Childe Rowland to the Dark Tower Came

04 Wednesday Dec 2019

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

Tags

Alan Lee, Barad-Dur, Child Ballads, Fairy Tale, Hildebrandts, Hogwarts, John Howe, Neuschwanstein, Shakespeare, Sunset Crater, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Wukoki

If you are a reader/watcher of Shakespeare, you’ll immediately recognize the title, dear readers, as coming from King Lear, Act 3, Scene 4, where a character named Edgar, pretending to be mad, babbles (among other things):

“Child Roland to the dark tower came.

His word was still ‘Fie, foh, and fum,

I smell the blood of a British man.’ “

“Child Roland” belongs to a Scots ballad, “Burd Helen”, first cited in detail in Robert Jamieson’s Illustrations of Northern Antiquities (1814), page 397 and following. (“Burd” is an old Scots term for a young woman.) [If you’d like your own Jamieson, here’s the LINK to obtain a free copy: https://archive.org/details/illustrationsofn00webe]

That “Fie, foh, and fum” may also be familiar to you from the story of Jack the Giant Killer/Jack and the Bean Stalk, which first appeared in Round about our Coal Fire (1734), in “the story of Jack Spriggins and the Enchanted Bean” on page 45, with the words in a slightly different form:

“Fee-Faw-Fum!————–

I smell the Blood of an English-Man;

Whether he be alive or dead,

I’ll grind his Bones to make my Bread.”

[A copy of the whole pamphlet may be had at this LINK: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/98/Round_about_our_Coal_Fire%2C_or%2C_Christmas_Entertainments%2C_4th_edn%2C_1734.pdf]

It wasn’t about Jack or his beanstalk, that we began writing this, however, but about that “dark tower”.

And, when we write that, we think, at once, of the Barad-dur—although not perhaps as the Hildebrandts saw it— image1hild

or Alan Lee

image2lee

or John Howe

image3howe

or Ted Nasmith,

image4ted

as much as we respect their ideas and enjoy their work. It’s interesting to see how Tolkien imagined it.

image5jrrt

Oddly, to us, this doesn’t look like anything western, but rather like a Japanese castle, such as Kumamoto, originally built in the 15^th century.

image6kumamoto

There is no long description of Sauron’s fortress in The Lord of the Rings, but there are a few bits here and there–

“The Dark Tower was broken, but its foundations were not removed, for they were made with the power of the Ring, and while it remains they will endure.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 2, “The Council of Elrond”)

“Then at last his [Sam’s] gaze was held: wall upon wall, battlement upon battlement, black, immeasurably strong, mountain of iron, gate of steel, tower of adamant, he saw it: Barad-dur, Fortress of Sauron.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 10, “The Breaking of the Fellowship”)

“…that vast fortress, armoury, prison, furnace of great power, Barad-dur, the Dark Tower…” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 8, “The Road to Isengard”)

“…towers and battlements, tall as hills, founded upon a mighty mountain-throne above immeasurable pits; great courts and dungeons, eyeless prisons sheer as cliffs, and gaping gates of steel and adamant…” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 3, “Mount Doom”)

The last description, in particular, with its mention of “towers and battlements, round as hills”, makes us think of medieval fictional castles built on rocks, like Andelkrag, from the stories of Prince Valiant,

image7andelkrag

or historical castles, like “Dracula’s castle”—actually Bran Castle–in Rumania,

image8dracs

or even the mock-medieval Neuschwanstein, built in the 19^th century.

image9neu

All of these have the “towers and battlements” necessary, suggesting that the Barad-dur may be called “the dark tower”, but is, in fact, like many medieval castles, a conglomeration of towers

image10ideal

and therefore perhaps even Hogwarts might be a candidate for a model.

image11hogwarts

In one respect, however, we agree with the Hildebrandts’ view.

image12hil

The Barad-dur is built in what is clearly a volcanic world—rather like this—

image31wilderness

so what is it built from? The volcanic area we have some experience of is in northern Arizona, a place called Sunset Crater, the site of a volcanic eruption about 1085AD.

image14sun

It’s obviously a bit overgrown in comparison with our first image, but in the area are the remains of a number of buildings—ancient buildings from a culture called “Puebloan”—which date from after the eruption and they are made of the local sandstone. The most imposing is this—

image15wukoki

Imagine, then, a many-towered castle, with a central tower (perhaps darker than the others, and taller?), built of a ruddy local stone, set on a rocky outcropping in a wide volcanic valley and you have our idea of the Barad-dur. What do you think, dear readers?

Thanks, as always, for reading and

MTCIDC

While we were thinking and doing a little looking around about this, we happened on two very different views of that 19^th-century castle, Neuschwanstein,

image16neu

image17neu

and we suddenly wondered whether it hadn’t been an inspiration for Minas Tirith?

image18mt

pps

By the way, welcome, dear readers!

Orc Looks

13 Wednesday Nov 2019

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, J.R.R. Tolkien, Villains

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Alan Lee, Angus McBride, Count Orlok, Denis Gordeev, Description, Frank Frazetta, Hal Foster, Hildebrandts, Illustration, John Howe, Nosferatu, Orcs, Peter Jackson, Prince Valiant, Ted Nasmith, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Villains

As ever, dear readers, welcome.

Two postings ago, we were discussing henchmen and, of course, orcs were among them.

While we were discussing, we began to wonder about orcs. They appear numerous times in The Lord of the Rings, from pursuing the Fellowship in the mines of Moria

to attacking Boromir and capturing Merry and Pippin

to forming the initial assault team on Minas Tirith.

But what do they really look like?

Here’s the first description we’re given, a second-hand one, spoken by Gandalf:

“There are Orcs, very many of them…And some are large and evil: black Uruks of Mordor.”

