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Praeteritio, or, Paraleipsis, Trailer, or Just Teasing?

17 Wednesday Jul 2024

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As ever, dear readers, welcome.

This posting came about because I was rereading Kipling’s Just So Stories (1902).  In the last of the stories, at the beginning, I found this:

“There are three hundred and fifty-five stories about Suleiman-bin-Daoud:  but this is not one of them.  It is not the story of the Lapwing who found the Water; or the Hoopoe who shaded Sulieman-bin-Daoud from the heat.  It is not the story of the Glass Pavement, or the Ruby with the Crooked Hole, or the Gold Bars of Balkis.  It is the story of the Butterfly that Stamped.” (Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories, “The Butterfly That Stamped”  You can read the story here:  https://archive.org/details/justsostories00kipl/page/n9/mode/2up in a 1912 American edition.  A word of caution, however:  sometimes Kipling’s language seems, to our ears, casually racist, but that was 1912 and, to my mind, doesn’t mar the stories in general, although, in 2024, it does stand out in an unpleasant way.)

It’s a trick I’ll bet you can spot immediately:  a politician speaking about a rival, will say, “But I will not mention my opponent’s _________”—and you can fill in the blank with anything negative which might come to mind.  It’s a very old rhetorical trick—so old that the Greeks used it (hence that “paraleipsis”, from the verb paraleipein, “to leave aside”) and the Romans, who were careful students of Greek rhetoric, employed it in turn (hence “praeteritio”, from praeter, “beside” and ire, “to go”).

This mentioning, but then withholding information, has a cousin in a form of this trick used by story-tellers in the West since the Greeks and clearly still in use in Victorian/Edwardian times by Kipling.   Consider, for example, Book 11 of the Odyssey.  Here, Odysseus, at the court of Alkinoos, (that’s al-KIH-noe-os),

is relating his visit to the Otherworld

and, at one point, lists a whole series of famous women he sees there, from Tyro, who slept with Poseidon and produced Pelias and Neleus—Pelias being the evil uncle who sends Jason off after the Golden Fleece—

(a wall painting from Pompeii—this is the moment when Pelias recognizes Jason by a prophecy which has warned him to beware of a visitor wearing only one sandal)

to Alkmene, mother of Herakles,

(a South Italian comic pot, in which Zeus, aided by Hermes, is trying to get into Alkmene’s window)

to Ariadne, daughter of Minos, who helped Theseus against the Minotaur in the Labyrinth.

(Ariadne gave Theseus a ball of string to help him get back from the maze.  You can read the whole list here:  Odyssey, Book 11, lines 235-330–https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0136%3Abook%3D11  )

Each time, there’s a mention, but no story is ever gone into in detail.

Each of the women is given a kind of mini-biography (mostly about how the majority of them slept with Zeus), with a little detail, and the whole list resembles a well-known, now-fragmentary work once attributed to the early Greek poet, Hesiod, called “The Catalogue of Women”, also known by the first word of each entry in the catalogue as Eoiai, which we can translate as “[or] her like”.  (You can read an extensive article about this here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalogue_of_Women  and you can read the collected fragments here:  https://www.theoi.com/Text/HesiodCatalogues.html  )

Assembling and preserving the past became an important feature of the later Greco-Roman world, but, thinking about the mini-catalogue in the Odyssey, and the fact the poem itself is a compilation of the works of earlier oral singers, I wonder if what we’re seeing here doesn’t have other purposes, first, the survival of a kind of boast on the part of those early singers—“Look what other cool stories I know”—and, second, a tease—“and wouldn’t you like to hear those next?” as if what we’re reading now wasn’t a sort of “trailer”, like those we still see in movie theatres, as well as on-line.  (As one easy example, here’s the original trailer for Star Wars:  A New Hope, from 1977:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1g3_CFmnU7k   If you haven’t seen this, you’ll be amazed at how “crude” it now seems when, in 1977, it was the beginning of a new age of technological adventure-telling which is still with us, the carefully-built and filmed tiny models of then now replaced by often-astounding CGI now.)

(You’ll notice, by the way, that this poster was designed by the same Hildebrandt brothers who also gave us so many wonderful Tolkien images.)

“The Butterfly That Stamped and the two catalogues from the Greek past brought another “here are stories—but I’m not going to tell you” to mind:

“   One winter’s night, as we sat together by the fire, I ventured to
suggest to him that as he had finished pasting extracts into his
commonplace book, he might employ the next two hours in making
our room a little more habitable. He could not deny the justice of
my request, so with a rather rueful face he went off to his bedroom,
from which he returned presently pulling a large tin box behind him.
This he placed in the middle of the floor, and squatting down upon
a stool in front of it he threw back the lid. I could see that it was
already a third full of bundles of paper tied up with red tape into
separate packages.
   ‘There are cases enough here, Watson,’ said he, looking at me
with mischievous eyes.  ‘ I think that if you knew all that I have in
this box you would ask me to pull some out instead of putting
others in.’
   ‘These are the records of your early work, then?’  I asked.  ‘ I
have often wished that I had notes of those cases.’
   ‘Yes, my boy; these were all done prematurely, before my
biographer had come to glorify me.’  He lifted bundle after bundle,
in a tender, caressing sort of way.
    ‘They are not all successes, Watson,’  said he, ‘but there are some pretty little problems among
them.  Here’s the record of the Tarleton murders, and the case of
Vamberry the wine merchant, and the adventure of the old
Russian woman, and the singular affair of the aluminium crutch,
as well as a full account of Ricoletti of the club foot and his
abominable wife. And here—ah, now ! this really is something a
little recherché.’  “  (Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Musgrave Ritual”—one of my all-time favorite Holmes stories, collected in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, 1894, which you can read in the 1894 edition, with the original illustrations, here:  https://ia801306.us.archive.org/27/items/memoirsofsherloc00doylrich/memoirsofsherloc00doylrich.pdf )

(one of those original illustrations by Sidney Paget)

And here we see again the same trick—and this is only one of a number of occasions in the Sherlock Holmes stories when a subject is mentioned—but there is no story to be found to follow it.  (See for much more:  https://www.ihearofsherlock.com/2016/01/the-unpublished-cases-of-sherlock-holmes.html )

As Conan Doyle came to dislike Holmes and even tried to kill him off in 1893 (see “The Final Problem” in the same volume as “The Musgrave Ritual”)

(another Sidney Paget)

it’s puzzling that he would do this to his readers—why would he suggest more stories to come?–but then, in 1901, he brought Holmes back in The Hound of the Baskervilles (originally published in The Strand Magazine, but you can read it in its 1902 book form here:  https://gutenberg.org/files/2852/2852-h/2852-h.htm ),

so, for all of his mixed feelings about his detective, perhaps that earlier quotation from “The Musgrave Ritual” is appropriate: 

   ‘There are cases enough here, Watson,’ said he, looking at me
with mischievous eyes.  ‘ I think that if you knew all that I have in
this box you would ask me to pull some out instead of putting
others in.’

And, as Conan Doyle’s last Holmes story appeared in 1927 (“The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place” collected in The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, and you can read it here:  https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/69700/pg69700-images.html#chap11 ) perhaps, even to Conan Doyle, there was always the chance for more.

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

Stay well,

For lack of space, I admit that I’ve left out such works as Filbert L. Gosnold’s “The Mystery of the Exploding Pants” as well as many other examples,

But remember that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

PS

In closing, I have what might be a final example, of which there is, alas, no chance of more, as teasing as the initial mention is:

“He is surer of finding the way home in a blind night than were the cats of Queen Beruthiel.”  (The Lord of the Rings, Book Two, Chapter 4, “A Journey in the Dark”)

Although Tolkien never mentioned those felines again in print, we know a little more about the Queen and her cats from what Christopher Tolkien calls “a very ‘primitive’ outline, in one part illegible” (see Unfinished Tales, page 419), including “She had nine black cats and one white…setting them to discover all the dark secrets of Gondor”, but, as the author himself wrote, in a letter to W.H. Auden:

“I have yet to learn anything about the cats of Queen Beruthiel.”

having prefaced that with, “These rhymes and names will crop up; but they do not always explain themselves.”  (letter to W.H. Auden, 7 June, 1955, Letters, 419)

Or is this like Conan Doyle, using Sherlock Holmes to drop a teasing hint of more to come—which never did?

