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You should not look in when the candles are lit
Following Easter brunch-dinner with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
wind05 and Sabitha and a number of people whose names I mostly had memorized by the end of the meal, I may never eat again. But it was very tasty, and very good company, and a lamb-shaped cake is particularly adorable when decapitated and its head—with black jelly beans for eyes and a pink gumdrop nose—served on a platter à la Salomé.
(The rest of this entry written this morning, but not posted due to me being obsessive-compulsive about not throwing things up on the internet while running out the door.)
I don't know, maybe this is gnomic dream sweeps week. Last night, the city was more than half under water, trains stalled and power lines down in the flood; I had walked along railway tracks with my cousin, who was male, and we were diving from the trestle bridge for the bodies of the dead, visible in all their clothes under the slightly rust-tinged water, loose-limbed with gravel and the currents in their hair, like the Dead Marshes of a post-industrial Middle-Earth.
I made the connection only now, but I think it's correct. Of all of Tolkien's topographies, the Mere of Dead Faces is the one I find most viscerally unheimlich, a no-man's-land between the last blasted territories of Men and the underworld of Mordor, through which can be glimpsed—like some window, glazed with grimy glass—not Valinor or the Valhalla of the Rohirrim, but the end all flesh comes to, corruption and obscurity. Allies and enemies lie together nameless, even the earth that held them susceptible to creeping influences, time and life and death all confused in the ghostly carrion of a battlefield three thousand years past:
"But I have seen them too. In the pools when the candles were lit. They lie in all the pools, pale faces, deep, deep under the dark water. I saw them: grim faces and evil, and noble faces and sad. Many faces proud and fair, and weeds in their silver hair. But all foul, all rotting, all dead. A fell light is in them."
The fool's fires that lure and flicker all around Frodo, Gollum, and Sam are literal corpse candles, the light by which the dead can be seen—all the more dreadful since it manifests not their spirits, but their decaying bodies, long since dissolved in their burial ground (But the Marshes have grown since then, swallowed up the graves; always creeping, creeping). These are not ghosts or wraiths as we understand the term, like the Dead Men of Dunharrow or even the Nazgûl. There is no life in them, not even the mockery of it, no animation. They are the past seeping up through the present, the corpse in the garden that has begun to sprout; they are moon-letters that spell quod ego sum, tu eris. They will not care if you go down to join them, mazed by the "tricksy lights." And unlike more traditional revenants, they offer not even the disordered hope of some survival beyond death: what they demonstrate, instead, is the obduracy of the grave.1
I would believe the Dead Marshes were partly created by Tolkien's memories of the trenches of France, mud-flooded with faces surfacing in shell-holes, but on first encounter they reminded me more of a folktale that terrified me in elementary school. It was called "The Drowned Moon," I think; I cannot remember the title or the author, but I would recognize the collection I read it in. The moon is a beautiful woman with bright hair, who one night comes down to earth to see whether those nights without her guarding light are as dangerous as mortals weep and swear they are; she hides her hair under a heavy cloak so as not to be recognized, but unhoods it to save a man she sees being foxfire-led to his death in a marsh, in the process exposing herself to all the ancient and treacherous things that live in the bogs: they seize her and drown her in the black water, burying her deep with a dead tree to mark her grave and a great stone to hold her down and a will-o'-the-wisp to keep vigil in case she rises; and the nights are moonless, and haunted, with things made of raked-up bones and slime waiting for travelers after dark, and no one knows what became of the moon. I think it is the man she saved who finally realizes what he saw that night; I remember that he is told to look for a cross, a coffin, and a candle in the middle of the marsh, and underneath the tree, the stone, and the dancing corpse-light he finds the moon, a pale beautiful face under black water. And then the moon is back in the sky again, but at age, I don't know, nine, I found that no comfort against the image of the moon drowned and dead, whose eyes I imagined were blind open under her coffin-stone. (I believe there was an illustration, too. It didn't help.) It's a strange folktale, like a piece of a lost myth—when was the last time you saw a female dying god who wasn't Persephone?—and I was very disappointed by Charles de Lint's treatment of it in "The Moon Is Drowning While I Sleep." But I had flashbacks while reading The Two Towers.
