"Where Even Now the Peacocks Pace a Stately Drill"

Another small snippet from the exploration of the first chapter of Tolkien's The Book of Lost Tales One, The Cottage of Lost Play. In this Chapter Christopher Tolkien includes various versions of his father's poem Kortirion among the Trees. All three versions include the line

"Where even now the peacocks pace a stately drill"

As we learn in this chapter in the original version of Lost Tales The seafarer Eriol comes from the ancestral home of the English to the lonely island which is England. Where he hears the story of the fairies and elves is Kortirion which will later become Warwick (Lost Tales I, p.25).

Well I was in Warwick last year and took this picture - I guess the peacocks persist although not sure if it is pacing a stately drill!!!




Posted from Andrew Higgins IPAD asthiggins@me.com

Richard Wagner and J.R.R Tolkien The Forgers of their Rings

i have just finished an excellent online Tolkien course through the University of Wales in Cardiff: (Tolkien Myth and Middle Earth in Context) by Dr Dimitra Fimi -author of a key work of Tolkien Scholarship Tolkien, Race and Cultural History . I highly recommend this course to anyone interested in an in-depth exploration of Tolkien and his legendarium.

For this course I wrote a paper focusing on Richard Wagner (another one of my passions) as a sub-creator like Tolkien and tried to find some "common ground" between these two incredible artists of the 19th and 20th century. This is an attempt to move the dialogue beyond the oft-quoted remark by Tolkien (made in a fit of anger!) "both rings are round and that's where the comparison ends" (Letters, 237).

The original paper was over 6,000 words long (double the requirement!) and several sections had to be omitted from the final paper. I would like to get the final paper in shape for potential publication. I will be posting to this blog some excerpts from the paper focusing on several thematic areas of shared common ground. I welcome any thoughts and comments. I will also be adding to the paper as I discover new material. For example, the recent excellent book Middle Earth Minstrel had some new intriguing material on Wagner and Tolkien

We will start at looking at the very specific item at the centre of both legendarium's - THE RING itself










"solang er lebt,
sterb' er lechzend dahin,
des Ringes Herr
als des Ringes Knecht!"

















"Ash nazg durbatuluk,
Ash nazg gimbatul,
Ash nazg thrakatuluk agh burzum-ishi kimpatul"









"A specific shared item of evidence for common ground is found in the actual item of Wagner and Tolkien’s ring. In his prose sketch The Nibelungen Myth, Wagner outlines the earliest origin for his ring:

“Alberich stole the clear and noble Rhine Gold, carried it away from the depths of the waters and forged from it with great cunning and art a ring that gave him the highest power over the whole race, the Nibelungs: so he became their lord, forced them from that moment to work for him and collected the immeasurable hoard of the Nibelungs. “ (Edward Haymes, 2010, p. 44)

The ring as sketched here is an item that gives the owner power and dominion. Based on the primary Norse sources Wagner would have known, there are several stories about magic rings. There are two major magic rings mentioned in the Eddas: Odin's ring Draupnir and the dwarf Andvari's ring Andvarnaut. Regarding the later, in Volsunga Saga, Andvari is forced to ransom his ring to the god Loki and he sets a curse on it.” (Finch, 1965, p. 67) From these and perhaps other sources, Wagner forged his own ruling ring – a ring that grants world domination, unlimited power, wealth and is also cursed.

As T.A. Shippey states “none of the ancient sources give the Ring the central place that Wagner does....It was Wagner who, in very Tolkienian fashion, noted the gaps of the ancient tradition and wrote his version of the story determinedly into them.” (Shippey, 2006, p. 106)

