More details on Tolkien’s election to the General Board of the Faculties, Oxford

Christina Scull and Wayne Hammond tell us in the expanded edition of their Chronology that on June 21, 1929 Tolkien was “elected to represent the Faculties of Theology, Law, Literae Humaniores, Modern History, English Language and Literature, Medieval and Modern European Languages and Literature [other than English], and Oriental languages on the General Board for three years until Michaelmas Term 1932” [1].

I’d like to add a little information to this. I have no doubt that Wayne and Christina know all this already but simply omitted these details in consideration of the space required versus the value of the information. As I have no such limitations, I’ll give you all a little bit more. Whether you find it useful or interesting, let me know. :)

Nominations were to be signed and dated and received before 3 PM on Saturday, June 15, by the Secretary of Faculties at the University Registry in the Clarendon Building, Broad Street, just across from the Bodleian Library and cattycorner from the excellent public house, the King’s Arms.

Nominations by at least six electors were required. Tolkien was one of two nominees for this post who met this initial bar. The other was Austin Lane Poole, M.A., Fellow of St. John’s College. [2] Poole would go on to publish the third volume in the Oxford History of England, From Domesday Book to Magna Carta, 1087–1216, in 1956, as well as critical editions of poetry by Thomas Gray. Poole seems to have been genetically predisposed to academia — the son of Reginald Lane Poole, archivist at the University of Oxford; the nephew of Stanley Lane Poole, professor of Arabic at Trinity College, Dublin; and the great-nephew of Reginald Stuart Poole, professor of archaeology at Cambridge.

By June 12, Poole had six nominators: G.N. Clark, Oriel; W.D. Ross, Oriel; E.A. Lowe, Corpus Christi; R. Coupland, All Souls; A.S. Owen, Keble; and J.W.C. Wand, Oriel.

Tolkien had six nominators at this time as well — and here, I’ll add just a little more context for each, where I can (these additional details are mainly from the Chronology):

• Sir M.E. Sadler, M.A., Master of University College: Tolkien had known Michael Sadler since his time at Leeds, where Sadler was Vice-Chancellor. In 1922, he played Father Christmas at a party for the children of Leeds staff where he got stuck in the chimney, no doubt to the immense amusement of the children. Sadler was also, like Tolkien, active with the British Esperanto Congress.
• F. de Zulueta, D.C.L., Fellow of All Souls College: Francis de Zulueta and Helen Buckhurst were the godparents to Tolkien’s daughter, Priscilla. De Zulueta also has an entry dedicated to him in Scull and Hammond’s Reader’s Guide, where you can read more.
• A.D. Lindsay, M.A., Master of Balliol College: Along with Sadler and Tolkien, Lindsay attended the British Esperanto Congress.
• H.C.K. Wyld, B.Litt., M.A., Fellow of Merton College: Wyld was a good deal older than Tolkien. He was the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature before Tolkien and nominated Tolkien to succeed him. Tolkien’s own student, Norman Davis, would succeed him. Wyld was one of Tolkien’s undergraduate examiners at Exeter in 1915. About a decade later, he and Tolkien would both be external examiners for the English Honor School. Like de Zulueta, Wyld has an entry in Scull and Hammond’s Reader’s Guide.
• A.E.W. Hazel, B.C.L., M.A., Principal of Jesus College
• Sir John C. Miles, B.C.L., M.A., Fellow of Merton College

Voting took place in the Convocation House from 12:45 PM to 1:15 PM and from 1:45 PM to 2:10 PM on June 21, 1929. By this time, Tolkien had attracted additional nominations, while Poole still only had six. Tolkien added R.R. Marett, Exeter, whom Tolkien had known since his undergraduate days; Dorothy Everett, M.G. Skipworth, and C.M. Chilcott, all of Lady Margaret Hall; G.E.K. Braunholtz, Worcester College, another Esperantist; C.J. Fordyce, Jesus College; John Fraser, Jesus College; J.A. Smith, Magdalen College; and the eminent C.T. Onions, Magdalen College (there’s an entry on him in the Reader’s Guide too). Sadler does not appear on the final list of nominations, strangely enough. [3]

Beginning to look a little lopsided, eh? The final results were 16 for Tolkien, 11 for Poole, which is a little closer than one might have expected based on the nominations. [4]

[1] Scull, Christina and Wayne G. Hammond. The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Chronology. Rev. and exp. ed. HarperCollins, 2017, p. 160.

[2] Oxford University Gazette. Vol. LIX, No. 1908 (June 12, 1929), p. 662.

[3] Oxford University Gazette. Vol. LIX, No. 1909 (June 19, 1929), p. 703.

[4] Oxford University Gazette. Vol. LIX, No. 1910 (June 26, 1929), p. 723.

