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

CHAPTER 8

‘ON THE COLD HILL’S SIDE’ Of Birch Hats and Cold Potions

Writing twenty years ago, I began this chapter with the words, ‘There is, in a way, no more of “Middle-earth” to consider.’ This was tempting Providence with a vengeance, for there were twelve volumes of ‘The History of Middle-earth’ yet to appear, and to be considered. Nor can I correct myself at this stage by suggesting, ‘Tolkien wrote no more of Middle-earth’, for the last three volumes of ‘The History of Middle-earth’ in particular show, like much of the Unfinished Tales, that Tolkien’s creativity was indeed released by the completion of The Lord of the Rings, and that he continued writing within the framework of his Middle-earth mythology all through the last twenty years of his life. Some of this has been discussed already, and there is further comment throughout chapter 9. This chapter turns, however, to a more personal theme: ‘the road to Middle-earth’, or Tolkien’s own attitudes to his work, as they emerge especially from the short pieces and poems of his later years. Tolkien might not have approved of such a study, for he valued his privacy. Still, the inquiry has much to do with the major theme of this book, namely the interlocking of philology and fiction. And here I, at least, cannot help looking at what I see as the third in Tolkien’s triad of short stories about the sources of his invention, Farmer Giles (written 1938), ‘Leaf by Niggle’ (a few years later), and finally, written in 1965, Smith of Wootton Major.¹

To me, this does not seem to be a difficult piece. I take it that, as with ‘Leaf by Niggle’ quite certainly, and as with Farmer Giles more partially, its mode is allegorical, and its subject is the author himself, especially the relations between his job and his private sources of ‘inspiration’. This assumption of mine has, however, been the one which has drawn the most determined rebuttals from other commentators, especially Mr David Doughan and (twice) Dr Verlyn Flieger,² and it is only fair, then, to restate the arguments for and against it. Against taking Smith allegorically, we have Tolkien’s own endorsement, Letters, p. 388, of a review by Roger Lancelyn Green which stated firmly that the meaning of Smith should be left alone: ‘To seek for the meaning is to cut open the ball in search of its bounce’. This can be backed up by Tolkien’s own stated dislike of allegory, discussed above, and indeed by an even firmer statement of his own specifically about Smith, ‘This short tale is not “allegory”’. That would seem to settle the matter (for in cases like this I would scorn to fall back on the well-known critical get-out, ‘you cannot trust what an author says about his own work’) – if Tolkien had not gone on immediately to add ‘though it is capable of course of allegorical interpretation at certain points’. Tolkien furthermore gave a lead for any such allegorical interpretation by saying, ‘The Great Hall is evidently in a way an “allegory” of the village church; the Master Cook with his house adjacent, and his office that is not hereditary … is plainly the Parson and the priesthood’. Tolkien’s own surviving commentary on his own story, from which these statements, cited by Dr Flieger, are taken is indeed, again according to Dr Flieger, ‘a running argument with himself on the question of whether the story is or is not an allegory’.³ If Tolkien himself could not decide, then, the question can fairly be taken as open.

There is furthermore one element which seems to me a clear case of Tolkienian private symbolism, and that is the name of Smith’s main antagonist throughout the work, the rude and incompetent Master Cook, Nokes. As I have said repeatedly, Tolkien was for some time perhaps the one person in the world who knew most about names, especially English names, and was most deeply interested in them. He wrote about them, commented on them, brought them up in conversation. With all the names in the telephone book to draw on, Tolkien is unlikely to have picked out just one name without considering what it meant: and ‘Nokes’ contains two clues as to its meaning. One is reinforced by the names of Smith’s wife and son and daughter, Nell and Nan and Ned, all of them marked by ‘nunnation’, the English habit of putting an ‘n’ in front of a word, and especially a name, which originally did not have one, like Eleanor and Ann and Edward.⁴ In Nokes’s case one can go further and observe place-names, as for instance Noke – a town in Oxfordshire not far from Brill – whose name is known to have been derived from Old English æt þam ácum, ‘at the oaks’. This became in Middle English *atten okes, and in Modern English, by mistake, ‘at Noke’ or ‘at Nokes’. There is no doubt that Tolkien knew all this, for there is a character called ‘old Noakes’ in the Shire, and Tolkien commented on his name, giving very much the explanation above, in his ‘Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings’, written probably in the late 1950s. Tolkien there wrote off the meaning of ‘Noakes’ as ‘unimportant’, as indeed it is for The Lord of the Rings, but it would be entirely characteristic of him to remember an unimportant philological point and turn it into an important one later.

