• About

doubtfulsea

~ adventure fantasy

Tag Archives: Villains

Orc Looks

13 Wednesday Nov 2019

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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

As ever, dear readers, welcome.

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

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

image1aamines.jpg

to attacking Boromir and capturing Merry and Pippin

image1adeath.jpg

to forming the initial assault team on Minas Tirith.

image1battack.jpg

But what do they really look like?

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

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

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

Our first real view of them comes just paragraphs later:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

image1hild.jpg

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

image2boar.jpgand of a connection which we suggested some time ago with Jabba the Hutt’s Gammorean Guard—

image3gammoreangd.jpg

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

image4mcb.JPG

and Ted Nasmith–

image5nas.jpg

although not in this image of the wounding of Boromir–

image6bor.jpg

and sometimes in the work of Alan Lee,

image7lee.jpg

as well as that of John Howe.

image8jhowe.jpg

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

image9fraz.jpg

or this, by Alan Lee.

image10lee.jpg

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

image11bat.jpg

image12orc.jpg

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

image13nosf.jpg

image14orc.jpg

to being grossly human.

image15aorc.jpg

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

image15bear.jpg

image16orcs.jpg

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

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

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

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

image17asnape.jpg

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

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

image17val.jpgimage18val.jpg

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

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

Thanks, as always, for reading and

MTCIDC

CD

ps

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

Shortly after that, the Fellowship is attacked and:

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

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

Somewhere Over…Ephel Duath?

02 Wednesday Dec 2015

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Aragorn, Auntie Em, communication, crystal ball, Denethor, Dorothy, Emerald City, Galadriel, heroine, Kansas, Margaret Hamilton, Middle-earth, mirror, Oxford, Oz, Palantir, Pippin, Professor Marvel, Saruman, Sauron, seeing-stones, skype, The Lord of the Rings, The Wizard of Oz, Tolkien, Villains, Wicked Witch

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always. This posting is now one of two, but it was originally a single posting in which we discussed both Palantiri and Galadriel’s mirror.

Our first thought had been, in fact, a vague one: what did one see in such things? As we reviewed the various possibilities, we realized that they were, in fact, very different in function (yes, we probably didn’t think long and hard enough—we should have pulled out our spares and dipped into that cask of Longbottom Leaf for a three-pipe problem). So we separated them and here’s the first, on the Palantiri.

We begin in 1939. It’s not a happy time: war in Europe has broken out again after only two decades of peace. The Depression is still lingering. But there is a new film which Priscilla (age 10) has heard about and would very much like to see and her loving and indulgent father has agreed to take her—after all, this is a children’s movie and he, since his first novel was published in 1937, has become a children’s author.

The film was the story of a quest: the heroine, torn from home, acquires a magical object (two, in fact), slowly gathers a disparate band of companions who help her on her way, visits a grand city, has dealings with a wizard, defeats a powerful enemy and returns home, at last, a wiser person.

posterforwoo

In the very year he became a children’s author, the father had begun a new work. Based in part upon earlier materials and interests, as well as upon elements from his 1937 novel, this was to become not, as he thought at first (and his publishers hoped) a sequel to his previous work, but a kind of extension of that work and, in the years in which he continued to work on it, much more.

In the meantime, he sat in the theatre in Oxford and watched a bleak prairie worldkansas

turn into something almost hallucinogenically-technicolored

munchkinland

and filled with small and very energetic people.

munchkins

But the heroine, as we said, has been torn from home and, worse, she arrives and is immediately in trouble with a powerful enemy,

wickedwitchofthewest

having accidentally killed that enemy’s sibling.houseinwwoe

And the story moves on from there—the gathering of the companions

Wizard-of-Oz-w13

the grand city

oz

and, all the while, that powerful enemy is watching.

ball4

This isn’t the first time such a scrying device has been seen in the story. Earlier, the heroine had consulted another magical figure—or so he claimed.

profmarvelswagon Wizard-3-Marvel

What’s particularly interesting about this device is that, unlike crystal balls one remembers from film and books and from general folklore,

crystalball

the one which is actually used sees not the future, but the present.

The Wicked Witch of the West sees Dorothy—as, of course, that’s who they are–

wwowwithball

and Dorothy sees Auntie Em.

crystalballdseesem

(And “Professor Marvel”, as he calls himself, at least pretends to see the present.)

This made us wonder about the Palantiri.

