Green and Quiet.1

05 Wednesday Sep 2018

Posted by lebedusya1 in Economics in Middle-earth, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History

Tags

Birmingham, Charles Dickens, Cottage industry, factories, Goblins, Hard Times, Hilary Tolkien, I Can't Find Brummagem, Industrial Revolution, Isengard, James Dobbs, John Ezard, Mabel Tolkien, Mills, Ornthanc, Sarehole, Sharkey, The Hobbit, The Scouring of the Shire, Tolkien, World War I

As always, dear readers, welcome.

We’ve always loved the lines

“By some curious chance one morning long ago in the quiet of the world, when there was less noise and more green…”

which open the paragraph in which Gandalf first appears in The Hobbit and the story actually begins.

For JRRT, green and quiet are the ideal, but things have clearly changed—as this sentence implies, now there is more noise and less quiet. In our time—and even before Tolkien’s childhood in the late 19^th century—the green and quiet were and are going thanks to the Industrial Revolution. Or so we thought. Reading Tolkien, however, we begin to believe that it’s goblins:

“Now goblins are cruel, wicked, and bad-hearted. They make no beautiful things, but they make many clever ones. They can tunnel and mine as well as any but the most skilled dwarves, when they take the trouble, though they are usually untidy and dirty. Hammers, axes, swords, daggers, pickaxes, tongs, and also instruments of torture, they make very well, or get other people to do the work to make to their design, prisoners and slaves that have to work till they die for want of air and light. It is not unlikely that they have invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them, and also not working with their own hands more than they could help; but in those days and those wild parts they had not advanced (as it is called) so far.” (The Hobbit, Chapter Four, “Over Hill and Under Hill”)

In our last posting, we had linked this passage with the invention of poison gases by German scientists and their use first by German soldiers and then by the Allies in the Great War, but we would like to add to that idea that this may be in reality a larger indictment, of the Industrial Revolution and the effects it had had upon the English countryside.

This revolution had begun in the 18^th century, in Britain, when the country was first becoming a major mercantile and colonial power and the demand for British goods—especially British wool and cloth—was growing. A succession of inventions from the 1760s on had turned a (literal) “cottage industry” of clothing-making—

into something which produced thread and cloth on a massive scale in early factories.

These factories, often called “mills” because of their original use of waterpower,

as was done in the small factories which, all the way back to Roman times, had ground grain into flour,

could also, in time, be run by steam power.

Mills of this sort soon became prototypes for factories built to mass-produce anything

and soon the air around cities was thick with smoke and industrial waste.

With no laws to stop them, mill/factory owners bought up land, employed people (many of them ex-cottage workers thrown out of work by the very factories they now sought work in) in near-slave conditions—including children–and polluted water and air with no fear of punishment. Here is Charles Dickens’ description of a town filled such places, from his 1854 novel, Hard Times:

“It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.”

Set this next to Gandalf’s description of what had happened to Isengard and you can see what we mean about goblins (here, Saruman and his orcs—but JRRT sometimes uses goblin and orc interchangeably) as what has destroyed the quiet and green:

“I looked on it and saw that, whereas it had once been green and fair, it was now filled with pits and forges…Over all his works a dark smoke hung and wrapped itself about the sides of Orthanc.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 3, “The Council of Elrond”)

In 1895, Tolkien’s mother, Mabel,

who had been living in South Africa with her husband, brought her two sons, JRRT and Hilary, to the Birmingham area of England for a visit to relatives.

Unfortunately, while they were gone, Tolkien’s father died of rheumatic fever. Mabel decided to stay in England and found a place for her sons and herself at Sarehole, southeast of Birmingham itself.

Birmingham was a booming product of that Industrial Revolution, which we’re sure is why Mabel chose a tiny village several miles away.

Birmingham was also an ancient settlement, (here’s a LINK to a minitour of the medieval town) but had mushroomed, both in factories and population even at the beginning of the 19^th century, as this verse from a music hall song from 1828 by James Dobbs depicts:

‘I remember one John Growse,
Who buckles made in Brummagem,
He built himself a country house,
To be out of the smoke of Brummagem
But though John’s country house stands still,
The town itself has walked up hill,
Now he lives beside a smoky mill,
In the middle of the streets of Brummagem.”

(James Dobbs (1781-1837), “I Can’t Find Brummagem”. Brummagem is an old local nickname for Birmingham. Here’s a LINK so that you can see the whole song and its tune, which we know as “Duncan Grey”. If you go to the link, you’ll notice we’ve made a few editorial additions, which we knew from another version of the song and which help the words to better fit the tune.)

And yet, although Sarehole had an old mill, it was not like those in Birmingham or even in Dickens,

and, in later years, in fact, Tolkien saw the little village beyond it as a kind of paradise, as he said in an interview:

‘It was a kind of lost paradise,’ he said. ‘There was an old mill that really did grind corn with two millers, a great big pond with swans on it, a sandpit, a wonderful dell with flowers, a few old-fashioned village houses and, further away, a stream with another mill. I always knew it would go – and it did.’

(This is taken from an article by John Ezard in The Guardian for 28 December, 1991—here’s a LINK so that you can read all of it.)

This strong contrast between green and quiet and its opposites, as seen in Sarehole versus Birmingham, early in Tolkien’s life, and the two stages of Isengard, will appear again in the Shire as Saruman/Sharkey has planned. The green and quiet is literally uprooted and even Sandyman’s old mill is a victim of the goblinesque work as Farmer Cotton says:

“But since Sharkey came they don’t grind no more corn at all. They’re always a-hammering and a-letting out a smoke and stench, and there’s no peace even at night in Hobbiton. And they pour out filth a purpose; they’ve fouled all the lower Water, and it’s getting down into Brandywine.”

(The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 8, “The Scouring of the Shire”)

Those who work for Sharkey are men, but, as you can see, under his influence, they act very much like those destructive goblins with which we began. For all that he rode in automobiles and trains and used telephones and typewriters, JRRT was never quite happy in the modern world and, considering that the goblins seemed always poised to ruin more green and produce more noise at the command of a modern-day Saruman, it’s perhaps not surprising. It’s also not surprising, we would add, that his favorite creatures, trees, are the ones who destroy Saruman’s handiwork at Isengard and return it to a leafy park.

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

In our next, we want to talk about another aspect of quiet which had changed from Tolkien’s childhood and may be a reason why there are Rohirrim and why JRRT himself enlisted in the volunteer cavalry…

Gobs and Hobs.2

29 Wednesday Aug 2018

Posted by lebedusya1 in Artists and Illustrators, Fairy Tales and Myths, J.R.R. Tolkien, Language, Literary History

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A Midsummer Night's Dream, Arthur Rackham, Christina Rossetti, Elf Child, Fairies, Fairy Tale, George Macdonald, Goblin Feet, Goblin Market, Goblins, Historia Ecclesiastica, Hobgoblin, James Whitcomb Riley, John Garth, John Singer Sargent, King Edward's Horse, Little Orphan Annie, Orderic Vitalis, Pat Walsh, Psalm 91, Robin Goodfellow, The Crowfield Curse, The Crowfield Demon, The Hob and the Deerman, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Princess and the Goblin, Tolkien, Tolkien and the Great War, Tolkien at Exeter College

As always, dear Readers, welcome!

In our last, we were talking about JRRT’s 1915 poem, “Goblin Feet” its origins, original publication, and context.

In this, we want to think out loud a bit about the idea of goblins in general.

Although the poem was entitled “Goblin Feet”, Tolkien seemed not to focus so much on goblins—there are also other creatures from the Otherworld, including fairies and gnomes and even leprechauns (not to mention bats—called by their old country name “flitter-mice”—and beetles and coneys).

In this posting, however, we’re going to stick to goblins—well, and hobgoblins—but more about those later.

We first encountered goblins as very small children when a teacher read us a poem by the American poet, James Whitcomb Riley (1849-1916).

(We can’t resist a second picture. This is by one of our favorite late-19^th-early-20^th-c. American Painters, John Singer Sargent—1856-1925.)

This poem, first entitled “Elf Child”, originally appeared in a newspaper in 1885. After that, it was meant to be “Little Orphan Allie”, but, owing to a typsetter’s error, it gained its present title, which it’s had ever since.

