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The Botanists and the Critics

On June 1, 2019

A lot of my time exploring fantastical literature ends up being spent on trying to understand facts from widely-separate fields of knowledge that, in the context of a story, seem like disconnected. So it’s a pleasure to report a case in which everyone just plain agrees.

As we noted earlier, Tolkien re-used a medieval cure for elf-shot to describe how Aragorn and Elrond cured Frodo of the Witch-King’s knife-wound. The cure involves boiled herbs (feverfew, deadnettle, and plantain), a knife held in the healer’s hands, and an incantation in an ancient language. Cutting and pasting from LotR I, xii:

He sat down on the ground, and taking the dagger-hilt laid it on his knees, and he sang over it a slow song in a strange tongue. … He crushed a leaf in his ﬁngers, and it gave out a sweet and pungent fragrance. ‘It is fortunate that I could ﬁnd it, for it is a healing plant that the Men of the West brought to Middle-earth. Athelas they named it’…. He threw the leaves into the boiling water and bathed Frodo’s shoulder.

There’s one problem, though: Athelas is the cure for Black Breath, not for elf-shot. Frodo probably suffers from both, so athelas is worth trying. But the text says Aragorn knows he’s not doing the cure with the right herb: It has great virtues, but over such a wound as this its healing powers may be small. (Ibid.) e43r87[1]

Ought to be suitable for next year’s questing

In their book Flora of Middle-Earth, Walter & Graham Judd looked around our world to find something that might be athelas, and they decided comfrey was the closest thing. As it happens, I’ve just planted comfrey in a little plot on my farm. It has some useful properties for building up soil fertility that this plot badly needs. But comfrey is kind of a cult-object, too . When you talk to an expert about comfrey, you get lots of other information along with advice relevant to your primary application. In particular, I got a cautionary story about its healing properties.

Comfrey is useful for topical treatment of wounds. It closes up cuts fast, even though that’s not always the best thing. I heard the story of a dog who lacerated himself on a barbed-wire fence. He was treated with comfrey salve, and the wound closed up nicely, but such a closure was premature. There was something still deep inside, and the wound got infected. A vet had to slice the scar back open to remove whatever the little splinter was. This sounds familiar: ‘His wound was small, and it is already closed. There’s nothing to be seen but a cold white mark on his shoulder.’ (Ibid., a few pages later) Aragorn the field medic had to stop the bleeding, ward off the Black Breath, and keep Frodo mobile, so he used the strongest herb he could find. When the patient gets to the hospital, the doctors there can undo the quick fix. Elrond will be called upon to do a similar re-opening, and make use of his more-complete herbarium in Rivendell.

So, for once, we have 10th-century herbal lore, 20th-century fiction, 21st-century botany, and current lived experience all neatly lined up, with no contradictions to be reconciled. An account to the Tolkien blogosphere of so strange an event was required, I think.

[1] While I was writing, Fléau the Cat walked across my keyboard and I didn’t notice her scribal interpellation until the post went live. So I left it in. This is her first contribution to Tolkien scholarship.

Works Cited

Judd, Walter S., and Graham A. Judd. Flora of Middle-Earth: Plants of JRR Tolkien’s Legendarium. Oxford University Press, 2017.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. Houghton-Mifflin, 2002.

What letters alliterate?

By Joe

On May 12, 2019

In Alliterative Verse

Humans have it easy. If we want to know whether two words alliterate, we can just listen and decide for ourselves. It’s poetry, so if it sounds good, it is good. Computers don’t have that option. We have to tell it which sounds are equivalent and which are different. The basics are taken care of by the pronouncing dictionary, but we still have to deal with the edge cases.

In Anglo-Saxon verse, Jun Terasawa is the authority. That’s the scheme I’ll start with. B, D, F, G, L, M, N, P, R, T, and W are in classes by themselves; they don’t alliterate with anything but themselves. The complicated classes are: {G, even when pronounced like Y}; {C, whether pronounced as CH or K}; {S}; {SC}; {SP}; {ST}; and {A,E,I,O,U,Y,H}.

