Idiosophy

Tolkien’s Empty Chapel

On October 8, 2024

Tolkien’s Collected Poems contains several we’ve never seen before. One of them is a bit surprising. Number 36 is a half-finished piece called “The Empty Chapel”, written in 1915 while JRRT was in basic training before shipping out to the front. One stanza in particular jumped out at me from Page 226:

Lo, war is in your nostrils and your heart
And burning with just anger as of old
Though stunted in dark places far from God
Though cheated and deluded and oppressed
Arise you, O ye blind and dumb to war
Come open your eyes and glorify your God
Come sing a hymn of honour to your Queen.

When I read that, I thought that Tolkien was right there with Wilfred Owen among the World War 1 poets. I heard echoes of “Dulce et Decorum Est“, and could hear irony dripping from them. I don’t think I’ve ever heard that kind of voice from Tolkien before. Yes. About that. It’s important to read poems more than once, and this is why. On third reading, I see that Tolkien was completely sincere. The “Queen” is the virgin Mary, about whom Tolkien would never have been less than reverent. This wouldn’t have worked out well for him.

The survivors of WW1 would become Gertrude Stein’s “Lost Generation”.¹ Earnest poems about how the destruction wrought by the war somehow brings glory to god would fall flat on any reader’s ear. So how to oppose the ironic disillusionment of the Zeitgeist? Blank verse stating the opposite of everyone else won’t do. As well be shot for a sheep as for a lamb, and write poems about Faërie.

Tolkien wrote limericks?!

By Joe

On September 26, 2024

In trivial

My copy of The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien, Hammond and Scull, eds., arrived today. So if you don’t see me for a while, you know where I’ll be.

Looking through the table of contents, I saw there were limericks on page 1365 . Naturally, I turned there first. Turns out, the old Professor wasn’t very good at them, and one of them is, shall we say, familiar.
Limerick [C] is

There was an old monk of Algeria
Who of fasting grew wearier and wearier,
Till at last with a yell
He jumped out of his cell
And ate up the Father Superior.

Google has been kind enough to provide me with a bound archive of Life Magazine, 1902, which contains this passage:

A NUMBER of our alleged literary journals, in their reminiscences of the late Mr. Stockton, have been ascribing to him the following “Limerick”:

“There was an old monk of Siberia
Whose life it grew drearier and drearier
Till he broke from his cell
With a hell of a yell
And eloped with the Mother Superior.”

This poem had its origin at Trinity College, Dublin, and has been well known in university circles here and abroad for generations. The Stockton version is simply an adaptation for the drawing-room.- Evening Sun.

Tolkien’s seems more of a bowdlerization than a composition.

That issue of Life also contained a Charles Dana Gibson cartoon I’d never seen before, voici:

An older man is quizzing a newlywed couple. The groom is a good-looking young man; the bride is one of the famous Gibson Girls.

“Where did you go on your honeymoon?”
“That’s what I’ve been wondering.”

The Post-War Economy of Mordor

By Joe

On September 20, 2024

In fantasy, Vive la France

Have you ever wondered what became of the lands of Mordor in the Fourth Age? I certainly have. I got a valuable clue today.

The climate of Ithilien is like Italy’s, so the other side of the Mountains Until Recently of Shadow would be like the Adriatic coast. The soil would have been covered with volcanic ash. After a few years of rainfall, it would be fertile again, and it would be packed with the minerals plants love. We know that volcanic soils in Italy grow excellent wine grapes. Maybe the inhabitants of the Black Land could take up viniculture?

Well, after a trip to the wine store, I can report that’s exactly what they did.

Label of a wine bottle: "La Reine des Bois" Domaine de la Mordorée Chateuneuf du Pape

click to embiggen

I don’t know what exactly this “Pape” refers to. It’s not in any of my elvish glossaries, and Sindarin doesn’t have many “p” words anyway. Must be something invented later. Anyway, it’s perfect for toasting Bilbo’s birthday.

Oh, all right

The word “mordoré” means a golden-bronze color with metallic highlights. Just the thing for autumn. The wine is dry and light, which is what I want from a Rhône.

The company is all women, and organic.

