Mern Þonke

The context of 'weapontake' in Tolkien is the "Muster of Rohan," when all the men able to bear weapons are assembled in preparation for the ride to Minas Tirith. It seems from the passage (RK, V, ii, 72) that Tolkien is using the word to mean the assembly of all the able-bodied men of Rohan in companies. Although a folk etymology might construe the passage as meaning that the king provided the weapons--i.e., the able-bodied men arrive and are issued weapons from the king's armory-- (as was the case in Peter Jackson's depiction of the Rohirrim in both The Two Towers and The Return of the King), I don't think Tolkien intended that meaning, and I don't think that would be accurate for Anglo-Saxon England (I could be wrong here).

[Snip]

The etymon for the word seems to be ON "vápna-tak," though this is used in a different sense. It is, according to Bosworth-Toller, a Northern word; in the south "hundred" was used (which is why I think that folk-etymologizing the word and assuming that it means that men showed up somewhere to "take" their weapons is probably wrong), and its being Northern would explain the ON etymon. Bosworth-Toller gives the primary source as the laws of Edward the Confessor.

The point here is that Tolkien is likening the Rohirrim to the Anglo-Saxons yet again (even though the "Northern" word is a bit of a curve ball here, since the Rohirrim are linguistically Mercian), suggesting that at the king's call, all the men of Rohan were expected to assemble for military service and form themselves into companies that were, apparently, led by the professional soldiers of the king's household. This practice is in contra-distinction to the customs of Gondor, where a large, standing, professional army was in place.

The larger point is that Tolkien is not merely being archaic for the sake of archaism: he is being particularly precise, using exactly the right word (both in terms of definition and cultural connotations) that he needs for this particular situation. Tolkien's sense of the "right" word, which includes sound and etymology, is actually more 'theorized' than the word choices of the great Modernists to who he is often unfavorably compared (do you really think Faulkner, or Hemingway, or Woolf knew anything of the History of English; they were great talents, but they were working by gut instinct. Joyce is a somewhat different case, but he was no historical philologist--although knowing and sampling so many languages made him more sensitive to the interconnections of European languages).

For the sake of completeness, I also reproduce my own comments here:

Here are some thoughts on weapontake. The Old Norse use of vápnatak seems to have involved the confirmation of a vote at an assembly. In England, the word came to be used for the assembly itself and was, in areas with heavy Danish populations applied to the local judicial body. It was probably also used for the place where the assembly met. As the administrative and judicial boundaries within English counties became more stable, the sense was extended to refer to areas of jurisdiction in addition to the bodies themselves, rather than just the body or the place of the court. We can thus see a sort of evolution in the word from the taking up of weapons to an area of jurisdiction, and it might be possible to locate Tolkien’s usage on this timeline.

It seems to me that, when Tolkien writes that ‘all who could be spared were riding to the weapontake at Edoras’, he could mean a point of assembly, but probably not an official jurisdictional unit for the region of Edoras (the precise meaning of which is also quite interesting, especially given its use in two different senses in Beowulf 1035-1045). In other words, it’s in the middle of the timeline. But, of course, there is no necessity to assume that the weapontake of the Rohirrim accurately reflects the wapentake of Anglo-Saxon England, since the Rohirrim do not exactly match the Anglo-Saxons. Tolkien modernises the spelling (unlike Edoras), which, conceivably takes it in a new—or an alternative—direction consistent with a possible folk etymology: a taking up of weapons as part of a military gathering. The modernisation of the spelling curiously gives the word a more archaic effect by restoring the original connection to weapons. Perhaps this was necessary. Words like Edoras don’t seem particularly archaic to anyone who doesn’t know Old English; they’re simply foreign words like Minas Tirith. But if Tolkien wanted to give the sense of something familiarly English, but archaic, the term weapontake worked pretty well.

As a side note, Higden’s definition is very interesting. Here it is in John of Trevisa’s 1387 translation (with the thorns changed to ‘th’ and yogh to ‘y’): ‘Wepentake and an hondred is al oon, for the contray of an hondred townes were i-woned to yilde vppe wepene in the comynge of the lord.’ I take this to mean: ‘A wapentake is the same as a hundred, for the country of a hundred towns were wont to present weapons at the coming of the lord’. Clearly the word was prone to folk etymology, and it is not impossible that Tolkien had something similar in mind; i.e. Théoden would take the weapons offered by those who owed fealty to him.

