Be Very Qwiet, I am Hunting Tolkienian Woodwoses

This week in The Mythgard Institute's Tolkien and the Epic course, Wotan has been part of an incredible experience of exploring the Finnish national poem The Kalevala, Tolkien's earliest work on his version of the Kullervo story and then Tolkien's transformation of this story into his own secondary world cycle of Turin Turambar. Our guide through this exploration has been the famous Tolkien scholar and one of my favorite writers on Tolkien - Dr Verlyn Flieger - who I am very excited to hear will be taking part in future Mythgard Institute courses - spring enrollment is now open for two excellent courses

Wotan has a long list of ideas to explore from these two weeks of lectures (and for Wotan these resulted in very late night but very well worth it web moots!).

One item that jumped out at me as I was re-reading The Children of Hurin (CoH)was the inclusion of an interesting word seemingly taken from Tolkien's primary word academic work and put into his secondary one. In the The Children of Hurin, when the hapless Turin is staying in Doriath he is taunted by an Elf named Saeros and Turin hurls a drinking vessel at him. Then Saeros says

"How long shall we harbour this woodwose? Who rules here tonight? the King's law is heavy upon those who hurt his liegers in the hall....Outside the hall I can answer you, Woodwose!" (CoH, p.88)

There has been some really good work on the word and meaning of "woodwose" especially in Dr T.A. Shippey's Road to Middle Earth and on a recent excellent blog post by Jason Fisher

What interests Wotan is WHEN this word might have found its way into Tolkien's secondary world and why?

Tolkien's earliest professional encounter with the word probably came with his work in the 1920's on the late 14th century alliterative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight which he worked with E.V. Gordon on publishing as a Middle English Text for students with notes and glossary while he was teaching at Leeds in 1923-1925 (finally being published by Oxford University Press in 1925).

In the second passus of the poem Sir Gawain travels to find the Green Chapel and encounters several mythical and real beasts including the wildmen of the wood

"Sumwhyle wyth wormez he werrez, and with wolues als,
Sumwhyle wyth wodwos, þat woned in þe knarrez,
Boþe wyth bullez and berez, and borez oþerquyle,
And etaynez, þat hym anelede of þe heȝe felle;

Sometimes he fights with dragons and sometimes with fierce wolves
Sometimes with woodwose that haunted the mountains
Both with bulls and bears and occasionally a boar
And giants chased him through the fells (my translation)

Interestingly the same term is found in another Middle English alliterative romance - The wars of Alexander translated chiefly from the Historia Alexander di Magni de preliis by Leo Archpresbyter in the 10th century.

Wroȝt full of wodwose → · & oþer wild bestis;
And þan him hiȝtild his hede · & had on a Mitre,
Was forgid all of fyne gold · & fret full of perrils,

Although in this case the editor of the text Rev Walter W. Skeat glosses the word as faunus or Silvanus giving it a more classical meaning (which would make sense for a romance about Alexander the Great.

Turning back to the Turin cycle - the actual use of the word "woodwose" is not evident in any of the earlier versions of the Turn story.

Tolkien evolved the germ of the Turin story from his work on the Kalevala's Kullervo story - first developing his own version of the Kullervo tale with original names (and evidence of early Qenya) and then using some of the themes in an original story around the hapless Turin (one of the great legendary cycles of Tolkien's complete legendarium)

The earliest versions of this key scene in Turin's life (it causes him to become an outlaw which sets the whole doom of his life in motion) as found in The Book of Lost Tales (Turambar and The Foaloke) from 1918-1919 and in the alliterative poem The Lay of the Children of Hurin all seem to follow a similar narrative pattern. Tolkien would have worked on the alliterative poem (published in volume three of The History of Middle Earth) while he was teaching at Leeds (1920-1925), at the same time as he was working with Gordon on the Middle English text of Sir Gawain. In these early versions of the Turin story, The offending Elf is not the later Saeros but Orgof - who is described in The Lay as as "of the ancient race that was lost in the lands where the long marches from the quiet waters of Cuivienen were made in mirk of the midworld's gloom" (Lays, p.18) - so is Orgof an Avari? (but I digress). Orgof taunts Turin and Turin retaliates by throwing a large drinking vessel at Orgof who is struck by it and falls to the floor dead.

