The Long Defeat (2) by Sorina Higgins

https://theoddestinkling.wordpress.com/2016/03/24/the-long-defeat/ (@Oddest_Inkling)

 (2) Man in the Moon himself came down…

An enormous guffaw exploded from all four mouths, puffing away the smoke and rattling the walls. Four heads were thrown back, hands slapping the table or someone else’s back in merriment, faces red with laughter, feet pounding the floor in delight. The slender dancer leaped up and cut a caper in the middle of the room. Then the tall, thin fellow did him one better by clambering upon the table and declaiming with gusto:

“Hiġe sceal þē heardra, heorte þē cēnre,

mōd sceal þē māre þē ūre mæġen lȳtlað.”

After only two words, the big fellow joined in, adding his booming voice to the other’s rather garbled articulation, and the ancient sounds rolled across the pub:

“Hēr līð ūre ealdor eall forhēawen

gōd on grēote. Ā mæġ gnornian

         se ðe nū fram þisum wīġplegan wendan þenċeð.”

As the chanting went on, the other two joined, a line or so behind, adding modern English antiphonally to the din:

“Thought shall be the harder, heart the keener,

courage the greater, as our might lessens.

Here lies our leader all hewn down,

the valiant man in the dust; may he lament for ever

who thinks now to turn from this war-play.”

The gentleman on the table tripped on an empty pint pot—there had been only a couple of beers shared among them that evening, what with the rations and the shortages—and the others reached up to steady him, roaring with laughter as they offered their hands to help him down from the table.

“No, no!” he protested. “I have a song to sing first!”

They struggled with him for a moment, trying to get him off of the table-top, but he resisted, shook himself free of their hands, and announced:

“The Man in The Moon Came Down Too Soon.”

“The old man had better not send you off to war, Tollers,” the beefy chap bellowed. “You’d only sing songs at the Germans to frighten them away.”

“And then begin analyzing the history of their language,” the lithe little fellow put in. “Didn’t you spent the whole of the first war talking about verbs with a German prisoner?”

“I fought in the battle of the Somme!” the table-top singer protested, but the little man went on:

“And Jack would retell their own myths to them until they all fell asleep with boredom and we could walk right into Berlin over their snoring forms.”

C. S. “Jack” Lewis howled at this, banging the table with his fist. The table shook, and Professor John Ronald Reuel Tolkien wobbled among the dishes. He put out a hand to steady himself, and it landed on the head of the stoop-shouldered man on his right, who grasped it and burst into a fluid stream of quotation:

“A pack of blessings light upon my head,

Happiness courts me in her best array,

But, like a misbehaved and sullen wench,

I pout upon my fortune and thy love.”

Tolkien and Lewis, tears of merriment running down their faces, shouted together:

“Take heed, take heed, for such die miserable!”

And Lewis went on:

“Art thou a man? Thy form cries out thou art. Thy tears are womanish. —But you are a true man, Williams, and regular charmer to the ladies. Maybe the top brass should send you to Germany to seduce all of Jerry’s women. You could do what you liked with them as either a cad or a Don Juan, undermining national morale and making way for an Allied invasion—if you were not a thoroughly good man.”

Tolkien harrumphed, as it he wasn’t quite sure about the “good man” part, but he kept his hand on Charles Williams’s head to steady his precarious balance upon the table. Williams beamed up at him, a beatific smile that glowed upon the little fellowship, transforming his face from simian wizardry to angelic beauty. Dapper little Owen Barfield looked on, tapping his heels in an impatient rhythm on the floor, and said:

“But we need Charles here more than over there. Not for the women, but for the sanity and consciousness of England herself. Your doctrines of love and forgiveness keep madness at bay here in this city of wisdom in our trying times.”

The others nodded soberly.

“I have never heard anything like your lecture on Milton,” Lewis agreed. “It is the first, and probably the last, time that I have ever seen a university doing what it was meant to do: teaching wisdom.”

Williams stood gracefully, catching Tolkien’s hand to steady the professor, who still stood on the tabletop, waiting to sing his song. Williams bowed ceremoniously, one hand on his heart, then kissed his hand to each of them, gracious as an emperor.

