Most scholarly texts don’t put the useful information up front like this.1
What other information do you need?
Several things growing in my yard are useful against Elves, which I don’t doubt is why I see them so seldom.
I was reading the story in Malory of sir “La Cote Male Tayle” when a question occurred to me. 2 There’s a big fight scene at the end with three brothers: sir Playn de Fors, sir Playn de Amoris, and sir Plenoryus. 3 For anyone who loves allegory (and who doesn’t?) this is the good stuff: sir Brunor the eponymous hero has to simultaneously defeat a knight who’s full of strength and one who’s full of love. Isn’t that the constant struggle when you’re in a medieval romance — How do we meet the Scylla and Charybdis of sex and violence and come out victorious? And our hero does so, by forcing his opponents into a tactical position where he was never caught between them. So far, so good.
But then we get to the third brother. Sir Brunor loses to him, and Lancelot has to bail him out. What does his name symbolize? If you search on the web you find people who say “honor”. But those aren’t etymologically sound; a syllable is missing. And besides, what’s the allegorical interpretation we should make when a knight is defeated by honor? I don’t think that’s it. We could approach the problem as a triad: a knight can fail through an excess of strength, love, and … i don’t know … pride, maybe? But if pride is the problem, Lancelot isn’t the one who will bail you out.
I went rummaging in a dictionary of medieval French, where the best I could find is ore, meaning “prayer”, like the word “orison” today. I can just stretch my credulity to see some meaning in a knight defeated by the power of prayer, but that should happen to the bad guys, not the good guys.
Therefore, I turned to the Arthurian subreddit. A couple of redditors who have apparently read everything came to my aid. Hat tips to u/lazerbem and u/New_Ad_6939 for their explanation. Malory didn’t make up his stories, he adapted them from other romances. In this case, it’s the “Prose Tristan“. In the Prose Tristan, sir Plenorius is an original character, but there were two other unnamed knights in the story. Malory emphasized their role in his telling, which promoted them to the point that he decided they should have names too. Perhaps as a kind of word-play, and because allegory is almost as popular as puns, he picked the names Pleindeforce and Pleindamour as phonetic riffs on Plenorius’s name. But he didn’t take the allegory all the way because that would require (a) thinking up a moral lesson he wished to convey, in a story that’s pretty much just about sword fights and (b) tweaking Plenorius’s name and running the risk that nobody in the audience would recognize Plenorius anymore.
For us readers who picked up Malory first, this is clearly a case of allegorius interruptus.
Dan Stride has purchased a copy of The Bovadium Fragments by J.R.R. Tolkien, and saved me $26.99. I won’t be buying one, even though I love that kind of humor, which I now know is called “macaronic”. When I encountered Godley’s poem “The Motor Bus” about 50 years ago, I laughed my fool head off. But this poem will always be my favorite, not least because it proves that sort of erudition isn’t the sole possession of the English: Malum Opus.
A friend is working on a talk about the relationships Charles Williams had with C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot. He noticed that Eliot gets mentioned more in Williams’s letters than Lewis does, which might not be expected since Lewis and Williams were good friends. He counted 46 letters in Letters to Michal from Serge mentioning Eliot and 33 for Lewis. Is that a big difference, I wondered, or could it be due to chance? That’s the sort of question we use statistics for, if we can think of a way that we’re talking about a random process. The mechanical computation part of statistics is amazingly easy these days, but before I can let the computer tools loose, I have to figure out what question I’m really asking. Fortunately, that’s the fun part.
Let’s begin with a model of mentioning writers in letters. Suppose there’s some underlying thing about writers that’s generally “how important they are to Charles Williams”, which causes him to mention them in a letter or not. For statistics, we don’t need to know the precise definition of what the importance factor is in literary terms (or general-human terms). All we need is that the higher that factor is, the more letters they’ll be mentioned in.
