U.C. Tondropolis

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Jason Tondro

Education

• PhD Candidate, University of California, Riverside, 2004 - English
• MA, University of California, Riverside, 2003 - English
• Graduate Study, University of Wisconsin, 1999 - Medieval Literature
• Graduate Study, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 1998 - Medieval History and Literature
• BA, University of Nevada, Reno 1990 - Major: English, Minor: History
• High School, La Sierra High School, Riverside, CA 1985

Teaching and Professional Experience

• Fall 2001-Present: University of California, Riverside
• Fall, 2005: English 1C (Comics and Literature; Composition)
  
• Summer, 2005: English 1C (Comics and Literature; Composition)
  
• Spring, 2005: English 1C (Green Eggs and Hamlet; Composition)
• Winter 2005: English 4 (Man As Disease; Composition)
  
• Fall 2004: English 5 (Subject A Composition)
  
• Spring 2004: English 23C (19th century British Lit, Robert Essick, Professor)
• Winter 2004: English 5 (Subject A Composition)
• Fall 2003: English 1D (Subject A Composition Discussion)
• Summer 2003: English 1C (Green Eggs and Hamlet: Composition)
• Spring 2003: English 1C (Green Eggs and Hamlet: Composition
• Winter 2003: English 1B (Dystopian Lit: Composition)
• Fall 2002: English 1C (Green Eggs and Hamlet: Composition)
• Spring 2002: English 1A (23 Celestial Masters: Composition)
• Winter 2002: Religious Studies 005 (Introduction to Asian Religion, Vivian Lee Nyitray, Professor)
• Fall 2001: Chinese Studies 30 (Introduction to Chinese Civilization, Yang Ye Professor) 
  

• 1997-1999: The Front Page, Las Vegas, NV
• News Writer and Editor 
  

• 1997: San Bernardino County School District
• Public School Teacher, San Gorgonio High School

    See also Other Projects for community outreach teaching experience.

Publications





Conference Participation


Offices Held


 Professional Organizations

• Modern Language Association
• Popular Culture Association
• National Association of Comic Art Educators
• SW/Texas Popular Culture Association
• Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association

Other Projects


References


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Denmark's a Prison

Chaucer's Knight's Tale as a Source for Hamlet

 

In this essay I would like to examine the influence of Chaucer's Knight's Tale on Hamlet, with an eye towards considering that play as a "talking back" to Chaucer's narrator figure of the Knight, as a continuation of the story of Palamon and Arcite which ends in a manner more overtly cynical than the Knight's version. My basis for this perception is multi-level, including similarity of plot, of theme, of characterization, and of line. My examination begins with a close look at two key scenes in the play: the wedding scene with Claudius, Gertrude and the prince in Act I scene ii and the climactic duel scene between Hamlet and Laertes in Act V scene ii. These two scenes provide much of the direct poetic link between the two works, and they were my first hint that there may be more of a connection than critics have heretofore acknowledged. I will then shift to Palamon and Arcite and the way in which the relationship of Claudius and his brother King Hamlet, as well as the relationship between the Prince and Laertes, mirrors that of Chaucer's knights. This thesis inherently suggests both Gertrude and Ophelia as "doubles" of Emily, and that also figures in my analysis. Before concluding, I will touch on some of the thematic elements that seem to concern Shakespeare in his treatment of Chaucer, perhaps shedding light on how he interpreted Chaucer and the Knight's Tale in particular. Finally, to carry on the theme of "talking back", I will illustrate how elements of Two Noble Kinsmen suggest that Shakespeare's use of the Knight's Tale in Hamlet was known to his fellow author, John Fletcher, who tries to "quite" Shakespeare much in the same way Shakespeare tries to answer Chaucer's Knight.

That Shakespeare read and was influenced by Chaucer is not an issue to be reasonably questioned. In addition to the obvious genealogy that links Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida to Troilus and Criseyda, and the invocation of Chaucer at the beginning of Two Noble Kinsmen, a play overtly retelling the Knight's Tale, Midsummer Night's Dream features Theseus and a batch of erratic lovers in the woods which is very reminiscent of Knight's Tale. Ann Thompson has made a strong examination of this relationship and calls Midsummer "Shakespeare's first dramatization of the Tale in some respects."[1] She also makes a case for Troilus and Criseyda as a source for Romeo and Juliet.[2] E. Talbot Donaldson finds Sir Thopas to be a poetic source for the action of the Rude Mechanicals and their performance of "Pyramus and Thisbe" in Midsummer [3]while also expanding on the common hunch among scholars that there must be something in common between Falstaff and the Wife of Bath, on principle alone. These references, however, are only the most overt uses of Chaucer by Shakespeare; critics have found verbal borrowings from and thematic echoes of Chaucer in virtually everything Shakespeare wrote, with the notable exception of the sonnets. The Chaucerian works mentioned in these discussions include not just the Tales, but also the Legend of Good Women, Parliament of Foules, Book of the Duchess, House of Fame and even the apocryphal Prophecies of Merlin which Chaucer did not write but which Shakespeare, as well as the rest of Elizabethan society, ascribed to him in Thomas Speght's 1598 and 1602 editions of Chaucer. [4]

The 1598 edition of Speght, the first Chaucer edition since 1561, is particularly important; it presages a run on Chaucer-inspired plays in the period. Henslowe's diary includes Dekker's Fair Constance of Rome and a number of Troilus plays, reinforcing the impression that Chaucer was most highly regarded during this time for his romantic poetry, his comic verse going largely unappreciated despite many frequent jests concerning his general bawdiness. Shakespeare's Troilus is a part of this wave, dating to 1601-1602, and Pistol wonders "Shall I Sir Pandarus of Troy become?" when he is asked to deliver love letters for Falstaff in Merry Wives of Windsor. This helps set the stage for any use of Chaucer in Hamlet, which was written in 1600-1601 immediately previous to Troilus and Cressida. This is during the peak of Chaucer-inspired plays and right after Speght's edition would have brought Chaucer back to the poetic forebrain.

I have already said that Hamlet can be seen as something of a continuation of Knight's Tale. This is a hypothesis suggested by the plots of each work on the most surface level: both stories rely on the marriage of one man to his brother's wife. But while Palamon's marriage to Emelye comes after two thousand lines of poetry and is apparently a happy and successful one, Claudius's wedding with Gertrude immediately precedes the action of Hamlet and is the Prime Mover for one of the most infamous body counts in literature. Moreover, this is not the only time Shakespeare would work in this manner. Look, for example, at the end of Marlowe's second Tamburlaine. The aging king, sensing his weakness, divides up his vast kingdom among his siblings, some of whom are good and loyal, but others of which prove traitorous. King Lear thus becomes Shakespeare's answer to Tamburlaine, breaking down the Scourge of God's triumphant victory-in-death into one of Shakespeare's most profoundly depressing plays. It is tempting to see this as a revisionary act on the part of Shakespeare, a struggle to surpass the literary forefather in the sense that Harold Bloom has detailed in Anxiety of Influence and other works.[5] Such a view, however, requires that Shakespeare be a rather simple-minded critic of Chaucer, a man who, unsatisfied with the saccharine ending of Knight's Tale and then Tamburlaine, sought to add more complexity and depth by treating the topic in what Bloom sees as a more mature fashion. But critics of Chaucer have more recently come to appreciate that author's creation of a literary persona: an affable, humble, and not terribly deep writer who gets all of his best work from other people when, in fact, Chaucer manipulates sources like Boccaccio in ways not only subtle but outright deceptive.[6] If we presume that Shakespeare at least questioned the harmless Geoffrey of the pilgrimage and saw some of the more subversive elements of a work as apparently supportive of the status quo as Knight's Tale, then we can also reject Shakespeare's need to, Oedipus-like, murder his literary father in an effort to surpass him. Instead, we can see Shakespeare quiting not Chaucer proper but the Knight as narrator, taking up Harry Bailey's game in a mood which, while still competitive, also maintains a spirit of brotherhood and company. .

The first scene of Hamlet has always been extraordinary for the way it proves exception to the author's usual practice. In its moody, supernatural start it fails to introduce the title character or his main concern (the over-hasty marriage) and in some of the most well-known film versions of the play [7] it is skipped entirely or reshuffled after scene two, in which Claudius announces his marriage to the Danish court. In that scene, the King of Denmark adopts a role parallel to that of Theseus in Knight's Tale: his own marriage is closely linked to a funeral, he endorses another marriage that is only made possible through a funeral, and he counsels the young prince on the proper form of grief. It may seem contradictory to see a parallel between Claudius and Theseus when the relationship of Claudius and his brother has already been linked to Palamon and Arcite. This is, in fact, symptomatic of Shakespeare's treatment of Knight's Tale; the characters of Palamon, Arcite, Emilye and Theseus seem to each have multiple corollaries in Hamlet as the playwright creates doubles and triples which each reflect on one another. Just as Hamlet has more than the usual allotment of sons who must avenge their fathers (Hamlet, Laertes, Fortinbras) so it has more than one Theseus, more than one Arcite.

Like Theseus in the first lines of Knight's Tale, Claudius's marriage exists in close proximity to a funeral. Chaucer's Theseus has already married before the women of Thebes persuade him on bended knee to go to war to secure the burial of their husbands. In Hamlet, however, the order is reversed and the funeral comes first, the marriage later. Interestingly, this reverse order is also observed in Two Noble Kinsmen, where Shakespeare again puts off Theseus's wedding and creates a king unwilling to forestall his nuptials over the mere decorum of observing grief. The Theseus of Two Noble Kinsmen has more in common here with Claudius than he does with his namesake in Chaucer, a fact which helps us see the relationship between the two plays and the way Kinsmen can be seen as another manipulation of material Shakespeare had already played with ten years previous in Hamlet. I'll return to the link between Hamlet and Two Noble Kinsmen in my discussion of Fletcher.

Similarly, Shakespeare's Theseus has little to say at the climax of his play, giving unusually short shrift to the long and famous  words of advice which Theseus gives to Palamon and the other Athenians at the end of Knight's Tale. Shakespeare's decision to use little of Theseus's speech makes more sense, however, after recognizing that the playwright had already used the speech to introduce another wedding: Claudius's own at the beginning of Hamlet. Here Claudius and Theseus attempt the same feat: to bring happiness out of grief. Claudius's whole kingdom is "contracted in one brow of woe" over the death of the former king, but from this condition he has taken Gertrude to wife with

 

"... defeated joy,

With an auspicious and a dropping eye,

With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage,

In equal scale weighing delight and dole." (Hamlet I ii 10-13)

 
For his part, Theseus urges:

o perfit joy, lastynge evermo." (KnT 3071-3072)

 

To create this joy, he begins where the woe is most concentrated: in the funeral-garbed Palamon and the still-unmarried Emilye.

When we finally meet the Prince of Denmark, 230 lines into his own play, he is conspicuously in mourning. Wearing black a month or two after the death of your father seems perfectly appropriate to an audience, but Claudius sees his son-in-law as something of a wet blanket. Theseus has the same issue when he tries to kick off a wedding at the end of Knight's Tale, for Palamon (the only character whose clothes are described) appears "in blake clothes sorwefully" (2978) seven years after Arcite's death. This act of grief does seem rather unusual: a rhetorical device intended to emphasize the bond between Palamon and his brother.[8] Theseus does not complain of Palamon's mourning though he has cause, contrary to Claudius who has no cause but does complain. The obvious mourning activity also helps bring Arcite's death to the foreground despite the quick passage of seven years; it gives Theseus a target upon which to focus his mood-transforming efforts.

Emilye has little to say at the news of her betrothal to Palamon, a fact which the Knight explains away as the easy adaptability of women to whatever fortune befalls them, and Gertrude, too, is silent for most of this scene. But it is she who next uses elements of Theseus's consolation when she reminds her son:

 

"Thou know'st Ôtis common, all that lives must die,

Passing through nature to eternity." (Hamlet I ii 72-73)

 

Hamlet uses this as a chance to pun on "common," a simile he will expand upon in IV iii when he observes "your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes, but to one table" and that "a man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm." He demonstrates thus that "a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar." Theseus also finds the difference between king and commoner to be eliminated in death:

 

"He moot be deed, the kyng as shal a page;

Som in his bed, som in the depe see,

Som in the large feeld, as men may see;

Ther helpeth noght;al goth that ilke weye.

Thanne may I seyn that al this thyng moot deye." (KnT 3030-3034)

 

Claudius recognizes the need for "mourning duties" but, like Theseus who by 3057 is ready to put such dour events behind him in favor of a more joyful future, accuses the over-active mourner of "obsequious sorrow," "obstinate condolement," and "impious stubbornness." Hamlet's activity is "unmanly grief" that is "incorrect to heaven." By continuing in grief and not recognizing the inevitability of death Hamlet performs "a fault to heaven, a fault against the dead, a fault to nature." Here Claudius agrees with Theseus's argument concerning the "Prime  Moevere" and His design for mankind's mortality. "The contrarie of al this is wilfulnesse," the King of Athens insists: Claudius's "impious stubborness."

