Pearls before swine, Aelfric of Eynsham, and the catherdral at Chartres

Aelfric, pulling no punches and insulting his congregation, while delivering a sermon on Job:

"Wē sǣdon ēow and ġȳt secgað þæt wē ne magon ealle ðās race ēow be endebyrdnysse secgan, for ðan ðe sēo bōc is swīðe miċel, and hire dīgele andġyt is ofer ūre mǣðe tō smēaġenne."


"We told you before and we'll tell you again that we cannot tell you this whole story from beginning to end. For this book is very large, and its hidden meaning is beyond your ability to ponder."

When I was in high school they decided to show us some film about the cathedral at Chartres. Being 14-18 years old most of us had not yet developed that finally honed aesthetic sense which some of us later could call our own. I know I hadn't. When the priest showing us the film told us what the film was about, there was a rather loud collective groan. The priest -- let's just call him Father Aelfric -- regarded us in silence for a moment. At length he said, not quite sotto voce:

"Pearls before swine."

I can't speak for anyone else, but I knew I had just been insulted. 

"a path of ascent however hard" -- Tolkien to Lewis on the mysteries and opportunities of pain (Letters² #113)

In January 1948 Tolkien said something to C. S. Lewis that hurt him. In Letter #113 Tolkien continues what appears to be a longer conversation about the incident. This is the only letter we have from the correspondence and we don't know what Tolkien said or about what he said it. I encourage the reader to go look at this letter because it makes clear that Tolkien is truly unhappy that he has wounded his friend, who is also truly unhappy, and because the words from the letter I quote below, when read out of context, don't seem particularly contrite or apologetic. 

In an article I am working on right now I quote this letter in order to show that Tolkien did not believe that the mere fact of suffering sanctified or ennobled us. I think these few sentences make that point clearly, but that's not what I am here to write about. As I was looking at this passage again yesterday I caught an allusion to Vergil's Aeneid that I probably should have caught before. I have no doubt that Tolkien intended this allusion and that Lewis would have noticed it, probably right off.

Lewis's engagement with the Aeneid was deep and lifelong, from his school days onward, so much so that he labored on and off for decades on his own translation, and Tolkien had heard him read parts of it aloud at meetings of the Inklings. A. T. Reyes provides a good discussion of this in the introduction to his book, C. S. Lewis's Lost Aeneid. Tolkien, too, was steeped in Vergil from his own school days, as was entirely normal at that time. We even have a page from the 1920s on which Tolkien transliterated phrases from the Aeneid into one of his early Elvish alphabets (Parma Eldalamberon 16, 38-39).

What am I talking about already? Here's the quote:

I daresay under grace that [pain which you are feeling] will do good rather than harm, but that is between you and God. It is one of the mysteries of pain that it is, for the sufferer, an opportunity for good, a path of ascent however hard. But it remains an ‘evil’, and it must dismay any conscience to have caused it carelessly, or in excess, let alone wilfully.

Letters² #113 p. 180

The words I've emphasized recall some of the most famous lines in Vergil's Aeneid. In Book 6 of this work, Aeneas must journey to the underworld, but first he receives instructions about the way and its perils:

Tros Anchisiade, facilis descensus Averno:
noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;
sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras,
hoc opus, hic labor est.

Trojan son of Anchises, easy is the descent to hell:
Night and day the doors of dark Dis lie open;

But to retrace your steps, and escape to the upper world,

this is the task, this the labor.

            (Aen. 6.127-130)

Notice that Tolkien isn't trying to cheer Lewis up here, or to comfort him with platitudes about how they'll get through this. Had Tolkien been trying to do that, and had he been clumsier and more obvious (like me), he would have alluded to another famous passage of Vergil, where Aeneas is trying to encourage his followers after yet another disaster has befallen them. 

“O socii—neque enim ignari sumus ante malorum—
O passi graviora, dabit deus his quoque finem.
Vos et Scyllaeam rabiem penitusque sonantis
accestis scopulos, vos et Cyclopea saxa
experti: revocate animos, maestumque timorem
mittite: forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit."

"O my Comrades -- by now we know all about evils
-- You've seen worse! God will let these end, too.
You, you've come near rabid Scylla's baying cliffs;
You've seen the giant stonework of the Cyclops's home.
Take up your courage again, let go dejection and fear:
Perhaps one day it will please us to recall these evils, too."

(Aen. 1.198-203)

Rather than pat Lewis on the back, Tolkien allows that Lewis is in pain, that he (Tolkien) has done him wrong, however unintentionally, and that the way back from this will involve hard work. He knows that when we are hurt even forgiving the offender often doesn't make the pain go away. There are times when we are downhearted because the world is just giving us a hard time; there are times when someone in particular whom we care about hurts us; and there are times when we feel the pain of hurting someone we love and losing them. Encouragement like that given by Aeneas to his followers can help in the first of these scenarios. At least it can encourage us to pull ourselves together and go on. The second and third scenarios are much harder, darker and more hellish. "This is the task, this the labor."

