New reviews of past work

Reviews of my book, Tolkien and the Study of His Sources, are beginning to appear — so far, they’ve been unanimously positive! I’ll be writing some posts about these in the near future, but today I wanted to share excerpts from newly published reviews of two other books to which I contributed. Both reviews appear in the new issue of the journal VII: An Anglo-American Literary Review, Volume 28 (2011).

Jonathan Saylor, a professor of music at Wheaton College, which publishes VII, reviewed Brad Eden’s collection, Middle-earth Minstrel: Essays on Music in Tolkien (McFarland, 2010), to which I contributed the opening chapter, “Horns of Dawn: The Tradition of Alliterative Verse in Rohan”. The overall character of the review is mainly positive, and of my own essay, Saylor has this to say:

In relating the Kingdom of Rohan to the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Mercia, Jason Fisher underscores the singing of alliterative verse structure and the Rohirrim [sic] militaristic use of horns. He also defends Tolkien’s sensitivity towards things musical though not a musician himself, using words and phrases that resound “like harp-strings sharply plucked” (19).

Turning the page, veteran Tolkien scholar Richard C. West reviews Middle-earth and Beyond: Essays on the World of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Kathleen Dubs and Janka Kašcáková. For those who have not heard, Kathleen passed away very recently after an illness — very sad that she didn’t live long enough to see reviews of her last published work. My contribution to this collection is titled, “Sourcing Tolkien’s ‘Circles of the World’: Speculations on the Heimskringla, the Latin Vulgate Bible, and the Hereford Mappa Mundi”, and West had the following remarks on it:

An editor tries to open a collection with a particularly strong essay, as is the case here with Jason Fisher’s tracing the sources of Tolkien’s oft-repeated phrase “the circles of the world” to Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla (a thirteenth-century collection of Old Norse sagas that takes its title from its opening words “Kringla heimsins” meaning “the circle of the world”), and the common Latin phrase “orbis terrarum” with the same meaning (with particular reference to the deuterocanonical Book of Wisdom in Saint Jerome’s Vulgate Bible where Fisher noticed that the phrase occurs ten times in a short text). That Tolkien revised his original phrase “the girdle of the Earth” to “the circles of the world” just may have been suggested to him by such sources. Fisher is properly cautious that there is no direct evidence of his reading either one, but it is virtually certain that Tolkien read all of the sagas in the original Old Norse — he founded the Coalbiters at Oxford for that purpose, and would not have overlooked Snorri whom the Icelanders consider their greatest saga writer — and highly probably that he read Jerome’s Latin translation of the Bible, both because it is still the official Roman Catholic Bible and because it was the version known throughout the Middle Ages and therefore relevant to his work. Fisher offers a good deal more linguistic speculation, filled out with information about medieval maps and their possible relation to Tolkien’s shaping of the world of Arda (chiefly the Hereford Mappa Mundi which was created and is still housed in Tolkien’s beloved West Midlands). I was particularly struck by the discussion of the relation between Old Norse kringla (circle) and hringr (ring), which I agree would have delighted Tolkien whether or not he had already thought of it himself.

So there you have it. Both books are recommended by their reviewers, especially Middle-earth and Beyond, and I am gratified my contribution to each elicited comments and some praise. If you haven’t read these two essay collections, let me recommend them again now. Both are a bit expensive, but I think they’re worth owning — both have a lot of interesting things to offer that have not been said before. If they are too dear, then maybe you can look for them at your local library. And if they don’t have copies, suggest they buy them! For those who would like a taste, you can read all of one of my essays and part of the other online (here and here). I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Tolkien’s translation conceit — new evidence?

As you probably know by now (and if not, read this), HarperCollins is publishing several new books, both this year and next, to celebrate the 75th anniversary of The Hobbit — “a literary party of special magnificence”, as it were. One of these, “the flagship book of the anniversary year” according to David Brawn, is The Art of The Hobbit, edited by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull. I have had my copy for a few days now, dipping in here and there, and it is simply gorgeous!

It’s a beautifully produced coffee-table book, an oversized hardcover, slip-cased like the original Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien (1979). The new book attempts to collect together in one place every known sketch, drawing, and painting Tolkien made with any connection to The Hobbit — more than 100 of them! Many have never been published before, and of those that have been, some are reproduced in color for the first time. Many are larger than the reproductions in earlier books.

The editors have written a short but valuable introduction, as well as running commentary on the works, which they present in the order of the events from the novel that they represent. This commentary is kept to a minimum, allowing the artworks to speak for themselves. Four gatefolds show the evolution of particular scenes — Hobbiton, Rivendell, The Elven-king’s Gates, and the Forest River. Another page brings together every known illustration of Bilbo for easy comparison. In a nutshell: it’s a must-have!

In perusing the artworks, I’ve noticed a few interesting things already. For instance, on the reverse of Death of Smaug, Tolkien wrote some calligraphic lines pertaining to the story, in one of which he refers to “Elrond the half-elfin” — quite a late date for the spelling Tolkien rejected (consistently preferring “elven” from this point on).

Another interesting thing is some Old English and Old Norse associated with Thror’s Map. Actually, there is some Elvish as well — a bit of ammunition for those who argue (as John D. Rateliff does) that The Hobbit was far more connected to Tolkien’s legendarium than many people believe — but I will leave that to the Elvish scholars!

