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:

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 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.

Tolkien, Goethe, and the long long ago

In a recent Facebook conversation, someone asked about The Making of Middle-earth: The Worlds of Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings by Christopher Snyder. I didn’t recognize it from its cover, but I usually try to help with queries like this. I said, “I haven’t seen it. David Bratman reviewed the first edition in Tolkien Studies Vol. 11 [1]. Fairly mixed review, but overall, sounds like it’s not terrible.” David also covered it more briefly a couple of years later in The Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies Vol. 13 [2]. So, I’d done my duty … but this snagged in the back of mind for some reason.

I had said I hadn’t seen this book, but funnily enough, I actually have. I’ve got a copy on my own bookshelves! I didn’t recognize it because the one shared on Facebook is a 2022 reissue with a very different cover — a beautiful one, to be fair, though the original one is also nice. Apparently I received a review copy of the original 2013 edition, probably intended for review in Mythprint. But I had never done anything more than flip through it. It’s pretty, with lots of illustrations, but I couldn’t have said more than that.

Reading David Bratman’s review now — which I hadn’t when it first appeared; sorry, David! — I see that Snyder made a passing comparison between Tolkien and Goethe, something I myself explored in much greater detail in a conference paper I gave in Spring 2014, and then published in 2015. This means that Snyder actually beat me to getting the basic idea into print — although his comments are only two paragraphs and a short quotation from the poem. I did a survey of the literature when I wrote my paper, as I always do, but I didn’t discover Snyder’s comments at the time, as his book had only just been published.

All this got me to thinking back. Although I didn’t write this paper until 2014, I originally had the idea much earlier. In June, 2010 — four years earlier! — I pitched it to Thomas Honegger and Fanfan Chen for their (at the time) new journal, Fastitocalon. The idea itself predates that abstract, but the first germ is lost in the fog of memory. At least a year before, I expect, maybe longer. Maybe much longer. I might have been reading Goethe. I might have been listening to Schubert. Who can say?

A couple of weeks after I sent in the proposal, I got some feedback from Thomas (hoping he doesn’t mind my quoting it here):

I’ve received the feedback from several members of our board of advisors and the overall response to your proposal has been positive, though with some critical remarks concerning the ‘scope’ or ‘focus’ (well, that’s what peer-review is good for). I enclose an excerpt from one of the reports below to give you an idea.

What I’d like to suggest is that you slightly shifted the focus from looking for Tolkien’s sources for his Ringwraiths to considering Tolkien’s black riders as one (by now very popular) ‘incarnation’ of an ancient Germanic tradition (regardless of Tolkien’s actual acquaintance with the texts you mention). This would allow you to investigate the ‘Erlkönig’ background, which seems to me highly relevant for the Ringwraiths, yet at the same time it does not limit your argument to ‘sources’ only. What do you think?

To be sure! I was obsessed with digging out sources in those days, but this feedback sounds like the advice I myself would give blundering source-hunters today. Thomas encouraged me to finish and send in the paper. This was right around the time I was co-chairing the annual Mythopoeic Conference in Dallas with Randy Hoyt, and we were both already buried. Not only that, but I was in the middle of working on my book, J.R.R. Tolkien and the Study of His Sources. I had also taken on the job of editor of Mythprint in the Spring of 2010. And I was co-editing C.S. Lewis and the Inklings: Discovering Hidden Truth with Salwa Khoddam and Mark Hall, plus writing other essays for books and journals. Gaaaah!

I had a really self-destructive tendency in those days to overcommit to any and every opportunity that came my way. I still have a bit of a problem with this, but I’ve gotten much better about it. Looking back at that summer, I can’t believe how much I was actually juggling — including my full-time job! It’s a great lesson in what not to do. It’s a miracle I managed to be as effective as I was in all those projects. In any case, I told Thomas I’d finish the paper after Mythcon, intending to get it to him before a November 30 deadline for the issue. Ha! Ha! Ha!

In July, I got another piece of feedback from Thomas:

I’ve received another feedback from one of our readers. Since he makes a rather specific point in a), I forward it to you below (some of his more general points such as under b) have been kind of taken care of by what we discussed earlier on).

The Erlkönig theme itself - and certainly Goethe’s ballad — is fascinating, but the connection to Tolkien’s Old Man Willow episode and the rest needs some strengthening. What I miss is a) a consideration of the “Alder Maiden” episode in MacDonald’s Phantastes (Ch. 6), which is relevant for the “tree spirit” interpretation and which Tolkien, via Lewis’s recommendation, is likely to have known, and, perhaps even more important, b) some reflections on what is gained by such a (rather speculative) linking of different texts. ([… which] perhaps could be used to gain or support some insights into the intertextual quality of fantasy fiction in general.)

I hadn’t (and still haven’t) read Phantastes, though I’ve meant to and have heard many conference papers on it. So it goes.

