J.R.R. Tolkien and Eminem make common cause

This is Part 2 of my presentation at Mythmoot VII. Part 1 is here. Part 1 was the mathematical treatment; this is the humanities context.

This paper grew out of Prof. Olsen’s explication of Eminem last year. I took upon myself the mission to figure out why Tolkien fans should like Eminem. Paradoxically enough, it’s because Tolkien was a reactionary.  It’s common to hear critics use that word about him. (Google Scholar returns over 2,000 hits.) But everybody elides one detail: Against what was he reacting? Well, in technology or theology, practically everything, but in terms of poetry, I think I’ve found a specific person.

Introducing Edith Sitwell

Celebrities

Dame Edith Sitwell was a character. A classic English eccentric. Wealthy as sin, six feet tall, thin as an icicle, descended from the Plantagenet royal family. She was a bit older than Tolkien, so she was a presence in the English literary scene when he was in his 20s and 30s. Emphasis on the word “scene” — Photographers loved photographing her, and she loved to be photographed, so she was a pioneer of the publicity-driven life we see so much of today.  This photo is the level of celebrity we’re talking about: She and Marilyn apparently took to each other immediately.

As a medieval illumination

The second photo is what she looked like at the beginning of her fame as a writer, in the early 1920s. This is the time at which she would have come to the attention of the Inklings, the way she came to the attention of absolutely everyone.

I like this photo because she looks like she just climbed out of an illuminated manuscript. It’s easy to imagine her among her 12^th Century ancestors.

Façade

The work I want to talk about is called Façade.[1] It’s a series of poems intended to be spoken aloud from a stage, set to music by a very young Sir William Walton. The poems frequently are titled with reference to music or dance: “Tarantella”, “Fox Trot”, “Country Dance”, “Hornpipe” … Edith and her brothers Osbert and Sacheverell would write poems, then they would set up a screen in their parlor, and read the verse aloud from behind the screen. The verse was mostly nonsense. “It’s all a bloody façade!” said their housekeeper one day, so Edith named the whole piece accordingly.

Performance screen designed by John Piper

Façade is subtitled “An Entertainment”, and it’s fun to imagine what the audience thought they were in for when they walked into the theater. There on the stage were a few chairs, a piccolo, two trumpets, a saxophone, two cellos, and an array of percussion. Behind it all was a screen painted with a face whose mouth is a megaphone. The poems get read through the megaphone. They’re not sung, though performers sometimes try. If you look around YouTube you’ll see what a bad idea singing them can be. I like the way Paul Driver put it: “It is not so clear for what kind of non-singer Facade was conceived.” [2] Well, you’re about to find out.

This is what C.S. Lewis called “The gibberish literature of the Lunatic Twenties” in The Pilgrim’s Regress. [3] I can’t find any time that J.R.R. Tolkien mentioned the Sitwells, but Lewis was there to pick up the cudgel. At least one reviewer identifies the Sitwells as one of the inspirations for the “Clevers” in Lewis’s book.

Anyway, love her or hate her, I’m calling her the “Anti-Tolkien” here. What does it mean to be the “Anti-Tolkien”? Well, like matter and anti-matter, you have to have a lot of things in common, but disagree on one or two fundamentals. Both Sitwell and Tolkien were Modernists, but they pushed back against some of the basics of Modernism. A nice paper by Demoor, Posman, and Van Durme [4] put this part of the Modernist project in musical terms. To start at the beginning: The most inclusive definition of of “music” is “sounds arranged in time”. The arrangement can go two ways. Melody is the part of music that goes along with the flow of time; Harmony goes perpendicular to time. Modernism devalued melody and emphasized experimental harmony. Tolkien and Sitwell both thought the melody was the important part. They were united in the belief that language could and should be musical, but what that music ought to be about is where they parted company.

I’ve put the relevant areas of agreement and disagreement into a table.

The big difference comes in their relationship to their inspirations. Sitwell is frankly imperialist, though she can see the end of Empire coming up soon. That’s actually the meaning of “Hornpipe”, which I just recited, but the tempo of the piece makes it invisible until you sit down and read it line by line and try to figure out if it’s really nonsense or not. Like any imperialist, she thinks of her source material as a resource to be exploited. She doesn’t care whether in reality a Hottentot is hot or not — all she wants is the sound of the words. Dame Edith definitely did not take Prof. Sturgis’s advice about how to write other cultures.

By contrast, when Tolkien takes inspirations from north-western English villagers, it’s with genuine affection. He notes their flaws, but likes them anyway. Lobelia Sackville-Baggins is the clearest case.[5] When he’s done telling the story, we see that things that are flaws in one context sometimes turn out to be great strengths in another.

This leads directly to their second area of disagreement. Nonsense verse can be a lot of fun, but it’s rarely respectful. (That’s why I like it so much.) Tolkien occasionally wrote a tra-la-lally or a ring-a-dong-dillo, but only as a brief insertion into an otherwise intelligible sentence. Which, of course, is entirely consistent with English folk song. As Professor Flieger mentioned Friday, Tolkien is “longing for a lost and irretrievable past.” Sitwell is, to put it mildly, not.

Looking at the last column, Eminem and Dame Edith look like almost exact opposites, but their ears for rhyme have a lot in common. To understand the relationship, we’ll need a way to make the scattered rhymes of their verses visible, which means we have to dig into some rhyme measurement.

