“Origin of Gandalf”

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

There are of course several possibilities:

1. Tolkien didn’t know where he’d got the idea for Gandalf from.
2. Tolkien knew about Rübezahl ‘mit seinen zwergen’ before this picture was painted.
3. 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.)

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!

Tractatus Illogicus

Let's be realistic! Derek Jarman wouldn't have made Wittgenstein if the chap hadn't been a batty boy.

Not that it's a bad film. In fact it's probably one of Jarman's more watchable efforts - though to tell the truth it's the only Jarman that I've actually sat through all the way, so (to quote someone holier than me) who am I to judge?

It's not actually a biopic so much as a brief overview of some of the more pertinent facts about the man's life and work - pertinent that is in Jarman's mind rather than in that of his subject. And so we have a prepubescent and, at times, partially clothed Clancy Chassay as a Young Wittgenstein narrating a theatre-of-the-absurd-style "filmed play" featuring an Old Wittgenstein, played by Karl Johnson, performing little set-pieces from Wittgenstein's life as a young man in a slightly jokey, piss-take sort of a way. Chassay had previously been in Jarman's film War Requiem, so one can only assume that the old perv had taken rather a shine to him. But then with a script by Terry Eagleton one doesn't expect intellectual greatness, nor even an inkling of the spectacular lyricism of Wittgenstein's thought. And one doesn't get either either.

Wittgenstein himself was of course the last of the "great" philosophers - not so much in the sense that he was a man who produced good philosophy as in that he was a character whose life-story can be said to have encouraged a different way of looking at the universe. Where are the Kierkegaards and the Heideggers of today? Where have all the Kants and Hegels been since Wittgenstein's time? Where, for that matter the Rousseaus and the Descarteses? There have, if one reflects for a moment, been none.

There was actually rather more Wittgenstein-related fun to be had in a film I saw when it first came out in 2008 (but then never heard of again) called The Oxford Murders. It was set, coincidentally enough, in Oxford, and starred a post-Rings but pre-Hobbit Elijah Wood. It also featured lots of quotations from Wittgenstein, and seemed to be pitched almost as a pilot for an Inspector Morse-style TV-series - only of course I saw it at the cinema. In short, it was the sort of guff that would have had Douglas Adams turning in his grave. At the time I quietly thought it an overlooked geekgasm - almost as if the New Frodo had decided to take a leaf out of fellow hobbit Dominic Monaghan's playbook to do a bit of Hetty Wainthropp-style investigating, only instead of teaming up with John Thaw - with whom Monaghan had of course appeared in underrated WWII cozzie drama Monsignor Reynard - he'd plumbed for the Old Aragorn - Old Aragorn in this case being not Robert Stephens (already dead by that stage in his career) but John Hurt - at that stage still pre-Who.

Confused? Well, who knows?

Mapping the Imagination

Yesterday evening found me hobbling along (on a strangely gammy right knee) to the British Library - an architectural disaster of a building even by the standards of modern architecture that falls haphazardly somewhere between the two stools of old-fashioned brutalism on the one hand and the neo-post-postmodernism of Norman Foster and his disciples on the other. (It's as if Frank Hampson's dreamy youngest son inherited a leftover project from the Festival of Britain and didn't quite have the guts and gumption to go full-on Dan Dare in the execution, leaving us with the sort of pointless, shapeless monstrosity that would give most Daleks a headache, complete with its own Paolozzi in its central "piazza". And yes, things have come to a pretty pass when the most aesthetically pleasing thing about your country's national depositary of its literary heritage is one of Sir Eduardo's effing space robot monsters, especially if your country happens to be that of Shakespeare and the Lindisfarne Gospels.)