Monty Python cribs from Aristotle

By Joe

On September 7, 2024

In Slow learner

According to Monty Python¹ King Arthur, when asked how he could have coconuts in a temperate climate like England’s, replied “The swallow may fly south with the sun, or the house martin or the plover seek hot lands in winter, yet these are not strangers to our land.” (page 2) In my copy of the screenplay, which is a facsimile, lots of lines are scratched out, hand-written, or otherwise edited in production. Not this speech. It is unchanged from the first typewritten copy.

Eleanor Parker (the scholar, not Lenore from Scaramouche) on the approach of autumn, directs us to the Secreta Secretorum²:

In herust fallyth the contrary. In this tyme the eeyre wixeth colde and dry, the wynde of the Northe oftymes turnyth, Wellis wythdrawen ham, grene thynges fadyth, Frutes fallyth, the Eeyre lesyth his beute, the byrdys shechyn hote regions, the bestis desyryth hare receptis, Serpentes gone to hare dichis. (P. 245)

This is an odd book. Wikipedia refers to it as a pseudo-Aristotelian treatise, which implies there are more things like it in the world. Let’s see how rusty my Middle English is: “In harvest the contrary happens. In this time the year grows cold and dry, the wind often comes from the north, water levels in the rivers drop, green things fade, fruits fall, the year loses its beauty, the birds seek hot regions, the beasts desire their burrows, serpents go to their holes.”

Monty Python’s line about birds “seeking hot lands in winter” clearly came from here.³ The more I learn about history, the more I wonder if Monty Python actually made up anything at all.

Un Changeable

By Joe

On August 30, 2024

In fantasy, scholarship

Tom Hillman is taking on another of the big questions. This time it’s Fate, and how Turin relates to it.¹ He calls out the line from “Beowulf”: “Fate often keeps an unfey man safe when his courage avails.”

I’ve taken a couple of courses from Tom Shippey in which he brought up that line. Usually with a comment like, “That’s not much of a fate, if you can avoid it with a bit of courage.” When he’s being more formal², he says

… people are not under the domination of wyrd, which is why “fate” is not a good translation of it. People can “change their luck”, and can in a way say “No” to divine Providence, though of course if they do they have to stand by the consequences of their decision.

The Road to Middle-Earth, Chapter 5

I suspect that wyrd isn’t the only word here whose meaning has slipped over the last thousand years. The word unfaege, produced from the word for “fey”, also has the prefix “un-“. When I first learned Old English, it jumped out at me that “un-” isn’t quite what it used to be. In most words, it means what modern speakers expect, but there are plenty of words where it doesn’t. Unweder, “un-weather”,is a storm. Unweod, “un-grass”, is a weed, as is unwyrt. Uncræft, “un-craft”, is an evil art. Unbletsung, “un-blessing” is not the absence of a blessing, but a curse.

The “un-” prefix seems also to have meant “wrong” or “the opposite of what you wanted”. Is it possible that unfaege, “un-fey”, might have meant something like “doomed to something else”? Then the Beowulf poet would have meant, “If wyrd has something else in mind for a man, he’ll come through this one safely as long as he keeps his courage.” With the implication that a coward can screw up even the fate of the world, so don’t be one.

Lagrangian Theory of Science Fiction

By Joe

On August 14, 2024

In science fiction

Sørina Higgins gave a talk recently at the Brazilian Mythopoeic Society about how time flows in fantasy. This is something that has interested me ever since I read Umberto Eco’s essay “The Woods of Loisy”¹. One of the techniques Eco used there to describe the temporal flow in a story was to make a graph of the “in-world time”, what the calendar on the wall says, versus the reader’s progression through the narrative. I’ll use “page number” to stand in for that. Eco uses it for The Odyssey, and Sylvie by Gerard de Nerval, and a limerick about a man from Peru.² I want to use it for stories about literal time-travel, instead of a narrative that shifts about in time while the characters all go forward.

Figure 1.

For experimental purposes, let’s construct a trivial time-travel story: A mad scientist in Texas invents a time machine. He uses it to go back to last February in Brazil. While he’s sight-seeing there, a butterfly lands on his shoulder and he brushes it off. Then he climbs back into his time machine and returns to the time he left. Well, we all know about the awesome power of butterflies in Brazil. When he returns, his lab has been blown apart by a tornado, the infrastructure for time-travel is wrecked, and so he sets about the job of rebuilding, one day at a time like the rest of us have to. The End.

