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Small Talk

02 Wednesday May 2018

Posted by Ollamh in Fairy Tales and Myths, Films and Music, Heroes, J.R.R. Tolkien, Narrative Methods, Villains

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Assyrians, Charles Goodyear, cyclops, David and Goliath, Death Star, Egypt, Ewoks, Greeks, Hetep Senworset, Hobbits, Jack and the Beanstalk, Kelandry of Mindelan, Lachish, Medieval, Odysseus, Polyphemus, Protector of the Small, Romans, Sling, slingers, Slingshot, Smaug, Star Wars, Tamora Pierce, thrush, Tortall, Vulcanized, Woses, Yoda

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

Sometimes, ideas for posts come from something we’ve seen in a movie theatre or something we’re reading or even from something we’re teaching or studying.  Sometimes we employ the Sortes Tolkienses.  And sometimes things just seem to fall into our hands.  And that’s where this post comes from.

We were moving a bookshelf and something literally dropped into our hands, a boxed set of books by one of our favorite YA authors, Tamora Pierce.

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As you can see from our image, the series is called “Protector of the Small” and is about the life of Keladry of Mindelan, who lives in Pierce’s imaginary Tortall, where it is possible—just possible—for a girl to become a knight.  Through the four volumes, Kel gradually works her way from pre-page to knighthood and, is always the case with TP’s books, there are both surprises and interesting and not always predictable difficulties along the way, as well as an ultimate humanity which makes her books such satisfying reading.

It wasn’t the actual books, however, which got us to thinking, but the word “small” in the series title.  How often, in our favorite adventure stories, it’s a case of small versus big

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and, very often, the big thinks that that’s all which counts—think of the fairy tale “Jack and the Beanstalk” for example.image3ajackgiant.jpg

For all that the giant is huge and menacing in the story, he’s vulnerable as he climbs down the beanstalk and Jack’s quick thought–to cut down the stalk even as the giant descends–makes quick work of the oversized (but perhaps overconfident—and underbrained?) creature.

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In the Judeo-Christian tradition, we have the Biblical story of David and Goliath.

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Goliath is not only huge, but armored, and David is a boy who has only his shepherd’s staff, a sling, and five stones from a river bed, but it’s all he needs.

A sling is an ancient weapon

image4sling

This is from the Egyptian Middle Kingdom town of Hetep Senwosret, c. 1895BC.  The Assyrians were still using the weapon more than a thousand years later, as this scene from one of the Lachish reliefs (c.700BC) shows.

image5assyrians.jpg

The Greeks had slingers

image6aspendosslinger.jpg

as did the Romans

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as did medieval westerners.

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Slings shouldn’t be confused with slingshots, by the way.  (Or “catapult” if you’re one of our British friends.)

image9slingshot.jpg

This is the weapon of choice of the cartoon character, Dennis the Menace.

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These are a modern invention which requires a large rubber band (an “elastic”) to propel the missile and such rubber bands can only come from the 1840s and beyond, when the process of heat-hardening rubber (“vulcanization”) was patented by Charles Goodyear.

image11chasgoodyear.jpg

For us, then, the image of Ori in P Jackson’s film armed with a slingshot

image12oriwithslingshot.jpg

goes into our catalogue of anachronisms, like the steam engine whistle, the popgun, and the tomatoes in The Hobbit.

But, as we were saying, small David has no fear of big Goliath, as one of those stones from the riverbed stuns the giant warrior, allowing David to use Goliath’s own sword to cut off his head.

image13dandg.jpg

In ancient Greek tradition, Polyphemus the Cyclops obviously thinks his size will allow him to consume all of Odysseus’ men—and then Odysseus, too, saving him for last as a “guest gift”.

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Big body, however, doesn’t necessarily mean big brain as Odysseus gets the Cyclops drunk and then blinds him with his own staff.

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Then, he uses the Cyclops’ own sheep as escape vehicles for himself and his men.

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Small versus big is a major theme in Star Wars, from the fact that the gigantic Death Star has a single ventilator duct which makes it vulnerable

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to attack by a single fighter,

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to the ferocious Ewoks,

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and, of course, Yoda, with his famous question.

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And then there are The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, where the world of the small and tough seems to be everywhere, from the hobbits

image21hobbit.jpg

to the dwarves

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and even to the Woses.

image23woses.jpg

Their opponents are suitably large—trolls,

image24trolls.jpg

dragons

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wizards

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to the biggest evil in Middle-earth (although it’s not clear, really, how big he is, physically).

image27baraddur.jpg

But there’s someone even smaller in The Hobbit who, because of that size, perhaps, is left behind, but is crucial to the story:  the elderly thrush

image28thrush.jpg

who informs Bard the Bowman just where to fire that black arrow which never fails him—and doesn’t this time, thanks to the bird.

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We were sorry that his part was completely removed from The Battle of the Five Armies, but perhaps this was, in fact, one of the few times when the small hero lost to the big–studio.

