Etc.: Tolkien's names, Pullman's grimly good

Tolkien's monogram, and Tolkien Estate trademark WHAT'S IN A NAME: Just some trivia for the end of the weekend about J.R.R. Tolkien's interest in the late, great storyteller Snorri Sturluson.

Nancy Marie Brown's new book on the Viking chronicler (featured in a previous post at Call of the Siren) who gave us stories of Odin, Thor & Company also recalled her shock as she flipped through the pages of Snorri's Prose Edda.

Brown couldn't believe her eyes: There, on the page, was a listing of the names of Gandalf as well as that courageous, merry band of dwarves that traveled far and wide in order to battle the dragon Smaug. The list was written more than seven centuries before Tolkien penned "The Hobbit."

Here's that passage from Snorri:

Then all the powerful gods went

to their thrones of fate,

the most sacred gods, and

decided among themselves

that a troop of dwarves

should be created...

Nyi, Nidi,

Nordri, Sudri,

Austri, Vestri,

Althjolf, Dvalin,

Nar, Nain,

Niping, Dain,

Bifur, Bafur,

Bombor, Nori,

Ori, Onar,

Oin, Modvitnir,

Vig and Gandalf,

Vindalf, Thorin,

Fili, Kili....

(taken from Penguin Classics' edition of the Prose Edda, translated by Jesse Byock)

So, the great Tolkien wasn't smart enough to invent names on his own?

If you've read any of the great Tolkien scholars, like Tom Shippey, you know the answer: The great inventor of Middle Earth (Midgard, in Snorri's epic) wanted to root his saga in older Western traditions. It increased his cycle's mythic reality. Instead of being an isolated, separate invention, his tales would belong to the great web of historical legend ... and live forever. He wasn't unoriginal -- he was aiming for immortality.

GRIMLY GOOD: Philip Pullman, the epic storyteller behind "The Golden Compass" and the rest of the "His Dark Materials" stories, has retold the stories of the Brothers Grimm in a new edition. A friend, Mindy Farabee, has written a review of the book for the Los Angeles Times that's definitely worth checking out.

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Relic, relique, reliquus: Part I

Recently, two unusual objects entered my life: an icon, and an old newspaper article.

The icon, of St. Nicholas  (good name), was made in Minsk -- the gift of a Belarus friend. The saint's holy image is painted on a thin slip of parchment that's been pasted to the smooth side of a piece of birch. There's still bark on the rough side, and when I close my eyes, I almost can see the forest in which that tree once stood.

The other item is a 50-year-old newspaper article showing a Pennsylvania church committee. There's my father, slim, trim and bow-tied, standing in the back row. I once stuck that article in a book to protect it and ensure that it wouldn't get lost -- and then I nearly lost it. I'm so glad I didn't.

It's not hard to understand why these two objects are important relics to me. The personal and religious meaning are pretty accessible.

Not all artifacts, however, yield their meanings so easily -- and a writer like Umberto Eco has spent his career examining, often excavating, the meanings in cultural objects past and present. In his latest book, "Inventing the Enemy: Essays" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Eco takes readers on another of his pleasing travels in the worlds of arcana. Is "The Name of the Rose" on your list of essential novels? If it is, then you're going to love this book.

What's one of the natural enemies of an old relic? Eco tells us.

It's science. An aura clings to old objects: when I place a lit votive candle in front of St. Nicholas, the icon glows. Too much analysis dispels the light, blows out the candle. As Eco says, in the essay "Treasure Hunting," "we should not approach...reliquaries with a scientific mind; otherwise there's a risk of losing faith..."

"As I child," Eco says in another essay, "Imaginary Astronomies," "I dreamed over atlases. I imagined journeys and adventures in exotic lands..."

That essay goes on to examine versions of our imagined orld in the work of many thinkers--among them Dante, Cosmas Indicopleustes (say it three times fast), Copernicus. It is a spectacular survey from Eco, our foremost explorer of terra incognita.

This essay collection demonstrates why Eco is among the best practitioners of nonfiction today. I wish I could say the same about his fiction. Once, he was a sublime craftsman of fiction and nonfiction: His novels struck a marvelous balance between plot and antique morsels about the way the world used to be (or never was).  That balance has tipped in recent years. Though I admired the 2011 novel "The Prague Cemetery" (despite its repulsive narrator) in the pages of the Los Angeles Times, I was more interested in the research than the story. That's where Eco's passion seemed to be in that novel, too.

Which is why "Inventing the Enemy: Essays" is such a welcome book: Here you'll get the writer's engaged, inspired considerations in the raw -- all free from any plodding novelistic apparatus.

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