Story Elements in Elidor

I was struck by several things reading Elidor by Alan Garner. First, there is the theme of the Fisher King. When Roland goes into Elidor to find his brothers and sister, he wanders into a wasteland where the only person he finds is Malebron, who is a lamed king. Bron is the name of the Fisher King in some of the grail stories. So it is no wonder that he gave a spear to Roland rather than a sword like Childe Rowland was given.

At first I thought the one child who is strong enough to overcome the enchantment of the barrow is called Roland after the nephew of Charlemagne, who was the strongest and the bravest knight, but it seems he is called Roland for a fairy story called Childe Rowland. This boy went into fairy land to find his two brothers and sister who were under an enchantment after losing a ball in a church and after the sister went to get the ball but had gone widdershins(counter to the sun).

I was also struck by how much the barrow scene resembled the hobbits' battle with the barrow wights of the Barrow Downs in Lord of the Rings. Most likely, Garner and Tolkien were drawing on the same folk tales. It seems to me the stone circle, with the eighty one uncountable stones, could be any one of stone circles in England but Stonehenge had eighty one Sarsen stones.

The 'Lay of the Starved Fool' that Malebron is using as his own Sibylline prophecy book hearkens to the grail stories because Percival, the original grail knight was also the 'fool'. Some etymologies say Parzival did not mean 'pierced valley' but 'wise fool'. This also leads into tarot because Percival's journey is rather like that of the Fool. The treasures are hidden under a bed of roses, the rose garden being an important location in Medieval song.

The thing that is needed to heal Elidor and Malebron is not a grail but the song of a unicorn. While digging the hole to bury and hide the Treasures, the children dig up and accidentally break a jug with unicorn on it. This is what sets the unicorn free. Roland's sister Helen is needed to capture the unicorn, Findhorn (white horn), but the virgin is usually used to lure the unicorn so it can be killed and Findhorn, although not killed by the children, is killed by the men hunting them. Its dying song brings the light back to Elidor. The different elements of older stories brought together in a new way reminds me of J.R.R. Tolkiens' essay 'On Fairy Stories' and the cauldron of story. You can throw whatever ingredients you want in the 'soup' but of course they have to blend well together and these ones do.

And one last word, if you are not Canadian, you likely have not heard the Unicorn Song but here it is.

Prester John

I do not have a great deal of time for recreational reading lately but I decided to treat myself to a novel over the Christmas break. You do not expect to find something in Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum that leads to J.R.R. Tolkien but something did. This is, unfortunately, one of those areas where my personal library fails me for research. Although I do have Humphrey Carpenter's biography on Tolkien, my collection of what could be called 'occult' books is restricted to one small volume on the tarot. So I have had to resort to the 'Net. Sorry.

Eusebius of Caesarea is one of the first to mention Prester John, the king of a mythical Eldorado in the East. He did not start off that way. Eusebius was merely distinguishing him from John the Apostle. The legend of a king in the Orient with all the wealth and refinement of the East except that he was one of 'our guys' became current in the Middle Ages, especially during the Crusades. The Crusaders were hoping this king would come with all his splendor and huge armies to rescue the crusade from disaster.

John Mandeville wrote about the kingdom of Prester John in his Travels. Marco Polo also wrote about who he thought Prester John might be. Prester John was supposed to be descended from one of the three Magi and carried an emerald scepter. Prester John is implicated in the search for the grail in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival by being John, the son of Fierefiz and Repanse de Schoye. The introduction to my copy of Parzival avoids mentioning Prester John at all even though the green stone of the grail (lapis exiliis, a stone that has fallen from Heaven), seems to be mirrored in Prester John's emerald scepter. I have read somewhere, forgetting where, that in gnostic writings the emerald was a stone that fell from Lucifer's (who was the true King of the World) crown when he fought with the usurping Demiurge (who we now erroneously worship as God). This is strange territory for Tolkien to be venturing in.

The letter from Prester John that was circulating around in the Middle Ages, claimed that among his treasures which included the Fountain of Youth, was a mirror which allowed the king to see everything that went on in his kingdom. The question now would be, since this would appear to be outside of Tolkien's normal area of study, is how would he even be aware of this mirror? From Charles Williams of course. Williams, who was a member of the Inklings and one of Tolkien's friends, wrote a book called War in Heaven in which Prester John is a protector of the Holy Grail. Williams was a Rosicrucian and was good friends with Evelyn Underhill, who was a member of the Golden Dawn. One has to wonder what this means for Frodo's alias. However, I am going to state that I think the mirror, or mirrors, of Prester John is the inspiration for the palantir. Williams' book was published in 1930, early enough to have influenced Tolkien, and the Medieval legend has been around even longer than that.

The only thing bothering me is that spotting all these little details is beginning to spoil my enjoyment of the novel.