Ring Composition

09 Wednesday Jan 2019

Posted by lebedusya1 in Fairy Tales and Myths, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Narrative Methods

Tags

Alberich, Andrew Lang, Andvari, Anglo-Saxon, Annatar, Der Ring des Nibelungen, Fafnir, Fairy Books, Goetterdaemmerung, Halvor, Heroic literature, Hildebrandts, Midgard Serpent, Norse Folktales, Old English, Otter, Red Fairy Book, Richard Wagner, Ring, Sauron, Sigurd, Sir George Webbe Dasent, Soria Moria Castle, The Lord of the Rings, The Ring of the Nibelung, The Silmarillion, Tolkien, Widsith

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

The title of this essay is derived from a technique in heroic literature, in which, in some way, the story/song ends, more or less where it began, just like a ring—or the Midgard Serpent, which encircles the earth in Norse mythology.

Thinking about ring composition made us think, of course, about the Ring

and to ask ourselves a question about the composition of The Lord of the Rings: where did the idea of a powerful ring come from?

There has been a lot of scholarly work about what influenced JRRT, some of which he himself agreed with, some he did not. For instance, the suggestion that Richard Wagner’s (1813-1883)

huge 4-opera cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen, “The Ring of the Nibelung” (1848-1874)

might have provided a spark was vigorously dismissed by Tolkien—although, to our minds, there is a certain similarity—the ring of the title is a magical one, after all, whose power would allow the owner to rule the world—but it’s accursed and only brings unhappiness—or worse– to anyone who possesses it. And yet characters in the four operas which make up the cycle struggle over its possession. There, however, the similarity ends. The maker of the ring isn’t a semi-divine figure who’s attempting to rebuild his kingdom through a combination of his magical powers and his political abilities, but, rather, a dwarf, named Alberich, who has stolen the gold from which the ring is made from the Rhine Maidens, and, in return, Alberich must give up love, which he renounces.

He soon loses the ring and there is no parallel with the Shire, or with hobbits: this is a world with gods and heroes, all larger-than-life, and Sam, in particular, would feel very out of place here. Just contrast the Hildebrandts’ Frodo and Sam meeting Faramir with this children’s theatre character sheet depicting the figures from the last of the four operas, Goetterdaemmerung, “The Gods’ Twilight”.

We would suggest that a stronger influence might be found in JRRT’s interest in Old English literature. In that literature, Anglo-Saxon kings and lords are known as “ring-givers” and “gold-givers”,

who reward their followers—as well as singers—with precious decorations–as the poet in the poem called Widsith tells us:

Likewise I was among the Eatula with Ælfwine,
he had the lightest hand of all mankind, as I have heard,
to perform his praises, the most generous in the sharing of rings,
the bright bracelets, the child of Eadwine. (68-74)

(translation by Prof. Aaron K. Hostetter of Rutgers University, Camden—here’s a LINK so that you can read the whole poem—and much more—at his website—he has a wonderful project to translate a mass of Old English literature and has done a great deal to make it all accessible in one place. As for Widsith, there’s a very useful Wiki article, if you’re interested. Here’s a LINK to it.)

Whereas there might be some distant influence in the making of a powerful ring in Wagner’s operas, the giving of rings makes us think of Sauron, when he reappears in the Second Age. At that time, he comes in the guise of “Annatar”, “Lord of Gifts” and, to gain power over the Elves, encourages them to make rings, all the while creating his own to overpower and master them. As his power grows, he collects all of the rings he can (he never succeeds in getting the last three Elven rings) and doles them out, like those Anglo-Saxon kings and lords, to attempt to control dwarves and men, as well:

“But Sauron gathered into his hands all the remaining Rings of Power; and he dealt them out to the other peoples of Middle-earth, hoping thus to bring under his sway all those that desired secret power beyond the measure of their kind.” (The Silmarillion, 288)

The theme in both Wagner and The Silmarillion is that of supernatural control through what appears to be a rather ordinary object, a ring, something which, when Bilbo first finds it, is described as nothing more than “a tiny ring of cold metal” (The Hobbit, Chapter 5, “Riddles in the Dark”). Tolkien may have been influenced by its appearance in opera, and more likely, by the use of rings in Old English, but there is an older possibility:

“Outside school-room hours his mother gave him plenty of story-books…The Arthurian legends also excited him. But most of all he found delight in the Fairy Books of Andrew Lang, especially the Red Fairy Book, for tucked away in its closing pages was the best story he had ever read. This was the tale of Sigurd who slew the dragon Fafnir: a strange and powerful tale set in the nameless North.” (Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien, A Biography, 31)

Andrew Lang (1844-1912),

who might be considered a perfect example of the Victorian literary figure, having written novels, poems, criticism, travelogues, and early anthropological works, had also begun publishing a series of collections of stories for children, each one of the series being bound in a different color.

His wife, Leonora Blanche Alleyne (1851-1933), did most of the editing after the initial volumes, publishing, in all, a dozen volumes between 1889 and 1910. The Red Fairy Book (1890) was the second in the series

and it was in this volume that a little boy

first discovered dragons—and perhaps magic rings, as well, as in the story of Sigurd, we find:

“Now there was at that time a dwarf called Andvari, who lived in a pool beneath a waterfall, and there he had hidden a great hoard of gold. And one day Otter had been fishing there, and had killed a salmon and eaten it, and was sleeping, like an otter, on a stone. Then someone came by, and threw a stone at the otter and killed it, and flayed off the skin, and took it to the house of Otter’s father. Then he knew his son was dead, and to punish the person who had killed him he said he must have the Otter’s skin filled with gold, and covered all over with red gold, or it should go worse with him. Then the person who had killed Otter went down and caught the Dwarf who owned all the treasure and took it from him.

Only one ring was left, which the Dwarf wore, and even that was taken from him.

Then the poor Dwarf was very angry, and he prayed that the gold might never bring any but bad luck to all the men who might own it, for ever.” (Lang, editor, “The Story of Sigurd”)

And this is not the only ring to be found in The Red Fairy Book.

In the “Draft of a letter to ‘Mr. Rang’ ”, dated by Tolkien as “Aug. 1967”, JRRT has this to say about the origin of the name Moria:

“In fact this first appeared in The Hobbit chap.1. It was there, as I remember, a casual ‘echo’ of Soria Moria Castle in one of the Scandinavian tales translated by Dasent. (The tale had no interest for me: I had already forgotten it and have never since looked at it…)” (Letters, 384)

The “Dasent” mentioned here is Sir George Webbe Dasent (1817-1896), lawyer, civil servant, and sometime professor of English Literature and Modern History at King’s College, London, who, in 1859, had published Popular Tales from the Norse, a translation from the Norwegian of a series of pamphlets and books by Asbjornsen and Moe under the general title “Norske Folkeeventyr” (“Norse Folktales”), published between 1841 and 1871. By the third edition (1888), Dasent had added, among other works, a story entitled “Soria Moria Castle”. Tolkien may have seen any one of the several different editions of this work as an adult, but, as a child, he would have first read “Soria Moria Castle” in the same Red Fairy Book in which he had encountered Sigurd and the dragon. (Here’s a LINK to the Lang if you would like to see the two stories as JRRT would have.)

