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For anybody who’s laughing at the doctors in Bram Stoker’s Dracula who prescribe brandy for any illness: Remember that Elrond gave Gandalf a flask containing a cordial that was a sure-fire cure for hypothermia and squid attacks.
http://youtu.be/lPUAwwC_U8c&t=860
The post on using a British GIS to learn things about hobbits attracted so much positive attention (42 inbound links!) that I’ve decided to turn it into a serious paper. I’m stunned – given the obscure topic, my expectations for the whole blog were more like “42 page views”.
One drawback is that I don’t yet know what the paper will be about. But Idiosophers are nothing if not data-driven, so I shall start collecting correlations, and we shall go where the numbers take us.
Things I’ll keep my eye on, in case one turns into the topic:
To-do list:
Once that is done, we can identify the topic. Statistical methods will not be required, since I’m going to use every hobbit I can find. As statisticians say, “n=all”.
[1] Ordinarily I would include a link here, but none is available. Sub-sacroiliac pain from copyright law is Tolkien’s wyrd, even beyond the grave. [back]
Bless that good, good woman who hung the crucifix round my neck! for it is a comfort and a strength to me whenever I touch it. It is odd that a thing which I have been taught to regard with disfavour and as idolatrous should in a time of loneliness and trouble be of help.
Bram Stoker, Dracula, ch. 3
To which I compare,
When I find myself in times of trouble,
Mother Mary comes to me, …Paul McCartney, “Let It Be”
I’m going to assume that this is just a coincidence. I will keep it in mind, though, when I listen to experts in natural-language processing tout their skills at making connections between texts.
Since it got such a positive response, I’m trying to turn the GIS distribution of names in Britain into a piece of real scholarship. The first step is collecting and classifying Hobbit names.
Shortly after I started doing that, I was forcibly reminded that some characters just aren’t as important as others. Names that get mentioned a single time won’t be as carefully managed as those of more-important characters (even by JRRT), so they should carry less weight. I’ll need some kind of quantitative measure for the concept of “importance”. Searching about the Web for an hour produced nothing. I see plenty of syllabuses from digital-humanities courses that ought to use such a thing, but no explicit references. Perhaps it’s too trivial for them to mention. That’s an opportunity: What could be more appropriate for this blog than something too trivial for professors? Onward!
Principles for quantitative importance of a character:
These two principles are just the definition of a multiplicative scale, like we use for sound. It would be funny to express importance of characters in units of dBfrodo, but a proper solemnity dictates that we use a more information-theoretic definition: the importance of a character will be the log2 of the number of pages on which that character is mentioned. The page mentions are from the index of the 2002 single-volume edition of LotR from Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt.
Fig. 1:Distribution of importance of hobbit families
For hobbit families in The Lord of the Rings, the distribution of importance looks like Figure 1. There are 28 family names mentioned in the story. Four are mentioned much more frequently than the others, which is reassuring.
There is a group of families that are mentioned only once. A larger group is mentioned thrice. This is due to the repetition for comic effect of the list of Bilbo’s relatives at the Long-Expected Party. Then there is a smaller group of hobbits who appear on dozens of pages. These can be good guys or bad guys. [1]
Fig. 2 Family names ranked by mentions
On the far right are Baggins, Gamgee, Took, and Brandybuck, as expected. Figure 2 is an attempt to reconcile my desire for a density graph like Figure 1 with the fact that logarithms don’t really mesh well with histograms. The left-right position is the number of pages, the vertical position of the name is that family’s position in the bin in Figure 1.
I think this measure of importance will work. It emphasizes the right things: Farmer Cotton is “the chief person around here”, and his family duly shows up near the top. It de-emphasizes the right things: Merry gets mentioned about 40% less than Pippin, but that washes out if importance is quoted with no fractional part. Hobbits who barely exist at all, such as a few families in Bree whose only significance is that there are similar names in the Shire, have zero importance.
[1] Sauron is mentioned on 273 pages, which makes him two notches worse than the Sackville-Bagginses.[back]
Just listened to Sørina’s lecture on little loosed dragons, and then played “Synchronicity” by the Police. The result was a fascinating experience in parallels.
And, in a tour de force of seizing control of meaning from the author, I have always thought Miss Gradenko worked at the N.I.C.E., and C.S. Lewis left her out of That Hideous Strength because he didn’t have the chops to cover the electric guitar part properly.
P.S. For what it’s worth, I think Genette’s definition of “intertextuality” is useless. If I were going to define a sub-class of literature, I’d try to think of something that excluded at least one book. When anything that uses words is intertextual, why not just say “literary”?
P.P.S. The part where Prof. Higgins says the text isn’t really layered, but is actually woven of lots of threads — <dadjoke> you mean it’s a textile? </dadjoke>
They can do amazing things with geographic information systems, these days. My local county government lets you look up all kinds of useful geographic information on line. This one came across the Twitter feed this morning: look up your family name, and find out where they live on a map of the UK. Obviously it’s intended for real people, not fictional ones, so let’s start with reality. Here’s my maternal grandfather’s name:
Tracking my British ancestry.
I see two hot-spots. One is in Manchester, the other in Birmingham. Family lore says we’re Scottish, but family lore says lots of things and believing them is not always advisable. (That castle in Toulouse turned out not to exist, dommage.)
Enough reality. From what I know of Professor Tolkien’s biography, there’s an intriguing overlap here. His old stomping grounds were near Birmingham, and he wrote it into his tales. That got me to looking up hobbit names. Surprise, it worked! Took, Burrows, Bolger, Baggins, Underhill … Lots of them have hot-spots around Birmingham. Maybe my grandfather comes from good Hobbiton stock. The Cottons are a bit to the north, like us.
