Who Goes There? (4)

05 Wednesday Dec 2018

Posted by lebedusya1 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

Psalters and Psalms

11 Wednesday Apr 2018

Posted by lebedusya1 in Artists and Illustrators, Heroes, Literary History, Military History

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Easter Sepulchre, Irnham, King David, King John, Lincolnshire, Luttrell Psalter, Magna Carta, Medieval, Middle-earth, Nottingham, psalter, Robin Hood, Scriptorium, Sir Geoffrey Psalter, St Andrew's, Tolkien, Utrecht Psalter, Westminster Psalter

As always, dear readers, welcome.

In past posts, we’ve occasionally used images from a very famous medieval manuscript, the Luttrell Psalter. One fairly recent one, on carts and wagons in Middle-earth, included this, for example—

A medieval psalter is a collection of psalms—religious poems which were traditionally attributed to King David of Israel–

(This is, in fact, from the Westminster Psalter, c.1200)

plus other Christian religious material. It was clearly a place which offered lots of opportunities for illustrations because a number of them have them, some of them very generous in just how many, like the Utrecht Psalter, from the 9^th century, which has an illustration for every psalm.

The Utrecht Psalter has been digitized—here’s a LINK so that you can see all of this wonderful book.

Such books were created in the medieval equivalent of copy-centers, called scriptoria (singular = scriptorium). For many years, it was said that this was a specific room in a monastery in which teams of monks worked on writing/copying books. More recently, this view has been challenged (see this LINK for discussion on the subject), but certainly monks made and copied books, as this manuscript illustration of the 12^th-century English priest and Latin poet, Lawrence of Durham reminds us. In fact, this illustration may be more accurate than other medieval illustrations as it shows Lawrence working on a single sheet, which was the standard method. All sheets were then gathered up and bound into a book—a very different scene from this Spanish medieval illustration, in which at least the monk on the right seems to be writing in a book (the figure on the left looks to be a lay person and may be painting—hence, illustrating).

Illustrated books—especially heavily-illustrated books like the Luttrell Psalter—would have been very costly, and so only the wealthy would have commissioned such a work. We know the name of the person who commissioned this book because that name and a suggestion of a portrait are at Psalm 109 of the manuscript.

As it says just above the illustration: “DNS Galfridus Louterrell me fieri fecit” = The Lord Geoffrey Luttrell had me made”.

Sir Geoffrey (1276-1345) was descended from an earlier Sir Geoffrey, who had been a supporter of King John (1166-1216), the dodgy character of the Magna Carta and from the Robin Hood story.

Here’s King John forced to sign the Magna Carta, designed to lessen the king’s power and increase that of the nobles—

which, of course, he didn’t do, since the sign of royal approval in 1215 wasn’t a name, but an official seal.

Sir Geoffrey’s descendant, also Geoffrey, held land, among other places, around Irnham (probably from the Old English for “Georna’s settlement”, Geornaham) in Lincolnshire (yes, when it comes to England, we can never quite escape the Shire, can we?). Here’s where Lincolnshire is on a map of England. (It’s interesting that Nottingham, notorious for its sheriff and Prince John in the Robin Hood stories, is only about 40 miles west of Irnham.)

This Sir Geoffrey’s manor house has long disappeared, but we imagine that the area called a manor might have looked something like this.

Its church, St Andrew’s, survives, however, and, though rebuilt in 1858, dates from the 12^th century.

Inside, is a monumental brass for Sir Geoffrey’s son, Andrew, (died 1390).

There is no tomb for his father, Sir Geoffrey, but there is what’s called an “Easter Sepulchre”, which was commissioned by him and which may have been based upon such a tomb.

This piece of architecture was used in an elaborate ceremony connected with the celebration of the Christian Easter in the Middle Ages.

Beyond the church, our monument to Sir Geoffrey is the psalter, over whose date there has been lots of scholarly discussion, so we’ll go with the general area of dating, c.1320-1340. The book is about 14.5 inches by 10.5 (368.3mm x 266.7mm) and contains 309 pages made of vellum (fine calfskin), with illustrations on more than 200 pages. The text was written by a single scribe, it is thought, but at least five artists were involved in the illustrating—and what illustrations!

In fact, it seems a crazy variety, and, unlike the Utrecht Psalter, the illustrations don’t match the psalms. Instead, the scenes depicted vary from the high religious—like the three Wise Men/Kings/Magi following the star to Bethlehem, from the New Testament

to all sorts of grotesque creatures

to what we love most, the agricultural and domestic scenes.

These can show a whole town

or mills, both water and wind-driven

or how the grain is raised and processed to get to the mills

or even controlling the pests who would eat the grain. (Is this a screencap from the first cat video?)

Here’s a LINK to a selection of images from the British Library, but there are more if you google “Luttrell Psalter”. See what your favorites might be.

And thanks, as always, for reading!

MTCIDC

Let’s add here a LINK to a short film based upon the psalter, which we think you might enjoy.

I Love a Parade

28 Wednesday Feb 2018

Posted by lebedusya1 in Artists and Illustrators, J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, Terra Australis

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Agincourt, Bayeux Tapestry, Dol Amroth, Forlong, Great Gate, Harold Godwinson, hauberk, Hirluin the Fair, Howard Pyle, huscarls, Imrahil, Langstrand, Lincoln Cathedral, livery, Lossarnach, Medieval, Minas Tirith, Morthond, N.C. Wyeth, Palermo, parade, Ringlo Vale, Robin Hood, spangenhelm, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Tower of Gondor

“I love a parade, the tramping of feet,

I love every beat I hear of a drum.”

