Monthly Archives: January 2018

Mothlach

by David Haden

Mothlach was a word in old Irish, meaning “rough, bushy, tangled, scraggy”, with the implication of a type of scrubbily wooded place. With the variant Mothrach being the name for an equivalent woody tangled place if the place were persistently wet and damp, such as an overgrown wet hollow.

In Welsh it took the form of the very similar mwthlach, meaning a tangled and scrubby bit of overgrown ground. Later, and within living memory in the 1900s, it was applied in parts of Wales to a soft person who was a bit of a ‘walking heap’. Presumably with the implication that a few moths or flies might be flitting about them.

The words are mentioned by Sir John Rhys in his Celtic folklore, Welsh and Manx (1901, in two volumes, I and II), and I found the variant Mothrach in an earlier Irish dictionary. There was also the related meaning of murlach from the Isle of Islay, as ‘woman having an ugly head of hair’.

I can’t discover scholars noting a link to the Norse Myrkviðr (Anglicised as Mirkwood by Scott, Powell, William Morris and then picked up by Tolkien), but the meaning is broadly similar if on a much larger scale. Myrkviðr being a “dark boundary-forest” (Tolkien) which is “untracked” (Drout, J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, p. 430) and thus implicitly defensive in military terms. Drout refers to the deeper…

   proto-Indo European roots for *mer– “to flicker,” with derivatives indicating dim states of illumination, and *merg-, “boundary, mark, border”

Interesting. Moths flicker in dim illumination, and recent linguistic scholarship seems to confirm the ‘soul’ cultural connotations…

   “certain other small, often winged, creatures are marked as special by the fact that their death, unlike that of “normal” animals, can be described with forms based on the Proto-Indo-European root *mer– (as in Lat. morior), otherwise reserved for humans.” (Anatolisch und Indogermanisch, 2001, Indogermanische Gesellschaft Kolloquium, page 209)

Those “certain other small, often winged, creatures”… again that sounds to me like moths. The ecological habitat of a dark “trackless” wood, windless and “rough, bushy, tangled, scraggy”, would certainly be conducive to abundant moth-life. One wonders if there was an ancient perception that moths were “already-dead things” or linked with human death? I found immediate confirmation of this notion via a quick search…

   “folklore describes moths or butterflies — and occasionally, bees — which appear after a person’s death and which hold their escaping soul.” Source: Henderson, George. Survivals in Belief Among the Celts. Glasgow: James MacLeose and Sons, 1911 (in The Encyclopedia of Celtic Mythology and Folklore, 2014).

This reminded me of my recent and similar musing on a local instance in which a ‘lady well’ spirit was referred to with the curious phrase “or else an insect” by a local informant.

This brings me neatly back to Rhys’s authoritative Celtic Folklore, in which I found Mothlach. Elsewhere, on page 612 of volume 2, he notes…

   “Cornish tradition applies the term ‘pisky‘ both to the fairies and to moths, believed in Cornwall by many to be departed souls. So in Ireland: a certain reverend gentleman named Joseph Ferguson, writing in 1810 a statistical account of the parish of Ballymoyer, in the county of Armagh, states that one day a girl chasing a butterfly was chid [chided] by her companions, who said to her: ‘That may be the soul of your grandmother.’ This idea, to survive, has modified itself into a belief less objectionably pagan, that a butterfly hovering near a corpse is a sign of its everlasting happiness. … it is also stated that the country people in Yorkshire used to give the name of souls to certain night-flying white moths.”

In which case the dense tangled woods that defensively surrounded hill-forts such as The Wrekin…

   “according to him [Caesar] the British idea of a town or fortress was a place with a tangled wood round it, and fortified with a rampart and ditch” (Sir John Rhys, Celtic Britain, page 53)

… might have been understood by the ancient inhabitants to be flickering at night with the souls of their recent ancestors. And these large white moths would have visited for nectar the first wood anemones — wind-stars or windflowers in the Midlands. These beautiful flowers are the first and commonest woodland flowers of the year and are likewise white, since they have no need to attract day-time insects (there are none at that time of year). The wearing of these wood anemone flowers on the lapel or in the hair was recorded by late English folklorists as deeming bad luck, and I wonder of this was originally due to their cultural association with attracting the souls of the dead (in moth form)? In this they would be rather like Tolkien’s grave-associated Simbelmyne white flowers, which likewise grow at the edge of a large hill-fort.

