. Alas, not me: William Shakespeare
Showing posts with label William Shakespeare. Show all posts
Showing posts with label William Shakespeare. Show all posts

25 July 2023

C. S. Lewis and William Shakespeare on Vergil



https://www.worldhistory.org/image/5836/portrait-of-virgil/


Several years back I published a post on echoes of Vergil in Shakespeare and Tolkien. I noted that I had always associated Sonnet 130's line -- "I grant I never saw a goddess go" -- with Aeneid 1.405 -- "et vera incessu patuit dea." The Latin may be seviceably rendered as "And by her gait was revealed a true goddess."

Today I was doing some work involving Aeneid book 1, and it occurred to me to check a book I've had for several years but had barely cracked it open: C. S. Lewis's Lost Aeneid: Arms and the Exile. As the title suggests, Lewis worked on a translation, though he never came near finishing it. I thought, "I bet Lewis heard Vergil in that Shakespeare, too."

Sure enough, Lewis translates the line: "... and all / The goddess in her going was revealed."

Being fond of Lewis for various reasons, I was pleased to find that we had the same take on Vergil and Shakespeare here. Of course, he does more than notice. Lewis turns the echo back again, so that now Vergil echoes Shakespeare.



01 November 2022

Another Allusion to Macbeth?


Tolkien quite famously supplanted Shakespeare's humdrum imagining of Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane with the march of the Ents upon Isengard. Even better known thanks to Peter Jackson's film of The Return of the King is Éowyn's clarification for the Witch-king of just how tricky a thing prophecy can be.* I have also long believed that the hobbits' vision, prompted by Bombadil, in which 'strode shapes of Men, tall and grim with bright swords, and last came one with a star on his brow' (FR 1.viii.146) owes something to the vision given to Macbeth by the witches of Banquo's Stuart progeny (Macbeth 4.i).**


This morning, even before coffee, I believe I found another allusion to Macbeth. In The Taming of Sméagol, as Frodo and Sam are trying in vain to find a way down from the heights of the Emyn Muil, Frodo decides they have done enough search for one day:


‘Well,’ he said, at last withdrawing his eyes, ‘we cannot stay here all night, fix or no fix. We must find a more sheltered spot, and camp once more; and perhaps another day will show us a path.’ 

‘Or another and another and another,’ muttered Sam. ‘Or maybe no day. We’ve come the wrong way.’

(TT 4.i.604)

Did you catch the cadence of Sam's answer about tomorrow? The iambic meter of Sam's 'another and another and another' and Macbeth's 'tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow' match perfectly (Macbeth 5.v). Each repeats a three syllable word with the stress on the second syllable, and punctuates the tedium of its creeping pace from day to day with the stress it places on the repeated 'and' which binds them. 'And', as Patrick Stewart says in the clip below, quoting Ian McKellen's advice to him, is 'the important word' in that speech. It carries the burden of what the speaker is feeling, whether it's Macbeth or Sam. 

When I catch things like this, I swear, for a moment I can hear the Inklings laughing.





 


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* As I noted back in 2016, the prophecy about the Witch-king comes true, not in one, but three unexpected ways. Éowyn is no man; Merry is no Man; and the smith who had forged the blade long ago is no living Man. One thing I am going to have to do, I have just realized, is to look beyond Tolkien's reinterpretation of the misinterpreted prophecy to the equivalence of the Witch-king and Macbeth.

** In keeping with Tolkien's belief that Shakespeare was best studied on the page as a concomitant to its being viewed on the stage, I did not make the connection between the vision of Banquo and his  descendants and of Aragorn and his ancestors until I was watching Kenneth Branagh's staging of the play some years ago. Banquo's descendants appeared and strode off across the stage much as the hobbits saw the 'sons of forgotten kings' do in their vision. 


28 January 2022

Shakespeare's Silmarillion

Shakespeare's Silmarillion:

Melkor: do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will - Eru: Mine. Melkor: I do not well understand that. Eru: I can fret you, I can play upon you. Mine instrument.

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I just wanted to add that it took me the longest time to see Eru's use of the word 'instrument' as a musical reference, despite that the entire metaphor of the Ainulindalë is musical. I had always seen 'instrument' as 'tool.' Once I made the connection, as blindingly obvious as things always are in hindsight, my mind leapt to Hamlet.

13 May 2020

I'll show myself out (RK 6.iii.946)

'Precious, precious, precious!' Gollum cried. 'My Precious! O my Precious!' And with that, even as his eyes were lifted up to gloat on his prize, he stepped too far, toppled, wavered for a moment on the brink, and then with a shriek he fell. Out of the depths came his last wail Precious, and he was gone. 
(RK 6.iii.946)
'Precious' six times and 'my' twice, which certainly makes clear his view of things:


'Methinks I could not die anywhere
so contented as in the [R]ing's company'

(Henry V 4.i.130-31).

I'll show myself out.

