Locus Focus

Locus Focus is hosted at Shredded Cheddar and is all about settings in books. Read the rules and share a setting!

"Even Sauron knows them not. They are older than he."

A setting in Middle-earth is primarily drawn through a mini-history unfolding within that setting's longer and larger history. One receives a vivid evocation of the place when in the middle of it; that is to say, in the middle of the actions taking place there. But there are worlds in Middle-earth so low and so high, so beyond knowledge, that they occupy a mere two pages in The Two Towers; and it is enough to "take the lid off your top" and beset one with wild wonder, of a kind that is deeply ingrained in the soul - unless of course one is a zombie.

"'Then tell us what you will, and time allows!' said Gimli. 'Come, Gandalf, tell us how you fared with the Balrog!'

'Name him not!' said Gandalf, and for a moment it seemed that a cloud of pain passed over his face, and he sat silent, looking old as death. 'Long time I fell,' he said at last, slowly, as if thinking back with difficulty. 'Long I fell, and he fell with me. His fire was about me. I was burned. Then we plunged into the deep water and all was dark. Cold it was as the tide of death: almost it froze my heart.'

'Deep is the abyss that is spanned by Durin's Bridge, and none has measured it,' said Gimli.

'Yet it has a bottom, beyond light and knowledge,' said Gandalf. 'Thither I came at last, to the uttermost foundations of stone. He was with me still. His fire was quenched, but now he was a thing of slime, stronger than a strangling snake.

'We fought far under the living earth, where time is not counted. Ever he clutched me, and ever I hewed him, till at last he fled into dark tunnels. They were not made by Durin's folk, Gimli son Gloin. Far, far below the deepest delvings of the Dwarves, the world is gnawed by nameless things. Even Sauron knows them not. They are older than he. Now I have walked there, but I will bring no report to darken the light of day. In that despair my enemy was my only hope, and I pursued him, clutching at his heel. Thus he brought me back at last to the secret ways of Khazad-dum: too well he knew them all. Ever up now we went, until we came to the Endless Stair.'

'Long has that been lost,' said Gimli. 'Many have said that it was never made save in legend, but others say that it was destroyed.'

It was made, and it had not been destroyed,' said Gandalf. 'From the lowest dungeon to the highest peak it climbed, ascending in unbroken spiral in many thousand steps, until it issued at last in Durin's Tower carved in the living rock of Zirakzigil, the pinnacle of the Silvertine.

That swift but solid efficiency with which Tolkien emblazons in the mind this incredible place: "They were not made by Durin's folk, Gimli son Gloin." and "He was with me still." And how is it that to ponder the existence of this place entails an awesome sort of reformulation, or harrowing, of everything else existent in the world, in Middle-earth? Suddenly the world is living, more than one could even imagine. Gandalf continues:

'There upon Celebdil was a lonely window in the snow, and before it lay a narrow space, a dizzy eyrie above the mists of the world. The sun shone fiercely there, but all below was wrapped in cloud. Out he sprang, and even as I came behind, he burst into new flame. There was none to see, or perhaps in after ages songs would still be sung of the Battle of the Peak.' Suddenly Gandalf laughed. 'But what would they say in song? Those that looked up from afar thought that the mountain was crowned with storm. Thunder they heard, and lightning, they said, smote upon Celebdil, and leaped back broken into tongues of fire. Is not that enough? A great smoke rose about us, vapour and steam. Ice fell like rain. I threw down my enemy, and he fell from the high place and broke the mountain-side where he smote it in his ruin. Then darkness took me, and I strayed out of thought and time, and I wandered far on roads that I will not tell.'

Gandalf asks, "Is that not enough?" Yes, it is.

You have to wonder, what would be more terrible: to be at the bottom of the abyss of Khazad-dum, which gives "forsaken" and "lost" in any other place of the world, like a deserted island or the middle of the Amazon, the look and feel of home; or on the pinnacle of the Silvertine (the window out onto it being caved-in), "without escape upon the hard horn of the world"?

These two settings, linked by the "lost" Endless Stair, are somewhat like those margins of Middle-earth where the Elves go sailing (completely different too of course), but they are quite concretely within Middle-earth.

Locus Focus - Morgul Vale

The Scary Settings at Shredded Cheddar continue!

'No!' said Frodo. 'But do not wander from your road. What of the third turning?'

'O yes, O yes, there is a third way,' said Gollum. 'That is the road to the left. At once it begins to climb up, up, winding and climbing back towards the tall shadows. When it turns round the black rock, you'll see it, suddenly you'll see it above you, and you'll want to hide.'

What was Minas Ithil, or the Tower of the Moon, in former times long ago, built by Isildur (who cut the ring from the hand of Sauron), is now Minas Morgul, the Tower of Black Sorcery. If Isildur built Minas Ithil long ago, it was very, very long ago; for when the Nazgul, the Nine Ringwraiths (former kings of Numenor), took it over and the valley about it (Morgul Vale), that too was long ago.