 

A newly discovered primary account of Arthur Tolkien’s death

Bloemfontein was a rough place to be on the late 19th century. In addition to the Boer Wars, the climate was a difficult adjustment for Europeans, and disease was rampant. The infant J.R.R. Tolkien and his mother were both ill-stuited to South Africa and often sick, hence, they had returned to England rather than stay on. On October 12, 1899, the bishop of the Anglican Diocese of the Free State, known then as the Diocese of Bloemfontein, Wale Hicks died in office, leaving the bishopric sede vacante until the appointment of Arthur Chandler in 1902.

Before his own death, Bishop Hicks commented on at least three other notable British deaths among his flock in Bloemfontein. First, Alfred Bracebridge Stanford, Vicar of Mafeking (now called Mahikeng), of dysentery late in 1895. Then:

We have had two further losses since. William Walter Powell, a master in St. Andrew’s College, and a candidate for Holy Orders, a young man of considerable promise, died of typhoid fever on January 10. He was a licensed reader, and had given his spare time and energy to helping in church work in various ways with a very simple and unaffected devotion. [1]

And then, he goes on to relate the death of J.R.R. Tolkien’s father:

And now on the 15th inst. [instante mense, i.e., of the current month, i.e., when the bishrop was writing this piece in February, 1896] we have lost one of our good, devoted business men, Arthur Tolkien, who was treasurer of our Diocesan Finance Board. I had hoped to propose him as a member of the Society (S.P.G.) before now. [2]

Arthur Tolkien died of severe bleeding and rheumatic fever, according to an obituary reprinted in The Tolkien Family Album [3]. We get here a picture of Arthur actively involved in church activities and in the promulgation of Christianity to distant parts of the globe, in a church of the Anglican denomination. Scull and Hammond note in their Chronology that Arthur was buried in an Anglican cemetery [4]. Indeed, it seems that Arthur and his new bride Mabel were in fact Anglican, however much we associate J.R.R. Tolkien with his profound Catholic faith. After Arthur’s death and Mabel’s permanent return to England with her two sons, she and her sister converted to Roman Catholicism in June 1900, a conversion which apparently infuriated both the Tolkiens, referred to as Baptists, and the Suffields, who were Methodist/Unitarian. [5] Arthur was also the treasurer of the Diocesan Finance Board, just as he had been treasurer for the Old Edwardians Club, as I have previously documented.

[1] “Varied Needs in Bloemfontein Diocese: A General Review of the Work by the Bishop.” The Mission Field: A Monthly Record of the Proceedings of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel at Home and Abroad. Volume XLI (1896). May 1, 1896. G. Bell & Sons, p. 180.

[2] loc. cit. By S.P.G., Hicks is referring to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, a missionary organization founded in 1701 by royal charter of King William III, and the publisher of the mission field notes being quoted here.

[3] Tolkien, John and Priscilla. The Tolkien Family Album. Houghton Mifflin, 1992, p. 19. Other accounts disagree and say it was typhoid fever; see Chronology, p. 818.

[4] Scull, Christina and Wayne G. Hammond. The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Chronology. Rev. and exp. ed. HarperCollins, 2017, p. 5.

[5] Priestman, Judith, ed. Tolkien: Life and Legend. Bodleian Library, Oxford. 1992, p. 12.

Like father like son

 The Old Edwardians were “a society of former students (‘old boys’) of King Edward’s School, Birmingham” in which J.R.R. Tolkien participated during his undergraduate years at Exeter College, Oxford. He attended Old Edwardian meetings and played in at least one rugby match on the side of the “Old Boys” versus the youngsters still attending King Edward’s School. This much you know already, I expect.

While there have been former Edwardians since the school was founded in 1552, the Old Edwardians Club, as such, was not established until 1883, and was formed primarily as “a football club, as that was the sport in which the School had traditionally excelled, and one which many of the ‘Old Boys’ still indulge in” [1]. Tolkien himself was a solid rugby player, a bit lighter than the usual weight, but he made up for it with “ferocity” [2].

Well, like father, like son, as it turns out. Arthur Reuel Tolkien also attended King Edward’s School, and he too was active in the Old Edwardians after he left. An 1885 issue of the King Edward’s School Chronicle records a cricket match between the Old Boys and the King Edward’s School team on June 15, ending in the victory of the youngsters by “7 wickets and 4 runs”. Tolkien is listed as scoring no runs or wickets or whatever, and bowling to or being bowled to by — no, I really don’t under cricket, so these scorecards are pretty mystifying to me — a KES student called Arblaster. [3]

A few pages later, as in most issues, comes the summary of the Birmingham Old Edwardians Club, broken down into sections. The first of these is the Lawn Tennis Section — other sections included Gymnastics, Football (i.e., Rugby), and Literary and Debating — which was new to the Club, and for which Arthur Tolkien was elected to the post of Treasurer, quite appropriate for a future bank manager:

In spite of the predictions of evil prophets, this section has made a start, and we see no reason why it should not be one of the most successful sections of the Club.

