Fëanor doesn’t make any sane speeches for comparison.
But what the heck. Full speed ahead. The longest verbatim speech we get is in Chapter IX, “Of the Flight of the Noldor”. I won’t repeat the whole thing here, but it runs from “Why, O People of the Noldor…” and runs to “No other race shall oust us!” We can validate our presumption that this is a mad rant by noting that 11 of the last 13 sentences end with exclamation marks.
There are 27 French words out of 299, or 9%. The French words in Fëanor’s rant almost suffice to convey the entire meaning of the speech: race, oust, pursuit, beauty, levels, endure, ease, return, realm, people, vengeance, cowards, mountains, await, conquered, jealous, folly, city, journey, serve, war, regained, enemy, valiant.
This raises the question: How close is that to Denethor’s 10%? Most English prose will be loaded up with articles and prepositions that are all from Old English, so there’s a ceiling on how French a passage can be. Is 9% significantly different from 10%? What is the range of tolerable frenchification?
To look into that, I processed the first paragraphs from Chapter XIV, “Of Beleriand and its Realms”, which has to be the least-crazy part of the Quenta Silmarillion. That came out to 20 French words out of 266, or 7%. The words are ages, borders, fortress, defence, assault, dungeons, war, haste, destroy, search, tunnel, issued, mountains, furnaces, refuse, issued, desolation, plain, citadel. Morgoth definitely skews toward the Romance languages. Note the dungeon and the tunnel — they’ll be back shortly.
Who else isn’t crazy, besides the Narrator? Beren comes immediately to mind. He doesn’t make any long speeches [1] that I recall, but if I splice together everything he says to Thingol on their first meeting it adds up to 200 words. Of those, 10 are French. Just 5%: perils, possess, jewels, powers, spy, price, perform, fate, rock, crown. (Not such a good plot summary, but it catches a lot of the flavor.)
In case anyone is wondering if the human/elf distinction matters, I decided Legolas was a sane elf. His speeches in LotR range from 2% French when he’s singing a lament for Boromir to 11% when he’s talking about visiting the Glittering Caves. [2] His average is 6±2.5%. In general, the Quenta Silmarillion has a higher French quotient than LotR, but they’re comparable. Christopher Tolkien and Guy Gavriel Kay took care to match J.R.R. Tolkien’s style and they picked up on this facet very well, arithmetically speaking.
So, with Sam’s permission we will call that settled. As long as they can stay above ground, sane people in Tolkien use less than 7% French words.
[1] This may be a better sign of sanity than any amount of etymology.
[2] It’s almost impossible to use English words to talk about caves.
The team at the Oxford Dictionary have upgraded their text visualization tool. The first beta version was the tool of some idiosophizing a few months ago. This new version still has the 500-word limit, but it’s gotten better at guessing which meaning of a word the author had in mind, and it handles Elvish words and proper names much more gracefully. That is, it ignores them.
The madness of kings and the damage it can do to a country has been on my mind of late, so today I used the new tool to look at Denethor’s first and last speeches. Long-time readers know I’m an admirer.
Here’s the first thing of any length we hear Denethor say, after removing all the things that aren’t Denethor:
Dark indeed is the hour, and at such times you are wont to come, Mithrandir. But though all the signs forebode that the doom of Gondor is drawing nigh, less now to me is that darkness than my own darkness. It has been told to me that you bring with you one who saw my son die. Is this he? …
Verily. And in my turn I bore it, and so did each eldest son of our house, far back into the vanished years before the failing of the kings, since Vorondil father of Mardil hunted the wild kine of Araw in the far fields of Rhun. I heard it blowing dim upon the northern marches thirteen days ago, and the River brought it to me, broken: it will wind no more. What say you to that, Halfling?
As before, the size of the circle is how common the word is in English, the horizontal position is the year the word entered the language, the vertical position is how many times the word appears in the text, and the color of the circle is the language family whence the word came into English. Blue is Germanic (dark for Old English, lighter for German or Norse), red is French (and other Romance languages). Other languages appear in other colors, but these passages don’t have any of those.
