I know I need to still circle back on Thomas Marsh, but I mentioned at the very end of my post last night this word "Vo" that came up before. Yesterday, I had mentioned NUVO, and had translated it as an Elvish word or phrase as literally "west son", which itself could mean a few different things, I suppose.
The word 'vo' had come up before on the morning of Feb. 17, so about a week and a half ago. I had said in an earlier post that since 2022 I hadn't really had any Elvish phrases, but I have had a few days lately. February 17 happens to be my mom's birthday as well, as random trivia.
Anyway, the word "Avon" came first, and although I understood it (or thought it, at least) to be an Elvish word, it also came across as an English word. As in, Avon the company, and specifically a representation of the Avon Lady. I had this specific sense of a Being associated with this word, and that this person was the Avon Lady. This comparison became more interesting and actually funny as I have thought a bit about it since, which I will get into in just a second.
"Vovo" then came just a little bit later as its own independent word, but I ended up thinking about it in conjunction with Avon, and after a few days of noodling on it, I think it is a pretty straightforward phrase, though you never know.
Just taking the words themselves - Avon vovo - and looking at translations, I land on something like this:
Avon = Aman (the Unmarred State or Land)
Vovo = together son
Thus, "Aman together son".
My guess is that this simply means that from the perspective of the speaker (i.e., whoever is sharing these words), they will be together with the 'son' in Aman.
It doesn't seem too complicated now, and I think that is right (and the Avon Lady connection seems to support this) but the first day or two thinking about this, I had a few different things going for vovo. I didn't know if this might mean something like "son-son", either two sons, or the son of a son (grandson). But I concluded that there are better Elvish words that would be used to communicate either of those possibilities (and that have been used in the past, even, in my other words), and there wasn't a clear reason why a play on words with less clear meaning was useful here. Consequently, I've landed on something like "I [speaker] together with son in Aman" as the likeliest meaning.
Given my previous thoughts and posts of the 'son' being Faramir and meeting Eowyn in Aman (Tirion), this would then suggest that the speaker is Eowyn.
This is where the idea of the Avon Lady comes into play, so let's turn to that now. It has a couple interesting links and connections I mean, first off, if Eowyn is in Aman, or Avon (I think), and Tirion is her home, then it would make sense to call her the Avon Lady in just those terms. As I suppose it would be to also refer to Asenath in that way due to where she is now potentially.
Avon is a company based out of the US, but operating globally. They have a history going back to the late 19th century. Unknown to me until I looked this up, the company was started by a man, David McConnell, who was a door-to-door book salesman. In the course of his house calls, he usually ended up talking to women who were home while their husbands were at work. In order to try and break the ice and get in the door to sell his books, he developed a fragrance that he would give away as a small sample. No one wanted to buy his books, however, but they really liked the fragrance.
So, McConnell stopped selling books and focused solely on fragrances. He started the California Perfume Company in the 1880s. The company would later change it's name to Avon. Why Avon? Well, that is where William Shakespeare was born, and that was McConnell's favorite playwright. The same Shakespeare that Star Trek is so fond of also quoting in their movies (and whose play "Hamlet" the phrase "Undiscovered Country" Star Trek 6, the movie I just covered in my previous post, came from).
He then had the revolutionary idea that perhaps women would like to buy fragrances and perfumes not from McConnell and a bunch of other men showing up at their door, but from other women. The Avon model would ultimately consist of women who would sell the products, and act as their own business owners. They would buy the product and literature from the parent company, and then sell these products in their own way and on their own time. The culture of door-to-door sales remained foundational for this business model.
In the 1950's, Avon developed what is known as their iconic marketing campaign featuring Avon Ladies going door-to-door and selling their products. The slogan of the campaign was the quote I included in my title: "Ding-Dong! Avon Calling!". The campaign was so successful and iconic that it ran from 1954 to 1967. Here is an old commercial from the 50s (Note: I replaced the original video I inserted because the video owner disabled playback on other sites like mine - this other video still captures how the commercials would end with the phrase and imagery of the Avon Lady calling at a door):
For kicks, here is another campaign from the 1970s, which shows that even though the changed the "Avon Calling!" phrase (replacing it with "If you don't know your Avon Lady, you should" - which was also kind of funny), they kept the iconic door chime/ Ding-Dong sound. There were other campaigns from the time that also had "You never looked so good", and also still kept the door chime sound. [Note: Rather than also replace this video, since this one rep seems to have posted all of them but restricted views to just her YouTube channel, just click on the link and watch it there]
I don't know when/ if they phased out the door chime, but I imagine it didn't survive into the 21st century - at least I didn't find any.
