I made an interesting and expenses-paid trip to Oxford today, for the Tolkien exhibition. On arrival I was glad to be able to thoroughly peruse the two new Tolkien books. The bookshop there had open inspection copies. The small £12 paperback, which I thought I wanted, proved only to be a cut-down of the full £25 ‘book of the exhibition’.

Thus I came away with the big £25 paperback version (above), and perused it on the train home to Stoke. I’m already very pleased with it, even on ‘a first flip’ and without the good reading-glasses. The book is almost as good as seeing the exhibition itself, I’d say, if you can’t get there. More so in many ways, because it’s fairly dark in the gallery for archival reasons, and no photography is allowed. Plus it was also very crowded (caused by people lingering, without being ushered out, and the next lot of people coming in behind). I dodged around and stayed in for about two hours. Excellent, though the religion is of course unmentionable.

Curiously Amazon UK only has the hardback of the £25 book. And they mis-state the page-count as 288 pages. It’s actually a hefty 416 pages, not including fold-out card covers. I’m assuming here that the Bodleian Library are not selling some super-sized special edition that’s only available in their shop.

Anyway for the edition I had… lovely paper, great design and printing, though I felt it was too often ‘padded’ in terms of the layout. I could have cut it down by 24 pages, with no loss of anything except pointless empty white space, and saved a few trees.

It was fascinating to see the size of certain things in the exhibition, including the “Book of Ishness”. I saw Tolkien’s painting “Eeriness” (January 1914) for the first time, showing ‘trees with reaching hands’ decades before the Old Forest and Ents. It was also good to finally see his painting “Beyond” (January 1914) in colour. The pyramids are blue and the star is red, not what you might expect of what (in black & white) appears to be a straight desert pyramids scene. Both are in the book in colour. “Beyond” may have been in the exhibition, but if so then I couldn’t find it.

The £25 book also has the first page (1913) of Tolkien’s ‘hours’ logging book’, by which he proved to Edith that he was working hard as promised.

I also saw the frontage of Exeter College, and even stepped through an open gate-door and thus saw the lawned quadrangle for a minute before the security guard appeared. Sadly the around-the-corner doorway to the Fellows’ Garden was as close as I got to the garden, though one could just about see the trees.

The Museum of the History of Science was also visited, in terms of the ground floor and upper floor permanent exhibitions (the temporary political shows in the basement were skipped). I was pleased to see they allow non-flash photography (a policy nowhere stated on their website). I got a couple of nice macro pictures with my pocket digicam (stabilised by slightly resting the lens rim on the glass case, no flash)…

Astronomical Compendium, by Humfrey Cole, London, 1568 (Inventory Number: 36313, Museum of the History of Science, Oxford).

And they had a loan of the late Danish clogg almanac, which makes an interesting comparison with the Staffordshire Clogg Almanacs I’ve previously blogged about here…

All three Oxford pictures in this particular blog post are placed under Creative Commons Attribution.

Maps for Saxon Britain and Norman Britain. From Charles H. Pearson, Historical Maps of England, 1883, third edition revised.

At the edge of The Peak, “Badecan Wyl” is ‘Badecan’s Well’, or today the town of Bakewell.

New Tolkien letter(s) at auction, with an interesting quote being given from one letter…

“I can only hope that the ancient proverb (attributed to King Alfred): ‘When the bale is at the highest, then the boot (betterment) is ever highest’ may prove in your case true.”

Old English bale appears to have been mostly a shorthand for ‘tormenting woe, caused by deliberate mischief and wickedness – usually arising from hate, envy and similar’. Could also include actual wounds and bodily binding arising from the same.

It was obsolete by the mid 1500s, but the use of baleful survived in poetry and today that word can still be used and understood in poetry and fantasy literature. Usefully in the descriptive context of a character or animal only having one eye, and that eye having a ‘baleful’ aspect to it. Or a star of ill-omen having a similar ‘baleful’ aspect to it.

Boot is interesting. We still have something like boot in the modern ‘booty’, meaning gathered-up and taken-away treasure. The getting of which would of course lead to betterment, enrichment.

But boot is not in Bosworth-Toller, and instead one needs to search for bót, ‘mending, repair, remedy, improvement’ (also compensation).

The original saying is found in the The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, Volume 3…

When the bale is hest,
Thenne is the bote nest.

Which indicates that it’s one of the sayings attributed to a wise-man named “Hendyng”, who thrived in the mid 1200s in what is now the West Midlands.

Some of the Hendyng translations at ‘The Complete Harley’ seem a bit off, seemingly skewed by the later interpretive verses that precede each saying. For instance, the horse one makes more sense and is wiser and more wryly Midlands-y as: “He is free of his horse, who never had one.” But the “boot” saying is translated there as:

“When the pain is highest,
Then is the remedy nighest”

The word bale here is presumably being translated as ‘pain’ due to the context supplied by the preceding words. But that seems only partly justified by the context, which is evidently using ‘pain’ as a shorthand for what is expanded a few words later as treye ant tene, ‘trouble and grief’, rather than as a precise pain-word meaning ‘bodily agony’. Thus the translation of bale as ‘pain’ risks misleading the modern reader. Given this, and Tolkien’s suggestion of ‘betterment’ for boot, a translation might better run:

  When the woe is worst,
  Then betterment is not far off.

In modern parlance, something like:

  When things are really bad,
  It can only get better.

Which means it’s not quite the same in sentiment as the similar modern saying…

“Every cloud has a silver lining”.

It’s a little more active that that. The ‘betterment’ here comes from the anticipation that there will soon be ‘action in-the-world’ to fix things and to actively restore things to how they were before. On the other hand the modern understanding of “Every cloud has a silver lining” suggests more of a time-delayed ‘mental reconsideration and re-framing’ of, and ‘learning from’, the misfortune. Something which then potentially leads to the discovery of a new unexpected element in the resolving situation. The addition of this unexpected element then actually makes things better than they were before.

