If I post about some obvious point in a text by Poul Anderson, then there is a good chance that I have posted about it before. However, there remain many unobvious points. Some legendary supernatural beings are vulnerable to sunlight so what would it feel like for them to be caught in it?
"As the first beams touched him, Balamorg screamed. Holger had never heard such agony before... He writhed and changed, gruesomely." (p. 79)
CS Lewis dreams:
"'The morning! The morning!' I cried, 'I am caught by the morning and I am a ghost.' But it was too late. The light, like solid blocks, intolerable of edge and weight, came thundering upon my head."
-CS Lewis, The Great Divorce (London, 1982), pp. 117-118.
Then he woke up.
(Those were imaginative accounts of the fates of a giant and a ghost.)
6 comments:
Holger spun out the conversation until it was too late for B.
Kaor, to Both!
We see something similar in the "Roast Mutton" chapter of THE HOBBIT. Gandalf beguiled the trolls who captured the dwarves into wasting time quarreling over how to cook their prisoners until it was too late, and they were turned into stone by the rising sun.
Ad astra! Sean
Yeah, conventionally the foot-soldiers of evil are dumb. This is wishful thinking, by the way.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree it's a mistake to think all "...the foot-soldiers of evil are dumb." Still, trolls are generally perceived to be, well, dumb as rocks.
A better example would be the orcs we see in Tolkien's legendarium--not all of whom were stupid. Examples I've thought of being Ugluk, the Uruk-Hai captain commanding the orcs of Saruman which captured Merry and Pippin. Ugluk struck me as being a tough and able soldier. I also thought of the conversation Gorbag (commanding the patrol from Minas Morgul) had with Shagrat in "The Choices of Master Samwise." Gorbag was quite shrewd in his analysis of how the war with Gondor was going, strongly suspecting not everything was going well. And that orc sergeant in Book Six, Chapter II of LOTR, with his sardonic "Where there's a whip, there's a will,..." was grimly amusing.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: Of course, orcs are corrupted elves, IIRC.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Yes, that was one alternative, among others that Tolkien considered. But he never came to a final decision on how best to regard the origins of the orcs.
Elves corrupted and debased by Morgoth seems to me the simplest possibility. With Saruman later adding a "nice" touch in extra degradation by mating orcs with men, breeding the fighting Uruk-Hai.
Ad astra! Sean
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