Photo credit: Gage Skidmore

I’m generally a few months behind in my reading of the Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society, so I only got to the Sept./Oct. 2012 issue yesterday. The front page story is “The Riddle of Gollum: A Speculative Meditation on Tolkien’s Sources,” by Woodrow and Susan Wendling. As the authors examined the origins of both the character and his name, they mentioned a poem Tolkien wrote around 1928. It’s called “Glip,” and comes from a collection called Tales and Songs of Bimble Bay. Here’s Glip’s description:

Glip is his name, as blind as a mole

In his two round eyes

While daylight lasts; but when night falls

With a pale gleam they shine

Like green jelly, and out he crawls

All long and wet with slime….

Glip is a scavenger. He lives near a mermaid who lures sailors onto the rocks with her songs, and scavenges their bones for his meals.

The name “Glip” intrigued me. Tolkien, of course, was a master linguist concentrating on northern European languages. I know that there’s a Norwegian word, “glipp,” which means to blink. However, there’s also a verb phrase, “å gå glipp av,” which means to lose or mislay something. I’m not qualified to say, but that form may be related to the Old Norse word “glepja,” which means to confuse or beguile. (I don’t read Old Norse, but I have access to an online dictionary here. And now so do you. Thanks to Kelsey Patton for the link.)

If Glip was an early version of Gollum, could the original name have suggested to Tolkien the idea of a creature who mislays something important to him? The conjecture’s a little weak, as Tolkien rejected the name Glip and moved on to Gollum. But I thought I’d mention the possible connection. The tangle of associations in an author’s mind can be extremely complex.

“I turned to Aunt Agatha, whose demeanour was now rather like that of one who, picking daisies on the railway, has just caught the down express on the small of the back.” (The Inimitable Jeeves, 1923)

“Like so many substantial Americans, he had married young and kept on marrying, springing from blonde to blonde like the chamois of the Alps leaping from crag to crag.” (Summer Moonshine, 1938)

Two quotes I got while playing with the Random Wodehouse Quote at The Drones’ Club. Great fun.

I ran across it just now while reading about what little we know of P.G. Wodehouse’s meeting F. Scott Fitzgerald in New York in the 1920s. Both were successful authors and shared a literary agent. Both lived in Great Neck on Long Island. Wodehouse saw “Scott” on the bus once and wrote a letter about it, but then the curtain falls. (via Books, Inq.)

“[W.H.] Auden became a close friend of Tolkien’s and an ardent champion of his work, defending him in public and in print against a host of early skeptics; he was one of the first serious writers (along with C. S. Lewis) to ask whether Tolkien’s narratives of heroic quests and imaginary worlds could be considered something more than simply escapist reading,” writes Erin Overbey at The New Yorker

Auden praises Tolkien for succeeding where Milton failed, that is in showing an absolutely powerful God who has allowed us to reject him.

All Christians agree, of course, that God reveals himself through the world around us. In that broad sense, all Christians have a sacramental vision.

But O’Connor, as a Catholic, was much more comfortable with mystery than most Protestants tend to be. She wrote:

“The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.”

Treven Wax interviews Jonathan Rogers on The Legacy of Flannery O’Connor.