Idiosophy

Parenthesizing

On November 18, 2021

Tom Hillman has joined the ranks of the digital humanists¹ with three posts (I, II, III) at “Alas, not me” investigating parenthetical remarks in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. These are good analyses. They’re not just counting; they contain fascinating insights about the deeper purpose Tolkien had in using that particular stylistic choice. Highly recommended.

Of course, that’s not what we do here at Idiosophy. Tom points out that there are two chapters that don’t fit the paradigm: “At the Sign of the Prancing Pony” and “Treebeard”. He calls them “aberrations”. That’s more like it. Aberrations, we can work with.

At the Sign of the Prancing Pony

The primary reason for thinking there’s an aberration at The Prancing Pony² is the generally-accepted idea that Bilbo only wrote the first chapter of LotR. As he confessed to Frodo, “when I have time to write, I only really like writing poetry.” (VI,vii.) Taking Bilbo at his word, I note this chapter contains a two-page poem of Bilbo’s creation. Whoever wrote it did not omit a single stanza. Frodo’s fondness for his old cousin was immense, but even so stopping the narrative for such a long time might have been too much to ask. I’ve always suspected that this chapter was also written by Bilbo, because it’s a place he (probably) knew firsthand and it introduces his friend the Dunadan. The sudden up-surge in the use of parenthetical comments is a fourth item of supporting evidence.

Treebeard

The chapter “Treebeard” uses a lot of parentheses.³. As has been noted before, Treebeard talks like an old hobbit. There’s a reason. Let’s imagine Frodo, locked in a tower in Minas Tirith, getting briefed on all the things that happened in Books III, V, and VI that he wasn’t around to see. For most of the chapters, there’s one authoritative voice, or there are a lot of people who can remember for him what’s going on. But “Treebeard” is unique. For that one chapter, Frodo had both Merry and Pippin as sources, and no one else to straighten them out.

As we’ve noted in both LotR and The Hobbit, Bilbo is easily distracted. He uses parentheses to mention things that just crossed his mind, including things that just are amusing. What if Bilbo’s protegés picked up the same habit? Poor Frodo! He must have been getting the story from two different directions, both Merry and Pippin talking at once, saying different things as often as not. Bilbonian distractions were built into the source material. I can’t blame Frodo if he decided the best way to make sense of that chapter was to split the difference between the two versions, and preserve deviations in parenthetical asides. So what if that makes Treebeard sound like Gaffer Gamgee?

Coda

I can’t resist one small addition. Tom was sure to point out that he didn’t use a single logarithm in his analysis. (This has been a point of contention in the past.) But let’s look at a plot of the cumulative number of parentheses in the texts.

Fig. 1. The abrupt upward jumps are the chapters discussed above.

Those curves have an awfully familiar shape. Let’s take the logarithm of the horizontal axis.

parenthetical insertions vs. log of words into text

Fig. 2. I knew it!

Both Bilbo and Frodo pile up parentheses early in the text (when many explanations are needed) but let them fall by the wayside as the plot thickens. Those straight lines fit really well; the pattern is logarithmic. In fact, we can infer authorship from the slope of the count of parentheses on a log scale. See that blue dot above the red line in the lower left corner? That’s “A Long-expected Party”. We recognize the lion by its paw!

Notes

Familiar rings

By Joe

On November 16, 2021

In fantasy

Chapter VIII of The Nature of Middle-earth is about Elvish legends that sprang up around the awakening at Cuivienen. Right up front, there’s a passage that caught my eye.

During the waking of their first hröar from the “flesh of Arda” the Quendi slept “in the womb of Arda”, beneath the green sward, and “awoke” when they were full grown. … Imin, Tata, and Enel awoke before their spouses, and the first thing that they saw was the stars, for they woke in the early twilight before dawn.

The Eldar were under the grass at first, but when it was time for them to wake up they were lying on top of the grass. They woke up just before dawn, in the dark.

Dear readers, Tolkien here is describing a fungal mycelium, producing mushrooms overnight when it’s time to reproduce. An area big enough to produce a gross of elf-couples is not unheard of among fungi. And from personal experience, it’s normal for a few mushrooms to appear one night, and then the whole rest of the batch the next night.

I love this idea. Mushrooms pop up from my lawn in a circle, which we were all taught to call a “fairy ring“. Fairies and elves are the same thing, just in different languages. The Wikipedia article I just linked has “elf-circle” in the list of synonyms at the top. So it’s likely that the first elves who awoke did so in a big circle. Ages later, when Celebrimbor wanted to design a device to preserve Elvish things the way they were in the beginning, what would be more natural than to do it in the form of a ring?

Tolkien’s Presence in the Publishing World

By Joe

On November 11, 2021

In Digital Humanities

The Times Literary Supplement has put on line a digitized archive of its content since 1902, with some basic search tools. So naturally I jumped in. Numerical analysis of such a database won’t tell us much about literature, but it has things to say about the reception of literature.

timeline of mentions of Tolkien in the TLS

Vertical lines indicate publication of The Hobbit, LotR, and The Silmarillion

This is the number of times articles mentioning “Tolkien” appear in the TLS by year. The blue line is the Loess¹-smoothed trend. With this kind of smoothing important things are slopes as much as levels.

