Plagiarism - are all writers magpies?

[Eric]

The concept of plagiarism has been mentioned here and there on the WLF, but there is, as far as I know, no thread devoted exclusively to this crime, misdemeanour, or gentle foible.

I read in today's Times the following article:

Plagiarism is a harsh word — all real artists are magpies - Times Online (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article6908970.ece)

This is about Andrew Motion, but it could have been about any number of shades of copying, nicking, allusion or presentation.

Shakespeare, Martell, van Dis, etc., etc. Where do we draw the line? If I need the money, I could rip off whole stories written by "obscure" Estonians, or others, alter a few names, and publish "all my own work" in English. This is dead easy, as the Brits are too ignorant to check out funny little Baltic languages. But something in me says that I shouldn't steal the fruits of others without at least acknowledgement.

What does the team think?

[Galatea92]

Plagiarism isn't using someone else's story, it's using someone else's words.

If you did choose to take a story from an obscure Estonian author and write your own English version, no one would be able to touch you (as long as it was obvious that it wasn't just a straightforward translation). If you wanted to keep your reputation as well, you'd just need to add a tag line, Based on a story by Blah Blah :).

And that's as it should be. We'll be able to tell from your treatment of the story whether you're a good writer or not. If you take your style and treatment from the original author as well (without using his exact words), then you're treading on thin ice. If you do that regularly, using different writers as the source for your stories, we'll begin to smell a rat because there will be an unnatural inconsistency in your authorial voice.

In the other thread on Shakespeare, backwoods applies an anachronistic nineteenth century notion of originality to Shakespeare. Before the nineteenth century it was very uncommon for anyone to invent a new story as a subject for literary treatment. Much easier to take a story that everyone already knows and give that a twist.

As the old song goes, it ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it.

[Clarissa]

I think we must first define the word 'plagiarism' .

In my Collins dico
to plagiarise - to appropriate (ideas, passages, etc. from (another work or author) [sic]

To add to the classics thread: from Latin plagiarus, plunderer from plagium kidnapping...

In my mind, plagiarism was never quite as drastic as the dico explanation. I always thought it to be outright theft, whole sentences or paragraphs lifted by someone (the plunderer, in this case) from someone else's written work. As in a book in France that won some prize or other, many years ago, only for a critic (?) to find that whole passages had been copied word for word from Graham Greene.

However, it does put paid to most 'original' writing. And not only Shakespeare. It's that word 'ideas' that reduces the scope so considerably! This seems to imply that everything is plagiarised in some form or another. This takes me to Joseph Campbell's magnificent The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

It also takes me back to school where we were taught if we had read the Bible and Shakespeare, we had read it all. As Shakespeare also used older existing works to create his own, I guess I can eliminate Shakespeare, Racine, Corneille, Schiller, Goethe and everyone else...

So the answer to your question, Eric
Plagiarism - are all writers magpies? must inevitably be yes. As it must be for musical composition, painting or philosophy. Every new creation is developed from and built on existing ideas and works of art

Plagiarism? Magpies? Theft? Borrowing? Development?

[Igu Soni]

The specifics of what you say are true, but isn't it wrong to steal someone else's idea?
I mean, if I, say, wrote Macbeth from the point of view of Lennox or something, it doesn't count as plagiarism, but you know it's a rip-off of Tom Stoppard, right? Should or should not there be legal grounding for that?
If you don't, it's not completely right. And if you do, you could have the problem of two people coming up with the same idea...
I'm just trying to raise a larger ethical question here, and I don't think either side is right or wrong.

[Clarissa]

That was precisely my question.

The old biblical 'nothing new under the sun'. It is obvious that no one will rewrite Greek tragedy in the same way as the ultraclassical French playwrights, Racine and Corneille. And how many versions of Medea (for ex.) are there, in whichever language, style, era? Yet was that work plagiarism? Written in a different style, at a different time, in different words but with an identitical story? This is where that word 'ideas' worries me in that dico definition.

[Eric]

Galatea has made a very sensible statement:


Plagiarism isn't using someone else's story, it's using someone else's words.

This is a good starting point. By that criterion, The Life of Pi may be close to original, but innocent, whilst the paragraph-long quotes copied and translated unacknowledged (in the first edition of the book) by Adriaan van Dis would be plagiarism.

I always bring this Dutch thing up in the context of plagiarism. Because the stupid mistake that van Dis made was that he stole paragraphs from an American, i.e. someone writing in the world's most accessible language. The wonderfully named Crapanzano and van Dis settled out of court and it was all forgotten. But it makes me wonder how many others there are who compensate for shortcomings by theft.

