About "Carnap Finds the One Ring"

ℑt should come as no surprise that I read webcomics, perhaps more avidly than is good for me. I am, after all, a nerd, as the simple fact of my having written here and having returned to writing here (after far longer than should have been the case, I admit) indicates. But then, it's not a bad thing to be a nerd, and it is at least the case that my focus and attention doesn't result in much that can be used to do harm.

One subject of the comic
Image from Wikipedia, here,
and presumably public domain

In any event, as I was reading the webcomics I regularly read (and there are a few of them), I came across Existential Comics #611, "Carnap Finds the One Ring." For obvious reasons, it piqued my interest; for similarly obvious reasons, I thought a discussion of it here might be fitting. (If I'm wrong, I don't think I want to know.)

The comic itself pokes fun at both Carnap and Tolkien. The former is of a piece with the webcomic series as a whole; the entire premise of Existential Comics is that it presents philosophers and their works and ideas as somewhat absurd, something that no doubt finds much agreement among the reading public (and likely would among the non-reading public did they bother to look at the comic--but as non-readers, they would hardly be expected to do so). Carnap's struggle towards wholly objective language is made no more or less silly by the comic than is Plato's concept of ideal forms or the inevitability of certain puns in the context of philosophy. The latter is perhaps less common in my experience; those I've encountered who decry Tolkien's works rarely do so from a place of having actually read them in any detail but often on the grounds of disliking fiction or fantasy fiction or "that old shit," generally.

So much said, the comic does raise some good points.  One is that riddles depend for their effect on a tension between exactness and ambiguity of meaning. Indeed, I recall one of my professors at UL Lafayette, the late James E. Anderson, remarking that they were used in early English scriptoria specifically to help teach multi-level thinking. I know that in my own teaching, my use of riddles with students worked to that end, and generally well. (I've written about it more formally, for those interested; it's in Ballad of the Lone Medievalist, and an abstract can be found here.) For someone who strives toward exactness and away from ambiguity, engagement with riddles is an easy way to make a joke; addressing them in such a manner as is presented usefully points out the limitations of the riddle as a genre--namely that there is always another possible answer to them, depending on the approach taken.

Another point is that it is somewhat absurd that the riddle-game in The Hobbit happens at all. "For some reason" is, admittedly, something of a misrepresentation of the interaction between Gollum and Bilbo in the damp darkness under the Misty Mountains--both of them had good reason to stall for time, and riddling offers them both opportunity for such--but moving to such a game also admittedly can strike more modern audiences than those original to the novel as an oddity. Playing along with a threat to gain time for assessment makes sense; a word-game as the means for doing so, perhaps less so.

Of course, it must be remembered that the comic is a comic. The point is to get money for the comic-writer make a joke, and so misrepresentation can be excused in the service of that point so long as it does not proceed to the extent of making the subject matter unrecognizable. It does not in the present case. Indeed, the comic does work, or at least it did for me; I laughed at it when I read it, even if doing some dissection on it kills the humor later on.

There is this, too: the treatment of Carnap and Gollum is not the only time Existential Comics has taken up Tolkien...but I'm not sure I'm quite ready to go there at the moment. Another time, perhaps?

The Weirdness of Tolkien’s Old Norse Poems

The guest-post series by Dennis Wilson Wise, "The New Poets of Rum-Ram-Ruf," concludes its investigation of Tolkien's works, furthered here.

If you like the work Wise does, find more of it in his edited collection, Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival, reviewed by Daniel A. Rabuzzi at Strange Horizons.

Editorial intrusion remains minimal, mostly inserting relevant links.

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[Last week, I discussed Tolkien’s poem in dróttkvætt meter, “The Derelicts,” and showed how “Black Heave the Billows” is in ljódaháttr meter. This helps date both texts to 1932-1934. As I’ll show here, however, the picture is actually more complicated than that.]

The Problem

𝔗o pick up where I left off last week, I’ve been arguing that Tolkien’s four poems in Norse meters all appeared roughly together during the period of 1932–1933. By relying on metrical form rather than subject matter, I also avoid the problem of why Tolkien might have chosen Old Norse meters for Old English subject matter.

That problem is mainly why I hesitated with the dating provided by Scull and Hammond. After all, they linked “The Derelicts” with Tolkien’s first lectures on the old Germanic legend of Finn and Hengest, which in my view puts the poem two years too soon, and they also linked “Black Heave the Billows” thematically with the Old English poems The Wanderer and The Seafarer. Although I ultimately agree with their c. 1932 dating, there’s nothing concrete about any of these poems’ contents to suggest this linkage. Nothing except vibes, anyway.

Here’s the hitch. Even if “The Derelicts” and “Black Heave the Billows” are Old Norse-style poems (and they most definitely are), they sure are weird Old Norse-style poems.

Actually, let me back up a moment. Earlier, I had harped on the idea of Tolkien using a metrical form that misaligns with his content. However…well, he sometimes did do exactly that. At least for “The Prophecy of the Sibyl,” we can blame things on habit. Tolkien was just used to writing poetry in octosyllabic rhyming couplets. In something like The Fall of Arthur, though, he clearly uses Old English meter for an Arthurian subject, but the Anglo-Saxons, of course, never had an Arthurian tradition. It was the Saxons, after all, whom Arthur was most famous for trouncing from one end of the British Isles to another.

My best explanation for that one is that Tolkien just wished to combine the “Matter of Britain” with a metrical form especially connected with the English language prior to the Norman Conquest. Yet it’s relevant, too, I think, that Tolkien had just completed his Norse quartet. He remained bored with octosyllabic couplets and had rediscovered his joy in alliterative verse. The Fall of Arthur helped him continue in that vein.

Which brings me back to the weirdness of “The Derelicts” and “Black Heave the Billows.”

Now: Old Norse and Old English alliterative poetics share the same basic fundamentals. In terms of content, however, they had some differences. Norse poets generally used fornyrðislag for heroic legends and ancient myths. Dróttkvætt is a court poetry for praising kings. Ljódaháttr typically applies to wisdom poetry, magical charms, and dialogue.

None of these conditions apply to “The Derelicts” or “Black Heave the Billows.” In fact, according to Tolkien’s own lecture notes, Old Norse poets like to “seize the situation.” They had a flair for the dramatic and the shocking. In other words, these poets (says Tolkien) wanted to “poke you in the eye,” or to borrow a more contemporary idiom, Old Norse poets wanted to present their audiences with a nice swift kick in the gonads. 

E.g.
Taken from Giphy

What does such gonad-kicking entail? You know, the standard things. Murder. Incest. Bloody betrayals. Or maybe eating a dragon’s heart cooked over an open flame. Perhaps even forcing your (semi-) beloved young sons to knead dough filled with poisonous serpents, but after they start whining about the snakes like the sniveling little cowards they are, asking your handsome brother to decapitate them with a battle-axe. The usual.