–Koehler/Arlen Rhythmania (1931)

Welcome, dear readers, as always. In the past, we’ve spent a posting or two discussing military aspects of The Lord of the Rings, from the look of the Rohirrim to the attack on Minas Tirith. In this posting, we would like to go back one step from that attack to consider what is a rather melancholy moment in the lead up to that assault.

Pippin and his newfound friend, Bergil, have come down to the Great Gate of Minas Tirith.

Here’s the gate from the films.

This immediately reminded us of places like the west door of Lincoln Cathedral.

Or the main door of the cathedral of Palermo.

Because he is now a member of the Guard of the Tower of Gondor, Pippin is allowed to pass through the Gate—and to take Bergil with him out to see and hear the following:

“Beyond the Gate there was a crowd of men along the verge of the road and of the great paved space into which all the ways to Minas Tirith ran. All eyes were turned southwards, and soon a murmur rose: ‘There is dust away there! They are coming!’

Pippin and Bergil edged their way forward to the front of the crowd and waited. Horns sounded at some distance, and the noise of cheering rolled towards them like a gathering wind. There was a loud trumpet-blast, and all about them people were shouting.” (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 1, “Minas Tirith”)

What happens then is a kind of parade.

When we see the defenders of Minas Tirith in the films, they are all uniformly clad.

In our medieval world, this was highly unlikely, the best being that soldiers and servants might wear the colors/crest of the lord they served. This was called “livery”. Uniformity in clothing, weapons, and armor would be some time in the future.

What is coming up the road from the south are reinforcements, marching in a long column of units, and those units differ greatly in look. First are the men of Lossarnach, led by their lord, Forlong:

“Leading the line there came walking a big thick-limbed horse, and on it sat a man of wide shoulders and huge girth, but old and grey-bearded, yet mail-clad and black-helmed and bearing a long heavy spear. Behind him marched proudly a dusty line of men, well-armed and bearing great battle-axes; grim-faced they were, and shorter and somewhat swarthier than any men Pippin had yet seen in Gondor.”

To us, those axes make the men of Lossarnach sound like the huscarls, the bodyguard of an Anglo-Saxon king, like Harold Godwinson, whom we see depicted on the “Bayeux Tapestry”.

Their leader, Forlong, might be similar in appearance, wearing a type of helmet called a spangenhelm,

and protected by an early form of mail shirt called a hauberk.

After these, we see more units, but with little description—the men of Ringlo Vale “striding on foot”, so infantry of some sort, five hundred bowmen from Morthond, from the Langstrand, “a long line of men of many sorts, hunters and herdsmen and men of little villages, scantily equipped save for the household of Golasgil their lord”. After them, “a few grim hillmen without a captain”, and “fisher-folk of the Ethir”, all of which we imagine in their workaday clothes of hunters and shepherds and farmers and sailors, as depicted in medieval English and French manuscripts.

Next comes a unit which is perhaps wearing livery: “Hirluin the Fair of the Green Hills from Pinnath Gelin with three hundreds of gallant green-clad men.” We aren’t told how they’re armed, but that they may be in livery suggests that they may be better armed than some of the earlier contingents. (In fact, “gallant green-clad men” makes us think of Robin Hood—perhaps more archers?)

And, finally, folk we’ve discussed before:

“And last and proudest, Imrahil, Prince of Dol Amroth, kinsman of the Lord, with gilded banners bearing his token of the Ship and the Silver Swan, and a company of knights in full harness riding grey horses; and behind them seven hundreds of men at arms, tall as lords, grey-eyed, dark-haired, singing as they came.”

“knight in full harness”, as we talked about in an earlier post, probably meant, to JRRT, something from Howard Pyle or NC Wyeth, like this—

As for those “men at arms”, if they appear to be “tall as lords”, we assume that they’re on foot, which puzzles us a bit. “Men at arms” usually means “armored soldiers on horseback” in our world—perhaps with less armor than knights, but still cavalry (unless dismounted, to fight on foot, as the French did at Agincourt in 1415, for example). We see them, then, as looking like those dismounted cavalry, like these—

However they are armed and clothed, however, they are thought to be too few by those watching and, considering what Mordor eventually sends against them, they would not have been enough, if the brave Rohirrim and Aragorn’s reinforcement from the south hadn’t arrived in time. What would have happened if they hadn’t? A subject for very grim fan-fiction!

Thanks, as ever, for reading!

MTCIDC

A Longer Stretch

19 Wednesday Jul 2017

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Achilles, Angelica Kauffmann, Athena, Bard the Bowman, Circe, cyclops, Dora Wheeler, English Longbowmen, Errol Flynn, Greek, Henry VIII, Heracles, His Dark Materials, John William Waterhouse, Laertes, Lord Asriel, N.C. Wyeth, Odysseus, Paris, Patroclus, Penelope, Philip Pullman, Philoctetes, Portsmouth, Priam, Robin Hood, Sparta, Stelmaria, Telemachus, The Amber Spyglass, The Golden Compass, The Illiad, The Mary Rose, The Odyssey, The Subtle Knife, Tolkien, Troy

Welcome, dear readers, as always.
In our last posting, our central focus was upon Bard the Bowman and what he might have looked like.

