The Green Chapel

Saturday, 9 May 2026

W. G. Collingwood, The Northern Gods Descending (1890)

The Original Scout Salute

Actually even though I think this picture was taken in Lithuania, the salute was clearly virtually the same as the salute ("raised hand", at any rate) for making the Pledge of Allegiance in America. This old way of doing things I believe pertained in America up until the 1930s, when it suddenly became politically incorrect - for some reason.

In 1939 Lord Baden-Powell noted in his diary:

Lay up all day. Read Mein Kampf. A wonderful book, with good ideas on education, health, propaganda, organization etc.—and ideals which Hitler does not practice himself.

He also admired Mussolini, and some early Scouting badges had a swastika symbol on them. He maintained that his use of the symbol related to its earlier, original meaning of "good luck" in Sanskrit, for which purpose the symbol had been used for centuries prior to the rise of fascism.

Baden-Powell was a target of the Nazi regime in the Black Book, which listed individuals which were to be arrested during and after an invasion of Great Britain as part of Operation Sea Lion. Scouting was regarded as a dangerous spy organisation by the Nazis.

The Boorman Kids

The other thing about Excalibur is the Uther-Igrayne shagging scene at the beginning. What with the grinding and tit-sucking and all, as a kid it used to turn me on and freak me out in equal measure. (Dude, this is King Arthur. But I shouldn't be watching this! Etc.) Uther, it just so happens, was played by the aforementioned Gabriel Byrne. But it's only when one bears in mind that the Igrayne in question was actually Boorman's daughter that the real freakiness of the scene starts to emerge.

And just to, er, top that, here's beautiful Charley Boorman (who appears in Excalibur in his undies, being oiled up by Helen Mirren) in The Emerald Forest.

It's a fairly recognisable syndrome - doting dad decides that his kid (female or male) is the most gorgeous thing in the world and gets her or him a plum part in some little remembered movie (or, in the case of Excalibur, in a well remembered one). Danny the Champion of the World, for example, is actually a sweet enough film, but it's still little more than an Irons family home movie.

Boorman's home movies would presumably have been along the lines of not just Hope and Glory (which really is glorious) but also I Dreamt I Woke Up (which is weird and interesting, but not quite so interesting as I wanted it to be). Taken together though, Excalibur and The Emerald Forest make Robby seem positively normal.

Tea and Death

Does David Blair really think that Iran is becoming more pro-western simply because Iranian young people are adopting western fashions, drinking Coca-Cola and ignoring the Koran?

Any visitor to Tehran is struck by how young Iranians have embraced Western – and specifically American – popular culture. This does not simply extend to fashion, films, music and the regime's famously futile attempts to ban satellite dishes. What struck me on my last visit was how the bookshops outside Tehran University sell dictionaries of American idiom and helpful guides on how to adopt an American accent.

So what, I say? Even if you approve of American culture - and I don't - it won't stop the Iranians from hating us (whether or not you even believe there is a meaningful "us" left for them to hate).

Why? Because this sort of "culture" has very little to do with anything! The worst wars ever fought have been between enemies that were culturally almost indistinguishable. For me the most startling pictures from modern histories of the Second World War aren’t the shots of death-camps and mass graves. They're the photos and bits of film footage of Hitler and his cabinet at the Berghof, dressed up in tweeds with their hair neatly parted, having afternoon tea. One can almost hear Gilbert & Sullivan playing on the gramophone. A year or so later Hitler was ordering the bombing of Britain – which, after Germany, was his favourite country. “Culture” had absolutely nothing to do with it, and trying to pretend that the current “Long War” is about culture (rather than about what every war is about – i.e. politics) is seriously to misapprehend our enemies.

