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.

WOTD: Tooken

Tooken isn’t a word. This is what you hear from the prescriptive grammarians and their acolytes. If they have children, sooner or later they end up correcting them. Children use tooken naturally as they attempt to understand and internalize the “rules” of our language. But rules are made to be breaken. :)

It starts with take. This goes back to Old English tacan, adopted from Old Norse taka “to take” sometime between the end of the eleventh century and the first half of the twelfth, which is pretty late — almost too late to be called Old English at all. Before this very late borrowing, the usual Old English verb was niman “to take, receive, get”, a common word with a wide range of cognates among the other Germanic languages (cp. Old Norse nema; Old Frisian nima, nema; Old High German neman; Old Saxon niman; Gothic niman). It survived into Middle English as nimen, but it was more and more displaced by Middle English taken, táken (not to be confused with tácnen “to signify, betoken”, to which we’ll come back a little later).

The verb take has its own history. The verb originally carried the meaning “to touch”, where the Old Norse (and later Old English) sense of “take” came from the association of touching with the hands, i.e., getting a hold of, grasping, seizing. In the original sense, we find such cognates as Gothic tékan, Old Saxon *takan, West Tocharian täk, Latin tangere, etc. Modern English tackle and attack are clearly related. But take in its modern sense is specifically Northern Germanic.

The Old English verb, like its Old Norse source, is what we call a strong verb, meaning that it forms the preterite (i.e., past tense) with a change in the stem vowel, rather than by the addition of a suffix (in Modern English, –ed). For example, a strong verb speak, has a preterite like spoke, while a weak verb like talk, has a preterite like talked (instead of, say, *telk). In the case of take, the stem vowel, a, changes to a long-o in the preterite. In Modern English terms, we call this kind of verb irregular. Its past tense is not *taked, but took (OE tóc, ON tók). The participles, however, retain the root stem vowel unchanged. Thus, the past participle is taken < OE tacen. It’s worth noting that in Old Norse, the normal past participle (tekinn) does exhibit a vowel change; however, this is umlaut, not ablaut. In fact, the form takinn also occurs, though much less often. (If you don’t understand what I mean by umlaut and ablaut but would like to, start here.)

The point is that, in normal English (that is to say, prescriptive English), we should expect taken, not tooken. But tooken is a legitimate enough word, particularly in historical or dialectal use, in both the U.K. and the U.S. To begin with, the Oxford English Dictionary itself gives tooken as an obsolete past participle of take. Obsolete essentially means here that we ought not to use it, unless we don’t mind appearing old fashioned, but it is attested in the history of the language. That is, it wasn’t “wrong”, at least once upon a time. That’s very different from an accidental form that has never been in use. If a form was once in use, and we decide we no longer like it, well, that’s prescribing use, rather than describing it.

The form tooken also appears in Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary, both as the preterite and the past participle. For the former, Wright gives a quotation from the Devon dialect: “he tooken off his coat”. For the latter, he gives several examples, from Lanark, Yorkshire, Lincoln, Cheshire, Shropshire, Devon, Cornwall, etc. Except for the last two, these are all in northern England or southern Scotland. A couple of examples will suffice: “I’ve tooken a deal o’ pains”, “for fear I should be tooken faint like”, and how about this wonderfully rich one: “Hoo was tooken wi’ one on her feenty aitches an’ hoo tiped o’er”. But that’s barely English, you might object!

A short sidebar, while you collect your righteous grammatical indignation. Before I give a few more details and examples of the history and validity of tooken as a preterite and past participle of take, I should disambiguate it from a nonce word of the same spelling. It turns out that you can find tooken in Early Modern English as an antecedent form of the Modern English word token (remember, I mentioned Middle English tácnen above). Sir John Cheke, the first Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge, translated parts of the Gospels from the original Greek into Tudor English. In his translation of The Gospel of Matthew (c. 1550), Cheke spells the English token with two o’s, as in: “And ye Pharisais and Sadducees cam and tried him, and required him to shew yem a tooken from heaven.”

