Speaking Australian

So, I got an interesting query after making my recent post re. Alexander Macdonald's THE LOST EXPLORERS [1906], asking whether the author included any examples of Aborigine language in it. The answer is, a little but not much. But since I'd fd this aspect of the book interesting myself, esp. given Tolkien's endemic interest in languages, and since I got the query, I thought I'd go ahead and make this second, follow-up post re. what little 'native language' is included in the book.

First, there's ghingi, or more properly the ghingi-ghingi, the sound made by a monster or demon or god that can apparently be mimicked by a clever Outbacker through a device rather like a bull-roarer. (p. 84-85)

Next, there's Wangul, the name for the great Dweller in the Waters, apparently another god/beast/monster. Like the Bunyip, this seems to be something greatly feared rather than sought out. (p. 246/247)

Also, there's Babba, or "water", which gets repeated over and over during what's meant to be a comic scene when they capture a native and torture him a little to get him to lead them to his tribe's hidden water supply. (p. 260-263)

Last of all, there's the term Bilya Bakan, meaning 'sorcerer', applied by an advanced tribe to one of the captured explorers who they've become convinced has magical powers. Shaman or witch doctor wd probably also be rough equivalents in other cultures. (p. 346/347).

In addition to these, there are two brief descriptions of what Aborigine language sounded like to the English interlopers:

[a native] "addressed Mackay in a series of unintelligible ejaculations -- presumably of inquiry" (p. 334)

and

"the aged chief suddenly hastened forward, and shrilled a few words to Bentley, which had the effect of arousing that happy man to a true sense of his responsibilities. He answered the old warrior in an odd monosyllabic language, which he spoke with perfect ease, much to the astonishment of the youthful members of the group, who had never before heard a white man converse so fluently in the savage tongue. For some moments they held high conversation thus . . . " (p. 345)

Of course, I don't believe for a moment that there's such a thing as a single Aborigine language spoken all over the continent, any more than there's a 'Native American' tongue or a language known as 'European' or 'Asian'. But a few universals for words like 'water' don't push probability too badly, even after over 40,000 years of divergence. I'd hoped when reading this to catch some hints of the origins of Ghan-buri-Ghan, but if anything I'd afraid they're more like THE HOBBIT's goblins. Alas. Would that it were not so.

--John R.

current reading: CROW PLANET [2009]

St. Veep

So, years ago (September 1978) I wrote to Blackwells and asked if they had for sale any of a list of books to which Tolkien had contributed. And they wrote back that yes, they had one: OXFORD POETRY 1915. So I bought it, for fifteen pounds (plus an extra pound's postage); the first of the few more-or-less rare Tolkien book I own*

*another being the report on the Lydney excavation containing Tolkien's note on The Name Nodens, a particular favorite of mine among his lesser works.

Edited by G.D. H. C. (= mystery writer GDH Cole) and T.W.E. (= T. W. Earp, the original twerp), it's actually an interesting little volume, containing poems not just by Tolkien but fellow T.C.B.S. member G. B. Smith (I suppose the only book Smith's work appeared in during his lifetime) and also poems by Dorothy L. Sayer and Aldous Huxley. In fact, while I'm glad to have it, Tolkien's poem ("Goblin Feet") is one of the volume's weaker entries.

One of the poems in it I've always rather liked is the following. I know nothing about the author (Esther Lilian Duff), except that she was a 'home student', whatever that is**

**(I'm writing this from the Little Rock airport, with no chance to look things up)

In any case, thought I'd share. Here it is:

"A Kalendar"

I made a Kalendar of Saints

To name upon my rosary,

And daily I entreat their aid for thee.

To guard thee during sleep

I name St. Veep;

St. Prisca has thy wardrobe in her care,

And blithe St. Hugh the dressing of thy hair;

St. Madoc aids the toilette of my fair.

When thou betimes to household tasks repair,

St. Silvester is there;

St. Chad inspects the linen and the lace;

Each polished spoon reflects the shining face

Of St. Remigius, minister of grace,

And o'er the meal presides St. Boniface.

To keep thy missal, tempting thee to read,

I name St. Bede;

And later, when thy friends shall visit thee,

Ensuring that the talk be blithe and free,

I seek betimes the bland St. Alphege;

Whilst to thy pen, lest haply thou shouldst need it,

Attends St. Deusdedit.

And when the little masque of day is over,

Gentle St. Damien of Villanova

Takes charge of thee, and all that thou shalt know

Of this hour's passing is that thou wilt grow

Dreamily willing for the night, and so

(Turning a bead in prayer to deft St. Probin

For thine unrobing)

To guard thee during sleep

I name St. Veep.