Beyond the title and its hint of Dwarfish mines, however, there is also a magic ring to be found in this story, given to the hero, Halvor, by three princesses whom he has rescued from trolls:

“Then they dressed him so splendidly that he was like a King’s son; and they put a ring on his finger, and it was one which would enable him to go there and back again by wishing, but they told him that he must not throw it away, or name their names; for if he did, all his magnificence would be at an end, and then he would never see them more.” (“Soria Moria Castle”)

JRRT was born in 1893. We don’t know exactly when his mother may have handed him Lang’s collection, but it was in childhood, according to his own recollection. Thus, the Ring—disguised as a ring—may have entered his life long before he heard an opera, or studied an earlier form of his native language.

The Lord of the Rings has a ring in its composition and we began this posting with talk of ring composition, but now we’re going to conclude by breaking loose from that ring by suggesting that perhaps that was the ultimate purpose in the original choice of the Ring for JRRT: to symbolize completion not by circling back, but by the breaking of a seemingly unbreakable circle. Sauron, once the servant of Melkor, but having great power of his own, has used that power not only to return and return through the ages from defeat, but to fashion a master ring, one which controls all others, giving him even more strength. At the same time, it had required such strength to make such a ring that, at its destruction:

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

(Another wonderful illustration by one of our favorite Tolkien illustrators, Ted Nasmith)

As Gandalf has said of the Ring:

“If it is destroyed, then he will fall, and his fall will be so low that none can foresee his arising ever again. For he will lose the best part of the strength that was native to him in his beginning, and all that was made or begun with that power will crumble, and he will be maimed for ever, becoming a mere spirit of malice that gnaws itself in the shadows, but cannot again grow or take shape. And so a great evil of this world will be removed.” (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 9, “The Last Debate”)

Thus, after the Ring was destroyed, so was the ring of Sauron’s return in age after age, bringing about what we might then call “ring de-composition”and the story ends not where it began, but going towards old places—the Grey Havens and beyond—for some, and new places—the Fourth Age—for others.

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

Can we resist saying one thing more? JRRT couldn’t—but was he thinking of a teaser for a sequel when Gandalf added to what he’d said above:

“Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary.”?

Orc Arsenal.1

26 Wednesday Sep 2018

Posted by lebedusya1 in Artists and Illustrators, Fairy Tales and Myths, Heroes, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, The Rohirrim

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Alan Lee, And Inquiry Into Ancient Armour, Angus McBride, arming sword, Battle Axe, English Longbowmen, Eowyn, Falchion, Gladius, Gondor, Hildebrandts, Howard Pyle, John Howe, King Arthur, Longbow, Mace, Medieval, Mongols, Morning Star, Orcs, Pelennor, Pitt-Rivers Museum, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rohirrim, Scimitar, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir Samuel Meyrick, Ted Nasmith, The Black Arrow, The Lord of the Rings, The White Company, Tolkien, Victorian, Wallace Collection, War Hammer, Weaponry, Witch-King of Angmar

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

“The great shadow descended like a falling cloud. And behold! It was a winged creature…

Upon it sat a shape, black-mantled, huge and threatening…A great black mace he wielded.”

(The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 6, “The Battle of the Pelennor Fields”)

This is clearly a scene which has caught the attention, over the years, of many artists, starting, we’d guess, with the Hildebrandts.

Then others, like Angus McBride and Ted Nasmith,

And Alan Lee and John Howe,

as well as many very good artists whom we don’t know by name—

Of these, all but Lee and the unknown sixth artist follow JRRT’s description more or less closely. Number 6—it’s a little unclear– but he might be carrying a war hammer of some sort,

rather than a mace.

(These last two are basic patterns of a mace.)

The Lee is, well, we’re not sure what it seems to be. It sort of looks like a battle axe

but also like what was called a “morning star”,

which should, we think, belong to the flail family.

This rather fits in with the P Jackson image, shown in this model (and note that sword—definitely not in the original description—which is in his other hand).

This difference made us curious about the weapons the Rohirrim—and the Gondorians—face and, in particular, those of the orcs. The Hildebrandts

provide us with odd-looking spears and what might appear to be scimitars

but might be the suggestion of a medieval sword called a falchion.

McBride, who spent much of his artistic career illustrating military subjects, gives us weapons (mostly) less fanciful.

Lee

and Howe

veer between the practical and the fantastic and the films clearly follow them—

How does JRRT describe the orc weaponry?

The first armed orc we see appears in Moria:

“His broad flat face was swart, his eyes were like coals, and his tongue was red; he wielded a great spear…Sam, with a cry, hacked at the spear-shaft, and it broke. But even as the orc flung down the truncheon and swept out his scimitar…” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 5, “The Bridge of Khazad-dum”)

The orcs who pursue the Fellowship through Moria have similar weapons:

“Beyond the fire he saw swarming black figures: there seemed to be hundreds of orcs. They brandished spears and scimitars which shone red as blood in the firelight.”

After the death of Boromir, however, Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas find a different kind of orc:

“There were four goblin-soldiers of greater stature, swart, slant-eyed, with thick legs and large hands. They were armed with short broad-bladed swords, not with the curved scimitars usual with Orcs: and they had bows of yew, in length and shape like the bows of Men.” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 1, “The Departure of Boromir”)

So far, we’ve seen spears

and scimitars

and now we can add to that “short broad-bladed swords”. Perhaps Tolkien is thinking of the medieval “arming sword”

or even the Roman gladius?

When we add “bows of yew, in length and shape like the bows of Men”, we immediately see the classic English longbow.

This doesn’t quite match with the first orc bowman we see in the films, however, “Lurtz”—

who appears to have some sort of recurved bow, possibly composite, of the sort the Mongols used

even though, from the white hand on his face, he is supposed to be one of those “goblin-soldiers” from Isengard.

As we were looking through Tolkien’s text, we wondered where he would have gotten his ideas for weapons from. If the basis, as we imagine it, would have been his background in medieval literature, then he might have gone to the library and found an old standard work, Sir Samuel Meyrick’s (1783-1848)

An Inquiry Into Ancient Armour, As It Existed in Europe, Particularly in Great Britain, From the Norman Conquest to the Reign of Charles the Second, first published in 1824. (Here’s a LINK if you’d like to look at this text for yourself.)

Meyrick was the first great English specialist in armor and the later editions of his work (in 3 volumes) have wonderful early hand-colored plates, all based upon surviving armor, tombs, manuscripts, and any other period materials he could gather.

If JRRT wanted to see such things for himself, he would have found more exotic weapons in the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford,

or he could have traveled up to London to see the Wallace Collection

or, best of all, he could have visited the Tower of London, with its massive collection (the organizing of which had earned Meyrick his knighthood in 1832) of medieval arms and armor, which had been available to the public in some form even before Meyrick’s time—here’s a Victorian tour.

