A To Z Blogging Challenge 2024 - Villains! - G Is For Gollum

 Gollum first appears in Tolkien’s children’s book The Hobbit, which came out in the 1930s. He doesn’t really have a back story until Lord Of The Rings, when we find out by what a nasty way he acquired the Ring. 

In The Hobbit, the Ring was just a magic ring that let you turn invisible. In Lord Of The Rings, it was Dark Lord Sauron’s lost ring of power, and has been trying to find its way back to him for thousands of years.

Originally Gollum was not going to be too much of a baddie. That changed when Tolkien rewrote the novel for consistency with its sequel. 

Bilbo Baggins gets lost in the dark, picks up the Ring and puts it into his pocket, without really knowing what it is. He meets Gollum, who challenges him to a contest of riddles. If Bilbo wins, Gollum says he will show him the way out, if Gollum wins, he gets to eat Bilbo. In the original version, Gollum intends to keep his word about showing Bilbo out. He even offers to give Bilbo the Ring! But once Lord Of The Rings was published, he had absolutely no intention of keeping his word. By this time, he is addicted to the Ring like a drug. That’s the interpretation of Andy Serkis, who played the role in both trilogies.

Bilbo manages to escape, taking the Ring with him. However, he feels sorry for Gollum, thinking about how awful his life must be, so instead of killing him while invisible, Bilbo jumps over  him to get out of the tunnels. 

Gollum follows, in hopes of getting the Ring back. Sixty years go by. Bilbo leaves the Shire, and the Ring with his kinsman Frodo. 

We do learn Gollum’s back story in Lord Of The Rings  Remember how Bilbo started his ownership of the Ring by pitying Gollum? This is why it had so little effect on him. Gollum, a hobbit himself, started his ownership of it by killing the friend who found it, first demanding it as a birthday gift. This is why the Ring wrecked him. He was already not too popular in his community anyway, and not a nice person. 

In this novel , he accompanies Frodo and his servant Sam on their journey, hoping to get the Ring back from them. He is unable to eat their offered Elvish lembas bread, which is symbolic of the Christian sacrament. Not somebody who is likely to have a redemption arc, alas! 

He betrays them, leaving Frodo to be stung by the giant spider Shelob. Fortunately Sam takes the Ring for a short time, and isn’t corrupted by it, so Gollum doesn’t have it and neither do Sauron’s orcs. 

In the end, Gollum saves Frodo, though it’s not what he had in mind; Frodo is on the point of keeping the Ring, instead of throwing it into the flames of the Cracks of Doom in Mordor, the only way to destroy it. Gollum leaps forward, bites off Frodo’s finger and falls into the flames himself, holding the Ring. Sauron is defeated, Frodo survives the effect of the Ring. But let’s face it, that wasn’t what Gollum had in mind! He just wanted the Ring. 

Terry Pratchett has fun with this character in his Discworld novel Witches Abroad. The witches Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg and Magrat Garlick are rowing down an underground river. They hear a splashing behind them; someone is following them. Suddenly, a strange creature pops up, hissing, “It’sss my birthday!” 

They hit him. He sinks again.

Maybe someone should have done that to Gollum? It might have saved a lot of trouble.

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2024 - Villains! - F Is For Fairies

Arthur Rackham: The Fairy Ring. Public Domain

 So, you think fairies are sweet little things that flutter around flowers, do you?

It’s true that this idea has grown up over the centuries. Artists have painted flower fairies. Shakespeare’s fairy King and Queen, Oberon and Titania, are like benevolent woodland gods. Mind you, the weather goes crazy around their quarrel, and Puck brags to another fairy about the mischief he does. But it is just mischief, and Oberon looks after the young lovers, feeling sorry for them, then blesses them on their wedding night. 

However, if you had lived in the old days, you would be very wary of the fairies - or Good Neighbours, as they didn’t like to be called fairies, much as the Greek and Roman Erinyes/Furies were called the Kindly Ones, when they were anything but kindly. People used to try protecting their children’s cradles against them. It didn’t always work(see below, changelings)

Some varieties were helpful and did housework in exchange for food. Others were not as benign.

There was the story of a woman who was called on by mysterious folk to deliver a baby. She did, and was rewarded, but rubbed an eye with a magical ointment that let her see the fairies. When she saw some afterwards she said hello. They asked her with which eye she saw them. When she showed them, she was struck blind in that eye. I suppose it could have been worse, they might have killed her or struck both eyes blind without asking. 

There were stories about changelings, when babies were snatched by the fairies and replaced with elderly fairies. There was one solution by which you did something weird to get them to show up who they really were. Unfortunately, another way was to abuse them till they left and returned your child. It was unfortunate because people who really believed this would abuse babies born with disabilities. 

