As always, dear readers, welcome.

In past years, Orcs have appeared a number of times in CD’s postings, including a study of the appearance of Orcs as Tolkien describes them versus the ways in which artists have depicted them (“Orc Looks”, 13 November, 2019).  Recently, however, I’ve been thinking about something Frodo sees—not through his own eyes but through the Ring, on Amon Hen (appropriately, as it is called “the Hill of the Eye of the Men of Numenor”):

“But everywhere he looked he saw the signs of war.  The Misty Mountains were crawling like anthills:  orcs were issuing out of a thousand holes.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 10 , “The Breaking of the Fellowship)

I’ve recently taught The Hobbit again (it never gets old) and the Misty Mountains, of course, appear.

There were no orcs then, just goblins on the way in,

and goblins on the way out.

Others have written about the influence of George MacDonald (1824-1905)

on Tolkien and the title of one of MacDonald’s best-known books suggests one influence:

The Princess and the Goblin (1872).

In the Letters, JRRT twice associates MacDonald with goblins (178, to Naomi Mitchison, 25 April 1954;  185, to Hugh Brogan, 18 September 1954), but another influence besides the word and the idea may lie in where the goblins live.  In The Princess and Curdie, a boy, Curdie, who works in the mines, has broken through into the goblin realm and comes upon a great hall:

“He was at the entrance of a magnificent cavern, of an oval shape, once probably a huge natural reservoir of water, now the great palace hall of the goblins. It rose to a tremendous height, but the roof was composed of such shining materials, and the multitude of torches carried by the goblins who crowded the floor lighted up the place so brilliantly, that Curdie could see to the top quite well. But he had no idea how immense the place was until his eyes had got accustomed to it, which was not for a good many minutes. The rough projections on the walls, and the shadows thrown upwards from them by the torches, made the sides of the chamber look as if they were crowded with statues upon brackets and pedestals, reaching in irregular tiers from floor to roof. The walls themselves were, in many parts, of gloriously shining substances, some of them gorgeously coloured besides, which powerfully contrasted with the shadows…

At the other end of the hall, high above the heads of the multitude, was a terrace-like ledge of considerable height, caused by the receding of the upper part of the cavern-wall. Upon this sat the king and his court: the king on a throne hollowed out of a huge block of green copper ore, and his court upon lower seats around it.” (The Princess and the Goblin, Chapter 9, “The Hall of the Goblin Palace”)

Here is the equivalent in The Hobbit:

“…they stumbled into a big cavern.

It was lit by a great red fire in the middle, and by torches along the wall, and it was full of goblins…

There in the shadows on a large flat stone sat a tremendous  goblin with a huge head, and armed goblins were standing round him carrying the axes and the bent swords they use.”  (The Hobbit, Chapter 4, “Over Hill and Under Hill”)

MacDonald’s goblins have extensive tunnels and are planning to use them both the kidnap the princess of the book’s title and to cause great destruction by employing the tunnels to flood the human mines to which they are adjacent. 

Tolkien’s goblins also have extensive tunnels, as we hear when the news spread about the death of the Great Goblin:

“Messengers had passed to and fro between all their cities, colonies and strongholds…Tidings they had gathered in secret ways; and in all the mountains there was a forging and an arming.  Then they marched and gathered by hill and valley, going ever by tunnel or under dark, until around and beneath [the great mountain Gundabad of the North, where was their capital, a vast host was assembled…” (The Hobbit, Chapter 17, “The Clouds Burst”)

By the time of The Lord of the Rings, it is clear that those Hobbit goblins had metamorphosed into orcs—Tolkien, basically, had decided that “goblin” was too close to the fairy tale world with which he did not want his work too closely associated—and even in the Letters, if you look for references to them in the index, you are referred to orcs (Letters, 470).

Their appearance, goblin or orc, varies.  Take Ugluk and Ghrishnakh, for instance:

“…a large black Orc, probably Ugluk, standing facing Grishnakh, a short crook-legged creature, very broad and with long arms that hung almost to the ground.  Round them were many smaller goblins.  Pippin supposed that these were the ones from the North.” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 3, “The Uruk-hai”)   In an undated letter to Forrest J Ackerman, from June, 1958, Tolkien describes them as:  “squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes” (Letters, 274). 

This has, in turn, spawned a wide variety of images, from the early Hildebrandts

and Angus McBride

to the later Alan Lee,

John Howe,

and Ted Nasmith.

