Ungoliant, o 'buraco negro' da Terra Média

[Ilmarinen]

O livro de C.S. Lewis, seu último romance, o elogiado Till We Have Faces ( que eu, mui vergonhosamente, não li ainda), tem uma personagem, ou um aspecto negro dela, Ungit, que é, claramente, um correspondente "espiritual" de Ungoliant, como bem observado por um comentarista na Internet.

Ungit and Ungoliant: Queens of Earth and Darkness

No Reino de Glome-Até termos rostos

“But she had disowned her Master, desiring to be mistress of her own lust, taking all things to herself to feed her emptiness. . .and took shape as a spider of monstrous form, weaving her black webs in a cleft of the mountains. there she sucked up all light that she could find, and spun it forth again in dark nets of strangling gloom, until no light more could come to her abode; and she was famished.”*


And: “I was that Batta-thing, that all-devouring womblike, yet barren, thing. Glome was a web–I the swollen spider, squat at its center, gorged with men’s stolen lives.”**

Lembrando que, além de Ungoliant lembrar Ungit, o reino de Glome lembra "Wirilómë", outro nome de Ungoliant, significando Urdidora de Trevas, "Gloom"weaver O C.S. Lewis pegou o vírus "trocadalho do carilho" do Tolkien

A Ungit do C.S. Lewis parece ser, nesse livro uma espécie de engenharia revertida de Ungoliant, da Rainha da Noite da Flauta Mágica e da Afrodite bitch do Asno de Ouro de Apuleio, onde a história de Eros e Psiquê foi apresentada pela primeira vez.

Uma análise inteira sobre Orual ( a irmã feia, mas amazona/guerreira, de Psiquê no livro) sua relação com a deusa Ungit do livro segue no último link aí. A história, se não me engano, redunda de uma leitura "esotérica" e aprofundada do A Volta de Ela do Rider Haggard e tb da relação entre Imanaala e Tishnar nesse maravilhoso livro do Walter de La Mare, The Three Mulla Mulgars, já mencionado por mim como possível influência pra Shelob e Ungoliant.

Ungit and Orual-Facts, Mysteries and Epiphanies

Mais um linkzinho aí:

A Face de Ungit ( em inglês)

Já vi que vou virar fã da mulher...

Heroic Orual and the tasks of Psyche

 

[Ilmarinen]

Tolkien teve uma citação incluída na nova edição comentada de Sobre os Contos de Fadas onde ele fala do livro de M.R. James, Contos de Fantasma de um Antiquário, famosa coletânea de histórias de horror que inclui o conto "The Ash Tree" com aranhas gigantes.

O conto foi adaptado aí

Dale J. Nelson fez dois artigos especulando a respeito da influência dos contos de James sobre Tolkien:

Extollager
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Feb 26, 2012
#16
Jeffbert said:
Interesting stuff!

Yes -- by the way, another interesting bit from these critical editions comes from Tolkien on Fairy-Stories -- Tolkien knew M. R. James's Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, arguably the best collection of ghost stories in the language. In case anyone's interested, I'll post a couple of things that I wrote for the fine Tolkien newsletter Beyond Bree

http://www.cep.unt.edu/bree.html

on the matter.

TOLKIEN AND M. R. JAMES AND J. S. LE FANU
by Dale Nelson
Not long ago I wrote about 19th- and 20th-century influences on Tolkien for Routledge’s Tolkien Encyclopedia. If I had known then that the professor was acquainted with M. R. James’s Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), I’d have proposed the barrow-wight episode in The Fellowship of the Ring as a passage showing possible “influence.” I’ve only just found out about Tolkien’s awareness of this volume of James’s tales, from the new critical edition of On Fairy-Stories prepared by Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson (London: Harper Collins, 2008; Tolkien’s very brief reference is on page 261).

James wrote four collections of ghost stories, concluding the series in 1925. His stories eschew the conventional Victorian trappings. There are no translucent shades pointing woefully at wall panels or desks that conceal documents whose disclosure will at last secure peace for the dead, justice for the innocent, or punishment for the guilty. However, there is a convincing atmosphere of scholarship in these stories by James (1862-1936), who was a medievalist and the translator of the so-called “New Testament Apocrypha.” He is best known, though, for his ghost stories. The “Jamesian tradition” that developed eventually included collections of stories by R. H. Malden, A. N. L. Munby, L. T. C. Rolt, and others.

Throughout James’s four books, the “ghost” is generally not a specter, but kin to the draug of Norwegian and Icelandic lore: it is undead, repulsive of appearance, tangible, murderous, and perhaps the guardian of buried treasure or a haunter connected with some ancient object. The entity in “’Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,’” perhaps James’s most famous story, is associated with a centuries-old whistle, while the “ghost” in “A Warning to the Curious” guards an ancient crown buried in the sand. Some of James’s “ghosts,” such as the one in “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book,” are like demons in medieval art, or may be tentacled monstrosities, such as the pursuer in “Count Magnus.” Often the Jamesian “ghost” is an active but frightfully emaciated corpse. In the first collection of stories, “The Ash-Tree” provides not only a horribly withered undead attacker, but, interestingly, some large, disgusting spiders, which the creator of “Old Tomnoddy, all big body” in The Hobbit would have appreciated.

The Jamesian ghost is usually glimpsed, or at least not described extensively. The protagonists, scholarly bachelors who, like hobbits, have no desire for excitement, quite often escape having experienced nothing worse than a bad scare. One reason the stories are appealing to many readers is that they combine a sophisticated tone of pedantry with a basically schoolboyish spookery. James censured the introduction of excessive gruesomeness and of sexuality into the ghost story. Effects should be nicely calculated, he wrote in a 1929 essay. “Malevolence and terror, the glare of evil faces, 'the stony grin of unearthly malice', pursuing forms in darkness, and 'long-drawn, distant screams', are all in place, and so is a modicum of blood, shed with deliberation and carefully husbanded; [but] the weltering and wallowing that I too often encounter merely recall the methods of M. G. Lewis.” The loathsome and the dreadful are to be evoked, tastefully, as a mere “peep into Pandemonium.” The object is entertainment, and it was as entertainments that James read some of his tales to intimate audiences on Christmas Eve.

James was an admirer of the ghost stories of the Irish-born Victorian author Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873), and edited a collection of his magazine work as Madame Crowl’s Ghost and Other Tales of Mystery (1923). Le Fanu’s novel The House by the Churchyard contains a short story, “The Authentic Narrative of the Ghost of a Hand,” that is sometimes published independently. A household is terrorized by a hand.

“There was a candle burning on a small table at the foot of the bed, beside the one [Mr. Prosser] held in one hand […]. He drew the curtain at the side of the bed, and saw Mrs. Prosser lying, as for a few seconds he mortally feared, dead, her face being motionless, white, and covered with a cold dew; and on the pillow, close beside her head, and just within the curtains, was, as he first thought, a toad—but really the same fattish hand, the wrist resting on the pillow, and the fingers extended towards her temple.” It transpires that Mrs. Prosser was in a “trance,” and afflicted by horrifying visions or nightmares, while the hand was there.