The evil of this place is such that to look upon it can drive a person mad. There is a perpetual and penetrating watchfulness, as though the city itself were a person. The city of the Morgul Vale is, one might say, an anti-Lothlorien. It is a "paradise" of superior evil grown unabated as an enclosed garden over countless years, that you suddenly come upon, after you "turn round the black rock". Frodo who comes near this place with Sam and Gollum feels himself both loathing it being drawn toward it, sucked towards its very gate, which Tolkien likens to a mouth. Faramir tells about the history to Frodo:

'The valley of Minas Morgul passed into evil very long ago, and it was a menace and dread while the banished Enemy dwelt yet far away, and Ithilien was still for the most part in our keeping. As you know, that city was once a strong place, proud and fair, Minas Ithil, the twin sister of our own city. But it was taken by fell men whom the Enemy in his first strength had dominated, and who wandered homeless and masterless after his fall. It is said that their lords were men of Numenor who had fallen into dark wickedness; to them the Enemy had given rings of power, and he had devoured them: living ghosts they were become, terrible and evil. After his going they took Minas Ithil and dwelt there, and filled it, and all the valley about, with decay: it seemed empty and was not so, for a shapeless fear lived within the ruined walls. Nine Lords there were, and after the return of their Master, which they aided and prepared in secret, they grew strong again. Then the Nine Riders issued forth from the gates of horror, and we could not withstand them. Do not approach their citadel. You will be espied. It is a place of sleepless malice, full of lidless eyes. Do not go that way!'

Morgul Vale is so awful in part because it was so beautiful before it became the dwelling of the Ringwraiths. The evil is seen in how it twists and perverts the former beauty:

'A long-tilted valley, a deep gulf of shadow, ran back far into the mountains. Upon the further side, some way within the valley's arms, high on a rocky seat upon the black knees of the Ephel Duath, stood the walls and tower of Minas Morgul. All was dark about it, earth and sky, but it was lit with light. Not the imprisoned moonlight welling through the marble walls of Minas Ithil long ago, Tower of the Moon, fair and radiant in the hollow of the hills. Paler indeed than the moon ailing in some slow eclipse was the light of it now, wavering and blowing like a noisome exhahalation of decay, a corpse-light, a light that illuminated nothing. In the walls and tower windows showed, like countless black holes looking inward into emptiness...'

And again:

'Wide flats lay on either bank, shadowy meads filled with pale white flowers. Luminous these were too, beautiful and yet horrible of shape, like the demented forms in an uneasy dream; and they gave forth a faint sickening charnel-smell; an odour of rottenness filled the air.'

For all the shudder-inducing vividness, the unforgettable character of this place, Tolkien does not take the reader inside the city of the Morgul Vale. And why would he?

Locus Focus - The House of Usher

This is the first in the Locus Focus Scary Settings Challenge for October, as hosted at Shredded Cheddar.

"And travellers now within that valley,
Through the red-litten windows, see
Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody;
While, like a rapid ghostly river,
Through the pale door,
A hideous throng rush out forever,
And laugh - but smile no more."

That is the last stanza of The Haunted Palace which Roderick Usher composes on his guitar for his friend-from-boyhood, the unnamed narrator of the The Fall of the House of Usher. He has come to visit for some weeks, at Usher's heartfelt request, in the hopes that his presence will alleviate Usher's undetermined hereditary/mental illness (or good old Gothic "melancholy").

The ballad leads to a discussion between the two, well into the narrator's sojourn at the house, in which the hypochondriac and hypersensitive Usher begins to tell his friend of his belief that the house and property (in which they are residing) has individual sentience:

"The belief, however, was connected (as I have previously hinted) with the grey stones of the home of his forefathers. The conditions of the sentience had been here, he imagined, fulfilled in the method of collocation of these stones -- in the order of their arrangement, as well as in that of the many fungi which overspread them, and of the decayed trees which stood around -- above all, in the long undisturbed endurance of this arrangement, and in its reduplication in the still waters of the tarn. Its evidence -- the evidence of the sentience -- was to be seen, he said, (and I here started as he spoke) in the gradual yet certain condensation of an atmosphere of their own about the waters and the walls."

At least decaying things, though desolate, are recognizably relieved by that "half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment" as the narrator relates at the beginning of the The Fall of the House of Usher. But the "undisturbed endurance" that keeps the process of decay in arrest, is part of what unnerves the narrator when he approaches the mansion enough for an inspection narrower than when he first approached the property itself:

"Its principal feature seemed to be that of an excessive antiquity. The discoloration of ages had been great. Minute fungi overspread the whole exterior, hanging in fine tangled web-work from the eaves. Yet all this was apart from any extraordinary dilapidation. No portion of the masonry had fallen; and there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling condition of the individual stones. In this there was much that reminded me of the specious totality of old woodwork which has rotted for long years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance from the breath of the external air. Beyond this indication of extensive decay, however, the fabric gave little token of instability."

And immediately after that sentence, a quite different, yet more disconcerting detail is added:

"Perhaps the eye of a scrutinizing observer might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn."

