John D. Rateliff's Blog, page 74

Lost Dave Sutherland Art

So, here's an example of something turning up unexpectedly. I knew I had a drawing by Dave Sutherland someplace, and I thought it was his picture of Orcus, but it's been misplaced for years.

And now it's turned up. It was among some other misc. TSR art in a box full of calendars --mostly old Tolkien calendars (lots and lots of these) but with some TSR/D&D calendars as well from Lake Geneva days, which must be how they wound up where I found them. Now that they've resurfaced I've put them together with the slender pile of other TSR art so I'll know where it is henceforward.
The Art itself is a long narrow strip, 8 3/4 inches long by 2 1/2 inches tall.






The piece itself is not signed but the matting it came in is. I think Dave, at my request, signed it when I bought it (i.e. the signature dates from 1996, not 1976).
At that night's CTHUHU game I consulted some of my friends from TSR days and one of them, Jeff G., identified it within a matter of minutes as coming from ELDRITCH WIZARDRY, Supplement III to the original three-booklet first edition of D&D. Sure enough, there it is on the bottom of page 45, illustrating the Artifact Queen Ehliss's Marvelous Nightingale.  Since the published version is shrunk down to just 4 1/2 inches by 1 1/4 inch, the reproduction loses a lot of the detail in the cross hatching et al. I can even make out some light blue underdrawing on the original.

As for how I came to have such a thing, that's due to that reprehensible charity auction in December of 1996, when upper management at TSR organized an auction to raise money from their employees for some good cause (I forget what), knowing that they were going to be laying off a significant portion of those employees the end of that week.

From what I can tell, this is one of the two oldest pictures of D&D's Orcus, the other (which I assume predates it) being on page 35 of the same book.


So there it is: unexpected, but welcome. Now to look for a suitable frame and a place to hang it out of the reach of bouncy cats.  It's good to have this as a memento of someone I knew, and liked, and respected.

--John R.

Reliques of WisCons Past

So, more time spent straightening in the Box Room means more things turn up. Some I'm deliberately searching for (I have a shortlist of four or five so far elusive items), others I'd forgotten about until they show up mixed in with other unrelated stuff in one of a multitude of miscellaneous boxes. An example of the latter is a cassette tape recording a panel at the 1986 WisCon over in Madison. The topic was Tolkien's Posthumously Published Work, which we seem to have divided into scholarly works (translations and editions of medieval texts), children's works (Mr. Bliss, Fr. Xmas), and items belonging to the legendarium (The Silmarillion and all that).

While the topic is of perennial interest, more interesting to me in this particular case are the participants: Jared Lobdell, Verlyn Flieger, Richard West, and me.

Haven't had a chance yet to do more than make sure the tape's not mislabeled and that it's still playable (happy to say the answer is good on both counts).  Once I've had a chance to listen to it all the way through a time or two I shd be making another post commenting on this relique of a nearly vanished past: the years from about 1982 through 1989 when Tolkien scholars gathered from all over the area to spend a weekend in camaraderie in conjunction with that year's WisCon. Good times and, on the whole, fondly remembered.

--John R.

Good Omens petition

So, I came late to the GOOD OMENS Petition story, but wanted to contribute my bit.

When twenty thousand people signed a petition demanding that Netflix take down the Terry Pratchett/Neil Gaiman six-part series GOOD OMENS, they overlooked the fact that it's not on Netflix: it's on Amazon.

It's like demanding Coke cancel a flavor of Pepsi.

Here's a quick overview

https://www.vulture.com/2019/06/christians-petition-netflix-to-cancel-amazons-good-omens.html

and a more detailed piece

https://variety.com/2019/tv/news/good-omens-christian-petition-amazon-prime-netflix-1203249420/


Checking out their website, we find the group involved, Return to Order, is miffed that after months of posting various petitions trying to get attention for their extremist agenda* they've finally succeeded, only to make a humiliating blunder in a very public way.

Here's the group's website

https://www.returntoorder.org

and their spokesman's comment on the current fiasco

https://www.returntoorder.org/2019/06/why-did-the-liberal-media-notice-and-ignore-this-petition/


That so many of their followers signed the thing suggests the people who sign their petitions do so blindly, without either reading or thinking about what they're supporting. That a revised petition (redirected against Amazon) got just about the same number of signatures makes me think that number is v. close to their website's total audience.

What's more disturbing is that the website's purpose seems to be to drum up sales for a book (also called RETURN TO ORDER). It's hard to avoid the suspicion that the folks who generate and circulate this stuff are among those in the reprehensible business of making money off of God. Particularly repellent among the earlier posts on their website is a post that crows over the failure of a plan to feed the poor because it was "socialistic".


I admit I have my own reservations about GOOD OMENS. The book is one of my least favorite works by either author, both of whom are among my favorite writers for others of their works.**
And the many, many years it spent in development (nearly thirty) did not bode well. The (mini)series itself had some shortcomings: the scenes with the kids were the low point of the show, closely followed by those with the modern-day witch and also the crusty old witchfinder. I could sum up my reservations by saying that for me this was a six-part series that wd have been improved by being trimmed to five parts.

That said, the two leads were superb. This is the best I've ever seen David Tennant (as Hell's agent Crowley, the serpent from The Garden), and Michael Sheen is even better as his angelic counterpart,  Aziraphale. And the storytelling was great, especially when it focused on the two main characters. They even managed to get in the music by Queen --a toss off running joke in the original book, here elevated into a recurring theme.  The use of humor to critique some of Xianity's more problematic teachings --the very thing the 'Return to Order' lot denounced-- is the work's greatest strength; it reminds me, and in a good way, of Twain's Papers of the Adam Family, CAPTAIN STORMFIELD'S VISIT TO HEAVEN, and his (posthumously published) LETTERS FROM THE EARTH, all three of which can be found in the collection THE BIBLE ACCORDING TO MARK TWAIN (ed. Baetzhold & McCullough, 1995).

The series: Recommended.
The petition: not so much.


--John R.
--now back in Kent.


*they seem to view the greatest threat to Xianity and the world today to be not hunger or hatred or violence but novelty-item Jesus toilet seats.

**I'd go so far as to say I think Gaiman the best living author of fantasy, while I've read all but a handful of Pratchett's many books.

What is this?

So, on the light by the front door of the place I'm staying there's a most unusual structure. You can see it dangling from the bottom right corner, shaped somewhat like a tiny hot-air balloon with the opening at the bottom.

It's clearly a nest of some kind, but what kind of creature made it? It's too small for a bat or even the smallest bird.




My first thought was that it might be a dirt-dobber, though an unusual one. But cautiously touching it reveals its not made of clay dobbing, as I thought, but grey paper, which makes me think it's some kind of solitary wasp. At any rate it's not doing anyone any harm.

Thanks to Janice K. for the photo.

--John R.

C. S. Lewis and the Munich Crisis

So, I've been reading through Stephanie Derrick's new book, THE FAME OF C. S. LEWIS: A CONTROVERSIALIST'S RECEPTION IN BRITAIN AND AMERICA (2018), which draws a strong distinction between Lewis's reputation in the US, where he's mainly thought of as a children's author and an Xian author, vs the UK, where he's primarily considered an academic and 'controversialist' (in the mode of Chesterton, Belloc, and Orwell).

There's much food for thought in what I've read so far (about a quarter of the whole), but one passage in particular stands out. At the time of the Munich crisis in 1938, a fellow Magdalen don, Bruce McFarlane, noted the unusual unanimous feeling among all the Magdalen dons in opposing the pact:

The unanimity of dons is quite unprecedented. Even the President is sound. There's only one Chamberlain supporter in Magdalen—Lewis who is so otherworldly that he thinks the Munich settlement a victory for self-determination. I suggested the same treatment for Ulster & he was quite shocked.[Derrick p. 55; emphasis mine]
I'm not really sure what to make of this -- whether Lewis was one among the many who thought the prime minister had just achieved Peace in Our Time, or this shd be marked down as an example of just how clueless and ill-informed Lewis was on current events,* or that he here, as so often, was just being a contrarian.

--JDR

*His brother records having once had a conversation with CSL about the Balkans in which CSL's odd remarks puzzled Warnie mightily, until he realized that CSL thought Tito was the King of Greece.

On the other hand, Lewis came out strongly about Franco's claim that God was on his side in a nasty civil war, so he was capable of reading a complex political situation clearly

I See Lightning Bugs

Or Fireflies, depending on where you hail from.

Last night, coming back to the place we're staying here in Rockford just after twilight, we were lucky that the lightning bugs were just coming out. It was pretty much perfect viewing conditions: warm night, gathering dark, and a total lack of mosquitos.

--John R.
current reading: The Fame of C. S. Lewis

Weird Tolkien (IV). Morgoth Rapes the Sun

So, there are many stories about the Sun-Maiden (usually called Arien or Urwendi) in Tolkien's legendarium, most of which cohere together pretty well, the most familiar of these being that found in THE SILMARILLION. But from very far back in the legendarium come hints that the sun is in some way diminished or damaged (I'm thinking in particular of the BLT's prophesized Rekindling of the Magic Sun), a point Tolkien stresses in his LETTER TO WALDMAN.*

What strikes me as extraordinary in the Myths Transformed section of MORGOTH'S RING (HME.X.380-381 & 131-132) is that how straightforwardly Tolkien presents Morgoth's rape of Arie, the Maia who ruled the sun, who we are told is "the most ardent and beautiful of all the spirits that had entered into Ea with [Varda]".  Tolkien is usually reticent about such matters, but not here:

. . . afire at once with desire and anger, [Melkor] went to Asa
[The Sun] and he spoke to Arie, saying: 'I have chosen thee,
 and thou shalt be my spouse, even as Varda is to Manwe,
 and together we shall wield all splendour and majesty. Then the kingship of Arda shall be mine in deed as in right, and thou shalt be the partner of my glory.'
But Arie rejected Melkor and rebuked him, saying:
 'Speak not of right, which thou hast long forgotten. Neither for thee nor by thee alone was Ea made; and
  thou shalt not be King of Arda. Beware therefore;
 for there is in the heart of [Asa] a light in which
thou hast no part, and a fire which will not serve thee.
 Put not out thy hand to it. For though thy potency
may destroy it, it will burn thee and thy brightness
 will be made dark.'

Melkor did not heed her warning, but cried in his wrath:
  'The gift which was withheld I take!' and he ravished Arie,
 desiring both to abase her and to take into himself her powers.
 Then the spirit of Arie went up like a flame of anguish and wrath,
 and departed for ever from Arda; and the Sun was bereft
 of the Light of  Varda, and was stained by the assault of Melkor.
And [the Sun] being for a long while without rule . . . grievous
 hurt was done to Arda . . .  until with long toil the Valar made
 a new order. But even as Arie foretold, Melkor was burned
 and his brightness darkened, and he gave no more light,
 but light pained him exceedingly
 and he hated it.

Nonetheless Melkor would not leave Arda in peace . . .
[HME.X.381]

I think this is unique in Tolkien, the only rape scene in the legendarium, and I'm surprised more has not been written about it. For a start, it says worlds that it's only the most evil being in the whole subcreation we are told commits such a deed. And we are told that it was Melkor's intent to "abase" her.

This scene is also remarkable in that it could be read as the only account on record of deliberate murder by one Vala/Maia of another, Arie being so traumatized that she discorporates and leaves Arda for ever.


There is certainly bride-by-capture, evidenced sinisterly in "Shadow Bride" and light-heartedly in Bombadil's seizing Goldberry, with Eol & Aredhel somewhere in-between (we are told that Aredhel was 'not wholly unwilling').  The most famous such episode, appearing in one of the Great Tales (and thus in a key component part of the legendarium) and prominent within that tale through many iterations, is of course Morgoth's decision to force himself upon Luthien when he sees her dancing in his hall, an act alluded to but not explicitly stated.  Luthien saves herself through her spell of sleep. But none of these have the directness and brutality of the Melkor/Sun-Maiden scene.


*[Tolkien's Note:] A marked difference here between these legends and most others is that the Sun is not a divine symbol, but a second-best thing, and the 'light of the Sun' (the world under the sun) become terms for a fallen world, and a dislocated imperfect vision.

--John R
--current reading: Raymond Edwards (plugging along), Stephanie Derrick (well into the second section now)

Weird Tolkien (III). Melkor Makes the Moon

So, wanting to refresh my memory of Tolkien's account of the Making of the Sun and Moon for my Flat-Earth paper at Kalamazoo, I went to the pre-eminent Tolkien astronomer, Kristine Larsen, who pointed me to her paper in the 2005 Aston conference proceedings, where she had addressed these very issues.*

I was familiar with the BOOK OF LOST TALES/SILMARILLION story about the Moon being made out of the last fruit or flower of The White Tree of Valinor but had not made any study of the variant legends, and so had missed the odd story told in Text C* of the AINULINDALE (HME.X) in which it is actually Melkor and not the Valar who makes the moon.
Melkor . . . gathered himself together and summoned all his might and his hatred, and he said: 'I will rend the Earth asunder, and break it, and none shall possess it.'
But this Melkor could not do, for the Earth may not be wholly destroyed against its fate; nevertheless Melkor took a portion of it, and seized it for his own, and reft it away; and he made of it a little earth of his own, and it wheeled round about in the sky, following the greater earth wheresoever it went, so that Melkor could observe thence all that happened below, and could send forth his malice and trouble the seas and shake the lands . . . [T]he Valar assaulted the stronghold of Melkor, and cast him out, and removed it further from the Earth, and it remains in the sky, Ithil whom Men call the Moon. There is both blinding heat and cold intolerable, as might be looked for in any work of Melkor, but at least it is clean, yet utterly barren; and nought liveth there, nor ever shall . . . [HME.X.41-42] 
Among the many depictions of the Moon Tolkien made, going all the way back to his 1914 Earendel poem, I think this might be the strangest. But perhaps that's only because it's so much at odds with the familiar Lamps > Trees > Sun-ship and Moon-ship stories. Perhaps if this version had appeared, with variation, since the BLT in various iterations of the myth it too wd seem the established moon-myth in Tolkien's cosmogony.  Certainly there are many moments in his Plot Notes to LotR when Tolkien comes up with what seems to us now just wrong which only feel that way because he did, decisively, decide to go a different way instead.

--John R.--currently at Rockford--current reading: Derrick.--visited a Barnes & Nobel today, my first time in a bookstore this week (last week's being a downtown Williamstown bkstr and the gift show of an art museum).


*Kristine Larsen: "A Little Earth of His Own: Tolkien's Lunar Creation Myths",  The Ring Goes Ever On: Proceedings of the Tolkien 2005 Conference  

Weird Tolkien (II). Valinor is North America

So, THE SHIBBOLETH isn't that hard to get, appearing in THE PEOPLES OF MIDDLE-EARTH  (HME.XII) as it does, but how about J. R. R. TOLKIEN, L'EFFIGIE DES ELFES?*

This French-language publication prints some short pieces by Tolkien, in English, the most interesting of which to me is "The Numenorean Catastrophe & End of 'Physical Arda' ". This asks the question: what became of Valinor/Aman after the enormous upheaval of Numenor's destruction? An excerpt shows Tolkien's line of thinking, leading to conclusions which I don't think I'm alone in finding surprising:

Is Aman 'removed' or destroyed at Catastrophe?
It was physical. Therefore it could not be removed,without remaining visible as part or Arda or as anew satellite! It must either remain as a landmassbereft of its former inhabitants or be destroyed.
I think now . . . best that it should remain a physicallandmass (America!). But as Manwe had alreadysaid to the Numenoreans: 'It is not the land that ishallowed . . . but . . . the dwellers there' -- the Valar.
It would just become an ordinary land, an additionto Middle-earth (the European-African-Asiaticcontiguous land-mass) . . . 

Tolkien is unambiguous here, but I find it hard to get my mind around Valinor and Elvenhome, bereft of their former inhabitants, becoming North and South America.

For the part about Aman becoming a new satellite, see my next post.


--John R.
--current reading: continuing the Derrick, which looks more and more like a keeper

*Le Feuille de la Compagnie, No.3, ed. Michael Devaux. I am grateful to Charles Noad for drawing this passage to my attention.

Weird Tolkien (I). Feanor's Seventh Son

Feanor's seventh son never reached Middle-earth
So, as I said in my last post, there are times reading through the late material in the last three volumes of the HISTORY OF MIDDLE-EARTH when I come across passages that surprise me because they're so much at variance with the established story as I know it from the 1977 SILMARILLION and other more familiar sources.

Take for example Tolkien's statement that only six of the Seven Sons of Feanor ever set foot on Middle-earth.

The passage in question appears in a philological essay, THE SHIBBOLETH OF FEANOR, which is obstinately about a sound-shift in Quenya that got caught up in the power-politics of the day, especially the cult of personality Feanor built up around himself, but wanders off into nomenclature (re. mother-names and father-names).

According to the SHIBBOLETH, when Feanor burned the ships upon arriving in Beleriand, he did not realize that his youngest son had decided to spend the night aboard and consequently burned to death in his sleep. Feanor, demonstrating his increasingly irrational behavior, responds not by any recognition of responsibility or expression of remorse for killing his own son but instead orders that no one ever speak of this to him again.

So we're left with two explanations of this. If this passage represents Tolkien's final thoughts on the topic, then every appearance of Amrod from this point onward in the SILMARILLION narrative shd be altered to remove any mention of Amrod's from them.*

Or, a more interesting but considerably more unsettling option, we can note that the from this point onward in the SILMARILLION narrative the twins always appear together, one never acting without the other inseparably by his side, and conclude that only Amras is actually there, Amrod always accompanying him like an imaginary friend. I like this option best because of its narrative economy, and it certainly underscores the defiance of reality that underlies the whole Noldorian war-on-Morgoth project.


Either way, it demonstrates one of Tolkien's concerns in his latter days: to infuse some of the minor characters in the legendarium with personality.**


--John R.
--current location: enroute from Boston to Rockford by way of Milwaukee and Harvard
--current reading: THE FAME OF C.S.Lewis by Stephanie L. Derrick (promising)

*here I'm using Amras to mean the sixth son and older twin and Amrod the seventh son and younger twin, as they appear in the 1977 SILMARILLION, Tolkien having gone back-and-forth in the SHIBBOLETH over which names belonged to which.

**another good example being two of Finrod's brothers, Aegnor who is given a little personality late in the development of the legedarium by the addition of a reference to his love for a mortal woman, but not Angrod who is left undefined.