Tag Archives: Fantasy

King Trotter?

08 Wednesday Oct 2025

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Welcome, dear readers, as ever.

I had been outside on some land being cleared when I spotted this—

and, as someone who thinks and writes and teaches about adventure in literature, I immediately thought of  this—

(This version of the scene is from Howard Pyle’s 1903 The Story of King Arthur and his Knights          , which you can read here:  https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/60184/pg60184-images.html#CHAPTER_FIRST-A )

My own knowledge of King Arthur probably began with books like The Boy’s King Arthur, by Sidney Lanier, originally published in 1880, with perhaps the best known version being the 1917 edition, with its wonderful illustrations by N.C.Wyeth,

(Here’s your copy:  https://archive.org/details/boyskingarthursimalo/mode/2up  )

and Howard Pyle’s The Story of King Arthur and His Knights, mentioned above, before, as a teenager, I found  the Imaginative and witty but ultimately melancholy T.H. White’s 1958 The Once and Future King,

(This is actually an omnibus volume of earlier White works, which you can read about here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Once_and_Future_King   )

the first volume of which being made into a Disney movie, The Sword in the Stone in 1963,

all of which being direct descendants from Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, written perhaps in the 1460s and one of the first books printed in England by William Caxton in 1485.

(Only 2 copies are known to exist:  one in the Rylands Library in Manchester, the other in the Morgan Library in New York—this is the Morgan Library copy.  You can read an 1893 edition here:  https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/46853/pg46853-images.html   Malory’s book—and Malory himself—have been the subject of much scholarly work and debate and you can read a little about it and him here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Morte_d%27Arthur  )

I had known that, behind Malory, lies Geoffrey of Monmouth’s early 12th-Century Historia Regum Britanniae (aka De Gestis Britonum—that is, “History of the Kings of Britain” or “Concerning the Acts/Deeds of the Britons”), but there was something new to me in doing a little reading for this posting:  the story of the sword and its stone.   Because it’s in all the later versions, even forming the title of one part of White’s larger collection, I had assumed that it was a story which had always been part of the bigger history of Arthur, and yet it seems to have been an independent creation, by a French knight, Robert de Boron, in a poem entitled Merlin, dated to the end of the 12th, the beginning of the 13th-Century.  

 

(This is from 13th-Century manuscript in the Bibliotheque nationale in Paris.   The BnF has a short feature—in French—on it here:  https://essentiels.bnf.fr/fr/litterature/moyen-age-1/ed6c3713-b2d5-4b94-8cac-a35fbd9471b1-mythe-arthurien/video/9ad866b9-c7ac-47b8-9356-9bcb793fb0ad-histoire-merlin )    

The whole Arthur story is a tangle of English and French poems and prose works, showing what a fertile field it was for poets and story-tellers, just as Troy had been, many centuries before—and still could be for medieval creators, if we think of Geoffrey Chaucer’s  Troilus and Criseyde as an example of a continued interest.   (You can read Chaucer’s poem here:  https://www.gutenberg.org/files/257/257-h/257-h.htm )    Who influenced whom, sometimes even who someone might have been, is a happy battlefield for scholars, so I’ll only point you to some discussion of de Boron and his poem here:   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_de_Boron#Further_reading and here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merlin_(Robert_de_Boron_poem)  and include a 15th-century English prose translation of the Old French of the original here, which is quite readable, and not just if you’re used to Chaucer’s 14th-century English:  https://metseditions.org/read/jy0W7X8HvLalIgvvC1z6jFMKyK4EakW ) 

For me, the important point of the story is really a question :  who is to be king of England and how can he prove that he is the rightful king?  And the answer is provided by that sword, as the 15th-century text reads:

“And the archebisshop lowted to the swerde and sawgh letteres of golde in
the stiel. And he redde the letteres that seiden, ‘Who taketh this swerde out of
this ston sholde be kynge by the eleccion of Jhesu Criste.’ “ 

(“And the archbishop bent over  the sword and saw letters of gold in the steel.  And he read the letters that said, ‘Who takes this sword out of the stone should be king by the choice of Jesus Christ.’ “)

This brings us to King Trotter.

It’s clear from his various letters and from Carpenter’s biography that Tolkien spent a lot of time in a kind of creative wandering before he settled upon various elements which make up the eventual The Lord of the Rings.  As he writes to W.H. Auden:

“…the main idea…was arrived at in one of the earliest chapters still surviving…It is really given, and present in germ, from the beginning, though I had no conscious notion of what the Necromancer stood for (except ever-recurrent evil) in The Hobbit, nor of his connexion with the Ring.  But if you wanted to go on from the end of The Hobbit I think the ring would be your inevitable choice as a link.  If then you wanted a large tale, the Ring would at once acquire a capital letter; and the Dark Lord would immediately appear.  As he did, unasked, on the hearth at Bag End as soon as I came to that point.  So the essential Quest started at once.  But I met a lot of things on the way that astonished me.  Tom Bombadil I knew already; but I had never been to Bree.  Strider sitting in the corner of the inn was a shock, and I had no idea who he was than had Frodo.”  (letter to W.H. Auden,  7 June, 1955, Letters, 315-316)

In one of his wanderings, he had created a kind of Hobbit Ranger, “Trotter”.  As Carpenter tells us:

[on a holiday at Sidmouth in 1938] “There he did a good deal of work on the story, bringing the hobbits to a village inn at ‘Bree’ where they meet a strange character, another unpremeditated element in the narrative.  In the first drafts Tolkien described this person as ‘a queer-looking brown-faced hobbit’, and named him ‘Trotter’.”  (Carpenter, 191)

And so, in fact, Tolkien had not initially met Strider in the Prancing Pony in Bree at all, but a completely different character, one who would, at a later date, disappear, to be replaced by Aragorn, son of Arathorn, who would, by the end of the story, be the king who has returned.

(the Hildebrandts)

But how will he ever prove that he is that king?

One  clue is in the verses which are attached to a letter Gandalf had written to Frodo, but, neglected by the landlord of The Prancing Pony, was only delivered when Frodo and his friends had reached Bree:

“All that is gold does not glitter,

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does no wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,

A light from the shadows shall spring;

Renewed shall be blade that was broken,

The crownless again shall be king.”  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 10, “Strider”)

When Pippin and Sam both express doubt about Strider’s identity, he makes a bold gesture, saying,

“ ‘If I had killed the real Strider, I could kill you.  And I should have killed you already without so much talk.  If I was after the Ring I could have it—NOW!’

He stood up, and seemed suddenly to grow much taller…Throwing back his cloak, he laid his hand on the hilt of a sword that had hung concealed by his side.”

But then:

“He drew out his sword, and they saw that the blade was indeed broken a foot below the hilt.”

As I have suggested  in a previous posting (see “Swords Drawn”, 2 July, 2025), this sword appears to have been influenced by something which Tolkien had either read or had read to him as a child from Andrew Lang’s The Red Fairy Book, 1890.

(here’s a copy for you:  https://archive.org/details/redfairybook00langiala/redfairybook00langiala/ )

In the last tale in the book, “The Story of Sigurd”, we find:

“ONCE upon a time there was a King in the North who had won

many wars, but now he was old. Yet he took a new wife, and

then another Prince, who wanted to have married her, came up

against him with a great army. The old King went out and fought

bravely, but at last his sword broke, and he was wounded and his men

fled. But in the night, when the battle was over, his young wife came

out and searched for him among the slain, and at last she found

him, and asked whether he might be healed. But he said

 ‘No’, his luck was gone, his sword was broken, and he must die. And he

told her that she would have a son, and that son would be a great

warrior, and would avenge him on the other King, his enemy. And

he bade her keep the broken pieces of the sword, to make a new sword

for his son, and that blade should be called Gram.”  (Lang, “The Story of Sigurd” from The Red Fairy Book, 357)

Just as Sigurd, when other swords have failed his test, has his father’s sword reforged, so the smiths of Rivendell reforge Aragorn’s sword and he changes its name from Narsil to Anduril, and even shows it, via Saruman’s palantir, to Sauron, clearly as a threat, as this is the very sword Isildur used to cut the Ring from Sauron’s hand long ago. (see The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 2, “The Passing of the Grey Company”)

But returning to the opening of this posting, I would wonder just how surprised JRRT really was when he returned to the Prancing Pony and found, not Trotter, the hobbit, but Strider, aka Aragorn, son of Arathorn, descended from the ancient rulers of Gondor and himself the heir?  Although he had mixed feelings about Arthurian legend (see from a letter to Milton Waldman, “late in 1951”, Letters, 202, among other places– even though, in the mid-1930s, he attempted and abandoned  a long poem, “The Fall of Arthur”—see Carpenter, 171),  Tolkien had been well aware of its stories from childhood (“The Arthurian legends also excited him.”  Carpenter, 30) and it’s clear that no story he had ever read or heard ever completely disappeared from his mind and so we’re left perhaps with a question:  did Aragorn arrive with the sword, either from Sigurd or Arthur, or did the sword, in Tolkien’s memory from his earliest years, come first, making Aragorn—who needed proof that he was the rightful king, just as Arthur did–come first?

In either event, I think that we should be thankful that both arrived as it’s hard to imagine the coronation not of Aragorn,

(the Hildebrandts)

but of “a queer-looking brown-faced hobbit”!

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Stay well,

Wander, if you will, but don’t be lost,

And remember that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

Plain and Grassy

24 Wednesday Sep 2025

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Welcome, as always, dear readers.

If you read this blog regularly, you know that, when I review something, I will see it/read it twice before I put fingers to keyboard and that I always try to understand, as best I can, what it is that the creators are intending, finding completely negative reviews of the sort which are too common on the internet simply unhelpful. 

 I’ve watched The War of the Rohirrim only once, so far,

and, after I’ve seen it a second time, I’m sure that I’ll want to say more, but one point struck me immediately and I thought that others might find it interesting—or puzzling, as I did.

To begin with, I very much enjoy anime and have seen all sorts of examples, from the adventures of Cowboy Bebop

to the sad and beautiful adaptation of When Marnie was Here

to the almost hallucinatory Mononoke.

My curiosity, then, was aroused to read that someone was making an anime-influenced film from section II, “The House of Eorl” of Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings, both because of the anime and because I’m always interested to see how different artists might imagine works with which I’m familiar.

Some years ago, for instance, a Russian artist, Sergey Yuhimov, had illustrated The Lord of the Rings in the style of Russian religious art, which was an intriguing idea.  Here’s the death of Boromir, as an  example–

(For more, see:  https://www.openculture.com/2014/06/russian-illustrations-of-the-lord-of-the-rings-in-a-medieval-iconographic-style-1993.html )

At the same time, I was a bit concerned about just what could be made of this material when there was so little of it—pages 1065-1067 in my 50th-anniversary edition of the book.

