Some years ago, an Italian friend of mine decided to take a French course. By the second week, he was complaining about pronunciation: “In Italian, 100 percent of everything written is said. In French,” he continued, his eyebrows raised, “almost nothing is!”
This is, for an English speaker, a standard complaint—and only one of two, not only those silent letters on the end of words, but also that, even when something is pronounced, the same letters can stand for different sounds, which is what gave this posting its title, three similarly spelled English words—and yet: through is said “throo”, rough is said “ruff”, and bough is said “bow”—but that looks like the word we pronounce as “boe”—although, in this case, it’s said as b + ow! as in ouch!—or is that ooch? Or uhch?
All this comes from something called the Great Vowel Shift, first named that by Otto Jesperson (1860-1943)
in his extensive A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles (7 volumes, 1909-1949), where the term shows up in Volume 1, “Part I Sounds and Spellings”. Here, he described an odd change in English pronunciation from the medieval period
through Shakespeare’s time
and beyond.
The explanation for this is complicated, including the Norman conquest of England,
which brought a ruling class
(William the Conqueror with his half-brothers, Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, and Robert, Count of Mortain)
which spoke one kind of French (which itself must have had elements of Norse, as the Normans’ direct ancestors had been Vikings who had so colonized one area of western France that it came to be called “Norsemanland”—Normandy).
Although the rulers spoke French, the ruled continued to speak Anglo-Saxon (also and now commonly called Old English),
which must have made for no end of difficulties, at least initially, although, when it came to things like seizing local land and demanding taxes, the Normans appear to have had little trouble making their demands known.
(This is a page from the “Winchester Book”, known colloquially as “the Domesday Book”. Written in Latin, this was the attempt, in 1086, by William’s agents, to catalogue all land-holding in England and part of Wales in great detail. For more, see: https://www.domesdaybook.co.uk/ )
Writing in Old English appears to have continued, in some areas, into the mid-12th century, but then fades away, although the spoken language remained and, combined with a second wave of northern French, formed the basis of what is called Middle English, which people usually refer to as “the language of Chaucer”.
(This is from the early 15th-century Ellesmere Manuscript, which is a beautifully illustrated copy of the “Canterbury Tales”. To see more about it, go to: https://hdl.huntington.org/digital/collection/p15150coll7/id/2360 As Chaucer died in 1400, it’s possible that this is an actual portrait. Unfortunately, we have no information about his horse. It is interesting, however, that Chaucer’s last name is not English, but French, meaning “shoemaker” , while his first name, “Geoffrey” seems to be derived from a Germanic compound which appears in the Old English name “Godfrith” and in the Norman French name, “Geoffrei”, meaning something like “God’s peace/protection”. See: https://ia904506.us.archive.org/34/items/ancestryofchauce00kern/ancestryofchauce00kern.pdf for much more on the subject of Chaucer’s last name.)
Tolkien, however, would have been the first to tell you that Middle English began some time before Chaucer had been born and that Chaucer’s English was just one form, from one area of England. Tolkien himself had published an edition of Ancrene Wisse, an early 13th century handbook for anchoresses (a kind of medieval female hermit—see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchorite ), written in a dialect very different from that of Chaucer,
as well as, with E.V. Gordon, an edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which, although written by an author who lived in the same era as Chaucer, spoke a Middle English which showed significant differences from that of the author of “The Canterbury Tales.
Throw into this mix the fact that, when printed texts began to appear in the late 15th century,
early printers were influenced by the English which they spoke, there not being a “common English”, either in speech or in writing. William Caxton (c.1422-c. 1491), who is believed to have introduced the printing press to England in the 1470s, came from Kent and was well aware that his English was not the English spoken elsewhere and that even the English of his own childhood was changing. (See this brief article for more on this: https://www.bl.uk/treasures/caxton/english.html and for a very interesting monograph on Caxton’s prologues and epilogues, see this: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.233974/page/n245/mode/2up )
Putting all of this together, we arrive at the bizarre word GHOTI, first mentioned in a letter from the publisher Charles Ollier to Leigh Hunt in 1855, in which the spelling of the word is explained as:
1. the GH is the F sound in “enough”
2. the O is the IH sound in “women”
3. and the TI is the SH in “mention”
so GHOTI is actually an alternate spelling of FISH. (See: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=81 with its wonderful attached comments), and the Great Vowel Shift is—or perhaps should be—to blame.
Needless to say, then, when my Italian friend had complained about French, he turned to me and said, “And then there’s English…” (which he, in fact, spoke extremely well) and I had to admit, English has its orthographic difficulties. This was a sort of personal nostra culpa (which I’ve seen translated in the singular as “my bad”, but, since I’m at the other end of many generations of English speakers/writers, it seemed more appropriate to write “our bad”) for the quirks in my native tongue. At the same time, another Latin phrase came to mind, usually written tu quoque, which should probably be translated in a childish tone, “you do it, too!” and I point at one of our Germanic cousins, Danish. There’s a common example of “well, it’s spelled like this, but said like that”: rodgrod med flode (which requires that the O’s all have the slash through them which indicates a sound like—hmm, go to: https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/danish-alphabet to see all of the ways in which it can be pronounced (and already I imagine that you understand where I’m going with this). Here’s a native speaker saying it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xasgdhN7S48 (For an entertaining little lecture on why Danish sounds the way it does—and I myself think that it’s actually pretty cool, in fact—see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eI5DPt3Ge_s )
It’s clear that we English-speakers are not alone.
Thanks for reading,
Stay well,
Remember: “I before E—except after C—or—when sounded like AY, as in ‘neighbor’ and ‘weigh’ “,
And know that, as always, there’s
MTCIDC
O
PS
Here’s an intelligent and fun historical explanation of why French frustrated mio amico italiano (in whose home language every letter is pronounced): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2TWBBxwhbU
When Frodo and his companions meet what appear to be two beggars on the road home to the Shire, they are in for an unpleasant surprise.
(a splendid Ted Nasmith, who often chooses moments in Tolkien which no one else seems to have thought of)
“ ‘Well Saruman!’ said Gandalf. ‘Where are you going?’”
Saruman’s response is just what one would expect: self-pitying and spiteful, attacking Galadriel in particular:
“…You have doomed yourselves, and you know it. And it will afford me some comfort as I wander to think that you pulled down your own house when you destroyed mine.”
He also has words for the Hobbits:
“…Well, it will serve you right when you come home, if you find things less good in the Southfarthing than you would like…” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 6, “Many Partings”)
Sam is, of course, right to say “And I didn’t like the sound of what he said about the Southfarthing” as the hobbits discover when they reach the Brandywine and the edge of the Shire:
“It was after nightfall when, wet and tired, the travelers came at last to the Brandywine, and they found the way barred. At either end of the Bridge there was a great spiked gate; and on the further side of the river they could see that some new houses had been built; two-storeyed with narrow straight-sided windows, bare and dimly lit and all very gloomy and un-Shirelike.”
It only gets worse from there, with hints of a kind of brutal communist-like regime
“It’s all those ‘gatherers” and ‘sharers”, I reckon, going round counting and measuring and taking off to storage. They do more gathering, and we never see most of the stuff again,” says Hob Hayward, who is, in fact, a servant of this new regime.
And, instead of an elected mayor, there is “the Chief” and, behind him, “Sharkey”, who turns out to be Sam’s foreboding personified: Saruman.
(by Inger Edelfeldt)
Saruman has been busy in the Shire:
“…’if they’re such fools, I will get ahead of them and teach them a lesson. One ill turn deserves another.’ It would have been a sharper lesson, if only you had given me a little more time and more Men. Still I have already done much that you will find it hard to mend or undo in your lives. And it will be pleasant to think of that and set it against my injuries.”
Besides reorganizing the Shire socially and politically, Saruman has been busy turning the countryside into an equivalent of early Industrial Revolution England—Tolkien’s own nightmare of what was happening before and in his own time:
“Still there seemed an unusual amount of burning going on, and smoke rose from many points round about. A great cloud of it was going up far away in the direction of the Woody End…
…they came to Bywater by its wide pool; and there they had their first really painful shock…there was a whole line of ugly new houses along Pool Side…An avenue of trees had stood there. They were all gone. And looking with dismay up the road towards Bag End they saw a tall chimney of brick in the distance. It was pouring out black smoke into the evening air.” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter , “The Scouring of the Shire”)
Because of Saruman’s words, it’s possible to see this as simply a complex act of revenge, a payback by him for the loss of Isengard and his position as head of the Istari.
(by those Tolkien illustrator pioneers, the Hildebrandts)
Frodo, however, sees it as one part of something much larger and much worse:
“ ‘This is worse than Mordor!’ said Sam…
“ ‘Yes, this is Mordor,’ said Frodo. ‘Just one of its works. Saruman was doing its work all the time, even when he thought he was working for himself…’ “
This is a theme which we can trace all the way back to Gandalf’s description of his conversation with Saruman in “The Council of Elrond”, where Saruman has tried to enlist Gandalf on his side for the conquest of Gondor he anticipates:
“ ‘…A new Power is rising. Against it the old allies and policies will not avail us at all. There is no hope left in Elves or dying Numenor. This then is one choice before you, before us. We may join with that Power. It would be wise, Gandalf. There is hope that way. Victory is at hand; there will be rich reward for those that aided it. As the Power grows, its proved friends will also grow; and the Wise, such as you and I, may with patience come at last to direct its courses, to control it…’
‘Saruman,’ I said, ‘I have heard speeches of this kind before, but only in the mouths of emissaries sent from Mordor to deceive the ignorant…’ “ (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 2, “The Council of Elrond”)
As we learn, Saruman has unwisely believed that, in handling a palantir, his communications with Sauron have been simply an exchange of views between two sovereign powers.