If anyone could make a single fissure in a wall terrifying, and do so by making it "barely perceptible", it is Edgar Allen Poe. It would also be he who could make a tarn - a source of reflection of light, and thus of relief - into something else as the narrator first approaches the property:

"It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down -- but with a shudder even more thrilling than before -- upon the remodelled and inverted images of the grey sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows."

After the tarn merely deepens his first impressions of the place rather than dissipating them (how terrible is that?!) he tries to shake off what must be a dream about the place, to believe he's just imagining "that about the whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their immediate vicinity -- an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which reeked up from the decayed trees, and the grey wall, and the silent tarn -- a pestilent and mystic vapour, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued."

If the dream doesn't go away, it is positively made real during a great storm one night, when everything outside is made luminous, though the sky is thick with clouds and no lightning strikes; and then terror strikes, both from within and without an antique volume that the narrator reads to soothe his mad friend, called, the Mad Trist of Sir Launcelot Canning. Ethelred, the hero of Trist, "...feeling the rain upon his shoulders, and fearing the rising tempest, uplifted his mace outright, and, with blows, made quickly room in the plankings for his gauntleted hand..."

And that fissure in the wall, though the reader isn't thinking about it, is still there. But the "gauntleted hand" is not coming from outside, but from within the house.

Locus Focus - Grendel's Mere

As a continuation of last week's Subterranean-Themed Challenge, for this week's Locus Focus (as hosted at Shredded Cheddar) I am covering Grendel's mere in Beowulf.

"Everybody gazed as the hot gore
kept wallowing up and an urgent war-horn
repeated its notes: the whole party
sat down to watch. The water was infested
with all kinds of reptiles. There were writhing sea-dragons
and monsters slouching on slopes by the cliff,
serpents and wild things such as those that often
surface at dawn to roam the sail-road
and doom the voyage. Down they plunged,
lashing in anger at the loud call
of the battle-bugle. An arrow from the bow
of the Geat chief got one of them
as he surged to the surface: the seasoned shaft
stuck deep in his flank and his freedom in the water
got less and less. It was his last swim."

So Beowulf and a troop of Geat and Heorot men come to Grendel's mere, following the tracks through the forest made by Grendel's mother, after she avenged her son's death by snatching up Hrothgar's counsellor, Aeschere, back in Heorot. When they come to the haunted mere, they find Aeschere's head at the foot of the cliff. His blood and entrails are boiling up from beneath the mere's surface.

Beowulf must meet with Grendel's mother under the water of the mere; and infested as the water is with monsters, dragons and serpents, he remains resolute in the promise he made to Hrothgar in Heorot:

"'So arise, my lord, and let us immediately
set forth on the trail of this troll-dam.
I guarantee you: she will not get away,
not to dens under ground nor upland groves
nor the ocean floor. She'll have nowhere to flee to.
Endure your troubles to-day. Bear up
and be the man I expect you to be.'"

The visitation to the mere, and hence its actual enfleshment, is preceded by its vivid description in the form of country tale and hearsay retold by Hrothgar the morning after the attack, before the men set out to the mere. This layering is typical of the poem. The setting is pre-given, in the form of tales, and then the characters come to occupy the actual setting.

In Heorot, Hrothgar speaks to Beowulf thus about Grendel and his mother and their mere:

"'I have heard it said by my people in hall,
counsellors who live in the upland country,
that they have seen two such creatures
prowling the moors, huge marauders
from some other world. One of these things,
as far as anyone ever can discern,
looks like a woman; the other, warped
in the shape of a man, moves beyond the pale
bigger than any man, an unnatural birth
called Grendel by country people
in former days. They are fatherless creatures,
and their whole ancestry is hidden in a past
of demons and ghosts. They dwell apart
among wolves on hills, on windswept crags
and treacherous keshes, where cold streams
pour down the mountain and disappear
under mist and moorland.
A few miles from here
a frost-stiffened wood waits and keeps watch
above a mere; the overhanging bank
is a maze of tree-roots mirrored in its surface.
At night there, something uncanny happens:
the water burns. And the mere bottom
has never been sounded by the sons of men.
On its bank, the heather-stepper halts:
the hart in flight from pursuing hounds
will turn to face them with firm-set horns
and die in the wood rather than dive
beneath its surface. That is no good place.
When wind blows up and stormy weather
makes clouds scud and the skies weep,
out of its depths a dirty surge
is pitched towards the heavens. Now help depends
again on you and on you alone.'"

When Beowulf arrives at the mere he dons mail and helmet and a sword that Unferth gives to him; he makes a short speech and impatiently goes in:

"...the prince of the Weather-Geats
was impatient to be away and plunged suddenly:
without more ado, he dived into the heaving
depths of the lake. It was the best part of a day
before he could see the solid bottom.
Quickly the one who haunted those waters,
who had scavenged and gone her gluttonous rounds
for a hundred seasons, sensed a human
observing her outlandish lair from above."