Remembering my dismay at “Azog”

and “Tauriel”

 in P. Jackson’s The Hobbit, where there was plenty of original material with which to work, I wondered if this would this mean the appearance of a number of characters never devised—or intended—by the author?  (for more on this see “A Fine Romance”, 15 February, 2023)

As I said, however, more on the film in general in a future posting, but for now I want to concentrate on a bit of geography.

Here’s a map of Rohan, the location of the film’s story

It’s divided into a couple of regions, their names based on Old English words—“Wold”, I’m presuming coming for “weald”, defined as “high land covered with wood”, which would be appropriate for land just outside Fangorn, “Emnet” from “emnett”, “a plain”—basically a level or flat area, and “Fold” from a word used in compounds, meaning “earth/land”.  (See Bosworth & Toller’s  Anglo-Saxon Dictionary here:  https://bosworthtoller.com/  )  So, the central area, at least, is, at best, rolling, I would say, and we know, from the text, covered in grass:

“Turning back they saw across the River the far hills kindled.  Day leaped into the sky.  The red rim of the sun rose over the shoulders of the dark land.  Before them in the West the world lay still, formless and grey; but even as they looked, the shadows of night melted, the colours of the waking earth returned:  green flowed over the wide meads of Rohan…” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 2, “The Riders of Rohan”)

“Mead” is from Old English “maed”, “meadow” (itself from Old English “maedwe”, which Etymonline, from the OED, glosses as “low, level tract of land under grass; pasture” (for more, see:  https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=meadow )

I’ve always imagined, then, something like this—

it being a perfect place for grazing for the herds of horses kept by the Rohirrim.

Unfortunately, New Zealand doesn’t appear to have such places and so Jackson, in his films, had to make do with this—

With those snowy mountains in the background, it makes an impressive scene, but it’s not really what JRRT had clearly—and rather beautifully–imagined.

I thought, however, that the makers of the new film would take advantage of the fact that, their landscape being anything which they could imagine and depict, and would restore to us Tolkien’s vision of the plains of Rohan as he described them.

Unfortunately, that’s not what happened:  instead, the artists simply copied the Jackson look of the nearly-barren countryside, far from anything a horse people would delight in—

Why do this?  The creators weren’t limited, as Jackson was, by the available landscape, and yet they simply followed what was already available on film, virtually down to the last detail.

Needless to say, I was disappointed, and it made me wonder what else I would see as the film progressed.  But that’s for another posting.

Thanks for reading, as ever.

Stay well,

May you always seek green—but not greener– pastures,

And remember that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

Bard

09 Wednesday Jul 2025

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Welcome, as ever, dear readers,

When Bilbo and the dwarves

(the Hildebrandts)

set out on their quest, they’re aware that, at its end, they must face the reason the dwarves’ forebears died or fled Erebor, the “Lonely Mountain”.

(JRRT)

And yet they go, suggesting an almost foolhardy shrug of an attitude, particularly as Gandalf has suggested that they need someone right out of myth to help them:

“ ‘That would be no good…not without a mighty Warrior, even a Hero.’ “

But:

“ ‘I tried to find one; but warriors are busy fighting one another in distant lands, and in this neighbourhood heroes are scarce, or simply not to be found.’ “ (The Hobbit, Chapter 1, “An Unexpected Party”) 

Everything about this trip already seems haphazard, having no map of their destination, till Gandalf furnishes them with one,

(JRRT)

and even then they have no idea of another, secret entrance until Elrond spots the inscription which describes it—and how to open it.  Clearly, then, this is a case of “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

Uh oh.

There’s also no clue in the text as to who or what may destroy the destroyer—until Bilbo, flattering Smaug, spots that fatal weak point:

“ ‘I’ve always understood…that dragons were softer underneath, especially in the region of the—er—chest…’ “

The dragon stopped short in his boasting.  ‘Your information is antiquated,’ he snapped.  ‘I am armoured above and below with iron scales and hard gems.  No blade can pierce me.’ “

There’s a clue here, if not for Bilbo, for readers who are aware of something in Tolkien’s own past reading: 

“Then Sigurd went down into that deep place, and dug many pits

in it, and in one of the pits he lay hidden with his sword drawn.

There he waited, and presently the earth began to shake with the

weight of the Dragon as he crawled to the water. And a cloud of

venom flew before him as he snorted and roared, so that it would

have been death to stand before him.

But Sigurd waited till half of him had crawled over the pit, and

then he thrust the sword Gram right into his very heart.”  (Andrew Lang, ed., The Red Fairy Book, 1890, “The Story of Sigurd”, page 360)

And Bilbo persists, goading Smaug to turn over, where Bilbo sees—and says:

“ ‘Old fool!  Why, there is a large patch in the hollow of his left breast as bare as a snail out of its shell!’ “ (The Hobbit, Chapter 12, “Inside Information”)

Still, although we might have a target now, who will make use of it and how and with what?  Sigurd is just what Gandalf says is not locally available, a Hero, and it’s clear that neither Bilbo nor the dwarves are capable of taking on that role.

And here we can bring in another clue from Tolkien’s past.

In “On Fairy-Stories”, he writes:

“I had very little desire to look for buried treasure or to fight pirates, and Treasure Island left me cool.  Red Indians were better:  there were bows and arrows (I had and have a wholly unsatisfied desire to shoot well with a bow)…”  (“On Fairy Stories”, 134)

This suggests that Tolkien may have been exposed to the works of James Fenimore Cooper, 1789-1851, who, beginning with The Pioneers, 1823, wrote a series of novels set on the 18th-century western Frontier (much of it what is now central and eastern New York State), called the “Leatherstocking Tales”,

the best known, even now, being The Last of the Mohegans, 1826. 

These books were filled with battles between the British and French, with Native Americans on both sides and I wonder if it’s from the adventures depicted there that JRRT was inspired with his passion for bows and arrows?

(artist?  A handsome depiction and I wish I could identify the painter.)

Another clue might lie in British history.  During the medieval struggle for English control of France, the so-called “Hundred Years War” (1337-1453), the English enjoyed three great victories, at Crecy (1346), Poitiers (1356), and Agincourt (1415), where companies of English longbowmen shot their French opponents to pieces.

(Angus McBride)

Tolkien would have read about this as a schoolboy, but, in an odd way, he might have had his knowledge of these long-ago events refreshed in 1914.

Outnumbered and in danger of being outflanked by massive German columns, the small BEF (British Expeditionary Force), in the early fall of 1914, retreated, one unit (2nd Corps) fighting a desperate battle to slow the Germans at Le Cateau.

The British managed to fend off the enveloping Germans and, considering the odds against them, some might have believed their escape miraculous. 

Enter the fantasist Arthur Machen, 1863-1947. 

In the September 29th,  1914,  issue of The Evening News, Machen published a short story which he entitled “The Bowmen”.  This was a supposed first-hand account of a British soldier who had seen a line of ghostly British longbowmen shooting down German pursuers, just as they had shot down the French, centuries before.

Machen subsequently republished it with other stories in 1915—

but was astonished when his fiction was believed to have been true, and widely circulated as such. We don’t have any evidence that JRRT actually read this story, but it was extremely widespread at the time and, once more, we see men with bows. (For more on this, see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angels_of_Mons And you can read the stories in Machen’s volume here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angels_of_Mons )

I think we can add to this the legends of Robin Hood, which could appear in any number of sources—our first known reference being in William Langland’s (c.1330-c.1386) late 14th-century Piers Plowman, where Sloth—a priest deserving of his name, doesn’t seem to have any religious knowledge, but says,

“Ich can rymes of Robyn Hode” (that is, “I know rhymes/songs about Robin Hood”—see the citation at:  https://robinhoodlegend.com/piers-plowman/ at the impressively rich Robin Hood site:  https://robinhoodlegend.com/ )

Then there is the collection of poems/songs from about 1500, A Gest of Robyn Hode,

which JRRT might have encountered in F.J. Child’s (1825-1896) The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 1882-1898,

where it appears as #117.  (If you don’t know the so-called “Child Ballads”, here’s a beginning:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Ballads  And, for a massive one-volume edition:  https://archive.org/details/englishscottishp1904chil/page/n11/mode/2up The texts are interesting in themselves, but, for me, they’re even better as songs.  To hear one, you might try one of my favorite folk singers, Ewan McColl’s version of “The Dowie Dens o’ Yarrow here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vfsv8zUdqKM&list=RDVfsv8zUdqKM&start_radio=1 For more on Yarrow, see “Yarrow”, 10 April, 2024.

For lots more on Robin Hood, see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Hood )

In more recent times, perhaps Tolkien had seen Howard Pyle’s (1853-1911) The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, 1883,

 or Paul Creswick’s (1866-1947) 1917 Robin Hood,

with its wonderful illustrations by N.C.Wyeth (1882-1945).

(If the Tolkien journal Amon Hen, is available to you–but, alas, not to me–you might also have a look at Alex Voglino’s “Middle-earth and the Legend of Robin Hood” in issue 284.)

And, although Tolkien may not have liked Treasure Island, we might add to this possible influence Robert Louis Stevenson’s (1850-1894) The Black Arrow (serialized 1883, published as a book in 1888).

An adventure story set during the Wars of the Roses, you can read it here:  https://archive.org/details/blackarrowatale02stevgoog/page/n1/mode/2up

Although there are more possibilities (Tolkien might have read Sir Walter Scott’s (1771-1832) Ivanhoe, 1819, where Robin Hood makes an appearance, for instance—and here’s the book:  https://archive.org/details/ivanhoe-sir-walter-scott/page/n7/mode/2up )

that title suggests something else:

“ ‘Arrow!’ said the bowman.  ‘Black arrow!  I have saved you to the last.  You have never failed me and always I have recovered you.  I had you from my father and he from of old.  If ever you came from the forges of the true king under the Mountain, go now and speed well!’ “ (The Hobbit, Chapter 14, “Fire and Water”)

(Michael Hague, one of my favorite Hobbit illustrators)

So, we’re about to see that the Hero to kill Smaug is a Lake-town local, Bard, and his weapon of choice is Tolkien’s special favorite, the bow.  But how to attack?

We first see Smaug on the ground, lying on his hoard.

(JRRT)

Angered at Bilbo’s teasing, he gets up long enough to attempt to flame him, but his real method of destruction is to take to the air.

(Ted Nasmith)

Fafnir was never airborne, dragging himself along the ground.  Sigurd solved the problem of his scaly protection by digging a pit and attacking him from below with his sword.  It makes good sense, then, with all of the possible bowman influences upon him, that Tolkien would imagine that the way to deal with a flying dragon would be an arrow from below.

