And made Pees porter to pynne the yates
Of alle tale-telleris and titereris in ydel."
--Langland, Piers Plowman, Passus XX (298-300)
I was going to write a post on the Seven Deadly Sins in Piers Plowman until I stumbled across these three lines, and, after recently reading Usha's latest, had a Tolkien moment. The term that caught my eye--I'm not sure how I missed it before--is "tale-telleris."
In The Silmarillion Tolkien wrote a race of elves called the Teleri. According to his annotated index, they were
The third and greatest of the three hosts of the Eldar on the westward journey
from Cuivienen... Their own name for themselves was Lindar, the
Singers; the name Teleri, the Last-comers, the Hindmost, was given
to them by those before them on the march. (Tolkien, 350)
It's a highly speculative point, but the literary relation of the name "Teleri" with "tale-telleris" is irresistible. First of all, this race called themselves "the Singers," a name which brings to mind the gangland description of a snitch's actions: "he sang." Moreover, in Piers Plowman these characters are "coming after," hence Pees porter's orders to "pynne the yates" against them.
The question of Tolkien's intention with regard to this term is, sans textual evidence, unanswerable. But the connection is fascinating.
1 comment:
I would assume that Tolkien also had an eye on Greek telos, meaning 'end,' in keeping with these elves' status as the last to arrive, though that's not to say that he wasn't also interested in an English-language echo as well. Multilingual puns of this sort would be right up his alley.
Post a Comment