In the poem of Tam Lin, he is a young man kept by the fairies for seven years, after which he is to be sacrificed to hell, to which the Queen owes a rent. Fortunately for him, a girl called Janet, who is pregnant with his child, saves him. 

There are elements of this in New Zealand author Elizabeth Knox’s novel The Absolute Book, a novel I highly recommend.

Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin is set in the 1970s, on a small American university campus. The heroine, Janet, is a student. The actual Queen of Faerie has brought her court from the past, and is now the head of the Classics department. Every seven years a Classics student dies. This year it’s the boy Janet cares about who has been chosen. It’s a wonderful book, but you might need to get it second hand.

Elizabeth Ann Scarborough’s Songkiller Saga is mainly about how Hell has decided to make humans miserable by removing folk music. They only succeed in the US, with the help of the Debauchery Devil, but a bunch of folk musicians travel to Britain to retrieve their songs. As it happens, the Debauchery Devil is, in fact, the Queen of Faerie, who failed to pay her rent to Hell due to Janet’s rescue of Tam Lin. She needs rescuing herself.

It’s a trilogy, and, if interested, you can get it in ebook. I loved it - I’ve always loved folk music, but this one made me realise that folk is a lot broader than I had known.

There is a fairy origin story that they are not quite fallen angels, but almost. They weren’t quite as bad, but ended up on earth instead of in hell. 

Tolkien uses the term “fairies” for his Elves, who are mostly the good guys, but also violent and slaughter each other quite a lot. Death is supposed to be a gift. It’s not much help, because they just get reborn. 

Melissa Marr has done a series of novels, Wicked Lovely,  with genuine folklore fairies, though she has them with tattoos just because she likes tattoos, and they are rather tough, fighting each other, hanging around the city and riding motorbikes. They are not remotely like flower fairies! 

To be honest, I quite like evil fairies; they are a lot more interesting than the cutesy ones. 

A to Z Blogging Challenge 2024 - Villains! E Is For Eris

Eris at the wedding of Thetis and Peleus. After Rubens. Public Domain

 Eris is the Greek goddess of strife. The Romans called her Discordia. In some ways, you’d have to ask if a goddess who was just doing her job should be called a villain at all, really, but there is no question that she did a lot of nasty things - and enjoyed doing them. She was known for hanging around on the battlefield after the other gods left, enjoying the destruction and bloodshed. She appears in Homer and in Hesiod’s work, and if there is anything positive to say about her, I can’t remember it.

Eris was, according to some sources, the daughter of Nyx, the goddess of night, and very, very old. She is the mother of all the evils that plague humanity.

But she is better known as the sister of Ares, the war god, so would be a daughter of Zeus and Hera. It was as this version that she did her most famous - or infamous - deed: starting the Trojan War. 

The story goes that, like the evil fairy in Sleeping Beauty, she was not invited to a party, in this case the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, the parents of Achilles, and decided to get revenge. She threw a golden apple between the three goddesses Athena, Hera and Aphrodite, with the inscription “For the most beautiful.” Then,  no doubt chuckling, she left and let them get on with it. She didn’t need a curse or a threat; she knew those goddesses well enough to know they would bicker over it. Even if this was the only effect, she was doing her job, but these were not just three vain women, they were goddesses with a lot of power. They went to see the Trojan Prince Paris and let him judge. Each of them offered him a bribe - political power, wisdom and the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen. 

That sounds like good revenge for not being invited to a party. 

As a matter of fact, I used this myth in my story “Five Ways To Start A War”, published in the anthology Light Touch Paper, Stand Clear, Peggy Bright Press. In my story, she gets the golden apple from the garden of the Hesperides, who are all at the wedding. The dragon guarding it is too scared of her to make any trouble! 

And it might well be scared. She was Trouble, with a capital T.

There is a story in which she was actually commissioned to cause trouble, the story of Polytekhnos and Aedon, when they claimed to love each other more than Zeus and Hera. You can’t get away with that sort of thing in Greek mythology, so Hera sent our girl Eris to come between them and cause trouble. They got into a quarrel over who could finish a job first. There was cheating in the tasks, then  murder, then everyone was turned into a bird. 

She even turns up in an Aesop fable. The story goes that Heracles saw something that looked like an apple on the ground. He hit it with his club several times and it got bigger and bigger, till Athena stopped him and explained that it would just get bigger if he kept doing that. It’s symbolic, of course. It was said of her that she started small and grew till her head was in the clouds; trouble starts small and the more you pay attention to it, the bigger it gets. 

It’s a nice metaphor, isn’t it?

