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

On August 13, 2020

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.

	Tolkien	Sitwell	Eminem
English	Yes	Yes	No
Edwardian	Yes	Yes	No
Poet	Yes	Yes	No
Drawing from country life	Yes	Yes	No
Inspired by Classical mythology	Yes	Yes	No
Scenic depictions of darkness	Yes	Yes	No
World War 1	Yes	Yes	No
Hunting shows up in odd places	Yes	Yes	No
Importance of musicality in poems	Yes	Yes	No
Respect for the traditions they’re appropriating	Yes	No	Yes
Poems should make sense	Yes	No	Yes
Structured rhyme	Depends	No	No

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.

Rhymometry

By Joe

On August 11, 2020

In Digital Humanities

This is part of the paper I presented at Mythmoot VII. I’m breaking it up into blog-sized pieces. This is the graphical core. In the next post, I’ll show what that means in context.

The objective is to find similar patterns of rhyming words in poems that may be very different in genre and era. Going through the verse and marking the rhymes (as I did here) is instructive, but it’s hard to define similarity of patterns. Instead, let’s use the idea of density of rhymes. The way we’ll do it is to start with a chunk of verse of 100-200 words. We’ll number the words in order. Next to each word that participates in a rhyme, we’ll put a 1. Others words get 0. Then we graph the density of 1’s in the poem as a function of linear position in the text. This method doesn’t require the poem to be in lines, which is good because as Prof. Olsen noted, one of our subjects doesn’t use lines per se.

But if the poet uses similar-length words and puts rhyme at the end of a line, we’ll see that come out. It will show a smooth, wavelike structure. Particularly long or short words make small perturbations around the wave. When it’s applied to metric verse, we’ll see things about the poet’s word-choices. When they switch from short words to long, it’ll show up in the troughs between rhyme-peaks. Mosaic rhymes (like the ones Eminem, Dame Edith, and Gerard Manley Hopkins are so fond of) add variation to the pattern by putting a cluster of 1s together, which raises a peak.

Shakespeare

Here are two sonnets back to back. “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” and “When my love swears that she is made of truth”. The rhymes happen at regular intervals, as you’d expect. The troughs are the interesting parts. The first thing this chart hits us with is that these sonnets are mostly monosyllables. The place just to the right of center is where Shakespeare used some big words “some untutored youth, unlearned in the world’s false subtleties.” That reduces the number of non-rhyming words, which raises the minimum density. Note that these (my two favorites) are both “light verse”.

Sonnets 130 and 138

Who else, seen from the vantage of the 1920s, is a stodgy traditionalist? How about Alfred, Lord Tennyson? Another master of iambic pentameter. My first thought was to use “The Idylls of the King” since there are so many Arthurian fans here, but that’s because I’m not very good at thinking sometimes. The Idylls are blank verse, of course, so there are no predictable points at which the density will peak. What I’d never noticed before was that there are no rhymes at all in the Idylls. In the few hundred lines I looked at, not a single accidental rhyme. That’s impressive versifying. So here’s the first few hundred words of “In Memoriam”. It’s just as predictable as Shakespeare.

“In Memoriam”, first 34 lines

Dame Edith Sitwell

Now let’s look at what happened in the 1920s. Europe was recovering from insanity (into which it had dragged the entire world). Here’s the rhyme density in “Hornpipe”. It’s clear that structure was not on Dame Edith’s mind when she wrote this. The peaks are up almost to 2 in these dimensionless units. I do see a little chunk of traditional verse about 75% of the way in – Tennyson would not approve of that sloppiness.

“Hornpipe” from Façade

Here’s “Fox Trot”. Once again, Dame Edith throws a big bolus of rhyme at us up front, and then sort of settles down in the second half. There’s also a 13-word gap of no rhymes at all, to keep us guessing.

