Monthly Archives: October 2025

A Plague o’ Both—No, o’ All Your Houses!

29 Wednesday Oct 2025

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As always, dear readers, welcome.

It’s almost Halloween again, one of my favorite holidays, when children dress up in various costumes and wander the streets in groups, demanding treats and threatening tricks,

while older people, themselves in costume, attend parties.

People dress up as monsters, vampires, and superheroes, but, recently, I’ve also seen a few of these—

a costume which you can actually buy on Amazon.

It’s a very haunting image:  crowlike, and yet not, and it struck me as an interesting basis for this year’s Halloween posting.

But what is it?

If you don’t know, I’ve given you a clue in that (modified) quotation I’ve used as a title.

In Act III, Scene 1, of Shakespeare’s The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, 1591/95, as the 2nd Quarto (1599) has it,

Romeo’s best friend and perhaps the sanest character in the play, Mercutio, has been mortally wounded.  Dying, he curses both of the feuding families, wishing that a plague would take them both.

In Shakespeare’s England, this was not a random remark.  Since its original appearance, in 1348, when it may have killed as many as 40-60% of the population, the Black Plague (aka the Black Death) had

reappeared over the next couple of centuries, killing 30,000 in London, in 1603 alone,

before its grand finale (or nearly), in 1665-6,when it was responsible for perhaps 100,000 deaths there.

(And, in 1666, came the great fire, which destroyed much of the city—it’s a wonder that everyone surviving didn’t attempt to flee to anywhere as far away as they could.

For the fire, I recommend J. Draper’s short presentation here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bvB_gJThYk   with one correction.  She says that the artist/engraver Wenceslaus Hollar was Dutch when, in fact, he was a Czech.  See:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wenceslaus_Hollar  Otherwise, I have nothing but praise for Draper, who does proper research and wanders the London area , looking for odd and interesting aspects of London’s—and English—history which she then presents in creative ways.  For her grim and striking view of the Black Death, see:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ybh1jSZLIKY  )

Medieval science was not really even in its infancy—although there were highly intelligent and thoughtful men struggling to look at the world without superstition or religion, like Friar Roger Bacon, 1214-1294.

(an imaginary image—we have no known portrait)

Medical science, such as existed, followed the classical world and believed that communicable diseases were spread through miasma—that is, through “bad air”,

which isn’t such a far-fetched idea:  rotting things, dead things, stink, so death and bad smells are easily associated.

In fact, the Black Plague was—and is–a bacterium, Yersinia Pestis,

which lives in the gut of fleas,

which inhabited what was called the “black ship rat”,

which traveled on trading vessels from the Far East in the 14th century,

and eventually came, either directly on rats, or indirectly by a human carrier, to England, causing havoc on and off, for several centuries.

Needless to say, in a packed city, like London,

rats and their passengers could easily spread out and, in doing so, would spread the bacterium through the bites of those fleas. 

Medical men of that world, however, could make no such connections.  They only saw the horrible symptoms—including the swelling of the lymph nodes, attempting to defend the body—the buboes of bubonic plague—

(This is such a gross image that I almost didn’t include it, but it’s very helpful in explaining what exactly was going on in the body, so…)

The plague produced fever, chills, vomiting, violent headaches—and all that doctors could do was what they did for almost anything:  try to balance the humors—the basic elements of the body—which included bleeding, a treatment which actually weakened the body.

Because the real agent of contagion wasn’t understood, doctors could only be brave and deal with their patients as best they could—and contract the disease themselves—or could attempt to protect themselves, which brings us to this image again—

(appropriately titled “the clothing against death”, implying the Black Death)

This diagram

(with some strange English—it appears to be a translation—I’ve seen one copy in which the text is in Russian– gives you a general idea of how a doctor might attempt to ward off infection, including basics which had to do with bad air, like carrying a pomander—a little vessel containing strong-smelling herbs to fend off that air—

which someone might carry simply to ward off the bad smells of a time when streets in cities often had the equivalent of open sewers, as well as might be employ ed as a fashion accessory—for more on pomanders, see:   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomander )

as well as that beaky thing—which is really a kind of early surgical mask

combined with a pomander—the beak being stuffed with those protective herbs.  And, as who knows what can get in through the eyes, add crystalline lenses to the beak.

Gloves and a long coat, sometimes waxed, probably as much for water-proofing as against floating miasma, and a broad-brimmed hat to cover the head, complete the outfit.  Oh—and a rod for probing the infected, plus a light source—medieval/Renaissance houses being notoriously dim. 

Note, however, that, whoever designed this modern version hadn’t done quite enough research:  that’s a 19th-century kerosene lantern.  Here’s a lantern of a sort which would be likely—

(This is an Elizabethan image of a city watchman, armed with a spear, followed by a dog, and carrying a bell to sound the hours.)

And so, when you see someone dressed like this at a party, you can confidently ask, “Tell me, doctor, is the plague spreading and should I flee the city?”

although he may respond by offering you not a pomander, but one of these, instead.

Thanks, as always for reading.  Happy Halloween, if you celebrate it.

Stay well,

Avoid miasma like the plague,

And remember that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

PS

There is now some argument about the gear of such doctors.  See:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_doctor  and https://www.livescience.com/plague-doctors.html   Plague could actually take several forms.  See:  https://www.britannica.com/science/plague   Because cemeteries—and grave-diggers were often overwhelmed, mass graves in unconsecrated ground began to be common—and now are sometimes happened upon unexpectedly.  See recent London plague pit discoveries:  https://www.cityam.com/after-crossrails-gruesome-discovery-weve-mapped-every-one-londons-plague-pits-do-you-work/

It’s in Writing (2:  I’st a Prologue, or a Poesie for a Ring?)