In terms of following JRRT’s idea, that, as Trolls were made “in mockery of Ents”, so “Orcs were made of Elves”, I would say that only the Nasmith is close, but what Frodo saw in his vision has suggested a completely different possibility, one which is furthered by something Tolkien wrote in a long letter of 1954 to Peter Hastings.  He has been discussing Morgoth and the orcs:

“I have represented at least the Orcs as pre-existing real being on whom the Dark Lord has exerted the fullness of his power in remodelling and corrupting them, not making them.”

But it’s what appears at the end of the paragraph which caught my attention:

“There might be other ‘makings’ all the same which were more like puppets filled (only at a distance) with their maker’s mind and will, or ant-like operating under direction of a queen-centre.”  (Letters, 195)

This matches, of course, what Frodo saw: 

“The Misty Mountains were crawling like anthills:  orcs were issuing out of a thousand holes.”

Orcs as the equivalent of insects who live in holes?  I would add another detail, however.  As Treebeard has said that orcs are a mockery of elves, he has also noticed something else:

“…he has been doing something to them; something dangerous.  For these Isengarders are more like wicked Men.  It is a mark of evil things that came in the Great Darkness that they cannot abide the Sun; but Saruman’s Orcs can endure it, even if they hate it.”  (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 4, “Treebeard”)

Insects of varied size and color, but can’t endure the sun.  Might another model for orcs be cockroaches?

With that very creepy thought, I thank you as ever, dear readers, saying

Stay well and be sure that there’s

MTCIDC

O

Ps

If you’d like to read The Princess and the Goblin yourself, here’s a LINK:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/708/708-h/708-h.htm

I recommend it, not only as a (distant) source for JRRT, but as a very interesting and engaging piece of Victorian fantasy.

Welcome, as always, dear readers. 

If you are, like me, a compulsive reader of footnotes, endnotes, and appendices, you’ll immediately recognize the names in the title of this posting.  If not, you’ll probably imagine them as locations on a very exotic map, somewhere south of the Kingdom of Prester John.

They are in fact, the original names of Sam

and the Gaffer,

(Seen here giving directions to a tourist.)

from The Lord of the Rings—or, rightfully, Ban and Ran.  As Tolkien explains:

“But Sam and his father Ham were really called Ban and Ran.  These were shortenings of Banazir and Ranugad, originally nicknames, meaning ‘halfwise, simple’ and ‘stay-at-home’; but being words that had fallen out of colloquial use they remained as traditional names in certain families.  I have therefore tried to preserve these features by using Samwise and Hamfast, modernizations of ancient English samwis and hamfast which corresponded closely in meaning.” (The Lord of the Rings, Appendix F, Part II, “On Translation”)

(“Samwis” , my Old English dictionary tells me, means “stupid/foolish”, and “hamfast” means “resident/homeowner”.)

JRRT’s pains in creating the world of Middle-earth are endlessly surprising and, to me, oddly touching.  He will spend hours or even days adjusting a lunar cycle (as mentioned in a letter to his son, Christopher, on 14 May, 1944, Letters, 80—there’s a very interesting article about this and other lunar sightings here:  https://shire-reckoning.com/moon.html ) and go to such trouble to translate names he has created in a language he has created into an earlier form of the language he has “translated” his story into.

Which brings me to the subject of this posting:  that The Lord of the Rings (and The Hobbit, for that matter), are not written by JRR Tolkien, but “drawn mainly from the Red Book of Westmarch”, and edited and translated by him.  (The Lord of the Rings, Prologue, “Note on the Shire Records”)

Claiming to be other than the author is not a new game in English literature.  Horace Walpole (1717-1797),

the author of the early Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764),

(by the date on the title page, I’m presuming that this is a later printing)

provides quite a lot of information on the title page:  “A Story Translated by William Marshal, Gent. From the Original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto, Canon of the Church of Saint Nicholas at Otranto”.  And he doesn’t stop there, but goes on in the “Preface” to explain that this supposed true story was “found in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England.  It was printed at Naples, in the black letter, in the year 1529.”  And, if that’s not enough:  “If the story was written near the time when it is supposed to have happened, it must have been between 1095, the era of the first Crusade, and 1243, the date of the last, or not long afterwards.”   So, this was a medieval manuscript which somehow found its way into print in the Renaissance.  All of which is false, of course.  The whole thing was made up by Walpole, the 1529 volume, the manuscript, the Canon—only the castle is real.