In an 1843 edition of this translation, James Godwin (also of Cambridge, three centuries later) writes that Cheke “was desirous of […] correcting the orthography and pronunciation of English” and, moreover, of conscientiously avoiding words of foreign origin. “The introduction of these words was begun in the days of Cheke”, he continues. “But Cheke considered the English language to be sufficiently copious without them. In fact, he thought them intruders, and that the English language was degraded by being mixed up with other words and phrases, for which we were indebted to other countries”. Consequently, Cheke didn’t care too much for existing English translations and endeavored to produce some of his own, in which the native wordstock of English was properly showcased. To do so, he invented some words out of native English roots to take the place of recent acquisitions of Latin and Green origin; so, for example, where Wiclif (1380) has centurien, and Tyndale (1534) has centurion, Cheke substitutes hunderder; where Wiclif has apostlis, and Tyndale apostles, Cheke coins frosent (meaning “those sent forth); and where Wiclif and Tyndale have crucified, Cheke has crossed. Tolkien would have been sympathetic to the effort.

Even more unsettling, Cheke adopted some new rules for spelling English, designed (so he thought) to facilitate better pronunciation. One of his rules was to double a vowel pronounced long (dropping the final e, if there was one). For example, taak, Ameen, stoon, and so on. And this was just the tip of the iceberg. To give you a taste, here’s a lengthier passage:

On ye sabbot daí, at night, when ye first daieslight of ye week began to daun, marí magdaleen and an oyer marí cãm to look on ye graue, and loo yeer was a great earthquaak. For y’angel of ye L. cam doun from heaven, and cam yiyer, and rolled awai ye stoon from ye brinke and sat doun apon it, and his face was lijk lightening, and his cloying whijt lijk snow, and ye kepers did schaak for fear, and weer lijk dead men. (Mt. 28:1–4)

But back to the other tooken. Wiclif used this form in his own translation of the Gospel of Matthew. “But the five foolis tooken her lampis, and tooken not oile with hem: but the prudent tooken oile in her vessels with the lampis” (Mt. 25:3–4). This comes toward the end of the fourteenth century, as you saw above. To give another example, Saint Catherine of Siena used the same form in her Dialogues (1370): “And not oonly þat þei plauntid not ony good plaunt in her vyneᵹeerd, but raþir þei tooken up þerefro þe seed of grace.”

In his Middle English Vocabulary, Tolkien cites this form of the preterite (spelled with one o). Under tok(e), token, Tolkien directs readers back to take(n). The source to which Tolkien points readers is from The Gest Hystoriale of the Destruction of Troy, an alliterative romance by an unknown “journeyman poet”, based on the Latin Historia Troiana of Guido de Columna (1287). The word occurs in a passage in Book XXXI of the poem:

Thus tho lordes in hor longyng laghton þe watur,
Shotton into ship mong shene knightes,
With the tresowre of þe toune þai token before,
Relikes full rife, and miche ranke godes. (emphasis added)

[Thus those lords in their longing put out to sea,
Sprang aboard ship among their fair knights,
With the treasure of the town they had tooken before,
Rife with relics, and many fine goods. (translation mine)]

For those who fancy another fancifully Tookish Tolkien connection to the word, I’ve tooken up the subject before.

Probably the best known author to use tooken is Geoffrey Chaucer. A few examples: “And tooken awey this martir from his beere” (The Prioress’s Tale), “yet tooken they noon heede of the peril” and “And right anon they tooken hire wey to the court of Melibee, / and tooken with hem somme of hire trewe freendes” (both from The Tale of Melibee). Chaucer’s contemporary, John Gower, also used this form of the word.

So, you may say, it’s all very well and good to show that tooken was once a valid form, hundreds of years ago, but what has the word done for us lately? Well, as it happens, it’s still being used in dialectal forms. It’s true these are usually looked down on by prescriptive grammarians and those of us who have taken their suggestions as holy writ, but there is absolutely no reason to take a condescending attitude toward dialect. If you’re inclined to, I daresay you’re not a big fan of Mark Twain!

Speaking of Twain, he and his contemporaries were tooken with tooken too. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, tooken is conspicuous in Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories, a collection that sought to reproduce post-Reconstruction African-American dialect. Setting aside the controversy about their content, the dialect in these stories comes quickly to the fore. “Brer Rabbit,” says Brer Tarrypin at one point, “I’m dat tickle’ twel I can’t shuffle ’long, skacely, en I’m feared ef I up’n tell you de ’casion un it, I’ll be tooken wid one er my spells whar folks hatter set up wid me kaze I laff so loud en laff so long.” And another point: “Brer Fox talk so close ter de fatal trufe, dat Brer Wolf got tooken wit de dry grins” (emphasis added in both quotations).

