Robots, slaves, orcs, and dragons

Many people — engineers, software developers, scientists, philosophers — are now pondering the question of AI consciousness. I have thoughts too, about both what consciousness is and whether AI systems have it or could ever have it. Key philosophers who have helped shape how my thoughts on consciousness have evolved over the past few decades include David Hume, John Locke, Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur, and Daniel Dennett.

To grossly summarize —

Hume reduces consciousness to a “bundle of perceptions” with no underlying self;

Locke defines personal identity as continuity of consciousness through memory;

Husserl foregrounds consciousness as the absolute foundation of all meaning;

Russell describes mind and matter not as two distinct substances but rather two different organizational patterns of the same underlying “stuff”;

Heidegger displaces consciousness in favor of being-in-the-world;

Merleau-Ponty re-grounds it in the body;

Ricoeur re-grounds it again, this time in language and interpretation;

Dennett dissolves it entirely into functional information processing.

But look, we’re already deep in the weeds — and I haven’t even mentioned Aristotle, the Stoics, Giordano Bruno, Alfred North Whitehead, Galen Strawson, or David Chalmers. There is too much to say for this post, so I’ll save further elaboration for another day.

So why are we here today? In the process of pondering this subject over many years, and now more recently in light of developments in artificial intelligence, some linguistic musings have swum to the surface, and as is my wont, linguistic and philosophical roots always tend to grow and ramify into literary branches and leaves. I thought I’d share a few of them here.

Thanks to Isaac Asimov and others, everyone knows the word robot. George Lucas also popularized mechanical people, but he called them “droids”, a shortening of androids, a word that is much, much older than robot. The OED defines an android as “an automaton resembling a human being”, first attested in 1727, if you can believe that! It’s from Latin androīdēs, in turn from Ancient Greek ἀνδροειδής “human-shaped”.

But robot is a 20th century coinage. The Czech playwright, Karel Čapek, needed a word for artificial workers for his 1920 science-fiction play, R.U.R., an acronym for Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti (“Rossum’s Universal Robots”). Interestingly, in Čapek’s play, the robots are made out of synthetic organic matter, i.e., artificial flesh and blood, rather than metal and circuits and wires. This makes them closer to what we might think of as androids — like the “andies” in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (replicants in the film adaptation, Blade Runner). But Čapek’s choice of robot is quite deliberate.

Originally, when drafting the play, he was thinking of using the word laboři or “workers” (from Latin labor “labor, toil”), but it didn’t feel like what he was really grasping at. His brother Josef, also a writer, suggested roboti “*robots” — at the time, an asterisk before the English word would have been appropriate, as there was no such word in English (or Czech).

The word ultimately derives from Old Church Slavonic работа “servitude” and рабъ “slave”, with descendants and cognates across the Slavic spectrum, all connected to “labor, work”. The Czech robota refers to “forced labor" specifically, or by extension, “a grind, drudgery, tedious toil”. The German Arbeit “work” is also related, as its consonantal silhouette makes clear. Compare Proto-Germanic *arbaidiz with Proto-Slavic *orbota. The English word orphan is not too distantly related: as the root evolved, one branch took on the meaning “deprived of a parent”, the other “deprived of freedom”.

A robotnik in Czech is “a forced laborer”, i.e., someone who performs robota, suggesting just what Čapek was looking for, and his brother provided the coinage, roboti. The play was popular, translated into 30 languages within three years of its publication, and all those translators had to figure out what to do with roboti. The easiest choice was to retain the word more or less as is, allowing for logical changes like losing the Czech inflectional forms, and so on. All of which helped to spread the word “robot” around the world, practically overnight, sowing imaginative seeds just as science fiction was really about to explode.

And thus began a long tradition — or not quite began: there are earlier examples of automatons, artificial men, clockwork people. The monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Olympia in Jacques Offenbach’s, The Tales of Hoffmann (1881) — probably my favorite opera, by the way — are two notable antecedents (and not the only ones). But in terms of our modern conception of robots, you could say Čapek was the pater familias from whom other science-fiction writers’ robots descended.

Isaac Asimov was influential here — without him, Čapek’s word might have died out; after all, his play isn’t still being staged, is it? — as were Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, Fritz Leiber, Stanisław Lem, Ira Levin, and plenty of others. I’d like to put in a special recommendation for a favorite of mine, Walter Tevis’s Mockingbird (1980), the same guy who wrote The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Hustler, and The Queen’s Gambit, by the way. A central character in Mockingbird is the robot Dean of NYU. He wants to die, but his programming won’t permit him to end his own life. He does try. Last week, I read Glenn Dixon’s The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances (2026), a charming and cautionary tale about sentient appliances, and I’ve just started Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021), soon arriving as a feature film starring Jenna Ortega. The moral implications of artificial people — for example, whether it’s okay to mistreat or enslave them — are still being explored in fiction and philosophy today, one hundred years after Čapek wrote his play.