For a useful summary of information about these so-called “seeing-stones”, see the entry for Palantiri at Tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Palantiri, but, in short, they are an ancient communication device. That is, they are unlike the usual crystal ball, which looks into the future (or possibly the past), but are rather like the Middle Earth form of skype.

skype

These items don’t have the security offered by our earthly form, however. Within The Lord of the Rings, we see them used by Saruman

sarumanpalantir

Pippin

Pippinpalantir

and Aragorn

palantirandaragorn

and Denethor.

denethorandpalantir

Aragorn, however, is the only one able to escape the control of Sauron as exerted by the sphere.

the_palantir_of_barad_dur_by_stirzocular-d7xwbi9

Their function as a medium of communication, so different from their usual use, brings us back to Margaret Hamilton, staring into her crystal ball

ball4

and we wondered whether, in that dark late summer of 1939, Tolkien might have sat in a theatre in Oxford, watching the Wicked Witch of the West, and, as he did so brilliantly with so many other things, absorbing, then recreating what he saw for his own purposes. What do you think, dear readers?

As always, thanks for reading.

MTCIDC

CD

The Sadness of a Second Reading

27 Wednesday May 2015

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Aragorn, Arwen, Canterbury Tales, Chaucer, Ents, Fangorn, Frodo, Gandalf, Herblore, Hildebrandt, Hobbits, Isengard, Meduseld, Merry and Pippin, Ring, Saruman, Sauron, Smaug, The Lord of the Rings, Theoden, Tolkien, Villains

Welcome again, dear readers!

We’re sure to return to villains—Orcs first, we think—but, as we reread material for the last posting, we came across a passage which so struck us that we had to sit down and write a posting about it…

   Isengard is ruined. So much of what Tolkien described in such vivid detail in “The Road to Isengard”, both before Saruman decided to be a rival to Sauron and after, has been destroyed—here is the Hildebrandts’ version of it in Saruman’s early days

greg-hildebrandt-isengard-orthanc-saruman-607429-1300x962

And here it is when Saruman’s ambition overcame his sense of mission as one of the Istari and he could tell Gandalf that their job was to strive for “Knowledge, Rule, Order”—

Isengard_by_Nagzuku

But Fangorn and his Ents have changed all of that—

The Wrath of the Ents, by Ted Nasmith

So that, when Gandalf and his company appear, they see

“…And all about, stone, cracked and splintered into countless jagged shards, was scattered far and wide, or piled in ruinous heaps.” 

On top of one of those heaps                  

ruins 

“…two small figures…at their ease. One seemed asleep; the other, with crossed legs and arms behind his head leaned back against a broken rock and sent from his mouth long wisps and little rings of thin blue smoke.”

     Not tiny Smaugs sunning, it is, of course Merry and Pippin making themselves comfortable in the wreckage of Saruman’s palace/fortress/factory. That comfort is an affront to Gimli—or, at least, he pretends that it is—but it is a source of amusement to the rest of the company and the Hobbits themselves are a source of amazement to Theoden:

     “The days are fated to be filled with marvels. Already I have seen many since I left my house; and now here before my eyes stand yet another of the folk of legend. Are these not the Halflings, that some among us call the Holbytlan?” 

     But Theoden’s wonder is greater: not only are these figures from distant legend, but, “I had not heard that they spouted smoke from their mouths.”

     This sets Merry off on a lecture, which prefigures, of course, his later treatise, Herblore of the Shire, but which Gandalf stops in its tracks, saying,

“You do not know your danger, Theoden…These hobbits will sit on the edge of ruin [ironic here, as they are, in fact, doing so—it’s Saruman’s ruin] and discuss the pleasures of the table, or the small doings of their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers and remoter cousins to the ninth degree, if you encourage them with undue patience.” 

     Theoden, however, shows that, in the future, at least, he will encourage them with that patience—

“Farewell, my hobbits! May we meet again in my house! There you shall sit beside me and tell me all that your hearts desire: the deeds of your grandsires, as far as you can reckon them; and we will speak also of Tobold the Old and his herb-lore. Farewell!”

     Merry and Pippin, usually less-than-respectful, are quite charmed by this and behave better than usual:

     “The Hobbits bowed low. ‘So that is the King of Rohan!’ said Pippin in an undertone. ‘A fine old fellow. Very polite.’”

