#philologydust #tolkien

For the morning came, morning and a wind from the sea; and darkness was removed, and the hosts of Mordor wailed, and terror took them, and they fled, and died, and the hoofs of wrath rode over them.

end of chapter 5, “The Ride of the Rohirrim”, The Return of the King

In my yearly re-read of the LOTR trilogy, I was struck by this sentence and the glory of the phrase “hoofs of wrath.” It would be absurd if it were not so damn beautiful.

One of the dangers of high epic style in the modern age is navigating the razor's edge between effect and parody. In any other context, “hoofs of wrath” sounds like a tongue-in-cheek headline about mad cow disease or an Onion lede. But the fact is that it works, even now, post Game of Thrones and all the gritty Tolkien-inspired sensibilities, in part because Tolkien commits so fully to epic style here. It's all parataxis (that is, one clause next to the other, lots of linking with “and,” no subordination). It goes beyond everyday parataxis, with particularly strong overlapping of ideas from one clause to the next. It is cinematic to be sure. To modern eyes, one of the striking things about parataxis (the hallmark of Homer, Beowulf et al) is that it reads to us like action film or comic books, with quick cuts that mimic in some way the darting of attention, taking in a scene in bits and pieces.

(Nerd note: Reid analyzes the style of this particular passage in Reid, Robin Anne. “Mythology and History: A Stylistic Analysis of The Lord of the Rings.” Style, vol. 43, no. 4, 2009, pp. 517–538. Part of a broader picture of Tolkien's style.)

Tolkien's other stylistic trick is to hold off on his customary adjectives. He tends to use adjectives with frequency. Some of them are exultant in their texture and rarity, others are pedestrian, but he is clearly following an ancient habit of epithetizing, something that is often frowned upon in modern writing. (On this I like the recent piece on what you can learn from author's adjectives by Michael Maar: By their epithets ye shall know them. )

So this “hoofs of wrath” line got me thinking. Is that a coinage? Did he pull that from somewhere? In Beowulf horses aren't described in battle, though they are common. In fact, the horses in Beowulf may be pretty strange when compared to Anglo-Saxon horses. I'm not an expert in things medieval or Old English, so perhaps this is a familiar collocation to others.

I only had a moment to look into this. More digging will be required.

Until then, I am going to look for every opportunity to use this phrase in everyday speech. No longer is an errand urgent. Rather, I shall henceforth “set my hoofs of wrath” upon the task. To my kids, “Don't get all hoofs of wrath with me!” And to wayward students, it's going in the syllabus. “Submit assignments lest ye find hoofs of wrath thundering upon you. (over email, of course, because nothing is real anymore)”

#philologydust #ovid #metamorphoses

Pyramus dies with blood that spurts like a Roman sewer:

et iacuit resupinus humo: cruor emicat alte, non aliter, quam cum vitiato fistula plumbo scinditur et tenui stridente foramine lognas eiaculatur aquas atque ictibus aera rumpit.

Here's Raeburn: As he lay stretched out on the earth, his blood leapt up in a long jet, just as a spurt from a waterpipe, bursting because of its faulty leadwork, gushes out through a tiny crack to create a hissing fountain of water and cuts the air with its impact.

And here's Humphries: As he lay there on the ground, the spouting blood Leaped high, just as a pipe sends water spurting Through a small hissing opening, when broken With a flaw in the lead, and all the air is sprinkled.

That's some serious poetry chops, to make a burst pipe the metaphorical domain for murder. It's ridiculous and horrific and the kind of thing that Ovid uses to show off his mad skills.

Nerd stuff: There's a cool sound effect here. Hissing and sighing more than anything else: “alte non aliter” and then later “aquas atque . . . aera” (that last one is the breathy word for air, three syllabus — ah -ehr -ah; it is also a noticeably Greek-y word amidst a lot of good solid Latin)

Interspersed in these lines is Ovid hitting the words for spurt/hit with a clever (and gloriously Ovidian) bit of verbal gymnastics. “iacuit” (he lies down) becomes eiaculatur (spurts out), a word that may be an Ovidian coinage, and then is rounded out by “ictibus” (“with the blows/spurts”): “the air [aera] is broken [rumpit] by the hits [ictibus].“) So... lying down becomes spurting out becomes blows. The twist is that ictibus would normally refer to something like a sword or arrow that has a blow that draws blood. So Ovid transfers the expected referent and makes the image about the result of the blow rather than referring to the blow of the weapon. The blood is “hitting” the air like a weapon would hit a body (in the inversion of terms here). (and note that there is of course a linguistic relationship between iacuit (lie) and iaculatur (throw) even though they are in classical Latin considered different words and may seem particularly different in English. i.e. something that was thrown now lies (Causative vs. Resultive forms). But it is completely in keeping with Ovid to riff on etymology like this.)

