No, not _those_ jewels; hands off, Valar
I just finished Victoria Finlay's Jewels tonight, a popular-science tome on precious gems, and there's a passage that brings to mind a bit of LotR lore.
I remember speculation on how the Frodo-Sam relationship was made less servile in the movies allegedly because U.S. audiences wouldn't understand the British master-servant relationship that informed Tolkien's writing. (I personally think the writers realized Sam worked better as a full-fledged character rather than as an accessory to his "master," but whatever.)
All right, so in the chapter about jet, Finlay early on how jet was made popular in Victorian England through Queen Victoria's conspicuous mourning jewelry. She later goes on to discuss Cybele, the dark ancient earth goddess herself associated with jet, and observes an altar carved with a scene of Cybele lamenting the passing of her lover, Attis.
At the front of the altar of Cybele is pictured between two priests, a large female figure swathed in heavy clothes and deep, almost tender, gloom. She does not appear to be the vengeful angry goddess of myth, nor the literally petrifying proto-gorgon she is sometimes thought to have been. I was reminded of another ruler who, like the mythical Cybele, made the jet stone famous. On this ancient shrine, the Eastern goddess bore a startling resemblance to a more recent personification of mourning: Queen Victoria. Perhaps the nineteenth-century passion for jet was more than the desire for a gemstone for a symbol; perhaps it was the desire for an archetype.
Now: Nienna's always seemed like an eternally lame character, hasn't she? Her big character trait is that she's perpetually crying. Why would you give your figure of divine mercy such a patience-trying form? Finlay, a Brit, applies the word "archetype" to the image assumed by Victoria and Cybele (and Nienna). But the mourning-mother, the female leader whose grief lends her moral authority, isn't something that is in my cultural vocabulary as an American. Is whatever Nienna embodies another of those suppposed Tolkien Anglicisms that're lost on a larger audience?
.
I remember speculation on how the Frodo-Sam relationship was made less servile in the movies allegedly because U.S. audiences wouldn't understand the British master-servant relationship that informed Tolkien's writing. (I personally think the writers realized Sam worked better as a full-fledged character rather than as an accessory to his "master," but whatever.)
All right, so in the chapter about jet, Finlay early on how jet was made popular in Victorian England through Queen Victoria's conspicuous mourning jewelry. She later goes on to discuss Cybele, the dark ancient earth goddess herself associated with jet, and observes an altar carved with a scene of Cybele lamenting the passing of her lover, Attis.
At the front of the altar of Cybele is pictured between two priests, a large female figure swathed in heavy clothes and deep, almost tender, gloom. She does not appear to be the vengeful angry goddess of myth, nor the literally petrifying proto-gorgon she is sometimes thought to have been. I was reminded of another ruler who, like the mythical Cybele, made the jet stone famous. On this ancient shrine, the Eastern goddess bore a startling resemblance to a more recent personification of mourning: Queen Victoria. Perhaps the nineteenth-century passion for jet was more than the desire for a gemstone for a symbol; perhaps it was the desire for an archetype.
Now: Nienna's always seemed like an eternally lame character, hasn't she? Her big character trait is that she's perpetually crying. Why would you give your figure of divine mercy such a patience-trying form? Finlay, a Brit, applies the word "archetype" to the image assumed by Victoria and Cybele (and Nienna). But the mourning-mother, the female leader whose grief lends her moral authority, isn't something that is in my cultural vocabulary as an American. Is whatever Nienna embodies another of those suppposed Tolkien Anglicisms that're lost on a larger audience?
.