Some Thoughts on Episode 1 of American Gods

The look is quite different from what I'd imagined. Gaiman's book was marketed as "better than Stephen King or your money back" and that was more or less how I'd pictured the visuals. For that matter, Stephen King is more or less the only popular author nowadays who still writes about an America that Hillary Clinton (to her cost) refused to believe still existed. What better place for the Old Gods to carry on existing, where people believe (albeit less and less as time goes by), than flyover country? Only outsiders like Gaiman still dare to venture to such a place - which is genuinely sad, because the people who live there are (in their own way) genuinely splendid.
Shadow in the book is "mixed race". In the series he appears to be just a stereotypical whining black man, which is unfortunate. By making him mixed race Gaiman both held up to scrutiny a Marxist vision of America the "melting-pot" and implicitly queried its validity in a stubbornly multicultural world. (This was before 9/11!) What gods, indeed, does a "mixed race" man worship? At the same time, he gleefully subverted the standard "magic negro" trope so familiar from King's prison drama The Green Mile (for example). Shadow is a "black" man, but he's almost the only character in the story who doesn't have magic powers.
Obviously it's always difficult to transfer a cerebral type of hero, with internal monologues and long descriptive observations and angst, from the page to the screen, but even so, Shadow in the book is much more likeable than he is in the TV-version.
The idea that female flight attendants are like völvas or Valkyries actually played out clearer and funnier in the TV-series than it did in the book, though arguably that was just a function of the executive producer source material-author (i.e. Gaiman himself) seeing that the more "important" jokes from his work got transferred over to the screen version properly.
In the late '80s Ian McShane was Lovejoy, a smug wide-boy antiques dealer who ran rings round the yuppy denizens of London's home counties whilst getting off with the daughters of the minor aristocracy. The last time I saw him he was a special guest star (one episode only) playing a smug fantasy trendy vicar in Game of Thrones. And instead of playing Prof Merriman Lyon from The Dark is Rising Sequence (the tall, ancient, kindly, otherworldly Great Uncle Merry character from the books), in the film version of The Dark is Rising he played a smug and wonderfully violent butler. And now here he is playing a smug conman version of Mr Wednesday that is nothing like the Creepy Col Sanders character from the book. But that is perhaps permissible and (more to the point) more enjoyable on telly. And an Englishman playing an American character for once works rather well, given that Mr Wednesday is, of course, not "really" American.
The mindless violence is surprisingly unnecessary, as are the four-letter words. Some things have been unnecessarily coarsened, others surprisingly bowdlerised. Making Bilquis into an internet date rather than a hooker was a disappointing example of the latter. Americans even after Game of Thrones still seemingly can't deal with a character who practices the world's oldest profession.
And on the subject of Bilquis, was she supposed to be beautiful? Was the point that she isn't but men still desire her? Or was she supposed to look younger and more beautiful at the end of her scene than she did at the beginning? In the book Bilquis had brown hands, and even in the script she has a cherry red mouth. But in our modern Marxist dualist (or post-modern) western culture, where it doesn't matter what things look like (q.v. Lily Potter's eyes in the final Harry Potter film!), and, more to the point, in an American popular culture that currently only recognises two races as authentically "American", she has to be played by a black actress.
On the one hand it feels hammy, over the top, shiny and slightly gaudy. On the other, it feels low budget, much like Auntie's revival Doctor Who series (or their dreary version of SS-GB, come to that). Miscasting can make a show feel just as cheap as shabby sets and poor dialogue can, and more specifically the problem with racial miscasting (so far Shadow and Bilquis are the most obvious, though of course McShane too is an odd racial fit, given that he doesn't look particularly Nordic) is that American Gods implicitly is all about characters from different races and cultures who, having come to America, are trying to reconcile what they are and where they're from with the world of today. With a casting director who doesn't care where people are from, either ethnically or (implicitly) geographically and "religiously", the show has arguably got off on the wrong foot.
All-in-all though, the whole thing is watchable, nay enjoyable. Early episode weirdness can be quickly ironed out, and provided it can carry on being fresh and inventive it should be able to keep its audience until the end.

Could it all come back?

The above is from a stunning collection of colour photos, apparently from Life magazine.

Could it all come back? Up to a point one would have to say certainly not. For one thing we simply no longer have a culture of militarism, either in this country or in any other (and certainly not in Germany). And nor is there even any fondness for order and discipline generally, in private life or in public. People nowadays are in love with slovenliness and degradation, and their children are always inevitably worse.

Again though, I say only up to a point. The greatest pity is that much that was wicked and evil about National Socialism (e.g. the nationalism, not to mention the socialism) is still very much alive today. For example, I'm not really into physical fitness, and whenever I've taken myself down to the gym most of the other boys and girls there have been reasonably civilised. But now it would seem that if the balding old coot on the treadmill next to yours turns out to be a ranting fascist nutter then it's not impossible that he'll be a senior civil servant at the FCO as well.

Similarly, I suspect (or is it just the usual gut instinct?) that Gerard Warner is wrong when he says that fascism is ideologically 'exhausted and discredited'. Morally, of course, fascism always was discredited. But ideologically it would seem to be very much alive. Ideologically it is, after all, merely a "scientific" approach to human existence, based on the theories (now elevated to the level of revealed truths) of Charles Darwin - who is still very much a celebrity du jour. It dismisses rationality and spirituality as mere sentimentality and weakness, prizing the will above human reason and "reality" above religion. Modern science and modern politics, which set no store by the mere humanity of their victims (whether old or unborn - to which latter extent modern doctors are a good deal worse than their Nazi forebears), simply take these principles to their logical extremes.