Turning to Tolkien, how did he forge his Ruling Ring? It is important to remember that the role of the ring in Tolkien went through many changes from the time it was first found in the dark by Bilbo in The Hobbit to its later manifestation as the Ruling Ring- “For Bilbo's Ring is not the same as Frodo's in its nature nor its powers...Bilbo and Gollum's Ring is a simple ring of invisibility with rather limited power.” (Rateliff, 2007, pp. 174-5). Indeed, Tolkien’s early concept of the ring is much more like Wagner’s tarnhelm - the magical instrument (either a helmet or chain mail) which has the power, among several, to make you invisible. The other main characteristics of Wagner’s ring – greed, dominion and a curse are not evident in Bilbo’s ring. However, as Tolkien started to work on the much demanded sequel for The Hobbit, he did explore the idea of incorporating the slightly nefarious concepts of greed into the potential plot line for his new Hobbit. In the first sketches of the opening chapter, The Long Expected Party, Bilbo is to leave the Shire to look for more dragon-gold having spent his share of the treasure he received from his activities in The Hobbit. (Shadow, pp. 19-34) In a fourth version sketch Bilbo says, “Now I have spent all my money which once seemed to me too much and my own has gone after it. And I don't like being without…in fact I am bring lured.” (Shadow, p. 41) Later in the same sketch, he asks Elrond what he can do to heal his “money wish and unsettlement. “ (Shadow, p. 41) As Tolkien developed this idea he wrote “The Ring: whence its origin. Necromancer? Not very dangerous when used for good purpose. But it exacts a penalty. You must lose either it our yourself .” (Shadow, p. 42) Tolkien eventually connects these earlier ideas of greed and lust and the curse with the nefarious attributes of the Ruling Ring.

Thus, in the development of the ring it changes from a useful ring of invisibility (more akin to Wagner's Tarnhelm) to the One Ring (more akin to Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung). Now certainly Tolkien could have arrived at this through synthesis of the same type of sources that Wagner found in Old Norse works. Shippey states that if Tolkien did take anything from Wagner it was perhaps no more than the idea that something could be done with the idea of the Ring of Power, something more laden with significance, than anything in an ancient source but at the same time and very definitely not what Wagner had done with it.” (Shippey, 2006, p. 113). However, Michael Scott Rohan in his paper Was Tolkien the Real Ring Thief states that there is nowhere else Tolkien can have come by it; no dark passages in which his hand rested on an enigmatic Ring. (Rohan, 2005, p. 151 ). In his piece The Ring and the Rings, Alex Ross goes even further stating that it is clear that Tolkien used Wagner to develop his ring and accuses Tolkien of being a closet Wagnerian and brandishing his walking stick as Nothung Siegfried's reforged sword! (Ross, 2003).

One item which Ross focuses on in his analysis are the similarities in the actual curses put on the ring by Alberich and Sauron (both included above) In the final libretto for Das Rhinegold, Alberich curses the ring “Forfeit to death, faint with fear shall he be fettered; the length of his life he shall long to die, the lord of the Ring as the slave to the Ring.” (Wagner, 1876). Which is interesting to compare to Sauron's curse “One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to Bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.” (FR, p. 49) Clearly, each ring carries a curse that is bound up with themes of slavery and dominion over all who dare to bear it. “Wagner's fundamental message is, in short, a warning against the curse of covetousness and hunger for power.” (Bjornsson, 2003, p.276)

The same could certainly be said of Tolkien's One Ring as well."

So that's the first instalment - Next time we will look at some evidence of shared ground in character and fates of Wagner and Tolkien's final Ring bearers.

Happy YuleFest to all!!!



REFERENCES

Works Cited by J.R.R. Tolkien

The History of the Hobbit: Part One Mr. Baggins, edited by John D. Rateliff. (London: HarperCollins, 2007)
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter with the assistance of Christopher Tolkien. (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981)
The Return of the Shadow: The History of The Lord of the Rings, Part One, edited by Christopher Tolkien. (London: Harper Collins, 2002)

