I Am Reviewed (in Dutch)

So, thanks to McFarland (thanks Lori) I've now seen the interview of the Shippey festschrift (AUTHOR OF THE NEW CENTURY) that appeared in LEMBAS (vol. 35, whole number 168, March 2015, pages 32-25), the journal of the Dutch Tolkien society, Unquendor.

In addition to being one of the five editors of this collection, I am myself one of contributors as well, so I was curious what they thought of my piece as well as the book as a whole.

As it happens, I cannot read Dutch, beyond recognizing that a passage is (probably) Dutch and not, say, German or Danish.

In any case, not having a Dutch dictionary handy, I decided to see what Google translation would make of it.

Here's the original Dutch text, as transcribed by me from a pdf of the review

Auteur: John D. Rateliff

   Titel: Inside Literature. Tolkien's Explo-

   rations of Medieval Genres

   Inhoud: Overzicht van allerlei manieren waarop

Tolkien vootborduurde op Middeleeuwse teksten,

en dan met name buiten zijn bekende legendarium

om.

   Kerncitaat: "Door de kunst te leren nieuwe ste-

nen te maken in de vorm en stijl van de oude exem-

plaren, was Tolkien in staat zijn eigen Toren te bou-

wen" (145, paragrase). ³

   Mening: Heel verfrissend om eens in kort bestek

te lezen hoe Tolkien allerlei Middeleeuwse voorbeel-

den vormgaf, om dat later in zijn beste werk succosvol

te gebruiken. Een extra woord van lof voor de noten,

die alleen al fascinerend leesvoer vormen.

3) Uiteraard gemodelleerd naar Tolkien's befaamde allegorie van de Toren die op zee uitkijkt, uit zijn Beowulf-lezing..

And here's an English translation, as provided by an online translation site:

Contents: Overview of all the ways Tolkien voot embroidered on medieval texts, and especially outside its known legendarium to.

Key Quote: "By learning the art to make new bricks in the shape and style of the old ones, Tolkien was able to build its own tower" (145 paragrase).

Opinion: Very refreshing to once briefly read how Tolkien vormgaf kinds medieval examples, so later in his best work succosvol to use. An additional word of praise for the nuts, which alone make fascinating reading.

3) Of course, modeled on Tolkien's famous allegory of the Tower overlooking the sea, from his Beowulf lecture ..

--it's nice to see that they liked it.

I will observe that the 'nuts' they particularly liked were probably the 'notes' (noten) -- wh. pleases me, since I always put a lot into the notes of each of my pieces (one in this essay shows how we know C. S. Lewis wrote JRRT's obituary)

--JDR.
current reading: TOLKIEN'S BEOWULF, WHAT MAKES THIS BOOK SO GREAT

today's song: Shooting Shark by Blue Oyster Cult

Jo Walton's Two Thoughts on Tolkien

So, since getting back from my latest trip I've continued to read, on and off, Jo Walton's WHAT MAKES THIS BOOK SO GREAT [2014]. This is a very dip-able collection, given that it's composed of a hundred and thirty blog posts made over the period of more than two years (July 2008 thr Febr 2011). I've also felt no compunction about skipping around and reading the individual entries in whatever order took my fancy, since for the most part they're independent of each other -- the exception being  when she does a block of entries on the same author, such as the five on Cherryh (none of which so much as mention any of the Cherryhs I've read), the fifteen on Lois McMaster Bujold, or the eighteen on Steven Brust (which I think is at least seventeen too many).

Naturally, the first one I read is the one on Tolkien, specifically THE HOBBIT (#122, Sept 2010, p. 412-416). Walton takes the standard line that THE LORD OF THE RINGS is a masterpiece and THE HOBBIT isn't but is merely "journeyman work" (obviously, I disagree). There are a lot of good points in this piece, which I'd like to return to another time, but for now I wanted to highlight two really interesting comments she makes towards the end of her piece.

