In a personal communication, Don Gifford has told me that the
main root of many ash saplings takes a horizontal bend for
several inches, just below the surface, before continuing its
downward path. In a chapter on the ashplant (27-32) in James
Joyce's Disunited Kingdom and the Irish Dimension (Gill
and Macmillan, 1976), John Garvin offers the same information
about the ashplant's origins in an uprooted sapling. He adds
that it is typically seasoned in a chimney and filled with
molten lead. Garvin speculates that Joyce acquired his
ashplant during one of his visits to Mullingar and surrounding parts
of Westmeath in 1900 and 1901.
Stephen’s ashplant has a “ferrule,” a metal
ring or cap placed at the end of the shaft to keep it from
splitting or wearing down. In Telemachus the
“squealing” of the metal scraping against stone makes him
think of a “familiar,” the supernatural
animal-like spirit which attends a magician. He imagines this
little spirit calling "Steeeeeeeeeeeephen!" as he walks along
dragging the stick behind him.
At the beginning of Proteus, Stephen thinks, "My
ash sword hangs at my side." Later in the chapter,
he lifts his ashplant by its “hilt” as if it
were a sword, “lunging with it softly.” This
playful action anticipates a climactic action in Circe,
when Stephen cries, “Nothung!”—the
name of the magic sword in Wagner’s Ring cycle—and raises it
over his head with both hands to smash the chandelier in the
brothel. Gifford notes that in the second of the four operas
in the cycle, Die Walküre, the god
Wotan has planted this sword “in the heart of a giant ash
tree” (emphasis added). Siegfried’s father Siegmund pulls the
sword from the tree, and in the final opera of the cycle, Die
Götterdämmerung, Siegfried unwittingly uses
the magic of Nothung to bring about the Twilight of the Gods.
The Wagnerian magical subtext empowers Stephen. When he
smashes the chandelier he is violently resisting his mother’s
fiendish call to repent and return to God’s grace.
The ruin of the lamp makes him think of the “ruin of all
space” and time: the destruction of the divinely constituted
order which he has been contemplating ever since Nestor.
In Proteus Stephen calls his stick "my
augur's rod of ash," linking it with another kind
of magical power. Just as the shape of the stick has allowed
him to think of it as a sword with a hilt, so now it becomes a
lituus, a staff with
one curved end that Roman priests used to consecrate a sector
of the sky before reading the appearance of birds for omens.
The priests' staffs were elaborately curved, like the crozier
of a Christian bishop, but earlier Etruscan brass horns, also
called litui, had shapes more exactly approximating
Stephen's walking stick. Apparently, the name originally
referred to a shepherd's crook.
Joyce thought of his own ashplant as distinctively Irish, and
it has been suggested that Stephen's stick should also be seen
as embodying the prophetic power of the ancient Irish filí,
or bards.
