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Tag Archives: Hans Christian Andersen

Water Which?

12 Wednesday Jun 2019

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Fairy Tales and Myths, Heroes, Literary History, Narrative Methods, Poetry, Theatre and Performance

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Alaric Hall, Alberich, Antonin Dvorak, Apollonius, Argonautica, Arthur Rackham, Elves, ETA Hoffmann, Friedrich de la Motte Fouque, Hans Christian Andersen, Heinemann, Heracles, Hylas, Jason and the Golden Fleece, John William Waterhouse, Judy Collins, mermaids, naiads, Nemean Lion, Old English Poems, Rhine Maidens, Richard Wagner, Rusalka, selkies, silkies, sirens, swan-maidens, The Great Silkie of Sul Skerry, The Little Mermaid, Tommy Makem, Undine, waeteraelfadl, Water Elf Sickness

Welcome, as ever, dear readers.

Just today, our English friend, Michael, sent us an interesting CD set, “Old English Poems, Prose & Lessons”.  We turned the jewel box over and our eye was immediately caught by #12 of the listings on the back, “Charm Against Waterelf Sickness”.

In Old English, “waterelf sickness” is a compound which can be read two ways:  “waeteraelf-adl” (“water-elf sickness”) or “waeter-aelfadl” (something like “watery elf-sickness”).  Alaric Hall, in his extremely informative dissertation, “The Meaning of Elf, and Elves, in Medieval England” (2005), 116, leans towards the second possibility, but, with our western classical background, we immediately imagined a “water elf” and, from there, we thought of naiads—female water spirits–in fresh water, like streams and pools.  (If you would like a comprehensive listing of all the subvarieties of such spirits, here’s a LINK to an article on the subject.)

Probably the most famous story about such creatures appears in Apollonius of Rhodes’ 3rd-c. BC, Argonautica, the story of Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece.

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Two of Jason’s crew on the Argo are Heracles (seen here dealing with the Nemean Lion)

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and his companion, Hylas (seen here about to get into trouble).

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Ancient travel in the Mediterranean often meant coasting, with frequent stops for water, and, in Apollonius’ story, Hylas had gone ashore and found a pool, but was ambushed by a group of naiads, who pulled him under.

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(This is John William Waterhouse’s famous 1896 painting of the scene.)

We meet woman waterfolk in much of western folk tradition—and this is excluding those on salt water, including mermaids,

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selkies/silkies (who are shape-changers, between seals and humans),

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and even sirens.

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For fresh water, we had those naiads, but also swan-maidens, often enchanted into water bird forms.

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(Here’s a LINK to a whole little collection of stories about such creatures.)

As well, we have the Rhine Maidens,

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who, in Wagner’s “Ring” cycle, guard the Rhine gold, deep under the river, but who lose it to the craftsman dwarf, Alberich, with whom they flirted—with evil consequences.

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We mentioned mermaids as salt water creatures and, in Hans Christian Andersen’s (1805-1875)

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“The Little Mermaid” (1837), we have the story of the mermaid who falls in love with a handsome prince and trades her voice for human form.

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(This is the first page of Andersen’s original manuscript.)

There had been an earlier Romantic version of the water spirit and the human (in this case, a knight) in Friedrich de la Motte Fouque’s (1777-1843) novella, Undine (1811).

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This, in turn, became an early Romantic opera, Undine (1816), the text by the author, the music by another famous Romantic author, E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822).

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The theme which runs through all of these meetings of water spirit and human is the uneasy relationship which seems the only possibility for them, virtually always leading to unhappiness, and this is true of our last water spirit, Rusalka, the subject of an opera, Rusalka, (1901) by the Czech composer, Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904)

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Like Andersen’s Little Mermaid, the water spirit (“rusalka” can mean “water spirit” in Czech) falls in love with a prince, trading her immortality for human love.

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(This is an image of the original Rusalka, Ruzena Maturova.)

If we said “leading to unhappiness” is the usual conclusion to such romances, Rusalka is even worse.  When she is betrayed by the prince, Rusalka becomes a water demon, luring people to their deaths in her pool—a far cry from the happy ending of the Disney movie!