Great. Now I want to re-read Tolkien, and he totally doesn't go with Derek Walcott. Then again, neither does Rudyard Kipling, and he's the other very heavy book beside my bed.
1. Hence I find the film version of this scene not as effective as the original text, although Jackson renders the corpse-apparitions beautifully. To endow a dead Elf-king with the will to attack the Ring-bearer is to grant the Mere's dead faces a measure of self they simply do not possess. Their horror is not in their imitation of life, but their utter lack of it—and yet they persist. And this last clause suggests to me a connection with the Ring's effect on a mortal bearer's lifespan, stretching them out to exhaustion, undying, but I will have to consider it further. The chances are generations of Tolkien scholars have gotten here before me, anyway.
wind05 and Sabitha and a number of people whose names I mostly had memorized by the end of the meal, I may never eat again. But it was very tasty, and very good company, and a lamb-shaped cake is particularly adorable when decapitated and its head—with black jelly beans for eyes and a pink gumdrop nose—served on a platter à la Salomé.(The rest of this entry written this morning, but not posted due to me being obsessive-compulsive about not throwing things up on the internet while running out the door.)
I don't know, maybe this is gnomic dream sweeps week. Last night, the city was more than half under water, trains stalled and power lines down in the flood; I had walked along railway tracks with my cousin, who was male, and we were diving from the trestle bridge for the bodies of the dead, visible in all their clothes under the slightly rust-tinged water, loose-limbed with gravel and the currents in their hair, like the Dead Marshes of a post-industrial Middle-Earth.
I made the connection only now, but I think it's correct. Of all of Tolkien's topographies, the Mere of Dead Faces is the one I find most viscerally unheimlich, a no-man's-land between the last blasted territories of Men and the underworld of Mordor, through which can be glimpsed—like some window, glazed with grimy glass—not Valinor or the Valhalla of the Rohirrim, but the end all flesh comes to, corruption and obscurity. Allies and enemies lie together nameless, even the earth that held them susceptible to creeping influences, time and life and death all confused in the ghostly carrion of a battlefield three thousand years past:
"But I have seen them too. In the pools when the candles were lit. They lie in all the pools, pale faces, deep, deep under the dark water. I saw them: grim faces and evil, and noble faces and sad. Many faces proud and fair, and weeds in their silver hair. But all foul, all rotting, all dead. A fell light is in them."
The fool's fires that lure and flicker all around Frodo, Gollum, and Sam are literal corpse candles, the light by which the dead can be seen—all the more dreadful since it manifests not their spirits, but their decaying bodies, long since dissolved in their burial ground (But the Marshes have grown since then, swallowed up the graves; always creeping, creeping). These are not ghosts or wraiths as we understand the term, like the Dead Men of Dunharrow or even the Nazgûl. There is no life in them, not even the mockery of it, no animation. They are the past seeping up through the present, the corpse in the garden that has begun to sprout; they are moon-letters that spell quod ego sum, tu eris. They will not care if you go down to join them, mazed by the "tricksy lights." And unlike more traditional revenants, they offer not even the disordered hope of some survival beyond death: what they demonstrate, instead, is the obduracy of the grave.1
I would believe the Dead Marshes were partly created by Tolkien's memories of the trenches of France, mud-flooded with faces surfacing in shell-holes, but on first encounter they reminded me more of a folktale that terrified me in elementary school. It was called "The Drowned Moon," I think; I cannot remember the title or the author, but I would recognize the collection I read it in. The moon is a beautiful woman with bright hair, who one night comes down to earth to see whether those nights without her guarding light are as dangerous as mortals weep and swear they are; she hides her hair under a heavy cloak so as not to be recognized, but unhoods it to save a man she sees being foxfire-led to his death in a marsh, in the process exposing herself to all the ancient and treacherous things that live in the bogs: they seize her and drown her in the black water, burying her deep with a dead tree to mark her grave and a great stone to hold her down and a will-o'-the-wisp to keep vigil in case she rises; and the nights are moonless, and haunted, with things made of raked-up bones and slime waiting for travelers after dark, and no one knows what became of the moon. I think it is the man she saved who finally realizes what he saw that night; I remember that he is told to look for a cross, a coffin, and a candle in the middle of the marsh, and underneath the tree, the stone, and the dancing corpse-light he finds the moon, a pale beautiful face under black water. And then the moon is back in the sky again, but at age, I don't know, nine, I found that no comfort against the image of the moon drowned and dead, whose eyes I imagined were blind open under her coffin-stone. (I believe there was an illustration, too. It didn't help.) It's a strange folktale, like a piece of a lost myth—when was the last time you saw a female dying god who wasn't Persephone?—and I was very disappointed by Charles de Lint's treatment of it in "The Moon Is Drowning While I Sleep." But I had flashbacks while reading The Two Towers.