Figure 1 is what that story looks like when it’s drawn as one of Eco’s diagrams. An upward-sloping line is what we all do all the time. A big jump straight up or down is when the time machine causes a change of the in-world time on a single page for the reader. These parts are the pure science fiction.

Among Sørina’s citations are Ted Chiang’s “The Story of Your Life”³ and Richard Feynman’s Nobel lecture. Though she didn’t mention it, these two texts share a deep structural element. Chiang’s protagonist learns an alien linguistic form from creatures who perceive language as a kind of variational principle, and ends up seeing her daughter’s life in that way, instead of via pedestrian linear time. Chiang, according to the end-notes in my copy of the book, is fascinated by Lagrangian dynamics, so he wrote them into a story.

Feynman earned his Nobel Prize for applying Lagrangian variational principles to Quantum Electrodynamics, and in the process inventing a way to compute preposterously-complex integrals⁴ without making your head explode. That method is now called a “Feynman diagram”. A Feynman diagram has solid lines with arrows for electrons, quarks, etc. There are wavy lines for photons and curlicue lines for gluons. Other bosons are represented by dashed lines. (E.g. the famous Higgs boson, but there are lots of smaller ones.) There are rules about how different lines connect at vertices, and if you follow all the rules, you can read the function you need to integrate off the diagram, and you’re sure to be doing a calculation that makes sense.

One of the key insights that made diagrams possible was that we can think of a particle of anti-matter as a particle of regular matter traveling backward in time. That’s because the critical parameter describing motion is the product of energy and time, so, mathematically, there’s no difference between something with positive energy going forwards and something with negative energy going backwards. -iEt = i(-E)t = iE(-t), right? But the corners of the red zigzag in Figure 1 all have one arrow coming in and one going out, which means they obey the most important rule of Feynman diagrams.

Figure 2.

In Figure 2, let’s fix the diagram in Figure 1 so that it obeys the rest of the rules, too. Those blue dashed lines are some kind of boson. They represent a force coming into the story from outside, which causes the time machine to turn on or off.

The upper left corner, when the time machine is first turned on if we read from left to right, has a forward-in-time arrow and an backward-in-time arrow if we read from bottom to top. That’s particle anti-particle annihilation. The bottom left corner is the reverse, called pair production. The third and fourth corners are good old scattering, as a particle gets kicked so it moves differently but doesn’t change into antimatter or anything. Another fun thing is that the internal lines don’t have to obey one law of physics (E=mc²); breaking one law of physics is very useful for someone in a science fiction story.

Now, if I were a French philosopher, I’d say something like we’ve drawn the role of the author into the story. And the next step is to add up the contributions from all the possible locations of the vertices and all possible trajectories of the internal lines, which means that all stories involving turning a time-machine on and off twice will be added together. Most of them will cancel each other out, but the ones that reinforce each other will be the enduring Ur-myth of the Time Machine. Good thing I’m not a French philosopher!

But that means that I don’ t know what is represented by those blue dashed lines. I know they aren’t eternal; the number of them isn’t conserved. They can be created or destroyed by interaction with a plot. What do you think they are?

Appendix

Here are Feynman diagrams for two simple scattering events.

on the left, scattering of matter, on the right, matter and antimatter.

time flows left to right

Meticulous etymology

By Joe

On July 29, 2024

In squibs & crackers

It just occurred to me, and the Digital Tolkien project confirms, that in all the books Tolkien wrote about war, he never once used the word “martial”. Which makes perfect sense — Mars would be as out of place in Middle-earth as Father Christmas in Narnia. There is one use of the word in an appendix near the back of Unfinished Tales, discussing the Marshals of the Riddermark. But those are drafts, for which I do not hold J.R.R. Tolkien responsible. The word “Marshal” must have exerted a gravitational force, which would surely have been corrected before publication.

Separating us from all the good things

By Joe

On June 16, 2024

In fantasy

Tom Hillman ponders the relationship between humans and Faërie over on his blog. I think he’s right that Tolkien thinks it’s our fëa that doesn’t belong in Faërie. But there’s another conclusion we can draw from the literature that says something Tolkien would have liked a lot less. It’s not The Fall, or positivism, or statistical analysis, or the industrial revolution that separated us from the Fair Folk.

