Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical | Note on the Shire Records

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Do you enjoy reading convoluted histories of transcribed and translated documents with discrepancies between surviving copies and a missing original manuscript? Then look no further than The Red Book of Westmarch, also known at The Red Book of Periannath, which is the fiction origin of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and possibly other works by J.R.R. Tolkien, including parts of The Silmarillion. A highly detailed explanation concerning the creation of this manuscript and its early copies is given in “Note on the Shire Records”, the final section of the Prologue found in The Lord of the Rings: Part One The Fellowship of the Ring. While the confusing contents of this two-and-a-quarter page explanation have been reviewed elsewhere, I will take a few paragraphs to explain what fictitious books were presumably used in Tolkien’s “translation”, the framing device for the work. Then, I will cover a few rediscovered works in the real world, along with several historical hoaxes, to hypothesize a fictional history of the Red Book manuscript in addition to what appears in the text.

The Red Book of Westmarch

The original Red Book was written in sections with multiple authors over many years, not unlike the Bible. Bilbo’s private diary, which he wrote for about eighty years and completed while in Elrond’s home of Rivendell, made up the first section called The Hobbit. Frodo took this book, along with Bilbo’s three works translated from Elvish, and brought them back to the Shire for editing. While annotating Bilbo’s diary, he compiled The Lord of the Rings, a book nearly four times the length in collaboration with multiple authors in different countries during Shire Reckoning (S.R.) 1420 and 1421, or a period of under two years. (Fellowship, 16). According to LOTR Project, the word count for the English-language version of the entire trilogy is 481,103. Assuming that Frodo worked on the book for about 550 days, this amounts to about written 875 words per day. During this time, while not mentioned in the Prologue but implied in “The Grey Havens”, the final chapter in Part Three Return of the King, Frodo served as Deputy Mayor of the Shire, seemingly restructured the government, likely arranged the funeral of his cousin-in-law Lobelia, oversaw the renovation of his houses Bag End and Crickhollow, encouraged Sam to get married and must have been involved with the wedding, moved Sam and his new wife Rosie into Bag End, battled a serious illness, and apparently experienced such serious burnout that he left for the Elven blessed realm of Valinor not long after the book was completed.

Back to the contents in the Prologue, the descendants of Sam and Rosie bound The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, the three volumes of translations, and information on Hobbit culture into a single red book, hence its name. They created a transcription system at Undertowers, Westmarch, the Shire to make copies for anyone interested in the work. The first copy was called The Thain’s Book and giving to Frodo’s younger cousin Pippin Took, who had inherited position of ruler over the Shire. Upon retiring, he moved into Aragorn’s palace at Minas Tirith, Gondor and brought the book with him. A few generations later, Pippin’s great-grandson wanted the book back. The original may have already been lost at that point; fortunately, Aragorn had ordered an exact copy from his official scribe, Findegil, who added “much annotation, and many corrections, especially… in the Elvish languages” (Fellowship, 17), and that was sent back to the Great Smials, Tookland, the Shire. This may imply that Frodo was not a good speller despite his writing ability, which is relatable, or the information given by Legolas was inaccurate. Other works that appear to be lost include three books by Merry Brandybuck: Herblore of the Shire, last mentioned in my post on “Prologue, 2 Concerning Pipe-weed”; Reckoning of Years comparing calendars of the many cultures in Middle-earth; Old Words and Names of the Shire, which attempted to recover some of the lost Hobbitish language. The compiled work The Tales of Years only survived as an abbreviated form in Appendix B at the end of The Return of the King, which I will cover in a few weeks.

While the fictional story behind the writing of the book that Tolkien “translated” into the English-language The Lord of the Rings may seem overly thorough, it actually lacks significant and important details. How did the book end up in a presumably English library where Tolkien could access it? Did this involve interdimensional travel between Middle-earth and our world, or was Middle-earth part of prehistoric Earth? Did the book travel from traditional library to library over centuries, or was it discovered in an abandoned cave like many other famous historic works? How did he decipher the Westron, Sindarin, Quenya, and Khuzdul languages used to write the book, especially when each had their own script and even used different scripts for the same language depending on the time in history? Did Tolkien already know one of these languages and use the book as a Rosetta Stone for learning the others? These questions add to the mystery surrounding the text, but real-world examples offer some explanation for how the discovery and translation process might have worked.