It could have been all of the above, of course, but it seems to us that the descriptions we’re reading are actually not really very specific—“mace”, “spear”, “scimitar”—only those short swords and bows suggest anything more detailed. Perhaps, then, Tolkien was inspired by something else—perhaps he had read, perhaps even possessed, as a boy, books like Howard Pyle’s 1903 The Story of King Arthur and His Knights

and been inspired by its illustrations.

There were plenty of illustrated tales like this—Conan Doyle’s The White Company (first published in serial form in 1891),

or Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Black Arrow (serial 1883, book 1888).

With any and all of that background, we wonder what he might have made of this, however, an orc sword from the films which looks more like something manufactured from a car part than the product of a medieval armorer…

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

If car part weapons don’t bother you, you might be interested in this LINK—it’s an early article on ideas for weapons and armor for the Jackson films.

Are You Sitting Down.1?

04 Wednesday Oct 2017

Posted by lebedusya1 in Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Narrative Methods

≈ Leave a comment

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

Crowning Achievement

20 Wednesday Sep 2017

Posted by lebedusya1 in Artists and Illustrators, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Narrative Methods

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Alexander the Great, Alice in Wonderland, Barrow-downs, Barrow-wights, Bayeux Tapestry, Brunhilde, Charlemagne, Cheshire Cat, circlet, Cleopatra VII, diadem, Egypt, Egyptian crowns, Elightenment France, Eowyn, French Revolution, Gondor, Gondorian crown, Greek, Greek coins, Hildebrandts, Imperial Crown of the Holy Roman Empire, Julius Caesar, Lupercalia, Marcus Antonius, Medieval, Napoleon I, Nazgul, Octavian Augustus, Pharoahs, Philip II, Pontifex Maximus, Ptolemy I, Queen Elizabeth I, Queen Elizabeth II, Queen Victoria, Richard Wagner, Rohan, Romans, Tenniel, The Lord of the Rings, Theoden, Tolkien, William Shakespeare, Witch-King of Angmar, wreaths

Welcome, dear readers, as ever.

Recently, one of us was lecturing on ancient Egypt, a country of two lands, in fact, Upper and Lower, and each could be represented in the crown worn by the pharaoh.

Within in blink, we began to think about JRRT’s illustration of the traditional crown of Gondor,

of which Tolkien says:

“I think that the crown of Gondor (the S. Kingdom) was very tall, like that of Egypt, but with wings attached, not set straight back but at an angle.

The N. Kingdom had only a diadem (III 323). Cf. the difference between the N. and S. kingdoms of Egypt.”

(Letters, letter to Rhona Beare, 10/14/58, 281)

For us, the first crown we believe we ever saw as children was either one in an illustrated fairy tale (here’s a Tenniel illustration from Alice)

or the actual one of Queen Elizabeth II, and that hardly fits JRRT’s idea about the southern crown—or the northern one

or that of her ancestor, Queen Victoria

or that of their distant ancestor, Elizabeth I.

When we think of a “diadem”, however, we are reminded of the earliest western European crowns, which, in contrast to Elizabeth’s, is barely there at all.

Here is the first type of crown we know of being depicted—it’s that “diadem” in a Greek form, being on a coin of Philip II, King of Macedon and father of Alexander the Great (the reverse—the back side—the front side is called the “obverse”—shows Philip’s Olympic victory horse and Philip’s name in the genitive—possessive—case, “of Philip”—showing not only possession of the horse, but of the victory, of the coin, and, by implication, the right to issue coins).

This became a regular pattern, both of coin and of crown for those who followed Philip, and, thinking about Philip’s victory, we can imagine that the original of the crown was based upon the wreath athletic game victors wore.

And coins like Philip’s set the pattern for classical coins—and crowns—for centuries. Here’s the crown pattern on the head of Ptolemy I, one of Alexander’s generals.

At Alexander’s death, Ptolemy seized Egypt, making it a family possession for the next nearly three hundred years, all the way down to his greatgreatgreat etc granddaughter Cleopatra VII.

The pattern was not confined to Greece or Egypt, however—Julius Caesar wore something similar—

although, unlike Ptolemy and other such rulers, Caesar might have hoped to muddy people’s perceptions of what such a thing symbolized and what position (dictator for life) he’d forced the Senate to give him. Rome had hated monarchs, after all, since they’d kicked out their last king 450 years before.

(And see Act I, Sc.2 of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in which, at the festival of the Lupercalia, Marcus Antonius publically offers him a crown and Caesar rejects it, much to the loud delight of the mob.)

In the Greco-Roman world, wreaths had many purposes: besides Greek kings and winners at games, people at parties and weddings and other festive occasions wore them, as well as celebrants at religious rites.

Perhaps Caesar hoped that, appearing in one, he might appear less like a Hellenistic king and more like anything from an Olympic victor or party-goer to a priest (he was Pontifex Maximus, head of religion in Rome, so there was a certain credibility to the latter).

Malicious people in Rome also suggested another reason for the wreath: Caesar was sensitive about his thinning hair.

Caesar’s grandnephew and successor, Octavian/Augustus, continued the tradition,

as did following emperors for several centuries—and even Charlemagne, hundreds of years after the last western emperor, revived it.

At some point, just after Charlemagne’s time or thereabout (c1000ad), a new pattern appeared, which you can see in the famous “Imperial Crown of the Holy Roman Empire”.

Instead of a wreath, this was a built-up circlet, with lots of “bits and bobs” on top.

This newer look persisted in various more or less complicated forms in the west for centuries

and seems to underlie the crowns seen in more recent times (often with what appears to be a red velvet balloon in the middle).

There is a throwback, however: Napoleon I. He had grown up in Enlightenment France, in a world which idealized classical learning and art, and so, when he made himself emperor in 1804, his model wasn’t medieval and Germanic, but Augustine.

This doesn’t mean that he wasn’t aware of that other model and he would have used it—the so-called “crown of Charlemagne”–at his self-coronation

had it not suffered the fate of many medieval treasures and been destroyed during the French Revolution (the famous Bayeux Tapestry was almost converted to wagon covers by revolutionaries). In fact, a “crown of Charlemagne” did turn up for the ceremony—“recreated” by a clever Paris jeweler.

[A footnote about the coronation. In the painter David’s sketches for it, he shows the pope (Pius VII) with his hands in his lap.

Napoleon saw the drawing and said to David that the pope should be blessing the occasion—after all, that’s why Napoleon had dragged him all the way from Rome. David redid his sketch, of course!]