Walpole was a wealthy gentleman with a high social position to maintain, being not only the son of a former prime minister of Great Britain, Sir Robert Walpole (1676-1745),

but would himself become the 4^th Earl of Orford.  It would be easy, perhaps, to understand why he would choose to distance himself from his creation, on social grounds alone—but then something happened:  the book was a big success.

This prompted him to write in the “Preface to the Second Edition”:

The favourable manner in which this little piece has been received by the public calls upon the author to explain the grounds on which he composed it. But before he opens those motives, it is fit that he should ask pardon of his readers for having offered his work to them under the borrowed personage of a translator. As diffidence of his own abilities, and the novelty of the attempt, were the sole inducements to assume that disguise, he flatters himself he shall appear excusable. He resigned his performance to the impartial judgment of the public; determined to let it perish in obscurity, if disapproved; nor meaning to avow such a trifle, unless better judges should pronounce that he might own it without a blush.

Clearly, being the author of a book which met with popular favor put a different complexion upon things for Walpole!

But what can we say about Tolkien’s choice?  It’s possible that this was just all part of his project to provide a kind of mythical history for England, as Verlyn Flieger has ably discussed in several books (which I would very much recommend to anyone interested in understanding The Lord of the Rings in a larger context).  Mythology may be collected by someone with an identity, but myth is created before authors—and especially editors—ever exist.

Although a reader of and occasional writer about Tolkien, I am not a Tolkien scholar.  I sometimes happen upon books and articles either by recommendation or by accident, and so I wasn’t aware until recently of this interesting book, published last year by Oxford.

The author points out that Tolkien had long been uncomfortable about his creative work versus his scholarly responsibilities, citing, for example, this, in a 1956 letter to Anne Barrett, of his American publisher, Houghton Mifflin:

“Most of my philological colleagues are shocked (cert. behind my back, sometimes to my face) at the fall of a philological into ‘Trivial literature’; and anyway the cry is:  ‘now we know how you have been wasting your time for twenty years’.”  (Letters, 238)

The above speculation about Tolkien’s distancing may be true, probably is true, but perhaps we might not be totally wrong to wonder whether this pretense at translation also has a subconscious motive?  Did JRRT say to himself, “Author of ‘trivial literature’?  Not at all.  You see, this is really a medieval manuscript, the sort we medievalists deal with all the time, and all I’m doing is exactly what a medievalist might do in preparing a modern edition”?

As ever, thanks for reading,

Stay well,

And be assured that there is

MTCIDC

O

ps

If you don’t know The Castle of Otranto, an important work for the history of the Gothic in English literature and as an ancestor of English Romanticism, here’s a LINK to your own copy:  https://www.gutenberg.org/files/696/696-h/696-h.htm Be warned, however:  by modern standards, it’s all pretty silly stuff, including the fall of selective pieces of a giant suit of armor at useful moments.

 Walpole was such a highly intelligent and witty man that it’s hard to tell just how seriously to take it all.  Reading his letters makes you wish that he were your correspondent.)

pps

While rewriting this, I realized that, since first reading The Lord of the Rings, many years ago, I had always assumed that the Gaffer was Sam’s grandfather, with “gaffer” being an ancient contraction of “grandfather”.  Because of that assumption, it was only when I reread Tolkien’s explanation of his and Sam’s names that I saw my mistake.  As Holmes says to Watson in “A Scandal in Bohemia”:  “You see, but you do not observe.”!

As always, welcome, dear readers.

Recently, I was overhearing Gaffer Gamgee correcting a wild rumor from “a stranger, a visitor on business from Michel Delving” about Bilbo, his fortune, and about the Gaffer’s grandson, Sam:

“Crazy about stories of the old days, he is, and he listens to all of Mr. Bilbo’s tales. Mr. Bilbo has learned him his letters—meaning no harm, mark you, and I hope no harm will come of it.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 1, “A Long-Expected Party”)

(Gaffer conversing with a more sinister visitor, one on business from Mordor.)

“Learned him” might strike you as odd—Tolkien himself would have said, “Mr. Bilbo has taught him his letters”.  Tolkien, however, is using what would have been an archaic form still in use in rural areas, “to learn someone something”, to suggest that the Gaffer is himself someone without much learning.

As I listened, I thought about the idea of Bilbo teaching Sam to read.