The Once and Future Ring King

The real genius of Excalibur, as with any proper modern rendering of a classic work, is that John Boorman picked up Malory's dog-eared, 500-year-old blockbuster and steadfastly refused to admit that it was boring. Yes, there are lots of boring bits in it. Yes there are hundreds of footling minor characters, the plot goes hither and yon, and the author probably didn't know very much about ancient British mysteries or Jungian mythic archetypes. But hey! It's got wizards, magic swords, magic forests, magic caves, magic castles, handsome knights galloping to battle in shining armour, damsels in distress (and various states of undress), lots of violence... and lots and lots of SEX. Throw in a bit of mumbo-jumbo about the King and the Land being one, and with a pinch of Carl Orff and lashings of Wagner you've got yourself a pretty sharp movie.

Yes, arguably Excalibur only really wins because the overwhelming majority of King Arthur films have been rubbish. Hollywood, sadly, tends to be scared of things they think people won't know about. So re-packaging Arthur, Merlin and Guinevere and the rest as a sub-sci-fi genre piece was a smart move. It wasn't even meant to be King Arthur in the first place. It was meant to be Tolkien (according to Boorman himself in a recent Indie interview). And of course Tolkien was another one of those things that Hollywood used to be scared of.

But then the lesson of every superhero movie made in the last three decades is that a pop cultural phenomenon (such as Superman or Spider-Man) really has to have been around for forty years or more before Hollywood is comfortable enough with it to allow a "proper" film to be made. Why else did we have to wait until the late '70s for the Man of Steel? Why did we spend the '80s enduring drivel like Legend and Willow and Krull and Dragonslayer and God-only-knows-what, when what everyone really wanted were hobbits and High Elves and Mordor and the One Ring? (To be fair, Conan was a pretty good film-version of Conan, who by then had more than done his pre-Hollywood four decades: famously poorly reviewed by Time with a single line - 'Star Wars... as done by a psychopath!' - it's hard to imagine that the original psychopath Robert E Howard himself would have disapproved.)

Well, for better or for worse, the Jackson films (as I feel compelled to refer to them) have most likely burst Hollywood's fantasy dam once and for all. In the long term Middle-earth itself seems likely to become one of those gifts that just keeps giving. (Personally in my lifetime I'm predicting Turin and Lúthien and bloody Gondolin. But never mind!)

Blood Brotherhood

Blood-brotherhoods and similar rites have been employed by men to mark friendships and alliances for thousands of years. Evidence of the practice can be found in the lore, literature and recorded history of most cultures—from Norse and Celtic mythologies to the tribes of Africa, Australian and the South Pacific, to the fiction of Jack London and Mark Twain.

Today, many homosexual men are adopting and adapting marriage rites and relationship ideals that were designed to unite males and females, and which remain steeped in millennia of culture, tradition and imagery inspired by heterosexual unions. Blood-Brotherhood offers an alternative mode of perception: why not remove the feminine element and the trappings of heterosexual romance from the equation altogether and model bonds between androphiles after the bonds that men have made between each other for thousands of years? Why not base these unique unions between men on a tradition that honors male friendship?

Blood-brotherhood is not an attempt to “homosexualize” history or to “homoeroticize” the practice of blood-brotherhood, which has traditionally been practiced between heterosexual male friends. Rather, it is an attempt to inspire homosexual men to think about and solemnize their relationships differently—no matter what legal arrangements they decide to make.

Blood-Brotherhood is a toolbox for the imagination, containing a wealth of research about blood-brotherhood myths and practices from a wide variety of cultures and time periods, including excerpted texts and original translations by Nathan F. Miller. Blood-Brotherhood also documents Jack Donovan’s own bond with his compadre in a unique blood-brotherhood rite, presented as modern adaptation of this ancient ritual.

[Jack Donovan]

Fabian Hambüchen

Preparing

Celebrating

At London 2012

A hug for the coach

And a very brotherly hug for Dutch rival and gold medalist Epke Zonderland. (Hambüchen won silver.)

Lust and Love in Wagner

The first scene of Das Rheingold is simply glorious. It's a very neat little parable in an of itself, about sexuality, virginity and the foolishness of inexperience, and the desire that old age and ugliness has for youth, beauty and sex.

Crucially, the Rhinemaidens - being maidens - confuse love and lust. They imagine that the Rhine gold is perfectly safe because they cannot imagine that Alberich, a creature of such dark and potent sexuality, could ever renounce love, which he must do if he is to unlock the gold's power and wield the Ring. It is their encouragement and then rejection of Alberich, and his subsequent renunciation of love, enabling him to steal the gold and forge the Ring, that sets the tragedy of the whole cycle in motion.

Thematically it's actually a remarkably subtle start for a story whose overriding theme is the conflict between love and freedom (i.e. "free love", incest not excluded!) and authority and duty (albeit the essentially arbitrary authority of Wotan, whose laws are burdensome even to himself).

The piccie above is one of Arthur Rackham's. Obviously the Rhinemaidens are not normally naked on stage, and to date no one's actually found a way to make them actually swim either. But that doesn't mean the audience will necessarily be spared silliness of other kinds.

Un, deux, trois...