In the alliterative poem Turin says:

"Thou fool, he said, fill thy mouth therewith and to me no further thus witless prate by wine bemused and he fell backward and heavy his head there hit upon the stone...." (Lays, p.19)

This story pattern continued through Tolkien's prose Sketch of the Mythology (1927) and the 1930's The Quenta (Qenta Noldorinwa). In the Earliest Annals of Beleriand the date of 184 is given for "Turin slays Orgof, kinsman of the Royal House, and flees from Thingol's court. In the Later Annals of Beleriand the same basic story event is given.

We then have the period when Tolkien turned his attention to the great matter of the second and third ages culminating in the great works of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (in which Elrond refers to Turin as a great elf friend of old).

According to Hammond and Scull's J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide regarding Tolkien and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

"Sir Gawain became a set text on the Oxford and English School in 1947, and every two years from 1946 Tolkien gave a series of lectures about it, usually spread across two or three terms. The number of lectures in the course increased over the years in 1956-7. During this time Tolkien also supervised or examined several B.Litt theses on various Arthurian texts or topics, including two on Sir Gawain.' (Hammond and Scull v.2, p. 924)

In addition to this in 1952-3 Tolkien was chosen to give the WP Ker lecture in Glasgow and on 15 April 1953 he gave this lecture on, you guessed it, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to 300 attenders (and later published in J.R.R. Tolkien The Monster and the Critics)

Turning back to Turin, the first post LOTR Turin mention we have is in The Gray Annals and here the story of Orgof being killed by Turin with a drinking cup persists (War of the Jewels, p. 81)

But this treatment starts to change in the next major work Tolkien did on the early part of the Turin cycle and the scene with Turin and Orgof/Saeros - this appears in a 12 page typescript which in HOME's War of the Jewels Christopher Tolkien describes as "a 12 page typed manuscript composed ab initio by my father and bearing the title "Here begins the the Tale of the Children of Hurin, Narn i Chin Hurin, which Dirhaval wrote" and what follows is the story that first appeared in Unfinished Tales and then in the later The Children of Hurin. Hammond and Scull indicate this work is from the late 1950's.

There are two interesting developments here. First the introductory note to the Narn now indicates that this work was the tale of a man named Dirhaval (a name possibly meaning Star Watcher -more work to be done here) of the Havens which he wrote during the time of Earendel. Dirhaval is said to come from the House of Hador and dwelt at the havens of Sirion where he gathered together tales from eyewitnesses. Tolkien also states "The lay was all that Dirhaval ever made, but it was prized by the Eldar for Dirhaval used the Grey-Elven tounge in which he had great skill. He used the that mode of Elvish verse which is (long space left in typescript - later to be filled by Minlamad thent) which was of old proper to the Narn, but though this verse mode is not unlike the verse of the English, I have rendered it in prose, judging my skill to be at once scop and walhstod." (War of Jewels, p.312). A note indicates that "walhstod' is Old English for interpreter.

A bit further along, Tolkien also says "I have not added to Dirhavals tale, nor omitted from it anything he told, neither have I changed the order of the history.

The second major change is the narrative of the story of the early Turin story which is now represented as being part of Dirhaval's Narn. Orgof has now become Saeros (possibly in Sindarin this means "bitter rain" - good name for a baddie) and the story arc has now been significantly expanded

• Saeros taunts Turin at the table
• Turin takes up a heavy drinking vessel and throws it at Saeros
• Saeros falls backward with great hurt (but does not die)
  
• Turin draws his sword but Mablung the Hunter restrains him
  
• Saeros spits blood and utters the woodwose lines
  
• Turin leaves the hall - Saeros and Mablung have words
  
• Next morning Saeros waylays Turin and attempts to kill him
• Turin and Saeros fight
  
• Turin throws Saeros to the ground and strips him
  
• He lets Saeros go and chases him through the wood
  
• Mablung and others see this and call it Orc Work
  
• Saeros attempts to leap a great cleft but falls back with a cry and crashes on the rocks below
  
• "Long will Mandos hold him"
  

Therefore in this expanded version of the story Tolkien creates more opportunity for Saeros to have a voice and it was in this development of the narrative that the opportunity arose to have Saeros come up with a pejorative word for Turin and Tolkien's use of the word 'woodwose' not only accomplishes this but also foreshadows the orc like behavoir Turin will adapt by chasing Saeros naked through the wood with his sword (truly the act of a wildman) as well as a later episode of someone leaping over a cliff (his doomed sister Nienor). As Dr Flieger also said in her talk it is due to this action of killing Orgof/Saeros that Turin does become a wildman of the wood by becoming an Outlaw and living with Gaurwaith (The Wolfmen of the Wood).

