Idiosophy

A physicist loose among the liberal arts

Category: fantasy Page 2 of 9

Gimli’s Opium Dream

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On January 8, 2022

In Digital Humanities, fantasy, mythgard academy

I’m currently taking the mini-course “Tolkien’s Ents and the Environment” from Signum University’s SPACE program, taught by the unwiðmetenlic Sørina Higgins. We were discussing Gimli’s speech about the glories of the Glittering Caves (III, viii) and how it parallels the (more frequent) references to trees and plants as the object of environmentalist sympathies.  Sørina challenged us to a close reading of Gimli’s speech.

by Massupa Kaewgahya

Surprising no one, I zoomed in on the extraordinary number of French-derived words in the passage. I’ve never counted them before. Time to fire up the OED Text Annotator!  This analysis focused on Gimli’s direct speech, from “Strange are the ways of men…” to “It makes me weep to leave them.”  This passage is 14% derived from French. As we have established, the threshold of madness in Tolkien is 7%. In this passage, Gimli leaves behind even the suicidal Denethor. It’s the second-highest French density I’ve identified so far, just behind Gollum’s pre-taming peak of 15%.

Then Sørina pointed out something fascinating: Gimli’s speech sounds a lot like Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan.” The speech and the poem are roughly the same length. (381 words to 349.) They share words like measureless caverns, underground rivers, domes, caves, towers, round, cover, hill, sea, music, deep, wall, war… (omitting the boring, common words). Of course the quantitative metrics kind of miss the point. The feeling is similar. Both are gushing over a beautiful place from which they’ve been untimely taken away.1 As Sørina put it, the caverns cause Gimli not just to switch languages, but also centuries.

“Kubla Khan” is famously the result of an opium dream. There’s only one conclusion to draw here. There’s some kind of narcotic in the Glittering Caves of Aglarond. Sauron missed a trick when he tried to snare Dwarves with Rings of Power. That kind of addiction2 doesn’t work on them. However, limestone caves apparently emit a gas that humans don’t notice, which acts like a drug on Dwarves. Even short-term exposure leads to monologuing, Romanticism, and French.

 

Hyphens and Colors

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On January 1, 2022

In fantasy

Sparrow Alden has published a paper on hyphens in the latest issue of Mallorn, which rejoices in the erudite title “Hyphens as Sub-Lexical Morphemes in The Hobbit“.1 If you’re not a member of the Tolkien Society, you’ll be able to read it for free in a few years, or maybe you can reconstruct it from the pieces she’s already published on her blog.

It’s not easy to make the jump from a quantitative analysis full of numbers and graphs to the level of discourse that humanists expect. Sparrow makes it, and sticks the landing. Her idea is that Tolkien, as translator of a text originally in Westron, needed to come up with English equivalents to highly specific words in hobbit-speech for which we’ve never needed an equivalent. (e.g., “hobbit-speech”) The pattern, therefore, is that hyphenated words are focused in parts of the text that deal with things known well to Bilbo, but not to us. Where things are commonly familiar or commonly strange, the hyphens aren’t necessary to the translation. Very nice!

Let’s see where that idea can take us. I was looking for color-names in The Lord of the Rings the other day. It has ten cases of colors with hyphens in them.

Color Mentions
grey-green 7
silver-grey 3
golden-red 2
blue-grey 1
brown-green 1
black-grey 1
green-white 1
green-yellow 1
red-golden 1
silver-green 1

“Grey-green” is used for everything from fields of grass to Ents. “Black-grey” is tree bark in Fangorn;  “brown-green” is oak trees just about to bud. “Golden-red” is a rowan-tree or a fire. If Sparrow’s idea is correct, the vegetation in Middle-earth is of a slightly different color from anything we’re familiar with, and maybe burns differently.  “Silver-grey” is purely Elvish; it’s perfectly reasonable to suppose Elves make things in a color we don’t have. “Silver-green” is Goldberry’s dress; ditto. The two “green-” compounds are Gollum and Shelob; I’m glad to be unfamiliar with them. “Red-golden” is Gandalf’s fireworks, which I regret never seeing. “Blue-grey” is smoke. That’s the only weak spot; smoke ought to be familiar.

