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Tag Archives: The Inklings

Pub Crawl

17 Wednesday Jul 2019

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

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CS Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, Eagles, Green Dragon Inn, Hutchinson Family Singers, inn, pub, Smaug, The Eagle and Child, The Green Dragon, The Hobbit, The Inklings, The Ivy Bush, The King's Arms, The Lord of the Rings, The Mitre, The Prancing Pony, The Vulture of the Alps, The White Horse, Tolkien

As ever, dear readers, welcome.

After a very disturbing evening with a group of vengeful and determined dwarves,

image1banddwarves.jpg

Bilbo wakes to a wreck of breakfast dishes and, soon after, the appearance of Gandalf, who prompts him to see that he has a note from Thorin (& Co.).  It makes an appointment for 11am that morning at the Green Dragon Inn, in Bywater.

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With Gandalf harrying him, Bilbo barely makes it, but, a moment later, the journey eastward of The Hobbit begins.

It is ironic, of course, that a trip which focuses upon removing a dragon

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should commence with a place named after one, but, judging by the number of Green Dragon pubs in Britain one might find by googling right now, it may be nothing more than a common name—

image4pubsign.jpg

image5greendragsign.jpg

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although, as Douglas Anderson points out in The Annotated Hobbit, 61, we know that JRRT had been interested in dragons, especially green ones, from childhood, as he wrote to WH Auden:

“I first tried to write a story when I was about seven.  It was about a dragon.  I remember nothing about it except a philological fact.  My mother said nothing about the dragon, but pointed out out one could not say ‘a green great dragon,’ but had to say, ‘a great green dragon.’  I wondered why, and still do.” (Letters, 214, 7 June, 1955)

The countryside east of the Shire and the story itself are empty of pubs (short for “public houses”, originally meaning simply a place open to the general public, but, in time, it came to mean a place licensed by the government to sell alcoholic beverages) after this, but, until we reach Bree, there are a certain number mentioned in The Lord of the Rings.  We meet the first, The Ivy Bush, in The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 1, “An Unexpected Party”, where we see a group of hobbits gossiping about Bilbo and Frodo.  In the next chapter,  “The Shadow of the Past”, The Green Dragon makes its second appearance in Tolkien when Sam Gamgee has a verbal tussle with Ted Sandyman on the subject of things seen and unseen, as well as on the sanity, or lack of it, of Bilbo and Frodo, there.

The Ivy Bush will only appear once more, linked with The Green Dragon, in the succeeding chapter, “Three Is Company”, but we will see The Green Dragon (mentioned by Sam in hopes that The Prancing Pony in Bree will measure up to it in Chapter 8, “Fog on the Barrow-Downs”) close to the end of The Lord of the Rings.  In The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 8, “The Scouring of the Shire”, it appears as an emblem of the endless ruin by Sharkey and gang of the old ways of the Shire:  “When they reached The Green Dragon, the last house on the Hobbiton side [of the Water], now lifeless and with broken windows…”

This is in great contrast to The Prancing Pony Sam worried about earlier

image8prancingpony.jpg

as we see it in The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 9, “At the Sign of the Prancing Pony”.  At first, the place seems menacing, especially to Sam, who:

“…stared up at the inn with its three storeys and many windows, and felt his heart sink.”

But then—

“As they [the hobbits] hesitated outside in the gloom, someone began singing a merry song inside, and many cheerful voices joined loudly in the chorus.  They listened to this encouraging sound for a moment and then got off their ponies.  The song ended and there was a burst of laughter and clapping.”

