Who Goes There? (4)

05 Wednesday Dec 2018

Posted by Ollamh in J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History of Middle-earth, Narrative Methods, The Rohirrim

Tags

Cirith Ungol, doorwarden, Edoras, Faramir, Gorbag and Shagrat, guards, Hama, Heorot, Ingold, Isengard, Ithilien, Meduseld, Merry and Pippin, Minas Tirith, N.C. Wyeth, Orcs, Rammas Echor, Rangers, Robin Hood, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, White Tree of Gondor

Welcome, dear readers, as ever.

This post will complete our series on watchmen, sentries, and patrols in The Lord of the Rings and how confrontations with such figures may change the action.

In our last, we’d gotten as far as Edoras and, within, Meduseld, with Hama, its doorwarden.

(This is actually from John Howe’s painting of Heorot, the mead hall in Beowulf, but, as Meduseld is meant to mean “mead hall” in Rohirric—the language of Rohan—we figure that we can justify the substitution.)

From Edoras, we’ll follow Gandalf and Pippin to Minas Tirith,

passing through the Rammas Echor, the old barrier wall protecting the fields of the Pelennor, where Gandalf talks with Ingold, who appears to be in charge of repairing a section of that wall fallen into disrepair. (See The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 1, “Minas Tirith”) We don’t have a illustration of this—although we think that it would make a good one—so, as we think of the Rammas Echor as a cousin of Hadrian’s wall, here’s an illustration of that wall under construction, just to give the idea.

But we said we will follow Gandalf and Pippin. First, we have to double back to Isengard, where the Ents have wreaked justifiable havoc.

(A T Nasmith we’ve used before)

When Gandalf and crowd come to call upon Saruman, they meet with very different doorwardens from Hama:

“The king and all his company sat silent on their horses, marvelling, perceiving that the power of Saruman was overthrown; but how they could not guess. And now they turned their eyes towards the archway and the ruined gates. There they saw close beside them a great rubble heap; and suddenly they were aware of two small figures lying on it at their ease, grey-clad, hardly to be seen among the stones. There were bottles and bowls and platters laid beside them, as if they had just eaten well, and now rested from their labour. One seemed asleep, the other, with crossed legs and arms behind his head, leaned back against a broken rock and sent from his mouth long wisps and little rings of thin blue smoke.” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 8, “The Road to Isengard”)

It’s Merry and Pippin, of course, and, for Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli, after their long, grim march across northern Rohan in search of their missing companions, only to have Eomer suggest that they’ve been killed with the orcs, this is certainly a change of mood, as well as a change of plot—not only are the two restored, but Pippin will help to rescue Faramir from his mad father and Merry will save Eowyn from the Nazgul.

Now, however, having picked up Pippin, we’ll continue on to Minas Tirith,

where, at the approach of Shadowfax:

“So Gandalf and Peregrin rode to the Great Gate of the Men of Gondor at the rising of the sun, and its iron doors rolled back before them…Then men fell back before the command of his voice…” (The Return of the King, Book 5, Chapter 1, “Minas Tirith”)

Passing up through the seven levels of the city, they dismounted at the gate of the Citadel, where:

“The Guards of the gate were robed in black, and their helms were of strange shape, high-crowned, with long cheek-guards close-fitting to the face, and above the cheek-guards were set the white wings of sea-birds; but the helms gleamed with a flame of silver, for they were indeed wrought of mithril, heirlooms from the glory of old days. Upon the black surcoats were embroidered in white a tree blossoming like snow beneath a silver crown and many-pointed stars.”

This was an image surprisingly difficult to find. Here’s a depiction (sort of) from the Jackson films.

The helmet might be right, but the black surcoat is missing—here’s Pippin, also from the films, wearing one.

We add to this an image by a Russian illustrator, Denis Gordeev. Here, the helmet may not be quite what we’d expect, but the rest of the ensemble works.

It says much for Gandalf’s influence in Minas Tirith that neither does Ingold, at the Rammas Echor, challenge him, nor the guards at the main gate of Minas Tirith, nor those at the Citadel—as Ingold says:

“Yea, truly we know you, Mithrandir…and you know the pass-words of the Seven Gates and are free to go forward.”

Our next sentries, are not so easily passed however, as Frodo and Sam discover, when:

“Four tall Men stood there. Two had spears in their hands with broad bright heads. Two had great bows, almost of their own height, and great quivers of long green-feathered arrows. All had swords at their sides, and were clad in green and brown of varied hues, as if the better to walk unseen in the glades of Ithilien. Green gauntlets covered their hands, and their faces were hooded and masked with green, except for their eyes, which were very keen and bright.” (The Two Towers, Book Four, Chapter 4, “Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit”)

Their outfits immediately made us think of NC Wyeth’s Robin Hood and his men

from Wyeth’s 1917 Robin-hood.

Their leader, Faramir, questions Frodo and Sam closely before letting them go—and this meeting gives Faramir news of the end of Boromir, a view of Boromir’s character from Frodo, as well as providing us with a view of Faramir, who says of the Ring:

“I would not take this thing, if it lay by the highway. Not were Minas Tirith falling in ruin and I alone could save her, so, using the weapon of the Dark Lord for her good and my glory. No, I do not wish for such triumphs, Frodo son of Drogo.” (The Two Towers, Book Four, Chapter 5, “The Window on the West”)

Once he knows their purpose, Faramir lets them go—to much worse sentries. First, there are orc patrols, like those of Shagrat and Gorbag.