Little Orphant Annie – Poem by James Whitcomb Riley

To all the little children: — The happy ones; and sad ones;
The sober and the silent ones; the boisterous and glad ones;
The good ones — Yes, the good ones, too; and all the lovely bad ones.

Little Orphant Annie’s come to our house to stay,
An’ wash the cups an’ saucers up, an’ brush the crumbs away,
An’ shoo the chickens off the porch, an’ dust the hearth, an’ sweep,
An’ make the fire, an’ bake the bread, an’ earn her board-an’-keep;
An’ all us other childern, when the supper-things is done,
We set around the kitchen fire an’ has the mostest fun
A-list’nin’ to the witch-tales ‘at Annie tells about,
An’ the Gobble-uns ‘ll git you
Ef you
Don’t
Watch
Out!

Wunst they wuz a little boy wouldn’t say his prayers,–
An’ when he went to bed at night, away up-stairs,
His Mammy heerd him holler, an’ his Daddy heerd him bawl,
An’ when they turn’t the kivvers down, he wuzn’t there at all!
An’ they seeked him in the rafter-room, an’ cubby-hole, an’ press,
An’ seeked him up the chimbly-flue, an’ ever’-wheres, I guess;
But all they ever found wuz jist his pants an’ roundabout:–
An’ the Gobble-uns ‘ll git you
Ef you
Don’t
Watch
Out!

An’ one time a little girl ‘ud allus laugh an’ grin,
An’ make fun of ever’ one, an’ all her blood-an’-kin;
An’ wunst, when they was ‘company,’ an’ ole folks wuz there,
She mocked ’em an’ shocked ’em, an’ said she didn’t care!
An’ jist as she kicked her heels, an’ turn’t to run an’ hide,
They wuz two great big Black Things a-standin’ by her side,
An’ they snatched her through the ceilin’ ‘fore she knowed what she’s about!
An’ the Gobble-uns ‘ll git you
Ef you
Don’t
Watch
Out!

An’ little Orphant Annie says, when the blaze is blue,
An’ the lamp-wick sputters, an’ the wind goes woo-oo!
An’ you hear the crickets quit, an’ the moon is gray,
An’ the lightnin’-bugs in dew is all squenched away,–
You better mind yer parunts, an’ yer teachurs fond an’ dear,
An’ churish them ‘as loves you, an’ dry the orphant’s tear,
An’ he’p the pore an’ needy ones ‘at clusters all about,
Er the Gobble-uns ‘ll git you
Ef you
Don’t
Watch
Out!

In some ways, this is a typical Victorian moral poem: children better behave, or… But, instead of being in “proper” English, it’s been told in the dialect of the US state of Indiana and this was something for which Riley was well-known, having written numbers of poems in the so-called “Hoosier” dialect. (This includes what looks like a misprint for the proper spelling “orphan”.)

Our acquaintance with goblins has continued to be literary, from Christina Rossetti’s (1830-1894)

Goblin Market (1862)

to George Macdonald’s (1824-1905)

1872 fantasy novel, The Princess and the Goblin.

Our biggest—and longest—exposure, of course, was in The Hobbit (1937).

Goblins turn up from the moment Bilbo and the dwarves fall into their hands in Chapter 4, “Over Hill and Under Hill” and we see them again in their pursuit of the party once they’ve escaped the goblin stronghold and finally at the Battle of the Five Armies. At their first appearance, they are described as “great ugly-looking goblins” and, unlike the nimble-footed creatures of Tolkien’s 1915 poem, these have flat feet and flap them as they move. They live in a monarchy, ruled (for the moment) by a king described as “a tremendous goblin with a huge head”.

So far, we might see that as traditional nightmarish beings, like the “great big Black Things” in stanza 3 of Riley’s poem, but JRRT does something further and very interesting with them. This first novel was written in the 1930s, only twenty years after the Great War which had ruined much of western Europe and killed all but one of Tolkien’s oldest friends, and the emotional scar was still fresh, it seems. He was too humane (and too wise) to blame Germany for what had happened, but it’s clear that he wouldn’t excuse the Industrial Revolution and the goblins become a stand-in for all the worse of it:

“Hammers, axes, swords, daggers, pickaxes, tongs, and also instruments of torture, they make very well, or get other people to make to their designs, prisoners and slaves that have to work till they die for want of air and light. It is not unlikely that they invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them, and also not working with their own hands more than they could help; but in those days and those wild parts they had not advanced (so it is called) so far.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 4, “Over Hill and Under Hill”)

The word “goblin” has a rather mysterious etymological history and, like so many early words, that history is a murky one, full of guesses and suggestions. A little research produces the explanation that the word first seems to appear in Latin, in Orderic Vitalis’ (1075-c1142) Historia Ecclesiastica, Book 5, Chapter 7, in which, while reviewing the life of the early French saint, Taurinus, (lived c.400AD), Orderic mentions a demon whom the saint has vanquished, but which still haunted the area around the town of Evreux in Normandy, a demon the locals called “gobelinus”.

A century later, in the long Old French poem on the Third Crusade (1189-1192) of Ambroise of Normandy (who lived at the end of the 12^th century), a noted figure in the actual history of the period, Balian d’ Ibelin, is referred to as being “more false than a gobelin” (L’Histoire de la Guerre Sainte, line 8710), with no explanation, suggesting that readers would be aware of what a gobelin was (and that he wasn’t trustworthy).

The word first appears in English in John Wycliffe’s translation of the Bible in the late 14^th century, in Psalm 91, in which a God-fearing person will never be afraid of various things, including

“of a gobelyn goyng in derknisses”.

If 14^th-century people knew what this creature was, we wonder whether it was still clear to people two centuries later—the older standard English translation (the so-called “King James Bible”, 1611) translates this as

“the pestilence that walks in darkness”

(which actually is close to the Hebrew original, as best as we can make out, as we don’t, unfortunately, read Hebrew—see this LINK to read for yourself.)

In the preface to the 1951 second edition of The Hobbit, Tolkien gives his own gloss, based upon the word he will employ almost entirely in The Lord of the Rings for such creatures:

“Orc is not an English word. It occurs in one or two places but is usually translated goblin (or hobgoblin for the larger kinds). Orc is the hobbits’ form of the name given at that time to these creatures…)

thus blending villains from 1937 with those readers would soon see in his new work, The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955).

“Hobgoblin” brings us to our conclusion, however. As in the case of “goblin”, things get murky here, too, with some stating that, as “Hob” is an old nickname for “Robert” (compare “Hodge” as an old nickname for “Roger”), so a hobgoblin is related to “Robin Goodfellow”, (“Robin” being another nickname for “Robert”) aka the Puck we see in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595-96?).

(This image is from Arthur Rackham’s (1865-1939) 1933 version of the play.)

Hobgoblins sometimes appear as prickly household helpers (rather like Dobby in the Harry Potter books), and those who want to associate the “hob” of “hobgoblin” with the “hob” (earlier “hubbe”), “the side of a fireplace” see that prefix as suggesting that “hobgoblins” might be a subset of “goblins” in general.

For us, however, a “hob” is a character in an on-going series we recommend to our readers. These are novels set in and around a decaying medieval monastery in 1347 and the haunted world around it, written by Pat Walsh, an archaeologist/fantasy author.

The first two in the series are The Crowfield Curse (2010) and The Crowfield Demon (2011)

In this series, the hero, Will, an orphan, discovers a wounded creature and brings it back to the monastery. It’s a hob—and will be a major character as the series develops. In 2014, Walsh began a new series with The Hob and the Deerman.

Walsh has promised a third book in the Crowfield series, Crowfield Rising, but it has yet to appear—unlike our next posting, which will appear (provided that there is no space alien invasion or implementation of Order 66 or Sauron producing a new ring), next week.

