The Road to Middle-Earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology

CHAPTER 6

‘WHEN ALL OUR FATHERS WORSHIPPED STOCKS AND STONES’ Stylistic theories: Tolkien and Shakespeare

Mentioning Tolkien in the same breath with Shakespeare will seem to many rash, even perverse. If there is one image which biographical criticism has projected powerfully, it is that of Tolkien the Philistine, hater of literary mainstreams. He read little modern poetry and little modern fiction, taking ‘no serious notice’ even of what he read. He liked as much as anything the works of John Buchan. In 1931 he succeeded in eliminating Shakespeare from his part of the Oxford English syllabus. In childhood he found that he ‘disliked cordially’ Shakespeare’s plays, remembering especially an early ‘bitter disappointment and disgust … with the shabby use made in Shakespeare of the coming of “Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane hill”’.¹ Many critics have felt that these strongly anti-literary or anti-poetic attitudes have found suitable reflection in Tolkien’s own style, described variously as ‘Brewer’s Biblical’, ‘Boy’s Own’, irresistibly reminiscent of ‘the work of Mr Frank Richards’ (the creator of a sequence of school stories about a fat boy, Billy Bunter). It is a common critical stance to praise Tolkien’s conception, often somewhat vaguely, or with even more vagueness his ‘mythological’ or ‘mythopoeic’ powers; but then to declare that the words do not live up to the things, the style ‘is quite inadequate to the theme’.² There are however immediate reasons for thinking that this stance is imperceptive. Tolkien said that he ‘disliked’ Shakespeare ‘cordially’, but he used exactly the same phrase of allegory too, where it concealed an opinion of some subtlety. On a larger scale one might observe that his lifelong preoccupation with words gave him a kind of sensitivity to them, even if it was an unorthodox one; and further that it is strange that a myth should so make its way if enshrined and embodied in words as inappropriate as critics have made out. ‘Style’ and ‘mythology’ are in fact not to be separated, though they may be disentangled. A concept which helps one to see Tolkien’s view of both is that of ‘loose’ or ‘tight’ semantic and dramatic ‘fit’.

The beginnings of this idea emerge well from a passage in The Lord of the Rings which has been singled out for especially ferocious criticism: the parting of Treebeard from Celeborn and Galadriel in The Return of the King, p. 959:

Then Treebeard said farewell to each of them in turn, and he bowed three times slowly and with great reverence to Celeborn and Galadriel. ‘It is long, long since we met by stock or by stone, A vanimar, vanimálion nostari!’ he said. ‘It is sad that we should meet only thus at the ending. For the world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air. I do not think we shall meet again.’

And Celeborn said: ‘I do not know, Eldest.’ But Galadriel said: ‘Not in Middle-earth, nor until the lands that lie under the wave are lifted up again. Then in the willow-meads of Tasarinan we may meet in the Spring. Farewell!’

These two paragraphs are quoted in his book Modern Fantasy by Dr C. N. Manlove, who then goes straight on as usual to spearhead the critical assault and declare:

The overworked cadences, the droning, monotonous pitch, the sheer sense of hearts charged not with lead but gas, can offer only nervous sentimental indulgence or plain embarrassment to the reader.

Compare this with, say, Ector’s lament over Arthur in Malory, or the ‘Survivor’s Lament’ in Beowulf, or this from ‘The Wanderer’ …

and Dr Manlove goes on to cite a well-known Ubi sunt passage from the Old English poem and to observe that ‘This is real elegy, for it has something to be elegiac about’.³ Considered as criticism, much of this is mere rudeness, but it does have the merit of introducing medieval comparisons: not on the whole good ground for a Manlove to fight a Tolkien on.

Exactly that passage from The Wanderer, for instance, is paraphrased by Aragorn in chapter 6 of The Two Towers: a candid mind might have looked to see what Tolkien could make of it. As for Ector’s lament, it was in fact over Lancelot, not Arthur. If one reads even more attentively, one cannot help noting a curious stylistic feature not entirely dissociated from Treebeard. What Malory actually wrote was:

‘And now I dare say,’ sayd syr Ector, ‘thou sir Launcelot, there thou lyest, that thou were never matched of erthely knyghtes hande. And thou were the curtest [i.e. most courteous] knyght that ever bare shelde! And thou were the truest frende to thy lovar that ever bestrade hors, and thou were the trewest lover of a synful man that ever loved woman, and thou were the kyndest man that ever strake with swerde.⁴

The kindest man that ever struck with sword?, modern readers reflect. The truest lover that ever bestrode a horse? In modern contexts phrases like this could only be funny. Strong belief in the virtues of stylistic and semantic consistency urge us to keep kindness and sword-strokes, loved women and bestridden horses, in separate mental compartments. But clearly Malory did not feel this urge towards exactness at all. Did Tolkien? Tolkien furthermore no doubt noted that Malory’s insensitivity in this respect (a common thing in medieval writers) had not led necessarily to failure. His emulation of ‘loose semantic fit’ does however puzzle many modern readers – those especially who have been sophisticated by modern literary practice.

To go back to Dr Manlove and Treebeard: it is actually hard to make out what bits of the text have caused the irritation. It could be the boldly untranslated fragment of Quenya,⁵ or the triple repetition of ‘feel … feel … smell’, or the sudden change to less plain language in Galadriel’s speech, with its elvish place-name (and also its typical echo of wartime English popular song).⁶ However all these are easily defensible. If the paragraphs quoted do contain anything to gripe at seriously, it must be Treebeard’s opening sentence, with its oddly redundant phrase, ‘by stock or by stone’. What have stocks and stones got to do with the matter? Isn’t the phrase just meaningless, flung in for the rhythm, meaning no more than ‘by pillar or by post’, ‘by night or by day’, ‘by hook or by crook’? So one might feel. But it is exactly in phrases like this that one sees Tolkien playing with medieval notions of style, with ‘loose semantic fit’, with a personal view of poetry.

‘By stock or by stone’ is certainly a deliberate echo of the fourteenth century poem Pearl, written by the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and probably the most powerful of all medieval elegies. Under its image of the jeweller who has lost his pearl in an orchard, this describes a father lamenting his dead infant daughter in the graveyard where she is buried. He falls asleep with his head on her grave mound, to be taken away in spirit to a strange land where all his grief suddenly fades – and where to his utter delight he sees his lost child facing him, on the other side of a river. But she has grown up strangely, and she treats him with a cold formality, calling him ‘Sir’ but correcting him almost every time he speaks. How sad he has been, he says; he had no need to be, she replies. Quite right, he agrees, for (praise God) he has found her and will live with her in joy from now on; no, she says, she is not there, he cannot join her, he cannot cross the river. Don’t send me away again, he pleads, to ‘durande doel’. Why are you always talking about sorrow? she asks fiercely. At that the father gives up his attempt to take an active role, humbles himself, but repeats his grief in his apology:

‘My blysse, my bale, ye han ben bothe,

Bot much the bygger yet watz my mon;

Fro thou watz wroken fro vch a wothe,

I wyste neuer quere my perle watz gon.

Now I hit se, now lethez my lothe.

And, quen we departed, we wern at on;

God forbede we be now wrothe,

We meten so selden by stok other ston …’

The quotation here is based on the edition of Pearl by E. V. Gordon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), originally meant to be a cooperative venture with Tolkien; and I would translate it as follows:

‘You have been both joy and grief to me, but so far sorrow has been much the greater; I never knew, once you were removed from earthly dangers, where my pearl had gone. But now I see it, my sadness is assuaged. And when we were separated, there was no strife between us. God forbid we should now be angry with each other – we meet so seldom by stock or by stone …’

In his version of Pearl published in 1975 Tolkien translated that last line as ‘We meet on our roads by chance so rare’, but probably ‘We meet so seldom by stock or by stone’ is better. The pathos lies in the characteristic early English understatement – ‘so seldom’ means ‘never’ or worse still ‘just this once’ – and also in the last phrase’s suspense between precision and vagueness. ‘Stok other ston’ could mean nothing, be just a line-filler, like ‘erly and late’ a few lines afterwards. On the other hand it implies very strongly ‘on earth’, ‘in reality’, ‘in flesh and blood’. Where is the dreamer-father? At the end of the poem he will realise that the water was Death, his daughter in Heaven, the strange land a premonition of Paradise. If at the moment he speaks he thinks he is meeting his child in a land of real stones and tree-stumps, he is sadly mistaken; if he realises he is not, then already a touch of grief is creeping back into consolation.

‘By stok other ston’ is great poetry, one should see; not a great phrase, but great poetry, in its context.⁷ Could the same effect be reached in modern English, with its much fiercer attitude towards phrasal looseness? Tolkien tried the experiment in Treebeard’s farewell, and maybe he failed; though one might say that the image behind the phrase works well for Fangorn, whose sense of ultimate loss naturally centres on felled trees and barren ground. However the real point is that Tolkien was trying continually to extend the frontiers of style beyond the barbed wire of modern opinion. In this endeavour he thought he had the backing of the great poets and romancers, like Sir Thomas Malory or the anonymous authors of Pearl and Beowulf and The Wanderer. It was true that they had mostly been forgotten, left unappreciated. The tradition they stood for, though, had not. You could see it, thought Tolkien, even in Shakespeare, here and there.

It is thus quite clear that whatever he said about Shakespeare’s plays, Tolkien read some of them with keen attention: most of all, Macbeth. Motifs from this play are repeated prominently in The Lord of the Rings. The march of the Ents to Isengard makes true the report of the frightened messenger to the incredulous Macbeth in Act V Scene 5: ‘As I did stand my watch upon the hill / I looked toward Birnam and anon methought / The wood began to move.’ The prophecy that the chief Ringwraith will not fall ‘by the hand of man’, and his check when he realises Dernhelm is a woman, similarly parallels the Witches’ assurance to Macbeth and his disconcertment when told ‘Macduff was from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripped.’ There is a more complicated echo of Shakespeare in the scene when Aragorn, as the true king, revives the sick in the Houses of Healing with his touch and the herb athelas. In Macbeth too there is a healing king, but offstage – it is Edward the Confessor, the last legitimate Anglo-Saxon king, who sends Siward Earl of Northumbria to assist the rebels. This seems to be a deliberate compliment by Shakespeare to James the First (of England) and Sixth (of Scotland), who had begun to touch for the ‘king’s evil’ or scrofula by 1606. Tolkien probably did not approve, thinking this mere flattery. After all James was of the Stewart dynasty, so called because his ancestor Robert had been High Steward of Scotland, and had succeeded to the throne on the death of David II in 1371. When Denethor says that stewards do not come to be kings by the lapse of a few centuries in Gondor, but only ‘in other places of less royalty’, the remark is true of Scotland, and of Britain – though not of Anglo-Saxon England, ruled from the legendary past of King Cerdic to 1065 by kings descended in paternal line from one ancestor. The Return of the King is in a way a parallel, in another a reproach, to Macbeth.

