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A Celtic Chill Up the Spine

23 Wednesday May 2018

Posted by Ollamh in Fairy Tales and Myths, Films and Music, Heroes, Literary History, Military History, Narrative Methods

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Banshee, Bean Nighe, Bloody Clavers, Bodbh, Bonnie Dundee, Coiste bodhar, Cuchulain, Darby O'Gill and the Little People, Dragoons, Dullahan, Gan Ceann, Greco-Roman, Hera, Highlanders, Hugh Herriot, Hugh Mackay, James II, Jason, Johm Graham, Morrigan, Old Mortality, Pass of Killecrankie, Picts, Pikemen, Rosemary Sutcliff, Sir Walter Scott, tumuli, William of Orange, Williamite, Woman of the Sidh

Welcome, as ever, dear readers.

As we just finished a novel, Bonnie Dundee (1983),

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by one of our favorite YA historical authors, Rosemary Sutcliff (1920-1992), we were snagged by what, at first, seems just an odd little detail—but we’ll come to that.  First, let’s talk about the book in general.

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The title refers to a 17th-century Scots nobleman, John Graham, 7th Laird of Claverhouse, 1st Viscount Dundee (1648-1689), also known as “Bloody Clavers” for his zeal in observing the law in a complicated religious situation (the subject of a Sir Walter Scott novel, Old Mortality, 1816),

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and “Bonnie Dundee” from his noble title (and, we presume, his good looks).

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In 1689, Dundee was a royal cavalry officer, leading a regiment of mounted infantry, called, at that time, dragoons.

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In that same year, a combination of elements of Parliament, the army and navy, and the forces of William, Prince of Orange, Stadtholder of the other provinces of the Netherlands,

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and husband of Mary,

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the daughter of the King of England, James II, had overthrown James.

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William was the son of James’ sister, and so James was both his uncle and his father-in-law—a very tricky situation!

Rather than fight, James had fled, but elements in Ireland and Scotland were still loyal.  One of the main leaders of resistance in Scotland was Bonnie Dundee.

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Against him was a Williamite army, led by Hugh Mackay.

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The major battle happened at the Pass of Killiecrankie, 27 July, 1689.

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The government’s side consisted almost entirely of regular infantry regiments, but a real mixture of raw and experienced soldiers, it seems.

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Dundee’s men were primarily Highlanders, untrained in modern battlefield discipline and tactics.

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The usual method in period battles was to begin by softening up the enemy with artillery fire in hopes that you could goad him into attacking you or at least you might shake his organization.

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Then, if the enemy advanced, you used your firepower to break up his formations

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and, if you were lucky, to drive him back, whereupon you might loose your cavalry to drive him off the battlefield.

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1689 was a time of transition in European armies, in which the Renaissance weapon, the pike,

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which had been increasingly flanked by men with firearms,

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was being replaced by the bayonet, turning a musket into a short pike and thus removing the need for pikemen.  The earliest bayonets, however, were simply knives stuck into the muzzle of the musket.

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Of course, if you stick a knife into the muzzle, it means that you lose the ability to keep up your volleys and this seems to have been part of the difficulty for MacKay, the Williamite general.  The Highlanders had, as their main weapon, the charge, the goal being to get close to the enemy before he could do much damage with firearms, and cut him to pieces with swords and axes.

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Somehow, the Highlanders managed to break up the Williamite regiments—possibly because they were caught between firing and fixing bayonets?—and drive them off—although at the cost of losing Dundee, mortally wounded while attempting to direct the attack.

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Sutcliff’s hero, a Scots Lowlander named Hugh Herriot, is first a groom in Dundee’s household and then a trooper in his dragoons, eventually following Dundee to Killiecrankie and his death.  (Dundee was buried nearby just after the battle.)

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It is on the march to the battlefield that Hugh sees something which briefly captures his attention at the time, but nothing more, and it was this description which has haunted us, ever since we put the book down:

“Once we came to the place where a cattle-track dipped down from the north, to cross the river by a made ford.  And on the far side, tucked in among the roots of overshadowing hazel and alder trees, looking as twisted and as rooted into the bank as themselves, an old woman in an earth-coloured gown knelt washing a pile of household clothes and linen.