As we do so often, we tried to use something from the history of our world to help us to flesh out JRRT’s description. In this case, we looked at Henry VIII’s battleship (a carrack, in the vocabulary of the period), the Mary Rose, which sank during a naval battle with the French on 19 July, 1545.

The ship was raised in 1982 (you can see the large surviving section of the hull in the Mary Rose museum, in Portsmouth, England).

It was full of artifacts—and of crew.
Because she sank so suddenly—and in the middle of a battle—almost none of the crew of 400 and more escaped. One of those trapped was this man.

His was among the roughly 90 skeletons well-enough preserved to allow for forensic exploration. That exploration, and the subsequent brilliant reconstruction, brought back to life a man about 6 feet (182cm) tall, with a powerfully-developed upper body. His build, certain characteristic marks of stress, and the fact that over 130 longbows and several thousand arrows were found in the wreck, led the archaeologists to see this man as an archer. We, in turn, then used him as the body-model for Bard.
But “bowman/archer” to us, who are crazy for adventure, immediately brought back Robin Hood, first in what we believe to be his best 20th-century incarnation, Erroll Flynn,

in the classic 1938 film.

To which we would add N.C. Wyeth’s illustrations

for the 1917 Robin Hood.

Thinking about bowmen in adventure stories then took us back to the first big adventure story in western literature, the Odyssey, and its hero, Odysseus, who has two associations with bows, but who, oddly enough, is never depicted as an archer, but rather as a trickster, who uses his brains to escape everything from a one-eyed giant

to an enchantress, Circe, who has already turned a good number of his crewmen into ham-on-the-hoof.

One of our favorite illustrations of Circe is by John William Waterhouse, which he worked on from 1911 to 1915.

The leopards in this version of the painting (in another, apparently, they are bears) reminded us of the snow leopard which is Lord Asriel’s demon, Stelmaria,

in Philip Pullman’s trilogy

His Dark Materials, the three books being The Golden Compass (in the British edition, Northern Lights), 1995, The Subtle Knife, 1997, and The Amber Spyglass, 2000.

These are remarkable books—full of vivid characters and places-other-than-here-and-now, and we have read and reread them since they first appeared. If you haven’t read them, we would add only one proviso: there is a strong anti-religious theme throughout and some devout readers might have difficulty with Pullman’s views. If you are willing to imagine that this is a critique of beliefs in other worlds than our own, however, we would unqualifiably recommend them. (Our favorite characters are Lyra, the fierce and fearless heroine, and Iorek Byrnison, a panserbjorn, or armored bear. There is a film version, released in 2007, based upon The Golden Compass, which we enjoy, although it has simplified and changed certain elements in the original story.)

But back to Odysseus the archer…
In the story of Troy, the famous archer is Paris, the son of Priam, the king of Troy, who uses his skill to kill Achilles, the most famous and powerful hero on the Greek side (in this pot illustration, almost by accident!).

Paris, according to some accounts (there are a number of them and they can differ in all sorts of details), is then killed by Philoctetes, who has inherited Heracles’ bow. A prophecy lies behind that bow: it seems that it is a necessary element in the conquest of Troy.

When Heracles is suffering from a poisoned shirt, and builds a pyre to cremate himself

it is Philoctetes who is willing to light it and, in return, he receives Heracles’ bow. On the way to Troy, however, Philoctetes is bitten by a snake and left behind on an island.

In some versions of the story (including Sophocles’ play), Odysseus acts as the main agent for, initially, bringing the bow to Troy, and then for bringing Philoctetes himself. So far, that is Odysseus’ only connection with archery. He is depicted as clever—being part of a successful scouting expedition in which a Trojan ally is killed and possibly the creator of the wooden horse—but, otherwise, his main accomplishments lie in beating up a trouble-maker at a public meeting and, at the funeral games which Achilles holds at the end of the Iliad for his companion, Patroclus, winning a footrace.
This footrace, however, leads us from Troy westward, as well as backward in time.
For all that there are these two huge things called the Iliad and the Odyssey, they are not all of the Troy story. They themselves are just collections of smaller stories stitched onto a plot outline. In the case of the Iliad, that outline is very basic: a. Achilles leaves war; b. Greeks substitute other warriors for Achilles; c. Achilles returns to war. The Odyssey is actually even more basic: man tries to find a way to sail home from Troy. Along with these, there are fragments from other parts of the tradition and lots of separate tales which often act as back-stories, probably invented when the popularity of the Troy tale in general caused a demand for singers to supply more material—the ancient equivalent of fan fiction!
One of these back-stories explains why Odysseus wins at the funeral games: he must already have been a famous foot racer, as he wins his bride, Penelope, from her father, the king of Sparta, in a footrace.

Not long after that, having gotten Penelope pregnant, he is off to Troy and won’t return for twenty years.
In the meantime, Penelope gives birth to a son, Telemachus, who grows up fatherless and in a household increasingly besieged by young men who claim that Odysseus must be dead and demand that Penelope must marry again.

To delay being forced to accept one of these obnoxious toads, Penelope (our favorite in the story, along with Athena) claims that, before she can choose, she has to finish a shroud she is weaving for Odysseus’ father, Laertes. (That’s Telemachus, on the left.)