“Wisdom shall soon cease in this city and all such ordered civilizations of our times,” he said, “if we are all sent off to wield our useless weapons in aged hands, to die beside our sons and brothers, and for all our learning to be buried with our bones in France.”

A blue haze settled over the friends for a moment—then Tolkien burst out, waving the smoke away from his face with a slender hand:

“Enough of this serious chatter! I have a song to sing!”

He began warbling:

“There is an inn, a merry old inn

beneath an old grey hill,

And there they brew a beer so brown

That the Man in the Moon himself came down

one night to drink his fill.”

There was much more of this song, and much more of their talk, in a tiny pocket of laughter on that Oxford evening before Hitler landed.

(to be continued)

The Long Defeat (1) by SorinaHiggins

https://theoddestinkling.wordpress.com/2016/03/24/the-long-defeat/ (@Oddest_Inkling)

The 'Bird and Baby'

It was the spring of 1945, and Hitler was about to plant his boots on English soil. The United States had refused to come into the war, in spite of the unprovoked attack on military personnel and civilians alike at Pearl Harbor. The testing of nuclear weapons at Los Alamos had gone horribly wrong, wiping out the local population and affecting millions of people in the subsequent fallout. Hitler had made plans to invade Russia early in the war, but had changed his mind and strengthened his alliance with Stalin. With the Soviet Union, Japan, and Italy as strong Axis supporters, Germany marched on across Europe: east, west, and north. The morale of the Royal Air Force was broken, its once cocky young pilots dead, imprisoned, wounded, or traumatized, and the Luftwaffe ruled the skies. The English Channel, swept clean of English mines and sealed off by Germans at either end of the Strait of Dover, was open and waiting for the German navy’s easy crossing, further protected by heavy artillery along the coast of occupied France. The Royal Navy, distracted by meaningless skirmishes in the North Sea and the Mediterranean, was scattered and destroyed piecemeal. London was on her knees, bombed into submission, beaten and dying. Churchill, defeated and desolate, committed suicide, and the nation collapsed into impotent mourning.

Oxford had survived the Blitz; the rumor was growing that Hitler coveted it for his British headquarters, and many residents were bracing themselves to accept the possibility that he would set up his center of operations in the ancient university city after the inevitable end of the war. There, in the golden bubble of Oxford, the towers and spires dreamed on, and children were still sent there for safety from the relentless bombing of London and the south coast. But the corridors of the great colleges were nearly empty of echoing footfalls: most of the faculty and nearly all of the students had been massacred in the killing fields of France. As the war dragged on and the Allies lost one battle after another, as Germany was victorious at Monte Cassino, at the Battle of the Bulge, as D-Day failed and the Nazis overran Normandy, a desperate Britain had begun calling up older and older men, younger and younger boys, and finally women.

Oxford fought to keep her irreplaceable Dons, those human receptacles of wisdom and culture. If England’s greatest minds were blown apart on the battlefield, who would rebuild civilization when the warmongers were done destroying? If England won the war but lost her wisest men, how would victory be any different than defeat? And now that defeat was inevitable, the men of letters were more valuable than ever before: they were the last hope of the human spirit, the tiny enclave of all that was good in human history, and they were the only ones who could rebuild all that had been lost. Who would educate that generation of lost, fatherless children, refugees in this quiet golden city? Who would teach them to keep the old ways, when the tyrant had them under his sway? So argued the University’s Chancellor, more and more feebly, as his faculty were killed off one by one, and he heard the tramping boots of England’s enemies drawing near.

Huddled in the back room of a smoke-darkened pub, four men shared one cigarette among them, passing it from hand to hand. The smoky haze hovered over their heads and wrapped around their dark coats, hiding them from a hostile world. The Chancellor’s special authority hovered over them, too, keeping them safe in the ivory tower while their friends, brothers, sons, colleagues, and students fought on the south coast and in the skies above England. One was unfit, anyway, with a nervous disorder that made his hands shake so badly he could not shave himself, but had to go to a barber every morning. The others were beyond the usual age of fighting men: one, a hearty, loud, beefy man of forty-six; the other two tall, slender, ages forty-six and fifty-three, the younger with the delicate build of a dancer—but men a decade older than they were dying in the air and on the beaches and in the streets of London even now.