That's all to say that there could be a sound effect of sorts, but it doesn't seem obviously humorous. However, note Anderson on this passage, who thinks that the simile is overdone and an indication of Ovid inviting us to laugh at his internal narrator:

However, she [i.e. the internal narrator at this moment] picks a simile that is notably anachronistic and, because of its technical nature, flagrantly “unpoetic.” . . . Earlier critics who have simply been shocked and disapproving, and therefore attributed to the poet an artistic mistake or bad taste, must be regarded as themselves mistaken. Since the archaic Boeotian could not have known about the Roman water system (to which Ovid probably refers), I believe that he is intruding the anachronism and the technical unpoetic details as a way of sabotaging the Minyeid's naive narrative. This spurt of blood turns into a ridiculous geyser that demands a corps of plumbers. We don't' really care how precisely the blood struck the berries — the less detail, the better, on the whole — but the narrator seems more interested in this trivial aetiology than in the love story that is its main justification for Ovid's audience. (on lines 122-24)

Anderson is wrong at every point here. His note betrays his taste, not Ovid's, namely that aetiology is “trivial” and that the technical is “unpoetic”. (Ovid's clear affinity for and dependence on predecessors like Callimachus and Nicander are constant reminder that Ovid's taste is not our taste. And Anderson wages war on “trivial aetiology” throughout his commentary. He seems to think that the explanations which are throughout Ovid's work are somehow external intrusions on the poetic whole.) The question of anachronism is more difficult and there may be something to the point that the anachronism is a wink and a nod to make the narrator humorous or absurd. But the entire premise of the stories that the Minyads tell is absurd and well beyond the kind of thing we might expect them to know. I think, contra Anderson, that Ovid is delighting his audience by making the Minyads into professional mythographers and astoundingly good (perhaps a bit over the top) poets in his own image. We are supposed to marvel at Ovid more than anything.

But of course there is debate. Narratological analyses on this passage complexify things, but I'm not sure that actually gets us much further on the question of whether it is humorous.

In any case, the alliteration and such certainly does not need to be taken humorously. I read it as very much in keeping with Ovid's regular “clever” style, with a nod towards very traditional ways of dealing with scenes like this. e.g. Homer, Callimachus, et al. use similar sound play when dealing with rivers, air, and the like. Things that flow or burst or hiss are particularly fertile ground for this sort of effect.

Ovid's signature gesture is the mic drop. “Blood and sewers? Sure, I can pull that off.”

inde genus durum sumus experiensque laborum et documenta damus, qua simus origine nati.

From this we are a hard race, tried in work and we bear the brand of being birthed from this source.

On Ovid

This ends the account of the flood and the story of Deucalion and Pyrrha. The last two humans alive have repopulated the earth by throwing the bones of the mother (i.e. stones of mother earth) behind them. Ovid maps the wet and the dry to the composition of the human body, with the earthy part turned flesh and the solid part turned bones. The veins of rock turn to veins of blood.

On Poetic Explanation

Anderson on Ovid's Metamorphoses 1.414-15 comments on the word documenta: “a prosaic word captures the didactic manner of the aetiologist.”

Such a loaded statement. There's a sneer in there, about “the didactic manner” and “aetiologist” as if that is something different from poet.

Wrong on both counts.

Here's Anderson on the line as a whole: “The narrator affects to reduce the significance of the whole story to simple aetiology: why human beings are hardy and used to toil. The audience should not feel so restricted”

Why all the hate towards didactic and etiologizing? Anderson, like so many critics, seems to think that any sort of explanation is “prosaic” or inherently unpoetic; he assumes that explaining origins brings the whole thing down and “reduce”[s] the story. This is rather backwards as a value judgment for a poet (Ovid) who is all the time explaining things. There is the prejudice of modern tastes about poetry and what makes something poetry at work here. For ancient audiences, explanation is not some foreign bit of dirt infecting the glistening leaves of poetry. It is a core feature of the poetry itself. (To mention the most obvious point, the very first line of the poem, in nova, echoes the Greek tag for telling an origin story, en arche. So if Ovid thought explanation any sort of “reduction” of significance, then it is there in the very first line of his 15 book poem.

Let's focus on the word “documenta”. First, there is clearly a connection between experiens and documenta (from doceo, to teach), almost a gloss on the notion of experiens but given a different form. One hears “teaching in mind” or something similar perhaps, even though Ovid uses it for something very different.

On etymology

It seems obvious to say that words matter to a poet like Ovid. This explanation is one that hinges not just on an idea (namely that stones become people) but also on an etymology which is clear in Greek versions of the story (namely that laas and laos, stones and people, are similar words). Etymology is not epiphenomenon or play or surface cleverness. It reveals deep truths about the world. The choice of Laborem (415) seems like a non-trivial echo of the Greek etymological connection. It is Hesiodic certainly, in connecting work and the nature of humanity, but these are not the same terms as Hesiod. Rather, Ovid makes the Greek etymology work in Latin, a non-trivial task, certainly clever, but also, if we take seriously that etymology reveals deep truth, then a powerful statement about how the world is ordered.

Contra Anderson, the endpoint of this story is an affirmation of Ovid's opening salvo in the Metamorphoses, a demonstration in words and word origins of the order of the world and how its traces can be found even still today (kai eti nun).