(The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 5, “The Bridge of Khazad-Dum”)

Our first real view of them comes just paragraphs later:

“…a huge orc-chieftain, almost man-high, clad in black mail from head to foot, leaped into the chamber…His broad flat face was swart, his eyes were like coals, and his tongue was red.”

If this orc-chieftain is representative, then, orcs are smaller than men, with dark skin and broad flat faces. But is this a consistent description?

We next meet the orcs as casualties after the death of Boromir:

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

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

As we know from other references to “goblins”, Tolkien came to blur the words “goblin” and “orc”, where the earlier Hobbit has only the former. Thus, that compound “goblin-soldiers” really means “orcs” and we see that word “swart”—“dark/black” (like German schwarz)—again. To which is added “slant-eyed” and the detail “of greater stature” (than the surrounding dead orcs), emphasizing a second time that many, if not most, orcs are apparently normally small creatures.

So far, then, orcs, in general, seem to be dark-skinned and little, with broad, flat faces. And their next appearance may add a little more:

“In the twilight he saw a large black Orc, probably Ugluk, standing facing Grishnakh, a short crook-legged creature, very broad and with long arms that hung almost to the ground. Round them were many smaller goblins. Pippin supposed that these were ones from the North…

Ugluk shouted, and a number of other Orcs of nearly his own size ran up.”

(The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 3, “The Uruk-Hai”)

This suggests that there, in fact, at least two subspecies of orcs: smaller ones (possibly from the north) in the service of Sauron, and larger ones, who are the followers of Saruman.

(There are also large orcs in Sauron’s pay, however, as we saw above in Moria.)

And we might add one more detail—at least one has rather menacing teeth:

“He stooped over Pippin, bringing his yellow fangs close to his face.”

With this much information from the text, we turned to illustrations: how close are they to these bits of description? There are many images of orcs on the internet and we ourselves have used a certain number of those images over the years, beginning with this from the Hildebrandts, which we believe must be one of the earliest.

These are mostly very piglike, reminding us both of a wild boar (with a close shave)

and of a connection which we suggested some time ago with Jabba the Hutt’s Gammorean Guard—

That green skin color, both on the Hildebrandt orcs and the Gammorean Guard, will follow orcs through the work of many artists, like Angus McBride,

and Ted Nasmith–

although not in this image of the wounding of Boromir–

and sometimes in the work of Alan Lee,

as well as that of John Howe.

In place of the piggyness, we see a kind of apelike quality in this illustration by Frank Frazetta

or this, by Alan Lee.

In the Jackson films, the orcs can range from what we think of as rather batlike

to resembling Count Orlok in Murnau’s 1922 film, Nosferatu,

to being grossly human.

And then there’s an outlier in the illustrations of Denis Gordeev, who seems to have read a different version of The Lord of the Rings, as his orcs, whose faces are in the ape category, but who appear to be as shaggy as bears, though definitely “swart”.

Thus, we mostly see images which don’t really match the descriptions in the books, the short (or almost man-height), black-skinned, flat-faced creatures of The Lord of the Rings, have mostly turned green, come in all sizes, and have faces which range from piglike to batlike.

But does JRRT have any more to say about the look of orcs? In an undated letter from 1958 to Forrest J. Ackerman, he says of them:

“The Orcs are definitely stated to be corruptions of the ‘human’ form seen in Elves and Men. They are (or were) squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) less lovely Mongol-types.” (Letters, 274)

The skin color has changed from “swart” to “sallow”, often meaning a kind of yellowish tint, rather like this image of Snape from the Harry Potter films.

Much of this description, however, seems to match, at least roughly, the earlier ones—except for the potentially racist tone of “less lovely Mongol-types”. (We should always remember, though, that Tolkien was born in 1892, grew up in a world in which Britain controlled 2/5s of the earth’s land mass in colonies, and where a national poet like Kipling could refer to those colonized as “lesser breeds”. This might at least explain something of his approach to non-Caucasian people, if not excuse it.)

Putting aside that tone for the moment, to try to understand what he had in mind in this description, what we come up with is something like this, from illustrations done for Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant Fights Attila the Hun (1952)—

We admit that this is only a rough guess—Tolkien’s orcs, though supposedly derived from elves and therefore more humanoid than most illustrators make them, are probably smaller and perhaps more caricatured or exaggerated, but, at the same time, these figures suggest, to us, something of the barbaric look we believe that JRRT had in mind.

As we’ve seen, however, Tolkien himself seems to have changed his mind over time, turning his orcs from “swart” to “sallow”, although the general impression of smaller, broad creatures with flat faces remained pretty much the same throughout The Lord of the Rings. So many of his illustrators, however, appear to have had anything from a slightly different to a very different view, making us wish that we could read their letters to find out just where their ideas came from.

Thanks, as always, for reading and

MTCIDC

We do have an idea of where that green skin color came from—perhaps from a misreading of the text, in fact. In “The Bridge of Khazad-Dum”, Gandalf, in the brief initial description of orcs we quoted above, adds “…but there is something else there. A great cave-troll, I think, or more than one.”

Shortly after that, the Fellowship is attacked and:

“A huge arm and shoulder, with a dark skin of greenish scales, was thrust through the widening gap. Then a great, flat, toeless foot was forced through below.”

This appears to be one of those “great cave-troll[s]” and perhaps that “skin of greenish scales” has been accidentally transferred to the orcs?

Helm (2)

04 Wednesday Sep 2019

Posted by Ollamh in Films and Music, J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, The Rohirrim

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Alan Lee, Anglo-Saxon, Bayeux Tapestry, Christian Schwager, Dernhelm, Eowyn, Frank Frazetta, great helm, Great War, helmets, Howard Pyle, John Howe, kettle helm, King Arthur, spangenhelm, Tolkien, vikings, WWI

As ever, dear readers, welcome.