Till then, thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

In our last, we mistakenly identified a photo of JRRT in a uniform which we thought belonged to a unit at his alma mater, King Edward’s School, as the caption with it said “1907”. It seemed odd to us, however, because it had the look of a cavalry unit (the bandoleer across the chest was common during the period for cavalry and for artillerymen) and, for all that he writes admiringly of horses, we had no sense that he himself was ever a horseman. This nagged at us until we did a little research and realized our mistake: the uniform was for King Edward’s Horse, the equivalent of a national guard/volunteer unit raised before the Great War. Tolkien was a member of this at the beginning of his Oxford career in 1911, but later resigned. John Garth’s two really useful books, Tolkien at Exeter College and Tolkien and the Great War, set us straight.

PPS

If you read us regularly, you know that we have a special love for early, silent film While researching this posting, we learned that, in 1918, a film was made based upon “Little Orphant Annie” and that a copy of it has survived for us to see. Here’s a poster and a still.

A Power

25 Wednesday Apr 2018

Posted by lebedusya1 in J.R.R. Tolkien, Narrative Methods, Villains

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Tags

Gandalf, Grima, Harry Potter, Isengard, Istari, Mini-Me, Mirkwood, Necromancer, Ornthanc, Palantir, power, Rings of Power, Rohan, Saruman, Sauron, The Council of Elrond, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Theoden, Tolkien, Voldemort, White Council, Wormtongue

Welcome, dear readers, as ever.

Some time ago, we did a post on Saruman as a “Mini-Me” version of Sauron

but, since that time, one of us has used The Hobbit in a class. Mirkwood

and the Necromancer

came up and we began to think about him again, this time to consider his strategy: how long has he been planning something and what might be the elements within that plan?

Although there is no hard evidence for just how long Saruman has been at work, it seems like his scheme has been under construction for at least 80 years. We base that upon Gandalf’s description of the White Council’s meeting on the subject of Sauron and what to do when it’s discovered that he is in Dol Guldur, calling himself the Necromancer:

“Some, too, will remember also that Saruman dissuaded us from open deeds against him, and for long we watched him only. Yet at last, as his shadow grew, Saruman yielded and the Council put forth its strength and drove the evil out of Mirkwood and that was in the very year of finding this Ring…”

(The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 2, “The Council of Elrond”)

Almost 80 years before the story of Bilbo and the Ring, then, it appears that one element in Saruman’s plot was shielding Sauron—a fact clearly not lost on Treebeard:

“He was chosen to be the head of the White Council, they say; but that did not turn out too well. I wonder now if even then Saruman was not turning to evil ways.”

(The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 4, “Treebeard”)

From something Saruman says to Gandalf we might guess the obvious reason for helping Sauron to escape action by the White Council:

“A new Power is rising. Against it the old allies and policies will not avail us at all. There is no hope left in Elves and dying Numenor. This then is one choice before you, before us. We may join with that Power. It would be wise, Gandalf. There is hope that way. Its victory is at hand; and there will be rich reward for those that aided it.”

(The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 2, “The Council of Elrond”)

But being a lackey to that Power is not quite his ultimate design, as we see:

“As the Power grows, its proved friends will also grow; and the Wise, such as you and I, may with patience come at last to direct its courses, to control it. We can bide our time, we can keep our thoughts in our hearts, deploring maybe evils done by the way, but approving the high and ultimate purpose: Knowledge, Rule, Order; all the things that we have so far striven in vain to accomplish…”

As is well-known, Saruman, as one of the Istari, was sent into Middle-earth as a counter to Sauron, not as an ally, and their purpose was:

“…coming in shapes weak and humble were bidden to advise and persuade Men and Elves to good and to seek to unite in love and understanding all those whom Sauron, should he come again, would endeavor to dominate and corrupt.”

(Unfinished Tales, 406)

Knowledge, yes, but Rule and Order? Emphatically not! But if that Power (and we note that even Saruman won’t just come out and say “Sauron” at this point, rather like the use of “He Who Must Not Be Named” in the Harry Potter books)

image5voldemort

can be used as a tool in Saruman’s hands—which may show us one element in his grand design.

First, however, it would seem that he needed a base. As Treebeard tells Merry and Pippin:

“He gave up wandering about and minding the affairs of Men and Elves, some time ago—you would call it a very long time ago; and he settled down at Angrenost, or Isengard as the Men of Rohan call it.”

(The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 4, “Treebeard”)

image6orthanc

Saruman even then was already thinking of something, though the purpose was intentionally shrouded:

“There was a time when he was always walking about in my woods. He was polite in those days, always asking my leave…and always eager to listen. I told him many things that he would never have found out by himself; but he never repaid me in like kind. I cannot remember that he ever told me anything. And he got more like that; his face, as I remember it…became like windows in a stone wall: windows with shutters inside.”

Although he was powerful, Saruman needed allies—or, rather, servants—and he wasn’t too particular who or what they were:

“He has taken up with foul folk, with the Orcs…Worse than that: he has been doing something to them; something dangerous. For these Isengarders are more like wicked Men. It is a mark of evil things that came in the Great Darkness that they cannot abide the Sun; but Saruman’s Orcs can endure it, even if they hate it. I wonder what he has done? Are they Men he has ruined, or has he blended the races of Orcs and Men? That would be a black evil!”

With the help of these servants, Saruman has turned his base into a factory and storehouse for his scheme, as Gandalf says:

“…it had once been green and fair, it was now filled with pits and forges. Wolves and orcs were housed in Isengard, for Saruman was mustering a great force on his own account, in rivalry of Sauron and not in his service, yet.”

(The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 2, “The Council of Elrond”)

In fact, it would appear from what Saruman has told Gandalf, that he actually never intends to offer his service to Sauron.

From his base, he has been extending his own power into Rohan, in the south. In his encounter with Aragon and his companions, Eomer says:

“But at this time our chief concern is with Saruman. He has claimed lordship over all this land, and there has been war between us for many months. He has taken Orcs into his service, and Wolf-riders, and evil Men, and he has closed the Gap against us, so that we are likely to be beset both east and west.”

(The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 2, “The Riders of Rohan”)

His attacks aren’t always military and Eomer hints at another possibility:

“His spies slip through every net, and his birds of ill omen are abroad in the sky. I do not know how it will all end, and my heart misgives me; for it seems to me that his friends do not all dwell in Isengard. But if you come to the king’s house, you shall see for yourself.”

We know that this is “fifth-column” work—Grima Worm-tongue, who has been slowly poisoning King Theoden with defeatism.

And now we can see, in broad outline, what Saruman is up to:

establish a base
recruit an army
build up an intelligence network (birds, spies, even wandering himself to pick up information)
use your strength to expand power into the next land, Rohan
at the same time undercut the King of Rohan’s ability to resist by subversive methods

So far, so good, as long as all that Saruman wants is to be the ruler of the land south of the Gap of Rohan and north of Gondor, but we’ve already seen that he’s more ambitious yet, suggesting to Gandalf that they—really he, as Gandalf knows—can take over that unnamed Power and use it for their—his– purposes, Knowledge, Rule, Order. When he sees that Gandalf is unconvinced, Saruman lets slip the capstone of his scheme:

“Well, I see that this wise course does not commend itself to you…Not yet? Not if some better way can be contrived?…And why not, Gandalf? Why not? The Ruling Ring? It we could command that, then the Power would pass to us.”

And here is the real heart of Saruman’s design: to obtain the One Ring.

He has been searching for it for a long time, even traveling to Minas Tirith to examine ancient records.

“In former days the members of my order had been well received there,” says Gandalf to the Council of Elrond, “but Saruman most of all. Often he had been for long the guest of the Lords of the City.”

His purpose is now easy to guess.

Gandalf had been aware that Saruman had seemed to know a great deal about the Ring, even to its appearance, as Saruman had said to the White Council:

“The Nine, the Seven, and the Three had each their proper gem. Not so the One. It was round and unadorned, as it were one of the lesser rings; but the maker set marks upon it that the skilled, maybe, could still see and read.”

How had Saruman known that since, as Gandalf says, “What those marks were he had not said. Who now would know? The maker. And Saruman? But great though his lore may be, it must have a source. What hand save Sauron’s ever held this thing, ere it was lost? The hand of Isildur alone.”

Gandalf discovers the truth of this in the dusty records of Gondor:

“…there lies in Minas Tirith still, unread, I guess, by any save Saruman and myself since the kings failed, a scroll that Isildur made himself.”

