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.
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.
A thing from Poetic Diction1 has stuck with me since my last reading. Owen Barfield doesn’t challenge the idea that verse began as rhythm. I, like most timid thinkers, think rhythm was there to aid the poet’s recall, but Barfield extends it further. He says rhythm is intrinsic to Nature, indeed to our own bodies: “We can only understand the origin of metre by going back to the ages when men were conscious, not merely in their heads, but in the beating of their hearts!”2
But he also notes a problem, as history goes on and languages change: those ancient languages used inflection instead of word order to convey meaning, which is very handy for a poet. If you need to adhere to a meter you can just rearrange the words however you need them. But as languages mature, word order becomes more important, so that putting a word in an unusual place is still intelligible, but it sounds affected and archaic. Poetry gets harder to make.
Barfield suggests this is how rhyme came to be. It’s a much more flattering idea to a rhymer than the usual. He says there’s a general trend: Poets tend to lose ground to writers of prose, as word order becomes more strict. For an extreme example, nobody’s writing physics papers in verse any more, as Lucretius did with De rerum naturae. So poets need something else to add to their verses. Barfield suggests it’s music. “Music (if one can use a fraction here) may comprise perhaps as much as half the meaning of a modern lyric.” Modern meaning post-medieval.
He’s thinking of rhyme, first: “in rhyme we are face to face with the development, at a comparatively late date, of an entirely new system of versification.” To which he adds changing uses of sound in general, explicitly mentioning alliteration and assonance, claiming that they were “unknown to the ancients”. I don’t agree that alliteration and assonance are quite what he’s saying they are. As I’m sure he knew from drinking beer with Tolkien,3 alliteration was there first as far as English poetry is concerned. But I’m more interested in the modernist experiments in sound that were under way in the 20th Century, such as the Sitwells were doing. Barfield saw the trend away from classical poetry to music happening around him, and didn’t see it stopping. That definitely turned out to be correct.
Which leads us to a path I’ve trodden before. Those modernist experiments in the UK fused with the afro-celtic musical innovations happening in America4 to create rap music in the last quarter of the century. By now, “as much as half of the meaning” is now “basically all”. Chapter IX of Poetic Diction closes with this: “It would be pure fantasy to attempt to prescribe in advance what uses man himself shall henceforth make of the material element in language.” Barfield lived until 1997, so he overlapped hip-hop by two decades. I wonder if he ever heard a rapper. And if he did, did he recognize his prediction coming true?
ETA: this is a re-posting of an essay from May that has mysteriously vanished from the database.
I’ve just handed in my essay for Gardeners of the Galaxies. But before I did, I ran it through the JSTOR Text Analyzer to see if there was anything I’d missed. It found me a paper I’d never heard of that was relevant enough to include.
In the process it produced a list of relevant tags. My first reaction to it was, “What in the world did I just write?” My second reaction was, “Mission Accomplished!”
Last year, Brenton Dickieson wrote a series of blogposts asking the question, “Why is Tolkien Scholarship Stronger than Lewis Scholarship?” The third post gives a number of hypotheses that may answer the question, but no definite conclusion was reached. The discussion in those posts, and the comments that follow them, is much better informed than I can be. However, I can always contribute to the low end of a scholarly debate.
The Idiosopher’s Razor: When several hypotheses are consistent with the evidence, the least dignified one is to be preferred.1
I’ve recently been researching criticism of Poul Anderson’s science fiction. A lot of people named “Anderson” have written books,2 which means that the first step answering any question, at the moment, is making sure I’ve got the right Anderson. It’s the literary equivalent of the “data cleaning” problem in statistics. It’s a huge part of the work in studying anything, C.S. Lewis for example. That’s a trans-disciplinary fact. And don’t even get me started about “Charles Williams”!
This is a problem that Tolkien scholars never have. Anybody writing about anyone named “Tolkien” is certain to be relevant. Looking up Tolkien is a lot easier than looking up Anderson, Lewis, or whomever. Eliminating a laborious step in the research lowers one of the barriers to getting the paper written. Applying our Razor, we can slice away many hypotheses in favor of pure laziness. Tolkien papers are easier to research, so there will be more of them, and the best of a larger group will often be better than the best of a smaller group, such as the papers about Lewis.
