My Mythprint reviews and essays

I contribute occasionally to Mythprint, the (mostly) monthly bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society. This is a really small publication, and as such, it has no explicit author agreement; nor are back issues available for sale anywhere, so far as I know*. All of which gives me free license to share these publications with Lingwë readers. I’ll do so after the fact — as a matter of courtesy to Mythprint and its readers — but below you will find a list of my reviews (and one essay) published so far. I will continue to update this page in the future, so you might like to revisit it once in a while.

• Film review of The Fountain (January/February 2007)
• Review of The Golden Dream of Carlo Chuchio, by Lloyd Alexander (November 2007)
• Essay, “Remembering Lloyd Alexander” (December 2007)
• Review of the 70th anniversary edition of The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien (April/May 2008
• Review of The Bestiary, by Nicholas Christopher (date to be provided, 2008)
• Review of Tales Before Narnia, edited by Douglas A. Anderson (date to be provided, 2009)

* Update!
Well, what do you know? I’ve just learned that back issues of Mythprint are available, in one-year sets going all the way back to 1970. Very affordable, too. The entire set — almost forty years of the Society’s news and reviews! — will only set you back about $200.

And yet more new languages at Google

Last October, I updated Lingwë readers on Google’s online language tools. At that time, Google offered machine-assisted translation of 34 languages (including English). Though impressed, I did manage to complain about the conspicuous lack of several important ones (including Albanian). Well, Google has amended that oversight at least, as well as bringing out several more choices.

The number is up to a remarkable 41 languages. Newly added: Albanian, Estonian, Galician, Hungarian, Maltese, Thai, Turkish. Never mind that Galician is really only spoken by three or four million people, and Maltese by fewer than half a million — it’s nice to see regular progress. Hopefully, Swahili, Punjabi, Tamil, et al., are on the way.

Google has also added a handy dandy link labeled swap, which flips the source and target languages. Very handy now that the list of languages itself has grown so long.

WOTD: Accidie

Accidie is often identified as or equated with Sloth (one of the Seven Deadly Sins). Here’s a little taste of Chaucer’s use of the word in The Parson’s Tale:

After the synne of envye and ire, now wol I speken of the synne of accidie; for envye blyndeth the herte of man, and ire troubleth a man, and accidie maketh him hevy, thoghtful and wrawful. […] Thanne is accidie the angwissh of troubled herte, and Saint Augustyn seith, it is anoy of goodnesse and joye of harm. [And the Parson goes on in much the same prolix manner for quite some while, not unlike myself, I suppose. :)]

In the century before Chaucer, Thomas Aquinas described the sin in his Summa Theologica, equating accidia (the Latin form; also, acedia) with torpor mentis (“a torpor of the mind”), which I think captures the sense of accidie much better than mere sloth. The modern sense of “sloth” (lower-case), implying laziness, seems too dismissive, and too insensitive. (And speaking of sloth, if you had only two toes, you probably wouldn’t get much done either! ;) Torpor, ennui, listlessness, and apathy are all closer to the intended sense than sloth.

Turning to the authority the Parson himself invoked, Augustine of Hippo dissertates on this and the other Deadly Sins in the City of God, but perhaps the best, most thorough description of accidie comes in Book X of John Cassian’s De institutis coenobiorum, written in the early 5th century (contemporary with Augustine).

The Latin accidia is not related to acidus “sour, tart”, nor to accidentia “an accident” (something that befalls one) — these explanations, common enough, are mere folk-etymology. It ultimately springs from the ancient Greek ακήδεια “indifference, torpor”, from α– “not” + κήδος “care”. Interestingly, κήδος eventually became the modern English “hate”. Accidie (the word, yes, but probably the need for the word too, hahae) came to Middle English with the Norman invaders, in the Old Norman French form accidie, acidie (from Old French accide, acide). The word was popular throughout the Middle Ages, particularly in Ecclesiastical use, but all but died out after that.

