• About

doubtfulsea

~ adventure fantasy

Tag Archives: Across the Doubtful Sea

Roses—War of, Cranes—Mon

27 Wednesday Feb 2019

Posted by Ollamh in Heroes, Military History, Narrative Methods

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Across the Doubtful Sea, Arnemuiden, Bosworth, Clint Dohnen, Edward IV, Era of the Warring States, Henry Tudor, Kojiro Takeda, Lancaster, Mary Rose, Mori, Richard III, Sengoku Jidai, Tewkesbury, The Rose and the Crane, The Wars of the Roses, Tokugawa Shogunate, Tudor Rose, York

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

If you read us regularly, you know that, in general, we tend to write about the past—a lot of the past, including not only our own historical past and the past of Middle-earth, but also about past authors, as well.  Today, we’re doing something slightly different in that we are writing a review of a novel, The Rose and the Crane (2017)

image1rose.jpg

by someone who is definitely of the present, Clint Dohnen, although his book is set in the period 1483-1485.

image2cd.jpg

Like our own Across the Doubtful Sea (2015)

image3doubt.jpg

this is a self-published book, available at Amazon.com, and we found it as an Amazon recommendation.

The title interested us immediately for its juxtaposition of two things one would normally not think of at the same time:

image4rose.jpg

 

image5crane

That cover, however, with its crossing of medieval sword and katana, suggested that those two things weren’t plant and bird, but something heraldic, as in the Tudor rose

image6trose

and the badge (mon) of the Mori clan of Japan.

image7mori

That rose was, in fact, a piece of political symbolism, being the combination of two separate house badges, the white rose of York

image8white

and the red rose of Lancaster,

image9red

which noble houses, along with their allies, fought an on-again off-again civil war mostly through central England from 1455 to 1487.  This struggle later came to be known as “The Wars of the Roses” because of those two flowers.

image10roses

The protagonist of this novel is Simon Lang, a young refugee from that conflict as, at the beginning of the novel, in 1483, his family’s side, the Lancastrians, have suffered what apparently had been a decisive defeat at Tewkesbury, 4 May, 1471 and the heavy hand of the Yorkist government had been upon them since.

TEWKESBURY print

(This is by Graham Turner, who has done a whole series of dramatic paintings of battles of the Wars of the Roses for Osprey, one of our favorite publishers of military history.)

Simon has become an exile, currently working on a Venetian trading ship off the coast of Japan.  (We were a little puzzled by this, we must admit, as, to our knowledge, the first Renaissance ships in that part of the world would only appear–after a strenuous trip around Africa—under Vasco da Gama in 1499—but, once the novel got under weigh, we put this puzzlement aside and let the plot carry us away.)  This ship is armed with cannon, which might seem a little surprising in 1483, but the first known use of guns on European ships actually dates all the way back to the battle of Arnemuiden, 23 September, 1338.

image12arne

When we think of early ships’ guns, however, we always think of those of the Mary Rose,

image13mrose

which sank, with virtually all hands, during a naval battle with the French, on 19 July, 1545, was rediscovered in the late 20th century, raised, and now is on display in Portsmouth, England.

image14mrose

As you can see, about half the ship has survived and, with it, an enormous quantity of wonderfully-preserved artefacts, including a number of its guns.

image15guns

It’s while on board this ship that the Rose, so to speak, meets the Crane, the samurai Kojiro Takeda

image16onin

in the time in Japanese history known as Sengoku Jidai, the “Era of the Warring States” (1467-1600), when the country went through its own complex period of civil wars before the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1867) brought repression and peace simultaneously.

Takeda is rescued, along with a friend, from the ship of an enemy family and the first part of the novel deals with adventures in Japan (including a battle to defend the village of Takeda’s friend, which is very clearly and convincingly described—as are all the battles in the book—and there are several of them).

The merchant ship is on a trading venture, however, and the second major episode involves the main characters in an expedition south from Japan to the Molucca Islands (now known as the Maluku), a group which is situated between New Guinea and Borneo.

image17moluccas

There—this is an adventure novel after all—they are attacked by cannibal headhunters.  These headhunters are not given a name, but, from the description, we imagine that they could be Sea Dayaks from Borneo,

image18dayak

known for collecting heads.

M0005506 Punan's heads taken by Sea Dayaks

From there, it’s back to Venice—but this is not a breather because there is another plot—a meanwhile.