One wonders if Tolkien might have come across this story at some time before writing “Fog on the Barrow-Downs.”* In that chapter, Frodo, Merry, Sam and Pippin are drawn into a burial mound, and the latter three are cast into a spellbound sleep, somewhat as Mrs. Prosser is. Frodo sees a “long arm… groping, walking on its fingers towards Sam, who was lying nearest.” Frodo grabs a sword and attacks the arm, “and the hand broke off.” Tom Bombadil rescues the hobbits, but as Frodo leaves the barrow he thinks he sees “a severed hand wriggling still.” As if adapting James’s technique, Tolkien provides very little description of the haunter.

So far as I know, Tolkien had no special interest in or liking for ghost stories, but the barrow-wight episode, with its aura of antiquity, and the physical appearance and custodial character of the glimpsed “wight,” recalls the standard Jamesian scenario. The sequence, Tom Shippey has written in The Road to Middle-earth, “could almost be omitted without disturbing the rest of the plot.”** Its inclusion inserted a Jamesian entertainment into The Lord of the Rings; it is an adventure that lacks the sense of seriousness that develops as the great narrative continues.

Notes

*The creeping hand in the barrow may have originated in young Michael Tolkien’s dream of “a gloved hand without an arm that opened curtains a crack after dark and crawled down the curtain.” Tolkien made a colored drawing of this hand, called Maddo, in 1928 (Hammond and Scull: J. R. R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator, pp. 83-84). Of course it’s just possible that young Michael’s dream derived from a reading of Le Fanu’s story, or a retelling of it.

**The barrow-wight episode provides Merry with the sword with which he stabs the chief of the Ringwraiths in The Return of the King; no other blade, we are told, could have dealt the Witch-King so bitter a wound, “cleaving the undead flesh, breaking the spell that knit his unseen sinews to his will.” However, Éowyn’s sword-thrust is the coup de grace. The reader may wonder if the detail about Merry’s blade was a not entirely convincing ploy intended to justify retention of a passage not really integral to the book.

One might consider a more positive take on the episode. We know that the Barrow-wight dates back to a Bombadil poem written before The Lord of the Rings. We see Tolkien drawing up, into the more serious morality of LOTR, material that could indeed be -- for the most part -- integrated into it because it readily related itself to the key theme of the spiritual danger of acquisitiveness. It was appropriate to bring in this theme in an early adventure that was commensurate with the "hobbitry" of the opening chapters. It's as if Tolkien resourcefully, though not perhaps completely, assimilated and transformed the Jamesian entertainment, whose spooks are often possessive beings, for the purposes of LOTR, after having responded imaginatively to it just as amusing creepiness that left a trace in the early Bombadilia.
[FONT=&quot] [/FONT]


Extollager
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#17
Also relevant to Tolkien and M. R. James (I know, this is supposed to be a thread on E. R. B.):


A JAMESIAN SOURCE FOR TOLKIEN’S CONCEPTION OF GOLLUM?
by Dale Nelson
Plate VI of John Rateliff’s Mr. Baggins, the first of the two volumes of The History of The Hobbit, shows a detail from Tolkien’s “Father Christmas Letter” of 1932, which Rateliff says shows a painting of Smaug on a cave wall, and Gollum himself peeking around the edge of a cavern tunnel.

The Gollum-image is very small, but it recalled to my mind James McBryde’s picture of the demonic guardian of “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book ” from M. R. James’s 1904 book Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, which, thanks to the critical edition of Tolkien’s “On Fairy-Stories” that has been prepared by Anderson and Flieger, we now know Tolkien had read. Readers are invited to compare the two images. The McBryde illustration is reproduced here.

Gollum’s starved but ghastly tenacity is in keeping with the demeanor of the typical Jamesian haunter.

Também de grande interesse tem isso aí

Ray McCarthy said:
So I have no difficulty in Lewis liking it (much SF he thought stupid and shallow, he'd not have said that without reading the stuff
Lewis was very well-read in science fiction and was one of the first academics (or the first?) publicly to promote it. Here's an article relevant to the topic.


C. S. Lewis and American Pulp Science Fiction


By Dale Nelson


C. S. Lewis, Oxford don and then Cambridge scholar specializing in medieval and Renaissance literature – an impressionable reader of American science fiction pulps?

The inventor of Narnia – indebted to the co-founder of Arkham House?

It seems so. Lewis made no secret of these debts. In The Great Divorce, he refers to two stories that he thinks came from the cheaply-printed pages of the pulps. He was wrong about one of the stories. The story he refers to in the preface has to have been “The Man Who Lived Backwards,” by the forgotten British author Charles Hall and appeared in a British magazine. But apparently Lewis was so deeply read in the American pulps that he just assumed that he’d read the story, which features raindrop like bullets, in one of them. The other story is alluded to in a footnote: “This method of travel also I learned from the ‘scientifictionists’.”

“Colossus,” which first appeared in the January 1934 issue of Astounding, appears to be the story that suggested to Lewis the idea, central to The Great Divorce, of travel from one universe to a much vaster one -- travel during which the vehicle and passenger(s) expand concomitantly so as to “fit“ the new cosmos. The universe -- ours -- that is left behind in Donald Wandrei’s story is but an atom relative to the size of the universe that is entered. Similarly, in The Great Divorce the immense, sprawling city of Hell is an invisible point relative to the vastness of Heaven’s borderland. The spaceship White Bird, piloted by the intrepid Duane Sharon, expands in Wandrei’s story: “According to the law propounded decades ago by Einstein, the White Bird, all its contents, and he, himself, would undergo a change, lengthening in the direction of flight” as they travel thousands of times the speed of light (54, 56/130). The busful of passengers from Hell expands so that, when it emerges from a tiny crack in the celestial soil, the holiday-makers are “to scale.”

Wandrei’s story may also have suggested to Lewis something of the splendor of outer space that Ransom discovers in Out of the Silent Planet. Sharon beholds “[w]hite suns and blue, pale-orange and apple-green stars, colossal tapestry of night blazing with eternal jewels” and an “emerald sun, flaming in the radiant beauty of birth” (Wandrei 58,59/133, 134). Ransom contemplates “planets of unbelievable majesty, and constellations undreamed of: there were celestial sapphires, rubies, emeralds and pin-pricks of burning gold” (Lewis 31); space is not dead but rather is “the womb of worlds” (32).

I wonder if Wandrei ever read The Great Divorce or Out of the Silent Planet. Lewis may have been aware of the small press that Wandrei and August Derleth founded, since a catalog of books from Lewis’s library, prepared a few years after his death, included at least one AH book, Robert Bloch’s The Opener of the Way. But don’t get too excited about the prospect. Likely enough, the book had belonged to Lewis’s wife, Joy, an American.