Were they cowed and quiet, this quartet of veterans from the first war, these men held back in their books while the world fell apart around them? Did they creep and crawl with embarrassment that they were not fighting again while their loved ones were? Did they shudder and shake with fear of the coming invasion?

(to be continued)

Pure White Magic

By April (1962) Jack had recovered sufficiently to be able to return to Cambridge. I drove him there one Monday, and for fun we stopped on the outskirts of the Duke of Bedford's great Woburn estate and entered the woods by a small gate. Almost nervously law-abiding, he was rather unwilling to do this because it was marked "Private," but I assured him that trespassing was no crime in English law, that the trespasser must simply leave when asked to and could only be sued for any damage done. We walked with some hesitation along a narrow path through a wood and suddenly found ourselves in a glade surrounded by a number of miniature deer. Jack was entranced. "You know, while I was writing the Narnia books, I never imagined anything as lovely as this," he said. We sat on a fallen tree trunk, and Jack gazed radiantly at the elegant little animals and adored the God who had created them. "Pure white magic," he said when we had returned to the car.

On another occasion, I drove him back from Cambridge, again via Woburn. We went in through the same private gate, but there were no deer this time. "Well," said Jack, "as I found once before, you can't expect the same miracle twice."

From Jack: A Life of C.S. Lewis, by George Sayer (1988)

Narnian Suite (2)

Shortly after the last apple had been eaten, Susan went out to the well to get another drink. When she came back she was carrying something in her hand."Look," she said in a rather choking kind of voice. "I found it by the well." She handed it to Peter and sat down. The others thought she looked and sounded as if she might be going to cry. Edmund and Lucy eagerly bent forward to see what was in Peter's hand -- a little, bright thing that gleamed in the firelight.

"Well, I'm--I'm jiggered," said Peter, and his voice also sounded queer. Then he handed it to the others. All now saw what it was -- a little chess-knight, ordinary in size but extraordinarily heavy because it was made of pure gold; and the eyes in the horse's head were two tiny rubies--or rather one was, for the other had been knocked out.

"Why!" said Lucy, "it's exactly like one of the golden chessmen we used to play with when we were Kings and Queens at Cair Paravel.""Cheer up, Su," said Peter to his other sister."I can't help it, said Susan. "It brought back--oh, such lovely times. And I remembered playing chess with fauns and good giants, and the mer-people singing in the sea, and my beautiful horse -- and -- and --"

C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian (1951)

March for Drum, Trumpet, and Twenty-one Giants

With stumping stride in pomp and pride
We come to thump and floor ye;
We’ll bump your lumpish heads to-day
And tramp your ramparts into clay,
And as we stamp and romp and play
Our trump’ll blow before us –
(crescendo) Oh Tramp it, tramp it, tramp it, trumpet, trumpet blow before us!

We’ll grind and break and bind and take
And plunder ye and pound ye!
With trundled rocks and bludgeon blow,
You dunderheads, we’ll dint ye so
You’ll blunder and run blind, as though
By thunder stunned, around us –
By thunder, thunder, thunder, thunder stunned around us!

Ho! Tremble town and tumble down
And crumble shield and sabre!
Your kings will mumble and look pale,
Your horses stumble or turn tail,
Your skimble-scamble counsels fail,
So rumble drum belaboured –
(Diminuendo) Oh rumble, rumble, rumble, rumble, rumble drum belaboured!

C.S. Lewis (Poems)

Narnian Suite (1)

March for Strings, Kettledrums, and Sixty-three Dwarfs

With plucking pizzicato and the prattle of the kettledrum
We’re trotting into battle mid a clatter of accoutrement;
Our beards are big as periwigs and trickle with opopanax,
And trinketry and treasure twinkle out on every part of us –
          (Scrape! Tap! The fiddle and the kettledrum).

