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Alliterative Revival Revival

On September 25, 2021

Just came across a wonderful paper. “Antiquarianism Underground: The Twentieth-century Alliterative Revival in American Genre Poetry” by Dennis Wilson Wise.¹

According to Wise, scholars of the history of poetry have missed most of the impact of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “one-man alliterative revival”.² Tolkien was joined by Poul Anderson here in the USA, who updated Old Norse verse forms in much the same way Tolkien updated Old English. Anderson published in fantasy and science-fiction magazines, where English professors used to deny hanging out. Both of them inspired lots of poets, it turns out. Wise finds enough examples that we might be able to call it another revival, or perhaps a revival of the revival. The people who carry on their ideas do so within the world of F/SF fandom and the Society for Creative Anachronism. It’s good to see us lowlives appearing in the refereed literature.

A non-surprise (at least it’s not surprising once I’ve given it a moment’s thought) is that alliterative humorous verse has a long history. Avram Davidson wrote one in 1961, entitled “Lines Written By, or To, or For, or Maybe Against, That Ignoble Old Viking, Harald Hardass, King of the Coney and Orkney Islands.” Tom and I aren’t the first.

Personal note: Wise singles out for praise for the poetry of Jere Fleck, a professor who was the faculty advisor of the Markland Medieval Mercenary Militia when it was a student group in the 1970s. I spent a lot of convivial evenings in the company of the MMMM back then, so I’m pleased to see the organization still exists. They’re a lot better equipped now, if the photos are any guide.

On the legal utility of horns

By Joe

On September 18, 2021

In fantasy, Slow learner

This week’s post from Stephen Winter reminded me of this.

To scholars of Saxon law, Boromir’s horn-blowing in “The Ring Goes South” has a completely different meaning. I was delighted to read this paper by Thijs Porck ³ that explains what Boromir was doing:

Gif feorcund mon oððe fremde butan wege geond wudu gonge & ne hrieme ne horn blawe, for ðeof he bið to profianne: oððe to sleanne oððe to aliesanne.

This is from the laws of Ine, King of the West Saxons. In modern English, it says, “If a stranger from afar journey through a wood, off the road, and neither call out nor blow his horn, he is to be taken for a thief, either to be killed or set free.”

So when Boromir said, “I will not go forth as a thief in the night,” he was just following the law.

Blogger’s note: This post has three purposes: (a) because I use this blog as a prosthetic long-term memory; (b) to circumvent the terrible sharing functions of the Reddit iOS app; and (c) to try out the “easy footnote” plug-in.

Proverbial desolation

By Joe

On September 11, 2021

In fantasy, squibs & crackers

A tweet from a few days ago:

https://twitter.com/tolkienguide/status/1435064827861291009

Guides to action, ranked

People weren’t coming up with good ones in the replies. (The best was from “The Homecoming of Beorthnoth”, which is a pretty deep cut.)

This is weird, because Sam Gamgee in Book VI of LotR is pretty much the personification of determination and perseverance. Examples of those qualities are plenty, but quotable lines are not to be found. Tolkien loved updating proverbs, or coining them where no traditional wisdom was available [1], so how can this be?

I verified the emergent conclusion of the twittersphere: Book VI from Cirith Ungol to Mount Doom contains no proverbs from the good guys. The only character who says anything quotable is an Orc NCO: where there’s a whip, there’s a will. The domination of Sauron means not only the end of songs, but also of proverbial wisdom.

Or, in a more critical vein, we can call this one of the techniques by which Tolkien changed the mode of the story in Northrop Frye’s construction from Romance to Low Mimesis.

[1] A feature Tolkien’s works share with those of William Morris.

The Beards of Middle-earth

By Joe

On September 4, 2021

In fantasy, trivial

Something is missing…

The box-hauling guy just delivered my copy of The Nature of Middle-earth. Curiously, the dust jacket of my copy bears no hint of the title of the book. I guess the publishers have decided the author’s name is sufficient, just this once.

When I get a new book of nonfiction my ritual begins by protecting the spine the way my mother taught me: set the spine on the table; take about 20 leaves of each end and press them down flat; repeat until the book lies open in front of me. It hasn’t been necessary in years, but we know what happens to those who forsake the mos maiorum. Then I look in the table of contents for anything amusingly weird (this is the mos mei). What do you know — there’s a chapter on “Beards”!

We all know about elves, hobbits, and dwarves, but this chapter tells us what we need to know about Numenoreans. Namely, that elvish blood in the noble houses meant that the really high-ranking Gondorians and Arnorians didn’t have beards. Though neither Tolkien nor Hostetter says it, it’s clear that a part of the ennoblement of Men, given to them by the Elves, was the suppression of facial hair. Hirsute scruffiness is the antithesis of ennoblement.

Pace a certain influential Kiwi, Boromir, Faramir, and Aragorn didn’t even need to shave. Come to think of it, neither do most Native Americans. Those proto-trolls who raised such a stink about Aragorn looking like an Native American in Ralph Bakshi’s film have been proven wrong again.

