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Fragments of a Geographical Approach to Fantasy Criticism

On September 27, 2016

In ardagraphy, fantasy, mythgard academy

My presentation from the Mythgard Mid-Atlantic Speculative Fiction Symposium 2016. It begins with the paper from this summer, drops the math, and investigates what happens if we try to apply the same methods to other fantasy works.

Primary Geography of Sub-created worlds

Introduction

A subcreated world is derivative of the primary world, so fantastical geography is going to be derivative of primary-world geography. This work began last winter when I stumbled across Oliver O’Brien’s public-access database that lets you type in a name and see where in the UK people are called that. Geographers have done extensive work on matching names with places all over Europe, it turns out. Like hobbits, English people move around only slowly, so names are strongly associated with places. When I was given the opportunity to map a family name in Great Britain, the second name I tried was “Baggins”. The distribution of that name is centered near Birmingham almost exactly over top of J.R.R. Tolkien’s boyhood home.

It turned out that this is not a coincidence. Tom Hillman pointed out that the connection wasn’t dumb, and is worth pursuing. So let’s see what we can learn about fantasy novels by using real-world geography. This talk will tell you about three of them. The title has the word “fragments” because they don’t fit together into a solid piece of china.

The Lord of the Rings

Alone among the denizens of Middle Earth, hobbits have family names. They’re conscious of their difference. They effortlessly slide into “Peregrin son of Paladin” phrasing when they encounter Men. As Tolkien wrote in letter 25, “[hobbit] family names remain for the most part as well known and justly respected in this island as they were in Hobbiton and Bywater.”

There had always been a Baggins at Bag End. Computed by Oliver O’Brien.

I took this comment, along with another from Letter 211, as explicit permission to look at The Lord of the Rings with real-world geography. Hobbits are from different parts of England, according to their role in the story, and we know this is intentional because the story was stretched to fit them, if they didn’t match.

When we start looking at names, we can identify three categories of hobbits. Some people you keep close to you. They could be family, or they could be just friends.

JRRT was from the West Midlands; the close-by hobbits have names from that region. The Tooks and the Bagginses, despite their considerable differences in temperament, are quite close.

The Tooks of Birmingham

This shows up on the map as surely as it does in the text. The Cottons are nearby, too, as is Hob Hayward, whom Sam picks out of the group of Shirrifs as being someone friendly. The readers Tolkien had in mind would have heard “Hayward” as going perfectly well with Cottons or Bagginses.

The second group of hobbits we find are neighbors who aren’t exactly bad, but they frequently seem to act in a way that interferes with others getting on with their lives. It’s good practice to keep them at arm’s length. They might be an unwisely-chosen in-law, or a cousin who borrows books and doesn’t return them. For example a Sackville-Baggins, rather distant from Birmingham to start with, can be led further from the fold by marriage to a Bracegirdle, who’s practically a foreigner in hobbitish terms.

The last category is the “liminal” hobbit-names. Hobbits in Buckland and the

Marish have them. Their family names in our world are either concentrated far from Birmingham, or they don’t appear in the UK at all,

Underhills in the UK

like the Maggots or Brandybucks don’t. Frodo uses the name “Underhill” when he’s in Bree because Gandalf knows that someone who hears it won’t think of the bearer as living anywhere near the Shire. You can see here how well Gandalf knows his business. The Hornblowers are in this group, too. They’d “hardly ever set foot in Hobbiton before.” Although “Brandybuck” isn’t a name found in England, “Buckland” is. It’s on the extreme east outside Dover, that is, almost in France.

I mentioned that Tolkien would stretch the story, if a name didn’t fit. Sam Gamgee is the conspicuous example. We know from Letters 72 & 144 that “Gaffer Gamgee” was a name Tolkien made up to amuse his children. It was a pun on “cotton”, like the Cotton family, and it occurred to him because there was a Dr. Gamgee at the University, but — it turns out that the name “Gamgee” doesn’t come from the West Midlands.

Serving the Bagginses may have involved commuting.

How then can Tolkien make Sam, whose presence in the story is essential, fit the pattern? The solution he found to this problem explains something I wondered about since the first time I read the Appendices.

Why is it worth half a page of Appendix F to write a lengthy discourse on the subject of how “Gamgee” isn’t really a family name, but more an epithet derived from the town of Gamwich whither their ancestors had decamped several generations back? This is why – Tolkien needed to get his hero within shouting distance of Birmingham. A London name wouldn’t do at all, but a nickname isn’t definitive.