Great. Now I want to re-read Tolkien, and he totally doesn't go with Derek Walcott. Then again, neither does Rudyard Kipling, and he's the other very heavy book beside my bed.
1. Hence I find the film version of this scene not as effective as the original text, although Jackson renders the corpse-apparitions beautifully. To endow a dead Elf-king with the will to attack the Ring-bearer is to grant the Mere's dead faces a measure of self they simply do not possess. Their horror is not in their imitation of life, but their utter lack of it—and yet they persist. And this last clause suggests to me a connection with the Ring's effect on a mortal bearer's lifespan, stretching them out to exhaustion, undying, but I will have to consider it further. The chances are generations of Tolkien scholars have gotten here before me, anyway.
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Shiversome.
Nine
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It was not a standalone; it was definitely part of a collection. It might have been the title story, but I'm not willing to swear to it. I think what I need to do is visit libraries.
(This isn't it, but I might as well check it out anyway.)
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The dream sounds fascinating. Most interesting dream I've had in a while was a few days ago, when I was watching a movie about people in WWII-style piston-engine fighter planes fighting each other with battleaxes (don't ask me how it worked--it didn't make sense at the time, let alone after waking), but somehow participating at the same time. That was less profound than just... not on.
The Tolkien and folktale reflections are also interesting--I think I'll have more to say when I've thought more on it, but just now I've thought of how to continue the story of my young academics and their new werewolf friend, and I'd best get back to them.
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The person to whom it was served took pictures, but unfortunately I do not have his e-mail address.
a movie about people in WWII-style piston-engine fighter planes fighting each other with battleaxes (don't ask me how it worked--it didn't make sense at the time, let alone after waking)
Are you kidding? I'd be disappointed if it didn't happen in a webcomic somewhere.
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Ah, that's a pity. Well, I'm glad he's got pictures, at least.
Are you kidding? I'd be disappointed if it didn't happen in a webcomic somewhere.
Thanks! I suppose I'd actually like to see it in a webcomic, myself.
It seemed as if the pilots were riding the fuselages of the planes, as if they were horses; how, exactly, they managed to hang on and steer was unclear. They were passing each other and striking, something like jousting, except that when they connected the enemy plane was destroyed, rather than the pilot simply falling off.
At least once I experienced the victor's sensations, in a strange vicarious fashion--the nose of the plane pitched sharply upward, and the pilot (I was feeling his feelings, but had no sense of control over his actions at all. It was as if, 3D being no longer striking enough, somebody had invented a form of film that included a feeling of being in the viewpoint character's body.) had to struggle to bring her level. It felt like riding out a bucking horse, except for having bits of aircraft flying past. I thought for an instant that I might be hit by the propeller.
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And this:
Allies and enemies lie together nameless, even the earth that held them susceptible to creeping influences, time and life and death all confused in the ghostly carrion of a battlefield three thousand years past
It did, too.
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Thank you. I think there's a reason I've remembered it for twenty years.
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I also find the Dead Marshes fascinating. I need to re-read Lord of the Rings -- it's been such a long time. I think I could bring something more to the reading now.
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I hadn't thought of that! That's a striking image: a triple-killed moon.
