. Alas, not me: J. R. R. Tolkien
Showing posts with label J. R. R. Tolkien. Show all posts
Showing posts with label J. R. R. Tolkien. Show all posts

07 March 2024

Forgetting the Way to Faërie -- a bit of L. M. Montgomery and Tolkien


Well, the Story Girl was right. There is such a place as fairyland—but only children can find the way to it. And they do not know that it is fairyland until they have grown so old that they forget the way. One bitter day, when they seek it and cannot find it, they realize what they have lost; and that is the tragedy of life. On that day the gates of Eden are shut behind them and the age of gold is over. Henceforth they must dwell in the common light of common day. Only a few, who remain children at heart, can ever find that fair, lost path again; and blessed are they above mortals. They, and only they, can bring us tidings from that dear country where we once sojourned and from which we must evermore be exiles. The world calls them its singers and poets and artists and story-tellers; but they are just people who have never forgotten the way to fairyland.
The Story Girl -- L. M. Montgomery 

I ran across the quote above on the internet the other day, and tracked it down to a 1911 novel by Lucy Maud Montgomery of Anne of Green Gables fame. It interested me for a couple of reasons. First I am trying to gather references to people who visited Faërie as children, but then forgot it and grew up, or grew up and forgot it. Second it reminded me immediately of a passage or two in The Book of Lost Tales, which I've been spending a great deal of time with over the last year. In the following passage an elf is speaking to Eriol, a mortal human mariner who has found his way to Faërie, about mortal human children who had done the same by a different path: 

Yet some [human children] there were who, as I have told, heard the Solosimpi piping afar off, or others who straying again beyond the garden caught a sound of the singing of the Telelli on the hill, and even some who reaching Kôr afterwards returned home, and their minds and hearts were full of wonder. Of the misty aftermemories of these, of their broken tales and snatches of song, came many strange legends that delighted Men for long, and still do, it may be; for of such were the poets of the Great Lands.

         LT I 19

In this passage Eriol writes in the epilogue of his book:

So fade the Elves and it shall come to be that because of the encompassing waters of this isle and yet more because of their unquenchable love for it that few shall flee, but as men wax there and grow fat and yet more blind ever shall they fade more and grow less; and those of the after days shall scoff, saying Who are the fairies—lies told to the children by women or foolish men—who are these fairies? And some few shall answer: Memories faded dim, a wraith of vanishing loveliness in the trees, a rustle of the grass, a glint of dew, some subtle intonation of the wind; and others yet fewer shall say……

LT II 288

I don't really have much to say about this at the moment, except that the connection between Faërie and poets and memory and forgetting is interesting. I have no information suggesting that Tolkien read Montgomery, though it's not impossible. I thought it might interest others as well.

18 February 2024

Tempt me twice, shame on me -- Sam and the Ring

Over at his blog, Joe Hoffman has thoughtfully suggested that Sam's moment of temptation by the Ring is not in fact his grand vision of being Samwise the Strong, Hero of the Age, who not only defeats Sauron but with a wave of his hand turns Mordor into a garden. Rather, Sam's moment of temptation is his urge to make a heroic last stand defending Frodo from the orcs in the pass of Cirith Ungol. 

I must admit I like the idea that this, too, is a temptation produced by the effect of the Ring. But the temptation of the Ring is not simply a one-off event, a test to be passed and left behind. And Sam's love of old stories is also visible in Sam's heroic last stand fantasy "for eyes to see that can" (FR 2.i.223). For when read with Sam's thought of throwing himself upon his sword or leaping from a cliff it shows that the Tale of the Children of Húrin is in Sam's mind in The Choices of Master Samwise (TT 4.x.732). 

I can see Sam's temptation beginning in the debate that goes on in his heart and mind about what "see it through" means now that, as Sam believes, Frodo is dead. There is a series of thoughts that runs from revenge (on Gollum) to suicide to duty to heroic sacrifice to the victory garden of Samwise the Strong, that is, from futility to delusion. 

