As always, dear readers, welcome.

“The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At

one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display,

had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enor-

mous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of

about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and rugged-

ly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no

use trying the lift.  Even at the best of times it was seldom

working, and at present the electric current was cut

off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive

in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up,

and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer

above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on

the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster

with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of

those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow

you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING

YOU, the caption beneath it ran.” (George Orwell, 1984, Part One, Chapter 1)

This is the second paragraph in the first chapter of “George Orwell”’s (aka Eric Blair, 1903-1950) 1948 dystopian novel, 1984.  It’s an extremely thoughtful, well-written book, but its view of the future seems so hopeless and grim that it’s not easy to  read—you can do it here, however:  https://archive.org/details/GeorgeOrwells1984

I’ve been interested in that poster.

The first film made from the book, in 1956, doesn’t appear to have believed the kind of image of “Big Brother” which Orwell described—

nor does the second film, from, appropriately enough, 1984—

The first is lacking that mustache (and looks more like a man in a staring contest) and the second to me appears to be the image of someone earnestly trying to sell us something.  I wonder if what Orwell (who loathed Stalinist Russian and who used it as a model for his future Britain) actually had in mind was something like this—

combined with this—

(the British Field Marshall and Secretary of State for War, H.H. Kitchener, 1850-1916, on probably the most influential recruiting poster of the Great War/WW1)

The stare—a kind of commanding gaze—is clearly very important.  As Orwell tells us:  “It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move”, which made me immediately think about Sauron as he appears in The Lord of the Rings—or, rather, doesn’t appear in actual physical form, but is only represented by what Frodo sees in Galadriel’s Mirror:

“But suddenly the Mirror went altogether dark, as dark as if a hole had opened in the world of sight, and Frodo looked into emptiness.  In the black abyss there appeared a single Eye that slowly grew, until it filled nearly all the Mirror.  So terrible was it that Frodo stood rooted, unable to cry out or to withdraw his gaze.  The Eye was rimmed with fire, but was itself glazed, yellow as a cat’s, watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil opened on a pit, a window into nothing.”

(an actual yellow cat’s eye)

This is powerful enough, but then—

“Then the Eye began to rove, searching this way and that; and Frodo knew with certainty and horror that among the many things that it sought he himself was one.”  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 7, “The Mirror of Galadriel”) 

When, much later in the story, Pippin makes the mistake of looking into Saruman’s Palantir, he discovers just how powerful that gaze can be:

“ ‘I, I took the ball and looked at it…and I saw things that frightened me.  And I wanted to go away, but I couldn’t.  And then he came and questioned me; and he looked at me, and, and,  that is all I remember…Then suddenly he seemed to see me, and he laughed at me.  It was cruel.  It was like being stabbed with knives…Then he gloated over me.  I felt I was falling to pieces…’ “ (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 11, “The Palantir”)

Just like the eyes of Big Brother, and of Field Marshall Kitchener, then, Sauron’s eye radiates authority and sends the same signal:  “Sauron is watching YOU”, which is why it appears even on the equipment of Sauron’s orcs—who would dare to flinch or fail when Sauron may actually be watching you personally?

(Angus McBride)

It is the badge, then, of never-sleeping watchfulness.

We know, from the narrator, that Saruman had plans to imitate Sauron—although he was deceived into thinking that he was doing so:

“A strong place and wonderful was Isengard, and long had it been beautiful…But Saruman had slowly shaped it to his shifting purposes, and made it better, as he thought, being deceived—for all those arts and subtle devices, for which he forsook his former wisdom, and which fondly he imagined were his own, came from Mordor; so that what he made was naught, only a little copy, a child’s model or a slave’s flattery, of that vast fortress, armoury, prison, furnace of great power, Barad-dur, the Dark Tower, which suffered no rival, and laughed at flattery, biding its time, secure in its pride and its immeasurable strength.”  (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 8, “The Road to Isengard”)

If the all-seeing, ever-watchful Eye was Sauron’s badge, it’s interesting to see what Saruman chose:

“Suddenly a tall pillar loomed before them.  It was black; and set upon it was a great stone, carved and painted in the likeness of a long White Hand.” 