I think I just understood Shakespeare scholarship, too.
This is Part 2 of my presentation at Mythmoot VII. Part 1 is here. Part 1 was the mathematical treatment; this is the humanities context.
This paper grew out of Prof. Olsen’s explication of Eminem last year. I took upon myself the mission to figure out why Tolkien fans should like Eminem. Paradoxically enough, it’s because Tolkien was a reactionary. It’s common to hear critics use that word about him. (Google Scholar returns over 2,000 hits.) But everybody elides one detail: Against what was he reacting? Well, in technology or theology, practically everything, but in terms of poetry, I think I’ve found a specific person.
Introducing Edith Sitwell
Celebrities
Dame Edith Sitwell was a character. A classic English eccentric. Wealthy as sin, six feet tall, thin as an icicle, descended from the Plantagenet royal family. She was a bit older than Tolkien, so she was a presence in the English literary scene when he was in his 20s and 30s. Emphasis on the word “scene” — Photographers loved photographing her, and she loved to be photographed, so she was a pioneer of the publicity-driven life we see so much of today. This photo is the level of celebrity we’re talking about: She and Marilyn apparently took to each other immediately.
As a medieval illumination
The second photo is what she looked like at the beginning of her fame as a writer, in the early 1920s. This is the time at which she would have come to the attention of the Inklings, the way she came to the attention of absolutely everyone.
I like this photo because she looks like she just climbed out of an illuminated manuscript. It’s easy to imagine her among her 12th Century ancestors.
Façade
The work I want to talk about is called Façade.[1] It’s a series of poems intended to be spoken aloud from a stage, set to music by a very young Sir William Walton. The poems frequently are titled with reference to music or dance: “Tarantella”, “Fox Trot”, “Country Dance”, “Hornpipe” … Edith and her brothers Osbert and Sacheverell would write poems, then they would set up a screen in their parlor, and read the verse aloud from behind the screen. The verse was mostly nonsense. “It’s all a bloody façade!” said their housekeeper one day, so Edith named the whole piece accordingly.
Performance screen designed by John Piper
Façade is subtitled “An Entertainment”, and it’s fun to imagine what the audience thought they were in for when they walked into the theater. There on the stage were a few chairs, a piccolo, two trumpets, a saxophone, two cellos, and an array of percussion. Behind it all was a screen painted with a face whose mouth is a megaphone. The poems get read through the megaphone. They’re not sung, though performers sometimes try. If you look around YouTube you’ll see what a bad idea singing them can be. I like the way Paul Driver put it: “It is not so clear for what kind of non-singer Facade was conceived.” [2] Well, you’re about to find out.
This is what C.S. Lewis called “The gibberish literature of the Lunatic Twenties” in The Pilgrim’s Regress. [3] I can’t find any time that J.R.R. Tolkien mentioned the Sitwells, but Lewis was there to pick up the cudgel. At least one reviewer identifies the Sitwells as one of the inspirations for the “Clevers” in Lewis’s book.
Anyway, love her or hate her, I’m calling her the “Anti-Tolkien” here. What does it mean to be the “Anti-Tolkien”? Well, like matter and anti-matter, you have to have a lot of things in common, but disagree on one or two fundamentals. Both Sitwell and Tolkien were Modernists, but they pushed back against some of the basics of Modernism. A nice paper by Demoor, Posman, and Van Durme [4] put this part of the Modernist project in musical terms. To start at the beginning: The most inclusive definition of of “music” is “sounds arranged in time”. The arrangement can go two ways. Melody is the part of music that goes along with the flow of time; Harmony goes perpendicular to time. Modernism devalued melody and emphasized experimental harmony. Tolkien and Sitwell both thought the melody was the important part. They were united in the belief that language could and should be musical, but what that music ought to be about is where they parted company.
I’ve put the relevant areas of agreement and disagreement into a table.
