Green and Quiet.1

05 Wednesday Sep 2018

Posted by Ollamh in Economics in Middle-earth, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History

Tags

Birmingham, Charles Dickens, Cottage industry, factories, Goblins, Hard Times, Hilary Tolkien, I Can't Find Brummagem, Industrial Revolution, Isengard, James Dobbs, John Ezard, Mabel Tolkien, Mills, Ornthanc, Sarehole, Sharkey, The Hobbit, The Scouring of the Shire, Tolkien, World War I

As always, dear readers, welcome.

We’ve always loved the lines

“By some curious chance one morning long ago in the quiet of the world, when there was less noise and more green…”

which open the paragraph in which Gandalf first appears in The Hobbit and the story actually begins.

For JRRT, green and quiet are the ideal, but things have clearly changed—as this sentence implies, now there is more noise and less quiet. In our time—and even before Tolkien’s childhood in the late 19^th century—the green and quiet were and are going thanks to the Industrial Revolution. Or so we thought. Reading Tolkien, however, we begin to believe that it’s goblins:

“Now goblins are cruel, wicked, and bad-hearted. They make no beautiful things, but they make many clever ones. They can tunnel and mine as well as any but the most skilled dwarves, when they take the trouble, though they are usually untidy and dirty. Hammers, axes, swords, daggers, pickaxes, tongs, and also instruments of torture, they make very well, or get other people to do the work to make to their design, prisoners and slaves that have to work till they die for want of air and light. It is not unlikely that they have invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them, and also not working with their own hands more than they could help; but in those days and those wild parts they had not advanced (as it is called) so far.” (The Hobbit, Chapter Four, “Over Hill and Under Hill”)

In our last posting, we had linked this passage with the invention of poison gases by German scientists and their use first by German soldiers and then by the Allies in the Great War, but we would like to add to that idea that this may be in reality a larger indictment, of the Industrial Revolution and the effects it had had upon the English countryside.

This revolution had begun in the 18^th century, in Britain, when the country was first becoming a major mercantile and colonial power and the demand for British goods—especially British wool and cloth—was growing. A succession of inventions from the 1760s on had turned a (literal) “cottage industry” of clothing-making—

into something which produced thread and cloth on a massive scale in early factories.

These factories, often called “mills” because of their original use of waterpower,

as was done in the small factories which, all the way back to Roman times, had ground grain into flour,

could also, in time, be run by steam power.

Mills of this sort soon became prototypes for factories built to mass-produce anything

and soon the air around cities was thick with smoke and industrial waste.

With no laws to stop them, mill/factory owners bought up land, employed people (many of them ex-cottage workers thrown out of work by the very factories they now sought work in) in near-slave conditions—including children–and polluted water and air with no fear of punishment. Here is Charles Dickens’ description of a town filled such places, from his 1854 novel, Hard Times:

“It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.”

Set this next to Gandalf’s description of what had happened to Isengard and you can see what we mean about goblins (here, Saruman and his orcs—but JRRT sometimes uses goblin and orc interchangeably) as what has destroyed the quiet and green:

“I looked on it and saw that, whereas it had once been green and fair, it was now filled with pits and forges…Over all his works a dark smoke hung and wrapped itself about the sides of Orthanc.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 3, “The Council of Elrond”)

In 1895, Tolkien’s mother, Mabel,

who had been living in South Africa with her husband, brought her two sons, JRRT and Hilary, to the Birmingham area of England for a visit to relatives.

Unfortunately, while they were gone, Tolkien’s father died of rheumatic fever. Mabel decided to stay in England and found a place for her sons and herself at Sarehole, southeast of Birmingham itself.

Birmingham was a booming product of that Industrial Revolution, which we’re sure is why Mabel chose a tiny village several miles away.

Birmingham was also an ancient settlement, (here’s a LINK to a minitour of the medieval town) but had mushroomed, both in factories and population even at the beginning of the 19^th century, as this verse from a music hall song from 1828 by James Dobbs depicts:

‘I remember one John Growse,
Who buckles made in Brummagem,
He built himself a country house,
To be out of the smoke of Brummagem
But though John’s country house stands still,
The town itself has walked up hill,
Now he lives beside a smoky mill,
In the middle of the streets of Brummagem.”

(James Dobbs (1781-1837), “I Can’t Find Brummagem”. Brummagem is an old local nickname for Birmingham. Here’s a LINK so that you can see the whole song and its tune, which we know as “Duncan Grey”. If you go to the link, you’ll notice we’ve made a few editorial additions, which we knew from another version of the song and which help the words to better fit the tune.)

And yet, although Sarehole had an old mill, it was not like those in Birmingham or even in Dickens,

and, in later years, in fact, Tolkien saw the little village beyond it as a kind of paradise, as he said in an interview:

‘It was a kind of lost paradise,’ he said. ‘There was an old mill that really did grind corn with two millers, a great big pond with swans on it, a sandpit, a wonderful dell with flowers, a few old-fashioned village houses and, further away, a stream with another mill. I always knew it would go – and it did.’

