Idiosophy

A physicist loose among the liberal arts

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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

Look, Ma! I’m on a podcast!

I don’t talk about my job much, because getting permission to release things to the public is a gigantic pain. But this time someone else did all the work.  Here’s a podcast about one of my co-workers. She’s talking about a cool thing she’s doing with graph theory:

Episode 16

The coolest figure from “Graph Theory as a Mathematical Model in Social Science”

My role in the podcast is to be an authoritative old geezer who tells amusing stories about what graphs are good for. As it happens, I started my experiments in 21st-Century graph theory right here on the blog. I do a lot of it at my job now, because I happened to be thinking along those lines when a problem came across my desk that needed graphs. And it took off from there. There are a lot of people thinking about how the humanities can play a bigger role in engineering, as engineers make decisions they think are independent of squishy, qualitative stuff.  I’m not sure this is what they’re referring to.

Funny coincidence: Corey Olsen was saying something similar in the Mythgard Academy “Alice” class the other night, except he was talking about English and chemistry.

 

Alice Breaks a Law of Physics

It’s been fun going Through the Looking Glass with the Mythgard Academy. In my own (frequent) readings, I tend to focus on the mathematical jokes1, so the way Corey Olsen takes apart the verses is new to me.

I love the idea that the mirror is playing a substantial role. Tweedledum and Tweedledee are characters in a poem in our world. It’s in trochaic meter, with lines of four feet and three feet alternating. The poem they recite to Alice, which necessarily comes from their world, is in iambic meter, with lines of four feet and three feet.2 They’re mirror images!

Also, the way cause and effect get reversed is fun. The White Queen can remember either way through time, and Prof. Olsen makes the excellent point that when Alice thinks of a nursery rhyme from the primary world, and then the events happen to the characters around her, that’s the same phenomenon. She can remember things that haven’t happened yet.

Tenniel's illustration of the Lion and the UnicornReversal of poetic meter also happens, though less perfectly, in “The Lion and the Unicorn”. Suppose we use “+” to indicate a stressed syllable and “-” to indicate unstressed.3 The pattern of stresses in “The Lion and the Unicorn were fighting for the crown” is “-+-⁠-⁠-+-⁠-⁠-+-⁠-⁠-+” which my ear splits up into (-+-⁠-)(-+-⁠-)(-+-⁠-)(-+). That is to say, I hear it as a four-syllable foot. Now, I know that real scholars think the rhythm of the end of the line is important and the beginning is not, but that’s not how I hear things. I hear the rhythm established at the beginning as dominant. A change in rhythm within a line sounds like it’s at the end. 4

In the second line of “L&U”, Prof. Olsen talked quite a bit about the “all ’round the town”. One of the students asked why the first syllable was missing from “around”, which with the would have made it a nice alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables. But that’s not what this poem is about. This poem is about four-syllable feet. All ’round the town is “++-+”, which is what we get for the rest of the verse, like “Some gave them brown.” This latter foot is related to the first foot “-+-⁠-” by a mathematical transformation: exchange stressed syllables for unstressed, and reverse the order in time.

But wait a minute — there’s a symmetry of nature called CPT Symmetry that says if you exchange positive charges for negative (Charge), flip a system in a mirror (Parity), and reverse the flow of time (Time), all the laws of physics are the same. We’ve done all three here, so the plum-cake should act the same as it does in our world. At least, I hope we have done all three — if she’s just flipped Time and Parity, Alice has entered a world of antimatter and boom! the book would be much shorter. Slicing a plum-cake after it’s handed round is un-physical.

Now, we might be tempted to excuse Lewis Carroll on the grounds that quantum field theory wouldn’t be invented for half a century after the publication of Through the Looking Glass, but your humble Idiosopher respectfully submits that an author so skilled at time reversal should have remembered it.


 

Gimli’s Opium Dream

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.


 

iPod Intertextuality

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 poemDeparture” 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?

Seven Centuries

Catching up with the Mythgard Academy class on Dante’s Inferno, when one of Prof. Olsen’s glosses sounded suddenly familiar.

Dante Alighieri, 1320:

Can those who lie within the sepulchers
be seen? The lids—in fact—have all been lifted;
no guardian is watching over them.”

Corey Olsen, 2021:

Why don’t they get away? I mean, like, the door’s open.

Pete Townshend, 1969:

But you’ve been told many times before
Messiahs pointed to the door —
No one had the guts to leave the temple!

A pretty high-level piece of Tolkien geekery

The title of this post refers to one of the Idiosopher’s suggestions for the school-spirit section of the bookstore.  It is the opinion of President Corey Olsen of Signum University. Praise is always welcome, especially from one of the world’s premier Tolkien geeks.