Now that you’ve had the chance to wrap your head around the idea of Lewis as pulp-mag reader, let’s consider a little historical background. C. S. Lewis’s “On Science Fiction” was read, or was the basis of a talk, at a 1955 session of the Cambridge University English Club (Hooper xix). In this paper, Lewis said that, “some fifteen or twenty years ago,” he “became aware of a bulge in the production” of stories of the type pioneered by H. G. Wells. Lewis said: “In America whole magazines began to be exclusively devoted to them” (“On Science Fiction” 55). This statement nails down the fact that Lewis read American pulp “scientifiction.” Such magazines were readily available to British readers. Richard Kyle recalls “bins of ‘Yank Magazines – Interesting Reading’ in the English Woolworth stores of the middle ‘30s” (Lupoff 92).

Historian of science fiction Mike Ashley regards the “mid-thirties” as the time in which these magazines exhibited a phase of “cosmic sf,” emphasizing stories that dealt with “not just the exploration of space but the nature of time, space and the universe” (231). Along with “Colossus,” a couple of other such stories may have left traces in Lewis’s own science fiction.

Jack Williamson’s “Born of the Sun” (Astounding, March 1934) may have had something do with Weston’s “rind” remarks at the end of Chapter 13 of Perelandra (1943). In the Williamson story, some at least of the solar system’s moons, as well as its planets, are actually spawn or “‘seed of the Sun’” (Asimov 532): huge egg-like objects from which eventually hatch immense monsters (which possess the ability to fly in a vacuum!). When the planet Earth begins to hatch, there ensue apocalyptic consequences for human beings living on the outer surface of the shell. In Lewis’s novel, Weston describes the universe as a globe with a crust of “‘life’” (the crust, however, being time; it’s about seventy years thick for human beings). As one ages, Weston says, one sinks through the crust until he emerges into the dark, deathly “‘reality’” that God Himself does not know (168). In each story, there is the idea of humanity living on a thin surface beneath which is something truly appalling.

OK, maybe that’s a stretch. How about this one? Edmond Hamilton’s “The Accursed Galaxy” (Astounding, July 1935) may have contributed two essential components to Lewis’s Ransom trilogy.

Hamilton’s story proposes that organic life, viewed very Un-Lewisly as a loathsome contagion, originated two billion years ago when one member of a race of immortal “volitient beings of force” was experimenting with matter. He accidentally released “the diseased matter” from his laboratory, and it rapidly spread from world to world. This “experimenter” (Asimov 717) was punished by the other force creatures by being confined in a “shell of frozen force” (719) that eventually descends to the earth. Human beings involuntarily set him free at the climax of the story. In addition to imprisoning the offender, the other force-creatures also caused the primal super-galaxy to break up into millions of galaxies, all the others rushing away from the infected core -- our own Milky Way galaxy. The vast (and increasing) distances of space effect a cosmic quarantine. Central to Out of the Silent Planet (1938), of course, is the idea of the confinement to our earth of its “bent Oyarsa” (the devil), lest he do further damage, having already stricken the moon and Mars ages ago (121). In the first of the Ransom books, and in Perelandra, human beings are the means by which the devil is enabled to threaten Mars and Venus.

Lewis’s eldila are described, in the Ransom trilogy, as appearing as light. For example, in the first chapter of Perelandra, the narrator sees “a rod or pillar of light” of an unnamable color (18). The force-being who appears in “Accursed Galaxy” is a “forty-foot pillar of blazing, blue light, crowned by a disk of light” (Asimov 719). The edila “do not eat [or] suffer natural death” (Perelandra 9), and Williamson’s force-beings are “immortal” and “[need] no nourishment” (Asimov 717).

It’s reasonable to surmise that Lewis was influenced by impressions of Hamilton’s story as he wrote his own “planet books,” but also that he had forgotten “The Accursed Galaxy,” or judged that his “revisions” of elements from Hamilton’s story were so thorough as to make allusion to it not obligatory.

So, was Prof. C. S. Lewis not only a reader of American pulp mag science fiction, but a writer influenced by it? I think so!




Ashley, Mike. The Time Machines: The Story of the Science-Fiction Pulp Magazines

From the Beginning to 1950. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000.



Asimov, Isaac (ed.). Before the Golden Age: A Science Fiction Anthology of the 1930s.

Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1974.



Hooper, Walter. “Preface.” On Stories and Other Essays on Literature by C. S. Lewis.

San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1982.



Lewis, C. S. The Great Divorce. Glasgow: Fontana, 1972.



----------.“On Science Fiction.” On Stories and Other Essays on Literature. San

Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1982.



- - - - - - - - - -. Out of the Silent Planet. New York: Macmillan, 1973.



- - - - - - - - - -. Perelandra. New York: Macmillan, 1969.



Lupoff, Richard A. and Patricia E. Lupoff. The Best of Xero. San Francisco: Tachyon,

2004. This book is a selection of contributions to a classic fanzine of 1960-1962.



Wandrei, Donald. “Colossus.” Astounding Stories Jan. 1934: 40-72. This story is reprinted, with some changes by the author, in: Colossus: The Collected Science Fiction of Donald Wandrei. Ed. Philip J. Rahman and Dennis E. Weiler. Minneapolis: Fedogan and Bremer, 1989, pages 110-153. “Colossus” does not appear to have been reprinted until 1950 (several years after the composition and publication of The Great Divorce), when it appeared in an anthology, Beyond Time and Space, edited by August Derleth. “Colossus” may also be found in Asimov’s Before the Golden Age anthology.

(c) Dale Nelson 2015; printed originally in Pierre Comtois's magazine Fungi, (c) ca. 2010.

 

[Eriadan]

Que tópico e discussão fantásticos. @Seiko-chan cadê você para voltar a nos bridar com mais desses?

 

[Ilmarinen]

Ah, agora, com o novo filme adaptando o It do King, mais pessoas estão sacando que o tal é da progênie "interdialogética" de Ungoliant

Tolkien's Time Ethics
Mostly Tolkien metas. Occasionally comics.
Tolkien’s Ungoliant and Stephen King’s It – some interesting parallels

Scene from It (1990) - the Losers confront Its ‘true’ from.



While watching the recent adaptation of Stephen King’s It (2017) and reacquainting myself with King’s work in general throughout the past year (including watching some older adaptations of his books, among which was also the 1990 miniseries It), my mind was constantly going back to Ungoliant, Morgoth and the Silmarillion.

Why? Well, some of it undoubtedly has to do with my ongoing interest in Tolkien, but I also managed to find some parallels between Ungoliant and It, and Morgoth and the arch villain of the Kingverse, the Crimson King.

Long story short, enjoy me shamelessly hopping on the It bandwagon!

Warning for the arachnophobic.

So, what do Ungoliant and It have in common?

They both:

1) assume a form of a (female) spider

2) have hunger as one of their defining traits

3) use Deadlights/Darkness, a fear inducing form of ‘unlight’ which traps their victims (connected to the spider form), also used by the Crimson King/Morgoth

4) are ancient and have a somewhat unclear origin

5) have a loose allegiance with the Big Bad’s of their universes (Morgoth/the Crimson King)


What do Morgoth and the Crimson King have in common?