(This is taken from an article by John Ezard in The Guardian for 28 December, 1991—here’s a LINK so that you can read all of it.)

This strong contrast between green and quiet and its opposites, as seen in Sarehole versus Birmingham, early in Tolkien’s life, and the two stages of Isengard, will appear again in the Shire as Saruman/Sharkey has planned. The green and quiet is literally uprooted and even Sandyman’s old mill is a victim of the goblinesque work as Farmer Cotton says:

“But since Sharkey came they don’t grind no more corn at all. They’re always a-hammering and a-letting out a smoke and stench, and there’s no peace even at night in Hobbiton. And they pour out filth a purpose; they’ve fouled all the lower Water, and it’s getting down into Brandywine.”

(The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 8, “The Scouring of the Shire”)

Those who work for Sharkey are men, but, as you can see, under his influence, they act very much like those destructive goblins with which we began. For all that he rode in automobiles and trains and used telephones and typewriters, JRRT was never quite happy in the modern world and, considering that the goblins seemed always poised to ruin more green and produce more noise at the command of a modern-day Saruman, it’s perhaps not surprising. It’s also not surprising, we would add, that his favorite creatures, trees, are the ones who destroy Saruman’s handiwork at Isengard and return it to a leafy park.

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

In our next, we want to talk about another aspect of quiet which had changed from Tolkien’s childhood and may be a reason why there are Rohirrim and why JRRT himself enlisted in the volunteer cavalry…

Gobs and Hobs.2

29 Wednesday Aug 2018

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Fairy Tales and Myths, J.R.R. Tolkien, Language, Literary History

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A Midsummer Night's Dream, Arthur Rackham, Christina Rossetti, Elf Child, Fairies, Fairy Tale, George Macdonald, Goblin Feet, Goblin Market, Goblins, Historia Ecclesiastica, Hobgoblin, James Whitcomb Riley, John Garth, John Singer Sargent, King Edward's Horse, Little Orphan Annie, Orderic Vitalis, Pat Walsh, Psalm 91, Robin Goodfellow, The Crowfield Curse, The Crowfield Demon, The Hob and the Deerman, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Princess and the Goblin, Tolkien, Tolkien and the Great War, Tolkien at Exeter College

As always, dear Readers, welcome!

In our last, we were talking about JRRT’s 1915 poem, “Goblin Feet” its origins, original publication, and context.

In this, we want to think out loud a bit about the idea of goblins in general.

Although the poem was entitled “Goblin Feet”, Tolkien seemed not to focus so much on goblins—there are also other creatures from the Otherworld, including fairies and gnomes and even leprechauns (not to mention bats—called by their old country name “flitter-mice”—and beetles and coneys).

In this posting, however, we’re going to stick to goblins—well, and hobgoblins—but more about those later.

We first encountered goblins as very small children when a teacher read us a poem by the American poet, James Whitcomb Riley (1849-1916).

(We can’t resist a second picture. This is by one of our favorite late-19^th-early-20^th-c. American Painters, John Singer Sargent—1856-1925.)

This poem, first entitled “Elf Child”, originally appeared in a newspaper in 1885. After that, it was meant to be “Little Orphan Allie”, but, owing to a typsetter’s error, it gained its present title, which it’s had ever since.

Little Orphant Annie – Poem by James Whitcomb Riley

To all the little children: — The happy ones; and sad ones;
The sober and the silent ones; the boisterous and glad ones;
The good ones — Yes, the good ones, too; and all the lovely bad ones.

Little Orphant Annie’s come to our house to stay,
An’ wash the cups an’ saucers up, an’ brush the crumbs away,
An’ shoo the chickens off the porch, an’ dust the hearth, an’ sweep,
An’ make the fire, an’ bake the bread, an’ earn her board-an’-keep;
An’ all us other childern, when the supper-things is done,
We set around the kitchen fire an’ has the mostest fun
A-list’nin’ to the witch-tales ‘at Annie tells about,
An’ the Gobble-uns ‘ll git you
Ef you
Don’t
Watch
Out!

Wunst they wuz a little boy wouldn’t say his prayers,–
An’ when he went to bed at night, away up-stairs,
His Mammy heerd him holler, an’ his Daddy heerd him bawl,
An’ when they turn’t the kivvers down, he wuzn’t there at all!
An’ they seeked him in the rafter-room, an’ cubby-hole, an’ press,
An’ seeked him up the chimbly-flue, an’ ever’-wheres, I guess;
But all they ever found wuz jist his pants an’ roundabout:–
An’ the Gobble-uns ‘ll git you
Ef you
Don’t
Watch
Out!

An’ one time a little girl ‘ud allus laugh an’ grin,
An’ make fun of ever’ one, an’ all her blood-an’-kin;
An’ wunst, when they was ‘company,’ an’ ole folks wuz there,
She mocked ’em an’ shocked ’em, an’ said she didn’t care!
An’ jist as she kicked her heels, an’ turn’t to run an’ hide,
They wuz two great big Black Things a-standin’ by her side,
An’ they snatched her through the ceilin’ ‘fore she knowed what she’s about!
An’ the Gobble-uns ‘ll git you
Ef you
Don’t
Watch
Out!

