Deacons and thimbles

Six or seven years ago, one of my employees put lots of painted wooden letters up on one of the walls of my school, and they've been there ever since. None of them had ever fallen off the wall until a couple of days ago, when I found that two of them had fallen: R and V.

This made me think of a song from a dream I had when I was 12 or 13, which I recorded in "Sometimes a banana is just a banana -- right?":

R-V!

Remember the other word: dea-con!

Indestructible worker

Let him without stone cast the first cigarette

In the dream, I understood the letters RV to stand for preparation worker (dream logic for you) and to be a synonym for deacon.

Yesterday I read this in The Story of Alice:

[Lewis Carroll's] passport was kept separately in a black leather wallet with 'REVD. CHARLES L. DODGSON' stamped on it in crisp gilt letters, just in case there was any doubt over where a document made out to 'The Reverend Charles L. Dodgson' belonged.

I was somewhat surprised to see the clerical honorific used -- even on his passport! -- since I knew that Carroll had chosen not to become a priest, even though he was required to do so by the rules of his college. He had been ordained deacon, though, and it turns out that in the Church of England even a deacon is entitled to the clerical style The Reverend. So finally, all these years later, a somewhat intelligible connection between RV and deacon. That "him without stone" line also syncs with my recent "no balls" post.

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Another thing that is mentioned in The Story of Alice is Carroll's predilection for thimbles:

He remained especially fond of objects such as thimbles, which frequently rose to the surface of his writing even when its real subject was something else entirely. Typically, The Hunting of the Snark includes an account of the Snark-hunters going forth 'To seek it with thimbles' . . . while in 1890 he wrote to Queen Victoria's granddaughter Princess Alice promising her a golden armchair . . . 'made so that you can fold it up small, and put it in a thimble, and carry it about in your pocket!'

One is not surprised to find thimbles in a book about Lewis Carroll, but today I unexpectedly found one in another book I am reading: Words of Them Liberated. Quite near the end of this extremely strange book (which I have almost finished), we read that "Eru" -- yes, the God of Tolkien's Legendarium -- "left them a token of his warning, a thimble," and this thimble is mentioned several more times in the pages that follow.

I am currently reading only two books (not counting scripture), and they are about as different as two books could be. One is a polished, well-written biography of a Victorian children's writer by an Oxford professor of English literature and mentions thimbles 12 times. The other is a barely intelligible congeries of channeled Tolkienian material by an anthropologist who usually writes about the Book of Mormon, and it mentions thimbles eight times.

I suppose it goes without saying that the overwhelming majority of the books I read do not mention thimbles at all. Nor have I ever had occasion to mention them on this blog until just now.

In Liberated, the thimble is made to be incongruously momentous. It comes from God himself, and later we read of a character "admiring only his thimble." This is paralleled by Carroll's first literary use of the thimble, in Alice:

Then they all crowded round her once more, while the Dodo solemnly presented the thimble, saying "We beg your acceptance of this elegant thimble;" and, when it had finished this short speech, they all cheered.

Alice thought the whole thing very absurd, but they all looked so grave that she did not dare to laugh; and, as she could not think of anything to say, she simply bowed, and took the thimble, looking as solemn as she could.