Happy St. Patrick's Day!

More Of The Many Faces Of Bilbo Baggins

Since my last post on "The Many Faces of Bilbo Baggins," the part of Bilbo has been cast for Peter Jackson's two upcoming movies based on The Hobbit. The crucial part has at last gone to Martin Freeman, best known to me previously for his role as Arthur Dent in the movie The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. As satisfied as I was with his work in that film, I was not totally convinced about Freeman until I saw an interview that he and all the actors cast as Thorin and Company gave in New Zealand. When I saw him out of other context and simply in himself, I caught a glimpse of his potential as Baggins.

Part of this potential is his comic English diffidence, the sense of self-worth tempered by humility that tries not to be "uppity," and then feels chagrin when that is taken at face worth. The greatest danger in making The Hobbit is, perhaps, the temptation to make Bilbo into an action hero. He is a hero, of course, but his heroism is a different kind of courage, and he only wields Sting defensively. The story of The Hobbit is (besides a Quest) the story of a culture conflict, of the modern sensibility (and Bilbo, with his morning letters, butcher's meat, and handkerchiefs, is to all intents and purposes Modern) with the tenets of a Heroic Age, typified mainly by Thorin. As in any dialectic, the two viewpoints meet, clash, and change each other. Bilbo's virtues are mercy, pity, non-possessiveness and (when in a pinch) the courage to face horror with hope. These will take a steady hand to translate into film.

So, the pictures are, in order: 1) Martin Freeman; 2) Bilbo reading Tolkien's manuscript, looking rather like Leo McKern, a picture by Tony de Terlizzi of Spiderwick fame; 3) Bilbo and Gandalf by Iain McCaig; and 4) Bilbo and Gandalf by Ted Naismith.

Crazy Hope: Favorite Quotations

"The human animal is a beast that eventually has to die. If he's got money, he buys, and he buys, and he buys. The reason he buys everything that he can is because of some crazy hope that one of the things he buys will be life everlasting."



--Burl Ives as Big Daddy in Tennessee Williams' Cat On A Hot Tin Roof.

Among The Ashes Of The Dustbins Of Your Mind

I recently cleaned out my storage (one of the reasons my posts have been so scanty on the ground) and came across a few interesting educational relics. These scans are from a workbook called From Sounds To Words, from a workbook of the SRA Aqua Unit, and from Highlights, the monthly book for children. Everybody of a certain age remembers Goofus and Gallant, but how many recall The Timbertoes, by John Gee?

More Baba Yaga From "Jack and Jill"

More Ursula Koering illustrations from the Jack and Jill Baba Yaga stories, this time from "Baba Yaga and the Alexandrite Ring;" this is not a Katherine O. Kurtz story.

In this tale Baba Yaga has a magical Alexandrite ring (an Alexandrite is a real gemstone, a dark green chrysoberyl that looks red when placed under artificial light) that can freeze things when green or warm things when red. But it has lost its powers and can only be restored when polished by a bit of web from the Spider Queen. Of course it is up to the witch's faithful cat to obtain some.

This is the story that I read and remembered from the early 1970's, and once more I am impressed by the persistence of imagery from that time in the make-up of my imagination. I have drawn that cat's muffler in many of my pictures, and it has turned up in my book, worn by one of my main characters.

Angels and Afterlifes: Fine Distinctions

"I have instanced the belief in angelic music calling away the soul as one heathen item in popular Protestant mythology--

"Hark! They whisper! Angels say

'Sister spirit, come away!' "

Another is embodied in the tenet that the souls of the departed become angels. In Judaic and Christian doctrine, the angel creation is distinct from that of human beings, and a Jew or a Catholic would as little dream of confusing the distinct conception of angel and soul, as in believing in metempsychosis [reincarnation]. But not so dissenting [Protestant] religion. According to Druidic dogma, the souls of the dead were guardians of the living; a belief shared with the ancient Indians, who venerated the spirits of their ancestry, the Pitris, as watching over and protecting them. Thus, the hymn 'I Want To Be An Angel,' so popular in dissenting schools, is founded in the venerable Aryan myth, and therefore of exceeding interest; but Christian it is not.

"Another tenet which militates against Christian doctrine, and has supplanted it in popular belief, is that of the transmigration of the soul to bliss immediately on its departure from the body.

"The article stantis vel cadentis Fidei, of the Apostles, was the resurrection of the body. If we read the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles with care, it is striking what great weight, we find, is laid on this doctrine. They went everywhere preaching--1. the rising of Christ; 2. the consequent resurrection of the bodies of Christians. 'If the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised; and if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain. But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the first fruits of them that slept. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive.' This was the key-note to the teachings of the Apostles; it runs through the New Testament, and is reflected in the writings of the Fathers. It occupies its legitimate position in the Creeds, and the Church has never failed to insist upon it with no faltering voice.

"But the doctrine of the soul being transported to heaven, and of its happiness being completed at death, finds no place in the Bible or the Liturgies of any branch--either Greek, Roman, or Anglican--of the Church Catholic [Universal]. Yet this was the tenet of our Keltic forefathers, and it has maintained itself in English Protestantism, so as to divest the doctrine of the resurrection of its grasp on the popular mind. Among the Kelts, again, reception into the sacred inner circle of the illuminated was precisely analogous to the received dissenting doctrine of conversion. To it are applied, by the bards, terms such as 'the second birth,' 'the renewal,' which are to this day employed by Methodists to designate the mysterious process of conversion."

--Sabine Baring-Gould, Curious Myths of the Middle Ages, 1894.

Frank Papers From Frank C. Pape

Some of the line drawings from James Branch Cabell's Jurgen (1921) by English artist Frank Cheyne Pape (there should be an accent over that final 'e': and it's pronounced paw-PAY). Pape had previously done more romantic pictures for collections of fairy tales and the like, but after the witty and accomplished work he did for Cabell's books he was tapped to do similar drawings for authors like Suetonius and Anatole France and Rabelais, writers who were deemed at the time to be ribald or dangerous, but whose books nowadays would hardly quicken a pulse. Pape, who was born in 1878, did little work after the Forties, and died in 1972.