Wessex Blogs

Archaeology and the sense of history in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth

admin — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 10:23:17 +0000

ENCOUNTERS WITH RUINS are found in the earliest expressions of English literature, so it is not surprising that J.R.R. Tolkien would also include such scenes in his own fiction. For example, the dragon’s lair in Beowulf is a chambered tomb (Keillor and Piggott 360-61), the Old English elegiac poem The Ruin describes a Roman town (Mitchell 131), and in Tolkien’s own translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the green chapel is a barrow mound (79). In Tolkien’s usage, encounters with ruins-or, to choose a more inclusive term, archaeological places-contribute to the successful evocation of a sense of history in Middle-earth. This achievement of time-depth is one quality lending his secondary world its realism.

Tolkien’s favored medium to accomplish this effect is linguistic, discussed at length by Tom Shippey in The Road to Middle-earth. Bits of old tales and partial recitations “do the job” of time-depth by suggesting there must have been some larger, older body of lore (Shippey 111). Tolkien’s characters use words-folklore and proverbs, song, oral traditions of epic poetry, and written chronicles-to know, remember, and understand their world. Scholarship of words is a recurring motif throughout the fiction. Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam write the Red Book of Westmarch and compose poetry; Gandalf studies Gondor’s archives to discover the history of the Ring; nearly everybody recites. All this makes perfect sense given Tolkien’s lifelong fascination with language, and respecting his claims of the primacy of linguistic invention as the inspiration for the whole Middle-earth legendarium. (2)

But Tolkien also knew that a language is more than a list of words and rules about how to use them. His entire project demonstrates this. For a language to live, there must be stories to tell in it, people to speak the stories, and a reason to pass them on–in short, a living culture (e.g., Letters 231, 375). Furthermore, Tolkien clearly was sensitive to the fact that the life of a people, their beliefs and all the events that go to make up their history, are intimately bound up with place. This is reflected in his biography, in his feeling of a connectedness by descent to the West Midlands (Letters 54; Carpenter 132, 175), and by his youthful desire to restore, through invention, a body of myth that would be for England, tied, in his words, to the “air” and “soil” and “clime” of Britain (Letters 144).

As eloquently expressed by anthropologist Keith Basso,

Fueled by sentiments of inclusion, belonging, and connectedness to
the past, sense of place roots individuals in the social and
cultural soils from which they have sprung together, holding them
there in the grip of a shared identity, a localized version of
selfhood. (85)

In Tolkien’s successfully sub-created secondary world, no less than in the primary world, cultural identity is shaped by a shared experience of community whose sense of history is intertwined with a sense of place. Thus, Tolkien has carefully imprinted his imaginary mythology onto the landscape of Middle-earth, and worked into his narrative expressions of time-depth and a sense of history conveyed not only in words,

Gloucestershire

Portrait of a lady

admin — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 16:52:17 +0000

Clarissa Eden’s father was the younger brother of Winston Churchill. Her mother was the daughter of the seventh Earl of Abingdon. She was born into an upper-class society which still, as in Trollope’s novels, was organised to bring daughters into contact with eligible husbands at summer balls. A beauty, with her mother’s blue eyes, she would have triumphed as a debutante. But she soon got bored with the social rituals of the season; ‘one dance, ‘ she wrote, ‘was very much like another’. Always independent-minded, Clarissa struck out on her own and sought her chosen friends among artists and writers. She attended Ben Nicolson’s parties where a drunken Philip Toynbee sang communist songs. To the astonishment of her friends, in 1952 she married Sir Anthony Eden, foreign secretary in Churchill’s government formed in 1951. This opened what she calls the ’second phase of my life’. Thus her memoirs fall into two distinct parts. Her account of her life before her marriage is based on her correspondence in the days when friends still wrote copious, often daily, letters to each other, a habit finally killed by the mobile phone. The second part contains extracts from the diary she kept after her marriage, skilfully sewn together and put in context by her learned and lively editor.

Going to university in the 1930s was almost inconceivable for a girl of her class, so she embarked instead on a process of selfeducation. Sent to Paris to ‘finish’ at the age of 16, she discovered Braque and attended Paul ValÃ©ry’s lectures at the Sorbonne. She ignored her mother’s warning that she was getting into the wrong set. In London she studied art at the Courtauld and began her interest in philosophy. Dissatisfied with her ‘useless, dilettante academicism’, in October 1938 she settled in Oxford, which, she writes, ‘changed my life’.