I say all but died out, because the Inklings and their circle clearly knew the word. John Wain, reviewing C.S. Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism, referred to “the cultured accidie in Oxford” [1]. Another Inkling, Charles Williams, used the word in more than one of his books (e.g., in The Figure of Beatrice, his study of Dante). W.H. Auden, a student and later friend to Tolkien, wrote a commentary on accidie. Though Lewis does not use the word in it, the Narnia novel, The Silver Chair, deals with the sin of “spiritual sloth” (accidie), and we may be absolutely certain Lewis knew the word. (I believe he may have used the word in his letters, but I will have to check on that; they’re not very, er, portable. :) I’m likewise sure that Tolkien knew the word. It is not in his Middle English Vocabulary, but the man knew his Chaucer, not to mention Aquinas and Augustine.

So. Accidie, then. Less critical than sloth, not so banal as ennui, and well suited to pointed or metaphorical use. Well suited, in short, to be brought back into “the parlance of our times”. Shall we bring it back? Or are we too lazy? ;)

[1] Qtd in Hooper, Walter. C.S. Lewis: A Complete Guide to His Life and Works. London: HarperCollins, 1996, p. 74. [Published previously as the C.S. Lewis Companion and Guide.]

— Hat tip to Gary for the indirect suggestion of this WOTD. :)

English ascendant — long foreseen?

I suppose we all have a certain chauvinism for the language we learned to speak first — our “cradle-tongue”, as Tolkien has called it [1]. We may learn other languages, explore the aesthetics of speech, and perhaps (if we are fortunate) even find our native language — “our own personal linguistic potential”, embodying our “inherent linguistic predilections”. But for all that, we still fall often enough into the prejudices of our “language of custom” [2]. So please take the following with that caveat in mind and not as a personal endorsement of English as the best language in the world. (Far from it, I sometimes think.)

It has become pervasive, though, hasn’t it? One recent book on Tolkien, in which a number of international contributors were given a voice, bemoaned “the fact that English has, without a doubt, become the koiné in Tolkien studies – some sort of Middle-earth Common Speech” [3]. And of course, English has spread far beyond Middle-earth. It is spoken in almost every corner of the world, and learning it is frequently required in the educational systems of many countries. I am told that Indians begin learning English in school at the age of two years! (In the U.S., children don’t even begin school until age five or six!)

Why has English become so popular? I won’t rehearse the many arguments about the whilom successes of the British Empire, the emergence of the United States as a world-dominating political and economic force, etc., etc. You have heard these arguments many times. But other answers might be closer to the mark — or at least equally valid. Why, after all, didn’t Chinese or Hindi become the ascendant lingua franca? Both can boast more native speakers than English, almost as widely distributed around the globe.

Part of the answer might be the particular structural, phono-logical, morphological, and assimilative qualities of English. All the foregoing has been a perhaps too lengthy introduction to the following quotation. Here, Richard Carew (quoted in William Camden’s Remains Concerning Britain) extoled the virtues of English some 400 years ago. His description of the “excellency” of the English language seems to come near the mark (bracketed insertions are mine):

The Italian is pleasant, but without sinews, as a still fleeting water. The French, delicate, but even nice as a woman, scarce daring to open her lips for fear or marring her countenance. The Spanish, majestical, but fulsome, running too much on the O, and terrible like the devil in a play. The Dutch [i.e., modern German, not modern Dutch], manlike, but withal very harsh, as one ready at every word to pick a quarrel. Now we, in borrowing from them, give the strength of consonants to the Italian, the full sound of words to the French, the variety of terminations to the Spanish, and the mollifying of more vowels to the Dutch, and so (like Bees) gather the honey of their good properties and leave the dregs to themselves. And thus when substantialness combineth with delightful-ness, fulness with fineness, seemliness with portliness, and currantness [i.e., fluency] with stayedness, how can the language which consisteth of all these sound other than most full of sweetness?

