Camouflaged

27 Wednesday Mar 2019

Posted by Ollamh in Films and Music, Heroes, J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth

Tags

camouflage, Disney, Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Errol Flynn, Faramir, feldgrau, Great War, Ithilien, jaeger, khaki, Men in Tights, Richard Knoetel, Robin Hood, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, trenches, uniforms

As ever, dear readers, welcome.

After standing and reciting his “party piece”, and stewing two rabbits, Sam is about to see his first—and only—oliphaunt.

Before he does, however:

“Four tall Men stood there. Two had spears in their hands with broad bright heads. Two had great bows, almost of their own height, and great quivers of long green-feathered arrows. All had swords at their sides, and were clad in green and brown of varied hues, as if the better to walk unseen in the glades of Ithilien. Green gauntlets covered their hands, and their faces were hooded and masked with green, except for their eyes, which were very keen and bright.” (The Two Towers, Book Four, Chapter 4, “Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit”)

The chief of these men soon identifies himself as “Faramir, Captain of Gondor” and the men with him are rangers, a term which first appears in 14^th-century English to mean “game keeper”, which seems appropriate for Faramir and his men, as far as their dress is concerned. One might expect that those who spend their days in the woods would only naturally want to blend in, especially if part of their job is to apprehend poachers—trespassers who illegally hunt game. Faramir’s and his men’s clothing could also be that of poachers, if we match that description—the green and brown part—with some very familiar figures from another famous story—

If you read us regularly, you will probably recognize them, especially if we add one of our favorite illustrations.

If you still don’t recognize them, we’ll add a book cover.

This is the 1917 publication of the retelling of the Robin Hood stories, with illustrations by NC Wyeth and it’s clear that his depictions of Robin and his men—just like his illustrations of pirates—have influenced story-tellers and costume-designers long after that initial 1917 publication. Just look at Douglas Fairbanks Sr.’s 1922 Robin Hood,

cbe9537043957223ed32b027acbd3812

or the 1938 Errol Flynn The Adventures of Robin Hood

or even Disney’s 1973 animated Robin Hood

and even the 1993 parody, Robin Hood: Men in Tights.

Tolkien, we presume, would have known the Wyeth illustrations and perhaps the Errol Flynn, and might have had them in mind when he was describing the basic dress of Robin and his men. Beyond the basic outfit, however, these men are clearly dressed for more than poaching and apprehending—and it isn’t just the weapons, but also the gloves and the face-coverings. These men are soldiers and rangers have been soldiers, or the models for them, since at least the 18^th century, when certain German states, including Prussia and Hesse Kassel, employed forest rangers as light infantry—men trained as sharpshooters and skirmishers, called jaeger (“hunter” in German).

In the 19^th century, increasing numbers of ordinary troops of many western nations were given similar training, but the jaeger continued to be allowed special uniforms, usually green.

This is an illustration by one of the greatest (and one of our favorite) German military/historical artists of the late 19^th-early-20^th centuries, Richard Knoetel, dated 1910.

When the Great War began in 1914, all the soldiers of many of the countries involved were already moving away from the bright-colored uniforms of past years and dressing more like hunters. The British put off their parade uniforms

and dressed in a mud-color, that color being called “khaki” (originally a Persian word meaning “dust”).

The Germans, whose parade dress was blue,

dressed in a color called feldgrau (“field grey”).

Only the French began the war still on parade,

but even they gradually changed into something which blended in better with the terrain.

And blending in was absolutely necessary in a world in which war was being fought not with muskets and cannon, as in Napoleon’s days

but with machine guns which could fire 600 rounds per minute

and guns so big that some had to be transported on railroad trains.

Whenever possible, soldiers dug in, spending their days below ground level, in trenches.

When they had to go above ground level, they wanted to be as inconspicuous as possible. Here’s what 2^nd Lieutenant Tolkien might have looked like in 1916 (notice that, by 1916, British soldiers had put aside caps in the trenches and used helmets which looked positively medieval).

The term for this blending-in was “camouflage”, which entered English from French in 1917 and it was used not only by infantry, but the practice was extended to everything on the battlefield and beyond– to the new tanks

and even to ships, where the goal was to conceal or sometimes simply to confuse the eye.

Some of the most extreme varieties take us back to the rangers of South Ithilien, like this sniper, whose job was to pick off unsuspecting soldiers (officers were a special prize) from complete concealment.

This makes us wonder what Faramir and his men would have done if they had been armed with magazine rifles,

instead of bows as, after all, they are there for an ambush…

As always, thanks for reading and

MTCIDC

Heil, Sharkey!

20 Wednesday Mar 2019

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

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Tags

Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Black Shorts, Blackshirts, Blueshirts, Brownshirts, Charlie Chaplin, dictatorships, Eoin O'Duffy, facism, fascis, Francisco Franco, Industrial Revolution, Jeeves and Wooster, P.G. Wodehouse, Sir Oswald Mosley, Sir Roderick Spode, Sturm Abteilung, The Code of the Woosters, The Great Dictator, The Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King, The Scouring of the Shire, Tolkien, Vidkun Quisling, Vittorio Immanuele III

As ever, welcome, dear readers.

Some time ago, we did a posting on The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 8, “The Scouring of the Shire”.

At that time, our emphasis was upon its reflection of JRRT’s dislike for the effects of the Industrial Revolution on rural England

and the importance of the chapter to closure in The Lord of the Rings.

In this posting, we want to look at it from another direction and to view Sharkey’s Shire as a kind of proto-fascist state.

Although the word “fascist” is now used pretty loosely as a verbal attack on politicians and political parties with a rightward-lean, it had a more specific meaning in the 1920s and 1930s. Then, fascists were believers in a kind of militarized state, in which the economy might be in the hands of the government, and the government in the hands of a few (a kind of oligarchy) or even of one, a dictator. (Here’s a LINK if you want to know more.)