Tolkien however used the play for both more and less than motifs. There is a flash of minute observation in chapter 6 of The Two Towers. What shall we do about Saruman, asks Théoden. ‘Do the deed at hand’, replies Gandalf, send every man against him at once. ‘If we fail, we fall. If we succeed – then we will face the next task.’ The jingle of ‘fail-fall’ echoes a famous crux in Macbeth, where the hero falters in front of his wife. ‘If we should fail?’, he asks. ‘We fail?’ replies she – in the Folio punctuation. Actresses have tried the line different ways: as a sarcastic question, a flat dismissal, a verbal slap. They were all wrong, implies Tolkien; it was a misprint, the word was ‘fall’ meaning ‘die’ and is a straight answer to a straight question. The reading might not seem very good, except for one thing. ‘Alliterative assonances’ such as ‘fail’ and ‘fall’ are very common in Old English poetry, and indeed in Middle English in the tradition which includes Pearl. Macbeth is the only one of Shakespeare’s plays to include Anglo-Saxon characters; and by some odd stylistic response it too is full of this ancient (but still popular) rhetorical device. ‘My way of life / Is fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf’, says Macbeth; ‘why do you start, and seem to fear / Things that do sound so fair?’ asks Banquo; ‘I see thee still’, says Macbeth to the imaginary dagger, ‘And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood, which was not so before.’ ‘Fail’ and ‘fall’ would then be one in a set of nearly forty – a part of the play’s poetic texture. How strange that critics should not have remarked the possibility! Or how typical, thought Tolkien. Modern critics were not good at Anglo-Saxon echoes, especially at ones which hung on into modern times in phrases like ‘mock’ and ‘make’, ‘chance’ and ‘choice’, ‘bullet’ and ‘billet’, all mentioned already in this study.

Gandalf’s adaptation of Macbeth also, of course, restates the idea of aggressive courage, a quality very strong in the play and expressed very much in Tolkienian style by Old Siward, ‘Why then, God’s soldier be he … And so his knell is knolled’; by Malcolm, ‘The night is long that never finds the day’; by Macbeth himself, ‘Send out more horses, skirr the country round, / Hang those that talk of fear.’ To this Tolkien could not remain immune. However the final and strongest influence of Macbeth on The Lord of the Rings is quite obviously in theme. If there is one moral in the interlacements of the latter it is that you must do your duty regardless of what you think is going to happen. This is exactly what Macbeth does not realise. He believes the Witches’ prophecy about his own kingship, and tries to fulfil it; he believes their warning about Macduff and tries to cancel it. If he had not tried to cancel it (and so murdered Macduff’s family), Macduff might not have killed him; if he had not killed Duncan, he might conceivably have become king some other way. Macbeth is a classic case of a man who does not understand about the cooperation between free will and luck. Galadriel’s warning about the events in her mirror, ‘Some never come to be, unless those that behold the visions turn aside from their path to prevent them’, would have been well said to him. But he had no Galadriel. The only mirror he sees is controlled (Act IV Scene 1) by the Witches.

Tolkien was trying, then, to make Shakespeare more positive – a bold venture, but based on a clear insight itself based on very minute reading. If he disliked Shakespeare, other than in joke, it was because he thought Shakespeare (a true poet with a deep tap-root into old English stories and traditions) had too often neglected that root for later and sillier interests. King Lear stems from the gaudy fictions of Geoffrey of Monmouth, laughed at in Farmer Giles, and yet it contains one ancient and resonant line in the mad scene of ‘poor Tom’:

‘Child Roland to the Dark Tower came.’

The line obviously comes from some lost ballad telling the story of how Child Roland went to Elfland to rescue his sister from the wicked King, a monster-legend, a Theodoric-story.⁸ Now why couldn’t Shakespeare have told that, Tolkien must have reflected, instead of bothering with King Lear! As things were, Tolkien had to tell the ‘Dark Tower’ story himself. Still, there was no doubt that Shakespeare knew something. Besides Macbeth and Lear Tolkien was probably struck by The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (the two ‘fairy’ plays and the two whose plots were not borrowed but made up by Shakespeare). But he remembered less likely plays too. As the Fellowship leaves Rivendell Bilbo says:

‘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.’

In rhythm and theme he echoes the magnificent coda to 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,

Tu-who …

Shakespeare’s piece is better, but Bilbo’s is good enough. Remarkably, every single word in both is ordinary if colloquial English; every single word is also (with the doubtful exceptions of ‘logs’ and ‘nipped’) rooted in Old English. Both poems would require little change to make sense at any time between AD 600 and now. Yet they are representatives of a tradition Tolkien thought, if not too short, very much too scanty. The poetry of the Shire

One can see Tolkien’s attempt to extend that tradition in the hobbit-poems scattered through The Lord of the Rings – or to be more accurate, in the new hobbit-poems. Near the start there are a couple of pieces which Tolkien had written up to thirty years before, both rewritten a little for their new context: Frodo’s ‘Man in the Moon’ song in the Prancing Pony, Sam’s ‘Rhyme of the Troll’ near Weathertop. Take these away and one is left with a little body of poems from the Shire, mostly in quatrains with alternate lines rhyming, in plain language and metre and with for the most part a gently proverbial quality. They look unambitious. They were all written for The Lord of the Rings alone. It is tempting to say that they have no function besides advancing the story or embellishing the characters, no value outside their immediate context. However one check to this theory should be that, although the poems all do fit their settings in the story very tightly, there is a strong sense even so that the same words can mean different things in different places. As in Pearl, a stock phrase or cliché can at any moment be given new point.

Bilbo’s ‘Old Walking Song’, for instance, is repeated three times in different versions. The first or basic text is this, sung by Bilbo as he leaves Bag End for the last time:

‘The Road goes ever on and on

Down from the door where it began.

Now far ahead the Road has gone,

And I must follow, if I can,

Pursuing it with eager feet,

Until it joins some larger way

Where many paths and errands meet.

And whither then? I cannot say.’ (p. 35)

Many years later, as The Return of the King draws to an end, Bilbo gives a markedly different version sitting in Rivendell, having heard Frodo tell the story of the destruction of the Ring and, in his advanced old age, having failed to understand most of it:

‘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.’ (p. 965)

And with these words, we are told, ‘his head dropped on his chest and he slept soundly’. This seems to be an obvious case of context determining words. The first time he sang the poem Bilbo had just handed over the Ring and was off to Rivendell; the words accordingly express a sense of abdication, of having been left behind, along with determination to accept this and make a new life somewhere as yet unknown. ‘I must subordinate my own wishes to the larger world’ would be a fair summary, highly appropriate to Bilbo at that time. By contrast the second version – almost a mirror-image of the first – expresses only justified weariness. Bilbo is no longer even interested in the Ring. He thinks the ‘lighted inn’ is Rivendell, as indeed it is in immediate context. All readers however perceive that it could as easily mean death.

In between these two variants Frodo has sung the song (p. 72). His version is identical with Bilbo’s first one, except that it makes the significant change, in line 5, of ‘weary feet’ for ‘eager feet’. ‘That sounds like a bit of old Bilbo’s rhyming’, says Pippin. ‘Or is it one of your imitations? It does not sound altogether encouraging.’ Frodo says he doesn’t know. He thinks he was ‘making it up’, but ‘may have heard it long ago’. This uncertainty (over an issue to which the reader knows the answer) points to the great difference between Bilbo’s position and Frodo’s. Both are leaving Bag End, but the former cheerfully, without the Ring, without responsibility, for Rivendell, the latter with a growing sense of unwished involvement, carrying the Ring and heading in the end for Mordor. Naturally the poem does not mean the same thing for him as for Bilbo. But can the same words carry different meanings?

It depends on how one sees ‘the Road’. The most obvious thought is that if the ‘lighted inn’ means death, then ‘the Road’ must mean life. It need not be individual life, since in Bilbo’s second version others can take it up and follow it in their turn; however in Frodo’s and Bilbo’s first version the image of the traveller pursuing the Road looks very like a symbol of the individual pursuing his moment of consciousness down the unknown road which is everyone’s future life, to an end which no one can predict. There is a further point to add, made by Frodo but repeating Bilbo:

‘He used often to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary. “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,” he used to say. “You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to. Do you realize that this is the very path that goes through Mirkwood, and that if you let it, it might take you to the Lonely Mountain or even further and to worse places?”’ (p. 72)

In context this is just a reply to Pippin’s remark that the song ‘does not sound altogether encouraging’. Frodo does not know he is going to Mordor yet, and Pippin shrugs the whole thing off. However, looking back, and especially looking back after all the interlacements of Volumes Two and Three, one might well think that besides an image of life ‘the Road’ has crept up to being an image of Providence. After all, Bilbo is right about the road outside Bag End leading all the way to Mordor. On the other hand there are on that road, which Frodo takes, thousands of intersections, as also thousands of choices to be made or rejected. The traveller can always stop or turn aside. Only will-power makes the road seem straight. Accordingly when Bilbo and Frodo say they will pursue it, eagerly or wearily, till it is intersected by other roads, lives, wishes, and will then continue into the unknown, if they can, they are expressing a mixture of doubt and determination – exactly the qualities Gandalf so often recommends. This has become much stronger and clearer with Frodo. Indeed it is not too much to say that the traveller walking down the branching road becomes in the end an image of ‘the Good’ in Tolkien, and one opposed to the endless self-regarding circuits of the Ring. By the time one comes to that opinion the immediate dramatic contexts of the poem – leaving Bag End, leaving the Shire – have not been dropped, any more than ‘the Road’ has lost its obvious literal quality, but they have come to seem only particular instances of a much more general truth.

The ‘tight fit’ of poems to characters and situations is accordingly illusory. There is a sense that the lines mean more than their composers know, may indeed not be their personal compositions at all; they may also be brooded upon, to be repeated with new understanding much later. Thus at the very end of Volume Three Frodo sings again ‘the old walking-song, but the words were not quite the same’; he says not ‘we may … take the hidden paths that run, / Towards the Moon or to the Sun’, but ‘I shall’.⁹ And he does, leaving Middle-earth the next day. The song he is refashioning is another of Bilbo’s, though it is ‘to a tune that was as old as the hills’. Even in its innocent context near the start of Volume One, when the hobbits are using it only to help themselves along, it has an odd ring. ‘Upon the hearth the fire is red,’ they sing, ‘But not yet weary are our feet’. If one goes by the ‘inn and weariness’ symbolism of Bilbo’s Rivendell song, that means they still have a zest for life. Still, what the song celebrates are ‘hidden paths’, ‘sudden tree[s]’, ‘A new road or a secret gate’ – things which seem to be or to lead out of this world. The refrain of each stanza addresses the familiar sights of the landscape, the little homely trees of English hedgerows, but bids farewell to them:

‘Apple, thorn, and nut and sloe,

Let them go! Let them go!