Sadly the excellent word mothlach doesn’t appear to have survived into English, its meaning having been superseded in use by common Norse and French words. Although in meaning “tangled, scraggy” it has a likeness to the disused Old English mothfret, meaning something moth-eaten. To say today that an item of clothing had been found to be “moth-fretted” would still be understood in modern English.

Lastly, if someone wanted a title for an eclectic magazine or academic journal then Mothlach might serve.

All around the Wrekin

by David Haden

My Birmingham grandmother, who grew up in rural mid-Staffordshire, used a common Staffordshire and Shropshire phrase meaning ‘going all around-about on foot, in a long and tangled journey back to where you started’. This was “all around the Wrekin”. The same phrase was also used to refer to a person who verbally rambles, taking a long time to say something that could be said more directly.

The Wrekin [ree-kin] in question is a famous and impressive hill-fort of the Cornovii in nearby Shropshire, on the Welsh Marches. Its size and location indicates it was their most significant tribal centre, although they were probably still somewhat seasonally nomadic in terms of having summer and winter palaces…

[Caesar] “had ample opportunities of observing the appearance of the country, and of learning much about the inhabitants … He considered the country very thickly inhabited, and the abundance of cattle to be deserving of notice. The buildings he saw resembled those of Gaul, and were very numerous, but according to him the British idea of a town or fortress was a place with a tangled wood [the mwthlach or mothlach] round it, and fortified with a rampart and ditch; inside this they would, as Strabo tells us, build their huts and collect their cattle, but not with a view of remaining there long.” (Sir John Rhys, Celtic Britain, page 53)

These are the words of J.R.R. Tolkien’s early inspiration on matters Celtic, Sir John Rhys. He published an essay on the Wrekin and its various linguistics in 1908, and this is now online: “All around the Wrekin”, Y Cymmrodor XXI, printed November 1908.

Tolkien was familiar with Rhys from a young age. He had read Rhys’s Celtic Britain (probably in the second edition of 1884) as a boy in Birmingham. Later he very likely sat in on Rhys’s series of lectures at Jesus College, Oxford, even though Tolkien was then at another Oxford college and the lectures were not required for his degree. There is, however, no evidence that I know of that the Wrekin was “the inspiration for Middle-earth” — a claim made in local Tourist Board piffle.

Rhys’s essay on the Wrekin mostly delves very deeply in the history and word-meanings, and is as digressive as its title suggests. But everyday readers may be interested to know that, buried deep among the dense philology, Rhys notes (page 11) a similar surviving phrase of the 1900s…

“a local toast in our day describes [the district] comprehensively as: “All friends round the Wrekin”.”

Rhys passes this swiftly by and he assumes the phrase was a conflation of the people of the district with the district itself. In effect a phrase meaning that: ‘all are friends who live around the Wrekin’, because from a common stock. But the use of the phrase in print, as a dedication for the book The Recruiting Officer (1706), seems to me to indicate that it then meant something slightly different: ‘too many friends to go all-around and mention each person by name’. In the era of heavy-drinking banquets, this would have been a convenient and welcome phrase for a toast-giver, getting him out of having to remember and recount a string of names while drunk. And risk mispronouncing or forgetting people’s names. This meaning is then congruent with the modern use of “all around the Wrekin” meaning someone who verbally rambles. In effect, at a banquet it would have been easily remembered shorthand for: ‘Here’s a toast to all my friends… but I won’t go all around the Wrekin, by trying to mention each of them by name’.

One might recall Bilbo’s party speech here, at the start of The Lord of the Rings, when he thanks the…

“”Bagginses and Boffins … Tooks and Brandybucks, and Grubbs, and Chubbs, and Burrowses, and Hornblowers, and Bolgers, Bracegirdles, Goodbodies, Brockhouses and Proudfoots …” Why couldn’t he stop talking and let them drink his health?”