Anyway, I now know more about Avon than I ever thought I would.
Let's go ahead and make some connections.
First off, I should note that Avon is not the only 'company' known for its door-to-door sales approach that I have mentioned on this blog. The Mormons are well known for their own door knocking. I thought it was funny that the Avon founder actually started out as a door-to-door book salesman, just like the Mormon missionaries. Speaking from my own experience, Mormon missionaries likely have about as much success selling the Book of Mormon as David McConnell had selling his books.
Initially, the "calling" part of the slogan captured my attention. This notion of 'call', potentially through the linkage of the Anor and Ithil Stones, has come up several times. In my post "I'll call ya, pal!": Linking stones, 'aliens', and a toast to Tron, for example, I recounted a dream in which a woman said "I'll call ya, pal!", and also connected some of that language like "ya" and "pal" to Stones.
There have been other words and dreams that have all been associated with this notion of 'calling', and that this call will be between Eowyn and Faramir. I thought I had shared the following, but in a quick search, it doesn't look like I did. In March 2021, I picked up this short dialogue one morning:
We will attempt to reorganize that which has been forgotten
And be sure to get every persons' view on a remake
Also to be called in the night, our big, tall ether
Shining in Powers' confidence
To me Ether (I think the 'ether' above references him, even though I didn't capitalize it) and Faramir are the same Being, so someone is going to call him, and my belief is that is Eowyn. "Power's confidence" is likely a play on words. Confidence can mean something like "belief in", but it can also mean "secret or private communication". That secret might be what is contained on the Sawtooth Stone, perhaps.
And, of course, in the Xanadu movie there is that song "Suspended in Time" which I spent some time on in a recent post. I had mentioned there that the phrase "And so I appeal to you", can mean something like "And so I call to you", since a meaning of appeal is to call.
Anyway, other things also point to this 'call', and thus the notion of an "Avon Lady" (literally a Lady in/ from Avon = Eowyn) calling seemed to fit right in with these old Avon commercials, for some odd reason.
Beyond the calling, the other things that struck me as fascinating was that Avon (after its foray into book selling) was a fragrance company. Initially, one would have associated an Avon Lady with fragrance or smells. This concept of smells has come up quite a bit as I thought about it.
In the post "Wagon's East!"... or was that supposed to be West?, I quoted what I viewed as Saruman's words to Faramir suggesting that he go East and that the fragrance of Eowyn would perhaps guide him, or at least be something he could sense. It was such a peculiar reference - this notion of a fragrance - that when I saw that Avon was first associated with perfumes and fragrances, I noticed it.
Recall that I also had a dream relating to fragrances, in which I saw the phrase "22 Fragrances" while recognizing that 22 was perhaps said "tutu" or "tudu", and potentially a reference to Elves (from a creative link to an Elf on the Shelf) or having something to do with fire or kindling a flame, perhaps, among other things. That was related in the post "Artu's and Tutu's (and Mr. Potato Head)"
And of course, I have mentioned my Herbie the Hamster short story a few times, where smells and fragrances oddly played a major part in his experience in ultimately breaking out or free of his cage.
Besides calls and fragrances, I think there were one or two other things I had thought of earlier, but I lost the thread for now. If I remember them, I'll add them in the comments. I think just those two, however, were pretty interesting for me to play off of.
Anyway, I suppose nothing new again, but just some funny or interesting/ creative ways and thoughts to support some of the story that we've been exploring there. Namely, there is a woman or women in "Avon" (Aman), one of them is Eowyn, and as the "Avon Lady" she will make a house call on Faramir, through means of the Stones. This call will ultimately act as a catalyst that results in Faramir joining with Eowyn in Tirion.
Again, I feel like a lot of these words and thoughts keep coming back to that story, but I guess that is how it goes.
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