Tag Archives: Macbeth

Peace! Count the Clock!

25 Wednesday Oct 2017

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

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Welcome, as always, dear readers.

In our last, we puzzled over something in the entryway to Bag End.

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It’s that thing to the left of the door.   It looks rather like a clock (which is what we thought before examining it more closely), but it is, in fact, a barometer—and a very puzzling thing for Bilbo to have, as we suggested.

On the right hand wall, however, there is another puzzling object:  an actual clock.

In our world, of course, this is no puzzle at all, clocks being so common.  In fact, our major way of indicating time in English is to say, “It’s 11 o’clock”, where “o’clock” is a contracted form of “of the clock”.  Even if, like many in our world, you get your time from your phone, you’ll still say this, won’t you?

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This has been the case since the 16th century, as we can see in Shakespeare’s plays—including moments when characters who live in times before clocks still talk about them, as in Macbeth, Act II, Scene 4, where Macbeth’s cousin, Ross, says to an Old Man, “By th’clock ‘tis day”, when the historical Macbeth lived in the 11th century AD, perhaps 200 and more years before clocks began to appear in western Europe.

Although we’ve seen it regularly cited that Pope Sylvester II

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invented the first mechanical clock in the 990s AD, we have yet to see anything in the way of concrete evidence that this is so.  Rather, we see the first clocks to have appeared in the later 14th century, including the Salisbury Cathedral clock, which perhaps dates from 1386.

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Likewise there is the clock of Wells Cathedral, tentatively dated to about the same time

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or the Gros Horloge in Rouen, in Normandy, whose internal workings date from 1389.

 

And the pendulum clock—which is what is visible on the right hand wall of Bag End—is an even later invention, credited to the Dutch scientist of the mid-17th century, Christian Huygens.

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Long before such devices, people marked time by such things as hour glasses (possibly medieval? Lots of discussion about this, but there is documentation that medieval ships’ captains began to use them)

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and water clocks (used in Athenian court rooms to control speeches—when citations of established law were read in court, the order was to “stop the clock”, as reading law as evidence clearly wasn’t considered to be part of a speech)

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and even put the sun to work, using its moving shadow to tell the time.  (This is the earliest sundial we’ve seen—it’s Egyptian, from the 13th century BC)

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(And just a linguistic footnote on “telling time” as a sort of pun.  On the one hand, we read time off a device—and, if asked, aloud—so that we are “telling—that is reciting—the time”.  At the same time, an older usage of the verb “to tell” was “to count”.  This is preserved in the “teller” in a bank, by someone “telling” a rosary, and by “tolling” a bell.  It can also be seen in other Germanic languages, like Danish, which has the verb “taelle”, “to count”, and German, “zaehlen”.  So, when you “tell” time, you’re both deciphering the information from a device—possibly aloud—and doing so by counting.)

All of which leads us back to Bilbo’s clock, on a wall in the Shire.

As far as we can tell, at the end of the Third Age, the Shire was primarily a non-feudal medieval agricultural world.

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Such worlds are, considering how much the sun is involved in growing things like grain,

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governed by daylight, which is, on the whole, easy to mark and measure.  (A difficulty for sundials, of course, is that the sun changes position throughout the year and the hours of daylight can vary greatly.  Perhaps this is why there is a famous sundial motto:  “Horas non numero nisi serenas”—“I count only the fair—that is, sunny—hours”.)

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So why is there a pendulum clock on that wall?

A partial answer might be the same as that for the barometer:  JRRT is recreating something from his own past, or even from his present—the big dial looks later to us than the 1890s.  Just as in the case of that reference to Bilbo shrieking “like the whistle of an engine coming out of a tunnel” (The Hobbit, Chapter One, “An Unexpected Party”), it mirrors Tolkien’s own world—a world in which railways in Britain were a major influence on changes in marking time.

Railways had begun to appear in 1830, with the Liverpool and Manchester Railway.

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(And here, by the way, is an engineering marvel of the time—the 1.25-mile long Wapping tunnel, dug to allow the railway’s passage into Liverpool and the first such tunnel to be constructed under a city.  Seeing this 1831 illustration, it’s easy to imagine what kind of shriek Bilbo must have made!)