The pronouncing dictionary takes care of G and C. The letter “S” is different from the three di-consonants it helps form in Anglo-Saxon. (but read on!) The vowels have a couple of interesting features. Not every case of a word beginning with a vowel alliterates. This came up in the first version of the program: It found the line, “Aragorn and Éomer and Imrahil rode” and said that was a good alliterative line. I put it to the company at Thursday Nights at the Green Dragon, all of whom agreed it was not. This is because the thing that’s really alliterative isn’t the vowel, it’s the glottal stop when the previous word ends with a vowel, too. (Terasawa, §2.1.) That’s how the “H” finds its way into that group. In a sense, H plays the same role as the glottal stop. We know this is a complicated issue because the English still have problems with words beginning in “H”.

Now off to the computer. We know a syllable has the stress when its vowel has a “1” after it. So when the computer finds a “1”, we can tell the computer to back up to the previous consonant and that’s the sound on which we alliterate – almost. Some stressed syllables begin with two consonants, and we want to alliterate on the first of them. Like “blue-embroidered”: using the naive rule rule would say the consonants to check are L and R, and the computer would return “no”. But those of us with ears to hear would call that an alliteration on B. So we build those in as special cases to test first. The di-consonants are: BL BR CL CR DR DW FL FR FY GL GR KL KN KR PL PR SC SK SL SM SN SP SQ ST SW TR TW. When it sees one of these cases, the computer has to back up two consonants to find the beginning of the syllable.

I’m breaking some of Terasawa’s rules since we’re speaking Modern English — I think phrases like “second story” alliterate now, so “S” and “ST” are in the same equivalence class. “S” and “SH” are still different, so “SH” isn’t in the list of di-consonants.

Works Cited

Lerner, Alan Jay and Frederick Lowe. My Fair Lady. New York, 1956.

Terasawa, Jun. Old English Metre: An Introduction. University of Toronto Press, 2011.

Chasing down the Sunrise

By Joe

On May 2, 2019

In Alliterative Verse, Failed Classical Education

When the Prancing Pony Podcast did their March 2019 Questions after Nightfall, Legolas’s proverb came up: “Rede oft is found at the rising of the sun.” My brain has alliterative-verse infection, so I dropped a note in the mailbag to point out that the proverb is an Anglo-Saxon alliterative long line. Why would Legolas say something so Rohirric, I wondered. Do proverbs wander around Middle-earth and get picked up by faraway Elves who think they sound exotic? Or is there something in the water around Rohan that makes people alliterate? Treebeard does it too, after all.

What rede, rosy-fingered Dawn?

Barliman passed the note to Shawn. (In less than a month, it should be noted. Old Butterbur is picking up his game.)

My phrasing was ambiguous, so Shawn asked whether it was actually Anglo-Saxon, or just Tolkien writing modern English in that style. Which turned out to be a much better question. I looked around the various stockpiles of Old English proverbs. I couldn’t find rede and sunrise together anywhere on line.

If Legolas’s observation were an actual proverb in Old English, it would be something like Oft is ræd æt dægred gefunden. There’s nothing there to alliterate with. But then the penny dropped: this is the cliché folk-witticism “You can’t spell X without Y”. Like, “you can’t spell ‘awesome’ without ‘me’.” Or, the Internet being the Freudian sort of place it is, “You can’t spell ‘subtext’ without ‘sex’.” The letters of “ræd” are all there in “dægred”.

This isn’t a new joke. Something similar can be found in the 1st Century BCE, when people wondered whether wood burns because the Latin word for “fire” is in the word for “wood”. Lucretius delivered the smackdown:

Non est lignis tamen insitus ignis.

– Lucretius, De Rerum Natura

As Shawn put it, “I’ll never underestimate Tolkien’s ability to include an oblique pun requiring knowledge of another language.” In fact, he pointed out that the Bosworth-Toller dictionary includes a citation of one manuscript where the scribe spelled it “dægræd”, which makes it an even better joke. JRRT actually preferred Mercian. Could “dægræd” be a dialectical spelling? Thanks to the Mercian aversion to putting books in places where they’d survive to the 21st Century, I only speak West Saxon, so I don’t know.

I’m going to say we’ve found another Easter egg, especially since (1) it was Easter when we found it, and (2) a sunrise pun is seasonally appropriate.

