The Friendship of Animals

“It is a hundred years and three and fifty since I came out of the egg.”
- Roäc, son of Carc

Roäc the raven has some good advice for the dwarves in the mountain: “If you will listen to my counsel, you will not trust the Master of the Lake-men, but rather him that shot the dragon with his bow… he is a grim man but true.”  Thorin’s greed and pride will get the better of him – he should have paid more heed to the bird.

Humans and animals may see the world differently, but we may find that we have much to learn from them…

Nova: Animal Odd Couples

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xg5YcEBUGz4

“It’s time to challenge the notion that only humans form lasting friendships.” 

There may come a time when humanity – amidst its endless, wild dervish-dance of decadence – will be grateful for the simple, if enigmatic, friendship of animals. 

Image: John Bauer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Julbocken_1912.jpg

 

The Fate of Smaug (art)

 

 

This picture contains an element from the American Museum of Natural History.

Old Dragon-Spells

The young have so little patience for the old, sometimes, and scorn the slow and the frail.  Yet in some ways, age brings a kind of power.  Lafcadio Hearn, a notable folklorist of the early twentieth century who lived in Japan, wrote about the ways that ghosts and biological memory – the oldest remnants of humanity, as it were – shape the course of human destiny.  In Elizabeth Bisland’s collection, The Japanese Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, he argues, “The race feeling is the most powerful of all impulses; stir it deeply, – and to the living the value of life and fame and love and all else disappear like smoke; and the dead become the masters; and the living only instruments.”

Smaug is no ghost, but a vast incarnation of physical energy.  His power, though, lies not just in his body, but also in his mind and his magic.  Bilbo finds this out as he tries to hide from the beast.  “Whenever Smaug’s roving eye, seeking for him in the shadows, flashed across him, he trembled, and an unaccountable desire seized hold of him to rush out and reveal himself and tell all the truth to Smaug.  In fact he was in grievous danger of coming under the dragon-spell.” 

 

The young may hold vitality, but the old and the dragons have truth in their bones.  And, in fact, Smaug’s power may have only increased with age.  He boasts, “I laid low the warriors of old and their like is not in the world today.  Then I was but young and tender.  Now I am old and strong, strong, strong…” 

When faced with the old that are strong, with their wisdom and cunning and magnificence, it may be that the young, the naïve, the innocent, will look on with wonder and tremble… for the old dragons are still casting their spells.

Image: Arthur Rackham

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Siegfried_and_the_Twilight_of_the_Gods_p_022.jpg

“The Splendor, the Lust, the Glory”

“The glow of Smaug!”

The theme of greed returns when Bilbo enters the lair of the dragon.  Tolkien’s writing here is particularly strong: “There he lay, a vast red-golden dragon, fast asleep; a thrumming came from his jaws and nostrils, and wisps of smoke, but his fires were low in slumber.  Beneath him… lay countless piles of precious things, gold wrought and unwrought, gems and jewels, and silver red-stained in the ruddy light.”  Upon actually seeing such wealth, “the splendor, the lust, the glory” began to affect the hobbit.

 

After the plucky hobbit manages to steal – or reclaim – a cup, Smaug’s “rage passes description – the sort of rage that is only seen when rich folk that have more than they can enjoy suddenly lose something that they have long had but have never before used or wanted.”

Is Smaug truly, as Bilbo calls him, “the Chiefest and Greatest of Calamities”?  At least dragons can be slain with an arrow.  What about the calamities that we make together?

 

Image: Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Secrets of Mirkwood

“so they gave up fires and sat at night and dozed in the enormous uncanny darkness”

 

Mirkwood is a place not only of danger, but of mystery.  There are insect eyes lurking in the woods, and white deer which no arrows can slay.  The dwarves hear a song “beautiful, but… eerie and strange” and begin a fruitless chase of a roving elven feast.  After spotting the woodland king and his company, Thorin approaches, but, “Out went all light.  The fires leaped up in black smokes.  Ashes and cinders were in the eyes of the dwarves, and the wood was filled again with their clamour and their cries.”
 

