As ever, dear readers, welcome.

It was that sad moment:  I’d come to the last page of an enjoyable book:  Terry Pratchett’s Feet of Clay, 1996.

But there was a sadder moment:  I’d finally read the entire “Disc World” series, all 41 novels. 

I came late to the work of (Sir) Terry Pratchett (1948-2015)

and Disc World, which he came clearly on time to, in 1983, with the first in the long series, The Colour of Magic.

It has been through numerous reprintings since, with all sorts of covers, but this is the first edition and the cover is significant, being a depiction of just what Disc World looks like:

1. at base, a monstrous turtle, Great A’Tuin, who is swimming through space

2. mounted on Great A’Tuin are four elephants—Berilia, Tubul, Great T’Phon, and Jerakeen

3. and, placed atop the pachyderms is Disc World itself, which is a couple of continents, a scattering of islands, and seas, always with the danger of being swept off at the edge

And on the surface lie the towns and cities, a major one being Ankh-Morpork, the scene of numerous volumes in the series,

an ancient conurbation dissected by a river, the Ankh, which is, at best, mostly slow-flowing sludge.  On one bank lie the affluent, on the other, the effluent, as Pratchett might say, all under the direction of the Patrician, an unelected replacement for a line of increasingly difficult kings and his modest force of  peace-keepers, the Watch, directed, in time, by Samuel Vimes, who not only becomes Sir in the course of the books, but is also discovered to be directly descended from the reason Ankh-Morpork no longer suffers under difficult kings—oh, and he marries a duchess, who, among other things, is involved in a dragon-adoption charity.

(Which painting bears a faint resemblance to a certain lesser-known work by the obscure Dutch painter, Rembrandt)

As you can see from the chart above, there is a certain method in what could easily appear to be madness:  a series of series-within-series, based upon sets of characters:  wizards, witches, Tiffany Aching (and her sometime-allies the Nac Mac Feegle), Death, the City Watch, and Moist von Lipwig.  Wizards, the City Watch, and Moist Von Lipwig are all associated (sometimes rather loosely) with Ankh-Morpork.  Witches andTiffany are more or less country people and Death (who ALWAYS SPEAKS IN CAPITAL LETTERS) is, as in real life, alas, everywhere.

As you can tell, Pratchett is given to rather bizarre names, and it was with one of these, Moist Von Lipwig, that I began my Pratchettry in the first novel in which he appears, Going Postal, 2004.

You can also see that book titles can vary from the mystical I Shall Wear Midnight to suggestive plays on words, like Equal Rites and the present Going Postal, which, although it doesn’t include homicidal mail workers, does have to do with Ankh-Morpork’s postal system and how the ingenious conman, Moist Von Lipwig, saves it with the help of everyone from another charity worker (and chain-smoker) Adora Belle to a Golem, Mr. Pump.

(Footnote on “golem”:  if you’re not acquainted with this term, it comes from Jewish religious and folklore:  a creature made, commonly, from earth (clay, mud) and given animation, if not life, often for a specific task.  For more—lots more—see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem .  I first met a golem in a still from the 1915 horror film, Der Golem, which, unfortunately, doesn’t survive complete. 

You can see a fragment here:  https://archive.org/details/silent-der-golem-aka-the-golem  This was actually eventually a trilogy, along with The Golem and the Dancing Girl, 1917, which is lost, and the 1920 The Golem and How He Came Into the World which you can see complete here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmSoAq80HcM If you’re not familiar with silent film, dialogue is conveyed by printed cards and by (for us) rather exaggerated acting, and there was music commonly played—just like a modern soundtrack—during the film.  This music was live, from an improviser at piano or organ to, in the case of rather grand films, a score especially written for the film and played by an orchestra, like that for D.W. Griffith’s 1916 Intolerance.

And you can see Griffith’s film here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lv6u3d99SKk  Again, if you’re not used to silent film, it might take a while to get used to, often being sentimental to the point of being soppy, by our standards, but it’s a wonderful art form, coming directly from the late Victorian stage, and certainly worth your time. )

Golems are only one form of supernatural to appear regularly in Pratchett’s work.  There are also vampires (many who have taken “the pledge” and no longer drink human blood) and werewolves and entire complex communities of dwarves, as well.

What I especially have enjoyed in these novels, besides the very thoughtful way in which Pratchett constructs characters—often people—even vampires—with worries and doubts, is the humor—much of it appearing in footnotes—and the occasional philosophic moments.  Tiffany Aching’s Nac Mac Feegle—first seen in The Wee Free Men, 2003, for example,

tiny, feisty creatures who speak a kind of Lallans—that is, Scots English—and are fantastically brave, primarily because they have made the decision to believe, unlike people in this world in general, that, rather than being alive and fearing death, they are already dead and that, consequently, anything goes (and usually does). 

Summarizing a Pratchett novel is possible—see, for example:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going_Postal –but, to me, this seems like the sort of thing he would mock—probably in a footnote, and it’s better to try one out for yourself.  I have a number of favorites I would recommend, starting with Going Postal, to which I would add Interesting Times, The Wee Free Men, and Small Gods.  There is a very good film adaptation of Going Postal, which I would also recommend. 

But—in very much a Pratchetty situation—I’ve just looked back at that chart and realized that—I’ve somehow miscounted.   Where did The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, 2001, come from?

Somehow, I’ve managed to miss this and so have only read 40 of 41 novels.  I suppose that this is what Tolkien calls a “eucatastrophe”—that is, a situation in which things look glum, but then suddenly turn out for the best, something which I think Pratchett would approve of (with an ironic footnote, however).

Thanks, as ever, for reading,

Stay well,

Consider adopting the philosophic position of the Nac Mac Feegle,

And know that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

As always, dear readers, welcome.

Looking back on nearly 500 postings, I see that names have popped up as a subject more than once.  As far back as 26 August, 2015, there was “What’s In a Name?”, a title which turned up again on 27 July, 2016.  Then there was “In a Name”, 2 March, 2022, and “Name of the Game, Game of the Name”, 10 May 2023.

And here is that theme again, the title coming from an old British Army expression, “No Names No Pack Drill”.  A pack drill was a fairly mild form of punishment, in which the offender was assigned a certain number of hours of sentry-go while wearing a pack which had been especially heavily-weighted (bricks being one possibility). 

(Imagine wearing this, loaded with bricks, and marching back and forth with it on your back for hours)

Thus, if the sergeant in charge of discipline had no name reported to him, the offender escaped.

It’s clear, however, that I can’t escape names, something which I find students struggling with when we read the Odyssey and suddenly they’re confronted with Agamemnon

(about to become “the late Agamemnon”, murdered by his wife and her BF)

and the suitors of Penelope, with names like Antinoos (an-TI-noe-os) and Eurymachos (eh-oo-RUH-mahk-os—that is, an-TIH-noe-os and eu-RIH-makh-os, in English),

(and more mayhem—about to become “former suitors” thanks to Odysseus and his son, Telemachos—teh-LEH-makh-os)

or Beowulf, with names which look quite unpronounceable, like that of Beowulf’s father, Ecgtheow (EDGE-theh-oh).