In the Old English tradition, however, scopas brought a slightly different sensibility to things. Oh, don’t get me wrong. They liked a good old-fashioned blood feud just as much as the next guy, particularly if everyone winds up dead at the end. But they at least expected you to feel sad about it.

Their sense of elegy, this mournful melancholy, is certainly a mood that pervades Tolkien’s two Norse-metered texts. In the first one, “The Derelicts,” Tolkien hits on bleak nature imagery especially hard. A nameless “they” are gazing upon a lonely beach at night, and various pools are reflecting “winter’s candles,” the stars, as a wind causes ripples across their surface. Tolkien’s next stanza then transitions to the stanza reprinted by Roberta Frank, then moves onto a third stanza that emphasizes gloom and silence. By this time, however, a mist had enshrouded the shore, so now the repeated phrase “winter’s candles” no longer refers to pool-reflected starlight but to starlight as “twisted” by the thick encroaching mist. 

Seems nice to me, actually.
Image provided by Wise

Which, you know, seems pretty bad. Somehow.

Happy times continue with “Black Heave the Billows.” Like Tolkien’s dróttkvætt poem, this one hits the nature imagery hard (i.e., waves–ship–shore), but Tolkien also subtly hints at a vicious, piratical marauding: “On a gleaming gunwale a glint of shields, / a white foaming furrow.” Yet beyond such vague hints of soul-destroying violence, the central situation—the reason for such gloom—is no more spelled out than in “The Derelicts.” We encounter an atmosphere of spiritual desolation as incarnated within bleak seascapes, but nothing specific.

This kind of spiritual desolation goes unparalleled within Old Norse literature. For one thing, skalds rarely bother to describe nature. Even more to the point is how frequently academics comment on the emotional impassivity of folks in Norse texts, especially the sagas. Such characters avoid every demonstrable expression of emotion. When a passionate response arises, poets generally represent them through involuntary gestures such as facial tics or random fist clenching. Or to put matters more bluntly, Norse heroes are about as attuned to their feelings as hard-boiled detectives. Mr. Sigurd Sigmundsson? Meet Sam Spade.

For Old English poets, however, although they don’t ever focus on the psychology of individual people, if you read their work long enough, you soon realize how every scop is basically just an emo goth kid moping his way through life. Emotional coloring suffuses their verse, especially the elegies. Britt Mize in Traditional Subjectivities (2013) does a good job highlighting this general moodiness. In Old English verse, he says, the poets give “generous attention to mental and emotional qualities and states” (p. 6). Even more importantly, they often strive to create an “atmosphere dominated by the portrayal of private emotion” (p. 7)

To me that sure sounds like “The Derelicts” and “Black Heave the Billows.” Tolkien punts on individual psychology, and he combines natural seascapes with a randomized sense of spiritual gloom in order to create a particularly un-Norse-like effect. He doesn’t “poke you in the eye”; he takes you by the hand and asks if you’d like to see a priest. So when Scull and Hammond date “Black Heave the Billows” to c. 1932 because of the striking similarities they see between this poem and The Seafarer and The Wanderer…well, damn. I can’t entirely disagree.

In fact, just about the only real Norse quality to these texts (other than meter) is Tolkien’s technique of stanzaic parataxis. Both New Lays use this often. Rather than wasting syllables by describing how episodes relate to one another causally, Tolkien simply sets his episodes side-by-side. He therefore forces readers to make the necessary connective leaps themselves, to deduce how situation A has contributed or led to situation B.

The same paratactic technique occurs throughout “The Derelicts” and “Black Heave the Billows.” The former poem has three stanzas; so does the latter. Between these stanzas there exists no explicit causal connections. In fact, we can’t be entirely certain these stanzas even constitute unified texts at all. But if they do form single texts (and I suspect they do), it’s up to readers to glean the narrative situations these poems seem to imply.

At end of day, it’s still not entirely clear to me why Tolkien chooses to mix-and-match medieval traditions in quite this way. What is clearer, at least in my humble estimation, is that “The Derelicts” and “Black Heave the Billows” are sister poems, perhaps written consecutively, and each belongs to the 1932–1933 period when Tolkien was likewise experimenting with fornyrðislag for his two New Lays.

The Final Countdown

Finally, though: why does any of this matter?

Well, for me, perhaps the major reason simply involves coming to a better understanding of Tolkien’s trajectory as a poet. Everyone knows that The Lord of the Rings contains verse, and everyone knows several of these verses appear in Old English alliterative meter. For that, Tolkien’s brief Norse phase was a stepping stone.

There’s a more general biographical interest as well. Tolkien was a busy guy, and for him the early 1930s were an especially fruitful time. Besides his alliterative anni mirabiles, Tolkien was also rewriting his “Sketch of the Mythology” in 1930; working to reform the Oxford English Syllabus in 1931; composing A Secret Vice by August of that year; taking on new students like E. O. G. Turville-Petre; writing and drawing his annual Father Christmas letters; and composing The Hobbit up through the death of Smaug. (He lent the manuscript to a friend at the end of 1932 or shortly thereafter.)

Between all this, Tolkien somehow found the time to reinvent himself as a poet. By June 1933, moreover, Tolkien was nominated as an honorary member of the Icelandic Literary Society—a group dedicated to promoting Icelandic language, literature and learning. I have no idea if Tolkien’s membership was connected somehow to his Norse quartet. Maybe. Or maybe he was nominated solely because of his teaching on Norse subjects. In any event, for understanding Tolkien better as a scholar, a poet, and as a fantasy author, everything helps.

Tolkien the Skald

The guest-post series by Dennis Wilson Wise, "The New Poets of Rum-Ram-Ruf," furthers its investigation of Tolkien's works, most recently here.

If you like the work Wise does, find more of it in his edited collection, Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival, reviewed by Daniel A. Rabuzzi at Strange Horizons.

Editorial intrusion remains minimal, mostly inserting relevant links.

Check back for the next post in the series soon!

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[Last week, I outlined the shape of Tolkien’s career as an alliterative poet and noted his immense productivity between 1932 and 1934—the moment he turned to Old Norse meters. Now I’ll tackle specific issues with his two shorter Old Norse poems.]

Tolkien’s “Lost” Stanzas: The Derelicts

ℑf your puppy ever runs away from home, everyone knows what to do. First you search. Then you plaster posters on telephone poles. Then you panic. Though not in that order. Personally, I prefer panic first.

But if your poem runs away from home, well, that’s a tougher situation.

To be fair, the story behind Tolkien’s dróttkvætt sequence “The Derelicts” doesn’t relate directly to whenever he wrote anything, but the tale’s too good to pass up. These stanzas first came to my attention when researching skaldic meters for Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival. My search uncovered an article entitled “Dróttkvætt” by medievalist Roberta Frank, and you can imagine my shock when, suddenly, I found myself reading a never before published skaldic poem by Tolkien. 