In our last, we focused upon the helmets worn by Tolkien and other European and US soldiers in the Great War, the French

the German,

and the British (US troops eventually settled on the British pattern).

The British helmet, we said, has produced the common comment that it looks like it was inspired by the medieval “kettle helm” (the second image being from the 13^th-century Maciejowski Bible—but these helmets were clearly so practical that they continued to be used well beyond that time).

“inspired by medieval” is the way we commonly see JRRT’s Middle-earth, and it made us wonder about the kinds of helmets we would meet in The Lord of the Rings. Unfortunately, if there were a concordance (that is, a book dedicated to listing all the times various words are used within a text, like this concordance for Homer’s Odyssey)

for Tolkien’s work, we are betting that perhaps the only word we would find there would be “helm”, which is generic, unless one adds “great”, which produces a more specific kind of head protection, looking like these, in use from the late 12^th to the mid-14^th centuries—

With only “helm” to go on, what clues might help us better to visualize what warriors are wearing?

We’ve suggested before that one possible visual resource for JRRT’s images of medieval warfare was the work of the American illustrator, Howard Pyle (1853-1911), in books like The Story of King Arthur and His Knights (1903), which Tolkien could have read as a boy.

And here’s a well-known illustration—with a knight in a great helm, in fact.

But what did Pyle use for models?

In Pyle’s time, the collection and classification of armor was still at its very beginnings (the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York only instituted an Arms and Armor Department in 1912, for example). We can only assume, then, that he thought “knights = medieval” and so any armor might do. (If Arthur were real—there’s been argument about this for many years—he would have lived centuries before the medieval period and so would have had neither knights nor the military equipment of later days anyway. As myth, Arthur can live at any time, of course. We think of Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant, where, at one moment, we’re facing Huns and, at the next moment, Vikings.)

If Pyle were one of JRRT’s sources, then, “helm” can easily stand for any kind of protective headgear made of metal and vaguely medieval. We think that there is more to be said on this, however, and we’ll go into a bit more detail about helmets in The Lord of the Rings in the third part of this little series, but, for now, we want to concentrate on one helmet in particular.

Normally, one thinks of helmets as protection, but, in the novel, we see one also used as a disguise, as Eowyn becomes “Dernhelm” (Old English dirne, “hidden/secret” + helm “head covering/helmet”, so, something like “a helm which hides”?).

What kind of helmet, we asked ourselves, would Eowyn be wearing which would:

keep her identity hidden
blend in with the helmets of other Rohirrim?

We began by looking at modern illustrations of Eowyn but, unfortunately, a cursory survey shows us that almost all modern illustrators appear to have chosen the same scene: the moment when Eowyn has removed her helmet when facing the Witch King.

So far, we’ve found only a few artists who capture the previous moment:

whose name so far has eluded us, but who shows a rear view of something which looks rather like a French Great War helmet.

the second, another anonymous (to us), again shows Eowyn from behind, but with a style of helmet which appears to owe more to fantasy than to any medieval reality—

and perhaps a little something to Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

the third is Christian Schwager, based in New Zealand.

Her armor is full plate, which, in our world, is later medieval. As for the helmet, it somewhat resembles a visored sallet, but only vaguely.

And that plume and its placement strike us as problematic, at best.

the last is the well-known fantasy illustrator, Frank Frazetta, and although we enjoy some of his work, this illustration suggests to us that the artist doesn’t appear to have taken the scene–or Eowyn– seriously—or practically.

As we wrote in a post some time ago, the basis of the Rohirrim is Anglo-Saxon, men who wore long mail shirts and conical spangenhelm,

making them look very much like dismounted versions of their Norman opponents, both being shown in the following panel from the Bayeux Tapestry.

A characteristic feature of the spangenhelm is that nasal—the bar which comes down to protect the wearer’s nose.

Potentially, this and the helmet’s brim might shade the eyes and make the face less visible.

So, with the need for disguise and blending-in being crucial, and only “helm” to go on in the text, we asked ourselves what did the two artists who acted as inspiration for Jackson’s films, Alan Lee and John Howe, choose to do? Here’s a picture of the battlefield confrontation by Lee—

image23lee

Eowyn is, as in the case of other illustrators, here depicted as having removed her helmet, and, even under magnification, it’s difficult to make much out. Howe, however, has given us a very detailed picture.

It’s clear, however, that, in choosing to emphasize the dirne in “Dernhelm”, he’s stepped away from the world of knights entirely and into a slightly older world, that of the Vikings, as his helmet more closely resembles the so-called “spectacle helmets”, of which a few examples survive from Viking burials, like this, reconstructed from a discovery at Gjermundbu, in Norway. (For a very useful view of Viking helmets in general, follow this LINK.)

In turn, Jackson’s designers have followed Lee—

This certainly gives us the “hidden/secret” part of “Dernhelm”, but what about the idea of blending in? Looking at a group shot of Rohirrim, we find a little surprise.

Instead of looking like Anglo-Saxons, as depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry, Jackson’s Rohirrim look more like Vikings—and so Eowyn’s helmet blends right in (in fact, in this picture, you can see at least one other warrior with a spectacled helmet), almost as if her helmet and its secrecy requirement have been the basis for all of the warriors of Rohan.

There are lots of other helmets to pursue, however, which we’ll do in our next, so, with thanks to you, dear readers, for reading this, we’ll say

MTCIDC,

Class, Order, Family…(2)

24 Wednesday Oct 2018

Posted by Ollamh in J.R.R. Tolkien, Language, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Cheshire, class, dialect, Drill Sergeant, gentlehobbits, John Howe, Mayor of Michel Delving, Michael Palin, Monty Python, Mummershire, Rustic, Samwise Gamgee, Shire, speech, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien

Welcome, as ever, dear readers.