Nota bene

The fact that your Idiosopher couldn’t grow a beard to save his life has absolutely no bearing on the content of this post.

Funny Names for Bureaucrats

By Joe

On July 10, 2021

In Digital Humanities, trivial

Brenton Dickieson posted the other day about a comic-book adaptation of The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis. I haven’t read that book in decades, but I did remember the wonderful names of demons. We’re in a digital world now, so I pulled out every such name from the text. The algorithm is nothing special: any word that begins with a capital letter and flunks spell-check is a candidate; delete a few dozen stragglers by hand.

Results: Scabtree, Screwtape, Slubgob, Slumtrimpet, Toadpipe, Wormwood.

What do we see here? They all come from the latter third of the alphabet. Lots of “s” words. (The Screwtape Letters is dedicated to Tolkien, who thought “s” was a sound for bad guys, too. Saruman, Sauron, Shelob, Sackville…). They’re mostly made from jamming two short English words together.

There’s another author who did that, at a much less elevated level. Keith Laumer wrote a ton of science-fiction stories about Jame Retief, a muscular, norm-busting diplomat in the “Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne” a gender-busting arm of Earth’s hegemony over the galaxy. Wikipedia says they’re satirical, but I’d describe them more like broad, sophomoric humor. 21st-Century intellects will find them a bit crass. (Naturally, I love them.) Laumer was a diplomat himself before he became a writer. These stories seem to be settling scores with his old bosses. The bosses in these stories get names like:

Barnshingle, Clawhammer, Clayfoot, Crodfoller, Dimplick, Grossblunder, Hidebinder, Hipstinker, Lackluster, Longspoon, Nitworth, Otherday, Passwyn, Pennyfool, Proudfoot, Rumpwhistle, Shortfall, Sidesaddle, Sitzfleisch, Spradley, Sternwheeler, Straphanger, Thrashwelt, Thunderstroke, Underthrust, Whaffle, Wrothwax

Of course, my favorite of these come from proverbs: he who sups with the devil must use a long spoon”; “he who runs away lives to fight another day”. We see the same pattern — fully a quarter of the names begin with “S”. Almost half come from the last third of the alphabet. If we remove the names that explicitly come from such proverbs, the pattern gets more pronounced.

What is it that makes funny names bend that way alphabetically?

An early hint of Numenor

By Joe

On June 30, 2021

In squibs & crackers

Thanks to Hana Videen of the Old English Wordhord (whose book is coming out soon in the UK, not so soon in the US), I learn about Alcuin’s commentary on the Book of Genesis in the form of a FAQ. It was long, bloated, and Latin, so my man Ælfric of Eynsham translated it into Englisc and cut it down to match Anglo-Saxon attention spans.

His answer to the question, “Why did God make a rainbow after the Great Flood?” contains a line that jumped out at me: Forþan þe he wiste gif he swa ne dyde þæt men woldan forhtigan þæt he mid flode eft fornumene wurdon þonne hy gesawon swiðlice renas. In Modern English, “because he knew that if he didn’t do that, every time it rained heavily men would think they were going to be destroyed by a flood.” God used the rainbow much the same way we now use an emoji to soften a harsh-sounding tweet.

“By a flood” hasn’t changed much in a thousand years; “mid flode” is still kind of readable. The word that did the jumping was “destroyed”: fornúmene. I wonder if J.R.R. Tolkien consciously took that as the source of the word “Númenor”, or if it was just one reason that the root “numen” sounded right to him, given the context.

The Relaxing Condition of Monoglottony

By Joe

On May 20, 2021

In trivial

I read a tweet today that described a Russian politician as a “гопник”. I didn’t learn that word in school, so I looked it up in the Oxford Russian-English Dictionary app. It was happy to tell me that the word means “yob” or “yobbo”.

Great.

What does that mean? It’s some kind of Brit slang that autocorrect won’t even let me type.

Brain wave: there’s a Robert/Collins French-English dictionary on the shelf that annoys me with the same stunt. Look up “yob” in there and find out it means loubard.

You can’t hang around a Parisian train station for long without meeting a loubard, so I’m all set. The Russian guy was a thug. But this episode has made me understand why Americans don’t learn foreign languages.

Door-trees

By Joe

On April 29, 2021

In squibs & crackers

A poem by Joy Harjo came into my inbox the other day. I’m sure she’s not thinking of Ents, but the poem has this bit in it:

The deepest-rooted dream of a tree is to walk
Even just a little ways, from the place next to the doorway—
To the edge of the river of life, and drink—
I have heard trees talking, long after the sun has gone down:
“Speaking Tree”, lines 15-18

A tree by the doorway? That reminded me of the scene at the ruined gates of Isengard, and Legolas saying, “Yes, a tall grey Ent is there, but his arms are at his sides and he stands as still as a door-tree. (LotR, III, viii)

Harjo and Tolkien are clearly talking about different things, which reminded me that I’ve been meaning to look up that word since the 1970s. A “door-tree”, the OED informs us, is one of the vertical posts that frame a door. To give a sense of how up-to-date the word is, their most recent citation is to Piers Plowman: “as ded as a dore-tree”. I’m sure Legolas doesn’t want us to think Quickbeam is playing dead, but I’m otherwise mystified. I don’t know what connotations Tolkien might have wanted us readers to pick up.

