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Renowned Inklings scholar and Causer of Things to Happen Sørina Higgins is organizing a conference on Jan 31 & Feb 1 of next year, called “Fahrenheit 2451”, dedicated to the idea that the human race has thought of some ideas that we ought to save, no matter what disasters may befall. Which ones would you pick?
It’s in San Francisco at the Internet Archive. There are still two weeks left to get your ideas in.
Two thoughts that suddenly got connected.
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.”. 1 Even great warriors like Boromir aren’t that tall. 2 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?”
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.” 3 Victorian fairies are uniformly tiny, though. Tolkien wondered about this in “On Fairy-stories”. 4
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.
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”.5 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.
Corey Olsen gave a talk at Mythmoot XI on the subject of Gimli’s song about the glory days of Moria. (LotR, II iv.) He began with the fact that the song’s rhythm is iambic tetrameter, steady as a metronome, and its rhyme pattern is a plain-vanilla aabb. This is kind of boring, so why is the song so interesting? Olsen’s answer is that there’s a counter-melody interwoven with the rhymed verse. When you look for stressed-syllable alliteration, a different verse-form emerges. Here are the last four lines. Look at the D’s and W’s:
But still the sunken stars appear
In dark and windless Mirrormere;
There lies his crown in water deep.
Till Durin wakes again from sleep.
Hypothesis: the te-tum-te-tum of the iambics is just the rhythm section, and there’s a melody going on in the alliteration that’s much more varied and interesting. Olsen thought of a hip-hop singer over top of a mechanical rhythm track; I’d have said a baroque concerto over a continuo. The alliterative patterns aren’t rigid or repetitive enough that it’s easy to say for certain that Tolkien created the counter-structure intentionally.
We can confirm or refute the hypothesis if we look at the full distribution of sounds in the poem. First thing I did was tweak the program I wrote for finding Old English alliterative long lines. Out with the Sievers types; now I just want to flag the initial sounds of stressed syllables. Start at the beginning of a text. Count how many stressed syllables there are before I reach the next repetition of its sound. Then do the same for the second stressed syllable. Repeat until we run out of text.
To see what this distribution ought to look like for different kinds of texts, let’s take some easy examples. First, the least-poetic thing in the world: Choose 50 random sentences from the Simple English Wikipedia. (Drop sentences with numbers in them.) I got this from Goldhahn, et al., 6 The histogram of intervals looks like this:
Fig. 1. Unpoetic intervals
This is a geometric distribution, more or less. If all stressed sounds were equally common in English, and people didn’t like the sound of alliteration, the distribution would be exactly geometric. But some letters are more common than others, so there are random peaks and valleys, and people like alliteration even when they’re not writing poems, so there’s a bit of a spike at zero. So far, so good. Let’s cut the graphs to hide the extreme outliers from now on — extremes tell us mostly about the length of the text, not so much about sounds.
Now let’s pin down the other end of the spectrum of possibility with the “Song of the Mounds of Mundberg”. Tolkien said in Letter 187 that it was “written in the strictest form of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse.”7 Old English long lines have alliteration patterns of either axay or aaax, so we’d expect the histogram of distance through the text to be heavily weighted at 0 and 1. And so it is:
Fig. 2. Intervals in strict Old English form.
More than half of the time, an alliterating sound comes with the next or next-but-one syllable. This is a good benchmark for the low end of alliteration intervals.
Last, we’d like a statistic to compress the information. The median over all intervals in the poem is not sensitive to the extreme tails of the distribution, but catches how scrunched-up to the left everything is.
Let’s look at a variety of texts that span a range of unintentional and intentional alliteration. I am indebted to Paul Deane’s overview of alliterative verse for good examples of verse-forms I’m not so familiar with.
The histograms in Fig. 3 give us a feel for what’s happening. “wiki” and “prose” seem to be the most spread out, as we’d expect.
Fig. 3. Interval histograms
Ranking the texts by median interval of sound similarity in Fig. 4, the prose texts are at the high end and the Old English are at the low end, as the metric was constructed to do.
This metric left the Old Norse patterns in the middle of the pack. “Valhalla” does have a strong presence of 0 and 1-syllable intervals, but it has a heavy presence of longer ones, too. Wrapping the alliteration around the end of a line9 moves it up the graph.
The most interesting thing about Fig. 4 is that it doesn’t have an obvious breakpoint between alliterative and non-alliterative verse. I was expecting a big gap, but the possible uses of alliteration form a continuum, visible even in this small sample.
Fig 4. Ranked text samples.