In our last posting, we began with JRRT stipulating, when selling the rights to The Lord of the Rings, that Merry and Pippin were not to be “rustics”. The word “rustics” caught our attention and, from its origin—an adjective from Latin rus, ruris, n., “country” (as in “countryside”)—we began some exploration of how, in The Lord of the Rings, it was possible to distinguish between “gentlehobbits” and “rustics” by their grammar, word choices, and speech patterns. We also talked about the speech of Saruman (don’t listen too long!) in contrast to his Uruk-hai.

In this posting, we want to do a little more exploring to see what else we might find, first in the speech of the principal representative of “the rustics” in The Lord of the Rings, Sam Gamgee. Then we’ll add a bit more on the speech of the orcs.

We begin this time with the home of Sam, the Shire.

Tolkien says of it that it “had hardly any ‘government’, but that “Families for the most part managed their own affairs.” Thus, although there was an actual Shire official “the Mayor of Michel Delving (or of the Shire), who was elected every seven years…As mayor almost his only duty was to preside at banquets given on the Shire-holidays…”(The Lord of the Rings, Prologue, 3, “Of the Ordering of the Shire”), at the same time, this was not a democracy (JRRT doesn’t appear very comfortable with them—see Letters, 64, among several other references), but, rather, an oligarchy, in which certain families appear to have held all the power—“The Shire was divided into four quarters…and these again into a number of folklands, which still bore the names of some of the old leading families…It is true that the Took family had long been pre-eminent; for the office of Thain had passed to them (from the Oldbucks) some centuries before, and the chief Took had borne that title ever since…The Took family was still, indeed, accorded a special respect, for it remained both numerous and exceedingly wealthy…”

In contrast to the Tooks, it would appear that the Gamgees were not accorded such respect and, from Sam’s speech, it’s clear that he is well aware of the fact. The first time we meet Sam, he immediately shows both his “rusticity” and his social status. Gandalf has caught him eavesdropping outside Frodo’s window and demands to know what he’s doing. Sam replies:

“ Lor bless you, Mr. Gandalf, sir!…Nothing! Leastways I was just trimming the grass-border under the window, if you follow me.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 2, “The Shadow of the Past”)

Here we see pronunciation—“Lor” for “Lord” in “Lor bless you” (which is a Christian exclamation and makes us wonder what it was doing in Sam’s speech to begin with), word choice—“leastways”—and method of expression—“if you follow me”, all of which suggest the nature of Sam’s social class (certainly neither Frodo nor Merry nor Pippin speaks in such a way). A second marker of class is that both Gandalf and then Frodo are called “sir” along with “Mr.”—“Mr. Gandalf, sir”, and, soon after, “Mr. Frodo, sir”. Such honorifics are never used when anyone addresses Sam. He’s always just “Sam”. And this social distinction is even more marked when Sam believes that Frodo has been killed by Shelob and he addresses Frodo as “Master, dear master” (The Two Towers, Book Four, Chapter 10, “The Choices of Master Samwise”—and we note here the irony of calling Sam “Master Samwise”—Sam may, briefly, be the master of the Ring, but it’s not a choice he really wants or relishes. Sam is most comfortable “knowing his place”, even as he shows that he has a sticktoittiveness without which both he and Frodo would not only have not reached Mount Doom, but would have died in its wilderness long before.)

When you hear Sam in the P Jackson movies, the actor, Sean Astin, uses the standard “rural British accent” sometimes referred to as “Mummershire”. This is based to a large extent on the distinctive accents of Southwest England. We imagine that JRRT, who was himself from the Midlands however, would have heard Sam sound rather more like people from Cheshire. Here’s Cheshire on a map of England’s shires.

And here’s a brief YouTube LINK to an elderly native speaker (to provide something a little more like that which Tolkien would have heard—the accent, like all accents under the influence of radio, television, and the internet, seems to be changing pretty rapidly). Notice those Rs—“shap” for “sharp”, for example.

When we think of accents and orcs (a John Howe illustration),

we always imagine their leaders as sounding like classic British drill sergeants—here’s an early nineteenth century example, but we believe that the breed hasn’t changed. Here’s a LINK to a modern example—with a SILLY WARNING because it’s Michael Palin of Monty Python as the drill sergeant.

Put together the sound of that sergeant—who is speaking in a London-area accent—with this quotation and perhaps you’ll see—hear—what we mean:

“ ‘Put up your weapons!’ shouted Ugluk. ‘And let’s have no more nonsense! We go straight west from here, and down the stair. From there straight to the downs, along the river to the forest. And we march day and night. That clear?’ “ (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 3, “The Uruk-hai”)

Add that to the whips used by such folk in Mordor and our view, both of Merry and Pippin’s captivity, as well as Frodo and Sam’s being swept up in an orc column, becomes all that much grimmer!

Thanks, as ever, for reading (AT EASE!).

MTCIDC

Orc Arsenal.1

26 Wednesday Sep 2018

Posted by Ollamh 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.

Middle-under-earth

04 Wednesday Apr 2018

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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

As always, dear readers, welcome!

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

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

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

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

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

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

and his The Princess and the Goblin (1872),

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Much of the entrenching was simply deep, reinforced ditching.

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

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

or something much worse.

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

Thanks, as ever, for reading!