When Bilbo climbs a tree to figure out their location, he enters a world of beauty – but finds no resolution to the forest’s secrets.  At first, it is the brilliance of the sun that blinds him – the very thing that allows him to see is also what obstructs his vision.  Then, “he saw all round him a sea of dark green, ruffled here and there by the breeze; and there were everywhere hundreds of butterflies.”  Yet “Gaze as much as he might, he could see no end to the trees…”

Such, then, is the nature of Mirkwood.  And such, perhaps, is the nature of many things in life – labyrinths filled with fear and uncertainty, above which float clouds of tumultuous beauty that we glimpse only briefly, and which contain only such answers as we hold deep in our hearts.

 

First Image: Adapted from Kay Nielsen, “The Gloomy Thick Wood.”

Second Image: Adapted from a photograph by AnnaLee Pauls

The Bears and the Bees

“He is not the sort of person to ask questions of.”

Despite his impressive strength and imposing physique, Beorn doesn’t eat animals.  Instead, “He keeps hives and hives of great fierce bees, and lives most on cream and honey.”  It’s a wonderful portrayal of a powerful vegetarian and brings to mind Henry David Thoreau’s Walden.  In that book, Thoreau challenges a farmer who mocked the viability of vegetarianism by noting that the man relied upon “his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plough along in spite of every obstacle.”

 

In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan describes Johnny Appleseed as a liminal figure, crossing the boundaries of civilization and wilderness.  Beorn is that and more, shifting as he does between the form of a human and the form of a bear.

Gandalf speaks of bears “dancing outside from dark to nearly dawn.”  Maybe they had drunk some wild, magic honey – the sweet witchcraft of sharp-bodied bees.

Image: adapted from a photograph by AnnaLee Pauls.

A Feast in the Eyrie

“The Lord of the Eagles of the Misty Mountains had eyes that could look at the sun unblinking.”

 

The physicality of the The Hobbit is striking.  Take, for example, the imagery of food in “Out of the Frying-Pan and Into the Fire.”  There is frightening hunger – Bilbo reduced to sorrel and three strawberries.  Yet by the end, there is feasting when the eagles bring “rabbits, hares, and a small sheep” which the dwarves butcher and toast on sticks.  I’m reminded of the second chapter in James Joyce’s Ulysses, when the dainty brutality of the carnivorous impulse is depicted: “Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.  He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod’s roes.”  While the dwarves stuffed their faces with meat, Bilbo found himself longing for more mild domestic pleasures: a loaf of bread and butter.

 

When eagles look to the sun, they find only mystic fire.  When they look to the earth, they find meat and wars and goblins.  We cannot look at the sun without blinking, yet how many among us can look at the truth of our earth, or our food, with unwavering eyes?

Image: American Museum of Natural History

Gollum, the Enigmatic Frog

“I don’t know where he came from, nor who or what he was.” 

If Bilbo can be compared (at least by trolls and such) to a clever rabbit, Gollum is a wicked little frog.  Though many people – understandably – are fascinated by his more complex portrayal in The Lord of the Rings, I think I actually prefer Gollum as the nasty, enigmatic creature in The Hobbit.  During the riddle game, Gollum thinks of “all the things he kept in his own pockets: fish-bones, goblins’ teeth, wet shells, a bit of bat-wing, a sharp stone to sharpen his fangs on, and other nasty things.”

There is something fascinating about a petty little creature without a history that possesses a great Ring of Power.  As a fallen hobbit, Gollum is a tragic figure.  As an evil frog-thing, he is something less nuanced but more exotic – almost a weak and corrupted version of Tom Bombadil's incarnation of natural energies, a slimy paddler in the dark and nameless pools of the mountains, a gurgle of malice gnawing at the stone heart of the world.

Image: Nasikabatrachus sahyadrensis (purple frog), by Karthickbala

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nasikabatrachus_sahyadrensis.jpg

Riddles in the Dark (art)

 

Image: Adapted from photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art



Down to Goblin-Town

“Beat them!  Bite them!  Gnash them!”
- The Great Goblin

 The goblins of The Hobbit are really quite brutal.  They whip prisoners, feast on ponies, and make instruments of torture.  And they even pinch – “unmercifully.”  Tolkien attributes many evils to the malice of goblins, as when he writes, “It is not unlikely that they invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them, and also not working with their own hands more than they could help…”  The narrator does concede that other groups are not blameless: “in some parts wicked dwarves had even made alliances with them.”  Nevertheless, the goblins are particularly violent and corrupt.