First, she points out what shd have been obvious but which in fact had never occurred to me before, nor do I recall ever seeing it commented on before: Bilbo has no servants. That seems perfectly normal to us reading THE HOBBIT today, seventy-plus years on, but as Walton points out it wd have been remarkably unusual for the time. Even the Tolkiens, who were by no means as rich as the Bagginses, had servants. Bilbo not only does his own cooking but his own cleaning, including doing the dishes. Yet by the standards of the time a large home like Bag End wd have had a sizable live-in staff: maids, cook, butler, et all. We do find out in THE LORD OF THE RINGS that Bilbo had a gardner (Holman), but that seems to be about it.

Second, does it make any difference to the story that Bilbo is male? To evoke what C. S. Lewis wd have called a supposal, would the story be any different if this were one of the tales of one of those hobbit-lasses we hear tell of who went off on adventures after listening to Gandalf's tales? If this were, say, Belladonna Took's adventure, wd the story be much the same with just the names and a bunch of pronouns changed?  I'm inclined to think Walton is right in suggesting that it wdn't change the story much, which is an interesting thought.*

More on her book as a whole once I've had a chance to finish reading it.

--John R.
current reading: TOLKIEN'S BEOWULF, WHAT MAKES THIS BOOK SO GREAT.



*for one of Tolkien's oft-overlooked intrepid female characters, see the dragon-killer Miss Biggins in the revised (1960s) version of his poem "The Dragon's Visit".

C. S. Lewis calls W. H. Auden "a pansy"

So, the problem with slang is that it changes meaning over time, and it can be hard to pin down what it meant at a particular time and place, when a particular person uses it. Take, for example, the case of C. S. Lewis at one point criticizing the poet W. H. Auden as "rather a pansy" (COLLECTED LETTERS, Vol. III, page 714; letter of Leap Day 1956).

So far as I can tell, this originally mean "effeminate" but later came to mean "homosexual".  The OED is careful to trace the evolution of new meanings of words, but it's no help here, since it doesn't deal with slang (though it's rather nice to have confirmed that 'pansy' is an anglicization of pensee, or 'Thoughts').  I'm not sure if slang dictionaries give the dates at which new meanings are attached to words, and I'm too wrapped up right now to make a library run to find out.

So the question is, shd CSL's comment be glossed as "too much of a sissy" or "too gay"?

--John R.
current reading: TOLKIEN'S BEOWULF

A Crackpot vents on Tolkien

So, about a month ago I was following a series of links from an online piece of C. S. Lewis's voice (thanks to Janice for the original link) to a presentation by my friend the late Christopher Mitchell, to some other Lewies-and-Tolkien sites, finally ending up by stumbling across a weird spiel by a crackpot.

Over the years of reading everything I can by and about JRRT I've seen plenty of pieces I considered a bit odd and occasionally one that was downright weird (like the one about elves being lizards from space), but I've never seen one before who equated linguistic talent with demonic possession. But now I'll have to use the past tense for that statement.

The piece in question is called "JRRT and CSL -- Occult Affiliations" by one Robin M. Fisher, whom I don't otherwise know; it was posted November 11th 2014. Despite being on YouTube it's audio, not video. Here's the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oL5NEXCDsxo

Listening to this, or as much as I could of it (I confess to tuning out during some of his rants, and I skimmed a bit), I was surprised by how much hatred he shows towards his fellow Xians --James Dobson, Focus on the Family, Charles Colson, and Joel Osteen all come in for particular venom.  Nor do non-Xians fare any better -- or, as he calls them, "vile unsaved people" To which I'd say: you mean, like the people Jesus hung out with a lot, to the annoyance of the Pharisees?

Among the things that particularly upset him and that he finds as signs of witchcraft at work are that James Dobson's Focus on the Family offer for sale a book called FINDING GOD IN LOTR for (dum-dum-dah) $13 (13 = promoting Satanism).