At Oxford she continued her philosophical studies as a private pupil of the flamboyant A. J. Ayer. She renewed her friendship with Lord David Cecil, then teaching English literature at Wadham. New friends included the philosopher Isaiah Berlin and the eccentric Lord Berners. Much lower down the social scale she became a friend of mine. We listened to records of Mozart in my rooms at Christ Church and at coffee in the Cadena CafÃ© forced the orchestra to play Beethoven quartets.

In Berners’s novel Far from the Madding Wa r Emeline is based on Clarissa:

Her manner was aloof and dignified. In fact she was not the sort of girl with whom you might be tempted to take liberties without encouragement.

I got no encouragement.

When war broke out she left Oxford and returned to London in order to work in the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Information. Living at first in the Dorchester, she remained in the foyer during bombing raids while others fled to the underground air-raid shelter. After the war she took up journalism for Vogue and, when that did not pay her well enough, she worked for the film director Alexander Korda, becoming an admirer of the notoriously unpunctual Orson Welles. Her friends and acquaintances ranged from the relatively unknown poet and artist David Jones to social grandees like the millionaire hostess Daisy Fellowes. She stayed in Paris with Duff Cooper, the British ambassador to France. She had admired his biography of Talleyrand. Her friends came to be a selection of literary eminences: Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen, Cyril Connolly and George Weidenfeld, the publisher who brought the provincial British into contact with European culture. She gives sharp portraits of them all. Perhaps her closest friend and constant correspondent was the photographer Cecil Beaton who introduced her to her oddest friend, Greta Garbo. She found her boring but still glamorous: the woman who publicly professed that she wished to be left alone turns out to have been a compulsive window-shopper. By 1952 and her marriage to Anthony Eden her process of self-education and her friendships had made her one of the most widely travelled members of the social establishment.

Clarissa’s aunt, Winston’s wife, regarded the marriage as a potential disaster: Clarissa was too independent-minded to make a good wife for a politician. This was to prove a wild misjudgment. She was totally loyal to Eden.

She supported him when her uncle Winston refused ten times to resign to make way for Anthony, his chosen heir, as prime minister.

The ‘old man’ resigned at last in the spring of 1955. Eden wrote in his diary, ‘My wife enormously eased the burden of the campaign’ (of the election of May 1955). Unlike our present prime minister, Eden did not long brood on the statistical chances of victory at the polls. The election turned out to be a personal triumph for him: the conservative majority rose from 17 to 60.

Author: Carr, Raymond

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Electronic Imaging

admin — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 09:12:13 +0000

Service Awards

PSA wishes to thank members who sacrifice their time to help the organization and these awards are usually presented by all divisions on an annual basis. However presenting Service Awards is a first for EID. The following awards were issued at the Annual International Conference in Tucson:

* Recognition Award - Nancy Sams, FPSA, EPSA.

* Special Awards - Laura Davies, FPSA and Ralph Pyke, FPSA, PPSA.

* Commendation Awards - Bill Buchanan, FPSA and Elaine Icklan.

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A plain book about beauty

admin — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 16:17:20 +0000

When people write about their experiences as drug addicts they often — wittingly or not — write with a degree of competitiveness. There is a tacit understanding that the reader will feel cheated by anything less than a full-blown addiction to class-A drugs. A handful of Solpadeine and two bottles of vodka every day for 20 years just isn’t going to cut it with a publisher. James Frey was well aware of this when he embellished A Million Little Pieces to make it more ‘appealing’, and how right he was: we lapped it up.

story behind the story, The

admin — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 23:43:10 +0000

And so we enter the Christmas books season, a phase in the publishing calendar so terrifying, so utterly without hope, that more sensitive bookbuyers may wish to hide in second-hand bookshops, or under their beds, until it’s all over. But amidst the piles of useless non-books in Borders and Waterstones, probably right at the back where they think we won’t find them, there will be a handful of genuinely good titles. They may not be very serious books, you may not necessarily buy them for yourself, but if you were given them for Christmas you would be more than pleasantly surprised. You might even read them all the way to the end.