Pubs, and their upscale cousins, inns, would have been vital to people traveling before motels, hotels, and b&bs, as we can see in Book One of The Fellowship, and, for most of the rest of the novel, with the exceptions of Rivendell, Lorien, Edoras, and Minas Tirith, accommodation for the night would have meant a blanket on the ground.  For Tolkien and his friends in the writers’ group called The Inklings,

image9inklings.jpg

they were vital meeting points—not for the reading of new work, which appears to have been done in one member, C.S. Lewis’, rooms at Oxford,

image10csl.jpg

but for socializing and discussion, which was equally important for such a group of intelligent, educated, and highly-creative men.  (No women, alas!  One of our favorite mystery novelists and Dante-translator, Dorothy Sayers, 1893-1957, was friends with several members but, with the short-sightedness of the 1930s-50s, was never invited to join.)

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They met during the week not only at the best-known of their watering holes, the Eagle and Child,

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but at The Mitre,

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The King’s Arms,

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and at The White Horse.

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The one which caught our eye in particular is the first, which, as we said, is probably the one most closely associated with Tolkien and his friends.  Here’s its sign—

image16bird.jpg

The explanation of the pub’s name is, to us, a bit murky, supposedly coming from an element of the crest of the Stanley family which portrays an infant stolen by an eagle,

image17crest.jpg

but found alive and unharmed.  (Here’s a LINK so that you can judge for yourself.)

For ourselves, the idea of a child stolen by a raptor makes us think of a really awful 19th-century song, “The Vulture of the Alps”, a poem set to music about 1842 by a famous American vocal group of the 1840s-1870s, the Hutchinson Family Singers.  The title pretty much says it all.

image18hutch.jpg

If you’d like to know more, here’s a LINK.

When we think of eagles and Tolkien, however, we remember them as rescuers—of Gandalf, the dwarves, and Bilbo from the goblins and Wargs

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and as providers of air assault in The Hobbit.

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And, in The Lord of the Rings, rescuer of Gandalf from Saruman,

image21rescue

 

as allies of the West at the battle at the Morannon,

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and as saviors of Frodo and Sam on Mt Doom.

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And it may be a crazy idea, but it makes us wonder—although Tolkien had abandoned The Hobbit unfinished in the early 1930s, he had picked it up again in 1936, just about the time the Inklings were meeting regularly (the first documented mention of them, apparently, is in a 1936 letter from CS Lewis to the novelist, Charles Williams, inviting him to join—see The Collected Letters of CS Lewis, Vol.2, 183—in a letter to William Luther White 9/11/67, JRRT dates the origins of the Inklings as “probably mid-thirties”—Letters, 387).  Could he have found his inspiration for these heroic birds and their habit of picking people up from the name of his pub?

As ever, thanks for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

ps

If you haven’t read CS Lewis’ wonderful essay, “On Three Ways of Writing for Children”, here’s a LINK.

pps

We have no illustration of Tolkien’s Green Dragon, but here’s a Tudor example from Wymondham in Norfolk which we think would do quite well.

image24green.jpg

The Return of the Who.2?

28 Wednesday Oct 2015

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

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Aragorn, Aslan, C.S. Lewis, Catholicism, Gondor, Hobbits, Jadis, Medusa, Middle-earth, monotheism, Narnia, Oxford, religion, Sauron, secular, The Bird and the Baby, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Eagle and the Child, The Hobbit, The Inklings, The Lamb and Flag, The Lord of the Rings, the Pevensies, The Return of the Ring, The White Witch, Tolkien, White Tree

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always.

This posting is a continuation of our last, in which we made a brief attempt to think about what the title “The Return of the King” might have meant for its author in his time.

In this posting, we want to expand that meaning from a secular king to one with more religious overtones.

We ourselves, as we’ve said before, are World Civ people, believing that all people in all times and places are and should be of interest and value to everyone. We are also pan-spiritual, thinking with Gandhi that, “I believe in the fundamental Truth of all great religions of the world.”

In the case of Tolkien, this meant Catholic Christianity, a form of monotheism. Of religion and The Lord of the Rings, he wrote in 1953:

“The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like ‘religion’, to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.” Letters, 172.

He adds to this, in a letter to Houghton Mifflin, in 1955, that “It is a monotheistic world of ‘natural theology’. (Letters, 220). At the same time, however, he adds “I am in any case myself a Christian; but the ‘Third Age’ was not a Christian world. Letters, 220.