Beyond the Crowns of Gondor, most of the crowns seen in The Lord of the Rings are described as “circlets”—

Sam, Merry, and Pippin, laid out in the barrow:

“About them lay many treasures of gold maybe, though in that light they looked cold and unlovely. On their heads were circlets, gold chains were about their waists, and on their fingers were many rings.”(The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 8, “Fog on the Barrow-Downs”)

Theoden:

“Upon it sat a man so bent with age that he seemed almost a dwarf; but his white hair was long and thick and fell in great braids from beneath a thin golden circlet set upon his brow.” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 6, “The King of the Golden Hall”)

But there is one which, well, looking at the various illustrations of its wearer, reminds us of Alice’s comment upon the Cheshire Cat:

“Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin…but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!” (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 6, “Pig and Pepper”)

On the Fields of the Pelennor, a “great shadow descended like a falling cloud. And behold! It was a winged creature.”

This might be bad enough, but:

“Upon it sat a shape, black-mantled, huge and threatening. A crown of steel he bore, but between rim and robe naught was there to see, save only a deadly gleam of eyes: the Lord of the Nazgul.” (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 6, “The Battle of the Pelennor Fields”)

We are aware of at least half-a-dozen professional renderings of this scene (and we plan to discuss them all in a future post), but it seems to us that those eyes, seeming to float in space, make it extremely difficult to illustrate it, no matter what crown—simply described as “steel”—he’s wearing. And that brings us back to our original crown. As JRRT described it:

“It was shaped like the helms of the Guards of the Citadel, save that it was loftier, and it was all white, and the wings at either side were wrought of pearl and silver in the likeness of the wings of a sea-bird, for it was the emblem of kings who came over the Sea; and seven gems of adamant were set in the circlet, and upon its summit was set a single jewel the light of which went up like a flame.” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 5, “The Steward and the King”)

If his drawing (seen at the beginning of this post) is what he had in mind, then the only professional illustration we’ve seen of it, by the Hildebrandts, is only an approximation.

And, in fact, reminds us all-too-easily of Brunhilde, the Walkuere, from Wagner’s operas.

If illustrators as good as the Hildebrandts struggle, this must be a tough one. The designers of the P. Jackson films are even farther away from the original, as so often.

Here, however, we have some sympathy! Somehow the medieval world of Middle-earth can not easily assimilate an Egyptian artifact. And so, we suspect that they thought “circlet” and “wings” and left it there. What do you think, readers? How do you imagine the crown?

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

Healing (II)

16 Wednesday Aug 2017

Posted by lebedusya1 in Heroes, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Narrative Methods

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Akira Kurosawa, Aragorn, athelas, bleeding, Boromir, cinquefoil, Eowyn, Faramir, four humors, Greco-Roman, healers, herbal medicine, Hildebrandts, Japanese block prints, John Bradmore, Kingsfoil, Macbeth, Medieval medicine, Medieval Monastery, Merry, Morgul Knife, Nazgul, Prince Hal, Prince Imrahil, Pyre of Denethor, Rammas Echor, The Battle of the Pelennor Fields, The Grey Havens, The Houses of Healing, The Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King, Throne of Blood, Tolkien, Washizu, Westernesse, Witch-King of Angmar, wounding, Yoshitoshi, Yoshitoshi's Courageous Warriors

Welcome, dear readers, as ever.
Two postings ago, we were talking about woundings in The Lord of the Rings and thinking about the medical care there as compared with that available in what we always think of as the actual parallel medieval world. We had gotten as far as Boromir, who, we imagined, would have been beyond help, pierced as he was by multiple arrows.

(We had also said that Boromir’s wounding reminded us of the death of the Macbeth figure in Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, 1957.

To which we would add—just because we love Japanese block prints (ukiyo-e)—this figure from Yoshitoshi’s series Yoshitoshi’s Courageous Warriors—1883-1886—)

[Here, by the way, are some great links—one to a massive collection of Yoshitoshi prints, the other is an excellent guide to the world of Japanese block prints in general—both highly recommended!]

http://yoshitoshi.net/

http://www.ukiyo-e.se/
The next wounding is that of Faramir.
After the fall of the Rammas Echor, the long wall which was meant to protect the far side of the Pelennor, Faramir was leading the rear guard, but:
“…there came flying a deadly dart, and Faramir, as he held at bay a mounted champion of Harad, had fallen to the earth.” (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 4, “The Siege of Gondor”)
At this time, we are not told of how the arrow was removed (we later are told that Prince Imrahil did it on the battlefield), but, that which concerned John Bradmore about the wounded Prince Hal in our 1403, after he had suffered an arrow wound,

now afflicted Faramir: infection.:
“During all this black day Faramir lay upon his bed in the chamber of the White Tower, wandering in a desperate fever…”
In our medieval world, medicine was based upon a combination of beliefs, some of which even dated back to the Greco-Roman world.
One major foundation block was the idea that the body was governed by four elements, called “humors”: black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood.

They determined personality and behavior, but, although they were natural to the body, they could be thrown out of balance and part of a medieval doctor’s job was to rebalance them.

This rebalancing could include doses of all sorts of things—dangerous metals, like mercury, concoctions from various plants, some of which were helpful, some poisonous, and bleeding—based upon the idea that, by removing blood, you were helping rebalance the body’s natural humorous proportions.

In Faramir’s case, a doctor might try a number of drugs based upon plants which were believed to bring fever down:
angelica

chamomile

datura

or coriander

In the text, however, although Pippin suggests that Gandalf be consulted, Denethor dismisses the suggestion and Faramir is left to burn—before almost being literally consumed by fire along with his mad father.
[And here we would suggest that the over-the-top scene of Denethor’s death in the film missed an important point. In the book, it is clear that what drove Denethor to try to set up a kind of Viking funeral for himself and his son was the palantir by which his mind was poisoned by a Sauron whose influence over him he fatally underestimated. And what a wonderfully spooky moment JRRT describes when the orb survives the fire which destroys the Steward:
“And it was said that ever after, if any man looked in that Stone, unless he had a great strength of will to turn it to other purpose, he saw only two aged hands withering in flame.” (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 7, “The Pyre of Denethor”)]
We will return to Faramir, but, first, we want to look at two more woundings, both occurring almost in the same moment: when Eowyn and Merry face the chief of the Nazgul.

In confronting the Witch King, Eowyn suffers what might seem a perfectly ordinary battle wound in a world of hand-to-hand combat such as this:
“Out of the wreck rose the Black Rider, tall and threatening, towering above her. With a cry of hatred that stung the very ears like venom he let fall his mace. Her shield was shivered in many pieces and her arm was broken; she stumbled to her knees.” (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 6, “The Battle of the Pelennor Fields”)

Eowyn is saved from the Nazgul by Merry, who “had stabbed him from behind, shearing through the black mantle, and passing up beneath the hauberk had pierced the sinew in his mighty knee.”
Combined with Eowyn’s final blow at the wraith’s face, this destroyed what we presume was an undead being, but, in return, both Merry and Eowyn take an invisible wound, something which the medical people of Minas Tirith can only observe:
“But now their art and knowledge were baffled; for there were many sick of a malady that would not be healed; and they called it the Black Shadow, for it came from the Nazgul. And those who were stricken with it fell slowly into an ever deeper dream, and then passed into silence and a deadly cold, and so died. And it seemed to the tenders of the sick that on the Halfling and on the Lady of Rohan this malady lay heavily.” (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 8, “The Houses of Healing”)
Eowyn and Merry (and Faramir) have been taken to “the Houses of Healing”, which, in our world, would be a hospital, something which, in our Middle Ages, would either have been part of a monastery/cloister, or were a private foundation, supported by charitable donations.

