Sunday, May 31, 2015

Charles Williams' Tirade


So, I've been reading Ch. Wms' wartime letters, written from his Oxford 'exile' to his wife back in London (TO MICHAL FROM SERGE, ed. Roma King [2002]). This is a book I've had for quite a while but not gotten around to reading before; now seemed a good time, as background to my piece on Williams and Lewis for this summer's MythCon.

For the most part, it's quite drab (so far; I'm only about a third of the way through it), and references to the Inklings are disappointingly few to be found -- e.g., at one point he mentions that "on Thursday evenings I come in late from Magdalen" (p. 63) and at another "the only time I was out after 11 was when I went to Magdalen, and Magdalen is off in the vacation unless occasionally" (p. 74).

Which made the following passage, appearing on p. 75, all the more remarkable. Note that 'Sir Humphrey', 'Sir H.', and 'Milford' are all the same person, Wms' boss at the Press; 'Jock' is another Oxford Univ. Press employee. 'Eliot' is T. S. Eliot, who is mentioned relatively frequently in the letters and with whom Wms was occasionally in contact.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Oxford, July 4th 1940
This will be a shorter note because I have been reading a MS for Sir Humphrey. Also because I am in a towering rage. The MS was about Milton and attacked Eliot. Sir H. remarks to Jock that he has given it me, & Jock says: "O he won't like it! Eliot is his great idol" & Sir H.: "Ah, but he is a great Miltonian too -- & which will win?"  Milford told me this and I said in extreme irritation: "I suppose it doesn't occur to either you or Jock that one might decide on purely critical principles, not on anything else?" And anyhow -- Eliot my great idol! I admire him very much; I like him immensely; but my idol!! All these people pretend to be cultured & read criticism, & after three years they . . .  it is unendurable. Yet I have said, exactly & carefully, in place after place, what I thought & what I meant . . .  One might as well talk to -- Germans.*  Well . . .  I am better now. But it is tiresome. If it had not been for our determination over the years, I should say I was misunderstood. But that is hell's own path -- to indulge that kind of nonsense; I will die first. At the same time it would be nice to have a little accuracy even in a publishing house, even among the Whigs of a dying culture. Really, darling, in these things I have tried to be accurate & careful, &
this blather of incompetent imbecility . . .

NO! I really am better-tempered. I have fought without allies in these things all my life, & I shall go on fighting -- "I did say this; I did not say that." One would think it simple, but the Oxford Press are incapable of understanding it. All right, but I shan't compromise or retreat. As you have once or twice hinted with some justice -- when I am arrogant, I am arrogant. Now you disagree with me over Eliot, but you don't say silly things about what I think about him. Idol, indeed! All that Jock knows of either of us would go on a pin's head and leave three-quarters of it empty.

Bless you for listening to that tirade . . .

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

*and remember, Wms wrote this during a nasty patch in WWII.


--I find this passage fascinating, and rather baffling. What is it that Williams finds so objectionable? Is it the implication that he's a disciple of Eliot's, not his peer? Having his autonomy as a critic called into question? Something else entirely? And what precisely is the "little accuracy" he sets so much store by? For that matter, why the odd phrase "Whigs of a dying culture" to characterize the two men? Anyone with more insight into Williams' mental processes care to explicate?

--John R.

Thursday, May 28, 2015

The Cat Report (OMAN KITTENS!) 5/27-15

And I'm back, to plunge immediately into the world of OMAN KITTENS (And Emma, she insists I add).

I was greeting by lots of meows and yeowls when I entered the Cat Room, with little Bluebell the loudest of them all. After a few weeks away, I found a v. different set of cats now that I've returned. Following the adoptions of Munro, Lilliand, and Tulip & Daffodil, that left just EMMA THE TERROR as the only hold-over from the cats I'd seen last time (on May 6th). The current cat-list is EMMA, SAHARA, BUTTERCUP, BLOSSOM, and BLUEBELL. Whoever named these kittens was clearly a fan of THE POWERPUFF GIRLS (though that doesn't explain why one is named 'Bluebell' rather than 'Bubbles'). 

THE KITTENS FROM OMAN: For those who haven't seen them yet, these are four five-month-old strays found as v. small kittens in Oman, on the Persian Gulf, flown back eight thousand miles to be put up for adoption. I gather that not only do they have a better chance of finding a home here than there, but their exoticism drew a lot of attention to the cat room. Here's hoping that Miss Emma benefits from that extra traffic to finally find a new person and home of her own.

I started with a walk for EMMA, who enjoyed being petted one-on-one without kittens about more than actual walking. Still, she did make it all the way to Banfield, where she looked wistfully out the glass door at the great outdoors. Once we had her back in the room I let all the kittens out, and shortly thereafter set up the 'catio'. The kittens pretty much ignored me, except as a source of games and attention, and amused themselves all morning, exploring and playing and playing and exploring. They're happy to report that string games, fresh catnip, laser pointers, feather dusters, and the ostrich feather have lost none of their appeal. The most dedicated hunter was little red-collar (BLUEBELL), who dug out the ostrich feather and pounced on it repeatedly, each time sinking her teeth in and carrying it away proudly as a trophy back to her lair. The others gladly played with it, but she was the only one who carried it about; v. cute. 