Not quite...
Image provided by Wise

Apparently what happened was that, forty-some years ago, Frank’s advisor Eric Christiansen gave her a copy of Tolkien’s three stanzas he made himself. Christiansen himself, it seems, knew Tolkien personally and had borrowed his colleague’s copy of Heimskringla, which contained a typed loose-leaf copy of “The Derelicts.” No idea if Tolkien knew he was sharing the poem or not, but at any rate Professor Frank held onto “The Derelicts” for nine different U. S. presidential administrations before unobtrusively inserting a single stanza into her short article for New Literary History.

Except she made a few…“corrections.” Which was a choice. Here’s the text as reproduced by Frank:

Winter’s winds had hunted
waves as dark as ravens,
their [leaden] ship laden,
lightless, sea-benighted.
Forth now fared they mirthless
far from mortal [portals]
in caves coldly-builded
kindled fires that dwindled.

Officially, the rationale Frank offers is that Tolkien’s original stanzas missed the true poetry of dróttkvætt. So a few touch-ups were necessary; just a light makeover to bring out the skaldic magic. For my part, I strongly suspect Frank was just nervous about printing her (copyrighted) stanza without the Tolkien Estate’s knowledge or permission. But four decades is too long to withstand temptation, apparently, so when she finally succumbed, she decided to hedge her bets. Publishing in a non-profit academic journal provides one layer of copyright protection, but “adapting” that material with slightly new wording adds another small layer of protection as well.

(By the way, Professor Frank’s nervousness became clear to me when I emailed her asking if “The Derelicts” was previously unknown, but even so, she couldn’t have been nicer in her responses to me, an unknown scholar.)

Anyway, these “lost” stanzas—as it turns out—were not actually lost. The Tolkien Estate had had copies of them the whole time, and with The Collected Poems of J. R. R. Tolkien now printing all three stanzas, all’s well that ends well.

But back to dating.

Scull and Hammond place “The Derelicts” at c. 1930. I think that’s two years too soon, coming as it does right at the tail-end of Tolkien’s Anglo-Norman phase, but I’m primarily interested in their subject-matter rationale. Although “The Derelicts” doesn’t contain any proper names or even individualized characters, Scull and Hammond detect a certain sense of atmospheric isolation and tragedy, and they think this atmosphere vaguely reminiscent of another poem written by Tolkien, “Hengest” (poem #118; c. 1930).

For the record, “Hengest” builds upon a barely coherent Germanic legend recounted by several different Old English texts. To summarize briefly, a Frisian king named Finn marries a Danish woman named Hildeburh, but as far as political marriages go, this one somehow culminates into a post-wedding bloodbath between their respective tribes. A brief truce ends the killing, but since it’s wintertime, Hildeburh’s countrymen cannot return home until the seas unfreeze. In Tolkien’s poem, he describes Hengest’s long wait through this long winter, knowing that when spring arrives, he’ll break the truce and slaughter the remaining Frisians anyway. And since Tolkien started lecturing on Finn and Hengest at Oxford in 1930, Scull and Hammond believe it makes sense to pair “Hengest” with “The Derelicts” at c. 1930.

As educated guesses go, this isn’t too bad. Still, I’m more than a little skeptical that Tolkien would use a skaldic Norse form to describe material so strongly associated with Old English literature. At least with “The Prophecy of the Sibyl,” Tolkien was using an Anglo-Norman form that had become his main vehicle for verse. (The “Hengest” text itself, incidentally, is one of Tolkien’s rare efforts in pentameter, although the rhyming couplets continue.) Yet, for him, dróttkvætt was entirely new, a form he never again repeated, and outside of sheer unpredictable whimsy, I see no compelling reason for him to have applied it to the Hengest legend.

This point brings me back to “Black Heave the Billows,” which Scull and Hammond place at c. 1932. This timeframe seems correct to me, but again, I’m skeptical of their subject-matter rationale. But now I’m going to feel like nitpicking jerk, ’cuz my argument will basically boil down to, “Wait, whaddaya mean you don’t know the esoteric technical details of a medieval meter obsolete for over 600 years?”

Nonetheless, maybe this is a good lesson for you kids out there. Never piss off a nitpicker. We’re armed with pedantry, and we’re not afraid to use it.

The Secret Meter of “Black Heave the Billows”

In Tolkien’s original manuscript for “The Derelicts,” he clearly labels this text as dróttkvætt. However, for “Black Heave the Billows,” no such authorial label exists. Accordingly, Scull and Hammond describe it merely as a work in “alliterative verse” (p. 1006), but while that’s not untrue, it’s also like discovering a bluejay and saying, “Yep, that’s definitely a bird. Don’t confuse it with an aardvark or an elephant. Bird all the way.”

With “Black Heave the Billows,” it’s easy for us to go more specific than that. In fact, Tolkien actually composes this poem in the “song” meter of Old Norse verse, ljódaháttr.

Granted, there’s no real reason any non-specialist should recognize the form, but the proof’s easy to see. Just set “Black Heave the Billows” side-by-side with another known ljódaháttr stanza by Tolkien. My example comes from The New Lay of the Völsungs, a long narrative work otherwise in fornyrðislag; I’ve modified the lineation to align with standard editorial practice. 

Wise's reference

As you can see, ljódaháttr’s odd-numbered lines look like normal alliterative poetry. Two half-lines separated by a caesura and connected by alliteration. The even-numbered lines, however, are hypermetric—i.e., longer and heavier than in normal verses.

An interesting wrinkle is something called Bugge’s rule. In Old Norse languages, words tend to follow a trochaic stress pattern. So something like “GUN-wale” is more common than “a-LONE.” Norse poetry thus tends to follow suit naturally. The exception is ljódaháttr’s hypermetric lines. As the brilliantly named Sophus Bugge discovered about two centuries ago, these hypermetrics usually end on an iambic phrase. Sometimes a heavy monosyllable, but more often a “resolved” two-syllable phrase. Above, I’ve bolded Tolkien’s two most obvious examples: brother and furrow.

An apparent outlier to Bugge’s rule, however, occurs in Tolkien’s second hypermetric line in stanza 43. That seemingly ends on a light monosyllable, “it.” As Tolkien scholar Nelson Goering observes, this verse “really deviates from normal medieval practice.” However, I’ve gathered decent evidence that Tolkien believed in multi-word resolution, so if we resolve “won it” into a single two-syllable phrase, his stanza follows Bugge’s rule perfectly.

So that settles things. “The Derelicts” is dróttkvætt and “Black Heaves the Billows” is ljódaháttr, and given the timeline I’ve established, it makes perfect sense that Tolkien would have composed all four of his Norse texts together in a single burst of Scandinavian inspiration. Thus these shorter poems join The New Lay of the Völsungs and The New Lay of Gudrún as an Old Norse “quartet” that Tolkien began shortly after parting ways with octosyllabic rhyming couplets.

And by relying on meter – not subject matter – for dates of composition, we avoid the sketchy problem of why Tolkien might have chosen Old Norse forms for Old English material. So as far as educated guesses go, everything seems perfectly reasonable. Right?