"Foxtrot" is similarly swooping and chaotic

“Foxtrot” from Façade

“Tarantella”, on the other hand, shows us two contending rhyme patterns fighting for control. These are higher peaks: “Trampling and sampling mazurkas, Cachucas and turkas” – every word except “and” is part of a rhyme. Looking at the graph, you could almost convince yourself there’s a classical rhythmic pattern hiding in there, but it’s interrupted by low spots. These are alliterative passages that form pivot points: “flatter the flat-leaved fruit” and “pheasants’ tail feathers”. The poem changes at these points from a conversation between Venus and Silenus that I’d call erotically-tinged if it weren’t so preposterous, and becomes a verbal representation of a country dance that might actually be a tarantella, and then changes back.

"Tarantella" is the same, with alliterative pivots

“Tarantella” from Façade

The Rappers

Now I can show you why I say Edith Sitwell is the grandmother of rap. Here’s Chuck D, who’s as serious as Tennyson. We see the craggy profile here that’s familiar from Sitwell’s Modernist nonsense-verse. Chuck D clusters his rhymes at the end, like a grand finale, which is something we haven’t seen before, because this is an exhortation. He’s winding up the crowd to take action, so he uses the bursts of rhymes at the end to focus their attention.

Chuck D. puts the rhyme-surge at the end.

“Fight the Power” by Public Enemy

And, finally, here’s Eminem. Just to show that I read the call for papers, this is his work “Darkness”. He’s on the “defining” side of the conference theme, not the “defying” – this piece tries to put himself into the shoes of the Las Vegas gunman. I’m allowing all kinds of slant-rhymes and assonances (like Prof. Olsen does) because Eminem seems to avoid perfect rhymes. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to infer that Eminem agrees with the luminaries of Poetry that perfect rhymes are frivolous.

This piece has a verse-and-chorus structure that you can see in the second half of the work. The structure is obscured in the first half by the standard pop-music formula of starting the chorus after the second verse. There are also rapid bursts of rhymes, so we know it’s Eminem. The density curve shows us long-wavelength and short-wavelength parts contending for attention.

Eminem's "Darkness" is almost a wave, but more complex

“Darkness” by Eminem

Notice that Eminem, like Chuck D and Dame Edith, has rhyme densities that peak around 2-2.5, where Shakespeare and Tennyson sustain a peak value around 1 to 1.5 for their entire poem. Here’s another example from Eminem is “Mosh”, which I chose because the chorus rhymes “darkness” with “spark that”. Once again, it starts with a bolus of rhymes (that fat peak at the beginning), and slacks off to normal levels to develop the themes. The rhyme density drops off towards the end, though, because this work is a political tract. The last quarter of the piece is basically exhorting the audience to register to vote, so the humor value of rhyme would detract from its effectiveness.

“Mosh” by Eminem

So we’ve established that there are structural similarities between the rhyme density of Sitwell’s verse and Eminem’s. They’re both musical performances, at bottom. Walton’s music is not an accompaniment any more than is Dr. Dre’s. It’s music.

Tolkien

Tolkien is another case. His verse doesn’t fit neatly into one category because Tolkien consciously changed his poetic voice according to which character was supposed to have written the verse. When he’s telling us Bilbo’s poems, they look as regular as Lord T’s. “The Road Goes Ever On” is really short, but it’s available in several versions which I’ve concatenated here to make it long enough to analyze this way. There’s one place in “Oliphaunt” where old Bilbo slips out of traditional chaucerian masculine rhyme. It really sticks out, in this metric.

Bilbo is almost as wavelike as it's possible to be.

“The Road Goes Ever On” by B. Baggins

"Oliphaunt" shows the influence of one mosaic rhyme

“Oliphaunt”, Traditional

Sindarin words break Bilbo’s perfect waves. Remember when Shakespeare went briefly trisyllabic, and we could read it like a seismograph? When Tolkien wrote English verse with Elvish names in it, in Legolas’s voice this time, the long names are constantly fighting with the regular rhymes, which causes low-amplitude turbulence in the density curve. The peaks are still there, though, as they ought to be.

