Idiosophy

A physicist loose among the liberal arts

Swallow the bones and choke

File Under: The things you find out while wasting time on a Sunday morning.

Eleanor Parker’s excellent newsletter this morning is about Old English people gearing up for Lent by eating everything they can. 1 She points us to Kate Thomas’s “For the Wynn” essay on cheese. That essay is wonderful for many reasons, but one that jumped out at me was the part about the use of cheese in jurisprudence:

Some early medieval liturgical books contain an ordeal using barley bread and cheese – a way of ascertaining a person’s guilt or innocence via the eating of small pieces of food. It operates upon the same rationale as ducking witches – nature rejects someone who has done wrong, so a guilty person will choke on the bread or cheese.

Of course, my mind went immediately to the pool beneath Henneth Annun, where Frodo compels Smeagol with force majeure: “I shall take Precious, and I shall say: make him swallow the bones and choke. Never taste fish again.” [LR 4.06.047] 2

This is the second time we’ve seen little asides in LotR that come straight from Anglo-Saxon law. I don’t imagine it’s the last.

 


Notes

The First Temptation of Sam

Icon of the RingWhen Sam took the Ring and entered Mordor, we get the famous passage that lots of people take for Sam’s test versus the Ring:

Already the Ring tempted him, gnawing at his will and reason. Wild fantasies arose in his mind; and he saw Samwise the Strong, Hero of the Age, striding with a flaming sword across the darkened land, and armies flocking to his call as he marched to the overthrow of Barad-dur. [LR 6.01.018]

I don’t agree that this is the test. This attempt to suborn the faithful Samwise is risible. If that’s the best the Ring can do, it wouldn’t have been a problem for anybody, let alone Boromir, Gandalf, or Galadriel. Tolkien gives us a hint that this idea isn’t quite right, though. The previous sentence takes us into Sam’s thoughts: “He felt that he had from now on only two choices: to forbear the Ring, though it would torment him; or to claim it, and challenge the Power that sat in its dark hold beyond the valley of shadows.” Sam is thinking, which is not his strong point. We shouldn’t expect him to comprehend such an important and subtle matter on the first try.

Tom Hillman points out that the Ring is exploiting the way Sam loves old fairy-stories.1 Sam is a romantic. In that passage, the Ring is using Sam’s romanticism against him. That’s what the Ring does, as we know. It attacks your virtues. It uses your strengths against you. But a fondness for old stories and songs is more of an endearing trait than a great virtue.2 It’s not where the Ring would try Sam, when we know that he has a great virtue to work with. That’s where we should expect the Ring to attack first.

Sam’s great virtue is his loyalty to Frodo. That’s where the Ring ought to start to work on him, and sure enough, it did. Back in “The Choices of Master Samwise” we saw the real attack.

He flung the Quest and all his decisions away, and fear and doubt with them. He knew now where his place was and had been: at his master’s side, though what he could do there was not clear. [LR 4.10.057]

Right there, Sam lost the contest of wills with Sauron’s Ring. Fortunately, being Sam, he botches the attempt to rescue Frodo, loses the orcs in the tunnel, and concusses himself on the door. The Ring fails to get back to Sauron, and Middle-earth survives for another day.

People who like to find the hand of the Valar in any lucky break will be disappointed, but Sam’s failure to make a heroic stand over Frodo’s body isn’t a eucatastrophe. It was predictable. Indeed, it was predicted back at the beginning of the story! I knew not that Pippin, of all people, was a hobbit foresighted, but he’s the one who said, “Sam is an excellent fellow, and would jump down a dragon’s throat to save you, if he did not trip over his own feet,” and he was almost exactly right. [LR 1.05.060]

It’s only fair. If Sauron can turn people’s strengths into vulnerabilities, some Vala or other ought to be able to turn klutziness into a world-saving virtue. There may be hope for me yet.

In Sauron’s Defense

I was just listening to Chris Pipkin’s podcast from last summer, in which he talked about Owen Barfield’s theory of Poetic Diction with Prof. Verlyn Flieger.