In fact, although she weaves by day, she un-weaves by night and continues to do so for three years before one of her maids tells the suitors what’s going on.

(This is a remarkable piece of work designed by the painter/designer, Dora Wheeler, 1856-1940.

It is not a painting, but, in fact, an embroidery—silk stitched into silk cloth—and a remarkable artifact—and, unfortunately, the only surviving one of its kind.)
In year 19, Odysseus comes home—disguised by Athena as an old beggar, to keep him safe until he can plot his revenge and gather allies. In the meantime, Penelope (who, to us, is as quick-witted as her wandering husband) announces an archery contest, the winner to—win her. Besides the trickiness of the target (having something to do with shooting through axes—scholars have argued over just how that works for years), there is the bow: it has such a pull that only her husband, she says, has ever been able to string it.

(This illustration is by another wonderful woman artist, Angelica Kauffmann, 1741-1807. Here’s a self-portrait.)

Needless to say, the suitors are unable to do it, but that dirty old beggarman can—and does—and then, with a little help from Telemachus and a servant or two—not to mention Athena—proceeds to slaughter the suitors and clean house.

So, remembering the Mary Rose archer (as well as Bard), can we now imagine Odysseus’ build? And, for that matter, Robin Hood’s?

Thanks, as ever, for reading!
MTCIDC
CD

Into Those Woods

17 Wednesday May 2017

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

A Midsummer Night's Dream, Athens, Burnham Wood, Caspar David Friedrich, Circe, Der Blonde Eckbert, Edmund Burke, Fangorn, forest, Gespensterwald, Grimm Brothers, Haensel and Gretel, Horace Walpole, Into the Woods, Ithilien, Jacob Grimm, John Bauer, John Walter Bratton, Lorien, Ludwig Tieck, Macbeth, Mirkwood, Misty Mountains, N.C. Wyeth, Nienhagen, Odysseus, Old Forest, Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas, Robert Frost, Robin Hood, Romanticism, Sir Walter Scott, Snow White, Steven Sondheim, Straparola, Teddy Bears' Picnic, The Castle of Otranto, The Fire Swamp, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Princess Bride, Tolkien, Treebeard, Waldeinsamkeit, Waverly, Wilhelm Grimm, Woses

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”,

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,

or Snow White,

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

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),

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).

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

or beautiful

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).

This brings us to this Friedrich painting:

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.

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),

“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,

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

or the traveling Burnham Wood in Macbeth

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

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

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC,

Bordering (.2: Blackmail, Battle, and Song)

05 Wednesday Apr 2017

Posted by lebedusya1 in Literary History, Maps, Military History

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

A Gest of Robyn Hode, Angus McBride, Ballads, Border Reivers, Carlisle Castle, Child Ballad, Connacht, Cuchulain, Cuchulain of Muirthemne, England, Ewan McColl, Faroe Islands, Francis James Child, Irish Iron Age, Johnnie of Breadisley, Kinmont Willie Armstrong, Loeg, Marches, Medb, Peggy Seeger, ring dance, Robin Hood, Scotland, Scott of Buccleuch, Sheriff of Nottingham, Sherwood Forest, skiparin, Tain Bo Cualnge, The Cattle Raid of Cooley, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, The Tale of MacDatho's Pig, Ulster, West March of the Shire

Welcome, dear readers, as ever.

This is a continuation of our last, on borders. In that post, we began with the West March of the Shire, then talked about the idea of marches—militarized border areas—and wardens—overseers of such. Our focus was upon the border between Scotland and England and, in particular, in the very troubled 16^th century.

The danger, in this world, was from reivers,

a kind of border bandit, but a more complex figure than, for example, Robin Hood.

In the Marches of Scotland and England, unlike Robin vs the Sheriff of Nottingham in Sherwood, who the heroes and villains were wasn’t always clear. England and Scotland were often at war throughout the later Middle Ages and into the Renaissance and, when not openly at war, continued to skirmish with each other. War and skirmishing brought financial problems to both sides—raids could ruin a farm or even a village on either side of the border– and there was also a certain level of vendetta—families always being bound to avenge a murdered kinsman—or rescue a living one, as we see here Scott of Buccleuch (said something like “buk-LOO”) rescuing Kinmont Willie Armstrong from imprisonment by the English in Carlisle Castle in 1596. Willie had been taken prisoner illegally during a “truce day” and Scott was the official representing Scotland on that day—so, as we said, the differences between heroes and villains aren’t always so obvious in this twilight world.

One thing reivers have in common with R. Hood, however, is that both are the subject of legends and songs. One of the first collections of those songs is A Gest of Robyn Hode, printed between 1492 and 1534.

A common form of song is the ballad. For those not familiar with the form, a ballad is a narrative poem commonly in couplets (2 rhymed lines—sometimes with a refrain—a line repeated throughout the poem—after each couplet) or in quatrains (4 lines, often rhyming on the 2^nd and 4^th line).

From the word, which appears to be related to the Romance language ballare/bailar/ballet, “to dance/a dance”, we might imagine that, originally, it was a song to which one danced and there are medieval illustrations of such—

This appears to be a ring dance and, in fact, resembles the ring dance and song of the Faroe Islands, where there is a central figure, a skiparin, (“captain”—just like English “skipper”) who sings a verse and all of the dancers join in on the chorus of kvaedi, or ballads.