(Not Ecgtheow, but Beowulf himself, when he first encounters a Danish coast guard—this is from the era of illustration when anyone vaguely Norse was required to wear a helmet decorated with wings or horns)

Tolkien had become accustomed to those Greek names when still a school boy, writing to Robert Murray, SJ, in a letter of 2 December, 1953:  “I was brought up in the Classics, and first discovered the sensation of literary pleasure in Homer.”  (Letters, 258)

Names in Homer can sometimes seem very appropriate—Antinoos, one of the leaders of Penelope’s suitors and a definite villain, has one that can mean “he who sets his mind in opposition” and the ocean-going magical people who finally send Odysseus back home, the Phaiakians, often have names like Pontonoos, “he whose mind is on the sea” or Nausithoos, “Swift-ship”.   Sometimes they seem puzzling:  why is the other leader of the suitors called Eurymachos, “he who fights broadly/widely” when he has, as far as we know, never done any fighting at all?  And why is that Cyclops called Polyphemos, “the very-well known”?  If he were, why would Odysseus have visited him, lost six of his crew to the Cyclops’ voracious appetite, and barely escaped by hiding under a sheep?

Although Tolkien, as an undergraduate at Oxford, was seduced away from Classics, as he tells us in a letter to W.H. Auden of 7 June, 1955 (see Letters, 312-313) by other languages (Welsh, Finnish), a process begun even earlier with Anglo-Saxon and Gothic, I would suggest that his early association with Homer and the possibilities which names might present, both as to character and to language, endured. As he says in the same letter:

“All this only as background to the stories, though languages and names are for me inextricable from the stories.  They are and were so to speak an attempt to give a background or a world in which my expressions of linguistic taste could have a function.  The stories were comparatively late in coming.” 

(This interest in naming could also lead him to be critical of another fantasy writer, E.R. Eddison, 1882-1945,

of whom he wrote “I read his works with great enjoyment for their sheer literary merit…Incidentally, I though his nomenclature slipshod and often inept.”  From a letter to Caroline Everett, 24 June, 1957, Letters, 372.  You can see what you think about Eddison’s way with names by reading The Worm Ouroboros, 1922, here:  https://ia801304.us.archive.org/10/items/1924EddisonTheWormOuroborus/1924__eddison___the_worm_ouroborus.pdf )

For JRRT, then, names were as crucial to the text as the plot and, as a long-time reader of his work and as someone who has spent an equally long time studying and teaching languages, I find that my admiration for his care and patience in developing them has grown with my reading.  It’s no wonder, for example, that he is so up in arms at the Dutch translator of The Lord of the Rings, who thought not only to translate the text, but the toponyms (place names) as well:

“In principal I object as strongly as is possible to the ‘translation’ of the nomenclature at all (even by a competent person).  I wonder why a translator should think himself called on or entitled to do any such thing.  That this is an ‘imaginary’ world does not give him any right to remodel it according to his fancy, even if he could in a few months create a new coherent structure which it took me years to work out.”  (letter to Rayner Unwin, 3 July, 1956, Letters, 359)

And there, in that phrase, “coherent structure”, you see what Tolkien was always aiming for:  his names, both of places and people, had to be consistent not only with the language they spoke, but also with the culture in which they lived—horse people like the Rohirrim can have names like Eowyn, perhaps ”delight in horses” and Eomer, “famous for horses”—and the history in which they lived.  (And, as JRRT pretended that his Middle-earth work was translated, he then had the added fun of turning original names he had invented, like those of Banazir and Ranugad, into what he said were their English equivalents, “Samwise” and “Hamfast”—Sam and the Gaffer.  See “Banazir and Ranugad”, 11 November, 2020 for more.)

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you probably will remember that, some time last spring, I decided that my knowledge of the history of science fiction was not what I would like it to be, and so I began a long-term project of going at least back to Jules Verne (1828-1905)

and reading—or rereading—as widely as I could, including translations from other languages, to give myself as wide an experience as I could.  So far, I’ve added about three dozen books and a number of short stories to my ongoing bibliography with an uncounted number to go, but I admit that I’m not systematically chronological and recently, I decided to reread Frank Herbert’s (1920-1986)

original Dune trilogy (1965-1976).

I’ve only begun, and I’m finding it as complex and interesting as I remembered it, but, trained by JRRT, I was struck by what seemed like a very odd soup of names—Bene Gesserit, Muad’Dib, Shaddam IV, Atreides, Paul, Duke Leto, Jessica, Mother Gaius Helen, Thufir Hawat, and, strangest-sounding to me of all, Duncan Idaho—all within the first 30 or so pages.  Some of the names were very familiar—Atreides is “the family of Atreus”, which includes the ill-fated Agamemnon and his less-than-distinguished younger brother, Menelaus.  Leto, to me, isn’t a duke, but the mother of Apollo and his twin sister, Artemis.  Gaius (also spelled Caius) is a common male Roman praenomen, that is, first name, as in Caius Iulius Caesar, or the emperor we commonly call by his childhood nickname, Caligula, who was another C/Gaius.  Muad’Dib, with its glottal stop marker, suggests Arabic and Shaddam makes me think Persian (especially as he’s called Padishah, Persian “master king”  so “king of kings”).  Duncan Idaho?  Duncan is an Anglicized version of Irish/Gaelic Donnchadh, about which there is scholarly disagreement (see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duncan_(given_name) )  Idaho—well, see this:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idaho   And then there’s Bene Gesserit.  Bene is a Latin adverb, “well”.  Gesserit is either the 3^rd person singular, future perfect active indicative, or third person singular, perfect active subjunctive of the verb gero, with a variety of meanings around the idea of managing something, as in the standard phrase bellum gerere, “to wage war”.  Thus, as a phrase, it should mean either “he/she/it will have managed well” or “she/he/it would have managed well”. 

Tolkien was a science fiction reader himself (see Letters, 530 and “Sci-Fi”, 22 September, 2021), so I wonder, knowing how he felt about a certain creative lack in Eddison, what he would have said about this soup?

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

Stay well,

Manage things well,

And remember that there’s always

MTCIDC

O

PS

For more on names in Homer, Tolkien, and elsewhere, see “In a Name”, 2 March, 2022, here:   https://doubtfulsea.com//?s=whats+in+a+name&search=Go

As always, dear readers, welcome.

As much as Tolkien, with justification, I think, denied external, historical influences on his work (and especially so, when, for example, it was suggested to him that the Ring was a stand-in for the atomic bomb—although he makes a grim reference to that possibility in a letter of 24 October, 1952, to Rayner Unwin—see Letters, 239), still, he was a highly intelligent, thoughtful, and sensitive man in a very complex era, one haunted, in part, by the disaster of 1914-1918, with its approximate 30,000,000 casualties,

(Tyne Cot Cemetery in southern Belgium, a heart-breaking place with 11,965 graves, of which 8,369 are of soldiers never identified)

and the understandable fear of another such which would bring as much, if not more, ruin, as that war had brought about even more destructive weapons than the later-19^th-century machine gun—war in the air, including the first hint of terror bombing

and the extensive use of chemical weapons.  (For more detail, see:  https://www.britannica.com/story/the-great-war-infographic-of-deaths-and-milestones )

(The brilliant society and landscape painter, John Singer Sargent’s“Gassed”, 1919)

Thus, when I recently re-read this passage, it set me to thinking:

“The Rabble of Gondor and its deluded allies shall withdraw at once beyond the Anduin, first taking oaths never again to assail Sauron the Great in arms, open or secret.  All lands east of the Anduin shall be Sauron’s for ever, solely.  West of the Anduin as far as the Misty Mountains and the Gap of Rohan shall be tributary to Mordor, and men there shall bear no weapons, but shall have leave to govern their own affairs.  But they shall help to rebuild Isengard which they have wantonly destroyed, and that shall be Sauron’s, and there his lieutenant shall dwell:  not Saruman, but one more worthy of trust.” (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 10, “The Black Gate Opens”)

The seemingly-doomed expedition to confront Sauron has marched out of the ruined Minas Tirith

and north, to the Morannon, the Black Gate,

(the Hildebrandts)

where it meets an emissary, the Mouth of Sauron.

