A Little Formula

Turns out that you can find out stuff about Old English texts with just a simple formula:

For any text of length n

with a sub-segment of length w < n

where k is the first term in w

þ is the total number of thorns in the segment;

ð is the total number of eths in the segment;

and w+k ≤ n.


The real tricks are figuring out if what you're detecting is significant or just a product of stochastic variation and, if it is statistically significant, whether or not it is just an epiphenomenon of a less interesting process.

As Richard Feynman, one of my intellectual heroes, once said “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”

Which is why I've been having learning to debug programs in Python and re-learning Stats II from 20+ years ago.

Unfortunately, at least one of the more striking findings is looking like its just an epiphenomenon. But the good news is that the other discoveries seem like they are pretty robust.

"How to Read Tolkien" lecture from Carnegie Mellon now on line

Father Brag

My son's first touchdown. 

The Killer-Barney Effect

In some of the Icelandic sagas in which he appears, Bjarni Brodd-Helgason is a generally peaceful man, even though he got the nickname Víga-Bjarni (Killer-Barney) when he had to kill some of his relatives at Bodvarsdalr. In Vápnfirðinga Saga he is reluctant to take revenge; he is eager to reconcile in Voðu-Brands þáttr; and he’s clever and honorable in Þorsteins þattr stangarhoggs. So the nickname is somewhat at odds with the character, especially in these sagas that come from the East, where Bjarni was from. The disjunction between name and personality seems to be the point, especially in Thorstein the Staff-struck. 

 Víga-Bjarni’s name, however, appears to have overpowered his character in later sagas from the West, where people either had not known Bjarni Brodd-Helgason, or the transmitted knowledge of his personality was forgotten. In this material, Killer-Barney is now a blood-loving, death-dealing maniac.

I hate you, 

you hate me, 

I had to slaughter members of my family....

 We can call this phenomenon, in which a traditional referent, like Víga-Bjarni's name, loses the link with its original extra-textual and contextual meaning and instead develops as part of a new, intra-textual tradition,  The Killer-Barney Effect.

How to Think: The Liberal Arts and Their Enduring Value

I have a new lecture course out from Recorded Books' Modern Scholar series:

How to Think: The Liberal Arts and Their Enduring Value

It's an 8-lecture course:

1. The Liberal Arts: Where did they come from?
2. Separating Science
3. Tools to Rule
4. Can the Liberal Arts Make you a Better Person?
5. The Best Reasons: Solving Complex Problems, Preserving and Transmitting Culture
6. Beowulf: A Case Study of the Richness of the Liberal Arts Tradition
7. What's Wrong with the Liberal Arts? (And How to Fix it).
8. A Defense and Celebration of the Liberal Arts.

The CD set is available from Amazon here at this link.
The direct link to all of my courses on Recorded Books is here.

John Alexander, the founder of The Modern Scholar and my producer for all 12 courses, has formed Scholarly Sojourns: beautiful, flawless educational tours throughout the world. In Summer 2014 I am leading tours to Anglo-Saxon Britain, Iceland and Tolkien's England. We could meet up!

Wisdom from Neal Stephenson

Some people try to communicate "out of a conviction that the world must be amenable to human understanding, and that if you can understand something, you can explain it in words: fancy words if that helps, plain words if possible. But in any case you can reach out to other minds through the medium of words." And by doing this, you are saying "here is something cool that I want to share with you for not other reason than making a spark jump between minds."

From the Foreword to David Foster Wallace's Everything and More.

The book is out!

The new book is out!

Tradition and Influence in Anglo-Saxon Literature: An Evolutionary, Cognitivist Approach.

This book was more years in the making than I like to think about.  I would never have finished it if it weren't for the unexpected help of Jack Zipes, who, in a kind of Tolkienian eucatastrophe, swooped in right when things were most dire.


The cover was designed by Wheaton students Leah Smith and Amira Pualwan. From it people of a particular age may be able to guess at what album I most overplayed in the summer of 1982.

Seamus Heaney passes the torch to the next great writer of English

(no pressure, sweetie). 

I'm very happy to announce that we'll be hosting the next Mythcon at Wheaton College.

Fantasy literature does not fit comfortably into any scheme. Both old and new, traditional and innovative, popular and elite, mainstream and esoteric, escapist and engaged, high-tech and anti-technology, fantasy defies definitions and transcends categories, dramatizing the incompleteness of our understanding of our own imaginations. At Mythcon 45 we will discuss the place of fantasy in our culture, our institutions, and our hearts. 