Hundreds of writers have rewritten Bible stories and similar. But they are rewritten, modernised, re-set in another epoch. It's when the plot follows the same twists, turns, and build-up or d?nouement that I get suspicious. So I certainly approve of Galatea's idea of the tag line, revealing your source.

Clarissa, I think that we should quietly forget the original etymology, as we all know what we mean nowadays: the theft of intellectual property, as it is so pompously termed. "To appropriate" is a nice verb, but leaves room for manœuvre. Writers may well be magpies by instinct. But they should be magpies with a conscience. Development, yes, the theft of exact items in large quantities, no. It is certainly a grey area. That's why it interests me.

Igu Soni brings up the idea of someone else's "idea". This is, unfortunately a very grey area indeed. I tend to think that if you follow the plot, characterisation, rhythm of the story, ending, genre, etc., in exactly the same way, then you're a thief. But then come endless grey degrees of adaptation. In Shakespeare's day, things travelled slowly. Nowadays you can plagiarise today and be found out tomorrow, while you're boasting on some chatsite like this one. You can always do another non-Stoppardian point of view: Macbeth from the point of view of Lady Macbeth, Macduff, Banquo's ghost, one of the witches, or even conflate the whole thing with Hamlet, Prince of Dither, with allusions to current-day politics. That wouldn't be Stoppard, or Shakespeare, really.

It's tricky, but I tend to come down on the side of the moralists, saying: "If you're so bloody good, why can't you at least invent an original plot, etc". All plays have people and drama or comedy, but it would be nice to see something new under the sun, whatever the adage says.

*


I understand that the Daily Telegraph will gleefully report anything that Andrew Motion, a Labour supporter I think, will have done, but surely someone of the stature of the Poet Laureate can't just claim writer's block and desperation, then go and write something uncomfortably near to someone else's work. When the Telegraph, such a staid paper, starts using terms such as "ripped off", you can see that the journos smell blood:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturenews/6531255/Sir-Andrew-Motion-ripped-off-history-book-for-Remembrance-Sunday-poem.html (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturenews/6531255/Sir-Andrew-Motion-ripped-off-history-book-for-Remembrance-Sunday-poem.html)

[Manuel76]

Having a good idea doesn?t always mean you?re a good artist or writer, and you will always have the prize of being remembered as the first one.

I think almost every great work of art is a follower of a tradition, if you look for originality at any prize probably you will create a curiosity but not a great book.

That idea from Stoppard for example , I haven?t read or saw any play by him, but I heard about them and sounds like a good idea.

Why not follow a good idea? For example the first cubist painting, not necessary a good painting, but that was a really good idea! A revolution!: whether it was by Braque or Picasso or Cezanne?should other painters look the other way? What would be of modern painting if nobody else dared to paint in what later on became cubist style!

About that idea from Stoppard, is it to retell the story wrote by another writer from a secondary character?s point of view? Perhaps the origin is quite old: I mean for example Agamemnon?s story, and Clitemnestra, and Cassandra and other main characters?Sophocles decides to retell that story which is giving success to other writers from the point of view of a completely secondary character: the daughter Electra, and how the tragedy affects her, and later on Euripides, he takes Sophocles character and decides to marry her with the gardener?and Stoppard decides to write the story from the gardener?s point of view.

I think, as Galatea92 says, that originality in subject or plot wasn?t always one of the most valuable qualities of a work of art till recently. Not in literature nor in painting or sculpture.

Cervantes was really angry with Avellaneda?s Quijote: same plot, same characters, and he was still alive!, but he knew everybody would distinguish between his work and Avellaneda?s. And some years later Avellaneda?s Quijote was successfully and very freely translated into French by Lesage?

Racine expected his public to recognise the origin of his plays, and he wanted them to see how much he thought he had improved them. Shouldn?t Corneille write Le Cid? Or Moliere write Don Juan? I thank God La Ponte decided to write his Libretto and give Mozart the opportunity to write his Don Giovanni! And it was exactly the same 200 year?s old story. There are as many examples as works of art.

I?m afraid perhaps nowadays we value too much a good idea (to be the first one to do something), in cinema, literature or music, much more than artistry. Sometimes they are not great artists, just clever people.

[Mirabell]

Plagiarism isn't using someone else's story, it's using someone else's words.