Benito Mussolini

was the first of these who actually succeeded in coming to power. In Italy, in 1922, he organized a march on the capital, Rome, which would lead to his becoming the head of state (although Italy remained a monarchy, the monarch, Vittorio Immanuele III, was brought out for state occasions only).

Mussolini, to make his power look like a natural historical progression, began using ancient Roman symbols. One of these was the mark of the escorts to Roman magistrates, the fascis, a bundle of birch rods with an axe in the middle, the sign that a magistrate had the power to inflict not only corporal punishment—the rods—but even death—the axe—on citizens. This bundle was carried by a lictor, a minor officer of state. The number of these lictors who marched in front of the magistrate signaled just how important the magistrate was.

Mussolini had his bullyboys, the “Blackshirts”

To emphasize this connection with the imperial past, he went so far as to impress the old initials of ancient Rome, SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus—“the Roman Senate and People”) on everything public in sight—even manhole covers (they’re still there to this day).

And his use of the symbol of the fascis was the basis of the term fascism—they’re even all around his tomb.

Mussolini might have been the first of these leaders—or would-be leaders—during this pre-war era, but there were plenty more. There was Eoin O’Duffy in Ireland, leading his thugs, called “Blueshirts”,

to Vidkun Quisling, with his Nasjonal Samling (“National Party”), who, after the Nazis conquered Norway, actually became leader there,

to Francisco Franco, in Spain,

to Hitler, in Germany,

whose original goon/enforcers were the SA—Sturm Abteilung (“Storm Detachment”) or “Brownshirts”.

In England, Tolkien would have been well aware of Sir Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists.

Hitler had been mocked by the famous silent film comedian, Charlie Chaplin, in his 1940, The Great Dictator,

but, closer to home, Mosley had become a figure of fun in the comic novels of PG Wodehouse

as “Sir Roderick Spode”. Here he is, memorably portrayed in the 1990-1993 television adaptation, Jeeves and Wooster, by John Turner—much of whose posture was a direct imitation of Mussolini,

even down to his pathetic followers, the “Black Shorts”.

His first appearance was in Wodehouse’s 1938 novel, The Code of the Woosters,

where he is described as:

“About seven feet in height, and swathed in a plaid ulster which made him look about six feet across, he caught the eye and arrested it. It was as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla, and had changed its mind at the last moment…

“I don’t know if you have ever seen those pictures in the papers of Dictators with tilted chins and blazing eyes, inflaming the populace with fiery words on the occasion of the opening of a new skittle alley, but that was what he reminded me of.” (The Code of the Woosters, Chapter One)

(Here’s a LINK to a free edition of the book, in case you’d like to read it—and why wouldn’t you? And this is a “plaid ulster” in case you’ve never seen one.)

Everything in the “Scouring” chapter, from the “great spiked gate” on the bridge over the Brandywine, to the “Chief’s Men”—who should be wearing brown tunics—to the very name “Chief”, instead of the old Shire title, “Mayor”, reeks of fascism, and, combined with:

“The pleasant row of old hobbit-holes in the bank on the north side of the Pool were deserted, and their little gardens that used to run down bright to the water’s edge were rank with weeds Worse, there was a whole line of the ugly new houses all along Pool Side, where the Hobbiton Road ran close to the bank. An avenue of trees had stood there. They were all gone. And looking with dismay up the road towards Bag End they saw a tall chimney of brick in the distance. It was pouring out black smoke into the evening air.”

links that political movement to the despoliation of the old natural world by the Industrial Revolution.

Behavior in this new Shire is based upon “orders” and here we really see the hand of Sharkey, who is, of course, Saruman. Here’s what he says to try to seduce Gandalf into joining him:

“A new Power is rising…As the Power grows, its proved friends will also grow…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…” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 2, “The Council of Elrond”)

And the most important element in that purpose is “Order”. It’s no wonder that Saruman is murdered.

Thanks, as always, for reading and

MTCIDC

On Time.3

13 Wednesday Mar 2019

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

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Tags

Calendars, Christopher Tolkien, Chronology, David Drake, Drafts, hobbit measurement, Moon Phases, Raj Whitehall, SM Stirling, The General, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Stairs of Cirith Ungol, Tolkien

Once upon a time, dear readers (and welcome, as always), this series began with this:

As you can see, it’s a reproduction of the first page of a draft of JRRT’s The Lord of the Rings chronology, which we found in a display case in Reading Adventureland at the marvelous Strong National Museum of Play, in Rochester, NY (the original is in the Tolkien papers at Marquette University).

We had seen the eventual complete version of this long ago in Appendix B of The Lord of the Rings, in the section entitled “The Great Years”, but, as with everything original, there’s a special thrill to seeing something much closer to the author than the printed page–like this, a leaf from a draft of what would become The Two Towers, Book Four, Chapter 8, “The Stairs of Cirith Ungol”, illustrated by Tolkien. If you compare it with the final text, it’s very interesting to see all of the kinds of changes JRRT made between it and that which we now read.

(We found this on a site called Biblioklept. As this means “book thief”, we were a little hesitant, at first, but it turned out to be a very interesting place—here’s a LINK to it so that you can see for yourself.)

The Hobbit (about which we wrote in parts 1 and 2 of this little series) was quite simple in its chronology. It’s all of a piece, the narrative being focused solely on Bilbo and the dwarves until Smaug flies off to devastate Lake-town (Chapter 14, “Fire and Water”). Even Gandalf’s disappearance in Chapter 7 (“Queer Lodgings”) is never really gone into. The opposite is true in The Lord of the Rings. In the opening chapters of Book One alone, Gandalf appears, Bilbo disappears, years pass and Gandalf reappears and disappears, and it’s only in Book Two that both reappear and we are told by Gandalf what happened between his last disappearance and his present reappearance (“The Council of Elrond”), even though some of what happened to him was occurring at the same time as Frodo’s packing up and leaving the Shire. Here’s a useful chronology from something called “scifi.stackexchange.com” (and here’s a LINK to it).

