and easy way to mark time and distance simultaneously.

Eating can show the same—think of Sam hoarding lembas as he and Frodo trek towards Mordor—

JRRT then uses it to show urgency, as well—what will they do in Mordor, when it runs out?

Of course, eating—in the form of feasting, in particular—can provide a major plot element.

Think of Heorot, the feasting hall, in Beowulf, for instance,

where feasts are ruined until Beowulf defeats their ruiner, Grendel.

Or the endless feasting of the suitors in the Odyssey

as they eat up everything which makes Odysseus the lord of his lands, besides trying to steal his wife, Penelope.

JohnWilliamWaterhouse-PenelopeandtheSuitors(1912).jpg

Here, eating and drinking take on a greater significance in that they are symbolic of the slow destruction of Odysseus’ household. They also provide a great setting for his reappearance and then, with the help of Athena, his massacre of the suitors in one of the wildest revenge scenes we know. It has quite a number of illustrators, from ancient

to Victorian

to modern—and our favorite, for the way it’s being shown from the angle of Odysseus’ patron, Athena

And then there is the feast, held in the rath of the king of Leinster, Mac Da Tho, which has to be one of the zaniest scela in Old Irish literature. Leinster’s most powerful neighbors, Ulster and Connacht, are at dinner, but there is a sudden difficulty over who will carve the pig.

Pictish_symbol_stone_from_Dores Wiki Commons.JPG

Like so many of the stories of the so-called “Ulster Cycle”, it is full of over-the-top violence and grim humor as both powers struggle to gain the honor of carving and therefore having the right to award the curadmir, the “hero’s portion”.

As you think about your favorite heroic or adventure story, consider the above—where can you see body care/body functions? Then, to take it a step farther: where does anyone ever sneeze? (We can think of one special one, but what can you come up with?—Hint: see Odyssey 17…)

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

“A kind of proud, venerable, but increasingly impotent Byzantium”

01 Wednesday Jun 2016

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

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Adventure, Byzantine Empire, Byzantium, Constantinople, Gondor, Justinian, Megara, Mehmet II, Milton Waldman, Minas Arnor, Minas Tirith, Mont Saint Michel, Ottoman Empire, Ted Nasmith, The Lord of the Rings, The Tower of Guard, Theodosian walls, Theodosius, Tolkien

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

The title of this posting is taken from a very long letter (10,000 words), written to Milton Waldman probably in 1951 (Letters No.131, 157). Waldman represented the English publisher, Collins, which had expressed an interest in The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion when Allen & Unwin had been hesitant. Determined to justify the simultaneous publication of both, Tolkien wrote in great detail about the general narrative, with an emphasis upon the religious aspects.

In the process, he likened Gondor to the Byzantine empire, a comparison which immediately attracted our attention. We ourselves had suggested in an earlier posting that the attack on its capital, Minas Tirith, had been like the siege of the Byzantine capital, Constantinople.

What was JRRT thinking of when he likened the two?

First, they both were—or had been—large kingdoms—in the case of Byzantium, an empire, really, as these maps demonstrate.

2000px-Byzantiumby650AD.svg.png

Their capitals were both of great age. Minas Tirith, “The Tower of Guard”, had been built originally as Minas Anor, “Tower of the Sun” in SA 3320 by Anarion, the younger son of Elendil, but only became the capital of Gondor in TA1640, after Osgiliath had been devastated by a plague. If we add its time in the Second Age (121 years) to the whole of the Third Age (3021 years), we reach a total of 3142 years at the defeat of Sauron. (For comparison, we might look at Athens, whose continuous habitation began before 3000BC, giving it a more-than-5000-year history.)

Constantinople, is old, by anyone’s standards, having been founded in 667BC as a Greek colony (there’s a bit of argument over the dating of this, which is typical of such things), and is still inhabited (and an absolutely amazing place!), but a bit younger than Minas Tirith at the time of The Lord of the Rings by some 500 years or so.

Third, there is the matter of the elaborate construction of these capitals.