The histogram for a poem with a free-form alliterative “melody” should have a secondary peak in its histogram at some larger spacing than the 0-1 that come from strict alliteration. We see something like that in Varnam’s poem, which definitely has such a melody. It’s a short poem, only half the length of the other texts, so its histogram can have large fluctuations around the ideal form. “Sea Change” has two linked stanzas, the second of which occasionally harks back to the first with K and S sounds, which puts a small peak about 15.
Alas for Prof. Olsen’s idea, Gimli’s song has barely closer alliteration than prose texts do. Figure 3 almost has a secondary peak at 5, but it’s not significantly different from random fluctuation. Now, I’m not one to claim poetry should have statistical significance, but the prose section just before Gimli’s song has more of those peaks than the song does. If anything, this method of measuring suggests Tolkien removed alliteration to make the poem, as John Ruskin totally didn’t advise.
There are 28 sounds on which we can alliterate here, since we count all vowels as one class, C is either K or S, etc. I’ve added the sound “KH” to the set since we’re dealing with Dwarves. Using the CMU notation, the sounds are “B” “CH” “D” “DH” “E” “F” “G” “HH” “JH” “K” “KH” “L” “M” “N” “NG” “P” “R” “S” “SH” “SK” “ST” “T” “TH” “V” “W” “Y” “Z” “ZH”.
The CMU pronouncing dictionary thinks “Shenandoah” is a four-syllable word with the accent on the “do”. John Denver probably deserves the blame for this geographical lapse. I overrode the dictionary entry to restore the name to its true dactylic nature. (The Boss said so.)
There are quite a few 2’s in the “Mundberg” graph that shouldn’t really be there. That’s because the intervening word is one that sometimes has a stress and sometimes doesn’t, and my program isn’t smart enough to tell which is which. This happens in all the texts. The extreme case is in “Mere-Watcher”: The last line of this poem is “So fucking what?” Under the usual rules, “so” would be unstressed. It’s stressed here, so I jumped into the program’s output and fixed it by hand to give it the proper weight. I imagine Seamus Heaney had the same problem, once.
Tolkien’s Collected Poems contains several we’ve never seen before. One of them is a bit surprising. Number 36 is a half-finished piece called “The Empty Chapel”, written in 1915 while JRRT was in basic training before shipping out to the front. One stanza in particular jumped out at me from Page 226:
Lo, war is in your nostrils and your heart
And burning with just anger as of old
Though stunted in dark places far from God
Though cheated and deluded and oppressed
Arise you, O ye blind and dumb to war
Come open your eyes and glorify your God
Come sing a hymn of honour to your Queen.
When I read that, I thought that Tolkien was right there with Wilfred Owen among the World War 1 poets. I heard echoes of “Dulce et Decorum Est“, and could hear irony dripping from them. I don’t think I’ve ever heard that kind of voice from Tolkien before. Yes. About that. It’s important to read poems more than once, and this is why. On third reading, I see that Tolkien was completely sincere. The “Queen” is the virgin Mary, about whom Tolkien would never have been less than reverent. This wouldn’t have worked out well for him.
The survivors of WW1 would become Gertrude Stein’s “Lost Generation”.10 Earnest poems about how the destruction wrought by the war somehow brings glory to god would fall flat on any reader’s ear. So how to oppose the ironic disillusionment of the Zeitgeist? Blank verse stating the opposite of everyone else won’t do. As well be shot for a sheep as for a lamb, and write poems about Faërie.
My copy of The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien, Hammond and Scull, eds., arrived today. So if you don’t see me for a while, you know where I’ll be.
Looking through the table of contents, I saw there were limericks on page 1365 . Naturally, I turned there first. Turns out, the old Professor wasn’t very good at them, and one of them is, shall we say, familiar.
Limerick [C] is
There was an old monk of Algeria
Who of fasting grew wearier and wearier,
Till at last with a yell
He jumped out of his cell
And ate up the Father Superior.
Google has been kind enough to provide me with a bound archive of Life Magazine, 1902, which contains this passage:
A NUMBER of our alleged literary journals, in their reminiscences of the late Mr. Stockton, have been ascribing to him the following “Limerick”:
“There was an old monk of Siberia
Whose life it grew drearier and drearier
Till he broke from his cell
With a hell of a yell
And eloped with the Mother Superior.”This poem had its origin at Trinity College, Dublin, and has been well known in university circles here and abroad for generations. The Stockton version is simply an adaptation for the drawing-room.- Evening Sun.
