A word by any other name ...

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by The Squatter of Amon Rûdh

I'm inclined to treat the connection under discussion as extremely suspect.

So then, an answer to my first question, of when Tolkien created the word, has been suggested.

But what of my second question? The connection is still easily and plausibly made by many, many readers. Tolkien's comments in the Forward takes pains to dismiss the allegorical reading of LotR as "about" World War II. Yet why did he still use a word which would suggest and support this kind of false allegory?

Originally Posted by davem

Which is not to say that he didn't smile to himself about the similarities....

So, was he having his cake and eating it too? He wouldn't be the first writer to play tricksome.

[davem]

Originally Posted by Bêthberry

So, was he having his cake and eating it too? He wouldn't be the first writer to play tricksome.

Synchronicity maybe?

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

Yet why did he still use a word which would suggest and support this kind of false allegory?

It only supports the false allegory in the same way that Moria supports the idea of a biblical allegory, or Gondor suggests that Tolkien preferred open-plan offices. Readers can plausibly connect Moria and Morīah or Gollum and Golem as well. Then, since we're choosing only to notice the first syllables of words, there's Fangorn and fang, even Aragorn and arrogant. Perhaps Tolkien left in those references because he didn't think they were there in the first place; because he couldn't second-guess every association that might be made by every reader.

I don't like to keep bringing up Moria and Morīah, but Tolkien's comments on the proposed link bear heavily on the instance under discussion. The two place-names are far more similar than nazgûl and Nazi, and more readers would probably make the connection if more people read the Bible.

I utterly repudiate any such significances and symbolisms. My mind does not work that way; and (in my view) you are led astray by a purely fortuitous similarity, more obvious in spelling than speech, which cannot be justified from the real intended significance of my story.

Letter #297, August 1967 (emphasis mine)

What Tolkien says here as clearly as he can is that he simply would not deliberately make associations between words on the sole basis of a similarity in written form. It even seems to me that he was as irritated by the assumption that he would as I would be by the assumption that my use of the word route in a set of directions was intended to insult those directed by implying rout. This example has added complexities, since as I speak English the two words sound completely different, but I know that they could be homophones to an American.

Perhaps it would be useful to point out that philologists are very pedantic about accents, pronunciation and spelling. It's a survival trait in a field which has many pitfalls for the unwary, a good number of which concern the similarity of written forms. To pick a field in which Tolkien had much early experience, when deriving a dictionary etymology, a completely inaccurate result can be reached by the mistaken association of two words in different languages which look similar on the page. Tolkien's early history with the New English Dictionary, if not his earlier training under one of the greatest English philologists of his era, would have beaten out of him the fuzzy thinking that grasps at obvious connexions at first sight. Time and again he shows us his abiding interest in the meaning of a word, which is only natural given that in mediæval texts one can encounter anything up to a dozen different spellings of a single word without its meaning or pronunciation varying once, a stylistic feature that even affects proper nouns.

What I am trying to point out is that Tolkien is highly unlikely to have noticed a similarity between Nazgûl and Nazi, even though many readers have made that connexion. He was so accustomed to careful and precise reading that he would have found it very difficult to make the sort of associations that less thoroughly trained readers find equally difficult to avoid. Moreover he was more accustomed than any of us to regard the sound, written form, meaning and history of a word as aspects of a whole, all of which must agree for an association to exist. He spoke disdainfully of "an age in which almost all auctorial manhandling of English is permitted (especially if disruptive) in the name of art or 'personal expression'": in short, he was a man obsessed with precision and detail, so that when he wanted to give a name a hidden meaning he simply translated it into another language or an earlier version of English. Since he would have demanded complete consistency with contemporary politics if he intended his Ringwraiths to have any conceptual link with Hitler, and since his entire intellectual history had been leading away from superficial correspondences of form, I don't think that Tolkien would even have noticed this supposed link unless someone pointed it out to him. For all his howlers, I notice that Mr. Rang never did.

I think it important to remember at all times when reading Tolkien that his side of English studies is very different from the study of literature even today. In Tolkien's youth, philology was considered a science, not an art; and all of the empirical, systematic instincts of Victorian academic method are embodied in its practice. Victorian philology was not a matter of opinion, but of fact; it was not a matter of metaphor or allusion but of laws and their application; and it was a matter not of free expression or association but of solid logical reasoning and painstaking research. Not only can I not imagine Tolkien spotting some of the associations that have occurred to his readers (I have to say that I didn't see the link under discussion either), but I can't imagine any other philologist of his day seeing it either. Philology demands a different style of reading from that of literary criticism, and for someone like Joseph Wright, Walter Skeat or Kenneth Sisam a connexion between two words not supported by sound, sense or narrative context would have been no connexion at all.

[davem]

While accepting everything Squatter says I'm sure that English speaking readers in the mid fifties particularly would not have failed to make the (albeit erroneous) connection Nazgul/Nazi - particularly at a time when most people still got their news from newspapers & would have been as used to seeing 'Naz'i as well as hearing Natzi. I find it difficult to believe that at no point did the 'similarity' even cross Tolkien's mind - only to be instantly dismissed admittedly.

Of course, its possible that Tolkien didn't make the connection - but didn't his editors or proof-readers? Point being that (some/many) readers do make that connection - however unfortunate that may be in terms of encouraging 'applicability'.

Personally, I don't think its that big a deal - the two words look similar when written down, Tolkien probably noticed it, smiled about it & then forgot the whole thing.