SAHARA, on the other hand, is our Escape Artist. Despite my keeping an eye on them, there were a few escapes and attempted escapes -- for the most part I was able to keep them distracted and entertained so they'd rather stay in the room and catio where the games were. But finally Sahara got so single-minded about slipping out of the fenced area that I made him and everyone else come back inside. Luckily it was nearing noon by the time, so they wd have had to come in soon anyway. As for the rest, they were playful and bouncy and pouncy like only overgrown kittens can be. Emma I must say bore it remarkably well: she settled herself atop the cat-stand near the door and let the kittens have the floor below as all their own. I moved her cat-stand out onto the catio, where she enjoyed the fresh air and attention from by-passers.

There were indeed a lot of visitors, attracted by the lure of kittens; several appreciated the contrast that calm, above-the-fray Emma offered. One woman who had very recently and unexpectedly lost her cat was particularly taken with little red-collar, who struck up a conversation with her; hope she comes back to get better acquainted. Also, Moreo's owner dropped by, with the report that he's still doing well; she was accompanied by poor Bugle Boy (Boogieman)'s owner. One visitor thought the Oman cats looked rather like Abyssinians (the long, sleek body and those ears); another woman said the kittens reminded her of the Ankara cats they have back in Turkey (looking these up online, I don't really see it). But there's no doubt that they're striking in appearance and appealing in behavior, much admired by visitors and by-passers alike. Here's hoping they soon find homes, and Emma too.

--John R.

P.S.: And now there's a sixth cat I have not met yet who arrived yesterday after I'd left: Chessa, who's almost totally blind. I've only known one blind cat before, who could navigate around his house remarkably well.

P. P. S.: And many thanks to Cher for covering for me while I was in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Illinois.
--John R. 


Tuesday, May 26, 2015

The Ready Letter

So, last night we were watching ANTIQUES ROAD SHOW at my father-in-law's when Janice and I decided to take a walk and enjoy the sunset, which was indeed beautiful. When we came back in, Janice's dad told us that as soon as we'd left there had been a Tolkien letter on, with mentions of Taum and Marquette. And while my 'hot-spot' had refused to work the whole time I was in Harvard, Janice's smart phone did work and she was able to find the entry online from that episode which discussed the letter in more detail and included a complete transcription as well as a complete facsimile image of the original. Here's the link:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/roadshow/stories/articles/2015/05/25/tolkien-letter-marquette-university/

The letter discusses Tolkien's projected visit to Marquette to give a lecture, which sadly never came to pass, as well as his having turned over some of the manuscripts (e.g., THE HOBBIT) to Bertram Rota, the London book-dealer who brokered the deal. All in all, an important piece, and I'm glad to see it resurface after all these years.

--John R.
enroute home at last (posting this from the Milwaukee airport)

Monday, May 25, 2015

I'm Cited by Sotheby's


So, thanks to Janice for pointing out to me the news that the copy of the first printing of THE HOBBIT J. R. R. Tolkien had sent to his friend and former pupil K. M. (Katharine Mary) Kilbride is currently being auctioned off by Sotheby's, with an estimated selling price of 50k to 70k pounds (roughly $75k to $100k in US dollars). Here's the link with the full auction catalogue write-up:


As the item description indicates, this is one of the presentation copies Tolkien himself had sent out when the book was first published; Kilbride's thank-you letter upon receiving it is now in the Tolkien collection in the Bodleian, so this is about as well-documented an associational item as we can get.

What's v. odd from my point of view is that I discussed these presentation copies in a section I added to the expanded one-volume edition of THE HISTORY OF THE HOBBIT, where it appeared as Appendix V: Author's Copies List. The Sotheby's description contains some biographical information about Kilbride I hadn't known before, and which is welcome. But it's odd, for me,
to see my own works quoted as an authority, right alongside Wayne's DESCRIPTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY identifier. I'm used to presenting information and arguing my case, but not to being cited in a case where real money is on the line. It's an odd experience.

And of course having just recently spent a little time in the Marquette Archives, I have to marvel that this single book could go for twenty times what Marquette paid for their entire seven thousand page collection. Just another example of how high Tolkien's stock has risen within our culture as a whole.

Finally, The Wife Says, in sharing the news to our friends and acquaintances: Feel free to bid. I already told John he can't have it.

--John R
current reading: CHILDREN OF THE SUN

P.S.: Tolkien Society's re-posting of this announcement (http://www.tolkiensociety.org/2015/05/rare-first-edition-presentation-copy-of-the-hobbit-to-be-auctioned/) points out that the lines Tolkien quotes are in fact in Old English, not Elvish.

Sunday, May 24, 2015

Into the Ether

Just to let folks know, I had an email outage yesterday, so that from about 10.25 am on Sat. May 23rd to about 12.45 am (just after midnight) of Sunday May 24th my mailbox behaved as if filled up and all messages sent to me seem to have bounced. So if you sent me something important (say, a paper proposal for the Flieger festschrift), please re-send.

And now, back to preparing the next post (although given online access iffyness when traveling, it may be a day or two before I get it posted.

--John R.
current reading: CHILDREN OF THE SUN (which is turning out to be disappointingly unfocused)
today's song: Poison Apples by Joan Osborne

Friday, May 22, 2015

Tolkien and E. M. Forster


So, thanks to Doug and, I think, Andrew for drawing to my attention a post by Jason Fisher from about five weeks earlier regarding Tolkien and the Nobel Prize:


As Jason points out, the news recently (some three yrs ago) came out that C. S. Lewis had nominated JRRT for the Nobel Prize in literature back in 1961/62: 


  Even though Tolkien's didn't win, of course, it was interesting that he'd actually been officially nominated. And it was good to know that Lewis's high opinion of Tolkien had not been diminished by the two men's drifting apart towards the end of their lives.  But what Jason uncovered was that Lewis also nominated Robert Frost the following year.*  That's not only an excellent choice (Frost having been among the premier poets of the century, and unlike his peers Eliot and Pound he had been widely and enduringly popular as well**) but it reveals something about Lewis's tastes, Frost not being a poet he mentions much in his writings. I knew that Lewis's short list had apparently been Frost, Eliot, Tolkien, and Forster (cf. COLLECTED LETTERS III.1224), but not that he'd actually nominated Frost in addition to JRRT.