18 August 2019

'When winter first begins to bite -- Echoes and Re-echoes of Chaucer at FR 2.iii.273





In The Road to Middle-earth Tom Shippey argues (184-85) that the poem Bilbo recites to Frodo in The Ring Goes South 'in rhythm and theme ... echoes the magnificent coda to Love's Labour's Lost' :

When winter first begins to bite
and stones crack in the frosty night,
when pools are black and trees are bare,
'tis evil in the Wild to fare;
(FR 2.iii.273) 

When icicles hang by the wall
 And Dick the shepherd blows his nail
And Tom bears logs into the hall
And milk comes frozen home in pail,
When blood is nipp'd and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,

(LLL 5.2) 
As far as rhythm and theme go there can be little argument, but I would suggest that we can say more here. For the words of Bilbo's poem echo the opening lines of þe Clerkes Compleinte, Tolkien's little known parody of the opening lines of Chaucer's Prologue to The Canterbury Tales. Tolkien's Middle English original is followed by my rendering into Modern English:

þe Clerkes Compleinte 
Whanne þat Octobre mid his schoures derke
Þe erþe haþ dreint, and wetė windes cherke
& swoghe in naked braunches colde and bare,
& þ’oldė sonne is hennes longe yfare; 
The Clerk's Complaint 
When October with his showers dark
The earth has drowned, and wet winds creak
And sigh in naked branches cold and bare,
And the old sun has from here far fared;
The dark waters, the cracking stone and the creaking, naked branches, the cold of winter, the rhyme of bare and yfare tell the tale plainly: in composing Bilbo's verse Tolkien echoes his own echoes of Chaucer.* 


þe Clerkes Compleinte is most easily found in J. Fitzgerald's A "Clerkes Compleinte": Tolkien and the Division of Lit. and Lang. Tolkien Studies 6 (2009) 41-57.

I have not yet completed my research on this connection yet, so I am unsure whether someone else has already noted it. Even so, I believe it is interesting enough to mention.

19 June 2019

Two -- No, Three Echoes of Vergil



In Book One of the Aeneid Venus comes in disguise to visit her son shortly after his battered fleet reaches the shores of North Africa. Not until the last moment does he realize who she is, but it's what tips him off that is of interest here:

Dixit et avertens rosea cervice refulsit
ambrosiaeque comae divinum vertice odorem
spiravere; pedes vestis defluxit ad imos;
et vera incessu patuit dea.  
(1.402-05) 
She spoke and turning away blushed red as a rose,
And her ambrosial hair breathed forth a divine fragrance;
Her robe flowed down to the soles of her feet;
And by her stride was revealed a true goddess.*

The moment I first read that last line -- longer ago than I can believe possible, looking back at the wastrel lad that I was -- I immediately thought of my favorite line in Shakespeare's Sonnet 130:

'I grant I never saw a goddess go.'

Even if Shakespeare's Latin were as small as Ben Jonson thought it was, it would have included Book One of the Aeneid

Tonight I noticed something else about these lines, largely because a note in an edition of Book One I've been perusing pointed out that '"fragrance" was regularly associated with the presence of a deity.'** And that made me think of:

'"Hmmm! it smells like elves!" thought Bilbo....'
(Annotated Hobbit, 91)

Finally, there is part of Vergil's description of Charon:

iam senior, cruda deo viridisque senectus
'very old now, but for a god old age is fresh and green,' 
(6.304)

I have always loved (I believe) Fitzgerald's rendering: 'old age in the gods is green'.

And what strikes me as an echo in The Lord of the Rings:
'The countless years had filled [the trees of the Old Forest] with pride and rooted wisdom, and with malice. But none were more dangerous than the Great Willow: his heart was rotten, but his strength was green;' 
(FR 1.vii.130)
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* The translations are meant to be serviceable, no more. 

** The note -- in Randall T. Ganiban's Vergil: Aeneid Book 1, Focus Publishing (2008) -- goes on to cite Euripides Hippolytus 1391 and Aeschylus Prometheus Bound 115.

07 May 2019

and a spell / his voice laid on her






Again she fled, but swift he came.
Tinuviel! Tinuviel!
He called her by her elvish name;
And there she halted listening.
One moment stood she, and a spell
His voice laid on her:  
(FR 1.xi.192)
I can think of no other instance of a human enchanting, or appearing to enchant, a fairy, except for this:
TITANIA:
I pray thee, gentle mortal, sing again:
Mine ear is much enamour'd of thy note;
So is mine eye enthralled to thy shape;
And thy fair virtue's force perforce doth move me
On the first view to say, to swear, I love thee. 
(MND 3.1.130-34)

I am just going to leave this here. It's just something I noticed in the middle of the night. It reminds me of what Tolkien does with Birnam Wood and 'No man of woman born'.

I would love to hear of other instances.

10 May 2018

The Bard Reviews 'Avengers: Infinity War'


Here be spoilers withal:
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
Fear no more the frown o’ the great;
Thou art past the tyrant’s stroke;
Care no more to clothe and eat;
To thee the reed is as the oak:
The scepter, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust.
Fear no more the lightning flash,
Nor the all-dreaded thunder stone;
Fear not slander, censure rash;
Thou hast finished joy and moan:
All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee, and come to dust.
No exorciser harm thee!
Nor no witchcraft charm thee!
Ghost unlaid forbear thee!
Nothing ill come near thee!
Quiet consummation have;
And renownèd be thy grave!
Cymbeline IV.ii.329-52 (adapted).

26 October 2017

The More You Read, The More Jokes You Get

Jean Simmons, Laurence Olivier, Hamlet (1948)

A friend of mine once told me that the more you read, the more jokes you get.

HAMLET:
Lady, shall I lie in your lap?

Lying down at OPHELIA's feet. 
OPHELIA:
No, my lord. 
HAMLET:
I mean, my head upon your lap? 
OPHELIA:
Ay, my lord. 
HAMLET:
Do you think I meant country matters? 
OPHELIA:
I think nothing, my lord. 
HAMLET:
That's a fair thought to lie between maids' legs. 
OPHELIA:
What is, my lord? 
HAMLET:
Nothing. 
OPHELIA:
You are merry, my lord. 
HAMLET:
Who, I? 
OPHELIA:
Ay, my lord.