Tolkien
Sitwell
Eminem
English
Yes
Yes
No
Edwardian
Yes
Yes
No
Poet
Yes
Yes
No
Drawing from country life
Yes
Yes
No
Inspired by Classical mythology
Yes
Yes
No
Scenic depictions of darkness
Yes
Yes
No
World War 1
Yes
Yes
No
Hunting shows up in odd places
Yes
Yes
No
Importance of musicality in poems
Yes
Yes
No
Respect for the traditions they’re appropriating
Yes
No
Yes
Poems should make sense
Yes
No
Yes
Structured rhyme
Depends
No
No
The big difference comes in their relationship to their inspirations. Sitwell is frankly imperialist, though she can see the end of Empire coming up soon. That’s actually the meaning of “Hornpipe”, which I just recited, but the tempo of the piece makes it invisible until you sit down and read it line by line and try to figure out if it’s really nonsense or not. Like any imperialist, she thinks of her source material as a resource to be exploited. She doesn’t care whether in reality a Hottentot is hot or not — all she wants is the sound of the words. Dame Edith definitely did not take Prof. Sturgis’s advice about how to write other cultures.
By contrast, when Tolkien takes inspirations from north-western English villagers, it’s with genuine affection. He notes their flaws, but likes them anyway. Lobelia Sackville-Baggins is the clearest case.[5] When he’s done telling the story, we see that things that are flaws in one context sometimes turn out to be great strengths in another.
This leads directly to their second area of disagreement. Nonsense verse can be a lot of fun, but it’s rarely respectful. (That’s why I like it so much.) Tolkien occasionally wrote a tra-la-lally or a ring-a-dong-dillo, but only as a brief insertion into an otherwise intelligible sentence. Which, of course, is entirely consistent with English folk song. As Professor Flieger mentioned Friday, Tolkien is “longing for a lost and irretrievable past.” Sitwell is, to put it mildly, not.
Looking at the last column, Eminem and Dame Edith look like almost exact opposites, but their ears for rhyme have a lot in common. To understand the relationship, we’ll need a way to make the scattered rhymes of their verses visible, which means we have to dig into some rhyme measurement.
Rhymometry
William Harmon, in his wonderful history of English versification,[6] says Rhyme is lowbrow. Classical verse generally doesn’t rhyme in Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Hebrew… Verse in old Germanic languages doesn’t rhyme either. It’s like Rhyme conveys a sense of frivolity, a lack of seriousness. Rhyming verse is down in the gutter, amusing the plebs. You know what rhymes? Light verse almost always rhymes. (Tom Hillman and I have written light alliterative verse, but it’s a really obscure niche.) And what’s more, the rhymes have to be perfect or it’s not funny. (This will come in later when the rappers join us.) The idea of rhyme as Art (capital A) only existed for a few centuries in English.
Rhyming verse came into respectability in English because the language was shifting from synthetic-suffixal to analytic-prefixal. That’s Harmon again; I don’t use words like that. The way it looked to me in high-school foreign language classes was “everything rhymes!” The French/Germanic fusion we were all speaking in the High Middle Ages was different, though. It put Chaucer in a position to grab two innovations and run with them: iambic rhythm and masculine rhyme. Or, as Prof. Olsen put it yesterday, the “single-syllable terminal rhymes” that would one day be the foundation of rap.
Two centuries later, Shakespeare was solidly in this respectable-rhyme world, but he’s already using enjambment to undercut the importance of the rhymes. “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments” – without seeing the rest of the sonnet, you’d never know which word of that sentence was the rhyme. By two centuries after Shakespeare, we were back to looking askance at rhyme.
But still, even with Chaucerian/Shakespearean pedigree, rhyme has a taint of the common people about it. It’s not serious. Which brings us to Eminem. Hip-hop is all about rhymes. Hip-hop poets even call their works “rhymes”, not “verses” or “poems” or “lyrics”, but what they consider a rhyme isn’t perfect (unless they’re trying to be funny). They use assonances, consonances, and other kinds of slant rhyme instead.
How rhyme is used
Part 1 of this paper showed graphically that the Modernists of the 1920s resemble the hip-hop rhymers of the 21st Century in their use of bursts of slant and mosaic rhyme. But I promised that there was a fight going on. What is the argument? What are these poets disagreeing about? We need to look at what each is doing with their art.