22 Wednesday Oct 2025

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As always, dear readers, welcome.

The first part of this posting began as far from Middle-earth and its history as possible:  the Biblical lands of our Middle-earth and the story of the ancient prophet, Daniel and specifically the event which gained Daniel his position in the court first of Belshazzar, the Babylonian king, and then in that of his conqueror/successor, Darius the Persian.  Uniquely for early prophecy, Belshazzar hadn’t been warned that he would be deposed by any of the accepted means—the reading of the flight of birds

or the reading of animal intestines, for example,

(This is a bit of Etruscology, being a bronze model of a sheep’s liver believed to be used as a guide to interpreting what an Etruscan priest might find on an actual sheep’s liver.  For more, see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haruspex )

but by a message written by a detached hand on an interior wall of his palace.

(Rembrandt—as I said in the first part of this posting, having no idea of what real Babylonians looked like, the artist went for the Magi look)

When Belshazzar’s own scribes and prophets could make nothing of it, Daniel was brought in as a consultant and delivered the grim message that the words—which were potentially chillingly ambiguous—signalled not only the end of Belshazzar’s reign, but of his kingdom.  (For more on this, see:  https://www.christianitytoday.com/2024/11/andrew-wilson-spirited-life-daniel-writing-on-wall-babylon/   For a wonderful 12th-century version of the story and a little on Daniel’s experience in the court of Darius, see:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Djf0DFkH7mA&list=RDDjf0DFkH7mA&start_radio=1 )

In that posting, I suggested that Daniel’s story not only confirmed his role as prophet, but, for the posting, that he was literate, which would have marked him out in a world in which literacy was a specialized skill, like being a boatwright.

(This is from one of my favorite medieval mosaics, the story of Noah and the Ark from the cathedral of Monreale in Palermo—for more see:  https://www.christianiconography.info/sicily/noahBuildsArkMonreale.html )

This, in turn, had led to considering literacy in Middle-earth, chiefly among hobbits, and, in particular, the literacy of one rather unlikely hobbit, Sam Gamgee.

(Robert Chronister)

For more on this, see that earlier posting, “It’s in Writing (1)” 15 October, 2025, but my conclusion, based upon the final chapter of The Lord of the Rings, “The Grey Havens”, was that, as the story of Daniel makes Daniel literate in order to elevate him to a level of prophetic importance, so JRRT makes Sam literate in order to allow him to be the author who will complete the story of the Ring.  

That posting briefly examined hobbits and even suggested some evidence of literacy among dwarves, but it was never meant to be a full inventory of mentions of literacy in Middle-earth—although I think that that would be a very interesting project and well worth doing—and one thing it omitted entirely was any mention of literacy in Mordor. 

Did Orcs read and write, for example?

(Alan Lee)

Considering the conversation of people like Ugluk and Grishnakh, it would seem that they were mainly oral, as much of their and other talk is based upon what they hear, rather than read. (“ ‘What are they wanted for?’ asked several voices.  ‘Why alive?  Do they give good sport?’ ‘No!  I heard that one of them has got something, something that’s wanted for the war…”  The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 3, “The Uruk-hai”—for more on Orcs and gossip, among other things, see “Scuttlebutt”, 27 October, 2021)

And yet there’s this:

“The brief glow fell upon a huge sitting figure, still and solemn like the great stone kings of Argonath.  The years had gnawed it, and violent hands had maimed it..Upon its knees were idle scrawls mixed with the foul symbols that the maggot-folk of Mordor used.”  (The Two Towers, Book Four, Chapter 7, Journey to the Cross-roads”)

The “maggot-folk of Mordor” must certainly be the Orcs and “idle scrawls” suggests graffiti, like the World War 2-era favorite–

(For more on orcs and graffiti, see “Ugluk was Here”, 14 December, 2016—for more on Kilroy see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilroy_was_here )

So what did they write in?  Pippin, while a prisoner of the Orcs, notices that they seem to speak different languages—or at least dialects—but employ the Common Speech to understand each other:

“To Pippin’s surprise he found that much of the talk was intelligible; many of the Orcs were using ordinary language.  Apparently the members of two or three quite different tribes were present, and they could not understand one another’s orc-speech.”  (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 3, “The Uruk-hai”)

Can we presume, then, that the “idle scrawls” were in the writing system called the Tengwar, as “[its letters] had spread over much of the same area as that in which the Common Speech was known” (The Lord of the Rings, Appendix E, II, “Writing”)?  Or possibly the runic Cirith, as “[it] became known to many peoples, to Men and Dwarves, and even to Orcs, all of whom altered it to suit their purposes and according to their skill or lack of it.”

But what about the Black Speech?

“It is said that the Black Speech was devised by Sauron in the Dark Years, and that he had desired to make it the language of all those that served him…”

however—

“…after the first overthrow of Sauron this language in its ancient form was forgotten by all but the Nazgul.  When Sauron arose again, it became once more the language of Barad-dur and of the captains of Mordor.”

