Ariel's Poetry

        Tomorrow I start my workshop on Shakespeare’s language with our town’s eighth grade as they begin their A Midsummer Night’s Dream unit.  So to be perfectly honest, Shakespeare is all I can think about right now.  Shakespeare isn’t big on fantasy, but he does have Midsummer Night’s Dream’s fairies, Macbeth’s witches, and The Tempest, which is full of magic.  So here’s some of Shakespeare’s fantasy poetry: two songs sung by the spirit Ariel in The Tempest.

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell.

Where the bee sucks. there suck I:

In a cowslip's bell I lie;

There I couch when owls do cry.

On the bat's back I do fly

After summer merrily.

Merrily, merrily shall I live now

Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.

        The first is full of gorgeous imagery, melancholy but also wonderful.  The second is cuter, and I really don’t picture Ariel lying in a flower or riding on a bat.  Ariel can fly without benefit of bat, so what would be the point?  I suppose it might be interesting just for variety.  Still, even if I’m not sure the poem describes Ariel, it does make a nice picture of some sort of wee imp or elflet.  Shakespeare may not have been big on fantasy, but he certainly was huge on rich imagery that evokes all manner of worlds, moods, emotions, and visions.

        One of the most interesting things about Ariel, from an illustration standpoint, is not only are there all those images to evoke all sorts of possibilities for Ariel - angel, fairy, genie, nymph, breeze? - but Ariel is one of the few characters in literature who is portrayed sometimes as male and sometimes as female, about equally.  It certainly makes it fun to see what artists have done with the character, and to think about how I picture the character myself.

[Pictures: Engraving by uncredited artist from The Tempest edited by Nicholas Rowe, 1709 (Image from rightreading.com);

Ariel’s Song, illustration by Charles Ricketts, 1895 (Image from feuilleton);

On the bat’s back I do fly, engraving by Louis Rhead from Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb, 1918 (Image from Internet Archive);

On the bat’s back I do fly, illustration from An Illustrated Shakespeare Birthday Book, 1883 (inspired by a painting by Henry Fuseli, 1800-10) (Image from 4umi);
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough, copperplate engraving by Charles William Sharpe from Imperial Edition of the Works of Shakespeare, 1873 (Image from Emory).]

Words of the Month - Weird Etymologies

        If there’s something strange in your neighborhood…

        If there’s something weird and it don’t look good

        Who you gonna call?  Ghostbusters!

        Yeah, it’s that time of year when strange things may be seen in your neighborhood, but instead of calling Ghostbusters, I will, of course, pin my faith on etymology.  Here are a handful of interesting origins for some of English’s many ways of referring to the strange and uncanny…

strange - The different meanings of strange in the English language continue to coexist (as illustrated by the Doors’ “People are strange when you’re a stranger…”)  We can still talk about strange meaning “foreign or unfamiliar” (our original, late 13th century meaning, from French, from Latin) while about a century later we gained the meaning “queer, surprising.”  The shift from one meaning to the other is pretty straightforward, too.  Think of the word outlandish, by way of comparison.  But some of our other odd words are a little odder.

odd - In Old Norse the word oddi began as a triangle, shifted to refer to the unmatched point of an isosceles triangle, and the points of other things, such as spearheads and promontories, and also the extra number or object in excess of an even set.  For example, the odd man breaks a tie in voting.  English borrowed the word with this meaning around 1300, where it took around a century to gain the sense of “rare, special.”  Think of the similar two senses of singular, by way of comparison.  The concept of the “odd one out” led eventually to our “strange, peculiar” meaning around 1580.

weird - In Old English wyrd was a noun meaning “fate, destiny.”  By Shakespeare’s time the word was pretty much extinct, having been replaced by Latinate words.  It did remain, however, in Scots dialects, meaning a witch (one who controls people’s fates), and appearing most commonly in the phrase “the weird sisters,” meaning the Fates in the classical sense, but generally thought of as hideous, uncanny witches.  That’s how Shakespeare found the word when he was raiding Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande for plots.  From the strange spellings in the First Folio of Macbeth, it’s actually unclear whether Shakespeare understood the word’s real meaning or just borrowed it willy-nilly.  At any rate, as time went on and the only place English speakers ever encountered this uncommon word was to describe the three ghastly, deformed, supernatural witches in productions of Shakespeare’s play, they interpreted it accordingly.  Thus by the early 19th century the word had gained new life and currency, but with the meaning “strange (adj),” instead of “fate (n).”