And, with the discovery and reading of that scroll, Gandalf knows not only about much more about the Ring, but how Saruman knew about its appearance and now, in Orthanc, pressed by Saruman to join him, he understands the last element in Saruman’s design—and also why Saruman has summoned him:

“That is in truth why I brought you here. For I have many eyes in my service, and I believe you know where this precious thing now lies. Is it not so? Or why do the Nine ask for the Shire, and what is your business there?”

So here, lacking only one element, the real element under all, is Saruman’s long plan—but lacking “this precious thing” (a telling phrase!), we will see how successful the rest will be. Treebeard has said of him,

“He has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment.”

What will happen when, without the Ring, Saruman will find that growing things, instead of serving him for the moment, might unseat him forever?

As always, thanks for reading!

MTCIDC

Boom

18 Wednesday Apr 2018

Posted by lebedusya1 in J.R.R. Tolkien

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A Long-Expected Party, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Backarapper, Benwell Fireworks, cracker, Elizabethan entertainment, Fireworks, fountain, Gandalf, Kenilworth Castle, Pain's Imperial Fireworks, Queen Elizabeth, Robert Dudley, Robert Langham, Roman Candles, Shakespeare, Sparkler, squib, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, thunderclap, Tolkien, torch

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

When Gandalf first arrives at Bilbo’s door “in the quiet of the world, when there was less noise and more green”, Bilbo’s memories of him are hardly those of someone aware who Gandalf really is:

“Gandalf, Gandalf! Good gracious me! Not the wandering wizard that gave Old Took a pair of magic diamond studs that fastened themselves and never came undone till ordered? Not the fellow who used to tell such wonderful tales at parties, about dragons and goblins and giants and the rescue of princesses and the unexpected luck of widows’ sons? Not the man that used to make such particularly excellent fireworks!” (The Hobbit, Chapter 1, “An Unexpected Party”)

And it’s the fireworks in particular which made a strong impression:

“I remember those! Old Took used to have them on Midsummer’s Eve. Splendid! They used to go up like great lilies and snapdragons and laburnums of fire and hang in the twilight all evening!”

[Here, by the way are the three flowers he mentions, in case, like us, you live in a climate where such things won’t appear for months yet!]

And, although he alludes to an edgier side of Gandalf (“Not the Gandalf who was responsible for so many quiet lads and lasses going off into the Blue for mad adventures?”), he concludes as if Gandalf were merely some sort of superior tradesman:

“I beg your pardon, but I had no idea you were still in business!”

Gandalf is patient, however, only replying:

“Where else should I be?… All the same I am pleased to find that you remember something about me. You seem to remember my fireworks kindly, at any rate, and that is not without hope…”

Perhaps the idea of linking Gandalf and fireworks is pardonable, however, when we see how, after being associated with them at the beginning of The Hobbit, he appears at the opening of The Lord of the Rings actually bringing fireworks to Hobbiton:

“At the end of the second week in September a cart came in through Bywater from the direction of Brandywine Bridge in broad daylight. An old man was driving it all alone. He wore a tall pointed blue hat, a long grey cloak, and a silver scarf. He had a long white beard and bushy eyebrows that stuck out beyond the brim of his hat. Small hobbit-children ran after the cart all through Hobbiton and right up the hill. It had a cargo of fireworks, as they rightly guessed. At Bilbo’s front door the old man began to unload: there were great bundles of fireworks of all sorts and shapes, each labeled with a large red G…and the elf-rune…” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 1, “A Long-expected Party)

(This is from a site called “Llama’s War of the Ring”, which has all sorts of interesting figures and conversions—here’s a LINK.)

Those great bundles turned into spectacular entertainment at the joint birthday party:

“The fireworks were by Gandalf: they were not only brought by him, but designed and made by him; and the special effects, set pieces, and flights of rockets were let off by him. But there was also a generous distribution of squibs, crackers, backarappers, sparklers, torches, dwarf-candles, elf-fountains, goblin-barkers and thunderclaps. They were all superb. The art of Gandalf improved with age.”

We ourselves enjoy fireworks, and, for the sake of our readers who might not be familiar with some of the types mentioned, we add here a few images—although some, like “dwarf-candles, elf-fountains, goblin-barkers” no longer seem to be available.

A squib is a small firecracker, like these.

Crackers seem to come in sets.

Backarappers—we don’t have an image, but here’s a definition (and it sounds like the previous image):

“A firework made from multiple firecrackers folded together so that they will explode one after another”. (from G.F. Northall’s Warwickshire Word-book, 1896)

Sparklers are metal rods or bamboo sticks whose upper part has what is called “pyrotechnic composition”—which means something which shoots out sparks when it’s lit.

Torches may be these—which, when lighted, change color as they burn down (or so the manufacturer’s description says).

Although there are no “dwarf-candles”, there are Roman Candles. These are built in stages and, as the fire burns down, they shoot out star-patterns—as you can see.

There are no “elf-fountains”, either, but there are fountains and they look like this—

Finally, we can date a “thunderclap”, made by Benwell, back to this advertisement from about 1950,

but we wouldn’t be surprised if Pain’s (not the best name for fireworks, we would say!) carried them, as they have something called “Laburnum Blossoms” in this 1903 listing

Gandalf’s productions were clearly quite spectacular—which was undoubtedly why Bilbo remembers them:

“There were rockets like a flight of scintillating birds singing with sweet voices. There were green trees with trunks of dark smoke: their leaves opened like a whole spring unfolding in a moment, and their shining branches dropped glowing flowers down upon the astonished hobbits, disappearing with a sweet scene just before they touched their upturned faces. There were fountains of butterflies that flew glittering into the trees; there were pillars of coloured fires that rose and turned into eagles, or sailing ships, or a phalanx of flying swans; there was a red thunderstorm and a shower of yellow rain; there was a forest of silver spears that sprang suddenly into the air with a yell like an embattled army, and came down again into the Water with a hiss like a hundred hot snakes.”

And then there was the finale. Pain’s, in that 1903 listing, could make claims to baskets of elaborate pyrotechnics, but this?

“And there was also one last surprise, in honour of Bilbo, and it startled the hobbits exceedingly, as Gandalf intended. The lights went out. A great smoke went up. It shaped itself like a mountain seen in the distance, and began to glow at the summit. It spouted green and scarlet flames. Out flew a red-golden dragon—not life-size, but terribly life-like: fire came from his jaws, his eyes glared down; there was a roar and he whizzed three times over the heads of the crowd. They all ducked, and many fell flat on their faces. The dragon passed like an express train, turned a somersault, and burst over Bywater with a deafening explosion.”

In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the fairy king, Oberon, says to his spirit-servant, Puck, these rather mysterious lines:

“My gentle Puck, come hither. Thou rememberest

Since once I sat upon a promontory

And heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back

Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath

That the rude sea grew civil at her song

And certain stars shot madly from their spheres

To hear the mermaid’s music?”

(Act 2, Scene 1)

In 1575, Queen Elizabeth I

visited Kenilworth Castle,

the home of Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester,

and a close friend (and maybe more). To entertain her, Dudley spent thousands of pounds.

(This is actually a gold sovereign—worth 20 shillings—that is, a pound, but there were no actual pound coins till after 1583.)

Among the entertainments was a big fireworks display (as well as at least one mermaid—see the LINK here for Robert Langham/Laneham’s contemporary “letter” in which he describes these entertainments in detail) and some scholars have theorized that those falling stars mentioned by Oberon are, in fact, Shakespeare’s boyhood memory of having seen the fireworks display (and the mermaid). Kenilworth is only 14 miles from Stratford and Shakespeare was 11 and living at home—we presume—at that time, so we can imagine that this is possibility. We know that JRRT had seen fireworks shows as a boy—as he tells us in a letter to Donald Swann, 29 February, 1968 (Letters, 390)—but we wonder: did he ever, in those early years, see Goblin-barkers, or a red-golden dragon?

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

We almost forgot–in case you’d like to make your own fireworks (definitely not recommended–and definitely illegal in some places!), here’s an 1878 manual on the subject.

