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

CHAPTER VI SHORTER WORKS:

DOUBTS, FEARS, AUTOBIOGRAPHIES Tolkien’s shorter works considered

No one could call Tolkien homo unius libri, a one-book man – Hammond and Anderson’s Descriptive Bibliography of 1993 lists twenty-nine ‘Books by J.R.R. Tolkien’, thirty-six more ‘Books Edited, Translated, or with Contributions’ by him, and thirty-nine ‘Contributions to Periodicals’, taking 349 pages to do it; and the list has been subsequently extended. However, these totals include a good deal of repetition and reprinting, and a substantial amount of posthumous publication, while many, indeed most of the items listed are brief or ‘occasional’: if it had not been for the later celebrity of their author they would be completely forgotten. If one considers that Tolkien was a professional academic, in a trade devoted to publication and in a position intended to free one for it (for few British academics manage thirty-five years in successive university Chairs), then one has to concede that by normal standards he did not publish very much – apart, of course, from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, which if not ‘one book’ may at least be considered one related sequence.

If one excludes posthumous publications – which include, besides The Silmarillion and The History of Middle-earth, the three children’s books, The Father Christmas Letters (published in 1976), Mr Bliss (1982), and Roverandom (1998) – the remainder may be divided into: academic works; poems; and short narrative pieces. The academic works are considered briefly below, but one may say even more briefly here that apart from the collaborative 1925 edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (which probably got him his first Oxford Chair), and the admittedly groundbreaking and field-defining essay on Beowulf eleven years later, Tolkien published less academically than most of his colleagues, and especially little after about 1940. From an early period, though, he had kept on publishing individual poems, sometimes pseudonymously, and nearly always in relatively obscure locations – college and university magazines, small or privately-printed collections. A list of these is given in Humphrey Carpenter’s Biography, and extended in Hammond and Anderson’s Bibliography. The count comes to about thirty, though the exact total may vary depending on how one deals with Tolkien’s habit of reprinting poems in different places, but also rewriting them more or less extensively. The count further excludes both his contributions to the 1936 collection (again privately-printed and little-circulated) Songs for the Philologists, and the sixteen poems in the 1962 collection The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, nearly all of them reprints or rewritings, as also the many poems in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (themselves in their turn often rewritings).

One is left with a small handful of narrative pieces which Tolkien wrote and published in his own lifetime: ‘Leaf by Niggle’ (1945), Farmer Giles of Ham (1949), and Smith of Wootton Major (1967). To these one might add the verse-dialogue section of’The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son’ (1953), which is in itself fiction but is framed by academic commentary, and so especially hard to classify. Of these four pieces I would regard ‘Leaf by Niggle’ and Smith of Wootton Major as quite clearly autobiographical allegories, in which Tolkien commented more or less openly on his own intentions, feelings and career; while both Farmer Giles of Ham and ‘The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son’, disparate though they are, also tell us something about the tension in Tolkien’s mind between the demands of his job and his increasingly urgent drive towards non-academic creation. In their different ways these pieces, backed up by the early poems and some of the posthumously-published fragments, take us closer to Tolkien’s inner life than do his major works. Autobiographical allegory: 1

‘Leaf by Niggle’

Tolkien seems to have published ‘Leaf by Niggle’ almost as a whim. He was asked on 6th September 1944 by the editor of The Dublin Review (we do not know why) for a story which would help his magazine to be ‘an effective expression of Catholic humanity’, and sent him ‘Leaf by Niggle’ on 12th October. By Tolkien’s standards this was practically by return of post, and would not have happened if the work had not already been in existence, probably for some time. In his Biography Humphrey Carpenter suggests that it was written close to the date of submission, and was born of Tolkien’s ‘despair’ at his failure to finish The Lord of the Rings; but it seems more likely that it had been written some five years earlier, just before the outbreak of World War II, though it probably did arise out of the author’s ‘preoccupation’ with The Lord of the Rings (Letters, p. 257). Tolkien himself said, in the ‘Introductory Note’ to Tree and Leaf (1964), that he woke one morning with the whole thing ‘already in mind’, and that it took him ‘only a few hours to get down, and then copy out’. One of its sources, according to the ‘Note’, was grief or anger at the fate of a tree, a ‘great-limbed poplar tree’ which ‘was suddenly lopped and mutilated by its owner, I do not know why’. However, it is not hard to see other and more personal sources for the anxiety, and the defiance, which Carpenter quite correctly senses in the work. Though it has a general bearing on ‘Catholic humanity’ as a whole, and so fits the original editor’s commission rather well, it is at once a personal apologia, and a self-critique: expressed, as often in Tolkien (for all his protestations, see p. 161 above) in the form of strict or ‘just’ allegory.

Allegorical meaning is signalled at once by the first sentence: ‘There was once a little man, called Niggle, who had a long journey to make.’ The reason for his journey is never explained, nor how he knows that he has to make it. But there should be no doubt as to what this means. The Old English poem Bede’s Death-Song begins, in its original Northumbrian dialect, Fore thaem neidfaerae, ‘(Be)fore the need-fare’. A ‘need-fare’, or ‘need-faring’, is a compulsory journey, a journey you have to take, and that journey, Bede declares, begins on one’s deothdaege or ‘death-day’. So the long journey the ‘little man’ Niggle has to make – which all men have to make – is death. The image is at once ‘as old as the hills’, completely contemporary, and totally familiar. This is the easiest of the equations in the extended allegory.

But if everyone has to take it, why is the central character of the story called ‘Niggle’, and not, for instance, Everyman? Here the OED gives a highly relevant definition. ‘To niggle’, according to the OED, means ‘To work…in a trifling, fiddling, or ineffective way…to work or spend time unnecessarily on petty details; to be over-elaborate in minor points’. This was certainly a vice of which Tolkien could be accused. One can see it in some of his posthumous publications, like the 1982 edition of Finn and Hengest, edited from Tolkien’s notes by Alan Bliss. Considering that this was only Tolkien’s second publication on Beowulf, and that his first has remained the most influential and frequently-cited publication on the poem of all time, it might seem amazing that it has had no academic impact at all – no one ever cites it. But it is extremely hard to follow, detail-crammed past ready comprehension. Many of Christopher Tolkien’s notes on sections of The History of Middle-earth create a similar impression, of his father constantly working and re-working on minor, or as the OED calls them, ‘petty’ details, with the result that nothing at all (except The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings) ever got finished. Much of this work was essential for the success of The Lord of the Rings, as has I hope been demonstrated in chapters II to IV above. But much of it was work wasted. Tolkien singles out ‘niggling’ here and there as a vice in his fiction – Sador in the ‘Narn î Hin Húrin’ is a niggler who ‘spends much time on trifles unbidden’, see Unfinished Tales, p. 64. It is a failing of which Tolkien was conscious, and which he ascribed to himself (‘I am a natural niggler, alas!’ he declared in a letter to Rayner Unwin in 1961). Though the ‘long journey [Niggle] had to make’ is death, still, Niggle should be equated not with Everyman but with Tolkien.

Niggle is a painter, and Tolkien of course was (pre-eminently) a writer. Though his paintings have proved surprisingly attractive, many of them collected in the 1979 volume Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien, they were nearly always illustrations of his writing. Turning back to Niggle, how good a painter is he? This is one of the two main questions raised in paragraphs two to five of the story, and the answer is fairly complex. He is certainly ‘Not a very successful one’, partly because ‘He was the sort of painter who can paint leaves better than trees’. But the ‘one picture in particular which bothered him’, while it started as ‘a leaf caught in the wind’, soon became a ‘tree’, indeed a ‘Tree’, while behind it ‘a country began to open out; and there were glimpses of a forest marching over the land, and of mountains tipped with snow’. If one translates this from Niggle to Tolkien, it makes good sense. Tolkien began with short poems like the 1914 ‘Lay of Earendel’ (leaves, so to speak); they grew into explanatory narratives (like the unpublished ‘Book of Lost Tales’ or the ‘Quenta Silmarillion’); as he wrote on a ‘country began to open out’ (see the account of the early stages of The Lord of the Rings, pp. 60-65 above); and there were indeed glimpses in it of a ‘forest marching’ (the Ents). When it says that ‘Niggle lost interest in his other pictures; or else he took them and tacked them on to the edges of his great picture’, one might relate this to decisions like Tolkien’s introduction of ‘The Adventures of Tom Bombadil’, the 1934 poem, to The Fellowship of the Ring, see again p. 62 above. In an earlier work I suggested that the ‘leaf was The Hobbit and the ‘Tree’ The Lord of the Rings, but this has been rendered doubtful by the continuing appearance of unpublished works which show how relatively late those two works developed. One would have to say now, more vaguely, that Niggle’s ‘great picture’, existing only in the mind, was something like a completely finished and integrated version of the whole history of Arda from Creation to the end of the Third Age.

