Just listened to Session 18 of the Mythgard Academy class on Le Morte d’Arthur. One unexpected thing I am really enjoying about this class is Prof. Olsen’s explications of knightly combat in “SportsCenter” style. Despite the five centuries since jousting was a thing, I recognize almost everything from my old days in competition, just one century ago.
This session had a long treatment of sir La Cote Male Tayle beginnning ab0ut 2:21:16. Sir La Cote Male Tayle is a strong knight, but not in the top ranks, so sometimes he wins and sometimes he loses. I can relate to that much better than to hot-shots like Tristram. When sir Mordred is spilling the beans on how top-ranked knights keep an eye on the competition, it reminded me of a bout I fenced long ago. January, 1998, the North American Cup in South Bend, Indiana. The luck of the draw put me in Pool #1. My first bout was against a short, left-handed, tough-looking guy whom I didn’t recognize.
What I did recognize was most of the US National Team, a few top-ranked coaches, and a couple of off-duty referees watching me fence. That’s weird. No, wait — they’re not watching me fence, they’re watching my opponent. I was doing all right, mostly because people tended not to believe how long my lunge could be. (I may occasionally have deceived opponents on that topic. 😇) We were tied 2-2 when he decided he’d seen everything I could do, and he won 5-2. As the spectators dispersed, I heard one of the coaches say, “Now we know who’s going to win the tournament.” Yeah, who?, I wondered. Oh: This guy. The one with an Olympic gold medal in his pocket.
Sir Mordred’s perspicacity hasn’t diminished a bit. But Ibragimov only beat me because the temperature was 20° F and I’m strongest in warm weather. That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.
Brenton Dickieson has a discussion going at A Pilgrim in Narnia about C.S. Lewis’s opinion that reading old books is good for you. I have always agreed with that, despite the fact that it sometimes makes me talk funny. That statement immediately raises the question, “how old does he mean”? Brent takes the minimum of the set {ages of books mentioned by CSL in that piece}, and gets 50 years. Surprisingly young, for a medievalist. I would have expected 10 times that.
The oldest book in easy reach, from my grandmother’s grade school
Obviously (I say, as is customary when I’m about to prove myself wrong), the definition of “old” is determined by the discipline within which one is working. The humanities change slowly, so a “research methods” class in a state-of-the-art university might have us reading St. Augustine, and people still care what Sir Philip Sidney had to say.
The sciences change faster: in 1989 I got some sidelong looks for citing a paper from 1962 [1]. Engineering changes faster still: I am now so old that I’ve written things that are indistinguishable from old books. At the extreme, computer software changes like quicksilver. One of my co-workers retired last week and left his books behind. His books unquestionably contained archaic thinking, despite the fact that some of them were published this year. Glibly phrased, by the time a book about software can get to your shelf, it’s obsolete.
There’s always an exception that proves me wrong, though. My Relativity professor was the extraordinary E. A. Desloge. One day in lecture, he mentioned that St. Augustine had actually asked the right question to have discovered the Theory of Relativity. Augustine asked, “Is time the same for everyone, or does each person have their own?” I believe Prof. Desloge was paraphrasing Confessions XI. Alas for the history of science, Augustine believed there was a Preferred Observer and he built his entire cosmology around Him. But as far as we’re concerned here, this is a definite case of a modern physicist reading a very old book.
My copy of A Wilderness of Dragons: Essays in Honor of Verlyn Flieger arrived today, so I turned immediately to the essay by Tom Hillman, Simon Cook, Jeremiah Burns, Richard Rohlin, and Oliver Stegen about dreams, memory, and enchantment. This is good stuff. Section 3 points out the many ways that Elvish dreams are described in LotR, which rang a bell with other things I’ve been reading lately.