Grendel's mother clutches Beowulf and takes him to the bottom and,

"carried the ring-mailed prince to her court
so that for all his courage he could never use
the weapons he carried; and a bewildering horde
came at him from the depths, droves of sea-beasts
who attacked with tusks and tore at his chain-mail
in a ghastly onslaught. The gallant man
could see he had entered some hellish turn-hole
and yet the water did not work against him
because the hall-roofing held off
the force of the current; then he saw firelight,
a gleam and flare-up, a glimmer of brightness.

The hero observed that swamp-thing from hell,
the tarn-hag in all her terrible strength..."

And so deep, deep under the "wide earth", in an underwater cavern that is free from water inside of it, Beowulf does combat with Grendel's mother, while the other men wait above, watching the boiling surface, losing hope.

---

Note: The translation used here is by Seamus Heaney.

Locus Focus - Jungle Boogie

Locus Focus is a meme hosted every Saturday at Shredded Cheddar. It's all about settings that come alive for you in books; so link-up your own choice of setting and read about the settings others have written about!

This Saturday's setting: The Island of the Black Eaters-of-men

Call It Courage
By Armstrong Sperry

"For a quarter of a mile the coconuts held, beautiful trees that were more luxuriant than any in Hikueru. It was always thus in the rich soil of the volcanic islands. Then came a belt of breadfruit and wild bananas, of oranges and guavas and mangoes. The roots of the mape' trees--the island chestnut--twisted over the ground in strange, tormented shapes. Vines trailed like aerial ropes from the high branches where orchids bloomed, while little parakeets fled on swift wings and vanished in the green gloom. Mafatu had never before seen woods like these, for Hikueru was open and wind-swept. These endless legions of trees seemed to close in upon him, imprison him with reaching arms, with heady odors, with eerie light and shadow. Ferns grew higher than a tall man's head; the roof of leaves was powdered with starry blossoms."

Such is the island where the young Mafatu, deemed a coward on his home island of Hikueru and a source of shame to his father, masters his sea-fears alone; alone, but for his dog companion - oh, and those cannibals.

Maybe the solitude of such a place (solitary even from pagan civilization, for cannibals from an adjacent island perform their sacrifices here) is what some like Mafatu need. The very precariousness of his position seems to push him from one great feat to another. Hunting, cooking, making a boat. (The adventure of getting and cooking one's own food is at its most alive here.)

A place most to be feared proves to be Mafatu's space for maturity: those who have the greatest tremblings of cowardice within them are by no means exempt from courage, for courage does not mean merely the absence of fear.

Something about the oppressiveness and immediate wildness of this luxuriant island affords continuous opportunities for Mafatu. Anyways, it's here where he comes into his own:

"On his left hand, far offshore, the reef boomed to the charging surf; the curve of the beach reached out like two great arms to enclose the lagoon. Coconuts and pandanus trooped in shining legions to the very edge of the sea. A flight of green-and-purple parakeets flashed across the sky and vanished. There was no other sign of life. No voices of men; no laughter of children; no footprint in the sand.

The volcanic peak that formed the background of the island rose perhaps three thousand feet straight up out of the sea. It was the cone of a volcano long extinct. From its base, ridges of congealed lava flowed down to the distant shore. Once, in the dim beginnings of the world, this mountain had belched forth fire and brimstone, spreading destruction over the land. But the forgiving jungle through fertile centuries had crept back up the slopes, clothing them in green, green."

Locus Focus - A Family Home

Link up at with Locus Focus at Shredded Cheddar. Locus Focus is a book-related meme in which you post about settings in books. This weekend's Locus Focus is themed: A Family Home. While the meme continues every weekend, there will now be a chosen theme once a month. For the theme of A Family Home I chose Homer's The Odyssey.

One is only really introduced to the house of Odysseus as the story winds closer and closer to him slaughtering the freeloaders that occupy it. One gets acquainted in more detail with the hall, the courtyard, pets, the maids and nurses, latches and bedrooms and storerooms. The Odyssey is in many ways the journey into the heart of a house, without which the heart of man is sick.

Odysseus is changed in his outward appearance by Athena to an old, weather-beaten begging man, dressed in rags; and he comes to his own home, after many years, by way of the swine-holding. It is inevitable he will beg scraps from the hands of the shameless pseudo-suitors he will later be killing.

But even after he has killed these men and has had their blood and guts cleaned up, and the floor washed down and the hall purified with sulphur, it is almost as if the man is still distant from his own home. He has yet to face his wife, in his own appearance.

It is then that the movements of the journey, the fates, the intervening and meddling of the gods, they come to a kind of halt and hush as Odysseus and his wife face each other in their own house. Penelopeia is wary of trusting that her hsuband is actually her husband, for she is numb after all the years of mourning; she thinks it might be a trick of the gods.