Despite the moments of dark comedy and the wry commentary from the narrator, the goblin scenes are quite nasty – perhaps something of a surprise from the amiable, hobbit-loving Tolkien.  Yet, of course, this was a man who had served in World War One, when civilization – with its ingenious weapons and machines – had looked upon the young men of the day and, with goblin cruelty, pronounced:

“Beat them!  Bite them!  Gnash them!  Take them away to dark holes full of snakes, and never let them see the light again!”

 

 

 

 

Image: Sidney Sime, “The Lean, High House of the Gnoles.”



Fairy-Tale Elves

In each of Tolkien’s major works, the characterization of elves is somewhat different.  In The Lord of the Rings they are noble but elegiac, a fading memory of an ancient time.  In The Silmarillion they are in their prime – bold, defiant, tragic.  In The Hobbit, though, elves are more playful, sprite-like creatures, linked, I suppose, with the Victorian fairy tradition.  The narrator explains, “So they laughed and sang in the trees; and pretty fair nonsense I daresay you think it.  Not that they would care; they would only laugh all the more if you told them so.” 

It is a less sophisticated and perhaps less compelling vision than in the other books, yet there is still something charming about them.  After all, “Elvish singing is not a thing to miss, in June under the stars…”  And Elrond is certainly a dignified character, “noble… strong… wise… venerable… and as kind as summer.” 

It’s interesting to try to visualize the details of the elves-in-the-trees scene.  After they finished their songs, did the elves leap down from the trees, falling like delicate leaves, all softness and ethereal flesh?  Or did they scramble down like nimble animals, with twigs still tangled in their wild hair?  Were they kissing up there, in their leafy hideaways?  Or merely dreaming of the Undying Lands, to which they might return?

  

 

Or were the elves just waiting around for some dwarves to show up, so they could give them a hard time?  The Hobbit’s fairy-like elves are a good example of why it might have been fun if Guillermo del Toro could have made a fresh Hobbit film, not linked with Jackson’s Rings project.  It could have been really, really weird – but thereby captured, perhaps more authentically than did the recent movie, the playfulness and strangeness of the book.  Tolkien may have hoped to firmly affix The Hobbit to his later, more grand and masterly project, but as I read it now, this book seems something apart from that greater story, yet something curious and wonderful, like a child still laughing and dancing with the reckless Peter Pan.

Image: From the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Maps

Tolkien’s maps are a delightful addition to his stories, giving a sense of tangible reality to the world of Middle-earth.  Thorin’s map of the Lonely Mountain is an important plot device in The Hobbit, even though the dwarf is initially dismissive of the document, grumbling “I remember the Mountain well enough… And I know where Mirkwood is, and the Withered Heath where the great dragons bred.”   Yet upon this reading of the story, I was particularly drawn to a passing reference to other maps.  Bilbo “loved maps, and in his hall there hung a large one of the Country Round with all his favorite walks marked on it in red ink.” 

D.M. Cornish

Today maps are technological magic, shifting digital matrixes.  Yet old maps – paper or parchment maps – still have a kind of power over some of us.  Maps are memory.  Maps are the world, remade, and yet abstracted.  Did Bilbo have other maps at Bag End?  Might he have marked not only walks, but places that were suited for smoking pipes, or snacking, or daydreaming?  Did he have star charts?  Did he ever map the fleeting clouds? 

What wild and secret destinations might we find, if only we dared to chart and map ourselves?  Upon the winding trails of our minds and our dreams, would we mark the places where dragons breed, where elves sing beneath the stars, or where our hearts most wish to linger?
 

 

 

First Image: The fictional city of Brandenbrass, by D.M. Cornish.  Buy his books!  Or at least visit his blog...

http://monsterbloodtattoo.blogspot.com/2012/12/brandenbrass-or-there-was-time-once_11.html

Second Image: A “map” of cracked stone.



Dragons of the Market

“There was a most specially greedy, strong and wicked worm called Smaug.”

The dragons of Middle-earth are not just powerful forces of nature – but rather intelligent, calculating creatures.  According to Thorin, “they hardly know a good bit of work from a bad, though they usually have a good notion of the current market value.”  Dragons are, as it were, creatures of the market, though especially brutal ones.  They are also parasites, since “they can’t make a thing for themselves, not even mend a loose scale of their armour.”