“For the fashion of Minas Tirith was such that it was built on seven levels, each delved into the hill, and about each was set a wall, and in each wall was a gate. But the gates were not set in a line: the Great Gate in the City Wall was at the east point of the circuit, but the next faced half south, and the third half north, and so to and fro upwards; so that the paved way that climbed towards the Citadel turned first this way and then that across the face of the hill. And each time that it passed the line of the Great Gate it went through an arched tunnel, piercing a vast pier of rock whose huge out-thrust bulk divided in two all of the circles of the City save the first. For partly in the primeval shaping of the hill, partly by the mighty craft and labour of old, there stood up from the rear of the wide court behind the Gate a towering bastion of stone, its edge sharp as a ship-keel facing east. Up it rose, even to the level of the topmost circle, and there was crowned with a battlement; so that those in the Citadel might, like mariners in a monstrous ship, look from its peak sheer down upon the Gate seven hundred feet below.”

The Lord of the Rings, Book 5, Chapter 1, “Minas Tirith”

Here’s one of our favorite paintings (by Ted Nasmith—one of our favorite Tolkien artists).

TN-Minas_Tirith_at_Dawn.jpgnaismith.jpg

And here’s the film.

The designers have said that they were influenced by the look of Mont Saint Michel, a medieval monastery just off the coast of Normandy in France.

Mont_St_Michel_3,_Brittany,_France_-_July_2011.jpg

The complex nature of the place is captured in this diagram.

minas-tirith-diagram.0.jpg

Byzantium (or, Constantinople, its later name) began its life, as we said, as a colony of the Greek mainland city of Megara. In the 4^th century AD, the Roman emperor Constantine I, the last survivor in a long civil war, chose the site for his new capital. As much of the weight, both of commerce and defense, lay in the eastern part of the Roman world by this time, he chose very wisely: his new city was placed to control trade with the rich Black Sea region and to provide a strategic jumping-off point for dealing with invaders and emerging kingdoms in Asia Minor.

The position was also well-chosen for defense, being at the end of a peninsula—the main strategy then being its walling-off from the mainland.

There is, of course, a big difference here between the 7 levels and 7 gates of Minas Tirith and the two walls—the older inner 4^th-century one of Constantine and the slightly-later (early 5^th century) walls of Theodosius II. Nevertheless, those later walls were well-constructed, in two successive lines, with a moat on the outside.

Theodosian Walls.jpg

The Theodosian walls were about a mile-and-half from the older, Constantine wall, encompassing a population which, at its height, may have been over 400,000 in number. By the time of its fall to the Ottoman army in 1453, that number had dropped to perhaps only 50,000, which reflected the gradual shrinking of the empire from its greatest size, in the 6^th century

Byzantine-empire.6thc.gif

under the emperor Justinian

when it encompassed the majority of the Mediterranean basin, to its last, worn-out phase in the early 15^th century, when it controlled a few scattered outposts, but mainly the area directly around the capital.

This shrinking of the empire and of its population proved disastrous for the capital. When the Ottoman army, under Mehmet II, arrived outside the walls in the spring of 1453, the imperial government could only provide 7000 defenders, 2000 of whom were foreigners, to defend about 3 and ½ miles of wall (that’s 5 ½ km). Against them were anywhere from 50 to 80,000 attackers, who brought with them (or cast on the spot), massive artillery pieces and, after a 53-day siege, broke into the city and put an end to an empire which had lasted for over 1100 years.

Illustration-of-angus-mcbride-showing-the-ottoman-cannon-basilica-during-the-siege-of-constantinople-in-1453-ad.jpg

Benjamin-Constant-The_Entry_of_Mahomet_II_into_Constantinople-1876.jpg

And this is the last sad similarity with Gondor and its capital, as we see through Pippin’s eyes:

“Pippin gazed in growing wonder at the great stone city, vaster and more splendid than anything that he had dreamed of, greater and stronger than Isengard, and far more beautiful. Yet is was in truth falling year by year into decay, and already it lacked half the men that could have dwelt at ease there. In every street they passed some great house or court over whose doors and arched gates were carved many fair letters of strange and ancient shapes: names Pippin guessed of great men and kindreds that had once dwelt there; and yet now they were silent, and no footsteps rang on their wide pavements, nor voice was heard in their halls, nor any face looked out from door or empty window.”