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By 1840, building and traffic had increased dramatically and, as the rail lines stretched across England, an awkwardness appeared:  there was no uniform time standard.  Towns close to each other might share the same time, but those between London and Liverpool, say, had their own methods of marking time and so attempting to produce a dependable schedule for a train’s journey was nearly an impossibility along the 178 miles (287km) between the two cities.

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Those in charge of the early railways quickly saw the difficulty and began, as early as 1840, to standardize the measurement of time along their routes.  By the late 1850s, standardization had been mainly achieved—although it was only in the 1880s that the government stepped in to complete the progress.

This regularizing of time produced, on the one hand, standard railway timetable books, like Bradshaw’s Railway Companion

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(first published in 1839 and often consulted by Watson and Holmes on their extra-London adventures) and The ABC Alphabetical Railway Guide

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(first published in 1853 and the basis of Agatha Christie’s 1936 novel, The ABC Murders).  On the other hand, it also produced standardized time in general, eventually going global, something which the industrial revolution increasingly demanded as part of its production cycle and now so deeply ingrained that virtually everything we do is influenced by it and we even incorporate it into our bodies, either tying it to our wrists

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or wear it as part of our clothing.

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Work, school, even fun (movies begin on time schedules, television is one long schedule, as well as certain elements of the internet—although the internet does offer the subversive possibility of doing things “on your own time”), all of it moves to the measured tick of time.   In 1937, the year after Agatha Christie’s novel based upon railway timetables was published, JRRT would have felt it, from his lecture schedule to the evening radio broadcasts of the BBC.

Almost as if it were a gathering force of the MODERN WORLD, then, the measurement and standardization of time has crept up, from the later medieval world on.  We can see that Shakespeare was influenced by it—in Julius Caesar (1599?), Act II, the jumpy Brutus and Cassius listen to the sound of a clock striking three—in a world where there would be no clocks to strike for almost 1400 years (but providing us with the title of this post).  Is it any wonder, then, that clocks could have slipped into Middle-earth?  And, besides, they do have a use for Bilbo—how else could he shout to the dwarves as he left them, “If ever you are passing my way…don’t wait to knock!  Tea is at four…” (The Hobbit, Chapter Eighteen, “The Return Journey”)?

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

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Healing (II)

16 Wednesday Aug 2017

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

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

 

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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.
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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.
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In Faramir’s case, a doctor might try a number of drugs based upon plants which were believed to bring fever down:
angelica
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chamomile
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datura
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or coriander
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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.
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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”)
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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.
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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…”
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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”)
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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

Into Those Woods

17 Wednesday May 2017

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

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Welcome, dear readers, as always.

There is an early-twentieth-century American popular song called “Teddy Bears’ Picnic”, by John Walter Bratton. This was first published, in 1907, as “The Teddy Bears Picnic: A Characteristic Two-Step”,

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but in 1932, it acquired both its current title and lyrics, beginning,

“If you go down to the woods today,

You’re sure of a big surprise…”

Here’s a link, if you’d like to read more. And here’s a link to the first recording of the version with its lyrics, from 1932. WARNING: it has a catchy little tune!

This song came to us because we’ve been thinking about forests and their frequency and importance in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Woods have always been spooky places in folktales. Think of Haensel and Gretel, for example,

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or Snow White,

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or even the story of Odysseus and Circe, as Circe’s house is set deep in a forest.

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Among our interests is Romanticism–both in itself because it’s in Romanticism that modern adventure stories really take off (for the supernatural, think Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, 1764; for historical, Sir Walter Scott, Waverly, 1814). The early Romantics were fascinated by the forest, both as a place of beauty and of fear. This is not surprising, for several reasons. First, they were influenced by the writings of Edmund Burke (1729-1797),

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who published a famous essay, “Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful” in 1757 (this is a 1770s reprint).

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Burke was interested in human reactions to things which, basically, are either awe-inspiring (how about this?)

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or beautiful

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Awe-inspiring (to which may even be added a little terror– you, sharp-eyed readers have probably already noticed that there are the remains of a crushed ship in the ice in the first picture) is a sort of opposite of the beautiful– we say “sort of” because they can be related, which is why we chose two pictures by the same artist– our favorite early Romantic artist, in fact, Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840).

