I can’t believe I just noticed this: Hobbits don’t like boats, right? The Shire is a fictional version of the West Midlands, right?
Administrative Regions of England
Of the nine regions of England, eight are on the coast. I’d expect that from a country that’s (a) an island and (b) a maritime power. One of the regions doesn’t touch the sea. It’s only natural that, compared to the others, West Midlanders would get a reputation as incompetent mariners.
So is this the origin of the sidelong remarks in The Lord of the Rings about how incompetent hobbits are on the water? Even if it’s not, I’m perfectly happy to find another reason that the Brandybucks belong in the “liminal” category.
Next question – is this why mariners are exotic heroes from far away in LotR and The Silmarillion?
My abstract has been accepted for the Mythgard Midatlantic Speculative Fiction Symposium 2016. What am I going to talk about? It’s not really done yet, but half-baked ideas are the soul of this blog, so here goes.
Applying geography to LotR worked pretty well. How do I extend this to other books? Since Tolkien, it’s almost required for fantasy novels to have maps in them. Fantasy novels that include maps invite geographic analysis, but it’s rare to find an author who spends the effort to build the understory of a world to the extent that JRRT did.
In a nutshell: Speculative fiction begins with world-building, so it ought to be the easiest genre to which science-based criticism could be applied. However, scientific approaches were invented for the real world, which is much larger than any one sub-creator’s imagination. How do I constrain the breadth of the analysis to a scope that is consistent with the author’s intent?
So my talk will show three examples of where geographical analysis gets you. I’ll start with re-using parts of this summer’s project for The Lord of the Rings, in which geography illuminates implicit references in the text. Then I’ll review Lyman Stone’s analysis of A Song of Ice and Fire, which runs aground because George R.R. Martin didn’t use geography for anything — Stone’s analysis exceeded the bounds of the requirements of the story. My third example will be Tigana, by Guy Gavriel Kay. Kay has lots of maps in that book, but doesn’t use geography for the story per se. I think he’s using it like a website theme: there are countless details about his world that don’t interest him; his maps and the references to them in the text give the reader permission to fill in any gaps with Renaissance Italy, and it will be fine. There’s a tangible virtue to that – Kay’s story is the only one of the three that fits into a single volume.
It is done. Fertig. Au fait. About 10 people came to my talk, which was one of three in that time slot, so I got my fair share. The audience seemed to like it. The level of glassy-eyed stares in the audience was gratifyingly low. Maybe I’ve learned something about talking to non-scientists since I last taught intro physics.
There was a sardonic remark during the opening plenary session about scientists who stick their noses into areas where they have no expertise. (She meant Fred Hoyle.) Thanks, whoever you were, for setting the bar low for me. Low bar = no pressure. (Trust me, that kind of thing has physicists rolling in the aisles with laughter).
I have a bad habit. Over the years, I’ve drifted into a presentation mode of putting graphs up on the screen and improvising the interpretation based on reactions from the audience. That doesn’t work well in a context where (a) they’re expecting me to read from a carefully-written paper, and (b) they’re not waiting to pounce on the slightest error in my Ansatz. Consequently, I said “um” a lot more than I should have. Next time, I’m just going to read the paper and see what happens.
In the question period, we had a pleasant discussion. Almost everyone had something to contribute. Kara Samborsky [1] pointed out that, while I’d been treating the parochialism of hobbits as a running joke through my talk, the Brexit vote seems to indicate that staying where you came from is a serious characteristic of the English. Her observation jibes awesomely well with James Cheshire’s results — the West Midlands (i.e., the trustworthy hobbits) had the highest percentage of “Leave” votes of any region in England. I thought I was giving a science/literature talk, not a current-events/literature talk!
One more “thank you” to everyone who came. Based on their responses, I need to make some tweaks to the paper before I publish it. The good thing about that is that I can give another presentation of the revised version. (In conformance with Arrow’s Other Theorem.)
[1] The blog takes no responsibility for misspellings of Slavic names in the Latin alphabet.
