Cimorene

[H]e saw a slender glittering warrior come forth from the door [...], who stood for a moment looking round about, and then came lightly and swiftly toward him; and lo! it was the Sun-beam, with a long hauberk over her kirtle falling below her knees, a helm on her head and plated shoes on her feet.

—William Morris, The Roots of the Mountains

Mentions of this book before I read it indicated to me that it was the inspiration behind several chunks of The Lord of the Rings for Tolkien, one of these being the "warrior women". There is a woman who swears herself to the war-god as a result of being disappointed in love, and some other echoes of Eowyn's story discussed in my previous post on the subject, The romances of Morris's Roots of the Mountains as forerunners of those in LOTR. But saying that The Roots of the Mountains' fighting women inspired LOTR, though possibly true, is quite misleading, because there is so much more warrior woman in The Roots of the Mountains.

In The Roots of the Mountains, Victorian socialist and medieval fanboy William Morris created a fantasy version of pre-Christian central european Gothic tribes in an idyllic egalitarian agrarian society where women hold political influence and freely fight in war against barbaric colonizing enslavers.

This fantasy society isn't closely based on any sources - the nearest is the bits of the poem Hlöðskviða or "The Battle of the Goths and Huns" preserved in a 13th century Icelandic "legendary saga" (fornaldarsaga) (ie not a historical saga; though the poem doubtless has its origin in some real poems/songs) - and while the image of the Germanic warrior woman or Valkyrie certainly exists in Norse and germanic folklore, Morris's world in ROTM goes far beyond that. ( Read more... )

Of the three female main characters (out of five) in The Roots of the Mountains, one is The World's Greatest Archer, typically a woodswoman and huntress, and a fierce fighting maiden all the time; one is a young athlete who was always skilled at fighting and makes a vow to go to war as a result of her broken heart, but throws herself gloriously into the fighting as a leader of the people; and one is a wise political leader who refuses to take up arms herself, but goes into the battle in full armor with her people.

‘And when I go down to the battle,’ said he, ‘shalt thou be sorry for our sundering?’

She said: ‘There shall be no sundering; I shall wend with thee.’

Said he: ‘And if I were slain in the battle, would’st thou lament me?’

‘Thou shalt not be slain,’ she said.

There are still plenty of women who don't go to battle in The Roots of the Mountains, too, and their choice is valid! But the ability to fight and the will to fight are fully accepted and fairly widespread for women throughout the four societies he portrays, (1) the Burgdalers (town dwellers), (2) the shepherds, (3) the woodsfolk, and (4) the Children of the Wolf, who have been living hidden in Mirkwood, the forest which lies between the dalesmen and the eastern invaders, and protecting the border from their SECRET BASE in the hidden Shadowy Vale.

First we learn of the fighting women of the Children of the Wolf - a mysterious, rather fantastical people, throwbacks to the heroic age, and thus possibly more apt to exotic things like warrior maidens:

Then the Sun-beam spake to Gold-mane softly, and told him how this song was made by a minstrel concerning a foray in the early days of their first abode in Shadowy Vale, and how in good sooth a maiden led the fray and was the captain of the warriors:

‘Erst,’ she said, ‘this was counted as a wonder; but now we are so few that it is no wonder though the women will do whatsoever they may.’

(In The House of the Wolfings - that is, before the Wolfings came to the Shadowy Vale, and at least a couple of hundred years before ROTM - the army is made up mostly of men, but ( Read more... )) The Sun-beam's foster sister Bow-may intended from the first to fight, and takes the first opportunity to ask Face-of-god where he got his extremely good armor, and if she can have some:( Read more... )

But next we learn that the settled town-dwelling society of Burgdale, which at first seemed like a traditional early medieval setting, enthusiastically accepts the vow of the Bride to dedicate herself to the war god and fight in the battle for her people, and that many other young maidens are inspired to follow her example:( Read more... )

