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’, Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum 49 (Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 1972).

Commentary on some talks I heard at Mythmoot V. They were recorded; when the recordings are posted I’ll add a link here.

Lee Smith – Getting sick of it

Lee looks at sickness in two sagas: Egils Saga Skallagrímssonar and Laxdæla Saga, and there is no way I could have spelled those correctly without looking it up in her abstract.

Illness is housekeeping, as she puts it. It’s a way to get characters off stage, if the author is denying them death in battle. The only three ways to die are battle, sickness, and old age. This is something I’d never noticed before: no accidents? Nobody gets kicked by a horse, or gets caught in an avalanche? Maybe vikings thought those were comedy, not fit for a saga. 3 characters who die of illness pair certainty that their illness will be fatal with noting they’ve never been sick before. People in real life do this, too, but these days they’re frequently wrong. These guys want to establish houses, and keep watch over them after they die. They’re aiming for “post-mortem agency” (another gem from Lee’s unique idiom), an naturally their descendants go mad from the haunting.

This was a funny talk about illness and death, which I think is probably the right attitude to take when reading sagas.

Jennifer Ewing – The bitter watches of the night

Jennifer’s point is that there are a lot of parallels between Anne Elliot in Jane Austen’s Persuasion to Éowyn of Rohan in The Lord of the Rings.

To begin with, both women are stuck in similar environments. Home is where tradition and memory are kept. Going out to work makes you forgetful. What Aragorn says about Éowyn in the Houses of Healing lines up nicely. Both women feel walls closing in. Both women are neglected by the men around them. It’s not Éomer who takes Éowyn’s side, it’s Gandalf and Háma. Anne is isolated by her family and others, and spends her time taking care of an aging uncle. Sounds familiar. Éowyn leaves her people to live in Ithilien, in the same way Anne wants a mariner husband who will take her far away. Captain Wentworth’s letter is parallel with Faramir’s speech in the Houses. The two do disagree about duty. Éowyn sees it as a cage; Anne sees it as a source of strength.

Jennifer’s conclusion is that JRRT can write as good a female character as writers of mainstream fiction.

Well, that started a lively discussion! John Garth noted that Jennifer carefully avoided claiming that Anne Elliot was an influence on Tolkien’s character, but the idea ought to be pursued. The context of 19th century society informed JRRT, who actually mentioned William Morris’s The Roots of the Mountains as an influence. That book contains the transitional character of a woman who goes to war. Jennifer replied that women actually were going to war by 1944, and dressing in men’s clothes while they did that.

Kay Ben-Avraham wasn’t having that last conclusion. She says you can’t put JRRT on a level with Austen, without addressing the Smurfette Principle. Jennifer’s reply was that most of the male characters in LotR are just cannon-fodder; only a few are fleshed out as fully as Éowyn. She’s better drawn than Éomer, for example.

Alicia Fox-Lenz says the centrality of the female characters is what makes the legendarium separate. The true sign of a hero in LotR is that a character can heal, and sing, and cook, and garden. Not masculine attributes. Kate Neville backed her up, pointing out that the entire concept of hobbits is a sort of feminine embodiment.

Then John Garth made a brilliant observation: LotR is a story about men going to war, not a story about women. But there’s Éowyn in the middle of it, a female hero in a men’s story exactly the way Dernhelm is concealed among the host of the Rohirrim. Applause.

Jennifer said her talk was drastically abridged from its original form. The audience clamored for her to publish the whole thing.

Tom Hillman – Lame Sovereignty in Melkor and Man in The Children of Hurin

This paper is already on line (yes, of course starting with Plutarch) so I’ll talk about the Q&A. The first question was that lameness doesn’t mean the same thing to us as it meant to the ancients, where “ancient” means “before antibiotics, X-rays, and other effective medical care”. In the ancient world, everybody knew someone who was lame. Does that affect the meanings of how these stories should be read? (I was wondering this myself.) The answer is best found in textual history – which character gets lamed by the author? The first one to appear in the development of the story, or is the lame character a foil for someone else?

Kate asked another good question – who would want to be compared to Turin? The story of Turin is the only story about Men that Elves tell each other. Alan Sisto followed up on that by pointing out that Elves can’t escape fate, and they kind of envy Men their apparent ability to change the course of the world. Turin is interesting to them because he’s more like them; he doesn’t have the human talent for wriggling out of fate. Tom wrapped it up by saying that it was a nice complement to our human fascination with Elvish immortality.

Alyssa House-Thomas – Planet of Exile and the Frontiers of the Human

Planet of Exile is the novel that begins Ursula K. LeGuin’s Hainish cycle. She was trying out new concepts, and we can see themes partially developed here that will appear in their full form in the later novels in the series. Here, there is a conflict between a humanoid race and some marooned Earthlings, which has to be set aside as an invading force comes into view. This sets up a Romeo-and-Juliet situation. The two humanoid races can’t interbreed, which is only the most biological level of the exploration of the boundaries of what is human. There’s a development of touching, at the physical level. The top level is etiquette. Alyssa worked from the taboo on looking another person straight in the eye for a big chunk of her talk.

What interested me was the way Alyssa called out the use of light. The skins of the two humanoid races are different colors, and the light-dark contrast is a launching point for LeGuin’s Taoist inspiration in the book. As Alyssa put it, “light means building connections”. That’s definitely a way to get an old physicist to prick up his ears. Exchanging light signals is the core of special relativity. The Hainish cycle will lead us to the physicist Shevek in The Dispossessed, who overthrows Einstein’s relativity in favor of simultaneity. And touching is an electromagnetic interaction, accomplished by the exchange of virtual photons between two extended bodies. Could this have been intentional? Like Alyssa, I’m inclined to doubt it, but the commonality of language is intriguing.