Another sign of Satan? He says Tolkien, writing in the midnight hours (dum-dum-dah!),  took twelve years to write LotR, and published in the 13th (dum-dum).  

More examples? Hobbits are "hybrid, demonic-like creatures". "Elves are demonic creatures". "Elves, gnomes, trolls, fairies: all demonic-type entities". Tolkien used runes, which not only smack of occultism but Hitler used them too (Fisher doesn't seem to know that they were just an early alphabet). Tolkien said "I desired dragons", which Fisher interprets as opening himself up to "Pure Evil, Satan Himself."

But I think the weirdest parts of his rant have to do with his equating Tolkien's facility with languages, reading and speaking them, with evil. That Tolkien wd make up new languages of his own, "Elf-ish" provokes the outcry "this is not from God!". That Tolkien then admittedly drew inspiration from his invented language in writing LotR --"that right there shows you how demonic LotR is".  For Fisher, the story was "channelled through him by demonic spirits as a result of this demonic language"; he equates Tolkien's writing LotR with automatic writing and demonic possession (just like Led Zeppelin, he says).

As for people who claim to find Xian themes in Tolkien's work, Fisher is having none of that: "There is much rank blasphemy in Tolkien's work, such as the death and resurrection of the wizard Gandalf".  As for Tolkien's translating The Lord's Prayer into "Elfish": "That's how blasphemous he was".

After about 37 minutes he wanders off onto CSL, but things don't really get any better after that. At fifty minutes or so he drifts onto Charles Williams and the Golden Dawn and the wheels really come off the bus. A few standout lines shd give a pretty good indication of this section: "a reader of Wms' biography is apt to come to the conclusion that he was rather creepy".* Among other things, Wms wrote about King Arthur and Holy Grail ("evil stuff here, okay?"). Fisher quotes someone named David Meyer (Myer?) who apparently has claimed that CSL and JRRT were both closet members of the Golden Dawn, but Fisher rather surprisingly is willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and considers them just fellow travellers. Fisher does insist that two Inkings were in the Golden Dawn: Ch. Wms (whom he says was "demonically possessed") and W. B. Yeats (he pronounces it 'yeets').

All I can say is that the claim that CSL was a member of the Golden Dawn is not just untrue but reveals a staggering ignorance about CSL's mental makeup and attitude towards the occult. Charles Williams was, of course, a member of a Christianized offshoot of the Golden Dawn (founded by A. E. Waite, who had hoped that Wms wd succeed him as head of that order; Wms instead left to found his own), but he hid those associations from his fellow Inklings. And to claim that Yeats was a member of the Inkling is to ignore (a) all histories of the group, which show Yeats never attended a meeting and probably never met Tolkien, (b) that Lewis met and greatly disliked Yeats personally, specifically for his occultism, an (c) that Yeats, a Nobel Prize winning poet and one of the two greatest poets in English in the century, was much too big a fish to swim in the Inklings' orbit.

Towards the end he does swing back to Tolkien in passing, and delivers himself of the following judgement: 

Fisher believes that
fantasy literature is "the particular genre that Satan so chose to use to indocrinate millions and millions . . . into the occult."

and also that
"CSL & Tolkien are going to be responsible for the blood of untold millions of people on their hands, most likely"

It turns out that after more than an hour of this it's just the first half of a much longer diatribe that goes on into another link, but frankly I'd had about all I cd stand by this point.

The one good thing I got out of all this? Fisher's bemused observation that

"JRRT had a middle middle name"

--That's a good one, but I certainly had to wade through a mile of mud to find it.

--John R. 

current reading: WHAT MAKES THIS BOOK SO GREAT by Jo Walton [2014]

current anime: RWBY


*THE WIFE SAYS: To be fair, Charles Williams was creepy.

Tolkien and Women: Dorothy Everett

So, there's that phenomenon every scholar knows where you research, write, and publish a piece, only to later find out that you got something wrong. Some piece of information you relied upon turns out to be wrong, or you simply find new evidence which contradicts a conclusion you made based on all the information available to you at the time. That's why we have errata, and revised editions: to be able to set things to rights with a minimum of fuss. Still, it's a sinking feeling which helps keep us humble.

