Parenthesizing

Tom Hillman has joined the ranks of the digital humanists¹ with three posts (I, II, III) at “Alas, not me” investigating parenthetical remarks in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. These are good analyses. They’re not just counting; they  contain fascinating insights about the deeper purpose Tolkien had in using that particular stylistic choice. Highly recommended.

Of course, that’s not what we do here at Idiosophy. Tom points out that there are two chapters that don’t fit the paradigm: “At the Sign of the Prancing Pony” and “Treebeard”. He calls them “aberrations”. That’s more like it. Aberrations, we can work with.

At the Sign of the Prancing Pony

The primary reason for thinking there’s an aberration at The Prancing Pony² is the generally-accepted idea that Bilbo only wrote the first chapter of LotR. As he confessed to Frodo, “when I have time to write, I only really like writing poetry.” (VI,vii.) Taking Bilbo at his word, I note this chapter contains a two-page poem of Bilbo’s creation. Whoever wrote it did not omit a single stanza. Frodo’s fondness for his old cousin was immense, but even so stopping the narrative for such a long time might have been too much to ask. I’ve always suspected that this chapter was also written by Bilbo, because it’s a place he (probably) knew firsthand and it introduces his friend the Dunadan. The sudden up-surge in the use of parenthetical comments is a fourth item of supporting evidence.

Treebeard

The chapter “Treebeard” uses a lot of parentheses.³. As has been noted before, Treebeard talks like an old hobbit. There’s a reason. Let’s imagine Frodo, locked in a tower in Minas Tirith, getting briefed on all the things that happened in Books III, V, and VI that he wasn’t around to see. For most of the chapters, there’s one authoritative voice, or there are a lot of people who can remember for him what’s going on. But “Treebeard” is unique. For that one chapter, Frodo had both Merry and Pippin as sources, and no one else to straighten them out.

As we’ve noted in both LotR and The Hobbit, Bilbo is easily distracted. He uses parentheses to mention things that just crossed his mind, including things that just are amusing. What if Bilbo’s protegés picked up the same habit? Poor Frodo! He must have been getting the story from two different directions, both Merry and Pippin talking at once, saying different things as often as not. Bilbonian distractions were built into the source material. I can’t blame Frodo if he decided the best way to make sense of that chapter was to split the difference between the two versions, and preserve deviations in parenthetical asides.  So what if that makes Treebeard sound like Gaffer Gamgee?

Coda

I can’t resist one small addition. Tom was sure to point out that he didn’t use a single logarithm in his analysis. (This has been a point of contention in the past.) But let’s look at a plot of the cumulative number of parentheses in the texts.

Fig. 1. The abrupt upward jumps are the chapters discussed above.

Those curves have an awfully familiar shape. Let’s take the logarithm of the horizontal axis.

Fig. 2. I knew it!

Both Bilbo and Frodo pile up parentheses early in the text (when many explanations are needed) but let them fall by the wayside as the plot thickens. Those straight lines fit really well; the pattern is logarithmic. In fact, we can infer authorship from the slope of the count of parentheses on a log scale. See that blue dot above the red line in the lower left corner? That’s “A Long-expected Party”. We recognize the lion by its paw!

Notes

1. Next stop, digital Faërie!
2. Aside from the frequently aberrant Alan and Shawn.
3. You can’t spell “parenthesis” without “ent”.