Medical people there could certainly have set Eowyn’s broken arm, even sealing it in plaster to keep it immobile, but the Black Shadow would have been as difficult for them as for the healers in Minas Tirith. Comas were recognized in the Middle Ages, but there was little to be done: apparently, comatose people lose the swallowing function, which means that someone in that condition would die of dehydration, probably within a few days (speed of dehydration depends upon many factors, as well as the individual, but the longest we’ve seen is about 10 to 12 days).
To their credit, those in the Houses of Healing tried to do something by observation:
“Still at whiles as the morning wore away they [Eowyn and Merry] would speak, murmuring in their dreams; and the watchers listened to all they said, hoping perhaps to learn something that would help them to understand their hurts.”
But the Shadow spreads quickly as day fades:
“But soon they began to fall down into the darkness, and as the sun turned west a grey shadow crept over their faces.”
And there is the added difficult of Faramir, who “burned with a fever that would not abate.”
At this point, both medieval healers and those in Minas Tirith were stumped—until another factor was added. In fact, two.
Plants have been used since ancient times for medicine world-wide, so it should be no surprise that Middle-earth should have a parallel. In this instance, the plant is called “kingsfoil” or athelas. (The “foil” in the first name is—in English—based upon the Old French foil/foille, “leaf”, which comes, in turn, from a Latin word for leaf, folium—perhaps JRRT was inspired by the plant called “cinquefoil” = “fiveleaf”. Athelas is also a compound, based upon Sindarin athaya, “helpful” and lass, “leaf”.) [There’s a really useful posting on possible our world parallels for this herb and we provide the LINK here.]
When Aragorn tended to Frodo’s Morgul-knife wound earlier in The Lord of the Rings, we would have seen its use then:
“He threw the leaves into boiling water and bathed Frodo’s shoulder. The fragrance of the steam was refreshing, and those that were unhurt felt their minds calmed and cleared. The herb had also some power over the wound, for Frodo felt the pain and also the sense of frozen cold lessen in his side…” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 12, “Flight to the Ford”)
This is not all to the treatment, however. Just before he uses the herb, Aragorn appears to employ some sort of counter-spell to that which was on the knife:
“He sat down on the ground, and taking the dagger-hilt laid it on his knees, and he sang over it a slow song in a strange tongue. Then setting it aside, he turned to Frodo and in a soft tone spoke words the others could not catch.”
This pattern of speech and herb is now employed in the healing not only of Eowyn and Merry, but of Faramir, as well, and forms both a part of the movement towards the eventual defeat of Sauron and the return of light to Middle-earth, and of the confirmation of Aragorn as the rightful heir to the throne. As the herb-master, when called upon by Aragorn to produce the herb, recites:
“When the black breath blows
And death’s shadow grows
And all lights pass,
Come athelas! Come athelas!
Life to the dying
In the king’s hand lying!”
Previously, the herb-master says “it has no virtue that we know of, save perhaps to sweeten a fouled air, or to drive away some passing heaviness…old folk still use an infusion of the herb for headaches.” Now, however, Aragorn proceeds to use it three times in quick succession, along with something else, to bring back the three so sunk towards death:
“Now Aragorn knelt beside Faramir, and held a hand upon his brow. And those that watched felt that some great struggle was going on. For Aragorn’s face grew grey with weariness; and ever and anon he called the name of Faramir, but each time more faintly to their hearing, as if Aragorn himself was removed from them, and walked afar in some dark vale, calling for one that was lost.”
Moving to Eowyn, Aragorn uses the athelas again, but summons her, as well:
“Then, whether Aragorn had indeed some forgotten power of Westernesse, or whether it was but his words of the Lady Eowyn that wrought on them, as the sweet influence of the herb stole about the chamber it seemed to those who stood by that a keen wind blew through the window…”

And a third time, with Merry: “I came in time, and I have called him back.”
We’ll end the second part of our discussion of woundings here—or almost. There is one more patient whom it appears even the king can’t heal:
“But I have been too deeply hurt, Sam.” Says Frodo. “I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger; some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.” (The Return of the King, Book 6, Chapter 9, “The Grey Havens”)

And yet, there is perhaps the promise of healing beyond Middle-earth, something which may even bear a faint suggestion of the scent of Athelas:
“And the ship went out into the High Sea and passed on into the West, until at last on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water…the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.”
Thanks, as ever, for reading.
MTCIDC
CD

Tobago to Lothlorien 2

26 Wednesday Oct 2016

Posted by lebedusya1 in Heroes, J.R.R. Tolkien, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Anduin, Barad-Dur, Bree, Caras Galadhon, Cirith Ungol, defense, Edoras, fortification, Galadriel, Helm's Deep, Hildebrandts, John Howe, Lothlorien, Minas Tirith, Morannon, Nenya, Offa's Dyke, Rhodes, Robinson Crusoe, stockades, Swiss Family Robinson, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, tree house

Welcome, dear readers, as always. As you can see from the title, this is a continuation of our previous post.

In that previous posting, we began with the novel, Robinson Crusoe (1719),

then on to Swiss Family Robinson (1812),

being especially interested in the stockade of the former

0_8a62b_11562dfa_orig

and the tree house of the latter.

swiss-family-robinson

The connection here was the tree house and Lothlorien, where the elves lived high up in the trees.

At least, that’s where we began. As we looked more seriously at the architecture of Lothlorien, however, we began to wonder, in a world in which darkness had gradually spread, how it protected itself. After all, Robinson Crusoe, afraid of the cannibals he had seen, had walled himself in. Part of it was the power of Galadriel herself, as she implies to Frodo:

“But do not think that only by singing amid the trees, nor even by the slender arrows of elven-bows, is this land of Lothlorien maintained and defended against its Enemy.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 2, Chapter 7, “The Mirror of Galadriel”)

But was there anything more besides singing, arrows, and Nenya, the Ring of Adamant?

Far to the south, Minas Tirith had seven concentric (more or less) walls,

and its opponents across the Anduin had the Morannon

and Cirith Ungol

and even the Barad Dur.