On business of his own

By Joe

On April 28, 2019

In trivial

For six months, I’ve been trying to get a good picture of the fox. Finally:

stop and smell the flowers, too late

High-stepper

Three-quarter turn is my best angle, n’est-ce pas?

I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. Attenborough!

Elves & Dwarves & How to Prevent Them

By Joe

On April 18, 2019

In Alliterative Verse, Slow learner

“That’s enough to begin with; there are plenty of hard words there.” – Humpty Dumpty

This is my term paper from the Signum University “Introduction to Anglo-Saxon” class. (Except that I deleted the jokes from the copy I actually turned in.) These are two healing charms, more or less in alliterative verse. I’m posting it here because I kept getting Tolkien connections as I did the translation. T. S. Eliot said, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal;” from which I extrapolate that a truly great writer steals from things that would otherwise be forgotten.

Dubious Tolkien references herein: Lembas, Elrond, barrow-wights, giant spiders, Galdor.

These are two charms to prevent illnesses that are ostensibly caused by supernatural intervention. The first is a sharp pain due to elf-shot. The second is sleep disturbance due to dwarf-riding. To effect a cure, the arsenal that a healer brings to bear on the problem includes knowledge of the natural world, familiarity with the supernatural, word-play, and personal authority.

The first modern scholarly edition of Lacnunga “of Leechcraft” was made by a Rev. Cockayne in 1866. (This has no relevance to the current translation project, but the medical aptonym is irresistible.) The original also contained a cure for cancer; alas, that part of the manuscript is now illegible. A 21^st-century critical edition by Edward Pettit is the source for these texts, altered as necessary by reference to the digitized Harley manuscript 585 made available by the British Library. Line numbers are from Pettit.

Wið Færstice: A charm against a stabbing pain

Lacnunga, CXXVII

This charm has three parts. First is an oily preparation of herbs that (as we now know) actually do relieve pain. The second is a chant in pretty-good alliterative form, interspersed with periodic imperatives commanding the elf-shot to get out of the body, and some lawyerly-sounding enumerations to make sure all the possibilities are covered. The third is a real knife, which plays a sympathetic role to help pull out the little elf-spear.

This charm may pre-date the Christian conversion. It has only the tiniest hint of Christianity, in a place where it could easily have been pasted on, long after the charm was originally written.

Notes on translation

760: Transcription error for feferfuge = “feverfew”, Tanacetum parthenium, which is still recommended as a cure for migraines. (I believe this to be the first citation of WebMD in a Signum term paper.)

reade netel is called purple deadnettle today; it’s an invasive weed that takes over fields between harvest and planting. inwyxð I take to relate to the invasiveness, by analogy with in-weaxan, because that takes an accusative object, and purple deadnettles are really invasive.

“wegbrade”= “waybread”; not lembas, just a plantain. Plantago is not a pain-killer according to St. Hildegard von Bingen or Macer Floridus; the Anglo-Saxons must have had a different physiology from the continentals.

Line 775: Six is a pun on “seax”, I think. Also 6+1=7 smiths total, and any time you can use the number 7 in a spell, you’re doing great.

Line 777: Even a small splinter of iron might be the problem, so the spell includes it. Elrond clearly knew this spell.

Line 784: ic wille ðin helpan: “yours” means “your afflicted body-part”, which isn’t written out in full because it would destroy the meter.

Line 787: Lacnunga LXXVI mentions Woden, which I’m taking as permission to run with Bosworth-Toller and say “Thor’s house” for “fyrgenhæfde”. Following that line of thought, the genetive plural “esa” who are as likely as elves to shoot someone, I translate as “gods”, cognate with Norse Æsir.

Line 788: “the liquid” refers to the herbed butter made in line 760.