      If this is your first reading, there is something to look forward to—or, if you are Gandalf, to dread. For the more experienced, we already see the splitting up of Merry and Pippin, Pippin’s whirlwind ride with Gandalf to Minas Tirith, and Merry’s equally grueling ride to the Pelennor and his part in the last heroic moments of Theoden’s life and his final words on the subject of that earlier promise:

“Live now in blessedness; and when you sit in peace with your pipe, think of me! For never now shall I sit with you in Meduseld, as I promised, or listen to your herb-lore.” 

deathoftheoden

   And this brings us to the point: if you know what’s going to happen—in detail—why read this again?

     The answers are many and here are only a few from an entire spectrum: it’s such a rich story that you can easily read it again and find something new every time; you’d like to escape to Middle Earth because, even troubled as it is with Sauron, it makes more sense than Here and Now; you don’t read it all, but there are scenes and/or characters you like to revisit; it has become a kind of happy yearly ritual, as Chaucer fans reread The Canterbury Tales every spring. For us, among all of the other reasons (and we would say that probably every one makes sense, in its way) there is another reason and it has to do with that knowing.

     Wherever the sun shines directly on an object, a person, there is a shadow. Shadows can be knife-edge precise or vague, still or moving, smaller than that which casts them or greater. Knowing what’s to come in Tolkien is like seeing each event with its outcome, its shadow, all at the same moment and, as so often in The Lord of the Rings, what’s to come is compromised—if there’s happiness, it’s happiness of the moment: Sauron is defeated, but the Elves fade; Arwen marries Aragorn at last, but, he being mortal, even if a long-lived one, she is left a widow for many years; Frodo survives the Ring quest, but somehow is never healed. Events cast shadows in our current life, but we only see the shadows in retrospect in this world. In Middle Earth, on second and subsequent readings, events cast their shadows before as well as after themselves. And there is a pleasure in this. One might say, “Hmph. Adolescent thinking. Really self-pity in literary disguise.” We would disagree.

     One of the most powerful enhancers of emotion is contrast, beginning with the very idea of human mortality. As so many religions and philosophical systems advise: live now, in the moment, because there are just so many moments and then…?

     Thus, to read Theoden’s affectionate promise to the hobbits and to know, at that same moment, that it will be broken, and very dramatically, with Theoden’s death, is, potentially, to see that shadow, which is the contrast between what is said now and what will happen then.

     So, dear readers, what do you think? We imagine that you’re like us, with favorite books about which it doesn’t matter in the least that you know them practically by heart—surprise is only the first sensation—like opening a wonderful present which, once opened, you’ll use and love again and again, always grateful to the giver.

MTCIDC

CD

Now You Don’t See Me, Now You Don’t

07 Thursday May 2015

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

1984, Antagonists, Big Brother, Hobbits, Invisible, Palantir, Paradise Lost, Prince Valiant, Ramayana, Ravana, Saruman, Sauron, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Villains, Visible

Invisible-Man

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always.

     Imagine this—and we’re sure it’s happened to you. You’re working, somewhere by yourself, maybe downstairs. It’s late. Very. Everyone else is long asleep. And you suddenly, for no easy reason, look up. It’s nothing. Nothing…visible. Is it something you heard, then? But what? Is it even a sound—and certainly not something distinctive, like things in old horror movies—chains, groans, thumping footsteps from overhead—but maybe something very quiet—almost nothing more than the disturbance of familiar patterns like appliance hums. In fact, maybe it’s the silence under the familiar patterns which magnifies it. No matter what it is, it’s there. And, at the moment you actively take notice, the creepy feeling catches hold, and you sit, listening ever more intently. (Holding your breath is optional, but a popular choice for times like this.)

     Recently, we wrote about two kinds of villains, those we called “open-ended” and those we called “terminal”. Another classification which might spring from that eerie feeling described above: villains visible and villains invisible.

     Let’s return for a moment to that not-so-quiet place where your work was disturbed by…what? If you were a small child, perhaps it would be easy to give it shape from a fairy tale book you’d read, or a movie you’d seen. One of us, for example, was haunted in far childhood by a Hal Foster Prince Valiant illustration in which Prince Valiant has been drugged by Morgan le Fay. Every night, creatures like those in the picture would creep out of the eaves doors at the far end of the room and clutch at the bottom of the bed…

PV-3-19-38

 As we’re adults (sort of), however, do we necessarily embody whatever it is at such moments? And there’s that second question: do we want to? For all that we may be creeped out, is there some odd, perverse pleasure in being creeped out? Certainly those who make horror movies think so! But is there a difference between seeing what scares you and only feeling it?