But the other reason for Niggle’s lack of success, besides trying to paint things ‘too large and ambitious for his skill’, is (and this is the reason mentioned first) that ‘he had many other things to do’. In particular he has a house, a garden, many visitors, and an annoying neighbour, Mr Parish. What, one has to wonder, if one accepts that this story is in fact an allegory, and therefore dependent on the making of equations (see pp. 162-4 above), are these supposed to represent? A good deal fits together if one remembers the particular circumstances of Tolkien’s job. He was a Professor, and an Oxford Professor. The capital letter is significant, for (as is not the case in the USA), not all faculty members at Oxford University were or are Professors: indeed few of them are, and even fewer in Tolkien’s time. A Professor is the holder of a University Chair, and in Tolkien’s time the English Faculty at Oxford had precisely three of them, the Rawlinson and Bosworth Chair of Anglo-Saxon which Tolkien held from 1925 to 1945, and the two Merton Chairs, by convention one for literature and one for language, the latter of which Tolkien held from 1945 till his retirement in 1959. These three Chairs are valuable and (it is fair to say) coveted by the very much larger number of college fellows and university lecturers – in Tolkien’s day some thirty or forty – who compete for them. (One might note that C.S. Lewis, despite the distinction of his scholarship, was one of the thirty or forty who never got one at Oxford, moving to Cambridge to take one up in 1954 when he was fifty-five.) The Chairs are valuable primarily because they are University appointments, not college appointments, and release their holders from the very time-consuming task of responsibility for providing undergraduate tutorials in colleges (in my day, some twelve to sixteen teaching hours a week). In return for this relative freedom Chairs are required to give a certain number of open lectures for undergraduates (Carpenter’s Biography says thirty-six a year, which I think should be thirty-five, five sets of seven), to teach graduate students (there were relatively few of these in Tolkien’s time), but above all to advance scholarship in their subject-areas, primarily by publication.

Tolkien may well have felt increasingly uneasy about this. By 1939, when ‘Leaf by Niggle’ was written, he had had two major academic ‘hits’, as said above, in the 1925 Gawain edition and the 1936 Beowulf lecture – and that is two more than most academics ever manage, and bears comparison with most Professors. But they were not being followed up: the projected Pearl edition appeared without his name on it (see p. 197 above), and the only sequel to the Beowulf lecture was the posthumous Finn and Hengest edition (and in a way the edition of the Old English poem Exodus, also appearing only posthumously, in 1981). Furthermore Tolkien had made a very considerable mark on Middle English studies with a 1929 article on the dialect of a group of early texts from Herefordshire (another of his favourite West Midland counties). He was certainly expected to follow this up with a major book-length study, or sequence of studies, but did not do so. His edition of one of the texts, Ancrene Wisse, did appear in 1962, after he had retired, but it is only a transcript: no notes, no glossary, and an introduction written by another scholar. Tolkien could have framed a defence against accusations of misuse of his time and favoured Professorial position. Carpenter’s Biography points out that in his second year as Professor, Tolkien gave not thirty-six ‘lectures and classes’ but ‘one hundred and thirty-six’, though that is still not a heavy teaching load. More significantly, Tolkien had several students and collaborators like Mary Salu and Simone D’Ardenne who were extremely grateful to him and who continued his work, especially on the Herefordshire texts. Just the same, the accusations were certainly being made, if not in 1940, then before many years had passed. One hears an echo of them in J.I.M. Stewart’s Oxford-based sequence of romans à clef, ‘A Staircase in Surrey’, in the third of which, A Memorial Service, we come upon two people discussing ‘Professor Timbermill’:

‘A sad case,’ [the Regius Professor] concluded unexpectedly.

‘Timbermill’s, you mean?’

‘Yes, indeed. A notable scholar, it seems. Unchallenged in his field. But he ran off the rails somehow, and produced a long mad book – a kind of apocalyptic romance.’

‘Timbermill’, of Linton Road, is a philology professor, author of The Magic Quest. The connection with Tolkien, the philology professor from Northmoor Road, is obvious, and the ‘ran off the rails’ verdict is one that was often passed by Oxford insiders.

All this is reflected in the ominous sentence early on in ‘Leaf by Niggle’, ‘Some of [Niggle’s] visitors hinted that his garden was rather neglected, and that he might get a visit from an Inspector’. In Tolkien’s day there were no ‘Inspectors’ at British universities – there are now, in the shape of the five-yearly Research Assessment Exercise – and one cannot tell quite what these hints in reality amounted to. They certainly applied to Tolkien, though. In a letter of 1958 he apologized for delay in reply, saying that he had been on leave, given so that he could:

complete some of the learned works neglected [my emphasis] during my preoccupation with unprofessional trifles (such as The Lord of the Rings): I record the tone of many of my colleagues.

(Letters, p. 278)

With all these data in mind, one can then continue the interpretation of the allegory, which becomes both more personal and more touching. The ‘many other things’ which Tolkien, like Niggle, had to do could be seen as his lectures, graduate supervisions, faculty meetings, examination setting and marking, involvement in faculty appointments, etc. They may not seem to amount to very much in total time, by normal office standards, but as any Professor will confirm, they break up almost every working and writing day, to the detriment of concentration. Niggle seeming ‘polite enough’ when visitors come to call, but ‘fiddl[ing] with the pencils on his desk’, may be an image of Tolkien trying to listen to his colleagues and his students but ‘thinking all the time about his big canvas’ (or his fiction-writing), out ‘in the tall shed that had been built for it out in his garden (on a plot where once he had grown potatoes)’. One might think of the shed as Tolkien’s own study, eventually in a converted garage; but it, and the garden, and indeed the potatoes, bear a less literal meaning.

The ‘neglected’ garden, for a start, which causes the hints about the Inspector, surely represents the professional field which Tolkien had been appointed to cultivate, and which some certainly thought, see above, he had indeed been neglecting. Niggle once grew potatoes in this garden; and Tolkien once wrote the academic articles expected in his field (about a dozen of them by 1939, but almost none in normal form thereafter). Niggle now uses the garden only as the place for a shed in which to do his painting; and Tolkien certainly exploited all his academic knowledge in his fiction, as indicated many times in the chapters above. But of course the visitors do not see the painting. In any case some of them come because they want his ‘pleasant little house’, know that he will eventually have to vacate it, are busy calculating when, and wonder ‘who would take [it], and if the garden would be better kept’. Ingrown academic societies are continually abuzz with rumours about Chairs being vacated, by death or retirement, and with speculations about who will get, or who deserves, the next appointment. Tolkien can hardly have avoided knowing this, and mentions junior colleagues yearning to take over his ‘padded seat’. What he wanted, like Niggle, was no doubt for someone in authority to tell him to forget everything else, get on with what he really wanted to do, and award him a ‘public pension’ to do so. But while an Oxford Chair might look like a sinecure from outside, Tolkien knew that it was by no means sine cura, ‘without a care’; he commented wryly in his letter that the ‘padded seat’ was actually ‘stuffed with thistle’. As for the public pension, that was a pipe-dream. What was needed was ‘some concentration, some work, hard uninterrupted work, to finish the picture, even at its present size’ (and the last phrase, this time, might really be taken to refer to The Lord of the Rings alone).

The scene-setting above covers only the first three or four pages of ‘Leaf by Niggle’. The story’s action begins, in the ‘autumn’ (Tolkien was by this time in his late forties), with ‘a knock on the door’. The knock is Niggle’s neighbour, Parish, and it has to be said that he is not so easy to fit neatly into the allegory being developed. He is extremely annoying. He has no respect for Niggle, often criticizes the state of his garden, and has no interest at all in his painting, which he sees as nothing but a waste of time and resources. He has no conscience about interrupting Niggle’s work (which he does not see as work), and sends him off, at a time when Niggle feels, correctly, that he has no time to spare, to fetch a doctor for his wife, and a builder for his wind-damaged house. This trip in the wet prevents Niggle from ever finishing his picture, and gives him the chill from which he has only just begun to recover when first the long-dreaded Inspector calls, and then the Driver appears to take Niggle on his ‘journey’. One might say that Parish kills Niggle, but this is not quite strictly true; what he does is kill his time. And there are a few things to say for Parish, and they are said, by the narrator or (in the end) by Niggle. Parish’s wife, it turns out, did not need a doctor, but Parish was genuinely lame, in pain, and without a bicycle. In times gone by (and this is what Niggle says in the Workhouse after he has gone on his journey), ‘He was a very good neighbour, and let me have excellent potatoes, very cheap which saved me a lot of time’. The successful or ‘eucatastrophic’ end of the story depends on Niggle and Parish cooperating, so much so that ‘Niggle’s Picture’ and ‘Parish’s Garden’ combine, to become ‘Niggle’s Parish’.

Tolkien wrote in 1962 that the name ‘Parish’ was just ‘convenient, for the Porter’s joke’, at the same time denying that ‘Leaf by Niggle’ was an allegory at all – he preferred to see it as ‘mythical’ – because Niggle was ‘a real mixed-quality person, and not an “allegory” of any single vice or virtue’. But allegory does not have to renounce mixed qualities. It is attractive to see Niggle and Parish as a ‘bifurcation’, as two aspects of Tolkien’s own personality which he wished he could combine: the one creative, irresponsible, without ties (Niggle is not married, but Parish is), the other scholarly, earthbound, practical, immediately productive (preoccupied, one might say, with the duties of his limited ‘parish’). The speculation may seem more plausible if one notes that there is a much more evident bifurcation in the near-simultaneous appearance of the Inspector of Houses, and the Driver who comes to take Niggle on his journey: ‘Very much like the Inspector he was, almost his double: tall, dressed all in black’ (my emphasis). And there is a third in the Two Voices whom Niggle hears discussing his case at the end of his time in the Workhouse, the severe First Voice, the gentle Second Voice. All three pairs seem to represent, in their different ways, Tolkien’s own mixed judgement on Tolkien.

