The Road (No Longer) Taken

21 Wednesday Sep 2016

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

Tags

Adventure, Fornost, History, Isengard, Medieval, Middle-earth, Numenorean road, pack horses, Ridgeway, Roman bridges, Roman occupation of England, Roman Roads, Stonewain Valley, the Greenway, The Lord of the Rings, the North Road, The Salt Road, Tiber River, Tolkien, Via Salaria

Dear Readers, welcome, as always. In this posting, we’ve been thinking about the subject of roads in Middle-earth and, in particular, the North Road, also called the Greenway.

This was the North-South Road, which ran, once upon a time, from Isengard to Fornost, described by Christopher Tolkien as “the great Numenorean road linking the Two Kingdoms, crossing the Isen at the Fords of Isen and the Greyflood at Tharbad and then on northwards to Fornost”. (Unfinished Tales, 314, n.32)

Mostly, the roads of Middle-earth seem to be what you’d expect in a text which is based upon the actual medieval world: dirt tracks.

In the real English medieval world, most of these were not really for carts or carriages,

but rather for pack horses and their loads, which only required the narrowest of paths.

packhorsetrain1

The_Marsden_pack_horse_road,_Marsden_-_geograph.org.uk_-_826758

Bridge in Marsden, West Yorkshire

There had been simple pathways in Britain since earliest times, like the Ridgeway.

Ivinghoe Beacon seen looking north from The Ridgeway.

And yet there were still the remains of a different sort of road in Britain, those built under the Roman occupation of England, from 43 to 410AD.

Roman.Britain.roads

The Romans had begun their rise to power in Italy by controlling a road, the Via Salaria, which ran inland from the Mediterranean. A major purpose of this road (you can see it in its name, “The Salt Road”) was to further the salt trade.

The salt came from salt pans on the Mediterranean coast.

saltblocks

saltpans

The early Romans had been lucky (or wise) in founding their city at a major ford of the Tiber River, where the Via Salaria crossed it.

archaicrome

And out from Rome spread a network of roads.

roman-roads-italy-map

In time, the main roads were not simply dirt tracks, but very-carefully-constructed, well-laid-out stone-paved roadways.

Eli dis 2

These included sturdy bridges, as well, some of them still in place.

alcantara-bridge

Over these roads marched Roman armies

romantroopsonroad

and Roman commerce, as well.

plaustrum2

Eventually, there were over 50,000 miles (80,500 km) of paved roads, as well as many miles more yet of unpaved. roman_empire_117_ad

As far as our current research goes, we have no actual proof that the Greenway was paved like Roman roads. One road for which there is a hint of evidence is that which runs through the Stonewain Valley:

“Through the gap the forgotten wain-road long ago had run down, back into the main horse-way from the City through Anorien; but now for many lives of men trees had had their way with it, and it had vanished, broken and buried under the leaves of uncounted years.” (The Return of the King, Book 5, Chapter 5, “The Ride of the Rohirrim”)

A comparable illustration—with grass instead of trees and leaves—is this of a Roman road in Lancashire, in northeastern England.

Roman Road walk Lancashire

The idea of a road nearly abandoned and covered with grass—therefore “the Greenway”—seems to fit both this modern photo and JRRT’s idea, though, doesn’t it?

One of the spooky, but wonderful things about the ancient Roman world is that, for all that it’s been gone for 1500 years or more, there is so much of it still there for us, above ground and below—as it was for Tolkien. Thus, when we think about what was once one of the major thoroughfares of Middle-earth, we imagine that he, like us, saw a Roman road, decaying, but still useful.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

STTL

06 Tuesday Sep 2016

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Fairy Tales and Myths, Literary History

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A Midsummer Night's Dream, Adventure, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Anthony Hope, Arthur Rackham, Cinderella, Fairies, N.C. Wyeth, Nathaniel Hawthorne's Wonder Book, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, Rip Van Winkle, Sleeping Beauty, The Dolly Dialogues, The Wind in the Willows, To the Other Side, trees

Welcome, as always, dear readers. This is a special day, so we have added an extra entry this week. 77 years ago today, on 6 September, 1939, 5 days after the beginning of World War 2, Arthur Rackham (1867-1939) died.

Beginning as a clerk for the Westminster Fire Office (an insurance company, founded in 1717) who took art lessons,

Rackham first shared illustrations with Alfred Bryant for the 1893 To the Other Side,

but his biographers tell us that it was his next book project, the illustrations for Anthony Hope’s The Dolly Dialogues,

which convinced him to put all of his energy into book illustrations, his focus from then until his death, in 1939.

A man dedicated to his art, Rackham turned out multitudes of images for books as varied as Rip Van Winkle (1905—also illustrated by N.C. Wyeth, another favorite of ours, in 1921),

Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906),

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1907),

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1908),

and The Wind in the Willows (published posthumously in 1940).

And his methods included the absolutely striking Cinderella (1919) and The Sleeping Beauty (1920), in which the illustrations are done almost completely in silhouette, as if the figures and scenes were designed for shadow plays.

Throughout, the themes of wonder and the fantastic/grotesque interested him the most and, for us, a major feature is his trees, of many types, but often haunted things with eyes and mouths.

02-arthur-rackham-imagina-1914-frontispiece

From William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1908

From Nathaniel Hawthorne’s A Wonder Book, 1922

“Come Now, a Roundel” from William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1908

From Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, 1940

From William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1908

From Nathaniel Hawthorne’s A Wonder Book, 1922

Although he was cremated, we still want to offer him a typical Roman farewell, sometimes found inscribed on Roman tombs and the title of this posting: Sit Tibi Terra Levis—“May the earth lie light upon you”. (Literally, “May the earth be light to you”)

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

What’s In a Name?

