J. R. R. Tolkien - Author of the Century

CHAPTER IV THE LORD OF THE RINGS

(3): THE MYTHIC DIMENSION Allegory and applicability

In the ‘Foreword’ to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien wrote: ‘I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence’. As with the denial of any link between rabbits and hobbits (see chapter I), the evidence is rather against Tolkien here. He was perfectly capable of using allegory himself, and did so several times in his academic works, usually with devastating effect. In his 1936 lecture on Beowulf, for instance, Tolkien offered his British Academy audience ‘yet another allegory’ (it was not the first in the lecture), about a man who built a tower. He took the stone for the tower from a ruin, ‘an accumulation of old stone’ in a field, part of which had also been used to build the house in which the man actually lived, ‘not far from the old house of his fathers’ (i.e. the ruin). But his friends came along, noticed at once that the tower was made of older stones, and laboriously knocked the tower down to examine the stones, look for carvings on them, prospect for coal, and so on. Then some of them complained that the tower was in a terrible mess, while even the man’s descendants murmured that he should have spent his time not building the tower but restoring the ruin. ‘But from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea’ (see Essays, pp. 7-8).

There is no doubt that this is an allegory, for Tolkien says so himself. A brief study of it, concentrating on the elements italicized above, may explain exactly what Tolkien meant by the word, how he expected allegories to work, and why he disliked both word and thing when they were misused. Tolkien’s little story is an allegory of the progress of Beowulf criticism, one of the major features of which, up to Tolkien’s time, had been a conviction that the poet had written the wrong poem. Its accuracy, or ‘justness’ to use Tolkien’s own term, is hard to appreciate without the kind of awareness of Beowulf scholarship which Tolkien’s original audience may be supposed to have had, but in brief one could say that:

The old stone, i.e. the ruin = the remains of an earlier, heathen, oral poetry which the Beowulf-poet might have known about

The house the man lives in, also partly built from the ruin = Christian poetry contemporary with Beowulf like the poem Exodus (Tolkien’s edition of which was published posthumously in 1981), which also drew on the early oral poetry

The tower, of course = Beowulf, and the man = the Beowulf-poet

The man’s friends who knock his tower down = the dissectionist critics of the nineteenth century, who concentrated their efforts on pointing out where the poem had gone wrong

Finally, the man’s descendants, who wished he had restored the old house = British critics like W.P. Ker and R.W. Chambers, who rejected dissectionism but said repeatedly that they wished the poet had written an epic about history rather than a mere fairy-tale about dragons and monsters.

The main point about the above, though, is the repeated = sign. Tolkien did not think that allegories made sense unless you could consistently and without error fill these in. And to him the function of allegory was usually, as in this case, as a reductio ad absurdum. Anyone listening to Tolkien’s allegory of the tower would sympathize with the tower-builder, and not with the short-sighted fools who destroyed it. Therefore, Tolkien implied, they should sympathize with the poem and not with its critics.

That was why Tolkien, in the ‘Foreword’, dismissed contemptuously those who would see The Lord of the Rings as an allegory of World War II. In the first place, as he pointed out, he started work on it ‘long before the foreshadow of 1939 had yet become a threat of inevitable disaster’. But in the second place the ‘equals’ signs were missing. One could, of course, say that the Ring = nuclear weapons, the coalition of Rohan, Gondor and the Shire (etc.) = the Allied powers, Mordor = the Axis powers, all of which has some general plausibility. But in that case what does the destruction of the Ring and the refusal to use it equal? As Tolkien wrote in the ‘Foreword’, if this equation had been true, ‘the Ring would have been seized and used against Sauron’, as nuclear weapons were used against Japan; Barad-dûr would have been ‘occupied’, as the Axis powers were by the Allies; Sauron ‘would not have been annihilated but enslaved’. As for Saruman, the unreliable ally, who would presumably have to ‘equal’ the USSR, he would ‘in the confusion and treacheries of the time have found in Mordor the missing links in his own researches’ and ‘made a great Ring of his own’, as the Russians used German scientists (Mordor) and Western agents (treachery) to make their own nuclear weapon. There could have been a Middle-earth allegory of World War II, Tolkien showed – but it would have been a quite different story, a significantly different story, from The Lord of the Rings.

One can accept, then, that Tolkien disliked vague allegories, allegories which didn’t work, though he accepted them readily in their proper place, which was either advancing an argument (as in the Beowulf example) or else constructing brief and personal fables (like, in my opinion, some of his shorter pieces to be discussed in chapter 6). He was however prepared to accept something which might well look like allegory to the unskilled, as he also said in the ‘Foreword’. Immediately following on from the sentence quoted at the start of this chapter, he wrote:

I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

To this he added further, ‘An author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience’; but his experience, he reminded readers, probably went back further than theirs. 1914 was just as bad as 1939, if you were young then: ‘By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead’. And ‘The Scouring of the Shire’, with its felled trees and polluted rivers, reflected a process which went back long before the austerity years of the Labour government of 1945-50, so that the chapter ‘had no allegorical significance or contemporary political reference whatsoever’. But that did not mean it meant nothing, and nor did the rejection of the World War II / nuclear weapons allegory mean that The Lord of the Rings had nothing at all to do with Tolkien’s early twentieth-century experience.

Hints of correspondence between our history and the history of Middle-earth are in fact fairly frequent. Frodo says, when Gandalf tells him that the Shadow has returned to Mordor, ‘I wish it need not have happened in my time’, and Gandalf replies, ‘so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide’. The phrase ‘in my time’ may recall Neville Chamberlain’s now infamous promise, on his return from capitulating to Hitler in Munich in 1938, that he brought ‘peace in our time’. He did not. Frodo’s wish to put the whole thing off (not cure it) is as short-sighted as Chamberlain’s turned out to be, and when Gandalf says ‘that is not for them to decide’, he is condemning the whole discredited idea of ‘appeasement’. Much later Elrond, looking back on the past, remembers the time ‘when Thangorodrim was broken, and the Elves deemed that evil was ended for ever, and it was not so’. The idea that evil could be ended ‘for ever’ may recall the belief that World War I was fought as ‘the war to end all wars’; but Tolkien himself lived both through the time of that belief, or that assurance, and its total failure with the second outbreak of world war in 1939.

More significantly detailed, perhaps, is the side-issue of the Rammas Echor, which is what the men of Gondor call ‘the out-wall that they had built with great labour, after Ithilien fell under the shadow of their Enemy’. This is first mentioned when Gandalf rides in to Minas Tirith with Pippin (V/l). It is still at this moment under construction, or under repair, and Gandalf tells the men working at it that they are ‘over-late’. The wall is a waste of time, so ‘leave your trowels and sharpen your swords!’ They ignore him and carry on, and the next time the Rammas is mentioned, it is in council (V/4) when Denethor insists that the wall, ‘made with so great a labour’, cannot be abandoned. Faramir objects to the idea of garrisoning it, seconded by Imrahil, the Prince of Dol Amroth, but Denethor insists, and it is his insistence that leads to the wounding, and almost the death of Faramir later on in the same chapter. That apart, the Rammas Echor plays no real part in the story, and the vignette of Gandalf and the trowellers could have been left out without disturbance. On the other hand, the image of men and labour wasted guarding a wall which served no purpose could hardly fail, in the 1950s, to remind readers of the Maginot Line, built (or half-built) in order to secure France for ever from German invasion, but in the end strategically pointless, influential only in contributing to a sense of false security. French experience is glanced at also in the encounter near the end of Book V with ‘the Mouth of Sauron’. He presents the terms of Sauron’s offer as follows, but I gloss them in the language of twentieth-century history: first, Gondor and its allies are to withdraw beyond the Anduin, taking oaths never again to attack (there will be a peace-treaty and an armistice); second, ‘All lands east of the Anduin shall be Sauron’s for ever, solely’ (sovereignty over the disputed territory of Ithilien, the Alsace-Lorraine of Middle-earth, is to be transferred); third, there will be an area west of Anduin which ‘shall be tributary to Mordor, and men there shall bear no weapons, but shall have leave to govern their own affairs. But they shall help to rebuild Isengard…and that shall be Sauron’s, and there his lieutenant shall dwell’. Gandalf and the others see through this last proposal straight away, but it is in effect the creation of a demilitarized zone, with what one can only call Vichy status, which will pay war-reparations, and be governed by what one can again only call a Quisling. ‘Vichy’ and ‘Quisling’ are words which were only proper names before the 1940s, without political meaning. As with Frodo’s wish for postponement, which could become appeasement, they represent a natural urge to salvage something out of defeat, but an urge which Tolkien’s own western world had learned by recent and bitter experience was even worse than the alternative.

Finally, in spite of Tolkien’s own denials, one might wonder again about the ‘applicability’ of ‘the Scouring of the Shire’. Tolkien said flatly that the chapter did not reflect ‘the situation in England at the time when I was finishing my tale’ (i.e. in the late 1940s); and for proof of this pointed out that it was an essential part of the plot, ‘foreseen from the outset’, and that the slender ‘basis in experience’ which it did have in fact dated much further back, to the time before World War II and indeed before World War I, when places like his old home in Sarehole, Warwickshire, were being drawn into the industrial Birmingham conurbation. Yet, as Tolkien also said, ‘applicability…resides in the freedom of the reader’, not ‘the purposed domination of the author’. For most readers in the 1950s, as for anyone who still remembers the time, the homecoming chapters were bound to have points of resemblance with England – perhaps most of all because here and there they seem slightly out of place in Middle-earth.

Take, for instance, the matter of pipeweed. There no longer is any in the Shire, for Hob Hayward reports that ‘All the stocks seem to have gone…waggon-loads of it went away down the old road out of the Southfarthing’. One wonders where to. Saruman has certainly become a smoker, which may explain the small amounts being traded earlier on, but he cannot be smoking ‘waggon-loads’ of it himself, and it seems hard to believe that he is either selling it or issuing it to his followers in Isengard. In the 1940s and 1950s, though, it was common in Britain for shortages to be explained with a shrug and the words ‘gone for export’; this created exactly the annoying paradox of the Shire, of plenty of production but no consumption and no other visible benefit. More significant may be the curious ‘socialism’, so to speak, of Sharkey and his men. They are robbers and bandits, and Sharkey/ Saruman’s only goal is vengeance, as he says himself, but it is strange that the ruffians camouflage their intentions with some sort of ethic of fairness. ‘It’s all these “gatherers” and “sharers”’, says Hob Hayward again, ‘going round counting and measuring and taking off to storage. They do more gathering than sharing, and we never see most of the stuff again’. Farmer Cotton confirms that they gather stuff up ‘for fair distribution’, and the quotation marks indicate that that is their phrase, not his; he also admits that some fraction of this does come back, as the ‘leavings’ at the Shirriff-houses.

All this seems oddly euphemistic for Middle-earth, whose villains usually feel no need to conceal their intentions. But Sharkey’s men do actually seem to believe their own rhetoric themselves. ‘This country wants waking up and setting to rights’, says the leader of the Hobbiton ruffians, as though he had some goal beyond mere hatred and contempt for the Shire, and in so far as this ever becomes visible, it seems to be more industrialization, efficiency, economy of effort, all things often and still wished on the population of Britain. The trouble with that (as developments after the publication of The Lord of the Rings have tended to confirm) was that the products of efficiency-drives were often not only soulless but also inefficient. Why do Sharkey’s men knock down perfectly satisfactory old houses and put up in their place damp, ugly, badly-built, standardized ones? No one ever explains, but the overall picture was one all too familiar to post-war Britons, as was the disillusionment of returning from victory to poor food, ration-books, endemic shortages, and a rash of ‘prefabs’ and jerry-built ‘council houses’. So was the suspicion that behind every ‘Lotho Pimple’ or domestic tyrant, there was some more sinister force, which would eventually take over and indeed devour the wretched Lothos. In ‘The Scouring of the Shire’ one can be sure that there is a good deal of Tolkien’s own early experience and personal feelings, especially over the loss of trees; though one can also see why he would not want these late chapters to be taken as a mere allegory of or attack on the Socialist government of Britain 1945-50, for that would be a petty and a transient conclusion for a work of such scope. Nevertheless, just as the Rammas Echor sounds a warning against the wish for safe solutions which bred the Maginot Line, so ‘The Scouring of the Shire’ gives a reminder that the loss and damage of wars do not end with the victory parades, but drag on in the drabness and poverty which Orwell (writing at exactly the same time) projected into the future as the ‘Ingsoc’ of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Saruman and Denethor: technologist and reactionary

There is a strong applicability, furthermore, in the characters Saruman and Denethor. One of the things that connect them is this. As I have said many times already, one of Tolkien’s characteristic activities was the antiquarian one of showing old words and beliefs and habits, like the riddle-game, persisting in to modern times. But he was also capable of working the other way: taking something apparently distinctively modern, and wondering what it would have been like in the different circumstances of an archaic world. Is the modern element really modern? Or was it there all the time, unnoticed, waiting to be revealed?

