. Alas, not me

06 February 2016

War of the Ghosts -- A Guest Post By Simon Cook

War of the Ghosts

F. C. Bartlett
At the March 1920 meeting of the Folk-Lore Society, all three papers were delivered by Cambridge men. A.C. Haddon gave the presidential address, W.H.R. Rivers discussed the conception of ‘soul-substance’ in New Guinea and Melanesia, and F.C. Bartlett reported on ‘Some Experiments in the Reproduction of Folk-Stories’.

Does this have anything to do with Tolkien? 

It depends how you look at things; which is really what I want to talk about in this post. Tolkien studies are full of ‘influences’ – as highlighted in the recent flurry of discussion over the state of Tolkien scholarship. Personally, I don’t get ‘influence’, a seemingly occultist notion of action at a distance. No doubt the confusion is subjective.

Another perspective draws upon notions like context and conversation. These are my preferred terms of art, reflecting my training as an intellectual historian. I’ll illustrate how they work by first discussing Bartlett and his 1920 paper, and then pointing to its possible significance for how we think about Tolkien.

Anthropology at Cambridge was established in the wake of a university expedition to Torres Straits in 1898. Returning from the expedition, Haddon and Rivers joined forces with more traditional scholars, notably the classical archaeologist William Ridgeway and the Anglo-Saxonist H.M. Chadwick, to establish a new faculty of anthropology. Ridgeway and Chadwick were working on a novel approach to early European history, which combined archaeology with the study of old literature, such as the Iliad and Beowulf. Haddon and Rivers introduced to this approach the folktales of contemporary ‘primitives’. Bartlett’s 1920 paper was a contribution to an emerging account of the relationship between story and society in history.

Bartlett was a psychologist. His paper on the reproduction of Folk Stories discussed an experiment in which members of his university read a Chinook folk tale, ‘The War of the Ghosts’, and, after varying intervals of time, reproduced it. Reproduction, Bartlett showed, was actually reconstruction: over successive retellings familiar elements were substituted for unfamiliar and the plot structure changed to remove (seemingly) inexplicable connections. As such, Bartlett’s paper contributed to the study of cultural diffusion by way of a psychological experiment on memory.

So what does this tell us? If we approach Bartlett’s paper in terms of influence, pretty much nothing. Tolkien may possibly have read the paper, but probably did not; and even if he did, any direct connection we might establish would probably sit all too easily between the trivial and the vacuous.

Approaching Bartlett’s paper in terms of context is another matter. To begin with, we see immediately that disciplinary divisions were not then what they are now. Under the broad umbrella of ‘anthropology’ we find a sustained interaction between students of Classical and Old English literature, archaeologists, experimental psychologists, and practitioners of a new participant-observer method of ethnological fieldwork. This was not an exercise in what today is called ‘inter-disciplinary studies’; rather, it reflects the fact that before the 1930s the borders between scholarly disciplines had not yet ossified.

Subsequent closing of the borders between academic disciplines has fostered a distorted image of the recent intellectual past. If you search for Bartlett’s ‘War of the Ghosts’ on the internet you will find many accounts by modern psychologists of a celebrated chapter in the history of their discipline. Unless you open up the original report of the experiment in Folk-Lore, however, you would never guess that this psychological experiment was designed to illuminate the processes of cultural diffusion.

Something similar has happened to Tolkien, whose intellectual context is very largely missing from modern Tolkien studies. Verlyn Flieger is better than most, and has correctly identified the discussions of the Folk-Lore Society as important background to Tolkien’s 1939 lecture on ‘Fairy Stories’. Yet even Flieger presents these discussions as focused simply on explaining the unpalatable elements of ancient stories. This is to project the concerns of a modern discipline (English) onto a past in which such narrow and restricted focus would have seemed an inexplicable voluntary myopia. The Folk-Lore Society brought to the table a wide range of interconnected contemporary debates, ranging over issues of comparative religion, racial ethnology, social history, and much else besides.

The context of intellectual debate was different back then. Disciplinary divisions counted for less, and the scholarly mind roamed over a much larger intellectual terrain. Scholars from a wide variety of specialized fields were engaged in the same or similar conversations.

Reading Bartlett can tell us something about the nature of these conversations, which form a vital (yet passed over) context of Tolkien’s thought. Of course, Tolkien was not part of this Cambridge project, nor were his methods, interests, or conclusions aligned with theirs. Yet his were responses to similar questions, and it is easy to locate ground shared by Cambridge psychologist and Oxford philologist.

Consider the ‘Origins’ section in ‘On Fairy Stories’, where Tolkien introduces his notion of individual sub-creation, alludes to the debate over diffusion, and then introduces his metaphor of the Cauldron of Story. The Cauldron presents an image of diffusion at work, with invented elements of fantasy blending with elements of stories significant parts of which have been forgotten. It is the fact that we forget elements of the old stories that allows invented elements of fantasy to be blended into them to make fairy stories.