The more casual reader of Rhys’s essay may also find useful his appendix, where in three pages he deftly summarises a long scholarly monograph on the name Wrekin: in Mercian the name was Wreocen, going back to a Celtic Wrikon-. Later authors (1949, 1963) have tentatively suggested a relation of Wrikon- to the Welsh gwrygio, meaning something like ‘to wax (grow, swell) strong and manly | to exert strength and thus thrive’.

The cost of roaming the fields

by David Haden

From a blog post I noted while searching, “A reviewer’s complaint”…

Thomas Honegger [in 2015, complained of Tolkien] scholars unaware of major and basic work in the areas they are covering. “How are we going to advance Tolkien studies if scholars in the field are ignorant of each others research?”

Well, I know how and why this happened. It’s the explosion in the size of our field.

I’d also suggest it’s the cost, and sometimes the difficulty, of obtaining the needed items. To obtain the “little opinion piece by Thomas Honegger”, for instance, I’d need to spend £20 plus postage for a print copy of a little-known German scholarly journal. Since I don’t need anything else that’s in the journal issue, and a quarter of the essays are in German anyway, £20 is not an enticing price.

Let’s say that one wishes to make a basic start in Tolkien scholarship. That’s a little less daunting than starting on someone comparable like H.P. Lovecraft, since Tolkien scholarship is not so saddled with rare book collectors (Tolkien collectors are only interested in what Tolkien wrote, not what’s been written about him). Even so, a basic small shelf for Tolkien is probably around £500. That’s less than the perhaps-£800 you’d need to make a start on Lovecraft and do proper fannish scholarship (not the risible slander which Lovecraft usually gets from fly-by university professors). But with Tolkien, the somewhat lower per-item costs are then balanced out by the larger range of items you’d need to see a clear outline of the field. There are also higher ongoing costs to keep up with the ongoing wash of Tolkien scholarship, compared to the relatively small trickle of annual Lovecraft scholarship (the valiant efforts of S.T. Joshi and co. aside) that’s worth reading. There is admittedly a very good survey in each annual issue of Tolkien Studies, but just acquiring the last four issues of Tolkien Studies would cost me $280.

Such startup costs would be no problem for an academic on a whopping £38,000+ a year, or even for an £18k funded PhD who has miraculously found a friendly librarian with ample funds for inter-library loans and book purchases. But even an initial £500 outlay would be daunting for most impoverished independent scholars. Especially as that initial £500 would soon need to be matched by another £500 for runs of paper journals, books and obscure out-of-print items. Even if one was very frugal, and also knew how and where to hunt items online, and how best to wrangle with Google Books etc, one could still end up having to spend at least £300 on ‘needed item’ print books. All in order to write a new book that may only sell 30 copies and get one review.

The other problem, in terms of Honegger’s complaint, may be the cost of getting a detailed pre-publication reader’s report from someone at the top of the field. Thus enabling one to sidestep the sort of small snags that so antagonise reviewers in the field. Perhaps Tolkien studies now needs some kind of subsidised pre-publication peer review system, for substantial new books from outside the academy. Or one might publish the PDF online for free for 18 months, with a public “call for comments” and commenting system, then publish a revised and corrected final-version in print two years later.

Mary Flynn in Stoke

by David Haden

“Farewell to Faha’s Friend”, the orthopaedic nurse Mary Flynn…

“Last week the small community of Faha outside Kilmacthomas [County Waterford, Ireland] mourned the death of one of its oldest and longest residents.

[When young] Mary and [her sister] Philomena found it difficult to get [nursing] work experience at home [in Co. Waterford, deep in rural Ireland]. Undeterred, they decided to travel to England to seek work, heading for Stoke-on-Trent where their aunt worked as a radiographer and a ward sister in City General Hospital. Mary had embarked on the daunting journey firstly, followed shortly afterwards by Philomena.

With little money and no modern telecommunications, they travelled to Dún Laoghaire to catch a ferry to Holyhead [in north Wales], a train to Crewe, and another train to Stoke-on-Trent. Travelling outside Waterford for the first time, Mary and Philomena faced many challenges but recounted their time in England with fond memories. Mary spoke of nursing the late English soccer international Sir Stanley Matthews, widely regarded as one of the greatest ever players of the game in Britain.”