27 Wednesday Jul 2016

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

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Adventure, akaletes, Baggins, Bilbo, Chico, cyclops, Gollum, Groucho, Marx Brothers, Odysseus, Polyphemus, Riddles in the Dark, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Odyssey, Tolkien, trolls, xenia

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

In this posting, we are interested in the use and danger of using names in the history of the Ring, as well as looking at a possible parallel from an earlier heroic story. How dangerous can a name be?

In Chapter 5 of The Hobbit, Bilbo makes what is almost a fatal mistake—not for himself so much as for Frodo, and not at the time, so much as some 77 years later.

Confronted by the curious Gollum deep under the Misty Mountains, Bilbo has responded to Gollum’s, “What iss he, my preciouss?” with, “I am Mr. Bilbo Baggins.”

The Riddle Game

First, of course, he hasn’t answered the question. He was asked what, not who. And, from Gollum’s viewpoint, in which seemingly all animate things are potentially at least a snack, if not a full meal (“I guess it’s a choice feast; at least a tasty morsel it’d make us, gollum!” The Hobbit, Chapter 5, “Riddles in the Dark”), “What is it?” is the more appropriate question.

Second, depending on the culture, names can have a much greater significance than simply being social identifiers. If your culture has a strong belief in magic, then your personal name is a point of vulnerability: someone who wishes to control you can use it in summoning spells. This is probably why, for example, Circe, in Book 10 of the Odyssey, when she can’t turn Odysseus into a pig, as she had already done with part of his crew, says that he’s akaletes—literally, “uncallable by name”. Although the story as we have it doesn’t say so, we can presume that, as he does in another circumstance—which we’re about to discuss—he gives the enchantress a false name and therefore escapes her magic.

This is not the first time Bilbo has slipped, however. William, the troll, has already asked, “What are yer?” And Bilbo has replied, “Bilbo Baggins, a bur-a hobbit.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 2, “Roast Mutton”)

TN-Trolls_colour_sketch

(By one of our favorite Tolkien artists, Ted Nasmith)

Again, Bilbo has given the wrong answer (reminding us of a scene in the Marx Brothers movie, Horsefeathers, 1932, where Chico, as Baravelli, the doorkeeper of a speakeasy, demands of Groucho, “Who are you?” to which Groucho replies, “I’m fine, thanks. Who are you?”).

Password Scene

He has also complicated matters by almost saying “burglar” (he’s just tried to steal William’s purse, after all, which has, in fact, asked him “’Ere, ‘oo are you?”), but, by changing it at the last moment, he’s then created a new confusion, as the trolls simultaneously ask, “A burrahobbit?” and William adds, “What’s a burrahobbit got to do with my pocket, anyways?”

(We also ask, is there a very mild joke here—“burra” could easily sound like “burrow” and, since hobbits traditionally lived in tunnels…?)

Gandalf and daylight take care of the trolls,

img__Art-The_Three_Trolls_are_Turned_to_Stone,_by_JRRT

but Gollum is another matter. Bilbo, caught off guard, gives him his name. This, in turn, under torture, is passed on to Sauron, now aware that the Ring has (literally) resurfaced on Middle-earth. And, somehow, the names “hobbits” and “Shire” have been added to Bilbo’s name, as Gandalf tells Frodo (The Fellowship of the Ring, Chapter 2, “The Shadow of the Past”). To find out more, Sauron sends out his search team, the Nazgul, and the danger begins…

ellenkurkinazgul

(A wonderfully atmospheric watercolor by Ella Kurki)

Odysseus, whom we mentioned earlier, has also been involved with a large and menacing creature, Polyphemus, the Cyclops, in Book 9 of the Odyssey.

Head-of-Polyphemos-Captmondo-wikimedia-commons

Having a little more experience of danger and living in a world where magic may be anywhere, he is more wary, however, than Bilbo and, when asked his name, replies “Ootis”, which is Greek for “Nobody”.

Scholars have argued for a very long time as to why Polyphemus, who has a Greek name (“The Much-Spoken-Of”) and speaks perfectly good Greek, can be so easily taken in by such a transparent trick and there are lots of theories to explain it. Perhaps, however, the answer is simply to point to Bilbo’s trolls, whom Tolkien describes as “slow in the uptake”—that is, they are not very quick to assess a new situation. Is this the case with Polyphemus? Or, being as big as he is, and not fearing the gods (as he informs Odysseus), perhaps he ignores Odysseus’ reply as simply part of the guest ritual known as xenia, in which, it is clear from his behavior, he does not believe anyway?

Over and over again, in the Odyssey, we see this social pattern, called xenia, which means something like “guest-friendship”, enacted In this pattern, a person comes to another’s house in need of food and shelter. There is then a ritual, in which:

the potential guest appeals to the householder
the householder fulfills that person’s wants
in return the person tells his name and his story

the host gives the person guest-gifts and sends him on his way
should he—or anyone to whom he’s related—be in the guest’s territory in the future, he can claim the same hospitality from the guest—and this can be passed down through generations

In the case of Polyphemus, Odysseus and his men have come to Polyphemus’ cave and helped themselves to his food while he was absent, therefore immediately disturbing the pattern. When the Cyclops comes home, his response is to kill and eat two of Odysseus’ men, a grim parody of the custom, in which he should be feeding them, not feeding on them. The situation escalates, with more men eaten, until Odysseus formulates an escape plan which includes getting the Cyclops drunk

Cyclops-Homer

and putting out his eye,

cyclops2

then using a flock of sheep as an escape vehicle.