And finally when the fighters muster we see how many fighting women there are in the whole host: apparently eight, counting the Bride, out of 1 581 fighters from the Dale (Woodlanders and Folk of the Vine ie grape-growers); 50 women out of 235 Children of the Wolf. A sample of the muster scenes: ( Read more... )

Of the female fighters, we later learn that another besides the Bride was injured, and Bow-May's hand gets hurt and her bow broken, but she keeps fighting. Morris also portrays them fighting heroically alongside the male warriors in his battle scenes: ( Read more... )

This duology by the author of Waverley and Ivanhoe was published in 1820 and concerns the progress of the Protestant reformation in Scotland:

• The Monastery is set in the 1550s and centers on the takeover by Protestants of the lands of Melrose Abbey (a 12th c. monastery) and the conversion to Protestantism of a fictional noble family. The family's guardian spirit, a sprite called the White Lady who speaks entirely in rhyme, interferes chaotically and helps bring about the happy ending of a romance, the conversion of the young couple and their vindication and installation in a Castle, and the downfall of the abbey. There is a lot of comedy of manners and minor adventures in this novel which I greatly enjoyed and will likely reread sometime; but the surrounding political violence is too real and chilling to go over lightly, so the mood felt uneven.



• The Abbey is a sequel about a young man adopted (sort of) and raised (for about ten years) by the couple who were united in The Monastery: a Protestant knight close in the service of the bastard half-brother of Mary Queen of Scots who was instrumental in deposing her in favor of her infant son, and his wife, the scion of the ancient and noble house of Avenel whose castle they inhabit. The book is about this youth recovering from two sets of very bad parenting and outgrowing the violence, impulsivity, pride, and petulance which resulted from them... by being sent as a representative of BOTH the Protestant government AND the Catholic conspiracy in support of Mary, Queen of Scots to Castle Lochleven where she is being imprisoned. ( Read more... )
  Roland is a purely fictional character, but the surrounding history is real, and it's pretty good; but the fact that so much of the interest is the real people makes the protagonist feel pastede on. In short, I think there was a better book hiding in there that was simply a novelization about Mary Queen of Scots at Lochleven without an invented protagonist and definitely without the ties to the other book. ( Also the child abuse plot is not saved by the fact that Scott knew it was what he was portraying. )

The Protestant Reformation famously, along with the destruction of the political power and wealth of the Catholic church as an institution, produced the physical destruction of numerous beautiful buildings and works of art: in many churches this took the form of removing statues, destroying carvings and stained glass windows, and painting over the wall paintings. But there were also many buildings that were torn down, burned, etc. This mob-violence aspect of the Reformation is presented in both novels in a way that is quite interesting, and succeeds in showing the issue's complexity, I think.

The introduction to The Monastery already warns the reader that Scott approaches the whole project from a perspective of hating Catholicism. Reading this, though, did not exactly prepare me for the prejudices of these novels. Hating the medeival Catholic church, the corrupt institution whose power had a stranglehold on Europe (and indeed much of the world) at the time of the Protestant reformation seemed like a reasonable middle-of-the-road position to me. I wasn't prepared for Scott apparently hating Catholicism:

the Catholic, defending a religion which afforded little interest to the feelings, had, in his devotion to the cause he espoused, more of the head than of the heart,

—The Monastery

Don't mistake me: he doesn't hate Catholic people or make them villains. But he views the entire project of struggling for Catholic control of a country to be inherently corrupt and evil, and all the people sincerely engaged in these projects are sadly deluded, or laughably illogical, if sincere. The monks in The Monastery couldn't present a more stark contrast to the monks in the Brother Cadfael novels: he has set two sincerely religious and moral, intelligent, admirable men among them, and the others, however sympathetic, are lazy, cowardly, intellectually negligble social parasites (the monastery is a feudal landowner and its monks are supported by the labor of indentured peasants, until the Protestant troops reposess its lands at the end of the first book).