After the death of the Yorkist king, Edward IV, in 1483,

image20ed

the crown should have passed to his two sons, but, instead, Edward’s younger brother, at first regent for the two boys, then takes the crown, the two boys are declared illegitimate—and, well, never seen again.

image21aprinces

Much of what was thought to be known of this younger brother, who became Richard III,

The Richard III Society Reveal A Facial Reconstruction Of Richard III

originally came from sources employed by his enemy and eventual replacement, Henry Tudor, aka Henry VII,

image22hank

but, over the years, the image of the hunch-backed monster of Shakespeare

image23olive

has gradually been changed to that of a successful administrator and more-than-competent king and soldier, but this is an adventure novel with both a young late-medieval knight and a ronin (masterless samurai) as main characters, so Richard is put back into his old role—and even more so, being clearly a psychopath.

image24olive

Simon is distantly related—half of noble England seemed to be—to the heads of the Lancastrian family and Richard is determined to remove any possible threat to his position as king, so Simon is a marked man—a situation which will continue to be the case till the very end of the book, when, in one final battle scene, Simon and his friends fight in the army of Henry Tudor at Bosworth, 22 August, 1485.

image25bosworth

Richard III is killed in the struggle

King Richard III in battle: Was Richard Really Evil?

and, in the aftermath, Henry—now Henry VII—returns Simon’s ancestral lands to him and suitably rewards the samurai and the other members of Simon’s fellowship (a familiar scene from the end of Star Wars IV, to “The Field of Cormallen” in The Return of the King).

We hope that you can tell from our summary that this is a fine example of just what we enjoy:  a wild adventure set in an actual historical era which the author has taken pains to reconstruct, with the kinds of characters one would hope for:  exiles with murderous talents, cheerfully making their way through hair-raising situations.  We would add to this three more items:

  1. the descriptions of scenery and actions are clear, precise, and persuasive
  2. the language barrier—after all, in the space of the book, characters move from England to Venice to Japan to the Moluccas and back—is handled with some care—if we have to suspend our disbelief, we only have to do so briefly and some games are played with language throughout
  3. which leads us to our third point—this is—we’ll use an old-fashioned word here—a rollicking book—it’s just plain fun and, like all of the best adventure stories, could easily be read more than once

We hope that you enjoy it as much as we did.

Thanks, as ever, for reading and,

MTCIDC

CD

ps

That image of Richard III has its own interesting story.  After Richard was killed at Bosworth, his body was quickly buried in a religious installation—Greyfriars Priory–in the city of Leicester.  Over the years from 1485 to the early 2000s, the Priory had long disappeared and the body with it (although there was another tradition that the bones had been dumped into the local river and lost).  In August, 2015, however, a joint project of the University of Leicester and Leicester City Council not only located the site, but almost immediately found the skeleton of a man of the right age who seemed to have suffered a battlefield death.  Subsequent DNA matching with descendants, plus the site itself, confirmed that the bones were that of the last Yorkist king and, before he was interred in Leicester Cathedral, measurements were taken and this image made.  Here’s a LINK, if you’d like to learn more.

Sugar Is Sweet, And…

01 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History, Narrative Methods

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

15th-century hat, 15th-century sallet, Across the Doubtful Sea, Bag End, bevor, Bilbo, British Navy uniforms, Caribbean sugar mill, Christopher Columbus, clone helmet, costuming, Darth Vader, Death Star Gunners, French Navy uniforms, hogsheads, honey, John Mollo, Middle-earth, Samurai, science fiction, Star Wars, sugar, sugar cane, sugar loaf, Taters, Ten Views in the Island of Antigua, The Illiad, Tobacco

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

As we continue to explore Bilbo’s entryway, we feel a little like Bilbo himself watching as all of those dwarves gradually pile in until they almost overwhelm their surprised host.

Unlike our earlier postings on barometers and clocks, which are really on the walls, in this posting, we confess to what is called in literary criticism a “creative misread”.  Take a look at the far left of the illustration.

image1bilboshallway.jpg

There is a kind of entryway table, with a mirror and hooks—probably for hats—and those should have tipped us off—but a preconceived notion overwhelmed us, inspired (well, we suppose you could call it that) by how we initially interpreted the object on the right hand corner.