Second assumption: Whether CW wrote a letter to his wife is determined by other parts of life than the literary-importance parameter. (Money, for instance, is a frequent topic.) If we believe that CW wasn’t motivated by his admiration for another writer to dash off a letter, then those circumstances are effectively random for our purposes.4 Now, let’s imagine an ensemble of parallel universes in which different letter-worthy events happen and spare time comes on different days. In each of those worlds, CW writes different letters from the ones he wrote in our world, but the number of times alt-CW mentions another writer is based on that same importance factor. 5 Then the mentions in each universe will fall on a curve whose shape we can calculate. From that posterior distribution, we can estimate how likely one writer is to be mentioned more than another.
Under this model, the number of letters mentioning a writer will have a binomial distribution. For a fixed set of 320 letters (like LtoMfromS), a binomial distribution has one unknown parameter in it; counting mentions in the book tells us information about that parameter.
The blurb on the flyleaf of Letters to Michal from Serge mentions six contemporary writers: Eliot, Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, W.H. Auden, Christopher Fry, and Edith Sitwell. Let’s run them all through the model. (It’s only one line of code apiece.) The peak of each author’s probability density is the most likely number of letters, which matches the figure in the book. What we get from these distributions is the spread — could things have been otherwise? How different are parallel universes likely to be?
The first thing we see is that the more likely a writer is to be mentioned, the more spread around their observed value there is. For example, Dame Edith gets mentioned 3 times; maybe that could have been 4 but it wasn’t going to be 10. Eliot, on the other extreme, might have been mentioned anything from 30 to 60 times under this model.
Binomial distributions for the six authors.
Eliot’s curve is definitely to the right of Lewis’s, but there’s some overlap. How likely is it that Lewis could have been mentioned more? These curves have analytic forms so we could compute it exactly, but these days it’s easier to run a simulation. I drew 10,000 numbers from each of their distributions, and Lewis’s number was higher than Eliot’s in just under 5% of them. That’s pretty solid evidence. The less-mentioned writers overlap more. Lewis was mentioned more than Sayers 99.98% of the time. Sayers is mentioned more times than Auden in 92% of our parallel universes. Auden is mentioned more often than Fry in 68% of them, which is in the range where the difference could have been just by chance.
The basic observation that started me down this path is confirmed: To Charles Williams, Eliot was almost certainly more letter-worthy than Lewis. Might be something to do with that Swedish thingy (as Paul Krugman calls his).
I have just made the acquaintance of the Old Icelandic Hávamál. Among other things, it’s a source of wisdom-verses. The originator of the wisdom related here is Odin himself. Here’s W.H. Auden’s translation in alliterative verse.
Carolyne Larrington points us to stanzas 54-56:
Not trusting this guy until I know where the other raven is.
It is best for man to be middle-wise,
Not over cunning and clever:
The learned man whose lore is deep
Is seldom happy at heart.It is best for man to be middle-wise,
Not over cunning and clever:
The fairest life is led by those
Who are deft at all they do.It is best for man to be middle-wise,
Not over cunning and clever:
No man is able to know his future,
So let him sleep in peace.
The three verses all start with the same two lines, which are a maxim. 6 The third and fourth lines explicate the maxim, slightly.
I know someone these might apply to. Let’s match these up with our friend Samwise Gamgee. We know from his name that he’s one of the middle-wise. How does that work out for him? His lore is not deep — he knows just enough to write silly songs about trolls. [LR 1.12.069] He is certainly deft at all he does. He’s a good cook, even by hobbit standards [LR4.04.027] and the restoration of the Shire after Sharkey’s depredations is largely his work. [LR 6.09.021] He’s not good at thinking, but he knows that. “Think, if you can!” is good practice for the half-wise. [LR 2.10.097] Can he sleep in peace? Like a log. [LR1.07.037]
So this supernatural being who looks like an old man in shabby grey robes drafts a medium-wise person to accompany Frodo. That’s the beginning of Sam’s relationship with Gandalf. He can be forgiven for wondering who this old guy actually is. Though by the time they get to Moria, Sam is sure Gandalf isn’t Odin. [LR 2.04.039] The role of Anglo-Saxon Merlin is still open, of course.7.
