Into the Trees.2

27 Wednesday Nov 2019

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

Tags

Alan Lee, Ents, Entwives, Hildebrandts, language, mallorn, Old Forest, Party Tree, Ted Nasmith, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Tom Bombadil, Treebeard, trees, Withywindle

As ever, dear readers, welcome.

In our last, we were examining something which JRRT said in a letter from 1958 discussing a script for a film of The Lord of the Rings. He was talking about trees and said that “the story is so largely concerned with them.” (Letters, 275)

That seemed to us rather an odd thing to say, there being so many human (or humanoid) characters and so much plot in which they are actors in the novel. And yet, as we began to consider it, we found ourselves trying to approach the story as if the trees were a major part of things—or perhaps more than one part?—and to wonder just what role or roles they were playing and whether that suggests that we might need to expand our understanding of the goals of the book in general.

We thought first of Treebeard, who is, of course, a character (here, drawn by Alan Lee) in the plot

and so are the Ents (by Ted Nasmith).

Besides being plot-drivers, though, Treebeard and his people represent an ancient part of Middle-earth which has somehow survived the long years of human occupation, with its own interests and its own memories—and its own tragedy: the loss of the Entwives. As Treebeard says:

“I am not altogether on anybody’s side because nobody is altogether on my side…” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 4, “Treebeard”)

The sentient nature of trees is not only to be found in Treebeard and the Ents, however. Consider the Old Forest.

As Merry describes it:

“But the Forest is queer. Everything in it is very much more alive, more aware of what is going on, so to speak, than things are in the Shire…I have only once or twice been in here after dark, and then only near the hedge. I thought all the trees were whispering to each other, passing news and plots along in an unintelligible language…” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 6, “The Old Forest”)

Perhaps the words “unintelligible language” say it best. Merry appears to accept not only that the trees are awake (“more aware”, as he puts it), but also that they have their own complex form of intercommunication (“language”). At the same time he may believe such things, what it is they are thinking and saying is not comprehensible, at least by him and, we presume, by those of his acquaintance. In other words, they are part of a world in which he has no part, just as Treebeard and the Ents are apart from those who visit or, in the case of the orcs, attack them.

In the case of Old Man Willow,

the mostly passive hostility of the Old Forest—

“And the trees do not like strangers. They watch you. They are usually content merely to watch you, as long as daylight lasts, and don’t do much. Occasionally the most unfriendly ones may drop a branch, or stick a root out, or grasp at you with a long trailer.”

becomes something more. The Forest seems to have been guiding the hobbits, funneling them towards the river Withywindle, about which Merry has said:

“We don’t want to go that way! The Withywindle valley is said to be the queerest part of the whole wood—the centre from which all the queerness comes, as it were.”

And then—

“Suddenly Frodo himself felt sleep overwhelming him. His head swam. There now seemed hardly a sound in the air. The flies had stopped buzzing. Only a gentle noise on the edge of hearing, a soft fluttering as of a song half whispered, seemed to stir in the boughs above. He lifted his heavy eyes and saw leaning over him a huge willow-tree, old and hoary. Enormous it looked, its sprawling branches going up like reaching arms with many long-fingered hands, its knotted and twisted trunk gapping in wide fissures that creaked faintly as the boughs moved. The leaves fluttering against the bright sky dazzled him, and he toppled over, lying where he fell upon the grass.”

Frodo isn’t alone in succumbing to the seductive nature of the place:

“Merry and Pippin dragged themselves forward and lay down with their backs to the willow-trunk. Behind them great cracks gaped wide to receive them as the tree swayed and creaked. They looked up at the grey and yellow leaves, moving softly against the light, and singing. They shut their eyes, and then it seemed that they could almost hear words, cool words, saying something about water and sleep. They gave themselves up to the spell and fell fast asleep at the foot of the great grey willow.”

Again, as Merry has said, there is a language here, this time a little more intelligible, but it might just be part of a general hobbit drowsiness on what appears to be a sultry autumn afternoon, unless we worry about those “great cracks” gaping “wide to receive them”—and we should. One of the hobbits—the only one not seduced into slumber—does:

“Sam sat down and scratched his head, and yawned like a cavern. He was worried. The afternoon was getting late, and he thought this sudden sleepiness uncanny. ‘There’s more behind this than sun and warm air,’ he muttered to himself. ‘I don’t like this great big tree. I don’t trust it. Hark at it singing about sleep now! This won’t do at all!’ “

As he rouses himself, he quickly discovers what the seductive tree has been planning: it is trying to drown Frodo and has completely swallowed Pippin and partially swallowed Merry.

They are rescued, of course, by Tom Bombadil, a character who has been left out of virtually every other medium of telling the story of The Lord of the Rings.

And it’s not hard to see why: he is somehow, truly out of the story, just as he’s unaffected by the Ring:

“It seemed to grow larger as it lay for a moment on his big brown-skinned hand. Then suddenly he put it to his eye and laughed. For a second the hobbits had a vision, both comical and alarming, of his bright blue eye gleaming through a circle of gold. Then Tom put the Ring round the end of his little finger and held it up to the candlelight. For a moment the hobbits noticed nothing strange about this. Then they gasped. There was no sign of Tom disappearing!” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 7, “In the House of Tom Bombadil”)

When it comes to things like the Old Forest and Old Man Willow, however, he is invaluable.

“As they listened, they began to understand the lives of the Forest, apart from themselves, indeed to feel themselves as the strangers where all other things are at home.”

As Tom is apart, and ancient—

“Eldest, that’s what I am. Mark my words, my friends: Tom was here before the river and the trees; Tom remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn.”

he is distanced, being senior to all living, growing things, and that gives him both greater knowledge and greater perspective, able to know and understand other ancient things, even if less ancient than he:

“Tom’s words laid bare the hearts of the trees and their thoughts, which were often dark and strange, filled with a hatred of things that go free upon the earth, gnawing, biting, breaking, hacking, burning: destroyers and usurpers. It was not called the Old Forest without reason, for it was indeed ancient, a survivor of vast forgotten woods; and in it there lived yet, ageing no quicker than the hills, the fathers of the fathers of trees, remembering times when they were lords.”

And here again we see that sense of otherness: these are living creatures only tangentially—and then, it seems, often negatively—involved with humans (and humanoids). And they are not just living things, but things with their own interests and purposes. Taking all of that into account, and adding in the healing nature of the mallorn seed which Galadriel gives to Sam, which replaces the cut-down Party Tree (please see our previous posting on that subject), we would tentatively advance two possible reasons for JRRT’s remark about the major place of trees in The Lord of the Rings.