The Lord of the Rings, Book 5, Chapter 1, “Minas Tirith”

And, just as in the case of Constantinople, the capital of Gondor was hard-pressed to defend itself. Luckily for it, however, there was an uncrowned king with a ghostly army, a brave reinforcement of southern yeomen, a mass of wild horsemen from the north, a wizard, and the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy about a witch king to aid it in its hour of need…

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

Rear Guard

18 Wednesday May 2016

Posted by Ollamh in Films and Music, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Maps, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, Narrative Methods

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66th Regiment, British Infantry, Denethor, Faramir, Gary Zaboly, Le Cateau, Maiwand, Nazgul, Osgiliath, Pelennor, Peter Jackson, Rammas Echor, Richard Caton Woodville, the Alamo, The Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King, The Siege of Gondor, Tolkien

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

In a previous posting, we rolled our eyes verbally at a moment in P. Jackson’s The Return of the King in which Faramir, according to the script, was required to mount a double-rank cavalry charge against the west bank of Osgiliath.

To us, this was a clumsy attempt to convey the clash between Faramir and his father Denethor, derived from material in The Lord of the Rings, Book 5, Chapter IV, “The Siege of Gondor”, principally from this:

“ ‘Much must be risked in war,’ said Denethor. ‘Cair Andros is manned, and no more can be sent so far. But I will not yield the River and the Pelennor unfought—not if there is a captain here who has still the courage to do his lord’s will.’

Then all were silent. But at length Faramir said: ‘I do not oppose your will, sire. Since you are robbed of Boromir, I will go and do what I can in his stead—if you command it.’

‘I do so,’ said Denethor.

‘Then farewell!’ said Faramir. ‘But if I should return, think better of me!’

‘That depends on the manner of your return,’ said Denethor.

Gandalf it was that last spoke to Faramir ere he rode east. ‘Do you throw your life away rashly or in bitterness,’ he said. ‘You will be needed here, for other things than war. Your father loves you, Faramir, and will remember it ere the end. Farewell!’ “

In the text, Faramir then goes to Osgiliath, having “taken with him such strength of men as were willing to go or could be spared.” The tone here is hardly encouraging and, the following day, “The passage of Anduin was won by the Enemy. Faramir was retreating to the wall of the Pelennor, rallying his men to the Causeway Forts; but he was ten times outnumbered.”

In an earlier posting, we have discussed the Rammas Echor, the wall which enclosed the farmland outside the walls of Minas Tirith.

We have also discussed the use by both Saruman and Sauron of what appears to be an early form of explosive—seen here in the following description of the fall of the Rammas:

“The bells of day had scarcely rung out again, a mockery in the unlightened dark, when far away he [Pippin] saw fires spring up, across in the dim spaces where the walls of the Pelennor stood. ..Now ever and anon there was a red flash, and slowly through the heavy air dull rumbles could be heard.

‘They have taken the wall!’ men cried. ‘They are blasting breeches in it. They are coming!’ “

Outnumbered and, with the fall of the wall in different locations, outflanked, the best that Faramir can do is to fall back towards Minas Tirith, as Gandalf says, “Yet he is resolved to stay with the rearguard, lest the retreat over the Pelennor become a rout. He may, perhaps, hold his men together long enough, but I doubt it.”

Unlike the silly—there’s really no other word for it—charge of P. Jackson—Faramir is a professional soldier, after all, much loved by his soldiers—we see what JRRT, having been a soldier himself, would have known was the military solution: a fighting retreat, led by a brave and capable leader.

His task had been an impossible one to begin with and, properly understood and depicted on the screen, would not only have been powerful dramatically, but much more believable. It was an impossible task, however, against the odds of ten to one. (For a comparison, we offer the siege and fall of the Alamo, late February-early March, 1836. The garrison numbered about 180, the besiegers eventually approximately 3000. In the final assault, before dawn on 6 March, 1836, the four assaulting columns had about 1200 men, offering odds of roughly 6 to 1 and the entire garrison died, along with somewhere between 400 and 600 of the attackers.)

(This is the work of the amazing Gary Zaboly– as an historical illustrator, he can’t be recommended highly enough. Much of his work concerns the 18th century, especially the 1740s and 50s, but he also has done some wonderful depictions of warfare in the American southwest in the 1830s and 40s.)

There are lots of examples of fighting retreats and we’ve picked two: a failure (Maiwand, Second Afghan War, 1880) and Le Cateau (The Great War, 1914).