I don't think there's a word for the opposite phenomenon, that happy moment when you come across some fact that actually strengthens your argument, made on other grounds: something you'd gladly have included in your original piece had you only known of it at the time.

I had an example of that this week. I've been doing some research on the Clarendon Chaucer, Tolkien's never-finished collaboration with Geo. Gordon, as part of my Kalamazoo piece, and ran across a passage that'd escaped my notice before. It seems that in May of 1951, when Tolkien turned over all materials for the long-abandoned project to Oxford University Press in hopes they might be able to find another Middle English scholar to complete the book, Tolkien "has suggested that Dorothy Everett might complete the book" but the head of the Press "does not want to distract her from another project" (Scull-Hammond CHRONOLOGY, p. 375). Given that earlier it had been suggested that E. V. Gordon, Tolkien's collaborator on the SIR GAWAIN & THE GREEN KNIGHT and several other unfinished projects, and fellow future Inkling J. A.W. Bennett might take over the project, that Tolkien wd suggest Everett for the job seems to indicate that he had a high regard for her ability to do a good job as his collaborator. I had argued in my piece "The Missing Women: JRRT's Lifelong Support for Women's Higher Education"* that Tolkien was a strong supporter of women taking advanced degrees and pursing medieval scholarship (as opposed to the much more dismissive attitude of his friend C. S. Lewis), and this provides just another example which I'd have been glad to include, had I noticed it in time. As for Everett herself, I need to look up more about her. As it is, she flits through the great Scull-Hammond CHRONOLOGY without making much of an impact, leaving behind the general impression that she was someone who went to a lot of the same committee meetings as JRRT. I do know she died just two years after being mooted for the Clarendon Chaucer project, so that may have had something to do with its ultimately being abandoned.

--John R.

*recently published in PERILOUS AND FAIR: WOMEN IN THE WORKS OF J. R. R. TOLKIEN, ed. Croft & Donovan

Good Advice (D&D)

So, a blog I like to check once in a while that doesn't update nearly as much as I'd like is Steve Winter's HOWLING TOWER blog. Lately he's been giving out some good advice re. gaming, which I thought I'd share:

http://www.howlingtower.com/2015/03/a-need-for-speed.html

I know when I'm playing a game, be it an rpg or boardgame, I try to plan out my next move over the course of the other folks' turn, so that I know basically what I want to do when my turn comes around. But all too often something will happen that renders all my planning moot, in which case I've found I'm not good at coming up with a good plan on the fly. Of course there are those wonderful moments when something you've spent the two previous turns setting up finally goes off without a hitch. Those are good moments, and all too rare.

So, I'd say re. Steve's post: good advice, harder to follow sometimes than others.

--John R.

Elemental Evil, 5th edition style (D&D)

So, Tuesday (the seventh) was the official release date for the second* mega-adventure for the new Fifth Edition D&D: LORDS OF THE APOCALYPSE, by Rich Baker. I've been looking forward to this since I first learned it was on the way, having (a) been a fan of Rich's work for years** and (b) learned that it was a fifth edition successor/sequel to T1-4. TEMPLE OF ELEMENTAL EVIL, an adventure with a long and illustrious history. There are some (myself among them) who wd give this the nod as the single greatest D&D adventure of all time. It's certainly Menzter's masterpiece, *** his own 'personal best'. Even a decade after its release it was still selling 5k copies a year, simply by word of mouth, before it was deliberately taken out of print. And of course it had superb cover art by the inimitable Keith Parkinson.