I mind thinking it was late in the year for that; mostly the crofter women fling everything out-of-doors and deal with the bed-bugs and wash all things washable in May.  I mind also noticing that there was something of a dark brownish-red colour among the grey pallor of the unbleached linen; a shawl, maybe; you could not see, in the cave of shadows under the alder branches.

She took no more notice of our passing than if we had not been there at all.  And we marched on, and I thought no more of the thing, for the time being.”  (Bonnie Dundee, Chapter 21, “The Old Woman by the Ford”)

It’s only when later, in camp, Hugh senses that something appears to be worrying the Highlanders that it comes clear that they, too, saw the old woman—and something more, as his Highland friend, Alisdair, explains:

“Did ye see anything—any one, by the cattle ford an hour’s march up-river, as we came by?”

To which Hugh answers:

“An old woman doing her household wash…”

And Alisdair says in return:

“Aye, and you a Lowlander, ye would not be knowing.”

Continuing:

“The Woman of the Sidh—the Washer by the Ford.”

Although a Lowlander, Hugh does know:

“The Washer by the Ford, and she was washing the blood-stained linen, who comes before the death of chiefs and heroes…”

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For us, who grew up in the Greco-Roman world, an old woman at a ford has a completely different meaning:  in the story of Jason, his patron-to-be, Hera, disguises herself as an old woman and sits by a ford, testing men by asking to be carried across.  Jason agrees to and loses a sandal in the process, thus fulfilling a divine warning sent to the king of Iolcus about his eventual overthrow (by Jason):  beware the man with one sandal.

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This story in the Sutcliff—really, as we said, only a little detail in a much larger story—struck us as not only extremely well told (which we expect from Sutcliff, a very gifted story-teller—we’ll talk more about her in a future post), but well-told because, initially, it does just seem like nothing at all—something idly noticed and nothing more.  Its creepiness comes not from the description, which might be ordinary, but from its Celtic heritage—the Highlanders belong to a world made long before 1689, being a combination of the prehistoric settlers of the north, the Picts,

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and the Irish, who began arriving in Scotland in the 5th century AD.

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Although the Irish had converted to Christianity early, there were certain older beliefs which lasted throughout many centuries.  The Old Woman at the Ford is clearly one.  In Gaelic, the Irish-based language of Scotland, she is the Bean Nighe, (ben NEE-yeh, “the washer-woman”), or as Alisdair calls her, “the Woman of the Sidh” (sheethe).

“Sidh” has, in fact, several possible translations:  it can mean “peace”, but, as well, it signifies the Neolithic tumuli (like the barrows to the east of the Old Forest in Middle-earth), as well as the People of the Other World (who may either live in tumuli, or use them as doorways into that Other World).

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Our English word “banshee” is simply the Irish ben side (ben SHEE-thyeh), “woman of the Sidh” which, as we’ve seen, is just what Alisdair calls the Old Woman at the Ford.

Banshees—who do not necessarily always appear as old women, sometimes visit as young–are a kind of messenger from the Other World, sent to warn family members of an impending death.  Their manner of communicating this can vary—in some parts of tradition, they fulfil the task of old women at traditional funerals, wailing in grief, with a sound which has come into English as “keening”.

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To give you an idea of this, here’s a LINK to a clip from the 1959 Disney movie, Darby O’Gill and the Little People, in which we see not only a banshee, but also the next step, the coiste bodhar, [KOH-shte BOW-er] the “silent coach” with its headless coachman, the Dullahan, called in Irish, Gan Ceann,(gan KENN) “Headless”, who carries the dead person…somewhere… [Be warned, by the way:  one of us saw this only once, many years ago, on a Disney program, and has spent many further years trying not to remember it!]

In other parts of the tradition, the banshee stands outside the doomed person’s window and simply says her/his name (which impresses us as especially creepy), or calls out “My wife!” “My husband!” or “My child!”