First, when it comes to the Old Forest and Old Man Willow, as well as Treebeard and the Ents, by having them in the story we are being quietly told that the history of Middle-earth is not just about its two-footed inhabitants. Although so much of the plot focuses upon them, there is more to the story, a deeper, older context yet, putting them into a frame so much larger than that in which they and their past or even current actions take place. This gives Gandalf’s words to Bilbo at the end of The Hobbit that much more weight:

“You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!” (The Hobbit, Chapter 19, “The Last Stage”)

Second, in growing things there is a continuity beyond the human world, and not necessarily only an Old Forest malevolence. The seed may be from a tree in fading Lorien, as Galadriel says when she gives the box containing it and earth from her garden to Sam:

“Then you may remember Galadriel, and catch a glimpse of far off Lorien, that you have seen only in our winter. For our Spring and our Summer are gone by, and they will never be seen on earth again save in memory.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 8, “Farewell to Lorien”)

Yet, planted in the Shire, the young tree appears at a time when the whole world is being regenerated:

“Altogether 1420 in the Shire was a marvellous year. Not only was there wonderful sunshine and delicious rain, in due times and perfect measure, but there seemed something more: an air of richness and growth, and a gleam of a beauty beyond that of mortal summers that flicker and pass upon this Middle-earth.” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 9, “The Grey Havens”)

And, thus, though the magical Lorien may fade and die, something of it will live beyond it in another place and time, linked to, and a reminder of, that other place and time, by a tree which

“In after years, as it grew in grace and beauty,… was known, far and wide, and people would come long journeys to see it: the only mallorn west of the Mountain and east of the Sea…”

(by the Hildebrandts)

Thanks, as always, for reading and, as always,

MTCIDC

Into the Trees.1

20 Wednesday Nov 2019

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

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A Long-Expected Party, Alan Lee, Angus McBride, Beech, Charles Addams, Cousin It, Eugenia Weinstein, Galadriel, Hildebrandts, Inger Edelfeldt, Lorien, mallorn, Party Field, Party Tree, Samwise Gamgee, Ted Nasmith, The Addams Family, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Treebeard, trees

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

In the draft of an undated letter from 1958 about a proposed film of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien wrote about the work of the preparer of the draft for the script (whom he calls “Z”):

“I deeply regret this handling of the ‘Treebeard’ chapter, whether necessary or not. I have already suspected Z of not being interested in trees: unfortunate, since the story is so largely concerned with them.” (Letters, 275)

“since the story is so largely concerned with them” puzzled us at first. JRRT himself, of course, had strong feelings for trees, as he says in this letter from three years earlier:

“I am (obviously) much in love with plants and above all trees and always have been; and I find human maltreatment of them as hard to bear as some find ill-treatment of animals.” (Letters, 220)

“so largely concerned with them”, however, would make them seem almost like characters, or at least major subjects of discussion, within the text.

As far as characters go, there is Treebeard, of course.

(We’re not quite sure about this early version by the Hildebrandts. Here, he appears to be wearing a coat of Spanish moss

and rather reminds us of Cousin It, from the cartoonist, Charles Addams, 1912-1988,

who created a number of mock-sinister characters, including “Cousin It”.

Here it/It is in the 1991 film

or here it/it is in the new animated feature.

image7it

The challenge in illustrating Treebeard is to find a happy balance between human and tree, as we see in this Alan Lee portrayal, on the one hand,

or that of Angus McBride on the other, with much in between–

by Inger Edelfeldt,

by Eugenia Weinstein.)

And there are the Ents, as well, who, like Tolkien, are more than a little upset over the destruction of trees, but, unlike the author, take a very direct approach to stopping it (by Ted Nasmith).

Beyond Treebeard and the Ents, what do we find?

First, there is the so-called “Party Tree”:

“The tents began to go up. There was a specially large pavilion, so big that the tree that grew in the field was right inside it, and stood proudly at one end, at the head of the chief table. Lanterns were hung on all its branches.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 1, “A Long-expected Party”)

Although its first appearance is understated, it clearly has greater significance, as we see when the hobbits return to the Shire and Sam sees one particular piece of completely unnecessary destruction:

“ ‘They’ve cut it down!’ cried Sam. ‘They’ve cut down the Party Tree!’ He pointed to where the tree had stood under which Bilbo had made his Farewell Speech. It was lying lopped and dead in the field. As if this was the last straw Sam burst into tears.” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 8, “The Scouring of the Shire”)

And this is not the end. When the Fellowship was leaving Lorien, Galadriel gave each a special gift. To Sam she said:

“ ‘For you little gardener and lover of trees,’ she said to Sam, ‘I have only a small gift.’ She put into this hand a little box of plain grey wood, unadorned save for a single silver rune upon the lid. ‘Here is set G for Galadriel,’ she said; ‘but also it may stand for garden in your tongue. In this box there is earth from my orchard, and such blessing as Galadriel has still to bestow is upon it. It will not keep you on your road, nor defend you against any peril, but if you keep it and see your home again at last, then perhaps it may reward you. Though you should find all barren and laid waste, there will be few gardens in Middle-earth that will bloom like your garden.’ “ (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 8, “Farewell to Lorien”)

When the hobbits return to the Shire and Sharkey and his henchmen are removed, Sam uses Galadriel’s gift to do exactly as she told him to, to regenerate things. When he opened the box, he found something extra:

“Inside it was filled with a grey dust, soft and fine, in the middle of which was a seed, like a small nut with a silver shale.” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 9, “The Grey Havens”)

(“Shale” here is an old variation of “shell”.)

Sam chooses a special place for this:

“The little silver nut he planted in the Party Field where the tree had once been; and he wondered what would come of it. All through the winter he remained as patient as he could, and tried to restrain himself from going round constantly to see if anything was happening.”

From this much build, we know that something just this side of miraculous must be about to happen—and it does:

“Spring surpassed his wildest hopes. His trees began to sprout and grow, as if time was in a hurry and wished to make one year do for twenty. In the Party Field a beautiful young sapling leaped up: it had silver bark and long leaves and burst into golden flowers in April. It was indeed a mallorn, and it was the wonder of the neighborhood. In after years, as it grew in grace and beauty, it was known far and wide and people would come long journeys to see it: the only mallorn west of the Mountains and east of the Sea; and one of the finest in the world.”

It seems that Tolkien so loved trees that he even invented one here. Mellyrn (the plural of mallorn by the same linguistic process which, in English, turns “foot” into “feet”) appear to be mostly a beech tree of the type called “Fagus sylvatica” or “European beech” (although there are also actual beech trees in Middle-earth).

Some adaptation has taken place: European beeches have spreading branches and can grow to as much as 150 feet, but Tolkien’s tree seems even bigger and has “long leaves”—longer than beech?—

and “golden flowers”, which beech trees don’t have, although the silver bark is similar.

So much of Middle-earth is visibly old, sometimes in layers of antiquity, and JRRT is very careful to present a Shire which lives on top of something older, as the East Road, which runs through its middle and had been built by the dwarves and improved upon by the Numenoreans reminds us. The Party Field, under that name, is almost brand new, however, the party being Bilbo and Frodo’s joint birthday, celebrated at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings. The original tree just happens to be in the middle of that field. This replacement, however, is clearly more than just a replacement and we’ll examine its possible significance and more in part 2 of this in our next posting.

In the meantime, thanks, as always for reading and

MTCIDC

Orc Looks

13 Wednesday Nov 2019

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

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Tags

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

As ever, dear readers, welcome.

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

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

to attacking Boromir and capturing Merry and Pippin

to forming the initial assault team on Minas Tirith.

But what do they really look like?

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

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

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

Our first real view of them comes just paragraphs later:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and Ted Nasmith–

although not in this image of the wounding of Boromir–

and sometimes in the work of Alan Lee,

as well as that of John Howe.

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

or this, by Alan Lee.