I’ve mentioned before that, according to Rudyard Kipling, the Protestant Reformation chased the fairies out of England:

This Reformatories tarrified the Pharisees same as the reaper goin’ round a last stand o’ wheat tarrifies rabbits. They packed into the Marsh from all parts, and they says, “Fair or foul, we must flit out o’ this, for Merry England’s done with, an’ we’re reckoned among the Images.” (p.242)

Of course, the Faërie creatures of the Continent had been chased out much earlier. The faun in Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword¹, whom Skafloc meets in his elf foster-father’s lands, says:

The new god whose name I cannot speak was come to Hellas. There was no more place for the old gods and the old beings who haunted the land. (p.21)

The faun is fleeing West, like Tolkien’s elves. But it doesn’t stop in England. I heard a familiar echo when I was reading the introduction to Alan Lomax’s collection of American folk s0ngs.²

With most of the Southern Negro ministers and teachers urging their followers to abandon the old songs, a flood of jazz and of tawdry gospel hymns comes in. A black giant in the Nashville penitentiary resolutely refused to sing an entirely innocuous levee camp work song since he was a Hardshell Baptist and his church regarded such melodies as “Devil’s songs” or “sinful songs.” (p. xxxi)

They never stop! Fortunately, the world is round, so the Fair Folk, and now the Singing Folk, can’t be cornered. They can always keep going west. I recommend Japan, where the anime industry would welcome them.

Time-traveling pronunciation

By Joe

On May 30, 2024

In Alliterative Verse, Slow learner

While thinking about alliterative verse, I came across an interesting case. Alliteration, in the traditional Old English form, doesn’t have to be on the first consonant in the words — it’s on the first consonant in the stressed syllables. A thousand years later, in Modern English it’s not rare to have more than one syllable in a word that gets stress, though the others are less emphasized. (24% of the words in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary have a secondary stress in them.) We still alliterate on the stressed syllable, in principle. Which brings me to the word “technological”. The way I say it, the primary stress is on “log”, and the Wise Clerks of Pittsburgh agree with me. Let’s try to alliterate with it:

“Technological Language” sounds like alliteration, and it matches the Old English form.
“Technological Treatise” sounds like alliteration, too.

It’s like the second word causes a change in how we hear the first. The secondary stress on “tech” gets promoted. The presence of “Treatise” seems to move the primary accent from the third syllable “log” to the first syllable “tech”. But I’ve already read the first word — This is time travel!

Light cone, showing the accessible past an future of any event where the speed of light is the limit.

By: K. Aainsqatsi at Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Maybe I can see a physical mechanism here. When I read, I “hear” the words in my head, but I sight-read the words much faster than that. Reading is different from systems described by the Theory of Relativity, because signals are primarily at the speed of (thinking about) sound, but there are also light signals that can exceed that maximum speed. Which makes the “sound cone” permeable, unlike the light cone we know about from Relativity.

So my eyes see the next word before I read the line into memory, and therefore later words in a line can affect the earlier ones. I’m sure every theater director already knew this.

Post Scriptum

The same thing happens with “proctological”, but in this case the dilemma can be resolved easily by never using that word in a poem.

What kind of tree is Treebeard?

By Joe

On May 11, 2024

In fantasy, graphs

J.R.R. Tolkien spends so much time talking about trees, telling us details of their species and their growth, that it’s curious there’s one omission. What kind of tree is Treebeard?

A few seemed more or less related to Treebeard, and reminded them of beech-trees or oaks. But there were other kinds. Some recalled the chestnut: brown-skinned Ents with large splayfingered hands, and short thick legs. Some recalled the ash: tall straight grey Ents with many-fingered hands and long legs; some the fir (the tallest Ents), and others the birch, the rowan, and the linden. [LR 3.04.142]

We get a hint here that Treebeard sort-of looks like an oak (400 species) or a beech (13 species), but it’s never explicitly stated and that doesn’t narrow it down much. Can we use external information to figure out what Tolkien might have been thinking? Of course we can!

Since Treebeard can get most of the Ents of Fangorn to a moot with one morning’s work, he must be a central figure in the Ent community. If we had a graph of relationships between trees, then we could look for centrally-positioned tree species. Treebeard is probably one of those.