A wander in the Morlock Mountains

by David Haden

I’ve been reading the new essay by H.L. Spencer, “The mystical philology of J. R. R. Tolkien and Sir Israel Gollancz: monsters and critics”. One of the things I was pleased to learn was that Tolkien seems to have known Wells’s The Time Machine, on the genesis of which I’ve recently written a book. The evidence for Tolkien having read The Time Machine is that he wrote a poem, circa 1927, which satirised the fearsomeness of “exalted” academics by describing them in proto-Gollum terms. In both person and topography, since they live underground and beyond the “Morlock Mountains”. The reference being, of course, to the Morlocks — the devolved subterraneans in Wells’s The Time Machine.

This poem was titled “Knocking at the Door” and subtitled: “Lines Induced by Sensation When Waiting for an Answer at the Door of an Exalted Academic Person”. It was published 18th February 1937 in The Oxford Magazine (page 403, as ‘Oxymore’). Sadly it seems The Oxford Magazine is not online, and the original version of the poem seems not to be available online in any form.

The 1962 version is however online on YouTube, in several readings, and also at the Tolkien Gateway in text form. Here are the final verses…

The cellars where the Mewlips sit
Are deep and dank and cold
With single sickly candle lit;
And there they count their gold.

Their walls are wet, their ceilings drip;
Their feet upon the floor
Go softly with a squish-flap-flip,
As they sidle to the door.

They peep out slyly; through a crack
Their feeling fingers creep,
And when they’ve finished, in a sack
Your bones they take to keep.

Beyond the Merlock Mountains, a long and lonely road,
Through the spider-shadows and the marsh of Tode,
And through the wood of hanging trees and gallows-weed,
You go to find the Mewlips – and the Mewlips feed.

The similarity to “flap-flip”-footed Gollum, in his bone-strewn cave under the mountains, should be obvious. So it’s interesting that Gollum could have started off as a prototype as early as 1927 and in the form of a satire on slippery student-gobbling “exalted” academics. H.L. Spencer explores the possibility that the academic who Tolkien had in mind was his rival at the time for Gawain, Sir Israel Gollancz. But finds the evidence rather vague, and offers some counter-evidence on Tolkien’s sentiments at the time. It’s difficult to tell, without seeing the original poem. For instance, was “And there they count their gold.” in the 1937 original? [Update: no, it wasn’t] Or was it something more academic, like “And there they scratch so bold.”?

The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion & Guide comments on the later version of the poem, that…

“Knocking at the Door seems to be a comment on the trepidation of a student calling on a professor; transformed into The Mewlips and divorced from its original meaning, it is a work purely of mood and imagination.”

To be specific, it was re-titled, stripped of its explanatory sub-title and apparently re-worked (how much?) for children, and thus tamed. It was reprinted as “The Mewlips” in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (1962).

H. L. Spencer usefully comments in a footnote in the essay, that…

“The Mewlips are later said to live beyond the ‘Merlock Mountains’; in the original [1927/1937] version, these are the ‘Morlock Mountains’, referring to H. G. Wells’s cannibalistic underground creatures”.

I’d add that this shift from Morlock to Merlock also shifts the register from the Biblical (Morlock recalls Moloch) to the Arthurian (Merlock recalls Merlin). I’ve discussed Wells’s Biblical Moloch link at length, in my recent book on the genesis of The Time Machine. One then has to suspect that Tolkien easily spotted that Wells was quietly referencing Moses and Moloch worship throughout The Time Machine, and would thus have puzzled out all the subtle re-uses of such Biblical elements and names. In which case he knew that Morlock must recall Moloch for the fellows of Oxford who read The Oxford Magazine, which must then key the poem’s theme to the similar and well-known forms of Moloch worship. This can then be seen to tie in with certain other aspects of the information given in H. L. Spencer’s essay, and even with a certain gruesome later development in Gollum’s back-story as given in The Lord of the Rings.

Also interestingly, Tolkien’s apparent reading of The Time Machine, if in perhaps circa 1924/25, would have been closely paralleled by H. P. Lovecraft reading The Time Machine for the first time in New York during November 1924.1 It’s strange to think of them as such contemporaries in horror, like that. Shortly after experiencing the underground cannibalistic Morlocks, Lovecraft writes “The Horror at Red Hook” (underground, child sacrifice), and Tolkien writes “Knocking at the Door” (underground, student-eating).