FrCyclopsEscape

In the meantime, however, Polyphemus has asked for Odysseus’ name, gotten the “Nobody” answer, and offered a guest-gift in return: the Cyclops will eat Odysseus last. The plan works, Odysseus and his surviving men escape (with the sheep), and get back to their ship, but then things go wrong again. Even blind, Polyphemus pursues them and, tossing mountain tops, almost brings them back to shore.

cyclops3

They do manage to row out of range, however, but then Odysseus, seeming to destroy completely his earlier “Nobody” trick, and much to his crew’s horror, shouts out to the Cyclops not only who he really is, but where he lives, as well. What’s going on here?

polyphemos

Bilbo has twice, inadvertently, provided others with his name, if not his address. Although Odysseus may be more able when it comes to thinking quickly in a dangerous situation than Bilbo, he also belongs to what is called a “face culture”. This means that who you are is a public thing. You only gain credit if you do things publically and your name is attached to what you do. In Odysseus’ case, he has bested a monster and avenged the deaths of his crewmen and it is important that that monster knows who did it. Unfortunately, that monster is the son of the sea god, Poseidon, to whom he prays for revenge and, knowing Odysseus’ name and address, this is a bit more pinpointed than simply saying, “Get that guy who put out my eye, dad!”

Bilbo blundered into the territory of Gollum and, through inexperience and surprise, brought trouble, in time, to Frodo. Odysseus, having concealed his identity successfully, then exposed himself because his society and his position in that society required it. In turn, he returns home alone and on someone else’s ship, having brought trouble on himself and his crew. In answer to our initial question, “How dangerous can a name be?” The answer appears to be, “Very.”

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

Terrifyingly Funny? (Part 1)

13 Wednesday Jul 2016

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

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

Dear Readers, welcome, as always.

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

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

And so we shall.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks, as always, for reading,

MTCIDC,

Ambiguity in Oz

06 Wednesday Jul 2016

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

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

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

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always.

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

which brought to mind this message:

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

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

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

and certainly after the Great War

aircraft were increasingly common—even up to massive dirigibles.

Skywriting—

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

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

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

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

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

crows

witches

monkeys

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

Thus, a thing like a flying house

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

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

(This message, by the way, was:

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

)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

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

01 Wednesday Jun 2016

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

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

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

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

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

What was JRRT thinking of when he likened the two?

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

2000px-Byzantiumby650AD.svg.png

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

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

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

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

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

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

TN-Minas_Tirith_at_Dawn.jpgnaismith.jpg

And here’s the film.

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

Mont_St_Michel_3,_Brittany,_France_-_July_2011.jpg

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

minas-tirith-diagram.0.jpg

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

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

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

Theodosian Walls.jpg

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

Byzantine-empire.6thc.gif

under the emperor Justinian

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

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

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

Benjamin-Constant-The_Entry_of_Mahomet_II_into_Constantinople-1876.jpg

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

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

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

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

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

“My subject is War, and the pity of War.”

13 Wednesday Apr 2016

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Heroes, J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, The Rohirrim

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Adventure, Alexander Gardner, Alfred Waud, Alonzo Chappel, American Civil War, Antietam, Battle of the Somme, Charge of the Rohirrim, Confederate, early photography, Felice Beato, First Virginia Cavalry, Fort Geroge, Matthew Brady, Mexican-American War, Minas Tirith, Pelennor, Peter Jackson, Rohirrim, Second Opium War, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

In this posting, we want to talk a little about a subject so often left out of heroic stories: the aftermath of battle.

In Chapter 10 of The Return of the King, what we might call the GEF—the Gondorian Expeditionary Force—sets off from Minas Tirith for the Morannon. It begins with this little army mustered on the Pelennor and we see events through the eyes of one left behind, Merry:

“At last the trumpets rang and the army began to move. Troop by troop, and company by company, they wheeled and went off eastward. And long after they had passed away out of sight down the great road to the Causeway, Merry stood there. The last glint of the morning sun on spear and helm twinkled and was lost, and still he remained with bowed head and heavy heart, feeling friendless and alone.”

Considering what these folk had endured in the previous days, and what they dreaded might happen in those to come, it’s hardly surprising that it’s not described as a joyous event. What is not described, however, is the landscape in which they gather and which they initially march through.

The Minas Tirith to which Gandalf rides with Pippin

has been attacked by a massive army.

In an attempt to lift the siege, the Rohirrim have charged across the Pelennor,

only to encounter the fierce Southrons and their mumakil.

These are defeated, in turn, by Aragorn, his companions, and troops from South Gondor, as well as the surviving Rohirrim and a party from Gondor itself.

When the carnage is over and the invaders killed or driven off, the story, while touching on the burial of Snowmane, quickly moves back to the city. In real life, such destruction would have left behind a ghastly memorial, something only touched upon in the film of The Return of the King. As you can see in this still, all which seems to remain is the wreckage of the war machines.

In fact, there would have been thousands of bodies, not only of men and orcs, but of horses and mumakil as well.

Such an aftermath has not been a popular subject for art, except in scenes where fallen heroes are lamented when found among the slain. (Think here of Boromir, surrounded by dead orcs, for example.)

That sense of war was changed, in our world, by the introduction of the camera to the battlefield, first, briefly, by Felice Beato, during the Second Opium War (1860)

but in the US by Alexander Gardner, in the fall of 1862.