All together, the idea that hyphenated words are translations from things we don’t exactly have holds up well.

Pensée d’escalier

The word “orange” does not appear in LotR. “Red-golden” and “golden-red” must be Tolkien’s attempt to come up with an Old-English equivalent of the color. (I don’t know why — according to the OED, its use as a color name was used as early as 1557 so it sneaks in before the deadline.) This is a case where we know the concept perfectly, but Bilbo and Frodo didn’t.

Parenthesizing

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On November 18, 2021

In Digital Humanities, fantasy

Tom Hillman has joined the ranks of the digital humanists1 with three posts (I, II, III) at “Alas, not me” investigating parenthetical remarks in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. These are good analyses. They’re not just counting; they  contain fascinating insights about the deeper purpose Tolkien had in using that particular stylistic choice. Highly recommended.

Of course, that’s not what we do here at Idiosophy. Tom points out that there are two chapters that don’t fit the paradigm: “At the Sign of the Prancing Pony” and “Treebeard”. He calls them “aberrations”. That’s more like it. Aberrations, we can work with.

At the Sign of the Prancing Pony

The primary reason for thinking there’s an aberration at The Prancing Pony2 is the generally-accepted idea that Bilbo only wrote the first chapter of LotR. As he confessed to Frodo, “when I have time to write, I only really like writing poetry.” (VI,vii.) Taking Bilbo at his word, I note this chapter contains a two-page poem of Bilbo’s creation. Whoever wrote it did not omit a single stanza. Frodo’s fondness for his old cousin was immense, but even so stopping the narrative for such a long time might have been too much to ask. I’ve always suspected that this chapter was also written by Bilbo, because it’s a place he (probably) knew firsthand and it introduces his friend the Dunadan. The sudden up-surge in the use of parenthetical comments is a fourth item of supporting evidence.

Treebeard

The chapter “Treebeard” uses a lot of parentheses.3. As has been noted before, Treebeard talks like an old hobbit. There’s a reason. Let’s imagine Frodo, locked in a tower in Minas Tirith, getting briefed on all the things that happened in Books III, V, and VI that he wasn’t around to see. For most of the chapters, there’s one authoritative voice, or there are a lot of people who can remember for him what’s going on. But “Treebeard” is unique. For that one chapter, Frodo had both Merry and Pippin as sources, and no one else to straighten them out.

As we’ve noted in both LotR and The Hobbit, Bilbo is easily distracted. He uses parentheses to mention things that just crossed his mind, including things that just are amusing. What if Bilbo’s protegés picked up the same habit? Poor Frodo! He must have been getting the story from two different directions, both Merry and Pippin talking at once, saying different things as often as not. Bilbonian distractions were built into the source material. I can’t blame Frodo if he decided the best way to make sense of that chapter was to split the difference between the two versions, and preserve deviations in parenthetical asides.  So what if that makes Treebeard sound like Gaffer Gamgee?

Coda

I can’t resist one small addition. Tom was sure to point out that he didn’t use a single logarithm in his analysis. (This has been a point of contention in the past.) But let’s look at a plot of the cumulative number of parentheses in the texts.

parentheses vs words in Lotr & Hobbit

Fig. 1. The abrupt upward jumps are the chapters discussed above.

Those curves have an awfully familiar shape. Let’s take the logarithm of the horizontal axis.

parenthetical insertions vs. log of words into text

Fig. 2. I knew it!

Both Bilbo and Frodo pile up parentheses early in the text (when many explanations are needed) but let them fall by the wayside as the plot thickens. Those straight lines fit really well; the pattern is logarithmic. In fact, we can infer authorship from the slope of the count of parentheses on a log scale. See that blue dot above the red line in the lower left corner? That’s “A Long-expected Party”. We recognize the lion by its paw!

Notes

Familiar rings

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On November 16, 2021

In fantasy

Chapter VIII of The Nature of Middle-earth is about Elvish legends that sprang up around the awakening at Cuivienen. Right up front, there’s a passage that caught my eye.