(another Hildebrandt)
This has led him to produce his own Mordor in miniature at Isengard, with its imitation of Mordor’s industrial power—
“But Saruman had slowly shaped it to his shifting purposes, and made it better, as he thought, being deceived—for all those arts and subtle devices, for which he forsook his former wisdom, and which fondly he imagined were his own, came but from Mordor; so that what he made was naught, only a little copy, a child’s model or a slave’s flattery, of that vast fortress, armoury, prison, furnace of great power, Barad-dur, the Dark Tower, which suffered no rival and laughed at flattery, biding its time, secure in its pride and its immeasurable strength.” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 7, “The Road to Isengard”)
Something which appears in the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings, however, has led me to imagine that Saruman could be doing all of this not just for the sake of vengeance, but for a larger purpose, now that Sauron and Mordor are no more: making a comeback. Very early in that text, the narrator says of the Hobbits:
“They do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom, though they were skilful with tools.” (The Lord of the Rings, Prologue I “Concerning Hobbits”)
England, in the mid-18th century, was suffering an economic crisis. From the Middle Ages, it had long been a producer of wool and woolen goods for Europe.
This had always been a piece-work industry, in which everything had been done by hand.
With England’s rise to a dominant position in trade and shipping at the time of the Seven Years War, however, demand had begun rapidly to exceed supply. And the means to reorganize supply were the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. The slowness of supply came from having to depend upon spinners (called “spinsters”)
and weavers,
the usual formula being that it took at least five spinsters to keep a weaver in thread. And here we see the “hand-loom” which the Hobbits understood.
The means of changing this came in the form of machines, which began to appear in the 1760s with James Hargreaves’ (1721-1778) “spinning jenny”,
which allowed one operator, turning a crank, to produce 24 bobbins of thread at once.
Since the Romans, people had used water power to grind wheat and other grains into flour—this is the “water-mill” which the Hobbits also understood. And JRRT provides us with a picture of one.
It was easy, then, for an ingenious engineer, Richard Arkwright (1732-1792),
to take the next step and figure out a way to hook a thread-producing machine to water power, thus removing the person turning the crank entirely and producing something which, in theory, could work seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. And it was a simple jump from there to factories with water-powered looms mechanically producing yard after yard of cloth.
Water power had its disadvantages: drought and winter freezes could stop the process, so the further step was to replace the water with the magic power of the 18th and early 19th centuries: steam. Here, the brilliant James Watt,
who, I suspect, thought that virtually everything could be powered by it, enters the picture.
And so were created steam-powered mills, with their smokey stacks—just the sort of thing which Frodo and Sam see with such dismay on their way to Bag End.
In time, however, mills of this sort could have other uses including producing standardized weapons. Although the idea of making muskets with interchangeable parts
dates to the later 18th century and possibly France, it would appear that a leader in the industry was the American, Eli Whitney (1765-1825),
and we see here his steam-powered arms factory, near New Haven, Connecticut, in 1827.
No one in the Third Age had firearms (although Saruman and Sauron both appear to have gunpowder—see “Fourth Age—Big Bang Theory”, 17 February, 2016), but the machines which might have stamped out musket parts could just as well have used the same power for stamping out swords and shields and and whatever clothing Saruman’s orcs wore could easily have been turned out in factories just like the one which appalls the Hobbits.
We are told that Saruman, in imitation of Sauron, had turned Isengard into a vast production site to further his plans of conquest: can we also imagine that he might have had it in mind to do the same to the Shire, with his mind “of metal and wheels” to try to replace Sauron at last?
I have just finished John Christopher’s (one of a number of pen names for Samuel Youd, 1922-2012)
1960s tetrology about the tripods,
originally a trilogy, to which the author added a fourth volume as a “prequel”.
The tripods are the vehicles—and emblems—of an alien race , which at an earlier time, had invaded the earth. If you know H.G. Wells’ work, and, if you read this blog, that’s probably a sure bet, you’ll recognize where Christopher got the idea, both for the invasion and the tripods—
Europe, in the late 19th century, when Wells came up with his idea, was an increasingly large armed camp. Industrialization had promoted more and bigger armaments and larger populations had encouraged national conscription (except for Britain, which maintained only a small—especially in comparison–volunteer army).
With heightened awareness of the possibilities of imminent war somewhere, and perhaps soon, British fiction writers began to turn out books like William Le Queux’ (1864-1927)
In Wells’ narrative, Earth is attacked by a series of cylinders, fired like giant bullets, from Mars, which oddly presages Georges Melies’ (1861-1938) 1902 comic silent film Le Voyage dans la Lune (The Trip to the Moon), in which a group of Earthmen are shot to the moon by a giant cannon.
(And you can see it here: https://archive.org/details/VoyageDansLaLune The Internet Archive has over 200 silent films and is a wonderful resource for enjoying an art form which precedes later film, but has its own life and isn’t simply black and white movies without sound.)
Inside the cylinders are the Martians, few in number, but equipped with weapons far beyond anything available on earth. And so Wells’ story is the very opposite of a comedy, the Martians being so advanced that, even with a few losses, they, with their superior technology, quickly devastate not only the area around London, but the people around London as well with a combination of what Wells’ calls a “heat ray” and this:
“Each of the Martians, standing in the great crescent I have described, had discharged, by means of the gunlike tube he carried, a huge canister over whatever hill, copse, cluster of houses, or other possible cover for guns, chanced to be in front of him. Some fired only one of these, some two—as in the case of the one we had seen; the one at Ripley is said to have discharged no fewer than five at that time. These canisters smashed on striking the ground—they did not explode—and incontinently disengaged an enormous volume of heavy, inky vapour, coiling and pouring upward in a huge and ebony cumulus cloud, a gaseous hill that sank and spread itself slowly over the surrounding country. And the touch of that vapour, the inhaling of its pungent wisps, was death to all that breathes.” (The War of the Worlds, Book 1, Chapter XV)
which horribly prefigures this, which appeared only a few years later on the battlefields of the Great War—
The Martians were mostly represented by their “war machines”, huge metal monsters with three legs,
(There are many images of these things on-line, but this seems to me to come closest to Wells’ original description, although this, from the 2005 Tom Cruise film doesn’t seem so far off. )
but the anonymous main character manages to see some Martians outside their machines and here’s his description:
“They were, I now saw, the most unearthly creatures it is possible to conceive. They were huge round bodies—or, rather, heads—about four feet in diameter, each body having in front of it a face. This face had no nostrils—indeed, the Martians do not seem to have had any sense of smell, but it had a pair of very large dark-coloured eyes, and just beneath this a kind of fleshy beak. In the back of this head or body—I scarcely know how to speak of it—was the single tight tympanic surface, since known to be anatomically an ear, though it must have been almost useless in our dense air. In a group round the mouth were sixteen slender, almost whiplike tentacles, arranged in two bunches of eight each. These bunches have since been named rather aptly, by that distinguished anatomist, Professor Howes, the hands. Even as I saw these Martians for the first time they seemed to be endeavouring to raise themselves on these hands, but of course, with the increased weight of terrestrial conditions, this was impossible. There is reason to suppose that on Mars they may have progressed upon them with some facility.
The internal anatomy, I may remark here, as dissection has since shown, was almost equally simple. The greater part of the structure was the brain, sending enormous nerves to the eyes, ear, and tactile tentacles. Besides this were the bulky lungs, into which the mouth opened, and the heart and its vessels. The pulmonary distress caused by the denser atmosphere and greater gravitational attraction was only too evident in the convulsive movements of the outer skin.
And this was the sum of the Martian organs. Strange as it may seem to a human being, all the complex apparatus of digestion, which makes up the bulk of our bodies, did not exist in the Martians. They were heads—merely heads. Entrails they had none. They did not eat, much less digest. Instead, they took the fresh, living blood of other creatures, and injected it into their own veins. I have myself seen this being done, as I shall mention in its place. But, squeamish as I may seem, I cannot bring myself to describe what I could not endure even to continue watching. Let it suffice to say, blood obtained from a still living animal, in most cases from a human being, was run directly by means of a little pipette into the recipient canal. . . “(War, Book 2, Chapter II)
Probably the end of this story is familiar to you: although the Martians have advanced technology, they lack immune systems which will fight off terrestrial diseases and, just when it looks like they are about to march on the rest of the UK, they quickly succumb to infections.
Over the years, there have been a number of attempts to dramatize Wells’ story, from the famous Orson Welles (no relation, as far as I know) radio adaptation of 1938,
which caused a certain amount of panic among listeners in the US,
Unlike those who have written scripts which follow, sometimes more, sometimes less, closely Wells’ text, Christopher takes a completely different approach. To begin, the aliens are not Martians, but come from a distant galaxy and successfully conquer the majority of Earth. Although their tripods have the destructive power of Wells’ war machines, they conquer in a completely different manner: through brainwashing. They take over television and use it to convince most Earthlings that they are not hostile invaders, but beneficent beings and Earth would be far better off with them in control. This we learn in the first book, or “prequel”, When the Tripods Came.
Once they had achieved their conquest, they erect three huge dome-cities across the northern hemispheres and maintain control by placing a kind of webbing, called “the cap” on the heads of all humans past puberty. This mesh is dug into the skull and transmits electronic waves which convey the orders of the aliens. In the subsequent books, which take place some time later, we follow Will, an English boy who, with his difficult cousin, Henry, escapes England ahead of capping and manages to reach what has become a center of resistance to the aliens in The White Mountains.
In the third volume, Will and another boy, to gain intelligence, penetrate one of the three dome cities of the aliens in The City of Gold and Lead,
and, in the fourth and final book, The Pool of Fire, Will and others finally defeat the aliens by breaking open the domes of all three cities, allowing Earth’s atmosphere in, which then poisons all of the aliens.
One might see this as fairly standard science fiction of a certain sort, all about a willful but intelligent boy who has to learn first how to survive and then to take action in a hostile world. It moves along at a good pace and there is a certain amount of friction and character development, but, for me, the most interesting parts are about the aliens, beginning with Christopher’s description of them:
“…They stood much taller than a man, nearly twice as tall, and were broad in proportion. Their bodies were wider at the bottom than at the top, four or five feet around I thought, but tapered upward to something like a foot in circumference at the head. If it was the head, for there was no break in the continuity, no sign of a neck. The next thing I noticed was that their bodies were supported not on two legs but three, these being thick but short. They had, matching them, three arms, or rather tentacles, issuing from a point about halfway up their bodies. And their eyes—I saw that there were three of those, too, set in a flattened triangle, one above and between the other two, and a foot or so below the crown. In color the creatures were green, though I saw that the shades differed, some being dark, the green tinged with brown, and others quite pallid. That, and the fact that their heights varied to some extent, appeared to be the only means of telling one from another… (The City of Gold and Lead, 125-126)
It’s no wonder, then, that the aliens use tripod vehicles—they are tripods themselves.