PPS

If you have access to it, you might enjoy this lively BBC series by the English historian, Lucy Worsley, on Conan Doyle’s love/hate relationship with Sherlock Holmes–

Grocer or Burglar?

11 Thursday Jul 2024

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As always, dear readers, welcome.

For Bilbo Baggins, what promised to be an easy morning suddenly turned dark with the arrival of “an unexpected party” (this is a Tolkien pun:  “party” in Victorian English could mean “person” as well as “event”—and it’s still available in legal English, as in “the party of the first part”—which turns up in an hilarious scene from the Marx Brothers’ Night at the Opera, 1935—

in which Groucho, a shyster lawyer named “Otis P. Driftwood”, makes an agreement with the manager, played by Chico (say that “CHICK-oh” as he was supposedly always after girls), of an Italian tenor,

the agreement consists of mock legalese and—well, here, see it for yourselves:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_Sy6oiJbEk ).

This party is Gandalf

(the Hildebrandts)

and his arrival leads to that second party—the one with all of the dwarves—

(another Hildebrandts)

and the map

(JRRT—with the later addition of the moon letters)

and Bilbo’s reaction to the danger involved in joining the dwarves as a “burglar”:

“At may never return he began to feel a shriek coming up inside, and very soon it burst out like the whistle of an engine coming out of a tunnel…Then he fell flat on the floor, and kept calling out ‘struck by lightning, struck by lightning!’ over and over again…”  (The Hobbit, Chapter One, “An Unexpected Party”)

Needless to say, this did not leave a very good impression upon the dwarves, leading Bilbo to overhearing Gloin say:

“It is all very well for Gandalf to talk about this hobbit being fierce, but one shriek like that in a moment of excitement would be enough to wake the dragon and all his relatives, and kill the lot of us.  I think it sounded more like fright than excitement!  In fact, if it had not been for the sign on the door, I should have been sure we had come to the wrong house.  As soon as I clapped eyes on the little fellow bobbing and puffing on the mat, I had my doubts.  He looks more like a grocer than a burglar!”

But what does a burglar look like?  I’ve always presumed that Tolkien, if not Gloin, had in mind someone like this—

which certainly differs from Bilbo in every way.

If he doesn’t look like that, does he resemble a grocer?  What does a grocer look like?

In Tolkien’s England, except for a big city, like London, which had department stores like Whiteley’s,

people bought their necessities along certain streets (sometimes called “the high”), where there were shops for anything and everything (also true in middle and lower class neighborhoods even in big cities).

Thus, for example, you went to the butcher shop for meat,

the bakery for bread,

the fruiterer for fruit,

and the greengrocer for vegetables.

(This can still be the case today—I’ve certainly walked down such streets in recent years in what are commonly called “market towns”—

even when, just outside town, there are supermarkets with large parking lots—

Sainsbury’s itself began as a single shop in London in 1869—)

Such shops, and many others, including department stores, as they began to appear in the 1870s and beyond, were not self-service, as most stores are now, but were staffed with clerks, whose job was to take orders from customers, acting as in-store middlemen, like this fellow—

or these

and there could be a kind of obsequiousness to their behavior (where “the customer is always right” must have come from) which is, I think, what JRRT had in mind when he has Gloin say “more like a grocer”, “puffing and blowing”.

That Bilbo was a well-off individual, living in a rather luxurious dwelling, to begin with,

(JRRT)

and then being called “a shop assistant” or the equivalent, we can see why:

“The Took side had won.  He suddenly felt he would go without bed and breakfast to be thought fierce.  As for little fellow bobbing on the mat it almost made him really fierce.”

And so Bilbo was on his way to becoming the burglar Gandalf had advertized him to be. 

(Alan Lee)

Thanks for reading, as ever.

Stay well,

Be wary of eavesdropping on dwarves,

And remember that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

PS

If you’d like to read about a completely different burglar, (someone Tolkien could easily have read about), you might try A.J. Raffles, an “amateur cracksman”—that is, a gentleman burglar–created by E.W. Hornung (1866-1921), the brother-in-law of Arthur Conan Doyle—with The Amateur Cracksman, 1899, here:  https://archive.org/details/amateurcracksma03horngoog/page/n9/mode/2up

Soul Divided

19 Wednesday Jun 2024

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As always, dear readers, welcome.

Although I’ve never reread any but the first of them, I enjoyed the “Harry Potter” books when they were originally published, beginning in 1997.

My favorite was that first,

or, by its US title.

I prefer the original British title because it suggests something magical.  “Sorcerer’s Stone” was a make-shift replacement, with no resonance.  The “philosopher’s stone”, however, was a real (or at least hoped-for) thing, being thought of as a kind of alchemical tool which could turn substances into precious metals, and which seemed very appropriate for a book set mostly in a boarding school for witches and wizards.  (You can read more about it here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosopher’s_stone   Illustrating the article is a wonderful painting by Joseph Wright of Derby, 1734-1797,

which, although entitled–in short form—the full title is practically a brief lecture–“The Alchymist, in Search of the Philosopher’s Stone…”, has always struck me as potentially being a very useful portrait of Merlin.  If you know T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, you might imagine that that’s the young Wart—aka Arthur—in the background.)

When the series continued, I wondered how far the author would take what was, initially, a clever takeoff on a literary type:  the school story, which dates at least as far back as Thomas Hughes’ 1857 Tom Brown’s School Days and which you can read here:  https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1480/pg1480-images.html

In fact, although the series progressed with the main protagonists continuing their magical education, it became increasingly entangled with the villain, Voldemort, and a world folktale, classified in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as “The Giant (Ogre) who had no heart in his body” (ATU302).  In this story, of which at least 250 versions exist, the Giant (or his equivalent), to protect himself, removes his heart and conceals it where (he hopes) it cannot be found.   The protagonist (along with helpers) must find that location and destroy the heart—or at least use it as leverage.  (You can read the translation of a Norwegian version of it here, under the title “Cinder-Lad and His Six Brothers”:  https://archive.org/details/fairystoriesmych00shim/page/n7/mode/2up   And you can read more about the tale here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Giant_Who_Had_No_Heart_in_His_Body )  In the Harry Potter books, it’s not one piece of his heart–here, his soul–but 7, all hidden in what are called “Horcruxes”, and it takes Harry and his friends (along with the headmaster, at one point) to locate and destroy the set, providing for a major plot element beginning with the second book Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.  (For more, see: https://fortheloveofharry.com/list-of-horcruxes/  )

When all of the Horcruxes are gone, so is Voldemort and this brings to mind another complex story.

“The Enemy still lacks one thing to give him strength and knowledge to beat down all resistance, break the last defences, and cover all the lands in a second darkness.  He lacks the One Ring…

…the Nine he has gathered to himself; the Seven also, or else they are destroyed.  The Three are hidden still.  But that no longer troubles him.  He only needs the One; for he made that Ring himself, it is his, and he let a great part of his own former power pass into it, so that he could rule all the others.  If he recovers it, then he will command them all again, wherever they be, even the Three, and all that has been wrought with them will be laid bare, and he will be stronger than ever.”  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 2, “The Shadow of the Past”)

If this Ring is so crucial, it would be easy to wonder why Sauron hasn’t been more aggressive in finding it, but Gandalf answers that next:

“…He believed that the One had perished, that the Elves had destroyed it, as should have been done.  But he knows now that it has not perished, that it has been found.  So he is seeking it, seeking it, and all his thought is bent on it…”

In the Norwegian version of “The Giant (Ogre) who had no heart in his body”, the Giant’s heart was concealed in an egg and, when the egg was broken, “the giant burst to pieces”.

When the last Horcrux is gone, Voldemort seems to melt away,

rather like the demise of the Wicked Witch of the West when she is doused with water.

