Mars is Bright Tonight

 It's in Opposition today.

Sadly, I can't see it being bright.  Because cloud.

UPDATE: The clouds cleared, and I could see the red eye shining balefully...

Ollivander's in Tooting

I'm sure everyone who has read the Harry Potter stories or seen the films remembers Mr Ollivander's wand shop in Diagon Alley.  The many long boxes containing all sorts of wands, waiting for the right person to enter.

Well if you head for Jane's Trains model railway shop in Tooting, just by Tooting railway station, you will find something very similar.  Along much of the right-hand wall as you enter are long boxes, stacked higgledy-piggledy just like the wand cases in Ollivander's.  Only these boxes contains engines, coaches, trucks, track and other accessories for the aspiring or experienced modeller.

And unlike a wand and a wizard, I don't *believe* the model chooses the modeller. 

I might be wrong, though.

Crossing Over

We seem to be living in the era of crossover casting.  So while Mr Olivander (John Hurt) has become the next (not-quite?) Doctor Who for the upcoming fiftieth anniversary edition, Sherlock (Benedict Cumberbatch), after putting in a brief performance as Smaug, crops up in the new Star Trek.  Where the first person we see him meet is Mickey (Noel Clarke), one of the Doctor's old companions.  And let's not forget that Spock used to be Sylar while Scotty was Reepicheep and The Editor (a Dr Who villain) amongst many others...

Between Olympics

Well, not quite.  The Paralympics have in fact started.  But I started this post in the hiatus between the two Games, and I'm not changing the title now.  So:

As I sit here between Olympics, and with the godawful ticketing system still not working properly, and not likely to let us get to see any Paralympic competitions up close in the near future, if at all, it seems a good time, as they say on Thought for Today, to pause and reflect.

We always expected the Olympics to be far, far better, and more worthwhile, than the benighted Jubilee - and they didn't disappoint.  We were on Dartmoor, on holiday, during the Opening Ceremony, which meant we got to watch it on a huge plasma TV.  Which was nice.

As every commentator - well most commentators - have said, it was astonishingly good. 

I have to admit, when I first heard about the bucolic idyll that was being planned, a fantasy English countryside, my heart sank. But even that was enlivened by the rippling blue cloth that covered the stands and allowed us to see the idyll as 'sea-girt'.

And then we tore it all up in the Steam-driven Pandemonium of the Industrial Revolution, led by  Sir Kenneth Branagh as Caliban (a theme for all four ceremonies it seems) - cum - Brunel.  Echoes of Blake and Milton. 

Followed by (in random order):-
- NHS nurses (a great invention from 1948)
- Liberty director Shami Chakrabarti.
- Suffragettes
- Voldemort from Harry Potter,  Rowling and Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bang, and Mary Poppins (all representing children's literature?  But no Blyton I could see, nor Ahlberg, nor Kerr). And that section did  cause our 15-y-o to comment along the lines that the good socialist message of the NHS was undermined by the children in beds having to be saved by the privatised care of Mary Poppins...
- Beckham on a speedboat looking terribly stylish, and fireworks on Tower Bridge as it opened to let his ego through...
- The Swinging Sixties and psychedelia
- The Stunt Queen: so much more approachable than the one we have...
- The noise of the Tardis in the middle of another Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody...  (but why?)
- Rowan Atkinson & Simon Rattle in Chariots of Fire
A section on media (ish), introduced by the pips, Radio 4 and the Archers, leading to a house full of film and TV clips -  while decades of our pop and rock played...
- Python and Fawlty Towers, (let's ignore Eric Idle in the Closing Ceremony for the moment)
- A Matter of Life and Death
- Kes
- Gregory's Girl
- Bagpuss
- Queen Who Stones  Beatles
- Madness 
- Mud
- Jetpacks and Tim Berners-Lee
But sadly no Thunderbirds or HHGTTG or Fast Show that I noticed...

All really good fun.  But it did make me realise that we here at TANH appear to have been writing about the London 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony in half of our postings, without really knowing what we were doing...  It's like we were revising for it.

So is that it?  Do we have to stop writing about all that stuff now?

Interesting

I learnt two things from Radio 4 this morning:
1) Iceland has no railways, and
2) There is a book called "Harry Potter and the Tagine of Stoke."

JK Rowling's Harvard Commencement Speech

I'm not particularly a fan of Rowling, but I thought this was fun.


J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.

Achievement

A few days ago in the Guardian crossword,the answer to a clue (about 'No wizards with face and legs jumbled' was 'Muggles'.  So it's a real word at last - or at least as far as Paul is concerned....

On Tolkien, Harry Potter, Books and Films

Famously, the tone of voice Tolkien uses changes dramatically between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. In the former he often uses a chortling, avuncular tone of voice, occasionally twee, and from time-to-time addressing the reader directly. Chosen at random:

“You will hardly believe it, but poor Bilbo was really very taken aback. So far all his thoughts and energies had been concentrated on getting to the Mountain and finding the entrance. He had never bothered to wonder how the treasure was to be removed, certainly never how any part of it that might fall to his share was to be brought back all the way to Bag-End, Underhill.”

(The Hobbit, p.192)

‘You will hardly believe it’, ‘poor’ Bilbo – ‘very taken aback’. Examples multiply throughout the story.