This is how a great leader of men talks
And here is the last speech Denethor makes before he ignites the pyre, similarly edited:
Pride and despair! Didst thou think that the eyes of the White Tower were blind? Nay, I have seen more than thou knowest, Grey Fool. For thy hope is but ignorance. Go then and labour in healing! Go forth and fight! Vanity. For a little space you may triumph on the field, for a day. But against the Power that now arises there is no victory. To this City only the first finger of its hand has yet been stretched. All the East is moving. And even now the wind of thy hope cheats thee and wafts up Anduin a fleet with black sails. The West has failed. It is time for all to depart who would not be slaves.
Hope on, then! Do I not know thee, Mithrandir? Thy hope is to rule in my stead, to stand behind every throne, north, south, or west. I have read thy mind and its policies. Do I not know that you commanded this halfling here to keep silence? That you brought him hither to be a spy within my very chamber? And yet in our speech together I have learned the names and purpose of all thy companions. So! With the left hand thou wouldst use me for a little while as a shield against Mordor, and with the right bring up this Ranger of the North to supplant me. But I say to thee, Gandalf Mithrandir, I will not be thy tool! I am Steward of the House of Anarion. I will not step down to be the dotard chamberlain of an upstart. Even were his claim proved to me, still he comes but of the line of Isildur. I will not bow to such a one, last of a ragged house long bereft of lordship and dignity’
I would have things as they were in all the days of my life and in the days of my longfathers before me: to be the Lord of this City in peace, and leave my chair to a son after me, who would be his own master and no wizard’s pupil. But if doom denies this to me, then I will have naught, neither life diminished, nor love halved, nor honour abated.
Not the words of a well man.
When we meet him, Denethor is sane. He is firmly in command of the defense of the West. In a speech of 140 words he uses only three of French origin: sign, river, and march. Those are good, short words. You can barely fault him.
But the palantir is a dangerous thing. One must have a great strength of will to use it without being deceived. Mighty as Denethor was, madness took him, and we can see it in his speech: 37 French words out of 370. Alas for the son of Ecthelion! Sauron’s lies turned him 10% French, and from that there is no return.
Caveat
The results of the visualizer can be sensitive to the date of the text. As you can see from the vertical red lines, I chose a date before the author started writing, not the date of publication. Using the later date means there’s a risk that the robot will discover some obscure technical term that came into existence just before the book hit the shelves. The OED knows everything, and that has negatives as well as positives. (In this case, the tricky word was “kine”.)
It often happens while I’m doing manual labor that I get to wondering about a word. Today the word was “hitch-hike”. I remembered a story about its origin, and decided to check it out during my next break. The story was not true. But then I found this citation in the Oxford English Dictionary:
We may charge this wicked hitch-hiker the ten cents extra that she deserves for asking for a bath towel.
It’s from Barbara Starke, Touch and Go: the story of a girl’s escape. 1931. I can’t find this book online — neither the Internet Archive nor Google Books has it. You can buy a used copy from Amazon for $847, if you like. The references I’ve been able to find make it sound interesting — it was banned in Ireland.
Some humorists think of jokes from reading the newspaper, some from advertisements, some from pop culture. I think I now know where Douglas Adams got his.
In which we once again find our Idiosopher using insanely-powerful Internet research tools for frivolous ends.
A while back, Prof. Emily Steiner, who seems to be familiar with every medieval manuscript that’s survived to the modern era, tweeted an image of what she asserted to be a debate between a cockatrice and a wyvern. It’s a snippet from Brunetto Latini, Livre du Trésor (1230?-1294). Manuscript BnF Fr 568, folio 48v (available via Gallica).
I can’t resist reading the captions on medieval illuminations, just to see if I can. The red letters looked to me like “De toutes maines de serpens”. Obviously this means “Concerning all kinds of serpents”, except for the word “maines”– what’s that?
“Why did it have to be snakes?” – Prof. Henry Jones, Jr.
I consulted the Dictionary of medieval French, and found definition 2 for “maine” is “manière, espèce”, with a citation to Le Roman de Tristan. So, fine. [1] But there’s one thing I overlooked: that red curlicue over top of the word I’m puzzling over is a scribal abbreviation. After a couple of us got ourselves confused, Prof. Steiner let us know it stands for “re”, and the pen-strokes I read as “in” are actually “ni”. Properly read, that word is actually “manière” itself, and it hasn’t changed in 800 years.
That implies a nuance that hadn’t occurred to me about the lexicographer’s art: the scholar who wrote the dictionary included a word he knew didn’t exist and wasn’t used, just because it’s easy for students to read it that way in the text. Awfully considerate of him.