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So, what about our charm against waeteraelfadl?  Here’s a translation:

“If a man is in the water elf disease [waeter aelfadle], then the nails of his hand are dark and the eyes teary, and he will look down. Give him this as medicine [laecedome]: everthroat, hassock, the lower part of fane, yewberry, lupin, helenium, marshmallow head, fen mint, dill, lily, attorlathe, pulegium, marrubium, dock, elder, fel terre, wormwood, strawberry leaves, consolde. Soak with ale; add holy water to it. Sing this gealdor over it thrice:

I have bound on the wounds the best of war bandages, so the wounds neither burn nor burst, nor go further, nor spread, nor jump, nor the wounds increase [waco sian?], nor sores deepen. But may he himself keep in a healthy way [halewaege?]. May it not ache you more than it aches earth in ear [eare?].

Sing this many times, “May earth bear on you with all her might and main.” These galdor a man may sing over a wound.”

(translation from Karen Louise Jolly, Popular Religion in Late Saxon England: Elf Charms in Context (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996)

Unfortunately, this looks more like a cure for a skin disease than for an ill-fated affair between water spirit and human!

Thanks, as always, for reading and, also as always,

MTCIDC

CD

ps

You can find Alaric Hall’s dissertation (now a book) at:  http://www.alarichall.org.uk/phd.php.

pps

Child Ballad 113, “The Great Silkie of Sul Skerry” is about the male version of such a creature.  For a haunting performance of this, with a modern tune, sung by Judy Collins (with Tommy Makem on pennywhistle), here’s a LINK.

ppps

The most famous aria from Dvorak’s opera is a song sung to the moon by Rusalka, “Měsíčku na nebi hlubokém“, and we find it one of the most beautiful arias we know.  Here’s a LINK so that you can hear it, too.

pppps (we think that this is a record, even for us)

In 1909, the publisher Heinemann released a translation of de la Motte Fouque’s Undine with illustrations by Arthur Rackham.  Here’s a LINK so that you can download it and add it to your library.

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Matchless

15 Wednesday May 2019

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

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Tags

anachronism, Hans Christian Andersen, matches, Swan Vestas, The Hobbit, The Little Match Girl, The Lord of the Rings, tinder, tinder box, Tolkien, Vesta, Vilhelm Pedersen

As always, dear readers, welcome.

Recently, we’ve been examining anachronisms in The Hobbit.  These are always such minor things that JRRT, before its initial publication in 1937,

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doesn’t appear even to have noticed them (see our recent postings for more on them) and only corrected some in succeeding editions.

In our last, it was “guns”, but, in this, our last, at least for the present, it’s this:

“After some time he felt for his pipe…Then he felt for his pouch…Then he felt for matches…”

(The Hobbit, Chapter Five, “Riddles in the Dark”)

Others have noticed this before—Anderson in his invaluable The Annotated Hobbit even has a footnote on it (page 116), adding the detail from Chapter Six that “…Oin and Gloin had lost their tinder-boxes.  (Dwarves have never taken to matches even yet.)”

Why are matches an anachronism?  Tolkien, a life-long pipe smoker,

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would have used them without thinking—perhaps these, “Swan Vestas”, long sold as “the smoker’s match”.

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(The name “Vesta” comes from the Roman goddess of the hearth,

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a fragment of whose temple still stands in the Roman Forum in Rome.

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Inside was a hearth—a fire pit—which symbolized all of the hearths in Rome.)

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Matches, however, are a nineteenth-century invention, with a complicated history—and, at the beginning, a complicated ignition.  For example, these, from 1828, had a tip of sulphur which burst into flame when dipped into a container of phosphorus.

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This was hardly a practical way to strike a light and soon matches were made by which friction could be used to light them.  After 1830, the tips of these were coated with white phosphorus, which was rather unstable and could be set off by everything from rubbing against each other to strong sunlight.  They were made by the millions in factories (many employing young women and girls)

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and sold on street corners everywhere, commonly by children and the very poor.

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Considering this made us think of a Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875)

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story we can’t bear to read.  In English, it’s called “The Little Match Girl” and was first published in 1845.  Here’s an illustration for it by Vilhelm Pedersen (1820-1859), Andersen’s favorite illustrator.

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(If you would like to read it—we’ve warned you!– here’s the LINK to a very rich site, which has all of Andersen’s fairy tales both in the original Danish and translated into English, along with all of the rest of Andersen’s extensive literary work.)

But, if Bilbo lives in a sort of medieval world, where, presumably, matches wouldn’t be available, then what can he use?  The answer, of course, is what Oin and Gloin have lost (and Sam will have in The Lord of the Rings–see The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 6, “The Old Forest”):  a tinder box.