So perhaps Tolkien's increased primary world focus on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight during the time of developing and expanding the Turin cycle gave him the very word he was looking for to both brandish a nasty term at Turin and foreshadow both his later history and fate.

One last point - in the context of the secondary world - I wonder what the original word in Sindarin Dirhaval used which became rendered as the Anglo-Saxon wodwose. "Wildman of the Woods" in Sindarin would have been something like 'Adan alag en thewair' - so perhaps this is close to what Tolkien as walhstod saw - alas this is lost in the vestiges of real or feigned time.

Tolkien Works Cited

The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two, edited by Christopher Tolkien (New York: Random House, 1983)

The Lays of Beleriand, edited by Christopher Tolkien (New York; Random House, 1984)

The War of the Jewels, edited by Christopher Tolkien (New York: Random House, 2002)

The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, edited by Christopher Tolkien (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983)

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, edited by Christopher Tolkien (London: HarperCollins 1999)

The Children of Hurin edited by Christopher Tolkien (London, HarperCollins, 2007)

' "The Túrin Prose Fragment: An Analysis of a Rúmilian Document". In Vinyar Tengwar 37 (December 1995), (edited by Arden Smith) pp. 15-23

The Story of Kullervo and Essays on “The Kalevala” edited by Verlyn Flieger in Tolkien Studies Volume 7 (2010), p. 211-278

OTHER WORKS CITED

Hammond Wayne G & Scull, Christina The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide

(2 vols) .London: HarperCollins;

Posted from Andrew Higgins IPAD asthiggins@me.com

-Turambar and the Foaloke - Etymological Archaeology

In honour of Tolkien Reading Day (which for me has become a Tolkien Reading Weekend), this posting is based on my current re-read I am doing with a group called The Tolk-Lings whose objective is to read the entire 12 volume History of Middle Earth - one chapter a week (anyone can join along!). We are now in the heart of the great epic tales that make up the second book of Lost Tales around Beren, Turin and the Fall of Gondolin.

In the course of this re-read I am paying very close attention to what I am calling "etymological archaeology" that is a structured examination of the very earliest strata of Tolkien's linguistic development of the languages that form the great languages (Quenya, Sindarin, etc) of the legendarium. Along with the re-read I am also casting a foresnic eye on the two accompanying works - The Qenyaqetsa and The Gnomish Lexicon both published through the excellent linguistic journals Parma Eldalamberon by the Elvish Lingustic Fellowship.

This week what struck me in the re-read of Lost Tales 2 -Turambar and the Foaloke - the earliest version of the Turin story that would later become the great epic works of Turin Turambar - was in a passage given by Christopher Tolkien in the notes to the chapter. Christopher writes that in the notes for the original story, he was able to decipher a pencil outline for a very early version of the Turin story that was NOT erased (one of the few cases when Tolkien did not erase the pencil layer!) -

"Tiranne and Vainoni fall in with the evil magician Kuruki who gives them a baneful drink. They forget their names and wander distraught in the woods. Vainoni is lost. She meets Turambar who saves her from Orcs and aids in search for her mother." (History of Middle Earth, Lost Tales 2, p.138)

Christopher calls this unerased pencil version "a layer in the Turin saga older even than the erased text underlying the extant version." We know that Tolkien began work on Turambar and the Foaloke in 1917.

In this pencil passage we have three names that do not survive into the finalized version of Turambar or any of the later works and thus are of interest from an archaeological etymology point of view. In the notes, Christopher makes parallels from the penciled names to the final ones in Turambar and the Foaloke:

Tiranne - Mavwin (Mother of Turin later Morwen)

Vainoni - Nienori (sister of Turin)

Kuruki - possibly the dragon Glorund/Glauring

(Lost Tales 2, p.139)

The sources of two of these names - Vainoni and Kuruki - do appear in another very early work of Tolkien based on his study and love of the Finnish National Epic The Kalevala. Thanks to the excellent work of Tolkien Scholar Verlyn Flieger we now have Tolkien's original story of Kullervo from 1914 and his essay on the Kalevala (found in Tolkien Studies 7). Flieger writes in her introduction how it was Tolkien's very focus on turning one of the stories from the Kalevala (Runos 31-36 Kullervo) into "a short story somewhat on the lines of Morris romances which chunks of poetry in between" (Flieger, p.211). Tolkien considered this work the very germ of the Silmarillion and it later became the basis for the story of Turin Turambar.

