The Spire is essentially a dramatic poem on the lines of [T. S. Eliot's] The Waste Land. Indeed in many ways, it is curiously similar to The Waste Land, and not the least in its power of arousing echoes which constantly refer one out to a variety of works and with varying degrees of significance. In some cases, the echo arouses little more than the pleasing sense of recognition…. At the other extreme, the myth of Balder is as essential to the construction of The Spire as the Grail legend is to The Waste Land and any reading which does not take account of it must necessarily be a partial one. (pp. 65-6)
The main myth connected with Pangall … is undoubtedly that of the Norse god, Balder. Balder, according to the myth, was rendered invulnerable to all physical hurt by the goddess Frigg, who made all things on earth and in Heaven swear not to harm him. But Loki, the mischief-maker, learned that the mistletoe had not taken the oath because, rooted as it was in the oak tree itself, it was neither in Heaven nor on earth. Using this information, Loki brought about Balder's death by fashioning an arrow from the mistletoe and encouraging the blind god, Hother, to shoot it at Balder. A whole complex of associations surrounding Pangall suggests that it is this myth that Golding is most interested in. There is his death by the mistletoe, of course, but more than this is the whole process by which Pangall is associated, through his ancestors who built the original church, with the very oak out of which the beams were made. According to the Balder myth, the life of the god was in the tree, a fact which was clearly manifest from the mistletoe, the golden bough itself, which even when the tree in winter seemed dead still gave sign (the mistletoe being evergreen) of the sacred presence. The mistletoe once pulled, the god would die; or, to put it another way shorn of the religious association, no oak could be truly seasoned (or dead) while the mistletoe lived on it. It is this that causes Jocelin, when he first scrapes his foot against the mistletoe at the crossways, to have fears about the nature of the oak which is to form the octagonal framework of the spire…. The cross-reference between pagan myths of the oak on the one hand and its true properties on the other might well reflect at the simplest level the differing points of view of the workmen and of Jocelin, of pagan superstition as against Christian enlightenment; but the use of the Balder myth in connection with the persecution and death of Pangall prepares one for an additional interpretation. For if Pangall is to be seen as Balder, it is equally relevant to see Jocelin as Loki, the mischief-maker who brings about the conditions when play (e.g. the original treatment of Pangall by the workmen which is described by Roger as a "joke" in the same way that, in the myth, the crowd amuses itself by testing Balder's invulnerability) becomes real earnest, and disaster follows…. The "giants of old", reduced to one impotent old man, were not themselves pagan for they built a Christian church, but they built at a time when such distinctions had little real meaning, when the religious impulse lacked the sophistication to discriminate nicely between Christ and Balder, but prompted men nevertheless to take the biggest of all dares and to erect impossible buildings, under impossible conditions, in impossible places.
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