Long elvish names interfere with the smooth wave

“Nimrodel” translated by Legolas

Now it gets complicated. Among all the wonderful things about the Lord of the Rings, the real tour de force (in my humble opinion) is the way Tolkien wove a high romance about Aragorn and Théoden with a modernist tragedy (to quote Prof. Flieger again) about Frodo and Sam. Tolkien wrote verse in Sam’s voice, too, and this is the result. Sam came home from the war as Modernist as anyone. I think it’s interesting that the introduction to “The Adventures of Tom Bombadil” says that rhyme-games are an invention of the Elves, but Elves seem to be stodgy about rhyme. Modernism is not an Elvish mode of thought, I guess.

In "the Stone Troll", Sam begins to break away from tradition

“The Stone Troll”, by S. Gamgee

Cat is a truly modernist burst of rhyming chaos

“Cat” by S. Gamgee

We’ve established the sequence now. The traditionalists have a smooth wave-like structure of rhyme. Modernists have a different pattern, with exuberant bursts of rhyme, usually at the beginning. Tolkien straddles the divide, depending on the character who’s ostensibly writing the verse. He can be on either side, and I think that’s the key to what he’s doing.

Irrelevant Coda

The Beatles were famous for the artistic tension between their two most prolific songwriters. Here’s the difference between Lennon and McCartney in graphic form.

“I am the Walrus” by Lennon and McCartney

Blackbird is re-imposing smooth waves on modernist turbulence

“Blackbird” by Lennon and McCartney

Etymology of Two Cities

By Joe

On June 24, 2020

In Digital Humanities, fantasy

A research team at the Oxford English Dictionary has released a visualization engine for text analysis. This is fun: give it a text (up to 500 words, for the moment) and it will make a graph showing how common the word is in English (vertical axis), the year the word entered the English language (horizontal axis), the frequency of each word in the sample (size of the circle), and the language group from which we got the word (color).

This can be used for lots of things. We can test (for example) J.R.R. Tolkien’s success at excluding any word from later than 1600 from his prose.

Me, I wanted to go back to something that bothered me when I was a teenager. The first description of Minas Tirith, seen from a distance, sounded weird to me.

For the fashion of Minas Tirith was such that it was built on seven levels, each delved into the hill, and about each was set a wall, and in each wall was a gate. But the gates were not set in a line: the Great Gate in the City Wall was at the east point of the circuit, but the next faced half south, and the third half north, and so to and fro upwards; so that the paved way that climbed towards the Citadel turned first this way and then that across the face of the hill. And each time that it passed the line of the Great Gate it went through an arched tunnel, piercing a vast pier of rock whose huge out-thrust bulk divided in two all the circles of the City save the first. For partly in the primeval shaping of the hill, partly by the mighty craft and labour of old, there stood up from the rear of the wide court behind the Gate a towering bastion of stone, its edge sharp as a ship-keel facing east. Up it rose, even to the level of the topmost circle, and there was crowned by a battlement; so that those in the Citadel might, like mariners in a mountainous ship, look from its peak sheer down upon the Gate seven hundred feet below. The entrance to the Citadel also looked eastward, but was delved in the heart of the rock; thence a long lamp-lit slope ran up to the seventh gate. Thus men reached at last the High Court, and the Place of the Fountain before the feet of the White Tower: tall and shapely, fifty fathoms from its base to the pinnacle, where the banner of the Stewards floated a thousand feet above the plain.

LotR, V,i

Here’s what that looks like in the visualizer. Huge cluster of blue and green for English and other Germanic languages. The thing that struck teenaged me, though I didn’t know it at the time, was all that red. This paragraph is loaded with French words, from “fashion” at the beginning to “plain” at the end. 30 out of 300.

Minas Tirith

For comparison, here’s the first description of Edoras.

‘I see a white stream that comes down from the snows’, he said. ‘Where it issues from the shadow of the vale a green hill rises upon the east. A dike and mighty wall and thorny fence encircle it. Within there rise the roofs of houses; and in the midst, set upon a green terrace, there stands aloft a great hall of Men. And it seems to my eyes that it is thatched with gold. The light of it shines far over the land. Golden, too, are the posts of its doors. There men in bright mail stand; but all else within the courts are yet asleep.’
‘Edoras those courts are called’, said Gandalf, ‘and Meduseld is that golden hall. There dwells Theoden son of Thengel, King of the Mark of Rohan. We are come with the rising of the day. Now the road lies plain to see before us. But we must ride more warily; for war is abroad, and the Rohirrim, the Horse-lords, do not sleep, even if it seem so from afar.
Draw no weapon, speak no haughty word, I counsel you all, until we are come before Theoden’s seat.’

