This is another episode in my exploration of what we can see when we look at The Lord of the Rings through the lens of the frequency of French-derived words. Earlier posts are here and here, and the Silmarillion here. As always, kudos to the programmers of the OED Text Visualizer for providing the microscope.

We’ve seen that regular characters and situations use Germanic words. Like nuclear radiation, a low background level of French is unavoidable (viz., the louver on Meduseld), but as pomposity increases and sanity diminishes, the level of French in the text rises to double-digit percentages. This raises a question: does the craziest character use the most French words?  The answer appears to be yes.

Gollum/Smeagol is almost certainly the least sane character in LotR. His dialogue needs quite a bit of editing before it can go to a computerized text analyser. The number of “s”s in a word needs to be standardized, sometimes “gollum” is an onomatopoeic punctuation mark not a proper noun, and so on. Also, his speech tends to be broken up in the text. The following computations are done on the closest dictionary-entry to Gollum’s words, aloud or internal.

There are seven blocks of dialogue long enough to support statistics between “The Taming of Smeagol” and “Shelob’s Lair”.  One is a debate between Gollum’s two personalities; I’ve split that into its component parts. Depending on which of his personalities is dominant, the frequency of French words varies widely.

Frequency of French-derived words in Gollum’s speech

Tolkien gives us a brief flash of close reading from Sam that we can use as a guide: “[Sam] noted that Gollum used I, and that seemed usually to be a sign, on its rare appearances, that some remnants of old truth and sincerity were for the moment on top.” On each bar I’ve superposed the number of first-person singular pronouns in the passage. It correlates well, with the exception of one outlier.

The ring-maddened Gollum, as he talks to himself before he meets Frodo and Sam, reaches a level of French I’ve seen nowhere else in the text. If we recall our earlier estimate that something like 7% French is as far as a character can go without risking his health, Gollum’s 15.3% score is alarming. (Since much of that is his repetition of precious, maybe the computer isn’t telling us anything new.)

When Frodo uses his will, and the Ring, to dominate Gollum, Gollum’s word choices turn relatively normal for a chapter or two. Whether terrified or helpful, Smeagol’s French-level is healthy. But then, as the Gollum side recovers from the blow and he plots his revenge, he quickly blows past Feanorian levels into his record-level madness.

There’s one exception to this general rule. When Smeagol/Gollum gives us a short lecture on the history of Harad and Gondor, he briefly turns as normal as anyone in the book. He doesn’t use I, but he doesn’t sound much like himself either. And that’s a good thing. Later Frodo would say in another context, “his cure is beyond us; but I would still spare him, in the hope that he may find it.” There was no cure for Saruman, but Gollum could have been saved by an adjunct-lecturer position at the community college.

Daniel Stride, antipodean writer, book-blogger, and remarkably-good US election forecaster, wonders if Denethor’s french-fried vocabulary applies to Fëanor’s mad rants, too.

There are some methodological problems here.

1. The Silmarillion isn’t a finished work.
2. The Silmarillion has multiple authors.
3. 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.

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.