In the new volume of Tolkien Studies

Something I look forward to every year in the new issue of Tolkien Studies is David Bratman’s extensive “Year’s Work” essay. For the past couple of years, these have included assessments of my own work. In the newest installment, David discusses The Silmarillion: Thirty Years On (ed. Allan Turner; Walking Tree, 2007). He offered the following thoughts on my contribution to that collection:

“From Mythopoeia to Mythography: Tolkien, Lönnrot, and Jerome” by Jason Fisher (111-38) surveys the thematic and linguistic inspirations from the Kalevala in The Silmarillion, noting also stylistic echoes of the Bible. (Fisher is discussing Jerome’s Vulgate, but one suspects readers who call The Silmarillion Bibli­cal are thinking of an English translation, probably the King James). Fisher hits on his true subject briefly when he notes that unlike the Ka­levala, The Silmarillion is not in verse (122)—though it could have been, had Christopher Tolkien selected different source texts. (Fisher’s error in stating that nothing from The Lays of Beleriand appeared in The Silmarillion is unimportant.) This eventually leads to a comparison between Christo­pher Tolkien and Elias Lönnrot, compiler of the Kalevala. Each smoothed out complex, irregular source material into a coherent text. [1]

I’m not quite sure what David means when he says I ‘hit on my true subject briefly’ in the formal comparison, but David is certainly right to point out the mistake; it was kind of him to call it unimportant. In my essay, I erred in saying that “Christopher elected not to include in The Silmarillion any of the thousands of lines of poetry that would later comprise the Lays of Beleriand” [2]. But I was carelessly forgetting that Christopher did include about thirty lines from the (unfinished) Lay of Leithian. This is less than a drop from that bucket, but it’s a mistake I never should have made — moreover, one that the editor should have caught. My assertion could be made accurate by the addition of a single letter, emending “any” to “many” (though this would produce an awkward-sounding sentence).

And now, speaking of the Kalevala, it’s time to start devouring Tolkien’s “Story of Kullervo” and draft essays on the Kalevala, some very exciting new material published in the latest issue of Tolkien Studies. Isn’t it wonderful, after so many references to these works, to be able to finally read them? It’s wonderful to see Tolkien’s early verses in the Kalevala meter too. You have to read these aloud to get the full effect. I’m hearing Tom Bombadil in my head, with a little of Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha mixed in, as in this brief example:

O Terenye maid of Samyan
Little daughter of the forest
Clad in soft and beauteous garments
With thy yellow hair so lovely
And thy shoon of scarlet leather [3]

It will take some time to digest all of the new material, but I certainly hope to see a broad and careful reassessment by scholars who have weighed in on Tolkien’s debt to the Finnish national epic (such as myself). In many cases, we should see our guesses corroborated by these “new” comments and admissions from Tolkien himself; in other cases, we may have conjectures to reconsider.

[1] Bratman, David. “The Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies 2007.” Tolkien Studies 7 (2010): 347–78, p. 359.

[2] “From Mythopoeia to Mythography: Tolkien, Lönnrot, And Jerome.” The Silmarillion: Thirty Years On. Ed. Allan Turner. Zollikofen: Walking Tree Publishers, 2007. 111–38, pp. 121–2.

[3] Tolkien, J.R.R. “‘The Story of Kullervo’ and Essays on Kalevala.” Transcribed and edited by Verlyn Flieger. Tolkien Studies 7 (2010): 211–78, p. 225.

The Attercops of Mirkwood

In my post on Slavic echoes (or the lack of them) in Tolkien’s works, and especially in the comments which it prompted, I talked about the temptation to find such echoes in unlikely places out of mere wishful thinking. But I also acknowledged that Tolkien’s linguistic borrowings were diverse and layered. He liked to imbue words with multiple shades of meaning, or even double-meanings, within and across languages. A classic example of Mordor, which in Sindarin is the “black land”, but which also points to Old English morðor “murder”.