(by Douglas Beekman. This scene is badly mismanaged in the Jackson film, with the emissary being struck down, which is a gross violation of the chivalry which stated that such emissaries were protected by custom—of which the Mouth of Sauron, flinching, reminds Aragorn–and is far from what JRRT wrote.)

The Mouth of Sauron believes he has shaken Gandalf and his allies when he has presented them with what appears to be Frodo’s “Dwarf-coat, elf-cloak, blade of the downfallen West” and he suggests that the owner will be in torment for years unless they yield to Sauron’s terms—which Gandalf, after seeming to waver, then rejects, saying to Sauron’s emissary, “Get you gone, for your embassy is over and death is near to you.”

In the course of their brief dialogue, however, Gandalf has raised a point which made me think of an historical bargaining session, something Tolkien would have read about in the newspapers and seen in newsreels in the cinema, a meeting in late September, 1938, in Munich, Germany, among Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Edouard Daladier, and Neville Chamberlain.

Hitler had already assimilated Austria in March, 1938, during the event called the Anschluss (AHN-shluss, literally, in German, a “connection”)

and was now aiming to do the same to the young state of Czechoslovakia.  That lurking fear of another war was behind the West’s scramble to do something to stop a new conflict brought about that meeting, as well as the so-called “Munich Agreement”, then signed by the four representatives, which, basically, handed Hitler much of Czechoslovakia, while signaling that the Western allies weren’t willing to fight to keep him from grabbing the rest.  

And here we see a difference between Sauron and Hitler.  When Gandalf says to the Mouth of Sauron:

“And if indeed we rated the prisoner so high, what surety have we that Sauron, the Base Master of Treachery, will keep his part?”

The reply is:

“Do not bandy words in your insolence with the Mouth of Sauron!…Surety you crave!  Sauron gives none.  If you sue for clemency you must first do his bidding.  These are his terms.  Take them or leave them.”

Hitler had said that he would be satisfied and even signed an agreement, separate from the Munich Agreement, with Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, which included these words:

“” … We regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again”. 

And Chamberlain took this back to London, waving it over his head at the airport in a famous gesture as he addressed a crowd.

You can hear Chamberlain address that crowd here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMtG38ZKf3U

(As you can imagine, this is an extremely simplified version of events.  If you would like to have a much more detailed version, see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_Agreement )

The worth of Hitler’s words came quickly:  in March, 1939, he invaded the remaining portion of Czechoslovakia.

In September, 1939, he invaded Poland and World War II, which the West had compromised itself to avoid, would begin.

Looking at the map of Middle-earth,

we can see that Sauron’s terms would have:

1. reduced Rohan and Gondor to puppet states, to be ruled over by Sauron’s viceroy

2. stripped them of all future power to resist whatever that viceroy (meaning Sauron, of course) would have demanded, for all that the terms said that they could rule themselves.

What happened in Munich in September, 1938, rather than stopping a coming war, simply told the one who would pursue that war that the West was willing to sacrifice a great deal—even another country—to keep the peace.  Was Tolkien at least marginally influenced by all of this?  And, in a terrible “What If?” can we imagine a West had Gandalf and his allies given in to Sauron’s terms? Would Sauron have been content?

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

Stay well,

Beware the promises of dictators,

And know that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

PS

As this is the first posting of the new year, as gloomy as this is, I don’t want it to suggest an omen.  I’ve written that John Singer Sargent was, along with being a society painter, a landscape painter, usually in water colors, so here’s one of my favorites as, I hope, a more cheerful theme for the year to come—“Palms”, 1917

Welcome, dear readers, as ever.

As I’ve written before, one reason why I return to Tolkien again and again is that his richness provides so many subjects to write about.  Often they are episodes or characters, but, occasionally, they are simply phrases and, in teaching The Hobbit this time, one phrase I’d never thought about before suddenly stood out and puzzled me with its odd, rather over-the-top exclamation.

When I was growing up, I lived in a valley which was shaped rather like an elongated bowl.  It had that shape because it was the bed of an ancient lake, whose legacy to farmers and gardeners who lived and worked there was, below a thin layer of soil, a much deeper layer of sheets of petrified mud—shale.

There are places where shale contains oil, which would make it of some value in this fossil-fuel world (which JRRT so disliked) in which we live.

Ours, fortunately or unfortunately, was just very old, very hard, mud and a curse to dig through.

Because of the shape of the valley, it was also an attracter of lingering thunderstorms,

which, especially in midsummer, could sit over the valley for hours.  We, therefore, had a lightning rod attached to our chimney,

which was actually once struck, when there was a tremendous BANG! but the rod did its job, guiding the lightning to the ground and our house didn’t burst into flame.

(This reminds me of Ray Bradbury’s wonderful novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes, 1962,

with its character, Tom Fury, the lightning rod salesman, which you can read a summary of here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Something_Wicked_This_Way_Comes_(novel)#Plot_summary   There’s also a very good, if very different, treatment of the story in the 1983 Disney film of the same name.)

Having had some real-life experience, then, of lightning, it’s not surprising that, in school, I was struck (pun intended) by this image in an old school book–

It was identified as Benjamin Franklin, and he seemed to be out of his mind—flying a kite in an electrical storm?

It turns out, of course, that this was part of a science project, by which Franklin wanted to prove that what shot out of the clouds was, in fact, electricity.  You can read more about his experimentation and theories here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kite_experiment   And you can read Franklin’s first report of this particular—and ground-breaking—experiment from Franklin’s own The Pennsylvania Gazette for 19 October, 1752, here:  http://www.benjamin-franklin-history.org/kite-experiment/  .  His personal experience with lightning also made Franklin perhaps the first to suggest, in 1753, that one might, using an iron rod and a wire, divert lightning from buildings and even ships.  Franklin’s suggestion is quoted in this same article as that which quotes his report of his experiment.  (You’ll note, by the way, that the artist for that school book image doesn’t seem to have read the 1752 article, as Franklin stresses that the holder of the kite string needs to be indoors and Franklin himself was standing in a barn when he performed this experiment.)

Franklin’s experiment was part of a trend, beginning in the 1740s, towards better understanding lightning, as part of the general strong interest in science which was part of the Enlightenment.  Earlier people in the West had a very different view, however, which often tied thunder and lightning to divinities.  Ancient Greek stories include that of Asclepius, the son of Apollo and a brilliant physician,

who, when he began to restore the dead, was struck down by a “thunderbolt”,

the weapon of choice of his own grandfather, Zeus.

This belief in Zeus’ electric power was shared by the Romans, in their version of Zeus, Jupiter,

as we can see in Ovid’s (43bc-17/18ad) treatment of the story of Semele, in Book 3 of his Metamorphoses, where he repeats the Greek myth of Semele, a sometime-gf of Jupiter, who was tricked by Juno into asking him to show her his real form,

with its drastic consequences:

est aliud levius fulmen, cui dextra cyclopum               305
saevitiae flammaeque minus, minus addidit irae:
tela secunda vocant superi; capit illa domumque
intrat Agenoream. corpus mortale tumultus
non tulit aetherios donisque iugalibus arsit.

