Consider these three English translations of a passage from the Book of Isaiah (27:1).
On that day the Lord shall punish with his hard sword, yea, with his great and strong sword, Leviathan, that piercing serpent, Leviathan, that twisting, wriggling serpent, and he shall kill this monster which is in the sea.
- Wycliffe
In that day the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.
- Geneva (re-used in the KJV)
In that day, the Lord will punish with his sword — his fierce, great and powerful sword — Leviathan the gliding serpent, Leviathan the coiling serpent; he will slay the monster of the sea.
- New International Version
Each attempt uses the kind of vocabulary and syntactical structure that have come to be associated with grandeur, archaism and the epic.
We might notice in the first translation, for instance, yea; the second that is in the sea; the third in that day. Other words such as shall and slay recur sporadically across the three. Taken altogether, they establish the required idiom of Biblical English. So far, so uncontroversial.
But — only two of these are authentic early modern prose; what clues do we need to look for to tell us which is the real article and which the 'fake'? That is, one not merely created by a person with knowledge of the form. In other words, what sets the first two (pre-1600) examples apart from the third (a ‘non-authentic’ product of the late twentieth century)?
I claim that we recognise the authenticity of the first two from two otherwise ordinary epithets applied to the sword: Wycliffe's hard and GNV's sore. And moreover from the ostensibly 'nonsensical' use of such adjectives.
No modern writer would describe a sword like this. 'Hard' seems almost tautologous (what kind of sword would be soft?), while 'sore' is now semantically restricted usually to an effect, although even this would be comically bathetic (who would say "being stabbed with the sword made me sore"?). Lacking in sense, their use approaches something like 'nonsense'. You might even have inwardly sniggered when you read them.
However, the passage of time has rendered these words somehow more evocative for us moderns. Owing to gradual semantic drift, both words have to some extent slipped their original moorings and drifted out to sea. Nevertheless, the position of both Shakespeare and early modern Bibles (canonical exemplars of the golden age of English poetry and prose) acts as a kind of 'semantic anchor'; the vessel can drift, but not beyond the horizon. Even when pushing against the limits of meaning, the cable is still able to transmit sense from a store of shared cultural memory.
What do we hear when we read hard? An unyielding physical object, but various other meanings too (hard: as nails, at it, of heart, evidence, sciences, left, of hearing, day's night, cash, etc).
Sore does something similar (a sore point, sorely missed). But it also reminds us of the object's effect on its target (a bodily sore, to be sore).
Both of these words, then, bulge and teem with inherited meaning. They are ripe nonsense. Some of their connotations amplify the original meaning, some undermine, some hint at new possibilities. They are superficially discordant - you knew something was 'off' somehow when you read them. We know we don't understand them quite in the way they were intended, but we possibly end up with a richer, instinctive understanding.
None of this can quite be said of the NIV's translation (a worthy piece of prose in its own right), which uses the early modern idiom only to the extent that misunderstandings can be avoided. Its chosen elements all point in one direction; the vocabulary and syntax are iron filings aligned in perfect accordance with the magnetic field. Sense and authenticity seem somehow mutually exclusive.
As a brief detour, I wonder whether Monty Python were unconsciously aware of this in their own pastiche Biblical epic The Life of Brian. It takes place in the holy land in the age of Christ.
One scene depicts a group of preachers competing for attention in the market place.
First: And the bezan shall be huge and black, and the eyes thereof red with the blood of living creatures, and the whore of Babylon shall ride forth on a three-headed serpent, and throughout the lands, there'll be a great rubbing of parts…
Second: And the demon shall bear a nine-bladed sword. Nine-bladed! Not two or five or seven, but nine, which he will wield on all wretched sinners, sinners just like you, sir, there, and the horns shall be on the head...
Third: At this time, a friend shall lose his friend's hammer and the young shall not know where lieth the things possessed by their fathers that their fathers put there only just the night before, about eight o'clock. Yea, it is written in the book of Cyril....
All of these performances in their own way are obviously pastiching the language of biblical prophecy. They are certainly comically absurd in their various ways (be it grotesque or bathetic), but there is nothing quite nonsensical about them - they make sense according to the logic of the speaker. For all this, they don't seem to be having much effect on their audience. Brian, the film's protagonist, disguises himself and joins them on stage to avoid the clutches of Roman centurions seeking his arrest. He begins with a worthy maxim:
"Don't pass judgement on other people, or you might get judged yourself." He continues with a series of poorly told parables (fumbled copies of what we know to be New Testament stories), and the crowd turns on him, accusing him of fraud. The climactic moment arrives when the Roman authorities pass close by and circumstances force him to desperately give his best performance, to appear most authentic:
Blessed are they who convert their neighbour's ox for they shall inhibit their girth, and to them only shall be given…
This seems to do the trick. We are in the realms of true nonsense and the audience duly recognises they are in the presence of divinity. For us, the audience of the film, moreover, this passage echoes something we have heard earlier in the film, which opens with Brian attending Christ's Beatitudes. The film gives us (and only us) access to this. There is no reason for the crowd to have heard Christ’s sermon. But for we the cinematic audience, Brian’s nonsense words now ring with syntactic echoes of what we know to be the ‘original’. A type of cultivated nonsense somehow underlies rather than undermines perceived authenticity.
Having 'established' this proposition, we might briefly survey some recent attempts at early modern pastiche, or Epic English for want of a better phrase. While some are mort artful than others, I argue that none of them is really successful.
Video games:
Dark Souls: I suspect thou hast taken a gander at it, but the Dark of the Abyss, which swallowed poor Artorias, threatens to devour our entire land of Oolacile.
Assassin's Creed: Let them have answers - and let those answers be difficult and complex. Such is life.
God of War: The nature of a thing’s more important than the form of a thing.
Television programmes:
The Rings of Power: I swore an oath to Durin. To some, that may now hold little weight. But, in my esteem it is by such things our very souls are bound.
House of the Dragon: You cannot live your life in fear, or you will forsake the best parts of it.
The Witcher: I bow to no law made by men who never bore a child.
Most of this is little more than trite motivational-poster fodder, under the torn mantle of antiquity. This isn't nonsense; it's common (all too common) sense. This is partly why it is so unsuccessful.
What we have, in fact, is modern sentiment and modern character each in fancy dress (textual or textile).
At no point are we perturbed. We don't snigger. We don't screw up our faces and say 'what?'. It's neat, it's tidy to a fault. They are monosemic. This is unhappily ironic in the case of Assassin’s Creed. The sentiment of the expression is ostensibly an acceptance of complexity, spoken in childlike simplicity that suggests the writers are not capable of the kind of complex artistry involved in a creative endeavour.
I will consider two more brief examples. I am here, as elsewhere, interested in only nonsense ‘in the wild’ as it were, not in captivity (ie formal literary nonsense).
1. Tolkien, Rowling, Martin
The eccentric philologist John Tolkien was influential in establishing the forms of modern fantastic fiction; it strikes me that the success of his diction involves, to a small extent, the incorporation of nonsense.
Tolkien, given his expert knowledge of archaic forms of English, was able more than any writer of fiction before or since to build linguistic relics into his work. Two (non-incidental) cases, I believe, are somewhat nonsensical.
What shall we do with the Ring, the least of things, the trifle that Sauron fancies? That is the doom that we must deem.
And elsewhere:
It is a sign of our fall, and the shadow of doom, a Fell Rider of the air.
Tolkien would certainly have been conscious that his audience would be unlikely to know the sense in which his character means 'doom' here. Whether or not you are familiar with it should not contradict the primary meaning that occurs to you when you read this text. A character asking the assembly to ‘deem’ ‘doom’ strikes us as immediately nonsensical.
Similarly, there is illogicality abroad when a flying enemy is called a 'fell rider’, particularly one ‘of the air', whatever degree of familiarity you have with the archaic meaning of ‘fell’.
Each of these passages are intended to effect an atmosphere of grandeur or dread in the reader. A film of nonsense coating both does nothing to reduce this; in fact, bulging with meaning as they are, they force us to reconcile different meanings, and this gives his work the desired authenticity lacking in other 'pastiche'. We have to wrestle with our initial impulses; of course, we will only have the motivation to do this if it is nestled within an appealing artistic context.
I detect a corresponding logic of nonsense in the fantastic works of JK Rowling. Her characters speak magic spells, typically based on relatively transparent and ‘logical’ cod-Latin (Petrificus Totalus etc). But the most important incantation in her saga is the killing curse - not only for its obviously fatal repercussions, but especially because the story of her hero is of the ‘boy who lived’, one who survived this spell.
Rowling does not choose Latin here - rather unexpectedly she borrows a piece of juvenilia, common to the lips of every child as a way of achieving any magical effect: Avada Kedavra. Many readers find this risible for its similarity to Abra Cadabra. And it is. While the author is at pains to vouch for its etymological authenticity, we feel the lady is protesting rather too much. Its authenticity is no way lessened by its being simultaneously laughable — it suggests the passage of time, a veil beyond which we can only imagine, which we are forced to imagine. Death is present within the childlike (the very theme of Rowling’s novel). Fantasy is above all imaginative fiction, and if it doesn’t stoke and unleash our imaginations it isn’t performing its creative function.
The blockbuster works of modern fantasy writer George Martin do not seem to engender the same effect. His neologisms are resolutely logical and understandable: skinchanger, dreamwine, ironborn and so on. For all their verbal literalness, they strike us as fake, tame, unrealistic, unthreatening, inauthentic.
2. Nursery Rhymes
One final illustration is the humble nursery rhyme.
Ring-a-ring o' roses,
A pocket full of posies.
A-tishoo! A-tishoo!
We all fall down!
I asked an internet 'chatbot' to produce some nursery rhymes. They quite rightly abound with the expected coterie of friendly animals, bright colours and benign natural phenomena. But they are too neat to be realistic or authentic (see appendix).
What does ring-a-ring o’roses mean? Nothing. Or half a dozen things. It too, bristles with association as half-glimpsed meanings jostle up against quasi-onomatopoeic nonsense that we don’t perceive as such. This is a sign of the real McCoy.
Closing thoughts
The Shakespearean scholar Stephen Booth (1933 – 2020) produced a book (Precious Nonsense, 1998) on how nonsensical effects underlie the success of works that might not otherwise be thought to traffick in the nonsensical (The Gettysburg Address, Ben Jonson’s epitaphs and Twelfth Night). (It can be read in full here).
In the introduction he suggests a reason for the literary appeal of this type of nonsense.
What does the human mind ordinarily want most? It wants to understand what it does not understand. And what does the human mind customarily do to achieve that goal? It works away—sometimes for only a second or two, sometimes for years—until it understands. What does the mind have then? What it wanted? No. What it has is understanding of something it now understands. What it wanted was to understand what it did not understand. I suggest that [this nonsense] does something comparable to the impossible: it gives us understanding of something that remains something we do not understand.
And of Twelfth Night (Shakespeare’s masterpiece in romantic comedy) in particular, he later observes
Twelfth Night creates a music of ideas—a music of ideas that is inconsequential in all that word's senses, a music that makes us superior to the limitations of syntax and logic (and thus effectively though temporarily superior to the human limitations of which syntax and logic are such telling evidence), and a music that is an unobserved source of the value the play has for us.
Two hundred years earlier, the poet Leopardi made a remarkably similar observation (albeit untainted by Booth’s optimism):
It is a mistake to talk about a desire being satisfied. Desires are not satisfied when we have reached their goal, but extinguished, that is, they are lost or abandoned in the certain knowledge that they can never be satisfied. And all that is gained from reaching the desired goal is to know this wholly.
Whether we are Leopardians or Boothians depends on our capacity to accept the preciousness of nonsense. Twelfth Night in Booth’s reading is saturated in nonsense— words, form, character, structure. While it would be unfair on all succeeding writers of English to aim for this masterfully sustained effect, it should serve as a timely encouragement to embrace the unlikely magic that nonsense can conjure.
Appendix
Nursery Rhymes produced by ChatGPT.
1. Little Mouse in the House
Little mouse in the house,
Squeaking all about,
With his tiny paws,
And whiskers that sway.
He's the cutest thing,
In the house every day!
2. Rainbow in the Sky
Rainbow in the sky so high,
Colors shining bright and nigh,
Red and orange, yellow too,
Green and blue, indigo hue.
Purple and pink, what a sight,
A rainbow in the sky so bright!
Chirping Birds
Chirping birds on the tree,
Sing a song so merrily,
With their wings they take a flight,
In the sky they dance with light.
Come back soon and sing with glee,
Chirping birds on the tree!
Great post. It reminds me of Housman’s “The Name and Nature of Poetry.” For Housman, the poetic is independent of sense, though it can be (intermittently) combined with it. It’s probably no accident that the literary value of a certain type of nonsense has been maintained by fantasy writers, as they rely more than other novelists on a sense of poetic grandeur, antiquity, other-worldliness, etc.