Thomas of Erceldoune I -- First Thoughts and Intentions

Lystyns, lordyngs, bothe grete & smale,
And takis gude tent what j will saye:
I sall ȝow telle als trewe a tale,
Als ever was herde by nyghte or daye:
And þe maste meruelle ffor owttyne naye,
That euer was herde by-fore or syene,
And þer-fore pristly j ȝow praye,
That ȝe will of ȝoure talkyng blyne.

Listen, lordings, both great and small,
And take good heed of what I will say:
I shall you tell as true a tale,
As ever was heard by night or day:
The most marvellous, there's no denying,
That ever was heard before or since.
And therefore readily I you pray,
That ye will of your talking cease.

I am about to embark on a task for which I am not particularly well qualified, being rather an expatriate Classicist than a native Medievalist. But I am going to try to provide some kind of text of the Romance and Prophecies of Thomas of Erceldoune. I am doing this because I find it an interesting work, of undoubted influence, and because no one, as far as I can see, has done so since 1875. I hope that what I come up with will at least be useful because of its accessibility, even if it might not be all that every Medievalist (and sometime Classicist) would want it to be. 

That hat, those shelves!

The 1875 edition, published by the Early English Text Society (reprinted 2008), and edited by the James Murray, is also available at archive.org. The online edition is hard to work with because of the formatting, and the EETS reprint is bit dear. This led me to a mistake. I purchased (though not from EETS) what turned out to be a criminally overpriced, abominably bad scan of Murray's edition. I can only concede that I got what I paid for. It was so poor, blurry, and faint that I found it nearly impossible to read. Had I lashed it to a brick and hurled it through the manufacturer's window, a jury would have called us even. 

I then inquired of the good folk at the Middle English Texts Series whether anyone had an edition in the works for them. They said no, but declared themselves always willing to consider proposals. Though I backed slowly away, I nevertheless kept thinking that this work should be available and readable. So recently I bit the bullet and bought a library rebinding of the actual first edition. It's a wonderful little book, with the library hard covers bound over the original soft covers, and the marvelous ragged edges of a book whose pages came uncut. (If you've never cut pages, it is both thrilling and a little scary. The Collection Budé series of Latin and Greek authors still came with uncut pages as recently as the 1990s.)

What did I mean above when I said I meant to provide 'some kind of text' of this work? Well, nothing as ambitious as a critical edition. I haven't the time or the ability to go see the manuscripts themselves, of which there are five, nor do I have the expertise in Middle English, its northern dialects, or its paleography to establish or emend a text. Murray gives the texts of all five mss. I shall give only the text of the oldest, Thornton (Lincoln MS 91), which was made in the 1430s, a generation or so after the Romance was composed (Murray, xxiii), and about a century and a half after the historical Thomas the Rhymer lived (ca. 1220 - ca. 1298). For this I give two reasons. The oldest ms is often (though not always) the best, since it is closest to the source.  And simplicity: Murray supplies all five mss, as nearly side by side as can be managed on a small page, but this makes following the tale from one page to the next more difficult and at times confusing. At least this was so for me. By restricting myself to the Thornton MS, I aim to provide a text of the story that is easier to follow. In the end, that's what it's all about.

Wherever the other mss offer interesting details or readings of note, I will of course bring them in. Any scholarship more recent than 1875 that I find and can get my hands on will also find a place here along with my own comments on the text. I imagine that in time I will bring in the later material from the ballads, though I am still undecided about what to do, if anything, with the prophecies. But obviously the place to start will be with the Romance itself, which I will begin putting up soon. Any questions and suggestions will as always be welcome. Just be kind: in the fine tradition of Harlan Ellison, I am working without a net here.

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Murray's Introduction→

Who Says Middlemarch is Outdated?