Now that I’ve recovered from my trip to the Big Apple, and the bottle of Pellegrino is half empty at my elbow, I have a chance to write down what I saw and heard at the NY Tolkien Conference 2016. I got to meet a lot of interesting people, and hear a lot of interesting ideas. Mission accomplished! The conference was held at Baruch College (part of the City University of New York), and the obvious joke was already made for me: When I registered, they handed me a rubber wristband reading “Baruch Khazâd”. Let the record show that I did in fact pass a short man with a long white beard on 24th Street as I entered the building.
Here are my notes on the talks I was able to attend. Bronwen put a bunch of videos online — Hurrah!
The Inklings were no scientists, but they were members of a generation that could take for granted a substantial familiarity with science among their audience. C. S. Lewis used current developments in astronomy to build credibility for his work, even when it led to some odd juxtapositions. My favorite is the fact that Narnia, which is geometrically flat in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, has correct stellar evolution above it in The Last Battle. Kris informed us that the stellar evolution part was brand-new science, just publicized by Fred Hoyle. Lewis used it despite his slight regard for Hoyle.
This is the second academic discipline in which I’ve been present for a Hoyle-bashing session. The thing about Hoyle is that his ideas were wrong as often as they were right, but proving him wrong is worth the effort even today. I learned as much physics detesting Hoyle as I learned admiring Einstein. (BTW, Kris, we certainly can blame Uncle Al for nuclear bombs. But I was of draft age during the Reagan Administration, so I’m more likely to say “credit” than “blame”.)
There was an entertaining discussion of lunar phases, too. They are correct in LotR, totally screwed up in the Hobbit. Lots of writers work astronomy into their stories; Kris pointed out that there are very few built around the theory of evolution. (Would Pokémon count, I wonder?)
Conclusion: The interplay between science and the arts is what we need to encourage. Kris has an acronym: “STEAM” studies instead of “STEM”. JRRT and CSL might approve. Since I’m working in an engineering job with a liberal-arts degree, I concur.
Self-Imposed Reading Assignment:
Verlyn Flieger, A Question of Time
Ray Bradbury, All Summer in a Day
Janet Brennan Croft:
Doors Into Elf-Mounds: JRR Tolkien’s Introductions, prefaces and forewords.
Diana Glyer calls the preface-writer a “resonator”. Resonance is a good physics word — it means that oscillatory energy introduced into a system at certain frequencies doesn’t dissipate. It feeds back into the system, so it persists for a long time. If energy is supplied at a constant rate, the oscillation of the system can become very large in amplitude. In particle physics, it can even lead to the creation of new things. This talk gave some explicit examples of JRRT resonating, and the new things that emerged.
Janet didn’t audibly structure her talk this way, but all four relationships between forewords and texts were there:
relationship
Example
Text -> Foreword
JRRT is frequently an unacknowledged editor of a work, not just the writer of the introduction.
Text -> Text
JRRT wrote an introduction to Dialect of the Huddersfield District , which dialect later found its way into hobbit mouths.
Foreword -> Text
“Smith of Wootton Major” began as an introduction to MacDonald’s The Golden Key. JRRT wasn’t fond of the moral allegory, so he found his introduction turning negative in tone. That wouldn’t suit the purpose at all, so it became a stand-alone story.
Foreword ->
Foreword
The Red Book of Westmarch first appeared as a meta-fictional frame in the preface to the 1957 edition of The Hobbit. It later formed the backbone of the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings second edition
The question session was a free-for-all, with the audience tossing out lots of other things Tolkien wrote that count as paratextual material. Janet is going to have to give another talk on this in the future, twice as long.
Self-Imposed Reading Assignment:
Diana Glyer, Bandersnatch
Yr. Humble Idiosopher
Ardagraphic Information Systems: Locating Hobbits on the Map of England
Prof. Lobdell is the author of A Tolkien Compass, which I read in a previous century, and lots of other books which I have not. He talks about the Inklings in a friend-of-a-friend kind of way that made the whole room envious.