MTCIDC

Throwing Shade

20 Wednesday Dec 2017

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

A Day: Paris In the Rain, Adelard Took, Assyrians, Bag End, Bilbo Baggins, bowler hat, ceramic chariot, China, city gent, CS Lewis, elephant, Emperor Ch'in Shihuang, Greeks, Gustave Caillebotte, Jean Marius, John Howe, Jonas Hanway, Lobelia Sackville-Baggins, Marchesa Elena Grimaldi, Mary Poppins, Monty Python, Palais Galleria, Persians, Romans, Sharkey, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Ministry of Silly Walks, Tolkien, umbrella, umbrella stand, Un Jour: Paris sous la Pluie, van Dyck

Welcome, dear readers, as always and, if you’re in the US, we hope you’ve had a happy and not over-stuffed Thanksgiving.

Just when we think we’ve exhausted a topic, we return and, well, here we are.

Just to the left of the door and below what we now see as a barometer, there’s a tall tube-like structure, something once common—we wouldn’t be surprised if there was one in every house in which JRRT ever lived: an umbrella stand.

As a child, one of us was fascinated by having once seen an umbrella stand made out of an elephant’s lower leg and foot—or at least the skin.

The couple we’ve seen are all identified as “Victorian”, so, as we are very fond of pachyderms, we hope that such a use is now long in the past!

Umbrellas, at least as sunshades, appear to have been around since at least before 200BC in China, as this ceramic chariot—with large umbrella—from part of the tomb complex of the Emperor Ch’in Shihuang demonstrates.

The Assyrians had them.

The Persians had them.

The Greeks had them.

As did the Romans.

And so on for centuries, although it seems that the first modern references to them in England date from the early 17^th century and appear, by the latter part of the century and into the 18^th as part of “ladies’ apparel”, used as much for sun as rain as this 1623 portrait by van Dyck of the Marchesa Elena Grimaldi shows us.

A center for the manufacture of umbrellas was Paris, and the inventor of the modern collapsible model may have been Jean Marius, who received a 5-year monopoly on his invention in 1710. Here is a later (1772) advertisement for his business

and here is a model, identified by the Palais Galleria in Paris as post-1715 because it has no Marius markings.

If there was a prejudice against men carrying them, being a combination of the association with “feminine things” and perhaps also a long-standing prejudice against the French, how did that so change that, by the 20^th century, the umbrella, along with the bowler hat, became the marks of the “city gent” in London,

caricatured in the 20^th century by Monty Python in skits like “The Ministry of Silly Walks”?

This change is said to stem from the behavior of one rather eccentric man, Jonas Hanway

who, sometime in the 1750s, began to appear on London streets carrying an open umbrella.

As you, sharp-eyed reader, can tell from our verbs and constructions like “seems”, “appears” and “is said to”, this, like other items of fashion and its changes, hasn’t the firmest of scholarly foundations, but, considering how many illustrations (often mocking cartoons) begin to appear by the 1770s, something happened to alter men’s behavior. Just look at these three, from 1772, 1782, and 1790.

All of this is very interesting, you may ask, but what does it have to do with Bilbo, or with JRRT? There are, in fact, a couple of references in The Lord of the Rings to umbrellas. First, there is one of Bilbo’s mocking gifts:

“For Adelard Took, for his very own, from Bilbo; on an umbrella. Adelard had carried off many unlabeled ones”. (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 1, “A Long-Expected Party”)

Then there are two to Lobelia Sackville-Baggins. The first is suggestive of her suspicious behavior at the near-auction of Bilbo’s property at the end of The Hobbit (you’ll remember that some spoons never reappeared):

“He [Bilbo] escorted her [Lobelia] firmly off the premises, after he had relieved her of several small (but rather valuable) articles that had somehow fallen inside her umbrella.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 1, “A Long-Expected Party”)

The second reference is actually rather pathetic. Once “Sharkey” and his thugs take over the Shire, they evict Lobelia from Bag End and, because she resists, they drag her off to the Lockholes, as young Tom Cotton tells Merry and the others:

“She comes down the lane with her old umbrella…”

When told that “Sharkey” gave the order for her eviction (and the building of sheds at Bag End):

“ ‘I’ll give you Sharkey, you dirty thieving ruffians!’ says she, and ups with her umbrella and goes for the leader, near twice her size.” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 8, “The Scouring of the Shire”)

Here’s a little illustration of a defiant Lobelia by John Howe.

By the later 19^th century, men with umbrellas seem quite common—even to the point of providing material for social commentary in the public press—

But, in the 20^th century, we who love children’s literature see them in a completely different way, either as a mode of transportation

or as part of the origin of a favorite story, when CS Lewis, at 16, had a recurring image of “a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood” (from It All Began with/as a Picture). (We’ve seen the title cited both ways.)

But we want to end this posting not with literature, but with pure art. There are lots of paintings from the 18^th and 19^th centuries with umbrellas, but here is what may be our favorite, by Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894). Although he is grouped with the Impressionists, this painting in particular shows the artist’s interest in the hard-edged world of early photography (“Un Jour: Paris sous la Pluie”—“A Day: Paris In the Rain”)

Stay dry, dear readers, and thanks, as ever for reading!

MTCIDC

Floored

06 Wednesday Dec 2017

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Bag End, Baggins, carpet, classical altars, Cosmati, English Ham House, Erasmus, Felicity Irons, floors, Gamgee, John Howe, Lady Chapel, paneling, parquetry, rush door mat, Shire, social levels, stone block, swags, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, tile, Tolkien, Took, Typha, Versailles, Westminster Abbey

Welcome, dear readers, once more to our blog. In this installment, we are returning to our inspection of Bilbo’s entryway.

So far, we’ve examined the barometer, the clock, the umbrella stand, and that hat in the left foreground—intentionally misread as a sugar loaf. Now we want to examine the floor, which looks to be a pretty complicated place, asking ourselves, as we always do, where does this come from and how much of the medieval—so often the foundation of Middle-earth—does it contain?

