Tag Archives: Tolkien

She: A book that influenced many authors.

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She: A History of Adventure

SHE by H Rider Haggard (full title “She: A History of Adventure” “is one of the foundational works of fantasy literature, published around the time of The Princess and the Goblin (1858) by George MacDonald, William Morris’ The Wood Beyond the World and The Well at the World’s End, and the short stories of Lord Dunsany.”*

“Several authors, including JRR Tolkien, Rudyard Kipling, Henry Miller, Graham Greene and Margaret Atwood, have acknowledging its importance to their own and others’ writing. With more than 83 million copies sold, the novel is one of the best-selling fictional works of all time and has been translated into 44 languages.” [Wikipedia]

The Leaves of Gold Press edition of SHE includes an introduction written by me. It is also the first edition to contain illustrations from not one but four acclaimed artists who were contemporaries of JRR Tolkien, and whose works he admired:

  • Maurice Greiffenhagen
  • Charles H.M. Kerr
  • E. K. Johnson, and
  • G. C. Wilmshurst.

“She” was first published in book form in 1887. The story is an enduring classic, more than a century old. It’s a fantasy adventure packed with action, mystery, wonder, supernatural marvels and beauty, along with violence and darkness. While it bears some of the now-discredited hallmarks of the era in which it was written, it remains an enthralling page-turner. Critics consider it one of the most influential novels in modern literature.

Refreshingly, considering 19th century social attitudes, the story features a strong woman with a complex personality as the central character. Haggard’s representation of womanhood has received both praise and criticism.

SHE is one of those powerful stories whose popularity endures for centuries. The story has been made into movies and radio dramas.

Tolkien and SHE

The Lord of the Rings

In common with every writer, Professor JRR Tolkien was influenced by many books. When he was growing up, he greatly enjoyed reading all the works of H. Rider Haggard. He stated in a 1966 interview, “I suppose as a boy SHE interested me as much as anything. . .”
Many interesting parallels can be drawn between “The Lord of the Rings” and SHE. Readers will find echoes of Galadriel and her mirror here, and arguably, even the literary progenitors of Frodo and The One Ring.

Tanith Lee and SHE

The Birthgrave

Tanith Lee’s superb science fantasy novel THE BIRTHGRAVE, first published in 1975, is also the first novel in The Birthgrave Trilogy. The story follows a nameless protagonist who awakens with amnesia. She travels across a fantastic, epic landscape on a quest to discover her past and her identity. The novel was nominated for the 1975 Nebula Award for best novel.

I was captivated by THE BIRTHGRAVE the moment I began to read it, and it remains one of the favourites on my bookshelves. On re-reading SHE, I began to see Haggard’s influence on Lee’s enchanting fantasy work. A volcano. An exotic, wild landscape. Ancient, ruined cities. Lost civilizations. A powerful, beautiful woman who is close to immortal. . .

Dart-Thornton and SHE

The-Ill-Made-Mute

In turn, THE BIRTHGRAVE influenced my own writing. The beauty of Lee’s prose was a revelation to me, but more than that, I found the concept of someone who awakens with no memories, no past, no identity, deeply intriguing. That became the seed of THE BITTERBYNDE TRILOGY.

[Ref: Cornwell, Neil (1990). The Literary Fantastic: from Gothic to Postmodernism. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. ISBN 978-0-7450-0804-2. Also Clute, John (2002). Encyclopedia of Fantasy. New York: St Martin’s.]

Words can cast a spell

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What is it about welsh?

Cardiff Castle in Wales

Warning: do not read any further unless you are interested in deeply geeky stuff.

Words. I’ve always been fascinated by them. It’s not just the meanings they convey, but the sound of words, and the way they look written down.

Certain languages have an added appeal for me because they sound amazing when spoken, they look mysterious and exciting when written down, and they are bafflingly unlike my own mother tongue – the language you, the reader, presumably knows also, if you’re able to decipher this post.

Such a language is Welsh. It’s “a Celtic language of the Brittonic subgroup that is native to the Welsh people,” says Wikipedia. “Welsh evolved from Common Brittonic, the Celtic language spoken by the ancient Celtic Britons.”

Up till now, the only languages I’ve been familiar with (aside from Pig Latin, Elvish and Klingon) are English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and a smattering of Russian.

Language families

Google says there are 48 language families, and they are are at the root of all human languages.

Those I’ve mentioned above all descend from the ancient and widespread Indo-European language family.

The Indo-European family is divided into several branches, of which there are eight with languages still alive today and another nine that are now extinct.

English and German are descended from the Germanic branch, Russian from the Balto-Slavic, French, Italian and Spanish are from the Italic (they have another sub-group, called “Romance“) and Welsh from the Celtic.