A to Z Blogging Challenge 2024 - Villains! D Is For Darth Vader and Dolores Umbridge

Two villains today, Darth Vader(Star Wars) and Dolores Umbridge(Harry Potter).  I probably should keep them for V and U, but it’s nice to be able to have them together.

One main difference between them is that Darth Vader had a redemption arc, due to his love for his son. Dolores had no redemption whatsoever. She was plain evil - and she is very real as a person. She has powers, as she is, after all, a witch, but nothing special. But she is real in that she is someone you might actually meet in real life. And I have - the real-life Dolores was someone I had to work with, and a nasty piece of work she was.

Let’s start with Vader. He was born Anakin Skywalker, son of a slave woman. As a child, he was very sweet. He built C3PO to help his mother. We do eventually find out why C3PO doesn’t remember his early days. Not his maker’s fault! 

When presented as a potential Jedi, the council says he is too old, but his mentor, Qui Gon Jinn, has faith in him and then, dying, asks his own “padawan”(apprentice) Obi Wan Kenobi, to train him, even if he isn’t admitted to Jedi school. Poor Obi Wan. I can’t help wondering if things might have been different if Qui Gon had survived. 

He falls in love with Senator Padme Amidala and they marry at the end of the second prequel movie. But it doesn’t take long for him to go to the Dark Side, and not only because he is tempted by Palpatine, the future Emperor. His first evil deed is when he wipes out an entire tribe who have captured his mother. He could have simply rescued her, he has the power for that, but this is revenge.

And then he kills a lot of children studying to be Jedi, the “younglings”. The consequences of this show up in the TV series Obi Wan Kenobi. Dear, dear! Anakin has really gone dark. He is then persuaded by Palpatine to do certain things to save his pregnant wife. She dies anyway, in childbirth.

We meet him again in Obi Wan Kenobi. He hasn’t changed for the better.

But if, like me, you saw the original trilogy, you know that he will reform, even if at the last minute. And he isn’t as bad as you might think. He still believes in the Force. He might throttle those who irritate him, but his underlings don’t seem afraid to ask him questions - which he answers! 

 When I saw the original Return Of The Jedi, before Hayden Christensen took the role of the young Anakin, his Force Ghost was shown as a smiling, pleasant faced middle aged man instead of young Hayden. I really hated the change of image! 

It does make it a bit odd when his grandson, Ben Solo aka Kylo Ren, becomes obsessed with Anakin’s evil self and wears dark clothes and a mask at the start of the sequel trilogy(he did take off the mask, looking like a young Severus Snape). I kept waiting for the Force Ghost to turn up and tell him he was being stupid. It didn’t happen, but that young villain did repent, for love of Rey, the female Luke Skywalker of this series.

Now for Dolores. She first appears in Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix. Something I have always wondered is why wizarding school teachers don’t seem to have to get qualifications. Either they are naturally good or they are dreadful. Ironically, the villainous Barty Crouch Junior, posing as Madeye Moody in the fourth novel/movie, is one of the naturally good teachers! Even after the students know the truth, they still say they learned a lot from him.

Dolores is dreadful, but it doesn’t matter to her, because she has the support of the Ministry of Magic. She even gets the job of Headmistress when Dumbledore escapes. She is, after all, working for Fudge, that totally useless Minister of Magic. 

She makes her first appearance when Harry is on trial for having done magic outside of school. It was she who sent those Dementors that made Harry do what he did, to protect himself and Dudley. She doesn’t even deny it. 

When she arrives at the school, she literally tortures students, including Harry, who is forced to write “I must not tell lies” while it appears - painfully - on his hand. All this in her pink office filled with pictures of cute cats and kittens. 

She has her own squad of supporters led by Draco Malfoy. She boots out Sybil Trelawney, the Divination teacher. Trelawney is pretty hopeless as a teacher, but generally harmless and the act is cruel. Considering what a poor job Dolores does in her own class, this is ironic. 

She later gets a job in the Ministry and abuses the Muggleborn wizards and witches. Something really odd is the scene where she has a Patronus(cat shaped, of course) in the court room, walking back and forth, protecting her. A Patronus is supposed to be created using a really happy memory. You do have to wonder what a happy memory would be for her! It’s scary even to think of it.

In the play, Harry Potter And The Cursed Child, she appears as Hogwarts Headmistress in an alternative universe where the Death Eaters won, Harry was killed and his son Albus was never born, the result of Albus and his friend Scorpius Malfoy trying to save that gentle boy Cedric Diggory from dying in the Triwizard Tournament. The school is celebrating Voldemort Day. Dementors are permanently surrounding the school. Snape has been hiding Ron and Hermione from her. 