But even more interesting is Jason's news that Tolkien himself got to nominate someone for the Nobel Prize back in 1954, and that he (along with fellow Inkling Lord David Cecil***) picked E. M. Forster -- a novelist whose name has, so far as I know, never been linked with Tolkien before, aside from a few of the earlier studies of the history of fantasy that looked at both Forster's chapter on fantasy**** in ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL and JRRT's seminal ON FAIRY-STORIES. Forster was a core member of the Bloomsbury Group but didn't go in much for its signature experimentalism (unlike fellow Bloomsburian Virginia Woolf, who excelled at it); most of his works predated Modernism. I suspect that Tolkien was thinking not of PASSAGE TO INDIA but HOWARD'S END (a very English novel) and perhaps also A ROOM WITH A VIEW. All in all, the news is a good reminder that Tolkien was much more widely read than is the general impression, and it suggests he was more in attune with his own times than Humphrey Carpenter made him out to be.

So, kudos to Jason for rounding out our picture of JRRT in a new and interesting way.

--John R.
currently on the road, and reading (slowly) CHILDREN OF THE SUN by Martin Green [1976]

*one thing Tolkien and Frost share is that both started their careers as Georgians, before that literary movement was largely destroyed in The Great War
**along with Yeats and Larkin, probably the only three of whom this cd be said.
***a much maligned figure, by the way, blasted by both F. R. Leavis from one side and Kingley Amis from the other
****by which Forster means a book like MOBY DICK, oddly enough

Saturday, May 16, 2015

Verlyn Flieger Festschrift (A Call for Papers)

Here's something I wanted to spread the word about: a new collection of essays in honor of Verlyn Flieger's three-plus decades of Tolkien work.


Call for Papers


"A Wilderness of Dragons":
Essays in Honor of Verlyn Flieger
. . .

An call for papers
centered on, but not limited to,
her groundbreaking work on J. R. R. Tolkien

Other possible topics include
• her work with fantasy and the Arthurian mythos
• her engagement with other authors (fantasy and non-fantasy)
• examinations or appreciations of her own fiction.


Verlyn Flieger is the author of Splintered Light,
A Question of Time, Interrupted Music, and Green Suns and Faerie,
and editor or co-editor of The Story of Kullervo and
the extended editions of Smith of Wootton Major & Tolkien On Fairy-stories.


She has been asking interesting questions,
and coming up with even more interesting answers,
since her first book.


Paper proposals: September 1st 2015
Finished papers: March 1st 2016



Contact: John D. Rateliff
sacnoth@earthlink.net

Friday, May 15, 2015

Christopher Tolkien Roundtable (The Saga of King Heidreks the Wise)

So, I thought I'd post my contribution to the Christopher Tolkien Roundtable. I thought the event went well, and particularly enjoyed Doug Anderson's presentation.

Enjoy.


Christopher Tolkien Roundtable

It seems to me that there are two kinds of people who come to Tolkien events at Kalamazoo.

There are the Medievalists, who read Tolkien because they've heard he was influenced by Beowulf, and The Wanderer, and the Volsunga Saga.

And there are the Tolkienists, who read Beowulf, and The Wanderer, and the Volsunga Saga because they've heard Tolkien had been inspired by them.

I'm one of the latter group, one of those who first read Beowulf  because Tolkien was a Beowulf scholar. The same holds true of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Voluspa  and Vafthrufnismal, as well as more modern works I read because I had reason to think Tolkien had been influenced by them in some way, such as The Gods of Pegana, The Well at the World's End, The Worm Ouroboros, The Wind in the Willows, and many many more.

A case in point: The first saga I ever read was because of a Tolkien connection. I knew that Tolkien was said to have been influenced by the old Icelandic sagas, so I read all the sagas in the local college library. Both of them. But the one I started with had a clear Tolkien connection, having been edited by Christopher Tolkien himself: The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise.

This was actually in the days before Christopher Tolkien had edited any of his father's work,[nt1] (just) before the release of his translations of Sir Gawain & the Green Knight•Pearl•Sir Orfeo (though it'd take me three years to track down a copy of that, in those pre-amazon days), and a good two years before The Silmarillion would see the light of day.

And despite it being happenstance that this formed my first exposure to sagas, it was a fortuitous choice. First, because it introduced me to the work of Christopher Tolkien, a superlative editor, whose work I suppose I have read and re-read more than that of any other editor over the years and decades that followed. And second because all through the years this has remained my favorite among all the sagas I have read, not least for its inclusion of the memorable episode known as The Waking of Angantyr, to which I'll return later on. And of course there are the Tolkienesque touches I found in this saga: the Battle of Mirkwood, Hervor the Eowyn-like sword maiden, the brief appearance of the dwarves Durin and Dvalin, the cursed sword they make (under duress), and one of Gollum's riddles.

 So for the rest of this piece, I'd like to look at this saga by following one thread to trace out a specific way in which Christopher Tolkien's edition thereof enables us to identify a specific borrowing his father made from this saga.