The second clue lies in the derivation from ‘oak’. ‘Oak’ had a special meaning for Tolkien, pointed out by Christopher Tolkien in his footnote to Shadow, p. 145.^* In his early career as Professor at the University of Leeds, Tolkien had devised a system of splitting the curriculum of English studies into two separate groups or ‘schemes’, the ‘A-scheme’ and the ‘B-scheme’. The ‘A-scheme was for students of literature, the B-scheme for the philologists. Tolkien clearly liked this system, and tried unsuccessfully to introduce it to Oxford in 1930 with similar nomenclature (see ‘OES’, p. 780). But in his private symbolism ‘A’ was represented by the Old English rune-name ác, ‘oak’, ‘B’ by Old English beorc, ‘birch’. Oaks were critics and birches philologists, and Tolkien made the point perfectly clear in Songs for the Philologists, for which see below. As must surely be obvious from chapters 1 and 2 of this work, oaks were furthermore the enemy: the enemy of philology, the enemy of imagination, the enemy of dragons. I do not think that Tolkien could ever have forgotten this. Furthermore it makes sense within Smith, and is not inconsistent with Tolkien’s own equation of the Master Cook with the Parson and the priesthood.

The name ‘Nokes’, then, is my main reason for seeing a professional element in the fable’s allegory, which I would develop as follows. First, Tolkien liked to bring ‘philologist-figures’ into his fiction: the parson of Farmer Giles, the Master of the Houses of Healing, even Gollum as Sméagol with his head turned down and his fascination with ‘roots and beginnings’. There is then something faintly recognisable in the first Master Cook, whose retirement prompts the rest of the story: ‘He had been a kind man who liked to see other people enjoying themselves, but he was himself serious, and said very little’. His sojourn in Faërie made him merrier. Nevertheless one might say that the man who knows a lot, but does not communicate it, and gives a false and unfortunate impression of gravity, is a good image of the nineteenth-century philologist – the type of man who turned the subject into a bogy, see chapter 1. By contrast Nokes seems very clearly to be an unsympathetic picture of the propounders of ‘lit.’. He has no idea of the charms of fantasy. He equates the supernatural with the childish, and both with what is sweet and sticky. His idea of elvish allure has dwindled to a doll with a wand, labelled ‘Fairy Queen’. In particularly annoying fashion, having set up a feeble image of the charms of Faërie, he takes it for granted that the feebleness of the whole concept has been demonstrated: he behaves, in fact, exactly like the critics of Beowulf whom Tolkien had excoriated thirty years before, who, having pushed over the tower of the poem, ‘said (after pushing it over), “What a muddle it is in!”’; or like the Oxford colleagues of whom Tolkien had said, in his somewhat embittered ‘Valedictory Address’, that he ‘felt it a grievance that certain professional persons should suppose their dullness and ignorance [over philology] to be a human norm’; or, one may as well add, like so many of Tolkien’s own critics in later years. As for what Nokes has to offer, his Great Cake is good enough, with no particular faults (Tolkien had nothing against literary study per se), ‘except that it was no bigger than was needed … nothing left over: no coming again’. Not much food for the imagination, one might paraphrase. In any case much of the cake’s goodness seems derived from the sly watch Nokes keeps on Alf Prentice, and from the ‘old books of recipes left behind by previous cooks’, which Nokes cannot understand, but from which he scrapes a few ideas. Literary criticism in England (one might translate) leapt forward from a springboard of old philology, without which even readings of Shakespeare would not get very far. But once it took over the Mastership from the old serious philologists it refused to give credit; this thwarted its own development and left great areas of its proper subject misunderstood.

