VII. Tolkien and the Great Rood Screen

I shared this story briefly in my previous post, but as I continue my meditations on a Language of Beauty I thought it would be worth considering further here, since, with a few well-chosen words, Tolkien perfectly encapsulates a complex idea which I have been wrestling with. 

The setting is a conversation, early on in their friendship, between C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Like most good friends they had their ins and outs, their ups and downs, and like most men they came to certain boundaries within their relationship--certain rivers over which lay deeper intimacy, but beyond which one or the other were not able to cross. 

Both men were Christians, of course. Lewis was Church of England, neither as Anglo-Catholic as Anglo-Catholics would like to claim, nor nearly as Evangelical as Evangelicals would like to claim.* For Lewis, the Middle Ages held a great deal of beauty and attraction, but there seem to have been certain medieval ideas and practices with which he was willing to intellectually engage, but into which he was never able to fully enter. 

The veneration of the saints seems to have been the biggest of these objections, especially in the early years after his conversion (or rather, reversion) to Christianity. Tolkien, on the other hand, was a fairly traditional Roman Catholic in every sense. For him, the faith of the Middle Ages seems to have been still a vibrant, living thing, and therefore not something which could be dissected piecemeal without killing it. This was the subject of one of Tolkien's earliest conflicts with Lewis, the first one of those "rivers" which could not be crossed. I will here quote a rather lengthy passage from Humphrey Carpenter's The Inklings, since some context is important lest I seem to paint too bleak a picture of their friendship:

‘We were coming down the steps from Magdalen hall,’ Tolkien recalled, ‘long ago in the days of our unclouded association, before there was anything, as it seemed, that must be withheld or passed over in silence. I said that I had a special devotion to St John. Lewis stiffened, his head went back, and he said in the brusque harsh tones which I was later to hear him use again when dismissing something he disapproved of: “I can’t imagine any two persons more dissimilar.” We stumped along the cloisters, and I followed feeling like a shabby little Catholic caught by the eye of an “Evangelical clergyman of good family”1 taking holy water at the door of a church. A door had slammed. Never now should I be able to say in his presence:

Bot Crystes mersy and Mary and Jon,
Thise am the grounde of alle my blysse
– The Pearl, 383-4;

and suppose that I was sharing anything of my vision of a great rood-screen through which one could see the Holy of Holies.’

Tolkien wrote this thirty years later, when other events had soured his recollections. In the early days of the friendship such moments were rare, and for the most part he was profoundly grateful for Lewis’s conversion. In October 1933 he wrote in his diary that friendship with Lewis, ‘besides giving constant pleasure and comfort, has done me much good from the contact with a man at once honest, brave, intellectual – a scholar, a poet, and a philosopher – and a lover, at least after a long pilgrimage, of Our Lord’.

Embedded within this somewhat painful recollection of Tolkien's is what I believe to be one of his most profound ideas, too often overlooked: the idea of the Pearl poem (which, according to Carpenter, Lewis especially disliked) and by extension the whole world of medieval language and literature to which it belonged as a kind of "rood-screen" through which one could glimpse a vision of holiness. 

15th-century rood screen from the chapel of St Fiacre at Le Faouet Morbihan. Note the saints beneath the cross.

In mulling over this metaphor of Tolkien's, I've conceived a sort of three-way (i.e. triangular) relationship between the rood-screen, the veneration of the saints, and medieval literature.**

Medieval art and literature*** seems to assume a world paradoxically characterized by what Lewis called the 'thick' and the 'clear':

We may [reverently] divide religions, as we do soups, into ‘thick’ and ‘clear’. By Thick I mean those which have orgies and ecstasies and mysteries and local attachments: Africa is full of Thick religions. By Clear I mean those which are philosophical, ethical and universalizing: Stoicism, Buddhism, and the Ethical Church are Clear religions. Now if there is a true religion it must be both Thick and Clear: for the true God must have made both the child and the man, both the savage and the citizen, both the head and the belly. ...Christianity really breaks down the middle wall of the partition. It takes a convert from central Africa and tells him to obey an enlightened universalist ethic: it takes a twentieth-century academic prig like me and tells me to go fasting to a Mystery, to drink the blood of the Lord. (C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock)

Medieval Christianity is full of both, in a way which truly must be experienced in order to be understood fully. It is why a theological titan like St Ambrose or St Augustine could compose hymns to jubilantly celebrate the miraculous finding of a martyr's relics, something I suspect most modern "theologians" would be too sober to do. It is why it was precisely the people who lived the 'clearest' existence--the hermits, stylites, and monks--who defended the 'thick' uses of incense, liturgical arts, and the veneration of the holy icons. It was a world that had rejected the extremes both of paganism and Platonism not because either was too much of something but because both were not enough of anything. 

In the nave of even the smallest medieval church, the altar--where the holy oblation was offered up day-in and day-out through the brightest days and darkest nights of the world--was the focal point of the whole building just as the elevation and sacring was the focal point of the Mass. But at the same time, the nave of even the smallest medieval church was full of beads and images, candles and whispered prayers--a whole world of personal and para-liturgical devotion, all oriented toward the altar and yet organic and growing, like the undergrowth of a great forest, in a way which the Reformation and Enlightenment would find unsanitary and chaotic. 

St Nicholas Orthodox Cathedral, Washington DC

It is a world in some sense crowded, just as medieval frescoes or illuminations are too busy for modern eyes or the interlaced plot of your average Arthurian legend has too many changes of character and story for the modern attention span to track. But its inhabitants did not find it crowded--they found it full. Full--but with plenty of corners which still needed filling in. They saw very little difficulty in telling and retelling their favorite stories (be it Arthurian legends, hagiographies, or the Romance of Alexander) with an attitude towards authorship which would curl the toes of a modern Intellectual Property lawyer. Whole worlds of the old pagan undergrowth could be repurposed as in Beowulf or the Prose Edda, just as the high philosophy of the Classical world could be reinterpreted for the local idiom as in the Anglo-Saxon Boethius. So too The Divine Comedy is likely to offend the modern reader by its 'thickness' and its 'clarity' all at once.