Mythcon came and went, and by October I had landed a publisher for my book and started the final push to complete the opus magnum (Thomas’s description) — a very big job requiring my full attention. I wrote to Thomas, who was incidentally also a contributor to my book, that “the sudden acceleration in this project means that I have had to put the Erlkönig / Black Riders comparative piece for Fastitocalon on hold. I’m not going to be able to have that for you next month; it will have to come next spring, I imagine, once the book has moved further along and no longer demands the kind of time it has heretofore.” Thomas nodded back, indicating we could shift our plans for the essay to the second issue of Fastitocalon, planned for 2011.

My book arrived in the summer of 2011, and the Khoddam/Hall/Fisher collection arrived some months after that, but I didn’t manage to return to the essay. I ended up interviewing at Microsoft near the beginning of 2012 and moving across the country in a major career and life pivot in the spring of that year. The essay was never completed for Fastitocalon — nor did Thomas and I end up talking about it any further, though we continued to correspond about lots of other things, as one does. It had effectively slipped my mind — and perhaps his as well. Then, in January 2014, the Call for Papers for the C.S. Lewis and Inklings Society’s annual conference hit my inbox, and as I cast about for an idea — remember, I couldn’t say no to anything back then — I remembered the planned paper.

I finished the essay in February 2014, still thinking that I alone in all the universe — my crest has now fallen — had made this connection between Goethe’s poem and the episode in The Lord of the Rings.

David Bratman’s review was announced in July 2014, but the issue didn’t reach people until at least November. David mentioned the Tolkien/Goethe/Schubert connection explicitly, but I had finished my paper nine months before I could have seen his review, even if I read it when it was published, which I’m sure I didn’t.

Of note in David’s review:

A comparison of the wounded Frodo’s journey from Weathertop to Rivendell to the Goethe-Schubert song “Der Erlkönig” works better in relation to the more frantic pace of the movie than of the wearying slog of the book (132–33). [3]

At the Mythcon in Colorado Springs in 2015, I read the paper again (about a year about a half after I had read it for the CSLIS). There, I did something I hadn’t done before but had always envisioned as part of making the case for the paper. I played the scene from the Peter Jackson film adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring, but I substituted the Franz Schubert Lied, “Erlkönig”, for the film’s audio. That’s something you just can’t do in print, and it was something David had almost seemed to be asking for in his review — again, if I had read it; which, again, I hadn’t.

On his blog, David recounted highlights from Mythcon, in which he wrote:

Better music made an appearance in today’s program when Jason Fisher delivered an erudite paper on resemblance and possible influence of Goethe’s “Erlkönig” on Tolkien’s Black Riders and Old Man Willow. He even went so far as to play a clip of the Ford of Bruinen scene from Jackson’s “Fellowship” with Schubert’s setting of Goethe substituted for whatever crap Howard Shore wrote for that scene. It was so much better this way it wasn’t funny. I suggest we make a full Schubert lieder recital as a substitute soundtrack for the entire movie. Except then I’d have to watch the thing again.

So that was incredibly gratifying. And perhaps as a tease, I might say that I have another paper that has been years in the works in which I might be pulling the same trick!

So, what is the point of this meandering recollection?

I suppose it may be to ruminate on just how much you can forget, even of your own work; how easy it is to overlook the work others are doing (and there is a lot of it); and the delights of remembering and retracing your steps later on.

It may also be a cautionary tale on delaying the pursuit of an idea too long. Like the child in the poem, an idea may die if you can’t get it home in time. Even now, I still have old notes and abstracts I’ve never returned to. With such delays, this means that occasionally someone will beat me to getting a connection or discovery into print. I used to lose sleep over being “scooped”, but this is much less important to me now. Now, I’m more likely to greet such an essay with a sigh of relief. So long as the idea gets out there, that’s a mountain of work I don’t have to do!

And one final note. It’s been ten years, but perhaps someone wants to take Thomas Honegger’s anonymous reviewer’s idea to heart and bring MacDonald’s Phantastes back into this discussion. Anyone?

[1] Bratman, David. Rev. of The Making of Middle-earth, by Christopher Snyder; The Essential Tolkien Trivia and Quiz Book, by William MacKay. Tolkien Studies 11 (2014): 254–57.

[2] Bratman, David, Edith L. Crowe, Jason Fisher, John Wm. Houghton, John Magoun, and Robin Anne Reid. “The Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies 2013.” Tolkien Studies 13 (2016): 223–300, p. 225.

[3] See [1], p. 256.

Tom Riddle and Roman Castevet

I’ve written before about possible sources — or close similarities, at least — between motifs in J.K. Rowling’s Wizarding World and earlier works by other authors. In one case, I compared horcruxes in the world of Harry Potter with an analogue in Lloyd Alexander. In another, I looked at whether Rowling could have been influenced by Charles Williams in her conception of Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place. I’m back today with another such similarity.

