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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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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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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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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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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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If you find the source of "The Drowned Moon" let us know. That's one hell of a story.
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I'm really glad to hear that you are reading Derek Walcott.
Omeros, I assume?
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