It’s not surprising, then, that JRRT needed to make very careful notes of who went where and when.

This didn’t always work out, however, as has been pointed out more than once, in the matter of phases of the moon. This is a complicated story (here’s a LINK to help), but, basically, JRRT, as meticulous as he always was, based the moon phases on a calendar from 1941-2

and mistook the marker for “new moon” to mean “the second day of the new moon”, which would have allowed for just the faintest of crescents in the sky, rather than the astronomical definition, “the full dark of the moon”.

Here’s a moon phase chart to help.

We know from a note in Christopher Tolkien’s The Treason of Isengard that JRRT was working from such a calendar (or almanac) because:

“Either while the making of Time-scheme I was in progress or at some later point my father wrote at the head of the first page of it: Moons are after 1941-2 + 6 days. (p. 369—if you happen to consult the Tolkien Gateway: User: Gamling/Hobbitdates on the subject, you will be puzzled at its footnote 2, which cites this volume, and, within it, “The Great River”, note 23, as note 23 says nothing about this)

For us, to focus upon such a detail is to miss the bigger point, however, which was, in fact, encapsulated in W. H. Auden’s review of The Fellowship of the Ring

in 1954:

”Of any imaginary world the reader demands that it seem real, and the standard of realism demanded today is much stricter than in the time, say, of Malory. Mr. Tolkien is fortunate in possessing an amazing gift for naming and a wonderfully exact eye for description; by the time one has finished his book one knows the histories of Hobbits, Elves, Dwarves and the landscape they inhabit as well as one knows one’s own childhood.” (The New York Times, October 31, 1954)

Where does such sense of reality come from?

We once read that, before science-fiction authors SM Stirling

and David Drake

began their 5-volume series of the adventures of Raj Whitehall, The General, in 1991 (see LINK—and here’s the first volume book cover),

they created a many-page description of the world, Bellevue, upon which those adventures are set. We thought that that was a great idea and it certainly made Bellevue and all of its events more believable and the narrative more engrossing.

On a much more massive scale, there are the 13 volumes of Christopher Tolkien’s

publication of his father’s papers and his own notes (this is obviously just a few of the books).

For us, however, there is a small, but equally revealing image of what lies behind JRRT’s work.

This is another item from that display case at the Strong Museum (and the original is also from the Tolkien collection at Marquette). As you can see, it’s a menu card, for a formal dinner, and we don’t know whether an always-paper-hungry Tolkien tucked it into a coat pocket to use at a later date, or whether it was a very boring dinner and he whiled away the time till the “cheese straws” by creating a neat little measurement system based upon hobbit physiognomy (we hope it was the latter).

What particularly catches our attention is the detail that “6 toes = 1 foot” (odd—do hobbits have six toes, like certain cats?)—but added to that, in a gloss to the right, is the translation into English measure that this hobbit “foot” equals 9 inches. The standard English measure of a foot is 12 inches, but in the days before the English conquest of Wales in the 13^th century, (under Edward I, 1239-1307), something called the “Venedotian Code” provided the measurement system in northern Wales, and, in that system, the foot was 9 inches—could it be that JRRT thought of the hobbits as Welsh?

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

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

On Time (1)

13 Wednesday Feb 2019

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

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Calendars, Chronology, Marquette University, Reading Adventureland, Strong National Museum of Play, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Time, Tolkien

Welcome, dear readers, as ever.

Our last two postings were all about calendars of various sorts and, as we thought about those, it brought us back to something we’d seen some years ago at the wonderful Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York.

In the part of the museum called “Reading Adventureland”,

there was a small exhibit on JRRT, and, in the middle, was this:

This is a reproduction of the first page (from the collection of JRRT’s papers at Marquette University) of a highly-detailed chronology of Book One of The Fellowship of the Ring, covering, day by day, the movements of major characters from the end of September, SR1418, through the first half of October.

It doesn’t surprise us that there would be such a thing—considering how many names there are: Frodo, Tom Bombadil, Aragorn, Gandalf, Elrond, and Glorfindel (not to mention the Nazgul)—and all are potentially in play in this short time, something almost like a train schedule would seem necessary.

This made us wonder if, when reading the text, we’re always as aware of time passing as the author. Are there moments when we can almost literally hear the clock ticking (there’s one on Bilbo’s wall—but I don’t think we ever see another)?

Are there times/places where it seems to move at a different speed or we forget time completely?

And what about The Hobbit? Is there the same sense of time there as in The Lord of the Rings?

On the very first page of the latter, we’re given a date:

“Bilbo and Frodo happened to have the same birthday, September 22.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 1, “A Long-Expected Party”)

And this date then forms a central point in that first chapter. In contrast, The Hobbit presents us with:

“By some curious chance one morning long ago in the quiet of the world…” (The Hobbit, Chapter One, “An Unexpected Party”)

So how is time then marked, say, from that moment

to the first real incident on the way to the Lonely Mountain, the adventure with the trolls?

To begin with, Gandalf gives us a hint at least as to the month Bilbo left the Shire with the Dwarves, saying to Thorin:

“And Thrain your father went away on the twenty-first of April, a hundred years ago last Thursday…”

It is the end of April, then. The next suggestion of a date comes as they are about to come upon those trolls, when Bilbo says to himself, “To think that it will soon be June!” (The Hobbit, Chapter Two, “Roast Mutton”). This makes us think that they’ve been traveling east for about a month. How long, then, from there to their first stop, Rivendell?

