Daniel Stride, kiwi clarissimus, points us to a YouTuber who does a not-bad job of speculating on what JRR Tolkien would have thought about generative AI. A useful application of AI would be to turn that 20-minute talking-head video into a blog post I could read in five. A really useful application of AI would be to take a video of a conference presentation and turn it into a written document of what I wished I’d said. But I digress. What was I talking about? Oh, yes.

“Girl Next Gondor” thinks that JRRT would have seen Large Language Models as a vindication of his ideas about language in “On Fairy-stories”: that we can abstract the word “green” from grass and “sun” from the sky and conceive of a “green sun”, which is the fundamental act of fantasy. That’s pretty close to what LLMs do. When the temperature is low, they only connect green with green things, but if you turn the temperature higher the model will connect adjectives with a much more diverse set of nouns.

Daniel kind of agrees, but notes that of the various kinds of magic, LLMs do not engage in the good kind. They don’t produce enchantment, because there is no enchanter. The person thinking of the fantastical situation is writing a prompt of a few dozen words, not, say, a novel. The resulting block of text is not really a work of art. LLMs produce a kind of mindless, inescapable magic in which we blunder around. We are not enchanted; maybe the word “emprompted” could be coined and pressed into service.

I’m less optimistic. Tolkien saw this coming — at his “Hobbit Dinner” in Amsterdam in 1958 he said, “the Age of Paper is ending; the Age of the Gadget begins.” Looking around the world, he said “… I see that Saruman has many descendants.” LLMs are definitely the work of one of those. As is generally the case, an LLM “cannot make, not real new things of its own.” [LR 6.01.109] It just twists existing language to whatever purpose it’s given. But we know what a maker of twisted language is in the Legendarium: that’s the essence of dragons. Like Glaurung, an LLM assembles words to achieve its goal without regard for truth. The goal for an LLM is maximizing likelihood conditional on the prompt, where the goal of the dragon was ruining Hurin’s life, but the effect can be the same. 

Why would something as innocuous as maximizing a function turn out as evil as a dragon? In Letter 153 to Peter Hastings, Tolkien was talking about military contractors developing weapons, but the words he used sound painfully applicable to the LLM-mania of our current crop of tech oligarchs. They may not be intrinsically evil, but “things being as they are, and the nature and motives of the economic masters who provide all the means for their work being as they are, are pretty certain to serve evil ends.”

I just re-read That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis for the first time since I started studying the Inklings. It’s a completely different experience, now that I know the subtexts of what he’s talking about. Everyone gets the “Numinor” references, but for someone who’s read Owen Barfield and Charles Williams, the book turns out to be stuffed with easter eggs. ⁴ This line jumped out at me particularly: “… they had all, by various routes, come too far either to consider [Merlin’s] art mere legend and imposture, or to equate it exactly with what the Renaissance called Magic.” (p.200) It reminded me of Galadriel’s line, “this is what your folk would call magic. I believe; though I do not understand clearly what they mean; and they seem also to use the same word of the deceits of the Enemy.” (LR2.07.080) That change in the meaning of the word “magic” is intriguing. Galadriel comes from an earlier Age than the hobbits. She’s from the Elder Days, whereas the Shire is post-medieval.⁵ Hobbits think and talk like we do. Therefore, they use the word “magic” in a way she doesn’t get. Galadriel’s line emphasizes her distance from them, as if it needed more emphasis.

Not here! by Olena Panasovska

Galadriel has a Ring that she uses “to preserve all things unstained”. That’s Elrond’s phrasing (LR2.02.240), but “on the land of Lorien there was no stain,” (LR2.06.160) so Galadriel and Elrond are of one mind on this. What kind of stain are they talking about? Lewis’s line gave me a new way to read that: the stain is Renaissance rationalism, the kind that gave us the twin children Science and Magic. Galadriel is preserving a pre-modern concept of Nature that doesn’t have a place for Early Modern concepts like those. She is using her Ring to make sure that there will be no Renaissance while she has the power to prevent it. She’s not alone: Elrond is called a “lore-master” by Denethor (who should know). A lore-master is a worthwhile person to have around, but he doesn’t create new knowledge like a scientist does. Rivendell has libraries, but I’d be surprised if it had a laboratory. And Gandalf, who held the third Ring, delivered a memorable warning against foolish scientism.⁶

I have learned, whenever I get an idea for one of these bloviations, to check what Tom Shippey has to say on the topic. (He’s always there before me.) He extracts from the Inklings’ writings an opposition of magia, goeteia, scientism, and religion.⁷ That Hideous Strength is about goeteia and scientism ganging up on religion, which defends itself successfully when it’s reinforced by Merlin’s magia. Shippey identifies a common theme among the Inklings, lamenting the loss of authority by religion as the new knowledge. That may be the stain Galadriel is talking about.

But why should she, in a world without religion as we think of it, care? Religion to her is completely irrelevant — she’s actually met most of the people a religion would be aimed at worshiping, though until Frodo’s visit, they’re not taking her calls. Why is she afraid of a Renaissance? Well, that one has already been figured out. Tolkien thought that the Renaissance (in its guise as the Age of Discovery) had put an end to Faërie by sending explorers around the globe and finding just more land and more people. He suggested that shrinking to Shakespearean proportions was their defense. Perhaps Galadriel was willing to diminish to an extent, but not all the way to flitting around an English garden on moth wings. And then, of course, will come the Enlightenment, and fairies are doomed.

