I will
be satisfied: deny me this,
And an
eternal curse fall on you!
-Macbeth
Macbeth Act
IV, scene i Line 105
Once again, good ol’ Macbeth. Our protagonist is making one
of his visits (I believe his last?) to the prophesizing sisters/witches. Now
these are the ladies that got the whole mess started in this story by telling
Macbeth that he would be king. Neither he, nor his wife, was entertaining any
thoughts of kingship or murder before he ran into these trouble makers in the
first act. Now they’re giving him three infamous predictions: Beware Macduff, and …none
of woman born/ Shall harm Macbeth, and Macbeth shall never vanquisht be,
until/ Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill/ Shall come against him. But
of course he wants to know more, and hence the threat of today’s Totally Random
Shakespeare. I mean really, can you blame him?
So this gives me a perfect segue to talk about one of my
favourite topics; Shakespeare’s influence on JRR Tolkien. Consider yourself warned, because that’s we’re we’ll be going for the rest of this post. Bail out now if
you want.
Okay, first of all let’s make clear that Tolkien clearly
disavowed any affinity for Shakespeare. In fact, it would appear that he had
little use for much of any literature written much later than Beowulf. And
that’s fine; we’ll give him that. However, given that he was raised and
educated in England in the early part of the twentieth century, I think it’s a
pretty good bet that like it or not he had a pretty healthy dose of exposure to
Shakespeare early on. And the stuff in today’s Macbeth selection is pretty good
evidence that he ended up using some of these ideas in his own writing.
First take the none of woman born/ Shall harm Macbeth line.
We all know that it turns out that the person who ends up killing Macbeth was
born via a C-section and thus, at least in the view of Shakespeare’s time, was
not ‘woman born’. I know, it seems a bit of a stretch, but that’s what they
went with. Compare that to the King of the Nazgul in Tolkien’s epic. “No living
man may hinder me!” he claims in the battle on the Pelennor Fields, not
realizing he’s speaking to a woman. Eowyn laughs at him saying “But no living
man am I! You look upon a woman” before driving her sword through his head.
Next take the until/ Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane
hill/ Shall come against him. Which Macbeth took to mean when the Great
Birnam wood moved, which seemed pretty unlikely. And what happened? The
opposing army camouflaged themselves with branches from the Great Birnam wood,
as they moved against high Dunsinane hill. So the woods moved. Now, what did
the men of Rohan see when they looked out from helms deep the morning after the
battle? There was a great woods there that wasn’t there the day before. The
woods had moved.
Now I’ll grant you two things. One is that I didn’t come up
with these two examples. I came across them in my reading several years ago, I
can’t remember where, but I am not taking credit for them. Two is that even
though I think they’re pretty good examples, I’ll admit that by themselves
they’re a little bit sketchy to base a claim that Shakespeare significantly
influenced Tolkien’s writing. HOWEVER, I’ve come up with other stuff, on my
own, that bulwarks this claim. Now I’m not going to go on here, because this
post is already too long, but when we
get to the Tempest next time I’ll bore you with some more. Meantime I’ll start
a tab where we can begin to accumulate this stuff and perhaps I’ll get you to
see what I’m talking about. I hope.
In the meantime, how about savoring a little Tolkien?
“You look upon a woman. Eowyn I am, Eomund’s daughter. You
stand between me and my lord and kin. Begone, if you be not deathless! For
living or dark undead, I will smite you, if you touch him.”
It’s practically iambic pentameter for goodness sake!
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