This is understandably, the number one question, when confronted with Tolkien’s geometry and private symbolism.
Adam Roberts discovered the Alvissmæl acrostic in the Hobbit (‘The Riddles of the Hobbit’). It had been lying there secretly for over 70 years. Priya Seth discovered a number of anagrams including this one which had been hidden for over 60 years.
TOM BOMBADIL IARWAIN BEN-ADAR FORN ORALD
WARN FRODO AND BILBO I BE A MAIA – MR RONALD T
Seth, Priya. Breaking the Tolkien Code (p. 218).
Tolkien never told you about that then did he? He also never told any of the professors and scholars of Tolkien or any of the people you consider to be ‘experts’ that you know. And he never told his closest friends or family. Many millions of people have read these books and many have studied them and discussed them for decades.
Just consider that for a moment. You don’t want to waste your time here after all.
The chances of that anagram being the product of random chance are…well, exceedingly remote. I would go as far to say that, if you think that that anagram is a product of chance, you are quite possibly lunatic. Even so, the author, who I spoke to, told me that she had received ‘some abuse’ on forums for her work and views. I have received a lot of abuse too. My experience of the Tolkien community on the whole, regarding new ideas, and even debate based on argument and proof, has not been a good one. And recourse to etymological analysis of the words in his texts in non-existent. Strange, considering Tolkien was a world renowned philologist and had strong, clearly stated views regarding literature and philology. That should be the first place you look.
By the time I read ‘The Riddles of the Hobbit’, a few years prior I had stated that the riddles in the Hobbit were a ‘meta-riddle’. I wrote some analysis on it which will appear on this site. I didn’t spot the acrostic, but I did see that the riddles formed a larger connected whole. I tagged the author on Twitter informing him that I could explain the underlying rationale behind the letters. I received no response.
When I bought Priya Seth’s excellent book, I scanned it very quickly. During that first very hasty scan, I made three predictions, two of which were about the solution to the riddle. You see, I knew what was coming, because I had already found 9 other instances of the same thing she found.
I’ve made 96 predictions to date. To be clear, without wanting to put too fine a point on it, but while putting a very fine point on it indeed, that’s 96 more than anyone else in history. That’s because a) I’ve studied Tolkien’s etymologies forensically for 15 years and b) Tolkien is predictable and has a system c) I don’t let anyone else stop me from thinking for myself d) Above all, I got LUCKY.
Before reading this I would strongly suggest you read the statement on the homepage and ‘Tolkien’s Contrasistency‘ which discusses Clyde Kilby’s ‘Tolkien and the Silmarillion’. Kilby spent time with Tolkien, and strongly suspected he was hiding something and Tolkien almost confided in him. I believe that that was the closest we ever got to unlocking the door. I have unlocked the door. And what I have found is astonishing.
Here’s a response I wrote to a friend on FaceBook who asked something similar to the opening question.
I don’t pretend to understand a lot of these Tolkien posts…if any to be honest! But, in summary, are you saying that Tolkien was engaged in a variety of steganography? That he was hiding things inside other things? If so, why?
My reply.
Everything was hidden for a number of reasons: explicitly and implicitly.
(1) Tolkien spent the whole of his life immersed in philology. He was a world expert in his field. He worked on the O.E.D more than once and according to Tom Shippey (probably the most respected Tolkien critic), he often ‘knew more than the O.E.D'[1]. Philology by its very nature is hidden. If you look at the words on a page, each one lies on the end of a branch leading back into history. It’s all hidden to the average reader. He was also one of the world’s most knowledgeable persons about the etymology of proper names – at least British/European ones. All of his names were chosen in this context.
Tolkien was for some time perhaps the one person in the world who knew most about names, especially English names, and was most deeply interested in them. [Shippey]
Apart from the visual language in his art works, all of my understanding is based on extensive philological understanding of his works. I’ve studied thousands of etymologies of the words in his texts. That was my approach from day one, from 15 years ago. I also got lucky, which led me to start this whole thing in the first place. I had no desire whatever to be a literary critic. When you read his works, if you think you are speaking the same English as Tolkien, you are very, VERY mistaken. In order to understand them and how the words relate to meaning within his works, you have to look at the etymology of every single word he uses.
The writing of The Lord of the Rings is laborious, because I have been doing it as well as I know how, and considering every word. [Letter 35 To C. A. Furth, Allen & Unwin 20 Northmoor Road, Oxford].