At Maiwand, 27 July, 1880, a British-Indian brigade of 3 infantry units plus two cavalry units and a battery (6 guns) of horse artillery, anywhere from 1500 to 2000 soldiers, faced perhaps 12,000 Afghans with 6 batteries of guns.

Basically, the British were outflanked and their left-hand units began to buckle under the pressure of the attacks and the number of attackers which they had to face. As they gave way, the right hand end of the line began to move backwards, feeling increasingly in danger of being surrounded, just as Faramir’s men must have.

As the infantry retreated, the artillerymen used their guns to buy time for a general withdrawal, ending by losing a section (2 guns) to the enemy. There’s a famous painting of the withdrawal of the remaining guns by the late-Victorian artist, Richard Caton Woodville.

At the end of the withdrawal from the battle, a small group of British soldiers of the 66^th Regiment took shelter inside an enclosure in a nearby village and fought it out to the end.

Gandalf’s worry had been that Faramir couldn’t hold his men together and you can see here what happens when organized units come apart—they are defeated piecemeal, “in detail” is the military expression.

In contrast to this, we offer an action from Tolkien’s own time, the battle at Le Cateau, fought on 26 August, 1914. The British Expeditionary Force, facing superior numbers and in danger of being outflanked, particularly to the west, was engaged in a long retreat. Miraculously, unit cohesion was mostly maintained, although communications were often poor, causing confusion and, in one case, even in losing a unit, never notified of withdrawal.

The British Army was divided into two larger groupings, First and Second Corps, and it was Second Corps which turned to face its pursuers. During a long morning, the British, in hastily-dug trenches, fended off superior numbers of German infantry.

Having lost heavily, but having given the enemy similar punishment, the British slowed German pursuit and were able to withdraw without being as closely pursued as they had been.

The difference here is in exactly what Gandalf was worried about. At Maiwand, the brigade fell apart and could easily be swept away by the enemy. At Le Cateau, although it was hardly a perfect affair, the British kept enough cohesion not only to withstand and defeat heavy attacks, but then to retreat in units, without ever collapsing into a fleeing mob.

What happens in that struggle in the fields behind the Rammas Echor is, in fact, a mixture of the two retreats described above. We see “Small bands of weary and often wounded men…some were running wildly as if pursued.” Then, “…less than a mile from the City, a more ordered mass of men came into view, marching not running, still holding together.” And then “Out of the gloom behind a small company of horsemen galloped, all that was left of the rearguard.”

So, it looks like Faramir had succeeded in maintaining that sense of order and purpose which is vital for a fighting retreat. It was not to last, however, as a mass of enemy horsemen on the causeway behind, as well as several Nazgul from above, threw all into confusion—which was stemmed, in turn, by the arrival of a rescue party, led by the Prince of Dol Amroth and accompanied by Gandalf arrived to drive back the attackers.

gandalf_to_the_rescue___speed_paint4_by_myworld1-d7wjv97.png

In that flurry, Faramir is struck by an arrow and has to be rescued and brought into the City, badly wounded.

Looking back, it is a very different scene from that preposterous cavalry charge, isn’t it? As our readers are probably also experienced watchers of the films, we wonder: which do you prefer, Jackson/writers or the author?

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

Tell How

04 Wednesday May 2016

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

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A Passage to India, A Walk at Dusk, Ajanta Caves, Aslan, Aslan's How, C.D. Friedrich, C.S. Lewis, Catacombs, consular diptychs, cromlech, E. M. Forster, haugr, Late antique ivories, Malabar Caves, Narnia, Newgrange, Nicomachi, Oseberg Ship, Prince Caspian, Qin Shi Huangdi, River Boyne, Stone Table, Symmachi, Telmarines, Terracotta warriors

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

We’ve been rereading C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series and have just finished the second book, Prince Caspian. We were interested, as we read, in “Aslan’s How”.

We knew, from the text, what the place was, as Doctor Cornelius describes it:

“…it is a huge mound which Narnians raised in very ancient times over a very magical place, where there stood—and perhaps still stands—a very magical Stone. The mound is all hollowed out within into galleries and caves, and the Stone is in the central cave of all.”