The ‘professional’ interpretation given above, meanwhile, seems readily compatible with Tolkien’s own equation of Cook with Parson. Nokes is, one should note, married. This is one of the reasons given for selecting him as a stop-gap after the departure of the first Master Cook: he was ‘a solid sort of man with a wife and children, and careful with money’. But if he is married he must surely represent a Protestant parson, in England probably an Anglican, whose house (the vicarage) would indeed stand next to the Great Hall (the village church). Tolkien, however, was a Catholic. He might well have felt that just as Nokes represented a degradation, a decline, from philologist to critic, so he also represented a dwindling from Catholic priest with the power to celebrate the Mass to Anglican vicar capable only of holding a communion. In each case, one could argue on Tolkien’s behalf, something had got lost, something vital if undefinable. Within the story, this mysterious element, ‘not [quite] invisible to attentive eyes’, is represented by the fay-star: left behind by the old Master Cook, baked into a cake by Nokes, swallowed by Smith, for whom it becomes the passport into Faërie, returned reluctantly to Alf Prentice, destined in the end for Nokes’s great-grandson Tim. Whatever wording one chooses, this object must surely stand for, and be understood by all readers to stand for, something like: vision, receptiveness to fantasy, mythopoeic power, ability to pass outside Wootton Major, Wootton being, of course, wudu-tún, ‘the town in the wood’, the ‘wood of the world’ in which so many of Tolkien’s characters, elves, men and hobbits, wander temporarily or permanently ‘bewildered’.

There are two further strange features in the story which seem to call for an explanation, and which should be noted before trying to come to a conclusion. One is, as mentioned above, that the fay-star will go in the end to Nokes’s kin, not Smith’s. Smith is the central character, the bearer of the vision, he has a much-loved son, Ned, it would be a natural and satisfying ending for the star to go to him when Smith has finally to relinquish it. But this comfortable conclusion is rejected. Though Nokes is, at almost the very end, satisfactorily squashed, it might be said that his family, at least, will have the last laugh over Smith’s, as Nokes has the last word – rather like Councillor Tompkins’s final and crushing victory over Niggle, in this world, in ‘Leaf by Niggle’. The other strange feature is a kind of duality in the supporters of Faërie. Smith is the central character and the bearer of the star, but the real controller of the star is Alf Prentice, and he too is in a way a dual character. One of his names, Prentice, is a trade-name just like Smith, but the other is Alf. And while Alf is common English short-for-Alfred (and so looks like Ned or Nan or Tim) it is also the modern spelling of Old English ælf, ‘elf’, which is what Alf is. He disguises himself as an ordinary person, but is revealed at the end as King of Faërie, to whom the Queen sends her cryptic message, ‘The time has come. Let him choose.’ Alf/Prentice, Smith/Prentice: what did Tolkien mean by this (for him) novel double duality?

I would suggest that, if the old Cook is a philologist-figure, and Nokes a critic-figure, the suspicion must be that Smith is a Tolkien-figure. Smith himself never becomes Cook, never bakes a Great Cake. It is perhaps fair to remark that Tolkien never produced a major full-length work on medieval literature. Against that Smith’s life is one of useful activity: pots, pans, bars, bolts, hinges, fire-dogs – or, one might say, lectures, tutorials, scripts, pupils. Furthermore Smith has the ability to pass into Faërie, and the mark of his strangeness is not only on his brow but in his song: he brings back visions for others. These visions furthermore expand. The doll ‘on one foot like a snow-maiden dancing’, the maiden ‘with flowing hair and kilted skirt’ who drags Smith into the dance, the Queen ‘in her majesty and her glory’ – all three are avatars of the Queen of Faërie, representing successively the tawdry images of former fantasy which are all the modern world has left, Tolkien’s own first attempts to produce something truer and better, his final awareness that what he had attempted had grown under his hand, from Hobbit to Silmarillion. The image of Smith apologising for his people, and being forgiven – ‘Better a little doll, maybe, than no memory of Faery at all. For some the only glimpse. For some the awaking’ – might be taken without too much strain as Tolkien forgiving himself for ‘Goblin Feet’. But still one is left with Alf.

He, perhaps, is born of a kind of weakness. Defeat hangs heavy in Smith of Wootton Major. Smith has to hand over his star, and return to Faërie no more; though he gains the right to say who shall have the star, his choice falls on Nokes’s blood, not his own. These points are hard to read except as a kind of valedictory, an admission of retirement – Smith is ‘An old man’s book’, as Tolkien said in Letters, p. 389. But Alf is there to put Smith into a longer history. There were men who wore the star of inspiration before Smith; in a later age there will be others; in any case that star, that inspiration, is only a fragment of a greater world, a world outside the little clearing of Wootton. Alf is there to reassure. His ‘message’, to put it with deliberate bathos, is that if stories have a particular quality of conviction or ‘inner consistency’, then they must (as Tolkien had said before) in some sense be true. The star on Smith’s brow that makes him sing is a guarantee of the existence of Faërie; by the same reasoning Tolkien’s drive to create a world came not from within him but from some world outside.