Once I was teaching Hamlet, and one of my exceptional, fun students, stopped me when we were discussing Act III Scene ii. There was an editor's note in the text, she said, which pointed out that 'country matters' was an obscene pun. She didn't get it. For a moment I stopped, trying to think of a way to suggest it to her without saying too much. You have to hear it to get it, I told her, and turned away to write on the board. A few seconds passed, in which the tap and scratch of chalk on slate seemed to fill the room. Then I heard her: "Oh..OH!" Recognition murmured its way across the room.

This morning, twenty years after, I was reading Thomas of Erceldoune, and came across an obscene joke that was almost certainly not there, but which I got but because I had read Shakespeare.

'Come lygge thyne hede downe on my knee,
And [þou] sall se þe fayreste syghte,
þat euer sawe mane of thi contree.' (1.194-96) 
Come lie thine head down on my knee,
And thou shalt see the fairest sight
That ever saw a man of thy country.

I don't think this is what my friend meant, but in a November of the soul you take what you can get.

05 August 2017

'Do you bite your thumb at me, sir?' -- A Shakespearean Túrin

Alan Lee © 2007


One of the strangest sidelights on the long dark tale of Túrin Turambar is perhaps the following:

[F]or indeed the speech of Doriath, whether of the king or others, was even in the days of Túrin more antique than that used elsewhere. One thing (as Mîm observed) of which Túrin never rid himself, despite his grievance against Doriath, was the speech he had acquired during his fostering. Though a Man, he spoke like an Elf of the Hidden Kingdom, which is as though a Man should now appear, whose speech and schooling until manhood had been that of some secluded country where the English had remained nearer that of the court of Elizabeth I than of Elizabeth II.
(Jewels 312)
Tybalt wouldn't stand a chance, but then again no one near Túrin did.

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17 April 2017

A Head Full of Homer, A Trench Full of Blood



The comradeship of poetry and war is one of the most ancient relationships humanity knows. They have served together on the plains of windy Troy and walked eye deep in the hell of the Somme. Sometimes it is all thrill and glory, sometimes horror and shame, sometimes the hypocrisy of promoting the first and pretending the second doesn't exist, or worse, doesn't matter. Having read a lot of Homer and a lot of history, and having been a young fool once held captive by the romance of the Lost Generation, I long ago found myself drawn to the cataclysm of the Great War and the brilliance of its poets.  From them I learned, in a way that only illuminated Homer, of the kaleidoscope of terror, disgust, and mad valor that people know in war. 

My late brother was in Vietnam. As often happens, he had little to say about it, especially to people like me, who had no clue of what it had been like. Once, though, when we'd both had too much to drink, I asked him if he'd been afraid in battle, and for once he answered. It all happened too fast for fear, he said, when you were in the middle of a firefight; it was beforehand, while waiting, that you were afraid, and afterward, when the things you'd seen and done came home to you.  Then he added in one of the most savage voices I've ever heard, 'It wasn't the fighting that got to you. It was the mud and the come and the scum and the f***ing every-day.' Years later, when the country began to try to make peace with all the internal turmoil the war had caused and veterans began to have reunions, I asked him whether he was going to his. 'Tommy,' he said, 'I love those guys like brothers, but I never want to see them again.'

So I often read the WWI poets and wonder what it must have been like for them to go off to war, young men with heads full of Homer.  Did it defend them, at least at first, from the shattering reality of dismemberment and death?  Did it lead to a greater disillusionment if that defense failed? And for those who did not 'lose the day of their homecoming', as Homer would have said, what about looking back years later? Did it help them come to an understanding they could live with? And what did it take and what did it mean for them to talk about it? Did the ghosts of who they were have to drink the blood again in order to speak once more, as the shades Odysseus meets in the underworld do (Odyssey XI.100ff, Fagles)? 

But I can never read any of the poems and memoirs these men wrote without thinking of what C. S. Lewis said about it many years later in Suprised by Joy (195-96):

The war itself has been so often described by those who saw more of it than I that I shall here say little about it. Until the great German attack came in the Spring we had a pretty quiet time. Even then they attacked not us but the Canadians on our right, merely "keeping us quiet" by pouring shells into our line about three a minute all day. I think it was that day I noticed how a greater terror overcomes a less: a mouse that I met (and a poor shivering mouse it was, as I was a poor shivering man) made no attempt to run from me. Through the winter, weariness and water were our chief enemies. I have gone to sleep marching and woken again and found myself marching still. One walked in the trenches in thigh gum boots with water above the knee; one remem­bers the icy stream welling up inside the boot when you punctured it on concealed barbed wire. Familiarity both with the very old and the very recent dead confirmed that view of corpses which had been formed the moment I saw my dead mother. I came to know and pity and reverence the ordinary man: particularly dear Sergeant Ayres, who was (I suppose) killed by the same shell that wounded me. I was a futile officer (they gave commissions too easily then), a pup­pet moved about by him, and he turned this ridiculous and painful relation into something beautiful, became to me al­most like a father. But for the rest, the war—the frights, the cold, the smell of H.E., the horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses, the landscape of sheer earth without a blade of grass, the boots worn day and night till they seemed to grow to your feet - all this shows rarely and faintly in memory. It is too cut off from the rest of my experience and often seems to have hap­pened to someone else. It is even in a way unimportant. One imaginative moment seems now to matter more than the real­ities that followed. It was the first bullet I heard—so far from me that it "whined" like a journalist's or a peacetime poet's bullet. At that moment there was something not exactly like fear, much less like indifference: a little quavering signal that said, "This is War. This is what Homer wrote about."