In addition to the American South, tooken persisted in the Scottish North. To give one example, there is John Joy Bell’s Wee Macgreegor (1902), an early story of a familiar challenge: getting a small child to pose for a photograph. “What for dae folk get likenesses tooken?”, Wee Macgregor asks his father. In this case, it’s because his mother wants one to give to his grandfather. But “I’m no’ wantin’ to be tooken, Paw,” he complains. Typical. When he’s finally convinced, he asks, “Maw, wull I get ma likeness tooken wi’ ma greengarry bunnet on?” He wants to keep in on. Okay, so then, “Can I get makin’ a face when I’m getting’ ma likeness tooken?” No. In front of the camera at last, the photographer begins to count to three. Wee Macgregor can hardly sit still, then blurts out, “Am I tooken, Paw?”, to which his father replies, “No’ yet, Macgreegor, no’ yet. Ye near spoilt anither photygraph. Keep quate, noo.” The photos are finally taken, but when they arrive, Wee Macgregor is disappointed that the tassle on his cap, which is black, didn’t turn out red in the picture. He had specifically requested his father to tell the photographer to make it red! It’s a cute story about being flummoxed by new technology, a bit like Tolkien’s Mr. Bliss.

Six hundred years after Wiclef the Bible translator, there’s another man of a similar name, still using the word today: Wyclef Jean, the Haitian rapper and former member of The Fugees. In “Year of the Dragon” from his debut solo album, The Carnival (1997), Jean recalls “comin’ from Haiti, growin’ up in Brooklyn / On Flatbush got my first sneakers tooken”. And in the African-American dialect of today, we keep seeing tooken — Jay-Z, Lil’ Kim, Eminem, Black Eyed Peas, Lil’ Wayne. Some will complain that the use of tooken by rappers is of the “tooken isn’t a word!” variety — that is to say, it’s wrong. Some say that you can’t take advice about usage from rappers, because they’re on the fringe of language; they don’t get it; they never learned how to speak properly; etc. Actually, a great rapper is a genius with language, stretching it to the most imaginative limits. Complaining that rappers are wrong is just prescriptive grammar again.

Descriptive grammarians, on the other hand, would argue that since tooken is being actively used, then of course, it clearly is a word. We should merely document when, how, and by whom it’s being used. And if you’re still with me at this point, you’ve realized that it’s not new either; tooken has been a word for centuries. It may not be taught in school, but perhaps that’s just a kind of prejudice. The gatekeepers of language always have their reasons for keeping certain words — or certain people — out. Me? I say the more words, the better. Our children are right to try and force tooken back on us. Will it ever make it into the grammar books? Maybe one day — if enough of us are tooken with it.

Word of the Day: Fart

I recently received a birthday wish that included the following charming observation: “Thou art an old fart […] but the most awesomest anglo saxon speaking one that I know.” I replied that fart was a word known to the Anglo-Saxons. In fact, like the words for many bodily parts and functions, it goes much further back than this. It turns out there are quite a few interesting things to say about this word and some of its relatives, so I decided — even at the risk of lowering our collective brows — to write a post on it. Rest assured: I’ll find ways to elevate the conversation again. (“Mr. Shakespeare, your cue in five minutes.”)

The Old English word for a fart is attested in only one form and only one place (that I know). That form is feorting — a bit surprisingly, this is a feminine noun. Yes, women fart too, though they usually won’t admit it. But if you want to look it up in any of the major Anglo-Saxon dictionaries, don’t expect to see the Modern English fart. Most bodily terminology has been glossed with euphemism, often in Latin. In the great Bosworth/Toller dictionary, feorting is glossed as crĕpĭtus ventris, which is Latin for a “chattering of the belly” — cute, eh? The Latin crĕpĭtus is an imitative word, from which we also derive the Modern English words crepitation, i.e., “a crackling (e.g., of the joints)”; and decrepit, i.e., “creaking with old age”. I did just turn forty, after all.