Eminem is trying to elevate hip-hop to an artistic genre. Rap is unquestionably lowbrow, with a few people trying to elevate the form from its natural habitat on the sidewalk to something higher. Their individual purposes differ. Chuck D is trying to motivate political action. Eminem does that sometimes, but usually he’s trying to exorcise personal demons, like any Romantic. As the musicologist Robert Greenberg says, “In many ways, we’re still in the Romantic period,” and that fits perfectly here.
You don’t have to listen to a work of hip-hop for very long before you hear the word “respect”. That’s what all rappers want. Eminem is making verse that tries to get respect from the highbrows, while staying entirely within the idiom of the street.
Dame Edith didn’t need any more respect. Her status was as sure as the Thain of the Shire’s. She was mining lowbrow amusements for form, just as she was mining the empire for sounds. She agreed with Tolkien that the current forms were becoming hidebound, and she re-vitalized them by bringing in this low-brow infusion. She might even have said, “The inhabitants were too stupid and dull for words, and an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them.”[7] Everyone was shocked by the result, which was exactly what she wanted. In a sense, she was pushing the highbrows downward.
Tolkien was embracing the lowbrow for its own sake. He wasn’t gentrifying rhyme, he was celebrating it. Like Beethoven writing country dances, he’s showing his audience the merit in the simple people. At the same time, he’s trying to revitalize highbrow verse with an infusion of bucolic vitality. When the highbrow and lowbrow sides of culture are too separated, art stagnates. True vitality comes from free exchange between the sides of culture. Like Eminem, Tolkien wanted to create art by lifting up the bottom of society. Dame Edith Sitwell wanted to go the other way, bringing the high down to the low. And the war between the brows isn’t really as disconnected as it looked at first. Tolkien has become so popular that there are highbrows who look down on him. Especially since the Jackson movies made a billion dollars, there’s a nimbus of the lowbrow around the Lord of the Rings.
Artists frequently describe their work as in conversation with those who have gone before, but the conversation can go only one way. JRRT couldn’t respond to hip-hop for obvious reasons, so what this work has accomplished is to identify an analogous contemporaneous situation to which he clearly related, and restore a bit of symmetry. This, then, is my conclusion. A Tolkien fan who likes hip-hop can be entirely consistent with the artistic missions of both.
Works Cited
[1] Sitwell, Edith. Façade and other poems, 1920-1935. Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd., 1950.
[2] Driver, Paul. “‘Façade Revisited.” Tempo (1980): 3-9.
[3] Lewis, Clive Staples. The pilgrim’s regress. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2014.
[4] Demoor, Marysa, Sarah Posman, and Debora Van Durme. “Literary modernism and melody: an avant-propos.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 55.1 (2013): 31-35.
[5] Tolkien, J.R.R The Lord of the Rings. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002. VI,ix.
[6] Harmon, William. “English versification: fifteen hundred years of continuity and change.” Studies in Philology 94.1 (1997): 1-37.
I’ve been listening to Tom Shippey’s lectures on Beowulf again and reading “The Monsters and the Critics”. Pre-Tolkien scholars seem to have loved finding other things that Grendel could be, besides a monster. They wrote papers proving he was a symbol of malaria, or floods, or the plague, or bears. People in the middle ages loved finding hidden meanings for things that are obvious on the surface. Scholars in the modern era kept it up. Old habits are hard to break.
I got to wondering, though. This poem was meant to be heard, not studied. What did the name “Grendel” sound like to the people who heard the poem? I have the entire corpus of Old English literature here on a disk — let’s find out! How would the name resonate with other words in the language? What other words use those sounds?
Let’s re-use the technique I mentioned earlier with respect to Gollum, except this time we’ll use Old English instead of modern. I constructed a regular expression that has only vowels separating G, R, N, D, and L. Consonants are much more stable than vowels., so I kept them fixed and let any vowels slide in and around them. The word has to start with G because alliteration is so important. We’ll exclude Beowulf and derivative places named for Grendel himself, like “grendles mere” or “grendles bece”, that we sometimes find in land-grant charters. What else do we find?