Previous images of war had tended towards the glorious, full of bravery and flags, as in this engraving made from Alonzo Chappel’s painting of the taking of the Canadian Fort George in 1813—

Even if the depiction tended to be more realistic, it came heavily filtered. During the American Civil War, several northern newspapers and magazines sent artists into the field, who drew what they saw or at least heard about from those who had seen events. One of the best was the Englishman, Alfred Waud.

He drew from life, as in the picture of the First Virginia Cavalry, with whom he spent a brief time in late September, 1862. Here’s his original drawing, which he would have sent to his publisher, in New York.

In New York, the drawing would have been turned into a woodblock print for ease of conversion to a magazine page.

1st-virginia-cavalry-halted-based-on-sketch-by-waud-harpers-sept-27-1862.jpg

And, thus, the reading public would have lost immediacy practically at the first step.

Photographs had been made in the US since the 1840s, and even some during the Mexican-American War of 1846-8, but they had been static pictures of soldiers off the battlefield.

In September, 1862, however, Gardner had been sent by his boss, Matthew Brady

from the studio in Washington, DC, to the field of the recent battle of Antietam, which had been fought only two days before. Gardner came with his photographic wagon

brady'swhatsit.jpg

and ranged the battlefield. The battle was over, but the dead were still in place, where they had fallen, and soon he had a collection of images. Because there was already a tradition of photographing the dead (and, no, we’re not going to continue this practice here—just do google.images “photos of dead victorians” or the like and you can see this for yourself), it was probably not quite so horrifying as one might imagine, but those who saw the exhibit in Brady’s New York gallery

brady'snygallery.jpg

might have agreed with the New York Times review of 20 October, 1862, that “Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war.”

Gardner didn’t take the pictures he did out of a morbid interest, but because the cameras of the day were large and cumbersome

and the process necessary to make a picture took too long to capture motion (just look what happens when there is motion).

Grand Review of Army May 1865 02796u.jpg

Thus, what one might see in a painting, even if it had attempted to depict reality, as in this Keith Rocco painting of a moment in the battle of Antietam when Confederates were fighting behind a fence on the Hagerstown Road,

was impossible to capture. What Gardner could capture was the aftermath. And so he did.

For us, who are modern Rohirrim, as far as horses are concerned, it’s just as well that he confined himself to humans. After Gettysburg, several other photographers included them—only a few photos, but representing anywhere from 3 to 5000 horses and mules who died during the three days of battle. (And, no, again, we won’t show you those—google.images will, but we’re not sure what’s harder to look at.)

Lieutenant Tolkien

would have seen such horrors every day during the battle of the Somme

and perhaps that’s why he moves so quickly from the battlefield to the city and healing. Perhaps it’s also why the view we are given of the GEF is through the eyes of a wounded survivor and, at this moment in the story, one full of foreboding at the thought of another battle. And it may be that Peter Jackson felt the same way.

What do you think, dear readers?

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

Our title is taken from the work one of our favorite Great War poets, Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), who, having survived the entire war, was killed just before the armistice which halted the fighting.

Lamentable

23 Wednesday Mar 2016

Posted by Ollamh in Fairy Tales and Myths, Heroes, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Narrative Methods, Poetry

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Adventure, Ballads, Boromir, Child Ballad, Doune Castle, Earl of Huntly, Eglinton Tournament, Ewan MacColl, Francis James Child, James Stewart, Lallands, Lament for Boromir, Laments, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Outlander, Scots, The Earl of Morray, The Lady of Mondegreen, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien

Dear readers, welcome, as always.

“Ye Hielands and ye Lowlands,

O, whaur hae ye been?

They hae slain the Earl o’ Moray,

And laid him on the green.”

So begins a version of Child Ballad #181. As we are lucky enough to have readers from around the world (and thank you, every one of you, for visiting!), we might explain that a Child Ballad is not a nursery rhyme, but a distinctive type of traditional song from the massive collection of 305 such songs made by Francis James Child, a professor at Harvard, and published in five volumes between 1882 and 1898 under the title The English and Scottish Popular Ballads.

Ballads are verse narratives, sometimes based upon folk tales, sometimes based upon actual historical events. This particular ballad is historically-based and concerns a murder in 16^th-century Scotland. For our purposes, its actual historicity doesn’t matter, however, because what we’re really interested in is the fact that this is a lament for the murdered man, James Stewart, the Earl of Moray (pronounced “Murray”). We also have this posthumous painting, commissioned by his mother, to draw attention to the crime, but it doesn’t appear to have made much difference.

There are a number of different versions of this ballad, but the one which we heard first and with which we are most familiar (and from which we originally learned a tune—there’s more than one) was recorded by the famous Scots folksinger, Ewan MacColl, and is still available on the Smithsonian/Folkways CD FW03509/FG3509, “The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Vol.1”.

As we said, it’s a lament—just like that for Boromir in the chapter entitled “The Departure of Boromir”–and that’s really where we began to think about laments, especially a lament for a prominent person. And, as ever, we looked for a useful parallel between our world and that of Middle Earth. In this case, the murdered man in the ballad was an earl—a high-level nobleman—but he was also the son of the Regent (the temporary ruler) of Scotland and so we might see him as on about the same social level as Boromir the son of the Steward of Gondor.

Here’s how the lament for Boromir begins.

“Through Rohan over fen and field where the long grass grows

The West Wind comes walking, and about the walls it goes.

‘What news from the West, O wandering wind, do you bring to me tonight?

Have you seen Boromir the Tall by moon or by starlight?’ ”

You can see a similarity between this and the ballad already. The ballad begins by addressing all of Scotland. The lament begins by addressing the West Wind. Both appeal to something more than a listener, or even a group of listeners, as if speaking to simple mourners wouldn’t be enough: bigger forces must be involved. In the case of the ballad, the speaker (unknown—but clearly well aware of the facts) asks where the country has been. In the lament, Aragorn (as he is the initial mourner) has a more specific addressee and a more specific question: West Wind, have you seen Boromir?