LotR, III,vi

Crunched and visualized, Edoras looks like this:

Edoras

A bare smattering of French words (10 out of 200). All the words from before 1600, with two exceptions. One of those yellow others is “Rohan”, which the OED thinks is Sanskrit (and I’m sure it is). We’ll let that slide. The other is “afar”, which is listed as Cushitic. I’m not sure I believe that — it sounds like the Old English prefix “a-” stuck to the Old English-derived “far”. This descriptive passage passes Tolkien’s constraint test easily.

In conclusion, my old suspicion has been quantified: Gondor is 10% French. Tolkien may have been using French words to designate social hierarchy, which Gondor has in bucket-loads. I suspect a lot more French words will appear in Gondor once we can process more than 500 words at a time. We’ll see if the OED research team lets us do that before my Signum classmate James Tauber releases the same capability open source.

Tip of the hat to Thijs Porck for letting us know about this via Twitter.

The End of Saruman

By Joe

On June 20, 2020

In fantasy

A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry has wrapped up its analysis of the Battle of the Hornburg from the point of view of military science. It’s a tour de force. I addressed the subject from my own less-educated perspective a couple of years ago, and reached similar conclusions. (Lucky!) It drives home the sheer ineptitude of Saruman’s military planning, and reveals why both Sauron and Gandalf held him in such contempt and pity, respectively.

Prof. Devereaux wraps up his essay with a lecture on another subject dear to my heart, which he calls “the Cult of the Badass”. This trope, which I trace back to Charles Bronson movies in the 1970s, has taken over the genres of fantasy, mystery, horror, and probably romance too^{[citation needed]}. I’m tired of it. The essay links to a video piece discussing how that attitude made a hash out of Game of Thrones. A really good treatment, except that it attributes to Robert A. Heinlein a sentiment that goes much further back. Heinlein, in fact, was paraphrasing Chairman Mao.

The Introverts of Middle-earth

By Joe

On April 18, 2020

In fantasy

Thinking before you speak, by Jason Rowley

Introvert (schematic)

The poll about Bombadil’s introversion seems to have resonated with the online Tolkien community. Among many other reactions, Daniel Stride of A Phuulish Fellow (his book is up to #2 in my “to-read” pile) has a response. He dives into which characters in Tolkien are introverted, besides the obvious bad guys, and comes up with some interesting pearls.

I have one disagreement with Daniel (and a lot of redditors): some people seem to think that introverts don’t talk much, and therefore Tom Bombadil can’t be an introvert. Taciturnity and introversion are not correlated! Half of all introverts talk less than average, but the other half — well, I won’t expect anyone to understand if I mention Uncle Page, but most of the USA has heard of Garrison Keillor. The man made a career out of getting up on stage every Saturday night and talking hilariously for two hours about how shy and reclusive he is. Click that link and read his front-page coronavirus essay, and you’ll see what I mean. (N.B.: your Idiosopher might have been accused of insufficient taciturnity once or twice himself.)

But this post isn’t to argue with anyone. The virtue of scholarship (and a goal to which Idiosophy aspires with rare success) comes when it’s useful for understanding something. And there are two names on Daniel’s list that struck me as particularly useful applications.

Beorn

Beorn lives by himself, and doesn’t like visitors. Strong indications of introversion. Except he also built a big hall that can seat dozens of people. He can set a table for 16 at a moment’s notice. How do we resolve this paradox? Maybe he’s not so much a born introvert, but rather has had introversion thrust upon him. I mean, he’s also a grizzly bear. Grizzly bears require about 300 square miles (78,000 ha) of territory, each. That, plus the fact that everyone’s terrified of him, is going to lead to a lot of what we now call social distancing.