1. Lovecraft thought Wells was a tedious and canting socialist, which he was by that point. Thus Lovecraft avoided his books. But a young protege of Lovecraft was making a collection of very early SF, then largely forgotten, with the aid of the used bookshops of New York City. He encouraged the master to at least read The Time Machine.

Tolkien at Leeds, July 2018

by David Haden

A wealth of Tolkien sessions, at the International Medieval Congress 2018 at the Leeds Hilton in the UK (2nd – 3rd July). The most interesting papers for me would be those on the deeper historical context, in “Tolkien: Medieval Roots and Modern Branches, II” on Tuesday 3rd July: “Tolkien’s Agrarianism in its Time” (hopefully surveying the verdant undergrowth of nature-thinking, land reform concerns and organicist living that informed radical politics from the 1920s onwards), and “A Man of His Time?: Tolkien and the Edwardian Worldview”. Rather too expensive for me, though, just to hear those two papers: £35 + a £45 train fare to arrive after noon = £80.

Free: “The mystical philology of J. R. R. Tolkien and Sir Israel Gollancz”

by David Haden

Excellent, I’ve found the essay “The mystical philology of J. R. R. Tolkien and Sir Israel Gollancz: monsters and critics”. It’s in full-text Open Access at the Oxford University Research Archive. No need to pay $70 for it, in a copy of the latest edition of Tolkien Studies where it forms the lead essay.

I also found a summary on the author’s blog of the other interesting essay “Visualizing the Word: Tolkien as Artist and Writer”.

Though sadly the volume also contains the desirable “The Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies 2014”, which isn’t going to be Open Access any time soon.

Map of the Arthurian Regions, 1910

by David Haden

Bartholemew’s 1910 map of the Arthurian Regions. Public Domain.

Interesting, but now seems a bit wayward in places. Chester as Caerleon? Some places, such as Wolverhampton, are presumably there only for orientation. The location of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Staffordshire Moorlands, was only discovered by scholars many decades later.

Britannia

by David Haden

I’m usually very sceptical of me-too Game of Thrones knock-offs, but the new Britannia series (starting tomorrow night) intrigues. Sky Atlantic’s new series is about the Roman conquest of Britain. It’s from a very good writer and team, which is encouraging, but sadly the rival BBC’s Radio Times reports today that…

“there’s a decidedly contemporary feel to the drama”

Oh well. I guess the actors weren’t up to quite that much period acting, consistently and across the entire cast. That’s an understandable approach in terms of cohering a sprawling historical epic, I suppose.

The costumes and make-up and props do look fabulous. Lots of mud n’ blood, apparently, of course. No fantasy dragons, but fantastical special effects are said to come from the psychedelic mushroom-chomping of the two local tribes. It’ll be interesting to see how deeply the series explores and visualises the animistic and land-magic angles.

Sadly the quotas and subsidies mean that its nine parts (some sources say ten) had to be filmed in the Czech Republic, with only small bits filmed in Wales. But hopefully it’ll stimulate more public awareness of the Iron Age in the British Isles. The tribes in the first series are the Cantii (Kent) and the Regni (roughly Sussex and Surrey). So they’re actually fairly civilised continental tribes of the Gaulish type (from where modern Belgium is, roughly), who had crossed over and occupied that part of our south coast about 170 years before the Romans arrived, and who had thus displaced the native British (the latest genetic testing suggests, up toward what is now London and over toward Devon/Cornwall).

So the Romans in the series are first encountering Gaulish Belgic recent-incomer tribes, relatively civilised tribes of the sort they’ve already become very familiar with on the continent. As Julius Caesar had noted of the tribes some ten years earlier, from his first-hand experience…

“those that inhabit the lands of the Cantii [Kent] are the most civilized and it is a wholly maritime region. These Cantii differ but little from the [continental] Gauls in habits of life. But [by contrast,] many of the inland Britons do not grow corn. They live on milk and flesh and are clothed in skins. All the Britons stain their persons with a dye that produces a blue colour. This gives them a more terrible aspect in battle.”