It was the formal language of the top of the chain of command, then, but, as JRRT had written earlier of Sauron’s first attempt to make it the official language, “he failed in that purpose” and the Orcs picked and chose what they found useful and nothing more.  (See The Lord of the Rings, Appendix F, “Of the Other Races”)

Save for what might be the Black Speech in a curse (“Ugluk u bagronk sha pushdug Saruman-glob bubhosh skai”, says one menacing Orc to Pippin– The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 3, “The Uruk-hai”), when we hear it, it’s Gandalf, reciting what he read when he “set the golden thing in the fire a while” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 2, “The Council of Elrond”). 

And this brings us back to reading and writing.  Why was there writing on that particular ring? 

Not being a party to its maker’s mind, this is only my guess, but I think that it may have had several possible purposes.

First—and this seems the most obvious—comes from something Gandalf says, repeating a remark made by Saruman:

“ ‘The Nine, the Seven, and the Three…had each their proper gem.  Not so the One.  It was round and unadorned, as it were one of the lesser rings; but its maker set marks upon it that the skilled, maybe, could still see and read.”  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 2, “The Council of Elrond”). 

Thus, Sauron had written on it to distinguish it from the other rings—and this writing was seemingly to be seen only by Sauron, as Isildur suggests:

“It was hot when I first took it, hot as a glede [a hot coal], and my hand was scorched, so that I doubt if ever again I shall be free of the pain of it.  Yet even as I write it is cooled, and it seemeth to shrink, though it loseth neither its beauty nor its shape.  Already the writing upon it, which at first was as clear as red flames, fadeth and is only barely to be read.”

Isildur’s explanation for this fading was:

“The Ring misseth, maybe, the heat of Sauron’s hand, which was black and yet burned like fire.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 2, “The Council of Elrond”). 

The second purpose, then, might be that The Ring mirrored, in a way, its master, the inscription legible to him because it took its heat from his hand and, with that removed, it cooled, eventually, into silence.  Isildur had guessed that heat might revive it (“…maybe were the gold made hot again, the writing would be refreshed”) but it was Gandalf, having read Isildur’s suggestion, who did, by placing it into an environment like to its original.  That it would lose that inscription if the Ring were removed from its owner’s hand might also suggest a third purpose, which lies in what the writing actually said:

“One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,

One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.”  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 2, “The Shadow of the Past”)

Although Gandalf says that this formed part of “a verse long known in Elven-lore”, the Ring itself was meant to be the master ring:

“He only needs the One; for he made that Ring himself, it is his, and he let a great part of his own former power pass into it, so that he could rule all the others.”

Thus, though it may have been part of a “verse long known in Elven-lore”, it sounds to me like a kind of spell Sauron would have chanted as he made the Ring, not only putting “a great part of his own former power” into it, but binding the lesser rings to it, as the words written on the Ring may have eventually been part of later tradition, but, logically, must have been his words long before they became part of that tradition.

These might have been Sauron’s purposes, but they also serve the narrative.  As Bilbo’s ring, passed down traumatically to Frodo, is “round and unadorned”, Gandalf has to have some way to prove to himself and to Frodo that this ring is the Ring.

(Alan Lee)

When Gandalf begins explaining to Frodo in detail about it and about Bilbo’s connection to it, he first mentions that

“A mortal…who keeps one of the Great Rings, does not die, but he does not grow or obtain more life, he merely continues, until at last every minute is a weariness.”

and Bilbo, says Gandalf, “…was getting restless and uneasy.  Thin and Stretched, he said.”

He speaks further about his worries about Bilbo and then tells Frodo that “There is a last test to make”, meaning in his confirmation that this is the Ring.

That last test takes place when, reluctantly, Frodo hands the Ring to Gandalf, and Gandalf throws it into the fire on Frodo’s hearth, where, when Frodo picks it up, he spots “fine lines, finer than the finest pen-strokes, running along the ring, outside and inside:  lines of fire that seemed to form the letters of a flowing script” and that script says:

“Ash nazg burbatuluk, ash nasz gimbatul, ash nazg thrakatuk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.”

“One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the Darkness bind them.”  (translation by Gandalf—earlier quotations from The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 2, “The Shadow of the Past”, the Black Speech from Book Two, Chapter 2, “The Council of Elrond”  For more on the Black Speech, see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Speech )

For Gandalf, that inscription is the final element in his understanding of just what, long ago, Bilbo picked up in the tunnels under the Misty Mountains.  He explains that it’s “only two lines of a verse long known in Elven-lore”, but those two lines are apparently all that’s necessary.

But where might the idea for an inscription have come to JRRT from originally?  I have no proof, but, as a medievalist, Tolkien might have been aware of what we find in medieval bling and is later picked up in Hamlet.

If you, like me, are a Shakespeare fan, you may recognize the subtitle of this posting as a sharp little remark by Hamlet in Act III, Scene 2 (you can read it here in the First Quarto of 1603:      https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/Ham_Q1/complete/index.html ).  Hamlet is making fun of a very brief prologue before The Murder of Gonzago, the “play within a play” (renamed “The Mousetrap” by Hamlet) by which he hopes to force his uncle, Claudius, to reveal his guilt in the death of Hamlet’s father, but it’s the second half of that line, “a Poesie for a Ring” which provides an answer to my question.

What Hamlet is suggesting is that the prologue is as clumsy as the poetry found within a ring (although occasionally on the outside) usually given by one lover to another in the late medieval era at least into the 18th century, like this one—

where inside is written “When this you see, remember me.”