And yet we would suggest that there is not only more of a Christian theme, but also a Christian parallel with a book written at about the same time as the later stages of The Lord of the Rings and published slightly before it. This is C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950).

TheLionWitchWardrobe(1stEd)

As is well known, both Lewis and Tolkien

jrrt and csl

were members of a literary group in Oxford, the Inklings.

draft_lens9242861module102711761photo_1274835984eagle_and_child_pub_inkli

Lewis and Tolkien formed part of the permanent core, with other members coming and going over the years (1933-1949).   The meetings were held in Lewis’ rooms at Magdalen College,

magdalen room-used-by-cs-lewis

as well as at two local pubs, The Eagle and Child (called locally “Bird and Baby” or just “Bird”)

Birdandbaby

as well as The Lamb and Flag.

Lamb-and-flag-pub-oxford

The purpose (besides refreshments) was literary discussion, both of others’ works and of their own, and an important feature was the reading aloud of works in progress. Lewis had been very supportive, both of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, but Tolkien had not been so enthusiastic in return. All the same, we would suggest that various elements of Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and events around Gondor in Tolkien’s The Return of the King at times bear strong similarities.

In Lewis’ book, the main protagonists are four children, the Pevensies.

childrenaslanbbc

In Tolkien’s, there are four grown Hobbits, often mistaken, beyond the borders of the Shire, for children.

hildebrandthobbits

Both groups are on an errand which they barely understand and are faced with a supernatural enemy, the White Witch for the one, Sauron for the other. (There seems to be a lot of mirroring in all of this: the White Witch is already in Narnia and must be driven out. Sauron is outside Gondor and wants to get in, for example. The White Witch’s name is “Jadis”, by the way. Undoubtedly Lewis’ little linguistic joke: jadis in French means “formerly”, suggesting that even from the first time she appears, she’s already on her way out.)

wwbbc

main_1-Greg-Hildebrandt-Signed-Sauron-The-Dark-Lord-Limited-Edition-34x23-Giclee-PristineAuction.com

(Notice, in the movie version of Jadis, the strong similarity between her and the Medusa. In fact, Jadis turns her enemies, when she can, to ice.)

jadis1

bernini medusa

frozenmrtumnus

Before the current world of Narnia, to which the children come, there was a king who had been somehow ejected a century before. In Middle Earth, there has been no king in Gondor for ten times that. In Narnia, there has been winter for that century.

winteratthelamppost

In Gondor, in Middle Earth, its symbol of growth and stability, the White Tree, has withered and died.

WhiteTreeGondor

When the Pevensie children have been involved in the defeat of the White Witch, they will rule Narnia in the place of the true king, the lion Aslan.

the-chronicles-of-narnia-the-lion-the-witch-and-the-wardrobe-wallpaper-the-chronicles-of-narnia-the-lion-the-witch-and-the-wardrobe-poster_590x384_23014

For about a thousand years, stewards ruled Gondor in place of the king. (Another example of mirroring.)

denethor

When Lewis’ Aslan returns, it is from death, having sacrificed himself to save one of the Pevensie children.

aslandead

Thus, Aslan, in effect, heals himself. When the king of Gondor, Aragon, appears, he heals others. (Tolkien would probably associate this with the old English custom of having the monarch touch people attacked with a disease called scrofula, or “the King’s evil”. We include a picture of Queen Mary—1516-1558—doing so.)

Queen_Mary_I_curing_scrofula_Levina_Teerlinc_16th_C

healingeowyn

When Aslan appears, spring returns to Narnia.

springinnarnia

When Aragorn claims the throne, he and Gandalf discover a sapling of the old tree on Mindolluin, bring it down, and plant it and it soon flowers.

whitesapling whitetreebeginstoflower

We’re sure that there are other parallels, dear reader: can you think of any?

Thanks, as always, for reading this.

MTCIDC

CD

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