     With that in mind, suppose that you’re not you, spooking yourself (yes, pun intended) late at night in your living room, but Tolkien constructing a long and complex combination of myth and adventure. You’ve got a wide assortment of protagonists, beginning with some of those beings you created in an earlier story, Hobbits.

fellowship

     What about villains, antagonists? As we’ve discussed in a previous posting, they are necessary to provide friction, that resistance which pushes against the heroes and creates the motion which is a plot.

     Commonly, such a figure is visible, like Lucifer, in Paradise Lost.

GustaveDoreParadiseLostSatanProfile

     Or he’s very visible, like Ravana in the Ramayana, with his ten heads.

page12_1

     For us, however, this is to risk circumscribing the villain, his visible body suggesting his visible limits. After all, it was a Sauron with hands who lost the Ring to a sword blade. To have a body, then, is to be vulnerable (literally, in the case above) and, more perhaps more important, in terms of story, more predictable, more bound by conventions.

     You (as JRRT) create Sauron, then, who once had a body, but now you make him nearly disembodied, being represented physically as a single, fiery eye.

Eye_of_Sauron

     This gives the effect of a brooding, ever-watchful presence, a bit like all of those posters in 1984’s London of Big Brother.

big-brother-is-watching

     This presence can be captured in the text in all sorts of ways, both direct and indirect. You have only to look up “Sauron” in the index to The Lord of the Rings to understand this: “Dark Lord, Enemy, Black One, Black Hand, Black Master, Base Master of Treachery, Dark Power, dark hands of the East, Nameless One, etc.”

     A brooding presence, however, is a real challenge for anyone trying to transfer The Lord of the Rings to the screen, which is why, after the previous defeat of Sauron, in which he appears as a huge being in black armor, he is reduced to that eye, sometimes captured in a palantir

palantir

Or Galadriel’s mirror, though, more often, as Sam and Frodo come closer to their goal, as the equivalent of a tower-mounted searchlight.

Mordor

     Film and fiction are different media, with different needs and tools to satisfy those needs, as the script writers never tire of explaining to us. In our opinion, however, this extremely literal depiction so strongly smacks of old black-and-white prison escape films,

C_71_article_1408592_image_list_image_list_item_1_image%20(1)

that we wish that those script writers could have left the Dark Lord offstage entirely, if this is the best they could do.

     With our feeling that an bodyless villain might be more powerful here than an incarnated one—remember feeling spooked at night by a subtle change in the ambience?—we would wish that the writers had been a bit more imaginative—and had read their author a little more closely. After all, he had plenty of good ideas about how to depict villains. And it is perhaps a sad commentary on their work that, increasingly, in their years of using JRRT, they abandoned him, choosing, instead, to bloat his story and turn it in directions he clearly never intended. Why not, for example, do as Tolkien did and mirror the villain not only in that long list of titles, but also in the actions and words both of his subordinates and his opponents? Would this have worked? Perhaps a reference to the amount of time “You Know Who” appears on-screen in the first Harry Potter movie in contrast to how often he is mentioned would suggest how this might have worked.

     As for villainous subordinates and their actions, we’ll have more to say about them in our next.

lee34

Thanks, as always, for reading. Remember: we want to encourage discussion and debate. If you agree with us, say so. If you don’t, say so and we can have fun working through our views.

MTCIDC

CD

Villainous Thoughts 1

16 Thursday Apr 2015

Posted by Ollamh in Narrative Methods, Villains

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Cruella de Vil, Ebenezer Balfour, Gollum, Jafar, Prince John, Robin Hood, Sauron, Sheriff of Nottingham, Villains

Dear Readers,

Welcome! 

     Is an adventure possible without a villain? Not an “antagonist”—that’s for serious essays on subjects like “the nature of evil”—but someone tall and devious, like Jafar

 Jafar

or stumpy and seedy like Uncle Ebenezer in Kidnapped

 kidnapped-balfour-and-uncle

or skinny and smoky, like Cruella de Vil.

 cruella__s_coat_by_justin_mctwisp-d4tqil3 

Whatever the figure, on the one hand, he/she provides the kind of friction which can set a story in motion and keep it there. On the other, villains can add a certain stature to a story. When the villain is an oaf, the story is in danger of being, or becoming, oafish. The Hobbit with only the stone trolls,

 lee09

for example, would quickly become something out of Monty Python’s gumbies, at best.

 gumbies

An ancient and smooth-talking dragon makes the story bigger and gives it more weight.

 hildebrandtSmaug

(To see how a quiet and amiable dragon affects a story, see Kenneth Grahame’s “The Reluctant Dragon” from Dream Days (1898—available for free at Gutenberg)

 Reluctant%20Dragon%201

An elegant villain can make a story more elegant, as Captain Hook would insist.