I searched all kinds of places around the World-Wide Web for someone who’s noticed this before, but came up blank. I guess it’s either too obvious or not significant enough to be included in a journal paper. Which means it ought to be perfect for a blog post.
When Old English maxims appear in poetic usage, as opposed to collections, they frequently take the form of an indisputably true observation about nature, followed by a statement about the current situation, from which we are to infer an analogy that will guide the character’s choice. That sounded familiar, but it took me days to figure out what I was remembering. It was a song by Jerome Kern & Oscar Hammerstein from “Showboat“:
Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly,
I gotta love one man till I die.
Can’t help lovin’ that man of mine
Or, just maybe, it was Tom Lehrer. Either way, I love seeing thousand-year callbacks in popular culture.
It’s fun hearing Alan Sisto and Sara Brown on the Prancing Pony Podcast judge Aldarion and Erendis by the standards of a 21st-century two-career couple. It’s not surprising that pre-modern Númenoreans fall short, especially since Aldarion is in line to be a king, and Sara has told us before how little she thinks of kings. But we ought to be a little bit fair to Aldarion, and try to infer how he’s doing by his own standards.
How good was Aldarion at being a crown prince? The duties of a crown prince are almost the same as the duties of a king, except doing them as an apprentice. I can think of six big ones. There could be more, but they’d just be guesswork, given how few details we know about what was going on on the island.
1. Secure the succession
This is the top priority for any royal heir. Alan and Sara haven’t really talked bout this, as of Episode 388, but to be fair, J.R.R. Tolkien didn’t pay much attention to it, either. (cf. Boromir, Faramir, Théodred, Éomer…) Aldarion doesn’t have a leg to stand on here. It’s a shameful dereliction of duty to trust the grace of the Valar to keep you alive until some century when you feel like having a child.
2. Manage the royal bureaucracy
To the extent that Númenor is like an ancient kingdom (probably Egypt), Aldarion is guilty here, too. Except that there are few things Tolkien thought less of than bureaucracies (Letter 52), so Númenor may not have had one for Aldarion to master.
But now we get to the things Aldarion was paying attention to. Setting up the Guild of Venturers was a very clever thing for the crown prince to do. It covers four things I could think of that he ought to be doing.
3. Lead large groups
Leadership is the sine qua non of a king. It’s essential for the heir apparent to practice it before it becomes a matter of survival. If the crown prince doesn’t spend his time doing something like a Guild of Venturers, you get Henry the 8th, and nobody but tour guides wants that. Tar-Meneldur makes a fair point that Aldarion needs to learn to lead the women of Númenor too, but the skills aren’t very different. Besides, this seems to imply that Meneldur wasn’t expecting war.
4. Secure resources for the country
People always want more than they have. We’re humans. That’s what we do. A country with a growing population will need more stuff, and a good king finds ways to provide it. Of course, if everyone in Númenor is like Aldarion they won’t have a growing population, but then they just die out and nobody sings songs about them in the Third Age.
4. Expand the country’s power (or “splendour” in Tolkien’s word)
We have to look into the future to see why this is important. At the time of the story, though Meneldur doesn’t find out until the end, Sauron is threatening Middle-earth and Gil-Galad is worried. Without Aldarion’s focus on building naval power, what use would Númenor be in a fight?
6. Keep the population of unemployed young men manageably small
Bored young men are bad for a country’s stability, as a glance at the newspapers might suggest. Historically, people have tried all kinds of things to keep them out of mischief. The Guild of Venturers must have been a good safety valve. Aldarion deserves credit for finding a productive use for whatever surplus manpower was loafing around the docks.
I’d say a record of 4 wins, 1 loss, and 1 unknown is pretty good for a prince, so maybe we should lighten up on Aldarion just a bit.