Other Works Cited

Bjornsson A (2003) Wagner and the Volsungs: Icelandic Sources of Der Ring des Nibelungen. London: Viking Society for Northern Research
Finch, R.G (1965) The Saga of the Volsungs. London: Thomas Nelson
Hammond, Wayne G. & Scull, Christina (2008), J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide vol. 2 Companion London: HarperCollins
Haymes, E (2010) Wagner's Ring in 1848: New Translations of The Nibelung Myth and Siegfried's Death. New York: Camden House
Rohan, M (2005) 'What Story I Wonder?” said Gandalf....” Was Tolkien the real Ring-Thief', in Sarah Wells (ed.) The Ring Goes Ever On Proceedings of theTolkien 2005 Conference vol. 2, Tolkien Society, Coventry England, pp. 147-155
Ross, A. (2003) The Ring and the Rings. Available at http://www.therestisnoise.com/2004/04/wagner_tolkien_1.html (Accessed on
4th December 2010)
Shippey, T (2003) The Road to Middle Earth. London: HarperCollins
Shippey, T (2006) Roots and Branches: Selected Papers on Tolkien. Walking Tree Press
Wagner, R (1898) 'A Communication to My Friends (Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde)', in The Art-Work of the Future: Richard Wagner's Prose Works Vol 1, Translated by William Ashton Ellis. London: The Wagner Library, pp, 230-344.
Wagner, R (1876) Der Ring des Nibelungen. Librettos available at http://www.rwagner.net/libretti/rheingold/e-t-rhein.html (Accessed on 5th December 2010)


Posted from Andrew Higgins IPAD asthiggins@me.com

A Visit to Kortirion

Happy New Year to all. With what is happening in the Middle East (again) not a great way to start the New Year and the ravens (Huginn and Muninn) are fluttering around Wotan and saying this will not be an easy year all around!!

So the best remedy to troubling times?? Reading and study!! And I have set up a list of projects which I will track on this blog to keep me up on all the current languages I know - solidify my proficency in Portugese and start a new one for me, Russian (and a new script!).

During the holidays my partner and I took a short day trip to Warwick - a town steeped in Tolkien inspiration. There is a great article about this on the Tolkien Society website by Lynn Forest-Hill which I will quote sections of here. Warwick Castle is now privately owned by an entertainment group and it does smack of going to a historical DisneyLand - but the tours are done very well and you do get a sense of what Tolkien was thinking when he looked upon the hill (which is reported to have had a hall on the top of it prior to the Norman invasions that looked like Meduseld....as Lynn Forest-Hill writes....

"(Tolkien's)foremost biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, has written that Tolkien 'found Warwick, its trees, its hill, and its castle, to be a place of remarkable beauty' and yet little notice has so far been taken of the way all those elements of Warwick that were so attractive to Tolkien can be seen echoing in his works throughout his life."