Having thus set the table, let me serve you up a dish of spiders. Specifically, the great poisonous Spiders of Mirkwood. It is pretty well known by now that Bilbo’s taunt, “Attercop! Attercop!”, simply means “poisonous spider” [1]. The compound átor-coppe “spider” is attested in the Old English literature. I do not know of any occurrence of this compound form in Old Norse (one does find köngur-váfa, in which the second element, rather chillingly, means “ghost”), but I’d think it would have been *eitr-koppr. The Old English compound also made its way into Welsh as adargop, eventually shortened to adrop.

Gilliver, et al., think that Tolkien encountered the word while making notes on the 13th-century poem “The Owl and the Nightingale” as an undergraduate. Could be, but I wonder whether he might have seen the poem by Robert Graves, “Attercop: The All-Wise Spider”, published in 1924 [2]. Tolkien used the word “attercops” in early drafts of the poem “Errantry”, probably composed at the beginning of the 1930’s, perhaps even a bit before. (“Attercops” survived into the version published in The Oxford Magazine, 1933, but was not retained in the version printed in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, 1962.) In his poem, Graves is more complimentary to the reviled creature (“Attercop, whose proud name with hate be spoken”), but the poem, and its use of this archaic word, could have been prominent enough to catch the eye of Tolkien, a young poet himself at the time. Tolkien later described Robert Graves and a lecture he (Graves) gave in 1964: “A remarkable creature, entertaining, likeable, odd, bonnet full of wild bees, half-German, half-Irish, very tall, must have looked like Siegfried/Sigurd in his youth, but an Ass.) It was the most ludicrously bad lecture I have ever heard” [3]. Bees, eh? Well, in Old Swedish, a kopp was a “bee”, and *etter-kopp might have been a good substitute for “wild bee” (or today’s Africanized “killer” bees). Ah, but this is just in fun.

Returning to real etymology, the first element in “attercop” goes back to Old English átor (and variously, áter, áttor, ǽtor, etc.), meaning “poison”; cognate forms in the other Germanic languages include Old Norse eitr, Old High German eitar, Old Saxon êttar, hêttar, and among the modern languages this survives in Swedish etter. In Modern English, the word adder, a kind of poisonous snake, derives from Old English nædre, but it could be that átor “poison” influenced the word.

The second element, cop(pe), is usually said to mean “spider” (it survives in Modern English cobweb), but I think it probably came to refer to the arachnid relatively late, and there is much more to say about its earlier etymology. There are three possibilities: (1) “head”, (2) “cup”, and (3) variously “pock, bag, blister”. But when you boil these down, I think it all comes down to one source: PIE *keup “a hole, a hollow”, which gave IE *kaput “head”. How does a head come from a hollow? Think about it. :)

From PIE *keup / IE *kaput developed such related words as Sanskrit कूप /kūpa/ “a pit, well, hollow, cavity”; Greek κύπελλον “cup, goblet”, from κύπη “a hole, hollow”; and Latin caput “head” and cupa “vat, cask, butt” (if you’re snickering at the latter, it’s the source of Modern English butler). Moving forward into the Middle Ages, we have Old Church Slavonic kupa “cup”, OE copp, cuppe “cup, vessel”, ON koppr “cup, small vessel”, and Middle High German kopf “a drinking vessel”. Ah, but that last word looks familiar, doesn’t it? Modern High German has Kopf for “head”, along with Haupt, phonologically related. Modern Dutch, Danish, and Swedish have kop, kop, and kopp, respectively, for “cup”, and Afrikaans gives kop the additional shades of a hilltop and (informally) common sense (i.e., what’s in your kop “head”).

What about “pock, bag, blister”? Where in the world do those come from? Well, a pock is a small hole, related to the American southern dialectal poke (cf. “a pig in a poke”), which is a bag. These two are clearly related, not by etymology but by sense, to PIE *keup “a hole, hollow”. In addition to the meanings of both “cup” and “head”, Modern Frisian kop also has the sense of “blister, bubble, pock”, and so it’s no great leap to the sting of a poisonous spider. But this leap is not mine; I came across this theory (more tenuous than the others, if you ask me, but still connectable to them) in a 19th-century issue of the Proceedings of the Philological Society of London [4].