“There is another, lighter thunderbolt, to which the right hand of the Cyclopses

Has added less of ferocity and flame, less of fury:

They call these the secondary weapons of the god.  Those he takes and enters

The Agenorean house.  The human body did not endure

The divine tumult and blazed with the husbandly gifts.”

(Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 3, lines 305-309, my translation—Agenor was Semele’s grandfather)

(There is a very lush opera on the subject by George Frederick Haendel (1685-1759) from 1744 which goes into extended detail about events.  There’s a summary of the plot here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semele_(Handel) and a performance here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FibDMWk0i5k , and, as well, you can hear probably the most famous aria from this opera, “Where E’er You Walk” (sung by Jupiter to Semele in Act 2, Scene 2) sung by one of my favorite tenors, John Mark Ainsley, here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYOZnwQQV18 )

All of this brings me back to the what seemed an odd turn of phrase in Chapter 1, “An Unexpected Party” of The Hobbit.  After much food and some moody music,

Thorin has been talking quite frankly about the expedition to the Lonely Mountain, but the real gravity has only struck Bilbo—

“Poor Bilbo couldn’t bear it any longer.  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.  All the dwarves sprang up, knocking over the table.  Gandalf struck a blue light on the end of his magic staff, and in its firework glare the poor little hobbit could be seen kneeling on the hearth-rug, shaking like a jelly that was melting.  Then he fell flat on the floor, and kept on calling out ‘struck by lightning, struck by lightning!’ over and over again; and that was all they could get out of him for a long time.”  (The Hobbit, Chapter 1, “An Unexpected Party”)

What is going on here?  Why such an extreme reaction?  Bilbo’s attitude towards the dwarves and their plan has fluctuated during their stay:  he has been appalled by their aggressive behavior as guests and seduced by their haunting song, but, when Thorin has begun to unroll the actual facts of their scheme, he has been moved to a new level of resistance as the truth of what they’re planning comes clearer—

“Gandalf, dwarves and Mr. Baggins!  We are met together in the house of our friend and fellow conspirator, this most excellent and audacious hobbit—‘…He paused for breath and for a polite remark from the hobbit, but the compliments were quite lost on poor Bilbo Baggins, who was wagging his mouth in protest at being called audacious and worst of all fellow conspirator, though no noise came out, he was so flummoxed.”

Is what Bilbo actually experiencing and expressing, an English expression, “a bolt out of the blue”?  A useful website, “The Phrase Finder”, says that this expression appears to be rather comparatively recent, first traced to Thomas Carlyle’s (1795-1881) The French Revolution, 1837, (oddly exactly a century before the initial publication of The Hobbit) where there is found:

“Arrestment, sudden really as a bolt out of the Blue, has hit strange victims.”

The meaning is “a sudden unexpected event” and the website then takes it back I think quite believably  to Horace (65-8bc) and an ode, Number 34 in Book 1.  This begins with the idea that the speaker has been lax in his religious observances, but, thanks to a sudden meteorological occurrence, he is changing his ways:

…namque Diespiter               5
igni corusco nubila dividens
     plerumque, per purum tonantis
     egit equos volucremque currum,

“for Father Jupiter,

Generally splitting the clouds with flashing fire,

Drove his thundering horses and his winged chariot

Through [a] clear sky…”

(Horace, Odes, Book 1, Number 34, lines 5-8, my translation)

As Horace has been unpleasantly surprised by Jupiter, might we then imagine Bilbo, coming close to being brought into the dwarves’ plan, then suddenly caught by Thorin’s grim “may never return” have suffered a similar epiphany, almost as if he, too, had almost been “Struck by lightning, struck by lightning!”?   Considering all that is about to happen to him in the course of The Hobbit, perhaps Bilbo’s outburst isn’t so over-the-top after all.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Stay well,

Keep making sacrifices to Jupiter,

And remember that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

One of the reasons I so often write about the work of Tolkien is that it is just so full of things to write about.  Sometimes these are moments or people in texts to comment upon, sometimes they are things to be inspired by.  From the title, this posting might appear to be sparked by Smeagol/Gollum who, in a brilliant piece of psychology on the author’s part, refers to the Ring, which he actually acquired on a long-ago birthday, as “his birthday present”, when, in fact, he gained it by murdering Deagol, his friend, the discoverer of the long-lost creation of Sauron, as we learn from Gandalf:

“ ‘Give us that, Deagol, my love,’ said Smeagol, over his friend’s shoulder.

‘Why?’ said Deagol.

‘Because it’s my birthday, my love, and I wants it,’ said Smeagol.

‘I don’t care,’ said Deagol.  ‘I have given you a present already, more than I could afford.  I found this, and I’m going to keep it.’

‘Oh, are you indeed, my love,’ said Smeagol; and he caught Deagol by the throat and strangled him, because the gold looked so bright and beautiful.  Then he put the ring on his finger.”  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 2, “The Shadow of the Past”)

(I don’t have an artist for this, unfortunately.)

This posting isn’t about Gollum and his birthday, however, and it was inspired by another moment in The Lord of the Rings altogether.

I’m rewatching the Jackson LotR for the first time in some years and I’ve come to the moment in The Fellowship of the Ring where the Fellowship is blocked from crossing the Misty Mountains at the Redhorn Gate—

“They went on.  But before long the snow was falling fast, filling all the air, and swirling into Frodo’s eyes.  The dark bent shapes of Gandalf and Aragorn only a pace or two ahead could hardly be seen.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 3, “The Ring Goes South”)

It’s very convincingly done in the film, the snow thick, the mountains menacing, and, as this is December, as in the book, and we’ve just had our first snowfall, I was reminded of this wonderful and playful poem–

“It sifts from Leaden Sieves —
It powders all the Wood.
It fills with Alabaster Wool
The Wrinkles of the Road —

It makes an Even Face
Of Mountain, and of Plain —
Unbroken Forehead from the East
Unto the East again —

It reaches to the Fence —
It wraps it Rail by Rail
Till it is lost in Fleeces —
It deals Celestial Vail

To Stump, and Stack — and Stem —
A Summer’s empty Room —
Acres of Joints, where Harvests were,
Recordless, but for them–

It Ruffles Wrists of Posts
As Ankles of a Queen —
Then stills its Artisans — like Ghosts —
Denying they have been —“

(Amherst College MS 78)

It was written by Emily Dickinson (1830-1885)

and, as I write this, it’s her 193^rd birthday—10 December, 2023.

Her imagery and its links are always surprising, sometimes domestic, sometimes almost surreal, and always thought—and imagination—provoking.

This poem begins with an image taken from something the poet herself did a great deal of in the Dickinson household:  baking.

The one doing the sieving isn’t the baker, however, but the dull-grey snowclouds overhead.

Alabaster is a soft, white stone, often used for carving,

but there’s an interesting contrast here between the heaviness of stone and the lightness of wool, and where that stone/wool has fallen reminds us that Dickinson lived in a country town, where the roads would not have been paved—and very rutted, especially in winter.

