Soul of a Dwarf

Today we stand and raise a toast to Tolkien on his birthday.  Mine will be single malt and, appropriately enough, matured in two casks (one of plain oak, one that formerly held Sherry) in a nod to the proverbial "barrels out of bond" of The Hobbit, Chapter 9.

Professor Tolkien set out to give the English their own heroic saga, yearning for a national epic equivalent to the Finn's Kalevala, and ended up with the creation myth of modern fantasy.  His works remain the sacred texts of Swords and Sorcery, inspiring a multiverse of variations on the ancient themes he incorporates into his imagined Middle Earth.  Ever since The Hobbit was heralded as "a delightfully imaginative journey...with no age limits", Tolkien has inspired and obsessed generations of readers and role-players around the world.

It will come as no surprise to readers of Walking the Berkshires that I share this obsession, nor that the extensive appendices at the end of my copies of The Lord of the Rings trilogy are as well thumbed as its central story.  I was sufficiently geeky about Tolkien that in high school I once wrote my biology lab notes in his runic Cirth alphabet, only to discover to my great chagrin that my teacher had been a cryptologist in WWII.  He was therefore able not only to evaluate my mastery of the elements of amphibian dissection but also to correct my spelling errors in red-lined runes of his own. 

You will find, if you spend any time at all with fans of Middle Earth, that we tend to self-identify with one or another of its denizens.  I have always been drawn to his dwarves.  No flighty, heroin chic elves for me.  Square boots and forked beards are more my style, and mead halls, and caverns under stone.   The late lamented Balin, companion of Thorin Oakenshield and briefly Lord of Moria, was my ideal type.  Tolkien's dwarves are among the most enduring products of his fantasy: less alien than elves (although these clearly had his heart) and more substantial than his hobbits, though they are the heart of his greatest fiction. 

But as I raise a glass to the Professor tonight, I will also pay homage to that other demi-god of the fantasy pantheon, he who is worshiped with polyhedral dice: Gary Gygax.  Still with us although in poor health and reportedly suffering from an inoperable aneurysm, Gygax is the father of the modern role-playing hobby who in 1974 created D&D, a limitless portal to medieval worlds, including Tolkien's. Those of us who were adolescents in the late 1970s, particularly but not exclusively those who were teen-aged boys, lived in the glory days of Dungeons & Dragons, and spent hours on end memorizing hit tables and monster attributes the way others are drawn to baseball stats.  I learned more about the mythology of ancient Sumer and the pantheons of Egypt and Rome from the classic D&D reference Deities and Demigods than in my ancient civilizations classes, and the pages of the 1st edition Monster Manual brought the creatures of legend vividly to life.

D&D made it possible to go to Middle-Earth, or to worlds of our own creation.  As a player, I role-played dwarves; as a Dungeon Master and game referee, I created dwarven realms with densely developed back stories.  As I aged and role-play advanced from the basic "Hack n' Slash to complex plot and character development, my dwarves wrote first in Old English, then in Afrikaans.  Tolkien got his dwarf names from Old Norse, which has actually inspired the Tolkien Norse Rip-off Purity Petition to address the grievences of plagerized - and long dead - Icelandic skalds.  I hereby plagerize the logo of the TNROPP and reproduce it thus:

(I might add, parenthetically, that while Tolkien inspired role-playing as an adolescent made it difficult to get dates - as I suspect may also be the case for the mad dwarf behind the TNROPP - once in college it introduced me to much more interesting women.)

D&D's great drawback was the time involved in translating thought to action.  It could take 45 minutes of set up alone to get a small party to its first melee, and the endless rolling of dice and consulting tables to resolve a simple skirmish.  All that changed with computers and the Internet, and the successor of the old pencils and hexagonal graph paper games of my role-playing youth is unquestionably the Massively Multi-player On-line Role-Playing Game or MMORPG.  Fortunes have been squandered and reality lost to the likes of the fiendishly addictive World of Warcraft - though as with its precursors, parental fears of resultant Satan worship appear to be unfounded. 

As a grown man with adult responsibilities, I limit my exposure to such temptation to a couple of Saturday nights each month with my friend Shannon, when we go adventuring together with about 6,000 other players in far Azeroth.   I go as a dwarf.  So if you - or your teen-aged offspring - should ever come across "Sterkfontein", the dwarvish warrior whose name in Afrikaans means "strong fountain", I'd be glad to make you some decent green iron bracers or form a party to raid the Stormwind Stockade.  Even if you are an elf, or a member of the TNROPP.

Comments

[Mark Dreyer]

No offence taken, Tim, & you try most handsomely: Carry on. It's another analytical language as English & Scots is, so you'll make rather more progress there than many speakers of more grammatical tongues. While we mention Scots, you may find just putting yourself in a linguistically Scottish frame of reference wil shunt you a fair distance all by itself. Only remember the the verb comes on the end, as with the Great Sage Yoda you would say. Aanhou wen!

Die Uwe,
Gillie

[Tim Abbott]

Asseblief, Meneer. Ek kan nie Afrikaans praat nie, ek is n Engelsman, maar ek probeer.

I would not dream of calling you or any other Afrikaner a 'hairyback' or a 'rock spider' or worse things.