In Ireland, the banshee is restricted to the pre-Norman-invasion population (pre-the-year 1169, more or less), suggesting that this is a purely Celtic belief, which would make sense of Hugh’s Highland friend, Alisdair’s, fear of the Washer.

It has been suggested that perhaps this figure is descended from a fearful Irish goddess, the Bodbh (BAH-thv),

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who has a possible three-part persona and appears before battles and on battlefields, with a raven as her totemic animal.

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She is also called Morrigan, meaning “great queen”, which sounds rather like a euphemism.  In Old Irish stories, she is the enemy of the boy hero Cuchulain (Koo HOO lun), and brings about his death through tricking him into destroying his own protective spells (he eats dog, his own totemic animal—his name means “hound of Culann”).  There’s a famous bronze statue of him, with her raven on his shoulder, in the old main Dublin post office.

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And here Sutcliff now helps us to complete a kind of grim mythological circle.  Hugh Herriot not only knows who the Washer is, but this further fact:

“The Washer by the Ford, and she was washing the blood-stained linen, who comes before the death of chiefs and heroes—aye, before the death of Cuchulain himself.”

Who is the chief and hero of the novel—and is riding to battle the Williamites?  It’s clear, if one accepts this portent, what is to happen, and yet Hugh tries to deny what he knows to Alisdair—

“Och, away!  Dinna be sae daft!…She was real enough; just an old hen-wife, a wee thing late with her spring washing.  Aye, she was real enough.”

Alisdair’s reply still chills us—as it does Hugh—and explains why what was originally only a passing observation in this novel has stayed with us:

“ ‘She seemed real enough,’ he said, ‘she always does.’ “

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

Lent to a Museum (Mathom.2)

07 Wednesday Mar 2018

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

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Abbotsford, armor, Ashestiel, Cartley Hole, Castle, Craigievar, cuirassier, czapska, Edinburgh, Gothic, Henry Fox Talbot, Horace Walpole, Marquis de Montrose, Mathom-house, Melrose Abbey, Napoleon's Hair, Prince Albert, Queen Victoria, Rob Roy MacGregor, Scottish, Scottish Baronial, Sir Walter Scott, Strawberry Hill, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Waterloo, Waverly

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

In a posting from January, 2017, we discussed the idea of a “mathom house” at Michel Delving in the Shire.  We know about this place from the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings:

“So, though there was still some store of weapons in the Shire, these were used mostly as trophies, hanging above hearths or on walls, or gathered into the museum at Michel Delving.  The Mathom-house it was called:  for anything that Hobbits had no immediate use for, but were unwilling to throw away, they called a mathom.  Their dwellings were apt to become rather crowded with mathoms, and many of the presents that passed from hand to hand were of that sort.”  (Prologue, The Lord of the Rings)

Rereading this passage this time, we were caught by two things:  “some store of weapons” and “Their dwellings were apt to become rather crowded with mathoms” because, put together, they sound like part of the description of the personal Mathom-house of the original inspirer (we would say) of adventure-writing in English, Sir Walter Scott.

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Trained to become a lawyer, Scott had lived for some years in several houses in Edinburgh, for much of his later life at Number 39, North Castle Street–

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Although he began his rise to literary fame with the publication of The Lay of the Last Minstrel, a long poem, in 1805,

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money began to pour in with his first novel, Waverley, published anonymously, in 1814.

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(What a great illustration, by the way—both the first edition and the manuscript.)

Because his legal work required him to have a residence outside Edinburgh, Scott had rented this, at Ashestiel, from 1804-1811.

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When the lease was up, he then invested in this rather modest farm house at what was called “Cartley Hole”, which locals called “Clarty Hole”, “clarty” being a Scots word for “mucky”, suggesting that our illustration is prettier than the actual place.

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More commercially successful novels and an eventual baronetcy gave Scott grander ideas and he began to rebuild—and rebuild—the house, as well as changing its name to the more dignified “Abbotsford”, as it was near the ruins of the 12th-century Melrose Abbey.