Image13: shag and bag

There is no conversation here between hobbits and orcs, but we certainly gain a better view of orc loyalty, as one orc leader, Gorbag, says to another, Shagrat:

“What d’you say? –if we get a chance, you and me’ll slip off and set up somewhere on our own with a few trusty lads, somewhere where there’s good loot nice and handy, and no big bosses.” (The Two Towers, Book Four, Chapter 10, “The Choices of Master Samwise”)

Then there are the Watchers at the Tower of Cirith Ungol:

“They were like great figures seated upon thrones. Each had three joined bodies, and three heads facing outward, and inward, and across the gateway. The heads had vulture-faces, and on their great knees were laid clawlike hands. They seemed to be carved out of huge blocks of stone, immovable, and yet they were aware: some dreadful spirit of evil vigilance abode in them. They knew an enemy. Visible or invisible none could pass unheeded…” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 1, “The Tower of Cirith Ungol”)

And here are the last sentries and perhaps a last sign for Frodo and Sam before their terrible and near-fatal trip across Mordor that there is still power for good in a world grown dark. Having rescued Frodo from his orcish imprisonment, Sam and Frodo have come up against the Watchers, who seem to block their way until:

“ ‘Gilthoniel, A Elbereth!’ Sam cried…

‘Aiya elenion ancalima!’ cried Frodo once again behind him.

The will of the Watchers was broken with a suddenness like the snapping of a cord, and Frodo and Sam stumbled forward. “

There are no more sentries, although the two hobbits will be passed by a small search party and will then be swept up into an orc marching company before being on their own on the way to Mount Doom, where we will leave them and this set of postings.

As always, thanks for reading and

MTCIDC

Class, Order, Family… (Part 1)

17 Wednesday Oct 2018

Posted by Ollamh in J.R.R. Tolkien, Language

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Baggins, Chief Joseph, class, Cockney, Common Speech, Gamgee, George Bernard Shaw, Hobbits, language, Lerner and Loewe, Liza Doolittle, Merry and Pippin, My Fair Lady, Nez Perce, polysyndeton, Pygmalion, Rustics, Saruman, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Uruk-hai, verbal class distinction, vocabulary

Welcome, dear readers, as ever.

In Lerner and Loewe’s musical My Fair Lady (1956),

image1alady

based upon George Bernard Shaw’s play, Pygmalion (1913), one major character is Professor Henry Higgins, who studies English dialects. He is given to musical rants and, in his first, he laments “Why can’t the English teach their children how to speak?” with the couplet:

“An Englishman’s way of speaking absolutely classifies him,

The moment he talks he makes some other

Englishman despise him.”

Somewhere—we’ve temporarily lost the quotation—Tolkien, in signing over his rights to The Lord of the Rings to someone, stipulated that Merry and Pippin weren’t to be “rustics”.

This word “rustic” entered English in the mid-15^th century, being derived from the Latin rus, ruris, n., “country/farm” and its adjective, rusticus/a/um, “rural/of the countryside”, the adjective then meaning “a country person”—like these Romans

image1romanfarmers

or these, in the medieval world

or these, from JRRT’s childhood.

image3farmfolk

To JRRT, the linguist, what made the rustic was clearly not so much the look or even the activities which country people did so much as how they spoke. In Chapter One of the first book of The Lord of the Rings, we overhear a group of older hobbits discussing Bilbo and Frodo and Daddy Twofoot says:

“And no wonder they’re queer…if they live on the wrong side of the Brandywine River, and right agin the Old Forest. That’s a dark bad place, if half the tales be true.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 1, “A Long-Expected Party”)

Here, we see “agin” for “again”, “dark bad place”, which is more a rhythmic pattern of dialect than the words themselves (although we wonder about the placement of those adjectives together), and the use of the old subjunctive “if half the tales be true”. And, in the next paragraph, Gaffer Gamgee then uses a dialect form of “drowned”—“drownded”. The content of this dialogue is gossip, but the sound of it is meant to provide a quick aural sketch of rural people with perhaps the faint suggestion that such gossip is based upon few facts and much “folk wisdom”, such as the idea that, because one lives on the far side of a river, one is “queer”, leading to the conclusion that rustics are, at best, ill-informed, and, at worst, ignorant and potentially bigoted.

And so, we would presume that what JRRT wanted was that Frodo’s cousins should sound like Frodo, who speaks, in Middle-earth, what Tolkien calls “the Westron or ‘Common Speech’ of the West-lands of Middle-earth” and what is in Modern-earth called “Received Standard English”. Here’s a brief example of that from that same chapter, when Gandalf and Frodo are discussing Bilbo and the Ring:

“If you mean , inventing all that about a ‘present’, well, I thought the true story much more likely and I couldn’t see the point of altering it at all. It was very unlike Bilbo to do so, anyway; and I thought it rather odd.”

Vocabulary choice plays a strong part here, with a Latinate element—“altering”—and the use of “odd”, where the Gaffer had earlier used “queer”, plus what we might think of as “higher class” words, like “likely” and “unlike” and “rather” as adjectives.

The Bagginses and their relatives, after all, are looked upon as well-to-do–“a decent respectable hobbit” the Gaffer says of Frodo’ father, Drogo, and calls Bilbo, “a very nice well-spoken gentlehobbit”. In Middle-earth, dialect—especially here meaning that spoken by what appear to be meant to be “rustics”—can make the difference between gentlehobbits and people like the Gaffer. As the Henry Higgins mentioned above says to Colonel Pickering, whom he regards as a social equal, of Liza Doolittle, a Cockney (inner London, lower-class girl):

“If you spoke as she does, sir,

Instead of the way you do,

Why, you might be selling flowers, too.”

image4pat

It’s not just among hobbits that we see what Henry Higgins calls a “verbal class distinction”, however. Here’s Saruman

image5aasaruman

speaking to Gandalf:

“I did not expect you to show wisdom, even in your own behalf; but I gave you the chance of aiding me willingly, and so saving yourself much trouble and pain. The third choice is to remain here until the end.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 2, “The Council of Elrond”)

We notice here the long compound sentence (long sentence made up of clauses which depend upon each other), from “I” to “pain”. This is clearly the equivalent of “gentlehobbit” talk.

