Orc Arsenal.1

26 Wednesday Sep 2018

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

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

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

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

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

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

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

Then others, like Angus McBride and Ted Nasmith,

And Alan Lee and John Howe,

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

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

rather than a mace.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lee

and Howe

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

How does JRRT describe the orc weaponry?

The first armed orc we see appears in Moria:

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

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

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

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

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

So far, we’ve seen spears

and scimitars

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

or even the Roman gladius?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and been inspired by its illustrations.

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

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

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

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

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

Speaking Up

19 Wednesday Sep 2018

Posted by Ollamh in J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Poetry

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Against Idleness and Mischief, Alice in Wonderland, Children, Edwardian, Isaac Watts, Lewis Carroll, Oliphaunt, recitation, Tennyson, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Victorian, William Wordsworth

Welcome, dear readers, as ever.

We are always interested in linking JRRT and Middle-earth with things of this earth, from Tolkien’s experience in the Great War to English geography vs that of Middle-earth. In this posting, we begin with an elephant—or, rather, oliphaunt. Which is an elephant—sort of, only bigger and menacing.

“Big as a house, much bigger than a house, it looked to him, a grey-clad moving hill…his great legs like trees, enormous sail-like ears spread out, long snout upraised like a huge serpent about to strike, his small red eyes raging. His upturned hornlike tusks were bound with bands of gold and dripped with blood.” (The Two Towers, Book Four, Chapter 4, “Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit”)

As big as the oliphaunt is, the real subject of our post is actually one small part of what might have been JRRT’s Victorian/Edwardian educational experience and its reflection in the form of Sam Gamgee, who, “stood up, putting his hands behind his back (as he always did when ‘speaking poetry’) and began:

Grey as a mouse

Big as a house

Nose like a snake

I make the earth shake

As I tramp through the grass

Trees crack as I pass

With horns in my mouth

I walk in the South

Flapping big ears

Beyond count of years

I stump round and round

Never lie on the ground

Not even to die

Oliphaunt am I

Biggest of all

Huge, old, and tall

If ever you’d met me

You wouldn’t forget me

If you never do

You won’t think I’m true

But old Oliphaunt am I

And I never lie.”

In the 1890s, when JRRT was a little boy, a mainstay of that education was the combination of memorization and repetition through recitation.

Children were expected to commit to memory—and to be able to perform—any number of poetic works whenever called upon. In what was probably an extreme example, the poet Alfred Tennyson’s (1809-1892)

father is said to have required him to memorize and repeat to him over four mornings all four books of the Roman poet, Horace’s, ( 65-8BC)

(This is a “traditional” portrait of the poet, but probably isn’t really he.)

odes—a hefty chore—that’s 103 poems—in Latin.

It’s not surprising, then, that one little Victorian girl, finding herself in a strange and distorted world, would try to provide herself with both comfort and stability by returning to the familiar: reciting.

“I’ll try and say ‘ How doth the little—'” and she

crossed her hands on her lap as if she were

saying lessons, and began to repeat it…”

This is from Chapter 2, “The Pool of Tears”, of Lewis Carroll’s

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865 (this is an 1866 printing).

What Alice will try to repeat is a poem called “Against Idleness and Mischief”, by the clergyman Isaac Watts (1674-1748),

from his 1715 collection, Divine Songs Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children.

This is what Alice thought that she was going to say:

1 How doth the little busy Bee

2 Improve each shining Hour,

3 And gather Honey all the day

4 From every opening Flower!

5 How skilfully she builds her Cell!

6 How neat she spreads the Wax!

7 And labours hard to store it well

8 With the sweet Food she makes.

9 In Works of Labour or of Skill

10 I would be busy too:

11 For Satan finds some Mischief still

12 For idle Hands to do.

13 In Books, or Work, or healthful Play

14 Let my first Years be past,

15 That I may give for every Day

16 Some good Account at last.

What Alice recited, however, was not quite that:

“but her voice sounded hoarse and strange, and the words did not come the same as they used to do :

” How doth the little crocodile

Improve his shining tail,

And pour the waters of the Nile

On every golden scale!

How cheerfully he seems to grin,

How neatly spreads his claws,

And welcomes little fishes in

With gently smiling jaws.”

which was hardly comforting!

Twice, Alice is called upon by others to recite—in Chapter 5, by a hookah-smoking caterpillar,

who demands that she recite “You are old, Father William”—which is, in itself, topsy-turvy, as, instead of the kind of morally-inspiring poem Victorian children were clearly expected to produce, it’s a parody of William Wordsworth’s (1770-1850), “Resolution and Independence” (1802, published 1807), a poem about an elderly pauper who makes a living collecting leeches (and who perks up the previously-despondent Wordsworth with his sturdy view of life).