If the beginning of Hamlet thus seems like a continuation of the end of Knight's Tale, the end of Hamlet seems to repeat the climactic scene from Chaucer, in which Palamon and Arcite duel for Emilye's hand. Claudius again adopts Theseus's role: it is he that arranges the duel and it is he who mandates that the weapons themselves will be non-lethal while simultaneously ensuring that one of the two competitors will die. Theseus anticipates the needs of the competitors when he sets out wine:

 

"And some tyme dooth hem Theseus to reste,

Hem to refresshe and drynken, if hem leste." (KnT 2621-2622)

 

Claudius's cup is, of course, Chekov's gun on the mantlepiece: both an instrument of assassination and a tragic misfire. Like Palamon and Arcite, Hamlet and Laertes exchange protestations of love and kinship, but this time with a heavy dash of irony: Hamlet repents,

 

"That I have shot my arrow o'er the house

And hurt my brother." (Hamlet V ii 243-244)

 

While Laertes, poisoned rapier at the ready, insists:

"I do receive your offer'd love like love,

And will not wrong it." (Hamlet V ii 251-252)

 

Hamlet will repeat his familial invocation a few lines later when he agrees he "will this brother's wager frankly play." The repetition of brotherly status for Laertes not only emphasizes their supposed friendship, but also brings back the key figure of Ophelia: if all had gone as Gertrude had wished Laertes and Hamlet would indeed be brothers, and Ophelia's madness and death is one of the two reasons for Laertes's revenge. In body, Emilye would seem to be absent from this duel, but Ophelia's ghost hovers over it, bride and sister to the two competing men.

Despite the precautions taken by Claudius/Theseus, the duel turns bloody:

 

"Out renneth blood on bothe hir sydes rede." KnT 2635

 

Horatio: "They bleed on both sides." (Hamlet V ii 304)

This prompts a reaction by the woman present:

"Shrighte Emelye, and howleth Palamon,

And Theseus his suster took anon

Swownynge" (KnT 2817-2819)

 

Claudius: "She sounds to see them bleed." (Hamlet V ii 307)

 

But in the case of Gertrude, her swooning comes from another source: the poisoned drink and not any weakness in her own flesh. Even the poison that kills Laertes (and, by extension, Hamlet) is an echo of Chaucer, for the warlike Arcite's wounds become infected with a "venym" the symptoms of which are described in grisly detail. Likewise, Laertes's "envenomed" blade leaves both he and Hamlet alive only long enough to confess their sins and make atonement with their brother.

In the simple matter of the duel at the end it would seem that Laertes is based on Arcite. In comparison to Hamlet, he is known for his martial character; indeed his skill at fencing is so well known that Hamlet is given a handicap: in twelve exchanges Laertes must beat him three hits in order to win. While Arcite soon escapes Athens and briefly returns to Thebes, Laertes's first words are to beg for a return to France.[9] But while Arcite is able to return and serve Emilye as a page, Laertes returns to find his sister mad and their father dead. It is, in fact, at Ophelia's funeral that Laertes and Hamlet sound most like the Knight's characters, when their rivalry centers not on competing praise for the flower maiden but, rather, competing displays of grief. Laertes leaps in the grave and insists that Ophelia's burial mound be raised

 

"T' o'ertop old Pelion, or the skyish head

Of blue Olympus." (Hamlet V i 253-254)

 

But Hamlet mocks Laertes's "obsequious sorrow" when he invokes the very signs of lovesickness that plague Arcite, transforming him into a figure unrecognizable:

 

"'Swounds, show me what thou't do?

Woo't weep, woo't fight, woo't fast, woo't tear thyself?

Woo't drink up eisel, eat a crocadile?" (Hamlet V i 274-276)

 

The prince then makes sarcastic play out of the mutual protestations of love which Palamon and Arcite engaged in with a straight face.

 

"And if thou prate of mountains, let them throw

Millions of acres on us, till our ground,

Singeing his pate against the burning zone,

Make Ossa like a wart! Nay, and thou'lt mouth

I'll rant as well as thou." (Hamlet V i 280-284)

 

While Palamon and Arcite both engage in much hyperbolistic praise of Emilye and protestations of love, Palamon directly questions the depth of Arcite's emotions in one particular phrase when he asks,

 

"Wheither seistow in ernest  or in pley?"

"Nay," quod Arcite, "in ernest, by my fey!

God helpe me so, me list ful yvele pleye." (KnT 1125-1127)

 

More than anything this exchange seems to echo that between Gertrude and her son in the already examined wedding scene, when the Queen uses the word "seems" in her probing of Hamlet and the prince bristles with "Seems, madam? Nay, it is, I know not Ôseems.'" After listing all the external manifestations of grief he insists:

 

"These indeed seem,

For they are actions that a man might play." (Hamlet I ii 83-84)

 

This similarity in theme and action actually complicates analysis, for the person being questioned in Knight's Tale is Arcite, and if Hamlet "seems" to be the representative of Palamon in his play Ð he is the "hero" who, if not wholly victorious, at least lives longest Ð that representation is not entirely secure. Much in the way Palamon and Arcite seem to slide into one another and become impossible to differentiate, so Hamlet also ends up leaving the country: exiled by the king after the prince's murder of Polonius. Likewise he displays the signs of lovesickness which seem to transform Arcite when, in an offstage moment, he frightens Ophelia. But in other scenes Hamlet acts in a manner more befitting Palamon. After all, "Denmark's a prison," [10] and while Hamlet is abroad (and again offstage) he is captured by pirates in a most unmilitary manner; he arranges the death of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern not through warfare but through guile.

The rivalry between Hamlet and Laertes echoes not only the action of Knight's Tale but also Denmark's preceding generation. King Hamlet and his brother Claudius compete for the crown in the same way Laertes competes with Hamlet, [11] they compete in their love for a woman, (albeit one insane then dead) and find their mutual end through poison. Shakespeare's doubling technique thus makes King Hamlet and Claudius into descendants of Palamon and Arcite, but in reverse order. Since the young prince Hamlet acts the role of the heroic Palamon, we may expect his father to do the same. On the contrary: it is old King Hamlet who is most famous for his martial exploits against Norway and whose ghost appears garbed head to toe in armor. It is old King Hamlet who dies first, of a "leprous" poison whose effects on the body are a thickening of the blood:

 

Swelleth the brest of Arcite, and the soore

Ecreeseth at his herte moore and moore.

The clothered blood, for any lechecraft,

Corrupteth, and is in his bouk ylaft (KnT 2745-2746)

 

"And with a sudden vigor it doth posset

And curd, like eager droppings into milk,

The thin and wholesome blood." (Hamlet I v 68-70)

 

Claudius's similarities to Theseus have already been discussed, but in this context he doubles as a Palamon whose marriage is just the beginning rather than the ending. The character of Claudius is difficult to pin down; performances of the play seem to alternate between making him into a drunken, evil schemer or a loving husband conflicted by the heinousness of his own crime. But he does value Gertrude so much that he cannot give her up even to save his own soul. I refer, of course, to the chapel scene when Claudius kneels at the altar and attempts to pray for forgiveness in a flawed re-enactment of Palamon's successful prayer to Venus.

The two older brothers are often compared in Shakespeare's play, usually by Hamlet and usually to Claudius's detriment, using a wealth of classical allusions to "Hyperion" and "Hercules." The most telling  of these comparisons takes place in Gertrude's closet, when Hamlet holds up two portraits: a picture of Claudius that is around Gertrude's neck and a picture of the old king, around Hamlet's.

 

"Look here upon this picture, and on this,

The counterfeit presentment of two  brothers.

See what a grace was seated on this brow:

Hyperion's curls, the front of Jove himself,

An eye like Mars, to threaten and command" (Hamlet III iv 53-57)

 

The eye like Mars belongs to Hamlet's father (Arcite/King Hamlet), while Claudius is cast as an object of lust, not love (i.e. Palamon). "You cannot call it love," Hamlet insists rather meanly to his mother in her middle age:

 

"... for at your age

the hey day in the blood is tame, it's humble,

And waits upon the judgment." (Hamlet III iv 68-70)

 

Claudius and Gertrude might think differently; indeed there is every indication that the two are quite happily in love. Critics who know Two Noble Kinsmen will note the similarity of the scene I have just described with one from that play: There, it is Emilia who holds up two portraits belonging to Palamon and Arcite and attempts to decide between them. In attractive poetry she describes first Arcite and then Palamon, eventually deciding she cannot choose between one or the other and "must cry for both!" While nicely written, this sentiment is at odds with Emilia's stated intentions in Acts I and V of the play, [12] and thus usually ascribed not to Shakespeare but to his collaborator, John Fletcher. I believe that what we are seeing here is a cognizance, on the part of Fletcher, of the link between Hamlet and Knight's Tale and it is that cognizance that I would like to turn to next.

Two Noble Kinsmen was published ten years after Hamlet, after Shakespeare's heyday, and it is a play with unique problems. Critics usually ascribe the first and last acts to Shakespeare with the middle parts credited to Fletcher. Shakespeare is also given Act III scene iv: the meeting of Palamon and Arcite in the forest that results in their duel and their discovery by Theseus and his hunting party. Likewise, Act V scene ii, which resolves the subplot of the Jailer's Daughter, is usually considered to be Fletcher's, based on the fact that his scenes also include the rest of the Jailer's Daughter subplot. If "The Jailer's Daughter" sounds like a substandard role there is reason to think so: the subplot never satisfactorily connects with the primary plot of Palamon and Arcite in their competition for the love of Emilia. She is the daughter of the man who keeps Palamon and Arcite in prison in Athens; neither the daughter nor the man himself ever get a real name. She falls in love with Palamon and, hoping to attract his attention, secures his escape. This places her and her father at risk, but Palamon fails to notice or return her affection. She falls increasingly into madness, referring to the same bawdy songs (by title) that Ophelia sings in Hamlet, and attempts to commit suicide by jumping into a lake while gathering flowers. The echoes of Ophelia are particularly strong, especially when a wooer of the daughter relates her attempted and off-stage suicide in a speech that profoundly recalls Gertrude's famous soliloquy on Ophelia's death.

While it is hardly unusual to find Fletcher drawing inspiration from other works by Shakespeare, in the light of the strong link between Knight's Tale and Hamlet that I have already detailed, I think we can at last explain the specific nature of Fletcher's borrowing here. Fletcher read Chaucer; in addition to his work with Shakespeare on Two Noble Kinsmen he cooperated with Beaumont on The Triumph of Honor (based on the Franklin's Tale and written only a year before Two Noble Kinsmen) and Women Pleased, a disappointing take on the Wife of Bath's Tale. [13] Working in collaboration with Shakespeare, he thus was in a position to either detect or be shown Hamlet's use of Chaucer, prompting Fletcher to do the same thing in reverse when he wrote the middle acts of Two Noble Kinsmen. Instead of looking to Chaucer to write Shakespeare, he looked to Shakespeare to write Chaucer, "borrowing back" the characterization of Ophelia/Emelye for his Jailer's Daughter subplot and writing the speech in which Emilia, Gertrude-like, compares her two lovers' portraits to debate their respective merits. What is Fletcher doing here? Is this some kind of theatrical in-joke, an exposure of Shakespeare's sources that only dedicated playgoers or actors would detect? That cannot be ruled out; conversations between playwrights in verse are legion and not limited to the "War of the Theaters." Fletcher's tendency is towards the bawdy, and I cannot help but wonder if we see in his manipulation of Hamlet within the scenes of Two Noble Kinsmen an attempt at appropriation, a quiting action like that which the Miller and other characters perform on their fellow pilgrims. It is just this sort of action that I have suggested Shakespeare may be performing not so much on Chaucer per se, but on the Knight as narrator. By the time Fletcher's career became worthy of note Shakespeare had retired to the second-largest house in Stratford to enjoy the life of a prosperous country gentleman; he was thus a much more accessible figure for emulation and competition than Chaucer. Fletcher may read Chaucer but he cannot have a conversation with him; Chaucer does not talk back. But Shakespeare may, and in Two Noble Kinsmen we can see Fletcher talking back to Shakespeare's greatest play through the voices of female characters like Emilia and the Jailer's Daughter.