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

 

PS

Here’s a LINK to an amazing demonstration of just how accurate the sling can be.

In the Future, Use the Past

13 Wednesday Sep 2017

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Fairy Tales and Myths, Films and Music, Heroes, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Narrative Methods

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A New Hope, A Princess of Mars, Ages of Middle-earth, Death Star, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Emperor Palpatine, Frank Schoonover, George Lucas, Hildebrandt, Mos Eisley, Oxford, Percival Lowell, Return of the Jedi, Sauron, science fiction, special effects, Star Wars, Stonehenge, Tatooine, The Empire Strikes Back, The History of Middle-earth, The Last Jedi, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, tower of St Michael

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

As The Last Jedi (Star Wars 8) approaches (and Star Wars Rebels, season 3 has appeared via the postman—season 4 premieres in mid-October—sadly the last season, as Disney has canceled season 5), we’ve been thinking about the original Star Wars of 1977.

image1poster.jpg

This poster—the second ever Star Wars poster, in fact (used by 20th Century Fox in the UK)– is a great link to JRRT—as if we don’t seem to make such links every time we write!  It’s by two of our favorite Tolkien illustrators, the Hildebrandt brothers.  Here’s a picture of the surviving twin, Greg, with that very poster (his brother, Tim, died in 2006).

image2gh.png

(Clink here for a LINK to an interesting little piece from 2010 about the Hildebrandts and George Lucas.)

We believe, however that there may be a deeper link.

The original reviews (here’s a LINK to summaries of some of them) were a mixture, with some critics enthusiastic about what they saw and others (in our view the stodgier ones) calling the film things like “puerile”.  One element which was occasionally commented upon was the look of the picture—and not just the (for the time) dazzling special effects—but the fact that all the worlds depicted were lived-in, not shiny and new—well, almost.  Consider Mos Eisley, for example,

image3moseisley.jpg

which looks dusty and battered, suggesting the passage of time as well as the effects of the harsh desert climate of Tatooine.

Or the Jawa sandcrawler, old and clearly rusting–

image4jawasandcrawler.jpg

We said “almost” shiny and new because there’s one part of this galaxy with a different look:  the Death Star.

image5insidedeathstar.jpg

It looks like it’s dusted and waxed hourly, doesn’t it?  And the outside appears to be just as neat.

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What does this say about the nature of those who inhabit it?  For us, thinking about the spotless Darth Vader,

image7vader.jpg

immediately suggests that the old proverb should be changed to “Cleanliness is next to Un-godliness”!  (Okay—we’re not the neatest and most organized people we know.)

It has been pointed out, more than once and beginning with the director himself, that George Lucas was influenced by Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter series, beginning with A Princess of Mars (first published serially in The All-Story, February to July, 1912).

image8princess.jpg

(And here’s another connection—this cover and the illustrations for its first publication in book form, in 1917, were by Frank Schoonover, 1877-1972, who was the student of another of our favorite illustrators, Howard Pyle, whom we have occasionally mentioned in previous postings.  The convincing detail in this cover painting shows that, just like his teacher, Schoonover did his research—in his case, by very carefully going through the text and taking note of any technical information the author might have mentioned.)

In A Princess of Mars and subsequent books,  Mars has a civilization which is old and in decline (the inspiration for which, in turn, may have come from the work of the amateur astronomer, Percival Lowell, 1855-1916, whose telescopic observations of Mars had convinced him that the planet was—or had been—the home of a dying civilization which had constructed a vast network of canals to supply themselves with water from the polar ice caps—unfortunately, numerous NASA missions have found no evidence of the desperate Martians or their canals).   It would be easy, then, to say that Lucas was just following his source material, but we would suggest that there are two better explanations for showing wear.

The first comes from something Lucas is quoted as having said to his production designers:  “What is required for true credibility is a used future.” In Lucas’ view, then, the story’s believability comes in part from its look:  if things appeared not shiny, but worn, then viewers would be more likely to accept the narrative as somehow “true”, we presume because things in our world so often look used.

There is then, we think a further presumption:  if things look worn, then they have a past, which implies that the here-and-now of the story is a small part of bigger things and, certainly, just looking at the “crawl” at the beginning of the original Star Wars,

star-wars-crawl-163729.jpeg

which leads us to  our second explanation.  This one deals with something deeper, something which we would say might provide another possible link with JRRT and is, in fact, suggested by the titles of the first three Star Wars films made and even in their sequence:  A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, The Return of the Jedi.

In two earlier postings, we talked about the condition of Middle-earth at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings, in which everything, from the trees to the houses of Minas Tirith, has grown old and weary—and even potentially hostile, in the case of the trees.  Part of this comes from the fact that Middle-earth is old:  one has only to turn to Appendix B, subtitled “The Tale of Years”, in The Lord of the Rings to see that, in the Second and Third Ages alone, nearly 6000 years have passed.   (In terms of our earth, that’s moving from the late Neolithic Era to modern times, 4000bc to 2017ad.)  This also emphasizes the age and depth of evil, as well as its power to corrupt in the present:  Sauron began to build Barad-dur c. SA1000—5000 years before the main narrative of The Lord of the Rings opens and, in the present, the world is crumbling.