Middle-under-earth

04 Wednesday Apr 2018

Posted by lebedusya1 in Artists and Illustrators, Heroes, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Narrative Methods

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Alan Lee, Andrew Lang, Barrow-downs, Beowulf, cyclops, Dragons, George Macdonald, Goblin Feet, Goblins, Great War, Grendel, Grendel's Mother, John Howe, monsters, Polyphemus, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Smaug, Storia Moria Castle, Tales of Troy and Greece, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Princess and the Goblin, The Red Book of Animal Stories, The Red Fairy Book, Tolkien, trenches, tumulus

As always, dear readers, welcome!

One of us is currently teaching The Hobbit and, is always seems to be the case when we are teaching an old friend, we are struck by something new. In this case, it’s the idea of “what lurks beneath” and where it might come from.

What occurred to us now was that, virtually every time there is trouble for Bilbo and the dwarves, it is strongly linked with caves and hollowed-out places: trolls who came out of a cave (“Roast Mutton”), goblins who live in caves (“Over Hill and Under Hill”), Gollum (“Riddles in the Dark”), hostile elves (“Flies and Spiders” and “Barrels Out of Bond”), and, of course, Smaug (“On the Doorstep”, “Inside Information”, and “Not At Home”). Only the wargs, the overgrown spiders, and the men of Lake-town in the Battle of the Five Armies have above-ground origins, as, after all, the other forces—goblins, elves, and even Iron Hills dwarves (we assume), have subterranean dwellings.

We knew that JRRT thought to become a classicist early in his academic career and we can imagine right away that one influence upon him for this underground menace would have been Polyphemus the Cyclops, who, after all, lives in a cave.

Before he read that part of Odysseus’ story in Greek, he might have seen it in Andrew Lang’s 1907 Tales of Troy and Greece—

Tolkien tells us that, as a child, he had read other Lang works and a story in one, The Red Fairy Book (1890), might even have influenced some Middle-earth geography, from “Storia Moria Castle”.

Another childhood favorite (although he appears to have changed his mind later in life) were the fantasy novels of George Macdonald

and his The Princess and the Goblin (1872),

as its title suggests, is full of goblins and their underground world. These goblins are powerful, but have one fatal flaw—tender feet—which JRRT said that he never believed (see Letters, 178)—although Tolkien’s first published poem was entitled “Goblin Feet” (Oxford Poetry 1915).

Beyond possible childhood reading, there is his career focus, which includes two other potential underground influences.

First, there is Beowulf. Grendel, the monster in this poem,

lives in a cave at the bottom of a pool with his mother and, in the second part of his monster-slaying, Beowulf has to dive into that pool to deal with her.

This illustration comes from another Andrew Lang book, The Red Book of Animal Stories (1899).

(The picture of Grendel is by Brian Froud. We found it on the website of K.T.Katzmann, I Write Monsters. Here’s a LINK.)

Then, of course, there’s that dragon, against whom Beowulf fights and dies—and which is the direct ancestor of another famous and familiar dragon…

We are told that it lives in an abandoned tumulus—that is, an ancient grave mound, like this one.

(This is, in fact, a famous Neolithic burial at Gavrinis, in Brittany.)

JRRT worked in Middle English, as well as Old English, and here we find one more possible source in his own edition (with E.V. Gordon) of the 14^th-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

The Green Knight who challenges King Arthur’s court to a mutual head-chopping contest, is said, in the fourth part of the poem, to inhabit a “green chapel” and to appear out of a hole when Sir Gawain, who has accepted the challenge and cut off the Green Knight’s head, makes his appearance there to fulfill his half of the contest.

This chapel has sounded like a tumulus to generations of scholars and here’s John Howe’s 2003 illustration, complete with chapel as tumulus (not to mention a very large green man).

Tumuli also make their appearance, of course, in The Lord of the Rings, when Frodo and his party go astray on the Barrow Downs.

We can’t finish this posting without at least suggesting one more source, something even more personal than JRRT’s scholarly work: his experiences in the Great War.

By the time Tolkien entered the service in France, the Western Front was, basically, a 500-mile trench, from Switzerland to the North Sea.

Much of the entrenching was simply deep, reinforced ditching.

But some—particularly on the German side—could be elaborate, even built with stone or concrete, and set far enough into the ground as to be almost impervious to bombardment.

And we imagine that, with all of that earlier literary work in his mind, JRRT might have faced such defenses wondering whether what was inside them would be Germans

or something much worse.

And did this haunt his later writing as much as the Great War haunted the minds of soldiers all over the world?

Thanks, as ever, for reading!

MTCIDC

“Dragons, Other”

21 Wednesday Mar 2018

Posted by lebedusya1 in Artists and Illustrators, Fairy Tales and Myths, Heroes, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Maps

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Arthur Rackham, Beowulf, C.S. Lewis, Chrysophylax, Custard the Dragon, Dragons, Dream Days, Esgaroth, Farmer Giles of Ham, Jabberwock, Jabberwock-slayer, Kenneth Grahame, Lewis Carroll, Lonely Mountain, Luttrell Psalter, map, Middle-earth, Narnia, Ogden Nash, Pauline Baynes, Rumer Godden, Smaug, St George, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Dragon of Og, The Hobbit, The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe, The Lord of the Rings, The Reluctant Dragon, Through the Looking-Glass, Tolkien, Walt Disney

As always, readers, welcome.

One of us is currently teaching a class where our present focus is upon The Hobbit.

At the center of the book is the Lonely Mountain and at the center of that is Smaug.

This got us to thinking about other dragons in our experience, and some of those are not quite of the same breed as the hoard-sitter faced by Bilbo and the dwarves. That dragon is closely related to the Beowulf variety

which, unlike Smaug, has neither a name nor (it seems) human speech, but it certainly has the same suspicious streak: when an escaped slave steals a cup from its hoard, it’s almost immediately aware that it’s missing and suspects a human.

And they are both vengeful. As Smaug devastates Esgaroth, even if he dies for it,

so Beowulf’s dragon scorches the countryside in revenge for the theft.

But what about those other dragons?

First, we thought of Kenneth Grahame’s Dream Days (1898),

a collection of short stories, the next-to-last of which is “The Reluctant Dragon”.

This is the story of a beast the very opposite of Smaug—no hoard, no suspicion, no flaming violence, and, in fact, a poetry lover. This story was then converted into a Disney cartoon of 1941.

Needless to say, although the core of the plot is the same, what makes the Grahame distinctive is the language. All of the major characters: the dragon, the little boy who finds him, and St. George, who is brought in as a dragon-slayer, are thoughtful and articulate late Victorians who would rather discuss literature than do battle—a far cry not only from Beowulf’s encounter, but also from every other earlier depiction we could think of.

The sword in this last one looks like it actually belongs in the hands of the jabberwock-slayer

in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass (1872).

Here’s a LINK to Dream Days so that you can enjoy the story for yourselves.

Nearly sixty years later, the comic verse writer, Ogden Nash,

produced not a literary dragon, but a timid one in “Custard the Dragon” (1959).

This is a poem in 15 stanzas and is a story about Belinda and her pets, including a dragon, who is taunted by the other pets as being less than brave. To underline this, the last line in a number of stanzas is a variation upon the first version of the line, “But Custard cried for a nice safe cage”. (Here’s a LINK to the poem.)

The surprise is that, when a pirate climbs in through the window (this happens all the time here—possibly they escape from dreams?), Custard promptly eats him—and the cries of “Coward!” disappear immediately.

In contrast to the unnamed dragon in “The Reluctant Dragon” and in “Custard the Dragon”, our next dragon is a talker—like Smaug, but also like Smaug, potentially malevolent. This is Chrysophylax in JRRT’s 1937/1949 Farmer Giles of Ham. (JRRT is having a quiet joke here—“Chrysophylax” is Ancient Greek for “Goldguard”.)

The artwork is by Pauline Baynes (1922-2008).

If, like us, you’ve loved the Narnia books, then you know her as their original illustrator.

She was also the artist for an early Middle-earth map.

