Tolkien Prediction #66. That gasp is related to gape etymologically.
| gape (v.) |
| early 13c., from an unrecorded Old English word or else from Old Norse gapa “to open the mouth wide, gape” (see gap (n.)). Related: Gaped; gaping. As a noun, “act of opening the mouth,” from 1530s. |
| gasp (v.) |
| late 14c., gaspen, “open the mouth wide; exhale,” of uncertain origin, perhaps from Old Norse geispa “to yawn,” or its Danish cognate gispe “gasp,” which probably are related to Old Norse gapa “open the mouth wide” (see gap (n.)). Related: Gasped; gasping. |
| gap (n.) |
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early 14c., “an opening in a wall or hedge; a break, a breach,” mid-13c. in place names, from Old Norse gap “chasm, empty space,” related to gapa “to gape, open the mouth wide,” common Proto-Germanic (cognates: Middle Dutch, Dutch gapen, German gaffen “to gape, stare,” Swedish gapa, Danish gabe), from PIE root *ghieh- “to yawn, gape, be wide open.”
From late 14c. as “a break or opening between mountains;” broader sense “unfilled space or interval, any hiatus or interruption” is from c. 1600. In U.S., common in place names in reference to a deep break or pass in a long mountain chain (especially one that water flows through), a feature in the middle Appalachians.
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The use of the word gasp in the text of The Lord of the Rings suggests a link to gape via:
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The light was still grey as they rode, for the sun had not yet climbed over the black ridges of the Haunted Mountain before them. A dread fell on them, even as they passed between the lines of ancient stones and so came to the Dimholt. There under the gloom of black trees that not even Legolas could long endure they found a hollow place opening at the mountain’s root, and right in their path stood a single mighty stone like a finger of doom.
‘My blood runs chill,’ said Gimli, but the others were silent, and his voice fell dead on the dank fir-needles at his feet. The horses would not pass the threatening stone, until the riders dismounted and led them about. And so they came at last deep into the glen; and there stood a sheer wall of rock, and in the wall the Dark Door gaped before them like the mouth of night. Signs and figures were carved above its wide arch too dim to read, and fear flowed from it like a grey vapour.
The company halted, and there was not a heart among them that did not quail, unless it were the heart of Legolas of the Elves, for whom the ghosts of Men have no terror.
‘This is an evil door,’ said Halbarad, ‘and my death lies beyond it. I will dare to pass it nonetheless; but no horse will enter.’
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From wiki
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Hellmouth, or the jaws of Hell, is the entrance to Hell envisaged as the gaping mouth of a huge monster, an image which first appears in Anglo-Saxon art, and then spread all over Europe. It remained very common in depictions of the Last Judgment and Harrowing of Hell until the end of the Middle Ages, and is still sometimes used during the Renaissance and after. It enjoyed something of a revival in polemical popular prints after the Protestant Reformation, when figures from the opposite side would be shown disappearing into the mouth
The oldest example of an animal Hellmouth known to Meyer Schapiro was an ivory carving of c. 800 in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and he says most examples before the 12th century are English. Many show the Harrowing of Hell, which appealed to Anglo-Saxon taste, as a successful military raid by Christ. Schapiro speculates that the image may have drawn from the pagan myth of the Crack of Doom, with the mouth that of the wolf-monster Fenrir, slain by Vidar, who is used as a symbol of Christ on the Gosforth Cross and other pieces of Anglo-Scandinavian art.[5] In the assimilation of Christianised Viking populations in northern England, the Church was surprisingly ready to allow the association of pagan mythological images with Christian ones, in hogback grave markers for example.[6]
In the Anglo-Saxon Vercelli Homilies (4:46-8) Satan is likened to a dragon swallowing the damned:
“… ne cumaþ þa næfre of þæra wyrma seaðe & of þæs dracan ceolan þe is Satan nemned.” – “[they] never come out of the pit of snakes and of the throat of the dragon which is called Satan.”[7]
The whale-monster Leviathan (translated from Hebrew, Job 41:1, “wreathed animal”) has been equated with this description, although this is hard to confirm in the earliest appearances. However, in The Whale, an Old English poem from the Exeter Book, the mouth of Hell is compared to a whale’s mouth:
The whale has another trick: when he is hungry, he opens his mouth and a sweet smell comes out. The fish are tricked by the smell and they enter into his mouth. Suddenly the whale’s jaws close. Likewise, any man who lets himself be tricked by a sweet smell and led to sin will go into hell, opened by the devil — if he has followed the pleasures of the body and not those of the spirit. When the devil has brought them to hell, he clashes together the jaws, the gates of hell. No one can get out from them, just as no fish can escape from the mouth of the whale.