[1]Shippey, Tom. The Road to Middle-earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien created a new mythology (p. 59).
HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.
(2) Allied to (1), you have to understand his backward looking mind set. The loss of his parents was almost certainly the driver for this. As such, his belief that the closer to the root of a word you can get, the closer you are to its truth. That being a kind of myth. He also employs ‘Emanation’ in his works, which means the further you get away from God in the past, the more imperfect things become. Modern language use is at this end of the journey. It makes his style highly idiosyncratic and his meanings opaque. As such, meanings are hidden from the start.
Tolkien’s ‘The Lord of the Rings’ is set roughly 5000 years ago in an alternate timeline of N.W Europe. When writing in English, Tolkien almost always used words whose meanings were the root meanings of words. And he chose Germanic language roots. He also very occasionally used Persian/Turkish/Avestan as a counterfoil to those languages and cultures.
(3) Part of his field of professional interest was with riddles. Tolkien even taught on occasion using riddles. Someone has a book published on Tolkien’s use of codes during his life. I became aware of that after I had studied this and arrived at most of my understanding. He used riddles of course explicitly in his works. The famous riddle game in The Hobbit being one of them. Riddles were also implicit in the opaque philological nature of his view of the world. The dense ‘undergrowth’ of meanings.
(4) He explicitly stated that he set riddles. Tom Bombadil and Goldberry being one of them. There are others too. And my claim is there are others which are not even declared by him. As stated, Adam Roberts found the Alvissmæl acrostic and Priya Seth found the anagrams including the one about Tom Bombadil. All of which were hidden for 70 years or more.
(5) Tolkien spent his whole life using codes. His letter as a child from France known as ‘the rebus’ to his guardian is one example of them. Early language invention are others- some of which are self professedly code-like. He used to write in code in the margins of his letters during the War apparently. He very often abbreviated proper names and words to initials. That itself is a code-like means of communication- substituting one thing for another and it has a tradition going back to illuminated manuscripts and symbolic monograms such as the Chi Rho christogram etc. Shippey terms it ‘Tolkien’s private symbolism’. The effects of it on conversations with him were, to the observer, confusing. Clyde Kilby encountered it and C.S.Lewis knew it well. My claim is that his published ‘Floral Alphabet’ is a rebus for his languages. I even use my understanding of that code now to help me understand his Elvish words and the narrative they are in. His famous monogram is a good example of a visual, geometric expression of language. It is actually incorporated into his implementation of Space-Time geometry (another story!). See my comments on finding Tolkien’s initials hidden in his works.
(6) He disliked critics. He explicitly stated that he did not believe in the practice of reductionist analysis of art. It was to be enjoyed for what it was. As like smelling the flower, not examining the branches and roots which carry the flower. Enjoying the soup without inquiring about the bones that went into it. However, in complete contradiction to that view, he also set riddles for his readership. So we might ask ourselves, if we are not supposed to use our analytical minds to solve them, what are we supposed to use? The force? It is in that contradiction that we can see Tolkien’s secretive and riddlesome nature with his readership and what Kilby termed his ‘contrasistency’. Shippey suspected this I’m sure. It’s my belief that he was riddling everyone- even in his letters- intentionally quite often.
It was playful, not malicious. Which leads us to his self-declared ‘Secret Vice’. His life-long pastime of language invention. Tom Shippey stated that he more or less didn’t think that Tolkien could always be entirely trusted in his comments and responses to questions about his own works. I’d already arrived at that conclusion independently. This has created a difficulty for both the readership and the critic. Critics being alienated from his work (both in terms of philological understanding) and in terms of his acceptance as a writer/thinker.
(7) He use of visual language and framing of his ideas. He used geometry- that is Time and space are mapped to geometric planes: 3 of them to be precise. Movement between those planes provides the means to navigate between rational planes up towards or down away from God. He drew artworks all of his life. The ‘Book of Ishness’ is where it began. That visual language again renders his symbols more hidden to a readership which is focusing on the books.
(8) He often wrote literary works or drew illustrations to work out ideas. Again rather than write notes about things, he would create another work of art. Apparently he used this approach to understanding art in teaching methods in his lectures. That again creates difficulty in understanding his works.