I think I could bring something more to the reading now.
I would like to hear your thoughts.
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Oh, lucky.
I am thinking this is in the collection of folktales that Yeats edited/translated/collected/cobbled together...?
I don't think I read it in Yeats, unless there's a version with illustrations, but I should have at least one of his collections around the house: I'll check. Thanks!
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It is true that the spirits of Elves, upon death, go to the Halls of Mandos in Valinor, and the spirits of Men leave Arda to parts unknown. So the lack of animation of the Dead Marsh corpses is consistent with their being mere preserved corpses unanimated by spirits. (I'm not sure, but I believe Barrow-wights are least spirits (sub-Maiar, sort of), a handy category that at one point Tolkien considered for some famous Orc leaders like Azog and are probably necessary to explain the rock-giants in The Hobbit as well, unless you consider them an invention of Bilbo's memoirs or an intrusive one by his translator; we don't know where Tolkien stood since his 1960 attempt to re-write the book to make it perfectly consistent with LOTR stopped before that point.)
I will now turn off the Tolkien geek part of my brain and start thinking about baseball Win Probabilities again. (My two worst recent dreams were that Jonathan Papelbon blew the save on Opening Day, which he just emphatically did not do!)
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Thank you.
So the lack of animation of the Dead Marsh corpses is consistent with their being mere preserved corpses unanimated by spirits.
But they are not corpses: they are the specters of corpses.
"Yes, yes," said Gollum. "All dead, all rotten. Elves and Men and Orcs. The Dead Marshes. There was a great battle long ago, yes, so they told him when Sméagol was young, when I was young before the Precious came. It was a great battle. Tall Men with long swords, and terrible Elves, and Orcses shrieking. They fought on the plain for days and months at the Black Gates. But the Marshes have grown since then, swallowed up the graves; always creeping, creeping."
"But that is an age and more ago," said Sam. "The Dead can't be really there! Is it some devilry hatched in the Dark Land?"
"Who knows? Sméagol doesn't know," answered Gollum. "You cannot reach them, you cannot touch them. We tried once, yes, precious, I tried once; but you cannot reach them. Only shapes to see, perhaps, not to touch. No precious! All dead."
They cannot be reached, they cannot be touched, they cannot even be seen except by night and the "candles of corpses": the Marshes were dry land when they died. They are preserved only in image by the waters that crept, over the centuries, into their graves (and I am reminded of Beowulf, where Grendel and his mother dwell: frēcne fen-gelād . . . flōd under foldan, the fraught fen-paths . . . the flood under the earth) and now reflect what they claimed, like a grisly fossilization. And hence their horror. We are brought up to believe that the body rots and something intangible persists, but here in the dying lands at the borders of hell, the intangible persistence is the rotting body. That is not only unheimlich, but unheilig. And I think unparalleled in any other treatment of shades or hauntings in Middle-Earth—you would know better than I.
(Mordor seems to possess the property of confusing life and death, a trait that I think P.C. Hodgell adapted and amplified for Perimal Darkling, the wave of boundary-dissolving chaos that rolls down the Chain of Creation in her Chronicles of the Kencyrath. Certainly the Mere of Dead Faces would not be out of place in the Haunted Lands.)
(I'm not sure, but I believe Barrow-wights are least spirits (sub-Maiar, sort of),
The Barrow-wight is also unsettling, especially since—as with the Watcher in the Water, another genuinely shiversome moment in the first book—only enough of it is shown to allow the audience's imagination to do its worst, but I think it is totally outclassed by the Dead Marshes. I think the Balrog is outclassed by the Dead Marshes. Monsters are one kind of nightmare, but primal metaphysical transgression is another order entirely.
a handy category that at one point Tolkien considered for some famous Orc leaders like Azog
What's with Azog?
we don't know where Tolkien stood since his 1960 attempt to re-write the book to make it perfectly consistent with LOTR stopped before that point.
Just as well. The Hobbit is a species of one as it stands and I like those.
(My two worst recent dreams were that Jonathan Papelbon blew the save on Opening Day, which he just emphatically did not do!)