And here is one of Saruman’s orcs:

“…We are the fighting Uruk-hai! We slew the great warrior. We took the prisoners. We are the servants of Saruman the Wise, the White Hand, the Hand that gives us man’s-flesh to eat We came out of Isengard, and led you here, and we shall lead you back by the way we choose. I am Ugluk. I have spoken.” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 3, “The Uruk-hai”)

image5aorcs

Here, we have a series of simple, declarative sentences (sentences with only one subject and verb)—three in a row– followed by a longer sentence which is built upon a simple sentence, “We are the servants of Saruman the Wise…”, followed by an example of what is called “polysyndeton”—that is, several shorter sentences joined together by a conjunction (a word like “and” or “or”). All of this is followed by two more simple declarative sentences.

This is clearly not “rustic” speech—just compare it with that of Daddy Twofoot, above. Instead, it reminds us of translations of Native American speeches, like this, from the brave and wise Chief Joseph (1840-1904—Native American name in translation, “Thunder Traveling to Higher Areas”),

image5chiefjoseph

of the Nez Perce:

“Tell General Howard I know his heart. What he told me before, I have it in my heart. I am tired of fighting. Our Chiefs are killed; Looking Glass is dead, Ta Hool Hool Shute is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes or no. He who led on the young men is dead. It is cold, and we have no blankets; the little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are – perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my Chiefs! I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.”

How might we characterize this? It’s clearly very different from the speech of the orc’s master, who tends to speak in longer, more complex sentences, indicating more sophistication in the use of language (we remember the danger of listening too long to him, as demonstrated in The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 10, “The Voice of Saruman”). We would say that, where the “rustic” dialect—pronunciation (“agin”), odd forms (“drownded”), old verb forms (“be true”)–differentiates the Gaffer and Daddy Twofoot from Frodo (and Merry and Pippin), for the orcs—or Ugluk, at least– it is sentence structure which differentiates the Isengard equivalent of “gentlehobbit” speech from that of the “rustic” orcs.

It isn’t only sentence structure which we would suggest makes orcs sound different, however, and we’ll talk more about this—and about another “rustic”—a real one—in Part 2 of this posting, next week.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

Smoke (No Mirrors)

22 Wednesday Mar 2017

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

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Algonquian, Aragorn, Bag End, Baggins, Daemonologie, domestic, Gandalf, Gimli, Hernandez de Boncalo, hogsheads, Isengard, James I, Jamestown, John Rolfe, Longbottom Leaf, Matoaka, Merry and Pippin, Native Americans, Nictotiana, Philip II of Spain, pipe, plantations, Pocahontas, Popeye the Sailor, Saruman, Scouring of the Shire, Sharkey, Sherlock Holmes, Shire, smoking, Southfarthing, The First Part of Ayres of the Musicall Humours, The Hobbit, The Illiad, The Lord of the Rings, The Odyssey, Tobacco, Tobias Hume, Tolkien

As always, welcome, dear readers.

This posting takes us away from the Shire and back to it, all in a couple of pages, as well as linking itself with a recent one on Sharkey and his attempt at revenge on the Hobbits who have helped in his downfall.

We begin just after Helm’s Deep, at the moment when Gandalf and all of the major characters involved have followed the invasion route back to Isengard, only to find it in ruins and:

“And now they turned their eyes towards the archway and the ruined gates. There they saw close beside them a great rubble-heap; and suddenly they were aware of two small figures lying on it at their ease…One seemed asleep; the other, with crossed legs and arms behind his head, leaned back against a broken rock and sent from his mouth long whisps and little rings of thin blue smoke.” The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 8, “The Road to Isengard”

For Gimli, himself a smoker, that latter sight is not a surprising. For Theoden, however, not only are the Hobbits a surprise, but: “I had not heard that they spouted smoke from their mouths.”

Merry’s reply then leads us into today’s posting.

“That is not surprising…for it is an art which we have not practised for more than a few generations. It was Tobold Hornblower, of Longbottom in the Southfarthing, who first grew the true pipe-weed in his gardens, about the year 1070 according to our reckoning. How old Toby came by the plant…”

Gandalf interrupts Merry here, concluding with “Some other time would be more fitting for the history of smoking.”

But not for us.

For us, smoking, in the The Lord of the Rings, as in The Hobbit, belongs to a whole category of what we call the “domestication of the heroic”, a distinctive and important feature of JRRT’s narrative style. Earlier epics, like the Iliad and the Odyssey, certainly have their moments where combat and travel and dealing with monsters and enchantresses are not the only features of the stories. People sometimes pause to eat and drink and even sleep. JRRT goes beyond this, however, to provide what he himself might call the “homely” in his texts. By this term, we mean the ordinary and familiar, including such things as a brief inventory of the contents of Bag End, food more detailed than the “endless meat and sweet dark wine” of Homer–such as the mushrooms and bacon which Farmer Maggot offers–and Bilbo reading his letters and forgetting his pocket handkerchief. Such seemingly-trivial things give the stories—and certain of the characters within them—an extra depth and thus a deeper believability, as well as anchoring the story in something more ordinary than kings and wizards.