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Such a box would contain three basic items:  a dry material in which to catch a spark (bark, dry moss, linen rags), a piece of steel and a piece of flint to make sparks.

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And here’s how it works—

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Long before the invention of matches, this was the common way in the western world to strike a light (literally) with “flint and steel”, as it was called—and it’s what the dwarves use in The Hobbit.

It’s also the title of another Hans Christian Andersen story, but a jollier one, called, in English, “The Tinder Box”, first published in 1835—and here’s another Pedersen illustration.

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In this story, a soldier on the way home from war is stopped by an old lady on the side of the road.

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She tells him that there’s treasure below a tree and, if he will climb in, he can take all that he wants and all that she wants in return is a little tinder box to be found there.

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He climbs in and discovers rooms full of riches, as well as three dogs of increasingly enormous size.

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The tinder box is, of course, not a little nothing, but the key to the dogs and to the magic beyond, although the soldier doesn’t know that at the time.  When he climbs out of the tree, and the old woman (a witch, of course), demands the box, however, he grows suspicious and, instead of handing her the box, the soldier hands her her head.

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(We said that this was a jollier story—but clearly not if you’re a witch.)

We refer you to the LINK we mentioned earlier for the rest of the story—SPOILER ALERT:  it does have a happy ending.  As does The Hobbit, except for goblins and wargs, of course.  Oh, and Thorin.

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And then there’s Smaug, whose fire goes out—dare we say it?—like a burnt match.

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Thanks, as always, for reading and, as ever,

MTCIDC

CD

Theme and Variations.2

27 Wednesday Jun 2018

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Fairy Tales and Myths, Films and Music, Literary History, Military History

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Arthur Rackham, Baron Friedrich de la Motte Fouque, Brothers Grimm, Charles Dickens, Charles Perrault, Charles S Evans, Cinderella, Disney, Dornroeschen, Edgar Taylor, ETA Hoffman, French Revolution, George Cruikshank, German Popular Stories, Hans Christian Andersen, Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passe, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, James Robinson Planche, Kinder und Hausmaerchen, La Belle au Bois Dormant, Little Briar-Rose, Louis XIV, Louis XVIII, Mariinski Theatre, Napoleon, Robert Samber, Sleeping Beauty, St Petersburg, Tchaikovsky, The Little Mermaid, Undine