Scholar Guest of Honor:

Richard West

Author Guest of Honor:

To be announced

keep an eye on http://mythcon.org

Intellectual Environments

We've been having another successful season of research in the Lexomics Lab this summer: discoveries made, complex things figured out, methods invented, tools created.  And most of all, it has, once again, been really, really fun.  Much more fun, and much more intellectually exciting, than anything I ever did in grad school (or in undergrad or as a professor, for that matter).

I've been wondering why.

Probably the simplest reason is that English students don't naturally work in a lab environment. Our ideal seems to be lots of solitary time with books and a computer and then a quick chance to show off what we've written in a seminar or at a conference.  It's not that we're not social, but that our socialization comes after the fact, not during the research.  The daily give and take, the continuously social nature of the lab, isn't really part of our experience. So we get all the way through our studies never knowing that we're missing out on the most intellectual fun you can have. 

We were lucky to have the use of a single big room, with one wall of white-board, desks and monitors around the other walls, and moveable smaller tables, which we configured as a "library table" and a work table around which we put our laptops. Since we all worked together, we talked a lot, working through ideas out loud, overhearing the challenges various parts of the project faced (i.e., the Beowulf-focused people hearing the discussions of the Cynewulf-focused people and the Shakespeare-focused people and the Old Norse-focused people and the software people, etc.).

So it was all shared and cross-pollinated and social and fun.

But also there was another factor in play, I think. Because my students are undergraduates ranging from  freshmen to seniors and ranged in major from English to Computer Science to Chemistry to Philosophy, there was always more than one person in the audience who didn't know something. And so it was always ok to ask for more explanation.

We completely avoided that most damaging of statements a teacher or mentor can make: "What! You don't already know that!"

It's a damaging statement, because it encourages the student, in the future, to bluff, to hide ignorance or cover it up.  And when you do that, you never end up learning what you need to learn.

Intellectual bluff is such an important part of grad school, and the job market, and the tenure game, that it's absolutely ingrained throughout academic culture. And it's debilitating, because people aren't willing to ask questions that would expose their ignorance, and so they don't get answers or explanations that could enable them to solve particular problems and make real contributions.

But in a room with as many computer-scientists as medievalists, everybody is ignorant about lots of stuff and so, over the course of the summer, we've gotten to the point where we can confess that ignorance, get an explanation, and then learn more.  It's exhilarating.

Quick example: I was trying to derive some kind of measure of comparative vocabulary homogeneity for different segmentations of a text.  I had an elaborate formula that I thought made sense, but I couldn't get the numbers out that were consistent with what we thought we knew. Finally, my student research partner (the chemistry major) just plotted a bunch of data on a graph, and, uh-oh, it made a straight, diagonal line. I didn't have enough variables in my equation, so x+y always equalled one. So I was being a math doofus. But by doing so, in front of all my students and some colleagues and the computer science students, who were half listening in, I modeled, I think, the way to approach such a problem: take a stab at it, fail, take another stab, fail better, get some help (I dragged a physics professor in from the hallway), take another stab, fail even better, and maybe finally get somewhere.

And hopefully what the students learned--and their amazing contributions suggest that they did--was that being a scholar is about seeking the answers, not already having them (or pretending to).

On Discipline

If the experiment contradicts the theory, then the theory is wrong.

                                                  —Richard Feynman (paraphrase)  


it can be so hard to accept this rule sometimes, but just keep telling yourself...




Progress comes when the experiment contradicts the theory.

More Stages of Textual Transmission

Very General Hypothesis: 
There are more stages of transmission in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts (i.e., between original source and the manuscript we actually possess) than are generally recognized.

Anecdotal Evidence: 
Nearly every time I start to work with a text that is not among those most familiar to me, I discover that there is evidence for multiple stages of transmission.

Examples: 
Paul Remley shows that there could be as many as eight stages between the biblical book of Daniel, two Latin canticles (the Oratio Azariae and the Canticum Treum Puerum), and the manuscript texts of Daniel and Azarias.

I'm pretty certain that the OE translation of Chrodegang's Rule was done in the earlier 10th century, between 940 and 950 and then copied again between 984-1006 (when the names from the Old Minster at Winchester were added), before being copied in the 11th century to create the manuscript version we now have.