Instead of that sturdy view, here is what Alice begins to recite on the subject of Father William’s behavior:

” You are old, Father William,” the young man said,

”And your hair has become very white;

And yet you incessantly stand on your head—

Do you think, at your age, it is right ?”

And in Chapter 10, a gryphon

orders her to “Stand up and repeat ‘Tis the voice of the sluggard’, another moral poem by Watts. It should begin:

‘Tis the voice of the sluggard, I heard him complain,

“You have waked me too soon, I must slumber again.”
As the door on its hinges, so he on his bed,
Turns his sides and his shoulders and his heavy head.

Instead, out comes:

”’Tis the voice of the lobster; I heard him declare,

‘ You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair!

As a duck with its eyelids, so he with his nose

Trims his belt and his buttons, and turns out his toes.””

In each case, what was meant to be comforting or at least dutiful, has turned out distorted and disturbing. As the Caterpillar says—and Alice answers–

” That is not said right,” said the Caterpillar. ”Not quite right, I’m afraid,” said Alice,

timidly; “some of the words have got altered.”

” It is wrong from beginning to end,” said the

Caterpillar decidedly, and there was silence for

some minutes.

This was hardly the expected effect, either for Victorians in general or for Alice, in particular, but, if the Caterpillar is censorious and Alice apologetic, Sam’s master has a completely different reaction to the hobbit’s recitation:

“Frodo stood up. He had laughed in the midst of all his cares when Sam trotted out the old fireside rhyme of Oliphaunt, and the laugh had released him from hesitation.” (The Two Towers, Book Four, Chapter Three, “The Black Gate is Closed”)

We wonder what the Caterpillar’s reaction might have been if Alice had recited “Oliphaunt”.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

Green and Quiet.2

12 Wednesday Sep 2018

Posted by Ollamh in Heroes, J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History

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21st Lancers, Bataclava, Cavalry, Charge of the Light Brigade, Edwardian, Great War, horses, King Edward, Medieval, Omdurman, Oxford, Pelennor, railways, Rohirrim, Romans, Scots Greys, Tolkien, Victorian, Waterloo

Welcome, as ever, dear readers.

The late-Victorian/Edwardian world of JRRT’s childhood and youth was full of stirring stories and illustrations of military adventure, from the 1815 charge of the Scots Greys at Waterloo

to the disastrous (but glorious) charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava in 1854

to the near-disastrous (but also glorious) charge of the 21^st Lancers at Omdurman (1898)

to the expectation of more glorious attacks in the event of a Great War on the continent.

Such images may have inspired him to join a volunteer cavalry unit at Oxford, King Edward’s Horse,

and may even lie behind the charge of the Rohirrim at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields.

To us, however, it also symbolizes something else: the role of the horse in Tolkien’s world. Its military role was more than simply carrying the glamorous cavalry, however.

It also pulled the guns,

the supply wagons,

the ambulances,

as well as carried those in control of it all, from the Kings (after 1901)

to the generals,

and it was the same for all of Europe and the US, as well.

All of which simply reflected that, for all that there were railroads

and the West was crisscrossed with railway tracks,

horses still pulled the world,

as they had from Roman times

through medieval

and still did, even beyond the Great War.

In our last posting, we discussed a line from The Hobbit : “By some curious chance one morning long ago in the quiet of the world, when there was less noise and more green…”

We suggested that, with that phrase “long ago” and that imperfect tense verb form, “was”, all was no longer so quiet or green and that goblins/orcs, or their modern equivalent in the Industrial Revolution, were eating up the green of the world, as well as the quiet, but we would like to add to that that a major change in transport, which removed the horse almost entirely from the picture, also contributed greatly.

First, of course, it was those railways which cut through everywhere, steaming and smoking and hooting.

These greatly reduced the use of horses for carrying things—and people—over distances.

At the turn of the century, however, a new invention would come to so diminish the employment of horses eventually to the point where they would be thought obsolete.

At first, they were few and far between, available only to the rich for personal use.

The massive production needed for the Great War (1914-1918),

however, encouraged both post-war demand and supply.

As we’ve discussed in previous postings, the Romans had been masters of the paved road.

image30romanroad

After the Romans, however, the secret (and the massive amounts of cash, as well as the numbers of workers) to such roads was lost and roads declined into, at best, wide paths—dust baths in summer, swamps in winter.

