Magical Borders

Or Fantasy, Reality, and the Places They Choose to Meet

You wouldn’t likely recognize the name Laurie Battle, but you’d be familiar with her work. Laurie has managed Tolkien Enterprises through thick and thin, storm and fair weather, for the last three decades, and probably knows more about the ins and outs of Tolkiendom than most.

So, of course when she replied enthusiatically to my slightly timid request concerning the eventual possibility of maybe considering the idea of one day doing a guest newsletter, I was delighted. Laurie has written about magical borders, clearly demonstrating that myth is never wholly a question of geographical boundaries.

MAGICAL BORDERSCertain special books draw us into a place and time when life had a leisurely pace and people lived in close contact with the natural world. The Lord of the Rings is, of course, an outstanding example. There’s an epic feel to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth that is amplified by his suggestion that the events related in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings have a historical basis in an era lost in the mists of time. As the story goes, a copy of an ancient manuscript known as The Red Book of Westmarch was passed down through the ages, with its significance only being recognized and appreciated in relatively recent times (this just so happens to bear a striking similarity to the history of the famous Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf). By a stroke of good fortune, the manuscript landed in Tolkien’s hands—whereupon he transcribed and edited the narrative accounts written long ago by the hobbits Bilbo and Frodo Baggins and found a suitable publisher.

This is a stock device of the fantasy genre, of course, but I’m a total sucker for it. So many of modern culture’s ills seem to flow from a relentless onslaught of too much that is too noisy and too shallow coming at us too fast from too many directions. Every now and then we need to step out of the fray for some quiet, a breath of fresh air, and a nourishing draught served up from a deep well.

<<>><<>><<>> 

The Gods of old are silent on their shore,
Since the great Pan expired, and through the roar
Of the Ionian waters broke a dread
Voice which proclaimed “the Mighty Pan is dead.”
How much died with him! false or true—the dream
Was beautiful which peopled every stream
With more than finny tenants, and adorned
The woods and waters with coy nymphs that scorned
Pursuing Deities, or in the embrace
Of gods brought forth the high heroic race
Whose names are on the hills and oe’r the seas.¹

 

 

<<>><<>><<>>Tolkien’s wonderful essay “On Fairy-Stories” maps a way into the larger literary forest through which he wandered. He describes how history, myth, philology and moral philosophy are strands woven into the narrative fabric of his stories, and, by tracing the roots of fantasy literature and placing them within an infinitely broader context, exposes the faulty logic of unenlightened souls who brand his work simplistic or escapist:

“Faërie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted.”²

Fantasy holds the power to let us see the essence and possibility of things. Used wisely, it can bring a spark of the sacred into daily life and inspire our actions.

 

<<>><<>><<>> 

And round about the (breeze) murmurs cool through apple boughs,
and slumber streams from quivering leaves

 

<<>>Come, goddess of Cyprus, and in golden cups serve
nectar delicately mixed with delights³

 

 

<<>><<>><<>>The character Ioreth in The Return of the King is a wise woman herbalist who works in the Houses of Healing in Minas Tirith. She remembers an old rhyme that holds the key to the healing powers of kingsfoil (also known as athelas), a common plant found in the forest outside the city walls. The episode is steeped in tradition and lore, and Gandalf wryly observes how folk wisdom can be superior to the pronouncements of the educated classes.

Kingsfoil may be fictitious, but the magic of plant lore is real. When my son was a child we used to gather mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris) on our hikes in the Berkeley hills and put it under our pillows to induce magical dreams. Plantain (Plantago major, P. lanceolata), noted for its healing properties for both external and internal wounds and mentioned by Chaucer and Shakespeare in their writings, spills out over the sidewalks where I walk my dog most afternoons. So does mallow (Malva sylvestris), which yields up a mucilaginous goo that is excellent for sore throats and coughs (the marsh variety, Althaea officinalis, which doesn’t grow in the wild here, forms the basis for real marshmallows). The dandelion plant (Taraxacum officinale), so pervasive it pops up through sidewalk cracks, has so many nutritional and healing properties that it challenges the idea of what constitutes a weed. From a naturalist’s standpoint, manicured expanses of green lawn seem like the true alien invader.

 

<<>><<>><<>> 

Now came still evening on, and twilight gray
Had in her sober livery all things clad;
Silence accompanied; for beast and bird,
They to their grassy couch, these to their nests,
Were slunk, all but the wakeful nightingale;
She all night long her amorous descant sung;
Silence was pleas’d: now glow’d the firmament
With living sapphire; Hesperus, that led
The starry host, rode brightest, till the moon,
Rising in clouded majesty, at length
Apparent queen unveil’d her peerless light,
And oe’r the dark her silver mantle threw.⁴

 

 

<<>><<>><<>>La Belle Dame sans Merci, an 1820 poem by John Keats that inspired several Romantic painters, is about a beautiful woman of Faërie who lures a hapless knight off into her twilight realm and sucks out his vital juices. Spectral kings and princes appear in his fevered dream and warn him that he is caught in her thrall, and he awakens on a cold hillside disoriented and near death. In the 19th century, this theme had much to do with blaming women for the sins of the flesh. Man was supposedly the rational being who brought the light of reason to worldly affairs, while woman’s job was to tend the messy details of daily life and stay out of the way of the real business of society. Nowadays, we’re more nuanced about such things. Another way of looking at Faërie is that it represents the realm of emotion and unbounded imagination, where anyone can wander at will.

The trick lies in what we do with the bounty we find there. The crossing from fantasy to reality is more perilous than it might seem, as forces cloaked in many guises are out to manipulate our behavior toward myriad ends. Myth and symbol are used to hawk everything from material goods to rationales for going to war.