So how historically correct Britannia will be remains to be seen. Will the wild indigenous Britons be lurking mysteriously in the background, or will the “most civilized” Gaulish Cantii and the Regni be given wilder British aspects for dramatic purposes?

Katherine Thomson (1797–1862)

by David Haden

I’ve found another Stoke writer. Katherine Thomson (1797–1862) was the seventh daughter of Thomas Byerley of Etruria. She compiled many ‘memoir biographies’, and wrote a string of historical novels. Here is The Chevalier : A Romance of the Rebellion of 1745 (1844), with a description of Hartshill…

“It was more than two days’ journey before the famous hill, called Mow Corp, at the foot of which lies Congleton, rose, darkened by the bilberry wires which dotted its sides, before the view of the travellers. They had journeyed along through what is now a defaced, and revolting country [the Jacobites had reached Macclesfield, but the town did not welcome the invading Jacobites and was murderously hostile]; amid hills, now obscured by volumes of the darkest smoke [a sign of pillaging Jacobites, seizing supplies], and vales … [They arrive at the industrialising Potteries, which in 1745 was pre-Wedgwood] standing on the ridge of the valley of Stoke, you may see countless chimneys vieing in height … The Trent [below was] narrow in this part of its course, where it has but lately quitted its source, wound through fertile fields, and beneath, at this point, a gentle rise, upon which, not many weeks since, wavy corn had been growing attracted the eye. A windmill stood on this fair bank, bearing the name of Harts-hill, just by a group of dark pines which rose against the blue sky. … Only a few days ago, the Trent had reflected that blue sky, that grove of pines, and the withies that grew on its bank. It was now fringed with a row of tents; the vale was speckled over with the [English army] camp, and its appurtenances. Horses were fording the shallow Trent; women were washing linen low down in the [Fowlea] stream; pennons [i.e.: war pennants] were waving in the breeze; the miller at Hartshill was weighing out his corn to the ravenous tyrants of the [English army] commissariat; beasts were penned in folds, in the grassy fields. The inconveniences of war were manifest … ”

The windmill was later the site of Holy Trinity church at Hartshill.

Thompson followed this two years later with a three-volume Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745, outlining from first-hand accounts the local manoeuvring of the armies…

The Duke therefore assumed the command of an army ten thousand strong [to prevent the Jacobites reaching Lichfield, and thus the road to London.] The Duke of Cumberland was by no means so ignorant of the force which he was now destined to attack [as he] had become acquainted with the peculiar mode of fighting practised by the Highlanders …

At Macclesfield, Prince Charles gained the intelligence that the Duke of Cumberland … was quartered at Lichfield, Coventry, Stafford, and Newcastle-under-Line.

The Prince then resolved to go direct to Derby; and it was to conceal his design, and to induce the Duke to collect his whole army at Lichfield, that [his man] Lord George Murray marched with a division of the army to Congleton, which was the road to Lichfield. Congleton, being on the borders of Staffordshire, was sufficiently near Newcastle-under-Line for Lord George to send General Ker to that place to gain intelligence of the enemy. General Ker advanced to a village about three miles from Newcastle [which would suggest Burslem?], and very nearly surprised a body of dragoons, who had only time to make off. … [Cumberland then decided to try to force a battle, meeting the invading Jacobites just outside Stone rather than Lichfield, but the battle there never materialised].

Upon the third of December, Lord George Murray with his division of the [Jacobite] army marched by Leek to Ashbourn; and the Prince, with the rest of the [Jacobite] forces, came from Macclesfield to Leek, where, considering the distance of the two columns of his army, and the neighbourhood of the enemy, he naturally considered his situation as somewhat precarious. It was possible for the enemy, by a night-march, to get betwixt the two columns; and, contemplating this danger, the Prince set out at midnight to Ashbourn, where it was conceived that the forces should proceed in one body towards Derby. “Thus,” remarks a modern historian, “two armies in succession had been eluded by the Highlanders; that of Wade at Newcastle, in consequence of the weather or the old Marshal’s inactivity, and that of Cumberland” … The young Prince [and] this gallant but trifling force was enabled to return to Scotland … scarcely ever was there a handful of valiant men placed in a situation of more imminent peril.