An’ little Orphant Annie says, when the blaze is blue,
An’ the lamp-wick sputters, an’ the wind goes woo-oo!
An’ you hear the crickets quit, an’ the moon is gray,
An’ the lightnin’-bugs in dew is all squenched away,–
You better mind yer parunts, an’ yer teachurs fond an’ dear,
An’ churish them ‘as loves you, an’ dry the orphant’s tear,
An’ he’p the pore an’ needy ones ‘at clusters all about,
Er the Gobble-uns ‘ll git you
Ef you
Don’t
Watch
Out!

In some ways, this is a typical Victorian moral poem: children better behave, or… But, instead of being in “proper” English, it’s been told in the dialect of the US state of Indiana and this was something for which Riley was well-known, having written numbers of poems in the so-called “Hoosier” dialect. (This includes what looks like a misprint for the proper spelling “orphan”.)

Our acquaintance with goblins has continued to be literary, from Christina Rossetti’s (1830-1894)

Goblin Market (1862)

to George Macdonald’s (1824-1905)

1872 fantasy novel, The Princess and the Goblin.

Our biggest—and longest—exposure, of course, was in The Hobbit (1937).

Goblins turn up from the moment Bilbo and the dwarves fall into their hands in Chapter 4, “Over Hill and Under Hill” and we see them again in their pursuit of the party once they’ve escaped the goblin stronghold and finally at the Battle of the Five Armies. At their first appearance, they are described as “great ugly-looking goblins” and, unlike the nimble-footed creatures of Tolkien’s 1915 poem, these have flat feet and flap them as they move. They live in a monarchy, ruled (for the moment) by a king described as “a tremendous goblin with a huge head”.

So far, we might see that as traditional nightmarish beings, like the “great big Black Things” in stanza 3 of Riley’s poem, but JRRT does something further and very interesting with them. This first novel was written in the 1930s, only twenty years after the Great War which had ruined much of western Europe and killed all but one of Tolkien’s oldest friends, and the emotional scar was still fresh, it seems. He was too humane (and too wise) to blame Germany for what had happened, but it’s clear that he wouldn’t excuse the Industrial Revolution and the goblins become a stand-in for all the worse of it:

“Hammers, axes, swords, daggers, pickaxes, tongs, and also instruments of torture, they make very well, or get other people to make to their designs, prisoners and slaves that have to work till they die for want of air and light. It is not unlikely that they invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them, and also not working with their own hands more than they could help; but in those days and those wild parts they had not advanced (so it is called) so far.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 4, “Over Hill and Under Hill”)

The word “goblin” has a rather mysterious etymological history and, like so many early words, that history is a murky one, full of guesses and suggestions. A little research produces the explanation that the word first seems to appear in Latin, in Orderic Vitalis’ (1075-c1142) Historia Ecclesiastica, Book 5, Chapter 7, in which, while reviewing the life of the early French saint, Taurinus, (lived c.400AD), Orderic mentions a demon whom the saint has vanquished, but which still haunted the area around the town of Evreux in Normandy, a demon the locals called “gobelinus”.

A century later, in the long Old French poem on the Third Crusade (1189-1192) of Ambroise of Normandy (who lived at the end of the 12^th century), a noted figure in the actual history of the period, Balian d’ Ibelin, is referred to as being “more false than a gobelin” (L’Histoire de la Guerre Sainte, line 8710), with no explanation, suggesting that readers would be aware of what a gobelin was (and that he wasn’t trustworthy).

The word first appears in English in John Wycliffe’s translation of the Bible in the late 14^th century, in Psalm 91, in which a God-fearing person will never be afraid of various things, including

“of a gobelyn goyng in derknisses”.

If 14^th-century people knew what this creature was, we wonder whether it was still clear to people two centuries later—the older standard English translation (the so-called “King James Bible”, 1611) translates this as

“the pestilence that walks in darkness”

(which actually is close to the Hebrew original, as best as we can make out, as we don’t, unfortunately, read Hebrew—see this LINK to read for yourself.)

In the preface to the 1951 second edition of The Hobbit, Tolkien gives his own gloss, based upon the word he will employ almost entirely in The Lord of the Rings for such creatures:

“Orc is not an English word. It occurs in one or two places but is usually translated goblin (or hobgoblin for the larger kinds). Orc is the hobbits’ form of the name given at that time to these creatures…)

thus blending villains from 1937 with those readers would soon see in his new work, The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955).

“Hobgoblin” brings us to our conclusion, however. As in the case of “goblin”, things get murky here, too, with some stating that, as “Hob” is an old nickname for “Robert” (compare “Hodge” as an old nickname for “Roger”), so a hobgoblin is related to “Robin Goodfellow”, (“Robin” being another nickname for “Robert”) aka the Puck we see in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595-96?).