These questions apply with particular force to Saruman. One should note to begin with that his name, as so often, comes from a philological puzzle, though it is one which no one had identified before Tolkien, and to which he gave a highly personalized solution. The puzzle is what the word searu might mean in Old English (searu is the recorded West Saxon form, ^*saru would be its unrecorded equivalent in Mercian, the language of the Mark, Tolkien’s West Midland home). This word survives in several compounds, and it has associations first with metal – Beowulf’s mail shirt is a searonet, a searo-net, sewed, we are told, by the cunning thought (orÞanc) of the smith. The Danish hall of Heorot is held together by searo-bonds, presumably iron clamps. The standard translation for searo here is something like ‘cunning’, and this fits with other uses, such as the description of the thoughts of wizards as searoÞonc, ‘cunning thought’. The word has ominous suggestions as well, in the adjective searocræftig or the noun searoniÞ, ‘cunning-crafty’, ‘cunning-spite’. Finally it is connected also with treasure, which may be a searugimma geÞræc, a ‘confusion of cunning gems’; in one final crux, one Old English poem declares, making the word into a verb, sinc searwade – ‘treasure was cunning’. The standard dictionary suggests that this means it ‘left its possessor’, but Tolkien was more likely to think it meant the exact opposite, treasure stayed with its possessor, gave him the ‘dragon-sickness’ of which the Master of Laketown died.

Saruman could then mean simply ‘cunning man’, itself an old designation for a wizard, and so suitable enough. But behind that one may see that for Tolkien the Old English word expressed very accurately a complex concept for which we no longer have a term. What does Saruman stand for? One thing, certainly, is a kind of mechanical ingenuity, smithcraft developed into engineering skills. Treebeard says of Saruman that ‘He has a mind of metal and wheels’; his orcs use a kind of gunpowder at Helm’s Deep, and later on he uses against the Ents a kind of napalm, or (remembering Tolkien’s own war experience) perhaps one should say a Flammenwerfer. This might in itself be ethically neutral, and Tolkien had a lifelong sympathy with all kinds of creative endeavour, including the forging of the Silmarils and ‘the love of beautiful things made by hands and by cunning and by magic’, the ‘desire of the hearts of dwarves’ which Bilbo feels for a moment in chapter 1 of The Hobbit. Yet in the dwarves, just as in the Old English poem mentioned above, this love can lead on to something greedier and more treacherous, the ‘bewilderment of the treasure’ which works on Thorin as on the Master of Laketown. There is another connection entirely personal to Tolkien. In his childhood he lived in the village outside Birmingham then called ‘Sarehole’, and feared the bone-grinding millers he and his brother called ‘the White Ogre’ and ‘the Black Ogre’ (see Biography, pp. 20-21). Sarehole Mill became for him an image of destructive technology, remembered in the scenes with the miller Ted Sandyman in the Shire. How suitable that ‘Sarehole’ could be taken to mean ‘the saru-pit’ or possibly ‘the sere pit, the withered pit’. Ted Sandyman is withered, in a way, says Farmer Cotton (VI/ 8): ‘he works there cleaning wheels for the Men, where his dad was the Miller and his own master’. His is not the dragon-sickness associated with gold, but it is a metal-sickness associated with iron, and both sicknesses are catching and potentially fatal.

One sees ‘Sandyman’s disease’ in an advanced form in Saruman: it starts as intellectual curiosity, develops as engineering skill, turns into greed and the desire to dominate, corrupts further into a hatred and contempt of the natural world which goes beyond any rational desire to use it. Saruman’s orcs start by felling trees for the furnaces, but they end up felling them for fun, as Treebeard complains (III/4). The ‘applicability’ of this is obvious, with Saruman becoming an image of one of the characteristic vices of modernity, though we still have no name for it – a kind of restless ingenuity, skill without purpose, bulldozing for the sake of change. It is interesting that Saruman’s followers call him ‘Sharkey’, Orkish, we are told, for ‘Old Man’. A medievalist might think of the ‘Old Man of the Mountains’ in Sir John Mandeville’s Travels, the master of the sect of Assassins. His title in Arabic would be shaikh, ‘old man’, and he ruled by deluding his followers with dreams of Paradise created by hashish. Similarly, one might say, the Sarumans of the real world rule by deluding their followers with images of a technological Paradise in the future, a modernist Utopia; but what one often gets (and this has become only more relevant since Tolkien wrote and since he died) are the blasted landscapes of Eastern Europe, strip-mined, polluted, and even radioactive. One may disagree with Tolkien’s diagnosis of the situation, and with his nostalgic or pastoral solution to it, but there can be no doubt that he has at least addressed a serious issue, and tried to give it both a historical and a psychological dimension nearly always missing elsewhere.

In view of the ‘socialist’ suggestions clinging to Saruman, one ought to point out that he has a counterpart who is very clearly an arch-’conservative’. This is Denethor. Denethor’s most evident counterpart is Théoden, as has been said, both old men who have lost their sons, representatives of cultures clearly contrasted to one another. Their fates are also both connected and contrasted. Both men at one time or another succumb to despair, both are encouraged by Gandalf, each gains a hobbit-squire who attempts to cheer him further. At a critical moment, however, they react differently. At the end of ‘The Ride of the Rohirrim’ Merry sees Théoden seemingly quail before the Black Breath, the ‘great weight of horror and doubt’, and fears that he will turn back, ‘slink away to hide in the hills’. Instead he cries out five lines of heroic verse, an extension of the ‘call to arms’ he had given on taking Éomer’s sword in ‘The King of the Golden Hall’, blows the horn he takes from his banner-bearer, and charges. At exactly the same moment, carefully synchronized for us by the horn-blowing heard in Minas Tirith, Denethor is attempting to commit suicide and to take his son Faramir with him. In yet another example of the close cross-referencing of interlace, we know exactly why, and what mistake Denethor has made. The key reference is some thirty pages before, when, after Faramir has been brought in wounded, Denethor retires to his secret room, and watchers see ‘a pale light’ gleaming and flickering from the windows. Denethor is looking in a palantír, as is confirmed later by Gandalf and Beregond. In it he sees, for one thing, the black sails of the Corsairs coming up the Anduin, but that must be on the day of the battle itself, March 15th, or the day before, March 14th. What did he see on the 13th, the day when Faramir was brought in, the day the ‘pale light’ was seen flickering? The 13th is the day when Frodo is captured and taken to Minas Morgul. The likelihood is that that is what Denethor has seen, in a vision controlled by Sauron. That is why he says to Pippin, speaking of Gandalf, ‘The fool’s hope has failed. The Enemy has found it, and now his power waxes’. It is the Ring, but (though the first-time reader does not yet know this) the Enemy has not found it. Indeed, the 15th, the day of the battle and the deaths of both Théoden and Denethor, is also the day when Frodo and Sam escape. Denethor’s suicide is then ironically misguided, and in a further example of chains of cause and effect, Denethor kills not only himself but also his counterpart Théoden – for as said on p. 111 above, that is the implication of Gandalf’s comment, as he hesitates before following Pippin to rescue Faramir, that ‘if I do [save Faramir], then others will die’. He and Pippin hear the death-cry of the Lord of the Nazgûl as they come back from saving Faramir; while they have been doing so, Théoden has charged, met the Black Rider, been thrown, and is now saying his last words to Éomer and Merry.

Is there any ‘applicability’ in all this? One point surely is the difference between Théoden and Denethor, over all their similarities. Denethor is cleverer than Théoden, knows more, is more civilized and perhaps more intelligent: but he is not wiser. He does not understand about luck. He looks too far into the future, and misinterprets what he sees. Above all, he trusts to his own chains of logic. What he sees in the future is, in the first place, defeat, but even if that were to be avoided, change. He has worked out who Strider is, and sees that victory would mean being supplanted as Steward by ‘the return of the King’. But he is not prepared to accept any change at all. When Gandalf asks him, almost at the last moment, what he wants, he says, ‘I would have things as they were in all the days of my life…and in the days of my longfathers before me’. And if that is not possible, ‘if doom denies this to me, then I will have naught neither life diminished, nor love halved, nor honour abated’. By the time The Lord of the Rings was published, of course, it was for the first time in the history of the world possible for political leaders to say they would have ‘naught’, and make it come true. In this context there is a special ominousness in Denethor’s prophecy, ‘It shall all go up in a great fire, and all shall be ended. Ash! Ash and smoke blown away on the wind!’ Denethor cannot say ‘nuclear fire’, but the thought fits. His decision to commit suicide and take his son with him rather than be enslaved has a kind of similarity to the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction, ‘better dead than Red’, which hung over the world from 1947 (the time of the first Russian nuclear explosion). It is significant that Denethor’s most repeated statement – he says it three times, once in V/4 and twice in V/7 – is ‘The West has failed’. If Saruman suggests one kind of disastrous future familiar from twentieth-century experience, the technological Utopia turned into squalid dictatorship, Denethor represents the major late twentieth-century fear, leaders with a death-wish who have given up on conventional weapons. One sees how fortunate it is that Denethor did not gain control of the Ring.

None of this says, of course, that the Ring = nuclear weapons, the starting move of the would-be allegory which Tolkien mocked so decisively. Nevertheless some at least of the thoughts above, whether about the Maginot Line or council housing, Vichy status or the failure of the West, are bound to have occurred to any adult reader with any memory of recent history. They do not mean that The Lord of the Rings is a veiled rewrite of recent history, which would be an exercise with almost no point. They do mean that the patterns discernible in it, including the ironies of interlace and the moral they point out, can be applied to recent history and indeed to future action. The moral, obviously, is that one should never give up hope (like Denethor), nor on the other hand sit back and wait for things to change (like too many of the inhabitants of the Shire). But as Tolkien says, ‘applicability…resides in the freedom of the reader’, and should only be suggested or provoked by the author. Mythic mediation

A second area where one may feel inclined to disagree with Tolkien’s overt statements about his own work is that of religious meaning. In a letter of 1953, written to a Jesuit friend, he claimed that:

The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like ‘religion’, to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.

(Letters, p. 172)

The first thing one is bound to ask here is, what did he mean by ‘fundamentally’? The Lord of the Rings is certainly superficially neither Catholic nor religious, nor Christian. As Tolkien says, there is almost no hint of any religious feeling at all in the characters or in their societies, not even where one would be most likely to expect it. The hobbits, for all their nineteenth-century Englishness, are devoid of any religious sanction for any of their activities. We know they get married, and might suppose that they did so rather like Tolkien’s own contemporaries. But they have no churches, and there is no hint as to who marries them. The Mayor, in a ‘civil ceremony’? The Thain? One of the Shirriffs? The hobbits furthermore have elaborate genealogies, but apparently no tombstones or burying-grounds, whether in churchyards or out of them. The dwarves have tombstones, for we see that of Balin son of Fundin, but all we are told about them (in Appendix A (III)) is that the dwarves have many strange beliefs, apparently in a kind of reincarnation. The Riders again might be expected on general cultural grounds to have some sort of religion comparable to that of the ancient English before the time of their conversion to Christianity, and there are indeed hints of something like that in their past. On the border of Rohan is a mountain called the Halifirien, and this must be Old English halig fyrgen, ‘Holy Mountain’. But we never find out who or what it was once holy to. They are also very scrupulous about burying their dead, both those killed in battle and their kings, all of them ‘laid in mound’, as Théoden is after the Battle of Pelennor. We get a detailed description of this in VI/6, with the Riders burying their king with his weapons and his treasure, raising a mound over him, and riding round his barrow singing a dirge. But what is remarkable here, perhaps, is what is missing. There is a description of a burial in real history very like Théoden’s, that of Attila the Hun, and Tolkien refers to the text containing it in a letter to his son Christopher. In that description, though, the barbarian riders gash themselves so that their king can be honourably lamented in the blood of men, not women’s tears, and after Attila is entombed the slaves who do the work are sacrificed to accompany him. Those barbarians were Huns, but on the first occasion when the English are mentioned in history, the Roman historian Tacitus comments on their habit of sacrificing victims to their god or goddess Nerthus by drowning; many preserved corpses have been recovered from the peat-bogs of south Jutland to prove that what he said was true. But the Riders do nothing like that. They are not Christians, but they do not seem to be proper pagans either.

As for the Gondorians, they do have much more sense of ceremony than anyone else in the story, with a custom before meals rather like that of saying grace – they turn and face the West, in memory not only of Númenor but ‘beyond to Elven-home that is, and to that which is beyond Elvenhome and ever will be’. Frodo and Sam characteristically do not understand what Faramir is talking about, nor is it explained, but the Gondorians do believe in the Valar, supernatural powers above the human but below the divine. Tolkien might have had some difficulty in explaining to his Jesuit friend quite what the status of these ‘demi-gods’ was, and how they were to be distinguished from pagan deities, and they do lead him into a kind of anachronism, perhaps conscious. When Denethor decides to commit suicide (something of course especially repugnant to Catholics), Gandalf rebukes him:

‘Authority is not given to you, Steward of Gondor, to order the hour of your death…And only the heathen kings, under the domination of the Dark Power, did thus, slaying themselves in pride and despair, murdering their kin to ease their own death.’

(V/7)

Gandalf here faces the idea of funeral sacrifice, and admits that things like this have taken place in Middle-earth, but he uses the significant and in a way illogical adjective ‘heathen’. ‘Heathen’, paradoxically, is a specifically Christian word, the Old English translation of Latin paganus, one from the pagus or pays, not however a ‘peasant’ in the social sense but a rustic, someone from the back-country, someone ignorant of civilized behaviour, a non-Christian. Does Gandalf calling someone else a heathen imply that he himself is not one, and if so, what is he? The question as usual is not answered.

