Two thoughts that suddenly got connected.

Thought 1:

In Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings we learn that in his youth Aragorn journeyed through Rohan and Gondor and won fame under the name of Thorongil. (LR A.1.iv.63-67.) He made quite an impression on the people of those countries at the time, but a few decades later things are different. We don’t hear of any old men in Rohan who recognize him, even though he rode with Thengel, father of Theoden. Denethor apparently recognizes Aragorn through the image in his palantir, so his appearance can’t have changed too much. But then Prince Imrahil, who is of similar age, says “Shall we not now send for the Lord Aragorn?” when Aragorn is standing a few feet away. (LR 5.08.041) Imrahil doesn’t notice him until he speaks.

But here’s the thing – Aragorn is “at least 6 ft. 6.”. ¹ Even great warriors like Boromir aren’t that tall. ² How is a bean-pole like Aragorn not immediately recognized by everyone over the age of 50? His reception in Edoras should have been less laden with suspicion, and more like, “Eala, Thorongil! Long time no see! How’s the weather up there?”

Thought 2:

The odd shrinkage of Elves. Medieval fairies could be small, or very large, or human-sized. “Taking the broadest known parameters, we find that size can range from fourteen feet high to a being small enough to sit on a cowslip.” ³ Victorian fairies are uniformly tiny, though. Tolkien wondered about this in “On Fairy-stories”. ⁴

As for diminutive size: I do not deny that the notion is a leading one in modern use. I have often thought that it would be interesting to try to find out how that has come to be so; but my knowledge is not sufficient for a certain answer.

The Professor goes on to speculate that elves started to shrink during the Age of Discovery, when Europeans sailed all around the world and found no Faërie anywhere. In order for Elves to continue to be a thing people could believe in, they needed to be able to hide from view. It was advantageous for them to shrink. The process was exactly parallel to evolutionary pressure: just as squirrels are now the right size to fit through the holes in a chain-link fence, Elves met the challenge by shrinking until they could hide practically anywhere, even behind garden flowers.

Synthesis:

Evolution by natural selection is tempting, but it is fraught with difficulties when we’re dealing with immortal creatures. Fortunately, there’s an easier answer, provided by Tolkien himself. The way the cloaks of Lothlorien hide you from view must be to make you look short. Otherwise, there’s no way Aragorn could have maintained his anonymity while standing half a head above everyone around. Apparently it’s not just Galadriel and her maidens who can make those; it’s a common skill among Elves. Maybe it’s the only way they know to make clothes. It also explains the cloaks’ preternatural effectiveness in getting Sam and Frodo to Mount Doom — knock a foot off the perceived height of hobbits and they’re just barely macroscopic.

I’m not just making this up. Let’s jump over to “Smith of Wootton Major”.⁵ Alf’s dramatic revelation at the end:

’Would you spare a few moments for the King of Faery?’ the other answered. To Nokes’s dismay he grew taller as he spoke. He threw back his cloak.”

In 1939, Prof. Tolkien’s knowledge was not sufficient, but by 1967 he had figured it out.

Tom Hillman ponders the relationship between humans and Faërie over on his blog. I think he’s right that Tolkien thinks it’s our fëa that doesn’t belong in Faërie. But there’s another conclusion we can draw from the literature that says something Tolkien would have liked a lot less.  It’s not The Fall, or positivism, or statistical analysis, or the industrial revolution that separated us from the Fair Folk.

I’ve mentioned before that, according to Rudyard Kipling, the Protestant Reformation chased the fairies out of England:

This Reformatories tarrified the Pharisees same as the reaper goin’ round a last stand o’ wheat tarrifies rabbits. They packed into the Marsh from all parts, and they says, “Fair or foul, we must flit out o’ this, for Merry England’s done with, an’ we’re reckoned among the Images.” (p.242)

Of course, the Faërie creatures of the Continent had been chased out much earlier. The faun in Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword⁸, whom Skafloc meets in his elf foster-father’s lands, says:

The new god whose name I cannot speak was come to Hellas. There was no more place for the old gods and the old beings who haunted the land. (p.21)

The faun is fleeing West, like Tolkien’s elves. But it doesn’t stop in England. I heard a familiar echo when I was reading the introduction to Alan Lomax’s collection of American folk s0ngs.⁹

With most of the Southern Negro ministers and teachers urging their followers to abandon the old songs, a flood of jazz and of tawdry gospel hymns comes in. A black giant in the Nashville penitentiary resolutely refused to sing an entirely innocuous levee camp work song since he was a Hardshell Baptist and his church regarded such melodies as “Devil’s songs” or “sinful songs.” (p. xxxi)

They never stop! Fortunately, the world is round, so the Fair Folk, and now the Singing Folk, can’t be cornered. They can always keep going west. I recommend Japan, where the anime industry would welcome them.