[1] The Romance of Tristan is attributed to an author called Béroul, about whom nothing is known. The manuscript is in poor condition. The dictionary tells me the word “maine” is used in the phrase “male maine”, meaning intransigence or evil will, not bad manners. I tried to find the word in the manuscript, but failed. Maybe it’s underneath one of the coffee spills.
The title of this post refers to one of the Idiosopher’s suggestions for the school-spirit section of the bookstore. It is the opinion of President Corey Olsen of Signum University. Praise is always welcome, especially from one of the world’s premier Tolkien geeks.
I have just finished reading Beowulf: A New Translation by Maria Dahvana Headley. Not without some trepidation, because the reviews in the mass media and on Twitter all advertised it as a translation into current Internet idioms. That could have been awful, but I’m here to tell you it was all just clickbait. This is a “new translation” in the sense that the English used here is from the last half century. Sure, the pull quotes that they quoted are in there, but they’re not important to the text. One of the most popular lines to quote looks frankly spliced in to attract attention.
This is what I was afraid of
The words in the book are much better than the ones in the reviews. MDH uses the difference in language between the current world and standard modern English as a tool. The narrator, as I hear him[1], is the same guy who narrated the original. He’s old and getting a bit cranky. He puts in some contemporary locutions to attract the kids’ attention, but the moment he’s got it, he slides back into an archaic mode. That contrasts with the more colloquial sound of the direct quotations, forming dissonances that are sometimes brilliant:
Only then did Hygelac begin to question his comrade, calmly, commandingly, to glean the story of the war-Geats, and take the tale for his own hall-history.
“Holy hell, Beowulf, how’d it go out there?” (1988)
One question I always have to get out of the way in an adaptation of Beowulf is, “Did the translator do her homework?” Not even a question here. In the introduction, she deftly gets Tolkien out of the way, in accordance with Terry Pratchett’s dictum.
So I definitely liked this book. It is the fastest to read of all the versions I’ve read. A backhanded shot at Princess Diana was completely unexpected, but worked well, too.
[1] I’m sure “him” is still the right pronoun. That’s not the case for all the characters in this book — MDH is good at making little gender-bends that stay within the original text.
This is Part 2 of my presentation at Mythmoot VII. Part 1 is here. Part 1 was the mathematical treatment; this is the humanities context.
This paper grew out of Prof. Olsen’s explication of Eminem last year. I took upon myself the mission to figure out why Tolkien fans should like Eminem. Paradoxically enough, it’s because Tolkien was a reactionary. It’s common to hear critics use that word about him. (Google Scholar returns over 2,000 hits.) But everybody elides one detail: Against what was he reacting? Well, in technology or theology, practically everything, but in terms of poetry, I think I’ve found a specific person.
Introducing Edith Sitwell
Celebrities
Dame Edith Sitwell was a character. A classic English eccentric. Wealthy as sin, six feet tall, thin as an icicle, descended from the Plantagenet royal family. She was a bit older than Tolkien, so she was a presence in the English literary scene when he was in his 20s and 30s. Emphasis on the word “scene” — Photographers loved photographing her, and she loved to be photographed, so she was a pioneer of the publicity-driven life we see so much of today. This photo is the level of celebrity we’re talking about: She and Marilyn apparently took to each other immediately.
As a medieval illumination
The second photo is what she looked like at the beginning of her fame as a writer, in the early 1920s. This is the time at which she would have come to the attention of the Inklings, the way she came to the attention of absolutely everyone.
I like this photo because she looks like she just climbed out of an illuminated manuscript. It’s easy to imagine her among her 12th Century ancestors.
Façade
The work I want to talk about is called Façade.[1] It’s a series of poems intended to be spoken aloud from a stage, set to music by a very young Sir William Walton. The poems frequently are titled with reference to music or dance: “Tarantella”, “Fox Trot”, “Country Dance”, “Hornpipe” … Edith and her brothers Osbert and Sacheverell would write poems, then they would set up a screen in their parlor, and read the verse aloud from behind the screen. The verse was mostly nonsense. “It’s all a bloody façade!” said their housekeeper one day, so Edith named the whole piece accordingly.