The deepest sense of religious belief mentioned explicitly in Middle-earth comes in an Appendix, in the ‘Part of the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen’ told in Appendix A (V). Here we have several death-scenes including that of Aragorn’s mother Gilraen, but they are noticeably lacking in what used to be called ‘the comforts of religion’. Gilraen dies declaring that she cannot face the ‘darkness of our time’. Her son tells her that ‘there may be a light beyond the darkness’, but she replies only with the riddling linnod in Quenya, ‘I gave Hope [i.e. Aragorn] to the Dúnedain, I have kept no hope for myself. Is Aragorn’s ‘light beyond the darkness’ some hope of salvation, some promise of immortality? Or does he just mean that there is a chance still of winning the war which Gilraen sees coming? His own death-scene looks a little further, for Aragorn, talking to his elvish wife, says:

‘In sorrow we must go, but not in despair. Behold! We are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory. Farewell!’

This does suggest that there is another world beyond Middle-earth, and that the ‘more than memory’ may include a meeting in something like Heaven. But the veiled promise has no effect on Arwen, who has sacrificed her elvish immortality to marry Aragorn. Perhaps the saddest lines in the work are those of her own death in Lothlórien on Cerin Amroth:

and there is her green grave, until the world is changed, and all the days of her life are utterly forgotten by men that come after, and elanor and niphredil bloom no more east of the Sea.

To revert from emotion to mere grammar, though, the lines are syntactically ambiguous. Do they mean (a) Arwen will lie there until the world is changed; and now she is utterly forgotten? Or (b) Arwen will lie there until the world is changed, and until she is utterly forgotten? If the second alternative is correct, then the changing of the world has already happened, and the sentence means only that Arwen’s grave still rests undisturbed. However, the first alternative is also possible, in which case there is a half-suggestion that though Arwen still lies in her grave and is utterly forgotten, nevertheless the world-change has not yet taken place: so there is something the other side of ‘until’, something in our future as well as hers. Tom Bombadil shares the same belief, one might note, for he tells the barrow-wight to go ‘where gates are ever shut, / Till the world is mended’. The world, then, will be mended, will be changed, and then gates will be open, and (perhaps) the dead will rise. The wisest characters in Middle-earth (Gandalf, Aragorn, Bombadil) have some idea of this future resurrection, life after death, but it is never overtly stated, and it is not shared by Arwen or Gilraen, still less by the hobbits. Théoden, like Thorin in The Hobbit, has some sense of ancestor-worship, in which the dead go to their fathers, but this is felt only by the most aristocratic characters: Théoden may mean only that he will be buried alongside his predecessors in the row of barrows by Edoras.

In this whole only-slightly-qualified absence of religion the societies of Middle-earth are unlike any human societies we know about; and in this sense Middle-earth could rightly be called a ‘Never-never Land’. More politely, and more Catholically, one could say that Middle-earth is a sort of Limbo, in which the characters, like unbaptized innocents or the pagan philosophers of Dante, are counted as neither heathen nor Christian but something in between. Tolkien was moreover not the only writer to set a story in a similar Limbo, the Beowulf-epic making very similar censorships (Beowulf’s barrow-funeral is like Théoden’s, not like Attila’s), and exactly the same slip in its single anachronistic use of the word hœðen, ‘heathen’, to condemn Danish devil-worshippers (a point Tolkien considered in his 1936 lecture, see Essays, p. 43). The parallel with Beowulf may perhaps indicate Tolkien’s underlying problem and underlying intention, and cast some light on this paradox of a ‘fundamentally Catholic’ work which never once mentions God.

Many people have remarked, and even more have felt, that The Lord of the Rings is in some way or other a ‘mythic’ work. The word ‘myth’, however, has several meanings. One which is certainly relevant is the idea that the main function of a myth is to resolve contradictions, to act as a mediation between or explanation of things which seem to be incompatible. Thus, to give a couple of clear examples, Christians like other monotheists believe in the existence of a God who is at once omnipotent and benevolent; at the same time, no one, not even Boethius, could fail to remark the existence in the world of undeserved suffering, unpunished evil, unrewarded virtue. The incompatibility is resolved by the myth of Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden and the Fall of Humanity, which explains that evil is the result of human disobedience, and is allowed to exist in order to create free will, freedom to resist or to succumb to temptation, without which humans would be God’s slaves, not his children. The whole theory is explained not only by thousands of Christian commentators but also by Milton in Paradise Lost, and again by C.S. Lewis in his 1943 rewriting of Paradise Lost in twentieth-century terms as Perelandra, or Voyage to Venus. Meanwhile, if we accept the Norse mythology as retold by Snorri Sturluson, it seems that his pagan ancestors believed in protecting deities like Thor, but also (unlike Christians) that even these deities were not omnipotent, ultimately mortal. The limits of their powers are explained in the myth of the journey of Thor and Loki to the court of the giant-king, in which Thor does his utmost, but is nevertheless not able to overcome the giant-powers of, in succession, Utgarð-Loki, the Miðgarð Serpent, and in the end the hag Elli, or ‘Old Age’. Both these stories, the Garden of Eden and the Journey of Thor, look at a contradiction of belief, and tell a story to explain why this is so.

The contrastive nature of myths like these was, however, for Tolkien almost an everyday concern. Virtually every day of his working life as a Professor of Anglo-Saxon, or of English Language and Literature, he found himself reading, teaching, or referring to works like Beowulf, the Elder Edda, or Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, which were in one way or other ambiguous in their Christian status. They were almost always recorded by Christians, like the Beowulf-poet or (at least two centuries later) the Icelander Snorri. But in some cases they might well have been composed by pagans, like many of the poems of the Elder Edda, or they contained explicitly pagan material, like the Prose Edda, or they were about heroes whom even the Christian author knew lived in pagan times, and so must have been pagan, like Beowulf himself. To take the last case first, how were heroes of the latter category to be regarded? One of the clichés of Beowulf-scholarship is the decision given by the early English churchman Alcuin, who wrote to the abbot of Lindisfarne monastery late in the eighth century, just before that monastery was destroyed by the Vikings, telling him angrily that he must stop his monks listening to stories about pagan heroes – in particular stories about one ‘Ingeldus’, clearly the same person as a peripheral character in Beowulf, Ingeld prince of the Heathobards. He put his opinion rhetorically in the form of question and answer:

For what has Ingeld to do with Christ? The house is narrow. It cannot contain them both. The King of Heaven wishes to have no fellowship with lost and pagan so-called kings; for the eternal King reigns in Heaven, the lost pagan laments in Hell.

Is that so? For if that is true, then poems like Beowulf ought to have been (probably most of them were) ejected from proper monastic libraries. But that is a decision which would have all but destroyed Tolkien’s profession, and his ruling passion, and which he could not possibly accept. Moreover, it is clear enough that (though he never mentions Christ) the Beowulf-poet was a Christian as devout as his countryman Alcuin: they just had different opinions about the status of pagans, especially of pagans who (unlike the Vikings about to descend on Lindisfarne) had not rejected the Gospel, indeed had never heard of it, or done Christians any harm. The whole poem Beowulf, it could be said, is a mediation between contradictory opinions, with strong similarities to The Lord of the Rings. Both works were written by believing Christians, but neither mentions anything specific to their belief; The Lord of the Rings goes further in all but eliminating references to any form of religion at all. In each case the deaths of heroes remain highly ambiguous. There is a faint sense of hope or consolation for the future at the death of Aragorn, as at the death of Beowulf, but neither work brings this hope into clear focus, and both death-scenes, while dignified, are shadowed by gloom and uncertainty about the future. Beowulf further contains not only obscurely menacing references to ‘shadow’, or ‘the Shadow’, but also hints of something very like the Valar – for though it is God who sends the hero Scyld to rescue the Danes, he is actually launched on his voyage across the seas by creatures known only as ‘those’, who must be doing God’s will but who may be superhuman. Both works, finally, resolve the same contradiction by a kind of mediation, alien to ‘hard-liners’ like Alcuin. Must one necessarily believe that all those who lived before the coming of Christ, or between the coming of Christ and the preaching of the Gospel, are irrevocably damned? Neither Tolkien nor the anonymous Old English poet expresses an opinion about this, or indeed ever mentions the question, but both present a heathen or a pre-Christian world with intense sympathy, and with sympathetic bowdlerization (no slavery, no human sacrifices, no pagan gods). The contradiction mediated in both works is that of the ‘virtuous pagan’: to be damned for inherited paganism or to be saved for personal virtue? In Middle-earth (and one sees that there are more than one reasons for the name) this is a question which need not and in fact cannot arise. The myth of Frodo

The connection between what has just been argued and the central story of The Lord of the Rings lies in the name, and the character, Frodo. There is one very strange thing about his name, and that is that although he ought to have been ‘the famousest of the hobbits’, his name is one which is never discussed or mentioned at all in the explanation of Shire-names in Appendix F.

Tolkien deals with these at considerable length. Most of them, he says, have been translated from Westron into English according to sense, though in both Westron and English the wearing-down processes of language have left many people unaware that place-name elements like ‘bottle’ (or ‘bold’) once meant ‘dwelling’, so that such names often sound stranger than they once were. When it comes to first names, Tolkien says, hobbits had two main kinds. In category (a) were ‘names that had no meaning at all in their daily language’, such as ‘Bilbo, Bungo, Polo’ etc. Some of these were, by accident, the same as modern English names, e.g. ‘Otho, Odo, Drogo’. These names were kept, but they were ‘anglicized…by altering their endings’, since in hobbit-names (as in Old English) -a was masculine, -o and -e were feminine. Bilbo’s name, then, was actually Bilba. However, there is also a category (b), since in some families it was the custom to give children ‘high-sounding’ first names drawn from ancient legend. Tolkien says that he has not retained these but translated them, using such faded legendary names as Meriadoc, Peregrin, Fredegar, which do not sound like, but have the same sort of feel as their hobbit originals.

The question is, what sort of name is Frodo – the one name out of all the prominent hobbit characters in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings which Tolkien does not mention or discuss? Possibly the reason is that Frodo is in a one-member category of his own, category (c). His name looks like one of the meaningless ones, such as Bilbo, in which case it would have been, not Frodo, but Froda. However, Froda is not a meaningless name. Just like Meriadoc or Fredegar, it is a name from the heroic literature of the past, though it is one which, significantly, and appropriately to Frodo’s character, has been all but entirely forgotten. Froda was the father of the hero Ingeld whose legend the monks of Lindisfarne were censured for listening to; Beowulf refers to Ingeld, once, as ‘the fortunate son of Froda’, and that is all we ever hear about him in Old English. In Old Norse, though, the exact equivalent of Froda would be Fróði, or Frothi, and this name appears frequently and confusingly, as if later authors were trying to make sense of different and contradictory stories. One thing that is certain, though, is that both Froda and Frothi (by rights they should both have a long vowel, fróda, fróði) mean ‘the wise one’ in Old English and Old Norse; and the most prominent of all the Norse Frothis is indeed famous for his wisdom, above all in turning away from war. According to both Saxo Grammaticus (c. 1200) and Snorri Sturluson (c. 1230), this Frothi was an exact contemporary of Christ. During his reign there were no murders, wars, thefts or robberies, and this Golden Age was known as the Fróða-frið, ‘the peace of Frothi’. It came to an end because the peace really came from the magic mill of Frothi, which he used to grind out peace and prosperity; but in the end he refused to give the giantesses who turned the mill for him any rest, and they rebelled and ground out instead an army to kill Frothi and take his gold. Their magic mill is still grinding at the bottom of the Maelstrom, says Norwegian folk-legend, but now it grinds out salt, and that is why the sea is salty.

Has this story anything, other than the names, to do with either Beowulf or The Lord of the Rings? One point that may have struck Tolkien is the total contrast between Froda and Ingeld, father and son. The former is a man of peace, the latter the defining image, in the Northern heroic world, of the man who would not give up the obligations of vengeance no matter what this cost him. There is something sad, ironic, and true about the fact that Ingjaldr remained a popular Norse name for generations, and even the monks of Lindisfarne wanted to hear about him, while the story of his peaceful father was rapidly turned into a parable of futility. Frothi, furthermore, is not only a contemporary of Christ, but also an analogue (of course a failed analogue), one who tries without ultimate success to put an end to the cycles of war and vengeance and heroism. He fails both personally, in being killed, and ideologically, in that his son and his people return gleefully to the bad old ways of revenge and hatred, and paganism. For after all the ‘peace of Frothi’ could just have been an accident, an unrealized reflection of the Coming of Christ, about which the pagans never learned. This composite Froda/ Frothi, then, could have been to Tolkien a defining image of the ‘virtuous pagan’, a glimpse of the sad truth behind heroic illusions, a brief and soon-quenched light shining in the darkness of heathen ages.

All this seems strongly relevant to Tolkien’s Frodo. At the start he is, one may say without impoliteness, a ‘good average’ hobbit, no more aggressive than the rest of them – there has never been a murder in the Shire – but capable of self-defence. He strikes at the wight in the barrow, tries to stab the Nazgûl on Weathertop, stabs the troll in the foot in Moria. He thinks it a pity that Bilbo did not kill Gollum when he had the chance. After Lothlórien, though, Frodo’s actions are increasingly ones of restraint. He threatens to stab Gollum at in IV/1, but does not do so, and later on saves him from the archers at ‘The Forbidden Pool’, against Sam’s strong inclination to say nothing and let him die. He gives Sting away in VI/2, keeping an ore-blade but saying ‘I do not think it will be my part to strike any blow again’. A few pages later he throws even that weapon away, declaring ‘I’ll bear no weapon, fair or foul’. By this time Frodo has become almost a pacifist. In ‘The Scouring of the Shire’ he speaks up defiantly several times – till the moment when Pippin draws his sword to avenge the squint-eyed ruffian’s insult. Then, though Merry and Sam also draw and go forward in support, ‘Frodo did not move’. After that he speaks up in defence even of Lotho, reminds the others that ‘there is to be no slaying of hobbits…No hobbit has ever killed another on purpose in the Shire’, but then in effect withdraws, saying nothing at all in reply to Merry’s ‘I knew we should have to fight’. At the Battle of Bywater he does not draw sword, and his main concern is to prevent angry hobbits from killing their prisoners. Even in this there is a touch of passivity. Talking to Merry (who disagrees and tells him he cannot save the Shire just by being ‘shocked and sad’), Frodo is capable of giving an order, ‘Keep your tempers and hold your hands’. But as the Battle of Bywater approaches, and Merry blows his horn and the bystanders cheer, Frodo seems increasingly sidelined:

‘All the same,’ said Frodo to all those who stood near, ‘I wish for no killing; not even of the ruffians, unless it must be done, to prevent them hurting hobbits.’