In fact, the center of this domestication are the Hobbits: think of Sam wanting a bit of rope or explaining taters to Gollum or that heart-breaking moment when Sam discards his pots and pans and “The clatter of his precious pans as they fell down into the dark was like a death-knell to his heart.” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 3, “Mount Doom”) And, along with things like rope and conies, there is what once was called “the pleasures of the pipe”.

We live in a different world from JRRT. When he took up the pipe, in the early 20^th century, no one knew the dangers of smoking.

It was simply something men, in particular, did. After all, there was Sherlock Holmes, with his famous “three-pipe problem” (“The Red-Headed League”, The Strand Magazine, August, 1891) as a perfect model.

Thus, smoking was acceptable and, potentially, domestic: after all, although the ancient comic book and cartoon character, Popeye the Sailor (1929-1957), may hold a pipe in his mouth while battling,

it is generally something done in quiet and contemplation. Perhaps, then, for the times in which JRRT was writing, a perfect symbol of the domestic. (Hence the old expression for household comfort that someone—typically his wife–brings the owner “his pipe and slippers” when he comes home from work?)

And it appears very early in our experience of Hobbits. After all, the first time we see Bilbo, he is “standing at his door after breakfast smoking an enormous long wooden pipe that reached nearly down to his woolly toes”. (The Hobbit, Chapter 1, “An Unexpected Party”)

In time, we’ll see Gandalf smoking

and Strider/Aragorn, too.

In fact, we wonder if it isn’t a kind of unconscious sign that someone is a positive character—after all, as we said, Gimli smokes, too.

There is one exception, of course—and we’ll come back to that!

It should be no surprise, then, that one more positive character, Merry, is a smoker. Knowing, from the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings, that he is also the author of Herblore of the Shire, among other works, it is also not surprising that he appears to be the main authority on “pipe-weed”, claiming that the Hobbits were the inventors of its consumption: “Hobbits first put it into pipes. Not even the Wizards first thought of that before we did.”

This, of course, made us think about who invented tobacco-smoking in our world—or, at least, in the English-speaking Western Hemisphere. (Although we are glad to point out that, as early as 1559, Philip II of Spain ordered Hernandez de Boncalo to bring back tobacco seeds from the New World to plant in Spain.)

Merry says of the plant (which he correctly identifies with our genus Nicotiana):

“…observations that I have made on my own many journeys south have convinced me that the weed itself is not native to our parts of the world, but came northward from the lower Anduin, whither it was, I suspect, originally brought over Sea by the Men of Westernesse. It grows abundantly in Gondor, and there is richer and larger than in the North, where it is never found wild, and flourishes only in warm sheltered places like Longbottom.”

In our world—that is, in the Americas– Native Americans first cultivated tobacco—as can be seen in this engraved version of John White’s 1580s drawing of the Algonquian village of Secoton by Theodor de Bry for the 1590 second edition of Thomas Harriot’s A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia.

At the top, center, is a tobacco field, with stylized plants, which, up close, might look like this:

Native Americans appear to have used tobacco—and its smoke—primarily for religious and political ceremonies, rather than for recreation.

This soon changed, however, when a member of the newly-established (1607) colony of Jamestown, John Rolfe, in what would become the US state of Virginia,

saw the commercial possibilities and began to cultivate tobacco for export.

Although John Rolfe is known to those interested in early English colonization, his wife is much more famous. She was Matoaka, called Pocahontas as a nickname (it means something like “playful/lively”), the 400^th anniversary of whose funeral is the day of this writing, 21 March (although it will be posted tomorrow, the 22^nd).

Tobacco was already known in England,

had become a sort of craze,

and even inspired at least one pop song, Tobias Hume’s “Tobacco”, from his The First Part of Ayres of the Musicall Humours (1605). Hume was a big fan of the lyra viol (a member of the string bass family).

image16lyraviol

(We include here a link so that you can hear the song sung and accompanied by his favorite instrument. Oh—and it’s sung in the pronunciation of the early 17^th century, so be prepared for some differences in sound.)

Thus, Rolfe’s exploitation was a good business investment, even though tobacco quickly ran afoul of the British government, in the form of the new king, James I,

image17james1

who had already published an attack on smoking in 1604.

image18counterblast

James I had opinions on numerous subjects, including witches, about whom he had published a book, Daemonologie, in 1597.

M0014280 James I: Daemonologie, in forme of a dialogue. Title page.

His attack on tobacco—although more sensible than believing in witches—didn’t stop it from becoming the major Virginia crop, however—as this roadside sign points out.

Virginia farmers planted huge fields of tobacco,

cultivated it (a major use of slave labor, like the sugar plantations of the Caribbean),

cut and dried it,

packed it into huge barrels, called hogsheads,

dragged those hogsheads to a port,

and shipped those hogsheads to England

where smokers enjoyed it.

We don’t know the methods used in the Southfarthing, but, looking at tobacco around the world in our world, the main difference seems to be in the curing (drying) technique used. We can imagine, then, that, when Merry talks about “pipe-weed” and its cultivation, if we visited the southern part of the Shire, we would see familiar sights—except, perhaps, for those hogheads. The stuff which Merry is smoking came from “two small barrels, washed up out of some cellar or store-house…When we opened them, we found they were filled with this: as fine a pipe-weed as you could wish for, and quite unspoilt.” (The Two Towers, Chapter Nine, “Flotsam and Jetsam”)

Gimli admires the quality and Merry says, “My dear Gimli, it is Longbottom Leaf! There were the Hornblower brandmarks on the barrels, as plain as plain. How it came here, I can’t imagine. For Saruman’s private use, I fancy.”

This brings us back to the final smoker and one exception to our fanciful rule that, in Tolkien, if you smoke, you’re a positive character: Saruman.