760 Wið færstice: feferfuige 7 seo reade netele ðe þurh ærn inwyxð 7 wegbrade; wyll in buteran.	Against a stabbing pain: feverfew, & the purple dead-nettles that invade the fields, & plantains; boil in butter.
Hlude wæran hy la hlude ða hy ofer þone hlæw ridan wæran anmode, ð hy ofer land ridan.	Loud they were, so loud, when they rode over the barrow. Single-mindedly they rode over the land.
scyld ðu ðe nu þu ðysne nið genesan mote.	Now shield yourself from them, and you might survive this trouble.
765 ūt lytel spere gif hēr inne sīe	Out, little spear, if one be in here!
stōd under linde under lēohtum scylde þær ðā mihtigan wīf hyra mægen beræddon 7 hy gyllende gāras sændan	There he stood under linden-wood, under a light shield. The mighty women are calling on their powers to send spears on him, but their powers were nullified.
770 ic him oðerne eft wille sændan fleogende flane forane togeanes	I will send another again to defend against the flying darts.
ut lytel spere gif hit her inne sy	Out, little spear, if it be herein!
sæt smið slōh seax lytel īserna wund swīðe	A smith sat, forged a knife, little for a weapon, but quick to wound
ut lytel spere gif her inne sy	Out, little spear, if one be in here!
775 syx smiðas sætan wælspera worhtan	Six smiths sat, working on a battle-spear
ūt spere næs in spere	Out, spear, not in, spear!
gif hēr inne sy īsenes dæl hægtessan geweorc hit sceal gemyltan	If a piece of iron should be in here, a hag’s work, it shall melt.
gif ðu wære on fell scoten oððe wære on flæsc scoten 780 oððe wære on blod scoten / oððe wære on lið scoten næfre ne sy ðin lif atæsed	If you were shot in the skin, or were shot in the flesh, or were shot in the blood, or were shot in the limb, may your life never be hurt.
gif hit wære esa gescot oððe hit wære ylfa gescot oððe hit wære hægtessan gescot nu ic wille ðīn helpan	If it were god-shot or if it were elf-shot, or if it were hag-shot, now I will help yours.
785 þis ðe to bote esa gescotes ðis ðe to bote ylfa gescotes ðis ðē tō bōte hægtessan gescotes ic ðīn wille helpan	This to cure god-shot, this to cure elf-shot, this to cure hag-shot: I will help yours.
flēo þær on fyrgenhæfde hāl westū helpe ðīn drihten	Fly there to the house of Thor. Be you well, may the Lord help yours!
nim þonne þæt seax ādō on wætan	Then take the knife and put it in the liquid.

Wið dweorh – Against a dwarf

Lacnunga, LXXXVI

After thorough study, the only thing I know about dweorh is that whatever it means, it doesn’t mean a bearded guy with a pick-axe, nor a person deficient in pituitary hormones. This charm (galdor) seems to be aimed at thwarting something much more dangerous than elves or hags or Norse gods: the last lines seem to imply that the healer is in as much danger from a dweorh as the sick person, and the patient’s guardian who summoned the healer, too. It is probably not coincidence that Christian powers are called upon instead of natural forces. Like a modern doctor, when things turn serious he gets out the Latin.

This charm shows the syncretic enthusiasm for which alternative medicine is still famous today. The objective is to cure, not to adhere to any particular system. The alliterative verse is there because it’s part of the tradition, but it is metrically inept. Christian saints are a power-source, so the healer brings them in without apparent embarrassment. I agree with Matthew Lewis that this is a charm against sleep disturbance, of an apparently horrible kind.

Notes on translation

Line 645: The seven names to be written on the stolen communion wafers (!) are the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. The wafers evidently must be strung into a necklace of some kind, though this is not specifically stated.

Line 650: In the manuscript, inspidenwiht is written clearly, so no chance of a mistranscription. A scribo had an ascender where the “n” is, which was scraped off. Note that it was not a descender, which would be needed for this to be “inspiderwiht”, as most transcriptions have claimed. Here, wiht shall be translated as “creature”, and inspiden by analogy with aspide I take to mean “dangerous”, venomous, or something like that. Lewis, in common with lots of other people, think it should be translated “spider”, but there are three other objections to that besides the typographical: first, spider isn’t the Anglo-Saxon word for “spider”; second, the things that it does aren’t things a spider can do; third, it’s referred to as deor on second mention, which is an odd thing to call a spider. (Unless it’s a giant spider from Mirkwood?)

Line 651: Haman and teage, in keeping with the horse motif, shall be translated “saddle” and “reins”.