Sand and stone and pool and dell,

Fare you well! Fare you well!’ (p. 76)

Are the hobbits, even in their good humour, ‘half in love with easeful death’? A better answer perhaps is that in some inherited way they carry the ‘tune’ of an ancient grief, lulled by earthly beauty but capable of being woken in Frodo in the end, as in Legolas by the cry of the gulls.

The elvish song which follows immediately on the ‘Walking Song’ indeed says just that, though probably few readers make the connection straight away. All it contains, apart from its invocations to ‘Elbereth’, are the two opposed images of the stars, seen as the flowers of the ‘Queen beyond the Western Seas’, and the wood in which the elves ‘wander’. Of course the elves are in a wood at that moment, and they are looking at the early evening stars, but that is not what they mean. Their song is of regret and exile, its core the oxymoron of ‘this far land’ – ‘this’ land is the real land, Middle-earth, ‘far land’ ought to be the one Elbereth is in beyond the Seas. But the elves refuse to accept the fact, seeing themselves as strangers whose highest function is memory:

‘We still remember, we who dwell

In this far land beneath the trees,

Thy starlight on the Western Seas.’

As for the wood, its beauty is a net and a barrier; starlight and memory alone pierce through ‘to us that wander here / Amid the world of woven trees’.

The myth behind the song remains obscure in The Lord of the Rings, just as the Sindarin song of Rivendell remains untranslated, merging only with the Quenya one just quoted in the story’s last few pages (p. 1005)¹⁰. However the image of the Wood of Life breaks through to hobbit consciousness with increasing clarity. Frodo uses it in the Old Forest:

‘O! Wanderers in the shadowed land

despair not! For though dark they stand,

all woods there be must end at last,

and see the open sun go past:

the setting sun, the rising sun,

the day’s end, or the day begun.

For east or west all woods must fail …’ (p. 110)

As usual we take the immediate point – Frodo and the others want to get out of the forest – while reading through to a kind of universality: the ‘shadowed land’ is life, life’s delusions of despair are the ‘woods’, despair will end in some vision of cosmic order which can only be hinted at in stars or ‘sun’. What does Frodo mean by the repeated contrasts of setting / rising, west / east, day’s end / day begun? They can hardly avoid suggesting death and life; in that case his song says there can be no defeat – even if the wanderers die in the dark wood, the real Old Forest, they will in death break through to sunlight and out of a hampering shade. ‘East or west all woods must fail’ is then a statement of exactly the same class as ‘The Road goes ever on and on’: literally true, literally unhelpful or even banal, but in its literal truth making a symbolic promise. Sam Gamgee hits on the same thought when he takes up the ‘Blondin’ role of faithful minstrel in Minas Morgul, and sings ‘words of his own’ fitted to another old Shire tune:

‘Though here at journey’s end I lie

in darkness buried deep,

beyond all towers strong and high,

beyond all mountains steep,

above all shadows rides the Sun

and Stars for ever dwell:

I will not say the Day is done,

nor bid the Stars farewell.’ (p. 888)

‘Day is done’ is of course another Shakespearean echo, like the Dark Tower: ‘The bright day is done’, says Iras to Cleopatra, ‘and we are for the dark’. But Tolkien would no doubt instantly have felt that Shakespeare had no copyright on the phrase, which must be of immemorial antiquity in English, ‘as old as the hills’. Sam’s song is simple and obvious, coming from ‘the voice of a forlorn and weary hobbit that no listening orc could possibly have mistaken for the clear song of an Elven-lord’. Still, it has the characteristic qualities of the Shire’s ‘high style’: plain language, proverbial sentiment, a closeness to immediate context reaching out simultaneously to myth, a brave suggestiveness at once hopeful and sad.

As has been said, the Shire is a calque on England. Where then is the source in English poetry for the poetry of the Shire? One might point to Spenser, whose Faerie Queene (regarded by Tolkien with disapproving interest) often uses the image of the wandering knight lost in trackless woods, and whose Merlin-vision of Britain reviving underlies Bilbo’s ‘Riddle of Strider’.¹¹ An even closer parallel is John Milton’s masque of Comus, which Tolkien must have admired partly for its theme – it is an analogue of ‘Childe Rowland’, a tale of a maiden lost in a dark wood and imprisoned by a wizard, till her brothers and her guardian angel come to the rescue – but even more for its hovering between fact and symbol. A herb will protect them, says the disguised angel to the brothers; a shepherd gave it to him:

‘The leaf was darkish, and had prickles on it,

But in another country, as he said,

Bore a bright golden flower, but not in this soil;

Unknown, and like esteemed, and the dull swain

Treads on it daily with his clouted shoon …’

Ugly, prickly, much-trampled, flowering only in ‘another country’: it sounds like Virtue. Maybe the shepherd lad was the Good Shepherd himself. As for the wood, the Younger Brother wishes he could hear something from outside it, bleat or whistle or cockcrow:

‘Twould be some solace yet, some little cheering

in this close dungeon of innumerous boughs.’

His Elder Brother would prefer a glimmer from moon or lamp or candle, to ‘visit us / With thy long levelled rule of streaming light’. Again the wood sounds like life, the ‘levelled rule’ from the world outside like Conscience. But as Tolkien said of Beowulf, the ‘large symbolism … does not break through, nor become allegory’. The plain, even rustic language appeals to everyday experience. Everyone has been lost and found again, everyone is lost, will be found again. The maiden who is the soul will be taken in the end from ‘the perplexed paths of this drear wood … the blind mazes of this tangled wood … this close dungeon of innumerous boughs’, or as the elves would say galadhremmin ennorath, ‘the world of woven trees’. The elvish tradition

Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton: the list could be spun out, to include for instance Yeats, whose poem ‘The Man Who Dreamed of Faery-land’ could stand as a Tolkienian epigraph. However the point should be clear. Tolkien was not by any means cut off from the mainstream of English poetry, though the qualities he valued were not surprise, the mot juste, verbal complexity, but rather a slow probing of the familiar. That was not, however, the end of his ambition or of his thoughts on style: there is an elvish streak too in the poetry of The Lord of the Rings, signalled in complete contrast by barely-precedented intricacies of line and stanza.

The best example of this is the ‘Song of Eärendil’ composed and sung in Rivendell by Bilbo (pp. 227–30). What the song means and what story lies behind it are typically not explained in The Lord of the Rings, but remain in suggestiveness till The Silmarillion. That suggestiveness, though, is much aided by devices not of sense but of sound. Bilbo uses some five of these: one is rhyme, which everyone recognises, but the others are less familiar – internal half-rhyme, alliteration (i.e. beginning words with the same sound or letter), alliterative assonance (the Macbeth device), and a frequent if irregular variation of syntax. All appear in the first eight lines:

‘Eärendil was a mariner

that tarried in Arvernien;

he built a boat of timber felled

In Nimbrethil to journey in;

her sails he wove of silver fair,

of silver were her lanterns made,

her prow was fashioned like a swan,

and light upon her banners laid.’

The rhymes are obvious, on lines 2 and 4, 6 and 8 – ‘-nien / -ney in’, ‘made / laid’. The internal rhymes however operate not between even lines but between odd and even, 1 and 2, 3 and 4, and so on. They are furthermore not on the ends of words but in the middle: ‘mariner / tarried in’, ‘timber felled / Nimbrethil’, ‘silver fair / silver were’, ‘like a swan / light upon’. Nor are they always complete. One might note that the full rhymes are similarly not always exact, some of them being ‘masculine’, i.e. on one syllable only, but some ‘feminine’, on more than one syllable, and tending towards similarity rather than identity, as in ‘Arvernien / journey in’, ‘armoured him / harm from him’, ‘helmet tall / emerald’, etc. These are too common to be the result of incapacity, and they are furthermore reinforced by the unpredictable but frequent use of the other devices of sound: alliteration in ‘light laid’, ‘shining shield’, ‘ward all wounds’, etc., alliterative assonance in ‘sails of silver’, ‘Night of Naught’, ‘sight … he sought’ and ‘boat it bore with biting breath’. Typically, in between there are such doubtful cases as ‘built a boat’ – just alliteration, or assonance as well? – while over the whole poem there lies a web of grammatical repetitions and variations, also never quite exact – ‘her sails (he wove) of silver fair, / of silver (were) her lanterns (made)’, or later ‘his sword (of steel) was valiant, / (of adamant) his helmet tall’.

Describing the technique is difficult, but its result is obvious: rich and continuous uncertainty, a pattern forever being glimpsed but never quite grasped. In this way sound very clearly echoes or perhaps rather gives the lead to sense. Just as the rhymes, assonances and phrasal structures hover at the edge of identification, so the poem as a whole offers romantic glimpses of ‘old unhappy far-off things’ (to cite Wordsworth), or ‘magic casements opening on the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn’ (to remember Keats). Frodo indeed finds himself listening in highly Keatsian style:

Almost it seemed that the words took shape, and visions of far lands and bright things that he had never yet imagined opened out before him; and the firelit hall became like a golden mist above seas of foam that sighed upon the margins of the world. Then the enchantment became more and more dreamlike, until he felt that an endless river of swelling gold and silver was flowing over him, too multitudinous for its pattern to be comprehended … (p. 227)

Romanticism, multitudinousness, imperfect comprehension: these are the poem’s goals, achieved stylistically much more than semantically.

Yet the ‘Song of Eärendil’ does of course tell a story as well: how Eärendil tried to sail out of this world to a kind of Paradise, how he succeeded in the end by virtue of the ‘Silmaril’, how this in turn led to his becoming a star, or rather the helmsman of a celestial boat in which the burning Silmaril appears to Middle-earth as a star. Still, more questions are raised than answered. Why did Eärendil go, why was he kept, what is a Silmaril? More acutely, what is the relationship in the story between success and failure? Eärendil’s star appears to be a victory-emblem, ‘the Flammifer of Westernesse’, and yet is associated with loss and homelessness, with the weeping of women on the ‘Hither Shore’. The ‘paths that seldom mortal goes’ may recall fleetingly the ‘hidden paths’ of the hobbits’ walking-song, and its similar oscillation between adventure and homesickness; in this sense the two stylistically quite different poems relate to each other like elvish assonances, hinting at a pattern but stressing change as much as identity. The overall effect of the song in Rivendell is perhaps to show Bilbo approaching a body of lore and of poetry higher than the normal hobbitic vein, higher indeed than mortals can normally comprehend. Aragorn sings his song of Beren and Lúthien some forty pages earlier with a certain reluctance, explaining that it is ‘in the mode that is called ann-thennath among the Elves, but is hard to render in our Common Speech, and this is but a rough echo of it’. ‘Echo’ is a useful word, for that in a way is what the poem’s metric is based on; there is no immediate similarity of stanza-form to Bilbo’s song, but once again the ‘elvish’ idea of poetry comes through in an unexpected subtlety.