They:

1) use Darkness (Unlight)/Deadlights to achieve their ‘goals’ - Melkor uses it to steal the Silmarils and kill the Trees, and the Crimson King uses it as a weapon (according to The Dark Tower Wiki)

2) have a loose allegiance with a hungry spider-like being who also uses Darkness (Unlight) /Deadlights)

3) both are Big Bads of their respective fictional universes

4) both are trying to rewrite reality in their own image



NOTE: Others have already found some references to the Crimson King being similar to Sauron (The Dark Tower Wiki page on the Crimson King, under ‘Inspiration’). I haven’t yet come across any articles comparing him to Morgoth which I believe to be a better position (to me Randall Flagg seems like a more credible reference to Sauron, even though, of course, overlaps are possible, both because Sauron imitated Morgoth in-universe and because King could have fused them on purpose).

So, let’s first break down the similarities between It and Ungoliant.

While Ungoliant takes the form of a giant spider and is referred to as female, It’s ‘final’ form is also a giant spider.

In the novel It the Losers call It the Spider (i.e. “The Spider stopped laughing”, It p 4153). It also seems to be considered by the Losers as femal(ish) as they refer to It as a 'bitch’ several times (“You k-k-killed my brother, you fuh-fuh-fucking BITCH” (…) p 4099, including the somewhat paradoxical “We killed It” (…) “We killed the bitch.”, It, p 4289) after discovering It’s eggs (It, p 4212).

It’s spider-form was also shown overtly in the finale of the 1990 miniseries It, as a kind of a 'boss-form’ for the Losers to fight:

In the new It adaptation the spider imagery is covert, but still pervasive in the way Pennywise (definitely less ambiguously masculine, in my opinion, than in the 1990 adaptation) behaves and operates. This makes ‘the spider’ more than just another of It’s many forms designed to induce fear.

For example, It lives in the sewers, which are a kind of a web. The new film puts great emphasis on this, giving us both Bill’s model of the sewers and a map of them, both of which serve as visualizations of a ‘spider-web’. The ‘sewer web’ is also in a sense ‘invisible’ (like a real spider web) because it is underground. Thus it is both a hiding place for It and a trap for It’s prey.

Furthermore, as we can see in the Losers first individual encounters with It, the prey Pennywise finds by using the sewers are paralyzed by their own fears - the fears not produced directly by It, but by the ‘mundane’ (as opposed to the ‘supernatural’) part of the plot - mostly bullies and abusive parents. Arguably, It first finds the Losers because they are afraid. Pennywise uses fear (in the new movie It smells fear) to locate its victims and moves through the sewers accordingly, like a spider traverses its own web when its prey becomes entangled in it and it feels the vibrations the prey produces. Fear, in a sense, produces ‘vibrations’ in Pennywise’s spiderweb.

Pennywise’s likeness to a spider in the new adaptation is also shown in the scene where the kidnapped children are suspended in air, as if trapped in some invisible spider web, stashed in a spider’s pantry.

As we can see when Pennywise suspends Beverly Marsh in the same way, all the children there are paralyzed by fear, the aftereffect of looking directly into It’s deadlights. Fear is the spider venom which keeps It’s victims paralyzed and helpless. Deadlights are like a high-concentrate fear-venom that leaves you senseless.

No matter what form It assumes, It always acts like a spider.

Stephen King Wiki says the following on this issue:

“Throughout the book It is generally referred to as male; however, late in the book, the protagonists come to believe that It may be female (due to Its manifestation as a monstrous female spider). This is, however, not Its true form, it is simply the closest the human mind can come to approximating it (…) Its natural form exists in a realm beyond the physical, which It calls the ‘deadlights‘. (…) Coming face to face with the deadlights drives any living being instantly insane.”

This can be compared with the description of the darkening of Valinor and the Elves and Valar’s experience of ‘the Darkness’ that Ungoliant has 'woven’:

“So the great darkness fell upon Valinor. Of the deeds of that day much is told in the Aldudénië, that Elemmírë of the Vanyar made and is known to all the Eldar. Yet no song or tale could contain all the grief and terror that then befell.The Light failed; but the Darkness that followed was more than loss of light. In that hour was made a Darkness that seemed not lack but a thing with a being of its own: for it was indeed made by malice out of Light, and it had power to pierce the eye, and to enter heart and mind, and strangle the very will.” (Silmarillion)

The Darkness that Morgoth unleashed on Valinor with Ungoliant’s help paralyzed the Elves and the Valar to such a degree than they couldn’t immediately pursue them.

It also interesting that, similarly to the paradoxically sounding name 'Deadlights’, Ungoliant’s darkness also gets a paradoxical negative prefix - ‘un’, ('Unlight of Ungoliant’ (Silmarillion p34)). Both present fear, in a sense, but in Tolkien’s case I would argue that the Darkness/Unlight presents above all fixation on the experienced loss, and not moving on creatively, still aptly shown by the spider imagery.

What also comes to mind here is Frodo’s and Sam’s confrontation with Shelob in Shelob’s Lair in The Two Towers.

The new movie’s whole 'Neibolt house hunt’ sequence reminds me very much of that, mainly because Beverly gives It a really good stab in the head after which It retreats like a wounded Shelob when stabbed by Sam. Also, the tunnels of Shelob’s lair are like a 3D spider web, much like King’s town of Derry sewer system is It’s spider web, with the emphasized spacial quality - you are not on the web, you are in the web.

And, yeah, Frodo almost gets stashed in the spider’s pantry, like Beverly.

Furthermore, Tolkien describes Sam’s fear like something akin to an invisible spider web of Shelob:

“But nothing of this evil which they had stirred up against them did poor Sam know, except that a fear was growing on him, a menace which he could not see; and such a weight did it become that it was a burden to him to run, and his feet seemed leaden.” (TTT, Shelob’s Lair)

Sam literally has difficulty moving because of his fear. Then a little bit later he has a moment of ultimate ‘fixation’, a moment of paralyzing fear - he believes Frodo to be dead:

“‘He’s dead!’ he said. ‘Not asleep, dead!’ And as he said it, as if the words had set the venom to its work again, it seemed to him that the hue of the face grew livid green. And then black despair came down on him, and Sam bowed to the ground, and drew his grey hood over his head, and night came into his heart, and he knew no more. When at last the blackness passed, Sam looked up and shadows were about him; but for how many minutes or hours the world had gone dragging on he could not tell. He was still in the same place, and still his master lay beside him dead.” (TTT, The Choices of Master Samwise)

It’s like Sam took a glance at the Deadlights. Notice also how this despair is first described as 'black’, which is a fairly common construction ('black despair’), but then 'blackness’ is described as an entity on it’s own, like it is described in The Darkening of Valinor - “a thing with a being of its own”.