The Shire clearly has social levels. Bilbo, Frodo, and Merry and Pippin (contrary to P Jackson—who violated JRRT’s wishes on the subject of the latter two), for example, all speak (in translation, of course) what is called “Received Standard English”. In contrast, Sam, the Gaffer, and the Cottons speak what would appear to be a rural dialect and Sam even thinks of Frodo as “Mister Frodo” and even “Master”. We do not know where these class distinctions came from, but we know of Bilbo that:

he is called “a very well-to-do hobbit “ at the very beginning of The Hobbit (The Hobbit, Chapter 1, “An Unexpected Party”)
he has distinguished forebears in the Tooks—his mother was “the famous Belladonna Took, one of the three remarkable daughters of the Old Took” (The Hobbit, Chapter 1, “An Unexpected Party”)
he lives in an extensive, rambling burrow: “a very comfortable tunnel without smoke, with panelled walls, and floors tiled and carpeted…The tunnel wound on and on, going fairly but not quite straight into the side of the hill…bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries (lots of these), wardrobes (he had whole rooms devoted to clothes), kitchens, dining-rooms, all were on the same floor, and indeed on the same passage.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 1, “An Unexpected Party”)

And the entryway certainly shows some elements of a wealthier lifestyle, with its paneled (US spelling) walls—but we intend to devote a later posting to the walls and support structure of Bag End, so let’s turn to what is said next: “floors tiled and carpeted”. Looking at JRRT’s drawing, we can see both—and more.

Before we had gone back to this passage, we were a little puzzled as to the basic floor. As you can see in Tolkien’s illustration, it’s in a checkered pattern and, at first, we wondered if this might be an example of what’s called “parquetry”. In this method of flooring, different strips or blocks of wood are laid into designs of all sorts. Here are a couple of fancy examples from the 17^th-century English Ham House.

Parquetry appears to have been developed in France, as an alternative to marble floors (much less weight to support by the floor beams and equally pretty, we’d guess). Here’s an example from Louis XIV’s Versailles.

But the description in The Hobbit says “floors tiled”– here’s an exterior tile pattern from Ham house.

and an indoor one.

So, although Bilbo appears well enough off to afford parquetry, there is no mention of it in JRRT’s description and it is a decorative detail from the 17^th century and beyond, which rather goes against our usual “Middle-earth is (more or less) medieval” idea. The text of The Hobbit clinches the fact that it’s tile, of course, but the tile we then see in JRRT’s illustration strikes us as even plainer than the late-19^th, early 20^th century hallway tile we’ve seen, as in this restoration picture, and with which Tolkien would have been familiar on a daily basis.

Medieval tiles, in fact, can be even more elaborate, first appearing in England in the 13^th century, mainly in ecclesiastical buildings. Here’s one from the Lady Chapel (completed in 1373) in York Minster.

Much medieval tiling has disappeared over the centuries and here’s a useful link which explains why. And to see an amazing example of such work, here’s a link to the restored Cosmati paving in Westminster Abbey.

Over this tile, Tolkien has laid a carpet (as his description has said, the floors are “carpeted”).

It’s faint, but what one can make out appears to be a solid-colored center with what appear to be wreaths and what are called “swags”—long chains made to imitate garlands of ribbons, fruit, and flowers used to decorate classical altars.

So far, we haven’t located anything which closely resembles the carpet at Bag End, but here’s an 18^th-century French example to provide a kind of general idea.

There are two more items on the floor, both just below the door.

The first looks to be perhaps a stone block, used as a sill. (Our illustration is actually of a mistake—the central block here has fallen out of position, but it gives you the idea of such a block in use.)

The other item appears to us to be a rush door mat (dog—“Bo”–optional).

Rushes (genus Typha) grow all over the world and can be used, it seems, for almost anything. Here’s the English rush weaver, Felicity Irons, busy harvesting.

Rushes, however, bring us back to the subject of English medieval flooring. Our research suggests that the houses of farmers and lower-level townspeople would have been of natural substances, like clay pressed to make a hard surface. Richer people would have had wooden or even, in a few cases, tile floors (more such floors after the commercial business took off in the 15^th/16^th centuries). Carpets appear to be much later (most weaving was hung on walls, to keep down drafts, it seems). Our sources for what people laid on top of their floors are very sketchy and some modern writers have depended upon a quotation from the Dutch scholar, Erasmus (1469-1536),

who visited England and spent some years there around 1500. He tells us that the English covered their floors with rushes, but that they only added more to the top, without cleaning out the lower levels, which became full of refuse and caused bad smells (which to a person of Erasmus’ time represented the danger of “miasma”—bad air which could cause disease—something believed as scientifically true even throughout the first half of the 19^th century). Some modern commentators have questioned this, proposing the difficulty of moving about on a weedy floor in a long gown, as women and, in time, men, wore during the later Middle Ages. At least one of those questioners even suggests that rushes meant rush mats—see above.

Bilbo’s hall has only one of these, meant, from its position, to be used as a modern would, as a doormat.

Taken altogether, we would suggest that Bilbo’s floor, just like his clock and barometer and umbrella stand, would appear to belong not to the medieval world which lies underneath Middle-earth, but rather to the late 19^th-20^th century world of the author. And we’re not alone in our opinion. Here’s John Howe’s version of that hallway—compare it with JRRT’s and see what’s been erased.

And here’s the film version–

There are more differences, too–for fun, see how many you can find.

And thanks, as always, for reading!