The Statue of George Eliot in Nuneaton, Warwickshire

Every now and then at the shop we receive spectacular news. Today a notice came in that a certain edition of Middlemarch contained a printing error, and that, if we had copies containing this error, we had to pull them from the shelves and destroy them. A few words had been dropped from the following sentence:

'Ladislaw had made up his mind that she must be an unpleasant girl, since she was going to marry Casaubon....'

Which produced what can only be considered a major revision:

'Ladislaw had made up his mind to marry Casaubon'

This could work out rather nicely, since it makes possible the ending I found myself wishing for, in which Dorothea ended up with the doctor. Not being at all fond of Casaubon and Ladislaw, I am perfectly content that they should be miserable together.

(It occurs to me, not without some trepidation, that I have just written a blog post on Middlemarch at 1 o'clock in the morning. I may have to adopt several cats.)

Ava Gardner, Robert Graves, and J.R.R. Tolkien Walk into a room....

Ava Gardner in "55 Days at Peking" (1963)

No, this isn't the beginning of a joke. But it is funny to hear Tolkien tell the story in a letter written January 1965:

I am neither disturbed (nor surprised) at the limitations of my 'fame'. There are lots of people in Oxford who have never heard of me, let alone of my books. But I can repay many of them with equal ignorance: neither wilful nor contemptuous, simply accidental. An amusing incident occurred in November, when I went as a courtesy to hear the last lecture of this series of his given by the Professor of Poetry: Robert Graves. (A remarkable creature, entertaining, likeable, odd, bonnet full of wild bees, half-German, half-Irish, very tall, must have looked like Siegfried/Sigurd in his youth, but an Ass.) It was the most ludicrously bad lecture I have ever heard. After it he introduced me to a pleasant young woman who had attended it: well but quietly dressed, easy and agreeable, and we got on quite well. But Graves started to laugh; and he said: 'it is obvious neither of you has ever heard of the other before'. Quite true. And I had not supposed that the lady would ever have heard of me. Her name was Ava Gardner, but it still meant nothing, till people more aware of the world informed me that she was a film-star of some magnitude, and that the press of pressmen and storm of flash-bulbs on the steps of the Schools were not directed at Graves (and cert. not at me) but at her. ....

Just so you know, the ellipsis at the end is not mine. Whether it was Humphrey Carpenter or Christopher Tolkien who edited out what immediately followed, I don't know. But the omission makes me wonder what came next.  Oddly, I had long remembered the letter for Tolkien's characterization of Graves and his lecture (the italics and the capital A are his), but had entirely forgotten the presence of Ava Gardner.  I really must get out more. 

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Works Consulted

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And his feet are faster -- Old Tom's Trochees (FR 1.viii.142)

copyright Alan Lee

Old Tom Bombadil is a merry fellow,
Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow.
None has ever caught him yet, for Tom, he is the master:
His songs are stronger songs, and his feet are faster. 

(FR 1.viii.142)

So I was driving down the road thinking of Tom Bombadil, as one does. The bit about the feet had long seemed to me to be only one of the many odd things Old Tom says. But now it occurred to me that there may be more here than eccentricity. For virtually every word out of Bombadil's mouth is poetry. Whether singing or speaking, his words are rhythmic and predominantly trochaic, though not perfectly regular. We can see this clearly in the lines I quoted, three out of four begin with slow and heavy spondees, but then suddenly switch to trochees and rush off to the end of the line. The other line is entirely trochaic:

Óld Tóm Bómbadíl ís a mérry féllow.
Bríght blúe his jácket ís, ánd his boóts are yéllow.
Nóne has éver caúght him yét, for Tóm, he ís the Máster:
Hís sóngs are strónger sóngs, ánd his feét are fáster.