This pic from the Scout Fraternity site is apparently a Pierre Joubert-esque depiction of the three main sorts of Scout in France - one from the "mainstream" Scouts of France on the left, one from the Scouts of Europe on the right, and in the middle a representative of one of the "traditionalist" Scout organisations - probably the Unitary Scouts. The website's stated aim is to encourage bonds of brotherhood between the three "branches".

(Bon chance with that!)

Some Wonderful Photographs

From the archive of Walter Frentz, who was Hitler's official cameraman, here!

The Psychology of Harry Potter

For the last couple of months I've been reading M. Scott Peck's book The Road Less Traveled. I've been "deliberately" reading it slowly and thinking a great deal about it as I've been going along. In fact I've mostly been reading it on trains and 'buses, not to mention whilst waiting for them. And whether deliberately or not I have probably assimilated more of it than I would have if I'd just sat down and read it straight through. And perhaps too I've benefited from reading it this way!

Most of what Peck has to say is actually very good. As a highly decorated military psychiatrist, his interest is very much on the "real world" rather than with fanciful theorising. Almost all of what he has to say is very interesting. There are only one or two bum notes, such as when he refers to himself and his own experience of "growing up" by funking prep school. His take on religion is somewhat disappointing - though according to his website he has taken a good deal more interest in his own religion (he's a sort of non-denominational, C S Lewis-type "Christian") since he wrote the book back in the 1970s. And there are one or two claims he tries to make that are just plain wrong. (For example, western society is not psychologically healthier now than it was in the 1950s, or, one imagines, than it was in the '70s, when he was writing. Quite the reverse, in fact, as Oliver James, for example, has been at pains to point out.) But all-in-all it is well worth reading.

I think I would particularly recommend this book for any "non-religious" person who is nevertheless still interested in spiritual growth - and indeed for anyone who has been let down by the modern Catholic Church (Ahem!) or who is simply ready to accept that "religion" only provides the tools and the starting point for spiritual growth and does not in and of itself cause the soul to open and expand. Prayer and the Sacraments, after all, are essential, but spiritual combat can only take place in the real world. If one confines one's spiritual efforts to the chapel and the confessional then either one must stay there twenty-four hours a day or one is lost.

I think it would be fair to say Peck takes a Jungian attitude to myth. His own, slightly idiosyncratic reinterpretations of Biblical passages are fairly grating. But he does make use of Buddhist and indeed classical myths in a way that is intelligent and engaging.

Perhaps the most important myth in his thesaurus is that of Orestes, which he refers to in the book's final chapter. A few years ago, various corners of the Internet were buzzing with all sorts of views about what the Harry Potter books were really all about. One of the most delightfully dotty theories I came across was that the Harry Potter stories were actually based on the Oresteia (of Aeschylus and, more generally, others as well). According to this theory, the character of Harry Potter himself was based on the hero Orestes, Ron was Pylades, and Hermione was, well, Hermione. This, by the way, was round about the time when one could find slashy fanfic out there (and some of it really was and is very "out there") for just about any coupling between any two characters in the Harry Potter universe one could think of. And it was said that J K Rowling herself, who was certainly no slouch at engaging with Internet-based fandom, was not a little perturbed by some of what was, er, "coming out".

For me the most wonderful thing about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows when it finally hit the shelves was discovering all the little scores that Rowling settles with her readers (not to mention her critics) in its pages. The book opens with a thank-you message to the fans who have been following Harry's adventures from the beginning - written, with not a little charm, in a "Carolingian" "mouse-tail" meter copied from Alice. Although officially the eponymous Deathly Hallows themselves are Voldemort's horcruxes, the thematic crux of the book is Harry's visit, long foreseen by fans, to his parents' "hallows" on Christmas Eve in Godric's Hollow. The inscriptions on their graves act as a gentle but powerful riposte to those who over the years have accused the Harry Potter books of being un-Christian. So too, in fact, is the scene with the Sword of Godric Gryffindor, guiding Harry to one of the horcruxes by its light in the shape of a cross. (Funnily enough, the hug that Harry gives Ron after the horcrux is destroyed rather suggests that even the slash-fic writers were not entirely missed from Rowling's thank-you list.)

The thematic significance of the scene in Godric's Hollow though is perhaps really brought out by the book's frontispiece quotation from The Libation Bearers (the only such frontispiece in any of the books, thus giving this one, the last in the series, a definite sense of being more "grown-up" than its precursors). The conclusion, that the scene in Godric's Hollow is Rowling's own version of the scene the quotation is taken from, and that Harry really is Rowling's Orestes, is hard to avoid. Harry and Hermione aren't actually carrying libations, nor are they actually brother and sister - though, as Harry later confesses to Ron, that is very much the nature of their relationship. But in general terms the two scenes are analogous. Moreover it is also hard to avoid the probability that J K Rowling, herself a classicist by education, knew exactly what she was doing.

