Author Archives: David Haden

The cost of roaming the fields

by David Haden

From a blog post I noted while searching, “A reviewer’s complaint”…

Thomas Honegger [in 2015, complained of Tolkien] scholars unaware of major and basic work in the areas they are covering. “How are we going to advance Tolkien studies if scholars in the field are ignorant of each others research?”

Well, I know how and why this happened. It’s the explosion in the size of our field.

I’d also suggest it’s the cost, and sometimes the difficulty, of obtaining the needed items. To obtain the “little opinion piece by Thomas Honegger”, for instance, I’d need to spend £20 plus postage for a print copy of a little-known German scholarly journal. Since I don’t need anything else that’s in the journal issue, and a quarter of the essays are in German anyway, £20 is not an enticing price.

Let’s say that one wishes to make a basic start in Tolkien scholarship. That’s a little less daunting than starting on someone comparable like H.P. Lovecraft, since Tolkien scholarship is not so saddled with rare book collectors (Tolkien collectors are only interested in what Tolkien wrote, not what’s been written about him). Even so, a basic small shelf for Tolkien is probably around £500. That’s less than the perhaps-£800 you’d need to make a start on Lovecraft and do proper fannish scholarship (not the risible slander which Lovecraft usually gets from fly-by university professors). But with Tolkien, the somewhat lower per-item costs are then balanced out by the larger range of items you’d need to see a clear outline of the field. There are also higher ongoing costs to keep up with the ongoing wash of Tolkien scholarship, compared to the relatively small trickle of annual Lovecraft scholarship (the valiant efforts of S.T. Joshi and co. aside) that’s worth reading. There is admittedly a very good survey in each annual issue of Tolkien Studies, but just acquiring the last four issues of Tolkien Studies would cost me $280.

Such startup costs would be no problem for an academic on a whopping £38,000+ a year, or even for an £18k funded PhD who has miraculously found a friendly librarian with ample funds for inter-library loans and book purchases. But even an initial £500 outlay would be daunting for most impoverished independent scholars. Especially as that initial £500 would soon need to be matched by another £500 for runs of paper journals, books and obscure out-of-print items. Even if one was very frugal, and also knew how and where to hunt items online, and how best to wrangle with Google Books etc, one could still end up having to spend at least £300 on ‘needed item’ print books. All in order to write a new book that may only sell 30 copies and get one review.

The other problem, in terms of Honegger’s complaint, may be the cost of getting a detailed pre-publication reader’s report from someone at the top of the field. Thus enabling one to sidestep the sort of small snags that so antagonise reviewers in the field. Perhaps Tolkien studies now needs some kind of subsidised pre-publication peer review system, for substantial new books from outside the academy. Or one might publish the PDF online for free for 18 months, with a public “call for comments” and commenting system, then publish a revised and corrected final-version in print two years later.

Mary Flynn in Stoke

by David Haden

“Farewell to Faha’s Friend”, the orthopaedic nurse Mary Flynn…

“Last week the small community of Faha outside Kilmacthomas [County Waterford, Ireland] mourned the death of one of its oldest and longest residents.

[When young] Mary and [her sister] Philomena found it difficult to get [nursing] work experience at home [in Co. Waterford, deep in rural Ireland]. Undeterred, they decided to travel to England to seek work, heading for Stoke-on-Trent where their aunt worked as a radiographer and a ward sister in City General Hospital. Mary had embarked on the daunting journey firstly, followed shortly afterwards by Philomena.

With little money and no modern telecommunications, they travelled to Dún Laoghaire to catch a ferry to Holyhead [in north Wales], a train to Crewe, and another train to Stoke-on-Trent. Travelling outside Waterford for the first time, Mary and Philomena faced many challenges but recounted their time in England with fond memories. Mary spoke of nursing the late English soccer international Sir Stanley Matthews, widely regarded as one of the greatest ever players of the game in Britain.”

A wander in the Morlock Mountains

by David Haden

I’ve been reading the new essay by H.L. Spencer, “The mystical philology of J. R. R. Tolkien and Sir Israel Gollancz: monsters and critics”. One of the things I was pleased to learn was that Tolkien seems to have known Wells’s The Time Machine, on the genesis of which I’ve recently written a book. The evidence for Tolkien having read The Time Machine is that he wrote a poem, circa 1927, which satirised the fearsomeness of “exalted” academics by describing them in proto-Gollum terms. In both person and topography, since they live underground and beyond the “Morlock Mountains”. The reference being, of course, to the Morlocks — the devolved subterraneans in Wells’s The Time Machine.