bizarre - A more recent addition to English (around 1640), borrowed from French, which borrowed it from Italian.  The Italian bizarro meant “irascible, tending to quick flashes of anger,” which shifted toward “unpredictable” and thence to “strange.”

peculiar - A prime example of an Inkhorn Term, English gained this word in the mid 15th century from Latin “private property,” literally “property in cattle.”  In English it first meant “belonging exclusively to one person,” but it wasn’t long before it gained the sense of “special,” and from there shifted to “unusual.”

        What’s kind of fun about these words is that they all began in different places, and converged over the centuries on the sense of… well, weird.  It’s interesting that we seem to keep adapting new words to try to get at that meaning from all different directions.  After all, isn’t weird almost by definition the stuff that’s hard to describe or explain?  But the beauty of language and its essentially social nature is that no matter how hard it is to talk about something, we never stop trying.

[Pictures: Macbeth and Banquo meet the Weird Sisters, woodcut from Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande by Raphael Holinshed, 1577 (Image from the Folger Shakespeare Library);

Choleric Men Drinking (i.e. bizarro), woodcut by Erhard Schön, c. 1530 (Image from Quadriformisration).]

Midsummer Fairies

        We’re going to a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream this evening, and since it is a fantasy story, I thought today I’d look at what kind of fantasy it presents.  It isn’t serious speculative fiction - there isn’t really much speculation at all, other than “What would be the silliest way to get a bunch of people to get mixed up for maximum situational comedy?”  Scholars think that Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of the few (if not only) plays for which Shakespeare made up the plot himself instead of borrowing someone else’s story.  But he obviously didn’t spend a lot of time on in-depth consistent world creation!

        The first question is what kind of creatures his fairies are.  They’re described as climbing into acorn cups and being wrapped in the shed skin of a snake, yet obviously they appear on stage the size of normal humans.  Moreover, even if you had a special effects budget to film the play and make the fairies small, the fairies would have to be full human size in order to keep a human changeling in their train, have

affairs with humans, and cuddle amorously with Nick Bottom, all of which they’re described as doing.  So there’s a contradiction there.  The other contradiction comes in their powers.  Puck is his usual puckish self, doing small mischiefs such as curdling milk and teasing horses.  He also has the power to transform himself into other shapes, including a crab-apple and a stool, and he has the power to transform Bottom’s head into an ass’s, and to travel at superhuman speed like the Flash.  Not bad, but for the most part petty little powers.  Titania and Oberon, on the other hand, have the power, by their quarreling, to disrupt the entire climate and cause natural disasters as if they were gods rather than mere sprites.  These contradictions can be somewhat explained if we imagine that the fairy realm is divided into different grades of spirits: the king and queen (and perhaps other noble or high fairies) who are human-sized and extremely powerful, and the lesser fairies, including Peaseblossom, Moth, Cobweb, and Mustardseed, who are tiny and have lesser magic.  Puck is, perhaps, a middling sort.

        None of the fairies, however, has the power to make the mortals fall in love.  For that they need to borrow another sort of magic.  Oberon explains that a flower has become magical by being hit by Cupid’s dart - thus raising the question of how Cupid fits into this universe.  Presumably we have the traditional Greek gods with all their traditional attributes, in addition to the fairies with their assorted supernatural abilities.  A mermaid is mentioned, too, so we know there are potentially other magical beings in this universe, as well.

        The fantastical elements in A Midsummer Night’s Dream are not just stage-dressing.  The whole plot of the play is made possible by the magic of the flower playing havoc with who loves whom, and the magic of Puck, who runs around making sure everything happens at the right time and place, and having a little too much fun with magical mischief along the way.  So this certainly is a fantasy and not just a human plot in fairy’s clothing.  Still, it isn’t a particularly good fantasy, is it?  For all the magical trappings, it doesn’t really invite you to imagine anything beyond the everyday world, and it’s always the simple, all-too-human tradesmen who steal the show.  But then, perhaps that is a true speculative fiction theme after all: how ordinary people can encounter the unknown, incomprehensible Other, and the different ways they can respond.  In any case, I’m really looking forward to the production tonight.  After all, it’s all in good fun, from the lovers’ overblown arguments to the “Mystery Science Theater 3000”-style play-within-a-play.  What can we do but smile and agree with Puck, “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

