Karmic Washing Machine?

I have been intrigued by the subject of a recently read very interesting and well written book - Parsifal as the Fifth Act of the Ring by Paul Schofield (a Wagnerian Scholar and a former Zen Buddhist) ever since my teens when I read in an introduction to an English translation of The Ring that Wagner considered Parsifal to be the fifth concluding act of The Ring cycle. Schofield takes this as a starting point and quotes several key references from Wagner's letters and prose writings and also masterfully combines into the hyopthesis Wagner's interest and desire to incorporate his study of Buddhism and Eastern thinking into his works even drafting in 1856 Die Sieger (The Victors) an opera about the Buddha. There is some also really good background on the sources of the Ring, Parsifal and he Holy Grail (which Wagner said in his 1849 essay The Wibelungs - The World History as Told Through Myth - ultimately came from the hoard of the Nieblung). Schofield focuses on three characters from the Ring - Wotan, Brunnhilde and Siegfried and demonstrates how the "wheel of karma" starts by Wotan profaning nature by breaking a branch from the world ash tree (the true beginning of the Ring) and starting a cycle of deceit, envy and greed that can only be "redeemed" by a cycle of karmic washing (Erlosung) that involves rebirth from The Ring to Parsifal where ultimate redemption is acheived through learning compassion "mitlied." A very interesting theory - at times I felt the author creates this structure and then attempts to fit into his scheme the different characters (and there are some contradictions - first Schofield says that Wotan perceieves his first act of contrition by renouncing any further attempt after Die Walkure to get The Ring back - but then we see Wotan as the Wanderer skulking around in Siegfried dropping hints to get Siegfried to get the Ring. The Brunnhilde/Kundry theory works philologically with one of Kundry's names being Gundryggia (Gunn meaning "strife" or "battle" is one of Wotan's key Valkyrie and Schofield has an interesting link with one of the other name's Klingsor called Kundry - Herodias - linking it to a poem by the Henrich Heine called "Atta Troll" (1847) where Herodias who demanded the head of John the Baptist is doomed to ride in the wild hunt of Odin continuing to kiss the dead head of John the Baptist till doomsday (and lets not forget that naff movie from the 80's where Demi Moore was forced to wander the world and be constantly reincarnated because she laughed at Christ on the cross - when I saw that movie, in my youth, I yelled out in the movie house - she's Kundry!!!) but i digress....

I was not conviced by Schofield's comment that Brunnhilde left the Ring world with bad karma because she plotted the death of Siegfried and needed to go through "the karmic washing machine (my term)" to eventually wind up as Kundry who still serves evil (Klingsor the karmic embodiement of Alberich) and Amfortas (the karmic embodiement of Wotan) and needs ultimate redemption through Parsifal (the karmic embodiement of Siegfried).

Interesting, and got me thinking - Schofield is a former Zen buddhist and the lae chapters have a somewhat preachy attitude to how we should apply this "karmic cleansing" in our lives (and a couple of references to less than academic works like Baigent and Lincoln's Holy Blood/Holy Grail and Gardener's The Line of the Grail Kings) - but worth the read for Wagner lovers!!!

Launch a Website - Read Tolkien Books

This week in the midst of launching a new website for the theatre I work at the Hackney Empire I got through two excellent books from the latest batch of books on Tolkien - The Frodo Franchise by Kristen Thompson and The Silmarillion Thirty Years On edited by Allan Turner. I enjoyed both very much and found some really good insights in each.

The Frodo Franchise is an in-depth analysis of the development he current Rings franchise from the movie and DVD's to website, games, and fan clubs that have sprung up. I especially love how that moment when Peter Jackson pitched the movie idea to New Line's Bob Shaye (after beiing forced by Mirimax to attempt to compress the movie into two parts - including cutting out completely Lorien and Galadriel) and after watching the preview reel Shaye said why two movies when Tolkien wrote three books - there is something almost mythic about this moment. Also the line of one of the Weinstein's (loveling depicted as trolls in one of the credits) saying - "do you have to have four hobbits?" just showed what PJ was up against. From a marketing point of view the online promotion and alliance with the fans now seems just commonplace (just look at the current marketing campaign for Cloverfield) and it will be interesting to sse how The Hobbit movie(s) will be promoted. Also, this book brought me to two web sites that has passed me by in the course of the movies - Lord of the Peeps and Figwit the Elf in Rivendell who thanks to the fans has become an online elf star (and made into a peep as well). Well worth a read a Thompson's blog is one I look at on a regular basis - especially as news on The Hobbit movies are starting to take off (as well as Ian Mckellen's excellent website where one can find any news and rumors of his Gandalf doings - the king of actors as his recent Lear in the UK showed)

On a different front - Walking Tree Presses The Silmarillon Thirty Years On is an excellent series of essays celebrating the thirty anniversary of the publication of The Silmarillion in 1977. The two essays that really had an impact on me (they are all very good) is Professor Michael Drout's very personal essay on what it was like to first read The Silmarillion when his parents were in the midst of a divorce and the idea of sadness and nostalgia (coming from the greek words nostos - "return home"/algos "pain."

My other fav article was Jason Fisher's Tolkien, Lonnrot, and Jerome - a really fascinating article about the role of Christopher Tolkien in forging together the vast source work of material Tolkien left at his death in 1973 into the published Silmarillion and comparing to the same process Lonnrot used in fashioning The Kalevala and Jerome used in The Vulgate Bible. This is a topic I first became interested in when I read Nagy's article in Jane Chance's Tolkien the Medievalist "The Great Chain of Reading" which relates that the various versions of some of the key cycles Tolkien developed (Beren, Turin, etc) were paralleling the various source works of the key myths and legends in different versions (lays, prose works, chronicles). What Christopher did is take these and develop a single narrative that became the "accepted story" of that specific cycle of legend - that is until he published in the 1990's The History of Middle Earth and we learned that actually there are many versions of the stories. Fisher who has an excellent blog called Lingwe - Musings of a Fish, also shows places in the story where Christopher actually had to write some of his own material (as in the chapter in the Silmarillion "The Ruin of Doriath") to give the story a unified narrative struture) Fisher as also done some great work on paralleling this to the creation of the Finnish epic The Kalevala - and he has made me take that CN Eliot Finnish Grammer I purchased for Ebay a year ago (the very 1915 edition Tolkien used to study Finnish) and start to "plod through some of the original" as JRR said.

It also got me thinking of another poet we all read and accept what is fixed in the literal poem as the "authorized story" - and that is Homer and The Iliad and The Odyssey. In college I did some work on the various lies that the willy Odysseus uses when he returns to Ithaca (to the goatherder Eumeaus, his son Telemachos and finally wife Penelope) - in each he says he from Crete and analysis of the language and structure indicated that this might be an older part of the oral tradition of the Odyssey (also similar with the Proteus episode) - it would be interesting to look at how those forgers of the Homeric tradition in Athens put together these epics into what we now accept as the Iliad and the Odyssey - and can we do similiar with Gilgamesh and Beowulf?

Both two great reads and worth a read - now its on to three more Tolkien books and I am slogging my way through the new translation of War and Peace which is excellent.

NB: Picture from Patrick Wayne's excellent website of images from The Silmarillion