                A ground has been secured for the season at Bournbrook, near the terminus of the Bristol Road tramway, and a dressing room taken in the Bournbrook Hotel. Play commenced on Saturday, May 9th, and has been continued every fine evening since then. There is room for four courts, and the necessary nets and balls have been provided, so that any member who goes up may be quite sure of a game. The Club has the exclusive use of the ground, which is always open; the nets being kept at the Bournbrook Hotel. The subscription (10/6) is a ridiculously small one for a Lawn Tennis Club. The subscription for University members if 7/6. Members have the privilege of taking up friends to play. A Lawn Tennis Tournament has been arranged to be played in a few weeks. The Rev. J. Hunter Smith has been elected President, G.A. Nutt, Vice-President, A.R. Tolkien, Treasurer, and C.E.P. Gabriel, Secretary. As the section is now fairly started, the Committee hope that the members of the Old Edwardians Club will largely support it, especially as it is the only athletic section which meets during the summer months. [4]

Bournbrook is an industrial and residential district in southwest Birmingham. Here’s an ordnance survey map of the area from 1882–1903, which covers the time in question. I’ve circled the area I think is being described. Today, this area comprises tennis courts and sports pitches for the University of Birmingham, just south of “Old Joe”, the Joseph Chamberlain Memorial Clock Tower, and the Elgar Concert Hall, named for the quintessentially English composer Edward Elgar, who was playing violin in Birmingham in 1885 in William Stockley’s Orchestra.

Like his son, Arthur Tolkien’s involvement in the Old Edwardians wasn’t strictly limited to sporting. On January 17, 1885, he delivered a speech as part of the Literary and Debating Section. A propos of the professional life he would soon be embarking on, Arthur advocated in “a carefully prepared speech” “[t]hat Free Trade under all circumstances was the best policy for England”, in response to which:

We cannot help thinking that, with the exception of the Mover [Arthur Tolkien] and perhaps one other Speaker, no one had thoroughly gone into the subject, and, in fact, one Speaker was apparently so confused in his own mind as to the question under discussion that, after making a most stirring speech against the motion, he voted for in on the plea that his convictions had always been in favor of Free Trade” [5].

In 1885, Arthur Tolkien would have just turned 28 years old — still 27 at the time of his debating club speech. He was three years away from becoming engaged to Mabel Suffield, and four years from his emigration to South Africa to work for the Bank of Africa. Another year, and he would be made manager of the Bloemfontein branch, and one more before Mabel traveled to South Africa to join him. They married on April 16, 1891, Mabel was pregnant more or less immediately, and they welcomed their first son, John Ronald Reuel, the following January.

Arthur’s involvement in the Old Edwardians Club — trivial, maybe; though perhaps not, if it’s fruitful to observe any likeness between father and son, even a son who scarcely knew his father — isn’t in Scull and Hammond’s Chronology, but if it were, these would be among the earliest entries. I don’t find any mention of this in their Reader’s Guide either. The issues of the King Edward’s School Chronicle I’m quoting here also contain short pieces on magic, etymology, and the Nibelungenlied, which I have to imagine would have tickled Tolkien’s fancy if he ever read these issues. Did he? Was he even aware he was following in his father’s footsteps? One wonders, indeed. 

[1] “The Old Edwardians’ Club.” King Edward’s School Chronicle, New Series. Vol. III, No. 23, October 1883, p. 89–90.

[2] Letters, #16, October 3, 1937 to Michael Tolkien, who was going out for his school rugby team.

[3] King Edward’s School Chronicle, New Series. Vol. IV, No. 33, July 1885, p. 115.

[4] ibid., p. 117.

[5] King Edward’s School Chronicle, New Series. Vol. IV, No. 30, February 1885, p. 59–60. 

Humphrey Carpenter was a professional jazz musician

Humphrey Carpenter, best known to readers of this blog as Tolkien’s authorized biographer, was also a professional jazz musician. This has been known to some for quite a while, but it came as a surprise to me. In the obituary in Tolkien Studies [1], Douglas Anderson referred to Carpenter as a musician and noted that a friend of his had set some of Tolkien’s work to music, but other, later aspects of his professional music career went unmentioned. But the obituary in the New York Times, which I just read today and overlooked when it appeared in 2005, does reveal all of this.

He played bass and sousaphone, and his band, Vile Bodies, named after Evelyn Waugh’s second novel, had a residency at The Ritz Hotel in London during the 1980s, not long after he had completed the biography and the collection of Tolkien’s letters. A jazz enthusiast and journalist, Dave Doyle, tracked down one of Carpenter’s bandmates, and has just published what he learned here. He was also a member of another jazz band, the Park Town Strutters, as described in a 2008 remembrance in the Oxford Mail.