Professor Tolkien appears occasionally in his capacity as a scholar of ancient languages before the publication of The Hobbit. The publicity campaign for the book gives him a brief spike upwards (advertisements are digitized the same as editorial content), but the mentions drop back quickly. Children’s book, you know. After The Lord of the Rings appeared and sold a hundred million copies, the attitude at the TLS changed. In this period, Tolkien became a cultural touchstone. Most of the mentions come from people comparing other things to LotR, which got more common over time.

Then came a big change. 1977 was the year The Silmarillion was published, but that’s not what drives the bolus of Tolkien mentions. (The TLS reviewer didn’t like it.) The big push comes from the publicity for, reviews of, and references to Humphrey Carpenter’s biography. That’s the thing about counting words in a database: If you put Tolkien’s name in the title of your book, you get one count for the Table of Contents, one for the review itself, and one from the contributor index at the end of the year. I didn’t remove those as redundant because by this point I’d realized I was looking at popular reception, not scholarly. Popularity drives mentions in the TLS, and when publishers put a word in the title of a book, it’s because of popularity. Same impulse.

After the surge of publicity in the late 1970s, Tolkien stays in the pages. Now it’s not because of publication announcements. The History of Middle-earth hardly gets mentioned. The level of references is steady for a few decades. Almost always, it’s because reviewers are saying whether a new book is like LotR or not. Some years there are few mentions, some years over a dozen, but it’s a steady state.

Then at the turn of the millenium come two big changes in the world. First, Peter Jackson made movies that brought in six billion dollars. Second, Tolkien scholarship started getting noticed. The second-highest year for Tolkien mentions was 2004. This year included Tom Shippey’s review of the movie version of The Return of the King (he liked it), but also John Garth’s Tolkien and the Great War. According with the aforementioned principle, Garth gets a triple word score. Then there was a review of books by Jane Chance and Verlyn Flieger. That’s what “getting noticed” means. The number of mentions didn’t drop off from the peak as it has in the past.

For the last decade and a half, with no particular events to drive engagement, the level of mentions is 8-16 per year and slightly rising. For comparison, that’s 1/10 of Shakespeare’s level. In 2019, the chances were one in four that any given issue would mention Tolkien. He even shows up in clues for the crossword puzzle now.

Coda

The first mention of the Professor in the TLS is from October 5, 1922. Reviewing Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose by Kenneth Sisam, A. Blyth Webster says, “The glossary has been prepared by Mr Tolkien. So far as we have tested it it is above the average.” High praise!

Short, sharp shock

By Joe

On November 8, 2021

In squibs & crackers

In Mitchell and Robinson’s A Guide to Old English¹, section 182 on Parataxis, as they’re refuting the notion that short, simple, declarative statements are a sign of a primitive language, we find this sentence:

Today, when the long and complicated sentence is losing favour in English, we will perhaps be more in sympathy with the constructions described in the following paragraphs, more able to appreciate the effect they produced, and less likely to believe that the juxtaposition of two simple sentences was necessarily less dramatic or effective than one complex sentence.

What I love about this is that they pulled this off in a textbook, where dramatic impact is not even wanted.

iPod Intertextuality

By Joe

On October 9, 2021

In fantasy, mythgard academy

It’s funny how often the old iPod throws up a piece of music that connects with something I’ve just heard on a Mythgard lecture. The last time I blogged it is here.

This time, it was class #2 of The Nature of Middle-earth. About 40 minutes in, the discussion turned to senescence in Elves. Basically, aging to them means that the weight of memory “began to be a burden” so heavy that they lose interest in bodily things.

To which the magic of shuffle-mode juxtaposed Graeme Edge’s poem “Departure” from In Search of the Lost Chord: “To have all of these things in our memory’s hoard, and to use them … to help us … to find…” and the reading dissolves into insane laughter. Poor Elf.

But this presents a conundrum. It’s the same issue as noticing how George Harrison’s song “Dream Away” parallels “The Notion Club Papers”. How can it be intertextual when one of the texts hadn’t been published?

Lear of the Nazgûl

By Joe

On October 1, 2021

In fantasy, trivial

seems fairer but feels feller

Michael Drout points out¹ an echo, when the Lord of the Nazgûl objects to being hindered by Eowyn: “Come not between the Nazgûl and his prey!” LotR, V, vi.

That’s exactly how King Lear objects when Kent tries to hinder his beatdown of Cordelia. “Come not between the dragon and his wrath.” King Lear, I i. Except that, as Drout notes, Lear is speaking metaphorically and the Nazgûl is being quite literal, except that the Witch-King seems to elide the difference between himself and the beast he rides.

I think we need to add this one next to the Ents’ attack on Isengard,² under the rubric of “LotR making Shakespeare’s metaphors literal”.³

But jumping back up, eliding that difference is interesting — what is a “Nazgûl”, then? Votes for “just the Ringwraith” come from Elrond, Radagast, Shagrat, and Pippin. Votes for “Ringwraith+Flying beast” come from Grishnakh, the Witch-King, and Gorbag. The narrator and Gandalf switch between sides as they please. If we’re just counting heads, a Nazgûl is the corrupted human. But I can’t help noticing that the characters who use the term only for the flying combination, though they are outvoted, are the ones who had the longest and closest contact with them.

Alliterative Revival Revival

By Joe

On September 25, 2021

In Alliterative Verse

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 ¹ 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.