In John R. Clark Hall’s dictionary (even the revised edition of 1960, ed. Herbert Meritt), it’s defined with Latin pēdātio. This is actually the direct Latin cognate given in Ælfric’s glossary, but unless you’re familiar with this word, it’s not much help. It doesn’t appear in the average student dictionary of Latin, but it comes from the pēdĕre “to break wind”, a verb which can be traced back to the Indo-European root √pezd “to fart”, again probably imitative of the sound. This root also gave us the Sanskrit पर्दते and Ancient Greek πέρδομαι, with the same meaning. The word also passed far and wide, as farts tend to do, into Avestan, Lithuanian, Latvian, Albanian, Russian, Welsh, etc.

Among the Germanic languages, the word was also rather widely attested too — and anyone who has experienced a particularly noxious chattering of the belly will not be surprised at its reach. Though we can only extrapolate the unattested Old English verb *feortan, we have evidence of Old High German ferzan, Old Saxon fertan, Old Norse freta, and various forms in the later medieval languages as well, e.g., Middle High German, Middle Dutch, and of course Middle English. Chaucer, it must be said, leet fle a fart rather often in his verses. (But Norman Davis omits the word from A Chaucer Glossary, tsk tsk tsk.)

There are two surprising offspring of the humble fart. The first, thanks to our friend William Shakespeare, has become an old saw, though not many realize it ever had anything to do with breaking wind. Recall the ominous lines from the close of Act III of Hamlet: “For ’tis the sport to have the engineer / Hoist with his own petard” (III.4:207–8). Poor Rosencrantz and Guildenstern!

A petard was a small bomb used to breach castle walls or gates. The word comes to us from the French pétard, literally a “farter”, in turn from Middle French péter “to fart”. The bomb had a long fuse — think of this image and you’re on the right track — which made a sputtering, “farting” sound as it burned down. The French word comes down from the Latin pēditum, in turn derived from the verb whose acquaintance we’ve already made above. Cognates include Italian petardo and obsolete Spanish petar.

The second surprising relative is the partridge — ironic, since one of my favorite etymologists (Eric Partridge) bears that surname. From Middle English partrich, in turn from Old French pertris, perdriz, from Latin perdix, from Green πέρδιξ, the partridge was so named because of the whirring sound of his wings. What a proud bird for such a lowly etymology! Cognates include Scottish partrick, Old Italian perdice, Spanish perdiz, Catalan perdiu, etc.

All of this from the sound of breaking wind. And since it’s Christmastime, if you’ll permit me: “And a partridge in a pear treeeeeeee … pffffftht!!” Excuse me! Okay, that was a new low for Lingwë.

WOTD: Accidie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WOTD: Plumb

It’s been a little while since my last WOTD; perhaps a better acronym would be WOTW or even WOTM. But as often happens, I was recently asked whether I knew anything about the origin of the word plumb — not the fruit; that’s plum — and as most often happens, I do know something.

Plumb is one of those surprisingly useful words. It can be a noun, adjective, adverb, and verb, with a range of apparently unrelated meanings — apparently unrelated, but as we’ll soon see, in fact connected by a central metaphor. As a noun, a plumb is a simple tool: a weight fixed to one end of a line. It’s used to determine depth or verticality. For depth, one drops the weighted end of the line in and lowers it until the weight touches the bottom; the length of the line meted out at that point is the depth of the hole, water, or what have you. To establish verticality, one simply lets gravity pull the weighted end downward, then one marks the line. Why is it called a plumb, then? The word comes from Old French plomb(e), in turn from Latin plumbum “lead”. If you remember your Periodic Table of the Elements, you’ll know that the symbol for Lead is Pb (= Plumbum). A plumb line is so called because the weight attached to one end is usually a small lead ball.

The word and some of its compounds (e.g., plumb bob, plumb rule, or plumb line) goes back at least as far as Chaucer. In his late 14th-century Treatise on the Astrolabe, he describes “a plomet hangyng on a lyne” as well as the use of “a plom-rule” “[t]o fynde the lyne meridional to dwelle fix in eny certeyn place.” The word also appears in the Promptorium Parvulorum, the first English–Latin dictionary (compiled in 1440).

Because one use for a plumb is to determine depth, the verb to plumb eventually took on a metaphorical shading, “to explore the depths, to examine, to probe” — as in “to plumb the limits of human understanding”. And because another use for a plumb is to determine verticality with precision and exactitude, an adjectival and adverbial use developed, meaning “perfect(ly), exact(ly), complete(ly)” — as in “plumb center”, “plumb crazy”, or “plumb done in”. This usage is generally more colloquial, regional, or rural.

