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Old Tom Bombadil, Introverted Fellow

On April 14, 2020

While we were all sitting at home to defeat the plague of coronavirus , I got to thinking about the all-time champion of social distancing: Tom Bombadil. I write about him and Goldberry a lot. There are constant debates going on about him on social media and in scholarship. Lots of us are fascinated by Tom, and the unbounded opportunities for speculation he provides. The rest of the writers on the internet can’t stand him.

It’s a funny thing. J.R.R. Tolkien was the most sociable person imaginable. He was always forming groups: the TCBS, the Coalbiters, the Inklings. The characters he writes are often as social and extroverted as he was. Hobbits spend their time in taverns, Elves convene in big feasts, Butterbur persuades total strangers to join the crowd in the common room, Dwarves go to the effort of digging through solid rock to build huge halls in which they can assemble, the Rohirrim are the descendants of Anglo-Saxons who saw exile as a trauma. Loners are usually evil.

Most of Tolkien’s dedicated fans, by diametric contrast, are introverts. We like the idea of convivial groups, but it would be exhausting to live like that all the time. Fortunately, there’s one couple of happy introverts in The Lord of the Rings with whom we can share our attitude. Tom and Goldberry live the introvert’s ideal life. They’re happy to have short-term visitors, but they didn’t make it easy to be one. They conduct their business as they see fit. They make their little realm exactly the way they want it. Best of all, they have the power to keep it that way. It occurred to me to wonder if there was a connection between the Internet’s fascination with Bombadil and his status as the Great Introvert.

How would we test this hypothesis? Our unique (it is to be hoped) circumstances offered a chance to find out. Usually, the people who discuss Tolkien on the Internet are doubly-likely to be introverted. This weekend was different. Everyone was confined to their house and the weather was forecast to be terrible. There would never be a better chance to find extroverted Tolkien fans on line.

The Experiment

Hypothesis: Introverts are more likely than extroverts to love the character of Tom Bombadil.

Approach: Conduct a web survey, soliciting responses from Twitter and Reddit (r/tolkienfans and r/lotr) to two questions.

What do you think of Tom Bombadil?
1. Love him
2. I understand why movies always leave him out, but it’s disappointing
3. Don’t like him
4. Other (free text)

Are you an introvert or an extrovert? For this purpose, an extrovert is someone who’s energized by interacting with large groups; an introvert is someone who likes to be alone to re-charge after being in a group.
1. Extrovert
2. Kind of in the middle
3. Introvert

The survey ran from April 12th to April 14th.

Results: 1,329 responses were received, of which 1,323 were intelligible. The free-text responses were overwhelmingly of two types. Either they were “both (a) and (b)”, which was reclassified as (a), or they were “neither like nor dislike” which is logically equivalent to and reclassified as (c).

		Reaction
Introversion	Don’t like him	Disappointing	Love him	Total
Extrovert	6	32	69	107
Kind of in the middle	49	192	197	438
Introvert	76	319	383	778
Total	131	543	649	1,323

Discussion: The attempt to find extroverts in online Tolkien discussion forums was probably doomed in any case, but we did get over a hundred of them to contribute. 59% of the sample was a proud introvert. 33% described themselves as neither introverted nor extroverted, but it is impossible to avoid the observation that this latter group’s answers were indistinguishable from those of the former (Pearson’s χ² test, p=.0092).

Unfortunately for our hypothesis, the probability that an extrovert would love Tom Bombadil was 64%, compared to 49% among introverts. Introverts were almost twice as likely to say “don’t like him” as extroverts (11% vs 6%).

Conclusion

Extroverts seem to like people more than introverts do, even when the person is fictional and the test is loaded to favor the introverts. The world is a harsh place, and the beauty of a hypothesis can not save it from the brutality of facts.

Thank you and ring-a-dong-dillo to everyone who helped spread the word!

Ents’ Work

By Joe

On April 4, 2020

In Alliterative Verse, fantasy

Over at Middle-earth Reflections, Olga cheers as the Ents wreck Saruman’s plans for dominating the northwest of Middle-earth. Serves him right. Her previous post talked about the Old English origins of the word “ent” and how Tolkien re-applied the old poets’ feelings of awe for the ancient (Roman) giants who built the ruins around them. That reminds me of what may be my favorite of all the jokes Tolkien buried in The Lord of the Rings. When Theoden & Co. are riding from Helm’s Deep to Isengard, their first sign that something has happened comes in this passage:

Dark lay the vale before them, for the moon had passed into the West, and its light was hidden by the hills. but out of the deep shadow of the dale rose a vast spire of smoke and vapour; as it mounted, it caught the rays of the sinking moon and spread in shimmering billows , black and silver over the starry sky.