That's a hard act to follow, especially when there's already been a 'Return to' back in Third Edition, wherein Monte Cook created a sequel to the original that's also highly regarded, if not quite the legend of the First Edition original.**** I played through T1-4 as a solo adventure, creating an entire party of PCs and running them through as DM, all through what wd otherwise have been a cold, lonely Christmas break  (I know I was fair because I lost a lot of PCs slogging through all the menaces in that Temple). But for RETURN I got to play in a playtest run by Monte himself. Unfortunately, deadlines being what they are, we didn't have time to play through the whole adventure: just the early parts (those set in the updated Hommlet), and in the mines, before the playtest had to wrap up so editing cd begin. I confess to this day I've never read the rest beyond Hommlet and Nulb, in the hopes that someday I might be able to play through the whole thing as a player. The publication of this new version has me finally admitting to myself that that's never going to happen, or at least that the chances of it are vanishingly slim.

So, given that background I was excited to hear that Rich and his team were going to tackle an old classic and give it a new Fifth Edition twist. I admit to being a bit disappointed when I heard it wasn't going to be an update nor a sequel per se but a new adventure addressing the same theme: Elemental Evil. Now that I've got a copy I need to read through this before I can give it any kind of evaluation about how well they pulled it off. The only things that stand out immediately are

(1) unlike the original, which was set against a backdrop that was officially somewhere in the vague world of Greyhawk but was genericized enough to easily drop into your own campaign world, this new adventure is firmly set in the FORGOTTEN REALMS. And I have to confess that, only three support products into the new edition arc (the Introductory adventure, the Tiamat adventure, and now the Elemental Evil adventure), I'm already tired of the FORGOTTEN REALMS, which I think has overstayed its welcome.  I come from the old tradition where each DM (or all the DMs belonging to the same player group) has his or her own campaign world, either creating his or her own adventures or adapting published modules into it with little regard for which TSR world they officially came from. So while I greatly enjoy some of the TSR/WotC game worlds (Ravenloft, Mystara, al-Qadim, and Eberron being particular favorites), I've never been one to ascribe much of a campaign's success to the world it was set in: the adventure itself has always been more important to me.

(2) I'm glad this is a campaign-adventure, a form I particularly like and think brings out the best in D&D:***** starting with low-level characters (1st level is best) and working them all the way up to 10th level or so by the end of the mega-adventure. The game is at its most challenging, and hence for me its most enjoyable, at 1st level, while it's good for those who persevere to receive the award of seeing that character come into his or her own by the end.

(3) My biggest complaint, and it's a biggie: the absence of author's name from the front cover. Or the back cover. Or the title page. The general impression WotC seems to be trying to convey is that all their products are produced by committee. I think it's an impression that serves them ill. The best adventures, and rules sets, et al, bear the distinct impression of an author's personality. Accurately crediting who wrote what is one of the most important things a publisher wants to convey to its audience. It's simple, it's useful, and it's the right thing to do.

--John R.

current reading: this and that
current audiobook: A History of Ancient Egypt
current viewing: RWBY, Howard Zinn documentary (YOU CAN'T BE NEUTRAL ON A MOVING TRAIN)

*we started at TSR the same month (Oct 1991) and I've long considered him one of the best TSR/WotC had to offer: one of the Great Underrated.

**the first having been the HOARD OF THE DRAGON QUEEN/RISE OF TIAMAT two-part mega-adventure by Wolf Baur, Steve Winter, and Alex Winter, which I have but have as yet only skimmed.

***although Gygax's name appears first on the cover, his contribution seems to have been limited to the already-published T1. Village of Hommlet and some notes regarding the subsequent adventure which he turned over to his amanuensis, Mentzer.

****it also ranked in the top ten in the Thirty Greatest D&D Adventures of All Time list, a few steps behind the original, at #4 and # 8 respectively [DUNGEON MAGAZINE #116, November 2004]. The only other 'Return to' adventure that made the top ten was Bruce Cordell's superlative RETURN TO THE TOMB OF HORRORS, at #10, which I think far superior to its original S1. (which came in at #3).

