Carpe Cakem!

I was delighted to find that Tolkien really wanted to have more fun than he was allowed to with cool gimmick maps and paper for his stories.

The Hobbit maps had to be redrawn by him because his originals had incorporated too many colours, and even then his scheme of having the general map as an endpaper and Thror’s map placed within the text of Chapter One was not followed. The publishers had decided that both maps should be used as endpapers, and in consequence his plan to ‘invisible lettering’, which would appear when Thror’s map was held up to the light, had to be abandoned.

-p.185

And later on:

He cared very much that his beloved book should be published as he had intended, but once again many of his designs were modified, frequently through considerations of cost. Among items that were declared to be too expensive were red ink for the ‘fire-letters’ which appear on the Ring, and the halftone colour process that would be necessary to reproduce the facsimile Tolkjien had made of ‘The Book of Mazarbul’, a burnt and tattered volume that (in the story) is found in the Mines of Moria.

He was much saddened by this, for he had spent many hours making this facsimile, copying out the pages in runes and elvish writing, and then deliberately damaging them, burning the edges and smearing the paper with substances that looked like dried blood. All this work was now wasted.

-Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, p.220

You can see a really nice shot of this book and the page in question, which was later given a moment in the spotlight of the first Lord of the Rings movie.

Growing up, my own father would make treasure maps for us on our birthday and then burn the edges to give them an “old pirate map look”. I loved it! Where’s the lighter?

Tolkien made an interesting comment when he tried, early on, to try and explain his new mythology.

He soon came to feel that the composition of occasional poems without a connecting theme was not what he wanted. Early in 1915 he turned back to his original Earendel verses ad began to work their theme into a larger story. He had shown the original Earendel lines to G.B. Smith, who had said that he liked them but asked what they were really about.

Tolkien had replied: ‘I don’t know. I’ll try to find out.’

Not try to invent: try to find out. He did not see himself as an inventor of story buy as a discoverer of legend. And this was really due to his private languages.

-Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, p.83

The language was what was invented, though still based on a deep knowledge of linguistics. Then the mythology came later as a way of explaining how the words developed (and they were already developed). The language poured a huge slab of concrete for him to build his cathederal upon.

Tolkien was a devoted Christian, a Roman Catholic. Where was God in his mythology some people wondered?

I know people who see Middle Earth full of pagan witchcraft. I think if you have even a cursory knowledge of paganism looks like see that it didn’t get the memo about when to show up. And black magic? Well yes, but it’s also quite different and intentionally vague. (Entire books have been written about this by the way.)

Carpenter had this to say about God in Middle Earth:

Tolkien’s universe is ruled over by God, ‘The One’. Beneath Him in the hierarchy are ‘The Valar’, the guardians of the world, who are not gods by angelic powers, themselves holy and subject to God; and at one terrible moment in the story they surrender their power into His hands.

Tolkien cast his mythology in this form because he wanted it to be remote and strange, and yet at the same time not to be a lie. He wanted the mythological and legendary stories to express his own moral view of the universe; and as Christan he could not place this view in a cosmos without the God that he worshipped. At the same time, to set is stories ‘realistically’ in the known world, where religious beliefs were explicitly Christian, would deprive them of imaginative colour. So while God is present in Tolkien’s universe, He remains unseen.

When he wrote the Silmarillion Tolkien believed that in once sense he was writing the truth.

-Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, p.99

Later at university, Tolkien encountered some works in Old English that he hadn’t heard of previously.

Among these was the Crist of Cynewulf, a group of Anglo-Saxon religious poems. Two lines from it struck him forceibly:

Eala Earendel engla beorhtast
ofer middangeard monnum sended.

“Hail Earendel, brightst of angels/above the middle-earth sent unto men”

-Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, p.72

Whoa, wait a minute. There we have “Middle Earth”, the name of his entire world and history, and Earendel, one of the chief Valar in his mythology. They were not always made from whole cloth but lifted from other sources.

In fact, this is one reason why Tolkien’s fantasy works and that of so many sci-fi authors do not. Their mythology is too new. It’s not connected enough to man’s (the reader’s) own history. Except that it IS, though in all the wrong ways. Ways the author’s are unaware of, especially in regards to language and the names of their characters.

Later, Tolkien was reading The House of the Wolfings by William Morris, which is written in Welsh.

Written partly in prose and partly in verse, it centres on  House or famly-tribe that dwells by a great river in a clearing of the forest named Mirkwood, a name take from ancient Germaic geography and legend.

There’s another one. Mirkwood lies in the east of course. Just like in Germany. Just like it does in Middle Earth.