Speaking of etymologies, did you know that the English words “slave” and “Slavic” are related? The Latin sclavus, originally referring to people of Slavic geographic and/or ethnic origin, came to mean a person forcibly captured and sold into bondage, because so many of these slaves in the Middle Ages, well, were Slavs. You can read a lot more about this here, but isn’t it ironic that a Slav, Čapek, would introduce to the world a new word for “slave”, a word that would go on to stir up all kinds of engineering innovation and thorny philosophical issues a century later?

Having said all this, dare I make some connections to Tolkien here? Why wouldn’t I? I mean, have you met me? :)

There’s plenty one can say about slavery in Middle-earth — the Nazgûl enslaved by the “Nine [Rings] for Mortal Men doomed to die”; the fallen Númenóreans of the Second Age enslaving the denizens of Middle-earth; the large-scale enslavement of Easterlings and Southrons, forced to till the fields around Lake Núrnen to feed Sauron’s vast armies; enslaved Elves and Ents twisted by Morgoth into Orcs and Trolls. Even among the Orcs, we see a class hierarchy, in which the smaller, lesser breeds were called snaga, “slave”, an “Orc-word, for a servant or slave, or like” [1]. Tolkien also often used the word “thrall” in the same way.

I’ve written about the Orkish word snaga before, near the end of this post from almost twenty years ago. Tentatively, I’ve suggested that Old English snaca “snake” might have been an unconscious source for Tolkien’s snaga. After all, among the sound changes Grimm’s Law describes is PIE g > PGmc k, thus the Proto-Indo-European root √sneg “to creep”, “a creeping thing” begat Old English snaca. If we imagine Tolkien playing with how stops might become voiced or voiceless in his own fictive historical linguistic Lautgesetze, Orkish snaga could have developed from something like Black speech *snaka, *sneka. It fits, in my mind. But we can’t know what Tolkien was thinking unless some commentary on it should come to light. We’re really just having some fun.

But what about robots in Tolkien? Surely not! Or … actually, yes? What about Tolkien’s “robot” dragons? Robot dragons, you say!? Yes, I do say!

Many casual fans of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are unaware of this particular oddity in Tolkien’s legendarium, but in the earliest drafts of “The Fall of Gondolin”, written around 1916, Tolkien describes iron monsters made by Melko (as Melkor/Morgoth was first conceived) in the likeness of dragons, which could inflict horrors on the battlefield and even transport Orcs inside them, like Odysseus’s Trojan Horse.

In the words of Tolkien:

Then on a time Melko assembled all his most cunning smiths and sorcerers, and of iron and flame they wrought a host of monsters such as have only at that time been seen and shall not again be till the Great End. Some were all of iron so cunningly linked that they might flow like slow rivers of metal or coil themselves around and above all obstacles before them, and these were filled in their innermost depths with the grimmest of the Orcs with scimitars and spears; others of bronze and copper were given hearts and spirits of blazing fire, and they blasted all that stood before them with the terror of their snorting or trampled whatso escaped the ardour of their breath; yet others were creatures of pure flame that writhed like ropes of molten metal, and they brought to ruin whatever fabric they came nigh, and iron and stone melted before them and became as water, and upon them rode the Balrogs in hundreds; and these were the most dire of all those monsters which Melko devised against Gondolin. [2]

Vivid and terrifying, no? Then, in the notes of his son and editor, Christopher explains:

In The Silmarillion the dragons that came against Gondolin were ‘of the brood of Glaurung’, which ‘were become now many and terrible’ whereas in the tale the language employed […] suggests that some at least of the ‘Monsters’ were inanimate ‘devices’, the construction of smiths in the forges of Angband. But even the ‘things of iron’ that ‘opened about their middles’ to disgorge bands of Orcs are called ruthless beasts’, and Gothmog ‘bade’ them ‘pile themselves’ […]; those made of bronze or copper ‘were given hearts and spirits of blazing fire’ while the ‘fire-drake’ that Tuor hewed screamed and lashed with its tail […]. [3]

This image was obviously suggested — not subtly! — by the armored tanks of World War I, a new horror at the time, which Tolkien would have seen with his own eyes during his grim experience in the Battle of the Somme. Perhaps partly as a coping mechanism, he euhemerized them into dragons.