(JRRT)

To which we might add one more potential influence from JRRT’s own experience. 

In 1914, there were few military aircraft and their main task was reconnaissance.

By 1918, there were many different models, with different tasks, including heavy bombers.

To protect their troops on the ground, all of the warring nations developed the first artillery defenses:  anti-aircraft guns, designed to shoot down threats from above. 

JRRT would certainly have seen such guns and possibly even in action, attempting to knock flying danger out of the sky.

Some of those guns were rapid-firing, spraying the air with metal, hoping to guarantee the success of their defense.  Bard, in turn, has his black arrow—and not just any black arrow, but one seemingly created perfectly for revenge:  “  ‘I had you from my father and he from of old.  If ever you came from the forges of the true king under the Mountain, go now and speed well.’ “

That is, this is an arrow created by the dwarves, whom Smaug had driven out or killed—or eaten—and it’s also an heirloom from the days before Smaug destroyed Dale:  what better weapon to deal vengeance to the wicked creature who had ruined so much?  To take out such a flying danger, but with a glaring vulnerability below, what means of propulsion, especially one known to have defeated whole medieval armies?  And, as the seemingly last descendant of the last lord of Dale, Girion, who better to take that revenge? 

As ever, thanks for reading.

Stay well,

Always monitor the skies—who knows what’s watching from above?

And remember that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

PS

For more on birds, Bard, and Smaug, see “Why a Dragon?” 28 May, 2025.

PPS

While looking for just the right Smaug images, I came upon this, entitled, “Dante aka Smaug on his hoard” and couldn’t resist.

Starre-crost

25 Wednesday Jun 2025

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As always, dear readers, welcome.

In adventure stories, heroes—and heroines– seem to appear in all sorts of ways.

Sometimes, it seems that they are just born for adventure, like Herakles, who,

although apparently the offspring of two mortals, Alkmene and Amphitryon, was actually the son of Zeus.

Others belong to noble families, where heroism is expected of them, like Beowulf, nephew of the king of the Geats.

(Here, meeting the Danish coastguard—but we just can’t escape those Wagnerian winged helmets, can we?)

Then there is Mulan, who, pretending to be a man, replaces her father in the army and serves valiantly for twelve years.

(As you can see from the label, this comes from a site called “Chinese Posters.net”—and it’s quite a site:  5100 propaganda posters from the Chinese past.  Here’s the address:  https://chineseposters.net/ For more on the original but probably fictional Mulan, see:  https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1596/mulan-the-legend-through-history/ and https://mulanbook.com/pages/northern-wei/ballad-of-mulan/ and https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Ballad_of_Mulan –two versions of the early “Ballad of Mulan)

A common motif is that of the apparent good-for-nothing—or at least for not much—who turns out to be of heroic material.  I immediately think of King Arthur, who is, basically, a servant until he fetches that sword from the stone/anvil.

Heroes and heroines, then, can be anything from a demigod to a nobleman to a good girl who loves her father to a good-for-nothing who is more than he seems, and set out on adventures or, as in the case of Arthur, adventure finds them.

Ordinary—or seemingly ordinary—people can also be pulled into adventures, as Bilbo is.

(the Hildebrandts)

Then there are people who are literally dropped into adventures,

(WW Denslow)

sometimes beginning those adventures in a very dramatic—and ultimately decisive—way.

Dorothy, of course, has been whirled by a tornado from Kansas to Oz,

(from the 1939 film)

but, when she arrives in Oz in the film, Glinda, the Good Witch of the North

(also from the film)

sings:

“Come out, come out, wherever you are and meet the young lady

Who fell from a star.

She fell from the sky, she fell very far and Kansas, she says,

Is the name of that star.”

Not true, of course, of Dorothy, (although Kansas has its beauties, no doubt), but it is true of another hero, Superman,

who had been shipped in a rocket by his parents from the dying planet, Krypton, and discovered in a field by Ma and Pa Kent, who would become his foster parents.

If you read this blog regularly, you know that I don’t find negative reviews which are nothing but hatchet jobs

at all helpful and, in my own reviews, I try to understand what it is that the creators attempted to do and react to that, being aware, of course, that I do have my own perspective on things.  I also buy DVDs of everything I can, so that I can watch things more than once before I review. 

I’ve now seen “Rings of Power”, both seasons,

only once, so I’m not going to attempt to review the whole two seasons here.  Certainly there have been some very impressive visuals and some very good acting.  I’m not sure how I feel about the two as a whole—some of the plot I found rather confusing and I’m not sure how I feel about proto-hobbits with Irish accents, although the idea of using proto-hobbits was, I thought, pretty ingenious—but I want to end this posting by talking about Gandalf.

He first appears—like Dorothy in Oz, but even more so like the baby Superman, in a dramatic fashion, having been conveyed in which appears to be a kind of meteor which roars across the sky and slams into the earth, leaving a fiery crater.

(Thank goodness that, whoever sent him, dressed him in underpants so that he wouldn’t embarrass himself or us when he stood up.)

At first, he seems stricken and quite clueless, not even really having language at first, although certainly having great powers, and it takes two seasons for him to begin to understand himself and what he’s been sent to do and I suspect that this stricken quality comes from a hint in Christopher/JRR Tolkien’s Unfinished Tales, where, under “The Istari” we find:

“For it is said indeed that being embodied the Istari had need to learn much anew by slow experience…” (Unfinished Tales, 407)

I understand that the creators of the series were somewhat hampered in their work—should they want to be as faithful as possible to Tolkien—because they were restricted in their sources, being confined, in this case, to The Lord of the Rings and its appendices.  And, at first glance, the appearance in Middle-earth of the Istari does seem rather vague.

In Appendix B, “The Third Age”, of The Lord of the Rings, we read:

“When maybe a thousand years had passed, and the first shadow had fallen on Greenwood the Great, the Istari or Wizards appeared in Middle-earth.  It was afterwards said that they came out of the Far West and were messengers sent to contest the power of Sauron, and to unite all those who had the will to resist him…” 

No meteors are mentioned, but no other means of transport, either, yet turn the page and we then read:

“Gil-galad before he died gave his ring to Elrond; Cirdan later surrendered his to Mithrandir (aka Gandalf).  For Cirdan saw further and deeper than any other in Middle-earth, and he welcomed Mithrandir at the Grey Havens, knowing whence he came and wither he would return.”  

If you know The Lord of the Rings, you know that the Grey Havens is a seaport on the west coast of Middle-earth:  it’s where Gandalf and others, including Frodo, depart for the Uttermost West—that is, Valinor.

(Ted Nasmith and a gorgeous view)

In fact, it was the Valar who had sent the Istari in the first place, as we know from Unfinished Tales, 406:

“For with the consent of Eru they sent members of their own high order, but clad in bodies as of Men, real and not feigned…”

And thus, from the source to which I’m informed the creators were confined, they would have learned that the Istari had sailed to Middle-earth, not been shot across the sky like Dorothy or Superman.  Why make such a change, especially as, because Cirdan recognizes Gandalf’s worth, he gives him one of the original Elvish rings, Narya, which turns up on his hand in the subsequent The Lord of the Rings?

The title of this posting is a quotation from Shakespeare, from the prologue to “An EXCELLENT conceited Tragedie OF Romeo and Juliet” (as the First Quarto title page reads) in which the Prologue says of the protagonists:  “A paire of starre-crost Louers tooke their life”. 

The creators of The Rings of Power, even with evidence available to them, have veered away from that evidence with no explanation as to why they have made such a choice.  What else may they have chosen to change and how might that affect JRRT’s view of the earlier history of Middle-earth, as well as ours?

As I begin my second viewing of The Rings of Power, then, I’ll be curious to see if another Shakespeare quotation, this from “The Tragedie of Julius Caesar”, Act 1, Scene 1, when Cassius, the leader of the plot against Julius Caesar, is trying to persuade Brutus to join him, may apply to the creators and their work:

“The fault (deere Brutus) is not in our Starres,

But in our Selues…”

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Stay well,

Think about what Cassius is telling us about horoscopes,

And remember that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

Why a Dragon?

28 Wednesday May 2025

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As always, dear readers, welcome.

I think that I’ve always been a fan of the Marx brothers.

Their lack of respect for pompous men in silk hats,

opera-goers who are only interested because it gives them social status,

and self-important artists,

among many others, and their creative methods of deflating such people,

have always cheered me immensely.

There is another side to their comedy, however, which means just as much to me:  their endless play with words, delivered always deadpan and with perfect timing—not to mention absolute absurdist nonsequiturism.

Take, for example, this fragment from The Cocoanuts, their first surviving film, from 1929.  It’s set during the 1920s Florida land boom (read about that here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_land_boom_of_the_1920s ) and, in this scene, “Mr. Hammer”, Groucho, is explaining the layout of a real estate plot to “Chico”, Chico,

saying, at one point:

“Groucho:   Now, here is a little peninsula, and, eh, here is a viaduct leading over to the mainland.

Chico:  Why a duck?

Groucho:  I’m all right, how are you?  I say, here is a little peninsula, and here is a viaduct leading over to the mainland.

Chico:   All right, why a duck?

Groucho:  I’m not playing ‘Ask Me Another’, I say that’s a viaduct.

[Ask Me Another was originally an early 1927 equivalent of “Trivia”.  You can read about it here:  https://www.thefedoralounge.com/threads/how-do-you-play-ask-me-another.62135/ and here’s a copy—

Chico:  All right!  It’s what…why a duck?  Why no a chicken?

Groucho:  I don’t know why no a chicken—I’m a stranger here myself.  All I know is that it’s a viaduct.  You try to cross over there a chicken and you’ll find out why a duck.”

(For the entire script see:  https://www.marx-brothers.org/marxology/cocoanuts-script.htm )

By the same kind of logic which produced this, I found myself thinking about The Hobbit:  and hence the title of this posting:  why a dragon?

The plot of The Hobbit is, basically, a quest:  a journey with a goal.

Quests are a familiar form of adventure story and still common—just think about Indiana Jones, with his Lost Ark

and his Holy Grail, for example.

Indiana has to travel to Tibet and Egypt and to an unnamed island in the Mediterranean for the Ark and to Germany and Turkey for the Grail.