The chuckle-headed humans think we’re only petty puppetry
And all our battle-tackle nothing more than pretty bric-a–brac;
But a little shrub has prickles, and they’ll soon be in a pickle if
A scud of dwarfish archery has crippled all their cavalry –
          (Whizz! Twang! The quarrel and the javelin).

And when the tussle thickens we can writhe and wriggle under it;
Then dagger-point’ll tickle ‘em, and grab and grip’ll grapple ‘em,
And trap and trick’ll trouble ‘em and tackle ‘em and topple ‘em
Till they’re huddled, all be-diddled, in the middle of our caperings –
          (Dodge! Jump! The wriggle and the summersault).

When we’ve scattered ‘em and peppered ‘em with pebbles from our catapults
We’ll turn again in triumph and by crannies and by crevices
Go back to where the capitol and cradle of our people is,
Our forges and our furnaces, the caverns of the earth –
          (Gold! Fire! The anvil and the smithying).

C.S. Lewis 
Poems (Bles, 1964)

This may be sung to the Major-General's song from HMS Pinafore by WS Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan!

Narnian Creation

At first they hear a mighty voice - the Word - that is raised in song, an immortal song that creates the first swirling movement over the face of the primal waters. The single voice of God, or the Creative Word, is then joined by the harmonious singing of innumerable voices, as all the stars of heaven blaze forth. They then see the land of Narnia slowly begin to form in the starlight, as a light fresh wind begins to stir, the movement of the life-giving Holy Spirit. 

Then the first dawn of the newly created world appears, as its Sun rises above the horizon to reveal the contours of the hills and valleys. It is then they see the great Lion, later to be known as Aslan, in the leonine form which is to be the image of God that is revealed to the people and creatures of Narnia. Following upon these primal acts the song of creation continues, accompanied by the angelic starry voices, and grass and trees appear, and all manner of vegetable life, followed by the different species of animals. And then, in response to a final burst of creative fire from the mind and voice of the Lion, the creatures of the inner side of nature appear - the gods and goddesses of the woods, the elemental and faery creatures, fauns, satyrs, dwarfs, and animals that have the gift of speech.

There is thus a place in Lewis's Christian vision not only for the angels of the stars but also for the nature spirits of the pagan world. In this he demonstrates a neo-Platonic breadth of vision, the loss of which is perhaps one of the major handicaps of the modern Church. A narrowness of vision even more deadly is demonstrated, each in their way, by Uncle Andrew and Queen Jadis. Jadis, who is in large part responsible for the destruction of her own world, finds herself in considerable discomfort in the presence of the Creative Word. Her first reaction is to flee from Aslan, and then to attack him, in desperation. It is her throwing an iron bar at him, snapped from a London lamp-post, that causes the lone lamp-post to grow in the wastes of outer Narnia. 

The creative ambience around Aslan, and the Tree of Life, is such that the fragment of iron acts like a seed or cutting of the original from whence it came. By a wondrous predestination, which has all the hallmarks of a higher magic, it forms an ever burning light, that subsequently guides Lucy and the children when their redemptive intervention is later required against the powers of Jadis in a later Narnian epoch.

Gareth Knight

The Magical World of the Inklings

Element Books (1990)

Narnia and Narni...

You may be surprised to know that C. S. Lewis took the name of 'Narnia' from an ancient Roman town in the Italian province of Umbria. An incident in the Punic Wars took place there. 

The Italian city on the site today is called 'Narni'. Narni now has a web page at http://www.bellaumbria.net/Narni/ 

In December 1996, WALTER HOOPER wrote; 

"It will perhaps surprise you to hear that I spent a day (in Narni/Narnia) in October (1996). In fact, this was my second trip, as my godson and I were there first five years ago. C. S. Lewis came across the name 'Narnia' in a classical atlas he used as a boy, and continued to use it all his life. I have it now, and it's interesting to see that he underscored the name when he first saw it back in about 1914. In Italian Narnia is called 'Narni', and it's under that name that you will find it on modern maps. 