As you will recall, Thror’s Map contains some ordinary runes, which say in English, “five feet high the door and the three may walk abreast”. In a pen-and-ink drawing of “Thror’s Map, Copied by B. Baggins”, Tolkien has added a mostly legible passage in Old English translating the same passage: “fif fóta heah is se duru and þrie mæg samod [?] þurhgangend” [1]. The question mark is a tiny scrawl which seems to have been meant for insertion, but I can’t even pretend to read it. Another word, above duru, has been erased. Leaving these out, the Old English literally means, “five feet high is the door and three may together going-through.” If this look ungrammatical, it’s because it is. The word þurhgangend (which actually ought to be þurhgangende) is a participle; I think Tolkien should have used the infinitive, þurhgangan.

More interesting, but more difficult, is an Old Norse translation of the Moon-letters. To refresh your memory, the moon-letters on Thror’s Map run, again in English: “stand by the grey stone when the thrush knocks and the setting sun with the last light of Durin’s Day will shine upon the key-hole.”

The Old Norse is very hard to read, in places totally illegible — to me, at least. Have a look at the text (above) and see if you can add anything to my transcription. The best I can do is something like this:

Staltri[?] hjal{la}[?] steininum þeima[?] hvenar[?] grá[—?]
Þar sein[?] þrostr[—?] þa nein[?] sól
Søkkvandi[?] með nogh[?] lys[?] Durnis dags
L[?]j[?] [?] lykill[?] [?] [2]

As you can see, I’ve numbered the words in the image at the top of the post, leaving out a couple which are (partly) repeated in the main passage. Let’s see what we can make of it! Update: Make sure you read the comments below, where bits and pieces are teased apart and worked out. I’m not going to revise the numbered list below (at least, not for now), so that you can follow my first thoughts.

1) This should be a verb meaning “stand”, but I’m puzzled right from the outset. The Old Norse verb I would expect to see is standa “to stand”, but I’m not sure what we’ve got here. I can’t find anything in my sources to explain it. I could certainly be transcribing it incorrectly, but there’s no way it’s a form of standa.

2) This appears to read hja, but notice the extra squiggle below? It looks like this might be hjalla, a form of hjalli “a shelf or ledge in a mountain’s side”. This would be the ideal word-choice for the sheltered bay where the Secret Door is located, but if I’m reading this correctly, then the Norse word, an addition by Tolkien, doesn’t correspond to anything in the English moon-letters.

3) Surely steininum — and finally a word I am pretty sure I am reading correctly. This is the definite dative plural of steinn “stone”, but it’s often translated in the singular. Here, following the English closely, it means “near, by the stone”.

4) This could be þeima “to this, to them”, but it’s hard to be sure.

5) Not much more than a squiggle. Tolkien himself seemed to realize he was jotting too hastily and went back over the beginning of the word to clarify it. Based on where we are in the moon-letters, it looks like it might be hvenar “when”.

6) All we can read we any confidence is grá—, but since grár is “grey”, it must be something along those lines.

7) Legible again! Þar is “there, at that place”.

8) This probably should be the verb “knocks”, but it is pretty much impossible to read. This word looks like it might be sein, senn, seim, or something like that. To translate “knock”, Tolkien probably ought to have opted or of knía “to knock, strike (poet.)”, but he could have used drepa, banga, klappa, or another word of the same sort. If the word is something like senn, it would mean “chatter”, which I suppose could work as a substitute for the knocking of the thrush. But I doubt this is the right answer, because it would be hard to explain such a departure from the English. I’m at a loss.

9) Although the word fades away into a mere scribble, this is without a doubt a form of þröstr “thrush”.

10) The word appears legible, which is a problem, because it appears to read þa, and I know of no such Old Norse word. I am going to make a daring suggestion: that Tolkien inadvertently code-switched into Old English, where þá is a conjunction meaning “when, then”. This fits the moon-letters very well at this point in the passage, so I think it’s plausible. On the other hand …

11) This squiggle could be hvenar, if we allow Tolkien a totally misshapen h. This would do the job of the conjunction “when, then”, discussed in the previous point. But I really can’t read this word. It looks more like it begins with an n, not an h. Anyone have any idea?

12) Another clear word: sól “sun”.

13) In Old Norse, the “setting of the sun” is usually rendered sól at setri komin. But søkkrendi means “sinking”, which is perfectly a propos here as well.

14) Although difficult to make out, this is certainly með “with”.

15) Anyone? Anyone? I can’t make this out.

16) This looks like is must be a form of lýsa “gleam, shimmering light” or lýsi “lighting, brightness”, though the appropriate grammatical ending is lost or omitted.

17) This is clearly Durnis, the genitive of the proper name, Durin, meaning “Durin’s”, and …

18) This is clearly dags, genitive of dagr, meaning “of day”; hence, “of Durin’s Day”.

19) This is hard to make out. It seems to begin with an l, and to contain a j, but I’m not sure what the loopy ascender is. In any case, we are looking for something like ljóma “to shine”, which seems to be quite close to what Tolkien scribbled.