Briefly, one can say that each stanza is in eight lines, rhyming abac / babc; and that the fourth and eighth lines at once interrupt the flow of each stanza and hold the two halves together by their strong ‘feminine’ three-syllable rhymes, on ‘glimmering / shimmering’, ‘sorrowing / following’, etc. More significant is the fact that the actual rhyming words in each first half are repeated once or more in each second half, as for instance ‘seen’ in the first stanza, ‘leaves’ in the second, ‘feet’ and ‘roam’ in the third, and so on. The device is somehow congruous with the repeated images of hair like a shadow, beauty flying, leaves and years falling, through it all the hemlock-leaves of death. But the last stanza of nine breaks the pattern. Its rhyme words are all different: ‘bare / grey / door / morrowless / lay / more / away / sorrowless’. What does this fact mean? All one can say is that the story being told (or hinted at) is also one of gloom, death and parting, like that between Eärendil and Elwing, the mariner and the weeping women of Middle-earth. The last words of the song, ‘singing sorrowless’, stand out against this current, but still wherever the lovers go it is ‘away’, ‘in the forest’, maybe the forest of mortality and final death. Aragorn indeed confirms this thought with his gloss that not only has Lúthien died (as many elves do), but ‘died indeed and left the world’. Further explanation has to wait till The Silmarillion, but in a sense is not needed. A point has been made by a sudden (if barely perceptible) breaking of pattem, an absence of echoes. Perhaps that is the essence of ann-thennath.¹²

Further stylistic and thematic variations could easily be listed. Gimli’s ‘Song of Durin’ on pp. 308–9 is dwarvishly plain and active, but still carries on the sense of decay in Middle-earth opposed to ultimate hope; Legolas’s ‘Song of Nimrodel’ a little later makes similar oppositions but ends on an opposite note, of faltering and ultimate defeat on the ‘Hither Shore’. Frodo’s elegy for Gandalf ends on the word ‘died’; but Sam’s coda prefers ‘flowers’, and turns out to be truer in the end. Galadriel’s song in the Common Speech ends with regret and a question, ‘What ship would bear me ever back across so wide a Sea?’, but her Quenya one on hope and an assertion, ‘Maybe thou shalt find Valinor. Maybe even thou shaft find it.’¹³ As with the hobbit-songs, behind all these there lies some story of a Sentence and a Great Escape, but an escape forever hindered by loving involvement with Middle-earth itself; that is the root of the disagreement between Fangorn, Celeborn and Galadriel when the Ent half-voices his lament for the stocks and the stones. However the surprise in this ‘elvish tradition’ of mythic poetry is how much of its stories is conveyed by purely formal devices, by verbal patterns with meaning as apparently inherent in them as elsewhere in place-names, in untranslated fragments, or in Bombadil. Tolkien’s idea of poetry mirrored his ideas on language; in neither did he think sound should be divorced from sense.

In reality this ‘elvish tradition’ was an English tradition too. The ultimate source for much that has been discussed must certainly be Pearl, with its story of the (failed) escape from mortality, its heavily traditional phrasing, and its fantastically complex metrical scheme, of twelve-line cross-rhymed stanzas with alliteration, assonance, syntax-variation and (even Tolkien did not attempt this) stanza-linking and refrains.¹⁴ However the Pearl tradition did not last till Shakespeare and Milton and the Romantics, who are accordingly and to that extent impoverished. Tolkien obviously hoped in one way to recreate it. More generally, the link between the last three sections of this book is Tolkien’s perception, from Pearl and from poems like it, that poetry does not reduce to plain sense (so far most critics would agree with him), but furthermore that this is because words have over the centuries acquired meanings not easily traced in dictionaries, available however to many native speakers, and (this is where many critics part company) at times breaking through the immediate intentions of even poetic users. ‘Loose fit’, in a word, works better in poetry than ‘tight fit’; there are roads to wisdom besides the painstaking perverse originality of twentieth-century writers. Middle-earth and Limbo: mythic analogues

What has been said about Tolkien’s poetry has an immediate bearing on that most attractive but least tractable subject, ‘Tolkien’s mythology’. In a sense the problems and intentions were the same. Tolkien wanted his poems to make good sense in their dramatic context, as part of the story of The Lord of the Rings; he also wanted them to suggest a truth independent of their context. ‘East or west all woods must fail’ therefore applies both to the Old Forest and to the symbolic woods of Life and Error. In the same way his legends of Eärendil and Lúthien, his central fable of Frodo and the Ring, must firstly and continually work as fiction, but also reach out towards non-fictional truths about humanity – and perhaps about salvation. Yet in this latter ambition there lies a danger. If The Lord of the Rings should approach too close to ‘Gospel-truth’, to the Christian myth in which Tolkien himself believed, it might forfeit its status as a story and become at worst a blasphemy, an ‘Apocryphal gospel’, at best a dull allegory rehearsing in admittedly novel form what everyone ought to know already. In that case The Lord of the Rings would look like one of Bilbo’s poems removed from context and put without explanation in The Oxford Book of English Verse – fictionless and unhappy. Tolkien had to take a rather strict line over ‘myth’.

One reason, no doubt, was that he had little tolerance for real pagan myths or for naive mythicizers. In his YWES chapter for 1924 (p. 58), he remarked that ‘it will be a grievous shock to many an innocent sentimentalist, accustomed to see the one-eyed and red-bearded deities everywhere, to learn that Þórr and Oðin cannot be found in any Scandinavian placename in England’.^* Tolkien did not believe in ‘old religions’ or ‘witchcults’; C. S. Lewis wrote a paper called ‘The Anthropological Approach’ which damned the learned variety of that error beyond redemption. Probably a major cause for their intolerance was that both, but especially Tolkien, had some idea of what genuine old paganism was like. The earliest account of the English (Tacitus’s Germania, AD 97–8) remarks on their habit of drowning sacrificial victims in bogs. Many such have been recovered from the preserving peat of Denmark and of ‘the Angle’. It would be surprising if Tolkien had not looked at the calm face of Tollund Man, or the hideously frightened one of ‘Queen Gunhild’ (all too obviously still struggling as she was pinned down alive), and reflected that these were the true lineaments of his pagan ancestors.¹⁵ ‘There, but for the grace of God, go I.’ No statement could be more apposite. Tolkien had grounds to suspect simple views of ‘the noble pagan’.

Virtuous pagans, however, were quite another matter. Indeed it is not too much to say that the Inklings were preoccupied with them. C. S. Lewis offered the most daring statement in the final volume of the ‘Narnia’ series, The Last Battle (1956), in which we come across a young (dead) virtuous pagan, Emeth, who explains that all his life he has served Tash and scorned Aslan the Lion – earlier on it has been made clear that Tash is a bloody demon, Aslan, one might as well say, the Narnian Christ. But once he is dead Emeth meets Aslan and falls at his feet in instinctive adoration, as in terror, ‘for the Lion … will know that I have served Tash all my days and not him’. But Emeth is saved, for good deeds done for Tash belong to Aslan, and bad deeds for Aslan to Tash; as if to say that God and Allah are different, but yet that virtuous Mohammedans will be saved rather than murderous Christians. Later on each of the souls pouring out of Narnia on Doomsday looks at Aslan as it comes through the Doorway of Death – to be saved if it loves, destroyed if it hates. Lewis here repeats the belief of the fourteenth-century friar Uhtred of Boldon, that each dying person has a ‘clear vision’ or clara visio of God, on his reaction to which depends his ultimate fate.¹⁶ Uhtred’s opinion was denounced as heretical at Oxford in 1367 – it tends to suggest no man needs the Christian Church to be saved. But Lewis, a Protestant, might have agreed with that.

Tolkien, a determined Catholic, would not. Still, he was doubtless interested. Uhtred after all was an Englishman, only one of a list of would-be savers of righteous pagans from the British Isles. Pelagius, the great opponent of St Augustine, was a Welshman, his real name probably ‘Morgan’. The story of the salvation of Trajan, the virtuous pagan Emperor, was first told by an Anglo-Saxon from Whitby about the year 710. The poem St Erkenwald is a variant of that tale; some people have argued it is by the author of Sir Gawain and Pearl. Above all, to Tolkien’s mind, there must have been present the problem of Beowulf. This is certainly the work of a Christian writing after the conversion of England. However the author got through 3182 lines without mentioning Christ, or salvation, and yet without saying specifically that his heroes, including the kind and honest figure of Beowulf himself, were damned – though he must have known that historically and in reality they were all pagans, ignorant even of the name of Christ. Could the Christian author have thought his pagan heroes were saved? He had the opinion of the Church against him if he did. Could he on the other hand have borne to consign them all to Hell for ever, like Alcuin, the deacon of York, in a now notorious letter to the abbot of Lindisfarne, written about AD 797: ‘What has Ingeld to do with Christ?’ he asked scornfully – Ingeld being a minor character in Beowulf. ‘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’.¹⁷ The Beowulf-poet’s dilemma was also Tolkien’s. His whole professional life brought him into contact with the stories of pagan heroes, Englishmen or Norsemen or Goths; more than anyone he could appreciate their sterling qualities. At the same time he had no doubt that paganism itself was weak and cruel. Uhtred’s and Lewis’s individualistic beliefs did not appeal to him, any more than Alcuin’s smugly intolerant one. If there was anyone in the twentieth century to resolve the dilemma, repeat the Beowulf-poet’s masterpiece of compromise, and preserve ‘the permanent value of that pietas which treasures the memory of man’s struggles in the dark past, man fallen and not yet saved, disgraced but not dethroned’ (‘Monsters’, p. 266), Tolkien must have thought it should be himself. Such activity was for one thing ‘part of the English temper’. The Lord of the Rings is quite clearly, then, a story of virtuous pagans in the darkest of dark pasts, before all but the faintest premonitions of dawn and revelation.

Yet there is at least one moment at which Revelation seems very close and allegory does all but break through – naturally enough, a moment of ‘eucatastrophe’, to use Tolkien’s term for sudden moments of fairy-tale salvation. This appears to different characters in different ways. As has been said, Sam and Frodo experience it as thinking for a moment they have died and gone to Heaven, when they wake up on the field of Cormallen. Faramir, however, in the next chapter feels it more physically. He and Éowyn sense the earthquake that is the fall of Barad-dûr, and for a moment Faramir thinks of Númenor drowning. But then like the father in Pearl an irrational joy comes over him, to be explained by the eagle-messenger in a song:

‘Sing now, ye people of the Tower of Anor,

for the Realm of Sauron is ended for ever,

and the Dark Tower is thrown down.

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.