However, Sam manages to disentangle himself from this web – there is a moment of fixation on the experienced loss, but then he goes to the ‘underground’ (externalized by him literally being underground, in Shelob’s lair) of his own thoughts and feelings (this chapter is not named for nothing 'The Choices of Master Samwise’) and manages to move on with the objective of the Fellowship’s mission on his mind:

“‘But what can I do? (…) Or go on? Go on?’ he repeated, and for a moment doubt and fear shook him. ‘Go on? Is that what I’ve got to do? And leave him?’ (…)"‘What? Me, alone, go to the Crack of Doom and all?’ He quailed still, but the resolve grew. ‘What? Me take the Ring from him? The Council gave it to him.’ But the answer came at once: ‘And the Council gave him companions, so that the errand should not fail. And you are the last of all the Company. The errand must not fail.’” (TTT)

At this moment Sam passes Tolkien’s ethical test - he is able to ‘go on’, even after a crippling loss.

So, that would be points 1) and 3).

2) hunger as a defining trait

Hunger is also a big parallel here. Pennywise practically only sleeps (hibernates) and eats, and Ungoliant (just like her offspring Shelob) is always hungry. She ate the Trees’s sap. She tried to eat Morgoth and the Silmarils:

'Blackheart!’ she said. 'I have done thy bidding. But I hunger still.’ (Silm)

She even ate her sex partners:

“(…) other foul creatures of spider form had dwelt there since the days of the delving of Angband, and she mated with them, and devoured them”

And, in the end, probably herself:

“Of the fate of Ungoliant no tale tells. Yet some have said that she ended long ago, when in her uttermost famine she devoured herself at last.”

In the novel, Pennywise describes itself in terms of it’s hunger:

“(…) I am the eater of worlds, and of children. And you are next!”



I didn’t address everything I listed in this post, in particular, those last two parallels between Ungoliant and It:

4) they are ancient and have a somewhat unclear origin

5) they have a loose allegiance with the Big Bad’s of their universes (Morgoth/the Crimson King).

These are tightly connected with the second list that explains the parallels between Morgoth and the Crimson King so I will elaborate on them together in my next post.

Thank you for reading this.

Pennywise Came From Middle-earth

Pennywise The Dancing Clown or also known as Mr. Bob Grey… What is he? Where did he come from? What is the purpose of his slumber and eating of children’s meat saturated with fear? These are questions and debates that have filled message rooms at the far edges of the internet and are ever increasing as we get closer and closer to the reimagining of King’s masterpiece.

I am proposing a darker origin to IT and in no way saying this is exactly canon and more a fun theory to create an assumption and tease the inspirational source for Stephen King that Pennywise has ancestral origins in Middle-earth.

For one let us begin with the ancient one Ungoliant, the word means “Dark Spider” and is a primordial being that chose to take the shape of a giant spider.

In “The Silmarillion” Tolkien explains that she is a primeval old one of the night with an uncontrolled hunger, she collaborated with Melkor (later known as Morgoth) who convinced Ungoliant to attack the Trees of Valinor draining them of their sap. In Tolkien’s novel Valinor was the place where angelic beings derived and had two trees; one of silver, one of gold, and the dew was made of a liquid form of magical light that was destroyed by Ungoliant when she sucked all the source from the trees thus killing them.

After she attacked Varda drinking the reserves of light from their wells, the Valar attacked her forcing her to flee to a land called Nan Dungortheb (No Land) and created a home made of dark light webs called Unlight. There Ungoliant mated with the Giant Spiders of the area creating a horde of evil spawn, one well known who took residents in the mountains of Mordor known as Shelob.

Ungoliant was presumed to have perished by her own hunger, with an infinite emptiness ever growing it was rumored that she ultimately ate herself leaving her undetermined amount of children to ravage the land and spread out across the world.

Now am I saying that Pennywise is Ungoliant? No, but I am saying there are marvelous similarities between this ancient being and the thing from the Macroverse and the idea could be flirted with that possibly not only was Pennywise a product of Ungoliant but maybe another character from King’s Dark Tower Series as well.
Let us start with the origin of It, the Macroverse is described as a void surrounding our present universe, it is later described in the Dark Tower series as the Todash Universe or a purgatory existing in between the infinite of alternate universes.

This puts It and brethren in the same realm as The Turtle or Maturin, Maturin is the eternal enemy of It representing creation as opposed to It’s consumption. Maturin is also one of the 12 Guardians of the Beams that like a spiral on a wheel is the power that holds up the Dark Tower. These Beams are forces that have no age and derive from the beginning of the Universe, each Beam has a Guardian in figurative form of an animal.

This is very similar to the enemy of Ungoliant the Valar, who attacked her after she drained the light from the wells of Varda. The Valar are type of ‘gods’ or angelic beings”, they have no physical form but often took the shape of Men, Elves or others creatures from nature with 14 in all 7 Lords and 7 Queens.

Next let us investigate the “Dead-Lights”, in IT’s final form it showed what the children referred to as the “Dead-Lights” a living darkness that possibly had an orange tint to it with the ability to cause great suffering and death with soul destroying powers.

Pennywise was said to be made of this darkness and the Crimson King from the Dark Tower Series and Insomnia holds this “magical ability” as well as the capability of shape shifting into whatever his victim fears.

It could be speculated as conjecture that the Crimson King and IT are two of the 6 greater demon elementals (as was described in Song of Susannah) from the Prim; or also known as The Void.

These are characteristics shared with Ungoliant, who produced the Unlight. The Unlight was an inexplicable and ever encompassing nothingness of horror and dread, taking in all light that crossed its path. It was described as similar to silk but indestructible and thick and polluted the area with a terrible darkness with the ability to disorient and distract.

At this point I am sure I have infuriated King fans and positive that Tolkien fans have stopped reading a long time ago. For those that have stuck with me on my thesis you are probably at the point asking where I am going with this?

I am simply entertaining the concept that this ancient evil from before chose the physical form of a spider and had an uncontrollable hunger with a passion to destroy light, eat worlds and procreate hordes of evil.

Out of the unknown amount of Ungoliant’s children, some inherited an ability to change form. One or more of her lineage broke out of Tolkien’s Verse with one landing specifically in prehistoric Derry. Since her ancestral line has knowledge of man and other beings IT was aware of their eventual evolution, biding IT’s time to feast on the fear from the light of children.

Ungoliant had an unsatisfied hunger, IT knew this and saw as a potential weakness with fatal consequences choosing to create a home territory where it would hibernate every 30 years allowing food source to flourish then rise and feast completely undisturbed for hundreds of years.

Since there is balance in the cosmos IT was confronted with the force of the Beams in this case The Turtle who IT eventually was able to kill. IT’s ultimate fatal ignorance was the lack of understanding of the the light of children, and the power to combine into a force capable of destroying darkness (Creation of The Turtle). The strength of friendship over came IT as the strength of Sam to defend Frodo after he was poisoned by Shelob one of Ungoliant’s known children helped save the hobbits.

