Evil Trees

A few sessions ago in Exploring The Lord of the Rings we briefly considered how odd it seemed that Old Man Willow was surrounded with such lush growth, when in Tolkien's legendarium evil is usually associated with no-man's-land-like devastation, destruction, and rottenness (as in 'the leprous growths that feed on rottenness',The Passage of the Marshes). Some passages that seemed relevant came to my mind. 

First, when Sam, affected by the gravity of the Ring, imagines himself Samwise the Strong, hero of the Age, at whose command 'the vale of Gorgoroth became a garden of flowers and trees and brought forth fruit'. Luckily his love of his master and his hobbit-sense sober his vision: 'The one small garden of a free gardener was all his need and due, not a garden swollen to a realm; his own hands to use, not the hands of others to command.' 

'Swollen' is here the critical word. It suggests that, however beautiful and green Sam's garden might have been, it would have exceeded its due measure and thus become bad. Elsewhere we find it used to suggest that Ugluk's head is too big for his shoulders, and to describe Sam's parched tongue on the slopes of Mt Doom. Then there's the Deeping Stream at the Hornburg, swollen by rain until it overflows its banks. And of course there's Shelob, 'who only desired death for all others, mind and body, and for herself a glut of life, alone, swollen till the mountains could no longer hold her up and the darkness could not contain her'. And again: 'behind her short stalk-like neck was her huge swollen body, a vast bloated bag, swaying and sagging between her legs.'

The other passage was in Of Aule and Yavanna: 

... and Yavanna returned to Aulë; and he was in his smithy, pouring molten metal into a mould. 'Eru is bountiful,' she said. 'Now let thy children beware! For there shall walk a power in the forests whose wrath they will arouse at their peril.' 

'Nonetheless they will have need of wood,' said Aulë, and he went on with his smith-work.

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It's interesting to note two things here. First Yavanna refers to the 'wrath' of the power that will walk in the forests, but Manwe had just said to her before she returned to Aule that the just anger of these powers (by which of course they mean the Ents) would be something to fear. So proportion is important here. Second Aulë's response is also about balance. Wood is needful. In due measure. 

Turning back from these passages to Old Man Willow, consider his extreme power over the other trees of the Old Forest and his status as the most dangerous of the trees who hated all that went free upon the earth and remembered the time when they were lords. His evil remembers and foresees a dominance as green and growing as the Barrow-wight's foresees a dead sea and a withered land.

Sean Connery -- Two Unexpected Parallels, Paradisiacal, and Profane

In one of the more spectacular innuendos in James Bond history, Sean Connery, in 1964's Goldfinger, awakens to find Honor Blackman watching him.

Connery: Who are you? 

Blackman: My name is Pussy Galore. 

(A truly stunning series of smirks rapidly cross Connery's face, threatening to escape containment, but wit prevails.) 

Connery: I must be dreaming.

A decade later in The Wind and the Lion Sean Connery plays the Raizuli, a Berber Chieftain who has abducted an American woman, Mrs Pedecaris, played by Candice Bergen. As they ride through the desert, she asks him his name:

Bergen: There is just one thing I would like to ask you. What is your first name? 

Connery: My first name? 

Bergen: Your Christian name, I mean, the name that precedes all your other names. 

Connery: My first name, my Christian name. I am Muli Ahmed Muhammad Raizuli the Magnificent, Lord of the Rift. 

Bergen: Muli, Muli. That is a nice name. 

Connery: Yes 

Bergen: Muli ... I am Eden, Muli. 

His heads whips around. He looks at her. 

Connery: Eden ... Of course. 

A bemused smile crosses his face as he rides away from her.

Review: Stand in the Trench, Achilles: Classical Receptions in British Poetry of the Great War

Stand in the Trench, Achilles: Classical Receptions in British Poetry of the Great War by Elizabeth Vandiver
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It was my great pleasure some years ago to discover Paul Fussell's marvelous The Great War and Modern Memory, which remains one of the best blendings of literary criticism and history I have yet read. And even though subsequent research has made clear that Fussell (among others) did not cast his net wide enough, and consequently gave too much emphasis to the bitterness and disillusion of war poets like Sassoon and Owen, there is still much to learn from his pages.

Elizabeth Vandiver's Stand in the Trench, Achilles: Classical Receptions in British Poetry of the Great War explores how British poets, male and female, soldier and private citizen, with widely varying knowledge of Latin and Greek, used what they knew to process their experiences in and attitudes towards The Great War. As she does so, she makes perfectly clear how very wide the range of opinion was among them:

A way to frame the aggression of the Kaiser; a source of appropriate elegies for the eternally youthful dead; a measure of an autodidact's learning; a strengthening and heartening foundation for the concept of liberty; a dead weight of meaningless platitudes that must be cast aside; a template against which one's own experience of the war could be read: classics was all of these and more for writers trying to express the varying realities of their own war.

