chat

Exiles, Outcasts, and Orphans

lfsaldenbirch

I am listening to Verlyn Flieger’s lectures of the “Tolkien’s World of Middle Earth” course at Signum University.   I hope to showcase the marvelous words which she holds up for consideration.  Right there in Lecture 1, she exhorts us to look for exiles, outcasts, and orphans throughout Tolkien’s work.  I searched for every variation on exile, outcast, orphan, and widow.  Here we go:

1.017 and the unexpected luck of widows’ sons?
14.033 and aid for our widows
14.033 and orphans?’

Both “widow” and “orphan” are common words for our purposes; I’ll run and add them to the concordance.  Now it is for someone else to follow up with the other works!

Your word trivia for today is that “exile” has an obsolete meaning of  “Slender, shrunken, thin; diminutive.”  Thank you, OED, it’s nice to be back in your shelter.

“exile, adj. and adv.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, July 2018, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/66233. Accessed 5 October 2018.

Happy Birthday, Oxford English Dictionary!

lfsaldenbirch

In honor of the ninety year anniversary of the publication of the first edition, the Oxford English Dictionary offers individual subscriptions for £90 or $90 during this celebratory year.  I gratefully accept!  My institution no longer can afford its OED subscription, so I have been foundering a bit.  What to do without access to my much loved resource?  With these happy news about the special price, I have obtained my own subscription for the year: let the birthday candles glow!

I dearly hope they have a hundred-and-eleventh birthday event as well…

Works Cited so Far For Hyphen Project

lfsaldenbirch ,

Good morning, Word Fans!

It will be my pleasure to talk about hyphens at the Tolkien in Vermont conference in early April with fellow scholars – perhaps I’ll see you there?  Folks can find my references right here for their convenience.  The slides are posted here as well.

Works Cited

Alden, L. F. S. “A Tolkien Concordance”. Words That You Were Saying: An adventure through the words of The Hobbit.  WordPress, 2015. https://wordsthatyouweresaying.blog/concordance/

Alden, L. F. S. “Hyphen Mini-Concordance”. Words That You Were Saying: An adventure through the words of The Hobbit.  WordPress, 2017. https://wordsthatyouweresaying.blog/2017/05/13/hyphen-mini-concordance/

Alden, L. F. S. “Uncommon Words Revealing Adventures in Mirkwood” Words That You Were Saying: An adventure through the words of The Hobbit. WordPress, 2015.  https://wordsthatyouweresaying.blog/2015/06/14/uncommon-words-revealing-adventures-in-mirkwood/

Burroughs, F. G., Jr. Old English. Bowdoin College. Autumn, 1984. Lecture.

Carroll, Lewis. Through the Looking-Glass. Project Gutenberg, 2016. E-book.

Drout, Michael. “Germanic languages allow compounding…” Michael Drout: Timeline.  Facebook, September 19, 2017.  Informal post with disclaimer.

Flieger, Verlyn (2002-01-28). Splintered Light: Tolkien’s World, Revised Edition (Kindle Locations 931-940). Kent State University Press. Kindle Edition.

GIMP: GNU Image Manipulation Program. Open source software. Web. https://www.gimp.org/

LeBlanc, M.D., Drout, M., Kahn, M., Kleinman, S. Lexomics Tools. Wheaton College, 2013.  Web. http://lexos.wheatoncollege.edu/

OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015, http://www.oed.com. Various dates 2015-2017.

Olsen, Corey. Exploring J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. Print.

Parsons, Catriona NicIomhar.   Gàidhlig Immersion Week. Colaisde na Gàidhlig.  August, 1996.  Lecture.

Tolkien, J. R. R.  A Secret Vice: Tolkien on Invented Languages, edited by Dimitra Fimi and Andrew Higgins. HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Tolkien, J. R. R. “On Faerie Stories.” The Tolkien Reader. New York: Ballantine Books, 1966 (first Printing). Print.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Annotated Hobbit.  Revised and expanded edition annotated by Douglas A. Anderson. Houghton Mifflin Company. Boston. Print.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Hobbit: or There and Back Again. The Children’s Book Club.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.

“One of the nerdiest Tolkien projects”

lfsaldenbirch

I finally feel like it’s OK to brag a little.  Brenton Dickieson, Tolkien scholar and lecturing professor at Signum University, has called this project “one of the nerdiest Tolkien projects I know about.”  I’m just over the moon with this compliment – Dickieson would know from nerdy.  His delicious blog, A Pilgrim in Narnia, has a new post about C. S. Lewis, Inklings, fantasy, and other treats at least weekly.