The Celtic branch is very distinct. It’s divided into two sub-groups: the Goidelic (or Gaelic) languages and the Brythonic (or Brittonic) languages. I’m intrigued by both of these sub-groups but decided to focus on Welsh due to time constraints. (Oh and Wales has dragons, too, which is a bonus.)

J R R Tolkien and the Welsh language

It was listening to a Welsh song that inspired me to start learning the language. That, and the fact that my literary hero J R R Tolkien was also inspired by Welsh. As a boy, he used to see Welsh place-names painted on coal trucks from South Wales that clattered along on a railway line adjoining his childhood garden in King’s Heath, Birmingham.

I should have said Welsh has always attracted me. By its style and sound more than any other, ever though I first only saw it on coal trucks, I always wanted to know what it was about.

~ J R R Tolkien

The mystery and beauty of the Welsh written language inspired him to create his own languages. He, too, was spellbound by it. On an early train journey into Wales, he spotted the name “Ebbw” and ‘just couldn’t get over it. Not long after I started inventing my own languages.’”

The spell cast by the song

Back to that song, “Yma O Hyd” (translating as “Still Here”). It’s a nationalist song, filled with passion, opening with the drumming of an acoustic guitar and the molten silver notes of a harp. Then in comes the mellow voice of the song’s composer, Dafydd Iwan. I make it a rule to avoid commenting on politics, and it was not the meaning of the song that entranced me (I had no idea what it meant) but the beauty of the language and the melody. As far as I was concerned, the song could have been about anything or nothing. To me it was magical.

For a start, right there in the third line is the word “flynyddoedd”. Gob-smacking. What a word! Completely unpronounceable, obviously, though Dafydd was somehow managing to sing it with no problems. I was tempted never to translate this beauty into English, in case it lost its magic by meaning something mundane like “beige” or “carpet-slippers”, but eventually I did. To its credit, it means “years”. This is a concept that’s majestic enough to suit such a word.

Anyway, what’s with all the “d”s and “y”s in “flynyddoedd”? Not to mention all the “w”s that inundate the rest of the Welsh language? I wonder if it’s something to do with ancient writing systems, and rune-derived characters we’ve lost over the last few thousand flynyddoedd?

The missing letters of the alphabet

eth

The wonderful Youtuber Rob Words published a video called LOST LETTERS OF THE ALPHABET: 9 letters we stopped using. If English hadn’t dropped all those letters, we could be using them to write Welsh.

“dd” for example is just a pale replacement for “eth”. Eth (uppercase: Ð, lowercase: ð) was a letter used in Old English. The sound is the “th” sound in “those”, “these” and “they”. If we brought eth back we could write “flynyddoedd” as “flynyðoeð”. That would make it look even more Elvish and magical.

Barred U

The “Barred U” ʉ isn’t a missing rune, but it’s a symbol used in the International Phonetic Alphabet to indicate the sound “oo” as in “goose”. This would be very useful in writing Welsh, because currently the letter “w” is used to represent that sound.

On the other hand, using “w” for “oo” does increase the mystery and allure of the language. Take, for example, a word like “cwrw”. Written down, it looks impenetrable, esoteric, marvellous. It also sounds glorious, “cooroo”… the sound of the wind blowing through the boughs of pine trees at the edge of the ocean . . . cʉrʉ . . .

In fact the word simply means “beer”, which is nice, but a bit prosaic.

I vote we bring back the Old English runes wynn, Ƿ ƿ, thorn þ (the softer “th” sound in “thorn”) and eth ð.

Welsh vowels – some of the other mysteries

Youtuber Gwyneth Angharad teaches us about Welsh vowels. As well as pronouncing “w” as “oo”, you pronounce “u” as “i”.
“Y” is mostly pronounced like schwa, the a vowel sound denoted by the IPA symbol ⟨ə⟩. Gwyneth describes this as “the lazy sound you have at the beginning of ‘alive’ or ‘about’.” Depending on where it is in a word, “y” can also sound like “i”. . .

It’s not easy learning Welsh!

Some of my favourite Welsh words

If Tolkien wasn’t inspired by the Welsh word for “The Netherlands” I’d be very surprised. It sounds as if it comes straight from Middle-Earth: “yr Iseldiroedd” (or Iseldiroeð if you use “eth”). So much more attractive than the English version!

Another magnificently Tolkienesque Welsh word is “hiraeth”. This is one of those special words whose meaning actually matches the haunting melodiousness of its sound.

“Hiraeth,” says Wikipedia, “is a Welsh word that has no direct English translation. The University of Wales, Lampeter, likens it to a homesickness tinged with grief and sadness over the lost or departed, especially in the context of Wales and Welsh culture. It is a mixture of longing, yearning, nostalgia, wistfulness or an earnest desire for the Wales of the past.”