Although Thorin doesn’t mention the travel in his “mission statement”, much of the story will be about travel, from the Shire to the Lonely Mountain and back again,

to reach the dwarves’ goal, as stated in the first chapter by Thorin:

“But we have never forgotten our stolen treasure.  And even now, when I will allow we have a good bit laid by and are not so badly off…we still mean to get it back, and to bring our curses home to Smaug—if we can.”  (The Hobbit, Chapter 1, “An Unexpected Party”)

The goal, then, is in two parts:

1. to regain the treasure taken from the dwarves by the dragon

2. to take revenge upon said dragon

Because they are aware that the dragon can be lying on top of the treasure (“Probably”, says Thorin, “for that is the dragons’ way, he has piled it all up in a great heap far inside, and sleeps on it for a bed.”), it’s clear that 1 and 2 have to be dealt with as a sequence:  no getting the treasure without getting rid of the dragon.

Which brings us back to my title.  Indiana Jones commonly has Nazis (and eventually Communists and even Neo-Nazis) as opponents,

these being the characters who compete for his goal and stand in the way of his achieving his quest. 

Tolkien was a medievalist, writing a sort of fairy tale, so what would be his equivalent and why?

 We know that Tolkien had been interested in dragons since far childhood—at least the age of 6, when he tried to write a poem about a “green, great dragon” (to the Houghton Mifflin Company [summer, 1955?], Letters, 321—JRRT tells a somewhat different version of this to W.H. Auden in a letter of 7 June, 1955, Letters, 313) and he confesses to an early love for them in his lecture “On Fairy-Stories” where he mentions Fafnir and Sigurd, suggesting that he may have had read to him or had read for himself from Andrew Lang’s The Red Fairy Book, 1890, the last chapter of which is “The Story of Sigurd”, and since, elsewhere, he mentions “Soria Moria Castle”, which is the third story in the same book.

(Your copy is here:  https://archive.org/details/redfairybook00langiala/redfairybook00langiala/ )

Fafnir, the dragon in the Sigurd story, is described as, having killed his own father:

“he went and wallowed on the gold…and no man dared go near it.”  (“The Story of Sigurd”, 360)

The next major dragon story with which Tolkien was probably involved saw the same draconic behavior, as, in Beowulf, we’re told that the unnamed dragon, having discovered a hoard in a tumulus:

“This hoarded loveliness did the old despoiler wandering

in the gloom find standing unprotected, even he who filled

with fire seeks out mounds (of burial), the naked dragon of

1915

fell heart that flies wrapped about in flame: him do earth’s

dwellers greatly dread. Treasure in the ground it is ever his

wont to seize, and there wise with many years he guards the

heathen gold – no whit doth it profit him.”

(from JRRT’s draft translation of 1920-26 in Christopher Tolkien’s 2014 publication)

Traditionally, then, dragons and gold go together—and, as JRRT admitted in a letter to the Editor of the Observer, “Beowulf is among my most valued sources” (letter to the Editor of the Observer, printed in the Observer, 28 February, 1938, Letters, 41)

There is a very interesting twist in Tolkien’s version of the story, however.

By lying in a pit below the dragon, Sigurd slays Fafnir

and Beowulf, along with his companion (and successor), Wiglaf, make an end of the nameless dragon,

Beowulf fighting against a dragon. Scene from the early medieval epic poem “Beowulf”. It is one of the most important works of Old English literature and was probably created after the year 700 and plays in the time before 600 AD in Scandinavia. Chromolithograph after drawing by Walter Zweigle (German painter, 1859 – 1904), published in 1896.

(This is a pretty silly version, with costumes and armor which look like they came from the original production of Der Ring des Nibelungen, but finding a depiction of the two attacking the dragon has seemed surprisingly difficult.)

but, in The Hobbit, although we have the traditional dragon on the traditional hoard, we don’t have the traditional dragon-slayer, a fact underlined by Thorin’s “to bring our curses home to Smaug, if we can”.

This has always struck me as the potential weak point in the quest:  to travel hundreds of miles through dangerous territory filled with trolls, goblins, wolves, hostile elves, and even giant spiders, to come to a mountain inhabited by a fearsome dragon—but to have no plan in mind as to how to deal with it, especially when the other half of the plan—to get back the dwarvish treasure—requires somehow eliminating the current guardian of that treasure.

(JRRT)

Faced with that possible weak point, so much now may appear to have a certain haphazard happenstance about it, the kind of attempted slight-of-hand which indicates an author who hasn’t the skill to create a narrative in which every element seems to fall naturally into place, and this might make us question the finding of the Ring, the convenient rescue at Lake-town, even the ray of sun which indicates the opening to the back door of the Lonely Mountain (suppose it had been overcast).

But this is where the burglar comes in—and the story of Sigurd once more.

It seems that Bilbo was not Gandalf’s first choice for the quest when he came to visit him.

(the Hildebrandts)

Thorin has just mentioned the inconvenient dragon and the awkwardness of his sudden appearance, to which Gandalf replies:

“That would be no good…not without a mighty Warrior, even a Hero.  I tried to find one; but warriors are busy fighting one another in distant lands, and in this neighbourhood heroes are scarce, or simply not to be found.”

And he continues:

“That is why I settled on burglary—especially when I remembered the existence of a Side-door.  And here is our little Bilbo Baggins, the burglar, the chosen and selected burglar.”

Bilbo’s first attempt at burglary:  picking a troll’s pocket,

(JRRT)

almost ends in disaster, but, with the eventual aid of the Ring, he even manages, first, to steal from Smaug, in a direct echo of Beowulf,

(artist?  So far, I haven’t seen one credited.)

and then to confront Smaug in his lair and escape, at worst, with only a singeing. 

(JRRT)

So far, it’s been burglary, with some help from the Ring, but then the Sigurd story comes in.

You’ll remember that, although the version in The Red Fairy Book doesn’t say so, it was clear that the vulnerable part of the dragon Fafnir was its underside, which is why Sigurd hid in a pit so that, when the dragon crawled over it, Sigurd could stab him in that unprotected underbelly. 

Using his burglarious skills, as well as a fluent tongue, Bilbo actually persuades Smaug unknowingly to expose his own vulnerability:

“ ‘I have always understood…that dragons were softer underneath, especially in the region of the—er—chest; but doubtless one so fortified has thought of that.’

The dragon stopped short in his boasting.  ‘Your information is antiquated,’ he snapped.  ‘I am armoured above and below with iron scales and hard gems.  No blade can pierce me.’”

And the smooth-tongued burglar actually flatters Smaug into rolling over, exposing “…a large patch in the hollow of his left breast as bare as a snail out of its shell”.

What to do with this potentially deadly piece of information requires the reverse of the Sigurd story.

In that story, Sigurd, having killed Fafnir, has been asked by his mentor, Regin, to roast the dragon’s heart and serve it to him.  In the process, Sigurd burns a finger, puts it in his mouth, and suddenly understands that all of the birds above him are talking about him and telling him to beware of Regin.

In The Hobbit, the opposite happens:  the thrush who had tapped the snail

(Alan Lee)

and therefore set off the chain of events which revealed the back door to the Lonely Mountain to Bilbo and the dwarves, overhears Bilbo telling the dwarves about Smaug’s vulnerable spot, which he then conveys to Bard the Archer, who is then the dragon-slayer

(Michael Hague—one of my favorite Hobbit illustrators)

needed to dispose of the one-time guardian of the hoard.

And so the dragon is disposed of—but he has one more use in the story:  as a negative model. 

Although Thorin has led the quest to retrieve the dwarves’ treasure, it seems that there’s only one which he craves, the Arkenstone,

(Donato Giancola)

and it’s clear that, in its pursuit, he becomes much like the Smaug who once reacted almost hysterically when he sensed that something was missing from his hoard:

“Thieves!  Fire!  Murder!…His rage passes description—the sort of rage that is only seen when rich folk that have more than they can enjoy suddenly lose something that they have long had but have never before used or wanted.”  (The Hobbit, Chapter 12, “Inside Information”)

Here’s his dwarvish parallel:

“ ‘For the Arkenstone of my father,’ he said, ‘is worth more than a river of gold in itself, and to me it is beyond price.  That stone of all the treasure I name unto myself, and I will be avenged on anyone who finds it and withholds it.”  (The Hobbit, Chapter 16, “A Thief in the Night”)

And, when he finds that Bilbo has taken it as a way to make peace between the dwarves, the elves, and the Lake-town men, Thorin almost does take revenge:

“ ‘You! You!’ cried Thorin, turning upon him and grasping him with both hands.  ‘You miserable hobbit!  You undersized—burglar!…By the beard of Durin!  I wish I had Gandalf here!  Curse him for his choice of you!  May his beard wither!  As for you I will throw you to the rocks!’ he cried and lifted Bilbo in his arms.”  (The Hobbit, Chapter 17, “The Clouds Burst”)

So why a dragon?

First, to Tolkien the medievalist, gold and dragons go together:  a quest for treasure needs a particularly powerful enemy and the dragon of Beowulf, who actually fatally wounds Beowulf,

who had previously defeated two terrible opponents in Grendel and his mother, provides a strong model.

Second, JRRT had, from childhood, a long-standing interest in dragons—he’ll return to them in his 1938/49 novella, “Farmer Giles of Ham”, where the practical farmer eventually not only tames the dragon, Chrysophylax (“Goldwatchman”, perhaps), but makes him disgorge much of his treasure—this time by doing nothing more than outfacing him and threatening him with his sword, “Tailbiter”.

It’s interesting, by the way, that, although, in “The Story of Sigurd”, the dragon talks, he has only one short speech:  a curse on anyone who touches his gold, whereas, in perhaps the greatest draconic influence upon Tolkien, Beowulf, another wyrm who enjoys lying on a hoard, is mute.

Smaug, in The Hobbit, however, is not only positively talky, but, like Saruman in The Lord of the Rings, his voice and manner have their own dangerously persuasive power, at one point in his conversation with Bilbo even beginning to seed Bilbo’s mind with doubts about the dwarves Bilbo accompanies (The Hobbit, Chapter 12, “Inside Information”).

