Welcome to the first instalment of a new round of secondary discussion,
featuring summaries of papers presented at The Lord of the Rings,
1954–2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder, a conference held
October 21–23, 2004, at Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Those of us
from the Reading Room who attended the conference have divvied up the papers
among ourselves and will be presenting you with a new paper weekly, for your
perusal, degustation, questioning, discussion, and critique. You'll find that
our posting styles will vary considerably.
I've drawn the short straw insofar as I have to start off this new segment of
secondary discussion, but I think I've won in content. I hope you enjoy my
summary of Tom Shippey's talk and that I've given you somewhat of a feel for
what he's like as a speaker. I look forward to your questions and comments and
expansions and quibbles, and to any further additions or corrections from
others who were present. And now, I am pleased to present ... Tom Shippey.
Tom Shippey, “History in Words: Tolkien’s Ruling Passion”*
Shippey chose to speak without a microphone, stepping forward and speaking
(very nearly without referring to his notes) directly to the audience—a habit
he ascribed to philologists generally. His subject of choice was thinking
laterally about Tolkien’s language, which he said could be accomplished simply
by looking in a dictionary, where words are organized alphabetically—which,
philologically, “is as good as to say ‘randomly.’” His choice of dictionary,
however, was not random: by dictionary, he said, “I mean etymological
dictionary, which means wisdom.”
The dictionary Shippey chose to base his talk on was Charles Onions’ Oxford
Dictionary of Etymology, although it was the Chambers dictionary that
Tolkien said got him hooked on words. (Shippey made much of the pronunciation
of “Onions,” which the Onions in question apparently chose to pronounce
“Ohn-EYE-ons.”) Shippey discussed what “philology” meant to Tolkien, including
the “rule” of philology that if two words sound similar, they have nothing to
do with each other.
Shippey explored several Tolkienian words. Fiction, for example, is
related to the Latin fingere, the nearest English cognate of which is
dough. (Fiction derives from Latin fictio, which is
related to fingere, “to shape, form, devise”; fingere is thought
to derive from an Indo-European word that sounds remarkably like D’oh!,
meaning “to knead, to shape,” from which we get the English word dough.)
The English finger, however, is not connected to fingere but to
words meaning “five” and “fist.” Indeed, its nearest Latin cognate is
pugnare, “to fight.”
Tolkien, as we all know, was very conscious of the philological basis of LOTR,
its origin in the invention of languages; after all, “what good,” said Shippey,
“was a language without a history?” Just as languages develop (and here Shippey
referred to the influence of Grimm in particular, but, interestingly, also of
Darwin), so too are tales made better by filtering them through history and
various versions—hence the multiple versions of the story of Beren and Lúthien.
Shippey posited that there are, in fact, philologists in LOTR, most obviously
the philological manager of the Houses of Healing, who knows all about herbs
and their names and lore “but hasn’t got any.” Gollum is also an image of
Tolkien the philologist—his grandmother wise in lore; himself interests in
“roots and beginnings,” but no longer looking upward. In LOTR, however, there
are no secrets at the roots of the mountains. Tolkien sensed the danger
of being too concerned with root: it is important to work not only from the
flower to the root, but back to the flower; from dead leaf to tree. How, then,
asked Shippey, “could the history of words be made to live again?” Perhaps, he
suggested, in Tolkien’s own manner in his earliest academic works: feeling our
way back through words to the belief from which they sprung.
Shippey then focused on some of Tolkien’s own old words in LOTR, including
wraith and heathen (the latter a pre-Christian word), which are
discussed in his published works. In so doing, he pointed to the usefulness of
Blackwelder’s thesaurus, which he called “a hobbit work.” He also pointed to
Tolkien’s similar scholarly efforts, including a glossary of Sir Gawain and
the Green Knight (including etymologies; Shippey called himself “the Sir
Gawain of central-east Missouri”) and a study of the dialect of Huddersfield
District.
Ninnyhammer, used twice in LOTR, both times in connection with Elvish
rope (Shippey read Sam’s lines here in the Gloucestershire accent he believed
most appropriate), is a nunnated word, formed by adding n in the front
of a word that begins with a vowel, in this case a form of innocent. A
ninny is someone who is unfit for practical purposes. Ammer is
Old English, meaning “unknown,” but occurs only once in Old English texts;
hammer may mean “little rascal.” Ninnyhammer, then, might mean
“someone so foolish as to be almost dangerous.”
A very different old word is dwimmerlaik. It may derive from the Old
English lac, “sport” or “play,” and from dwimmer, a word that is
recorded only five times—several times (in different forms) in LOTR. The
Oxford English Dictionary gives it the meaning “magical arts,” but, as
so often, Tolkien clearly disagreed with the OED; to him, it seems to have
meant “hard to make out, on the edge of sight,” a form of -immer. The
word may also be related to dwam, “swooning fit.” Shippey thus concluded
that dwimmerlaik could be translated as “sportive nightmare.”
One of the appeals of LOTR, said Shippey, is its “enormous range of
vocabulary”—as great as Shakespeare’s—and its “versality of narrative styles.”
For example, he said, Tolkien enjoyed Merry and Pippin trying to change their
speech to make it sound “better” when they were communicating with Theoden and
Denethor.
Philology, Shippey said, is democratic compared with the elitism of modernist
and postmodernist literature. He concluded with “another burst of spite and
malice,” this one against the canon and so on: “The more we listen to silenced
voices, the more we hear echoes of our own.”
*Thanks to nerdanel, Altaira, drogo drogo, Entmaiden, Modtheow, and N.E.
Brigand for amplifying and correcting my own notes. Any errors are mine
alone.
Lúthien Rising
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Reading the Sil for the first time? Getting confused? Look in the Reading Room every other weekend for the NDQ (No Dumb Questions) thread. Because there are no dumb questions.
