[HPforGrownups] Harry and the house-elves---another view (LONG)

[Marion Ros]

No: HPFGUIDX 162182

Eric Oppen wrote:

>>>One thing that a lot of posters on this point forget, again and again, is 
that _house-elves are NOT human!!!_ They are another race entirely. Humans 
hate being enslaved. House-elves may well see their situation as the 
highest and noblest calling available to them. Dobby is not a typical 
example, and the other house-elves seem to consider him to be on the same 
level as the sort of harmless mentally-disturbed person one sees 
sometimes---not dangerous, but not to be emulated.<<<<


Marion:

I wanted to stay out of discussions for a while (I'm busy trying to find a subject for my thesis) but I did have my thoughts on the matter. And because my thoughts coincided with yours, I wanted to say 'hear, hear!'

JKR seems to have moulded her 'house elves' on the brownies and hobs of folklore. 
When I was small, I read 'Hobberdy Dick' by Katherine Briggs and that book (and others about myths and folklore) sealed my idea of the 'house elf' for me.
In traditional folklore they are not slaves, but 'spirits of place': bound to the place they care for, not so much the people (since mortals come and go, but the place stays) When a house is build on the place of a hob, the hob will consider that house as *his*. He is the helpmeet of the domestic servants, but he will taunt and torment the lazy maid or farmhand rather like a poltergeist (the word 'misschief', which is often used for hobgoblin behaviour, used to have a far more nastier meaning in ye olden days!)
The hobgoblin expects (and recieves if the family wants to keep in the good graces of a hob) a bowl of fresh milk every day and a specially baked cake. The worst thing you could do, however, was offer it clothes. It would take offense and leave.

JKR had her house elves bound to the House instead of the house (or has she? It might be that the old wizard families that have house elves might have had their physical houses on the same spot for thousands of years. Grimmauld Place was probably once a wizard's house a few miles outside a Roman encampment town called Londinium) and she - seemingly, in the case of Dobby - has changed the power balance in the favour of the wizards. Maybe the house elves that live in the houses of Muggles (if they have survived the Enlightement and it's non belief in magic) still have supremacy in the home, and wizards, being able to see them for a start, simply have gained the 'upper hand' because they have magic as well as the hobs.

Incidently, it is my opinion that the behaviour of Dobby, Winky and Kreacher is not so much the behaviour of slaves who either want their freedom or not, but more of religious people. 

Dobby constantly states things in the trend of "I'm not worthy". He appearantly switched from his old religion to a new on (Harry is clearly his Messiah) wanting to prostrate himself for and obey his new religious leader, but feeling the need to be a flaggelant from time to time because in following the new religion he has sinned against the old.

Winky has been excommunicated and is devastated, wailing and gnashing her teeth is Limbo Hogwarts.

Kreachur is being forced to recant his religion. The house is being stripped off it's relics and artifacts. The mounted elfheads, which horrify Harry just as much as a wooden carving of a semi-naked, bleeding, tortured man, nailed to a piece of wood horrifies me (I'm not a Christian and I hope nobody is offended when I say that what is a sacred image to one is totally incomprehensible to others who don't share their beliefs) are being ripped off the wall and destroyed. Kreacher feels as deeply about those elfheads as a devout Roman Catholic would about his crucifix.
Try to imagine the following: during the Reformation, Protestant Iconoclasts destroyed many a beautiful old masterpiece, spitting on them, defeacating on them, calling them 'works of the devil' and 'craven images'. If a Catholic sneaked out to meet other Catholics, perhaps even plotting to overthrow the Protestant government (as many did in 16th and 17th century England) we would condemn them (because religious/political murder is a no-no in these times) but we would understand, or try to understand, that for people in less enlightened days it was a matter of Live or Death. They believed that not being able to celebrate the eucharist by the hands of an ordained priest would mean that there souls would burn for all eternaty in Hell.
Yet, somehow, people consider Kreacher 'evil' and 'insane'. If Kreacher is 'insane', then so are Dobby and Winky, as are all other house elves. They are all 'religious'. They just belong to different, conflicted, 'churches'.

JKR has therefor given a new, strange twist to the old hobgoblin and hobberdy dick. They are, in my opinion, more a 'fantasy version' of a religious group than a parable of slavery.


To finish; I pulled the following off the web for those who are interested in the book 'Hobberdy dick' by Katharing Briggs and hobgoblins in general:



http://ww2.wizards.com/books/Wizards/default.aspx?doc=main_classicshobberdy

"[Brownies] are generally described as small men, about three feet in height, very raggedly dressed in brown clothes, with brown faces and shaggy heads, who come out at night and do the work that has been left undone by the servants. They make themselves responsible for the farm or house in which they live . . . 
A brownie will often become attached to one member of the family . . .  he has a right to a bowl of cream or best milk and to a specially good bannock or cake . . . 
Any offer of reward for its services drove the brownie away . . .
Where he was well treated, however, and his whims respected, a brownie would be wholly committed to the interests of his master."
-- Katharine Briggs, A Dictionary of Fairies
Of Hobs, Lobs, and Hobgoblins