At the centre of this is a severe judgement on ‘niggling’. Niggle goes on his journey (dies). Although he had not entirely forgotten that he was going to do so, and had begun ‘to pack a few things in an ineffectual way’ (to make spiritual preparations), this amounts to little, for his bag contains neither food nor clothes, only paint and sketches, and in any case he loses it on the train (for some things cannot be taken with you). He is removed to the ‘Workhouse’, which is clearly Purgatory. And there he learns to stop niggling, in the OED sense given above. ‘He had to work hard, at stated hours’, at jobs which are useful but of no interest. What he learns is to manage his time:

he could take up a task the moment one bell rang, and lay it aside promptly the moment the next one went, all tidy and ready to be continued at the right time. He got through quite a lot in a day, now; he finished small things off neatly.

This, of course, is what he needed to learn in life, and it brings him, not ‘pleasure’ but at least ‘satisfaction’. He becomes ‘master of his time’ and loses the continuous ‘sense of rush’. Many academics and office-workers will sympathize with his problem and wish they could reach the same solution. But what has it cost?

In the world which Niggle has had to leave, it appears to have cost everything. The Inspector of Houses had the last word, and he agreed with Parish. Niggle’s picture was of no value. He should have used the resources it represents to fix Parish’s house. ‘That is the law.’ Public opinion strongly agrees with him. The narrator had said early on that though the Tree was ‘curious. Quite unique in its way’, ‘I dare say it was not really a very good picture’, while Niggle, though also unique, was at the same time ‘a very ordinary and rather silly little man’. The last phrase is repeated without all the qualifications in the story’s penultimate scene, when Councillor Tompkins says ‘he was a silly little man’. He is contradicted by Atkins (all the characters in this scene, NB, have ‘Huggins’-names, not ‘Baggins’-names, see p. 8 above), but Atkins is ‘nobody of importance, just a schoolmaster’. It is Tompkins who gets Niggle’s ‘pleasant little house’ in the end. All Niggle’s canvases are used as patching, and though Atkins manages to preserve a fragment of one, and even to frame it and have it hung in the Town Museum, in the end both Museum and leaf are burned and Niggle and all his work ‘were entirely forgotten in his own country’. His earthly epitaph is (from Perkins), ‘poor little Niggle!…Never knew he painted’. This fate of oblivion must have been what Tolkien feared; in 1939, and 1944, it seemed all too likely. The story’s title, ‘Leaf by Niggle’, is ironically enough the same as the title of the fragmentary work first preserved in the Museum and then lost for ever. Tolkien on other occasions at about this time (see Sauron Defeated, pp. 303, 308) gloomily imagined his writings surviving only uncomprehended and unread. In 1944 it might well have seemed to Tolkien that the story ‘Leaf by Niggle’ would indeed (apart from The Hobbit) be all that would ever be left of thirty years of writing.

However, that is only half of the story. As at the climax of The Lord of the Rings (see pp. 210-11 above), ‘Leaf by Niggle’ offers what is this time a narrative bifurcation. The real world, the live world, dismisses and forgets Niggle: from that point of view, Niggle’s story is a tragedy. The other real world, the world after death, turns to ‘eucatastrophe’. The Two Voices discuss his case, and the Second Voice (Mercy, I would suggest, as opposed to Justice, two of the four Daughters of God), makes the statement for the defence. Niggle could paint; but he was humble; he did a good deal of his duty; he expected nothing for it, not even gratitude; in the end he sacrificed himself in something like full awareness of what he was doing. Tolkien might have hoped that the first four points at least would also apply to him. Niggle’s reward is to find his picture come true at the end of his journey, his ‘sub-creation’ accepted by the Creator, there in full detail and ‘finished’ but (exactly the opposite of what happens in the world he has left) not ‘finished with’, in the sense that there is still enormous scope for development. But for the development he needs, and gets, Parish, whose time in the Workhouse has clearly been spent in making him less practical, not more so. In the end Niggle is ready to turn his back even on the Tree and go on elsewhere, under the guidance of a man who ‘looked like a shepherd’ (with obvious Christian suggestion). The Great Tree and the country round it are left, however, in the heavenly country, as ‘a holiday’, ‘a refreshment’, and even an ‘introduction to the Mountains’ for others – which by a further irony, which Tolkien must have deeply appreciated, is what they have become, in their way, in our real world, through the publication of so much of his ‘picture’, finished and even unfinished, but by no means finished with. ‘Leaf by Niggle’ ends as a comedy, even a ‘divine comedy’, on more levels than one. But while it looks forward to ‘divine comedy’ it incorporates and springs from a sense of earthly tragedy: failure, anxiety, and frustration. Poems written and rewritten

These feelings are to some extent mirrored, even increasingly mirrored, in Tolkien’s thirty or so separately-published poems. Some are entirely comic, like the two poems on ‘Bimble Town’ (a British seaside resort), ‘Progress in Bimble Town’ and ‘The Dragon’s Visit’. Others are exercises in difficult metre, like ‘Errantry’ (its long development into ‘Bilbo’s Song at Rivendell’ is explained in The Treason of Isengard). Quite a few could be described as ‘Missing Link poems’, or ‘ancestor-poems’, poems which Tolkien wrote, like Macaulay’s Lays, to fill a gap in literary history. Examples include Tolkien’s 1923 ‘egg’ riddle in Anglo-Saxon, his two ‘nursery-rhyme’ poems from the same year (see pp. 25-26 above), and the two Old English ‘trapped mortal’ poems from Songs for the Philologists reprinted and translated in Appendix B to The Road to Middle-earth. These latter could again readily be seen as reconstructed ‘ancestors’ for much later works like Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’. Conversely, in 1923 Tolkien picked out a single line from Beowulf, iumonna gold galdre bewunden, ‘the gold of men of old, enmeshed in spell’, and constructed a whole poem with the line as title. The poem deals with the way that the spell of treasure betrays and corrupts its successive owners, elf, dwarf, dragon and man, a theme Tolkien returned to in The Hobbit and later, see pp. 48-9, 169-70 above. He rewrote and republished this poem, with the same title in 1937 and as ‘The Hoard’ in 1962 and 1970. Several of the best of his comic or light-hearted poems were picked out and reprinted in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil in 1962, while others remain unpublished. According to Hammond and Anderson’s Bibliography there were six ‘Bimble’ poems. The most extensive of Tolkien’s ‘Missing Link’ poems, also still unpublished, may well be ‘The New Lay of Sigurð’ (Sigurðarkviða hin nyja), said to have been written, entirely characteristically, to fill the gap in the hero Sigurd’s adventures caused by the loss of a number of pages from the one major surviving manuscript of the Elder Edda poems.

From very early on, however, Tolkien wrote and published a number of poems which are not so light-hearted, which indeed seem to be preoccupied with the themes of mortality and immortality. Some of them, but not all, are related to the developing ‘Silmarillion’. Thus the poem which he published as ‘The City of the Gods’ in 1923 is given a context within Tolkien’s mythical geography as ‘Kor’ in The Book of Lost Tales I); the same is true of ‘The Happy Mariners’ (1920, and again 1923, this time with an Old English title, ‘Tha Eadigan Sælidan’, later in The Book of Lost Tales II); of ‘The Lonely Isle’ (1924, but see Letters, p. 437); and ‘The Nameless Land’ (1927, but contextualized as ‘The Song of Ælfwine’ in The Lost Road). Nevertheless these poems, all rather like each other, say something even as first published, detached as they then were from the ‘Silmarillion’.

They are in the first place static: visions, or perhaps one should say observations, of a city, a country, an island. ‘The City of the Gods’, a sonnet, simply describes a stone city, without inhabitants, without noise of any kind, standing under hot afternoon sun. ‘The Lonely Isle’, two twelve-line stanzas plus a single-line coda, has in it fairies dancing and a bell pealing, but once again no narrative movement, not even vestigial story. ‘The Nameless Land’, sixty lines in the extraordinarily difficult Pearl-stanza form, starts off with the word ‘There’, and again describes a Paradisal landscape by the sea, inhabited only by dancers who cannot be human for there ‘no man may be’. ‘The Happy Mariners’ has slightly more movement in it, and begins ‘I know a window in a western tower’. Looking out of the window, the observer sees ‘fairy boats go by…through the shadows and the dangerous seas, / Past sunless lands to fairy leas’, these latter being no doubt the ‘nameless land’ where ‘no man may be’. But the observer in the tower cannot follow them; they are ‘happy’, he is not. ‘The Nameless Land’ ends with an image of longing, ‘The lights of longing flare and die’, as does ‘The Lonely Isle’, ‘I long for thee and thy fair citadel’, but the longing has no power: the last coda-line of ‘The Lonely Isle’ is ‘O lonely, sparkling isle, farewell’. Within the geography of the ‘Silmarillion’, all this can of course be fitted together, as indeed it is in ‘The Song of Ælfwine’ – Ælfwine is an Anglo-Saxon sailor who in one version reaches, in others has a vision of Tol Eressëa, the ‘nameless land’ now named. But as the poems stand, the impression they make is of an observer in this world haunted by visions of an ideal landscape which he cannot reach, a Paradise from which he is for ever barred. The observer is mortal, the land is for immortals.