Just read a paper by Dennis Wilson Wise 8, in which he talks about the way Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies flatten and trivialize the historical depths of Tolkien’s fiction. It’s always gratifying when someone who thinks deeply about things comes close to my reflexive response. In this case, twenty-five years ago, I walked out of “The Fellowship of the Ring” thinking that (a) If Peter Jackson understands what the Ring is, he didn’t put that in the film, and (b) that could be because the evil of the Ring might strike a bit too close to home for a movie-maker to be comfortable. DWW shows the whole iceberg of which I’d just seen the top.
In the process, he lands some well-deserved punches on Marxist literary critics. I’m always up for that. But he points us to a quotation from Fredric Jameson from 1991 that got me thinking:
…this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world…
Right now, we have a natural experiment to test Jameson’s theory. The USA is backing away from military and economic domination, so if Jameson is right, a new literary and cultural movement is about to emerge. Authors, sharpen your pencils and get to work!
As I mentioned the other day, I’m reading about Old English wisdom poetry. What with the all the references to winter in the examples there, I suddenly realized that Bilbo’s little quatrain in Rivendell is just such a seasonal wisdom poem:
When winter first begins to bite,
and stones crack in the frosty night,
When pools are black and trees are bare,
‘Tis evil in the wild to fare. [LR 2.o3.o14]
As always when I think I’ve discovered something, I go check what Tom Shippey had to say about it. In Chapter 6 of The Road to Middle-earth9 Shippey makes the connection with the coda of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Lost and notes that both contain only words “… rooted in Old English. Both poems would require little change to make sense at any time between AD 600 and now.” So the idea of a wisdom poem is kind of there, but not explicitly stated. Scull and Hammond, in The Collected Poems10, bundle this poem in with “I Sit beside the Fire and Think”, but don’t make any further reference.
Bilbo’s quatrain supports my reading of the Exeter Maxim so well, I have to suspect that remembering it is what gave me that reading in the first place.
I’m six pages into A Store of Common Sense: Gnomic Theme and Style in Old Icelandic and Old English Wisdom Poetry by Carolyne Larrington11, and I’ve run into a swamp. Scholars from 50 years ago got themselves wrapped around the axle, trying to figure out the difference between maxims that have “bið” in them and those that have “sceal” in them. “Bið” is a fancy word for “is”. “Sceal” is our modern word “shall”, among other things. Those other things are making a mess as the scholars try to figure out when maxim-makers chose to use one or the other.
“Winter bið cealdost” means “winter is [the] coldest [season]”. That’s fine. It’s in a list of seasons, the next of which is “lencten hrimigost (he byð lengest ceald)”, which is the punchline (spring is frostiest, it’s cold for the longest time). Everyone who’s planted a garden knows the temptation to plant as soon as it feels like spring, and then watch your plants die when the temperature drops below freezing two weeks later. Even scholars understand “bið” here.
But then we come to “sceal”. Among its meanings are “oughta be”, “has to be”, and so forth. A parallel maxim to the winter one from Maxims II is in the Exeter Maxims: “forst sceal freosan”. One of the snottors cited on page 7 translates that as “It is appropriate that frost should freeze.” I am unable to understand why. Nobody would ever say that! That sentence means, “Frost is gonna freeze you”! The whole point of Wise Sayings is to warn people about what’s going to happen, and Old English doesn’t have a future tense, so this is what’s available to the writer.
What is it about scholaring that makes people miss things that are obvious?
OK; now I’m up to page 18. Prof. Larrington is no longer quoting distinguished greybeards, but speaking for herself: “I contend there was a body of folk-wisdom, not yet in metrical form, a body which can be sensed…” Exactly. When a writer puts a Wise Saying into the text, they’re not springing some new insight on the reader. The reader already knows it. If a character in a story says a contemporary maxim like, “Never sign anything by neon light,” the expected reaction is “damn right,” not “gee, I never thought of that before.”