It’s interesting to think about how Beorn’s heroism at the Battle of Five Armies might have contributed to a certain kind of fame, enough to attract 100%-humans from Rhovanion to his lifestyle. But years of isolation don’t slough off instantly. Bringing new people in as followers of a war hero is a well-structured relationship. This is important to introverts, which meant that he could make it work and become the founder of a new society of Beornings.

Faramir

People who fancy themselves political realists (don’t worry, G., I’m not mentioning any names) claim it’s a shortcoming of Tolkien’s plotting in LotR that no opposition factions in Gondor are mentioned. Why did Faramir passively accept Aragorn’s claim to the throne? He had an army of loyal soldiers, much bigger than Aragorn could call on. Without his consent, Aragorn is only a Ranger.

If Faramir is really an introvert, it all makes sense. I went back and looked at Olga’s wonderful essay about his “quality”, and sure enough, through that lens lots of his behavior looks clear. (Also his clumsy approach to romance.) Faramir’s emotional reaction to Boromir’s death is mostly fraternity, but it’s easy to see a streak of dismay in it that he is suddenly expected to spend the rest of his life as a politician. Once he recovered from the Black Breath and learned that the battle had ended with so many signs and portents of a returning King, he would have felt like it was his own personal eucatastrophe.

So thanks, Daniel – that’s really interesting!

Old Tom Bombadil, Introverted Fellow

By Joe

On April 14, 2020

In Digital Humanities, fantasy

While we were all sitting at home to defeat the plague of coronavirus , I got to thinking about the all-time champion of social distancing: Tom Bombadil. I write about him and Goldberry a lot. There are constant debates going on about him on social media and in scholarship. Lots of us are fascinated by Tom, and the unbounded opportunities for speculation he provides. The rest of the writers on the internet can’t stand him.

It’s a funny thing. J.R.R. Tolkien was the most sociable person imaginable. He was always forming groups: the TCBS, the Coalbiters, the Inklings. The characters he writes are often as social and extroverted as he was. Hobbits spend their time in taverns, Elves convene in big feasts, Butterbur persuades total strangers to join the crowd in the common room, Dwarves go to the effort of digging through solid rock to build huge halls in which they can assemble, the Rohirrim are the descendants of Anglo-Saxons who saw exile as a trauma. Loners are usually evil.

Most of Tolkien’s dedicated fans, by diametric contrast, are introverts. We like the idea of convivial groups, but it would be exhausting to live like that all the time. Fortunately, there’s one couple of happy introverts in The Lord of the Rings with whom we can share our attitude. Tom and Goldberry live the introvert’s ideal life. They’re happy to have short-term visitors, but they didn’t make it easy to be one. They conduct their business as they see fit. They make their little realm exactly the way they want it. Best of all, they have the power to keep it that way. It occurred to me to wonder if there was a connection between the Internet’s fascination with Bombadil and his status as the Great Introvert.

How would we test this hypothesis? Our unique (it is to be hoped) circumstances offered a chance to find out. Usually, the people who discuss Tolkien on the Internet are doubly-likely to be introverted. This weekend was different. Everyone was confined to their house and the weather was forecast to be terrible. There would never be a better chance to find extroverted Tolkien fans on line.

The Experiment

Hypothesis: Introverts are more likely than extroverts to love the character of Tom Bombadil.

Approach: Conduct a web survey, soliciting responses from Twitter and Reddit (r/tolkienfans and r/lotr) to two questions.

What do you think of Tom Bombadil?
1. Love him
2. I understand why movies always leave him out, but it’s disappointing
3. Don’t like him
4. Other (free text)

Are you an introvert or an extrovert? For this purpose, an extrovert is someone who’s energized by interacting with large groups; an introvert is someone who likes to be alone to re-charge after being in a group.
1. Extrovert
2. Kind of in the middle
3. Introvert

The survey ran from April 12th to April 14th.