Here, things become vague. The next chapter, “A Short Rest”, begins:

“They did not sing or tell stories that day, even though the weather improved; nor the next day, nor the day after.”

And then the text says, “One morning”, though no day or month is specified. Presumably, they are now at the beginning of June. It seems that, that same day, “Morning passed, afternoon came…”, then “Tea-time had long gone by, and it seemed supper-time would soon do the same. There were moths fluttering about, and the light became very dim, for the moon had not risen.” At this point, Gandalf discovers the way down to Rivendell.

In a mocking song which the elves sing to Bilbo and his companions, they confirm that it’s June:

“No knowing, no knowing

What brings Mister Baggins

And Balin and Dwalin

Down into the valley

In June…”

How long do the travelers stay in Rivendell, now that they’ve reached it? Here we have a bit more concrete information:

“They stayed long in that good house, fourteen days at least…”

And we also know when their stay ended:

“So the time came to midsummer eve, and they were to go on again with the early sun on midsummer morning.”

In Tolkien’s England Midsummer’s Day is the 24^th of June, so we now know that Bilbo and the Dwarves have been on the road at least a month and a half.

On Midsummer’s Eve, we are given a more fixed point to their journey when Elrond reads the “Moon-letters” on Thorin’s map.

“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”)

This would mean that, at the end of the expedition to the Lonely Mountain, the Dwarves, to enter the back door, must be at a specific location at a specific time. Unfortunately, though Thorin can identify what “Durin’s Day” is, he then says, “But this will not help us much, I fear, for it passes our skill in these days to guess when such a time will come again.”

Without that knowledge, they still set out on Midsummer’s Day and we wonder if we will be told how long it will take to reach their next adventure, capture by the goblins?

Unfortunately not. Instead, we are only told:

“Long days after they had climbed out of the valley and left the Last Homely House miles behind, they were still going up and up and up.” (The Hobbit, Chapter 4, “Over Hill and Under Hill”)

We know that the summer is passing, however, because Bilbo says to himself, “The summer is getting on down below…and haymaking is going on…They will be harvesting and blackberrying…”

This is a little uncertain. Wheat planted in September, our sources tell us, is usually harvested in August of the following year and blackberrying in England begins in August. If the travelers have set out from Rivendell on 24 June (Midsummer’s Day), have they been climbing into the Misty Mountains for a whole month?

Our first bit of concrete data for this part of the journey comes from Gandalf, who tells them, as they stand on the far side of the Misty Mountains:

“You lose track of time inside goblin-tunnels. Today’s Thursday, and it was Monday night or Tuesday morning that we were captured.” (The Hobbit, Chapter Six, “Out of the Frying-Pan into the Fire”)

Thus, although their flight from the goblins has been “miles and miles” and they’ve come out on the eastern side of the Mountains, they’ve taken between two and three days to do so—but we still don’t know what month we’re now in.

From their current location, it seems like a quick trip to Beorn’s house.

Rescued from goblins and Wargs by eagles, they have an overnight stay in the eagles’ nests before being dropped at the Carrock, a huge rock set in the river Anduin.

It appears to be no more than a day’s walk from there to Beorn’s, so the question is, how long do they stay? Counting by wakings and meals, it appears that they were at the shape-shifter’s house, basically two days and left on the morning of the third, then, when leaving, they traveled for three days to the edge of Mirkwood:

“That third evening they were so eager to press on, for Beorn had said that they should reach the forest-gate early on the fourth-day, that they rode still forward after dark and into the night beneath the moon.” (The Hobbit, Chapter Seven, “Queer Lodgings”).

They camp overnight at the edge of the forest and we’ll camp here, too, before continuing to investigate the measurement of time further in the second part of this posting, next week.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

Unhealing

23 Wednesday Jan 2019

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

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Achilles, Frod, Greeks, Morgul Knife, Mysia, Nazgul, Neoptolemus, Odysseus, Philoctetes, Telephus, The Grey Havens, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Tristan and Iseult, Troy, Weathertop, wound, wounded

As always, dear readers, welcome.

The war around Troy was a very complicated thing, with traditions stretching in all directions. In one, the Greeks actually sailed to Troy twice, the first time missing it entirely and landing in Mysia, to the east of Troy.

There, the Greeks were met by local defenders under their king, Telephus, who was wounded by Achilles

before the Greeks realized their mistake and withdrew.

After they’d gone, Telephus’ wound simply wouldn’t heal, but, after consulting oracles, he was told that there was a cure: rust from the spear which had wounded him. The Greeks had gone back to Greece to regroup and to try again, so Telephus went after them to request that Achilles treat the wound which he had made. For some reason, Achilles refused, so Telephus grabbed the High King Agamemnon’s baby son, Orestes, and threatened to kill him if Achilles didn’t grant his request.

(This scene bordered on the edge of hilarious to the Greeks and was the subject of parodies in ancient times—here’s a pot with one, Orestes being replaced by a wineskin.)

The threat worked and Achilles healed Telephus.

This isn’t the only example of the wound which won’t heal to be found in the Trojan material. Philoctetes, who had inherited Heracles’ bow (given to him by Heracles because he helped with Heracles’ funeral pyre), was on his way with the other Greeks to Troy when he was bitten by a snake. The wound wouldn’t heal and smelled so bad that the Greeks left him—and the bow—behind (this is one version—there are others).

Later in the story, however, a prophecy told the Greeks that they wouldn’t take Troy without the bow. (By late in the Troy tradition, there had piled up a number of these conditions—rather like the horcruxes in the Harry Potter books—all to keep the story going.) Odysseus and Achilles’ son, Neoptolemus, went off to persuade—or steal—the bow (in one version—there are lots of others) and eventually persuaded Philoctetes to come to Troy with the bow, where he was healed and used the bow to aid the Greeks.

