Simon J. Cook's Blog, page 5

Gandalf’s mark

And I assure you there is a mark on this door-the usual one in the trade, or used to be. Burglar wants a good job, plenty of Excitement and reasonable Reward, that’s how it is usually read. You san say Expert Treasure-hunter instead of Burglar if you like. Some of them do. It’s all the […]

J. S. Mill’s mark

*Notare, to mark; connotare, to mark along with: to mark one thing with or in addition to another. A footnote found in John Stuart Mill’s System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive (1843): Book I, Chapter II, Of Names. Having languished since the Middle Ages, Mill reintroduced logic into Victorian public discourse. Here he resurrects a term of the medieval schoolmen: connotate. He […]

Morgiana’s mark

You are in a series of posts that began with a review of halfir’s legendary thread ‘Tom Bombadil: Peeling the Onion.’ Having indicated a path to Tom Bombadil by way of the original Bilbo Baggins (and his magic ring) and declared that we are here entering into J.R.R. Tolkien’s theory of meaning, we now take […]

Bilbo’s ‘Good morning!’

The opening conversation in The Hobbit between Bilbo Baggins and Gandalf the wizard includes the following exchanges: “Good morning!” said Bilbo, and he meant it. But Gandalf looked at him from under long bushy eyebrows that stuck out further than the brim of his shady hat. “What do you mean?” be said. “Do you wish me a […]

Otto Jespersen

To read the linguistic philosophy in Tolkien’s stories we need a guide to linguistic philosophy as it was when he wrote. While I am not sure how far he can take us, we can certainly take our first steps with the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen (1860-1943). In this post I introduce Jespersen; in the sequel […]

Word magic

‘Peeling the Onion’ arrives at the idea that Tom Bombadil is a name-maker because he speaks the original Adamic language in which a name is a word of power over that which bears the name. My review of this legendary lost thread dismissed such an idea out of hand; but, of course, halfir truly saw one […]

Tom Bombadil: Peeling the Onion

Once upon a time, way back around 2005, the place to discover the meanings of Middle-earth was an internet forum named The Lord of the Rings fanatics plaza. I only enterted this world around a decade later, when it was already moribund. Indeed, my wanderings in the plaza reminded me of the time-travellor in H.G. Wells’s story who discovers […]

Riddles of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings

The online meme is, or was, ‘why did Gandalf not get the eagles to fly them direct to Mount Doom?’ This is a question posed by orcs who see jet planes and think of engines and magic. It is a completely genuine question, but asked from a Dark Tower. The question as found in the […]

The Unfound

The Lord of the Rings respells a spell that was dispelled by Ingeld, Hrothgar, and Freawaru.

Tom Bombadil

So anyway, I promised a while back to say who Tom Bombadil is. He is a mirror of Bilbo Baggins, the original and singular Hobbit, brought into focus after the hobbits became English rather than aborigines. Only the mirror is made by the magic ring, which hides bodies but reveals hidden people in the world […]