A Jewish analogue to The Doors of Durin

It is well known to Tolkien scholars that the Dwarves were in some ways analogous to the Jews, both culturally and linguistically. Tolkien made this quite clear himself. He wrote in 1955: “I do think of the ‘Dwarves’ like Jews: at once native and alien in their habitations, speaking the languages of the country, but with an accent due to their own private tongue” (Letters, #176).

Near the end of his life, he repeated this idea in a 1971 interview with the BBC: “The dwarves of course are quite obviously — wouldn’t you say that in many ways they remind you of the Jews? Their words are Semitic obviously, constructed to be Semitic.” Like the Semitic languages, Khuzdul, the language of the Dwarves, seems to be based on triconsonantal roots. Even a cursory examination of the attested corpus is enough to demonstrate this, and others have said more than enough about it already (for example, this treatment; and see Magnus Åberg’s “An Analysis of Dwarvish” [1]). Tolkien, again, made this quite explicit: “The language of the Dwarves […] is Semitic in cast, leaning phonetically to Hebrew (as suits the Dwarvish character)” [2].

And lest anybody think that Tolkien considered this any kind of denigration, he put that notion firmly to rest with his responses to requests from a Nazi-era German publishing house to substantiate that he had no Jewish background before they would go forward with a German translation of The Hobbit. In 1938, he replied tetchily: “Do I suffer this impertinence because of the possession of a German name, or do their lunatic laws require a certificate of ‘arisch’ origin from all persons of all countries?” He goes on: “Personally I should be inclined to refuse to give any Bestätigung (although it happens that I can), and let a German translation go hang. In any case I should object strongly to any such declaration appearing in print. I do not regard the (probable) absence of all Jewish blood as necessarily honourable; and I have many Jewish friends, and should regret giving any colour to the notion that I subscribed to the wholly pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine” (Letters, #29; and see also #30).

So, what do I have to add to this? More than a year ago, a friend of mine was travelling in China and shared some photos (thank you, Russ Hanser!), one of which really caught my eye, as I am sure it will yours. I’ve been meaning to write about this ever since. So, take a moment to consider the following image. The similarities are pretty jaw-dropping, don’t you think?

In both cases, a gateway or door is formed with two pillars and an arch connecting them above. The pillars are both tree-woven, and there is a crown beneath the apex of the arch. In both cases, there is writing in a script which can be written as both a true alphabet and as an abjad. In Tolkien’s illustration of the Doors of Durin, there are also seven stars, a single many-rayed star, and a hammer and anvil, which are not to be seen in the other image. But you can see why this Jewish imagery got my attention. I have no reason to think Tolkien had ever seen anything like it, but the resemblance is pretty incredible. So what is this Jewish image?

It’s the parokhet in front of the aron ha-kodesh in a synagogue, or what used to be a synagogue. Sounds like Dwarvish? Okay, let me back up. And for any of my Jewish friends who find fault with the explanation to follow, please don’t hesitate to correct me. I know I’m venturing into unfamiliar religious territory here.

Synagogues contain a closet or chest in which the Torah scrolls reside. This is an imitation of the Ark of the Covenant. Normally, the Ark of the Torah (the aron ha-kodesh, or aron kodesh “holy ark”) is placed a few steps above the ground on the wall nearest Jerusalem. In front of the ark, an ornate and expensive curtain is usually hung. This is the parokhet “curtain” < Aramaic porokta, symbolizing the curtain covering the Ark of the Covenant (cf. Exodus 40:21). For a bit more detail, follow this link.

So, the imagery that is so similar to Tolkien’s is on the parokhet. One could ask, then, whether this is typical imagery, of the type Tolkien could possibly have seen. The answer is yes and no. Since discovering this particular example, I’ve looked at many, and while the crown and pillars are pretty universal, and the arch pretty common, the style of the imagery on the parokhet varies a lot. You can follow this link to see a number of different examples. Most will not remind you very much of Tolkien’s illustration. A few are close, but this one is amazingly similar.

Could Tolkien have seen it? Alas, no. This particular parokhet hangs in what used to be the Ohel Moshe Synagogue in Shanghai, China, built in 1927, located at 62 Changyang Road in the Hongkou District. It is no longer an active synagogue; today, it’s the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum. From 1933 to 1941, Shanghai took in 30,000 Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust (learn more here). The parokhet was donated to the museum in 2009 by the Israeli consulate in Shanghai (details here).

It also seems unlikely that the influence ran in the other direction, with Tolkien’s image influencing this design. It seems to be a purely coincidental resemblance, albeit a very strong one. It could be that the general design of the traditional parokhet influenced Tolkien’s conception of the Doors of Durin, though even that seems very unlikely to me. Better to say it is just one of those strange but wonderful coincidences that sometimes arise in literature and life. (Never mind that the Hebrew letter daleth, D as in Durin, comes from the word and pictogram for “door”.)