A hundred times over when you see a word or especially a name in Tolkien’s writing, it was very carefully chosen, following Owen Barfield’s principals I think, to evoke other qualities from the deep past of etymology, even if you aren’t fully aware of it consciencely.

Only a few pages into Tolkien’s biography, it’s amazing to see how much of The Lord of the Rings show up already:

Not far from Sarehole Mill, a little way up the hill towards Mosely, was a deep tree-lined sandpit that became another favorite haunt for the boys. Indeed, explorations a could be made in many directions, though there were hazards. An old farmer who once chased Ronald for picking mushrooms was given the nickname ‘the Black Ogre’ by the boys. Such delicious terrors were the essence of those days…

-p.28

This is of course a parallel to Merry and Pippin stealing mushrooms from farmer Maggot. He always said he himself was a hobbit.

…he liked Red Indian stories and longed to shoot with a bow and arrow. He was even more please by the Curdie books of George Macdonald, which were sent in a remote kingdom where misshapen and malevolent goblins lurked benearth the mountains.

-p.30

Guns were like evil machines, but bows and arrows were highly regarded.

If every other fantasy book/movie/game since has based their orcs/goblins on Tolkien’s (which is almost universally true), then they should keep in mind that Tolkien’s are based largely on George Macdonald’s. Even their history of genetic deterioration and slavery by dark powers is simply Macdonald’s goblins with an expanded history.

I’ve just began to read the first of the Curdie books to my daughter (nearly five). Unfortunately, it’s over the head of my two-year-old and I will likely have to switch to something else.

Back to J.R.R.’s childhood. Here’s an especially detailed one:

In later years he especially remembered ‘the bitter disappointment and disgust from schooldays with the shabby use made in Shakespeare of the coming of “Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane hill”: I longd to devise a setting by which the trees might really march to war.’

.-Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, p.35

For years he thought Shakespear’s versions was so lame, it had to be rewritten. In the attack of the Ents on Isengard, he finally got the chance.

Since reading Rene Girard, I’ve become increasingly exasperated at how difficult it is to explain his theory to other people with a short 1-minute or 1-paragraph answer. I’ve wrestled with how to do this because I think that his ideas are very relevant to Christianity and Biblical Scholarship and I’d like to see them get some more exposure. He’s remarkably underrated. Whenever I bring him up, most people have never heard of him, even in theological circles.

A big part of the problem is that he uses a bunch of special vocabulary that MUST be defined ahead of time. Even his use of the word “sacrifical” is not at all what people are used to. For example, he insists that Jesus’s death was not a sacrifice. This makes people scratch their heads, but it’s because he’s talking about his special definition of sacrifice. How can this be explained without a 20 page essay? The best summary of Girard’s theory I’ve found is still a good 5-6 pages long.

At some point, I would like to rewrite some his work to be more accessible. If someone clever beats me to it though, I’ll be happy.

What reminded me of this was reading Tolkien’s biography.

Concerning his teaching duties at Oxford:

Throughout the nineteen-thirties he continued to give at least twice the statutory number of lectures and classes each year, considerably more than most of his colleagues undertook. [136 hours versus the required 36 hours]

So lectures, and the preparation for them, took up a very large proportion of his time. In fact this heavy teaching load was sometimes more than he could manage efficiently, and occasionally he would abandon a course of lectures because of insufficient time to prepare it. Oxford seized gleefully on this sin and bestowed upon him the reputation of not preparing his lectures properly, whereas the truth was that he prepared them too thoroughly. His deep commitment to the subject prevented him from tackling it in anything less than an exhaustive manner, with the result that he often sidetracked himself into the consideration of subsidiary details, and never managed to finish the treatment of the main topic.

-Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, p.140

This is a necessary shortcoming of many brilliant scholars I think. They cannot think outside of an exhaustive foray into their discipline. It is often for other scholars to come after them and pick up the pieces and repackage them in such a way that they can be effectively disseminated to the next generation. As far as I know, someone has yet to do this with Girard. Perhaps because he’s still alive (86 years old and still kickin’).

A teacher who is ardently devoted to their discipline will go above and beyond what is required to pull their paycheck. I think we find this in all the great pedagogues.

Here, Tolkien’s tenure and Oxford is described:

What, in practical terms, did it mean to be the Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford? The simplest answer is that it meant a good deal of hard work.

The statutes called upon Tolkien to give a minimum of thirty-six lectures or classes a year, but he did not consider this to be sufficient to cover the subject, and in the second year after being elected Professor he gave one hundred and thirty-six lectures ad classes.

-Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, p.140

Job requirement: 36 hours.