(9) The medieval mind, from which Catholicism gets many of its idiosyncratic inheritance had a strange view of the world to modern minds. Remember the upgrading of The Holy Stone of Clonrichert to a Class II relic in Father Ted? 😀 Number symbolism being one of them. The medieval symbolic landscape is another manifestation of that mind. Tolkien is using a medieval symbolic landscape. The famous map is one and can only be understood on a symbolic level UPSIDE DOWN (more to be revealed!). The medieval Romances of Arthur are a good example which he talks about and had studied extensively.
(10) Allied to his attitude towards critics (literary establishment that is). His belief in philology versus literature. His difficult style, and the literary establishment’s misunderstanding of his works, is directly due to his use of philology. He believed in returning to the roots of the meanings of words. That’s what makes his works opaque to the non-philologist. He had a view more or less stated, that if you didn’t do the work of studying the philology then you didn’t really have a right to critique it. He was not going to do the work for you. But you were more than welcome to enjoy is for what it was, art.
(11) Private pleasure. He amused himself greatly with his games. Shippey refers to this as his ‘obsessive
playing with words’. He had a strong sense of humour. That forms the basis for many of his riddles, word play. Puns was a favourite of his. It’s not a coincidence that the rebus he sent to Friar ‘Francis’ from France used visual code. His inspiration was not doubt the link between him writing a letter from France to Friar France-is’. That’s how Tolkien’s mind worked. And it never changed. Clyde Kilby who spent time with Tolkien, strongly suspected he was a deeply secretive man who was hiding a lot about his works and enjoyed the game of confusing people. He even coined the word ‘contrasistency’ to describe him. See ‘Tolkien’s Contrasistency‘.
(12) A problem of image and the ‘Tolkien establishment’. After his secrecy, this is quite possibly the biggest barrier to understanding his works. Tolkien, pipe-smoking, tweed-jacketed, Edwardian Oxford Don, devout Catholic. This
narrow view of him, which is quite prevalent to varying degrees, I would describe, is the gentrification of Tolkien. I had this narrow view of him originally myself before I’d read very much about him. It was a real barrier to my understanding of him to begin with. From my initial discovery of change in his languages I termed it ‘linguistic alchemy’. I was VERY uncomfortable with it. Tolkien, an Oxford Don..? Alchemy? Surely not! Then I read his reference to language change as ‘the long alchemic process of time’ in his essay ‘On Fairy Stories’, and I almost fell off my chair! Peoples’ love for Tolkien is ironically also the biggest barrier to understanding him *critically*. People have a vested interest, for good and bad reasons, for loving Tolkien. It is very often their consolation (and escape) from the World. I’m not criticizing people loving him and his works. The problem is with approaches to critical analysis. As I say I’ve always loved him, like everyone else that loves him, and I never once had any ambition or
interest to critique his works. It began with a stroke of luck.
(13) Sheer lack of time to explain to people. He was a busy man with family commitments, often overworked
and struggling financially. It’s taken me fifteen years on and off to decipher what I believe to be his symbolic language: visual, geometric, wordplay, numbers symbolism, etc. No way would he have had the time!
(14) He described his language invention as his ‘Secret Vice’. He was quite embarrassed and was very reluctant to reveal the extent of his efforts. He was worried about how his academic peers would receive it. He had a noticeable sense of guilt about the extents of his language games. That’s another reason why he hid everything. His Secret Vice actually refers to a mechanism for navigation between rational planes which underpins everything, (to be revealed!) and his incorporation of sex (see Tolkien’s Contrasistency‘).
(15) Allied to (1), his works were written to be a vehicle for his languages, not the other way around. He did not create his world and decide to put his languages within them. It was the opposite way around. Therefore, if you don’t understand his languages, you can’t understand the narrative on more than a superficial level. His languages were invented, and you therefore have a considerable barrier to understanding his works at a symbolic level. For eg, his languages have a system of graphemes which employ the same geometric ideas as previously mentioned. Even the very strokes of the invented letters are built from the same geometric language-in fact they form the origin of that language. Time and Space. The bones of it. In addition, the means of language production- the bodily mechanics of his phonetics are also grounded in this geometric, planar language. Up being God (the letter i), down being the Devil, the letter ‘a’. The nasal sounds are mapped to one of these geometric planes. The semantics of his works are consistently generated from very obscure origins developed from an early age and over a life time that require specialized knowledge to understand. He described languages as like savouring wines. He was a syneasthete. That’s another barrier to understanding Tolkien since his experience and expression was deeply subjective and personal.