Barfield’s idea, as I’ve talked about before, is that in the early days of language, many concepts (as we conceive them) were combined in a single word. We don’t have direct access to the earliest days, but we can see some of it in ancient Greece. For example, Hestia the goddess and “hestia” (εστία) the hearth weren’t two different things; they were a single thought. Since then, as we have needed to speak more specifically and more abstractly, we’ve fractured those ur-concepts into lots of precise words. That’s a positive development: we can make things and do things and think things the ancients could never conceive of. But we’ve lost something along the way.

splinters flying out from the center of an explosionProf. Flieger tells us in Splintered Light was that Tolkien took this idea and ran with it. All of Arda is just such a splintering of the thought of Eru. The Ainur split into Valar and Maiar. The Elves split into Calaquendi and Moriquendi, and then into a dozen subdivisions. Humans likewise. Even hobbits split into Stoors and Harfoots and Fallohides.

Barfield’s book is called Poetic Diction because, as he sees it, gluing all those shattered pieces back together is the poet’s job. Sometimes the assembly is a reconstruction of the ancient thought. Other times it’s something new. This happens with characters in Tolkien all the time: pivotal characters are frequently of mixed ancestry, putting the variously split pieces back together again. Elrond is the extreme case in the First Age. His grandson Eldarion is the culmination in the Fourth.

So. Do we know anyone else who’s dedicated himself to putting the splinters of reality back together, better than before? Why yes, we do! Sauron dedicated himself to putting it all back together again. His mission at the beginning of the Second Age began “with fair motives: the reorganising and rehabilitation of the ruin of Middle-earth” (Letter 131). There are lots of ways to reassemble the splinters of original truth, some more poetic, others more effective. As I’ve previously noted, Sauron chose “hierarchy” as his organizing principle, and nearly conquered the world with it.

This is as close as I’ve ever come to sympathy for the devil. From this point of view, Sauron was working from almost the same motives as Celeborn and Galadriel, trying to reassemble something out of the messy shards of reality around him.

Of course, his plan for organizing things didn’t end well. He chose a method designed for effectiveness, not poetry. Efficient dictatorship, not poetic diction. Sauron was not just organizing the physical world, after all. “Morgoth dispersed his power into the very matter of Arda…” as Tolkien says in Morgoth’s Ring, so as Sauron reassembled and organized things, he simultaneously was re-consolidating Morgoth’s evil. You can’t do one without the other. And that might be the most succinct argument for Tolkien’s odd fusion of Catholicism and anarchism I’ve ever heard.

Capitalists look scared

Today I got to thinking about portraits of business executives. Whenever a magazine puts a CEO on its cover, they’re usually in the same position. They stand there rigid, with arms folded. It’s so common that an image search for “business executive standing” returns countless examples. Now, I understand. It’s hard to know what to do with your hands, and if you get it wrong, you look like a doofus. (Watch any political primary debate for details.) But the thing is, according to acting coaches and books about body language, that’s a defensive posture. People stand like this when they’re feeling attacked.

a man and a woman in business attire, arms folded

You’re not fooling anyone, you know.

That’s not the image you want to project when you’re a Lord of Capitalism. You want to show strength and confidence. You want to show you’re in charge. You want to show divine favor, if you can think of a way to pull that off.

Therefore, a modest proposal. Business executives need to adopt attributes, like saints. When you see a medieval painting of a bearded man holding a key, you know you’re looking at St. Peter. A woman holding a wheel is St. Catherine. A man writing a book with a lion at his feet is St. Mark. A woman with a cannon is Santa Barbara. (No, really!) None of these people has any trouble knowing what to do with their hands while their portrait is being taken. Better yet, it makes them immediately recognizable by the illiterate masses. This is useful, because frankly most CEOs kind of look alike.

Mostly the attributes are obvious: Tim Allen should hold an apple. Warren Buffet should hold one of those bags with a $ on it like the ones cartoon burglars carry. Sundar Pichai should hold a can of Spam, if the CEO of Hormel will let it go. The guy who first programs his 3D printer to crank out hand-sized, brightly-colored corporate logos for lesser captains of industry to hold when they’re photographed will make a fortune.


Coda

This post is my first foray into the art of clickbait titles. Idiosophy is linked to micro.blog, but the link only sends across the title of the post. That doesn’t go well with my usual preference for oblique, allusive titles that only make sense after you read the post. Let’s see how this new technique works!

The shoal in question, in the lee of a limestone boulder.

