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Speaking Up

19 Wednesday Sep 2018

Posted by Ollamh in J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Poetry

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Against Idleness and Mischief, Alice in Wonderland, Children, Edwardian, Isaac Watts, Lewis Carroll, Oliphaunt, recitation, Tennyson, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Victorian, William Wordsworth

Welcome, dear readers, as ever.

We are always interested in linking JRRT and Middle-earth with things of this earth, from Tolkien’s experience in the Great War to English geography vs that of Middle-earth.  In this posting, we begin with an elephant—or, rather, oliphaunt.  Which is an elephant—sort of, only bigger and menacing.

image1oliphant.jpg

“Big as a house, much bigger than a house, it looked to him, a grey-clad moving hill…his great legs like trees, enormous sail-like ears spread out, long snout upraised like a huge serpent about to strike, his small red eyes raging.  His upturned hornlike tusks were bound with bands of gold and dripped with blood.”  (The Two Towers, Book Four, Chapter 4, “Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit”)

As big as the oliphaunt is, the real subject of our post is actually one small part of what might have been JRRT’s Victorian/Edwardian educational experience and its reflection in the form of Sam Gamgee, who, “stood up, putting his hands behind his back (as he always did when ‘speaking poetry’) and began:

Grey as a mouse

Big as a house

Nose like a snake

I make the earth shake

As I tramp through the grass

Trees crack as I pass

With horns in my mouth

I walk in the South

Flapping big ears

Beyond count of years

I stump round and round

Never lie on the ground

Not even to die

Oliphaunt am I

Biggest of all

Huge, old, and tall

If ever you’d met me

You wouldn’t forget me

If you never do

You won’t think I’m true

But old Oliphaunt am I

And I never lie.”

 

In the 1890s, when JRRT was a little boy, a mainstay of that education was the combination of memorization and repetition through recitation.

image2aaareciting.jpg

Children were expected to commit to memory—and to be able to perform—any number of poetic works whenever called upon.  In what was probably an extreme example, the poet Alfred Tennyson’s (1809-1892)

image2aatennyson.jpg

father is said to have required him to memorize and repeat to him over four mornings all four books of the Roman poet, Horace’s, ( 65-8BC)

image2abhorace.jpg

(This is a “traditional” portrait of the poet, but probably isn’t really he.)

odes—a hefty chore—that’s 103 poems—in Latin.

It’s not surprising, then, that one little Victorian girl, finding herself in a strange and distorted world, would try to provide herself with both comfort and stability by returning to the familiar:  reciting.

image2alice.jpg

“I’ll try and say ‘ How doth the little—'” and she

crossed her hands on her lap as if she were

saying lessons, and began to repeat it…”

This is from Chapter 2, “The Pool of Tears”, of Lewis Carroll’s

image3carroll.jpg

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865 (this is an 1866 printing).

image4alicefirsted.jpg

What Alice will try to repeat is a poem called “Against Idleness and Mischief”, by the clergyman Isaac Watts (1674-1748),

image5watts.jpg

from his 1715 collection, Divine Songs Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children.

image6divine.jpg

This is what Alice thought that she was going to say:

1    How doth the little busy Bee

2    Improve each shining Hour,

3   And gather Honey all the day

4    From every opening Flower!

 

5    How skilfully she builds her Cell!

6    How neat she spreads the Wax!

7    And labours hard to store it well

8    With the sweet Food she makes.

 

9    In Works of Labour or of Skill

10   I would be busy too:

11   For Satan finds some Mischief still

12    For idle Hands to do.

 

13    In Books, or Work, or healthful Play

14    Let my first Years be past,

15   That I may give for every Day

16    Some good Account at last.

 

What Alice recited, however, was not quite that:

“but her voice sounded hoarse and strange, and the words did not come the same as they used to do :

” How doth the little crocodile

Improve his shining tail,

And pour the waters of the Nile

On every golden scale!

 

How cheerfully he seems to grin,

How neatly spreads his claws,

And welcomes little fishes in

With gently smiling jaws.”

 

which was hardly comforting!

Twice, Alice is called upon by others to recite—in Chapter 5, by a hookah-smoking caterpillar,

image7cater.jpg

who demands that she recite “You are old, Father William”—which is, in itself, topsy-turvy, as, instead of the kind of morally-inspiring poem Victorian children were clearly expected to produce, it’s a parody of William Wordsworth’s (1770-1850), “Resolution and Independence” (1802, published 1807), a poem about an elderly pauper who makes a living collecting leeches (and who perks up the previously-despondent Wordsworth with his sturdy view of life).

image8ww.jpg

Instead of that sturdy view, here is what Alice begins to recite on the subject of Father William’s behavior:

” You are old, Father William,” the young man said,

”And your hair has become very white;

And yet you incessantly stand on your head—

Do you think, at your age, it is right ?”