Welcome, as ever, dear readers.
In our last, we began talking about the fairy tales of Charles Perrault (1628-1703), originally published under the rather vague title, Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passe, (“Stories or Tales of the Past”) in 1697.
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Among his stories was one entitled “La Belle au Bois Dormant”—literally “The Beautiful Girl in the Sleeping Woods”, which we English-speakers call “Sleeping Beauty”. We had said that we thought it would be interesting to look at various treatments of that story over time and, so far, we’ve discussed James Robinson Planche’s (plawn-SHAY) two works, an 1840 “extravaganza” (a kind of very early musical comedy) and his 1868 story-in-verse version (here’s the first edition).
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Planche could read the French original, but those whose knowledge of French was confined to menus could find English translations dating all the way back to the first, that of Robert Samber, in 1729.
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(This image, by the way, explains not only why English-speakers call this story “Sleeping Beauty”, but also why we call the stories as a group “Mother Goose Tales/Stories”. Please see our previous posting for where Mother Goose came from in Perrault.)
In the early 19th-century, a competitor to Perrault appeared. In 1812, two German scholars, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (1785-1863, 1786-1859,)
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began publication of a work which they would enlarge numerous times through the first half of the 19th century, Kinder und Hausmaerchen (something like “Children’s and Domestic Wondertales”), the first volume of which first appeared in 1812.
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“Sleeping Beauty” appears as #50, under the title Dornroeschen, “Little Briar-Rose”. This is like the Perrault story, but not the same, providing an alternate version of the tale. For those without German, an English translation was published in 1823.
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Although their names aren’t on the title page, this is a collaboration between Edgar Taylor (1793-1839), translator,
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and George Cruikshank (1792-1878), illustrator.
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Of the two, Cruikshank is the better-known. Originally, he was famous as what we now call an “editorial cartoonist”, creating images critical of politicians and political events of his time. Here is his 1823 caricature of Louis XVIII of France (reigned 1814-1824 with a little gap in 1815 when Napoleon came back briefly from exile on Elba).
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His public relations people wanted Louis to look like this:
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to remind them that he was the direct descendant of Louis XIV, the famous “Sun King”, a grand and heroic figure in recent French history.
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In reality, Louis was old and fat and looked more like this—
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It wasn’t about Louis per se, weak and temporary monarch though he was, so much as the long-standing English/French rivalry/hostility, which went back for centuries and which had intensified during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, stretching almost without a break from 1792 to 1815. Napoleon, as representative of what the English of the time saw as revolution-which-led-to-chaos-and-worse, was a regular target from the later 1790s on and Cruikshank certainly aimed his pen and brush at him—as in this mocking depiction of the fate of Bonaparte after his first abdication in April, 1814.
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Political commentary aside, Cruikshank, as we see in his illustrations for the Brothers Grimm (and isn’t it odd that we never say, in English “the Grimm Brothers”—which sounds either like a menacing secret society or perhaps an old, established firm of teakwood importers), was involved in all sorts of illustrating, including a second volume of the Grimms, in 1826. This is the 1868 reprint which the editor says duplicates in one volume the text and illustrations of the original two. (We include a LINK so that you can download your own copy.)
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As well, he illustrated the original serialized version of Charles Dickens’ (1812-1870) Oliver Twist (1837-1839). This is a famous scene near the end of the novel, where the main villain, Fagin, is in the condemned cell, awaiting dawn and his execution. Dickens was famous for his performance of this.
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On a more cheerful note, here’s Cruikshank’s sketch of Dickens himself from 1836.
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The Grimms’ version of the “Sleeping Beauty” story is combined with that of Perrault in our next example. It’s the 1920 The Sleeping Beauty,
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text by Charles S. Evans (1883-1944), of whom we have found no picture, and Arthur Rackham (1867-1939) of whom this may be our favorite picture.
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The year before, Evans and Rackham had collaborated on a version of Perrault’s “Cinderella”—and we’ll talk about that in our next. The Sleeping Beauty is anything but sleepy—its illustrations practically dance off the page. (Here’s a LINK for your own copy.)
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And dance itself is the basis of our last example.
In 1888, Pyotr/Peter Tchaikovsky (1840-1893)

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was offered a commission for a ballet. Originally, the subject was to be a famous early German Romantic novella, Undine (un-DEE-neh), written by the Baron Friedrich de la Motte Fouque (foo-KAY) (1777-1843),
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and published in 1811. It’s the story of a knight and a water spirit and shares the basic plot of HC Andersen’s later “The Little Mermaid”. Here’s an illustration from Rackham’s 1909 version.
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As things developed, however, this story was replaced by the Perrault/Grimms’ “The Sleeping Beauty”, which first appeared at the Mariinski Theatre
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in St Petersburg in January, 1890. We are lucky to have a number of photos of the original production and cast.
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And here’s a LINK to a suite (selection) of music from the ballet—but the full ballet is available on YouTube and we hope that you like this suite so much that you’ll try the whole thing.
In our next, we’ll move on to a second Perrault story, “Cinderella”.
Thanks, as always, for reading.
MTCIDC
CD
ps
If you’re a regular reader, you’ll know that we can rarely resist adding something more. In fact, in this ps, we add two somethings more.
First, before Undine was proposed for a ballet, it was the subject of an opera by the strange and wonderful German Romantic author and composer ETA Hoffmann (1776-1822).
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Here’s a LINK to the overture. In a future post, we’ll have more to say about Hoffmann…
Second, as people who grew up on Disney, we can’t close without mentioning Disney’s 1959 Sleeping Beauty, with its attempt at a new style of visual presentation—as well as its use of Tchaikovsky’s music as the basis of its score. If you haven’t seen it, we certainly recommend it, especially for its combination of elements of the older look of such films as Cinderella (1950) with a newer, simplified one.
image30disney

Winter is Coming

29 Wednesday Jun 2016

Posted by Ollamh in Fairy Tales and Myths, J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History, Narnia, Narrative Methods, Villains

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

C.S. Lewis, Frozen, Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin, Hadrian's Wall, Hans Christian Andersen, Kay, Middle-earth, Mile castle, Puddleglum, Queen Elsa, Rammas Echor, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe, The Lord of the Rings, The Night Watch, the Pevensies, The Snow Queen, The White Witch, Tolkien, Westeros, White Walkers, Winter is Coming

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as ever.