Shenandoah River, North Fork, July 2023

Last summer we found that over the years, all kinds of old ironmongery had been caught in the current of the river, and dumped in the lee of a boulder that’s normally underwater. I wrote about it on my Old English blog because it seemed like the sort of thing Old English elegiac poets would like.

I showed the post to Sørina Higgins’s Author’s Circle, who told me that (no Old English poets being available) I should write the poem myself. There wasn’t much to make a poem out of, though, until I read a Mastodon post from Martin Rundqvist. He pointed out that the movie version of a Viking ship burial, where the ship is set on fire, is nonsensical — the ship would only burn down to the waterline. In reality, the ship was buried. The wood rots away, but the pattern of nails tells him and his colleagues what they’re looking at. OK — now there can be a poem.

This is in the standard Old English alliterative form, which I’ve tweaked for Modern English by allowing any number of unstressed syllables among the four stresses. Many thanks to the Author’s Circle for their advice.


The Shenandoah shows a shoal among rocks.
There eddies swirl, iron comes to rest,
concealed beneath stream-flows where
salamanders swim. But summer’s drought
lowered the river to levels unheard-of.

A drought like this can dig up old times.
Farms and pastures that formerly stood
on the banks of the river in bygone days
decayed, collapsed, and crumbled to ruin.
The forest fauna, fungus, and termites
ripped out the parts of the ruins they could use.
The rest washed to the riverbed. Rainfall carried
hardware to sunken heaps out of memory.

Likewise Vikings were laid to rest
in ships whose timbers have shivered to mould.
In ages afterward, archaeologists
sifted through soil, seeking their history.
Prows like dragons, once proud and high,
deteriorate to mere traces in soil,
but the nails are waiting in numbers undiminished.

The land I call mine is littered with items
from camps built by campaigning armies:
arrowheads left by Iroquois bands;
a scabbard left over from the Civil War.
When farmers cut furrows into the earth,
hunters of relics from history come
to pick among the plow-leavings
and rummage around the river’s terraces.
Normally they turn up just nails and screws,
hinges from doors, and hoops from barrels,
and toss them back. Trash isn’t interesting.

Many are keepers of memories of war,
but few keep the old farmers in mind.

Communication Devices

crystal ball by Yasmin AlanisStephen Winter has another insightful essay, this time about the palantir, which he thinks about next to smartphones (as we all must, now). He uses the generic term “device” instead of “smartphone”, as is common.

The word “device” is fascinating in this context. It appears 20 times in LotR, 12 referring to insignia and 8 referring to some sort of art or craft.1 The word is evenly split between the good guys and the bad guys, depending on how you count Fëanor.

When Gandalf talks about the palantir he could be foretelling the smartphone: “Perilous to us all are the devices of an art deeper than we possess ourselves.” (LR 3.11.099) To Stephen’s question whether our palantiri are more mysterious than we think, the answer is an emphatic “yes”. The constant stories of surveillance both by their makers, for purely pecuniary reasons, and by others who can be much more nefarious, make it undeniable that these things are perilous.

But then there’s Eomer’s observation that “Our enemy’s devices oft serve us in his despite.” (LR 5.04.026) In this context I can’t help thinking of the Arab Spring, or the flash protests against the attempt to ban Muslims from entering the United States. Both were organized over cell-phone networks. Perhaps it is a stretch to think of oppressive governments and the lords of Silicon Valley as a single Enemy, but their roads often seem to lie together for many hundreds of miles.


Note

Auden got it

Looking for something else. Found this poem by W. H. Auden.  It’s rare for me to find a poet who both (a) perfectly describes a feeling I’ve had and (b) is taken seriously by experts.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=119&issue=2&page=5

Note, 50-year-old typesetting means this poem just barely spills over to a second page.

C.S. Lewis Lays an Easter Egg

I always assume that C.S. Lewis knows what he’s talking about when he puts something in a book. So this item I found when I read Till We Have Faces1 must be a kind of easter egg, avant la lettre.

In Chapter 19, the Queen is fighting a duel with the King of Phars, which ends this way: “I gave the straight thrust and then, all in one motion, wheeled my sword round and cut him deeply in the inner leg where no surgery will stop the bleeding.”