The Lexomics Research Group has come across some evidence that strongly suggests more than one stage of textual transmission behind a few Exeter Book poems, including Christ III, Guthlac A, and the Descent into Hell.

Beowulf is consistent with being at least a copy of a copy: Lapidge's argument for the exemplar being in  a different hand, the problems the scribes have with proper names, the apparent haplography in a few lines, and now some work by the Lexomics group strongly suggests a rather complex textual history.

Speculation:
I think that many scholars (I certainly was one of them) have unconsciously adopted the idea that the earlier textual history of Anglo-Saxon texts was like their late textual history: texts sat un-read and un-revised in a monastic library for centuries, only to be copied over in the 10th century, to then be neglected after the Conquest and sit un-read until, after surviving the cataclysms of the Dissolution, the English civil war and the Cotton Fire, they are finally re-discovered in the 18th century.

Also, because our ability to locate texts in time and space is very limited (our resolution is extremely coarse grained), we unconsciously adopt the position that texts might be handled, copied or read once in a century or so.

Tentative Conclusions:
Evidence scattered throughout the corpus suggests instead that there was a rich and complex history of textual transmission, modification, editing and augmentation throughout the Anglo-Saxon period. If this is so, then texts may have been very much more "alive" and in use than we have previously thought. They may have been less of a quiet archive than a regularly consulted set of intellectual resources (cf. the heavily glossed texts that are the product of Athelwold's and Dunstan's "Aldhelm Seminar" at Glastonbury).

Implications:
The texts we have may not represent only a single temporal slice of a culture but instead be multiple re-workings of inherited material, and our authors may have been widely read in their vernacular literature as well as in the Latin tradition.

Mechthild Gretsch, RIP

One of my prized academic possessions
is a small yellow post-it note that I received in 2005.

With great trepidation I had sent Prof. Mechthild Gretsch an offprint of my article, "Re-Dating the Old English Translation of the Enlarged Rule of Chrodegang: The Evidence of the Prose Style," from JEGP.  I had originally submitted this article to another journal, which had asked Mechthild's husband, Prof. Helmut Gneuss, to be the outside reviewer.  Helmut sent his review directly to me as well as to the editors: typed, seemingly on a manual typewriter, on a narrow sheet of paper.  My German isn't great, but I knew enough that when I read the words "grosse mangel" in the second line, I broke out in a cold sweat.  Needless to say, the journal didn't publish the article, but by addressing the helpful criticisms of Helmut and another reviewer I was able to fix the essay and get it published in JEGP. 

But it was not because of her connection with Helmut that I sent my article (which was my best technical work up to that point) to Mechthild, but because she was the living Anglo-Saxonist whose work I most admired.  But she didn't know that, I had never met her personally, and she had a fearsome reputation as a scholar who did not hesitate to point out errors and lacks, particularly if they were grosse. It had taken some willpower, and maybe a drink or two, to put the offprint in an envelope and mail it off.

You see, though I never told her this, my intellectual debt to Mechthild is very great.

In 2001 I had been stuck. The success of Beowulf and the Critics was combining with the difficulty I was having in putting together my first monograph on Anglo-Saxon to pull me away from the field. Kalamazoo that year had been a big, depressing disappointment. What other people seemed to find exciting did nothing for me, and the terrible job market had caused a number of my friends to leave academia altogether. The intellectual spark had gone out.  Anglo-Saxon studies was following a path that led only to insignificant but all-consuming quibbling. The field was entangled in miserable thickets of personal and institutional politics, and those who--through the positions they occupied, if not the work they were no longer doing--should have led were instead dissipating the hard-won intellectual inheritance of our titanic forebears (not on debauchery, more's the pity, but on orthodoxy, groveling, scheming). It was just a radical change from my feelings of immense excitement at ISAS '95 at Stanford or '97 at Palermo or '99 at Notre Dame. I wanted out, to be away from this whole field that I had loved so much.

I clearly remember sitting on the floor of O'Hare airport at 6:30 a.m. on Sunday morning exhausted (having gone to bed at 3:00 and gotten up at 4:30), bored, and with a five-hour wait ahead of me, thinking that this was going to be my last Kalamazoo. I would focus on Tolkien, get my tenure in a couple years, and spend my energies on my 1-year-old daughter.