The Riddle of the Fish:
Christopher Tolkien's Saga of King Heidrek the Wise

In his 1960 edition and translation of Heidreks Saga (a.k.a. Hervarar Saga), Christopher Tolkien uses his expertise in Old Norse literature to present a masterful dual-language edition of one of the most interesting of all sagas, with the original Old Norse text facing his modern English translation. In addition to presenting a smooth, readable text of the best (earliest) surviving version of the saga, supplemented at points from other versions where the key manuscript has suffered damage (in the form of missing pages, including the end), he also presents, in highly readable form, learned commentary on points as diverse as Gothic settlements just north of the Black Sea in the fourth or fifth century, or a description of the boardgame Hnefatafl.


This particular saga, while less well known today than, say, Njal's Saga (also known as 'The Story of Burnt Njal') or Egil's Saga [which was translated into English by fantasy author E. R. Eddison], had been at the forefront of the modern recovery of Old Norse literature in the 18th century, having been translated into English as early as 1705.[nt2] Among its admirers was Thomas Gray (he of the country churchyard and the unfortunate cat), who planned to adapt The Waking of Angantyr into English verse in the 1760s—though that in the event he seems never to have gotten around to it might be fortunate, given such versions as were produced by other hands during the period, such as Matthew 'Monk' Lewis (1801) and by Anna Seward, 'The Swan of Lichfield' (1796) in a somewhat overwrought pseudo-Gothic verse. Christopher describes the latter, in his characteristically understated way, as "a version that she herself described, inadequately, as a 'bold Paraphrase'." (CT.xxxiv) [nt3]


[Seward]
Argantyr wake! — to thee I call,
Hear from thy dark sepulchral hall!
'Mid the forest's inmost gloom,
Thy daughter, circling thrice thy tomb,
With mystic rites of thrilling power
Disturbs thee at this midnight hour!


[Lewis]
Angantyr, awake! awake!
  Hervor bids thy slumbers fly!
Magic thunders round thee break,
  Angantyr, reply! reply!

Reach me, warrior, from thy grave
  Schwafurlama's magic blade
Fatal weapon, dreaded glaive,
  By the dwarfs at midnight made.

[Christopher Tolkien]
Wake, Angantyr,
wakes you Hervor.
Svafa's offspring,
your only daughter;
the keen-edged blade
from the barrow give me,
the sword dwarf-smithied
for Sigrlami.


While certainly the most interesting part of the saga for a modern reader, The Waking of Angantyr is only one of the three things this saga is best known for. The second concerns the climax of the story, The Battle of the Goth and Huns. Like The Waking of Angantyr, this centers on an ancient 'Eddic' poem centuries older than the saga itself, which has been embedded in the prose account—rather as if all that survived of some Shakespearean play had been a single soliloquy which a modern-day writer decides to incorporate verbatim into his or her historical novel. With The Battle of the Goths and Huns,  the interest is not in intrinsic literary merit, as with The Waking of Angantyr, which is still a compelling story all these centuries later, but in what the Battle might reveal about ancient history, or at least the legends based upon that history. And indeed Christopher Tolkien's first scholarly publication, his essay "The Battle of the Goths and the Huns", which had appeared in Saga-Book: The Viking Society for Northern Research (Vol. XIV, 1955–56, p. [141]–163) had focused precisely on the possibility that fragments of actual history might be preserved in this old poem.[nt4]

For Tolkienists, The Battle of the Goths and Huns is of interest for its portrayal of Mirkwood, depicted here as the great forest dividing the Goth-lands from the Hun-lands. But even more important is the character Hervor the swordswoman (Heidrek's daughter, granddaughter of the Hervor who retrieved the family sword from the barrow), who is quite clearly an inspiration for Tolkien's Eowyn (especially since this Hervor dies heroically in battle, the fate Tolkien had planned for Eowyn, before he changed his mind and gave her tale a happier ending; cf. HME.VII.448 and VIII.256). This heroic woman-warrior is more than just a swordswoman: she is the sister of the king and holds command over the Goths' armies in the field, dying while making a heroic stand against overwhelming odds to hold back the invading Huns long enough for her brother to muster the defense.[nt5]

The third feature which makes this saga stand out for scholars of saga literature is that it contains a riddle-game—in fact, the riddle game, for Christopher makes clear that the contest between King Heidrek and Odin is unique. Both in his commentary in his edition, and in his introduction to G. Turville-Petre's earlier edition (sans translation), Hervarar Saga ok Heidreks (Viking Society, 1956), p. xiv–xv,  Christopher stresses that the riddle-game found therein is extraordinary. For one thing, the riddles themselves are, in CT's words,

unique, in more senses than one. They are unique in that there are no others in ancient Norse; and even more surprisingly, there is no record in the poetry or in the sagas of a riddle ever having been asked. They are unique also in that [with two exceptions] there are no parallels to them in the riddle-literature of any other country [CT.xix, emphasis mine]

There are certainly contests of wisdom, as when Odin questions the giant Vafthrufnir in Vafthrufnismal, or when Thor treacherously delays the dwarf Alviss through questioning in Alvismal—indeed, both the contests in Vafthrufnismal and Heidrek's Saga end with the same trick questions (CT accounts for its reuse by suggesting it had become the iconic unanswerable question in tradition; CT.xx). But only the contest in this saga involves actual riddles, posed by one (Gestumblindi, the disguised Odin) and answered by the other (King Heidrek).

If we needed more evidence that Tolkien drew upon this riddle-contest when writing The Hobbit, we find it in one of the riddles therein:

What lives on high fells?
What falls in deep dales?
What lives without breath?
What is never silent?
This riddle ponder,
O prince Heidrek!

