Stephen Hawking passed away today.  Hawking’s cosmology began at the Beginning, with cosmogenesis.  J.R.R. Tolkien included cosmogenesis in his mythology, too.  There is a connection, unlikely though that might seem. Here’s the text from Tolkien:

There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made. And he spoke to them, propounding to them themes of music; …

Why music? Well, ever since the Romantic period, other artists have envied the musicians. “All art aspires to the condition of music,” said Walter Pater. “Poets such as E.T.A. Hoffmann … conceived of instrumental music as the language of a higher realm,” as Jonathan Friedmann put it. If you’re a Modernist writer, and you want to express something exalted, you use the language of music to do it.

But what exactly is music? There’s no way JRRT wanted us to imagine the Valar sitting in a concert hall, so this must be referring to something outside the mainstream definition.  When we’re talking about cosmogenesis, what counts as music and what doesn’t?  Well, “music” is only slightly better defined than “literature”. I like this definition from Robert Greenberg: “music is patterns of sound in time.”  [1]

Ainulindalë does not sound like the way musicians talk, so eventually I thought of looking at it as a scientist. From a physicist’s point of view, this passage looks very different.  It’s all about building the framework within which creation can take place: the introduction of time.

This is the idea behind the Hartle-Hawking state of the universe. At the Big Bang (and shortly thereafter), time and space weren’t so clearly differentiated as we see them now, looking (as we do) at length scales of a meter or so. Essentially, there wasn’t “time” per se. The four dimensions were all muddled together. When things cooled down a bit (literally), the symmetry was broken and we got the familiar dimensions, three spatial and one temporal. Stephen Hawking, the more famous member of the team that came up with this idea, wrote about it in A Brief History of Time, in a way that’s accessible to the educated layman. (When physicists are talking to each other, it sounds like this. The American Physical Society has made all of Hawking’s papers freely available if you scroll down on that link.) Here’s roughly how Hawking described it:

Our universe (left) and the way it was during the Big Bang (right)

The figure on the left shows a body moving in space (horizontal axis) and time (vertical). The “light cone” (imagine spinning the picture around the vertical axis) is the maximum velocity a body can have: the speed of light.  Massive bodies move like the black arrow, using up more time to cover less space than a light ray would. Back at the Big Bang, though, Hawking’s work showed that it all looked like space.  All lines moved sideways out from the origin. Moving in time didn’t happen until the Universe had expanded from its initial state.  Without time, there couldn’t be music.

The opening of Ainulindalë, therefore, can be read as a metaphor of the introduction of time into the universe. Or, in current jargon, the transition from Hartle-Hawking to Minkowski states.  The second sentence in the quotation above describes Eru separating time out from the other dimensions. “Music”, here, is a synecdoche of time.

[1] This is very much a late-20th-century definition, by the way.  Before the musical traditions of other continents were absorbed into musicology, and before the radical experiments of later Modernists, the definition looked rather different.

Like Butterbur, I think less than I talk, and slower. This particular case doesn’t count as seeing through a brick wall, though, more like an open window.

The implication of Tom’s comment on my previous post just sank in: J.R.R. Tolkien did finish his time-travel story, after all!

Merry & Pippin’s Journey

The fay places are omitted so the scale would be more visible.  Fourth-Age Gondor is in the 12th Century because I had the Brothers Hildebrandt calendar on my bedroom wall when I was young.

The article by Cory Grewell in The Inklings & King Arthur begins by reminding me of an old essay by Umberto Eco that takes a swipe at Tolkien’s “neo-medievalism”. Grewell agrees with Eco (and Tom Shippey) that some kind of medievalism is happening here: “Certainly both The Lord of the Rings and The Fall of Arthur are both readily identifiable as instances of ‘devotion to medieval ideals.'” (p.221)

Despite the fact that Grewell is building on the work of some of my favorite scholars, I feel like I need to push back on this.  JRRT is certainly talking about the Middle Ages, but not in isolation. LotR relates the medieval world to many other periods of history. Nowhere in Middle-earth is exactly like a real-earth culture, but we can infer a place’s spot in history by focusing on its role in the story. Let’s take a tour and see who’s where on the real-earth timeline.

Rohan

Their role in the story is military. They speak Anglo-Saxon, live in Anglo-Saxon houses, and fight with weapons you can see on the Bayeux Tapestry. Inference: Medieval

Dol Amroth

The only important thing about Dol Amroth is military. Imrahil is wearing the armor of a 15th century knight. Inference: Medieval

Minas Tirith

Minas Tirith has both military and cultural roles in the story. Their fighting style could be from any time between the Marian reforms and the invention of mounted knights.  They have a monumental scale of construction. They wear high-crowned helms. A big part of the city is ostentatious mausoleum facilities. They have legible 3,000-year-old scrolls in the library. (see also Letter #211)  Inference: Roman Egypt

The Shire

Hobbits are in no way medieval. They wear 18th-Century clothing. The Shire is dominated by a civilian aristocracy. It is supported by freehold agriculture. The Shire was easily nudged into a fossil-fuel economy by Saruman, so it couldn’t have been far from one to start with. Michel Delving has a public museum. Their military technology is medieval, but with a couple of individual exceptions, hobbits’ role in the story is anything but military. Inference: 18th Century

Bree

We get no explicit textual indications about Bree, but from the descriptions of the Prancing Pony my mental image was a Tudor half-timbered building. This is bolstered by the fact that alehouses with painted signs were a 16th Century invention. Bree is not a mono-ethnic state. Narratively and historio-technologically, it is a transition between the Shire and Arnor. Inference: 16th Century