Whether or not Tolkien was ‘influenced’ by Bartlett is largely irrelevant. The point is that the two men were both participants in a wide-ranging and ongoing conversation. Their work, or at least parts of it, emerged from a shared intellectual context. Bartlett was particularly arrested by the distortions introduced by memory, Tolkien was concerned especially with forgetting. But reading their texts together reveals a wider scholarly community grappling with the relationship of memory and story in history.

One could go further (much further), had we but world enough and time. Suffice it here to point out that while Bartlett’s most famous book was entitled Remembering (1932), Tolkien’s Elves, with their immortal memories and seemingly perfect recall, can be viewed (in addition to many other things) as an intensive and prolonged thought-experiment on what human memory might aspire to, yet palpably is not.

Again, I suggest no influence of Bartlett’s psychology of memory upon Tolkien’s Elves. What I do suggest is that reading Tolkien in context reveals much about the kind of questions that stand behind his writing, just as Tolkien’s highly idiosyncratic answers illuminate the intellectual and cultural concerns of the twentieth century far more than is usually suspected.

Whatever the present state of Tolkien studies might be, it leaves much to be desired from the point of view of the intellectual historian. I submit that, alongside established methods, the cultivation of a contextualist reading of the history of ideas has the potential to transform our understanding of what Tolkien was about.


Some bibliographical references

On the recent ‘state of Tolkien studies’ debates, my favourite contribution, which contains links to others, is ‘Tolkien Criticism Unbound’.

Bartlett’s 1920 paper (as also those of Haddon and Rivers) can be accessed here, via the (wonderful) archive.org (make sure to turn to the second half of the volume).

Flieger has written about the Folk-Lore Society in several places. See for example the first chapter of her Interrupted Music (Kent State University Press, 2005).

You can no doubt access Tolkien’s ‘On Fairy Stories’ without need of biographical reference from me.

Those who wish to read more on Bartlett and Cambridge anthropology in the first decades of the twentieth century can soon turn to two papers available on my Academia.edu page: ‘The Tragedy of Cambridge Anthropology’, forthcoming in History of European Ideas, and (with Tiziana Foresti) ‘War of the Ghosts: Marshall, Veblen, and Bartlett’, forthcoming in History of Political Economy.


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Another excellent piece of work by Simon Cook that I would recommend to readers is the monograph, J.R.R. Tolkien's Lost English Mythology, Thank you for agreeing to publish your post here first, Simon. 







01 February 2016

The Saga of Wigend's Chicken Run -- Guest Post by Joe Hoffman


The Saga of Wigend’s Chicken Run


BY JOE

ON FEBRUARY 1, 2016

IN MYTHGARD ACADEMY


During last fall’s fundraiser for Signum University, Dr. Prof. President Olsen committed to running from the Shire to Minas Tirith in the form of a chicken. In Lord of the Rings Online, that is. The Great Mythgard Chicken Run took place on January 30th. I watched it on TV. Despite (or possibly because of) its absurdity, it was an interesting introduction for me to the LotRO world.


Of course, a chicken doesn’t stand a chance alone in the Wild. He had companions, so the quest should not fail. As the crowd of Mythgardians, elves, dwarves, hobbits, men, and other chickens, swarmed through a square in Edoras, temporarily quadrupling its population, I was provoked to tweet, “I would like to hear the minstrels of Rohan sing of the gang of weirdos who ran through their lands with a flock of chickens.” Be careful what you wish for on the Internet.


Tom Hillman started it, and deserves at least half the blame. The narrative lines are mine; the funny lines are his.


From dark Dunharrow in the dim morning

with hen and hatchling strode Hampshire’s son.

‘Gainst foes and foxes, fighters protecting him,

to Minas Tirith the tourist came.

With Foghorn Leghorn, long enduring:

son, I say, son, strong in scorning.

For no lectures would he linger in Lamedon or Lebennin.

His clumsy coursing carried him forward.

Even women long-skirted outran wingéd Wigend

Politely pausing until his approach.

From Rammas Echor to the door of Rath Dinen

Into every breach he stuck his beak.

‘Til his goal achieved, glory gaining

He gracefully tumbled from the Tower of Guard.

In red day dawning crew he loudly.

Eleven herbs and spices seasoned breast and drumstick,

Biscuits in bucket, slaw on the side.

Sweet was the feasting, so the songs tell us.





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My thanks to Joe for assembling the fragments of our verse into an at times nearly coherent whole.