Vandiver's knowledge of Greek and Roman poetry allows her to handle masterfully all the many transformations the poets of The Great War worked on their material. And if the conclusion seemed to me to speak too much of Rupert Brooke, there is a lesson in that too for the reader, especially this one. For the hero cult that attended Brooke's memory and poetry in and after the war is essential for understanding the way the poet and those who tended his shrine drew on the classics of Greek and Roman poetry. A full understanding requires that we examine even those parts of the picture that we don't understand or care for. Brooke, as enshrined, may seem to me a good fit for a song by Carly Simon, but I cannot ignore the evidence because of that.

What emerges is a fascinating and significant portrait of a culture using the tools it had to search for the meaning of so many of the concepts they had grown up with, all of this at the dawn of a calamitous century.

Review: Flora of Middle-Earth: Plants of J.R.R. Tolkien's Legendarium

Flora of Middle-Earth: Plants of J.R.R. Tolkien's Legendarium by Walter S Judd
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book makes a very nice addition to the library of those who find Middle-earth compelling. It will be an especially welcome reference for those of us who lack an extensive knowledge of the flora of the world in which we live. The entries are informative, both for Tolkien's Middle-earth and our own, and are well illustrated with images by Graham A. Judd in the style of woodcuts. The author also refers, a good touch this, to Tolkien's own illustrations of the flora, Old Man Willow, for example. which appear in J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator. References to the scenes in The Lord of the Rings in which the various plants appear or play a role are copious and detailed. There is even a section on hobbit names, so many of which, both first and last, spring from the names of flowers. So far so good. Yet the lack of a separate entry on Ents and Entwives might frustrate some, Yavanna not least, though it would not surprise her. One inexplicable blemish, however, needs to be pointed out. Athelas, or Kingsfoil, arguably most important plant to the plot of The Lord of the Rings is everywhere misspelled athelias.

Achilles ... terrifies us with his violent shouting.

Reconstruction of the Shield of Achilles by Kathleen Vail © All Rights Reserved

If you've really read The Iliad through, slogged through the sometimes horrid tedium of the so called battle books, the deaths of both Sarpedon and Patroclus hit you hard, with all the weight of how different it could have been for them thrown into the scales of Zeus. And now, with Patroclus' death, Achilles' wrath has a cause that even we these days can grasp fully, the needless and unexpected violent death of one we love. The rage that comes soaring up from within him, shouting 'now for wrath, now for ruin, and a red nightfall' as it were, can blow you away. As it did the Trojans, as it did me. (But then fuimus Troes.) Tennyson's version of this explosion of wrath at Iliad 18.202ff. is a marvel. Read it out loud.

Achilles Over the Trench SO SAYING, light-foot Iris pass’d away. Then rose Achilles dear to Zeus; and round The warrior’s puissant shoulders Pallas flung Her fringed ægis, and around his head The glorious goddess wreath’d a golden cloud, And from it lighted an all-shining flame. As when a smoke from a city goes to heaven Far off from out an island girt by foes, All day the men contend in grievous war From their own city, but with set of sun Their fires flame thickly, and aloft the glare Flies streaming, if perchance the neighbours round May see, and sail to help them in the war; So from his head the splendour went to heaven. From wall to dyke he stept, he stood, nor join’d The Achæans—honouring his wise mother’s word**— There standing, shouted, and Pallas far away Call’d; and a boundless panic shook the foe. For like the clear voice when a trumpet shrills, Blown by the fierce beleaguerers of a town, So rang the clear voice of Æakidês; And when the brazen cry of Æakidês Was heard among the Trojans, all their hearts Were troubled, and the full-maned horses whirl’d The chariots backward, knowing griefs at hand; And sheer-astounded were the charioteers To see the dread, unweariable fire That always o’er the great Peleion’s head Burn’d, for the bright-eyed goddess made it burn. Thrice from the dyke he sent his mighty shout, Thrice backward reel’d the Trojans and allies; And there and then twelve of their noblest died Among their spears and chariots.

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** Achilles' mother, Thetis, had asked him not to enter battle until Hephaestus made him new armor.

The title of this post of course comes from C.P. Cavafy's allusion to this moment in his poem Trojans.

And go visit Kathleen Vail's Shield of Achilles website. It's worth every minute.

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Postscript: 

One of the most powerful moments I have ever had in a classroom was discussing The Iliad for weeks, and then watching the 1989 film Glory. I wept.  It also gave me the idea for what was my favorite exam question. I quoted the scene in The Odyssey, where the ghost of Achilles tells Odysseus that he would rather be the slave of the lowest man on earth than king of all the dead, and asked my students if they thought the men of the 54th Massachusetts would agree.