The diaspora of the Dwarves cannot help but reminds us of the diaspora of the Jews. Are Hitler and Mussolini analogous to the great dragons of the north by comparison? Well, let’s remember that Tolkien was not consciously representing the two great wars of the twentieth century in his fiction. Though, as he said, applicability is still the prerogative of the reader [3].



[1] Åberg, Magnus. “An Analysis of Dwarvish.” Arda Philology 1 (2005) [The Proceedings of the First International Conference on J.R.R. Tolkien’s Invented Languages; Omentielva Minya; Stockholm, 2005]: 42–65.

[2] From a 1964 letter to W.R. Matthews, quoted in “Words, Phrases & Passages in The Lord of the Rings”, Parma Eldalamberon 17 (2007), p. 85.

[3] See the foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings.

The World and Man’s essential place in it

Okay, I admit that sounds a bit overblown and vaguely philosophical — calling to mind subjective idealism, phenomenalism, the intellectual debates of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, and so on. But while that’s an interesting subject in its own right (feel free to stop by Wikipedia on your way out), I had something else in mind. As usual, it all starts with words. So perhaps I might restate the title of this post as something more like: “world” and the essential place of “man” in its etymology.

If language really does define our perceptual limits (I won’t digress into a discussion of the theories of Sapir/Whorf), then it makes sense that we might find “man” in the “world” — human beings can’t really imagine a world without them in it, after all. I know I can’t! ;)

The word world derives from Old English weorold (interestingly, as you’ll soon appreciate, a feminine noun — I wonder whether this is the same grammatical process responsible for distinctions like the French le mort “a dead man” versus la morte “death, as an abstract concept”). [1] Skeat points out in his Etymological Dictionary that the word is clearly a composite form [2]. Cognate forms among the other Germanic languages include Old Norse (and Modern Icelandic) veröld, Old High German weralt (cf. Modern German Welt), Old Low Franconian uuerolt, and though not attested, I feel confident theorizing Gothic *waíralds [3].

Of what individual elements, then, might weorold be composed? Spenser thought it was war + old ; that is, the domain of an ever ongoing strife. So he says in the Faerie Queene — “But when the world woxe old, it woxe warre old / (Whereof it hight)” [4]. A clever guess, and one that seems apt enough given mankind’s perennial struggles, but wrong. Rather, the word comprises the two joined elements of man + age = “the age of man” = therefore, the world. Thus, OE wer “man” (cf. Modern English werewolf = “man-wolf”, and cf. Latin vir “man”) + eald “old, ancient, aged” (cf. eald-dóm “age”); and likewise, ON verr + öld; OHG wer + alt; OLF uuer + olt — all from Primitive Germanic *weraz + *alda.

Interesting, no? And it turns out that world is hardly the only word dependent on man. Consider Latin sæculum “lifetime, age of man” (from one of the oldest known Indo-European roots, meaning “to tie, bind”). As it developed, the Latin word retained both the senses of time, cf. Modern French siècle “century”; and world, cf. Modern English secular, meaning “worldly, mundane”. Speaking of mundane, which itself derives from the Latin word mundus “universe, world” (cf. French monde, Spanish mundo, Italian mondo), it’s tempting to look for the man in mundus as well, but that’s a misstep. The original meaning of mundus is “order”, as in a world or universe arranged neatly according to a divine plan. (The Greek κόσμος carries the same original sense and survives into Modern English in the words Cosmos, cosmic, and as a combining form in words such as cosmology.)

It is equally tempting to look for man in human, but the etymology of that word is a little different. Even so, we still can find a connection to the world in it. Turning back to the familiar Latin source, the adjective hūmānus “pertaining to man”, from the noun homo “man”, we find something surprising: homo derives from humus “the ground, the earth, the soil” from which, according to the Christian tradition, the first Man came [5]. The word humus has survived into Modern English as well, referring to fertile, organic topsoil suitable for growing things. Where did the Romans get this idea? From the Hebrew Bible, one would surmise. There, the first Man took his name, Adam (Hebrew אדם), from the substance out of which God made him, the earth (Hebrew אֲדָמָה /adama/). Genesis 2:7 [6] may therefore be one of the oldest statements of etymology we know!