This poem was titled “Knocking at the Door” and subtitled: “Lines Induced by Sensation When Waiting for an Answer at the Door of an Exalted Academic Person”. It was published 18th February 1937 in The Oxford Magazine (page 403, as ‘Oxymore’). Sadly it seems The Oxford Magazine is not online, and the original version of the poem seems not to be available online in any form.

The 1962 version is however online on YouTube, in several readings, and also at the Tolkien Gateway in text form. Here are the final verses…

The cellars where the Mewlips sit
Are deep and dank and cold
With single sickly candle lit;
And there they count their gold.

Their walls are wet, their ceilings drip;
Their feet upon the floor
Go softly with a squish-flap-flip,
As they sidle to the door.

They peep out slyly; through a crack
Their feeling fingers creep,
And when they’ve finished, in a sack
Your bones they take to keep.

Beyond the Merlock Mountains, a long and lonely road,
Through the spider-shadows and the marsh of Tode,
And through the wood of hanging trees and gallows-weed,
You go to find the Mewlips – and the Mewlips feed.

The similarity to “flap-flip”-footed Gollum, in his bone-strewn cave under the mountains, should be obvious. So it’s interesting that Gollum could have started off as a prototype as early as 1927 and in the form of a satire on slippery student-gobbling “exalted” academics. H.L. Spencer explores the possibility that the academic who Tolkien had in mind was his rival at the time for Gawain, Sir Israel Gollancz. But finds the evidence rather vague, and offers some counter-evidence on Tolkien’s sentiments at the time. It’s difficult to tell, without seeing the original poem. For instance, was “And there they count their gold.” in the 1937 original? [Update: no, it wasn’t] Or was it something more academic, like “And there they scratch so bold.”?

The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion & Guide comments on the later version of the poem, that…

“Knocking at the Door seems to be a comment on the trepidation of a student calling on a professor; transformed into The Mewlips and divorced from its original meaning, it is a work purely of mood and imagination.”

To be specific, it was re-titled, stripped of its explanatory sub-title and apparently re-worked (how much?) for children, and thus tamed. It was reprinted as “The Mewlips” in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (1962).

H. L. Spencer usefully comments in a footnote in the essay, that…

“The Mewlips are later said to live beyond the ‘Merlock Mountains’; in the original [1927/1937] version, these are the ‘Morlock Mountains’, referring to H. G. Wells’s cannibalistic underground creatures”.

I’d add that this shift from Morlock to Merlock also shifts the register from the Biblical (Morlock recalls Moloch) to the Arthurian (Merlock recalls Merlin). I’ve discussed Wells’s Biblical Moloch link at length, in my recent book on the genesis of The Time Machine. One then has to suspect that Tolkien easily spotted that Wells was quietly referencing Moses and Moloch worship throughout The Time Machine, and would thus have puzzled out all the subtle re-uses of such Biblical elements and names. In which case he knew that Morlock must recall Moloch for the fellows of Oxford who read The Oxford Magazine, which must then key the poem’s theme to the similar and well-known forms of Moloch worship. This can then be seen to tie in with certain other aspects of the information given in H. L. Spencer’s essay, and even with a certain gruesome later development in Gollum’s back-story as given in The Lord of the Rings.

Also interestingly, Tolkien’s apparent reading of The Time Machine, if in perhaps circa 1924/25, would have been closely paralleled by H. P. Lovecraft reading The Time Machine for the first time in New York during November 1924.1 It’s strange to think of them as such contemporaries in horror, like that. Shortly after experiencing the underground cannibalistic Morlocks, Lovecraft writes “The Horror at Red Hook” (underground, child sacrifice), and Tolkien writes “Knocking at the Door” (underground, student-eating).

1. Lovecraft thought Wells was a tedious and canting socialist, which he was by that point. Thus Lovecraft avoided his books. But a young protege of Lovecraft was making a collection of very early SF, then largely forgotten, with the aid of the used bookshops of New York City. He encouraged the master to at least read The Time Machine.

Tolkien at Leeds, July 2018

by David Haden

A wealth of Tolkien sessions, at the International Medieval Congress 2018 at the Leeds Hilton in the UK (2nd – 3rd July). The most interesting papers for me would be those on the deeper historical context, in “Tolkien: Medieval Roots and Modern Branches, II” on Tuesday 3rd July: “Tolkien’s Agrarianism in its Time” (hopefully surveying the verdant undergrowth of nature-thinking, land reform concerns and organicist living that informed radical politics from the 1920s onwards), and “A Man of His Time?: Tolkien and the Edwardian Worldview”. Rather too expensive for me, though, just to hear those two papers: £35 + a £45 train fare to arrive after noon = £80.