Results: 1,329 responses were received, of which 1,323 were intelligible. The free-text responses were overwhelmingly of two types. Either they were “both (a) and (b)”, which was reclassified as (a), or they were “neither like nor dislike” which is logically equivalent to and reclassified as (c).

		Reaction
Introversion	Don’t like him	Disappointing	Love him	Total
Extrovert	6	32	69	107
Kind of in the middle	49	192	197	438
Introvert	76	319	383	778
Total	131	543	649	1,323

Discussion: The attempt to find extroverts in online Tolkien discussion forums was probably doomed in any case, but we did get over a hundred of them to contribute. 59% of the sample was a proud introvert. 33% described themselves as neither introverted nor extroverted, but it is impossible to avoid the observation that this latter group’s answers were indistinguishable from those of the former (Pearson’s χ² test, p=.0092).

Unfortunately for our hypothesis, the probability that an extrovert would love Tom Bombadil was 64%, compared to 49% among introverts. Introverts were almost twice as likely to say “don’t like him” as extroverts (11% vs 6%).

Conclusion

Extroverts seem to like people more than introverts do, even when the person is fictional and the test is loaded to favor the introverts. The world is a harsh place, and the beauty of a hypothesis can not save it from the brutality of facts.

Thank you and ring-a-dong-dillo to everyone who helped spread the word!

Ents’ Work

By Joe

On April 4, 2020

In Alliterative Verse, fantasy

Over at Middle-earth Reflections, Olga cheers as the Ents wreck Saruman’s plans for dominating the northwest of Middle-earth. Serves him right. Her previous post talked about the Old English origins of the word “ent” and how Tolkien re-applied the old poets’ feelings of awe for the ancient (Roman) giants who built the ruins around them. That reminds me of what may be my favorite of all the jokes Tolkien buried in The Lord of the Rings. When Theoden & Co. are riding from Helm’s Deep to Isengard, their first sign that something has happened comes in this passage:

Dark lay the vale before them, for the moon had passed into the West, and its light was hidden by the hills. but out of the deep shadow of the dale rose a vast spire of smoke and vapour; as it mounted, it caught the rays of the sinking moon and spread in shimmering billows , black and silver over the starry sky.

LotR, III, viii.

The company is miles away from Isengard at that point. The Old English poem “Maxims II” (as its title indicates, this poem is a long string of maxims saying how the world ought to be) begins,

Cyning sceal rice healdan. Ceastra beoð feorran gesyne,
Orðanc enta geweorc, þa þe on þysse eorðan syndon,
Wrætlic weallstana geweorc.

I translate these first two Wise Sayings as, “A king should hold his realm. A fortress should be visible from afar to all who are on this earth, the skillful work of giants, wonderful works of stone.” The word “Orthanc” sitting there with the Ents tells me that this is something we shouldn’t overlook, and is why Tom Shippey says it’s a joke, deep-down, where you can’t get at it.

Most places the old poets use the phrase enta geweorc, they’re referring to a ruin. So, which was the Ents’ work? The original construction, or the ruining? Grim-voiced men like the poets who wrote “Beowulf” or “The Wanderer” always meant the former. Tolkien’s sense of humor led him to wonder, what if it were the latter? And so the next chapter came to be.

A Dickieson Festpost

By Joe

On March 4, 2020

In Academy and Society, mythgard academy

Brenton Dickieson is celebrating his 1,000th post at A Pilgrim in Narnia, and everyone is invited! He’s been a positive influence on this little escapade into humanities scholarship since nearly the beginning. All the people who Know the Internet assure me that blogs are passé; nobody blogs any more. Fortunately for his 7,500 followers, Brent doesn’t read those people. Go on over and congratulate him. In honor of the occasion, an infinitesimal Festschrift about C.S. Lewis:

I’m just catching up on the Mythgard Academy class on Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis. I first read it when I was a teenager. Even though I didn’t have the concept of “imperialism” clear in my head, I could tell that Weston’s rant about human destiny was a withering indictment of the whole imperial project. But something I never noticed before is the initial description of Oyarsa. He’s not part of the planet. He’s actually out in heaven, but he rules Malacandra. We’re supposed to be thinking of planetary intelligences, of course, but that description also fits the civil-service functionary in London who administers a colony, or a bureaucrat in Washington DC who handles relations between an overseas military presence and the indigenes. Imperialism appears to be a tenacious concept — if we’re not careful, we’ll find ourselves with empires layered on top of empires, in a Great Chain of Politics.