There is no secret that King was greatly inspired and drew his imagination from reading Tolkien and though I am drawing thin conclusions based on two separate stories from two different writers, as a fan I am interested and find it intriguing to imagine that there are some connections.

So when I reread IT again (because I always do) I like to pretend when the part comes where Richie and Mike see the great orange flash breaking into our Universe that there is a slight possibility that where IT came from was primordial Middle-earth. If this is blasphemy so be it, but it is intriguing to consider that worlds do collide.

 

[Neoghoster Akira]

Eu consigo enxergar a forma pela qual Tolkien poderia ter chegado a se interessar por este assunto.

De fato eu estava por aí procurando sobre as influências na arte da Pauline Baynes quando ela desenha a cidade de Charn no livro O Sobrinho do Mago (minha tradução é antiga e a chama de Sepul e o livro é Os Anéis Mágicos) e topei com um comentário falando em como os designs das roupas e estruturas lembravam os povos bárbaros que invadiram Roma, em especial ao saque de Roma pelos Góticos que derivaria também no período medieval (foco de interesse de Tolkien).

O horror em Tolkien e a atmosfera de antigüidade também vão beber no fascínio que esses povos exerciam para os povos civilizados por Roma, afinal góticos eram sinônimo para "bárbaros". É como Cemitério Maldito (Pet Cemetery) do Stephen King que brinca com a idéia de um terror local previamente habitado por povos bárbaros (por sinal acho que teve um trailer para a nova versão esse ano do filme dos anos 80s).

Curioso notar que em Nárnia a Bruxa é uma fonte de terror ancestral. Ela vem de um mundo antigo e a beira da morte, de fora. As crianças a encontram em uma cidade morta, uma cidade fantasma aonde o terror foi petrificado numa imagem antiga.

 

[Ilmarinen]

 

[Ilmarinen]

 

[Ilmarinen]

Superman e Mulher-Maravilha vão ficar juntos na Nova DC

Superman e Mulher-Maravilha terão um relacionamento amoroso na DC Comics. Geoff Johns, o diretor criativo da editora, revelou hoje cedo que os dois super-heróis vão ficar juntos na edição 12 da HQ Justice League, da Liga da Justiça, que sai na próxima semana nos EUA. Detalhes não foram...

www.valinor.com.br

 

[Ilmarinen]

Para quem, porventura, possa ( e até devesse ter dúvidas) sobre a postagem de cima... explicação nos comentários dessa postagem aí:

https://www.facebook.com/paulo.lages.90/posts/1390632344370051

 

[Amadeath]

---




Temos aqui um ser de complexidade inimaginável, que mantém uma relação de amor e ódio com a luz: Ungoliant se alimenta dela, num processo perpétuo de busca de preencher seu vazio interior - que pode ser interpretado como um vazio existencial, pois quando foi criada, Melkor não tinha uma real utilidade para ela, ou físico, uma espécie de dimensão vazia, uma 'zona morta' ou até mesmo um buraco negro, que suga toda e qualquer forma de energia e a converte em energia própria, ou em antiluz:



Buracos negros apenas sugam energia, inclusive energia luminosa que se perde em seu interior, mas ela 'metabolizava' a luz absorvida em forma de veneno ou 'antiluz' - as nuvens e teias de escuridão perene que frequentemente envolviam a ela e ao seu covil não seriam de fato somente 'escuridão', mas sim a completa ausência - ou utilizava para aumentar o tamanho de seu invólucro físico. Veículo este que, por sorte, separa o mundo material de ser sugado por este 'vazio suspenso' em seu interior.

As questões são:

A natureza de Ungoliant pode ser atribuída realmente a um 'buraco negro' possuidor de um 'invólucro' vivo e dotado de consciência?

Qual seria o comportamento de gemas de luz perene como as Silmarilli, se engolidas por ela? Seria ela finalmente saciada em sua fome terrível?

Ou, sendo Ungoliant composta de energia negativa, projeção direta do canto dissonante de Melkor - e consequentemente, uma 'figura-pensamento' composta da maldade em estado puro - seria ela destruída pelo choque quântico derivado do contato com uma energia diretamente antagônica à dela?


---

Muito interessante as perguntas que propôs. Gostei. Muito perspicaz e inteligente. Show! Vou pensar e depois respondo. Obrigado pelo conteúdo de alto nível.

 

[Ilmarinen]

Pq o Google agora deu pra esconder de mim o tópico do Tio de Bombadil

Tio de Tom Bombadil?

Tom Bombadil é mais antigos que os rios mas nas Aventuras de Tom Bombadil no 7 capítulo ele diz que o Troll está roendo o osso de seu tio(ele acaba chutando o Troll e entortando o pé). Se ele é tão antigo como possui um tio? Existem teorias que ele é um Maia ou um espírito da natureza, talvez...

www.valinor.com.br

E vale aqui lembrar: qual é MESMO, em termos de "tipo" de "estória", que é o outro poema da coletânea do Bombadil sem correspondência óbvia mítica no Legendarium e a que ele (o poema) fazia alusão "criptografada" ao ponto de ser "bombadiliano" e "silmarilliano" ao mesmo tempo, uma coisa que foi discutida em OUTRO tópico...lembrando que Tolkien disse que Melkor havia pervertido vários dos maiar rebeldes com "dádivas traiçoeiras" (Annatar, anyone?).

Olha uma "dádiva traiçoeira" aí nessa cena do A Lenda Neoghoster.

E também vale dizer...o The Book of Lost Tales I traz uma figura "Bombadiliana" que é uma espécie de cruzamento de Pã com Flautista de Hamelin e Peter Pã(n)...com uma PORRADA de paralelos interessantes com o Tom Bombadil, pra começar a origem incerta, já que Tolkien deu PELO MENOS 3 versões alternativas da sua natureza e raízes nos manus-cri(s)tos do Livro dos Contos Perdidos...o tal era o TIN(M?) fang Warble...

Tinfang Warble
Tinfang Warble
Tinfang Warble
Physical Description
Race Half Elf, half Fay
Gender Male
Tinfang, whom the children call Tinfang Warble is a creature mentioned in The Book of Lost Tales and in the poem Tinfang Warble.

Vairë tells to Eriol about Tinfang Warble, a spirit who is half fay of Palúrien and half Elf (Gnome or Solosimpi). He was a flautist whose fluting had an enchantment, and the stars twinkled according to his notes. Not even the Solosimpi could rival his fluting.

He led the Elves forth with his piping, and could be heard in the Great Lands and sometimes also in Alalminórë. Eriol also heard him.[1]

Contents
[hide]

• 1 Other versions of the Legendarium
• 2 Etymology
• 3 Inspiration
• 4 References

[edit] Other versions of the Legendarium
Tinfang Gelion is mentioned in the Lay of Leithian as being one of the greatest of the minstrels of the Elves, beside Maglor and next to Daeron.[2]

"Tinfang Gelion who still the moon
enchants on summer nights of June
and kindles the pale firstling star..."
― Lay of Leithian Canto III
[edit] Etymology
The meaning of Tinfang is "star-beard" (from tinu "spark, little star" + fang "beard"; found in The Etymologies of The Lost Road).[source?] He apparently was one of those few elves who grew beards during the first age of their life, like Mahtan.[source?]

