I’ve now seen the 10% free sample for David Day’s new A Dictionary of Sources of Tolkien. All was going well until I got half way through the ‘A’s and hit “Alcuin of York”. Alcuin as “comparable” to Gandalf? After that I began to spot many “is comparable to” and similar broad statements. While I found some entries informative, a few seemed to be grasping at straws. “Bard the Bowman” for instance, is deemed to be modelled on the Greek Apollo. Really? I also sensed a slight pro-Christian and pro-King Arthur tilt on some of the entries, more so than might naturally to be expected to come from dealing with Tolkien material.

The book’s introduction states it was written for the “general” reader, and as such it appears (at least in the ebook) to feel free to dispense entirely with footnotes and references. We are left to wonder, for instance, about “Alfirin” (Simbelmynë) when it is stated that… “As a flower, Tolkien himself compared it to the anemone” [as understood by the ancient Greeks], in terms of where to find the reference for that. The Tolkien Letters offer only…

“I have not seen anything [i.e.: in either life or botanical reference books] that immediately recalls niphredil or elanor or alfirin: but that I think is because those imagined flowers are lit by a light that would not be seen ever in a growing plant and cannot be recaptured by paint. Lit by that light, niphredil would be simply a delicate kin of a snowdrop; and elanor a pimpernel (perhaps a little enlarged) growing sun-golden flowers and star-silver ones on the same plant, and sometimes the two combined. Alfirin (‘immortal’) would [in name-translation] be an immortelle [i.e. flower that does not loose its colour when picked and dried], but not dry and papery [as a dried immortelle is]: [in its growing form] simply a beautiful bell-like flower, running through many colours, but soft and gentle.”

The Flora of Middle-earth has it that… “Tolkien considered it to be an imagined kind of anemone” but the reference there is to “Nomenclature of the Lord of the Rings” section in the 2005 Reader’s Companion. The Tolkien Gateway entry on “Simbelmynë” (Alfirin) also has this claim and reference. One then needs to be savvy enough to know that the Reader’s Companion and the Reader’s Guide are quite different reference books by the same authors, published just one year apart, and that their shorthand titles are easily confused. On consulting the correct book, we find Tolkien’s guide to his overseas translators offering…

“an imagined variety of anemone, growing in turf like Anemone Pulsatilla, the pasque-flower, but smaller and white like the wood anemone. … the plant bloomed at all seasons [yet] its flowers were not ‘immortelles’ [for the nature of ‘immortelles’, see the Letters quotation above].

Thus Day’s conflation of Tolkien’s advice to his translators and the outlining of a Greek myth…

“As a flower, Tolkien himself compared it to the anemone, which the Ancient Greeks associated with mourning: when the goddess of love Aphrodite wept over the grave of her lover Adonis, her tears turned into anemones.”

… does not support the run-on implication that it was Tolkien explicitly making the link with the myth. Also, the myth as given seems a little ‘off’. Since Ovid (Metamorphoses X) has it that the mythic flower in question is purple, not white, and made from the mingled “nectar” of Aphrodite and the turf-splashed blood of Adonis. Nor is there a “grave” in Ovid, as Adonis is a shepherd-boy and has been gored in the leg by a boar, hence his blood on the close-cropped turf. Later Bion of Smyrna was more coy, and in his telling of the tale he turned the implied-sexual “nectar” into “tears”.

Anyway, the free 10% for Day’s A Dictionary of Sources takes you to the ‘Be..’ entries, and you can make your own judgements. But on the basis of their being enough of interest in the sample, I’ll be looking for a paper copy when the price gets low enough — as it surely will due to the likely sales levels. But then I’ll be marking it up with a scoring system for each entry. Which means that I need the paper edition. Another reason to prefer paper here is because the ebook appears to lack any linked table-of-contents for the main entries. Paging through its entries on a Kindle 3 is thus a pain. Possibly this is remedied by a hyper-linked index at the back, but I wouldn’t like to spend £17 on finding out that there isn’t one.

Who knew? One of Walter de la Mare’s best short ghost-stories is “Crewe”, set locally in Crewe railway station.

When murky winter dusk begins to settle over the railway station at Crewe its first-class waiting room grows steadily more stagnant. Particularly if one is alone in it. The long grimed windows do little more than sift the failing light that slopes in on them from the glass roof outside and is too feeble to penetrate into the recesses beyond. And the grained massive furniture becomes less and less inviting. It appears to have made for a scene of extreme and diabolical violence that one may hope will never occur.

Available free at Archive.org in text. Not free in audio, except in abridged form.

It was published 1930 in his collection On the Edge: Short Stories, and thus we might plausibly assume it to have been written in the last years of the 1920s.