Chrysophylax, in “Farmer Giles of Ham” is even more talkative than Smaug, and I wonder about the model for these chatty beasts.  Tolkien was a great fan of Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932) and of his well-known children’s book, The Wind in the Willows (1908),

mentioning in a letter to Christopher Tolkien that Elspeth Grahame, Grahame’s widow, is publishing a book with other stories about the main characters of The Wind in the Willows, a book which JRRT is very eager to obtain (letter to Christopher Tolkien, 31 July, 1944, Letters, 128).  In 1898, Grahame published a collection of stories, Dream Days,

which included “The Reluctant Dragon”, in which we see another very loquacious beast,

(from the original book, illustrated by Maxfield Parrish)

(I couldn’t resist including E.H. Shepard’s 1938 version)

but rather more like the ultimately rather timid dragon of “Farmer Giles” than the grim and mute creature of Beowulf or the more-than-a-little-pleased-with-himself Smaug, but, in his garrulousness, could he have been a model for Smaug?  (You can make your own comparison with:  https://www.gutenberg.org/files/35187/35187-h/35187-h.htm )

To this we add perhaps not a model, but a parallel:  Thorin as becoming a kind of dwarvish dragon in his obsession with the Arkenstone.  Fafnir dies with a curse, however, the Beowulf beast dies killing Beowulf, and Smaug dies destroying Lake-town,

but, in his own last moments, Thorin escapes such a poisonous model, saying to Bilbo:

“Farewell, good thief…I go now to the halls of waiting to sit beside my fathers, until the world is renewed.  Since I leave now all gold and silver, and go where it is of little worth, I wish to part in friendship from you, and I would take back my words and deeds at the Gate.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 18, “The Return Journey”)

(Darrell Sweet—you can read a little about him here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darrell_K._Sweet )

And so “Why a dragon?”—and not “Why No a Hippogriff?”

(artist? so far, I haven’t found one–a pity, too, as it’s quite a splendid illustration and I’ll love to mention the author!)

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

Stay well,

Remember not to laugh at live dragons,

And remember, as well, that there’s

MTCIDC

O

By Ear (3)

21 Wednesday May 2025

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Welcome, dear readers, as always.

In the closing of the second part of this little series, I quoted Marcus Antonius in his funeral oration upon Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s play of the same name.

It is a masterpiece, both in its design and in its deception:  saying one thing for the assassins, led by Brutus, to hear, and, on the other, poisoning the common people against the assassins, originally seen as liberators of the Republic.  You probably remember its opening:

“Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears:

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him:

The euill that men do, liues after them,

The good is oft enterred with their bones,

So let it be with Caesar. The Noble Brutus,

Hath told you Caesar was Ambitious:

If it were so, it was a greeuous Fault,

And greeuously hath Caesar answer’d it.

Heere, vnder leaue of Brutus, and the rest

(For Brutus is an Honourable man,

So are they all; all Honourable men)

Come I to speake in Caesars Funerall.”

(Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene 2, from the First Folio, 1623, in the original spelling.  You can see it at my favorite site for the plays:  https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/JC_F1/scene/3.2/index.html )

Speech with a deceptive goal is a theme of this series, as, in the first part, were poison–and ears.

In the scene in Shakespeare’s play, Marcus Antonius plays a dangerous game.  In order to be able to speak, he has made a deal with the assassins of Caesar not to say anything inflammatory against them, and so we see those words “Honourable men” repeated, as if Antonius is going to praise them—while only burying Caesar, as he says—just the sort of thing which we can imagine the assassins wanted to hear.  And yet, as he continues, “Honourable men” gradually becomes ironic and, by the end of his speech, he controls the mob and it’s clear that the assassins are no longer considered liberators, but murderers, Antonius having successfully poisoned those lent ears against the very men who foolishly gave him leave to speak.

We began the series with poison—and Shakespeare:  literal poison (possibly henbane)

which, as Hamlet’s ghostly father tells Hamlet, had been administered to him through his ear by his own brother, Claudius, while he was napping in his garden

But, as we progressed, we moved from that chemical murder to a different kind of destruction, spiritual, in the case of Saruman in the second installment, and now, in the third and final installment, we move to the instrument of that poisoning, include a second poisoning victim, and find the mind behind it all and that mind’s method of persuasion, which, I would suggest, must be very like Antonius’ initial remarks, seeming to praise the assassins, but, just like his, with another motive underneath.

(JRRT)

When Saruman, failing to succeed with Theoden, has turned to Gandalf, Gandalf has alluded to his previous visit with Saruman, saying:

“What have you to say that you did not say at our last meeting?…Or, perhaps, you have things to unsay?”  (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 10, “The Voice of Saruman”)

That last meeting had ended with Gandalf’s imprisonment in the tower of Orthanc,

(the Hildebrandts)

but, before that, Saruman had tried to persuade Gandalf to become an ally, and not only of Saruman, but of someone else, his speech including these words:

“We can bide our time, we can keep our thoughts in our hearts, deploring evils done by the way, but approving the high and ultimate purpose:  Knowledge, Rule, Order; all the things we have so far striven in vain to accomplish…”  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 2, “The Council of Elrond”)

Gandalf’s reply then suggests that what Saruman is saying is not really his own argument:

“ ‘I have heard speeches of this kind before, but only in the mouths of emissaries sent from Mordor to deceive the ignorant.’ “

What is it in those words which betrays their original authorship?

In the draft of a letter to Peter Hastings, Tolkien wrote:

“Sauron was of course not ‘evil’ in origin.  He was a ‘spirit’ corrupted by the Prime Dark Lord…Morgoth.  …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)

What Gandalf is actually hearing then is the thinking of Sauron and his “high and ultimate purpose”, but wrapped in words which will sound familiar to Saruman and appeal to his increasing arrogance—those words “high and ultimate purpose” echo Saruman’s depiction later in the story of just who the Istari are:

“Are we not both members of a high and ancient order, most excellent in Middle-earth?”  (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 10, “The Voice of Saruman”)

That “order” was not sent to Middle-earth for “Knowledge, Rule, Order”, however, as this entry in the Appendices to The Lord of the Rings tells us:

“When maybe a thousand years had passed, and the first shadow had fallen on Greenwood the Great, the Istari, or Wizards appeared in Middle-earth.  It was afterwards said that they came out of the Far West and were messengers sent to contest the power of Sauron, and to unite all those who had the will to resist him; but they were forbidden to match his power with power, or to seek to dominate Elves or Men by force and fear.”  (The Lord of the Rings, Appendix B: “The Third Age”)

Marcus Antonius has spoken indirectly to the assassins and directly to the mob, both through their ears, but Sauron’s words have reached Saruman through this—

(the Hildebrandts)

which we know that Saruman has had as it is flung through the doorway of Orthanc by Grima and almost brains Gandalf—

“With a cry Saruman fell back and crawled away.  At that moment a heavy shining thing came hurtling down from above.  It glanced off the iron rail, even as Saruman left it, passing close to Gandalf’s head, it smote the stair on which he stood.”

I never think of a palantir without thinking of another device used for conning unsuspecting victims—

Staring into the ball might have a kind of hypnotic effect, but it clearly also has the effect of focusing the will of another upon the victim—as Pippin found out to his grief:

“In a low hesitating voice Pippin began again, and his words grew clearer and stronger.  ‘I saw a dark sky, and tall battlements…And tiny stars.  It seemed very far away and long ago, yet hard and clear…Then he came.  He did not speak so that I could hear words.  He just looked and I understood…He said:  “Who are you?’  I still did not answer, but it hurt me horribly; and he pressed me, so I said:  ‘A hobbit.’  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”)

This isn’t Sauron’s only use of such a device for his poisoning—another palantir lies in Minas Tirith and it’s clear from its possessor, Denethor’s, speech how Sauron has reached him:

“Do I not know thee, Mithrandir?  Thy hope is to rule in my stead, to stand behind every throne, north, south, or west.  I have read thy mind and its policies…So!  With the left hand thou wouldst use me for a little while as a shield against Mordor, and with the right bring up this Ranger of the North to supplant me.”

And here we see how Sauron has distorted the original Istari goals, which Tolkien had described to Naomi Mitchison:

“They were thought to be Emissaries (in the terms of this tale from the Far West beyond the Sea), and their proper function, maintained by Gandalf and perverted by Saruman, was to encourage and bring out the native powers of the Enemies of Sauron.”  (letter to Naomi Mitchison, 25 April, 1954, Letters 269-270)

Denethor is correct in understanding that Gandalf—and supposedly all of the Istari—are meant to stand behind thrones—but to encourage their possessors to oppose Sauron, not to gain power for themselves, as Saruman deceived himself into thinking.  Denethor has not read Gandalf’s mind, but Sauron has definitely read Denethor’s—when Gandalf asks him what he wants, he replies:

“ ‘I would have things as they were in all the days of my life…and in the days of my longfathers before me:  to be the Lord of this City in peace, and leave my chair to a son after me, who would be his own master and no wizard’s pupil.”

The Stewards are not the kings of Gondor.  Although they have ruled for centuries, they are merely the lieutenants of the Numenorean kings, holding Gondor until a rightful king should appear, but it’s clear that Denethor has forgotten that, seeming to assume that he is the king—something surely in which Sauron has encouraged him .  And we see here another sore point:  Faramir.

In the midst of a complex scene in which Faramir reports that he had met Frodo, Denethor turns to him sharply:

“Your bearing is lowly in my presence, yet it is long since you turned from your own way at my counsel.  See, you have spoken skillfully, as ever; but I, have I not seen your eyes fixed on Mithrandir, seeking whether you said well or too much?  He has long had your heart in his keeping.”  (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 4, “The Siege of Gondor”)

So Sauron has spotted two weak points in Denethor:  a mistaken idea about his role in the governing of Gondor and his jealous attitude towards his younger son.  This almost leads to Faramir’s death by burning and certainly does his father’s.

(Robert Chronister—about whom I have so far found nothing, although it’s clear that he’s illustrated more than one scene from The Lord of the Rings.)

Marcus Antonius, one of Julius Caesar’s right-hand men, has tricked Caesar’s assassins into letting him speak,

initially using language which they want to hear, but, just below the surface, and increasingly, as he proceeds, his word choice turns the mob listening to those same words into a force which will help to drive the assassins from Rome and, eventually, in the case of two of the main assassins, Brutus,

(This is a very famous coin pattern.  On the obverse—the “heads”—we see what we presume is an image of Brutus, with the caption “Brut[us]” and his assertion that he has the state’s authority:  “Imp[erator]”, along with the name of the mint master, “L[ucius] Plaet[orius] Cest[ianus]”.  On the reverse—the “tails”—we see a shorthand version of the claim of the assassins:  “Eid[ibus] Mar[tis]”—“on the ides of March”, plus two Roman “pugiones”—military daggers—bracketing a “liberty cap”—used in the ceremony of freeing a slave—hence:  “On the Ides of March, I/we, by the use of these daggers, freed Rome from its slavery (to Caesar)” )

and Cassius,

(Unfortunately, we have no definite image of Cassius—this is a coin minted on his authority by his deputy, Marcus Servilius.  The obverse has an image of “Libertas”, along with an abbreviated form of his name, “C[aius] Cassi[us]”, and that claim to have the authority of the state:  “Imp[erator]”.  The reverse has the name of his lieutenant, “M[arcus] Servilius”, his deputy rank “Leg[atus]” and what’s called an “aplustre”, which is the decorative stern of a Roman warship, thought to commemorate Cassius’ defeat of the navy of Rhodes.)

to defeat and suicide—Marcus Antonius’ ear-poison working very effectively.