All Lewis' understatement -- a shell every twenty seconds all day is not an attack, the discomfort of the leaking boots -- all his nonchalance -- the zombielike marching, the parenthetical 'I suppose' -- all his modest impotence -- 'futile', 'puppet' -- can, I think, lead the unwary into misapprehending his final statement.  Which is not glib.  It all turns upon 'quavering': the 'imaginative moment' hangs trembling between 'fear' and 'indifference', but is much closer to fear, an experience he can process only by means of his education. Yet he places War, with a capital W, first, as it came home to him in this moment, and Homer second. The emphasis is on War; Homer is the imaginative tool that was at hand. He's connecting Homer to the primary reality of War, not War to the secondary reality of Homer.

I would be interested, on a very personal level, to know if this was all Lewis felt as this thought came to him with the 'whine' of the first bullet.  If I could ask him only one perfectly impudent question, it would be about this moment. For, while I have not been to war, thank God, I once had someone who had been shot lie bleeding in my arms. He was a young man I barely knew who was shot by another young man I barely knew as the result of a profoundly stupid argument. He died not long after we reached the hospital. As I sat in the emergency room and looked at all his blood all over me, I could think only of Lady Macbeth.  Even now, just as Lewis says of himself, the rest of my experience that summer evening long ago seems cut off from me, though I can see it all quite clearly in the distance. The blood and Lady Macbeth remain. In that moment, however, I was ashamed of myself. I held this dying boy in my arms and all I could think of was Shakespeare? Now I know better. Now I know that it was the imaginative tool that was at hand.

Did Lewis have such a feeling? I don't know, but a remark he made several years after the war makes me think he must have done.  On 22 April 1923 in a letter to a friend he wrote of the wretched post-war death of a fellow veteran still suffering from his experience: 'Isn't it a damned world -- and we once thought we could be happy with books and music!'

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18 February 2017

Review: Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth

Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth by Brian Attebery
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a good book, not a great one, and there is the measure of my disappointment. Attebery is at his very best -- which is exceptionally good -- when actively analyzing and commenting on individual texts and authors. He is usually quite skilled in integrating such analysis with the opinions of other scholars. Attebery makes many fascinating observations on Charles Williams, Hope Mirlees, George MacDonald, and Ursula K. Le Guin, among others, as well as on various species of fantasy, angels, and post-colonial fantasy. This book is an excellent education in the history of the genre.

Yet it is not without fault. At times Attebery slips into that self-renewing world in which scholars reference only each other and make pronouncements for which they neither adduce evidence nor produce an argument. Some call this engagement, but elopement might be the better term. True enough, this turning away from evidence is a common enough failing in academic writing over the last couple of generations, but it is the flight of the deserter rather than the escape of the prisoner (and so not to be commended). Mercifully, Attebery never stumbles into the Mirkwood of Jargon, where every utterance is impressive, but only as clear as the lyrics to Close to the Edge.

He seems a bit harder on C.S. Lewis than is necessary, however, and is at times dismissive: the entry of Joy Davidman into Lewis' life is apparently the sole reason that Till We Have Faces is less open to the charge of misogyny than Narnia is. While Joy Davidman surely had a profound effect on him, perhaps Till We Have Faces should suggest the need for a re-examination of the case again Lewis rather than the facile conclusion that he was swept off his feet and into enlightenment.

He also makes the occasional bald assertion, such as claiming that 'in order to avoid direct representation of religious iconography' Shakespeare substituted 'fairies for angels.' Did he? How so? But no proof is offered, no argument made. Since Shakespeare's fairies could not be mistaken for angels, and since Shakespeare's audience knew well that fairies and angels were not the same. this is an odd claim.

In discussing the attempt, specifically of G. P. Taylor, to write fantasy acceptable to literalist Christians, a failed attempt as it turned out, Attebery comments: 'Even the most faithful transcription of faith language into a work of fantasy has the effect of setting religion adrift.' But this one unsuccessful attempt by Taylor doesn't establish this. Perhaps Taylor just did it badly. Moreover, while it only takes one example to prove that something can be done, one example cannot prove that it cannot be done.

So I do recommend this book, but not without reservation. I found much to profit by here, but also some moments that could mislead the unwary.



28 June 2016

Getting to the Bottom of Celeborn


'An evil of the Ancient World it seemed, such as I have never seen before,' said Aragorn. 'It was both a shadow and a flame, strong and terrible.' 
'It was a Balrog of Morgoth,' said Legolas; 'of all elf-banes the most deadly, save the One who sits in the Dark Tower.' 
'Indeed I saw upon the bridge that which haunts our darkest dreams – I saw Durin's Bane,' said Gimli in a low voice, and dread was in his eyes. 
'Alas!' said Celeborn. 'We long have feared that under Caradhras a terror slept. But had I known that the Dwarves had stirred up this evil in Moria again, l would have forbidden you to pass the northern borders, you and all that went with you. And if it were possible, one would say that at the last Gandalf fell from wisdom into folly, going needlessly into the net of Moria.' 
'He would be rash indeed that said that thing,' said Galadriel gravely. 'Needless were none of the deeds of Gandalf in life.'
(FR 2.vii.356)

Oh, darn, another image of Cate Blanchett
For his words here Celeborn earns a gentle rebuke from Galadriel. Her words are third person (he) rather than second (you), and all very politely subjunctive, 'would be' rather than 'is/are', leading to a generalization about a type of person ('that said') rather than a precise comment about a specific individual ('who said').  As such, Galadriel's statement neatly answers the two unreal conditional statements ('had I known.... And if it were possible') with which Celeborn responded to the news of the balrog and the death of Gandalf. In essence, she is saying that Celeborn, appearances notwithstanding, is not the sort of person who would say such things.