Well…as it turns out, there may be just the tiniest hitch (or two) to my theory…

The Norse Connection and JRR Tolkien (Part II), Tolkien’s Alliterative Anni Mirabiles

The guest-post series by Dennis Wilson Wise, "The New Poets of Rum-Ram-Ruf," continues its investigation of Tolkien's works, begun here.

If you like the work Wise does, find more of it in his edited collection, Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival, reviewed by Daniel A. Rabuzzi at Strange Horizons.

Editorial intrusion remains minimal, mostly inserting relevant links.

Check back for the next post in the series soon!

---

[Last work, I opened this four-part entry with an introduction to Tolkien’s immense versatility as an alliterative poet. Now we turn to looking at his career and his most productive years.]

𝔗oday, most readers of SFF have a bias for prose. That’s safe to say, right? As a young’un, I certainly did. Novels were where the action was. So for many contemporary readers, it might come as a surprise to learn just how much poetry dominated the literary world of Tolkien’s day.

Notably, when Tolkien and Lewis started their respective literary careers, each saw themselves foremost as a poet. And like his fellow Inkling, Tolkien composed verse all through his life. Most never saw print, naturally, but many were in rhymed trimeter, rhymed tetrameter, and so on. In other words, traditional syllable-counting meters, but Tolkien apparently held iambic pentameter in disdain. That is, he never composed blank verse or anything quite as “modern” as all that.

But Tolkien’s alliterative career seems to have operated in stages – a picture now clearer thanks to The Collected Poems of J. R. R. Tolkien.

Unfortunately, most of Tolkien’s texts lack firm composition dates. Moreover, he often returned to and revised old drafts over time, so the waters of dating can look quite murky. Still, if you examine the overall corpus, a compelling story begins to emerge.

For the sake of simplicity, I’ll ignore his translations, which muddy the waters even more, and focus only on original compositions. For instance, we’ll start with the two most obvious alliterative traditions from the Middle Ages:

1. Old English. Tolkien’s first stage lasts from 1920-1925, mainly The Lay of the Children of Húrin (poem #67). His second stage follows 1933 and includes about fifteen additional texts, including those in The Lord of the Rings.
2. Middle English. Tolkien only dipped into this tradition intermittently, but when he did, he always had an explicit medieval model in mind. We have three poems overall:
   • “The Motor-cyclists” (poem #63; ?1919). Modeled on the 14th-century Complaint Against the Black Smiths.
   • “The Nameless Land” (poem #74; 1924). Modeled on Pearl, which survives in the same late 14th-century manuscript as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
   • “Doworst” (poem #139; ?1933). Modeled on Piers Plowman.

Interestingly, Tolkien scholars formerly believed the third poem, “Doworst,” completely lost except for nineteen lines, but after C. S. Lewis’s literary executor, Walter Hooper, passed away in 2020, a complete copy from his papers meandered over to the Bodleian Library. That text is reprinted in full by Scull and Hammond…and thank the Allegory of Goodness they did, too. Besides being the longest original poem by Tolkien in a Middle English meter, it’s utterly hilarious to anyone who teaches at a university.

But Tolkien had no qualms about crossing the North Sea, either. His four Old Norse texts span the following three forms:

• fornyrðislag. Tolkien’s two New Lays (poem #131), both quite long, appear in this meter. The only exception are three stanzas in the one about Sigurd in ljódaháttr.

These New Lays first appeared in The Legend of Sigurd and Gúdrun (2009). Although the original manuscript lacks a date, Christopher Tolkien believes—perfectly reasonably, in my view—that they stem from 1932 through 1934.

• dróttkvætt. “The Derelicts” (poem #119). No known date of composition.
• ljódaháttr. “Black Heave the Billows” (poem #133). No known date for this one, either.

For people paying close attention, you might have noticed a six-year gap in Tolkien’s alliterative career. Between 1925 and 1931, we don’t have any firmly dated poem in an alliterative meter. What gives?

So glad you asked, because I got two explanations. Professionally, this interregnum coincides with Tolkien moving from the University of Leeds to the University of Oxford. That happened in summer 1925. Creatively, this transitional summer also coincides with Tolkien ditching The Lay of the Children of Húrin, an alliterative epic, and starting a brand new long poem called The Lay of Leithian.

For Leithian, he used octosyllabic rhyming couplets. Thus Tolkien had turned from the meter of Beowulf, the quintessential Old English poem, to a meter strongly associated with post-Conquest Anglo-Norman poets like Marie de France and the various anonymous authors of Breton lays.

In other words, after six years of foundering on an incomplete (and incompletable) epic poem, Tolkien had simply grown bored and frustrated with the alliterative meter. As a result, he decided to reinvent himself. A new medieval model was what he needed. And for six years after that, Leithian would absorb that vast majority of Tolkien’s poetic energy.

Unfortunately, a pattern slowly established itself for Tolkien. Leithian bloated to over 4,000 lines, and Tolkien once again found himself exhausted by his inability to edit himself or bring his stories down to manageable length. By September 1931, Tolkien once again abandoned a major epic poem.

In this post-Leithian aftermath, Tolkien tried a few more poems in his Anglo-Norman meter. Actually, he completed two of them, The Corrigian and Atrou and Itroun (#116), about a year earlier, but following Leithian he tried returning to his Húrin material (#130) only to abort this newly reimagined story after a scant 170 lines. His enthusiasm for that story, it seems, still had not returned. He needed a break from the Legendarium.

So he puttered around with a few more brief poems in octosyllabic couplets – “Monday Morning” (#122), “The Last of the Old Gods” (#126), “The Prophecy of the Sibyl” (#132) – but, ultimately, nothing seemed to stick.

So I’m arguing the time had arrived in 1932 for another metrical reinvention. Octosyllabic couplets were passe. Yet where to go? Well, after the Old English and Anglo-Norman meters, the next obvious candidate would have been Chaucerian pentameter, the last major meter in English from the Middle Ages. But as I mentioned, that never happened. Tolkien was well content to study The Canterbury Tales, but he declined to write anything resembling it.

That left metrical traditions outside the British Isles, so in 1932 Tolkien crossed the Baltic Sea and decided to go Viking.

A new question thus appears before us. Namely, what specifically drove Tolkien in 1932 (or so) to take his post-Leithian poetry away from metrical traditions associated with the British Isles? Sure, boredom with octosyllabic couplets got him started, but why medieval Norse literature in particular?

Well, for one thing, I’m sure Tolkien noticed the oddness of using an Anglo-Norman meter for something like “The Prophecy of the Sibyl,” a poem whose Old Norse subject was taken straight from Völuspá. So that would have jarred Tolkien’s scholarly sense of appropriate metrical form.

Distinctly professorial...
Image provided by Wise

Second factor – though this one is purely speculative. At the same time that Tolkien abandoned Leithian, he also accepted a new B.Litt student highly interested in Old Norse languages and literature. In due time, this young fella—E. O. G. Turville-Petre—would become one of his generation’s foremost authorities on Icelandic sagas, and in a curious twist of fate, he’d even supervise the B.Litt thesis of Tolkien’s own son Christopher.