Then, to pass the time, I opened a book I had bought: Mechthild Gretsch's The Intellectual Foundations of the English Benedictine Reform. I wasn't expecting much. The Cambridge UP Anglo-Saxon England books are always well-done, by smart (albeit connected) people with good training. They're usually correct in whatever it is that they say, the kinds of books that smart, connected people create to gather up and transfer knowledge.  But they aren't exciting. Or at least one never had been until I started reading Gretsch.

Then my whole intellectual world changed.

Here, finally, was what I had been looking for without knowing it: an approach to Anglo-Saxon texts that was scientifically rigorous, linked always to specific knowledge taken from texts rather than guesses or abstractions. Here were arguments the built upon one another with the same kind of logical beauty as those in math or physics. But what these arguments did was absolute romance: they brought the dead to life.

And Gretsch did this with Psalter glosses.

Psalter glosses! Possibly the most boring set of "texts"in the history of earth. But by sorting through layers of such glosses, categorizing them, understanding the ways that the medieval authors had tried to understand their Latin sources, the mistakes they made, even, perhaps, the puns that amused them, Gretsch had reconstructed the an "Aldhelm Seminar" at Glastonbury in the tenth century. Æthelwold and Dunstan had gathered their followers together and sweated out the difficulties of Aldhelms "dense wood of Latin." And then they had burst out to change English culture forever.

By the time my flight arrived, I had recaptured my love for Anglo-Saxon studies.  I read Intellectual Foundations the way Richard Feynman said to read a physic textbook: read until you reach a point where you don't understand, then go back to the beginning and re-read, hopefully getting further the second time. When I finally understood each step of the argument, I was ready (and able) write my own book.

In the process I stumbled upon stylistic patterns in the Old English translation of the Rule of Chrodegang that allowed me to re-date that text and put it in its correct Benedictine Reform context. I tried to make that argument as logically rigorous as Mechthild's argument in Intellectual Foundations, and I guess, thanks to the influence of that model, I succeeded.

My post-it note from Mechthild reads, in part:

Dear Michael,
Thanks for your offprint.
I think you are right.

It is in part due to Mechthild's scholarly example and her achievement that "I think you are right" is a greater compliment than any effusive praise could be.

Thank you, Mechthild, for your inspirational scholarship, for your uncompromising intellectual toughness and for your blend of logical rigor and creativity. Thank you for being so kind and encouraging. I hope you are resting peacefully and that you now know the authors of the glosses and their purposes, that you've had a chat with Æthelwold and Dunstan and Wulfstan and Ælfric and that when they tell you,"I think you are right" it gives your spirit as much joy as your words gave mine.  

Feynman on "Pretentious Science"

The "work" is always

(1) completely un-understandable,

(2) vague and indefinite,

(3) something correct that is obvious and self-evident, worked out by a long and difficult analysis, and presented as an important discovery, or

(4) a claim based on the stupidity of the author that some obvious and correct fact, accepted and checked for years is, in fact, false (these are the worst: no argument will convince the idiot),

(5) an attempt to do something, probably impossible, but certainly of no utility, which, it is finally revealed at the end, fails or

(6) just plain wrong.

There is a great deal of "activity in the field:" these days, but this "activity" is mainly in showing that the previous "activity" of someone else resulted in an error or in nothing useful or in something promising.

New Audio Course on the Vikings

Just in time for Christmas, my latest audio course is out from Recorded Books as part of the Modern Scholar series.

The Norsemen: Understanding Vikings and their Culture



















I'm pretty pleased at how this one came out. Come for the atrocities, stay for the poetry and literature.  I'm afraid I'll never be as comfortable in reading Old Norse our loud as I am with Anglo-Saxon, but I did get a fair bit of the poetry in there.

Hobbit Film Radio Interview

My interview on WBUR National Public Radio will be aired at 12:49. You can listen live here: http://www.wbur.org/listen/live

After 2:00 p.m. it will be archived at http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2012/12/13/hobbit-tolkien-movie

The First Hobbit Film: Some Thoughts

WARNING: MANY, MANY SPOILERS








Utterly consistent with the previous Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings films, The Hobbit has the same strengths and the same weaknesses as those movies. It is visually stunning from the large scale to the small. The landscape is lush and beautiful, and so perfectly rendered in the 3d format that it often feels as if you are looking out of a window rather than at a film, and the details of sets, costumes and make-up are remarkable. The CGI material is seamlessly integrated, making it almost impossible to find the boundary between the computer-generated and the traditionally made. Casting is excellent. The characters look right, and the acting is extremely well done within the limits of the script and the directing. Ian Holm, Andy Serkis, Ian McKellen, Kate Blanchette are as good as they were in The Lord of the Rings, and Martin Freeman (Bilbo) and  Richard Armitage (Thorin) interpret their characters well. Balin the dwarf is kind and warm-hearted as he should be, and the decision to give each dwarf bizarre and distinctive facial hair and other ornaments was a good one (but there are still a lot of dwarves to keep track of, and I don’t think I ever did get it entirely clear which ones were Oin, Gloin, Nori, Ori, and Bofur).