Performance screen designed by John Piper
Façade is subtitled “An Entertainment”, and it’s fun to imagine what the audience thought they were in for when they walked into the theater. There on the stage were a few chairs, a piccolo, two trumpets, a saxophone, two cellos, and an array of percussion. Behind it all was a screen painted with a face whose mouth is a megaphone. The poems get read through the megaphone. They’re not sung, though performers sometimes try. If you look around YouTube you’ll see what a bad idea singing them can be. I like the way Paul Driver put it: “It is not so clear for what kind of non-singer Facade was conceived.” [2] Well, you’re about to find out.
This is what C.S. Lewis called “The gibberish literature of the Lunatic Twenties” in The Pilgrim’s Regress. [3] I can’t find any time that J.R.R. Tolkien mentioned the Sitwells, but Lewis was there to pick up the cudgel. At least one reviewer identifies the Sitwells as one of the inspirations for the “Clevers” in Lewis’s book.
Anyway, love her or hate her, I’m calling her the “Anti-Tolkien” here. What does it mean to be the “Anti-Tolkien”? Well, like matter and anti-matter, you have to have a lot of things in common, but disagree on one or two fundamentals. Both Sitwell and Tolkien were Modernists, but they pushed back against some of the basics of Modernism. A nice paper by Demoor, Posman, and Van Durme [4] put this part of the Modernist project in musical terms. To start at the beginning: The most inclusive definition of of “music” is “sounds arranged in time”. The arrangement can go two ways. Melody is the part of music that goes along with the flow of time; Harmony goes perpendicular to time. Modernism devalued melody and emphasized experimental harmony. Tolkien and Sitwell both thought the melody was the important part. They were united in the belief that language could and should be musical, but what that music ought to be about is where they parted company.
I’ve put the relevant areas of agreement and disagreement into a table.
Tolkien
Sitwell
Eminem
English
Yes
Yes
No
Edwardian
Yes
Yes
No
Poet
Yes
Yes
No
Drawing from country life
Yes
Yes
No
Inspired by Classical mythology
Yes
Yes
No
Scenic depictions of darkness
Yes
Yes
No
World War 1
Yes
Yes
No
Hunting shows up in odd places
Yes
Yes
No
Importance of musicality in poems
Yes
Yes
No
Respect for the traditions they’re appropriating
Yes
No
Yes
Poems should make sense
Yes
No
Yes
Structured rhyme
Depends
No
No
The big difference comes in their relationship to their inspirations. Sitwell is frankly imperialist, though she can see the end of Empire coming up soon. That’s actually the meaning of “Hornpipe”, which I just recited, but the tempo of the piece makes it invisible until you sit down and read it line by line and try to figure out if it’s really nonsense or not. Like any imperialist, she thinks of her source material as a resource to be exploited. She doesn’t care whether in reality a Hottentot is hot or not — all she wants is the sound of the words. Dame Edith definitely did not take Prof. Sturgis’s advice about how to write other cultures.
By contrast, when Tolkien takes inspirations from north-western English villagers, it’s with genuine affection. He notes their flaws, but likes them anyway. Lobelia Sackville-Baggins is the clearest case.[5] When he’s done telling the story, we see that things that are flaws in one context sometimes turn out to be great strengths in another.
This leads directly to their second area of disagreement. Nonsense verse can be a lot of fun, but it’s rarely respectful. (That’s why I like it so much.) Tolkien occasionally wrote a tra-la-lally or a ring-a-dong-dillo, but only as a brief insertion into an otherwise intelligible sentence. Which, of course, is entirely consistent with English folk song. As Professor Flieger mentioned Friday, Tolkien is “longing for a lost and irretrievable past.” Sitwell is, to put it mildly, not.
Looking at the last column, Eminem and Dame Edith look like almost exact opposites, but their ears for rhyme have a lot in common. To understand the relationship, we’ll need a way to make the scattered rhymes of their verses visible, which means we have to dig into some rhyme measurement.
Rhymometry
William Harmon, in his wonderful history of English versification,[6] says Rhyme is lowbrow. Classical verse generally doesn’t rhyme in Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Hebrew… Verse in old Germanic languages doesn’t rhyme either. It’s like Rhyme conveys a sense of frivolity, a lack of seriousness. Rhyming verse is down in the gutter, amusing the plebs. You know what rhymes? Light verse almost always rhymes. (Tom Hillman and I have written light alliterative verse, but it’s a really obscure niche.) And what’s more, the rhymes have to be perfect or it’s not funny. (This will come in later when the rappers join us.) The idea of rhyme as Art (capital A) only existed for a few centuries in English.