Let me close by calling your attention to two or three related words. Everyone knows what a plumber is, but most people don’t realize that plumber and plumbing derive from an underlying reference to lead — as in a pipes made out of that metal. Lead for our drinking water?! Perish the thought!

And how about the verb, to plummet, meaning “to drop downward rapidly” — just as a lead weight does! And finally, the colorful noun, aplomb, meaning “confidence, poise, skill” — the very opposite of leaden, isn’t it? But it comes to us from the French à plomb “perpendicular” — perpendicularity, naturally, being a measure taken with a plumb.

So, till next time, I hope y’all found this post plumb int’resting. (Did I really just write that? *groan* :)

Diversion: Canterbury Tales Rap

You’ll either love it or hate it. It really gets going about twenty seconds in. :)

The origins of Tolkien’s “Errantry” — Part 2

Last week, I offered some thoughts on the origins of one of Tolkien’s fairly early poems, “Errantry” — mainly a partial and tentative refutation of Randel Helms’s theory that it (along with the other poems in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil) was a scholarly parody of Charles Williams, as well as an expansion on John Rateliff’s 1982 identification of Chaucer’s Tale of Sir Topas as a likelier source for the poem. I ended that post with the promise to return with another possible source, this one (I suggested ominously) “more controversial”. And so here we are.

I may as well not beat around the bush. The source I have in mind is Michael Drayton’s Nimphidia ... *crickets* (no pun intended) ... I know, the most probable reaction here is to object that Tolkien very specifically belittled Nimphidia and castigated Drayton as responsible in large part for all that Tolkien felt was wrong in the portrayal of fairies and Faërie. Be that as it may, I believe there are grounds from which to mount a pretty successful comparison, and so I mean to make the attempt. Drayton, in fact, offers encouragement in the very first line of his poem: “Olde Chavcer doth of Topas tell” [1].

Coming up next week, I’ll have a third and final part to this series, in which I’m going to touch on some further similarities between Nimphidia and Tolkien’s very early poem, “Goblin Feet” (1915), arguing that, to some extent, the latter may be a kind of bridge between Drayton and “Errantry”. And as a sidebar to this secondary comparison, I’ll offer a comment or two on George MacDonald, yet another early influence whom Tolkien would later disavow and throw to the wargs. Ambitious? In the end, it will be up to you to tell me whether I’ve made my case. For now, let’s press on with Drayton and “Errantry”.

Nimphidia: The Court of Fayrie is one of those poems, so common during the Elizabethan period, in which fairies and elves were tiny, precious things, smaller than a cowslip, drinking from a dew-drop, and so on. The portrait was perhaps epitomized best in Queen Mab, who appears not only in Nimphidia, but in works by Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare, Robert Herrick, Thomas Hood, and others (all the way to Percy Bysshe Shelley and beyond). This was the image Tolkien came to deplore, calling down “a murrain on Will Shakespeare and his damned cobwebs” [2]. But Nimphidia is, for its type, a marvelous poem, vivid in detail, and quite long (more than 700 lines). That being said, the poem will certainly not be everybody’s cup of tea (though the same has been said of Tolkien).

I won’t take the time to rehearse the entire story-line of the poem, but I recommend reading it in full if you haven’t. In a nutshell (appropriately enough), the poem is essentially a love triangle cum heroic quest. The hero is a “Fayrie knight” errant called Pigwiggen (Harry Potter fans might remember J.K. Rowling’s use of the name). He loves the “faire Queene Mab”, which angers her spouse, the “king Oberon”. The tale unfolds in a bucolic and diminutive “Eluish” setting, where Pigwiggen encounters ants, bumblebees, butterflies, glow-worms, wasps, among other miniature friends and foes in quest of Mab’s love. It is adorable, delightful fare. Let me hit a few specific points, and offer a few quotations, which I hope will establish the validity of comparing it to “Errantry”.