Lower screen detail from St Michael's Church, Barton Turf

This world might seem chaotic the way a great forest seems chaotic. And yet there is a logic--a grammar, a syntax, a musical leit motif--that underlies it all. Like the procession around the walls of the parish at the Paschal vigil, there is a clear order and goal to it all--and yet also a kind of organic pulse as sleepy children move about and people press and throng and try to keep up with the crowd. In short, this is what it looks like when something is alive.

This sense of a heaven--of a world--which was full, and always becoming more full, undergirds Dante's Paradisio, which manages to have both endless space and upward dimension in the blessedness of the saints, but which at the same time is radically centered around the Beatific Vision of the Holy Trinity, of Christ. These two things are not opposites; indeed, it is difficult to imagine a version of Paradisio which merely skips to the final canto, as various modern egalitarian theologies might suggest.

I have already made some stumbling attempts to discuss how the iconography--and particularly the iconostasis--of the Eastern Orthodox temple conveys this sense of fullness. In the medieval west--and, it seems, for Tolkien--the rood screen served a similar role. Historian Eamon Duffy describes it this way:

The screens were first and foremost Christological images, proclaiming the centrality of Christ's atoning death. The early sixteenth-century Rood-screen rail at Compsal near Doncaster had an inscription along it which hammered the point home:

Let fal down thyn ne & lift up thy hart
Behold thy maker on yon
Remembir his woundis that for the did smart
Gotyn without syn and on a virgin bor.
Al his hed percid with a crowne of thorn
Alas man thy hart ought to brast in two
Bewar of the dwyl whan he blawis his horn
And pray thy gode aungel convey thee fro.

These familiar facts are worth insisting upon when considering the saints painted on the dados or loft-fronts of Rood-screens, for they represent a powerful iconic and liturgical gloss on the perception of the role of the saints... The saints stood, in the most literal sense, under the cross, and their presence on the screen spoke of their dependence on and mediation of the benefits of Christ's Passion, and their role as intercessors for their clients not merely here and and now but at the last day. The whole screen was therefore a complex icon of the heavenly hierarchy, and many screens where clearly designed to underline this symbolism... representing... a sense of being surrounded and assisted by the "whole company of heaven."

Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, p. 158

For Tolkien, medieval art and literature seems to have served this purpose--to place the heart, the imagination, in a world that was full to overflowing with wonders and glories, the ultimate purpose of which was to reveal the Source of wonder and glory--to veil and therefore reveal as holy that which takes place beyond the rood-screen or iconostasis, where the Singer enters the tale--where the great Story unfolds.

Rood-screen of Croyland Abbey

*There is strong evidence to suggest that Lewis became more of a high churchman after his encounter with Fr Walter Adams, an Anglo-Catholic priest who served as Lewis's father-confessor and spiritual director from 1940-1952.  Adams convinced Lewis of the Real Presence in the Eucharist, and discipled Lewis in a love of liturgy, the Daily Office, and the monthly recitation of the Psalter. Lewis also subscribed to a certain understanding of the doctrine of Purgatory, though there are some nuances regarding that issue regarding which I'm not really qualified to speak.

**We should not forget that far and away the most popular genre of literature in the Middle Ages was hagiography, though these saints lives (some of which immensely fantastic, evocative, and entertaining; others of which are downright gory) now rarely catch the notice of modern readers.

***As though one could speak in any kind of an accurate, general way about a thousand-year period of human history.

A Gallimaufry for St John the Baptist

Today, on both the Eastern and Western liturgical calendars, is the feast of The Beheading of the Holy Glorious Prophet, Forerunner, and Baptist John. This is something of an odd "feast" (I use quotes here because it is in fact a strict fasting day in the Eastern Rite) in a number of respects, especially for those of us who are not native to a more medieval liturgical context. But given the importance of St John the Baptist to medieval Christianity, and given his especial important to Tolkien, I thought I might delve into the barrow of the past and produce a few treasures for consideration in honor of this remarkable man, the "greatest born among women" to quote one authority.

---

The Beheading of St John the Baptist, by Caravaggio

The Beheading is actually one of three feasts concerned particularly with the head of the Baptist: the other two (February 24 and May 25) commemorate the first and second, and third finding of the head, which according to tradition has been lost and recovered a number of times. Sorting through the various stories of the findings might be an enjoyable exercise for another blog post, but for now I only point this out to demonstrate that the figure of St John the Baptist loomed much larger in medieval Christianity than we often appreciate. In addition to the commemorations already mentioned, his nativity ("Johnmas" -- June 24), conception (September 23), and "synaxis" (primary feast day -- January 7th, the day after Epiphany or Theophany) are all commemorated on the calendar of the Eastern Rite. This is, of course, in addition to those events in the life of the Savior--the Theophany, the Visitation--which prominently featured St John. To top it all off, every Tuesday is dedicated to his memory.

To the medieval mind, the placement of these feasts and fasts were not arbitrary, nor merely the extraneous accretions of the centuries. As the medieval man or woman generally believed in a universe which was ordered by love, like an intricate dance (even if that order could be fully realized only beyond the circle of the moon), so too their experience of time reflected this belief. The intricate relationship between fixed and movable feasts alone would be the study of many lifetimes.

The feasts of the Baptist furnish some simple examples the kind of significance with which the whole year was imbued: his whole gestational period, from his conception to his nativity, is nine months and a day--one day longer than Christ's as the Virgin Mary's is one day less than Christ's, because only Christ was perfect man, you see. Then, too, his nativity comes around the time of the Summer Solstice, precisely that point where the sun will begin to turn and wane, and the days grow shorter as winter hastens on towards Christmas; for St John himself says "he must increase, but I must decrease."

Maybe these are the kinds of details which seem a little trite when they are removed from context and baldly stated in a blog post. Taken together, though, experienced within the whole world in which they belong, they are part of a beautiful dance which reveals a deep relationship between the story of redemption and the natural world. Today we are inclined to look at any correlation between the spiritual life and the natural cycle (for instance, the proximity of Christmas to the winter solstice) as either purely coincidental, or a suspicious vestige of some older pagan rite. Against both of these objections, the medieval person might ask "but when else could it have happened?"