Those wrinkles covered in snow lead us to the next image:  the landscape whose face has had its cracks and ruts smoothed out by the blanket of white.  And then we’re taken from the kitchen and a mirror to the fields which stretched beyond her town of Amherst (and still do, mainly to the south) to clear-cut (“stumps”) and hay (“stacks”) and harvested plants (“stems”) and the remains of corn fields (“acres of joints”, where the bottoms of the corn stalks resemble the points between bones).

From the fields, we’re suddenly whisked away to a palace and the boudoir of a queen, where we see the ruffles at the bottom of an intimate garment—

and the poem ends when “It”—the subject of all of the poem’s verbs—sifts, powders, fills, makes, reaches, wraps, is lost, ruffles—“stills its Artisans”—that is, its craftsmen—those who have done everything from powdering to wrapping—and they disappear—presumably as the clouds pass, leaving a world transformed from roads and mountains and fields with their fences into snowy sculpture.

Tolkien has informed us on the subject of hobbits and birthdays:

“Hobbits give presents to other people on their own birthdays.  Not very expensive ones, as a rule, and not so lavishly as on this occasion; but it was not a bad system.  Actually in Hobbiton and Bywater every day in the year was somebody’s birthday, so that every hobbit in those parts had a fair chance of at least one present at least once a week.  But they never got tired of them.”  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 1, “A Long-expected Party”)

And so, on Emily Dickinson’s birthday, I make a present of this lovely poem to you.

Stay well,

Don’t worry about sending her a card,

And remember that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

PS

As you might know or imagine, Dickinson was a constant and voracious reader, and it’s clear that, for this poem, she was influenced by another poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), who published, in his 1847 volume, Poems, of which she owned a copy, his own beautiful poem, “The Snow -Storm”.  Read it on page 65 here:  https://archive.org/details/poems1847emer/page/4/mode/2up  

Welcome, as ever, dear readers.

Occasionally, I’ve done a film review, but they’ve commonly been of Star Wars or Tolkien-themed shows.  Yesterday, however, I went to see the new Napoleon film and I want to think aloud a bit about it.

If you read this blog regularly, you know that I really dislike the levels of hatred and abuse which can be found on every level of the internet and, when such is applied to film, a review which employs them is, to me, useless.  It might tell me what the reviewer didn’t enjoy, but it doesn’t really enlighten me as to the film itself.  In my reviews, I try to understand what the creators were attempting to do and, in my opinion, whether they succeeded. In the case of this new film, much of the anger, etc., has been directed at its lack of historical accuracy and that’s true.  The four battle scenes:  Toulon (1793), Austerlitz (1805), Borodino (1812), and Waterloo (1815), although given the correct date on the screen, have virtually nothing to do with the actual events.  Instead, they seem like fables about the brutal violence behind Napoleon’s “glory” and, though this isn’t underlined in the film, it’s clear that Napoleon’s rise is just as this period caricature shows it to be—

Still, in a film which goes to such lengths to look like the time in which it takes place (the costume designers should definitely be handed awards, and the sets are impressive), history does have a place.  Napoleon’s self-coronation, for instance, really captures something of the grandeur which David created in his depiction of it.

(Napoleon, instead of being crowned by Pope Pius VII, crowned himself, then turned and crowned Josephine, as in the painting.  What wasn’t in David’s original sketches was the Pope raising his hand in a traditional blessing.  Napoleon, as usual, micromanaging, saw that the Pope’s right hand was in his lap and told David to redraw it.)

But, for me, the real problem lies in the title of this posting, which is a term by which the English, who feared and hated Napoleon at the same time, sometimes referred to him.

(There are dozens and dozens of different English caricatures of Napoleon throughout his entire life and career, depicting him as everything from a dwarfish sword-waver to a crocodile.  Here’s an illustrated article on the subject—with a mild parental guidance warning:  https://www.danceshistoricalmiscellany.com/corsican-monster-british-caricature/ )

By “monster”, the British meant a kind of demonic figure, sometimes, in caricatures, linked with Satan,

but, when it has come to film-making, it seems that his active career, which we might see as from his victory at Toulon in 1793

(by Edouard Detaille—one of my favorite late 19^th-early-20^th century military artists)

to his second and final exile on St. Helena, where he died in 1821,

was so full of events, that the Monster was, in fact, a monstrosity, an almost impossible thing to capture on film—although not for want of trying.  An incomplete list of films—fictional, not including things like documentaries—set in, or about, the Napoleonic era in general on WIKI runs from 1912 to 2018 and has several hundred (I stopped counting in 1950, when there are already over one hundred) entries.  (Here’s the link—see how far you get:   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Napoleonic_Wars_films )

As for films about Napoleon himself, this is a complex picture, part of it covered by this article:  https://www.vulture.com/article/napoleon-movies-history.html , but just a quick pass through the material underlines my point:  the difficulty of somehow compressing a life full of events into something which won’t give an audience what Ridley Scott, in an interview, called “bum ache”. 

The first known film in which Napoleon appears certainly wouldn’t have afflicted anyone, being a short, by Louis Lumiere, in 1897 (42 seconds).  After that there followed, in 1908-9, two films from the same studio, Vitagraph, “Napoleon, the Man of Destiny” and “The Life Drama of Napoleon Bonaparte and Empress Josephine of France”, which appear to have been combined into one, “Incidents in the Life of Napoleon and Josephine”—here’s the YouTube version:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmnHQbrh3KY (This is from the site of the very knowledgeable Clark Holloway.)  “Incidents” it is, being only about 25 minutes long.

After this comes Abel Gance’s (1889-1981) Napoleon, 1927, whose production history illustrates my point. 

Gance intended a full-scale film biography in 6 parts.  The director’s definitive cut of the first part lasted for 9 hours and 40 minutes.  No other parts were ever made and the film languished mostly in notoriety until the product of a process of reconstruction in 1979 produced a 4-hour version, then a 5-hour version.  (You can read the fascinating history of the whole project, from Gance’s original, here:  https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/monumental-reckoning-how-abel-gances-napoleon-was-restored-full-glory )  And Gance’s first part went no further than Napoleon’s first reaching Italy, in 1796.

Although there were further attempts at the big picture, like Sasha Guitry’s Napoleon, 1955, (you can see it here in the US dubbed version:  https://archive.org/details/Napoleon_ )–at two hours, you can imagine how little that big picture was—

film-makers also tried other approaches, much smaller and more domestic, such as the 1937 Conquest, about Napoleon’s affair with the Polish countess and nationalist, Maria Walewska (1786-1817).

And here we see the idea of Napoleon the romantic (if not womanizer, which was probably closer to the truth), which forms one half of the plot of Scott’s Napoleon.  As the screenwriter, David Scarpa, explains:

“So [Ridley] wants to know what you’re going to bring to it, what your point of view on it is. It was an almost impossible story to tell just in terms of the sheer sprawl of what Napoleon had done and his influence on European history and 45 battles fought and essentially writing the Code Napoleon, which is the basis of much of continental European society. So it would be almost impossible to tell the definitive version of that story within two and a half hours. And what I found myself most intrigued by was this little vignette in the book about his relationship with Josephine, his wife.”  (You can read the whole interview here:  https://www.msn.com/en-us/movies/news/ridley-scotts-napoleon-writer-david-scarpa-explains-whats-true-and-false/ar-AA1kTqd1 )

So, in two-and-a-half hours, we’re shown, in very brief form, Napoleon’s life, from 1793 (although the first date shown is 1789, along with the execution of Marie Antoinette, which actually took place on the 16^th of October, 1793),

to his death on St. Helena in 1821, intertwined with his complex relationship with Josephine.  He first meets Josephine at a party, after his success at Toulon, in 1793, where he stares at her until she comes up and inquires as to why he’s staring, which he fumblingly first denies, then admits.  And the story goes on from there.  It seems to me that there are two big dangers here:

1. the relationship story will overwhelm the biography and the real title of the film should be “Josephine—and Napoleon”

2. the appeal of this relationship relies upon the two principal characters—are they at least believable, if not likeable?