It sounds exactly like the “langothe” from the BITTERBYNDE trilogy.

Are there any languages that you particularly love for their sound and style?

Cecilia

The Otherworldliness of Elves

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Image courtesy of Mysticsartdesign on Pixabay.

ON HIS BLOG “Every Day Should Be Tuesday”, H.P. has posted a piece titled “Pre-Tolkien Fantasy Challenge: Howard, Moore, and Dunsany“.

In it he notes that “One of the things that struck me rereading The Lord of the Rings this summer . . .  is the otherworldly nature of the elves. The movies of course miss this entirely, as do his imitators. [In The Lord of the Rings] Legolas isn’t a superhuman archer; he doesn’t really come off as human at all. The otherworldliness of the elves in The King of Elfland’s Daughter is much more marked. . .

“. . . It is the otherworldliness, evoking a sense of wonder, that most stands out, as distinctive in Dunsany’s tale, present but more subtle in Tolkien’s, and entirely absent from his imitators.”

I must agree with H.P. and extend the idea to cover not only elves, but also the Faêran, wights and vampires. In modern literature, movies and games, elves and vampires are usually depicted simply as good-looking humans with supernatural abilities. They think like human beings. Their emotions are typically human.

Yet Dunsany, Tolkien and students of the great folklore collector Katharine Briggs know that this is as far from the original conception of these creatures as it is possible to be. These magical, non-human beings have a completely different, unhuman mindset.

H.P. writes, “an elf can never understand a human,”  and I would add that human beings can barely fathom the minds of elves, the Faêran, wights, or indeed vampires as they were originally conceived. Even the look of these beings has changed. Vampires, for example, were first described as  being bloated, with flushed or dark faces – very different from the slender, pallid vampires that became fashionable in the early 19th century.

Take, for example, the Drowner in my novel The Ill-Made Mute. This unseelie wight takes the form of Sianadh’s sister and calls to him with her voice, to lure the man to his death beneath the river. When her attempt is sabotaged and she fails:

‘The drowner, cheated of her prey, did not scream in rage. No recognizable expression crossed her delicate features. She reacted in no human fashion.
“Kavanagh, Kavanagh,” she called, or chanted,
“If not for she,
“I’d have drunk your heart’s blood,
“And feasted on thee.”
Having spoken, she subsided gracefully, leaving a faint turbulence.’

Of course, since elves, the Faêran, wights and vampires are fictitious, it could be argued that there is no right or wrong way to depict them, but to discard their otherworldliness is to strip away their most magnetic and intriguing qualities.

It is too easy to transform them into superhumans. Too easy, and far too boring!

 

Tolkien’s House

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ON 24 MARCH Locus Magazine reported that the campaign to buy Professor JRR Tolkien’s house at 20 Northmoor Road, Oxford and turn it into a literary centre dedicated to Tolkien, had failed.

He and his family lived there between 1930 and 1947 while he was professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University, It was there that he wrote The Hobbit and the first two volumes of The Lord of the Rings.

Some years ago I visited that address and viewed it from the street, it being a private residence. My visit was part of an informal tour ‘In the Footsteps of Tolkien’, organised by a couple of friends, with whom I travelled.

What a glorious jaunt it was. We went to every place he was known to have set foot in the UK. These included the Eagle and Child pub where The Inklings used to gather, the cave houses at Alderley Edge that are said to have inspired hobbit homes, the hotel room in which Tolkien and Edith spent their honeymoon, at The Plough and Harrow Hotel in Birmingham, the old mill at Sarehole, Mosley Bog, the Rollright Stones, King Edward’s School, Birmingham, and 264 Wake Green Road, one of Tolkien’s childhood homes. And there were more.

Along the way we dropped in for a cuppa with Tolkien artist Alan Lee in Chagford, Devon.

I was disappointed to read that the scheme to purchase Northmoor Road had failed, until I read this: ‘The Tolkien Society refused to support the project, noting that “the property itself is a listed building in a conservation area – with a blue plaque proudly showing its connection to Tolkien – meaning the property is well protected under the law and not in need of rescue.”’

This is indeed true, and as Locus states, ‘ the organizers [of the campaign] announced that “we have been offered an alternative home for the first literary centre dedicated to Tolkien in a very suitable venue in the heart of Oxford that fits our needs perfectly for in-person courses and a base for tours visiting the locations that inspired Tolkien.”’

It has, for a long time, bemused Tolkien fans that there exists no centre dedicated to him in the UK, as there is for other authors such as the Bronte sisters, Beatrix Potter, Arthur Ransome etc. Let us hope this oversight is soon rectified.