The circle on such a dance/song can expand to the point where it looks more like a snake dance—as this link from a recent performance shows.

An easy example of the quatrain form of ballad might be the opening of “Johnnie of Breadisley” (Child 114):

Johnny rose on a May mornin’,

Called for water to wash his hands,

Saying loose to me my twa grey dogs

Wha’ lie bound in iron chains.

We did this from memory, it being one of the first ballads we memorized years ago. If it’s compared with the standard ballad text—that’s from Francis J. Child’s The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-1898), we’re sure you’ll find that, without even knowing it, we’ve made little changes, turning it into a variant—which always happens when songs are learned by ear. (You can also see that rhyme can be very loose—sometimes only assonance, but it’s clearly less important than telling the story.) Our version came from one sung by the famous Scots folk singer/composer, Ewan McColl, shown here with Peggy Seeger, his equally-famous wife and fellow artist.

You can hear his version on YouTube here.

Child

image9child

was a professor at Harvard who spent most of his adult scholarly life searching out traditional ballads and a version of his massive collection—305 ballads, with many variants—is available (based upon early editions) at the wonderful Sacred Texts. (If you are interested in adventure/fantasy/mythology and you don’t know this site, spend some time browsing it—you will be impressed.)

The border between Scotland and England wasn’t the only place in the UK which spawned heroic stories, however. During the Irish Iron Age, two of Ireland’s five provinces, Ulster and Connacht, were imagined to be constantly at war and raids across the border formed the basis or background of all kinds of tales, the most elaborate being the Tain Bo Cualnge (Tahn Boh KOO-al-nyeh)—“The Cattle Raid of Cooley”. In this story—a kind of prose epic, with occasional short verse inserts—Medb (Mi-YEDTH), the queen of Connacht, has decided that she must have a famous bull, owned by someone in Ulster. At the time, the warriors of Ulster are under a geis (gesh), a kind of magical prohibition, which keeps them from defending the province, which leaves only one—their best, in fact—the 17-year-old Cuchulain (Koo-HOO-lun), with his charioteer, Loeg (loig) to delay the Connachtmen. Here’s a rather over-the-top illustration by one of our favorite military artists, Angus McBride, of the pair rocketing towards the enemy.

If you would like to read a translation of the Tain, here’s a link to a really useful website, which juxtaposes the Old Irish and English (and includes, as a bonus, another great story—and the first one we read in Old Irish—the Tale of MacDatho’s Pig). If you would like to read more Old Irish Stories about Ulster and Connacht, there is Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902). It’s available at Sacred Texts. (And a note here: Old Irish literature has a very plain-spoken way of talking about body functions, among other things, and early translators, like Lady Gregory, quietly removed or softened such things. On the whole, however, the basic stories are there—and they’re free!)

Among those stories, we find a very different idea about otherworlds—not the fairly-strict western classical one that there is a clearly-marked border between this world and the next, but something looser and therefore spookier and we want to talk about this in our next (and mention a favorite YA author and his treatment of the subject, as well).

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

Killer Monks (and Friars)

11 Wednesday Jan 2017

Posted by lebedusya1 in Artists and Illustrators, Fairy Tales and Myths, Heroes, Literary History, Narrative Methods

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Baze Malbus, Bo staff, Canterbury Tales, Chirrut Imwe, Cluny, Dauntless, Friar Tuck, Friars, Geoffery Chaucer, Guardians of the Whills, Howard Pyle, Jahng Bong, Jedha, Little John, monastery, monks, N.C. Wyeth, Nijedha, quarter-staff, religion, Robin Hood, Rogue One, Scarif, Star Destroyer, Star Wars, stormtroopers, Tae Kwon-Do, Temple of the Kyber, the Force, The Force Awakens, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown's Schooldays

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

Today, for the first time in some time, we are not visiting Middle-earth. Instead, we are visiting our earth, as well as another planet or two.

Recently, we saw Rogue One,

which, in our opinion, was a bit more coherent than The Force Awakens, but which still—again, our opinion—like Force, had too many players and too many planets. For us, this has always been the danger of fantasy fiction, when plot overwhelms character, as—and aren’t we opinionated in this posting?—in the Harry Potter series.

The first volume was a pleasant twist on the traditional school story, a genre which dates at least as far back as Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857).

by Thomas Hughes.

We thought that that first book had a number of potentially interesting characters—Hermione, the Weasley twins, Snape, Hagrid—but, as the books piled up and the plot became more complex and more and more characters appeared, there was less and less, it seemed to us, of those interesting original figures. And many of the characters who were there, seemed much sketchier.

In the case of Rogue One, we thought that two of the most interesting were the two Guardians of the Whills, rather like monks

Chirrut Imwe

and Baze Malbus.

These two had been attached to the Temple of the Kyber in the city of Nijedha on the desert moon Jedha.

The Empire has arrived, however (hard to miss the Star Destroyer Dauntless in this picture, isn’t it?), to seize all of the kyber crystals on Jedha (used originally to power Jedi light sabers) to fuel the superlaser on the new terror weapon, the Death Star.

In the process, the two monks have been driven from the Temple, which has been pillaged, and now appear to be living on the street. Chirrut believes in the Force, while Baze seems to believe in his very large gun. Chirrut, who is blind, first shows his skills in an amazing scene where, surrounded by stormtroopers, he makes short work of them with his fighting staff, which resembles the Jahng Bong or Bo Staff used in Tae Kwon-do, among other Eastern weapons and martial arts.