Laws that constrain free speech bring out the childish bigot in me

admin — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 02:29:15 +0000

It is a long time since I have incited homophobic hatred against anyone; I think I was about nine years old the last time it occurred. My mother had patiently explained to me that homosexuals were like vampire bats, passing on disease and filth through their ghastly and peculiar sexual practices. Her colourful image stayed with me for a year or so and I would level the term ‘poof’ or ‘bumboy’ at anyone who got on my nerves. I don’t know if the people at whom I levelled this abuse were, or would become in later life, homosexuals, so I don’t know if my behaviour would have fallen foul of Jack’s legislation.

Whatever the case, I don’t do it any more.

My children may do, though. Quite recently my oldest son asked me about Auschwitz, because he’d heard of the place from somewhere or other. I told him that it was a concentration camp, where Hitler sanctioned the murder — through the use of gas chambers — of hundreds of thousands of people: Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, communists. He looked suitably shaken at this and then said, ‘That’s awful.

Except for the homosexuals.’ We had to have another little talk. ‘Gay’ is used pejoratively and universally in his school just as its earlier incarnation, ‘poof’, was used in mine. I don’t know where it comes from, this animus. Nor is it exclusive to junior schools in Wiltshire. According to a friend of mine, a school in south London recently attempted to counter incipient homophobia among its students by instituting severe penalties for anyone heard using the word ‘gay’ in a derogatory manner. So the kids stopped screaming ‘gay’ at one another.

Now they shout out ‘Jew’ instead.

I have a lot of respect for the gay rights organisations who have driven the government towards this legislation (and for whom the legislation is presumably intended as a sop of some kind). For example, I cannot, offhand, think of a single British citizen whom I admire more than Peter Tatchell of Outrage for his bravery and his principle. But nonetheless we will soon be in the bizarre position whereby two recent pieces of legislation designed to prevent ‘hate crimes’ taking place actually contradict one another. Under the Religious Hatred legislation, Islam must be afforded our respect as a valid and noble belief system. And yet at the same time, a Muslim who espouses one of its fundamental tenets — that homosexuality is wicked and a sin — might find himself banged up by the old bill for inciting homophobic hatred. And if I were then to say what I believe — that, partly because of its attitude towards gay people, Islam is a vindictive, bigoted and repressive ideology — then I might be banged up, too. This is surely ludicrous.

The excellent Ben Summerskill, chief executive of the gay rights group Stonewall, has said look, don’t worry, this new legislation will not apply if opposition to gay lifestyles or sexual practices are rendered in a polite and mildly expressed form.

Trouble is, I don’t think Ben is wholly au fait with Mohammed’s hadiths on homosexuality. ‘Kill the one who is doing it and the one to whom it is being done’ strikes me as being singularly impolite. Indeed, if you were to construct a sentence designed precisely to fall foul of Jack Straw’s legislation, that would be it. Not that the Christian Bible is much more lenient on the matter. Leviticus xx 13 and the proclamation ‘They shall surely be put to death’ also lacks something in terms of mildness and has the whiff of the impolite about it.

So now we are in a position where simply quoting from the Bible, or one of Islam’s hadiths, is technically against the law.

But then, it has been for some time.

Author: Liddle, Rod

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Survival tactics

admin — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 18:16:05 +0000

Ever since Margaret Thatcher’s great falling-out with Radio Four, the network has been seen by many, and especially by recalcitrant politicians, as a bastion of the liberal Left (or as Jeffrey Archer once so cogently put it, ‘a bunch of leftie communists’). But why? If you take a look at the current schedule, it’s stuffed full of programmes that do very little to challenge conservative orthodoxy. The station formerly known as the Home Service operates on its listeners like a comfort blanket.

The world outside may be very different - a land spied on by CCTV cameras and scattered with spookily vast warehouse complexes - but you can still tune in to Just a Minute (Radio Four, Sundays and Mondays) and feel as if nothing much has changed.

There was a time when the sound of that irritatingly perky Chopin waltz was guaranteed to send me speedily to the off button, but just recently it’s been catching me unawares and I’ve found myself hooked. Those long-winded spiels may have got smuttier with the arrival of Graham Norton as a regular team-member, but the wordplay is sharper, and sillier, than ever. It’s as if the rigidity of the format - one minute without repetition, hesitation or deviation - somehow inspires from Norton, Paul Merton and co. the most fantastical riffs about nothing. It works, too, I’m sure, because it conjures up so perfectly the horror of the party bore, droning on about nothing, or the repeating nightmare in which you dry up completely in the middle of an important conversation.