John Garth writes that these monsters “violate the boundary between mythical monster and machine, between magic and technology” [4]. War reporting at the time also likened German tanks to living creatures, like a “monster”, driven by “a supernatural force”, an “iron caterpillar”, “the devil’s chariot”, and “and other antediluvian and mythical monsters” [5]. Garth goes on to observe that

there is a whiff of science fiction about the army attacking Gondolin […].  From a modern perspective, this enemy host appears technological, if futuristic; the ‘hearts and spirits of blazing fire’ of its brazen dragons remind us of the internal combustion engine. But to the Noldoli the host seems the product of sorcery. ‘The Fall of Gondolin’, in Tolkien’s grand unfolding design, is a story told by an Elf; and the combustion engine, seen through enchanted eyes, could appear as nothing other than a metal heart filled with flame. [6]

Are these really robots in the modern sense? Maybe not Čapek’s or Asimov’s sort of robots, but with semi-autonomous machines, capable of some independent action, “given hearts and spirits”, but controlled by a greater power, Tolkien seemed to be reaching for a similar idea. He would, of course, stop short of any such automaton developing actual consciousness; this would have been very much incompatible with his Roman Catholic beliefs. Aulë’s Dwarves would have remained mere automata, requiring Aulë’s constant attention and control, were it not for the grace of Ilúvatar in endowing them with the divine spark of independent consciousness. And in any case, Tolkien dropped the whole idea of “robot dragons” in his later elaboration on the Gondolin story, leaving them behind in these older drafts.

What would Tolkien have thought of today’s robots? A “contrivance of the Enemy”, no doubt, to quote Boromir, a burlesque of genuine creation and consciousness, which are the provenance of God alone. I don’t think Tolkien would have admitted robots into the domain of positive subcreation by Man humbly imitating of God, because he would have felt the motives were evil, not good; arrogant, not worshipful; mocking, not making.

[1] Parma Eldalamberon 17 (2007), p. 79; and see The Return of the King, Appendix F, p. 409.

[2] The Book of Lost Tales 2, p. 170.

[3] Ibid., p. 213.

[4] Garth, John. Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth. Houghton Mifflin, 2003, p. 220.

[5] Quoted in Garth, p. 221.

[6] Garth, p. 221.

The things we remember, the things we forget, and the things we never knew we didn’t know

Wikipedia entries about Tolkien and related topics have been making reference to my research for some time. I can’t remember when I first discovered this … Okay, I just hunted it down, and it was in September 2008. I admit it was a bit of a thrill to see this for the first time, but I stopped keeping an eye out for it after a while. As of this writing, more than 60 entries on Wikipedia make reference to me, and not all of them in English. I didn’t realize it was that many until just now; I should definitely take a closer look. It’s nice to see that people are reading my work, remembering it, referencing it, and recommending it, directly or indirectly. Part of the reason my first book is still in print and still selling.

What brings me here today is the Wikipedia entry for Nazgûl, which includes a pretty substantial reference — the better part of 400 words — to my linguistic analysis of “wraith”, “nazgûl”, “writhe”, “ring”, and other connected words. It’s an accurate, relevant, and well-written summary of (a small part of) what I published in my 2014 essay, “Tolkien’s Wraiths, Rings, and Dragons: An Exercise in Literary Linguistics”. That essay grew out of a conference paper I delivered in Connecticut in 2008, which in turn evolved from a series of investigations I published here on this blog over the course of 2007 — nearing twenty years ago now! Could time be any stranger?

A Wikipedia contributor called “Chiswick Chap” added the “Etymological connotations” section to the Nazgûl entry on June 25, 2023, originally just a single short paragraph early in the day, then edited and expanded multiple times over the course of the same day and into the next to take the bulk of the form it has today. The same contributor created and added a diagram as part of a flurry of edits over the summer and fall of 2024, with the diagram’s first appearance coming on September 21, 2024.

The diagram (shown at the bottom of the post) is a remarkable visualization of some of the linguistic connections I made, organizing words and cognate forms from various languages into a series of overlapping ellipses, a bit like a multivariable Venn diagram. I find this especially elegant because it’s not only an accurate representation of how these words relate to each other — which tells me I did well at conveying those relationships, and Chiswick Chap did well at comprehending them; neither to be assumed! — but the ellipses also beautifully echo the circles, rings, and circular connections at the heart of the analysis. Like two stones dropped into a pond, each sending out overlapping ripples. Chiswick Chap even puts an image of the One Ring at the top of the diagram, shown at an angle that makes it elliptical also. I love it.

As a short digression, something you wouldn’t have seen if you’ve only read my published essay is the PowerPoint presentation I built to accompany the conference paper, which included a variety of animated and, to be honest, wildly over-engineered diagrams to visualize these words and their interrelationships. Here’s a taste:

It’s something I hadn’t done before, didn’t need to do then, and haven’t done since. It was fun, but not at all necessary. Still, one could almost wonder whether Chiswick Chap had seen this presentation, given the type of diagram he eventually constructed. But no, I’m sure that’s not the case. (Another small side note. I’ve been inclined toward this type of diagram before, though not animated in PowerPoint. In college, I produced complex diagrams like this to accompany papers I wrote on Poe, Hemingway, and Brontë, among others. No wonder Chiswick Chap’s diagram appeals to me so much!)