To the first, I would say that this was more-or-less successful, in my opinion.  There was a balance between the two and I rarely felt that Napoleon’s private life was overwhelming his public life—although the idea that Napoleon abandoned his 1798 Egyptian campaign to return to France just because it was rumored that Josephine was having an affair is stretching things a bit.

To the second, I admit that I wasn’t convinced.

Part of the problem, for me, was that Joaquin Phoenix, Napoleon, seemed to me to be miscast, playing the role as if he were a sometimes rather pathetic middle-aged Mafia boss (it didn’t help that his flat American accent and delivery were surrounded mostly by British actors, including the woman who played Josephine—and there was a laugh in the theatre when he turned on the British ambassador and shouted in that flat accent, “You think you’re so great, ‘cause you got boats!”).  As well, for much of the movie, he was simply physically too old, Napoleon at the time of his success at Toulon in 1793 was in his early 20s, having been born in 1769.  One has only to see David’s unfinished portrait of him from about 1797 to see what he must really have looked like at the time.

versus

Phoenix never seems to be young and as daring and lively as the real man must have been in his first years, but is already simply stodgy, even at times with Josephine.  It’s no wonder that, initially, she seems to be thinking about him as a kind of social investment, rather than as a potential BF and, in their physical encounters, she continues to be detached, even when we’re being told that this has become a powerful, if complex relationship.  I’m aware that the script writer wanted to show what might be a paradox:  the active, intense general/statesman, on the one hand, but the clumsy and mostly unromantic husband on the other:

“the idea of a man who is profoundly capable and competent in the realm of battle, and yet profoundly incapable and incompetent in the realm of love, in the realm of human relationships, and how those two things play off of one another.”

The difficulty for me is that we seem to be told, at the same time, that there was passion at the base of this, but, apart from a couple of tearful moments, I don’t feel that I was ever shown that in a meaningful way.   She seemed too passive and he too bullish.

So, would I recommend this film?  Without hedging, I guess that I would say the following:

1. if you’re a military history buff and know something about this period, you probably will spend a certain amount of time shaking your head (wondering, for instance, why the British and French are fighting from entrenchments at Waterloo and why the Prussians appear on the battlefield from the wrong direction)

2. if you want to see another side of a World Conqueror, this is definitely a start, but don’t expect too much—behind this film are letters exchanged between Napoleon and Josephine and they have their passionate moments, but, as read in a flat voice by an off-screen Phoenix, I kept wishing that this is what the writer and director would have shown me, rather than narrated at me.

At the same time, as always, I would say that viewers, like reviewers, often have very different opinions and, if anything I’ve written sparks your interest, go see it for yourself.

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

Stay well,

Avoid Waterloo at all costs,

And know that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

PS

While I might have mixed reactions to this film, I whole-heartedly recommend Ridley Scott’s much earlier (1977) Napoleonic film, The Duellists, which is a little jewel.

 It’s based upon a short story by Joseph Conrad, “The Duel”, which you can read here:  https://archive.org/details/asetsix00conrgoog/page/n6/mode/2up

Dear readers, welcome, as always.

Aquila muscas non capit, una hirundo ver non facit, ignis aurum probat, festina lente!

Or, “an eagle doesn’t catch flies, one swallow doesn’t make spring, fire tests [the] gold, make haste—slowly!”

It might be easy to wonder whether this was going to be a posting on riddles, but, in fact, as the title suggests, it’s about much knowledge packed into a few words—which is, in fact, like Bilbo’s riddle:

“A box without hinges, key, or lid,

Yet golden treasure inside is hid.”

(The Hobbit, Chapter Five, “Riddles in the Dark”)

and which appears to be a bit of a poser for his sinister fellow player–

(Alan Lee)

“This [Bilbo] thought a dreadfully easy chestnut, though he had not asked it in the usual words.  But it proved a nasty poser for Gollum.  He hissed to himself, and still he did not answer; he whispered and spluttered.”

Gollum was, in fact, only saved by Tolkien’s joking allusion to a proverb which Douglas Anderson in The Annotated Hobbit quotes from Francis Grose’s (1731-1791) A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1785, as, “Go teach your granny to suck eggs; said to such as would instruct anyone in a matter he knows better than themselves.”

 (You can read it for yourself here:  https://archive.org/details/aclassicaldicti01grosgoog/page/n114/mode/2up  in the 3^rd, 1796, edition.  If you’re a dictionary reader, this is simply a fun book, “learned”—hence “A Classical Dictionary”—and occasionally witty—see “Grave Digger” just below.  The advertisements at the front are also very tempting, being things like The Scoundrel’s Dictionary.  Grose’s A Provincial Glossary, 1787, available in the 1790 edition here:  https://archive.org/details/provincialglossa00gros/page/n5/mode/2up is subtitled, with a COLLECTION of LOCAL PROVERBS and POPULAR SUPERSTITIONS and is full of interesting bits and pieces on language and belief.  Grose himself is a wonderful example of the 18^th-century English Antiquarian and you can read something about his adventures and collecting here, including his friendship with Robert Burns:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Grose  Much of Grose’s antiquarian work is available at the Internet Archive—an institution of which Grose himself would have been fascinated, I think.  Charles Dickens’ had his own opinion of such early sometime-archeologists/scholars of the past, which you can read here in Chapter XI of the 1868 edition of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, 1836-37:   https://archive.org/details/pickwickpapers02dickgoog/page/n216/mode/2up  )

Tolkien was having fun with that proverbial expression (like his explanation of the creation of the game of golf in Chapter One), yet it gave Gollum the answer:

“But suddenly Gollum remembered thieving from nests long ago, and sitting under the river bank teaching his grandmother, teaching his grandmother to suck—‘Eggses!’ he hissed.  ‘Eggses it is.’ “

The subject of proverbs is enormous–the Latin proverbs (even the word is Latin, through Old French—pro—“before/in front/forward” and verbium—“speech act”, so “a speech put forth”, to use another old word) at the beginning of this posting are just a tiny fraction of such verbal wisdom preserved from all over the world, in the West surviving first in The Maxims of Ptahhotep

of the 12^th Dynasty (basically 2000 to 1800BC—you can read about them here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Maxims_of_Ptahhotep ) and passing through the book of Proverbs in the Hebrew/Christian Bible (much scholarly argument about dating—900-300BC?) through lines in Greek tragedies, often as end-tags like “Look upon no man as fortunate until his life has come to its full circle” (Sophocles, Oidipous, 1528-30—my—very loose—translation), up to Old English works which Tolkien would have known well, like the 11^th-century Durham Proverbs and the 12^th-century Dicts of Cato, and it’s clear that his creation, Bilbo, has a knowledge of such things, seeming to apply them commonly when something unpleasant is to be done, and often attributing them to his father.

