Legend: A Boethian Analysis (Part 2)

Jack and the Ordo amoris

In his telling of the Orpheus myth, Boethius asserts the Augustinian principle that morality consists in properly ordering one’s loves towards the fount of goodness itself: “Happy was he who could look upon/The clear fount of the good;/Happy who could loose the bonds of heavy earth” (307). But Jack’s call to his heroic journey and two tests which follow prove even more definitively that Jack’s orientation to goods temporal and transcendent is on the whole properly sorted out. After Jack reveals to Gump and the other fairies the nature of the curse and the need for a hero “pure of heart,” Gump chooses Jack to fill the role. When Jack protests that he “knows nothing of weapons,” the elf leads him to a cave where he says he cannot follow, but Oona can lead the way (reminiscent of Link’s companion Navi to debut thirteen years later in Ocarina of Time). Why the other fairies cannot enter the cave is not spelled out, though it may have something to do with the general fairy aversion to iron, as it is apparently a treasure-trove of human-made artifacts. Oona apparently is not bothered by iron, and later will rescue Jack and his friends when they land in the prisons of Darkness. Serving as a miniature underworld in which he can be molded, Jack must don the ancient armor, take up the sacred sword, and wield the shining shield kept there as the clear capstone treasures in the cave, with the pages of an open book visible but not legible behind it². Although the words are inscrutable, I am tempted to assume it must be open to Ephesians 6:11-13:

Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.

Having equipped himself with a breastplate of righteousness, a sword of the spirit, and a shield of faith, Jack quite literally must go face the ruler of the darkness of his world.

Before this happens, however, Jack receives a startling revelation: the Navi-like Oona can grow to an ordinary human size, which apparently the other fairies are unable to do. Oona offers Jack a temptation, though not one she asks him to decide on just yet: “I can be anything you want me to be. We need you, Jack!” Vowing to keep her power a secret, Jack puts on the holy armor and they set out to the Great Tree which puts out old and ancient roots around the subterranean lair of Darkness. In his first, easier challenge, Jack will lose the sword and shield, but in the meantime both have value when they encounter Meg Mucklebones, who after deciding not to eat the dwarf Screwball (calling him a foul-tasting fairy), sets her appetites on Jack. Defending himself with the shield, Jack decapitates the monstrous creature, dramatizing what Boethius argues is the self-harm caused by pursuing bodily pleasure as one’s highest good:

Such is every pleasure

Goading those enjoying it,

And like swarming bees

That have poured out their pleasing honey,

It flees, and strikes our hearts

With a too lasting sting. (Boethius, 259)

Furthermore, in the director’s cut, Jack’s cunning is on display: he notices that Meg, despite her hideous appearance, is drawn to her reflection. Jack uses flattery to distract her with her own reflection in the shield, and in so doing decapitates the cannibalistic swamp hag with a stroke of the sword³.

Jack’s ability to think through the repulsive appearance of this monstrous visage, who looms out of a bog to eat him, shows that he can keep his bearings when things get ugly (literally). But a second test awaits him in this regard. As the band of heroes crosses the threshold into the lair of Darkness, Screwball lives up to his name (this film’s version of Pippin) and pulls on a lever which causes the floor to drop out beneath them, plopping them into a dungeon in Hell’s Kitchen (again, literally). They see their estranged friend Blunder, who had for some reason been masquerading as a goblin, dragged off to become a grotesque fairy-potpie (thankfully he is rescued later). But no one can open the jail cell, not even Gump with his magic because the lock is made of iron, which he says is “trouble for fairies.” At this point, Jack feels compelled to ask Oona to help in spite of his promise to her, at which she protests. But realizing the dire situation, Oona agrees to help – on the condition that Jack kiss her. The quick peck he gives, of course, does not satisfy her, and so she uses fairy glamour to try to entrance Jack into giving her a real kiss by taking on the appearance of Lily. The special effects of the scene, with the visual distortion around Oona’s Lily-like countenance, invite the viewer to think this is “fairy magic,” as Screwball calls it in fear, that not only creates the appearance of the person but actually enchants the mind with confusion, as Jack for a moment thinks it is Lily despite the fact that he watched Oona transform before his eyes. Like Dame Fortuna whose fickle changing face Boethius must cease to trust, Jack must resist Oona’s attempt to enchant him into believing she is Lily. The spell breaks, however, as Jack rejects the mere fairy glamour. Understandably, Gump is frustrated that Jack won’t just give her a kiss, but it’s clear that Oona wants a kiss from Jack’s heart: “Human hearts don’t work that way,” he tells her, to which she petulantly replies, “What care I for human hearts, soft and spiritless as porridge? A fairy’s heart beats fierce and free!”⁴ But of course Jack has just demonstrated that his heart is anything but soft and spiritless, and to kiss Oona and mean it to her satisfaction would be a betrayal he could not countenance. Whether Oona intends it or not (probably not), the fact is that it is after this test that she lets them out of the dungeon, and so another step of the hero’s journey is completed: Jack rejects superficial beauty in favor of the true, and so is released from an infernal prison.