For Middle-earth, there is a happier ending.  The real goal of sending the Istari succeeds, even with the treachery of Saruman, brought about through the poison introduced and spread by Sauron through the palantiri, which affects Denethor, as well, teaching us that toxicity is just as deadly in word as it is in deed.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Stay well,

Lend no one your ears unless you’re clear what he/she wants,

And remember that, as ever, there’s

MTCIDC

O

By Ear (2)

14 Wednesday May 2025

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Welcome, dear readers, as always.

In Part 1 of this posting, I began talking about ear poisons, beginning with the actual poisoning of Hamlet’s father by Hamlet’s uncle, Claudius, who, according to Hamlet’s father’s ghost:

“Sleeping within my orchard,

My custom always of the afternoon,

Upon my secure hour, thy uncle stole

With juice of cursèd hebona in a vial,

And in the porches of my ears did pour

The lep’rous distilment…” (Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5)

But there are poisons just as potent which come in the form of poisonous words, as we began to see in Saruman’s attempts to win over Theoden,

(Francesco Amadio)

and, failing that, with Gandalf:

“Gandalf stirred, and looked up.  ‘What have you to say that you did not say at our last meeting?’ he asked.  ‘Or, perhaps, you have things to unsay?’ “

In their last meeting, Gandalf became Saruman’s prisoner in Orthanc—

(the Hildebrandts)

but the words which Saruman employed then were revealing, as Gandalf says, having listened to Saruman’s plea:

“A new Power is rising…We may join with that Power.  It would be wise, Gandalf.  There is hope that way.  Its victory is at hand; and there will be rich reward for those that aid it.  As the Power grows, its proved friends will also grow; and the Wise, such as you and I, may with patience come at last to direct its courses, to control it.  We can bide our time, we can keep our thoughts in our hearts, deploring maybe evils done by the way, but approving the high and ultimate purpose:  Knowledge, Rule, Order; all the things that we have so far striven in vain to accomplish, hindered rather than helped by our weak or idle friends.  There need not be, there would not be, any real change in our designs, only in our means.”  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 2, “The Counsel of Elrond”)

When attempting to win over Theoden, Saruman had chosen words which suggested how much Saruman honored and respected him, defending himself from his own aggressive actions by saying that, if he had used violence against Rohan, so had Rohan used violence in the past, and now, together, he and Theoden could make peace—and therefore avoid what Saruman calls “the ruin that draws nigh inevitably”, even implying a bond between them, changing his former address from “you” to “we” and “our”—

“Shall we make our counsels together against evil days, and repair our injuries with such good will that our estates shall both come to fairer flower than ever before?”

When that hadn’t worked, Saruman had turned to Gandalf, at whom he had sneered only moments before, saying now that Gandalf had “a noble mind and eyes that look both deep and far”—in other words, attempting the same flattery which had failed with Theoden.  And he tried the same kind of shift from “you” to “we” here:

“I fear that in my eagerness to persuade you, I lost patience.  And indeed I regret it.  For I bore you no ill-will; and even now I bear none, though you return to me in the company of the violent and the ignorant.  How should I?  Are we not both members of a high and ancient order, most excellent in Middle-earth?”

That word “order” reminds us of something which Gandalf had said to Frodo long before about Saruman:

“He is the chief of my order and the head of the Council…The lore of the Elven-rings, great and small, is his province.”

(Alan Lee)

And yet:

“I might perhaps have consulted [him], but something always held me back.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 2, “The Shadow of the Past”)

Gandalf has, then, long had doubts about Saruman, even though Saruman was head of that “order”. 

But what, actually, was that “order”?

“When maybe a thousand years had passed, and the first shadow had fallen on Greenwood the Great, the Istari, or Wizards appeared in Middle-earth.  It was afterwards said that they came out of the Far West and were messengers sent to contest the power of Sauron, and to unite all those who had the will to resist him; but they were forbidden to match his power with power, or to seek to dominate Elves or Men by force and fear.”  (The Lord of the Rings, Appendix B: “The Third Age”)

Recall, then, what Saruman has so far done:

1. he has turned Isengard into a miniature version of Mordor, ravaging the surrounding landscape

2. roused the Dunlendings to attack Rohan

3. created his own army of orcs—and perhaps done something worse to them than simply create them, if Treebeard’s thoughts are true (“Worse than that:  he has been doing something to them; something dangerous…For these Isengarders are more like wicked men.”  The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 4, “Treebeard”)

4. attacked Rohan and, in the process, Theoden’s son, Theodred, has been killed

5. not to mention that, when Gandalf has resisted his proposals, Saruman has imprisoned him

And so, how believable could anything Saruman says be?  And yet he persists:

“Our friendship would profit us both alike.  Much we could still accomplish together, to heal the disorders of the world.  Let us understand one another, and dismiss from thought these lesser folk!  Let them wait on our decisions!  For the common good I am willing to redress the past, and to receive you.  Will you not consult with me?  Will you not come up?”

In other words, of everything which Saruman, as one of the Istari, has been sent to do, he has done the opposite—and persists, even when he has failed in his plans and is now a prisoner in his own domain.

(Carl Lundgren–you can read about him here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Lundgren_(illustrator) )

Yet his tone, for the moment, still has the remains of its ability to charm:

“So great was the power that Saruman exerted in this last effort that none that stood within hearing were unmoved.  But now the spell was wholly different.  They heard the gentle remonstrance of a kindly king with an erring but much-loved minister.  But they were shut out, listening at a door to words not meant for them…”

Until—

“Then Gandalf laughed.  The fantasy vanished like a puff of smoke.”

And what follows reveals not only why Gandalf declines the offer, but who Gandalf believes lies behind all of those empty words about “heal[ing] the disorders of the world” and “the common good” and, earlier, “knowledge, rule, order”—poisonous words when coming from the mouth of Saruman:

“I keep a clearer memory of your arguments, [says Gandalf] and deeds, than you suppose.  When last I visited you, you were the jailor of Mordor, and there I was to be sent.”

Saruman’s reaction is predictable:  each time he finds that his magic tones do not lull the listener, he falls into a rage, but, this time, there is something else mixed with it:

“A shadow passed over Saruman’s face; then it went deadly white.  Before he could conceal it, they saw through the mask the anguish of a mind in doubt, loathing to stay and dreading to leave its refuge.  For a second he hesitated, and no one breathed.  Then he spoke, and his voice was shrill and cold.  Pride and hate were conquering him.”

Pride and hate, but there is something more, as Gandalf warns him:

“ ‘Reasons for leaving you can see from your windows…

(Ted Nasmith)

Others will occur to your thought.  Your servants are destroyed and scattered; your neighbors you have made your enemies; and you have cheated your new master, or tried to do so.  When his eye turns hither, it will be the red eye of wrath.’ “

Gandalf snaps Saruman’s staff and, as if on-cue:

“With a cry Saruman fell back and crawled away.  At that moment a heavy shining thing came hurtling down from above.  It glanced off the iron rail, even as Saruman left it, passing close to Gandalf’s head, it smote the stair on which he stood.”

What this can be and how it figures in all of this poison will appear in the final part of this short series—

(the Hildebrandts)

As ever, thanks for reading.

Stay well,

Remember what Marcus Antonius says to the mob in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, “The evil that men do lives after them…” when he is supposedly only burying Caesar, not praising him…

And remember, as well, that there’s

MTCIDC,

O

By Ear (1)

07 Wednesday May 2025

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Welcome, dear readers, as always.

No matter how often I read or see the play, I’m always struck by how multifacted Hamlet is—a revenge tragedy, a murder mystery, a psychological study, a ghost story, all in one (and probably more than this list besides).  Tolkien was not a big fan of reading Shakespeare, but, seeing a performance in 1944, he wrote to his son, Christopher:   “Plain news is on the airgraph [a form of letter photographed onto microfilm, shipped, then printed out at its destination—called “V-Mail” in the US—a useful background:  https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/v-mail-photos/ ]; but the only event worth of talk was the performance of Hamlet which I had been to just before I wrote last.  I was full of it then…It was a very good performance, with a young rather fierce Hamlet; it was played fast without cuts; and it came out as a very exciting play.” (letter to Christopher Tolkien, 28 July, 1944, Letters, 126)

That ghost story is the explanation for the murder mystery, the victim being Hamlet’s father, Hamlet Senior, and the murderer being his brother, Claudius, the ghost telling Hamlet:

“Sleeping within my orchard,

My custom always of the afternoon,

Upon my secure hour, thy uncle stole

With juice of cursèd hebona in a vial,

And in the porches of my ears did pour

The lep’rous distillment, whose effect

Holds such an enmity with blood of man

That swift as quicksilver it courses through

The natural gates and alleys of the body,

And with a sudden vigor it doth possess

And curd like eager droppings into milk

The thin and wholesome blood; so did it mine,

And a most instant tetter barked about

Most lazarlike with vile and loathsome crust

All my smooth body.”  (Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5 from the 2nd Quarto, 1604—this is from my go-to Shakespeare internet site, which you can visit here:  https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/Ham_Q2/scene/index.html )

“Hebona” has been argued about for years, some scholars, seeing what appears to be a linguistic similarity with “henbane”,

have suggested that, as the poison, and, seeing its effects, I’m not surprised:

“As a result of this distinct chemical and pharmacological profile, overdoses can result not only in delirium, but also severe anticholinergic syndrome, coma, respiratory paralysis, and death.” (see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxidrome#Anticholinergic for lots more distressing symptoms on the way to the end—although some of the above description doesn’t appear to be present in such poisoning—“tetter” means a kind of skin eruption, which is why Hamlet Sr. uses“lazarlike”, meaning “leprous”.  For more on other possible poisons, see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebenon And for more on Shakespeare’s drugs, see:  https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140416-do-shakespeares-poisons-work ) 

One can see why Uncle Claudius uses the method he does:  he’s assuming that, if all the poison is absorbed, there will be no outside traces, which is why Hamlet Senior says, “’Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard/A serpent stung me” (although, given the usual nature of bites, one might have thought that someone would have checked for a snake bite wound, suggesting that Claudius was already prepared with a quick explanation for what had happened to his brother—“it is given out” sounds like palace propaganda, doesn’t it?).

Hamlet’s father is poisoned through the ear with an actual toxic substance, whatever it was, and that supposedly left no trace of the crime, but, in Tolkien’s own work, we see another ear poison, which also leaves no obvious physical trace, being administered by this—

(the Hildebrandts)

but which is just as deadly—spiritually.