The theme of the unhealing wound reappears in western medieval literature in several places. In the story of Tristan and Iseult,

Tristan is wounded fighting an Irish giant

and, as in the Greek stories of Telephus and Philoctetes, the wound won’t heal. The theme appears again in the story of the Holy Grail—and like the Troy tradition, it has many versions. In some, the last guardian of the Grail is a wounded king (sometimes called the “Fisher King”) .

But, if you’re a regular reader, you know where this is leading. On Weathertop, Frodo is attacked by the Nazgul.

He is wounded with a morgul knife

and the tip of the blade not only remains in the wound, but begins to travel towards Frodo’s heart. He is saved by Elrond’s healing powers, but, somehow, things are never quite the same and, some time after the hobbits return to the Shire–

“One evening Sam came into the study and found his master looking very strange. He was very pale and his eyes seemed to see things far away.

‘What’s the matter, Mr. Frodo?’ said Sam.

‘I am wounded,’ he answered, ‘wounded; it will never really heal.’” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 9, “The Grey Havens”)

We began with Greeks and the complex epic of Troy, then passed through a pair of medieval stories to The Lord of the Rings, but something in all of these tales interested us in what seemed a common theme: protecting something, keeping something, can bring long-lasting harm to the protector/keeper, even if done for the best of reasons. It’s less clear if this pertains to Philoctetes, but Telephus was defending his country, as was Tristan in fatally wounding the Irish giant, who was leading an invasion force to Cornwall, where Tristan lived. The Fisher King is the guardian of the Grail.

Frodo clearly has come to understand this and, when the time comes, he goes with Bilbo and Gandalf and others to the Grey Havens and beyond, saying to Sam:

“…But I have been too deeply hurt, Sam. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.”

(These are two very different versions of the leave-taking at the Grey Havens—first, the Hildebrandts’, second, Alan Lee’s.)

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

On the Horns

16 Wednesday Jan 2019

Posted by Ollamh in J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, The Rohirrim

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Boromir, buccinae, Cavalry charge, Chanson de Roland, Charlemagne, cornet, Easterlings, Eorl the Young, Gondor, Greek, horn, Meduseld, Militari, Rohan, Rohirrim, Roman, The Lord of the Rings, Theoden, Tolkien, trumpet, Trumpeter, Vegetius, war-horn

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

Our friend, Erik, once said that one of his very favorite passages from The Lord of the Rings began with this: “And as if in answer there came from far away another note. Horns, horns, horns. In dark Mindolluin’s sides they dimly echoed. Great horns of the North, wildly blowing. Rohan had come at last.” (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 4, “The Siege of Gondor”)

Of course this brings on the charge of the Rohirrim, one of our own favorite moments in the Jackson films.

And what is more exciting than a cavalry charge (as long as you don’t think too hard about the fate of the horses)?

Those horns begin blowing because Theoden:

“…seized a great horn from Guthlaf his banner-bearer, and he blew such a blast upon it that it burst asunder. And straightaway all the horns in the host were lifted up in music, and the blowing of the horns of Rohan in that hour was like a storm upon the plain and a thunder in the mountains.” (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 5, “The Ride of the Rohirrim”)

A number of images immediately come into our minds when reading this.

First, when Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli initially come to Edoras and enter Meduseld,

(This is a particularly fine possible Meduseld by Inger Edelfeldt.)

they look up to see:

“Many woven cloths were hung upon the walls, and over their wide spaces marched figures of ancient legend, some dim with years, some darkling in the shade. But upon one form the sunlight fell: a young man upon a white horse. He was blowing a great horn, and his yellow hair was flying in the wind. The horse’s head was lifted, and its nostrils were wide and red as it neighed, smelling battle afar. Foaming water, green and white, rushed and curled about its knees.

‘Behold Eorl the Young!’ said Aragorn. ‘Thus he rode out of the North to the Battle of the Field of Celebrant.’” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 6, “The King of the Golden Hall”)

Thus, we’re reminded of an earlier rescue, when Eorl brought the Rohirrim out of the north in TA2510 to aid Gondor in defeating a combined army of orcs and Easterlings.

Second, anyone interested in Western medieval literature would be reminded of the early French poem, the Chanson de Roland (c1000AD),

in which Roland, a young warrior and leader of the rear guard of Charlemagne’s army, refuses to blow his horn for reinforcements when his men are ambushed in a pass, saying that to do so would be cowardice.

Rather than his horn exploding, Roland’s head does, from the exertion, but the broken horn makes us think of Boromir’s last stand, where he blows his horn, but no help comes until it’s too late.

All that we know of the horn which Theoden blew was that it was “great”—that is, big—but perhaps it looked like Boromir’s?

“On a baldric he worn a great horn tipped with silver that was now laid upon his knees.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 2, “The Council of Elrond”) Here’s a medieval one from the British Museum.

It should be remembered, of all of these horns, that they have a military use, both in Middle-earth and in our world, as a method of transferring commands from officers to soldiers, both in and out of battle, and what Theoden is actually doing is the musical equivalent of shouting CHARGE! to his 6000-man eored. Nowhere is the military use of horns made clearer for earlier warfare than in the writing of the late Roman (4^th c. AD) author, Vegetius. In Book II of his De Re Militari (“Concerning Military Affairs”) he describes the use of such instruments:

“The music of the legion consists of trumpets, cornets and buccinae. The trumpet sounds the charge and the retreat. The cornets are used only to regulate the motions of the colors; the trumpets serve when the soldiers are ordered out to any work without the colors; but in time of action, the trumpets and cornets sound together. The classicum, which is a particular sound of the buccina or horn, is appropriated to the commander-in-chief and is used in the presence of the general, or at the execution of a soldier, as a mark of its being done by his authority. The ordinary guards and outposts are always mounted and relieved by the sound of trumpet, which also directs the motions of the soldiers on working parties and on field days. The cornets sound whenever the colors are to be struck or planted. These rules must be punctually observed in all exercises and reviews so that the soldiers may be ready to obey them in action without hesitation according to the general’s orders either to charge or halt, to pursue the enemy or to retire. F or reason will convince us that what is necessary to be performed in the heat of action should constantly be practiced in the leisure of peace.” (This is taken from a 1944 digest of the 1767 translation by John Clarke—if you would like to see the Latin original, here’s a LINK to a text. The relevant passage is: “XXII. Quid inter tubicines et cornicines et classicum intersit.”)