Of course Tolkien had no ‘Alf’ to reassure him or to ease his retirement. No doubt he wished very much that he had. Yet there is one further oddity to keep Smith of Wootton Major from being just a fable of self-justification. This comes from the story’s centre, i.e. the sequence of Smith’s Faërie visions. First he sees the great warship returning from the Dark Marches; then the Great Tree; then the lake of glass and firecreatures; then the maidens dancing; finally the Faërie Queen. In the third of these visions, though, we find an odd sequence of events. When Smith touches the lake he falls, while a great ‘boom’ raises a wild wind to sweep him away. He is saved by clinging to a birch:

and the Wind wrestled fiercely with them, trying to tear him away; but the birch was bent down to the ground by the blast and enclosed him in its branches. When at last the Wind passed on he rose and saw that the birch was naked. It was stripped of every leaf, and it wept, and tears fell from its branches like rain. He set his hand upon its white bark saying: ‘Blessed be the birch! What can I do to make amends, or give thanks?’ He felt the answer of the tree pass up from his hand: ‘Nothing’, it said. ‘Go away! The Wind is hunting you. You do not belong here. Go away and never return!’ (Tales, p. 159)

What is the birch that saves, the wind that threatens?

I have already suggested that while ‘oak’ and ‘Nokes’ in Tolkien’s private symbolism stand for literature and literary critics, the birch stands for the ‘B’ scheme of study, for philology, for the defiance of mere ‘literature’; and this is confirmed by two poems about birches in the 1936 collection Songs for the Philologists, given in the original and in translation in Appendix B. One is in Gothic, ‘Bagme Bloma’, or ‘Flower of the Trees’: this hails the birch as defier of wind and lightning, bandwa bairhta, runa goda, þiuda meina þjuþjandei, ‘bright token, good mystery, blessing my people’. The other is in Old English, ‘Éadig béo þu’ or ‘Blessed be you’. Its last stanza, in translation, reads: ‘Let us sing a cheerful song, praise the birch and birch’s race, the teacher, the student and the subject – may we all have health, joy and happiness. The oak shall fall into the fire, losing joy and life and leaf. The birch shall keep its glory long, shine splendidly over the bright plain.’ The birch, it seems, represents learning, severe learning, even discipline. But those who subject themselves to serious study – the ‘dull stodges’ of the ‘B’-scheme at Leeds University, perhaps, see above – are under its protection.⁵

The birch has one further association Tolkien did not miss. He respected the English and Scottish Popular Ballads collected by F.J. Child as being (see above) the last living relic of Northern tradition; in what is perhaps the most famous ballad of all the birch takes on a special role. ‘The Wife of Usher’s Well’ is about a widow who calls her drowned sons back from the dead:

It fell about the Martinmass,

When nights are lang and mirk,

The carlin wife’s three sons came hame,

And their hats were o the birk.

It neither grew in syke nor ditch,

Nor yet in any sheugh,

But at the gates o Paradise,

That birk grew fair eneugh.

The ‘birk’ is the birch; its wearers come to Middle-earth from another world; but they are not allowed to remain past dawn. In Lowry C. Wimberly’s Folklore in the English and Scottish Ballads (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928), Sir Walter Scott is quoted as having found a story of an apparition who wore the birch ‘to the end the wind of the world may not have power over me’. Smith’s Wind, then, could be the world; the birch is its traditional opponent, scholarly study; but that study, like the birch hats of the drowned sons, also acts as a passport, into and out of Middle-earth. It is a kind of Golden Bough; not between Earth and Hell, like Aeneas’s bough, but between Earth and Paradise.

