Dappled Things

 My sweet friend Esther started a blog and named it after the same Gerard Manley Hopkins poem that my blog's title comes from. Check it out!

“Goblin Feet”

“The Meeting of Oberon and Titania,” Arthur Rackham (1908)
Wikimedia Commons

 

“Goblin Feet”
~ J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973)

I am off down the road
Where the fairy lanterns glowed
And the little pretty flitter-mice are flying:
A slender band of gray
It runs creepily away
And the hedges and the grasses are a-sighing.
The air is full of wings,
And of blundery beetle-things
That warn you with their whirring and their humming.
O! I hear the tiny horns
Of enchanted leprechauns
And the padded feet of many gnomes a-coming!

O! the lights! O! the gleams! O! the little tinkly sounds!
O! the rustle of their noiseless little robes!
O! the echo of their feet—of their happy little feet!
O! their swinging lamps in little starlit globes.
I must follow in their train
Down the crooked fairy lane
Where the coney-rabbits long ago have gone,
And where silvery they sing
In a moving moonlit ring
All a-twinkle with the jewels they have on.
They are fading round the turn
Where the glow-worms palely burn
And the echo of their padding feet is dying!
O! it’s knocking at my heart—
Let me go! O! let me start!
For the little magic hours are all a-flying.

O! the warmth! O! the hum! O! the colours in the dark!
O! the gauzy wings of golden honey-flies!
O! the music of their feet—of their dancing goblin feet!
O! the magic! O! the sorrow when it dies.


~*~ ~*~ ~*~

Written on 27-28 April 1915, shortly before leaving for the War, for his future wife who “loved tales of ‘spring and flowers and trees, and little elfin people.’”

Obviously this is nothing like his portrayal of elves and goblins that fans of The Lord of the Rings are familiar with and Tolkien himself later tried to distance himself from this very Victorian painting of the little people — in 1971 when he was asked permission to include “Goblin Feet” in an anthology, he said, “I wish the unhappy little thing, representing all that I came (so soon after) to fervently dislike, could be buried for ever.”

Tolkien’s first encounter with fighting was in France, in the Battle of the Somme, which is remembered as the bloodiest battle ever fought in history. On the first day of the battle nineteen weeks before Tolkien arrived, nineteen thousand British troops were killed. By the time the battle was over more than eight hundred thousand of the British had been killed.

[…]

Tolkien never forgot the brutality and horror of the battle. Many years later he drew on these memories to create his own lands. The blackened landscape of Mordor, and the Battle of Helm’s Deep were both based on The Battle of Somme.

(Information and quotes found at the Tolkien Library.)

 ~*~ ~*~ ~*~

This post first published April 17, 2008.

We watched 1917 (such a good movie!) a few days ago and it has me thinking about that war and especially how it changed the men who fought it. Tolkien was a very different man after the Great War, wasn’t he?

Random thoughts while reading The Divine Comedy

 In her introduction to Hell, Dorothy Sayers quotes a passage from Dante’s Vita Nuova where he describes how he felt the first time Beatrice ever spoke to him. “Dante is describing the effect upon him of Beatrice’s ‘salutation’; and it should be remembered that the Italian word salute means not only ‘salutation’ but also ‘salvation’.” Think now of how Charlotte greeted Wilbur in Charlotte’s Web. “Salutations!”

Moving through the Cantos of Inferno, I got the distinct impression we were moving through the celestial spheres—or rather through an infernal reflection of the spheres. That shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did.

I kept wondering why this is called a Comedy when it feels more like a Romance, then I noticed Anthony Esolen’s footnote to I.XVI.129: “For writers of the Middle Ages, a comedy is a song written in humble style . . . wherein the main character begins in grief and trouble and ends in happiness.” It’s good to be aware that terminology has changed over the centuries.

Layers of meaning

I originally wrote the post below in April of 2019, but this past week I reread Macbeth for a class I’m teaching in Medieval cosmology and something new occurred to me this time through.

The story of the woman with the lap full of chestnuts can be looked at it from a different angle. A witch came to her wanting to take her blessings, and the woman, recognizing the evil creature, told the witch to leave, and she left. The witch attacked the husband’s ship, but she couldn’t do any permanent harm:

Though his bark cannot be lost,
Yet it shall be tempest-tossed.

Evil influences can be refused. Macbeth and his lady could have rejected their evil impulses, but they chose not to.

And in Medieval and Renaissance literature, those two meanings (this one, and the one in the post below) can both be true at the same time. In his Anatomy of Criticism, Northrup Frye calls this the “principle of manifold or ‘polysemous’ meaning.”

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

First impressions of Shakespeare's Macbeth, Act I, Scenes 1-5

That’s an awfully boring title, isn’t it? I couldn’t think of anything clever. :-p

The kids and I are reading Macbeth for our Medieval and Renaissance Literature class with Angelina Stanford, and I had some random things I wanted to write down before I forgot them, so here they are.

The Weird Sisters, Henry Fuseli, c. 1783

First Witch:
A sailor’s wife had chestnuts in her lap
And munched and munched and munched. “Give me,” quoth I.
“Aroint thee, witch,” the rump-fed runnion cries.
Her husband’s to Aleppo gone, master o’ th’ Tiger;
But in a sieve I’ll thither sail,
And, like a rat without a tail,
I’ll do, I’ll do, and I’ll do.