Well, I googled myself there and wended my way to the auditorium - which, like much of the rest of the mise en scène, was very à la LOS. 'Auditorium nostrum in nomine Domini', I thought to no one in particular, and plonked myself down to listen to three speakers talking about maps - specifically literary maps, some of which are currently on display at the BL's new exhibition on maps in the twentieth century. They were "literary" maps in that they were all maps of non-existent, imaginary places - literally of utopias, starting chronologically, as it happens, with Utopia itself, the first book about a wholly imaginary place to be published complete with an imaginary map. (Its influence on the fantasy genre is unparalleled.)

The first speaker, who set the scene and produced the lion's share of both spoken verbiage and visuual aides, was Brian Sibley. He actually started with Robert Louis Stevenson, then moved back to Utopia itself, before moving on to Pilgrim's Progress, which never had its own map though other's have supplied them, and Dante's Divina Comedia, which similarly ended up with "maps" in the sense of diagrammatic illustrations by that little known pulp-hack Botticelli.

Various books with stories set on imaginary islands also did not originally have maps of their own, including Robinson Crusoe and the Swiss Family Robinson, Jules Verne's Mysterious Island and, indeed, The Lord of the Flies. Lilliput and Brobdingnag did just about appear on map of each other, but it's really only with Treasure Island, King Solomon's Mines (written as an homage to Stevenson and to win a bet) and The Lost World that maps came into their own - literally in the sense that they are treasure maps that are essential to the stories that their creators were trying to tell.

And then of course there are plenty of places that almost exist in real life: Barsetshire (which to be fair is a little more exciting than Wintoncester and environs, especially since it was at least a shared world where M R James was happy to drop in from time to time), the Island of Sodor (where the trains talk and have adventures), and the slightly, perverse version of Oxford that can be reached by Zeppelin. Then there are places that really do exist in real life: the River Thames at Pangbourne (just upstream from Toad Hall), Kensington Gardens (next to the Serpentine, with the island of Neverland in the middle of it), the Lakeland (of Beatrix Potter's talking animals, which was only finally mapped in 2012), Ashdown Forest (of Christopher Robin's walking, talking toys), and of course the Norfolk broads (of the Swallows and Amazons) - not to mention Watership Down. Leave it up to the Americans then to imagine whole lands and kingdoms that really don't exist, such as Oz and the land that lies beyond the Phantom Tolbooth.*

Following Sibley we had David Brawn, who showed us a few slides of Professor T's early drafts of the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings maps. And then finally we had Jonathan Roberts, who made the big "official" maps of George R R Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series. According to Brawn, Tolkien included maps in his early books because at the time everyone was doing it. According to Roberts, Braavos is going to be very important in The Winds of Winter.

The only real disappointment of the evening (apart from missing maps of Zimiamvia and Alderley Edge and probably several other places) was Brawn's attitude. For him, Tolkien's maps were only there so that he could tell his story. I found that hard to stomach, for the simple reason that for Tolkien the maps were his story - at least, that is, in The Lord of the Rings, in which it's the maps that connect the characters in the story to the languages that were Tolkien's chief interest because they do so via the different peoples of Middle-earth who live in the various lands that the maps depict.† What makes Tolkien's maps different, in other words, is that they don't just help to tell the story by illustrating it: they are essential to the story, in a way that maps in other storybooks never had been before, and arguably ever have been since.

*Sibley did ponder the sheeer number of children's fantasys that came out 1902. My own feeling is simply that new centuries have that effect on people, and hence the Potter and Rings films of the early 2000s. But that's just me.
†Their equivalent in The Silmarillion are the family trees, in that they're the reference diagrams at the back of the book that the reader must keep referring to in order to keep up with the story, but also in that it's those diagrams that connect the story of the Silmarils to the philology - the history, which was what Tolkien really wanted to write, of the different Elvish languages and how they had grown unlike each other: by contrast, there's no real need to know were Hithlum or Taur-nu-fuin "are", even in relation to each other, the most important place in the story is Angband, which doesn't appear on the map at all, and other places, such as Gondolin and Menegroth, are hidden fairy kingdoms that do appear on the map but arguably shouldn't.