At best, a road might be “metalled”—that is, covered in loose stone (from Latin “metallum”—here, meaning “quarry”).

In the 1820s, the Scots engineer, JL McAdam, created roads with a crushed stone surface over larger inlaid stones.

image33mcadam

Each of these was an improvement over a dirt track,

but, about 1900, the next process arrived, with the use of bitumen and then various petroleum substances to cover the surface and, along with the use of concrete, these produced the roads we still drive on today.

Unfortunately for green and quiet, this rapidly multiplied the decay of both, as cars and trucks and the roads they needed began to spread across the landscape. Imagine, for a man who had been born into the greener and quieter and horsier world of 1892, what this 1930s traffic jam would have been like and you can easily see why he would have believed that goblins and orcs could so harm the peaceful world!

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

Recently, we happened upon this very interesting story, which we had never seen before, from the online BBC New, 3 July, 2006. The author mentions “Tolkien’s son” by whom he means JRRT’s second son, Michael.

Many years ago I corresponded with Tolkien’s son, a schoolmaster like myself. He said the Dark Riders in his novel were based on a real recurring nightmare from the Forst World War. Tolkien, riding a good cavlary horse, had somehow got lost behind the German lines,and, imagining he was behind his own trenches, rode towards a group of mounted cavalrymen standing in the shade of a coppice.

It was only when he drew nearer he realised his mistake for they German Ulhans, noted for their atrocities and taking no prisoners. When they saw him they set off in pursuit with their lances levelled at him. He swung his horse round and galloped off hotly pursued by the Germans. They had faster steeds but Tolkien’s horse was a big-boned hunter.

They got near enough for him to see their skull and crossbone helmet badges. Fortunately for Tolkien (and us, his readers)he raced towards some old trenches which his horse, used to hunting, took in its stride. The Uhlans’ horses weren’t up to it and they reined in leaving Tolkien to get away to his own side.

He was terrified and the cruel faces of those Uhlans and their badges haunted him in nightmares for a long time afterwards. Years later, when he was writing his novel, the Dark Riders were the result of that terrifying chase.
Revd John Waddington-Feather, Shrewsbury

There are some odd typos, but we think that the basic story might be true except for the details about the German cavalry. Uhlans are lancers, but lancer cap badges looked like this.

German hussar busbies, however, could have the famous “death’s head” badge.

And German hussars also could carry lances as in this picture from 1915.

German cavalry went to war with covers over their headgear (as in the photo of the hussars), but, if the story is accurate, we might presume that the hussars, for some reason, have shed those covers.

Mirror Image

03 Wednesday Jan 2018

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

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ancient mirrors, Bag End, chiaroscuro, Claude Debussy, Egyptians, Etruscans, Georges de la Tour, Greeks, hall stand, Headington, Magic mirror, Maurice Ravel, Medieval, Miroirs, mirror, North Oxford, Parmigianino, Portrait of the Money-Lender and His Wife, Quentin Matsys, Reflections in the Water, Reflets dans L'eau, Renaissance, Romans, Snow White, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Victorian

Welcome, as ever, dear readers.

In English, we have the expression “upon reflection”, meaning something like “I’ve looked back at something and have considered (or reconsidered)”. When we look at the word “reflection”, we see its Latin origin, re “back/again” and flection, from the verb flecto, flectere, flexi, flexum “to bend/turn/bow” (we show all four of what are called the “principal parts” of the verb so that you can see where words like “flexible”—and, together with that re—“reflex” come from) and can imagine that, originally, it was almost a physical act—as if a person were believed literally to have turned back to a thought, event, action, to think about it again.

But that made us wonder about a reflection in a different sense—when an image is repeated, in water, say.

(And here we provide a YouTube LINK for a beautiful piece of music “Reflets dans L’eau”—“Reflections in the Water” by Claude Debussy—1862-1918, from the set entitled, Images, Book One—1905.)

Or in a mirror.

(This haunting painting is by Georges de la Tour, 1593-1652—known for his chiaroscuro—shadow-versus-light effects—style.)

Fancifully, we might ask: does a “reflection” in this sense suggest that the image in the mirror was turning back to look at the viewer? More realistically, we might say that the image is bent/turned back upon the viewer—but we also wonder if the Latin word from which our word mirror comes might give a certain flavor of the uncanny about it. Miror, mirari, miratus sum in Latin means “to wonder/be amazed at something” (Put the Latin preposition ad– on the front of this and you’re looking at English “admire”—originally “to wonder at something”—our modern sense of this has lost something of the wide-eyed nature implied in the original, but that’s how language works—sharp things, like knives, become dull with use. In Spanish, for example, mirar comes to mean “to look at/watch/observe”.)

