Transcript
Speaker: Hi everyone! Welcome to Queer Lodgings, the Queer Led podcast about everything Tolkien. I'm Grace, and I'm here with my usual co -host, Leah. Hey there! And Alicia! Hello! Today, in honor of Tolkien Reading Day, we are bringing you a brief mini -episode where each of us podcast hosts are going to share one of our beloved pieces of Tolkien's writing. So...
Speaker: Tolkien Reading Day is held on the 25th of March each year. That was selected as the date on which the ring was destroyed, completing Frodo's quest and vanquishing Sauron. And so the Tolkien Society has been organizing this since 2003 to encourage fans to celebrate and promote the life and works of J .R .R. Tolkien. So without further ado, I am going to be reading one of my favorite of J .R .R. Tolkien's poems, The Mulets.
Speaker: The shadows where the mulips dwell are dark and wet as ink, And slow and softly rings their bell as in the slime you sink. You sink into the slime who dare to knock upon their door, While down the grinning gargoyles stare and noise some waters pour. Beside the rotting river -strand the drooping willows weep, And gloomily the gore -crows stand croaking in their sleep.
Speaker: Over the Murloc Mountains, a long and weary way, in a moldy valley where the trees are gray, by a dark pool's borders without wind or tide, moonless and sunless, the muleps hide. The cellars where the muleps sit are deep and dank and cold, with single sickly candle lit, and there they count their gold.
Speaker: Their walls are wet, their ceilings drip, their feet upon the floor, go softly with a squish flap flip as they sidle to the door. They peep out slyly through a crack, their feeling fingers creep, and when they're finished in a sack, your bones they take to keep. Beyond the Moorlach Mountains, the long and lonely road, through the spider shadows and the march of toad, and through the wood of hanging trees and the gallows weed,
Speaker: you go to find the mulets and the mulets feed. That is a poem of Gerard Tolkien's that is published in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. You'll actually find a few different variations published in different editions of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. And it's based on an earlier poem about students coming to see their professors that was called Knocking on the Door.
Speaker: All right, I will go next. I am going to read one of a series of poems. There are six of them about a fictional English coastal town named Bemble Bay.
Speaker: It's really hard to find copies of these poems. Not all of them have been published. So good luck. I found this copy that I'm reading by a Google search, but you can't find all of them online because a lot of them are in his unpublished works. I'm reading Progress in Bimble Town, dedicated to the mayor and the corporation.
Speaker: Bimble Bay has a steep street. It runs down with many houses, tall and short ones, shops with meat, shops with cabbages, shops with blouses, jerseys, jumpers and umbrellas, a post office, new and squalid, a library filled with bestsellers and yellow jackets, an old solid many windowed in where motors make strong smells and no horse goes in cobbled yard, a place where bloaters from wooden boxes lie in rows, brought by train for seaside air.
Speaker: a pharmacy with sunburned lotion, and picture cards of God knows where, and fat women dripped in ocean, a toy bazaar with things of tin and bits of crock and all the news, windows, windows with chocolate in, cigarettes and gum one shoes,
Speaker: wrapped in paper, cased in card, for folk to strew on grass and shore. Loud garages were toiling hard, grimy people bang and roar, and engines buzz and the lights flare all night long, a merry noise. Sometimes though, this is rare, one can hear the shouts of boys, sometimes late when motorbikes are not passing with a screech. One hears faintly if one likes, the sea still added on the beach.
Speaker: At what? At churching orange rind, piling up banana skins, gnawing paper trying to grind, a broth of bottles, packets, tins, before a new day comes with more, before next morning's cherubangs. Stopping at the old indoor with reek and rumble, hoots and clangs, brings more folk to God knows where, and they don't care, to Bimbletown, where the steep street that once was fair with many houses staggered down. See Britain first.
Speaker: For context, See Britain First was a slogan that was on billboards in the 20s that was advocating in -country holidays. This was written sometime between 1922 and 1928, kind of at the beginning of Tolkien's writing.
Speaker: And I guess I will go last. I will be reading Arantree, also from The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. And I thought that it was sort of in keeping with the travel and adventure theme of token reading day, which obviously we're not really adhering to, but that's okay.