Lowbrow Rhyming

By Joe

On March 2, 2020

In Slow learner

I needed some terms and history about rhyming for my Mythmoot paper, so off I went to JSTOR. This article by William Harmon at UNC turned out to be a lot of fun. He cites “The Flintstones”. And in a discussion about how hard it is to do quantitative metrical verse in English (compared to Latin or Greek), he begins the sentence, “Some notable poets attempted the feat but…”. Galloping amphibrachs! (Link to Wikipedia because I love their examples.)

I was looking for an explanation of how rhyme and alliteration seemed to switch roles in poetry, and when it happened. It turns out that it wasn’t a switch, it was a long fight between the pop poets and the highbrows. Here’s a fact of which I didn’t have an inkling: rhyme was “shunned by versifiers in all major literatures of classical antiquity (Sanskrit, Greek, Latin) and all other ancient Indo-European literatures including the Germanic, and in Hebrew and other Semitic languages”. (p.26). Here’s one I did: “No sooner was rhymed qualitative verse established in England than it was attacked as vulgar and cheap.” (p. 29) Today’s hip-hop poets are in if not “good” then at least long-established company. The source of the fight is something everyone who learns French, German, Spanish, or Italian notices: everything rhymes in an inflected language. It’s too easy, so unworthy of a highbrow poet.

The biggest thing I learned from this paper is not the thing I came to read it for. Have you ever noticed that poets aren’t very good at meter? Even Shakespeare, for crying out loud: “When my love swears that she is made of truth”, despite what my high-school English teacher said, isn’t iambic pentameter. It’s not “x/x/x/x/x/”, it’s “xx//xxx/x/”. Harmon says that’s OK because the importance of adhering to the meter is low at the beginning of a line, and high at the end. Quantifying the importance is a topic for digital humanities, I would imagine. The other thing we can see there is the persistence of the four-beat line from Old English alliterative verse. Even when Modern English poets are trying to write pentameter, one stress usually gets short-changed. The language seems to relax naturally back into four.

Here’s the thing I really wanted to learn: when a rhyme is between sets of syllables that span across several words, it’s called “heteromerous” or “mosaic rhyme”. (For obvious reasons involving immunity from tenure review, I prefer the latter.) When Edith Sitwell rhymes “gourd and the” with “gardener”, or Eminem rhymes “mom’s spaghetti” with “calm and ready”, that’s mosaic rhyme. Harmon says Gerard Manley Hopkins was the first poet of note to use it. (p. 33)

Another new kind of rhyme has to do with disyllabic words in which both syllables are stressed, requiring rhymes on both. His examples include “hobnailed/bobtailed” (Sitwell), “suitcase/bootlace” (McCartney). This seems to have appeared around 1850. When I look through the pronouncing dictionary for words like that, I find lots of words like “lugnut”, “airport”, “workshop”, “starship”, “broadband”, “deadline”, and so forth. Very modern concepts — I wonder if this is a mode of speech brought to prominence by the Industrial Revolution?

Works Cited

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

Furlongs in hydrography

By Joe

On February 13, 2020

In squibs & crackers

Furlongs are almost always used in measurement on land, analogously to the statute mile. This is the only hydrographical “furlong” in the citations given by the Oxford English Dictionary. They quote Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler (1653) :

VIAT. But Master, do not Trouts see us in the night?

PISC. Yes, and hear, and smel too, both then and in the day time, for Gesner observes, the Otter smels a fish forty furlong off him in the water; and that it may be true, is affirmed by Sir Francis Bacon (in the eighth Century of his Natural History) who there proves, that waters may be the Medium of sounds, by demonstrating it thus, That if you knock two stones together very deep under the water, those that stand on a bank neer to that place may hear the noise without any diminution of it by the water.