(16) His works are primarily about change. Language change. Not only do you have the barrier of understanding his invented languages, you also have to understand how they change over time. It is only by understanding that do you understand how and why the narrative changes.
| what he did, with remarkable stubbornness, was to persist in not inventing a story, and instead to expand on what one might now call his obsessive playing with names and brooding on the question of transmission. [Shippey, Tom. The Road to Middle-earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien created a new mythology] |
(17) Humility and simple joy. He believed, as a SubCreator his work was a kind of religious devotion. A
reflection of God, however hopelessly flawed. In the end it was to be loved, not analysed.
Since writing this reply 18 months ago, I’ve learned a lot more. I’ve finally after a very long time, worked out the principles of his system. I would add the following point, which I think is probably the most important point of all.
(18) His works are chiefly and fundamentally about his relationship with his wife Edith. He wanted to keep the details of his symbolism private. His entire works are built on a ‘Sacred Geometry’. That is a right-angled triangle. He divides everything in his works to one of these planes. EVERYTHING. This is one of the reasons why his system is predictable. He assigns himself and Edith to the opposite and adjacent planes of that triangle. They naturally exist in a state of discord because of the fallen nature of the world. The plane of the hypotenuse is harmony, twilight, and among other things, sexual congress. The left and right hands of Ilúvatar are the female, Edith, and the male, Tolkien. The geometry is created in the hands sequence of Ilúvatar in the Music of the Ainur. The relationship and the geometry is God ordained. When Ilúvatar raises them in response to the discords of Melkor, he creates Time and Space, that being, Edith and Tolkien. In this way the triangle and the geometry contains discord and harmony. The ‘Music’ is in the geometry. The Music progresses between harmony and discord. Like all music, it has tensions which are resolved. Just like a relationship in fact. The Music is the Music of the Spheres because the oscillation between tension and harmony can be found in the courses of the Sun and Moon. The Sun is Time-Edith, the left hand, the plane of the opposite. The Moon is Space-Tolkien, the right hand, the plane of the adjacent. Every character in the book is assigned to one of these planes. Ever wonder why so many characters raise their hands or arms? That’s the system laid out in the opening with Ilúvatar. He also assigns characteristics and phenomena to these planes, for e.g. inside and outside, white and black.
In short the geometry is a dialectic, a conversation between Edith and Tolkien under God. In this way we have thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Synthesis being a meeting under God, at twilight. At this juncture the Door opens. The conversation moves between them, and the narrative moves between the planes of the triangle. It moves between the horizontal planes via a device called the TURN (see ‘The Turn in Principle‘ and ‘The Turn in Practice‘). The narrative and characters also move vertically between rational planes, up or down towards or away from God in heaven. In this way the geometry and the Music in the geometry describes the narrative and character progression and the battle between good and evil. Likewise, the relationship between left and right hands is a ‘battle of the sexes’. Sexual symbolism is fundamental because it is God’s gift to husband and wife. It is an important part of the marriage and conversation. And this is part of the reason why he wanted to keep it all private. And he came very close to revealing it to Clyde Kilby. See ‘Tolkien’s Contrasistency‘.
At the end of the list, I added the following to my reply.
Referring to the small man he encountered in A Secret Vice:
| I never gathered any further details of his secret grammar; and military arrangements soon separated us never to meet again (up to now at any rate). But I gathered that this queer creature – ever afterwards a little bashful after inadvertently revealing his secret – cheered and comforted himself in the tedium and squalors of ‘training under canvas’ by composing a language, a personal system and symphony that no one else was to study or to hear. Whether he did this in his head (as only the great masters can), or on paper, I never knew. It is incidentally one of the attractions of this hobby that it needs so little apparatus! How far he ever proceeded in his composition, I never heard. |
Tolkien IS the secret master here! He is referring to himself. Tolkien is the master riddler. That quote is from his essay ‘A Secret Vice’. He kept that hidden for a very long time. Look at the Moria mirror image I uploaded (see below). And consider all of his other known riddles. I say known because I knew the Chamber of Mazarbul was a riddle and its not declared. I’ve written 200 pages on it, but no-one has realized that it is. And I will say with total sincerity, his entire corpus is a riddle. Both, because of his methods, and very often (much more than people realize), intentionally.
