Idiosophy

Short, sharp shock

On November 8, 2021

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 out² 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,³ under the rubric of “LotR making Shakespeare’s metaphors literal”.⁴

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.⁵

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”.⁶ 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 ⁷ 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.

Nota bene

The fact that your Idiosopher couldn’t grow a beard to save his life has absolutely no bearing on the content of this post.

Funny Names for Bureaucrats

By Joe

On July 10, 2021

In Digital Humanities, trivial

Brenton Dickieson posted the other day about a comic-book adaptation of The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis. I haven’t read that book in decades, but I did remember the wonderful names of demons. We’re in a digital world now, so I pulled out every such name from the text. The algorithm is nothing special: any word that begins with a capital letter and flunks spell-check is a candidate; delete a few dozen stragglers by hand.

Results: Scabtree, Screwtape, Slubgob, Slumtrimpet, Toadpipe, Wormwood.

What do we see here? They all come from the latter third of the alphabet. Lots of “s” words. (The Screwtape Letters is dedicated to Tolkien, who thought “s” was a sound for bad guys, too. Saruman, Sauron, Shelob, Sackville…). They’re mostly made from jamming two short English words together.

There’s another author who did that, at a much less elevated level. Keith Laumer wrote a ton of science-fiction stories about Jame Retief, a muscular, norm-busting diplomat in the “Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne” a gender-busting arm of Earth’s hegemony over the galaxy. Wikipedia says they’re satirical, but I’d describe them more like broad, sophomoric humor. 21st-Century intellects will find them a bit crass. (Naturally, I love them.) Laumer was a diplomat himself before he became a writer. These stories seem to be settling scores with his old bosses. The bosses in these stories get names like:

Barnshingle, Clawhammer, Clayfoot, Crodfoller, Dimplick, Grossblunder, Hidebinder, Hipstinker, Lackluster, Longspoon, Nitworth, Otherday, Passwyn, Pennyfool, Proudfoot, Rumpwhistle, Shortfall, Sidesaddle, Sitzfleisch, Spradley, Sternwheeler, Straphanger, Thrashwelt, Thunderstroke, Underthrust, Whaffle, Wrothwax

Of course, my favorite of these come from proverbs: he who sups with the devil must use a long spoon”; “he who runs away lives to fight another day”. We see the same pattern — fully a quarter of the names begin with “S”. Almost half come from the last third of the alphabet. If we remove the names that explicitly come from such proverbs, the pattern gets more pronounced.

What is it that makes funny names bend that way alphabetically?

An early hint of Numenor

By Joe

On June 30, 2021

In squibs & crackers

Thanks to Hana Videen of the Old English Wordhord (whose book is coming out soon in the UK, not so soon in the US), I learn about Alcuin’s commentary on the Book of Genesis in the form of a FAQ. It was long, bloated, and Latin, so my man Ælfric of Eynsham translated it into Englisc and cut it down to match Anglo-Saxon attention spans.

His answer to the question, “Why did God make a rainbow after the Great Flood?” contains a line that jumped out at me: Forþan þe he wiste gif he swa ne dyde þæt men woldan forhtigan þæt he mid flode eft fornumene wurdon þonne hy gesawon swiðlice renas. In Modern English, “because he knew that if he didn’t do that, every time it rained heavily men would think they were going to be destroyed by a flood.” God used the rainbow much the same way we now use an emoji to soften a harsh-sounding tweet.

“By a flood” hasn’t changed much in a thousand years; “mid flode” is still kind of readable. The word that did the jumping was “destroyed”: fornúmene. I wonder if J.R.R. Tolkien consciously took that as the source of the word “Númenor”, or if it was just one reason that the root “numen” sounded right to him, given the context.

The Relaxing Condition of Monoglottony

By Joe

On May 20, 2021

In trivial

I read a tweet today that described a Russian politician as a “гопник”. I didn’t learn that word in school, so I looked it up in the Oxford Russian-English Dictionary app. It was happy to tell me that the word means “yob” or “yobbo”.

Great.

What does that mean? It’s some kind of Brit slang that autocorrect won’t even let me type.

Brain wave: there’s a Robert/Collins French-English dictionary on the shelf that annoys me with the same stunt. Look up “yob” in there and find out it means loubard.

You can’t hang around a Parisian train station for long without meeting a loubard, so I’m all set. The Russian guy was a thug. But this episode has made me understand why Americans don’t learn foreign languages.

A physicist loose among the liberal arts

Nota bene