And though he accepts her reproof and apologizes at once, readers have been far less forgiving than Galadriel and the members of the Company. Indeed Celeborn is seen as something of a dolt, whose folly here wholly belies Galadriel's statement, only a few moment later, that he is 'accounted the wisest of the Elves of Middle-earth' (FR 2.vii.357). Since he plays little other role, and since the attention shifts almost completely to Galadriel, the rashness of his remarks, spoken 'in the trouble of my heart', is never redeemed. We never get to see the wisdom of which Galadriel speaks. So, readers have long wondered just what it is she's talking about. Indeed Celeborn's wisdom seems chiefly to consist in having married Galadriel.

and another one!
His words and his apology, I would argue, are meant to have a different and a greater effect than a first glance suggests. They aim to reveal how frightening a balrog is, even to the wisest Elf and to indicate how troubling the fall of Gandalf is with the fate of Middle-earth hanging in the balance. Consider the reaction of the otherwise dauntless Legolas, whom the balrog so 'filled...with terror' that he dropped his arrow and cried out in 'dismay and fear' (FR 2.v.329). By contrast, when the Company later encounters the winged Nazgûl the 'sudden dread' Legolas and the others feel does not prevent him from shooting it from the sky just as 'suddenly' (FR 2.ix.387). Aragorn himself, moreover, calls the balrog 'terrible', which he means quite literally, that is to say, it inspires terror; and to Gimli it is Durin's Bane, a race-nightmare of which he speaks with 'dread in his eyes.' It was, as Gandalf said, 'a foe beyond any' of them, and its power posed a serious challenge to his own (FR 2.v.327, 329-331). Small wonder, then, that at the bridge he chose to declare himself.

We must also recall that Aragorn seems to have broken off his account at 'the coming of the Terror,' that is, before the battle at the bridge, in order describe the balrog. This exactly parallels the narrative of events, which pauses to do the same once the balrog comes into view. (FR 2.v.329-330). The Terror which so dismays Legolas that his courage briefly falters at that moment, has its match in the lapse of Celeborn's wisdom in this one. It may also be, given Aragorn's apparent pause in telling the tale, that Celeborn does not yet know that Gandalf threw the balrog down into the abyss, apparently killing it. He may know only that Gandalf saved his companions and perished himself. His '[h]ad I known that the Dwarves had stirred up this evil in Moria again' makes more sense if he does not know that the balrog also fell.  If Gandalf is dead and a balrog is on the loose, that would be a very troubling situation indeed. Nor is Celeborn alone in questioning the wisdom of entering Moria. Aragorn also thought it folly, and warned Gandalf against it (FR 2.iii.286-87; iv.297; vi.333).

But if a close reading provides us a context in which Celeborn does not seem entirely dim, we still never encounter any evidence that allows us to consider him 'the wisest of the Elves of Middle-earth.' If anything, the surefooted grace with which Galadriel steps in to save the situation, gently but firmly correcting her husband and simultaneously winning the heart of a 'glowering' Gimli with her generosity and charm, makes her appear wiser by far than Celeborn.  And everything we see of her hereafter tends only to reinforce this opinion of her wisdom: her power in creating Lothlórien and defending it from Sauron, her humility in refusing the Ring when Frodo freely offers it, and her willingness to let all she loves fade in defense of all else.  In short nothing Celeborn does or says, and nothing anyone else says of him, allows us to reconcile Galadriel's description of him with the impression he initially creates in the reader of not being particularly wise at all.

In part, as I have said, this has to do with the subtlety of the context, which would of course have been plain as day to the man who wrote it. An author's intent is not always perfectly realized on the page; and even if it is, it is not always fully or easily appreciated by readers. In part it also has to do with the way the text developed. Once introduced into the narrative the Lady of Lothlórien quickly became more important than the Lord (The Treason of Isengard 233-66). The combination of the subtlety of the context and the transition from Lord to Lady did Celeborn no favors. 

Yet there may be one more small aspect of the portrayal of Celeborn and Galadriel that we need to consider briefly. It's possible that Tolkien was having a bit of fun with us. We have seen him do this before. At FR 2.iv.298 we have seen him play with the tale of Odin being swallowed by Fenris Wolf. At 1.x.171 he plays with Shakespeare's 'fair is foul and foul is fair' in contrasting the apparent and the real characters of Strider (Macbeth 1.i.10). At TT 4.viii.714 he plays with 'the lean and hungry look' of Cassius in Julius Caesar (1.2.193-96). In larger and more forceful ways at TT 3.iv.484-87, ix.564-69 and RK 5.vi.840-42 he amuses himself with 'Birnam Wood' and 'none of woman born' (Macbeth 4.1.95-96, 108-110; 5.5.31-36, 8.9-16).  I would also argue that the vision of the Kings and Chieftains of the Dúnedain which Bombadil conjures for the hobbits (FR 1.viii.145-46) owes much to the third prophecy -- the vision of the line of Stuart Kings (Macbeth 4.116-140) -- in that same scene in Macbeth which gives us Birnam Wood and 'none of woman born'. But it is never a mere echo of Shakespeare or Norse Myth. Gandalf is not Odin. Strider is not Macbeth. Gollum is not just thin as starvation, but no more to be trusted than Cassius. The wood really does march to war. And the Witch-king is slain by two people, one not a Man, and the other not a man. 