—OXFORD POETRY 1915, ed. G.D.H.C. & T.W. E. (p. 3–4)

THE LOST EXPLORERS

So, one of the interesting side-notes I came across when preparing my Haggard & Tolkien paper was the information in John Garth's TOLKIEN & THE GREAT WAR that in 1912 Tolkien gave the King Edward's School library, where he'd graduated just a year before, a copy of THE LOST EXPLORERS by Alexander Macdonald [1906]*

This got my curiosity up, and after doing a little poking about on amazon, bookfinder, and abebooks, I managed to find a copy on the last of these (from The Book Moose, in Lincoln New Hampshire) -- in good condition, for a v. reasonable price.

Naturally, I read it in hopes of finding some hint that it'd influenced Tolkien in some way. And I have to say I drew pretty much a complete blank. Since my mind is full of Tolkien, I can suggest a few parallels and echoes here and there, but none of them are compelling and only one is strong enough that I'd think it worth drawing attention to. In general I'd have to conclude that this is a book Tolkien read and liked and wasn't influenced by. Which of course is the case with most of the things Tolkien wd have read in his lifetime, only the barest fraction of which we can identify with confidence; it's salutary to have a reminder of that once in a while.

So, it's good to know what kind of book Tolkien enjoyed,** but I won't be doing an essay on "Alexander Macdonald: A Lost Source" anytime soon.

That said, here's a quick precis of the book, followed by a listing of occasional Tolkienesque bits.

Two sixteen year old English kids decide to give up their poorly paid clerkships before they get too deeply into a rut and a lifetime of wage-slaving and take up with an explorer just back from Australia, where he lost his entire party in an Aborigine ambush. They join forces and head out to the Outback with him, where they engage in gold-mining for a hundred pages or so to earn capital for their expedition. The best thing about this part are the names of their five partners in the enterprise, all "bushmen" (outbackers) with years of experience: Nuggety Dick, Emu Bill, Dead Broke Dan, Never Never Dave, and The Shadow (no relation). The weirdest thing about this part is the evaporating gold they find, which sublimates away when exposed to air (one of our two lads finds a chemical treatment that restores the gold to its original purity. Yeah, right.

Once they've defeated the local bully (not once but three times, in three different ways), a villain who I imagined as looking a lot like Eric Campbell (the 'heavy' in a dozen of Chaplin's early shorts, most notably 'EASY STREET' [1916], they head out into the Never Never (as they call the Outback). Much detail about desert travel with camels follows, along with several encounters with the Aborigines that are painfully, teeth-grindingly racist through and through. The very worst bit, I think, comes when one of our heroes is tricked into falling into a natural cistern by a native he's chasing; once rescued his comrades not only take all the water for themselves and their camels but glory in the fact that the local Aborigine community must have hoarded this water supply for months if not years and that they'll be unable to continue living there now that it's gone. Ugh.

Eventually they reach the 'Mystic Mountain' where the previous expedition was wiped out, a sheer unclimbable peak that towers some eight hundred feet high, which is presented as a vast height they can't figure out how to get over or around. Maybe western Australia is pretty flat, or maybe I've just become a mountain snob since moving from (v. flat) SW Arkansas and (even flatter) SE Wisconsin, but I'm suspecting that Mr. Macdonald must have been a Lowlander Scot, not a Highlander.

And here's where, belatedly, the story becomes almost interesting. While most of the explorers are asleep their camp is attacked in the night by natives, who have a secret tunnel going through the mountain that, from the outside, merely looks like a crack in the rock; after the natives retreat back through it it closes with a snap. This sounds a bit like the ambush on Thorin & Co in the mountain-cave high in the Misty Mountains, but while interesting I don't think the parallel's strong enough to build much on. And, just because we haven't had any weirdness in a while, the explorer's leader decides to blow a hole in the mountain wall so our heroes can slip into the hidden tunnel without the natives being any the wiser -- we're actually told several times they'll never notice a new tunnel blasted into the side of their own.

It all ends happily, of course; the members of the previous expedition turn out to all be alive as captive guests of the tribe beyond the mountain, and despite the sad death of one of our plucky gang a little earlier, all the rest escape safely, carrying with them a small fortune in gold and a much larger one in diamonds and rubies. Finally, in a nice closing touch, when they stumble out of the desert two months later they don't recognize their gold camp anymore, since it's now a sizable town (named after one of our two teen heroes). Plus, one of the missing explorers turns out to be the long-lost uncle of one of the lads. Happy endings all round, and none too soon (at 378 pages, this isn't a quick read).