LotR, III, viii.

The company is miles away from Isengard at that point. The Old English poem “Maxims II” (as its title indicates, this poem is a long string of maxims saying how the world ought to be) begins,

Cyning sceal rice healdan. Ceastra beoð feorran gesyne,
Orðanc enta geweorc, þa þe on þysse eorðan syndon,
Wrætlic weallstana geweorc.

I translate these first two Wise Sayings as, “A king should hold his realm. A fortress should be visible from afar to all who are on this earth, the skillful work of giants, wonderful works of stone.” The word “Orthanc” sitting there with the Ents tells me that this is something we shouldn’t overlook, and is why Tom Shippey says it’s a joke, deep-down, where you can’t get at it.

Most places the old poets use the phrase enta geweorc, they’re referring to a ruin. So, which was the Ents’ work? The original construction, or the ruining? Grim-voiced men like the poets who wrote “Beowulf” or “The Wanderer” always meant the former. Tolkien’s sense of humor led him to wonder, what if it were the latter? And so the next chapter came to be.

A Dickieson Festpost

By Joe

On March 4, 2020

In Academy and Society, mythgard academy

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.

Lowbrow Rhyming

By Joe

On March 2, 2020

In Slow learner

I needed some terms and history about rhyming for my Mythmoot paper, so off I went to JSTOR. This article by William Harmon at UNC turned out to be a lot of fun. He cites “The Flintstones”. And in a discussion about how hard it is to do quantitative metrical verse in English (compared to Latin or Greek), he begins the sentence, “Some notable poets attempted the feat but…”. Galloping amphibrachs! (Link to Wikipedia because I love their examples.)

I was looking for an explanation of how rhyme and alliteration seemed to switch roles in poetry, and when it happened. It turns out that it wasn’t a switch, it was a long fight between the pop poets and the highbrows. Here’s a fact of which I didn’t have an inkling: rhyme was “shunned by versifiers in all major literatures of classical antiquity (Sanskrit, Greek, Latin) and all other ancient Indo-European literatures including the Germanic, and in Hebrew and other Semitic languages”. (p.26). Here’s one I did: “No sooner was rhymed qualitative verse established in England than it was attacked as vulgar and cheap.” (p. 29) Today’s hip-hop poets are in if not “good” then at least long-established company. The source of the fight is something everyone who learns French, German, Spanish, or Italian notices: everything rhymes in an inflected language. It’s too easy, so unworthy of a highbrow poet.

The biggest thing I learned from this paper is not the thing I came to read it for. Have you ever noticed that poets aren’t very good at meter? Even Shakespeare, for crying out loud: “When my love swears that she is made of truth”, despite what my high-school English teacher said, isn’t iambic pentameter. It’s not “x/x/x/x/x/”, it’s “xx//xxx/x/”. Harmon says that’s OK because the importance of adhering to the meter is low at the beginning of a line, and high at the end. Quantifying the importance is a topic for digital humanities, I would imagine. The other thing we can see there is the persistence of the four-beat line from Old English alliterative verse. Even when Modern English poets are trying to write pentameter, one stress usually gets short-changed. The language seems to relax naturally back into four.

Here’s the thing I really wanted to learn: when a rhyme is between sets of syllables that span across several words, it’s called “heteromerous” or “mosaic rhyme”. (For obvious reasons involving immunity from tenure review, I prefer the latter.) When Edith Sitwell rhymes “gourd and the” with “gardener”, or Eminem rhymes “mom’s spaghetti” with “calm and ready”, that’s mosaic rhyme. Harmon says Gerard Manley Hopkins was the first poet of note to use it. (p. 33)

Another new kind of rhyme has to do with disyllabic words in which both syllables are stressed, requiring rhymes on both. His examples include “hobnailed/bobtailed” (Sitwell), “suitcase/bootlace” (McCartney). This seems to have appeared around 1850. When I look through the pronouncing dictionary for words like that, I find lots of words like “lugnut”, “airport”, “workshop”, “starship”, “broadband”, “deadline”, and so forth. Very modern concepts — I wonder if this is a mode of speech brought to prominence by the Industrial Revolution?