As everyone who has seen Rogue One (and, by now, many who haven’t, we’d guess) knows, the two don’t survive the attack on Scarif

and this made us wish we had seen more of them, not only in this movie (perhaps them ejected from the Temple—which wouldn’t have been easy!), but in another Star Wars story, in which they were the main characters. So many questions: how did they meet? Why does the one believe so fervently in the Force and the other does not? What did they do before Nijedha? Were they always monks? If not, how did they become so? How and where did they train?

Seeing fighting with that Bo Staff immediately prompted us to think of much earlier figures with a similar weapon: Robin Hood, who fights, on a log over a stream, his soon-to-be-lieutenant, Little John, with quarter-staves.

This is an illustration by N.C. Wyeth from the 1917 Robin Hood,

but there is an earlier edition of the stories of Robin Hood by Wyeth’s teacher, Howard Pyle, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (1883).

And here is a version of the aftermath of that scene on the log with Little John.

Robin has another encounter with water and a fighter when he meets a friar beside a stream. A monk is a man who enters a religious community called a monastery and spends his life working (and praying) within its walls.

Western medieval Europe was full of monasteries, like this, at Cluny, in France.

Friars, on the other hand, traveled within their appointed district, called a “province”. Here is a friar from an early (beginning of the 15^th century) illustrated version of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

Because friars were much less strictly governed, they gained a folk reputation as tricksters and high-livers, and the trickster shows through when Robin Hood forces a friar (he will become Robin’s friend, Friar Tuck) to carry him across a stream—and the friar dumps him before proving that he’s also an expert swordsman. Here’s an illustration from the 1883 Pyle version.

As we thought about it, by combining Little John’s skill with the quarterstaff with Friar Tuck’s wits and courage and holy orders, we could see a possible inspiration for Chirrut Imwe.

If you know the old Robin Hood stories and you’re seen Rogue One, what do you think?

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

Bolts and Arrows

06 Wednesday Apr 2016

Posted by lebedusya1 in Films and Music, Heroes, J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, Narrative Methods, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Agincourt, anti-aircraft gun, ballista, Bard the Bowman, Battle of Crecy, Battle of Poitiers, Border Reivers, Boromir, crossbow, Crossbow Bunnies, English Longbowmen, harpoon, Hundred Years War, John Singer Sargent, latch, Maximus, N.C. Wyeth, Peter Jackson, Richard the Lionheart, Robert Louis Stevenson, Robin Hood, Roman d'Alexandre, Siege of Chalus, Smaug, Tangled, The Black Arrow, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Mary Rose, Tolkien, Towton

In our review of the third Hobbit film, we questioned the use by Bard of something a little larger in the way of a missile than Tolkien had intended:

“Then Bard drew his bow-string to his ear. The dragon was circling back, flying low, and as he came the moon rose above the eastern shore and silvered his great wings.

‘Arrow!’ said the bowman. ‘Black Arrow! I have saved you to the last. You have never failed me and always I have recovered you. I had you from my father and he from of old. If ever you come from the forges of the true king under the Mountain, go now and speed well!’ ” (TH 307).

As Bard was firing this himself, we always envisioned him as an English longbowman.

And this led us to think a bit about Tolkien’s possible sources, not only for Bard and his bow, but for that arrow–the real one, not the monster dart used in the film.

From any children’s history of England, Tolkien would have learned that longbowmen like the one shown above destroyed three brave French armies in the Hundred Years War, at Crecy (1346), Poitiers (1356), and Agincourt (1415).

In the film, however, although Bard was depicted as an archer,

his weapon of choice looks like this.

This reminds us of either a Roman ballista

or an anti-aircraft gun

or, most especially, a harpoon gun.

Especially when you look at this Bard’s arrow.

Although we currently have no evidence for Tolkien’s sources, we can imagine that they might have included, among others, Robin Hood,

the actions of actual Medieval archers like those at Agincourt or Towton (1461),

and a book, perhaps from boyhood, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Black Arrow (1883/1888). Stevenson (here in an 1880s portrait by John Singer Sargent)

had originally published the story serially in a children’s magazine in 1883

before its publication in book form in 1888.

The classic illustrations are by one of our all-time favorite illustrators, NC Wyeth, from 1917.

We can’t resist showing you a few:

Although the bow is the weapon of choice of those who use the black arrow of the title (it’s employed for revenge), the hero in fact, has a crossbow.

The longbow requires years of training and great upper-body strength, leaving its mark on bowmen, as can be seen from this skeleton (and its reconstruction) brought up from the English warship, the Mary Rose,

which sank with most of its crew in 1545 and was brought up from the mud of the ocean floor in 1982.

The crossbow is a mechanical weapon, which uses much less strength to draw

and, in the more developed versions, even uses a crank to produce the necessary string tension.

(And, just as in the case of NC Wyeth illustrations, we can’t resist medieval manuscript illustrations. Look at this pair of crossbow… bunnies from a copy of the Roman d’ Alexandre, circa 1340.)

This makes it a less romantic weapon, but equally deadly: Richard the Lionheart was killed with a bolt/quarrel (what one calls a crossbow arrow) at the siege of Chalus in 1199.