During the waking of their first hröar from the “flesh of Arda” the Quendi slept “in the womb of Arda”, beneath the green sward, and “awoke” when they were full grown. … Imin, Tata, and Enel awoke before their spouses, and the first thing that they saw was the stars, for they woke in the early twilight before dawn.

The Eldar were under the grass at first, but when it was time for them to wake up they were lying on top of the grass. They woke up just before dawn, in the dark.

Mushroom by the Icons ProducerDear readers, Tolkien here is describing a fungal mycelium, producing mushrooms overnight when it’s time to reproduce. An area big enough to produce a gross of elf-couples is not unheard of among fungi. And from personal experience, it’s normal for a few mushrooms to appear one night, and then the whole rest of the batch the next night.

I love this idea. Mushrooms pop up from my lawn in a circle, which we were all taught to call a “fairy ring“. Fairies and elves are the same thing, just in different languages. The Wikipedia article I just linked has “elf-circle” in the list of synonyms at the top. So it’s likely that the first elves who awoke did so in a big circle. Ages later, when Celebrimbor wanted to design a device to preserve Elvish things the way they were in the beginning, what would be more natural than to do it in the form of a ring?

iPod Intertextuality

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On October 9, 2021

In fantasy, mythgard academy

In Search of the Lost Chord Album CoverIt’s funny how often the old iPod throws up a piece of music that connects with something I’ve just heard on a Mythgard lecture. The last time I blogged it is here.

This time, it was class #2 of The Nature of Middle-earth. About 40 minutes in, the discussion turned to senescence in Elves. Basically, aging to them means that the weight of memory “began to be a burden” so heavy that they lose interest in bodily things.

To which the magic of shuffle-mode juxtaposed Graeme Edge’s poem “Departure” from In Search of the Lost Chord: “To have all of these things in our memory’s hoard, and to use them … to help us … to find…” and the reading dissolves into insane laughter.  Poor Elf.

But this presents a conundrum. It’s the same issue as noticing how George Harrison’s song “Dream Away” parallels “The Notion Club Papers”. How can it be intertextual when one of the texts hadn’t been published?

Lear of the Nazgûl

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On October 1, 2021

In fantasy, trivial

cute pterodactyl by Sergey Sobin

seems fairer but feels feller

Michael Drout points out1 an echo, when the Lord of the Nazgûl objects to being hindered by Eowyn: “Come not between the Nazgûl and his prey!”  LotR, V, vi.

That’s exactly how King Lear objects when Kent tries to hinder his beatdown of Cordelia. “Come not between the dragon and his wrath.” King Lear, I i. Except that, as Drout notes, Lear is speaking metaphorically and the Nazgûl is being quite literal, except that the Witch-King seems to elide the difference between himself and the beast he rides.

I think we need to add this one next to the Ents’ attack on Isengard,2 under the rubric of “LotR making Shakespeare’s metaphors literal”.3

But jumping back up, eliding that difference is interesting — what is a “Nazgûl”, then? Votes for “just the Ringwraith” come from Elrond, Radagast, Shagrat, and Pippin.  Votes for “Ringwraith+Flying beast” come from Grishnakh, the Witch-King, and Gorbag. The narrator and Gandalf switch between sides as they please. If we’re just counting heads, a Nazgûl is the corrupted human. But I can’t help noticing that the characters who use the term only for the flying combination, though they are outvoted, are the ones who had the longest and closest contact with them.

On the legal utility of horns

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On September 18, 2021

In fantasy, Slow learner

This week’s post from Stephen Winter reminded me of this.

To scholars of Saxon law, Boromir’s horn-blowing in “The Ring Goes South” has a completely different meaning.  I was delighted to read this paper by Thijs Porck 1 that explains what Boromir was doing:

Gif feorcund mon oððe fremde butan wege geond wudu gonge & ne hrieme ne horn blawe, for ðeof he bið to profianne: oððe to sleanne oððe to aliesanne.