In a second, later group of poems, Tolkien imagined a mortal getting closer to immortality. These poems, though, are sadder than the visions, and became even sadder as they were rewritten. The first of them, like ‘Leaf by Niggle’, was presumably sent in reply to a request, this time from the Sisters of the Sacred Heart Convent at Roehampton, and was published in their Chronicle in 1934. In thirteen eight-line stanzas it tells the story of a girl, Firiel, who goes out from her parents’ house at dawn and sees an elf-boat going by. The elves invite her to join them. She asks where are they going – ‘To Northern isles grey and frore’? No, they reply, they are going ‘to Elvenhome / beyond the last mountains’, to the bell, the tower and the sea-foam of Tolkien’s earlier visions; few, they say, receive this offer to leave the mortal world where ‘grass fades and leaves fall’. Firiel takes one step towards the boat, but then her heart fails her and the elves leave. She goes back in the house, ‘Under roof and dark door’, the dew and the vision fading. She is re-absorbed into the mundane world: housework, talk of ‘this and that’, but also breakfast. The poem’s last words are ‘please, pass the honey’. Tolkien rewrote this poem as the last in the collection The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, where it has become ‘The Last Ship’. Once again Firiel (as she is now) goes out, sees the elf-boat, receives the invitation, asks the question, is given the answer. This time, though, it is made clear that this is the last boat, there is room for only one more, this is ‘our last call’ (my emphasis). Fíriel stops this time not because ‘her heart misgave and shrank’ but because ‘deep in clay her feet sank’. She calls out to the elves, ‘I cannot come…I was born Earth’s daughter’. She goes back this time not only ‘under roof and dark door’ but also ‘under house-shadow’. And, most significantly, the two-stanza scene of busy chatter and cheerful breakfast has been removed. She no longer dresses in ‘green and white’ but plain ‘russet brown’, and goes simply ‘to her work’. All that is said of the morning is ‘Soon the sunlight faded’. The poem ends with a single stanza saying that the world is still there but there is no more passage out of it – a stanza which ends, like the one before it, with the word ‘faded’. In ‘The Last Ship’ the sense of loss, and of death, is very much stronger than in ‘Firiel’, and is presented as an inevitable loss. Fíriel is made of ‘clay’, like all children of Adam, she is ‘Earth’s daughter’, and this is the fate she has to accept – indeed her name, we are told in the 1962 mock-editorial ‘Preface’, simply means ‘mortal maiden’. Hers is an ‘anti-fairy story’, about the ‘Escape from Death’ rejected.

Tolkien rewrote another 1934 poem, ‘Looney’, in a very similar way in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, as ‘The Sea-Bell’. Both versions consider what happens to humans who do manage to reach Elvenhome, and who by old tradition (as in Keats’s ‘Belle Dame Sans Merci’) are never the same again. The rewriting is however in this case even more extensive – 60 lines in 1934 become 120 in 1962 – and the editorial ‘Preface’ adds further ominous suggestion. In ‘Looney’ the speaker who narrates the main portion of the poem (the ‘looney’ or lunatic of the title) is asked at the start, ‘Where have you been; what have you seen / Walking in rags down the street?’ In reply he says he comes from a land where he met no one. He got there by sitting in an empty boat, which took him unbidden ‘to another land’ – seemingly, the land of flowers and bells and unseen dancers of the ‘vision’ poems above. ‘Looney’, unlike Fíriel or the longing visionaries, has then actually reached the ‘nameless land’. But something in it goes wrong, with the appearance of a ‘dark cloud’; the spring vanishes, the leaves fall, the sea freezes. He gets back in the empty boat and comes home, to find that all the ‘Pearls and crystals’ he gathered in the strange country have become ‘pebbles’, the ‘flowers’ ‘withering leaves’. All he has left is a shell, in which he hears an echo, perhaps of music – the poem does not say. It is traditional, of course, for ‘fairy gold’ to turn to leaves, and for the people the elves reject to be unable to return to society, often because everyone they once knew is dead, see p. 89 above. The 1934 poem can be understood within this convention.

The 1962 poem, however, no longer has the query at the start, or the identification of the speaker as a ‘looney’, while in the ‘Preface’ to The Adventures of Tom Bombadil Tolkien, in his role as editor of a hobbit-manuscript, remarks that it is ‘certainly of hobbit origin’, is ‘the latest piece’ in the collection, and ‘belongs to the Fourth Age’, i.e. the age which begins after the War of the Ring is over. It is included in a collection of poems from the Third Age, though, ‘because a hand has scrawled at its head Frodos Dreme’. One wonders what is the effect of this last piece of Tolkienian invention. Is it not yet another ‘bifurcation’? At the end of The Lord of the Rings Bilbo and Frodo, unlike Ælfwine or Fíriel or any of the other visionaries, do leave Middle-earth and make the Great Escape to ‘white shores and beyond them a far green country’. Only very shortly before, though, Frodo has been quite sure that ‘I am wounded…it will never really heal’. As with the earthly and heavenly endings of ‘Leaf by Niggle’, or with Sam and Frodo lying down in Mordor to die, and being rescued in their sleep by the eagles, we are given in a way two endings, the ‘eucatastrophic’ one which is validated by the story, and a tragic one which seems equally if not more plausible: ‘It’s the way things are, Sam’. ‘The Sea-Bell’, or ‘Frodos Dreme’, gives the normal ending for those, humans or hobbits, who follow visions of immortality, not the exceptional one set aside for Ring-bearers. They hear the ‘sea-bell’ ringing, they get in the empty boat, they find themselves transported to the glimmering jewel-land with its unseen dancers and far-off music which haunted Tolkien’s imagination. As in ‘Looney’, something goes wrong. But in ‘The Sea-Bell’ it seems to come as a punishment for hubris. The speaker makes himself a mantle, a wand, a flag and a crown, and names himself ‘king of this land’, calling on the inhabitants to show themselves. Immediately the cloud comes, the country is disenchanted, becomes a land of beetles, spiders and puffballs, the speaker realizes he is old, ‘years were heavy upon my back’. The boat brings him back, he has nothing, and even the shell is now ‘silent and dead’, without even an echo.

Never will my ear that bell hear, never my feet that shore tread.

Not only is the speaker exiled; his vision has gone too. In ‘The Sea-Bell’ one may see Tolkien turning his back on the very notion of the Great Escape, and on images which had been with him for close on fifty years. The Lost Road

The most persistent of those images, as has been shown above, is that of the land far across the sea, Westernesse, the Blessed Land, the Earthly Paradise, the Land of the Undying. This was not just Tolkien’s image, for hints of such a belief are scattered widely across North-European literature. King Arthur is taken away across the sea to be healed of his wounds and to return one day from Avalon; in Tolkien, Avallónë is a place on the Lonely Isle, Tol Eressea. The legend of the Drowning of Atlantis was known already to Plato; Atalantë is the Quenya or Elf-latin word for ‘the Drowning of Númenor’. There are versions in several languages of the story of ‘the Navigation of Saint Brendan’, which Tolkien was to rework as ‘Imram’, the most successful of his later ‘poems of (im)mortality’ (see pp. 288-9 below). Less known than any of the above, and still unexplained, there is the mysterious opening of Beowulf, which tells how a child is sent across the sea to become King Sceaf, or King Sheave, of the Danes, and is eventually sent back in a boat after his death to ‘those who sent him’ (not, note, ‘Him who sent him’, though the Beowulf-poet was certainly a Christian). The belief in a Land of the Dead, or of future life, across the ocean must be the reason, Tolkien argued, for the Anglo-Scandinavian custom of burying kings and nobles in their ships, or under ovals of standing stones arranged to look like ships. It is hard, indeed, to think of a better explanation.

