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here is almost seven hundred words of poetry all about spiders
It's Blank Verse Blog Week! I suppose, today
I’ll have to try to write in rhythmic glee.
(Am I the only one who feels dismay
That that name's less of iamb than spondee?)
I'm in the mood for formal language play
Because I'm reading in the book called "Doom"
Or sometimes "Angry Elves" if you're my friends,
By which I mean the Silmarillion,
Which I have tried to read before, and failed,
But this year's goal is "Finish all the books
That sit, half started, lonely, on your shelves"
And so I'm pushing though until the end.
I've got at far as fair, lost Beleriand
But must confess I still don't care for elves
Who love unmoving shadows in the West
And sometimes I mix Finrod and Fingon
And so on, but there's one old name I love,
Who's passed right through the story, and then gone
To an unsung and silent happy age,
And that, of course, is she, Ungoliant.
Long I’ve loved spiders, curious and quiet,
The weavers, hunters, builders, mothers, friends,
The fat and fuzzy, bright-eyes-in-the-dark,
Festooning silent places, guarding trails,
But most of all I think I love the way
They are the ones that we cannot shut out:
In all the sealed and sterile homes we've made,
Hidden from the earth that lives, for fear
Of anything that’s free, unclean, Not-Us.
And watching flick'ring lights as evening falls,
It's spiders that will find the open doors,
And dash across the shower-wall and say:
You can't shut out the world though you may try
For there is more outside than you can find,
And it is life, like yours, and not alone.
In the same way as dark Ungoliant
Who walked into the Pure-Land-Walled-From-Fear
And taught them light unshared is light devoured
In that uneasy twilight of the world
When all the Powers kept the world in dark
Except their private garden of the Trees:
Until she came and sucked up all the glow
So covetously kept corralled away,
And left no choice to them but share the Sun.
Not only light she sucked up that dark year,
For of the Nine Fell Oaths that were ill-sworn
Those days before the first dawn of the world,
The first-sworn of them all, and first fore-sworn,
Was Melkor's oath to aid Ungoliant:
And when that oath he broke, she broke his power,
No more with Valinor could he contend,
But tied to Children's clothing, weak he strove
Against the swords of Men and Angry Elves,
His black hands always burning with his Oath
He broke to she who cared not for their cares.
And as to she herself - she rolled eight eyes,
Expecting nothing less from Eru’s spawn,
And went away beyond the pains of song,
And wove her cloth to catch the gen’rous light
Of the bright Sun, the fruit she did not eat,
But left to spread for all beneath the Sky.
And had no truck with Oaths and Wars and such
And raised her daughters and her sons in peace,
To a great dynasty that spanned the World,
Until she chose to leave it her own way,
The only creature ever under sky
Who conquered Melkor and the Valar both,
And in one day, and only as she chose.
(If she *did* leave - the Moriquendi tell,
In the far South, and in the East, that still
She throws her silk into the sky and climbs
To dim the Moon to blood, from time to time.)
I mean, it could just be that she’s the first
Who bears the pronoun she, in all that book,
To do aught more than cry, grow plants, and sleep,
And that is why I love her, like her child
Shelob in Frodo’s tale, who’s feared alike
By Dark and Light, still scorning all their wars.
But mostly I have loved the ones who stay
Outside the realms where Kings and Noldor fight,
The spiders, Old Tom, Hobbits who wed Fae,
And all who learned to live between the light.
I’ll have to try to write in rhythmic glee.
(Am I the only one who feels dismay
That that name's less of iamb than spondee?)
I'm in the mood for formal language play
Because I'm reading in the book called "Doom"
Or sometimes "Angry Elves" if you're my friends,
By which I mean the Silmarillion,
Which I have tried to read before, and failed,
But this year's goal is "Finish all the books
That sit, half started, lonely, on your shelves"
And so I'm pushing though until the end.
I've got at far as fair, lost Beleriand
But must confess I still don't care for elves
Who love unmoving shadows in the West
And sometimes I mix Finrod and Fingon
And so on, but there's one old name I love,
Who's passed right through the story, and then gone
To an unsung and silent happy age,
And that, of course, is she, Ungoliant.
Long I’ve loved spiders, curious and quiet,
The weavers, hunters, builders, mothers, friends,
The fat and fuzzy, bright-eyes-in-the-dark,
Festooning silent places, guarding trails,
But most of all I think I love the way
They are the ones that we cannot shut out:
In all the sealed and sterile homes we've made,
Hidden from the earth that lives, for fear
Of anything that’s free, unclean, Not-Us.
And watching flick'ring lights as evening falls,
It's spiders that will find the open doors,
And dash across the shower-wall and say:
You can't shut out the world though you may try
For there is more outside than you can find,
And it is life, like yours, and not alone.
In the same way as dark Ungoliant
Who walked into the Pure-Land-Walled-From-Fear
And taught them light unshared is light devoured
In that uneasy twilight of the world
When all the Powers kept the world in dark
Except their private garden of the Trees:
Until she came and sucked up all the glow
So covetously kept corralled away,
And left no choice to them but share the Sun.
Not only light she sucked up that dark year,
For of the Nine Fell Oaths that were ill-sworn
Those days before the first dawn of the world,
The first-sworn of them all, and first fore-sworn,
Was Melkor's oath to aid Ungoliant:
And when that oath he broke, she broke his power,
No more with Valinor could he contend,
But tied to Children's clothing, weak he strove
Against the swords of Men and Angry Elves,
His black hands always burning with his Oath
He broke to she who cared not for their cares.