It is not so clear about Edoras. There is mention that “A dike [that is, a ditch/moat] and mighty wall and thorny fence encircle it”, along with the phrase “wide wind-swept walls and gates” (The Two Towers, Book 3, Chapter 6, “The King of the Golden Hall”), but little else. And you can see that lack of information reflected in the rather scanty look in the Jackson films—

Helm’s Deep, is, of course, a different matter—we show you versions by the Hildebrandts and by John Howe

Lothlorien is, in fact, not a single site, like any of the above. This map

gives you an idea of its complexity. There is the outer forest, with its camouflaged guard flets in trees, seemingly along its borders, and then the actual center, the city of Caras Galadhon. Here’s JRRT’s description of that center:

“There was a wide treeless space before them, running in a great circle and bending away on either hand. Beyond it was a deep fosse lost in soft shadow, but the grass upon its brink was green, as if it glowed still in memory of the sun that had gone. Upon the further side there rose to a great height a green wall encircling a green hill thronged with mallorn-trees taller than any they had yet seen in all the land.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 2, Chapter 7, “The Mirror of Galadriel”)

We are then told that there is a bridge, on the southern side, which crosses to “the great gates of the city; they faced south-west, set between the ends of the encircling wall that here overlapped, and they were tall and strong, and hung with many lamps.”

A fosse (from the Latin verb, fodio, fodere, fodi, fossum, “to dig”) means that there was a moat—in this case, it would appear to be a dry moat, like this one at the city of Rhodes.

(Those stone balls, by the way, are left over from the Turkish artillery and stone-throwers which pounded the walls of Rhodes in 1522–when we have another posting–soon–on the attack on Minas Tirith, we’ll say more about that.)

That “green wall”, however, is a bit of a puzzle. Is it a wall of green stone of some sort? Or is it a “thorny fence”, like that which surrounds Edoras? There are two similar defenses, or at least boundaries, in LOTR. First, there is the border between Buckland and the Old Forest:

“Their land was originally unprotected from the East; but on that side they had built a hedge: the High Hay. It had been planted many generations ago, and it was now thick and tall…” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 1, Chapter 5, “A Conspiracy Unmasked”)

The second such construction appears at Bree (which sounds much like Edoras):

“On that side, running in more than half a circle from the hill and back to it, there was a deep dike with a thick hedge on the inner side.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 1, Chapter 9, “At the Sign of the Prancing Pony”)

So what is the green wall? English hedges can be very dense things, often to mark off fields, as in this photo of Offa’s Dyke–and you can see the fosse/ditch/moat here, as well.

In at least one previous entry, we discussed Offa’s Dike, a (possibly) 8^th-century-AD ditch and earthen wall between England and Wales.

Can we imagine the palisading of this reconstruction replaced with a thorny hedge? Here’s a long shot of Offa’s Dike with a bit of hedging visible.

When we consider the general look of Caras Galadhon, it is of something organic: the elves loved the trees and, instead of cutting them down, as the hobbits had done outside the High Hay, they climbed up into them. Might we then see that their physical barrier against their enemies was of the same green and growing material as were their dwellings?

What do you think, dear readers?

Thanks, as ever, for reading,

MTCIDC

A Country for Old Men—and Old Men for a Country

11 Wednesday May 2016

Posted by lebedusya1 in Fairy Tales and Myths, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Apollonius, Aragorn, Argo, Blue Wizards, Denethor, Faramir, Gandalf and the Balrog, Grey Havens, Heracles, Hildebrandts, Hylas, Istari, Jason and the Golden Fleece, Merlin, Radaghast, sage, Saint Nicholas, Saruman, Sharkey, The Argonautica, The Fantastic Four, The Lord of the Rings, Theoden, Tiresias, Tolkien, Valar, W.B.Yeats

Dear readers, welcome, as always.

Recently, we wrote a posting about Saruman and his fate. It was fun to think about, but it made us think further about why Saruman, in the Shire, is called “Sharkey” by his thugs—supposedly from Orcish sharku, “Old Man”. If we had never read a description of Saruman, but only the nickname, we might think of “the old man” either as an older Anglo-American expression either for a father—“my old man keeps nagging me about cutting the grass, if I want my allowance” (note the use of the possessive “my”)—a naval/military term for commander—“the old man said that, on his ship, smoking would never be allowed again” (always without the possessive)—or older English for husband—“her old man is fooling around behind her back—I hope she turns around!” (again, with a possessive).

In fact, Saruman is, literally, an old man

greg-hildebrandt-isengard-orthanc-saruman-607429-1300x962.jpg

—as are all five of the Istari, the wizards sent to Middle-earth by the Valar about the year 1000 of the Third Age. As JRRT says in a letter to Robert Murray, S.J. (there’s a surviving draft on pages 200-207 of The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien):

“They are actually emissaries from the True West, and so mediately from God, sent precisely to strengthen the resistance of the ‘good’, when the Valar become aware that the shadow of Sauron is taking shape again.” Letters, 207

He further explains their role:

“At this point in the fabulous history the purpose was precisely to limit and hinder their exhibition of ‘power’ on the physical plane, and so that they should do what they were primarily sent for: train, advise, instruct, arouse the hearts and minds of those threatened by Sauron to a resistance with their own strengths; and not just to do the job for them.” 202

JRRT could have chosen a different path, of course, and created a plot in which there was constant, open war between the wizards and Sauron, and there is mention of war of some sort, as, during the time of The Hobbit, the White Council drives “the Necromancer” out of Dol Goldur in the southern part of Mirkwood. It’s not said how, but no army is mentioned, so we presume that it was done by magic against magic (on the subject of magic, see JRRT in the letter previous to the one to Murray, Letters, 199-200).

We wonder if, in choosing to limit the wizards’ power, Tolkien made the same choice which Apollonius of Rhodes (3^rd century BC) made in his version of the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece, The Argonautica. If you don’t know this story, the shortest way to explain it is to say that Jason’s wicked uncle has stolen the throne which rightfully belongs to Jason and, in an effort to make Jason disappear, his uncle has sent him off on what he hoped was a suicide mission. That mission was to bring back a magical golden fleece from the far side of the Black Sea (at the time, this would have been like a mission to Mars). To help him, Jason summons heroes from across the Greek world.

Unfortunately for Apollonius, the traditional story on which his epic is based had, over time, gradually come to include every hero from ancient Greece on Argo,

This means that Heracles had to be asked to join, but there is a big difficulty in including Heracles: he’s so powerful that he could do the job all by himself.

Apollonius was extremely scrupulous, as far as we can tell, in following tradition, so he finds a way out. He puts Heracles’ bff, Hylas, on board the ship, then, at a watering spot, has the boy lured away by some randy water nymphs.

hylas_and_the_nymphs.waterhouse1896.jpg

When Heracles goes off to find the boy, the ship leaves without him and the problem is solved. (Although Apollonius chooses to ignore the fact that the ship is still absolutely crammed with the ancient equivalent of The Fantastic Four. We suppose that, for him, Heracles was the only really major hero.)

Thus, we can imagine that Tolkien, believing that he could create a more interesting (and longer?) story without too much magic, has, in general, limited the wizards not in their power, but in the use of it. (There are exceptions, of course—we immediately think of Gandalf and the Balrog, for instance.)

The wizards do not just have the shape of men, however, but old men—“Thus they appeared as ‘old’ sage figures” (Letters, 202).