A Point about Elf Ears

This is a lighthearted not terribly serious post. It's a joke really. So nobody stones anybody, okay?

The other night I came across a passage in Morgoth's Ring (209-10), which made me think about the ears of Elves more than I usually do, which is almost not at all. Most people think they have pointed ears, and there is some evidence that this is so. Growing up reading Tolkien I never pictured them as having anything but ears like ours. But let's go with pointed ears since the passage I read the other night sparks an interesting question to which I offer a tongue-in-cheek solution.

The text is Ælfwine’s Preamble to "Laws and Customs among the Eldar." Ælfwine is of course a Man, writing about Elves for other Men who know nothing about them. Naturally you would expect him to point out the differences and similarities.

The Eldar grew in bodily form slower than Men, but in mind more swiftly. They learned to speak before they were one year old; and in the same time they learned to walk and to dance, for their wills came soon to the mastery of their bodies. Nonetheless there was less difference between the two Kindreds, Elves and Men, in early youth; and a man who watched elf-children at play might well have believed that they were the children of Men, of some fair and happy people. For in their early days elf-children delighted still in the world about them, and the fire of their spirit had not consumed them, and the burden of memory was still light upon them.

Ælfwine says that as little children, Men and Elves are easily mistaken for each other. That sounds like Elves, or at least Elf-children, don't have pointy ears. That should make identification easy, especially of children running around and playing. So, does this mean that for Elves pointed ears are a secondary sex characteristic?

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Lúthien Unbound?

In his introduction to the Lay of Leithian in The Lays of Beleriand, Christopher Tolkien writes: 

My father never explained the name Leithian 'Release from Bondage', and we are left to choose, if we will, among various applications that can be seen in the poem. Nor did he leave any comment on the significance - if there is a significance - of the likeness of Leithian to Leithien 'England'. In the tale of Ælfwine of England the Elvish name of England is Lúthien (which was earlier the name of Ælfwine himself, England being Luthany), but at the first occurrence (only) of this name the word Leithian was pencilled above it (II. 330, note 20). In the 'Sketch of the Mythology' England was still Lúthien (and at that time Thingol's daughter was also Lúthien), but this was emended to Leithien, and this is the form in the 1930 version of 'The Silmarillion'. I cannot say (i) what connection if any there was between the two significances of Lúthien, nor (ii) whether Leithien (once Leithian) 'England' is or was related to Leithian 'Release from Bondage'. The only evidence of an etymological nature that I have found is a hasty note, impossible to date, which refers to the stem leth- 'set free', with leithia 'release', and compares Lay of Leithian.

(Lays 188-89)

In September of 1978 I was a freshman at NYU taking my first class in Ancient Greek. One of the first verbs a student becomes acquainted with is the verb λύω/lúo. It's a common verb, meaning "set free, release, undo, let loose," and it is very regular in the way it's conjugated. There's nothing exceptional or odd about it. So it's a good verb to practice with. Now in English verbs have three principal parts, that is, forms which allow you to make all the other forms. So "sing, sang, sung" or "walk, walked, walked" supply the building blocks. In Greek regular verbs commonly have six principal parts, and there's a discernible pattern to them which makes learning them easier. The principal parts of λύω are λύω, λύσω, ἔλυσα, λέλυκα, λέλυμαι, ἐλύθην/lúo, lúso, élusa, léluka, lélumai, elúthēn. 

Did that last principal part--ἐλύθην/elúthēn--catch your eye? Or maybe your ear? Because it sure caught mine 46 years ago. The Silmarillion had come out a year before and I was reading The Lord of the Rings two or three times a year at that point. So the combination of form and meaning-- a standard translation of ἐλύθην/elúthēn would be "I was set free" or "I was released"--fairly leaped off the page at me. All I could think of was Lúthien and the long poem about her and Beren called The Lay of Leithian and that leithian means "release from bondage."* λύω is the verb you use if you are talking about freeing slaves or prisoners.

I asked my Greek teacher about ἐλύθην/elúthēn after class. Her name was Stephanie and she was probably the best teacher I ever had. She was so good at making things clear, at correcting you without making you feel like an idiot, and she so obviously loved teaching Ancient Greek. I know how she felt. It was later my favorite course to teach as well, but I didn't do it anywhere near as well as she did. In any event in 1978 Tolkien was still largely looked down on in academic circles. As I recall, she said she supposed a connection between this verb and the words Lúthien and leithian was possible, but I could also tell she wasn't really keen on having a prolonged discussion about it.  

As we worked our way through the truly immense verbal system of Ancient Greek, we learned more and more forms of this and other verbs. When we came to the form λυθεῖεν, once again my eye was caught because this form can be transliterated in several ways, that is, we can change the word letter by letter from the Greek alphabet into our own. The Greek letter upsilon, |υ|, is commonly represented in English with |y|, as in analysis for the Greek ἀνάλυσις -- and yes, that derives ultimately from the same root. But as the English spelling upsilon attests, |υ| is not always represented by |y|. The diphthong |ει| -- pronounced like |ay| in day in Attic Greek (think Plato) or |ee| in Koine Greek (think the Gospels) -- can be transliterated as |ei| or |i|. So λυθεῖεν could be transliterated lytheien, lythien, lutheien, or luthien. As we can see, Lúthien sounds like it could have its origin here. 