The Staffordshire Hoard: An Anglo-Saxon Treasure, being the 640-page official Research Report of the Society of Antiquaries. The book was supposed to ship at the end of September 2019, but it hasn’t been getting reviews or a “Look Inside” tab on Amazon. An article in The Sentinel (10th October) suggests why — the shipping date has slipped by over a month…

“This book will be available to buy from 1st November”

Given the dates, it seems to me most likely that the Hoard originated in a turbulent time (655-658) in Mercia. The years between the death of King Penda and early years of the rule of King Wulfhere and his restoration of Mercia. My own working theory would be that it was a purging of ‘tainted’ gold and similar items, by the new King Wulfhere early in his reign. Mostly a purging of items made for Peada and given from Northumbria by Oswiu, items which there had been petty disputes over, or which now was deemed too pagan or which had failed to bring good fortune in battle. By burying it in secret, at more or less the centre of the kingdom as it then was, the items would be deemed ‘cleansed’ and returned to the earth.

Weird Derbyshire and Peakland at the Buxton Museum and Art Gallery.

The prolific American science-fiction author Poul Anderson also wrote historical fantasy novels. One was even set here in England and had a witty earth-mysteries / dark-faerie twist.

A Midsummer Tempest (1974) is an alternative history fantasy set in an England in which Shakespeare’s Fairy Folk are real and the English Civil Wars are partly an early-steampunk affair with airships. Better, I see it has scenes set in Buxton, the Welsh Marches of Shropshire and Stratford-upon-Avon. There’s even a passing mention of Stoke. A quality local(ish) fantasy novel that I had no idea existed. Who knew?

At just 200 pages it’s not one of those over-padded 1990s/2000s “thick as a brick” fantasy books, either. Nice.

It was nominated for the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel and the Nebula Award for Best Novel. It also won the Mythopoeic Award. And that was back in the 1970s, when awards in fantasy and SF still meant something and had not been hijacked by the far-left.

Stoke and Newcastle Ramblers are soon to do walks over more-or-less the ‘Gawain country’, which may interest those who have read my recent book on Gawain in North Staffordshire. I’m uncertain if they’re even aware of Sir Gawain but their relevant 2019/2020 walks include, in order of possible/likely Gawain travel…

Danebridge(?)
Mow Cop(?)
Biddulph Moor(?)
Rushton Spencer
Out of Peak Forest
Ecton Hill and the Manifold Valley
Alton Common

A new scan of the famous story “The Garden Of Forking Paths” by Jorge Luis Borges in its 1958 English translation. The story appeared in The Michigan Quarterly Review, Spring 1958. As I’ve shown, it is mostly set in Stoke-on-Trent.

Stoke and the district seems to be getting a bit of a sweet tooth. Not only are the Cherry Bakewells made at Trent Vale in Stoke…

“In the last five years, Premier Foods has invested more than £22 million at its Stoke-on-Trent facility to improve the production process, with the introduction of more automation and technology.”

But we’ll soon have a big fancy chocolates factory too…

“Daniel’s Delights now employs 22 staff at the former Royal Doulton works in Fenton, Stoke-on-Trent. … The company has doubled its turnover to almost £2m in the past two years … The £440,000 in funding from Lloyds Bank will allow the business to buy its existing four-storey premises, along with the property next door to allow space for its expanding team.”

There are also quite a lot of edible nibbles being produced out at the old Cadbury’s milk chocolate factory, near Eccleshall. Now run as Knighton Foods. Apparently they produce a whole range of powdered yummies, of the Angel Delight packet type.

The Cherry Bakewells are on the telly tonight in a documentary, if you’re still a live BBC watcher. It’s not going to make up for years of the mainstream media slagging off Stoke, but it’s a start. Let’s just hope they don’t frame the factory footage with the usual stock footage of grotty Stoke back-alleys.

A 1963 glimpse of the house Tolkien stayed in when he came to stay in Stoke-on-Trent.

The white house partly seen on the right of the picture. There was a lot less traffic, in those days!

The Burslem Specials (PDF booklet), a small force formed of local men over 40 who were recruited during the First World War to police the town.

The ‘Wednesday section’ at their farewell dinner circa 1920…

The Beautiful Electricity Sub-stations of Stoke-on-Trent. In photography and art-stencils.

A new report from the UK’s Office for Students finds 34% of Staffordshire University students now get ‘first class’ for their final degree classification. At nearby Keele it’s 27.8%. A little further away, at the nearly-closed MMU Crewe campus it’s 32.3%.

The Mail reports…

“The Department for Education has now said that universities have been given a ‘stark warning'” on this grade inflation.