When the Ring is destroyed, the end is a bit more dramatic:

“And even as he spoke the earth rocked beneath their feet.  Then rising swiftly up, far above the Towers of the Black Gate, high above the mountains, a vast soaring darkness sprang into the sky, flickering with fire.  The earth groaned and quaked.  The Towers of the Teeth swayed, tottered, and fell down; the mighty rampart crumbled; the Black Gate was hurled in ruin; and from far away, now dim, now growing, now mounting to the clouds,  there came a drumming rumble, a roar, a long echoing roll of ruinous noise.

…And as the Captains gazed south to the Land of Mordor, it seemed to them that, black against the pall of cloud, there rose a huge shape of shadow, impenetrable, lightning-crowned, filling all the sky.  Enormous it reared above the world, and stretched out towards them a vast threatening hand, terrible but impotent:  for even as it leaned over them, a great wind took it, and it was all blown away, and passed; and then a hush fell.” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 4, “The Field of Cormallen”)

(An amazing illustration by Ted Nasmith)

Somehow, in contrast, for all that his end brings a dramatic conclusion to the Harry Potter series, the melting of Voldemort seems more like the melting of Vole de Mort, in comparison.

(by Exifia at Deviant Art—I’m sorry that I can’t say more, but Deviant Art’s website appears to be unavailable at present)

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

Stay well,

When it comes to hiding things, see E.A. Poe, “The Purloined Letter” here:  https://poestories.com/read/purloined

And remember that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

PS

Looking at Vole de Mort, I’m reminded of one of my (many) favorite Terry Pratchett characters,  The Death of Rats (“aka ‘The Grim Squeaker’ “).  Put a black robe on him and perhaps a resemblance?

(credited to Paul Southard)

For more, see:  https://wiki.lspace.org/Death_of_Rats

Speak Friend, or, Open, Sez Me

22 Wednesday May 2024

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As always, welcome, dear readers.

Occasionally, I return to something I’ve already written about, but, this time around, hope to see in a new, or at least newish, light.  The subject of today’s posting first appeared back in “Do What I Say, Not What I Speak”, 13 June, 2018, but, since then, I began my campaign to read all of The Arabian Nights and am now in the second volume of the Penguin edition (for the first volume, see “Arabian Nights for Days”, 31 January, 2024).

I’ve known some of the stories in this vast collection since childhood, but the first two stories I heard as a child are actually so-called “orphan tales”, being stories which appear to have no early manuscript tradition, first appearing in Antoine Galland’s (1646-1715)

Les Mille et Une Nuits (1704-1717).

and from there into the first edition in English, the anonymous so-called “Grub Street Edition” of 1706-1721.

(This is an image from the earliest edition I can locate—as you can see, it’s from 1781.  Only two copies of the first edition are known to exist, one in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, the other in the rare books collection of Princeton University and clearly they don’t get out much.)

There has been much discussion as to the actual origins of “Aladdin”

and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves”–

in particular, that, although they contain standard folktale motifs, they are actually the work of a Syrian storyteller named Antun Yusuf Hanna Diyab (c.1668-post-1763) and were added by Galland to his translation without attribution.  (For more, see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanna_Diyab ) 

Whatever is the truth of this, these were the stories I carried in my head for years before I came back to them when commencing my “Arabian Nights” reading campaign. 

When I was small, they were actually quite scary—the magician who pretends to be Aladdin’s long-lost uncle and who only wants to use him long enough to obtain the lamp, then would let him die in the cave where the lamp was kept, and the merciless thieves, who once they found their cave with its secret password was compromised, cut up Ali Baba’s brother who had discovered the secret but, who, forgetting the password, was trapped until the thieves returned, were among the creepier parts of my childhood, and, as may always be the case with creepy things, not easily forgotten.

At the same time, I was always puzzled by the opening to “Ali Baba”:

“IN a town in Persia there dwelt two brothers, one named Cassim,

the other Ali Baba. Cassim was married to a rich wife and lived

in plenty, while Ali Baba had to maintain his wife and children by

cutting wood in a neighbouring forest and selling it in the town.

One day, when Ali Baba was in the forest, he saw a troop of men

on horseback, coming towards him in a cloud of dust. He was

afraid they were robbers, and climbed into a tree for safety.  When

they came up to him and dismounted, he counted forty of them.

They unbridled their horses and tied them to trees. The finest man

among them, whom Ali Baba took to be their captain, went a little

way among some bushes, and said: ‘ Open, Sesame!’ so plainly that

Ali Baba heard him. A door opened in the rocks, and having made

the troop go in, he followed them, and the door shut again of itself.”

Why would a door obey a password?  And why that word, which I knew was a kind of seed.

(For more—much more—see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sesame#Allergy )

This sat somewhere in my memory until I read:

“But close under the cliff there stood, still strong and living, two tall trees, larger than any trees of holly that Frodo had ever seen or imagined…

(JRRT)

‘Well, here we are at last!’ said Gandalf.  ‘Here the Elven-way from Hollin ended.  Holly was the token of the people of that land, and they planted it here to mark the end of their domain; for the West-door was made chiefly for their use in their traffic with the Lords of Moria.’ …

…they turned to watch Gandalf.  He appeared to have done nothing.  He was standing between the two trees gazing at the blank wall of the cliff, as if he would bore a hole into it…

 ‘Dwarf-doors are not made to be seen when shut,’ said Gimli.  ‘They are invisible, and their own makers cannot find them or open them, if their secret is forgotten.’

‘But this Door was not made to be a secret known only to Dwarves,’ said Gandalf…’Unless things are altogether changed, eyes that know what to look for may discover the signs.’

He walked forward to the wall.  Right between the shadow of the trees there was a smooth space, and over this he passed his hands to and fro, muttering words under his breath.  Then he stepped back.

‘Look!’ he said.  ‘Can you see anything now?’

…Then slowly on the surface, where the wizard’s hands had passed, faint lines appeared, like slender veins of silver running in the stone…

At the top, as high as Gandalf could reach, was an arch of interlacing letters of an Elvish character.

(Ted Nasmith)

Below, though the threads were in places blurred or broken, the outline could be seen…

(JRRT)

‘What does the writing say?’ asked Frodo…

‘…They say only:  The Doors of Durin, Lord of Moria.  Speak, friend, and enter.’

‘What does it mean…?’ asked Merry.

‘That is plain enough,’ said Gimli.  ‘If you are a friend, speak the password, and the doors will open, and you can enter.’ “  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 4, “A Journey in the Dark”)

We know from various clues, like the story title “Storia Moria Castle”, that Tolkien had read—or been read to—from Andrew Lang’s (1844-1912) The Red Fairy Book, 1890,

but, interestingly, “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba” both appear in Lang’s previous The Blue Fairy Book, 1889,

from which both the “Ali Baba” quotation and illustration above, come.  Could Tolkien have been read to from, or read, “Ali Baba” there?  Certainly we see that door, and the need for the password.  But what about that password?

In The Fellowship of the Ring, Gandalf tells us that “ ‘I will tell you that these doors open outwards.  From the inside you may thrust them open with your hands.  From the outside nothing will move them save the spell of command.  They cannot be forced inwards.’   Try as he might, however, Gandalf can’t come up with that word—until he realizes that he’s made a slight mistranslation: 

“ ‘The opening word was inscribed on the archway all the time!  The translation should have been Say “Friend’ and enter.  I had only to speak the Elvish word for friend and the doors opened.’ “

To a linguist with a fine ear, like JRRT’s, the distinction, in English, between the verb “to speak”, as in “to speak a language”, and “to say”, as in “to say the right thing”, can be subtle—in this case, almost too subtle—as Gandalf says:

“ ‘Quite simple.  Too simple for a learned lore-master in these suspicious days.’ “

With the problem solved, the doors swing open—but where they’re about to go is, ultimately, worse than Ali Baba’s thieves’ treasure cave, even as I’m reminded of what happens to Ali Baba’s jealous brother.  Obtaining the password, he easily enters the cave, but, when he tries to leave, he confuses “sesame” with other grains, is trapped, and eventually dismembered by the returning thieves.  (Think Balrog and “Drums in the Dark”…)

And, though “Friend”, says Gandalf, is quite simple, and, adding, “Those were happier times” in which such a pleasant password was all that was necessary,  I’m still puzzled about “sesame” and, in both cases, I wonder about those doors—who or what was doing the opening?  Then again, when I post this,  I’ll need a password and, when I employ it, the site will pop open—who or what is doing the opening there?