Sing and be glad, all ye children of the West,

for your King shall come again,

and he shall dwell among you

all the days of your life.’ (p. 942)

There is no doubt here about Tolkien’s stylistic model, which is the Bible and particularly the Psalms. The use of ‘ye’ and ‘hath’ is enough to indicate that to most English readers, familiar with those words only from the Authorised Version. But ‘Sing and rejoice’ echoes Psalm 33, ‘Rejoice in the Lord’, while the whole of the poem is strongly reminiscent of Psalm 24, ‘Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, for the King of glory shall come in.’ ‘Who is the King of glory?’ asks the Psalm, and one traditional answer is Christ, crucified but not yet ascended, come to the city of Hell to rescue from it those especially virtuous pre-Christians, Moses and Isaiah and the patriarchs and prophets. Of course the eagle’s song is not about that. When it says ‘the Black Gate is broken’ it means the Morannon, a place in Middle-earth described on pp. 622–3; when it says ‘your King shall come again’, it means Aragorn. Yet the first statement could very easily apply to Death and Hell (Matthew xvi, 18, ‘and the gates of hell shall not prevail’), the second to Christ and the Second Coming. This is a layer of double meaning beyond that even of ‘East or west all woods must fail’ or ‘The Road goes ever on and on’.

Approach to the edge of Christian reference was here deliberate, as one can tell from the date Gandalf so carefully gives for the fall of Sauron (p. 931), ‘the twenty-fifth of March’. In Anglo-Saxon belief, and in European popular tradition both before and after that, 25 March is the date of the Crucifixion; also of the Annunciation (nine months before Christmas); also of the last day of Creation.¹⁸ By mentioning the date Tolkien was presenting his ‘eucatastrophe’ as a forerunner or ‘type’ of the greater one of Christian myth. It is possible to doubt whether this was a good idea. Almost no one notices the significance of 25 March, or of the Company setting out from Rivendell on 25 December; the high style of the eagle’s song has not had much appeal; though Tolkien himself wept over the grandeur of the Field of Cormallen (Letters, p. 321), many other readers have found the delight, tears and laughter (of Sam especially) unconvincing. Tolkien did right normally to avoid such allusions, to keep like the author of Beowulf to a middle path between Ingeld and Christ, between the Bible and pagan myth. The care with which he maintained this position (highly artificial, though usually passed over without mention) is evident, with hindsight, on practically every page of The Lord of the Rings.

Consider for instance the Riders. As has been said, they resemble the ancient English down to minute detail – with the admitted partial exception of their devotion to horses. However the real ancient English had some belief in divine beings, the *ósas or ‘gods’ analogous to the Norse æsir, Gothic *ansós, whose names survive in our days of the week (Tíw’s day, Wóden’s day, Thunor’s day, Frige day). To this the Riders have no counterpart, or almost none. Their place-names sometimes suggest ancient belief in something or other: thus ‘Dunharrow’ in Common Speech presumably represents Rohirric dún-harg, ‘the dark sanctuary’, just as ‘Halifirien’ on the borders of Gondor must be hálig-fyrgen, ‘the holy mountain’. In ‘Drúadan Forest’ the second element is Gondorian -adan,‘man’, the first probably drú-, ‘magic’. In the same way the Anglo-Saxons borrowed the Celtic element of ‘Druid’ to create the term dry-cræft, ‘magic art’. The Riders, one may say, have a sense of awe or of the supernatural; but they do nothing about it. No religious rites are performed at Théoden’s burial. His followers sing a dirge and ride round his barrow, as indeed do Beowulf’s. The only real-life burial where this combination of song and cavalcade is reported is that of Attila the Hun, in Jordanes’s Gothic History. But there the mourners also gash their faces so their king will be lamented properly in human blood, and when he is in his tomb they sacrifice (i.e. murder) the slaves who dug it. That kind of thing seems very out of place in Middle-earth. The Riders, like most of the characters of Beowulf but unlike all we can guess of the real pre-Christian English, do not worship pagan gods; they also do not hold slaves, commit incest, practise polygamy.¹⁹ Their society has in a word been bowdlerised. They are so virtuous that one can hardly call them pagans at all.

Certainly Tolkien never does. As has been noted before, he followed the Beowulf-poet in being very loath to use the word ‘heathen’, reserving it twice for Denethor and by implication the Black Númenóreans.²⁰ Nevertheless his characters are heathens, strictly speaking, and Tolkien, having pondered for so long on the Beowulf-poet’s careful balances, was as aware of this fact as he was aware of the opposing images of open Christianity poised at many moments to take over his story. The pagan counterpart of the eagle’s song may be the death of Aragorn, relegated as it is to an Appendix. Aragorn is a remarkably virtuous character, without even the faults of Théoden, and he foreknows his death like a saint. Nevertheless he is not a Christian and nor is Arwen. He has to say then to her, ‘I speak no comfort to you, for there is no comfort for such pain within the circles of the world’ (p. 1037). When she still laments her fate he can only add ‘We are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory. Farewell!’ Arwen is not comforted. She dies under the ‘fading trees’ of a Lórien gone ‘silent’, and the end of her tale is oblivion, ‘and elanor and niphredil bloom no more east of the Sea’. Aragorn, then, has some hope of the future and of something outside ‘the circles of the world’ that may come to heal their sorrow, but he does not know what it is. This is a deathbed strikingly devoid of the sacraments, of Extreme Unction, of ‘the consolations of religion’. It is impossible to think of Aragorn as irretrievably damned for his ignorance of Christianity (though it is a view some have tried to foist on Beowulf). Still, he has not fulfilled the requirements for salvation either. Perhaps the best one can say is that when such heroes die they go, in Tolkien’s opinion, neither to Hell nor Heaven, but to Limbo: ‘to my fathers’, as Théoden says, ‘to sit beside my fathers, until the world is renewed’, to quote Thorin Oakenshield from The Hobbit, perhaps at worst to wait with the barrow-wight ‘Where gates stand for ever shut, till the world is mended’. The whole of Middle-earth, in a sense, is Limbo: there the innocent unbaptised wait for Doomsday (when, we may hope, they will join their saved and baptised descendants).

Tolkien took different views of his own work’s religious content at different times. In 1953 he wrote to a Jesuit friend:

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)

Tolkien perhaps found difficulty in explaining to a Jesuit why a ‘fundamentally’ Catholic work should cut out references to religion, but the reason is clear: he thought, or hoped, that God had a plan for pre-Catholics too. Later in life Tolkien may have become more uncertain about his own originality, and wrote that the elvish song of Rivendell was a ‘hymn’, that ‘these [invocations of Elbereth] and other references to religion in The Lord of the Rings are frequently overlooked’ (Road, p. 73). On the whole the earlier statement that references have been cut out seems truer than the later one that they are in but ‘overlooked’. The elvish song is only analogous to a hymn as Gandalf is analogous to an angel; Elbereth too is unlike (say) the Holy Ghost in remaining visible, to elves, and rememberable as a being by those elves like Galadriel who have been across the Sea and met her. Tolkien did best when he kept mythic invention on the borderline between literal story and a wider suggestiveness (Fangorn, Bombadil, Lúthien, Roads and Rings); too conscious an approach to ‘mythopoeia’ would have ended only in allegory. To repeat a philological point made already in this study, the Old English translation of Greek euangelion was gód spell, modern ‘Gospel’, the ‘good news’ of salvation. Besides ‘news’, however, spell meant ‘spell’ and also ‘story’. The foundation of Gospel lies then in ‘good story’, though ‘good story’ ought to generate a spell (or glamour) of its own. Fróda and Frodo: a myth reconstructed

If one thinks that a ‘myth’ is an ‘old story containing within itself vestiges of some earlier state of religious belief’ – like the Grail-legend with its hints of sacrificed kings and vegetation-rituals – then The Lord of the Rings definitely is not one. Tolkien was alert to all such echoes and did his best to eradicate them. If one thinks that a ‘myth’ should be a ‘story repeating in veiled form the truth of Christ Crucified’, then The Lord of the Rings does not qualify either. There is an evil Power in both stories, and a glorious Tree, but Frodo, to make only three of the most obvious points, is not sacrificed, is not the Son of God, and buys for his people only a limited, worldly and temporary happiness. Nevertheless there is at least one sense in which The Lord of the Rings can claim ‘mythic’ status, which is as ‘a story embodying the deepest feelings of a particular society at a particular time’. If one can speak of Robinson Crusoe as a ‘myth of capitalism’ and of Frankenstein or Dr Faustus as ‘myths of scientific man’, then The Lord of the Rings could be claimed as a ‘myth against discouragement’, a ‘myth of the Deconversion’. In 1936 Tolkien had warned the British Academy that the Ragnarök spirit had survived Thórr and Óthinn, could revive ‘even in our own times … martial heroism as its own end’. He was quite literally correct in this, as he was also in his further prophecy that it would not succeed, since ‘the wages of heroism is death’. Still, he wanted to keep something of that spirit, if only its dauntlessness in what looked like a hopeless future; for similarly contemporary reasons he wanted to offer his readers a model of elementary virtue existing without the support of religion. Perhaps most of all he wanted to answer Alcuin’s scornful question, relevant again after 1150 years: ‘What has Ingeld to do with Christ?’

To his intentions here Tolkien left two very strong clues. One is the name of the ‘hero’ of The Lord of the Rings, Frodo. The other is the note in Appendix F, which says that some hobbit-names have been retained by Tolkien without translation, ‘though I have usually anglicized them by altering their endings, since in Hobbit-names a was a masculine ending, and o and e were feminine’ (p. 1109). ‘Frodo’, in other words, is an English form of original ‘Froda’. But what kind of a name is that? Most readers probably take it as explained by Tolkien’s preceding remark, ‘To their man-children [hobbits] usually gave names that had no meaning at all in their daily language … Of this kind are Bilbo, Bungo, Polo, Lotho … and so on. There are many inevitable but accidental resemblances to names that we now have or know …’ If ‘Frodo’ strikes any chords, then, it could be accident. On the other hand ‘Frodo’, surprisingly, is never mentioned in the name-discussion of that Appendix. Maybe his name is not a Bilbo-type, but a Meriadoc-Peregrin-Fredegar-type. As Tolkien goes on to say:

In some old families … it was, however, the custom to give high-sounding first-names. Since most of these seem to have been drawn from legends of the past, of Men as well as of Hobbits, and many while now meaningless to Hobbits closely resembled the names of Men in the Vale of Anduin, or in Dale, or in the Mark, I have turned them into those old names, largely of Frankish and Gothic origin, that are still used by us or are met in our histories.

‘Frodo’ could be one of these, like ‘Peregrin’. It could still and at the same time be an anglicisation of ‘Froda’, a name ‘meaningless’ to hobbits by the time of the War of the Ring, and accepted by them as just another chance disyllable like ‘Bilba, Bunga, Pola’, but actually preserving in oblivion the name of an ancient hero from the Dale or the Mark. That would make Frodo’s name something of a freak in hobbit-nomenclature. However this seems only appropriate for the central figure, especially since his name is so strikingly left uncategorised.