Dick is, as his name suggests, a hob -- a type of friendly faerie creature variously called a hob, a lob, or a brownie (i.e., little brown man). Hobs, unlike goblins, are solitary, shy, helpful creatures, so long as they are not crossed; a house-hob will mend items, sweep floors, churn butter, and generally help out by completing unfinished chores if treated well (the "elves" in the Brothers Grimm tale "The Shoemaker and the Elves" are clearly hobs). Wise homeowners will reward him with a saucer of milk or small cakes spread with honey left out for him at night. But, like many of "the fair folk", they have a sinister side; a hob who was offended would either abandon its post or, worse, turn into a boggart or bogle (the English folklore equivalents of a poltergeist), spoiling work instead of completing it. Those who fell between the helpful and the malicious were generally called hobgoblins, like Shakespeare's Robin Goodfellow, better known as Puck; the Irish pooka (known to American audiences via the Jimmy Stewart movie Harvey) is a similar creature, and some have even suggested that the Robin Hood legend began as a hob story (Rob [or Hob] -in-the-Woods). Aside from being the probable inspiration for Tolkien's "hobbit", hobs have largely failed to make the transition from folklore into modern fantasy, unlike other faerie creatures such as elves and dwarves, mythological beings like sphinxes and dragons, fairytale favorites like witches and ogres, or even fellow folktale creatures such as giants and goblins. 

Perhaps one reason for their dropping out of sight is that hobs, unlike the aristocratic elves, master-craftsmen dwarves, scheming witches, or huge lumbering giants, were neither the heroes of stories nor the monstrous foes overcome by heroes. Their lot was humbler; they were very much the supernatural helpers of servants, not companions of lords and ladies -- and before Tolkien few fantasy authors expressed much sympathy or interest in the "Downstairs" side of the Upstairs/Downstairs equation. Morris's, Dunsany's, and Eddison's heroes tend to be princes and lords, and the same is true of most other fantasies of the times; even the apparently ordinary protagonists of novels like Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions (1953) and Fletcher Pratt & L. Sprague de Camp's Land of Unreason (1941/42) turn out to be reincarnations of Ogier the Dane and Frederick Barbarossa, respectively. And while working class "proletarian" heroes were a well-established folktale tradition, their stories -- Jack the giant killer, the tailor who killed seven with one stroke, etc. -- were far more active and dramatic than those who, in Milton's phrase, "stand and wait". Briggs achieves what J. K. Rowling more recently tried and failed at with her Dobby and Kreature: take a nearly forgotten class of folklore creature, personalize a single member of that group, and imbue his steadfast attempts to protect his home and adopted family in troubled times with a heroism of its own.



A Time and a Place

The second distinctive feature of Briggs' book, aside from her choosing an almost forgotten folklore creature as its title character, is the time and place in which she chooses to tell her story -- a country house near Oxford in the year 1652, during the upheaval that followed upon England's Civil War (1642-1651) and the establishment of Cromwell's Puritan Commonwealth. Vague, idealized medieval settings have been the default for fantasy since William Morris's day, with modern-day tales the recognized alternative. Fantasy set in other periods, especially when the author is specific about when and where, were a rarity until quite recently (cf. the Tor "Fairy Tale series" launched the late '80s, which started a vogue that has continued to the present day). Briggs is not only very specific, having her characters visit many real-world sites (such as the famous Rollright Stones, a neolithic stone circle that also appears briefly in Tolkien's Farmer Giles of Ham), but grounds her book in the events of the time. The story begins when the traditional owners of Widford Manor leave, ruined by supporting the losing side in the war, and new owners arrive, a family of London merchants from Cheapside who aspire to become landed gentry. Dick almost leaves with the last of the old family at the beginning of the story, but decides to stay behind: 

Dick had half a mind to . . . scramble into the cart . . . before running water parted them. The Culvers had been good friends to him, and he would  have liked to share their fortunes a little longer . . . But he had been at Widford time out of mind and had only known the Culvers for a little over two centuries. He would stay with the old place a little longer and give it a chance of life; it would soon fall into ruin if he left it.

The opening chapter, describing the hob in the empty house, conveys vividly how desperately a hob needs people about him and things to take care of (as Briggs puts it, "hobs fare ill without [human company]"), and the touching degree to which he becomes attached to the only living thing left at the desolate house, a little red hen who escaped being rounded up after the auction. When the new family comes, not only are they city folk who know nothing of country ways and customs, they are Puritans who scorn old superstitions as ungodly. Briggs is very good at portraying unsympathetic characters without villainizing them. Mr. Widdison, the father, is a stern man with little use for any point of view but his own, yet he is redeemed for the reader by a fundamental core of decency, a determination to do the right thing as he sees it, and his devotion to his ailing mother-in-law, the mother of his first wife who he makes sure has a comfortable home with him to her dying day. Mrs. Widdison, the second wife, is a selfish and self-important woman, but Briggs always shows how her occasionally cruel treatment of others is partly due to vanity, party to thoughtlessness; she is not a "wicked stepmother" but simply a bad parent and worse employer, something far more believable. The eldest son (and only child from the first marriage) and the young woman who comes to serve as Mrs. Widdison's lady-maid (the last living member of the deposed family who once lived there), quickly come to be the main human characters, along with some of the servants; it's hard to deal with a large cast, some of whom play very minor roles in the story, and keep their personalities distinct, but Briggs pulls it off.