Seen here is Humphrey Carpenter’s personal copy of The Ellington Era 1927-1940: Volume One, Part Two (CBS, 1963), which Doyle found in a second-hand shop near Oxford.

[1] Anderson, Douglas A. “Obituary: Humphrey Carpenter (1946-2005).” Tolkien Studies 2 (2005): 217–24.

Hallucinations

Last fall, I wrote about whether/to what degree generative AI could help us analyze The Lord of the Rings (spoiler: probably not, or not much, or at least not so much yet). Here today, I’d like to share another relevant experiment. 

There’s one serious problem with generative AI. It’s been a problem since the beginning, and it’s not been solved yet. While AI is good at many things, if it doesn’t know the answer to a question, it often just makes one up! In addition to that, I’ve often found that if you make a false statement — even knowingly — the AI trusts you, assumes it’s true, and builds an entire response around the error. It doesn’t always do this, but it does so much more often than to inspire trust. Here’s an example.

I fed a prompt into Google Gemini that even a casual Tolkien fan will know to be total garbage.

Please elaborate on the passage in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings where Frodo Brandybuck tells Leroy Bolger, “I have never been taken with jewelry”, explaining how this amplifies or undermines the temptation of the Ring.

Gemini took the bait and replied.

I then dug us deeper into this hole:

And what is the significance of Leroy’s immediate response, “Alas that the jewelry should take you, my dear hobbit!”

And again Gemini was happy to make up all manner of nonsense.

So … not great, right? I conducted this experiment a couple of months ago, though, and generative AI models are always improving. Plus, they are stochastic models that do not always give the same answer. So how about we try again? Today, I fed the same two prompts into Gemini, and got longer answers, but not better ones.

Please elaborate on the passage in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings where Frodo Brandybuck tells Leroy Bolger, “I have never been taken with jewelry”, explaining how this amplifies or undermines the temptation of the Ring.

And what is the significance of Leroy’s immediate response, “Alas that the jewelry should take you, my dear hobbit!”

And again Gemini was happy to make up all manner of nonsense.

A couple of points to note in how today’s response is worse.

Both then and now, Gemini takes the bogus quotations I dangled as genuine, but in the latest test, it tells me exactly where the quotes are supposed to occur and actually offers a completely invented alternate version of one of them. Not only is there no such quotation, but the word “jewelry” never appears anywhere in the novel. And the idea of the One Ring as jewelry is frankly absurd. In the latest test, the answers Gemini provides are also lengthier and more detailed than before.

Also, both then and now, the character I invented — Leroy Bolger — is assumed to be real, but in the latest test, because of the surname, I guess, Leroy is equated with Fatty Bolger — “or ‘Leroy’ depending on the edition”! Er, which edition would that be? Gemini has not only bought into and extended the error, but it has also invented an explanation! On top of that, in the detailed — and completely invented — analysis that follows, Gemini has created reasons and explanations for something that isn’t even close to true. The latest test also provides a “source” for me to consult, furthering the impression that its answers are to be trusted.

So, this is a pretty bad result from Google Gemini. Now, I wouldn’t have been surprised if generative AI often confused dialog from the Peter Jackson films with Tolkien’s novel — that has been a danger even among fans — but completely invented quotations are much more worrisome.

Will AI get better at this? Maybe. There is some reason for hope!

I tried the same prompts using Microsoft’s generative AI chatbot, Copilot, and was relieved to see a much better response. 

To the first prompt:

And to the second:

Copilot has recognized the erroneous names and quotations, but offers to play along “to entertain this hypothetical scenario within the spirit of Tolkien’s themes”. So, not such a bad outcome after all. And as Gandalf might add, “and that may be an encouraging thought”.

C.S. Lewis by Joel Heck

Today I want to bookmark for myself and share with all of you an incredible set of resources on C.S. Lewis put together by Joel Heck, a Lewis scholar and currently the Interim President of Concordia Lutheran Seminary in Edmonton, Alberta. I’ve never met Dr. Heck, but like me, he’s from Texas. We know a lot of the same people; we’ve been published in a lot of the same places; I’ve edited scholars’ who have cited him; and we’ve commented on some of the same Facebook posts. There’s a pretty good chance we’ve attended some of the same conferences and may have sat in the same rooms at the same time.

A few years ago, a friend of mine asked whether I knew of a day-by-day chronological resource on Tolkien’s life and work — he was trying to remember the Scull and Hammond Chronology — something “Similar to Chronologically Lewis by Joel Heck”, he said. I was too preoccupied with talking Tolkien and with the specifics of my friend’s line of research to really dig into Chronologically Lewis, whatever that was.

