An Icelandic Interlude: Fill & Download for Free

Okay I’m going to take a hack at my own question because I understand yet take grave exception to the prevailing and conventional wisdom that “… conflicted characters are more interesting.”I disagree wholeheartedly.Make no mistake, the Vanyar were the highest and greatest of the elves. It was the Vanyar who overwhelmed and defeated Morgoth, his Balrogs, regular and flying dragons, trolls and millions of orcs in the War of Wrath after the numerically superior hosts of the Noldor had been slaughtered and turned into wandering refugees. It was the Vanyar who gazed deepest into the Vision of Eru Ilúvatar and stayed true to the hallowed purposes of Manwë and Varda rather than becoming ensnared in the deluding pursuit of physical treasures or kingdoms in Middle-earth. And the noblest of the Noldorin elves — including Galadriel, Finrod Felagund and Glorfindel — belonged to House Finarfin whose golden hair signified the ennobling admixture of Vanyarin blood.The lack of discussion of the Vanyar thus represents a tremendous missed opportunity on Tolkien’s part, both in service of the philosophical themes he was trying to convey and — more importantly and tragically — in a historical literary sense. Let’s address these separately.Tolkien’s message. Tolkien loved the pagan epics abidingly and the lion’s share of his reading, discussion and writing were on pagan topics including the Elder and Poetic eddas, Beowulf, the Kalevala, the Nibelungenlied and Icelandic myths. Perhaps to compensate for deeply harboring such heretical passions Tolkien infused his works with Catholic themes of blind faith, sacrifice and redemption. However, the failure to depict the very beings living closest to the Catholic ideal of purity and obedience to Eru Ilúvatar (i.e., the Catholic god) completely undercuts that effort. Are the Vanyar boring and uninteresting because they’re not conflicted like the Noldor? Then by extension Catholics who dutifully follow the precepts that Tolkien ostensibly wanted to convey are similarly boring and uninteresting. That may or may not be true, but Tolkien certainly missed a chance to bolster the case for his publicly professed religion by focusing on the Vanyar as a counterpoint to the rebellious Noldor. When Fëanor aroused the passions of the Noldor with his fiery speeches, what sage words did Ingwë speak to the Vanyar in order to prove the righteousness of nonintervention and trust in the Valar and Eru? Are words of peace and wisdom less interesting and desirable to hear than those of conflict and discord, particularly when they are proved true by later events? I disagree.Literary influence. Rightly or wrongly, generations of writers have jumped onto the Tolkien bandwagon and attempted to follow his footsteps while lacking the erudition and deeper vision that guided him. While not all have taken the paint-by-the-numbers approach of say, Terry Brooks’ The Sword of Shannara, one Tolkien-ish theme that innumerable fantasy genre authors have cloven to is the practice of focusing on the conflicted characters. The thinking seems to go along the lines of ‘People only care about conflicted characters. Okay, let’s give them the most conflicted, sick, wacko characters we can dream up!’ There are occasions where this works, such as in Michael Moorcock’s Elric stories. But in general it has led to a dumbed-down cycle of grim and unimaginative brutality and degradation depicted in such works as The Malazan Book of the Fallen and A Song of Ice and Fire. With such a focus on the basest motives of humanity (or whichever races are depicted) as entertainment the uplifting and ennobling possibilities of fantasy literature are often completely overlooked, to the detriment of us as readers and to the genre itself.Call me a Pollyanna but for me The Lord of the Rings would not resonate in my heart as it does had Tolkien chosen to leave out his lengthy descriptions of hobbits and their society — which is quite possibly the least conflicted imaginable. Tom Bombadil, the Master, is the absolute embodiment of an unconflicted being yet he provides a fascinating interlude in the story. One of Tolkien’s masterstrokes, which is almost completely overlooked or forgotten, takes place after the Scouring of the Shire and is a simple description of the events of the year 1420 of the Third Age. There is no conflict at all, it’s an idyllic recounting of the innocent pleasures of the Shire in a bountiful year of plenty. Take a few moments to read it and revel in its unconflicted celebration of life, hope and fertility because this is the realization of everything the Free Peoples of Middle-earth were striving for. The Lord of the Rings would be sadly diminished without its presence.Parallels can be found in the Indian epic The Mahabharata in which the innumerable fighting scenes undertaken by the conflicted characters at the battle of Kurukshetra are as dull, dreary, brutal and repetitive as their counterparts in Homer’s Iliad. To me, the real value of the epic lies in the simple appreciation of Nature and the quiet philosophical conversations shared by the Pandava brothers and their wife in the jungle during their exile.In summary, I am strongly of the opinion that The Silmarillion would not have been lessened for having a chapter or two focusing on the nobility, wisdom and restraint of the Vanyar as counterpoint to the baseness, unwisdom, greed and routine savagery displayed by the conflicted Noldor. On the contrary, I find the lack of such literary treatment a significant hole in Tolkien’s otherwise well-constructed legendarium. The fact that Tolkien didn’t think it necessary to examine or portray in depth the pure good with nearly the time and attention he spent on the pure evil — and various shades of grey in between — is sadly reminiscent of his Catholic faith’s focus on Satan’s Hell rather than God’s Heaven.Why didn’t Tolkien spend much time on the Vanyarin elves? Because he blew it.