Free: “The mystical philology of J. R. R. Tolkien and Sir Israel Gollancz”

by David Haden

Excellent, I’ve found the essay “The mystical philology of J. R. R. Tolkien and Sir Israel Gollancz: monsters and critics”. It’s in full-text Open Access at the Oxford University Research Archive. No need to pay $70 for it, in a copy of the latest edition of Tolkien Studies where it forms the lead essay.

I also found a summary on the author’s blog of the other interesting essay “Visualizing the Word: Tolkien as Artist and Writer”.

Though sadly the volume also contains the desirable “The Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies 2014”, which isn’t going to be Open Access any time soon.

Map of the Arthurian Regions, 1910

by David Haden

Bartholemew’s 1910 map of the Arthurian Regions. Public Domain.

Interesting, but now seems a bit wayward in places. Chester as Caerleon? Some places, such as Wolverhampton, are presumably there only for orientation. The location of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Staffordshire Moorlands, was only discovered by scholars many decades later.

Britannia

by David Haden

I’m usually very sceptical of me-too Game of Thrones knock-offs, but the new Britannia series (starting tomorrow night) intrigues. Sky Atlantic’s new series is about the Roman conquest of Britain. It’s from a very good writer and team, which is encouraging, but sadly the rival BBC’s Radio Times reports today that…

“there’s a decidedly contemporary feel to the drama”

Oh well. I guess the actors weren’t up to quite that much period acting, consistently and across the entire cast. That’s an understandable approach in terms of cohering a sprawling historical epic, I suppose.

The costumes and make-up and props do look fabulous. Lots of mud n’ blood, apparently, of course. No fantasy dragons, but fantastical special effects are said to come from the psychedelic mushroom-chomping of the two local tribes. It’ll be interesting to see how deeply the series explores and visualises the animistic and land-magic angles.

Sadly the quotas and subsidies mean that its nine parts (some sources say ten) had to be filmed in the Czech Republic, with only small bits filmed in Wales. But hopefully it’ll stimulate more public awareness of the Iron Age in the British Isles. The tribes in the first series are the Cantii (Kent) and the Regni (roughly Sussex and Surrey). So they’re actually fairly civilised continental tribes of the Gaulish type (from where modern Belgium is, roughly), who had crossed over and occupied that part of our south coast about 170 years before the Romans arrived, and who had thus displaced the native British (the latest genetic testing suggests, up toward what is now London and over toward Devon/Cornwall).

So the Romans in the series are first encountering Gaulish Belgic recent-incomer tribes, relatively civilised tribes of the sort they’ve already become very familiar with on the continent. As Julius Caesar had noted of the tribes some ten years earlier, from his first-hand experience…

“those that inhabit the lands of the Cantii [Kent] are the most civilized and it is a wholly maritime region. These Cantii differ but little from the [continental] Gauls in habits of life. But [by contrast,] many of the inland Britons do not grow corn. They live on milk and flesh and are clothed in skins. All the Britons stain their persons with a dye that produces a blue colour. This gives them a more terrible aspect in battle.”

So how historically correct Britannia will be remains to be seen. Will the wild indigenous Britons be lurking mysteriously in the background, or will the “most civilized” Gaulish Cantii and the Regni be given wilder British aspects for dramatic purposes?

Katherine Thomson (1797–1862)

by David Haden

I’ve found another Stoke writer. Katherine Thomson (1797–1862) was the seventh daughter of Thomas Byerley of Etruria. She compiled many ‘memoir biographies’, and wrote a string of historical novels. Here is The Chevalier : A Romance of the Rebellion of 1745 (1844), with a description of Hartshill…

“It was more than two days’ journey before the famous hill, called Mow Corp, at the foot of which lies Congleton, rose, darkened by the bilberry wires which dotted its sides, before the view of the travellers. They had journeyed along through what is now a defaced, and revolting country [the Jacobites had reached Macclesfield, but the town did not welcome the invading Jacobites and was murderously hostile]; amid hills, now obscured by volumes of the darkest smoke [a sign of pillaging Jacobites, seizing supplies], and vales … [They arrive at the industrialising Potteries, which in 1745 was pre-Wedgwood] standing on the ridge of the valley of Stoke, you may see countless chimneys vieing in height … The Trent [below was] narrow in this part of its course, where it has but lately quitted its source, wound through fertile fields, and beneath, at this point, a gentle rise, upon which, not many weeks since, wavy corn had been growing attracted the eye. A windmill stood on this fair bank, bearing the name of Harts-hill, just by a group of dark pines which rose against the blue sky. … Only a few days ago, the Trent had reflected that blue sky, that grove of pines, and the withies that grew on its bank. It was now fringed with a row of tents; the vale was speckled over with the [English army] camp, and its appurtenances. Horses were fording the shallow Trent; women were washing linen low down in the [Fowlea] stream; pennons [i.e.: war pennants] were waving in the breeze; the miller at Hartshill was weighing out his corn to the ravenous tyrants of the [English army] commissariat; beasts were penned in folds, in the grassy fields. The inconveniences of war were manifest … ”

The windmill was later the site of Holy Trinity church at Hartshill.