As for possible Tolkien echoes, these are disappointingly few. At one point the Shadow uses what from the description must be a bullroarer to frighten off natives, but he doesn't call it a "bull-roarer" but a ghingi (this being the name of the monster it sounds like). There's one scene where the explorer feels remorse when he realizes he's introduced wanderlust into the two likely lads which made me think of Uncle Bilbo and the youngsters he inadvertently encouraged to be adventurous -- but Tolkien never actually wrote that scene, though the original Trotter story came close. At one point they capture a native and I thought the book might be about to go into a taming-of-Smeagol scene, but instead they feed him a huge amount of salt so that he'll be so desperate he can't help but reveal his tribe's well/natural cistern (that is, they torture him a bit in what's intended to be comical fashion. again, ugh). Other slight echoes aren't specific enough -- their saying farewell, King Thorin fashion, to their dying comrade after a battle; the reflection adventures are "All not sunshine and romance and pleasurable excitement" (cf. Bilbo's sad reflections early on in The Hobbit), or the drama of the Aborigines passing by the plucky hero in the dark in the tunnel, allowing him to slip past into daylight on the other side of the mountain (cf. Bilbo's escape from Gollum), or finally the surprise of coming home and finding yourself presumed dead and everything greatly changed in the months you've been away. All these seem too generic to make much of. The lone linguistic note is a brief mention of one of the lost explorers actually being able to talk to the tribe beyond the mountain in their "monosyllabic language" (which, even knowing as little about Aborigine culture as I do, seems wildly unlikely).

So, in the end I don't think this book had much if any influence -- on Tolkien or anyone else. WHich, in a way, is more a relief than a disappointment. Because I have to admit I didn't enjoy THE LOST EXPLORERS at all. While it's certainly better than S. R. Crockett's THE BLACK DOUGLAS, Macdonald was no Haggard; his 'boys' book" doesn't transcend mere adventure into something worth reading even by those not part of his original target audience -- both in age group and time-and-place. The pervasive casual racism towards the Aborigines is particularly disturbing to any modern reader -- or perhaps the back-to-back doses of so many Haggards plus Conan Doyle plus this has rubbed me raw on that point. The colorful names (e.g., Never Never Dave and Dead Broke Dan) are a hoot, but that's really not enough to carry a reader through. Ah well; some lost explorers are just as well staying lost.

--JDR

current audiobooks: EXODUS and GOD IS NOT GREAT

current reading: "The Invention of Tradition" and YSABEL.

........................

*no relation to George MacDonald, apparently.

**I'm assuming here that since he owned the book he read it, and since he donated it to his old school he'd liked it, before having outgrown it by the time he was in college. Neither of these is actually provable, but they seem reasonable enough.

An Offer, Rescinded

So, yesterday I had the surprising experience of reading something intriguing and unexpected in Marquette's alumni magazine -- alumni magazines usually being as mild and uncontroversial a format as may be imagined. This time, the outgoing president's lead editorial included two strangely allusive paragraphs referring to recent events I'd heard nothing about till then:

"At the end of this academic year I made one of the most difficult decisions of my 14 years as president in rescinding a job offer made to a candidate for dean of the . . . College of Arts and Sciences. I came to this decision only after considerable reflection on a range of factors but most particularly on aspects of the candidate's writings as they pertained to Marquette's mission and identity. You may have heard various leaders talk about how lonely it can be at the moment of a particularly critical and tough decision. For me it was actually in being alone and in drawing upon my faith and training as a Jesuit and a theologian that I was able to strip away outside voices and interests and discern my own obligations as president of this institution and the community that I love and to act accordingly -- and, I continue to believe, correctly.

"However, the decision provoked great concern among some members of the university community -- some of which stunned me, particularly accusations of bias because of sexual orientation, and all of which saddened me, because it revealed shortcomings in our own internal processes and created divisiveness on campus. But from this incident, I also learned a great deal, including our need to deepen our own understanding of how our university is both Catholic and catholic, both of the Church and inclusive, open to ideas and opinions and welcoming to all people, regardless of age, culture, ethnicity, race, gender, sexual orientation or social class. During my tenure . . . we have established a well-documented record of working for diversity and inclusivity among our students and staff and have fiercely defended academic freedom against those outside of the university who question it . . . "

--Fr. Rbt A. Wild, S.J.;

MARQUETTE Magazine (Summer 2010 issue), pages 3-4

(emphasis mine)

Curious what all this was about, since Fr. Wild tried hard to avoid actually saying anything about what he was talking about, I did a quick online search and learned that what seems to have happened back in May is roughly along these lines. The Search Committee for the new dean had picked a woman for the job who happens to be lesbian. The university first offered her the job and then suddenly withdrew the offer, apparently after the local Archbishop got involved (though his weighing in against her is hard to document). The stated reason was not her sexual orientation, they said (that sort of discrimination wd open them to all kind of lawsuits), but that fact that she had written in favor of gay marriage.