20) This word is scratched out, so I think we should conclude Tolkien rejected it and move on.

21) This word is scrawled well enough to make out lykill “key”.

22) I can’t read the last word at all: nothing but a descender, a scribble, and an ascender. It could be almost anything. But “hole” should be hola, or perhaps auga “eye”. Neither seems to fit this blob, but it must be the second element of the compound “key-hole”.

So, allowing for Tolkien’s untidy scrawl and a few mystery words, this is plainly pretty close to the original English passage represented by the moon-runes on Thror’s Map. Why would Tolkien bother to translate these Dwarvish instructions into Old Norse? Why is this significant? Was it merely a personal amusement, or was it perhaps more?

As we all know, the names of the Dwarves are Norse names, drawn from the Völuspá, but until now, there haven’t been any other significant signs of the elaborate “translation conceit” in The Hobbit. One could just as easily hypothesize (and I suspect it usually has been hypothesized) that the translation conceit Tolkien describes in the Appendix F to The Lord of the Rings emerged later, as a way to explain away the choice of Old Norse names from the earlier book, long ago committed to and unavoidable now in the sequel. But this jotting suggests the conceit might have begun to take shape earlier than previously thought.

I have had reason to suspect this before, actually. The real formalization of the conceit certainly must have emerged later, in fact, in February, 1942 [3]. But this translation into Old Norse suggests that Tolkien was playing with the idea of representing much more than just the names of the Dwarves in The Hobbit as Old Norse. As early as December, 1937, Tolkien admitted that “[Old] Icelandic was in a foolish moment substituted for the proper language of my tales” [4]. Not just the names, but also the language, it seems Tolkien is saying. And here, in The Art of The Hobbit, is a bit of hard evidence to back this up! The map, in fact, predates the letter to Selby by at least a few years, implying that a nascent translation conceit may have been swimming around in Tolkien’s mind for a good deal longer than previously thought. Amazing, isn’t it, the things you notice when you hold a map up to the light!


[1] Art of The Hobbit, bottom of fig. 25, p. 51.

[2] Art of The Hobbit, middle of fig. 30, p. 56.

[3] See The Peoples of Middle-earth, p. 70, where Tolkien first jots down the rubric of Old English for Rohan, Old Norse for Dale (and the Dwarves of the region), etc.

[4] Tolkien makes this rather significant admission in a letter to G.E. Selby, dated December 14, 1937. Christopher Tolkien quotes a selection from this letter in his foreword to The Return of the Shadow (p. 7) — but not the passage I have quoted. The complete letter to Selby was printed in the exhibition guide, J.R.R. Tolkien — The Hobbit: Drawings, Watercolors, and Manuscripts, Patrick and Beatrice Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, June 11–September 30, 1987, p. [4].

Beware the Neekerbreekers

“There were also abominable creatures haunting the reeds and tussocks that from the sound of them were evil relatives of the cricket. There were thousands of them, and they squeaked all round, neek-breek, breek-neek, unceasingly all the night, until the hobbits were nearly frantic.” [1]

Neekerbreekers (as Sam calls them) are an incessantly noisy insect species inhabiting the Midgewater Marshes, about three days’ east of Bree. In the “Nomenclature of The Lord of the Rings”, Tolkien explains that this is “[a]n invented insect-name” and that translators should render it by an “invention of similar sound (supposed to be like that of a cricket)” [2].

This is straightforward enough. Tolkien suggests the name is onomatopoeic. As Steve Walker succinctly puts it: “Neekerbreekers sound their name” [3]. My friend Mark Hooker has aptly noted a parallel in H. Rider Haggard. In his novel She, there are “sullen peaty pools” filled with “musqueteers”, “tens of thousands of the most blood-thirsty, pertinacious, and huge mosquitoes” [4]. What else can I add to these clear-cut comments? Maybe a bit more.

First, consider that the word mosquito itself, a Spanish diminutive of Latin musca “fly, gnat”, is thought to be imitative in origin too (cp. Greek μύζειν “to mutter”). Cognates in the Germanic languages include Old High German mucca, Middle High German mücke, Middle Dutch mugge, Old Saxon muggia, Old Norse mý, and Old English mycg, from which we derive the Modern English midge — as in Midgewater Marshes. That’s rather a nice coincidence, and possibly a bit of ammunition for Mark’s case that Tolkien may have had Haggard in mind.

Second, something else struck me recently. This is a bit more of a stretch, but I offer it as food for thought. Consider this passage from Laȝamon’s Brut —

Þat is a seolcuð mere | iset a middel-ærde
mid fenne & mid ræode | mid watere swiðe bræde
mid fiscen & mid feoȝelen | mid uniuele þingen
Þat water is unimete | brade nikeres þer ba[ð]ieð inne
þer is æluene ploȝe | in atteliche pole.

For those whose Early Middle English is a bit rusty: “It is a strange lake, set in Middle-earth, with marsh and with reed, with waters exceedingly broad, with fish and with fowl, with evil things. The water is immensely wide, nickers bathe in it, there elves play in the dreadful pool.”

The passage has the Dead Marshes dead to rights, don’t you think? But perhaps there is a hint of the Midgewater Marshes with its neekerbreekers as well. After all, what are these Middle English nikeres, which I translated above as nickers?