Mayor Sam Gardner’s family

The final resolution of the story is in Appendix C. We learn that upon his accession to Mayor, Samwise changed his family name to “Gardner”.

That name has a much closer association with the West Midlands, though it’s not primarily in Birmingham. Evidently, three generations of residence plus saving the whole world from evil is almost sufficient to get one accepted into Hobbiton society.

The match of names isn’t perfect, but it works. As Tolkien says in the Prologue, “By the time of this history these names were no longer found only in their proper folklands.” Of course there will be some leakage across the boundaries for artistic purposes, and perhaps some because geographic information systems in the 1950s were less accessible.

Tigana

At this point I went off looking for another novel I could subject to the same scrutiny. First consideration, I needed a world that was linguistically integrated. Most fantasy novelists don’t take the time to do that. They just pick names that sound cool. Unfortunately, this gives a geographical critic nothing to work with.

Tigana, by Guy Gavriel Kay, seemed ideal. First, most of the names sound Italian. Second, the author makes a grateful mention of the cartographer in the acknowledgements. He mentions that having clear maps guided him to fix some problems with the story. There are five maps in the TOR paperback edition, so it was reasonable to suppose that geography is important.

Tigana isn’t as famous as The Lord of the Rings, so here’s what it’s about in a few sentences. Two warlord/sorcerers are contending for the Peninsula of the Palm.

The Peninsula of the Palm

The Palm is divided into a small number of pseudo-feudal states. In the process of conquering the left side of the Palm, one warlord lost his son in battle. To punish the country that he was fighting at the time, he devised what may be the most absolute revenge ever conceived: The cities were razed, the populations were dispersed, and he cast a spell so that nobody can remember or even say the name of the country any more. Except, some of the people who were born there have formed a resistance movement, and when they induct another Tiganan (by birth) into their cell, they teach him or her the name. Covert action is only half of their subversion; the greater crime is memory. In the second part, a Tiganan woman has insinuated herself into the king’s seraglio to assassinate him, but ended up falling in love instead. Her love of her country gets opposed to her love of Brandin. In a nutshell, these are Kay’s two themes: love and memory.

So this is where I went looking for geographical significance in the text. What I found was several early mentions of the shape of the peninsula. Its shape is important to the characters in the first few chapters. After that, though, maps and geography are almost never mentioned. What’s going on?

Kay wants us to read this as an upside-down Italy. In case an inattentive reader didn’t notice the place names are all Italian (though the character names aren’t), he includes an epigraph from Dante. There are plenty of other inversions, once you start to look for them: Italy looks like a foot, the Palm looks like a hand. Italy points south towards a desert, the Palm points north towards a desert. Lower Corte, the new name given to the lost land of Tigana, is actually uphill from Corte. The queen of the empire to the east is named Dorotea, flipping the Byzantine Empress Theodora.

Putting the book in an inverted Italy has two purposes. First, this book is about memory. The former Tiganans, even if they don’t know that’s what they are, have a nagging feeling of uncertainty about their past. The spell isn’t perfect, so they have fleeting half-memories that leaked around its edges. I confess that’s a pretty good description for my own education in history – I never know if I’m remembering something correctly. For example, I had to hit up Wikipedia to see if there actually was a Queen Dorotea somewhere, to whom Kay was alluding. So this reader (at least) has the same sort of feeling about the past that the heroes do.

The second purpose is that, rarely among fantasy novels, Tigana fits into single volume. Using a mirror-image of our own world lets Kay focus his efforts on constructing his meticulously-crafted moral dilemmas. Kay uses this technique in many of his books. He invites us readers to use medieval Italy as a touchstone, any time we feel like we need a detail that didn’t interest the author. There’s no danger of taking us out of the story when he does this, because when we supply details from our own memory, they feel right automatically. But it’s not historical fiction, which brings us to the third book.

A Song of Ice and Fire

George R.R. Martin told January Magazine, “the only problem I have with historical fiction is that I know too much history. So I always know what’s going to happen. … With this sort of thing you can take people by surprise. It reads like historical fiction. It feels like historical fiction but you don’t know how it’s going to come out.”

It’s obvious that Martin isn’t interested in writing about anything but political history. He’s said as much, in fact. Perhaps out of respect for Tolkien’s precedent, there’s a map in the front of A Game of Thrones, but we can get an idea of its importance to the story by noticing that Chapter 2 takes place in a city that’s not on the map.