So she tries him with a secret that only her true husband would know. And it is here - a secret about their marriage bed, the bed where conception takes place, the physical place of generating the family of a family home - that the tenderest part of Odysseus is revealed:

"Wife, that has cut me to the heart! Who has moved my bed? That would be a difficult job for the best workman, unless God himself should come down and move it. It would be easy for God, but no man could easily prize it up, not the strongest man living! There is a great secret in that bed. I made it myself, and no one else touched it. There was a strong young olive tree in full leaf growing in an enclosure, the trunk as thick as a pillar. Round this I built our bridal chamber; I did the whole thing myself, laid the stones and built a good roof over it, jointed the doors and fitted them in their places. After that I cut off the branches and trimmed the trunk from the root up, smoothed it carefully with the adze and made it straight to the line. This tree I made the bedpost. That was the beginning of my bed; I bored holes through it, and fitted the other posts about it, and inlaid the framework with gold and silver and ivory, and I ran through it leather straps coloured purple. Now I have told you my secret. And I don't know if it is still there, wife, or if some one has cut the olive at the root and moved my bed!"

And it is here that Odysseus becomes for the reader a real man. That is not meant in some chauvinistic sense, but in the mere sense of flesh and blood; he is not a god. Nor for that matter is he really a world-worn traveller; for it is here he becomes the true man he is - in the family home.

Locus Focus - Faery and Wootton Major

Link up with Locus Focus at Shredded Cheddar and share a book's setting with others

It is impossible to think of Wootton Major without Faery, or Faery without Wootton Major in J.R.R. Tolkien's tale, Smith of Wootton Major; his finest tale (to this writer) outside of The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion (yes, better than Leaf by Niggle).

Wootton Major is a village from "not very long ago for those with long memories, nor very far away for those with long legs." The village is known most of all for its cooking:

"It had a large Kitchen which belonged to the Village Council, and the Master Cook was an important person. The Cook's House and the Kitchen adjoined the Great Hall, the largest and oldest building in the place and the most beautiful. It was built of good stone and good oak and was well tended, though it was no longer painted or gilded as it had been once upon a time."

Now, a little bit from Faery:

"When he first began to walk far without a guide he thought he would discover the further bounds of the land; but great mountains rose before him, and going by long ways round about them he came at last to a desolate shore. He stood beside the Sea of Windless Storm where the blue waves like snow-clad hills roll silently out of Unlight to the long strand, bearing the white ships that return from battles on the Dark Marches of which men know nothing. He saw a great ship cast high upon the land, and the waters fell back in foam without a sound. The elven mariners were tall and terrible; their swords shone and their spears glinted and a piercing light was in their eyes. Suddenly they lifted up their voices in a song of triumph, and his heart was shaken with fear, and he fell upon his face, and they passed over him and went away into the echoing hills."

Faery and Wootton Major are completely distinct from each other, and yet they are interpenetrated; the Village being very much the dependent as it were, like the way the Shire is generally ignorant of literal Kings protecting its borders and keeping watch.

















Smith is the one by whom the reader interpenetrates the two realms. And a fay-star is the key. Smith comes to receive it at the Twenty-four Feast. What all this means is a matter I would rather leave to the discovery of those who choose to read this deeply moving tale.

Whereas C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald often seize on the stunning aspects of Faery and the approaching of it, J.R.R. Tolkien is so replete with it, so deeply rooted in it, that the mere unfolding of the tale - simply yet fully written - blesses you, harrows you, with the reality of Faery; with the realization that myths are not lies.

Locus Focus - The Princess & the Goblin

Link up, share and read about settings and worlds in books

This Saturday's Locus Focus:

George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin takes place in a sort of castle, midway on a mountain:

There was once a little princess whose father was king over a great country full of mountains and valleys. His palace was built upon one of the mountains, and was very grand and beautiful. The princess, whose name was Irene, was born there, but she was sent soon after her birth, because her mother was not very strong, to be brought up by country people in a large house, half castle, half farm-house, on the side of another mountain, about halfway between its base and its peak.

This home is like a station of the "ordinary" between realms below and above it that are, in contrast, the true realities: the realms of goblins and heavenly great-great-grandmothers.

These mountains were full of hollow places underneath; huge caverns, and winding ways, some with water running through them, and some shining with all colors of the rainbow when a light was taken in. There would not have been much known about them, had there not been mines there, great deep pits, with long galleries and passages running off from them, which had been dug to get at the ore of which the mountains were full. In the course of digging, the miners came upon many of these natural caverns. A few of them had far-off openings out on the side of a mountain, or into a ravine.

Now in these subterranean caverns lived a strange race of beings, called by some gnomes, by some kobolds, by some goblins.

But above, staircase after staircase in the big house-castle lives Irene's great-great Grandmother - without the wrinkles of age you would expect on such a face. To all others, this heavenly mother is non-existent. Once, even Irene has doubts about what is the true reality. But no, the great grandmother has been up there the entire eight years that Irene has been living in the place; just that in all those years, Irene had never gone up all those stairs, and never explored the empty hallways.

One gets the sense of greater places, of everlasting places, just, just beyond those you are familiar with, when Irene stands in the door and sees this woman for the first, and the grandmother simply says, as though there were no need for any introduction:

"Come in, my dear; come in. I am glad to see you."