The word “sage” here is definitely one element in Tolkien’s choice for his characters. There is a world-wide tradition that old men are wise men—think of the ancient Greek seer Tiresias, for example—

Johann_Heinrich_Füssli_tiresias.jpg

or the Arthurian Merlin

or Father Christmas/Santa Claus.

We wonder whether there might also be the idea that, dramatically, older rulers, like Theoden

And Denethor

might be more inclined to listen to such a person (although we notice that the corrupted Denethor is less than willing).

And, that younger men like Aragorn

and Faramir

Tim Hildebrandt - Faramir rencontre Frodon et Sam (2).jpg

would see them as mentors.

And, as the Istari have been sent by the Valar, the last act on Gandalf’s part, as depicted in this Hildebrandt twins’ painting, has special significance, suggesting that, Aragorn has been given the throne with divine approval and, with his crowning, Sauron has been completely defeated and balance has been restored, even if only temporarily, to Middle-earth.

When this has been accomplished, Gandalf is then allowed to “retire”, as we seem to expect old men to do in our world (and as Tolkien himself did, in 1959), going to the Grey Havens and a final journey back to the West.

We hear nothing more of Radagast and the two so-called “Blue Wizards”, but, Saruman also leaves Middle-earth—though not in Gandalf’s gentle way. And perhaps his end, shabby and disgraced, also shows a kind of divine approval: those given power must not abuse it, for the consequences not only to the world around them, but to them, can be fatal.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

Our title is an adaptation of the first line of W.B. Yeats’ gorgeous poem, Sailing to Byzantium (first published in 1928). Although it has nothing to do with Middle-earth, it does depict a strange, magical place.

Beaux Gestes? (2)

27 Wednesday Apr 2016

Posted by lebedusya1 in Artists and Illustrators, Fairy Tales and Myths, J.R.R. Tolkien, Villains

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

19th-century tombs, Cicero, Galadriel, Gandalf, Grey Havens, Hildebrandts, Istari, Mourning, Queen Victoria, Quintilian, Saruman, Scouring of the Shire, The Lord of the Rings, The Mirror of Galadriel, Theatrical gesture, Tolkien, Valar

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

In our last, we commenced a small examination of gesture in The Lord of the Rings, relating specifically to Galadriel and Saruman. We began with Galadriel

and her rejection of Sauron. JRRT describes it in this way: “She lifted up her white arms, and spread out her hands towards the East in a gesture of rejection and denial.” In that post, we said that her gesture seemed theatrical, almost melodramatic, and we suggested that JRRT had been influenced by what we imagined he had seen on stage and on screen late in the 19^th and into the 20^th centuries, a time when such broad gestures were still considered the best way to convey strong emotion. This mode was, we proposed, ultimately based upon the writings of two ancient Romans, Cicero and Quintilian, who lived between the years 100BC and 100AD. In their day and up to the 20^th century, the only magnification available to allow speakers to be heard over crowds was the human voice. Thus, a range of gestures emphatic enough to be seen and clear enough to be understood at a distance was an important component of effective speaking and such gestures were adopted and adapted by actors and used and reused for many centuries to come.

Because none of the illustrations based upon “The Mirror of Galadriel” depicts this gesture, we used a photograph from an 1898 book on public speaking to provide the sense of what we believe we were meant to see.

In our last, we also suggested that Galadriel’s gesture was linked to one of Saruman’s—in fact, his last gesture on Middle Earth, as far as we know.

In sudden resentment at the contemptuous treatment consistently dealt him by Saruman, Grima Wormtongue has drawn a hidden knife and cut the wizard’s throat.

“To the dismay of those that stood by, about the body of Saruman a grey mist gathered, and rising slowly to a great height like smoke from a fire, as a pale shrouded figure it loomed over the Hill. For a moment it wavered, looking to the West; but out of the West came a cold wind, and it bent away, and with a sigh dissolved into nothing.” The Lord of the Rings, Book 6, Chapter viii.

Saruman had been one of the Istari, as Tolkien describes them all in describing Gandalf:

“There are naturally no precise modern terms to say what he was. I wd. venture to say that he was an incarnate ‘angel’—strictly an angelos: that is, with the other Istari, wizards, ‘those who know’, an emissary from the Lords of the West, sent to Middle-earth, as the great crisis of Sauron loomed on the horizon. By ‘incarnate’ I mean they were embodied in physical bodies capable of pain, and weariness, and of afflicting the spirit with physical fear, and of being ‘killed’, though supported by the angelic spirit they might endure long, and only show slowly the wearing of care and labour.” Letter to Robert Murray, S.J. (draft), 4 November, 1954.

Saruman, then, as another of the Istari, can be killed—and is, but what then? In his battle with the Balrog, it appears that Gandalf has met his end. He returns, however, suggesting that his physical body might be capable of the repair which Galadriel administers in Lorien. As JRRT says in the same letter, “He was sent by a mere prudent plan of the angelic Valar or governors; but Authority had taken up this plan and enlarged it, at the moment of its failure.”—that is, Gandalf’s apparent death.

As Gandalf puts it, “I was the enemy of Sauron”, and, with Sauron defeated, apparently conclusively, Gandalf is allowed to return to the West, to do or be what, is never explained. It is a privilege, clearly, since it is granted only to High Elves and, with special dispensation, to Bilbo and Frodo.

This brings us back to Saruman’s gesture: “For a moment it wavered, looking to the West; but out of the West came a cold wind, and it bent away, and with a sigh dissolved into nothing.”

In a way, what we see here is actually a lack of gesture—it is a wavering, with a sense of hope, perhaps? Almost as if Saruman is appealing for pardon? As in the case, of Galadriel, we have no artist’s depiction of this, but we’ve used the clue of “a pale shrouded figure”, as well as that wavering, to imagine that this is someone in mourning and so we can offer several figures from later 19^th-century tombs as a possible image.

It’s interesting that these all are female, as if this is one of the expected jobs of 19^th-century women, to be the Mourners in Chief. We suppose that, since Queen Victoria mourned for her husband Albert from his death in 1861 to her own death in 1901, this shouldn’t be surprising, but we are planning a later posting about mourning in The Lord of the Rings which will examine the subject within certain western traditions in more depth.

Queen-Victoria-Her-Latest-Portrait-1900_tr_4643_566.jpg

In the meantime, we return to Galadriel to match these two gestures. Saruman had failed because he had accepted the East and the deceptive words of Sauron. His fate, then, is to be met with a cold wind and to dissolve, with a sigh, into nothing, rejected by the West from which he had been sent, several thousand years before. Galadriel, on the other hand, by protecting her people and rejecting Sauron, had been accepted back into the West and the last we see of her is aboard a ship at the Grey Havens, bound for her reward.

Thanks for reading, as always.

MTCIDC

We couldn’t resist this final image: the Hildebrandts with the painting.

For all of the wonderful paintings he and his brother have given us, may Tim Hildebrandt (1939-2006) have been given a safe passage to the West, as well.