The three Latin terms translated as “trumpets, cornets and buccinae” are actually, “tubicines cornicines bucinatores”, meaning “players of tubae, players of cornua, players of buccinae”. In this ancient relief, we can see, on the left, tuba-players, and, in the center, either players of cornu, or the buccina, as the instruments appear to be rather hard to distinguish in shape.

And here’s a modern reconstruction, by Peter Connolly.

We live in a world of such rapid electronic communication

that it might be easy to forget that, for centuries, any order beyond the sound of a general’s voice had to be transferred by other means. Like Greek trumpeters,

or Roman

or medieval mounted messengers (the Latin says “messengers of William”).

Drums might be used—

image14rendrum image15drum

and the early 18^th-century British general, the Duke of Marlborough even had his own foot-messenger squad, wearing distinctive clothing (one, in blue, with a jockey cap, is just to the left of the Duke in this tapestry).

But what, we asked above, is more exciting than a cavalry charge (we once did a posting devoted specifically to them)—and what makes that more exciting than the trumpeter at the front, sounding the charge?

image17friedland4

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

Ring Composition

09 Wednesday Jan 2019

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

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Alberich, Andrew Lang, Andvari, Anglo-Saxon, Annatar, Der Ring des Nibelungen, Fafnir, Fairy Books, Goetterdaemmerung, Halvor, Heroic literature, Hildebrandts, Midgard Serpent, Norse Folktales, Old English, Otter, Red Fairy Book, Richard Wagner, Ring, Sauron, Sigurd, Sir George Webbe Dasent, Soria Moria Castle, The Lord of the Rings, The Ring of the Nibelung, The Silmarillion, Tolkien, Widsith

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

The title of this essay is derived from a technique in heroic literature, in which, in some way, the story/song ends, more or less where it began, just like a ring—or the Midgard Serpent, which encircles the earth in Norse mythology.

Thinking about ring composition made us think, of course, about the Ring

and to ask ourselves a question about the composition of The Lord of the Rings: where did the idea of a powerful ring come from?

There has been a lot of scholarly work about what influenced JRRT, some of which he himself agreed with, some he did not. For instance, the suggestion that Richard Wagner’s (1813-1883)

huge 4-opera cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen, “The Ring of the Nibelung” (1848-1874)

might have provided a spark was vigorously dismissed by Tolkien—although, to our minds, there is a certain similarity—the ring of the title is a magical one, after all, whose power would allow the owner to rule the world—but it’s accursed and only brings unhappiness—or worse– to anyone who possesses it. And yet characters in the four operas which make up the cycle struggle over its possession. There, however, the similarity ends. The maker of the ring isn’t a semi-divine figure who’s attempting to rebuild his kingdom through a combination of his magical powers and his political abilities, but, rather, a dwarf, named Alberich, who has stolen the gold from which the ring is made from the Rhine Maidens, and, in return, Alberich must give up love, which he renounces.

He soon loses the ring and there is no parallel with the Shire, or with hobbits: this is a world with gods and heroes, all larger-than-life, and Sam, in particular, would feel very out of place here. Just contrast the Hildebrandts’ Frodo and Sam meeting Faramir with this children’s theatre character sheet depicting the figures from the last of the four operas, Goetterdaemmerung, “The Gods’ Twilight”.

We would suggest that a stronger influence might be found in JRRT’s interest in Old English literature. In that literature, Anglo-Saxon kings and lords are known as “ring-givers” and “gold-givers”,

who reward their followers—as well as singers—with precious decorations–as the poet in the poem called Widsith tells us:

Likewise I was among the Eatula with Ælfwine,
he had the lightest hand of all mankind, as I have heard,
to perform his praises, the most generous in the sharing of rings,
the bright bracelets, the child of Eadwine. (68-74)

(translation by Prof. Aaron K. Hostetter of Rutgers University, Camden—here’s a LINK so that you can read the whole poem—and much more—at his website—he has a wonderful project to translate a mass of Old English literature and has done a great deal to make it all accessible in one place. As for Widsith, there’s a very useful Wiki article, if you’re interested. Here’s a LINK to it.)

Whereas there might be some distant influence in the making of a powerful ring in Wagner’s operas, the giving of rings makes us think of Sauron, when he reappears in the Second Age. At that time, he comes in the guise of “Annatar”, “Lord of Gifts” and, to gain power over the Elves, encourages them to make rings, all the while creating his own to overpower and master them. As his power grows, he collects all of the rings he can (he never succeeds in getting the last three Elven rings) and doles them out, like those Anglo-Saxon kings and lords, to attempt to control dwarves and men, as well:

“But Sauron gathered into his hands all the remaining Rings of Power; and he dealt them out to the other peoples of Middle-earth, hoping thus to bring under his sway all those that desired secret power beyond the measure of their kind.” (The Silmarillion, 288)

The theme in both Wagner and The Silmarillion is that of supernatural control through what appears to be a rather ordinary object, a ring, something which, when Bilbo first finds it, is described as nothing more than “a tiny ring of cold metal” (The Hobbit, Chapter 5, “Riddles in the Dark”). Tolkien may have been influenced by its appearance in opera, and more likely, by the use of rings in Old English, but there is an older possibility:

“Outside school-room hours his mother gave him plenty of story-books…The Arthurian legends also excited him. But most of all he found delight in the Fairy Books of Andrew Lang, especially the Red Fairy Book, for tucked away in its closing pages was the best story he had ever read. This was the tale of Sigurd who slew the dragon Fafnir: a strange and powerful tale set in the nameless North.” (Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien, A Biography, 31)

Andrew Lang (1844-1912),

who might be considered a perfect example of the Victorian literary figure, having written novels, poems, criticism, travelogues, and early anthropological works, had also begun publishing a series of collections of stories for children, each one of the series being bound in a different color.