_______

I have also come up with a new piece of head-canon and a literary corollary to the laws of thermodynamics.

Reflecting on Sam's vision of turning Mordor into a garden with a wave of his hand, I came to believe that it was the act of forging the Ring that turned Mordor into a dead, poisoned post-industrial wasteland.

Reflecting on Joe's response to what I said in my book and my response to his response, I came to believe that literary interpretations are an expression of the growth of entropy which can only end in the meaning death of the universe.

06 February 2024

Arwen's Green Grave


"... and she went out from the city of Minas Tirith and passed away to the land of Lórien, and dwelt there alone under the fading trees until winter came. Galadriel had passed away and Celeborn also was gone, and the land was silent.

"There at last when the mallorn-leaves were falling, but spring had not yet come, she laid herself to rest upon Cerin Amroth; and there is her green grave, until the world is changed, and all the days of her life are utterly forgotten by men that come after, and elanor and niphredil bloom no more east of the Sea."

(RK App. A, The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, p. 1063)

Tolkien says that "The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen" is "the highest love story" in The Lord of the Rings (Letters #131 p. 229). He also referred to it as "the most important [tale] of the Appendices; it is part of the essential story, and is only placed so, because it could not be worked into the main narrative without destroying its [hobbit-centered] structure" (Letters #181 p. 343). Since Arwen also makes the Choice of Lúthien, which is the heart of what Tolkien calls "the kernel of the mythology" (Letters #165 p. 320), and The Lord of the Rings is famously part of the story of Beren and Lúthien, it is undeniably a very important tale. 

Now sometimes people take the paragraph I quoted at the start to suggest that Arwen despaired at the last, that she lacked the faith Aragorn displayed in his last words: "Behold! We are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory. Farewell!" In my book, Pity, Power, and Tolkien's Ring: To Rule the Fate of Many, I argued that this was not so (254-58). She is grieving, yes, and full of sorrow, but that is not the same thing as hopelessness. Indeed Aragorn concedes the bitterness of their parting, and that sorrow and grief are a natural part of it. But despair need not be. I am not going to repeat the evidence and arguments I made there, but I would like to add some points here that I think lend additional weight to what I wrote there. 

The words that stand out to me as most important are "her green grave" and the most important fact is that her green grave shall endure until the ending of the world and Arda is healed. If we look at an earlier version of these words, which Tolkien abandoned, I think we can notice something else of significance.

Then Arwen departed and dwelt alone and widowed in the fading woods of Lothlórien; and it came to pass for her as Elrond foretold that she would not leave the world until she had lost all for which she made her choice. But at last she laid herself to rest on the hill of Cerin Amroth, and there was her green grave until the shape of the world was changed.

(Peoples 355)

The tone here is quite matter of fact. It's a very prosy account, certainly when compared to the high romantic regster of the passage as published. The draft version records the passing of a world; the published version evokes the sorrow and beauty of its passing. The most significant change, however, is the shift in tense. The original passage simply reports the past. While the published text also begins in the past tense, once Arwen has "laid herself to rest upon Cerin Amroth," that changes. After a brief rest at the semicolon, the sentence begins again with a new movement in the present tense. The combination of the present tenses with the three clauses governed by "until" gives the sentence the vivid prophetic quality that anticipates the future. And the green grave shall be there when that future comes. 

Of course her grave's greenness by itself suggests life and growth amid death and the oblivion of time. It's as if the world itself will remember her even if we do not. I did a quick survey of signficant hills and mounds that I could recall. Unsurprisingly, many of those places called "green" are graves, but not all. 