(This creates another aside–about the hand weapon used as late as the 16th century by the Border Reivers of the land between northern England and southern Scotland–called a “latch”, it was the weapon of choice for those who couldn’t afford early hand guns but wanted to fire easily from the saddle.

The soldiers in Disney’s wonderful movie, Tangled, carry them–notice the off-hand side pouch with a handful of bolts for one on Maximus’ saddle–)

But we would like to conclude with one more use of that black arrow. A flight of them kills Boromir in The Lord of the Rings.

Just as we began by pointing to the text and the actual bow and arrow which kill Smaug, and not the harpoon of the film, so we would criticize this scene. In our opinion, it is stretched beyond believability, as well as beyond the text, taking away something of Boromir’s valor in combat with dozens of the enemy, in which he is gradually overcome.

This is just as true for the brief scene of Aragorn at Boromir’s death. What was simple in the text, thus making it more moving–just Boromir’s confession and Aragorn’s comforting him–becomes a soppy scene in which Boromir swears loyalty and calls Aragorn “my brother”, a liberty Aragorn-the-king-t0-be, would hardly have welcomed. In the theatrical world, this is called “milking the scene” and here, we think it curdled.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC,

Subsubcreations

03 Wednesday Jun 2015

Posted by lebedusya1 in Fairy Tales and Myths, J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History of Middle-earth, Narrative Methods, Villains

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Chicken Run, Corsairs, Easterlings, Gorbag and Shagrat, Haradrim, Melkor, Minions, Morgoth, Nazgul, Nick and Fetcher, Orc, Robin Hood, Sauron, Star Wars, Storm Troopers, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Zorro

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always!

Two posts ago, we talked about how it might be possible to make Sauron –the- nearly-invisible slightly more visible by means of his minions.

[oh yes—minions—from Middle French, “mignon”, meaning “little/darling” and coming to have a negative meaning in English, “lackey”]

These included the Nazgul

various humans—corsairs, Haradrim, Easterlings—

And, the real stars (as Nick and Fetcher, the two rats from Chicken Run, refer to themselves)

the Orcs.

Tolkien appears always to have had trouble placing them. We would suppose that this problem arose because Orcs were not the usual run-of-the-mill lackeys one usually sees in adventure, like the sheriff of Nottingham’s men

the soldiers of the evil commandante in the Zorro adventures

or the hordes of faceless stormtroopers in Star Wars

His first question—where do they come from? was immediately followed by a second—if they are created, do they have free will? That first question, any author might ask himself. The second, however, was pure Tolkien, fitting into the pattern which those who’ve only read The Lord of the Rings and not JRRT’s letters on the subject or the volumes produced by the admirable (a pale adjective!) Christopher Tolkien, would never see: the complex spiritual history which lies behind the creation of Middle Earth.

Not that the first question was simple. In The Lord of the Rings, Fangorn says of the Orcs:

“But Trolls are only counterfeits, made by the Enemy in the Great Darkness, in mockery of Ents, as Orcs were of Elves.” L486

The author, however, had a very different opinion:

“Their nature and origin require more thought. They are not easy to work into the theory and system.”

(Morgoth’s Ring 409)

Not easy because of that second question. As he wrote in an unpublished essay entitled (not surprisingly) Orcs (Morgoth’s Ring 409-413),

“…only Eru [the central creative deity] could make creatures with independent wills, and with reasoning powers. But the Orcs seem to have both: they can try to cheat Morgoth/ Sauron, rebel against him, or criticize him.”

Morgoth (Sauron’s former master) made the Orcs in some way, but, because only the central deity, Eru, can give independent wills and reasoning powers—which Orcs display by cheating, rebelling, and criticizing– to created beings, what is to be made of Orcs? Bound by those seemingly contrary facts, the conclusion was obvious to him that “therefore they must be corruptions of something pre-existing.” (409)

But of what?

“But Men had not yet appeared, when the Orcs already existed. Aule constructed the Dwarves out of his memory of the Music; but Eru would not sanction the work of Melkor [i.e. Morgoth] so as to allow the independence of the Orcs.

It also seems clear…that though Melkor could utterly corrupt and ruin individuals, it is not possible to contemplate his absolute perversion of a whole people, or group of peoples, and his making that state heritable.

In that case Elves, as a source, are very unlikely.” (409)

Thus, logically, if the Orcs are created, not corrupted, and created by a power which hasn’t the ability to give his creations independence, then–

“The Orcs were beasts of humanized shape (to mock Men and Elves) deliberately perverted/converted into a more close resemblance to Men. Their ‘talking’ was really reeling off ‘records’ set in them by Melkor. Even their rebellious critical words—he knew about them. Melkor taught them speech and as they bred they inherited this; and they had just as much independence as have, say, dogs or horses of their human masters. This talking was largely echoic (cf. parrots). ..Also (n.b.) Morgoth not Sauron is the source of Orc-wills. Sauron is just another (if greater) agent. Orcs can rebel against him without losing their own irremediable allegiance to evil (Morgoth).” (410-411)

We don’t know about you, dear Readers, but we confess to a certain disappointment at the idea that the Orcs are only more complex puppets. Consider this piece of villainous dialogue between Gorbag and Shagrat:

“I’d like to try somewhere where there’s none of ‘em. But the war’s on now, and when that’s over things may be easier.”