Grundling
17 mentions, meaning totally, or from the ground up. Bible stories love this word. A phrase like hi tobræcon þa burh grundlinga “the broke the castle down to the ground”, is a great way to describe just how bad the Israelites had it, back then.
Grundleas
15 mentions, meaning groundless, or bottomless. Grundleas pytt is a common phrase, too. Tartarus grundleas seað, “Tartarus is a bottomless pit”.
Grindle
Today I learned that “grindle” is still an English word. It means a narrow ditch. Those are useful for marking land grants, too. There five such mentions. It also used to mean a herring; I think there’s one use like that.
Conclusion
That’s all I found. The general theme is that Grendel’s name sounds like it belongs underground, in a deep pit. It reminds us of destruction, and of hell. Even if the poet didn’t call Grendel a devil, this would hold up. There’s a hint of water there. So it’s entirely possible that the poet didn’t mean Grendel as a symbol of anything — his name sounds like exactly what he is.
This is the same conclusion JRRT reached, which greatly boosts my confidence in its correctness.
Corey Olsen descended from the presidential throne to present a paper at Mythmoot VI, entitled “The Song of Words: The Prosody of Eminem”. Everyone was scandalized, mostly because we enjoy being the kind of people who can be scandalized by an academic presentation.
Rap has several similarities to Anglo-Saxon poetics. It was intended to be heard, not read. A line doesn’t have a fixed number of syllables. Instead, it’s built around a fixed number of beats. Where Anglo-Saxons alliterated on the beat, rappers rhyme on the beat. Rap has a lot more complexity, though, because the DJ is laying down a beat that may be quite different from the stressed syllables. The interplay between the two beats is another of the raw materials the poet can use to convey meaning. (I am assuming that Anglo-Saxon bards didn’t have a rhythm track behind their performances, though there is no evidence to support such an idea.)
It takes like 10 seconds to make a picture of M&Ms in MS Office
The concept of “rhyme” experiences a certain amount of strain in the lyrics of Eminem, but it’s clearly audible. Assonance, plus a common stress pattern and one common consonant, build up patterns of 3- or 4-syllable rhymes. A lyric sheet with the various rhymes highlighted showed that Eminem has as many as three interleaved multiple rhymes going in succession. At one point, Prof. Olsen calculated that 89% of the syllables in a verse were participating in one of the rhymes. That’s an amazing figure. Chaucer managed 18 rhymes in succession at one point. George Starbuck wrote a ballad that briefly reached a figure of 100%, but only for the last 15 syllables. This kind of density neither CO nor I have seen before.
The most interesting part of the talk was when Prof. Olsen rearranged the lyrics to “Lose Yourself” to align with the beats of the rhythm track: the song has an internal section where the narrator (otherwise trapped in poverty) envisions himself succeeding on stage. In most of the song, the rhymes wind around the rhythm track in a just-barely oscillatory pattern. But during the dream-section, the principal rhymes line up with the beat. What’s more, it was the third beat in the line — the beat that always alliterates in Anglo-Saxon verse. (“Just sayin'” – CO)
The title of Prof. Olsen’s talk is a quote from the Silmarillion, but I’d like to wrap it around and come back to Tolkien again. It’s common to hear critics describe JRRT as reactionary. (Google Scholar returns over 2,000 hits.) Against what was he reacting? Well, in technology, theology, or prose style, practically everything, but in terms of poetry, I think I’ve found a specific person.
Dame Edith Sitwell published “Façade (An Entertainment)” in 1922. It was performed with music written by Sir William Walton. The poems are completely dedicated to rhythm and “the song of words”, with meaning as a secondary consideration. Eminem too is willing to sacrifice sense in favor of sounds; occupational hazard, I think.
Here’s the opening stanza of “Tarantella“, analyzed similarly to the way Prof. Olsen did it. I’ve numbered the rhymes and called out a slide into alliteration with letters:
Where the satyrs are chattering Nymphs with their flattering
1 1 2 1
Glimpse of the forest enhance
2 3
All the beauty of marrow and Cucumber narrow
4 4
And Ceres will join in the dance
3
Where the satyrs can flatter The flat-leaved fruit
1 1a a a
And the gherkin green And the marrow
b b 4
Said Queen Venus "Silenus, we'll settle between us
5 5 5
The gourd and the cucumber narrow!"