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

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

to being grossly human.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks, as always, for reading and

MTCIDC

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

Shortly after that, the Fellowship is attacked and:

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

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

Over the River…

06 Wednesday Mar 2019

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

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

atlas, Maps, Middle-earth, Roman Roads, Ted Nasmith, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien

As ever, dear readers, welcome.

Two postings ago, we had been discussing how time is marked in The Hobbit. After a one-post interlude—a book review—we were intending to extend our discussion (as our original plan was) to The Lord of the Rings, but something caught our attention and, in this posting, we’re still interluding—although it is about The Hobbit.

We had just set off from Bag End with Bilbo and the dwarves and noticed this:

“At first they had passed through hobbit-lands, a wide respectable country inhabited by decent folk, with good roads, an inn or two, and now and then a dwarf or a farmer ambling by on business. Then they came to lands where people spoke strangely, and sang songs Bilbo had never heard before. Now they had gone on far into the Lone-lands, where there were no people left, no inns, and the roads grew steadily worse. Not far ahead were dreary hills, rising higher and higher, dark with trees. On some of them were old castles with an evil look, as if they had been built by wicked people.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 2, “Roast Mutton”)

The company passes over an ancient bridge:

“Somewhere behind the grey clouds the sun must have gone down, for it began to get dark as they went down into a deep valley with a river at the bottom. Wind got up, and willows along its banks bent and sighed. Fortunately the road went over an ancient stone bridge, for the river, swollen with the rains, came rushing down from the hills and mountains in the north.”

They go on till Bilbo and the dwarves reach the trolls.

(drawings by JRRT)

Here, though, we want to pause for a moment and look back, and, like any careful—and curious—traveler, consult a map.

First—and this is something we noted in that previous post—there is really no hard evidence for just how long this leg of the trip took. All we are given are “At first”, “now and then”, “Then”, and “Now”, and the sense of distance comes to us as much through landscape changes as from those vague words: from “hobbit-lands” to “lands where people spoke strangely…” then “Now they had gone far into the Lone-lands”.

Second, looking at that map, there are certain puzzling words in that description of travel. The description twice says “roads”, at first “good roads”, then, as the journey goes eastwards, “the roads grew steadily worse”. Our map, however, shows only one road, the East or East/West Road, the history of which goes far into the history of Middle-earth and which we have always imagined that JRRT modeled on the remains of Roman roads one could still walk in England in his time—and even today.

(Here’s a LINK to a very good basic article on constructing roads in Roman Britain.)

And then there is this:

“Not far ahead were dreary hills, rising higher and higher, dark with trees. On some of them were old castles with an evil look, as if they had been built by wicked people.”

As far as we know, there are no “castles” in Middle-earth—the East Road does skirt Weathertop. As Aragorn says:

“The Old Road, which we have left far away on our right, runs to the south of it and passes not far from its foot.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 11, “A Knife in the Dark”)

And perhaps his description might—very roughly—fit a (ruined) castle:

“…in the first days of the North Kingdom, they built a great watch-tower on Weathertop, Amon Sul they called it. It was burned and broken, and nothing remains of it now but a tumbled ring, like a rough crown on the old hill’s head.”

As it was destroyed in the conflict against the Witch King of Angmar, we would certainly agree that “wicked people” had once been involved in its history.

Our puzzlement is not just about what appears in the text, however. There is also what’s missing (most of it shown on the map):

the bridge over the Brandywine which appears in the first paragraph of “The Scouring of the Shire”
any mention of the Greenway, which crosses the East Road at Bree
and then there is Bree itself

Of course, this is back-reading. We are looking at a map which is descended from one which JRRT gradually built up over time in the years after The Hobbit, when Middle-earth continued to grow and grow in his imagination and hence in his fiction. (For an extensive view of his work as a world-creator, see this intelligent and extremely useful volume by Karen Wynn Fonstad,

which deals with the whole history of Middle-earth in chronological order. For The Lord of the Rings, we would recommend this, by Barbara Strachey,

which has been our guide on a number of trips along Frodo’s route.)

As well, it’s good to remember that, for the most part, the company in The Hobbit is traveling at its own speed, a speed determined primarily by the countryside they cross and their trip seems—if occasionally miserable—almost leisurely, especially in comparison with The Lord of the Rings, in which so much of the first volume in particular lays out a route along which several of the main protagonists are driven by evil pursuers. The journey itself, in the latter, becomes, day by day, the focus of the narrative as they attempt to escape the Nazgul and that day-by-day quality is intensified after the wounding of Frodo on Weathertop, as he begins to fade and his friends are desperate to reach Rivendell.

The contrast between the two stories is especially striking here, as Bilbo and company are mocked and sung to by invisible elves in The Hobbit (Chapter 3, “A Short Rest”) as they ride down into the valley, whereas, in The Lord of the Rings (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 12, “Flight to the Ford”), we see this (by the excellent Ted Nasmith)—

This change in the narrative emphasis, from discrete events along a route in The Hobbit, to an emphasis upon the journey itself, will bring us back to our original discussion on the marking of time—moving now from the earlier book to The Lord of the Rings in our next posting.

Thanks, as always, for reading and

MTCIDC

We would guess, by the way, that that “ancient stone bridge” mentioned above is the so-called “Last Bridge”, which Glorifindel calls “the Bridge of Mitheithel” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 12, “Flight to the Ford”) and which crosses the River Hoarwell (“Mitheithel” to the elves) on the East Road.

PPS

If you grew up, as we did, hearing the song we hinted at in our title, you might want to learn more at this LINK…

On Time (2)

20 Wednesday Feb 2019

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

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Chronology, crannogs, Durin's Day, John Bauer, Laketown, Loch Tay, Lonely Mountain, Mirkwood, passing time, Scotland, Smaug, Ted Nasmith, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Thorin, Thror's Map, Tolkien

As always, dear readers, welcome.

Some years ago, we visited the Strong National Museum of Play, in Rochester, New York. (Highly recommended!)

image1strong

There, we had found this in one of the display cases–

image2chrono

It’s a reproduction of the first page of a chronology of The Lord of the Rings by JRRT, covering the end of September and the beginning of October of SR1418, from the Marquette University collection. Looking closely we could see just how detailed it was and, recently, we looked at the page again and it made us wonder just how visible such detailing was in the actual work: do we really see each day portrayed? Are there moments when days—or more—go by unmarked? If so, when? And why?

To answer our questions, we turned first to The Hobbit, as a kind of test case, and, in our last posting, had, by the end, reached the western edge of Mirkwood.

image3mirk

This, as the caption says, is a work by Ted Nasmith, one of our favorite Tolkien illustrators, but here’s JRRT’s version.

image4mirkwood

(As we’ve pointed out some time ago, Tolkien’s version would appear to owe something to the work of the early-20^th-century Swedish illustrator, John Bauer (1882-1918).)

image5bauer

As Gandalf waves a good-bye and shouts a final warning, the company plunges in—and immediately time seems to blur:

“All this went on for what seemed to the hobbit ages upon ages…days followed days, and still the forest seemed just the same…” (The Hobbit, Chapter 8, “Flies and Spiders”)

They reach a dangerous stream, one of their company falls in—and immediately drops into a deep sleep, forcing them to carry him as they move away from the stream and, although their journeying continues to seem endless:

“About four days from the enchanted stream they came to a part where most of the trees were beeches…A few leaves came rustling down to remind them that outside autumn was coming on…Two days later they found their path going downwards.”