Through a combination of encountering the Kalevala (in Kirby's English translation of 1911) and finding a copy of C.N. Elliot's Finnish Grammar Tolkien became absorbed by study of the Finnish language and myth - indeed the very notebook that Tolkien started to use to sketch a Germanic/Gothic based language became the same note book that he sketched the more Finnish based "Qenya" language - one of the two key languages in the early parts of the legendarium (Parma 12, ix-x)

But before working on an original story based on Kullervo (which became Turin)- Tolkien rewrote the legend of Kullervo from the Kalevala - developing his own story with new characters (including a pre-Huan dog companion called Musta (A good Finnish name for a dog Blacky) and inventing new names for the characters. Flieger makes a note that some of these names echo or prefigure Tolkien's earliest efforts at his invented language - Qenya (Flieger, p.213).

So back to those three names from the early penciled version of Turin and the Foaloke

KURUKI

It is in Tolkien's retelling/reconstruction of Kullervo that we first find the name KURUKI (the evil magician). There is a list of names that accompanies the work that includes the names - KURUWANYO, KURU - The great black river of death. The notes for this indicate that Tolkien may have formed this name from the Finnish word for death - KUOLEMA (Flieger, p.244) Interestingly, there is a Finnish play called Kuolema written in 1903 by Arvid Jamefelt which has incidental music by the writers brother in law Jean Sibelius which is about death visiting a home. The word comes into the Qenya Lexicon where we find Tolkien has transformed the root of this word KURU to mean magic or wizardry with the name KURUVAR meaning wizard (PE 11, p.28). It also has associations with sin, wickedness and evil (CURDHU). Later in The Etymologies, this root KUR becomes "craft Q. KURWE craft, N CURW, CURU; CURUNIR wizard; cf Curufin, CF N CRUM, wile guile, CORW cunning, wily (Lost Road, p. 366) Interestingly there is an added entry "N CRUM was rejected; see KURUM" Lost Road, p. 366). KURUM is glossed as "N. CRUM the left hand, CRUM left, CRUMI left-handed Could there be an association one can draw between crafty, cunning and left-handiness - the idea of the left having a slightly sinister side (as in the very Latin word for left SINISTER and those nuns who used to whack left handed writers till they changed to their right hand?). So in its possible Finnish origin and its later early Qenya association we see Tolkien combining the idea of death (which indeed is what the "baneful drink" ultimately does for Turambar and Vainoni) and the idea of wizardry and cunning. Later of course the Istari Curunir (Saruman) is bound up very much with both evil and death.

VAINONI

The early pencilled version of Turin Turambar's sister Nienor/Niniel whose name means "mourning" or "tear maiden" Vainoni is close to the name Tolkien's uses in his original tale of Kullervo - WANONA (once mentioned as WANORA) which is a name of Tolkien's own creation - in the original Kalevala the sister in not named. Another suggestion of "water" might be in the Elvish stem of the name VAI - which is the name of the outer ocean - but that might be a bit of a stretch. In the Gnomish Lexicon, there are several words with the root GWAN meaning beautiful, fair and there is GWANN who is glossed as a Valsi of dancing, joy, spring, life and beauty (PE 11, p.44) - quite an ironic potential source for a character who meets such a tragic end.

TIRANNE

An elusive name that does not appear in any of the early Finnish works. Tiranne is the name for the mother who would later become Mavwin in Turambar and the Foaloke and in later versions Morwen (dark hair and tall - with the MOR the root for dark). This is a tricky one to source. In both the Qenya and Gnomish Lexicons the root TIRI is associated with watching, looking for, looking out for (PE 12, p.71) and one can certainly argue that Tiranne/Mavwin/Morwen spends a lot of her time waiting and watching for her husband, Urin/Hurin, who was captured in battle by Melkor as well as waiting for her son Turin. I have yet to find a link with this in Finnish. Tirana is the capital of Albania and I have yet to find any connections here!

So here we have three examples of names Tolkien constructed based on his very early work with the Kalevala and his love of Finnish - not just translating the Kalevala but using the phonology of Finnish and his "elvish craft" to construct new names - names that later found there way into the early versions of his legendarium. Luckily due to Tolkien not putting the eraser to this very early strata of the Turin story we are able to see some of his earliest thoughts and influences on the development of the legendarium - and I will be keeping a "Gwahir" eye on other ones throughout this study of The History of Middle Earth.

This entire blog post was written while listening to Dunedain Radio on the Middle Earth Network which is brilliant!