Again, the long words that we borrow [e.g., from the Latin and Greek], being intermingled with the short of our own store, make up a perfect harmony; by culling from out which mixture (with judgment) you may frame your speech according to the matter you must work on, majestical, pleasant, delicate, or manly, more or less, in what sort you please. Adde hereunto, that whatsoever grace any other language carrieth in verse or prose, in Tropes or Metaphors, in Ecchoes [i.e., onomatopoeia] and Agnominations [i.e., alliteration], they may all be lively and exactly represented in ours. [4]

Carew goes on from here to provide a litany of Classical writers and the English writers who capture their styles in that language. I won’t repeat them all here. He’s clearly very partial to English (“if mine own eyes be not blinded by affection,” he admits), and he may go too far in some of his verdicts — but even so, I think he has hit on some important points. Most importantly: that even then, and moreso now, English owes much of her success (and, to Carew, aesthetic virtue) to her unique ability to assimilate the most successful or euphonic words and elements from other languages and to make them her own.

I welcome your thoughts on this — especially those of you whose “cradle-tongue” is not English. (And let me congratulate you for reading this blog in English and perhaps helping to prove the point. ;)



[1] Tolkien, J.R.R. “English and Welsh.” The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983, p. 190.

[2] All quotations, loc.cit.

[3] Segura, Eduardo and Thomas Honegger, eds. Myth and Magic: Art according to the Inklings. Zurich: Walking Tree Publishers, 2007, p. ii.

[4] Camden, William. “The Excellency of the English Tongue, by R.C. [Richard Carew] of Anthony Esquire to W.C. [William Camden].” Remains Concerning Britain. London: John Russell Smith, 1870, pp. 50–1. The text quoted is the 1870 reprint of the 7th edition (1674). The last edition Camden himself revised was the 5th (1607); the first edition appeared in 1586.

A new publication on Alan Garner

Toward the end of last summer, I wrote about Randy Hoyt’s online mythology magazine, Journey to the Sea (then relatively new). Issue 8 appeared yesterday, and in it a new essay written by me, on Alan Garner’s use of northern Germanic mythological elements in The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. (I’ve written about Alan Garner here at Lingwë on previous occasions, too.) The issue also features an article on Batman — yes, the same Batman you’re thinking of — seen through the lens of myth.

If you haven’t hied thee over to Journey to the Sea yet, you definitely should. Randy has done an admirable job of presenting articles on a wide variety of multicultural mythological topics, as well as several on newer subjects examined in the context of myth (e.g., Batman, as already mentioned, role-playing games, the illustration of myths, the Native American totem pole, and so on). In addition, Randy has managed to nab a couple of very well-known figures in the Tolkien community for interviews: Verlyn Flieger and Ted Nasmith.

There’s really something here for almost anyone, so if you’ve been dithering, do yourself a favor and take a look. And while you’re there, feel free to drop a comment onto my Alan Garner essay.

The Atlas of True Names

I’m coming to this late, but as it’s right up my alley, I couldn’t resist. Has anyone here seen the Atlas(es) of True Names — published by Kalimedia? These are beautifully produced, and not very expensive, etymological maps of the World and Europe. The Frankfurt Review said of them: “Middle Earth [sic] is alive!” And indeed, I think Tolkien would have approved of the idea very much; and of course, seeing these etymological maps of the real world have put it into my mind to produce a similar one for Middle-earth (if nobody has done this already).

As you can see from the snippet above (click to enlarge, slightly; visit the link above for some larger illustrations), the maps are really quite fascinating. Like Bilbo, I love maps and could easily stare at them for hours. In fact, here in my office at work, I have a large map on my wall. No, not Middle-earth; it’s a January 1970* map of the West Indies and Central America. (Why? Because I’ve traveled to several places represented on this map, and I like to look at them from time to time. And like I said: I love maps. That’s reason enough, isn’t it? I have a map of the British Virgin Islands in my bathroom at home, too.)

Language Log has examined the Atlas of True Names, back in November, with a more thorough post than this one. They note (as I would have) that “the cartographers [of the Atlas] have accepted a good number of disputed derivations and folk etymologies.” The creators of the Atlas have acknowledged that “not all translations are definitive,” and anyway, it’s still great fun.

