I’m currently taking the mini-course “Tolkien’s Ents and the Environment” from Signum University’s SPACE program, taught by the unwiðmetenlic Sørina Higgins. We were discussing Gimli’s speech about the glories of the Glittering Caves (III, viii) and how it parallels the (more frequent) references to trees and plants as the object of environmentalist sympathies. Sørina challenged us to a close reading of Gimli’s speech.
by Massupa Kaewgahya
Surprising no one, I zoomed in on the extraordinary number of French-derived words in the passage. I’ve never counted them before. Time to fire up the OED Text Annotator! This analysis focused on Gimli’s direct speech, from “Strange are the ways of men…” to “It makes me weep to leave them.” This passage is 14% derived from French. As we have established, the threshold of madness in Tolkien is 7%. In this passage, Gimli leaves behind even the suicidal Denethor. It’s the second-highest French density I’ve identified so far, just behind Gollum’s pre-taming peak of 15%.
Then Sørina pointed out something fascinating: Gimli’s speech sounds a lot like Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan.” The speech and the poem are roughly the same length. (381 words to 349.) They share words like measureless caverns, underground rivers, domes, caves, towers, round, cover, hill, sea, music, deep, wall, war… (omitting the boring, common words). Of course the quantitative metrics kind of miss the point. The feeling is similar. Both are gushing over a beautiful place from which they’ve been untimely taken away.1 As Sørina put it, the caverns cause Gimli not just to switch languages, but also centuries.
“Kubla Khan” is famously the result of an opium dream. There’s only one conclusion to draw here. There’s some kind of narcotic in the Glittering Caves of Aglarond. Sauron missed a trick when he tried to snare Dwarves with Rings of Power. That kind of addiction2 doesn’t work on them. However, limestone caves apparently emit a gas that humans don’t notice, which acts like a drug on Dwarves. Even short-term exposure leads to monologuing, Romanticism, and French.
Tom Hillman
Being underground and damp, the glittering caves seem more likely to produce mushrooms than poppies, and the symptoms of Gimli’s animation and sensitivity to color and sound also seem more consistent with mushrooms. I wonder how the Frenchification of the speech of those who have lost it even temporarily is handled in the French translation.
Joe
You’re right — it would be awesome if the French translation switched to Québécois.
LeesMyth
I would note that Gimli’s unusual speech pattern here prompts Legolas to say “You move me, Gimli. I have never heard you speak like this before. Almost you make me regret that I have not seen these caves.”
Off the top of my head, it seems a little unusual for Elves to be so moved by the words or rhetoric of another race.
Might this be the Dwarvish equivalent of ‘Faërian drama’: a speech with “realism and immediacy beyond the compass of any [Elvish] mechanism,” so much so that Legolas is moved to make a bargain to go visit Helm’s Deep? It works rather differently from Faërian drama, of course, but might we almost say that Gimli’s opium-dream/mushroom-vision word-picture of the caverns is a de facto secondary world (within the story), which Legolas finds so alluring that he arranges to visit it in their primary world?
Joe
Makes sense to me. There are plenty of stories about a secondary world underground. And Dwarves are faërie creatures too. They’re just more down-to-earth than most.
Daniel Stride
Would that make Legolas the Person from Porlock?
Joe
Wikipedia tells me that Porlock is on the sea coast, so initially no, but the stumps of a submerged ancient forest are just offshore, so maybe?