Remembering those lines from Sir Topas so reminiscent of Tolkien’s “Errantry”, consider the following assortment of lines from Nimphidia (the lines all occur in close proximity, but I have edited out a few intervening passages in order to emphasize, but not distort, the similarity to Tolkien):

A little Cockle-shell his Shield, [...]
His Speare a Bent both stiffe and strong, [...]
The Pyle was of a Horse-flyes tongue, [...].
And puts him on a coate of Male,
Which was of a Fishes scale, [...]
His Rapier was a Hornets sting, [...]
His Helmet was a Bettles head, [...]
And for a plume, a horses hayre, [...] (ll. 490–509)

The resemblance is rather striking, don’t you think? The “Rapier [...] a Hornets sting”, furthermore, reminds one immediately of Bilbo and the Elvish knife he used for a short-sword in The Hobbit. I need hardly remind you he called the sword Sting. This should come as no great surprise, since soon after writing “Errantry”, and (I would argue) still very much in the same imaginative place, Tolkien set to work on The Hobbit. During Pigwiggen’s encounter with the Wasp, too, we find this passage: “I am a Waspe behold my sting, / At which the Fayrie started” (ll. 211–2). Compare this to the Mirkwood Spiders’ answer: “Ugh! He’s got a sting has he? Well, we’ll get him all the same [...].”

And the resemblance doesn’t end there. Consider the following pairs of lines: “a bridal bed / of flowers and of thistle-down”, “For feare of ratling on the stones, / With Thistle-downe they shod it”; “He wove a tissue airy-thin / to snare her in [...] / He caught her in bewilderment / with filament of spider-thread”, “A Cobweb ouer them they throw, / To shield the winde if it should blowe”; “he made her soft pavilions / of lilies [...] / with blossom for a canopy”, “And for the Queene a fitting bower, / [...] is that faire Cowslip flower”; “in ship of leaves and gossamer”, “Their Harnasses of Gossamere”; “he threaded gems in necklaces”, “A Bracelet made of Emmotts eyes”; and so on. In fact, had I not tipped my hand by retaining the antique spelling, I daresay many readers might find it difficult to tell which lines are Tolkien’s and which Drayton’s.

In addition to their imagery and phrasing, both poems share similarities of meter, too. Tolkien’s is more complex, but both rely heavily on sing-song feminine rhymes. And finally, both poems close with an emphasis on memory. In Nimphidia, the waters of Lethe bring forgetfulness to Oberon, wiping away his jealousy and thus bringing the adventures of Pigwiggen to a happier ending. In “Errantry”, the appeal is not to forgetfulness, but memory: “He tarried for a little while / [...] and coming home / with honeycomb to memory his message came, and errand too!” Finally, I would note in passing the curious reference in Drayton’s Nimphidia to “Nigromancie” (l. 34). This is echoed directly in The Hobbit, but more obliquely in “Errantry”, which has “sigaldry” (l. 28) and “glamoury” (l. 88). [3]

Now let me offer some response to the potential objection, that Nimphidia couldn’t be a source for “Errantry” because of Tolkien’s obvious distaste for the poem. In the essay, “On Fairy-stories”, Tolkien makes this very clear, doesn’t he? He writes of the “flower-and-butterfly minuteness” of the fairy tradition that

it was largely a literary business in which William Shakespeare and Michael Drayton played a part. Drayton’s Nymphidia [sic] is one ancestor of that long line of flower-fairies and fluttering sprites with antennae that I so disliked as a child, and which my children in their turn detested.

But did he really detest these fairies as much as he says, or might Tolkien be overstating his odium? It would not be the first time he had changed his mind, and I will dare to gainsay him in this case too. On several occasions Tolkien claimed to dislike someone or something which he demonstrably had liked or which or who had influenced him much earlier on (e.g., Celtic mythology, George MacDonald, the Matter of Britain, not to mention The Hobbit itself). These instances, I think, are reason enough to question, and perhaps even to overturn, this claim in “On Fairy-stories”. After all, if Tolkien really did hate this fairy image as much as he says he did, why the more than superficial resemblance to it, here in “Errantry” as well as in other early poems? Tom Shippey said that “Errantry” itself “seems to be just the kind of fairy poetry Tolkien would later abjure. In it an unnamed but tiny fairy-knight marries a butterfly but then leaves her to battle dragonflies and honeybees” [4]. Mutatis mutandis, this is the very story of Nimphidia.

More likely then, it strikes me, is that Tolkien liked Drayton and the whole precious fairy tradition from the Elizabethan to the Victorian Age well enough to imitate it in his early work (or perhaps he could simply think of nothing more original yet) — even though his opinion of it would make a complete volte-face later.