We first meet this sign when Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli are looking through the Orc dead after Boromir’s death:

“There were four goblin-soldiers of greater stature, swart, slant-eyed, with thick legs and large hands.  They were armed with short broad-bladed swords, not with the curved scimitars usual with Orcs; and they had bows of yew, in length and shape like the bows of Men  Upon their shields they bore a strange device:  a small white hand in the centre of a black field; on the front of their iron helms was set an S-rune, wrought of some white metal.” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 1, “The Departure of Boromir”)

(Inger Edelfeldt)

I don’t believe we ever see that “S-rune” again,

but the White Hand, along with the Eye, will appear as the Orcs carry Merry and Pippin off to the west.

(Denis Gordeev)

But what does it signify?  Saruman, as he has become unknowingly corrupted by Sauron, has become “Saruman of Many Colours”, as he explains to Gandalf (see the dialogue between them in The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 2, “The Council of Elrond”), but he began as Saruman the White, and that might explain the color of the hand.  On that pillar outside Isengard, the hand, then, might indicate a warning:  “Stop.  This is the Land of Saruman.  Go Back.”, as we imagine the two figures of the Argonath might be indicating by their gesture—

(the Hildebrandts)

This might work for a boundary pillar, but what about those shields?  Can we add a second meaning? 

Ugluk the captain of the Isengard Orcs might offer a very grim one:

“We are the servants of Saruman the Wise, the White Hand:  the Hand that gives us man’s flesh to eat.”  (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 3, “The Uruk-hai”)

Could this then be another warning:  “If you face us, not only will we defeat you, but then we’ll eat you”?

Perhaps a clue to this possibility may be found in a closer examination of that pillar:

“Now Gandalf rode to the great pillar of the Hand, and passed it; and as he did so the Riders saw to their wonder that the Hand appeared no longer white.  It was stained as with dried blood; and looking closer they perceived that its nails were red.” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 8, “The Road to Isengard”)

It’s just as well, then, for Pippin when:

“An Orc stooped over him, and flung him some bread and a strip of raw dried flesh…”

that

“He ate the stale grey bread hungrily, but not the meat.”

Thanks, for reading, as ever.

Stay well,

Sometimes it may be good to be a picky eater,

And remember that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

PS

While poking around for white hand images, I found this:

If you’d like to know more about it, see:  https://www.shirepost.com/products/white-hand-of-saruman-silver-coin 

As ever, dear readers, welcome.

Sometimes, for all of his hard work, something which Tolkien planned simply never appeared, at least in his lifetime.

The biggest and most obvious of these is The Silmarillion,

with which he struggled for years, even flirting with an American publisher, Collins, when his Hobbit publisher, Allen & Unwin, agreeable to The Lord of the Rings, proved unwilling to publish it along with that work, which only appeared, edited by Christopher Tolkien, in 1977.

An earlier disappointment had been a smaller one, but JRRT put the same amount of creative energy and effort into it which he applied to much grander works:

“There were many recesses cut in the rock of the walls, and in them were large iron-bound chests of wood.  All had been broken and plundered; but beside the shattered lid of one there lay the remains of a book.  It had been slashed and stabbed and partly burned, and it was so stained with black and other dark marks like old blood that little of it could be read.  Gandalf lifted it carefully, but the leaves cracked and broke as he laid it on the slab.  He pored over it for some time without speaking.  Frodo and Gimli standing at his side could see, as he gingerly turned the leaves, that they were written by many different hands, in runes, both of Moria and of Dale, and here and there in Elvish script.”  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 5, “The Bridge of Khazad-dum”)

This is the “Book of Mazarbul”, which Gandalf describes as “a record of the fortunes of Balin’s folk”—that is, of the dwarves who followed Balin to repopulate the mines of Moria about 30 years before the beginning of the final adventure of The Ring.  This is a story with an unhappy ending, of course, as Balin and all of his people were eventually killed by orcs who themselves came to repopulate Moria and it ends with those terrible words, “they are coming”.

