{"id":366,"date":"2018-11-07T00:56:26","date_gmt":"2018-11-07T05:56:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.superversivesf.com\/inklings\/?p=366"},"modified":"2018-11-07T22:49:29","modified_gmt":"2018-11-08T03:49:29","slug":"kubla-khan-and-father-nicholas-christmas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.superversivesf.com\/inklings\/2018\/11\/07\/kubla-khan-and-father-nicholas-christmas\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cKubla Khan\u201d and Father Nicholas Christmas?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0Article by David Llewellyn Dodds<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"

Tolkien’s illustration of North Polar Bear<\/p><\/div>\n

In 1927, John Livingston Lowes published The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination<\/em><\/a> with a revised edition following in 1930. He traces the \u201ccaves of ice\u201d in Coleridge\u2019s \u201cKubla Khan\u201d (lines 36, 47) to William Bartram\u2019s Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws. Containing an Account of the Soil and Natural Productions of Those Regions; Together with Observations on the Manners of the Indians<\/em><\/a> (1791), by way of a note of Coleridge\u2019s of \u201can Image of Ice\u201d in \u201ca cave in the mountains of Cashmere\u201d (pp. 379-80).<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"I do not know if Tolkien had read this, or was thinking of Coleridge, but in his 23 December 1932 letter to the Tolkien children, Father Nicholas Christmas recounts in his own shaky hand the adventures of his helper, the North Polar Bear (NPB), in \u201cthe caves (belonging to Mr Cave Bear, or so he says) not far from the ruins of my old house\u201d (largely destroyed in 1925 when NPB brought the North Pole down on its dome, but ravaged further the following year when he messed with \u201cthe tap for turning on the Rory Bory Aylis fireworks\u201d \u2013 \u201cstill in the cellar\u201d, there \u2013 releasing \u201call the Northern Lights for two years in one go\u201d). And he illustrates the letter (far from shakily) with reproductions of cave paintings there (not a little resembling renderings of more southerly ones by Abb\u00e9 Henri Breuil), noting Cave Bear says \u201cthe bears first had the idea of decorating the walls, and used to scratch pictures on them on soft parts\u201d \u2013 though later \u201cMen came along\u201d: \u201cCave Bear says there were lots about at one time, long ago, when the North Pole was somewhere else.\u201d What astonishing eye-witness Polar revelations: caves in stone underneath the snow and ice of the North Pole. A Pole, if Ursine tradition can be trusted (for \u201cThat was long before my time, and I never heard old Grandfather Yule mention it even, so I don\u2019t know if he is talking nonsense or not\u201d), which was previously \u201csomewhere else\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"In his delightful Tolkien at Exeter College<\/em> (2014: p. 8), John Garth suggests that in 1911 the young Tolkien \u201cmay have enjoyed knowing that, nearly a century earlier the father of modern geology, Sir Charles Lyell, had also read classics at Exeter College.\u201d Now, Lyell (as Garth may have been thinking), in 1872 had written, \u201cContinents [\u2026] although permanent for whole geological epochs, shift their positions entirely in the course of ages\u201d. And, as it happens, that recurring idea, already a controversial one for some 80 years, the idea to which Alfred Wegener had given the name \u2018continental drift\u2019, was just being championed again in 1931 by Professor Arthur Holmes of Durham University.<\/span><\/p>\n