In my early posts about William Morris's The Roots of the Mountains I raised issues of anachronisms (here and here) and this led to a conversation with mildred_of_midgard that was really fun about brasilwood and medieval trade! Also, ultimately she made a very good point about my statements relating to dating these novels, namely: they are not exactly meant to be datable, because they aren't really historical fiction in the traditional sense. ( Read more... )

So yes, it's completely legit to observe that dating their events, or identifying contradictions in the dating thereof, is beside the point to the same extent that this is true of medieval romances or epic poetry. However, even though that's true, it doesn't mean that there's no value in investigating the real history behind the folklore. Even if the main value is fun. And in my case, ( picturing the clothing, because I'm into medieval clothing. ) So anyway, what CAN be pinned down about the time/setting of HOTW and ROTM?

• HOTW deals with a massive alliance of germanic tribes successfully repelling a Roman invasion from their forest home of Mirkwood, which is definitely somewhere on the continent, but that's all we got. Goths have already joined the Roman army, but this is evidently only a recent development, and these traitor-Goths are responsible for leading the Romans to their homeland. At the beginning of HOTW the Romans are still a distant rumor, basically new to most of the members of these tribes. So it likely takes place quite early in the history of Roman-germanic conflicts, perhaps somewhere between the 2nd century BCE and the 1st century CE.



• All the peoples in HOTW dwell in wooden longhouses, which, accurate. You can read on Wikipedia about how Tolkien just copied Meduseld from HOTW and therefore introduced the word "louvres", which historians later accused Tolkien of being anachronistic for because the word 'louvres' wasn't present in Anglo-Saxon England, lol. Yes okay Wikipedia, point taken. I'm trying not to be quite that silly.



• ROTM takes place many generations, perhaps a few hundred years, after The House of the Wolfings. The tribe of the Wolfings live in the forest, protecting the boundaries of a small settlement of farmers and shepherds in a peaceful valley at the foot of the mountains. The shepherds and farmers are allied germanic tribes and all are still pagan. If Wikipedia is to be believed, the Goths converted to Christianity in the late 4th century AD and were one of the first germanic peoples to do so. This is covered extensively in Jordanes (Morris was certainly familiar with it, and drew on it for these books otherwise, although that's no guarantee he intended to treat it as canon).



• The settled germanic tribes in ROTM still preserve a basically egalitarian society based on seasonal Thing assemblies in a stone circle ("[In] Finland [so-called "court stones"] are found in Eura, Ulvila and Kokemäki. They date typically [to] during the Pre-Roman Iron Age and the Roman Iron Age. In Sweden, they are called Domarringar (judge circles), Domkretsar (judge circles) or Domarsäten (judge seats). In Finland they are called Käräjäkivet (court stones). In some places in [the] Nordic countries they were used [for Thing assemblies] until [the] 17th century"), but they have hereditary chieftains now instead of their former method of elected war leaders from HOTW.



• The society of ROTM have a fortified city with stone houses. I don't think this can be used to date anything though, because as far as I know, there is no stone architecture from pagan germanic tribes currently available to architectural historians. I think this was just Morris letting his fancy run away with him, to be frank.

(Regarding my two posts about anachronisms: if ROTM is intended to be set in Crimea, which is possible, the brasilwood dye is probably fine even as far back as the 200s or 300s CE; but if you want to use the existence of the bowed string instruments to date it the whole thing would have to be pushed forward to around the 10th century CE, when like, almost everyone was converted to Christianity: they established the Archbishopric of Uppsala in Sweden in 1164 and that's the furthest Northwest they had to go. Yeah, I'm not serious about dating it then. Possibly he just didn't care but probably he was just plain wrong about the bowed string instrument.)

I was originally (before looking up a ton of stuff) thinking 5th or 6th century AD might be the intended ballpark target time period, because there were many more Asian incursions into germanic tribal territory in those centuries; but that is actually way too late for them to all be pagans. Of course, Morris might have just kept them pagan because he loved germanic paganism and was a Norse saga fanboy, while still imagining his setting in the 5th or 6th centuries. But on the whole - and this conclusion is definitely pretty much vibes-based -, I am thinking 3rd-4th century CE for ROTM and 1st century BCE or CE for HOTW. To the extent that that is valid. Which is like... maybe roughly 20%.