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Stay well,

When it comes to locks, I prefer a good, sturdy key,

And remember that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

PS

In case you want to read the two fairy books—and I hope you do—here they are:

The Blue Fairy Book 

https://archive.org/details/bluefairybook00langiala/page/n7/mode/2up

The Red Fairy Book

https://archive.org/details/cu31924084424013/page/n9/mode/2up

Terror Weapon

15 Wednesday May 2024

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Welcome, dear readers, as always.

If you grew up, as I did, with the 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz,

but had never read the original,

L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, 1900,

you would be surprised to open the book and find that Chapter 1 is entitled “The Cyclone”,

which, considering the use of that terrifying force of nature in the story isn’t surprising, but that “Miss Almira Gulch”, the initial incarnation of the story’s main antagonist, with her wonderful last name (a “gulch” is, as Etymonline tells us, a “deep ravine” suggesting that Miss Gulch is empty—and treacherous, as “ to dry gulch” someone is archaic Wild West slang for “to ambush”) is not to be seen.

As a small child, I found almost everything about her disturbing.  As someone who, initially, wanted to deal with Toto and had the economic power to do it (shades of 1930s social commentary about the 1%), she was bad enough.  It was the green skin of her next incarnation and those dagger-like fingernails, however,

which were at the edge of nightmares, and even more so the menace of flight—not only her own skywriting,

but her nasty little airborne monkeys.

These seemed almost too prescient for what was about to happen in the real world as, on 1 September, 1939, only about two weeks after the Hollywood premiere of the film on 15 August, Germany invaded Poland, and, in less than a year, Denmark, Holland, Norway, and France, major weapons being a deadly form of those flying monkeys—

(by Mike Chappell, a favorite military artist)

paratroopers, and dive bombers, the notorious  Ju87, “Stuka” (short for “Sturzkampfflugzeug”—“dive bomber”).

To add to the effect of having such a thing racing down to drop a bomb on you, sirens were attached to the landing gear or wings, the so-called “Jericho trumpets”  (You can read more about them here:  https://www.warhistoryonline.com/instant-articles/trumpets-jericho-luftwaffe.html And you can hear one here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80bOdm2P9Y8 ), giving a wailing, screeching sound to the attacker in hopes of destroying morale even before a bomb hit.  Although designed to be support for infantry and armor, numbers were employed in the air campaign against Britain and, although Oxford was never attacked as the great ports and manufacturing centers were, I wonder if Tolkien, as a volunteer air raid warden, ever heard that sound overhead.

Even if it only appeared in a newsreel, it must have been an unforgettable noise and my wondering brought me to this:

“And Minas Morgul answered.  There was a flare of livid lightnings:  forks of blue flame springing up from the tower and from the encircling hills into the sullen clouds.  The earth groaned; and out of the city there came a cry.  Mingled with harsh high voices as of birds of prey, and the shrill neighing of horses wild with rage and fear there came a rending screech, shivering, rising swiftly to a piercing pitch beyond the range of hearing.  The hobbits wheeled round towards it, and cast themselves down, holding their hands upon their ears.”  (The Two Towers, Book Four, Chapter 8, “The Stairs of Cirith Ungol”)

In Minas Tirith, Pippin heard something very similar:

“Suddenly as they talked they were stricken dumb, frozen as it were to listening stones.  Pippin cowered down with his hands pressed to his ears…”

Not Stukas diving out of the clouds to bomb the city,

but

“…now wheeling swiftly across it, like shadows of untimely night, he saw in the middle airs below him five birdlike forms, horrible as carrion-fowl yet greater than eagles, cruel as death.  Now they swooped near, venturing almost within bowshot of the walls, now they circled away.

‘Black Riders!’ muttered Pippin.  ‘Black Riders of the air!’ “

And this was not the first time that any of the hobbits had heard that terrible sound:

“Pippin knew that shuddering cry that he had heard:  it was the same that he had heard long ago in the Marish of the Shire, but now it was grown in power and hatred, piercing the heart with a poisonous despair.”

It’s unclear if Frodo and Sam had heard the same cry at Cirith Ungol, but certainly what Pippin heard and to which he reacted violently:

“Another long screech rose and fell, and he threw himself back again from the wall, panting like a hunted animal.”  (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 4, “The Siege of Gondor”)

(Alan Lee)

had the same effect—and, in fact, the same effect which Stukas were intended to have upon their victims—just as the Wicked Witch, aka, Miss Gulch—had had a similar effect upon me as a little boy,

even without her creepy little simian assistants.

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

Stay well,

When going outdoors, always cast a wary eye upwards,

And remember that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

PS

In case you don’t have a first edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz with its original illustrations, here it is for you:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80bOdm2P9Y8

Yarrow

10 Wednesday Apr 2024

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As always, dear readers, welcome.

I don’t know how Tolkien thought about ballads in general, but, about what was termed a modern “ballad”, The Ballad of the White Horse, 1911,

by its author, G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936),

he had this to say:

“P[riscilla]…has been wading through The Ballad of the White Horse for the last many nights; and my efforts to explain the obscurer parts to her convince me that it is not as good as I thought.  The ending is absurd.  The brilliant smash and glitter of the words and phrases (when they come off, and not mere loud colours) cannot disguise the fact that G.K.C. knew nothing whatever about the ‘North’, heathen or Christian.”  (from an airgraph to Christopher Tolkien, 3 September, 1944, Letters, 131)

For myself, I would say that, although I’ve been reading (and singing) old ballads for a long time, I don’t think of them as having “smash and glitter”, but rather, at their best, being plain and, often, grim—and perhaps it’s in part why they have the lure they do—and have had, since at least early Romanticism.  I’m presuming that that’s a reason why, for example, following collectors who date back at least to the early 18th century, Sir Walter Scott (1770-1832),

XCF277642 Portrait of Sir Walter Scott and his dogs (oil on canvas) by Raeburn, Sir Henry (1756-1823); Private Collection; (add.info.: Walter Scott (1771-1832);); Scottish, out of copyright

(portrait by Sir Henry Raeburn—who clearly captured Scott as Scott wanted to be remembered—a reader in a romantic atmosphere—with his dogs)

published Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802-1830—Scott kept revising and revising),

which included not only ballads he had personally collected or had from others, but also contemporary imitations of what he admired.  (There’s a very useful article here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minstrelsy_of_the_Scottish_Border on Scott and his working methods and even a site about a combined Scots/German project on the collection here:  http://walterscott.eu/ )

One of the ballads was clearly in the mind of another author, William Wordsworth (1770-1850),

“The Dowie Dens o Yarrow” (in modern English, perhaps something like “The Gloomy/Melancholy Dells of Yarrow”), when he wrote a very interesting poem in 1803, “Yarrow Unvisited”.

Yarrow itself is a narrow river which is a tributary of the River Tweed.  Here’s a late 19th-century map to help you to locate it—find St Mary’s Loch and follow the river line towards the Tweed.

And here’s the Yarrow in full spate—appropriately in a rather stark early 20th-century photo—

The original ballad—and there are a lot of variant forms—tells the story of a lady to be fought over by a series of lords—and  their rival, in some versions, a “plough-boy lad of Yarrow” (to see variants, here are those published in FJ Child’s, 1825-1896, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 1882-1898, known as “Child 214” and by the title “The Braes of Yarrow” (that is, “The Hillsides of Yarrow”):   https://sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/child/ch214.htm  )  The rival defeats the lords, but is then treacherously stabbed from behind, often by the lady’s brother.  (You can hear the version I first heard and learned, sung by Ewan McColl, here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vfsv8zUdqKM Be warned:  this performance is in line with older traditional performances, which I’ve always preferred, but might be rough, if you’re used to smoother folk singers.) 