If you did choose to take a story from an obscure Estonian author and write your own English version, no one would be able to touch you (as long as it was obvious that it wasn't just a straightforward translation). If you wanted to keep your reputation as well, you'd just need to add a tag line, Based on a story by Blah Blah :).

And that's as it should be. We'll be able to tell from your treatment of the story whether you're a good writer or not. If you take your style and treatment from the original author as well (without using his exact words), then you're treading on thin ice. If you do that regularly, using different writers as the source for your stories, we'll begin to smell a rat because there will be an unnatural inconsistency in your authorial voice.

In the other thread on Shakespeare, backwoods applies an anachronistic nineteenth century notion of originality to Shakespeare. Before the nineteenth century it was very uncommon for anyone to invent a new story as a subject for literary treatment. Much easier to take a story that everyone already knows and give that a twist.

As the old song goes, it ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it.


completely correct.

[Galatea92]

I understand that the Daily Telegraph will gleefully report anything that Andrew Motion, a Labour supporter I think, will have done, but surely someone of the stature of the Poet Laureate can't just claim writer's block and desperation, then go and write something uncomfortably near to someone else's work. When the Telegraph, such a staid paper, starts using terms such as "ripped off", you can see that the journos smell blood

I saw Motion's poem in the Guardian (I didn't read it because I never read him), and it was clearly introduced as a "found poem", which I usually take to mean a poem created by taking lines from other people's work. So I don't think there was any intention to pass the actual words off as his own, only the arrangement.

The fuss amuses me because at school I had a friend who put together a poem by taking random lines from his history books. He entered the poem in the annual school poetry competition for a joke, and ended up winning first prize. The funny thing is, the poem was actually very good; he had unconsciously used his aesthetic sense to fashion something that people enjoyed reading. So who was the writer of the poem: my friend; or the individual historians whose lines he had taken?

[Galatea92]

The specifics of what you say are true, but isn't it wrong to steal someone else's idea?
I mean, if I, say, wrote Macbeth from the point of view of Lennox or something, it doesn't count as plagiarism, but you know it's a rip-off of Tom Stoppard, right? Should or should not there be legal grounding for that?
If you don't, it's not completely right. And if you do, you could have the problem of two people coming up with the same idea...
I'm just trying to raise a larger ethical question here, and I don't think either side is right or wrong.

I think there's a difference between plagiarism and just stealing someone's idea. I'll try to illustrate the difference with one of my favourite stories about plagiarism: the history of Sergio Leone's film, A Fistful of Dollars.

Every film buff now knows that this film is a remake of Kurosawa's Yojimbo, but when the film was released Leone didn't credit Kurosawa. So Kurosawa sued him and won 15% of the East Asian distribution rights of the film.

The story isn't straightforward, though, because Kurosawa's film itself is clearly based on Dashiell Hammett's novel Red Harvest (although Kurosawa claims the influence of The Glass Key - another Hammett novel - rather than Red Harvest). Despite this link no one suggests that Kurosawa did anything unethical or illegal.

So what's the difference between the two cases? Why is Kurosawa's borrowing an example of acceptable influence, whereas Leone's is an example of plagiarism?

What Kurosawa took from Red Harvest (or The Glass Key) was the story idea - stranger comes to town and plays rival gangs off against each other until all the villains are dead. But the details of the story, the individual scenes, are quite different. The details of the stories are so different that Yojimbo isn't in any sense an adaptation of Red Harvest.

A Fistful of Dollars, on the other hand, is almost a scene-by-scene copy of Yojimbo. The similarity is so striking that you can't help wondering whether Leone thought, 'Ah, no one's going to see this obscure film by this obscure Japanese director. Nobody will notice.' (If you get a chance, I do recommend that you watch the two films side by side. It really is uncanny.)

Amusingly, in his defence, Leone tried to claim a common influence, but it wasn't Red Harvest he cited, but the eighteenth century play, A Servant of Two Masters by Carlo Goldoni, which itself derives characters and plot devices from Commedia dell'Arte. Who knows the true origin of such an archetypal plot?

[Clarissa]

Which takes me back to Joseph Campbell.

[Clarissa]

Joseph Campbell - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Campbell)

[Funhouse]

Witi Ihimaera, one of New Zealand's most prominent novelists, has just been exposed for plagiarising sections of his new novel: How Witi was found out (http://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501119&objectid=10607862)

Here is a blog entry by the reviewer who discovered him: Busytown: A good read (http://publicaddress.net/default,6286,a-good-read.sm)

I read about this on the same evening that I busted six of my students for plagiarising work on their assignments. It's so endemic as a problem in schools that I design most tasks so that there is no opportunity for plagiarism, but there's still the odd assignment where it's possible and the temptation for lazy students is too much. They're paying for it now, of course...