'Your riddle is good, Gestumblindi,' said the king; 'I have guessed it. The raven lives ever on the high fells, the dew falls ever in the deep dales, the fish lives without breath, and the rushing waterfall is never silent.' [CT.80; italics mine]

In Gollum's recasting, a single line out of this is taken up and expanded:

Alive without breath,
  As cold as death;
Never thirsty, ever-drinking,
  All in mail never clinking            [DAA.123; emphasis mine]

This in turn is revisited and further expanded in The Lord of the Rings, where Gollum turns the riddle into a little song:

'Ha! ha! What does we wish?' he said, looking sidelong at the hobbits. 'We'll tell you,' he croaked. 'He guessed it long ago, Baggins/ guessed it.' . . .

Alive without breath,
 as cold as death;
never thirsting, ever-drinking;
clad in mail, never clinking.
Drowns on dry land,
thinks an island
is a mountain;
thinks a fountain
is a puff of air.
So sleek, so fair!
   What a joy to meet!
We only wish
to catch a fish,
   so juicy-sweet!            [LotR.645–646]

What's remarkable about this borrowing is that it comes from what Christopher Tolkien has called 'Riddles peculiar to the H-text' [CT.80]. That is, this riddle does not occur in the main manuscript of the saga (the R-text, so-called from the manuscript's being held in the Royal Library in Copenhagen), the version which Christopher has chosen as his base text, but from an alternate and slightly different version, the Hauksbók  or H-text. But if this were not complicated enough, the Hauksbók , like the R-manuscript, has suffered damage over the centuries and breaks off shortly after the start of the riddle-game, in the middle of the answer to the second riddle [CT.xxix]. Luckily, sometime in the seventeenth century, two copies were made of extracts from the Hauksbók, which fortunately included the riddles. Thus the fish-riddle survives in late copies of an alternate version of the saga —just the kind of chance survival of an old bit of legendary lore that most attracted Tolkien (for Tolkien's propensity to 'write into the gaps', cf. T. A. Shippey). 

And so we see that while most of the things in Tolkien's work that appear as borrowings from this saga could come from some other source as well (e.g. the dwarf-names Dvalin and Durin, which also appear in the Dvergatal), one seems unique to Heidrek's Saga—and not only this saga, but latter-day copies of a particular text of a particular version of that saga: Gollum's 'alive without breath' riddle.

In closing, I'd just like to observe that, in hindsight, it can be argued that Christopher's edition of The Saga of King Heidreks the Wise provides a template for his later exemplary work editing his father's literary manuscripts. Much editorial labor has obviously gone into it, but we are presented with clean, readable texts in final editorial form. Christopher tells us his editorial procedure and then proceeds to get on with it, moving commentary and editorial notes to precede or follow the saga itself. And, in a very Tolkienesque touch, many of the editorial notations concern the sometimes-shifting names of characters and places in the story.

—John D. Rateliff
Thursday, May 14th, 2015.


[nt1]. Or, to be more strictly accurate, he had not yet published any such edition as yet.

 [nt2] by George Hickes in his Thesaurus [CT.xxxiv]. Gray, by the way, seems to have known the poem only in Latin translation, not himself being a scholar of Old Norse.

 [nt3] similarly, M. Lewis noted, quite truthfully, that he had 'taken great liberties with it, and the catastrophe is my own invention'; Tales of Wonder , poem VII, "The Sword of Angantyr", pp. 34–44.
   For another example of Christopher's elegant criticism, cf. his comment in his "Battle of the Goths and Huns" essay about "Heinzel's theory . . . which compel[s] admiration but not belief" [Saga Book.146].


[nt4] he concludes that there may well be an actual historic event behind the poem, but that it is one of which we have no other record (that is, it cannot be correlated with any known battle in history, although many have tried). This essay is distinct from the lecture "Barbarians and Citizens", on how 'the heroes of northern legend [were] seen in different fashion by Germanic poets and Roman writers'. [JRRT to CT, Feb. 21st 1958; Letters.264], which seems to remain unpublished. His father attended the latter event, finding it 'a very excellent performance. It filled me with great delight' but confessed that his favorite part was the philological observation that Attila the Hun's name was in fact an affectionate diminutive: atta, 'father' (or rather Daddy).

[nt5] It's worth noting that William Morris wrote his own version of the Battle of Mirkwood, between the goths and huns, in The Roots of the Mountain [1889], which is known to have been a favorite of Tolkien (cf. Letters.303), who of course would also have known the older, saga, version of the tale.



Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Norrell and Strange: The Miniseries ("Amadeus meets Lord of the Rings")

So, Saturday while taking a break from putting together my presentation for the Christopher Tolkien roundtable (that is, a roundtable at the Medieval Congress in honor of C.T.), I found out that the BBC has made a seven-part adaptation of Susanne Clarke's JONATHAN STRANGE & MR. NORRELL [2004]. Here's the link:

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/may/09/jonathan-strange-mr-norrell-susanna-clarke

This is interesting to see, because I don't think there's any question that Clarke's book is the most important work of fantasy of its decade, yet it's surprisingly unreadable. That is to say, I found myself getting bogged down when reading it, and in the end could only get through the story by borrowing an audiotape version from a friend (thanks, Bill).* Upon which I discovered that it's the main story, with Mr. Norrell and Mr. Strange, that's the problem. The worldbuilding is superb, and the writing v. well-done, but this is a novel in which the footnotes are better than the main ongoing story. Just going through the audio cd, in which each footnote has its own track, and listening to the embedded stories of magicians of olden days and past encounters with magical folk is like reading Child's Ballads or a really good collection of short stories that really capture an elusive something (the best novel version of which is Mirrlees' LUD-IN-THE-MIST). This is reinforced by the excellent of her short story collection, LADIES OF GRACE ADIEU, which is a marvellous read: well-written, evocative, and engrossing (and, again, better as an audiobook).

