The Tomb of Lars Porsena and the Tower of Orthanc

      The imaginations of architects, artists and historians are haunted by buildings, both real and imaginary. Perhaps this is true for us all to some extent, but it is most acute for those, like myself, whose creative life rotates around architecture.  One of these buildings which have continually stimulated the creative imagination is the almost certainly legendary Tomb of Lars Porsena, the Etruscan king. Various architects including Filarete and Alberti have attempted, on paper at least, to reconstruct it. The tomb fascinated Wren and Hawksmoor, providing Wren with the inspiration for the catafalque for the funeral of Queen Mary, in Westminster Abbey, 1695. However  reconstructing the tomb, even on paper, cannot be an easy thing for the description left to us from Antiquity is somewhat confusing; here it is described by the Roman writer Pliny the Elder quoting an earlier writer, Marcus Varro:

     'For it is proper to use the term 'Italian' for that [labyrinth] that Porsena, the King of Eturia, built for himself as a tomb, in order to show at the same time how even the vanity of foreign kings is exceeding by those of Italy. But since the fabulous nature of the description exceeds all bounds, I shall make use make use of the words of Varro in presenting it:

     'He [Porsena] was buried just outside the city of Clusium in the place where he had built a square monument of dressed stones. Each side was three hundred feet in length and fifty in height, and beneath the base there was an inextricable labyrinth into which, if any-body entered without a clue of thread, he could never discover his way out. Above this square building there stand five pyramids, one at each corner and one in the centre, seventy-five feet broad at the base and one hundred and fifty feet high. These pyramids so taper in shape that upon the top of all of them together there is supported a brazen globe, and upon that again a petasus from which bells are suspended by chains. These make a tinkling sound when blown about by the wind, as was done in bygone times at Dodona. Upon this globe there are four more pyramids, each a hundred feet in height, and above them is a platform on which are five more pyramids.'

      As to the height of these last, Varro was too embarrassed to give it, but the Etruscan fables hold that it was equal to the total height of the work up to the level of these five pyramids - insane madness.'

     Madness indeed. Here is a reconstruction (one of the less outlandish ones) by John Greaves (1602-52), the Antiquary, in his book 'Pyramidion: or a description of the Pyramids of Aegypt' of 1646

     I want to contrast this with Tolkien's description of the great tower of Orthanc in the Lord of the Rings, another imaginary building of great and haunting power:

     'There stood a tower of marvellous shape. It was fashioned by the builders of old, [] and yet it seemed a thing not made by the craft of men, but riven from the bones of the earth in the ancient torment of the hills. A peak and an isle of rock it was, black and gleaming hard; four mighty pillars of many-sided stone were wielded into one, but near the summit they opened into gapping horns, their pinnacles as sharp as the points of spears, keen-edged as knifes.  Between them was a narrow space, and there upon a floor of polished stone, written with strange signs, a man might stand five hundred feet above the plain.' 

     Was Tolkien, I wonder, under the influence of not only the great donjon towers of late Medieval France and England, but also the tomb Lars Porsena when he conjured up the Tower of Orthanc? As both a pupil at King Edward's School in Birmingham and Exeter College, Oxford, (where, for a year, he studied Classics), he would have come across the work of both Pliny and Varro. He might even have seen the drawing produced by John Greaves, but that is to speculate.

     It appears from the drawings Tolkien produced, that he originally conceived Orthanc as a singular circular structure: one design looking as though it was constructed from a set of diminishing circular Roman Mausolea such as the Tomb of Cecilia Metella (even down to the rustication); in an another it looks as though it was influenced in part by the Qutub Minar in Delhi. His final idea for the tower seems an altogether more complex structure where the four corner towers of a donjon such as the Chateau de Vincennes, or, here in England, Tattershall Castle in Lincolnshire have grown and swelled to enormous proportion. The corner towers at Tattershall were originally crowned by blunt spires of wood and lead and in the final, published, description of Orthanc these have been exaggerated into blade-like pinnacles. And it is this arrangement of pinnacles and platform that remined me of the upper section of John Greaves's reconstruction of the Tomb of Lars Posrsena. It all, I suppose, may be just coincidental. Alas.