Soon after that, Bilbo is sent up a tree to see where they are—and, it appears the next day they are tormented by visions of feasting elves. The next morning? the scattered dwarves and Bilbo are attacked by outsized spiders.

image6spider

As we said, this is all rather blurry—not many time words are used and, like the forest itself, the passage of time appears almost featureless. In the confusion around the elvish torment and the spiders, however, Thorin has disappeared, only to be made captive by those very elves and taken to the palace of their king.

image7palace

And then time moves forward—a little: “The day after the battle with the spiders Bilbo and the dwarves made one last despairing effort to find a way out before they died of hunger and thirst…Such day as there ever was in the forest was fading once more into the blackness of night, when suddenly out sprang the light of many torches all round them…” (The Hobbit, Chapter 9, “Barrels Out of Bond”)

The other dwarves are captured by the elves, but Bilbo, using his ring, escapes–and then manages to slip into the elves’ underground world—and into what appears to be another nearly-timeless place:

“Poor Mr. Baggins—it was a weary long time that he lived in that place all alone…Eventually, after a week or two of this sneaking sort of life, by watching and following the guards and taking what chances he could, he managed to find out where each dwarf was kept.

He found all their twelve cells in different parts of the palace, and after a time he got to know his way about very well.”

The chance discovery of the use of an underground stream as a method of shipping goods—and wine in particular—provides Bilbo with the final means to escape the elves, but how long does all of this, from the capture of the dwarves to that escape, take?

“For some time Bilbo sat and thought about this water-gate, and wondered if it could be used for the escape of his friends, and at last he had the desperate beginnings of a plan.”

If you are familiar with the story, you know that the plan entails escaping in barrels,

image8barrels

bobbing and rolling all night down the river till they were snagged and collected and, the next morning, moved on towards Lake-town, which they reached in the evening (“The sun had set when turning with another sweep towards the East the forest-river rushed into the Long Lake.”).

image9laketown

(This reminds us to mention crannogs—lake houses—of which there is a very convincing reconstruction on Loch Tay, in Scotland. Here’s a LINK if you’d like to know more.)

image10crannog

The dwarves and Bilbo had stayed in Lake-town two weeks when: “At the end of a fortnight Thorin began to think of departure.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 10, “A Warm Welcome”) When they actually departed, however, is unclear: “So one day, although autumn was now getting far on, and winds were cold, and leaves were falling fast, three large boats left Lake-town, laden with rowers, dwarves, Mr. Baggins, and many provisions.”

They land “On the Doorstep” (the title of Chapter 11) of the Lonely Mountain. It has taken them three days to get there by boat. (“In two days going they rowed right up the Long Lake and passed out into the River Running…At the end of the third day, some miles up the river, they drew in to the left or western bank and disembarked.” The Hobbit, Chapter 11, “On the Doorstep”)

image11lonely

But how long do they spend on that doorstep?

We know, from Elrond’s reading of the moon runes on Thror’s map, that there is a kind of deadline:

“Stand by the grey stone when the thrush knocks…and the setting sun with the last light of Durin’s Day will shine upon the key-hole.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 3, “A Short Rest”)

Thorin himself is hard-pressed to say exactly what day this is, but the dwarves and hobbit continue their journey to find the hidden back door.

After camping where their supplies have been left, they begin their actual explorations the next day. (“They spent a cold and lonely night…The next day they set out again.”) Bilbo and several of the dwarves make a brief expedition to the front door and back, seemingly within a day.

We now enter into another blurry period, for, as the dwarves and Bilbo search for the hidden door, all we read is “day by day they came back to their camp without success” until: “ ‘Tomorrow begins the last week of autumn,’ said Thorin one day.” And the next day—which is, in fact, the Durin’s Day of the map—they find and open the door.

image12door

Thorin sends Bilbo down into the dark, which, we presume takes some time because we are told that “It was midnight and clouds had covered the stars” when Balin carried him out. (The Hobbit, Chapter 12, “Inside Information”) He has taken a cup from Smaug’s hoard, however, and this rouses the dragon, forcing the dwarves to take shelter in the tunnel within the hidden door where they remain as Bilbo returns a second time—the next day—to visit Smaug again. (“The sun was shining as he started…”) That same day, they take shelter within the tunnel and Smaug seals them in.

How long they are sealed in isn’t initially clear: “They could not count the passing of time…At last after days and days of waiting” Chapter 13 begins, but, with the addition of “as it seemed”, suggesting that not much time—perhaps even only hours—had actually passed. (The Hobbit, Chapter 13, “Not at Home”). This is made clearer, however, when we are told: “As a matter of fact two nights and the day between had gone by…since the dragon smashed the magic door…”). After Bilbo makes another foray—followed by the others—down into Smaug’s lair, they find it empty, press beyond it, and, eventually, the same day, move their camp to an old watchpost on the southwest corner of the mountain.

image13erebor

(We presume that the post is at the left-hand edge of this JRRT illustration.)

Smaug, of course, has gone off to destroy Lake-town and is killed there

and soon a combined force of forest elves and men from the ruined Lake-town set off for the Lonely Mountain (“It was thus that in eleven days from the ruin of the town the head of their host passed the rock-gates at the end of the lake and came into the desolate lands.” The Hobbit, Chapter 14, “Fire and Water”)

The narrative then moves back once more to the dwarves, who, by means of an ancient raven, have heard what is approaching and begin to fortify the main door of the Mountain when: “There came a night when suddenly there were many lights as of fires and torches away south in Dale before them.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 15, “The Gathering of the Clouds”) Presumably, this is some days after the invaders have reached the desolate lands, though how many is not said, but, “The next morning early a company of spearmen was seen crossing the river…”

Thus begins the last big event in The Hobbit: the siege of the Mountain by elves and men and the following Battle of the Five Armies. With the arrival of the besiegers and the stalemate caused by Thorin’s stubbornness, time is blurred once more: “Now the days passed slowly and wearily.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 16, “A Thief in the Night”) It is suddenly marked, however, by news:

“Things had gone on like this for some time, when the ravens brought news that Dain and more than five hundred dwarves…were now about two days’ march of Dale…”

This sparks Bilbo into attempting to use the Arkenstone as a bargaining chip and “Next day trumpets rang early in the camp” (The Hobbit, Chapter 17, “The Clouds Burst”) as the allies try to deal with Thorin and here we see time, from being blurred, begins to be more clearly stated: after the “for some time”, we see “the next morning” and then, with the parley discouraged by dwarvish arrows, “That day passed and then the night” and, that following day, everything falls apart: Goblins and Wild Wolves appear and the allies, Dain and his Iron Mountain dwarves, and Thorin & Co, are all involved in a massive struggle which only ends when the Eagles arrive—and Beorn–, Bilbo is knocked unconscious, and Thorin is mortally wounded.

(This is by Justin Gerard—here’s a LINK to a really interesting website dedicated to fantasy illustration where we found it.)