It’s hard to think of Saruman as indulging in the domestic. As Treebeard says of him: “He has a mind of metal and wheels” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 4, “Treebeard”). And yet, although he has lost his position as head of the White Council, and has lost Isengard, as well, as Gandalf says of him, “I fancy he could do some mischief still in a small mean way.” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 6, “Many Partings”). Thus, what better small, mean way than to attack that very domesticity which is embodied in the Hobbits and their Shire? As Sharkey, he does so, destroying the Shire by cutting down trees, knocking or burning down houses, replacing water mills with steam, and turning a nearly a-political place into a little fascist state. And, perhaps, as a last straw, he attacks one last small comfort, saying to Merry, as he keeps his tobacco pouch:

“Well, it will serve you right when you come home, if you find things less good in the Southfarthing than you would like. Long may your land be short of leaf!” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 6, “Many Partings”)

If so, perhaps there is a certain horrible irony, then, that, when Saruman is murdered, he is last seen as “a grey mist…rising slowly to a great height like smoke from a fire”. (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 8, “The Scouring of the Shire”)

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

Shire Portrait (5a): Hostile Takeover

08 Wednesday Mar 2017

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

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A Long-Expected Party, auction, Bag End, Baggins, Barliman Butterbur, Galadriel, Government, Isengard, Longbottom Leaf, Luke Skywalker, Merry and Pippin, Mirror of Galadriel, Pipeweed, Sackville-Bagginses, Sam Gamgee, Saruman, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, The Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King, The Scouring of the Shire, The Shire, Tolkien, Yoda

As always, dear readers, welcome!

This is, we think, the last in our Shire Portrait series (although a 2-parter)—at least for the moment. In it, we intend to consider just how the Shire fell into the hands of “Sharkey” and his “boys”.

The Ring destroyed and the King returned, Gandalf, the Hobbits, and a party of Elves are traveling back toward Rivendell and beyond when they come upon Saruman and Grima, now no more than Saruman’s slave.

It is not a happy meeting, as can be imagined. When offered help, Saruman replies:

“All my hopes are ruined, but I would not share yours. If you have any…You have doomed yourselves, and you know it. And it will afford me some comfort as I wander to think that you pulled down your own house when you destroyed mine.” The Return of the King, Book 6, Chapter 6, “Many Partings”

In such a mood, it can be imagined how he treats the Hobbits—even when Merry offers him pipe-weed, which he does while commenting, less than tactfully, on its origin:

“ ‘You are welcome to it; it came from the flotsam of Isengard.’

‘Mine, mine, yes and dearly bought!’ cried Saruman, clutching at the pouch. ‘This is only a repayment in token; for you took more, I’ll be bound. Still, a beggar must be grateful, if a thief returns him even a morsel of his own. Well, it will serve you right when you come home, if you find things less good in the Southfarthing than you would like. Long may your land be short of leaf!’”

Saruman’s remark—a curse, really—resonates especially with Sam.

“’Ah!’ said Sam. ‘And bought he said. How, I wonder? And I didn’t like the sound of what he said about the Southfarthing. It’s time we got back.’” The Return of the King, Book 6, Chapter 6, “Many Partings”

This is a natural reaction on Sam’s part because of what he had seen in Galadriel’s mirror, we presume.

“’Hi!’ cried Sam in an outraged voice. ‘There’s that Ted Sandyman a-cutting down trees as he shouldn’t. They didn’t ought to be felled: it’s that avenue beyond the Mill that shades the road to Bywater…

But now Sam noticed that the Old Mill had vanished, and a large red-brick building was being put up where it stood. Lots of folk were busily at work. There was a tall red chimney nearby. Black smoke seemed to cloud the surface of the Mirror…

‘I can’t stay here,’ he said wildly. ‘I must go home. They’ve dug up Bagshot Row, and there’s the poor old Gaffer going down the Hill with his bits of things on a barrow…” The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 2, Chapter VII, “The Mirror of Galadriel”

At the time, Galadriel had told him

“’You cannot go home alone,’ said the Lady. ‘You did not wish to go home without your master before you looked in the Mirror, and yet you knew that evil things might well be happening in the Shire. Remember that the Mirror shows many things, and not all have yet come to pass. Some never come to be, unless those that behold the visions turn aside from their path to prevent them. The Mirror is dangerous as a guide to deeds.” The Fellowship of the Ring, Book 2, Chapter VII, “The Mirror of Galadriel”

[A footnote: suddenly, we are reminded of that scene on Dagobah in Star Wars V, when Luke has had a vision and immediately wants to rush off to Bespin.

“Luke: I saw—I saw a city in the clouds.

Yoda: [nods] Friends you have there.

Luke: They were in pain…

Yoda: It is the future you see.

Luke: The future?

[pause]

Luke: Will they die?

Yoda: [closes his eyes for a moment] Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future.

Luke: I’ve got to go to them.

Yoda: Decide you must, how to serve them best. If you leave now, help them you could; but you would destroy all for which they have fought, and suffered.” The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

As—using various websites—we provide links here—we can see that an imitation of the opening of the Hobbit—Bilbo and Gandalf meeting—appears in an early script of Star Wars IV, I think that the scene at Galadriel’s Mirror was somewhere back in G. Lucas’ wonderfully fertile brain—and, yes, we are big fans.]

“Secrets of the ‘Star Wars’ Drafts”

Was George Lucas Inspired by Tolkien?

Star Wars Origins: The Lord of the Rings

At this point, we know from two sources that Saruman has had commercial dealings with the Southfarthing.