Gelion can also be found in several other compounds.

[edit] Inspiration
His name probably comes from an earlier poem Tolkien penned named Tinfang Warble (poem), about a fairy-bird.[source?]


References

1. ↑ J.R.R. Tolkien, Christopher Tolkien (ed.), The Book of Lost Tales Part One, "The Chaining of Melko", p. 94 ff
2. ↑ J.R.R. Tolkien, Christopher Tolkien (ed.), The Lays of Beleriand, "III. The Lay of Leithian: Canto III (Beren's meeting with Lúthien)", p. 174

Categories: Articles needing citation | Characters in The Book of Lost Tales | Elves | Gnomish names | Spirits

Quanto à seriedade da leitura possível que o poema A Noiva Sombra fazia taí como foi previamente discutido

Dica Neoghoster....

a correlação que a história do Shadow Bride tem com a história e a natureza de Tom Bombadil-Goldberry reside no fato de que é uma versão da história de Kore-Perséfone e Hades ( como bem analisou o Kocher ainda na década de setenta), onde Hades sequestra a Moça do Mundo Luminoso pro Submundo. Onde eles se casam hierogamicamente.

Constraste e compare isso com a forma com que Bombadil aborda Golberry e a arrebata da "Mãe do Rio"

Dá uma lida nos textos nos links nas minhas postagens anteriores.



Ver anexo 69104
Ver anexo 69105

January 12, 1964

From 'Shadow-Bride'
By J. R. R. Tolkien

There was a man who dwelt
alone,
as day and night went past
he sat as still as carven stone,
and yet no shadow cast.
The white owls perched upon his
head
beneath the winter moon;
they wiped their beaks and
thought him dead
under the stars of June.
There came a lady clad in grey
in the twilight shining:
one moment she would stand and
stay,
her hair with flowers en-
twining.
He woke, as had he sprung of
stone,
and broke the spell that
bound him;
he clasped her fast, both flesh
and bone,
and wrapped her shadow
round him.

There never more she walks her ways
by sun or moon or star ;
she dwells below where neither days
nor any nights there are.
But once a year when caverns yawn
and hidden things awake,
they dance together then till dawn
and a single shadow make.

J. R. R. Tolkien in "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses From The Red Book."
Return to the Books Home Page




13. A NOIVA-SOMBRA

Era um homem que sozinho vivia

enquanto dia após noite fugia;

sentado e quedo como pedra lavrada,

sem qualquer sombra projetada.

Corujas brancas para ele subiam

sob as estrelas que surgiam;

limparam os bicos, julgando-o indisposto

sob a Lua de Agosto.

Então uma dama toda de cinzento,

surgiu no crepúsculo pardacento:

por um momento ficou olhando,

flores no cabelo entrançando.

Ele acordou como da pedra saído

e quebrou o encanto que o tinha prendido.



Tomou-a nos braços, a carne e o osso,

e a sombra enrolou no seu pescoço.

E então não mais ela ali apareceu

sob o Sol ou a Lua do céu;

vive lá embaixo na caverna triste,

onde nem a noite nem o dia existe.

Mas uma vez por ano, quando as cavernas bocejam

e as coisas surgem para que as vejam,

eles dançam juntos até a alvorada,

como uma só sombra alada

Reassista A Lenda de Ridley Scott.

Ou com a trilha sonora instrumental clássica do Jerry Goldsmith ( prefiro)

Mais informações ligadas de perto a esse tema no livro da Leslie Jones ( a mesma que analisou as correlações entre Bombadil e Taliesin) no capítulo sobre o "Casal Cósmico Céltico", o Cosmic Couple .

Ver anexo 69111

Checa isso aí também

adicione-se isso:

Contudo, tão extraordinário era o poder de sua rebelião, que, em eras esquecidas, combateu Manwë e todos os Valar, e durante longos anos em Arda manteve a maior parte dos territórios da Terra sob seu domínio. Mas não estava sozinho. Pois, dos Maiar, muitos foram atraídos por seu esplendor em seus dias de majestade, permanecendo fiéis a ele em seu mergulho nas trevas.E outros ele corrompeu mais tarde, atraindo-os para si com mentiras e presentes traiçoeiros

E quem é (simbolegoriza) a "Lili"(tch(!)- vcs inda numdivi(n-a((r)r)nharam???) de A Lenda-Legend?

Resposta: (Tcham, Tcham, Tcham, Tchaaaaaaammmmm)

** Posts duplicados combinados **

Shall We Dance?: Legend’s Lily and the Subversion of the Damsel Stereotype
by Genevieve Valentine

Legend has long been the whipping boy of fantasy moviemakers and fans alike. The criticism comes not entirely without cause—any fantasy movie with Tom Cruise in it is already on notice, and the production design suffers from an overabundance of sincerity and fake flower petals. But Ridley Scott’s vision for Legend was a dark and subversive take on the archetypal fairy tale princess, as lushly appointed as a Cocteau film, and in the fantasy spectrum, it has less in common with Disney’s heroines than with the Cinderella whose sisters sliced off their heels and toes to fit into the glass slipper.

The film has the feel of a story you heard as a child, and even if this story is new, the elements are old standards: the heroic wood-dweller who fights his way through the briars to win his princess; the innocent princess enchanted by the darkness; and Darkness himself, a no-bones-about-it villain who’s Satan’s own son. Jack takes his beloved Lily into the forest to see the pair of unicorns that dwell in it. Lily, assuming that her pure heart will keep the animals safe, touches one—which is shot by a demon and butchered for its horn. As the world above turns to winter, Lily and the world’s last unicorn are kidnapped, and Jack must summon the magic folk of the forest to steal the unicorn—and Lily—back from the underworld before the world freezes to death.

Make no mistake, the movie’s first act is a game of Archetype Bingo. However, what keeps Legend from being paint-by-numbers and gives a Gothic cast to the sun-and-pollen-drenched first act is the way Scott gives Lily a narrative arc that stands apart from the hero’s quest. Jack, the brave child of the wood, is a good-hearted boy aided by the fairy folk and able to resist all temptation. It’s Lily who takes the journey in this film, though like her folk-tale counterparts (most obviously Persephone and the young queen from “East of the Sun, West of the Moon,” whose innocent mistakes set the stage for their growth and redemption), Lily does not escape suffering. It’s a neat subversion of the damsel trope that pervades modern fantasy movies, and it sets Legend in the realm of the modern fantasy film: movies that examine, rather than perpetuate, old myths.