Rhymometry

William Harmon, in his wonderful history of English versification,[6] says Rhyme is lowbrow. Classical verse generally doesn’t rhyme in Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Hebrew… Verse in old Germanic languages doesn’t rhyme either. It’s like Rhyme conveys a sense of frivolity, a lack of seriousness. Rhyming verse is down in the gutter, amusing the plebs. You know what rhymes? Light verse almost always rhymes. (Tom Hillman and I have written light alliterative verse, but it’s a really obscure niche.) And what’s more, the rhymes have to be perfect or it’s not funny. (This will come in later when the rappers join us.) The idea of rhyme as Art (capital A) only existed for a few centuries in English.

Rhyming verse came into respectability in English because the language was shifting from synthetic-suffixal to analytic-prefixal. That’s Harmon again; I don’t use words like that. The way it looked to me in high-school foreign language classes was “everything rhymes!” The French/Germanic fusion we were all speaking in the High Middle Ages was different, though. It put Chaucer in a position to grab two innovations and run with them: iambic rhythm and masculine rhyme. Or, as Prof. Olsen put it yesterday, the “single-syllable terminal rhymes” that would one day be the foundation of rap.

Two centuries later, Shakespeare was solidly in this respectable-rhyme world, but he’s already using enjambment to undercut the importance of the rhymes. “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments” – without seeing the rest of the sonnet, you’d never know which word of that sentence was the rhyme. By two centuries after Shakespeare, we were back to looking askance at rhyme.

But still, even with Chaucerian/Shakespearean pedigree, rhyme has a taint of the common people about it. It’s not serious. Which brings us to Eminem. Hip-hop is all about rhymes. Hip-hop poets even call their works “rhymes”, not “verses” or “poems” or “lyrics”, but what they consider a rhyme isn’t perfect (unless they’re trying to be funny). They use assonances, consonances, and other kinds of slant rhyme instead.

How rhyme is used

Part 1 of this paper showed graphically that the Modernists of the 1920s resemble the hip-hop rhymers of the 21st Century in their use of bursts of slant and mosaic rhyme. But I promised that there was a fight going on. What is the argument? What are these poets disagreeing about? We need to look at what each is doing with their art.

Eminem is trying to elevate hip-hop to an artistic genre. Rap is unquestionably lowbrow, with a few people trying to elevate the form from its natural habitat on the sidewalk to something higher. Their individual purposes differ. Chuck D is trying to motivate political action. Eminem does that sometimes, but usually he’s trying to exorcise personal demons, like any Romantic. As the musicologist Robert Greenberg says, “In many ways, we’re still in the Romantic period,” and that fits perfectly here.

You don’t have to listen to a work of hip-hop for very long before you hear the word “respect”. That’s what all rappers want. Eminem is making verse that tries to get respect from the highbrows, while staying entirely within the idiom of the street.

Dame Edith didn’t need any more respect. Her status was as sure as the Thain of the Shire’s. She was mining lowbrow amusements for form, just as she was mining the empire for sounds. She agreed with Tolkien that the current forms were becoming hidebound, and she re-vitalized them by bringing in this low-brow infusion. She might even have said, “The inhabitants were too stupid and dull for words, and an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them.”[7] Everyone was shocked by the result, which was exactly what she wanted. In a sense, she was pushing the highbrows downward.

Tolkien was embracing the lowbrow for its own sake. He wasn’t gentrifying rhyme, he was celebrating it. Like Beethoven writing country dances, he’s showing his audience the merit in the simple people. At the same time, he’s trying to revitalize highbrow verse with an infusion of bucolic vitality. When the highbrow and lowbrow sides of culture are too separated, art stagnates. True vitality comes from free exchange between the sides of culture. Like Eminem, Tolkien wanted to create art by lifting up the bottom of society. Dame Edith Sitwell wanted to go the other way, bringing the high down to the low. And the war between the brows isn’t really as disconnected as it looked at first. Tolkien has become so popular that there are  highbrows who look down on him. Especially since the Jackson movies made a billion dollars, there’s a nimbus of the lowbrow around the Lord of the Rings.

Artists frequently describe their work as in conversation with those who have gone before, but the conversation can go only one way. JRRT couldn’t respond to hip-hop for obvious reasons, so what this work has accomplished is to identify an analogous contemporaneous situation to which he clearly related, and restore a bit of symmetry. This, then, is my conclusion. A Tolkien fan who likes hip-hop can be entirely consistent with the artistic missions of both.

Works Cited

[1] Sitwell, Edith. Façade and other poems, 1920-1935. Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd., 1950.

[2] Driver, Paul. “‘Façade Revisited.” Tempo (1980): 3-9.

[3] Lewis, Clive Staples. The pilgrim’s regress. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2014.

[4] Demoor, Marysa, Sarah Posman, and Debora Van Durme. “Literary modernism and melody: an avant-propos.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 55.1 (2013): 31-35.

[5] Tolkien, J.R.R The Lord of the Rings. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002. VI,ix.

[6] Harmon, William. “English versification: fifteen hundred years of continuity and change.” Studies in Philology 94.1 (1997): 1-37.

[7] Tolkien, op.cit., I,ii.