First, of course, we’ve just seen it confirmed by Saruman’s response to Merry. Second is that scene at Isengard, where Gandalf, Theoden, Eomer, and Aragorn, travel with an escort and find there Merry and Pippin, who tell them of their discovery of two small casks:

“ ‘My dear Gimli, it is Longbottom Leaf! There were the Hornblower brandmarks on the barrels, as plain as plain. How it came here, I can’t imagine.” The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 9, “Flotsam and Jetsam”

Knowing, however, of Saruman’s increasing interest in the Shire, we can imagine that one of his agents, active in the Southfarthing, had acquired it for him. As the Appendix B, “The Tale of Years” tells us, under TA2953:

[Saruman] notes his [Gandalf’s] interest in the Shire. He soon begins to keep agents in Bree and the Southfarthing.” (page 1089 in Appendix B)

Spying was clearly only the beginning for Saruman, however. The actual evidence for his eventual take-over is scattered throughout The Lord of the Rings, but we believe that it can be pieced together to provide a picture of how it must have been done. It was a two-step process.

First, he appears to have gained knowledge of internal dissatisfaction within the Shire. Because there is really nothing political in the Shire–as readers will know from the first posting in this series, there is virtually no government—this unrest was domestic—as is said in the Prologue, “Families for the most part managed their own affairs.”

In the case of Bilbo and Frodo, the dissatisfied were the Sackville-Bagginses. We first met them in the last chapter of The Hobbit, where they were described as “Bilbo’s cousins” and were shown as being actively involved in the auction of the “effects of the late Bilbo Baggins Esquire”—as well as in the disappearance of some merchandise not auctioned off:

“Many of his silver spoons mysteriously disappeared and were never accounted for. Personally he suspected the Sackville-Bagginses. On their side they never admitted that the returned Baggins was genuine and they were not on friendly terms with Bilbo ever after.” The Hobbit, Chapter 19, “The Last Stage”

It was one more blow to the Sackville-Bagginses when Bilbo rescued the now-orphaned Frodo from “those queer Bucklanders” and brought him to live at Bag End, as Gaffer Gamgee related in The Ivy Bush:

“ ‘But I reckon it was a nasty knock for those Sackville-Bagginses. They thought they were going to get Bag End, that time he went off and was thought to be dead. And then he comes back and orders them off; and he goes on living and living, and never looking a day older, bless him! And suddenly he produces an heir, and has all the papers made out proper. The Sackville-Bagginses won’t never see the inside of Bag End now, or it is to be hoped not.’ “ The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 1, “A Long-Expected Party”

Bad blood, then, on several counts—and, for Saruman, looking for a way in, a great opportunity.

Bilbo might have suspected them of spoon-pilfering, but his was a more generous nature, however, and he even invited them to his and Frodo’s joint birthday party.

“The Sackville-Bagginses were not forgotten. Otho and his wife Lobelia were present. They disliked Bilbo and detested Frodo, but so magnificent was the invitation card, written in golden ink, that they had felt it impossible to refuse…” The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 1, “A Long-Expected Party”

On the other hand, Bilbo does not please them when he announces that Frodo is coming into “his inheritance”—

“The Sackville-Bagginses scowled, and wondered what was meant by ‘coming into his inheritance’ “ and, when Bilbo makes his startling disappearance, they “departed in wrath”. (quotations from Chapter One).

And yet they didn’t quite depart. It seems they have only stepped away from the party, only to return to cause trouble, demanding to see Bilbo’s will.

“Otho would have been Bilbo’s heir, but for the adoption of Frodo. He read the will carefully and snorted. It was, unfortunately, very clear and correct…” The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 1, “A Long-Expected Party”

Otho “snapped his fingers under Frodo’s nose and stumped off”, but Lobelia, his wife, remained, and Frodo later found her “still about the place, investigating nooks and corners, and tapping the floors. He escorted her firmly off the premises, after he had relieved her of several small (but rather valuable) articles that had somehow fallen inside her umbrella.” And she leaves with a kind of threat and what she believes is an insult:

“ ‘You’ll live to regret it, young fellow! Why didn’t you go too? You don’t belong here; you’re no Baggins—you—you’re a Brandybuck!’ ”

It’s never said why there is such an animus held by the Sackville-Bagginses against the Bagginses, but there is clearly something wrong with the S-Bs, from their covetousness to Lobelia’s open theft, and whatever is wrong is just what Saruman will find and exploit. Our next mention of them is oblique and it has to do with that pipe-weed. Merry and Pippin have been explaining how they had come to discover it at Isengard and all seems clear—

“ ‘All except one thing,’ said Aragorn: ‘leaf from the Southfarthing in Isengard. The more I consider it, the more curious I find it. I have never been in Isengard, but I have journeyed in this land, and I know well the empty countries that lie between Rohan and the Shire. Neither goods nor folk have passed that way for many a long year, not openly. Saruman had secret dealings with someone in the Shire, I guess. Wormtongues may be found in other houses than King Theoden’s…” The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 9, “Flotsam and Jetsam

With that faint foreboding, we hear no more until Gandalf and the Hobbits are once more leaving Bree and Butterbur says, almost in passing:

“ ‘I should have warned you before that all’s not well in the Shire neither, if what we hear is true. Funny goings on, they say.’ “ The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 7, “Homeward Bound”

With Butterbur’s words in their ears, the Hobbits ride out and conversation begins:

“ ‘I wonder what old Barliman was hinting at,’ said Frodo.

‘I can guess some of it,’ said Sam gloomily. ‘What I saw in the Mirror: trees cut down and all, and my old gaffer turned out of the Row. I ought to have hurried back quicker.’

