Welcome, dear readers, as ever.

In our last posting, in which we talked about the use (or not) of maps in late-Third Age Middle-earth, we included this quotation:

“…But in the wild lands beyond Bree there were mysterious wanderers.  The Bree-folk called them Rangers, and knew nothing of their origin.  They were taller and darker than the Men of Bree and were believed to have strange powers of sight and hearing, and to understand the languages of beasts and birds.  They roamed at will southwards, and eastwards even as far as the Misty Mountains; but they were now few and rarely seen.”  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 9, “At the Sign of the Prancing Pony”)

We thought that we knew what “rangers” were—everything from the US Rangers who formed part of the Allied attack force on D-Day

to the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers of the 1990s.

It seemed like fun, however, to learn a little more, beginning with the word “ranger” itself.

“To range” in English is, in fact “to roam at will”, but the verb has no suggestion of mystery about it in itself—except for the fact that it is appears to be derived from the word “rank”.  How did that happen?  we wondered and our best guess is that it had to do with hunting.

Our thinking went something like this:

1. One method—still used today for things like grouse shooting in England—is for a group of unarmed people to move across the countryside, beating the ground and bushes with sticks to scare the animals to be hunted into moving from hiding.

2. These people—called “beaters”–form up in a loose row—a rank—as they cross the land and perhaps “ranging” comes from this formation. As the word “ranger” has been associated with “gamekeeper” since the 14^th century, this seems to make sense to us.

In mid-18^th century England and British North America, “ranger” became a popular term for what would later be called “light infantry”.  In Europe, during the Seven Years War (1756-1763), British armies made up of men in red coats

fought battles massed in long lines

against their main enemy, the French, in their grey-white coats.

In North America, however, things were different.  Although there were a small number of soldiers in grey-white, many more were locals, with many Native American allies, who didn’t fight in the open, but used every inch of cover they could find.

To counter this, the British raised units from local colonists, whose manner of fighting and whose clothing matched more closely that of their local French and Native American opponents.  These colonists called themselves “rangers”, probably because, in their rougher clothing, calculated to blend into the landscape, they looked more like gamekeepers

than redcoated regulars,

and probably also because their style of combat was more like that of hunters.

In time, they and one of their officers, Robert Rogers,

gained a reputation for daring, fighting independently of the more formal (and usually slower) regulars.

(Twenty years later, during the American Revolution, the British, to oppose such tactics, hired German soldiers who were actually drawn from gamekeepers.  In German, they were called jaeger, which means “hunter”.)

The term kept some of its glamor in North America into the 19^th century.  It was used as the name for a mounted police force and border guard in Texas both when it was an independent republic (1836-1845), after it had become a US state (1845-1861), when it was brought back into the Union (1870), and up to the present.

It continued to be used during the American Civil War (1861-1865), mainly as the name for early (and often southern) militia companies with very colorful uniforms, probably to suggest that they were as dashing as the earlier units, even if, at the war’s beginning, they hadn’t the experience which those first rangers had acquired, sometimes painfully, in their forest wars.

The Texas use of the term also allows us to add a little mystery to “ranger”:  in 1933, there began a radio drama series entitled “The Lone Ranger”, which followed the adventures of a masked justice-fighter in the US west and his side-kick, the Native American, Tonto.  The Lone Ranger (aka John Reid) was the sole survivor of an ambush in which his elder brother and four other Texas rangers had been killed.  Badly wounded, he had been rescued by Tonto, but, in order to conceal his identity, Tonto dug six graves and John Reid wore a mask (or a disguise) ever afterwards.  The series was so successful that it ran for 2956 episodes (1933-1954), produced novels and comic books, several movies, and a television version which ran for 217 episodes (1949-1957).  We include an image from the television series.

That the Lone Ranger is a mysterious wanderer on the side of good brings us back to our opening and one more fact about those Rangers.  As the hobbits and Gandalf are on the way back from their adventures, they stop again at The Prancing Pony in Bree and in conversation, the owner of the inn, Barliman Butterbur, describes the situation after their first visit, with a moment of revelation:

“You see, we’re not used to such troubles; and the Rangers have all gone away, folk tell me.  I don’t think we’ve rightly understood till now what they did for us.  For there’s been worse than robbers about.  Wolves were howling round the fences last winter.  And there’s dark shapes in the woods, dreadful things that it makes the blood run cold to think of it…” (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 7, “Homeward Bound”)

Although he never says it directly, Butterbur implies that, like the Lone Ranger, the Rangers in the wilderness beyond Bree had fought evil and Sam and Frodo will see men like that again in their trip farther south:

“Four tall men stood there.  Two had spears in their hands with broad bright heads.  Two had great bows, almost of their own height, and great quivers of long green-feathered arrows.  All had swords at their sides, and were clad in green and brown of varied hues, as if the better to walk unseen in the glades of Ithilien.  Green gauntlets covered their hands, and their faces were hooded and masked with green, except for their eyes, which were very keen and bright.”  (The Two Towers, Book Four, Chapter 4, “Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit”)

It’s Faramir and his Rangers of Ithilien and they are about to ambush a column of reinforcements for Sauron, including mumakil—oliphaunts, as Sam calls them.

(A splendid illustration by Ted Nasmith)

Faramir and his men, in their camouflage and use of bush warfare techniques, remind us of those 18^th-century rangers, just as their goal might remind us of the Lone Ranger and his fight for justice, as one of Faramir’s rangers, Mablung, tells Frodo and Sam:

“These cursed Southrons come now marching up the ancient roads to swell the hosts of the Dark Tower…And they go ever more heedlessly, we learn, thinking that the power of their new master is great enough, so that the mere shadow of His hills will protect them.  We come to teach them another lesson…”

And on that word “lesson”, we’ll finish this posting, hoping that you’ve learned a bit more about rangers, both those in Middle-earth and on modern Earth, as well.

As ever, thanks for reading,

Stay well,

And

MTCIDC

CD

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

One reason why we love teaching—and which we’ve really missed since everything went on-line here in mid-March—is the daily contact with students and the really stimulating questions which they so often ask.  There’s been some discussion by correspondence, but it’s just not the same as when things pop up in class and we suddenly have to consider something from a new (and sometimes surprising) angle.

Take, for example, the idea of maps in Tolkien—not the ones you’ll find in your copy of The Lord of the Rings, or in Karen Wynn Fonstad’s The Atlas of Middle-earth

or Barbara Strachey’s equally excellent Journeys of Frodo—

but the ones employed in the text by the characters—or not…

For JRRT, maps were always a subject of great interest and might even form the basis of the narrative itself, as he wrote to Rayner Unwin in 1953:

“…in such a story one cannot make a map for the narrative, but must first make a map and make the narrative agree.” (Letters, 168)

“Even at a little cost,” he wrote to his publishers about those in The Lord of the Rings, “there should be picturesque maps, providing more than a mere index to what is said in the text.  I could do maps suitable to the text.  It is the attempt to cut them down and omitting all their colour (verbal and otherwise) to reduce them to black and white bareness, on a scale so small that hardly any names can appear, that has stumped me.” (Letters, 171)

At an earlier time in his own life, proper maps had even been a literal matter of life and death.  In the Great War,

his and his fellow soldiers depended upon good maps, showing not only where they were, but also where the enemy was, and the Army spent a great deal of time collecting information from many sources, including deserters and prisoners,

the bodies of enemy casualties,

trench raids, to acquire prisoners and possibly documents,

and aerial photography,

to create maps as detailed as this—

A bad map could cause no end of confusion or even get you killed, as ANZAC (Australian/New Zealand) soldiers found to their grief at Gallipoli in 1915, when incomplete intelligence led to a fatal ignorance both of local geography and the location of their Ottoman opponents.

So, one day, before the world went crazy, our class was in the middle of discussing the early chapters of The Hobbit, and one bright student (in a class full of bright students, in fact), asked, “But how would the dwarves know how to get to the Lonely Mountain?”

Another student said, “Well, there’s that map.”

But then a third student, who’d been flipping through the text, raised his hand and said, “But it wasn’t very complete” and read:

“ ‘This was made by Thror, your grandfather, Thorin,’ he said in answer to the dwarves’ excited questions.  ‘It is a plan of the Mountain.’

‘I don’t see that this will help us much,’ said Thorin disappointedly after a glance.  ‘I remember the Mountain well enough and the lands about it.  And I know where Mirkwood is, and the Withered Heath where the great dragons breed.’ “ (The Hobbit, Chapter One, “An Unexpected Party”)

“So,” said the first student, “if that map wasn’t useful, what were they going to use?”

In answer, we said that, because no other map was mentioned, we had always assumed that they used their memories, as Thorin had said that he remembered the Lonely Mountain and Mirkwood, to which the first student replied, “But when was the last time the dwarves saw it?  And how far away was it?”

And then class ended and we went off to do a little research.

Using the always-helpful The Atlas of Middle-earth , we found that the trip was about 950 miles, one way, and some browsing in the appendices of The Lord of the Rings provided the necessary time scheme:   Smaug arrived at the Mountain in TA2770 and The Hobbit begins in TA2941, so Smaug had occupied the Lonely Mountain for 171 years before the opening of the story.

Of the dwarves, Thorin, born in TA2746, was the oldest (the Jackson films have, for unexplained reasons, made him seem much younger), and therefore was about 24 when Smaug appeared.  The next oldest dwarf, Balin, was born in TA2763 (but whom the films make to appear much older than Thorin), and would therefore have been about 7.  None of the rest of the company had been born when the Lonely Mountain fell to the dragon.  We doubted that Balin, at 7, would have had much memory of the events of the few surviving dwarves’ early exile, which meant that they must be relying upon whatever Thorin could bring back from his own brutal experience at 24, 171 years before.  Dwarves clearly have very long memories, we said to ourselves.

And the more we thought about this question of how do people find their way around Middle-earth, the more the only explanation in general appeared to be that:  memory, not maps. Just the other day, for example, we were working on a posting on a subject from The Lord of the Rings, and it occurred to us that there were no maps employed at all by any of the characters in any of those three volumes—and the story entails tremendous amounts of travel, from Hobbiton to Bree to Rivendell to Moria to Lorien to Fangorn to Rohan to Minas Tirith, the Paths of the Dead, the Dead Marshes, the Morannon, Cirith Ungol, and Orodruin (which, when we read it back, sounds like a railroad conductor announcing stops on the local line—or end of the line, when it comes to Mordor!)

The Hobbit itself tells us that other maps existed, the author saying of Bilbo that:

“He loved maps, and in his hall there hung a large one of the Country Round with all his favourite walks marked on it in red ink.”  (The Hobbit, Chapter One, “An Unexpected Party”)

This was a local map, however, and in that way rather like Thror’s map.  It might have guided you to the edge of the Shire, but what then?  Certainly, Bilbo didn’t know:

“One morning they forded a river at a wide shallow place full of the noise of stones and foam.  The far bank was steep and slippery.  When they got to the top of it, leading their ponies, they saw that the great mountains had marched down very near to them.  Already they seemed only a day’s easy journey from the feet of the nearest.  Dark and drear it looked, though there were only patches of sunlight on its brown sides, and behind its shoulders the tips of snow-peaks gleamed.

‘Is that The Mountain?’ asked Bilbo in a solemn voice…

‘Of course not!’ said Balin.  ‘That is only the beginning of the Misty Mountains, and we have got to get through, or over, or under those somehow…” (The Hobbit, Chapter Three, “A Short Rest”)

We might explain this narrowness of mapping by that fact that there doesn’t appear to be a need for maps (which would all have been made and copied by hand, after all).  In general, people simply don’t travel much in the Middle-earth of the Third Age, places like Bree—or Rivendell or Lorien, for that matter–being like islands in a nearly-empty landscape:

“In those days no other Men had settled dwellings so far west, or within a hundred leagues of the Shire.”  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 9, “At the Sign of the Prancing Pony”)

And–

“But the Northern Lands had long been desolate, and the North Road was now seldom used:  it was grass-grown and the Bree-folk called it the Greenway.”

Exceptions are rare.  There is Gandalf, of course,

who has crisscrossed the landscape for centuries, having arrived in Middle-earth nearly 2000 years earlier, and whose endless traveling has earned him the Elvish name Mithrandir, “the grey wanderer”.

As well:

“…in the wild lands beyond Bree there were mysterious wanderers.  The Bree-folk called them Rangers, and knew nothing of their origin…They roamed at will southwards and eastwards even as far as the Misty Mountains…”

And then there is a third experienced traveler, Gollum,

whose seemingly extensive knowledge of the darker east of Middle-earth both aids and nearly dooms Frodo and Sam.

We are so used to having the world at our (electronic) fingertips

and so lucky to have the painstaking efforts of the Tolkiens, Fonstad, Strachey—and of our friend, Erik, of course, to whose future efforts we look with great anticipation—that it’s good to be reminded that, for all they help us readers, the principal geographical help for the characters is the experience of their own feet and the clearness of their memories—and for which reminding, we, personally, thank our students.

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

Stay well

and

MTCIDC

CD

 

ps

If you’d like to learn a bit more about time and distance in Tolkien, here’s an interesting LINK:

http://lotrproject.com/timedistance/

Welcome, dear readers, as always.

If someone says the word “trophy”, does an image like this spring into your mind?

or this?

or perhaps this?

If so, we wouldn’t be surprised:  these and many similar objects are what we now call by that name.

Once, though, the word had a very different meaning, a much darker meaning than a sporting victory—although it did involve victory.

Battles fought in historical times in ancient Greece were not of the sort you might read about in the Iliad, where, often, warriors square off and challenge each other, sometimes even indulging in menacing speeches before attacking each other.

Instead, in the period between, say, 700 and 400BC, armored men, called hoplites

after their broad shields,

fought in a dense group, called a phalanx.

Each side formed up into one of these and the two sides then collided and the battle consisted of stabbing, pushing, and shoving until one side managed to break open the other side’s formation.

This was the turning point of the struggle.  Once the phalanx was broken, that side’s choices were limited:  usually, to fight to the death, or to drop that shield—three feet (about 1 metre) wide, it was thought an incumbrance if a getaway was planned—and run.  The Greek poet, Archilochus, who lived in the middle of the 7^th century BC and whose unit appears to have suffered defeat at the hands of Saians, a people of Thrace, in northeastern Greece, seems almost proud to have done this:

“On the one hand, some man of the Saians is happy with a shield,

A decent one, which, unwillingly, I left by a bush,

On the other hand, I saved myself.  What do I care about that shield?

Let it go!  In the future, I’ll own one no worse.”

(our translation)

When the enemy was dead or fled, the victors would mark the spot on the battlefield where that turning point had taken place.  The ancient Greek verb “to put to flight” was trepo (TREP-oh) and, on that spot, they would raise a kind of victory monument, which they called a tropaion (troh-PYE-on).  The earliest depiction we can locate so far is from the middle of the 4^th century BC, from one of the carved panels of a hero-shrine (heroon—heh-ROE-on) in Lycia, in Asia Minor.

This is from a 19^th-century engraving or early photograph, so it’s a bit fuzzy, but, basically, we hope that you can see that it’s a post on which the victors have hung armor, presumably taken from the bodies of the defeated enemy.

Either the Romans borrowed the custom, like so much else, from the Greeks, or came up with their own version, based upon the same idea:  commemorating a victory on the battlefield.

We have many more Roman images:  there appear to be lots of coins, for instance, which feature what the Romans called a tropaeum (troh-PYE-um)—which, clearly adapted from the Greek word, might suggest that the custom, as well as the word, came from the Greeks.  Here’s a coin with a tropaeum which dates from the brief dictatorship of Julius Caesar (44BC) and which shows what appears to be Gallic armor and several captives, reminding his fellow Romans that Caesar conquered the Celtic peoples of Gaul.

As you can see from this coin and from the previous modern illustration, the basis was rather like a kind of crude scarecrow:  an upright with a crosspiece, which would allow for the armor to be displayed in a more lifelike fashion.  Trajan’s (53-117AD) column, in Rome, provides us with an even more detailed illustration—

This column, which is extremely rich in imagery of a Roman army on campaign, c.100 AD, commemorates the emperor’s victories against the Dacians at the beginning of the second century.  For all that it is a victory monument, and although it depicts a tropaeum among its many images, it is not on a battlefield, but in downtown Rome, and so it is not, itself, a tropaeum.  Trajan did leave us one such, however, on or near the site of the battle of Adamclisi, fought in the winter of 101-102AD, in modern Romania.  It had fallen into ruin over the centuries, but was reconstructed in 1977.

Originally, there had only been an altar on the site, but, a few years after the final campaign, this splendid monument was erected.  This reconstruction is only one of several suggested, but we should point out that, somewhere, originally was placed a statue which would have reminded any Roman of the origins of this more sophisticated construction.  It is preserved in the site museum—

As you can see, it has that familiar shape:  upright with what appears to be a crosspiece, all covered in armor.

If we say that such things were placed on battlefields by both Greeks and Romans, what was the purpose or what were the purposes?  The Adamclisi tropaeum has a fragmentary inscription, which mostly gives us Trajan’s many names and titles, but also mentions the defeat of the Dacians and their allies, the Sarmatians.  It is dedicated to Mars, the Roman war god, which is not surprising,

It’s not just to Mars, however, but to Mars Ultor, “Mars the Avenger” (no—not one of those Avengers)

and this makes us wonder what message was being sent by such a monument at such a place.  Obviously, at one level, it says:  we won—and you ran away—or you should have–but you left valuable things behind.  After all, armor and weapons were all hand-made, and, even if Archilochus pretended to be indifferent to the loss of his shield, someone had to make another, cutting the boards, gluing them together, covering the outside with a shell of bronze—

certainly medieval people knew the value of what was left on a battlefield, as the lowest band illustration from the Bayeux Tapestry here clearly displays.

At another level, it looks like it might be a thank offering to a god—in the case of the Adamclisi tropaeum, Mars.

At a third level, two things interest us:  first, it might be that the basic shape—that of a stretched-out man—was simply an easy way to hang up armor and helmets.  Then again, we were reminded of the Assyrians and the display they left outside captured towns, as a warning about the consequences of resisting them

 

Vlad, the 15^th-century border lord who provided Bram Stoker with inspiration for his Dracula, was nicknamed tepes  (TEH-pets) “impaler”, for doing the same thing to prisoners.

 

Secondly, remembering the Ultor in the Adamclisi inscription, we wonder if such things, besides commemoration, possible mockery, and a thank-you to the divine, might have one more use:  as a warning, especially if, before that basic shape, an actual enemy warrior—dead—or perhaps alive? was set up, as if to say:  invade our land and this is what will happen to you and to all of your fellow soldiers, too.  Mars (in the form of our spears) will avenge your attack.

With that in mind, we remembered a scene in The Lord of the Rings:

“At last as the afternoon was waning they came to the eaves of the forest, and in an open glade among the first trees they found the place of the great burning:  the ashes were still hot and smoking.  Beside it was a great pile of helms and mail, cloven shields, and broken swords, bows and darts and other gear of war.  Upon a stake in the middle was set a great goblin head; upon its shattered helm the white badge could still be seen.”  (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 2, “The Riders of Rohan”)

And what was the message of that head, we wonder?

As ever, thanks for reading.  Stay well and know that there’s

MTCIDC

CD

The story of the publication of The Lord of the Rings is complicated, dear readers, and one element in that complication is the dividing of what JRRT thought of as a single book, into three.  This entailed, among other things, creating titles for all three volumes and it’s interesting to see the discussion between Tolkien and Rayner Unwin, the publisher’s son, on the subject.  (See Letters, 166-171 for particulars.)

Even as he was still thinking about volume three, however, JRRT had come to believe that volume two’s title had been found:

“The Two Towers gets as near as possible to finding a title to cover the widely divergent Books 3 and 4; and can be left ambiguous—it might refer to Isengard and Barad-dur, or to Minas Tirith and B; or Isengard and Cirith Ungol.” (Letters, 170)

Towers might appear to be everywhere in Tolkien’s early life.  From works like Andrew Lang’s (1844-1912)

The Red Fairy Book (1890),

he would have seen Rapunzel in her tower.

In church, he would have heard about the Tower of Babel (from Genesis 11.1-9 in the Hebrew Bible),

and with his curiosity about language (which we can trace as far back as when he was seven, as he tells WH Auden—see Letters, 213-214), the explanation given there of how different languages came to be and how they spread must have readily caught his attention.

As a devout Catholic, he would have heard the Virgin Mary described as an “ivory tower” (turris eburnea)

in the 16^th-century “Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary”.

He might have been taken to London, for a visit, or at least seen a postcard of the Norman keep, the “White Tower” at the center of the Tower of London.

And then, of course, on any day at Oxford, either as student or professor, he might have strolled past the remains of Oxford Castle and seen the surviving St George’s Tower.

Places like St George’s tower, however, were reminders of a long-gone military past.  2^nd Lieutenant Tolkien

would have been well aware of the change.

Gunpowder weapons had begun to appear on battlefields in the mid-14^th century and, once early cannon began to develop into increasingly large tubes called bombards, no stone castle, town, or tower was as safe as it might once have been thought to have been.

The most telling early example of the power of such things must have been their use at the final siege of Constantinople, in the spring of 1453, where elaborate walls which had stood for many centuries

were pounded to pieces by Ottoman artillery.

Military architects adapted, turning from the higher, thinner walls of castles to low fortifications banked with earth to absorb the power of huge stone or iron balls.

But, when it came to battle in the field, by the early 20^th century,

machine guns

and heavy artillery

had forced soldiers who had customarily (with the exception of sieges) fought above ground to dig into the earth to save themselves, even if only temporarily, from the quick and sure destruction of such weapons.

The castles of the Great War were now not towering stone structures, but elaborate below-ground fortifications

and concrete and iron bunkers were the closest thing to medieval towers.

For those going above ground, there were reminders, as well, that height meant being an easy target, like this famous church spire, with its drooping figure, hit repeatedly by artillery fire until it finally collapsed.

We have written several times in the past about gunpowder, or its equivalent, in Middle-earth (see, for instance:  “Fourth Age:  Big Bang Theory”, 17 February, 2016), and it certainly appears in some form in The Lord of the Rings, at Helm’s Deep and again at the Rammas Echor, the great wall which surrounds the fields and farms below Minas Tirith.  Other than its use at these two places, however, this is a world in which the 20^th-century Industrial Age violence into which JRRT had been pulled in 1916 was entirely absent.  Instead, we have those towers Tolkien mentions in his letter about the title of the second volume:  Isengard,

the Barad-dur,

Minas Tirith,

and Cirith Ungol.

Having seen what he did of modern war,

is it any wonder that Tolkien, in his wonderfully elaborate fiction, would retreat to the comparative safety of those towers of his past?

As always, thanks for reading and

MTCIDC

CD

ps

For Andrew Lang’s Red Fairy Book, as well as all of the other Fairy books, and other good things, too, here’s a LINK to a site you’ll want to visit:  https://www.worldoftales.com/fairy_tales/Andrew_Lang_red_fairy_tale_book.html#gsc.tab=0

pps

We apologize, by the way, for the second appearance of the stave church illustration in our last posting.  Our site was not happy about accepting illustrations last Wednesday for some reason and, though we gently encouraged it, it seems that it had a final moment of stubbornness and with a “So there!” it added a second copy of the image, which we didn’t notice till we’d uploaded the posting.

Welcome, as ever, dear readers.

Because we so dislike the huge amount of electronic criticism which exists—what does it help, after all?– with very rare exceptions, we’ve always made it our policy to write about things we admire and they are, we are thankful to say, so many that we don’t think that we will ever run out—or at least we hope not!

In the past, our rare exceptions have included Jackson’s Hobbit films, of which a friend once said, “Might have been fun as films, but only if you had never read Tolkien’s The Hobbit.”  And that’s about what we now would say about them, but there is, as well, a scene in the film of The Two Towers which we’ve always found out of place.  It occurs after the great victory at Helm’s Deep, in which Saruman’s forces are defeated by a combination of Rohirrim and Ents.

(This is an absolutely amazing Lego version—see this LINK for a little more:  https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/lego-battle-helms-deep-is-647177 )

The main protagonists return to Edoras, the Rohirrim capital,

(image by Alan Lee)

to Theoden’s hall, Meduseld.

(another Lee—what wonderful details—and you can immediately see one of his inspirations, the so-called “stave churches” now found almost entirely in Norway—here’s the reconstructed  Gol Stave Church from the 12^th century.  If you’d like to learn and see more, here’s a LINK:   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stave_church  )

In the original novel, this is a time for counsel and planning, as everyone is well aware that the defeat of Saruman is not the defeat of evil in the world, but the film shows us a giant party, including a drinking bout between Gimli and Legolas, which ends with Gimli drunk and passed out, while Legolas doesn’t appear to be in the least affected.

We imagine that the director and writers included this scene because they wanted to release some of the tension from what had been, previously, a very fraught situation, but, for us, the usually grim Gimli, belching and falling over with crossed eyes, seemed completely out of character.

Drinking in a place like Meduseld, however, could seem very appropriate, given its name, which is based, as so often when it comes to Rohirric, upon two Old English words,  medu, “mead” and sele, “hall”.

This, of course, brought us immediately to another Old English source for Tolkien, Beowulf and Hrothgar, the Danish king’s, mead hall (in the poem, it’s called a medoærn, which combines “mead” with a word meaning lots of things in Old English, including “house”).

magodriht micel·      him on mód bearn		into a mighty battalion;      it came into his mind
þæt healreced      hátan wolde		that a hall-house,      he wished to command,
medoærn micel      men gewyrcean		a grand mead-hall,      be built by men
þone yldo bearn      aéfre gefrúnon	70	which the sons of men      should hear of forever,
ond þaér on innan      eall gedaélan		and there within      share out all
geongum ond ealdum      swylc him god sealde		to young and old,      such as God gave him,
búton folcscare      ond feorum gumena·		except the common land      and the lives of men;
ða ic wíde gefrægn      weorc gebannan		Then, I heard, widely      was the work commissioned
manigre maégþe      geond þisne middangeard·	75	from many peoples      throughout this middle-earth,
folcstede frætwan.      Him on fyrste gelomp		to furnish this hall of the folk.      For him in time it came to pass,
aédre mid yldum      þæt hit wearð ealgearo		early, through the men,      that it was fully finished,
healærna maést·      scóp him Heort naman		the best of royal halls;      he named it Heorot,
sé þe his wordes geweald      wíde hæfde·		he whose words weight      had everywhere;
hé béot ne áléh·      béagas daélde	80	he did not lie when he boasted;      rings he dealt out,
sinc æt symle.      Sele hlífade		riches at his feasts.      The hall towered,
héah ond horngéap·		high and horn-gabled…

(This is from Benjamin Slade’s Beowulf website (https://heorot.dk/beowulf-rede-text.html ), which is rich in annotation, as well as having a very interesting attempt to translate not only the words of the poem, but the feel.  We have no idea, by the way, why, when we move the text from that site to our blog, it turns into this box thing.)

This place is named Heorot, which means a “stag”—that is, a male deer.  We can certainly understand why it would be named something like “drinking hall”, but why “stag”?(Another word for a doe, a female deer, is a “hind”, in case you’d like take match them.)

In the annotations to Slade’s version of the poem, he suggests that the hall is named that because stags are a symbol of royalty in the ancient Germanic world, and cites this object, from the 6^th-century Sutton Hoo ship burial, where the top of it is clearly a stag.

We call it an “object” because there’s a good deal of scholarly discussion as to what it actually is.  Two suggestions:  a whetstone (a stone used to sharpen blades)

and a sceptre (the baton royalty carries to show that they are, indeed, royalty).

We have no opinion, but would add that the poem says that the hall “towers” (from the verb hlifian) “high” and is what Slade translates as “horn gabled”.  We are not Old English scholars, but others have translated this “wide/broad between the gables”, seeing geap as meaning “wide” (among other things—see the modern English word, “gap”—as well as its cousin, “gape”)—so “horn wide” perhaps?  Thinking about what this would look like, however, we prefer Slade’s idea—as in this rather dramatic illustration—

or in this lower-key illustration of an Iron Age house, with its trophy—

or this reconstruction of a Viking longhouse.

As this is a “mead hall”, it would seem that the drink of choice is mead, which is made from a combination of fermented honey and water.

It’s a very old word (just look at the entry in Etymonline:  https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=mead  ), suggesting that, once people tried it, they never put it down.  (We confess to being partial to it ourselves, but you have to be careful—the sweetness conceals the fact that it can be pretty powerful!)

It’s also a very appropriate word for Beowulf, if his name means what has been suggested.  “The “wulf” part is easy, of course, but the “beo”?  Some scholars suggest that it’s derived from beadu “war/fighting”, so the hero is “warwolf”.  For us, however, there is another possibility, easily linked with mead and its main ingredient:  beo means “bee”, suggesting that, rather than being a “warwulf”, our man is a “beewolf”—that is, a bear.

Thanks, as always, for reading, stay well in our current mad world, and know that there’s

MTCIDC

CD

 

ps

If you’d like to have a little Old English dictionary fun,  use this LINK:  https://www.oldenglishtranslator.co.uk/  Type in modern English words and see their equivalent, if any.  An endlessly interesting site, in our opinion!