It has never been my intention to suggest that Knight's Tale was the primary source for the plot of Hamlet; that honor belongs to historical chronicles and the so-called "Ur-Hamlet" performed in London in the years previous to Shakespeare's effort. But with a recent edition of Chaucer in hand, and shortly before the writing of Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare found in Knight's Tale the second scene of Hamlet. He found in the warlike Arcite and the lover Palamon characterizations and a rivalry that would inform not only Hamlet and Laertes but Claudius and his brother, the dead king of Denmark. Perotheus found his new identity in the role of Polonius, becoming not just Arcite's advocate, but his father. The flower-gathering Emelye and her lackluster dedication to Diana appears in Ophelia's turmoil over marriage vs. chastity, and in Theseus's construction of the lethal non-lethal duel Shakespeare found inspiration for the climactic scene at the end of the play. There are signs that Shakespeare's use of Knight's Tale as a source for Hamlet was known at the time, illustrated  by Fletcher's use of Hamlet when he appropriates Gertrude to characterize Emilia in Two Noble Kinsmen and introduces Ophelia's surrogate, the Jailer's Daughter, in the same play.

Throughout this study I have been careful to differentiate between Chaucer the author and the narrating figure of the Knight, suggesting that Shakespeare is talking back to the latter figure and not the former. In so doing, I am presuming that Shakespeare knew the difference between the Knight, Chaucer, and "Geoffrey", the effeminate pilgrim whose verses "are not worth a turd." [14] In his manipulation of characters and themes from Knight's Tale, Shakespeare seems to always take the path that leads to more irony and cynicism; the Knight's admiration for bygone days of romantic chivalry do not impress the author of Hamlet. Indeed, Hamlet shows signs of being not merely a "continuation," in which the marriage Theseus endorses at the end of Knight's Tale goes on to beget murder and death, but also, through the doubling of Claudius/King Hamlet and Hamlet/Laertes, a re-enactment. It is as if the action of Chaucer's tale forms a kind of infinite loop, repeating itself over and over again with an ever-larger body count.

Notes (use your BACK button to return to the essay)

 

[1] Ann Thompson, Shakespeare's Chaucer: A Study in Literary Origins. p. 90

[2] On pages 94-110 of Shakespeare's Chaucer.

[3] E. Talbot Donaldson, The Swan at the Well: Shakespeare Reading Chaucer, p. 7-29.

[4] Thompson has a convenient if somewhat dated table listing Chaucerian influences on each of Shakespeare's works on pages 220 and 221 of Shakespeare's Chaucer. Merlin's Prophecies form the basis for one of the Fool's memorable speeches to Lear.

[5] For a discussion of Bloom's theories specifically in regard to Shakespeare and Marlowe, see Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.

[6] I am thinking particularly of Troilus here, where Chaucer claims complete fidelity to the source while in fact adding material not present, deleting material that is present, and manipulating the source lines for the creation of a very different poem.

[7] Such as Zeffirelli's 1990 Hamlet and the 1948 Olivier version which greatly influenced it.

[8] Palamon and Arcite are referred to as brothers once in the poem, line 1147. They are not, of course, actual brothers in blood. Nor are they even brothers in marriage, since Arcite does not marry Emilye even though they are engaged to do so. Thus, they both are and are not brothers, a duality that serves Shakespeare well in his doubling of the characters with Claudius/King Hamlet and Hamlet/Laertes.

[9] It is worth noting in this context that in Shakespeare's traditional sources for Hamlet, the name of the king's advisor is Corambis (or a variant spelling thereof); in Hamlet, of course, the character is named Polonius, a Perotheus sound-alike, who must persuade the king to allow Laertes to leave Denmark and return abroad. If this is not convincing enough of a link between Polonius and Perotheus, there is the story the Knight "list me nat to write": Theseus's adventure to the underworld to find Perotheus after that man's death. Hamlet invokes this tale when he answers Theseus/Claudius's question "Where is Polonius?" with the phrase "In heaven, send thither to see; if your messenger find him not there, seek him i' th' other place yourself."

[10] Hamlet's rhetorical  debate with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is provocative ground for further influences from the Tales. It is Symkyn the miller who pokes fun at his clerkish houseguests when he tells them "Myn hous is streit, but ye han learned art; ye konne by arguments make a place a myle broad of twenty foot of space. Lat se now if this place may suffice, or make it rowm with speche, as is youre gise." (ReT 4122-4126) In other words: "I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space."

[11] When Laertes returns from France the common "rabble" demand, "Choose we, Laertes shall be king!"

[12]  Emilia has sworn herself to chastity in Act I of Two Noble Kinsmen, but by Act V is reconciled, like Emilye, to accepting whichever of her two suitors loves her best. The young woman linked to chastity in Hamlet is, of course, Ophelia, whose virginity is the primary concern of both her father and her brother as well as Hamlet himself. While she is willing to marry, the men who surround her instead try to push her into the arms of Diana and fail.

[13] Ann Thompson discusses Fletcher's knowledge of Chaucer on pages 44-57 of Shakespeare's Chaucer.

[14] This memorable appraisal of Chaucer's poetic talents is made by Harry Bailey after the mercifully abbreviated Sir Thopas.

 

Bibliography

 

Beaumont, Francis. The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, vol 5. Fredson Bowers, general editor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966.

Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

-- . Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books, 1998.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edition. General editor, Larry D. Benson. Boston, Mass: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1987.

Donaldson, E. Talbot. The Swan at the Well: Shakespeare Reading Chaucer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.

Donaldson, E. Talbot and Judith J. Kollmann, eds. Chaucerian Shakespeare: Adaptation and Transformation. Published for Michigan Consortium for Medieval and Early Modern Studies; Detroit, MI: Distributed by Fifteenth-Century Symposium, Marygrove College, 1983.

Hefferman, Carol Falvo. The Melancholy Muse: Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Early Medicine. Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1995.

Henslowe, Philip. Henslowe's Diary. R. A. Foakes, ed. Cambridge, U.K.; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Marlowe, Christopher. The Plays of Christopher Marlowe. Edited with an introduction by Roma Gill. London, New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.

Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed. General and textual editor, G. Blakemore Evans, with the assistance of J. M. Tobin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.

Thompson, Anne. Shakespeare's Chaucer: A Study in Literary Origins. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1978.

 

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Elevenses

Some Structural Questions Concerning The Faerie Queene

 

Over the past few months I have had several occasions to mention my study of Spenser to family, friends, and former professors. In every case, the response from my audience has been the same. "Spenser!" he or she exclaims, smiling. "I haven't read him since ..." The confession then trails off, lost in a failed attempt to recollect the last time that we did read Spenser. The truth is that it has been an awfully long time since most of the academy, or anyone else, has given Faerie Queene the attention it once commanded.  In the Canon Wars, Spenser has become an unfortunate casualty; one Dead White Guy too many. His isolation in the public sphere is perhaps more understandable, though no less tragic. Annual visits to the nearest Shakespeare festival do not prepare the layman either for vocabulary which was antique even when Spenser wrote it, or a single poem which can reasonable claim to be twelve times as long as Hamlet. To these challenges one can add an overabundance of symbolic imagery and a cast list the size of Cleopatra.

In my own attempt to understand both the scope and intricacies of Spenser, I looked to three specific moments of the poem: the battle between Red Cross and the dragon in the eleventh canto of Book I, Arthur's defense of Alma's castle in the eleventh canto of Book II, and Britomart's arrival at the House of Busirane in the eleventh canto of Book III. When I placed these three distinct episodes alongside one another, I expected to find patterns (it was Arthur's battle with Melegar and its triple echo of the dragon fight which had first attracted me to this approach). But as I sifted through these cantos stanza by stanza I was confronted by the overwhelming similarity in structure between them. Indeed, the narrative movements of all three cantos are parallel to a degree that should be stifling yet in fact seems to go almost unnoticed. There is also evidence in these three cantos for the notion that Spenser worked from the center of his poem outwards and that, as the first three books were published as a distinct unit, that Temperance may have been written first. The parallel actions and objects in these cantos also led me to question the role which certain characters in them play, especially when we see them in the light of "corresponding" characters from the eleventh cantos in other books. Finally, I have come to the conclusion that, for these cantos at least, Spenser's primary organizational tools are the seven-canto and three-canto unit. This poses intriguing questions in relation to Spenser's rhyme scheme and its possible relation to the structure of the poem as a whole.

In the broadest strokes, each of these three cantos tells a simple story. In the first, Red Cross arrives with Una at the land where her parents dwell. In order to liberate them from their own "brasen tower," Red Cross must defeat a dragon. In Book II, the titular hero Sir Guyon appears only long enough to leave. Instead, Prince Arthur comes to the defense of Alma, whose castle is besieged by an army of fiends. They are led by Melegar and his pair of Hags, and Arthur's battle with them dominates the canto. In the end, he is victorious, but must be taken into the castle for his many wounds to be healed. Britomart begins Book III in the company of Satyrane and in the pursuit of Ollyphant, but the two knights are soon parted. The warrior maiden comes upon Scudamore, who is in the depths of despair. After rousing him, the two new companions reach the House of Busirane, where Britomart penetrates a fiery gate. Inside she finds an apparently empty series of chambers decorated with elaborate tapestries and an altar to Cupid. In the end, however, no enemy appears and she begins a long and nervous watch through the night. Each of these three cantos can be broken down into stanza groups that represent distinct narrative or thematic units, which I present here in outline format. In the analysis which follows, I will make frequent reference to this outline.

 

 

Each of these books is marked by the presence of three dominant characters: in the first, Red Cross, Una, and the dragon; in the second, Arthur, Alma, and Melegar; in the third Britomart, Satyrane, and Scudamore. There are additional minor characters in all three -- Una's parents, the Hags, Guyon, Ollyphant -- but these individuals do not have a narrative weight that compares to the three primary actors. Several of them may have very important roles to play in other cantos (I am thinking most obviously of Guyon and Satyrane) but not within these isolated chapters.  What can be made of these three trios? Each contains one man (Red Cross, Arthur and Scudamore), one woman (Una, Alma and Britomart), and one character less easily defined. Melegar is "of such subtile substance and vnsound, That like a ghost he seem'd" while the other two are a satyr and a dragon. It is tempting to see an alchemical relationship here, one in which the male and female principles are joined to create an androgynous third form, but in no case is this third form a particularly enviable one. In the first two cases the monstrous is the thing that is to be destroyed, while in the last Satyrane rides off harmlessly in pursuit of Ollyphant. With the rubric of the "alchemical marriage" discarded, we might resort to the traditional dramatic structure of Hero, Victim, and Villain.

 

 

This analysis does not fail so much as it poses interesting questions for the book of Chastity. There seems to be no question that Red Cross, Arthur and Britomart are the heroes of their respective cantos. Una and Alma share a common dramatic role: that of the victim who requires the help of the hero. And in the first and second Books, the dragon and Melegar ably fill the role of antagonist. This leaves Satyrane and Scudamore to beg further analysis. Considering Britomart's actions in the second half of the canto, Scudamore would seem to be the obvious choice for the "victim" role. But the structural analysis suggests otherwise. Una is first named in stanza one of I xi, Alma is first named in stanza two of II xi, and Satyrane is first named in stanza three of III xi. In each case the character swiftly retreats to leave the action to the hero. By stanza eight in all three cantos the enemy has appeared: the dragon's seven stanza description begins on stanza eight, this same stanza number introduces the army of which Melegar is the Captain, and Britomart's seven canto long discovery of Scudamore begins in stanza seven. Satyrane would therefore seem to be the structural parallel to Una and Alma, while Scudamore holds the place of the dragon and Melegar. Scudamore is, however, no villain. The categories must be rethought.

It would be foolish to over-stress the victimized character of Una and Alma, especially considering the intended audience for The Faerie Queene. The women may very well be incapable in the field of arms, but as unmarried noblewomen with domains and resources they  have agency of her own. They do, however, act briefly as companions to the exemplar characters of Red Cross and Arthur. Satyrane can also be seen in this companion role, briefly riding behind Britomart in the hunt for Ollyphant. Like Una and Alma, Satyrane needs a knight to demonstrate virtue on the field of battle. Scudamore, on the other hand,  bears the challenge that Britomart must face. Like the dragon or Melegar, Scudamore is the "face" of the crisis to come.

 

 

This is something of an allegorical approach; the characters of the dragon, Melegar, and Scudamore are not so much evil or weak as representative of a particular challenge which the hero can overcome only through demonstrating his or her virtue. Any character in the poem could occupy this role, even one who had been the clear protagonist in an earlier canto, and it may be useful to keep this in mind while reading the rest of the poem.

There are so many commonalities among these three cantos that some of the most obvious must be dealt with first, clearing the way for a more specific examination later. Each takes place in the shadow of a building, and these buildings are reflected both before and after. Book I xi begins with the mention of the "brasen tower" in which Una's parents are trapped. Book II xi both begins and ends with Alma's castle, from which Arthur sallies forth and is at last brought back to be healed. Finally, Book III xi ends (but does not begin) at the House of Busirane. The central canto therefore acts as the source, from which the cantos previous and after seem to emanate.