Is the real point then of the Harry Potter books a psychological one - that it is only when we confront our demons and take responsibility for ourselves that we can conquer them, at the same time, nay at the very instant that we finally achieve full spiritual adulthood? It is when Orestes takes responsibility for his own actions, rather than blaming them on the curse that has been placed on his family the House of Atreus, that the gods take pity on him and revoke their curse. The Furies then become the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones, and the hero is spiritually healed. Similarly it is only when Harry finally takes up his personal responsibility for destroying the Dark Lord, and indeed when he stops being merely a pawn in Albus Dumbledore's (somewhat obscure) masterplan, that Voldemort, himself very much the embodiment of schizophrenic mental illness, is defeated and banished forever.

Obviously there's always a danger that one can read too much into popular stories, not to mention popular children's books and indeed all myths and fairy-stories. But it's just as possible, and more unfortunate, to read too little into these things, and given the huge success of the Harry Potter franchise it is probably worthwhile giving the boy-wizard and his world at least a passing thought along the way.

“Origin of Gandalf”

Humphrey Carpenter got it wrong. This painting was painted after Tolkien had written The Hobbit.

There are of course several possibilities:

Tolkien didn’t know where he’d got the idea for Gandalf from.
Tolkien knew about Rübezahl ‘mit seinen zwergen’ before this picture was painted.
Rübezahl is currently depicted as more Gandalf-like (he now has a broad-brimmed hat, a long staff and, most improbably of all, a long pipe) to make him more tourist friendly.

Personally I find 2. most appealing. Carpenter is only one amongst many Tolkien biographers/"scholars" who has pushed the idea of Tolkien the geek, Tolkien the nerd, perhaps even Tolkien the philistine, who knew precious little of the world, much less of culture and art generally, outside of his own narrow academic field.

In actual fact, though there is no direct evidence that Tolkien knew about Rübezahl, there are various details about him that make him a good model for Gandalf.

He’s a mountain giant. (There are mountain giant, or “rock giants”, mentioned in The Hobbit - by Gandalf - and, very unusually for Tolkien’s creations, there’s not so much as a corroborative mention of them anywhere else.)

He has “dwarfs” with him.

He has more than one name.

He’s a liminal being - specifically one who ranges the mountains between modern Poland and the Czech Republic (traditionally Silesia and the Bohemian Sudetenland) and hence, in Tolkienian fashion, his various names.

Most poignantly of all, since The Hobbit’s publication, the German-speaking people of Rübezahl’s realm have themselves become exiles, having been driven westward in the anti-German campaign of ethnic cleansing that followed WWII.

(Personally I have a strong suspicion that since his death Tolkien’s political views have been significantly censored, if not actually bowdlerized - so we’re allowed to know that he was a Tory, a monarchist, proto-libertarian (though he preferred to think of himself as a "philosophical" anarchist), something of a philo-Semite (and staunch, though not necessarily outspoken anti-Nazi), a firm patriot, a bit of a “greenie”, and something of a Luddite, and that he found the changes to the Mass post-Vatican II deeply hurtful. But what he really thought about de-colonialisation, mass non-white immigration, Britain’s entry into the European common market, or even about wars in Suez, Korea or Vietnam, we simply do not know - although it’s quite possible that since he didn’t read newspapers he wouldn’t have felt qualified to venture opinions on many of these things.)

Friday, 8 May 2026

'Trees'

I THINK that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth's flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

[Joyce Kilmer]

Tintin and Snowy

... as you've never seen them before.

Did "Viking Age" people really look like this?

I'm not so sure, but it's nice to think.

Beyond Traditionalism

Did men only turn to the cultivation of their Aryan heritage when they had lost (and lost touch with) everything else?

I used to call myself a ‘traditionalist’, but I have now dropped the term. I am concerned about the demise of traditional forms of aesthetic and spiritual knowledge in the world today, and more specifically I am concerned about the decline of the so-called white or "Nordic" race. I do not, however, hold the central traditionalist belief that all the world’s religions descend from a single source - except in the sense that they may all contain within them some natural inkling of divine truth. It might be more accurate to say that by instinct I am a counterrevolutionary or a reactionary rather than merely a traditionalist. I am also interested in some "neo-reactionary" ideas.

By 1933 the German people had lost the monarchy, in both Bavaria and Prussia, their faith in the Catholic Church, the Great War itself, and of course their savings (in the hyperinflation of the 1920s) and, finally, their jobs (in the Great Depression).

I believe homosexuality is an integral part of radical National Socialism. (I do not, however, support in any way the Marxist inspired "gay rights" agenda.) What I mean by “radical” National Socialist was the movement within the Party for a “Second Revolution” after 1933, as advocated by Goebbels, Röhm and Darré. My suspicion is that physical “man-love” or “man-sex” was actually confined to a just small group within the SA, though it was presumably an important part of the male Gemütlichkeit within the SA’s unofficial Männerbund.