But first here's a few hills, which are not graves, and other places where the green seems significant:

  • "Before its western gate there was a green mound, Ezellohar, that is named also Corollairë; and Yavanna hallowed it, and she sat there long upon the green grass and sang a song of power, in which was set all her thought of things that grow in the earth" (S 38).
  • "To [the Teleri] the Valar had given a land and a dwelling-place. Even among the radiant flowers of the Tree-lit gardens of Valinor they longed still at times to see the stars; and therefore a gap was made in the great walls of the Pelóri, and there in a deep valley that ran down to the sea the Eldar raised a high green hill: Túna it was called. From the west the light of the Trees fell upon it, and its shadow lay ever eastward; and to the east it looked towards the Bay of Elvenhome, and the Lonely Isle, and the Shadowy Seas. Then through the Calacirya, the Pass of Light, the radiance of the Blessed Realm streamed forth, kindling the dark waves to silver and gold, and it touched the Lonely Isle, and its western shore grew green and fair. There bloomed the first flowers that ever were east of the Mountains of Aman' (S 59).
  • "Then Tuor looked down upon the fair vale of Tumladen, set as a green jewel amid the encircling hills" (S 239).
  • "There came a time near dawn on the eve of spring, and Lúthien danced upon a green hill; and suddenly she began to sing. Keen, heart-piercing was her song as the song of the lark that rises from the gates of night and pours its voice among the dying stars, seeing the sun behind the walls of the world; and the song of Lúthien released the bonds of winter, and the frozen waters spoke, and flowers sprang from the cold earth where her feet had passed" (S 165).
  • Cerin Amroth had "... grass as green as Springtime in the Elder Days" (FR 2.vi.350).
  • "Three Elf-towers of immemorial age were still to be seen on the Tower Hills beyond the western marches. They shone far off in the moonlight. The tallest was furthest away, standing alone upon a green mound. The Hobbits of the Westfarthing said that one could see the Sea from the top of that tower; but no Hobbit had ever been known to climb it" (FR "Prologue" 7). 
  • "And the ship went out into the High Sea and passed on into the West, until at last on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise" (RK 6.ix.1030).

Now here are some graves that are definitely not green, and that's definitely no surprise:

  • "the Death Down" under which the orcs slain at Helms Deep had been buried by the Huorns: "no grass would grow there" (TT 3.viii.553).
  • "With toil of many hands they gathered wood and piled it high and made a great burning and destroyed the body of the Dragon, until he was but black ash and his bones beaten to dust, and the place of that burning was ever bare and barren thereafter" (Children of Húrin 257).
The Barrow Downs are of course as full of graves as their name suggests, but the evil there is invasive and comparatively recent, having been summoned by the sorcery of the Witch-king (FR 1.vii.130; RK Appendix A 1041; UT 348). For thousands of years before that the dead had rested there in peace and shepherds had pastured their flocks on the downs. Contrast the sunlit green grass outside the mounds, on which Bombadil spreads the treasure hoard to break the spell on the barrow, with the cold "pale greenish light" within the barrow, which is a prelude to the incantation and human sacrifice the wight is about to perform (FR 1.viii.140-45). The present evil of the Barrow Downs, brought by a hostile force from the outside, uses the green of the grassy downs to hide.