Jolly Tom.1

09 Wednesday Sep 2015

Posted by lebedusya1 in Narrative Methods, Poetry, Tolkien

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Barrow-wights, Elrond, Gandalf, Hildebrandts, Nazgul, Old Man Willow, Peter Jackson, Ralph Bakshi, Sauron, Tales from the Perilous Realm, The Lord of the Rings, The Old Forest, Tolkien, Tom Bombadil

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always!

There has been lots of discussion, if not downright argument, about Tom Bombadil and The Lord of the Rings. Although he appears in the first BBC radio adaptation in 1955 (which Tolkien disliked, saying in a letter of the period that “I thought Tom Bombadil dreadful”) and in the 1979 American radio drama, he was excised from Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 animated feature and from the 1981 BBC radio production, although reappearing in the radio adaptation of the relevant material from The Lord of the Rings in Tales from the Perilous Realm (BBC 1992).

Then we come to Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring (2001). As anyone who has read our past postings knows, we have very mixed feelings about this and the subsequent films, but, in this posting, we want to take a completely different tack, not asking, as has always been the subject “why was Tom left out?” but, rather, “why might you keep him in?”

This is two questions, really, the first being “what would be his effect upon the story?” and, second, “just what of him would you keep?”

Lost in the Old Forest

the Hobbits run afoul of Old Man Willow

only to be rescued by Tom Bombadil

As much as we love the Hildebrandts’ work, this is not one of our favorites—this illustration really makes us wonder what kind of magic mushrooms Tom has been trading with Farmer Maggot and which Grateful Dead album is running in his head. As an antidote, here’s one of our favorites:

One could say that this is part of the pattern of increasingly-dangerous encounters the Hobbits are having as they try to leave the Shire—

the first encounter was with the Nazgul

This doesn’t justify including him, though, if he’s thought to be just one more in a series—and this is clearly an opinion held by a Jackson scriptwriter, who once said:

“Tom Bombadil is part of several false starts to Frodo’s journey, and you cannot have things happening quite so episodically; that’s not what storytelling is all about.” (quoted from The One Ring, “complete list of film changes”—see the link here)

If he’s not just a “false start”, what is his function—and may he have more than one?

One of those elements of The Lord of the Rings which runs always just below the surface is the great age of Middle Earth. This is an ancient place and that fact was clearly very important, to the author, who spent years building up that narrative infrastructure, and to the story. This is clearly not a quick, little, one-time adventure, but, rather, one more part of a very old tale, of the “long defeat” as Galadriel calls the struggle with Sauron.

As a living token of that antiquity—and the first, but hardly the last, they meet—on their journey, there is Tom Bombadil. As Elrond says of him:

“But I had forgotten Bombadil, if indeed this is still the same that walked the woods and hills long ago, and even then was older than the old. That was not then his name. Iarwain Ben-adar we called him, [“Old-young, fatherless”? see The Lord of the Rings Companion, 128 for more on his names) oldest and fatherless.” LotR 265.

Thus, one of his functions is to represent a distant past, though now as shrunken as the Old Forest, “but an outlier of its northern march. Time was when a squirrel could go from tree to tree from what is now the Shire to Dunland west of Isengard.” (Elrond—LotR 265) In this, he is akin to Fangorn/Treebeard, described by Gandalf (himself so old that he was created by Iluvatar before the Music of the Ainur) as “the oldest living thing that still walks beneath the Sun upon this Middle-earth.” LotR 499.

He also, in a curious way, might be understood to represent one possible—perhaps hopeful—form of the future. When Frodo asks him, “Who are you, Master?” he replies (and it strikes us as sounding like both a Middle-earth riddle and its solution):

“Eldest, that’s what I am. Mark my words, my friends: Tom was here before the river and the trees; Tom remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn. He made paths before the Big People, and saw the little People arriving. He was here before the Kings and the graves and the Barrow-wights. When the Elves passed westward, Tom was here already, before the seas were bent. He knew the dark under the stars when it was fearless—before the Dark Lord came from Outside.” LotR 131.

Tom represents continuity, unchanging stability, then, although he is not all-powerful. As Glorfindel says:

“I think that in the end, if all else is conquered, Bombadil will fall, Last as he was First; and then Night will come.” LotR 266.

And yet he also, because of his immense age and ability to endure, might represent the unspoken possibility that, though Sauron is powerful, because he is not the creator nor rightful owner of Middle-earth, but rather an invader, he can be defeated: as there was a time before Sauron, could there not be a time after him?

(As an afterthought here, might we also add Tom’s complete immunity to the Ring? In a story full of people, from Gollum to Sauron, from Bilbo to Galadriel, so affected, in one way or another by it, is this another form of hope? That not everyone in the whole of Middle-earth wants the Ring or has to deny it strenuously lest the temptation overcome them?)

We want to continue this discussion in our next posting, but we want to end this one by considering the second part of this question, “Just what of him would you keep?”

Although the usual explanation for excising him has to do with his being a supposed “false start”, which has to do with the mechanics of plot, we believe that a real reason has to do with the large quantity of verse which appears when he appears. These verses signal that appearance:

“Hey dol! merry dol! ring a dong dillo!

Ring a dong! hop along! fal lal the willow!

Tom Bom, jolly Tom, Tom Bombadillo!” LotR 119

Although there has been verse earlier in the book, it has been scattered, not concentrated, and has seemed more apropos to what has been going on in the text. Much of this verse appears to come from nowhere, rather like Tom himself (and there’s more on 121, 122, 124, 126, and a final bit on 134—although, as a cry for help, it somehow fits better). In a story primarily in prose, with the occasional song, how would you present such a character believably on film or on tape? (Especially when one notices that even his speech is sometimes cadenced—“What be you a-thinking of? You should not be waking. Eat earth! Dig deep! Drink water! Go to sleep! Bombadil is talking!” LotR 120)

In fact, the character of Bombadil is not organic to the development of the plot of The Lord of the Rings. Tom Bombadil made his first appearance in The Oxford Magazine in 1934, when The Hobbit was being written, but three years before its initial publication. (See The Lord of the Rings Companion 124-129 for the poem and further information).

The basic plot of chapters 6 and 7 is simple: Tom frees the Hobbits from Old Man Willow, leads them to his house, the Hobbits eat and drink there and converse with Tom, but there’s little more to the two scenes. Thus, except for the distress call which Tom teaches the Hobbits on 134, does any of this verse do more than show us the poetic/almost manic side of Bombadil? If we wished to retain the character, might it be possible to cut away the verse (including a certain amount of rhythmicized prose), leaving only those elements which further the plot?

To us, this is a more pressing issue than it might at first appear—but see our next post, Jolly Tom.2, to understand our interest.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

doubtfulsea

~ adventure romance fantasy

Tag Archives: Hildebrandts

Ring Composition

Orc Arsenal.1

Are You Sitting Down.1?

Crowning Achievement

Healing (II)

Tobago to Lothlorien 2

A Country for Old Men—and Old Men for a Country

Beaux Gestes? (2)

Jolly Tom.1