And as to she herself - she rolled eight eyes,
Expecting nothing less from Eru’s spawn,
And went away beyond the pains of song,
And wove her cloth to catch the gen’rous light
Of the bright Sun, the fruit she did not eat,
But left to spread for all beneath the Sky.
And had no truck with Oaths and Wars and such
And raised her daughters and her sons in peace,
To a great dynasty that spanned the World,
Until she chose to leave it her own way,
The only creature ever under sky
Who conquered Melkor and the Valar both,
And in one day, and only as she chose.
(If she *did* leave - the Moriquendi tell,
In the far South, and in the East, that still
She throws her silk into the sky and climbs
To dim the Moon to blood, from time to time.)
I mean, it could just be that she’s the first
Who bears the pronoun she, in all that book,
To do aught more than cry, grow plants, and sleep,
And that is why I love her, like her child
Shelob in Frodo’s tale, who’s feared alike
By Dark and Light, still scorning all their wars.
But mostly I have loved the ones who stay
Outside the realms where Kings and Noldor fight,
The spiders, Old Tom, Hobbits who wed Fae,
And all who learned to live between the light.
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Is only, like, three pages at the most
(I'm told Akallabeth is good as well
If Sauron being hot appeals to one
And so I'm counting down until I'm there)
But it is really good created-myth
Which after all may be a thing you like!
It's worth a read, I think, if only just
To have these myths inside to call upon...
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I like spiders. I like myths! But I don't think I have time for this Or time at all to read and sit And when I do - I usually knit >.>
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this year and pulled together all the books
where I had got distracted halfway through
and went to go do something else I had-
Well, it was lots and lots, I'll leave it there
I was too shamed to even make a list,
so they're still in a pile on my floor
that goes two-deep and higher than my waist.
(The stuff to read I haven't started yet
is even longer - and gets worse each day...)
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It's so great to see something totally new on the Silmarillion! Can I persuade you to post it somewhere more public? I know several Silm fans who I'm sure would enjoy reading it.
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So anyway I have no idea if anyone's gone this direction before! I did kind of get the impression that the Valar as being overprotective-to-the-point-of-smothering was a reasonably well-known opinion? Ungoliant as savior figure might be new I guess, but come on! She's basically the only one in the whole darn book who gets to walk away unscathed! She's the best.
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My, my, MY! Yes, a brand-new view on an old, old figure. I've been thinking a lot lately about Charlotte...
As you might know, I am sort of supernary in grammar and spelling, and do copyediting for a number of webfic writers in the same... web... as yourself:
• coralled away
→ corralled
> "coralled" would mean something like "bedecked with coral"
• first fore-sworn
→ forsworn
> "fore-" = ahead, in advance, before ("the foregoing", "a foregone conclusion"), yet to come ("foreknowledge", "forecast"; that's English for you!)
> "for-" = away, to destruction or oblivion, cancel ("forsworn, forget, forgive, forgo [= do without]")
> Note minimal pair foregone/forgo(ne)
• He broke to she who cared not for their cares
→ to her
• And as to she herself - she rolled eight eyes,
→ to her
> Lots of people do this. I think it's a result of having had it hammered into their heads that "It's her" is wrong and should be "It's she"... which is absurd in all but the most formal usage. As the object of a preposition (here, "to") or a verb, the pronoun needs to be in the objective case: her. The subject of "cared not" in the relative clause is "who"; the "as to" sentence has no relative clause.
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"Foresworn" is a recognized variant spelling, and over-use of the subject pronouns is pretty common in formalized contexts and if blank verse silmarillion poetry isn't the place for absurd formality and archaic variants I don't know what is, so I will leave those. :P
(Especially in the constructions I'm using, "She herself" as an alternative to the awkward repetition of "her herself" in the object position has a long and illustrious history in written English; and "she-who-cared-not" is a deliberate play on the traditional usage of the "she-who-x" construction as a sort of title/epithet, which would never take the object pronoun.
Plus both of those pronouns are being directly modified by a relative pronoun clause and there's some debate about whether that sort of construction ever takes an object pronoun, as for a lot of English speakers it seems more natural to apply the rule that in those constructions the lead pronoun is always a subject regardless of its role in the larger sentence. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
...which is just to say you're welcome to post corrections but I'm 100% a descriptivist and will probably not agree with most of what you say. ^_^
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By the way, I am using mostly "Swype + Dragon" speech recognition for this note, correcting what I can see in the 5.5pt? type on my Android smartphone. I think I've got all the reccos*, but don't blame me for any remaining boo-boos. ;-)
Edited to add:
«if blank verse silmarillion poetry isn't the place for absurd formality and archaic variants I don't know what is, so I will leave those. :P
(Especially in the constructions I'm using, "She herself" as an alternative to the awkward repetition of "her herself" in the object position has a long and illustrious history in written English; and "she-who-cared-not" is a deliberate play on the traditional usage of the "she-who-x" construction as a sort of title/epithet, which would never take the object pronoun.»
I confess, you clearly know just what you're doing, and I can but agree.
* speech recognition errors.
Respectfully submitted,
Dr. Whom: Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoëpist, and Philological Busybody
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