Jo Walton, whose collection of blogposts I recently read,  WHAT MAKES THIS BOOK SO GREAT, at one point asks the question of why Clarke's book [2004] hasn't been widely imitated. I think it has, but badly: there's a slew (or perhaps it shd be slough) of Jane-Austen-meets-fantasy books out there (Kowal, Becker**), which all fall apart on the grounds that their authors aren't, in fact, Jane Austen. Austen makes what she does look easy, but it's not (reading through her juvenalia is one way to see that). And the best way to see it's not is to read her imitators, from the dire DEATH COMES TO PEMBERLEY to Kowal, Becker, et al.

So soon we'll see if they were able to pull off a worthwhile adaptation -- one better than 'Amadeus meets Lord of the Rings' (the tag-line of their pitch to the BBC) would indicate.

And here's hoping that Clarke is working on another book that plays to her strengths.

--John R.
--still on the road, about to head over to the Amtrak station.


*the audiobook version, by the way, is extremely well done; highly recommended

**the one attempt I've seen at this kind of thing that pulled it off was Wrede & Stevermer's epistolary pastiche SORCERY & CECELIA, and even they faltered on the sequel

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Off to Kalamazoo!

So, I'm on the road, on my way to Kalamazoo. Today was the plane ride (less terrifying than usual*) followed by some time in Milwaukee. Got to spend a few hours in the Marquette Archives, where I started a new project that's good for an on-again, off-again rhythm of spurts of work during visits separated by months at a time. Also got to catch up some with my friend Jim (hi, Jim), who I don't get to see nearly often enough.

I'm now in the hotel, having made some tea and read through my piece for the roundtable but finding three hour's sleep last night means I'd be better off waiting until tomorrow to go over my Tolkien as editor and translator piece -- if not here in the room in the morning then on the train ride east.

And so it's off for an early night. More later.

--John R.
current reading: GRETTIR'S SAGA (about a Viking afraid of the dark)
current viewing: R.W.B.Y.






*as in, things went well, or as well as they can go for an acrophobiac miles high off the ground

Saturday, May 9, 2015

"Chasing Rabbits in a Nice Way": the Art of Rabbit Jumping

So, here's a light-hearted piece to offset the rather grim previous post about Warnie Lewis's alcoholism.

I've been reading the English news lately, following the twists and turns of the recent English election,* when I came across a light piece on the new sport of rabbit jumping. Here's the link.

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/may/08/rabbit-show-jumping-london-pet-show

my favorite quotes out of this:

"What a bad mood would look like is anybody’s guess."

"they learn extremely fast, but it turns out that means two years. They don’t understand commands."

"This sounds a lot like chasing the rabbit, though given the rules, obviously they are chasing their rabbits in a nice way."


Meanwhile, the countdown for Kalamazoo has started: time to get my papers in presentable form, sort out what I'll need for the trip, and (in some ways hardest of all) what to take to read while I'm away.

--John R.
today's song: "Bullets for Brains" by Roland Orbzabal


  *turns out I shd have been following the Canadian news out of Alberta, but so it goes.




Friday, May 8, 2015

A Distressing Letter (CSL to OB)

So, the newest issue of THE JOURNAL OF INKLINGS STUDIES has arrived, and this time the story that caught my eye is the printing of a previously unpublished letter* from C. S. Lewis to Owen Barfield, dated July 5th 1949. According to the accompanying article by Walter Hooper which sets the letter in context, this particular letter was held back by Barfield when he sold the rest of his C. S. Lewis correspondence to Wheaton back in 1972, because it dealt with Warnie Lewis's alcoholism (Warnie was still alive at the time, dying early the next year, in April 1973).**

It makes for distressing reading, all the more so in that CSL was struggling with sickness (a strep infection) and exhaustion at the time as well as taking care of Janie Moore, who was suffering from alzheimer's, while trying to deal with Warnie's binge drinking. The usual pattern seems to have been for Warnie to check himself into a private hospital for detox, then sneak out each night to visit a nearby  pub for an evening's drinking. We've known for a long time that this was his pattern during vacations to Ireland, but it was news to me that he did the same in Oxford, at least during this particular (July 1949) episode.

All this is simply one man's personal difficulty, shared with his immediate family, but reading this makes me wonder: were Warnie's troubles a contributing factor to the break-up of the (Thursday evening) Inklings? We know that the Inklings ceased to meet on Thursday evenings just a few months later (in October 1949).  Presumably not, given that they continued to meet thereafter in a pub, unless Warnie's problem was not set off by beer but only by stronger drink (e.g., gin, whiskey) of a sort less likely to be served at a convivial luncheon.

All in all, a sad account*** of a good man's fatal flaw, and the misery it caused himself and others.

--John R.


*at least I'd certainly not seen it before, and it's not included in COLLECTED LETTERS, though several letters for CSL to Arthur Greeves discussing Warnie's condition dating from about the same time made their way into that collection.

**the original letter is now in the Wade; thanks to Laura for confirming its location for me.

***the main account of Warnie's alcoholism is to be found in the introduction to THEY STAND TOGETHER, the collected CSL/Arthur Greeves correspondence [1979];  I think this new account supplements rather than supersedes that older one.