As so often, Tolkien adapted all these fragmentary suggestions for his own uses, and tried at least twice, in his centrally creative years, to make them into an extended and publishable story. These attempts survive as ‘The Lost Road’, written probably in 1936 and published in 1987 under the same title; and ‘The Notion Club Papers’, written probably in 1944 and appearing in 1992 as part of the volume Sauron Defeated. In framing both of these, however, Tolkien faced an obvious problem: the discovery of America. Saint Brendan or medieval Arthurians might have been able to believe in a supernatural land across the ocean to the West, but this is no longer credible. The problem was solved, in Tolkien’s developed if never quite perfected mythology, by the idea of ‘the Lost Straight Road’ – a good further example, incidentally, of the use of myth to mediate between incompatible beliefs (see p. 179 above). According to Tolkien, Aman, the land of the Valar, was cut off twice from Middle-earth. The first time comes after the defection of the Noldor and the return of Fëanor and his followers to Middle-earth. After this the Valar fill the seas between Aman and Middle-earth ‘with shadows and bewilderment’. There is no physical separation but just the same, ‘the Blessed Realm was shut’ (The Silmarillion, chapter 11). The way is opened again by Eärendil, piloted by the Silmaril, and the human allies of the Valar are rewarded not only with the new land of Númenor, raised from the ocean, but with new sight of the coasts of the Undying Land. In the end, though, corrupted by Sauron, and by resentment and fear of death, the king of Númenor sails to invade Aman with an armada, and to gain immortality by force. The Valar, so to speak the archangels of Earth, lay down their government of Arda and call upon the One, Ilúvatar, God the Creator. And he ‘changed the fashion of the world’. Númenor and its armada are drowned; Aman and Eressëa are removed for ever from the world, ‘into the realm of hidden things’; ‘new lands and new seas’ are made in their place – this must be the creation of America; and (though Tolkien does not say this quite openly) the world is for the first time made round. When at the end of the ‘Akallabêth’ section in The Silmarillion the descendants of the surviving Númenóreans put to sea again to look for the land in the West which they know was there, they find only lands ‘subject to death’, and those who press on furthest find themselves in the end back where they started, so that they say ‘all roads are now bent’. Their loremasters continue to insist, though, that there must still be a Straight Road, for those permitted to find it, which leads off the Earth and through the atmosphere and through space, ‘as it were a mighty bridge invisible’, leading to the Lonely Isle and even beyond to Valinor. It must be this road which is taken by Frodo and company at the end of The Lord of the Rings; this road which Fíriel is invited to take, and (perhaps) which ‘Looney’ has taken. There may be others, Tolkien suggests, who ‘by some grace or fate or favour of the Valar’ find the hidden gateway. As the hobbits sing, probably without understanding what the words mean:

Still round the corner there may wait

A new road or a secret gate…

The ‘problem of America’ continued to bother Tolkien into old age. He remained dissatisfied with the solution given above, wondering if such a myth was still acceptable in a scientific age, see Morgoth’s Ring pp. 369-83, and Hammond’s article in Tolkien’s ‘Legendarium’. His doubts might have been assuaged if he had remembered that there was distinguished precedent for ambiguity, in Paradise Lost X 668-91, where Milton carefully wrote in a passage about the Earth’s tilt allowing his readers to believe either a traditional/mythical or a modern/scientific explanation. A more pressing problem – it was the one Tolkien continually faced – was that of converting image into story. John Rateliff has suggested, in another article in Tolkien’s ‘Legendarium’, that the famous decision of C.S. Lewis and Tolkien (recorded most clearly in Letters p. 378) to write a story each, the one about space-travel, the other about time-travel, was triggered by Lewis’s reading of Charles Williams and realization that it was possible to write such a thing as a ‘philosophical thriller’. Lewis then produced Out of the Silent Planet (1938), with the two further volumes of the ‘Space trilogy’ to follow, the third of them, That Hideous Strength (1945) making evident if mis-spelled cross-reference to Tolkien. Tolkien, however, found himself in a blind alley.

It is fairly clear what he meant to do in ‘The Lost Road’. As with word-sets like ‘dwarf’ -dvergr-Zwerg (see p. xiv above), he was struck by the consistency and continuity of names in Germanic tradition, and felt it must mean something. He knew that the names Alboin and Audoin, found in a famous story in Peter the Deacon’s History of the Lombards, were just different spellings of Old English Ælfwine and Eadwine, or indeed modern Alwyn, Edwin. He knew also that they meant respectively ‘elf-friend’ and ‘bliss-friend’, while there was a third name in Old English, Oswine, which meant ‘god-friend’, or at least ‘friend of the pagan gods’, the osas, the Old Norse Æsir. Names like Oswald and Oswine had been borne, however, by Christians and indeed by saints, and Tolkien was prepared, rather daringly, to identify the osas/Æsir not with demons, but with the demi-gods or archangels or Valar of his own mythology. His idea was to do as he had done with the opening chapters of The Hobbit, and put traditional story into a new and this time a contemporary, rather than just an anachronistic context. The names would continually recur. There would be a story about three modern English characters, named rather confusingly Oswin, Alboin and Audoin; another one about an Anglo-Saxon called Ælfwine, which would draw in the legend of ‘King Sheave’ from Beowulf, one about the famous Lombard pair (this would have been hard to manage, given its ferocity and triumphal skull-goblet); and one set in Númenor before its fall, where the names would have become Valendil, Elendil, Herendil, again respectively ‘friend of the Valar, elf-friend, bliss-friend’. The main point of the story as a whole, presumably, would have been the recurrence of the theme of loyalty to an ideal in different settings. The difficulty was that the same story repeated, whatever the settings, was bound to be monotonous. Mr Rateliff argues that Tolkien was getting there, and that the story might have succeeded as a ‘philosophical thriller’ if Tolkien’s attention and his energies had not been drawn off by the many problems connected with getting The Hobbit into print, in 1937, but the contrast with Lewis’s companion-piece is not encouraging. Five thousand words into Out of the Silent Planet, its hero has been kidnapped and is on a space-ship heading for Mars on a mission of conquest. Five thousand words into ‘The Lost Road’ and the characters are still considering the history of languages, the story as yet invisible.

Amazingly, however, Tolkien tried again, and at a much less propitious time. In 1944 Tolkien was two-thirds done with The Lord of the Rings and might have been expected to be pressing on to its conclusion – he had, after all, a publisher ready, waiting, and keenly supportive. Instead he spent a very considerable amount of time and effort, which he concealed perhaps slightly guiltily from Stanley Unwin (see Sauron Defeated, p. 145) on a second ‘Lost Road’ effort, ‘The Notion Club Papers’. This moves even more slowly than ‘The Lost Road’, with an assortment of characters loosely based on the Inklings discussing dreams, languages, the works of C.S. Lewis, and time-travel. The characters include at least two Tolkien self-images in Ramer (the name means, I think, ‘Looney’, see once again Sauron Defeated, p. 150) and Rashbold (a translation of ‘Tolkien’). Several of the same elements as in ‘The Lost Road’ recur, especially the continuity of names – one character is Alwin Arundel Lowdham, i.e. Ælfwine Éarendel. Visions of Númenor and of Anglo-Saxon England appear, along with a poetic version of ‘King Sheave’, and this time ‘The Navigation of Saint Brendan’ is brought in, as a poem which was to be published in 1955 as ‘Imram’. At the centre of both versions lies the sentence (in Old or Proto-Germanic, a non-existent or asterisk-language), Westra lage wegas rehtas, nu isti sa wraithas, ‘the Straight Road lay west, now it is bent’: one might note the ominous adjective wraithas, ‘bent’. Tolkien also repeatedly quoted some lines from the genuine Old English poem ‘The Seafarer’ about the longing to go to sea, which he expanded with lines of his own invention, so as to convert the sea-longing into longing to cross the sea and reach the wlitescéne land,/’eardge-ard celfa and ésa bliss, ‘[a land lovely to look on], the dwelling place of the Elves and the bliss of the Gods’. The last line neatly brings together Tolkien’s three ruling name-elements, Ælf-, Os-, Ead-, ‘elf-, god-, bliss’.

There are, one may concede, some moments of pathos in Tolkien’s two ‘lost road’ inventions. When in the earlier of them Alboin reads to his father Oswin the lines from ‘The Seafarer’ which say, no one knows ‘what longing is his whom old age cutteth off from return (eftsíth)’, his father looks at him and says the old know perfectly well that they cannot return, and that while they are cut off from eftsíth, they are not cut off from -he uses the word forthsíth, going away, going forth, but he means death (The Lost Road, p. 44). That is the journey he has to take, like Niggle – or like Fíriel, a name which re-appears without explanation in Lost Road. In ‘The Notion Club Papers’ Tolkien built in a suggestion that the Oswin-equivalent had found the Straight Road in his boat Éarendel (unless it hit a mine), but this is a withdrawal (Sauron Defeated, p. 234). The two ‘lost road’ stories which Tolkien tried so hard to write, in 1936 and 1944, in tandem with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, centre like ‘Firiel’ and ‘Looney’ on the fear and the acceptance of mortality, the vision and the rejection of the Earthly Paradise. But the theme could not be integrated into adventure. Its most finished and perfect expression is the 1955 poem ‘Imram’ (reprinted in Sauron Defeated) in whose 132 lines Saint Brendan tells a younger man of his journeys: he saw a mountain (the remains of Númenor), an island and a Tree (perhaps Tol Eressëa), and a Star ‘where the round world plunges steeply down / but on the old road goes’ (the Silmaril at the end of the Lost Straight Road). But he does not take the Straight Road, the Star is now only ‘In my mind’, and even Saint Brendan accepts the common fate:

Saint Brendan had come to his life’s end under a rain-clad sky,

journeying whence no ship returns; and his bones in Ireland lie. Popular lays, a lai, and an anti-lay