----8----- 4
See, like palaces hid in the lake They shake -
7 6 6
Those greenhouses shot By her arrow narrow!
7 4 4
The gardener seizes the pieces, like
8 6 6
Croesus, for gilding the Potting-shed barrow.
6 4
There’s a kind of a-b-a-b rhyme scheme going, in two chunks, but there are four other rhymes interleaved with the two chunks. The two chunks pivot about the alliterative passage. (I would never have noticed the slant-rhyme between “gourd and the” and “gardener” before I listened to Prof. Olsen’s talk, incidentally.)
I see a lot of connections between what Dame Edith did with poetry set to Modernist music and what Eminem does with rap. I used the term “Anti-Tolkien” up above because, while there’s a shared knowledge of mythology and a genuine love for the sound of words here, JRRT was meticulous about keeping his word-play and his classical allusions within meaningful sentences. I suspect Sitwell’s Modernist embrace of Chaos is what JRRT pushed against with his own, superficially more traditional, verse. I’m going to try to fill in the gaps in this idea for a paper next year — may the scandals continue!
Let me simplify the rhyme just to amplify the noise – “Mosh”
I’ve already written about my favorite part of Kate Neville’s paper at Mythmoot VI, but it has a second-favorite part, too. Warning: Contains Star Wars Episode V spoilers.
By BGBOXXX Design via the noun project
Tolkien’s dragons started out as a mythological counterpart to tanks and machine guns. They didn’t lie because they were machines. Kate tracks down the dragons available to JRRT in his youth, who also didn’t lie. In William Morris’s Volsung Saga, Fafnir is all brute strength, no guile. But as Middle-earth evolved, Tolkien’s dragons picked up a psychological dimension as well as physical power. If we look at what Glaurung says to Turin, for example, the word the narrator uses repeatedly is “lie”. That’s not exactly right, though. All of it would pass a fact-check at the Newspaper of Record. It’s much more subtle than mere lies.
Deception, maybe. Definition 2a in the OED for “deceive” is “To cause to believe what is false; to mislead as to a matter of fact, lead into error, impose upon, delude, ‘take in’.” This is how I see what’s going on with Glaurung, and later when Smaug talks to Bilbo. Saruman is good at it, too. Kate says he’s “dragon-hearted”.
You know who flat-out lies? Gandalf, when we first meet him at the beginning of The Hobbit. Bilbo is not a burglar, nor any kind of adventure. It’s diametrically different from the dragons, though. Dragons say things that are almost true, so you believe that little twist at the end. Kate points out that nobody believes Gandalf when he says Bilbo is a burglar. And Gandalf is OK with that. He’s making a prophecy with an incorrect verb tense, more than stating a fact about the world. Whether anyone is actually misled by the lie makes the difference between a good character and an evil one.
Off on a tangent from the paper, now. You know who else flat-out lies to the hero of his story? Obi-Wan Kenobi. [1] That behavior always seemed wrong for the character and made me not trust him an inch, even though it’s effortless to forgive Gandalf for a similar untruth. Now that I’ve heard this paper, I see why I had that reaction. The lies from ostensibly trustworthy elder figures in Star Wars are intended to be believed, so they’re not acting like good guys do. But they don’t have any of the subtle psychological manipulation that dragons use to make the deception interesting. And the whole plot turns on those lies. Some mentor the Jedi turned out to be.
[1] Confession: I don’t really like Star Wars. I suspect that its staggering popularity comes from its shallowness. Its fans supply depth from their own imaginations. At the end of the process, the fans have awesome special effects to go with whatever they thought up on their own. It’s like a “call for fanfic.” For me, though, the constant lies from the Jedi ruin the process. Darth Vader looks like a paragon of good management practice, next to them.
I complained a while back that I didn’t know anything about dragons. Mythmoot VI took care of that for me.