We learn from Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of Tolkien that:

“Mabel [Tolkien’s mother] soon began to educate her sons, and they could have had no better teacher—nor she an apter pupil than Ronald, who could read by the time he was four and had soon learnt to write proficiently.”  (Carpenter, 20)

What did she use to teach him? I wondered.  If he had been an American child in 1896, his mother might have used a very standard method employed in US schools into the 20^th century, McGuffey’s First Eclectic Reader,

created by William Holmes McGuffey (1800-1873)

and first published in 1836.

When it came to “learn him his letters”, this was taken literally, as the first thing to which a child was introduced was the alphabet, immediately followed by a first lesson, which included an image and a simple sentence about the image, that first image being a dog.

As the pupil worked his way through the book, sentences gradually become more complex, although the words remain simple, having no more than three letters until Lesson VI. 

(If you would like to see a copy for yourself, follow this LINK:  http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14640/14640-pdf.pdf )

There were English equivalents—here’s a page from one called The Victoria Primer, though, by the clothing on the children in the illustration, it’s an edition from early in the 19^th century.

There is a problem with these, of course.  As different as they look from the kinds of books you and I learned from, dear readers,

they are printed books and, as far as I can tell, the Middle-earth equivalent of Johannes Gutenberg (c.1400-1468)

has yet to appear.  This means that, if Bilbo taught Sam from a book, it was a manuscript, that is, something copied by hand, probably from another book. 

So often, Middle-earth has parallels in our Middle Ages, and, in our Middle Ages, that manuscript would probably have been the product of a scriptorium, a kind of medieval writing center, where books were created and copied.

Such centers were commonly part of monasteries and monasteries and cathedrals, besides being religious centers, were also the site of medieval schools, where most teaching and learning was done.

Study began with learning the letters of the alphabet, then moved on to words and from there to sentences.

Everything was done aloud, it being the custom in general that all reading was done that way.

And lack of attention or mistakes were not treated kindly.

When it came to practicing writing, it was done on a wax tablet, of the very sort which the Romans had used for rough drafts.

(You used the pointy end of the stylus to write, the blunt end to erase, smoothing the wax over with it.  The Roman poet Horace makes a witty remark about its use:  “If you’re going to write things which may be worthy to be read again, turn your stylus over often.”  That is:  “If you’re going to write things worth a second reading, do lots of erasing.”– Saepe stilum vertas, iterum quae digna legi sint scripturus.  Horace, Satires, Book I, X.75 )

Presumably, then, Bilbo began by sitting down with Sam (when Sam wasn’t evesdropping)

and began with the letters of tengwar—

Children in the US commonly begin with something called “the alphabet song” (in case you don’t know it, here’s a LINK:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75p-N9YKqNo ) in which all the letters of the writing system used for many Western languages (with some variations) are set to a simple tune.

If you try reciting the tengwar table, it easily (more or less) fits into a rhythmic pattern:

Tinco, parma, calma, quesse,

Ando, umbar, anga, umwe,

Thule, formen, harma, hwesta,

Anto, ampa, anca, unque,

Numen, malta, ngoldo, ngwalme,

Ore, vala, anna, vilya,

Romen, arda, lambe, alda,

Silme, silme nunquerna,

   esse, esse nunquerna,

Hyarma, hwesta sindarinwa,

   yanta, ure

So we perhaps can imagine Sam at work, trimming hedges,

and repeating the letters until he had them down.  Then it would be back to learn to form words and then sentences and then?

The ultimate goal of monastic students would be to study religious texts, but to what use would Sam put his newly-acquired learning?

On the Stairs of Cirith Ungol, Frodo and Sam are talking about their journey and Sam, still “crazy about stories”, as the Gaffer has described him, has proposed that they are in such a story themselves—

“Still, I wonder if we shall ever be put into songs or tales.  We’re in one, of course; but I mean:  put into words, you know, told by the fireside, or read out of a great big book with red and black letters, years and years afterwards.”

Assuming that Bilbo had books with such stories in his library,

is this the sort of thing which Sam would then have opened and read?

If so, it’s an uncomfortable feeling to remember where they are in light of what the Gaffer had added, “Mr. Bilbo has learned him his letters—meaning no harm, mark you, and I hope no harm will come of it.” And to hear Frodo’s reply to Sam’s fantasy:

“ ‘We’re going on a bit too fast.  You and I, Sam, are still stuck in the worst places of the story, and it is all too likely that some will say at this point:  “Shut the book now, dad; we don’t want to read any more.” ‘ “ (The Two Towers, Book Four, Chapter 8, “The Stairs of Cirith Ungol”)

Thanks, as always, for reading,

Stay well,

And know that there’s

MTCIDC

O