So where might we find a fairy queen in an enchanted wood who is mistaken about the wisdom of her beloved? In A Midsummer Night's Dream of course, where Titania, under an enchantment, falls in love with Bottom. 'Thou art as wise as thou art beautiful', she tells him (3.1.140). Since Puck has just given Bottom, 'the shallowest thickskin of that barren sort' (3.2.13), the head of an ass, Titania is clearly out of her reckoning. Bottom is of course neither wise nor Titania's husband, but Titania's folly is also brief and presently Oberon, her spouse, recalls her to her senses.

Of the points I have made here the one I am most serious about, and most convinced of its value, is the first part of the point about the context in which we need to read this scene. The second part, about the seeming pause in Aragorn's account has to contend with the quite reasonable objection that Celeborn asked to be told 'the full tale', and Aragorn seems to set out to do just that. While I believe that it can contend with that objection, not everyone may be convinced.  And I do think that Tolkien probably is having a bit of fun here, playing Titania and Bottom against Galadriel and Celeborn, but if so it is a mere whiff of a joke meant to underscore the seriously troubling situation that Celeborn believes confronts him.*



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*I will admit that this connection between Tolkien and Shakespeare actually came to me in a dream on or about Midsummer. Blame it on Puck then.

06 June 2016

In the Dead Marshes We Hear No Larks at Morning

Paul Nash, We Are Making A New World, Imperial War Museum

Since at least the twelfth century larks at morning have featured in English poetry, at first not even in English, as these Latin lines from Alexander of Neckam show, playing on the similarity of 'lark' (alauda) and 'praises' (laudat) to derive a (false) etymology:
Laudat alauda diem, praenuncia laeta diei
    Laudat, et a laudis nomine nomen habet.
Quamvis moesta thorum properans Aurora Tithoni
    Linquat, surgentem laeta salutat avis. 
(De Laudibus Divinae Sapientiae, 2.765-68
The lark, day's happy herald, praises the day,
    She praises it, and from the name of 'praise' gets her name.
Though sad Aurora leaves in haste Tithonus' bed,
    The happy bird greets her as she arises.
Onward through the centuries in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Wordsworth, Meredith, and Hopkins, the lark is jubilant, protective of its own, and soaring high and free to greet the dawn. There's nothing to wonder at in all this poetry on the lark. For long ago in the quiet of the world when there was less noise and more green, every morning was full of birdsong. (In fact, it still is. Open your windows; mute your machines.)  As J. V. Baker, who knew firsthand what the poets he was writing about knew, said: 
 Any knowledge of the habits of the English lark will make it easy to see why it is always associated with rapturous and soaring flight; no bird is apparently more airy and carefree or ventures higher; yet it always has an invisible cord of attachment that pulls it back to its grassy nest concealed on the ground. My first recollection of larks is of hearing them above a wheatfield; the golden ranks of wheat, relieved here and there with blood-red poppies, stood right up to the edge of the chalk cliffs falling perpendicularly into the sea near Margate; and the blue sky was filled with the song of larks. 
(The Lark in English Poetry, p. 70)
It is thus no surprise that during World War One men raised on such poetry and such experiences would find solace in the larks that sang and soared about the fields of France at dawn. 'What the lark usually betokens' for the men at the front, writes Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory (p. 242), 'is that one has got safely through another night', though men were also well aware of the absurdity of the birds singing while around them swirled a nightmare of slaughter, something the poets of the war saw both sides of.
A Lark Above the Trenches  
Hushed is the shriek of hurtling shells: and hark!
Somewhere within that bit of soft blue sky-
Grand in his loneliness, his ecstasy,
His lyric wild and free – carols a lark. 
I in the trench, he lost in heaven afar,
I dream of Love, its ecstasy he sings;
Doth lure my soul to love till like a star
It flashes into Life: O tireless wings 
That beat love’s message into melody –
A song that touches in this place remote
Gladness supreme in its undying note
And stirs to life the soul of memory –
‘Tis strange that while you’re beating into life
Men here below are plunged in sanguine strife!
Will Streets
 And:
Returning, We Hear the Larks
Sombre the night is:
And, though we have our lives, we know
What sinister threat lurks there.

Dragging these anguished limbs, we only know
This poison-blasted track opens on our camp—
On a little safe sleep.

But hark! Joy—joy—strange joy.
Lo! Heights of night ringing with unseen larks:
Music showering on our upturned listening faces.