Actual time: 136 hours.

Where have I seen something like this before? Oh yes. Dan Bukvich of course. By far the most effective teacher I encountered in university. I’ve written about him before.

Job Requirement:

Teach freshman music theory
Teach Freshman ear training
Give private percussion lessons (once a week per student)

Reality:

Teach freshman music theory
Teach freshman ear training
Write and continually revising the textbooks for both these courses
Give private percussion lessons (TWICE a week per student)
Direct large jazz choir (his most pubic role)
Direct small jazz choir
Compose and personally arrange huge piles of music for these choirs to sing
Teach “Theoretical Basis of Jazz”
Direct percussion ensemble
Direct the annual “Dancers Drummers Dreamers” show
Oversee directed studies in composition
And much much more…

That’s all I can remember. And that’s just his job. What did Tolkien do on the side? He wrote The Lord of the Rings, the greatest novel of the 20th century. Bukvich? Composed a multitude of music for choir, concert band, orchestra, percussion ensemble, and so forth. These exist in a smaller circle of influence than a novel read worldwide, but by many measures are no less significant.

I had other good professors in college, but none had near the impact on my education. Talk about “above and beyond”. Thanks Dan!

Tolkien and colleague E.V. Gordon worked together to translate the Anglo-Saxon poem Pearl. Unfortunately, the work was interrupted by the untimely death of Gordon in 1938. This discouraged Tolkien, who was already to busy with other projects to see it through completion.

However, the footnotes of his Biography note:

Tolkien intended to complete the Pearl edition, but he foud himself unable to do so (by this time he absorbed in writing The Lord of the Rings). It was eventually revised and completed for publication by Ida Gordon, the widow of E.V. Gordon, and herself a professional philologist.

-Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, p.145

Here we find one of the few well education women surrounding the Inklings. Carpenter mentions her later in the Biography as one of the few wives who had skills or ambitions beyond the domestic. I’m curious her relationship with her academic husband looked like.

The only other lady I’ve ever come across mentioned in connection with the Inklings is Dorothy Sayers.

It appears that key elements in both Lewis’s and Tolkien’s fiction come from their own recurring dreams.

Lewis decided to make Aslan in the Chronicles of Narnia a lion after a spate of lion-themed nightmares. Charles’s William’s metaphysical novel The Place of The Lion may have also had something to do with it.

Here, we discover that Numenor/Atlantis became prominent the mythology of Middle-Earth in a similar way:

Tolkien’s legend of Numenor, the great island in the West that is given to the men who aided the Elves in the wars against Morgoth… It had one of its origins in the nightmare that had distrubed him since childhood, his “Atlantis-haunting” in which he “had the dreadful dream of the ineluctable Wave, either coming up out of a quite sea, or coming in towering over the green inlands”.

-Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, p.173

Our creativity can be influenced by all sorts of things. It makes perfect sense for a dream to inform these things. What is interesting about a dream though is that it’s origin can be utterly subconscience and intuitive. They are in our head, but even after much pondering we cannot always make the connections as to where they came from. If you like to have things resolved, dreams like this will always stay curious. I think the very fact that we are unable to make the connection sometimes gives the imagery special significance.

Frodo’s forshadowing dreams figure heavily into The Lord of the Rings, though they seem to rarely be discussed. They don’t end up being important to the story. It’s almost as if Tolkien had some sort of explanation in mind for them but never got around to telling us what it was.

What do you do with all those violent psalms?

Most people ignore them completely, without even giving a reason. Throughout my entire childhood and religious education, these were never dealt with. It’s like they weren’t even there.

On the flip side, some insist on integrating all of them, verbatim, into the worship service.

May his children be fatherless
and his wife a widow!
May his children wander about and beg,
seeking food far from the ruins they inhabit!
May the creditor seize all that he has;
may strangers plunder the fruits of his toil!
Let there be none to extend kindness to him,
nor any to pity his fatherless children!

-Psalm 109:9-12

How about following that up with another rousing chorus of “Jesus Loves the Little Children”, right?

The possible reasons they are in there are many and some are rather complicated. I’m not going to get into that here. There is a decent outline here.

Atheists and antagonists love to point out how much bloody violence is in the Bible. We shouldn’t hum and haw and make excuses for this though. If there is something confusing in the scriptures, our first reaction shouldn’t be to apologize for it (slavery anyone?), but to seek to understand what God is trying to tell us by keeping it preserved throughout the years.

I’ve acquired a few killer points from reading a (relatively) recent essay on the subject by the great sage of violence himself, Rene Girard. He uncovers a fascinating clue by contrasting it with ancient pagan literature. If the Bible is nasty violent, it’s violent compared to what exactly? And when did we become so worried about this?