His wife, Leonora Blanche Alleyne (1851-1933), did most of the editing after the initial volumes, publishing, in all, a dozen volumes between 1889 and 1910. The Red Fairy Book (1890) was the second in the series

and it was in this volume that a little boy

first discovered dragons—and perhaps magic rings, as well, as in the story of Sigurd, we find:

“Now there was at that time a dwarf called Andvari, who lived in a pool beneath a waterfall, and there he had hidden a great hoard of gold. And one day Otter had been fishing there, and had killed a salmon and eaten it, and was sleeping, like an otter, on a stone. Then someone came by, and threw a stone at the otter and killed it, and flayed off the skin, and took it to the house of Otter’s father. Then he knew his son was dead, and to punish the person who had killed him he said he must have the Otter’s skin filled with gold, and covered all over with red gold, or it should go worse with him. Then the person who had killed Otter went down and caught the Dwarf who owned all the treasure and took it from him.

Only one ring was left, which the Dwarf wore, and even that was taken from him.

Then the poor Dwarf was very angry, and he prayed that the gold might never bring any but bad luck to all the men who might own it, for ever.” (Lang, editor, “The Story of Sigurd”)

And this is not the only ring to be found in The Red Fairy Book.

In the “Draft of a letter to ‘Mr. Rang’ ”, dated by Tolkien as “Aug. 1967”, JRRT has this to say about the origin of the name Moria:

“In fact this first appeared in The Hobbit chap.1. It was there, as I remember, a casual ‘echo’ of Soria Moria Castle in one of the Scandinavian tales translated by Dasent. (The tale had no interest for me: I had already forgotten it and have never since looked at it…)” (Letters, 384)

The “Dasent” mentioned here is Sir George Webbe Dasent (1817-1896), lawyer, civil servant, and sometime professor of English Literature and Modern History at King’s College, London, who, in 1859, had published Popular Tales from the Norse, a translation from the Norwegian of a series of pamphlets and books by Asbjornsen and Moe under the general title “Norske Folkeeventyr” (“Norse Folktales”), published between 1841 and 1871. By the third edition (1888), Dasent had added, among other works, a story entitled “Soria Moria Castle”. Tolkien may have seen any one of the several different editions of this work as an adult, but, as a child, he would have first read “Soria Moria Castle” in the same Red Fairy Book in which he had encountered Sigurd and the dragon. (Here’s a LINK to the Lang if you would like to see the two stories as JRRT would have.)

Beyond the title and its hint of Dwarfish mines, however, there is also a magic ring to be found in this story, given to the hero, Halvor, by three princesses whom he has rescued from trolls:

“Then they dressed him so splendidly that he was like a King’s son; and they put a ring on his finger, and it was one which would enable him to go there and back again by wishing, but they told him that he must not throw it away, or name their names; for if he did, all his magnificence would be at an end, and then he would never see them more.” (“Soria Moria Castle”)

JRRT was born in 1893. We don’t know exactly when his mother may have handed him Lang’s collection, but it was in childhood, according to his own recollection. Thus, the Ring—disguised as a ring—may have entered his life long before he heard an opera, or studied an earlier form of his native language.

The Lord of the Rings has a ring in its composition and we began this posting with talk of ring composition, but now we’re going to conclude by breaking loose from that ring by suggesting that perhaps that was the ultimate purpose in the original choice of the Ring for JRRT: to symbolize completion not by circling back, but by the breaking of a seemingly unbreakable circle. Sauron, once the servant of Melkor, but having great power of his own, has used that power not only to return and return through the ages from defeat, but to fashion a master ring, one which controls all others, giving him even more strength. At the same time, it had required such strength to make such a ring that, at its destruction:

“ ‘The realm of Sauron is ended!’ said Gandalf. ‘The Ring-bearer has fulfilled his Quest.’ And as the Captains gazed south to the Land of Mordor, it seemed to them that, black against the pall of cloud, there rose a huge shape of shadow, impenetrable, lightning-crowned, filling all the sky. Enormous it reared above the world, and stretched out towards them a vast, threatening hand, terrible but impotent: for even as it leaned over them, a great wind took it, and it was all blown away, and passed; and then a hush fell.” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 4, “The Field of Cormallen”)

(Another wonderful illustration by one of our favorite Tolkien illustrators, Ted Nasmith)

As Gandalf has said of the Ring:

“If it is destroyed, then he will fall, and his fall will be so low that none can foresee his arising ever again. For he will lose the best part of the strength that was native to him in his beginning, and all that was made or begun with that power will crumble, and he will be maimed for ever, becoming a mere spirit of malice that gnaws itself in the shadows, but cannot again grow or take shape. And so a great evil of this world will be removed.” (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 9, “The Last Debate”)

Thus, after the Ring was destroyed, so was the ring of Sauron’s return in age after age, bringing about what we might then call “ring de-composition”and the story ends not where it began, but going towards old places—the Grey Havens and beyond—for some, and new places—the Fourth Age—for others.

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

Can we resist saying one thing more? JRRT couldn’t—but was he thinking of a teaser for a sequel when Gandalf added to what he’d said above:

“Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary.”?