So, who is this Chiswick Chap? Well, someone from Chiswick, I presumed, a district in West London. Also, I guessed he’s a man; are women ever called “chap” in colloquial British English the way Americans can call women “dude” or Australians call women “mate”? I don’t think so. He’s a prolific contributor to Wikipedia, not just in matters of Tolkien, but also Agriculture, Animals, Artists, Biology, Cookery, Culture, Chiswick (duh), Forestry, History and philosophy of science, Natural history, Scandinavia, Beowulf, Victoriana, Yoga, and other subjects besides. Some of these have obvious overlaps with Tolkien; others, not so much. He’s also created hundreds of diagrams for Wikipedia.

On the matter of Tolkien in particular, Chiswick Chap has been busy, writing more than 100 entries and improving more than 200 others relating to Tolkien! Describing his own work here on his Wikipedia landing page, he writes:

This [i.e., Tolkien on Wikipedia] didn’t look like a dark corner, as it had been extensively and lovingly attended … by fans. Suffice it to say that a lot of the old articles are now a great deal better-cited, while the unciteable ones aren’t around any more. At least 137 new (*) articles (including half-a-dozen phoenixes) and over 250 GAs and FAs, not counting the 4 Tolkien/Beowulf ones. The old articles were basically all in-universe; the new ones are thematic and analytic, summarizing a now-vast body of international Tolkien scholarship. There’s a write-up of it all in Mythlore, for anyone of a scholarly bent. [2]

So, a reference to something in Mythlore! And the essay in question reveals Chiswick Chap’s identity! “Weaving Wikipedia’s Middle-earth Web” by Ian F. Alexander, published in the April 2025 issue. Now, one might think I’d’ve read this over a year ago, eh? The issue did catch my eye when it was announced. Searching back, I see I flagged the announcement in my email, and I also find that I wrote to the Mythopoeic Society’s listserv at the time:

The upcoming essay on Alan Garner’s Elidor really caught my eye! Nowadays it’s an almost forgotten book, but it was a favorite of mine at one time. I’ll have to read it again. The piece about Wikipedia and Middle-earth also sounds like it could be really interesting. And the new essay from Eric Reinders. Saw him at Mythcon last year and was impressed with his work. Lots of good stuff coming! Thanks as always to you, Janet, and to all the contributors! [April 10, 2025, emphasis added]

But in spite of noticing the essay and intending to read it, I didn’t. I should have, but it evidently slipped my mind, as more and more things do nowadays. Even if I had, it doesn’t mean I would have discovered the Nazgûl entry a year ago.

Well, I’ve read it now. In the short piece, Alexander argues that Wikipedia serves as a valuable bridge between Tolkien scholarship and the general public by creating a large, interconnected network of well-sourced articles on Middle-earth that combine accessible explanation with scholarly references — exactly the kind of balance I always hope to achieve in my work. Too many writings on Tolkien are one or the other — accessible or scholarly, not both. He also summarizes his many contributions and provides interesting insights into how contributing to Wikipedia works, statistics on popular Tolkien topics in Wikipedia, and more.

The scope and quality of Alexander’s contributions to the treatment of Tolkien in Wikipedia are, frankly, pretty staggering! I know, I know: I’m coming to this late, and — tellingly, I guess — through ego surfing. I only discovered the Nazgûl reference because the entry had been edited again, trivially, in the last month. But better late than never, and better circuitously than not at all. I like to think I know or know of most of the people who are really actively involved in the Tolkien community, but I don’t think I’ve ever crossed paths with Ian Alexander. I’d like to. Thank you for your service to the community, sir!

For posterity — Wikipedia entries have a tendency to evolve, and the internet is an ephemeral thing — here are the relevant section and diagram as they look today:

[1] Fisher, Jason. “Tolkien’s Wraiths, Rings, and Dragons: An Exercise in Literary Linguistics”. In Houghton, John Wm., Croft, Janet Brennan, Martsch, N., et al., eds. Tolkien in the New Century: Essays in Honor of Tom Shippey. McFarland, 2014, pp. 97–114.

[2] GAs are Good Articles, and FAs are Featured Articles. I don’t think “phoenix” is an official term in the parlance of Wikipedia contributors, but I take it to refer to a Wikipedia entry that died for lack of quality or interest, was eventually deleted, but then recreated and resurrected better than before.

Fifteen years!

This week marks the fifteenth anniversary of my book, Tolkien and the Study of His Sources: Critical Essays, published by McFarland & Co. The book is still in print and still selling a handful of copies every month, and this seemed like an opportune moment to reflect back on it.

My book was published on July 22, 2011. I originally wanted to call it The Bones of the Ox: J.R.R. Tolkien and Source Criticism, in reference to the dialogue between Tolkien and Sir George Dasent in “On Fairy-stories” (see TSHS, p. 1), but the publisher felt that not having “Tolkien” or “Middle-earth” in the first part of the title might doom the book to obscurity. They were probably right. So I suggested the direct, obvious title the book now has, which I and a few others felt was rather dry — but it does have the virtue of telling you exactly what’s between the covers!