Westeros, by KingofFairview, via Brilliant Maps

When Martin does take the time to describe a landscape, in the very next sentence he’s back to politics. Here are two consecutive sentences. Catelyn is riding through the lands where she grew up. She hasn’t seen them in a long time.

North of here the Kingsroad ran along the Green Fork of the Trident, through fertile valleys and green woodlands, past thriving towns and stout holdfasts and the castles of the river lords. Catelyn knew them all: the Blackwoods and the Brackens ever enemies, whose quarrels her father was obliged to settle; Lady Whent …; Lord Frey ….

A Game of Thrones, P. 241

The first sentence jumped out at me because it’s almost a pastoral lyric, by GRRM standards. I’ve elided about 40 words of aristocratic political detail with those ellipses. It’s clear that the political actors are the important part. Martin uses the land as a board to hold the pieces in his chess game, and that’s all. His text doesn’t encourage geographic analysis.

His fans, though, seem to have overruled him. By now, twenty years after the first volume was published, Westeros has been invaded by amateur geographers like Adam Whitehead, professional demographers like Lyman Stone, and what appears to be a large detachment from the Stanford University Department of Geology.

The geologists support Martin fairly well. Mapping what must be happening in his world from beneath, they can find analogues to the earth’s crust. Nothing they found in the book is obviously absurd.

The geographers and demographers, on the other hand, are pretty brutal. They find only one way to make sense of the population densities, the city sizes, the number of ethnic groups, the patterns of dynasties, and so forth. They conclude that A Song of Ice and Fire has an unreliable narrator. If you assume that city populations are a factor of 10 too large, that all the distances are 5 to 10 times too broad, and that spans of time are 2 to 5 times too long, then Westeros at least is a self-consistent world. In a sense, Martin has reproduced a familiar problem – all the way back to Herodotus, sizes of armies and all the casualty figures are inflated by anyone’s-guess-how-much. Martin has actually expanded that mis-feature of ancient historiography into new areas.

At this point, I was all set to declare that my objective – using real-world geography as an approach to understand fantasy stories – must be limited to only a few, extremely thorough authors. But then I read a post by Adam Whitehead. Martin is listening to his fans, so these criticisms are feeding back into the series. In A Feast for Crows, Whitehead notes that the characters have begun mentioning that you can’t exactly trust things you hear from the maesters at the Citadel. The characters now know the lore is wrong.

Conclusion

I’ll conclude, therefore, by saying that Tolkien, and the writers who followed him, do to a large extent “keep their feet on their own mother-earth,” so this approach can be useful.

But subcreation is becoming a new and different thing. World-building need not be an author’s solitary pursuit. It can be a collaborative effort, drawing on a range of knowledge that is limited only by the breadth of the author’s fan base. And not only “can be”, soon we may find that it must be. Once an author has a fan base, he may find that a world will be built whether he likes it or not. And literary criticism via the sciences is no longer a passive pursuit. In some cases, it appears to be able to affect the work it studies.

Signum University Fall Fundraiser

By Joe

On September 24, 2016

In mythgard academy

It’s that time of year again. Signum University is having its annual fundraiser, with all the festivities appertaining thereto. I gravely doubt that anyone who reads this page doesn’t already know that, but there are forces in this world beyond our ken. Let this be as a sacrifice to the search-engine gods, that prosperity may rain down upon Signum like a summer shower.

Landlocked

By Joe

On September 12, 2016

In ardagraphy, Slow learner, squibs & crackers

I can’t believe I just noticed this: Hobbits don’t like boats, right? The Shire is a fictional version of the West Midlands, right?

Administrative Regions of England

Of the nine regions of England, eight are on the coast. I’d expect that from a country that’s (a) an island and (b) a maritime power. One of the regions doesn’t touch the sea. It’s only natural that, compared to the others, West Midlanders would get a reputation as incompetent mariners.

So is this the origin of the sidelong remarks in The Lord of the Rings about how incompetent hobbits are on the water? Even if it’s not, I’m perfectly happy to find another reason that the Brandybucks belong in the “liminal” category.

Next question – is this why mariners are exotic heroes from far away in LotR and The Silmarillion?

What do I do for an encore?