Line 652: the land is a metaphor for the physical world. Sleep is like a sea-voyage away from things that are familiar (and warm). A sea-voyage also lets in the pun on liþan (to sail) and ða liþu (in the limbs).

Line 654: I’m going to go out on a limb (I am not averse to continuing a pun a millenium later). Pettit, Lewis, and even Drout have com here. It’s written “cō” in the manuscript, so I’m going to replace that with con. We need a present/future-tense verb here or the spell doesn’t do anything. Also it prevents com ingangan from being redundant. (I realize that I am on shaky intellectual ground by claiming that there existed at least one Anglo-Saxon who worried about being redundant.)

Line 655: adlegan means funeral pyre, which is plainly wrong. Replace it with adlican, “the sick person” (accusative).

645 Wið dweorh man sceal niman VII lytle oflætan swylce man mid ofrað, 7 writan þas naman on ælcre oflætan: Maximianus, Malchus, Iohannes, Martimianus, Dionisius, Constantinus, Serafion.	Against a dwarf, a man shall take seven little wafers, such as one makes offerings with, and write these names, one on each: Maximianus, Malchus, Johannes, Martimianus, Dionisius, Constantinus, Serafion.
Þænne eft þæt galdor, þæt heræfter cweð man sceal singan, ærest on þæt wynstre eare, þænne on þæt swiðre eare, þænne bufan þæs mannes moldan	Next one must sing this charm that follows here, first in to one ear, then into the other ear, then above the crown of the patient’s head.
7 ga þænne an mædenman to 7 ho hit on his sweoran, 7 do man swa þry dagas; him bið sona sel.	And then let a virgin go to him and hang it about his neck, and do the same for three days; soon he will be well.
650“Her com in gangan inspidenwiht. Hæfde him his haman on handa, cwæð þæt þu his hæncgest wære, Lege þe his teage an sweoran.	“Here comes in a dangerous creature. He had his saddle in his hand, said that you were his horse, laid his reins on you and swore.
Ongunnan him of þæm lande liþan.	He started to sail himself away from the land.
Sona swa hy of þæm lande coman þa ongunnan him ða liþu colian	As soon as they came out of that land, then the limbs on him began to chill.
Þa con ingangan deores sweostar.	Then the beast’s sister can come in.
655 Þa geændade heo, 7 aðas swor / ðæt næfre þis ðæm adlegan derian ne moste, ne þæm þe þis galdor begytan mihte, oððe þe þis galdor ongalan cuþe.	She ended it and swore oaths that this gang must never harm the sick one, nor him who obtains this charm, nor him who knows knows how to sing this charm.
Amen. Fiað.”	Amen. So be it.

Works Cited:

Bosworth, Joseph, et al. “An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online.” Edited by Thomas Northcote Toller and Others, Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague, 21 Mar. 2010, http://www.bosworthtoller.com/ Accessed 30 Mar. 2019.

British Library Digitized Manuscripts. Harley MS 585: http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=harley_ms_585_f167r for Dwarves. http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=harley_ms_585_f175r for Elves.

Drout, Michael D.C. “Against a Dwarf”, Anglo-Saxon Aloud. Feb 20, 2008. http://mdrout.webspace.wheatoncollege.edu/category/against-a-dwarf/

Hall, Alaric. “Elves in Anglo-Saxon England: Matters of Belief, Health, Gender, and Identity (Anglo-Saxon Studies 8).” Woodbridge: Boydell (2007).

Lewis, Matthew Charles. Dreaming of Dwarves:Nightmares and Shamanism in Anglo-Saxon Poetics and the Wið Dweorh Charm. Diss. UGA, 2009.

Macer Floridus. “Des vertus des plantes” in Les Propriétés Médicinales Des Plantes: Textes des III^e, IV^e et XI^e Siècles. Clermont-Ferrand: Éditions Paleo, 2007.

Pettit, Edward. Anglo-Saxon Remedies, Charms, and Prayers from British Library Ms Harley 585: Commentary and bibliography. Vol. 1. Edwin Mellen Press, 2001.

Throop, Priscilla, translator. Hildegard von Bingen’s Physica: The complete English translation of her classic work on health and healing. Simon and Schuster, 1998.