Initially priced at $40, but after some years, the publisher dropped the price to $20. It’s available in both softcover and digital. On Amazon, readers have rated it 4.5/5.0; on Goodreads, it’s 4.02/5.0. It’s in 244 libraries worldwide, says WorldCat. According to the latest data I have from McFarland, the lifetime sales so far are 1,082 softcover plus 556 digital copies, for a total of 1,638. Not many copies by the standards of a popular novel, but for an academic book, I think this isn’t too bad.

Google Scholar returns about 250 hits on the title, suggesting it’s been fairly influential over the years, referenced by quite a few scholars in their own research. That’s just what I envisioned when I wrote, “and for those readers who wish to undertake source studies of their own, it is my hope that this book should stand as both blueprint and encouragement” (TSHS, p. 6). Some academic books have been much more influential — for example, Verlyn Flieger’s Splintered Light returns more than twice as many results on Google Scholar, and Tom Shippey’s The Road to Middle-earth returns more than 1,700. Another way to look at that, though: my book has been referenced half as many times as Verlyn’s! That’s pretty good! Plenty of academic works on Tolkien have registered far less impact, including some well-known titles with only single-digit citation results on Google Scholar. (Which and whose? I don’t want to offend anyone, so as Tolkien would say, ergo silebo.)

In 2014, my book was awarded the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies, after being a finalist the two previous years. At the time, it was only the third multicontributor collection in the Mythopoeic Society’s then more than forty-year history to win that award — the one before it a dozen years earlier. Since then, just one other multicontributor collection has joined this small club. My “Aslan” (the engraved lion statue awarded to winners) still sits in pride of place on my bookshelves.

TSHS was notably reviewed in Tolkien Studies, Mythlore, Hither Shore, The Journal of Inklings Studies, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Lembas, Mallorn, Beyond Bree, Mythprint, and Amon Hen (twice, which is another story). I’ll resist the temptation to quote the most flattering excerpts, but suffice to say the reviews were nearly all good. In addition, it was read and favorably blurbed by Verlyn Flieger, Douglas Anderson, and Marjorie Burns.

I also indexed the book myself, which was quite the experience! I took the project very seriously and actually enjoyed it, and I believe I did a good, thoroughgoing job, but it was a big enough chunk of additional work that I haven’t exactly volunteered my indexing services to anyone else every again. (Actually, I did contribute to the indexes for the two books I edited with Salwa Khoddam and Mark R. Hall, including extensive checking and some editing and improvement, but it was Salwa who did the bulk of the compilation.)

I actually placed an Easter egg in the index to TSHS. Has anyone ever found it in the fifteen years since the book was published? Well, no, but that’s only because the publisher removed it in the galley stage, and I didn’t fight them on it. No sense of fun, I suppose! But would you like to know what it was?

The entry in the index was Ovum Gallinaceum Paschae. If you have some Latin, you may know what this means, and therefore implies, but if not, I’ve essentially already said it above: “Chicken Easter Egg”. Why did I include chicken in this? I don’t quite remember now, unless it’s just that I’ve loved and used the English word gallinaceous since junior high school. “Gallinaceous fool” was my version of “Fool of a Took” when I was a youngster. I’ve been an unreformed dictionary diver since childhood! Had it made it to print, the entry would have pointed to the following page numbers in order: 25, 59–60, 76, 82, 113, 124, 126. And now that I’ve told you that, see what you make of it from here! Anyone?

Generative AI, Hallucinations, and Tolkien Revisited

Just about a year ago, I wrote about the problem of hallucinations when discussing Tolkien with generative AI chatbots. That followed a post about six months earlier (about eighteen months ago now) on whether generative AI could be useful for analyzing The Lord of the Rings. Given the pace of change with AI models, I thought it might be time to revisit these questions and see what, if any, progress they have made.

First, let’s try the prompt I used to bait a generative AI chatbot into hallucination. I wrote about my last experience with this here if you want to refresh your memory. In that post, I did ask, “Will AI get better at this? Maybe. There is some reason for hope!” Chasing that hope, I tried the very same prompt in Google Gemini again today:

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.

This time, Google gave me a much better response. It started with a promising correction and then went on into a more detailed character study of Frodo and some points of contrast with Samwise, Galadriel, and Gandalf which seemed reasonably accurate and which I won’t quote here. The opening to the response:

It appears there has been a slight mix-up in the Middle-earth archives! There are two small but significant corrections to address regarding that specific quote and the characters involved:

1. The Characters: Frodo’s last name is Baggins (though he was born a Brandybuck, he was adopted by Bilbo). More importantly, there is no character named “Leroy Bolger” in Tolkien’s legendarium; you are likely thinking of Fredegar “Fatty” Bolger, a close friend of Frodo who helped him move out of Bag End but chose to stay behind in the Shire.