This sailor must be must be quite a man, given the trip he’s on, the ship he masters, and the fact that the Witch says she can’t sink his ship. She can, however, curse the husband of this foolish woman.

I’m saying she’s foolish because here she is with her lap full of blessings gobbling them so greedily that she won’t even share when an old woman asks for some.

If you know anything about fairy tales, you know that’s a huge mistake, a mistake of wicked stepmother proportions.

The chestnuts caught my attention though because so often the chestnut tree is used in literature as a symbol of happiness and prosperity. If you know anything about Macbeth, you know that this most definitely isn’t a story about happiness and prosperity.

Let me go back to the beginning.

The Tragedy of Macbeth opens with the stage direction, “Thunder and lightening. Enter three Witches.” These three make a plan to meet with Macbeth before the day is over (to tell him he will be king, as we later learn), and saying, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” they exit, and Scene 1 ends.

Given that the story begins with upheaval in nature, I’m going to assume that whatever disorder that set off this tragedy has already happened.

They reappear in Scene 3: “Thunder. Enter the three Witches.” The First Witch tells of her encounter with the sailor’s wife, which Asimov says has nothing at all to do with the play—it’s just there to please King James I, who “considered himself a particular expert on the matter of witchcraft,” and had “written a book called Demonology, in which he advocated . . . the severest measures against witches.” [Isaac Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare: The English Plays, page 151]

Asimov, you’re a genius and I love you dearly, but you completely missed the boat on this one. Shakespeare wasn’t just a suck-up. He was an artist and he knew exactly what he was doing here.

(Before going on, I want to point out that these three are elsewhere in the play called the weyward/weird/wyrd sisters, so I think we’re supposed to think of them as being similar to the Fates of classical mythology, or the Norns of Norse mythology, priestesses who told the future.)

Now back to the chestnuts. Chestnuts provide a lot of nutrition and calories in a tiny little package, so they’ve always symbolised things like prosperity and fertility. Because they fall in such abundance during the harvest season, they also symbolise foresight and long life. Here’s something new I learned: They also symbolise the ability to receive ancient wisdom.

So, we have a prosperous woman (that she’s “rump-fed” tells us this) enjoying the bounty of nature, who refuses an old woman’s request for food, resulting in her husband being cursed. In Scene 5, we meet Lady Macbeth, who is as unnatural a woman as it’s possible to be.

I don’t have any conclusions exactly, mostly questions and guesses. Was Macbeth already corrupted before he met the Weird Sisters? I tend to think so, since good people don’t jump head-first into evil. CS Lewis talks about this regarding Mark Studdock’s descent in That Hideous Strength. Macbeth does briefly seem to accept that if he’s meant to be king, it’ll happen without his taking action. But Lady Macbeth must have long since fallen since she’s so quick to push her husband into evil action in order to bring about the prophecy.

Because he's 20 today

. . . and still asking questions . . .

More real bits for Donna and some mothering stuff for Kristen
Yesterday afternoon I dropped my eldest off at the library and took the two younger boys along for the ride. My three-and-a-half-year-old four-year-old asked questions the whole entire trip which I tried really really hard to answer patiently and thoughtfully.

"Mama, how do spiders get in houses?"
"Mama, why are houses old?"
"Mama, what's that place?"
"Mama, what bus is that?"
"What persons go on it?"
"Where do they go?"
"Mama, what's that place?"
"Mama, where are we going?"
"Can I go in, too?"
"Mama, what's that's place?"
"What do persons need banks for?"
"Mama, is that a church?"
"Is that a church, too?"
"Why do they make all the churches here?"
"Mama, what's that place?"
"Why did God make wasps?"
"Do Luke cough?"

Though my voice was never raised, by this time having made my third wrong turn, dissolving into hysterics I told him not to ask me any more questions.

Margaret mentioned in a comment below that she had never heard me raise my voice to my children, and though I fail plenty, this is an area where God has really blessed me, so I want to share a couple of things I've learned along the way.

Before I married, I provided after-school care for K4 through 1st graders at a Christian school. On my first day of work, while sitting outside the classroom waiting for the teacher to introduce me, I resolved never to raise my voice to these children, a resolution which was broken on the playground less than an hour into the job when it was time for the kids to line up and go back inside. After work that day I bought myself a whistle that I trained the kids to respond to - one long blast meant "line up," and two short ones meant "stop!" - someone was either about to get hurt or was behaving badly.

After that first day, I never did raise my voice to those children, and by the end of the school year, after spending 25 hours a week with two dozen four to seven year olds, I concluded that God had uniquely gifted me to be a good mommy to a large family.

Ha! Pride goeth before a fall, and successfully managing several small children in a controlled environment for five hours a day is nothing at all like managing one or two small children in a normal house all day, every day, with no weekends off or vacations, but I did learn one valuable lesson that I've put into practice since that time - if at all possible, use a whistle or bell to call the kids when they are too far away or too spread out to speak to them in a normal tone of voice. Over the years we've used different bells to call the family to a meal or to call them in from play. You just don't want yelling to become a habit, or for your kids to be used to hearing your voice raised. That should be saved for extreme emergencies.