‘Froda’ actually is a name from the dimmest reaches of Northern legend. It is mentioned once in Beowulf (not in the main story), when the hero, discussing politics, says that the king of the Danes means to marry his daughter glædum suna Fródan, ‘to the fortunate son of Fróda’. By this means he hopes to heal the feud between the Danes and the ‘Bards’ over whom Fróda once ruled. His idea won’t work, says Beowulf, for the pressure on heroes to take blood-revenge is too strong – it seems, though this is speculation from other sources, that Ingeld’s father Fróda was killed by the Danish king who now wants to make alliance with his son. The likelihood is that in this as in other matters Beowulf is meant to appear a good prophet, since the unsuccessful, possibly treacherous, but in heroic terms entirely praiseworthy attack which Ingeld made on his father-in-law is repeatedly mentioned in Northern story. Probably it was the subject of the Northumbrian songs which so scandalised Alcuin. When he asked, then, ‘What has Ingeld to do with Christ?’, he was using Ingeld as an example of the most extreme gap between good ‘heroic’ behaviour and good Christian behaviour; Ingeld took unforgivingness as far as it could go. There is no need, however, to think the son was exactly like the father.

Nothing else is ever heard of Fróda in Old English, but the Norse form of the word – it means literally ‘the wise one’ – is Fróthi, and round this there are several stories. The most persistent is that Fróthi was a contemporary of Christ, alleged by both Saxo Grammaticus (c. AD 1200) and Snorri Sturluson (c. 1230). During his reign there were no murders, no wars, no robberies, and gold rings lay untouched in the open, so that everyone referred to his age as the Frótha-frith, the ‘peace of Fróthi’. But it came to an end because of greed, or maybe over-altruism. The peace really came from Fróthi’s magic mill, turned eternally by two giantesses to grind out gold and peace and prosperity. Fróthi (perhaps fearing for his subjects’ security) would never let them rest – and so one day they ground out an army to kill Fróthi and take his gold. The viking army also would not let the giantesses rest, but sailed away with them and set them to grinding salt; they ground so much that the boat sank and the mill with it, though still (adds folk-tradition) in the Maelstrom the giantesses grind their magic quern. And that is why the sea is salt.

This is a story, one can see, about the incurability of evil. Has it anything to do with Beowulf? There is no overt connection, but Tolkien was used to ‘reconstructing’ stories. The point that seems to have struck him is the total opposition between son and father, Ingeld / Ingjaldr and Fróda / Fróthi. The one is an example of the Ragnarök-spirit undiluted, of heroic conventionality at its worst; in the Beowulf lecture Tolkien called Ingeld ‘thrice faithless and easily persuaded’. The other has about him a ring of nostalgic failure; in his time everything was good, but it ended in failure both personally (for Fróthi was killed) and ideologically (for Fróda’s son returned to the bad old ways of revenge and hatred, scorning peace-initiatives and even apparently his own desires). Of course the Frótha-frith could have been just an accident, a result of the Incarnation which not even virtuous pagans knew about. For all these reasons the composite figure of Fróda / Fróthi became to Tolkien an image of the sad truth behind heroic illusions, a kind of ember glowing in the dark sorrow of heathen ages. In ‘The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth’ Tídwald says reprovingly to Torhthelm – who has just discovered his master’s headless body:

‘Aye, that’s battle for you,

and no worse today than wars you sing of,

when Fróda fell, and Finn was slain.

The world wept then, as it weeps today:

you can hear the tears through the harp’s twanging.’

(Tree, p. 131)

There is something grimly appropriate, further, in the fact that ‘Ingjaldr’ remained a common Norse name for centuries. ‘Fróthi’ however was quickly forgotten.

All this sounds very much like Tolkien’s ‘Frodo’. He is a peacemaker, indeed in the end a pacifist. One can trace his progress from p. 316, when he stabs the Moria troll, to p. 600, when he threatens to but does not stab Gollum. On pp. 670–3 he saves Gollum’s life from the archers, against Sam’s strong inclination to keep quiet and let him die. He gives Sting away on p. 905, keeping an orc-blade but saying ‘I do not think it will be my part to strike any blow again.’ He throws even that away ten pages later, saying ‘I’ll bear no weapon, fair or foul’. In ‘The Scouring of the Shire’ his role is to forbid killing (pp. 983 and 986–7), and later, after a battle in which he has not ‘drawn sword’, to protect prisoners. He will not kill Saruman even after his mithril-coat has turned a treacherous stab. His self-control has been learnt, of course, while carrying the Ring; but there is a touch of witheredness about it. ‘“All the same,” said Frodo to all those who stood near, “I wish for no killing …”’ ‘Those who stood near’? One might have hoped Frodo would get up on a block and speak to everybody, impose his will. But Wit is the opposite of Will, and as a figure of increasing wisdom, Frodo (‘the wise one’) seems to lose all desire, even for good. Merry puts forward his plans for dealing with the ruffians by force. ‘“Very good,” said Frodo. “You make the arrangements.”’

This sense of age perhaps motivates the general unconcern for Frodo shown by the Shire, his unfair though unintended supplanting by the large and ‘lordly’ hobbits Merry and Pippin, the rudeness or much-qualified respect shown to him by Sharkey’s men and Gaffer Gamgee too. Saruman knows better, and so do some others, but ‘Sam was pained to notice how little honour [Frodo] had in his own country’. It is prophets who proverbially have no honour in their own country, and Frodo is increasingly a prophet or a seer. However even in other countries the honour he gets is the wrong sort. One may remember Ioreth repeating to 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.’ A wrong tale, naturally, but a heroic tale. In Gondor as in the Shire one sees how all achievement is assimilated to essentially active, violent, military patterns – ‘the better fortitude’, as Milton said in Paradise Lost, ‘Of patience and heroic martyrdom / Unsung’. The end of Frodo’s quest, in the memory of Middle-earth, is nothing. Bilbo turns into a figure of folklore (‘mad Baggins’), the elves and dwarves percolate through to our world as time-shifters and ring-makers, even ‘the Dark Tower’ remains as an image for ‘poor Tom’ in King Lear. Of Frodo, though, not a trace: except hints of an unlucky, well-meaning king eclipsed on the one hand by the fame of his vengeful son, on the other by the Coming of the true hero Christ.

What has Ingeld to do with Christ? Nothing. But Fróda had something to do with both. He was a hinge, a mediation, like The Lord of the Rings in its suspension between pagan myth and Christian truth. He stood, in Tolkien’s view, for all that was good in the Dark Ages – for the heroic awareness of heroic fallibility which Tolkien thought he could detect in Beowulf and in Maldon, for the spark of virtue which had made Anglo-Saxon England ripe for conversion (a process carried out without a single martyrdom). Maybe his story had been, in God’s plan, an evangelica praeparatio: a clearing of the ground for the good seed of the Gospel. It is possible that Tolkien thought of The Lord of the Rings in the same way. He knew his own country was falling back to heathenism again (if only on the model of Saruman, not Sauron), and while mere professorial preaching would make no difference, a story might. Frodo presents then an image of natural man in native decency, trying to find his way from inertia (the Shire) past mere furious dauntlessness (Boromir) to some limited success, and doing so without the inherited resources of the heroes and longaevi like Aragorn, Gandalf, Legolas, Gimli. He has to do so furthermore by destroying the Ring, which is merely-secular power and ambition, and with no certain faith in rescue from outside the géara hwyrftum, ‘the circles of the world’. ‘Myth is alive at once and in all its parts, and dies before it can be dissected’, declared Tolkien (‘Monsters’, p. 257), and his statement is more than usually true of The Lord of the Rings, as I have said above. Something like the last few sentences must however have been at least a part of Tolkien’s intention. The styles of romance

One can see that ancient story is used very differently in The Lord of the Rings from the way it is in, say, James Joyce’s Ulysses. Not only is the relation in the latter between Homeric ‘myth’ and modern novel one of irony and transformation; in it the ‘myth’, oddly enough, is given a higher and more assured status as something less sophisticated, more archetypal, closer to the holy and the divine. Tolkien by contrast was pre-eminently aware of his source-texts, like Beowulf, or Snorri’s Edda, or Lazamon’s Brut, as the works of individuals like himself, who used old stories for contemporary purposes just as he did. In his view The Lord of the Rings was not a derivative or a metamorphosis of them and Pearl and Comus and Macbeth and all the other works I have mentioned of ‘mythic’ or near-‘mythic’ status: instead all of them, including The Lord of the Rings, were splinters of a truth, transformations on the same level of something never clearly expressed, not even (in entirety) in the Gospels.²¹ Human awareness of this truth, he may have concluded, was passed on with just the same loose and haunting persistence as the rhythms and phrases of English poetry, surviving from Anglo-Saxon times to Middle English and ‘The Man in the Moon’, and on again to Shakespeare and Milton and Yeats and nursery-rhyme, without intention as without a break. Middle-earth itself survived in song even after people had forgotten what it meant: ‘O cocks are crowing a merry midd-larf, / A wat the wilde foule boded day.’²² Should that ballad of 1776 be classified as a ‘myth’? It has old roots and is about a supra-rational world; but it was also sung for immediate pleasure without claims to any specially transmitted truth. In all these ways ‘Sweet William’s Ghost’ is analogous to The Lord of the Rings, and even more so to its embedded songs and verses.

There is another way of approaching the question of the trilogy’s literary status, which has the further merit of concentrating attention on its prose style as well as on poetry. This is via Northrop Frye’s now-famous book, Anatomy of Criticism (1957), a work which never mentions The Lord of the Rings, but nevertheless creates a literary place for it with Sibylline accuracy. Mr Frye’s theory, in essence, is that there are five ‘modes’ of literature, all defined by the relationship between heroes, environments, and humanity. ‘If superior in kind both to other men and to the environment of other men’, declares Mr Frye, ‘the hero is a divine being and the story about him will be a myth.’²³ One sees immediately that this does not apply to Gandalf or Aragorn, still less to Frodo: Gandalf can feel fear and cold, Aragorn age and discouragement, Frodo pain and weakness. Two steps down from ‘myth’, according to the Anatomy, we find ‘high mimesis’, the level of most epic and tragedy, in which heroes are ‘superior in degree to other men but not to [their] natural environment’. This looks more like The Lord of the Rings, where many of the characters – Éomer, Faramir, Aragorn again – are very much of the stamp of old Siward or Coriolanus or other Shakespearean heroes. But are they on a par with their natural environment? Aragorn can run 135 miles in three days; he lives in full vigour for 210 years, dying on his birthday. Around him cluster characters who are immortal, like Elrond or Legolas, who can make fire or ride on eagles, while he himself can summon the dead. Clearly the mode intended is the one below ‘myth’ but above ‘high mimesis’, the world of ‘romance’ whose heroes are characteristically ‘superior in degree [not kind] to other men and to [their] environments’.