‘And something’s wrong with the Southfarthing evidently,’ said Merry. ‘There’s a general shortage of pipe-weed.’

‘Whatever it is,’ said Pippin, ‘Lotho will be at the bottom of it: you can be sure of that.’”

Here again, after Aragorn’s remark long before, we see that pipe-weed turn up—and associated somehow with a Sackville-Baggins. Butterbur has already replied to Gandalf’s request for it that “That’s the one thing that we’re short of, seeing how we’ve only got what we grow ourselves, and that’s not enough. There’s none to be had from the Shire these days.”

It’s never explained why Pippin makes the connection with Lotho at this point—was the bad blood between the Bagginses and the Sackville-Bagginses part of a darker picture of the S-Bs? This seems more than possible when Gandalf adds to Pippin’s remark:

“ ‘Deep in, but not at the bottom,’ said Gandalf. ‘You have forgotten Saruman. He began to take an interest in the Shire before Mordor did.’”

And now we begin to see a potential bigger pattern: Saruman-an S-B-Shire and, with it, the second step in the take-over of the Shire, that from outside. But that’s for Shire Portrait 5b: “Hostile Take-Over.2”, next time.

Until then, thanks, as ever, for reading!

MTCIDC

Trading with the Enemy

15 Wednesday Jul 2015

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

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Bree, Cross-Roads, Gandalf, Gimli, Great East Road, Greenway, Isengard, Laketown, Legolas, Marxist Critics, Merry and Pippin, Middle-earth, Mirkwood, North-South Road, Peter Jackson, Pipeweed, Roads, Roman Roads, Rome, Saruman, Sauron, South Farthing, Swanfleet, The Lord of the Rings, The Shire, Theoden, Tolkien, Trade, Transport

Dear Readers,

In a recent posting, we opened with the image of Merry and Pippin happily feasting among the ruins of Isengard as Gandalf, Theoden, and company ride up to meet them.

“…suddenly they were aware of two small figures lying…at their ease…there were bottles and bowls and platters laid beside them, as if they had just eaten well, and now rested from their labour. One seemed asleep; the other, with crossed legs and arms behind his head, and little rings of thin blue smoke.” L543

We, as the readers, may be just as taken aback as the company; we’re joining the Hobbits again for the first time since Isengard’s demise, and it’s natural to ask: where, in the midst of all of this ruin, did they find this stuff? Gimli doesn’t hesitate to ask for us.

“’Where did you come by the weed, you villains?’” L544

Of course, he’s talking about pipeweed, something common, yet treasured, in the Shire. It is not native to a place like Isengard, so far south, but here we have the Hobbits smoking it and even enjoying a surplus. Legolas is just as impressed,

“’You speak for me, Gimli,’ laughed Legolas, ‘though I would sooner learn how they came by the wine.’” L544

Pippin only teases, answering that

“’Here you find us sitting on a field of victory…and you wonder how we came by a few well earned comforts.” L544

And so we’re left with this mystery of supplies, but we can be sure that, in Tolkien’s mind, there was an answer. He was, after all, diligent about even minute details concerning Middle-earth, and was also the same man who once said that

“I am not incapable or unaware of economic thought; and I think as far as the ‘mortals’ go, Men, Hobbits, and Dwarfs, that the situations are so devised that economic likelihood is there and can be worked out…” LT, L.154 P.196.

In this quotation, Tolkien can almost be echoing, in an ironic way, the argument of Marxist critics that economic systems, even those appearing in literature, hide their true nature. Tolkien seems to be telling us that he was well aware of trade systems, and, we would suggest, this would include a basic foundation: transport. And, using what we are given in the texts, we can see that there were two main methods. One is by water–as in the flourishing wine trade between Mirkwood and Laketown.

This pair of places is naturally connected by river and lake. Such is not the case with the South Farthing and Isengard, of course. Instead, water bodies like the Swanfleet lie between them. And yet there is that pipeweed. The Hobbits are smoking it and, in the extended edition of the film version, Peter Jackson even shows us two large barrels of pipeweed labeled “South Farthing”.

This brings us to our second method of transport, by road.

Like all educated men of his time, Tolkien had been raised on the world of the Greeks and Romans and, among the longest-lasting monuments of the Roman world was the extensive system of roads, some of which are still in existence in our own time and are even (asphalted over) the basis of certain modern English roads. In Middle-earth, there appear to be a number of such ancient roads, such as the Cross-Roads:

The Great East road:

The North-South road:

Other possibilities would include once-active, but now abandoned routes, like the Greenway, running north from Bree and the Stone Road which the Woodwoses know and point out to Theoden.

As you can see, we can easily imagine Tolkien thinking out the economics of Middle Earth through a road network similar to that of the Roman Empire, with its own intricate road systems

Along these roads came much of Rome’s wealth and the case would have been the same for Middle-earth, so here’s a clue to Saruman’s pipeweed trade with the Shire. Looking at a map, we see that The Great East Road, which, traveling east from the Shire, would lead to Bree, and to the Cross-Roads, reaching The North-South Road.

Such trade would seem natural, not only to the Romans, but to us. In the wreckage of Isengard, however, for all that Merry and Pippin are so casual about it, there is another implication: Saruman, who wants to be another Sauron, must know much more about the Shire than anyone, even Gandalf has understood, and, thinking of the “Scouring of the Shire”, that could easily bode ill for the future of that place which the Hobbits think so safe and removed…

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC,

The Sadness of a Second Reading

27 Wednesday May 2015

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

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Tags

Aragorn, Arwen, Canterbury Tales, Chaucer, Ents, Fangorn, Frodo, Gandalf, Herblore, Hildebrandt, Hobbits, Isengard, Meduseld, Merry and Pippin, Ring, Saruman, Sauron, Smaug, The Lord of the Rings, Theoden, Tolkien, Villains

Welcome again, dear readers!