The last two clauses indicate that Frodo has not gone all the way to pure pacifism (perhaps inconceivable to a man of Tolkien’s background), but ‘All the same’ seems to concede that an argument has already been lost; ‘to all those who stood near’ suggests that Frodo is no longer very assertive even in his rejection of force. In the end all he says to Merry is ‘Very good…You make the arrangements’. He forbids anyone to kill Saruman, and tries to rescue even the murderer and cannibal Wormtongue, but the decisions are taken out of his hands first by Wormtongue and then by the hobbit archers.

All this has its effect on the way he is perceived in the Shire. As said above, Sam is ‘pained’ by the way in which Frodo is supplanted by the large and ‘lordly’ hobbits, Pippin and Merry, and by seeing ‘how little honour he had in his own country’. It is prophets who proverbially have no honour in their own country, and Frodo functions increasingly as a seer rather than a hero. Even in other countries the honour he has is of the wrong sort. One remembers Ioreth telling her cousin in Gondor that Frodo ‘went with only his esquire into the Black Country and fought with the Dark Lord all by himself, and set fire to his Tower, if you can believe it. At least that is the tale in the City.’ The tale is wrong, but it is a heroic tale, and that is the kind of tale people prefer to hear, ‘The better fortitude’ (as Milton wrote) ‘Of patience and heroic martyrdom / Unsung’. One wonders what the minstrel said in the lay of ‘Frodo of the Nine Fingers and the Ring of Doom’, but whatever it was, it was forgotten. The end of Frodo’s quest, in the memory of Middle-earth, is nothing. Bilbo dwindles into ‘mad Baggins’, a figure of folklore, the elves and dwarves percolate through to our world in legends of shape-shifters and sword-makers, even ‘the Dark Tower’ is remembered in a fragment from ‘poor Tom’ in King Lear. But of Frodo there remains not a trace: except (and one sees that Tolkien has made even the fragmentary nature of his sources into a part of his story) faint hints of an unlucky, well-meaning, ill-fated king, his reputation eclipsed on the one hand by the fame of his vengeful and conventionally heroic son, on the other by the Coming of the true hero Christ, who made the Fróða-frið, the ‘peace of Frothi’, literally marginal.

What has Ingeld to do with Christ, asked Alcuin, and the answer is, obviously, ‘nothing’. But Froda has to do with both, father of one, analogue of the other. He is a hinge, a mediation: and so is Tolkien’s Frodo, the middle-most character in all of Middle-earth. It would be quite wrong to suggest that he is a Christ-figure, an allegory of Christ, any more than the Ring is one of nuclear power – the differences, as Tolkien pointed out in the latter case and easily could have in the former, are more obvious than the similarities. Yet he represents something related: perhaps, an image of natural humanity trying to do its best in native decency, trying to find its way from inertia (the Shire) past mere furious heroic dauntlessness (Boromir and the rest) to some limited success, and doing it without the resources of the heroes and the longaevi, like Aragorn and Legolas and Gimli. He has to do so furthermore by destroying the Ring, which is merely secular power and ambition, and he does so with no certain faith in rescue (or salvation) from outside, from beyond ‘the circles of the world’. In this he is once again a highly contemporary figure, an image suitable for a society which as Tolkien knew perfectly well had largely lost religious faith and had no developed theory to put in its place. Could ‘native decency’ be enough? As a Christian, Tolkien was bound to say ‘no’, as a scholar of pagan and near-pagan literature he could not help seeing that there had been virtue, and a wish for something more, even among pagans. The myth, or story, that he created expresses both hope and sadness. It is a mark of its success that it has been appreciated by many who share its author’s real beliefs, but by even more who do not. Timeless poetry and true tradition

One of the differences between applicability and allegory, between myth and legend, must be that myth and applicability are timeless, allegory and legend time-constrained. The difference of course is not an absolute one, and a story can have elements of both at the same time: Saruman, and the Master of Laketown, are both examples of something which one can recognize as having a timeless quality, likely to reappear among human beings in any Age of the world, and which one can readily apply to modern times in particular. This does not mean that they stop having roles in a single, one-moment-in-time story, and it would be unfortunate if they did, for they would fade away to becoming mere labelled abstractions. Fortunately there are, scattered through The Lord of the Rings, demonstrations of Tolkien’s attitude to individual time and to mythic timelessness. They are often related to a subject not yet discussed with relation to either The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, but of major importance to both, and to Tolkien: Tolkien’s poetry.

The poetry of the Shire in particular – plain, simple, straightforward in theme and expression – seems continuously variable. The first time we hear the poem listed in the Lord of the Rings Index as ‘Old Walking-Song’ is when Bilbo leaves Gandalf and Bag End in the first chapter, and Bilbo sings it at the door. It is obviously closely related to that particular situation. Bilbo sings:

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…

Bilbo is here singing about something which he is just about to do; and ‘the door where it began’ in line 2 is the door he is standing at, the door on which Gandalf put the secret mark for the dwarves many years before, when indeed Bilbo’s adventures began. The next time we encounter the poem, though, it is Frodo who sings it, just before the hobbits’ first encounter with a Ringwraith, and there are two significant changes: Frodo does not sing, he speaks, and he does not say ‘eager feet’, he says ‘weary feet’. Whose version is correct? Obviously, either. One could say just that Frodo has adapted Bilbo’s song to suit his own less happy and hopeful circumstances, but then it is quite possible that Bilbo did the same thing himself. As soon as Frodo has finished, Pippin says: ‘That sounds like a bit of old Bilbo’s rhyming…Or is it one of your imitations? It does not sound altogether encouraging.’ Frodo replies, ‘I don’t know…It came to me then, as if I was making it up, but I may have heard it long ago.’ Actually, we know that Frodo is not making most of it up, since we have already heard Bilbo’s version. But this does not mean that Bilbo made it up, or not that he made all of it up. Three pages after Frodo’s adaptation, the hobbits start to sing another song, listed in the Index as just ‘A Walking-Song’, and this time we are told that ‘Bilbo had made the words’, but set them to ‘a tune as old as the hills’.

It should be noted that the two poems, the ‘Old Walking-Song’ repeated by Bilbo and Frodo, and the longer ‘Walking-Song’ sung by Frodo and his companions collectively, are quite easy to tell apart: the first one is an eight-line stanza and has alternating rhymes ababcdcd, the second is in ten-line stanza, divided into six longer and four shorter lines, and is in couplets all the way through. Just the same, the Index has mixed them up, and one can see why. For the ‘Old Walking-Song’ comes back a third time, to be repeated in Rivendell by Bilbo once more, at the end of VI/6. The context here is one of the many sad scenes in The Lord of the Rings, for it is obvious to everyone that Bilbo is dying. His memory has gone, he keeps on falling asleep, he even asks ‘what’s become of my ring, Frodo, that you took away?’, no longer remembering anything of what has happened. As he talks on, with painful irrelevance, he breaks into a third version of the ‘Old Walking-Song’ or ‘Road’ poem, this time radically altered:

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.

When Bilbo talks about ‘sleep’ and ‘the lighted inn’ he could mean, perhaps does mean, Rivendell and the sleep he falls into as soon as he finishes the poem (just as the ‘door’ in his first version could be the door of Bag End). But in the Rivendell scene everyone realizes immediately that there is a symbolic meaning, in which the sleep is death. Sam says cautiously and tactfully that Bilbo cannot have been doing much writing – ‘He won’t ever write our story now’ – and Bilbo wakes up enough to respond and in a sense appoint Frodo his literary executor. Bilbo, then, has adapted the poem just as Frodo did (taking over Frodo’s phrase ‘weary feet’), and left it still immediately relevant to his own personal circumstances, to what is happening in the room at the time. But the more the poem is adapted, the clearer its symbolic sense becomes, in which the Road is life, always followed, eagerly or wearily, but from which everyone in the end must turn aside, leaving it to others to follow.

The counterpart to Bilbo’s leave-taking comes in the last chapter, when Frodo, heading for the Grey Havens and the boat which will take him out of Middle-earth altogether, starts to sing ‘the old walking-song, but the words were not the same’. The Index lists this, not unnaturally, under ‘Old Walking-Song’, i.e. the ‘Road’ poem we have had three times before, but in fact it is the other one, the one in couplets – it should be indexed as ‘A Walking-Song’ – though it is true that once again ‘the words are not the same’. Both versions have the same lines about there being ‘A new road or a secret gate’, but where the hobbits setting off sang only:

And though we pass them by today,

Tomorrow we may come this way

And take the hidden paths that run,

Towards the Moon or to the Sun,

Frodo passing out of Middle-earth sings:

And though I oft have passed them by,

A day will come at last when I

Shall take the hidden paths that run

West of the Moon, East of the Sun.

Frodo’s version is once more, like Bilbo’s Rivendell version of the ‘Road’ song, entirely relevant to his immediate situation, when he is just about to take the ‘hidden path’ that leads out of the world, but at the same time the ‘new road’ and the ‘secret gate’ have taken on quite a different significance. The hobbits may just have meant (as is suitable for a walking-song) that another day they could take a different route, but Frodo’s ‘new road’ is the ‘Lost Straight Road’ of Tolkien’s own mythology, the road to Elvenhome. Shire-poetry, in short, can be new and old at the same time, highly personal and more-than-personal, subject to continuous change while retaining a recognizable frame. It is not surprising that the indexers of The Lord of the Rings got confused between poems and versions. But that, one might say, is mythic timelessness for you in miniature. Myths are what is always available for individuals to make over, and apply to their own circumstances, without ever gaining control or permanent single-meaning possession. Three Shire-poets: Shakespeare, Milton, and ‘Anonymous’

The last clause may account for some of Tolkien’s expressed annoyance about his poetic predecessors, especially Shakespeare. In Tolkien’s professional lifetime Shakespeare had a status which approached the holy, and it has seemed indefensibly Philistine to many critics that Tolkien should have had the nerve to be dissatisfied with him; but Tolkien usually saw things from a different angle than his literary colleagues, and often expressed only half of his opinion at a time. What Tolkien said, in a letter to W.H. Auden, is that at school he ‘disliked cordially’ Shakespeare’s plays (using the same word that he used about allegory), and remembered especially ‘the bitter disappointment and disgust…with the shabby use made in Shakespeare [in Macbeth] of the coming of “Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane hill”‘.

On the face of it, this does not seem to be true. If there is one work to which The Lord of the Rings is indebted again and again, it is Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Not only do we find the ‘march of the trees’ motif entirely reworked in the march of the Ents on Isengard, and on Helm’s Deep. The prophecy on which the Lord of the Nazgûl relies – ‘No living man may hinder me!’ – is much the same as the one which the witches’ apparition gives to Macbeth, ‘Laugh to scorn / The power of man, for none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth’. Both Macbeth and the Nazgûl are deceived in much the same way, for Macduff was not born but ‘from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripped’, while the Nazgûl falls not to a ‘living man’, but to the combined attack of Eowyn, a woman, and Merry, a hobbit. The scenes in which Aragorn uses athelas to heal the injured recall the account in Macbeth of King Edward the Confessor touching for the King’s Evil, and healing through his sacred power of royalty; and there is a kind of rebuke to Macbeth in the scene in which Denethor discusses the role of stewards and kings. In Macbeth Shakespeare is generally thought to have been flattering James VI of Scotland and I of England, who succeeded Elizabeth on the throne in 1603. He claimed descent from Banquo, and some say that in the scene in which the witches show Macbeth Banquo’s long line of descendants, the original production in front of the king had a mirror on stage set so as to have King James appear in it. James was, however, a Stewart, or Steward, like Denethor: except that in Scotland, and England, stewards could aspire to the throne. When Denethor replies to Boromir’s dissatisfied question – how many years does it take for a steward to become worthy of a vacant throne – that this happens only ‘in places of less royalty’ (IV/5), the remark applies to Britain. Tolkien could be seen, here as in the march of the Ents, to be correcting or improving on Macbeth. He may have had a low opinion of Shakespeare’s dramatic opportunism.

