Mio and Jum Jum travel into Mordor. I mean, the Land Beyond, of course. ;) There were actually a number of similarities between the two, even above and beyond that they are both places corrupted by complete and irredeemable evil, and that the authors must have had similar ideas about what such a corrupted place would look like. Bad water, dead seas/marshes/forests, dark hard mountains, stony plains.... But the most copy-cat of all the passages was this, when they are looking up at the EVIL KNIGHT KATO's fortress. (Borg sounds even cooler, though. ;))
Det lignet et ondt øye, det vinduet, et rødt, uhyggelig og skrekkelig øye som stirret ut i natten og ville oss vondt.
My translation: It looked like an evil eye, that window, a red, unpleasant and scary* eye which stared out in the night and willed us harm.
* - I think the Norwegian words here are a bit better than 'unpleasant and scary', but those are the most accurate.
Compare that to this:
But Mordor has it's volcano, and likewise the Land Beyond has a few features of it's own. One of these are the Forheksede Fuglene - The Cursed Birds. They fly over the dark and wild water of the dead sea constantly, with dead eyes and crying out mournfully. We find out that most of the children the Evil Knight Kato took were turned into these birds.
Mio and Jum Jum are lucky enough to meet one of the friendly (actually not being sarcastic here) residents of the Land Beyond early on. They hear someone moaning and groaning that they are starving to death, and follow the voice (it's apparently very dark and hard to see, so that they can hear a soft voice long before they see the house it's coming from) to a little shack that's falling apart. There's an old man inside, who is referred to as Gamling - Old Man, but it's so cute, like Oldling, until we find out that his name is Eno. Mio and Jum Jum give him some bread, and so he tells them that they have to be super careful, because most people here are evil (really?), and that there are many evil spies, but that there are still some good people, including a guy who can give them a sword. They will find him in the deepest hole in the blackest mountain, after they pass through the dead forest.
When they leave Eno, (we are treated on the last page of his part to an illustration of him, in a little pinstripe suit, and I couldn't help but laugh, or wonder where he had gotten his clothes in that awful land), Mio and Jum Jum see Miramis getting stolen, and Mio has a difficult moment trying to decide between calling out and making an attempt to save his horse, or watching Miramis taken away to some bad fate while he only watches, thereby saving himself. Of course he must pick the latter, because the former would help no one, but it's still a difficult decision, and he cries, and the two of them are very disheartened as they carry on with their quest.
In the dead forest we first become aware of two patterns that are to be repeated again and again in the Land Beyond section of the book. One is that Jum Jum will take up two lines to make a statement to the effect of,
"If only the way hadn't been so hard, if only the forest hadn't been so dark and awful, if only we hadn't been so small and alone!"
He changes the specifics depending on what part of the realm they are working their way through, and sometimes, without a clear pattern, alone is switched with 'afraid'. I estimate that he says this about 8 times.
The other pattern is that right when Mio and Jum Jum are about to get caught, the landscape itself seems to interfere to save them. For example, a hole in a large tree might open up for them to scurry inside of before the spies pass by. This sort of thing is common enough in fantasy, but what is really striking and repetitious about it in Mio, Min Mio is that it's handled with two somewhat lengthy passages each time, and these passages resemble one another very closely, with the specifics of course switched out.
First they are about to get caught, and make a remark about it being the end, and shivering close together. "And then something strange happened". They are delivered, the confusion of the enemies may or may not be elaborated upon, and then, as they leave their hiding place, Mio reflects upon why they were helped. It looks something like this:
"It was as if the earth (forest, sea, mountain, you name it) itself had helped them. He didn't know why. Perhaps it was that the earth too hated the evil knight Kato. Perhaps it had once been covered in soft green grasses that the wind rustled through at night, and was wet with dew in the mornings. It seems to me that the earth could never forgive someone who had burnt away it's soft green grass.
Thank you, nice earth, I said, but it was still."
This formula is repeated for the trees in the forest, the earth, the mountain, the ocean, and the cliff wall.
Myself I felt ambiguous towards this repetition. I can imagine some advantages to doing it this way, for example that it is a device commonly employed in folktales, so it made it more like a legend, but it did throw me out of the story, which is a no-no. :) I wonder if reading it as an older reader and reading it in a foreign language slowed me down and made me overthink it significantly enough that a younger, native reader would not have been bothered.
In the mountain they get lost and have to play their flutes to find each other again, which leads to a nice line:
"Den lød så ren og vakker der inne i det svarte berget, nesten vakrene enn på Grønne Engers Øy."
"It sounded so pure and beautiful in the dark mountain, almost more beautiful than it had on the Island of Green Meadows."
Then they meet a guy who looks like Gimli. You can really feel his growling that shakes the entire mountain, and his anger and frustration at having been kept chained in a cave for thousands and thousands of years. They are extraordinarily fond of that saying, btw, and it frustrated me that the lifespan of the inhabitants of the world are never defined. They think thousands and thousands of years is a very long time, but not as much as we do, and it seems like some characters, like this one and the weaver woman, have lived that long without anyone thinking it odd. This is something that bothers me a lot because I like to write stories, and I like to know how the system works in other stories, but all in all tis a minor thing.
The swordsmith gives them a sword that he has been forging for thousands and thousands of years, but has just finished tonight. It can cut through stone, and therefore it is the only sword that can kill the EVIL KNIGHT KATO, who we finally learn something about. He has a heart of stone, that must be cut through with this sword to defeat him. And he is missing one of his hands, so in its place he has a claw of iron.