In the 2008 film of Prince Caspian, this is depicted as what appears to be a stone structure which is covered in earth and trees

(Spoiler Alert! Underneath the magic of CGI…)

This version reminds us of the Ajanta Caves, an Indian Buddhist monument dating from the 2^nd century BC to (perhaps as late as) the 7^th century AD.

These are, as you can see from this photo, spectacular on the outside, but even more so on the inside, as they are full of a huge number of wall paintings and sculptures.

Hamsa_jâtaka,_Ajanta,_India.jpg

(These, by the way, have their own literary history, being a model for the “Malabar Caves” which feature in the plot of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, 1924.)

Lewis, however, was from Belfast, and we’ve always imagined that what he was actually thinking of was the Neolithic monument of Newgrange, in Eire (the Republic of Ireland).

This was possibly a passage tomb—but there’s lots of scholarly discussion about that. At least it can be said that it has “galleries and caves”

newgrange plan.gif

and, like Aslan’s How (“How” being a worn-down form of Old Norse “haugr”, “tumulus/hill”), it’s up from a river, in this case, the River Boyne, as the How is just up from the Great River, in Narnia.

In Lewis’ description, it seems that the Narnians of long ago had constructed the mound to protect an object, “a very magical Stone”. As we know from the first book in the Narnia series, this is the Stone Table on which Aslan allowed himself to be sacrificed by the White Witch.

We’ve chosen this painting by Michael Hague because it strikes us as closer to what we imagine the scene to have been like and we prefer it to the scene in the 2005 film.

In particular, we differ on the table. Here’s another view of the one from the film.

To us, it’s more likely to have been modeled on a cromlech, the remains of a Neolithic tomb, of a kind found in numbers all over western Europe and which Lewis must certainly have seen.

The Hague painting obviously reflects this and the power of such monuments for painters goes back at least to the German Romantics. Here’s a wonderfully moody depiction (“A Walk at Dusk”, 1821) by our favorite painter of that movement, C.D. Friedrich (1774-1840).

Commonly, large artificial mounds like the How are tombs. In an earlier post, we talked about ship burials, like that of the Oseberg ship–

which must have looked like this before its excavation.

Such burials are a worldwide phenomenon. In China, perhaps the grandest is for Qin Shi Huangdi, the so-called “First Emperor” (built 246-208BC).

This site was rendered even more impressive in 1974 when the first of at least 7000 life-size ceramic warriors was uncovered after a local farmer began to dig a well.

These figures were originally painted in bright colors and held bronze weapons.

Aslan’s How is not a tomb, however, but the resting place of its opposite—the broken stone which is intended to be a symbol of resurrection, and this is in keeping with the parallel between Aslan and the Christian figure, Jesus, who is believed by Christians to have been killed, entombed, but, on the third day escaped the tomb.

(And we can’t show one of these wonderful late classical ivory carvings without adding another, a favorite, a so-called “consular diptych”—that is, a pair of ivory plaques joined together. They are thought to have commemorated the appointment of a member of an upper class family to the rank of consul. This diptych celebrated the appointment of someone from one or both of two families, the Nicomachi and the Symmachi, and is dated to about 400AD.)

This idea leads us to another possible model. Outside Rome, there are miles of underground passages associated with early Christians. They served both as secret places of worship, as well as burial places.

Considering that those Old Narnians who resist the rule of the Telmarines and take refuge in the How are often those who believe in the existence of Aslan as well, may we see Aslan’s How, with its central stone table as a reminder of Aslan’s sacrifice and resurrection, as the equivalent of the catacombs?

What do you think, dear readers?

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

Beaux Gestes? (1)

20 Wednesday Apr 2016

Posted by Ollamh in J.R.R. Tolkien, Narrative Methods, Theatre and Performance

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Cicero, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Elizabethan, Film, Galadriel, Globe theatre, Hamlet, Hildebrandt, Mirror of Galadriel, Quintilian, rejection, Roman theatre, The Argonath, The Lord of the Rings, The Phantom of the Opera, The Popular Entertainer and Self-Instructor in Elocution, theatre, Theatrical gesture, Tolkien

Dear Readers, welcome, as always.

In this posting, we want to begin to consider a pair of contrasting gestures in The Lord of the Rings, where they may come from, and how they may mirror each other.

We begin with Galadriel in The Fellowship of the Ring, Book II, Chapter 7, “The Mirror of Galadriel”.