(This image is from Arthur Rackham’s (1865-1939) 1933 version of the play.)

Hobgoblins sometimes appear as prickly household helpers (rather like Dobby in the Harry Potter books), and those who want to associate the “hob” of “hobgoblin” with the “hob” (earlier “hubbe”), “the side of a fireplace” see that prefix as suggesting that “hobgoblins” might be a subset of “goblins” in general.

For us, however, a “hob” is a character in an on-going series we recommend to our readers. These are novels set in and around a decaying medieval monastery in 1347 and the haunted world around it, written by Pat Walsh, an archaeologist/fantasy author.

The first two in the series are The Crowfield Curse (2010) and The Crowfield Demon (2011)

In this series, the hero, Will, an orphan, discovers a wounded creature and brings it back to the monastery. It’s a hob—and will be a major character as the series develops. In 2014, Walsh began a new series with The Hob and the Deerman.

Walsh has promised a third book in the Crowfield series, Crowfield Rising, but it has yet to appear—unlike our next posting, which will appear (provided that there is no space alien invasion or implementation of Order 66 or Sauron producing a new ring), next week.

Till then, thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

In our last, we mistakenly identified a photo of JRRT in a uniform which we thought belonged to a unit at his alma mater, King Edward’s School, as the caption with it said “1907”. It seemed odd to us, however, because it had the look of a cavalry unit (the bandoleer across the chest was common during the period for cavalry and for artillerymen) and, for all that he writes admiringly of horses, we had no sense that he himself was ever a horseman. This nagged at us until we did a little research and realized our mistake: the uniform was for King Edward’s Horse, the equivalent of a national guard/volunteer unit raised before the Great War. Tolkien was a member of this at the beginning of his Oxford career in 1911, but later resigned. John Garth’s two really useful books, Tolkien at Exeter College and Tolkien and the Great War, set us straight.

PPS

If you read us regularly, you know that we have a special love for early, silent film While researching this posting, we learned that, in 1918, a film was made based upon “Little Orphant Annie” and that a copy of it has survived for us to see. Here’s a poster and a still.

Middle-under-earth

04 Wednesday Apr 2018

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

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Alan Lee, Andrew Lang, Barrow-downs, Beowulf, cyclops, Dragons, George Macdonald, Goblin Feet, Goblins, Great War, Grendel, Grendel's Mother, John Howe, monsters, Polyphemus, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Smaug, Storia Moria Castle, Tales of Troy and Greece, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Princess and the Goblin, The Red Book of Animal Stories, The Red Fairy Book, Tolkien, trenches, tumulus

As always, dear readers, welcome!

One of us is currently teaching The Hobbit and, is always seems to be the case when we are teaching an old friend, we are struck by something new. In this case, it’s the idea of “what lurks beneath” and where it might come from.

What occurred to us now was that, virtually every time there is trouble for Bilbo and the dwarves, it is strongly linked with caves and hollowed-out places: trolls who came out of a cave (“Roast Mutton”), goblins who live in caves (“Over Hill and Under Hill”), Gollum (“Riddles in the Dark”), hostile elves (“Flies and Spiders” and “Barrels Out of Bond”), and, of course, Smaug (“On the Doorstep”, “Inside Information”, and “Not At Home”). Only the wargs, the overgrown spiders, and the men of Lake-town in the Battle of the Five Armies have above-ground origins, as, after all, the other forces—goblins, elves, and even Iron Hills dwarves (we assume), have subterranean dwellings.

We knew that JRRT thought to become a classicist early in his academic career and we can imagine right away that one influence upon him for this underground menace would have been Polyphemus the Cyclops, who, after all, lives in a cave.

Before he read that part of Odysseus’ story in Greek, he might have seen it in Andrew Lang’s 1907 Tales of Troy and Greece—

Tolkien tells us that, as a child, he had read other Lang works and a story in one, The Red Fairy Book (1890), might even have influenced some Middle-earth geography, from “Storia Moria Castle”.

Another childhood favorite (although he appears to have changed his mind later in life) were the fantasy novels of George Macdonald

and his The Princess and the Goblin (1872),

as its title suggests, is full of goblins and their underground world. These goblins are powerful, but have one fatal flaw—tender feet—which JRRT said that he never believed (see Letters, 178)—although Tolkien’s first published poem was entitled “Goblin Feet” (Oxford Poetry 1915).

Beyond possible childhood reading, there is his career focus, which includes two other potential underground influences.

First, there is Beowulf. Grendel, the monster in this poem,

lives in a cave at the bottom of a pool with his mother and, in the second part of his monster-slaying, Beowulf has to dive into that pool to deal with her.

This illustration comes from another Andrew Lang book, The Red Book of Animal Stories (1899).

(The picture of Grendel is by Brian Froud. We found it on the website of K.T.Katzmann, I Write Monsters. Here’s a LINK.)

Then, of course, there’s that dragon, against whom Beowulf fights and dies—and which is the direct ancestor of another famous and familiar dragon…

We are told that it lives in an abandoned tumulus—that is, an ancient grave mound, like this one.