Death could drop from the dark
As easily as song—
But song only dropped,
Like a blind man's dreams on the sand
By dangerous tides;
Like a girl's dark hair, for she dreams no ruin lies there,
Or her kisses where a serpent hides. 
Isaac Rosenberg
Now, as has long been clear, Tolkien's experience of the Somme in WWI influenced his portrayal of Sam and Frodo's journey to Mordor with Gollum. We can see this most clearly in The Passage of the Marshes, as Tolkien conceded (Letters, no. 226), and as John Garth has amply demonstrated in his splendid (if hard to come by) " 'As under a green sea': Visions of War in the Dead Marshes". Now we should not expect Tolkien to have included every commonplace of English literature, nor of the WWI poets, in his translation of his experience. Nor would its absence be particularly noteworthy, or even noticeable, if he did not draw our attention to it:
As the day wore on the light increased a little, and the mists lifted, growing thinner and more transparent. Far above the rot and vapours of the world the Sun was riding high and golden now in a serene country with floors of dazzling foam, but only a passing ghost of her could they see below, bleared, pale, giving no colour and no warmth. But even at this faint reminder of her presence Gollum scowled and flinched. He halted their journey and they rested, squatting like little hunted animals, in the borders of a great brown reed-thicket. There was a deep silence, only scraped on its surfaces by the faint quiver of empty seed-plumes, and broken grass-blades trembling in small air-movements that they could not feel.  
'Not a bird!' said Sam mournfully.  
'No, no birds,' said Gollum. 'Nice birds!' He licked his teeth. 'No birds here. There are snakeses, wormses, things in the pools. Lots of things, lots of nasty things. No birds,' he ended sadly. Sam looked at him with distaste.
(TT 4.ii.626)
Larks belong to the serene, dazzling world of the golden sun, to a world where dawn came clear and bright, as it had not in the marshes that morning (TT 4.ii.625). Theirs is not the rotten, murky world in which the three hobbits seek to hide. Their absence is a silence that grieves and dispirits Sam. And Gollum, who regrets the lack of birds for a different reason, makes quite clear that their absence from the marshes is not merely a passing one. 

And Tolkien was well acquainted the image of the lark at dawn and the power it could have. He certainly knew it from Chaucer and from most if not all of the poets down to Meredith and Hopkins; and even if he had never read another WWI poet, he had edited Spring Harvest, the collection of his friend Geoffrey Bache Smith, who wrote of the lark in his poem 'Over the hills and hollows green' before perishing at the Somme. In The Lay of Leithian, moreover, he uses the image of the lark three times (Lays, 176, 291, 355), and then once in Aragorn's song of Beren and Lúthien in The Lord of the Rings (FR 1.xi.192).  But it is in The Silmarillion (165) that he uses it with most striking effect:
There came a time near dawn on the eve of spring, and Lúthien danced upon a green hill; and suddenly she began to sing. Keen, heart-piercing was her song as the song of the lark that rises from the gates of night and pours its voice among the dying stars, seeing the sun behind the walls of the world; and the song of Lúthien released the bonds of winter, and the frozen waters spoke, and flowers sprang from the cold earth where her feet had passed. 
Then the spell of silence fell from Beren .... 
That Tolkien here likens Lúthien Tinúviel, the nightingale who sings in the dusk, to the lark is fascinating in its own right, and I think this juxtaposition signals just how epochal the love of Beren and Lúthien will be. Yet more importantly for us here now is that in both these texts without the song of the lark silence has lease. In The Silmarillion Lúthien sings like the lark and breaks the spell on Beren, whose naming her Tinúviel, nightingale, then casts a spell of love over her, thus changing the world. In The Passage of the Marshes, without lark or song, things just get worse for Frodo and Sam. Ahead of them that very night are the 'things in the pools' that Gollum slyly alluded to, the dead from whom the marshes take their name (TT 4.ii.627-28); and when, still later that same night, they at last hear a cry upon the air and the rush of wings, it is no skylark welcoming the dawn, but a creature of horror whose coming snuffs out even the candles of the corpses: " 'Wraiths!' he wailed. 'Wraiths on wings!' " (TT 4.ii.630). As a result, a shadow falls on all their hearts. Gollum begins to revert to his former self, and Frodo himself grows increasingly silent, like Beren before Lúthien sang.  After two more such visitations (TT 4.ii.634-35), the chapter ends :
So they stumbled on through the weary end of the night, and until the coming of another day of fear they walked on in silence with bowed heads, seeing nothing and hearing nothing but the wind hissing in their ears.
(TT 4.ii.635)
So in The Passage of the Marshes not only does Tolkien eschew the common trope of larks at dawn, which is reasonable enough given the context, but by substituting the winged Nazgûl to break the larkless silence he reworks the trope to introduce the nightmare that will persist and deepen, with one contrasting interlude in Ithilien, until Mt Doom. 

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James V Baker, The Lark in English Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Spring 1950), pp. 70-79

Priscilla Bawcutt, The Lark in Chaucer and Some Later Poets, The Yearbook of English Studies,Vol. 2 (1972), pp. 5-12


15 May 2016

An early intimation of elvish immortality in the South English Legendary?

Arthur Rackham, from A Midsummer Night's Dream
It's common knowledge that as he grew older Tolkien came to despise the silly, diminutive elves and pixies so popular among the Victorians of his youth, and that he had an equal dislike for the fairies of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (Hammond and Scull, 2006, v. 2.280, 340). And while I am inclined to believe Tolkien's famous 'cordial dislike' for Shakespeare to be far more a distaste for Shakespeare studied on the page rather than watched on the stage (Letters, nos. 76, 163), there is no denying that he felt Shakespeare played a cardinal role in diminishing the inhabitants of Faërie who haunt the forests and moors of medieval literature (Letters, no. 151).  So lately I've gone back and begun reading many of those older texts, to see exactly what Tolkien had in mind when he sought to revive those elves for the mythology he could dedicate to England (Letters, no. 131). 