rubs hands togetherThe /θ/ and /ð/ sounds are more commonly known as the “th” sounds, as in “thing” and “this”, respectively; in linguistics, they’re called dental fricatives, roughly translating to “sounds made by using your tongue to hiss air around your teeth area”. They’re found in most English dialects and some varieties of Arabic and Spanish, but worldwide they’re relatively rare, which is why a lot of people learning English have trouble pronouncing them.(Please take a moment to remember what these are and which is which, because, as you might expect, they’re somewhat important to the story.)Which language you’re talking about will have a different story for why it has the sounds it does. For specifically English, the history will differ depending on the sound, but /θ/ and /ð/ generally fall into one of three categories: Grimm’s law, Verner’s law, and Greek being funny.I would strongly suggest anyone reading this who doesn’t know what Proto-Indo-European is to see my answer here, but in short, it’s the ancestor of most of the languages of Europe and many of the languages of India, including English.Proto-Indo-European (PIE) probably didn’t have either “th” sound, and this is reflected in its earliest written descendants: Latin, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, and Hittite all lack it.The language spoken by the few Indo-European offshoot tribes who migrated to Denmark and northern Germany initially didn’t have the “th” sound, either. But then, over many generations, it acquired one.Sound changes happen all the time in languages: it’s why we have different accents. This particular group changed and shifted their vocabulary so much over the course of several hundred years that it branched off into a completely new language: Proto-Germanic.The first, and most prominent, sound change that Proto-Germanic underwent is called the First Germanic Sound Shift, also known as Grimm’s law - and yes, that’s the same Grimm who went around collecting fairy tales with his brother.Grimm’s law, or at least a less technical version of it, goes something like this:Where other Indo-European languages have “k”, Proto-Germanic had “h”; where other IE languages have “p”, Proto-Germanic had “f”; where other IE languages have “t” (or sometimes “d”), Proto-Germanic had “th”.It’s supplemented with Verner’s law, which tweaks it a bit and says:Grimm’s law is alright for the most part, but in words where PIE had an unstressed vowel before the sound that should have changed to a fricative, it instead switched to a voiced form of that stop, eg. PIE *patḗr became Proto-Germanic *fader instead of *father because the accent was on the second syllable instead of the first.(*Fader eventually became “father” in English, but ignore that for now.)This is why Latin has tu (with the original “t” sound), while English has “thou” (with the shifted “th” sound).Right about now, you might be wondering just which “th” sound Proto-Germanic had. Was it the /θ/ in “think” or the /ð/ in “the”? Or was it both?The confusing answer to that question: it was both…and neither.I’ve covered allophones here, so see that answer if you’d like to know the particular fiddly bits of phonology. In short, though, Proto-Germanic speakers did not perceive a difference between the two “th” sounds. Both [θ] and [ð] appeared in the language, but they were counted as a single sound.Then one day around the fall of the western Roman Empire, some speakers of a western variety of Proto-Germanic decided to band together and invade Britain. The language spoken by these people eventually split off altogether and became Old English.Fast-forward a few centuries. There are some Irish monks who want to Christianize the barbarous Anglo-Saxons, but to do that efficiently they’d need a way to write the language down, and to do that, they’d need to fit the Latin alphabet to Old English. The Germanic peoples already had an alphabet - the Runes - but that reeked of paganism, and the monks wanted to stay as far away as possible from it.Latin, as mentioned above, did not have either “th” sound, so there was no existing letter that could accurately represent it. The solution they came up with was to create a new letter - but no one could quite agree on what that letter was.One group decided that since there was already a rune for “th”, they should adopt that. Þ (thorn) was their creation.Others