Gandalf laments the absence of heroes to fight the dragon: “Swords in these parts are mostly blunt, and axes are used for trees, and shields as cradles or dish-covers; and dragons are comfortably far-off (and therefore legendary).”  Yet Bilbo is able to imagine “plundering dragons settling on his quiet Hill and kindling it all to flames.”

 

 

In our world, there may not be dragons – but there are cold, calculating things, greedy, brutal, and cruel.  Let us hope that there are also heroes and wizards enough to defend us from them – or that we find, in ourselves, some forgotten heroism and wizardry.

Image: My photography mixed with art by Arthur Rackham

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:04_rackham_poe_decoration.jpg

 

Note: The use of the Atlas statue is not intended as commentary upon Rockefeller Center or its affiliates.  It just looked interesting.  The statue is, however – curiously enough – associated with Ayn Rand…

 

Storytelling Alchemy

By some definitions, alchemy involves turning ordinary metals into gold – the opening of The Hobbit achieves a similar effect.  Seemingly “ordinary” elements are combined with one another and take on a magical, wondrous quality.  There is food and drink and smoking and singing – but the effect of them all together is greater than the sum of their parts.  There is a strong theme of mingling and mixing, even transmutation.  Sometimes this is harmonious, as with this segment of the dwarf song:

On silver necklaces they strung

The flowering stars, on crowns they hung

The dragon-fire, in twisted wire

They meshed the light of moon and sun.

Even the lines of the song are twisted together.  Sometimes, however, this mingling is less harmonious, as with the famous:

Chip the glasses and crack the plates!

   Blunt the knives and bend the forks!

That’s what Bilbo Baggins hates –

   Smash the bottles and burn the corks!

 

There is a clashing of expectations about Bilbo’s role, of course, and even the dwarves get mixed together: “He pulled open the door with a jerk, and they all fell in, one on top of the other.”  Around Gandalf there is a more elegant mingling of smoke rings: “He had a cloud of them about him already, and in the dim light it made him look strange and sorcerous.”  Likewise, Gandalf is the magical element that combines Bilbo and the dwarves into a single company.

 

The greedy impulse in gold-hunting alchemy is reflected in the motives of the dwarves, whose longing for “pale enchanted gold” affects even the humble hobbit, such that he “felt the love of beautiful things made by hands and by cunning and by magic moving through him, a fierce and jealous love, the desire of the hearts of dwarves.”

 

But for the reader, the whole of the chapter is simply magic… and so the journey begins.

 

 

Happy Birthday, Professor!

A tribute to Tolkien, by way of his book covers…

Planet of the Hobbits

The Hobbit, I think, lends itself to flights of fancy and turbulent imaginings.  After all, this is a story that presumes to trace the invention of the game of golf to a hobbit that knocked the head off a goblin king with a club and sent it flying down a rabbit-hole.  Hobbits are often revered for their quaint charms, but they are still creatures that live in holes – and it is easy to imagine them in a more animalistic fashion, as when the narrator of The Planet of the Apes visits the stock exchange and says, “Imagine a hall of vast proportions crammed full of apes, screaming, gesticulating, and running hither and thither in a completely disorganized manner, apes in hysteria, apes… who formed a swarming mass right up to the ceiling…”  He goes on to note that “The most disturbing part of my present image was that… I now saw the members of this insane crowd in the guise of human beings.  It was men I thus saw shrieking, barking, and swinging about on ropes…”

For a long time, the boundary between humans and animals has fascinated, and sometimes frightened, observers – and hobbits, for all their oddities, are thoroughly human characters.  To the eyes of, say, a dragon, hobbits might appear as unpleasant, furtive creatures.  Bilbo lives a genteel life, but one could imagine great burrows full of them, greedily hoarding piles of food, breeding like rabbits, tentatively exploring the outside world, sending up vast clouds of smoke from their countless pipes and endless cooking-fires.  In such a vision, the older powers of the world might look at swarms of furry-toed, giggling hobbits with disdain and disgust – thinking them, as it were, little more than rabbits with pocket watches.

 

 

Yet, fortunately, our hobbit’s home is “Not a nasty, dirty wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.” 

Image: Arthur Rackham

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rackham_Alice.jpg