Sgt Harry Stone

Played by Ricci Harnett, from the poster for the 2006 film Joy Division

Doctor Who's Science of Miracles?

Here's Jon Pertwee's Doctor on the subject of psychokinetic energy.

DOCTOR: Well the emotions of a group of ordinary human beings generate a tremendous charge of psychokinetic energy. This the Master channels for his own purpose.
MISS HAWTHORNE: But that is magic - that’s precisely what black magic is!
DOCTOR: No, Miss Hawthorne, I’m afraid not.
MISS HAWTHORNE: Are you trying to tell me that the invocations, the...the rituals, even the sabbat itself are just so much window dressing?
DOCTOR: No, no, no, of course not. No, they are essential to generate and control the physonic forces - and to control the Dæmon himself.

[Guy Leopold, Doctor Who: The Dæmons, 'Episode Five']

Funny, the things that stick in one's mind!

'Siegfried'

'Siegfried', by Gustaf Tenggren

Gustaf Tenggren was actually one of Walt Disney's animators on Snow White. This was his illustration for the 1939 Gertrude Henderson book version of The Ring of the Nibelung.

Coexistence

Of course I loathe the mindless and moronic liberal fantasist "coexist" bumper sticker.

This is much more fun.

And really to take the whole reductio to its absurdum, how about a GoT version?

Neat!

Four Swords of Wayland

According to legend, the Great King and Emperor Charlemagne had four swords, each forged by Wayland the Smith.

His own sword was called Joyeuse. He wielded it in battle against the Turk, and after his death it became the coronation sword of the Kings of France. After the Revolution it was moved to the Louvre museum, where it remains to this day.

A second sword, known as Durendal, Charlemagne gave to his most famous paladin Roland, who carried it at the battle of the Roncevaux Pass, where he died. With his last strength Roland cast Durendal away, rather than let it be captured by the Enemy, and there is to this day a sword protruding the living rock of a cliff-face in Rocamadour in south-western France. It can still be seen by visitors to the region, despite the local tourist board’s insistence that it is not original.

Also at the Battle of the Roncevaux Pass died Bishop Turpin of Rheims, another ally of Charlemagne, whose sword, though less well known than Durendal, was also forged by Wayland from the same steel. Its name was called Almace.

A fourth sword, also brother to Durendal, was given by Charlemagne to his former enemy Ogier the Dane, who thereafter became one of the Great King’s most loyal liegemen in the Turkish wars. Its name was Curtana, and it had long before been the sword of Sir Tristan of Lyonesse.

Ogier is the Danish equivalent of King Arthur, and according to one legend after his last battle he was taken to Avalon by Morgan le Fay. Also like Arthur, as well as like Frederick Barbarossa of Germany and Duke St Wenceslaus of Bohemia, he is thought to be not dead but sleeping under a mountain, waiting to return to his country’s aid in its darkest hour.

Ogier’s sword Curtana though was broken, much like Siegfried’s sword in The Nibelungenlied. It has since become one of the coronation swords of the Kings of England, where it is called the Sword of Mercy and is borne in the coronation ceremony as one of the three Swords of Justice. According to legend, it was broken by an angel when an attempt was made to use it to commit an unjust act. Some say that the sword that is used to this day was recreated for the coronation of Charles II. Others though maintain that the Swords of Justice were amongst the few royal relics that survived being melted down by Oliver Cromwell.

Heraldry is Cool

What is it about sigils and logos? My own feeling is that Game of Thrones finally made heraldry cool - in a geeky way, of course, but still. Previously, having a Homer Simpson mug or an Eric Cartman throw pillow was a way of demonstrating that you were in the in-crowd - provided, that is to say, your in-crowd was vaguely studenty. It showed that you were hip and with it (and studenty) and not afraid of your inner kid, whilst at the same time it showed that you were postmodern and trendy enough to know that even though The Simpsons was a kids' show it had lots of adult jokes in it too, and even though it was made by crazy far-out liberals it also supported old-fashioned family values, and so on. Meanwhile, having the White Tree of Númenor on a throw pillow was about as cool as having a crucifix on your wall. And having an Aslan throw pillow was tantamount to asking for a nonce-bashing.

So far, so uncool! Of course, context really was everything. Darth Vader mug? Not cool! Darth Vader toaster? Cool! Aliens t-shirt? Not at all cool! United States Colonial Marine Corps t-shirt? Very cool! A Homer Simpson bobblehead is not remotely cool unless somebody asks you about it and you say "Even Homer nods." Which would make it über-cool indeedy. A Simpsons hip-flask must obviously be used sparingly, but in the right setting one sees that it could have its uses. I'm skeptical about any sort of James Bond fragrance for men. The Pope's Cologne, on the other hand, is surely a must-have for even the most heterosexual fogey.