How much of this connection between man and the earth is due to our own anthropocentric view of the universe? All of it, really; Man was, and is, the central actor on the stage of the world (to paraphrase Shakespeare). After all, without Man, who would there be to speak the word world — or anything else, for that matter? I suppose our glossopoeic nature gives us license to name, even to define, the world with our own distinctly human nomenclature. If we one day should find that chimpanzees, dolphins, or bees have genuine languages of their own, then who knows? We may have to rethink our whole Weltanschauung. :)



[1] Does it go without saying that there are several different dialectal variations of the word, as of most Old English words? It should. “Old English” usually corresponds to the West Saxon dialect, simply because of the extent of the surviving lexis, though Modern English, in fact, is closer to the Mercian dialect. At any rate, other attested forms include weoruld, weorld, woruld, worold, etc.

[2] Skeat, Walter William. An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. 2nd ed. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1893, p. 718.

[3] Built from the same components as the other cognate forms; in this case, the attested Gothic waír “man” + alds “age, life” (see Wright, Joseph. A Primer of the Gothic Language. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1892, pp. 238, 212, for these words. Putting them together, however right or wrong, was me.) There is also an attested word with a similar composite meaning in Gothic: manaséþs “mankind, multitude, world” (lit. “man-seed”).

[4] Book IV, Canto VIII, ll. 276–7.

[5] Valpy, F.E.J. An Etymological Dictionary of the Latin Language. London: Baldwin, Longman, and Whittaker, 1828, p. 188. Note that other mythologies explain the origin of Man differently; for example, in the Old Norse tradition, the first Man and Woman were Ask and Embla, the Ash and Elm tree, respectively.

[6] In the King James translation, “And the Lord God formed man [Adam] of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul,” emphasis added. (The original Hebrew, וייצר יהוה אלהים את האדם עפר מן האדמה ויפח באפיו נשמת חיים ויהי האדם לנפש חיה)

“Let them sa-si, if they can speak no better.”

Today’s post is about allophones, speech impediments, and onomatopoeia — with a little Tolkien thrown in for good measure. (What isn’t improved by the addition of a little Tolkien? ;)

Browsing Omniglot today, I came across a great WOTD: the Czech verb šišlat, which means something like “to lisp”. More specifically, it refers to the substitution of /∫/ for /s/ (whereas, lisping in English is the substitution of /θ/ for /s/). The word is marvelously onomatopoeic, isn’t it? It’s lovely how the word includes the very sound in question, isn’t it? Just as the English lisp contains the very sibilant a lisper can’t pronounce. Wait, did I say that’s lovely? I think I meant rather that it’s a bit of a cruel joke on lispers. ;)

While the Czech refers to a speech impediment, Spanish speakers are aware of a deliberate regional variation in the pronunciation of the sibilant sound. Speakers in parts of Spain and Argentina recognize a distinción between /s / and /θ/, meaning that casa and caza are not homophones. The so-called Castilian lisp. In Mexico and most of the rest of Latin America, by contrast, these are allophones. Where pronounced like /θ/, the term used is ceceo; where /s/, seseo. Those terms, once again, exhibit an apt onomatopoeia. Have I lost you? Perhaps it’s me; try Wikipedia for a more detailed explanation.

The Czech word šišlat also reminds me of the story of the shibboleth. In the Bible, there is a passage in the Book of Judges where the pronunciation of the Hebrew word שיבולת (”shibboleth”) proved quite significant. There, the same distinction between /s/ and /∫/ identified members of rival tribal groups. For anyone who couldn’t pronounce the shin (ש) properly, the price was death. Once again — are you hearing an echo? — the word shibboleth contains the sound in question, though in this case, it’s not inventive onomatopoeia, but rather an existing word with an identifying pronunciation which gave the speech pattern its name.

J.R.R. Tolkien — I promised I’d be coming round to him eventually! — adopted this terminology to describe a similar phonological distinction in his Elvish language, Quenya. In the late essay, “The Shibboleth of Fëanor” (circa 1968, published in The Peoples of Middle-earth), Tolkien discusses the change from Quenya /θ/ to /s/ — though Tolkien uses the letter Þ in place of θ in the essay. As in the Biblical story, the Quenya pronunciation became a matter of political struggle. Tolkien writes that:

Into the strife and confusion of loyalties in that time this seemingly trivial matter, the change of Þ to s, was caught up to its embitterment, and to lasting detriment to the Quenya tongue. Had peace been maintained there can be no doubt that the advice of Fëanor, with which all the other loremasters privately or openly agreed, would have prevailed. But an opinion in which he was certainly right was rejected because of the follies and evil deeds into which he was later led. He made it a personal matter: he and his sons adhered to Þ, and they demanded that all those who were sincere in their support should do the same. Therefore those who resented his arrogance, and still more those whose support later turned to hatred, rejected his shibboleth.

A fascinating and diverse collection of words for describing the pronunciation, or mispronunciation, of sibilant sounds, eh?