The story hasn’t ended, however, though time goes back into its biggest blur yet. The dragon dead, the Mountain recovered by the dwarves, Bilbo “started on his long road home” . Long it is, as “by mid-winter Gandalf and Bilbo had come all the way back…to the doors of Beorn’s house: and there for a while they both stayed…It was spring, and a fair one with mild weathers and a bright sun, before Bilbo and Gandalf took their leave at last of Beorn…” (The Hobbit, Chapter 18, “The Return Journey”) We see them reach Elrond’s Last Homely House “on May the First”, though “after a week…[Bilbo and Gandalf] said farewell to Elrond” (The Hobbit, Chapter 19, “The Last Stage”). It is June, however, while the two are still on their journey (“for now June brought summer”) and, in fact, we are told that it is precisely the 22^nd of June that they arrive at Bag End, as, on that day, “Messrs Grubb, Grubb, and Burrowes” are about to auction off “the effects of the late Bilbo Baggins, Esquire”.

The book goes on a little further, into Bilbo’s future, but this seems like a good place for us to end this posting. What have we discovered with our investigation? We guess we would say that, in The Hobbit, time comes in two forms:

there is passing time—those blurs when people are traveling or waiting—this can be simply marked as time passing, or it may be described in weeks
there is slowed time—this is around important events in the narrative and is always specific to days

And, unless one keeps a very detailed journal

perhaps this can be seen as a kind of imitation of everyone’s life: long stretches of just “doing things” broken up by short patches of intense, memorable activity. What do you think, readers?

And, while you’re thinking, thanks for reading.

MTCIDC

Orc Arsenal.1

26 Wednesday Sep 2018

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Fairy Tales and Myths, Heroes, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, The Rohirrim

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Alan Lee, And Inquiry Into Ancient Armour, Angus McBride, arming sword, Battle Axe, English Longbowmen, Eowyn, Falchion, Gladius, Gondor, Hildebrandts, Howard Pyle, John Howe, King Arthur, Longbow, Mace, Medieval, Mongols, Morning Star, Orcs, Pelennor, Pitt-Rivers Museum, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rohirrim, Scimitar, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir Samuel Meyrick, Ted Nasmith, The Black Arrow, The Lord of the Rings, The White Company, Tolkien, Victorian, Wallace Collection, War Hammer, Weaponry, Witch-King of Angmar

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

“The great shadow descended like a falling cloud. And behold! It was a winged creature…

Upon it sat a shape, black-mantled, huge and threatening…A great black mace he wielded.”

(The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 6, “The Battle of the Pelennor Fields”)

This is clearly a scene which has caught the attention, over the years, of many artists, starting, we’d guess, with the Hildebrandts.

Then others, like Angus McBride and Ted Nasmith,

And Alan Lee and John Howe,

as well as many very good artists whom we don’t know by name—

Of these, all but Lee and the unknown sixth artist follow JRRT’s description more or less closely. Number 6—it’s a little unclear– but he might be carrying a war hammer of some sort,

rather than a mace.

(These last two are basic patterns of a mace.)

The Lee is, well, we’re not sure what it seems to be. It sort of looks like a battle axe

but also like what was called a “morning star”,

which should, we think, belong to the flail family.

This rather fits in with the P Jackson image, shown in this model (and note that sword—definitely not in the original description—which is in his other hand).

This difference made us curious about the weapons the Rohirrim—and the Gondorians—face and, in particular, those of the orcs. The Hildebrandts

provide us with odd-looking spears and what might appear to be scimitars

but might be the suggestion of a medieval sword called a falchion.

McBride, who spent much of his artistic career illustrating military subjects, gives us weapons (mostly) less fanciful.

Lee

and Howe

veer between the practical and the fantastic and the films clearly follow them—

How does JRRT describe the orc weaponry?

The first armed orc we see appears in Moria:

“His broad flat face was swart, his eyes were like coals, and his tongue was red; he wielded a great spear…Sam, with a cry, hacked at the spear-shaft, and it broke. But even as the orc flung down the truncheon and swept out his scimitar…” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 5, “The Bridge of Khazad-dum”)

The orcs who pursue the Fellowship through Moria have similar weapons:

“Beyond the fire he saw swarming black figures: there seemed to be hundreds of orcs. They brandished spears and scimitars which shone red as blood in the firelight.”

After the death of Boromir, however, Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas find a different kind of orc:

“There were four goblin-soldiers of greater stature, swart, slant-eyed, with thick legs and large hands. They were armed with short broad-bladed swords, not with the curved scimitars usual with Orcs: and they had bows of yew, in length and shape like the bows of Men.” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 1, “The Departure of Boromir”)

So far, we’ve seen spears

and scimitars

and now we can add to that “short broad-bladed swords”. Perhaps Tolkien is thinking of the medieval “arming sword”

or even the Roman gladius?

When we add “bows of yew, in length and shape like the bows of Men”, we immediately see the classic English longbow.

This doesn’t quite match with the first orc bowman we see in the films, however, “Lurtz”—

who appears to have some sort of recurved bow, possibly composite, of the sort the Mongols used

even though, from the white hand on his face, he is supposed to be one of those “goblin-soldiers” from Isengard.

As we were looking through Tolkien’s text, we wondered where he would have gotten his ideas for weapons from. If the basis, as we imagine it, would have been his background in medieval literature, then he might have gone to the library and found an old standard work, Sir Samuel Meyrick’s (1783-1848)

An Inquiry Into Ancient Armour, As It Existed in Europe, Particularly in Great Britain, From the Norman Conquest to the Reign of Charles the Second, first published in 1824. (Here’s a LINK if you’d like to look at this text for yourself.)

Meyrick was the first great English specialist in armor and the later editions of his work (in 3 volumes) have wonderful early hand-colored plates, all based upon surviving armor, tombs, manuscripts, and any other period materials he could gather.

If JRRT wanted to see such things for himself, he would have found more exotic weapons in the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford,

or he could have traveled up to London to see the Wallace Collection

or, best of all, he could have visited the Tower of London, with its massive collection (the organizing of which had earned Meyrick his knighthood in 1832) of medieval arms and armor, which had been available to the public in some form even before Meyrick’s time—here’s a Victorian tour.

It could have been all of the above, of course, but it seems to us that the descriptions we’re reading are actually not really very specific—“mace”, “spear”, “scimitar”—only those short swords and bows suggest anything more detailed. Perhaps, then, Tolkien was inspired by something else—perhaps he had read, perhaps even possessed, as a boy, books like Howard Pyle’s 1903 The Story of King Arthur and His Knights

and been inspired by its illustrations.

There were plenty of illustrated tales like this—Conan Doyle’s The White Company (first published in serial form in 1891),

or Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Black Arrow (serial 1883, book 1888).

With any and all of that background, we wonder what he might have made of this, however, an orc sword from the films which looks more like something manufactured from a car part than the product of a medieval armorer…

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

If car part weapons don’t bother you, you might be interested in this LINK—it’s an early article on ideas for weapons and armor for the Jackson films.

In a Pukel

09 Wednesday May 2018

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Fairy Tales and Myths, J.R.R. Tolkien, Maps, Medieval Russia, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, The Rohirrim

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balbal, Carnac Stones, Cherna, Denis Gordeev, Druadan Forest, Dunharrow, Easter Island, Eored, Ghan-buri-Ghan, Gondor, menhirs, moai, Pukel-men, Rapa Nui, Rohan, Rohirrim, Stonewain Valley, Ted Nasmith, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Unfinished Tales, Vsadniki, Woses

Welcome, dear readers, as ever.