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This brings us to this Friedrich painting:

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There are lots of his paintings in which we are standing behind someone who is looking off into the distance– as in the one we chose for “the beautiful”. As you can see in the above, here we have a man contemplating a path into a snowy wood. (Which reminds us of a poem by the American poet Robert Frost, 1874-1963, and we can’t resist adding it here, just for the pleasure of it:)

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

There is menace here (note the crow on the stump in the foreground…), and yet it’s beautiful. And tempting– and that’s part of the sublime, as well.

Besides their interest in Burke, the early Romantics were also deeply interested in folktales. People had been collecting and publishing such things in early modern Europe since at least Straparola in the 16th century, but, from the Romantics, we have the work of these two men, highly-intelligent brother-scholars, the Grimms, Jacob (1785-1863) and Wilhelm (1786-1859), whose work, either in itself on in adaptation, is known throughout the whole western world.

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The story of Haensel and Gretel comes from them, in fact (as does Snow White). Because of a famous short story by Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853),

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“Der Blonde Eckbert” (maybe “Fair-haired Eckbert” in English?), there is a word in German for this fascination for the woods, Waldeinsamkeit, meaning something like “The Sense of Being Alone in the Forest”. Like “sublime”, this word has a wide range of feeling to it, including that sense of aloneness/being alone/loneliness/ mixed with the pleasure of being alone in the forest. In the story, the word is contained in a little poem sung by a strange bird, which begins:

“Waldeinsamkeit

Die mich erfreut

So morgen wie heut

In ewger Zeit

O wie mich freut

Waldeinsamkeit.”

“Aloneness in the forest–

That delights me,

As today so tomorrow

In eternal time

Oh how it delights me

Aloneness in the forest!”

In the case of JRRT, however, although he was well known to be quite passionate in his love for trees, forests in his work do not always appear to be places for pleasure. (And how can we not be reminded of that moment in the film, The Princess Bride, when the hero and heroine are at the edge of the Fire Swamp, a kind of haunted wood,

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and the hero, Westley, says, “It’s not that bad. I’m not saying that I’d like to build a summer home here, but the trees are actually quite lovely”– and only a moment later the heroine, Buttercup, is attacked by a spurt of flame from the ground itself?)

Out first wood in The Hobbit is the one into which several of the dwarves disappear, captured by three rather dimwitted trolls.

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When we look at this and at other JRRT illustrations, we are reminded of the world of the Swedish illustrator, John Bauer (1882-1918), some of whose fairy tale forests bear a certain strong similarity in their regularity.

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What’s surprising is that, in northern Europe, there actually appear to be stands of wood which actually look very like this. Here’s Nienhagen, in northern Germany.

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It’s a beechwood (one of JRRT’s favorite trees and ours, too– remember this big beech from N.C. Wyeth’s Robin Hood illustrations?

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Nienhagen has another name, however, Gespensterwald, “Ghostwood”, and, seeing this next picture and comparing it to Bauer’s paintings, we imagine that you’d agree with us that this is an appropriate nickname.

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Across the Misty Mountains, we come to Mirkwood, with its disappearing Elves, sleepy stream, and giant spiders– hardly an inviting place.

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The forests of The Lord of the Rings are a bit mixed. There is the Old Forest, which is so hostile that is has to be kept off with cutting, burning, and a hedge and, in its depths, there is Old Man Willow, who almost swallows several unwary hobbits.

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Then there is Lorien, a place of safety and healing for the Fellowship.

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And, last, there is Fangorn, with its Ents, especially the thoughtful and ultimately sympathetic Treebeard.

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These are principal woods– there are also the woodlands of South Ithilien, there Faramir

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and his rangers lurk, as well as the unnamed wood where the Woses live, but it’s the people there who are the focus of the story, not the forests.

This sense of a wood being dangerous goes far beyond fairy tales and even JRRT, of course. Shakespeare has several puzzling forests– as in the wood outside Athens in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

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or the traveling Burnham Wood in Macbeth

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And there is even the wonderful Steven Sondheim musical, Into the Woods (1986), in which going into the woods has a magical/metaphorical side.

