Newly online:

* Ryszard Derdzinski (Juliusz Zebrowski trans.), “On J.R.R. Tolkien’s Roots in Gdansk“, November 2017, PDF online March 2018.

Tolkien knew about the Polish line in his family tree, since he mentioned it in a major speech in 1955…

“I am not a German, though my surname is German … I have inherited with my surname nothing that originally belonged to it in language or culture, and after 200 years the ‘blood’ of Saxony and Poland is probably a negligible physical ingredient” — Tolkien in English and Welsh (1955).

The Saxony bit seems dubious now but is explained by a family tradition, as explained by Carpenter in the 1977 biography…

“Opinion differed among the Tolkiens as to why and when their ancestors had come to England. The more prosaic said it was in 1756 to escape the Prussian invasion of Saxony, where they had lands.”

A 1938 letter by Tolkien (Letters, No. 30) states…

“My great-great-grandfather came to England in the eighteenth century from Germany.”

But according to the new article the paternal line can be traced back to many generations in “Kreuzburg, East Prussia” (aka Kreuzberg, now Slavskoye, Russia). Then in the nearby port city of Gdansk (which “was then Lithuanian”), from where they took ship to London as Lutheran emigres skilled in the furrier trade.

Map: Königsberg is marked with red and Kreuzburg was about 20 miles east of it, about under the “erg” bit of its name label.

According to various historical maps of the tribal migrations, and current thinking on the origins, Kreuzburg was ‘ground zero’ for the bulk of the Gothic tribes. Which at first glance may seem to explain Tolkien’s early interest in them. Either that, or the Polish dimension to his family tree later (circa 1939-55?) came as a wonderful surprise to him — that the Goths who had fascinated him since boyhood emerged into history from exactly the place where his father’s family had originated.

On the other hand, perhaps the surprise of Poland wasn’t found to be very wonderful. Or maybe he never really knew much about or trusted the Poland connection that he evidently knew about in the 1950s. Because he firmly rebuts a late claim that his ‘Saxony’ surname actually originated from Poland…

Letters, No. 349. From a letter to Mrs E. R. Ehrardt, 8th March 1973:

I do not understand why you should wish to associate my name with TOLK, [meaning] an interpreter or spokesman. This is a word of Slavonic origin that became adopted in Lithuanian (TULKAS), Finnish (TULKKI) and in the Scand. langs., and eventually right across N. Germany (linguistically Low German) and finally into Dutch (TOLK). It was never adopted in English.

Thus his boyhood interest in the Goths was not spurred by knowing early on that his paternal family-tree went back to Kreuzburg. This is confirmed by his 1955 letter to Auden stating that his discovery of both Gothic and Finnish were accidents which happened while he was browsing through books out of sheer curiosity…

“I learned Anglo-Saxon at school [in Birmingham] (also Gothic, but that was an accident quite unconnected with the curriculum … 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. … [the fascination with it proved] nearly disastrously as I came very near having my exhibition [i.e. course funding] taken off me if not being sent down [i.e. expelled]. Say 1912 to 1913 [for the first interest in Finnish].” — Letters, No. 163.

The Gothic book had been purchased in error by a Birmingham schoolmate who thought it might help him with his Bible studies, circa 1908-09. It didn’t help, and thus Tolkien — realising what it was — took the book off his hands for a modest sum. One imagines that the first word the tree-loving Tolkien looked up in it was “Tree”. He would have found that in Gothic this was bagyms, and that “the Germanic congates vary in their final syllable”. Old Swedish having Bagyn. Baggins, if you like.

Further reading: “The Realms in Exile: A Historical Origin?”, Amon Hen #204. Discusses the fate of the English exiles after the Norman conquest, who sailed a fleet to Byzantium and established a large and long-standing English colony on the northern shores of the Black Sea. Tolkien would have known of this via the Icelandic Edwardssage (aka Edward’s Saga, or Játvarðarsaga). Not discussed, but looking possible to me, is that after the fall or decay of this colony circa the 14th Century exiles from it may have travelled north to Kiev along the river, and from there to Kreuzburg hoping to take ship back to England. If they only made it that far, and settled there… then the Tolkiens might even have come, in a roundabout way, from English Anglo-Saxon stock.

The far Northern equivalent of the goddess Venus was… drawn through the air by two cats?

Domestic cats are not thought to have been present that far north, at that time, though we know from footprints across wet clay that they were in the British Isles in Roman times. Hence the two grey-white house cats shown here are not likely to have been an accurate depiction, if cats were the correct creatures.

The evidence for cats is usefully sifted by William P. Reaves in his thorough online essay “Freyja’s fressa: A car drawn by cats?”. He concludes that…

“For the car [small chariot] to be drawn by bears, the word köttum would have to be an innovation by Snorri Sturluson, the author of the Prose Edda, based on [his swopping it in for] the word fressa [which could mean either cats or bears] … Based on the available evidence, Freyja most likely rode in a car drawn by a pair of tom-cats (köttom, fressa), either domestic or wild. A likely breed is the Norsk skogkatt or Norwegian forest cat.”

I would only add that the Finnish National Gallery provides a picture of a most elegant alternative to a spitting wildcat, the “Räv-lo i vinterdräkt” (1829) (Rav-lo or Raf-lo in winter coat), a type of large forest lynx with a grey-white winter coat. It seems a most suitable cat to be associated with a northern Venus-equivalent. Apparently the Romans thought stones of amber originated from the urine of such lynx, which may interest some readers in terms of the possibility that the Romans connected amber to Venus and her equivalents. Tacitus knew differently on that matter, knowing that amber must originate in tree secretions, but the mass of Romans who wore amber amulets thought it was the lynx.