This talk was mostly about a collaboration between JRRT & CSL on a book called Language and Human Nature that was never written. I have to admit, I was kind of lost by his delivery. He seemed to be talking to the lectern, not the people in the room. But it was worth it for the zingers he slipped in. “Tolkien used words so precisely as to make them a pun,” was one of his own. One he took from the Inklings themselves: “Conversations with [Charles] Williams make me understand how the Inquisitors could have burned people. Some students are eminently kickable; Williams is eminently combustible.”
Rebecca Anderson
The science of sub-creation in Tolkien’s corpus
Becky is a student in the Ph.D. program at Waterloo, and it shows. She slings impenetrable academic jargon around like a master sushi chef wields knives. I wish her the best of luck getting her thesis approved quickly, so she doesn’t have to say things like “iconophobia” or “transmedial” any more.
She addressed her topic via the MMORPG Lord of the Rings Online. In particular, she looked at how it tries to scare you, even when you’re playing as one of the Orcs. For the “good guys”, fright comes from animal characteristics (fangs, scales, etc.) grafted onto a human form. When you’re an Orc, it comes in the form of verbal abuse from your superior officers. (You always have a superior officer.)
There was a long discussion following about how the corporate structure of the content owner (I hate business jargon, but it’s inescapable here) affects the structure of an adaptation of a story to a new medium. There’s something extremely interesting in there, especially since I’ve worried so long about how American intellectual-property laws seem to be strangling the arts.
Another question: does the cultural embedding of Tolkien count as an adaptation? I’m referring to the image macros, the YouTube mashups, the fan-fiction, the wisecracks in business meetings, and the hundreds of other references to LotR that you can find. Is there such a thing as crowd-sourced subcreation?
Laurel Michalek & Kaleena Ma
The Importance of Genealogy in Tolkien’s Works
Genealogies are to characters what etymology is to language. This topic was the closest to what I was talking about. (Kaleena actually referred to my talk, a couple of hours before. Thanks, Kaleena!) Laurel and Kaleena’s presentation was a review of something Tolkien thought was tremendously important, even though it shows up only peripherally in the text. (Diana Glyer mentions that the biggest revisions in LotR were hobbit genealogies. !) It was half lecture (Laurel’s word) and half audience-participation trivia game.
The original Call for Papers wanted group presentations, not just people reading papers. Kaleena and Laurel are the only ones who gave the organizers what they asked for. The presentation was kind of weak on the “so what?” question, but everybody was having a great time so who cares?
Coda
This was my first shot at contributing to a conference in any role other than wisecracks. I could see that most of the other speakers were citing each other’s previous work. I did what I could, but this is going to take a lot more reading. Next year’s theme is the 80th anniversary of The Hobbit. Less science, more fiction. Looking forward to it already!
There are three ways that talk is relevant to my project here.
He knocks the “so what” question out of the park. Easily half the time he’s talking, he’s suggesting ways that the connection can be used to give a new perspective on perennial questions about Lewis’s work. It’s a useful model for how to talk about my “discovery”, though I don’t have such a clear picture of the future.
He gave the talk as a first-person narrative, whence I shall claim legitimacy for my own upcoming presentation. Writing it has been a continual struggle to keep it in the mode of an academic paper. Releasing myself from that straitjacket will make the rest of the writing much easier.
…and this is the big one, Brenton tossed off a casual side remark to the effect that “world-building is what we’re really interested in, here.” That crystallized for me the structure in which I’m working. (As I’ve mentioned, I am so slow on the uptake that I make Butterbur look like a quicksilver wit. This is another case of that.) Science can meet Speculative Fiction scholarship to their mutual benefit, if we focus on how the authors build their worlds. In a way, I’d be reverting to a pre-Enlightenment approach to science, except studying Nature to learn about the intention of the sub-creator.