The ballad then goes right to the point:

“They hae slain the Earl of Moray

And laid him on the green.”

[A footnote here. That last line became famous because of an essay by Sylvia Wright in the November, 1954 issue of the American publication, Harper’s Magazine entitled “The Death of Lady Mondegreen”. In the essay, Wright explains that, as a child, she misheard “and laid him on the green” as “Lady Mondegreen” and imagined that Stewart had been murdered along with a female companion. The word “mondegreen” has become a technical term in language studies for a misheard word which produces a new meaning.]

The next part of Aragorn’s lament is unspecific: Boromir is simply missing.

“ ‘I saw him ride over seven streams, over waters wide and grey;

I saw him walk in empty lands, until he passed away

Into the shadows of the North. I saw him then no more.

The North Wind may have heard the horn of the son of Denethor.’

‘O Boromir! From the high walls westward I looked afar,

But you came not from the empty lands where no men are.’”

The ballad then tells us something about the quality of the dead man.

“He was a braw gallant,

And he rade at the ring,

And the bonny Earl o’ Moray,

He might have been a king.”

This might need a little translation. The ballad is written in Lallans, the English—and we might really say the wonderfully rich English—originally of southern Scotland (Lallans= “Lowlands”). In general, the grammar and syntax are recognizably English, but the expressions and vocabulary are sometimes different—and sometimes very different!

So, here (so far):

Braw = “fine/splendid”

Gallant = “young man” (can also be spelled “callant”)

But the next expression is actually from medieval jousting. This was a game in which a knight would be required to ride at a ring, suspended in mid-air, and spear it on the end of his lance. Here’s an illustration from the 1839 Victorian tournament revival at Eglinton, in Scotland.

Although we might normally imagine that tournaments died out with the Middle Ages,

Elizabethans and their successors, the Jacobeans, still jousted, as a kind of expensive archaic sport. Here’s Nicholas Hilliard’s c1590 portrait of George Clifford, 3^rd Earl of Cumberland, dressed for a tournament as the Queen’s Champion.

So, we know that the speaker believes that James Stewart was a fine young man, and able at tournaments. We also know that Stewart was able enough—as far as the speaker is concerned—to be a king. As his father had been the Regent for the infant James VI, perhaps this is a quiet suggestion that James junior might have done better on the throne than James.

In contrast, all we know at the moment about Boromir was that he was tall and that his father’s name was Denethor, with the suggestion that he was on an errand or quest in some deserted land.

But then we find out more about James Stewart.

“O lang will his lady

Lok frae the Castle Doune

Ere she see the Earl o’ Moray

Come soundin’ through the toun.”

He had a wife or mistress and we see something about where he lived: in a castle. If you just heard this ballad, rather than reading it, and you came to the next word, “Doune”, you might be confused, since you can hear “doune”, meaning “down” in Lallans. This gives you a picture of a lady standing on the castle wall, waiting for Stewart to return, which is fine, but Doune is also the name of a castle owned by James Stewart.

If you’ve seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail, you will recognize this place.

Or, if you watch Outlander.

As for the last line, we imagine that the Earl has a trumpeter ride in front of him, to clear the way.

Will we learn more about Boromir from the second stanza, which Legolas sings?

“From the mouths of the Sea the South Wind flies, from the sandhills and the stones;

The wailing of the gulls it bears, and at the gate it moans.

‘What news from the South, O sighing wind, do you bring to me at eve?

Where now is Boromir the Fair? He tarries and I grieve.’ “

With the idea that the speaker is appealing to nature for answers, we see Legolas address a second wind, but, so far, all we have added to our store of knowledge is that Boromir was good-looking (“the Fair”—and, in English, this can also mean “light-skinned/light-haired”)—and the anxiety at his absence continues.

In the ballad, we move farther into the crime, the actual murderer being spoken to.

“Now wae be to ye, Huntly,

And wherefore did ye sae?

I bade ye bring him wi’ ye,

And forbade ye him to slay.”

A little glossing first.

Wae be to ye= “may you be sad/sorrowful” (wae is Lallans for “woe”)

Bade= “ordered”

Forbade= “forbid/prohibited” (and should be pronounced “for-BAHD”)

Here we are presented—a bit obliquely—with the identity of the speaker of the ballad. He is one who gives order to lords—hence, he’s the king, meaning, historically, James VI of Scotland (soon—1603—to be James I of England, as well).

If we only go by the verse, he has ordered “Huntly” (historically, the Earl of Huntly, ordered by James VI to arrest Stewart) to bring the Earl of Moray to the king’s court. In real life, he murdered Stewart when Stewart tried to escape, and here we see that, literarily, the same thing is suggested.

At this point, we have three characters: king, Huntly, Moray, and a murder, supposedly against the king’s orders. What more does Legolas’ lament have to tell us?

“ ‘Ask not of me where he doth dwell—so many bones there lie

On the white shores and the dark shores under the stormy sky;

So many have passed down Anduin to find the flowing Sea.

Ask of the North Wind news of them the North Wind sends to me!’

‘O Boromir! Beyond the gate the seaward road runs south,

But you came not with the wailing gulls from the grey sea’s mouth.’ ”

Nothing is said directly here, but that first line’s mention of “so many bones” might be seen to reveal what has happened to Boromir. The South Wind tells the speaker to ask the North Wind, but will that make a difference?