By Joe

On September 3, 2016

In fantasy, scholarship

My abstract has been accepted for the Mythgard Midatlantic Speculative Fiction Symposium 2016. What am I going to talk about? It’s not really done yet, but half-baked ideas are the soul of this blog, so here goes.

Applying geography to LotR worked pretty well. How do I extend this to other books? Since Tolkien, it’s almost required for fantasy novels to have maps in them. Fantasy novels that include maps invite geographic analysis, but it’s rare to find an author who spends the effort to build the understory of a world to the extent that JRRT did.

In a nutshell: Speculative fiction begins with world-building, so it ought to be the easiest genre to which science-based criticism could be applied. However, scientific approaches were invented for the real world, which is much larger than any one sub-creator’s imagination. How do I constrain the breadth of the analysis to a scope that is consistent with the author’s intent?

So my talk will show three examples of where geographical analysis gets you. I’ll start with re-using parts of this summer’s project for The Lord of the Rings, in which geography illuminates implicit references in the text. Then I’ll review Lyman Stone’s analysis of A Song of Ice and Fire, which runs aground because George R.R. Martin didn’t use geography for anything — Stone’s analysis exceeded the bounds of the requirements of the story. My third example will be Tigana, by Guy Gavriel Kay. Kay has lots of maps in that book, but doesn’t use geography for the story per se. I think he’s using it like a website theme: there are countless details about his world that don’t interest him; his maps and the references to them in the text give the reader permission to fill in any gaps with Renaissance Italy, and it will be fine. There’s a tangible virtue to that – Kay’s story is the only one of the three that fits into a single volume.

Canons and Chains

By Joe

On August 11, 2016

In Academy and Society, literature

In which your Idiosopher considers how to measure an author’s cultural depth.

Brenton has a quotation from a letter by C.S. Lewis that seems to say nice things about the way I’ve been approaching literature. Lewis doesn’t like the idea of canonical lists of books that youngsters should read. I don’t like canonical lists either, unless I’ve read everything on it and can feel smug therefore. The only time I’ve ever gone and read books because they were part of a canon, it was Michael Dirda’s list of the “100 Best Humorous Novels.” (Alas, no link. It was in the Washington Post, long ago.)

Un jour viendra où l’on montrera un canon dans les musées comme on y montre aujourd’hui un instrument de torture, en s’étonnant que cela ait pu être!
(Someday we’ll exhibit canons in museums, as we do now with instruments of torture, amazed that such things could ever have existed!)

Victor Hugo

What Lewis prefers is a sort of terrain-following model, as one work you love leads to other writers, in a long chain of culture. It’s not linear, of course. It’s more like following a river through its delta. Some streams split and merge, some flow straight to the sea, some spin around in eddies and backwaters.

For me, on the science fiction/fact side, one chain was Asimov → Clarke → Niven → Dyson → Feynman → Dirac → Einstein. [1] On the fantasy side, there’s a chain that goes Tolkien → Ursula LeGuin → Mervyn Peake → E.R. Eddison → Lord Dunsany → Thomas Malory → Medieval romances. [2] To be absolutely accurate, the latter chain should start with Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungs, the libretto of which I read before Lord of the Rings. The chain has a kind of “V” shape in time, bouncing off World War II.

There’s a nice idiosophical vein here. Lots of people measure the cultural significance of a work by how many arrows lead from it. LotR, by this measure, might be the most culturally-significant work of the twentieth century, since arrows lead from it to a large section of modern bookstores and the entire art of fantasy role-playing games.[3] That’s the azimuthal direction, if you will. But maybe there’s another dimension: Might it be of interest how long the chains are, as well how many chains originate there? The depth to which authors connect into existing cultural structures seems orthogonal to their azimuthal impact, and might yield interesting insights. The fact that the metric will be biased towards books enjoyed by teenagers may be entertaining, as well.

Quantitative data to rank various authors by chain-length can be obtained from elderly scholars. They’ll have to be elderly, because these chains are only visible in hindsight. It seems easily parallelizable, hence ideal for the Web. The job could be a lot of work, but if you like talking to classicists and medievalists anyway, it wouldn’t be much of a chore.

[1] The linked pages were for fun; they’re unrelated to my own research.
[2] The lectures of Corey Olsen are in there at the last step.
[3] The Tenth Art, I think.