Had he had the time, I wouldn’t be in the least surprised to find that Tolkien would have reconstructed the entire book, but, in a fit of realism, he confined himself to three pages, including that final page,

hoping to include them among the illustrations (maps, the Hollin gate of Moria, and the lettering on Balin’s tomb).  This page shows his efforts, which including burning the pages with his pipe, punching holes in the margin to indicate where the pages would have been stitched to the binding, and staining them with red (I presume water color) to simulate blood.  For all those efforts, however, the publisher informed him that including them in color would have been too expensive and so, like The Silmarillion, they only appeared after Tolkien’s death.  (For images of all three pages—in color—and more details, see pages 348-9 of the highly informative Catherine McIlwaine Tolkien Maker of Middle-earth, published in 2018 by the Bodleian Library.)

For someone who worked in Early English literature, models for his pages would have been easy to come by.  Here’s the first page of his beloved Beowulf, from the manuscript called “Cotton Vitellius A XV”.

Though not “slashed and stabbed”, it was certainly “partly burned” in a great fire in 1731 which not only damaged this manuscript, but destroyed a number of others.  (For more on the manuscript and on the poem, see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nowell_Codex and         https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf#External_links  This is our only manuscript of the poem and I shake my head at the thought that, had the fire gone a little farther, we would have lost this wonderful piece of English poetry forever.)

So often, these postings are explorations of some of the many various sources which influenced and stimulated Tolkien, but I’ve recently come upon what I suspect might be the opposite.

In 2010, the director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, narrated a 100-part series on BBC Radio 4 entitled, A History of the World in 100 Objects, all drawn from the Museum’s vast collections.  That same year, a companion book appeared.

It was a very clever idea (although it takes a moment to imagine how these objects were, initially, unseen, but only described) and soon there were a number of imitations, including this—

which recently came into my hands.  What’s marvelous about this is that, in contrast to the British Museum book, which uses actual historical artifacts, everything in this book, beginning with the idea of Star Wars itself, is something creatively imagined, even if based on things from our own galaxy.  It was, like the MacGregor, a fun read, but my attention was particularly caught by these—

“[Objects Number] 76 Ancient Jedi Texts”. 

With names like “Aionomica” and “Rammahgon” (which immediately reminded me of that magical Indian epic, the Ramayana,

a story of a kidnapping, a demon king, and a rescue–an easy introduction would be this–)

they were, as the book’s text informs us: “Far from those exciting stories of lightsaber adventures…” but, instead, were meant “…to preserve the sacred knowledge of those most in tune with the nature of the galaxy.” 

Interestingly, however, the “Rammahgon”

“…contains four origin stories of the cosmos and the Force…Recovered from the world of Ossus, the pressed red clay cover represents an omniscient eye referenced in a poem within.  But between the wordplay and talk of battling gods, there lies real, indisputable knowledge that saved the galaxy from the Sith Eternal.”

The look of ancient wear and tear of these texts imitates manuscripts the study of which occupied Tolkien’s scholarly work for most of his life

and presented a model for his own imitation of pages from the “Book of Mazarbul”.  Could it, in turn, have provided an inspiration for the creators of the “Jedi Sacred Texts”?  And, considering the kinds of material found in the Silmarillion—foundation and stories of struggles between lesser gods and would-be greater ones and evil as great as the Sith–could we see another bit of earlier Tolkien influencing later Star Wars? 

As always, thanks for reading.