Speaker: There was a merry passenger, a messenger, a mariner. He built a gilded gondola to wander in and had in her a load of yellow oranges and porridge for his profender. He perfumed her with marjoram and cardamom and lavender.
Speaker: He called the winds of Argosys, with cargoes in to carry him, across the rivers seventeen that lay between to tarry him. He landed all in loneliness, where stonally the pebbles on the running river Derelyn goes merrily forever on.
Speaker: He journeyed then through meadowlands to shadowland that dreary lay, and under hill and over hill went roving still a weary way. He sat and sang a melody, his errantreatarian. He begged a pretty butterfly that fluttered by to marry him. She scorned him and she scoffed at him. She laughed at him, unpitying. So long he studied wizardry and sigilry and smithying.
Speaker: He wove a tissue airy thin to snare her in to follow her. He made him beetle leather wing and feather wing of swallow hair. He caught her in bewilderment with filament of spider thread. He made her soft pavilions of lilies and a bridal bed of flowers and a thistle down to nestle down and rest her in and soak in webs of flimsy white and silver light he dressed her in.
Speaker: He threaded gems and necklaces, but recklessly she squandered them, and fell to bitter quarreling. Then, soaring, he wandered on. And there he left her withering, as shivering he fled away. With windy weather following, on swallowing, he sped away. He passed the archipelagos, where yellow grows the marigold, where countless silver fountains are, and mountains are a fairy gold.
Speaker: He took to war and ferrying, a herring beyond the sea, and roaming over Belmarie and Thelemy and Fantasy. He made a shield and morion of coral and of ivory, a sword he made of emerald and terrible his rivalry, with elven knights of Aerie and Faerie, with paladins, that golden haired and shining eyed came riding by and challenged him.
Speaker: Of crystal was his habergion, his scabbard was of chalcedony. With silver tipped at plenilune, his spear was hewn of ebony. His javelins were of malachite and stalactite he brandished them and went and fought the dragonflies of paradise and vanquished them.
Speaker: He battled with the Dumbledore's, the Hummerhorns and Honeybees, and won the Golden Honeycomb and running home on sunny seas. In ship of leaves and gossamer with blossom for a canopy, he sat and sang and furbished up and burnished up his panel play.
Speaker: He tarried for a little while in little isles that lonely lay and found their knot but blowing grass. And so at last the only way he took and turned and coming home with honeycomb to memory. His message came and errands too and daring due and glamoury.
Speaker: He had forgot them, were journeying and turning, a wanderer. So now he must depart again and start again his gondola, forever still a messenger, a passenger, a terrier, a roving as a feather does, a weather -driven mariner.
Speaker: So I really like that poem because you can kind of see it's a unique meter that Tolkien made. It is sort of reminiscent of iambic pentameter, of course, but it's one that he sort of made up on his own. And of course, if you're familiar with Lord of the Rings and Bilbo's poem about Erendil the Mariner,
Speaker: You can kind of recognize the same meter and a lot of the same images and themes. But of course, this little messenger is literally a tiny sort of Thumbelina had a fairy sprite who asks a butterfly to marry him and also just kind of wanders around the earth and
Speaker: fights wasps and bees, which I think is kind of whimsical and fun for Tolkien, but also has, there's this really kind of lovely weight about he has to go back on to wandering.
Speaker: And so those are our Tolkien Reading Day selections for 2023. We'd love to know how you're celebrating Tolkien Reading Day. So let us know on any of our social media and use the hashtag TolkienReadingDay2023 so that we and the folks of the Tolkien Society can see how everyone is celebrating.
Speaker: You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or stream our episodes directly on Zencaster. That is zencaster .com slash queer lodgings, a Tolkien podcast with hyphens in between all of those words. Please leave us a rating and like, share, and subscribe.
Speaker: Our Facebook is facebook .com slash queer lodgings. You can find us on Twitter for the moment at queer underscore lodgings or you can email us with show ideas or feedback at queer lodgings podcast at gmail .com.
Speaker: Hello and welcome to Queer Lodgings, the Queer Led Hood— I'm sorry, man. Apparently I still need a script to remember what to say for a single fucking sentence. Alright, here we go.