So through the early 1930s, while Tolkien never stopped lecturing on Old English and Old Norse subjects, supervising the precocious Turville-Petre might have re-triggered his creativity into an Old Norse direction. Say what one will about Tolkien’s lecturing style—Kinsley Amis certainly did—but nobody can deny that Tolkien was a professor for whom teaching and scholarship went hand-in-hand. If nothing else, the New Lays are the creative expression of a scholarly problem that had long occupied him.

My third factor? Clive Staples Lewis.

So, I’ve written before about Lewis’s slow education into alliterative verse. Long story short, the key factor was the Coalbiters, a study group founded by Tolkien in 1926 for studying and translating Old Norse texts. Over the next few years, both men became friendly, but their relationship took a turn in December 1929 when Tolkien lent Lewis his manuscript for The Lay of Leithian. This romance utterly enchanted Lewis. Notably, though, this time also coincided with Lewis himself trying his hand at the alliterative meter. Less than nine months after reading Leithian (and just over a year after doing his first surviving alliterative poem), Lewis finished the fair copy version of a 742-line narrative romance in Old English style called The Nameless Isle.

I think it’s a safe assumption that Lewis would have shared The Nameless Isle with Tolkien at some point. And while Tolkien would have surely admired Lewis’s skill with the meter, he might also have remembered his own long-abandoned Húrin…and felt a sense, not only of inspiration, but also creative rivalry. (I’ve written before, too, about how low-key scholarly rivalry led directly to Tolkien’s essay “On Translating Tolkien.”)

In any event, all Tolkien’s greatest—and longest—alliterative poems hail from 1932 through 1934, at least according to our best scholarly estimations. These poems are The Fall of Arthur, Doworst, and both New Lays (The New Lay of the Völsungs, The New Lay of Gudrún). Tolkien even finished the latter three poems—an utter rarity for him. And given that Lewis wrote every single one of his alliterative poems during this period as well, including a few just recently discovered, I’ve dubbed this period their alliterative anni mirabiles.

Honestly, during the early 1930s, the Inklings were just plain rocking the Modern Revival. Which brings me back to “The Derelicts” and “Black Heave the Billows,” those two pesky Norse poems by Tolkien without a composition date.

If you look at The Collected Poems of J. R. R. Tolkien, Scull and Hammond date these texts c. 1930 and c. 1932 respectively—and actually, that’s pretty close. For my own estimation, I put “The Derelicts” and “Black Heave the Billows” within the 1932–1933 time frame. However, I’m less enthusiastic about the subject-matter approach to dating used by Scull and Hammond. To see how the argumentative drama unfolds, however, you’ll have to tune in next week.

Guest Post Series: Dennis Wilson Wise, "The New Poets of Rum-Ram-Ruf: The Norse Connection and JRR Tolkien (Part I)"

Dennis Wilson Wise's series of guest-posts, of which the most recent is here, continues looking at alliterative verse and its persistence into contemporary writing. This time, Wise looks a little bit back--to Tolkien.

If you like the work Wise does, find more of it in his edited collection, Speculative Poetry and the Modern Alliterative Revival, reviewed by Daniel A. Rabuzzi at Strange Horizons.

Editorial intrusion remains minimal, mostly inserting relevant links.

Check back for the next post in the series soon!

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𝔖o far in this series, I’ve tended to tackle either individual poets (C. S. Lewis, Amit Majmudar, etc.) or specific issues such as SF or fan verse. Now let’s sneak a peek at what happens by focusing on a specific alliterative tradition in the Modern Revival—namely, Old Norse.

So here’s a riddle for you. What do medieval Norse skalds—folks like Thjódólf of Hvinir or the legendary Bragi Boddason—have in common with medieval English poets wise in the ways of alliterative poetics? People like Cædmon, William Langland, and whoever the hell wrote Beowulf?

Not much, actually.

Got you with a trick question! So, yeah…this riddle’s somewhat like Bilbo asking Gollum what’s in his pockets. Although us moderns might study a wide range of medieval texts side by side—thank you, anthologies—in the Middle Ages, obviously, most people could not. For them, poetry was largely oral. But also…well, northern Europe is a big place, and there are few barriers more formidable than geography, language, and time. Although Latin might have been medieval Europe’s universal language, alliterative poetry belongs to the vernacular. So if one thing besides language separates modern revivalists from their medieval counterparts, it’s how we can access multiple medieval alliteration traditions with ease. Norse or English poet during the Middle Ages simply did not have that advantage.

Given this versatility, someone might naturally ask who our most versatile modern revivalist happens to be, the one fella who takes best advantage of the multiple traditions lying at our fingertips? Well, luckily, this question has a clear answer. I’m depressed to say, however, that it’s the least surprising and most obvious answer of all: the man himself, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. 

As noted, the man, himself
Image provided by Wise

It’s true, though. Most revivalists tend to stick with their preferred tradition, like Poul Anderson with Norse forms, but the viability of impressionism muddies the waters considerably. As brilliant as Pound and Auden are, their innovations and creativity often take them out of any recognizable medieval tradition. Which is fine. But even among purists, folks like C. S. Lewis, Sandra Straubhaar, or Jere Fleck, they tend to concentrate their skills on mastering a single alliterative tradition.

But Tolkien? Mister Oxford was an alliterative jack-of-all-trades…and master of them all, too. Although Old English was his “base” meter, the one he gravitated toward most instinctively, he perfected not only the “scholarly” version of Old English but its more popular lay versions as well. The Fall of Arthur and The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son, for instance, each respectively imitates the metrical styles of Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon.

Similarly, Tolkien has delved into several varieties of Middle English alliterative meter. Nor does he neglect Norse forms, having written several rigorous texts in fornyrðislag, ljódaháttr, and the immensely difficult skaldic dróttkvætt.

Thus Tolkien is the ultimate model, the undisputed Lord of Alliterative Meters. The one person in whom technical skill and scholarly erudition have combined with sheer productivity in order to yield an astounding corpus of alliterative verse.

The recently published Collected Poems of J. R. R. Tolkien (2024), moreover, positions us even better to appreciate Tolkien’s versatility. In this three-volume set, edited brilliantly by Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond, we can now access dozens of previously unpublished texts, many of them alliterative, that show off Tolkien’s immense range. 

Pretty...and available!
Image provided by Wise

For this four-part entry in “The New Poets of Rum Ram Ruf,” then, I’d like to concentrate on two fascinating texts never before seen in print. The first is “The Derelicts” (poem #119), and the second is “Black Heave the Billows” (poem #133). My discussion will, in addition to providing the action-packed discourse you’ve all come to expect, also prove definitively when Tolkien wrote these particular texts.

Or maybe just semi-definitively. There’ll be some degree of definitiveness, at any rate.

Anyway, to set up argument, which may or may not rock Tolkien Studies to its very core (ahem), let’s first tackle the interesting parabola curve taken by Tolkien’s alliterative career…

Once upon a Time Rewatch 2.4, "The Crocodile"

Read the previous entry in the series here.
Read the next entry in the series here.