Clearly, however, his ideas were changing around the time he first drafted the Andrew Lang lecture of 1938–9. He had, by this time completed The Hobbit and begun The Lord of the Rings, which was taking him into very different imaginative territory. In many ways, “On Fairy-stories” represents the critical moment of change, in which Tolkien’s new, more original theories of storytelling began to supplant his older, more imitative ones. By the end of this process, his views on fairy-stories would change markedly. The transformation of the early “Errantry” into the much more mature “Eärendil was a mariner” seems to me to encapsulate perfectly the evolution of Tolkien’s own tastes and conceptions — from fairy to Faërie, as it were. This same change can likewise be observed in Tolkien’s early appreciation and imitation of George MacDonald, which by the middle of the 1960’s would have evaporated into a strikingly similar dislike. More on that in the next installment, where I will examine “Goblin Feet”, elaborate further on these questions (and my suggested answers), and attempt to tie up the loose threads.


[1] Drayton, Michael. Minor Poems of Michael Drayton. Ed. Cyril Brett. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1907, p. 155. We cannot demonstrate this incontrovertibly, but it seems probable this is an edition Tolkien might have read.
[2] Tolkien, J.R.R. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981, p. 143.
[3] For more on these two rare words, see Gilliver, Peter, Jeremy Marshall, and E.S.C. Weiner. The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 185–7.
[4] Shippey, Tom. “Poems by Tolkien: The Adventures of Tom Bombadil.” The J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment. Ed. Michael D.C. Drout. New York: Routledge, 2006, p. 516.

The origins of Tolkien’s “Errantry” — Part 1

We’ve been talking a little bit about Tolkien’s early poetry over the last few days, in the comments to my last post, as well as in some email the post prompted (a more selective we there :). In one of those comments, I mentioned that I had once considered assembling a variorum edition of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. That statement led N.E. Brigand to share via email an abstract for a paper he’s proposed writing on a related subject, and in that abstract was a comment which jogged a faint chord of memory — all of which “set the rocket off” for a post on some of the sources (or at least some overwhelming analogues) for “Errantry”, one of Tolkien’s most famous early poems.

That catalytic statement, which I don’t think N.E. Brigand will mind my sharing, was this: “even ten years later [i.e., after the publication of ATB], Paul Kocher, one of Tolkien’s most astute interpreters, was treating ‘Errantry’ as if it derived from ‘Eärendil was a mariner’, when the reverse is true.” Indeed, and this is what I remembered: that it was not only Kocher who missed something important in his approach to the poem, but also Randel Helms.

Just over twenty-five years ago, John Rateliff published a short but valuable piece in Notes and Queries. He writes:

In his book Tolkien’s World Randel Helms suggests that many of the poems in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil are scholarly parodies and singles out one, ‘Errantry’, as ‘a friendly parody of Charles Williams’ Taliessin poems’. Aside from the fact that ‘Errantry’ was originally published [...] five years before Taliessin Through Logres, Helms has missed a much more obvious parallel: that between ‘Errantry’ and Chaucer’s ‘Tale of Sir Topas’. [1]

I would add that not only was “Errantry” first published in a 1933 issue of Oxford Magazine, it was certainly drafted much earlier. Tolkien recalled reciting it during one of the earliest meetings of the Inklings, in the early 1930’s, and it was in existence well before that. A penciled draft survives, along with five further revisions, all predating the first publication. [2] It may therefore have predated Williams’s Taliessin poems by perhaps as much as a decade!

Chaucer’s tale, for those unfamiliar with it, is something of a parody of more serious works of the Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the “Thomas Rhymer” traditions. It’s well worth reading. In his note, Rateliff offers a half-dozen illustrative lines from the poem. I’ll give you a little extra here, to give you a bit more of the flavor [3]:

His heer, his berd was lyk saffroun,
That to his girdel raughte adoun;
His shoon of Cordewane.
Of Brugges were his hosen broun,
His robe was of ciclatoun,
That coste many a Iane.
[...]
His Iambeux were of quyboilly,
His swerdes shethe of yuory,
His helm of laton bryght;
His sadel was of rewel boon,
His brydel as the sonne shoon,
Or as the mone lyght.

His spere was of fyn ciprees, [...]

[And so on. I could easily have quoted a dozen other lines of much the same sort.]