It’s a hat—you can just make out the brim.  It’s a kind of 15th-century hat called a “sugarloaf”, however, because of the crown.

image2sugarloafhat.jpg

(There is a 13th-14th century helmet given that nickname, as well.

image3asugarloafhelm.jpg

In fact, perhaps there’s a certain similarity with the phase 1 clone helmet, if you add a sort of flange to the lower edge—and a ridge piece?

image3b.jpg

If so, it certainly wouldn’t be the only medieval-influenced helmet in Star Wars—just look at the Death Star gunners

image3cdeathstargunner.jpg

and compare it with a 15th-century sallet with its bevor

image3dsalletwbevor.jpg

Although Darth Vader’s helmet is a bit more samurai-ish.

image3edv.jpg

image3fsam.jpeg

All of these came to the screen through the work of uniform historian and costume designer John Mollo,

image3gjohnmollo.jpg

who died on 25 October, 2017, at the age of 86.  His work included not only science fiction costuming

image3himps.png

image3irebs.png

but also the text for works on the history of uniforms.  For our first novel, Across the Doubtful Sea, he and his illustrator for Uniforms of the American Revolution in Color (1975),

image3juniforms.jpg

provided us with an accurate view of the uniforms of the British and French navies of the period.

image3kbrit.jpg

image3lfrench.jpg

 

But—as we began to say—the crown of that hat bears that nickname because it looks like sugar as it used to be formed, shipped, and sold.

Today, we see sugar in bags

image4sugarbag.jpg

or in little packets in fast food restaurants

image5packet.jpg

or even in cubes.

image6sugarcubes.jpeg

In earlier centuries, sugar came in a very different form:

image7sugarloaf.jpg

and, to use it, you had special tools to snip off or scrape off pieces when you needed them.

image8tongues.jpg

image9sugarwork.jpg

Sugar came like this because of the process by which sugar was extracted from a very tall plant,

image10sugarcanefield.jpg

the sugar being inside the plant.

image11sugarcane.jpg

The first step was to cut the plant down.

image12cutting.jpg

This and some of the following illustrations are drawn from a series of colored engravings published in 1823 and entitled Ten Views in the Island of Antigua.

image13tenviews.jpg

And, as you can see from the subtitle, the collection is devoted to the sugar-production industry, which was an extremely profitable one.  (And it should always be remembered that the great majority of the workers in these images are slaves.)

Cutting, however, is just the first stage in the process.  In the next step, the cane has to be crushed to get the pulp out.

image14crushing.jpg

(We note the mistake in the caption—this isn’t a painting, but a colored engraving.)

The pulp then has to be boiled and sieved until it’s a pure liquid.

image15boiling.jpg

Then—initially—it was dried, forming a coarse brown powder, as you can see on the right hand side of this illustration.

This was then packed into huge barrels, called “hogsheads”,

image16packing.jpg

and shipped.

image17shipping.jpg

When it reached its final destination, it was turned back into a liquid and further refined until poured into molds, which is how it was commonly sold, even into the 20th century, apparently.

image18mold.jpg

It is estimated that the average person consumes 53 pounds (24kg) of sugar a year, partly because sugar is mixed in with a huge variety of products where you would have to read the label before you realized that it was even an ingredient.

But what about Bilbo?  So far, as there is no concordance to the complete works of JRRT, as there is for something like the Iliad.

image19concordance.jpg

(A concordance is a complete collection of all the words, in their various forms, in a work, listed alphabetically, with reference to where they may be found.)

Our research, then, is completely casual—we paged through The Hobbit and, although we found no mention of the word “sugar” per se, we did find, particularly in Chapter One, a number of references to baked goods (“cake”, “seed cake”, and “tarts”).  We might suppose that, as in our medieval times, Bilbo employed honey in his recipes,

image20honeycomb.jpg

but, for the sake of our sugar loaf misread, we’re going to imagine that sugar is the ingredient.  (After all, there are “taters” and tobacco/pipeweed and, in the first edition of The Hobbit, even tomatoes mentioned, so why not?)

The next question, of course, is where this sugar came from.  Sugar is native to Southeast Asia, growing in tropical regions.  As far as we understand it, the Shire appears to be rather like southern England for climate, which means grains and things like hops, for beer, and perhaps even tobacco (in the United States, tobacco is grown as far north as Massachusetts), but nothing which requires a warmer, moister climate.

image21tobacco.jpg

Europe first began to receive its sugar (after tiny and very expensive exotic imports) in the 16th century from plants descended from cuttings from the Canary Islands and planted in the Caribbean by the agents of Christopher Columbus.  (The Portuguese did something similar in Brazil.)