It was already a very ancient town when the Romans conquered it in about 299 BC. In a little history of the place, it is stated that 'Although Neolithic people lived in this region, the first historical document, mentioning the town, is dated 600 BC, when Nequinum and its inhabitants are mentioned. In 299 BC, Narni was a Roman colony under the name of Narnia, a name that comes from the Nar river, which today is called the Nera.' 

For me one of the most surprising things about Narnia is that a very popular local saint is called 'Blessed Lucy of Narnia.' She was a Dominican nun of the 16th century, but whether Lewis had ever heard of her I don't know. My godson, to whom the Lewis COMPANION is dedicated, and I first went there in October 1991. We knew about Blessed Lucy of Narnia, but we didn't know whether she was still remembered by the inhabitants of Narnia. To our delight, she is buried in a beautiful chapel attached to the 12th century cathedral of Narnia, and is very popular in that area… 

But - oh! - what a beautiful place Narnia is. It's only about 50 miles north-east of Rome, and very easy to get to by train, or car. So far it remains unvisited by tourists, and so I've never encountered crowds there on my two visits." 

Aslan... in 1931?

Is this the first appearance of Aslan in literature?  Written by Charles Williams and first published in 1931 here we meet a tremendous lion.  My question… was C.S. Lewis influenced by this passage in his invention of Aslan two decades later?  At the time it was written, Jack and Charles had not met, nor did they know each others work.  I’d be very interested in any comments from Lewis/Williams scholars and readers.

“Forms and shadows twisted and mingled for two or three seconds in the middle of the garden, a tearing human cry began and ceased as if choked into silence, a snarl broke out and died swiftly into similar stillness, and as if in answer to both sounds there came the roar of a lion - not very loud, but as if subdued by distance rather than by mildness.

With that roar the shadows settled, the garden became clear.  Anthony and Quentin saw before them the form of a man lying on the ground, and standing over him the shape of a full-grown and tremendous lion, its head flung back, its mouth open, its body quivering.  It ceased to roar, and gathered itself back into itself.

It was a lion such as the young men had never seen in any zoo or menagerie; it was gigantic and seemed to their dazed senses to be growing larger every moment.  Of their presence it appeared unconscious; awful and solitary it stood, and did not at first so much as turn its head.  Then, majestically, it moved; it took up the slow forward pacing in the direction which the man had been following; it passed onward, and while they still stared it entered into the dark shadow of the trees and was hidden from sight.”

Charles Williams

The Place of the Lion

(Victor Gollancz, 1931)

On Dragon Island

Laying anchor off the shore of the island, most of the ship's company went to the island to restore provisions, repair the broken water casks, and find a tree to fell and replace the Dawn Treader's broken mast.

Not wanting to work, Eustace ran off to find a shady spot. Wandering off into the mist, Eustace became lost and found his way into a valley where dwelled a dragon. The dragon had only just come out of its cave when it lay down and died. Eustace went into the cave and found its treasure horde -- donning a rather lovely golden bracelet he found -- and lay down to sleep. When he woke up, he found himself in the form of the dragon. In a panic, he tore his way out of the valley and came down to the beach. The crew was about to slay him when he was challenged by Caspian and Reepicheep, who quickly deduced who he really was.

Working with the crew for a while, Eustace became disheartened in that he might have to remain on the island since he won't fit on the Dawn Treader. However, Aslan appeared to heal him and restore him to human form so that he could remove the bracelet, which Caspian recognized as belonging to the Lord Octesian. At the end, when the ship was ready to set sail, they decided that the dragon had either killed Octesian, or was itself the lord transformed.

"A powerful dragon crying its eyes out under the moon in a deserted valley is a sight and a sound hardly to be imagined."

C. S. Lewis ~ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

---oOo---

This is what another writer made of the Story...