I did finish The Roots of the Mountains and The House of the Wolfings, and I did get quite interested in the romantic plots and depictions of women fighting in war therein, which certainly do seem to have inspired LOTR. But another issue fascinated me alongside it, namely the orcs.

For context, my opinion, prior to my recent reading of and about these two Morris books, of the whole issue of orcs and goblins in LOTR was that they are essentially racist. I think any attempt to portray a humanoid fantasy species that are inherently evil would be inevitably (with the possible exception of a hypothetical situation where exploring and deconstructing that exact issue was the whole point). I had garnered the impression that the dehumanification of orcs was done with the intention of making it less agonizing/harrowing/tragic, to allow the Good characters to be fighting and killing a depersonalized Evil, but that Tolkien himself (eventually?) even was aware of (? or uncomfortable with?) the implications. (I set aside the film portrayal, which made it worse, but I'm just discussing the books here.) But I haven't investigated that issue or the scholarship about it that I recall, just read posts and essays in fandom and online about it. (I know there is scholarship about it, but I haven't looked.)

Recently I did a websearch about William Morris's HOTW/ROTM and discovered (as mentioned in a couple of previous posts) some indications that these books, specifically, had inspired bits of LOTR, and my curiosity determined me to finish wading through the boringness/rhyming poetry of HOTW in order to finally read ROTM. And I read it! Part of what I found in that websearch was the Wikipedia article called William Morris's influence on Tolkien, which is a bit of a grab bag but included this:

Morris describes the Dusky Men as "long-armed like apes", "as foul as swine", fighting with crooked swords, and forming "a stumbling jostling throng".[24] Massey comments that their nature is dehumanised, so they can be slaughtered "with impunity", and that Tolkien modelled the Orcs on them.[24]

[24] Massey 2007, pp. 130–132.

Massey, Kelvin Lee (2007). The Roots of Middle-Earth: William Morris's Influence upon J. R. R. Tolkien. University of Tennessee (PhD thesis).

And then also, in Graham Seaman's 2003 Introduction to The Roots of the Mountains (also mentioned in a previous post), this: ( Read more... ) Therefore, I started reading the book after these two passages with the impression that the "Huns" or Dusky Men of Morris's ROTM were going to be a fantasy race: definitely not human - acting like zombies, incapable of breeding with people (and also inherently evil). Please note: I do not unquestioningly accept that quote from Jordanes and what it is apparently arguing, but I wanted to investigate the matter further myself. But even if I didn't swallow the argument whole, I did still expect this passage to be factual - that is, for the Dusky Men to actually be unambiguously, in the text, a fantasy race, not just human beings, who are inherently evil and all that jazz.

But they aren't.

Surprise!

So now I have to deal with what they actually ARE in the text before I come back to whether Jordanes, et. al. absolves Morris and Tolkien, or to what it could mean.

Are the Huns unambiguously inhuman fantasy monsters? No. Are they like orcs, goblins, or zombies? No. They are described as ugly, short-necked, small-eyed, etc., but none of the physical descriptions go beyond the standard anti-Asian racism discussed so extensively in Said's Orientalism. They are guys who are not as smart or good at fighting as the heroic germanic tribesmen - that's why they formed a stumbling, jostling throng in that quote: because they weren't all drilled and prepared to take up orderly formations and obey the orders of their commanders. They were just panicking. Can they interbreed with humans? Yes. And they do. Are there half-breeds to deal with? Yes. They are either raised as Dusky Men or murdered as infants by them. So, then, is it possible that they are actually human? Again, not really, if you take the testimony of the various characters who relate exposition about them as true (and it is true within the story, I would say), but I don't think that's intentional. Here is a small selection of the most relevant quotations about them:( Read more... )

So to sum up: ROTM's Dusky Men are an all-male, all-warrior parasitical society. All its citizens are warriors who do no other labor, and they keep a proportionally massive enslaved population, whom they abuse egregiously. Their natural children by their captives usually resemble their fathers but not always, and are not infrequently born with severe cognitive disabilities; of the apparently healthy offspring, the male ones are raised as Dusky Men and the female ones murdered. They travel in groups, but they are not nomadic: they look for a comfortable place they can exploit and move in there to stay. Further groups of Dusky Men arrive over time, but this seems to be the result of having exhausted natural resources or grown too numerous for their previous residences, or from being driven out in war.