Magic apart, Dolores is very real, which makes her worse than Voldemort, who is a fantasy Dark Lord. My real life Dolores bullied students and staff alike. I remember some students who went on a school bus trip telling me that they couldn’t believe the things she did on the ride. No, I won’t go into detail here. Mainly, she was a bully. When I read the book, I wondered how J.K Rowling had known about her! I guess she just wasn’t unique. 

Which makes the character truly scary! You can escape a Dark Lord - you can’t escape someone you might actually meet.

A to Z Blogging Challenge 2024. Villains! C Is For Circe

 Looks like I have covered this subject before - whoops! Still, a good post in a villains theme.

Circe is a Greek goddess, the daughter of Sun god Helios and sea nymph Perse. She is the aunt of Medea, sister of Minos’s wife Pasiphae, who was the mother of the Minotaur. Quite an impressive family line up! 

She lived on the island of Aeaea, where she turned men who visited into various animals, including pigs. This included the crew of Odysseus, but not Odysseus himself, who was warned and received a herb called moly from the god Hermes, which he put in his mouth to protect himself. After that, he demanded she change his men back before he would sleep with her. She agreed and they all stayed on her island for a year.

When they were about to leave, she gave them advice. The only way to get where they needed to go was to travel between monsters Scylla and Charybdis. Scylla was on a rock and had six heads, which could lean down and snatch men off their ship. Charybdis was a whirlpool which would simply suck the entire ship down. She recommended they go closer to Scylla. When Odysseus protested, she told him he was an idiot. Better, in her opinion, to lose six crewmen than all of them. 

Ironic, really, since, according to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, she was the one who had turned Scylla from a beautiful girl to a monster! 

Madeline Miller’s wonderful novel Circe shows her in a more sympathetic light. It is absolutely accurate according to Greek mythology, but still lets the reader see the story from her viewpoint. She is, in this novel, the only decent family member. Yes, she does turn Scylla, who has taken  Circe’s boyfriend Glaucus, though Circe is actually regretting having changed him from human to god. 

But she starts turning sailors into animals after the first crew she welcomed raped her. Her family are a bunch of crazies. She falls in love with Hermes and Odysseus, but they turn out not to be what she thought them. 

I’ve reviewed it here. 

https://suebursztynski.blogspot.com/2018/05/just-finished-reading-circe-by.html

A to Z Blogging Challenge 2024 - Villains! B is for Baba Yaga

 

When I was a small child, about five or six, our house had a back yard toilet, at the back of a narrow yard. Mum used to scare my older sister by telling her she might meet Baba Yaga if she went outside at night. Mum is a lovely person, not sure why she did that, but it does tell you something about where she came from. 

Baba Yaga is a witch who comes from Slavic folklore. There are many stories connected with her, both in folklore and modern stories. I even remember her from a collection of stories about Russian Prince Ivan I read when I was about seven. Sometimes she is a villain, sometimes she helps the hero. 

She appears in music(Pictures At An Exhibition) and fiction, by the likes of Jane Yolen and Peter Morwood.

She flies around in a mortar and pestle - yes, a giant version of the kitchen equipment we use to grind stuff. Her hut, deep in the forest, is on chicken legs. It is surrounded by a fence of human bones - the bones of her victims.

Author Susan Price’s Ghost World sequence has those huts as homes for shamans. At one point they have a sort of  shaman conference in which everybody arrives in their chicken leg houses. 

Usually, Baba Yaga stories involve someone on a quest, passing by her home and having adventures, or sometimes going there because they have to. 

For example, Vasilisa the Fair, a sort of Cinderella figure, is sent by her wicked stepmother to fetch a light from Baba Yaga.

The witch demands she does some housework in return for the light. She does it with the help of a magic doll her mother left for her and returns with a glowing skull. The stepmother and sisters are burned to death. 

Eventually Vasilisa marries the king. We don’t hear what happens to Baba Yaga, who had thrown the girl out in disgust when told that Vasilisa did all that work with the help of her mother’s blessing. Presumably she is still out there in the forest, meeting young questers and threatening to eat them.

Jane Yolen wrote a verse novel, Finding Baba Yaga, seen from the viewpoint of the witch.

She is in Peter Morwood’s Tales Of Old Russia trilogy, starting with Prince Ivan. This is set in a specific time in mediaeval Russia, but it’s fantasy all right. It begins with the story of Prince Ivan, whose sisters all marry shapeshifting men, before he marries the warrior Marya Morevna. 

In Orson Scott Card’s Enchantment, a young man doing research for his PhD thesis encounters the Sleeping Beauty, who is in a Ukrainian forest. She was put there by Baba Yaga. When the couple marry and move to the US, she follows - and absolutely adores aeroplanes! 

There is plenty more in modern fiction, though many modern stories tend to turn her into a feminist figure. 

Up to you to decide what to call her!