More on Wolves

Dear readers, here is quick review of recent things our editors have found on wolves, as we continue to research into wolf lore and collect submissions for our fall issue on wolf folklore and werewolf lore. Please also visit our rolling discussion on the message board on this topic, which now includes quite a few thoughts on wolves and werewolves in J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth. Chime in with your own "wolf sightings" and thoughts on the attraction and fascination that our culture(s) has with the wolf.



Meanwhile, here are a few items:

1. Endicott Studio of Mythic Arts just posted links on their blog to all of the (quite good) poems on Little Red Riding Hood that have collected over the years in their online Coffee House. Take a look!

2. If you haven't seen it yet, you must check out Wolf Song of Alaska, a massive and beautiful online resource on wolf fact and folklore. The site also features some wonderful photographs of the arctic wolf.

3. A YouTube video featuring an Arctic encounter between a man in a truck and a wolf on the road (no, not a collision). There is always something enchanting to us about such encounters between the "human" and the "wild" (perhaps because such encounters suggest simultaneously distance between those two and that perhaps the distance is an illusion):



Drop by the message board and share your own encounters with wolves or with wolf stories...

Credit for the painting above goes to J-C at deviantart.

Rare Seahorses in the River Thames

Dear readers, one of our fiction editors, newly back from England, sent this article from the BBC to me today, with the comment:

Seahorses are just mystical to me and I loved seeing them at the London Zoo, where there was a wonderful exhibit of watercolor sketches of them (seadragons, too).

We wanted to pass the article to you, because this is indeed a wild magic of nature and a wonder of ecology. British biologists report that short-snouted seahorses, usually living in the warmer waters off the Canary Islands or in the Mediterranean, have been sighted in the Thames "in shallow muddy waters, estuaries or seagrass beds" as far upriver as east London. Think of that! Subtropical seahorses, beautiful with their tiny, ridged bodies, living in that cold river. Seahorses in London. It is a beautiful thing. As of last weekend, the species has been granted protected status, and the BBC reports that the presence of the seahorses indicates an increase in the quality of London's water. (I wonder if it indicates global warming, as well.)

The portrait to the left is Seahorse, an oil and canvas painting by the former photojournalist Shawn Olson, and it does not depict a short-snouted seahorse. However, you can learn more about snort-shouted seahorses here.

Seahorses: they are beautiful and evocative even without the invention of sea-folk to ride them: they are a species that rides the waves by wrapping their tails around plants; in which the male carries the eggs; and in which the creature's two eyes move completely independently of each other, in its attempt to watch for food or peril. What could be more wondrous?

Moments of Wonder in Computer Animated Scenes

Computer animation has something of a bad rep, a stigma it must fight. Everyone remembers Jar Jar Binks. But ah, what a tool our new visual technologies can be in the hands of an artist or a great director - someone who understands how to evoke wonder not just for the sake of startling or amazing the viewer, but wonder at just the right moment to break the story open in some new way...especially if combined with powerful music, or powerful acting, or powerful dialogue. I want to write a quick post here with a few of my favorite moments, to celebrate some moments in the past few years when the computer animators and the storytellers came together to make us gasp...and feel.

First prize among those that come first to mind tonight is the opening of The Two Towers...the stirring music, the sweeping camera view over an ice-cold mountain ridge as the sounds of terrible battle slowly become audible, then the moment that makes it all: that long meteoric fall into a lake within the earth, while a daunting choir laments in our ears. That is wonder-work; that is film-making. (After all, what did we all set down our books a few moments and go to the movies for, if not in hope of such moments of wonder as that?)



Now for Number 2 - the critical scene in Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children - the return of the villain, Sephiroth, whom the heroes had thought put away forever. Three things I love in this scene, besides the music (did I mention the importance of a great choir?). One: the widening of Cloud's eye when he realizes his enemy is back. How did the animators capture so much emotion in a cartoon eye? In the words of our art editor, who grabbed my arm at that moment in the movie, "You see that look? That's consciousness!"

Two: Sephiroth's lines. This is the kind of villain that rouses all my boyish horror and admiration. "I want to sail the darkness of the cosmos with this planet as my vessel." That's quite a way to say hello after a long absence. There is dark ambition and a grim majesty to his first lines upon his return.

Three: The grace and menace with which the animators imbued Sephiroth's movements on the screen - especially that moment when he leaps into the ruined tower after Cloud and gets our adrenaline going, sword out, hair flying, at a dead run, moving like some wild god, relentless, self-sufficient, terrible. This is no mindless car chase action scene: there is a grace and dark poetry to the duel.

The Two Towers scene is an example of how to begin a movie right; Advent Children, how to end a movie right. Here's the scene:



And now for a middle from a movie. Not a flawless movie by any means, but a movie with many beautiful scenes. The moment in Big Fish when our hero first sees his beloved so well illustrates the wonder of first love and of love at first sight, which the French used to call le coup de foudre (i.e., being hit by lightning), that I can never forget it. And once more, the storytellers has given us some great lines: "They tell you that when you meet the love of your life, time stops. And that's true. ...What they don't tell you is that once time starts again, it moves extra fast to catch up."