I don't think I have ever dreamed about baseball. I'll let you know if I do.
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Read Appendix A, Part III, starting at the third section ("Years afterward Thror ...") and continuing to the end of the Battle of Azanulbizar.
_The Hobbit_ is a species of one as it stands and I like those.
Tolkien tried in 1960 to rewrite the text to match the LOTR maps while keeping the canonical dates (e.g., Bilbo celebrating his birthday in Laketown) and phases of the moon (the Moon-runes in Rivendell, Durin's Day). It's impossible. In particular, the north of Middle-Earth in The Hobbit is about twice as big.
"[W]e see Tolkien attempting to take The Hobbit, a story written out of one storytelling tradition of long ago and far away, where details are only included where dramatically relevant or aesthetically effective and things work according to their own narrative logic, and make it into a story like LOTR, which is written in a very different tradition, where each mile of each day of each character's journey can be followed on a map and plotted on a timetable. Tolkien himself is largely responsible for creating the latter, and making it the standard by which modern fantasies are judged, but he excelled at writing the former, a traditional mode going all the way back to the Middle Ages and beyond ... The Hobbit hearkens back to an older tradition, where forests seem endless, a period of captivity is a weary long time rather than twenty-one days (August 9th-30th) [captivity by the Wood-Elves according to one bruited timeline], [and] dragons and goblins destroyed Gondolin 'many ages ago' (rather than exactly 6,472 years before to the very day)." -- John D. Rateliff, The History of _The Hobbit_, Part Two: Return to Bag End
I have always loved the beyond-the-field-we-know feel of the earlier book; I think it's crucial that we have no real idea how far the Edge of the Wild on the provided map is from Bilbo's hole. And yet it really ought to fit into Middle-Earth. In a perfect world, Tolkien would have succeeded in tweaking the text just enough to make it covertly in accord without spelling it out so much that it moved the actual narrative style from the original tradition for this sort of tale to the one he would later invent. He wrote entire scenes in 1960 that were never published until Rateliff's History that can and should be regarded as canonical (they bought supplies in Bree, including lots of pipe-weed, and camped on the east side of Weathertop). One can put all this information in to one's head and imagine such a Platonic ideal of the text, but its actual execution would be stylistically challenging and probably technically impossible without redrawing the LOTR map (Mirkwood needs to much wider and the Iron Hills needs to be much closer to Erebor, and even with a re-drawn map the moons might defeat you).
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I was asking why Azog should have been considered a sub-Maiar spirit rather than simply a badass Orc, but perhaps the appendices will answer that question.
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If you find the source of "The Drowned Moon" let us know. That's one hell of a story.
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Yes. Drums, drums in the deep. We cannot get out. That's chilling.
If you find the source of "The Drowned Moon" let us know. That's one hell of a story.
Will do.
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That's wonderful. I had a Latin teacher in high school who used to sacrifice Twinkies at the beginning of class, to see if it would be a dies fas or nefas. One day the Twinkie was opened and the entrails were dripping red. Nefas, without a doubt. There was a pop quiz.
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I like that. It seems to be something that good Latin teachers do--a friend (Someone from college? Or elsewhere?) had a story about Peeps being sacrificed in her Latin class, with a similar result.
Of course, now that I'm posting this I've a sneaking suspicion that I'm going to discover that I've heard this story of yours before, and conflated it with someone else's story of a Peep sacrifice. Just because that's how my luck always goes.
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I have probably told it before.
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I reckon you have. Bhuel, I'd like to believe that many Latin teachers are teaching haruspicy with the sacrifice of junk food.
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I'm really glad to hear that you are reading Derek Walcott.
Omeros, I assume?
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No, various collections of poetry. I read Omeros at Yale for a course I assistant-taught on ancient and modern epics. I really like him.
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Among my prized possessions: a VHS copy of A Maddening Space, the Joseph Brodsky documentary that includes copious footage of Brodsky and Walcott together at Brodsky's farmhouse, discussing poetry over coffee (and, later, other libations).
I envy your access to literate minds.