The movie’s most pivotal scene is the seduction of Lily in the hall of Darkness. Scott makes no bones about what Darkness intends to do with the captive girl; she is locked in a chamber fitted up with the world’s most foreboding dinner for two, given jewels, and bewitched by a possessed black gown that tempts her into a dance—and into the dress. Scott leaves the scene ambiguous; is the dress itself bewitched, or has Lily simply given in to the lure of the beautiful dark? Another thematic question arises: the moment one ceases to fight evil, has one to some degree given in? (Interestingly, it’s one he chooses not to answer, opting instead for a much more ham-fisted morality play at movie’s end.)

As Darkness emerges from a mirror in all his monstrous bulk to woo his intended bride, Lily fearfully resists his advances, every inch the protesting innocent. However, as Darkness makes clear that he is not looking for a meal, but a wife, she cunningly tempers her responses to him, going so far as to deliberately provoke him and then to laugh coyly when he rages. Darkness is confused, aroused, and—when she asks if she may kill the unicorn as a wedding present—nearly joyful.

Tim Curry and Mia Sara’s tête-à-tête lends a dangerous, sensual edge to what could have been a stilted seduction; Curry manages to telegraph his attraction to (and even fondness for) Lily through three inches of mask, and Sara pitches her voice stronger and lower with every line, changing in a single scene from an ingénue to a femme fatale. The audience takes Darkness’s love on faith; with such an alluring object, how could he resist?

Jack, relegated to the active background, assembles a tunnel of mirrors that will bring light into the caves and defeat Darkness (an interesting parallel to the demon-glass through which Darkness travels—in Legend, no object is inherently evil or good, except as it’s used). Jack’s actions are Noble Hero 101: surrounding himself with allies, navigating tests, devising a plan, rescuing the princess. But Scott is twisting, not replaying, the fairy tale, and so it’s Lily we follow into the dark, and her fate for which we worry. Jack will succeed because of his inherent goodness; Lily has confronted her dark side, and may or may not be changed beyond redemption.

This dark twist carries into the final confrontation, when a concealed Jack and the wood-nymph Gump wait to see if Lily will go through with her strike and cut off the unicorn’s horn. Jack is confident that she’s not as evil as she looks; he closes his eyes and whispers, “I trust you, Lily.” Tellingly, the wood-sprite Gump, whose eyes are open, lifts his bow to shoot her. Of course, Lily (never really as evil as she seemed) frees the unicorn with the axe-stroke, and in the ensuing melee all is forgotten, but Gump’s drawn bow is Scott’s tantalizing hint to the viewer that Lily really is no longer the innocent girl Jack knew.

Scott’s thematic point in making Legend is that a little bit of evil can be a very good thing, even a necessary thing. For those who might have missed the message, Tim Curry helpfully screams it just as he’s sucked into the abyss. Despite the falsely-bright ending, it’s obvious in the movie’s last few minutes that without this hardship to struggle against, our heroes really were the jam-boned milksops the demons mocked them for being. The Lily who outsmarted the son of the Devil will be a much better queen than the Lily who thought that no harm could come to her if her intentions were pure.

It’s unfortunate that, because of filming difficulties and test audiences who wanted a happy ending, none of the rewards of Lily’s journey reach the petal-soaked final minutes of implied connubial bliss. The director’s cut ameliorates this by sending Lily home to the palace and leaving Jack among his true kind, the fairy folk; it’s a much more ambiguous and satisfying ending, but it still falls short of what it could be—a fairy tale, all grown up.

Legend suffers from an overabundance of glitter, stilted editing in its theatrical release, and one of Tom Cruise’s more wooden performances, which is saying something. However, in the end none of that takes away from a genuinely dark and beautiful tale about good against evil, where good conquers not by rejecting evil, but by overcoming it—a rare trick in fantasy filmmaking, and one that makes Legend a more complicated fairy tale than it seems.

(Turns out I’m not the only person who thinks this; some kind soul on YouTube has put together a great series of clips. Enjoy!)

Genevieve Valentine is a writer in New York; her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Farrago’s Wainscot, Diet Soap, Journal of Mythic Arts, and Fantasy. Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on her blog. She is currently working on a formula to evaluate the awfulness of any given film, a scale that will be measured in Julians.

@Deriel @ana @Rufgand @Lew @Thor @Fea podem querer conferir isso

Legenda pra picture de baixo

'Dance with me my former lover, let us dance the Music of the Night".

( Dance comigo meu outrora amado, vamos dançar a Música da Noite...

Spoiler

E agora com um look e uma pegada mais pelospalpospa(l)pável

E arremata com isso

E ISSO pq Music of the Night sem Sarah Brightman... mesmo que eu tenha que aguentar o dano colateral do Antônio Banderas...

 

[Ilmarinen]

https://www.facebook.com/paulo.lages.90/posts/2711538365612769

 

[Ilmarinen]

Frodo and his Spectre: Blakean Resonances in Tolkien

Comparisons between Blake and Tolkien are tempting, not least because of superficial resemblances, but more valid comparisons can be made in their treatment of similar underlying themes. One such is that shown in the opposition of Los and his Spectre (Blake) and of Frodo and Gollum (Tolkien)...

dc.swosu.edu

HTML SiteMap

v

https://www.facebook.com/paulo.lages.90/posts/3003883466378256

 

[Ilmarinen]

Para quem já assistiu Babylon 5 e o desenho japonês Heroic Age ( como seus análogos de Ungoliant) assim como o space opera original Lensman* isso NÃO É novidade.

The Transcension Hypothesis, John M. Smart, 2011

*ou pensando fora do espaço sideral propriamente dito, olhando pro lLegendarium de Tolkien, B5 e Heroic Age são baseados um BOCADÃO no Silmarillion. E Tolkien pode ter sido influenciado por E.E.Doc Smith e seus Lensman.

https://www.facebook.com/paulo.lages.90/posts/3003261173107152

https://www.facebook.com/paulo.lages.90/posts/2369221719844437

X-Men Read Through blog - X-Men - Comic Vine

Hi everyone. I wanted to start a blog because in about a month I’m gonna start re-reading X-Men comics from 1963 to about 2000 although I will most l

comicvine.gamespot.com

https://www.facebook.com/paulo.lages.90/posts/3003824473050822

Books by Nesbit, E. (Edith) (sorted by popularity)

Project Gutenberg offers 74,690 free eBooks for Kindle, iPad, Nook, Android, and iPhone.

www.gutenberg.org

https://www.facebook.com/paulo.lages.90/posts/2711538365612769

https://www.facebook.com/paulo.lages.90/posts/3003883466378256

X-Men Read Through blog - X-Men - Comic Vine

Hi everyone. I wanted to start a blog because in about a month I’m gonna start re-reading X-Men comics from 1963 to about 2000 although I will most l

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FRIDTJOF NANSEN & E. NESBIT

 

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E olhem os trocentos comentários:

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Power of the Void

Some characters use the Power of Darkness to show off how cool they are. Not this guy. When darkness isn't dark enough, the only thing that can properly express your morally dubious badassery is the Power of the Void--power over nothingness. Of course, how this actually works isn't always very...

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