The main points of this mode are then displayed by Mr Frye in ways immediately applicable to The Lord of the Rings. In it, we are told, ‘the hero’s death or isolation has the effect of a spirit passing out of nature, and evokes a mood best described as elegiac’; ‘passing out of nature’ is of course the main theme of hobbit-poetry. Elegy is further accompanied ‘by a diffused, resigned, melancholy sense of the passing of time, of the old order changing and yielding to a new one’; while true of Beowulf and The Idylls of the King this is conspicuously truer of The Return of the King and its dissolution of the Third Age. However the main merit of Mr Frye’s analysis, at this moment, is that besides describing Tolkien’s literary category so well it further indicates, first, an inevitable problem associated with that category, and then, more indirectly, the terms in which to express a solution.

To take the problem first: it is caused by the fact that there are literary modes beneath romance and beneath epic or tragedy, i.e. ‘low mimesis’, this being the mode of most novels, in which the hero is much on a level with us – and lower still ‘irony’, where heroes turn into anti-heroes like Sancho Panza or Good Soldier Schweik or Leopold Bloom. ‘Looking over this table’, Mr Frye observes, ‘we can see that European fiction, during the last fifteen centuries, has steadily moved its center of gravity down the list’ – so much so that, as has been remarked of The Hobbit, the co-existence of ‘romance’ characters like Thorin Oakenshield with ‘ironic heroes’ like Bilbo Baggins is immediately comic and only after many adventures rises to gravity. Tolkien’s problem all through his career lay in his readership’s ‘low mimetic’ or ‘ironic’ expectations. How could he present heroes to an audience trained to reject their very style?

His immediate solution was to present in The Lord of the Rings a whole hierarchy of styles. In this the hobbits are, orcs apart, at the bottom. Their very pronouns are against them, for the Shire version of Common Speech, like English but unlike all other major European languages, fails to distinguish polite from familiar forms of ‘you’; Pippin, Merry and the others accordingly talk in a style which appears to Gondorians as unnaturally assured (though it is in fact almost ‘democratic’, see p. 1107). In a more obvious way they are prone to compulsive banter. Merry, in the Houses of Healing, asks immediately after his recall from death by the sacral king for ‘supper first, and after that a pipe’. The resultant memory of Théoden is dissolved by jokes about tobacco, about his pack, and by friendly abuse from Pippin. ‘It is the way of my people to use light words at such times’, says Merry apologetically, but just the same he cannot stop. One sees what causes the unkind critical remarks about Boy’s Own and Billy Bunter. However the emergence of anti-heroes like Billy Bunter, the demotion of romance to children’s literature, are obvious consequences of the Western world’s fifteen-hundred-year long climb down the ladder of literary modes. All the hobbitic jokes are doing, then, is to reflect and by intention deflect the modern inhibition over high styles which we and they share; if we were not embarrassed by the hobbits, in other words, we would be by the heroes.

Many people indeed manage to be embarrassed by both, and for the latter reaction there is more excuse. As he climbed to the top of his stylistic hierarchy Tolkien on occasion wrote in the responses he wanted instead of evoking them. High style is accompanied by characters stepping back, swelling, shining. Aragorn puts down Andúril at the gate of the Golden Hall, and declares its name: ‘The guard stepped back and looked with amazement’. A few lines earlier ‘wonder’ has come into his eyes at the mention of Lothlórien. In the same way the guards at the Great Gate of Gondor ‘fell back before the command of [Gandalf’s] voice’, while at the last embassy near the Morannon ‘before his upraised hand the foul Messenger recoiled’. At that moment ‘a white light shone forth like a sword’ from Gandalf, as many people see ‘the light that shone’ round Éowyn and Faramir as they come down to the Houses of Healing. Galadriel is ‘illumined’ by ‘a great light’ when Frodo offers her the Ring, and seems ‘tall beyond measurement’. All these images together are used when Aragorn draws Andúril and declares himself to Éomer (p. 423):

Gimli and Legolas looked at their companion in amazement, for they had not seen him in this mood before. He seemed to have grown in stature while Éomer had shrunk; and in his living face they caught a brief vision of the power and majesty of the kings of stone. For a moment it seemed to the eyes of Legolas that a white flame flickered on the brows of Aragorn like a shining crown.

Éomer stepped back …]

Obviously his reaction is meant to be ours. Equally obviously that reaction cannot be counted on, because of the surly distrust engendered in us (as in Éomer) by generations of realistic fiction. Nevertheless it is a mistake to think that the only literary modes which exist are those one period is familiar with. By his continual switching from one level of style to another, and his equally continual use of characters as ‘internal reflectors’ of embarrassment or suspicion, Tolkien showed at least that he was aware of that very predictable mistake, and ready to do what he could to help his readers round it. The worst one can fairly say is that in some scenes – the Andúril ones, the Field of Cormallen, the eagle’s song – Tolkien underestimated his audience’s resistance and reached too hastily for the sublime or the impressive. The real difficulty, though, is not his but ours: in ordinary modern ‘low mimetic’ novels such qualities are simply not allowed.

In fact one can often feel Tolkien, between these ‘low’ and ‘high’ stylistic poles, breaking with complete success out of all the categories into which he should have been put, rising again from the edge of romance to what almost anyone might call ‘myth’. Perhaps the best example occurs at the end of Book V, chapter 4, ‘The Siege of Gondor’. Here many of the story’s threads are about to intersect. Faramir lies critically ill within the walls. Pippin is rushing to fetch Gandalf to save him, while Merry and Théoden are simultaneously approaching from Anórien; but at the Great Gate the chief Nazgûl, the ‘haggard king’ himself to whom Frodo had almost surrendered in the vale of Minas Morgul, leads the assault. All this is presented simply as story, even as history, but supra-realistic suggestions keep crowding in. The battering-ram of Mordor has a ‘hideous head, founded of black steel … shaped in the likeness of a ravening wolf; on it spells of ruin lay. Grond they called it, in memory of the Hammer of the Underworld of old’ – as if to recreate some earlier unstated triumph of the chthonic powers. Meanwhile the Nazgûl himself goes even more than usual beyond the boundaries of even ‘romantic’ humanity: he looks like a man, and carries a sword, but it is a ‘pale’ or insubstantial one; he bursts the Gate not only by Grond but by a projection of fear and dread, ‘words of power and terror to rend both heart and stone’, which work like ‘searing lightning’. On the one hand he turns almost to abstraction, ‘a vast menace of despair’, as also to an image of the unexistence of evil, a ‘huge shadow’ which Gandalf tries to send back to ‘nothingness’. But though the Nazgûl ironically proves Boethius right by throwing back his hood – ‘and behold! he had a kingly crown; and yet upon no head visible was it set’ – his deadly laughter shows that ‘nothingness’ can still have power and control. At this moment he calls himself Death:

‘Old fool!’ he said. ‘Old fool! This is my hour. Do you not know Death when you see it? Die now and curse in vain!’ And with that he lifted high his sword and flames ran down the blade.

Gandalf did not move. 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 sides they dimly echoed. Great horns of the North wildly blowing. Rohan had come at last.

In this passage the key words are perhaps ‘as if’. Within the world of romance everything that happens here is literally ‘coincidence’. The cock means nothing by crowing, that he crows at this moment is mere happenstance. Nor are the horns replying – they only seem to. Nevertheless no reader takes the passage like that. The cockcrow itself is too laden with old significance to be just a motif. In a Christian society one cannot avoid the memory of the cock that crowed to Simon Peter just as he denied Christ the third time. What did that cockcrow mean? Surely, that there was a Resurrection, that from now on Simon’s despair and fear of death would be overcome. But then again, what of Comus and the cockcrow the Younger Brother wishes for? ‘Twould be some solace yet, some little cheering / In this close dungeon of innumerous boughs.’ It would show there is a world elsewhere. Tolkien too might think of the Norse legend of the ‘Undying Lands’, the Odáinsakr: when King Hadding reached its boundary the witch who guided him killed a cock and threw it over the wall – a moment later he heard the cock crow before he himself had to turn away and go back to mortality.²⁴ Cockcrow means dawn, means day after night, life after death; it asserts a greater cycle above a lesser one.

And what of the horns? They too are just the horns the Riders happen to be blowing, but they carry meaning in a more complicated way as well. Their meaning is bravado and recklessness. When he sets out from Rivendell Boromir blows his horn, the family heirloom, and is rebuked by Elrond for doing so; but he takes no notice. ‘Always I have let my horn cry at setting forth, and though thereafter we may walk in the shadows, I will not go forth as a thief in the night.’ He means that good is stronger than evil, and even if it is not, that makes no difference to him. Challenging horns echo through Northern stories, from the trumpets of Hygelac, Beowulf’s uncle, coming to rescue his dispirited compatriots from death by torture, to the war-horns of the ‘Forest Cantons’, the ‘Bull’ of Uri and the ‘Cow’ of Unterwalden, lowing to each other across the field of Marignano, as the Swiss pikemen rallied in the night for a second suicidal assault on overwhelming numbers of French cavalry and cannon. Horns go back to an older world where surrenders were not accepted, to the dead defiant Roland rather than the brave, polite, compromise-creating Sir Gawain, whose dinner is served to ‘nwe nakryn noyse’ – the sound of chivalric kettledrums. Nor are these the ‘horns of Elfland dimly blowing’ of late Romanticism; their echoes may be ‘dim’, but they themselves are ‘wild’, uncontrolled, immune to the fear and calculation on which the Nazgûl is counting. The combination of horncall and cockcrow means, if one listens, that he who fears for his life shall lose it, but that dying undaunted is no defeat; furthermore that this was true before the Christian myth that came to explain why.

The implications of that scene are more than realistic, and more than romantic. Nevertheless the style of the passage is deliberately neutral.²⁵ There are touches of alliteration in ‘wizardry’ and ‘war’, ‘death’ and ‘dawn’, ‘dark’ and ‘dim’, while the verb ‘recking’ is old-fashioned. However the vocabulary as a whole could hardly be simpler, largely monosyllabic, mostly words from Old English or Old Norse, but with an admixture of French words taken into the language many centuries ago, and even one Classical one in ‘echoed’. Like Bilbo’s and Shakespeare’s winter songs, the ‘breaking of the Gate’ would take little rewriting to seem comprehensible and even colloquial at any time over the last half-millennium. The power of the passage lies not in mots justes but in the evocation of ideas at once old and new, familiar in outline but strongly redefined in context: like ‘stocks and stones’.