The most suggestive contrast with Macbeth, however, lies perhaps in the use of magic to foretell the future. The central irony in Macbeth is that the witches speak true. Everything they and their apparitions say comes about, though increasingly in ways which Macbeth did not expect. He is made Thane of Cawdor; he does become ‘king hereafter’; the advice to ‘beware Macduff is sound; ‘none of woman born’ ever does harm him; he is not vanquished till Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane; and it is Banquo’s descendants who succeed, not his own. The question which the play does not raise is whether these events would have come true if Macbeth had not tried to make them come true. He was made Thane of Cawdor without doing anything. Could he have succeeded by fair means without murdering Duncan? And would Macduff have become his deadly enemy if Macbeth had not tried to forestall the prophecy by murdering him and his family? Shakespeare does not raise these issues, but Tolkien does, in the scene in which Galadriel shows the Fellowship her Mirror. One might note that she does not entirely accept Sam’s repeated use of the word ‘magic’, saying that she does not ‘understand clearly’ what the word means, and that the same word is used to describe ‘the deceits of the Enemy’; so the ‘magic of Galadriel’ is not the same as the ‘deceits’ of Macbeth’s witches. She also adds that ‘the Mirror shows many things, and not all have yet come to pass. Some never come to be, unless those that behold the visions turn aside from their path to prevent them.’ Someone should have told Macbeth that. But the dilemma is the same in both works. If Macbeth had ignored the witches’ deceits, and had refused to murder Duncan, would their prophecy have come true anyway? If not, then they have no power. But maybe it would have, in some quite unexpected way. Similarly, if the Nazgûl had not been faced by Eowyn and Merry – if for instance he had been confronted by Gandalf, as might have happened if Gandalf had not been held back by Pippin, see p. 173 above – would the prophecy about his fate have been falsified? Perhaps not, for it could again have come true in some other way: Gandalf is arguably not a man either, for one thing. Both Tolkien and Shakespeare are aware of prophetic ambiguity, but Tolkien is much more concerned with drawing out its philosophical implications. His point, always, is that his characters have free will but no clear guidance, not from the palantír, or from the Mirror of Galadriel. As it happens, all the visions seen in the Mirror by Sam and Frodo seem to be true, though they are a mix of present, past and future; but unlike the witches’ visions, they have no effect on anyone’s actions.

Tolkien’s complex attitude to Shakespeare may now be somewhat clearer. Tolkien, I think, was guardedly respectful of Shakespeare, and may even have felt (if the thought does not seem too sacrilegious to Bardolaters) a sort of fellow-feeling with him. After all, Shakespeare was a close countryman, from Warwickshire, in which county Tolkien spent the happiest years of his childhood, and which in early drafts of his Lost Tales mythology he had tried to identify with Elfland. Shakespeare could write Shire-poetry too. Bilbo’s poem in ‘The Ring Goes South’,

When winter first begins to bite and stones crack in the frosty night,

when pools are black and trees are bare, ‘tis evil in the Wild to fare,

is a clear rewrite of Shakespeare’s stanzas at the end of Love’s Labour’s Lost:

When icicles hang by the wall, And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,

And Tom bears logs into the hall, And milk comes frozen home in pail,

When blood is nipped, and ways be foul Then nightly sings the staring owl…

And just as we cannot be sure that Bilbo’s poem is his (it might be another Shire-saying ‘as old as the hills’), so Shakespeare’s stanzas have about them an air, and a by no means unattractive air, of folk-tradition. But the trouble with Shakespeare (Tolkien might have said) was that he was too much of a dramatist. He dealt by choice with single events closely related to the fortunes of particular characters, tightly contextualized. His witches’ visions apply only to Macbeth; we are offered no alternative within the text to Macduff as fulfiller of the ‘none of woman born’ prophecy; the march of the trees is only a tactical ruse – and if one looks at it this way, it is indeed a ‘bitter disappointment’ that what the Messenger says, ‘anon methought / The wood began to move’, is no more than a mistake. What Shakespeare did not try to reach in such scenes is the simultaneous immediate relevance, and wider symbolic application, so carefully set up by Tolkien, especially through the device of inset poems. Shakespeare could have done it, of course, and (Tolkien might also have said) he showed his abilities in scenes and characters which Tolkien clearly noted, like the enchanted wood in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (a model of sorts for Fangorn), or the enchanter Prospero in The Tempest (a model of sorts for Gandalf, at least in his short temper). But Shakespeare left the Mark and went to London to seek and find his fortune. His uses of ‘true tradition’, the traditions of the Shire and the Mark, are accordingly peripheral.

There is a better example of ‘mythic timelessness’, again linked to native poetic tradition, in the account of Lothlórien. Just before they look in the Mirror of Galadriel, Sam has summed up the peculiar feel of Lórien, saying in effect that it is indefinable. The elves seem to be even more at home there than hobbits in the Shire:

‘Whether they’ve made the land, or the land’s made them, it’s hard to say, if you take my meaning…If there’s any magic about, it’s right down deep, where I can’t lay my hands on it, in a manner of speaking.’

Frodo agrees with him, saying in reply to the last remark, ‘You can see and feel it everywhere’. But where does the ‘magic’, if that is the right word for it, come from? Part of the answer is that it comes from another of the great poets of the Mark, one whom Tolkien rated perhaps higher than Shakespeare, though we do not know his name. The poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which Tolkien edited together with his colleague E.V. Gordon in 1925, is found in only one manuscript, and that manuscript contains besides Sir Gawain three other poems, almost certainly by the same poet. One of these is called Pearl, and Tolkien remained involved with it all his life. The poem is in an extremely complex stanza-form (like many early poems from the West Midlands), which Tolkien carefully and painstakingly imitated in an early poem called ‘The Nameless Land’, published in 1927. After the edition of Sir Gawain came out, the plan was for Tolkien and Gordon to collaborate on an edition of Pearl. But Gordon died prematurely in 1938, and the project was taken over by his widow Ida Gordon, who eventually completed and published it in 1953. She thanks Tolkien for his assistance in the ‘Preface’, and some of the notes to it probably came originally from him, or from his suggestions. Tolkien however kept working on the poem by himself. His translation of it, in the original stanza-form, was published two years after he died, in 1975. One may wonder what was the source of the continuing interest; and what this has to do with myth, and with Lórien.

Pearl seems to be (the whole narration is veiled and riddling) an elegy for a dead infant daughter, possibly called Margaret, which means ‘pearl’, written by her father. At the start of the poem he goes into an ‘arbour’ to look for the pearl he has lost there, and falls asleep with his head on a mound. The mound is the child’s grave, the arbour the graveyard. In his sleep he finds himself in a strange land where his grief disappears, and where he sees his pearl on the other side of a river. They have a conversation in which she explains the nature of salvation to him, and in the end he tries to rush across the river – only to wake and find himself back in the graveyard, still sad, but now enlightened. All readers realize that the river which the dreamer cannot cross is the river of death. But in that case, where is he standing? What is the strange land, the ‘nameless land’, with its brilliant trees and shining gravel? It is not Paradise, for that is the other side of the river; but it is not Middle-earth either, for in it all grief is forgotten. Already one can see the hints of Lórien, affected by the medieval legends (which both Tolkien and the Pear/-poet knew) of the Earthly Paradise.

But the old poem has provided Tolkien with further suggestions. The whole approach to Lórien is an oddly complex one. First the Fellowship, coming down from the Dimrill Dale, meets the source of the Silverlode, which Gimli immediately cautions the others not to drink. Then they meet the Nimrodel, whose ‘falling water’, says Legolas, ‘may bring us sleep and forgetfulness of grief. As they cross it, Frodo feels that ‘the stain of travel and all weariness was washed from his limbs’. This could mean, of course, entirely literally, that Frodo feels the grime of Moria being washed off, but ‘stain’ is a slightly odd word to use in this context. It is also an odd word etymologically, the OED suggesting that it is originally French, but affected by a Norse word which merely sounded similar. As a result it has the early meaning, not only of ‘to colour’ or ‘discolour’, but also almost the opposite, ‘to lose lustre’. It is repeated some pages later, when Frodo reaches Cerin Amroth, in a passage of description which seems designed to elaborate exactly the last meaning given:

[Frodo] saw no colour but those he knew, gold and white and blue and green, but they were fresh and poignant, as if he had at that moment first perceived them and made for them names new and wonderful. In winter here no heart could mourn for summer or for spring. No blemish or sickness or deformity could be seen in anything that grew upon the earth. On the land of Lórien there was no stain.

Gandalf uses the word again in his ‘Song of Lórien’ much later, ‘Unmarred, unstained is leaf and land / in Dwimordene, in Lórien’. So, the ‘stain’ of normal life is washed off by crossing the Nimrodel; life on the other side regains its natural lustre.

But then the Fellowship goes on and crosses a second river, the Silverlode (the one which Gimli had warned them not to drink). Nor do they wade it this time, they cross above it on the rope-bridge. The reason given by Haldir, again an entirely literal and sensible one, is that it is both ‘swift and deep, and…very cold’; and Sam, with his fear of heights and vague chatter about ropewalks and his uncle Andy, is there to prevent any immediate hints of allegory, or any more-than-literal meaning. Just the same, there are continuing hints that the rivers which the Fellowship keeps crossing are leading them further and further out of the world. Once they are across the Nimrodel, they are in something like the Earthly Paradise, the place where the Pearl-dreamer forgot even the grief for his dead daughter; the members of the Fellowship seem likewise to forget about Gandalf till Celeborn asks them directly. But where are they once they are across the Silverlode, a stream across which Gollum is unable to follow them? One answer is that they are as if dead: at the end of the chapter ‘Lothlórien’ it says that Aragorn never returned to Cerin Amroth ‘as living man’. He did, then, as a dead one? To visit his wife Arwen’s grave? Or are they in England – old England, of course, real England, the ‘mountains green’ of ‘ancient time’ before the ‘dark satanic mills’ of Blake’s poem? Haldir says very carefully that ‘You have entered the Naith of Lórien, or the Gore, as you would say’. We would say neither ‘naith’ nor ‘gore’, but Haldir tries a third word with similar meaning when he says they can walk free till they come nearer the heart of the kingdom, ‘in the Angle between the waters’. The names ‘England’ and ‘English’ come from the word ‘angle’, and the old now-German homeland of the English was the Angle, or corner of land, between the Flensburg Fjord and the River Schlei – just as that of the hobbits was the Angle between the rivers Hoarwell and Loudwater. Frodo feels that he is ‘walking in a world that was no more’, that he has ‘stepped over a bridge of time’. And perhaps, like the dreamer in Pearl, he has.

Tolkien thought that the PeaW-poet came from Lancashire, but would be pleased, I think, to hear later arguments that he came from Staffordshire; for Tolkien said repeatedly that he was ‘a West-midlander by blood’, that he ‘took to early West-midland Middle English as a known tongue as soon as [he] set eyes on it’ (Letters, p. 213), and the heart of the West Midlands is formed by the five counties of Herefordshire and Shropshire, Worcester, Warwick, and Stafford. Like Shakespeare, the Warwickshire man, the Staffordshire PearZ-poet was in touch with true traditions, of English poetry, of otherworld vision, of real-world insight, and unlike Shakespeare he had never been lured away from them. His dreamer’s state of liminal uncertainty, in which he is both aware of the physical and literal world, and conscious of some deeper symbolic meaning, is exactly the state of mythic or magic timelessness which I believe Tolkien aimed from time to time to reach. And there is one more poet, or poem, which I think contributed to Tolkien’s mix of myth and poetry, and that is the rather unlikely figure of John Milton, the Protestant, the regicide, author of the masque Comus.

One should note, to begin with, that there is an elvish element in Tolkien’s poetry. It is considered in its pure form in the article by Patrick Wynne and Carl Hostetter in Tolkien’s ‘Legendarium’, but it is present even within the poetry of the Shire, which Tolkien explains within the story as the result of Bilbo’s contacts with the elves and antiquarian researches. Thus, almost immediately after the hobbits sing the second ‘walking song’, and then fall silent as they see a Black Rider tracking them, the Nazgûl is driven off by the appearance of a party of elves. They are singing, in Quenya (the older of the two elvish languages used in The Lord of the Rings), and Frodo is the only one who understands any of it, consciously. However, ‘the sound blending with the melody seemed to shape itself in [all of] their thought into words which they only partly understood’. We then have four stanzas of the song as understood by Frodo, an invocation to Elbereth. The song returns as seven lines of Sindarin (the language of the elves who remained in Middle-earth) sung in Rivendell, though this time the lines are not translated: Frodo merely stands and listens while ‘the sweet syllables of the elvish song fell like clear jewels of blended word and melody’. ‘It is a song to Elbereth’, explains Bilbo. Tolkien is here carrying out a rather daring exercise on his readers’ patience, first by not translating the Sindarin song and second, by explaining nothing in either case about the subject of the song, Elbereth. His belief seems to be that, for his readers as for Frodo’s hobbit companions, the sound of the poetry on its own will convey (some) meaning. In the last chapter of the whole work, just after Frodo has sung the second altered version of the second walking song, the elves reply with four lines of the Sindarin song of Rivendell, this time translated: ‘We still remember, we who dwell / In this far land beneath the trees / The starlight on the Western Seas.’ Meanwhile, as he turns to face Shelob at the start of the last chapter of The Two Towers, Sam remembers both the elvish song he heard in the Shire, and the one he heard in Rivendell, so that ‘his tongue was loosed and his voice cried in a language which he did not know’ – and he comes out with yet a third invocation to Elbereth, this time in Sindarin, but again not translated. Finally, once one has the translations (Tolkien eventually gave them in 1968 when he contributed the texts to Donald Swann’s song-cycle The Road Goes Ever On), one can see that the four Elbereth poems all have a bearing on two further hobbit-poems, the song Frodo sings to try to encourage his fellows in ‘The Old Forest’, and the song which Sam sings to try to locate Frodo in ‘The Tower of Cirith Ungol’, a song the words of which come ‘unbidden’ to him to fit a ‘simple tune’ he knows already – just like the first hobbit walking song, with its (possibly) new words and tune which is ‘as old as the hills’. Sam indeed has just been murmuring ‘old childish tunes out of the Shire’, as well as ‘snatches of Mr Bilbo’s rhymes’, so that one could believe that his ‘Song in the Orc-tower’, as the index calls it, is like other Shire-poems part his, part Bilbo’s, and part traditional.