I’ve heard of this move before. It’s named after Guy de Chabot, seigneur of Jarnac, who used it in a duel against La Châtaignerie in 1547.2 It was legal, but the discourse in the fencing community (as we’d say now) regarded it as only marginally ethical. Captain Sir Alfred Hutton says3, “In later times an idea got abroad that there was something unfair about this hamstringing cut, and the term coup de Jarnac came to be applied … metaphorically to any underhand attack of what kind soever.”

This may be another subtle indicator that the Queen’s character is not 100% admirable.

Image from Cohen,  p. 127

Edited to add:  I just noticed that in the illustration de Jarnac’s hand is pronated, so he’s cutting with the part of the weapon called the “false edge”. Subtle reinforcement that there’s something dishonorable going on.


Notes

True vs. Useful

The difference between the concept of “truth” in the sciences and the humanities is endlessly fascinating. I’ve bloviated about it before, in the context of research progress. But another instance came to me recently as I was reading a book called Affective Ecologies1.

schematic neuron

We use neurons when we reflect, so, maybe?

The book is about how the reader’s psychological affect is the channel by which literature affects our attitudes about the events related in a story. Prof. WvM takes the idea of “mirror neurons” and runs with it, treating mirror neurons as the physiological mechanism underlying readers’ empathy. All well and good, except, well, the mirror-neuron hypothesis seems not to be true. When it was conceived a few decades ago, it was greeted with excitement, but as people have looked at it more closely, it seems to flunk a couple of tests. That’s a shame — had the hypothesis panned out, it might have led to therapies that could have helped almost everyone on the autism spectrum.

Prof. WvM introduces the idea of mirror neurons on page 23. On page 25, she acknowledges that there are problems.

“Needless to say, the use of mirror neuron research in literary studies does have its caveats. As Kuzmičová points out, “in each attempt at fusing literary theoretical speculation with experimental cognitive science, one could identify a host of methodological problems, starting from the fact that the stimuli used in cognitive experiments usually do not bear the slightest resemblance to literary narrative”. Like Kuzmičová, I have chosen to accept most of these problems as a natural part of any interdisciplinary inquiry.”

That last line is what got me intrigued. With my scientist’s hat on, if I find one of the premises of my research is wrong, I go get a new premise. But maybe this book has a different purpose. Could it be that there’s a value to carrying out the train of logic to a conclusion, even if the starting place isn’t true? I suppose it’s reasonable to presume that something must be the physiological basis for empathy. Almost nothing of the argument depends on specifics of biology, so once the correct mechanism is discovered, the argument here can be carried over directly.

This is an interesting role for the humanities: the repository of all ideas, whether they work or not. It certainly explains why it’s necessary to keep incorrect concepts around and make grad students learn them and cite them, as I was complaining about in the older post.

Who owns the One Ring?

A few years ago, Ashley at The Nef Chronicles wrote a post in which she tried to work out who the legal owner of the One Ring might be. She was at the time a law student. She concluded that nobody owns it.

Yesterday, Daniel Stride took up the challenge and revealed himself as a legal bloodhound: https://phuulishfellow.wordpress.com/2023/09/17/of-golf-balls-and-war-spoils-the-one-ring-and-property-law-squabbles/ He concludes that it’s complicated, but there are four possibilities. The strongest one is one I never would have guessed. (Clickbait.)

The only weakness I can find is that Stride applies New Zealand law. While there is substantial videographic evidence that many of the events in question took place in New Zealand, the veracity of those records can be challenged. Instead, we have to consider that Sauron, the original owner, is not human, but has a quasi-divine status. Therefore ownership of the Ring is subject to Divine Law.

For the most relevant explication of Divine Law I am indebted to Tom Holt1 He quotes Erda, Mother Earth herself, saying “Human law has no bearing on property that is or has been owned or held by a God.” “God” in this context, explicitly includes characters like Sauron. She continues,”under divine law, right of inheritance is subordinate to right of conquest.” (p. 200] Lest there be any confusion, Alberich the Nibelung clarifies, “if I take something away from you it becomes mine, and if they take something away from me it becomes theirs.” (p.201)

With this precedent in mind, many of the ambiguities clear up nicely. After numerous transfers by violence and trickery, Frodo is the true owner. If any further confirmation were needed, we may note that Sam said the Ring was Sauron’s [LR 4.05.132], and Sam may be assumed to be incorrect.

 

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