MTCIDC

Tintinnabulations

24 Wednesday May 2017

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Asfaloth, bells, Child Ballad, dance, Edgar Allan Poe, Glorfindel, Headless Horseman, Joan of Arc, John Howe, Medieval, Minas Tirith, Morris Dance, Nazgul, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Sortes Tolkienses, Sortes Vergilianae, sun-down bells, The Hobbit, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The Lord of the Rings, Thomas the Rymer, tocsin, Tower of Echthelion

Welcome, once more, dear readers.

The sources of our postings come from all sorts of places. Sometimes, we are reading something and we have an idea, or we spot an image or see a film. Sometimes, it’s from a friend’s e-mail, or reaction to an earlier posting. Sometimes they come from our sortes tolkienses. If you’ve missed our original posting where we invented this, it’s based upon an ancient fortune-telling method, where one closes one’s eyes, opens an important book, like the Aeneid or the Bible, puts one’s finger on a verse—and hopes that it tells you something about the day or the future. In our case, we use The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit.

And what did we find today? This, from The Lord of the Rings—

“Hand in hand they went back into the City, the last to pass the Gate before it was shut; and as they reached the Lampwrights’ Street all the bells in the towers tolled solemnly.” (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 1, “Minas Tirith”)

These are the “sun-down bells”, as Pippin learns from Bergil, son of Beregond. Bergil is a boy of Minas Tirith and has just given Pippin a tour of the city.

“Sun-down bells” made us think first about the bells of Minas Tirith, and then about bells in Middle-earth in general, and we could easily pick out three kinds.

To begin with, there are the city bells. Or, rather, where are the city bells? The text says “in the towers”. In the medieval world in which we so often find illustrations and parallels to Middle-earth, those bells are commonly in church belfries.

Minas Tirith clearly has towers—and, in fact, is a towering place—literally:

“…the Tower of Echthelion, standing high within the topmost wall, shone out against the sky, glimmering like a spike of pearl and silver, tall and fair and shapely, and its pinnacle glittered as if it were wrought of crystals; and white banners broke and fluttered from the battlements in the morning breeze, and high and far he heard a clear ringing as of silver trumpets.” (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 1, “Minas Tirith”)

Because there are no churches—or even temples—in Minas Tirith, by examining some images of the city, from John Howe’s painting to the model used in the films, we can pick out towers here and there and some of those, we might imagine, could hold bells.

image4howe

image5mt In our medieval world, such bells had a number of functions. Not only did they ring the hours of the medieval Christian day, but they could also sound a warning, called the “tocsin”, and signal that the day was over and that fires should be covered for the night, the “curfew”—rather like the “sun-down” bells in Minas Tirith. Joan of Arc (c.1412-1431) said that she could sometimes hear the sound of angelic voices, inspiring her to drive the English out of France, in her village bell.

There are other uses—and places—for bells in Middle-earth, however. In The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 1, “A Long-Expected Party”, they turn up at an impromptu dance:

“Master Everard Took and Miss Melilot Brandybuck got on a table and with bells in their hands began to dance the Springle-ring: a pretty dance, but rather vigorous.”

The wording of this sounds like it came from the “society section” of a newspaper, as not only are the hobbits’ names given, but given with their social titles—“Master” and “Miss”—to show that they are unmarried.

The boisterous dance, being energetic and accompanied by bells, makes us think of traditional English Morris dances, where the dancers not only strap bells to their arms and legs, but occasionally carry sticks with bells attached to them.

image7morris OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA image9jinglestick

This also makes us think about medieval music bands, which could include a percussionist who played bells.

image10medbellers image11bellplayers

A further use is as decoration—and perhaps as something more. When Aragorn is leading the hobbits, with the wounded Frodo, towards Rivendell, they heard “a sound that brought sudden fear back into their hearts: the noise of hoofs behind them.” The fear is, of course, of pursuing Nazgul, depicted here first in an Alan Lee sketch, and then in a painting which we believe is by the Hildebrandts, of one of the Ringwraiths almost riding down Farmer Cotton.

image12nazgul image13nazgul

[We are always struck, by the way, how the Nazgul bear a certain resemblance to the “Headless Horseman” from Washington Irving’s (1783-1859) story, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820). Walt Disney made a musical version of this in 1949, which was shown on Disney tv programs in later years, around Halloween, and the image of the Horseman could always give us nightmares.]

image14headlessh

What Aragorn and the hobbits are actually hearing is the horse of the Elf lord, Glorfindel, Asfaloth—

“The sound of the hoofs drew nearer. They were going fast, with a light clppety-clippety-clip. Then, faintly, as if it was blown away from them by the breeze, they seemed to catch a dim ringing, as of small bells tinkling.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 12, “Flight to the Ford”)

image15glorf

Although Frodo never explains why he says this, he exclaims, “That does not sound like a Black Rider’s horse…” The only difference in sound clearly is coming from the bells, perhaps on Asfaloth’s halter or bridle—or perhaps on his mane, as in the case of what might be a source for those bells, Child ballad 37 (we’re quoting from Variant A). 37 is called “Thomas Rymer” and describes the meeting of the actual 13^th-century Thomas of Earlston with the Queen of Elfland. [We include a LINK here to the useful Wiki entry.)

image16tther

In the ballad, her horse is described as having

“At ilke tett [“every tuft/lock”] of her horse’s mane

Hung fifty silver bells and nine.”