(For more, see:  https://web.archive.org/web/20080611125813/http://www.wartski.com/Posy%20ring%20messages.htm )

Often called “posy rings” (a contracted form of “poesie”, as in the Shakespeare quotation), there are hundreds of surviving examples—here are only a small number from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford—

The texts vary, from what appears confident–“In thee my choice I do rejoice”—to the less so:  “I live in Hope”, but the general purpose of these little gifts is clear, if less sinister than Sauron’s.  They are meant to remind someone that someone else is thinking of them.  The difference, however, is that, if there’s one thing you wouldn’t want, it would be to have the Eye of Sauron looking in your direction.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Stay well,

Consider what Orcs might write on their rings,

(Alan Lee)

And remember that, as ever, there’s

MTCIDC

O

PS

For a little more on posy rings, see the monograph by John Evans, “Posy-Rings” (1892) at https://ia800704.us.archive.org/5/items/PosyRingsEvans/evans-j-posy-1892-00011597.pdf

It’s in Writing (1)

15 Wednesday Oct 2025

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As always, dear readers, welcome.

Belshazzar, the king of the Babylonians, was having a lovely party—

“Baltassar rex fecit grande convivium optimatibus suis mille: et unusquisque secundum suam bibebat aetatem.”

“Belshazzar held a great banquet for a thousand of his elite and each one was drinking according to his time of life.”
But, wishing to up the fun, he decided to make the party a bit more lavish—

Praecepit ergo jam temulentus ut afferrentur vasa aurea et argentea, quae asportaverat Nabuchodonosor pater ejus de templo, quod fuit in Ierusalem, ut biberent in eis rex, et optimates ejus, uxoresque ejus, et concubinae.

“And so now, being drunk, he ordered that the golden and silver vessels which Nebuchadnezzar, his father, had carried away from the temple which had been in Jerusalem be brought in so that the king and his nobles and his wives and concubines might drink in them.”

[“fuit” here is the perfect form and might be translated “has been”, but that form can suggest a permanent state, the pluperfect, suggesting that there would be no more Jerusalem.]

and then things go very wrong–

“In eadem hora apparuerunt digiti, quasi manus hominis scribentis contra candelabrum in superficie parietis aulae regiae: et rex aspiciebat articulos manus scribentis.”

“In the same hour, there appeared fingers, like a man’s hand, opposite the lampstand, writing on the surface of the wall of the royal hall, and the king was staring at the joints of the hand writing.”

(Rembrandt—who clearly had no idea what the real Babylonian king would have worn, but settled for something right out of the visit of the Magi, which was undoubtedly good enough for his audience, who would have had no more idea than he did)

Needless to say, this was a bad omen, but one his own counselors couldn’t interpret, as the message was not in Babylonian.  His queen, however, recommended that a Jewish interpreter, Daniel, be summoned, who arrived and interpreted the writing, which may have included some rather fancy word-play, but which meant:  “You are not long on the throne and your kingdom is about to become the property of the Persians.”

(All Latin translations are mine from Section 5 of “The Book of Daniel”.  The Latin text is from Jerome’s 4th-century translation, which you can read, with an English translation, here:     https://vulgate.org/ot/daniel_5.htm  For more on the message, see:   https://www.christianitytoday.com/2024/11/andrew-wilson-spirited-life-daniel-writing-on-wall-babylon/   For more on the historic Belshazzar—an ironic name as far as the ancient Hebrews must have been concerned, as it means “[the god] Bel [aka Baal] protect the king” which the Book of Daniel indicates that he certainly didn’t!—see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belshazzar )

Behind this story lies not only the status of Daniel as prophet and interpreter, and the idea that the Hebrew God is not to be messed with, even by kings, but also, for this posting, the importance of writing—the omen isn’t, like so many others, based on the flight of birds or the liver of a sheep or the behavior of chickens,

(for more on such practices see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augury )

all things which the ancient world would have thought significant–but on something handwritten (literally) on a palace wall.  This is clearly so unusual that its significance is immediately multiplied, and which, since Daniel can not only interpret it, but, to do so, he can read it, tells us something more about Daniel:   he is literate.

Because we in the modern West live in such a literate world ourselves, it’s sometimes hard to understand earlier worlds where literacy was not the norm.  Could Belshazzar read?  Probably not:  that was the job of technical people, scribes,

(These are actually Sumerians, but can stand in for Babylonian scribes, as the Babylonians used the writing system, cuneiform,

which the Sumerian scribes had invented.)

whom rulers could call upon when needed, as we see in ancient and medieval societies in general.  Literacy was a skill, like carpentry or masonry, and limited in the number of people who could practice it.  Could this have been true in Middle-earth, based as it is upon the medieval world of our Middle-earth, as well?

Gondor appears to have had a long tradition at least of extensive record-keeping, as we hear from Gandalf:

“And yet there lie in his hoards many records that few even of the lore-masters now can read, for their scripts and tongues have become dark to later men.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 2, “The Council of Elrond”)

As for the Rohirrim, I would guess that, although there may have been some literacy, much of their past—and possibly their present—was preserved in oral tradition, as Aragorn says of Meduseld:

“But to the Riders of the Mark it seems so long ago…that the raising of this house is but a memory of song.” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 6, “The King of the Golden Hall”)

And Theoden says to Aragorn:

“Will you ride with me then, son of Arathorn?  Maybe we shall cleave a road, or make an end as will be worth a song—if any be left to sing of us hereafter.”  (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 7, “Helm’s Deep”)

In the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings, we are told that the Hobbits as a whole had had potential literacy for some time, in fact, from their days of moving westwards towards what would become the Shire:

“It was in these early days, doubtless, that the Hobbits learned their letters and began to write, after the manner of the Dunedain, who had in their turn long before learned the art from the Elves.”  (The Lord of the Rings, Prologue I, “Concerning Hobbits”)

As in the case of other medieval worlds, however, this was seemingly not general literacy, although rather than being the possession of a specialized class, as in Babylon or ancient Egypt,

it might, instead, have been a mark of class.