Did I look it up at the time? I can’t remember now, but when I stumbled upon it (again?) recently, I was staggered by it. It’s a 1,300-page, year by year, day by day, in some cases hour by hour account of the life and doings of C.S. Lewis. At more than 749,000 words, it’s longer than The Lord of the Rings! In fact, it starts in 1894, four years before Lewis was born, with the marriage of his parents, and ends in 1973, ten years after his death, with the deaths of his brother, Warnie, and his friend, Tolkien. It’s a meticulously sourced project of more than 20 years (consulting more than 200 other works) — begun in 2004, last updated in October 2024, and still ongoing. The innumerable details range from the momentous to the mundane and everything in between. Letters written, works completed, walks taken, lectures delivered and attended, meetings of the Inklings — you name it.

As incredibly valuable a resource as this is, it’s not all you’ll find at Heck’s website. He also has a 25-page chronological bibliography of Lewis’s works, including those still unpublished, and a nearly 200-page literary biography of Lewis, focusing on “the intellectual history of Oxford and Cambridge during the Lewis years”. He intended this for publication at one time, but it was evidently found to be “too technical” for a mass audience.

And even that isn’t all! Heck provides downloadable photo tours of The Kilns, Oxford University, Magdalen College, Holy Trinity Church, The Eagle and Child, Addison’s Walk, and other locales of interest; more than forty PowerPoint slide shows on Lewis’s major works and related topics that you can download and reuse however you like (with proper credit); and lots of other reviews and essays.

For anyone doing research on Lewis, it’s a truly indispensable trove! Dig in and enjoy, friends. I know I will.

J.A.W. Bennett on Tolkien

For some Tolkien collectors, desiderata include anything with Tolkien’s name on it or in it in any capacity whatsoever. For example, Tolkien served as a general editor for the Oxford English Monographs series, and as such, his name appears on a number of volumes (seven, if memory serves). Tolkien was actively involved in some of these. For the Old English Appollonius of Tyre (ed. Peter Goolden, 1958), for instance, Tolkien provided a one-paragraph prefatory note, and revisions he that suggested personally were acknowledged by the editor in his introduction. That’s something of note, certainly — I have a scan. But for others of this series, Tolkien probably had much less direct involvement. Even so, collectors grab them up and display them proudly!

I don’t tend to go so far in my own collecting (because of the expense and minor relevance), but some acknowledgments and mentions of Tolkien I do find worthwhile, particularly when the comments are being made by someone who knew him well — even more so when made by an Inkling.

Jack Arthur Walter Bennett (1911–1981) was a younger and lesser-known member of the Inklings. Born in New Zealand to English parents, he grew up in poverty and, after earning his undergraduate degree in Auckland, came to Merton College, Oxford, on a scholarship, where he was a student of Tolkien’s. He was part of what has been called the “New Zealand Mafia”, New Zealanders who came to Oxford, often as Rhodes Scholars, before World War II. Another of these, and another of Tolkien’s students, was Norman Davis, who edited the revised edition of Tolkien and Gordon’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Kenneth Sisam, who gave Tolkien one of his first big academic jobs, was also from New Zealand, but about a generation older than Bennett.

Bennett — called Jack or “Jaw” (as Warnie Lewis referred to him) — first attended a Thursday night Inklings meeting on August 15, 1946. Warnie was annoyed. Bennett came back a week later, and Warnie recorded in his diary: “J[ack; i.e., C.S. Lewis] and I much concerned this evening by the gate crashing of B[ennett]; Tollers, the ass, brought him here last Thursday, and he has apparently now elected himself an Inkling. Not very clear what one can do about it” [1].

Bennett was known primarily as a scholar of Middle English, Chaucer especially. With G.V. Smithers, he edited Early Middle English Verse and Prose (to which Norman Davis contributed the glossary). A friend of mine — Bruce Leonard, I believe — gave me a nice copy he’d picked up from the Oxfam Bookshop in St. Giles, when so many of us were in Oxford for the Maker of Middle-earth exhibition back in 2018. Bennett also helmed the well-known journal, Medium Ævum from 1957 until his death in 1981. This is the journal in which Tolkien published his own work on “Sigelwara Land” (two decades before Bennett’s time as editor). After World War II, he was elected a Fellow and Tutor at Magdalen College, Oxford, and worked directly with C.S. Lewis, taking the language side of his curriculum. Warnie called him Lewis’s “new lieutenant” [2]. Bennett later followed Lewis (after Lewis’s death) as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge University, where he remained until shortly before his own death. [3]

With some background out of the way — maybe more than necessary, but probably helpful for some, since Bennett is not very well known even to many Tolkien fans — let me turn to the book I have in front of me.