His methods:
(1) etymology. The very nature of it is hidden since it relies on definitions of words in books. You have to go find them in other books beyond the book Tolkien wrote. Every word lies at the end of a branch on a tree. We only see the leaf. That branch disappears into the murky depths out of sight. Diachronism, the changing meaning of a word over time. He has used this too symbolically, for eg, in the word ‘precious’. The nature of the change over time itself is part of the reason he uses it.
(2) His illustrations. This is one of the places that he did outwardly document his ideas. If Tolkien wanted to work an idea out, to develop it, he would go write a story or draw an illustration: N.C.P, Smith of Wooten Major, etc. Since as I argue, he’s using planar geometry from the ground up, you can see that geometry is a visual language. Tolkien was highly visual.
(3) Linking and proximity. One of his narrative techniques.
(a) He links across large distances in the narrative. They’re quite difficult to spot. Eg, in the Moria sequence he links the beginning and end of the last sequence of 8 by the hammer and anvil imagery. That’s because 8 is the octave and it forms the return to the beginning but also moved on in the story. It’s an echo.
He sets up the idea in the readers’ minds here at the West Gate. He primes us. It’s a technique known in film as ‘foreshadowing’. It’s used in magic too.
| Below, though the threads were in places blurred or broken, the outline could be seen of an anvil and a hammer surmounted by a crown with seven stars. |
Then he associates the hammer with the Enemy, not with the dwarves…(Hammer of the Underworld)
| ‘That was the sound of a hammer, or I have never heard one,’ said Gimli. |
Then in Gimli’s chant he foreshadows the attack in the Chamber of Mazarbul -see the agreement between the
place of that line in the poem and the line of symmetry which is the Chamber itself.
| “There hammer on the anvil smote,” |
Then in Gimli’s chant he foreshadows the attack in the Chamber of Mazarbul -see the agreement.
Then he foreshadows the moment in the dell where the mithril shirt is revealed and the final reference to hammer and anvil is made. You have to use the location of the line in the chant (see image) to associate this line with that moment after the attack. In this way the Chant is the key to the whole sequence.
| No harp is wrung, no hammer falls: |
Then in the Chamber itself:
| There was a crash on the door, followed by crash after crash. Rams and hammers were beating against it…. ‘Well, it did not skewer me, I am glad to say,’ said Frodo; `though I feel as if I had been caught between a hammer and an anvil….`There is more about you than meets the eye,’ |
And in that first line we find support of my claim that the hammer is the Hammer of the Underworld since it references and again foreshadows Grond at the gates Minas Tirith. He has linked the two gates: West Gate and Minas Tirith in this way. The statement there is more to him than meets the eye foreshadows the dell sequence where the mithril shirt is revealed.
| `No! ‘ said Aragorn. `We must have a look and see what the hammer and the anvil have done to you. I still marvel that you are alive at all.’ Gently he stripped off Frodo’s old jacket and worn tunic, and gave a gasp of wonder. Then he laughed. The silver corslet shimmered before his eyes like the light upon a rippling sea. |
And finally the rippling is echo of the ripple in the water created by the Watcher in the Water. Everything comes full circle. We have a link back to the Chamber via hammer/anvil and a link back to the West Gate via hammer and ripple. These are two circles, two cycles, and together form the figure 8. A figure 8 visually is two circles. The point in the very centre of the figure 8 is the Chamber of Mazarbul. This is Tolkien’s cycles as he puts it, but in this case, on a small scale.
(b) links via for eg, two statements adjacent to each other on the page. “Goldberry is waiting. There is time enough” This is as close as he gets to saying she is time. This is his riddling nature. Even though grammatically he has not linked the two statements, because they are next to each other, they are offered as being linked. The link is in the author’s head. This goes back to his visual nature. Even though grammatically there is no explicit link, because they are visually next to each other, one is implied by the author- it’s a hint, a visual clue, just like his drawings- for eg, the bull’s head in the cliff in the Moria illustration. You can see that very thing in the Riddle sequence in the Hobbit
where the actual riddles are prompted and come to mind by the events happening around them. The characters (and readers) are given prompts (clues) by the author as to what is coming next. The real riddle is not in the riddles, it’s in the book for the reader. The passage is a riddle about riddles.
(4) related to (3b) linking via internal connections, both intentionally and unintentionally. As a philologist much of his professional life was spent following the paths of development of words, the links between words. I believe that was imprinted on his brain in a very real way. He had been trained to think in this manner, and his mind to operate like this, in other ways, for eg, links between subjects, themes, symbols. You can see evidence of this in his letters.