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2.4, "The Crocodile"

Written by David H. Goodman and Robert Hull
Directed by David Solomon

Synopsis

Gold attempts to woo Belle with fineries from his shop, offering to take her out on the town. Leroy interrupts, demanding the return of his axe and chiding Belle. Gold erupts in anger at the insult to Belle and assails Leroy, reverting briefly to his Rumpelstiltskin form--and prompting Belle to wake in the night and stalk through the house she and Gold share. Snooping about, she finds him spinning straw into gold, working magic.

Be it ever so humble...
Image taken from the episode, used for commentary.

Back in the past of the Enchanted Forest, Rumpelstiltskin returns to his home, calling for his wife, Milah, and son. The latter greets him, the former is absent, and Rumpelstiltskin takes Baelfire out to find her. She is carousing with pirates in a tavern, making mock of him until Baelfire's appearance shames her into returning home. There, she pushes Rumpelstiltskin to relocate, and he argues against it.

In Storybrooke, Gold and Belle confer about his magic use. She rebukes him for his lack of courage with her.

In the past, Rumpelstiltskin is summoned to the nearby docks, where the pirates are taking Milah. He proceeds there as swiftly as he may, only to be refused and ridiculed by the ship's captain, Kilian Jones.

In Storybrooke, the dwarves attempt to mine fairy dust, David aiding them. Their efforts are unproductive, and David proceeds to take on law enforcement duties. Gold tries to talk to Belle, finding her fled from his home. He goes in search of her, seeking her at her father's; he is, understandably, greeted unkindly. Gold challenges him for information, receiving none.

In the Enchanted Forest, the empowered Rumpelstiltskin meets with Smee, who offers a realm-jumping magic bean. After a tense exchange, the two reach an agreement, and Smee leaves--as Jones arrives, and Rumpelstiltskin purposes to observe him.

Good advice. When in doubt, to the library!
Image taken from the episode, used for commentary.

In Storybrooke, Belle finds herself at the diner, and Ruby talks with her there. She offers to help find family, and the idea of Belle taking over the town library is raised. She heads there, inspecting it until confronted by Smee--who abducts her.

Rumpelstiltskin confronts Jones in the street, receiving the sobriquet "Crocodile" before challenging him about Milah. Jones notes Milah's long-ago death, and Rumpelstiltskin sets up a duel between them.

Gold calls on David, reporting the disappearance of Belle. David reluctantly agrees to help find her.

The duel between Rumpelstiltskin and Jones begins and is swiftly concluded, Jones getting the worse of the exchange. Milah, whose death had been falsely reported, calls for Rumpelstiltskin to stop before killing Jones.

Smee delivers Belle to her father, and the two are happily reunited. They exchange news, and Belle's father challenges her about Gold and his depredations; when she refuses to cut ties with Gold, her father has Smee take her away again. Meanwhile, David continues to search for Belle, fruitlessly. He also advises Gold that hard work and honesty support love, discoursing on the difference between precise wording and "honesty of the heart."

Rumpelstiltskin confronts Milah about Jones and her abandonment of her husband and son. She notes having fallen in love with Jones, and she offers Smee's bean in exchange for Jones's life and hers.

Forth, the Three Hunters?
Image taken from the episode, used for commentary.

David asks Ruby after Belle, disbelieving her denial of information about her. She relents and notes that Belle's interest in the library. She also notes her ability to track by scent, and moves off in pursuit, accompanied by Gold and David. They have to give off pursuit, Ruby discommoded by the flower shop Belle's father runs (and which puns off of Martin's series for its name). Gold confronts Belle's father again, and he notes her safety will be secured by sending her across the town line, with its concomitant memory loss. David realizes she will be sent out through the mines, and the three speed thence.

Rumpelstiltskin confronts Jones and Milah aboard their ship, where she shows him the bean. He mocks them and upbraids her for leaving Baelfire. He kills her and takes Jones's hand. Jones tries to kill him, in turn, failing and swearing vengeance. He takes up a hook after Rumpelstiltskin departs.

Smee sends a restrained Belle down the mineshaft, and she attempts escape without success. Gold's magic saves her from passing the town line and forgetting all. She thanks Gold but does not agree to return to him. Nor yet does she return to her father, citing his misdeeds. Later, Belle and Ruby confer again, and Belle takes lodgings at Granny's inn, receiving the key to the library, which she soon moves to use. Entering the library, she finds Gold, who admits his cowardice to her and reports his failures and his need and inability to leave to find Baelfire. His magic use is an attempt to allow himself to leave Storybrooke, and Belle offer a possibility of reconciliation.

Rumpelstiltskin finds Jones's hand empty, the pirate having retained the magic bean for himself as he sails away and Milah is buried at sea. Smee is conscripted into Jones's service, and they make for another realm: Neverland.

Gold returns to his basement, where Smee is restrained. He presses him for information about Jones--who is with Cora, the two conferring about how to proceed to Storybrooke, where they will find Regina and Gold.

Discussion

Hooray, anachronism!

As the effective introduction to the series of Captain Hook, the present episode necessarily makes much of stereotypical depictions of eighteenth-century pirates. I've noted on several occasions and in relation to several properties--including others from Disney--that the collapse and compression of the pre-modern (and I'll admit to using a fuzzy definition of "modern," here, but periodization is slippery at best, as I've noted) tends to attract a lot of attention to the putative Age of Piracy. Like the medieval, or conceptions of it, "traditional" piracy is easily and often romanticized (something I've touched on in other writing I've done), a seemingly removed and far-away thing onto which much can be projected. And there is some justification, certainly; I recall readings and lectures that associated the early modern English privateers with neochivalric movements occurring in the late Tudor and early Stuart courts, among others, and the clear parallels between eighteenth-century piracy and the Viking raids of a millennium before are, well, there. What purpose is served, what effect achieved, is less clear to me, although that may well just be me--but I think it's another example of the overall compression of all that came before. It remains a dangerous thing, a pernicious one, but how to address it...I do not know.

Once upon a Time Rewatch 1.14, "Dreamy"

Read the previous entry in the series here.
Read the next entry in the series here.

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1.14, "Dreamy"

Written by Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz
Directed by David Solomon

Synopsis

The very picture of grace...
Image taken from the episode, used for commentary.

Recapitulation of the series' premise being absent, after the title card, the episode opens in the Enchanted Forest with the Blue Fairy receiving a delivery and report from another fairy of much less poise. She rebukes the other fairy and dispatches her, the latter dropping some fairy dust along the way--which settles onto a large egg and alters it in advance of its unexpected hatching a smiling dwarf.

In Storybrooke, Leroy angrily eats his breakfast as Mary Margaret pleads for help with candle sales. She is greeted with silence. Leroy notes their shared pariah status, rattling her; Emma follows after, asking about the candle sale and reactions to Mary Margaret. She laments her status, and Emma is called off to tend to duty; she offers encouragement as she leaves.