Rhyming verse came into respectability in English because the language was shifting from synthetic-suffixal to analytic-prefixal. That’s Harmon again; I don’t use words like that. The way it looked to me in high-school foreign language classes was “everything rhymes!” The French/Germanic fusion we were all speaking in the High Middle Ages was different, though. It put Chaucer in a position to grab two innovations and run with them: iambic rhythm and masculine rhyme. Or, as Prof. Olsen put it yesterday, the “single-syllable terminal rhymes” that would one day be the foundation of rap.
Two centuries later, Shakespeare was solidly in this respectable-rhyme world, but he’s already using enjambment to undercut the importance of the rhymes. “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments” – without seeing the rest of the sonnet, you’d never know which word of that sentence was the rhyme. By two centuries after Shakespeare, we were back to looking askance at rhyme.
But still, even with Chaucerian/Shakespearean pedigree, rhyme has a taint of the common people about it. It’s not serious. Which brings us to Eminem. Hip-hop is all about rhymes. Hip-hop poets even call their works “rhymes”, not “verses” or “poems” or “lyrics”, but what they consider a rhyme isn’t perfect (unless they’re trying to be funny). They use assonances, consonances, and other kinds of slant rhyme instead.
How rhyme is used
Part 1 of this paper showed graphically that the Modernists of the 1920s resemble the hip-hop rhymers of the 21st Century in their use of bursts of slant and mosaic rhyme. But I promised that there was a fight going on. What is the argument? What are these poets disagreeing about? We need to look at what each is doing with their art.
Eminem is trying to elevate hip-hop to an artistic genre. Rap is unquestionably lowbrow, with a few people trying to elevate the form from its natural habitat on the sidewalk to something higher. Their individual purposes differ. Chuck D is trying to motivate political action. Eminem does that sometimes, but usually he’s trying to exorcise personal demons, like any Romantic. As the musicologist Robert Greenberg says, “In many ways, we’re still in the Romantic period,” and that fits perfectly here.
You don’t have to listen to a work of hip-hop for very long before you hear the word “respect”. That’s what all rappers want. Eminem is making verse that tries to get respect from the highbrows, while staying entirely within the idiom of the street.
Dame Edith didn’t need any more respect. Her status was as sure as the Thain of the Shire’s. She was mining lowbrow amusements for form, just as she was mining the empire for sounds. She agreed with Tolkien that the current forms were becoming hidebound, and she re-vitalized them by bringing in this low-brow infusion. She might even have said, “The inhabitants were too stupid and dull for words, and an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them.”[7] Everyone was shocked by the result, which was exactly what she wanted. In a sense, she was pushing the highbrows downward.
Tolkien was embracing the lowbrow for its own sake. He wasn’t gentrifying rhyme, he was celebrating it. Like Beethoven writing country dances, he’s showing his audience the merit in the simple people. At the same time, he’s trying to revitalize highbrow verse with an infusion of bucolic vitality. When the highbrow and lowbrow sides of culture are too separated, art stagnates. True vitality comes from free exchange between the sides of culture. Like Eminem, Tolkien wanted to create art by lifting up the bottom of society. Dame Edith Sitwell wanted to go the other way, bringing the high down to the low. And the war between the brows isn’t really as disconnected as it looked at first. Tolkien has become so popular that there are highbrows who look down on him. Especially since the Jackson movies made a billion dollars, there’s a nimbus of the lowbrow around the Lord of the Rings.
Artists frequently describe their work as in conversation with those who have gone before, but the conversation can go only one way. JRRT couldn’t respond to hip-hop for obvious reasons, so what this work has accomplished is to identify an analogous contemporaneous situation to which he clearly related, and restore a bit of symmetry. This, then, is my conclusion. A Tolkien fan who likes hip-hop can be entirely consistent with the artistic missions of both.
Works Cited
[1] Sitwell, Edith. Façade and other poems, 1920-1935. Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd., 1950.
[2] Driver, Paul. “‘Façade Revisited.” Tempo (1980): 3-9.
[3] Lewis, Clive Staples. The pilgrim’s regress. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2014.
[4] Demoor, Marysa, Sarah Posman, and Debora Van Durme. “Literary modernism and melody: an avant-propos.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 55.1 (2013): 31-35.
[5] Tolkien, J.R.R The Lord of the Rings. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002. VI,ix.