Her 2008 obituary in The Daily Telegraph tells of how they came to work together:

“In 1948 Tolkien was visiting his publishers, George Allen & Unwin, to discuss some disappointing artwork that they had commissioned for his novella Farmer Giles of Ham, when he spotted, lying on a desk, some witty reinterpretations of medieval marginalia from the Luttrell Psalter that greatly appealed to him. These, it turned out, had been sent to the publishers “on spec”by the then unknown Pauline Baynes.” (The Daily Telegraph, 8 August, 2008)

JRRT was then so impressed with her work that it appeared both in other later publications and his recommendation led to her being engaged by CS Lewis’ publisher for the Narnia books, as well. (And here’s a LINK to that obituary, which has more on Tolkien and Baynes, as well as Lewis.)

And the Baynes connection leads us to one further dragon, that in Rumer Godden’s (1902-1998) 1981 The Dragon of Og, for which Baynes provided the cover art.

It’s not our practice to discuss work we haven’t read, but we’ve just discovered this novel and have already put it on our spring reading list. The little we know about it comes from a blurb or two, but it looks promising: this is more of the reluctant dragon, but one who is in danger of being provoked by a new local lord until his wife steps in and cleverly changes the situation.

Before we close, however, we want to look back for a second at the Tolkien/Baynes connection and add two further things. First off, here’s the first page of JRRT’s graceful letter of thanks and praise to Baynes for her work in illustrating Farmer Giles.

Second, as the Telegraph obituary says, Tolkien was impressed with her versions of the marginalia from the Luttrell Psalter, which is high on our list of favorite medieval manuscripts.

In our next, we want to spend some time looking at that work, thinking about marginalia, and not only there, but also in the work of another favorite illustrator, Arthur Rackham (1867-1939).

Till then, thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

Wormy

21 Wednesday Feb 2018

Posted by lebedusya1 in J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, Villains

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Adolf Hitler, Bilbo, Dragon, Fifth Column, Gandalf, Germany, Grima, Madrid, Middle-earth, Nazis, Norway, Norwegian facist party, Republican government, Rohan, Saruman, Second World War, Smaug, Spanish Civil War, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Scouring of the Shire, Theoden, Tolkien, traitor, Vidkun Quisling, William Blake, worm, Wormtongue

Welcome, as always, dear readers.
In 1936, the Nationalist forces were marching to attack the Republican government in Madrid, during the Spanish Civil War.

When interviewed, a Nationalist general is reported to have said that, as four military columns were about to assault the city,

a fifth column of loyalists would join the attack from inside.

This phrase “fifth column”, then, was picked up and began to be used world-wide to mean “traitors/betrayers from within” and was popular during the Second World War era.

When the Nazis attacked Norway in 1940,

and the Allies failed to defend their positions there successfully and were forced to surrender or flee

a member of the small Norwegian fascist party, Vidkun Quisling,

declared himself ruler as the Germans marched in.

In time, the Nazis recognized him as the head of Norway and he even had an audience with Hitler.

This time, a specific “fifth columnist” had not only betrayed his country, but also profited greatly from it and, when we looked at the dates—1936 and 1940—we wondered, as we so often do, if the current events of our world may have colored JRRT’s relation of the events in Middle-earth—even as we hasten to say, as we always do, that this is just a suggestion.
In his first meeting with Aragorn, Eomer is troubled and his veiled comments suggest just the same sort of fifth-columnist action:
“But at this time our chief concern is with Saruman. He has claimed lordship over all this land, and there has been war between us for many months…”
His concern, however, as we see, is for more than border security, as he says of Saruman:
“His spies slip through every net, and his birds of ill omen are abroad in the sky. I do not know how it will all end, and my heart misgives me; for it seems to me that his friends do not all dwell in Isengard. But if you come to the king’s house, you shall see for yourself.” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 2, “The Riders of Rohan”)
So, all is not well, not only in Rohan, but in Meduseld itself. When Gandalf and the other survivors of the Fellowship arrive at the gates of Edoras, they are stopped by guards and by a command from Theoden, king of Rohan—or is it? A guard says:
“It is but two nights ago that Wormtongue came to us and said that by the will of Theoden no stranger should pass these gates.” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 6, “The King of the Golden Hall”)
“Wormtongue” seems a very odd name—do worms actually have tongues?

But this isn’t a worm, it’s a “worm”—an old term for “dragon”.

And, if Smaug’s speech and its effect upon Bilbo is anything to go by:
“Bilbo was now beginning to feel really uncomfortable. Whenever Smaug’s roving eye, seeking for him in the shadows, flashed across him, he trembled, and an unaccountable desire seized hold of him to rush out and reveal himself and tell all the truth to Smaug. In fact he was in grievous danger of coming under the dragon-spell.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 12, “Inside Information”)
then a person having a dragon tongue might be a real threat, as Wormtongue, seated at Theoden’s feet,

inserts himself between Gandalf and Theoden:
“Why indeed should we welcome you, Master Stormcrow? Lathspell I name you, Ill-news; and ill news is an ill guest they say.”
Gandalf immediately resists this and, in a burst of power, breaks the real “spell”—the dragon’s words which Grima Wormtongue has been pouring into Theoden’s ears, as Theoden says to him of Gandalf’s efforts: “If this is witchcraft…it seems to me more wholesome than your whisperings. Your leechcraft [that is, “medical skill”—obviously ironic here] ere long would have had me walking on all fours like a beast.”
[A footnote here—is JRRT making a quiet reference to the fate of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, mentioned in the book of Daniel in the Old Testament? In Chapter 4, the king is driven mad and spends seven years as a grazing animal to prove the power of the Hebrew divinity. Here is William Blake’s (1757-1827) striking depiction of the mad king.]

Certainly something Grima has been doing has affected Theoden, as he is initially described as “a man so bent with age that he seemed almost a dwarf…” and this shrinking is suddenly reversed when Gandalf strikes Grima down:
“From the king’s hand the black staff fell clattering on the stones. He drew himself up, slowly, as a man that is stiff from long bending over some dull toil. Now tall and straight he stood, and his eyes were blue as he looked into the opening sky.”
For all that Grima has been blocked and Theoden restored, the fifth columnist tries once more. When he is told that he must ride with the king and his warriors to battle, he makes a countersuggestion:
“One who knows your mind and honours your commands should be left in Edoras. Appoint a faithful steward. Let your counsellor Grima keep all things till your return…”
But he gives himself away by finishing that sentence with “and I pray that we may see it, though no wise man will deem it hopeful.”
And Gandalf sees all too clearly what is behind Grima’s proposal—and who is behind it:
“Down, snake!…Down on your belly! How long is it since Saruman bought you? What was the promised price?…”

Although it is said that Grima deserves death for his treachery, he is allowed to flee, and, when we next see him, he is with his true master, acting as his “footman” as Gandalf calls him (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 10, “The Voice of Saruman). And here, as Bilbo’s pity has preserved Gollum for an unseen but vital part in the later story of the Ring, so Gandalf’s mercy to Grima preserves him for two final acts: first, his mistaken use of a palantir as a missile, which puts it into Gandalf’s hands and, ultimately into Aragorn’s, who shakes Sauron’s nerve with it; second, Saruman’s ultimate end:
“[Saruman] kicked Wormtongue in the face as he groveled, and turned and made off. But at that something snapped: suddenly Wormtongue rose up, drawing a hidden knife, and then with a snarl like a dog he sprang on Saruman’s back, jerked his head back, cut his throat, and with a yell ran off down the lane.” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 8, “The Scouring of the Shire”)

Grima doesn’t survive this attack, however: “Before Frodo could recover or speak a word, three hobbit-bows twanged and Wormtongue fell dead.”
Merry calls these final acts of violence “the very last end of the War”, but we would suggest a parallel with a specific event in our world: the end of Vidkun Quisling–executed by firing squad in October, 1945, for treason. Could we say that Grima’s death—deserved earlier, but deferred—was also a kind of execution for treason, against Rohan, finally carried out?
And a final thought: after World War 2, Quisling’s name became, for a time, an easy synonym for “fifth columnist/traitor”—could we imagine that, in the Common Speech of Middle-earth after the War of the Ring, the same might have happened to “Grima Wormtongue”?
Thanks, as ever, for reading.
MTCIDC
CD

Throwing Shade

20 Wednesday Dec 2017

Posted by lebedusya1 in Artists and Illustrators, J.R.R. Tolkien, Narrative Methods

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A Day: Paris In the Rain, Adelard Took, Assyrians, Bag End, Bilbo Baggins, bowler hat, ceramic chariot, China, city gent, CS Lewis, elephant, Emperor Ch'in Shihuang, Greeks, Gustave Caillebotte, Jean Marius, John Howe, Jonas Hanway, Lobelia Sackville-Baggins, Marchesa Elena Grimaldi, Mary Poppins, Monty Python, Palais Galleria, Persians, Romans, Sharkey, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Ministry of Silly Walks, Tolkien, umbrella, umbrella stand, Un Jour: Paris sous la Pluie, van Dyck

Welcome, dear readers, as always and, if you’re in the US, we hope you’ve had a happy and not over-stuffed Thanksgiving.