They very definitely aren't the historical Huns, because they don't fight on horseback, and don't even seem to move their people on horseback, and they don't arrive with herds of livestock. (Also we know the Huns didn't practice universal female infanticide.) (If Wikipedia is to be believed, Jordanes wrote about the Hunnic Altziagiri tribe's summer and winter pasturage in Crimea, so this lack of herding is a deliberate departure on Morris's part: he puts quite a lot into emphasizing the Dusky Men's refusal to do any labor at all, which is certainly his socialism showing. More on this later.) They also very definitely aren't a possible depiction of any other real civilization in history, because of ( Read more... ) But given that the Victorian English reader would not find these circumstances implausible, I think they are still compatible with intent to portray a race of people, not a race of orcs or monsters. ( Read more... )

When you consider that ROTM is a novel from the point of view of the Goths, it is easier to accept that some parts - like the accusations of ugliness - might represent racism on the part of the characters, and not necessarily the author. In other words, the Dusky Men might be intended as a portrayal of a plausible human society of total assholes, whose assholery is in their behavior - enslaving and oppressing other people so that they can be the idle rich, and also sadism and cruelty - and whose appearances are described in all the classic racist cliches from Said's Orientalism because that is, realistically, how medieval central European societies repeatedly described people from Asia. The descriptions are xenophobic and reflective of the worst traditions of Orientalist racism, but they are completely in character for his text, which is essentially a fictional medieval history - it poses as the kind of history composed on the basis of oral folklore, with many appeals to what the fictional oral tradition says, with levels of detail comparable to epic poetry. (Morris was a huge fan of epic poetry and translated a lot of the prose Edda, some of the poetic Edda, Beowulf, and various medieval French romances into English.) Roughly, this book seems to be answering the question, "What if there existed a bundle of orally-transmitted song and poetry about the length of the Iliad about this bit of the history of the Goths (that particular racist one from Jordanes up above, I mean) and the bits around it, and somebody had translated it into graceful and beautiful prose, what might that look like?"

This has accounted for sources and motivations behind a lot of choices here, but it hasn't really settled why his Dusky Men differ in the ways they do from what you might expect of the, you know, horrible enslaving Asian conquering horde in the middle ages. And the answer to all of those whys is probably ultimately "Morris's passionate socialist beliefs", although the connection between those beliefs and the outcome on the page is open to multiple interpretations.

The enslaving Dusky Men's monstrous refusal of labour - which isn't just about becoming social parasites, but is a choice which was inherently destructive of one's moral character and happiness, according to Morris's worldview - is clearly related to socialism. We can detect reflections of growing capitalism, the transatlantic slave trade, the oppression of the English working classes, etc. But it's harder to diagnose the universal female infanticide. Is this a choice driven by titillation, essentially - an attempt merely to make them more alien, more horrible? ...No. Spoiler: it's probably because for Morris, socialism includes and implies female equality.

Morris is not a perfect feminist, but his novels, his nonfiction, and his actions as a business owner and political activist were all strongly in support of what we would today call feminism. He believed that women were men's moral and intellectual equals, and his vision of a future socialist utopia is one of full gender equality. In his socialist fantasies women and men share equally in the joyful, physically and morally edifying physical labor of agriculture and figure equally as masters of all the arts and crafts; in his medieval pastiche novels women figure as heroes, warriors and decision-makers, though not always to the same degree. So. That's probably why. Maybe I'll have figured out a theory to explain the connection better by the time I've written the other essay I need to write about the women warriors and politicians in this book.