Wordsworth, and his sister, Dorothy, (1771-1855)

had made a brief tour of southern Scotland in the late summer of 1803 and had met Walter Scott there, fresh from publishing the first edition of Minstrelsy.  I suspect that the combination of their tour, that meeting, and Scott’s collection all came together in a poem which Wordsworth then wrote, probably in the early fall of 1803, “Yarrow Unvisited”.  I’ve always liked this poem because it’s not about what Wordsworth and Dorothy did see (this becomes the subject of the later “Yarrow Visited” of 1814—a good background article:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yarrow_poems_(Wordsworth) ), but the fact that, because they didn’t see Yarrow, they could still imagine it—perhaps imagination, Wordsworth even suggests, is better, and seeing might spoil it—and because there was always the future possibility of actually seeing it.  (I am a big fan of Dorothy’s work—she had a wonderful eye for the natural world and a shrewd eye for people—and you can read her “Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland” here:  https://www.gutenberg.org/files/42856/42856-h/42856-h.htm )

Here’s Wordsworth’s poem, the “winsome Marrow” is Dorothy, the word  “marrow” meanIng “equal/match”, being a description of the lady in the ballad:

“FROM Stirling Castle we had seen

The mazy Forth unravell’d,

Had trod the banks of Clyde and Tay

And with the Tweed had travell’d;

And when we came to Clovenford,

Then said my “winsome Marrow,”

“Whate’er betide, we’ll turn aside,

And see the Braes of Yarrow.”

“Let Yarrow folk, frae Selkirk town,

Who have been buying, selling,

Go back to Yarrow, ’tis their own,

Each maiden to her dwelling!

On Yarrow’s banks let herons feed,

Hares couch, and rabbits burrow;

But we will downward with the Tweed,

Nor turn aside to Yarrow.

“There’s Gala Water, Leader Haughs,

Both lying right before us;

And Dryburgh, where with chiming Tweed

The lintwhites sing in chorus;

There’s pleasant Tiviotdale, a land

Made blithe with plough and harrow:

Why throw away a needful day

To go in search of Yarrow?

“What’s Yarrow but a river bare

That glides the dark hills under?

There are a thousand such elsewhere

As worthy of your wonder.”—

Strange words they seem’d of slight and scorn;

My true-love sigh’d for sorrow,

And look’d me in the face, to think

I thus could speak of Yarrow!

“Oh, green,” said I, “are Yarrow’s holms,

And sweet is Yarrow flowing!

Fair hangs the apple frae the rock,

But we will leave it growing.

O’er hilly path and open strath

We’ll wander Scotland thorough;

But, though so near, we will not turn

Into the dale of Yarrow.

“Let beeves and home-bred kine partake

The sweets of Burn-mill meadow;

The swan on still Saint Mary’s Lake

Float double, swan and shadow!

We will not see them—will not go

To-day, nor yet to-morrow;

Enough if in our hearts we know

There’s such a place as Yarrow.

“Be Yarrow stream unseen, unknown!

It must, or we shall rue it:

We have a vision of our own,

Ah! why should we undo it?

The treasured dreams of times long past,

We’ll keep them, winsome Marrow!

For when we’re there, although ’tis fair

’Twill be another Yarrow!

“If Care with freezing years should come,

And wandering seem but folly,—

Should we be loth to stir from home,

And yet be melancholy;

Should life be dull, and spirits low,

’Twill soothe us in our sorrow

That earth has something yet to show,

The bonny holms of Yarrow!”

Although Wordsworth doesn’t use a ballad metre here, he cleverly echoes the sound of the 4-line stanzas in the older poem, keeping that word “Yarrow” at the end of each stanza, and rhyming or suggesting rhyme, in the second line to match it, following this Child version (214Q):

“There lived a lady in the West,

I ne’er could find her marrow;

She was courted by nine gentlemen,

And a plough-boy lad in Yarrow.”

No “smash and glitter” here, but, in the ballad, grimness and plainness and even fierceness, and, in Wordsworth’s poem, a quiet, playful thoughtfulness and, in neither, what Tolkien said of his daughter, Priscilla’s efforts with “The Ballad of the White Horse”, a need to “wade through”—although, one could always wade the Yarrow…

As ever, thanks for reading.

Stay well,

Watch your back,

And remember that there’s always

MTCIDC

O

PS

So that you can decide for yourself about that “smash and glitter”, here’s Chesterton’s poem for you:  https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1719/1719-h/1719-h.htm   It’s interesting that JRRT comments that he doesn’t think that Chesterton knew anything about the “North”—a subject upon which Tolkien himself was passionate—see his anger at the Nazis for their pirating of the subject, in his letter to Michael Tolkien, 9 June, 1941, Letters, 77)—as Chesterton boldly states, in his “Prefatory Note” he’s perfectly willing to admit that what he writes isn’t really historical and that he’s accepting myth even as he is making his own:

“This ballad needs no historical notes, for the simple reason that it does not profess to be historical. All of it that is not frankly fictitious, as in any prose romance about the past, is meant to emphasize tradition rather than history. King Alfred is not a legend in the sense that King Arthur may be a legend; that is, in the sense that he may possibly be a lie. But King Alfred is a legend in this broader and more human sense, that the legends are the most important things about him.”

PPS

If you would like to see Scott’s version of the ballad, it’s here:  https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12882  All three volumes of the Scott are available here at Gutenberg.  They appear to be the 3rd edition of 1806.  For the various Child variants in Vol.3 of his collection, see:  https://archive.org/details/englishandscott07unkngoog/page/n8/mode/2up  This—and all 7 other volumes are available at the Internet Archive. 

PPPS

A “holm” in the Wordsworth is—I’m quoting “Etymonline” here:

“small island in a river; river meadow,” late Old English, from Old Norse holmr “small island,” especially in a river or bay, or cognate Old Danish hulm, from Proto-Germanic *hul-maz, from PIE root *kel- (2) “to be prominent; hill.” Obsolete, but preserved in place names, where it has various senses derived from the basic one of “island:” “‘raised ground in marsh, enclosure of marginal land, land in a river-bend, river meadow, promontory'” [“Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names”].”

Setting Boundaries

27 Wednesday Mar 2024

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Welcome, dear readers, as always.

“ ‘Behold the Argonath, the Pillars of the Kings!’ cried Aragorn…

As Frodo was born towards them the great pillars rose like towers to meet him.  Giants they seemed to him, vast grey figures silent but threatening.  Then he saw that they were indeed shaped and fashioned:  the craft and power of old had wrought upon them, and still they preserved through the suns and rains of forgotten years the mighty likenesses in which they had been hewn.  Upon great pedestals founded in the deep waters stood two great kings of stone:  still with blurred eyes and crannied brows they frowned upon the North.  The left hand of each was raised palm outwards in gesture of warning; in each right hand there was an axe; upon each head there was a crumbling helm and crown.  Great power and majesty they still wore, the silent wardens of a long-vanished kingdom…” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 9, “The Great River”)

There are a number of illustrations of this, from the Hildebrandts

to John Howe

to Alan Lee

to J.C. Barquet

and more, including in Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings,

where, in the sometimes perverse method of the films, one figure has a sword, rather than the axe which Tolkien had specifically described (true of the Alan Lee sketch, as well).  Reviewing this short list, however, the first two of these seem to portray the kings with a more peaceably raised left hand, whereas the others more clearly portray what the author wanted:  “The left hand of each was raised outwards in a gesture of warning…”

These figures, in fact, are boundary markers, set up by the Gondorian king Minalcar (later crowned as Romendacil II) some time during his regency (TA1240-1304—see The Lord of the Rings, Appendix A, (ii) “The Southern Line[:] Heirs of Anarion” and (iv) “Gondor and the Heirs of Anarion”) and the gesture is clearly meant as a warning to potential invaders.

More than once, in past postings, I’ve suggested influences upon Tolkien, from The Red Fairy Book of his childhood,

to Mussolini as a possible Saruman model.