So, it's sad to see Marquette's attempt to enter the twenty-first century result in them sliding all the way back into the nineteenth instead, but not that surprising. I thought the most telling part was not that Marquette wd, in a sudden spasm, revert to arch-orthodoxy (that was the pattern at least once a year all the time I was there). Nor that Fr. Wild wd be shocked that some might accuse him of bias, simply because he'd just committed a discriminatory act. No, it was his conclusion that all this teaches him there's something wrong with their search committee. If only they'd made sure nobody who wasn't the proper sort of person holding the proper sort of opinions got the nod, he'd have been spared firing someone for holding an unOrthodox opinion before she even started to work for him.

All in all, I think the erstwhile-dean is lucky to have been fired before she even started, rather than the first time she said or wrote anything that didn't agree in full with the current administration in Rome.

--JDR

current audiobook: GENESIS (Jacob & Joseph)

current reading: YSABEL by G. G. Kay

The Darkness Beneath (More Nightmares for the Tolkien Children?)

The Darkness Beneath (More Nightmares for the Tolkien Children?)

So, Janice once commented, after hearing me read out a passage from THE HOBBIT (from Chapters IV [goblin tunnels] or V [lost in dark, Gollum] I think, though it cd have been VIII [Mirkwood]), that Tolkien's bedtime stories must have occasionally given his children-listeners nightmares and gotten him into hot water with Mrs. T. I was reminded of that recently when listening to the Derek Jacobi audiobooks of ROVERANDOM and LETTERS FROM FATHER CHRISTMAS (the expanded edition of THE FATHER CHRISTMAS LETTERS).* For such a light-hearted book, ROVERANDOM has one surprisingly dark passage (both figuratively and literally) that I only noticed when Jacobi's reading drew it to my attention:

[T]he deeps [of the sea] are . . . full of dark and awful places where light has never been and never will be, because they will never be uncovered till light has all gone out. Horrible things live there, too old for imagining, too strong for spells, too vast for measurement. [p.63]

cf. also the passing mention of "the deep, dark, unmentionable monsters of the black abysses [who] do horrible and wicked things." [page 71]

This rather reminded me of two passages in THE LORD OF THE RINGS, first when Gandalf is discussing The Watcher in the Water:

Something has crept, or has been driven out of dark waters under the mountains. There are older and fouler things than Orcs in the deep places of the world. [LotR.327]

the second comes as part of Gandalf's account of his battle with the Balrog:

Gandalf: Long I fell, and he fell with me . . . we plunged into the deep water and all was dark. Cold it was as the tide of death . . .

Gimli: Deep is the abyss that is spanned by Durin's Bridge . . .

Gandalf: Yet it has a bottom, beyond light and knowledge . . . Thither I came at last, to the uttermost foundations of stone . . . We fought far under the living earth, where time is not counter . . . at last he fled into dark tunnels. They were not made by Durin's folk . . . Far, far below the deepest delvings of the Dwarves, the world is gnawed by nameless things. Even Sauron knows them not. They are older than he. Now I have walked there, but I will bring no report to darken the light of day . . .

I know about the associations of Ungoliant with the dark places beneath the world, but these seem to me a wholly separate, parallel set of associations with (1) immemorial darkness, (2) ancient evil, and (3) subterranean waters. I've long been struck by the possibility of a link between Charles Williams' P'o-l'u and Lovecraft's Lost R'lyeh (both of which feature dark ancient octopoidal entities of uttermost evil)** on the one hand and Tolkien's Watcher on the other; these passing references in as innocuous a tale as ROVERANDOM make me think this was a more important element in Tolkien's cosmology than I'd realized; I'll be on the look-out, next time I read the earlier Silm. material, for any other hints at this, particularly in the Ungoliant/Earendel/moon-boat stories.

--JDR

current reading: THE LOST EXPLORERS by Alexander Macdonald

current audiobook: GOD IS NOT GREAT by Christopher Hitchens; THE BOOK OF GENESIS (King James Bible).