There is no hint of any of the themes above in Farmer Giles of Ham, Tolkien’s only entirely successful published narrative outside the hobbit-sequence. It seems to have been conceived at about the same time as The Hobbit, when the Tolkien children were still small, and to have reached its eventual published shape by 1938 (see Bibliography, pp. 73-6). I have remarked above (p. 58) on its root in the interpretation of place-names. I have also remarked elsewhere (in The Road to Middle-earth) on its potential as an allegory, and sketched out such a reading. I freely concede, however, that this is probably furor allegoricus, or alle-gorist’s mania: Farmer Giles of Ham makes too much sense as a narrative in its own right to need an allegorical reading, and is furthermore entirely light-hearted. Some of its cheerfulness may come from the fact that it is set neither in real history nor in the world of Tolkien’s mythology, but in the entirely spurious history, long accepted but long since disproved, of the ‘Brutus books’ of Sir Gawain, of King Lear, and indeed of the ‘Old King Cole’ of nursery-rhyme, all of which are referred to. It is very much in a ‘Never-Never Land’, and Tolkien felt no urge to take any of it seriously – so that we have in it the overpowering figure of Farmer Giles (a kind of anti-Beowulf, with his extremely amateurish preparations for fighting the dragon), several of the best human-dragon conversations in literature to set against Bilbo and Smaug, and a whole cast of comic minor characters, from Garm the dog to Augustus Bonifacius Ambrosius Aurelianus Antoninus, the proud tyrant of the Little Kingdom, not to mention the miller, the giant, Sunny Sam the blacksmith, the grey mare and the parson-grammarian.

Yet entirely in line with the light-heartedness, the story makes a point, and a rather aggressive one. In the mock-editorial ‘Foreword’, a device Tolkien liked, we are told that the story is just like the histories erected on Macaulay’s hypothesized Lays, i.e. not contemporary with the events it records, ‘evidently a late compilation’, and ‘derived not from sober annals, but from the popular lays to which its author frequently refers’. As he does: popular lays are mentioned at least five times in the story. After his accidental victory over the giant Giles finds himself ‘the Hero of the Countryside’, and comes home from market ‘singing old heroic songs’. These may well be the same as the ‘popular romances’ which give Farmer Giles’s sword its name Tailbiter; and it is certainly the ‘tales about Bellomarius’ the dragon-slayer which give Giles the heart to face the dragon. The knights are singing a ‘lay’ – an old one, from before the tournament-era they live in – when the dragon surprises them; they should obviously have paid more attention to it. And after Giles’s defiance of the king, ‘it was impossible to suppress all the lays which celebrated his deeds’, and indeed it is this which prevents the king from raising an army. All these songs and lays and romances, of course, have disappeared before the time of the mock-editor’s ‘Foreword’, as is usually the case with lays of this type. But they are associated in the story with Giles; with the ‘vulgar tongue’; with ‘plain heavy swords’ like Tailbiter, made to do their job; with being out of fashion. By contrast the king’s court is associated with magniloquence, book-Latin, style at the expense of substance (the Mock Dragon’s Tail made by the confectioner), and a reluctance to take old tales seriously. There is no doubt about which of these two sides wins, and one could say that the conflict between them is more serious than the one between Giles and Chrysophylax, for in the end the two latter form an alliance.

One could also say that the situation at the centre of Farmer Giles of Ham is rather similar to the situation in Laketown when Bilbo arrives there in chapter 10 of The Hobbit. The ruling class or official Establishment has no time for ‘old heroic songs’ or the creatures mentioned in them, being entirely concerned with money; the king’s knights regard dragons as mythical (and of course vice-versa). There are also those who do remember old tradition, but have got entirely the wrong idea from it; they are the people in The Hobbit who expect the river to start running gold immediately, or the people in Ham who crowd round Giles calling him ‘Hero of the Countryside’ and praising ‘The Glory of the Yeomanry, Backbone of the Country’ (etc.). In between are figures like Giles and Brand, at once traditional and practical. All these had their counterparts in the twentieth society Tolkien lived in, and it is clear that he was mocking at once the ‘Correct and sober taste’ of his literary contemporaries (see Essays, p. 16), and something like the taste for easy fantasy which has become more widespread since his time.

However, the only person in the story who gets things right nearly all the time, besides Giles (and the grey mare), is the parson of Ham. He is treated with a certain comedy, especially in his first recorded conversation with Giles. He insists on seeing the sword presented by the king (one may wonder why? What makes him suspect something?). He looks carefully at the letters on scabbard and blade, but ‘could not make head or tail of them’. He covers up with bluff, of a highly professional kind – ‘The characters are archaic and the language barbaric’. Nevertheless, he gets the answer right in the end: the sword is Caudimordax, or Tailbiter. After Giles’s first victory over Chrysophylax, the parson gets things wrong in his rather pompous speech setting the terms for Chrysophylax’s compensation-payments. Or does he? The dragon has no intention of keeping the many oaths he swears, and though this may have been:

beyond the comprehension of the simple, at the least the parson with his booklearning might have guessed it. Maybe he did. He was a grammarian, and could doubtless see further into the future than others.

This does not make sense in modern terms, in which grammar has nothing to do with foresight. But it does in medieval terms, in which grammar was the same as ‘glamour’ (the ability to change one’s shape and deceive observers) and as ‘grammarye’ (magic). The parson is at any rate the first to realize the dragon is not coming back; and, critically, he is the one who tells Giles to take some stout rope with him, ‘for you may need it, unless my fore-sight deceives me’. It does not, the rope enabling Giles to bring back both dragon and treasure, so that the parson deserves his eventual bishopric and handsome rewards. In all this one might see a for once self-flattering image of Tolkien’s own trade: runology paying off, linguistic skills abetting plain horse sense – with, of course, the business-like skills of a self-consciously modern world gratifyingly and correspondingly humiliated.

Farmer Giles of Ham, unlike ‘Leaf by Niggle’ and the poems discussed above, shows Tolkien quite at ease with himself. In this it remains the exception in his minor works. An anxiety which may have weighed with him was his own increasingly detailed and powerful work of’mediation’ (see pp. 179-82 above) between the Christian world of, for instance, the parson-grammarian, and the pagan traditions of older mythology (which are not allowed into Farmer Giles at all). One could put an orthodox case against him like this. Tolkien was presenting his Valar as benevolent archangels subject to the One, the Creator, but he showed a certain tendency towards identifying them with the pagan deities of his ancestors – Tulkas, for instance, Tolkien’s warlike Vala, is very like Snorri’s image of the god Tyr, and his name could easily be seen as a Proto-Germanic word for ‘warrior’, ^*tulkaz. Tolkien was by no means the first Christian philologist to veer in this direction, and a case could be made out in his defence. C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity suggestion about the ‘good dreams’ of heathen religions has already been mentioned; and Tolkien seems to accept something like this through the ‘splintered light’ thesis embedded in his poem ‘Mythopoeia’, quoted in Carpenter’s Biography. One could make out the case, but it was by no means the view of the Catholic Church, and runs directly contrary to the view of Alcuin (see p. 181 above). Tolkien’s famous and much-quoted assertion, to a Jesuit friend, that ‘The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work’ has an air of defensiveness about it. How far could a believing Christian go in dealings with pre- or non-Christians? This question animates both the long poem ‘The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun’ (published 1947) and the verse dialogue ‘The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son’ (published 1953).

The word ‘lay’ in the title of ‘Aotrou and Itroun’ means something different from all previous uses in this book. There are in Old French a number of poems called lais, usually ‘Breton lais’, pre-eminently the twelve lais of Marie de France. Some eight Middle English poems also call themselves ‘Breton lays’ in imitation. Tolkien’s ‘Aotrou and Itroun’ closely follows the form and matter of these, using ‘Britain/Brittany’ and ‘Briton/Breton’ interchangeably. It is derived (as Jessica Yates has shown in her essay of 1993) from a late Breton ballad about a ‘Corrigan’, a witch, or fairy, or shape-shifter with malevolent powers. What seems original to Tolkien is the poem’s stern morality. In his version, the story begins with a noble Breton couple, Aotrou and Itroun, who remain childless. Instead of bearing their fate humbly, Aotrou, the lord, calls on the Corrigan for a fertility potion, not agreeing the fee. The potion works, Itroun bears twins, but the Corrigan’s fee (she has now turned from hag to beauty) is a demand for Aotrou’s love. He refuses, is cursed, and dies, as does Itroun, of grief. The refusal, the curse, and the death of Aotrou are there in the Breton ballad; but in Tolkien alone the death is deserved, or at least prompted by Aotrou’s attempt to sway Providence by supernatural forces. Tolkien’s moral is clear and unequivocal. Aotrou’s sin lay not in submitting to the Corrigan – he defied her as successfully as Sir Gawain warded off the Green Knight’s lady, and with a firm profession of Christian faith – it lay in having any dealings with her at all. The poem ends:

God keep us all in hope and prayer

from evil rede and from despair,

by waters blest of Christendom

to dwell…

This complete rejection of supernatural allure goes several stages beyond the ambiguity of poems like ‘Looney’.