We are always careful never to say, without documentary evidence, that such-and-such is “definitely” the source for something in JRRT, but this particular detail seems to line up so well:

Glorfindel is an Elf
so is the unnamed Queen
each has bells on his/her horse

And these bells suggest—at least to Frodo—something unworldly, but, unlike the Nazgul, something positive. We can add to this another—okay, undeniable—source, and our evidence for this is JRRT himself. In 1925, Tolkien (in collaboration with E.V. Gordon) published an edition of the 14^th-century Middle English poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

image17greenknight

The Green Knight is an enchanted being and part of his magic lies in his greenness and in the elaborate decoration of himself and his horse, including

“Ther mony bellez ful bry3t of brende golde rungen” (line 195)

This is only a preliminary investigation—done out of our heads, rather than from a thorough scouring of the text—so, can you, dear readers, think of other bells in The Lord of the Rings? We could think of two references in The Hobbit—but we leave it to you to guess where they are (and to find more?).

And thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

We include a LINK here to an appropriate poem which uses our title, Edgar Allan Poe’s, “The Bells” (1849).

Ugluk Was Here

14 Wednesday Dec 2016

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, J.R.R. Tolkien, Language, Literary History, Military History

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Alan Lee, Alfred Waud, American Civil War, Angus McBride, Argonath, Belgium, Black Speech, cemeteries, Confederate, Egyptian monuments, First Virginia Cavalry, graffiti, Great War, Greek mercenaries, Greeks, Hildebrandt, John Howe, Journey to the Cross-roads, Kilroy, Kilroy was here, Literacy, Napoleon I, Orcs, Pompeii, quarry at Naours, Sauron, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Union, Virginia, World War I, World War II

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

One of our reasons for holding Tolkien’s work in such high esteem is that it’s so rich: practicing Sortes Tolkienses (see our earlier posting on this), we find innumerable subjects to write about.

In this posting, our eye was caught by this:

“The brief glow feel upon a huge sitting figure, still and solemn as the great stone kings of Argonath. The years had gnawed it, and violent hands had maimed it. Its head was gone, and in its place was set in mockery a round rough-hewn stone, rudely painted by savage hands in the likeness of a grinning face with one large red eye in the midst of its forehead. Upon its knees and mighty chair, and all about the pedestal, were idle scrawls mixed with the foul symbols that the maggot-folk of Mordor used.” (The Two Towers, Book 4, Chapter 7, “Journey to the Cross-roads”)

We had the feeling that we’d seen a statue something like this before—and we were curious whether JRRT had, too, and with a little mental rooting-around, we found this:

It’s Egyptian (13^th century BC), and has a head, but, not only is it monumental, and seated, but it has lots of “idle scrawls” on the bases and lower parts of its legs.

What’s particularly interesting to us is that one piece of the graffiti is actually from some Greek mercenaries c. 600bc

As long as there has been a certain level of literacy, of course, there has been graffiti. The walls of ancient Pompeii (sealed in by the eruption of 79AD) are loaded with everything from election posters to the admiration of gladiators to personal insults.

There’s so much, in fact, that this is our favorite:

A translation of this might be: “I wonder/am in awe, wall, that, you, who are holding up so much boring writing, haven’t fallen down!”

Soldiers, in particular, seem prone to leaving messages behind—beginning with those 7^th-c Greeks, but continuing throughout the centuries. When Napoleon I led an expedition to Egypt in 1798,

his soldiers left their mark in more ways than one upon the landscape.

Recently discovered in a house in Virginia was a large collection of inscriptions from the soldiers, Union and Confederate, of the American Civil War.

Graffiti House Wall and Chair.jpg Alfred R. Waudfirstva.jpg

(An irresistible footnote: the picture you see of the Confederate cavalry—actually the 1^st Virginia—was made by one of the greatest Civil War artists, Alfred Waud (pronounced “woad”). He had been briefly detained by this unit and took the opportunity to sketch them from life. His sketch—with his notes—then went to his publisher in New York, who had a group of engravers ready to turn his sketch into a finished—and publishable—picture. 1st-virginia-cavalry-halted-based-on-sketch-by-waud-harpers-sept-27-1862.jpg

For more on the process by which a sketch becomes a magazine illustration, see this link.)

Another recent discovery was a mass of inscriptions (something like 2000 of them) in an abandoned quarry at Naours, in northern France.

6XYh68h5xHSK2-3026250-In_this_image_made_on_Feb_20_2015_showing_names_engraved_on_the_-a-32_1428320205858.jpg

These date from the Great War (World War I) and, in a sad way, parallel the epitaphs on the seemingly-endless graves in the seemingly endless military cemeteries in the same region and in southern Belgium.

Tyne Cot 3.jpg

And World War II brought us Kilroy, of the famous (and ubiquitous) “Kilroy was here”.

Engraving-of-Kilroy-on-the-WWII-Memorial-in-Washington-DC.jpg

American prankster soldiers doodled this everywhere they went.

We have written previously about literacy in Middle-earth: not uncommon among hobbits, it would seem, but much less so among the other peoples. As for orcs, be they Hildebrandt

Mcbride,

Howe

John Howe - Merry et Pippin prisonniers des orcs.jpg

Or Lee,

Alan Lee - Orcs (1).jpg

although the Black Speech was created for them and Sauron’s other creatures, we have no evidence (except for the Ring inscription) of any use of it as a writing tool by any of them.

Which leaves us free to imagine just what those “idle scrawls” might read like. How about:

LUGDUSH SMELLS LIKE MAN FLESH!

LAGDUF + MUZGASH = CLUELESS AND SHIRTLESS!

GORBAG LOVES SHELOB

SHAGRAT IS A SNAGA!

And, of course:

UGLUK WAS HERE

Thanks for reading! (And why not submit your own graffiti? We’d be glad to add them to our list!)

MTCIDC

doubtfulsea

~ adventure fantasy

Tag Archives: John Howe

Childe Rowland to the Dark Tower Came

Orc Looks

Helm (2)

Class, Order, Family…(2)

Orc Arsenal.1

Middle-under-earth

Throwing Shade

Tintinnabulations

Ugluk Was Here