Certainly, folktales and folk customs once preserved something eerie about mirrors. Think of the wicked queen’s magic mirror in Snow White.

If you know the Disney version of Snow White, you probably expected us to show this image.

But this so creeped us out as children that it was not our first choice!

In various western European countries, looking into a mirror on New Year’s Eve (lots of extra things to do: while combing hair, eating an apple, taking a bath first so that the mirror is steamy) will show you the image of your intended spouse. And breaking a mirror can mean seven years of bad luck.

For Egyptians,

Greeks,

Etruscans,

Romans,

and western Medieval people, as well,

mirrors were not very breakable, however, being commonly made of a piece of polished bronze (although there were attempts, apparently, from late classical times on to do something with glass and a metal backing). Artists in the classical world, rarely missing a chance to do something more, used the backs of mirrors as surfaces for decoration, as well. Here’s a very interesting Etruscan mirror back, including an inscription (it’s the story of Icarus and Daedalus).

Mirrors with a silvered back and glass cover, the direct ancestors of modern mirrors, appeared during the Renaissance.

This is a little joke—a self-portrait of the painter—which has been included in Quentin Matsys’ (1466-1530) painting “Portrait of the Money-Lender and His Wife” (1514).

(And, speaking of Renaissance paintings with mirrors, we couldn’t resist including this famous little painting by Parmigianino (1503-1540), a self-portrait painted on a mirror-shaped convex panel.)

If silver-backed, glass-covered mirrors only appeared in the Renaissance, however, what can we say about this object on the left house wall in this picture?

We can tell it’s meant to be a mirror as, looking closely, you can just make out the reflection of a tree which is outside to the right of the open door on its surface. And is that another mirror, on the piece of furniture in the foreground on the left? If so, it fits the kind of thing called a “hall stand” which one might see in a later-Victorian house—like this piece from the 1870s.

This makes us wonder once again: how much of this entryway depicts a Middle-earth based not upon the Middle Ages, but upon the memory of houses JRRT grew up in or perhaps furnishings from his own homes in North Oxford or Headington as an adult?

But we’ll save what appears to be a Gothic Revival chair there on the right for another day…

In the meantime, thanks, as ever, for reading!

MTCIDC

We would like to take a moment and turn to the west to thank the Valar for the full recovery of our dear friend and fellow Tolkien enthusiast, EMH, from a serious operation. Get even well-er soon!

Caspar_David_Friedrich_-_Woman_before_the_Rising_Sun_(Woman_before_the_Setting_Sun)_-_WGA08253.jpg

PPS

If you enjoyed the Debussy in the link above, perhaps you might also enjoy Maurice Ravel’s (1875-1937) Miroirs (1906)—here’s a LINK.

About That PS

18 Wednesday Oct 2017

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

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anachronism, Bag End, banjo clock, barometer, clocks, Edwardian, Evangelista Torricelli, Hobbiton, Lucien Vidie, Middle-earth, Oxford, railway, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Victorian

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

In a PS to our last posting, we showed this illustration

and asked you if you saw something peculiar about it.

In fact, there are two peculiar things about it. Look to the left of the door. What is that? At first, we were inclined to imagine that it was a clock of a style known as a “banjo clock”.

But there was also a clock on the right hand wall, and, unless Bag End was like a stock exchange, with clocks showing various times around the world,

(image the one on the left being “Shire Time”, while the one on the right is “Mordor Time”!)

why would Bilbo have two clocks?

There’s also the technical problem: banjo clocks—maybe all clocks?—which have pendulums need to use gravity to help in their swing. If the object on Bilbo’s wall is a clock, it’s upside down and therefore—

and so, after lots of searching to see if we could match it somehow, we were scratching our collective heads when we realized that it wasn’t a clock at all, but a barometer—and a distinctively Victorian one, which fits in with our suggestion in a recent posting that JRRT was using his memories of his Victorian/Edwardian childhood as the basis of Bag End.

So, what’s a barometer and why might Bilbo have one?

The simplest answer to the first of those is that a barometer measures atmospheric pressure. That measurement, in turn, can tell you about changes in weather: low pressure, it’s more likely to rain, high pressure, not. Here’s a basic chart to explain.