The dome city is, in fact, a kind of eco-dome, which replicates not only their home world’s atmosphere, but also its heat and heavy gravity. They use young human males as slaves and so wearing is life in such a different climate, even when wearing an oxygen mask, which is a necessity, that it seems that 6 months are the usual life expectancy. The humans are so conditioned, however, that, when they feel too worn out, they willingly betake themselves to “the Place of Happy Release” to be exterminated.
A striking fact about the aliens is that they seem almost solitary, perhaps because reproduction is by budding and therefore there is little need for the kind of socializing which goes on in human society. As well, they are aesthetes, seeking or making what they believe to be beautiful—including preserving what they consider fine specimens of young female humans in collections which echo rows on butterflies on pins. Altogether, I feel that Christopher has produced a distinct race, intelligent, capable, but ultimately alien in every sense.
The idea of the Martian invasion first caught my attention when I read it in comic book form in childhood,
and I’ve read and reread the novel more than once—and even once wrote a blog posting about it (One World, Two Wars, 19 February, 2020), but, reading it this time for this posting, I found a connection—perhaps only the suggestion of a connection—with Tolkien.
This appears in a footnote by JRRT in one of his letters. A couple, Charlotte and Denis Plimmer, had interviewed him for The Daily Telegraph Magazine in the later 1960s and though seemingly kind and well-meaning, had either misunderstood or simply recreated parts of the interview, a draft of which they then sent to JRRT. Tolkien then, very patiently, wrote to correct a number of points and, in the process, added:
“I was greatly taken by the book that was (I believe) the runner-up when The L.R.was given the Fantasy Award: [The] Death of Grass. (letter to Mr. and Mrs. Plimmer, 8 February, 1967, Letters, 377)
The Death of Grass is a 1956 science fiction novel by John Christopher.
If Tolkien knew and enjoyed that earlier novel by Christopher, perhaps he had read about tripods, too?
Thanks, as ever, for reading.
Stay well,
Avoid hair nets,
And know that, as always, there’s
MTCIDC
O
PS
If you would like to know more about the tripods and their world, have a look at:
There is a very interesting 2013 pseudo-documentary about a Martian invasion called The Great Martian War, 1913-1917, in which the Great War of 1914-1918 is replaced with an alternative: the great powers of Europe and North America, instead of fighting each other during this period, are allied in a war against exterrestrial invaders. You can read about it here:
I have, more than once, in reading about Tolkien, seen a reference to a book with a rather odd title: The Marvellous Land of Snergs. I confess that I don’t find the word “Snergs” at all inviting, but I have been intrigued: what’s so marvelous about this land and why is it associated with JRRT to the point where Douglas Anderson, in his The Annotated Hobbit, calls it an ”obscure influence” upon The Hobbit?
I had a copy of the 2008 Dover reprint of the 1928 US edition on my bookshelf,
and, when I took it down, I noticed this quotation at the bottom of the cover:
“I should like to record my own love and my children’s love of E.A. Wyke-Smith’s Marvellous Land of Snergs. J.R.R. Tolkien”
Hmm. So this was a favorite book of JRRT. But where had this quotation—perfect for a book blurb– come from?
Although I often write about some aspect of Tolkien and his work, I would never claim to be a Tolkien scholar. Fortunately, there are now numerous members of that community, from Tom Shippey
whose book, The Road to Middle Earth, should be on the bookshelf of everyone interested in JRRT,
to John Garth
to Dimitra Fimi
to Verlyn Flieger,
and far beyond.
Among the works of these excellent students of Tolkien, one book has now carried me through teaching The Hobbit half-a-dozen times in the last few years: Anderson’s
The Annotated Hobbit.
It’s rare that, when I have a question about The Hobbit, a quick thumb-through doesn’t answer it (although I wish that some enterprising person would make an index for it, thus speeding up my thumb) and so I flipped to his introduction and there it was.
And, in a draft to “On Fairy-Stories”, a lecture given at the University of St Andrews in 1939, Anderson reports that Tolkien wrote:
“I should like to record my own love and my children’s love of E.A. Wyke-Smith’s [The] Marvelous Land of Snergs, at any rate of the snerg-element of that tale, and of Gorbo the gem of dunderheads, jewel of a companion in an escapade.” (Anderson, The Annotated Hobbit, 7).
That Tolkien had read the work to his children, who had enjoyed it, we know from Humphrey Carpenter, as he writes:
“…the nursery housed more recent additions to children’s literature, among them E.A Wyke-Smith’s The Marvelous Land of Snergs…Tolkien noted that his sons were highly amused by the Snergs…” (Carpenter, Tolkien, 184)
So, what and where is this land and what has it got to do with Hobbits?
E.A. Wyke-Smith (1871-1935),
was, among other things, the author of 8 novels, four for children, of which the last was The Marvellous Land of Snergs, published in Britain in 1927 and the US in 1928.
As I read it, it seemed to me actually to be several different novels at the same time. It begins somewhere on the coast of South Africa, at an imaginary place called “Watkyns Bay”, which is, in fact, the base for something called the “S.R.S.C.”, which stands for “The Society for the Removal of Superfluous Children”. This sounds like a Victorian goblin association, poorly concealed behind the respectable words “The Society for…”, but is, in fact, a kind of fantasy orphanage. A group of rather severe English ladies have the ability to observe neglected or mistreated children and carry them away, seemingly on the wind, like Mary Poppins,
(don’t try this at home)
to this mysterious spot, where they appear to be frozen in time, which is, I suspect, why the original US publisher added his blurb:
“All who love Peter Pan will also love this story for children of every age and kind.”
After all, the original J.M.Barrie play of 1904
and Barrie’s subsequent novel of 1911
both begin in England, then move—by flying–to an island in a place called “Neverland”, where children remain children, presumably forever.
(Although it is suggested that a few children may be returned to better homes in England, Snergs, 2-3). Thus, we begin with a sort of mild social satire on children’s welfare in Britain. This is then briefly interrupted by the mention that, although Watkyns Bay, is protected by its position, someone named “Vanderdecken” has landed a ship just north of it and is encamped there with his men. Although he is not identified directly, there is a clue to who he is in the following:
“Owing to his rash oath that he would beat round the Cape of Good Hope if he beat round it till Doomsday he found himself doing so…” (Snergs, 2)
And, with this, we have moved from social satire to legend, as this “Vanderdecken” is actually the folk character called “the Flying Dutchman”, condemned to sail the seas forever because of a vow he had foolishly made—although, in one version of the story, he is allowed, every seven years, to come ashore and, if he finds a woman brave (or mad) enough to love him, he can be redeemed. This forms the basis of Richard Wagner’s (1813-1883)
German composer Richard Wagner is shown in an undated file photo. Credit; The Bettman Archive
1843 opera Der Fliegende Hollaender (“The Flying Dutchman”).
(This is the first page of the overture. It’s quite a piece of music, full of Wagner’s characteristic leitmotifs, little themes tied to characters and emotions. If you don’t know it, here’s a LINK to a recording of that overture with its ferocious opening here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEcyCEAm1Mg From the details Wyke-Smith offers us about Vanderdecken, I suspect that he had read this early account in Blackwood’s Magazine for May, 1821: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=KPUAAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA127&focus=viewport&output=html )
So far, with the exception of the linking of the S.R.S.C. and the Dutchman to South Africa, there seems to be little connection between two seemingly disparate stories—then enter the Snergs.
We are told, at the beginning of Part I, Chapter 4 (if the chapters had numbers) that :
“Probably they are some offshoots of the pixies who once inhabited the hills and forests of England, and who finally disappeared about the reign of Henry VIII.” (Snergs,7)
To me, this is an echo of the tradition that the English Reformation (1532-34) and the subsequent Dissolution of the Monasteries (1536-1541)
saw the migration of the supernatural (with one notable exception) from England. This would have been relatively recently expressed in Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910), the title of the latter being based upon Richard Corbet’s 17th-century poem “The Fairies’ Farewell” which laments the disappearance of England’s “other” world because of the change of religion in Henry’s time. (For more on this, see the posting for 22 June, 2022, “(Failed) Rewards and (No More) Fairies”).
The Snergs act as general dogsbodies to the ladies of Watkyns Bay, building houses, providing game, even acting as lifeguards for the children, and are described in ways that might suggest something hobbitlike about them:
“The Snergs are a race of people only slightly taller than the average table but broad in the shoulders and of great strength…They are great on feasts, which they have in the open air at long tables…” (Snergs, 7, 10)
After a certain amount of description of said Snergs, we are introduced to the two main human characters, Sylvia and Joe, children of a neglectful or abusive parent, respectively, and, with them, the main narrative begins. Soon, they run away from Watkyns Bay, are lost in a dense forest on the way to the Snergs’ town, meet a local, Gorbo, who seems less-than-brilliant,
and stumble through a complex tunnel network which lands them on the other side of a difficult river. In this part of the story, then, we’ve moved from social satire and legend into what appears to be a standard fairy tale: a journey by children attempting to return home—with a dubious guide.
Thereupon, they meet a shakily-vegetarian ogre, a timid knight, an obnoxious (and very unfunny) jester, a witch out for revenge, a king said to be a monster (but who turns out to be quite genial, if touchy), before finally being rescued and sent home. With the story ended, there is, as far as I can tell, no more possible influence upon The Hobbit than a kind of general sense that the Snergs are vaguely suggestive of Hobbits (and why their land is “marvellous” is difficult to tell, as most of the story occurs to the east of that land and, in itself, isn’t marvellous, just home to some odd characters).
What about that blurb, then, and its source, with what sounds like unbridled enthusiasm?
I think that we can begin with an interesting fact about the source of that blurb, which Anderson tells us was taken from a draft of a talk—those words only appear in the draft and don’t appear in the published version of the lecture (see Tolkien, The Monsters and the Critics, edited by Christopher Tolkien, 109-161, for the actual text). Did Tolkien have second thoughts about Snergs as early as 1939?
Certainly , upon rereading George MacDonald’s The Golden Key, for a proposed introduction to a reprinting in 1965, he found the work “illwritten, incoherent, and bad, in spite of a few memorable passages”, Carpenter, Tolkien, 274) and abandoned the project. And, in 1955, he certainly appears less enamored of Snergs in writing to W.H. Auden of the history of The Hobbit:
“But it became The Hobbit in the 1930s, and was eventually published not because of my own children’s enthusiasm (though they liked it well enough)…not any better I think than The Marvellous Land of Snergs, Wyke-Smith, Ernest Benn 1927. Seeing the date, I should say that this was probably an unconscious source-book! for the Hobbits, not of anything else.” (letter to W.H. Auden, 7 June, 1955, Carpenter, Letters, 215)
As Tolkien could be rather touchy about sources and influences, it’s interesting that he would suggest that the volume had had some sort of effect—on the Hobbits—but, he’s quick to add, “not [on] anything else”, which, for me, underlines one part of Anderson’s description of The Marvellous Land of Snergs—although, as JRRT writes, it might have had some “influence”, that influence was certainly “obscure”, even to Tolkien.
Since I began teaching World Civilizations, a number of years ago, this image, which I’ve used in discussing the elaborate nature of Egyptian funerary beliefs and practices, has always struck me, both for its sheer beauty and for its complex meaning.
It comes from a kind of instruction manual, a so-called “Book of the Dead”, the goal of which was to aid the deceased through the process of judgment and (with luck) into the afterlife. This version dates from about 1300BC, at the time of the 19th Dynasty (one of two methods for laying out ancient Egyptian history is by ruling family, the other being by Kingdoms and Intermediate Periods) and is in the British Museum.
The figure to the far left is Hunefer, an important court official for a very important pharaoh, Seti I.
Important as he is, Hunefer still must face the Judgment to determine whether he is worthy of passing to the afterlife. The main focus of the judgment is the weighing of Hunefer’s heart on the scales of the goddess Ma’at, who is the patroness of justice, which, to Egyptians, meant attaining a proper behavioral balance.
(She is sometimes represented as having wings
which I would guess suggests that she is omnipresent.)
Hunefer is being led to the judgment by Anubis, who acts as the overseer, as well as administrator of the weighing. Hunefer’s heart is represented by the jar on the left pan of the scales. On the other pan stands the feather of Ma’at (who is also represented in miniature on top of the center of the scales). The point of the weighing is to see if Hunefer’s behavior, represented by the heart, in life has been just—in Egyptian belief, in balance—and the feather (from an ostrich), which is not so light as it seems, is the symbol of the goddess.
If the pans are equal, Hunefer will progress beyond the weighing. If the heart sinks, it is then consumed by that very sinister creature just under the right-hand pan, Ammit, who has the head of a crocodile, the front legs of (here) a lion (other legs are possible), and the rear legs of a hippopotamus. The judgment is then recorded by Thoth, the god of, among other things, literacy, who is standing to the right of the scales (and is Ma’at’s partner among the gods). If the heart is devoured, all chance for a life beyond the grave is gone and the soul is lost. Fortunately for Hunefer, his heart and the feather have the same weight and we can see him further on being conducted by Horus (who is the pharaoh himself in divine form) to an audience with the ruler of the Underworld, Horus’ father, Osiris, mother, Isis, and Isis’ sister, Nephthys.
Just as there is a goddess of balance among the ancient Egyptians, there is also a divinity for its opposite, chaos, called Isfet/Asfet. So far, I haven’t found an ancient image of her, but here’s her name in hieroglyphs.
Thus, with the potential for Isfet, Ma’at’s scales represent a safe middle ground, where justice is achieved by a careful balance and which is then a defense against the chaos which would come if people not properly monitored could behave in any way which they wished, to the harm of others.
When I see justice as balance, and injustice as chaos, I’m immediately reminded of the Greek concept of dike (DEE-kay), as we see it first appearing in Aeschylus’ (EH-skih-lus c.525-455BC)
trilogy, the Oresteia (or-es-TYE-uh 458BC).
(an early printed edition from Antwerp, 1580)
Initially, dike clearly implies eye-for-eye revenge, but, as we’ll be shown through three plays in succession, this leads to a kind of societal imbalance—a bloody chaos: where will vengeance ever stop?
If you don’t know the plays, they are Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and TheEumenides (a nice name for The Furies, as we’ll see). The basic plot which runs through these dramas is the following:
1. while Agamemnon, high king of the Greeks, has been off fighting at Troy, his wife, Clytemnestra, remaining in Argos, has been having a long-time affair (7 years) with Aegisthus, Agamemnon’s cousin, as well as grieving for her daughter, Iphigenia (or so she claims), ruthlessly sacrificed by her husband to obtain the wind he needs to sail to Troy. (He had offended Artemis, who withheld the wind until he offered his daughter as recompense for his behavior.)
(In case you’re worried, this wall painting from Pompeii offers an ancient alternative, where, at the last minute, Artemis substitutes a stag for Iphigenia, carrying her off to become her priestess in far away Taurus, where she becomes the subject of Gluck’s (1714-1787) beautiful and striking 1779 opera Iphigenie en Tauride—which you can hear here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTgmncbsqzg )
2. when Agamemnon comes home to Argos, Clytemnestra and Aegisthus kill not only Agamemnon, but his Trojan captive, Cassandra,
and the surviving men from his Trojan expedition (which, after being away for ten years in Agamemnon’s service, must have seemed like a particularly rotten end). This brings us to the conclusion of Agamemnon.
(The play’s description of the murder, as more or less depicted here, differs from that in Book 4 of the Odyssey, where the killing happens at a feast, instead of by a bathtub.)
3. in The Libation Bearers, some years later, Agamemnon’s son, instructed by Apollo, returns to Argos and, with the aid of his cousin, Pylades, kills both Aegisthus
and his mother, Clytemnestra.
This act of revenge, however, doesn’t end the play as the Furies, spirits who hunt down those guilty of kin-murder, now appear to Orestes and it’s clear that, though no human may attack him for the murder of his mother, there are otherworldly beings who will.
4. with the opening of the third play, The Eumenides, we see Orestes having taken refuge at Apollo’s shrine at Delphi (after all, it was Apollo who encouraged him to seek revenge), but surrounded by the Furies.
With Apollo’s help, he escapes to Athens, where, when he appeals to Athena, she sets up the first trial: 12 unbiased (she must hope) Athenian citizens as a jury to try Orestes for murder. Considering the complicated circumstances, it’s not surprising that it’s a hung jury: 6 to 6. Athena then adds her vote for acquittal and Orestes is free—but the Furies are outraged: they are the spirits of vengeance—what will happen to them—and worse, to revenge, at least for kin-slaying—if they are replaced by this new system? Athena then tells them that they will now have a new job description: overseers of justice, with a new name: Eumenides, “the Kindly Ones”.
And, with this, we see a new definition of dike: not the chaos of endless vengeance, but civil justice, which brings a new balance to the world. (I almost wrote “to the Force”—but, certainly, Darth Sidious, as the Emperor Palpatine, has seriously brought the entire galaxy into an unbalanced condition, beginning with the murder of most of the Jedi, who are the traditional guardians of order—that is, balance–the overthrow of the Senate, and his new brutal police state.)
Using this idea of balance versus chaos, I approached the final episodes of A Game of Thrones. If you read this blog with any regularity, you know that my approach to such complex visual narratives as this or the whole 9 Star Wars films (minus Rogue One and Solo) is not to praise or condemn (although I’ll definitely praise what I believe to be good work), but rather to try to understand what the creators wanted to present and how successful I thought they were (see two postings on the Obi-Wan miniseries: “Obi Won? (One)”, 6 July, 2022, and “Obi Won? (Two), 13 July, 2022, for an example of this method). I usually avoid reading negative criticism, as well, because, commonly, it’s mostly invective, and therefore not really helpful to anyone.
In the case of Thrones, its eighth and final season attracted a great deal of such invective and I admit that, the first time I saw the series, I began that last season, then stopped, as I knew just enough to dread what might be coming next. In a second viewing, this summer, however, I watched it all the way through–with the concept of balance in mind. (I’m assuming by the way, that, by now, there’s no reason for a “spoiler alert”here.) As I did so, I tried to imagine what it was that the creators had intended for the conclusion.
From the beginning, Daenerys Targaryen,
along with Jon Snow,
and Tyrion Lannister,
seemed to me the characters I most wanted to know more about. In their various ways, they were the underdogs: Daenerys, sold by her brother to a barbarian horse lord in order to gain an army; Jon Snow, the bastard of a major nobleman condemned to a celibate life at what was termed “the end of the world”; Tyrion, always condemned simply because he was a dwarf.
As the series progressed, we saw Daenerys grow and gradually become a powerful figure, not only because she had three dragons at her back,
but also because she was eternally resilient—no setback ever really set her back, beginning with her survival as the widow of the horse lord and progressing to her massing an army to free the thousands of slaves in cities along her route west towards the Narrow Sea. There were, at the same time, some disturbing moments: although she was adamant about ending slavery, she was equally so about becoming the queen of all seven kingdoms of Westeros and, when she finally managed to reach that island, her behavior seemed to become increasingly over-focused upon that ambition. In a word, she was gradually becoming unbalanced—and this is what I believe the creators intended us to see. From the pawn of the opening of the series to Series 8, Daenerys had grown, certainly, but there was always that disturbing undercurrent, much of it based upon her increasing insistence that she be obeyed unquestioningly.
(I’m reminded here of Alexander the Great, who began by treating his men as comrades, but, after he had mastered the Persian empire, began to demand that, when people came into his presence, they should throw themselves to the floor in the gesture called proskynesis, which we can see here being performed before one of Alexander’s Mesopotamian predecessors.)
This reached the point where, even though she knew that all of Westeros was threatened by the coming of the White Walkers over the Wall to the north, and that their victory meant a kind of living death for every human,
she would only ally herself with the forces in the North, led by Jon Snow, another underdog who had done very well for himself, if he acknowledged her position as his queen.
This obsession then progressed to the point that, with the White Walkers defeated, Daenerys demanded that all would now march to the south to take the throne of the Seven Kingdoms for her, beginning with the capital, King’s Landing.
When this did not go quite as planned and Daenerys was forced to witness the murder of her closest friend and confidante, Missandei,
she uses her remaining dragon to destroy the capital city and most of its inhabitants, something which Tyrion, now one of her counselors, had begged her not to do.
Tyrion himself has gone the opposite route. Initially, he had begun the series as a drunken, womanizing loser, bitterly hating himself.
By Season 8, he had, after several years of horrific events (including strangling the woman he had loved, but who had betrayed him, and killing his own father), gained some balance, so that his obvious intelligence was matched by a sort of calm, thoughtful decency, encouraged by another calm, decent character, Lord Varys.
Varys had begun under a cloud, being spymaster to a succession of kings, but he, too, has progressed towards balance. Unfortunately for him, this balance has led him to see what Daenerys was becoming in her all-consuming ambition, which brings him to plotting to overthrow her and to his death by dragon, leaving Tyrion alone to watch Daenerys gradually fall into the same kind of tyrannical mindset as the Emperor Palpatine, obsessed with control. (In fact, at this point, she admits that, as she will never be loved, as sovereign, she will rule by fear—another step towards the Dark Side.)
Ma’at and her feather signify balance in ancient Egypt and dike comes to mean balance in the Greek world, so what can bring balance to the world of Westeros? Once King’s Landing is in ruins and Daenerys’ chief enemy, Queen Cersei, has been destroyed,
it seems Daenerys will only go on, terrorizing with her dragon, until the whole world, of which Westeros is only a part, will be subjected to her increasingly brutal approach to monarchy. Tyrion sees this, as Lord Varys had before him,
and he now takes action, but, being Tyrion, it is indirect action. He prompts Jon Snow, who has not only become Daenerys’ vassal, but her lover, pointing out the danger of a queen so obsessed with domination, and pushing him to draw the only possible conclusion—balance can only be restored if she is removed, permanently.
As I tend to avoid invective, I can only guess that this was a major feature of the wave of criticism which washed over Season 8, and, having found her initially such a sympathetic character, I can understand such a reaction: did this have to be the end for her?
As I wrote earlier, however, I try always to understand what it is that the creators are aiming for and, after seeing Daenerys’ vengeful swoops over King’s Landing,
and remembering her expressing her belief that she would have to rule by fear, what would the world be like if she were allowed to do so? The very chaos in the world which was the opposite of the rule of Ma’at, certainly.
In the ancient Egyptian world, everyone’s behavior in life was literally weighed,
and the consequences for a life which didn’t balance were extreme, but unbalanced people, in the Egyptians’ view, would be wicked people and would deserve what happened to them after death, as they would have caused so much harm in this world.
In ancient Greece, the dramatist Aeschylus elaborated upon the myth of how old dike, vengeance which brought only brief balance before the cycle began again, was replaced by a new definition, in which the cycle could be stopped by a new dike, law in an impartial court, whose judgment would replace vengeance with justice and there would be no return to the cycle and its potential endless damage.
In the case of Daenerys, who, dead, is carried off by her remaining dragon,
she undergoes no trial in this world and we have no idea of what judgment she may then have undergone in any world beyond, but her end brings order once more to war-torn Westeros and perhaps that’s reason enough to justify what the creators of A Game of Thrones decided upon for a conclusion.
People wearing impressionistic medieval armor turn up all over the internet these days.
When it comes to combat, however, something always seems to be missing
and this is where an attachment to the real medieval world and internet productions comes loose. In the real medieval world, not protecting your head could lead to unfortunate consequences…
The week of 21 August, 1485, for instance, was a very bad one for Richard III, (1452-1485), briefly King of England (1483-1485).
Challenged for his claim to the throne by Henry Tudor (1457-1509),
he faced his opponent at Bosworth Field
only to find that the Stanley family, supposedly allies, first hung back—and then, much to what I imagine was Richard’s horror, joined forces with Henry Tudor.
(a Graham Turner, capturing Richard’s dawning awareness of what was going wrong)
Richard was then killed in the fighting which followed—and that wasn’t the end of his bad week.
(another Graham Turner)
Henry ordered that his body be publically displayed so that everyone would know who was the king and who was dead, then the body was hastily dumped, probably naked, into a hole dug in the grounds of the Priory of the Grey Friars in Leicester. (For more on the priory, see: https://storyofleicester.info/faith-belief/grey-friars/ )
When Henry VIII (1491-1547) began the process of restructuring the English branch of the Church by emptying monasteries, nunneries, and other Church properties, then selling them off,
the Priory was knocked down and disappeared for nearly 500 years, leaving Richard to be the subject of one of Shakespeare’s first hits,
which depicted a twisted monster, juicily played by everyone from the original Richard, Richard Burbage (c.1567-1619),
to David Garrick (1717-1779),
to Laurence Olivier (1907-1989).
By 2012, the site of the Priory had been covered by a car park,
In which, upon excavation, was found what was first posited to be Richard’s grave, and then confirmed when DNA from the bones was matched with those of living descendants.
When those bones were examined, it appeared that Richard had received a number of wounds to his torso, most of them posthumous and slight, but what probably killed him were two to the head,
one, perhaps with a sword,
the other with a polearm, like one of these.
Such a wound in such a place suggests that, surprisingly, for a man with the ability to afford the finest Italian or German armor,
I doubt that this was carelessness—Richard was an experienced warrior in his early 30s. When it was rumored, during the Battle of Hastings in 1066, that Duke William had been killed, he unstrapped his helmet in mid-battle and rode among his men to prove that he was still alive,
but, over 400 years later, bright-patterned and easily recognized heraldry, on shields, banners, and horse trappers, had made such potentially dangerous self-identification unnecessary.
Thus, Richard would have had no need to doff his helmet to make himself known to his faltering followers.
Might we presume, then, that perhaps earlier blows had so damaged his helmet that he’d been forced to discard it?
This, or some other plausible explanation might tell us why Richard had lost his helmet at Bosworth, but what can we say about certain medieval-ish warriors in a number of popular films and television productions who always seem to appear totally fearless—and helmet-less–in battle?
Aragorn, for example, faces an army of orcs like this–
And there’s a whole list of characters from A Game of Thrones—
Robb Stark,
Jaime Lannister,
Brienne of Tarth,
and Jon Snow.
This strikes me as especially odd when people in that series seem always to be talking about “sigils” which identify “houses”,
which is just like the heraldry which we see in the time of Richard III.
We even see Robb with such a sigil on his shield (but still no helmet)—
And I sense that this will also hold true for the latest series, “Rings of Power”, with its Galadriel looking more like Brienne of Tarth of AGame of Thrones
than the Lady of Lorien.
(the Hildebrandts)
This is not to criticize the new series—I have only seen a trailer or two and some stills—but the consequences in the real medieval world without a helmet could be deadly, as in the case of Richard III, or nearly so in the case of the young Prince Henry (1386-1422), son of Henry IV and, after his father’s death in 1413, Henry V.
Henry was with his father at the Battle of Shrewsbury, 21 July, 1403, when he was hit in the face by an arrow. It’s highly doubtful that he was helmetless—at 16, he was seasoned enough that Henry IV had trusted him with command of part of the royal army—but perhaps had raised his visor
at what he had thought was a safe moment. (This is a slightly later helmet, but it gives you the idea. By the way, if you read that saluting is derived from this, just shake your head: the gesture actually comes from the move to take off your hat and bow to a superior officer.)
The arrow sank deep in and it was only the genius of the surgeon/goldsmith, John Bradmore, who, with a combination of early antisepsis—the use of wine to wash out the wound and honey to prevent infection—along with an extractor of his own invention—
which saved the life of the prince. (For more on Prince Hal and his terrible wound, see “Too Narrow Escapes”—a Doubtfulsea posting from 5 July, 2017.)
In his days in A Game of Thrones, Jon Snow suffers enough wounds to kill at least three people—and, in fact, is once actually killed, but brought back to life—
and yet, true to television and film, his head is always bare.
I wonder what, seeing that, and even admiring his seemingly endless luck, Richard III might have told him?
Thanks for reading, as ever.
Stay well,
Keep your visor down,
And know that, as always, there’s
MTCIDC
O
ps
Perhaps Galadriel has overheard me and is choosing a better helmet?
I’ve just finished watching an ancient TV production
of Charles Dickens’ (1812-1870)
The Old Curiosity Shop (first published 1841—although printed serially slightly earlier)
This is, in my view, one of Dickens’ gloomiest novels, mostly about a sadistic and physically-twisted character named Quilp,
who pursues a rather mentally-unstable elderly man with a gambling addiction and his granddaughter, called “Little Nell”.
There are a number of literary anecdotes related to this book, including one which says that people supposedly mobbed the wharf in New York when it was reported that the last installment, in which we find Nell succumbing to what appears to be a combination of exhaustion and perhaps tuberculosis, had just arrived by ship from London. This reinforces the usual stereotype of the overly-sentimental Victorians, but there is another side to this, a later Victorian’s opinion, which may have been said or written by Oscar Wilde (1854-1900): “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.” (For more on this quotation, see: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/02/21/heart-stone/#more-439260 )
It is not my favorite Dickens (Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, and Bleak House being those which I reread) but there is a scene here which recently caught my attention because of another work entirely. Kit (surnamed “Nubbles”, a typical Dickensian last name, but hardly up there with “Mr Pumblechook” from Great Expectations) works as a kind of assistant in Little Nell’s grandfather’s antique store (or junk shop—it’s a little hard to tell).
Several times a week, he is instructed in writing by Nell, which affords much merriment all around, it seems, but perhaps not much actual learning–
“…when he did sit down, he tucked up his sleeves and squared
his elbows and put his face close to the copy-book and squinted
horribly at the lines how, from the very first moment of having the
pen in his hand, he began to wallow in blots, and to daub himself
with ink up to the very roots of his hair how, if he did by accident
form a letter properly, he immediately smeared it out again with his
arm in his preparations to make another how, at every fresh mistake,
there was a fresh burst of merriment from the child and a louder and
not less hearty laugh from poor Kit himself…” (The Old Curiosity Shop, Chapter 3)
(This is a well-known painting by Victorian painter by Robert Braithwaite Martineau, 1826-1869,
entitled “Kit’s Writing Lesson”, 1852.)
Just before I finished the Dickens, I had also viewed the finale of the last season of A Game of Thrones. As I’ve written previously I did this reluctantly because I was aware that some of my favorite characters would not survive. One of these was “Lord Varys”, the spy master for several Westeros kings in succession,
who, for all that he was an agent for espionage and potential assassination, was, in fact, one of the most humane of characters.
Another, who, fortunately, did survive, was Sir Davos Seaworth,
whose past career as a smuggler had lost him the fingers of his right hand and whose loyalty to the would-be king Stannis Baratheon,
who had punished him, would lose him his son.
Seemingly always on the edge of execution, he is befriended by Stannis’ only child, Princess Shireen, who, when he is imprisoned, tries to cheer him by bringing him some of her books, only to have him admit that he can’t read. She begins to teach him (he’s clearly a very rapid learner), moving from letters to words (ironically, he has trouble with “knights”, even though he is one) and here I saw reappear that same image: the child helping someone older to become literate.
That Kit can’t read or write might not be surprising when The Old Curiosity Shop is supposed to take place, in the 1820s, but literacy grew rapidly throughout the 19th century in Dickens’ England, pushed by the Industrial Revolution and helped in the latter part of the century by the government’s Taunton Report (1868) and the Elementary Education Act (1870). (For a quick look at the history of British education, see: https://www.schoolsmith.co.uk/history-of-education/ )
And, in real terms, that literacy can be seen in the amazing spread of newspapers and magazines throughout the century. Just a rough count using the listing in the WIKI article “List of English 19th Century Periodicals (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_19th-century_British_periodicals ) and starting the count in the 1830s (Victoria became queen in 1837), we can see just for the 1830s-40s, 78 publications, some of them, like the Illustrated London News (begun in 1842) surviving as late as 1971.
Westeros, in contrast, and true to its medieval roots, appears to have very limited literacy, restricted to the upper classes—Sir Davos originally came from the lowest slum in the capital city, Flea Bottom—and specialists, the “maesters”. Messenger ravens travel from maester to maester for long-distance communication,
and there are a number of libraries stashed around the island under the control of the maesters, including this rather dazzling one at Oldtown.
This semester, I’m once more teaching a fun course about monsters and, in it, we read, among other things, The Odyssey, and The Hobbit, the one depicting an ancient world and the other a sort of medieval world a bit like that in A Game of Thrones and it’s interesting to see that one of the differences between these two is the appearance—or lack—of literacy.
No one in The Odyssey ever reads or writes anything. Information is conveyed entirely by word of mouth. That news is highly valued when it comes is emphasized in Book 1, where, when Penelope complains that the aoidos (ah-oy-DAWS), Phemios, is singing about the (relatively) recent war at Troy—in the story, obviously treated as a real event–and its aftermath, her son, Telemakhos, replies:
“My mother, why, then, do you begrudge the distinguished singer
To sing in whatever way the spirit moves him?…
For men applaud more a song
[which is] the newest which floats around those listening.” (1.346-352)
These are not readers, then, but those who use their ears to gain knowledge (the Greek word I translated as “listening” is the present active participle akouontessi from the verb akouo, “to hear”).
In the opening chapter of The Hobbit, although Tolkien tells us that “By no means all Hobbits were lettered” (The Lord of the Rings, Prologue, 3 “Of the Ordering of the Shire”), what do we see Bilbo doing (besides smoking an enormous pipe and trying to fend off Gandalf)?
“Then he took out his morning letters, and began to read, pretending to take no more notice of the old man.” (The Hobbit, Chapter One, “An Unexpected Party”)
(Perhaps my favorite Hildebrandt Bros illustration)
The Prologue to The Lord of the Rings, gives us a bit more about the Shire’s postal system (see 3 “Of the Ordering of the Shire”, as well as does an earlier posting from this blog, “His Letters”, 25 May, 2016), and the very idea of such a system suggests a level of literacy far beyond that of the occasional raven. As well, there are other references to the ability to read, such as the inscriptions, visible and invisible, on Thror’s map,
and even the written announcement of the auction of the (officially assumed deceased) Bilbo’s house and possessions in Chapter 19:
“There was a large notice in black and red hung on the gate, stating that on June the Twenty-second Messrs Grubb, Grubbe, and Burrowes would sell by auction the effects of the late Bilbo Baggins Esquire…” (The Hobbit, Chapter 19, “The Last Stage”)
Kit is laboriously acquiring literacy, as is Sir Davos, each being instructed by someone younger than himself. That makes me wonder who taught Bilbo, let alone anyone else in the Shire—and beyond—to read and how?
As there are no schools in the Shire, we can only presume that it was done in an informal setting, as in the case of Kit and Sir Davos. Beyond that, we can only guess, but we do have a hint in something which the Gaffer says in Chapter One of The Lord of the Rings about Bilbo himself:
“But my lad Sam will know more about that. He’s in and out of Bag End. Crazy about stories of the old days he is, and he listens to all Mr. Bilbo’s tales. Mr Bilbo has learned him his letters—meaning no harm, mark you, and I hope no harm will come of it.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 1, “A Long-expected Party”)
So, in the case of Sam, at least, we see the same instruction as that received by Kit and Sir Davos—one on one teaching. For more on this, please see “Learned Him His Letters”, a posting here, from 4 November, 2020.
Thanks, as ever, for reading—and how wonderful it is that we all can do what I still find such a magical act: stepping into other times and other worlds at the turn of a page.
Stay well,
Turn that page,
And remember that there’s always
MTCIDC
O
PS
File under “odd coincidence”–
Martineau’s best known work is this, entitled “Last Day in the Old Home”, painted in 1862.
It is actually a portrait of a friend of the artist, John Leslie Toke, whose most distant ancestor came to England in 1066 with Duke William. That ancestor came from Touques in Normandy and so the spelling and the pronunciation differ, as so often in English. That being the case, the name should be said “Toook”. Although Tolkien goes into a bit of detail about various Tooks in Letters (especially about “Lalia the Great”—see 294-5) and we are given tantalizing hints about Took propensities in Chapter One of The Hobbit, I have yet to see any information about the Tolkienian inspiration for the name, but perhaps the original Baron Touque was a forebear? (For more on the historical family, see: https://www.houseofnames.com/toke-family-crest )
This summer, I’ve been re-watching A Game of Thrones—to the end in Season 8, which I simply couldn’t bear to do last time, knowing, from spoilers of various sorts, that a number of my favorite characters wouldn’t survive through the last episode. As I’ve watched, I’ve been intrigued by this—
For Daenerys and her forces, this is the equivalent of a modern attack aircraft, like these Fairchild Republic Thunderbolt IIs—
using fire in place of bombs and strafing.
I’ve wondered about that fire, however: where did it come from?
If we look at dragons when we first see them in Western literature in the Greco-Roman world, their danger seems to come not from flaming gasses, but from size and teeth and maybe just plain dragonicity.
[A footnote: the word dracon, in Greek, and draco, in Latin, are very vague terms, referring to scaly things from perhaps water snakes or whatever Herakles’ hydra is supposed to be
to beasts we might think of as dragons. For the purposes of thinking out loud about the subject, I’m going to assume that the creatures in these stories are all forms of what we would call dragons.]
A main source for early stories is the Library of the rather mysterious “Apollodorus”—so mysterious, in fact, that he’s now often called “Pseudo-Apollodorus”, although that seems a little unfair—who may have lived in the 1st or 2nd century AD. This is a huge collection of myth which records that the first human who appears to have encountered dragons in a hostile situation (at least for the human) was Minos (the Minotaur man).
Minos has his adventure in 3.3.1, where, in a complicated story of death and rebirth, Minos kills one dragon with a stone, only to have another dragon appear, who heals the first, whereupon they disappear from the story. The dragons, in fact, seem to have no interest in Minos and all that’s said of them suggests nothing of the fearsome, but rather of the magical.
Cadmus, the founder of Thebes, is the second to be involved with dragons, having dealt with one who had killed most of his men who had gone to a spring for water, in the Library, Book 3.4.1.
Cadmus kills the dragon, the text doesn’t say how, but there’s no more detail about the dragon than that it was a dragon and that it had slain Cadmus’ men.
Perhaps Apollodorus had left something out? There is a late commentary on the story in the so-called “Chiliades” (“Thousands”) of John Tzetzes (c1110-1180AD), a Byzantine literary man, which adds the details that there were two men sent, Deioleon and Seriphos, and that:
“….the dragon, the guardian of the spring, killed them both,
but Cadmus, with the throwing of stones, killed the dragon…”
(Chiliades, X.406-407)
But that’s all the description we get—just a dracon, albeit, in the Cadmus story, given to homicide.
When Eurystheus
(he’s the one cowering in the big jar)
demands that Herakles do two more labors, the first of the two is to fetch the Golden Apples of the Hesperides,
(by the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, 1833-1898, the besty of William Morris),
which were guarded, in one version of the story ,by a deathless, hundred-headed dragon (Apollodorus, the Library, 2.5.11). Herakles kills the dragon (Apollodorus doesn’t say how, any more than he provides any details about the dragon).
Continuing through mythical history, we now arrive at Jason, who, in his quest to obtain the Golden Fleece, finds that the fleece is guarded, like the Golden Apples, by a dragon—this one both immortal (Apollodorus, The Library 1.9.16) and sleepless ( Apollonius, Argonautica 2.1209-10). When, in Apollonius’ (3rd century BC) Argonautica, Book 4, Jason actually confronts the dragon, it has an amazingly loud hiss (4.130-131 ) and huge jaws (4. 154-56 ), but is quickly subdued by the enchantress Medea, with a sung charm and a drug for his (now very sleepy) eyes (4.156-58) and, as ever, no fire.
Even in Ovid’s (43BC-17AD) retelling of the Jason story, in Book 7 of the Metamorphoses, the dragon is only described:
…linguis…tribus… et uncis
dentibus…
“with triple tongue and with curved teeth” (Ovid, Metamorphoses 7.150-151)
It’s interesting, however, that, in the Jason story, there is fire-breathing, just not reptilian. Before the King of Colchis, Aeetes, will deal with Jason’s request for the Fleece, he sets him a task:
1. he must yoke bronze-hoofed bulls
2. he must plow a field with them
3. he must sow dragon’s teeth
and then fight the warriors who spring up from the teeth.
As if all of this weren’t difficult enough, the bulls breathed fire. As Apollonius describes it:
“And they up to that time were raging exceedingly,
The pair of them breathing out turbulent flame of fire…” (Argonautica 3.326-7)
Bovine fireworks, but nothing from dragons—and yet, somewhere along the way between these early dragons and Beowulf,
something set off the reptiles and, from that moment on, dragons were flaming.
I have two suggestions for possible models for this change—and I’ll put “possible” in quotation marks to show just how tentative I think these are.
First, as early as Aristotle (384-322BC), there was the belief that salamanders could live in fire (Historia Animalium 5.19),
a fact repeated by Augustine (354-430AD), in Book XXI of his De Civitate Dei Contra Paganos, where he cites the example of a salamander’s survival in fire to suggest that the damned could burn for eternity and not be consumed:
“ut scripserunt qui naturas animalium curiosius indagarunt, salamandra in ignibus uiuit…”
“…as they have written who, curious, have investigated the qualities of animals: the salamander lives in fires…” (XXI.iv)
Imagine, then, a lizard-like creature, as we see in medieval illustrations—
associated with fire from as far back as the Greco-Roman world…
Second, there is a fire-spouting weapon which could also have served as a model/inspiration: Greek fire.
As early as the late 7th century AD, the Byzantines had not only invented a new and terrifying weapon, the compounding of which is still unknown, but guessed at,
but also a way to project that fire over a distance—almost as if were being breathed out.
Think of it flying–certainly not something you could, like Cadmus, knock over with a stone.
Thanks, as ever, for reading.
Stay well,
Never say “Dracarys” unless you mean it,
And know that there’s always
MTCIDC
O
PS
Although I love science—especially the natural sciences—I’m certainly not a scientist, but does the explanation below seems oddly plausible to you?
“One possible way: Their metabolism is capable of creating a low-boiling flammable liquid (such as diethyl ether or pentane) and this substance is stored in sacs somewhere in the head. The dragon also has an enzyme that acts to ignite the stuff when in contact with air.
To breathe fire, the dragon pumps (by muscle action) some of this liquid out of its mouth; its own body heat evaporates it and the enzyme, sprayed out at the same time, sets it off.”
Here’s an interesting passage from Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings:
“The third evil was the invasion of the Wainriders, which sapped the waning strength of Gondor in wars that lasted for almost a hundred years. The Wainriders were a people, or a confederacy of many peoples, that came from the East; but they were stronger and better armed than any that had appeared before. They journeyed in great wains, and their chieftains fought in chariots.” (iv: “Gondor and the Heirs of Anarion”)
Even if you didn’t know that a “wain” is a kind of wagon,
the context would probably provide you with an image of one—although probably the best-known wain now would be the one in John Constable’s (1776-1837) famous 1821 painting, “The Hay Wain”.
Such wagons as these (and “wain” and “wagon” come from the same Old English word, waegn), however, seem a little small for a wandering people, and I imagine that Tolkien saw them as more like a Boer trekwagen (also called a “Cape wagon”)
which he might have seen in South Africa as a small child, or at least had noticed in some of the numerous images of the Boer War of 1899-1902 available in magazines of that period,
like this issue of The Sphere from March, 1900–
Another possibility is that he had seen so-called Conestoga wagons
either in illustrations or even in films of the American West,
(from The Big Trail, 1930)
where they were shown being employed in ferrying families onto the Great Plains or beyond.
This might explain the wain—but what about the riders?
Invasions from the East were a common feature in the late Roman era, when the Western Empire was gradually turning into a Germanicized world, with various Gothic tribes pushing into what were once Roman provinces and even into Italy itself.
And behind the Goths came the Huns, a nomadic steppe people,
who were stopped at the Battle of the Catalaunian Fields (also called the Battle of Chalons) in 451AD by a combination of Romans and Germanic allies.
Even before this, there had been Celtic movement along the borders of the growing Roman world in the last century BC. A major trek was that of the Helvetii, who attempted to move from what is now western Switzerland, but were stopped and pushed back in 58BC by Julius Caesar (100-44BC).
As a medievalist, JRRT would certainly have known about the Goths and Huns, and, as a schoolboy, he would have read (or suffered through) Book One of Caesar’s De Bello Gallico, with its well-known opening, “Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres”—“All of Gaul has been divided into three parts”. There, in Section 3, he would have read that, prior to their invasion, the Helvetii
“constituerunt ea quae ad proficiscendum pertinerent comparare, iumentorum et carrorum quam maximum numerum coemere…” (De Bello Gallico, 1.3)
“decided to collect those things which would be suitable for their setting off—to buy up the greatest number possible of beasts of burden and of wagons…”
Carrorum—the nominative singular is carrus–is itself a Celtic word and Aulus Hirtius, Caesar’s lieutenant, who continued Caesar’s account of campaigns against the Gauls, says of them:
“magna enim multitudo carrorum etiam expeditos sequi Gallos consuevit…” (De Bello Gallico, 8.14)
“for a great number of wagons was accustomed to follow the Gauls, even [when]traveling lightly” (expeditus, often means “lightly-armed”, but can also mean “without baggage”, hence my less formal translation)
It’s unclear what such vehicles looked like. If they were carts—that is, two-wheeled vehicles—they might have appeared like this simple Roman one—
If a 4-wheeled vehicle, perhaps something like this—
Here, then, might be sources for Tolkien’s invaders, both wains and riders, but what about those leaders and their chariots?
Although there are a number of chariot burials found in France (more or less modern Gaul),
Caesar never encountered chariot fighters in his conquest—of Gaul. In his two brief visits to England, it was a different matter, however.
As he describes them:
“Genus hoc est ex essedis pugnae. Primo per omnes partes perequitant et tela coiciunt atque ipso terrore equorum et strepitu rotarum ordines plerumque perturbant, et cum se inter equitum turmas insinuaverunt, ex essedis desiliunt et pedibus proeliantur. Aurigae interim paulatim ex proelio excedunt atque ita currus conlocant ut, si illi a multitudine hostium premantur, expeditum ad quos receptum habeant. Ita mobilitatem equitum, stabilitatem peditum in proeliis praestant, ac tantum usu cotidiano et exercitatione efficiunt uti in declivi ac praecipiti loco incitatos equos sustinere et brevi moderari ac flectere et per temonem percurrere et in iugo insistere et se inde in currus citissime recipere consuerint.” (De Bello Gallico, 4.33)
“This is the method of fighting from chariots. First, they ride around in every direction and hurl javelins and shake the ranks in general with the terror of [their] horses and the noise of [their] wheels, and, when they have worked themselves in among the troops of cavalry, they leap down from [their] chariots and fight on foot. Meanwhile, [their] charioteers gradually retreat from the battle and so place [their] chariots that, if those [chariot warriors] may be pressed back by a large number of enemies, they may have an unimpeded mode of retreat for them. In this way, they display in battle the mobility of cavalry, the steadiness of infantry, and they accomplish so much by daily use and practice that they have become accustomed to control [their] stirred up horses in sloping and steep places and to direct and turn [them] quickly and [they have also become accustomed] to run along the chariot pole and to stand on the yoke and to take themselves back from there into [their] chariots.”
In a letter to his son, Christopher (28 December, 1944, Letters, 107), JRRT mentions another figure connected with these ancient Britons, Julius Agricola (40-93AD), who was involved in several stages of the Roman conquest of Britain in the 1st century AD. What we know about him comes almost entirely from the biography of him written by his son-in-law, Publius Cornelius Tacitus (c.56-120AD). In Book XIV of his Annals, Tacitus describes a revolt of some of the British tribes against Roman rule, those tribes being led by a haunting figure in early British history, Boudicca, queen of the Iceni.
(This is a famous statuary group, by Thomas Thorneycroft (1815-1885), erected on the Thames Embankment, basically across the street from Parliament, in 1902.)
And in Tacitus’ description of the moments before the final battle of the revolt, we might see one more possible inspiration for those Wainriders and leaders in chariots:
“at Britannorum copiae passim per catervas et turmas exultabant, quanta non alias multitudo, et animo adeo fero[ci], ut coniuges quoque testes victoriae secum traherent plaustrisque imponerent, quae super extremum ambitum campi posuerant.
Boudicca curru filias prae se vehens, ut quamque nationem accesserat, solitum quidem Britannis feminarum ductu bellare testabatur…” (Annales, 14.34-35)
“…and the forces of the Britons were rejoicing everywhere in their companies and troops, how much more numerous than other [such forces], and with such a fierce spirit that they were bringing with them their wives, as well, as witnesses of their victory, and were settling them in wagons, which they had drawn up at the extreme edge of the field.
Boudicca, riding in a chariot, with her daughters in front of her, as she had reached each tribe, was swearing that it was indeed the custom for Britons to fight under the direction of women…”
Gothic invasions turned France, Italy, and Spain, at least briefly, into Germanic-speaking worlds, muscling in on the local Romans. The Helvetii needed serious fighting to be driven back to their original homeland. And those chariots initially made Roman infantry very nervous (Caesar himself says that they were “pertubati novitate pugnae”—“shaken by the novelty of the [manner] of fighting”—De Bello Gallico, 4.34). Perhaps, with such models behind them, it’s no wonder that it took nearly a hundred years to defeat those Wainriders.
As ever, thanks for reading.
Stay well,
When driving your chariot towards the enemy, always circle them counterclockwise (a huge insult in Old Irish stories),
(A totally overthetop Angus McBride of Cu Chulainn–but fun–and the Cu himself was more than a little overthetop when he would produce the gae bolga.)
My last posting employed a quotation from Tolkien, to be found in a letter to Prof. L.W. Forster from 31 December, 1960:
“The Dead Marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme. They owe more to William Morris and his Huns and Romans, as in The House of the Wolfings and The Roots of the Mountains. “ (Letters, 303)
And, in that previous posting, I had discussed what seemed to me to be some influences direct and indirect upon Tolkien’s work from the first of those two works, William Morris’ (1834-1896) 1889
In this posting, I want to examine that second book, also published in 1889, The Roots of the Mountains Wherein Is Told Somewhat of the Lives of the Men of Burg-dale Their Friends Their Neighbours Their Foemen and Their Fellows in Arms
After reading both this and Wolfings, I found myself a bit puzzled. Certainly I saw things which might have been influences, but really nothing struck me as related to the Dead Marshes and the Morannon. Instead, in Wolfings, there were names like “the Mark” and “Mirkwood” and some suggestions of Eowyn and Arwen and Galadriel to come, and this is the sort of thing which I discovered, as well, in Roots.
Here, we had “(the) Dale” (Chapter I) as well as:
“This was well-nigh encompassed by a wall of sheer cliffs; toward the East and the great mountains they drew together till they went near to meet, and left but a narrow path on either side of a stony stream that came rattling down into the Dale: toward the river at that end the hills lowered somewhat, though they still ended in sheer rocks; but up from it, and more especially on the north side, they swelled into great shoulders of land, then dipped a little, and rose again into the sides of huge fells clad with pine-woods, and cleft here and there by deep ghylls: thence again they rose higher and steeper, and ever higher till they drew dark and naked out of the woods to meet the snow-fields and ice-rivers of the high mountains. But that was far away from the pass by the little river into the valley; and the said river was no drain from the snow-fields white and thick with the grinding of the ice, but clear and bright were its waters that came from wells amidst the bare rocky heaths.
The upper end of the valley, where it first began to open out from the pass, was rugged and broken by rocks and ridges of water-borne stones, but presently it smoothed itself into mere grassy swellings and knolls, and at last into a fair and fertile plain swelling up into a green wave, as it were, against the rock-wall which encompassed it on all sides save where the river came gushing out of the strait pass at the east end, and where at the west end it poured itself out of the Dale toward the lowlands and the plain of the great river.” (Chapter I)
All of which reminded me of Rivendell—
And this, which seemed even closer to the description of that body of water which lay in front of the eastern gate of Moria:
Besides the river afore-mentioned, which men called the Weltering Water, there were other waters in the Dale. Near the eastern pass, entangled in the rocky ground was a deep tarn full of cold springs and about two acres in measure, and therefrom ran a stream which fell into the Weltering Water amidst the grassy knolls. Black seemed the waters of that tarn which on one side washed the rocks-wall of the Dale; ugly and aweful it seemed to men, and none knew what lay beneath its waters save black mis-shapen trouts that few cared to bring to net or angle: and it was called the Death-Tarn. (Chapter I)
There were details, too:
1. a reminiscence of The Hobbit, Chapter 18, “The Return Journey”, when Gandalf and Bilbo spent “Yule-tide” with Beorn:
“Natheless at Yule-tide also they feasted from house to house to be glad with the rest of Midwinter, and many a cup drank at those feasts to the memory of the fathers, and the days when the world was wider to them, and their banners fared far afield.” (Chapter I)
2. lots of grey-eyed people, like a major character “the Friend” (aka “Sun-beam”—Chapter VII)
3. a woman-warrior, “the Bride”, who seems, at first, reminiscent of Eowyn:
“But just as the Alderman was on the point of rising to declare the breaking-up of the Thing, there came a stir in the throng and it opened, and a warrior came forth into the innermost of the ring of men, arrayed in goodly glittering War-gear; clad in such wise that a tunicle of precious gold-wrought web covered the hauberk all but the sleeves thereof, and the hem of it beset with blue mountain-stones smote against the ankles and well-nigh touched the feet, shod with sandals gold-embroidered and gemmed. This warrior bore a goodly gilded helm on the head, and held in hand a spear with gold-garlanded shaft, and was girt with a sword whose hilts and scabbard both were adorned with gold and gems: beardless, smooth-cheeked, exceeding fair of face was the warrior, but pale and somewhat haggard-eyed: and those who were nearby beheld and wondered; for they saw that there was come the Bride arrayed for war and battle, as if she were a messenger from the House of the Gods, and the Burg that endureth for ever.” (Chapter XXVI)
She becomes more so when, cast off by the protagonist, “Gold-mane”, she fights, is wounded, and eventually marries a secondary protagonist, “Folk-might”, after a lingering and tentative courtship (Chapters XXXVI, XL, and L), like Eowyn and Faramir.
4. The image of a revealed banner appears:
“But before the hedge of steel stood the two tall men who held in their hands the war-tokens of the Battle-shaft and the War-spear, and betwixt them stood one who was indeed the tallest man of the whole assembly, who held the great staff of the hidden banner. And now he reached up his hand, and plucked at the yarn that bound it, which of set purpose was but feeble, and tore it off, and then shook the staff aloft with both hands, and shouted, and lo! the Banner of the Wolf with the Sun-burst behind him, glittering-bright, new-woven by the women of the kindred, ran out in the fresh wind, and flapped and rippled before His warriors there assembled.”
And this could be a foreshadowing of the banner which Arwen has woven for Aragorn:
“…For he saw that instead of a spear he bore a tall staff, as it were a standard, but it was close-furled in a black cloth bound about with many thongs…And with that he bade Halbarad unfurl the great standard which he had brought; and behold! It was black, and if there was any device upon it, it was hidden in the darkness.” (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 2, “The Passing of the Grey Company)
5. But, for me, the most striking single description was this:
“It was a bright spring afternoon in that clearing of the Wood, and they looked at the two dead men closely; and Gold-mane, who had been somewhat silent and moody till then, became merry and wordy; for he beheld the men and saw that they were utterly strange to him: they were short of stature, crooked-legged, long-armed, very strong for their size: with small blue eyes, snubbed-nosed, wide-mouthed, thin-lipped, very swarthy of skin, exceeding foul of favour.” (Chapter XV)
“In the twilight he saw a large black Orc, probably Ugluk, standing facing Grishnakh, a short crook-legged creature, very broad and with long arms that hung almost to the ground.” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 3, “The Uruk-hai”)
(A favorite Alan Lee)
So much for “Roots”, but I would also include a “Branch”.
Tolkien was very sensitive on the subject of language choice in The Lord of the Rings, defending himself at some length in the draft of an unsent letter to Hugh Brogan, September, 1955, when Brogan had apparently suggested in an earlier letter that the occasional archaizing seemed artificial to him:
“Of course, not being specially well read in modern English, and far more familiar with works in the ancient and ‘middle’ idioms, my own ear is to some extent affected; so that though I could easily recollect how a modern would put this or that, what comes easiest to mind or pen is not quite that. But take an example from that chapter that you specially singled out (and called terrible): Book iii, ‘The King of the Golden Hall’. ‘Nay, Gandalf!’ said the King. ‘You do not know your own skill in healing. It shall not be so. I myself will go to war, to fall in the front of the battle, if it must be. Thus shall I sleep better.’… For a king who spoke in a modern style would not really think in such terms at all, and any reference to sleeping quietly in the grave would be a deliberate archaism of expression on his part (however worded) far more bogus than the actual ‘archaic’ English that I have used. (Letters, 225-6)
This has always struck me as a very reasonable defense, but I would add something more from Tolkien’s—and my—reading of Morris. As early as 1914, JRRT wrote to Edith Bratt:
“”Amongst other work I am trying to turn one of the stories [from the Finnish folk-collection of Elias Loennrot, the Kalevala]—which is a very great story and most tragic—into a short story somewhat on the lines of Morris’ romances with chunks of poetry in between…” (letter to Edith Bratt, October, 1914, Letters, 7)
These ‘Morris romances’ — novels like Wolfings and Roots, as well as his earlier work, like his translation of the Odyssey (1887)—had come in for serious criticism for their language choices. In fact, a expression which was used into the 20th century for such archaizing, “Wardour Street”, was invented specifically for criticizing Morris’ prose:
“This is not literary English of any date; this is Wardour-Street Early English—a perfectly modern article with a sham appearance of the real antique about it. There is a trade in early furniture as well as in Early English, and one of the well-known tricks of that trade is the production of artificial worm-holes in articles of modern manufacture.”
In the 19th century, Wardour Street, London, was the center of the used and antique furniture trade and so this term, in 1888, had punch: fake “Olde Englishe” language in a text was the equivalent of faking antique furniture: both created for the purpose of deceiving readers/buyers into believing that they were receiving something authentic (“authentick”).
Morris, just from the two novels I’ve cited in these postings, has had, perhaps, a stronger influence upon Tolkien than has been previously understood, but, for myself, I agree with this reviewer of The Roots of the Mountains about Morris and, with some adjustment in terms of his criticism of Morris’ prose for Tolkien’s , maybe it will serve for Tolkien, as well:
“Much dust has been raised, and it was practically impossible that some should not be raised, about the ‘Wardour Street’ style of The Roots of the Mountains…Now, Mr. William Morris’ Wardour Street is on the whole a very superior specimen of the article…There is less narrative verse (though there are songs, &c, and good ones), and since, good as Mr. Morris’ prose always is, it is less good than his verse, we lose something…The old merit of Mr. Morris’ work, both in prose and verse, its adjustment of literary and pictorial merit, appears throughout the book…”
( Unsigned, The Saturday Review, 12/14/89, 688)
Thanks, as ever, for reading,
Stay well,
Check your furniture for worm-holes,
And know that, as always, there’s
MTCIDC
O
PS
Ballantyne’s 1888 review disappeared into the back pages of literary history, but the term he had invented was carried into the 20th century by the once-commanding figure of H.W. Fowler, whose books on the English language were once gospel for correctness. Here’s where “Wardour Street” was kept alive:
“As Wardour Street itself offers to those who live in modern houses the opportunity of picking up an antique or two that will be conspicuous for good or ill among their surroundings, so this article offers to those who write modern English a selection of oddments calculated to establish (in the eyes of some readers) their claims to be persons of taste & writers of beautiful English.” (700)
H.W. Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, 1926
(We should note, by the way, that the actual inventor isn’t mentioned here—I wonder what Fowler might have to say about “lack of proper citation”?)
doubtfulsea 