In her much more articulate treatment of the subject, Eleanor Parker writes:

It strikes me (once again) that however much many people today, in their ignorance of all but the broadest stereotypes about the Middle Ages, stigmatise the medieval church as worldly, rigid, and oppressive, it was in some ways immeasurably more humane and creative than its modern successors. It was happy to see human life as fully part of the natural world, shaped by the cycles of the sun and moon and the seasons; it was able to articulate a belief that material considerations, convenience, and economic productivity are not the highest goods, and not the only standards by which life should be lived. When confronted by calendar clashes with the potential to be a little awkward or inconvenient, the medieval church could have the imagination not to simply suppress them or tidy them away, but to find meaning in them - meaning which springs from deep knowledge of the images and poetry of scripture, the liturgy, and popular devotion.

---

Eastern Orthodox icon of St John the Baptist. The Baptist is often shown with wings in Eastern iconography, indicating his angelic ministry.

For my money, the hymnography surrounding this feast is some of the most "metal" in the history of liturgical composition. Although the history of this feast goes all the way back to the Fourth Century, the earliest I've been able to positively date the following hymns is back to the Seventh Century. Either way, they're solidly medieval and so well within the purview of this blog.

The basic setting of the celebration is outlined in the following verses, sung at Vespers in the Eastern Rite:

During the celebration of shameless Herod’s birthday,
the terms of the oath to the wanton dancer were fulfilled,
for the Baptist’s head was cut off and carried like food on a platter
in the presence of those reclining at the loathsome banquet.
Truly they feasted on wickedness and murder.
But let us bless the Forerunner as is his due,
and honor him as the greatest born of women!

We're already a long way from Hillsong. Subsequent stanzas are poetic elaboration on the story. Like much festal hymnography, the chief interest seems to be in elaborating what is set down in sacred Scripture and church tradition, examining the story from the perspective of the various characters involved. In that way, such hymns take their cues from the many Psalms and canticles within Scripture itself, and serve as a sort of poetic sermon which invites us to imaginatively engage in the story of salvation. The following verses are sung, alternating chanted verses from the Psalms:

The dance of the devil’s disciple
was rewarded with thy head, O Forerunner.
Oh, banquet of blood!
Would that thou hadst never sworn, deceitful Herod!
Better that thou lie than shed righteous blood!
But let us bless the Baptist as is his due,
and honor him as the greatest born of women!

In demonic love and fiery passion, O Herod,
thou didst condemn him who reproved thine adultery.
For the sake of an oath to a dancing girl,
thou didst deliver his holy head to that Jezebel.
Woe to thee! How hast thou dared such murder?
Why was the wanton dancer not consumed by fire?
But let us bless the Baptist as is his due,
and honor him as the greatest born of women!

 Again Herodias raves with raging lust.
Oh, dance of deceit and feast of murder!
The Baptist is beheaded, and Herod is troubled.
Through the prayers of Thy Forerunner, O Lord, grant peace to our souls!

 During the celebration of shameless Herod’s birthday,
the terms of the oath to the wanton dancer were fulfilled,
for the Baptist’s head was cut off and carried like food on a platter
in the presence of those reclining at the loathsome banquet.
Truly they feasted on wickedness and murder.
But let us bless the Forerunner as is his due,
and honor him as the greatest born of women!

I really love the juxtaposition of the banqueting imagery to the image of St John's head on a platter. This dark, grotesque side of the concept of feasting helps account for the fact that this is the only "feast" of the Church which (to my knowledge) calls for strict fasting. 

Eastern Orthodox icon of the beheading of St John the Baptist (c. 1600). Imagine walking into a church and seeing this in the center of the nave!

Then these stichera, which come after the Old Testament readings for the feast (which are themselves quite instructive):

What shall we call thee, O Prophet?
Angel, apostle, martyr?
Angel, for thou hast spent thy life like those who have no body.
Apostle, for thou hast taught the nations,
and martyr, for thy head has been cut off for the sake of Christ.
Pray to Him then that our souls may be granted great mercy!

Let us celebrate the memorial of the beheading of the Forerunner;
at that time thou didst gush forth blood upon the platter,
and now thou pourest forth healing to the ends of the earth!

Today the mother of murder,
acting with more wickedness than has ever been seen,
has roused to evil her utterly wanton daughter
against the divinely-chosen and greatest of all the Prophets.
For while hateful Herod was celebrating his ungodly birthday,
she contrived according to the oath he had given her for her dancing,
to beg for the precious head of the herald of God
that gushed forth miracles.
And he, in his madness, fulfilled his promise
and gave it to her as reward for her brazen dancing.
But the initiate of the coming of Christ
ceased not after death to rebuke them for their repulsive union,
but reproved them loudly, saying:
“It does not become thee to commit adultery with the wife of thy brother Philip.”
Oh, birthday, killer of prophets!
Oh, banquet full of blood!
Let us, arrayed in white, piously celebrate the Beheading of the Forerunner,
and rejoice on this day as on a great feast!
And let us ask the Forerunner to beseech the Trinity for us,
that we be delivered from dishonorable passions, and that our souls be saved!

The reference to Herodius here as the "mother of murder" seems a fitting contrast to St Elizabeth, the mother of the Baptist, who has already been referenced in scripture readings earlier in the service. 

The hymnody is extensive, but one more example will suffice draw out the theological importance of this feast:

Come, O people,
let us praise the Prophet and Martyr and Baptist of the Savior!
For being an angel in the flesh, he thoroughly reproved Herod
by condemning his act of unlawful adultery;
and through the impious dance, he endured the cutting off of his precious head,
that he might proclaim to those in hell
the good news of the Resurrection from the dead;
and he earnestly intercedes with the Lord, that our souls may be saved.

This verse alludes to a common patristic understanding of the ministry of St John the Baptist: that, just as he had been the Lord's forerunner on earth, going before him to "prepare the way," so too he was the foreunner in Hades, going ahead of his kinsman to announce the defeat of Death and the triumph of the Son of God and Son of Mary. Once again, John is about six months ahead of his cousin (give or take, depending on the date of Easter and the usual mixup with the Julian/Gregorian calendars). Thus, martyrdom--an ever-present reality within the Church's memory--becomes a means of understanding, and even announcing, the final consummation of all of our hopes and fears, as Christ descends to our lowest place and brings us out in triumph.

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12th c. Anglo-Saxon illumination depicting the Harrowing of Hell. Note St John the Baptist is the first to come out of Hell's mouth to greet his kinsman.