One odd thing about Bilbo’s is that, commonly, barometers are combined with thermometers in patterns of the sort you see on the Bag End wall, whereas this one appears to be by itself.

The really odd thing, however, is that he has one to begin with. The first barometers date from the 1640s, being an offshoot of trying to understand the concept of a vacuum.

It was only in the 1840s that someone (Lucien Vidie) postulated that air pressure changes—measurable by this device– could signal weather changes. For Bilbo to have such a thing in a Middle-earth which appears to be almost entirely devoid both of science as we understand it and of mechanical technology, is a puzzle at best. Who made it? How did he obtain it? And last—and hardest—what did he do with it?

Of course, as we have discussed in past postings, there are whole areas of knowledge about Middle-earth about which we have little or no information and it’s been fun for us to try to reconstruct things using parallels from our own world, combined with the little we do know. That first barometer was, we presume, handmade by Evangelista Torricelli (1608-1647).

It appears to have been, basically, a long glass tube, attached to a piece of wood by white metal fittings. The hobbits have glass windows, so the art of glass-blowing exists in their world. The wood and metal could be used in many other settings. Once the concept was understood, it would be easy to see someone taking already available techniques and materials and creating the object.

But who made it? When it came to ingenuity in craft, JRRT suggests the dwarves—with the men of Dale as fellow-workers or perhaps as middlemen. As Thorin says of the past:

“Altogether those were good days for us, and the poorest of us had money to spend and to lend, and leisure to make beautiful things just for the fun of it, not to speak of the most marvelous and magical toys, the like of which is not to be found in the world now-a-days…the toy market of Dale was the wonder of the North.” (The Hobbit, Chapter One, “An Unexpected Party”)

How did Bilbo acquire it? He had come to be known in Hobbiton as unlike other hobbits—his mother, after all, was the famous Belladonna Took (for her history—or, rather, her mystery–see The Hobbit, Chapter 1) and, after his travels, “he took to writing poetry and visiting elves”. Perhaps the barometer came from one of his trips? Or had it been sent to him?

If we take the preparations for the famous joint-birthday-party at the opening of The Lord of the Rings as a clue, there must have been at least a small degree of commerce between the Shire and the dwarves of the Lonely Mountain and the rebuilt town of Dale:

“On this occasion the presents were unusually good…There were toys the like of which they had never seen before, all beautiful and some obviously magical. Many of them had indeed been ordered a year before, and had come all the way from the Mountain and from Dale, and were of real dwarf-make.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 1, “A Long-Expected Party).

But then there is that third question: what did he do with it? As far as we can currently determine from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, neither Bilbo nor Frodo nor even Gandalf ever mentions a barometric reading, or is concerned that the pressure is dropping.

So what are we to make of this?

For all that JRRT was increasingly careful about this, there a few anachronisms in his work. In The Hobbit, there is the well-known one of Bilbo’s reaction to Thorin’s explanation of the dangers of future burglary:

“At may never return he began to feel a shriek coming up inside, and very soon it burst out like the whistle of an engine coming out of a tunnel.” (The Hobbit, Chapter One, “An Unexpected Party”)

Although JRRT himself considered changing this for the 1966 revision, Douglas Anderson, in The Annotated Hobbit, 47-48, argues that this doesn’t have to be an anachronism at all:

“…for Tolkien as narrator was telling this story to his children in the early 1930s, and they lived in a world where railway trains were a very important feature of life.”

In fact, built in 1844, the first railway station in Oxford was almost a century old when The Hobbit was published in 1937.

(And we can’t resist this quotation from Jackson’s Oxford Journal for 15 June, 1844, which describes the arrival of the first train as “one of those rampageous, dragonnading fire-devils”. Clearly, dragons and railroads have a long history together!)

So, is this just a slip on JRRT’s part? Perhaps he had a barometer in his past, next to a door, and, in his urge to fill up the wall space of Bag End, he simply filled in what he already knew? We can only shrug—and, in our next, wonder about that clock on the wall to the right: what’s it doing in Middle-earth?

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

Dancing with the Elves

09 Wednesday Aug 2017

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

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19th Century, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Anglo-Saxon, Arthur Rackham, Beren and Luthien, dance, Dicky Doyle, Elbereth Gilthoniel, elf ring, Elves, Fairy, fairy ring, Fairy Tale, Folklore, In Fairyland, Kenneth Grahame, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, Song, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Victorian, William Shakespeare

Dear readers,

Welcome, as always.