Just when we think we’ve exhausted a topic, we return and, well, here we are.

Just to the left of the door and below what we now see as a barometer, there’s a tall tube-like structure, something once common—we wouldn’t be surprised if there was one in every house in which JRRT ever lived: an umbrella stand.

As a child, one of us was fascinated by having once seen an umbrella stand made out of an elephant’s lower leg and foot—or at least the skin.

The couple we’ve seen are all identified as “Victorian”, so, as we are very fond of pachyderms, we hope that such a use is now long in the past!

Umbrellas, at least as sunshades, appear to have been around since at least before 200BC in China, as this ceramic chariot—with large umbrella—from part of the tomb complex of the Emperor Ch’in Shihuang demonstrates.

The Assyrians had them.

The Persians had them.

The Greeks had them.

As did the Romans.

And so on for centuries, although it seems that the first modern references to them in England date from the early 17^th century and appear, by the latter part of the century and into the 18^th as part of “ladies’ apparel”, used as much for sun as rain as this 1623 portrait by van Dyck of the Marchesa Elena Grimaldi shows us.

A center for the manufacture of umbrellas was Paris, and the inventor of the modern collapsible model may have been Jean Marius, who received a 5-year monopoly on his invention in 1710. Here is a later (1772) advertisement for his business

and here is a model, identified by the Palais Galleria in Paris as post-1715 because it has no Marius markings.

If there was a prejudice against men carrying them, being a combination of the association with “feminine things” and perhaps also a long-standing prejudice against the French, how did that so change that, by the 20^th century, the umbrella, along with the bowler hat, became the marks of the “city gent” in London,

caricatured in the 20^th century by Monty Python in skits like “The Ministry of Silly Walks”?

This change is said to stem from the behavior of one rather eccentric man, Jonas Hanway

who, sometime in the 1750s, began to appear on London streets carrying an open umbrella.

As you, sharp-eyed reader, can tell from our verbs and constructions like “seems”, “appears” and “is said to”, this, like other items of fashion and its changes, hasn’t the firmest of scholarly foundations, but, considering how many illustrations (often mocking cartoons) begin to appear by the 1770s, something happened to alter men’s behavior. Just look at these three, from 1772, 1782, and 1790.

All of this is very interesting, you may ask, but what does it have to do with Bilbo, or with JRRT? There are, in fact, a couple of references in The Lord of the Rings to umbrellas. First, there is one of Bilbo’s mocking gifts:

“For Adelard Took, for his very own, from Bilbo; on an umbrella. Adelard had carried off many unlabeled ones”. (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 1, “A Long-Expected Party”)

Then there are two to Lobelia Sackville-Baggins. The first is suggestive of her suspicious behavior at the near-auction of Bilbo’s property at the end of The Hobbit (you’ll remember that some spoons never reappeared):

“He [Bilbo] escorted her [Lobelia] firmly off the premises, after he had relieved her of several small (but rather valuable) articles that had somehow fallen inside her umbrella.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 1, “A Long-Expected Party”)

The second reference is actually rather pathetic. Once “Sharkey” and his thugs take over the Shire, they evict Lobelia from Bag End and, because she resists, they drag her off to the Lockholes, as young Tom Cotton tells Merry and the others:

“She comes down the lane with her old umbrella…”

When told that “Sharkey” gave the order for her eviction (and the building of sheds at Bag End):

“ ‘I’ll give you Sharkey, you dirty thieving ruffians!’ says she, and ups with her umbrella and goes for the leader, near twice her size.” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 8, “The Scouring of the Shire”)

Here’s a little illustration of a defiant Lobelia by John Howe.

By the later 19^th century, men with umbrellas seem quite common—even to the point of providing material for social commentary in the public press—

But, in the 20^th century, we who love children’s literature see them in a completely different way, either as a mode of transportation

or as part of the origin of a favorite story, when CS Lewis, at 16, had a recurring image of “a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood” (from It All Began with/as a Picture). (We’ve seen the title cited both ways.)

But we want to end this posting not with literature, but with pure art. There are lots of paintings from the 18^th and 19^th centuries with umbrellas, but here is what may be our favorite, by Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894). Although he is grouped with the Impressionists, this painting in particular shows the artist’s interest in the hard-edged world of early photography (“Un Jour: Paris sous la Pluie”—“A Day: Paris In the Rain”)

Stay dry, dear readers, and thanks, as ever for reading!

MTCIDC

Pop!

13 Wednesday Dec 2017

Posted by lebedusya1 in J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, Narrative Methods

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anachronism, Bag End, gun, gunpowder, hand gonne, Helm's Deep, pop-gun, Professor Moriarity, Reichenbach Falls, Rosenbach Library, Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Empty House, The Hobbit, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Trev's Air Gun Scrapbook

Welcome, as always, dear reader.

The anachronisms in the 1937 Hobbit are well known: “cold chicken and tomatoes”, “like the whistle of an engine coming out of a tunnel”, etc. We ourselves have contributed to the commentary in several past postings and here we are again.

This time, we were caught by something Gandalf says to Bilbo in Chapter 1:

“It is not like you, Bilbo, to keep friends waiting on the mat, and then open the door like a pop-gun” (The Hobbit, Chapter 1, “An Unexpected Party”)

So, “pop-gun”?

Just previously, Bilbo was described as pulling open “the door with a jerk” (and in tumble 4 dwarves), which suggests what the pop-gun sounds like, as well as how sudden the motion.

How is that sound made? Here’s an example of such a gun.

As you can see, it’s just a tube. Inside is a kind of plunger—a rod with a flattened end which faces towards the muzzle (the opening at the left). You pull back the rod and it draws air into the barrel. If you stick a cork in the muzzle, so that it makes a seal, when the rod is pushed up the barrel, the flattened rod end pushes the air in front of it, compressing it. The compressed air then forces out the cork, which shoots out with a POP!

For all that it uses air to propel the cork, this is, as its name implies, a kind of gun. Although there may be gunpowder in Middle-earth (see our earlier posting on the use of explosives at Helm’s Deep and the gate area of the Rammas Echor), it seems to be employed as the equivalent of dynamite,

and never as the propulsive force in what medieval people in our world called a “hand gonne”.

And thus it falls into that category of anachronisms. The idea of air guns, however, makes us think of the Daisy Air Rifle one of us had as a child.

The air was pulled in when the lever underneath the trigger was pulled down and then pushed back, to make it ready to fire. The illustration fires bbs, but ours was more peaceful, firing cork balls.

But a very unpeaceful version appears in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s

“The Adventure of the Empty House” (1903). Here’s the first page of the manuscript, housed at the Rosenbach Library, in Philadelphia. (And here’s a LINK to their excellent on-line magazine.)

Sherlock Holmes had disappeared after his combat with Professor Moriarity at the Reichenbach Falls

in Switzerland in 1891 (although the story in which this happens was published in The Strand Magazine in December, 1893).

For financial reasons, Conan Doyle brought Holmes back—first in the novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1901,

but this story was supposed to have taken place in 1889, two years before Holmes’ disappearance. It was only with “The Adventure of the Empty House” that Holmes reappeared in contemporary London. Here, it was revealed that Holmes had not fallen to his death with Moriarity, but had survived and had lived in disguise for some years, traveling the world and avoiding the vengeance of Moriarity’s men and, in particular, his chief lieutenant, Colonel Sebastian Moran, who had actually seen Holmes escape the clutches (literally) of Moriarity and had tried unsuccessfully to kill him with a fall of rock.