Tolkien’s seems more of a bowdlerization than a composition.
That issue of Life also contained a Charles Dana Gibson cartoon I’d never seen before, voici:
“Where did you go on your honeymoon?”
“That’s what I’ve been wondering.”
Have you ever wondered what became of the lands of Mordor in the Fourth Age? I certainly have. I got a valuable clue today.
The climate of Ithilien is like Italy’s, so the other side of the Mountains Until Recently of Shadow would be like the Adriatic coast. The soil would have been covered with volcanic ash. After a few years of rainfall, it would be fertile again, and it would be packed with the minerals plants love. We know that volcanic soils in Italy grow excellent wine grapes. Maybe the inhabitants of the Black Land could take up viniculture?
Well, after a trip to the wine store, I can report that’s exactly what they did.
click to embiggen
I don’t know what exactly this “Pape” refers to. It’s not in any of my elvish glossaries, and Sindarin doesn’t have many “p” words anyway. Must be something invented later. Anyway, it’s perfect for toasting Bilbo’s birthday.
The word “mordoré” means a golden-bronze color with metallic highlights. Just the thing for autumn. The wine is dry and light, which is what I want from a Rhône.
The company is all women, and organic.
According to Monty Python11 King Arthur, when asked how he could have coconuts in a temperate climate like England’s, replied “The swallow may fly south with the sun, or the house martin or the plover seek hot lands in winter, yet these are not strangers to our land.” (page 2) In my copy of the screenplay, which is a facsimile, lots of lines are scratched out, hand-written, or otherwise edited in production. Not this speech. It is unchanged from the first typewritten copy.
Eleanor Parker (the scholar, not Lenore from Scaramouche) on the approach of autumn, directs us to the Secreta Secretorum12:
In herust fallyth the contrary. In this tyme the eeyre wixeth colde and dry, the wynde of the Northe oftymes turnyth, Wellis wythdrawen ham, grene thynges fadyth, Frutes fallyth, the Eeyre lesyth his beute, the byrdys shechyn hote regions, the bestis desyryth hare receptis, Serpentes gone to hare dichis. (P. 245)
This is an odd book. Wikipedia refers to it as a pseudo-Aristotelian treatise, which implies there are more things like it in the world. Let’s see how rusty my Middle English is: “In harvest the contrary happens. In this time the year grows cold and dry, the wind often comes from the north, water levels in the rivers drop, green things fade, fruits fall, the year loses its beauty, the birds seek hot regions, the beasts desire their burrows, serpents go to their holes.”
Monty Python’s line about birds “seeking hot lands in winter” clearly came from here.13 The more I learn about history, the more I wonder if Monty Python actually made up anything at all.
Tom Hillman is taking on another of the big questions. This time it’s Fate, and how Turin relates to it.14 He calls out the line from “Beowulf”: “Fate often keeps an unfey man safe when his courage avails.”
I’ve taken a couple of courses from Tom Shippey in which he brought up that line. Usually with a comment like, “That’s not much of a fate, if you can avoid it with a bit of courage.” When he’s being more formal15, he says
… people are not under the domination of wyrd, which is why “fate” is not a good translation of it. People can “change their luck”, and can in a way say “No” to divine Providence, though of course if they do they have to stand by the consequences of their decision.
The Road to Middle-Earth, Chapter 5
I suspect that wyrd isn’t the only word here whose meaning has slipped over the last thousand years. The word unfaege, produced from the word for “fey”, also has the prefix “un-“. When I first learned Old English, it jumped out at me that “un-” isn’t quite what it used to be. In most words, it means what modern speakers expect, but there are plenty of words where it doesn’t. Unweder, “un-weather”,is a storm. Unweod, “un-grass”, is a weed, as is unwyrt. Uncræft, “un-craft”, is an evil art. Unbletsung, “un-blessing” is not the absence of a blessing, but a curse.
The “un-” prefix seems also to have meant “wrong” or “the opposite of what you wanted”. Is it possible that unfaege, “un-fey”, might have meant something like “doomed to something else”? Then the Beowulf poet would have meant, “If wyrd has something else in mind for a man, he’ll come through this one safely as long as he keeps his courage.” With the implication that a coward can screw up even the fate of the world, so don’t be one.
