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 deepunder the water, those that stand on a bank neer to that place may hearthe noise without any diminution of it by the water.
Readers of this blog are invited to join the Idiosopher in a fellowship of skepticism.
“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.
While debugging yet another misfeature of my computerized alliteration detection program, I came across a phrase from LotR (II, ix) that was not only a good Anglo-Saxon alliterative line, but was also the last two lines of a stanza of a double dactyl.
Coming from a writer as sensitive to rhythm and sound as J.R.R. Tolkien, that can’t be a coincidence. Wherefore I plunged into the Archive of Lost Documents and found the laundry receipt on which Tolkien had originally written the complete poem. This particular slip eluded inclusion in the History of Middle Earth because it was used to light a backyard barbecue grill in 1941. Doubtless JRRT was dismissive of the importance of this work because the double-dactyl verse form would not be invented for another decade, and no audience yet existed for it.
Tolkien’s handwriting is notoriously difficult to read even before the incineration of the medium bearing the autograph text, so it was only through strenuous exertion that I am able to restore it here:
Higgledy-piggledy
Gift of Galadriel
Gimli was fingering
Gold in his mind
Wondering if it was
Fit to be worked into
Crystallographically
Perfect design.
This research breaks new ground in mitigating the tension of intentionality. I shall be submitting a paper to the Appropriate Journal.
Kate Neville gave one of her characteristically brilliant talks this morning at Mythmoot VI. Her theme was that Tolkien’s dragons always lie, and that this is essential to their nature.
In the Q&A period Chuck reminded us that evil can’t create anything, so Morgoth must have had some raw material to make dragons from, and asked Kate for her opinion about what that material might have been.
Kate replied that Tolkien didn’t say, so the floor was open for guesses. Sparrow sat up and said, since lies are essential to dragon’s nature, then they must be a twisted version of language itself! In a world created by a philologist this would make them the most powerful of monsters. The audience loved that; applause all around.
Then Richard delivered the punch line: “Well, that explains the Old English term ‘word-hoard’!”
In the Anglo-Saxon poem called “The Battle of Maldon”, when we come to the point where the Viking raiders cross over the causeway to the battlefield where the English army awaits, the poet says:
Wōdon þā wælwulfas (for wætere ne murnon),
wīċinga werod west ofer Pantan,
ofer scīr wæter scyldas wēgon,
lidmen tō lande linde bǣron. (Lines 96-99)
Linden-wood (left)
This is usually translated something like, “Battle-wolves waded ashore, not worrying about the water. The Viking band crossed the Panta, over shining water, shields aloft, these men of the fleet towards land advanced their linden shields.” Based on my long expertise in Old English (12 weeks next Tuesday), I think this misses something important about that last line. Translated literally it says, “Sailors to land, linden-wood they bore.”
First fact: A few weeks ago, I was talking to a guy at work. Him: “I may miss the meeting; my daughter is about to have my second grandchild, so I may have to go down to Florida all of a sudden. Me: “You keep your grandchildren in Florida, and you live in New York? That’s a switch!” [Sensible chuckles all around.] This is not good comedy, because comedy is not welcome in an office. It’s something a natural smart-aleck like me adopts because people like jokes as long as they don’t disturb the solemnity of the hierarchy.
Second fact: One of the things the Norsemen wanted from Britain was wood for ship-building.
Let’s suppose for a minute that concern for hierarchy and solemnity in front of authority figures was as important in a medieval English court (where poems would be performed) as they are in an office today. Let’s imagine that smart-alecks became poets back then, and one such was this poet. What’s he really saying? He just used “shields” in line 98, so the audience is expecting some kind of appositive involving wood. Then he drops line 99. It’s the same joke I made in the office: “Sailors bringing wood to the land, for a change!”
It’s awesomely cool to find a kindred spirit talking to me across a gulf of a thousand years. Hey, Maldon-poet, wherever you are: I got it!
We students were working our way through translating “The Battle of Brunanburh”, and I eventually noticed what she was referring to: “The Raven” has quite a bit of vocabulary in common with the older poem. Naturally they have ravens in common, but that’s not all. Emily translated “Quoth the raven, ‘Nevermore’.” into Anglo-Saxon down-thread, which is straightforward because all the words are cognate.
There might actually be something deeper there, too. In the opening lines I’ve emboldened words that are in the B of B and underlined other words of Anglo-Saxon origin. Function words and words we got from Romance languages are in normal italics. Clearly, Poe is using Anglo-Saxon words where he wants emphasis on rhyme or rhythm.
Once upon a midnightdreary,
while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
Did he know he was doing that? I can’t tell. He wrote an extremely dusty essay on “The Philosophy of Composition” about the process of writing “The Raven” without once mentioning word origins. That essay is followed by one entitled “Old English Poetry”, but he means Donne, not Cædmon.