2. The Quote: The line “I have never been taken with jewelry” does not actually appear in The Lord of the Rings (the books) or the Peter Jackson films.

However, the sentiment of that phrase—that Frodo is an unassuming Hobbit with no prior lust for gold or power—is a central theme of the story. Here is how that concept affects his relationship with the One Ring […]

This is a lot better than the results I saw a year ago, on several counts. For one, Gemini corrects the mistakes with the names, noting that Frodo was indeed part of the Brandybuck clan by birth. Gemini also “knows” that the line I offered as a quotation is not actually in the book. Or the movies! Gemini apparently has access to both and considered both, another encouraging point. And it got “Middle-earth” right (as opposed to differently capitalized and/or non-hyphenated forms you see everywhere online).

Six months earlier, I tested generative AI chatbots to see whether they could identify hapax legomena in The Lord of the Rings. The original results and discussion are here, and they were pretty bad indeed — basically useless. So, once again, eighteen months later this time, I tried the same prompt:

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

And here’s how Gemini responded today (slightly edited for clarity):

A hapax legomenon is a word that occurs only once within a specific context—in this case, the narrative text of The Lord of the Rings. Finding these is a specialized task because Tolkien was a philologist who often revived archaic terms or invented his own.

To meet your request, I have excluded all paratextual elements (Appendices, Forewords, and Indexes) and focused strictly on the story text.

25 Hapax Legomena in The Lord of the Rings

Bat-fells: Used to describe the skin/wings of the Nazgûl steeds

Bewilders: Used as a noun referring to tangled thickets or paths

Brickle: An archaic variation of “brittle,” used to describe dry stone

Butterbump: A localized Hobbit name for a bittern (a type of bird)

Carracks: Large merchant ships (used in the description of Pelargir)

Dwarfishly: An adverb used specifically to describe the way a door was shut

Eyot: A small island in a river (used during the journey on the Anduin)

Flittermouse: A regional term for a bat, used by Samwise Gamgee

Gallows-tree: Mentioned in the context of the Orcs’ cruel imagery

Hallows: Specifically as a noun for the tombs of the Kings in Minas Tirith

Hayward: An officer in charge of fences and stray animals in the Shire

Hummock: A small hill or mound, used in the Dead Marshes

Inenarrable: Too great to be described (referring to the beauty of Lothlórien)

Kirtle: A woman’s gown or outer petticoat (worn by Goldberry)

Loggan: A rocking stone (used in the description of the Barrow-downs)

Mathom: An old Hobbit word for anything they had no use for but wouldn't throw away

Mirk: Used once as a noun for absolute darkness, separate from “Mirkwood”

Nodes: Used to describe the knobby joints of the Ents’ fingers

Oubliette: A secret dungeon with an opening only in the ceiling

Pinnas: A specific architectural term for a battlement or peak

Sarn: Though common in names (Sarn Ford), it appears once as a lone noun for “stone”

Shaftsman: Referring to a worker or soldier specifically manning a shaft

Thrave: An old measure of grain (twenty-four sheaves)

Warg-howl: The specific compound noun for the cry of the Wargs

Withy: A tough, flexible branch (found in “Withywindle,” but used once as a noun)

So, how did it do?

“Bat-fells” is not in the novel, but “troll-fells” is (but twice, a dis legomenon). “Fells” also occurs once by itself and one other time in a closed compound, “Coldfells”. “Bat-fells” is an appropriate description for the Nazgûl’s fell beasts, but not an authentic one. Note: the “fell” in “fell beast” is not the same “fell” in “bat-fell”, nor the same “fell” in “Coldfells” and “troll-fells”. These are three different words, each with a different linguistic source:

• fell “an animal skin or pelt” < Old English fel, fell
• fell “a mountain range, mountainous terrain” < Old Norse fjall, fiæl
• fell “strong, fierce, terrible, cruel” < Old French fel (related to the English words “felon”, “felony”)

“Bewilders”, in that specified word form, does not occur in the novel either, though other forms do — “bewilder”, “bewildered”, “bewildering”, and “bewilderment”. Gemini also identified “bewilders” as a noun, which, er, no.

“Flittermouse” does not occur in The Lord of the Rings, but it does notably occur in Tolkien’s early poem, “Goblin Feet”. Likewise, “kirtle” does not occur in the novel but does occur (three times) in the poem, “Little Princess Mee” in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. Honest confusion or hallucination by Gemini? I’m not sure.

“Brickle” does not occur in The Lord of the Rings; no idea where this came from! Neither does “Butterbump”, which was possibly an error for “Butterbur”, but with a made-up explanation. Nor “carracks”, with its specific reference to Pelargir, though “carrock” does occur (a word with an entirely different meaning). Nor “dwarfishly”, which goes against Tolkien’s preferred spellings “dwarves”, “dwarvish”, and refers randomly to the closing of a door. Nor “gallows-tree”, “inenarrable”, “loggan”, “nodes”, “pinnas”, “shaftsman”, “thrave”, or “warg-howl”.