Works Cited

Harmon, William. “English versification: fifteen hundred years of continuity and change.” Studies in Philology 94.1 (1997): 1-37.

Furlongs in hydrography

By Joe

On February 13, 2020

In squibs & crackers

Furlongs are almost always used in measurement on land, analogously to the statute mile. This is the only hydrographical “furlong” in the citations given by the Oxford English Dictionary. They quote Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler (1653) :

VIAT. But Master, do not Trouts see us in the night?

PISC. Yes, and hear, and smel too, both then and in the day time, for Gesner observes, the Otter smels a fish forty furlong off him in the water; and that it may be true, is affirmed by Sir Francis Bacon (in the eighth Century of his Natural History) who there proves, that waters may be the Medium of sounds, by demonstrating it thus, That if you knock two stones together very deep under the water, those that stand on a bank neer to that place may hear the noise without any diminution of it by the water.

Readers of this blog are invited to join the Idiosopher in a fellowship of skepticism.

Ominous Furlongs

By Joe

On February 12, 2020

In fantasy, squibs & crackers

“Furlong” is fun to say, and Professor Tolkien liked to say “furlong” as much as anyone else. He got it into LotR 14 times, one of which occurs as the Fellowship (and the Prancing Pony Podcast) approaches the artificial lake in front of Moria.

I don’t know if this is common, but the use of “furlong” that stuck in my mind as a child was this one:

Almost forgetting for the moment all thoughts of Moby Dick, we now gazed at the most wondrous phenomenon which the secret seas have hitherto revealed to mankind. A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream-colour, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach. No perceptible face or front did it have; no conceivable token of either sensation or instinct; but undulated there on the billows, an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life.

-Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ch.59

Given what’s under the water of that lake, I wonder if Professor Tolkien stuck “furlongs” there on purpose.

Can’t Hear the Forest for the Trees

By Joe

On January 21, 2020

In Slow learner

I have been reading things I thought were selected without pattern from across my range of dilettantish interests. But not so — they’ve turned out to be a lot more connected than I was expecting.

Item: A permaculturist has suggested that I plant a chestnut orchard at the farm. The soil isn’t ideal for that, so I’ve been doing a lot of reading to find out how possible that can be. Penn State knows a lot about disease-resistant hybrids. The American Chestnut Foundation has an interesting program to back-cross resistant hybrids with native chestnuts to try and restore something like the original tree to its original range. Chestnuts sound interesting, and tasty.

Item: From reading various tweets about Native American politics, I came to hear about a book by Robin Wall Kimmerer called Braiding Sweetgrass. Dr. Kimmerer is a botanist who wrote about the interface between Native lore and our emerging understanding of ecological dynamics. A great deal of it is about forests. There’s a chapter entitled “Learning the Grammar of Animacy”, in which she talks about learning the language of a place, by listening. (Some form of the word “listen” occurs 78 times in 350 e-book pages.) Her thesis is that tens of thousands of years 0f coevolution gave Natives the language they need to understand their ecosystem, and “language” is used literally.

“The very best scientists are humble enough to listen.”

“The language scientists speak, however precise,is based on a profound error in grammar, an omission, a grave loss in translation from the native languages of these shores.”

“I come here to listen, to nestle in the curve of the roots in a soft hollow of pine needles…”

Item: The Overstory by Richard Powers has been sitting on my bookshelf for a year. It begins and ends with a chestnut tree. (no spoiler) It has oblique references to J.R.R. Tolkien in several places, as much of the environmentalist movement does. This is a brilliant novel, and reading it immediately after Braiding Sweetgrass was a shock of familiarity. Kimmerer’s ideas underlie Powers’s novel like a hyporheic flow. Towards the end, this line jumped out:

His hand goes out, gesturing toward the conifers. “It amazes me how much they say, when you let them. They’re not that hard to hear.” The man chuckles. “We’ve been trying to tell you that since 1492.” (p.493)

Item: Megan Fontenot talks about apocalypse and healing in the latest issue of Tolkien Studies. She draws connections between Tolkien and the shamanic tradition. She says our lack of communication with the forest is a consequence of the Fall.

Here, the break that Eliade identifies between heaven and earth appears also between humankind and “nature”. Communication has been broken off in this relationship also, is indeed impossible, save to a privileged few.