 CaptHook-PP

As a way of testing this premise, imagine a Lord of the Rings in which the main villain is Gollum. It might be entertaining, but how much smaller the drama than that which we see as grand, in part because of the size and menace of the villain.

 illustration-d-Alan-Lee-The-Hobbit-

(A note: while we have shown you the various villains we’ve mentioned so far, when it comes to Sauron, we’re stuck. We know that he is embodied in some form and that he was once “comely” (that is, good to look at) and he was of a size to fight Gil-Galad & Co., but, otherwise, it’s hard to know quite what to show: certainly not the searchlight from the Jackson films. His and his writers’ difficulty is obvious: how do you make what, in the books, is more a kind of watching, brooding evil feeling than a form (with the exception of that eye) into something visible?   We don’t believe, however, that their choice was successful, but, in fact, diminished the menace. We intend to discuss further the idea of “the invisible villain”, however, in a further part of this series.)

     What adds to the power of a villain is a certain primal nature: this is someone driven to be who he/she is because of what she/he wants—and the converse is true: what he/she wants can define who he/she is. What is Cruella, for instance, apart from her lust for a fur coat made from Dalmatians?

     In the case of Robin Hood, even if we had never heard him say a word, we would know what Prince John wants—that word “Prince” might serve as giveaway. He wants to be King John.

Adventures-of-Robin-Hood-02 

It perfectly suits his ambitions that his brother, Richard, the real king of England, is being held for ransom in Austria. It’s even an opportunity to look pious—you’re rescuing your brother with that huge sum of money—when, in reality, you’re simply increasing your own revenues. And your chief collector (in the tradition), the Sheriff of Nottingham, is thus nothing but a function in the story of John: the actual hand in the people’s purse, but he’s doing it for the sake of his master.

(Here’s the Sheriff—both images from the classic Errol Flynn 1938 The Adventures of Robin Hood.)

09-melville-coopersheriff 

As long as Richard doesn’t return, there will be John (and his—quite literal—extension, the Sheriff). And thus he is what we might call an open-ended villain, someone who can be employed again and again to apply the friction. This fits perfectly with his role in the Robin Hood stories as, unlike a novel, with its elaborate built-in sense and need of resolution brought about by the author, the original Robin Hood stories were folktales and folksongs—brief, their initial goal a short narrative from set-up to resolution. Villains here could be reused, their resolution not necessarily requiring their complete destruction. This can also have the side benefit of allowing singers/tellers to give villains a sense of depth from the number of experiences (usually very bad ones!) with the hero they have. The urge towards development of this sort, both for villain and hero, might, in fact, be a reason for A Gest of Robyn Hode, a collection of Robin Hood stories roughly made into one long tale and printed somewhere between 1492 and 1534. (For more, see the useful Wiki site.)

A-Gest-of-Robin-Hood

     The opposite of a character like Prince John would be what we might call a terminal villain. He/she appears and the story’s action begins. With his/her disappearance, the story, effectively, ends, even if there’s a coda: once Darth Vader/Anakin tosses the Emperor over the railing, what’s left but funerals, ghostly reunions, and fireworks? And, even if you clone the Emperor for a rematch, the original has been eliminated and his complex and long-developing relationship with his star pupil, Vader, has been resolved.

     This is, of course, only the beginning of our discussion of villains. Next, we want to ask, faintly echoing Freud, “What do villains want?”

Thanks, as ever, for reading and, as always, we welcome questions and comments!

MTCIDC

CD

What About Villains?

24 Friday Oct 2014

Posted by Ollamh in Imaginary History, Narrative Methods, Villains

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Adventure, Fantasy, Fiction, Villains

Dear Readers,

Villains– a big question, and something which needs more than one post.

There are so many kinds, from Sauron to the Joker. All of them, however, produce friction– that which produces problems and demands solutions. As well, it allows for heroes to be defined and to define themselves.

For this series, we have two kinds of villains so far: those native to our hero’s homeland and those who are entirely alien to everything our 18th century understands. The former include corrupt officials within the royal government, and the latter, those who might appear human, but who also have powers over nature which seem superhuman.