As the consortium of essayists puts it, “we would seem to be justified in identifying Elvish dreams with a ‘clear vision’ generated from the memories and also the imaginings of Elves…” (p.132). This derives from an etymological extract from Unfinished Tales, where the name “Olórin” is glossed as coming from a word that means not-exactly “dream”, rather something that ‘included the vivid contents of their memory as of their imagination”.
idk which one this is
So an old man cloaked in grey, wearing a big hat and carrying a staff, is associated with two kinds of mental activity that don’t translate easily into modern English. We’ve heard that before. All this time I’d thought of Gandalf as having a strong streak of Odin in his character, but it had never occurred to me to include Hugin and Munin in the package.
John Crowley‘s latest novel is about Crows. One Crow, in particular — the one who invented the idea of giving Crows names so listeners know whom you’re talking about. Dar Oakley (for it is indeed he) learned human language, which is how humans can learn his story. I loved this book and want to tell everyone about it. However, I am in no way qualified to write book reviews, so that’s not what this is. This is just a list of bullet points, vaguebook style, of things I remember from my first reading that might intrigue people enough to pick it up.
Know how David Copperfield is narrated in the first person, but the narrator isn’t born until the end of Chapter 1? Crowley tops that.
The first few chapters reminded me of Watership Down in the way the author teaches us all sorts of things about Crows seamlessly within the story line. (This book capitalizes animal and plant species; I don’t yet understand why.) The difference is that Rabbits eating is kind of cute, and Crows eating is decidedly not.
My favorite part is when Dar Oakley domesticates a medieval monk.
Crowley’s fantasy keeps up with the times. I noticed several places where the plot turns on facts about ecology or anthropology that were only established in the last few years.
This is not a fairy tale, much as it sometimes seems. It has a eucatastrophe, but it’s not at the end.
Crowley may be in a conversation with Neil Gaiman. There’s a reply to American Gods here, I think.
Influence among artists is a complex and poorly-understood phenomenon. Diana Pavlac Glyer took an excellent shot at understanding influence among the Inklings in The Company They Keep. This post is a graphical expression of her work; no additional scholarship has been committed. I had grandiose plans for network analysis of the Inklings and their influence on each other, but I hit an insurmountable stumbling block: the Inklings didn’t write very much. It’s folly to apply big-data analytical techniques to a small set of things, so I’m just drawing pictures here.
As anyone would anticipate, C.S. Lewis is at the center of things, almost any way we choose to plot the graph. Here, the size of the dot indicates the number of connections to other people. There is one link per mention in TCTK, so when there are lots of mentions, the links look like a fat blob, not a line.
All interactions among Inklings
OB
Owen Barfield
JAWB
J.A.W. Bennett
DC
David Cecil
NC
Nevill Coghill
JDG
James Dundas-Grant
HD
H.V.D. Dyson
AF
Adam Fox
CH
Colin Hardie
RH
Robert E. Havard
CSL
C.S. Lewis
WL
Warren Lewis
GM
Gervase Mathew
RBM
R.B. McCallum
CES
C.E Stevens
CRT
Christopher Tolkien
JRRT
J.R.R. Tolkien
JW
John Wain
CW
Charles Williams
CLW
C.L. Wrenn
All
The ensemble
This is a complicated network, but it can be analyzed into components. DPG cites Karen Burke LeFevre’s book Invention as a Social Act, which identifies four different types of influence that authors (or any creators, actually) can have on one another: Resonator, Opponent, Editor, and Collaborator. To these four, DPG adds a writer-specific category: dedications.
Resonators are not just cheerleaders; they can bring out the best in an author by insisting they produce nothing less. C.S. Lewis was the champion resonator.
Resonators among the Inklings
Opponents are those who poke holes in the weak parts of a work before you finish it, so prospective publishers don’t do it. These are not so common among such supportive friends as the Inklings, so the network is much smaller. The line from HD to JRRT is a mathematical representation of the most famous quotation in all of Inklings scholarship.
Opponent relationships among the Inklings
Editors are editors. Again, C.S. Lewis is the nexus around which everyone else is arranged. Christopher Tolkien only has one line to his father, because DPG considers him more of a collaborator than an editor of the History of Middle-earth. “All” is there in the bottom-right corner because J.R.R. Tolkien gave credit to the whole group for helping edit The Lord of the Rings. It’s not clear whom exactly he meant, so I didn’t resolve it into individuals.