Locus Focus - A Remote Valley

(Update: I overlooked something so have removed unnecessary excuse-making)

For this Locus Focus I took Hills and the Sea down from the shelf.

The essays are generally concerned with the places that Hilaire Belloc, the writer of the essays, travelled. As the title suggests, each essay is vitally connected to a concrete place - the inspiration for each essay deriving from them, though not every essay is solely about the place.

Belloc's portrayal of these settings almost always goes into the mythical, whimsical and the fantastic (not to mention the historical, the political and the philosophical). The places that Belloc describes therein are vividly envisioned and become places the reader would like to, or wouldn't mind, visiting and exploring (preferably back in 1906).

At first I thought I would randomly pick a title from the index and go with that one, since I haven't read this collection for a while. But I read through a few essays. Now, I could go into the essay that talks about a town whose entirely unique, present-day layout was developed over time by the negative spaces that drying fish nets happened to make as they were haphazardly laid out on the ground - the buildings slowly growing over the centuries between and around the placement of the drying fish nets. A town born of its trade if there ever was one.

But the essay that reclaimed my attention was one called, The Mowing of a Field. Belloc is here returning to some place of his childhood. The essay begins:

There is a valley in South England remote from ambition and from fear, where the passage of strangers is rare and unperceived, and where the scent of the grass in summer is breathed only by those who are native to that unvisited land.

Belloc the cosmopolitan was big on non-cosmopolitan places. He continues:

The roads to the Channel do not traverse it; they choose upon either side easier passes over the range. One track alone leads up through it to the hills, and this is changeable...The woods grow steep above the slopes; they reach sometimes the very summit of the heights, or, when they cannot attain them, fill in and clothe the combes. And, in between, along the floor of the valley, deep pastures and their silence are bordered by lawns of chalky grass and the small yew trees of the Downs.
The clouds that visit its sky reveal themselves beyond the one great rise, and sail, white and enormous, to the other, and sink beyond that other. But the plains above which they have travelled and the Weald to which they go, the people of the valley cannot see and hardly recall. The wind, when it reaches such fields, is no longer a gale from the salt, but fruitful and soft, an inland breeze; and those whose blood was nourished here feel in that wind the fruitfulness of our orchards and all the life that all things draw from the air.
In this place, when I was a boy, I pushed through a fringe of beeches that made a complete screen between me and the world, and I came to a glade called No Man's Land. I climbed beyond it, and I was surprised and glad, because from the ridge of that glade I saw the sea. To this place very lately I returned.

Belloc has returned to this place in late evening. The next morning he wakes up:

…before it was yet broad day, I awoke, and thought of mowing. The birds were already chattering in the trees beside my window, all except the nightingale, which had left and flown away to the Weald, where he sings all summer by day as well as by night in the oaks and hazel spinneys…The birds and the thought of mowing had awakened me, and I went down the stairs and along the stone floors to where I could find a scythe; and when I took it from its nail, I remembered how, fourteen years ago, I had last gone out with my scythe, just so, into the fields at morning. In between that day and this were many things, cities and armies, and a confusion of books, mountains and the desert, and horrible great breadths of sea.

The author describes in detail the proper way of sharpening a scythe. He then describes the proper way of mowing the grass, and the proper time to do it. He has many swathes already cut before the time for the Angelus. Later, a man comes to help him for a wage. Belloc brings out some small ale for them to drink, and later some lunch…

Evening comes. The entire two acres are finished and the two men agree to meet again next morning to gather up the swathes.

One could venture to this nurturing, balmy place just to do the simple things Belloc did there, or else one feels he could go there to die.

Locus Focus - A home where there are none

Link up, share and read about the settings and worlds in books

"It was already very dense twilight when we struck southward from Purley. Suburbs and things on the London border may be, in most cases, commonplace and comfortable. But if ever by any chance they really are empty solitudes they are to the human spirit more desolate and dehumanized than any Yorkshire moors or Highland hills, because the suddenness with which the traveller drops into that silence has something about it as of evil elfland. It seems to be one of the ragged suburbs of the cosmos half-forgotten by God - such a place was Buxton Common, near Purley."

This Saturday's Locus Focus looks for a memorable (and recently remembered) setting in an early, obscure collection of short stories written by G.K. Chesterton and published in 1905, called, The Club of Queer Trades.

The six stories, making a slim volume easily read in one day, are narrated by Charles Swinburne, as he follows Basil Grant (former judge gone mad at the bench, now eccentric mystic and somewhat hermetic sleuth living mostly in his attic) and his more practical brother, Rupert Grant, private eye.

The trio is always happening upon inexplicable, often nightmarish mysteries that are inevitably discovered to have The Club of Queer Trades behind them.

This book is a gem. It is an early, crackling concentration (and portending) of many later Chesterton books: Father Brown, Manalive, The Four Faultless Felons, and there's even the air of The Man Who was Thursday in it - not to mention Dickens' The Pickwick Papers.