 

Red Cross approaches Una's tower ...
Arthur begins in Alma's castle ...	...and is brought into the castle for healing
	...Britomart enters the House of Busirane

 

Both the first and third cantos under examination are 55 stanzas in length, with the second canto serving as a smaller source at 49 cantos. The first and third could be said to reflect one another in this way, lending further credence to the theory first suggested by the Mutability cantos -- that Spenser composed his books from the center outwards. Since the first three books were the first to be published, and in a distinct unit, I find it likely that "Temperance" was the first Book to be written.

The narrative movements in these three cantos follows a very close parallel structure. After an introduction of about seven stanzas, there is an equal length physical description of the challenge that the exemplar must overcome, an attempt which occupies the next fourteen stanzas and which brings the canto to its "center." A second battle follows and then a third engagement which is shorter than the previous two. The last few stanzas depict the victory of the exemplar character, and the injuries he or she has endured. There are exceptions and nuances to this structure in each of the three cantos under examination, but Spenser's overall outline is quite plain. What I find compelling is the manner in which Spenser is not bound by the strictness of the outline, but rather flexes it in much the same way that one might manipulate a metrical or rhyme scheme  to accommodate the necessities of line, keeping each phrase fresh while still preserving the scaffold which a reader so often requires. A closer examination of these narrative movements may illustrate my point.

Each of these three cantos begins with the naming of the hero of the book and the swift introduction of a companion figure who requires the hero to display his or her virtue. For Ana and Alma, this requirement is for succor by a knight skilled in battle. Satyrane, as alluded to earlier, has a different need. He needs someone to learn from, a "role model" if you will whose chastity might help in some way to correct his own behavior. Britomart shows no sign of slowing down to give this instruction, so Satyrane is forced to follow in her wake, giving chase to the monstrous Ollyphant. Ollyphant's stanzas also have mirrors in the previous two cantos: the beginning of the siege against Alma's castle in II xi and an invocation to the Muses in I xi. With this "introductory matter" complete, Spenser moves to the character of the challenge itself.

In each canto a physical description approximately seven stanzas in length follows -- firs of the dragon, then of the besieging army with its emphasis on the five senses, and finally of Scudamore as he lies on the grass despondent, talking to himself while Britomart overhears. This sets up the opposition for each of the exemplar characters. In the case of Red Cross and Athur, the mission is clear: the dragon must be slain and the army defeated. Britomart's task is different, less martial, even nurturing. She must save Scudamore from himself, from his own despair and his inability to provide relief to Amoret. To begin this task she engages in a conversation that lasts seven stanzas, with the result that Scudamore agrees to lead her to the House of Busirane. But he is thrown back into despair when, in the seven stanzas that follow, he is unable to penetrate the fiery gate. Britomart does enter the House but her quest remains unfulfilled. Not only has Amoret not yet been freed, but Scudamore is once again returned to his state of despair as he waits outside. We have now reached  halfway through the canto; Scudamore is beating himself on the grass in stanza 27 while the interior of the House is first described in stanza 28. Red Cross and Arthur have things no less difficult in their own cantos; each spends the same fourteen stanzas giving battle to their enemy to unhappy results. Red Cross's fight with the dragon is perhaps simplest. He has no outside intrusions by other characters and trades blows more or less evenly until the dragon lets loose with a breath of fire which sends the knight to the ground in stanza 28 -- again the midway point of the 55 stanza canto. The fall of Red Cross foreshadows or, more properly echoes, the fall of Arthur in II xi.

The Prince's first battle with the forces which are arrayed against Alma is a complicated passage with many distinct units. While the general drift of these stanzas is easy to describe, the subdivisions within that larger action are not so clear. The last of the five troops which assail the senses is described in stanza thirteen; the next two describe the action of the siege itself. Arthur offers Alma his aid in stanza sixteen, rides forth in seventeen, and is attacked by the besieging army in eighteen and nineteen. Melegar, though unnamed, enters in stanza twenty and is described through twenty-two, followed by one stanza for his Hag squires. Arthur attempts to engage his enemy, but the tiger on which Melegar rides is too quick, and the Captain is able to evade the knight until the Hags run up to Arthur in twenty-eight and throw him to the earth in twenty-nine. We are thus left with a fourteen stanza unit which details Arthur's failed attempt to relieve Alma. Rather than fighting with Melegar himself, the Prince is first kept off with archery fire and then lept upon by the Captain's two assistants. The martial character of the conflict certainly resonates with Red Cross's duel with the dragon but the relationship to Britomart is more illuminating. Arthur and Britomart would seem to be in parallel situations in which their best efforts avail them naught, not because of a failure of courage or virtue but because they are facing the wrong foe. No matter how persuasive Britomart may be, she cannot relieve Scudamore's despair without physically entering the House of Busirane. Likewise, Arthur's skirmishes with the Hags and Melegar's larger army are heroic but ultimately pointless. He must reach the source of the problem: the Captain himself.

While reading these three Books in sequence, Britomart's adventure inside the House of Busirane at first seems rather anticlimactic. After all, Red Cross and Arthur are fighting it out in lakes of blood. Where is Britomart's glory? But if we see Scudamore's plight as the challenge which Britomart must overcome, it can be seen how III xi acts as a test on gendered terms. That is, while the masculine knights are expected to challenge their foes physically, Britomart must nurture and persuade Scudamore through appeals to his emotion. Further, her challenge takes place not on the battlefield where Arthur and Red Cross fight, but in a house, a corrupt domestic space. Each of the three exemplar characters will be witness to a battle in three parts, but while Arthur and Red Cross use their swords and armor, Britomart may find a needle and thread more to her liking, for her arena is a tapestry that dominates the rest of the canto.

 

And in those Tapets weren fashioned

Many faire pourtraicts, and many a faire feate,

And all of loue, and all of lusty-hed,

As seemed by their semblaunt did entreat;

And eke all Cupids warres they did repeate,

And cruell battels, which he whilome fought

Gainst all the Gods, to make his empire great;

Besides the huge massacres, which he wrought

On mighty kings and kesars, into thraldome brought.

 

The tapestry depicts the amorous adventures of three gods -- Jove, Phoebus and Neptune -- and if we can take Spenser's "entreat" at face value it would appear that the tapestry has an aspect of temptation about it. In the process of glorifying Cupid's deeds the tapestry acts as a lure, putting chastity to a test which Britomart seems to overcome with an ease that the gods themselves cannot demonstrate, and the three wars of Cupid selected for the tapestry echo the three rounds of conflict which both Red Cross and Arthur must overcome in their own cantos.

Both I xi and II xi have a central trio of stanzas in which the exemplar character receives aid from an unexpected source. Without this aid, the hero would fail. In the case of Red Cross, the aid comes in the form of the Well of Life, into which the knight falls. There he is given succor for the night while his wounds heal. Arthur, on the other hand, receives help from his brave squire, who beats back the Hags and wards them off with his sword while Arthur regains his feet. Everything gets easier for Arthur from this point forward; while he is faced with perplexing problems and a brutal foe the Prince retains the upper hand throughout. The midway point (which does seem to fall between stanzas 28-29 despite the shorter length of this canto) marks the nadir of Arthur's quest, as it marks Red Cross's fall at the hands of the dragon and Britomart's failure to relieve Scudamore. Once back on his feet, Arthur has his first real duel with Melegar -- a segment which parallels the tapestry's depiction of Jove in III xi. Red Cross has already fought his first round; he spends the parallel stanzas rising again and resuming the struggle, which brings all three heroes into their second "warre" at the same time: stanza 35 or 36. While Arthur is trying again to defeat a villain who heals from injuries the moment he comes into contact with the earth, Red Cross is engaged in his second day of battle with the dragon and Britomart is reading about Phoebus's affairs with Daphne and other mortal women.

As each canto nears its close, small variations continue to appear. After the long seven stanza catalog of Jove's affairs, for example, Phoebus and Neptune merit a mere three stanzas each. Arthur's second battle lasts the full seven stanzas, while Red Cross's second round lasts fourteen (note that there are two ways to count it, however: 32-45 or 35-48, depending on whether you choose to include the knight's rise from Well of Life at the beginning or the stanzas on the Tree of Life at the end). Indeed, Arthur's canto seems to telescope in on itself towards the end, having a midpoint between stanzas 27 and 28, but ending six stanzas early. This leaves only three stanzas for his final triumph over Melegar and a final three stanza segment in which Alma takes the wounded Prince into her castle where his injuries may be tended. This leaves episodes in I xi and III xi which seem to have no parallel in Arthur's canto.

The Tree of Life and the Altar of Cupid occupy equivalent places in Books I and II, echoing one another and even referring directly to one another. For ease of discussion, the relevant stanzas are reproduced here.

 

There grew a goodly tree him faire beside,             And at the vpper end of that faire rowme,

Loaden with fruit and apples rosie red                   There was an Altar built of pretious stone,

As they in pure vermilion had beene dide,              Of passing valew, and of great renowne,

Whereof great vertues ouer all were red:                 On which there stood an Image all alone,

For happie life to all, which thereon fed,               Of massy gold, which with his owne light shone;

And life eke euerlasting did befall:                        And wings it had with sundry colours dight,

Great God it planted in that blessed sted                More sundry colours, then the proud Pauone

With his almightie hand, and did it call                 Beares in his boasted fan, or Iris brought

The tree of life, the crime of our first father's fall    When her discolourd bow she spreds through heauen bright.

                                                                    

In all the world like was not to be found,              Blindfold he was, and in his cruell fist

Saue in that soile, where all good things did grow,  A mortall bow and arrowed keene did hold,

And freely sprong out of the fruitfull ground,         With which he shot at random, when him list,

As incorrupted Nature did them sow,                    Some headed with sad lead, some with pure gold;

Till that dread Dragon all did overthrow.                (Ah man beware, how thou those darts behold)

Another like faire tree eke grew thereby,                A wounded Dragon vnder him did ly,

Whereof who so did eat, eftsoones did know           Whose hideous tayle his left foot did enfold,

Both good and ill: O mournefull memory:             And with a shaft was shot through either eye,

That tree through one mans fault hath doen vs all   That no man forth might draw, ne no man remedye.

to dy.

 

From that first tree forth flowd, as from a well       And vnderneath his feet was written thus,

A trickling streame of Balme, most soueraine        Vnto the Victor of the Gods this bee:

And daintie deare, which on the ground still fell,     And all the people in that ample hous

And ouerflowed all the fertile plaine,                    Did to that image bow their humble knee,

As it had deawed bene with timely raine:               And oft committed fowle Idolatree.

Life and long health that gratious ointment gaue,    That wondrous sight faire Britomart amazed,

And deadly woundes could heale and reare again      Ne seeing could her wonder satisfie,

The senseless corse appointed for the graue.           But euer more and more vpon it gazed,

Into that same he fell: which did from death           The whiles the passing brightnes her fraile sences dazed.

him saue.

 

The vocabulary issue is perhaps the most rudimentary. Various similarities in phrasing can be seen throughout the stanzas, such as the use of the same word in the first line ("faire") and the choice of the same rhyme at the end of the second stanza (memory and dy, eye and remedye). More interesting are the thematic echoes throughout, often in the form of opposites or contrasts. The tree has fruit and apples, the altar is made of "precious stone." Both are notable for their colors, though the fruit of the tree is all red and vermillion while the altar boasts an over-ripe abundance. God is contrasted with the prideful peacock Pavone and the pagan Iris. The alchemical reference is provocative; Cupid holds arrows of gold and base lead, in contrast to the "incorrupted Nature" of the tree. Both objects are inextricably linked to dragons. In the first case, the dragon cannot approach, either in the temporal frame of the tree's first creation or now, as Red Cross lies beneath it. Cupid instead rides astride the dragon which is built into the altar. Like the creature Red Cross battles, this dragon is wounded. The epigram on the altar flows forth from it like the balm from the tree, but while all wounds can be healed by the balm, the dragon suffers injuries no man can remedy. Most important, however, is the effect the two objects have on the exemplar characters, an effect which is similar and yet also opposite. Both Britomart and Red Cross lose their senses, but while the altar of Cupid is the source of Britomart's confusion, the tree serves to heal Red Cross from a near-death inflicted by the dragon. The altar and the lust it symbolizes hypnotizes Britomart; she literally cannot take her eyes off it. This is probably the most dangerous moment for her in the entire canto, and it is only her providential observation of the "Be Bold" epigram that encourages her to leave the altar and enter the next chamber, penetrating farther into the house.