Looking south on the map of Middle-earth, where would the climate allow for the growth of such plants?

image22map.jpg

Our best guess is to look as far south as we can—which is why, in our next posting, we want visit Harad and chat with those Corsairs of Umbar…

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

Mathoms and Fathoms

18 Wednesday Jan 2017

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Across the Doubtful Sea, alternate history, anachronisms, Anglo-Saxon, Bertil Thorvaldsen, cabinet of curiosities, Cicero, Elias Ashmole, Gaius Verres, Greeks, Hellenistic, hobbit measurement system, John Tradescant the Younger, Marquette University, mathom, Mathom-house, mathum, Muses, Oxford, Renaissance, Rochester, Romans, sculptor, Shire, Strong Museum of Play, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Victorian Museum

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

A year or two ago, we were visiting the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, a wonderful place, filled with memorabilia of childhood, as well as up-to-date exhibits and generally just fun things to see and do. (Strong Museum website)

1Strong-back-exterior.jpg

Museums, as public display areas, are rather recent in western history.

The name tells us that it was to be a place devoted to the inspirers of the arts, the ancient Greek Muses.

2a-thorvaldsonmuses.JPG

(This is not ancient, but a 19th-century imitation by Bertil Thorvaldsen, 1770-1844, one of the early Romantic period’s most famous sculptors.)

2bb-bertilthorvaldsen.JPG

Greeks—later ones (in the period called “Hellenistic”)—and the Romans collected artistic things, but they were private collections—although Cicero

2bbcicero.jpg

in his orations attacking the corrupt ex-governor of Sicily, Gaius Verres, mentions that a predecessor had nobly allowed his art to be loaned out to decorate the public streets on festive occasions. (It is a horrible irony that Verres, who had fled Rome when it was clear that Cicero had demolished him and his reputation in his first speech, was eventually murdered in Massilia—present-day Marseilles–over a piece of sculpture.)

The first actual “museums” in modern times were Renaissance collections—often hodgepodge assemblies called things like “cabinet of curiosities”, but in England, by the 17th century, John Tradescant the Younger (1608-1662)

2b-jtradescantjr.jpg

had built upon his father’s collection, which was held in the family house south of the Thames (called “The Ark”).

2ctradescanthouse.png

At his death, that collection passed to Elias Ashmole (1617-1692)

2dashmole.jpg

—and there’s a really strange story about how this happened and the consequences, including the very suspicious death of Tradescant’s second wife, Hester.

2ehestertrad.png

Ashmole bequeathed it to his alma mater, Oxford, on the condition that an appropriate building be constructed for it. That structure was built, in 1678-83, and may have been the first public museum in western Europe.

2eashmolean.JPG

There is, in fact, a museum in the Shire. In the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings, we are told of Bilbo that:

“…his coat of marvellous mail, the gift of the Dwarves from the Dragon-hoard, he lent to a museum, to the Michel Delving Mathom-house, in fact.”

(where Gandalf supposes it is “still gathering dust”—The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 2, Chapter 4, “A Journey in the Dark”).   Its name and function are described in the Prologue:

“The Mathom-house it was called; for anything that Hobbits had no immediate use for, but were unwilling to throw away, they called a mathom.”

Such a description suggests something more like an old-fashioned Victorian museum,

4pittrivers.jpg

or even a “cabinet of curiosities” like Ole Worm’s 17th-century one.

5oleworm.jpg

We suspect that the Mathom-house is JRRT’s quiet joke on such older museums, which, even in his day, could be filled with dusty glass cases in which were a wide variety of objects, from fossils to rusty weapons found in the fields, all described on yellowing, hand-labeled cards. In the Hammond and Scull Companion, they suggest that the joke is even more complex, first quoting Tolkien “mathom is meant to recall ancient English mathm”, to which they add:

“Bosworth and Toller’s Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (1898) notes mathum ‘a precious or valuable thing (often refers to gifts)’. Thus Tolkien uses mathom ironically for things which are not treasured, only for where there was ‘no immediate use’ or which the Hobbits ‘were unwilling to throw away’.”