In The Lord of the Rings, Elves are powerful, human-like figures– immortal, skilled, and revered as counselors. In Tolkien’s work, however, they have not always been this way– early drafts suggest a sort of Victorian confusion, as if Tolkien’s elves have ancestral ties to both the tall, beautiful elves of the Anglo-Saxons, and to the jovial, delicate elves and fay of the mid- to late- 19th century.

In the beginning of June this year, Christopher Tolkien published an edited version of his father JRRT’s story, “Beren and Luthien”, which was originally published as a part of The Silmarillion, a history of the Elves.

Within this book are previously unpublished earlier drafts and versions of the story, and in the introduction to them, Christopher Tolkien comments upon them: Beren was originally a gnome (which he was quick to explain meant an immortal figure– not what we would find in gardens),

and then an elf, before his final incarnation as a mortal man. Luthien, the immortal Elven princess, is referred to by Tevildo, Prince of Cats, as “Princess of Fairies”. After being ordered to dance before him by the dark lord Melkor, Luthien began

“Such a dance as neither she nor any other sprite or fay or elf danced every before or has done since… magically beautiful as only Tinuviel ever was… and Ainu Melko for all his power and majesty succumbed to the magic of that Elf-maid, and indeed even the eyelids of Lorien had grown heavy had he been there to see” (76).

What we found curious here was JRRT’s uses of “Elf” and “Fairy” as seemingly synonymous with each other, when, depending on to which story an Elf or Fairy belongs, they may be quite different. Being people who spend a good deal of time in the Victorian world, when we think of dancing fairies, what is more likely to come to mind are the tiny winged figures who appear in Kenneth Grahame’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906), with illustrations by Arthur Rackham.

We might also be reminded of the little people who inhabit Dicky Doyle’s In Fairyland (1869)

What we see in the Victorian sense of fairies and elves in images and stories is a revival of Elizabethan fairy-stories, which focus on little people: much like the fairies of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example, the fairies in Kensington are light-footed, winged beings who wear flowing garments, and they fancy calling themselves “dancey” rather than “happy”.

Dicky Doyle’s In Fairyland finds Elves in the “Elf World” to be the same sort of creatures. The picture below gives us an idea of the jovial nature of Victorian Elves, and is captioned, “The little Elves would cross over the border, and come into the King’s fields and gardens.”:

J.R.R. Tolkien was born in 1896, at the end of the Victorian period. It would be understood if the Victorian sense was residual in his work– after all, he was a child when Arthur Rackham’s illustrations met the height of their popularity, at the beginning of the 20th century, and he mentions in his letters having seen them.

In his Middle-earth, however, we see a very different kind of Elf. Tolkien describes how he imagined them in a letter to Naomi Richardson on 25 April 1954:

” ‘Elves’ is a translation, not perhaps now very suitable, but originally good enough, of Quendi. They are represented as a race similar in appearance (and more so further back) to Men, and in former days of the same stature… [they] are in fact in these histories very little akin to the Elves and Fairies of Europe; and if I were pressed to rationalize, I should say that they represent really Men with greatly enhanced aethetic and creative features, greater beauty and longer life, and nobility…” (Letters, 176).

Below are a few artists’ renditions of what these Elves might look like, and they’re very different from the imaginations of Arthur Rackham and Dicky Doyle.

And some images from Peter Jackson’s films, as well:

When JRRT refers to “the former days”, we can assume that he means two things:

The former days of Middle-earth, such as in The Silmarillion
The former days of our world–specifically, Anglo-Saxon Elves, which resemble the Elves of Middle-earth in their stature and beauty. Thus, the “former days” refer to a former rendition of Elves– one which, belonging to the Anglo-Saxons, would be familiar to JRRT.

(Attached here is a very useful book on this subject by Alaric Hall, which provides an in-depth look at pre-Elizabethan and pre-Victorian Elves.)

These Elves are almost the polar opposite of the Elfin and Fay creatures of the Victorians, and we found it curious that they would have anything in common. As demonstrated by Rackham’s “dancey” fairies and Luthien in Beren and Luthien, however, we found one thing: a love for song and dance.

While looking through Jack Zipes’ collected anthology of Victorian Fairy Tales, The Revolt of Fairies and Elves, we came across an example of this in “Charlie Among the Elves”, in which the protagonist, a young boy who finds himself, by some sort of magic or dream, in the world of fairies and elves. The elves invite him in and greet him with a song:

“…they struck up a melody which Charlie thought was the very sweetest music which he had ever heard in the whole course of his life, and thus ran the song of the Elves:

In the waning summer light

Which the hearts of mortals love

’Tis the hour for elfin sprite

Through the flow’ry mead to rove.