A Little Ring, the Least of Rings

02 Wednesday Jan 2019

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

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Aladdin, Alexandre Dumas, Barad-Dur, Chateau d'If, Edmond Dantes, Elba, French Revolution, Galadriel, Harad, Hitler, Jinghiz Khan, Louis XVI, Morannon, Mordor, Napoleon, Nazgul, Ring Wraiths, St Helena, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Toulon, Umbar, Waterloo

Welcome, readers, as always, and, if it’s part of your culture, Happy New Year!

We’ve recently been reading a book about Napoleon

and his first fall, in 1814. He was forced to abdicate,

thereby losing the massive empire he had built up in the early 19^thcentury.

His many enemies had a number of possibilities as to what to do with him. They could, for example, have imprisoned him, as Edmond Dantes is in Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo (serialized 1844-46), in a fortress like the Chateau d’If.

Or, more radically—but certainly very effectively—they could have permanently removed him by the same means by which revolutionary France removed his predecessor, Louis XVI.

Instead, they allowed him not only to live, but even to continue to be a kind of monarch—although only of a tiny island, Elba, off the west coast of Italy.

They thought they’d seen the last of him, leaving him to spend the rest of his life as a sovereign of a ragged collection of fishermen and farmers.

For Napoleon, however, who always saw himself as destined for only the greatest things, being king of Elba must have felt to him rather like the way the genie in Disney’s Aladdin (1992) expresses the contrast in his life–

That being the case, Napoleon lived on Elba for less that a year before he planned and accomplished his escape.

Back in France, he was welcomed by the very soldiers sent to stop him,

image10fifth

raised new armies,

image11napog

marched north to deal with his nearest enemies, Prussia and England, and was finally—and permanently—defeated at Waterloo, 18 June, 1815.

image12waterloo

This time, his enemies, having learned their lesson, sent Napoleon as far away from Europe as they could and to a much less hospitable place, the island of St Helena, in the South Atlantic,

where he died in 1821.

From his first success, at the siege of Toulon in 1793,

Napoleon had climbed and climbed until, by 1801, he was the real ruler of France (as “First Consul”)

and then, in 1804, Emperor.

And yet, it was never enough, which reminds us of so many of the “great conquerors” of history, from Alexander,

to Jinghiz Khan and his successors,

to Hitler.

In every case throughout history, no conqueror has ever had enough and, if we move out of this earth to Middle-earth, we find Sauron, a figure in many ways like all of these earthly conquerors, who, although defeated by an alliance of Elves and Men in the past, has returned and, in time, reacquired immense power. To begin with, he has the entire realm of Mordor.

He has also somehow gained the means to create giant fortifications (sometimes based upon older constructions), like the Barad-dur

and the Morannon and all of the other inner and outer works of Mordor.

image26morannon image27mord image28cirithungol

He also controls the Nazgul,

massive armies of orcs,

as well as allies from the Harads and Umbar.

All of which he has done, it seems, by whatever innate powers he possesses—without the Ring. And this made us wonder: what is it that the Ring actually does for its wearer that Sauron wants it back?

Certainly, the only power Gollum appears to have gotten from the Ring is that of invisibility (and the side-effect of longevity).

This is true for Bilbo, as well,

and for Frodo–

although, when Frodo puts on the Ring on Weathertop, he is plunged into a kind of alternate dimension, seeing the Nazgul as they really are

and, again, on Ammon Hen, he is put into direct contact with the Ring’s real owner.

Does this suggest that the Ring’s power is only as powerful as the Ring’s current wearer? Galadriel confirms this when Frodo asks her about the other rings: “why cannot I see all the others and know the thoughts of those that wear them?”

To which she replies:

“Did not Gandalf tell you that the rings give power according to the measure of each possessor?”

(The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 7, “The Mirror of Galadriel”)

This then accounts for Gandalf’s almost violent explanation when Frodo offers it to him:

“’No!’ cried Gandalf, springing to his feet. ‘With that power I should have power too great and terrible. And over me the Ring would gain a power still greater and more deadly.’ His eyes flashed and his face was lit as by a fire within. ‘Do not tempt me! For I do not wish to become like the Dark Lord himself. Yet the way of the Ring to my heart is by pity, pity for weakness and the desire of strength to do good. Do not tempt me! I dare not take it, not even to keep it safe, unused. The wish to wield it would be too great, for my strength. I shall have such need of it. Great perils lie before me.’” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 2, “The Shadow of the Past”)

Or when Frodo offers it to Galadriel:

“You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 7, “The Mirror of Galadriel”)

Sauron has been able to accomplish so much without the Ring—what would happen should he ever wear it again? In “The Shadow of the Past”, Gandalf tells Frodo that it controls the other rings—even the three long-concealed from Sauron:

“The Three are hidden still. But that no longer troubles him. He only needs the One; for he made that Ring himself, it is his, and he let a great part of his own former power pass into it, so that he could rule all the others. If he recovers it, then he will command them all again, even the Three, and all that has been wrought with them will be laid bare, and he will be stronger than ever.”

And, just as important—maybe even more so—Sauron has based his place of power and refuge, his sure foundation in Middle-earth, upon it, as Elrond tells the council:

“Sauron was diminished, but not destroyed. His Ring was lost but not unmade. The Dark Tower was broken, but its foundations were not removed; for they were made with the power of the Ring, and while it remains they will endure.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 2, “The Council of Elrond”)

So, then, just as Napoleon, exiled on Elba, could plot and accomplish return, given the Ring, Sauron, defeated before, could return and, with a greed for conquest as insatiable as that of the French emperor, reappear again and again in Middle-earth, where there was no St Helena to keep him for good.

Thanks for reading!

MTCIDC

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~ adventure fantasy

Tag Archives: The Lord of the Rings

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A Little Ring, the Least of Rings