In this posting, however, I’m moving forward, perhaps seeing a Tolkien model for something erected long after Tolkien’s death in 1973.

It begins with a bit of history in JRRT’s lifetime.

At the end of the Great War (aka “World War I”), the Middle East, the majority of it the fading Ottoman Empire, was very much in flux, with France and Britain struggling diplomatically to extend their influence over Syria, Lebanon, and the area then known as Palestine, as well as farther inland.  (For more on this, see David Fromkin’s The Peace to End All Peace, 1989,

and Sean McMeekin’s The Ottoman Endgame, 2016)

Farther north, and encouraged by the victorious Allies, Greece had invaded Turkey, hoping to expand Greece beyond its current boundaries.

This led to a number of bloody encounters between the two sides, with the Greeks advancing to within 50 miles (80km) of the capital at Ankara in the late summer of 1921 before being stopped at the climactic battle in the area of the Sakarya River.  When the Greeks finally withdrew, they had suffered 23,000 casualties (plus perhaps as many as 15,000 prisoners) against Turkish totals of 22,000 casualties and 1,000 prisoners.  This withdrawal turned into a scorched earth retreat towards the Aegean coast and ultimate evacuation of the Greek army along with thousands of civilians from Asia Minor.  (For more see:  https://www.historynet.com/the-battle-that-made-kemal-ataturk/ ) 

In 2015, the Turkish government established the Battle of Sakarya National Historic Park, but, in 2008, several private companies had already commemorated the battle by commissioning a statue of a Turkish infantryman to be placed on a height (Karaltepe) looking westward in the direction from which the Greek army had come.

 It’s not a boundary marker, per se, as the Argonath is meant to be, but, by marking the line of Turkish resistance to the Greek invasion, it has somewhat of the same effect.  And, though not gigantic, like the Gondorian figures, it’s over 100 feet (31m) tall on its base and the pose certainly reminds me of what Frodo sees in the river ahead,

even if it doesn’t produce the same emotional reaction as it did members of the Fellowship:

“Awe and fear fell upon Frodo, and he cowered down, shutting his eyes and not daring to look up as the boat drew near.  Even Boromir bowed his head as the boats whirled by, frail and fleeting as little leaves, under the enduring shadow of the sentinels of Numenor.”

Had the designers of the Turkish monument read The Fellowship of the Ring, or perhaps had seen the Jackson movie?

Thanks for reading, as ever.

Stay well,

What ancient monument might awe you?

And remember that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

ps

In answer to my own question, I’ve always loved this—

It’s often called “the mourning Athena”, but I imagine that the goddess isn’t grieving, but reading a boundary stone and, armed with helmet and spear, seems ready to defend her city from any who would violate that boundary.  It’s nowhere near the monumental size of those images discussed above, being only about 1 ½ feet (.48m) high, but, with a goddess, does size matter?

*(A)Dun[e]-(aic)

20 Wednesday Mar 2024

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Welcome, dear readers, as always.

If you’re a regular reader, you know that I have begun a (definitely!) long-term project to deepen my knowledge of Science Fiction.  I’ve read Sci-Fi since childhood, but totally unscientifically (sorry!), and, being interested in both Fantasy and Sci-Fi, I thought that it was more than time to have a better grasp of it and its (as I’ve found out) complicated history.

Although I’m still reading somewhat haphazardly—when I find an author whose work catches my attention, I catch myself reading more than one representative—see novels by L. Sprague de Camp (1907-2000), including those in collaboration with Fletcher Pratt (1897-1956)—like Lest Darkness Fall, 1941,

or The Castle of Iron, 1950,

I am developing a chronological list, and, so far, have read about three dozen novels and maybe a dozen short stories, my most recent novel being Dune, 1965,

about which I’ve already written one posting (see “No Names, No…”, 10 January, 2024).  It’s an impressive beginning, full of vividly imagined things, especially anything and everything about the desert planet of Arrakis, its native inhabitants, their environment, and their survival in it.  It’s easy to see how some early reviewers compared it to The Lord of the Rings for its depth of detail.  In my earlier posting, I admitted to being less convinced by the names, which sometimes seem rather haphazard—something which Tolkien would never allow (and actually criticized in the work of E.R. Eddison, 1882-1945—see a letter to Caroline Everett, 24 June, 1957, Letters, 372)—and this brings me to the subject of this posting, which is about Chakobsa—not “Shikwoshir”, or “Shikowschir”, or even “Schakobsche” or “Farschipse”, all possible names for a Northwest Caucasian language (or perhaps invented dialect based upon one of the languages—see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chakobsa )–but one of the principal languages of Dune.

The first film based upon Dune appeared in 1984

and was not a success—I remember seeing it, but have virtually no memory of what I saw.  (For more on the tribulations of making a film of the novel, see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(1984_film) )  If anyone spoke anything other than standard English, I couldn’t say.  There was a difference, however, in Dune, 2021,

where, although English substitutes for Galach, the standard universal language (like the Common Speech of Middle-earth), the language of the natives of Arrakis, the Fremen, is in need of subtitles.  (And there seems to be a bit of confusion here about what they actually speak, which even one of its creators, in an aside in a recording, admits:  https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/%22Neo-Chakobsa%22_(2020s_film_series)?file=Work_Stream_6-_Translating_into_Chakobsa%2C_Part_1 )  The language we hear most about—and which appears even more frequently in Dune 2, 2023,

was named by the original author, Frank Herbert (1920-1986), after that Northwest Causcasian language, Chakobsa, but, linguistically, has nothing to do with it.  Instead, it was a gallimaufry (a wonderful word in itself, meaning “a hodgepodge”—see:   https://www.etymonline.com/word/gallimaufry where you’ll discover that it’s actually one of those etymologies with a question mark after it).  As Herbert’s son, Brian, says of the linguistic constructions in Dune in general:

“  The words and names in Dune are from many tongues, including Navajo, Latin, Chakobsa (a language found in the Caucasus), the Nahuatl dialect of the Aztecs, Greek, Persian, East Indian, Russian, Turkish, Finnish, Old English, and, of course, Arabic.” (Dune, “Afterword”, 878 in the Ace edition)

There is a great difference, however, between Herbert’s approach to language and that of the language created for the Fremen in the two films and the latter approach might be seen as coming directly from JRRT’s method of language construction.

In 1931, Tolkien gave a lecture to the Johnson Society at Pembroke College, Oxford.

Daringly entitled “A Secret Vice”, it was an essay about his own “vice”, the creation of languages.  In it, he used his own early experiences with everything from Esperanto to “Nevbosh”, expressing not only his long interest, but also his ideas about the possibilities to be found in such a hobby, including:

“…various other interests in the hobby.  There is the purely philological (a necessary part of the completed whole though it may be developed for its own sake):  you may, for instance, construct a pseudo-historical background and deduce the form you have actually decided on from an antecedent and different form (conceived in outline); or you can posit certain tendencies of development and see what sort of form this will produce.  In the first case you discover what sort of general tendencies of change produce this a given character; in the second you discover the character produced by given tendencies.  Both are interesting, and their exploration gives one a much greater precision and sureness in construction—in the technique in fact of producing an effect you wish to produce for its own sake.” (Tolkien, A Secret Vice:  Tolkien on Invented Languages, edited by Dimitra Fimi & Andrew Higgins, Harper/Collins, 2016, 25)

I was reminded of this passage when I watched a brief interview with the creators of Chakobsa, Jessie and David Peterson, which you can see here:  https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p0hg5n6z/dune-and-the-art-of-creating-a-fictional-language  .  David was the creator of Valyrian and Dothraki for A Game of Thrones, as well as the author of a very entertaining and informative book on the subject of constructed languages (“conlang” for short), The Art of Language Invention (Penguin, 2015).