A trochee is a metrical foot which in English consists of two syllables, the first stressed and the second unstressed. The English noun trochee comes from the Ancient Greek adjective τροχαῖος (trochaios). This in turn derives from the verb τρέχω (trecho), meaning 'run'. Τροχαῖος, moreover, is shorthand for τροχαῖος πούς (trochaios pous), which means 'running foot'. Trochees thus run. They are much swifter than their opposite, iambs (unstressed, stressed), which in poetry both Greek and English have long been used to represent the rhythm of normal speech. All of this will have been well known to Tolkien, who, like many educated Englishmen of his day, had learnt a great deal of Latin and Greek at school. It was this, he said, that helped him discover his love of poetry:

'[As a child] I was, for instance, insensitive to poetry, and skipped it if it came in tales. Poetry I discovered much later in Latin and Greek, and especially through being made to try and translate English verse into classical verse.'

(OFS ¶ 56)

In this connection it is also intriguing that most other poetry in The Lord of the Rings is iambic, though the lengths of the lines vary.  Hobbit poetry tends to be in iambic tetrameter, Elvish in iambic heptameter, or alternating lines of tetrameter and trimeter. Two things make this noteworthy. First, the first elf poem we encounter in The Lord of the Rings is in iambic tetrameter, which we normally associate with hobbits, but we are hearing this poem, which the Elves are singing in Elvish, as it is understood and represented by a hobbit (FR 1.iii.79). Second. Bombadil's songs are also in heptameter, but a largely trochaic heptameter. Thus their seven trochaic beats counterbalance the seven iambic beats of the 'elf meter.' Clearly Tolkien devoted thought to details of this kind, and one wonders what might lie behind this metrical opposition. When the poet is also a philologist who professes that '[t]he incarnate mind, the tongue, and the tale are in our world coeval' (OFS ¶ 27), there is certainly room for further inquiry.

So the faster feet of which Tom spoke may not be the feet we thought they were.

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Works Consulted

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There Were Giants in the Earth in Those Days -- Jakob Grimm's 'Teutonic Mythology'

Jakob Grimm

Teutonic Mythology 

Chapter I. 

Introduction.¹

From the westernmost shore of Asia, Christianity had turned at once to the opposite one of Europe. The wide soil of the continent which had given it birth could not supply it long with nourishment; neither did it strike deep root in the north of Africa. Europe soon became, and remained, its proper dwelling-place and home.

It is worthy of notice, that the direction in which the new faith worked its way, from South to North, is contrary to the current of migration which was then driving the nations from the East and North to the West and South. As spiritual light penetrated from the one quarter, life itself was to be reinvigorated from the other. 

The worn out empire of the Romans saw both its interior convulsed, and its frontier overstept. Yet, by the same weighty doctrine which had just overthrown her ancient gods, subjugated Rome was able to subdue her conquerors anew. By this means the flood-tide of invasion was gradually checked, the newly converted lands began to gather strength and to turn their arms against the heathen left in their rear. 

Slowly, step by step, Heathendom gave way to Christendom. Five hundred years after Christ, but few nations of Europe believed in him; after a thousand years the majority did, and those the most important, yet not all.