Archaeological Discoveries of Written Works

When archaeologists discover a written artifact, they might not know the language. For many years, this was the case for cuneiform, a script widely used throughout the ancient Middle East. Around 3200 BC, Sumerian scribes developed the system in Uruk, a city-state in modern Iraq. Many languages from the region but from different language groups adopted these characters. However, when modern archaeologists began excavating the tablets, their linguist counterparts could not read the messages. In the late 16th and early 17th century, European diplomats saw a trilingual cuneiform message on a life-sized bas-relief located in Behistun or Bisotun, meaning “place of gods”, now modern Iran, but did not understand the importance of the site.

Over the next three hundred years, Western explorers visited the site to transcribe and later translate the inscriptions. Because of this work, scholars can translate the Iranian language of Old Persian, the Babylonian dialect from the Semitic language of Akkadian, and the language isolate of Elamite. Other treasures benefiting from this new knowledge included the complaint tablet of Ea-nasir, a historical artifact turned internet meme that I last mentioned during “Prologue 1 Concerning Hobbits”. Today, the site is on the UNESCO World Heritage List and consider comparable to the Rosetta Stone, which included Ancient Greek, Demotic script Egyptian, and Egyptian hieroglyphs. However, Bisotun is not as widely known as its counterpart, possibly because the writing remains on the Iranian wall and was merely visited by employees of The British Museum, rather than carried away by employees of The British Museum like the Rosetta Stone.

Sometimes the language of a document is already known, but the information is new, as was the case for the Herculaneum Papyri. In 79 AD, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius destroyed the town along with its neighbor Pompeii. Now listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, this buried city preserved artifacts from the lavish lifestyle of Rome’s elite, as the seaside village was a vacation destination for Roman politicians and wealthy citizens. Currently, scholars compete in the Vesuvius Challenge, “a machine learning and computer vision competition” attempting to decipher the inside of the unopenable Herculeum scrolls using x-rays and 3D software with the hopes of winning part of the over $1,000,000 purse.

Some discovered texts are written in a known language and act as an older copy of previously known information. The Dead Sea Scrolls, as noted in my recent review of the official digital database and accompanying online exhibit, contained some new information about sacred and secular life in Israel, but the most referenced discoveries are the books appearing the Old Testament, proving that these texts had not been altered for hundreds of years.

Ancient Middle Eastern societies are not the only sources of archaic writing and rediscovered texts. In Shang Dynasty China, which lasted from around 1600 BC to 1046 BC, fortune-tellers used an early form of Chinese writing to inscribe divinations on oracle bones made from the scapulae of farm animals like oxen or inside turtle shells. Questions for the future covered a wide range of events, including getting married, planting crops, and paying taxes. In later periods, Chinese Traditional Medicine practitioners ground up these so-called “dragon bones” to use as medicinal powders. Fortunately, many of the bones were saved by Chinese historians and are now found in museums around the world, including our old friend The British Museum.

While the oldest writing in China is found on small bones, the oldest writing in India appears on a series of fifty-foot tall Pillars of Ashoka found throughout the country. Carved with edicts in Brahmi script, the “parent” to all Indian and many Southeast Asian writing systems, the pillars were erected by a king of the same name who ruled during the Mauryan dynasty around 240 BC and had recently converted to Buddhism. Fragments of these pillars were taken by explorers and placed in museums, and you are never going to believe where one of them ended up. (Hint: It is in The British Museum.)

Across the water in Mesoamerica, Maya carved glyphs into stone using a unique logosyllabic writing system, with pictures representing either a full syllable or an entire concept. This contrasts phonetic alphabet systems with vowels and consonants representing single sounds. In fact, scholars once believed the Maya system had to be similar to alphabet systems thanks to incorrect information spread by the Spanish colonizer Fray Diego de Landa, who burned a good portion of Maya books. Modern understand of Maya is thanks to Yuri Knorozov, a Ukrainian-born Soviet Russian linguist with a dour expression who loved pre-Columbian languages and Siamese cats. He realized Egyptian hieroglyphs found on the Rosetta Stone might be a similar system to Maya. His work was slow to be accepted by other scholars, but once the academic community used the translation system, mainstream media picked up such delights as the resetting of the Maya calendar marking the end of the world. Naturally, many Maya artifacts are now in The British Museum.