In 1970, Bennett traveled to Canada to deliver a series of lectures at the University of Toronto. These he then collected and published as Chaucer at Oxford and at Cambridge in 1974, just a year after the death of Tolkien. In the fourth lecture of the book, “The Jolly Miller”, Bennett praises some of the work Tolkien had done on Chaucer forty years before:

But what did Chaucer mean by ‘fer in the north’ (4015)? [cf., Chaucer, The Reeve’s Tale, l. 4015: “Fer in the north; I kan nat telle where”] This is a question that only a philologist can answer. And a brilliant philologist and story-teller has answered it. Buried deep in The Transactions of The Philological Society for 1934 lies one of the first papers that the author of The Lord of the Rings ever published. If admirers of that work, or admirers of Chaucer, would study this paper they would learn something that no critics of either can teach. The pity is that since 1934 linguistics has elbowed philology out of the way and no one has bothered to test or extend Tolkien’s findings on ‘Chaucer as a philologist’ in the light of new collations of the manuscripts or later place-name studies. [4]

Tolkien’s death goes unmentioned, which might simply have been English (or New Zealand) decorum, or it may be that the book was already in galleys by the time Tolkien died in September 1973. But in any case, Bennett’s compliments, mindful of Tolkien’s passing or not, are a worthy remembrance of an Inkling only recently gone.

[1] Lewis, Warren Hamilton. Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis. Ed. Clyde S. Kilby and Marjorie Lamp Mead, Harper & Row, 1982, p. 194.

[2] Ibid., p. 193.

[3] For more about Bennett, see David Bratman’s “The Inklings: Their Lives and Works” in Glyer, Diana Pavlac. The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community, Kent State University Press, 2007, p. 232; and Scull, Christina and Wayne G. Hammond, The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide, Readers’s Guide, Part I (2017), “Bennett, Jack Arthur Walter”, pp. 119–120. And if you want to know even more, McNeish, James, Dance of the Peacocks: New Zealanders in Exile in the Time of Hitler and Mao Tse-tung, Random House, 2003.

[4] Bennett, J.A.W., Chaucer at Oxford and at Cambridge, Oxford University Press/Toronto University Press, 1974, p. 100.

A short review of The Mythmakers

I just finished TheMythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, a — what would you call it? — graphic joint-biography written and illustrated by John Hendrix. It’s pretty good overall, very engaging, mostly accurate, and it goes a bit deeper than I expected. For example, rather than just The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Space Trilogy, and The Chronicles of Narnia, Hendrix touches on Tolkien’s Silmarillion, the TCBS, “The Book of Lost Tales”, “The Lost Road”, the Ace pirate edition of The Lord of the Rings, and on Lewis’s “Boxen”, Shelley’s Pond at the Kilns, and other surprising details. He even mention the Apolausticks!

The book utilizes a sort of framing device with two guides —Wizard, modeled on Tolkien; and Mr. Lion, modeled on Lewis — through a fantastical landscape of underground caverns, great trees of tales, mountain passes, isolate lighthouses, and even the Western Europe of World War I. Along the way, they dissert and digress about the roots of fantasy, epic tales, folklore, legends, the Great War and its sequel, and other topics, at each point introducing and providing context for sections of biography on Tolkien and Lewis.

Periodically, a greater digression is offered — what Hendrix calls a “portal” — and interested readers may turn to the indicated page at the end of the book, after which they are redirected back to the page they had just left. Alongside Wizard and Mr. Lion, there are a few additional characters who deliver these digressions into the roots of myth, the origins of fairy tales, and so on. Diverting (literally), effective, and probably quite fun for younger readers.

After spending a number of pages and illustrations on “the breaking of the fellowship” between Tolkien and Lewis, Hendrix also indulges in a little bit of fan service/self-soothing to imagine a sort of final farewell scene between Lewis and Tolkien, taking place in some liminal, half-real, half-fantastical place. Their “proper goodbye”, so to speak. It’s a rather maudlin fiction, but I can understand the impulse.

Hendrix is also a Christian, and part of the appeal of Tolkien and Lewis, for him, lies in that affinity. To his credit, he does a good job of keeping this largely out of the book. He discusses Tolkien’s and Lewis’s religious views (and differences), but not in a way where you feel like he is endorsing this viewpoint or pushing his own agenda.

This book does contain some errors, though fewer than I expected, if I’m being honest. Here’s a short list (selective, not exhaustive).

