The Raven -- Christopher Lee

Today in 1845, Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven was first published.

Review: Peter Pan

Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What a sublime little book this is, which I had never read till now. It's so much sadder and full of longing, both for those who grow up and those who don't, than I ever expected it to be. Among the many things I found interesting was that there is only one actual fairy in it, the splendidly chaotic Tinker Bell, but the story isn't about her. In fact she disappears for much of it.

Rather, it is the adventures of humans in Faërie: the lost boys, the Darling children, the Pirates, the Indians, even Peter. But, as Tolkien, who as a very young man (1910) had seen the stage play of Peter Pan and was much impressed by it, pointed out decades later, that is what good fairy-stories are:

Stories that are actually concerned primarily with “fairies,” that is with creatures that might also in modern English be called “elves,” are relatively rare, and as a rule not very interesting. Most good “fairy-stories” are about the adventures of men in the Perilous Realm or upon its shadowy marches. Naturally so; for if elves are true, and really exist independently of our tales about them, then this also is certainly true: elves are not primarily concerned with us, nor we with them. Our fates are sundered, and our paths seldom meet. Even upon the borders of Faërie we encounter them only at some chance crossing of the ways.

On Fairy-stories,  ¶ 11

Part of what's interesting about this is that Tolkien of course grew to loathe fluttery gossamer fairies like Tinker Bell. Another interesting point, which Dimitra Fimi has discussed in her Tolkien, Race and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits (2010) 34-38, is the moment when Peter, in order to help save Tinker Bell, reaches out to children in the real world who are asleep and 'might be dreaming of the Neverland, and who were therefore nearer to him than you think: boys and girls in their nighties, and naked papooses in their baskets hung from trees' (chapter XIII, Do You Believe in Fairies?). The idea that dreaming children are 'nearer' to Faërie reappears in Tolkien's early poem (1915) 'You and Me and the Cottage of Lost Play,' in which children reach Faërie through their dreams. Tolkien also later speaks of this Path of Dreams, the Olórë Mallë, in The Book of Lost Tales, Part One.  We might also hear a more distant echo of this in Frodo's dream/vision of Elvenhome while in the house of Tom Bombadil.

So both for its storytelling and for its influence elsewhere, this is definitely a book worth reading.

John Hurt -- Jabberwocky

Anachronism and Artifacts of Translation (FR 1.i.27-28)

The lights went out. A great smoke went up. It shaped itself like a mountain seen in the distance, and began to glow at the summit. It spouted green and scarlet flames. Out flew a red-golden dragon – not life-size, but terribly life-like: fire came from his jaws, his eyes glared down; there was a roar, and he whizzed three times over the heads of the crowd. They all ducked, and many fell flat on their faces. The dragon passed like an express train, turned a somersault, and burst over Bywater with a deafening explosion. 

(FR 1.i.27-28, emphasis mine)

'Like an express train' is of course a simile entirely unsuited to the pre-industrial world of Middle-earth. Many have called it an anachronism, and it is, broadly speaking, but, as Corey Olsen has noted more than once in my hearing, strictly speaking it is not, because the 'translator' of the Red Book has introduced this phrase, not the narrator. Presumably the narrator (Frodo) used a phrase or idiom that conveyed the same meaning, only with different words. The translator, however, wasn't sufficiently alive to the words he was using to realize the paradox he was creating. 

Sound far-fetched?

Not quite.

Consider one of Aubrey de Selincourt's least happy translations of Livy's Latin:

The tribune would have been roughly handled but for the universal and determined support of the mob and the rapid filling of the Forum by excited men who ran from every part of the city to swell the crowd. Appius stuck to his guns, ugly though the situation was.... 

(Livy, Book 2, Chapter 56; emphasis added)

The events described here took place, according to Livy, in the year we would call 471 B.C.E.  So clearly Appius, one of the consuls of that year, had no guns to stick to. The Latin for 'Appius...was' is 'sustinebat tamen Appius pertinacia tantam tempestatem,' which may be easily rendered into the following English: 'Nonetheless through tenacity Appius withstood so great a storm.' De Selincourt, however, in his search for a forceful metaphor lost sight of the literal meaning of the words he chose.

Thus we can understand 'express train' as precisely analogous to 'stuck to his guns', as an artifact of a translation momentarily out of touch with the larger context of the words being translated.* And since Tolkien himself is the only 'translator' of the Red Book who lived in the age of express trains, he is poking fun at himself by not removing the 'anachronism', perhaps at first as unwittingly as de Selincourt later did with Livy. 

Livy, 'The Early History of Rome: Books I-V of 'The History of Rome from Its Foundations,' translated by Aubrey de Selincourt, Penguin (1960, reprinted with additional material 2002).

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Works Consulted

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*It has been suggested that a close paleographical analysis of the surviving ms of the Red Book of Westmarch is consistent with the reading 'like Bolgers at a buffet' for the original simile,

In the Realm of Useless Footnotes III

In the first chapter of Peter Pan, while reckoning up the costs of raising children with his wife, Mr Darling mentions mumps, measles, German measles (rubella), and whooping cough (pertussis). My edition of the text, which appeared in 2005, footnotes each of these diseases with a description of its symptoms. 

It took me a dull moment to realize why the editor felt the need to gloss these once common childhood diseases for her readers. Ah, once common. Then I could only laugh out loud. It isn't every day that a work of fantasy supplies evidence of the effectiveness of vaccination. 

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J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan, with introduction and notes by Amy Billone, Barnes and Noble Books (New York: 2005).