Joan Bushwell,  in an old piece called “The Tolkienian War on Science”.
(h/t Daniel Stride), explains Fëanor in a way that makes him (to me) almost sympathetic. I do have one big disagreement with the author, though. I’m on board when she calls Fëanor “the master smith/scientist/engineer”. But then she builds an analogy between Morgoth’s theft of the Silmarils and the current anxiety engineers have about intellectual property. No way. Fëanor is not upset about the theft of “intellectual property”. It’s clear that Fëanor gave away intellectual property freely – look at the alphabets for the best example. Silmarils are different. When Morgoth stole the Silmarils, Fëanor didn’t have them any more. In fact, he couldn’t even make new ones. They were like moon rocks or glacial core samples: literally irreplaceable, since we don’t fly to the Moon and the glaciers are melting.

“Intellectual property” is a bizarre legal fiction because it’s exactly the opposite of Silmarils. When (not “if”) intellectual property is stolen, the possessions of the developer are unchanged. The only thing the developer loses is the secrecy. The potential for profit.

Gandalf was fond of lecturing on topics like this, so pontification must not be too reprehensible. There are several reasons why people would want to own things and keep thieves away.

1. They need things to live their lives, e.g. a wheelchair or a craftsman‘s tools
2. A wish to preserve the things from harm
3. The pleasure of accumulating things
4. They want the status that possessions provide
5. To exploit them for advantage in battle or its modern equivalent, trade

JRRT approves of number 1: “Would you part an old man from his support?” (III,vi) JRRT approves of number 2: “It shall be set in imperishable crystal to be an heirloom of my house…”. (II, viii) [1]

Numbers 3 & 4 are deadly sins. I’m pretty sure Morgoth was working from one of these or the other.

Number 5 isn’t morally nailed down outside of LotR, but Faramir was unambiguous: “If it were a thing that gave advantage in battle, I can well believe that Boromir, the proud and fearless, often rash, ever anxious for the victory of Minas Tirith (and his own glory therein), might desire such a thing and be allured by it.” (IV, v) Either way, it is the only one of the five that we know wasn’t motivating Fëanor.

Maybe the whole debate over Fëanor can be boiled down to an argument over which motivation he thought he was acting on.

[1] Yes, I could have chosen more weighty quotations, but Idiosophy is a hobbitish discipline.  By the way, is anything else in Middle-earth “imperishable”?

Over at Earth and Oak, there’s an interesting discussion going on about how seeking after knowledge can destroy characters in Tolkien’s writing. The two that are held up for our inspection are Gollum and Saruman.

By chance, a wonderful contrast to Gollum just came across my twitter feed. The Japanese space agency has just landed a pair of rovers on an asteroid, and photos are coming in.  Gollum was disappointed to learn that ‘all the “great secrets” under the mountain had turned out to be just empty night…” (LotR, I, ii). Hayabusa 2 took off into the empty night, knowing perfectly well that there were things there “which have not been discovered since the beginning.” (ibid.) Let’s go find out what they are.

The surface of asteroid Ryugu. Source

I’ve joviated at length about how I disagree with JRRT about the morality of seeking knowledge. He seems to come down on it pretty hard in LotR, despite his interest in science in real life. [1] I think the resolution is one layer down: the problem is more about keeping things secret than about finding them out in the first place. C.S. Lewis was on about the same thing in That Hideous Strength, after all.

I feel confident that the team running the Minerva II1 rovers will not come to a bad end because they’re not trying to keep secrets.  Publishing discoveries the moment they come in is a foolproof antidote for any of the moral hazards faced by scientists.

You can guess what Idiosophers think about current intellectual-property law.

[1] Now that I think of it, why is breaking white light into its component colors foolish when Saruman does it, but a thing of beauty and wonder when the Men of Gondor divert a waterfall at Henneth Annûn?

Stephen Winter says a lot of nice things about Idiosophy over at Wisdom from the Lord of the Rings this week.

One thing I’d like to clarify: In case anyone concluded that the disjunctions in time in Middle-earth are a weakness in the story, I think they’re intentional. When Tolkien wanted his creation to resemble our world, he was careful to make sure his facts were correct. We have seen this in astronomy, botany, cosmology, ecology, and even in quantum physics.