"During the late sixties his residency in the town was celebrated.
Anglo-Saxon Warwick, on its rocky outcrop, commanded a crossing on the river Avon. It was fortified in 914 during the Anglo-Saxon offensive against Mercian Viking settlement, becoming one of the Anglo-Saxon burhs or fortified towns of the kingdom of Mercia. (By the time Doomsday Book was written it was a royal borough). Tolkien himself acknowledged that his kingdom of Rohan was Anglo-Saxon England, specifically Mercia. He gave the horsemen of Rohan not just Old English as their language, but the dialect of Anglo-Saxon known as Old Mercian, which would have been used in pre-Conquest Warwick and the surrounding shire. Tolkien did not want his Rohirrim to speak standard West Saxon although, or perhaps because, that was the dominant language of language and literature before the Conquest. Tolkien's best known contribution to Anglo-Saxon studies was his analysis of Beowulf, and this poem is widely thought to have been composed for Offa King of Mercia, although the language of the manuscript is primarily West Saxon. Tolkien's attitude to the elitism implicit in the status accorded to West Saxon can be deduced from one of his early letters in which he wrote: 'I think I shall have to refuse to speak anything but Old Mercian.'
The physical aspect of Anglo-Saxon Warwick suggests the pattern of Edoras, the chief settlement in Tolkien's Rohan. Early Warwick would have been fortified with a stout wooden palisade. Its halls, including that of its lord Earl Thurkill, as well as all the smaller dwellings and buildings would have been primarily constructed of wood. Like the hall of the kings of Rohan, Earl Thurkill's great wooden hall could have looked out from its elevated position on the hill on which modern Warwick now stands, over the rolling green countryside of Warwickshire; but that Warwick was swept away in the years following the Norman invasion of 1066 and a new town developed with a feudal lord, a steward of the newly defined 'county'. The Anglo-Saxon stronghold became a Norman castle, looming over the countryside, as much a threat and declaration of power as a protection to the local people. Norman castles were intended to quell an unruly conquered populace. In the aftermath of 1066, stone replaced wood as the means of differentiating the rulers from the ruled. Tolkien once corrected an impression that he deplored war by saying that it was not only modern warfare that he had in mind, but the cultural catastrophe of the Norman Conquest. We know, however, that Tolkien admired the stone-built castle on its rock rising above the river which became a model for Middle-earth locations such as Minas Tirith, Amon Hen and Amon Sul, as well as Edoras - all fortified places set on imposing rocks, hills or mountains. Nor would he have ignored the beauty of the Beauchamp chapel or its association with Richard Beauchamp earl of Warwick, one of the great knights-errant of the Middle Ages. Sir Richard epitomised in life the values of knighthood set down in the manuscripts of medieval romances upon which Tolkien drew for inspiration. The other medieval buildings that survived the 1694 fire that devastated Warwick would have added to the sense of stepping back in time. Also from the medieval period Warwick's medieval hospital or Maison Dieu has its reflection in the Houses of Healing in Minas Tirith to which Merry Brandybuck, Eowyn, the Lady of Rohan, and Faramir, second son of the steward of Gondor are taken after their separate encounters with the deadly Lord of the Nazgûl. Tolkien uses the two historical aspects of Warwick, the Anglo-Saxon and the post-Norman medieval as sources for two of the most clearly defined kingdoms of Middle-earth - Rohan and Gondor. They are neighbours and allies in the book, but their social, cultural, and political situations are clearly differentiated, and that differentiation can be illuminated through the history of Warwick. In The Lord of the Rings Tolkien maps geographically what was in reality a temporal change. He contrasts the society and culture of Rohan with the culture and society of Gondor, and as Rohan is Anglo-Saxon, Gondor is influenced by Norman and French culture and history. Here Tolkien changes the scale. Where Meduseld, the hall of the kings of Rohan sits on a hill, Minas Tirith's rocky location is a shoulder of Mindolluin, in the White Mountains, where the Steward of Gondor sits isolated in his massive citadel above the city. However, while Theoden of Rohan regains his nobility in old age, Denethor the Steward echoes the Carolingian usurpation of the Frankish Merovingians in his arrogant refusal to bow to the 'last of a ragged house long bereft of lordship and dignity'. Although the scale changes in a reflection of the historical shift, the configuration of Minas Tirith like that of Edoras reiterates the geography of Warwick.

Warwick's associations in Tolkien's life are of two principle kinds, and these are interwoven in the medieval English romances which were the focus of much of his academic work. His marriage to Edith Bratt in the church of St Mary Immaculate on Wednesday, March 22nd was the culmination of a period in Tolkien's life that bore striking similarities to some of those same romances. These romances were popular stories of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, composed as poems in different dialects of Middle English, probably for oral performance by travelling storytellers and minstrels, and they formed an important part of the inspiration for his later epic The Lord of the Rings.

One of the funniest moments of our trip was when David and I went to St. Mary Immaculate and as we were entering I said to the lady at the desk - is this the church where Tolkien married Edith Bratt - she looked at me and went "who?" - ashame - this knowledge could increase their offerings and profits at their book store!!!

Lynn Forest Hill continues

"Three versions of this poem (Kortiron among the Trees) were published by Christopher Tolkien in the first Book of Lost Tales (1983), for Tolkien worked on it intermittently for around fifty years - a testimony to the importance he placed on the ideas expressed in the poem and inspired by Warwick, to which he dedicated it. There are marked differences between the versions in the vocabulary which expresses the poem's most significant features, but some concepts remain unchanged, or only slightly modified. Two extracts must serve as examples.