Jack’s love for Lily is further vindicated as true love when he chooses to trust the life of the mare in her hands, despite all appearances. Boethius warns us not to confuse inherent goods with their material manifestations: “Because you delight to give things which are otherwise names they should not bear and which are easily shown to be false by the effects of the things themselves, so that this cannot rightly be called wealth, nor that really power, nor the other truly an honor” (Boethius, 213). Lily has been embroiled in a world where such false images attempt to cover over the true, and has herself donned the embroideries of the shadow side of such goods. She wears the gown Darkness gave her, and speaks vile intent to slay the last unicorn⁵. Gump advises Jack to judge her with his heart, not his eyes, but then himself is taken in by appearance: “She means to do it, Jack! Shoot her!” But Jack closes his eyes and says, “I trust you, Lily,” as he had before, and she breaks the chain holding the unicorn as Jack looses an arrow into the neck of Darkness to distract him from the princess. As Boethius taught, Jack looked past appearance and saw the wisdom of her misdirection. Of course, Jack had heard her shriek “No!” in response to the intention of Darkness to slaughter the mare in an earlier scene. But Jack had also taught her the language of animals, even as Adam had named them, and as with Oona he has to ask whether this appearance is an illusion or the reality. His faith in Lily saves her life and the unicorn’s.

Unlike Orpheus, Jack uses the wisdom of Lily to break the chains of darkness. Not only does he rely on her to make the right choice with the unicorn’s life in her hands, he also thinks of a way to defeat Darkness through her tutelage. Lady Philosophy told Boethius of the difficulty of her arguments that many cannot accept them because they ‘cannot raise eyes accustomed to darkness to the light of manifest truth” (Boethius, 347). Wielding light like a playful Lady Philosophy, Lily had held up a heart-shaped pendant which reflected light in his eyes, saying in the director’s cut, “Let me dazzle you with my wisdom.” From this memory Jack realizes he can use the giant metal plates kept in Hell’s kitchen to reflect light from the sun into the Underworld. The Christian thinks of the harrowing of Hell by Christ during the days in the tomb; like Christ, Jack casts out the demonic by bringing the light that saves his Bride (or Bride-to-Be in Jack’s case). But unlike Christ, Jack’s victory, though decisive in the moment, is not eternal. The theatrical release ends with the haunting laughter of Darkness as he whirls through the abyss; the director’s cut, though it lacks this scene, shows the relationship of Jack and Lily, while nonetheless still deeply in love, less naively trusting of each other than they were before. Although the theology of the opening scrawl asserts a metaphysics too Manichean⁶, when in both versions Darkness warns, “I am a part of you,” it serves as a reminder for Christian viewers of the original sin which carries on even despite virtuous efforts by mortals to bring light into the dark. Jack is more like another literary progeny of Boethius and the Orpheus myth: Sir Orfeo, who in the Middle English poem of his name rescues Heurodis not from the Underworld but from the Fairy World (which, however, in many respects is not so different from an Underworld). Christlike but not Christ, Sir Orfeo and Jack cannot make all things right forever, but they can model what setting things right looks like for now.

Lily’s Love of Wisdom in Nature and Song

The greater agency of Lily, her wisdom and her cunning, also makes her like Lady Philosophy, the mentor of Boethius who seeks to perform a reversed Orpheus by drawing him out of the hellish prison of his despair and back into the light of love for God. The director’s cut makes this parallel even stronger in making Lily a singer:

Come down sparrow, sing me good morning.

Rise up sun like the arch of the sky.

Living river, turn light to diamonds

When I look in my true love’s eyes.

Philosophy too loves to sing of nature, especially the structure of the cosmos:

“I have decided now

In clear song, with my pliant strings, to show

What great control Nature in her power

Wields over all things, with what laws

She in her foresight keeps the vast universe… (Boethius, 237)

The sparrow, as an emissary of light from the sky which mirrors the light in the true love’s eyes, mirrors how the unicorns stand as intermediaries between the harmony of the cosmos and the personal love of Jack and Lily, as part of Nature’s laws. In this same meter, Philosophy sings about a bird as well:

The tree-top loving, chirruping bird

Is shut in a coop like a cavern.

Men treat her as a toy and care for her

With kindliness putting in honeyed drink

And food in plenty:

Yet if she sees, hopping in her narrow cage,

The beloved shade of trees,

She scatters her food beneath her feet

And all she wants is her woods,

Sings sadly, softly, sweetly of her woods. (Boethius, 237-239)

Lily is, like the bird, treated like such a prisoner by Darkness, but one can infer that she also felt cooped up in her life as a princess, given her love for visiting Nell, a humble local villager outside of the castle (never even shown in the film)⁷. In fact, while visiting Nell, Lily has a vision of the future she does not understand, where the clock is frozen in ice momentarily. This moment seems to vindicate her appreciation for people in a lower station in life (“there’s more magic here than in all the castles of the world”), but also suggests she has a deeper affinity for the fundamental structure of things that she has yet to fully develop⁸.