Consider also a series of graves in which despite all attendant sorrow the green grass has positive connotations. 
  • "By the command of Morgoth the Orcs with great labour gathered all the bodies of those who had fallen in the great battle, and all their harness and weapons, and piled them in a great mound in the midst of Anfauglith; and it was like a hill that could be seen from afar. Haudh-en-Ndengin the Elves named it, the Hill of Slain, and Haudh-en-Nirnaeth, the Hill of Tears. But grass came there and grew again long and green upon that hill, alone in all the desert that Morgoth made; and no creature of Morgoth trod thereafter upon the earth beneath which the swords of the Eldar and the Edain crumbled into rust" (S 197).
  • "‘Yes,’ [Túrin] answered. ‘I fled [the darkness] for many years. And I escaped when you did so. For it was dark when you came, Níniel, but ever since it has been light. And it seems to me that what I long sought in vain has come to me.’ And as he went back to his house in the twilight, he said to himself: ‘Haudh-en-Elleth! From the green mound she came. Is that a sign, and how shall I read it?'" (UT 124; Children of Húrin 218).
  • "They buried the body of Felagund upon the hill-top of his own isle, and it was clean again; and the green grave of Finrod Finarfin’s son, fairest of all the princes of the Elves, remained inviolate, until the land was changed and broken, and foundered under destroying seas. But Finrod walks with Finarfin his father beneath the trees in Eldamar" (S 175-76).
  • The burial mounds of the kings of Rohan, Théoden's included (TT 3.vi.507; RK 6.vi.976) are all green."Green and long grew the grass on Snowmane’s Howe, but ever black and bare was the ground where the beast was burned" (RK 5.vi.844-45).
  • "Then Thorondor bore up Glorfindel’s body out of the abyss, and they buried him in a mound of stones beside the pass; and a green turf came there, and yellow flowers bloomed upon it amid the barrenness of stone, until the world was changed" (S 243).
  • Elendil's grave: "...the hallow was found unweathered and unprofaned, ever-green and at peace under the sky, until the Kingdom of Gondor was changed" (UT 309).

Finally, I would note how phrases like "until the world is/was changed" convey a sense of the promise of the endurance of the green grass. In the passages quoted above we've seen a half dozen variations on the phrase. The Silmarillion ends with a reference to a change coming to the world someday: 
Here ends the SILMARILLION. If it has passed from the high and the beautiful to darkness and ruin, that was of old the fate of Arda Marred; and if any change shall come and the Marring be amended, Manwë and Varda may know; but they have not revealed it, and it is not declared in the dooms of Mandos.
(S 255)

The change it mentions is carefully presented in a conditional statement, but the main verb of the "if" clause is "shall," which all but promises that the change will come, and that Marring of Arda will be amended. Think of how differently this would read with even slightly different wording. For "if any change should come," or "will come," or "is to come," or "comes" are all less forceful than that prophetic "shall." 

Compare this to Tom Bombadil's enchantment as he breaks into the barrow to rescue the hobbits:

Get out, you old Wight! Vanish in the sunlight!
Shrivel like the cold mist, like the winds go wailing, 
Out into the barren lands far beyond the mountains! 
Come never here again! Leave your barrow empty! 
Lost and forgotten be, darker than the darkness, 
Where gates stand for ever shut, till the world is mended.
(FR 1.viii.142)
He casts the wight not only out of the green grave he has invaded, but also out of the world itself into the outer darkness "till the world is mended." If anybody in Middle-earth knows for sure that the world shall be changed and amended, it's Old Tom. That is the change that he and the grass on Arwen's green grave look forward to.

22 November 2023

Somme Rain, but More Starlight

A year ago in July I posted a note called "Somme Starlight" in which I discussed the likelihood that Tolkien had seen Venus in the early morning hours of later July or early August of 1916, and that if this did not give him hope in the moment it may well have formed the basis for a pair of later sightings of the star Eӓrendil in The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings, sightings that did inspire hope in those in darkness.

At the time I wrote the blogpost I had been able to ascertain that 1) Venus was indeed a morning star in July and August, 2) that it was exceptionally bright even for Venus (-4.7 magnitude) for the first half of August, and 3) that the weather seemed to be generally quite clear. This all seemed to fit, but I wanted more specific information on the weather, ideally from someone who was there.

Enter General Sir Henry Seymour Rawlinson, later 1st Baron Rawlinson GCB,  GCSI,  GCVOKCMGKStJ who commanded the British Fourth Army during the Battle of the Somme. Most importantly, he is an eye-witness who kept a diary with fairly detailed daily information on the weather, which I found reproduced online here. After some rain early in late June and early July, Rawlinson records only 19 mm, or about 3/4", from 9 July through 15 August, almost none of which fell when Venus was at its brightest in the first half of August. In July Rawlinson records the sky was frequently "overcast," but towards the end of the July and into the first half of August he says either that it was "clear" or remains silent. I don't want to push too hard on his silence by inferring that it means "not overcast" or "clear." But John Buchan's description of the weather in the first fortnight of August as "blazing summer weather" that made the soldiers' helmets rather hot certainly points towards the weather being clear. On Buchan, see here

So Rawlinson's information makes it seem much more likely that Tolkien would have had ample opportunity to look up from the trenches and see an image that he would later construe as hope. 