This idea of the Baptist as the herald and forerunner of Christ into Hades is one of the major themes of the body of Anglo-Saxon poetry around the "Harrowing of Hell." In this context, John the Baptist is Earendel, the "morning star" (i.e., the star which presages the coming of the dawn). The following couplet from Christ I, justly famous for inspiring J.R.R. Tolkien's own mythopoeic imagination, is one I often find myself whispering when I see Venus shining high over the elms:

Eálá Earendel engla beorhtastOfer middangeard monnum sended.

Hail, Earendel! Of angels brightest
Over Middle-earth to mankind sent.

Tolkien himself seems to have had a special devotion to the Baptist--hardly surprising all things considered. He once tried to share this side of himself with his close friend C.S. Lewis. Lewis (who, while not exactly an Evangelical, was still at the end of the day a Protestant) shot him down--probably with a bluff, boisterous comment which he did not intend to wound his more sensitive friend. But it did. Humphrey Carpenter records Tolkien's recollection of this painful moment in his biography, quoting from a letter which has otherwise never made it into any official publication:

“We stumped along the cloisters, and I followed feeling like a shabby little Catholic caught by the eye of an ‘Evangelical clergyman of good family’ taking holy water at the door of a church. A door had slammed. Never now should I be able to say in his presence:

Bot Chrystes mersy and Mary and Jon,Thise arn the grounde of alle my blysse (The Pearl)

. . . and suppose that I was sharing anything of my vision of a great rood-screen through which one could see the Holy of Holies.”

More about this "great rood-screen" when we return to our regularly scheduled programming.

Currently reading: The Stripping of the Altars

Current audio book: The Return of the King

Currently translating: The Dream of the Rood

PERCIVAL

"Keep silent; do not look the fool!"
So the wise man said to me.
I obeyed and held my tongue
While a strange and solemn chanting rung
And tapers blazed like a thousand suns
In the house of the Fisher-king.

A young man came with a bloody lance,
And a maid with a plate of gold.
And a Virgin came with a golden Grail--
It was covered o'er with a silken veil--
And the candle light was shining, pale,
And the castle strange and cold.

She--the Virgin who bore the Grail--
Had a face I though I'd seen.
Once, long before, in a city cold
I saw a minster, ruined and old,
Where a maiden wept in carven stone
At the foot of a gallows tree.

"Keep silent! Do not look the fool!"
So I did as I was told.
And the whole procession, strange and glad
Came slowly on, in samite clad,
While the smoke of incense caught the shafts
Of light like liquid gold.

I held my peace. My silent host
Watched me with meaning glance.
"It will come again," it seemed to say,
"The Grail and the plate and the Holy Maid;
One more chance have you to say:
'How serves this Grail and Lance?'"

So his silence spoke. It came again--
And the Grail shone forth with light.
Again there passed the bloody lance,
And the maidens in their stately dance,
Then through a door it seemed to pass--
And I thought I saw a Knight.

A handsome lord, pale with pain,
Was lying hurt upon a bed.
The Virgin from the gallows-tree
Wept beside his bleeding knees
While close at hand a stone stood free
And the hall was hung with red.

I thought some words were written there--
Carved upon the stone:
CORPUS CHRIS-- then all was dark,
And I sat alone with a broken heart
In an empty house and a silent yard
While the West Wind softly moaned.

The faucon hath born my mak away

Lulley, lully, lulley, lully,
The faucon hath born my mak away.
He bare hym up, he bare hym down,
He bare hym into an orchard brown.
In that orchard ther was an hall,
That was hanged with purpill and pall.
And in that hall ther was a bede,
Hit was hangid with gold so rede.
And yn that bede ther lythe a knyght,
His wowndes bledyng day and nyght.
By that bedes side ther kneleth a may,
And she wepeth both nyght and day.
And by that bedes side ther stondith a ston,
"Corpus Christi" wretyn theron.

- Corpus Christi Carol, c. 1500

I've been pondering this carol the last few days in connection with a long-term research project on the Grail story. Much as I dislike the concept of "doing a reading," I would venture to call the present project an exercise in a "liturgical" reading of the Grail story, particularly in its earliest form. I'll say more about the project later. In the meantime I wanted to point out some interesting features of this poem. No original content here, just some things which stood out to me, in no particular order.

A note on the word mak: this means of course (as can easily be inferred from context) "mate." It's from Old English mæc, an adjective which has the sense of "well-matched, fitting, agreeable."

The obvious allusions to the Grail story: the "orchard brown" and the "knight/His wowndes bledyng day and nyght" seems to be an allusion (or more, but not less than, an allusion) to the Fisher-king of the Grail story, in which the king's wounds have caused the land to become barren.

But of course the Corpus Christi reference at the climax of the poem takes us... Well, if not exactly beyond the Grail story (the Grail is first and foremost the vessel for the Host), certainly beyond the periphery of the legend and to its heart. There is probably also a ritual reference here--to Church architecture, and to the Corpus Christi plays and Holy Week services of medieval England. In The Stripping of the Altars, Dr. Eamon Duffy argues that the "Easter sepulchre and its accompanying ceremonial constitute something of an interpretative crux for any proper understanding of late medieval English religion" (31).

The Easter Sepulchre at Holcombe Burnell Church, dating to the 1500's (the same period as the carol). Note the central icon of Christ rising from the tomb.

A brief description of this sepulchre should make its connection to the Corpus Christi Carol clear. The sepulchre was a standard feature of medieval English church construction, consisting of an arched recess in the north wall of the chancel or sanctuary (that is, the space around the altar). In this,  a small wooden tomb was placed during Holy Week, and from Good Friday to Easter Sunday a consecrated Host would be laid in the sepulchre, signalling the presence of Christ in the Tomb. Duffy writes: "Expressing to the full as it did the late medieval sense of the pathos of the Passion, the sepulchre and its ceremonies were also the principal vehicle for the Easter proclamation of the Resurrection" (31).

On Easter morning, before Mass, the Host was removed from the sepulchre, and the church bells were triumphantly rung as clergy and faithful processed around the church singing the anthem Christus Resurgens:

Christus resurgens ex mortuis, jam non moritur, mors illi ultra non dominabitur.
Quod enim mortuus est peccato, mortuus est semel, quod autem vivit, vivit Deo, Alleluia.
Mortuus est enim propter delicta nostra: et resurrexit propter justificationem nostram,
Quod autem vivit, vivit Deo, Alleluia.
Dicant nunc Iudaei quomodo milites custodientes sepulcrum perdiderunt Regem.
Ad lapidis positionem quare non servabant petram iustitiae?
Aut sepultum reddant, aut resurgentem adorent, nobiscum dicentes: Alleluia. 

Given the sheer medievalism of these proceedings--the great solemnity with which they must have been performed in even the simplest parish church, the absolute belief in the Real Presence, which would have made the laying of the Host in the church sepulchre a kind of imaginative re-participation in the events of Holy Week, it is not hard to see how greatly they might have impacted the imagination--both for this original composition and the understanding of the Grail myth (which uses the same liturgical pattern and focus on the Real Presence as the Mass, as I will discuss in a later post).

Our Lady St Mary, Norfolk, UK. The church is currently hung in "lenten array," with its altar and most of its images veiled.

Thus, the carol--which begins as a lament--moves through the lenten world which is withered and brown, into a hall hung in Lenten array. Within that hall there is a bed--it might be an altar--beside which a virgin sits weeping and upon which the body of a wounded lord lays, and the stone of the sepulchre is nigh at hand.

Currently Reading: The Stripping of the Altars, by Dr. Eamon Duffy
Current Audio Book: The Return of the King, JRR Tolkien

Hail Elbereth

I wanted to push back on a popular misconception concerning prayer in Tolkien's legendarium. It is often said that the "Window in the West" passage is the only example of a prayer, or at least of something approximating to it, in The Lord of the Rings. This seems to me to not be the case. I would agree that it is one of the only examples of men praying (unless Hobbits count), but the book is absolutely full of prayers, one in particular. The longest version of it goes like this:

Snow-white! Snow-white! O Lady clear!
O Queen beyond the Western Seas!
O Light to us that wander here
Amid the world of woven trees!
Gilthoniel! O Elbereth!
Clear are thy eyes and bright thy breath!
Snow-white! Snow-white! We sing to thee
In a far land beyond the Sea.
O stars that in the Sunless Year
With shining hand by her were sawn,
In windy fields now bright and clear
We see your silver blossom blown!
O Elbereth! Gilthoniel!
We still remember, we who dwell
In this far land beneath the trees,
Thy starlight on the Western Seas.

Then of course there is the hymn of the elves of Rivendell:

A Elbereth Gilthoniel, 
silivren penna míriel
o menel aglar elenath!
Na-chaered palan-díriel
o galadhremmin ennorath, 
Fanuilos, le linnathon
nef aear, sí nef aearon!

In translation (Tolkien's own) this runs:

"O! Elbereth who lit the stars, from glittering crystal slanting falls with light like jewels from heaven on high the glory of the starry host. To lands remote I have looked afar, and now to thee, Fanuilos, bright spirit clothed in ever-white, I here will sing beyond the Sea, beyond the wide and sundering Sea."

I could cite more examples (such as Galadriel's amazing song, which does some very interesting things with the dual pronoun). In all, I counted 10 instances of where her name was invoked as a kind of prayer:

• 7 in The Fellowship of the Ring
• 1 in The Two Towers
• 2 (or arguably, 3) in The Return of the King

What is so interesting about these uses is that they begin to taper off after Lothlorien, as invocations of Varda/Elbereth are replaced by invocations of Galadriel, who the Three Hunters thank in their hearts for the gift of Lembas, and to whom Sam wishfully prays for light and water in Mordor--after which they find both. In fact, whenever the words "the Lady" are used without any other name in The Two Towers and The Return of the King, they always refer to Galadriel.

VI. An Icon of Paradise

And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it. And, behold, the Lord stood above it, and said, I am the Lord God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac: the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed; And thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south: and in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed. And, behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest, and will bring thee again into this land; for I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of. And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not. And he was afraid, and said, How dreadful is this place! this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven. And Jacob rose up early in the morning, and took the stone that he had put for his pillows, and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil upon the top of it. And he called the name of that place Bethel: but the name of that city was called Luz at the first. And Jacob vowed a vow, saying, If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat, and raiment to put on, So that I come again to my father's house in peace; then shall the Lord be my God: And this stone, which I have set for a pillar, shall be God's house: and of all that thou shalt give me I will surely give the tenth unto thee.
- Genesis 28:12-22

Nathanael saith unto him, Whence knowest thou me? Jesus answered and said unto him, Before that Philip called thee, when thou wast under the fig tree, I saw thee. Nathanael answered and saith unto him, Rabbi, thou art the Son of God; thou art the King of Israel. Jesus answered and said unto him, Because I said unto thee, I saw thee under the fig tree, believest thou? thou shalt see greater things than these. And he saith unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man.
- John 1:48-51

Following the previous look at Paradise and its hierarchical structure in the Old Testament scriptures, and in the poetry of St Ephraim the Syrian, we have laid the groundwork to consider the interaction of sacred art and sacred space in the construction of the Eastern Orthodox "temple," the name which Eastern Christians usually apply to their places of worship. I've chosen this as my first case study for three reasons:

• I can speak from personal experience here, since my encounter with sacred art and sacred space in this context answered a certain longing I have felt since childhood.
• As one of the oldest, stable iconographic and architectural traditions in the world, there is a lot of material to work with--not just in Russia or Greece, but in Italy, Sicily, Spain, Romania, other parts of Western Europe, and even the British Isles. The features I will be focusing on in this post are not specifically Eastern, and at one point in time were part of the common expression of the sacred that was found throughout Christendom.
• The beauty one encounters in an Eastern Orthodox church is an excellent example of beauty as an objective reality rather than a subjective "in the eye of the beholder" response. What I mean is this: many people, when first stepping into the nave of a canonically adorned and decorated Orthodox church, will say something like "it's very beautiful," with the often explicit caveat that it is not to their taste. In other words, they recognize the transcendent qualities of the art and architecture while at the same time acknowledging that it belongs to a world so far removed from their own time and context that they would not choose to decorate their own houses of worship (let alone their own houses) this way. It will perhaps seem ironic, but I consider this to be one of the surest proofs of beauty in this tradition--objective beauty is beautiful whether or not I like it.

The Temple

It's become a commonplace in certain circles to notice the similarities between the temples of the Ancient Near East (and first and foremost, the Tabernacle of Moses) and the layout of the Christian house of worship. This is particularly true in the Eastern Rite, where the ancient understandings of sacred space have only been reinforced by medieval and early modern developments (such as the development of the curtained templon into the great carved iconostasis in the Russian Orthodox tradition).

Photo credit: http://stdemiana.church/orthodoxy/inner-layout-structure/

As discussed in a previous post, this basic understanding of hierarchical space was a means of incarnating ancient understandings about God, man's relationship to the divine, and even the interior structure of human nature itself. The amount of attention given to the Tabernacle/Temple in both Old and New Testament Scriptures, and the extensive Patristic commentaries on the long passages found in Exodus and elsewhere detailing the exact dimensions and materials to be used in the Tabernacle all point to the great significance of this concept in ancient Jewish and Christian thought. In The Language of Creation, Mattieu Pageau suggests that the structure of the Tabernacle (and by extension Eden, the Genesis narrative, etc.) functions like the spelling, grammar, and syntax which forms arbitrary lines on paper into a means of communicating an abstract spiritual reality:

Given our current materialism, the best way to understand the role of the temple is through analogies with our written language. Like a written word, the temple is made from a collection of physical parts arranged by the rules of an arcane language. The purpose of this "body" is to host an invisible "breath." This pattern is then reiterated within the temple itself (in the Ark of the Covenant) where the written tablets (the testimony) physically host the spoken laws of God... With the analogy of written language, it is easier to understand why the plans of the temple are so detailed and complicated. These patterns are examples of "lowering meaning" into the lowest depths of material reality. At these levels, they are like the rules of an alphabet because they organize "marks" in a very detailed manner. Similarly, if we were to describe how to embody the meaning of "holy temple" on this page, the plans for its construction might look something like this:

You shall make nine vertical marks, ten horizontal marks, and six slanted marks. Three of the slanted marks shall be left-leaning, and three shall be right-leaning, etc. You shall make two of the following patterns: three horizontal marks joined to the right of one vertical mark in equal distance, etc. 

- The Language of Creation, pp 94-5 

The diagram to which Pageau refers in the quote above. The book is full of many such helpful diagrams which show the work of man to "raise earth" (potential) and that of God to "lower heaven" (meaning) in Genesis.

The Old Testament Tabernacle--and therefore the Christian temple--is thus a meta-cognitive pattern. The structure alone is, of course, not enough. The structure is significant because it reveals to us "the pattern" which is the basis of beauty and meaning. For a Temple is not a monument, a mere edifice to remind us of some bygone era when Classical or Medieval man managed (usually to our great astonishment) to create something of lasting beauty. It is a place where something happens.

Here we can think of the difference between going to tour one of the great cathedrals of Europe and attending (and participating in) a Mass there. These are two radically different experiences. In the first case, the cathedral is merely an idea--an artifact or relic from a bygone era. It may be deeply moving, as a beautiful painting in a museum is moving, but a safe distance is maintained between ourselves and the structure.

In the second case, the structure--magnificent as it is--exists to uniquely and truly facilitate the meeting of heaven and earth. That this meeting could happen anywhere--say, on the side of a mountain in the Sinai peninsula--does not in any way refute the fact that some places or structures are better suited to incarnating certain spiritual realities than others. To partake in the Divine Liturgy in a great cathedral (or a small church--it is the peculiar genius of Eastern Orthodox architecture that small buildings can reveal Paradise as effectively as large ones; the impressiveness of the size is not the primary focus) is to ascend up and through the art, architecture, and music to something which is beyond any of them, but provides meaning to them all.

The nave of St John of Damascus Orthodox Church, Tyler TX. The space is relatively small--by Protestant standards--for a congregation of this size, however the lack of pews means that space which would be occupied by auditorium style seating can instead be arranged along traditional lines. Note that as this is a new temple, the process of adorning it with frescoes has not yet begun.

A tiny church in Urkaine. Photo credit.

In this experience, no particular attention need be paid to the icons--many of them are in fact in the high recesses of the ceiling where you cannot see them very well--or to the music, or to the smell of incense, or any of the other multi-sensory experiences of worship. For the thing which demands our attention is the Liturgy itself--all of the other incarnational aspects of art and architecture facilitate this journey in a way which aids our perception of the spiritual.

It is with this in mind that I will attempt to speak of the iconographic scheme of an Orthodox Church. It must be understood that the visual beauty is only one aspect of this experience, one which flows out of the basic forms of the architecture and moves us, not toward sensationalism or emotion, but sot a place of higher communion where God may be known.

The Narthex

Entry into an Orthodox church begins in the narthex (sometimes, there is a secondary area just inside the doors called the exo-narthex, sort of a narthex before the narthex). This word means "porch" and is analogous to the porch of Solomon's Temple, or to the outer court of the Tabernacle. The journey "up the mountain of Paradise" towards God begins when the faithful leave the world and step into this area. Ritually and iconographically, this is a border, a transitional space. Baptisms are traditionally held here, since Baptism is both a ritual death as well as a crossing through death into new life. Here also (at least traditionally) those who are not of the Faithful--catechumens, penitents, and well-behaved visitors--stand during the Liturgy. This is the base of the mountain.

Iconographically, the narthex is usually decorated with scenes from the Old Testament scriptures. One church near my house features:

• The creation of Adam and the expulsion from Paradise [Located on the Western wall, so that it is the last thing one sees when one leaves the church--the typology here, which goes all the way back to St Ephraim the Syrian, should be clear: the church is paradise.]
• Moses and the Burning Bush
• Moses parting the Red Sea
• Moses receiving the tablets of the Law
• The hospitality of Abraham at the Oak of Mamre
• The sacrifice of Isaac
• The Three Youths in the Fiery Furnace
• Jonah in the belly of the great fish

Each of these stories has a special relevance to the Christian understanding of God's redemptive work on behalf of His people--but the selection and arrangement is hardly unusual. Many of these same stories feature prominently in the narthex of my own parish. Thus, each approach to God, each ascent up the Mountain, begins in Genesis and takes us through the Law and the Prophets. In my parish, on the eastern verge of the narthex as one is about to step into the nave, one sees a large fresco of the Prophet Isaiah on one's right, and of King David on one's left. 

The Nave

As they arrive for the Liturgy, the Faithful move through the narthex into the nave, the name of which echoes well the understanding of the Church as the "ark of salvation." This is where the Faithful will stand, chant the Psalms, pray the prayers, and sing the hymns of the Liturgy. It is also the place where, at the summit of the journey, they will partake of communion. This is the largest space in the church, and corresponds to the Holy Place of the Tabernacle. The fact that all of the Faithful worship here has to do with the understanding of the Christian priesthood, which is a blog post for another day (and perhaps another blog).

As the largest area of the church, this is where we are likely to see the greatest iconographic variety--with some important exceptions:

• The dome (and there is always a dome over the nave if the building has been purpose-built for an Orthodox church) contains an icon of Christ enthroned in glory--most often of the variety called Pantocrator -- "the ruler of all."
• The Western wall (the direction you face when leaving the church) usually has an icon of one of the following subjects: the Last Judgment, the Dormition of the Theotokos, or a synaxis (gathering) of evangelist/missionary saints. Each of these makes a slightly different statement about what thoughts should occupy the Faithful as they return to the world.
• The Eastern end of the nave is dominated by a raised platform and, joining the nave to the Most Holy Place, the templon or iconostasis.

Here I can draw specifically upon the iconography of my home parish. At the apex of the dome (i.e. the top of the hierarchy) is Christ Pantocrator, surrounded by the Hebrew prophets. Each of the latter holds a scroll in their hand with a quotation from their prophecy, which directly relates to the Great Feast which is portrayed on the next tier down. [In the Orthodox Church, a Great Feast is a moment in the life of Christ, or the Church, which the Church specially commemorates; the feasts of the Mosaic Law were the original bases for these, and more have been since added. There are twelve of these plus Pascha/Easter, which is the "Feast of Feasts" and the "Day of Days."]

The dome of St Seraphim Orthodox Cathedral, Dallas TX

Supporting these top two tiers is a third, which goes all the way around the base of the dome, showing the Holy Apostles. The fourth tier of frescoes are more Great Feasts as well as other scenes from the Gospels. The fifth tier (which is eye-level if you are standing in the nave) includes moments from the life of the parish's patron saint, as well as numerous panel icons of Christ, the Mother of God, a crucifix, and a reliquary. These are places where the faithful may light candles, say their prayers, and stand in worship. 

Since the main windows (often the only windows) of the church are in the dome, the hierarchy of meaning follows the movement of light: from above, at the throne of God (where Christ is seated at the right hand) down through the prophets (the Old Testament Scriptures) and into the Gospels. At the lowest level--the saint frescoes, panel icons, and the living icons (the Faithful) standing in the nave, we see the implications of the Scriptures and Gospels lived out--incarnated, the way the architecture incarnates a divine pattern--by ordinary people in a variety of times and places, most of which are far removed from First Century Palestine.

On the West (rear) wall of the nave there is a fresco of the Bosom of Abraham and two tiers of evangelist/missionary saints (making it a combination of the themes of the Last Judgment and the Great Commission). Much more could be said about this scheme, which has been executed so well by a local iconographer who has done many churches in the area and throughout North America.

The Iconostasis

The iconostasis is easily the most visually dominating feature of the nave. It separates (or joins, depending on your perspective) the nave to the Sanctuary/Most Holy Place. Just as the dome and layout of the building are arranged hierarchically, so too the iconostasis suggests a hierarchy into which the Faithful are invited to move and partake.

The iconostasis.

In the top tier of the iconostasis featured above, Christ is shown at center, seated enthroned as the Son of Man, surrounded by the cherubim, which accords with the visions of the Prophet Ezekiel and St John the Theologian. This format is commonly called a deisis, where those on his right hand (here the Mother of God, St Michael, St Peter, and St Tikhon) and those on his left (St John the Baptist, St Gabriel, St Paul, and St Innocent) as well as the figures on either end of the bottom tier (Sts Herman and Seraphim) have their heads inclined and hands raised in worship. Immediately below the enthroned Christ there is a doorway, known as the Royal Doors (corresponding to the veil of the Most Holy Place in the Tabernacle; there is an actual veil which is drawn over this doorway at certain times in the Liturgy). On either side of it there are icons of Christ and the Mother of God, and then two other side doors known as the "Deacon's Doors" (more about them in a a future post, perhaps).

The doors themselves are of interest here, for they traditionally bear certain icons which help to reveal their purpose.

At the top row are two panels portraying the Annunciation--the moment of the Incarnation, when Christ the Word entered the womb of his mother. In the bottom four panels are icons depicting each of the four Gospel writers. These icons help us understand the purpose of the doors, of the veil, and of the whole iconostasis: it is not to keep us from God, but rather to reveal him as the man born of Mary, whose life is given to us in the Gospels. Thus, the first two ways that the Church encounters Christ--in the Incarnation and in Holy Scripture--open the way for the third and most intimate encounter: Holy Communion. 

Like the iconography of the nave, therefore, the iconostasis reveals to us not just a hierarchy, but participation and movement along that hierarchy.

The Sanctuary

The "summit of the mountain" is the Sanctuary, or Most Holy Place, corresponding to the sanctum sanctorum of Moses' Tabernacle. To fully understand the significant of this place--its role and purpose--one must understand the role of altars generally in the Hebrew Scriptures. They are--like Noah's altar, or the rock of Jacob at Bethel--a place where something (a sacrifice) is offered, and something (a blessing or anointing) is received. This basic understanding of sacrifice is retained in the Christian Eucharist: bread and wine, ourselves and all our lives, are offered to God; he sends down his Holy Spirit (often typologically understood as oil, as in the story of Jacob above) upon the gifts, making them the body and blood of the one who offered himself up "for the life of the world." By receiving these gifts in communion, the Faithful participate in the life of God. This is the same pattern of "man raising" and "God lowering" we see in the interaction of the giving of the pattern and construction of the Tabernacle.

What happens in the Sanctuary, then--and what happens at the apex of the Liturgy, for we must always remember that the temple is primarily a space where the cosmic drama is being played out--forms the summit of the experience of worship. All throughout the service, the clergy will process in and out of this place with books, cups, plates, fans, lances--a series of veritable Grail processions saturated with mystical meaning. 

Behind and above the altar there is--most often--in the apse, an icon of the Mother of God of the type known as Our Lady of the Sign. Her hands raised in the orans position, she invites us to adore the Christ child on/within her. The placement of this icon in the apse is important to our understanding of hierarchy as the basic grammar of the "language of beauty."

In the Tabernacle of Moses, the principle object in the Holy of Holies was the Ark of the Covenant. This box contained, as noted earlier, the tablets upon which Moses had received the Law, along with several other items of great significance to Patristic commentators: the Rod of Aaron that budded, and a jar of manna. The ark was topped by a lid with images of two cherubim worked from beaten gold. This lid is rendered in the LXX as hilasterion -- the Mercy Seat. Understood in the light of the visions of Isaiah (which shows the Lord enthroned and surrounded by six-winged seraphim) and Ezekiel (which shows the Lord enthroned upon the cherubim) and the following declaration,

There I will meet with you, and from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim that are on the ark of the testimony, I will speak with you about all that I will give you in commandment for the people of Israel. (Exodus 25:22)

it seems clear that the Mercy Seat is meant to be understood as a throne--a place where God meets with his people, rules over them, and dispenses justice. It is first and foremost a place where heaven meets earth. Christianity retained this understanding of the Holy Place and of the Ark, but extended it, so that in the divine liturgy which plays out in the Book of Revelation, the opening of the Holy Place reveals first the Ark, which is then followed by/transformed into the Woman Clothed with the Sun, who Patristic commentators universally understood to be the Virgin Mary and (by typological relationship) the Church:

And the temple of God was opened in heaven, and there was seen in his temple the ark of his testament: and there were lightnings, and voices, and thunderings, and an earthquake, and great hail. And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars... (Revelation 11:19-12:1)

This, and other extensive typology found in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, gave rise to the common understanding of the Virgin Mary as the Cherubic Throne, the Ark of the New Covenant, and the "living mercy seat." Her womb is, in the Christian understanding, literally the place where heaven and earth meet (where "Word becomes flesh"), and her lap becomes the new Cherubic Throne where the Magi come to adore Christ:

I behold a strange and wonderful mystery:
The cave a heaven, the Virgin a cherubic throne,
And the manger a noble place in which hath lain Christ
The uncontained God.
Let us therefore praise and magnify him.
- Katabasiae of the Nativity

Much earlier in this series I opined that the image of the Virgin and Child was the whole basis of the classical Christian understanding of beauty and wonder. It is little wonder then that in the Christian Holy of Holies, we most often find this image, for it contains within itself the whole mystery of the Eucharist--and the whole mystery of salvation. Here, at the very top of the hierarchy, the Word of God comes to us not from between the cherubim, but from the arms of his mother. 

A glimpse through one of the deacon's doors, up into the apse.

Here, at the very top of the hierarchy of space, there is a great mystery--not precisely the inversion of the hierarchy, but something which goes far beyond our own notions of hierarchy. The rest of the iconography in the Sanctuary is concerned with demonstrating the sacramental implications of the incarnation. Christ is shown here vested as High Priest, but also as a child in a grail or Eucharistic dish.

"Ascending and Descending Upon the Son of Man"

All of this--the art and architecture of the Orthodox temple--creates a space where the Faithful can ascend the Mountain of Paradise; where they can, in the Eucharist, partake of the fruit of the Tree of Life which is Christ himself. This matches perfectly with St Ephraim's spatial understanding, and it is thus an excellent case study of how the proper understanding of the Incarnation allows space and art to be transfigured, allowing a glimpse of He Who Is beauty itself.

Detail from secco of The Transfiguration, by Aidan Hart. Photo credit.

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Note 1: As I have mentioned before, I believe that this "language of beauty" applies to all of the arts. I have begun with the liturgical arts because within the traditional framework in which I am working--and in which, for instance, Tolkien was working--they occupy the highest place in the hierarchy, since they show the pattern most clearly. In future posts we will turn to how this same "spatial understanding" of hierarchy plays out in imaginative literature. Right now I am inclined to bump The Silmarillion farther down the list and start with the Grail story, since it's a very natural transition between liturgical arts and imaginative fiction.

Note 2: This is not a theology blog. However, given the subject matter of this and some of the other recent posts, speaking of higher things has been unavoidable. The views put forth here about certain things--such as sacred space, the sacraments, the typological readings of Scripture, and the Incarnation--are those views accepted "everywhere and by all" in the Church catholic for at least a thousand years, and remain the teachings of the Eastern Orthodox Church today. I lay claim to no unique theological views or insights. As for my own beliefs, to paraphrase C.S. Lewis, they can be found in the Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom. 

Note 3: Hopefully it will have become clear in this post that hierarchy itself is not enough for beauty. There must be movement along hierarchy--both up and down. It is for this reason, I think, that the most-portrayed scene in all of art history is that of the Annunciation, which shows us simultaneous movement in both directions.

Note 4: Anyone more interested in a fuller explanation of the Orthodox liturgical arts and the way iconography, architecture, music, and the minor arts work together to create an icon of paradise should read this series by Andrew Gould. Gould is an architect and liturgical artist and, unlike me, actually knows what he's talking about.

Further Up, Further In

It is as hard to explain how this sunlit land was different from the old Narnia, as it would be to tell you how the fruits of that country taste. Perhaps you will get some idea of it, if you think like this. You may have been in a room in which there was a window that looked out on a lovely bay of the sea or a green valley that wound away among mountains. And in the wall of that room opposite to the window there may have been a looking glass. And as you turned away from the window you suddenly caught sight of that sea or that valley, all over again, in the looking glass. And the sea in the mirror, or the valley in the mirror, were in one sense just the same as the real ones: yet at the same time they were somehow different—deeper, more wonderful, more like places in a story: in a story you have never heard but very much want to know. The difference between the old Narnia and the new Narnia was like that. The new one was a deeper country: every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as if it meant more. I can't describe it any better than that: if you ever get there, you will know what I mean.

It was the Unicorn who summed up what everyone was feeling. He stamped his right fore-hoof on the ground and neighed and then cried:

"I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this. Bree-hee-hee! Come further up, come further in!"

-- The Last Battle