The other thing I've learned by experience is that when I do raise my voice in anger or frustration it's almost always because I neglected a problem when it was small and more easily dealt with and didn't get around to taking care of it until after it had gotten big enough to make me angry. I've also learned to pay attention when I'm just plain irritable because it's so easy to sound angry or peevish or to respond sarcastically without noticing it. There are days when I have to take a deep cleansing breath and pray quickly, Oh God, HELP! almost every time I open my mouth to speak!

And I will gladly confess that the reason I pay so much attention to this area and work so hard on it is because it's such a weakness for me. Oh how my flesh enjoys the sins of the tongue, and oh how thankful I am that God has heard my many many prayers and is conforming me to the image of his son!

Identify your particular weaknesses early on, and begin working on them soon, before your sin has hurt your children. For me, this means not only curbing angry or sarcastic speech but making the effort to smile and to speak with kindness and gentleness even when I don't feel like it.

And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

Originally posted 21 October 2004

When one book helps you understand another

This morning we were reading Canto 3 of The Faerie Queene Book I, in which the sorcerer Archimago disguises himself as the Redcross Knight after having caused Redcross to mistrust Una and leave her behind.

Una (whom Spenser also calls Truth) has gone to find her knight, and when the disguised Archimago catches up with her, she really believes him to be Redcross. Every time I've read this I've wondered why the character who is identified as the Truth was deceived by this evil man, but today something caught my attention. A little earlier in the canto, Una is compared to the sun . . .

     . . . Her angels face
     As the great eye of heaven shyned bright,
     And made a sunshine in the shadie place;
Did never mortall eye behold such heavenly grace.

. . . and that reminded me of something.

At the beginning of the school year, I read Paradise Lost with Angelina Stanford's Early Modern Literature class. In this story, when Satan escapes from Hell, the first thing he does is to ask Uriel, the angel whose sphere is the sun, for directions to Earth, so that he can see "this new happy race of men," and give praise to God.

   So spake the false dissembler unperceived;
For neither man nor angel can discern
Hypocrisy, the only evil that walks
Invisible, except to God alone,
By his permissive will, through Heav'n and earth:
And oft though wisdom wake, suspicion sleeps
At wisdom's gate, and to simplicity
Resigns her charge, while goodness thinks no ill
Where no ill seems.

(Paradise Lost, Book III, lines 681-689)

The more Great Books you read, the more it improves your ability to understand what you're reading -- they're all talking to one another.

Poetry for Coronatide

“O sweeter than the marriage-feast,

’Tis sweeter far to me,

To walk together to the kirk

With a goodly company!”

The two youngest and I have been reading Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” aloud together since last week, one section per day. We read the final section this morning, where the passage quoted occurs. How appropriate, and how fitting, even though I had only vague memories of the poem when we decided to read it after finishing Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar.

When I asked my kids what they wanted to read next, my 17-year-old said, with a knowing smile, “The Wasteland.” Her older brother was looking through his poetry book to see if it was in there so he could go ahead an mark the place for tomorrow.

“What’s the first line of that?” he said.

“‘April is the cruelest month,’” she said, and we all laughed.

Lent

~ George Herbert (1593-1633)

Welcome deare feast of Lent: who loves not thee,
He loves not Temperance, or Authoritie,
                But is compos’d of passion.
The Scriptures bid us fast; the Church sayes, now:
Give to thy Mother, what thou wouldst allow
                To ev’ry Corporation.

The humble soul compos’d of love and fear
Begins at home, and layes the burden there,
                When doctrines disagree.
He sayes, in things which use hath justly got,
I am a scandall to the Church, and not
                The Church is so to me.

True Christians should be glad of an occasion
To use their temperance, seeking no evasion,
                When good is seasonable;
Unlesse Authoritie, which should increase
The obligation in us, make it lesse,
                And Power it self disable.

Besides the cleannesse of sweet abstinence,
Quick thoughts and motions at a small expense,
                A face not fearing light:
Whereas in fulnesse there are sluttish fumes,
Sowre exhalations, and dishonest rheumes,
                Revenging the delight.

Then those same pendant profits, which the spring
And Easter intimate, enlarge the thing,
                And goodnesse of the deed.
Neither ought other mens abuse of Lent
Spoil the good use; lest by that argument
                We forfeit all our Creed.

It ’s true, we cannot reach Christ’s fortieth day;
Yet to go part of that religious way,
                Is better than to rest:
We cannot reach our Savior’s purity;
Yet are bid, Be holy ev’n as he.
                In both let ’s do our best.

Who goeth in the way which Christ hath gone,
Is much more sure to meet with him, than one
                That travelleth by-ways:
Perhaps my God, though he be far before,
May turn, and take me by the hand, and more
                May strengthen my decays.

Yet Lord instruct us to improve our fast
By starving sin and taking such repast
                As may our faults control:
That ev’ry man may revel at his door,
Not in his parlor; banqueting the poor,
                And among those his soul.