Stay well,

Consider which texts you find sacred,

And remember that, as ever, there’s

MTCIDC

O

PS

If Neil MacGregor’s original series interests you, you can see/hear it here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/about/british-museum-objects/

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

When I was very little, many things puzzled me.  Among them was this from a Christmas carol:

“Don we now our gay apparel.

(assorted tra-la-las)

Troll the ancient Yuletide carol.”

(further fa-la-las, etc)

(“Deck the Halls”—for its interesting and fairly recent—1862—history, see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deck_the_Halls )

I suppose I wondered who “Don” was (which I heard as Don Wenow, possibly a Spanish grandee?), but what really confused me was what trolls had to do with Christmas.

I had first met a troll here—

in a “Little Golden Book”—a small children’s book with, as you can see, a single story.  Although I didn’t understand that word “Gruff”, I liked the story which, if you don’t know it, is a simple folktale:

1. three goats of increasing size lived in a meadow by a stream

2. across the stream was a lusher meadow, the stream being crossed by a bridge

3. under the bridge lived a troll

(from the Rolozo Tolkien site—no artist listed—and be careful if you go looking for trolls on the internet or you might end up with this–)

4. the smallest/youngest goat attempts to cross the bridge but is threatened by the troll.  The goat says wait for my brother—he’s larger and therefore will provide a better meal.  The troll agrees, the second goat appears, says the same thing, and the troll—who has yet to catch on, but that’s trolls for you—agrees again.  And, even if you don’t know this story, you being one of my readers (unless, of course, you’re a troll, in which case, although you’re certainly welcome to join us, take notes!) will guess right away that the third, and largest, goat butts the troll into the stream, where he drowns.

But what is a troll, other than a rather dim creature with a taste for goats and a damp residence?

I’ve always assumed that they were Scandinavian and, consulting my Old Norse dictionary (Cleaseby and Gudbrand Vigfusson, 1874—here’s a copy for you here:  https://cleasby-vigfusson-dictionary.vercel.app/ ), I find “A giant, fiend, demon, a generic term”, along with all sorts of expressions, compounds, and place names associated with them, adding this:  “a werewolf, one possessed by demons”.

Giants, fiends, and demons are found everywhere in old stories (in my long-term reading of the whole of The Thousand and One Nights, I meet them on a regular basis), but the ancestry of this particular tale certainly places at least one troll squarely in Norway, as it first appeared in Asbjornsen and Moe’s Norske Folkeeventyr (1841-44)—“Norwegian Folktales”.

(This is the second edition of 1852.)

In turn, selections from this were translated by George Webbe Dasent (1817-1896) as Popular Tales from the Norse (1859)—here’s a copy for you:  https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/8933/pg8933-images.html

And here, as Number XXXVII, we find the story. 

This is where I first met a troll—could that have been true for Tolkien, as well?  Let’s have a look at the possibility.

When we think of trolls and JRRT, I imagine the first thing which comes into readers’ minds is the near-disaster of Bilbo and the dwarves with William, Bert, and Tom in a glade—

(JRRT)

“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”)

That language was described by Douglas Anderson in his The Annotated Hobbit as “comic, lower-class speech”—but, more specifically, it’s the language of music hall comics, commonly lower-class Londoners, cockneys—

(This is Harry Champion, 1865-1942, a well-known performer in music halls, and, with that expression, half-way to becoming a troll himself.)

which is hardly what we’d expect of creatures William describes as “come down from the mountains”, where we might hear them speaking the kind of rural English you hear in Sean Astin’s Sam in Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings,

based upon southwestern speech, but generalized to a degree and called “mummershire” in England.

Tolkien once described himself as having “a very simple sense of humour (which even my appreciative critics find tiresome)” (from a letter to Deborah Webster, 25 October, 1958, Letters, 412), which might be true in general, but I find the juxtaposition of creatures from Norse mythology doing a kind of music hall routine a wonderfully grimly comic combination, particularly as, during that routine, they were about to kill and eat the dwarves—and Bilbo, too.  (I especially like William’s specific detail that “You’ve et a village and a half between yer, since we come down from the mountains.”)