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Tolkien translated the Book of Jonah from which we find one Christian source the hell mouth imagery, Jonah and the Whale.
| Tolkien… is among the ‘principal collaborators’ of the newly-translated Jerusalem Bible. Naming me among the ‘principal collaborators’ was an undeserved courtesy on the part of the editor of the Jerusalem Bible. I was consulted on one or two points of style, and criticized some contributions of others. I was originally assigned a large amount of text to translate, but after doing some necessary preliminary work I was obliged to resign owing to pressure of other work, and only completed ‘Jonah’, one of the shortest books. [Letter 294 To Charlotte and Denis Plimmer] |
We read in his letter:
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He says: þam is noma cenned/fyrnstreama geflotan Fastitocalon, ‘to him is a name appointed, to the floater in the ancient tides, Fastitocalon’. The notion of the treacherous island that is really a
monster seems to derive from the East: the marine turtles enlarged by myth-making fancy; and I left it at that. But in Europe the monster becomes mixed up with whales, and already in the Anglo-
Saxon version he is given whale characteristics, such as feeding by trawling with an open mouth. In moralized bestiaries he is, of course, an allegory of the Devil, and is so used by Milton. [255 From a letter to Mrs Eileen Elgar 5 March 1964]
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The gaping mouth imagery appears in his early symbolic maps and landscapes. Orientation is fundamental in Tolkien’s World much like it was to the Ancients and medievals after them.
We see the mouth imagery in the Morannon Gate from which the Mouth of Sauron issues. The Carach Angren are of course the Towers of the Teeth.
| To meet it there stretched out from the grey and misty northern range of Ered Lithui a long jutting arm; and between the ends there was a narrow gap: Carach Angren, the Isenmouthe, beyond which lay the deep dale of Udûn. In that dale behind the Morannon were the tunnels and deep armouries that the servants of Mordor had made for the defence of the Black Gate of their land; and there now their Lord was gathering in haste great forces to meet the onslaught of the Captains of the West. Upon the out-thrust spurs forts and towers were built, and watch-fires burned; and all across the gap an earth-wall had been raised, and a deep trench delved that could be crossed only by a single bridge. |
Isenmouthe is a play on words to intended to convey ‘eyes and mouth’.
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“The path climbed on. Soon it bent again and. with a last eastward course passed in a cutting along the face of the cone and came to the dark door in the Mountain’s side, the door of the Sammath Naur. Far away now rising towards the South the sun, piercing the smokes and haze, burned ominous, a dull bleared disc of red; but all Mordor lay about the Mountain like a dead land, silent, shadow-folded, waiting for some dreadful stroke.
Sam came to the gaping mouth and peered in”
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At the end we see that the vomit of the lava coming from the Cracks of Doom. Mouths vomit and belch. And we see both the words gaping and gasped used.
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A brief vision he had of swirling cloud, and in the midst of it towers and battlements, tall as hills, founded upon a mighty mountain-throne above immeasurable pits; great courts and dungeons, eyeless prisons sheer as cliffs, and gaping gates of steel and adamant: and then all passed. Towers fell and mountains slid; walls crumbled and melted, crashing down; vast spires of smoke and spouting steams went billowing up, up, until they toppled like an overwhelming wave, and its wild crest curled and came foaming down upon the land. And then at last over the miles between there came a rumble, rising to a deafening crash and roar; the earth shook, the plain heaved and cracked, and Orodruin reeled. Fire belched from its riven summit.
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‘Very well, Sam. If you wish to go, I’ll come,’ said Frodo; and they rose and went slowly down the winding road; and even as they passed towards the Mountain’s quaking feet, a great smoke and steam belched from the Sammath Naur, and the side of the cone was riven open, and a huge fiery vomit rolled in slow thunderous cascade down the eastern mountain-side.
Frodo and Sam could go no further. Their last strength of mind and body was swiftly ebbing.
They had reached a low ashen hill piled at the Mountain’s foot; but from it there was no more escape. It was an island now, not long to endure, amid the torment of Orodruin. All about it the earth gaped, and from deep rifts and pits smoke and fumes leaped up. Behind them the Mountain was convulsed. Great rents opened in its side. Slow rivers of fire came down the long slopes towards them. Soon they would be engulfed. A rain of hot ash was falling.
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And so it was that Gwaihir saw them with his keen far-seeing eyes, as down the wild wind he came, and daring the great peril of the skies he circled in the air: two small dark figures, forlorn, hand in hand upon a little hill, while the world shook under them, and gasped, and rivers of fire drew near. And even as he espied them and came swooping down, he saw them fall, worn out, or choked with fumes and heat, or stricken down by despair at last, hiding their eyes from death. |
| belch (v.) |
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Old English bealcan “bring up wind from the stomach,” also “swell, heave,” of echoic origin (compare Dutch balken “to bray, shout”). Extended to volcanoes, cannons, etc. 1570s. Related: Belched; belching. As a noun, “an act of belching,” it is recorded from 1510s; also slang for “poor beer, malt liquor” (1706).
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| vomit (n.) |
| late 14c., “act of expelling contents of the stomach through the mouth,” from Anglo-French vomit, Old French vomite, from Latin vomitus, from vomitare “to vomit often,” frequentative of vomere “to puke, spew forth, discharge,” from PIE root *weme- “to spit, vomit” (source also of Greek emein “to vomit,” emetikos “provoking sickness;” Sanskrit vamati “he vomits;” Avestan vam- “to spit;” Lithuanian vemti “to vomit,” Old Norse væma “seasickness”). In reference to the matter so ejected, it is attested from late 14c. |