The European Commission has funded research into forest types and the species that make them up, all available on line.¹ With a lot of transcription² and a little bit of matrix algebra, we can turn their tree species matrix into a species adjacency matrix, and thence into a graph.³ All matrix algebra and graph metrics were computed with the R statistical software, version 4.2.2.

I have omitted the species that only live by themselves, most conspicuously the junipers. (See the Canary Island pine, all off by its lonesome? Some species are even more isolated than that.) The introduced species are also removed,⁴ because Treebeard is nothing if not native to his forest. There are 112 species in the graph, after we remove the singletons. There are 92 types/subtypes of forest.

The graph is a dense cluster in the middle, with a halo of sub-graphs for Turkey, Portugal, Scandinavia, and the Canaries.

The European Forest Matrix converted to a graph. Hardwoods are in orange and softwoods in blue. Click to embiggen.

Even blown up to full size, that graph is too tightly connected to analyze with just eyeballs, so we need mathematical measures of centrality. I used four:

Degree just counts how many species can live next to the tree of interest, because they exist in the same kinds of forest. The Ent with the most friends has the highest degree.
Page Rank is how the Google search engine works. If your species is around other species that are themselves around lots of species, your centrality is higher. If organizing an Entmoot involves recruiting highly-connected Ents to help you out, the tree with the highest page rank would be a good one to do it.
Closeness is a measure of how many steps through the graph (friend-of-a-friend) a species needs to get to every other species. This would be useful for organizing an Entmoot by yourself.
Betweenness (that’s really the word) looks at the shortest paths through the graph connecting each pair of species. The species that’s on the most of those paths is the most between — this is the tree that would know all the news in the forest.

We don’t know how Treebeard did it; it might have been any of them, so I looked at these measures to find species that are near the top on all of them. Here are the candidates.

Ash: The European ash tree has the highest degree centrality. 65 other species connected to it. That’s because the range map on Wikipedia says it grows basically anywhere with water. Definite possibility! Except the text says that other Ents look like ashes, and they’re not Treebeard. Also, Gandalf’s staff was made of ash, so I doubt an ash-ent would think he’s such a good friend. So the ash is out.

Black elder: Besides elderberries being tasty, the Black elder has the highest page rank. Unfortunately, it looks more like a bush than a tree. I’m sad that this one didn’t work out because Celeborn addressing an elder as “Eldest” would have been a great joke.

Field maple: This tree isn’t number one on any metric, but it’s #3 or #4 on all of them so it’s a contender. It loses out because it doesn’t have any textual support. It doesn’t look anything like an oak or a beech. (No beech ranks above #8 on any metric.)

Pedunculate oak: This is the good old English oak. It’s a very long-lived tree, and very tall. The Wikipedia article says there are more ancient oaks in England than any other country in Europe. It also cites old myths saying oaks were the “thunderstorm trees”, with which Saruman might agree. Merry said “The Forest had felt as tense as if a thunderstorm was brewing inside it”. [LR 3.09.059] Though it’s not higher than #3 on any metric, this is almost certainly the species Tolkien was thinking of. But… the graph suggests a dark-horse candidate.

These trees have branches that look like arms. They're totally Ents.

Turkey oaks in New York’s Central Park

Turkey oak: It’s got a funny name (OK, maybe not as funny as “pedunculate”), but it’s #1 on the betweenness metric. Turkey oaks have an interesting history. Wikipedia says, “The species’ range extended to northern Europe and the British Isles before the previous ice age, about 120,000 years ago.” I can’t help remembering Elrond saying the Old Forest once stretched all the way from the Shire to Dunland, but had shrunk since. Almost like Treebeard could have walked among Turkey oaks from Wellinghall to England, but now there’s just empty lands between them.

So I liked Turkey oaks, but on top of that, searching for Turkey oaks on line took me to the website for Central Park. They have Turkey oaks there, and look at them! The one on the left is absolutely an Ent, caught in mid-pandiculation.

Credit where credit is due

About a quarter of the way through this exercise, I realized I was tracing the steps of Kieran Healy of Duke University, whose essay on how British intelligence might have caught Paul Revere if only they’d known some math is one of the funniest things ever written about graph analysis. Note for his most-obscure joke: “eigenvector centrality” is the same as what I called “page rank” here.

A physicist loose among the liberal arts

Oh, all right

Post Scriptum

Credit where credit is due