Consider Sam Gamgee.  His father is the gardener for Bilbo Baggins and Sam is his assistant.

(Robert Chronister)

From his position—and from the way he addresses his “betters” as “Mister”, while they address him by his first name—it’s clear that Sam and his father are not of the same social class as the Bagginses.   And so, when the Gaffer says:

“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”)

This appears to be what we might call a mark of that class difference:  Bilbo, a ‘gentleman” can read, although, as we hear of no academies in the Shire, presumably through home-schooling, implying that there was at least one other person in his family’s household who could also read and who had taught him.  Considering the Gaffer’s potential uneasiness about it—why should there be harm in being able to read?—I think that we can imagine that the Gaffer himself could not—and himself was aware of the class distinction (Sam might get ideas “above his station”?).

And yet it’s to Sam that Frodo passes the book begun so long ago by Bilbo:

“ ‘Why, you have nearly finished it, Mr. Frodo!’ Sam exclaimed.  ‘Well, you have kept at it, I must say.’

‘I have quite finished, Sam,’ said Frodo.  ‘The last pages are for you.’ “ (The Return of the King, Book Six, Chapter 9, “The Grey Havens”)

Daniel’s literacy gives him the ability to read the Hebrew God’s warning to Belshazzar, establishing his importance in the story (which continues, as he becomes the confidant and friend of the new king, Darius.)

And here we see the real reason JRRT had given Sam literacy:  not that he might read Bilbo/Frodo’s efforts, but that he might write and therefore complete the story of The Lord of the Rings, and thus add one more element to his importance in the narrative.

In our next posting, however, we will examine another use of writing and reading—and a much less benign one.

Thanks, as always for reading.

Stay well,

Delight in the fact that you can read,

And remember that there’s always

MTCIDC

O

PS

As to evidence of general literacy in the Shire, we see, in “The Scouring of the Shire”, some public notices—a sign on the new gate on the bridge over the Brandywine (“No admittance between sundown and sunrise”) and an anonymous hobbit calls out “Can’t you read the notice?”  In the watch house just beyond we see:   “…on every wall there was a notice and list of Rules”. As far as I can tell, however, these are the only public signs we see in Middle-earth and seem to me more about Authority than literacy.   Just the fact that they’re there must have an effect upon cowed hobbits, even if they can’t read.

PPS

For completeness sake, although we have only bits and pieces of dwarvish, we can say that at least some dwarves were literate, evidence being the fragmentary account of the reworking of Moria which the Fellowship find in the Chamber of Records there,

as well as the inscription on Balin’s tomb. (for more on JRRT’s work on recreating that fragmentary record, the so-called Book of Mazarbul, see: “Aging Documents”, 31 July, 2024)

King Trotter?

08 Wednesday Oct 2025

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Welcome, dear readers, as ever.

I had been outside on some land being cleared when I spotted this—

and, as someone who thinks and writes and teaches about adventure in literature, I immediately thought of  this—

(This version of the scene is from Howard Pyle’s 1903 The Story of King Arthur and his Knights          , which you can read here:  https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/60184/pg60184-images.html#CHAPTER_FIRST-A )

My own knowledge of King Arthur probably began with books like The Boy’s King Arthur, by Sidney Lanier, originally published in 1880, with perhaps the best known version being the 1917 edition, with its wonderful illustrations by N.C.Wyeth,

(Here’s your copy:  https://archive.org/details/boyskingarthursimalo/mode/2up  )

and Howard Pyle’s The Story of King Arthur and His Knights, mentioned above, before, as a teenager, I found  the Imaginative and witty but ultimately melancholy T.H. White’s 1958 The Once and Future King,

(This is actually an omnibus volume of earlier White works, which you can read about here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Once_and_Future_King   )

the first volume of which being made into a Disney movie, The Sword in the Stone in 1963,

all of which being direct descendants from Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, written perhaps in the 1460s and one of the first books printed in England by William Caxton in 1485.

(Only 2 copies are known to exist:  one in the Rylands Library in Manchester, the other in the Morgan Library in New York—this is the Morgan Library copy.  You can read an 1893 edition here:  https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/46853/pg46853-images.html   Malory’s book—and Malory himself—have been the subject of much scholarly work and debate and you can read a little about it and him here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Morte_d%27Arthur  )

I had known that, behind Malory, lies Geoffrey of Monmouth’s early 12th-Century Historia Regum Britanniae (aka De Gestis Britonum—that is, “History of the Kings of Britain” or “Concerning the Acts/Deeds of the Britons”), but there was something new to me in doing a little reading for this posting:  the story of the sword and its stone.   Because it’s in all the later versions, even forming the title of one part of White’s larger collection, I had assumed that it was a story which had always been part of the bigger history of Arthur, and yet it seems to have been an independent creation, by a French knight, Robert de Boron, in a poem entitled Merlin, dated to the end of the 12th, the beginning of the 13th-Century.  