After their mustering and rapid journey to the aid of Gondor, the Rohirrim

have been stopped:

“Scouts had been sent ahead. Some had not returned. Others hastening back had reported that the road was held in force against them. A host of the enemy was encamped upon it, three [4.8km]] miles west of Amon Din, and some strength of men was already thrusting along the road and was not more than three leagues [about 9 miles/14.5km] away.” (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 5, “The Ride of the Rohirrim”)

And so they are camped temporarily in the murk which has fallen over the West—a sign of Sauron on the move.

As they remain there, Merry gradually hears a sound like distant drums and, when Elfhelm, the Marshal of the eored [Rohirrim unit of horsemen] in which Merry and his mysterious companion, Dernhelm, are riding, stumbles over him, Merry asks if it’s the enemy:

“Are those their drums?”

Elfhelm replies:

“You hear the Woses, the Wild Men of the Woods…They still haunt Druadan Foest, it is said…But they have offered their services to Theoden. Even now one of their headmen is being taken to the king.”

Merry follows Elfhelm and soon sees:

“A large lantern, covered above, was hanging from a bough and cast a pale circle of light below. There sat Theoden and Eomer, and before them on the ground sat a strange squat shape of a man, gnarled as an old stone, and the hairs of his scanty beard straggled on his lumpy chin like dry moss. He was short-legged and fat-armed, thick and stumpy, and clad only with grass about his waist.”

This, we find out, is Ghan-buri-Ghan, leader of the Wild Men, who, as Elfhelm has said, has come to offer his and his people’s aid to Theoden.

(We note, by the way, that this Hildebrandt illustration has taken certain liberties with the scene as described in the book: it appears to be daylight—no lantern—if Eomer is there, he isn’t seated, and there is more than one Wild Man–oh, and the Wild Man’s beard has suddenly sprouted.)

What Ghan-buri-Ghan offers Theoden is a long-forgotten road which would provide a way around the soldiers of Sauron who are blocking the direct route to Minas Tirith: the path through the Stonewain Valley.

What caught our attention here was the connection Merry made between Ghan-buri-Ghan and something he’d encountered only recently:

“Merry felt that he had seen him before somewhere, and suddenly he remembered the Pukel-men of Dunharrow. Here was one of those old images brought to life, or maybe a creature descended in true line through endless years from the models used by the forgotten craftsmen long ago.”

Dunharrow

was a mysterious place—

“…the work of long-forgotten men. Their name was lost and no song or legend remembered it. For what purpose they had made this place, as a town or secret temple or a tomb of kings, none in Rohan could say. Here they labored in the Dark Years, before ever a ship came to the western shores, or Gondor of the Dunedain was built; and now they had vanished, and only the old Pukel-men were left, still sitting at the turnings of the road.

Merry stared at the lines of marching stones: they were worn and black; some were leaning, some were fallen, some cracked or broken; they looked like rows of old and hungry teeth.” (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 3, “The Muster of Rohan”)

For a moment, this description reminded us of something one sees in Brittany, on the west coast of France, the so-called “Carnac Stones”, a vast field of Neolithic upright stones, now called menhirs (Breton for “long stone”) in long lines in and around the village of Carnac.

And, just as the use or meaning of Dunharrow is lost, so is that of the elaborate construction of the Carnac Stones.

Once the Carnac Stones—and others like them, both in France and in Great Britain—came into our heads, we were whirled away to Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and all of those puzzling outsized heads on less-developed torsos, the moai.

It was not the size or placement of those figures like “rows of old and hungry teeth” however, which made us think further about Ghan-buri-Ghan and his stony cousins, but how the figures were carved:

“At each turn of the road there were great standing stones that had been carved in the likeness of men, huge and clumsy-limbed, squatting cross-legged with their stumpy arms folded on fat bellies. Some in the wearing of the years had lost all features save the dark holes of their eyes that still stared sadly at the passers-by. The Riders hardly glanced at them. The Pukel-men they called them, and heeded them little…”

As the Rohirrim are translated as speaking among themselves a sort of Tolkien-adapted Old English, so “pukel” appears to be derived from “pucel” = “goblin/demon”, which suggests perhaps a quasi-religious or magical use, but, if they once represented spirits, they are now spiritless, with no ability to frighten. Rather, as the narrator tells us:

“…no power or terror was left in them; but Merry gazed at them with wonder and a feeling almost of pity, as they loomed up mournfully in the dusk.”

The narrator’s elaboration then reminded us of something else: balbal.

These are carved stone figures with a history probably as long as that of the Pukel-men. They appear to be the product of Turkic peoples in Central Asia—with even older relatives, perhaps, to the west, as well. Some may have been tomb guardians or monuments themselves—as with the Pukel-men, their origins and use/s are lost to us. We ourselves have stolen them for use in our series of novels based in an imaginary medieval fairy tale Russia, called Cherna, “The Black Land”—but please don’t think “Mordor?” In our case, the reason it’s named that is that it is steppe country with extremely fertile black soil. So rich, especially as pasture-land, that it’s worth invading and fighting over, which is what the villains of our trilogy, the Vsadniki, modeled on the Mongols, do.

Unlike Pukel-men and menhirs and moai, however, there is no mystery about what the Vsadniki are up to with their stones: every time they conquer a new land, they set such stones up at their new far-western border to say not only “what’s behind these is ours”, but also “and we’re looking at your lands next”.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

In the Tolkien volume Unfinished Tales, we find further connections between the Wild Men/Woses and carvings. We use a paperback edition and this has somewhat different pagination from the hardbound, but, should you be interested, you can find it in either form in Part Four, I The Druedain.

pps

Here is a drawing of Ghan-buri-Ghan by Denis Gordeev, who has done a good deal of work illustrating a wide selection of JRRT’s fiction, rather as Ted Nasmith has, along with many other classics as well as modern fantasy fiction.

Gordeev has clearly been trained/trained himself in drawing as people did in that golden age of children’s writing and illustration, the 1880s to 1920s, and, once you get used to his very distinctive style, you may come to like it as we do. Here’s Gandalf arriving in Hobbiton, fireworks and all, just to give you a taste.

Hoards of the Things

28 Wednesday Jun 2017

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

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A Christmas Carol, A Visit to William Blake's Inn, Aeetes, Alexander Deruchenko, Alice and Martin Provensen, Argo, Barrow-downs, Barrow-wights, Beowulf, Bilbo, Charles Dickens, Cinderella's Dress, Colchis, Collyer Brothers, David Gwillim, dragon-sickness, Dragons, Dwarves, Ebenezer Scrooge, Eurystheus, Hera, Heracles, Hoard, hordweard, Jack Gwillim, Jane Dyer, Jason and the Argonauts, Jason and the Golden Fleece, Kinder und Hausmaerchen, Ladon, Lonely Mountain, magpie, Nancy Willard, Neolithic, Scrooge McDuck, Scythians, Ted Nasmith, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Treasure

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

Recently, we’ve had a couple of posts on dragons and hoards, but, having done a certain amount of research and thinking and writing, we’ve come back once again to the subject, with the question: why would a dragon want a hoard to begin with?