Eustace has little respect for others and lacks a sense of fairness: he tries to take more than his rightful share of water rations and lies about it, and later he slips away from his companions to avoid doing his part of the work. is behavior is beastly, and he turns literally into a monster, cut off from other human beings: he becomes a dragon – a creature straight out of the imaginative stories he had resisted. Only then can he begin to get outside himself, imagine how others see him, and “wonder if he himself had been such a nice person as he had always supposed”. After being un-dragoned by Aslan, he is able to escape the limited, materialistic, rationalistic world in which he had grown up, aided perhaps by Reepicheep’s stories about “emperors, kings, dukes, knights, poets, [and] lovers” who had fallen into distressing circumstances and recovered. Moral imagination comes to play an important role in Eustace’s life, and as readers respond to Eustace first with antipathy and then sympathy, they too can experience moral imagination at work in their own lives.

(Source unknown)

A floating paradise, with a dragon.

Over his head there hung from a hairy tube-like branch a great spherical object, almost transparent, and shining. It held an area of reflected light in it and at one place a suggestion of rainbow coloring. So this was the explanation of the glass-like appearance in the wood. And looking round he perceived innumerable shimmering globes of the same kind in every direction. He began to examine the nearest one attentively. At first he thought it was moving, then he thought it was not. Moved by a natural impulse he put out his hand to touch it. Immediately his head, face, and shoulders were drenched with what seemed (in that warm world) an ice-cold shower bath, and his nostrils filled with a sharp, shrill, exquisite scent that somehow brought to his mind the verse in Pope, "die of a rose in aromatic pain." Such was the refreshment that he seemed to himself to have been, till now, but half awake. When he opened his eyes -- which had closed involuntarily at the shock of moisture -- all the colours about him seemed richer and the dimness of that world seemed clarified. A re-enchantment fell upon him. The golden beast at his side seemed no longer either a danger or a nuisance. If a naked man and a wise dragon were indeed the sole inhabitants of this floating paradise, then this also was fitting, for at that moment he had a sensation not of following an adventure but of enacting a myth. To be the figure that he was in this unearthly pattern appeared sufficient.

C.S. Lewis, Perelandra, Chapter 4 (1944)

Seed of Dragons...

I
n 1939, Tolkien gave a talk at Oxford on 'Fairy-Stories', later published in Essays presented to Charles Williams. In this he quoted a poem he had written for Lewis (cf. Carpenter, Inklings, 63):

Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Light

through whom is splintered from a single White

to many hues, and endlessly combined

in living shapes that move from mind to mind.

Though all the crannies of the world we filled

with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build

Gods and their houses out of dark and light,

and sowed the seed of dragons -- 'twas our right

(used or misused), that right has not decayed:

we make still by the law in which we're made.

Thus Tolkien saw our (inklings) creativity as something like craft: a pleasant matter of professional obligation as a human being.

Coins; his dragon's loins

The king has set up his mint by Thames.
He has struck coins; his dragon's loins
germinate a crowded creaturely brood
to scuttle and scurry between towns and towns,
to furnish dishes and flagons with change of food;
small crowns, small dragons, hurry to the markets
under the king's smile, or flat in houses squat.
The long file of their snout crosses the empire,
and the other themes acknowledge our king's head.
They carry on their backs little packs of value,
caravans; but I dreamed the head of a dead king
was carried on all, that they teemed on house-roofs
where men stared and studied them as I your thumbs' epigrams,
hearing the City say Feed my lambs
to you and the king; the king can tame dragons to carriers,
but I came through the night, and saw the dragonlets' eyes
leer and peer, and the house-roofs under their weight
creak and break; shadows of great forms
halloed them on, and followed over falling towns.
I saw that this was the true end of our making;
mother of children, redeem the new law.

Taliessin's look darkened; his hand shook
while he touched the dragons; he said 'We had a good thought.
Sir, if you made verse you would doubt symbols.
I am afraid of the little loosed dragons.
When the means are autonomous, they are deadly; when words
escape from verse they hurry to rape souls;
when sensation slips from intellect, expect the tyrant;
the brood of carriers levels the good they carry.
We have taught our images to be free; are we glad?
are we glad to have brought convenient heresy to Logres?