[Another footnote, this one about verse structure. Did JRRT have W.B. Yeats’ early (1888) “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” in the back of his mind with that last line?

Here’s the last stanza of Yeats’ poem:

“I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.”

In this poem, Yeats weights the end of each stanza both by using a shorter line and by ending with a series of one-syllable words, which slow things to a stop: deep…heart’s…core. JRRT does the same thing with one-syllable words here: grey…sea’s…mouth.]

The next part of the ballad stanza repeats, in a variation, the earlier motif: what a wonderful person the murdered earl was.

“He was a braw gallant,

And he played at the glove;

And the bonny Earl of Murray,

He was the Queen’s true love.”

A final piece of glossing. Elizabethans used gloves as a love-present,

suggesting that the last two lines have more than a rhetorical meaning. Historically, James VI’s queen was Anne of Denmark—

was this the real reason why the historical James didn’t seem to be interested in punishing Huntly?

We then have a repetition of the earlier lines:

“O lang will his lady

Lok frae the Castle Doune

Ere she see the Earl o’ Moray

Come soundin’ through the toun.”

And, with these, the ballad ends, our last image being that of the lady on the castle wall, looking for someone who will never return. This same image, in the form of an inanimate object, waits for Boromir.

“From the Gate of Kings the North Wind rides, and past the roaring falls;

And clear and cold about the tower its loud horn calls.

‘What news from the North, O mighty wind, do you bring to me today?

What news of Boromir the Bold? For he is long away.’

‘Beneath Amon Hen I heard his cry. There many foes he fought,

His cloven shield, his broken sword, they to the water brought.

His head so proud, his face so fair, his limbs they laid to rest;

And Rauros, golden Rauros, bore him upon its breast.’

‘O Boromir! The Tower of Guard shall ever northward gaze

To Rauros, golden Rauros-falls, until the end of days.’ “

Putting the various elements together, we might see this kind of lament as going something like this:

a speaker appeals to a mass audience of some sort (Scotland/Winds)
that speaker reveals that something is wrong (Stewart is dead/Boromir is missing)
he/she can then describe what that is in some way (Stewart was murdered/Boromir has died fighting)
speaker may describe the fine qualities of the person lamented (Stewart as jouster, lover, kingly/Boromir as tall, fair, died fighting)
those who lament cannot be consoled—or perhaps refuse to be (lady on wall of Doune/Tower of Guard=Minas Tirith)

Using this suggested model, can you think of other laments, both in Tolkien or otherwhere which match it?

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

Beacons or Wills of the Wisp?

16 Wednesday Mar 2016

Posted by Ollamh in Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, Narrative Methods

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Adventure, Agamemnon, Beacons, British Royal Government, Byzantines, film changes, Lays of Ancient Rome, Minas Tirith, Mulan, Peter Jackson, Spanish Armada, The Great Wall, The Lord of the Rings, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Tolkien

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always. We begin this posting with something which puzzled us when we last read The Lord of the Rings.

Gandalf and Pippin are on their nonstop ride to Minas Tirith.

Then—

“There was silence again for a while. Then, ‘What is that? Cried Pippin suddenly, clutching at Gandalf’s cloak. ‘Look! Fire, red fire! Are there dragons in this land? Look, there is another!’

For an answer Gandalf cried aloud to his horse. ‘On, Shadowfax! We must hasten. Time is short. See the beacons of Gondor are alight, called for aid. War is kindled. See, there is the fire on Amon Din, and flame on Eilenach; and there they go speeding west: Nardol, Erelas, Min-Rimmon, Calenhad, and the Halifirien on the borders of Rohan.’ ” (The Return of the King, Chapter 1, “Minas Tirith”)

Beacons as a means of rapid communication occurs often, both in western literature and in history.

In Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (458BC), for example, Clytemnestra has a famous (and rather lengthy) speech in which she describes the beacons which alert Mycenae that Troy has been captured—alerting her to begin her plot to kill her husband and take over with her BF, Aegisthus.

The towers along the Great Wall in China were used as beacon stations, as in Mulan.

mulan-wall-of-china

In the 9^th century AD, the Byzantines had developed a system of beacons to warn them of invasion by their neighbors to the east.

If you read the Tolkien sites, you see a fair amount more on beacons, in particular, those set up by the British royal government along the southern shore of England in the 1580s to act as an early warning system to alert the country to the Spanish armada.

Tolkien would have known the story of these either from studying English history in his early schooling, or from reading “The Armada”, a well-known poem by Thomas Babington Macaulay first published in his Lays of Ancient Rome (1842).

In Jackson’s The Return of the King, Denethor has been stubborn about not lighting the beacons to alert Rohan that Gondor has need of it. Pippin climbs up the outside of the rock face where the beacon is and, while the guards are distracted, he lights the beacon which, in turn, sets off the whole series.

This is not the first or last time one sees changes made in the story—what, for example, are Merry and Pippin doing in a cornfield (that is, a field of maize—do we know that maize even grows in Middle Earth) when Pippin has actually been with Frodo and Sam from the time they left Hobbiton?

In past postings, we have sometimes commented upon the changes made to the story by the scriptwriters—especially the changes to The Hobbit, which have done so much to take the story away from the author’s intent entirely, to the point where, in the third film, Bilbo, the main character, is reduced to something like Third Spear-Carrier from the Left, when the story becomes something like The Tragical Historie of Thorin, Sometime King Under the Mountain. When questioned about this, the scriptwriters, in general, have always made the same reply: “film is different from print” (although, in interviews, they sometimes become more aggressive, once even suggesting that those who disagree with their approach don’t understand the books).