“It’s going well, they say.”

“They would,” grunted Gorbag. “We’ll see. But anyway, if it does go well, there should be a lot more room. 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, where there’s good loot nice and handy, and no big bosses.”

“Ah!” said Shagrat. “Like old times.” (LOTR 738)

The plans and reminiscences of demons—how wonderful! And what an interesting sidelight into their world and even their past: they used to be masterless marauders, in the “old times”—could this suggest that perhaps they weren’t such puppets after all? We would like to imagine so!

And what is your opinion, dear readers?

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

Villainous Thoughts 1

16 Thursday Apr 2015

Posted by lebedusya1 in Narrative Methods, Villains

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Cruella de Vil, Ebenezer Balfour, Gollum, Jafar, Prince John, Robin Hood, Sauron, Sheriff of Nottingham, Villains

Dear Readers,

Welcome!

Is an adventure possible without a villain? Not an “antagonist”—that’s for serious essays on subjects like “the nature of evil”—but someone tall and devious, like Jafar

or stumpy and seedy like Uncle Ebenezer in Kidnapped

or skinny and smoky, like Cruella de Vil.

Whatever the figure, on the one hand, he/she provides the kind of friction which can set a story in motion and keep it there. On the other, villains can add a certain stature to a story. When the villain is an oaf, the story is in danger of being, or becoming, oafish. The Hobbit with only the stone trolls,

for example, would quickly become something out of Monty Python’s gumbies, at best.

An ancient and smooth-talking dragon makes the story bigger and gives it more weight.

(To see how a quiet and amiable dragon affects a story, see Kenneth Grahame’s “The Reluctant Dragon” from Dream Days (1898—available for free at Gutenberg)

An elegant villain can make a story more elegant, as Captain Hook would insist.

As a way of testing this premise, imagine a Lord of the Rings in which the main villain is Gollum. It might be entertaining, but how much smaller the drama than that which we see as grand, in part because of the size and menace of the villain.

(A note: while we have shown you the various villains we’ve mentioned so far, when it comes to Sauron, we’re stuck. We know that he is embodied in some form and that he was once “comely” (that is, good to look at) and he was of a size to fight Gil-Galad & Co., but, otherwise, it’s hard to know quite what to show: certainly not the searchlight from the Jackson films. His and his writers’ difficulty is obvious: how do you make what, in the books, is more a kind of watching, brooding evil feeling than a form (with the exception of that eye) into something visible? We don’t believe, however, that their choice was successful, but, in fact, diminished the menace. We intend to discuss further the idea of “the invisible villain”, however, in a further part of this series.)

What adds to the power of a villain is a certain primal nature: this is someone driven to be who he/she is because of what she/he wants—and the converse is true: what he/she wants can define who he/she is. What is Cruella, for instance, apart from her lust for a fur coat made from Dalmatians?

In the case of Robin Hood, even if we had never heard him say a word, we would know what Prince John wants—that word “Prince” might serve as giveaway. He wants to be King John.

It perfectly suits his ambitions that his brother, Richard, the real king of England, is being held for ransom in Austria. It’s even an opportunity to look pious—you’re rescuing your brother with that huge sum of money—when, in reality, you’re simply increasing your own revenues. And your chief collector (in the tradition), the Sheriff of Nottingham, is thus nothing but a function in the story of John: the actual hand in the people’s purse, but he’s doing it for the sake of his master.

(Here’s the Sheriff—both images from the classic Errol Flynn 1938 The Adventures of Robin Hood.)

As long as Richard doesn’t return, there will be John (and his—quite literal—extension, the Sheriff). And thus he is what we might call an open-ended villain, someone who can be employed again and again to apply the friction. This fits perfectly with his role in the Robin Hood stories as, unlike a novel, with its elaborate built-in sense and need of resolution brought about by the author, the original Robin Hood stories were folktales and folksongs—brief, their initial goal a short narrative from set-up to resolution. Villains here could be reused, their resolution not necessarily requiring their complete destruction. This can also have the side benefit of allowing singers/tellers to give villains a sense of depth from the number of experiences (usually very bad ones!) with the hero they have. The urge towards development of this sort, both for villain and hero, might, in fact, be a reason for A Gest of Robyn Hode, a collection of Robin Hood stories roughly made into one long tale and printed somewhere between 1492 and 1534. (For more, see the useful Wiki site.)

The opposite of a character like Prince John would be what we might call a terminal villain. He/she appears and the story’s action begins. With his/her disappearance, the story, effectively, ends, even if there’s a coda: once Darth Vader/Anakin tosses the Emperor over the railing, what’s left but funerals, ghostly reunions, and fireworks? And, even if you clone the Emperor for a rematch, the original has been eliminated and his complex and long-developing relationship with his star pupil, Vader, has been resolved.

This is, of course, only the beginning of our discussion of villains. Next, we want to ask, faintly echoing Freud, “What do villains want?”

Thanks, as ever, for reading and, as always, we welcome questions and comments!

MTCIDC

doubtfulsea

~ adventure romance fantasy

Tag Archives: Robin Hood

Who Goes There? (4)

Psalters and Psalms

I Love a Parade

A Longer Stretch

Into Those Woods

Bordering (.2: Blackmail, Battle, and Song)

Killer Monks (and Friars)

Bolts and Arrows

Subsubcreations

Villainous Thoughts 1