Charles Williams ~ ‘Bors to Elayne: on the King’s Coins’
Arthurian Poets (The Boydell Press) 1991 (extract)
---oOo---

Lewis on Taliessin

Dec. 15th 1945
“... I am (these last 6 months) immersed in a v. different poet who I think great – Charles Williams: the two volumes of his Arthurian poems Taliessin and The Region of the Summer Stars. Inexcusably difficult, as I always told him, but here there really is something behind the difficulty – that something wh. we all need most in literature at present & wh. I wd. call opaque splendour – thick, rich, solid, heavy – porphyry, gold diamond.”

CS Lewis ~ Collected Letters

Tolkien and Beowulf

The Dragon in Beowulf… signifies the feond mancynnes (the enemy of mankind) and of God, so that the battle between Beowulf and the monsters on a higher level means that ‘the real battle is between the soul and its adversaries’ (p. 73). The figure of the monster externalises the evil within each soul. Hence it is the hero Beowulf and not the poem upon whom Tolkien focuses in the article’s title. More anagogically, such a battle with a feond also signifies the conflict between man and his ultimate enemy, Death. Tolkien imagines the Beowulf poet surveying past heroes so that he ‘sees that all glory (or as we might say “culture” or “civilization”) end in night’ (p. 73). 

In this world, as Germanic heroic values have it, ‘man, each man and all men, and all their works shall die’ (p.73). So the Beowulf poet represents for Tolkien the hero of the title, an idea conveyed by the article’s last line and final metaphor. Tolkien expresses his confidence in the permanence of Beowulf, given its similar language, geographical setting, and nationality of author – ‘it must ever call with a profound appeal’ – only, however, ‘until the dragon comes’ (p. 88). Even art will eventually perish before the final adversary of all creation, the antithesis of its Author – total annihilation. The Dragon thus concretely realises those allegorical personifications whom Milton portrayed as the offspring of Satan’s mind in Paradise Lost – Sin and Death. It recurs, in varying form, throughout Tolkien’s works.

Tolkien’s Art 'A Mythology for England' ~ Jane Chance Nitzsche (Page 5)
(Introduction)

Glaurung -- The Father of Dragons

Glaurung was a very powerful dragon, if not the most magical. The largest of dragons, discounting the later flying dragons. Most cunning and full of guile, at times he used these abilities to achieve his desired ends without resorting to direct physical violence, at which he was more than proficient. Like Sauron, another of his contemporaries, it was his nature to trick and deceive, and to spread lies and deceptions so cleverly that they could not be discovered until it was too late. In this manner, he accomplished damage that he could not have with brute force.

It is told that Glaurung sired the rest of his race, or at least the brood of Úruloki, wingless fire-breathing drakes. He was bred by Morgoth from some unknown stock and was the first dragon to appear outside of Angband. This first appearance occurred during the Siege of Angband in 260 First Age, when he came forth alone to attack, but because he was still young and his scales were not yet proof against arrows, he was driven back to Angband by Elven Horse-archers of Fingon. After this premature adventure, Morgoth kept Glaurung on a short leash until all the forces of Angband were ready.

In 455 First Age, all was prepared and Morgoth unleashed Glaurung, now grown to his full might. The Dragon spearheaded the attack of fire that defeated the Noldorin Elves and their allies and broke the Siege of Angband in the Battle of Sudden Flame, the Dagor Bragollach. In 472 during the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, Glaurung leads the final reserve and the beasts of Angband in an attack that prevents the joining of the two Elven-hosts and breaks and routs the Host of the sons of Fëanor causing the total defeat of the Union of Maedhros. During this battle Glaurung was stabbed in his vulnerable belly by the Dwarf-king Azaghâl and fled back to Angband.

In 495, having recovered from his wound and restored his fires Glaurung is given his first independent command and leads an Orc-host to victory in the Battle of Tumhalad against the Noldor of Nargothrond led by Túrin Turambar. He follows up his triumph by sacking Nargothrond, enslaving or slaying its people. He also fulfils Morgoth's special purpose to afflict the children of Húrin, deceiving by enchantment both Húrin's son, Túrin, and daughter, Nienor, causing their tragic ends. After the sack of Nargothrond, he made a bed of the treasure of the city and ruled Nargothrond as a Dragon-king.