The first version begins:

O fading town upon a little hill,Old memory is waning in thine ancient gates,The robe gone grey, thine old heart almost still;The castle only, frowning, ever waitsAnd ponders how among the towering elmsThe Gliding Water leaves these inland realmsAnd slips between long meadows to the western sea
....
And slowly thither have a many gone

Since first the fairies built Kortirion.

And from the third version:

O ancient city on a leaguered hill!

Old shadows linger in your broken gate,Your stones are grey, your old halls now are still,Your towers silent in the mist awaitTheir crumbling end.
....
The River Gliding leaves these inland realmsAnd slips between long meadows to the Sea,
....
The Fair, the first-born in an elder day,Immortal Elves, who singing in their way
....
Pass like a wind among the rustling trees.

The earliest version of the poem is full of the freshness and vigour of its youthful creator, even if its ideas are expressed with a certain rawness. The rhythm and metre are suitably measured to convey the stateliness of the subject. The second version is even more measured, while the third shows the mature creativity that is found in Tolkien's major prose works as well as in the poem. In this late version the archaisms that belonged to a pre-war deference to the authority of the past are rejected as 'thy' and 'thine' become simply 'your'. The anthropomorphism is gone - the grey robe, old heart, and frowning castle are exchanged for grey stones, old halls and silent towers, and the greater simplicity has greater power. Unchanged are the melancholy and nostalgia, the sense of diminishment or 'fading', particularly of the elves, and their association with trees and hills. The imagery of water - the flow of the river and the importance of the sea - signalled by its capitalisation in the later versions, these are all themes Tolkien refers to again and again in his later work. In The Lord of the Rings, the elves are leaving Middle-earth, and so it is losing the beauty and wisdom associated with them. The sea is often a presence sensed or feared, and in both this book and in The Silmarillion it is connected with loss, separation and exile. The story of the elves in all Tolkien's works is the story of their passing and re-passing over the great western or Sundering Sea.

Kortirion as a concept went through many changes. Originally the city on the Isle of Tol Eressea, it was a refuge for Elves returning into the West from which they originated but were not permitted to enter. By the time Tolkien wrote The Silmarillion, the city had become Tirion and it too was built on a green hill and was the home of elves in the far west from which the most destructive of them emerged. The creation of Kortirion in the poem was thus an early step towards the ethical cosmology and epic mythology which underpins Tolkien's vision of Middle-earth as it is alluded to in The Lord of the Rings and described in The Silmarillion."

The full article is worth a read

It was a great day out with lots of pictures which are being shown on the slide show widget I have put on this blog.

Here's to an exciting 2009!!

Selections quoted from: Kortirion among the Trees: the Influence of Warwick on JRR Tolkien's vision of Middle-earth by Lynn Forest-Hill

Being a Translator - I feel like Aelfric!

A rather productive weekend with some more work done on Finish, Old English and the translation of my Sindarin project Turin and Glorund the Dragon - more of that down below. I'm starting to feel like the 10th century monk Aelfric who in his preface to his translation "of Lydene" to "Englisc" descrbes what it is like translating something from one language to another and the fustration of trying to keep to the spirit of the work - it certainly got to Aelfric who at the end of the preface says

"Ic cwethe nu thaet ic ne dearr ne ic nelle nane boc after thisse of Ledene on Englisc awenden,"

Well on to Turin and the next lines of the poem - starting at line 18

Ennas in orc-hoth, in roeg in emyn, orthorir
den anethen vi nagor goeol ornanassen na Vauglir
gwenner den cuin
ah achatanner i anthalion in conin edain

There in host on host the hell fiend orcs
overbore him at lsst in that batt;e terrible
by the bidding of Bauglir
bound him living
and pulled dowen the proudest of the princes of men