Arnor

Arnor contains conspicuous ruins of a civilization far above anything the inhabitants could reconstruct. It is depopulated. If we knew more about plagues hitting Europe in Late Antiquity, we could pin down Arnor’s location in history better. The term “dark ages” is deprecated by modern historians, but it seems appropriate here. Inference: Medieval

Orthanc

Its role in the story is military.  It is a land of metal and wheels. Its armies used artillery at Helm’s Deep. Beechbone was attacked by napalm. Uruk-hai are products of biotechnology. [ETA: via the self-correcting Internet, I am informed that Treebeard was wrong about this – the Uruk were created by Sauron about 500 years earlier.] Inference: 20th-Century Europe

Mordor

To the denizens of Mordor, the most frightening threat is to be reported to faceless authorities. Though they are militarily advanced, they are technologically backward. They live among wholesale environmental destruction. Mordor has an array of subjugated satellite nations, but it is not an empire. Inference: Mid-20th-Century Soviet bloc

Elves

Elves are timeless, and what we see of their societies doesn’t conform well with anything I know of human history. Militarily they’re medieval, and have been since the dawn of time. Socially they’re all over the place. Some elves live under almost-human monarchies, but I’m not sure what to call Rivendell. A certain looseness of organization might be expected when governmental succession is a trivial detail, instead of the most important decision a society has to make. Elves play equally-important roles as healers and craftsmen, though, and they don’t seem very Medieval at all in those respects. Inference: Vaguely Medieval

Dwarves

Dwarves are difficult to place chronologically. They don’t change, either. “Aulë made the Dwarves even as they still are.” (Silm., ch.2.) Metalworking is surrounded with a magical nimbus in human societies, which sent me to this marvelously-titled paper: “The Faerie Smith Meets the Bronze Industry: Magic Versus Science in the Interpretation of Prehistoric Metal-Making”. In essence, the legends whence the Dwarves sprang originated in the technological transition from bronze to iron. The best match seems to be Neolithic Iran. Inference: New Stone Age

Observations

Looked at through this lens, the story in LotR is that an exemplar of the 20th Century is so awful that every other period of history needs to marshal its unique virtues and combine forces to eradicate it. The “return of the king” subplot could be seen as how the medieval societies (Rohan, Rivendell, and Arnor) bring a classical civilization (Gondor) into the medieval period.  That’s a fairly weak “devotion to medieval ideals and usages”, if it counts at all. So, from the technological perspective, I think LotR is a neo-medievalist work only at the most superficial (i.e. cinematic) level.

Dawn Walls-Thumma has an excellent essay up on her Tumblr blog.  “Excellent” in this case means “gave me the answer to something I’d puzzled about for a long time, and also something to argue about”.

The Wise

All through The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings we get references to “the Wise”. We are told who they are, but what about them makes people think they’re so wise? [1] The wisest thing they do is sign on to Gandalf’s confessedly-foolish plan to win the War of the Ring.

Dawn, though, has put her finger on it.  Northern Middle-earth has an oral culture. The upper classes can read, also some of the wealthier peasants like Butterbur, but as she shows, writing is ancillary to the spoken word.  Elves don’t have a written culture at all.  (Why would anyone write a history, when you could just go ask the guy who was there?)  I’ve often thought this is why the Elves of Rivendell liked Bilbo so much: his offer to write down all their stories was a novelty to them, and they were as flattered as an old Appalachian who gets a visit from a Smithsonian researcher.

So, then, the Wise are those who are best at remembering stories verbatim, so the old knowledge base doesn’t get corrupted. The techniques for doing this are well known, even today when we no longer need them.  (Can you imagine the size of Elrond’s memory palace?) You get a reputation for being Wise when the information you retrieve from the immense stores in your head is always correct, and you can act on it in confidence.

Incidentally, I think this exonerates Gandalf from Dawn’s charge that he’s not being square with Frodo when he says “If I were to tell you all that tale, we should still be sitting here when Spring had passed into Winter.”  We’ve been spoiled by the random-access data storage all around us. Remembering used to be hard work, especially if the needed facts are stashed among thousands of years’ worth of memories.  Extracting information from a memory palace isn’t fast. Gandalf would have to start at the front door and walk through all the corridors to get to the things Frodo wanted to know. [2]  It’s not like opening a book to the right page.  Which brings me to the thing I want to argue about.

Written-word vs. Oral-culture Infosec

Dawn says,

There is little control of information in the oral tradition. It exists among the people, and anyone present to hear it can possess it. Written tradition, though, can be controlled and its audiences limited, creating authority in a way that doesn’t exist in the oral tradition.

Not keeping a secret

I think this is backward.  Oral cultures strictly control who gets to know what. There are initiation rituals, rites of passage, etc. that one must pass through before one is permitted to hear. Speakers can usually arrange to see everyone in earshot. But when authors write something down, they have no control over where the paper will end up.

Tolkien certainly uses the two media this way.  Isildur didn’t tell people about the inscription on the Ring, he wrote it down “lest it fade beyond recall”.  He had no idea who would need to know it, so he couldn’t have guessed whom to tell. (The obvious answer to the latter is Elrond, but that would have been an awkward conversation.) In the immediate context of “The Shadow of the Past”, Sam eavesdropped on the oral communications between Gandalf and Frodo, but was immediately busted.  On the other hand, Merry got to read a page or two of Bilbo’s book with no one the wiser.  Altogether, writing things down is much better for disseminating them than telling people.

[1] Apart from Celeborn, of course. He’s obviously wise.  Shutting up and letting your wife do all the talking is the highest degree of sagacity, here at Idiosophy Labs.

[2] Note that when Gandalf is trying to remember the correct path in Moria, he sits there for six hours to make his decision. He can’t be collecting new information, so what’s he doing? He’s traversing his memory palace, over and over, looking for rooms he ought to have visited.