Of course, JRRT lived surrounded by the past.  The oldest surviving building in his daily Oxford is the tower of St Michael at the North Gate, dating from 1040ad, nearly a thousand years before his time,

image9stmichaels.jpg

but Neolithic Stonehenge is only 58 miles (93km) southwest of the city and that’s 5000 years old, taking us back to the time when, in Middle-earth, Sauron had begun the Barad-dur.

image10stonehenge.JPG

image11baraddur.jpg

In contrast, Lucas was born in 1944 in Modesto, California, a town only founded in 1870, and grew up in a post-World War II world, where the key was “the future”.  It is a tribute, then, to his story-telling gift that he realized how useful in telling his story the past—even an imagined one—could be and it is interesting to see how he shares that understanding with JRRT and perhaps shares a goal, as well.

We’ve said that our second explanation may be seen in the titles of Lucas’ three films, so let’s consider them in comparison with the general shape of Tolkien’s work to see what that shared goal might be.   (In an interview, Lucas even described the three as being like a three-act play, suggesting the dramatic progress inherent in the movement from one to another.)

At the beginning of the first film, it is a dark time in the galaxy:  the repressive regime of the evil Emperor Palpatine dominates and resistance is confined to “The Rebel Alliance”, which has scraped together a fleet (and, presumably an army—we see elements in Rogue One, which takes place before this film) to resist, but seems to spend most of its time running and hiding.  The past is only implied, but the fact that there is an Empire and a resistance suggests much, just as the run-down condition of places like Tatooine might suggest both age and that the galaxy has become run-down because of that Empire.

image12palpatine.jpg

At the beginning of The Lord of the Rings, we find ourselves in a place with a long history, as we see from the many pages of the “Prologue”.  It has been a quiet place, but the world outside is becoming less so, with sinister forces growing, as Frodo hears from passing dwarves:

“They were troubled, and some spoke in whispers of the Enemy and of the Land of Mordor.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 2, “The Shadow of the Past”)

In time, readers are brought to see that the dwarves are grossly understating the case:  the Enemy is real, Sauron, and that he has not only huge armies, but the Nazgul and a would-be ally in his enemies’ camp, Saruman.  The same may be said for the Empire:  not only do they have huge fleets and armies, but they have the “ultimate weapon”, the Death Star.

image13deathstar.jpeg

We will learn, as well, that, for all his great age and might, Sauron has an Achilles’ heel:  to give the One Ring its power, he has had to pour most of his power into it.  Thus, if he regains the ring, he will be much more powerful than he is at present, but, should the ring be destroyed, Sauron will be virtually destroyed with it.  As this struggle has been going on in Middle-earth for thousands of years, the idea that Sauron is vulnerable could easily be termed “a new hope”, just as Luke, the son of the Enforcer of the Galaxy, Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker, will provide a new hope for the Rebels (especially when we are told about “the Chosen One”—for whom he can be taken).

For a time, things do not go well for those opposed to Sauron:  he combines psychological/meteorological attacks with the march of huge armies, and even pirate raids on Gondor’s south coast. Gondor is overrun and Minas Tirith is assaulted.  This is clearly The Empire Strikes Back, just as the pursuit of the Rebel fleet to Hoth and the destruction of Echo Base disperses the Rebels and casts a shadow over the hope felt after the destruction of the Death Star.

This is not the end, however, for the Rebels or for the good people of Middle-earth.  Not only is the Ring destroyed and Sauron disembodied, but this paves the way for The Return of the King, with all of the reflowering-to-come, as we have suggested in a previous posting.

image14crowning.jpg

And there is a strong echo in the title of Lucas’ third film, The Return of the Jedi, in which the Emperor is destroyed and balance brought back to the Force—and the galaxy.  (Of course, with Star Wars 7, we see that the happy ending is only temporary, but we have hopes that, by the conclusion of 9, there will come a final rebalancing and peace at last.)

image15return.jpg

Lucas’ acknowledges many sources but, so far, we have yet to locate a quotation from an interview or anywhere else in which he says, “Yes, I’ve read Tolkien closely and, indeed, there is a strong affinity between my work and his”, but we believe that we can suggest, at least, that he, like JRRT, is following the same path in creating a world in turmoil, a visibly-aging world.  Into this world, he places his protagonist who provides a new hope, faces the might of a not-easily-defeated enemy, but, by his bravery and determination, finally brings about the destruction of that enemy (interesting in both cases he does not do so himself—Gollum inadvertently destroys the ring, just as Anakin, not his son, kills the Emperor) and the promise of renewal in the return of the Jedi—and the King.

And what do you think, dear readers?

Thanks, as ever, for reading!

MTCIDC

CD

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