Back in London, Holmes appears to Watson and enlists his aid in trapping Moran, which Holmes does by placing a wax bust of himself in outline in the window of 221B Baker Street as a lure. Holmes and Watson then wait across the street in an empty house (hence the title of the story), Holmes thinking that Moran will try to assassinate him from the street. Instead, Moran climbs to the very room where the two are concealed and, opening a window, uses an air rifle to attempt to kill Holmes—before he’s tackled by the pair and subdued, with the aid of several policemen summoned from hiding nearby.

Moran, Holmes explains, was thought to be the best shot in India, where he had been stationed for some years, so it’s not surprising that he would attempt the long-distance murder of Holmes, but why an air gun? (This is from the Granada television series of the 1980s, with the brilliant Jeremy Brett as Holmes.)

Air guns had first begun to appear in the 16^th century, but, by the later 19^th century could be either a toy, or a useful weapon for snipers, mainly because of its propulsion method. Until the 1890s, the main propellant was gunpowder which, when fired, produced a loud bang and a cloud of white smoke.

Imagine, instead, a weapon which made much less noise—or a noise very unlike a gun’s BANG! (Conan Doyle has Watson describe the sound as “a strange loud whiz”)– and no smoke at all. Perfect for a nighttime assassination, as Colonel Moran has planned it, never realizing that Holmes is well aware of his plan and foils it neatly (as Holmes almost always does).

In the 21^st century, smokeless powder is the norm and air guns are now used for target shooting (including an Olympic event), and pop-guns? Still for sale—just google “toy pop guns” at Amazon.com

or E-Bay and see what you find—something Bilbo never could!

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

If you’d like to know more about air guns, here’s a LINK for a great source, “Trev’s Air Gun Scrapbook”.

Floored

06 Wednesday Dec 2017

Posted by lebedusya1 in Artists and Illustrators, J.R.R. Tolkien, Narrative Methods

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Bag End, Baggins, carpet, classical altars, Cosmati, English Ham House, Erasmus, Felicity Irons, floors, Gamgee, John Howe, Lady Chapel, paneling, parquetry, rush door mat, Shire, social levels, stone block, swags, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, tile, Tolkien, Took, Typha, Versailles, Westminster Abbey

Welcome, dear readers, once more to our blog. In this installment, we are returning to our inspection of Bilbo’s entryway.

So far, we’ve examined the barometer, the clock, the umbrella stand, and that hat in the left foreground—intentionally misread as a sugar loaf. Now we want to examine the floor, which looks to be a pretty complicated place, asking ourselves, as we always do, where does this come from and how much of the medieval—so often the foundation of Middle-earth—does it contain?

The Shire clearly has social levels. Bilbo, Frodo, and Merry and Pippin (contrary to P Jackson—who violated JRRT’s wishes on the subject of the latter two), for example, all speak (in translation, of course) what is called “Received Standard English”. In contrast, Sam, the Gaffer, and the Cottons speak what would appear to be a rural dialect and Sam even thinks of Frodo as “Mister Frodo” and even “Master”. We do not know where these class distinctions came from, but we know of Bilbo that:

he is called “a very well-to-do hobbit “ at the very beginning of The Hobbit (The Hobbit, Chapter 1, “An Unexpected Party”)
he has distinguished forebears in the Tooks—his mother was “the famous Belladonna Took, one of the three remarkable daughters of the Old Took” (The Hobbit, Chapter 1, “An Unexpected Party”)
he lives in an extensive, rambling burrow: “a very comfortable tunnel without smoke, with panelled walls, and floors tiled and carpeted…The tunnel wound on and on, going fairly but not quite straight into the side of the hill…bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries (lots of these), wardrobes (he had whole rooms devoted to clothes), kitchens, dining-rooms, all were on the same floor, and indeed on the same passage.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 1, “An Unexpected Party”)

And the entryway certainly shows some elements of a wealthier lifestyle, with its paneled (US spelling) walls—but we intend to devote a later posting to the walls and support structure of Bag End, so let’s turn to what is said next: “floors tiled and carpeted”. Looking at JRRT’s drawing, we can see both—and more.

Before we had gone back to this passage, we were a little puzzled as to the basic floor. As you can see in Tolkien’s illustration, it’s in a checkered pattern and, at first, we wondered if this might be an example of what’s called “parquetry”. In this method of flooring, different strips or blocks of wood are laid into designs of all sorts. Here are a couple of fancy examples from the 17^th-century English Ham House.

Parquetry appears to have been developed in France, as an alternative to marble floors (much less weight to support by the floor beams and equally pretty, we’d guess). Here’s an example from Louis XIV’s Versailles.

But the description in The Hobbit says “floors tiled”– here’s an exterior tile pattern from Ham house.

and an indoor one.

So, although Bilbo appears well enough off to afford parquetry, there is no mention of it in JRRT’s description and it is a decorative detail from the 17^th century and beyond, which rather goes against our usual “Middle-earth is (more or less) medieval” idea. The text of The Hobbit clinches the fact that it’s tile, of course, but the tile we then see in JRRT’s illustration strikes us as even plainer than the late-19^th, early 20^th century hallway tile we’ve seen, as in this restoration picture, and with which Tolkien would have been familiar on a daily basis.

Medieval tiles, in fact, can be even more elaborate, first appearing in England in the 13^th century, mainly in ecclesiastical buildings. Here’s one from the Lady Chapel (completed in 1373) in York Minster.

Much medieval tiling has disappeared over the centuries and here’s a useful link which explains why. And to see an amazing example of such work, here’s a link to the restored Cosmati paving in Westminster Abbey.

Over this tile, Tolkien has laid a carpet (as his description has said, the floors are “carpeted”).

It’s faint, but what one can make out appears to be a solid-colored center with what appear to be wreaths and what are called “swags”—long chains made to imitate garlands of ribbons, fruit, and flowers used to decorate classical altars.

So far, we haven’t located anything which closely resembles the carpet at Bag End, but here’s an 18^th-century French example to provide a kind of general idea.

There are two more items on the floor, both just below the door.

The first looks to be perhaps a stone block, used as a sill. (Our illustration is actually of a mistake—the central block here has fallen out of position, but it gives you the idea of such a block in use.)

The other item appears to us to be a rush door mat (dog—“Bo”–optional).

Rushes (genus Typha) grow all over the world and can be used, it seems, for almost anything. Here’s the English rush weaver, Felicity Irons, busy harvesting.

Rushes, however, bring us back to the subject of English medieval flooring. Our research suggests that the houses of farmers and lower-level townspeople would have been of natural substances, like clay pressed to make a hard surface. Richer people would have had wooden or even, in a few cases, tile floors (more such floors after the commercial business took off in the 15^th/16^th centuries). Carpets appear to be much later (most weaving was hung on walls, to keep down drafts, it seems). Our sources for what people laid on top of their floors are very sketchy and some modern writers have depended upon a quotation from the Dutch scholar, Erasmus (1469-1536),

who visited England and spent some years there around 1500. He tells us that the English covered their floors with rushes, but that they only added more to the top, without cleaning out the lower levels, which became full of refuse and caused bad smells (which to a person of Erasmus’ time represented the danger of “miasma”—bad air which could cause disease—something believed as scientifically true even throughout the first half of the 19^th century). Some modern commentators have questioned this, proposing the difficulty of moving about on a weedy floor in a long gown, as women and, in time, men, wore during the later Middle Ages. At least one of those questioners even suggests that rushes meant rush mats—see above.

Bilbo’s hall has only one of these, meant, from its position, to be used as a modern would, as a doormat.

Taken altogether, we would suggest that Bilbo’s floor, just like his clock and barometer and umbrella stand, would appear to belong not to the medieval world which lies underneath Middle-earth, but rather to the late 19^th-20^th century world of the author. And we’re not alone in our opinion. Here’s John Howe’s version of that hallway—compare it with JRRT’s and see what’s been erased.

And here’s the film version–

There are more differences, too–for fun, see how many you can find.

And thanks, as always, for reading!

MTCIDC

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