Editorial relationships among the Inklings
Collaborators are collaborators. This is a dense network because I drew a line between any two Inklings whose names appeared as authors on a single work. For example, Essays Presented to Charles Williams had five Inkling authors which yields ten lines. C.S. Lewis is not so central, because he’s only one of a group of equals in these cases. Here also is the dense blob of links between the Tolkiens, one line for each of the posthumous volumes of the Legendarium. Various Festschriften are most of the other lines in this graph, so ironically it is dominated by books that were written after the Inklings had dissolved.
Collaboration relationships among the Inklings
Dedications are another Lewicentric network. Each of the the three most-prolific authors dedicated a work to the Inklings as a group. Without the node labelled “All”, this graph would almost look like a chain, mathematically trivial.
Dedication relationships between Inklings
Conclusion
The Inklings were a large and not-well-defined group. Writers’ groups tend to be much smaller.
“Collaborative circles usually consist of three to five members; only rarely do they consist of more than seven or eight.”
Michael P Farrell, Collaborative Circles (cited in TCTK)
Despite its size and fluidity, the group we know as the Inklings was among the most influential writers’ groups of the twentieth century. The graphs above give a hint how this could be. Resolving the network into LeFevre’s various types of artistic influence shows that the Inklings can profitably be thought of as a superposition of normal-sized collaborations, one for each type of influence. The various graphs share C.S. Lewis as the most important member measured by degree centrality, and also by who furnished the meeting space. The other members of each sub-network vary according to type. Like a refracting crystal, the network representation of the Inklings presents a different shape according to the perspective from which we choose to look at it, but each shape shares the important features of the underlying form.
Caveat: as DPG says, “The examples of encouragement conflict, editing, collaborating, and referencing described in this book are not intended to form a comprehensive or exhaustive list.” (TCTK, p.213) If she left it out, so did I. Apart from dedications, I have omitted the section about “referents”, where characters in one Inkling’s work are based on another Inkling. Referential relationships as DPG described them are so amorphous that indicating them with lines on a graph seemed incorrect.
Works Cited
Farrell, Michael P. Collaborative circles: Friendship dynamics and creative work. University of Chicago Press, 2003. Glyer, Diana Pavlac. The Company They Keep: CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien as Writers in Community. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2007. LeFevre, Karen Burke. Invention as a social act. SIU Press, 1986.
Shakespeare’s play Henry V came up on the BBC’s In Our Time podcast, in celebration of their 20th anniversary. Pretty impressive for a podcast! As the panel discussed all the Plantagenets in their turn, it reminded me of an experience from long ago.
An impressive theatrical company was performing the play in Paris while I was living there. Le Monde published a long review in their entertainment section. 25 years later I’m unable to track it down on line, so I’m working from memory here.
The writer pointed out a thing I’d never heard in any English-language source. All the carousing that young Hal did with Falstaff and the gang in the “Henry IV” plays has an important role in Henry V: because he had spent all that time in bars, he spoke fluent English. His rousing speeches to the troops at Harfleur and on St. Crispin’s day are a huge deal because no previous king since 1066 could have given them. From William the Bastard on, the kings only spoke French. When history is written by the winners, valuable perspectives like this can easily get lost.
Disclaimer: Henry IV spoke English as his native language, according to the fountain of all knowledge, but this may not contradict the Le Monde reviewer. Henry grew up in aristocratic surroundings, and the gaps between classes in England were wide, and are still large today. Henry IV probably could not speak in an idiom that would sound congenial to the common soldiers, at least not well enough to pull off something like this:
Joan Bushwell, in an old piece called “The Tolkienian War on Science”.
(h/t Daniel Stride), explains Fëanor in a way that makes him (to me) almost sympathetic. I do have one big disagreement with the author, though. I’m on board when she calls Fëanor “the master smith/scientist/engineer”. But then she builds an analogy between Morgoth’s theft of the Silmarils and the current anxiety engineers have about intellectual property. No way. Fëanor is not upset about the theft of “intellectual property”. It’s clear that Fëanor gave away intellectual property freely – look at the alphabets for the best example. Silmarils are different. When Morgoth stole the Silmarils, Fëanor didn’t have them any more. In fact, he couldn’t even make new ones. They were like moon rocks or glacial core samples: literally irreplaceable, since we don’t fly to the Moon and the glaciers are melting.