¹ In a book that deals so much with Heathenism, the meaning of the term ought not to be passed over. The Greeks and Romans had no special name for nations of another faith (for ἑτερόδοξοι, βάρβαροι were not used in that sense); but with the Jews and Christians of the N.T. are contrasted ἔθνος, ἔθνεα, ἐθνικοί, Lat. gentes, gentiles; Ulphilas uses the pl. thiudós, and by preference in the gen[itive] after a pronoun, thái thiudó, sumái thiudó (gramm. 4, 441, 457), while thiudiskó translates ἐθνικῶς Gal. 2, 14. As it was mainly Greek religion that stood opposed to the Judæo-Christian, the word Ἕλλην also assumed the meaning ἐθνικός, and we meet with ἑλλενικώς = ἐθνικῶς, which the Goth would still have rendered thiudiskós, as he does render Ἕλληνες thiudós, John 7, 35. 12,20. 1 Cor. 1, 24. 12, 13; only in 1 Cor. 1, 22 he prefers Krêkôs. This Ἕλλην = gentilis bears also the meaning of giant, which has developed itself out of more than one national name (Hun, Avar, Tchudi); so the Hellenic walls came to be heathenish, gigantic (see ch. XVIII). In Old High German, Notker still uses the pl. diete for gentiles (Graff. 5, 128). In the meanwhile pagus had expanded its narrow meaning of κώμη into the wider one of ager, campus, in which sense it still lives in It. paese, Fr. pays; while paganus began to push out gentilis, which was lapsing into the sense of nobilis. All the Romance languages have their pagano, payen, &c., nay, it has penetrated into the Bohem. pohan, Pol. paganin, Lith. pagonas [but Russ. pagan = unclean]. The Gothic háithi campus early developed an adj háithns agrestis, campestris = paganus (Ulph. in Mark 7, 26 renders ἑλληνίς by háithnô;), the Old H.G. heida as adj heidan, Mid. H.G. and Dutch heide heiden, A.S. hæð hæðin, Engl. heath heathen, Old Norse heið heiðinn; Swed. and Dan. use hedning. The O.H.G. word retains its adj. nature and forms its gen. pl. heidanêro. Our present heide, gen. heiden (for heiden, gen. heidens) is erroneous, but current ever since Luther. Full confirmation is afforded by Mid. Lat agrestis = paganus, e.g. in the passage quoted in ch. IV from Vita S. Agili; and the 'wilde heiden' in our Heldenbuch is an evident pleonasm (see Supplement).

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I can only start at the end here: '(see Supplement)'. See Supplement! And in a parenthesis, forsooth. I can only laugh, not in mockery but wonder. Or awe, if one can be said to laugh in awe. We have here the first footnote, not attached to the text but to the title of the first chapter. Grimm hasn't even said anything yet, and he is already providing footnotes more packed with learning and meaning than whole scholarly books I have read within these lonesome, latter years. (The second chapter is titled 'God'. What if there's a similar footnote on that? Reading it might have the same effect as seeing God face to face.) And Grimm with a wave of his hand tells me, merely, that there's more where this came from: 'see supplement.'

And why, pray, need we see the Supplement? To be filled in on the 'evident pleonasm' of 'wilde heiden' of course. If 'pleonasm' gives you pause, and small wonder if it does, it means 'the use of more words than necessary to convey meaning (e.g., to see with one's eyes), either as a fault of style or for emphasis', as Google tells us. And if we glance at the usage graph for pleonasm -- Google was kind enough to include with its definition -- we will see that this word was in its heyday when Grimm (1785-1863) was employing it to indicate that saying 'wild heathens' ('wilde heiden') was redundant.

So if 'pleonasm' isn't quite as current as 'woke', it also isn't as played out by the poseurs. Now you might well find 'pleonasm' pedantic, or indeed all of this splendid Goliath of a footnote, which is much longer than the first four paragraphs of the book itself -- the first volume of four, mind you. True enough, pedantry can also be a pose, but not here, I think. The immensity of the learning we discover in this footnote, deeply and firmly rooted in languages, fifteen different languages all related to each other, is not just here for display. It provides the philological underpinnings of so much of the grand sweep of history Grimm is about to set before us in those first four amazing introductory paragraphs: the transformative coming together of the Christian and the Heathen in Europe.

The all-knowing panoramic eye that takes in a thousand years of history at a glance seems godlike in a way that writers of the 19th century excelled at, and surely a part of the reason they did so was the view they embodied that Europe and Christianity were of course superior. The soil of Asia was not fertile enough for Christianity to flourish there, and in Africa, well, it could barely get roots down in Africa. But Europe now, Europe had just what Christianity needed. It had the vigor and courage of the onrushing northern invaders, so many of whom were Teutonic. And even if these Germanic peoples possessed in their heathendom one of the two elements that would make Europe "exceptional", and that would be used to "justify" its exceptionalism -- and, therefore, much else that was not admirable -- vis à vis the rest of the world, nevertheless the rediscovery of who those heathens were through their myths and their language was surely also a worthy object of study. And it remains worthy. Wrong again, Alcuin.