thought that was a bad idea, because it was from the pagan runes. Why not just modify the letter D - the sounds are similar enough, aren’t they? Ð (eth) was their creation. (In its lowercase form “ð”, it’s used in the International Phonetic Alphabet for /ð/.)In the battle for letterhood, neither prevailed over the other: they were used completely interchangeably, so the word for “thou” might be spelled þu one page and ðu the next.And now, a brief interlude to Ancient Greek, which, again, did not have the “th” sounds.Modern Greek does have both “th” sounds, which today are represented by θ (theta) and δ (dhelta, Ancient Greek delta). But Ancient Greek didn’t have them: θ represented a “puffy” “t” sound, while τ (tau) represented a normal, non-puffy “t” and δ made a simple /d/.When the Romans got around to stealing all of Ancient Greek’s words, they needed a way to properly transliterate the Greek alphabet, including its “puffy” or, to use the technical term, aspirated sounds: θ (aspirated “t”), φ (phi, an aspirated “p”), and χ (chi, an aspirated “k”).The solution put in place was to write them by putting an “h” after the sound’s unaspirated version. For example, θ, an aspirated “t”, was written by putting an “h” after a “t” to make “th”. Φ was written “ph”, and χ was written “ch”.Then Greek underwent some sound shifts, and its aspirated sounds became “hissier”. Θ started to become the sound in “thing”; φ became the sound in “Phillip”; χ became a throaty sound as in Scots “loch” or German “Bach”.Pronouncing Greek loanwords “correctly” (i.e., as in Greek) in Latin was considered a very classy thing to do - so much that one of the characteristics of the stereotypical (and especially satirical) upper-class Roman accent included the over-pronunciation of various Greek sounds, particularly the aspirated sounds. (The letters “Z” and “Y” were added for the purpose of transliterating Greek, which is why they come at the end of the Latin alphabet.)When the pronunciation of the Greek aspirates changed - in the New Testament Greek period - the change was reflected in Latin, for the reasons listed above: it was “classy” to pronounce the words as they were pronounced in Greek.But the spellings remained the same, so even though “ph” made the “f” sound now, it continued to be spelled “ph”, confusing everyone who’s ever tried learning to read English.During the period following the Norman Invasion, Old English (which also had the “th” sound) became much more “French-like”, and its writing system bent to French customs, which meant the phasing-out of Þ, Ð, and many of Old English’s other special letters.French, like Latin, does not have either /θ/ or /ð/, so it never had letters for those sounds. Instead, Norman scribes decided to steal the spelling for the sound that now represented /θ/ in Greek: “th”. Þu became “thou”, þæt became “that”, and þing became “thing”.There’s a kind of change called a split (the opposite of a merge). As you might guess from the name, it’s a split of one sound into two sounds, where speakers slowly realize the sounds are different and treat them as such.English used to consider “s” and “z” the same sound, but then they split into our modern two. Similarly, “f” and “v” were once one and the same before they separated. The relevant split here of course is /θ/ and /ð/.Exactly when this split occurred is uncertain, mainly because it happened at different times in different dialects. For the most part, it was during Early Middle English, but after the French-influenced practice of using “th” to spell the sound had been introduced.The result: English has two sounds, /θ/ and /ð/, that are both written “th”. They’re considered quite different - try saying “thing” with /ð/ at the start, or “that” beginning with /θ/ - but the way of writing them was never updated.(In Icelandic, by the way, Þ and Ð are still used to write /θ/ and /ð/, respectively.)Thanks for asking!

There would have been two hopeless and helpless little German garrisons stranded on the wrong side of someone else’s ocean, completely cut off by the Royal Navy, with not the slightest chance of any supply and reinforcement. After five or six weeks (at most) they would either surrender, if they had any sense, or be overrun if they didn’t. And once that little interlude had been thus concluded, the WW2 story would resume pretty much just the same as before.