These descriptions of the altar of Cupid and the tree of life end on the 49th and 48th stanzas of their respective cantos, the same spot where II xi ends. As mentioned earlier, Arthur is brought into Alma's castle to have his wounds healed, but the heroes on either side of him have more yet to do. In the three stanzas which follow, Britomart enters the second chamber of the house where she discovers "warlike spoils", the broken weapons of love's victims hung upon the walls. Red Cross, however, is made whole again from the balm of the tree of life, sustaining the antitype theme from the previous set of stanzas. Even as the dragon rushes Red Cross with "outrageous pride" in an attempt to swallow him whole, Britomart is reading "Be not too bold," and Britomart wonderment at the "solemne silence" of the chamber comes at the same line in which Red Cross thrusts his sword through the dragon's overeager mouth, silencing him rather permanently. Finally, both cantos end with a woman waiting -- Britomart settles in for a long vigil in the house while Una "Durst not approach for dred" of the dragon. She finally shakes off "vaine affright" and approaches, but Britomart's triumph is put off for the final canto of the three book poem which Spenser originally published in 1590.

When a given stanza is classified by subject matter and thematic content, there is always a certain degree of subjectivity involved. Prince Arthur's first encounter with the besieging armies of Melegar illustrate this point the best; where exactly should one draw the lines that group one stanza with another? But quagmires of this sort are surprisingly rare within the three cantos I have examined, instead yielding a large number of 3-stanza, 7-stanza and 14-stanza units. The latter feels too large for a unit of poetic organization, though I freely admit that nothing should be ruled out for a poet whose chosen verse form is the nine lines stanza, each line with ten syllables. But to count the number of distinct scenes which come to precisely seven or three stanzas in length is to rapidly run out of fingers: the invocation of the Muses; the descriptions of the dragon, Melegar, the well of life, tree of life, and altar of cupid; Britomart's discovery of the grieving Scudamore; the pair's attempt to cross the fiery gate of the house of Busirane; the depictions of both Phoebus and Neptune on Cupid's tapestry; each of the resurrections of Red Cross; the rescue of Arthur by his squire; Arthur's battle with Melegar and his final return to Alma's castle. Most of these passages are three stanzas long; a few are seven. I have left out fourteen-stanza units. Additional seven-stanza units can be found if we allow them to overlap with one another; illustration of this is perhaps the best way to make the point.
 

Action	Stanza
Red Cross rises again	32-34
Second battle	35-45
Tree of life	46-48
Red Cross rises again	49-52
Dragon defeated	53-55

 

While the description of the tree of life, the knight's return from death, and his final defeat of the dragon are each distinct episodes, they are also intricately bound to one another and each requires the preceding event to occur. They can be thematically grouped as two units of seven stanzas each (46-52 and 49-55) which overlap and combine into a ten stanza whole. Another example occurs at the end of III xi, as Britomart admires the tapestry of cupid. The stanzas are parallel to the ones just described; The overlapping starts a bit sooner and is not sustained as long.

 

Action	Stanza
Phoebus's lust	36-39
Neptune's lust	40-42
Tapestry ends	43-46
Altar of lust	47-49

 

While the structure is clear when laid out in this manner, what remains is the question of interpretation. What do we make of this layered approach, in which three stanza units make up seven stanza larger units, which may even combine into fourteen stanza units and so on? The poem seems to challenge the critic not only to find these patterns, but to somehow explain them.

The challenge is all the louder when Spenser's rhyme scheme is brought into consideration: A B A B B C B C C. Each stanza is made up of three units: two four-line quatrain (A B A B and B C B C) and one short final line (C). Because one rhyme from each quatrain carries over the to one that follows, however, the final line becomes a couplet and the three distinct units overlap in a way very much like what we have seen in the two sections I have just mapped out. In other words, the seven-stanza structure acts in a way similar to that of the overall rhyme scheme itself, acknowledging distinct units while simultaneously combining those units, sustaining them and causing them to overlap.

 

Action	Stanza
Phoebus's l	36-39
Neptune's lust	40-42
Tapestry ends	43-46
Altar of lust	47-49

 

 

I realize that this sort of structural analysis can go too far. An overenthusiastic critic can divide and subdivide the stanzas in whatever way he sees fit, cooking the data until secret code reveals that Spenser wrote Shakespeare. But this overlapping structure among the stanzas, combined with the quatrain-quatrain-couplet structure of the individual lines, seems to echo so strongly throughout the cantos I have examined that I cannot think it accident. Red Cross's battle with the dragon may serve as another useful example. The first "round" of the fight takes fourteen stanzas (15-28); this can be thought of as the first "quatrain" in a stanza. The three stanza Well of Life description follows (29-31). The second "round" also takes fourteen stanzas, counting from Red Cross rising from the dead in 32 to his second death in 45. Let us call this the second "quatrain." A three stanza interlude describing the Tree of Life follows, parallel to the Well of Life (46-48). But the knight's final battle with the dragon is quite short, only seven stanzas counting his second rise from the dead (49) and the dealing of a mortal blow (55). At half the length of the previous two battles, this final part of the canto thus acts as a "rhyming couplet" or C rhyme.

The analysis ultimately comes up against two barriers. The first is scope: in order to find how extensive this three/seven structure goes, it is necessary to examine other cantos in other books. Indeed, as ridiculous as it sounds, it is possible that Spenser only used the organizational structure I have described in the eleventh cantos of Books I-III. I find this unlikely, but the only way to be certain is to examine the rest of the poem. The second obstacle, however, is more critical (in both senses of the word): what does this structure tell us about Spenser's poem?  One result is a new appreciation for what modern mathematicians would call the fractal nature of Faerie Queene. That is, patterns seen in the microcosm of the line and stanza reproduce themselves on the macrocosm of the canto and the book. We can back away from the poem, but we see the same structure reproduced over and over on a larger scale. Parallel units like the Tree of Life and Altar of Cupid alert us to thematic mirrors that may exist elsewhere in the poem, antitypes which inform one another and the reader. The emphasis on three characters in each of these cantos (exemplar, companion and challenge) may be applicable to others, though it is important to keep an open mind and let the text inform a reader who has not yet come to conclusions. We may very well find that each set of parallel cantos has its own rules and laws. While the structure I have outlined shows clearly through, there are also places where it seems to defy augury, illustrating Spenser's determination to remain unchained by method. The poet is not a slave to a rigid structure; rather, the structure is flexible and meant to be occasionally discarded in deference to art. A study of this kind is only the first step in a much larger project, a project which has as its ultimate end not the placement of Spenser's poetry into a dogmatic and suffocating pattern, but rather the creation of a scaffold both within and around the poem which enables new readers to see the complexity of The Faerie Queene, how its themes, characters, and dramatic actions interact and associate with one another.

 

Bibliography

 

Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. Edited by Thomas P. Roche, Jr with the assistance of C. Patrick O'Donnel, Jr. Penguin Books: London.  1978

 

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A Tyger on the Lam

Alan Moore on William Blake

 

 

            On February 2, 2001, at the close of the William Blake exhibit at the Tate London, comic writer Alan Moore collaborated with his long-time musical partner Tim Perkins and dancer Andrea Svajcsik to perform Angel Passage, a five part mystical biography of Blake organized as four long poems (Innocence, Hell, Experience, Heaven) and a musical introduction (Golden Square). Incorporating not only music but also video stills and clips, dancing, and other aspects of performance art, Angel Passage was a unique event that cannot be duplicated or reprocessed. However, the principals were later gathered in the studio to record the music and poetry for release on the RE: label.

            While it is not necessary to justify an examination of Moore's comic work, it may be necessary to do this for his poetry. A close reading of Angel Passage provides key insights to the creative philosophy Moore has been developing since his work From Hell, revealing a self-identification with William Blake and providing examples of some of the magical acts that Moore describes himself as performing in interviews. Angel Passage  is particularly important for From Hell readers. In many ways, these four poems can be seen as the "Contrary" of that work (and I use Blakean vocabulary here with some conciousness) for in them the early Romantic poet and artist William Blake adopts a heroic role quite complementary to the role of that other William, William Gull. In Angel Passage, Moore describes the visionary artist who has the power to transform the banal society of his surroundings into a more heavenly, more cosmically good, environment. This is the path that Alan Moore is trying to walk today, and William Blake laid the cobblestones.

            There are essentially two audiences for Angel Passage: those who appreciate Blake but know nothing about Alan Moore, and those who read Alan Moore but have little knowledge of Blake. Many listeners will lie somewhere between these two poles. By necessity then, this edition is something of a compromise, but my final decision has been to aim for the comic reading audience, assuming some general familiarity with Moore's body of work and shaping my annotations -- of which there are over a hundred -- into a biographical study that not only introduces comic readers to Blake but also provides something of a foundation for more complex research by aspiring Blake scholars in any discipline.

            Alan Moore was born and has lived almost entirely in Northhampton, England. In his youth he attempted both drawing and music but decided his talents best lay in writing, specifically writing for comics. His stories were published in 2000 AD, one of Britain's most long-running and imaginative comic magazines, and it was for a British publisher that he first began his near future story of an anti-utopian England, V for Vendetta. Real popularity, however, came when he created Watchmen for DC Comics in 1985. Moore includes William Blake in his comic writing toolbox even at this early date: the fifth chapter of Watchmen, "Fearful Symmetry", is peppered with Blake quotations, and the protagonist of V for Vendetta sings the "Jerusalem Hymn" from the first page of Blake's Milton. More important than these relatively casual references  to Blake, however, is the fact that in V Moore began to develop his perception of ideas, and the dominance that ideas have over what the rest of us think of as the real world. In a phone-interview with Barry Kavanaugh of Blather magazine only months before Angel Passage was performed (an extensive interview to which we will often return) Moore spoke on this. "It [V for Vendetta] was very much centered upon the world of ideas as being in some ways more important than the material world, which is I think a notion which has probably born fruit recently in other areas of my work, where it's still something that I'm very much involved with". We will see that Angel Passage and William Blake demonstrate this notion on a fundamental level.

DC cultivated Moore as a talent and he continued to write for them, but his work was experimental and pushed the envelope of the Comics Code Authority. The threat of placing a "mature readers" label on Moore's books, in addition to his opinion that he had not been fairly paid for the enormously successful Watchmen, led to his departure from the company and an emphasis on his own work. Several projects were begun, but most became unfinished victims of an unpredictable publishing industry. The exception was From Hell, Moore's exploration of the Jack the Ripper case. In Blather he characterizes From Hell as "a big, black, monumental work. Victorian." In Neil Spencer's October 2000 article in The Observer we learn that it was while researching From Hell that Moore truly began to study Blake seriously. His sources for Blakean study (and, I should note, my own sources for these annotations) include Alexander Gilchrist's influential Victorian-era biography and Peter Ackroyd's much more recent one. Both of these works are extremely idiosyncratic but in very different ways. Direct comments on these sources, and others used by Moore in his work on both From Hell and Angel Passage, will be found in this edition's annotated bibliography.

From Hell's complexity is worth lingering over, especially for those whose sole exposure to the work is the Johnny Depp film vehicle. From Hell posits that our society at the end of the 20th century was essentially shaped by forces that arose in the Victorian era (and Moore uses topics like evolutionary theory, industrialization, and economics as examples). The Victorian era was in turn largely defined, in a popular culture sense, by the Ripper murders. Thus if A = B and B = C, then A = C and contemporary Western society is the product of Jack of the Ripper. William Gull, Moore's choice for the Ripper, turns Queen Elizabeth's order to assassinate four women into an occult ritual intended to place men forever in dominance over women. After his corporeal death, Gull finds himself transformed into a spirit that travels through all time and space as a kind of malignant shepherd for the 20th century. But the new world he has created leaves Gull confused and bewildered for reasons he never truly understands. We know, however, that his ritual was completed imperfectly -- another woman has been mistaken for Gull's final, intended, victim, and so a hope of feminine power survives.

            On the surface, William Blake's role in From Hell seems to be fairly small, although the fact that he is in the comic at all when he was dead years before the murders took place is in itself unusual. Gull visits Blake's grave in the grueling fourth chapter of the comic, during which he discusses Blake's philosophy and poetry, erroneously calling him a druid. After Gull dies he manifests before Blake at the top of a staircase as well as later during the composition of Blake's monstrous painting The Ghost of a Flea (Blake saw visions of angels, famous poets, and others throughout his life but said he had only ever seen one ghost; this was it). Blake's true significance would only be developed later, after Moore had passed through the philosophical gates that From Hell had opened in his thinking.

Soon after Moore had completed From Hell, around his fortieth birthday, he decided to become a magician (not giving up his increasingly successful career as a comic writer). The decision was prompted by a From Hell moment in which Gull explains, "The one place Gods inarguably exist is in our minds, where they are real beyond refute, in all their grandeur and monstrosity." In his annotations to his own work, Moore calls this phrase the one thing he had written which he knew to be true. His efforts to contact the gods of his own mind led to the study of magic and the use of hallucinogenic drugs. He now communicates regularly with a snake god, sees "spiritual entities", and performs magical rituals both public and private. These stir his imagination and have led him to his most creative and prolific phase as a writer. He is the first to admit that the entities he communicates with, and the powers he claims to control, may exist only in his mind, but their presence there is beyond question. Interviewers have not been shy about the topic. Moore measures his own sanity not by how happy he is, since the mad may be perfectly happy, but rather by his productivity and creativity (a measure that might also helpfully be applied to Blake). Since he is still working, and since that work is more successful than ever, he can only assume that the machine in his head is not broken. There was an initial period of discomfort with family and friends, but according to statements on Eddie Campbell's Ideaspace webpage, "By this time my [that is, Moore's] family and associates had become reassured that I was certainly no less rational, functional, and creative than I had been before, so they either shrugged and let me get on with it or else actively encouraged me to discourse upon the subject because they found it interesting too."

            By the late 90's, Moore the practicing magician felt that mainstream comics publishers had bungled the opportunity that he, Frank Miller, and others had created for the comics form in 1985. To quote Blather:

 

"The problem is that Ôgraphic novel' just came to mean Ôexpensive comic book' and so what you'd get is people like DC Comics or Marvel Comics -- because Ôgraphic novels' were getting some attention, they'd stick six issues of crap they happened to be publishing lately under a glossy cover and call it The She-Hulk Graphic Novel, you know? It was that that I think tended to destroy any progress that comics might have made in the mid-80s."

 

DC and others were too concerned with financial success and not enough concerned with the quality of the stories they were selling or the value of their themes. To change this, Moore used the immense power of his own name in the industry to create ABC Comics. Again, from Blather:

 

 "I just thought I'd like to do some cool stuff in the mainstream that is still progressive and forward-looking enough to actually be valid and worthwhile material but do it in the mainstream so that it can have an impact and hopefully can in some small measure go towards regenerating the currently dismal medium."

 

Other projects abound, including a series of performance art pieces held in and around London. Angel Passage is the fourth of these, which began with The Birth Caul and has continued through Snakes and Ladders and The Highbury Working. He has written novels (Voice of the Fire) and poetry, but remains a quiet figure who strictly avoids any online presence. Fortunately, interviews and annotations of his work allow readers to penetrate the workings of his texts.

            My transcription of Angel Passage is not perfect, and is a work in progress. Doubtful phrases have been placed in [square brackets]. No one will be happier than I if Moore or RE: should release an "official" transcript of the poem sequence, but in the meantime I have attempted to negotiate Moore's highly variable pacing and British accent as well as Perkins occasionally intrusive accompaniment to come up with a text that can be analyzed and discussed. This challenge includes not only the matter of simple word choice but also extends to those problems traditionally faced by editors: punctuation, stanza length, and other matters of presentation. I have attempted to punctuate rhetorically rather than with attention to proper grammar. The Angel Passage CD includes titles for the various verses which make up each of the four poems; I have included them even though they were not spoken in performance. It is difficult to say where one stanza ends and another begins, so I have been forced to make my best judgment. With one poem, Hell, even this proved impossible. The verse titles provided by the CD cover are neither numbered nor all readable. There are certainly more titles than I could clearly make out, and so proper numbering of them is impossible. My suspicion that there are precisely 69 verses in the collected four poems (Blake was 69 at the time of his death) cannot be proven until Hell's verse titles are made clear in an official transcript.

The poetry sequences Moore performs are strongly themed to the place of their delivery. The Highbury Working is a recording of his attempts to conjure the spirit of the Highbury district. He himself has noted these performances are "all about the place." Angel Passage has been criticized by some reviewers because it appears to be an exception to this rule: a poem attempting to invoke a person, not a place. But William Blake is inevitably tied to London, and Angel Passage is littered with references to Blake's geographical location. The Broad Street neighborhood where he was born, grew up, found a home, and put on his exhibition is one facet of the larger London that acts as a character in these poems. In fact, it is geography that leads us back to the phantom haunting Angel Passage: William Gull. If you ignore the paltry matter of a few decades (a minor trick indeed considering the temporal fugues crafted in both From Hell and Angel Passage), Gull and Blake literally lived around the corner from one another at South Molton and Brook Streets respectively. In the Observer interview mentioned earlier, Moore characterizes Blake as representing "the visionary heroism of the imagination." He has no such role in From Hell, however, where all the imaginative power is being wielded in a negative sense by Gull. It is safe to say that Moore's appreciation of Blake's role as a heroic practicioner of the same magical rites Gull is displaying came only later, after From Hell was completed. From a few panels and word balloons in that older work, Moore discovered that he had a hero much more admirable than the villain he had previously created. These two Williams both represent the power of individuals to transform their world according to their own will. For Gull, that means the imprisonment of the eternal feminine in bondage to the male, but Blake's vision is all energy, freedom, liberation and light. "He was living in a London which was not much more than a squallid horse toilet," Moore relates in The Observer, "on which he superimposed a magnificent four-fold city and populated it with angels, and philosophers of the past. Art at its best has the power to insist on a different reality." I would only note here that, as Gull demonstrates, Art at its worst also has this power, in a way that we can only dread. For make no mistake, if Blake's art is powerful magic, then Gull's magic is powerful art: a ghastly, hideous art. It is easy to see Moore's motive for composing Angel Passage: how could he, after forming his philosophy of the magical imagination and its ability to shape the world, leave us in the hands of his old creation Jack the Ripper? No, he must deliver us, the world, and himself, from this doom. The visionary power that allows Moore and William Gull both to speak with gods is also what allows Blake to see Paracelsus, Milton, angels and his dead brother Robert. It allows him to transform the soot-stained, mechanical, and prostituted streets of London into a fourfold edifice of spiritual liberation for all mankind.

As a man who has struggled with patronage, and who has felt his chosen art form stifled by the tastes of the fickle public, Alan Moore can identify with Blake. He does so throughout the poem, most forcefully in the final stanzas when he insists, "It's not enough to study or revere him, only be him." Moore's personal identification allows him to speak of Blake's early career with a voice of frustrated anguish, and to accept Blake's visions of angels at face value. In opposition to these angels are political and social forces which constrain the artist: throughout the first three movements of the sequence Moore uses the French Revolution and London's squallor as simultanous foes and fodder for the struggling poet. It is the common perception among Blake scholars today that the artist himself, while alive, was something of a failure. Indeed, he is described by one of his contemporaries, an art critic, as "as unfortunate lunatic." But to the Romantic artists who came later, and to poets, artists, and critics of our own time, William Blake is a landmark figure experiencing something of a renaissance. It is in this later perception of Blake -- who in an artistic sense is clearly not dead -- that Moore finds hope for his own medium. As he admits in Blather:

"It could have been different. If things had gone a bit differently fifteen, twenty years ago. And if you'd got the sort of people with vision in control then who actually thought ÔWell, you know, this could open up comics to a whole new market,' rather than leave us condemned to the same dwindling market that we've had for the last fifty years. But no, there was nobody there, there was no back-up. There was a few creators who were taking chances and who were actually for the first time making comics into something that adults could be interested in but there was no back-up." Blake, too, had no back-up, as Moore makes tragically clear in the phrases of Angel Passage. But he succeeds anyway because, in the end, his art worked eternal results that far outlived the flesh.

Moore's characterization of Blake's youth depends heavily on sex. He is portrayed as something of a naive innocent who is rescued by Catherine's "sweet wings of tenderness." The lines which introduce Catherine come so close to those discussing "pawned caresses" that it is tempting to see Moore describing both her and Blake's first, failed, object of affection as prostitutes. This would not necessarily soil her character in Moore's eyes; his portrayal of prostitutes in From Hell, Promethea, and other works has always been sympathetic to the women involved, if not to the institution. I suspect it is no accident that prostitution features so prominently in both From Hell and Innocence, but the larger significance of this relationship is, I think, worthy of a different study. In any case, Catherine's subservience to Blake is not discussed by Moore, nor are Blake's more misogynistic later writings. Events like her famous apology to Robert or her habit of referring to her husband as "Mr. Blake" would undermine Moore's theme of liberation and freedom, so Moore does not include them.

One thing missing from the formula that fuels the practicing magician is hallucinogenic drugs. Moore has stated in interviews that "Magic, as far as I  understand, since the dawn of time has been largely predicated upon drug use." I am unaware of any evidence that Blake took such drugs, probably because his visions required no such stimulus, and there is no such suggestion in Angel Passage.  Instead of sex, drugs and rock-n-roll, Blake's sources for inspiration are "Heaven, sex and insurrection". The last refers to the French Revolution, but the first, I suspect, serves as a surrogate for drugs in Moore's conception of Blake the practicing magician.

            The pace of Angel Passage goes constantly back and forth, from a relatively docile and straight-forward reading to one that is accelerated, spastic, and marked by increases in both musical tempo and volume. These verses correspond to Blake's visionary experiences, and negotiating them is a significant challenge for the transcriber. The third poem in the sequence, Experience, however, is notable for being the calmest and most tranquil in the sequence. Set in Blake's last year, it is dominated by recollections of his later life and a transcendant understanding in Blake's own mind. Moore portrays him as a man who at last understands his role in the larger cosmos after this petty physical world is done. Poverty and ill health do not matter to him, for the transformative ritual that he has been performing his whole life will see fruition not in the turgid streets of 19th century London, but in a spiritual plane far beyond matter.

            Experience functions as a lull before the storm; Heaven begins with an accelerated tempo and only increases as the poem reaches its climax. This is where Tim Perkins' musical accompaniment is at its best. It is in Heaven that Moore paints his portrait of William Blake as a heroic embodiment of imaginative might. His love for life and love for his fellow man is so awesome, so unlimited in its degree, that he at last grows too large even for the streets and events of London. He skips like a stone out of time and space, exploding outwards into the cosmological man. Suns and spiral galaxies become patterns on Catherine's dress, and Blake, adopting the exultant posture of his own "Albion Rose", becomes "our human compass", showing the direction for future mankind. And so, in this way, we achieve fulfillment, despite the fact that Moore has articulated our hero years after he created the fiendish villain. When William Gull sees the world his bloody murders have created that old Victorian is bewildered and enfeebled, but William Blake, discovering an affirmation of his principal values, is a Romantic "amazed, and unafraid."

 

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

Ackroyd, Peter. Blake. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. Alan Moore praises Ackroyd in the appendices to From Hell and reviewed this book in issue 95 of Fortean Times: the Journal of Strange Phenomena. Many of the details of London life, as well as various occult references, found in Angel Passage are drawn from Ackroyd.

 

Bentley, G.E. Jr. The Stranger From Paradise: A Biography of William Blake. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001. Readers who are interested in a less popular and more academic study of Blake's life will find Bentley's documentary study more to their taste.

 

The Blake Archive. Morris Eaves, Robert Essick, Joseph Visconi, eds. 5 March 2003. Library of Congress. http://www.blakearchive.org/ The pre-eminent online resource for Blake scholars, the Archive maintains impeccable editorial standards and allows, through powerful tools, searching, comparisons, and editorial commentary. With the recent addition of Jerusalem, the Archive contains (usually multiple) copies of all Blake's illuminated books and an expanding selection of Blake's other work.

 

Damon, S. Foster. A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Sumbols of William Blake. Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1965. It can be much easier to read Blake when you have a scorecard. Unfortunately, because this is Blake, the scorecard is over four hundred pages long. An invaluable resource.

 

Blake, William. The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake, Newly Revised Edition. Ed. David V. Erdman, commentary by Harold Bloom. USA: Doubleday, 1988. Erdman's edition of Blake is the standard text. This is unillustrated. To see Blake's works closer to their original model, investigate The Illuminated Blake (also Erdman, with black and white copies of the illuminated books) or Blake's Illuminated Books (6 volumes), David Bindman general editor.

 

Gilchrist, Alexander. The Life of William Blake. Ed. Ruthven Todd. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1945. Gilchrist rescued Blake's reputation from obscurity with this biography, which is 150 years old but still eminently readable. Since Gilchrist worked at a time when some of those who knew Blake personally were still alive, the book remains critical even today. I do not have access to a copy of Gilchrist's unedited biography of Blake, but only to the 1945 edition edited by Todd. For this reason, I have given references to Gilchrist only by Chapter and not by page. Fortunately it is possible to determine, based on notes in the appendices to From Hell, that Moore is using the (slightly prior) 1942 edition of Todd. Other Blake references used by Moore but not available to me include: William Blake by Kathleen Raine (Thames & Hudson, 1970) and "William Blake's Spiritual Four-Fold City" by Bernard Nessfield-Cookson in The Aquarian Guide to Legendary London, edited by John Matthews and Chesca Potter (The Aquarian Press, 1990).

 

Moore, Alan (w), Eddie Campbell (a). From Hell. Canada: Eddie Campbell Comics, 1999. Moore and Campbell's masterful telling of the Ripper case, and the source for the transcendent magic worked by Blake in Angel Passage. Fully annotated by Moore himself.

 

Moore, Alan (w), Dave Gibbons (a). Watchmen. Canada: DC Comics, 1985. This collected twelve issue series was one half of the combination punch that set the stage for a comics revolution. Whether or not that revolution succeeded or failed is another question.

 

Alan Moore (w), David Lloyd (a). V for Vendetta. Canada: DC Comics, 1990. Moore's (285 page) tale of a heroic anarchist waging war against a Big Brother state. Set in England after a limited nuclear exchange.

 

Moore, Alan, Tim Perkins. Angel Passage. RE:, 2001. Angel Passage is easiest to locate if purchased through Top Shelf Productions at http://www.topshelfcomix.com/ an independent comic publisher which handles most of Moore's non-ABC work.

 

Moore, Alan (w), J. H. Williams III (p), Mike Gray (i). Promethea. Canada: America's Best Comics, 1999-2002. In addition to being an outstanding remix of the superhero genre, Promethea is Moore's primary platform for the discussion of magic, mysticism, and the imagination as relevant to our society. As of this writing, three volumes of the ongoing series have been collected.

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Tolkien's Wanderer

eardstapa, Aragorn, and the Long Defeat


    'Who is that?' Frodo asked, when he got the chance to whisper to Mr. Butterbur. 'I don’t think you introduced him?'
    'Him?' said the landlord in an answering whisper, cocking an eyebrow without turning his head. 'I don’t rightly know. He is one of the wandering folk ...'

Tolkien's familiarity with The Wanderer does not have to be inferred; he worked for a time on an edition of the poem with E. V. Gordon [1] and he cites the poem as a source for Middle-earth's Ents in a letter to W.H. Auden. [2] The lines echo most clearly in Aragorn's, "Where now the horse and the rider?" This passage has been noted often and in prominent places. [3] This study, however, attempts to plumb deeper into waters that may very well have no bottom, or at least be too deep for such an impertinent dip. What I seek to do is to examine more subtle and thematic uses of The Wanderer in The Lord of the Rings. Beyond the simple quotation of lines, can we see The Wanderer's footprints elsewhere in the work? What is Strider’s role in all of this? And finally, why did Tolkien use The Wanderer (in specific) and elegiac Anglo-Saxon poetry (in general) in his creation of Middle-earth?

Tolkien's quotation of Wanderer comes at that point in the Lord of the Rings when Gandalf the White leads Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas to the Rohirric capital of Edoras. When Aragorn sees this countryside he recalls a song sung by "a forgotten poet long ago." [4] The song is of Eorl the Young, who founded the kingdom of Rohan some five centuries previous. At first, Aragorn sings in the native tongue of Rohan (Rohirric), but these lines are not duplicated in the text; the words are described only as a "chant" which is spoken "softly in a slow tongue" and we know there is "a strong music in it." When Legolas, Aragorn's immortal Elf companion, hears the words he describes the language as "rich and rolling in part, and else hard and stern as the mountains ... laden with the sadness of Mortal Men." Drafts of The Lord of the Rings make it clear that Tolkien originally wrote Anglo-Saxon dialogue for the people of Rohan, [5] but gradually stripped this element out, first removing distinctive alphabetic characters before finally settling for a simple English translation. Aragorn himself does the translation on this occasion, placing the song into "Common Speech ... as near as I can make it."

For ease of comparison, I have broken Aragorn's song of eight lines into the half-lines of which it is so clearly composed, and which form another strong link to the Anglo-Saxon original. The corresponding passage from Wanderer is shorter, and the phrases manipulated, but the thematic similarity is overpowering. The first two half lines read so:

‘Hwær cwom mearg? Hwær cwom mago?	Where now the horse and the rider?
Hwær cwom ma∂∂umgyfa? [6]	Where is the horn that was blowing?

This first line is also the most straight-forward, and it is this line which has drawn so many Anglo-Saxon readers of Lord of the Rings to The Wanderer. It is worth remembering that the horn being referred to here is the horn of Eorl the Young, first King of Rohan. That is, the “mathom-giver” for his people, the Eorlingas. Tolkien had no desire to emphasize the giving of treasure and gifts among a human culture when this characteristic already typified the Dwarves and Hobbits respectively (these latter even refer to such gifts as mathoms). But by shifting the line’s emphasis to the horn, he maintained the essential object of the phrase: the leader of the people.

Hwær cwom symbla gesetu?	Where is the helm and the hauberk
Hwær sindon seledreamas?	and the bright hair flowing?
Eala beorht bune!	Where is the hand on the harpstring
Eala byrnwiga!	and the red fire glowing?

Tolkien reverses these two lines, perhaps for purposes of rhyme. “Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?” is a proper alliterative verse according to the principles of Anglo-Saxon poetry, with three alliterations, two in the first half-line, one in the second, with the final stressed syllable not alliterated (more alliterative rhymes occur near the end of Rings,  spoken by Eomer, prince of Rohan, who it turns out is something of a scop. One sample: “Mourn not overmuch! Mighty was the fallen, / meet was his ending. When his mound is raised, / women then shall weep. War now calls us!”). The bright cup and the byrnied warrior become the helm/hauberk and the bright hair -- again a de-emphasis on Anglo-Saxon values of treasure and wealth in favor of more romantic symbols which suit the Nordic blonde-haired Eorl. The “seledreamas” get the most expansion, as Tolkien summons up concrete examples: harping and a warm fire. These are the sort of specific activities which “seledreamas” is in fact intended to abbreviate.

Eala ∂eodnes ∂rym!	Where is the spring and the harvest
	and the tall corn growing?

From this point forward, the relationship between the two poems becomes more problematic, and these phrases are without doubt the least similar. There is no reference to spring and a harvest in Wanderer unless it is to note its opposite: the cold and the winter. Tolkien’s Eorlingas live in a warmer and more fruitful clime than the Anglo-Saxons, and do not fear the winter as much. So although the Rings passage has no similarity to the corresponding Wanderer half-line, it is worth noting that The Wanderer’s word for prince or king is “∂eodnes” and the King of Rohan at the time of Aragorn’s visit is in fact named Theoden (it is Theoden’s death that prompts the “Mourn not overmuch!” lines quoted earlier by Eomer, Theoden’s nephew). While a clear use of Anglo-Saxon, this is not unusual. Every inhabitant of Rohan whom we meet in Lord of the Rings has an Anglo-Saxon name, from Eowyn (“horse-maiden” or “joy of horses”) to Hama (a name from Beowulf). Place-names are also derived exclusively from Anglo-Saxon, with the kingdom divided into West and East Emnet (“plain”), the king’s home of Meduseld (“mead hall”) and the fortress of Hornburg. The definitive study of Anglo-Saxon words in Rings is Ben Nordhjeim’s “In Quest of Tolkien’s Middle-Earth: On the Interpretation and Classification of the Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (with an Old English Word-List)”.

Hu seo ∂rag gewat,	They have passed like the rain on the mountain,
	like a wind in the meadow;
gena∂ under nihthelm	The days have gone down in the West
swa heo no wære!’	behind the hills into shadow.

Here Tolkien re-shapes “swa heo no wære” into a metaphor: “like the rain on the mountain, like a wind on the meadow.” These are phrases which would be very applicable to the people of Rohan, who dwell on the plains in the shadow of the magnificent White Mountains, and they continue Tolkien’s general movement towards increased specificity, increased physicality and sensual impression. The phrase “gena∂ under nihthelm” is greatly transformed, though the literal sense remains. These days are now dark under the cover of night, but it is a very particular night, and a very special dark, for Tolkien uses the words West and shadow. When Tolkien uses these words they always refer to the land of Valinor, the “uttermost West” where the “gods” of Middle-earth mythology dwell and where virtuous souls inevitably seek to travel. Ordinary mariners cannot find this land of myth, for the seas of the earth have been bent by the hand of God, so that only those who take special ships fashioned in the shape of swans can break free from the spherical world and sail into the heavens. This, I think, is an image inspired by “wa∂ema gebind” and that enigmatic passage in Wanderer: “sumne wig fornom ferede in for∂wege”. But returning to Aragorn’s song and “gena∂ under nihthelm”: shadow in Rings always refers to evil, corruption or, in this case, death. So the days have gone to the West to die, and this is the particular interpretation of “dark under cover of night” that Tolkien has sought to explore.

    Who shall gather the smoke
    of the dead wood burning,
    Or behold the flowing years
    from the Sea returning?

I include the last four half-lines of Aragorn’s song for completeness, though there is no comparative phrase in Wanderer once the “ubi sunt” passage ends. I would note, however, that this extension emphasizes physical details once more: smoke, burning wood, and the sea. I believe these two lines are more properly a reference to the end of Beowulf than to Wanderer, and the similarity of Tolkien’s chapter “The King of the Golden Hall” (in which the eight line song just scanned actually appears) to the opening passages of Beowulf is a fact commonly noted by scholars. [7]

Those who have studied Tolkien’s writing process on Lord of the Rings, which we know surprisingly much about thanks to the rconstructive efforts of his son Christopher, know that the work was largely composed “on the page.” While Tolkien outlined the possible direction of the plot, it always changed radicaly as he wrote, and he himself admitted the outlines were often of little use. [8] I mention this method of composition because it is clear from drafts of “The King of the Golden Hall” that Aragorn’s song was introduced quite late in the process, and may have been composed in one sitting, the final draft. As has been noted, after this nod to Wanderer, Aragorn’s reception at Edoras follows a very close Beowulf line, complete with a challenge by the outer guard, a later challenge by door-wardens, the leaving of weapons at the threshold, and the meeting with an aging, declining king who is ill-served by a poor counselor. The entire chapter was apparently dashed off without plan or outline, and I think it no accident that two major and clear borrowings from Anglo-Saxon originals occur in such proximity to one another. It may be impossible to tell if Tolkien first came upon the idea of modeling the chapter on Beowulf and then thought of The Wanderer as an introduction, or if he began by injecting The Wanderer and decided to follow up one borrowing with another much larger one (a weighing of the various drafts of “The King of the Golden Hall” suggests the former option, though not by much).

The poem is placed in the mouth of Aragorn, who is not only a warrior and rightful king, but also a poet and a man known for his ability to compose verse. Moreover, of all the four companions who come calling on Theoden king, it is Aragorn who has the most connection to this land, for he served Theoden’s father under the pseudonym of Thorongil (a name which is not of Anglo-Saxon derivation, and means “eagle of the star” in one of Tolkien’s elvish tongues). To fully appreciate Aragorn’s appropriateness to these eight lines and The Wanderer in general, it is necessary to recap some data from Lord of the Rings that relates to this man, known variously as Elessar, Wingfoot, and Strider. The descendant of a royal bloodline, Aragorn’s father dies when Aragorn is but an infant, and his mother when he was a child. The orphan is raised by Elrond, an elven lord who, though he has two sons and a daughter, is essentially widowed after his wife sails into the uttermost West out of despair. It is in the house of Elrond that Aragorn meets Arwen, the elf-lord’s daughter, with whom he falls in love.

But Elrond will not tolerate the thought of his daughter, a potent immortal possessed of ineffable grace, being wed to a mortal man, no matter how royal his blood. Elrond thus lays upon the young Aragorn a geas: the marriage will not be permitted unless Aragorn proves himself the best of all possible men, not just now but for all time. He must reforge the fallen kingdoms of Arnor and Gondor, defeat the dark lord Sauron, and unite all the free peoples in a new age of peace and prosperity ... and only then may Aragorn marry Elrond’s daughter. [9] Soon, Aragorn vanishes from Elrond’s hidden sanctuary in order to prove himself and complete the quest he has been given. For thirty years he travels across Middle-earth, battling the agents of the dark lord “far into the East and deep into the South.” [10] He serves as a soldier in Rohan under Thengel, who was born in Gondor and who speaks their tongue -- not the Anglo-Saxon of Rohirric -- in his court. In time he leaves Rohan and goes to Gondor itself, where he leads an invasion that extends Gondor’s borders to their largest extent in generations. But at the very moment of victory, he disappears again, returning to Elrond’s house. What prompts his return? No specific cause is mentioned, but it may be related to the death in this same year of Thengel, King of Rohan, who would have been Aragorn’s first “lord”.