What these six poems have in common (the four elvish Elbereth songs, Frodo’s song in the Old Forest and Sam’s in the Tower) is the reflection of a myth. It is a myth in two senses, first, an old story about semi-divine creatures (Elbereth), though to the long-lived elves this is a matter of memory and nostalgia rather than mere tradition and belief; and second, with more reference both to the hobbits and the readers, a set of images presenting a world-view. The images oppose stars and trees: the stars give a promise, or for the elves a memory, of a world elsewhere; the trees represent both this world and a barrier to starlight, something through the branches of which mortals look up to try to catch a glimpse of the vision which would otherwise be clear. So the elves address Elbereth as, ‘O Light to us that wander here / Amid the world of woven trees’, and sing that ‘We still remember, we who dwell / In this far land beneath the trees, / Thy starlight on the Western Seas’. The Sindarin song of Rivendell again addresses Elbereth as kindler of the stars, and presents the singer as gazing at the stars o galadhremmin ennorath, ‘from tree-tangled Middle-earth’. (There is a further confusion here. In The Road Goes Ever On, Tolkien gives word-for-word translations between the lines first of the Sindarin song of Rivendell, and then of Sam’s cry in Shelob’s lair. At the foot of the page he gives connected translations of both. Through some error, though, o galadhremmin ennorath is omitted from the latter. I have substituted ‘Middle-earth’ for the literal ‘middle-lands’.)

Sam meanwhile calls to Elbereth dinguruthos, ‘beneath the horror of death’ – and of course this is very relevant to the immediate context, facing Shelob. However, Middle-earth is the world of mortality. The tangle of trees is also a horror. Indeed (to revert to Comus for a moment), that is exactly what Milton calls it, ‘beneath the horror of this shady wood’.

The horror of the trees is also a matter of immediate context in Frodo’s cut-off song in the Old Forest, which begins, ‘O! Wanderers in the shadowed land’, and goes on to claim that all will emerge in the end from the dark woods and see the sun, ‘For east or west all woods must fail…’ The song is cut off when a branch drops near them, and Merry remarks that the woods ‘do not like all that about ending and failing’: better to get into the open before asserting the truth of myth. However despite the immediate context, what Frodo also means is something, as usual in Shire-poetry, more general and more symbolic: that the world is like a wood, in which one can easily wander lost and confused, like Aragorn and his companions in the enchanted wood of Fangorn; but that in the end (and in this context that perhaps means after life in Middle-earth is over) all will become clear, as one escapes from both ‘the horror of this shady wood’ (Milton) and nguruthos, ‘death-horror’ (Sam). Sam gives the obverse of the thought in his Cirith Ungol song, which seems to be sung by a prisoner, like Frodo, ‘in darkness buried deep’, who nevertheless remembers, like the elves and the hobbits in the forest, that ‘above all shadows rides the Sun, / and stars for ever dwell’. Sam’s song ends, ‘I will not say the Day is done, / nor bid the Stars farewell’. One can say several things about these last two lines. They have of course a point in immediate context, which is to encourage Frodo in his prison not to lose hope. They also repeat the elvish myth of the stars. They further repeat, but strongly contradict, a famous Shakespeare passage from Antony and Cleopatra, in which Cleopatra says to her handmaiden, ‘Our bright day is done, / And we are for the dark’. But was the phrase ‘day is done’ Shakespeare’s? Certainly not, it must be ‘as old as the hills’, like the alliterative opposition of’day’ and ‘dark’ (Old English dæg, deorc), free for any true poet writing English to use in any age.

In a similar way Tolkien’s whole myth of the stars and the wood is present in embryo in Milton’s Comus, which tells the story of a maiden lost in a dark wood, and caught by a wicked enchanter who places her in a magic chair, but can do no more because of the preserving powers of her chastity. She is rescued by her brothers, who break in with the aid of a river-nymph (like Bombadil’s wife Goldberry) and a protecting plant. But before they meet their supernatural assistant, the two brothers show signs of losing heart. The elder brother prays for moonlight, or for any kind of light that may pierce the ‘double night of darkness, and of shades’ in which they are wandering. Or if they cannot have light, adds the younger brother, it would be a consolation to hear something from outside the depths of the wood, to remind them there is a world outside:

‘’Twould be some solace yet, some little cheering

In this close dungeon of innumerous boughs.’

‘This close dungeon of innumerous boughs’ unites at once the images of the elves’ galadhremmin ennorath, ‘tree-tangled Middle-earth’, of the hobbits lost in the Old Forest, of Frodo imprisoned in the Orc-tower. As said above, I do not expect that Tolkien had much love for Milton, with his determinedly Protestant epic Paradise Lost and his revolutionary political views, but he accepted him like Shakespeare as a poet capable of true poetry; and while Milton was no West Midlander, Comus was written for a patron who came from Ludlow in Shropshire, another of the West Midlands core counties, and first performed there: maybe some of the ambience had rubbed off.

Just to round out the connections, there is a mysterious line in Pearl where the dreamer says the jewels in the stream of the strange country are bright ‘As stremande sterneƷ quen stroþe-men slepe’, ‘as streaming stars when stroth-men sleep’. But what in the world (or out of it) are ‘stroth-men’? The note in Ida Gordon’s edition (and I believe that some of these came originally from Tolkien’s suggestions) explains Old English ^*stroð as ‘marshy land (overgrown with brushwood)’, but explains further that ‘stroth-men’ must mean, generally, ‘men of this world’, unaware of any higher one, but also carries pictorially ‘a suggestion of the dark, low earth on to which the stars look down’.

The Pearl-poet, then, from Staffordshire, saw the inhabitants of Middle-earth as men sleeping in the wood, ignoring the stars above their heads; Milton, writing for Shropshire, produced what is close to an allegory of life as a march through the trees to rescue the imperilled soul; Shakespeare, from Warwickshire, produced his enchanted wood in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and knew more of true tradition than he admitted. Tolkien, who saw his family roots as being in Worcestershire, must have felt that he was only voicing, or disentangling, a myth long latent in the poetry of the Mark, and putting it into both the simple poetry of the Shire and the more complex elvish poetry that underlies it, as the lost tradition of poems like Pearl underlies unnoticed much of the English poetry that has succeeded it. The essence of this myth, however, is that it always has an immediate point within the context of what is happening at that moment in The Lord of the Rings, but carries strong suggestion of far more general, indeed universal, applicability outside that context. Tolkien’s myth of stars and trees presents life as a confusion in which we all too easily lose our bearings and forget that there is a world outside our immediate surroundings. This is not incompatible with Christian belief, but perhaps rings more true for those who have no access to Revelation, like the inhabitants of Middle-earth, or who have for the most part forgotten it, like the inhabitants of contemporary England, in Tolkien’s lifetime and still more in my own.

One might add finally that it contains a further element of ambiguity. The trees and the forest in this myth are symbols of error, or horror, or death, or confusion. But there are few people who have loved trees more than Tolkien did. The hobbits’ second walking song envisages leaving the world for the ‘hidden paths that run / Towards the Moon or to the Sun’, but the price of this is bidding farewell to the trees, the little and friendly trees of English orchards and hedgerows, ‘Apple, thorn, and nut and sloe, / Let them go! Let them go!’ Frodo is taken away in the end to Elvenhome to be cured. But he also loses any hope of revisiting Lothlórien, the Earthly Paradise. And as Haldir says as they walk into Lothlórien and he considers the possibility of leaving Middle-earth, there may be a refuge for the elves elsewhere, ‘But if there are mallorn-trees beyond the great Sea, none have reported it’. Unlike the Christian myth, Tolkien’s myth contains a deep love for and attachment to the beauty of Middle-earth itself, expressed also by Fangorn’s sad song of Ent and Ent-wife, and Bregalad’s lament for the rowan-trees. The forest, and Middle-earth, can turn into Mirkwood, ‘where the trees strive one against another and their branches rot and wither’, or into Lórien, so beautiful that in it no grief has power. The image of our world as it is now is perhaps Ithilien, once ‘the garden of Gondor’ but now part desolate, yet still retaining ‘a dishevelled dryad loveliness’; though protesters who write ‘Another piece of Mordor’ on yet one more example of ruinous chain-saw development have taken one of Tolkien’s points. Middle-earth is intrinsically beautiful, and that makes it hard to leave, even for a believer like Tolkien. Moments of eucatastrophe

There is however one moment in The Lord of the Rings where the Christian myth comes close to the surface and is explicitly alluded to; though it may confirm rather than deny the argument of this chapter that it is a moment which almost no one notices, and which looks designed not to be noticed. In his essay ‘On Fairy-Stories’, reprinted in Essays, Tolkien introduced the notion of (his own coinage) ‘eucatastrophe’, which he defines as ‘the good catastrophe, the sudden and joyous turn’ – not an ending, for ‘there is no true end to any fairy-tale’, but the moment when, in Andrew Lang’s late, literary and unsatisfactory tale ‘Prince Prigio’, the dead knights come back to life, or when, in the Scottish tale of ‘The Black Bull of Norroway’, the heroine’s final appeal to her enchanted lover, ‘And wilt thou not wauken and turn to me’, is answered, ‘He heard and turned to her’. In moments like these, Tolkien wrote, we get a glimpse of joy ‘that for a moment passes outside the frame, rends indeed the very web of story, and lets a gleam come through’: a gleam of revelation from outside the narrative.

In The Lord of the Rings this eucatastrophic moment comes in the chapter ‘The Field of Cormallen’. In the preceding chapter Frodo and Sam (and Gollum) destroyed the Ring, and at the start of the ‘Cormallen’ chapter the army of the West feels the realm of Sauron crumble, and sees the Sauron-shape stretching out ‘a vast threatening hand’ towards them, ‘terrible but impotent’, for as with Saruman’s wraith later on, ‘a great wind took it, and it was all blown away, and passed’. Gandalf calls the eagles to take him to Mount Doom, but meanwhile we are returned to Frodo and Sam, who know nothing of what is happening outside. They have little or no hope of getting away (Sam has little, Frodo has none), and in the end they fall unconscious, ‘worn out, or choked with fumes and heat, or stricken down by despair at last, hiding their eyes from death’. In their sleep they are picked up and carried away by Gandalf and the eagles. And when they recover consciousness, two weeks later, Sam naturally has no idea what has happened. He seems to be back in Ithilien. But the first person he sees is Gandalf, whom he last saw being dragged into the chasm of Moria by the Balrog, and whom he has long assumed to be dead. Is Gandalf dead? Is Sam dead? Perhaps he has died and gone to heaven (if one could use such a term in Middle-earth). Or has heaven turned Middle-earth into the Earthly Paradise? Sam is like the dreamer-father at the start of the vision in Pearl: he does not know where he is. And it is significant that we are given this moment from the viewpoint of Sam, not Frodo (who had woken up before), because Sam’s bewilderment is the greater and the more innocent. What he says is: ‘Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What’s happened to the world?’

Sam is not dead, nor is everything sad ‘going to come untrue’. What Gandalf replies is that ‘A great Shadow has departed’ – but it is not the great Shadow. Gandalf however goes on very carefully to tell Sam what day it is:

The fourteenth of the New Year…or if you like the eighth day of April in the Shire reckoning. But in Gondor the New Year will always now begin upon the twenty-fifth of March when Sauron fell, and when you were brought out of the fire to the King.

No one any longer celebrates the twenty-fifth of March, and Tolkien’s point is accordingly missed, as I think he intended. He inserted it only as a kind of signature, a personal mark of piety. However, as he knew perfectly well, in old English tradition, 25th March is the date of the Crucifixion, of the first Good Friday. As Good Friday is celebrated on a different day each year, Easter being a mobile date defined by the phases of the moon, the connection has been lost, except for one thing. In Gondor the New Year will always begin on 25th March, and the same is true of England, in a sadly altered and declined fashion. When the Julian calendar gave way to the Gregorian in 1752, there was an eleven-day discrepancy between them, so that the 25th March jumped to being the 6th of April. And in England the year still does start on the 6th of April. But only the tax year, which no one sees as a moment of eucatastrophe.

25th March remains a date deeply embedded in the Christian calendar. In old tradition, again, it is the date of the Annunciation and the conception of Christ – naturally, nine months exactly before Christmas, 25th December. It is also the date of the Fall of Adam and Eve, the felix culpa whose disastrous effects the Annunciation and the Crucifixion were to annul or repair. One might note that in the Calendar of dates which Tolkien so carefully wrote out in Appendix B, December 25th is the day on which the Fellowship sets out from Rivendell. The main action of The Lord of the Rings takes place, then, in the mythic space between Christmas, Christ’s birth, and the crucifixion, Christ’s death. Is this telling us something about Frodo? Are we meant to see him as a ‘type’ of Christ? I do not think so. If Frodo is a ‘type’, he is so only in a technical sense which has been almost entirely forgotten, and in which the differences are more important than any similarities. Frodo offers no promise of soul-salvation (though he has saved Middle-earth from a great danger), he releases no prisoners from Hell (though he does from Sauron’s dungeons), he does not rise from the dead (though Sam for a moment, and entirely understandably, thinks something like that might have happened). Frodo in other words has no supernatural dimension at all. But he and Sam do have a ‘eucatastrophic’ one.