Oh no, not my guy William Morris putting a New World ingredient in Europe 700 years too early!

...came out of the house clad in a green kirtle and a gown of brazil, with a golden-hilted sword girt to her side.

—The Roots of the Mountains (1889), William Morris

brazil (plural brazils)

Noun. (obsolete) A red-orange dye obtained from brazil wood. [14th–17th c.]

ETA: this might be wrong! Thanks to mildred_of_midgard, I now know the Wiktionary entry quoted above was incomplete 😠 and didn't inform me that brasilwood was a commonly used source of pigment/dye throughout Europe in the high middle ages and came from East Asia, frequently Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka). (Brazil, the country, was named for the wood, because a close relative — the plant now known as Brazil wood — was plentiful there before being exploited almost entirely away.) The question remains whether this trade really did go so far back, but it's not so implausible after all. Morris was likely familiar with the dye's usage after 1000 CE and extrapolating backwards, as with the fiddle which was definitely incorrect, but it is possible that the wood was present in the book's setting (probably the 4th - 5th c. CE, somewhere in the a Carpathian region - see Wikipedia Hlöðskviða (also Hlǫðskviða and Hlǫðsqviða), known in English as The Battle of the Goths and Huns and occasionally known by its German name Hunnenschlachtlied for discussion of the possible historical context of the Old Norse heroic poem on the subject).

Even though I was already super into the medieval pastiche novels of my pal William Morris, a big part of my motivation for finishing The House of the Wolfings and reading The Roots of the Mountains was learning that these books were a major, perhaps the primary traceable literary influence on LOTR. I was suddenly curious! My reading in a brief web search promised that The Roots of the Mountains influenced:

✒️ The Dunedain as a proud wandering people descended from a great and noble culture in a more heroic past, dedicated to protecting the less warlike civilizations around them (inspired by the Sons of the Wolf in ROTM)

✒️ A culture with warrior women (the article that said he probably borrowed this is hilarious, given that the only culture with warrior women in Tolkien is actually a culture where the woman has to crossdress and sneak away to war; The Sons of the Wolf actually have warrior women)

✒️ The armies of orcs are said to be inspired by the "Huns" in ROTM, which, as I've mentioned in the past, are actually an army of demonic? monsters? apparently in spite of the name. (I still haven't reached their part in ROTM yet, but if it turns out that JRRT borrowed the idea and all his changes made it LESS racist that will be funny.)

✒️ Apparently the cross-cultural romances in general and the Aragorn-Arwen-Eowyn triangle in particular have clear antecedents in ROTM. I've seen the beginning of this already, but I'm assured that the novel contains five couples and am intrigued to find out where the others are going.

So far I've only read about 10% of The Roots of the Mountains, but I've already noticed that its gender politics (and its other politics) are more progressive than LOTR's (ROTM was published in 1889, LOTR 1954-55; Morris was born in 1834, Tolkien in 1892). Truly, as one of the websites I read said (paraphrasing), a chunk of LOTR is a reactionary Catholic reimagining of Morris's radically socialist fantasy.

This reminds me of how Morris & Co was also notably less sexist in the Victorian era than the supposedly progressive idealists at the Bauhaus in the 1920s-30s.

Reading Morris's fantasy novel with the nomadic descendants of the great House of the Wolf of the Goths, who patrol the borders of a settled agrarian civilization composed of other, distantly related, more modernized Germanic tribes, and was the inspiration for Tolkien's Dunedain.

The thing is that The House of the Wolfings, by pinning itself to the Goths repelling the Roman empire, is pretty definitely in the 1st century CE, and so The Roots of the Mountains, by narrowing itself to within a few hundred years after that,

CANNOT plausibly have a bowed string instrument.

(But they definitely do in the novel.)