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“Bigger” at this time might have meant something Georgian, like this—

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but Scott, no doubt influenced by the Gothic ideas of people like Horace Walpole

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and his Strawberry Hill

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fixed upon a design which, in time, was not only bigger, but Gothic—and Scottish, in the style called “Scottish Baronial”, like this castle at Craigievar, completed in 1626.

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In a way, such a choice makes sense:  many of his novels have Scots locations and they made him wealthy enough to build such a place.

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This is perhaps the first photographic image of Abbotsford.  It dates from 1844 and is by the English inventor, as far as we currently know, of photography, Henry Fox Talbot.

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And here is a modern image.

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The outside of Abbotsford is striking enough, but it’s what’s inside which made us think of a Mathom-house.

There is seemingly an endless “store of weapons”.

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And then there are all of those other things.  A lock of Napoleon’s hair.

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The sword of a 17th-century Scottish hero, the Marquis of Montrose.

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The sporran (purse) of that early-18th century Highland legend, Rob Roy MacGregor.

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(Scot also believed he had Rob Roy’s musket.)image21rrsmusket.jpg

And even souvenirs he had picked up from the battlefield of Waterloo, which he had visited only a short time after the battle.

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Note the hole in the breastplate—and also that the  headgear with it (a czapska) belongs not to the man who would have worn the breastplate, a cuirassier,

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but to a French/Polish lancer

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With all of these trophies tacked onto every possible surface—including full suits of armor–

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we wouldn’t be surprised to see a rather familiar object, ancient, famous, which we are told “was arranged on a stand in the hall (until he lent it to a Museum)”—would you?

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Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

PS

Abbotsford was opened to visitors within a few months of Scott’s death.  Among those tourists were Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.

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They liked the place so much that, when they decided that they needed a little place in the country, Abbotsford would be one of their models.

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Long after Albert’s death in 1861, the Queen continued to pay a yearly visit to Balmoral.

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PPS

If you’d be interested in seeing Abbotsford as an early 20th-century tourist might have seen it, here’s a LINK to Beautiful Britain:  Abbotsford (1912).

 

Into Those Woods

17 Wednesday May 2017

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

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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”,

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

“If you go down to the woods today,

You’re sure of a big surprise…”

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

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

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

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or Snow White,

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

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

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

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

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or beautiful

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

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This brings us to this Friedrich painting:

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

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

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

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

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

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

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

“Waldeinsamkeit

Die mich erfreut

So morgen wie heut

In ewger Zeit

O wie mich freut

Waldeinsamkeit.”

“Aloneness in the forest–

That delights me,

As today so tomorrow

In eternal time

Oh how it delights me

Aloneness in the forest!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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or the traveling Burnham Wood in Macbeth

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

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

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Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC,

CD

Jacobites

17 Wednesday Aug 2016

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Literary History, Military History, Narrative Methods

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Anne, Aughrim, Boyne, Catriona, Charles II, Culloden, Elizabeth II, Falkirk, George I, George II, Glenshiel, Highlanders, Jacobites, James II, James III, Kidnapped, Killiecrankie, Lowlanders, Mary and William, N.C. Wyeth, Prestonpans, Prince Charles, Requiem, Robert Louis Stevenson, Scotland, Sir Walter Scott, The Black Arrow, The Old Pretender, Treasure Island, Underwoods, War of Austrian Succession, Waverly, Young Folks

Dear Readers, welcome, as always.

We’re taking a break from JRRT in this posting and looking at another favorite, Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novel, Kidnapped,

rlsjss2kidnappedfirstedition

which was first serialized in what must have been a remarkable Victorian children’s magazine, Young Folks (1871-1897, with various titles), as it featured Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1881-1882) and The Black Arrow (1883), as well.

It has been published and republished numerous times since its original appearance (just google the title), but, if you read us regularly, you’ll already know our favorite edition is that published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1913 and illustrated by N. C. Wyeth (although we agree with the critics that his Treasure Island, 1911, is even better). Here are a few of the illustrations to give you an idea—these are much moodier than those for Treasure Island, we think.

