. Alas, not me

05 June 2017

Wonder Invoked -- On the Uses of Enchantment



Trying to find my room on day one of Mythmoot



The theme of the most recent Mythmoot --  held just this past weekend in the Khazad-dûm-like corridors of the nevertheless comfortable and welcoming National Conference Center, where the fish entrees were always, fittingly, tasty --  was 'invoking wonder.' To be honest, my eye is a bit jaundiced when it comes to themes, which inspire me to think of (un-)motivational posters about the unstoppable power of one's dreams. But I am too much of a romantic to be anything but an easy prey to cynicism.

And yet I knew exactly where the fair folk of Mythmoot were coming from when they spoke of the importance of wonder and the first moments in their lives that they could recall experiencing it. For me that moment came in or just after September 1966, when I heard the words "Space, the final frontier...." for the first time.  There was something about the music and the way William Shatner said these words that moved me, that opened vistas of space and time for me the way the words "Eala Earendel, engla beorhtast" did for Tolkien, and "Balder the beautiful is dead, is dead" did for C. S. Lewis.

Many years later, in an interview after Kirk died in Star Trek: Generations, William Shatner said of the moment of Kirk's death on screen that Kirk "faced death as he had faced all those aliens, which was a mixture of awe and wonderment...." Shatner also said that it did not come through on the screen. It did for me. It was perfectly clear to me, just as the sense of awe and wonder with which Kirk approached "all those aliens" always had been. There were quite a few such moments over the years. There was "second star on the right and straight on till morning at the end of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country; there was Kirk's "young, I feel young" at the end of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.


But for me perhaps the most evocative is that sine qua non of Shatner imitations, that speech both famous and infamous, as beloved as belittled, from the episode Return to Tomorrow:



For me, and for my memory, wonder began here. But it's come in a thousand different forms since then, in experiences as well as in books.

  • That beautiful late summer afternoon over two decades ago, as our boat approached the harbor. The was setting sun before us, and the land's violet shadow reaching out towards us. It was drowsy and balmy and I was standing by the transom to enjoy the breeze. My eyes were unfocused but looking over the side at the swells we were soaring through. Then something else moved that wasn't the water. Beside us a humpback whale crested the surface to take a breath. I gasped. Somewhere in my mind the crew of The Pequod were shouting "she breaches", but all I could do was gape. By the time I was able to say anything to the others on board, who were all in the cabin, the whale was gone. 
  • "And as if in answer there came from far away another note. Horns, horns, horns. In dark Mindolluin's sides they dimly echoed. Great horns of the North wildly blowing. Rohan had come at last." (If you don't recognize these words, you're surely reading the wrong blog.)
  • Five years have past; five summers, with the length
    Of five long winters! and again I hear
    These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
    With a soft inland murmur.—Once again
    Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
    That on a wild secluded scene impress
    Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
    The landscape with the quiet of the sky. (Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey)
  • Every night in a chill Vermont winter, with the snow crunching beneath our feet as Argos and I walked past the dark wood, as the trees popped in the frigid air, and the luminous green curtain of the Northern Lights swayed and shimmered around us.
  • The day I saw an eagle lazily pivot 360 degrees on a wingtip, as if he were doing it just because he could.
  • "It may be laid down as a general rule that if a man begins to sing, no one will take any notice of his song except his fellow human beings. This is true even if his song is surpassingly beautiful. Other men may be in raptures at his skill, but the rest of creation is, by and large, unmoved. Perhaps a cat or a dog may look at him; his horse, if it is an exceptionally intelligent beast, may pause in cropping the grass, but that is the extent of it. But when the fairy sang, the whole world listened to him. Stephen felt clouds pause in their passing; he felt sleeping hills shift and murmur; he felt cold mists dance. He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak a language it understands. In the fairy's song the earth recognized the names by which it called itself" (Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell).
  • Whenever I discover the joy of silence, sitting by my window with a book, listening to the birds singing and the wind in the leaves of the oak trees.
  • That day underwater in Bonaire, as I looked down at my buddy 30 feet below me, and watched his bubbles rise towards me; and when they came within a couple of feet, I realized I could see my reflection in their surface.
  • The description of the history of the dragon's hoard in Beowulf.
  • The adagio of BWV 1060, especially this version
  • How even now, eleven years after she died, I can still feel the softness and warmth of my mother's hand in mine.
  • The still, small voice that comes after the earthquake, the fire, and the whirlwind.
  • The morning star.
  • The Sea, 
  • And the Sea,
  • And the Sea.
I could easily keep going with this list, since the things on it, and a hundred other things like them, and still others of a joy or sorrow too private to tell, are the things that help me keep going. That's what wonder does. It beckons me onward and bids me hope. Following isn't always an easy thing for me. My eyes tend to look back and rest on the things that went wrong. By all rights I should have turned into a pillar of salt long ago. Yet maybe there's a place where wonder can help to balance past and future. It's a hope like this that has always made me so fond of one particular poem in The Lord of the Rings. Even as a child reading this book for the first time, and knowing nothing of what it's talking about, this poem about wonder moved me. Whether that makes my soul old or prophetic, I don't know. 
I sit beside the fire and think
of all that I have seen
of meadow-flowers and butterflies
in summers that have been; 
Of yellow leaves and gossamer
in autumns that there were,
with morning mist and silver sun
and wind upon my hair. 
I sit beside the fire and think
of how the world will be
when winter comes without a spring
that I shall ever see. 
For still there are so many things
that I have never seen:
in every wood in every spring
there is a different green. 
I sit beside the fire and think
of people long ago
and people who will see a world
that I shall never know. 
But all the while I sit and think
of times there were before,
I listen for returning feet
and voices at the door.