Corrupt officials are pretty easy to create– they’re everywhere, but we believe that we’ve given ours an extra twist. As for the others, we’ll talk about those in our next post…

Thanks for reading,

MTCIDC,

CD

The Doubtful Sea Series Facebook Page

The Doubtful Sea Series Facebook Page

  • Ollamh

Categories

  • Artists and Illustrators
  • Economics in Middle-earth
  • Fairy Tales and Myths
  • Films and Music
  • Games
  • Heroes
  • Imaginary History
  • J.R.R. Tolkien
  • Language
  • Literary History
  • Maps
  • Medieval Russia
  • Military History
  • Military History of Middle-earth
  • Narnia
  • Narrative Methods
  • Poetry
  • Research
  • Star Wars
  • Terra Australis
  • The Rohirrim
  • Theatre and Performance
  • Tolkien
  • Uncategorized
  • Villains
  • Writing as Collaborators
Follow doubtfulsea on WordPress.com

Across the Doubtful Sea

Recent Postings

  • Horning In (2) February 1, 2023
  • Horning In (1) January 25, 2023
  •  Things You/They Know That Ain’t January 18, 2023
  • Sympathy for a Devil? January 11, 2023
  • Trumpeting January 4, 2023
  • Seating December 28, 2022
  • Yule? December 21, 2022
  • Sequels and Prequel December 14, 2022
  • Rascals December 7, 2022

Blog Statistics

  • 69,111 Views

Posting Archive

  • February 2023 (1)
  • January 2023 (4)
  • December 2022 (4)
  • November 2022 (5)
  • October 2022 (4)
  • September 2022 (4)
  • August 2022 (5)
  • July 2022 (4)
  • June 2022 (5)
  • May 2022 (4)
  • April 2022 (4)
  • March 2022 (5)
  • February 2022 (4)
  • January 2022 (4)
  • December 2021 (5)
  • November 2021 (4)
  • October 2021 (4)
  • September 2021 (5)
  • August 2021 (4)
  • July 2021 (4)
  • June 2021 (5)
  • May 2021 (4)
  • April 2021 (4)
  • March 2021 (5)
  • February 2021 (4)
  • January 2021 (4)
  • December 2020 (5)
  • November 2020 (4)
  • October 2020 (4)
  • September 2020 (5)
  • August 2020 (4)
  • July 2020 (5)
  • June 2020 (4)
  • May 2020 (4)
  • April 2020 (5)
  • March 2020 (4)
  • February 2020 (4)
  • January 2020 (6)
  • December 2019 (4)
  • November 2019 (4)
  • October 2019 (5)
  • September 2019 (4)
  • August 2019 (4)
  • July 2019 (5)
  • June 2019 (4)
  • May 2019 (5)
  • April 2019 (4)
  • March 2019 (4)
  • February 2019 (4)
  • January 2019 (5)
  • December 2018 (4)
  • November 2018 (4)
  • October 2018 (5)
  • September 2018 (4)
  • August 2018 (5)
  • July 2018 (4)
  • June 2018 (4)
  • May 2018 (5)
  • April 2018 (4)
  • March 2018 (4)
  • February 2018 (4)
  • January 2018 (5)
  • December 2017 (4)
  • November 2017 (4)
  • October 2017 (4)
  • September 2017 (4)
  • August 2017 (5)
  • July 2017 (4)
  • June 2017 (4)
  • May 2017 (5)
  • April 2017 (4)
  • March 2017 (5)
  • February 2017 (4)
  • January 2017 (4)
  • December 2016 (4)
  • November 2016 (5)
  • October 2016 (6)
  • September 2016 (5)
  • August 2016 (5)
  • July 2016 (5)
  • June 2016 (5)
  • May 2016 (4)
  • April 2016 (4)
  • March 2016 (5)
  • February 2016 (4)
  • January 2016 (4)
  • December 2015 (5)
  • November 2015 (5)
  • October 2015 (4)
  • September 2015 (5)
  • August 2015 (4)
  • July 2015 (5)
  • June 2015 (5)
  • May 2015 (4)
  • April 2015 (3)
  • March 2015 (4)
  • February 2015 (4)
  • January 2015 (4)
  • December 2014 (5)
  • November 2014 (4)
  • October 2014 (6)
  • September 2014 (1)

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • doubtfulsea
    • Join 68 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • doubtfulsea
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...