Mortal eyes the spot may scan,

Yet our forms they ne’er descry;

Though so near the haunts of man,

Merrily our trade we ply.”

In some folklore, there is also the danger of dance. Fairy rings, also called elf rings, are supernatural places created by the dancing of either fairies, elves, or witches. They have been considered hazardous by much of Western folklore to those outside of the fairy world; in these stories, mortals who have stepped inside have been cursed, trapped, or simply disappear.

Charlie was lucky that he had come across benevolent creatures, and this reminded us of another instance when an adventurer was greeted by Elves through song: in The Hobbit, which is where Tolkien first introduced Elves, before he later understood them. Before The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, Bilbo, Thorin, and Company are greeted by Elf-song in Rivendell:

” ‘Hmmm! it smells like elves!’ thought Bilbo, and he looked up at the stars. They were burning bright and blue. Just then there came a burst of song like laughter in the trees:

‘O! What are you doing,

And where are you going?

Your ponies need shoeing!

The river is flowing!

O! tra-la-la-lally,

here down in the valley!’ ”

As the Elves in both “Charlie Among the Elves” and The Hobbit are jovial and playful in their music, we might think that Tolkien had not completely abandoned the Victorian Elfin world, after all; of course, in The Lord of the Rings and in The Silmarillion, the Elves, just as much as the stories, take a more serious turn. Playful tunes are replaced with much more serious poetry, and in their native tongue, such as the Hymn to Elbereth Gilthoniel:

“A Elbereth Gilthoniel
Silivren penna miriel
A menel aglar elennath
Na chaered palandiriel.
O Galadhremmin ennorath
Fanuilos, le linnathon
Nef aer, si nef aeron!
A Elbereth Gilthoniel!
We still remember,
We who dwell
In the lands beneath the trees
Thy starlight on the western seas.”

When trying to reconcile these sorts of Elves and Fairies, rather than assessing them through their physical and behavioral qualities, we may look at them through something just as important in understanding them: music. The Silmarillion explains that the Elves, as well as the world and everything in it, including good and evil, originated from song.

But just as Elven music changes from The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings, so the Elves have changed– they are human-sized, but also perhaps more serious and melancholy, as a parallel to the world Tolkien had created, which was much more complex than he originally realized.

The songs in The Lord of the Rings, and the later versions of Luthien, which present her as an Elf princess– a beautiful being which Beren falls in love with as soon as he sees her dance– express that melancholy. As the tale of Beren and Luthien reflects the way Tolkien wishes us to see Elven folklore– romantic, adventurous, and, ultimately, sorrowful– perhaps we can conclude that JRRT’s Elves are really fairies grown up.

And what do you think, dear readers?

MTCIDC,

And Then the Dragon Came

14 Wednesday Jun 2017

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

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A.A. Milne, Apollonius, Arthur Rackham, Beowulf, Chrysophylax, Cressida Cowell, Dragons, Drawn From Life, Drawn From Memory, Dream Days, E.H. Shepard, Edwardian, Farmer Giles of Ham, How to Train Your Dragon, Kenneth Grahame, Maxfield Parrish, Nine Dragons, Now We Are Six, Octavian, Prince Valiant, Renaissance, Sir Gawain, Smaug, St. George and the Dragon, The Argonautica, The Hobbit, The House at Pooh Corners, The Reluctant Dragon, The Wind in the Willows, Tolkien, Victorian, Walt Disney, Western Medieval, When We Were Very Young, Winnie the Pooh

Welcome, dear readers, as always.
One of us is in the midst of creating a course for the fall term. It’s called “Handling Monsters: A Handbook” and several of those monsters are dragons—the “Sleepless Serpent/Dragon” of the ancient Greek literary epic by Apollonius, The Argonautica,

the dragon which Beowulf fights,

(when small, we always imagined this as looking like the one which Sir Gawain, Prince Valiant’s master, fights)

Smaug,

and Toothless, from How to Train Your Dragon (by Cressida Cowell—there’s also a movie by that name, which is fun—great flying scenes–but it’s so different from the book that it really should have another title!)

We must confess that we’ve never been big saurian fans, either dinosaurs or dragons, but, as monsters go, they have their uses. Saying that, however, we do have to add that we’ve always loved the “Nine Dragons” scroll, a 13th-century Chinese painting…

[And here’s a LINK to a site at the Center for the Art of East Asia which you can see the whole scroll—well worth the visit—and revisit, if you’re like us and love Chinese painting.]
While putting together this course, we’ve been spending some time gathering dragon images. Sometimes, they seem pretty fantastic—painters with wild imaginations—

And sometimes they look like someone once saw a crocodile.