We know from Gandalf (and the chapter title) that Saruman has an unusual weapon:

“ ‘What’s the danger?’ asked Pippin.  ‘Will he shoot at us, and pour fire out of the windows; or can he put a spell on us from a distance?’

‘The last is most likely, if you ride to his door with a light heart,’ said Gandalf…. ‘And Saruman has powers you do not guess:  Beware of his voice!’ “  (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 10, “The Voice of Saruman”)

We then see that voice in operation:

“ ‘But come now,’ said the soft voice.  ‘Two at least of you I know by name.  Gandalf I know too well to have much hope that he seeks help or counsel here.  But you, Theoden Lord of the Mark of Rohan, are declared by your noble devices, and still more by the fair countenance of the House of Eorl.  O worthy son of Thengel the Thrice-renowned!  Why have you not come before, and as a friend?  Much have I desired to see you, mightiest king of western lands, and especially in these latter years, to save you from the unwise and evil counsels that beset you!  Is it yet too late?  Despite the injuries that have been done to me, in which the men of Rohan, alas! have had some part, still I would save you, and deliver you from the ruin that draws nigh inevitably, if you ride upon this road which you have taken.  Indeed I alone can aid you now.’ “

The effect of this upon the Rohirrim is just what Saruman must have hoped for—and it underlines his method of address:

“The Riders stirred at first, murmuring with approval of the words of Saruman; and then they too were silent, as men spell-bound.  It seemed to them that Gandalf had never spoken so fair and fittingly to their lord.  Rough and proud now seemed all his dealings with Theoden.  And over their hearts crept a shadow, the fear of a great danger:  the end of the Mark in a darkness to which Gandalf was driving them, while Saruman stood beside a door of escape, holding it half open so that a ray of light came through…” 

Saruman has, by:

1. addressing Theoden in a stately way, almost overdoing it with his “Lord”, “noble”, “fair”, “worthy”, “mightiest”, suggesting that he has only the greatest respect for him

2. mentioning the defeat of his ravaging army and the destruction of his mini-Mordor as if they were “wrongs” done to him, rather than the treasonous behavior they actually represented

3. threatening doom awaiting the Mark

4. offering himself as the only savior,

turns himself from the Sauron he aspires to be into the gentle, admiring friend, who, though he has been harmed, is still willing to be that friend—and, in fact, the only friend for Theoden.  And, as the Rohirrim are meant to understand, this is all designed to be in contrast to Gandalf, that false savior.

(It’s clear that Saruman has been working to undercut Gandalf’s position in Rohan for some time previously:  see Theoden’s original greeting to Gandalf—prompted—and poisoned—by Grima in The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 6, “The King of the Golden Hall”.)

(Alan Lee)

Eomer, seeing Theoden silent, hesitating, tries to intervene, only to have that Voice—angered, but quickly controlled, turn everything rightly said against him into the “you do it, too” argument:

“ ‘But my lord of Rohan, am I to be called a murderer, because valiant men have fallen in battle?  If you go to war, needlessly, for I did not desire it, then men will be slain.  But if I am a murderer on that account, then all the House of Eorl is stained with murder; for they have fought many wars, and assailed many who defied them.’ “

It’s not just Saruman’s voice that one should be wary of–he is so skilled in deception—or so he thinks–that he can try to use such a cheap argument, then turn it around into what is intended to sound like a reasonable proposal:

“ ‘Yet with some they have afterwards made peace, none the worse for being politic.  I say, Theoden King:  shall we have peace and friendship, you and I?  It is ours to command.’ “

And notice how it’s now not “you”, but “we” and “ours”—any attack is being turned into “being politic” and not “you do it, too”, but “we all do it sometimes” and then we make peace and everything is fine.

Theoden’s response is not what Saruman expected, although, because Theoden had remained silent, we can imagine that Saruman was smiling quietly to himself in admiration of his own powers:

“ ‘We will have peace,’ said Theoden at last thickly and with an effort…’Yes, we will have peace,’ he said, now in a clear voice, ‘we will have peace, when you and all your works have perished—and the works of your dark master to whom you would deliver us.  You are a liar, Saruman, and a corrupter of men’s hearts…When you hang from a gibbet at your own window for the sport of your own crows, I will have peace with you and Orthanc…Turn elsewhither.  But I fear your voice has lost its charm.”

(Ted Nasmith—another side of this excellent artist)

The magic of that voice still lingers for a moment:

“The Riders gazed up at Theoden like men startled out of dream.  Harsh as an old raven’s their master’s voice sounded in their ears after the music of Saruman.”

But there is then a change in that music:

“But Saruman for a while was beside himself with wrath.  He leaned over the rail as if he would simite the King with his staff.  To some suddenly it seemed that they saw a snake coiling itself to strike.”

And Saruman becomes even more serpentine:

“ ‘Gibbets and crows!’ he hissed and they shuddered at the hideous change.’ “

Thwarted, we see him basically reverse his address to Theoden.  Where before Theoden was “Lord”, “noble”, “fair”, “worthy”, “mightiest”, now he is “dotard” and his “noble”, “fair” family becomes “the house of Eorl…but a thatched barn where brigands drink in the reek, and their brats roll on the floor among the dogs”.

He isn’t quite finished, however—

“ ‘But you, Gandalf!  For you at least I am grieved, feeling for your shame.  How comes it that you can endure such company?  For you are proud, Gandalf—and not without reason, having a noble mind and eyes that look both deep and far.  Even now will you not listen to my counsel?’ “

Theoden’s eventual reply was bitter—and biting—but Gandalf’s reaction is of a different sort altogether—though it still has a sting:

“Gandalf stirred, and looked up.  ‘What have you to say that you did not say at our last meeting?’ he asked.  ‘Or, perhaps, you have things to unsay?’ “

That last meeting saw Gandalf Saruman’s prisoner on the top of Orthanc–

(the Hildebrandts)

but what was it which Saruman said, how was it put, and what or who might lie behind it, will be the subject of Part 2 of this posting.

Thanks for reading, as always.

Stay well,

Remember that line from another Shakespeare play, “All that glisters is not gold”,

And also remember that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

Lingua Orca

16 Wednesday Apr 2025

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Welcome, dear readers, as always.

I begin this posting with a riddle:  how are Tolkien and Sauron alike? 

But we’ll come back to that.

Before that, I want to talk about the title of this posting. 

When Boromir is killed by the Orcs.

(Ted Nasmith)

Merry and Pippin are captured and carried off across country,

(Denis Gordeev)

Pippin waking eventually to this—

“He struggled a little, quite uselessly.  One of the Orcs sitting near laughed and said something to a companion in their abominable language..  ‘Rest while you can, little fool!’ he then said to Pippin, in the Common Speech, which he made almost as hideous as his own language.”

But what does that “abominable language” sound like?  Another Orc, equally gentle, gives us an example.

“ ‘If I had my way, you’d wish that you were dead now,’ said the other….’Don’t draw attention to yourself, or I may forget my orders,’ he hissed.  Curse the Isengarders!  Ugluk u bagronk sha pushdug Saruman-glob bubhosh skai’:  he passed into a long angry speech in his own tongue that slowly died away into muttering and snarling.”

One word is easy to pick out, of course—Saruman—but the rest calls for translating, something which Tolkien doesn’t provide in The Lord of the Rings, but there are, in fact, at least three translations:

1. “Ugluk to the cesspool, sha!  the dungfilth; the great Saruman-fool, skai!”  which comes from a draft of Appendix F of The Peoples of Middle-earth

2. “Ugluk to the dung-pit with stinking Saruman-filth—pig-guts, gah!”  which is a translation by Carl Hostetter in Vinyar Tengwar 26

3. “Ugluk to torture(chamber) with stinking Saruman-filth.  Dung-heap.  Skai!”  which is from Parma Eldalamberon XVII

(You can see the whole reference here:  https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Ugl%C3%BAk_u_bagronk_sha_pushdug_Saruman-glob_b%C3%BAbhosh_skai   For a bit more, including JRRT’s comment on Orkish, suggesting that he has bowdlerized this a bit in that 3rd translation, see:  https://glaemscrafu.jrrvf.com/english/ugluk.html )

Pippin can’t understand a word of this—

“Terrified Pippin lay still, though the pain at his wrists and ankles was growing, and the stones beneath him were boring into his back.  To take his mind off himself he listened intently to all that he could hear.  There were many voices round about, and though orc-speech sounded at all times full of hate and anger, it seemed plain that something like a quarrel had begun, and was getting hotter.” 

but still senses that there is strong emotion behind the Orcs’ words and part of how that “hate and anger” was conveyed to Pippin probably from the very sounds of the language—full of the hissing SH—sha, push-dug, bub-hosh—and words of only one or two syllables—Ug-luk, ba-gronk, sha, push-dug, bub-hosh, skai, making it sound abrupt.  And you can then see that 3-syllable “Saruman” was clearly a foreign word, which was then turned into an Orkish compound with that final single-syllable “glob”.

And yet:

“To Pippin’s surprise he found that much of the talk was intelligible; many of the Orcs were using ordinary language.”

“ordinary language” here is Pippin’s tongue—the Common Speech of Middle-earth (“Westron”)—which is also the language in which The Lord of the Rings was supposed  originally to have been written.

Dazed as he might be (“I suppose I was knocked on the head” he says to himself when he first wakes), Pippin, listening, comes to a clever conclusion as to why the Common Speech is employed by the Orcs who, after all, appear to have their own language:

“Apparently the members of two or three quite different tribes were present, and they could not understand one another’s orc-speech.”  (all of the above quotations from The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 3, “The Uruk-hai”)

It’s interesting to see what the Orcs are doing here:  finding a way to converse because their own languages—or at least their dialects—are not mutually intelligible.

This has been a problem throughout history, wherever one people meets another with which it doesn’t share a language.

Several different approaches have been created.

On the Great Plains of the US West, for example,

Native Americans produced a kind of universal sign language, which employed standardized gestures for common concepts and ideas.  Here’s a chart of a few of those gestures—

and here’s a possible extension—although I must say that it strikes me that it would take two very linguistically talented people, with a wide gesture vocabulary, to convey all of this.