Tolkien continued the eucatastrophe with the description of the feast of Cormallen, and gave another view of it in the next chapter, when Éowyn and Faramir, left behind in Minas Tirith, also feel the crash of the fall of the Dark Tower. They naturally do not know what it means, and feel it as ‘the stroke of doom’. To Faramir it brings thoughts of the Fall of Númenor, ‘the great dark wave climbing over the green lands…darkness unescapable’, but he rejects the thought. And then the eagle comes and announces what has happened in a strange verse which is composed, uniquely for Middle-earth, in exactly the language of the Psalms in the Authorized of King James version of the Bible, instantly recognizable to anyone of Tolkien’s generation:

Sing and rejoice, ye people of the Tower of Guard,

for your watch hath not been in vain,

and the Black Gate is broken,

and your King hath passed through,

and he is victorious.

This is in one way rather like the poetry of the Shire. It has immediate contextual meaning. The ‘people of the Tower of Guard’ are the garrison of Minas Tirith; ‘the Black Gate’ is the Morannon, the northern entry to Mordor; ‘your King’ is Aragorn. At the same time there are strong hints of universal meaning. The image of people guarding a city is commonly applied, in familiar hymns like Martin Luther’s Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott, ‘A safe stronghold our God is still’, to Christians guarding the city of salvation; Christians are often urged in parable to ‘watch’, to stay awake, never knowing when the Second Coming will take place; ‘the Black Gate is broken’ could be applied to the Harrowing of Hell, which took place between Good Friday and Easter Monday, between death and resurrection, when Christ led the souls of the patriarchs and prophets out of infernal bondage. Of course, and again, the eagle does not say that, and what he does say is adequately explained (just like Frodo singing about escape from the forest in the Old Forest) by what is going on in the immediate story. But both with the eagle and with Frodo, the hints of something greater do not go away: they promote the sense of mythic timelessness.

The Lord of the Rings, then, contains within it hints of the Christian message, but refuses just to repeat it. The myths of Middle-earth furthermore determinedly reject any sense of ultimate salvation. The ‘myth of stars and trees’ is highly ambiguous about ever escaping from the ‘tree-tangle’, in part because the inhabitants of Middle-earth do not want to, they want to live on in the woods of the Shire or the forests of Fangorn or Lórien or in the valley of the Withywindle. This hope is clearly not going to be fulfilled. The Lord of the Rings indeed seems to be full of ‘alternative endings’. There is one in Frodo and Sam’s experience. Though they are rescued by eucatastrophe and the eagles, there is a strongly-realized moment when they think they are dead. ‘Well, this is the end, Sam Gamgee’, says Frodo, twice repeating the phrase ‘the end of all things’. Sam tries to tell him there is hope yet, but Frodo replies – and what he says retains a kind of conviction, even after eucatastrophe, ‘it’s like things are in the world. Hopes fail. An end comes.’ This remains generally true, even if the story this one time falsifies it. As Tolkien said of eucatastrophe in ‘On Fairy-Stories’, surely by 1947 glossing his own fable (his words, but my emphases added):

In its fairy-tale – or otherworld – setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

(Essays, p. 153)

It should be added that most of the characters in The Lord of the Rings are staring ‘universal final defeat’ in the face. The Ents are doomed to extinction, and oblivion – their fate is proved by the fact that even the Anglo-Saxons did not know what Ents were, though they remembered the word. According to The Hobbit, hobbits still exist, but there is certainly no Shire any more. What happens to the elves? Galadriel is sure that they will ‘dwindle’, and she may mean that they will physically shrink in size, to become the tiny creatures of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and popular imagination. Or they may dwindle in number. Or something else may happen to them. Tolkien knew the Rollright Stones, the stone circle on the border of Oxfordshire and Warwickshire, and mentions them allusively in Farmer Giles of Ham. There is a legend attached to them, which is this. Once upon a time there was an old king, who was challenged by a witch to take seven strides over the hill and look down into the valley beyond. He did, but found his view blocked by a barrow and the witch’s curse activated:

Rise up, stick, and stand still, stone,

For king of England thou shalt be none.

Thou and thy men hoar stones shall be,

And I myself an eldern-tree.

This is proper Shire-poetry on several levels. But maybe that is what happens to the elves. The last we see of Galadriel and her company (other than the final scene en route to the Grey Havens) is her and Celeborn and Elrond and Gandalf talking after the hobbits are asleep. But do we see them, and are they talking?

If any wanderer had chanced to pass, little would he have seen and heard, and it would have seemed to him only that he saw grey figures, carved in stone, memorials of forgotten things now lost in unpeopled lands. For they did not move or speak with mouth, looking from mind to mind.

The next day the people of Lórien leave, ‘Quickly fading into the stones and the shadows’. Fading, or turning? A possible conclusion for the elves is that they do not all leave Middle-earth. Instead, like the old king of Rollright, they are absorbed into the landscape, becoming the ‘grey figures, carved in stone’, which dot English and Scottish folk-tradition (the Old Man of Coniston, the Grey Man of the Merrick). It would not be an unsuitable, or an entirely sad ending. But it is the marker of an ultimate loss and defeat. Further mythic moments

The closer the myths of Middle-earth approach to the Christian one, it seems, the sadder (because the more finally inadequate) they become. Tolkien’s pre-Christian Limbo contains no real heathens, but it has no scope either for a Divina Commedia, a divinely-inspired happy ending. Some of its characters, and not only the failing ones like Denethor but also the victorious ones like Frodo or Fangorn, seem to be on the edge of a situation of existential despair. Yet this is not the impression the work makes as a whole. One of the reasons for its success has certainly been its good humour, its ability to balance loss and defeat with acceptance, optimism, even defiance. I conclude this section by looking at four moments (out of a large possible selection) in which one can see The Lord of the Rings carrying out its function as a mediator between, on the one hand, Christian belief and the literature of the pre-Christian heroic world to which Tolkien was so much attached; and on the other, between Christian belief and the post-Christian world in which Tolkien thought himself increasingly to be living.

The first of these is the scene at the gate of Minas Tirith at the end of the chapter, ‘The Siege of Condor’. At this moment several strands of the story are about to come together. Gandalf is waiting at the gate to confront the chief of the Nazgûl, who has just directed against it the battering-ram, Grond. Pippin is running up to get him to come and rescue Faramir. Outside, Merry and the Riders under Théoden are about to arrive, unknown to Gandalf and the defenders. The Lord of the Nazgûl rides in, and is confronted by Gandalf, who tells him to go back, to ‘fall into the nothingness that awaits you and your Master’. But the Black Rider takes his challenge and throws back his head, to reveal that ‘nothingness’ has already come: ‘behold! he had a kingly crown, and yet upon no head visible was it set.’ He laughs and tells Gandalf, ‘Old fool! This is my hour. Do you not know Death when you see it?’ (As said above, pp. 129-30, he is at this moment very like Milton’s description of Death in Paradise Lost Book II.) Gandalf does not reply:

And in that very moment, away behind in some courtyard of the City, a cock crowed. Shrill and clear he crowed, recking nothing of wizardry or war, welcoming only the morning that in the sky far above the shadows of death was coming with the dawn.

And as if in answer there came from far away another note. Horns, horns, horns. In dark Mindolluin’s side they dimly echoed. Great horns of the North wildly blowing. Rohan had come at last.

At this moment the Lord of the Nazgûl represents both the Boethian and the Manichaean views of evil, as I have called them, at the same time. Evil does not exist, it is an absence, as Gandalf says, and as the Nazgûl confirms by throwing back his hood. But the absence can have power, can be a force itself, working physically as well as psychologically: this is the essence of the Nazgûl’s challenge, to which Gandalf makes (can make?) no answer.

The answer is made instead by the cockcrow, and by the horns. What does the cockcrow stand for? In the Christian story, of course, it is associated with Peter’s denial of Christ. Frightened after the arrest of Jesus, Peter denies three times that he knew him, and remembers Christ’s prophecy – ‘before the cock crows thou shalt deny me thrice’ – only after the third denial, when he hears the cock crow and realizes too late what he has done. In that story the crowing of the cock acts above all as a rebuke of Peter’s natural fear of death. What it means, perhaps, in that context, is that from now on the fear of death will be conquered, and not only by Peter: for beyond death there will be a resurrection. The Younger Brother in Comus imagines cockcrow as something similar. In the dark wood where he and his brother are wandering, he says, it would be a reassurance to hear a cock crow from outside, from beyond the wood:

‘ ’Twould be some solace yet, some little cheering In this close dungeon of innumerous boughs.’

Tolkien might well have remembered yet another scene from Northern pagan myth. Saxo Grammaticus tells the story of how King Hadding is guided by a witch to the boundary of the Ódáins-akr, ‘the Field of the Undying’, but he cannot gain entrance. As he turns away the witch beheads a cock and throws it over the boundary. A moment later he hears it crow, alive again. In all the stories the sound means new day, new life, escape from fear and the horror of death.

And in reply, or ‘as if’ in reply, come the horns blowing. Warhorns are the instrument par excellence of the heroic Northern world. In Beowulf the nearest thing the poem has to a ‘eucatastrophic’ moment is the one when the demoralized survivors of Beowulf’s nation, the Geats, trapped in Ravens’ Wood by Ongentheow, the terrible old king of the Swedes, who has passed the night by shouting threats of what he will do to them in the morning, hear samod ærdæge, ‘with the dawn’, the horns and trumpets of the army of Beowulf’s uncle Hygelac coming to their rescue. In later history the men of the Alpine cantons of Switzerland kept horns with special names (like the Nazgûl’s battering-ram Grond), the ‘Bull’ of Schwyz and the ‘Cow’ of Unterwalden: chronicles tell of them blowing defiantly through the night as the Swiss rallied after disaster at the Battle of Marignano. Roland’s horn Olifant is famous, though he is too proud to blow it and call for help. The later chivalric world turned away from them, preferring what Sir Gawain calls the ‘nwe nakryn noise’, the noise of the newly-invented (and Turkish-derived) kettledrums. But in The Lord of the Rings Boromir’s horn still has the old meaning. Boromir blows his mighty aurochs-horn when he sets out from Rivendell, and Elrond rebukes him for it, to get the defiant answer, ‘though thereafter we may walk in the shadows, I will not go forth as a thief in the night’. He blows it again in challenge as the Balrog comes up to the Bridge of Khazad-dûm, and even the ‘fiery shadow’ checks at it. If the cockcrow means new day, resurrection, and hope, horns mean defiance, recklessness, going on even when there is no hope: two answers to the existential dilemma posed by the Nazgûl, and it may be that the pagan or pre-Christian one is the stronger. It checks the Nazgûl, as it checks the Balrog.

How much of this does the reader need to know? Much of it, like Boromir’s horn, and the horn of Gúthlaf in chapter 5, is already in the story and unmistakable. Other images, like the one of dawn coming, are too familiar to need an explanation. The scene can be taken as just a string of coincidences, with the cock crowing because it does, not aware of anything that is going on, and the horns blowing only ‘as if’ in reply, not connected with the Nazgûl or the problem of ‘nothingness’ made visible at all. But it is a dull reader here who sees only immediate context.

The same is true of a scene which seems to go the other way, leaning towards despair as the gate-scene does towards defiance: Frodo and Sam in the Dead Marshes. The hobbits are picking their way through these, guided by Gollum, when they start to see the will o’ the wisp, the ‘misty flames’ of marsh-gas. Gollum calls the phenomenon corpse-candles. Sam notices that Frodo seems mesmerized by them, and tells him not to look. Then he too trips and falls with his face in the water, to jump up in horror. ‘There are dead things, dead faces in the water’. Frodo, still speaking ‘in a dreamlike voice’, agrees:

‘I have seen them too. In the pools when the candles were lit. They lie in all the pools, pale faces, deep deep under the dark water. I saw them: grim faces and evil, and noble faces and sad. Many faces proud and fair, and weeds in their silver hair. But all foul, all rotting, all dead. A fell light is in them…I know not who they are.’

Gollum has a simple explanation, ‘There was a great battle long ago’, the Battle of Dagorlad indeed, and these are the casualties lying in their graves. But Sam does not believe him, ‘The Dead can’t be really there’, and he seems to be right, for Gollum has put his theory to the test and tried to dig down to the graves, without success: ‘you cannot reach them. Only shapes to see, perhaps, not to touch’.