 

And in Chapter 10, a gryphon

image9gryphon.jpg

orders her to “Stand up and repeat ‘Tis the voice of the sluggard’, another moral poem by Watts.  It should begin:

‘Tis the voice of the sluggard, I heard him complain,

“You have waked me too soon, I must slumber again.”
As the door on its hinges, so he on his bed,
Turns his sides and his shoulders and his heavy head.

Instead, out comes:

”’Tis the voice of the lobster; I heard him declare,

‘ You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair!

As a duck with its eyelids, so he with his nose

Trims his belt and his buttons, and turns out his toes.””

 

In each case, what was meant to be comforting or at least dutiful, has turned out distorted and disturbing.  As the Caterpillar says—and Alice answers–

” That is not said right,” said the Caterpillar. ”Not quite right, I’m afraid,” said Alice,

timidly; “some of the words have got altered.”

” It is wrong from beginning to end,” said the

Caterpillar decidedly, and there was silence for

some minutes.

 

This was hardly the expected effect, either for Victorians in general or for Alice, in particular, but, if the Caterpillar is censorious and Alice apologetic, Sam’s master has a completely different reaction to the hobbit’s recitation:

“Frodo stood up.  He had laughed in the midst of all his cares when Sam trotted out the old fireside rhyme of Oliphaunt, and the laugh had released him from hesitation.”  (The Two Towers, Book Four, Chapter Three, “The Black Gate is Closed”)

We wonder what the Caterpillar’s reaction might have been if Alice had recited “Oliphaunt”.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

Crowning Achievement

20 Wednesday Sep 2017

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

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Alexander the Great, Alice in Wonderland, Barrow-downs, Barrow-wights, Bayeux Tapestry, Brunhilde, Charlemagne, Cheshire Cat, circlet, Cleopatra VII, diadem, Egypt, Egyptian crowns, Elightenment France, Eowyn, French Revolution, Gondor, Gondorian crown, Greek, Greek coins, Hildebrandts, Imperial Crown of the Holy Roman Empire, Julius Caesar, Lupercalia, Marcus Antonius, Medieval, Napoleon I, Nazgul, Octavian Augustus, Pharoahs, Philip II, Pontifex Maximus, Ptolemy I, Queen Elizabeth I, Queen Elizabeth II, Queen Victoria, Richard Wagner, Rohan, Romans, Tenniel, The Lord of the Rings, Theoden, Tolkien, William Shakespeare, Witch-King of Angmar, wreaths

Welcome, dear readers, as ever.

Recently, one of us was lecturing on ancient Egypt, a country of two lands, in fact, Upper and Lower, and each could be represented in the crown worn by the pharaoh.

image1crownsof-egypt.jpg

Within in blink, we began to think about JRRT’s illustration of the traditional crown of Gondor,

image2jrrtcrown.jpg

of which Tolkien says:

“I think that the crown of Gondor (the S. Kingdom) was very tall, like that of Egypt, but with wings attached, not set straight back but at an angle.

The N. Kingdom had only a diadem (III 323).  Cf. the difference between the N. and S. kingdoms of Egypt.”

(Letters, letter to Rhona Beare, 10/14/58, 281)

For us, the first crown we believe we ever saw as children was either one in an illustrated fairy tale (here’s a Tenniel illustration from Alice)

image3atenniel.jpg

or the actual one of Queen Elizabeth II, and that hardly fits JRRT’s idea about the southern crown—or the northern one

image3er2.jpg

or that of her ancestor, Queen Victoria

imaage4vr.jpg

or that of their distant ancestor, Elizabeth I.

image5er1.jpg

When we think of a “diadem”, however, we are reminded of the earliest western European crowns, which, in contrast to Elizabeth’s, is barely there at all.

Here is the first type of crown we know of being depicted—it’s that “diadem” in a Greek form, being on a coin of Philip II, King of Macedon and father of Alexander the Great (the reverse—the back side—the front side is called the “obverse”—shows Philip’s Olympic victory horse and Philip’s name in the genitive—possessive—case, “of Philip”—showing not only possession of the horse, but of the victory, of the coin, and, by implication, the right to issue coins).

 

This became a regular pattern, both of coin and of crown for those who followed Philip, and, thinking about Philip’s victory, we can imagine that the original of the crown was based upon the wreath athletic game victors wore.