(You can read about it here, which includes a wonderful piece of film in which various Native Americans and a seemingly-fluent US Government representative converse in gesture:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plains_Indian_Sign_Language )

Besides gesture, people have constructed what’s called a “lingua franca”—literally “French tongue”—that is, a kind of trade tongue, which might have a base in one language, but which then borrows words from other regional languages to build its working vocabulary.  The term comes from such a language employed from the early medieval period up into the 19th century in the Mediterranean, “franca” being used really to mean not “French” so much as “foreign”.    (You can read more about it here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca )

In contemporary Papua/New Guinea,

there is the English-based Tok Pisin, which has become so useful that it has become the first language of some groups.  (For more, see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tok_Pisin , which includes a demonstration of TP as spoken, although the background noise makes it a little difficult to hear.  Fortunately, there are a fair number of YouTube videos, should you want to hear more—and I hope you do.  YouTube is full of languages, both living and now no longer in use—I won’t say “dead”, because, if any language is still comprehensible, even if the last speakers are gone, I wouldn’t write an epitaph for it, myself– and we’re so lucky to be given so much to learn and understand.)

The Orcs, however, have simply resorted to employing another language entirely—although it would be interesting to see whether, had we more of their speech, we might find elements from other languages—there’s a clue in that “Saruman-glob”, where the speaker takes a word from another language and simply attaches an Orc word to it.

What was that “orc-speech”, which Pippin couldn’t understand?

“The Orcs were first bred by the Dark Power of the North in the Elder Days.  It is said that they had no language of their own, but took what they could of other languages and perverted it to their own liking, yet they made only brutal jargons, scarcely sufficient even for their own needs, unless it were for curses and abuse.  And these creatures, being filled with malice, hating even their own kind, quickly developed as many barbarous dialects as there were groups or settlements of their race, so that their Orkish speech was of little use to them in intercourse between different tribes.”

And so what we’re seeing is that the Orcs were actually developing a series of languages rather like linguae francae—basing them on whatever other language was locally available, then adding the odd curse or form of abuse which appealed to them, all of which turned their speech, even if once based upon a common borrowed language, into something incomprehensible to others from the same race.

It’s clear that Sauron, from whom Saruman got his definition of what Saruman claimed was always the goal of the Istari:  “Knowledge, Rule, Order”, wished Rule and Order to be at the heart of his dominion and therefore:

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

but the power of the Linguae Orcae, as we can call them, won out:

“…but [Sauron] failed in that purpose.  From the Black Speech, however, were derived many of the words that were in the Third Age wide-spread among the Orcs, such as ghash, ‘fire’, but after the first overthrow of Sauron this language in its ancient form was forgotten by all but the Nazgul.” 

And so even their master’s invention became nothing more than a vocab pool, from which to draw that which the Orcs fancied—and we know their preferences.

It’s no wonder, then, that

“So it was that in the Third Age Orcs used for communication between breed and breed the Westron tongue; and many indeed of the older tribes, such as those that still lingered in the North and in the Misty Mountains, had long used the Westron as their native language…”—just like those for whom Tok Pisin had moved from a trade tongue to a first tongue—but here’s an Orkish difference:  “though in such a fashion as to make it hardly less lovely than Orkish.” (all quotations from “The Orcs were first bred…” on from The Lord of the Rings, Appendix F)

And the answer to the riddle—I think that you’ve guessed it already:  “How are Tolkien and Sauron alike?”  Both were creators of languages, the difference being that it seems that virtually everyone in Middle-earth, from Elves to Dwarves to Ents to Orcs, speaks Westron, while no one speaks the Black Speech but Sauron’s last and soon to be lost, enslaved kings, the Nazgul.

(Denis Gordeev)

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Stay well,

Consider the endless borrowings which English has made from world languages,

And remember that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

Lud-ite?

29 Wednesday Jan 2025

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Welcome, as ever, dear readers.

Perhaps you’ve heard someone—often, I would say, an older person—who, confronted with something electronic, will say, “I’m not a Luddite, but…”

It’s taken to mean “I’m not against technology, but…”

But the history of the word casts a shadow on that disclaimer, as the real Luddites were very much against technology—technology which put them out of work and set them and their families to starve—or to be worked to death in the new factories.  (Charles Dickens captures a little of this in Hard Times, 1854:  https://archive.org/details/hardtimes0000char_w0u2/page/n11/mode/2up )

It all began with wool.

Wool production had made certain elements of medieval England very rich.

At the same time, because it was such a labor-intensive industry, it kept many ordinary people employed in everything from raising sheep to sheering, washing, carding, spinning, and weaving, almost all of which you can see in this illustration.

The demand for more and more wool and wool products in the later 18th century brought about the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, when clever men began to invent devices which sped up the originally slow process of wool production, creating machines and then factories.

(This is a room in Quarry Bank, a wool mill complex in Cheshire, just a few miles from where Tolkien grew up, in Manchester.  It is held by the National Trust and, if like me, you’re interested in the history of the Industrial Revolution, you’ll want to learn more at:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarry_Bank_Mill )

Such places not only sped up production, but also cut down on the number of people needed to process the wool, which soon began to trouble the many who once lived by the old methods. 

As early as 1768, there had been attacks on machines and the name “Ludd” had originally been attached to an apprentice, “Ned Ludd”, who had supposedly smashed two knitting machines, called “stocking frames” in 1779.

In 1811, things had reached a stage where organized violence against machines, factories, and even factory-owners, increased and “King Ludd” or “General Ludd” became a kind of meme for the anti-industrial movement.  (You can read more here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite )

This imaginary Ludd is, however, only one of a number of figures under that name.  There is, for instance, the Biblical Lud, the son of Shem, the son of Noah.

(from the wonderful mosaics of Monreale, in Sicily—Noah, we’re told, got drunk and his embarrassed sons are covering him up—see Genesis 9.20-23 for details)

There is Lud, son of Heli, and king of Britain, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 12th century Historia Regum Britanniae, the founder of London, and buried at Ludgate, of course.  (You can read, in a 1904 translation, about Lud in Historia 3.20 here:  https://archive.org/details/geoffreyofmonmou00geofuoft/geoffreyofmonmou00geofuoft/page/80/mode/2up

(as reconstructed in 1895—you can read more about the site here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludgate  including the actual etymology of the name)

And then there’s Lud-in-the-Mist, a 1926 fantasy novel

by Hope Mirrlees (1887-1978),

where Lud is the name of a town in the imaginary country of Dorimare.

(Ryuk-Duck, but, when I’ve gone to DeviantArt, I’ve been unable to locate anything more.)

Mirrlees had published two previous novels, Madeleine:  One of Love’s Jansenists (1919)

and The Counterplot (1924),

as well as a rather complex “modernist” poem, Paris (1920),

but this was her only fantasy novel. 

(You can read all four of these four works here:  Madeleine https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/65926/pg65926-images.html   Paris https://www.paris-a-poem.com/ —this is, by the way, a real work of scholarship and a very useful way to approach this poem—The Counterplot https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/63935/pg63935-images.html and Lud-in-the-Mist https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/68061/pg68061-images.html  You can read more about the author here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hope_Mirrlees )

I’ve just finished Lud-in-the-Mist, which, after disappearing for about 50 years, resurfaced in a first reprint in 1970, and several more, in 2000, 2005, and 2013.  The 2005 reprint had very distinguished opening matter:  a foreward by Neil Gaiman and an introduction by Douglas Anderson, of The Annotated Hobbit.  Gaiman has said of Lud-in-the-Mist that it’s “My favourite fairy tale/detective novel/history/fantasy”  (quoted from:  https://radicalreads.com/neil-gaiman-favorite-books/ ) and I would agree that it’s a combination at least of fairy tale and fantasy and there is a sort of detective story mixed in, but I’m not so sure that this all comes together for me as it clearly has for him.

The fantasy/fairy tale lies in the basic setting that:  Dorimare is an imaginary country and Lud-in-the-Mist is its capital, sitting at the meeting of two rivers:  Dapple and Dawl.  The Dawl seems to be the usual, expected kind of river, flowing southwards to the sea from somewhere inland, but the Dapple

“…had its source in Fairyland (from a salt inland sea, the geographers held) and flowed subterraneously under the Debatable Hills, was a humble little stream, and played no part in the commercial life of the town. But an old maxim of Dorimare bade one never forget that ‘The Dapple flows into the Dawl.’ It had come to be employed when one wanted to show the inadvisability of despising the services of humble agents; but, possibly, it had originally another application.”

This is at the very beginning of the second chapter, and already sets the tone:  Dorimare may be a picturesque little country on a river so broad that the town is also a seaport, although 20 miles from the actual sea, but that broad river is fed, in part, by a second stream, one which comes from the west (and the West, of course, is always a place perhaps to be dreaded, as it is often the direction to which the dead go in many folk traditions, as well as being the home of weird, otherworldly folk, the sort of people and creatures that voyagers west, like St Brendan

and Oisin, of the Irish Fenian Cycle, and Yeats’ early The Wanderings of Usheen, 1889, which you can read here:  https://www.gutenberg.org/files/38877/38877-h/38877-h.htm#THE_WANDERINGS_OF_USHEEN encounter. )  The river’s beginning lies, as well, in a place not visited by the Dorimarites for hundreds of years, Fairyland, and much of the book is taken up with “fairy fruit”, which is banned in Dorimare, along with any dealings or even mentions of fairies, but somehow keeps appearing and seriously disturbing the minds of those who consume it—as if the Dapple, under its pretty name, is actually underflowing and perhaps undercutting all of Dorimare.

The detective story seems almost a by-blow of the plot, although it involves a major character, Endymion Leer, who is a physician in Lud-in-the-Mist and, as the plot develops, much more, although I find that his role in the mystery somewhat trivializes the greater role he claims for himself near the end of the book at his trial for murder. 

I won’t summarize the complicated plot—you can read a brief and, I fear, inadequate précis here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lud-in-the-Mist and there are longer summaries to be had at various fantasy sites, although I find the ones I read, for me, too intent upon constructing complex, deeper meanings than I think the book really holds.

Instead, as I always do with reviews—films and books—I would encourage you to read it for yourself and come to your own conclusion.

There’s dry, quirky humor on the part of the narrator, some lush nature writing, a vivid depiction of what Fairyland might be like (unpleasant to nightmarish, I found it), and an appealing character in the protagonist, Nathaniel Chanticleer, who begins conventionally as a comfortable petit bourgeois (although he does have something haunting him), but grows into a feeling being through the fate of his son, Ranulph, all of which are at least enough to lure you in and perhaps keep you reading, as they did me.

So, as always, thanks for reading,

Wonder what fairy fruit might do to you,

And remember that, as ever, there’s

MTCIDC

O

PS

If going west myself, I should meet Hope Mirrlees, I would request that, should she, in some spiritual form, ever do a revised edition, she might include a map—a nice end paper one would do—as it would definitely help to keep one oriented in the characters’ travels around Dorimare.

PPS

For a powerful speech by Neil Gaiman on writing and reading and fantasy see:  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/15/neil-gaiman-future-libraries-reading-daydreaming