We’re sure to return to villains—Orcs first, we think—but, as we reread material for the last posting, we came across a passage which so struck us that we had to sit down and write a posting about it…

Isengard is ruined. So much of what Tolkien described in such vivid detail in “The Road to Isengard”, both before Saruman decided to be a rival to Sauron and after, has been destroyed—here is the Hildebrandts’ version of it in Saruman’s early days

And here it is when Saruman’s ambition overcame his sense of mission as one of the Istari and he could tell Gandalf that their job was to strive for “Knowledge, Rule, Order”—

But Fangorn and his Ents have changed all of that—

So that, when Gandalf and his company appear, they see

“…And all about, stone, cracked and splintered into countless jagged shards, was scattered far and wide, or piled in ruinous heaps.”

On top of one of those heaps

“…two small figures…at their ease. One seemed asleep; the other, with crossed legs and arms behind his head leaned back against a broken rock and sent from his mouth long wisps and little rings of thin blue smoke.”

Not tiny Smaugs sunning, it is, of course Merry and Pippin making themselves comfortable in the wreckage of Saruman’s palace/fortress/factory. That comfort is an affront to Gimli—or, at least, he pretends that it is—but it is a source of amusement to the rest of the company and the Hobbits themselves are a source of amazement to Theoden:

“The days are fated to be filled with marvels. Already I have seen many since I left my house; and now here before my eyes stand yet another of the folk of legend. Are these not the Halflings, that some among us call the Holbytlan?”

But Theoden’s wonder is greater: not only are these figures from distant legend, but, “I had not heard that they spouted smoke from their mouths.”

This sets Merry off on a lecture, which prefigures, of course, his later treatise, Herblore of the Shire, but which Gandalf stops in its tracks, saying,

“You do not know your danger, Theoden…These hobbits will sit on the edge of ruin [ironic here, as they are, in fact, doing so—it’s Saruman’s ruin] and discuss the pleasures of the table, or the small doings of their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers and remoter cousins to the ninth degree, if you encourage them with undue patience.”

Theoden, however, shows that, in the future, at least, he will encourage them with that patience—

“Farewell, my hobbits! May we meet again in my house! There you shall sit beside me and tell me all that your hearts desire: the deeds of your grandsires, as far as you can reckon them; and we will speak also of Tobold the Old and his herb-lore. Farewell!”

Merry and Pippin, usually less-than-respectful, are quite charmed by this and behave better than usual:

“The Hobbits bowed low. ‘So that is the King of Rohan!’ said Pippin in an undertone. ‘A fine old fellow. Very polite.’”

If this is your first reading, there is something to look forward to—or, if you are Gandalf, to dread. For the more experienced, we already see the splitting up of Merry and Pippin, Pippin’s whirlwind ride with Gandalf to Minas Tirith, and Merry’s equally grueling ride to the Pelennor and his part in the last heroic moments of Theoden’s life and his final words on the subject of that earlier promise:

“Live now in blessedness; and when you sit in peace with your pipe, think of me! For never now shall I sit with you in Meduseld, as I promised, or listen to your herb-lore.”

And this brings us to the point: if you know what’s going to happen—in detail—why read this again?

The answers are many and here are only a few from an entire spectrum: it’s such a rich story that you can easily read it again and find something new every time; you’d like to escape to Middle Earth because, even troubled as it is with Sauron, it makes more sense than Here and Now; you don’t read it all, but there are scenes and/or characters you like to revisit; it has become a kind of happy yearly ritual, as Chaucer fans reread The Canterbury Tales every spring. For us, among all of the other reasons (and we would say that probably every one makes sense, in its way) there is another reason and it has to do with that knowing.

Wherever the sun shines directly on an object, a person, there is a shadow. Shadows can be knife-edge precise or vague, still or moving, smaller than that which casts them or greater. Knowing what’s to come in Tolkien is like seeing each event with its outcome, its shadow, all at the same moment and, as so often in The Lord of the Rings, what’s to come is compromised—if there’s happiness, it’s happiness of the moment: Sauron is defeated, but the Elves fade; Arwen marries Aragorn at last, but, he being mortal, even if a long-lived one, she is left a widow for many years; Frodo survives the Ring quest, but somehow is never healed. Events cast shadows in our current life, but we only see the shadows in retrospect in this world. In Middle Earth, on second and subsequent readings, events cast their shadows before as well as after themselves. And there is a pleasure in this. One might say, “Hmph. Adolescent thinking. Really self-pity in literary disguise.” We would disagree.

One of the most powerful enhancers of emotion is contrast, beginning with the very idea of human mortality. As so many religions and philosophical systems advise: live now, in the moment, because there are just so many moments and then…?

Thus, to read Theoden’s affectionate promise to the hobbits and to know, at that same moment, that it will be broken, and very dramatically, with Theoden’s death, is, potentially, to see that shadow, which is the contrast between what is said now and what will happen then.

So, dear readers, what do you think? We imagine that you’re like us, with favorite books about which it doesn’t matter in the least that you know them practically by heart—surprise is only the first sensation—like opening a wonderful present which, once opened, you’ll use and love again and again, always grateful to the giver.

MTCIDC

doubtfulsea

~ adventure fantasy

Tag Archives: Merry and Pippin

Who Goes There? (4)

Class, Order, Family… (Part 1)

Smoke (No Mirrors)

Shire Portrait (5a): Hostile Takeover

Trading with the Enemy

The Sadness of a Second Reading