 

(This is from 13th-Century manuscript in the Bibliotheque nationale in Paris.   The BnF has a short feature—in French—on it here:  https://essentiels.bnf.fr/fr/litterature/moyen-age-1/ed6c3713-b2d5-4b94-8cac-a35fbd9471b1-mythe-arthurien/video/9ad866b9-c7ac-47b8-9356-9bcb793fb0ad-histoire-merlin )    

The whole Arthur story is a tangle of English and French poems and prose works, showing what a fertile field it was for poets and story-tellers, just as Troy had been, many centuries before—and still could be for medieval creators, if we think of Geoffrey Chaucer’s  Troilus and Criseyde as an example of a continued interest.   (You can read Chaucer’s poem here:  https://www.gutenberg.org/files/257/257-h/257-h.htm )    Who influenced whom, sometimes even who someone might have been, is a happy battlefield for scholars, so I’ll only point you to some discussion of de Boron and his poem here:   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_de_Boron#Further_reading and here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merlin_(Robert_de_Boron_poem)  and include a 15th-century English prose translation of the Old French of the original here, which is quite readable, and not just if you’re used to Chaucer’s 14th-century English:  https://metseditions.org/read/jy0W7X8HvLalIgvvC1z6jFMKyK4EakW ) 

For me, the important point of the story is really a question :  who is to be king of England and how can he prove that he is the rightful king?  And the answer is provided by that sword, as the 15th-century text reads:

“And the archebisshop lowted to the swerde and sawgh letteres of golde in
the stiel. And he redde the letteres that seiden, ‘Who taketh this swerde out of
this ston sholde be kynge by the eleccion of Jhesu Criste.’ “ 

(“And the archbishop bent over  the sword and saw letters of gold in the steel.  And he read the letters that said, ‘Who takes this sword out of the stone should be king by the choice of Jesus Christ.’ “)

This brings us to King Trotter.

It’s clear from his various letters and from Carpenter’s biography that Tolkien spent a lot of time in a kind of creative wandering before he settled upon various elements which make up the eventual The Lord of the Rings.  As he writes to W.H. Auden:

“…the main idea…was arrived at in one of the earliest chapters still surviving…It is really given, and present in germ, from the beginning, though I had no conscious notion of what the Necromancer stood for (except ever-recurrent evil) in The Hobbit, nor of his connexion with the Ring.  But if you wanted to go on from the end of The Hobbit I think the ring would be your inevitable choice as a link.  If then you wanted a large tale, the Ring would at once acquire a capital letter; and the Dark Lord would immediately appear.  As he did, unasked, on the hearth at Bag End as soon as I came to that point.  So the essential Quest started at once.  But I met a lot of things on the way that astonished me.  Tom Bombadil I knew already; but I had never been to Bree.  Strider sitting in the corner of the inn was a shock, and I had no idea who he was than had Frodo.”  (letter to W.H. Auden,  7 June, 1955, Letters, 315-316)

In one of his wanderings, he had created a kind of Hobbit Ranger, “Trotter”.  As Carpenter tells us:

[on a holiday at Sidmouth in 1938] “There he did a good deal of work on the story, bringing the hobbits to a village inn at ‘Bree’ where they meet a strange character, another unpremeditated element in the narrative.  In the first drafts Tolkien described this person as ‘a queer-looking brown-faced hobbit’, and named him ‘Trotter’.”  (Carpenter, 191)

And so, in fact, Tolkien had not initially met Strider in the Prancing Pony in Bree at all, but a completely different character, one who would, at a later date, disappear, to be replaced by Aragorn, son of Arathorn, who would, by the end of the story, be the king who has returned.

(the Hildebrandts)

But how will he ever prove that he is that king?

One  clue is in the verses which are attached to a letter Gandalf had written to Frodo, but, neglected by the landlord of The Prancing Pony, was only delivered when Frodo and his friends had reached Bree:

“All that is gold does not glitter,

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does no wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,

A light from the shadows shall spring;

Renewed shall be blade that was broken,

The crownless again shall be king.”  (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 10, “Strider”)

When Pippin and Sam both express doubt about Strider’s identity, he makes a bold gesture, saying,

“ ‘If I had killed the real Strider, I could kill you.  And I should have killed you already without so much talk.  If I was after the Ring I could have it—NOW!’

He stood up, and seemed suddenly to grow much taller…Throwing back his cloak, he laid his hand on the hilt of a sword that had hung concealed by his side.”

But then:

“He drew out his sword, and they saw that the blade was indeed broken a foot below the hilt.”

As I have suggested  in a previous posting (see “Swords Drawn”, 2 July, 2025), this sword appears to have been influenced by something which Tolkien had either read or had read to him as a child from Andrew Lang’s The Red Fairy Book, 1890.