In this posting, however, we intend to follow a different path, trying to understand why the change was made and how it might or might not benefit the narrative.

To a degree, the film has followed its source, in that Gandalf has taken Pippin with him on the ride to Minas Tirith, but Pippin’s role, from that point on in the book, becomes more that of observer than active participant. This is in contrast to Merry, who rides into the battle on the Pelennor and helps Eowyn destroy the Chief Nazgul.

We can imagine, then, that the scriptwriters, who have brought the two Hobbits so far, have decided to give Pippin another moment of action, as a kind of balance: if Merry fights a Nazgul, Pippin can do a little rock-climbing and alert the Rohirrim.

If you, readers, don’t know it, there is very useful area on the site www.theonering.com, called “Film Changes”. This particular change does not appear there, one presumes because, as the site says, their text was based upon a scripts still in the midst of production, but the structure of the area is very useful. It provides a summary title for each change, then there is this:

Film:

Book:

Pro:

Con:

It’s interesting to see how more-or-less neutral in tone this is. The writer shows the contrasts, suggests why the change, and then explains why this is not necessarily a change for the better, but there is none of the hostility we sometimes see on-line, one way or the other, and, if you’re a regular reader of blogs and websites, we’re sure you’ve seen that hostility. It’s one of the least attractive, but widespread features of the internet and it’s a pity that certain of these commentators couldn’t be delayed till dawn would overtake them and send them the way of Tom, Bert, and William in The Hobbit!

img__Art-The_Three_Trolls_are_Turned_to_Stone,_by_JRRT.jpg

[Tolkien’s trees, by the way, always remind us of the work of the Danish illustrator, Kay Nielsen (1886-1957), which we presume JRRT had seen–at least his illustrations for East of the Sun, West of the Moon (1914).

We have already provided you with the first two sections: the film has Pippin touch off a beacon after reaching Minas Tirith; in the book, Pippin sees the beacons alight, one after the other, as he and Gandalf ride towards Minas Tirith.

We presume that the Pro would be something like:

provides a balance between the two Hobbits who are so closely linked throughout the story
adds to the drama and underlines Denethor’s less-than-full-commitment—as depicted in the films—to defending Gondor to the end
adds a bit of visual spectacle, seeing the beacons light up, one after another

And the Con?

not in the original—and, as we always wonder, how far can you change things before you forfeit your claim that it’s “JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings” you’ve filmed?
Denethor is actually much more active and aggressive in his stance in the original, not being willing to give up anything without a fight until the near-fatal wounding of Faramir (and a late-night séance with the palantir)—the beacons have already been lit because he’s attempting to gather all of the forces he can to defend Gondor
in fact, the beacons are not on snowy mountain peaks in the original, but on reachable hilltops, just as are the sites for the beacons used to alert southern England of the approach of the Spanish armada in 1588, as in this fine photo by David Bellamy.

So, it might be a striking visual effect, but, as in #1, this isn’t quite what JRRT had in mind.

What do you think, dear readers? A justifiable change?

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

Lingua Orca

10 Wednesday Feb 2016

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

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Adventure, Black Speech, Bree, Cirth, Fantasy, Gandalf, L. Frank Baum, Mordor, Orcs, Origin of Orcs, Ozma of Oz, Princess Langwidere, The Lord of the Rings, Thorin, Tolkien

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

In P. Jackson’s The Desolation of Smaug, there is a scene at the opening, cut from whole cloth as so much of the later Hobbit movies, in which Gandalf meets Thorin in The Prancing Pony in Bree.

There Gandalf shows Thorin a “message”.

“Gandalf: It is Black Speech.

[Thorin looks at Gandalf with unease]

Gandalf: A promise of payment.

Thorin: For what?

Gandalf: Your head. Someone wants you dead.”

One can laugh at that last—is there the possibility that someone who promised payment for a head would not want the owner dead? (Here we thought, for a moment, of the Princess Langwidere in L. Frank Baum’s Ozma of Oz, who has a collection of 30 exchangeable heads which she keeps locked in a cabinet.)

After laughing, however, we began to wonder just who that message was supposed to be for.

Tolkien says of the Black Speech:

“It is said that the Black Speech was devised by Sauron in the Dark Years, and that he had desired to make it the language of all those that served him, but he failed in that purpose.”

We are never told why he failed: was it too complicated? Too impractical? Too limited? (In modern terms, we can imagine Sauron sending out memos, saying things like: “To All Departments: it has come to Our attention that there are those who are not using the Black Speech in all official documents. Please conform to standards as laid out in Mordor Bulletin #512. Immediate.”) If what Isildur has to say about the inscription inside the ring is true,

Sauron doesn’t appear to have devised a script in which to write it:

“Already the writing upon it, which at first was as clear as red flame, fadeth and is now only barely to be read. It is fashioned in an elven-script of Eregion, for they have no letters in Mordor for such subtle work…” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 2, Chapter 2, “The Council of Elrond”)

Tolkien continues:

From the Black Speech, however, were derived many of the words that were in the Third Age wide- spread among the Orcs, such as ghash ‘fire’, but after the first overthrow of Sauron this language in its ancient form was forgotten by all but the Nazgul. When Sauron arose again, it became once more the language of Barad-dur and of the captains of Mordor.”

Could the “promise of payment” be meant for the Nazgul, then? That hardly seems likely—after all, they are the main servants of Sauron, bound to him by the rings they wear, Nazgul, after all, meaning “ring wraith”. Sauron’s success is their success—just as his failure seems to mean their end.