 

And coins like Philip’s set the pattern for classical coins—and crowns—for centuries.  Here’s the crown pattern on the head of Ptolemy I, one of Alexander’s generals.

 

At Alexander’s death, Ptolemy seized Egypt, making it a family possession for the next nearly three hundred years, all the way down to his greatgreatgreat etc granddaughter Cleopatra VII.

image9cleo.jpg

The pattern was not confined to Greece or Egypt, however—Julius Caesar wore something similar—

CaesarCoin_Wikipedia_960.jpg

although, unlike Ptolemy and other such rulers, Caesar might have hoped to muddy people’s perceptions of what such a thing symbolized and what position (dictator for life) he’d forced the Senate to give him.   Rome had hated monarchs, after all, since they’d kicked out their last king 450 years before.

(And see Act I, Sc.2 of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in which, at the festival of the Lupercalia, Marcus Antonius publically offers him a crown and Caesar rejects it, much to the loud delight of the mob.)

In the Greco-Roman world, wreaths had many purposes:  besides Greek kings and winners at games, people at parties and weddings and other festive occasions wore them, as well as celebrants at religious rites.

image12symposium.jpg

Perhaps Caesar hoped that, appearing in one, he might appear less like a Hellenistic king and more like anything from an Olympic victor or party-goer to a priest (he was Pontifex Maximus, head of religion in Rome, so there was a certain credibility to the latter).

image13pm.jpg

Malicious people in Rome also suggested another reason for the wreath:  Caesar was sensitive about his thinning hair.

image14jc.jpg

Caesar’s grandnephew and successor, Octavian/Augustus, continued the tradition,

Augusts-in-Ancient-Roman-Cameo.jpg

as did following emperors for several centuries—and even Charlemagne, hundreds of years after the last western emperor, revived it.

image16charlemagne.jpg

At some point, just after Charlemagne’s time or thereabout (c1000ad), a new pattern appeared, which you can see in the famous “Imperial Crown of the Holy Roman Empire”.

image17impcrown.jpg

Instead of a wreath, this was a built-up circlet, with lots of “bits and bobs” on top.

This newer look persisted in various more or less complicated forms in the west for centuries

image18king.jpgimage19king.jpgimage20king.jpgimage21king.jpg

and seems to underlie the crowns seen in more recent times (often with what appears to be a red velvet balloon in the middle).

image22er1.jpgimage23chas2.jpgimage24geov.jpg

There is a throwback, however:  Napoleon I.  He had grown up in Enlightenment France, in a world which idealized classical learning and art, and so, when he made himself emperor in 1804, his model wasn’t medieval and Germanic, but Augustine.

image25agus.jpg

image25nappy.jpg

This doesn’t mean that he wasn’t aware of that other model and he would have used it—the so-called “crown of Charlemagne”–at his self-coronation

image26napcoron.jpg

had it not suffered the fate of many medieval treasures and been destroyed during the French Revolution (the famous Bayeux Tapestry was almost converted to wagon covers by revolutionaries).  In fact, a “crown of Charlemagne” did turn up for the ceremony—“recreated” by a clever Paris jeweler.

image27charlcrown.jpg

[A footnote about the coronation.  In the painter David’s sketches for it, he shows the pope (Pius VII) with his hands in his lap.

image28pope1.jpg

Napoleon saw the drawing and said to David that the pope should be blessing the occasion—after all, that’s why Napoleon had dragged him all the way from Rome.  David redid his sketch, of course!]

image29pope2.jpg

Beyond the Crowns of Gondor, most of the crowns seen in The Lord of the Rings are described as “circlets”—

  1. Sam, Merry, and Pippin, laid out in the barrow:

“About them lay many treasures of gold maybe, though in that light they looked cold and unlovely.  On their heads were circlets, gold chains were about their waists, and on their fingers were many rings.”(The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 8, “Fog on the Barrow-Downs”)

image30barrow.jpg

  1. Theoden:

“Upon it sat a man so bent with age that he seemed almost a dwarf; but his white hair was long and thick and fell in great braids from beneath a thin golden circlet set upon his brow.” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 6, “The King of the Golden Hall”)

image31theoden.jpeg

But there is one which, well, looking at the various illustrations of its wearer, reminds us of Alice’s comment upon the Cheshire Cat:

“Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin…but a grin without a cat!  It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!” (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 6, “Pig and Pepper”)

image32cheshirecat.jpg

On the Fields of the Pelennor, a “great shadow descended like a falling cloud.  And behold! It was a winged creature.”