Wyeth Kidnapped Siege of the Round-HouseWyeth Kidnapped Wreck of the CovenantOn_the_Island_of_Earraid_(N.C._Wyeth).kidnap212_kidnapped_wyeth_murderer

The actual title is based upon 18th-century models, where a great deal of the plot may be teasingly outlined beforehand. We won’t give it all to you, but it begins: Kidnapped Being the Memoirs of David Balfour in the Year 1751 How He Was Kidnapped and Cast Away; His Sufferings in a Desert Isle; His Journey in the Wild Highlands; His Acquaintance with Alan Breck Stewart and Other Notorious Highland Jacobites…

“Jacobites” if you are not acquainted with the term, means “followers of/those loyal to Jacob (that is, James)” and the Jacob/James story marks a turning point in the history of the British Isles.

The story begins when Charles II of England dies in 1685 without leaving a legitimate heir.

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The throne then goes to his younger brother, James II.

(c) Government Art Collection; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation

James was a very unpopular king, for some very complicated reasons, and he was driven from the throne in 1688 by a conspiracy which included members of Parliament, some of his army, and his daughter, Mary, as well as his son-in-law, William the Stadthoulder of the Netherlands.

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James didn’t go very easily and there was war in the British Isles from 1689 to 1692, with three major battles, Killiecrankie in Scotland (1689),

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the Boyne, 1690,

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and Aughrim, 1691, both in Ireland.

John_Mulvany_-_The_Battle_of_Aughrim.1691

Although James II’s forces lost, that did not end the matter, however. James II died in exile in 1701, but his son, the potential James III (called by his enemies “The Old Pretender”, meaning “claimant to the throne”), continued the struggle, being involved in three major attempts at taking back the monarchy.

In the meantime, Mary and William had both died and Mary’s younger sister, Anne,

6187,Queen Anne,by Michael Dahl

who succeeded them, as well. To keep both religious and family continuity, it had been agreed that, since Anne had no surviving heirs, her second-cousin, George, the Elector of Hanover (a country in what is now western Germany) and his family would inherit the throne, which George did, in 1714, as George I of England.

King_George_I_by_Sir_Godfrey_Kneller,_Bt_(3)

That continuity worked so well, in fact, that he is the direct ancestor of the present queen, Elizabeth II,

coronationpicofer2

article-2335617-1A1939BE000005DC-225_964x730

(We just couldn’t resist including this– even royalty don’t take reigning totally seriously, it seems!)

Not a year later, there was a plan to take the throne by invading Scotland, raising an army of Lowlanders and Highlanders alike, and marching on London. There was one inconclusive battle, at Sherriffmuir, in 1715,

Battle_of_Sheriffmuir

but, even with the arrival of James-the-possible-third,

Prince_James_Francis_Edward_Stuart_by_Anton_Raphael_Mengs

the whole thing fell apart. And something similar happened with the next attempt, in 1719. Modest Spanish support was not enough and the Jacobite army failed at Glenshiel

Glen_shiel

and things subsided into a cold war until 1745. During the intervening years, the struggle between Britain and France, begun in the days of Louis XIV (ruled 1661-1715) had intensified, with France supporting James II and his son as proxies. In 1745, the latest war, the so-called “War of the Austrian Succession”, had been going on since 1740. This was a much more complex pan-European war, but, with Britain and France backing different candidates for the throne, there was a good opportunity for a further attempt on the part of France to destabilize her old opponent. Thus, when it was proposed that the dashing young son of James, Prince Charles (1720-1788),

Young Charles Edward Stuart L_tcm4-563619

backed by a small French army

royalecossais

(with another waiting in the wings for an invasion of southern England), should land in Scotland and raise the country against the government of George II, the Old Pretender agreed.