No, I’ve decided that Poe subconsciously sensed that Anglo-Saxon words just have more oomph than Romance words, and gave them starring roles accordingly. That’s why “The Raven” was his most popular work at the time, and remains the only thing most people can remember about him.
Coda
Do you want to hear how good Signum University’s courses are? My classmates complimented me on how well I read my verses of the poem out loud, so I recorded it to find out what they meant. It’s not great, but I’m posting it here because this is only Week #8 of the class. Less than two months into learning any other language, there’s no way I could read a poem this smoothly. Props to Signum U!
By the way, those aren’t pronunciation mistakes. My ancestors came from a border town between the lands of the North Saxons and the West Anglians, so they spoke a unique dialect that I have re-created here. The villages were all destroyed in a flood, which led the neighbors to refer to us as the “Immercians”.
Blogging has been kind of light lately because I’m studying Anglo-Saxon at Signum U and I just don’t memorize things as quickly as I did when I was young. However, this week’s assignment is noun declensions, and the assignment I am at the moment neglecting reminded me of a small point in The Fellowship of the Ring.
Tom Shippey famously pointed out that “Sackville” is really just French for “Baggins”, and judges that “It is a very bad mark for the socially aspiring branch of the Baggins family that they have tried to Frenchify themselves…” (Shippey, p.10)
When Bilbo is calling them down at his Farewell Party, he refers to the family of “Proudfoots”. “ProudFEET!” old Odo contradicts him. (Tolkien, I, i) What’s the subtext, here? I submit that we’re looking at the same phenomenon. In French, the plural of “pied” is formed by appending an “s”. In Anglo-Saxon, though, “fot” uses the radical consonant declension, and becomes “fet” in the plural.
Bilbo is indulging in a bit of linguistic raillery here, good-naturedly accusing Odo of being like the Sackville-Bagginses. Odo is having none of it, and insists on a proper English form of his name. I suppose he has to insist fairly often, since something like 83% of the Odos in Wikipedia are French.
Works Cited
Shippey, Tom. J.R.R. Tolkien, Author of the Century. Houghton-Mifflin, 2002.
Tolkien, J.R.R., The Lord of the Rings. Houghton-Mifflin, 2002.
Anyone who talks to people from other countries a lot eventually notices that there are some parts of English that are very hard to get the hang of. (of which to get the hang?) One struck me in particular: no matter what language they spoke originally, hardly anyone gets “a three-hour tour” or “a ten-foot pole” right at first. Everybody wants to use the plural in phrases like that. “Three hours tour”, “five minutes wait”, and so on. I heard it from so many people that eventually I came to the conclusion that the foreigners are right, and English got it wrong.
Well, that turns out not to be quite true. While I was supposed to be doing my Old English homework this morning, I discovered a page about “inflectional survivors“: the words that still kept their Anglo-Saxon inflections, through all the Vikings, Frenchmen, and Vowel Shifts.
Eugeniusz Taraciński, the tallest man in Polish history
It turns out that the word “foot” in “ten-foot pole” is just such a survivor. “Ten-foot” takes the genitive plural. In Anglo-Saxon the phrase is “tien fota“. English-speakers being lazy, the ending eventually dropped off. Changing the vowels to make “foot” plural would have been too much work, so “ten-foot pole” it is.
So I was mistaken; English didn’t actually get it wrong. We do in fact have a little bit of grammar, despite the convictions of everyone in Europe.
My copy of A Wilderness of Dragons: Essays in Honor of Verlyn Flieger arrived today, so I turned immediately to the essay by Tom Hillman, Simon Cook, Jeremiah Burns, Richard Rohlin, and Oliver Stegen about dreams, memory, and enchantment. This is good stuff. Section 3 points out the many ways that Elvish dreams are described in LotR, which rang a bell with other things I’ve been reading lately.
As the consortium of essayists puts it, “we would seem to be justified in identifying Elvish dreams with a ‘clear vision’ generated from the memories and also the imaginings of Elves…” (p.132). This derives from an etymological extract from Unfinished Tales, where the name “Olórin” is glossed as coming from a word that means not-exactly “dream”, rather something that ‘included the vivid contents of their memory as of their imagination”.
idk which one this is
So an old man cloaked in grey, wearing a big hat and carrying a staff, is associated with two kinds of mental activity that don’t translate easily into modern English. We’ve heard that before. All this time I’d thought of Gandalf as having a strong streak of Odin in his character, but it had never occurred to me to include Hugin and Munin in the package.
It appears that the great computer scientist Donald Knuth was a pioneer in the discipline that would in a later century come to be known as Idiosophy. Alas, such was the benighted state of natural philosophy in that era that his seminal paper could only be published in the April issue of a learned journal.