This is from the laws of Ine, King of the West Saxons. In modern English, it says, “If a stranger from afar journey through a wood, off the road, and neither call out nor blow his horn, he is to be taken for a thief, either to be killed or set free.”

So when Boromir said, “I will not go forth as a thief in the night,” he was just following the law.

Blogger’s note: This post has three purposes: (a) because I use this blog as a prosthetic long-term memory; (b) to circumvent the terrible sharing functions of the Reddit iOS app; and (c) to try out the “easy footnote” plug-in.

Proverbial desolation

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On September 11, 2021

In fantasy, squibs & crackers

A tweet from a few days ago:

orders < habit < reasoning < proverbs

Guides to action, ranked

People weren’t coming up with good ones in the replies. (The best was from “The Homecoming of Beorthnoth”, which is a pretty deep cut.)

This is weird, because Sam Gamgee in Book VI of LotR is pretty much the personification of determination and perseverance. Examples of those qualities are plenty, but quotable lines are not to be found. Tolkien loved updating proverbs, or coining them where no traditional wisdom was available [1], so how can this be?

I verified the emergent conclusion of the twittersphere: Book VI from Cirith Ungol to Mount Doom contains no proverbs from the good guys. The only character who says anything quotable is an Orc NCO: where there’s a whip, there’s a will. The domination of Sauron means not only the end of songs, but also of proverbial wisdom.

Or, in a more critical vein, we can call this one of the techniques by which Tolkien changed the mode of the story in Northrop Frye’s construction from Romance to Low Mimesis.

[1] A feature Tolkien’s works share with those of William Morris.

The Beards of Middle-earth

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On September 4, 2021

In fantasy, trivial

Cover of TNoME

Something is missing…

The box-hauling guy just delivered my copy of The Nature of Middle-earth. Curiously, the dust jacket of my copy bears no hint of the title of the book. I guess the publishers have decided the author’s name is sufficient, just this once.

When I get a new book of nonfiction my ritual begins by protecting the spine the way my mother taught me: set the spine on the table; take about 20 leaves of each end and press them down flat; repeat until the book lies open in front of me. It hasn’t been necessary in years, but we know what happens to those who forsake the mos maiorum. Then I look in the table of contents for anything amusingly weird (this is the mos mei).  What do you know — there’s a chapter on “Beards”!

We all know about elves, hobbits, and dwarves, but this chapter tells us what we need to know about Numenoreans. Namely, that elvish blood in the noble houses meant that the really high-ranking Gondorians and Arnorians didn’t have beards. Though neither Tolkien nor Hostetter says it, it’s clear that a part of the ennoblement of Men, given to them by the Elves, was the suppression of facial hair. Hirsute scruffiness is the antithesis of ennoblement.

Pace a certain influential Kiwi, Boromir, Faramir, and Aragorn didn’t even need to shave. Come to think of it, neither do most Native Americans. Those proto-trolls who raised such a stink about Aragorn looking like an Native American in Ralph Bakshi’s film have been proven wrong again.

Nota bene

The fact that your Idiosopher couldn’t grow a beard to save his life has absolutely no bearing on the content of this post.

Gloin’s Rank

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On January 31, 2021

In fantasy, squibs & crackers

Over at “Wisdom from the Lord of the Rings” last week, we heard about Frodo’s conversation with Glóin. It begins with Frodo’s polite, “Am I right in guessing that you are the Glóin, one of the twelve companions of the great Thorin Oakenshield?”

The word companion sounded different to me this time. Before, I’d taken it to mean that Glóin held the rank of Count under King Dáin. But there’s another way to read it. There was another king called “the great” who had twelve companions. That’s Charlemagne, or in Anglo-Norman, …li reis Charle, ki poesté fud grant Par les dudze cumpaignuns…. (“King Charles, whose power was great through his twelve companions…”) If modern French helps (it’s not impossible) there’s a translation of the Song of Roland on line that carries the word “companion” in this sense into the modern era.

So it seems likely that we’re supposed to get echoes of Charlemagne’s companions here. Maybe Glóin is the Dwarvish version of a Paladin. He’s dressed all in white, I can’t help noticing.

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