File Under: The things you find out while wasting time on a Sunday morning.

Eleanor Parker’s excellent newsletter this morning is about Old English people gearing up for Lent by eating everything they can. ¹⁴ She points us to Kate Thomas’s “For the Wynn” essay on cheese. That essay is wonderful for many reasons, but one that jumped out at me was the part about the use of cheese in jurisprudence:

Some early medieval liturgical books contain an ordeal using barley bread and cheese – a way of ascertaining a person’s guilt or innocence via the eating of small pieces of food. It operates upon the same rationale as ducking witches – nature rejects someone who has done wrong, so a guilty person will choke on the bread or cheese.

Of course, my mind went immediately to the pool beneath Henneth Annun, where Frodo compels Smeagol with force majeure: “I shall take Precious, and I shall say: make him swallow the bones and choke. Never taste fish again.” [LR 4.06.047] ¹⁵

This is the second time we’ve seen little asides in LotR that come straight from Anglo-Saxon law. I don’t imagine it’s the last.

Notes

When Sam took the Ring and entered Mordor, we get the famous passage that lots of people take for Sam’s test versus the Ring:

Already the Ring tempted him, gnawing at his will and reason. Wild fantasies arose in his mind; and he saw Samwise the Strong, Hero of the Age, striding with a flaming sword across the darkened land, and armies flocking to his call as he marched to the overthrow of Barad-dur. [LR 6.01.018]

I don’t agree that this is the test. This attempt to suborn the faithful Samwise is risible. If that’s the best the Ring can do, it wouldn’t have been a problem for anybody, let alone Boromir, Gandalf, or Galadriel. Tolkien gives us a hint that this idea isn’t quite right, though. The previous sentence takes us into Sam’s thoughts: “He felt that he had from now on only two choices: to forbear the Ring, though it would torment him; or to claim it, and challenge the Power that sat in its dark hold beyond the valley of shadows.” Sam is thinking, which is not his strong point. We shouldn’t expect him to comprehend such an important and subtle matter on the first try.

Tom Hillman points out that the Ring is exploiting the way Sam loves old fairy-stories.¹⁶ Sam is a romantic. In that passage, the Ring is using Sam’s romanticism against him. That’s what the Ring does, as we know. It attacks your virtues. It uses your strengths against you. But a fondness for old stories and songs is more of an endearing trait than a great virtue.¹⁷ It’s not where the Ring would try Sam, when we know that he has a great virtue to work with. That’s where we should expect the Ring to attack first.

Sam’s great virtue is his loyalty to Frodo. That’s where the Ring ought to start to work on him, and sure enough, it did. Back in “The Choices of Master Samwise” we saw the real attack.

He flung the Quest and all his decisions away, and fear and doubt with them. He knew now where his place was and had been: at his master’s side, though what he could do there was not clear. [LR 4.10.057]

Right there, Sam lost the contest of wills with Sauron’s Ring. Fortunately, being Sam, he botches the attempt to rescue Frodo, loses the orcs in the tunnel, and concusses himself on the door. The Ring fails to get back to Sauron, and Middle-earth survives for another day.

People who like to find the hand of the Valar in any lucky break will be disappointed, but Sam’s failure to make a heroic stand over Frodo’s body isn’t a eucatastrophe. It was predictable. Indeed, it was predicted back at the beginning of the story! I knew not that Pippin, of all people, was a hobbit foresighted, but he’s the one who said, “Sam is an excellent fellow, and would jump down a dragon’s throat to save you, if he did not trip over his own feet,” and he was almost exactly right. [LR 1.05.060]

It’s only fair. If Sauron can turn people’s strengths into vulnerabilities, some Vala or other ought to be able to turn klutziness into a world-saving virtue. There may be hope for me yet.

I was just listening to Chris Pipkin’s podcast from last summer, in which he talked about Owen Barfield’s theory of Poetic Diction with Prof. Verlyn Flieger.

Barfield’s idea, as I’ve talked about before, is that in the early days of language, many concepts (as we conceive them) were combined in a single word. We don’t have direct access to the earliest days, but we can see some of it in ancient Greece. For example, Hestia the goddess and “hestia” (εστία) the hearth weren’t two different things; they were a single thought. Since then, as we have needed to speak more specifically and more abstractly, we’ve fractured those ur-concepts into lots of precise words. That’s a positive development: we can make things and do things and think things the ancients could never conceive of. But we’ve lost something along the way.