Thompson followed this two years later with a three-volume Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745, outlining from first-hand accounts the local manoeuvring of the armies…

The Duke therefore assumed the command of an army ten thousand strong [to prevent the Jacobites reaching Lichfield, and thus the road to London.] The Duke of Cumberland was by no means so ignorant of the force which he was now destined to attack [as he] had become acquainted with the peculiar mode of fighting practised by the Highlanders …

At Macclesfield, Prince Charles gained the intelligence that the Duke of Cumberland … was quartered at Lichfield, Coventry, Stafford, and Newcastle-under-Line.

The Prince then resolved to go direct to Derby; and it was to conceal his design, and to induce the Duke to collect his whole army at Lichfield, that [his man] Lord George Murray marched with a division of the army to Congleton, which was the road to Lichfield. Congleton, being on the borders of Staffordshire, was sufficiently near Newcastle-under-Line for Lord George to send General Ker to that place to gain intelligence of the enemy. General Ker advanced to a village about three miles from Newcastle [which would suggest Burslem?], and very nearly surprised a body of dragoons, who had only time to make off. … [Cumberland then decided to try to force a battle, meeting the invading Jacobites just outside Stone rather than Lichfield, but the battle there never materialised].

Upon the third of December, Lord George Murray with his division of the [Jacobite] army marched by Leek to Ashbourn; and the Prince, with the rest of the [Jacobite] forces, came from Macclesfield to Leek, where, considering the distance of the two columns of his army, and the neighbourhood of the enemy, he naturally considered his situation as somewhat precarious. It was possible for the enemy, by a night-march, to get betwixt the two columns; and, contemplating this danger, the Prince set out at midnight to Ashbourn, where it was conceived that the forces should proceed in one body towards Derby. “Thus,” remarks a modern historian, “two armies in succession had been eluded by the Highlanders; that of Wade at Newcastle, in consequence of the weather or the old Marshal’s inactivity, and that of Cumberland” … The young Prince [and] this gallant but trifling force was enabled to return to Scotland … scarcely ever was there a handful of valiant men placed in a situation of more imminent peril.

Holy Trinity church, Hartshill, Stoke-on-Trent

by David Haden

I happened to encounter the page on Holy Trinity Church, Hartshill, published by our local Council. Its description foregrounds an axe murder, of all things…

“Visit this magnificent church and listen to the gory tale of ‘Murder Most Foul’ – the story of an 1845 axe murder victim.”

Very cheerful. But perhaps it’s a relic from the Council’s immiserated socialist years, now in the past.

Here is Nikolaus Pevsner on the church, in his masterly survey Staffordshire (1974)…

“HOLY TRINITY, Hartshill Road. Built at the expense of Herbert Minton to the design of George Gilbert Scott in 1842, i.e. an early work. And, thanks to Minton’s attitude, also a large work. It is entirely Camdenian, or rather Puginian, i.e. it appears with the claim to be genuine Middle Pointed. w steeple, windows with geometrical tracery. The chancel incidentally was given its apsidal end only about the 1860s or 1870s. The date of the plaster ribvault is not recorded. It obviously cannot be Scott’s. It need hardly be said that glazed Minton tiles are copiously used inside, especially for the dado zone. Scott also did the SCHOOL behind and the PARSONAGE to the west, and again Herbert Minton paid. The school is quite large and an interesting design. The parsonage has been totally altered. Again built with Minton money is the long and varied group of Gothic brick houses with black brick diapering more or less opposite the church. They must be of before 1858.”

The Ecclesiastical Gazette of 1843 noted approvingly that…

“The form and arrangement of Hartshill church are those of the ancient English parish churches : a chancel of good proportions, a nave, aisles, south porch, and western tower, with spire.”

Historic England’s record page for the church adds a little more. Saying of the “apsidal end” that had been noted by Pevsner, that …

“The chancel was added in memory of Herbert by his nephew Minton Campbell. Notable pew ends carved by apprentices and stained glass windows depicting Biblical stories.”