The word usually means something like a water-monster, sprite, sea-goblin, siren, mermaid, etc., depending on the tale in which it appears. It is the source of the folkloric nixie (a kind of water sprite), and it has cognates in all the Germanic tongues — e.g., MD nicker, ON nykr, OHG nichus, and OE nicor. The latter has been glossed as hippopotamus and crocodile, but OE nicor, as well as the compound nicor-hús “nicker-house”, occur throughout Beowulf to describe sea monsters and their lairs. Indeed, the haunted mere in Laȝamon’s Brut is sometimes compared in the scholarly literature to the abode of Grendel’s dam in Beowulf. As C.S. Lewis put it: “[Laȝamon’s] nikeres and their pool might have come straight out of Beowulf.” [5]

The word survived into Modern English, spelled nicker, though it has been obsolete for a long time now. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “a supernatural being supposed to live in the sea or other waters; a water-demon, a kelpie. Formerly also (in Middle English): a siren, a mermaid (obs.).” E.R. Eddison used it as late as 1922 in The Worm Ouroboros: “on the walls strange portraitures: lions, dragons, nickers of the sea, spread-eagles, elephants, swans, unicorns” [6], but otherwise, the word is all but dead.

Is there any reason to think Tolkien had this word in the back of his mind when he invented the neekerbreekers? Not a strong reason, certainly, though it’s fun to imagine he might have. Why not? The neekerbreeker is an abominable creature inhabiting a marshy region in Middle-earth — and precisely the same could be said of the nicker, nikere, nicor, however you wish to spell it. Admittedly, “evil relatives of the cricket” are not quite the same as water-demons, but the phonological envelopes of both the real-world word and the first part of Tolkien’s are identical. The second half is probably an imitative reduplication, not at all uncommon in English.

In any case, I think it’s fair to say neekerbreekers are best avoided. They might be no more than noisy crickets, but maybe not. Better safe than sorry. ;)


[1] J.R.R. Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings. 50th anniversary ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004, p. 183.

[2] J.R.R. Tolkien. “Nomenclature of The Lord of the Rings.” The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion. Ed. Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005, p. 760.

[3] Steve Walker. The Power of Tolkien’s Prose: Middle-earth’s Magical Style. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, p. 23.

[4] Mark T. Hooker. A Tolkienian Mathomium: A Collection of Articles on J.R.R. Tolkien and His Legendarium. Llyfrawr, 2006, p. 148.

[5] C.S. Lewis. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966, p. 28. And for much more on the mythological background of the nicor, including older theoretical underpinnings in Roman and Greek mythology, see Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie, especially Vol. II, Ch. XVII.

[6] E.R. Eddison. The Worm Ouroboros. New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1926, p. 192.

And now for something a little more löwenbräu

Right off the bat, I have to point out to my European readers that the pun in my title only works with the American pronunciation of Löwenbräu, where it is usually said /loʊənbraʊ/. As with so much English and American humor, this is much too low-brow a jest to stand up to a stolid German pronunciation. If you haven’t already inferred this, I should warn you that the remainder of this post might even be more crude than this one. Once in a while I can’t resist a coarse pun. But if the low-brow was fair game for Chaucer and Shakespeare, let no one judge me ill for plucking an easy double entendre now and then.

Regular readers and friends know that I’m a tippler of some repute. I’ve written about beer and spirits before, but it’s been a while. High time for a potable post.

This is where beer snobbery meets the bizarre foods world. Not that the food I’m about to discuss is at all strange on its own, but together with beer? You be the judge, but let me whet your whistle with the most exclusive of beer styles — beer brewed with meat. Sound good? (Cue the gagging.)

I came across a tasty treat in the venerable tome, Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine, by William Carew Hazlitt (not that William Hazlitt; rather, his grandson) — cock ale. Yes, you read that right: cock ale. For audacious home-brewers, here’s the recipe:

To make Cock Ale: — Take ten gallons of ale, and a large cock, the older the better, parboil the cock, flea him, and stamp him in a stone mortar till his bones are broken, (you must craw and gut him when you flea him) put the cock into two quarts of sack [sherry], and put to it three pounds of raisins of the sun stoned, some blades of mace, and a few cloves; put all these into a canvas bag, and a little before you find the ale has done working, put the ale and bag together into a vessel; in a week or nine days’ time bottle it up, fill the bottles but just above the necks, and leave the same time to ripen as other ale. [1]

It sounds a bit like Dogfish Head’s Raison d’Être — with chicken bits floating in it. Notice there was no mention of straining or filtering the ale. And I don’t think parboiling would cut it with the FDA, do you? Mmmm, salmonella! :)

So that’s cock ale. The name sounds so dirty. As does another beer brewed with meat: oyster porter. Another relic of the 19th century. Yes, this is English porter brewed with oyster meat, or sometimes ground up oyster shells. Yum. Oysters, of course, and more specifically prairie oysters, are a euphemism in America for fried bull testicles. Goodness gracious, I can’t imagine going into the local organic market and telling the clerk I want cock and oysters! Oh, Shakespeare, come to my rescue: “I warrant / it had upon it brow, a bumpe as big as a young Cockrels / stone? A perilous knock, and it cryed bitterly.” [2]

Even worse — and believe me, I know I’m pushing my luck here — in the parlance of Hazlitt’s time, a cask of this ale could be referred to as “cock in a butt”. A butt is a cask for storing wine or ale, the source of the word butler. Jeeves, what have you been up to?! (Rest assured, I am properly ashamed of myself for this.)

