Idiosophy

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. ¹ 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] ²

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.¹ 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.² 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.¹ 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