(For more on Valyrian, see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valyrian_languages .  For more on Dothraki, see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dothraki_language )

In the interview, Jessie talks about the “evolutionary method” of designing a language—that is, just like Tolkien, creating an older version of the language which you then “age”, using standard linguistic methods for consistent change over time.  We see an example of this in an interview the Petersons did with IndieWire:

“The most everyday terms in any language — things like “hello” and “goodbye” — are often ones that have the most history behind them. ‘You don’t try to come up with a way to say hello. You try to come up with what would have been a common phrase that was repeated when you saw someone and which ended up getting reduced to a smaller form,’ Jessie Peterson said. “

All of this was trickier, of course, for the Petersons, since, unlike Tolkien, the language they were employed to build already had some chosen, if not invented, elements—words from Herbert’s gallimaufry—which they were obliged to begin with.  In the same interview with IndieWire, David Peterson had this to say about such difficulties:

”Peterson traced the longest existing phrase in Chakobsa, a funeral rite spoken for Jamis (Babs Olusanmokun) as his water is given to the well at Sietch Tabr, to a Romani nursery rhyme. 

‘He just changed the meaning and said that it had something to do with water,’ Peterson told IndieWire. “A lot of [Chakobsa] is just borrowed kind of haphazardly from different languages. We just had to come up with our own system and incorporate it as best we could.”  (You can read the whole interview here:  https://www.indiewire.com/features/craft/dune-fremen-langauge-how-to-speak-1234958145/ )

An interesting feature in Tolkien’s language invention—and perhaps eventually crucial—

“I might fling out the view that for perfect construction of an art-language it is found necessary to construct at least in outline a mythology concomitant.  Not solely because some pieces of verse will inevitably be part of the (more or less) completed structure, but because the making of language and mythology are related functions (coeval and congenital, not related as disease to health, or as by-products to main manufacture); to give your language an individual flavour, it must have woven into it the threads of an individual mythology, individual while working within the scheme of natural human mythopoeia, as your word-form may be individual while working within the hackneyed limits of human, even European, phonetics.  The converse indeed is true, your language construction will breed a mythology.”  (Tolkien, A Secret Vice, 23-24)

So far, David, and now David and Jessie, Peterson have worked to create languages for other people’s stories and mythologies.  I wonder what they might produce if they constructed a language—or languages—for a story of their own?

As always, thanks for reading.

Stay well,

So shiira isim un-rauqizak,

And remember that, as ever, there’s

MTCIDC

O

PS

If creating languages interests you, have a look at Jessie Peterson’s website here:  https://www.quothalinguist.com/about-me/

Seem Fairer

06 Wednesday Mar 2024

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As ever, dear readers, welcome.

If you flip to the back of The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien,

and page through the index to the aitches, you’ll find five references to Adolf Hitler.  The first, to his son, Michael, simply mentions the idea that Hitler must soon attack Britain (letter to Michael Tolkien, 12 January, 1941, Letters, 64).  The third is to another son, Christopher, and makes a brief reference to Stalin and Hitler (letter to Christopher Tolkien, 22 August, 1944, Letters, 131).  Both of these are neutral in tone.  The second, however, has more the tone of a rant:

“Anyway, I have in this War a burning private grudge—which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22:  against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler (for the odd thing about demonic inspiration and impetus is that it in no way enhances the purely intellectual stature:  it chiefly affects the mere will).”  (letter to Michael Tolkien, 9 June, 1941, Letters, 77)

And the fourth and fifth (in the same letter) have a similar tone:

“We knew that Hitler was a vulgar and ignorant little cad, in addition to any other defects (or the source of them)…” (letter to Christopher Tolkien, 23-25 September, 1944, Letters, 133)

Both of which are entirely understandable, of course.  In terms of his family, two of his sons were involved in the Second World War, Michael as an anti-aircraft gunner, Christopher as a pilot, and Tolkien worried very much about both, as various letters to them make very plain.

That “burning private grudge”, however, was about something entirely different—and characteristic of JRRT—was his anger at the Nazi perversion of what he thought of as “that noble northern spirit”, as he says in that letter to Michael:

“Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved and tried to present in its true light.”

This being under the direction of:

“…a man inspired by a mad, whirlwind, devil:  a typhoon, a passion:  that makes the poor old Kaiser look like an old woman knitting.”

For all that Tolkien descends to name-calling (not his usual method of dealing with whom or what he doesn’t like), there is a certain—I won’t call it respect—but wary awe of someone he calls a “mad, whirlwind, devil” and, as always when I think about JRRT, his time, and his influences, I wonder about how he his impression of that “vulgar and ignorant little cad”—and “whirlwind devil”—might have influenced his work.

Germany after the Great War was economically and socially in ruins.  The 1919 Treaty of Versailles, blaming Germany for the war and designed to exact severe punishment for that, had done much to put her in that condition.

When Germany was unable to pay the amount demanded on time, parts of western Germany were then occupied by several of the Allies.

Bankruptcy, monetary depreciation,

and ideas of revolution swirled—including a brief attempt at revolution in Munich, in 1923.

The leader of this attempt was an ex-serviceman named Hitler.

With a sympathetic court, instead of being executed for treason, he was given a light sentence and soon was out on the streets again, presenting himself not as a violent revolutionary, but as a reformer, someone who was working to bring his country back from the wreckage it has suffered from war, a brutal treaty, a ruined economy, and social unrest (some of which he himself had inspired—and would continue to inspire).

In time, he was so successful at this that he became his country’s director, under the very neutral title of Fuehrer, “Leader” and the economy did improve, living conditions did improve—

but under all of this improvement was something else and here I’m immediately reminded of Sauron:

“Sauron was of course not ‘evil’ in origin…until he became the main representative of Evil of later ages.  But at the beginning of the Second Age he was still beautiful to look at, or could still assume a beautiful visible shape—and was not indeed wholly evil, not unless all ‘reformers’ who want to hurry up with ‘reconstruction’ and ‘reorganization’ are wholly evil, even before pride and the lust to exert their will eat them up.” (draft of a letter to Peter Hastings, September, 1954, Letters, 284)

“But many of the Elves listened to Sauron.  He was still fair in that early time, and his motives and those of the Elves seemed to go partly together:  the healing of the desolate lands.  Sauron found their weak point, suggesting that, helping one another, they could make Western Middle-earth as beautiful as Valinor.” (to Milton Waldman, typescript, “late 1951”, Letters, 212)

And here are the consequences:

“[Sauron] lingers in Middle-earth.  Very slowly, beginning with fair motives:  the reorganizing and rehabilitation of the ruin of Middle-earth, ‘neglected by the gods’, he becomes a reincarnation of Evil, and a thing lusting for Complete Power—and so consumed ever more fiercely with hate (especially of gods and Elves).  All through the twilight of the Second Age the Shadow is growing in the East of Middle-earth, spreading its sway more and more over Men…” (to Milton Waldman, typescript, “late 1951”, Letters, 211)

The title of this posting, as I’ll bet you all know, is part of a remark which Frodo makes just after Strider has appeared and approached him at The Prancing Pony in Bree:

(the Hildebrandts)

“You have frightened me several times tonight, but never in the way that the servants of the Enemy would, or so I imagine.  I think that one of his spies would—well, seem fairer and feel fouler, if you understand.”

To which Strider makes a reply one would never expect Hitler—or Sauron– to have made—

“ ‘I see,’ laughed Strider.  ‘I look foul and feel fair.  Is that it?’ “

As always, thanks for reading.

Stay well,

When it comes to reformers, it might always be wise to question their ultimate motives,

And remember that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

Romance

14 Wednesday Feb 2024

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Welcome, as ever, dear readers.

As I believe I’ve reported before, I’ve been rewatching Jackson’s The Lord of the Ring films after a number of years and something struck me in his The Fellowship of the Ring which has brought to mind Tolkien’s own remarks about going from book to film.

In 1958, it was proposed to make a film of The Lord of the Rings.  Tolkien, via Forrest J. Ackerman, was sent a story-line created by a “Mr. Zimmerman” and spent a good deal of time reading through and commenting.  There are only some sections of this commentary available to us in Letters, but these suggest that what he read seriously dismayed and displeased him:

“The commentary goes along page by page, according to the copy of Mr. Zimmerman’s work, which was left with me, and which I now return.  I earnestly hope that someone will take the trouble to read it.