It’s hard to over-emphasize how important the sets and the landscape are to the film, and how Jackson’s A+ in these areas compensates for weaknesses in others. One thing that makes Tolkien’s works different from almost all the other literature of the 20^th century is the deep desire it stirs in readers to go there. Whatever else there is to criticize Peter Jackson about, he’s helped bring this wish true for many readers, and that is no small feat. It’s important to give him credit for really making the film beautiful and not trying to get away with cheap back-lot images and effects because the Tolkien name would have brought in a certain number of viewers no matter what.

That said, I had some issues. These are all more in sorrow than in anger, because I think Jackson had the opportunity to make a great film but missed it—in part because of the lowest-common-denominator needs of global Hollywood, but also in part because he and screenwriter Philippa Boyens didn’t entirely understand their material or trust their audience.

The problems come from the script and the directing, and they are the same problems of the first trilogy of films. But before I get to these, I want to address what I think it a misguided criticism, leveled in Variety and elsewhere: the idea that The Hobbit should be a light-hearted children’s story and played more for laughs than epic seriousness. If we accept the governing conceit of The Lord of the Rings (both book and films) that we are playing it straight, that these particular events really did happen to these characters, then there’s nothing wrong with treating them as serious and important. What Bilbo ended up doing—in the world of the text—really was epic and heroic, but when (in the conceit of the Red Book of Westmarch frame narrative) he told about it afterwards, he made it comic, a children’s story. There’s nothing wrong with showing “what really happened” rather than sticking to the way The Hobbit treats the events, and ironically Tolkien himself started to do something similar. In 1960 he began a revision of The Hobbit intended to make it consistent in both content and style to The Lord of the Rings. He let a friend see this revised version, and got the reply that the new version was nice, “but it’s not The Hobbit,” and so abandoned it. But Jackson need not apologize for treating the events without irony, as if they are true, and keeping the serious, epic tone of The Lord of the Rings.

What he should apologize for is a script with a fair number of false notes, missed opportunities and unnecessary changes. Tolkien’s text is not a film script, and there’s nothing wrong with adapting the story to fit the constraints of audience attention. Some of the changes are clever and effective and help illuminate the characters or the plot. For example, in the text, Tolkien makes little of the exiled dwarves’ wish to return to what was once their home: the driving emotion is “the desire of the hearts of dwarves” for gold and things made by craft, or for revenge against the dragon. Jackson effectively goes beyond the book when he depicts the dwarves as suffering from homesickness and longing. But at other times Hollywood schlock oozes up, and in others Jackson’s own playful (or goofy) tendencies—which can work very well in some places, such as most of the troll scene—should have been reined in in the interest of a more effective film.

The first false note is a small but telling script blunder. At the very beginning, in an overview of the history of Erebor, the narrator says that Thror, King of the Dwarves, “ruled as if by divine right.” This line is utterly irrelevant to everything that happens later, and it is jarring for no good reason. There are no references to God or religion in Middle-earth, so to invoke, through one of the top ten ideas of 1643 is incomprehensible and totally unnecessary.  You could, if you wanted, make some reference to Tolkien lore at this point, and there are innumerable other ways to say that Thror was arrogant or entitled. The film-makers took infinite pains over hundreds of tiny details, but they left a fair number of little turds like this one in the script: making Erebor the “greatest kingdom in Middle-earth”—why? Because an amazing dwarf kingdom under a mountain that is attacked by a dragon in a visually remarkable sequence isn’t enough? We have to be told it’s huge? Jackson should have trusted his visuals to say enough.