(here’s a copy for you:  https://archive.org/details/redfairybook00langiala/redfairybook00langiala/ )

In the last tale in the book, “The Story of Sigurd”, we find:

“ONCE upon a time there was a King in the North who had won

many wars, but now he was old. Yet he took a new wife, and

then another Prince, who wanted to have married her, came up

against him with a great army. The old King went out and fought

bravely, but at last his sword broke, and he was wounded and his men

fled. But in the night, when the battle was over, his young wife came

out and searched for him among the slain, and at last she found

him, and asked whether he might be healed. But he said

 ‘No’, his luck was gone, his sword was broken, and he must die. And he

told her that she would have a son, and that son would be a great

warrior, and would avenge him on the other King, his enemy. And

he bade her keep the broken pieces of the sword, to make a new sword

for his son, and that blade should be called Gram.”  (Lang, “The Story of Sigurd” from The Red Fairy Book, 357)

Just as Sigurd, when other swords have failed his test, has his father’s sword reforged, so the smiths of Rivendell reforge Aragorn’s sword and he changes its name from Narsil to Anduril, and even shows it, via Saruman’s palantir, to Sauron, clearly as a threat, as this is the very sword Isildur used to cut the Ring from Sauron’s hand long ago. (see The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 2, “The Passing of the Grey Company”)

But returning to the opening of this posting, I would wonder just how surprised JRRT really was when he returned to the Prancing Pony and found, not Trotter, the hobbit, but Strider, aka Aragorn, son of Arathorn, descended from the ancient rulers of Gondor and himself the heir?  Although he had mixed feelings about Arthurian legend (see from a letter to Milton Waldman, “late in 1951”, Letters, 202, among other places– even though, in the mid-1930s, he attempted and abandoned  a long poem, “The Fall of Arthur”—see Carpenter, 171),  Tolkien had been well aware of its stories from childhood (“The Arthurian legends also excited him.”  Carpenter, 30) and it’s clear that no story he had ever read or heard ever completely disappeared from his mind and so we’re left perhaps with a question:  did Aragorn arrive with the sword, either from Sigurd or Arthur, or did the sword, in Tolkien’s memory from his earliest years, come first, making Aragorn—who needed proof that he was the rightful king, just as Arthur did–come first?

In either event, I think that we should be thankful that both arrived as it’s hard to imagine the coronation not of Aragorn,

(the Hildebrandts)

but of “a queer-looking brown-faced hobbit”!

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Stay well,

Wander, if you will, but don’t be lost,

And remember that, as always, there’s

MTCIDC

O

The Voices in His Head 

02 Thursday Oct 2025

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As ever, welcome, dear readers.

Everyone knows the term “seascape”—as in this painting by Eugene Boudin (1824-1898)–

(You can learn a little more about him and see a small gallery of his work here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Boudin   and see a lot more of his work here:  https://www.wikiart.org/en/eugene-boudin  There is also a much longer and detailed biography—in French—here:   https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Boudin    As you view his work, you can see why Monet claimed him as an early influence, as well as a dear friend.)

and “landscape”—as in this painting by John Constable (1776-1837)—

(And you can learn a bit more about Constable and see a small gallery of his works here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Constable )

but, in this posting, I want to talk about another –scape:  soundscape, and, in particular, the soundscape I imagine inside the head of J.R.R. Tolkien.

We might begin where he began, with the tutoring of his mother, Mabel.

(Taken in Blomfontein, with Tolkien’s father on the left and a very tiny Tolkien on the right)

Carpenter’s biography tells us that Mabel

“…knew Latin…’

so we can imagine something like this in Tolkien’s ears:  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbcRm5EbGxg   “Scorpio Martianus”

To which I’ll add:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPuEO0VAh04  This is an attempt at Latin conversation and fun to listen to, but the subtitles don’t always mirror what is said and the use of “ius” instead of “lex” might be questioned for “law” in the script.

NativLang:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_enn7NIo-S0&t=44s   This is a favorite language site of mine and this is entitled “What Latin Sounded Like and How We Know”.

“…French…”

Try this slowed-down version with subtitles—in both French and English—as I imagine that any French Mabel would have tried out would have been in talking to JRRT, then a small child, and would have been slow:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMx0d42wzBs    Unfortunately, in later life Tolkien would write:  “For instance I dislike French..”—and he also rejected French cooking—see “From a letter to Deborah Webster”, 25 October, 1958, Letters, 411.

“…and German…”  (Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien. 35)

This is actually German words/phrases at the children’s level (with German/English subtitles):  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSu7RN1IP5Q

From Mabel, we can pass to more formal education, first at King Edward’s School in Birmingham.

Here, according to Carpenter, he was exposed to Greek:

“On his return to King Edward’s, Ronald was placed in the Sixth Class, about half way up the school.  He was now learning Greek.  Of his first contact with this language he later wrote:  ‘The fluidity of Greek, punctuated by hardness, and with its surface glitter captivated me.  But part of the attraction was antiquity and alien remoteness (from me):  it did not touch home.’ “  (Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien. 35)

For ancient Greek, try:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOJsnFz4Um0   

This is closer to what we understand Greek to have sounded like, including turning Greek theta into the sound T + a tiny explosion of breath afterwards (as Greek phi would sound like P + that same explosion).  There are a number of recitations on-line, but often strongly influenced by modern Greek, including the distinctive modern Greek pronunciation of sigma, which is a kind of hissy under-the-breath sound, which I like, but seems more modern than classical.

Even as he was increasing his knowledge of Latin and adding Greek to it through school instruction, Tolkien was making his own additions to what went on in his head.