In 498 Túrin led the Men of the forest of Brethil and defeated a force of Orcs sent against them by Glaurung. Glaurung then roused himself and next year came against Túrin and Brethil with fire. In the attempt to cross the ravine of Cabed-en-Aras of the river Taeglin, Glaurung was stabbed from beneath by Túrin wielding the black, magic, and sentient sword Gurthang. Glaurung died soon after, but not before he had managed to drive Nienor to suicide with his last words, lifting the spell of forgetfulness he had cast upon her about her kinship with Turambar.

Wikipedia (!)

The Dragon Speaks (Smaug?)

Once the worm-laid egg shattered in the wood.
I came forth shining into the trembling wood;
The sun was on my scales, dew upon, the grasses.
The cold, sweet grasses and the sticky leaves,
I loved my speckled mate. We played at druery
And sucked warm milk dropping from the ewes' teals.

Now I keep watch on the gold in my rock cave
In a country of stones; old, deplorable dragon,
Watching my hoard. In winter night the gold
Freezes through tough scales my cold belly;
Jagged crowns, cruelly twisted rings,
Icy and knobb'd, are the old dragon's bed.

Often I wish I had not eaten my wife
(Though worm grows not to dragon till he eats worm).
She could have helped me, watch and watch about,
Guarding the gold; the gold would have been safer.
I could uncoil my tired body and take
Sometimes a little sleep when she was watching.

Last night under the moonset a fox barked,
Startled me; then I knew I had been sleeping.
Often an owl flying over the country of stones
Startles me; then I think that I must have slept,
Only a moment. That very moment a Man
Might have come from the towns to steal my gold.

They make plots in the towns to take my gold,
They whisper of me in the houses, making plans,
Merciless men. Have they not ale upon the benches,
Warm wives in bed, and song, and sleep the whole night?
I leave my cave once only in the winter
To drink at the rock pool; in summer twice.

They have no pity for the old, lugubrious dragon.
Lord that made the dragon, grant me thy peace,
But say not that I should give up the gold,
Nor move, nor die. Others would have the gold.
Kill rather, Lord, the Men and the other dragons;
Then I can sleep; go when I will to drink.

C.S. Lewis ‘Poems’
Geoffrey Bles (1964)

The Jabberwock

"… the critic metamorphoses into the monster of the jabberwock, an unnatural creature that symbolises… perversion… This creature creates cacophony through a ‘conflicting babel’ of opinion: “For it is of their nature that the jabberwocks of historical and antiquarian research burble in the tulgy wood of conjecture, flitting from one tum-tum tree to another” (p. 56). 

They no longer constitute a physical danger to others because of the myopia, which resembles that of the ‘friends’ and ‘descendants’: “Noble animals, whose burbling is on occasion good to hear; but through their eyes of flame may sometimes prove searchlights, their range is short” (p 56). 

Such shortsightedness hints at a greater spiritual danger to themselves as well as to others, for the ‘conflicting babel’ of their opinions reminds us of the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel, as the epitome of the sin of pride (of course… the critics destroyed the tower of the artist in their pride). Pride and selfishness, myopia, a ‘conflicting babel’ of opinion, destructiveness, chaos, all characterise the critic – truly a monster."

Tolkien’s Art 'A Mythology for England' ~ Jane Chance Nitzsche (Page 12)
Discussing and quoting from ‘The Critic as Monster: Tolkien’s Lectures [1936]

The Lay of the Children of Húrin (excerpt)

With winding horns - winter hunted
in the weeping woods, - wild and ruthless;
sleet came slashing - and slanting hail
from glowering heaven - grey and sunless,
whistling whiplash - whirled by tempest.
The floods were freed, - and fallow waters
sweeping seaward, - swollen, angry,
filled with flotsam, - foaming, turbid,
passed in tumult. - The tempest died.

(JRRT)