Dragons, Southern Style

By Joe

On April 15, 2019

In fantasy

The call for papers at Mythmoot V was disappointing. The theme of the conference is “dragons”, and I know nothing original about dragons. Seeing my disappointment, Madame told me something new:

In Kabyle myth, dragons abduct people, like ogres in Europe. The dragon tucks its victim under its wing and flies away. The poor abductee in the dragon’s armpit gradually shrinks as the dragon sucks his life-force away. After a while, he’s reduced to a baby. At the end, he’s absorbed completely into the dragon.

The singer Ait Menguellet used this as a metaphor for life under an oppressive regime. It fits so perfectly that I find myself wondering just how old this dragon-legend really is.

Graphing CSL’s Letters

By Joe

On April 11, 2019

In graphs

A Pilgrim in Narnia has a post today that mentions, among other things, a social-network analysis of the relationships among Inklings, published in January 2019, that lines up neatly with one of the interests of this blog.

H.H. Kim goes through all the volumes of the letters of C.S. Lewis and produces a set of uni-polar graphs showing all the people with whom Lewis exchanged letters. The figures are impressive – that’s a lot of people. [1] Kim also sets up a chronological analysis, but not in the form of a graph, just a bunch of tables. The reason, as the Conclusion says, is that ‘The biggest limitation of this exploratory paper was the inability to create a directed “complete” network between 1) Lewis and his recipients, and 2) among Lewis’s recipients.’

That’s where my efforts to look at time-evolution of the graphs hit a wall, too. Building off Diana Glyer’s book gives a much more complete picture of the connections among people who aren’t Lewis, but most interactions between people have nothing like the date precision that letters provide. Even when Lewis is involved, most of the important connections don’t involve written records. Kim points out that there are hardly any letters between Lewis and Tolkien. Which makes sense: why write when you can just raise your voice? [2]

This is possibly the most frustrating thing about research in the humanities, to a scientist. When scientists think of a question that we don’t have enough information to answer, the next step is to figure out an experiment that will give us the other things we need to know. In humanities, going and getting more information is a lot less likely. It’s not at all possible with medieval literature (just finished the class, hurrah!). Things are not quite so hopeless with the 20th Century. And, of course, as long as storage media can still be read, it’s not going to be an issue at all with the 21st.

[1] I would tell you which figure I mean, but for some reason the editors of VII don’t use figure numbers. Possibly due to the shameful under-representation of scientific analysis in their journal to date.

[2] Roman historians make the same complaint: if Atticus had just stayed in Greece we’d know a lot more about the late Roman Republic than we do. Nobody writes letters to someone nearby, and letters are much of what we know. As Anthony Everitt put it in Cicero, “when Atticus is with Cicero in Rome the picture breaks up.” (page ix, but I promise I read the whole book.)

Snottor

By Joe

On April 1, 2019

In Academy and Society, mythgard academy

Now that I’ve read “The Wanderer”, I’ve learned the Anglo-Saxon word “snottor”. That got me thinking. I realized there’s a confluence of events in the world that need to be dealt with.

Signum U is about to get the authority to grant degrees. Master of Arts is the current thinking, which shows a lack of ambition.
More than a few Signum students already have master’s degrees and even doctorates. Why take a course for credit, if it gives you a distinction you’ve already got?
The title “doctor”, alas, carries a lot of social rank with it. This being the USA, for-profit STEM education has sprung up to meet the market. Trade schools around the country are cranking out doctorates in the servile arts that require relatively little effort. So there are lots of “doctors” out there. It’s not very distinctive any more.

We’re going to need a new academic title to differentiate real scholars from people who got their boss to pay their tuition to get an extra degree so they look more impressive on a contract proposal. It seems wrong to have a Latin-named degree at Signum, anyway.

I hereby propose the creation of a new academic degree of “Snottor” for continuing students who already have a Ph.D. in another field. It ranks higher than “Doctor”, so all the world may know our magnificent erudition. Let’s just see some unscrupulous college try to sell Snottorates for massaging the amour-propre of middle management!

And “diploma” should be replaced with “twifeald”.