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But we’ll leave you where we started– with JRRT– and a single tree…

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Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC,

CD

Bring Back Your Dead!

12 Wednesday Apr 2017

Posted by in Literary History, Narrative Methods

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Welcome, dear readers, as always.

In our last posting, we said that we intended to talk about otherworlds and also about one of our favorite YA (“Young Adult”) authors. That author is Lloyd Alexander (1924-2007)

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and we thought we’d open our exploration with one aspect of otherworlds: the dead, and with one aspect of them as seen in the second volume of Alexander’s pentalogy, The Chronicles of Prydain (1964-1968),

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The Black Cauldron.

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Alexander wrote more than forty books, mostly YA.

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Some are series, like “Westmark” and “Vesper Holly”, and some are one-offs, like The Iron Ring, and we’ve enjoyed them all, but those we have returned to most often are the books which make up The Chronicles: The Book of Three, The Black Cauldron, The Castle of Llyr, Taran Wanderer, The High King. These are lighter books than their Tolkien cousins, but they are equally serious, with genuinely unhappy moments, and a feel which might, at times, seem like a combination of The Hobbit and “The Grey Havens”, which is why we return to them. The characters can be familiar, like Taran the Assistant Pig Keeper, who is a foundling, but much more, and Dallben the very quiet wizard, but also unusual, like the Princess Eilonwy, a chatterbox with a practical mind, or Gurgi, who is somewhere between human and something else, and who talks in a distinctly rhythmic way, or the would-be minstrel, Fflewddur Fflam, who has trouble with the truth—something which his harp points out on a regular basis.

All of these characters and more have their home in “Prydain”,

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which is a kind of imaginary Wales, just as names and story elements in the pentalogy are derived from Welsh mythology and, in particular, from the medieval collection now called The Mabinogi (or Mabinogion—the title being the subject of much discussion). The first complete English translation was that of Lady Charlotte Guest (1838-1845) and it’s available at Sacred Texts. Here’s the link for the second edition of 1877).

In an interview with Scholastic, Alexander tells us that he spent a little time in Wales during World War II and fell in love with it and that the mythological part of the story came from a childhood love of King Arthur. (Here’s a link to the text of the interview—as well as one to the filmed interview, and, as a bonus, a separate film on Alexander.)

The general thread of the stories is derived, in part, from the story of Pwyll. (Yes—it looks unpronounceable, but it’s really not—go to this link from the Celtic Studies Association of North America to hear—for English speakers, that ll at the end would be the hardest—it’s said out of the corner of your mouth as a kind of musical hiss—if you know Sylvester the Pussycat from the old Warner Brothers cartoons,

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you can get a rough idea of the sound when he says—as everybody in the 1930s and 1940s appears to have said nearly constantly, if you believe their movies– “Say!”)

Pwyll is a prince who, when out hunting, has an encounter with Arawn (AH-ruhn, more or less), the Lord of Annwn (AH-nuhn), which is the name for the Otherworld. In the Alexander books, Arawn plans to conquer this world and Taran and his friends are brought into combat with his allies and Arawn himself again and again until Arawn’s final defeat.

One element in Arawn’s plans is a magical cauldron,

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which can bring back the dead. This is an idea which Alexander borrowed from another of the Mabinogi stories, that of Branwen, here depicted in a 1915 painting by Christopher Williams.

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It has been suggested that the use of this cauldron can be seen upon the “Gundestrup Cauldron”, a silver vessel discovered in a peat bog at Gundestrup, Denmark, in 1891.

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It’s a mysterious thing with lots of academic argument over who made it, where, and when, with dates between 200bc and 300ad, besides its purpose, but, among its many puzzling scenes is this:

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In The Black Cauldron, although Arawn had once controlled it, the vessel really belongs to three mysterious figures—Orddu, Orwen, Orgoch—who live in a hut in the Marshes of Morva. Three haglike figures around a cauldron suggest another such trio—the three weird sisters in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

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We believe, in fact, that these (in the play) are the three incarnations of the Irish goddess, the Badb (“Crow”). This image comes from a weird and interesting site called “Mygodpictures.com”.)