If Z and/or others do so, they may be irritated or aggrieved by the tone of many of my criticisms.  If so, I am sorry (though not surprised).  But I would ask them to make an effort of imagination sufficient to understand the irritation (and on occasion the resentment) of an author, who finds, increasingly as he proceeds, his work treated as it would seem carelessly in general, in places recklessly, and with no evident signs of any appreciation of what it is all about…

The canons of narrative art in any medium cannot be wholly different; and the failure of poor films is often precisely in exaggeration, and in the intrusion of unwarranted matter owing to not perceiving where the core of the original lies.” (from an undated—June, 1958—letter to Forrest J. Ackerman, Letters, 389-390)

As I watched, I found myself thinking about what Tolkien wrote and about, of all things, romance, but, as it’s Valentine’s Day, 14 February, what could be more appropriate for a posting?

Valentine’s Day was once celebrated in the Christian calendar as the occasion of the martyrdom of Valentinus, a 3rd-century AD priest, the date first (perhaps) officially appearing in the 8th-century Gelasian Sacramentary,

aka the Liber Sacramentorum Ecclesiae Romanae, where you’ll find, inLiber Secundus, XI, “Orat. in Natali Valentini, Vitalis, Feliculae”–“Prayers on the Martyrdom of Valentinus, Vitalis, and Felicula”, dated for “xvi Kal. Martias”—that is, 14 February.  (You can read it here:  https://books.google.com/books?id=S-20jhQQZBMC&dq=sacramentary&pg=RA3-PA1#v=onepage&q=sacramentary&f=false  The Gelasius mentioned is a 5th-century pope who probably had nothing whatever to do with the book—for more see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gelasian_Sacramentary )

Valentinus was squeezed out of the ecclesiastical calendar in 1969 (which you can read about here:  https://aleteia.org/2022/02/09/why-is-st-valentines-feast-day-not-on-the-churchs-calendar/ ), but St Valentine’s day has been part of Western romantic tradition since at least the later Middle Ages and began to become a commercial success in the 19th century, when preprinted cards first appeared.

(And I can’t resist this—possibly the first printed valentine—which dates, in fact, to 1797.

See this for more:  https://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/L1NM_6mWRymAMKXcRDlXJA

and see this for more on early commercial valentines:  http://www.go-star.com/antiquing/early-valentines.htm )

The romance I want to talk about in this posting, however, comes from a different time although, according to its author, Tolkien, not from a different place.

In a way, it’s actually a kind of echo-romance, in which the first part happened some 6500 years before the second part, in the First Age of Middle-earth, but many of its conditions were the same. 

The Tale of Beren and Lúthien, by J.R.R. Tolkie

(Alan Lee)

A note, however:   this is a very complex story, which JRRT developed over many years, appearing in one form in the Silmarillion, 1977,

and in a multiform, Beren and Luthien, 2017, both versions edited by Christopher Tolkien.

For my purposes, I’m going to compress the story into the simplest form possible—something like this:

1. Beren is a mortal, who falls in love with Luthien, an elven immortal and the daughter of Thingol, king of Doriath

2. Thingol sets Beren a task:  for Beren to wed Luthien, he must retrieve one of the Silmarils from the crown of Morgoth

3. Beren, with Luthien’s help, finally manages to do this and can marry Luthien, but, later, is killed and Luthien goes to the Halls of Mandos (basically, the ruler of the dead) and manages, through song (yes, Orpheus and Eurydice is in there somewhere)

to regain him, but is faced with a choice:  she can retain her immortality and go on to Valinor, the home of the immortal Valar, without Beren, or she can go back to Middle-earth with Beren, become mortal, and die

4. She stays with Beren and, from that comes “the Choice of Luthien”—giving up immortality to remain with a mortal loved one

This brings us to the echo:  Aragorn and Arwen, the many details of which you can read in Appendix A, V, in The Lord of the Rings, “Here Follows a Part of the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen”, but, in simplified form:

1. Aragorn, a mortal, falls in love with Arwen, an elf and daughter of Elrond

2. Elrond sets the condition that only if Aragorn can make himself king of Gondor and Arnor can he marry Arwen

3. we know how this turns out:  Aragorn eventually becomes king and gains Arwen

(the Hildebrandts)

4. but she, too, must make the “Choice of Luthien” and, as JRRT tells us:

“When the Great Ring was unmade and the Three were shorn of their power, then Elrond grew weary at last and forsook Middle-earth, never to return.  But Arwen became as a mortal woman, and yet it was not her lot to die until all that she had gained was lost.”  (The Lord of the Rings, Appendix A, V,
“Here Follows a Part of the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen”)

It’s clear that this choice, once made, is irrevocable, as Arwen tells the fading Aragorn, when he suggests that she can still make the journey to Valinor after his passing: 

“Nay, dear lord…that choice is long over.  There is now no ship that would bear me hence, and I must indeed abide the Doom of Men, whether I will or I nill:  the loss and the silence.”

And, to me, this is what takes Tolkien’s story from being a wonderful fantasy to a higher level:  heroic people here make choices which will bring bitter loss, but still choose to make them:  Frodo to save the Shire, as he tells us he originally hoped, Arwen to remain with Aragorn, fully aware of the consequences.   It’s grown-up romance and Arwen’s choice is central to that.

In Jackson’s film of The Fellowship of the Ring, however, we’re shown a completely different reason for Arwen’s choice:  she trades her immortality for Frodo’s life.  Here’s what happens in Scene 21:

“Frodo suddenly becomes very weak as Arwen lies [sic] him on the ground.

ARWEN:  No! Frodo! No!  Frodo don’t give in, not now.

Tears spring into her eyes as she hugs him.

ARWEN

VOICE:  What grace has given me, let it pass to him.  Let him be spared.

Visions of Rivendell appear.  Frodo appears sleeping in the visions.

ARWEN

VOICE:  Save him.

ELROND:  (face appears in the vision)  Lasto beth non.  Tolo dan na ngalad.  (Hear my voice, come back to the light)” (You can read the whole text of the film here:  http://www.ageofthering.com/atthemovies/scripts/fellowshipofthering1to4.php )

Much of Tolkien’s criticism of “Mr. Zimmerman’s” script is that, as he says, it shows “no evident appreciation of what it is all about”.  In this case, this is Arwen’s sacrifice not for someone she, in the book, will not meet at this point in the story, the script-writers having replaced the actual character who attempts to rescue Frodo, the elf lord Glorfindel, with Arwen, but her sacrifice of her immortality for her love, Aragorn, just as Luthien had done for Beren, thousands of years before.  The echo, besides its poignancy, is intentional on Tolkien’s part:

“Arwen is not ‘a re-incarnation’ of Luthien…but a descendant very like her in looks, character, and fate.  When she weds Aragorn…she ‘makes the choice of Luthien’…” (draft of a letter to Peter Hastings, September, 1954, Letters, 288)

In 1963, Tolkien tried to explain not her choice, which, to him, was evident, but the reason behind Frodo’s ability to pass to the West:

“It is not made explicit how she could arrange this.  She could not of course just transfer her ticket on the boat like that!  For any except those of the Elvish race ‘sailing was not permitted, and any exception required ‘authority’, and she was not in direct communication with the Valar, especially not since her choice to become ‘mortal’.”  (from the drafts of a letter to Mrs. Eileen Elgar, September, 1963, Letters, 462)

Eventually, he suggests that Gandalf must have been involved, but what’s important here—and for the romance with which I began—is that Arwen’s surrender of her immortality was not a generous act to save a fading hobbit, but rather the renewal of a sacrifice made for the same reason by a distant ancestor, Luthien (who is also, in fact, a distant ancestor of Aragorn, as well), many years earlier.  As I said before, it’s grown-up romance and her choice is central to that.

All of that being said, happy Valentine’s Day.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Stay well,

Be glad for saints—the good ones have much to teach us,

And remember that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

PS

There is, in fact, competition for the title of St. Valentine of the cards, flowers, and chocolate.  See:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Valentine )