Hazlitt’s cockbook — er, excuse me — cookbook is full of interesting tidbits like this. Just peruse the index, and before long, everything starts sounding dirty. A sampling of some of the more fetishistic-sounding dishes: Forced meat (p. 191), Jumbals (p. 128), Spread-eagle pudding (p. 114), White grease (p. 58), and what has to be my personal favorite: Rear-supper (p. 239, 242). God, I hope you are laughing at this …

Anyway, there you go: cock ale and oyster porter. Knock back a few of those, and I daresay the clothes are coming off. Just pray you don’t remember anything the next morning.



[1] William Carew Hazlitt. Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine. London: Elliot Stock, 1886, p. 152.

[2] Romeo and Juliet, I.iii.

The Poros and the Bosphorus

Through the hot, seldom-traveled plain of southeastern Gondor runs an overlooked river, the Poros, southernmost tributary of the great Anduin. Running more or less east to west, it forms a natural boundary between the furthest reaches of Gondor and lands under the sway of Harad to the south. The Harad Road fords the river at the Crossings of Poros, continuing north through Ithilien to the Crossroads and still further to the Morannon, the Black Gate of Mordor.

In The Lord of the Rings, the Poros is barely mentioned. Apart from its proper place on the maps, it figures only in the appendices as a site of frontier skirmishes between Gondor and the Haradrim (Appendix A.I.iv; and see Appendix B at TA 2885). With so few references, why should this far-flung river be of any interest to anybody? Well, it’s the name that attracted my attention. In the context of Middle-earth and its languages, we don’t know what it means — and that is pretty rare.

Such puzzles always pique my curiosity, and I think I have an answer. Having a look through the materials available to me, and performing some moderately thorough (though not exhaustive) searches of the Internet, I don’t come across anyone with the same theory I am about to share. If anyone has seen this, please let me know. Anyway, here goes.

Tolkien doesn’t discuss the name in “The Rivers and Beacon Hills of Gondor” (Vinyar Tengwar 42); it seems not to be glossed in “Words, Phrases & Passages in Various Tongues in The Lord of the Rings” (Parma Eldalamberon 17); it’s not in the “Nomenclature” Tolkien prepared for translators; nor is it in the Eldarin Etymologies. It’s really a bit of a mystery. As a result, guesses as to the meaning of this name are just that — guesses. The common element in most of these guesses is Sindarin ros “foam, spray”, but the first element is pretty much totally unknown. Eldarin roots with similar sound silhouettes seem to be red herrings (“flour”? “north”?). Jim Allan once suggested that it might be the same element in the equally rare (and also appendiceal) name, Araphor (= aran + por), but this doesn’t help much since we still have no idea what the element por is supposed to mean. And that’s assuming the name is Sindarin at all. A welter of names in the south of Gondor are said to be of pre-Númenórean origin and not Eldarin. The fact is, we just don’t know.

Here’s my theory, something I’ve been meaning to share with you for a long, long time. I can’t help wondering whether the name might have a primary world etymology. After all, it looks like a standard form Greek noun of the second declension, doesn’t it? In fact, there is such a word. Ancient Greek attests πόρος, matching Tolkien’s spelling exactly, and what is more, its meaning is highly suggestive. Of several connotations and uses, there are these in particular: (1) “a means of passing a river, a ford or ferry”, and (2) “a narrow sea, straight”. Through the regular laws of sound change, the Modern English words firth and ford are related, as are fjord < Old Norse fjörðr, and port “a haven” < Latin portus. I think Latin vadum “shoal, shallow, ford, sea, etc.” may be related to this same root as well.

The general sense of the Greek word is of a “passage, way, journey”, and it is also connected to the English fare (as in wayfarer and farewell) as well as ferry. It traces its ultimate origins to an Indo-European root √PER meaning “to lead, pass over, pass through” (also the source of prepositions and prefixes of directional meaning: e.g., for(e)– and peri–). This root has all sorts of interesting descendants; not only those previously mentioned, but also such an odd bunch as führer, porter, pier, parsely, fern, feather, gaberdine, and even the proper names Ferdinand, Portugal, and Parvati.

Plato wrote of Poros, a god of expediency, contrivance, and ease (i.e., passage). His antithesis was Aporia, goddess of difficulty, powerlessness, lack of means (i.e., impasse < α + πορία “without passage, means, device”). Aesop and Plutarch each have something to tell us about her. Aporia is a term still used in philosophy to express a state of puzzlement or doubt.

Finally, and I think most significantly, there is the Bosphorus, the Turkish strait that forms part of the boundary between Europe and Asia. The original meaning of the name is literally an ox-ford (βοῦς “ox” + πόρος “passage, ford”). This is amusing to me, and might be to you too, because it recalls the humble origins of the English Oxford and the Four Wise Clerks of Oxenford, the original editors of the Oxford English Dictionary whom Tolkien affectionately parodies in Farmer Giles of Ham.