Shortly after Language Log, the Strange Maps blog posted on them too, with this amusing observation:

The Atlas was first published in German as Der Atlas der wahren Namen, and in that version all the original etymologies are of course rendered in German. If like most people you are at least mildly conditioned by movies, literature and other media dealing with World War II to associate the German language with fascism, this ‘germanified’ version of the world is a bit disconcerting.

I’ll bet! If you’re interested in the German versions, there are actually three: the World, Europe, and Germany (plus Austria and Switzerland). Considering the richness of toponymic etymology in England, I hope somebody is working on that atlas now. I’ll be sure to let you know if I come across one (or if I decide to take a stab at Middle-earth).


* Belize is identified as British Honduras. :)

The etymology of “gavel”

I think most everyone knows what a gavel is: “a small mallet used by a presiding officer or an auctioneer to signal for attention or order or to mark the conclusion of a trans-action” (American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed., sense 1). There’s another kind of gavel, too, which might seem to better fit the usual subject matter of Lingwë — “tribute or rent in ancient and medieval England” (AHD, sense 2) — but I’m more interested in the first. Why? Because of the difficulties of its etymology. For sense 2, the etymology is unexceptional (OE gafol). Not so, the more familiar sense 1.

Of that word, AHD says nothing more than “origin unknown”. The Random House Unabridged (quoted by Dictionary.com) basically agrees: “1795–1805, Americanism; orig. uncert.” Encarta Online says only: “Early 19th century. Origin ?” And Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary is apparently flummoxed: “Etymol. uncertain.” Even the venerable Oxford English Dictionary fails us, giving no etymology, but thrusting it out of their jurisdiction as “U.S. Only.” Well, that’s just not good enough, is it?

The word is not in Skeat’s etymological dictionary (perhaps entering common usage a little too late for it), but Eric Partridge has taken a stab at it in his more recent dictionary. There, he acknowledges it to be “o.o.o. [of obscure origin], but perh[aps] akin to kevel, a hammer for stone-shaping or –breaking, itself o.o.o., but prob[ably] akin to naut[ical] kevel, a strong cleat or timber for fastening a vessel’s heavy lines” [1]. The origin of the nautical kevel is through Old North French keville “wooden peg” (OF cheville), from Latin clāvicula, diminutive of clāvis “key”. Hmmm. I find myself in the rare position of being unconvinced by Partridge.

But wait a moment: let’s back up. Setting aside this unnecessary nugget of nautical nomenclature, kevel = “a stonemason’s hammer” has promise. A gavel is a kind of a hammer, after all. So what about a kevel? Some dictionaries have nothing to offer for the etymology of this word (e.g., RHU), but WRUD points to cavil as an alternate spelling. But cavil is also a verb, meaning “to raise irritating and trivial objections”, derived from OF caviller “to cavil, wrangle, reason crossly”, from Latin cavillārī “to jeer, scoff, quibble”, in turn from from cavilla “jeering, jesting, or banter”.

Now, I think we’re getting somewhere! What the connection between kevel = “hammer” and cavil = “argue” might be, if any, I will leave to your imaginations for the moment, but caviling certainly seems relevant to the idea of the gavel used in the auction-house or courtroom. After all, one uses a gavel to interrupt caviling. Partridge ventures that L cavilla might, by dissimilation, derive from L calvāri “to deceive”, while Skeat says its origin is “unclear”, but I have another idea. Actually, I have two.

First, could cavil be related to caw, as in “the hoarse raucous noise of crows and other birds”, clearly of onomatopoeic origins? It seems a reasonable metaphorical picture to me: cawing, chattering, “arguing” birds = arguing people: that is, caw qua cavil, Q.E.D.?