What do these faces mean? The ominous thing about them is that they are all, now, the same. They seem to represent the casualties of both sides, the servants of Sauron, ‘grim faces and evil’, the Elves and Men who opposed and defeated him, ‘noble faces and sad’. But it has all come to the same thing in the end. The whole sequence has reminded many people of First World War battlefields (Tolkien was on the Somme for three months), where the static warfare left the dead unburied for years, with both sides inextricably confused. This might account for the fact, the unsurprising fact, that the bodies of both sides corrupt in the same way, they all end up ‘rotting’ and ‘dead’. But in Frodo’s vision even the ‘noble faces’ are ‘sad’, and they are all not just ‘rotting’ but ‘foul’; they all have a ‘fell light’ in them. There are several unvoiced implications. That the whole thing has been for nothing (a thought never too far away from the living characters’ sense of’ultimate defeat’); that Sauron, though defeated in battle, has somehow managed to take his revenge on the dead, and now holds them in his grip; perhaps worst of all, that all the dead are hostile to the living, that they have learned something in death that they did not know alive. As said before, there are hints in the barrow-wight chapter that the wight still controls the dead buried in his barrow, may even himself be one of the dead, one of those who fought the Witch-king of Angmar, now turned to evil by some sort of psychic decomposition. A fear like this is powerfully expressed by the Un-man in Lewis’s Voyage to Venus, the Un-man who is Weston the scientist taken over by diabolic possession: but the awful thing there is that Weston’s own psyche seems to be still alive underneath the possession, and screaming for help, terrified that he is going to sink down to what he sees as the inevitable fate of all who die. The conception is a Classical and a heathen one, going back to Homer, and Lewis and Tolkien and all the Inklings no doubt vehemently rejected it. But they did not forget it. Could it be true? Sam in fact suggests that this is ‘some devilry hatched in the Dark Land’, an illusion, a sending intended to do just what it does, to cause fear and demoralization, and that is the comforting answer. The right thing to do is what the hobbits do, press on regardless. But the stain of the vision remains. The defiance of the horns is one image in The Lord of the Rings, but the Dead Marshes provide a memory of all that has to be defied. They are two sides of the same existential situation, in a world which does not yet know salvation, and each is the stronger for the other.

There is an analogue to the dilemma just proposed in a highly understated and underplayed scene in Book V/9, ‘The Last Debate’. Legolas and Gimli are walking through Minas Tirith sightseeing. Gimli is critical of the stonework, ‘some good…and some that is less good’. Legolas is rather more appreciative, and remarks that if Gondor can still produce men like Imrahil, in its decline, then it must have been great indeed in its prime. The good stonework is probably the older, says Gimli, half-agreeing, but then going on to generalize:

‘It is ever so with the things that Men begin: there is a frost in Spring, or a blight in Summer, and they fail of their promise.’

‘Yet seldom do they fail of their seed,’ said Legolas. ‘And that will lie in the dust and rot to spring up again in times and places unlooked-for. The deeds of Men will outlast us, Gimli.’

‘And yet come to naught in the end but might-have-beens,’ said the Dwarf.

‘To that the Elves know not the answer,’ said Legolas.

By this time they are no longer discussing stonework. There is a strong sense that they are foreseeing also the end of the Third Age, and the future domination of Man. But could it also be that these two proverbially soulless creatures, elf and dwarf, are actually discussing (without, of course, being in the slightest aware of it), the Incarnation, the Coming of the Son of Man? There is a strong parable element in Legolas’s image of the seed, and what he says about the ‘deeds of Men’ outlasting his and Gimli’s species has come true, in our world. Nevertheless Gimli’s pessimistic reply might be seen as true also. It would be entirely true without qualification, in the Christian view, if fallen humanity had not been rescued by a Power from outside, a Power beyond humanity which nevertheless became human. But as Legolas says, the elves know nothing about that. Or as Tolkien put it in his Fairy-Stories essay, ‘elves are not primarily concerned with us, nor we with them. Our fates are sundered’. Legolas and Gimli go on to tell the hobbits their story about following the Paths of the Dead; and Gandalf, in the ‘last debate’ itself, reminds everyone that ‘it is not our part to master all the tides of the world’. After the momentary glimpse from ‘outside the frame’, the characters return to the business, the inevitably limited business, of Middle-earth.

The place where Middle-earth comes closest to twentieth-century life, however, is certainly the Shire, and the instinct which led commentators to see ‘The Scouring of the Shire’ as in some way a comment on Tolkien’s own time and country was not entirely false. Rather than seeing it just as an allegory of England in the aftermath of war, however, one might apply what is said there to a more general situation: of a society suffering not only from political misrule, but from a strange and generalized crisis of confidence. A similar diagnosis was made about England in entirely realistic terms by Tolkien’s great contemporary writer of fable, George Orwell, though he did it not in Nineteen Eighty-Four but in his relatively neglected between-war novel, Coming Up for Air (1938). In this the odd, the inexplicable thing, is that although the lead character George Bowling knows perfectly well what he wants to do with his life (go fishing), he never gets the chance till too late, and when he does, the idyllic world of childhood he remembers has completely vanished under suburban ‘development’, pools, fish, town, social life, community, all together. But why did he tamely acquiesce in the frittering away of his life and his hopes? Why, to return to Middle-earth, do the hobbits of the Shire tamely allow themselves to be taken over, when they quite clearly have the strength to resist, and face very little opposition when they do resist? They have no leadership; they are bewildered; they (or some of them) are like the Riders, confused by the Voice of Saruman, the insistent persuasion of modern political jargon. To this the answer, inside The Lord of the Rings, is the horn of Eorl the Young, made by the dwarves, taken from the hoard of Scatha the Worm, given to Merry by Éowyn. ‘He that blows it at need,’ she says, ‘shall set fear in the hearts of his enemies and joy in the hearts of his friends, and they shall hear him and come to him.’ In the Shire the rebellion starts as soon as Merry blows it, saying, ‘I am going to blow the horn of Rohan, and give them all some music they have never heard before.’ Immediately the paralysis dissipates. Everyone seems to wake up. Not only do they know what they want (they always did, like Orwell’s George Bowling), they have no hesitation in getting it, and rejecting the casual, pointless destruction (pouring filth into the streams, felling all the trees along the Bywater road, cutting down the Party Tree) that comes with Saruman and all he stands for.

Inside The Lord of the Rings, the horn of Rohan stands for a rejection of the despair which is Sauron’s chief weapon, and which hangs persistently on the edges of the story, in the barrow, in the Dead Marshes, in Fangorn Forest, in Mordor, and even in the Shire. Outside The Lord of the Rings, it stands maybe for The Lord of the Rings. If Tolkien were to choose a symbol for his story and its message, it would be, I think, the horn of Eorl. He would have liked to blow it in his own country, and disperse the cloud of post-war and post-faith disillusionment, depression, acquiescence, which so strangely (and twice in his lifetime) followed on victory. And perhaps he did. Style and genre

One final short comment should be made about the genre of The Lord of the Rings. In one obvious way it has created its own genre. The heroic fantasy trilogy – a genre, or sub-genre, totally unknown till Tolkien wrote one – has now become a publishing staple, obviously in imitation and emulation of The Lord of the Rings. Is it, however, still also a novel? Or a romance? Or even an epic? The difficulty of deciding tells us something about it.

The most comprehensive description we have of literary modes is that of Northrop Frye, in his book An Anatomy of Criticism, which came out only just after The Lord of the Rings, in 1957. Frye never mentions Tolkien’s work in the Anatomy. However, the framework he gives both allows us to place The Lord of the Rings, and to see why it is an anomaly. In Frye’s view, there are five very general literary modes, defined only by the nature of their characters. At the top is myth: if the characters in a work are ‘superior in kind both to other men and to the environment of other men’, Frye declares, then ‘the hero is a divine being and the story about him will be a myth’. One level down is romance: here the characters are superior only in ‘degree’ (not ‘kind’) to other men, and again to their environment. The next level down is high mimesis, the level characteristic of tragedy or epic, where the heroes and heroines are ‘superior in degree to other men but not to [their] natural environment’. Next to bottom is low mimesis, the level of the classical novel of lane Austen or Henry James, where the characters are very much on a level with ourselves in abilities, though maybe not in social class. Below it comes irony, where we see ourselves looking down on people weaker or more ignorant than ourselves, where heroes turn into anti-heroes and are often treated comically.

Where does The Lord of the Rings fit on this schema? The obvious answer is, at all five levels. The hobbits, for a start, are very clearly low mimetic, at least most of the time. As discussed in chapter I, their constant engagement with characters on higher levels may pull them up towards heroic speech, and dress, and action, but this is often seen by themselves as odd: Gaffer Gamgee looks at his son’s armour and says, unimpressed, ‘What’s come of his weskit? I don’t hold with wearing ironmongery’. Sam in particular (even more than Gollum/Sméagol) tends to sink towards the ironic, indeed his relationship with Frodo contains a hint of the most famous ironic/romantic pairing in literature, that of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. With his proverbs, his common-sense (his name is Samwise, Old English sám-wís, ‘half-wise’), his stubborn unthinking practicality, he tends always to drop the stylistic level of scenes he is in, even scenes tending towards the mythic like the rope-crossing into Lórien.

Nearly all the human characters occupy a higher level. Éomer, for instance, or Boromir, are characteristic figures of high mimesis, leaders, kings, stronger and bolder than everyday life, but still mortal, without supernatural powers. Aragorn, however, though staying on their level much of the time, with an element of deliberate disguise, is different: he can summon the dead, he can compel the palantir to his will, he lives in full vigour for 210 years, and is able to control his death. He, his non-human companions like Legolas, Gimli, and Arwen, and all the non-human species of Middle-earth, are figures of romance. Finally, characters like Gandalf, Bombadil, and Sauron, are very close to the level of myth. They are not exactly ‘divine beings’, but they are not human either, something intermediate (in fact Gandalf and Sauron are both Maiar, a class of being invented by Tolkien). The whole story furthermore aspires in places to mythic meaning, as discussed above. The aspiration is limited only by Tolkien’s refusal to reach out to, to do any more than hint at, a sixth level above and outside Frye’s categorizations, which one could call ‘true myth’, or gospel, or revelation, or (Tolkien’s word) evangelium. In his essay ‘On Fairy-Stories’ he argued that fairy-tales could have a glimpse or gleam of this, through ‘eucatastrophe’, but should not allow it in, as rending ‘the very web of story’.

In brief, then The Lord of the Rings is a romance, but one which is in continuous negotiation with, and which follows many of the conventions of, the traditional bourgeois novel. All the levels however interact continually and challengingly. Gandalf, Aragorn, Théoden, Merry and Pippin, can all be found together in scenes like the arrival at Isengard, representing as it were all five of Frye’s levels at once, and they move easily from amiable hobbitic prattle about pipeweed to ‘the speech of the oldest of all living things’, and intensely suggestive remarks about the nature of ‘chance’ and ‘luck’. Théoden himself is hard to put on the Frye scale. On the face of it he is the same as his nephew Éomer, but he also becomes ‘Théoden Ednew’, reinvigorated like Gandalf, capable as he dies of looking beyond death. Shire-poetry can be at once low mimetic and mythic, depending on whether one thinks of real forests, or forests as an image of life in the world. The flexibility with which Tolkien moves between the modes is a major cause for the success of The Lord of the Rings. It is at once ambitious (much more so than novels are allowed to be) and insidious (getting under the guard of the modern reader, trained to reject, or to ironize, the assumptions of tragedy or epic). This is how Tolkien in the end solved the problem first set up in The Hobbit, of bringing together the modern world of the Shire and the Bagginses, and the heroic world of were-bears and dragons and Thorin Oakenshield.

Literary mode is matched, of course, by style, and Tolkien’s stylistic levels go up and down in exactly the same way as his generic ones. At the top we have the eagle’s ‘psalm’ announcing the fall of Sauron; at the bottom, perhaps, the ores, or Gollum/ Sméagol talking to himself. Most of Tolkien’s variations from the middle level of the bourgeois novel have annoyed commentators, unused as they often are to earlier literature, or to contemporary popular literature. Tolkien has been criticized for writing a ‘Boy’s Own’ style, by Edwin Muir once again, and oddly enough, long ago, by Terry Pratchett, in the Bath and West Evening Chronicle for 7th December, 1974. It is true that hobbitic banter does sometimes sound like old-fashioned British school stories, now revived of course by the unexpected success of J.K. Rowling’s ‘Harry Potter’ series. Tolkien has also been condemned for writing archaically (as he does, obviously deliberately, in scenes operating at the level of high mimesis or romance). There is a kind of presumption, however, in literary critics, usually utterly ignorant of the history of their own language, telling Tolkien what to think about English. Tolkien could at any time, and without trying, have rewritten any of his supposedly archaic passages either in really archaic language, in Middle English or Old English, or in completely normal demotic contemporary slang. In a letter composed for (but not sent to) a friend (Hugh Brogan) who made a complaint of this kind Tolkien in fact carried out just that exercise, rewriting Théoden’s short speech beginning ‘Nay, Gandalf!’ in ‘The King of the Golden Hall’, first with a kind of advanced archaism including the old prefixed negative and second-person ‘thou’ [so ‘You know not’ becomes ‘Thou n[e] wost’), and then in modern:

‘Not at all my dear Gandalf. You don’t know your own skill as a doctor. I shall go to the war in person, even if I have to be one of the first casualties…’

‘And then what?’ Tolkien asked. How would a modern person, talking like that, express Théoden’s heroic sentiment, ‘Thus shall I sleep better’? As Tolkien replied:

people who think like that just do not talk a modern idiom. You can have ‘I shall lie easier in my grave’, or ‘I should sleep sounder in my grave like that rather than if I stayed at home’ – if you like. But there would be an insincerity of thought, a disunion of word and meaning. For a King who spoke in a modern style would not really think in such terms…Like some non-Christian making a reference to some Christian belief which did not in fact move him at all.

(Letters, pp. 225-6)

Tolkien could bring a modern style into Middle-earth: Smaug talks it, for one, and so does Saruman. But he knew the implications of style, and of language, better and more professionally than almost anyone in the world. The flexibility of his many styles and languages; the resonance of the highest levels of these; the ability to reach out towards universal and mythic meaning, while remaining embedded in story: these are three powerful and largely unsuspected reasons for the continuing appeal of The Lord of the Rings.