Prof. Flieger tells us in Splintered Light was that Tolkien took this idea and ran with it. All of Arda is just such a splintering of the thought of Eru. The Ainur split into Valar and Maiar. The Elves split into Calaquendi and Moriquendi, and then into a dozen subdivisions. Humans likewise. Even hobbits split into Stoors and Harfoots and Fallohides.

Barfield’s book is called Poetic Diction because, as he sees it, gluing all those shattered pieces back together is the poet’s job. Sometimes the assembly is a reconstruction of the ancient thought. Other times it’s something new. This happens with characters in Tolkien all the time: pivotal characters are frequently of mixed ancestry, putting the variously split pieces back together again. Elrond is the extreme case in the First Age. His grandson Eldarion is the culmination in the Fourth.

So. Do we know anyone else who’s dedicated himself to putting the splinters of reality back together, better than before? Why yes, we do! Sauron dedicated himself to putting it all back together again. His mission at the beginning of the Second Age began “with fair motives: the reorganising and rehabilitation of the ruin of Middle-earth” (Letter 131). There are lots of ways to reassemble the splinters of original truth, some more poetic, others more effective. As I’ve previously noted, Sauron chose “hierarchy” as his organizing principle, and nearly conquered the world with it.

This is as close as I’ve ever come to sympathy for the devil. From this point of view, Sauron was working from almost the same motives as Celeborn and Galadriel, trying to reassemble something out of the messy shards of reality around him.

Of course, his plan for organizing things didn’t end well. He chose a method designed for effectiveness, not poetry. Efficient dictatorship, not poetic diction. Sauron was not just organizing the physical world, after all. “Morgoth dispersed his power into the very matter of Arda…” as Tolkien says in Morgoth’s Ring, so as Sauron reassembled and organized things, he simultaneously was re-consolidating Morgoth’s evil. You can’t do one without the other. And that might be the most succinct argument for Tolkien’s odd fusion of Catholicism and anarchism I’ve ever heard.

Stephen Winter has another insightful essay, this time about the palantir, which he thinks about next to smartphones (as we all must, now). He uses the generic term “device” instead of “smartphone”, as is common.

The word “device” is fascinating in this context. It appears 20 times in LotR, 12 referring to insignia and 8 referring to some sort of art or craft.¹⁸ The word is evenly split between the good guys and the bad guys, depending on how you count Fëanor.

When Gandalf talks about the palantir he could be foretelling the smartphone: “Perilous to us all are the devices of an art deeper than we possess ourselves.” (LR 3.11.099) To Stephen’s question whether our palantiri are more mysterious than we think, the answer is an emphatic “yes”. The constant stories of surveillance both by their makers, for purely pecuniary reasons, and by others who can be much more nefarious, make it undeniable that these things are perilous.

But then there’s Eomer’s observation that “Our enemy’s devices oft serve us in his despite.” (LR 5.04.026) In this context I can’t help thinking of the Arab Spring, or the flash protests against the attempt to ban Muslims from entering the United States. Both were organized over cell-phone networks. Perhaps it is a stretch to think of oppressive governments and the lords of Silicon Valley as a single Enemy, but their roads often seem to lie together for many hundreds of miles.

Note

A few years ago, Ashley at The Nef Chronicles wrote a post in which she tried to work out who the legal owner of the One Ring might be. She was at the time a law student. She concluded that nobody owns it.

Yesterday, Daniel Stride took up the challenge and revealed himself as a legal bloodhound: https://phuulishfellow.wordpress.com/2023/09/17/of-golf-balls-and-war-spoils-the-one-ring-and-property-law-squabbles/ He concludes that it’s complicated, but there are four possibilities. The strongest one is one I never would have guessed. (Clickbait.)

The only weakness I can find is that Stride applies New Zealand law. While there is substantial videographic evidence that many of the events in question took place in New Zealand, the veracity of those records can be challenged. Instead, we have to consider that Sauron, the original owner, is not human, but has a quasi-divine status. Therefore ownership of the Ring is subject to Divine Law.

For the most relevant explication of Divine Law I am indebted to Tom Holt¹⁹ He quotes Erda, Mother Earth herself, saying “Human law has no bearing on property that is or has been owned or held by a God.” “God” in this context, explicitly includes characters like Sauron. She continues,”under divine law, right of inheritance is subordinate to right of conquest.” (p. 200] Lest there be any confusion, Alberich the Nibelung clarifies, “if I take something away from you it becomes mine, and if they take something away from me it becomes theirs.” (p.201)

With this precedent in mind, many of the ambiguities clear up nicely. After numerous transfers by violence and trickery, Frodo is the true owner. If any further confirmation were needed, we may note that Sam said the Ring was Sauron’s [LR 4.05.132], and Sam may be assumed to be incorrect.