We were playing Sortes Tolkienses yesterday. That’s the game where we close our eyes, open The Lord of the Rings to any page, then put our finger on a line to see if we can write about it.

On page 1042 of our edition, our finger fell upon:

“…you may stay here till the Witch-king goes home. For in the summer his power wanes, but now his breath is deadly, and his cold arm is long.” (The Lord of the Rings, Appendix A)

The Witch-king? Oh, we thought—that Witch-king.

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He has a very long history in Middle-earth, being “probably (like the Lieutenant of Barad-dur) of Numenorean descent” (from Hammond and Scull, The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion, 20, Note 5) and, in the quoted context rules Angmar

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with a command to destroy the northern Numenorean kingdom of Arnor.

What caught our attention, however, was that idea of a “cold arm”. This might be metaphorical—except for that “in summer his power wanes”, suggesting that, if he can’t control the weather, he can at least use it to his advantage.  And this set us thinking about stories in which winter was either controlled by someone or was, itself, the antagonist.

First, there is Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen (1845).   Although this shares a title with a 2013 Disney film, there is really nothing else to link them. The Disney film has, of course, the Princess Elsa, whose enchanted hands can turn the world into winter (perhaps like the Witch-king?).

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Andersen’s long fairy tale (in seven parts, or “stories”, historier, in Danish) is about the abduction of a boy and his rescue by his friend, a girl. The boy is being held by the Snow Queen, who lives in a far-off palace made of snow, the windows and doors of icy wind, lit by the Northern Lights.

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What particularly caught our attention here was the manner by which the boy, Kay, was stolen. He hitched his sled to the back of a sleigh, only to find that it was driven by the Snow Queen, who takes him under her robe.

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Liz Bobzin, “The Snow Queen and Kay”

This took us to the White Witch of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), the first of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books.

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She picks up one of the Pevensie children, Edmund, in her sleigh and, while she doesn’t abduct him physically, she corrupts him by playing upon his greed and vanity.

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This is an illustration of the Witch from the original 1950 book, and here are two later interpretations—the first is from the 1988 BBC production

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the second from the 2005 film.

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(We like both versions—we don’t mind the Steiff Aslan in the BBC production

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and who could ever be a better Puddleglum than Tom Baker, the fourth incarnation of Dr. Who, in the BBC The Silver Chair, 1990?

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We do worry a bit, however, about the changes made to the film versions of Prince Caspian, 2008, and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, 2010. They’re not so drastic as those we’ve come to expect from P. Jackson’s writers, but, especially in Prince Caspian, there is a tendency to change things for what appear to be marketing reasons…)

As in what appears to be the case of the Witch-king, the White Witch can control the weather and has imprisoned all of Narnia

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in snow and ice for a century—“always winter, never Christmas”.

The idea of a world of winter then brought us to George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, both the novels and the impressive (and addicting) television series. In the world of Thrones, the large island of Westeros—

Map_of_westeros.jpg

and the whole world, for that matter, has once suffered a winter which lasted for a generation and the fear of its return always casts a shadow over the present. During that time, the creatures known as the White Walkers appeared from the north, with armies of animated dead, and were only driven back at great cost. To prevent their return, the surviving humans built an immense wall, 700 feet high, 300 miles long, which effectively blocks entry to the lower two thirds of Westeros.

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In an earlier posting, we discussed the Rammas Echor, the outer boundary wall which protects the Pelennor and Minas Tirith, and what we believe to be a major influence upon Tolkien’s idea, Hadrian’s Wall, which divides England from the lands to the north.

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Unlike The Wall in Thrones, it is under a hundred miles long, was never more than 16 to 20 feet high, and was built of turf, timber, and stone, not solid ice. It was, however, a complex construction, with 17 forts behind it

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and a smaller fort (now called a “mile castle”) at the end of each mile,

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with small towers set in between the mile castles.

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It was garrisoned with thousands of soldiers over its years of occupation (begun 122AD, finally abandoned in the 5th century).

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In Thrones, this job has been taken on by The Night Watch, a rather haphazard collection of volunteers and conscripts.

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And, south of them, the lands of the Stark family, Wardens of the North, whose motto—a warning of the dreaded future—forms the title of this posting.

the_north_a_clash_of_kings.jpg

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

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