Before getting to the setting (nice rhyme eh?) in the fourth chapter (or fourth story), some light should be shed on what The Club of Queer Trades is:

"The nature of this society, such as we afterwards discovered it to be, is soon and simply told. It is an eccentric and Bohemian Club, of which the absolute condition of membership lies in this, that the candidate must have invented the method by which he earns his living. It must be an entirely new trade. The exact definition of this requirement is given in the two principal rules. First, it must not be a mere application or variation of an existing trade. Thus, for instance, the Club would not admit an insurance agent simply because instead of insuring men's furniture against being burnt in a fire, he insured, let us say, their trousers against being torn by a mad dog. The principle…is the same. Secondly, the trade must be a genuine commercial source of income, the support of its inventor. Thus the Club would not receive a man simply because he chose to pass his days collecting broken sardine tins, [LOL!] unless he could drive a roaring trade in them. Professor Chick made that quite clear. And when one remembers what Professor Chick's own new trade was, one doesn't know whether to laugh or cry.

"The discovery of this strange society was a curiously refreshing thing; to realize that there were ten new trades in the world was like looking at the first ship or the first plough. It made a man feel what he should feel, that he was still in the childhood of the world."

It is so good to return to this book! Each story is like a poem.

The Singular Speculation of the House-Agent is Chapter IV, and has the Grant brothers and Swinburne getting to the bottom (or shall we say top?) of an adventurous character named Lieutenant Drummond Keith, "…a man about whom conversation always burst like a thunderstorm the moment he left the room."

After Keith nonchalantly borrows a hundred pound cheque from Basil, both Rupert's and Charles' suspicions are aroused, in addition to the many other attributes about Keith's character. And they all go along with Keith to see whether this house-agent exists, of which Keith said was the purpose for the borrowed money.

The conversation between Keith and the house-agent seems coded and very evasive in front of the suspicious Charles and the far more suspicious and vehement Rupert, while the sleepy Basil seems unperturbed.

The next morning, as Rupert is having breakfast with Basil and Charles, a constable shows up at their door asking about this Lieutenant Keith, because it is apparent he gave the constable a false address after getting into a big street fight the previous night with five other people...

"'It was very simple, sir,' said the policeman, chuckling. 'The place he named was a well-known common quite near London, and our people were down there this morning before any of you were awake. And there's no such house. In fact, there are hardly any houses at all. Though it is so near London, it's a blank moor with hardly five trees on it, to say nothing of Christians. Oh, no, sir, the address was a fraud right enough. He was a clever rascal, and chose one of those scraps of lost England that people know nothing about. Nobody could say off-hand that there was not a particular house dropped somewhere about the heath. But as a fact, there isn't.'"

Basil, the mystic, decides he's going to go to the address himself.

"'Get down to that place?' I repeated blankly. 'Get down to what place?'

"'You don't seriously mean,' cried Rupert, who had been staring in a sort of confusion of emotions. 'You don't mean that you want to go to Buxton Common, do you? You can’t mean that!'

'Why shouldn't I go to Buxton Common?' asked Basil, smiling.

'Why should you?' said his brother…

'To find our friend, the lieutenant, of course, ' said Basil Grant. 'I thought you wanted to find him?'

Rupert broke a branch brutally from the plant and flung it impatiently on the floor. 'And in order to find him, ' he said, 'you suggest the admirable expedient of going to the only place on the habitable earth where we know he can't be.'. . .

Rupert ran after him with a considerable flurry of rationality.

'My dear chap, ' he cried, 'do you really mean that you see any good in going down to this ridiculous scrub, where there is nothing but beaten tracks and a few twisted trees, simply because it was the first place that came into a rowdy lieutenant's head when he wanted to give a lying reference in a scrape?'. . .

. . .There was certainly a sort of grey futility in the landscape itself. But it was enormously increased by the sense of grey futility in our expedition. The tracts of grey turf looked useless, the occasional wind-stricken trees looked useless, but we, the human beings, more useless than the hopeless turf or the idle trees. We were maniacs akin to the foolish landscape, for we were come to chase the wild goose which has led men and left men in bogs from the beginning. We were three dazed men under the captaincy of a madman going to look for a man whom we knew was not there in a house that had no existence. A livid sunset seemed to look at us with a sort of sickly smile before it died. . . .

. . .The wind swirled sadly over the homeless heath…There was not a sign of man or beast to the sullen circle of the horizon, and in the midst of that wilderness Basil Grant stood rubbing his hands with the air of an innkeeper standing at an open door.

'How jolly it is,' he cried, 'to get back to civilization. That notion that civilization isn't poetical is a civilized delusion. Wait till you've really lost yourself in nature, among the devilish woodlands and the cruel flowers. Then you'll know that there's no star like the red star of man that he lights on his hearthstone; no river like the red river of man, the good red wine, which you, Mr Rupert Grant, if I have any knowledge of you, will be drinking in two or three minutes in enormous quantities.'. . .