Second, and better, could cavil (and/or gavel) be related to gabble, the frequentative form of gab “to talk idly or incessantly, as about trivial matters”? What is a gavel for but to quiet down idle chatter? The word gab(ble) comes to us from ME gabben “to talk idly”, also used in the sense of “to lie, delude” (cause for concern in the courtroom, without a doubt!); and previously, from ON gabba “to mock, make a game of one”. Skeat calls the ON gabba “of imitative origin”, which sounds right on to me. It’s part of a cluster of similar onomatopoeic words (which, for brevity, I will save for a future post).

The sonic and semantic distance between the words cavil, gavel, and gabble seems quite small to me: I would find a relationship between them plausible, even probable. Far be it from me to second-guess Partridge or Skeat — not to mention the erudite men and women on the etymological teams of the various dictionaries cited above — but I feel pretty good about this. Although gab(ble) has a Germanic provenance and cavil a Romantic one, both are thought to be imitative; hence it’s not at all out of bounds to think they might have a common ancestor form. They’re also similar enough in form and function to have become conflated into gavel through protracted courtroom or auction-house usage, or even to have been blended deliberately into a kind of portmanteau.

What do you think? (And don’t all talk at once, or I’ll have to bring down the gavel to restore order. :)


[1] Partridge, Eric. Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English. 2nd ed. New York: Macmillan, 1959, p. 248 [The 3rd ed., 1961, is substantively the same].

New Tolkien material coming this summer!

Has anyone else just seen this? According to The Tolkien Library, this May will bring us The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited and introduced by Christopher Tolkien. From The Tolkien Library —

The previously unpublished work was written while Tolkien was professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University during the 1920s and ’30s, before he wrote The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The publication will make available for the first time Tolkien’s extensive retelling in English narrative verse of the epic Norse tales of Sigurd the Völsung and the Fall of the Niflungs.

And from David Brawn, of HarperCollins UK —

It is an entirely unpublished work, dates from around the early 1930s, and will be published – all being well – in May this year. Otherwise the clue as to what the book will contain is in the title – THE LEGEND OF SIGURD AND GUDRUN. You will surmise from this that it is not a Middle-earth book, but we are confident that Tolkien fans will be fascinated by it.

Certainly something to look forward to! At least for the medievalists among us; pace Brawn, I would think the work will have only the most limited appeal to mainstream fans of Tolkien’s fiction. For those unfamiliar with the story of Sigurd and Gudrún, follow the link above for a summary of the Norse subject matter The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún is expected to treat.

I suspect this work must be the “long unpublished poem entitled ‘Volsungakviða En Nyja’, probably written in the late 1920s or early 1930s. Tolkien described it, in a letter to [W.H.] Auden dated 29 January 1968, as ‘written in fornyrðislag 8-line stanzas in English: an attempt to organize the Edda material dealing with Sigurd and Gunnar’” [1]. Coincidentally, I was just discussing this poem with someone no more than a week ago. The title is Old Norse and may be translated, more or less, as “The New Lay of the Volsungs”. How good is it, this poem? No way to know that yet, of course, but Tolkien described it as “a thing I did many years ago when trying to learn the art of writing alliterative poetry” [2]. No doubt some will accuse Tolkien’s publisher, HarperCollins UK, of scraping the bottom of the barrel here, but even Tolkien’s “practice works” (perhaps even especially his “practice works”) hold great interest to scholars.

What is also unclear is the precise meaning of “long unpublished” in the note above — is it “long, unpublished” (i.e., the poem is long and has not yet been published), or is it “long-unpublished” (i.e., no comment on the length of the work, but rather on the duration of its languishment). Tom Shippey has pointed out that there is an 8-page gap in the Codex Regius manuscript of the Poetic Edda, specifically in the Sigurðr cycle [3]; if Tolkien’s poem was meant to fill that gap, as Shippey supposes, then we have reason to think it must be fairly short. If it is, then I hope the publisher doesn’t go overboard puffing it up into something “book-length” in the interests of profit. That may be a futile hope, but we will be very happy to have it, whatever its form.