Many commentators today want to show that far from being nonviolent, the Bible is really full of violence. In a sense, they are right. The representation of violence in the Bible is enormous and more vivid, more evocative, than in mythology and even Greek tragedy. If we compare Judaic texts to pagan ones, we find that the amount of represented violence is greater in the first than in the second.

He goes on to provide more examples of how the psalms of malediction are, surprisingly, worse than nearly anything that shows up elsewhere. C.S. Lewis, who knew the classics inside out, also noted the same thing.

There are other texts in the Bible that forbid human beings to pray to God for the destruction of their enemies, and this is precisely what these psalms do. C. S. Lewis in his Reflections on the Psalms finds them shocking and does not hesitate to say so: “In some of the Psalms the spirit of hatred which strikes us in the face is like the heat from a furnace mouth. In others the same spirit ceases to be frightful only by becoming (to a modern mind) almost comic in its naïveté.” 1 Lewis finds these texts especially problematic in view of the fact that this intensity of hatred is not found in pagan writing:

Here he quotes Lewis again:

If we are to excuse the poets of the Psalms on the grounds that they were not Christians, we ought to be able to point to the same sort of thing, and worse, in pagan authors. . . . I can find in them lasciviousness, much brutal insensibility, cold cruelties taken for granted, but not this fury or luxury of hatred. . . . One’s first impression is that the Jews were much more vindictive and vitriolic than the pagans.

Now what’s up with that? Girard argues that the nastiness is in the pagan mythology too, but it’s sanitized. It’s from the viewpoint of the victors. The “winners” wrote history. They glamorized, and softened their own deeds.

Once we realize that we must be dealing with the same social phenomenon in the Bible and in mythology, namely the hysterical mob that will not calm down until it has lynched a victim, we cannot fail to become aware of the fact of a great biblical singularity, even a uniqueness.

In mythology, the collective violence is always represented from the standpoint of the victimizers and therefore the victims themselves are never heard. We never hear them bemoaning their sad fate and cursing their persecutors as they do in the psalms. Everything is recounted from the standpoint of the persecutors.

I know I’m pasting large chunks here, but in this case Girard’s writing is so concise (unusual) it’s difficult to summarize. Read on though. It’s loaded with goodies.

No wonder the Greek myths, the Greek epics and the Greek tragedies are all serene, harmonious, and undisturbed. In pagan cultures, the persecutors are in charge. We never hear the victims. We only hear the persecutors who always have the last word, and who are unaware of their own arbitrary violence.

The psalms, in my view, tell the same basic story as many myths but turned inside out, so to speak.

The psalms of execration or malediction are the first texts in history that enable victims, forever silenced in mythology, to have a voice of their own. These spontaneous scapegoats understandably feel horribly betrayed by their friends, their neighbors, even their relatives. And no wonder. They are victimized by everybody without exception inside their own community.

These victims feel exactly the way Job does. The Book of Job must be defined, I believe, as an enormously enlarged psalm of malediction. If Job were a myth, we would only have the viewpoint of the friends.

And finally bringing it back to face the original criticism:

The current critique of violence in the Bible does not suspect that the violence represented in the Bible might also be there in the events behind mythology, although invisible because it is unrepresented. The Bible is the first text to represent victimization from the standpoint of the victim and it is this representation which is responsible, ultimately, for our own superior sensibility to violence. It is not our superior intelligence or sensitivity. The fact that today we can sit in judgment over these texts for their violence is a mystery. No one else has ever done that in the past. It is for biblical reasons, paradoxically, that we criticize the Bible.

-Rene Girard, Violence in Biblical Narrative, Philosophy, Vol. 22, No. 2, October 1999

Now isn’t that ironic? Post-Christian morality bites again! We criticize the bible for being too violent and yet the root of our being appalled at this sort of violence in the first place is… you guesed it – the Bible. Secular humanism is Biblical morality sanitized of diety and metaphysics. Liberal social values were UNTHINKABLE in antiquity because they were only lately derived from the shell of Christianity.

Back to Girard’s essay for a sec. Doesn’t that just lay the smack down hard? So someone comes to trash the word of God and demand some answers. Now you could give them good answers (which exist), or you can kick the table over and show how the very motivation behind their question is sourced in how deeply the Bible has already shaped their ethics and thoughts.

I think this happens all the time. The kinds of questions we care about every day come from Christianity itself and its 2000+ year shaping of our western minds. We find that even when we curse God, we still do so on his own turf.

Update: You can read the full text of Girard’s essay here.