Now one of the most distinctive characteristics of Tolkien's Elves is that they are immortal, or, more properly, that they will exist in one form or another within Arda for as long as Arda itself lasts (Silm. 42).  If killed, they will either reincarnate or remain as spirits in the Halls of Mandos in Valinor. But in time their existence will grow wearisome (Silm. 88). Given this, the following words from the section of the South English Legendary on St Michael the Archangel, which I found quoted in Alaric Hall's excellent Elves in Anglo-Saxon England (141-42), fairly leapt off the page:
And ofte in fourme of wommane : In many derne weye
grete compaygnie men i-seoth of heom : boþe hoppie and pleiȝe,
þat Eluene beoth i-cleopede : and ofte heo comiez to toune,                       255
And bi daye muche in wodes heo beoth : and bi niȝte ope heiȝe dounes.
þat beoth þe wrechche gostes : þat out of heuene weren i-nome,
And manie of heom a-domesday : ȝeot schullen to reste come.
And oft in form of woman in many a secret way
Great company men see of them both at dance and play,
the people that they call the Elves, and oft they come to town;                 255
By day much in the woods they be, and by night upon the downs.
They are the unhappy spirits that out of heaven were cast
And many of them on domesday shall come to rest at last.*
(ed. Horstmann p. 307)
While it is interesting to note here the tension between 'dance and play' on the one hand, and the Elves' 'unhappiness' and lack of 'rest' on the other, a tension we also see in Tolkien's Elves, the idea that they will not know 'rest' -- which can mean the rest of death as well as peace and respite from troubles -- until the ending of the world also seems familiar.  Even the euphemistic ambiguity of 'rest' here is in keeping with the uncertainty of what will become of the Elves after the end of Arda (Silm. 42; Morgoth 312). 

Arthur Rackham, from A Midsummer Night's Dream
Then, too, these elves are in a position not entirely unlike Tolkien's Elves. For they are fallen angels, who tried to take no side in the struggle between Lucifer and God, and for this were cast down, not to Hell but to Earth (Horstmann, p. 305, line 187ff.). Tolkien's Elves were of course no angels, but their position between two warring sides and their rejection of both led not only to their departure (albeit willing) from Valinor, but also to the Doom of Mandos, which forbade their return and foretold the pains they would suffer until the end. 

I cannot claim that this passage is Tolkien's source for these aspects of his Elves, nor can I say whether I am the first to notice it in this connection, or indeed whether there are other, earlier passages elsewhere that make the same claims about the place of elves within a Christian view of creation. Not yet. I am still reading. At the very least, however, the South English Legendary offers intriguing parallels that could well have set Tolkien thinking and contributed to his portrayal of the Elves of Arda. 

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*The translation is mine, and I've taken a few small liberties to try to preserve a sense of the meter. I would also dearly love to know what it means when the the elves come to town.

29 June 2014

Negative 3 Mister Darcys, or How I Came to Love √-1

I have a very good friend who went the extra mile to get two Bachelor's Degrees, one in Math and one in English.  What is more, after that she got her PhD in English Renaissance Drama.  Although she vehemently denies having a good memory, she can, if asked, deliver ex tempore a succinct and accurate plot summary of any play of the period you can possibly come up with.  I'm not talking about Shakespeare, Marlowe, or Ben Jonson here.  I'm talking about writers and plays most people not versed in the period are at best only dimly aware of.  And even 20 years after the last Math class she took, she could still remember and talk about the Math in a meaningful way.  So her memory isn't good.  It's prodigious.

Most of the Math she could discuss was lost on me, however.  Geometry and Trigonometry I loved and did well in, but I haven't taken a Math class since high school.  Never took Calculus.  Never wanted to.  But every now and then I would see some equation somewhere and say to her, "So what does that symbol mean?"  And she would launch into some explanation that before too long made my poor brain swell, but, you know what, it's rather charming to watch someone you like indulging a passion that they don't often get to indulge because they are surrounded by people who won't know what they are talking about.  It was a lovely thing to watch, though I was utterly clueless.

And as long as we didn't touch too much on negative numbers, we were fine.  For some reason I had always found the assertion that negative numbers were real particularly irksome.  (It is somehow akin to the claim that "perception is reality," though I have noticed that the perception which is also reality never ever seems to be my perception.)  I mean, okay, negative numbers come in very handy for solving equations, but they were just tools, a means to an end, a bit of mental mathematical gymnastics.  They didn't exist as a measure of real quantity.  Because of course you cannot actually have -3 apples or anything else.

And in my typical cleverer than thou way my proof of the unreality of negative numbers was that the square root of any negative number was an imaginary number. Because obviously a number that didn't exist would have a square root that was imaginary.  Somehow this failed to persuade her.  In fact it annoyed her. Largely because it was stupid, and she knew and disliked the fact that I was trying to tease her.

In revenge she gave me a book called An Imaginary Tale: The Story of √-1, by Paul J. Nahin, for Christmas.  (Revenge tragedy was her specialty.)  Now from what I have read about this book, it is a good book and very highly thought of by those who are able to think of it, but for me a visitation of three spirits by night would have been kinder.  She kept insisting that the Math wasn't that hard, and perhaps I would have decided she was right if I could have gotten to page three.  I couldn't even claim that it was all Greek to me, because then I would have understood it.  In any event my brain oozed out through my ears.  But I have always maintained that turnabout is fair play, and this was a most palpable hit.

Though I still didn't buy that negative numbers were real.

Because it's true that you can't have -3 apples.

Then one day it hit me.  If negative numbers are real because we can conceive of them, and can hold the idea of them in our heads, and do things with those numbers, well then Mr Darcy is real, too.  And Sam Gamgee.  And Falstaff.  And Colonel Aureliano Buendía.  And Viola.  And Diana Villiers.  And the incomparable Lily Bart.

And I can dance with Miss Elizabeth Bennet.

So don't be telling me if I'm wrong.  I don't want to know.