• *Sarehold; for Sarehole
• Andrew Lang's Red *Faery Book; for Fairy
• Tolkien’s story about a *"great green dragon". It's a "green great dragon", of course; that was the whole point! [1]
• R.E. “Humphrey” *Harvard; for Havard
• Although it's valid to call Lewis more prolific than Tolkien (at least, as measured by publications), Hendrix is a little unfair contrasting Lewis's and Tolkien's major works 1940–1947, in which he gives Lewis credit for 8 but Tolkien only for 1 ("Leaf by Niggle"), apart from academic works. Hendrix omits "The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun" (1945) and "On Fairy-stories" (1947). And why not consider the entire decade, which would have allowed Farmer Giles of Ham (1949)? Why stop at 1947?
• “Two *Latin terms”, he says of logos and mythos; these are both Greek words.
• He says that in the 1960s, The Lord of the Rings had been "translated into every European language", when that isn’t even close to true. By 1970, the Dutch, Swedish, Polish, Italian, Danish, and German translations had appeared. Even the French didn’t appear until the early 1970s, Spanish not until 1977–1980, and plenty of other European languages much later (e.g., Czech c. 1990, Icelandic c. 1995, Romanian c. 2000).
• Discussing the Ace pirate edition, Hendrix talks about the "money Tolkien lost in the authorized printing", but Ace actually did pay Tolkien royalties in the end. [2]
• *Magdalen for the Cambridge College, but it's Magdalene, and Hendrix has only a single entry in the index for both the Oxford and Cambridge colleges of almost the same name.

[1] See Tolkien’s letters, #163.

[2] See Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond, The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide, Revised and Expanded Edition: Reader’s Guide, Part I (2017), “Ace Books controversy”, pp. 4-6.

Can Generative AI help us analyze The Lord of the Rings?

Generative AI is everywhere these days. Some of its output can seem pretty impressive too, at least at a glance. So it’s natural to wonder whether we might be able to use this emerging technology to analyze our favorite works of literature in valuable, labor-saving ways. After all — as is well known by now — Generative AI has gobbled up practically every work of literature ever published as part of its training, copyrights be damned. I can’t help remembering Sméagol’s warning about Sauron, “Don’t take the Precious to Him! He’ll eat us all, if He gets it, eat all the world.” Large Language Models seem to be in the “eating all the world” stage now, and Sam Altman is no Sam Gamgee!

So, can this technology help us analyze The Lord of the Rings? The short answer is: no, not really, not yet, and maybe not ever. If that’s enough for you, you can stop reading now. :)

I’ve been experimenting with ChatGPT, Gemini, and other Generative AI tools for some time, but while they can be useful for certain tasks, they will not be replacing literary scholars (or other professions) any time soon. A scenario occurred to me recently, one that I thought might be suitable for the kinds of things Generative AI does fairly well — if the results were accurate. But hallucinations and other defects are still common, so I put it to the test. Some of you may remember my work on hapax legomena in The Lord of the Rings, which I wrote about here. Unfortunately, the Scholars Forum referred to is long gone (a long story), but the essay was later published.

I wondered whether this was the kind of analysis Generative AI might help with, so I tried this prompt with Google Gemini:

Please provide a list of 25 hapax legomena occurring in the novel, The Lord of the Rings, ignoring all paratextual elements.

This prompt tests a few things, even before you get to the results: (1) does Gemini understand what a hapax legomenon is? (2) Does it have access to the text of The Lord of the Rings? (3) Does it know what we mean by the paratext of the novel?

Let me break down the response into two parts. I’ll start with the surrounding explanatory content, and then I’ll move on to the list of words the chatbot provided.

Disclaimer: While I can provide a list of words that appear only once in The Lord of the Rings, it’s important to note that Tolkien’s world-building often involves the creation of unique languages and terms. As such, many words that might seem like hapax legomena are actually part of these invented languages, making them less truly unique in the context of Middle-earth.

Additionally, the concept of a “hapax legomena” [sic] can be subjective. Depending on how we define a “word” (e.g., including compounds, derivatives, or different grammatical forms), the list could vary significantly.

Note: This list is not exhaustive and may contain errors or omissions. It’s also possible that some of these words might appear in other works by Tolkien or in different editions of The Lord of the Rings.

This explanatory text provides some pretty good context. Gemini clearly understands what a hapax legomenon is, and it seems to have access to the text of The Lord of the Rings. It even seems to know there are different editions. It got “Middle-earth” right too; many people, let alone AI models, get that wrong. I was also impressed to see that is was aware of Tolkien’s glossopoeia and that this might inform how it should interpret the prompt. By hapax legomena, are we interested in, say, Elvish words too, or are we not? That’s for us to decide, but Gemini realized this could be an important distinction.

So far, so good. But now, let’s looks at the list Gemini provided:

1. Glimmering: Used to describe the light of the moon in the Shire.
2. Windlestraw: A type of grass mentioned in the Shire.
3. Wainwright: A person who makes or repairs wagons.
4. Garnishing: Used to describe the decorations on the walls of Elrond’s house.
5. Tarn: A small mountain lake.
6. Whirligig: A type of spinning toy.
7. Hobbity: Adjective used to describe something related to hobbits.
8. Hitherward: Toward this place.
9. Whitherward: Toward what place.
10. Thenceforth: From that time on.
11. Whilom: Formerly.
12. Withered: Dried up or shriveled.
13. Withering: Causing to dry up or shrivel.
14. Witheringly: In a withering manner.
15. Whither: To what place.
16. Whitherward: Toward what place.
17. Whithersoever: To whatever place.
18. Whithersoever: To whatever place.
19. Whitherward: Toward what place.
20. Whitherward: Toward what place.
21. Whitherward: Toward what place.
22. Whitherward: Toward what place.
23. Whitherward: Toward what place.
24. Whitherward: Toward what place.
25. Whitherward: Toward what place.