The Strong Museum, in contrast, is bright-colored and inviting, and, in a section dedicated to children’s authors, there is an entire display case devoted to JRRT, which included this. It’s a beautiful replica from the Marquette University Tolkien archive of a menu (the label gives the date “1937-1955”) on which JRRT has carefully written out the hobbit linear measurement system.

2jjrtmeasure.JPG

You can see that, unlike the rather abstract mechanism of the metric system, with its linear basis being a segment of the distance from the North Pole to the equator, Tolkien has used the Anglo-Saxon tradition, where the “foot” was actually originally based upon body parts, being divided into 4 palms or 12 thumbs (although there is another system based upon barley corns).

3barleycornmeasure.jpg

And, just to confirm this, to the right of his bold numbers, there are fainter numbers which indicate the English equivalents.

This system, as ingenious and carefully-worked out as it is, is never used, either in The Hobbit or in The Lord of the Rings. The measurements we can remember—this was done off the top of our heads—any reader who would like to supply more, please feel free!– actually being used are:

  1. leagues (about 3 miles per league is pretty standard = 4.8km)
  2. ells—30 make the coil of elven rope Sam takes from the boat in The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 2, Chapter 8, “Farewell to Lorien” (one ell = about 45 inches = 114 cm; 30 ells = about 112 feet = about 34 metres)
  3. inches–Sam, in The Return of the King, Book 6, Chapter 4, “The Field of Cormallen”, comments that Merry and Pippin are “three inches taller than you ought to be” (3 inches = 7.6cm)

Why spend so much time and effort on something which never went anywhere farther than a menu card in an archive, then?

It’s possible, of course, that this was written in a moment of boredom: although we don’t actually know the occasion, we can imagine that the menu was for a formal dinner to which JRRT had been obliged to go and he improved upon a dull moment with a little Middle-earth fun. Then again, the dating of the card, “1937-1955” places it between the publication of The Hobbit and that of The Lord of the Rings: was this something worked up to be employed in the latter, but simply never needed—or was it, once produced, abandoned as too obscure and hence the use of the (potentially) more familiar leagues, ells, and inches? Or, again, was this simply a product of the almost-obsessive side of JRRT, where so much was so painstakingly created in fine detail? Here is another item from the Strong Museum which displays that side. It is a working-out of the phases of the moon for The Lord of the Rings (sorry it’s a little blurry—this was taken through plexiglass with an i-phone).

6phases.JPG

In an early posting, we once wrote about achieving authenticity in a fantasy novel. Our first, Across the Doubtful Sea, which was set in an alternate 18th century, in France, in London, in South America, and in the South Pacific, required a great deal of research.

51qpin-2XcL.jpg

To prepare for it, we spent some time reading books on everything from 18th-century navies to South Pacific exploration (and even posted a partial bibliography).   Much of our research went into the finished book, but much never did. What we hoped, however, was that, by having so much background in our heads, that background would be reflected in our text. That meant, even if it were an alternate 18th-century, there wouldn’t be glaring anachronisms, on the one hand, but, on the other, that we would give our work a “feel” for the period which would be convincing to our readers and so increase both their engagement and their enjoyment. We would like to think that JRRT, when scribbling hobbit measures on a menu card, had had the same goals.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

ps

We’ve had the crazy idea to build our own imaginary Mathom-house for the works of JRRT and we’re having fun thinking what visitors would see hung from the walls or lying in the cases. Readers: what would you like to see on display?

Allons, enfants!

14 Thursday Jul 2016

Posted by Ollamh in Literary History, Military History

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Across the Doubtful Sea, Alexandre Dumas, Bastille, Bastille Day, Bastille Day parade, Beau Geste, Bernard Cornwell, Brigadier Gerard, C.S. Forester, CD, Charles X, Conan Doyle, Cyrano de Bergerac, de Bougainville, Edmond Rostand, Eugene Leliepvre, French Foreign Legion, French Royal Navy, Hornblower, King's French Guard, Louis Philippe, Marquis de Montcalm, Napoleon, Place de la Bastille, Place Henri Galli, Sharpe, South Pacific, The Three Musketeers

Dear readers, chers lecteurs,

Welcome/bienvenue as always/comme toujours. This is a special extra posting for our faithful French readers, but really for all of our readers who love adventure and history—and that, as far as we can tell, is everyone who regularly reads us.

When we were thinking about this special Bastille Day extra, we wondered what we should write about.