As Thorin attempts to push Bilbo into exploring down the tunnel from the back door towards Sauron’s lair, Bilbo replies:

“ ‘If you mean you think it is my job to go into the secret passage first…say so at once and have done!  I might refuse.  I have got you out of two messes already, which hardly were in the original bargain, so that I am, I think, already owed some reward.  But ‘third time pays for all’ as my father used to say…” (The Hobbit, Chapter 12, “Inside Information”)

and he repeats this in the next chapter, prefacing it with a second proverb:

“ ‘Come, come!’ he said.  While there’s life there’s hope!’ as my father used to say, and ‘Third time pays for all.’ “  (The Hobbit, Chapter 13, “Not At Home”)

To which he has already added a third: 

“ ‘Every worm has his weak spot,’ as my father used to say, although I am sure it was not from personal experience.’ “ (The Hobbit, Chapter 12, “Inside Information”)

Not only does Bilbo know a proverb or two, however, but he even, inadvertently, creates two.

In Chapter Five (with its own proverbial title, “Out of the Frying-pan Into the Fire”), we find Gandalf, the dwarves, and Bilbo trapped in trees with Wargs about to keep them there and Bilbo shouts:

“ ‘What shall we do, what shall we do!’ he cried.  ‘Escaping goblins to be caught by wolves!’ he said—“

to which the narrator adds:

“…and it became a proverb, though we now say ‘out of the frying-pan into the fire’ in the same sort of uncomfortable situations. “  (The Hobbit, Chapter Five, “Out of the Frying-pan Into the Fire”)

In Chapter 13, Bilbo, barely escaping from Smaug’s flames, says to himself:

“ ‘Never laugh at live dragons, Bilbo you fool!’ he said to himself…”

and the narrator, commenting, says:

“…and it became a favorite saying of his later, and passed into a proverb.”

(The Hobbit, Chapter 12, “Inside Information”)

To which we might imagine the hint of two more, both within a sentence of each other in the last chapter of the book.  Gandalf and Bilbo have left Rivendell, their faces to the west:

“Even as they left the valley the sky darkened in the West before them, and wind and rain came upon them.

‘Merry is May-time!’ said Bilbo, as the rain beat into his face, ‘But our back is to legends and we are coming home.”  (The Hobbit, Chapter 19, “The Last Stage”)

Many proverbs rhyme, as does Bilbo, in fact, surprising Gandalf, so could that first remark become something like,

“Even when sky is nothing but grey,

Still we may say, merry is May”?

and the second,

“Legends and heroes go and may come,

But now at the end, nothing’s better than home.”

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Stay well,

Strive to become legendary,

And remember that there’s always

MTCIDC

O

ps

For a quick history of collections of English proverbial literature, see:   W. Carew Hazlitt, English Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases, 1882, at  https://archive.org/details/englishproverbs00hazlgoog/page/400/mode/2up (this is the 1907 edition) and, on the page at the link—400—you’ll also find:

“Teach your grandame to grope her ducks/to spin/to suck eggs/or to sup sour milk” as well as a Latin equivalent, Aquilam volare, delphinum notare doce—“teach [the] eagle to fly, [the] dolphin to swim”

As always, welcome, dear readers.

Boston, in the late 1760s, was a turbulent place.

It shouldn’t have been surprising, as its founders had been dissenters from Charles the First’s absolutist ideas of religion

who, forming a corporation, had come to New England to found their own state, which they had run independently from 1630 to 1686, when a royal governor, Sir Edmond Andros,

was sent to rule, but lasted only three years before politics in England changed things until 1692, when Massachusetts became a royal colony for good—or at least until 1775.

A major difficulty was what seemed to be an endless quarrel between Massachusetts merchants and the government in London about the regulation of trade, which began as early as 1651, when Parliament instituted the first of four Navigation Acts.

The title you see here says it all:  “An Act for Increasing of Shipping,  And Encouragement of the NAVIGATION of this NATION”, the nation here being Britain—and only Britain, its colonies in North America, then really Masschusetts Bay, Plymouth, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Virginia, being viewed only as sources of revenue, not as part of Britain—the original cash cows—

By law, exports and imports were to be strictly limited to English ports, dealing directly with other countries being prohibited.

Smuggling, of course, immediately commenced,

but never could replace legitimate trade—and things got worse after the British victory in the Seven Years War (1756-1763—here in the US 1754-1763), when Britain, having plunged deeply into debt to defeat its enemies, was faced with the need to pay back the huge loans it had taken out.

It undoubtedly sounded logical to those in the government that, as part of the war had been waged to defend the North American colonies from the French and their Native American allies,

(Eugene Leliepvre, one of my favorite French military artists)

those colonies should help with that enormous debt.  From the other side of the Atlantic, Massachusetts, along with others of the English colonies, long resenting earlier attempts to control colonial trade, and having a tradition of their own elective assemblies,

felt that such an expectation should come with some formal influence in Parliament—the well-known complaint of “taxation without representation”. 

Foolishly, this complaint was ignored by those at the top, who, instead, began to issue, from 1763 on, a whole series of Acts designed to extract funds from the colonies, usually involving either domestic imports or even, in the Stamp Act of 1765, colonial documents (all legal papers had to bear a government tax stamp to be legal—and not only legal papers, even newspapers and playing cards came under this Act).

Needless to say, the tension could only grow and, in 1768, the government in London felt that it was necessary, to enforce its acts and to protect its officers, to send troops to Boston.

As the caption tells us, when the troops landed, they did so as if they were conquerors come to occupy enemy territory:  “there Formed and Marched with insolent Parade, Drums beating, Fifes playing, with Colours flying, up KING STREET…”—with the most ominous addition:  “Each Soldier having received 16 rounds of Powder and Ball”—that is, these men were ready for a fight, if necessary.

The population of Boston in 1768 was about 16,000, with no barracks and few public spaces besides its churches, so the addition of, eventually, 4 regiments of infantry—perhaps as many as 2,000 men, all told–would have put a strain on the town even if these had been welcome new inhabitants.  The soldiers were quartered in taverns, barns, stables, and whatever empty buildings might be found, but soon, as might have been expected, began to tussle with the locals, which led to open bloodshed in March, 1770, when a panicked squad of soldiers fired into a mob which seemed to be threatening them—the so-called “Boston Massacre”, as depicted in Paul Revere’s propaganda print, with its “Butcher’s Hall” over the doorway behind the troops—in case you might have missed the point.

(a more accurate, but no less bloody, depiction by the famous contemporary American military artist, Don Troiani)

Such violence on the part of what locals viewed not as their own government’s soldiers, but as occupiers, only made things worse and, although there was no second “massacre”, more attempts by the London government to squeeze profit from the colonies finally led to the destruction by locals of a large shipment of taxable tea, dumped into Boston harbor in December, 1773—the “Boston Tea Party”.

This was too much for London and the decision was made to send more soldiers, remove civilian control, and set a military governor, Thomas Gage, already commander of British troops in North America, over the town.

In an even bigger blow, the government officially closed the port of Boston, setting warships to block the harbor.

Gage would then be pressured, both by government in London and by those loyal to the Crown in Boston, to do more to deal with what appeared, increasingly, to be a movement towards armed rebellion, leading to the British troops’ disastrous expedition to seize military supplies and local leaders west of Boston at Concord in April, 1775, leading to an estimated 300 British casualties and about 100 locals

(another Don Troiani)

 and a siege of Boston so intense that the British were forced to evacuate the city the following March.