From this summary, it can be seen that Aragorn -- Strider -- is a perfect model of The Wanderer himself. Aragorn, whom Tolkien describes as “sad and stern because of the doom that was laid on him” is “modcearig” and has “wadan wræclastas” in many foreign lands. He is mindful both of hardships and of fierce slaughters, but his warrior skills are almost incidental. More importantly, he has become wise, “the most hardy of living Men, skilled in their crafts and lore." [11] Gold has no power over him, as “wunden gold” does not hold the “eardstapa”. In his own words, eerily familiar: “One who cannot cast away a treasure at need is in fetters.” With the death of Thengel he returns to Elrond, having buried his lord in “hrusan heolstre”. While the reunification of Arnor and Gondor is still many years in the future, he has at least begun the evolution that Elrond charged him with, an evolution which could have been lifted straight from the Wanderer:

The character of Strider was more or less invented on the page as well; even Tolkien admitted in a letter that when the character first appeared, Tolkien had no idea who he was or what he was doing in the story. [12] Eventually, Aragorn would mature into a messianic figure whose touch heals, and whose will is strong enough to contend with Sauron himself. But at his heart, Aragorn’s greatest source of inspiration may be a “forgotten poet long ago” who sung The Wanderer in the halls of Edoras and showed Aragorn the way to wisdom. It is no wonder that the love-lost Strider, working then under the name Thorongil, commited this poem to memory, for it is both the template of his character in an authorial sense and, from his own perspective, the mantra by which he lives his life.


 ‘ ... together through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat.’

It is no wonder, either, that Tolkien should find inspiration in an elegy, for Lord of the Rings is at its heart an elegiac work. It is the elven queen Galadriel (Elrond’s mother-in-law) who characterizes the history of the world as “the long defeat” [13] and Tolkien himself uses this phrase in letters to describe not just the world of Middle-earth but “history”, the world in which we live. [14] One of the conceits of Middle-earth which Tolkien employed (and struggled to accomodate) was that the tales of Lord of the Rings took place not in some fantasy world, but in our own world in another time. And because Middle-earth was our earth, then like our earth it was also “fallen ... going ‘to the bad’ all down the ages.” [15] Or, in the words of Wanderer, “Swa ∂es middangeard ealra dogra gewham dreose∂ ond fealla∂.”

As a man whose Roman Catholic faith was deeply ingrained, Tolkien saw the world as a fallen place, “though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.” [16] That parenthetical note is particularly interesting, for it is the answer to any critic who might point out that Aragorn’s success story would not seem to parallel the fate of The Wanderer. Aragorn is the Elessar, the ordained king who unites all people in a new golden age, and he is at last united with his beloved in a union which lasts for over one hundred and fifty years, before at last he surrenders to death and allows his soul to depart his body. But he also rekindles worship of the one God that is the true creator of Middle-earth, and for all his riches, his fame, and his royal bloodline, he still passes into the West with an air of sanctity, a reliance on divine mercy and wisdom that is perfectly in keeping with The Wanderer’s message. After his death, his kingdom flourishes for a time, but eventually it too decays and crumbles into ruin.

While this fallen world view extends throughout Lord of the Rings and, indeed, into its larger meta-narrative The Silmarillion, it is in the kingdom of Rohan that the Anglo-Saxon connection is strongest, and where the peculiarly elegiac themes of The Wanderer and other poems are found. I have already discussed Tolkien’s use of the Anglo-Saxon language for the language of Rohan, whom Tolkien describes as “a simpler and more primitive people living in contact with a higher and more ‘venerable’ culture, and occupying lands that had once been part of its domain.” [17] In this case, the ‘venerable’ culture is that of Rohan, but the similarity to Anglo-Saxon culture living in the shadow of Roman occupation is strong. One wonders if some “long forgotten” Rohirric bard looked upon the impregnable but long abandoned fortress of Orthanc (later inhabited by the cunning wizard Saruman) and composed his Ruin. It is this very fortress, the “old work of giants”, which is later destroyed by an army of Ents. Soon after “The King of the Golden Hall”, Aragorn and the others travel to Helm’s Deep, a fortress which is assaulted by a vast, uncounted army of orcs and “wild men” sent from the north out of Dunland. Here, atop a mighty wall which is attacked again and again, the brave warriors of Theoden are battered and slain, the “dugu∂ eal gecrong, wlong be wealle,” until they are driven down to hiding in caves.

How strong is this Anglo-Saxon/Rohan connection? The question is important because Tolkien himself insists that there is no connection, that only the language was the same. “This linguistic procedure does not imply,” he writes in one of the Ring’s many appendices, speaking directly on his use of Anglo-Saxon for Rohirric, “that the Rohirrim closely resembled the ancient English otherwise, in culture or art, in weapons or modes of warfare ...” [18] And yet, just the opposite is the case: the Anglo-Saxon people were especially used as models for the Rohirric peoples, as typified best by their poetry. To help bolster this thesis, I can appeal to the best of sources: Professor Tolkien himself.

For Tolkien was not always consistent in his sub-creation, as much as scholars might wish to hope otherwise, and the world of Middle-earth was always evolving. To name just one particular example, Tolkien struggled until the end of his life with the challenges posed by modern astronomy. Middle-earth was, in its most ancient days, lit not by a sun and moon but by two enormous trees that gave off golden and silver light and, when the trees were sucked dry of all life by the monstrous spider-demon Ungoliant, their light was preserved in enormous lamps which were erected one on each side of the world to provide light. It was only later that the lamps were in turn destroyed, and the sun and moon placed in the heavens, completing a fall from natural perfection to the world we inhabit today. [19] But if Middle-earth was our own world, possessed only of a nonhistorical time, how could this romantic fable of trees and lamps to light the world be reconciled with a Newtonian universe? Letters and drafts reveal that Tolkien had resolved to delete the trees and lamps and make Middle-earth a world forever round (it was flat before God bent the seas back on themselves and removed Valinor to the heavens) but had simply not yet gotten around to making this significant rewrite by the time of his death. [20] The Silmarillion, assembled from his notes and drafts, maintains the original myths of the trees, and is significantly better for it.

This constantly changing nature of Middle-earth, a tendency towards experimentation and extemporaneous writing, manifests also in Rohan and its people. For example, when explaining to a reader how the Rohirric spoke, Tolkien casually mentions,  “The Rohirrim no doubt (as our English ancestors in a similar state of culture and society) spoke, at least their own tongue, with a slower tempo and more sonorous articulation, than modern ‘urbans’” [21] So now the culture and society of the Rohirric people are “similar” to that of “our English ancestors”, in direct contradiction to the published note. So what of “weapons and or modes of warfare,” the second half of that cautionary appendix? If we are not to think of the Rohirrim as Anglo-Saxons, why then does Tolkien suggest to another reader, “The styles of the Bayeaux Tapestry (made in England) fit them well enough, if one remembers that the kind of tennis-nets [the] soldiers seem to have on are only a clumsy conventional sign for chain-mail of small rings.” [22]

It is precisely in matters of warfare and of culture that the people of Rohan are most like the Anglo-Saxons, and I am not the first to notice the strangeness of Tolkien’s blunt disavowal. Shippey notes it, but cannot explain it. [23] Tolkien’s letters reveal, however, that it is precisely in matters of culture that Tolkien felt most insecure. He could invent languages with unrestricted energy, and felt confident enough in matters of economy and trade, but “I am more conscious of my sketchiness in the archeology and realien than in the economics: clothes, agricultural implements, metal-working, pottery, architecture and the like. Not to mention music and its apparatus.” [24] Uncertain of these anthropological elements, Tolkien took his lead from the Anglo-Saxons when developing Rohan, all the while reserving the right to make whatever changes were necessary for his narrative. Add to this Tolkien’s famous dislike of “allegory” (by which he meant any attempt to force a direct comparison between something in his secondary world and a person, event, or group in our own primary world), and it is clear why an author might flatly state an injunction against seeing historical elements in a fabricated culture, while at the same time borrowing from that culture liberally. In truth, Tolkien had little to fear, for while the Rohirrim are in many ways similar to and influenced by Anglo-Saxons, they are not identical, as even the brief comparison from The Wanderer to Aragorn’s eight line song has shown. They are a people less reliant on an economy of battle-plunder and golden treasure, a people not of the sea and the cold north, but of the springtime sun and the rolling plains. They also, however, live in the same fallen world we do, and they have a similar view of that world. They must, or deceive themselves, for “Men have ‘fallen’ -- any legends put in the form of supposed ancient history of this actual world of ours must accept that." [25]

The elegiac nature of Middle-earth is not lost on Aragorn, its titular hero. He knows the poems sung by the people of Eorl, and he sees all too clearly his own role as the last of the great kings. He can create a new prosperity, but he can never bring back his lord, Thengel, who is buried in a hole in the earth. The horse Felarof and Eorl, his rider, are gone forever. Aragorn does not, in a plot Tolkien outlined but later scrapped, wed Eowyn of Rohan. If he had, this would have given Rohan and Anglo-Saxon culture pride of place in Aragorn’s new world order. Instead, he marries Arwen halfelven, and in so doing renews a covenant with God and God’s chosen people. The people of Rohan are left to slowly wither, looking back with awe on the old work of giants.

Works Consulted

Gordon, E. V. The Seafarer. London: Methuen, 1960.

Hammond, Wayne G, Douglas Anderson. J. R. R. Tolkien: A Descriptive Bibliography. USA: St. Pauls Bibliographies, 1993.

Klink, Anne L. The Old English Elegies: A Critical Edition and Genre Study. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992.

Nordhjem, Ben. “In Quest of Tolkien’s Middle-Earth: On the Interpretation and Classification of The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien (with an Old English Word List)” in Volve: Scandinavian Views on Science Fiction.

Shippey, T. A. “The undeveloped image: Anglo-Saxon in popular consciousness from Turner to Tolkien” in Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century, Donald Scragg and Carole Weinberg editors. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Tinkler, John. “Old English in Rohan” in Tolkien and the Critics, Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo editors. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Ed. Humphrey Carpenter. US: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. Great Britain: HarperCollins Publishers, 1994.

Tolkien, J. R. R. Morgoth’s Ring: the Later Silmarillion. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. US: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1993.

Tolkien, J. R. R. The Silmarillion. Second edition. USA: Mariner Books, 2001.

Tolkien, J. R. R. The Treason of Isengard, The History of the Lord of the Rings, Part Two Ed. Christopher Tolkien. USA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000.

Notes [use your BACK button to return to the text]

1  What is known of Tolkien’s work with E. V. Gordon on The Wanderer can be found in Mrs. Gordon’s preface to The Seafarer (London: Methuen, 1960) and is summarized in J. R. R. Tolkien: A Descriptive Bibliography, p. 305.

2  Letter 163 in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, p. 212.

3  Such as Christopher Tolkien’s The Treason of Isengard, the History of the Lord of the Rings, Part Two, pages 443, 449.
 
4  This phrase and most of the rest of the quotations from Lord of the Rings are found in Volume II chapter VI, “The King of the Golden Hall.” Because of the many editions of Tolkien’s work, it is difficult to cite page references that have any meaning. What I have at hand is the single-volume paperback edition printed by HarperCollins; the chapter in question is pages 495-513 and Aragorn’s song appears on page 497.

5  Especially in the scene in which the door-wardens speak their native tongue in a challenge to Gandalf and the others. See The Treason of Isengard p. 442-443 and 449-450.

6  All Wanderer selections are from Anne L. Klink’s Old English Elegies: A Critical Edition and Genre Study, p.75-78. Translations from the Anglo-Saxon are my own.

7  Both T. A. Shippey and Christopher Tolkien make such notes, in “The undeveloped image” p. 234 and The Treason of Isengard pp. 442, 449-450 respectively.

8  “From time to time I made rough sketches or synopses of what was to follow, immediately or far ahead; but these were seldom of much use: the story unfolded itself as it were.” Letter 199 to Caroline Everett, p. 258.

9  Those readers who have been ill received by potential in-laws will sympathize with Aragorn’s plight.

10  Aragorn’s early adventures could not be worked into the narrative and Tolkien was forced to include them in the appendices. This particular quotation is from Appendix A (v) “Here Follows a Part of the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen,” p. 1035.

11  Ibid.

12  “But I met a lot of things on the way that astonished me ... Strider sitting in the corner at the inn was a shock, and I had no more idea who he was then had Frodo.” Letter 163 to W. H. Auden.

13  “The Mirror of Galadriel” is Volume I, chapter VII, and the quotation is found on p. 348 of the single volume paperback HarperCollins edition.

14  Letter 195 to Amy Ronald, p. 255.

15  Tolkien’s letter 43 is to his son Michael, advising him on matters of faith. p. 48.

16  Letter 195 again, to Amy Ronald, p. 255.

17  Appendix F II “On Translation” in Lord of the Rings, p. 1110.

18  Ibid.

19  The full tale of the Two Trees and the lamps is told in the Silmarillion, not published in Tolkien’s life.

20  This particular transformation of Middle-earth is discussed in Morgoth’s Ring, especially pages 369-374.

21  Letter 193 to Terence Tiller, p. 254.

22  Letter 211 to Rhona Beare, p. 281.

23  Shippey describes this “odd thing” on p. 234 of “The undeveloped image.”

24  Letter 154 to Naomi Mitchison.

25  From a draft of a letter to Robert Murray, number 156, p. 203.

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