“Fair is foul and foul is fair,” Shakespeare’s witches warned. Emotions and the imagination are easily stirred up, but, while thoughts are free, actions bring consequences. Life in the nuclear age requires that civil society find a way to effectively harness the dragon of Chaos (which will always be with us, and which is not inherently destructive). Everyone has a role to play in accomplishing this feat.

Words Abraham Lincoln spoke almost 150 years ago are as timely and relevant today as they were during the dark days of the U.S. Civil War, and they have widespread applicability:

“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”⁵

The better we understand fantasy, the better equipped we will be to make realistic choices that serve our enduring best interests.

 

<<>><<>><<>> 

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.⁶

 

 

<<>><<>><<>>One of my favorite passages in Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter is the chapter where Orion, the half-elven prince, out hunting a unicorn with his pack of hounds, approaches the twilight mist that separates his earthly home from the enchanted land of his maternal heritage. His mother dwells in Elfland, having been summoned back by her father’s powerful rune spell when Orion was a small child. Orion barely remembers her, but the magic seeping through the mist stirs his Elvish blood, drawing him forward into the unknown. At the last minute, just as he is about to step across the border into Elfland (from which we know he will never return), one of his dogs stirs. As he turns to give it a goodbye pat, the whole pack eagerly gathers around, tails wagging, nosing his hands, trustingly watching for cues to what they should do, and he is instantly brought back. For a moment he remains torn, pulled between his earthly and magical lineages, but the dogs need to be cared for and that settles it. He turns away from Elfland’s border and heads for home.

Portals—magical places that mark a boundary between everyday life and the realm of Faërie—are a well-known fantasy motif. Cross the threshold, the idea goes, and you’ll step into a different world. If we clear our vision and fine-tune our senses, perhaps we’ll recognize these places when we happen upon them.

 

<<>><<>><<>>“Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln, Acton, Bedford, or Concord bell, when the wind was favorable, a faint, sweet, and, as it were, natural melody, worth importing into the wilderness. At a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept. All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it. There came to me in this case a melody which the air had strained, and which had conversed with every leaf and needle of the wood, that portion of the sound which the elements had taken up and modulated and echoed from vale to vale. The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood; the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph.”⁷

 

<<>><<>><<>>
Magical borders can be found everywhere. Here are a few I’ve found in my back yard of Northern California.
The Wilds of California

 

No California city is far from wild areas that resemble the habitat of otherworldly beings. Woodland glades, mountain meadows and lakes,  hidden canyons and lush streams invite the wayfarer to step off the beaten track and tarry awhile.
Mount Diablo

 

The mountain was a sacred site for native Americans for thousands of   years before Europeans arrived on these shores. Creation myths of the   local Miwok tribes held that the First People, animal and nature divinities who later created humans, were formed on the mountain at the dawn of Time. The name “diablo” (devil) arose from an incident in the early years of the 19th century when Spanish troops from San Francisco were pursuing escapees from the Catholic mission system. A group of natives was cornered in a thicket near the base of the mountain, and they mysteriously vanished. One account held that an elaborately dressed medicine man appeared in their midst and frightened off the pursuers. The thicket was given the name “Monte del Diablo” after the incident, and the name became attached to the mountain.
Golden Gate

 

Tales of an earthly paradise laden with gold at the far western reaches of the Known World date back to a popular series of Spanish novels written in the early 1500s by Garci Ordóñez de Montalvo. The early European explorers sailed right past San Francisco Bay, most likely because it was shrouded in fog and the safer route lay west of the Farallon Islands 27 miles out from the coastline. Spain and England staked claims in Northern California land two centuries before the entrance to the bay was finally discovered in 1775. It was given the name Golden Gate in 1846 after Europe’s Golden Horn, the harbor of Byzantium. Two years later, real gold was discovered in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains.
Berkeley Pathways

 

Berkeley’s pathways appear unexpectedly as you walk down perfectly ordinary-seeming streets, offering the allure of a secret shortcut—as if you’ve stumbled upon a real-time game of Chutes and Ladders. They connect the long and winding roads that run over the city’s hilly terrain, and are an eclectic blend of sidewalk meets nature trail. An unconfirmed rumor has it that the city has lost count of how many there actually are because a few of the wilder ones have never settled into fixed locations.
Laurie Battle,
January, 2009

With thanks to Terrell, Sean and Titania (all of whom assisted me in various ways to get all this together).
Footnotes:

1. Lord Byron, Aristomenes, Canto I, 1823

2. Tolkien, J.R.R., “On Fairy-Stories”, The Monsters & the Critics, London: Harper Collins, 1997

3. Sappho, H.T. Wharton translation of fragments, including an invocation to Aphrodite, 6th century B.C.
.
4. Milton, John, Evening in Paradise (from Paradise Lost, Book IV), 1667

5. Second Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862

6. Yeats, William Butler, He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, 1899

7. Thoreau, Henry David, Walden, excerpt from “Sounds”, 1854

All photos © Laurie Battle / Terrell Cunningham
If you wish to contact Laurie, you may do so at lbattle@tolkien-ent.com
OTHERWISE

If you feel like brushing up on your Chinese, here is a recent interview done for swissinfo.ch.
SWISS DESIGN IN HOLLYWOOD

We had a wonderful time in Valencia at the exhibition; more news on that (and a very special visit to a very special museum) next newsletter.
EASY LISTENING

I always enjoy having an illustration of mine on a CD cover. Two Worlds is just out from Waerloga Records. “Adventurous dark fantasy music, cinematic and utterly powerful” is just what it is – 2 CDs, with nearly 120 minutes of music. I’ve known one of the artists, Anabasis, for many years now. (And it’s got some nice artwork on it. Buy it. Now.)