*****other exceptional examples of the campaign-adventure model being NIGHT BELOW by Carl Sargent and RETURN TO THE TOMB OF HORROR by Bruce Cordell, plus (non-D&D) SHADOWS OF YOG-SOTHOTH by Sandy Petersen (et al).

Gifts from Crows

So, thanks to Janice for forwarding me the following link -- amusingly enough, a BBC story about a local Seattle-area event.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31604026


I've also gotten gifts from crows, though only twice, and once that may have been accidental. But the other time there was no doubt: I was walking south along 64th street to meet up with Janice after work, tossing the occasional peanut over my shoulder as I went, which were then swooped on by the very attentive crows in the trees overhead, who carried them off and stashed them, then came back for more. As usual the crows kept moving to get ahead of me, making sure I saw them move across my line of sight, and letting loose the occasional caw-caw-caw, when a crow dropped a chicken bone right in front of me. It was an old, old bone, a drumstick, completely dessicated, and they'd clearly gotten the last bit of good out of it, but there was nothing accidental about their dropping it in front of me. I think they were returning the favor for all the peanuts, but whatever their thinking (and crows definitely can think) there was no doubt about the action.

The key takeaway I get from the article, and personal experience, is that crows are smart birds. They see, and they remember. If something they do gets them the result they want (for example, a peanut), they do it again. I have several populations of crows that know me: the local ones here at Bayview as well as smaller populations around four spots in Tukwila and Renton. I visit two of these spots about once a week or so, but for the others weeks at a time can pass between visits, yet the crows there remember me very well when I do show up. They can also recognize both cars. They have several calls, and if the caw-caw-caw doesn't get them the result they want some will give a little wheedling cry which I suspect is the sound baby crows make to their parents.

So, I'm not the only person in the area to discover how interesting crows are, and how rewarding it is to feed them. They're ungainly compared with the small birds who come up to our feeder (mostly goldfinches, juncos, chickadees, and of course the hummingbirds) but they're also far more interesting.

--John R.
current anime: RWBY

The Thunder Plains (Monte Cook Games)

So, when we got back from our great weekend of whalewatching, during which time I was mostly offline, I learned about a nasty little flamewar that'd hit while I was away, and was sorry to see some friends be the direct recipients of the worst the web has to offer.

The immediate flashpoint was the posting online of a petition against Monte Cook Games over accusations of insensitivity in their depiction of native american culture in their new game THE STRANGE. I haven't played THE STRANGE -- what gaming time I have these days gets devoted to CALL OF CTHULHU and the new D&D, plus some boardgames -- but as I understand it, the adventuring worlds in THE STRANGE, called 'recursions', resemble various cultural archetypes and stereotypes from our world -- similar to the domains in RAVENLOFT (which echoed various horror tropes) or the realms in TORG or, for that matter, the nations in the D&D KNOWN WORLD (esp. the ATRUAGHIN CLANS, Gaz.14). I gather that these recursions are supposed to be generated by the collective unconsciousness, and there's no denying that the myth of 'cowboys and indians' looms large in our collective imagination.

But what's shared culture to some is appropriation to others; hence the petition:

https://www.change.org/p/monte-cool-games-we-the-undersigned-demand-immediate-removal-of-thunder-plains-and-all-related-content-from-all-monte-cook-games-publications-current-and-future-and-request-an-immediate-public-apology-for-harm-done-regardless-of-supposed-intent-fro


Having read this, I find I'd have more sympathy for the petitioner's  position if
(a) it didn't use the word 'DEMAND', which always puts me off, and
(b) didn't call for an APOLOGY, as if the petitioner's feelings were more important than the issue at hand, and
(c) if its depiction of Monte and Bruce's actions bore any resemblance to behavior I've seen from them in the twenty-odd years that I've known both. It simply fails to do so, and so loses credibility with me on that account.