An Anglo-Saxon Joke

By Joe

On March 31, 2019

In Alliterative Verse, squibs & crackers

For #WhanThatAprilleDay19 , a celebration of ancient languages.

In the Anglo-Saxon poem called “The Battle of Maldon”, when we come to the point where the Viking raiders cross over the causeway to the battlefield where the English army awaits, the poet says:

Wōdon þā wælwulfas (for wætere ne murnon),
wīċinga werod west ofer Pantan,
ofer scīr wæter scyldas wēgon,
lidmen tō lande linde bǣron. (Lines 96-99)

Linden-wood (left)

This is usually translated something like, “Battle-wolves waded ashore, not worrying about the water. The Viking band crossed the Panta, over shining water, shields aloft, these men of the fleet towards land advanced their linden shields.” Based on my long expertise in Old English (12 weeks next Tuesday), I think this misses something important about that last line. Translated literally it says, “Sailors to land, linden-wood they bore.”

First fact: A few weeks ago, I was talking to a guy at work. Him: “I may miss the meeting; my daughter is about to have my second grandchild, so I may have to go down to Florida all of a sudden. Me: “You keep your grandchildren in Florida, and you live in New York? That’s a switch!” [Sensible chuckles all around.] This is not good comedy, because comedy is not welcome in an office. It’s something a natural smart-aleck like me adopts because people like jokes as long as they don’t disturb the solemnity of the hierarchy.

Second fact: One of the things the Norsemen wanted from Britain was wood for ship-building.

Let’s suppose for a minute that concern for hierarchy and solemnity in front of authority figures was as important in a medieval English court (where poems would be performed) as they are in an office today. Let’s imagine that smart-alecks became poets back then, and one such was this poet. What’s he really saying? He just used “shields” in line 98, so the audience is expecting some kind of appositive involving wood. Then he drops line 99. It’s the same joke I made in the office: “Sailors bringing wood to the land, for a change!”

It’s awesomely cool to find a kindred spirit talking to me across a gulf of a thousand years. Hey, Maldon-poet, wherever you are: I got it!

The Bombadil Convergence

By Joe

On March 25, 2019

In fantasy

Today is Tolkien Reading Day, or New Year’s Day (Fourth Age), or Lady Day (in the Middle Ages), or Why-haven’t-you-started-the-pepper-seedlings-yet Day (in the vegetable garden).

Over at “Middle-earth Reflections”, Olga has published an essay about the mystery of Tom Bombadil, with the usual quiet charm that wouldn’t be out of place in the drawing room of a hobbit hole. Over in the more boisterous hall at the Prancing Pony, Ed Powell asks what Alan and Shawn think Bombadil is doing in the story, and they give a typically-entertaining answer. Well, Idiosophers know a harmonic convergence when they see one, so in I shall jump.

I must confess right off, I don’t know where the mystery is. This is one of those (frequent) cases where people who study literature for-real say things that I just note without understanding. Tolkien told us in Letter #153 [1] what Bombadil is doing there:

… he is then an ‘allegory’, or an exemplar, a particular embodying of pure (real) natural science: the spirit that desires knowledge of other things, their history and nature, because they are ‘other’ and wholly independent of the enquiring mind, a spirit coeval with the rational mind, and entirely unconcerned with ‘doing’ anything with the knowledge: Zoology and Botany not Cattle-breeding or Agriculture.

So many of the characters in Middle-earth who seek knowledge are doing so for the sake of power, seeking dark secrets they can use against others, that one might be tempted to think Tolkien disapproved of the search for knowledge. Bombadil is a counter-weight to that. He knows all there is to know about his little realm, but it hasn’t turned him into a power-hungry maniac like Saruman or a resentful wretch like Gollum. He’s happy, playful, always goofing around.

You can find people like that in any physics department. When I was in college, it was Rolf Winter. He didn’t look much like Tom Bombadil, though (now that I think of it) he bore a resemblance to Ken Stott’s portrayal of Balin in the Peter Jackson movies. Here’s a figure from Prof. Winter’s book Quantum Physics:

A world with only dark secrets would be unbalanced and considerably out of line with Tolkien’s own views. Tom Bombadil reassures us that a life of learning can be a joyful experience.