One More Forest

By Joe

On August 3, 2016

In fantasy, squibs & crackers

Tom Hillman points out an embarrassing omission in the post about forests:

you're missing one. https://t.co/SUlKr2iNjW

— Tom (@alas_not_me) July 29, 2016

Of course, I left out the Forest of Drúadan. It’s unique in LotR, in that trees are the only species Tolkien mentions there. (Not counting the grass in the Woses’ skirts.) It’s just a place where things happen. The other forests Olga and I talked about are much more than that. They’re practically characters in the story. Drúadan seems more like the old-growth American forests that we saw in The Last of the Mohicans: Large trees, well spaced, with not much undergrowth.

So there’s another question for me to think about: Is the Forest of Drúadan so bland because JRRT has a battle to get to, and has no time for dawdling? Or is the forest really a tamed human habitation, between being used as a quarry by the Men of Gondor, and continuously inhabited by Woses?

Middle-Earth’s Forests

By Joe

On July 29, 2016

In fantasy, squibs & crackers

Olga has a nice essay at her blog entitled “In the shadows of dark forests”. She’s all about the “dark, enchanted, haunted woods”: Mirkwood, Taur-nu-Fuin, and the Old Forest. Reading it, I was struck by two absences[1]: Fangorn and Lothlórien. Let’s see what their absence might imply.

Fangorn Forest looks at first like another of those magical places, but that changes quickly. In two pages, the narrator slides his description from”dark and tangled” and “a queer stifling feeling” through “untidy” and “shabby and grey” to “gleam[ing] with rich browns, and with the smooth black-greys of bark like polished leather.” (LotR III,iv) The reader starts out expecting a traditional entry point to Faërie, but then is gradually pulled via domestic, human-centered terms into a comfortable feeling that Meriadoc and Peregrin share.

The Forest of Lothlórien doesn’t have any negative connotations in its description. “In the dim light of the stars their stems were grey, and their quivering limbs a hint of fallow gold.” (LotR II,vi) Grey is a friendly color in Middle Earth, gold is pleasing to Man and Dwarf alike, and JRRT even includes the stars as a sort of benevolent framing device. Boromir expresses reluctance to enter, but both Aragorn and the narrator make it clear that he’s working from bad intelligence. Lothlórien seems like it ought to be Faërie, but it’s clear that we’re not invited to think of it that way.

Why don’t these two forests fit into Olga’s frightening group? Because someone is in charge. Real forests are complicated ecosystems, a huge network of cooperative and competitive relationships between individuals of a myriad of species. Haldir describes Southern Mirkwood as “a forest of dark fir, where the trees strive one against another and their branches rot and wither.” Competition apparently isn’t a good thing to Haldir. (or JRRT?) Much better if someone has everything organized, knows the name of each tree, makes sure that each is in its proper place and everybody has enough water and sunlight. Then you have a “good” forest, one which even the Entwives might appreciate. But the workload — “That would indeed be a burden!” as Goldberry put it. (LotR I,vii)

And now I understand something I didn’t when I started writing this post. The Old Forest looks like it doesn’t fit. When I put Fangorn and Lothlórien on one side, and Mirkwood and Taur-nu-Fuin on the other, they look like the classic dichotomy of Law and Chaos. For example, from Three Hearts and Three Lions:

This business of Chaos versus Law, for example, turned out to be more than religious dogma. It was a practical fact of existence, here. He was reminded of the second law of thermodynamics, the tendency of the physical universe toward disorder and level entropy. Perhaps here, that tendency found a more animistic expression…

Poul Anderson

What, then, do we do with the Old Forest? It looks to the hobbits like Chaos, but Bombadil is there in the middle of it. Why isn’t it a forest of Law? As Goldberry says, “…all things growing or living in the land belong each to themselves. Tom Bombadil is the Master.” I never understood the distinction she’s trying to convey.

This forest belongs to me, but I am not its Master.

There must be some difference between what Galadriel (for example) does and what Tom does. The word “master” comes from Old English mægester, “one having control or authority”. The Old English word comes from the Latin magister, meaning “the one who is greater”. Tom doesn’t control things, exactly, though he does seem to have authority. Like a fencing master! I don’t have to do what our fencing master says – she’s not the owner of the salle, nor is she the Queen – but if I know what’s good for me I’ll do what she says. She has authority because she knows more about fencing than I do. And now I know what Tom Bombadil’s role in the Old Forest is. Because he knows more songs, or his songs are closer to the actual Music, even Old Man Willow does what he says.

[1] There is no way to spell “absences” that will ever look right to this Idiosopher. [back]

Hobbits on the Map of Britain: the Paper

By Joe

On July 22, 2016

In ardagraphy, scholarship

My talk from the New York Tolkien Conference 2016, revised and improved by the comments of the audience, is now available for anyone to read.

ArdagraphicInformationSystems

Updated in 2022: I discovered Tom Shippey has already noticed the basic idea, because of course he has, so I included a citation.

Hobbits on the Map of Britain

The Evolution of Dracula

By Joe

On July 22, 2016

In mythgard academy

Warning: I am going to disagree with both Corey Olsen and Tom Hillman in this post, so I am wrong about at least some part of it.

I have just finished listening to the Episode 14, the last of the Mythgard Academy classes on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. They wound up with a discussion of how Dracula evolved over the twentieth century, from the novel to Dracula 2000. Corey and Tom both expressed some surprise that the “Christian spiritual elements” of the films had gotten more pronounced over time, even though society became more secular.

This trend does not surprise me at all. I think they were misled by the word “spiritual”. I would, instead, describe the Christian elements in Dracula as “ritual”. From this point of view, in the novel, an ancient, supernatural being threatens modern secular society. To defend itself, our quintet of heroes (a cross-section of society) calls on Professor Van Helsing to drag out of the dustbin of history the rituals developed by an older society to defend itself. An exact analogy is the discovery of digitalis among old folk remedies, which was refined to treat cardiac disease in modern hospitals.

The religious ritual elements in the movies have been getting stronger because over the last half-century, Christian ritual elements are becoming much more prominent in American society. It makes good business sense that they should be played up more in the movies. (And of course, that is the only sense that matters to movie producers.) One example: Donald Trump, who has based his entire campaign on breaking rules, felt obliged to pretend to be Christian to win the nomination (the famous “two Corinthians” episode). Public obeisance to religion is one rule he dared not break. Another: After every mass shooting, every elected official sends out a communiqué about how their “prayers are with the families of the victims”. It seems clear that “pray” in this context means “do nothing”.

I suggest that anyone who is surprised by the growing importance of Christian ritual in Dracula movies over time has been misled because they are thinking of Christianity in terms of its moral or ethical teachings. If they think of it instead in terms of the inch-deep religiosity that dominates current American politics and culture, along with Hollywood’s natural attraction for superficiality, they will see two trends marching in lock-step.

P.S. Bram Stoker looks like a feminist (not proven, though few feminists would find any problems in Dracula) because we naturally compare him with the blatant sexism of twentieth-century Hollywood. Yeah, I’m kinda down on movies these days.

First Solo Flight

By Joe

On July 20, 2016

In ardagraphy, scholarship

It is done. Fertig. Au fait. About 10 people came to my talk, which was one of three in that time slot, so I got my fair share. The audience seemed to like it. The level of glassy-eyed stares in the audience was gratifyingly low. Maybe I’ve learned something about talking to non-scientists since I last taught intro physics.

There was a sardonic remark during the opening plenary session about scientists who stick their noses into areas where they have no expertise. (She meant Fred Hoyle.) Thanks, whoever you were, for setting the bar low for me. Low bar = no pressure. (Trust me, that kind of thing has physicists rolling in the aisles with laughter).

I have a bad habit. Over the years, I’ve drifted into a presentation mode of putting graphs up on the screen and improvising the interpretation based on reactions from the audience. That doesn’t work well in a context where (a) they’re expecting me to read from a carefully-written paper, and (b) they’re not waiting to pounce on the slightest error in my Ansatz. Consequently, I said “um” a lot more than I should have. Next time, I’m just going to read the paper and see what happens.

In the question period, we had a pleasant discussion. Almost everyone had something to contribute. Kara Samborsky [1] pointed out that, while I’d been treating the parochialism of hobbits as a running joke through my talk, the Brexit vote seems to indicate that staying where you came from is a serious characteristic of the English. Her observation jibes awesomely well with James Cheshire’s results — the West Midlands (i.e., the trustworthy hobbits) had the highest percentage of “Leave” votes of any region in England. I thought I was giving a science/literature talk, not a current-events/literature talk!

One more “thank you” to everyone who came. Based on their responses, I need to make some tweaks to the paper before I publish it. The good thing about that is that I can give another presentation of the revised version. (In conformance with Arrow’s Other Theorem.)

[1] The blog takes no responsibility for misspellings of Slavic names in the Latin alphabet.