31 January 2016

Words Which They Only Partly Understood -- The First Hymn to Elbereth (FR 1.iii.79)


‘Listen! They are coming this way,’ said Frodo. ‘We have only to wait.’ 
The singing drew nearer. One clear voice rose now above the others. It was singing in the fair elven-tongue, of which Frodo knew only a little, and the others knew nothing. Yet the sound blending with the melody seemed to shape itself in their thought into words which they only partly understood. This was the song as Frodo heard it: 
    Snow-white! Snow-white! O Lady clear!
         O Queen beyond the Western Seas!
    O Light to us that wander here
        Amid the world of woven trees! 
    Gilthoniel! O Elbereth!
        Clear are thy eyes and bright thy breath!
    Snow-white! Snow-white! We sing to thee
        In a far land beyond the Sea.  
    O stars that in the Sunless Year
        With shining hand by her were sown,
    In windy fields now bright and clear
        We see your silver blossom blown! 
    O Elbereth! Gilthoniel!
        We still remember, we who dwell
    In this far land beneath the trees,
        Thy starlight on the Western Seas. 
(FR 1.iii.79)


Where is the partial understanding here? It cannot be of the sentences as such, since 'the song as Frodo heard it' is quite clear syntactically. So it must be the meaning of the content that eludes the hobbits. This suggests a limit to the power of elvish song. For elvish minstrels, we are told in The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, 'can make the things of which they sing appear before the eyes of those that listen' (RK App. A 1058), a statement which is made in the context of The Lay of Leithian. When telling a tale, elvish minstrels can create the impression that the listener is inside it. But this is a hymn of praise, which invokes images without telling their story. 

So, even though elvish minstrelsy can overcome the barrier of language, it cannot overcome that of ignorance through allusions alone. While Frodo recognizes the name of Elbereth, and knows that the High Elves, i.e., the Noldor, have great reverence for her, the rest of the song is obscure to him, presumably because he lacks the knowledge to make sense of the references to the Sunless Year and Elbereth's sowing of the stars.

See how hard life was before Bilbo's Translations from the Elvish?

Frank Wilbert Stokes -- 1902





17 January 2016

Gandalf, Odin, and the Wolf's Belly (FR 2.iv.298)


At Ragnarök the monstrous wolf, Fenrir, will swallow Oðinn, some of whose attributes Tolkien drew on in envisioning Gandalf, whom he saw as an 'Odinic wanderer' (Letters, no. 107).1  Gandalf shows this in The Lord of the Rings, as Marjorie Burns points out, 

by wearing a broad-brimmed hat and carrying a walking staff, as the wandering Odin does, though Gandalf's association with eagles, his enmity with wolves, and his ownership of a nearly supernatural horse add to this as well.2

All of which leads me to think that Sam's remark when the Company is being menaced by wolves is a joke on Tolkien's part:

'My heart's right down in my toes, Mr. Pippin,' said Sam. 'But we aren't etten yet, and there are some stout folk here with us. Whatever may be in store for old Gandalf, I'll wager it isn't a wolf's belly.' 
(FR 2.iv.298)


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1 See John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs, Oxford (2001) 111-14, 247-52, 254-58.

2 Marjorie Burns, Norse and Christian Gods: The Integrative Theology of J. R. R. Tolkien, in Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader, ed. Jane Chance, The University of Kentucky Press (2004) 168; Marjorie Burns, Gandalf and Odin in Tolkien's Legendarium, edd. Verlyn Flieger and Carl Hostetter, Greenwood Press (2000) 219-31. Gandalf, however, would have balked at the claim that he owned Shadowfax, a horse that carried riders only by his own consent. In Perilous Realms: Celtic and Norse in Tolkien’s Middle-earth, University of Toronto Press (2005) Burns rightly notes that Odin's fate is hinted at in Sam's words, but overlooks their humor.

Let me have hobbits about me that are fat (TT 4.viii.714)

Gielgud as Cassius
In Shakespeare's Julius Caesar 1.2.193-96 Caesar points out Cassius to Antony and comments:
Let me have men about me that are fat;
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o' nights:
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.
To anyone moderately acquainted with Julius Caesar these lines are quite familiar, and to say that someone has 'a lean and hungry look' has passed into the language as a warning against treachery. The words function much like a kenning, telling the reader more of a story than the words alone say. Now consider the following: 
Gollum looked at them. A strange expression passed over his lean hungry face. The gleam faded from his eyes, and they went dim and grey, old and tired. A spasm of pain seemed to twist him, and he turned away, peering back up towards the pass, shaking his head, as if engaged in some interior debate. Then he came back, and slowly putting out a trembling hand, very cautiously he touched Frodo's knee – but almost the touch was a caress. For a fleeting moment, could one of the sleepers have seen him, they would have thought that they beheld an old weary hobbit, shrunken by the years that had carried him far beyond his time, beyond friends and kin, and the fields and streams of youth, an old starved pitiable thing.
(TT 4.viii.714)
Thus, even as Gollum's teeters on the brink of repentance we find a hint that he is dangerous and not to be trusted, but at the same time the use of this phrase here deepens the pathos by sharpening the contrast between Gollum, never to be trusted, and Sméagol, shrunken, starved, and pitiable.