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She was also known as the Morrigan (“Great Queen”), who was thought to appear on battlefields, before, during, and after conflict.

These hags also remind us of the three figures of fate from the Norse tradition, the Norns (seen here in an especially ghostly picture by Arthur Rackham)

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and, beyond those, the Moirai, the three fates of Greco-Roman religion

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as well as the Fates from Disney’s Hercules

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to go from the serious to the nearly-silly.

In recent years, popular entertainment has used the re-animated, from World War Z

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to The Walking Dead,

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and can we ever escape zombies?

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For us, however, perhaps the most powerful of images lies not in the gross graphics of decaying flesh, but that, in the story of Branwen, the dead can be brought back, but cannot speak. Why is this? It’s a haunting question: is it that death—or rebirth—is so terrible that they are blocked from talking about it? Is it that no one is alive who cannot communicate, in some form or other? What do you think about the mute dead, dear readers?

Thank you, as always, for reading and definitely

MTCIDC

CD

Which Witch

31 Monday Oct 2016

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

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Welcome, dear readers.

This is our annual Guy Fawkes’ Day/Halloween/Samain posting. Last year, we looked at GFD. This year, it’s Halloween—and a little puzzle from JRRT (how not?).

Magic and mystery—centered on witches—is a central theme for Halloween celebrations.   Just look at the variety of commercially-made costumes available.

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For many of us, our introduction to witches was probably in the person of the Wicked Witch of the West in the 1939 The Wizard of Oz.

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This is not quite what the witch in L. Frank Baum’s original book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)

(illustrated by W.W. Denslow) looked like,

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but you can see, in her hat and dress, things which were already symbolic of witchery in popular culture: black cats, crescent moons, toads, some of it echoes from the words of the three Weird Sisters in Shakepeare’s Macbeth (1606), who meet the protagonist on the road after his victory over the enemies of Duncan the king of Scotland. (Theodore Chasseriau)

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A dark Cave. In the middle, a Caldron boiling. Thunder.

Enter the three Witches.

1 WITCH.  Thrice the brinded cat hath mew’d.
2 WITCH.  Thrice and once, the hedge-pig whin’d.
3 WITCH.  Harpier cries:—’tis time! ’tis time!
1 WITCH.  Round about the caldron go;
In the poison’d entrails throw.—
Toad, that under cold stone,
Days and nights has thirty-one;
Swelter’d venom sleeping got,
Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot!
ALL.  Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
2 WITCH.  Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the caldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg, and owlet’s wing,—
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
ALL.  Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.

Somehow, somewhere, witches acquired those distinctive clothes and hat—especially the hat. The story of Macbeth and the witches comes from Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577/1587) and here is that scene illustrated from that first edition of 1577.

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As you can see, to the modern eye, there’s nothing “witchy” about these ladies. So where do those clothes and hat come from? We have no firm answer for this, just a guess—and from another literary tradition, Mother Goose.

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The first published version of stories (and, in time, rhymes) under that name dates from 1695. Here’s the frontispiece from the first English translation (1729).

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Mother Goose was supposed to be a country woman and, by the latter part of the 19th century, was dressed as one—but we think with a particular look, that of Welsh women in distinctive traditional clothing.

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The style of hat is much older—here we have, in succession, three earlier versions from the 17th century—1610, 1640, 1676.

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Country people tend to be conservative, so something worn in much of the UK in the 17th century appears to have existed, at least in modified form, in the depths of Wales long after then.

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We wonder whether there hasn’t been a kind of cross-over effect: country women to Mother Goose to witches—all conservative dressers. There is also a long tradition in Wales of “wise women”—often mistaken in England for dealers-with-the-devil—those appear in this rather creepy painting by Goya of a witches’ Sabbath (1797-1798). (We note that there are no pointy hats here.) Perhaps the Welsh wise woman was consulted about wardrobe by Mother Goose?

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Witches (as the “Harry Potter” books point out) aren’t and weren’t always just women.