Like sure, nobody has a document that says the Goths and other Germanic tribes definitely didn't have bowed string instruments, yet at the same time, the earliest evidence for a bowed string instrument anywhere in the world is in the 10th century. (I went and checked because it sounded so wrong as I was reading along. Like no that's definitely not the kind of instruments I thought these people had! And I'm probably right, which is odd, when it comes to this period and these cultures, because that was Morris's Special Interest.)

Can I just be off by five hundred years in my placing of this setting? No, because the whole central deal of this novel are Hun incursions, which were pretty much over before the year 500 CE. (True, the "Huns" in this novel are apparently supernatural monsters and not human people - I haven't met them yet, but the introduction explained this - but honestly, this defense is even weaker here than in the case of Tolkien. I mean, he literally calls them Huns! So it's definitely racist that they're horrible evil ugly dehumanized monster hordes, even if he then describes them as supernatural beings. I will not tackle this issue until I've read that part, however.)

I guess it's my dude William Morris who is uncharacteristically (given the context of his beloved special interest) mistaken. Had to happen sometime. Really, Who Cares? But I'm finding it distracting.

William Morris's The House of the Wolfings and The Roots of the Mountains

Almost done with House of the Wolfings, but I want to make one post after I finish both of them.

Walter Scott's The Monastery and The Abbot

I finished The Monastery last night. Overall, I liked it significantly less than The Antiquary, but I did enjoy it. It is about the Protestant Reformation in Scotland, and... it has its points, but... anyway. I didn't quite realize that The Abbot is basically volume 2, though. So I will read it before making a post.

I just finished the Oresteia of Aeschylus (trans. Sarah Ruden), Electra of Sophocles (trans. Mary Lefkowitz), and Euripides' Iphigenia among the Taurians (trans. Anne Carson) and Electra (trans. Emily Wilson).

These are all about the same saga, though: Agamemnon's murder of his daughter Iphigenia, his wife Clytemnestra's revenge-murder of him, and his son Orestes and daughter Electra's revenge-revenge murder of her. I have a lot to say, but I intend to read Anne Carson's An Oresteia (Carson's translations of Agamemnon by Aiskhylos and Elektra by Sophokles - which I just read translated by those other people - and Orestes by Euripides, which I haven't read yet). I bought The Greek Plays, ed. Lefkowitz & Romm, which contains 16 plays, to get the Wilson translations of Euripides, but when I opened it I got curious and started reading the others and completely forgot that I had bought Carson's An Oresteia the day before.

The next Euripides translations by Anne Carson I read were the four in Grief Lessons:

1. In Herakles, the hero returns home just in time to save his family from execution by the tyrant who has usurped the throne, only to be driven mad (by Hera) and made to murder his wife and children himself.
   
   This play is most notable, as pointed out by Carson, for the ending, in which his loyal friend Theseus arrives as he returns to his right mind and prevents Herakles from killing himself. They leave together to build a new future. But I was also fond of the role of Madness, who protests her awful task only to be told by Iris, "Hera didn't send you here to practice sanity."



2. In Hekabe, set after the Trojan War, the widowed Queen of Troy and mother of Hektor and Paris, now a slave being transported to Greece, is consumed by her grief and despair until the murder of her youngest son reignites her sense of purpose in a desire for vengeance on his murderer.
   
   Hekabe, for me, is fascinating because it's about the murders of two of her children, and while she is prostate with grief even before the first, her reactions to the two are so different. (This is about the aftermath of the Trojan War, so, obviously, discussion of child murder, war, slavery, and rape beneath the cut.)( Read more... )



3. In Hippolytos, the titular son of Theseus is a self-righteous woman-hater whose sex-repulsedness drives him to publicly deride the goddess Aphrodite, who engineers his downfall by making his stepmother Phaidra fall in love with him.
   