I also chose the word “boundary” with good reason. If you were paying attention, you noticed I used the same word in the first paragraph of this post. Among drafts and notes for The Lord of the Rings (see The Treason of Isengard, p. 312), Tolkien explicitly identified the River Poros as a “boundary”. In Middle-earth, this was the boundary between Gondor and Harad, but if one overlays Middle-earth very roughly onto a map of our own real world, this corresponds pretty well to the boundary between Europe and Asia, making the Poros roughly analogous to the Bosphorus. Given this analogy and the similarity of the names, the likelihood the Greek word was in Tolkien’s mind seems hard to ignore.

By way of a closing fillip, I’d like to note that this isn’t the first time I’ve speculated about the specific influence of Greek on Tolkien’s nomenclature. If you’re interested and haven’t seen it yet, you might want to read my post on the name of the wolf, Carcharoth. I also wrote the entry on Greek Gods (among others) in the Tolkien Encyclopedia. In the same part of the ancient world, the Colossus of Rhodes seems like a possible model for the Argonath. And I could go on. A culture as rich as that of Ancient Greece could hardly fail to leave traces in Tolkien’s fictive world, especially when you consider that he began his academic career by specializing in Greek philology. A word like πόρος could easily have swum to the front of Tolkien’s mind when he needed a name for a boundary river. This, in fact, could explain why there is no adequate Eldarin gloss for the name. It was all Greek to him. :)

The curious lives of French prepositions

When you study comparative Romance philology, it’s only a matter of time before you notice that French exhibits some prepositional anomalies. These have interested me for years. For heaven’s sake, you might wonder, how do we explain Spanish con, Italian con, Portuguese com, Romanian cu, all from Latin cum, but French avec? Where did parmi “among, between” come from? And how about dans “in”? What about chez “at the home of”, which is so useful it has made its way even into English? None of these are found in the other Romance languages — and there are plenty of other examples — but why?

I was asking myself questions like these twenty years ago, and though I have now long known the answers, it struck me that some of my readers might be interested as well. Since chez is my favorite example, I’m going to save it for last. Let’s start with the strange-looking avec.

This word is the modern reflex of Middle French avecques, in turn from Old French avoc, avuec, avoec. The latter is the spelling found in The Song of Roland, used prepositionally near the beginning of the poem (l. 186), but used adverbially near the end (l. 3626). The word is a contracted or elided form of Latin apud hŏc “with this (thing)”. The path would have been something like Latin apud hŏc > ap[ud] hŏc > Vulgar Latin *abhoc > Old French avoc. What is most interesting is that French kept a vestigial trace of the pronoun, hōc, the neuter form of hīc “this”. Quite separately, the Latin preposition apud eroded directly into an Old French preposition od, ot, o “with” — which occurs with greater frequency than avoc in Roland. There is also one occurrence of the construction o tot “with all” (l. 1357), with the same meaning as modern avec, and which looks something like the obsolete English withal.

Originally, Latin apud and cum had different connotations, the latter more often associated with coincidence of time than with people or things, but French took one path, all the other Romance languages the other. Why is a difficult question, one that would require a lot deeper investigation that we have time for here, but it was during the Carolingian/Merovingian dynasties that avoc began to outshine od, likely under the influence of Frankish (i.e., Germanic) constructions and preferences. (Let us remember too that Old English wið was originally “against”, preserved now only in withstand; whereas, it was mid that connoted the sense of our modern preposition “with”.)

Many of the other anomalous French prepositions evolved along similar lines from Latin collocations of either preposition + noun/pronoun, preposition + preposition, or preposition + adverb. By contrast, the other Romance languages (particularly Italian) usually derived their forms directly and solely from the original Latin prepositions. The “French model” explains parmi and dans, among many others.

Parmi, also attested in Roland, is formed from a preposition + noun, from L per mĕdium “in, through the midst of” > VL per mĕdiu > OF par mi, parmi. The preposition dans is similarly formed. The usual Romance preposition from Latin in “in(to)” became French en (cp. Sp en, It in, P em, Ro în), but dans came from OF denz, in turn from L de ǐntus “from within”. There is also an alternative (and redundant) form in dedans, from OF dedenz (< L de de ǐntus). Other “compound” prepositions of this sort include avant, dehors, dessous, dessus, delà, dépuis, avant, devant, envers, devers, etc. Some of these have direct cognates in the other Romance languages, but not all of them.

As promised, my favorite: chez. This wonderful preposition is unique among the Romance languages, and so valuable and concise that is has been borrowed from French. We all know what it means: “at the house of”, as in, “party this weekend chez Jason and Jennifer.” (That’s just an example; please do not knock on our door tonight unless you come bearing wassail! ;). This one is the real anomaly, because it is essentially just a noun repurposed into a preposition. This becomes pretty obvious when you consider that the only way to translate it requires the use of a noun, “house, home, etc.”.

So, as you may have guessed already, French chez goes back to Latin casa “house”. The c > ch sound change is among the most common in the language; cp. OF castel, chastel < VL castellu, OF cheval < VL caballu, OF chien < VL cane, OF chose < VL causa, and hundreds more.