Drout draws attention to a little thread at The One Ring, which refers to the discussion and queries the importance of such philological knowledge in the interpretation of The Lord of the Rings, questioning Nokes’s observation that “a deep understanding of medieval language or culture is a prerequisite to serious study” of Tolkien.

Drout responds:

I think this raises a very interesting literary-theoretical question (one which I tried to deal with in my essay "Towards a Better Tolkien Criticism," which should be out any day now in a collection called Reading The Lord of the Rings): which reader's interepretation is more likely to be correct? I can come up with a number of types of readers, each of whom will have slightly different information with which to interpret. What is the authority of each reader?

Drout points out that a philologist with training like Tolkien’s is more likely to have insight into Tolkien’s mind and to possess more information (like the meaning of the historical meaning of “weapontake”) with which to read his work than is fanboy/girl. The philologist’s interpretation is therefore theoretically “richer and more likely to be correct than that of fanboy/girl.” However, he also points out that empowering the philologist in this way privileges author intent as the only meaningful type of interpretation. Furthermore, “even if we do accept author intent, we have to take into account the very insightful comment by Curious [on the One Ring that] ‘Tolkien did not write LotR for an audience of philologists’.”

I want to take up a couple of the issues raised here. First, I don’t entirely agree with the statement that Tolkien did not write The Lord of the Rings for an audience of philologists. After all, he does state explicitly that in the foreword to the second edition and elsewhere that the story took shape according to his own tastes; and Tolkien was a philologist. However, I do accept that Tolkien was thinking about the use to which philology could be put in reaching a non-philological audience. If I’m right, then philological knowledge is essential to our understanding of his intent. That is not to say that it provides the complete picture—just that it should not be ignored. The same is true for other fields, so I agree with Drout’s suggestion that we foster multiple perspectives. How Tolkien intended his philology to affect a non-philological audience is a fascinating and worthwhile question, which may require us to adopt multiple fields of knowledge. But what if we wish to abandon authorial intent altogether? What if we just look at reader response? Do we need to abandon philology, which is unknown to the majority of readers? I believe that Tolkien’s use of “weapontake” provides an interesting test case.

Let’s look at my analysis of “weapontake” more closely. A philological analysis reveals some interesting data to start out with. The element –take is not a native English word; it was borrowed from Old Norse taka perhaps as early as 1000, and occurs first in northern and eastern England, more or less in areas where they had wapentakes instead of hundreds. The first element, however, is derived from the southern dialect form of Old English wæpen (with a long vowel in the root). In other words, Tolkien’s “weapontake” is a hybrid word, not the historical wapentake. As a philologist, I can say this much. Now comes the difficult bit, where I have to put myself in the shoes of a nonphilologist. I take as my framework for speculation two possibilities. First, an intelligent reader, one who makes a serious effort to understand the literature, even if they do not share Tolkien’s background. Such a reader, coming across the strange word “weapontake” would, logically, go and look up the word. Because of the spelling, they might not find it. If they did, they would begin speculating about whether Tolkien’s matches any historical one. All sorts of questions would be begged about the relationship of the Rohirrim to the English past. I’m not sure what the answers would be, in part because I can’t divest myself of my philological perspective enough to put myself in the shoes of this reader. On the other, by this point, the reader would already be trying on one of my shoes. In other words, whether Tolkien intended it or not, the use of the word “weapontake” prompts the reader to begin speculations of a philological nature even if they’ve never had a course on philology.

Of course, there’s another type of reader, one who doesn’t have the same intellectual curiosity. This reader is more likely to pass over the word and not enquire of its meaning. Of course, it’s even harder for me to put myself in the shoes of this reader. Does a word like “weapontake” have no effect at all on this reader? Does it induce a sense of disorientation? Other effects? Does these effects influence broader views of the book? Suggestions are welcome.