“Intellectual property” is a bizarre legal fiction because it’s exactly the opposite of Silmarils. When (not “if”) intellectual property is stolen, the possessions of the developer are unchanged. The only thing the developer loses is the secrecy. The potential for profit.
Gandalf was fond of lecturing on topics like this, so pontification must not be too reprehensible. There are several reasons why people would want to own things and keep thieves away.
They need things to live their lives, e.g. a wheelchair or a craftsman‘s tools
A wish to preserve the things from harm
The pleasure of accumulating things
They want the status that possessions provide
To exploit them for advantage in battle or its modern equivalent, trade
JRRT approves of number 1: “Would you part an old man from his support?” (III,vi) JRRT approves of number 2: “It shall be set in imperishable crystal to be an heirloom of my house…”. (II, viii) [1]
Numbers 3 & 4 are deadly sins. I’m pretty sure Morgoth was working from one of these or the other.
Number 5 isn’t morally nailed down outside of LotR, but Faramir was unambiguous: “If it were a thing that gave advantage in battle, I can well believe that Boromir, the proud and fearless, often rash, ever anxious for the victory of Minas Tirith (and his own glory therein), might desire such a thing and be allured by it.” (IV, v) Either way, it is the only one of the five that we know wasn’t motivating Fëanor.
Maybe the whole debate over Fëanor can be boiled down to an argument over which motivation he thought he was acting on.
[1] Yes, I could have chosen more weighty quotations, but Idiosophy is a hobbitish discipline. By the way, is anything else in Middle-earth “imperishable”?
Barthélémy l’Anglais, Livre des propriétés des choses BNF Français 216 f. 285r
While I was there, a teacher was explaining to a group of 7- and 8-year-olds how unicorns were hunted: “A young woman, who’d never had a baby, and who was … very nice and very pure…” OK, she should have planned ahead about how to dodge a discussion of virginity here, but I thought it was a good save. Alas, she then continued, “… sits down in the forest, and the unicorn would come lay its head in her lap. Then the hunter would come out of hiding and grab it to take its horn.”
The children all looked at each other. The bravest one spoke up: “Well, she’s not very nice, then!” Euphemisms always get me into trouble, too.
The exhibit also amused the children with this sculpture, the attitude of which explains why unicorns don’t come around much anymore. I shall quit blaming the scientific revolution.
It appears that the great computer scientist Donald Knuth was a pioneer in the discipline that would in a later century come to be known as Idiosophy. Alas, such was the benighted state of natural philosophy in that era that his seminal paper could only be published in the April issue of a learned journal.
I have just subscribed to the Oxford English Dictionary (at a special discount rate, thanks to Sparrow). To inaugurate the subscription, I just read the entire definition of “what”. It took me an hour and a quarter.
In the midst of this, I discovered that I was completely wrong about the origins of my wife’s favorite English phrase. “What the x“, for various values of x, traces back to… Geoffrey Chaucer?! It looks like he brought it over from the French “que diable…”. I find this strangely disappointing.
Addressing a crucial question of language
Then it occurred to me that there might be something of interest in the choices we make about he noun we put at the end of the phrase. The pox is gone now, since we don’t have to worry about it any more (for the time being). “Hell” was my father’s preferred locution. Google ngrams don’t reach back very far, but they show hell is still going strong. In fact, it really took off about the time I was born. “Devil” and “deuce” have been fading since the Great Depression; there appears to be a transfer of authority from the central executive to the collective, coincident with the spread of popular democracy in the English-speaking world, but other than that tenuous connection I’ve found nothing.
Google Ngrams for the leader board
Apropos of which, I must salute the OED for the utility and delicacy of their phrase, “in polite colloq. usage…”