13 October 2023

Crown Shyness and the Fastness of Southern Mirkwood (FR 2.vi.351)

There is a phenomenon observed among trees called, among other things, "crown shyness." As the picture below shows, some trees will grow in a way that is not yet understood, but which results in the crowns of the trees giving each other room, growing to use the space available without encroaching on each other. It struck me this morning that we see the very opposite in Haldir's description of the trees in Southern Mirkwood, and he certainly seems to regard it as a sign that not all is well there.

‘There lies the fastness of Southern Mirkwood,’ said Haldir. ‘It is clad in a forest of dark fir, where the trees strive one against another and their branches rot and wither.

(FR 2.vi.351)

As Walter S. Judd and Graham A. Judd remark in their 2017 book, Flora of Middle-earth, p. 152: "under Sauron's evil influence the trees had become selfish, the forest perverted, in striking contrast to the forests of Lothlórien...."

Tolkien was knowledgeable about trees and quite observant, as his descriptions of the natural world make clear. While I have no idea whether he was aware of this phenomenon, first remarked on by scientists in the 1920s, he could have noticed it himself. I have to wonder.

 

River of Blue
(Dag Peak, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

29 September 2023

Wordplay in Colin Hardie's Latin Oration for Tolkien

In June 1972 Oxford University distinguished J. R. R. Tolkien by awarding him an honorary doctorate. At the ceremony Colin Hardie, the Classicist, Inkling, and offical Public Orator for the university delivered a speech he had composed in Latin to mark the occasion. He was after all the Public Orator. Though I had known about the speech, I had never read it until recently. I thought it might make an interesting post for my blog. The speech contains a remarkable amount of wordplay and humor, things visible in Latin but requiring an understanding of English, Greek, and Tolkien that a straighforward translation into fluent English might obscure. So I decided to prepare a translation that aimed to convey that humor and wordplay, either directly or through additional commentary. A simple translation just doesn't do this justice. While I am working on a translation and commentary for the entire speech, I wanted to share one amazing piece -- eleven words -- of a single sentence, which left me baffled until I came upon Hardie's English paraphrase (not translation) of the speech. Given the explaining required for this eleven words of wordplay, I understand why Hardie merely paraphrased in English the speech he composed in Latin. Had he tried to explain the joke in the speech itself, he would have killed it. I may kill it myself in my attempt to explain it in the commentary.

First the Latin: "... perpessus esse videatur non dicam apotheosin sed certe apodiphilosin vel apophidiosin."

Now for my English, which contains two words left untranslated for reasons that will become clear: "I won't say that Tolkien seems to have undergone apotheosis, but he has undergone apodiphilosis and apophidiosis."

Apotheosis is the standard Latin word for "deification," but the word itself is Greek in origin: ἀποθέωσις. The Romans borrowed it directly rather than making one of their own. To come up with a native Latin word would have been easy enough. "To deify" would be deificare and "deification" would be deificatio. But the earliest citation for the verb comes from the fifth and sixth centuries CE, from Saint Augustine and Cassidorus, and the earliest citation of the noun i can find is also from the early fifth century, a translation by a Christian theologian named Marius Mercator of a letter by Nestorius. In both Latin and Greek ἀποθέωσις/apotheosis is the standard word to describe the deification of a hero (Herakles) or an emperor (Augustus). Hardie knew well that the apotheosis of heroes and emperors came after death, which may be why he "won't say" (all blasphemy aside) that Tolkien, very much alive and sitting beside him, has undergone deification. But Hardy is just getting started with the wordplay here.