I’ve been on a horror kick in my reading of late. William Peter Blatty, Stephen King, and Ira Levin so far this year. I’ve been a big fan of horror films for — well, pretty much my whole life — but I’ve actually read very little horror fiction until recently.

In Rosemary’s Baby (1967), I spotted something that reminded me immediately of a similar episode from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1999).

Potterphiles will remember this scene near the end of the novel:

“Voldemort,” said Riddle softly, “is my past, present, and future, Harry Potter. . . .”

He pulled Harry’s wand from his pocket and began to trace it through the air, writing three shimmering words:

TOM MARVOLO RIDDLE

Then he waved the wand once, and the letters of his name rearranged themselves:

I AM LORD VOLDEMORT

“You see?” he whispered. […] “I fashioned myself a new name, a name I knew wizards everywhere would one day fear to speak, when I had become the greatest sorcerer in the world!” [1]

In Ira Levin’s novel, something similar occurs. Rosemary Woodhouse, nearing the end of her pregnancy, has begun to suspect that something isn’t quite right with her neighbors, Minnie and Roman Castevet. Her erudite and wary friend, Hutch, had formed the same suspicions far earlier and planned to meet with Rosemary once he had done some research. Before he could, he succumbed to an unexplained coma. Just before he died, he briefly returned to consciousness and asked another friend, Grace Cardiff, who was at his bedside, to give Rosemary a book. With the book came the clue and Hutch’s last words: “the name is an anagram”. The book, All Of Them Witches by J.R. Hanslet, is a pseudobiblium detailing the history of the Dark Arks and witch covens of the last century. (Incidentally, a similar fictive history of witchcraft features in Blatty’s The Exorcist. In that case, it’s A Study of Devil Worship and Related Occult Phenomena, borrowed from the Georgetown University library. This seems to be a common motif in horror.) The fourth chapter describes the witch, Adrian Marcato, born in Glasgow in 1846, and killed by a mob outside the Bramford, the same apartment building Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse were now living in.

She remembered then the other part of Hutch’s message, that the name of the book was an anagram. All Of Them Witches. She tried to juggle the letters in her head, to transpose them into something meaningful, revealing. She couldn’t; there were too many of them to keep track of. She needed a pencil and paper. Or better yet, the Scrabble set.

She got it from the bedroom and, sitting in the bay again, put the unopened board on her knees and picked out from the box beside her the letters to spell All Of Them Witches. […]

With All Of Them Witches laid out on the board, she jumbled the letters and mixed them around, then looked to see what else could be made of them. She found comes with the fall and, after a few minutes of rearranging the flat wood tiles, how is hell fact met. Neither of which seemed to mean anything. Nor was there revelation in who shall meet it, we that chose ill, and if he shall come, all of which weren’t real anagrams anyway, since they used less than the full complement of letters. It was foolishness. How could the title of a book have a hidden anagram message for her and her alone? Hutch had been delirious; hadn’t Grace Cardiff said so? […]

She took up the board and tilted it, spilling the letters back into the box. The book, which lay open on the window seat beyond the box, had turned its pages to the picture of Adrian Marcato and his wife and son. Perhaps Hutch had pressed hard there, holding it open while he underlined “Steven.”

The baby lay quiet in her, not moving.

She put the board on her knees again and took from the box the letters of Steven Marcato. When the name lay spelled before her, she looked at it for a moment and then began transposing the letters. With no false moves and no wasted motion she made them into Roman Castevet.

And then again into Steven Marcato.

And then again into Roman Castevet.

The baby stirred ever so slightly. [2]

The Roman Polanski film adaptation of Rosemary’s Baby (1968) depicts this scene almost exactly as it’s written in the novel, and although I’ve seen the film many times, it wasn’t until I read the novel this past week that the similarity to Harry Potter struck me. As a side note, one might almost say that the first time I saw Rosemary’s Baby was in utero. It’s family lore that my father took my mother to see it at the drive-in while she was pregnant with me. This supposedly reflected a lot on his character; what kind of sociopath takes his pregnant wife to see Rosemary’s Baby!? Maybe. But I also like to think it helps explain my life-long love of horror films!

Quite similar episodes, aren’t they? In both cases, the hidden identities of dabblers in the Dark Arks are revealed to the story’s protagonists, and to readers, through anagrams. Off the top of my head, and from my own reading knowledge, I can’t think of any other obvious analogues. Does anyone know of any others?

Now I’m not suggesting Rowling was directly borrowing from, or even knew, Ira Levin’s novel or the Roman Polanski film. Maybe she did — they were very successful — but just as likely, more likely even, she just came up with a similar idea for this dramatic revelation on her own. But it does catch the eye, doesn’t it?

[1] Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Scholastic, 1999, pp. 313–314.

[2] Levin, Ira. Rosemary's Baby. Pegasus Books, 2010 [1967], pp. 174–175.