King Ottokar's Sceptre
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| Tintin: King Ottokar's Sceptre (Le sceptre d'Ottokar) |
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King Ottokar's Sceptre (Le Sceptre d'Ottokar) is one of The Adventures of Tintin, a series of classic comic-strip albums, written and illustrated by Belgian writer and illustrator Hergé, featuring the young reporter Tintin. King Ottokar's Sceptre is the eighth in the series. The first strip was published in Le Petit Vingtième on 4th August 1938. A new colour version was drawn and published in 1947.
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[edit] The storyline
Tintin finds a lost briefcase and returns it to the owner, Professor Hector Alembick, who is a sigilographer, an expert on seals (as in the sort used to officiate state documents). He shows Tintin his collection of seals, including one which belonged to the Syldavian King Ottokar IV. Tintin then discovers that he and Alembick are under surveillance by some strange men. His flat is even bombed in an attempt to kill him.
Suspecting a Syldavian connection, Tintin offers to accompany Alembick to Syldavia for research.
On the plane Tintin begins to suspect his companion. The Alembick travelling with him doesn't smoke and doesn't seem to need the spectacles he wears, while the Alembick he first met smoked heavily and had very poor eyesight. Then the pilot opens a trap door and Tintin falls out, landing in a haywagon.
Tintin has a hunch that a plot is afoot to steal the sceptre of King Ottokar IV. In Syldavia, the reigning king must possess the sceptre to rule or he will be forced to abdicate. Every year he rides in a parade during St. Vladimir's Day carrying it, while the people sing the national anthem ("Rejoice, Syldavia!/This is our king/The sceptre is his witness/Of its feats I will sing!" or in some English translations "Syldavians unite!/Praise our King's might;/The Sceptre his right!").
Tintin succeeds in warning the current King Muskar XII despite the efforts of the conspirators. He and the King rush to the royal treasure room to find Alembick, the royal photographer and some guards unconscious. But the sceptre is missing. How did it leave the strongroom?
Tintin's friends Thomson and Thompson are summoned to investigate but their theory on how the sceptre was stolen proves bad and painful for them.
Later, Tintin notices a spring cannon in a toy shop and this gives him the clue. He returns to the treasure room and demonstrates that the camera is really a spring cannon in disguise - it must have let the conspirators fire the sceptre across the castle moat into a nearby birch forest.
Searching the forest, Tintin spots the sceptre being found by agents of the neighbouring country, Borduria. Following them all the way to the border, he wrests the sceptre from them. In the wallet of one of the thieves he discovers papers that show that the theft of the sceptre was just part of a major plan for the taking over of Syldavia by the neighbouring power of Borduria.
Tintin steals a Me-109 from a Bordurian airfield (whose squadron is being kept ready to take part in the envisioned "Anschluss" of Syldavia) to fly it back to the King in time. He is shot down by the Syldavians who naturally have opened fire on an enemy aircraft violating their airspace. He manages to make the rest of the journey by foot.
Meanwhile the Interior Minister informs the King that rumours have been spreading that the sceptre has been stolen and that there have been riots against local Bordurian businesses, acts which would justify a Bordurian takeover of the country. The King is about to abdicate when Snowy runs in with the sceptre (which had fallen out of Tintin's pocket).
Tintin then gives the King the papers he took from the man who stole the sceptre. They prove that the plot was masterminded by Müsstler, leader of the Iron Guard (the name implies that it is a pro-fascist paramilitary group similar to the SA or Blackshirts which were common in Europe between the wars).
The King takes action by having Müsstler and his associates arrested and the army mobilised along the Bordurian frontier. In response the Bordurian leader pulls his own troops back from the border, though he criticises Syldavia's "strange" behaviour.
The next day Tintin is made a Knight of the Order of the Golden Pelican, the first non-Syldavian to receive such an honour. Further inquiries by the authorities reveal that Professor Alembick is one of a pair of identical twins: Hector Alembick was kidnapped and replaced with his brother Alfred who left for Syldavia in his place.
Tintin and Snowy return home by flying boat with Thomson and Thompson, who suffer momentary panic when the aircraft appears to be falling into the sea at the end of the flight. Tintin points out their error, and they laugh about it so much that they do indeed fall into the sea as they disembark.
[edit] Notes
- This adventure was originally published under the name Tintin en Syldavie (literally "Tintin in Syldavia").
- Originally published in black-and-white in 1938, the story was redrawn in 1947 in colour.
- In this adventure Tintin first meets Bianca Castafiore. When Hergé redrew and colourised the story in 1947, he was assisted by former opera singer-turned-artist Edgar Pierre Jacobs.
- Jacobs is credited with much of the Balkan feel of the new edition. For instance, in the 1938 version, the Syldavian Royal Guard are dressed like British Beefeaters, while the 1947 version has them dressed in a more Balkan-like uniform.
- Like earlier albums The Blue Lotus and The Broken Ear, King Ottokar's Sceptre has a political subtext. Written in the late 1930s, the storyline reflects real-life events taking place in Europe at the time: the annexation of neighbouring states by Nazi Germany.
- The leader of the conspiracy is called Müsstler ("Müss-tler"), a play on Mussolini and Hitler. His group, the Steel Guard, seeks re-unification with a neighbouring country in ways similar to Nazi Germany’s Anschluss with Austria and the Sudetenland. It includes supporters in the police and the government. Syldavia represents the small, peaceful, agrarian countries which the Axis powers (represented by Borduria) were threatening.
- The fact that King Ottokar's Sceptre is critical of Nazi methods of unification appears to have been lost on the German censors during the occupation of Belgium during World War II. While books like Tintin in America and The Black Island were banned because they took place in enemy countries like the United States and Britain, King Ottokar's Sceptre was still allowed to be published.
- The King's treacherous adjutant, Colonel Boris, was to re-appear in as Jorgen in Destination Moon and its sequel Explorers on the Moon.
- The Syldavian motto, "Eih bennek, eih blavek", means "Here I am and here I stay", and the Syldavian words resemble that expression in the popular dialect of Brussels. The whole Syldavian language is based broadly on the slang of the Marolliens, the people of the popular quarter of Brussels, with the addition of some s and z sounds to make it sound more "Slavic". The use of Marollien slang is a staple of Hergé's humour, found also in the dialect of the Arumbayas in The Broken Ear and the Bordurians in The Calculus Affair, although it is lost on non-Belgian (and many Belgian) readers.
- All the aircraft featured in the book are carefully drawn from real contemporary designs.[1]
The flying boat featured at the end is a Lioré et Olivier LeO H.242, although Hergé appears to have added the door on the port side to facilitate his final joke. The aircraft's registration is SY-AMO (fictional SY prefix for Syldavia).
- When Tintin tells Thomson and Thompson that the flying boat is not falling into the sea, but landing on the water (amerrir in French rather than aterrir), the reader is treated to a rare "wink to the camera" from Tintin (p.62, frame 8).
- The animated series was subjected to well-meaning censorship to make the Alembick twin who smokes the bad one of the two.
[edit] External links
- Hergé's Syldavian: A grammar by Mark Rosenfelder
[edit] References
| The Adventures of Tintin | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Creation of Tintin · Books, films, and media · Ideology of Tintin | ||||
| Characters: | Supporting · Minor · Complete list | |||
| Miscellany: | Hergé · Marlinspike · Captain Haddock's exclamations | |||