(H. Charles McBarron—America’s first great military historical artist of the 20^th century)

All of this forms the background to a YA novel I’ve just been rereading, Esther Forbes’ (1891-1967) 1943

Johnny Tremain.

Johnny is an orphaned young Bostonian apprenticed to an elderly silversmith during the early 1770s and the book follows both the course of history in which he’s involved, as well as his own rather difficult personal life.  I very much recommend this book, but I don’t want to do a SPOILER ALERT, so I’ll just say that what makes it stand out for me is that the author is at great pains to depict Johnny’s development, from an arrogant boy with ambitions to a virtual outcast to someone who combines humility with a moving understanding of the people around him, including some of those who had given him difficulties in his growing up. 

Forbes herself wrote other historical novels set in early New England, as well as Paul Revere and the World He Lived In, 1942, which won her the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1943, and which clearly explains the authentic feel of Johnny Tremain.

As the book has so many dramatic elements—from 1770s Boston and its tensions to Johnny’s personal struggles—it’s not surprising that Walt Disney studios made a film of the novel in 1957.

As the book is complex, this is a very simplified version, stripping away many of the characters, but keeping most of the major moments, although, for the sake of colorful action, where Forbes had kept Johnny in Boston during the events of April, 1775, the film sends him to Lexington and Concord and follows the action there through him, including the British retreat to Boston through intensifying sniper fire from the locals.

(from a set of four engravings made after the events by Amos Doolittle, oddly, like Johnny—and Paul Revere–a silversmith who had taught  himself engraving—see this article about him for more:  https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/amos-doolittle-connecticuts-paul-revere/ )

Although not so mature as the book—and pretty sloppy on things like British uniforms and clothing of the period in general, though with very good sets—it’s a fun movie, which does capture some of the spirit of Forbes’ novel and, along with that novel, I would recommend it.  For more on events of this period, particularly military, I would also recommend the American Battlefield Trust website—you can read it here:  https://www.battlefields.org/learn/revolutionary-war/battles/lexington-and-concord

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

Stay well,

Always demand representation,

And remember that, also as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

Welcome, as ever, dear readers.

Last night, I rewatched Pixar/Disney’s Brave.

I hadn’t seen it in some years and, as I’ve been in the midst of archery recently, it fell off the DVD shelf into my hands.

If it’s not a film you’ve seen, I want to recommend it immediately, for the story of a young woman trying find her way in a rigid medieval world which sees her more as a pawn than a person.

(The famous “Lewis Chessmen”, 12^th-century walrus ivory and whale teeth carvings found in a kist (stone box) at Uig—Oo-ig–on the island of Lewis off the west coast of Scotland.  To read more, here’s a site actually devoted to them:  https://www.isleoflewischessset.co.uk/  From what culture we’re shown in Brave, these might be roughly contemporary with the story.  In 2010, there appeared the theory that they were carved in Iceland by Margret en Haga—Margaret the Handy/Dexterous—she is mentioned as a skilled worker in ivories in the 13^th century “Pols Saga” which you can read here on page 528 of Vigfusson and Powell, Origines Islandicae, 1905, where her name is translated “Margaret the Skilfull”:  https://ia904602.us.archive.org/4/items/originesislandic01guiala/originesislandic01guiala.pdf  )

It’s also funny and just absolutely pictorially beautiful, in the way a Miyazaki film can be.

Early in the film, the heroine, Merida, who is to be the pawn in a marriage alliance, alters things with a demand for a bride-contest in her specialty, archery, and

when one of her hapless suitors accidentally hits the bullseye, she promptly splits his arrow—and suddenly I’m in another story.  It’s 1938

and Robin Hood, played by Errol Flynn, disguised as a tinker, is about to win a golden arrow in an archery contest—and to be captured by a collection of villains.

He wins by—yes, you guessed it—splitting his final opponent’s arrow in two.

(This is from a useful article on the subject of arrow-splitting, which you can find here:  https://www.goldengatejoad.com/2012/07/how-hard-split-arrow-longbow/ and you can see the contest here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4gnNwVftp4  )

The idea for this may have come from the early 16^th-century “A Gest of Robyn Hode”, the “Fyfth Fytte”, in which Robin, in a contest at Nottingham, splits a series of wands with his shots—see F.J. Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Volume III, page 70 here:   https://archive.org/details/englishandscotti03chiluoft/page/70/mode/2up  (Robin, in Howard Pyle’s 1883 The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, trims the fletching off one side of his opponent’s shaft—see:  https://archive.org/details/merryadventureso00pylerich/page/30/mode/2up )

This wonderful shot, however, also reminded me of another kind of contest, rather like that which Merida sets up, this time in a much earlier era.

A few weeks ago, I finished teaching the Odyssey and I was reminded of a scene late in the story where Penelope, pestered for nearly 4 years by a gang of obnoxious suitors,

(J.W. Waterhouse)

sets up a rather peculiar sort of tournament, first telling Odysseus (in disguise as an old beggar), that she intends to reenact something her husband used to do for fun.  He would set up a dozen axe heads and fire an arrow through them.

(N.C. Wyeth)

It’s unclear in the text what’s really happening:  does he shoot through the axe blades?  Some have suggested (but it’s not in the text) that there were rings on the axes and he shot through them.

The real point, I suspect, isn’t the axes at all, but Odysseus’ bow.

(Alan Lee)

Penelope announces that the one who can string it—then do whatever it is with the axes, can have her hand.  And, although Telemachus (probably a sign that he’s Odysseus’ son, something he was very worried about at the beginning of the Odyssey) almost strings it—until Odysseus signals him not to—none of the suitors comes even close, which is humiliating for them, since it demonstrates quite graphically that, whatever their pretensions to be Penelope’s second husband, they will never come close to rivaling her first one.

At the same time, this contest has another outcome.  Odysseus easily strings the bow

(Peter Connolly)

and shoots (through?) the axes, but then begins picking off the suitors, beginning with one of the principal ones, Antinoos.

Thus, he is the successful participant in the contest for Penelope’s hand in three ways:

1. he strings the bow

2. he does whatever with the axes

3. he begins the elimination of any possible rivals

But I said at the opening that I was in the midst of archery these days—not only in the Odyssey, but, having just finished The Hobbit, I would add one more string to my bow—Bard the archer.

(Michael Hague from his beautiful illustrations)

Although it’s not a contest in the same sense, like Merida’s, Robin’s, and Odysseus’, his one shot is a tricky one, and the prize isn’t a bride, a golden arrow, or a wife, but life for him and much of the population of Lake-town, which he wins when his arrow (perhaps a magic one?) hits the one exposed spot on his enemy’s hide.

(JRRT)

Thanks for reading, as always.

Stay well,

Don’t let yourself be strung along,

And remember that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

PS

If you’d like a comprehensive collection of early Robin Hood material, try this 1885 edition of the antiquarian Joseph Ritson’s 1795 Robin Hood:  https://www.gutenberg.org/files/56926/56926-h/56926-h.htm   If you’d like to see what I think are the best Robin Hood book illustrations see Paul Creswick’s Robin Hood, 1917, for which the artist was N.C. Wyeth:  https://ia801603.us.archive.org/15/items/robinhood00cresrich/robinhood00cresrich.pdf  The Howard Pyle cited above has the most wonderfully elaborate illustrations and was, I suspect, an inspiration for the 1938 film.