Because this scene exists only in the minds of the scriptwriters, we could have just shrugged it off right there as being a piece with the resurrected Azog and that ridiculous arm which he seems to have borrowed from a macho Frosty the Snowman, “Tauriel” and the embarrassing romance with a Dwarf, etc, etc, etc. Instead, we decided to play with the idea.

Using Tolkien’s actual texts as the basis of our thinking, we wondered: if the message wasn’t for the Nazgul and the Black Speech is specifically linked to Mordor, who else might be the recipient? Well, there are always the Orcs—but could they read it?

We know—sort of—what they are. Fangorn tells Merry and Pippin that they were made by Sauron as mockery of Elves. Tolkien himself seemed initially a bit puzzled about Orcish origins, calling them, in a letter to Milton Waldman (Letters no.131, 151, “probably in late 1951”) “…the Orcs (goblins) and other monsters bred by the First Enemy”. The same is said in Appendix F of The Lord of the Rings: “The Orcs were first bred by the Dark Power of the North in the Elder Days.” Then, in a letter to Naomi Mitchison (Letters, no.144, 177-8, 25 April, 1954), however, he writes: “Orcs…are nowhere clearly stated to be of any particular origin. But since they are servants of the Dark Power, and later of Sauron, neither of whom could, or would, produce living things, they must be ‘corruptions.’” And, again, in the draft of a letter to Peter Hastings, from later in the same year, he explains, quoting Frodo, speaking to Sam: “ ‘The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make real new things of its own. I don’t think it gave life to the Orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them.’” to which he adds, “In the legends of the Elder Days it is suggested that the Diabolus subjugated and corrupted some of the earliest Elves…” (Letters, no.153, 191). (This is continued later in the same letter, 195.)

Of their speech, JRRT wrote:

“It is said that they had no language of their own, but took what they could of other tongues and perverted it to their own liking; yet they made only brutal jargons, scarcely sufficient for their own needs, unless it were for curses and abuse. So it was in the Third Age Orcs used for communication between breed and breed the Westron tongue…” (The Lord of the Rings, Appendix F)

(Linguistically, we wonder if it would be possible for a people—especially a people who appear, in the later Third Age, to be extensive in number—could actually have had no language—or languages–of their own, particularly if they were a people who had existed before being corrupted by Morgoth. In The Lord of the Rings, for example, although they speak the Common Speech, they clearly have names out of some other language—what might that have been?)

Taking the next step, in a previous posting, we had begun to probe the question of literacy versus orality in Middle Earth and here we might ask the question: were Orcs literate at all? The only possible clue we’d found is in Appendix E of The Lord of the Rings, where it is said of the form of writing called “Cirth”:

“The Cirth in their older and simpler form spread eastward in the Second Age, and became known to many peoples, to Men and Dwarves, and even to Orcs…”

This would suggest that they were.

When we actually see the Orcs, however, do we find any evidence of the use of that writing?

There are only a couple of extended passages when we hear the Orcs as well as see them. The first is in the chapter entitled “The Uruk-hai”. In this chapter, the Orcs who have Merry and Pippin argue over their captives and we hear several talk about “orders” and “my orders”, but no documents appear or are mentioned: are these only oral orders? The second time we hear the Orcs is in “The Choices of Master Samwise.” Here, Sam overhears two Orc officers, Gorbag and Shagrat, talking. “The messages go through quicker than anything could fly, as a rule. But I don’t inquire how it’s done. Safest not to.” says Gorbag. And, a little later, Shagrat says, “A message came: Nazgul uneasy. Spies feared on Stairs. Double vigilance. Patrol to head of Stairs.” Unfortunately, there’s no further information here– although that second message almost sounds like it’s one step from being a tweet! (Or, in JRRT’s time, a Western Union telegram.) But then Shagrat says, “ I have my orders…Any trespasser found by the guard is to be held at the tower. Prisoner to be stripped. Full description of every article, garment, weapon, letter, ring, or trinket to be sent to Lugburz at once, and to Lugburz only…” Does such detail require writing? It does say “full description…to be sent”, which certainly suggests it.

We have a final glimpse and earful of the Orcs from “The Tower of Cirith Ungol” and into “The Land of Shadow”, but there are no more discussions of orders or messages or descriptions, just more of the brutality and treachery which seems the norm for such creatures.

So, we have two statements, in total, which are more suggestive than actual proof: Cirth was known to Orcs and the order for a “full description” to be sent to Barad-dur. Does that mean that, should Shagrat or Gorbag have written, he would have done so in Cirth? If so, this proves only literacy in that form and, when we look back to the one sample we have of any length (all of two lines) of the actual Black Speech, it is in Tengwar as we know, from Isildur, that Sauron—at least at the time of the making of the ring—had no Black Speech writing system to employ.

Conclusions? Although it was fun to do the research, at base, this was a fool’s errand—the whole thing, after all, was a creation of the same people who brought you Thranduil on an Irish elk (for more on that, google the extremely useful—and entertaining!– www.tolkien-treasures and see the entry on Thranduil and his mount).

If we play along, as we have, there’s only a process of elimination. The only people who had anything to do with the (revived) Black Speech were in Mordor. If it wasn’t the Nazgul and it wasn’t the Orcs, who’s left? Only one possibility seems to remain: Sauron wrote it as a memo to himself, a kind of Barad-dur post-it, (“To Me: Thorin. Head. Reward? Do soonest.”), but, being very busy in contract negotiations with Benedict Cumberbatch’s agent on voice-overs, he absentmindedly sent it.

What do you think, dear readers?

As always, thanks for reading!

MTCIDC

doubtfulsea

~ adventure fantasy

Tag Archives: Adventure

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