Over at her blog, Lee Smith has found something fun to do on a rainy February day. She’s collected every time somebody insulted somebody else in The Lord of the Rings. To nobody’s surprise, “fool” is the most common way to insult someone. There’s more give-and-take than I’d thought, though. If we define “calling someone a fool” as a relationship, it makes a fairly complex network.
Lee confines her attentions to insulting people to their face. This has an elegant directness, but it misses some things that interest me, like Sam calling himself a fool. I’m going to expand on Lee’s definition for the sake of entertainment and include any time someone calls someone a fool, or a group of up to ten others.
The network looks like this:
Whom are you calling a fool?
I have omitted three trivial subgraphs, involving Farmer Cotton/Ted Sandyman, Shagrat/Gorbag, and Wormtongue/Hàma. I was expecting the graph to fall into two tight cliques with loose links between them, but that turns out not to be the case. Saruman’s insults at the end of the book tie everything together neatly into a tightly-bound community of disregard.
Here’s a table of fool-counts, sorted by the fraction of their arrows that point outwards.
| Character | Speaker | Referent | Disdain |
|---|---|---|---|
| Grishnakh | 4 | 100% | |
| Witch-King | 2 | 100% | |
| Shagrat | 1 | 100% | |
| Rory Brandybuck | 1 | 100% | |
| Farmer Cotton | 1 | 100% | |
| Wormtongue | 1 | 100% | |
| Gandalf | 14 | 3 | 82% |
| Saruman | 6 | 2 | 75% |
| Gollum | 2 | 1 | 67% |
| Boromir | 1 | 1 | 50% |
| Denethor | 1 | 1 | 50% |
| Gimli | 1 | 1 | 50% |
| Nameless Orc | 1 | 1 | 50% |
| Ugluk | 1 | 1 | 50% |
| Pippin | 2 | 5 | 29% |
| Frodo | 1 | 4 | 20% |
| Sam | 1 | 4 | 20% |
| Merry | 3 | 0% | |
| Bilbo | 2 | 0% | |
| Legolas | 2 | 0% | |
| Aragorn | 1 | 0% | |
| Ted Sandyman | 1 | 0% | |
| Butterbur | 1 | 0% | |
| Eowyn | 1 | 0% | |
| Gorbag | 1 | 0% | |
| Hama | 1 | 0% | |
| Lotho | 1 | 0% | |
| Radagast | 1 | 0% | |
| Nameless Ruffian | 1 | 0% | |
| Sauron | 1 | 0% |
And here’s the Queen of Soul, misapprehending the topology:
tom hillman
We still need to know who’s more foolish. The fool, or the fool who follows him?
Joe
I just looked through my list of Twitter followers, and came to a humbling conclusion on that score.
tom hillman
unfollowing you.
tom hillman
In The Silmarillion Glaurung calls Turin ‘captain foolhardy’, and a disguised servant of Morgoth says that in seeking the Light in the West, Men have followed a ‘fool-fire’ of the Elves. There are no other uses of ‘fool’
Joe
If somebody went around the english-speaking world and asked people to quote something from literature that was said by an elf/fairy, I bet the most common answer would be “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” So it was kind of surprising to discover that nowhere in the Legendarium does an elf call anyone a fool. Must be a new order from the Fairy King: “Shut the Puck up!”
Andrew
Hello Joe! I just heard, from Sean and Allen at the Prancing Pony Podcast, about this blog and the great network graph you made. Joe, I am wondering if you happen to have a full data set of the occurrences of fool calling from the Lord of the Rings? I mean a data set with every occurrence as a row, with the speaker and referent as the two columns. This way I could see every occurence, and not just the cumulative times each character has called and been called a fool.
I’ve had some experience with network graphs in JavaScript and I’d love to give it a shot myself. Thank you so much in advance!!! 🙂