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Men, too, could take part, sometimes called witches, sometimes warlocks or wizards. When we think wizard, of course, we immediately think of the 5 Istari—

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When we think of witch, however, in the context of LOTR, we can see that:

  1. In this respect, this is a different kind of culture—for instance, the only equivalent of a “wise woman” is Ioreth, in the “Houses of Healing”
  2. But there is a witch-king, that of Angmar, who is also the head of the Nazgul

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There is a puzzle here, however. In western tradition, witches are the servants of Satan, who spend their time, it seems, troubling humans at the daily level—making cows sick, tormenting babies, holding sabbbaths, casting spells.

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In that tradition, the only ruler is Satan himself, as depicted in this second Goya painting of a sabbath (and we note here that most of the witches appear to be something between human and other—a great—but horrible—touch—and who is that girl sitting off to the right? This comes from a series of paintings done by Goya in the last years of his life and there is a certain mystery about why he painted them—they’re murals, in fact—and what they might mean.)

francisco_de_goya_y_lucientes_-_witches_sabbath_the_great_he-goat

 

As there are no other witches in Middle-earth, then, where are the witches for the witch-king to be monarch of?

And that, perhaps, is another mystery for Halloween…

Oh—and Happy Halloween, by the way!

 

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

ps

While gathering images for this posting, we happened upon this photograph. Is this a picture from Professor McGonagall’s 50th Hogwarts  reunion?

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Nought’s had, all’s spent

03 Wednesday Aug 2016

Posted by in J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Narrative Methods, Theatre and Performance, Villains

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In “The Shadow of the Past,” Gandalf, giving Frodo backstory of the Ring, makes a confession:

“I might perhaps have consulted Saruman the White, but something always held me back.”

“Who is he?” asked Frodo. “I have never heard of him before.”

“Maybe not,” answered Gandalf. “Hobbits are, or were, no concern of his. Yet he is great among the Wise. He is the chief of my order and the head of the Council. His knowledge is deep, but his pride had grown with it, and he takes ill any meddling. The lore of the Elven-rings, great and small, is his province. He has long studied it, seeking the lost secrets of their making; but when the Rings were debated in the Council, all that he would reveal  to us of his ring-lore told against my fears. So my doubt slept– but uneasily. Still I watched and I waited.” (The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 1, Chapter 2, “The Shadow of the Past”)

In terms of the spiritual life and safety of Middle-earth, Gandalf’s confession foreshadows much evil to come. Both Gandalf and Saruman are Istari, one of a group of five divine beings sent specifically to counteract the activities of Sauron.

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Gandalf suspects that “the chief of my order and the head of the Council” is false, and his suspicion will prove to be true, but what has happened to Saruman? Gandalf suggests that it has something to do with the ring, but, in fact, the ring is only emblematic of the real problem: the lure of control.

Here is Saruman attempting to seduce Gandalf into joining him:

“I said we, for we it may be, if you will join with me. A new Power is rising. Against it the old allies and policies will not avail us at all. There is no hope left in Elves or dying Numenor. This then is one choice before you, before us. We may join with that Power. It would be wise, Gandalf. There is hope that way. Its victory is at hand; and there will be rich reward for those that aided it. As the Power grows, its proved friends will also grow; and the Wise, such as you and I may with patience come at last to direct its courses, to control it.” (The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 2, Chapter 2, “The Council of Elrond”)

Instead of fulfilling his role as a counter-balance to Sauron, Saruman proposes first to control Sauron, and then even to become Sauron. As Saruman says, “Why not? The Ruling Ring? If we could command that, then the Power would pass to us.” (The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 2, Chapter 2, “The Council of Elrond”)  This use of the first person plural pronoun is not convincing:

“Saruman,” I said, standing away from him, “only one hand at a time can wield the One, and you know that well, so do not trouble to say we.” (The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 2, Chapter 2, “The Council of Elrond”)

But what is it which Saruman wants to do with that ring?

“We can bide our time, we can keep our thoughts in our hearts, deploring maybe evils done by the way, but approving the high and ultimate purpose:  Knowledge, Rule, Order; all the things that we have so far striven in vain to accomplish, hindered rather than helped by our weak or idle friends.  There need not be, there would not be, any real change in our designs, only in our means.”  (The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 2, Chapter 2, “The Council of Elrond”)

Knowledge, rule, order?  We immediately want to know, knowledge of what, and who is ruling whom, with what order?   And the answers are all the same:  Saruman’s knowledge,  Saruman’s rule, Saruman’s order.  But what has happened to Saruman to so turn him away from the purpose for which he was sent?