We could, of course, write about the original Bastille day, 14 July, 1789, when a crowd of brave and angry Parisians, aided by some members of the King’s French Guard, attacked the 14th-century fortress-turned-state-prison, and forced its surrender.

Bastille_1715

l'attaquesurlabastille(We can’t resist a visual footnote– you’ll notice the people to the right in dark blue with the fuzzy hats. These are members of a grenadier company of the French Guard. Here’s a larger and more modern illustration of these Guards by one of our favorite French military artists, Eugene Leliepvre.)

leliepvregardefrancaise

Not satisfied with capturing the place, the revolutionaries soon tore it down, and it’s now the Place de la Bastille, with a column, erected in 1840, commemorating the revolution of 1830, in which the last member of the Bourbon monarchy, Charles X, was overthrown and was replaced by his cousin, Louis Philippe.

demolitiondelabastille

Place_de_la_Bastille,_1878

In 1899, a small section of one of the Bastille’s towers was discovered during metro excavations and is now on display in the Place Henri Galli, not far from its original site.

la-bastille1Paris4_SquareHenriGalli_VestigesBastille_Nov09

The Revolution which followed the fall of the Bastille brought on the era of Napoleon and, for those of us interested in adventure and who read English, at sea, C.S. Forester’s “Hornblower” series, among others, and, on land, Bernard Cornwell’s “Sharpe” series and, long before that, the “Brigadier Gerard” stories of Conan Doyle. Hornblower and others have appeared in some of our earlier postings, when we discussed sources for our first novel, Across the Doubtful Sea, set in an imaginary South Pacific in the 18th century,

Across Cover

but we’ve never looked at Gerard or Sharpe. And we would be glad if our French readers would offer comparable books in French for this period (one of us grew up in a Francophile household and reads French). One reason why heroes in our first novel are members of the French Royal Navy is that the period from 1750 to 1800 is filled with adventure, both in exploration and in war, and that navy is constantly involved, something of which English readers have no knowledge.

img_9168

(Another color plate by Leliepvre.)

One has only to remember de Bougainville (1729-1811),

Louis_Antoine_de_Bougainville_-_Portrait_par_Jean-Pierre_Franquel

who began his career as an aide to the Marquis de Montcalm, the daring and resourceful commander of French regular forces in New France, 1756-1759.

The_Victory_of_Montcalms_Troops_at_Carillon_by_Henry_Alexander_Ogden

In the 1780s, however, he had become a naval commander, leading an exploratory expedition to the South Pacific.

51_Pacific_02-419x600

Throughout the later 17th and 18th centuries, the French Navy formed a large part of the French struggle for commercial supremacy across the world.

Quibcardinaux2

Or then again, as we’ve done once before, we could go back to the 17th century and write about Alexandre Dumas and his famous musketeers, who first appeared in The Three Musketeers (1844).

alexandre-dumas-3TheThreeMusketeers099

Or there is the wonderful play Cyrano de Bergerac (1897) by Edmond Rostand, set about 1640. We could easily write a posting about the amazing scene in the first act alone, where, at the Hotel de Bourgogne, Cyrano fights a duel and composes a ballade at the same time.

Edmond_Rostand_en_habit_vert_01

cyrano_acte1

What else? Hmm. How about the French Foreign Legion of one of our favorite old adventure movies, Beau Geste (1939)?

beaugeste1939

And then a final then again, perhaps it’s best just to wish everyone a happy Bastille Day and end with some dramatic views from a previous parade…

defile114 Juillet 2013defile3

Merci, nos lecteurs/thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

The Doubtful Sea Series Facebook Page

The Doubtful Sea Series Facebook Page

  • Ollamh

Categories

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

Across the Doubtful Sea

Recent Postings

  • (Failed) Rewards and (No More) Fairies June 22, 2022
  • Stretching Back (II) June 15, 2022
  • Stretching Back (I) June 8, 2022
  • Loathing, If No Fear June 1, 2022
  • Black and Ominous? May 25, 2022
  • (Un)happily Ever After ? May 18, 2022
  • Riddles in the (Not So) Dark May 11, 2022
  • Feeling Blue (II) May 5, 2022
  • Feeling  Blue (I) April 27, 2022

Blog Statistics

  • 61,583 Views

Posting Archive

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

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • doubtfulsea
    • Join 65 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • doubtfulsea
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...