A more interesting question, it seems to me, is what he would have done if Quenya or Sindarin had produced the name 'Jeezuls' for his monsters - you see, both Nazgul & Nazi apply to thoroughly nasty pieces of work, so the connection is not so much of a problem even if the reader makes it. If the name for Sauron's servants had been too close to the name of ultimate good, would he still not have noticed, or would he have changed it?

What I'm asking is, did Tolkien notice the similarity between Nazi & Nazgul, but feel that it was not necessary to make a fuss over it because both refer to something 'bad'?

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

It wouldn't have been as simple as that. Tolkien's languages aren't just sounds picked out of the air. They follow the same rules of development as natural languages, so that to change the form of one word would be to demand a re-think not only of that word's morphological and phonological history, but also those of all related words and forms. It may seem obvious to change nazgûl to nascûl (although that does encourage a theory that his book is about NASCAR), but this affects the sound of the word, which must be accounted for in the phonological development not only of nazg -> nasc but also of all related forms and like sounds.

What worries me about this theory is that it's not one which I can find to have been addressed by any of Tolkien's correspondants in the 1950s, which suggests to me that this link is one deriving from what appears to be an obsession in English-speaking countries with Nazi Germany; a morbid curiosity that seems to be growing when time ought to have set it on the wane. Unbelievable though it may be, it's possible that the word 'Nazi' is used more nowadays than it was in the 1940s: at school almost the first thing British children ever learn about Germany is that malevolent Austrian dwarf and his disastrous chancellorship; the most over-subscribed history special subjects at my university were Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, which weren't even on the curriculum in the 1950s. What we have is a situation in which events sixty and seventy years ago are more present in the collective consciousness than they were half a century in the past, which is unhealthy in the extreme. We have no evidence whatsoever that anyone in the 1950s ever noticed this similarity of form, but I notice from a brief trawl of Google that it's referred to fairly regularly now.

Far more interesting to me than twentieth-century totalitarianism is the following extract from an article about the Topkapi Palace Harem.

The passion for garden flowers became evident everywhere, on clothing, furnishings and in architectural decoration, and extending even to the names of the harem women, who began to be given melodious Persian names like Laligül (Ruby Rose) and Nazgül (Shy Rose) that suggested they were as beautiful and graceful as flowers.

I also note that in Kazakh ghul, gul, goul means 'flower'. Did Tolkien mean to suggest that Kazakh is an evil and degraded language? Probably not, but I've just noticed a similarity, so obviously he must have too. Perhaps the whole thing is a Times crossword clue and 'flower' really means 'river', ironically referring back to the Ringwraiths' dislike of running water. It's not long before this sort of reasoning leads to insanity, and it needs to be nipped in the bud. Tolkien was not omniscient, and what seems obvious to us may not have been so to him. In fact this particular link is so erroneous that he might have needed it repeated to him before he could even credit it.

Now, clearly I do think that this is a big deal, because it suggests a mindset for Tolkien that simply isn't supported by things that we know about him, and suggests links between his invented world and the primary world that just do not, did not and could not exist. Moreover it perpetuates the ridiculous notion that any crackpot theory deserves to be considered just because it was someone's honest reaction. What if someone's honest reaction to a history of the Boer War is that the relief of Mafeking actually happened in Mafeking Street, Whitley Bay? Are we to give that credence? There was actually more evidence behind Mr. Underhill's link between the One Ring and marriage than there is behind this fascist Nazgûl theory, but nobody is asking why Tolkien left that potential invitation to allegory in his book.

What would Tolkien have done if Black Speech had thrown up Jeezûl? Well, it's very unlikely that it would (the phonology is all wrong), but if it did, he would either have had to change the entire language to remove it or leave it in place. If he personally thought it looked to be connecting Christ and evil I think that he would have re-written the entire book rather than let the similarity stand, but that's a different matter. What worries me is the search for symbolism where none is required to understand something, followed by the suggestion that Tolkien must have had a reason for leaving in the supposed symbolism: it's a circular argument, and can be applied to any foolishness. For example, in the first edition of LR, the sixth line of Book VI, chapter 6 is the beginning of a speech by Aragorn, the sixth word of which is 'come'. Does this imply a satanic message that all should worship at the feet of the Great Beast? Or am I just indiscriminately reading meanings into arbitrary patterns? I really wish I didn't now expect some fundamentalist loony to use that as a reason not to read Tolkien.

[davem]

I don't think its either significant, nor insignificant that some readers make the Nazi/Nazgul connection - some readers just do, & I can't believe that it never once, for one second, struck Tolkien too, before he dismissed it. The similarity between the two words is interesting, especially considering the period in which LotR was written. Noting the similarity between the words does not imply the whole book is an allegory. I'm not arguing that Tolkien was implying Nazgul=Nazis/Fascists. I'm simply arguing that some readers will make that connection, that possibly it struck Tolkien too, & that it doesn't actually mean very much except to show that people make those kinds of connections. Of course 'Good sense matters', but simply to mentally note ''Nazgul' looks like 'Nazi' & isn't it curious that both refer to sick/evil/twisted beings?' & then pass on (which is what I did on first reading LotR involves neither good nor bad sense - it was just what popped into my head at the time) doesn't actually involve 'sense' at all. However, if someone took up the idea & ran with it in order to 'prove' LotR was nothing but an allegory of WWII thye would have 'left the path of wisdom'.

As to the 'Mafeking' thing, actually I would find that quite an interesting example of how the popular imagination appropriates stories & localises events, in effect making their local area more significant & magical (if you look at how many sites across Western Europe are associated with King Arthur you perhaps see the same process).

Or am I just indiscriminately reading meanings into arbitrary patterns?

Yes, but its still interesting to see how people's imaginations work & the connections they make, & what a story means to them.