This same desire for communion with Nature doubtless led Lily to meet and fall in love with Jack, who teaches her the language of animals. Her somewhat mischievous nature, hinted at by her pranks with Nell and at its worst with the unicorns, apparently does not infringe on her innocence but prefigures the cunning she later exhibits with Darkness. Her love for song exhibits Lily’s ability to put into harmony personality traits which seem opposed, a theme which runs through the songs of Philosophy as well. Philosophy also sings the songs to comfort Boethius, which Lily also does for Jack – songs which perhaps instilled in him the vision of her goodness that allowed him to trust her. When Lily overhears the goblins discuss how she made possible their assault on the unicorn as she hides in Nell’s attic, she resolves, “What have I done? I’ll make it right.” Bravely, Lily follows the goblins and listens to their master, Darkness, command them to seek out and kill the mare. Lest the movie’s emphasis on Jack’s heroism be mistaken for mere chauvinism, Lily herself hears from Darkness an awareness of the power of the feminine. Of the mare, Blix asserts, “She’s only a female, my lord. She has no power.” Darkness rebukes, “Only the power of Creation. Get the Mare! I command you!” Darkness associates the continued power of light in the world with the female unicorn; Lily as a mortal woman too seeks to bring light into darkness, even as Lady Philosophy did for Boethius: “Then was the night dispersed, and darkness left me;/My eyes grew strong again” (Boethius 139). Lily warns Brown Tom of the plans of Blix, and while Brown Tom is unable to stop Blix and Pox from apprehending Lily and the mare, the fact that she remains alive is an encouragement to Jack in his quest.Lily initially rejects the Underworld as a place of fear, though Darkness attempts to seduce her with gifts of enchanted treasure which test her own commitment to the ordo amoris⁹. Notably, Lily never sings as she did with the unicorns when in the presence of these seductive gifts: “The voice wholly fills the ears of many hearers simultaneously, but your riches cannot pass to many unless they are split into small parts first” (201). In one of the more unsettling moments in the film, she dances with a shadowy spirit in a dark dress, and Lily apparently embraces her shadow self as the dancing spirit disappears and what one might call Persephone’s wedding gown magically transfers to Lily’s body. Despite the fact that these temptations show that Lily does harbor the ability to sin, she nonetheless rejects with bravery the initial blandishments of the Lord of the Underworld. Admirable, given how dangerous and erratic he proves to be, and protests adamantly at the plans to kill the unicorn while (wisely) refusing to eat the food of Hell. Lily even manipulates Darkness, who as a figure of Satan is himself a master of manipulation, by fooling him into believing she not only loves him (despite expressly hating him) but also wants the unicorn dead too (despite protesting at the creature’s murder). To some extent Darkness’s inability to interpret her stems from his own limited ability to interpret the world, but nonetheless Lily puts forward an act sufficiently convincing that Darkness sets up a sort of Black Sabbath to have the unicorn slain at her hand. Like Luthien in Tolkien’s Beren and Luthien, Lily becomes a mythic variation on Lady Philosophy, able to bring wisdom that confounds the wicked.

²The idea that the cave is a sacred analog to the underworld is corroborated by the fact that in the original script, the treasure trove is in fact the tomb of a forgotten hero, so that Jack becomes a participant in a sort of communion with the saints.

³Notably, Boethius also must ascend different levels of training in his quest for the good, first to overcome the false Muses (whom Philosophia speaks of as monsters as horrible as Meg Mucklebones) and then Dame Fortune who, like Oona, is able to take on seductive but false appearances.

⁴Notice of the inversion of the Orpheus myth: by refusing a condition, rather than failing it, Jack proves himself worthy.

⁵It seems likely that Legend was influenced by the book or the movie The Last Unicorn, both of which have the medieval myth of the unicorn as a healer, bringer of harmony, and even symbol of the incarnation in medieval bestiaries. However, while it is a motif in Peter S. Beagle’s story and even used in the film’s imagery, Legend even more directly pulls on the heritage of ancient medieval unicorn lore best witnessed in the Unicorn Tapestries, by having two specific hunt scenes, one where a unicorn is “slain” and another captured. The Holy Grail is also an important reference here.

⁶“Together they will learn there can be no good without evil… No love without hate… No heaven without hell… No light without darkness. The harmony of the Universe depends upon an eternal balance. Out of the struggle to maintain this balance comes the birth of Legends.” Of course, as with many fantasy narratives which assert the need for a balance between good and evil, the narrative really bears out a different kind of balance: between the need to maintain purchase on innocence while being able to address evil. Defeating Darkness is the correct thing to do – evil is not to be “balanced” but to be cast out.

⁷ The opening of George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin on the value of the princess as a symbol for feminine virtue is worth revisiting on this point. Likewise, Philosophia wields a scepter – both she and Lily carry different sorts of regal authority.

⁸ It’s worth noting that Lady Philosophy also speaks about the gap between time and eternity, which only God can cross, suggesting from a medieval point of view that providence has sent Lily a warning.

⁹ The enchanted treasure, aglow with fiendishly alluring light, parodies the heartshaped pendant Lily used to reflect natural sunlight into Jack’s eyes.