Of course these are aggregate percentages per institution. To really make sense of things you’d need to see it all broken down by degree area and weighted by the comparative stringency of the admissions policy for that degree area. But perhaps such figures are already posted on each degree’s recruitment page, these days, and I’m just unaware of that. Though I don’t see such things on a sample degree page at Keele, just a vapid ‘student satisfaction’ number.

For those readers of this blog who have little contact with education, I should point out that 27-34% is highly abnormal. The true figure should be about 8-12%, even accounting for a slight general up-skilling in students when balanced against the current state of secondary education.

In the old days before about 1996, back when ‘a first was a first’, if you had generally high-quality recruitment onto a degree, and had the usual moderate drop-out from the course at the end of the first-year, then at the end of a three-year degree you should expect no more than about four first-class degrees. That would be in a final-year class of around 40 students. 8 to 10% of students getting firsts is about right, and reflects the essentially fixed distribution of such abilities in the degree-capable population.

It used to be casually assumed that it was just duffers such as Wolverhampton University that had this grade-inflation problem. But the curious uniformity of the rises is now fully revealed, across everyone from Wolverhampton all the way up to Durham. This suggests to me that it’s not only some occasional institutional laxity or management-driven rankings-pressure on lecturers that’s at the root of the problem. The Office for Students finds a big chunk of this widespread rise to be simply “unexplained”, despite their casting around for suggestions from those on the ground.

One thus wonders what part the take-home essay and coursework has to play, as that must increasingly enable the easy use of informal and online ‘essay-writing services’ and other more undetectable methods such as translation-plagiarism for final dissertations. This suspicion of outright cheating seems at first glance to be backed up by a government comment, found in the media stories on the new report, that…

According to Education Secretary Damian Hinds, this increase is probably the result of “unfair practices”.

One might ask if these “unfair practices” happen at the bottom of the ability range, and thus (as a knock-on effect) they encourage university administrators to re-shape grade curves and thus make things easier at the top as well. Or perhaps the cheating is happening among marginal 2:1 students, who try to play the system with a few cheating third-year essays and a final dissertation in order to get a first. Or it may be a mix of both pressures.

If it’s mostly due to largely undetectable ‘contract-essay cheating’ then simply ‘toughening up the marking’ will have little impact. The essay-mills will scale accordingly. One way to get around the problem might then be to bring back sit-down exams. On my undergraduate degree, each year we had regular sit-down timed exams in large classrooms and halls, giving hand-written answers to a previously unseen sheet of exam questions. Something which one would almost certainly not encounter today as an undergraduate. We had the expected number of firsts — three in a class of about 40, and I still have a photocopy of the final noticeboard sheet that announced the final grades for the class.

End-of-year exams would pose certain organisational and logistics hurdles, given the sheer number of students today. It would also have to be introduced uniformly across all courses, or students seeking ‘easy’ choices would skew toward no-exam universities and a two-tier system would develop overnight. If done on a huge sports-hall scale there might also be a slight problem with ‘impersonation’ cheating, i.e.: where Dull Bill’s bright cousin turns up to take his written exam, pretending to be Bill. But if end-of-module exams were done on a small per-class basis and supervised by the class tutors in the usual classroom, then there would be no chance for that to happen.

There are likely to be emerging technical possibilities to prevent cheating. I don’t read the trade newspapers these days but, off the top of my head, I imagine that one might run timed date-limited exams online, with retina-scans enforcing identity, though that’s probably not ideal for a range of reasons. One of the best options might be to build an algorithmic ‘fingerprint’ of the student’s writing style and research-source types, from age 14 onward, which would flag up any coursework likely to have been written by someone else. By ‘research-source types’ I mean that if the quantity and range of sources for an essay suddenly expands, either Dull Bill just got really unexpectedly good at finding and reading research sources to pinpoint excellent supporting quotes, or else the essay may actually have been written by Dull Bill’s bright cousin. One of the problems here is that essay-writing services may ask to be sent three of your past essays, and then have an A.I. that re-shapes their cheating essay to conform to your personal style.

One further twist is likely to be added by the ‘all must have prizes’ brigade among leftist teachers. Customised personalised sit-down exam papers, thus making it impossible even for Dull Bill to fail. Provided he can be bothered to attend the exam hall, and has learned to read and write.

A new first* classification might also be a fix for the problem, although that would also inevitably become corrupted over time if the underlying problems were not fixed.

One very robust check on cheating would be if all job interviews for recent graduates were required, by law, to include a written sit-down exam component and basic intelligence test via an accredited test-centre. The centres would be completely independent from the educational system, under the control of industry and strictly monitored.