So, are we buying into the idea that Native Americans are prelapsarian? The subject is well represented on line; Google would be happy to provide me with a few thousand documents. I don’t think I’ll read them. Such matters are too subtle for me, and better left to the theologians. I’m just going to marvel at how I thought I was randomly choosing books and papers from a broad set of interests, and ended up instead with a tightly-coupled network. I’ve included two vertices on the graph without grey circles, to represent influences mentioned by the authors, but which I haven’t read myself.

Network of recent reading

Works Cited

Fontenot, Megan N. “The Art of Eternal Disaster: Tolkien’s Apocalypse and the Road to Healing.” Tolkien Studies, vol. 16, 2019, p. 91-109. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/tks.2019.0008.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. United States, Milkweed Editions, 2013.

Powers, Richard. The Overstory: A Novel. United States, W. W. Norton, 2018.

A Voyage in Middle-earth at the BNF

By Joe

On December 30, 2019

In fantasy, Vive la France

There was no time to get to Oxford for their big Tolkien exhibition in 2018 and I had too much homework to see it when it came to New York, but where will wants not, a way opens, and I was in Paris for the French version, entitled “A Voyage in Middle-earth”. It was the day after Christmas and despite the transport strike, the exhibition hall at the National Library of France was packed. Someone had to come out before the next person could come in. When I came out the exit, a cheer went up from the group waiting to enter. (It’s nice to be appreciated.) People of all ages were there, including both eager adults dragging recalcitrant teenagers and eager children dragging indulgent adults. I’m afraid I may have held up the line several times by stopping to read the Tengwar or the Old English, but I wasn’t the only one. It was fun to notice that Tolkien made spelling mistakes in Tengwar — the difference between creating a language and “just making stuff up” is that spelling mistakes are impossible in the latter.

Most of the exhibit was works by Tolkien or derivative works by Pauline Baynes, the tapestry-weavers of Aubusson, and plenty of others. (I had the Baynes poster on my bedroom wall, and now it’s in a museum. This is what getting old feels like.) There was a generous helping of Gustave Doré: about 10% of the exhibit. It works surprisingly well. For an example, here’s how Doré portrayed the arrival of Gandalf and Erkenbrand to lift the siege of Helm’s Deep.

Under the rubric “contextualization”, the organizers paired many of JRRT’s works with real-world analogues of things mentioned in his texts. I enjoyed seeing these as much as the directly-connected artifacts. They had a palantir, a credible Arkenstone, and they even made an attempt at the Silmarils. Those last were opals from NZ, Australia, and Mexico, illuminated so they glowed.

The fate of vanquished dragonflies

The exhibit had a bronze-age Greek sword that was the right size and shape for Sting. The Horn of Roland was a pretty good match for Boromir’s horn, especially since it has a big split in it. Elves love Art Nouveau, and the jewelers of Maison Fouquet were obviously in touch with the hero of “Errantry”.

Some items were included with only the most tenuous of connections (Charlemagne’s chess set?) but interesting nevertheless. At least there were oliphaunts involved.

The Death Dealer by Frank Frazetta

The more I think about it, the more I like the way they added the contextual objects. When I first read LotR, in the days when fantasy was strange and hard to find, anyone who wanted to know what unfamiliar objects looked like had to hit the encyclopedia. Therefore we found out exactly what JRRT meant by (e.g.) “battle-axe”. Today the supply of images of fantastic weaponry is unlimited. Everybody knows lots of examples of what a battle-axe looks like thanks to fan art, movies, anime, and video games… but 90% of those are not at all what Tolkien was thinking of. The historical battle-axe blade here was about five inches across rather than the 24-36 inches common in fantasy art. Can you imagine Gimli running from Rauros to Fangorn carrying one of those monsters?

Wings are much more practical than horns.

One item particularly pleasing to this Idiosopher was a winged helmet such as they wore in Gondor. I got some pushback for saying Gondor was like ancient Egypt (lots of people want it to be Byzantine Constantinople), but the Wise Clerks of Paris assure us Minas Tirith’s soldiers were wearing hats from the 4th Century BCE.

Altogether a delightful way to spend a rainy December afternoon. My thanks to all the people who made it happen.