Admittedly, I react to glitter similarly.
Image taken from the episode, used for commentary.

Preparations for the festival the candle sales underwrite--the Miner's Day celebration--proceed, and Leroy encounters a nun, Astrid, at work on them. He reacts much more happily than might be expected, helping out, and the two seem to connect before going off to their respective tasks.

Emma reports to the scene of Kathryn's disappearance, soon joined by Sidney. Investigation proceeds, and suspicion begins to fall on David swiflty.

The hatched dwarf, Leroy's counterpart, is brought into service, Explanations are offered to him, along with labor-force indoctrination. The dwarf, along with his seven brothers, receives a mattock that gives him his name, Dreamy, and the group are sent into the mines to work in support of the magic underlying the Enchanted Forest.

Leroy belatedly signs up to volunteer to help with candle sales. He overhears Astrid getting into trouble and moves to offer comfort; he learns of the financial difficulties she and the convent face. Emboldened, Leroy resolves to aid. Meanwhile, Emma confronts David regarding Katharine's disappearance, quizzing him about what he knows. Emma affirms that she will find Kathryn. Regina provides records to Sidney regarding the disappearance, as well.

Shiny.
Image taken form the episode, used for commentary.

In the Enchanted Forest, work proceeds in the mines to produce fairy dust, which the fairy counterpart of Astrid, Nova, monitors. She struggles with it and is aided by Dreamy, who recognizes her from his pre-hatching dreams. A series of mishaps ensues, from which Dreamy manages to save the fairy dust and the fairy tasked with its delivery. He encourages her, and the two connect.

Candle sales start off poorly at the event. Leroy takes it into his head to sell door to door. Emma presses Sidney for his promised help as the sales duo tries and fails to peddle their wares.

In the mines, Dreamy sits alone, contemplating his feelings. Belle, present where the dwarves are taking their meal, notes that Dreamy is in love; it is clear to her from his deportment. The other dwarves disbelieve as Belle expounds upon love to Dreamy. She encourages Dreamy to go meet Nova, and he does so.

Leroy makes to report his difficulties to Astrid. He is unable to follow through on doing so, for fear of disappointing her, and Mary Margaret rebukes him for his failure. He avows that he will make good on his promise.

They are cute together.
Image taken from the episode, used for commentary.

Dreamy rushes to meet Nova, and the two look out over the Forest together, happily. They confer about their respective situations, and Dreamy offers to sail the world together with Nova. She accepts, and they arrange to meet again and run off together.

Leroy offers to sell his boat to Gold. Gold refuses, citing a history with the nuns. Astrid calls on Leroy after Gold leaves, and she marvels at the boat before finding the unsold candles and silently rebuking Leroy for his dishonesty. Meanwhile, Emma receives Kathryn's phone records, giving her cause to doubt David. Leroy reports his failure to Mary Margaret, and the two commiserate about their common pariah status.

Dreamy rushes away to meet Nova again, sneaking out in the night from the dormitory he shares with his brothers. One, Stealthy, confronts him, the rest waking at the exchange, and they press him. Dreamy relates his reasoning, and his brothers cheer him on his way. A senior dwarf tries to interdict him, citing his responsibilities and a congenital inability to love--which the Blue Fairy, descending, affirms. Dreamy is persuaded to abandon his love for Nova, putatively in her own interest, just as Leroy tries to set aside his affection for Astrid. He resolves to take action, and proceeds to where the Miner's Day festival is in progress. Ascending to a rooftop, he disables the lighting for the festival--and obliging candle sales en masse.

"It's Grumpy, now," understandably.
Image taken from the episode, used for commentary.

Nova waits for Dreamy, having found a ship for the two of them to sail away. He relates what he has been persuaded to believe, and she rages at the situation. He denies her love, and they part in sadness. Dreamy returns to work; his old mattock fails him, and a new one declares him Grumpy.

Candles sales proceed at the Miner's Day festival, Mary Margaret and Leroy exhausting their inventory. Leroy delivers the proceeds to Astrid, and he offers to take her aboard his boat once it's restored. They delight in the festival while Emma reviews phone records, her investigation ongoing and under threat from Regina. Mary Margaret even begins to receive some reconciliation from the community, while David looks on in longing, and Emma takes him into custody as the town looks on.

Discussion

Of some interest is the depiction of fairies as being...not entirely benevolent. It's something at odds with the Disney sources that inform the understandings of neo/medieval/ist materials much or most of the presumed primary audience of the series has; in Disney, of course, the colorful fairies are sympathetic, helpful beings that work selflessly to the benefit of those they encounter, rather than traffickers in exploitable resources. Frankly, the Blue Fairy is something of a jerk in the present episode, outright laughing at her subordinate in a way that smacks of what James Fredal discusses in his January 2011 College English article.

I note, too, with some interest the hatching of the dwarves. Given my background and the Society, the Tolkienian comment about there being no dwarven women comes to mind--but who lays the eggs? More seriously, though, with Labor Day in the US having only recently passed, I am in mind of the labor stratification that is clearly at work with the former Dreamy and his siblings. The idea that certain groups are fated to work in support of others is hardly unique to the medieval, of course; there are any number of execrable people even now who espouse such hateful ideology. But it does line up in broad strokes with the traditional three orders social system many ascribe to and associate with the medieval; the dwarves are a "natural" labor class, conditioned and constrained to work and punished for deviations from that labor. It's...not a good message, really, embedded in them.

Some Thoughts about Some Dungeon Synth

𝔄s I have continued to work in this webspace and others, I have tended to do so with music of one sort or another playing in the background. It's often instrumental music; vocals tend to pull my attention to them to a degree I find incompatible with working on writing, as they sound too much like someone is trying to talk to me for me to be able to focus elsewhere. And as I was casting about for such music, I came across the Dungeon Synth Archives on YouTube, which both fit the kind of ambient, instrumental music I was seeking and suggested itself as presenting medievalisms that do not seldom make of themselves some kinds of tales after Tolkien.

Because I always try to have a blast when I work...
Gif from Giphy.com, deriving from Monty Python,
and used for commentary

While I have linked the channel above, plowing through examples does not necessarily or efficiently describe a genre. What dungeon synth is reported as being varies. Wikipedia, that first-use go-to reference, calls it here "a subgenre of dark ambient music that emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s" that "employs aesthetics and themes typically associated with black metal and applies it to dreamier ambient songs" in which "use of dark soundscapes suggests medieval or fantasy motifs, often with a nocturnal aesthetic" and which "is often compared to video game music, as it is occasionally applied in those settings." Another source, Andrew Werdna's Dungeon Synth blog--much like this webspace-- describes it here as "the sound of the ancient crypt. The breath of the tomb, that can only be properly conveyed in music that is primitive, necro, lo-fi, forgotten, obscure, and ignored by all of mainstream society." Robert Newsome's 2017 comments on Bandcamp identify it as "Drawing its musical themes from Medieval and Renaissance compositions and its aesthetic sensibilities from black metal and fantasy literature [...] the perfect soundtrack for this kind of escapist fantasy," much like "the 'intro' track to your favorite metal album, but stretched out to album length"; Jonathan Carron's 2021 comments on Invisible Oranges call it initially "a style of grim fantasy ambient that would serve as intros, interludes, and full releases played and traded among black metal musicians in the 1990s" that works well for many internet subcultures

Admittedly, there is always peril in posting genre definitions; there are always exceptions, of course, and there are always ambiguities to consider. This webspace has noted such things in the past; consider, for example the boundaries of "the medieval," as here. My own attempts at offering definitions have been...less than inspiring, I think, as these all attest. So I will not pretend that the definitions I note above are complete, comprehensive, or definitive; they are functional, and that has to be enough.

