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