I will end my celebration here, but please add some favorite scenes of your own in the comments. Frankly, the moviemakers are turning out so much special-effects-heavy shlock these days in the name of "fantasy" films that I feel no guilt at all in taking an evening just to throw up my hands and celebrate the real thing, the scenes that moved me, without necessarily offering anything really intelligent to say about any of them. And that's the beauty of a blog, as opposed to a conference or a class or a scholarly publication (although all three of those have their own place and their own beauty). A blogger is allowed a few free moments just to stand up and start cheering. Join me in that!

Valinor map

Maps are mere allegories of the world. I am fascinated by the cartography of paradise in this map of Valinor (the elvendom west of the Sea in Middle-Earth) by the late Karen Wynn Fonstad:


Fonstad strikes an intriguing compromise between the urge to map Paradise and so delimit the undefinable, and the desire to convey the beauty of Paradise as a blossom-open, uncontainable experience unfiltered by the dry map. The little framed boxes fail to contain their images, which, maplike though they remain, are also evocative and suggestive of the beauty of the woods of Orome or the pools of Este. This map strives to provide both chart and illustration, both the technical and the artistic, the flesh and the soul; it evokes both the engineer's and the poet's discovery of paradise.

How does one draw a map of paradise?

For more of the attempt to detail or describe paradise, see TheOneRing.Net's Grand Tour of Valinor. For more Karen Wynn Fonstad, check out her geographies of Middle-Earth, Pern, and Thomas Covenant's The Land.

(Seaworthy) Viking ship made out of ice cream sticks

I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.

Stuntman Robert McDonald must have been gripped with Sea-Fever indeed; according to an article our art editor found this morning, Robert, his son, and more than 5,000 children have worked to build a seaworthy Norse longship out of 15 million ice-cream sticks. I'm not kidding about this. It staggers my imagination. McDonald and his faithful crew are about to leave port in the Netherlands and brave the icy northern seas for England. But they are not coming as marauders; according to Reuters, "he has loaded his ship with cuddly toys and plans to reach London and visit children in hospitals." The media, of course, is eating up the human interest factor, and for my part I am gawking at what this man and 5,000 children made out of ice cream sticks. (A Viking ship carrying stuffed animals to hospitals in England may be wildly bizarre, but it is infinitely more beautiful and useful than 15 million small wooden sticks sitting in a landfill or at the bottom of the sea. I stand amazed.)

Our art editor has posted a link to the article and has opened the forum for discussion here, on our message board. Swing by, see a video about the ship, and comment - this is a remarkable, if unexpected, moment in the history of seafaring.

Turtle: Totem

Dear readers, here is a very quick post - I promise more later. I was fortunate enough to find this painting recently and wanted to share it with you. The piece is called Turtle: Totem.


Here is what the artist, a mythworker who goes by the callsign Inspiritous at deviantart, had to say about that great blue creature:

Turtle - Totemic:
Due a very stressful period of my life I was constantly having bad dreams and nightmares. During one, I felt myself sink into deep, blue water. I saw the sun filtering down through the water and waves, and slowly a large gnarled, ugly Turtle passed over me. This huge behemoth of a creature, scar covered, and armoured created a feeling of peace within me. The next day, I painted this.

Ah, "behemoth" - there is a beautiful word that we don't use nearly enough. And so well the word describes both that turtle and the feeling it evokes. As a man whose totem is the tree kangaroo, I am far too bouncy and hyper for my own good. I would enjoy having a friend whose totem was something as solid and at peace as an armoured sea turtle.

Glass Slipper

Do you know how many artists are actually making glass slippers (never in a pair), and how many bridal shops are called The Glass Slipper? It is remarkable. This beautiful slipper to the left, with its attendant mice, is the work of Francine Zaslow; the slipper below I found at the Crystal Fox Gallery, which showcases glass sculpture of many kinds. Beautiful and frighteningly fragile, these glass sculptures appear attempts to capture something fleeting in our culture, an image of the feminine or an image of courtship that is outdated and yet continues to leave traces throughout our culture.


Perhaps the slippers are nostalgic, a longing for the stories and safety of a childhood image of the world, one brought to young consumers by Disney and by bedtime stories and by a million Barbie commercials. Or maybe the slippers have their appeal because of a longing for romantic chivalry that has proven persistent amid the upheavals in gender conventions over the past decades?

To me, they are beautiful as art objects. I cannot imagine anyone wearing them, but in their breathtaking fragility and in the way the light shines off their edges, these glass slippers look like artifacts that someone from Faerie left behind. No doubt that is what the prince thought when he found Cinderella's one slipper left behind on the stair, no doubt he thought her an otherworldly beauty, someone as likely to have a faerie grandmother as a faerie godmother, for all her scrubbing of the kitchen floor. Stranger yet the slippers seem to me, a man in a generation in which men are taught that women, while fascinating, are not divine nor would they allow themselves to be confined or treated as any Victorian "angel of the house," but they are real human beings struggling to comb their hair and pay the bills. These slippers, in their shining light, must have been dropped not by any human woman but by some elf in the garden -- surely they can have no connection with someone I might take to a dance or someone who may want to split the cost of dinner.

I must ask some of my friends what these slippers look like to the eyes of a woman viewer. Do they arouse disgust? Longing? Curiosity? Laughter? Wonder?