Sources Used:

Tolkien, J.R.R. The History of Middle Earth (volume 1) HarperCollins: 2002

Parma Eldalamberon XI - Tolkien J.R.R - The Grammer and Lexicon of the Gnomish Tongue The Tolkien Trust:1995

Parma Eldalamberon XII - Tolkien, J.R.R - Quenyaqetsa - The Qenya Phonology and Lexicon - The Tolkien Trust: 1998

The Story of Kullervo and Essays on the Kalevala by J.R.R. Tolkien (edited by Verlyn Flieger) in Tolkien Studies Volume 7, West Virgina University: 2010

Launch a Website - Read Tolkien Books

This week in the midst of launching a new website for the theatre I work at the Hackney Empire I got through two excellent books from the latest batch of books on Tolkien - The Frodo Franchise by Kristen Thompson and The Silmarillion Thirty Years On edited by Allan Turner. I enjoyed both very much and found some really good insights in each.

The Frodo Franchise is an in-depth analysis of the development he current Rings franchise from the movie and DVD's to website, games, and fan clubs that have sprung up. I especially love how that moment when Peter Jackson pitched the movie idea to New Line's Bob Shaye (after beiing forced by Mirimax to attempt to compress the movie into two parts - including cutting out completely Lorien and Galadriel) and after watching the preview reel Shaye said why two movies when Tolkien wrote three books - there is something almost mythic about this moment. Also the line of one of the Weinstein's (loveling depicted as trolls in one of the credits) saying - "do you have to have four hobbits?" just showed what PJ was up against. From a marketing point of view the online promotion and alliance with the fans now seems just commonplace (just look at the current marketing campaign for Cloverfield) and it will be interesting to sse how The Hobbit movie(s) will be promoted. Also, this book brought me to two web sites that has passed me by in the course of the movies - Lord of the Peeps and Figwit the Elf in Rivendell who thanks to the fans has become an online elf star (and made into a peep as well). Well worth a read a Thompson's blog is one I look at on a regular basis - especially as news on The Hobbit movies are starting to take off (as well as Ian Mckellen's excellent website where one can find any news and rumors of his Gandalf doings - the king of actors as his recent Lear in the UK showed)

On a different front - Walking Tree Presses The Silmarillon Thirty Years On is an excellent series of essays celebrating the thirty anniversary of the publication of The Silmarillion in 1977. The two essays that really had an impact on me (they are all very good) is Professor Michael Drout's very personal essay on what it was like to first read The Silmarillion when his parents were in the midst of a divorce and the idea of sadness and nostalgia (coming from the greek words nostos - "return home"/algos "pain."

My other fav article was Jason Fisher's Tolkien, Lonnrot, and Jerome - a really fascinating article about the role of Christopher Tolkien in forging together the vast source work of material Tolkien left at his death in 1973 into the published Silmarillion and comparing to the same process Lonnrot used in fashioning The Kalevala and Jerome used in The Vulgate Bible. This is a topic I first became interested in when I read Nagy's article in Jane Chance's Tolkien the Medievalist "The Great Chain of Reading" which relates that the various versions of some of the key cycles Tolkien developed (Beren, Turin, etc) were paralleling the various source works of the key myths and legends in different versions (lays, prose works, chronicles). What Christopher did is take these and develop a single narrative that became the "accepted story" of that specific cycle of legend - that is until he published in the 1990's The History of Middle Earth and we learned that actually there are many versions of the stories. Fisher who has an excellent blog called Lingwe - Musings of a Fish, also shows places in the story where Christopher actually had to write some of his own material (as in the chapter in the Silmarillion "The Ruin of Doriath") to give the story a unified narrative struture) Fisher as also done some great work on paralleling this to the creation of the Finnish epic The Kalevala - and he has made me take that CN Eliot Finnish Grammer I purchased for Ebay a year ago (the very 1915 edition Tolkien used to study Finnish) and start to "plod through some of the original" as JRR said.

It also got me thinking of another poet we all read and accept what is fixed in the literal poem as the "authorized story" - and that is Homer and The Iliad and The Odyssey. In college I did some work on the various lies that the willy Odysseus uses when he returns to Ithaca (to the goatherder Eumeaus, his son Telemachos and finally wife Penelope) - in each he says he from Crete and analysis of the language and structure indicated that this might be an older part of the oral tradition of the Odyssey (also similar with the Proteus episode) - it would be interesting to look at how those forgers of the Homeric tradition in Athens put together these epics into what we now accept as the Iliad and the Odyssey - and can we do similiar with Gilgamesh and Beowulf?

Both two great reads and worth a read - now its on to three more Tolkien books and I am slogging my way through the new translation of War and Peace which is excellent.

NB: Picture from Patrick Wayne's excellent website of images from The Silmarillion