Thursday, May 7, 2015

Tolkien Estate's New Website (quick guide)

So, finding that the new Tolkien Estate website* is chock-full of good things, I thought a little cheat sheet might help folks see just how much is already up on the site. Accordingly, I've taken their sitemap** that comes at the bottom of their list of links and expanded it out by adding the author's names, where I knew them, next to the titles of individual pieces on specific works. Here's the result. Hope it's helpful.




I. WRITINGS
Tales of Middle-earth
The Hobbit— John D. Rateliff
The Lord of the Rings—???
The Silmarillion—Christopher Tolkien (1977)
Unfinished Tales—Christopher Tolkien (from introduction)
The History of Middle-earth—David Bratman
The Children of Hurin—???

Other Tales and Poetry
Farmer Giles of Ham —Wayne G. Hammond & Christina Scull
The Adventures of Tom Bombadil—Daniel Lauzon
Leaf, by Niggle —Priscilla Tolkien; also Vincent Ferre and Nadia Drici [to come]
Smith of Wootton Major—Verlyn Flieger
The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth—Thomas Honegger
The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun—Christopher Tolkien (website special)
The Fall of Arthur—Christopher Tolkien (from Foreword)
Beowulf: Translation & Commentary[to come]

Tales for Children
Letters from Father Christmas—Baillie Tolkien
Roverandom—Christina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond
Mr. Bliss—Christina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond
The Hobbit—John D. Rateliff

Translations, Essays
The Monsters and the Critics—T. A. Shippey
On Fairy Stories—Verlyn Flieger
Translations and Editions of Medieval Texts*—T. A. Shippey
J. R. R. Tolkien in Translation—JRRT, ed. CT

*covers Sir Gawain & the Green Knight, Pearl, Sir Orfeo, Ancrene Wisse, The Old English Exodus, and Finn & Hengest


The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien
[section contains six major letters by JRRT]
Timeline

II. LEARNING
Language and Writing Systems
Writing Systems—Arden Smith
Tolkien's Invented Languages—Carl Hostetter

Tolkien and Visual Arts
Tolkien's Art—Christina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond

Thoughts and Studies
Studies on Tolkien: English—David Bratman
Studies on Tolkien: French—???
Translating Tolkien‑Vincent Ferre
Discussion with Christian Bourgeois
Tolkien and Nature—Patrick Curry
Tolkien and Philology—T. A. Shippey
Reading J. R. R. Tolkien—Maxim Hortense Pascal

On Specific Works
Leaf by Niggle: Hidden Nucleus—Vincent Ferre
Leaf by Niggle: Peculiar Tale—Nadia Drici [to come]
The Lord of the Rings: How to Survive Fear and Despair—Dr. Nicole Guedeney [to come]
Lord of the Rings, Book of the Century—T. A. Shippey
The Lord of the Rings: Adventure Story?—Vincent Ferre
Understanding Beowulf—Leo Carruthers (Sorbonne)
The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun—Christopher Tolkien (website original)

III. PAINTING
The Book of Ishness
Pictures from Father Christmas
Trees
Landscapes
Calligraphy
Maps
Website illustrations
Photographs

IV. PATHS
F.A.Q.
—Biographical information
J. R. R. Tolkien and Fantasy
Literary Questions
Invented Languages and Names
Permissions and Requests
Glossary: Terms and Definitions

Links
Publishers and Periodicals
Libraries
Medieval Texts
Modern Texts
Sigurd and Gudrun
Art and Artists
Biographical links
Contributors
Other

Downloads  [to come]
Using Our Website
Sitemap
Credits and Contact



--I've already found a lot that looks v. interesting, and wish I weren't in the middle of a deadline and so had time to give it the close look it deserves. But then I suspect I'll be coming back to this website a lot in the years to come.

--John R.


*http://www.tolkienestate.com/en/home.html
**http://www.tolkienestate.com/en/paths/sitemap.html

Wednesday, May 6, 2015

The Cat Report (W. May 6th 2015)

Still at six cats, and the same six as last week and the week before: EMMA, SALEM, sweet LILLIAN, Mr. MUNRO, and bonded pair DAFFODIL and TULIP.

Things are settling down in the cat room, as everybody knows everybody, and what sets them off, and how to avoid it.  

We started out the morning with three walks, for EMMA, and MUNRO, and LILLIAN. Emma, who was quite insistent that she needed a walk, and Right Now, valued it more as one-on-one time than wee-I'm-outside. Munro was nervous but gained confidence as he went along. Lillian did well as well: she wants people to come up and give her lovin', and i they don't she'll go up to them and ask. 

SALEM doesn't like walks, and she spends too much time in her cage, but I've found that she likes the fenced off area just outside the room (the 'catio'), especially if I carry a small cat-stand out there (placing it in the middle so no lone uses it to jump over the fence) and put her atop it;. It's even better, she says, if I cover her with a blanket. When the catio's not available, she's perfectly will to accept as a good substitute the top of the basket, again with a blanket covering all but her head. 

EMMA has decided to ignore all the other cats, to explore all their cages, and to get as much attention and as many walks as possible. She's no longer bullying the other cats -- she'll hiss if they get too close or into her space, but there's no follow-up. She was adorable week before last: out on the cat-stand in the catio area, mewing at people who passed by asking them to pet her. 