Because his guardian, Father Francis Morgan (1857-1935)

spoke Spanish fluently and had a collection of books in Spanish, Tolkien was drawn to the language, later writing:

“…my guardian was half Spanish and in my early teens I used to pinch his books and try to learn it:  the only Romance language that gives me the particular pleasure of which I am speaking…”  (letter to W.H. Auden, 7 June, 1955, Letters, 312)

Here’s a little fun Spanish—this is Castilian, which is what I imagine Father Francis spoke, his family being from Andalusia:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybfyLfI5Ml0   You can read more about Father Francis here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Xavier_Morgan )

We can add to this Anglo-Saxon (now commonly called Old English) at this time—and here’s a sample for you:

Beowulf:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH-_GwoO4xI

and likewise Middle English, which you can hear here:

Chaucer, General Prologue:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWM1Yk_BXMw

both thanks to an assistant master at King Edward’s, George Brewerton, who loaned Tolkien an Anglo-Saxon primer –my guess being Sweet’s—

(You can see what Brewerton’s loan looked like here:  https://archive.org/details/anglosaxonprimer00sweerich )

and who:

“…encouraged his students to read Chaucer , and he recited the Canterbury Tales to them in the original Middle English.”  (Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien, 35)

(Here, by the way, is an interesting comparison in the changing sounds of English over centuries:  Old/Middle/Early Modern “The Lord’s Prayer”:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhgXnEGSn4A  )

This isn’t all, however. 

“One of his school-friends had bought a book at a missionary sale, but found that he had no use for it and sold it to Tolkien.  It was Joseph Wright’s Primer of the Gothic Language.  Tolkien opened it and immediately experienced ‘a sensation at least as full of delight as first looking into Chapman’s Homer. ‘ “ (Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien, 45)

(If you’d like to see what so pleased JRRT, see:  https://archive.org/details/aprimergothicla00wriggoog )

Here’s a short possible reconstruction of what Gothic sounded like: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/GORwFe5TL5c

And more about Gothic here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-pmudxHUfQ

To which we should add Old Norse:

“Then he turned to a different language and took a few hesitant steps in Old Norse, reading line by line in the original words the story of Sigurd and the dragon Fafnir that had fascinated him in Andrew Lang’s Red Fairy Book when he was a small child.” (Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien, 43)

Here’s a brief selection :  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ASsCH17cbA  ( This is from Jackson Crawford’s very interesting Norse website.  And you can read the Sigurd story which fascinated Tolkien here:  https://archive.org/details/redfairybook00langiala/redfairybook00langiala/  Tolkien formalized and extended his study of Old Norse at Oxford—see Carpenter, 71-72.  Old Norse is the ancestor of Icelandic and JRRT was particularly pleased when he was informed that The Hobbit was being translated into Icelandic.  See “from a letter ot Ungfru Adalsteinsdottir”, 5 June, 1973, Letters, 603)

With all of this behind him, Tolkien went off to Oxford, to Exeter College,

intending to continue his classical studies, but then:

“I did not learn any Welsh till I was an undergraduate, and found in it an abiding linguistic-aesthetic satisfaction…”

and here you can hear some Welsh:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvtbdq3WiyU

As a child, Tolkien’s eye had been caught by hopper cars labeled in Welsh full of coal from Welsh mines  (Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien, 33-34),

but it was only at Exeter , encouraged by the man who had written the Gothic text which had been such a revelation, Joseph Wright (1855-1930), that

“He managed to find books of medieval Welsh, and he began to read the language that had fascinated him on coal-trucks.  He was not disappointed; indeed he was confirmed in all his expectations of beauty.”  (Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien, 64)

and then:

 “ ‘Most important, perhaps, after Gothic was the discovery in Exeter College library, when I was supposed to be reading for Honour Mods, of a Finnish Grammar.   It was like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before.  It quite intoxicated me…’ ” (letter to W.H. Auden, 7 June, 1955, Letters, 312)

Here’s what Finnish sounds like:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6xt8HZy1-k

(I have no current evidence for what Tolkien’s actual discovery might have been, but here’s an 1890 Finnish grammar that, being an Oxford University Press publication, might be a good possibility:  https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59795/59795-h/59795-h.htm )

So, what might Tolkien have had echoing through his capacious head?  German, French, Latin, Greek, Old and Middle English, Gothic, Spanish, Old Norse, Welsh, and Finnish—which I thought covered them all until I discovered:

“In hospital, besides working on his mythology and the elvish languages, he was teaching himself a little Russian and improving his Spanish and Italian.”  (Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien, 106)

and:

“The Dutch edition and translation are going well.  I have had to swot at Dutch; but it is not a really nice language.  Actually I am at present immersed in Hebrew.  If you want a beautiful but idiotic alphabet, and a language so difficult that it makes Latin (and even Greek) seem footling—but also glimpses into a past that makes Homer seem recent—then that is the stuff!”  (letter to Michael George Tolkien, 24 April, 1957, Letters, 370)

As if German, French, Latin, Greek, Old and Middle English, Gothic ,Old Norse, Spanish, Italian, and a little Russian, Welsh, and Finnish—not to mention creating Sindarin, Quenya, a little of the language of the Dwarves, a bit of the tongue of the Ents, Rohirric, and even a fragment of the Black Speech–were not enough.

Thanks, as ever for reading.

Stay well,

Remember that:  “To learn a language is to have one more window from which to look at the world.” (a Chinese proverb)

And remember, as well, that there’s

MTCIDC

O

PS

As a contrast, here’s the sound of a language Tolkien didn’t care for (besides French)–see “From a letter to Deborah Webster”, 25 October, 1958, Letters, 412–https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfXBjv-uMZM