The 1953 essay-cum-poem on ‘The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son’ is harder to summarize, but briefly again, it consists of three sections, a short foreword which sets the historical scene – a battle the English fought and lost against Viking raiders in Essex in August 991, commemorated in the Old English poem The Battle of Maldon – and explaining what follows; ‘The Homecoming’ itself, a dialogue in alliterative verse between two characters, Torhthelm and Tídwald, come to retrieve the headless body of their master Beorhtnoth from the battlefield, seen as a coda to The Battle of Maldon; and a short section on ‘Ofermod’, which provides an academic critique of the Old English poem. This latter has been highly influential. Its six pages firmly reject the view of Maldon put forward by previous scholars, including Tolkien’s old colleague and collaborator E.V. Gordon, who had edited the poem in 1938, and W.P. Ker, who had called it ‘the only purely heroic poem extant in Old English’, and the best example of a native ‘heroic lay’ that we have. Tolkien argued that Gordon, Ker, and the rest, were completely wrong. The poem is not a celebration of the heroic spirit but a deep critique of it and of the rash and irresponsible attitudes it created. It was the alderman Beorhtnoth’s ofermod (Tolkien translates ‘overmastering pride’) in giving the pagan Vikings a sporting chance which led to his own death and the deaths of his men. He had no right to make such a gesture, and the poem should be read as making this point.

Tolkien’s opinion seems to be challenged in the original Old English poem, if not outright denied, by the famous speech of the old retainer Beorhtwold, who says as he refuses to retreat (Tolkien’s translation again):

‘Heart shall be bolder, harder be purpose,

more proud the spirit as our power lessens!’

Beorhtwold at least offers no criticism of his leader. Tolkien deals with this problem in the verse-dialogue–and this is entirely personal, quite without scholarly warrant–by taking the lines away from their context on the battlefield, putting them into a dream, and adding to them (and this is not translation but original composition):

‘Mind shall not falter nor mood waver,

though doom shall come and dark conquer’

(my emphasis).

The lines have become clearly pagan, indeed Manichaean, and the older and more sensible speaker in the dialogue, Tidwald, immediately identifies them as such: ‘your words were queer…It sounded fey and fell-hearted / and heathenish, too: I don’t hold with that’. Tolkien has a thumb firmly in the balance here, even more than he does elsewhere in the dialogue, though this is one-sided enough. Torhthelm (the name means ‘Shining Helmet’) is a young fool whose mind has been addled by the heroic lays he repeatedly mentions, while Tídwald (‘Time-Rule, Time-Ruler’) is a wise veteran who understands what the lays really mean: ‘you can hear the tears though the harp’s twanging’. As with ‘Aotrou and Itroun’, the point is made very evident. There should be no compromise. Christian men, even Christian warriors, should not be seduced by the ‘theory of courage’ which Tolkien had himself praised seventeen years before (see Essays p. 20), or by ‘the doctrine of uttermost endurance in the service of indomitable will’, as expressed by Beorhtwold. This was exactly the ‘Ragnarok spirit’ which had led to and been painfully crushed in World War II. Heroic lays, then, were entirely misleading–or at least, needed very careful revision amounting to rewriting to make them safe.

‘Aotrou and Itroun’ was published in 1947, Farmer Giles of Ham in 1949, ‘Beorhtnoth’ in 1953. We know, however, that Farmer Giles was in existence in substantially its present form in 1938, while a fragment of an early version of ‘Beorhtnoth’ survives from even earlier (see, respectively, Bibliography pp. 73-4 and The Treason of Isengard pp. 106-7). It is tempting to see ‘Aotrou’ and ‘Beorthnoth’, the lai and the anti-lay, as signs not exactly of the darkening of Tolkien’s imagination (it had always had its dark side, though this increases significantly between ‘Firiel’, say, and ‘The Last Ship’): rather, of a certain self-doubt. Was it acceptable to rewrite myths? How would this be seen by the Two Voices in the Workhouse? Autobiographical allegory: 2

Smith of Wootton Major

The genesis of Smith of Wootton Major is more easily traced than that of any of Tolkien’s other fictions. In 1964 Tolkien was asked to write a Preface to a new edition of The Golden Key, a work by the nineteenth-century writer of fantasy and fairy-story, George MacDonald (a major figure in C.S. Lewis’s 1946 allegory of death and judgement, The Great Divorce). He agreed, and started work in January 1965–when he was 73–intending at this stage to tell a story of a cook and a cake by way of explaining the meaning of the word ‘fairy’, or ‘Faerie’. But the story grew and the Preface was abandoned, the story being published eventually in 1967 as Smith of Wootton Major.

In my view this last of Tolkien’s completed fictions demands to be read in very much the same way, if with more difficulty, as ‘Leaf by Niggle’, as what I have called an ‘autobiographical allegory’. The view has been strongly resisted, for instance by David Doughan, in an article of 1991, and by Verlyn Flieger, who gives a long account of Smith of Wootton Major in her 1997 book A Question of Time. Flieger has further had the advantage of reading an unpublished essay on the story by Tolkien himself, in which he glosses the meaning of his own work; though Flieger reports that in the essay Tolkien appears to be ‘conducting a running argument with himself on the question of whether the story is or is not an allegory’, and veering from plain statement that it is not to reluctant concession that some of it evidently is. In particular, Tolkien states that ‘The great Hall is evidently an “allegory” of the village church’, while ‘the Master Cook…is plainly the Parson and the priesthood’. Nevertheless, one remark which Doughan, Flieger and Tolkien himself all cite with great approval is Roger Lancelyn Green’s comment in a review of the story that it should not be allegorized, for ‘To seek for the meaning is to cut open the ball in search of its bounce’.

Green’s comment is of course itself a short allegory, of exactly the kind which Tolkien himself deployed tactically in his Beowulf lecture, i.e. a reductio ad absurdum. Cutting open a tennis-ball to look for the bounce is evidently absurd, so cutting open a story must be the same. If, that is, a story is like a tennis-ball. I would suggest that the analogy is mistaken. An allegorical story (‘Leaf by Niggle’, say) is much more like a crossword-puzzle. In both cases, solutions which are too easy are no fun. In both cases, however, it helps to have a few easier solutions to start with (like realizing the ‘journey’ Niggle has to take is death). The reader then knows that the harder solutions you go on to look for must not be incompatible with the more obvious ones; and the more correct solutions that are filled in, the narrower becomes the range of possibilities for what is left. The strong point of my analogy is that the attraction of both allegories and crossword-puzzles is an intellectual one–the reader of an allegory is actively engaged, not being passively led. The weak point is that solving a puzzle gives only a fleeting feeling of satisfaction; but solving an allegory gives in addition a new awareness which entirely reshapes one’s understanding of the surface narrative. Furthermore, at the more advanced stages of reading an allegory, it is not essential to come up with the one single correct solution (which, again unlike crossword-puzzles, may never have existed). A suggestive or a provocative one will do. The story continues to make sense, or in the terms of Green’s allegory to ‘bounce’, even after it has been ‘cut into’. Indeed it bounces better, it makes more sense. Only the laziest of readers make no effort at all to respond to the clues given by authors of allegory.

The main clue by which one detects the presence of allegory is always something strange or inadequate in the surface narrative, such as the unexplained nature of Niggle’s certain but unmotivated journey. Situations like that do not arise in real life; so, this is not quite ‘real life’. This seems to me to be the case with Smith. Wootton Major is a perfectly plausible name for an English village, but the village itself is strange. It is centred on a Great Hall, ‘built of good stone and good oak’ but ‘no longer painted or gilded as it had been once upon a time’. Furthermore the village seems to centre on cooking, on the office of Master Cook, and on institutionalized feasts, such as the Twenty-four Feast, held only every twenty-fourth year, for which the Master Cook must bake a Great Cake. None of this has any resemblance to any English custom one can recognize. The strangeness provokes one to ask whether it all means something else; and Tolkien supplied the answer (wrote in a guide solution, so to speak) with his remark that Hall and Cook were allegories of church and parson. In which case, one has to remark, Wootton Major is in a fairly degraded state, the spiritual functions of the Church (as Tolkien also commented) ‘steadily decaying…into mere eating and drinking–the last trace of anything “other” being left in the children’.

Not that there is more than a trace left in the children. The most spiritually degraded figure in the story is the second in the succession of (four) Master Cooks which it contains, the stop-gap Nokes. Nokes is not much of a Cook, is furthermore sly, derivative, and malicious, but most damning of all, and strongly insisted on, he has very little idea of fantasy or of Faerie. It might be better if he had none (the Fairy Queen tolerantly disagrees), but unfortunately he does still have a memory of the concepts. He associates fantasy with childishness; accordingly creates a childish image of it in his sugar-icing Great Cake, which will be ‘pretty and fairy-like’ and have a ‘Fairy Queen’ doll in the middle of it; and shows it to the children, who then respond exactly on cue (a few of them), clapping their hands and crying, ‘Isn’t it pretty and fairylike!’ Nokes here surely represents many of the things which Tolkien most disliked, and which he presented in different ways from the Master of Laketown in The Hobbit to the ‘misologists’ of his ‘Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford’, those ‘professional persons’ who ‘suppose their [own] dullness and ignorance to be a human norm, the measure of what is good’ (see p. xvi above). The last clause describes Nokes very accurately. He has only a weak, childish, pink-icing notion of fantasy himself, but assumes that that is all there can ever be; and since he is well aware of the feebleness of his own imagination, he assumes all images of the fantastic, of Faerie, must be feeble too. One has to say that this seems to be the problem with many of Tolkien’s professional critics.