The word he says he can't use leads him to coin new words that he can use. He decides that Tolkien hasn't been deified, but Dphilified or PhDified. Once he made this realization, he was off, using apotheosis as his model. Since apotheosis comes originally from Greek, doing a proper job of the wordplay means going back to the source for the others. So he coins not one but two Greek words that did not previously exist, and then borrows them into Latin and transliterates them. His made-up Greek ἀποδιφίλωσις he turns into the made-up Latin apodiphilosis, and Greek ἀποφιδίωσις becomes Latin apophidiosis. And so the words he puts into his speech to describe in Latin what Tolkien has undergone are apodiphilosis and apophidiosis.

Now pity the poor translator who is not in on the joke from the start. Looking at these two words, which were coined for the occasion and exist nowhere else, the translator cannot look up their meanings. So the translator must work by analogy to try to discover it. If the native Latin for apotheosis would be deification, then apodiphilosis becomes diphilification, and apophidiosis becomes phidification. 

This is no closer to where the translator needs to go, however, because the words still have no readily discernible meaning. If you know Latin, you can look at the word deification and work out what it means. But looking at apodiphilosis and apophidiosis and trying to analyze the parts of the word to guess the meaning of the whole doesn't work very well at all.

For example, commenting in Vox Latina 57 (2021) 402 n. 17 on the Latin of Hardie's oration, Marcus Cristini looked at apodiphilosis and apophidiosis and ventured the guess that the diphil in apodiphilosis and the phidi in apophidiosis were references to Diphilus, a Greek comic poet of the fourth century BCE, and to Phidias, the Greek sculptor of the fifth century BCE. Now Diphilus, whose work has almost entirely perished, was a well known, well regarded, and influential writer of New Comedy (think sitcoms or A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum), but his work has perished almost entirely. Phidias was the renowned sculptor of the twelve meter tall chryselephantine statue of Zeus enthroned at Olympia, which was one of the seven wonders of the world. He also created the similarly tall but standing chryselephantine statue of Athena in the Parthenon. Cristini cautiously suggests that Hardie is joking that Tolkien has become a second Diphilus or a second Phidias.

What I found troubling about this suggestion was that, all wordplay aside, comparing Tolkien to Diphilus and Phidias made little or no sense. I just could not buy that Hardie would execute this amazingly complex multilingual pun only to have it fall flat on its face because he compared Tolkien to the wrong people. If Hardie had suggested that Tolkien was a second Homer or a second Sophocles, people could scoff -- Tolkien would be the first (Letters no. 201 p. 156) -- but they all compose myth and treat the subjects that myth treats. Homer and Sophocles are in the right category, but Phidias and Diphilus are not. 

So I could not agree to Cristini's hesitant suggestion, but I had nothing better to offer. The problem is that he and I were both looking too hard and not listening closely enough. Allow me an illustration. 

Many years ago I was teaching Hamlet, and while I was writing something on the blackboard with my back to the class, one of my best students said she had a question about one of the footnotes.

"Which one, Lexie?" I asked, still writing.

"The one that says 'country matters' is a pun. I don't get it. What's the pun?"

I stopped writing, but did not turn around. I was concerned I might offend someone if I explained the pun.

"You have to hear it," I said after a long, silent pause.

Another long, silent pause followed.

"Ohhhh," she said at last. "Thank you."

Just as my student needed to hear Hamlet's pun to get that it, I needed to hear Hardie's. But I could not get to that point until I came upon Hardie's English paraphrase (not translation) of his speech published in Amon Hen 27 (1977) 11: "not by deification but by D.Phil. or (Ph.D) -ification." Ohhhh.

I wish I could have thought of a way to write this post without giving away the pun so quickly. It seemed best to just give you the pun in a form in which you could appreciate it in English and then explain how the pun works in Latin. I was trying not to kill the joke.

We're just not worthy. I am sure Tolkien loved it.

Chapter 5: "Pity, Power, and Tolkien's Ring: To Rule the Fate of Many"