Tea at Trianon: Return to Middle-earth

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, October 9, 2021

Return to Middle-earth

From The National Review:

Part one, “Time and Ageing,” reveals the great lengths to which Tolkien was willing to go for logical and mathematical consistency in his mythology. If anything, the statistics are so exacting, one gets the feeling that this is the “Dungeon Master’s Guide” to the Tolkien universe. In this section, Tolkien deals with timelines galore, but he also gives us demographics — for example, the number of children a particular race in Middle-earth might have as well as the age of typical parents, rates of aging (as the title of the section indicates), vital dates in the mythology (such as when the wizards arrive), population increases, lengths of generations, etc. Some of this information has appeared in other writings, but most of it is new to the Nature of Middle-earth.

In addition, Tolkien makes numerous comments about his larger mythology and the significance of certain peoples, individuals, ideas, and events. In this first part of the book, as one example, we learn that the Elves never fell in the way that Adam and Eve fell:

The Quendi never “fell” as a race – not in the sense in which they and Men themselves believed that the Second Children had “fallen”. Being “tainted” with the Marring (which affected all the “flesh of Arda” from which their hröar [body] were derived and were nourished), and having also come under the Shadow of Melkor [Satan] before their Finding and rescue, they could individually do wrong. But they never (not even the wrong-doers) rejected Eru [God the Father], nor worshipped either Melkor or Sauron as a god – neither individually or as a whole people. Their lives, therefore, came under no general curse or diminishment; and their primeval and natural life-span, as a race, by “doom” co-extensive with the remainder of the Life of Arda, remained unchanged in all their varieties.

Additionally, one learns about the first Elvish speakers, as well as why speech meant so much to them, how the Elves envisioned the movement of time and history, and how predestined the first Elvish couples were.

In Part II of the Nature of Middle-earth, “Body, Mind, and Spirit,” Tolkien explores the complexities of the relationship of soul to physicality as well as the relationship of the Valar, the angelic powers of the mythology, to their followers.

In this section, one discovers that the Orcs, the malevolent shock troops of Middle-earth’s dark forces, were vampiric. “The last adjective ‘blood-thirsty’ (serkilixa) was also literal: the Orks actually drank the blood of their victims.” One also learns who did and did not have facial hair (neither Aragorn nor Borormir had facial hair, and Radagast the Brown Wizard had only curly scruff), how much royal blood Denethor, the last Steward of Gondor, actually possessed, how the Valar communicated with one another and with their followers, and why Melkor became so hideous in appearance. The reader also finds out, importantly, how Manwë, king of the Valar, avoided falling as Melkor did. (Read more.)

Tolkien rejected. From Open Culture:

When J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books appeared in the mid-1950s, they were met with very mixed reviews, an unsurprising reception given that nothing like them had been written for adult readers since Edmund Spencer’s epic 16th century English poem The Faerie Queene, perhaps. At least, this was the contention of reviewer Richard Hughes, who went on to write that “for width of imagination,” The Lord of the Rings “almost beggars parallel.”

Scottish writer Naomi Mitchison did find a comparison: to Sir Thomas Malory, author of the 15th century Le Morte d’Arthur — hardly misplaced, given Tolkien’s day job as an Oxford don of English literature, but not the sort of thing that passed for contemporary writing in the 1950s, notwithstanding the serious appreciation of writers like W.H. Auden for Tolkien’s trilogy. “No previous writer,” the poet remarked in a New York Times review, “has, to my knowledge, created an imaginary world and a feigned history in such detail.” (Read more.)