UPDATE — On the other hand, if we’ve identified the right poem, and if its companion is also published with it (as seems likely), then we may have a pretty substantial publication after all. As Ardamir pointed out in the comments (below), the two poems are 339 and 166 stanzas, respectively, each of eight lines, for a total of more than 4,000 lines. Based on the number of lines per page in The Lays of Beleriand, this would translate into something on the order of 115 printed pages. Even with an introduction and other front matter by Christopher Tolkien, that’s still a fairly short book, but not as short as I feared. Nor is it likely to be a simple gap-filler for the eight lost pages in the Codex Regius. Perhaps Tolkien began with this in mind, but in his usual way, eventually embellished it far beyond its original ambit. And so, mirabile dictu, we have a new book by Tolkien — a mere seventy or eighty years later. :)

[1] Tolkien, J.R.R. Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981, p. 452 [note 3 for Letter #295].

[2] Ibid., p. 379.

[3] Shippey, Tom. “Tolkien and Iceland: The Philology of Envy.” Roots and Branches: Selected Papers on Tolkien. Walking Tree Publishers, 2007 , p. 192.

New BBC collection includes Tolkien recording

First off, Happy New Year! :)

Now, a news item. I just heard about this today, though it’s possible it’s old news to some of you. At the end of this past October, the BBC released two interesting audio collections: The Spoken Word: British Writers and The Spoken Word: American Writers. Each is a three-disc collection featuring rare recordings of eminent writers from both sides of the Atlantic. You can read more details here, but allow me to spotlight a couple of things.

The British series includes a recording of J.R.R. Tolkien, presumably the 1971 Dennis Gerrolt interview from the BBC Radio 4 program “Now Read On ...” Whether it’s this interview or not, this would be a nice thing to have on CD. But the collection has much more as well, including the only surviving recording of Virginia Woolf, made in 1937; a recording of the late Harold Pinter; Graham Greene (one of my favorite writers) discussing a childhood memory which would find a place in one of his most celebrated short stories; Rudyard Kipling, E.M. Forster, P.G. Wodehouse, Arthur Conan Doyle, and others. There are also a couple of recordings that will be of some interest to Tolkien scholars: Algernon Blackwood and G.K. Chesterton.

The American series looks just as good. It includes recordings of F. Scott Fitzgerald (one of only three surviving recordings; here, he’s reading from Shakespeare’s Othello, of all things, in 1939), Arthur Miller (discussing his marriage to Marilyn Monroe), Gertrude Stein, John Steinbeck, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Eudora Welty, and more.

Each set is £19.50, which seems pretty reasonable to me. You can read the full track-listings and purchase either set by following the link at the top of the post. The other links salted throughout the preceding two paragraphs are to samples of each respective recording, from the website.

Update: Thanks to Andrew Ferguson, I can give you a bit more detail on the Tolkien recording (this, from the information booklet that comes with the CD set):

J.R.R. Tolkien[1892-1973]
Born in Bloemfontein, South Africa

The Fellowship of the Ring
Interviewer: Denys Gueroult
Date of recording: 20/01/1965
Venue: Randolph Hotel, Oxford
Duration: 11.44 [extract]

This lengthy interview, nearly 40 minutes in total, is the longest surviving recording made by J.R.R. Tolkien. It was recorded for the BBC Sound Archive and was not transmitted. The interview comprises a detailed discussion about his most celebrated work The Lord of the Rings (1954–5). By the mid 1960s, the time of this recording, the books had attained wide popularity on both sides of the Atlantic. As well as being an author of fantasy novels, Tolkien was professor of Anglo Saxon from 1925 to 1945, and Professor of English Language and Literature from 1945 to 1959, at the University of Oxford.

Thanks, Andrew! I’m not certain that the claim, “longest surviving recording made by J.R.R. Tolkien”, is accurate. Weren’t some of the recordings Tolkien made himself longer? But longest recorded interview is probably what they meant. Also, regarding the spelling of the interviewer’s name, yes, there has been some confusion over that. Varied forms have been recorded, including Denys, Denis, Dennis, and even David for the given name, and Gueroult, Gerrolt, Gerroult for the surname. Which one is correct? No idea!