The use of chez as a preposition comes along after Roland. In Old French, chez was not a preposition, but rather a noun meaning “house”. The prepositional use today has pushed this noun out of the language. Instead, the common French word for a house is maison, of which the English cognate form is mansion (< VL mansiōne < L manēre “to stay, remain”). The other Romance languages retain the derivatives of L casa in common use, cp. Sp casa, It casa, P casa, Ro acasă — but the Latin noun still survives in modern French as the specialized noun case “a small house or hut; or a square on a chess-board”. In the 11th century, the usual construction would have been je vais à chez Gautier (translating Latin vado ad casam Walterii), but à chez contracted rapidly to chez alone.

And the rest, as they say, is histoire. :)

One more obscure reference

At the heart of anything you might care to say about C.S. Lewis, there is this: he was a great polymath and bookworm with the habit of salting diverse, often obscure quotes into his own essays, frequently without attribution. This can be frustrating for those reading his works. Tom Shippey gives a perfect example of this:

[English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (OUP, 1954)] makes for very hard reading, as Lewis no doubt knew. The first few pages refer casually to Pico della Mirandola (1463–94), Marsilio Ficino (1433–99), Paracelsus [Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim] (1493–1541), [Heinrich Cornelius] Agrippa [von Nettesheim] (1486–1535), names barely known (if at all) to most students of English literature. A little later Lewis switches casually from the De Rerum Natura of [Bernardinus] Telesius (1509–88) to the De Rerum Sensu et Magia of [Tommaso] Campanella (1568–1639), giving no introduction to either name. Six pages later he mentions that “pleasing little tract De Nymphis”; from what Lewis says I would be interested to read it, but he gives no reference. [1]

Earlier today, a friend of mine sent me an email to inquire what I knew (if anything) about another of these unidentified quotations. This one comes from Lewis’s Experiment in Criticism. In the third chapter, Lewis writes without preamble, translation, or citation: “Zum Eckel find’ ich immer nur mich” [2]. My friend wanted to know what this meant and whether Lewis was quoting.

The meaning is straightforward enough. I told her to translate it, “ad nauseam, I find only myself.” Lewis uses this passage almost to translate his own phrasing in the sentences coming just before: “The real objection to that way of enjoying pictures is that you never get beyond yourself. The picture, so used, can call out of you only what is already there.”

But is Lewis quoting? If he isn’t, why German? It’s reasonable to suppose he is, so I poked around a bit, and it looks like he is indeed quoting — or to be more accurate, paraphrasing. There are two clues in proximity to the passage that point the way: (1) “Arthur Rackham’s [illustrations] to The Ring […] at a time when Norse mythology was the chief interest of my life”, and immediately following the German passage, and signalling a change in subject, (2) “In music […]”. [3]

I think the source is the libretto to Richard Wagner’s opera, Die Walküre. In Act II, Wotan (equivalent to the Norse Odin) sings: “Zum Ekel find’ ich / ewig nur mich / in Allem, was ich erwirke!” “Only I find / Myself in all I am planning!” [4] As you can see, Lewis turns immediately from pictures to music in the essay, right at the moment of this paraphrase. Prior to it, he discusses Arthur Rackham’s illustration’s to Wagner’s Ring operas. These include wonderful illustrations for The Valkyrie, published in 1910, when Lewis would have been twelve years old. Lewis even mentions Valkyries directly a few pages before trotting out this German passage. It all seems to fit. The German phrase is the fulcrum in the subject matter of the chapter, making it all the more intriguing that Lewis chose to signal the shift in untranslated German. Of course, in Lewis’s day, the majority of his readers could be relied on to understand simple phrases in the most common European languages. Whether they would have gotten the reference, I’m not sure. It seems likely enough. But today, not so much.

So, mystery solved? Does anyone have an alternative theory? I do think that some of Lewis’s works could really benefit from annotated editions, along the lines of Douglas Anderson’s Annotated Hobbit. I’ve thought this before, but I’ve never undertaken any such project myself, both because I have my hands full with Tolkien, and because I know so many other scholars better qualified than I am to take on Lewis at his most obscure.


[1] This is from an essay called “New Learning and New Ignorance: Magia, Goeteia, and The Inklings”, given as the keynote address at the C.S. Lewis and Inklings Conference in 2006. It was later published in the collection Myth and Magic: Art according to the Inklings (ed. Seguro and Honegger, Walking Tree, 2007), but since I don’t have the collection in front of me, the quotation I give above is from the keynote paper, which Tom kindly sent me in 2006. The published quotation might be slightly different.

[2] C.S. Lewis. An Experiment in Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961, p. 22.

[3] Ibid., pp. 14–5, 22.

[4] Richard Wagner. Die Walküre. Trans. Charles Henry Meltzer. New York: Fred Rullman, Inc. 1904, p. 28, 29.

Read a free excerpt from my book

McFarland works closely with Google Books to provide previews of the titles they publish. I’m happy to report you can now read an excerpt from my book, Tolkien and the Study of His Sources, online. Just point your browsers here. The amount you’ll get to read may vary depending on where in the world you are, but if you can see what I am seeing right now, then you’ll be getting the preface, all of Tom Shippey’s essay, the first couple of pages of E.L. Risden’s essay, and some of the front matter (copyright, abbreviations, acknowledgements, table of contents, epigraph).