Kevin Hensler is a student of ancient theology who did a great job backtracking through history to the origins of dragons. He started by noting the story parallels between the creation myths in Genesis chapter 1 and the Enuma Elish. Ever wonder what “divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament” means? I never figured it out, because I didn’t know about the older Babylonian text. The Babylonians, like any farmers, saw separating fresh water from salt water as the key to life.
Despite what you read in the Monster Manual, Tiamat wasn’t exactly a dragon, though they’ve found quite a few artworks that show a multi-headed lizard-thing fighting with the god Marduk, which may well be she. Kevin called her a “chaos creature”. All through history, storm gods have fought chaos creatures. Marduk vs. Tiamat turns to Thor vs. the Midgard Serpent turns to St. George vs. the Dragon. So it’s not a stretch to translate that ancient word into “dragon”. In general, a chaos creature’s role is to threaten society; the god’s job is to prevent that.
Kevin stops here; now comes my speculation. This gives us a pretty good idea of how old dragon-legends are: if the local religion’s purpose is to protect an established order from external chaos, then it must post-date agriculture. (Perhaps not by much.) A hunter-gatherer society wouldn’t see an established order as something that needs reinforcement, and a fishing society would see a storm god as someone to root against.
So why, as Richard asked, do dragons have hoards? Kevin says it’s because destroying the social order gives all power and wealth to the strongest. A hoard of treasure shows the audience the power of the dragon. This goes well with the idea that when you kill a dragon you ought to share the wealth as broadly as you can. Trying to keep it all exposes you to dragon-sickness like it did to Thorin. Even if the hero doesn’t spread the treasure out on the ground for all comers like that communist Bombadil, it’s still part of every legend that the hero either has to be generous with the loot or end up like a dragon himself.
I picked up one of the notepads on the tables in the main room and found this in it. If you’re the artist, let me know!
I think we’ve found the ur-text for olfactory theory. The question of how Elves smell has been popping up again. And what does that have to do with the Holy Grail, I wondered, since we just finished Le Morte d’Arthur. Here we go, with a tip of the hat to JSTOR Daily.
Harvey, Susan Ashbrook. “St. Ephrem on the Scent of Salvation.” The Journal of Theological Studies, vol. 49, no. 1, 1998, pp. 109–128. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23968211 .
Early Christians didn’t include incense in their ceremonies, perhaps because they wanted to distinguish themselves from the other religions around Syria in Late Antiquity. St. Ephrem was instrumental in getting smells back into the Mass, in the 4th Century AD. Even if Tolkien didn’t think along these lines himself, Charles Williams certainly did, and it seems likely that he would have suggested it. (Certainly the assertion that he did not would require some proof.)
Not as tasty, but still sage.
But there are other channels besides the sacramental at work, getting smells into LotR. Studies of religious practice are outside the Idiosopher’s ken, but puns are right in the middle of it.
Culinary sage belongs to the genus Salvia, and we get our word by mispronouncing that.
Elves are sage, too. According to the OED, sage-the-herb has nothing to do etymologically with sage-the-wise-person, so we English-speakers must have made the connection ourselves.
Harvey suggests in her footnote 3 that a broad survey of olfactory cultural significance can be found in her footnote 4. (A linked series of footnotes like this presents a challenge for the mathematical theory, which assumes independence of information.) Anyway, an aspiring olfactory literary critic would do well to start with these references:
Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott, Aroma: the Cultural History of Smell (New York: Routledge, 1994);
Béatrice Caseau, Euodia. The Use and Meaning of Fragrances in the Ancient World and their Christianization (100-900 AD) (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1994);
W. Deonna, ‘EUWDIA: Croyances antiques et modernes: L’Odeur suave des dieux et des élus’, Genava 17 (1939), 167-263;
Marcel Detienne, The Gardens of Adonis: Spices in Greek Mythology, with an introduction by Jean-Pierre Vernant, trans. J. Lloyd (Hassocks, Sussex: the Harvester Press, Ltd., 1977);
S. Lilja, ‘The Treatment of Odours in the Poetry of Antiquity’, CommentationesHumanarum Litterarum 49 (Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 1972).
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