Two thoughts that suddenly got connected.

Thought 1:

In Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings we learn that in his youth Aragorn journeyed through Rohan and Gondor and won fame under the name of Thorongil. (LR A.1.iv.63-67.) He made quite an impression on the people of those countries at the time, but a few decades later things are different. We don’t hear of any old men in Rohan who recognize him, even though he rode with Thengel, father of Theoden. Denethor apparently recognizes Aragorn through the image in his palantir, so his appearance can’t have changed too much. But then Prince Imrahil, who is of similar age, says “Shall we not now send for the Lord Aragorn?” when Aragorn is standing a few feet away. (LR 5.08.041) Imrahil doesn’t notice him until he speaks.

But here’s the thing – Aragorn is “at least 6 ft. 6.”. ⁸ Even great warriors like Boromir aren’t that tall. ⁹ How is a bean-pole like Aragorn not immediately recognized by everyone over the age of 50? His reception in Edoras should have been less laden with suspicion, and more like, “Eala, Thorongil! Long time no see! How’s the weather up there?”

Thought 2:

The odd shrinkage of Elves. Medieval fairies could be small, or very large, or human-sized. “Taking the broadest known parameters, we find that size can range from fourteen feet high to a being small enough to sit on a cowslip.” ¹⁰ Victorian fairies are uniformly tiny, though. Tolkien wondered about this in “On Fairy-stories”. ¹¹

As for diminutive size: I do not deny that the notion is a leading one in modern use. I have often thought that it would be interesting to try to find out how that has come to be so; but my knowledge is not sufficient for a certain answer.

The Professor goes on to speculate that elves started to shrink during the Age of Discovery, when Europeans sailed all around the world and found no Faërie anywhere. In order for Elves to continue to be a thing people could believe in, they needed to be able to hide from view. It was advantageous for them to shrink. The process was exactly parallel to evolutionary pressure: just as squirrels are now the right size to fit through the holes in a chain-link fence, Elves met the challenge by shrinking until they could hide practically anywhere, even behind garden flowers.

Synthesis:

Evolution by natural selection is tempting, but it is fraught with difficulties when we’re dealing with immortal creatures. Fortunately, there’s an easier answer, provided by Tolkien himself. The way the cloaks of Lothlorien hide you from view must be to make you look short. Otherwise, there’s no way Aragorn could have maintained his anonymity while standing half a head above everyone around. Apparently it’s not just Galadriel and her maidens who can make those; it’s a common skill among Elves. Maybe it’s the only way they know to make clothes. It also explains the cloaks’ preternatural effectiveness in getting Sam and Frodo to Mount Doom — knock a foot off the perceived height of hobbits and they’re just barely macroscopic.

I’m not just making this up. Let’s jump over to “Smith of Wootton Major”.¹² Alf’s dramatic revelation at the end:

’Would you spare a few moments for the King of Faery?’ the other answered. To Nokes’s dismay he grew taller as he spoke. He threw back his cloak.”

In 1939, Prof. Tolkien’s knowledge was not sufficient, but by 1967 he had figured it out.

Tom Hillman ponders the relationship between humans and Faërie over on his blog. I think he’s right that Tolkien thinks it’s our fëa that doesn’t belong in Faërie. But there’s another conclusion we can draw from the literature that says something Tolkien would have liked a lot less.  It’s not The Fall, or positivism, or statistical analysis, or the industrial revolution that separated us from the Fair Folk.

I’ve mentioned before that, according to Rudyard Kipling, the Protestant Reformation chased the fairies out of England:

This Reformatories tarrified the Pharisees same as the reaper goin’ round a last stand o’ wheat tarrifies rabbits. They packed into the Marsh from all parts, and they says, “Fair or foul, we must flit out o’ this, for Merry England’s done with, an’ we’re reckoned among the Images.” (p.242)

Of course, the Faërie creatures of the Continent had been chased out much earlier. The faun in Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword¹⁵, whom Skafloc meets in his elf foster-father’s lands, says:

The new god whose name I cannot speak was come to Hellas. There was no more place for the old gods and the old beings who haunted the land. (p.21)

The faun is fleeing West, like Tolkien’s elves. But it doesn’t stop in England. I heard a familiar echo when I was reading the introduction to Alan Lomax’s collection of American folk s0ngs.¹⁶

With most of the Southern Negro ministers and teachers urging their followers to abandon the old songs, a flood of jazz and of tawdry gospel hymns comes in. A black giant in the Nashville penitentiary resolutely refused to sing an entirely innocuous levee camp work song since he was a Hardshell Baptist and his church regarded such melodies as “Devil’s songs” or “sinful songs.” (p. xxxi)

They never stop! Fortunately, the world is round, so the Fair Folk, and now the Singing Folk, can’t be cornered. They can always keep going west. I recommend Japan, where the anime industry would welcome them.

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

Eleanor Parker’s excellent newsletter this morning is about Old English people gearing up for Lent by eating everything they can. ²¹ She points us to Kate Thomas’s “For the Wynn” essay on cheese. That essay is wonderful for many reasons, but one that jumped out at me was the part about the use of cheese in jurisprudence:

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

Of course, my mind went immediately to the pool beneath Henneth Annun, where Frodo compels Smeagol with force majeure: “I shall take Precious, and I shall say: make him swallow the bones and choke. Never taste fish again.” [LR 4.06.047] ²²

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

Notes