The earliest Western European stories we know in which dragons (or serpents—the Greek word can apply to either) are associated with valuables are:

the 11^th labor of Heracles, in which his cousin, Eurystheus, demands that Heracles bring him the Golden Apples of the Hesperides (“children of the evening star”)—which are on an island guarded by a 100-headed (in some versions of the story) dragon/serpent called Ladon

the story of Jason and the Argo, in which Jason must bring back to Greece the Golden Fleece, also guarded by a dragon/serpent (a sleepless one this time)

In both of these stories, the dragon is the agent for someone else—Hera, in the case of the Golden Apples,

and Aeetes, the king of Colchis, in that of the Golden Fleece.

(We’ve always loved the curly beard of Jack Gwillim in Jason and the Argonauts—1963. His son, David, by the way, was a perfect Prince Hal and Henry V in BBC productions from 1979—if you can find them, we highly recommend them.)

After these, we see the dragon of Beowulf.

In his case, although he’s called hordweard, “hoard guardian/watchman”, we are told that he has come upon a treasure in a barrow, piled in for safe-keeping several hundred years before. Europeans in the Neolithic Period and long beyond buried high-status people in such places—like this, in Denmark.

As it was the custom for high-status people to be buried with at least some of their riches, it’s easy to see how singers might be inspired to create a barrow like that of the Beowulf dragon. Some of our favorite grave goods come from the Scythians, a horse-people who once lived north of the Black Sea, and who had buried them in grave mounds with their dead.

(A wonderfully atmospheric picture by Alexander Deruchenko.)

The Beowulf dragon is not the proper owner of the hoard: rather, he has taken possession (the poem may even be suggesting that dragons—or this dragon, at least– have a special affection for barrows (2270-2278), rather as the barrow wights have taken over the tumuli on the Barrow Downs, both places being much older and long-abandoned. You may remember this striking image by one of our favorite Tolkien artists, Ted Nasmith–

In contrast, Smaug has taken possession of the Lonely Mountain by force, burning out the rightful owners.

In both cases, however, the latest owner is very sensitive about his new property: the removal of one object, as Beowulf and Bilbo find out.

(And we can’t resist this item—it’s copy of a cup used in the 2007 Beowulf film. We don’t see that it would be very useful for drinking from, but it’s certainly fun to look at!)

It’s one thing if it’s your job to guard gold: you’re like a sheepdog with a flock. (Here’s a Maremma, in fact, with a flock.)

It’s another if you are occupying, seized or not, someone else’s gold. In the latter case, however, we are still left with our initial question: why is this important to a dragon?

Perhaps they just like the look of it. After all, Smaug seems quite proud of what he sees as a waistcoat of precious things. When Bilbo says: “What a magnificence to possess a waistcoat of fine diamonds!” Smaug replies “Yes, it is rare and wonderful, indeed.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 12, “Inside Information”) Yet there is the darker side:

“To say that Bilbo’s breath was taken away is no description at all. There are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful. Bilbo had heard tell and sing of dragon-hoards before, but the splendor, the lust, the glory of such treasure had never yet come home to him. His heart was filled and pierced with enchantment and with the desire of dwarves; and he gazed motionless, almost forgetting the frightful guardian, at the gold beyond price and count.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 12, “Inside Information”)

Just seeing such wealth brought on “lust” and “the desire of dwarves” and it’s clear that this is what infects Thorin after Smaug’s death and eventually brings on the “dragon-sickness” which leads to the end of the Master of Laketown (The Hobbit, Chapter 19, “The Last Stage”). As this “lust” for beautiful, valuable things seems inherent in the dwarves, it strikes us that we might imagine dragons as somehow enablers or carriers—like anopheles mosquitoes and malaria—

rather than originators of the disease and that the name is derived from that combination of acquisitiveness and sensitivity we noted earlier and which so clearly disturbs Thorin’s judgement.

But perhaps there is something in the idea of hoarding itself. In our world, “hoarding” has come to have a different meaning, being a kind of psychological condition in which a person acquires and acquires and has lost the ability to discard anything for complex internal reasons. In literature, one might imagine that misers have something of this—think of Ebenezer Scrooge, in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843).

Or, Uncle Scrooge McDuck, from Walt Disney comics. Who, as you can see, takes this to an extreme even Dickens’ Scrooge might find a bit excessive.

Underneath this, however, is the sad side: those who become imprisoned by their possessions, a famous case being that of the Collyer brothers in New York, whose apartment, after their joint deaths in 1947, was a subject both of curiosity and of mild horror in the New York newspapers of the time.

Is it possible that the Beowulf dragon and Smaug both suffer from this condition? Is that why the theft of a single piece from an uncountable hoard seems to mean so much?

We never want to shy away from serious subjects—after all, all of the best fantasy/adventure writers never did—but it’s an early summer day where we live—just after Midsummer’s Day, in fact, and so we’d like to end with another kind of acquisitor—the magpie.

Traditionally, magpies are famous for being attracted to—and collecting—shiny objects. Our favorite magpie story, however, isn’t about obsession, but about generosity. It’s a beautiful children’s book by Nancy Willard and Jane Dyer, entitled Cinderella’s Dress.

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In this book, told in light, easy verse, we see a magpie couple as fairy godparents for Cinderella, using their cache of shiny things to—but we’ll leave that to you to discover (although the title is a bit of a give-away). Here’s another page to tease you…

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

Another Nancy Willard book you might enjoy is A Visit to William Blake’s Inn (1981), illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen.

Bordering (.1: The Landscape)

29 Wednesday Mar 2017

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

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Anglo-Scots border, Black Middens Bastle, blackmail, Border Marches, Border Reivers, Border Wardens, Charlemagne, Debatable Lands, Emyn Beraid, Fairbairns, Hadrian's Wall, Hermitage Castle, hot trod, John Philip Sousa, Marca Hispanica, Marches, Monty Python, Offa's Dyke, Robert Carey, Scots Dike, Smailholm Tower, Ted Nasmith, The Liberty Bell, The Lord of the Rings, The Shire, Tolkien, Tower Hills, West March

Welcome once more, dear readers.

In this posting, we want to return to a recent one about “marches”—that is, not pieces for military bands (although we are partial to those of John Philip Sousa—1854-1932–

especially “The Liberty Bell”—1893—

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mostly because it was used by Monty Python. We provide a link here for what might have been its first recording, by the “Edison Grand Concert Band” in 1896. Watch out for the big foot!)

but border areas, usually sensitive ones, which might have been militarized, like that at the southern edge of Charlemagne’s empire.

This, the Marca Hispanica, existed as a buffer state between the Moorish Caliphate to its south and the Holy Roman Empire to the north.

In contrast, we have the West March, to the west of the Shire, as we’ve discussed before.

At its far western edge are the Tower Hills (here illustrated by one of our favorite Tolkien artists, Ted Nasmith)

on which are perched three white towers, described in the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings:

“Three Elf-towers of immemorial age were still to be seen on the Tower Hills beyond the western marches. They shone far off in the moonlight. The tallest was furthest away, standing alone upon a green mound. The Hobbits of the Westfarthing said that one could see the Sea from the top of that tower; but no Hobbit had ever been known to climb it.” (Gandalf adds to this that there was a palantir, Elendil’s Stone, located there—The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 11, “The Palantir”.)