The thing that strikes me as most ironic about the petition is this: a key idea that seems to underlie the petitioner's position is that The Thunder Plains offends by offering up a cultural icon based on only one single native culture, which fails to represent the vast variety of native cultures that existed in preColumbian America. And yet the petitioner seems to feel that she has the self-appointed right to speak for all those hundreds of tribes, past and present, surviving and extinct. That seems to me  to claim a wholly unwarranted authority; I simply can't see why this person's opinion shd carry any more weight than anyone else with a website. The First Nations never had a unified voice, or any single speaker to represent them, and to claim that role for yourself smacks of hubris.


For their part, Monte and Bruce have replied with a measured response explaining what's been going on from their point of view:

https://plus.google.com/+Montecookgames/posts/DhyFE67jFoZ

This was followed by voluminous commentary, some of it thoughtful but a good deal of it sheer vitriol.*  I have to say that Bruce and Monte's reaction is much more engaged and interactive than mine would have been: I'd have either ignored the nay-sayers or, if I thought they had a point no matter how misguided their methods, deleted the material in question. That Monte and Bruce are going to go back and replace this material with new material that they hope will fill the role they'd originally planned for the Thunder Plains shows a willingness to meet people more than halfway. It seems unlikely that the nay-sayers will be swayed by this (given their own emphatic statements to that effect in the string of online comments), but it speaks well of Monte Cook Games that they wanted to be thoughtful in their usage.


--John R.
current reading: WOULD I FIGHT (just resumed) 


*Reading through it, I did learn a new term: SJW, which turns out to have nothing to do with SJG (Steve Jackson Games) but instead is an acronym for 'social justice warrior' -- someone who talks up a position with great fervor but, as the saying goes, is 'all hat, no cattle'.

A Lord Howard de Walden Spotting

So, there are far more people interested in an incidental or passing reference to Tolkien (or Lewis, or Rowling, or Pullman) than to Lord Howard de Walden, an interesting but largely forgotten figure who  was one of the first to write works inspired by the MABINOGION. Lord Howard de Walden was a friend of Dunsany's (the two collaborated on an early lost story), gets mentioned in a biography of EDWARD VII as an Olympic fencer, had connections with Sime (who did the stage designs for some of his plays). But I didn't expect to see him referenced in a work on Old English literature.

The reference comes in STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF OLD ENGLISH LITERATURE, a collection of essays and articles by Kenneth Sisam, Tolkien's old tutor, in the third piece, entitled 'Seasons of Fasting'. Here's the passage referencing Lord Howard de Walden in full:

When he was examining the transcripts of Laurence Nowell 

which Lord Howard de Walden gave to the British Museum, 

the late Robin Fowler found in MS. Addit. 43703, transcribed 

by Nowell in 1562, a copy of a poem on the observance of fasts 

which, except for the incipit recorded by Wanley, had been lost 

when MS. Otho B XI was burnt in the Cotton fire of 1731. 

Flower's death prevented him from making the edition he planned, 

and it fell to Professor Dobbie to publish the editio princepts 

in his Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, 1942 . . . 

So, to the sequence of playwright-fencer-collaborator we need to add: generous donor who helped preserve what wd otherwise have been lost Old English material.

This notice is also interesting because it brings together, briefly, two underappreciated figures: Lord Howard de Walden and Laurence Nowell. Nowell is one of the unsung heroes of Old English studies, whose greatest claim to fame is that he preserved BEOWULF: the first page of the manuscript that includes the only surviving copy of BEOWULF bears the inscription "Laurence Nowell 1563". We have no idea where this manuscript (now called THE NOWELL CODEX) was before Nowell found and preserved it, a full century and a half before it fell into Sir Rbt Cotton's hands.*

Nor is this all: Nowell also compiled the first OLD ENGLISH dictionary, which I have a copy of: VOCABULARIUM SAXONICUM, probably compiled in the 1560s but not published until 1952.
And furthermore David Salo believes, rightly I think, that Nowell's dictionary had a direct influence on Tolkien. For example, the word 'orc' is usually translated 'monster' and associated with the demon Orcus (a derivation Tolkien is on record as doubting**): Nowell's entry is far more evocative of Tolkien's own usage:

Orc.  Orcus; a goblin, a Robin Goodfelowe. Entas & eotenas & orcas. [Nowell, p. 134]

So, there it is, dating all the way back to Tudor times: an association by a great Old English scholar of orcs not with Latin terms for Hell but with native faerie lore: goblins. Very Tolkienesque, is it not?