The last one is really obvious, but there’s a reason the penny hadn’t dropped. This is a way of reading books that I turned away from, decades ago. Lots of books can’t stand the scrutiny. Even when I was a child, I had to stop myself from throwing a book across the room when I read a line like, “slow the ship down, we need to be in a lower orbit.” After I’d spent a couple of decades of school, it got worse. I was catching even authors who brag about their mathematical prowess (looking at you, Robert Heinlein) in physics mistakes. If I’d stayed picky, I wouldn’t have had anything to read! The trick to making it work here will be first to discern what parts of the primary world the author was using to convey meaning, and confine my attention there.
If I still had any doubts about how much we can rely on the persistence of family names, Matt Yglesias just fixed them. The article reports the results of a study of wealthy people in Florence, Italy in 1427 and 2011. The richest people today have the same family names as the richest people in the fifteenth century.
The original paper is by Barone & Mocetti of the Bank of Italy. More information is in a column from the Center for Economics and Policy Research.
Prof. Olsen’s Dracula Lecture 8 includes a special bonus rant on the wrong way to write papers about literature. It matches up marvelously with the next section of my paper. The issue, in a nutshell, is that if students think up a thesis and then look for evidence to support it, they can usually find some. Which is a good first step, but it doesn’t go far enough. Stopping there lets the writer get away with a thesis that’s not necessarily true. Ideally, the writer should also collect all the evidence that the thesis is wrong, and then decide which set is more convincing.
This is one of those cases where being a scientist helps. Standard methods for data analysis take contrary evidence into account on an equal footing with supporting evidence, so the subject of Prof. Olsen’s rant is one of “the blunders we didn’t quite commit” (in Piet Hein’s words).
Which brings us to the core of the paper: how do the regions of England that provide the names of hobbits relate to their role in the story?
Hypothesis: Family names from Birmingham or the West Midlands are close to the Narrator; names from other parts of England indicate families to be kept at arms length; and names that aren’t found in England indicate families that are liminal or distant from the Shire.
Administrative Regions of England
I’ve previously defined the categories of families. The regions of England are from Wikipedia. Birmingham, where J.R.R. Tolkien grew up, stretches from the “W” to the “a” in “West Midlands” now; it was much smaller a hundred years ago.
These are administrative regions, but I’ve checked with an English colleague, who confirms that the regions have cultural significance as well as political. If they were both in London, for example, a person from Warwickshire and a person from Shropshire would agree that they are almost neighbors, as if they came from the same place. (An example of the opposite case would be a Virginian and a Marylander. We don’t feel like we’re from the same place, even when we’re both in California.) So it makes sense to include everyone from the West Midlands in a single category, which is essential to this project because the heat-maps are only that precise.
Hobbit families, by region and role
When we count the number of hobbit families in each group and region, the relationship looks like this figure. Birmingham names are dominant among the “close” group and rare among the others. Names from other parts of England are almost as common among the close group, dominate the “arms-length” group, and drop off in the other groups. Names that do not appear commonly in England are steady across the four groups. Of the three clauses in the hypothesis, the first seems likely true, but the second and third are dubious. Not so good.
Hobbit families by group and region
All names are not equally important, though. When the importance of each family to the story is included, the graph looks very different. Important characters with Birmingham names are overwhelmingly close to the narrator. Other English names dominate the “arms-length” group, as we expect. The high value of the red line in the “close” group is almost entirely due to Sam Gamgee, as we noted ‘way back at the beginning of this project. (If Sam were “close”, the red line would drop to 15 at “close” and the purple line would jump up above 35. More on that later.) The big spike of important, non-English names in the “liminal” category is mostly due to Merry Brandybuck. “Distant” families aren’t important at all.