Sørina Higgins gave a talk recently at the Brazilian Mythopoeic Society about how time flows in fantasy. This is something that has interested me ever since I read Umberto Eco’s essay “The Woods of Loisy”16. One of the techniques Eco used there to describe the temporal flow in a story was to make a graph of the “in-world time”, what the calendar on the wall says, versus the reader’s progression through the narrative. I’ll use “page number” to stand in for that. Eco uses it for The Odyssey, and Sylvie by Gerard de Nerval, and a limerick about a man from Peru.17 I want to use it for stories about literal time-travel, instead of a narrative that shifts about in time while the characters all go forward.
Figure 1.
For experimental purposes, let’s construct a trivial time-travel story: A mad scientist in Texas invents a time machine. He uses it to go back to last February in Brazil. While he’s sight-seeing there, a butterfly lands on his shoulder and he brushes it off. Then he climbs back into his time machine and returns to the time he left. Well, we all know about the awesome power of butterflies in Brazil. When he returns, his lab has been blown apart by a tornado, the infrastructure for time-travel is wrecked, and so he sets about the job of rebuilding, one day at a time like the rest of us have to. The End.
Figure 1 is what that story looks like when it’s drawn as one of Eco’s diagrams. An upward-sloping line is what we all do all the time. A big jump straight up or down is when the time machine causes a change of the in-world time on a single page for the reader. These parts are the pure science fiction.
Among Sørina’s citations are Ted Chiang’s “The Story of Your Life”18 and Richard Feynman’s Nobel lecture. Though she didn’t mention it, these two texts share a deep structural element. Chiang’s protagonist learns an alien linguistic form from creatures who perceive language as a kind of variational principle, and ends up seeing her daughter’s life in that way, instead of via pedestrian linear time. Chiang, according to the end-notes in my copy of the book, is fascinated by Lagrangian dynamics, so he wrote them into a story.
Feynman earned his Nobel Prize for applying Lagrangian variational principles to Quantum Electrodynamics, and in the process inventing a way to compute preposterously-complex integrals19 without making your head explode. That method is now called a “Feynman diagram”. A Feynman diagram has solid lines with arrows for electrons, quarks, etc. There are wavy lines for photons and curlicue lines for gluons. Other bosons are represented by dashed lines. (E.g. the famous Higgs boson, but there are lots of smaller ones.) There are rules about how different lines connect at vertices, and if you follow all the rules, you can read the function you need to integrate off the diagram, and you’re sure to be doing a calculation that makes sense.
One of the key insights that made diagrams possible was that we can think of a particle of anti-matter as a particle of regular matter traveling backward in time. That’s because the critical parameter describing motion is the product of energy and time, so, mathematically, there’s no difference between something with positive energy going forwards and something with negative energy going backwards. -iEt = i(-E)t = iE(-t), right? But the corners of the red zigzag in Figure 1 all have one arrow coming in and one going out, which means they obey the most important rule of Feynman diagrams.
Figure 2.
In Figure 2, let’s fix the diagram in Figure 1 so that it obeys the rest of the rules, too. Those blue dashed lines are some kind of boson. They represent a force coming into the story from outside, which causes the time machine to turn on or off.
The upper left corner, when the time machine is first turned on if we read from left to right, has a forward-in-time arrow and an backward-in-time arrow if we read from bottom to top. That’s particle anti-particle annihilation. The bottom left corner is the reverse, called pair production. The third and fourth corners are good old scattering, as a particle gets kicked so it moves differently but doesn’t change into antimatter or anything. Another fun thing is that the internal lines don’t have to obey one law of physics (E=mc2); breaking one law of physics is very useful for someone in a science fiction story.
Now, if I were a French philosopher, I’d say something like we’ve drawn the role of the author into the story. And the next step is to add up the contributions from all the possible locations of the vertices and all possible trajectories of the internal lines, which means that all stories involving turning a time-machine on and off twice will be added together. Most of them will cancel each other out, but the ones that reinforce each other will be the enduring Ur-myth of the Time Machine. Good thing I’m not a French philosopher!
But that means that I don’ t know what is represented by those blue dashed lines. I know they aren’t eternal; the number of them isn’t conserved. They can be created or destroyed by interaction with a plot. What do you think they are?
Appendix
Here are Feynman diagrams for two simple scattering events.
time flows left to right
It just occurred to me, and the Digital Tolkien project confirms, that in all the books Tolkien wrote about war, he never once used the word “martial”. Which makes perfect sense — Mars would be as out of place in Middle-earth as Father Christmas in Narnia. There is one use of the word in an appendix near the back of Unfinished Tales, discussing the Marshals of the Riddermark. But those are drafts, for which I do not hold J.R.R. Tolkien responsible. The word “Marshal” must have exerted a gravitational force, which would surely have been corrected before publication.
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