Most difficult of all, perhaps, is her treatment of the mother-in-law, old Mrs. Dimbleby. Here we have a person so good that she is actually surrounded by a kind of halo that Hobberdy Dick can see, though her fellow humans cannot ("Dick was rather frightened of her because of a luminous cloud in which she often sat, but he was fascinated, and she looked so mild and quiet that he could not think her dangerous"). The difficulty of presenting genuinely good characters who are both likable and believable is well-known, and very few writers of fiction can pull it off -- most prefer to create a good villain, which is much easier. Charles Williams tried several times to create such a numinous character and failed, as did C. S. Lewis (cf. Ransom in That Hideous Strength); Tolkien managed it with Faramir and Elrond, but witness those characters' fates at the hands of Peter Jackson, where all the character traits that make them admirable are stripped away. And every gamer is familiar with paladins who come off as sanctimonious and self-righteous rather than living examples to admire and inspire. That Briggs is able to believably present the story from a whole range of points of view, getting inside of good and bad people alike and showing how events look from their perspective, is one of the greatest strengths of her work, and a fine example for other authors to follow.



The Way of the Hob

A final strength of the book is the degree to which it is specific, not generalized. So much contemporary fantasy of the last three decades derives from synthesized stuff such as the writings of Joseph Campbell, Northrup Frye, or Carl Jung, rather than the actual stories these critics boiled down to construct their theories from. Briggs, by contrast, was probably the leading folklore scholar of her generation (her colleagues recently issued a thirteen-volume set of her Collected Works), and she draws inspiration directly from the original stories and tales collected over the last two centuries or so, many of which she published in collections such as British Folktales (1977), which includes the hob story "The Brownie". She also wrote several highly respected works on folklore: A Dictionary of Fairies: Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies and Other Supernatural Creatures (1976, also published under the variant title An Encyclopedia of Fairies) is undoubtedly her masterpiece, and probably the definitive work identifying and describing various folklore creatures, often accompanied by brief versions of the original stories in which they occur. Also significant are The Vanishing People: Fairy Lore and Legend (1978), The Fairies in Tradition and Literature (1967), Pale Hecate's Team (1962, a book on Elizabethan beliefs on witchcraft), The Anatomy of Puck (1959, which does the same for Elizabethan fairy lore), and Abbey Lubbers, Banshees & Boggarts: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Fairies (1979, a sort of Dictionary of Fairies lite).

Out of this expertise, Briggs has focused on a very specific part of all this lore; her plot is new, but the creatures and traditions are all authentic, and all drawn from English folklore of the period in which her story is set. This wealth of actual knowledge gives the tale a distinct flavor and realism more eclectic fantasies often lack. Nor do her self-imposed limitations hinder the story; she includes not just hobs (Long George, the Taynton Lob, Patch of Iccomb, Lull of Kingstanding, Hairy Tib of Bruern, the Shining Boy of Widley Copse, and Hobberdy Dick himself) but ghosts (the evil one in the West Attic and the miser's ghost haunting the bed from London), witches (Mother Darke) and their familiars, a will-o'-the-wisp (Willy Wisp), the old Grim of Stow churchyard (an ancient spirit that was once a god and is now a Hound of the Baskervilles-ish black dog), an Abbey Lubber (whose presence foretells doom for the house it haunts), and more. In short, she vividly recreates a now-lost folklore and, in a tour-de-force, presents it from inside, from the point of view of the supernatural creatures, with all their fascination of humankind. Nor does she make the mistake of listing off all Dick's powers at the onset; the reader finds out what he can do only by reading along -- a triumph of "show, don't tell."

Once, when they were both unawares, he caught a moment's glimpse of Dick  and stopped, startled and almost frightened; but Dick rallied all his powers,  and thought of a clump of ferns  with a rabbit peering out of it until he looked like one, and Joel went on, reassured.

In the end, Briggs' book is as satisfying a fairy tale as any of the ones she draws inspiration from. In the best fairy tale/fantasy tradition, everything works out the way it should. She ends with a particularly poignant final note, with a Eucatastrophe Tolkien could be proud of. In the final chapter, her newly united lovers present Hobberdy Dick with a choice: They lay out three presents for him. If he chooses the green suit they have made for him, he can enter the hollow hills and fairyland, becoming a member of the seely court. If he chooses the red suit, his time on earth is at an end and he can follow the humans he loves into the afterlife. And if he chooses the little broom, he can remain as he has always been, and witness what the next few centuries will bring to his beloved house and its people. I will not reveal his choice here, other than to say that it is both moving and entirely fitting -- the culmination of the entire book in its final pages.


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