You're gonna look at this and say it's not medievalist?
Image is one of the video thumbnails on the
Dungeon Synth Archives YouTube channel,
used for commentary

A quick glance at the albums uploaded to the Archive linked above notes a number of names that come from Tolkien or seem to evoke him and his work; "Aldaron" is both the name of a group with an album of dungeon synth and a by-name for one of Tolkien's Valar, while "Oshanoe" would read as well as a medievalist fantasy nation-state as it does as a performing name, and "Castle Zagyx" is a clear evocation of the Castle Zagyg that informs older Dungeons & Dragons--itself a decidedly medievalist  and Tolkienist construction. Other performance- and album-names are more overtly medieval: Walpurgisnacht and Tir, Mari Lwyd and Vale Minstrel, Fen Walker and Myrrdin all speak to northern and western Europe between the end of Western Rome and whatever temporal point might be used to mark the end of the Middle Ages.

It is clear that there are attempts to link the music back, either directly to perceptions of the medieval or vicariously through linking to works that link to the medieval. How accurate those attempts are, it surpasses me to say; there will be limits imposed due to instrumentation--"synth" is not exactly something attainable with the kinds of instruments available in the European Middle Ages, although I do know that time had more available than is commonly recognized--but I did not succeed as a music major, leaving that course of study before reaching the parts of it that would have let me speak with certainty to the accuracy of intonation and melodic and harmonic structures, for example, or performance practices. But this blog always welcomes outside contributions, so those who read it and who are thus knowledgeable would find their comments on the matter welcomed.

For myself, however, I have some reading and writing to do, and this should give me some more music with which to do both.

The Dragon Prince Rewatch 3.9, "The Final Battle"

Read the previous entry here.
Will there be another entry in this series?

It's no joke; the rewatch has caught up with the series at last.

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3.9, "The Final Battle"

Written by Aaron Ehasz and Justin Richmond
Directed by Villads Spangsberg

Synopsis

Maybe they'll work better as tattoos...
Image taken from the episode, used for commentary.

Callum marks himself with the characters for the spell Ibis uses to give himself wings, preparing to attempt the magic in advance of the coming battle. The attempt fails, and Rayla offers some gentle mockery before the two consider their situation and likely deaths. Soren interrupts to summon them to council, apologizing for his prior misdeeds towards Callum.

Viren's army passes the petrified remains of Avizandum, and Viren praises Claudia for her loyalty and her prowess. Aaravos offers to teach Viren how to drain Zym's power and enhance himself.

The council in the Stormspire progresses, with plan of battle laid out. Zym sorrows amid it, however, and Bait attempts to comfort him. Rayla offers to guard the two and is hailed as the last Dragonguard.

Not a face to see in a back alley...
Image taken from the episode, used for commentary.

Viren's army advances, approaching the Stormspire and its arrayed defenders in power and terror. The empowered Kasif rages forward without orders, followed swiftly by the rest of the army, and battle is joined. The use of magic by Claudia and Viren is a factor that further unbalances an already asymmetrical conflict; the arrival of a flight of dragons seems to even out matters initially, but the seeming soon reveals itself as such, as the dragons' fire strengthens the invading army.

Was this the plan all along?
Image taken from the episode, used for commentary.

Battle continues, with the dragons coming under restraining fire. Several are brought down.

Within the Stormspire, Rayla accompanies Zym as the titular dragon prince calls upon his mother at last. Despite his clear entreaty, she does not respond, but continues to slumber deeply.

The invading army breaks through the first defensive line. Callum deploys his own magic to interdict the advance, meeting only limited success. He is saved by the arrival of other human forces, led Aanya of Duren; the onslaught helps to balance the conflict, and the newly reinforced defenders make progress against their attackers, finding victory on the field. Ezran calls for tending to the enemy wounded amid freeing the restrained dragons, though there is some resistance to the idea. Viren's absence is noted and the search for him begins.

Pursuing Claudia, Ezran encounters Viren; Soren defends Ezran, confirming that he has turned against his father utterly. It is also revealed that the Viren present is not the real one; the actual Viren is elsewhere, pursuing Zym, whom Rayla and Bait defend in vain. Zym flees but is taken at the pinnacle of the Stormspire despite the attempt to fly away, and Viren begins to drain power from him through Aaravos's ritual. Rayla again attempts to interdict Viren, pitching them both from the pinnacle. Callum leaps to her salvation, finally enacting the spell Ibis used, and saving her; they affirm their love.

A promise of more to come.
Image taken from the episode, used for commentary.

After, the victorious forces confer, with amity among them in the offering as Ezran is recognized again as king. Zym's mother awakens, and the gathered forces present themselves to her as one. And Viren awakens, Claudia having restored his body and life at great cost to herself; Aaravos, however, is absent from him, having metamorphosed into a form that foretells something else...

Discussion

From the episode, in comparison to the films,
used for commentary...

It is clear that the battle scenes borrow from Jackson's Middle-earth films and their depictions of such battles as at Gorgoroth, of the Five Armies, at Helm's Deep, and at the Pelennor. That is not to be wondered at, given the outsize influence of the movies and their antecedent texts on popular culture, generally, and on the presumed secondary audience of the series--the parents of the children who would watch it, including me--more specifically. Such evocation does not make the episode particularly authentically medieval, but it does make it medievalist in the way Sturtevant describes as supplanting or replacing the medieval in common conception. That there are problems of coding in the episode--note the association of animalistic rage with dark-skinned characters on both sides of the conflict--is perhaps one with that, as might be inferred from applying Niels Werber across the similarity between works and looking at the long and amply attested association of medievalist work and racist impetus. Even without overtly racist intent, after all, a thing can reinforce racism, and appropriation by execrable ideologues happens, as is all too abundantly clear.

At a minimum, it is a fraught issue. But I think more than the minimum much of the time.

It should be noted that, while it is clear from the episode there is more story to tell, and press releases have noted that more of the series is to come, there is not more of it as of this writing. If and when more emerges--because renewals, even when announced, are not guaranteed--I will resume the re/watch; until then, though, I will turn to other projects after a bit of a break. I'll have new material on 15 April 2021; I hope you'll return to read it!