Coda

French Tolkien-nerds are better dressed than their US counterparts, but just as maladroit. We didn’t go three minutes without somebody triggering one of the infrared sensors that beep when you get to close to an artifact (only one was me). An informal scan suggests that less than a quarter of those incidents involved the artifact the person was actually looking at.

Jardin des Plantes

By Joe

On December 26, 2019

In Vive la France

Swung by my old neighborhood today. The botanical gardens are dressed up totally-insane for Christmas. The Jardin des Plantes re-uses the estates of the 18th-Century naturalist le Comte de Buffon, one of my old encyclopedia buddies. It has a big statue of Lamarck, the “creator of the theory of evolution”, featuring a panel where his daughter reassures him that “History will avenge you, father”.[1]

At night this is all lit up, perhaps because the people who designed the exhibits were, too. However, the thing that really made the trip memorable for me was the way the sign out front has been defaced.

I completely understand anyone who loves Paris for the refinement of its cuisine, the elegance of its women, or the creativity of its artists, but for me the glory of the city shall always lie in the fusion of hyper-education and pointless vulgarity exhibited by its graffiti.

(Oh, all right, if you think it will help.)

[1] I have just learned from Wikipedia that Lamarck fought in the Pomeranian War, which must have been the cutest bloodbath in history.

Reading Tolkien with Old English

By Joe

On December 7, 2019

In Alliterative Verse, fantasy, Slow learner

This past year I’ve had the experience of hearing The Lord of the Rings with fresh ears, now that I’ve learned Old English. The first thing that jumps out differently is the names, like seeing “Haleth” in a list, and recognizing a word for “warrior”. At the Council of Elrond we meet Galdor, whose name means a magic charm.

In Rohan, the Old English echoes become louder. Merry is knighted as “Holdwine”, which I now see is a nice double entendre: sure, he can hold his drink, but also hold means “loyal” and wine means “friend”. Here’s another thing I would never have done before: I’ve searched the Old English corpus for historical figures named “holdwine”, just to see if there’s a reference I’m missing. (Can’t find any.)

Treebeard and Legolas like alliterative proverbs. So do I. Perhaps it’s a function of age. Even Gimli gets into the act: “indeed, sooner would I bear a horse than be borne by one.” The first word is modern English that could have been spoken by anyone in the book. After the first two words, though, the sentence turns into a good alliterative line. Now that I’ve read a lot of old English verse, Gimli’s motivation in saying this sounds different. It sounds like he began the sentence in his usual idiom, but when he got two words in he noticed that he could make a witty epigram in the Rohirric style.

That style permeates Book III. Gandalf, making introductions at Meduseld: “And here beside me is Aragorn son of Arathorn, the heir of Kings, and it is to Mundburg that he goes”. On first reading, that sentence sounded weird to a teen-aged idiosopher. Now I get it. Describing a character three different ways in a row is a technique that’s all over Anglo-Saxon poetry. It’s reinforced by the alliteration++ on “Aragorn”, “Arathorn”, and “heir”. (Is there a word for going beyond alliteration, matching the whole first syllable, like a modern English rhyme turned backwards?)

The ancient roots of that sentence go deeper, though. What really struck me when I first read LotR was that weird comma-spliced extra sentence at the end, with the second part just barely related to the first part. English teachers constantly correct their students for doing that. JRRT was an English teacher. What gives? It turns out Anglo-Saxons loved conjunction splices. For example, Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 888: “Queen Æthelswith who was King Alfred’s sister died on the way to Rome, and her body lies at Pavia.”

This is the first of several ways Gandalf is being more British than the Queen in this chapter. “It is the will of Théoden King that none should enter his gates, save those who know our tongue and are our friends,” says the guard, so Gandalf lays it on thick.

There was one disappointment. “Éomer” is in Beowulf. Where did Éowyn come from? Her name doesn’t exist in the corpus, but “Þeowen” does. It’s a common variant of “Þeow”. “Handmaiden” is the nicest translation of that word (the others all connote slavery). Not cool! However, that word is part of Queen Wealhþeow‘s name. Maybe there’s a positive meaning we don’t have in the surviving literature. It wouldn’t surprise me if Tolkien inferred an unattested name that must have existed somewhere.

Altogether, this has been a profitable exercise. It’s not easy to have a fresh perspective, the ~50th time one reads a book. When I signed up for Intro to Anglo-Saxon at Signum last winter, the universal reaction of my friends was, “Why?” Maybe now I know the answer.