On one level then, the appeal of drinking your tea (or your beer) out of a mug (or a stein) with a direwolf on it is quite straightforward. But the fact that it's merchandising for a cable-TV spin-off of a popular series of fantasy novels makes it qualitatively different to drinking one's tea out of a mug with Brian Griffin on it. (OTOH a martini glass with Brian Griffin on it clearly is acceptable, provided you're drinking martinis. Ditto a coffee mug with Garfield on it, provided it's a picture of Garfield actually drinking coffee. Out of a mug.) The point simply is that the House of Stark is cool in a way that UNIT and SHIELD (with apologies) simply aren't, direwolves are cool in way that patronuses aren't and dæmons certainly aren't, and knowing what 'Winter is coming' means is much, much cooler (Ahem!) than knowing not to titillare the old dormientem draconem.

But then there's also another point to do with the nature of Game of Thrones itself. Because of its imaginary military, faux mediaeval setting, the heraldry of Game of Thrones actually really matters in a way that the emblems on the sides of star-ships and space-helmets in Star Wars and/or Trek frankly don't. In fact the direwolves and the lions rampant and the crowned stags and so on are as important in Westeros as Quenya and Sindarin are in Middle-earth. And so of course they're a marketeer's dream, just as (and let's be honest) heraldry has always been in real life. Slap the Royal Arms on a mug and it automatically becomes a "collectors' item" jubilee mug. Ditto the Union Flag (which, unlike official Olympics and FIFA World Cup logos, is very much out of copyright).* And what works in "real life" works just as well in the Forbidden Planet.

*And, to be fair, 'twas ever thus. In the 18th century, during the Seven Years War, when Frederick the Great was at the height of his popularity in England, there was a positive boom in tobacco jars inscribed with the royal arms of Prussia. (One can't exactly imagine Old Fritz made much off the back of them either.)

'The King's Ankus'

It's my favourite of the stories in the two Jungle Books. I recently re-watched 'Rumpole and the Judge's Elbow' again on DVD with Richard. Rumpole quotes from the poem.

THE SONG OF THE LITTLE HUNTER

Ere Mor the Peacock flutters, ere the Monkey People cry,
Ere Chil the Kite swoops down a furlong sheer,
Through the Jungle very softly Hits a shadow and a sigh —
He is Fear, O Little Hunter, he is Fear!
Very softly down the glade runs a waiting, watching shade,
And the whisper spreads and widens far and near;
And the sweat is on thy brow, for he passes even now —
He is Fear, O Little Hunter, he is Fear!

Ere the moon has climbed the mountain, ere the rocks are ribbed with light,
When the downward-dipping trails are dank and drear,
Comes a breathing hard behind thee — snuffle-snuffle through the night —
It is Fear, O Little Hunter, it is Fear!
On thy knees and draw the bow; bid the shrilling arrow go;
In the empty, mocking thicket plunge the spear;
But thy hands are loosed and weak, and the blood has left thy cheek —
It is Fear, O Little Hunter, it is Fear!

When the heat-cloud sucks the tempest, when the slivered pine-trees fall,
When the blinding, blaring rain-squalls lash and veer
Through the war-gongs of the thunder rings a voice more loud than all —
It is Fear, O Little Hunter, it is Fear!
Now the spates are banked and deep; now the footless boulders leap —
Now the lightning shows each littlest leaf-rib clear —
But thy throat is shut and dried, and thy heart against thy side Hammers:
Fear, O Little Hunter — this is Fear!

The illustrations are of course by the excellent Pierre Joubert.

Little Heroes

[H/T: Myths & Monsters]

The Legend of Ar

Our divine ancestors, the Aryans, came to Earth from outer space.

Forged in a matrix of ice and war, Ar became the first divine artist warrior.

But then... the Aryan was lead into temptation by soft swarthy people from bountiful lands.

And Ar's blood is polluted. And Ar grows weak.

And Ar becomes the slave of the Jews.

Grail Knights! Yes, because you are Grail Knights. lf we guard the purity of our blood, we have it in our power to again straddle the Earth like supermen.

[From Menno Meyjes's 2002 film Max]

French Scoutisme Photography in the 1950s

Robert Manson, circa 1950

Jacques Simonot, circa 1958

[H/T: Visual Vintage]

Dark Towers

For what it's worth, my feeling at the moment is that the Dark Tower itself was not originally part of the story of Childe Roland. Jacobs seems to have introduced the Dark Tower into his more famous version almost solely on the questionable evidence of Shakespeare, and it is wholly absent from Robert Jamieson's older version, of which its recorder noted

It was recited in a sort of formal, drowsy, measured, monotonous recitative, mixing prose and verse, in the manner of the Icelandic Sagas, and as is still the manner of reciting tales and fabulas aniles in the winter evenings, not only among the Islanders, Norwegians, and Swedes, but also among the Lowlanders in the north of Scotland, and among the Highlanders and Irish.