How should λυθεῖεν be translated? By form it is the third person plural aorist optative passive. The aorist tense often refers to past time, like a simple past, but not necessarily. It can also refer to something that happens suddenly. So, for example, the form ἐδάκρυσε/edakruse can mean "he wept" but is often better taken as "he burst into tears." And what's the optative? It's like the subjunctive, only more so. It doesn't refer to facts but to possibilities, intentions, hopes, and fears, to things that have not yet become real and may never become real. So λυθεῖεν by itself could be translated as a wish: "May they be set free" or "I wish that they be set free." Which of course would be a very significant name for a character like Lúthien, who comes by this name as Tolkien makes her more powerful and able to release or set free from bondage more things and people. As Clare Moore has shown in her article on Lúthien in Mallorn 62 (2021), with each successive version of her tale, Lúthien's power and importance grow.

Tolkien was keen on the sound of words. He specifically cited Ancient Greek as a tongue that gave him "'phonaesthetic' pleasure" (Letters #144 p. 265).** It may have been hard to resist the combination of sound and meaning to be found in Lúthien.

__________________________________

I hope that the list I've created below helps to clarify the name changes Christopher Tolkien refers to in the quoted passage to start this post. I use > to indicate "becomes" or "changes into"

1. The Tale of Tinúviel in The Book of Lost Tales, vol. II (1917-18)

• The daughter of Thingol and Melian is named Tinúviel, and never called Lúthien. 

2. Ælfwine of England in The Book of Lost Tales, vol. II (1917-1918)

• Lúthien = Ælfwine > Ælfwine = Ælfwine 
• Luthany*** = England > Lúthien = England ("Leithian" pencilled above 1st use of Lúthien for England)

3. The Lay of the Children of Húrin in The Lays of Beleriand (1918-1925)

• The daughter of Thingol and Melian is named Lúthien. Beren, not knowing her name, calls her  Tinúviel.

4. The Lay of Leithian in The Lays of Beleriand (1925-1931)

• The daughter of Thingol and Melian is named Lúthien. Beren, not knowing her name, calls her  Tinúviel.

4. The Sketch of the Mythology (1926) in The Shaping of Middle-earth.

• Lúthien = Lúthien, daughter of Thingol and Melian
• Lúthien = England > Leithien = England

5. Quenta Noldorinwa (the 1930 Silmarillion) in The Shaping of Middle-earth.

• Lúthien = Lúthien, daughter of Thingol and Melian
• Leithien (Leithian 1x) = England

___________________

*Yes, I know that we only had very small snippets of the Lay at that time, but we knew that within Middle-earth at least such a poem existed and what it was called.

** John R. Holmes has suggested that Tolkien coined the word "phonaesthetic," either in the cited letter or at around the same time ("'Inside a Song': Tolkien's Phonaesthetics," in B. L. Eden, Middle-earth Minstrel: Essays on Music in Tolkien 2010 p. 30). While Tolkien clearly could have coined such a word, the word already existed thanks to the linguist J. R. Firth, who appears to have coined it in his 1930 book Speech (Oxford University Press, p. 52). The word also appears in a 1950 article in the journal Essays and Studies. Tolkien knew the journal if not the article. His Homercoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son first appeared there in 1953, plus he owned a couple of issues of the journal from previous years (See Oronzo Cilli, Tolkien's Library, 103, 367). A google ngram search shows that the word suddenly came into much wider use (among linguists, that is) in the late 1940s and peaked in the 1970s.

*** 'Luthany' seems to come from a poem called "The Mistress of Vision," written by Francis Thompson, a poet of whom Tolkien was quite fond:

The Lady of fair weeping,
      At the garden’s core,
      Sang a song of sweet and sore
      And the after-sleeping;
In the land of Luthany, and the tracts of Elenore.

It's interesting to learn -- thanks to Andrew Higgins's paper, 'O World Invisible We View Thee' The Syncretic Nature of Francis Thompson's Visionary Poems,' which is available here -- that in 1968 George Carter suggested in an unpublished PhD dissertation that Carter suggested that "Thompson constructed 'Luthany' by anglicizing the Ancient Greek aorist passive infinitive of 'luo' – 'luthenai', which means 'to be broken' (Carter 1968, p. 62)."

In translating λυθῆναι/luthēnai as 'to be broken' Carter is thinking of another line in Thompson's poem -- "Pass the gates of Luthany" -- and arguing that this means "Pass the gates when they are broken." In the absence of other evidence, this translation and interpretation seem quite forced. "Unlocked" or "open" seem more plausible translations. λύω can be used of opening doors or gates, but, as far as I can tell, not of breaking them. I can see the resemblance between the English and the Greek here, but not more than that.