But if there’s one discipline Tolkien didn’t respect, it’s economics. He went out of his way to break economic laws. The logic of economics is the logic of the Industrial Revolution, and Middle-earth was going to have none of it. So The Shire and Bree have money, but no government that coins it. The places with the most advanced technology are the ones with the lowest population density. Fast technological development in Isengard is the product of one single mind, not a collaborative community. All of these things contradict well-established economic theorems.

The one place I can think of where economic logic applies is in Lake Town. The stories people tell about the King Under the Mountain are a good application of Keynesian macroeconomics, but we readers are not encouraged to think of the Master and his guild-inspired community leaders as heroes.

That, I think, is the purpose of the steep time-gradients on the map of Middle-earth — to renounce Adam Smith and all his works. Faërie and Economics are natural enemies.

Stephen Hawking passed away today.  Hawking’s cosmology began at the Beginning, with cosmogenesis.  J.R.R. Tolkien included cosmogenesis in his mythology, too.  There is a connection, unlikely though that might seem. Here’s the text from Tolkien:

There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made. And he spoke to them, propounding to them themes of music; …

Why music? Well, ever since the Romantic period, other artists have envied the musicians. “All art aspires to the condition of music,” said Walter Pater. “Poets such as E.T.A. Hoffmann … conceived of instrumental music as the language of a higher realm,” as Jonathan Friedmann put it. If you’re a Modernist writer, and you want to express something exalted, you use the language of music to do it.

But what exactly is music? There’s no way JRRT wanted us to imagine the Valar sitting in a concert hall, so this must be referring to something outside the mainstream definition.  When we’re talking about cosmogenesis, what counts as music and what doesn’t?  Well, “music” is only slightly better defined than “literature”. I like this definition from Robert Greenberg: “music is patterns of sound in time.”  [1]

Ainulindalë does not sound like the way musicians talk, so eventually I thought of looking at it as a scientist. From a physicist’s point of view, this passage looks very different.  It’s all about building the framework within which creation can take place: the introduction of time.

This is the idea behind the Hartle-Hawking state of the universe. At the Big Bang (and shortly thereafter), time and space weren’t so clearly differentiated as we see them now, looking (as we do) at length scales of a meter or so. Essentially, there wasn’t “time” per se. The four dimensions were all muddled together. When things cooled down a bit (literally), the symmetry was broken and we got the familiar dimensions, three spatial and one temporal. Stephen Hawking, the more famous member of the team that came up with this idea, wrote about it in A Brief History of Time, in a way that’s accessible to the educated layman. (When physicists are talking to each other, it sounds like this. The American Physical Society has made all of Hawking’s papers freely available if you scroll down on that link.) Here’s roughly how Hawking described it:

Our universe (left) and the way it was during the Big Bang (right)

The figure on the left shows a body moving in space (horizontal axis) and time (vertical). The “light cone” (imagine spinning the picture around the vertical axis) is the maximum velocity a body can have: the speed of light.  Massive bodies move like the black arrow, using up more time to cover less space than a light ray would. Back at the Big Bang, though, Hawking’s work showed that it all looked like space.  All lines moved sideways out from the origin. Moving in time didn’t happen until the Universe had expanded from its initial state.  Without time, there couldn’t be music.

The opening of Ainulindalë, therefore, can be read as a metaphor of the introduction of time into the universe. Or, in current jargon, the transition from Hartle-Hawking to Minkowski states.  The second sentence in the quotation above describes Eru separating time out from the other dimensions. “Music”, here, is a synecdoche of time.

[1] This is very much a late-20th-century definition, by the way.  Before the musical traditions of other continents were absorbed into musicology, and before the radical experiments of later Modernists, the definition looked rather different.

Like Butterbur, I think less than I talk, and slower. This particular case doesn’t count as seeing through a brick wall, though, more like an open window.

The implication of Tom’s comment on my previous post just sank in: J.R.R. Tolkien did finish his time-travel story, after all!

Merry & Pippin’s Journey

The fay places are omitted so the scale would be more visible.  Fourth-Age Gondor is in the 12th Century because I had the Brothers Hildebrandt calendar on my bedroom wall when I was young.