We’ve thus found a kind of double meaning — “head” versus “cup” — is the second element of attercop. Spiders are both “heads of poison” and “cups of poison”, and they may even have “bags of poison” or deliver a “pox of poison”. But I’m not finished yet.

Where do these Attercops live? Mirkwood of course. Again, it is pretty well known that Tolkien took the compound name for his forest from the Old Norse Myrkviðr, and he extrapolated an unattested Old English form, Myrcwudu, for use in his own legendarium [5]. The first element, English mirk, later murk(y), means “dark(ness)” in all the Germanic languages, e.g., ON myrkr, OE mirce, myrce, OS mirki, Modern Norwegian and Swedish mörk, Danish mørk. Even in Tolkien’s own invented languages, we have Queyna morë and Sindarin môr “dark”. This goes back to an Indo-European root *mer meaning “to flicker” (cf. Lithuanian mirgėti “to glimmer”), from which the Primitive Germanic *merkwia “twilight”.

So where’s the double-meaning? Ah, well, recall Tolkien’s interest in Finnish. There, we find the Finnish word myrkky, which is quite close phonologically, but which doesn’t mean “dark” at all; no, it means “poison”, just like the first element of “attercop”! Cognate to these are Estonian mürk, Hungarian mérĕg, and Lappish mir’hku, all meaning “poison”, and all looking like the first element in Mirkwood. Russian моръ “plague, pestilence” may also connected to the idea of poison. Coincidence? It could be, but I tend to doubt it. We know Tolkien studied Finnish (and to some extent modeled his own Quenya on it). The word myrkky doesn’t seem to occur anywhere in the Kalevala; however, we do find the phrase kuolla myrkystä “to die of poison” in Charles Eliot’s Finnish Grammar, the book Tolkien used in his studies of the language [6].

And I’ve still got one more. Who else have we got in the Mirkwood episode besides the Spiders, Mr. Baggins, and his Sting? Dwarves. How on earth could dwarves and spiders be connected etymologically? It just so happens — and I’ve known this for ages, but have had it up my sleeve awaiting the right opportunity — that dialectal Swedish uses the word dwerg for “spider”; of course, many of you probably know that its primary meaning is “dwarf”. Welsh exhibits the same behavior, where corr is both “dwarf” and “spider”, “the name probably given from the mythical skill of the dwarfs in handicraft” [7]. It’s all about metaphor, and quite possibly Tolkien knew of one or both of these usages.

So, double-meanings, ranging fairly wide, but among languages we know Tolkien studied and with strong ties to the same characters and setting in his first novel. Whether consciously intended or not, such interwoven meanings, like a spider’s web — or better, Ariadne’s thread — they help us to appreciate the ever rewarding complexities of Tolkien’s imagination.


[1] See, for example: Gilliver, Peter, Jeremy Marshall, and E.S.C. Weiner. The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 91–2; and Rateliff, John. The History of The Hobbit, Part One: Mr. Baggins. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007, p. 321n27.

[2] Graves, Robert. Mock Beggar Hall. London: Hogarth Press, 1924, pp. 14–5.

[3] Tolkien, J.R.R. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981, p. 353 (#267).

[4] Wedgwood, Hensleigh. “Notices of English Etymology.” Proceedings of the Philological Society of London, Volume II, Number 26 (22 November 1844), p. 6. For the same point again, see also the excellent and thorough, Adams, Ernest. “On the Names of Spiders.” Transactions of the Philological Society. Berlin: A. Asher & Co., 1859: 216–27, p. 217.

[5] Gilliver, et al., p. 165.

[6] Eliot, C.N.E. A Finnish Grammar. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1890, p. 143.

[7] Adams, p. 221.