--John R.


*here's a query for the well-informed: is there a complete catalogue listing all the books in Cotton's library, a brief description of their contents, and a notice accompanying each entry on whether or not that particular book survives?

**cf. H.o.H.217

An Improved Reading (Plot Notes D)

So, just before we left for our weekend of whalewatching, I got an interesting query via the comments on an earlier blog post, proposing an improved reading for a passage I'd only partially been able to make out in my transcription of Tolkien's HOBBIT manuscript.
( http://sacnoths.blogspot.com/2015/03/tackiest-museum-store-gift-ever.html#comments )

It's taken me a while to go back to dig out my file of Plot Notes and their transcriptions, but when I did it was certainly worthwhile.


Here's the reading as published in A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE HOBBIT p. 320 (corresponding to p. 570 of the full edition); Gandalf is speaking:

"Be not a greater fool than the fools who the dragon his wealth"

A.T.M.'s proposed reading of this is both ingenious and attractive:

"Be not a great fool than the fools who come between the dragon and his wealth" 

--pointing out that this has echoes both to KING LEAR (a point that was new to me) and to the Witch-King's threat to Eowyn.

Accordingly, I went back to the look at the original passage to see what I could make of it, and unfortunately had to rule out the proposed emendation:

(1) the word following 'dragon' clearly began with an 'f' or some similar letter (it had both an ascender and a descender), with the whole word being only three or four letters long; the final letter lacks the ascender that wd be required for the proposed 'd'. If I were just going letter-by-letter I'd guess at from, with fire and fine also being possibilities.

(2)  try as I might, I can't make the word or words between 'who' and 'the dragon' resemble 'come between'. It's clearly only one or two words, but if I had to transcribe them letter by letter it looks more like 'notwith' than anything else (i.e., with an ascender both in the middle and at the end).

However, before I admitted defeat I went back and checked an earlier transcription from the early stages of the project and found I'd suggested fire as the word following 'dragon', and plugging that in the whole passage suddenly clicked:

"Be not a greater fool than the fools who mistook the dragonfire for wealth"

--that is, the folk of Lake Town who saw the flame of the approaching dragon and thought it was the rivers running with gold as in the song.

So, those of you keeping track and write this in your copy as official errata.


For me, this is especially interesting because I'm currently working on a paper on Tolkien as an editor of medieval texts, scrutinizing his editorial principles and how he applied them in specific cases. Interrupting that process to do a little editing myself of a Tolkien text is a good reminder of the rewards and perils involved in trying to let the author's voice come through.

--John R.
current reading: LEWIS CARROLL: A BIOGRAPHY by Michael Bakewell [1996], which I confess is creeping me out.

Tolkien Spotting (A. S. Byatt)

So, glanced at the new Pratchett at the bookstore today (A BLINK OF THE SCREEN; his collected short stories), and while skimming the Preface by A. S. Byatt found a Tolkien reference in it. Basically in the process of praising Pratchett she brings in Tolkien's concept of secondary world, paraphrasing his idea approvingly. She follows this up by briefly discussing four fantasy writers: Tolkien, saying that she re-reads him for the landscape and sense of menace; J. K. Rowling, whom she would enjoy more if she didn't write about boarding school; C. S. Lewis, whom she finds too preachy; and Philip Pullman (who spends too much time writing against Lewis rather than doing his own thing).  An interesting little critique of British fantasy by a mainstream 'literary' voice, I thought.

--John R.
--current reading: LEWIS CARROLL by Michael Bakewell
--current viewing: TOP GEAR (guilty pleasure)