King_George_II_by_Charles_Jervas

Unfortunately for their cause, this ended as the other attempts had, in failure—and this was the final failure. After one great victory, at Prestonpans in 1745,

prestonpansSurrender

and a smaller one at Falkirk, in early 1746,

falkirk1746

the plan failed at Culloden in April, 1746,

The_Battle_of_Culloden

and this was the last grand attempt. As the inspiration for literature in the romantic period, however, it was extremely successful, beginning with Sir Walter Scott’s

Sir_William_Allan_-_Sir_Walter_Scott,_1771_-_1832._Novelist_and_poet_-_Google_Art_Project

Waverley, published anonymously in 1814.

waverleyfirsted

Regularly regarded as the first great historical novel, it was the beginning of great commercial success for Scott, as well as the beginning of a process which turned Scotland’s past into the basis of an entire cultural industry, of which Kidnapped (1886) and its sequel, Catriona (1893) formed a small, but prominent part and is still with us today in the US (and elsewhere) in Scottish festivals and bumperstickers.

scottishfestivalThank-God-Scottish-Sticker

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

ps

We can’t conclude without including Stevenson’s “Requiem” (from his collection Underwoods, 1887),

RLSrequiem1880

which we’ve always admired and which is on his tomb in Samoa, where he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1894.

rlstomb

Of Boats and Boromir

18 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by Ollamh in Fairy Tales and Myths, J.R.R. Tolkien, Narrative Methods, Poetry, Uncategorized

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Tags

Abbotsford, Anduin, Aragorn, boat, Boromir, burial, Camelot, Edoras, Eglinton Tournament, Falls of Rauros, Gimli, Gondor, Gyeongju, Henryk Siemiradski, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, Horace Walpole, Ibn Fadlan, Ibn Fadlan and the Rusiyyah, Idylls of the King, Ivanhoe, Journal of Islamic and Arabic Studies, King Arthur, Korea, Legolas, medievalism, neo-medievalist, On Heroes, poetry, pre-Romantics, Prose Edda, Pugin, Rohan, Romanticism, Ship burial, Silla, Sir Frank Dicksee, Sir Lancelot, Sir Walter Scott, Snorri Sturluson, Snorro, St. George's chapel, Story, Strawberry Hill, Sutton Hoo, Tennyson, The Departure of Boromir, The Hero as Divinity. Odin. Paganism: Scandinavian Mythology, The Lady of Shalott, The Lord of the Rings, The Vikings (1958), Thomas Carlyle, Tolkien, vaults, Victorian, viking burial, vikings, Westminster, Windsor

Dear Reader,

Welcome, as always.

In this posting, we want to take something we mentioned in our last about Tolkien having read Tennyson. This is our guess—but in the late Victorian world into which JRRT was born, he must have been inescapable.

We _could_ say that medievalism was in the air then, brought in by Romanticism—and even before, by pre-Romantics, like Horace Walpole, with his mock-castle at Strawberry Hill (1749-76).

walpole2964-correctionS

Strawberry_Hill_House_from_garden_in_2012_after_restoration]

There were lots of early neo-medievalist things—some of Sir Walter Scott’s novels, like Ivanhoe (1820)—not to mention his mock-castle, at Abbotsford.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Abbotsford_house

the absolutely wonderful and crazy Eglinton Tournament of 1839 (we may have to have a posting about this)

A_view_of_the_lists._Eglinton_Tournament1839

the medieval-revival architecture of Pugin

augustuspugin

stgilescheadle184046

before Tennyson began publishing Idylls of the King in 1859, with its poems about King Arthur and his court.

John_everett_millais_portrait_of_lord_alfred_tennyson

idylls1859

Even before Idylls, Tennyson had been interested in writing about King Arthur’s world, producing the poem “The Lady of Shalott” in his Poems (1833, revised version 1842), in this poem, a lady under a curse sees, from her tower, Sir Lancelot riding by, and falls in love with him without ever meeting him. What happens next was what brought us to write this posting.

Because it reminded us of Boromir.

At the beginning of The Two Towers, Aragorn finds the dying Gondorian sitting, with his back against a tree, and, scattered around him, and “Many Orcs lay slain, piled all about him and at his feet.” (The Two Towers, Chapter 1, “The Departure of Boromir”) When Legolas and Gimli join Aragorn, they decide upon a hasty, but they hope, appropriate burial.