In Wootton Major, then, spirituality has dwindled down to materialism, and authority-figures are liable to lead children in exactly the wrong direction, and against their natural inclination. What forces are operating against this? The major ones are Smith himself, Alf Prentice, and the ‘fay-star’ which passes from person to person. The fay-star is the story’s central symbol. Smith is present as a nine-year-old at the story’s first Twenty-four Feast, when he swallows the star without knowing it–it had been put in the cake by Nokes, with the agreement of Alf Prentice, though Nokes has no idea of what it may do, and Alf does. For most of his life this star marks Smith out as different from his fellow-villagers, and acts as his passport into Faery; it enables him to find the entrance unknown to others. However, unlike Looney or Firiel or anyone else in Tolkien’s works, Smith acquires the power to go into Faery and return freely, while when he does return he is not crazy and unsocial–like Looney or the hobbits we hear of taken by the ‘wandering-madness’–but a particularly valuable and admired member of the village community. He makes things that are ‘plain and useful’, but others ‘for delight’. He seems to have reached in life the balance which characters like Niggle and Parish could only achieve jointly, and then only after death. The star seems, then, to represent something like Tolkien’s own impulse towards fantasy, the quality of vision; while Smith represents the ideal response to it, using it as an enrichment of normal life rather than a distraction. In this view the story begins to look like another ‘mediation’, this time a successful one, between fantasy and reality.

Yet Smith’s situation is not ideal. There is a strong stress in the story on succession and inheritance. The star came in the first place, we learn, from Smith’s maternal grandfather Rider, once the Master Cook, also a visitor to Faery, but someone who in the end leaves and does not come back–someone who makes the Great Escape of Tolkien’s imagination. Smith inherits the star from him, but he does not inherit Rider’s position. Also, unlike his grandfather, when he has to return the star he loses his passport into Faerie and any chance he had of making the Escape: to use Oswin Errol’s terms, he is still condemned to forthsith, but knows there can be no eftsíth. To make the blow harder to bear–Tolkien uses the phrase ‘a great weariness and bereavement’–Smith knows the star will be passed on (indeed he decides that it shall be passed on) not to his own blood, though he has a son, Ned, to whom he is deeply attached, but to the great-grandson of the stupid and hostile Nokes. The one succession, of Master Cooks, entirely passes Smith by: it runs Rider–Nokes–Alf Prentice–Harper. The other succession, of owners of the star, includes him only temporarily: it runs Rider–Smith–Nokes’s Tim. Smith’s own bloodline, Smith–Nan–Ned, is passed over both for authority and for vision. Smith lives a good life, but it ends in multiple disappointment. He can never return to Faery; the star is passed on; he cannot give it to Ned. It is true that there is a coda to the story, in which Alf Prentice reveals himself as the King of Faery and squashes Nokes’s pretensions in satisfying style, rather like Farmer Giles declaring independence from Augustus Bonifacius; true also that Smith ends content with the new Cook, Harper, the Hall restored to its former glory, and his wife’s nephew inheriting the fay-star. But even then Nokes has the last word.

One explanation for this mixture of success and failure, happiness and bereavement, may be that we are looking once more at one of Tolkien’s narrative ‘bifurcations’, with elements of his own life projected into both Smith and Alf Prentice. Smith is very different from Niggle in his all-round real-world competence, his continuous making of useful things–though one might remember that Tolkien always insisted that he too had spent his life doing useful things (teaching, supervising, examining) for other people, and that the activity had been fostered, not as many people said ‘neglected’, as a result of his excursions into fantasy. It is easy to see Smith as a Tolkien-figure. And he is very like Niggle, after all, in his dominating visions of a world elsewhere. Alf Prentice provides an authority and a ratification which is quite absent from ‘Leaf by Niggle’. His appearance on Smith’s side (and very much against Nokes) is rather as if, in Tolkien’s earlier allegory, some figure had appeared in Niggle’s world to reprove Councillor Tompkins thunderously and have Niggle’s pictures displayed with suitable respect. Furthermore, if one remembers the Cook/parson equation made by Tolkien himself, the revelation that a Cook can also come from Faery and entirely approve of fay-stars very much supports Tolkien’s deep belief (or desire to believe) that his gift for fantasy in no way compromised his religion. Not only are fantasy and reality harmonized in Smith, one might conclude: so also are fantasy and faith.

There is one further point to be made about Smith before concluding. Its structure is clear, if unusual. After a few pages in which Wootton Major and its customs are introduced, the first extensive scene is the one in which Smith receives the star, at the first Twenty-four Feast. The next extensive scene in which main characters converse is two Feasts later, forty-eight years, when Alf is getting ready to bake his second Great Cake and wants the star back to put in it. Smith’s life has gone by in between. And most of the space in between deals with his visions of Faery: the elf-warriors returning from their ships, the King’s Tree rising into the sky, the Wind of the World which strips the weeping birch of its leaves, the dance where he receives the Living Flower, finally the scene where he recognizes the Queen of Faery and is returned to ‘bereavement’. It is very hard to say what these visions mean, if anything; they may just be meant as examples, like the stages of St Brendan’s ‘Imram’. The birch, however, certainly had particular and personal symbolic meaning for Tolkien. It stood for philology. It stood for the ‘B-scheme’ of education which he introduced to Leeds, and tried to introduce to Oxford (‘B’ is for beorc, ‘birch’, in the Old English runic alphabet). He wrote a poem in Gothic in praise of the birch in Songs for the Philologists, and another poem in that collection praises the birch and the ‘B-scheme’ together–the last ‘B-scheme’ graduates took their BAs in 1983. In that poem the derided opponent of the ‘B-scheme’ is the modern-literature-only ‘A-scheme’, represented by the oak (for in Old English ‘A’ is for ác); and Nokes’s name is really Okes, a modern mispronunciation of the common place-name æt pæm ácum, later ‘Atte(n) okes’. But if one makes this admittedly obscure and personal connection, then the naked and weeping birch in Faery to which Smith offers to ‘make amends’, only to be told ‘Go away and never return’, becomes ominous. It is as if Tolkien still, in some way, felt guilty about stripping philology for his own purposes–in Niggle’s terms, converting the potato-patch into a picture-shed.

Whatever one’s detailed reading of the story, it is in general clear that Smith of Wootton Major is another ‘Valedictory Address’, or ‘Farewell to Arms’, in which Tolkien lays aside his star; defends the real-world utility of fantasy; insists that fantasy and faith are in harmony as visions of a higher world; hopes for a revival of both in a future in which the Nokeses of the world (the materialists, the misologists) will have less power; and possibly, though this is my last and most tentative suggestion, expresses a veiled regret at his own denuding of the philological birch (a regret and a guilt which I share, see p. xi above). One cannot avoid noting, furthermore, that Smith picks Up several motifs from his earlier shorter pieces, not all of them evidently meaningful. As Alex Lewis pointed out in 1991, the geography of Smith of Wootton Major, though reduced, is much the same as that of the Little Kingdom in Farmer Giles of Ham. Its few place-names may well be carefully chosen. ‘Wootton’ for instance means no more than wudu-tun, ‘village in the wood’, but one may see woods as portals of entry, with Verlyn Flieger, or as the very heart of ‘tree-tangled Middle-earth’ (see pp. 202-6 above). Smith also has an oddly consistent nomenclature (Nokes, Nell, Nan, Ned) marked by ‘nunnation’–putting ‘n’ on the front of common words and names like Ann or Edward–just as the names in ‘Leaf by Niggle’ were marked by name-diminutives, Tompkins, Atkins, Perkins. I have suggested one possible implication of this for the name ‘Nokes’ just above. Major motifs, meanwhile, are ‘the man who sees into Elfland’, and ‘the mortal returned to mortality’, as in so many of Tolkien’s poems, and his ‘Lost Road’ pieces. With so much of his personal life poured into it, one can see why Tolkien might strongly resist any sense that what he had written was a simple allegory, to be reduced to one all-inclusive meaning, a habit he thought much too common in schools of literary criticism. Nevertheless Smith of Wootton Major is quite clearly not just a surface narrative. Even more than usual for Tolkien, its extraordinarily simple style is deliberately deceptive.

As is proper for valedictory addresses, Tolkien was wrapping things up, looking back over his life (as over Smith’s), taking the opportunity to make a final statement. One might compare Smith, finally, with ‘Bilbo’s Last Song’, given by Tolkien to his secretary Joy Hill on 3rd September 1970, as a token of gratitude, but not published till 1974, the year after he died. Bilbo is also saying ‘farewell’ to his friends and to Middle-earth, but he is about to take the Lost Road, to make the Great Escape. His words could, however, entirely appropriately for myth, be removed from their ‘Grey Havens’ context and be heard as the words of a dying man: but one dying contented with his life and what he had achieved, and confident of the existence of a world and a fate beyond Middle-earth.