As one can see in this ethnography-informed painting, even in modern times these are big kitties, and in older times they were perhaps even larger and deemed by story-tellers to be big enough to pull a small chariot. Recent radio-carbon dating has shown that the Lynx survived in northern Britain until at least the 6th century, and likely also benefited from human wolf-hunting.

One wonders if these cats of Freyja might be akin to the night-seeing “cats of Queen Berúthiel” mentioned by Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings. But no, we now know that’s not the case. As revealed to readers of Unfinished Tales (1980), Berúthiel is a “nefarious, solitary and loveless” southerner and somewhat like Cleopatra in rank. She enslaved cats and used them as spies in the dark. So, not at all the goddess of love and fertility, and much more of a witch-like evil queen character. In an interview in 1966 Tolkien added: “She was one of these people who loathe cats, but cats will jump on them and follow them about”, and thus she enslaved them.

Howard Shore’s superb score for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (the first of the film trilogy) is getting a limited edition pressing of 5,000 copies of a 5 disc set of L.P. records on red vinyl. Probably about as close as you’ll get to having the original master tapes, assuming that red vinyl has the same audio properties as black does. It’s released in April from Rhino, for $120.

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’.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The new edition of the leading journal Tolkien Studies (Volume 14, 2017) appears to be available now at Project MUSE. Not that I’d be able to tell, as it’s pay-walled there. Scholars outside academia and outside the USA have to pony up $70 for a paperback version. $70!

Why is there no ebook version, on Amazon? The editors might be able to make more profit that way, according to my back-of-the-envelope sums. Let’s say they sell 1,000 copies of the $50-$70 paperback and make $38 a copy after printing and overheads. That’s $38,000 profit in maybe 18 months of sales. Let’s say that West Virginia University Press takes a 35% publisher’s cut, thus leaving the editors with about $25k per issue.

But if there was an $8.95 Amazon-delivered ebook giving $6 profit per book, after Amazon’s modest cut, and it sold 5,000 copies (because it was on Amazon, and so cheap and accessible in digital form) then that would give $30k profit in 18 months or so.

Anyway…. the highlights of the issue, for those not interested in the invented languages, are:

* The Mystical Philology of J.R.R. Tolkien and Sir Israel Gollancz: Monsters and Critics. (Update: found in Open Access)
* Visualizing the Word: Tolkien as Artist and Writer. [Update: found a summary on the author’s blog]
* The Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies 2014. (The usual lengthy and authoritative survey review)

Project MUSE does at least have the first page of each of these, for free.

“Tolkien fan science and the flora of Middle-earth“, musing on a just-published Oxford University Press book Flora of Middle-Earth: Plants of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium.

“The book’s thoroughness and detail is exhilarating. Though most of the information it offers can be found in field guides, encyclopedias, and other reference sources, I did not really appreciate the variety of plants Tolkien portrays in his world until I read it. Sated with Tolkien’s love of trees and his obsession with climatic and ecological details, a reader can easily overlook the diversity and careful placement of Middle-earth’s plant-life. Flowers and shrubs are everywhere, from Bagshot Row to Morgul Vale. The biomes of Tolkien’s world show a profound ecological insight, from the First Age through to the Fourth.”

Yet… “it is unlikely to attract many botanists or Tolkienists, much less casual readers. A passion project it proceeds, seemingly without care for an audience, shoring its opinions with insouciance and data.”

Sounds absolutely wonderful. However, on closer perusal on Amazon I definitely don’t like the rather chilly and dour b&w woodcut style of Graham Judd’s illustrations, which doesn’t reflect the warm and enticing cover illustration. Good for researchers, though.

Update: Having seen it I really can’t recommend it for most, due to the choice of interior art style. Vastly better for most people will be the beautiful and warm book The Plants of Middle-earth. Perhaps accompanied, if a gift for a bloke, by Pipe-smoking in Middle-earth.

I’m pleased to see that the “J.R.R. Tolkien in Staffordshire” touring exhibition reaches the Brampton Museum soon, opening there on Saturday 24th June and running until 22nd July 2017. It’s my nearest venue, and I’ll be popping along at some point.

“Brampton Museum” seems to be a fairly new moniker for the museum, and as such won’t be recognised by many. When I first saw the name on the list I assumed it must be some obscure rural Staffordshire village. It’s actually the council-run museum in Newcastle-under-Lyme, located in Brampton Park on the northern edge of the town centre.

I see there’s also a talk in Newcastle-under-Lyme from the active local branch of The Western Front Association. Dave Robbie will talk on ‘J. R. R. Tolkien and The Great War’, 10th July 2017, 7pm until 9pm at “Newcastle Methodist Church”. That could be one of many such Methodist churches, but judging by the map on the website it’s the former church lecture hall in Merrial St., close to the Council offices…

I vaguely seem to recall that this is used by the ‘University of the Third Age’ crowd, so this must be it.

Possibly there will be other such talks and events in the town. “Tolkien in Staffordshire” is not a major show in size, but I happen to know that the assistant at the town’s Museum is a big Tolkien fan. So possibly there will be add-on events around the exhibition.

John Garth profiles his Tolkien at Exeter College: Birth of a legend in his blog. A very good booklet as far as it goes, and the scholarship is of course sound. It’s well worth getting if you’re interested in the pre-war Tolkien, but be aware that there are huge gaps and elisions.