[Perhaps on an old coin? For example, Octavian—the Emperor Augustus-to-be—after the defeat of Antonius and Cleopatra, issued this coin, which reads “Egypt Taken”,

suggesting that, when a Roman thought of Egypt, it wasn’t the pyramids which came to mind, but a scaly, many-toothed amphibian!]
And the image before the coin reminds us that, in Western medieval/early Renaissance art, a major source of dragon pictures is religious, being depictions of St. George and his dragon-slaying.

We’ve mentioned JRRT and Smaug, but that it only his first dragon story. There is another, Farmer Giles of Ham, written in 1937 and published in 1949.

If you haven’t read it, we recommend it as a look at JRRT at play, more Hobbit than Lord of the Rings. The story is about a very practical, but hardly adventurous farmer, Giles, who, after chasing off a giant from his village, is given the job of dealing with an invading dragon, Chrysophylax (maybe something like “Watchman of the Gold”).

Although the dragon is tricksy, Giles eventually overcomes him with a combination of shrewdness and a famous sword, Caudimordax (“Tailbiter”). In the process, he becomes not only wealthy, but also founds his own kingdom-within-a-kingdom. As well, though JRRT, more than once in his letters, lets us know that he is not an enthusiast for democracy, he provides a very critical view of monarchy and its pretensions. (This may also explain why, although those in the Shire may refer to “the king” and “the rules”, which presumably came with that monarch, their own local form of government is more familial than bureaucratic.)
Chrysophylax is chatty, rather like Smaug, but there is a much lighter touch here, and Chrysophylax reminds us of our favorite dragon after Tolkien’s, the unnamed dragon in Kenneth Grahame’s

short story, “The Reluctant Dragon”, from his 1898 collection, Dream Days.

If you recognize Grahame’s name, you probably know it from his 1908 novel, The Wind in the Willows, with its well-known characters, Toad, Rat, Mole, and Badger—not to mention the wicked weasels!–

first illustrated by E.H. Shepard

whom you may also know as the illustrator of A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, The House at Pooh Corners, When We Were Very Young, and Now We are Six.

[Shepard also wrote two volumes of autobiography—which he illustrated, of course—Drawn from Memory (1957) and Drawn from Life (1961)

and, for a picture of a growing up in the later Victorian world, beautifully written and illustrated, we very much recommend both.]
[And a second footnote here: Arthur Rackham—one of our favorite late-19th-early-20th-century illustrators– also illustrated The Wind in the Willows,

his last project before his death in 1939. It was published a year later, in 1940.]
The title gives away a great deal of the plot of Grahame’s “The Reluctant Dragon”. Instead of being a murderous hoarder, like Beowulf’s dragon, or Smaug, this is dragon-as-pacifist, (as depicted by his original illustrator, Maxfield Parrish):

not in the least interested in plundering and burning, but rather in viewing sunsets and living a peaceful existence—until St. George appears. As to what happens next, we’re not going to issue a spoiler alert here, but rather provide links to three works by Grahame: two collections of stories and essays, The Golden Age (1895), Dream Days (1898), and The Wind in the Willows (1908), inviting you to read for yourself and to enjoy Grahame’s elegant Edwardian prose and gentle approach.
With thanks, dear readers, for…reading.
MTCIDC
CD

PS
Walt Disney studios made cartoons of “The Reluctant Dragon” (1941) and “The Wind in the Willows” (1949), which are currently available in Disney collections. They both stray rather far from the original stories, but are fun in themselves (and Eric Blore’s voice is perfect for “the handsome and popular Toad”).
PPS
One of us has written what we might immodestly call a very good short story based upon Arthur Rackham’s last days and his determination to finish his illustrations to The Wind in the Willows before his death and we plan to publish it here next week as a kind of “Summer Holidays Extra”. We hope you’ll enjoy it.

Of Boats and Boromir

18 Wednesday Nov 2015

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

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

Dear Reader,

Welcome, as always.

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

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

]

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

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

the medieval-revival architecture of Pugin

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

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

Because it reminded us of Boromir.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

doubtfulsea

~ adventure fantasy

Tag Archives: Victorian

Orc Arsenal.1

Speaking Up

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Mirror Image

About That PS

Dancing with the Elves

And Then the Dragon Came

Of Boats and Boromir