“New Learning and New Ignorance”

You know what I love? When you’ve made an academic argument based on the best evidence you were aware of at the time, and then you find new evidence, long afterward, which backs up your theory! It also points out just how much “evidence” there is out there — both for and against any given proposition. Finding it, sifting through it, and evaluating its merit, that’s the great challenge.

A little over a year ago, I presented a paper at Mythcon 37 in which I attempted to trace the most likely sources for Tolkien’s well-known, but usually overlooked, literary collocation “Circles of the World.” The three I discussed were the Old Norse Heimskringla, the Biblia Vulgata, and the famous mappa mundi at Hereford Cathedral in the West Midlands. The two philological analogues here are the Old Norse kringla heimsins “circle of the world” and the Latin orbis terrarum “circle of the worlds”, and though I think I was successful in plausibly connecting both to Tolkien, I didn’t have a good transition from the one to the other — apart from the rather obvious fact that they mean the same thing. Well, thanks to serendipity — and to a diet of abstruse reading :) — I’ve now discovered a single source, one that Tolkien definitely knew, that connects these two precedents (as well as other conspicuously Tolkienian concepts) in the space of just a few pages. Curious?

I found it in Volume II of Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie (1883–1888). This is in the James Steven Stallybrass translation, which he retitled Teutonic Mythology. I was reading Chapter XXV Time and World, when I came across this (with apologies for the choppy editing):

The ON. heimr is mundus, domus, and akin to himinn, himil (p. 698), as mundus also is applied to world and sky; heimskrîngla, orbis terrarum. Ulphilas renders οικουμένη [...] by [Gothic] midjungards; to this correspond the AS. middangeard [...]; the OHG. mittingart [...]; the OS. middilgard; the ON. miðgarðr [...]; and even a Swed. folksong [...] has retained medjegård. [1]

This is quite something, to see my two philological sources separated by no more than a comma! And compellingly followed by a laundry list of precursors for “Middle-earth”, one of which (the Greek οικουμένη) Tolkien mentioned explicitly in a letter [2].

As Grimm continues, more tantalizingly Tolkienian references appear. These include linking orbis terrarum to the idea of the “sea-girt world,” with cognates and sources aplenty, most notably the Old Norse miðgarðs ormr, the “serpent [...] coiled round the earth’s circumference, [...] evidently the ocean.” This, too, finds a point of connection with my paper, in an argument suggesting that the Hereford mappa mundi, also depicted as girded round by water, may find an echo in Tolkien’s Ekkaia, the Encircling Sea in his fictive geography.

Then, at the bottom of the page, Grimm surprisingly produces the Finnish ilma “air, sky”, which many of you will recognize for Tolkien’s use of the same word in Quenya, with an obviously related meaning (“starlight”); as well as in Ilmarin (“Mansion of the High Airs”), the palace of Manwë and Varda atop Taniquetil; and even Ilmarë, the handmaid to Varda. Tolkien, we’re pretty sure, would have gotten this word from the Finnish Kalevala, but he evidently saw it here too.

And even more, as Grimm continues over the next two pages, we see mention of the Völuspá, a self-acknowledged source for Tolkien; Yggdrasil, the World Ash, connected by many scholars to Tolkien’s own metaphoric and mythopoeic use of the Tree imago; and specific mention of the Old Norse dwarves “Dâinn [sic] and Dvalinn,” both names memorably recycled by Tolkien. All of this, from start to finish, in just three consecutive pages of a text Tolkien knew — and knew well. It’s therefore no great stretch to see Deutsche Mythologie as having gone into the same leaf-mould that produced Tolkien’s “Circles of the World.”

I love that! Now, to incorporate this into a revision of my paper!

[1] Grimm, Jacob. Teutonic Mythology, Volume II. Trans. James Steven Stallybrass. Dover Phoenix Edition. Mineola (NY): Dover, 2004, p. 794.

[2] Tolkien, J.R.R. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Ed. Humphrey Carpenter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981, p.239 (#183).