More troubling of course is the origin of Old Tom's 'Fie, foh, and fum'.

Child Rowland to the dark tower came,
His word was still,--Fie, foh, and fum,
I smell the blood of a British man.

[King Lear, Act III, Scene iv]

It sounds like it's found its way into Roland from Jack the Giantkiller, but Jamieson vowed it was authentic.

What saves us of course is the 'still'. The joke, such as it is, is presumably that Child Rowland - he of the quest to rescue his sister from elfland - has later on turned up in the middle of the night at a little fort where everyone has gone to bed. And still he hears the dreaded bogle's voice pursuing him. Are we to imagine some Orestes-type version of Roland, perhaps driven made by the sound of the pursuing vengeance of elfland? In the context of the play, of course, this is Edgar as Poor Tom voicing his scepticism about entering Gloucester's hovel - not necessarily fearing betrayal, but at least staying in character as a wandering vagrant and perhaps fearing that at close quarters his ruse will be discovered and he'll be identified. (In the end it isn't.)

So what then was the 'dark tower'? Even without capitalisation, the definite article suggests is has independent existence if not of Child Roland then at least of Shakespeare. It is of course possible that, as well as the still extant story of Child Rowland's going off to rescue his siblings, that was another that did indeed feature just such an un-illuminated building. One might bear in mind, after all, that as well as the story of Jack and his beanstalk and his ending up being the bane of the Giant there are various other stories about what Jack got up to with the Giant's daughters. At any rate, we can feel certain that Shakespeare's audience would have got the reference.

Since it is quite possible that the Arthurian elements that Jamieson himself introduced to his version of the tale were not wholly incongruous, to my mind it is just possible that such a Dark Tower could have had an Arthurian or quasi-Arthurian origin in Caer Wydyr, the silent tower. Silence is of course associated with the dead not just in Celtic literature but also in Nineteenth-Century romanticism - quite possibly on the basis of the simple etymological principle that the infernal is literally that which cannot speak.

On the subject of Arthuriana, Shakespeare himself even introduces Merlin into King Lear (and quite randomly, at that), not to mention other extraneous matter (including Lear himself!) that he would have picked up, whether directly or indirectly, from Geoffrey of Monmouth. It's worth asking what it says about England's greatest playwright that none of his plays actually feature the greatest hero of English literature, but one must perhaps assume that since the death of Elizabeth Tudor's uncle the whole Matter of Britain had become deeply unfashionable.

And if Childe Roland without the Dark Tower sounds a lot like Parsifal without the Holy Grail, it is worth reflecting that the (original?) Welsh version of Parsifal, 'Peredur ap Evrawc', contains various objects that later turn up in Grail-lore in one form or another, but doesn't actually contain the cup itself.

Then again, after all, who was Roland meant to be? It feels instinctively de trop to imagine that he could actually have been Charlemagne's famous Paladin. It's slightly more appealing a thought though that he may have a been a genuine fairy-tale character, somewhere between Sir Percival and Jack the Giantkiller, but perhaps with elements of both.

As for the Dark Tower, it has changed a great deal. For Shakespeare, the "joke" implicitly is simply that a tower where there aren't any lights on ought be silent, not echoing with the blood-curdling cries of bogles. For Robert Browning, similarly, the tower is simply a place of failure and disappointment - empty, by inference, and utterly inhospitable, a 'round squat turret, blind as the fool’s heart, / Built of brown stone, without a counter-part / In the whole world.' And yet even just to have reached it and to wind the "slughorn" before it is an achievement of sorts! In many ways, as it happens, Roland in 1855 is a forerunner of Walter de la Mare's famous 'Traveller' of 1912. (Did he take a way through the woods to get there, or even stop by them on a snowy evening? We shall, of course, never know!)

Thomas Moran, 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came' (1859)

Alexander Woollcott and George S. Kaufman, The Dark Tower (1933)

Totleigh Towers in The Code of the Woosters (1938) - in real life Highclere Castle, long before it was the (far more sinister!) Downton Abbey

And Deverill Hall (aka Joyce Grove, Nettlebed), from The Mating Season (1949)

(1943)

(1946)

(1946)

Tolkien's Barad-dûr

The painting by J.R.R. Tolkien shows a door on the eastern side of the fortress with Mount Doom to the westward. It was published in The J.R.R. Tolkien Calendar 1973 and 1974, and again in The Lord of the Rings 1977 Calendar in a slightly enlarged and truncated reproduction together with the sketch of Orodruin as an inset.

Then at last his gaze was held: wall upon wall, battlement upon battlement, black, immeasurably strong, mountain of iron, gate of steel, tower of adamant, he saw it: Barad-dûr, Fortress of Sauron. All hope left him.