A Dickieson Festpost

Brenton Dickieson is celebrating his 1,000th post at A Pilgrim in Narnia, and everyone is invited! He’s been a positive influence on this little escapade into humanities scholarship since nearly the beginning. All the people who Know the Internet assure me that blogs are passé; nobody blogs any more.  Fortunately for his 7,500 followers, Brent doesn’t read those people.  Go on over and congratulate him. In honor of the occasion, an infinitesimal Festschrift about C.S. Lewis:

I’m just catching up on the Mythgard Academy class on Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis. I first read it when I was a teenager. Even though I didn’t have the concept of “imperialism” clear in my head, I could tell that Weston’s rant about human destiny was a withering indictment of the whole imperial project. But something I never noticed before is the initial description of Oyarsa. He’s not part of the planet. He’s actually out in heaven, but he rules Malacandra.  We’re supposed to be thinking of planetary intelligences, of course, but that description also fits the civil-service functionary in London who administers a colony, or a bureaucrat in Washington DC who handles relations between an overseas military presence and the indigenes. Imperialism appears to be a tenacious concept — if we’re not careful, we’ll find ourselves with empires layered on top of empires, in a Great Chain of Politics.

Modern English subjunctives

In Old English class last winter, the teacher introduced the subjunctive mood by saying, “We don’t have it in modern English, but …” Well, I still use the subjunctive. I’ve noticed that the BBC doesn’t use it much any more, but here in the States it’s not gone. Since then, I’ve been keeping track. Here are subjunctives I’ve collected in six months:

  • that an Internet image search for “subjunctive” is deeply disappointing?

    I wouldn’t do that if I were you

  • Be that as it may
  • God save the Queen
  • Let there be light
  • The powers that be
  • Let the chips fall where they may
  • Whisper words of wisdom, let it be…
Musical Interlude

Defying the BBC ban, this song by Eric Clapton points out that the subjunctive in modern English can be indicated by word order, too. I like the way we’ve adopted a good old-English modal-infinitive structure to convey a Continental verb mood, using “let” or “may” to change the mood to subjunctive.

Poetry Corner

A double dactyl by George Starbuck where the subjunctive forms the rhyme:

SAID
Dame Edith Evans to
Margaret Rutherford,
“Seance? Oh really, my
Dear, if there be
Nonhypothetical
Extraterrestrial
Parapsychologists,
THEY can call ME.”

Comments on the Epilogue to LotR

I’d never read the Epilogue to The Lord of the Rings, until the Mythgard Academy class. A few scattered comments:

Elanor

Although I generally agree with the Inklings’ decision to veto the Epilogue from the published text of LotR, I do kind of regret the loss of teen-age Elanor.  She’s smart, quick-witted, and can tie Sam into a knot if he tries to get around her. She would have been a fan favorite. Cutting out the Epilogue reduced by 25% the number of LotR characters who my girlfriends in college wished they could be.

Sunset

Sam, about the end of Faërie after the Elves leave Middle-earth: “things don’t really end sharp like that. It’s more like a winter sunset.”  The class had quite a bit of discussion about this line, which omitted the obvious.  As usual here at Idiosophy, we assume JRRT meant what he wrote literally, and only after that’s squared away can we look for symbolic meanings.  This is a perfect example.  When it’s rising or setting in summer, the sun crosses the horizon close to perpendicularly.  (On Midsummer at the Tropic of Cancer, it’s exactly perpendicular.) Sunset is the time from the time the sun’s disk touches the horizon until it’s entirely below.  Twilight is similarly defined (since we’re talking about elves) by the time it takes the sun to descend a certain number of degrees below the horizon.  Both are shortest in summer.  In winter, the sun crosses the horizon at a shallower angle, so it takes longer for the disk to descend the same number of degrees. (These are easiest to see in the extreme: Above the arctic circle, the horizon-crossing angle is so shallow that the top edge of the sun’s disk doesn’t even rise into view at midday.) For any fixed latitude, the length of time that we call “sunset” is longer in the winter than in the summer.  That’s important to a gardener, because it determines your quitting time for the day.

Perhail, Lanhail, and Panthail

Aragorn’s finesse at translating Sam’s name into Sindarin may have been my favorite part. “Samwise” of course wouldn’t sound like good-natured raillery in Elvish, so Aragorn had to suggest a diplomatic change.  In the first draft, the King changed “halfwise” to “plain-wise”.  In the second, he changed it to “full-wise”. I agree with Prof. Olsen that “plain-wise” would have been better, because the two meanings of “plain” in English make it an excellent double entendre. Which is the problem: “Plein” in French means “full”, so if JRRT had left “plain-wise” in the text he might have left himself open to accusations of a French pun. This was obviously unacceptable, so he changed it to “full” in English and Elvish.  Pure cowardice, if anyone should ever ask me.

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