So, to take us back to the top of this post, the preponderance of the evidence supports the hypothesis. The “Birmingham” line slopes sharply downward, the “Middle-Earth” line of names that sound strange slopes upward, and the “England” line of names that should sound like they’re from far away is in between the two. The causality runs only one way: if we’d tried to prove that families close to the Narrator were from the West Midlands, the first graph wouldn’t agree. (Only about half of the “close” families are from there.) Using a scientific approach tells more than one side of the story, and sets limits on the strength of the conclusion. With that I shall close, and amuse myself by imagining the look on the face of my high-school English teachers if I’d ever turned in a paper with graphs in it.
They’ve extended the deadline for submissions to June 1st. This has happened with depressing frequency at aviation conferences in the last year – the paper I’m presenting Tuesday at I-CNS is one I submitted when I found out about their extension.
An annotated bibliography of surname mapping. Research by James Cheshire and his collaborators underlies this ardagraphic study. Dr. Cheshire has a blog in addition to his university site linked above.
Cheshire, James A., Paul A. Longley, and Alex D. Singleton. “The surname regions of Great Britain.” Journal of Maps 6.1 (2010): 401-409.
The map of surname regions in Great Britain shows that distributions of names track well with the administrative regions. The map itself, available for download at the link (17 MB) is gorgeous.
Paul A. Longley, James A. Cheshire, Pablo Mateos, “Creating a regional geography of Britain through the spatial analysis of surnames”, Geoforum, 42, 4, July 2011, Pages 506-516.
Mapping names in the 21st century is valid for this practice because Longley, Cheshire, and Mateos’s techniques make it possible to identify “combinations of location specific surnames that date back 700 or more years”. Figure 5 shows that the “Lasker distances” between Census Area Statistics Wards in a region cluster into a tight grouping, and each region is unlike other regions in England. In fact, some geographic resemblances are visible through the multidimensional clustering: wards in the West Midlands look like they feel a gravitational pull from Wales, as names originating in the Welsh language diffuse across the English border.
The Lasker Distance is elegantly simple. If we write the fraction of people in a small area i who have the name n as p(i,n), then the distance between areas i and j is -ln(Σ p(i,n)×p(j,n)) where the summation is over all names. Names that don’t exist in one of the areas don’t contribute to the sum.
Once the distance in “name-space” between population points is established, the next step is to cluster the points in that space, and set the cluster sizes so that the result is interpretable in geographic terms. The method used here is “k-means” clustering, and I hope I’m not being uncharitable if I describe it as “try every possibility and keep those that work”. That’s unfair, of course — independent consistency checks are applied at each step; the choice isn’t arbitrary.
Cheshire, James, Pablo Mateos, and Paul A. Longley. “Delineating Europe’s cultural regions: Population structure and surname clustering.” Human Biology 83.5 (2011): 573-598.
Figure 7 in this paper shows the relationship between physical distance and Lasker distance for the countries they studied in Europe. Culturally homogenous places like Poland and Luxembourg show a tight cluster of points, lying on a line that’s almost horizontal. That is, you find the same names, no matter where in the country you go.
Some aspects of cultural history are visible in this figure copied from Cheshire, et al.
Countries unified by language, such as France, Italy, and Germany, show a slanted line (on a log-log plot), with a moderate upward slope. The further apart two villages are, the more likely you are to find different names in them. (France has a small Alsatian tail.) Norway and Denmark are fascinating exceptions: the line slopes downward! I’m just guessing here, but it could be due to the fact that until recently you didn’t get from one place to another by land. By sea, travel times depend on wind and currents as well, so genetics and patronymics can have a more complicated relationship with distance. (There might be a follow-on project, there, if I could only find family names in the Sagas.)
Spain has two distinct parts: One for the mainland and and one for the islands. They’re identical with respect to names. The mainland isn’t a long, thin shape, it’s an incoherent blob, caused by mixed Catalan, Spanish, Arabic, and possibly a Basque scattering off to the side.
The United Kingdom is a dense horizontal sprawl of English, with oddly-shaped protuberances of Welsh, Scottish, and Irish that make drawing a best-fit line through the points an exercise in graphical uniformity, not statistical rigor.
they
are always interested in technical
details when the main question is
whether the stuff is
literature or not
archy