[Manuel76]

Great story Galatea92!. I read Red Harvest and didn’t notice at the time how similar they are. And to link it with Goldoni's Arlecchino was a great idea too.

It’s a long time since I saw both films but I wouldn’t call A fistful of dollars a copy from Yojimbo but a remake. There’s no difference from the artistic point of view, only money (if you pay or not), so no problem with Leone who in any case would not have paid any dollar from his money.

And of course Kurosawa wasn’t an obscure director (Leone was the obscure director at that time!) and everybody could expect they would notice Yojimbo in A fistful of dollars. If there were a place were Kurosawa was recognised it was Italy. Kurosawa had presented Rashomon in 1950 (which by the way wasn't either an original but adapted it seems from an obscure, outside Japan, Japanese story) and won the Golden Lion, the first important price achieved by a Japanese film. Yojimbo was again nominated for the Golden Lion and Toshiro Mifune won the Volpi Cup so it wasn’t obscure at the time, on the contrary Kurosawa was at that time already considered a genius.

Of course they’re similar, but I think there’s perhaps much more borrowed from A fistful of dollars by the thousands of spaguetti western that followed than what took Leone from Kurosawa.

[rabbitfast]

Hmm....let's just call it a form of...*cough* intertextuality...:D

Kididng aside, there are seemingly infinite shades of gray here...I think all writers at least "borrow" from previous writers, myths etc.
So...is "true" originality even possible? At what point do attempts at originality cease to be original and turn into mere cliches?

[Eric]

I think the shades of grey can be narrowed down:

1) If you copy whole paragraphs, i.e. thousands of words, even if you translated them to disguise what you're doing, you are guilty.

2) If you take the whole story with too many matching components, you are guilty. (Scliar-Martell is a good test case.)

3) If you radically rework something, and introduce added value, subtlety, poetic vistas, new characters, plot lines, etc., you may either be a genius that has turned a kitchen-table drama into a work of international renown, or you're just another greedy parasitic con-trickster.

It's a grey area, but not completely beyond the bounds of the honesty-versus-theft debate.

[Igu Soni]

I think the shades of grey can be narrowed down:

1) If you copy whole paragraphs, i.e. thousands of words, even if you translated them to disguise what you're doing, you are guilty.

2) If you take the whole story with too many matching components, you are guilty. (Scliar-Martell is a good test case.)

3) If you radically rework something, and introduce added value, subtlety, poetic vistas, new characters, plot lines, etc., you may either be a genius that has turned a kitchen-table drama into a work of international renown, or you're just another greedy parasitic con-trickster.

It's a grey area, but not completely beyond the bounds of the honesty-versus-theft debate.
Thanks. This is probably the best summary of the problems I've seen.

However, we have to ask the question: is a con-trickster the bad guy if he adds subtleties to a kitchen drama?

[beelzebubbles]

I saw Motion's poem in the Guardian (I didn't read it because I never read him), and it was clearly introduced as a "found poem", which I usually take to mean a poem created by taking lines from other people's work. So I don't think there was any intention to pass the actual words off as his own, only the arrangement.

The fuss amuses me because at school I had a friend who put together a poem by taking random lines from his history books. He entered the poem in the annual school poetry competition for a joke, and ended up winning first prize. The funny thing is, the poem was actually very good; he had unconsciously used his aesthetic sense to fashion something that people enjoyed reading. So who was the writer of the poem: my friend; or the individual historians whose lines he had taken?

I created a poem that way. But it was from a slim volume of essays by a great poet. I retrieved the poem already latent within the material and added a few lines and some rhythm to it. I called it an excision then but now I think of it as a distillation.

I created another poem through the translation, misunderstanding and explosion of another great poet's poem. It is basically the act of experiencing the experience that the poet wrote about. That one, oddly enough, was born full blown after living with the original poem for quite awhile.

[Jan Mbali]

I think the shades of grey can be narrowed down:

1) If you copy whole paragraphs, i.e. thousands of words, even if you translated them to disguise what you're doing, you are guilty.

2) If you take the whole story with too many matching components, you are guilty. (Scliar-Martell is a good test case.)

3) If you radically rework something, and introduce added value, subtlety, poetic vistas, new characters, plot lines, etc., you may either be a genius that has turned a kitchen-table drama into a work of international renown, or you're just another greedy parasitic con-trickster.

It's a grey area, but not completely beyond the bounds of the honesty-versus-theft debate.

I agree that this sums the matter up well on a technical-come-moral level. Is it not also true that consciously playing with bits and pieces from your memory, inlcuding the works of others, is one of the most creative, surprising and enjoyable aspects of writing? Especially fiction. But it almost has to be from memory. I cannot do it, much, in cold blood by plundering text as pulled down from the shelves. The alchemy will not work.

[Eric]

As several people have said her, it boils down to morality as much as technique. If you consciously bugger about creating a poem out of sherds of other people's poems, it's good for a lark. But if you consciously set out to deceive the publisher and public into thinking you are the author, then that's a whole new ball game, as the Yanks say.

Intertextuality implies the existence of enough text to embed the borrowings into. It's a question of the proportion of borrowing, too.

[beelzebubbles]

As several people have said her, it boils down to morality as much as technique. If you consciously bugger about creating a poem out of sherds of other people's poems, it's good for a lark. But if you consciously set out to deceive the publisher and public into thinking you are the author, then that's a whole new ball game, as the Yanks say.


I admit to no 'conscious buggery' nor cold blooded plundering. If anything it was unconscious and definitely hot blooded. But the question is once you have a new work molded from a previous one; is it the property of its creator and how much and what is owed to the writer of the original text? And who is to make this decision?

Creating new works from old folk tunes has been going on forever and no one is calling those titans of classical music thieves. The better class of rock musicians steal liberally from the classics and folk music. Sampling of riffs from jazz, pop, soul and rock in rap has been going on since the 80's.

[Eric]

The "subliminal influence" defence is a bit of a cop-out. This assumes that your mind conveniently let's enter all manner of witty and clever lines of poetry or prose, but that some mysterious censorship mechanism highly conveniently suppresses the fact that you read it somewhere, the name of the author, and so on.

When Bart?k, Dvoř?k, and Mahler harnessed folk tunes to give added value to their symphonies and quartets, I'm sure they were well aware where they got the tunes from. They enhanced them, gave added value. Folk tunes are, in any case, not in copyright.

Nothing can be entirely new. But in our age of justice for all, equality, and human rights, I think that those creating something with effort should, within narrowly defined legal reason, have the right to make money out of what they invented: a tune, poem, novel, and so on. You suggest that musicians have a right to rip off (riff off?) other people's good ideas. If it happened to you, you would be furious, I'm sure.

[Manuel76]

does anybody recognise the tune? it made a composer world famous!! he thought it was a traditional tune and just borrowed it, later on he discovered the composer had died recently and decided to name him in his score. I don't think he had to pay anything at all.

YouTube - EL ARREGLITO.Habanera (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9l0e3M3Ek4c)

and from the same composer another beautiful tune:

YouTube - La Paloma S. Iradier (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLeQ6_qn750)

[beelzebubbles]

My creations such as they are. Were not influenced subliminally. The influence was wholly liminal. The unconscious part was the desire to make something of my own from a passionate attachment to two texts, one a poem the other a group of essays. As I said, there was nothing cold-blooded about it.

But I find it amusing that you excuse the greats because of a lack of copyright laws protecting the unknown and no doubt multiple authors of any one folk tune.

But I think most writers borrowing is often unconscious and small generally a felicitous phrase from this one or that one.

[nnyhav]

This thread wouldn't be appropriately sewn up without Jonathan Lethem:
The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism (http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/02/0081387)
and extends apporpriation beyond words:

Let's see, if we chide the writer who makes reference to low-brow material, who appropriates cultural material — because appropriations are a bit like sampling in rap, really borderline plagiarism, everyone knows this — we'll have to roll back to T.S. Eliot. Oops, we have to throw Eliot on the scrap heap, too — apparently he risked some high-low mixing, and some appropriations. Forget Joyce, of course. We'd better go even further back. Once you begin looking at the underlying premise — a blanket attack on the methods that modernism uncovered — the kind of bogus nostalgia for a pure, as opposed to an impure, literature, what you really discover is a discomfort with literature itself. [...] It's not about reading. That's the problem. It really is about — I'm repeating myself — class anxiety. Once you have an eye for this you spot it in odd places. I read a review in Book Forum where a critic, quite incidentally, in attacking Michel Houellebecq, said in an aside, "But then again, the French regard Hitchcock as art." Well, now, wait a minute! These battles were fought and won. These victories were decisive ones, fifty years ago. There's no rolling that back. Hitchcock is art. So if you pin Hitchcock's scalp to your belt: "Not only have I seen through Michel Houellebecq, the charlatan, but in fact I'm going to tell you that the auturists were wrong and Hitchcock is low-brow and unsavory," you've discredited yourself so absolutely that you deserve to read nothing but Trollope for the rest of your life.
from interview w/ Birnbaum (http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/birnbaum_v/jonathan_lethem.php) via pseudopodium (http://www.pseudopodium.org/search.cgi?essay=Reference+Work) (but then my expropriation downpage-lastlink was without Lethem ...)