This might be bad enough, but:

“Upon it sat a shape, black-mantled, huge and threatening.  A crown of steel he bore, but between rim and robe naught was there to see, save only a deadly gleam of eyes:  the Lord of the Nazgul.” (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 6, “The Battle of the Pelennor Fields”)

image33eonaz.jpg

We are aware of at least half-a-dozen professional renderings of this scene (and we plan to discuss them all in a future post), but it seems to us that those eyes, seeming to float in space, make it extremely difficult to illustrate it, no matter what crown—simply described as “steel”—he’s wearing.  And that brings us back to our original crown.  As JRRT described it:

“It was shaped like the helms of the Guards of the Citadel, save that it was loftier, and it was all white, and the wings at either side were wrought of pearl and silver in the likeness of the wings of a sea-bird, for it was the emblem of kings who came over the Sea; and seven gems of adamant were set in the circlet, and upon its summit was set a single jewel the light of which went up like a flame.” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 5, “The Steward and the King”)

If his drawing (seen at the beginning of this post) is what he had in mind, then the only professional illustration we’ve seen of it, by the Hildebrandts, is only an approximation.

image34coronation.jpg

And, in fact, reminds us all-too-easily of Brunhilde, the Walkuere, from Wagner’s operas.

image35brunhilde.jpg

If illustrators as good as the Hildebrandts struggle, this must be a tough one.  The designers of the P. Jackson films are even farther away from the original, as so often.

image36aragorn.jpg

Here, however, we have some sympathy!  Somehow the medieval world of Middle-earth can not easily assimilate an Egyptian artifact.  And so, we suspect that they thought “circlet” and “wings” and left it there.  What do you think, readers?  How do you imagine the crown?

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

Fairy Tale to Bill of Sale

19 Wednesday Aug 2015

Posted by Ollamh in Economics in Middle-earth, Fairy Tales and Myths, J.R.R. Tolkien

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Alice in Wonderland, Baggins, Bilbo, Contract, Dragon, Dwarves, Economics, Elves, Fairy Tale, Fantasy, Goblins, Hoard, Laketown, Middle-earth, Mirkwood, Odysseus, On Fairy Stories, Smaug, The Hobbit, The Odyssey, Tolkien

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always!

Recently, when we discussed the economics of Middle-earth, Tolkien told us that he was not entirely ignorant about such matters, saying “…the situations are so devised that economic likelihood is there and could be worked out”. LT, 296

So that’s what we’ve set out to do in this posting, working out something of those economics in a modest way.

The Hobbit, as everyone knows, began as a story for his children, set in a fairytale world of elves, goblins, dwarves, and a dragon—the sorts of things which, in Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy Stories”, are derived from fantasy, which is “a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason,” but enhances it, lest fantasy become mere “Morbid Delusion” (which, later in the essay, Tolkien links with a work like Alice in Wonderland).

But something begins to happen, even early on, when Bilbo signs a contract before setting out for his adventure—an odd start for a fairytale hero who, traditionally, has to prove himself.  The story proceeds for some time in fairy tale mode, but then, when the party loses everything in Mirkwood, it’s necessary for Bilbo and Company to resupply and here the story moves seriously from a fairytale world to capitalism, as the fairy tale quest evolves into a commercial venture.

To replace lost materiel, the company turns to the people of Laketown,

Laketown

who provide it–and clearly do so on speculation, since the Dwarves have nothing to offer but promises.

The fairytale then seems to resume.  The party reaches the mountain, gets in, the dragon wakes–but then things go very wrong, at least for the investors, as Smaug, easily putting together that two and two equal Laketown, sets off to destroy it and is destroyed himself, in the process.  And then the fairy tale comes apart completely in a potential war over economic resources and compensation for damage caused during the investment:  Laketowners versus Dwarves, which escalates when Elves stake a claim and then Dwarves come to reenforce Dwarves and then, just to keep things in flux, a goblin army arrives. One almost wonders whether the Eagles, when they arrived, have invested in Laketown bonds and are expecting to cash them in, with interest!

When all of this is resolved, we might think that we’ve returned to the fairy tale world once more:  Bilbo, with his share of the hoard, sets off for home, where happily ever after lies–or does it?

OdysseusSuitors

In The Odyssey, Odysseus comes home to find his house in the hands of suitors, and must deal with them with the help of a goddess—very much a folktale. Bilbo comes home to find that his house and goods have just been auctioned off, and has to retrieve his happy ending by buying back his own things. That initial contract seems to have haunted the story, even to this moment.

Fantasy for Tolkien was, “founded on the harsh recognition that things are so in the world as they appear under the sun”—one of those things was economics, something which Bilbo may have found almost as unavoidable as a vengeful dragon.

What do you think, dear readers?

As always, thank you for reading,

MTCIDC,

CD

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