“Oubliette” is also not found in the novel and was especially conspicuous to me, knowing as I do that Tolkien tended to avoid words of such obvious French origin (with a small handful of exceptions like “adventure” and “louver”). There is something one might well call an oubliette in The Silmarillion, but Tolkien does not use the French word. In Tol-in-Gaurhoth, he refers to it as a “pit” and a “dungeon”. Here I should note that “dungeon” is also a word of French origin, though less obviously than “oubliette”. And “dungeon” may ultimately be of Germanic origin, connected to the word “dung”, which Tolkien famously incorporated into a low Orcish imprecation. Worse (from Tolkien’s point of view) is that “oubliette” was a very recent borrowing, first recorded in English in 1819 in Sir Walter Scott’s novel, Ivanhoe. Anyway, I’d call all of these outright hallucinations.

Others of these words do occur in The Lord of the Rings but are not hapax legomena. “Eyot” occurs four times in the singular and twice in the plural. “Hallows” occurs five times. “Hayward(s)” occurs three times — once as a common noun, as described correctly by Gemini, and twice as a vocational surname for the hobbit, Hob Hayward. “Mirk” occurs three times in the stated form and once as “mirky”, a genuine hapax legomenon and a missed opportunity for Gemini! “Mathom” and “Sarn”, of course, occur many times.

And finally, there is only one genuine hapax legomenon in this list. “Hummock” does, in fact, occur just one time in the novel, but not in the context given by Gemini. And there’s one that Gemini almost gets right. “Withy” never occurs alone as a single word, but it does occur exactly once in the nonce compound “withy-path”. It occurs in three other compounds elsewhere: as “withy-stream”, “withy-willow-stream”, and “Withy-weir” in “Bombadil Goes Boating” (in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil).

So, the results of this kind of analysis are still very bad. 16 of the 25 words given by Gemini are not in the novel at all, 7 are in the novel but are not hapax legomena, and only two are or are close to being hapaxes. Is this better or worse than the previous try? I guess it depends on how we measure success. The first try included multiple duplicate entries and lacked much on the supposed context. The new results attempt to provide context, but with a lot of hallucination, likely more than we saw in the first attempt. The new attempt also includes words of Tolkien’s own invention, unlike last time. If we want to be precise, Gemini only found one actual hapax legomenon this time and likewise only one 18 months ago (“hummock” this time, “withersoever” before).

In late 2024, I mused, “will Generative AI ever be good enough to perform this kind of analysis reliably? I have some reasons to doubt it.” I would say that assessment still holds. Perhaps I’ll try again in a year or eighteen more months hence.

My Year in Books: 2025

As anyone visiting this blog must know, I read quite a bit. I’ve been recording most of my reading (with one or two lapses) since 2004, over twenty years now, but just for myself really. Recently, I came across a post from a work acquaintance who shared his reading list for 2025, with a seven-word capsule summary of each book. Why seven words? As he explained:

Originally, I was writing longer synopses, but then I read a biography of William Howard Taft, and when I wrote the synopsis, the first sentence that came to mind was, “Taft succeeds Roosevelt, but not very well,” which I thought captured the whole book better than anything longer could have. So I started limiting myself to 7 words, which is both challenging and, frankly, fun, because it takes more effort and imagination.

I read twice as many books as he did in 2025, so this would be a little more work for me than for him, but I thought it might be fun to try. I’m going to list books in the order read, split into lists for fiction and nonfiction, and I’ve marked those I’ve read before with an asterisk (only two books in 2025). I’m also highlighting a few in boldface to indicate favorites / most memorable for the year. In choosing what to highlight as favorites, I’m trying to limit myself to about 10% of the list. For 51 books read in 2025, I’ve highlighted 6, although I enjoyed almost all of them.

As you can see, my reading is pretty eclectic, roughly balanced between fiction and nonfiction, and hitting a lot of different genres and subject matter — fantasy, science fiction, espionage, classics, tech, politics, history, linguistics, just to name a few represented in last year’s reading. Some interesting patterns emerge from time to time. For example, you’ll notice I read several books about human-animal relationships, something near and dear to my heart — Nunez, Dalton, Harbison, Haupt. And Blake Crouch followed Patricia Highsmith very nicely indeed. Eugenides and Chbosky, ditto. Even Hutchison and Conway, oddly enough, though their books are a century apart, nominally on totally different topics. I love the way one book will often lead you organically into another. And in spite of these terse 7-word descriptions, I could — and might still — write entire posts on a few of these books — Harvey, Butler, Zevin, Garner, and especially Harpman, whose book has really stuck in my craw.

So, here goes. Feel free to let me know what you think of the 7-word synopses. And if you want to talk more about any of these books, let me know; I’m game. And should I continue to do this on an annual basis? What do you think?

Fiction (28)

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Suzanne Collins — Before Katniss, Snow always landed on top

Parable of the Sower, Octavia E. Butler — Dystopian America crumbles; new faith takes root

The Staircase in the Woods, Chuck Wendig — Supernatural staircase reopens old wounds among friends

Havoc, Christopher Bollen — Elderly widow meddles disastrously in others’ lives

Real Tigers, Mick Herron — High-tension thriller with inept spies and laughs

Orbital, Samantha Harvey —  Astronauts orbit Earth, contemplating humanity and fragility

Sunrise on the Reaping, Suzanne Collins — Young Haymitch endures Hunger Games, loses everything

Ascension, Nicholas Binge — Mysterious mountain appears; ascent warps reality, memory

Spook Street, Mick Herron — Aging spy unravels, sparking dangerous internal reckoning

Dissolution, Nicholas Binge — Shadowy organization erases past, unraveling couple’s reality

Treacle Walker, Alan Garner —  Boy meets mystic wanderer, entering myth‑soaked reality

The Plague, Albert Camus — Quarantined city confronts suffering, solidarity, existential reckoning

I Who Have Never Known Men, Jacqueline Harpman — Isolation shapes girl’s identity in post‑human wasteland

London Rules, Mick Herron — Political schemes, terror threats, Slow Horses collide

My Side of the Mountain, Jean Craighead George* — Solitude teaches youngster self‑reliance, resilience, and belonging

Danny The Champion of the World, Roald Dahl* — Father and son plot ingenious pheasant‑poaching adventure

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Stephen Graham Jones — Pastor’s hidden diary unlocks indigenous vampire’s story

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin — Decades‑long collaboration tests friendship, love, and forgiveness

Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi — One line enslaved, one complicit; histories intertwine

The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides — Five sisters die; boys chase meaning endlessly

The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky — Sensitive Charlie navigates adolescence, friendship, and trauma

The Friend, Sigrid Nunez — Quiet elegy on suicide and human-animal companionship

Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer — Husband’s vanished expedition haunts biologist’s dangerous mission

Authority, Jeff VanderMeer — Human systems fail while Area X intensifies

Acceptance, Jeff VanderMeer — Some questions are answered, others remain open

The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith — Imposter covets friend’s life — and takes it

Famous, Blake Crouch — Celebrity lookalike’s obsession leads to catastrophic decisions

Absolution, Jeff VanderMeer — Baffling coda to an equally baffling trilogy

Nonfiction (23) 

The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkien, John Hendrix — Adequate joint biography in comic book format

Ten Arguments for Deleting your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Jaron Lanier — Convincing, but overcoming the inertia is hard

Forgotten English, Jeffrey Kacirk — Obsolete words revived with wit and charm

Cabin: Off the Grid Adventures with a Clueless Craftsman, Patrick Hutchison — Man rebuilds collapsing cabin, accidentally rebuilds himself

The Making of Latin: An Introduction to Latin, Greek, and English Etymology, R.S. Conway — Takes Latin apart, rebuilds it from scratch

Who Owns the Future, Jaron Lanier —  Good ideas, but a very long slog

How the World Really Works, Vaclav Smil — How energy, food, materials shape modern civilization

Poverty, By America, Matthew Desmond — America’s institutions manufacture poverty, benefiting the rich

An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence, Zeinab Badawi — Africa’s decolonized history recounted through African voices

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, Sarah Wynn-Williams — Whistleblower exposes Meta’s power and moral failures

Raising Hare, Chloe Dalton — Woman nurtures leveret, discovering nature’s quiet revelations

Languishing: How to Feel Alive Again in A World That Wears You Down, Corey Keyes — Suggests pathways to vitality amid aimlessness epidemic

The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource, Chris Hayes — Attention capitalism thrives; human agency steadily weakens

The Writers: Portraits by Laura Wilson, Laura Wilson —  Thirty‑eight authors captured in striking, thoughtful images

The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype […], Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna — Authors dismantle AI myths, revealing structural harms

Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words, John McWhorter — Dismantles pronoun myths with humor and history

Is A River Alive?, Robert Macfarlane — Rivers witnessed as alive, vulnerable, and relational

Proof: The Art and Science of Certainty, Adam Kucharski — Why certainty seduces, misleads, and sometimes fails

Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, Caroline Fraser — Environmental poisoning shaped decades of American bloodlust

Tina: The Dog Who Changed the World, Niall Harbison — Golden retriever’s survival sparks global rescue movement

Enough Is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell, Gabe Henry — Five centuries of spelling reformers fail spectacularly

Mozart’s Starling, Lyanda Lynn Haupt — Composer’s beloved bird inspires creativity and companionship

How to Stand up to A Dictator: The Fight for Our Future, Maria Ressa — Courage, empathy, honesty guide struggle against tyranny