Paging Professor Frodo

August 19, 2008

Over the course of my Internet wanderings a couple of weeks ago, I stumbled across a fascinating abstract in the arXiv by one Alejandro Gangui on the 13th century cosmology of Dante's Divine Comedy. To my chagrin, the paper is in Spanish, so I was unable to peruse this unusual academic offering in-depth, although I'm guessing it focuses on the (pre-Copernican) Ptolemaic model of the heavens -- as, indeed, did much of medieval and Renaissance art and literature.

It also reminded me of an intriguing talk a few years ago at an APS meeting in Montreal on teaching astronomy through the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. (I can hear Lord of the Rings fans perking up this very moment.) This unique approach is the brainchild of Kristine Larsen, a professor of physics and astronomy at Central Connecticut State University who is known for her quirky creative approach to classroom instruction.  Larsen is also a hardcore Tolkien fan, so it was a natural choice to fuse her passion for Middle-Earth with her love for astronomy, writing academic papers and designing classroom activities exploring the science embedded in the LOTR trilogy.

Science fiction and fantasy relies upon world-building: the more "believable" you can make your fictional universe, the easier it is for the reader to become lost in that world. Star Trek, Star Wars, even Buffy the Vampire Slayer have carefully crafted "universes" with rules, origin myths, elaborate histories, geography, and the like. And those worlds are internally consistent, within reason. But Tolkien created one of the most elaborate worlds yet with Middle-Earth, complete with its own Elvish language (loosely based on ancient Anglo-Saxon) and -- according to Larsen -- its own cosmology. Tolkien, it seems, loved astronomy as well as story-telling.

He invented constellations, for example, some of which correspond to actual star groupings. For instance, in The Fellowship of the Ring, there are detailed references to specific stars: Remmirath, Borgil, and Menelvagor -- the latter described as the "Swordsman of the Sky... with his shining belt." This is an obvious reference to Orion. Larsen says Remmirath corresponds to the Pleiades. The identity of Borgil is less clear, but Larsen believes it corresponds to Aldebaran.

Tolkien painstakingly timed the internal chronology of the trilogy's events to the cycle of lunar phases. It gave him no end of grief, judging by letters to his son Christopher. In one dated May 14, 1944, for example, he laments his continued "trouble with the moon. By which I mean that I found my moons ... were doing impossible things, rising in one part of the country and setting simultaneously in another."

The extraordinary precision with which Tolkien mapped all this out makes for a terrific classroom exercise, according to Larsen. Her students study the cycle of the phases of the moon, and the times of day (or night) they are visible, using Discovery's online moon phase locator. Then they use what they've learned to analyze several passages from The Fellowship of the Ring, when Sam is asking Frodo how much time has elapsed on their journey ("What day is it, Mr. Frodo?").

Larsen even found evidence in The Silmarillion that the mythological origin for the moon in Middle-Earth  closely mirrored the "fission theory" of one G.H. Darwin that was popular at the time Tolkien was writing LOTR. I can't believe she managed to plow all the way through The Silmarillion, never mind make such an in-depth analysis. It's not Tolkien's most riveting work.

In fact, Larsen shares a bit of Tolkien's obsessive attention to detail, as well as his patience, poring over letters, manuscripts, notes and so forth to glean every last scrap of information about the author's creative process -- he was refining his fictional world right up until he died. But she still finds time for a bit of humor now and then, like this tongue-in-cheek scientific "paper" by one P. Legolas of the Mirkwood Academy of Sciences -- complete with elaborate footnotes -- proposing the existence of a new element ("Orodruinium") with unique properties used to create the One Ring. The abstract drily observes, "[T]his priceless antiquity was destroyed in an unfortunate ledge-dancing incident... which also claimed the life of one S. Gollum."

Photo: The Pleiades. Source: NASA/ESA/AURA/Caltech. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Comments

[a]

The moon phase locator URL is incorrect. The correct URL is: http://school.discoveryeducation.com/lessonplans/programs/lightofthemoon/