(This is, in fact, a famous Neolithic burial at Gavrinis, in Brittany.)

JRRT worked in Middle English, as well as Old English, and here we find one more possible source in his own edition (with E.V. Gordon) of the 14^th-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

The Green Knight who challenges King Arthur’s court to a mutual head-chopping contest, is said, in the fourth part of the poem, to inhabit a “green chapel” and to appear out of a hole when Sir Gawain, who has accepted the challenge and cut off the Green Knight’s head, makes his appearance there to fulfill his half of the contest.

This chapel has sounded like a tumulus to generations of scholars and here’s John Howe’s 2003 illustration, complete with chapel as tumulus (not to mention a very large green man).

Tumuli also make their appearance, of course, in The Lord of the Rings, when Frodo and his party go astray on the Barrow Downs.

We can’t finish this posting without at least suggesting one more source, something even more personal than JRRT’s scholarly work: his experiences in the Great War.

By the time Tolkien entered the service in France, the Western Front was, basically, a 500-mile trench, from Switzerland to the North Sea.

Much of the entrenching was simply deep, reinforced ditching.

But some—particularly on the German side—could be elaborate, even built with stone or concrete, and set far enough into the ground as to be almost impervious to bombardment.

And we imagine that, with all of that earlier literary work in his mind, JRRT might have faced such defenses wondering whether what was inside them would be Germans

or something much worse.

And did this haunt his later writing as much as the Great War haunted the minds of soldiers all over the world?

Thanks, as ever, for reading!

MTCIDC

Orcked

22 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by Ollamh in Economics in Middle-earth, Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Narrative Methods

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Arthur Rackham, Bosch, Brueghel, counterfeit, creation, Elves, Ents, Fangorn, Goblins, John Bauer, mockery, Orcs, Saruman, Sauron, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Treebeard, trolls, US Treasury Department, Weimar Republic

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

In our last, we discussed less familiar characters in The Lord of the Rings, the Corsairs of Umbar, and what we imagine they could look like.

In this posting, we want to look at much more familiar characters, Orcs—but from the viewpoint of Fangorn.

He says of them:

“Maybe you have heard of Trolls? They are mighty strong. But Trolls are only counterfeits, made by the Enemy in the Great Darkness, in mockery of Ents, as Orcs were of Elves.” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 4, “Treebeard”)

We’ve always been a bit puzzled by this. “Counterfeit” makes us think, immediately, of counterfeit money. Here are a pair of US 10-dollar bills: can you tell the counterfeit (from Old French via a Latin compound, contra, “against” + facere, “make/do”—in Medieval Latin a contrafactio is a thing put against another, something in contrast, thus “imitation”)?

To be a successful counterfeit, normally, it’s necessary that the imitation be as close to the original as possible, as in the case of these two tens. The US Treasury Department goes to a lot of time and expense to make counterfeiting as difficult as possible

image3anticounterfeit

but, if a counterfeiter is successful, he stands to make (in two senses) a lot of money. He can also cause a great deal of financial damage, breeding distrust in a government’s ability to coin money and to stand behind it. The more counterfeit money in the system, the more money the government has to back, which, in time, could lead to what is called hyperinflation and can bring a currency to collapse. When a government does this itself it can cause havoc with a country’s economy, as happened in the Weimar Republic in 1921-1924. At that time, for complex reasons having to do with paying off the German Empire’s war debts, the government began producing too much paper money and too rapidly. This caused the money to lose value very quickly, rendering it almost worthless.

image4weimarmoney

It’s no wonder that the penalty for counterfeiting was usually the most severe possible.

image5tyburn

Treebeard’s use of the word “counterfeit”, then, would suggest that what Sauron was doing was trying to make nearly-exact copies of something, either Ents or Elves, in his creation of Trolls and Orcs. So what do we find when we first see a description of Orcs?

“There were four goblin-soldiers of greater stature, swart, slant-eyed, with thick legs and large hands.”

(The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 1, “The Departure of Boromir”)

That’s not much to go on:

“greater stature” would suggest that most Orcs were short
“swart” means “dark-complexioned” (a term Sam uses to describe men from Harad, whom he calls “Swertings”—The Two Towers, Book Four, Chapter 3, “The Black Gate is Closed”)
“slant-eyed”—for contemporary people this is a tricky term, even a racial slur, but JRRT probably meant no more than that these Orcs had epicanthic folds to their eyelids, which is not uncommon among many of the world’s peoples.

image6epicanth

“with thick legs and large hands” suggests very stocky builds—like the “Trolls turned to stone” in JRRT’s illustration of the scene in The Hobbit.

image7stonetrolls

This is a start, but will our next view help? Pippin and Merry are the prisoners of the Orcs and Pippin is listening to a quarrel between those of Saruman and those of Sauron:

“In the twilight he saw a large black Orc, probably Ugluk, standing facing Grishnakh, a short crook-legged creature, very broad and with long arms that hung almost to the ground.” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 3. “The Uruk-hai”)

Counterfeit Elves? Of course we know—also from Fangorn—that perhaps Saruman was up to something more, as Fangorn says of him:

“He has taken up with foul folk, with the Orcs. Brm, hoom! Worse than that: he has been doing something to them; something dangerous. For these Isengarders are more like wicked Men. It is a mark of evil things that came in the Great Darkness that they cannot abide the Sun; but Saruman’s Orcs can endure it, even if they hate it. I wonder what he has done? Are they Men he has ruined, or has he blended the races of Orcs and Men? That would be a black evil!” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 4, “Treebeard”)

This might account for the size of the Uruk-hai, as well as for their ability to endure daylight, but what about the crook-leggedness and “long arms that hung almost to the ground”?

Perhaps here we should remember the end of Fangorn’s description: “…in mockery of Ents, as Orcs were of Elves.”

Hmm. Trolls certainly don’t look much like Ents—

Is this the “mockery”? It’s certainly not counterfeiting in the usual sense!

Should we understand the same for Orcs vs Elves? Here are illustrations of Galadriel and Legolas (both by the Hildebrandts):

Set those against any modern artist’s view of Orcs and, again, it’s not counterfeiting, in the strictest sense, so we suppose that we have to assume “mockery”—but with the added assumption that Sauron had a very twisted sense of humor. (There’s also that nasty half-suggestion of Fangorn’s that, since Saruman’s Orcs are behaving more like men, Saruman has been performing genetic experiments, something even Fangorn doesn’t want to think about.)

Looking at all of these illustrations, by the way, we were struck by where we’d seen creatures like this before. Could it be in the works of those strange Flemish/Dutch painters like Brueghel and Bosch?

Or Arthur Rackham?

Or the early 20^th-century Swedish painter, John Bauer, who, in his depiction of forests was an influence upon JRRT?

And, more recently, considering P. Jackson’s Orcs,

their skin color and general look: is there a suggestion here of the so-called “Bog People” (about whom we wrote a posting some time ago)—a whole series of bodies, at least one dating from the 4^th century bc

who have been discovered buried in peat bogs (a great preservative) in northern Europe?

And, in their color and oozy look–not to mention that they seem to move in scuttly groups–is there something cockroachy about them?

But, just as there is a place Fangorn doesn’t want to go, it’s true for us as well!

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

You probably spotted this (we have very intelligent readers), but it’s the top 10-dollar bill which is the counterfeit.

PPS

It has also occurred to us that JRRT more than once discussed the fact that Sauron, as a lesser deity-figure, could never originate, only copy and “subcreate”—perhaps suggesting another reason for making “mockeries”: his anger at his inability to do original work?

Are You Sitting Down.1?

04 Wednesday Oct 2017

Posted by Ollamh in Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Narrative Methods

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Tags

19th Century, An Introduction to Old Norse, Bag End, Beorn, Charles Dodgson, E.V. Gordon, Edwardian, Elvenking, Furniture, Goblins, Hildebrandts, House, Iron Age Farmhouse, Lewis Carroll, Listen with Mother, Master of Laketown, Monty Python, Norse house, Sackville-Bagginses, The Hobbit, Through the Looking-Glass, Tolkien, Victorians

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

Several times, Monty Python skits included the pattern, “Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.”

It was clear, when we first heard it, that, like so much of Python material, it was one of those references which an audience in Britain in the early 1970s would have understood immediately and chuckled at, but it was only with the advent of the all-knowing Wikipedia that the reference came clear to us. (Here’s a LINK, so that, if you don’t know it already, you, too, can be suitably enlightened.)

But it made us think—not everything does, we promise!—of Tolkien and what must sound like a very odd subject—furniture.

Furniture?

Consider Bilbo’s Bag End:

“The Door opened on to a tube-shape hall like a tunnel: a very comfortable tunnel without smoke, with paneled walls, and floors tiled and carpeted, provided with polished chairs, and lots and lots of pegs for hats and coats…The tunnel wound on and on, going fairly but not quite straight into the side of the hill—The Hill, as all the people for many miles round called it—and many little round doors opened out of it, first on one side and then on another. No going upstairs for the hobbit: bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries (lots of these), wardrobes (he had whole rooms devoted to clothes), kitchens, dining-rooms, all on the same floor, and indeed on the same passage…” (The Annotated Hobbit, Chapter 1, “An Unexpected Party”)

Here is JRRT’s version of the entryway–with Bilbo—or is that JRRT himself? There appears to be a strong resemblance…

As the narrator tells us, “This hobbit was a very well-to-do hobbit…”, but, at the same time, we could easily see this description (ignoring the fact that it’s about a hole, albeit “not a nasty, dirty, wet hole…nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole…it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort”) applied to the kinds of late-Victorian/Edwardian interiors with which Tolkien was familiar.

People of this world—middle-class England—seem to have loved to live among piles of possessions—heavy furniture, thick carpets, heavy drapes, and knickknacks galore.

(Oh–and swords, apparently.)

To us, this has a slightly claustrophobic effect—and we imagine that it may be why Alice in Through the Looking-Glass (1871) attempts to escape it–

only to find herself in a distorted version of the same room on the other side of the mirror.

[Here’s the actual mirror, from the childhood home of the real Alice, which is said to have inspired Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll to write a sequel to the first Alice book.]

What about other Middle-earth interiors, beginning in The Hobbit?

Surprisingly, there is really nothing before the Dwarves and Co. reach Beorn’s house. There is no description of any inside in Rivendell and, beyond that, the only “indoors” we see before Beorn is the main cave of the goblins and the only “furniture” is this:

“There in the shadows on a large flat stone sat a tremendous goblin…” (The Hobbit, Chapter 4. “Over Hill and Under Hill”)

Beorn’s house, as we see in Anderson’s The Annotated Hobbit (170-171), appears to be based upon an illustration to be found in E.V. Gordon’s An Introduction to Old Norse (1927) (with an older history yet—see Anderson, 171).

The Hildebrandts saw Beorn’s house as rather like a giant log cabin,

but we imagine the outside of Beorn’s house to look rather more like this view of an Iron Age farmhouse

And here’s a reconstruction of a Norse house interior which is a little more “lived-in”, to give you the idea of what Beorn’s house might look like day-to-day (without the magic animals, unfortunately).

As Tolkien’s illustration shows, however, this is hardly based upon a Victorian parlor! As the narrator describes it (with magic animals as the kitchen staff):

“Quickly they got out boards and trestles from the side walls and set them up near the fire…Beside them a pony pushed two low-seated benches with wide rush-bottoms and little short thick legs for Gandalf and Thorin, while at the far end he put Beorn’s big black chair of the same sort…These were all the chairs he had in his hall…What did the rest sit on?…The other ponies came in rolling round drum-shaped sections of logs, smoothed and polished, and low enough even for Bilbo…” (The Hobbit, Chapter 7, “Queer Lodgings”)

Beyond Beorn’s house, there is mention that the Elvenking sat “on a chair of carven wood” (The Hobbit, Chapter 9, “Barrels Out of Bond”) and the Master of Laketown has a “great chair” (The Hobbit, Chapter 10, “A Warm Welcome”), but we have come deeper into the Middle-earth/medieval world, it seems, where furniture (at least in the narrator’s view) is sparse and we will only begin to see more abundance, at least in a general way, when we return to the Shire and the unwelcome event of the auction of Bilbo’s possessions on June 22^nd:

“The legal bother, indeed, lasted for years…and in the end to save time Bilbo had to buy back quite a lot of his own furniture.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 19, “The Last Stage”)

“Furniture” is, unfortunately, a vague word, mentioned just previously in relation to the Sackville-Bagginses who were “busy measuring his [Bilbo’s] rooms to see if their own furniture would fit.” We’ll have to make do here with our original idea of Bilbo the Middle-earth Victorian’s house,

but, in our next, we’ll have a look at households (and palaces) in The Lord of the Rings, to see what we may find (and we have a hunch the inventory will include a quantity of thrones…)

Thanks, as ever, for reading!

MTCIDC

When One Door Closes (I)

09 Wednesday Nov 2016

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

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And Unexpected Party, Baggins, Beorn, Bilbo, Bilbo and Gollum, Chico Marx, doors, Dwarves, Gandalf, Goblins, Groucho Marx, hidden door, Hobbit door, Horse Feathers, Into the Fire, Lake Town, Lonely Mountain, Mirkwood, Out of the Frying-Pan, password, Smaug, speakeasy, Swordfish, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Marx Brothers, Thranduil, Tolkien, Took, wargs

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

Recently, we’ve been thinking about Bilbo’s remark to Frodo:

“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 1, Chapter 3, “Three is Company”)

What makes this true in Tolkien, we wondered? As an experiment, we began to list all of the significant doors in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and what happened at each of them and we believed that we could see that they fell, roughly, into two categories: doors (and we include gates here) which are the approach to danger, as Bilbo says, and doors which at least seem to offer safety. There are so many, in fact, that we have decided to break them down (no pun intended) and, in this posting, we’ll examine those we found in The Hobbit.

Our first door is Bilbo’s own, in front of which he is sitting when Gandalf first appears

and which he dodges behind, to escape Gandalf—or so he thinks:

“With that the hobbit turned and scuttled inside his round green door, and shut it as quickly as he dared, not to seem rude.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 1, “An Unexpected Party”)

This door, of course, is hardly a barrier to Gandalf, who scratches a rune on it, turning it from what Bilbo hopes is a “no trespassing” sign to a “welcome” mat.

We then get a scene which reminds us of one in the Marx Brothers’ movie, Horsefeathers (1932)

—or maybe it’s just an excuse on our part to bring up the Marx Brothers, who, in our opinion, are never brought up often enough. It’s a scene from the days of Prohibition, when hard liquor had been outlawed in the U.S. by an amendment to the Constitution (1920-1933). It was clearly a batty idea and, very soon, many people (some of whom must even have voted for the amendment), were looking for ways to skirt the federal law. One way to do so was to visit an illegal bar, called a “Speakeasy”, presumably because you could say what you wanted there, including criticizing a stupid law. These were secret places, with guards at the door and a need for passwords, so that people on the inside could detect attempts by the police to raid them. In the movie, Chico (pronounced “chick-o’’—as he was said to be an avid pursuer of girls)

is the guard on the inside and Groucho

is a potential customer.

As is typical with the Marx Brothers, the scheme collapses and they both end up on the outside of the door, but, before that happens, there is a lot of knocking and attempts (full of bad puns) to guess the proper password.

The door, then, is really only a prop, a site where Chico and Groucho can practice one-liners on each other and not much else (as if that matters with the Marx Brothers!). In the next door scene from The Hobbit, however, JRRT uses Bilbo’s door for larger purposes: to show Gandalf’s subtle understanding of Bilbo’s psychological make-up, as well as the beginning of his plan to turn Bilbo from a staid Baggins to a much freer Took, as Bilbo is forced to confront a gang of dwarves and their mission.

Gandalf’s method, as readers will remember, was to send the dwarves to Bilbo’s door one or two at a time. Gandalf repeats this trick when he and the dwarves (and Bilbo, of course) take refuge at Beorn’s,

after their escape from the pursuing wargs and goblins.

Whereas we might say that the second door scene at Bilbo’s led to danger, this scene leads to safety, although only temporary security, as Bilbo and the dwarves must set out again, even if refreshed and refitted.

(Readers note: this second time has been replaced in the second Hobbit film with a scene which misses both the quiet comedy of the original and its use in the story as a way to provide us with a more rounded picture of Beorn, as well as JRRT’s use of a repeated folk motif perhaps to reinforce the fairy tale-like structure of what was originally an oral tale turned children’s book.)

The dwarves had encountered the goblins through a hidden door (clearly a “danger door”), outside of which they had taken shelter. They are made prisoner

but Bilbo, being lost, finds the Ring, meets Gollum,

Bilbo and Gollum.JPG

and escapes by a door which certainly offers safety. (Although, as the title of the next chapter puts it, not for long, being “Out of the Frying-Pan, Into the Fire”.)

This, of course, not only leads us back to Beorn, but also on to Mirkwood and our next door, that of the Mirkwood Elves and their king, Thranduil (who does not ride an elk, as the movies would have it—and really silly-looking that is, in our opinion). This is one of a number of versions by JRRT himself.

palazzo di thranduil 2.jpg

Although this door leads to the dwarves’ imprisonment, the danger appears to be minimal. Thranduil threatens them, but, except for locking them up and putting them on short rations, he does them no harm. (And there is another backdoor escape—this time in barrels—one of JRRT’s own favorite illustrations—and ours, too).

The barrels led us to the lake and to Lake Town (a colored version of another JRRT illustration),

through the gate of which the dwarves had to pass. A strong theme in so many of these entryways is that they are a form of challenge: those who would get in (or out) must deal with a guardian—Bilbo, goblins, elves–and Lake Town is no different. Here, there is a squad of lax gate guards, who are rather easily impressed when Thorin announces who he is and that he wants to see the Master. As the dwarves persuade the Lake Town people to supply their expedition, we would label this one of the doors to safety—the last thing we would say for the final two: the back door and the front gate of the Lonely Mountain.

So far, we have had two front doors (Bilbo’s and Beorn’s), one hidden door (goblins), two sets of gates (elves, Lake Town), and two back doors (goblins and elves). Now we have a door with a spell cast upon it and the riddle of the spell acts as the guardian. It is, of course, the door most desired by the dwarves, but it’s hardly a door to safety as, at its bottom lies the reason they abandoned the mountain to begin with: Smaug.

The front gate is hardly better, as it soon becomes a defensive work for the dwarves as they prepare to fend off those who either try to seek recompense or are simply goblin attackers.

But wait—we’ve left out a final door, haven’t we? “the door where it began”—and, in front of it, Bilbo experiences one more trial: finding that he’s been declared dead and his property is up for auction—and just when he believes he is “back again”. But there is a happy ending and The Hobbit itself ends with Bilbo, some years later, answering that same door

and entertaining Gandalf and Balin. (Although in the drawing above, Bilbo bears a certain resemblance to someone else…)

In our next post, we’ll continue by looking at doors and gates in The Lord of the Rings.

Thanks, as always, for reading!

MTCIDC

Fairy Tale to Bill of Sale

19 Wednesday Aug 2015

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

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

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do you think, dear readers?

As always, thank you for reading,

MTCIDC,

doubtfulsea

~ adventure fantasy

Tag Archives: Goblins

Green and Quiet.1

Gobs and Hobs.2

Middle-under-earth

Orcked

Are You Sitting Down.1?

When One Door Closes (I)

Fairy Tale to Bill of Sale