Distinct and unique words in The Shire

lfsaldenbirch ,

Let’s look at our new word lists carefully.  I have used Lexos for today’s numbers, so we will move to the official Lexos count of words:

  • In the Shire text: 11,073 words
  • Distinct words within the Shire: 3,013 words
  • Words which occur only once in The Shire: 2,029
  • Words which occur only in the Shire: 559 (that’s from me, not Lexos)

That rate of 27% distinct words (3,013/11,073) is crazy high!  And 18% unique words?  In a non-technical work?  pretty much unheard of in contemporary work – I would be excited to compare this to Lewis Carroll, C.S. Lewis, and perhaps Patrick Rothfuss!  (Oh, why is Lexos’ count different from mine?  Lexos counted the word “Chapter” nineteen times, as well as the Roman numerals for chapters, and any numerals in the text).

But before I hand-type the Slow Regard of Silent Things (about half the length of The Hobbit), let’s compare The Hobbit to The Hobbit.  I used our new random-text-grab script to create a same-size file using words from the whole work (Dear Dave Kale and other number fans, the random grab works with replacement).

  • In the Random text: 11,073 words
  • Distinct words: 2,050 words
  • Words which occur only once in the grabbed text: 1,109

So that’s a rate of 18.5% distinct words and 10% unique words.  Drat it all.  You know me, now I have to see those rates for the whole work.

  • In the whole text: 97,436 words
  • Distinct words: 12,325
  • Words which occur only once in the total text: 7,091

We have in the total text a rate of 12.5% distinct words and 7.2% unique words.  The randomly-grabbed text is not the same.

… and Tech Support just texted me that they would be able to moosh on the code so that the floating-point math definitely doesn’t get in the way.  For total transparency, this is where Tech Support goes far and away beyond me.  I’ve heard of floating points, and I cheered in the 90s when they were available because I saw the numbers behave better… but I wouldn’t know a floating point from a non-floating point to save my soul.

 

Thank you, Tech Support

lfsaldenbirch , ,

My very dear Tech Support has added a new tool to the Digital Humanities Toolkit (which is also linked on our About page).  It is random-choice.py and it will grab your choice of a number of words from a given text file as randomly as a computer can grab and present them on your Terminal window along with the ordinal number of that word in the text.  It will grab numbers as though they are words, but it will not grab things inside of square brackets (like our paragraph references) or double-x (like our phrase separator).  It’s a short little bit of code, so I simply copy/pasted it from github to a text file and named it random-choice.py.  Seems to have worked.

Thank you to Daroc Alden, who always has the time to write a little script for their Mama, even during mid-terms.

Then they came to lands where people spoke strangely

lfsaldenbirch ,

I am following a little rabbit-trail, Word Fans, about dialogue and narration in the Shire.  What are the characteristics of these bits which distinguish it from all the other bits?  Won’t this be fun!

[02.028] At first they had passed through hobbit-lands, a wide respectable country inhabited by decent folk, with good roads, an inn or two, and now and then a dwarf or a farmer ambling by on business. Then they came to lands where people spoke strangely, and sang songs Bilbo had never heard before.

It would be luxurious to include all the prose about the Shire as well, but my current project has made me stare at a deadline and hmph at it.  For our purposes, then, I am counting “In the Shire” as from [01.001] to [02.028], up to but not including the words in the title of this post, plus [19.028] to the end, [19.048], inclusive.

To pass on a tantalizing bit of my thought, I’m calling “In Mirkwood” from [07.154] through [09.069], inclusive.

The plan is to use the Mirkwood text as the stopwords to look at the Shire text and vice-versa…  I wonder if I need to do this for all regions and chart their differences from the Shire?  I may have to.  If I don’t come up for air in a few days, please send chocolate.

The Shire text uses 11,119 words, of which 1484 do not appear in Mirkwood, this is counting every word used – “yes” counts as six words.  That’s 13.3% Shire words.  There are 562 words used in the Shire which are not used anywhere else in the book – 5%.  And yes, I see the logical error there and am going to – soon! – compare the Shire Text with a similarly sized sample.  If I’m lucky, Tech Support can create a “grab a random sample of text from here of size N” script.

The Mirkwood text uses 16,400 words, of which 2,400 do not appear in the Shire, and variations on “spider” account for about 60 of these.  14.6% . Nearly identical.  I do find it odd that the Mirkwood text numbers come out on an even “400” – I will chase that for a while with your indulgence, Word Fans.