There’s nothing wrong with holding on to your core programmes as long as this does not lead to a refusal to admit that present realities make change a necessary evil. I guess now that if it were ever suggested that JAM should be pulped there’d be such a public outcry that the Controller’s head would have to roll. No bad thing, except that sometimes Aunty does know best.

Over on Radio Three, deep inside the schedule, was a programme which could have been aired 40 years ago. The Sunday Feature took us on a trip to Geneva to investigate why the Swiss city has produced not just generations of watchmakers but also three great European thinkers - Calvin, Rousseau and Voltaire - all of whom have changed us in some way. Calvin launched his Protestant revolution from the city in 1536, changing the way religious belief was mediated to the people, giving everyone a voice and taking authority away from the clerics.

The historian Ruth Scurr visited a new museum which celebrates the achievements of the 16th-century Reformation. This was not mere tourism but a theological inquiry.

How, Scurr asked the museum’s curator, can we reconcile Calvin’s difficult insistence on the doctrine of predestination with our own demands for tolerance and inclusivity?

What Calvin meant us to understand by it, the museum’s curator told us, is that ‘It’s the only way not to worry any more about your life after death.’ Somehow, after years of struggling with what has always seemed like a Christian inconsistency, her explanation suddenly made sense. Only on radio can such moments of clarity occur - when something that is being said echoes in the mind.

Saturday evenings just aren’t the same without Ned Sherrin as the genial host of Loose Ends. He died this week, aged 76, but had to give up presenting the programme last autumn after losing his voice to throat cancer, perhaps the cruellest illness to inflict on someone whose

trade was conversation of the most brilliant kind. He was famously witty, but also erudite and above all interested in everything from the most abstruse classical poet to the latest lyrics from Amy Winehouse. I can remember when the show was launched in 1985 that I loathed what I thought was its selfsatisfied, metropolitan aesthetic. All those ‘luvvies’ gossiping about each other. But Sherrin won me over as I realised that his lovability was utterly genuine. He is perhaps best known for being the brains behind the groundbreaking TV satire, That Was the Week That Was. But perhaps the greatest tribute to him as an entertainer is that the Loose Ends audience was slightly younger than the Radio Four average.

Author: Chisholm, Kate

Gloucestershire

It isn’t only rabbits who will suffer from the new surge of myxomatosis

admin — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 13:50:11 +0000

Caught in the centre of a soundless field While hot inexplicable hours go by What trap is this? Where were its teeth concealed?

You seem to ask.

‘Myxomatosis’ by Philip Larkin Aldbourne, Wiltshire.

I saw the rabbit, a young doe, 50 yards or so down the path. ‘Look, ‘ I said to the kids, ‘a bunny.’ But even as I said the words, I knew that this would be a problematic encounter. The rabbit just sat there, its usual hair-trigger response to approaching danger apparently nullified.

RAMTIC system still ticking: this company’s innovative approach to process control is now enhanced by its innovative approach to production control in a "new" factory building

admin — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 11:27:05 +0000

This article is going to discuss artifacts, pyramids and a place called Stonehouse. It will even use the word “relic.” But this isn’t about archeology or ancient history. Instead, it is about advanced manufacturing in the 21st Century and one company’s strategic vision for rapidly developing new products while maintaining competitive manufacturing in its home country.

Renishaw, a U.K.-based maker of metrology systems, developed RAMTIC, its unique approach to process control, in the early 1990s. When it first appeared, RAMTIC (Renishaw’s Automated Milling, Turning and Inspection Center) was characterized by two conspicuous developments in tangible machine tool technology. One was the use of portable carrousels for palletized work-pieces and cutting tools. The other was the use of artifacts, or master components, by which a machine tool could check its own dimensional calibration.

Wessex Online

kelly devlin — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 22:08:55 +0000

We have set up a new website called Wessex Online.

Wessex online offers a full range of facilities to build a great on line commuity for the south west of England including,

Events,

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Why not join today

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