22 May 2017

Things You Find In Grammar Books




From A Guide to Old English, sixth edition (2001) by Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson.

...the O[ld] E[nglish verb distinguished only two tenses ... the present and the preterite. Hence ... the two simple tenses are often used to express complicated temporal relationships. This is one of the things which made Professor Tolkien once say in a lecture that most people read OE poetry much more quickly than did the Anglo-Saxon minstrel, reciting or reading aloud as he was to an audience which needed time to pick up the implications of what he was saying. And this would apply, not only to the subject-matter, especially to the hints and allusion which frequently had great significance, but also to the relationship between paratactic sentences ... and to the actual relationship in time between two actions both of which were described by a simple tense of a verb. 
(108, emphasis added)

Most people? 

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Conditions expressed by the word-order V[erb].-S[ubject] without a conjunction -- e.g., 'Had I plenty of money, I would be lying in the sun in Bermuda' -- occasionally occur in OE prose.
(99)

A sentence clearly composed in winter by someone not getting rich from writing an Old English grammar.

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'It has already been pointed out in § 179.4 that unreality is timeless in OE' (109)

§ 179.4 reads:
and þæt wisete eac weroda Drihten
þæt sceolde unc Adame yfele gewurðan
ymb þæt heofonrice, þær ic ahte minra handa geweald
'and the Lord of Hosts also knew that things would turn out badly between Adam and me about that heavenly kingdom, if I had control of my hands.'
...[the sentence] here might refer to something which is impossible at the time when Satan spoke -- the implication being 'if only I had control of my hands now, but I haven't'. But it could also be translated 'God knew that trouble would arise between Adam and me if I were to have control of my hands'.
.... Does this interpretation mean that there was a possibility that Satan might have control of his hands ... or that such a thing was impossible when God spoke? The issue here is complicated by questions of God's foreknowledge, though perhaps our own knowledge of the story enables us to dismiss the latter possibility. But enough has been said to make it clear that the Anglo-Saxon 'rule' that 'unreality is timeless' is not without its advantages.
(109, emphasis added)

Nothing, and I mean nothing, screws with the mood of a verb like questions of divine foreknowledge. Had Apollo only used the subjunctive, Oedipus might have been lying in the sun in Bermuda.


Toxic Advice from C. S. Lewis


In The Discarded Image, his otherwise marvelous introduction to the medieval model of the world, C. S. Lewis tells us:
Mercury produces quicksilver. Dante gives his sphere to beneficent men of action. Isidore, on the other hand, says this planet is called Mercurius because he is the patron of profit (mercibus praeest). Gower says that the man born under Mercury will be 'studious' and ' in writinge curious', 
bot yit with somdel besinesse
his hert is set upon richesse. 
(Confessio, vn, 765.)
The Wife of Bath associates him especially with clerks (D 706). In Martianus Capella's De Nuptiis he is the bridegroom of Philologia - who is Learning or even Literature rather than what we call 'philology'. And I am pretty sure that 'the Words of Mercury' contrasted with 'the Songs of Apollo' at the end of Love's Labour's Lost are 'picked', or rhetorical prose. It is difficult to see the unity in all these characteristics. ' Skilled eagerness' or 'bright alacrity' is the best I can do. But it is better just to take some real mercury in a saucer and play with it for a few minutes. That is what 'Mercurial' means. 
The Discarded Image, 107-08.
Better to play with mercury?

07 May 2017

Dreams of Beowulf




Sometimes I have the coolest dreams.

The other night I fell asleep at my desk (as one does) leaning on my hands, trying to hold my head up and stay awake, so I could finish my daily reading in Beowulf.  First I entered that strange state where I am just awake enough to know that my eyes are closed, but I am unable to open them, no matter how I try. 

Often, even when flat on my back reading in bed I can stay in this state for a while, and have dreams while still holding up my book and aware that I am doing so. Sometimes I will wake up again and read a little while longer, until my eyes close once more.

But this night I dreamt that my head sank, slowly and irresistibly, until my face was resting on my notebook where I write out the text and vocabulary. Still in the dream, I awoke to find that the lines of the poem were now written on my face. Somehow I was now standing looking at myself in the bathroom mirror, tracing the lines of black ink with my fingers. Somehow I knew they wouldn't wash off.

I don't much like tattoos, but this one I was okay with, especially since that day's lines touched on Beowulf's fight with the dragon.


05 May 2017

Aglæca

 Grendel © John Howe



There was just something about the word aglæca -- 'awesome opponent, ferocious fighter' as the DOE defines it -- that seemed familiar.  From the first time I encountered it in Beowulf, it rang a bell. There the poet most frequently uses it to describe Grendel or the Dragon as, according to the gloss in Klaeber, 'one inspiring awe or misery, formidable one, afflicter, assailant, adversary, combatant' (italics original):
ac se æglæca    ehtende wæs,
deorc deaþscua    duguþe ond geogoþe
seomade ond syrede; 
but the æglæca   was after them,
a dark death shadow,    warriors old and young
he lay for and ambushed; 
(Beowulf 159-61)
Elsewhere we find it used of Satan or sundry devils, in a way that combines their characteristic wretchedness and hostility:
Satan seolua ran    ond on susle gefeol,
earm æglece. 
Satan himself ran    and fell into Hell,
wretched æglæca.
(Christ and Satan 711-12)
And:
                                    Blace hworfon
scinnan forscepene,    sceaðan hwearfedon,
earme æglecan,    geond þæt atole scref
for ðam anmedlan    þe hy ær drugon.
                                    They turned black,
spirits transformed,     the devils wandered,**
the wretched aglæca,   through that horrid pit
because of the pride    they had formerly shown. 
(Christ and Satan, 71-73)
Beowulf and the Dragon ©John Howe
Even when the word is used, for example, of Beowulf himself, it stresses ferocity and hostility, as when the poet describes both Beowulf and the Dragon with it:

                              Næs ða long to ðon
þæt ða aglæcean    hy eft gemetton.

                                 It was not so long
before the æglæca    met each other again.
(Beowulf 2591-92)

So, clearly, the word describes a fierce opponent who inspires awe and is sometimes also seen as wretched. This would all certainly apply to Grendel, Satan, and the devils, if not to Beowulf and the Dragon. Now, as I said, there was always something about this word that seemed familiar, but it wasn't until the other night that I made the connection and realized of whom it made me think.  Both because of the harsh, guttural sound of the word and the qualities of those it describes, aglæca reminds me of Uglúk, leader of the Uruk-Hai in The Two Towers

I am quite well aware that this suggestion is entirely circumstantial. It may well be completely wrong. I haven't been able to find any direct evidence, but it seemed an intriguing possibility that I thought worth mentioning. I would welcome any evidence, for or against, as well as notice of any scholarly treatment I may have missed. 



**Here is one case in which all those who wander are indeed lost.

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