   The character interests me greatly because he seems to be a sex-repulsed asexual, dedicating himself to Artemis etc, at first. But ( Read more... )



4. Then there's the strange tragicomic Alkestis, which tells of a husband who arranges for his wife to die in his place.
   
   Mostly tragic, it ends with a surprise twist and superficially (but doubtfully) a happy one: Herakles wins her back from Death and presents her to her husband... but she seems stiff and can't speak (for three days, we're told). Did she come back wrong? Is she really back? Etc. (Tumblr should love that.) Wikipedia tells me tantalizingly that whether Admetus, her husband, is selfish is a hotly-contested subject of critical debate, without any further reference. ( Read more... )

There are short introductory essays by Carson to each of the plays, plus two framing essays: "Tragedy: A Curious Art Form" and "Why I Wrote Two Plays About Phaidra."

I wasn't as taken with these as with Bakkhai, Carson's celebrated translation of The Bacchae, which premiered in 2015 with the enchanting Ben Whishaw as Dionysos (Wax and I both remembered the publicity photos of this production from Tumblr). But having recently read Hippolytus and Alcestis in alternate translations from the U of Chicago volume, I can still say that I liked Carson's more, for the most part.

I continue rereading the mediæval-eclectic quest novels of my guy William Morris, founder of the Arts & Crafts movement, socialist, and arguably the greatest wallpaper designer in history (although Morris didn't really like wallpaper; he considered it a sad necessity because most people could not afford to cover their walls with tapestry, the perfect wallcovering. In Morris's ideal world, every object would be the lovingly decorated creation of an artisan who delighted in making it beautiful. When his friend designed a house for him shortly after his marriage, he invited all his pre-Raphaelite artist friends over and they had painting parties, hand painting the walls and furniture. But I digress).

This is Morris's last novel, published a year after his death. It's one of his most memorable plots, in my view. In the words of the introduction on Standard Ebooks, where you can download a nicely formatted edition:

[T]he novel follows Birdalone, a young girl who is stolen as a baby by a witch who takes her to serve in the woods of Evilshaw. After she encounters a wood fairy [who] helps her escape the witch's clutches, Birdalone embarks on a series of adventures across the titular Wondrous Isles. These isles are used by Morris both as parables for contemporary Britain and as vehicles for investigating his radical socialist beliefs. As Birdalone travels through the isles she slowly evolves into the embodiment of [Morris's progressive version of] the Victorian "[N]ew [W]oman," embracing hard physical labor, healthy exercise, higher education, socialist values, and financial freedom, while rejecting sexual exploitation, physical abuse of both women and children, and the restrictive sexual mores of the era. This makes her unique in the fantasy fiction of the era as one of the genre's first examples of a strong female hero.

( A brief comment on that )

The Water of the Wondrous Isles is a deliberately allegorical story; the heroine's very name, Birdalone, is a term for the last surviving child in a family as well as an expression meaning simply "all alone" (and apparently has never been a name). The characters include two nameless witches as well as three color-coded pairs of knights and maidens: Aurea (golden, fem., Italian), Viridis (green, neut., Latin), and Atra (dark or black, fem., Italian), and their suitors the Golden Knight, the Green Knight, and the Black Squire (so-called, but actually a knight), though the suitors, unlike the ladies, also have ordinary given names. On the other hand, Birdalone meets such ordinary people as Laurence, Gerard, Roger, Jacobus, and Audrey, in presumably less symbolic portions of the story.

Also, I love the weird little departures from what might be considered good storytelling and how they reveal the author's character. Five years are elided in the middle, and not even at the beginning or end of a chapter: in the midst of one it's suddenly like 'and five years went by like that, but then...'. It's also very funny that several scenes and a bunch of details are devoted to making sure we know that Birdalone is learning calligraphy and illumination from a priest, and then when she sets out to earn her fortune she's like 'I have two crafts that I could earn my living in, calligraphy and embroidery!' and then the calligraphy (or indeed, books at all) are never mentioned again. Morris just wanted us to know that he also stans calligraphy because it's very cool and obviously the coolest heroine has to be amazing at it, but he didn't have time to fit it into the plot anymore.

Anyway, here's my detailed summary: ( The Water of the Wondrous Isles (1897) )


Here are a few of my favorite quotes from this book:

• so she arose and thrust her grief back into her heart,

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