In this scene, she has offered Frodo and Sam the chance to look into what appears to be a small pool of enchanted water, where she tells Frodo “You may learn something, and whether what you see be fair or evil, that may be profitable, and yet it may not. Seeing is both good and perilous.”

Sam goes first and endures a nightmarish depiction of the future of the Shire—although Galadriel warns him that it is perhaps potential, not fated future.

Frodo has, in turn, an even worse experience: the eye of Sauron himself appears and Frodo can feel that it is trying to discover the Ring. It is something of which Galadriel herself is well aware, but she comforts Frodo, saying, “…I perceive the Dark Lord and know his mind, or all of his mind that concerns the Elves. And he gropes ever to see me and my thought. But the door is still closed!”

To emphasize this, “She lifted up her white arms, and spread out her hands towards the East in a gesture of rejection and denial.”

To modern people, like us, trying to visualize what Galadriel is doing , this might seem a very “theatrical” gesture. The closest we could find in our image bank of Galadriel actually doing it wasn’t more than a suggestion.

And, in fact, the image we’ve chosen (obviously not Galadriel!) to depict this comes from a book published in 1898, with the intriguing title, The Popular Entertainer and Self-Instructor in Elocution.

This brings us back to a time in history when public speaking was a polished art and men (primarily—although the women’s rights movement from the mid-19^th century had its speakers, as well) practiced stylized gestures to help them convey their meaning in lecture halls, theatres, and open spaces. Older public statues sometimes capture such a speaker in mid-gesture—as in this of the British intellectual and politician, Edmund Burke, in Bristol.

Such combinations of gesture and speech are derived from a tradition which stretches all the way back to the last century BC/first century AD in the works of the Roman orators/writers Cicero

And Quintilian.

These men described the art of public speaking, and Quintilian, in particular, discusses the use of gesture to expand and underline the spoken text emotionally. This tradition was continued from the Renaissance and beyond initially in translations of the two into local languages, but then in expansions of their ideas. Such gestures were also found useful for the young popular theatre and continued to form part of an actor’s training into the twentieth century. Here, for instance, is the 18^th-century actor, David Garrick, in a role for which he was famous, Hamlet. And you’ll notice that same gesture of rejection: arms extended, hands spread.

(This is not, by the way, the same gesture we see depicted on the Argonath. That seems to us more to convey the message: Stop! You have reached the boundary of Gondor—go no farther!

argonath hildebrandt.jpg

This is the Hildebrandt twins rather mild version. A fiercer one would be that from the film.)

To us, such gestures may seem very overdone, if not downright silly—as in this from the 1925 film of The Phantom of the Opera.

lchaneysrphantom

And it is probably film itself which has changed our view. Originally, these gestures were developed to extend a speaker’s ability to convey thought and feeling in a public space—a big place where there was no elaborate sound system with microphones and speakers to help.

In a big, noisy place like an Elizabethan theatre, such an extension would have proved just as useful.

Hodge's_conjectural_Globe_reconstruction.jpg

And, until artificial vocal magnification was invented in the 20^th century, it would have continued to help.

Film began as an offshoot of the stage—after all, what other model was there for actors? Film was much more intimate than the stage, however, even before sound films arrived at the very end of the 1920s. The heavy make-up and big, stylized gestures brought over from earlier drama must have seemed even more exaggerated, in time, to audiences, and everything was gradually scaled down. What Tolkien saw as a young man,

however, having been born in 1893, would have been the product of that earlier time—a time all the way back to the Romans—and thus, when he wants to depict strong emotion, he clearly uses what would have been more appropriate for an older time, just as he uses older language, borrowed from people like William Morris and Tennyson, when he wants to add a certain weight to the words.

In our second posting, we want to continue our exploration with what we feel to be an opposing gesture—and the final gesture—of Saruman.

greg-hildebrandt-isengard-orthanc-saruman-607429-1300x962.jpg

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

doubtfulsea

~ adventure fantasy

Category Archives: Narrative Methods

Terrifyingly Funny? (Part 1)

Ambiguity in Oz

Winter is Coming

Evil Twin?

Rare Good Ballast

Paying No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain

“A kind of proud, venerable, but increasingly impotent Byzantium”

Rear Guard

Tell How

Beaux Gestes? (1)