Four handy online dictionaries or lookups, for those studying historical aspects of the British Isles…

Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary online.

Digital Index of Middle English Verse.

GPC : Dictionary of the Welsh Language.

eDIL : Electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language.

Coming in June 2018, Humphrey Carpenter’s J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography done as an unabridged 10-hour audiobook.

And at the start of August, Tolkien: Treasures, a 144-page coffee-table book from the Bodleian Library… “that showcases the highlights of the Tolkien archives held at the Bodleian”.

Then later in August, The Fall of Gondolin.

New on the National Catholic Register: “J.R.R. Tolkien and the Birmingham Oratory”.

“Arriving in Birmingham, England’s second city — population in its metropolitan area in excess of 3 million people — I was dismayed to find that the city did not possess a Tourist Information Centre. Not a formal one, at any rate — there is an informal one in the City Library though. It was there I asked for information on the “Tolkien Trail.” The answer I received only increased my dismay: “Is that in Birmingham?”

Yup, that’s Brum city centre and the local council apparatchiks, alright. Apparently it’s been like that for years, with the default position (before the current utter unknowing) being: get the Tolkien freaks on the bus to south Birmingham…

“…when I sent media graduate Alma Sanz Fazio in there recently as a test, she was told to catch a bus to either Sarehole Mill (even though it doesn’t reopen until the spring) or Hall Green Library. What a welcome for a first time visitor from Madrid.”

Difficult to avoid the feeling that some of this attitude from the Council is snidely political. Anyway, the lesson is: do your research before you arrive at a place, including virtually ‘walking the route’ by using Google StreetView.

What are ‘the Tolkien basics’ of the West Midlands, then, if you don’t have much time? This is how I’d do what’s still there and is worth seeing. Given that so much has been swept away, there are some ‘maybe’-places and substituted ‘equivalents’.

1. Early morning train from London to Birmingham. Walk from Birmingham New St. station to the Birmingham Museum & Art gallery for the Pre-Raphaelite and Burne Jones collections, Birmingham city centre. (There’s no proof that he and the TCBS were influenced by this world-class collection, as schoolboys. But the long-gone school was at the other end of the street from the gallery, and how could a group plotting a resurrection of the English spirit never have seen this collection?)

I’d skip Moseley in the south of Birmingham entirely, especially if you have to struggle to get there by a bus grinding down the main road (very bad idea). Though the Moseley Bog can ‘have its moments’, if visited in a sunny springtime on a quiet weekday.

2. Uber from the city centre out to the Birmingham Oratory and perhaps a peep at the nearby 4 Highfield Road site. (I have found one mention, as aside in a blog post, that as a boy the young “Tolkien served Fr. Morgan’s Mass daily”, but I’ve never seen any scholarly reference to that apparent fact or its source). The devout may also want to then go on to the Catholic Cathedral. Again, no proof I know of that he was ever actually at the Cathedral, but how could he not have ever been there?

3. Train from Birmingham New St. to Stafford. Once beyond Wolverhampton, you’ll get a flavour of the mid Staffordshire lowland countyside from the windows. Then at Stafford you’d walk away from what has to be ugliest train station in England (sorry!), and through the pretty and safe adjacent river-park, for lunch at The Soup Kitchen. This is on the principle that the Soup Kitchen is about as close as you’ll get, in wood-panelling / atmosphere / uniformed waitress service, to the long-gone Barrow’s Stores tea-rooms in Birmingham in which the TCBS would meet. Then an Uber from Stafford out to the nearby Great Haywood in mid-Staffordshire.

4. The sites of his First World War camps on Cannock Chase, near to Great Haywood. The Essex Bridge, though trees now mean that Shugborough Hall can no longer be seen from the bridge approach.

5. Uber back to Stafford train station then on north to Stoke-on-Trent train station. An Uber for a quick look at 104 Hartshill Road in Stoke and perhaps the pleasant back part of the Butts where he learned to shoot live rounds with his rifle. Then hop back in the Uber and out of Stoke and up into ‘The Gawain country’ around Wetton Mill and up onto Cauldon Low for a sunset look at the barrow-downs in the west of the Peak District (don’t get trapped by the fog!). Again, there’s no proof he was ever there. But it seems difficult to imagine that (if he thought the North Staffordshire claims for Gawain worth considering) he didn’t venture up there during his holidays in Stoke, to see the landscape of the Gawain text he’d spent much of his life working on.

6. Back to Stoke-on-Trent in the dusk and catch the direct two-hour inter-city train to Oxford. Do Oxford the next day (perhaps two days), then back to London.

New Addenda and Corrigenda for the “now so big, it’s square-shaped!” new edition of the J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide.

If your letter box and/or wrists can’t quite cope with such hefty slabs, I see there are now Kindle ebook tablet editions of the 2017 edition. Although these don’t show up as links from Amazon’s hardback/boxed-set page. Here are the links to the ebooks:

* Volume 1: Chronology (£24)

* Volume 2: Reader’s Guide – PART 1 (£5)

* Volume 3: Reader’s Guide – PART 2 (£24)

So £53 for the lot. Not bad, and on the Kindle these are also keyword-searchable to boot (albeit individually, rather than all three at once — I know of no tool that will index across multiple .mobi files, even they were to be DRM free).

What is the difference between Reader’s Guide – PART 1 and PART 2? The publisher’s description is useless on that point. But thankfully there’s a view of the Contents page on Google Books:

Apparently the Index in Vol. 1 and Vol. 3 are both duplicates of each other, and presumably they refer to the pages of the print version.

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.