However, now I do know the answer to Charles Dickens’s puzzlement:

Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail. Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
A Christmas Carol, stave I

It looks like “door-nail” has replaced “door-tree” in the quote from Langland, since everyone has forgotten what door-trees were. Even though I have no more clue about current attitudes toward Ents than when I started, it’s fun to see a stone skipping across seven centuries of literature like that.

Literary Circles

By Joe

On March 16, 2021

In graphs

Today is another expedition into Distributed Collaboration. Not the kind your boss means, but the truly internetted kind of research in which Idiosophers specialize. This time, all the work was done by Martin Paul Eve, who has assembled a database of all the review essays in the London Review of Books. He has put the raw data on line, so all I have to do is type some commands in R. In his conception, reviews form a network where a node is a writer and a link in the network is an arrow pointing from the writer of the review to its subject. The LRB has been running since 1979, so the database has tens of thousands of entries.

Eve showed some graphs in a blog post where he had fun finding closed loops in the graph: A reviews B’s book, B reviews C’s book, C reviews A’s book. I’ve loved this kind of analysis ever since I read The Devil’s Dictionary. I went another direction, though.

This blog has been graphing the Inklings for a while. The LRB is too late historically to help out with understanding their direct interactions, but its network is useful for understanding their reception. So here’s the question: It’s clear that J.R.R. Tolkien was not welcomed into the sacred grove of Literature until we barbarians smashed the gates. The other Inklings weren’t mentioned in my college catalogue, either. Is that also true of the literary world across the pond?

One great thing you can do with a network graph is extract the subgraph around any point you ask for. I asked for the Inklings. I used Appendix A of Diana Glyer’s book The Company They Keep to decide who is an Inkling. None of them ever wrote a review, naturally, but six reviews of them appear in the network:

Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien
C.S. Lewis, edited by Walter Hooper
J.R.R. Tolkien, editor Christopher Tolkien
J.R.R. Tolkien, editor Alan Bliss
David Cecil
John Wain

That’s a respectable number of the group to be reviewed, considering how few of them were alive in 1979. I’m looking for how broad a reach they have with two degrees of separation. J.R.R. Tolkien has only a small network. Both of his entries in the database are due to reviews by Peter Godman. Peter Godman also reviewed a book by Tom Shippey, who wrote lots of things for LRB.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s network

C.S. Lewis’s network is larger, with 32 points, but that’s entirely due to J.I.M. Stewart. I’ve turned off the labels for anyone who was involved in fewer than 25 reviews (e.g. Arthur Conan Doyle) so we can read the graph. 32 connections would be kind of impressive, but I can’t help noticing that the graph they form is the same as the graph for Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of Tolkien. Out of the 33 nodes, there are seven writers here who are connected tightly enough to the LRB establishment to be labeled. (If I recall That Hideous Strength correctly, Lewis would shed no tears at being in a small backwater of the network.)

C.S. Lewis’s network

That’s it for the people we usually think of as the Inklings. No Barfield. A couple of minor members have much more connection. Lord David Cecil (as one might suppose from his title) is extremely connected, but only because he’s reviewed by Frank Kermode:

David Cecil’s neighborhood (click to embiggen)

John Wain is in Cecil’s neighborhood; if we re-center it on him, the graph is just slightly different. Charles Williams is a well-connected name in Eve’s database, but the name is attached to the biographer, not the Inkling.

Conclusion

It’s safe to say that the Inklings are still out of the British literary mainstream by this measure. Were it not for three reviewers taking a brief interest, none of them would have appeared in the LRB.

Better Conclusion

If you want to see a truly amazing list of people, check out the archive of Tom Shippey’s LRB reviews. Where else can you find Geoffrey of Monmouth and Nichelle Nichols next to each other?

I made one tweak to the original database: T.A. Shippey and Tom Shippey are the same person, so I consolidated those two nodes.

Gloin’s Rank

By Joe

On January 31, 2021

In fantasy, squibs & crackers

Over at “Wisdom from the Lord of the Rings” last week, we heard about Frodo’s conversation with Glóin. It begins with Frodo’s polite, “Am I right in guessing that you are the Glóin, one of the twelve companions of the great Thorin Oakenshield?”

The word companion sounded different to me this time. Before, I’d taken it to mean that Glóin held the rank of Count under King Dáin. But there’s another way to read it. There was another king called “the great” who had twelve companions. That’s Charlemagne, or in Anglo-Norman, …li reis Charle, ki poesté fud grant Par les dudze cumpaignuns…. (“King Charles, whose power was great through his twelve companions…”) If modern French helps (it’s not impossible) there’s a translation of the Song of Roland on line that carries the word “companion” in this sense into the modern era.

So it seems likely that we’re supposed to get echoes of Charlemagne’s companions here. Maybe Glóin is the Dwarvish version of a Paladin. He’s dressed all in white, I can’t help noticing.