Was Mr. Cave Bear espousing this, in his own way, just then, as well? Whether Men had added their paintings to the caves and these had then drifted north, or not, something perhaps relevant to that Polar bedrock had been publicly bruited about in years gone by. For, down the centuries, there are various witnesses that (as Hakluyt puts it in his translation of Gerard Mercator) \u201cin the yeere 1360, a certain English Frier, a Franciscan, and a Mathematician of Oxford,\u201d travelled to islands in the far North inhabited by descendants of people King Arthur had settled there, \u201cand passing further by his Magicall Arte, described all those places that he sawe\u201d, including the island at the North Pole, in a book now lost. Peter Heylyn notes that Oxonian\u2019s report of an Arctic island \u201cinhabited by Pygmies, the tallest of them not above four foot high\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now, we know how Tolkien later (Letter 239) told of abandoning the name \u2018Gnomes\u2019 in his work on Middle-earth \u201csince it is quite impossible to dissociate the name from the popular associations of the Paracelsan gnomus = pygmaeus.\u201d But, by 1932, Father Christmas had told the Tolkien children about the \u201cSnow-elves\u201d (1929) and now told them about \u201cthe Gnomes\u201d including \u201cthe Red \"\"Gnomes\u201d already there \u201csomewhere about Edward the Fourth\u2019s time\u201d (1461-70, 1471-83), Gnomes who are the \u201cgreatest enemies\u201d of the \u201cgoblins\u201d, whom they had helped clear out \u201cabout 1453\u201d \u2013 with the letter\u2019s envelope inscribed \u201cBy gnome-carrier\u201d. Might Father Christmas be telling more about the true identity of these \u2018pygmy\u2019 northern Gnomes and the true nature of that solid Polar earth, seen by that old travelling Oxford scholar? The height of \u201csome children of the Red Gnomes\u201d, at least, is shown in a 1932 painting, though that of the Red Gnomes themselves (seeming equally \u2013 if not more \u2013 diminutive) must await 1933.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tolkien might have said of his Polar region in these letters something like what he later said of Middle-earth in The Lord of the Rings<\/em> (Letter 187), \u201cHaving geological interests, and a very little knowledge, I have not wholly neglected this aspect, but its indication is rather more difficult \u2013 and perilous!\u201d Whether he would have been rereading older Father Christmas letters as he worked on his 1936 one, and so have mysterious continents that much the more in mind, as \u201cthe N\u00famenor idea arose between 5 and 8 December 1936, or in the days immediately following\u201d (to quote John Garth), are intriguing questions.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Illustrations by Tolkien, from his Father Christmas letters.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Bibliographical Note<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

The Wikipedia articles, \u201cInventio Fortunata\u201d and \u201cRupes Nigra\u201d are interesting, here, not least for their illustrations and links, while B.F. De Costa offers a convenient (if in many ways startling) overview with quotations in Inventio Fortunata: Arctic exploration with an account of Nicholas of Lynn<\/em> (New York, 1881), conveniently scanned in the Internet Archive. Edward Watson has a very interesting collection of posts at his blog, Clas Merdin: Tales for the Enchanted Island, gathered together under Arthur in the Arctic (linked at the top of its Home page).<\/span><\/p>\n

The quotation from Charles Lyell is from Principles of Geology or The Modern Changes of the Earth and Its Inhabitants Considered as Illustrative of Geology <\/em>(London: John Murray, 1872), p. 258 as scanned in the Internet Archive and linked in the Wikipedia article, \u201cContinental drift\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

The quotation from Richard Hakluyt is from Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation<\/em>, ed. Edmund Goldsmid as transcribed on the University of Adelaide website. The quotation from Peter Heylyn is from Gosmographie <\/em>[sic], The Fourth Book<\/em>: Part II Containing the Chorography & Historie of America, And all the Principal Kingdoms, Provinces, Seas, and Islands of it<\/em> (1656) as found in \u2018microform\u2019 in the Internet Archive.<\/span><\/p>\n

The quotation in the last paragraph comes from John Garth, \u201cWhen Tolkien reinvented Atlantis and Lewis went to\u00a0Mars\u201d (31 March 2017) on his website.<\/span><\/p>\n

J.R.R. Tolkien, Letters from Father Christmas<\/em>, ed. Baillie Tolkien (Hammersmith: HarperCollins, 2009 paperback ed. of 2004 revised ed.)<\/span><\/p>\n

The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien<\/em>, selected and ed. Humphrey Carpenter with the assistance of Christopher Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981).<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0Article by David Llewellyn Dodds In 1927, John Livingston Lowes published The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination with a revised edition following in 1930. He traces the \u201ccaves of ice\u201d in Coleridge\u2019s \u201cKubla Khan\u201d (lines 36, 47) to William Bartram\u2019s Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":369,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,17],"tags":[78,33,80,79],"class_list":["post-366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-speculation","category-tolkien","tag-david-llewellyn-dodds","tag-j-r-r-tolkien","tag-kubla-khan","tag-north-polar-bear"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.superversivesf.com\/inklings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.superversivesf.com\/inklings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.superversivesf.com\/inklings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.superversivesf.com\/inklings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.superversivesf.com\/inklings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=366"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.superversivesf.com\/inklings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":380,"href":"https:\/\/www.superversivesf.com\/inklings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366\/revisions\/380"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.superversivesf.com\/inklings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.superversivesf.com\/inklings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.superversivesf.com\/inklings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.superversivesf.com\/inklings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}