There had always been a Baggins in the middle.
Lots of other hobbits aren’t there. Sandyman and Brandybuck can’t be found in the modern UK at all. All the Grubbs are over in Lincolnshire, on business of their own that doesn’t concern me. Sackvilles are in Gloucester and Leicester, which makes me wonder if I ought to be skipping the pronunciation of some letters in the middle of their name.
So, nearby hobbits have Birmingham names. Strange half-foreign types like Bucklanders are completely fabricated. The bad guys are from “far-away” places. All this makes perfect sense, if we imagine that JRRT was trying to create an idealized version of his childhood surroundings in the Shire. Except for one glaring exception.
No Bagginses here. You’re in the wrong part of the Shire!
Samwise and his Gaffer seem to be Londoners. In Tolkien’s day they could have taken the train (making a noise like a firework dragon) but how the family ended up with jobs in the Shire is a mystery to me.
In any case, I love maps as much as old Bilbo did. Even if they don’t immediately open up new vistas for the digital humanities, they give me things to ponder. It’s not impossible to imagine a study of subcreated worlds that draws on maps of this one, but I can’t see it yet.
The New York Tolkien Conference has put out a “call for programming“. Never heard that term before, but I think I get what they mean. They’re interested in talks about the intersections between the Inklings and science. Deadline for submission is May Day.
Time to start thinking….
During last fall’s fundraiser for Signum University, Dr. Prof. President Olsen committed to running from the Shire to Minas Tirith in the form of a chicken. In Lord of the Rings Online, that is. The Great Mythgard Chicken Run took place on January 30th. I watched it on TV. Despite (or possibly because of) its absurdity, it was an interesting introduction for me to the LotRO world.
Of course, a chicken doesn’t stand a chance alone in the Wild. He had companions, so the quest should not fail. As the crowd of Mythgardians, elves, dwarves, hobbits, men, and other chickens, swarmed through a square in Edoras, temporarily quadrupling its population, I was provoked to tweet, “I would like to hear the minstrels of Rohan sing of the gang of weirdos who ran through their lands with a flock of chickens.” Be careful what you wish for on the Internet.
Tom Hillman started it, and deserves at least half the blame. The narrative lines are mine; the funny lines are his.
From dark Dunharrow in the dim morning
with hen and hatchling strode Hampshire’s son.
‘Gainst foes and foxes, fighters protecting him,
to Minas Tirith the tourist came.
With Foghorn Leghorn, long enduring:
son, I say, son, strong in scorning.
For no lectures would he linger in Lamedon or Lebennin.
His clumsy coursing carried him forward.
Even women long-skirted outran wingéd Wigend
Politely pausing until his approach.
From Rammas Echor to the door of Rath Dinen
Into every breach he stuck his beak.
‘Til his goal achieved, glory gaining
He gracefully tumbled from the Tower of Guard.
In red day dawning crew he loudly.
Eleven herbs and spices seasoned breast and drumstick
Biscuits in bucket, slaw on the side
Sweet was the feasting, so the songs tell us.
While I’m thinking of multi-lingual puns:
The lake was too polluted for fishing or swimming, so the town council declared that the water was verboten.
Gandalf tells the story of his confrontation with Saruman at Orthanc:
I looked then and saw that his robes, which had seemed white, were not so, but were woven of all colours, and if he moved they shimmered and changed hue so that the eye was bewildered.[1]
“I liked white better,” I said.
“White!” he sneered. “It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken.” LotR, II, ii.
Saruman is making an elaborate, layered pun here. Let’s step away from the Germanic-root words for a moment. Breaking white light into its spectral components: analysis. Writing things on paper: thesis. Dyed white cloth: high-status ancient Romans usually wore white to work, but it was tacky to wear that to dinner. For festivities, they wore a brightly-colored outfit called a synthesis. If you’re familiar with classical civilization and you like word games, Saruman is encapsulating the scientific method in three quick phrases.
Am I just imagining this? Well, “His knowledge was deep, his thought was subtle…” and there’s this:
… Orthanc, the citadel of Saruman, the name of which had (by design or chance) a twofold meaning; for in the Elvish speech “orthanc” signifies “Mount Fang”, but in the language of the Mark of old the “Cunning Mind”. LotR, II, ii.
This is exactly the same kind of multi-lingual pun. Saruman has a previous conviction, Your Honor. (Once again, little in Tolkien is due to “chance”.)
And we were warned this was coming. “Saruman” comes from “searo“, “art, skill, contrivance, deceit, stratagem…” which the Bosworth-Toller Dictionary[2] warns “is uncertain whether the word is used with a good or with a bad meaning”. And no way am I going to try to contradict Professor Tolkien on Anglo-Saxon, but I note that “orÞanc” also has a positive gloss as “original thought”. Both of these words for intelligence can be taken two ways. There’s a context in which this ambivalence persists in modern English: For every “smart person”, there’s a “smart alec”; for every “wise man”, there’s a “wise guy”. And those latter terms are generally applied to a person who makes clever puns in ostensibly serious situations.[3]
Saruman is playing a mind-game here, irritating Gandalf with too-clever puns so he’s rattled, and doesn’t see the trap Saruman is about to spring on him.
1. I have a friend who would buy a gown made of that cloth in a heartbeat.[back]
2. Thanks to Tom Hillman for the link to Bosworth-Toller. For learning Anglo-Saxon, Prague is the last place I’d have thought to look. [back]
3. The public-school career of your humble Idiosopher could in no way have contributed to the evidence for this observation. [back]
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