Saruman’s headquarters are at Orthanc, a tower set in a stone circle at Isengard.

orthanc.jpgOriginally, this had been the site of a Gondorian strongpoint, but, as Gondor waned, it fell into disuse until taken over by Saruman with the permission of the Steward of Gondor, Beren. When we think of wizards, we imagine them as wanderers, like Gandalf and Radagast, and even more so, the two Blue wizards who have wandered so far as to have disappeared almost entirely from the history of Middle-earth. Could the very fact that Saruman would want a permanent base have been a hint that his plans went beyond the directive he had received in Valinor?

And there is worse to come. Within Orthanc, Saruman has discovered a Palantir, a far-seeing stone of Numenor.

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Who else might have one of these stones? Unfortunately, one of them is in the hands of Sauron.

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And the seduction of Gandalf began with the seduction of Saruman, as Gandalf says:

“Saruman…I have heard speeches of this kind before, but only in the mouths of emissaries sent from Mordor to deceive the ignorant.” (The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 2, Chapter 2, “The Council of Elrond”)

This figure for good being drawn away from the proper path reminded us of a similar situation in Shakespeare. Macbeth has been a successful general for Duncan, the king of Scotland. For his latest victory, he has been well-rewarded by the king, but just as in the case of Saruman, there is some part of him which wants more. Thus, when, after the battle, he and a companion meet three strange women on the edge of the battlefield, their prophetic words touch him in a place perhaps untouched before, but there.

MacbethAndBanquo-Witches

They first hail him by titles King Duncan has yet to give him–but will.  Then they hail him as King of Scotland itself, and his corruption begins.  It may have gone no farther than unquiet dreams had there not be a second element in his seduction:  his wife.

Ellen-Terry-as-Lady-Macbeth-by-John-Singer-Sargent-1889

It is she who completes what these three strange women began, not only nurturing Macbeth’s ambition, but even planning the murder of King Duncan.

Lady_Macbeth_CattermoleLike Saruman, Macbeth is overcome, gives in, murders Duncan, seizes power, but, also like Saruman, can not retain it and, interestingly, an element in his defeat closely resembles an element in Saruman’s defeat:  trees.

As his reign suffers resistance and becomes bloodier and more confused, Macbeth sees a series of apparitions, including one which reassures him–or so he thinks–that

“Be lion-mettled, proud, and take no care
Who chafes, who frets, or where conspirers are.
Macbeth shall never vanquished be until
Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill
Shall come against him.” (Macbeth, 4.1.94-98)
But his enemies, to disguise their numbers and movements, camouflage themselves with foliage from Birnam Wood,
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Macbeth’s fortress is successfully taken, and Macbeth is killed in battle, his head taken by an avenging enemy, Macduff.
 macduff-wit-macbeth-head-jpg

Where Macbeth has had Birnam Wood, Saruman suffers from the Forest of Fangorn–

Tolkien, Nasmith, painting, illustration, Lord of the Rings, Silmarillion, Hobbit, Middle-earth

The Wrath of the Ents, by Ted Nasmith

(We would add one more Macbeth parallel for The Lord of the Rings.  Another seemingly reassuring apparition has told Macbeth that he can only be killed by a very special person:

“Be bloody, bold, and resolute. Laugh to scorn
The power of man, for none of woman born
Shall harm Macbeth.” (Macbeth, 4.1.81-83)
That person turns out to be Macduff, born from a Caesarian section.
Do we need to remind our readers of what Eowyn says in reply to the Witch-king’s “Hinder me?  Thou fool.  No living man may hinder me!”)
eowyn.nazgul

After the fall of Isengard, Saruman is imprisoned in his own tower.  During his imprisonment, he is deprived of the Palantir, but Sauron’s seduction has been thorough and, even when offered another chance, there will be nothing left for him in the future but being a petty spoiler and then the victim of his own slave, someone he had once seduced.

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Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD