Fear returns; how to redefine terms
In this chapter, Bardelys focuses on Otto, the ‘gangly farmhand’ and his seeming threat to Hans. The man seems mad – at least that’s the conclusion Hans reaches at the chapter-break. Otto insists that Hans must go into the Black Forest. His reasons are murky at best, something about being ‘the Forester now.’ A fit or frenzy overtakes Otto, and Hans fears they must come to blows. However the farmhand lapses into weird mutterings, and Hans is left on his guard, unable to sleep, trapped on the haystack in utter blackness beside a madman, while the grinding sounds of the wild-growing trees grow louder and louder in his ears…
This kind of fear is quite different from that of the traditional folk or fairy tale. In those tales, even monsters were reasonable beasts. Take a monster such as the Gian in the tale of Jack and the Beanstalk. This Giant wants to catch Jack and eat him because men (particularly Englishmen, according to the rhyme the Giant chants) are one of the things he eats. Though beastly and horrible it may be for man to eat man, the Giant looks upon Jack as a man might look upon a fat mouse in his house.
The muttering and fit of Otto partakes of madness. There may be reason enough behind what he wants of Hans, but the way Otto expresses it is classic madness: the gaping, pale eyes, the insistence without reason, the sudden mounting into frenzy, the lapse into muttering ‘sounds that were not proper words’ all are traits of the madman.
Now I wonder how familiar common folk were with madmen say 500 years ago. Schizophrenia must have existed then, but ‘Tom O’Bedlam’ was not surely someone the average person knew. I might say that today there are few enough of us who actually know people who are out of control in the way Otto the farmhand is – but we have seen them depicted in fiction and television and above all in horror movies so often, it is as if we had known such folk. Enough to make them a kind of cliché to any follower of the horror tale.
The creature Gollum, in Professor Tolkien’s The Hobbit, by contrast, is at first more like the Giant in Jack’s tale. It is a sneaking wretch, anthropoid but not, seemingly, human (or Hobbit), not quite a troll either. It is quite capable of throttling and eating just about any living thing that might fall into its clutches. But Gollum is not mad.
In the final line in the chapter, Bardelys equates this madness that has overtaken Otto with wicken. This is good: where a talesman does choose to create his own terms for creatures and aspects of his magic world, he must avail himself of every chance he finds to ‘charge’ these terms with the emotions he wishes us to associate with them. This is especially true in the beginning stages of the tale. ‘Wicken’ has been wild and magical, inhuman, vaguely threatening – and yet in its most extensive use thus far, the term is made into something similar to ‘Nature’ as a whole. This takes place in the scene when Hans and Father play chess in the small attic room. Hans wonders if ‘wicken’ is the same thing as ‘evil,’ and Father tells him No. Father goes farther, and tries to explain that the wicken-things in the Black Forest have something like their own rules, and are not to be feared by any man who knows his place in the natural order. Thus we might have begun to think of ‘wicken-things’ as something like big bears, extremely dangerous if threatened or attacked, but if we just avoid them, they won’t harm us.
This explanation takes the fangs out of the term, and Bardelys was mistaken to do that so early on: it affects how we will think of ‘wicken’ from then on. I suppose that since this was the last scene in which Father would appear before he dies, Bardelys wanted to plant this notion of wicken – probably Hans will come around to realizing the wisdom of such a position much later in the tale.
The problem is that having then explained to us that ‘wicken’ is not so terrible after all, Bardelys can’t just call the Sooty Prince, or the White Lady, ‘wicken-things’ and expect it to send shivers up and down our spines. He has placed ‘wicken’ into a ‘dangerous but not overly so’ box, and if now he wants us to think of ‘wicken’ as belonging to the box of those things ‘malevolent and dangerous,’ he is going to have to go twice as far as he would have if he had started us off with that view.
(Composed on keyboard Saturday 15 November 2008)