LILLIAN is a sweetie who loves petting (especially when it's deep enough to get that loose fur off), loves walks, loves attention, and doesn't mind the other cats. She's the calmest cat in the room. That said, she does love feathers, and the laser pointer (she made little I-want-it, I-want-it mews when it disappears). A lot of visitors admire her sweet disposition and say she's a beautiful cat, but still no adoption yet.

Mr. MUNRO is the most active of all the current cats: always exploring, always looking for games, always curious to see what I'm up to, or what some other cat is doing. Be warned that, while he likes the catio, he's quite capable of jumping the fencing. My solution are (1) to keep checking on him, which he likes, (2) to make sure any cat-stand out there is poorly positioned for a take-off spot, and (3) to have a few things scattered about on the catio that get in the way of him using the floor as a launch pad (a blanket for the other cats to stretch out on, the live catnip and live cat-grass, and the like.

The Bonded Pair, DAFF and TULIP, are starting to overcome their shyness. Both tend to avoid the other cats and so stay towards the back part of the room, but both wanted out as soon as I arrived and started exploring at once. I put them both up on the cage-tops, which worked out very well: they had a fine time exploring, crawling under things, and being where they could watch the other cats without being seen.

In short, the cats like walks (well, half of them anyway), the laser pointer, fresh grass, dried catnip, feathers, the catio (four out of six), and visits from both visitors and off-cuty volunteers (they were all v. happy to see Katrina come by and give them all a good petting).

I'll be out the next two weeks, so odds are some of these will be adopted while I'm away. If so I'll miss them but be v. glad to think of that cat in a well-deserved home of her or his own.

--John R. 

Monday, May 4, 2015

Tolkien Estate Website

So, I was happy to learn from a friend* that the Tolkien Estate website is now up.  Here's the link:

http://www.tolkienestate.com/en/home.html

There's been a placeholder site here since 2007 which featured some beautiful artwork (by JRRT himself, mostly early, lesser-known work) and a feature on THE CHILDREN OF HURIN but little else: By contrast, there are so many good things here that it'll take me a while just to sort them out. I'll be making another post once I've explored a bit.

--John R.


*thanks Wayne

Friday, May 1, 2015

First Peoples exihibtt at the museum

So, last Sunday Janice and I took a break and headed uptown via the light rail for another of our all-too-rare visits to the Seattle Art Museum.

The special exhibit we'd come to see was INDIGENOUS BEAUTY: MASTERWORKS OF AMERICAN INDIAN ART FROM THE DIKER COLLECTION (which is due to run for two more weeks, ending May 17th). We were lucky to have picked a slow day when the rooms weren't crowded and we got to spend as much time as we liked looking at the displays.

There were a lot of interesting items on exhibit, divided by region and cultural groupings: arctic, subarctic, California + Great Basin (prob. the group I knew the least about), Southwest (pueblos), 'plateau and plains' (e.g. Sioux et al*), 'woodlands and southeast' (which covered everything from Creek to Seneca). Last of all came Northwest Coast, which got about as much space as all the rest put together.  I was sorry not to see a single Caddo artifact in the whole exhibit (that being the native people from my part of the country, the ArkLaTex) and surprised to see only a single Duwamish item.  Since the Duwamish were the people who lived where Seattle is now(Chief Seattle himself was Duwamish),  I'd have thought they'd be more to the fore.


My favorite items in the exhibit were four:

1 & 2. evil dead masks. These were meant to represent the spirits of evil dead people. Their eyes were just slits, perhaps indicating that they were closed. One's mouth was a similar slit, which was sinister enough, but the other was puckered to whistle, which was worse. The signage said that these evil dead could not talk but communicated through whistles instead -- which reminded me of the cries of the Nazgul, and even more so of the famine spirits in HIAWATHA, one of the few genuinely creepy passages in that once-famous and now almost unreadable work.

3. the spooky dagger. This had a face on the handle. The dagger itself looked fairly normal, but if you looked at the shadow cast by the bright lighting on the wall behind it, you could see a silhouette with pinpoint eyes and a jagged mouth. The shadow looked v. like something Gorey wd have put on the cover of a John Bellairs book.

4. the Duwamish drum. As I said, this was the only item I saw in the whole exhibit that came from the local culture, the people who lived where Seattle is now, and it was a striking one: a drum hanging high up on the wall, decorated with a spirit figure unique to the drum.



One thing that I really liked was seeing a beautiful woven basket in one case while not far away was an old black-and-white photo of the weaver, with that same pot by her side.  Janice's favorite piece was a beaver bowl made by somebody with a deft hand and a sense of humor. But the thing she found most moving was a short film clip of a someone showing native masks created centuries ago by members of his tribe: that his people had ever made masks had been completely forgotten, thanks to the efforts of missionaries and teachers and government officials over the years. When those beautiful, sophisticated art pieces that'd once held so much significance were uncovered in an excavation, it was a startling revelation to them of a lost tradition: they'd not just forgotten about the masks, and what each represented, but forgotten that their people ever practiced such an art form -- all lost, all taken away.





One unusual feature of this exhibit is that it had a fair number of recent works in it. I had mixed feelings about the inclusion of modern pieces by native artists (potters, jewelry makers, totem-pole carvers, even a manga artist, et al) intermixed with pieces decades if not centuries old. Janice felt it was appropriate, a way to show that these cultures had survived concerted efforts to eradicate them and thus celebrate their continuance in the modern day. I get that, but felt that while the point was worthwhile it diminished the impact of the exhibition for me.

--John R.



*the depiction of the Battle of Little Big Horn by one of the survivors made me feel sorry for the horses!