Without spoiling anything (though that may be too late at this point) they do find the Lieutenant (and his invisible home), as he greets Rupert and Charles:

'Happy to see you, gentlemen; pray come in.'

Out of a hole in an enormous dark egg-shaped thing…was protruding the pale face and fierce moustache of the lieutenant…

We fell into the full glow of a lamp-lit, cushioned, tiny room, with a circular wall lined with books, a circular table, and a circular seat around it. At this table sat three people…The spears, the green umbrella, and the cavalry sword hung in parallels on the wall. The sealed jar of strange wine was on the mantelpiece, the enormous rifle in the corner. In the middle of the table was a magnum of champagne. Glasses were already set for us."

Locus Focus

All together now, to the tune of Weezer:

Oh Eg-don Heath - that's where I want - to be!

When Enbrethiliel announced her new and very awesome linkup subject, Locus Focus - a meme in which readers share their favourite (or not so favourite) settings in books - I said to myself I would not cover anything from Tolkien's middle-earth, simply out of counter-intuitive self-limitation: I would find myself too far out at sea, due to infatuation, covering one of those middle-earth settings.

Then I immediately decided to do Egdon Heath - an early love - smacking my hands with delight. I was a little miffed when later in her official announcement, Enbrethiliel went and mentioned, in such passing manner, Thomas Hardy's Wessex as a possible setting to write about.

What, said I, is she reading my mind? I wanted it to be a sublime surprise; an interesting and unique choice; a wonderfully gloomy vote for the underdog who breathed the fascinating transitional airs between centuries…

Apparently this Thomas Hardy fellow is more popular than I like to imagine.

Nonetheless, without further blathering:

Egdon Heath
The Return of the Native
By Thomas Hardy

The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other things sank brooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen. Every night its Titanic form seemed to await something; but it had waited thus, unmoved, during so many centuries, through the crises of so many things, that it could only be imagined to await one last crisis - the final overthrow.

Hardy was my second literary love after Keats. It was Keats' Ode to a Nightingale in English Lit.12 that ushered me past poetry's threshold. Then it was, strangely enough, Hardy's A Darkling Thrush. That both are about birds is something I haven't really given thought to.

Though our teacher did not prescribe Hardy for our mandatory study, I read The Three Strangers (the setting from which is not Egdon, but pretty much the same) that night from the textbook. That short story, from what I rememebr, was all setting.

I remember once when I was doing "extra" work on a film set (you know those anonymous minions in the backgrounds of scenes), and I was sitting there reading The Return of the Native, just beginning it, when a man who passed me by a few times came to me and said, "Excuse me, but I couldn't help notice the book you're reading…"

Then he went on to talk about how he and his class (I forget what sort of class it was, but he was one of the students) went to Thomas Hardy's actual past residence and they (I can't remember if it was his class or some other class) found a piece of paper inside Hardy's desk which Hardy had apparently written. This piece of paper said something to the effect that the actual returning native of the book's title was not Cym but the Reddleman…

And the only thing going on inside my head was: Hm? Reddleman? The who Native…yeah whatever - but oh, Egdon Heath!

Later, I would read the opening passages from The Return of the Native over and over again…how I wanted to be in that November gloom, smoking a fag in the last of the twilight by a bonfire while the wind howled down among the furze. But more than that, I wanted to see the aliveness of Egdon Heath in my own real-life setting - a setting which shares many physical similarities with Egdon, though quite different altogether.

It is not simply Hardy's descriptive force which gives Egdon its staying character, but the way he organizes the setting as a first, sole chapter; then in the next chapter brings a few characters into the setting, but does so without further describing Egdon to the same extent as in the first chapter - though he will in later chapters.

In the second chapter He doesn't really cast our glance beyond the still-shining road which the wayfarers are walking along in the twilight, with the exception of what the reddleman sees at the end of the chapter: the lone figure on the high mound. Then, in the third chapter, we get the lighters of the bonfires as darkness fully covers what was described in the first chapter.

This architectural deepening of the setting is of the kind of power that is retrospective as you read; that is, Hardy has sifted and organized it so that the evocation of this setting comes to you in a moment that is not descriptive, but during some other kind of passage, like during some straight dialogue between characters.

Both Hardy's individual sentences and accumulative, architectural structure have what I've come to term, self-weight.

Perhaps as many as thirty bonfires could be counted within the whole bounds of the district; and as the hour may be told on a clock-face when the figures themselves are invisible, so did the men recognize the locality of each fire by its angle and direction, though nothing of the scenery could be viewed. . .

It seemed as if the bonfire-makers were standing in some radiant upper storey of the world, detached from and independent of the dark stretches below. The heath down there was now a vast abyss. . .

It was as if these men and boys had suddenly dived into past ages, and fetched therefrom an hour and deed which had before been familiar with this spot. The ashes of the original British pyre which blazed from that summit lay fresh and undisturbed in the barrow beneath their tread. . .

But Egdon Heath is additionally so ancient because it bears witness to a new century.