[6] Harmon, William. “English versification: fifteen hundred years of continuity and change.” Studies in Philology 94.1 (1997): 1-37.
This is part of the paper I presented at Mythmoot VII. I’m breaking it up into blog-sized pieces. This is the graphical core. In the next post, I’ll show what that means in context.
The objective is to find similar patterns of rhyming words in poems that may be very different in genre and era. Going through the verse and marking the rhymes (as I did here) is instructive, but it’s hard to define similarity of patterns. Instead, let’s use the idea of density of rhymes. The way we’ll do it is to start with a chunk of verse of 100-200 words. We’ll number the words in order. Next to each word that participates in a rhyme, we’ll put a 1. Others words get 0. Then we graph the density of 1’s in the poem as a function of linear position in the text. This method doesn’t require the poem to be in lines, which is good because as Prof. Olsen noted, one of our subjects doesn’t use lines per se.
But if the poet uses similar-length words and puts rhyme at the end of a line, we’ll see that come out. It will show a smooth, wavelike structure. Particularly long or short words make small perturbations around the wave. When it’s applied to metric verse, we’ll see things about the poet’s word-choices. When they switch from short words to long, it’ll show up in the troughs between rhyme-peaks. Mosaic rhymes (like the ones Eminem, Dame Edith, and Gerard Manley Hopkins are so fond of) add variation to the pattern by putting a cluster of 1s together, which raises a peak.
Shakespeare
Here are two sonnets back to back. “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” and “When my love swears that she is made of truth”. The rhymes happen at regular intervals, as you’d expect. The troughs are the interesting parts. The first thing this chart hits us with is that these sonnets are mostly monosyllables. The place just to the right of center is where Shakespeare used some big words “some untutored youth, unlearned in the world’s false subtleties.” That reduces the number of non-rhyming words, which raises the minimum density. Note that these (my two favorites) are both “light verse”.
Sonnets 130 and 138
Who else, seen from the vantage of the 1920s, is a stodgy traditionalist? How about Alfred, Lord Tennyson? Another master of iambic pentameter. My first thought was to use “The Idylls of the King” since there are so many Arthurian fans here, but that’s because I’m not very good at thinking sometimes. The Idylls are blank verse, of course, so there are no predictable points at which the density will peak. What I’d never noticed before was that there are no rhymes at all in the Idylls. In the few hundred lines I looked at, not a single accidental rhyme. That’s impressive versifying. So here’s the first few hundred words of “In Memoriam”. It’s just as predictable as Shakespeare.
“In Memoriam”, first 34 lines
Dame Edith Sitwell
Now let’s look at what happened in the 1920s. Europe was recovering from insanity (into which it had dragged the entire world). Here’s the rhyme density in “Hornpipe”. It’s clear that structure was not on Dame Edith’s mind when she wrote this. The peaks are up almost to 2 in these dimensionless units. I do see a little chunk of traditional verse about 75% of the way in – Tennyson would not approve of that sloppiness.
“Hornpipe” from Façade
Here’s “Fox Trot”. Once again, Dame Edith throws a big bolus of rhyme at us up front, and then sort of settles down in the second half. There’s also a 13-word gap of no rhymes at all, to keep us guessing.
“Foxtrot” from Façade
“Tarantella”, on the other hand, shows us two contending rhyme patterns fighting for control. These are higher peaks: “Trampling and sampling mazurkas, Cachucas and turkas” – every word except “and” is part of a rhyme. Looking at the graph, you could almost convince yourself there’s a classical rhythmic pattern hiding in there, but it’s interrupted by low spots. These are alliterative passages that form pivot points: “flatter the flat-leaved fruit” and “pheasants’ tail feathers”. The poem changes at these points from a conversation between Venus and Silenus that I’d call erotically-tinged if it weren’t so preposterous, and becomes a verbal representation of a country dance that might actually be a tarantella, and then changes back.
“Tarantella” from Façade
The Rappers
Now I can show you why I say Edith Sitwell is the grandmother of rap. Here’s Chuck D, who’s as serious as Tennyson. We see the craggy profile here that’s familiar from Sitwell’s Modernist nonsense-verse. Chuck D clusters his rhymes at the end, like a grand finale, which is something we haven’t seen before, because this is an exhortation. He’s winding up the crowd to take action, so he uses the bursts of rhymes at the end to focus their attention.