Sorry to have given offense. Tim

[Mark Dreyer]

Greenman:

What is your case? Afrikaans is wel 'n liefdestaal, 'n minnetaal, wortel, stam, tak, ja, en diepgelegde aar vanuit dese ryke Aarde tot die bloeisel, blom en sapsoete windgestreelde songesoene vrug van die Liefde!

So spreek nog 'n dwerg. Ask my wife, though I stand 1,725m (5'9") in my horny soles. I am shamelessly bearded, as one can be in this country, as well as rather chunky & unlovely to normal canons of more gracile humanity, & I am broad enough at the shoulders (belly too, now) to look short at a distance. Moreover,if you cherish your bodily integrity do not call me a hairyback.

I apologise to Sterkfontein & to his conversants for his choice of name (it belongs by rights to a whole cave). Conceded, this is not his true name but that is not our affair. My public name is Gillie. The virtue thereof is that I can use it as freely without comment in mundane society. Bear in mind the initial consonant is an unvoiced velar fricative, as for the 'ch' in 'Loch Lomond', soft in the mouth like all Afrikaans consonants & iminently suitable for cradle-talk & for seduction too.

Seductive metaphor & amatory terminology is also somewhat more extensive in Afrikaans than in modern English, which explains a lot about the English, a nation second only to the Swiss in the inelegance of their trystings (Do you notice how I have to fall back on an older language & lexicon of this tongue to make this point to you?) Let it pass.

Back to the Middle-Earth analogue of Afrikaans, which I take to be the speech of the Rohirrim (Rosheeren?), as well as the ancestral tongue,that of the Eastern foothills of Mirkwood & the vales of Anduin, & that I relate to the Saxon & Nether-Frankish of the Northern Borders of Germany & the Netherlands - sweet dialects! No matter: Riddermal would no more be Dwarvish than Westron, though Gimli & his subjects in the Glittering caves under Hornburg would in the course of time speak it as featly as Westron.

In an 'Afrikaansed' Dwarfish the battle-cry would more truly be: "Dwergebyle! Dwergbyle het jou!" Mind you, that is NOT what we would cry, but rather, "BARUK KHAZA'D! KHAZA'D AIME'NU!"

Terloops, Greenman, dit treur my dat 'n minnaares JOU nie in die fryleer diep geskool het nie, en dat daarom hierdie deel van ons mooi Taal vir jou vir ewig geslote moet bly.
(in translation)
By the way, Greenman, it is to my sorrow that a lady-love never schooled YOU deep in the craft of courtship, & that that part of my beautiful Taal must be forever closed to you.

In closing, this addressed to Sterkfontein & to Greenman & the others, Courtship is to a dwarf a craft like any other, & those who stop to learn it are as dedicated & skilful craftsmen as a poet, a stone-setter or lapidiarist, blade-wright or mason, or any other master-craftsman of his kind may be.

Heil vriende, en vaarwel:
Die Uwe,

Gillie

P.S. (I quote), "Ek sal jou hoerse kind slaan, skop 'n doodmaak" sic. There are as Tolkien himself points out Orcish types enough among the English kind - no great effort is called for to find them, their types or their language. There is no need to look for them in mine; & they will be no easier to find.

[GreenmanTim]

Ah, those deadly puddings. But CV, did you ever confront the horror of the corridor-filling Gelatinous Cube? An adventurer's bane of the first order.

AVI - many thanks for the Lin Carter reference, which I will happily seek and failing that may indeed take you up on your kind offer.

Rereading Tolkien is a yearly pleasure, Genevieve, for the same reason you cite. No matter how familiar the territory, something fresh and new always surfaces.

LGD, When Sterkfontein issues that famed Khudzul battle cry, it comes out thus: "Besnoeis dwergese! Dwerge is tussen julle!" Afrikaans is not his first language, but whatever its grammatical shortcomings when bellowed by ol' Sterk it has taken the stuffing out many an adversary.

Afrikaans has many fine points but it is not the language of love. "Ek het jou lief." doesn't work so well for Sterk. He's more the sort who says "Ek sal jou hoerse kind slaan, skop 'n doodmaak!"

[LGD]

I am currently reading yet another of Christopher Tolkien's books on how his father created LRR. I can't seem to get enough of Middle Earth ...

Thanks for writing this tribute so I could forward the link to several other fans of the master.

Baruk Khaza'd! Khaza'd ai-me'nu!

[Genevieve]

I was grown up well before D&D became popular. I first happened across the Tolkien books about 1975, and I suppose I've read them through at least half a dozen times since then, each time discovering new things to enjoy.

[Assistant Village Idiot]

Good article. Lin Carter's "Tolkien: A Look Behind the Lord of the Rings" (Ballantine 1969) was the first place I encountered all the Old Norse and Old Icelandic references, including the dwarf names. If you can't find a copy, let me know and I'll lend you mine. I actually did my English Honors Thesis on how the Nordic tradition was being reworked into modern fiction. I don't have much patience for a lot of the derivative works of fantasy, but some were quite good, and I was a D&D addict for a few years myself. I was usually DM, but liked playing dwarves and halflings.

When I was at college in the early 70's someone told me about a medieval role-playing game that went on BY MAIL that was called Midgard. I have never been able to find anything else about it.

[Charlottesvillain]

Ah yes, I too recall endless Friday nights in the dungeon, fearful that a wrong turn might put me face to face with a black pudding. I would have pegged you as a dwarf man.

Would love to see a scan of your corrected Cirth lab notes, by the way.