Sometimes it’s clear that Tolkien’s very early experiences with stories has influenced his later writing—as much as he can be prickly on the subject—as in the case of Moria and “Soria Moria Castle”, of which he says:

“It was there, as I remember, a casual ‘echo’ of Soria Moria Castle in one of the Scandinavian tales translated by Dasent.  (The tale had no interest for me:  I had already forgotten it and have never since looked at it.  It was thus merely the source of the sound-sequence moria, which might have been found or composed elsewhere.)  I liked the sound-sequence; it alliterated with ‘mines’, and it connected itself with the MOR element in my linguistic construction.”  (drafts for a letter to ‘Mr. Rang’, August, 1967, Letters, 541)

For us, however, the important phrase here is “one of the Scandinavian tales translated by Dasent”.  And here, as well, we have a small problem.  A volume we know must have formed part of Tolkien’s reading experience was Andrew Lang’s 1890 The Red Fairy Book,

and “Soria Moria Castle” appears there as the third story in the volume.  (Here’s a copy for you of the first edition:  https://archive.org/details/redfairybook00langiala/redfairybook00langiala/page/n15/mode/2up )  Although, in his introduction, Lang credits the translators of other tales, he doesn’t credit Dasent for this story.  Instead, at the story’s end, there’s a footnote citing “P.C. Asbjornsen”, who, along with Moe, was the source for Dasent’s work.   And yet, when one compares the text in Lang with that in Dasent, although the basic story is the same, there are differences, beginning with the first sentence.

In Lang, it reads:

“There was once upon a time a couple of folks who had a son called Halvor.”

And, in Dasent, that reads:

“Once on a time there was a poor couple who had a son whose name was Halvor.”

What’s going on here?  My guess is that there’s been some editing by Lang or by his wife, who, in reality, quietly took over the series, almost from the beginning, as Lang acknowledges in the introduction to The Lilac Fairy Book, 1910 (for more on this see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lang%27s_Fairy_Books ). 

Reading on, we see that Halvor comes face to face (to face to face to face to face, as the troll has three heads) with a troll—in fact, there are several trolls—the next with six heads and a third with 9,

but these are not in the least like William, Bert, and Tom, being more like the giant in “Jack and the Beanstalk” with his “Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman”, saying, “Hutetu!  It smells of a Christian man’s blood here!”

One form of “Soria Moria Castle”, even with a differing text, occurs both in Dasent and Lang, but “Three Billy Goats Gruff” only appears in Dasent, leaving us with a puzzle:  did Tolkien read (or have read to him by his loving mother) “Soria Moria Castle” in Lang, in which case his trolls may come from that story, or did he have a copy of Dasent available and the trolls appeared, not only from “Soria Moria Castle”, but might also have done so (in a dimmer form) in “Three Billy Goats Gruff”?

And what about that other troll, the one in

“Troll the ancient Yuletide carol.”?

If we can believe the anti-Christian view of trolls in “Soria Moria Castle”, it’s doubtful that they would be associated with Christmas.  Etymonline says (along with a brief discussion of the use of the word in fishing, which doesn’t seem apropos), “sing in a full, rolling voice”, although one can picture very large trolls with large voices, I wonder what they’d sing?  (See the song of the goblins in Chapter 4 of The Hobbit, “Over Hill and Under Hill” for a possible model?) 

Now all I have to wonder about is who Don Wenow was and how he might be related to Christmas.

As ever, thanks for reading.

Stay well,

If you sing carols, you might consider the identity of Round John Virgin,

And remember that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

PS

As you’ll recall, William, Bert, and Tom soon have an early morning experience with Gandalf which leaves them petrified.  Have a look at this important contribution to what happens to them and why:  https://hatchjs.com/why-do-trolls-turn-to-stone/