“Fight the Power” by Public Enemy
And, finally, here’s Eminem. Just to show that I read the call for papers, this is his work “Darkness”. He’s on the “defining” side of the conference theme, not the “defying” – this piece tries to put himself into the shoes of the Las Vegas gunman. I’m allowing all kinds of slant-rhymes and assonances (like Prof. Olsen does) because Eminem seems to avoid perfect rhymes. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to infer that Eminem agrees with the luminaries of Poetry that perfect rhymes are frivolous.
This piece has a verse-and-chorus structure that you can see in the second half of the work. The structure is obscured in the first half by the standard pop-music formula of starting the chorus after the second verse. There are also rapid bursts of rhymes, so we know it’s Eminem. The density curve shows us long-wavelength and short-wavelength parts contending for attention.
“Darkness” by Eminem
Notice that Eminem, like Chuck D and Dame Edith, has rhyme densities that peak around 2-2.5, where Shakespeare and Tennyson sustain a peak value around 1 to 1.5 for their entire poem. Here’s another example from Eminem is “Mosh”, which I chose because the chorus rhymes “darkness” with “spark that”. Once again, it starts with a bolus of rhymes (that fat peak at the beginning), and slacks off to normal levels to develop the themes. The rhyme density drops off towards the end, though, because this work is a political tract. The last quarter of the piece is basically exhorting the audience to register to vote, so the humor value of rhyme would detract from its effectiveness.
“Mosh” by Eminem
So we’ve established that there are structural similarities between the rhyme density of Sitwell’s verse and Eminem’s. They’re both musical performances, at bottom. Walton’s music is not an accompaniment any more than is Dr. Dre’s. It’s music.
Tolkien
Tolkien is another case. His verse doesn’t fit neatly into one category because Tolkien consciously changed his poetic voice according to which character was supposed to have written the verse. When he’s telling us Bilbo’s poems, they look as regular as Lord T’s. “The Road Goes Ever On” is really short, but it’s available in several versions which I’ve concatenated here to make it long enough to analyze this way. There’s one place in “Oliphaunt” where old Bilbo slips out of traditional chaucerian masculine rhyme. It really sticks out, in this metric.
“The Road Goes Ever On” by B. Baggins
“Oliphaunt”, Traditional
Sindarin words break Bilbo’s perfect waves. Remember when Shakespeare went briefly trisyllabic, and we could read it like a seismograph? When Tolkien wrote English verse with Elvish names in it, in Legolas’s voice this time, the long names are constantly fighting with the regular rhymes, which causes low-amplitude turbulence in the density curve. The peaks are still there, though, as they ought to be.
“Nimrodel” translated by Legolas
Now it gets complicated. Among all the wonderful things about the Lord of the Rings, the real tour de force (in my humble opinion) is the way Tolkien wove a high romance about Aragorn and Théoden with a modernist tragedy (to quote Prof. Flieger again) about Frodo and Sam. Tolkien wrote verse in Sam’s voice, too, and this is the result. Sam came home from the war as Modernist as anyone. I think it’s interesting that the introduction to “The Adventures of Tom Bombadil” says that rhyme-games are an invention of the Elves, but Elves seem to be stodgy about rhyme. Modernism is not an Elvish mode of thought, I guess.
“The Stone Troll”, by S. Gamgee
“Cat” by S. Gamgee
We’ve established the sequence now. The traditionalists have a smooth wave-like structure of rhyme. Modernists have a different pattern, with exuberant bursts of rhyme, usually at the beginning. Tolkien straddles the divide, depending on the character who’s ostensibly writing the verse. He can be on either side, and I think that’s the key to what he’s doing.
Irrelevant Coda
The Beatles were famous for the artistic tension between their two most prolific songwriters. Here’s the difference between Lennon and McCartney in graphic form.
A research team at the Oxford English Dictionary has released a visualization engine for text analysis. This is fun: give it a text (up to 500 words, for the moment) and it will make a graph showing how common the word is in English (vertical axis), the year the word entered the English language (horizontal axis), the frequency of each word in the sample (size of the circle), and the language group from which we got the word (color).
This can be used for lots of things. We can test (for example) J.R.R. Tolkien’s success at excluding any word from later than 1600 from his prose.
Me, I wanted to go back to something that bothered me when I was a teenager. The first description of Minas Tirith, seen from a distance, sounded weird to me.