The survey report Minton Tiles in the Churches of Staffordshire (2000) has a short summary account of the tiles of the interior. There was apparently a severe fire inside the church in 1872, which occasioned new work. There are also more details in the 1992 150th anniversary booklet. The fire means the tilework is mostly 1870s, apart from the nave pavements. Fish tiles added at that time, referencing the ancient Christian symbolism of the fish, were made by the Campbell Brick & Tile Co. I’ve discovered that this early symbolism must echo the original ethos of the original design work. For instance, The Ecclesiastical Gazette of 1843 noted the original chancel ceiling was… “divided by wooden moulding into panels, which are filled by tiles of a rich blue, studded with stars of gold, in imitation of the ceilings of some early churches.”

While undeniably plain when seen from the side at a distance (see above postcard), the book The Work of Sir Gilbert Scott (1980) suggests its fine interiors and windows were partly inspired by Lichfield Cathedral, and that these served to establish Scott’s reputation. These interiors, especially the “square-ended chancel” being…

“the first of Scott’s considered adequate by Victorian standards”

One can also see here (see above photos) how the exterior profile might have been designed to appeal more to those climbing up the road from Stoke in the valley below, rather than to those who saw the church side-on. Sadly Stoke-on-Trent Council (Lab) allowed the cottages on the right to be demolished. Labour allowed them to be replaced by a 1980s petrol station, delightfully flanked by a decrepit used-tyres dump. But the similar and larger buildings opposite have survived, and are still homes. Here these are seen from the opposite direction, with the church behind the camera and to the left…

The pub on the corner has also survived, and today is one of the best in Stoke.

The Edwardians appear to have recognised the unappealing quality of the side-on view of the church, and they allowed trees to grow up to block it…

The potteries.org website cites Neville Malkin writing in the mid 1970s, on what was there before the church. This commanding crest of the hill was the site of a windmill.

“One of the few remaining windmills in the Potteries occupied this prominent site in Hartshill, until the late 1830s when it was demolished to make way for the church of the Holy Trinity”.

This is confirmed by Katherine Thomson‘s novel The Chevalier (1844), set in 1745. Thompson was a local writer who had grown up locally at Etruria…

“The Trent, narrow in this part of its course, where it has but lately quitted its source, wound through fertile fields, and beneath, at this point, a gentle rise, upon which, not many weeks since, wavy corn had been growing attracted the eye. A windmill stood on this fair bank, bearing the name of Harts-hill, just by a group of dark pines which rose against the blue sky.”

The Victoria County History has details such as the name of the Church’s first vicar, and details of its local mission houses in the Stoke valley below. It also adds just a little more detail on the size of the churchyard and who gave the churchyard land…

“The church of HOLY TRINITY at Hartshill was built and endowed in 1842 by Herbert Minton of Longfield Cottage (1792–1858). He also built the house for the incumbent to the west and the schools to the south and gave 2 acres of ground for the churchyard.”

Here is a view of some of the local people Holy Trinity would have served in the 1900s. The main-road gates of both the church and the vicarage are seen on the right of the picture, and the camera looks toward Newcastle-under-Lyme. Tram-stops are just out of sight on either side of the camera.

Many of these lads would have later served in the First World War. In the 20th century the potteries.org website notes the church had a …

“new organ (1948) to serve as memorial to those who fell in the two World Wars.”

According to the National Archives the newer 1948 organ was overhauled and rebuilt in 1973.

The original organ was designed by Edward Wadsworth of Manchester, built by Bewsher and Fleetwood. According to The Architect and Building News it was destroyed in the fire of 1872…

“Hartshill Church, Stoke-upon-Trent. This church … damaged by fire, has been restored sufficiently to allow some of the services being resumed. Besides other damage, the organ gallery was burnt and the organ destroyed.”

Today the church still appears to have its bells, and with a fine peal, since I heard them being rung a few years ago while passing by. There are occasional open days, usually about one a year. There are apparently windows high in the tower: The Ecclesiastical Gazette of 1843 noted the new church’s spire that it was “pierced midway toward the apex by canopied windows”, though today the chances of being permitted to ascend and open a window on Stoke are likely to be slim.

WikiMedia has several modern photos including one interior.

What of the future, for such churches in Stoke? The government has just published a major review on the upkeep of such parish churches. It suggests two new networks of professionals: a temporary national staff working to boost suitable local uses of churches, while also helping local people to carry on such work at the grassroots; and a dedicated national network of ‘church repair professionals’ and apprentices, to ensure that churches don’t fall into disrepair or become fire-risks through lack of routine repairs and neglect.