The difference is, those towers don’t seem defensive and the West March is not a military zone—although it is the site of Hobbit-expansion, as Appendix B tells us:

“1452 The Westmarch, from the Far Downs to the Tower Hills (Emyn Beraid) is added to the Shire by the gift of the King. Many hobbits remove to it.

1462 …the Thain makes Fastred Warden of Westmarch. Fastred and Elanor make their dwelling at Undertowers on the Tower Hills, where their descendants, the Fairbairns of the Towers, dwelt for many generations.”

Talk of marches and wardens and towers, however, immediately brought to mind for us something from our world (doesn’t it always?).

This is the border area between England and Scotland, an area of conflict for several centuries, but culminating in the struggles of the 16^th century.

The border area had been divided, on both sides, into three marches, with a subset for that area on the southwest side called the “Debatable Lands”, because both England and Scotland claimed it. In 1552, the decision was mutually made to put up an earthen barrier, the so-called “Scots Dike”, to split it.

Unlike Hadrian’s Wall, farther to the south, with its system of walls and towers and gates and little forts and big army camps, this was never an elaborate military structure, or even like Offa’s Dike between England and Wales,

but simply a boundary marker in low-lying land (and only 3.5 miles long– 5.6km).

When it came to the border towards the east, and the center of the region and beyond, however, the land rises into the characteristic twisty hills with long, narrow valleys.

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In this wild world, there are no long walls, of stone, wood, or earth to protect anyone, but castles, towers, and fortified farmhouses called bastles (possibly from the same root as “Bastille”?). Here we see Hermitage Castle, Smailholm Tower, and Black Middens Bastle.

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Although we see these now as gaunt ruins, we should always imagine them—as in this reconstruction of Smailholm—as living spaces, as well as refuges in an often lawless land.

One has only to see the thick walls of a bastle and, originally, no door at ground level (stairs appear to be a later convenience for a more peaceable time), to imagine the danger from reivers, raiders from either side of the Anglo-Scots border and sometimes, as there was a certain amount of intermarriage, from both.

As can be seen in this reconstruction, these walls might be all that would stand between the inhabitants and destitution or even death, should the reivers come raiding.

There was also the possibility of buying them off, by paying them blackmail, a word whose origin is contested, but whose purpose is clear: protection money. If you paid them, in coin or cattle, you were safe—at least until the price went up.

Curbing such behavior was the job of the Border Wardens, there being six, one for each March on each side of the border. Theirs was a difficult job: too much territory, too few men, and too few resources to back them up. Wonderfully, one of these Wardens, Robert Carey, has left us a memoir, which is available on-line: memoirsrobertca00orregoog.

If you were attacked and you survived, you might send word to the Warden or one of his officers, who could organize a posse to pursue the raiders. By law, all able-bodied locals were supposed to turn out to help when the organizer—Warden or officer—rode by with trumpeter and a rider who carried a flaming bit of peat on his “staff” (local word for “lance”).

This was called the “hot trod” and, under its conditions, the pursuers were allowed to cross the border. Such occasions could be very dangerous, however, as those raiders would be chased back across their own territory, giving them the chance to delay or destroy those in pursuit in an ambush on familiar ground.

We were originally drawn to this part of the world and of Anglo-Scottish history because of our interest in the musical literature of the region, the so-called “border ballads”, and, in our next, “Bordering (.2 Blackmail, Battle, and Song”) we’ll talk a bit about them—and perhaps a bit more about borders and heroic behavior, as well.

Thanks as ever, for reading!

MTCIDC

Infrastructure and Architecture in Rivendell

28 Wednesday Sep 2016

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

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Alan Lee, architecture, bridge, Bruinen, footbridge, Illustration, Lauterbrunnental, Middle-earth, Ottoman, packhorse bridge, Peter Jackson, Ring of Silvianus, Rivendell, Roman Britain, Roman villa, Sir Mortimer Wheeler, Stari Most, Ted Nasmith, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Wasdale

Welcome, dear readers, as ever. In our last posting, we looked at the Greenway from a comparative perspective. In this one, we’ve got an idea or two from having looked as closely as we could at one of JRRT’s illustrations of Rivendell, comparing it with various modern conceptions, including that in the films of P. Jackson.

Rivendell, Sindarin, Imladris, “deep valley in a cleft”, is located on the eastern edge of Eriador, at the foot of the Misty Mountains. Set in that deep valley, which was formed by the action of the river Bruinen (“Loudwater”), it was besieged on several occasions throughout its lifetime, but had survived to be the last refuge of the Elves on that side of the mountains.

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It is understood that Tolkien based it upon a Swiss valley, Lauterbrunnental, which he had visited on a hiking trip in 1911.

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(And maybe there’s an echo in the name—which is sometimes translated “Louder Springs”—in Bruinen, “Loudwater”?)

Here is the Tolkien illustration

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We want to look at two features here. First, in the middle ground, there is that bridge. Here is Alan Lee’s very beautiful version—although you will note that it’s been moved and shortened. The-Hobbit-and-dwarfts-on-the-bridge-alan-lee-18907573-1024-768

As we examined this bridge as closely as we could, we wondered, where had the idea come from for its shape? And two possibilities came to mind. First, because we’re very much World History people, we thought of those beautiful bridges from the Ottoman world. There are a number of surviving bridges which are more elaborate, but there are also single-arch bridges like these, which bear a strong resemblance to the bridge in Tolkien’s illustration.

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To us, one of the most beautiful is the Stari Most (Bosnian, “Old Bridge”), in Mostar (Bosnian, “Bridge Keeper”), which was built in the 16^th century, destroyed in 1993, and rebuilt, and reopened in 2004.

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Moving a little closer to home (England, that is, in the case of JRRT), another possibility for a model might be something mentioned in our last posting, when we talked about medieval English roads as mostly packhorse trails. Here’s a perfect example, from Wasdale in the Lake District of northern England, a packhorse bridge.

(n) The pack horse bridge behind the Wasdale Head Inn

Moving upstream from the bridge in Tolkien’s picture, we see a house depicted.

rivjrrt2

It’s hard to make it out, even under magnification, but, when we compare it with:

the buildings in the Jackson films

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Alan Lee’s Rivendell

leerivendell

or even Ted Nasmith’s,

rivendell TN-Fair_Valley_of_Rivendell

we personally don’t think anyone quite captures what Tolkien drew. To us, there appears to be, as we said before, something closer to home–in the reconstructions of Roman villas and their outbuildings. And, as we said in our last, so much of Roman Britain was still available, either above or below ground, that we can imagine JRRT being aware of it. (In fact, in 1929, the archaeologist, Sir Mortimer Wheeler actually consulted him on an ancient curse and the inscription on a Roman-British ring. See the Ring of Silvianus wiki page). Possible examples, some from reconstructed sites:

villa_mehring_01 villa archeon_temple_cuijk2 delaguia Gayton-Villa-Colour-web

Blow up the Tolkien illustration for yourself, dear readers, and what do you think?

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

doubtfulsea

~ adventure fantasy

Tag Archives: Ted Nasmith

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Into the Trees.1

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Over the River…

On Time (2)

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Hoards of the Things

Bordering (.1: The Landscape)

Infrastructure and Architecture in Rivendell