Manuscript Hoaxes

Not all discovered texts turned out to be the real deal. Even in antiquity, fraudsters used historical document hoaxes to alter religious views or gain political power. In the 8th century AD, an employee of Pope Stephen II created the Donation of Constantine, a legal document declaring that the Roman Emperor Constantine had given land to Pope Sylvester I, so that his property belonged to the Church. This document was used against the new, illiterate King of the Franks, Pepin the Short, who surrendered land to the papacy in his own Donation of Pepin. I imagine it is no coincidence that a ruler noted for his lack of height has a similar name to Pippin, tall-for-a-Hobbit but shorter than a Man, who became Thain of the Shire.

Forged Viking material is popular in the United States among those who claim Scandinavians built the earliest European settlements in America, rather than Spanish-Italian crews led by Christopher Columbus. In 1898 at a farm in Kinsington, Minnasota, Swedish American Olof Ohman claimed to have dug up a stone covered in Norse runes, including the year 1362. Rune experts from the University of Minnesota quickly deduced that the carvings were not of Viking origin. Instead of moving on from the matter, the nearby town of Alexandria built a museum for the runestone, which is still in operation today. Several years later, in 1965, academics at Yale University declared that they had discovered the Vinland Map, purported to come from traveling Norse around the 9th or 10th century. However, the Vikings were not known to be map makers; none were included in my “Introduction to Maps” from a few weeks ago. Experts soon discovered that this map resembled known genuine maps drawn much later in the 15th century by Venetian and Portuguese cartographers.

The other common category of hoaxes relates to religious material, especially documents that would change the doctrine of Judaism and Christianity. In 2011, Israeli Bedouin Hassan Saeda claimed that his grandfather had discovered the Jordan Lead Codices many years earlier, and he was interested in sharing them. After a media circus concerning relations between Jordan and Israel, the antiquities black market, and premature declarations that these were the most important documents since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Israeli Antiquities Authority (IAA) and Department of Antiquities of Jordan came to a rare binational agreement: the codices were fakes. This did not deter the formation of The Centre for the Study of the Jordanian Lead Books headed by Methodist theologian Dr. Margaret Barker and supported by some members of the Church of the Latter-Day Saints, formerly called Mormons, which aims to prove the authenticity of the materials.

Conclusion

As I always emphasize in my posts, The Lord of the Rings is a work of fiction with inspiration taken from the archeological discoveries and histories of the real world. Because of the care used by Tolkien while creating his fantasy world, the books sometimes read like genuine historical texts, even exceeding the authenticity exuded by deliberate hoaxes. Like real world discoveries of manuscripts, Tolkien leaves significant gaps in the history of his work, allowing room for speculation on how the Thain’s Book or other copies of the Red Book may have been discovered. The fictional version of Tolkien who translated the books may have developed a system for transcribing the languages of Middle-earth, as was the case for cuneiform and Maya logosyllabic writing. He could have used multiple translations of the same text to determine how to best write the book in English, as was the case for the Dead Sea Scrolls. His work even included a hoax, as the version of Bilbo’s confrontation with Gollum recorded in his diary was proven not true but never removed from the original manuscript and appeared in some Middle-earth copies of The Hobbit (Fellowship, 15), along with the first edition in the real world.

By reading the books as transcribed and translated historical texts, the uncertainty or ambiguity appearing throughout the work can be viewed as the original language of the text not being fully understood by the translator. Rather than committing to an interpretation and allowing other scholars find fault, the translator hedges with words and phrases like “maybe”, “he guessed”, “seems” and “as if”. You may have noticed that my own essays adopted this language to stylistically match the text.

With the Prologue complete, the reader has created a foundation for somewhat understanding the dialog portions of the text. However, the historical essay leaves significant gaps, never thoroughly explaining the names and relationships between characters mentioned in the first eighteen pages. A first-time reader will know Bilbo, Gandalf, and Elrond from The Hobbit and may understand the connection between Frodo and Bilbo, but other names cause confusion. Why dwell so much on Meriadoc Brandybuck, Master of Buckland or his counterpart Peregrin Took, Thain of the Shire? Who is Master Samwise, and what does he have to do with either Frodo or the Fairbairns, Wardens of Westmarch? Why should one care that Galadriel departed, and to where, and that Celeborn went to Rivendell instead? More information is revealed in the Appendixes, which will be the subject of my next set of observations on the books.

Read past installments of Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical