Merry, Pippin, Mary Poppins, secret names, golden straw, square heads, and fake colonels

A recent post by William Wright, "March 12 and 13 timelines: Shelob's Lair and a change in the wind," mentions both the Tolkien characters Merry and Pippin and the P. L. Travers character Mary Poppins, but without noting the similarity of the names. I had a vague memory of having posted something about that similarity and wrongly thought that it must have been a comment on William's blog or a post on my own blog inspired by something he had written -- I mean, when else have I had occasion to write about those characters? A search of my blog turns up no mentions of Pippin, and the only Mary Poppins reference is in passing, as an example of a movie I had seen that had Dik [sic] Van Dyke in it. It was on March 14 that I ran the search and found the Dik Van Dyke post. In the comments, Debbie mentions "an episode of the Twilight Zone released on March 14, 1963 called The Parallel."

I finally found what I was looking for, not in anything connected with William Wright, but in a heretofore unpublished sync note from 2015, a time when I was not blogging. Here is the note in question:

Reluctance to reveal one’s name before the time is right (also: M-ry P-pp-n, straw is gold)

2015 Nov 18 (Wed) – I had been reading The Two Towers but took a break for a week or so to read What the Bee Knows by P. L. Travers. Today I finished the last four or five pages of Travers (I had almost finished last night) and immediately after finishing picked up Tolkien again.

This passage is from page 301 of Travers’s 303-page book:

This idea of the secrecy of the name, the taboo against making it known, goes back to man’s very early days, to the time, perhaps, when he had no name. During the war I spent two summers with the Navaho Indians and when they gave me an Indian name they warned me that it would be bad luck both for me and for the tribe if I ever disclosed it to anyone. And I never have. For one thing, I do not want to receive or give bad luck, and for another I have a strong atavistic feeling –– one, I think, that is strongly shared by unlettered people all over the world –– that to disclose one’s name, or take another’s before the time is ripe –– well, it’s dangerous. I tremble inwardly and withdraw when my Christian name is seized before I have given it, and I have the same hesitancy about using that of another person. An Indian –– or a gypsy –– would understand this very well. It is a very ancient taboo and I relate it –– though I don’t suggest that anyone else relate it –– to the earliest times when men built altars ‘To the Unknown God.’ If I were ever to build an altar, I would put that inscription above it.

When I opened up Tolkien, my bookmark was between pages 606 and 607. The very first line:

Here it is with some context from pp. 605-606:

‘Nobody else calls us hobbits; we call ourselves that,’ said Pippin.

‘Hoom, hmm! Come now! Not so hasty! You call yourselves hobbits? But you should not go telling just anybody. You’ll be letting out your own right names if you’re not careful.’

‘We aren’t careful about that,’ said Merry. ‘As a matter of fact I’m a Brandybuck, Meriadoc Brandybuck, though most people call me just Merry.’

‘And I’m a Took, Peregrin Took, but I’m generally called Pippin, or even Pip.’

‘Hm, but you are hasty folk, I see,’ said Treebeard. ‘I am honoured by your confidence; but you should not be too free all at once. There are Ents and Ents, you know; or there are Ents and things that look like Ents but ain’t, as you might say. I’ll call you Merry and Pippin, if you please – nice names. For I am not going to tell you my name, not yet at any rate.’ A queer half-knowing, half-humorous look came with a green flicker into his eyes. ‘For one thing it would take a long while: my name is growing all the time, and I’ve lived a very long, long time; so my name is like a story. Real names tell you the story of the things they belong to in my language, in the Old Entish as you might say. It is a lovely language, but it takes a very long time to say anything in it, because we do not say anything in it, unless it is worth taking a long time to say, and to listen to.

As a second, related sync, the next page of What the Bee Knows (i.e., page 302, the penultimate page) refers to the book Mary Poppins in the Park and the character Mary Poppins (who, of course, is P. L. Travers’s creation). The Tolkien passage features the phonetically similar “Merry and Pippin.”

As a third ancillary coincidence, the paragraph immediately before the one quoted at the beginning of this entry (beginning on page 300) tells the story of Rumpelstiltskin, beginning thus:

‘Rumpelstiltzkin’ was another of my favourites, for its meaning lay very close to me. Everyone knows the story of how the miller’s daughter, in order to become a queen, promises the little old man her first child if he will spin her straw into gold. Of course he does it. It is no problem. To him they are one and the same.

The very first words of page 622 of The Two Towers are “When straw is gold” –– from the song with the Ent and the Entwife.

The fact that two of the syncs feature the very first words of one of Tolkien’s pages is itself a noteworthy coincidence, I suppose.

I looked up this old sync note yesterday, March 14, 2024. It is part of a sync log file consisting of a series of such notes in reverse chronological order, like a blog. Immediately after the note quoted above (and therefore written immediately before it) was this brief one:

Square heads and hairy bodies

2015 Nov 16 (Mon) – Skype. Amber asked me about an alleged trend in Taiwan where people cut a dog’s fur so that its head will be a perfect square.

2015 Nov 17 (Tue) – Read in P. L. Travers’s What the Bee Knows: “the wild women of ancient Russia with square heads and hairy bodies”

This got my attention because I am currently reading Shadowland by Colin Wilson, in which there are several mentions of human beings who have been genetically engineered to have square heads. The first such reference is on p. 342:

Niall . . . blinked with astonishment, suspecting that his eyes were deceiving him. The man seemed to have a square head. Niall pointed to him.

"Is there something wrong with him?"

"No. That is one of the karvasid's experiments. He thought that a man with a different-shaped head could be made more intelligent, but he proved to be wrong. They are very stupid."

Recall that before finding these old sync notes, I had searched this blog for Mary Poppins and found an old post where the March 14, 1963 Twilight Zone episode "The Parallel" was mentioned. Since finding that on March 14 was a bit of a sync, I read the summary of that episode on Wikipedia. An astronaut returns to Earth and slowly realizes that he has slipped into a subtly different parallel universe. One of the first clues is that everyone addresses him as Colonel even though in the universe he knows, he never held that rank. Later that same day, March 14, I read this in Shadowland:

Typhon placed his mouth close to Niall's ear. "If you don't mind, I'll introduce you as Colonel Niall. Most of the men here have military rank."

People with square heads, and a non-colonel being addressed as a colonel. Two pretty specific and unusual themes!