One can’t help but notice just how similar these lines are to those in “Errantry” (and to those in its more serious-minded descendent, “Eärendil was a mariner”). And if you don’t know what Cordewane, ciclatoun, or quyrboilly might be, well, did you really know what habergeon, chalcedony, and malachite were? ;)

And I hope you noticed the “rewel boon”. Ruel-bone (variously spelled, rewel, rowell, reuel, etc.) refers to a somewhat uncertain material, but probably whale ivory (note that Sir Topas’s sword-sheath is also made of ivory), and it’s fairly common in Middle English literature. Tolkien himself used this term elsewhere: in jottings on the story of Tuor and Turgon, where Turgon has a sheath of ruel-bone; also in The Lay of Leithian — “'teeth like ruel-bone”; and in the poem “The Sea-Bell” — “cliffs of stone pale as ruel-bone”). Equally (if not more) interestingly, there is also Tolkien’s middle name, Reuel — unrelated except by a coincidence of its sound and word-shape, but evocative nonetheless. [4]

There are two other important elements in Sir Topas I should mention. One is the presence of the “queen of Faïrye” in the story; the other is “a greet geaunt” going by the name, “sir Olifaunt”. That should naturally strike a third note in the chord of memory — “Oliphaunt” (like “Errantry” and “The Sea-Bell”) is another poem collected in, but written and published prior to, The Adventures of Tom Bomabil. And like “Errantry” (but unlike “The Sea-Bell”), “Oliphaunt” was incorporated directly into The Lord of the Rings. “Oliphant”, of course, has its own history, which I will not rehearse here. But most of the poems comprising ATB were being written and published during the 1920’s–30’s; the three I’ve written about here can be further narrowed down to roughly 1927–34, a time when Tolkien was doing major work with Chaucer (culminating in his 1934 essay, “Chaucer as a Philologist”).

Rateliff doesn’t mention any of this (the ruel-bone; the Queen of Faëry, to use Tolkien’s spelling; or the Giant called Olifaunt) in his short piece — he presses no further than the similarity of the lines of the formula, “his this was of that” — but I think all these points deepen the probability that Sir Topas was a conscious source for Tolkien. In my next post, I’m going to discuss another possible source (or analogue, at least), and probably a more controversial one. Stay tuned for that, and in the meantime, please feel free to comment on this first post. I will probably put this post and the next one together as a conference paper, to be eventually rewritten and submitted for publication, so I welcome feedback.

[1] Rateliff, John D. “J.R.R. Tolkien: ‘Sir Topas’ Revisited.” Notes and Queries Volume 29, Number 4 (August 1982), p. 348.
[2] J.R.R. Tolkien. The Treason of Isengard. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co, 1989, pp. 85–6.
[3] The text quoted here is from Walter Skeat’s 1880 edition.
[4] See also Gilliver, Peter, Jeremy Marshall, and E.S.C. Weiner. The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 181–2.

Tom Shippey on Geoffrey Chaucer

I came across an interesting new book recently — Literary Genius: 25 Classic Writers Who Define English & American Literature. Two of its collected essays especially caught my eye: “Geoffrey Chaucer” by Tom Shippey, and “Charles Dickens” by A.N. Wilson (known to me for his biography of C.S. Lewis).

The book wasn’t available in our local library system, so I requested it through interlibrary loan. It’s quite a handsome volume, with a novel two-column layout and beautiful woodcuts of the authors and scenes from their best-known works. My favorite was the illustration for Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Anyway, I immediately read Shippey’s essay on Chaucer, which I enjoyed immensely (as I do practically all of Shippey’s work). Like all the essays in the collection, this is a short overview, but it’s quite an insightful one. Here are a couple of excerpts to whet your appetite for more:

Chaucer seems to understand people intimately, from all classes of society and walks of life, yet identifies with none. His works span the range of medieval genres, but he delights in exposing their limitations. His poetry is one of constantly shifting perspectives and unconscious self-betrayal. [1]

And:

Chaucer delights in demonstrating that the meaning of words is determined by their users, or tales by their tellers. He likes to use the same line in different poems, with entirely different meanings in context. His characters, like his poetry, are complex, inscrutable, capable of being read many ways. He is the poet of shifting awareness and uncertain boundaries, of mixed motives and mirror images. [2]

Give it a look!

[1] Epstein, Joseph, and Barry Moser [illustrator]. Literary Genius 25 Classic Writers Who Define English & American Literature. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, October 2007, p.9.

[2] Ibid., p.13.