For the fashion of Minas Tirith was such that it was built on seven levels, each delved into the hill, and about each was set a wall, and in each wall was a gate. But the gates were not set in a line: the Great Gate in the City Wall was at the east point of the circuit, but the next faced half south, and the third half north, and so to and fro upwards; so that the paved way that climbed towards the Citadel turned first this way and then that across the face of the hill. And each time that it passed the line of the Great Gate it went through an arched tunnel, piercing a vast pier of rock whose huge out-thrust bulk divided in two all the circles of the City save the first. For partly in the primeval shaping of the hill, partly by the mighty craft and labour of old, there stood up from the rear of the wide court behind the Gate a towering bastion of stone, its edge sharp as a ship-keel facing east. Up it rose, even to the level of the topmost circle, and there was crowned by a battlement; so that those in the Citadel might, like mariners in a mountainous ship, look from its peak sheer down upon the Gate seven hundred feet below. The entrance to the Citadel also looked eastward, but was delved in the heart of the rock; thence a long lamp-lit slope ran up to the seventh gate. Thus men reached at last the High Court, and the Place of the Fountain before the feet of the White Tower: tall and shapely, fifty fathoms from its base to the pinnacle, where the banner of the Stewards floated a thousand feet above the plain.
LotR, V,i
Here’s what that looks like in the visualizer. Huge cluster of blue and green for English and other Germanic languages. The thing that struck teenaged me, though I didn’t know it at the time, was all that red. This paragraph is loaded with French words, from “fashion” at the beginning to “plain” at the end. 30 out of 300.
Minas Tirith
For comparison, here’s the first description of Edoras.
‘I see a white stream that comes down from the snows’, he said. ‘Where it issues from the shadow of the vale a green hill rises upon the east. A dike and mighty wall and thorny fence encircle it. Within there rise the roofs of houses; and in the midst, set upon a green terrace, there stands aloft a great hall of Men. And it seems to my eyes that it is thatched with gold. The light of it shines far over the land. Golden, too, are the posts of its doors. There men in bright mail stand; but all else within the courts are yet asleep.’
‘Edoras those courts are called’, said Gandalf, ‘and Meduseld is that golden hall. There dwells Theoden son of Thengel, King of the Mark of Rohan. We are come with the rising of the day. Now the road lies plain to see before us. But we must ride more warily; for war is abroad, and the Rohirrim, the Horse-lords, do not sleep, even if it seem so from afar.
Draw no weapon, speak no haughty word, I counsel you all, until we are come before Theoden’s seat.’
LotR, III,vi
Crunched and visualized, Edoras looks like this:
Edoras
A bare smattering of French words (10 out of 200). All the words from before 1600, with two exceptions. One of those yellow others is “Rohan”, which the OED thinks is Sanskrit (and I’m sure it is). We’ll let that slide. The other is “afar”, which is listed as Cushitic. I’m not sure I believe that — it sounds like the Old English prefix “a-” stuck to the Old English-derived “far”. This descriptive passage passes Tolkien’s constraint test easily.
In conclusion, my old suspicion has been quantified: Gondor is 10% French. Tolkien may have been using French words to designate social hierarchy, which Gondor has in bucket-loads. I suspect a lot more French words will appear in Gondor once we can process more than 500 words at a time. We’ll see if the OED research team lets us do that before my Signum classmate James Tauber releases the same capability open source.
Tip of the hat to Thijs Porck for letting us know about this via Twitter.
A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry has wrapped up its analysis of the Battle of the Hornburg from the point of view of military science. It’s a tour de force. I addressed the subject from my own less-educated perspective a couple of years ago, and reached similar conclusions. (Lucky!) It drives home the sheer ineptitude of Saruman’s military planning, and reveals why both Sauron and Gandalf held him in such contempt and pity, respectively.
Prof. Devereaux wraps up his essay with a lecture on another subject dear to my heart, which he calls “the Cult of the Badass”. This trope, which I trace back to Charles Bronson movies in the 1970s, has taken over the genres of fantasy, mystery, horror, and probably romance too[citation needed]. I’m tired of it. The essay links to a video piece discussing how that attitude made a hash out of Game of Thrones. A really good treatment, except that it attributes to Robert A. Heinlein a sentiment that goes much further back. Heinlein, in fact, was paraphrasing Chairman Mao.