The way this works has been once more illuminated by Mr Frye, who notes that though the line from Charles Kingsley’s ballad about the ‘cruel, crawling foam’ (which swallows a girl drowned by accident) could be censured by rationalistic critics as the ‘pathetic fallacy’ – thinking nature is alive – what the phrase actually does is to let realism aspire for a second to higher modes, to give to the drowned Mary ‘a faint coloring of the myth of Andromeda’. That aspiration is true of Tolkien in many places. It seems only apposite that he should hover so often on the edge of the ‘pathetic fallacy’, as for instance in the assault on Caradhras, where Aragorn and Boromir insist the wind has ‘fell voices’ and that stone-slips are aimed, or on the bridge at Khazad-dûm, where Gandalf is ‘like a wizened tree’, but the Balrog a mixture of fire and shadow, a ‘flame of Udûn’ – checked only for a moment by Boromir’s horn. A good example of open discussion of such ambiguities within the trilogy is Frodo’s passage of the Dead Marshes in pp. 613–5. It is Sam who falls with his face to the mud and cries out ‘There are dead things, dead faces in the water’. Gollum explains them as materialistically as possible. The dead are from the great battle long ago; the marsh-lights are exhalations from rotting corpses; he dug down once to eat them, though he found them beyond reach. Frodo sees more in them than that, though he cannot explain what:

‘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.’

He does not say that ‘fair is foul’, like the witches in Macbeth. But the fear of the vision comes from the way that all, elves and orcs, evil and noble, are reduced to weeds and foulness in the end. The image picks up Merry’s awakening from the barrow pages earlier, with its unexplained juxtaposition of the noble dead in the barrow with the wight itself. Does all glory decompose? That is what makes Frodo stand ‘lost in thought’. Later on Faramir is to dismiss the whole thing as a sending of the Enemy. But there remains a feeling that the Enemy is not telling absolute untruth, even so. The landscape itself reinforces that belief. ‘Far above the rot and vapours of the world the sun was riding high and golden’, but all the hobbits can see and hear is ‘the faint quiver of empty seed-plumes, and broken grass-blades trembling in small air-movements that they could not feel’. The discharged seed, the breathless air are images of the discouragement and sterility the Enemy projects. Mordor-flies have red eyes on them; all Mordor-bushes have thorns.

Both characters and readers become aware of the extent and nature of Tolkien’s moralisations from landscape in such passages. In the thematic opposite to Mordor and the Marshes, however, in and around Lothlórien, old poems, old beliefs, and fictional geography are much more closely intertwined, with the combination much less readily identified as fallacious. The word associated with Lórien most often is ‘stain’ – an odd word, both French and Norse in origin, with an early meaning of ‘to lose lustre’ as well as ‘to discolour’. Frodo perceives the colours of Cerin Amroth accordingly as at once ‘fresh’ and familiar, with a light on them he cannot identify: ‘On the land of Lórien there was no stain.’ A few pages earlier he had felt that ‘on the land of Lórien no shadow lay’. Much later Gandalf in the ‘Song of Lórien’ confirms, ‘Unmarred, unstained is leaf and land’. With this mysterious absence of ‘stain’ goes a forgetting of grief; though the Fellowship has just lost Gandalf in Moria, the fact is not mentioned for close on twenty pages (330–46), and indeed we are told that ‘In winter here no heart could mourn for summer or for spring’. This is very like Pearl, where the visionary landscape he wakes in makes the dreamer-father forget even his bereavement, ‘Garten my goste al greffe forzete’. It should be noted though that the dreamer crosses one boundary, from graveyard to dream, but not the next; when he tries to swim the river to Heaven at the end of the poem he is halted and woken before he reaches the water. Frodo and the Fellowship, however, cross two rivers, deliberately described and distinguished. One is the Nimrodel, which consoles their grief and promises them partial security; as Frodo wades it ‘he felt that the stain of travel and all weariness was washed from his limbs’. The next is Celebrant, the Silverlode which they cannot ford but have to cross on ropes. Here they are totally secure, for, though the orcs can splash across the Nimrodel – ‘curse their foul feet in its clean water!’ says Haldir – it seems they cannot wade or swim the Silverlode. Even Gollum, though seen by the elves, vanishes ‘down the Silverlode southward’, i.e. on the far bank, and according to Aragorn has followed the Fellowship only ‘right down to Nimrodel’.

With Pearl in mind, one might easily conclude that the stretch between the two rivers is a sort of ‘earthly Paradise’ for Frodo and the others, though one still capable of violation and invasion from the outside world. The ‘Naith’ of Lórien, though, across the second river, is Heaven; the company undergoes a kind of death in getting there, while there is a feeling of significance in the fact that they may not touch the water, not even to have their ‘stains’ washed away. A determined allegorist (or mythiciser) might go on to identify the Nimrodel with baptism, the Silverlode with death. A force which holds one powerfully back from such opinions is however Sam Gamgee, who counterpoints the most solemn moments of crossing with banalities like ‘Live and learn!’ and chatter about his uncle Andy (who used to have a rope-walk at Tighfield). He, and Gimli and Gollum and Haldir, keep even Lórien tied down to the level of story, in which rivers are tactical obstacles and not symbols for something else. Nevertheless, even though the Pearl analogue may occur to few, the references to absence of ‘stain’ and grief and blemish, the assertion that Lórien is a place apart, have their effect and keep one finally uncertain about the section’s proper mode. The best one can say is that in those chapters, as in The Lord of the Rings more generally, a work essentially of ‘romance’ manages to rise at times towards ‘myth’, and also to sink towards ‘high’ or even ‘low mimesis’.

Even ‘irony’ is not always out of place, though it is beneficent. As Sam and Frodo struggle on in Mordor, they come on a streamlet, ‘the last remains, maybe, of some sweet rain gathered from sunlit seas, but ill-fated to fall at last upon the walls of the Black Land and wander fruitless down into the dust’. ‘Fruitless’ (a significant adjective elsewhere)? The water seemed so, but turns out not to be. By refreshing the Ringbearer it does the best that any water could. The ‘streamlet’, in its apparent failure and eventual success, becomes a kind of analogue to Frodo’s pity for Gollum, say, to all appearances useless, in the end decisive. It is hard to say what mode such scenes are in. They could be (by themselves) anywhere in Northrop Frye’s stylistic hierarchy. This resonance of passages which can be read with different levels of suggestion at once, with ‘myth’ and ‘low mimesis’ and ‘irony’ all embedded deeply in ‘romance’, is perhaps the major and least-considered cause for the appeal of The Lord of the Rings. Some contradictions mediated

If the three volumes had a thematic heart (in fact their whole method defies centralisation) one might like to see it in the dialogue of Legolas and Gimli, walking through Minas Tirith on p. 855, and looking at the masonry. Gimli is critical:

‘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, I guess,’ said the Dwarf.

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

The exchange makes a point about Gondorian history. It also brings out further one character’s idée fixe (stonework), and develops the theme of racial tension / personal harmony which has been a feature of this relationship in the story for some time. Yet the characters’ speech here reaches out from its immediate context to timelessness and universality. Their sentences sound like proverbs. The idea of seed lying in the dust is furthermore likely to arouse memory of the parable (Matthew xiii, 18–23) of the seed that fell on stony ground. With a shock one may wonder whether these proverbially soulless creatures, Elf and Dwarf, are here – all unwittingly – talking about the Son of Man. It would be like the elves to know a Saviour would come to men, without having the slightest or remotest idea of the mingled horror and beauty with which that event would come about. We get a glimpse of how history might seem to the most virtuous, and most pagan, of virtuous pagans – an odd effect in, but not at all a contradiction to ‘a fundamentally religious and Catholic work’. In this way The Lord of the Rings can be seen mediating between Christian and pagan, Christ and Ingeld and Frodo, as between myth and romance, large pattern and immediate context.

It is at the same time hovering between styles. There is no archaic word in the passage, except perhaps ‘naught’. Nevertheless a strong archaic effect is produced, by inversion of nouns and adjectives, careful selection of adverbs of time like ‘yet’ and ‘seldom’, and other less obvious linguistic features. Tolkien could have given a lecture about all these at any time. It would have been no trouble to him to write the exchange in modern English: ‘It’s always like that with the things men start off on … But they don’t often fail to propagate … They’ll still come to nothing in the end … The elves don’t know the answer to that one …’ The Lord of the Rings would have offered fewer hostages to criticism if it had been written like that. But would it have been better? It seems very unlikely. The discrepancy between modern usage and archaic thought would simply have sounded bogus, leading to a deep ‘disunion of word and meaning’ (as Tolkien showed by rewriting a similar passage, see Letters, pp. 225–6). His prose style was carefully calculated, and had its proper effect, in the long run, and for those not too provoked to read carefully. One might say, in Aristotelian terms, that the trilogy succeeded in harmonising its ethos, its mythos, and its lexis – the subjects, roughly speaking, of the last three chapters respectively.

By those three words Aristotle would have meant ‘setting’, ‘plot’ and ‘style’, all meanings intended in the sentence above. However semantic change often gives an unexpected bonus, which one should accept in this case as in others. The sentence above would still be true if the Greek words meant ‘ethics’, ‘myth’ and ‘lexis’ (the technical term for what one gets from dictionaries or lexicons). Tolkien thought there was a truth in the vagaries of words independent of their users. He probably did not, for instance, personally admire either Milton or Wordsworth: the one was a Protestant, a divorcer, and a spokesman for regicides, the other a tinkerer with medievalism and a linguistic critic of the most ignorant type. But both were English poets, and the language spoke through them. How nearly Wordsworth echoed Pearl in his famous elegy on ‘Lucy’:

No motion has she now, no force,

She neither hears nor sees,

Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course

With rocks, and stones, and trees!

He should have written ‘stocks’, not ‘rocks’. But he preferred the alliteration on r (and the tautology). Milton meanwhile got the phrase right in his sonnet ‘On the Late Massacre in Piedmont’:

Avenge, O Lord, Thy slaughtered saints, whose bones

Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold,

Ev’n them who kept Thy truth so pure of old,

When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones …

However in Tolkien’s view everything else in the poem would be wrong: its vengeful ferocity, its equation of God’s truth with Protestantism, most especially its contempt for ‘our fathers’ before they were converted, for the Anglo-Saxons indeed. Milton knew very little about them, and his contempt was based on ignorance. Yet poetry which uses old phrases is not always bound down to its creator’s intention. Reading that line, and adding to it his memories of Finn and Froda, of Beowulf and Hrothgar and the other pagan heroes from the darkness before the English dawn, Tolkien may have felt that Milton was more accurate than he knew. Perhaps ‘our fathers’ did worship ‘stocks and stones’. But perhaps they were not so very bad in doing so. After all if they had not Christ to worship, there were worse things, many worse things for them to reverence than ‘stocks and stones’, rocks and trees, ‘merry Middle-earth’ itself.

^* Here, as a matter of fact, Tolkien was wrong. ‘Roseberry Topping’ in North Yorkshire preserves beneath pastoral euphemism the Viking name Othinesbeorg, ‘Odin’s mountain’. But Tolkien could have replied that this name had been so sharply changed as to suggest a deliberate de-mythicizing policy in the Middle Ages, which would support his general point.