The largest plot-related flaw is the way the War of the Dwarves and Orcs is handled. This is material from the Appendix A that is brought into the main narrative, and the review from the Associated Press is wrong in saying that this material is “bloat” to stretch The Hobbit into three films. The quest of Thorin and Company needed to interface with the epic storyline of The Lord of the Rings, and the War of the Dwarves and Orcs is a good way to do that. But the way the script handles this (excellent and exciting) material is weak. On the one hand, everything is personalized: the war seems like it is primarily a feud between Thorin and Azog, the Albino Orc. But at the same time, Jackson operates on the theory that each battle in the film series has to be bigger than the last, so there are about 144,000 dwarves and orcs, so we care about none of them. There’s elaborate choreography, but no emotion in what should be a very emotional scene. I think if Jackson had followed the appendix text, made the beginnings of the battle small and extremely personal (the desecration of Thror’s corpse, Thrain sitting shiva and then saying “this cannot be borne” in a laconic tone), he would have made us care about the battle and the characters far more than the pure spectacle does.

Moby Orc, er, Azog (he should be Bolg if we follow the Lore even a little) is the most fake-looking monster in the entire film, and really doesn’t do much to add tension to the story. It’s a repeat of the major unforced error from the first set of films of making Middle-earth too small (Saruman standing on Orthanc can see over to the Redhorn pass; elves can trot over from Lothlorien to Helm’s Deep in a few minutes). Azog is just sitting there on his Bengal-tiger-sized warg, waiting for Thorin to pass by. Jackson’s Middle-earth has New Zealand’s remarkable scenery all stuffed into a place the size of Disney World or maybe Rhode Island.

The other important sub-plot—the return of evil to Mirkwood and the rise of Sauron—is less effective, though to be fair, it looks to be more developed in the subsequent films. Unfortunately this sub-plot is entangled with the portrayal of the wizard Radagast the Brown.  Radagast is played for laughs, but it’s not particularly funny (or original; Radagast is visually T.H. White’s Merlin from The Once and Future King, even to the bird nesting under his hat and leaving droppings). The sled pulled by giant rabbits is remarkably stupid in conception, but, surprisingly, not as awful as I first thought it would be (and to be fair, one of the funniest and nerdiest lines in the film comes from Radagast. Gandalf warns him “Those are Gundobad Wargs. They’ll catch and eat you,” Radagast replies “These are Rhosgobel Rabbits. I’d like to see them try.”). But the entire Necromancer-in-Mirkwood sub-plot is terribly done. Dol Guldur isn’t particularly good visually, and, in a place where there was plenty of actual lore to use, Jackson invents spurious lore about a magic tomb in the mountains or something that is difficult to follow and does not make much sense. Have the characters think the Necromancer is the Lord of the Nazgul, work in the prophesy that he will not fall by the hand of any living man (as a wink to the audience that has seen The Lord of the Rings), and then have it turn out to be Sauron himself. Much easier than this mess.

Related to the failure of the Necromancer sub-plot is that flaw that just keeps on giving: Elrond. Hugo Weaving is by all accounts a solid actor. He was scary and believable in The Matrix, so the problem isn’t with him, but with the direction and the terrible script he has been given.  I understand that you have to move rapidly through the explication scenes and get to the fights, and that you need drama rather than reasoned debate, but honestly, Elrond is supposed to be 6000 years old and has seen anything that is to be seen (countless defeats and countless fruitless victories). His mother was a seagull and  his father lives in a flying boat! Yet the only thing he can do in debate is rant angrily, glare out from under his eyebrows, and criticize. First of all, he is never right and second of all nobody ever listens to him.  You’d think he would have learned how to be persuasive after all this time. So it’s a great idea to think “let’s dramatize the dissention on the White Council” but it’s terrible execution to have it turn into a stupid lowest-common-denominator yelling match like the Council of Elrond in The Fellowship of the Ring film. You’ve got good enough actors that they don’t always have to be turned up to eleven.

Other weaknesses are more forgivable, if only because we can’t ask Jackson to go against powerful tides of Hollywood culture, and, well, with the good that he does by filming what he likes to film (beautiful scenery, perfect props and sets), we have to take the bad of him following certain less artistic obsessions. Peter Jackson likes to film rocks flying through the air and things tipping over. A lot. In slow motion. And he does in this film. A lot. In slow motion. It gets boring rapidly and sucks the narrative tension out of later scenes. We know that Bilbo isn’t really going to fall off the cliff and die when the Stone Giants come out in the storm, but it makes us care less that he might fall off of various other tall and teetering things later. Too many times we see something that is visually cool but emotionally empty, a soon-to-be-built amusement park ride at Disney World (swinging back and forth on ropes, plunging through tunnels) rather than a real moment of danger or wonder. The battle with the wargs and goblins in the trees at the end was almost ruined by this weakness in Jackson. It’s an unforced error, since the scene in the book has much more emotional tension in it: the dwarves are chased up the trees by the wargs. The trees don’t fall over, but the dwarves are trapped. Then Gandalf tries the burning pine-cone trick, and the wolves are being burned, chased away, etc., but the forest as a whole starts to catch on fire, and then the goblins arrive, take charge of the situation, and start fires at the bases of each tree. The tension escalates, the goblins jeer and sing, and at the last minute, the eagles come.  No tipping over trees, falling dwarves, etc., but a great deal more emotional impact (this scene is partially saved by the excellence of the eagles vs. wargs battle). 