Well, this is not so good. The most obvious problem is that the word “whitherward” is given here nine times, along with several variants, including “whithersoever” given twice, and three variants on “wither”, which, worryingly, I suspect Gemini thinks is related to “whither”. All of this seems to ignore Gemini’s own preliminary comment about “compounds, derivatives, or different grammatical forms” too. It almost looks as if the model ran through the alphabet and got to W with quite a few spots left to fill in my requested list of 25 words.

But the problem is actually worse.

Let’s go through the list. Some of these words — “glimmering”, “withered”, “withering”, “whither” — occur multiple times in the novel. These aren’t hapax legomena at all. Not even close.

Most of the others — “windlestraw”, “wainwright”, “garnishing”, “tarn”, “whirligig”, “hobbity”, “hitherward”, “whitherward”, “thenceforth”, “whilom”, “witheringly”, “whitherward” — do not occur in the novel at all. Where did they come from? The films? Fan fiction? Who knows? These are what you might properly call hallucinations, in the terminology of Generative AI. Especially “garnishing”, which is supposedly “used to describe the decorations on the walls of Elrond’s house”.

Only one of the 25 words offered is actually a hapax legomenon in The Lord of the Rings, “whithersoever”, which occurs in only one place:

‘Do I not say truly, Gandalf,’ said Aragorn at last, ‘that you could go whithersoever you wished quicker than I? And this I also say: you are our captain and our banner. The Dark Lord has Nine. But we have One, mightier than they: the White Rider. He has passed through the fire and the abyss, and they shall fear him. We will go where he leads.’ [1]

So, it’s clear that Gemini handled this prompt quite badly overall. What about other LLMs? I did try this out with Microsoft Copilot, which uses the ChatGPT LLM. It stated, in part, “I can’t provide a verbatim list of hapax legomena from The Lord of the Rings due to copyright restrictions. […] If you’re interested in exploring hapax legomena in The Lord of the Rings, I recommend checking out scholarly articles or linguistic studies that analyze Tolkien’s language. These sources often provide detailed lists and discussions of such words.”

Here, Microsoft shows that it is aware of the copyright issue, where Google either isn’t aware or doesn’t care. This is a bit glib, though, because ChatGPT has most assuredly also gobbled up The Lord of the Rings, just as Gemini has. It just isn’t going to pull back the curtain for us. Is that better or worse? Hmm.

Following up, I then asked Copilot if it could recommend any specific scholarly articles or linguistic studies on hapax legomena in Tolkien’s works. You can imagine what I was angling for, eh? Was it aware of my own paper? Well, no, unfortunately. It recommended three papers, one on hapax legomena in natural language processing (a computer science topic), one of hapaxes in The Iliad, and one on ancient Akkadian and Ugaritic texts. Worthwhile, no doubt, but a missed opportunity to point an interested user to a directly relevant paper.

We could try other models, but it’s not likely any of this is ready for prime time. I hope amateur and new scholars aren’t relying on these models without double-checking their output, but we may be headed for a time of more and more careless reliance on supposed artificial intelligence. It’s bad enough that some people confuse the novel with the film and television adaptations. Generative AI could introduce a whole new set of problems for researchers.

Will Generative AI ever be good enough to perform this kind of analysis reliably? I have some reasons to doubt it, but elaborating would require quite a detour. I’ll try to address the question in a single paragraph for now. Suffice to say there are two substantial obstacles: (1) the cost of Generative AI, both direct costs as well as resource costs such as electricity, water, raw materials for chips, etc., and (2) the fact that the LLMs are running out of genuine human-generated material to train with. Models will increasingly be fed other AI output as new input, which will probably push us to a mediocre plateau in the capabilities of the technology. And the technology is not likely to get much better without a lot more investment, a lot more resource utilization, and a lot more raw material for training. The more people rely on it, the worse it may get, until the return no longer justifies the investment. In this way, Generative AI may be self-limiting. Garbage in, garbage out. This is not to say Generative AI will disappear; it’s just not likely to get a lot better than it is today. (If you want to read more about how Generative AI is a bubble that may be getting ready to burst, take a look at this very long, very detailed essay .)

[1] Tolkien, J.R.R. The Two Towers. Houghton Mifflin, 1965, p. 104.