The published text of Lord of the Rings is very different, of course. Although the first chapter or so does border on this style (I know several people who have found the first chapter so annoyingly twee they couldn’t get past it), it quickly settles into the more epic (cod archaic?) prose style that we know so well. Again at random:

“The host rode on. Need drove them. Fearing to come too late, they rode with all the speed they could, pausing seldom. Swift and enduring were the steeds of Rohan, but there were many leagues to go”

(The Two Towers, p.131 – near the beginning of ‘Helm’s Deep’)

It took Tolkien some time to achieve this shift (and to be fair an argument can be made that it began in the later chapters of The Hobbit). For example, looking at the manuscript evidence published by Christopher Tolkien:

“It is no good talking to hobbits about dragons: they either disbelieve you, or feel uncomfortable; and in either case tend to avoid you afterwards.”

(From the second version of A long-expected party, The Return of the Shadow, p.19)

If the direct address to the audience tails off fairly quickly as the story proceeds (and mostly disappears after Bree in the first draft), the full tone of the final work still took a while to be achieved. Famously, Aragorn originally – and for some time - was a hobbit called Trotter.

J K Rowling does something similar in the Harry Potter series. When Harry arrives at Hogwarts for the first time and is waiting to be sorted, she writes:

“A horrible thought struck Harry, as horrible thoughts always do when you’re very nervous. What if he wasn’t chosen at all?”

(Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, p.90)

That aside (“as horrible thoughts always do when you’re very nervous”) parallels the Tolkien writing in  The Hobbit. Rowling is in semi-parental mode, reassuring the reader. By the last few books of the series the tone is of course very different. These direct addresses disappear completely (at least I can’t find any).

However, I think something else also happens in the Harry Potter sequence. To explain it, it is necessary to look at the sequence of book and film publication:-

1997 Philosopher’s Stone (Book)
1998 Chamber of Secrets (Book)
1999 Prisoner of Azkaban (Book)
2000 Goblet of Fire (Book)
2001 Philosopher’s Stone (Film)
2002 Chamber of Secrets (Film)
2003 Order of the Phoenix (Book)
2004 Prisoner of Azkaban (Film)
2005 Half-Blood Prince (Book); Goblet of Fire (Film)
2006
2007 Deathly Hallows (Book); Order of the Phoenix (Film)
2008
2009 Half-Blood Prince (Film)
2010 Deathly Hallows part I (Film, planned)
2011 Deathly Hallows Part II (Film, planned)

By 2002, when presumably Rowling was writing the fifth novel, the first of the films was out. Certainly, by the time she was writing the last two books, two or three films were circulating. And I think this has a subtle effect on how she writes some of the key characters in the novels.

Take Severus Snape. The Alan Rickman performance in the films is very strong, and to a degree helps to fix our picture of the potions master. And I think this has an effect on how she describes him in the later novels. For example, in the first book his hooked nose is described several times (see eg p.94) and in Chamber of Secrets he is:

“… a thin man with sallow skin, a hooked nose and greasy, shoulder-length black hair.”

(Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, p.62)

But Rickman isn’t thin, and doesn’t use a false nose in the films. Aa a result, I would argue, in the later novels, these elements of Snape’s description are, mostly, quietly dropped (although the young Snape is described as thin and “stringy” in book seven). Instead, the descriptions concentrate on his thick greasy hair, pallid face and glittering black eyes.

If the physical descriptions of Snape change after the films begin to come out, I believe something similar happens to his patterns of speech. In Harry’s first potions lesson we have:

Snape, like Flitwick, started the class by taking the register, and like Flitwick, he paused at Harry’s name.
‘Ah yes,’ he said softly, ‘Harry Potter. Our new – celebrity.’

(Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, p.101)

Rickman delivers that pause and sneer brilliantly, of course, and his performance through the whole scene is extremely powerful. I suspect his delivery here and in other scenes from the first three films begin to subtly affect the way in which Snape is written in the latter novels. Certainly that end-of sentence pause seems to occur more towards the end (where possible).


Also I don't want to dismiss Rowling's use of the different responses of Fliotwick and Snape to the presence of Harry in their respective classes to quickly define some of the differences between them - I merely want to focus on a different aspect here.

Something similar – and perhaps a little more apparently - happens to McGonagall. Unlike Snape, her appearance doesn’t change in the later books, unless it may be that she seems slightly older, as there are few physical differences between Maggie Smith and the Head of Gryffindor as described. But I would argue that as the sequence progresses the writing makes her sound more and more like Miss Jean Brodie. Consider:

‘Potter!’ whispered Professor McGonagall, clutching her heart. ‘Potter – you’re here! What -? How -?’ She struggled to pull herself together. ‘Potter, that was foolish!’
‘He spat at you,’ said Harry.
‘Potter, I – that was very – very gallant of you – but don’t you realize -?’
‘Yeah, I do,’ Harry assured her. Somehow her panic steadied him. ‘Professor McGonagall, Voldemort’s on the way.’

(Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, pp.477-8)

‘Foolish’ – and even more ‘Gallant’ - are words that seem written for Smith/Brodie. It isn’t that they are wholly out of character for McGonagall, rather here her characterisation is subtly adjusted, warped towards that of Muriel Spark’s character.

How conscious this is on Rowling’s part – or, indeed, the consistency or extent of the change in general – is not part of my argument. Although I could go further and discuss the Dursleys, for example, in a similar manner. I just wanted to note that these changes do seem to be there.

So, finally, if a film of The Hobbit had been made before The Lord of the Rings had been written, how would the resulting epic have been different?