[Eric]

I'm afraid that Lethe-Man is writing for effect. I tried to simplify:



1) If you copy whole paragraphs, i.e. thousands of words, even if you translated them to disguise what you're doing, you are guilty.

2) If you take the whole story with too many matching components, you are guilty. (Scliar-Martell is a good test case.)

3) If you radically rework something, and introduce added value, subtlety, poetic vistas, new characters, plot lines, etc., you may either be a genius that has turned a kitchen-table drama into a work of international renown, or you're just another greedy parasitic con-trickster.

Some people take a delight in complicating what should be a pretty straightforward issue, with some grey areas. To turn everything into shades of dark and light grey would mean, in a "postmodernist" way, that theft, trickery, grandstanding, and so on do not exist and that it is quite legitimate to steal anything, and write wonderfully about it, as long as you can get away with it.

I can't stand the obfuscatory Sch?ngeist rhetoric of the likes of Lethem, because he tries to turn rational argument, and clear distinctions, into a mass of narcissistic waffle. "Pseudopodium" - what a load of...

[Liam]

Two beautiful poems from two gentlemen I highly admire:



Laurence Binyon: The Lure

The long road lures across the hill,
Divides the brown fields and the green,
And curves, and dips, and climbing still
Gleams over into lands unseen.

I think what valleys far more fair
Than ours, the road runs on to meet.
The light falls wild and happy there.
What shadowy doubt delays my feet?

Oh, one day, one day, I shall go
Whither the road runs out of sight,
And find, whatever winds may blow,
An inn at falling of the night.


...

J. R. R. Tolkien: The Old Walking Song

The Road goes ever on and on
Out from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
Let others follow it who can!
Let them a journey new begin,
But I at last with weary feet
Will turn towards the lighted inn,
My evening-rest and sleep to meet.


...

Hypothetically, Tolkien also might have borrowed the term Westernesse from Binyon, which occurs in one of the latter's "narrative" poems.

[Eric]

I cannot see plagiarism in this for the simple reason that there are so many differences between the two poems. Nor can it be said that the idea of the wanderer, traveller on foot with a long weary way to go is original to either author. A little analysis helps.

1) Tolkien is moving from door to door - the door of his dwelling, evoking the comfortable home of the Hobbit, to the door of the inn. Binyon starts the poem outside, and concentrates more on the topography.

2) The stanza division is different.

3) Tolkien calls it "The Old Walking Song", hinting at tradition.

The version of this song I remember from Lord of the Rings is the following. There are various versions, including this one:

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.

Why I specifically remember this version is because Donald Swann (of Flanders & Swann fame) sang it, back in the 1960s. See the Wikipedia entry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Goes_Ever_On_(song)

Finally, a little query: where does the word "Westernesse" come in?

[nnyhav]

It should also be noted that Oulipo recognizes the phenomenon of anticipatory plagiarism, when theft of the idea occurs well before it occurs to you, which also applies to the idea of anticipatory plagiarism: "Anticipatory plagiarism occurs when someone steals your original idea and publishes it a hundred years before you were born." So Anne Fadiman (Ex Libris) credits Robert K. Merton in a footnote, but I cannot locate the exact quote; the concept pervades On the Shoulders of Giants (OTSOG for short; now also signifying "a close-knit narrative that pays its respects to scholarship and its dues to pedantry; also, an extremely diversified (and thoroughly parenthesized *) piece of dedicated scholarship." Merton's Shandean investigations of the phrase commonly attributed to Isaac Newton finds precedent (among other places) in The Anatomy of Melancholy, not to mention that notorious postmodernist Laurence Sterne lifting Robert Burton's denunciation of plagiarism from the same source.

"* and heavily footnoted"

cf a recent instance: http://crowleycrow.livejournal.com/128030.html

[Eric]

I like your humour, Nnyhav. A good pastiche.