The best line in this section is when Mio asks the swordsmith why he is yelling 'death to the Evil Knight Kato' when he is Knight Kato's swordsmith, and the swordsmith roars,
"Fordi ingen hater Ridder Kato så mye som hans egen sverdsmed gjør."
"Because no one hates Knight Kato as much as his own swordsmith does."
Mio and Jum Jum escape from the mountain through a passage the swordsmith has dug through the mountain and to a narrow inlet in the sea, with a little boat there. They take the boat to the fortress (the crazy waves first seem to want to kill them, but later appear to have helped them get to the fortress).
I have to say that this chapter, Den Dypeste Hulen i Det Svarteste Berget (The Deepest Hole in the Blackest Mountain) was not my favourite. Most of it was simply puzzling for me, and not entirely because of language.
- Why did Eno tell Mio and Jum Jum that they had to go through the dead forest to get to the deepest hole in the blackest mountain, when after they go through the forest they realize that the have gone in a circle, and end up back at Eno's house... and just happen to be by the deepest hole in the blackest mountain?
- The mountain opens up and lets them in to save them from the spies. Or does it? It also leads to the deepest hole in the blackest mountain. It seems awfully plot devicish to tie these two plot ends together like that.
- There is a weak light in the mountain that just barely allows them to see a few feet ahead of themselves. They later find out that it is coming from the swordsmiths forge. But even the light from a huge fire only goes so far through winding cave passages, and they wandered for hours looking for the forge.
- The swordsmith is really hard to find through the mountain tunnels - so difficult to find, in fact, that another plot device (the dwarf's secret passage) allows them to get out quickly and takes them to the fortress. More about that later, but the secret passage is, by its nature, hidden from Knight Kato - so how does he get his swords? Does he send his slaves in through the twisty narrow passages? This is completely impossible if we assume that going through the side of the mountain is the only way into the passages, and only slightly more possible (still very implausible) if it has a normal cave entrance. I daresay if it had had an entrance close to the forge, Mio and Jum Jum would have found it, based on the account given of their wandering.
- Okay, so let's assume the implausible - that Knight Kato sends some slaves in through these winding and twisting passages to get his swords. Kato has still been to see the dwarf there at least once, because he chained him there himself. So are you telling me that Kato crawled on his belly in order to get there? (Mio and Jum Jum are young boys, and they couldn't always walk upright in the passages... :() Not buying it.
- The dwarf's secret passage I really don't buy at all. I guess that he has had 'thousands and thousands of years', but still... the whole idea, that although he is chained up and can never come out of his chains while Knight Kato lives, he nevertheless, straining the chains as far as they will go, manages to tunnel through the mountain all the way to the sea, and somehow obtains a little boat to keep there. ??? Even Mio and Jum Jum seem to find this a bit strange, as they ask "Why do you have a boat if you can't row it?" To which the dwarf replies, "I can too row. I stretch my chains really, really far, and I can row one or two boatlengths". Yeah, see, that doesn't quite count as properly rowing to me. I tried hard to work with the idea. The tunneling, picky logistics aside (which way is the ocean?), would permit him to get fresh air and see the sky and touch the sea. These are all desirable things, so I guess he has a motive. But where does he get the boat, and why? I tried to imagine that he might lay down in the boat, looking up at the sky, and feeling the water beneath him, or something like that... but given how nasty the ocean is there, and everything, it just doesn't make sense. Also, it's implied that he has very little leisure time, and if Knight Kato hasn't heard about his secret passage\inlet\boat, then he must not be spending a lot of time there, or he'd be caught.
This next chapter is called A Claw of Iron to remind you about Knight Kato's missing hand and replacement claw.
Once Mio and Jum Jum are at Knight Kato's Fortress, (Ridder Katos Borg, darnit, and it's getting harder and harder to translate things into English when I think of them in Norwegian, haha!), they must scale a cliff. This is tricky, and when they are right at the top the spies come by again. By now we know that Knight Kato suspects that Mio is here to fulfill the prophecy, and he is worried. The spies start looking with a torch over the edge of the cliff, but right before they see Mio and Jum Jum, just when I fully expected the cliff to make a new ledge right above them, something unusually unusual happens. The cursed birds fly up at the spy and one knocks the torch out of his hand. This breaks from the usual help from nature pattern in two ways - we know that these are no ordinary birds, but cursed children - and the bird that flew into the torch catches on fire, and then sinks into the waves, dead...
Continuing on, Mio and Jum Jum enter the fortress and climb a really awful staircase. One pattern I forgot to mention before is that Mio occasionally (3 or 4 times) will say that it is "the kind of staircase you sometimes dream of, where stairs disappear and trapdoors open and send you to your death, etc", and things to that end. It's a creepy staircase that goes up and up and Jum Jum says that he's afraid at one point, and when Mio turns, Jum Jum is gone. This is a creepy part, because Mio can't even shout for Jum Jum, or he will be caught. Mio is very, very upset and continues alone, but he doesn't see that the stairs end (it is dark), and so he falls, and just manages to hold onto the edge. He waits there a while, and then hears Jum Jum telling him to take his hand so he can help him up. He does this, then realizes that the extended 'hand' was something else entirely - A Claw of Iron.
Cliffhanger! :O
The exciting conclusion to our story comes with the last update. :D
1 comment:
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