*I just tried to see about upgrading these to cd, but only the audio cassette version seems to be available. Anyone know if a cd edition of these has ever been released? If not, what a pity: Jacobi does a wonderful job, particularly with FCL.

**it seems there is a chance that Williams knew of at least some of Lovecraft's work, but I haven't been able to track down anything concrete or specific. And of course both (or even all three) might be drawing on a common older source unknown to me.

Sinkhole in Milwaukee

So, last time we were in Milwaukee we were distressed to discover that the house we were married in,* which had the best upstairs flat ever, was being torn down.

Looks like some form of karma struck the neighborhood this past week, since Janice just found the following article about a huge sinkhole opening up at the corner of Oakland & North, a block away from where we lived. Here's the story:

http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/99071294.html?

Glad no one was hurt in the incident, but it's an odd feeling to read about a spot I've walked over and driven over many, many times suddenly giving way, having been undercut no doubt slowly by years and years of erosion. I assume this sinkhole more or less connects with the gully just to the south of that. What a mess it must be trying to re-route Lower East Side traffic around that.

--John R.

*eighteen years ago today!

**at the Mythcon I was just at two weekends ago, I learned from Mark Hooker's presentation that what we call "sinkholes" the British call "potholes" -- hence I was amused that here's an example that fits both definitions at once.

Conan Doyle

So, recently I was reading THE QUEST FOR SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE: THIRTEEN BIOGRAPHERS IN SEARCH OF A LIFE, ed. by Jon L. Lellenberg [1987]. I had assumed, from its title, that this consisted of thirteen Doyle experts each writing about a part of the author's life, but instead it's thirteen chapters, each of which critiques a different Doyle biography. I was curious to read some of Richard Lancelyn Green's work (he contributes two chapters) as well as Lellenberg's ('The American' in David Grann's account). I'm pleased to discover that Green's work is first-rate, as is Lellenberg's. The only Doyle biography I've read being TELLER OF TALES by Daniel Stashower [1999], so I learned a lot here.

I still believe Doyle may have been the most gullible man who ever lived (Dr. John Dee being a distant second), and that his knighthood came from writing propaganda in defense of the indefensible, but I hadn't realized he was essentially a neocon, always ready to weigh in supporting any expansion of the Empire. The biographers try hard to argue that Doyle is Holmes, whereas a far better case can be made out for him being a Watson who thought he was a Holmes. They argue, with varying degrees of unsuccess, for the importance of Doyle's historical novels about the Hundred Years' War and other work, at one point raising the question of what would be "his place in literature" had he never written the Holmes stories. That, too, is easy for an outsider to answer: None. Without the Holmes series, he'd be about as well known today as W. W. Jacobs; it's his one enduring claim to fame. Finally, it was fascinating to see how the Doyle family --first his widow, then his son, and finally his daughter-- manipulated Doyle scholars for three-quarters of a century, dangling out the hope of access to 'the family archives' in return for biographers portraying A.C.D. the way his family wanted him portrayed (i.e., not as he was but as they imagined him to be).* This is the same archive the loss of access to seems to have driven Richard L. Green to suicide, his long-planned biography, decades in the researching, apparently still unwritten.

Quite aside from Doyle being an interesting fellow to read about, I was struck by some parallels to Tolkien studies.

First, like Doyle, Tolkien essentially created his own genre, reducing those who came before to precursors** and branding those who came after as successors.

Second, both Doyle and Tolkien enjoyed decades of popularity without academic support.

Third, each attracted the attention of a cadre of independent scholars, publishing in their own self-generated journals that only gradually, reluctantly, grudgingly over time began to gain some critical acceptance.

Still, I'm glad I'm a Tolkien scholar rather than a Doyle scholar. I'd rather defend "Goblin Feet" over THE COMING OF THE FAIRIES anyday.

--JDR

*for example, none of the contributors to Lellenberg's book seem to be able to bring themselves to say that Houdini exposed Mrs. Doyle as a fraudulent medium -- a pretty big piece of evidence to suppress (one, and only one, does add a ftnt admitting that Houdini left an account of the incident that differs from Doyle's).

**one biographer's unflattering description of "The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes" (that is, the first generation of Doyle's imitators and successors) notes "To describe the stories as invariably clumsy would be to overgeneralize, but a brisk trot through them gives the impression of haste and disinterest, and sheer incompetence" -- which might stand as a fair description of several of the more famous 'in the tradition of Tolkien' fantasy series from the seventies and eighties and nineties.