[Pictures: Titania and Bottom, illustration by Paul Konewka, 1868 (Image from Book Graphics);

Costume design for Moth from Augustin Daly’s 1888 production (Image from the Folger Shakespeare Library);

Costume design for Oberon (But he looks like a Bishop Fish, doesn’t he?) from George Devine’s 1954 production (Image from Claremont University);

Puck, woodcut from 1825 edition by W. Harvey (Image from the British Library);

Puck meets a fairy, illustration by W. Heath Robinson from 1914 edition by Constable & Co;

Fairies at the feast, illustration by W. Heath Robinson from 1914 edition by Constable & Co (Images from The Pictorial Arts).]

Taboo, Or Not Taboo?

        Definitely taboo, but of a special kind.  Actually, I just wanted to use that title, but today’s post is really about geasa, a particular sort of taboo in Irish mythology.  A geis is a personal restriction, idiosyncratic, and often laid on a person as a curse or a gift.  And for my purposes, one of the interesting aspects of a geis is its magical properties.  Although he’s obviously not Irish, think of Samson, forbidden to cut his hair.  If his hair is cut, he loses all his strength: a curse.  Yet as long as he doesn’t cut his hair, he has magically enhanced strength: a blessing.

        Another aspect of geasa (that’s the plural) that make them good fantasy fodder is that they often take the form of a riddle that must be solved.  Think of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, who is told that “no man of woman born shall harm” him.  Of course, this being mythology, we know someone will find a way to break the spell, and the trick turns out to be that Macduff, delivered by Caesarean section, qualifies for the job.  Consider, too, the Witch-king of Angmar, Lord of the Nazgul in The Lord of the Rings.  It is prophesied that “not by the hand of man will he fall,” which makes him feel all self-confident and secure… until he finds himself faced in battle by a woman and a hobbit.  Now, these prophesy-type geasa are a little different because they don’t lay any requirements on their subject; there’s nothing in particular that Macbeth must do or not do to preserve his geis (other than avoid shieldmaidens, hobbits, and anyone delivered by c-section - which is not so easy these days!).  Nevertheless, Celtic folklore seems to count them.
        An example of a geis that is both prophecy and riddle is the Welsh hero Lleu Llaw Gyffes’s destiny to die neither “during the day nor night, not indoors or outdoors, neither riding nor walking, not clothed and not naked…” etc.  As with Samson, his wife induces him to show a way to fulfill those conditions so that she can betray him.  However, what I find interesting about this example is how closely it parallels the traditional eastern European folk tales such as “The Peasant’s Wise Daughter.”  (See “Clever Katya” for another nice example.)  “Neither riding nor walking” is astride or dragged, or with one foot on some non-riding animal; “not clothed and not naked” is wrapped in a fishing net; and so on.  In those “clever peasant girl” tales the riddle is solved not to weaken and kill a hero, but in order to impress and demand justice from a more powerful figure (often the tsar himself.)  I much prefer to see cleverness applied to positive ends!

        In the “clever peasant girl” stories, the riddle is given by the powerful man, and the woman gains power by solving it, whereas in Irish mythology geasa are often laid upon men by women, which is presumably the way for women to wield power.  It’s also often the device that leads to a hero’s downfall.  Because we know the rules of the hero’s geis, we can see his downfall coming, as in Greek tragedy.  The hero is led inexorably into breaking his geis, whereupon we can watch the relentless doom stoop ever closer until the inevitable end.  Not my kind of story, to be honest.  But here’s a representative example: Cúchulainn has one geis never to eat dog meat, and another geis that he must eat any food offered him by a woman.  Needless to say, the day comes when a woman offers him dog meat and the hero is ineluctably doomed.
        What I don’t know is what it takes to lay a geis on someone.  Surely not just anyone can say just anything.  It must require something special to make it real and binding.  At any rate, while I tend not to be much interested in stories with inexorable fate, this seems like an idea with lots of interesting possible applications.

[Pictures: Macbeth encountering the witches, woodcut from Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 1577 (Image from Wikimedia Commons);

Cú Chulainn’s Death, by Walter C. Mills, 1921 (Image from paddybrown).]