“ ‘Then let us lay him in a boat with his weapons, and the weapons of his vanquished foes,’ said Aragorn. ‘We will send him to the Falls of Rauros and give him to the Anduin. The River of Gondor will take care at least that no evil creature dishonours his bones.’” (The Two Towers, Chapter 1, “The Departure of Boromir”)

In other burial scenes of important people in The Lord of the Rings, we see that the Kings and Stewards of Gondor are laid to rest in special vaults, rather like medieval and later English kings buried either in St. George’s chapel at Windsor or in Westminster Abbey.

tombofthestewards

Windsor_Castle_from_the_air

Westminster_Abbey_-_Thomas_Hosmer_Shepherd

The Kings of Rohan lie beneath a series of mounds just before Edoras,

simbelmyne_mounds

like those of the Silla kings of Korea at Gyeongju (57BC-935AD).

Or like the sort of ship burials of which Tolkien must have read in the newspapers of 1939, the famous Sutton Hoo grave.

ship

From which came treasures like this helmet (with its reconstruction).

Sutton_hoo_helmet_room_1_no_flashbrightness_ajusted

Sutton_Hoo_helmet_reconstructed

A number of ship burials of northern European upper class people survive, all more or less in the same pattern: the ship is dragged to a spot where it is filled with the deceased, occasionally accompanied by others and even animals, and grave goods of a high quality, then a mound is built over it. The deceased may have been cremated beforehand, but not necessarily. There is a well-known description of this process by an Arab traveler, Ibn Fadlan. (for a translation of this with copious annotations, see James E. Montgomery, “Ibn Fadlan and the Rusiyyah”, Journal of Islamic and Arabic Studies 3, 2000—available on-line by googling “Ibn Fadlan and the Rusiyyah”)

Here’s an 1883 reconstruction of one part of that process by the Polish painter Henryk Siemiradski.

Funeral_of_ruthenian_noble_by_Siemiradzki

In contrast, the image of the deceased being placed in such a ship, the ship being launched, and then torched, would appear to be a Hollywood popularization, perhaps originating with the 1958 movie, The Vikings, of something rare (or at least difficult to document).

vikingsposter

At the conclusion of this film, a major character is given this treatment.

Vikiing Funeral - The Vikings burning ship

(That the Victorians were aware of this alternative can be seen in this 1893 painting by Sir Frank Dicksee.

dicksee1

Dicksee had based this painting not on a scholarly source, but upon a lecture by Thomas Carlyle, “The Hero as Divinity. Odin. Paganism: Scandinavian Mythology”, which he would have found in Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. Carlyle very loosely cites “Snorro” for his description of such an event, by which he means Snorri Sturluson, author of the Prose Edda)

But this brings up back to “The Departure of Boromir”—and to Tennyson.

In “The Departure of Boromir”, as we have seen, Boromir is placed into one of the Elven boats.

(FOTR) Boromir Dead in Boat

The three companions tow the boat as close to the Falls of Rauros as they can, then cast it loose to be carried over the Falls.

boromir_funerals

The companions, of course, are pressed for time: Frodo and Sam have gone one direction, Merry and Pippin have been carried off in another and there isn’t time, they feel, to bury Boromir or to build a cairn over him. As they have boats and there is the river below them, the method chosen seems a natural one, but we wondered if the author didn’t have Tennyson’s model in his mind, as well.

In “The Lady of Shalott”, after seeing Lancelot through her window (or in a reflection in the 1842 version of the poem), the Lady places herself in a small boat, with note in hand, and dies on her way down the river on the way to Camelot, apparently of a broken heart (as the backstory, appearing as early as the 13th century, tells us).

The Lady of Shalott 1888 by John William Waterhouse 1849-1917

robertson-the-lady-of-shalott

Not only would the poem (which has a rather catchy rhythm) have been readily available, but there were a number of paintings and engravings illustrating the story, practically from the time of the 1842 version.

Lady_of_Shalott_edmo lady1 lady2

lady9

 

lady10

 

lady13

 

lady14

lady15

This is not so dramatic as going over the falls and her death is pale in comparison to multiple arrow wounds, but there is that rhythm, the image of the body in the boat going downstream, and the popularity of the poet—plus the numerous illustrations. We’ll include a link to the poem so you can judge for yourself: was this a possible influence on JRRT?

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

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