Emotional impact is also lost due to Jackson’s tendency to let Hollywood convention overpower character and story development. The dwarves should not have attacked the trolls with weapons—save that for later.  And although the trolls sequence actually works reasonably well, the dwarves tied to a roasting spit so high above the fire that they would never have been cooked is just too goofy: put them in the sacks and let the trolls argue while standing over them, boiling water, building up the fire, etc.. Even more importantly, Bilbo should not have fought against an anonymous goblin with Sting or against Azog, either. Save that moment for his great triumph against the spiders (and speaking of the spiders, why on earth does Jackson telegraph that move? Save them and make their horror that much more of a surprise). Bilbo’s character development is weakened by him simply picking up the sword and fighting, and the bounds of plausibility are unnecessarily stretched when he does effective ninja-style sword fighting against experienced and much larger foes. Let him clutch his sword and be in the back or off to the side until the time comes (in the next film) for him to be heroic in that way.

But despite all these flaws, in overall assessment The Hobbit is a good, fun film (I’ll go see it again, and I never thought that about The Two Towers). Films are, after all, primarily a visual medium, and when the visuals are so good we can forgive other things (things that books will always do better, anyway). I was a little surprised at how precisely some of Jackson’s images match The Lord of the Rings On-line computer game: Goblin Town is an almost perfect rip-off (and as both are different from anything in the books, I have to wonder if someone on the production team sneaked a peak), dwarvish architecture is also awfully consistent with the MMO, as are particular features in Rivendell. But perhaps great minds do think alike.

And give Jackson the credit he deserves: Bag End is perfect, the unexpected party legitimately funny and over all far better than I would have predicted (only a few minor flaws—note to directors: I lived in fraternity house for four years; no one ever dumps good beer down his face. It’s a stupid Hollywood convention that can be dropped). Bilbo himself is played note-perfect, as is Balin, and Thorin for the most part, and Gandalf remains the real Gandalf. The opening sequence of the dragon’s attack on Erebor and Dale is stunning, with the brilliant idea of making the fire more liquid in its behavior than any on-screen fire I’ve ever seen: it is all the more terrifying. The Great Goblin is the most hideous monster in film history. Galadriel is what she should have been in The Fellowship, naturally glowing and beautiful and fundamentally strange, but without any obvious, cheesy special effects. And Andy Serkis’ Gollum may actually have gotten better: Riddles in the Dark is very well done indeed, though again, Jackson couldn’t resist a silly effect of having the Ring bounce up into the air and land perfectly on Biblo’s finger. And though there are a few times when his facial expressions didn’t seem to match what he was saying, Richard Armitage creates a Thorin that the audience believes and cares about: can a dwarf king be as big a heartthrob and action hero as Aragorn? Surprisingly, yes. (I predict that a certain anticipated scene at the end of the third Hobbit film will be one of the biggest tear-jerkers in cinematic history).

So overall The Hobbit is what you would expect from a Peter Jackson film: flawed by a weak script but saved by visual genius and, most importantly, by its source, J.R.R. Tolkien, who had the secret key to the hidden door of our imaginations. 

Lecture in NJ on Monday, Dec. 10

I'm giving a talk on Tolkien and The Hobbit at Brookdale Community College on Monday, December 10th, at 7:00 p.m. in the Performing Arts Center.  It's open to the public, and I hope I'll see some of my NJ friends while I'm there.  Fun to be giving a lecture at a place where I took classes.

Here's a link to the full information on the talk.

Book Title

The title for the new book is now official:

Tradition and Influence in Anglo-Saxon Literature: A Cognitivist, Evolutionary Approach

It will be out, I'm guessing, at the end of spring or beginning of summer.



(still accepting bids for the film and merchandising rights...)