A little more than a month out, the book seems to be selling well, as near as I can judge. It is starting to appear in library catalogs. Thirteen now report having it on their shelves, a new one every two or three days, though the nearest to me so far is more than 500 miles away! And I’m starting to hear from people who have read it. As of today, there are four reviews at Amazon.com, all of them five stars. There is another at GoodReads, also five stars. I’ve been getting some private email about the book as well — please keep the feedback coming!

Reader reactions so far are overwhelmingly positive, which I find extremely gratifying. I’ll be sharing published reviews as they appear. The first of these are likely to be in the monthly periodicals, Mythprint and Amon Hen, with Mythlore following this fall, and other journals such as Tolkien Studies in the new year. If anybody sees a review somewhere, or a mention of the book that goes beyond merely listing it, I’d really appreciate hearing from you.

Fiat Lingua!

From David Peterson, President of the non-profit Language Creation Society (LCS), comes the welcome announcement of a new journal aimed at the interests of language creators.

The LCS is launching a new online journal called Fiat Lingua. A new article will appear on the first of every month. Articles will be available in PDF form on publication, and will be free to download. Articles themselves are self-selected and published with permission, with the copyright reverting to the author upon publication. On occasion, when we’ve received enough material, LCS may publish an anthology of Fiat Lingua articles in print and electronic form. Information about such anthologies will be released when relevant.

If you’d like to contribute an article to Fiat Lingua, contact us at fiatlingua@conlang.org. We’re looking to include both formal academic-style papers and informal contributions (humor, news, tips, reviews, editorials, interviews, interesting works in progress, poetry, short fiction, conlang sketches, puzzles, etc.). All contributions, academic and nonacademic, should be of interest and value to a readership of people primarily interested in invented languages. You may include color, but future print anthologies will likely be in black and white. And, as publication will be online, authors will also have the opportunity to edit articles after they’ve been published. If you have a question about a project you think might be suitable but you’re unsure, feel free to send us an e-mail and we can discuss it.

The purpose of Fiat Lingua is to provide conlangers with a visible forum to publish papers related to conlanging or conlangs — especially subjects or projects which don’t lend themselves easily to listserv or forum posts.

The new journal’s first essay is “Case Marking and Event Structure: One Conlanger’s Investigations” by Matt Pearson, a professor of linguistics at Reed College. This essay is one of the “academic-style papers”, not an “informal contribution”. Some amateur conlangers may find this sort of thing a bit dense and intimidating, especially as the first half of the essay explores nominal cases systems in various real-world languages, some of them pretty obscure. It’s only in the second half that the author gets more “autobio-graphical” and talks about his own invented language. But if this essay is anything to judge by, the journal should be a valuable new venue for the discussion of artificial languages. I look forward to seeing more.

Having said that, I must now digress …

I’ve always found it interesting that the vast majority of conlangers devise complex case systems for their languages, with eight, ten, or more cases — much more complex than most real-world languages today. Seemingly, these conlangers don’t mind their languages going unlearned and unused (except by themselves), as intricate case systems are usually quite an obstacle (usually, but not always: witness Quenya and Klingon). Why do they do it? I guess I should rephrase — why do we do it — since I have been just as guilty. I haven’t worked on invented languages of my own in quite a few years, but at one time, I was simply mad for it. I was a conlanger avant la lettre. As I’ve written before, my friend Gary and I used to call them “Artificial Dialects”, and we had binders full of them. (They still exist, but they’ve been doing no more than collecting dust for what feels like a century now.)

So, why? Sometimes it’s out of the wish for “results [that] are sufficiently bizarre to satisfy my taste for the exotic”, as Pearson says. He also aims at “retaining the feel of a natural human language”, but the majority of the most widely spoken languages in the world today are shedding (or have already shed) their case systems. Of widely spoken languages that still do have case systems, real or vestigial, most are usually much simpler today than they were in centuries past. As a result, real-world languages tend to be more easily learned by wide audiences (which, in turn, often further erodes case systems and other complex grammatical features). The most successful artificial languages (like Esperanto) are usually the ones with the simplest grammatical systems.

Faced with that reality, why push on and do it anyway? Maybe your language is meant to have been spoken millennia ago, or by isolated pockets of indigenous people? Or maybe the real, secret reason is just to show off. “Look at me! Look how much I know about linguistics! I’m going to demonstrate every single oddity I’ve ever read about in my conlang, so buckle your seat-belts!” Things that are complex, it stands to reason, require more careful devising, more knowledge, more effort, and we want people to be impressed, by golly! And it’s not just nominal case systems. The same motivations apply to all aspects of conlang grammar, syntax, phonology. “Look at me! Look at this amazing inventory of sounds! I can pronounce a full range of aboriginal clicks, so you had better learn too! Look, I’ve discovered consonants for which I had to invent new glyphs! Oh, and I’m giving you tones as well. Why wouldn’t I?”

Why indeed? Such languages might be fun in theory and for study — and I don’t wish to deny anyone their fun, or their learning by doing — but with only a handful of exceptions, they will never be spoken outside the conlangers’ basements. My own invented languages certainly never got any further. :)