All this has a bearing on Tolkien’s fable, and on his state of mind. The birch protects Smith, but is left naked and weeping. Did Tolkien feel he had exploited philology for his fiction? It also tells Smith to ‘go away and never return’, a command he cannot obey. Why should he have included this embargo, from within Faërie, against revisiting it? Did he feel, perhaps, that in writing his fiction he was trespassing in a ‘perilous country’ against some unstated law? The Songs for the Philologists again contain two poems (in Old English, and again in Appendix B) about mortals who trespass in the Other World and suffer for it, ‘Ides Ælfscýne’, about the ‘elf-fair maiden’ who lures the young man away only to return him to a land where he is a stranger, and ‘Ofer Wídne Gársecg’, where a young man is lured away by a mermaid, to the sea-bottom and (traditional motif) the forfeit of his soul. It seems that at times, at least, Tolkien thought that getting involved with Faërie was deeply dangerous. Though Smith of Wootton Major offers a reassurance that imaginative visions are true, it also declares, in a concealed way, in private images, that mortal men cannot wander in these visions all the time, without danger. They must give up and make their peace with the world.⁶

This thought is strengthened, if not confirmed, by Tolkien’s longest published poem, ‘The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun’ of 1945.⁷ Its kernel, interestingly, is also in Wimberly, who quotes the Breton song of ‘Le Seigneur Nann et la Fée’, about a childless lord who gets a fertility potion from a witch and promises her her own reward; later she leads him into the woods in the shape of a white hart, only to reveal herself and demand his love as payment. He refuses (unlike the young men in ‘Ides Ælfscýne’ and ‘Ofer Wídne Gársecg’), preferring death.⁸ To this story Tolkien has added a heavy weight of faith. The lord’s defiance of the Korrigan is associated explicitly with home and Christendom; but his sin has been to despair of Christianity in his childlessness, and take ‘cold counsel’, the grey and frozen potion of the witch. He would have done better to trust in ‘hope and prayer’, even if the prayer were unanswered. As an anonymous voice comments, when the potion brings Aotrou twins:

‘Would every prayer were answered twice!

the half or nought must oft suffice

for humbler men, who wear their knees

more bare than lords, as oft one sees.’

The Tolkienian moral of the story is: be content; be resigned; we can’t all have everything. One might note, coincidentally, that in the OED’s 1972 Supplement, ‘escapism’ is defined for the first time as ‘the practice of seeking distraction from what normally has to be endured’ (my italics). A fear of barrenness, of leaving no descendants, and with it a fear that the escape from forge or castle into fantasy may not be permitted – these are the themes of ‘Aotrou’ and of Smith, like goblin doubts padding through Tolkien’s mind. An End to ‘Glamour’

The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, which Tolkien put together with unusual speed in 1961–2, may seem to have little connection with the foregoing. It is one of his more light-hearted books, centring on a character essentially fearless and self-confident, and a good deal of it is evidently old material from a more cheerful period (poems 1, 3, 5–7 and 9–10), while more is in a similar mode and probably of similar age (poems 4, 8, 11–12). The collection did not however escape Tolkien’s ponderings over ‘depth’. A letter to Rayner Unwin (Letters, p. 315) shows him wondering how to create a ‘fiction’ which would enable him to draw early works into the world of The Lord of the Rings, and deciding to do it by means of a comic ‘editorial’ preface. He carried this out with great finesse, explaining for instance that the poem ‘Errantry’ (which he had really written in 1933, when he had no need to harmonise his rhymes with Quenya) was actually written by Bilbo after he had returned from the Lonely Mountain – and so had learnt something of elves – but before he retired to Rivendell and began to learn Elvish properly. Other poems are ascribed to Sam, or (no. 14,⁹ reworked from 1937) given a link with the still unpublished ‘Silmarillion’. But the collection also contains both old and new work which hints at a deep sadness in Tolkien, and at an old but growing uncertainty.

The most obvious case is no. 16, the last poem, called ‘The Last Ship’. In this Fíriel – once more a name which is really a description, ‘mortal woman’, Everywoman – gets up in the morning to go to the river, hears ‘A sudden music’, and sees the vision of the last elvish ship leaving Gondor. Where are they going, she asks, to Arnor, to Númenor? No, the elves reply, they are leaving Middle-earth for ever to go to the Undying Lands. Come with them, they call, escape from the world:

‘One more only we may bear.

Come! For your days are speeding.

Come! Earth-maiden elven-fair,

Our last call heeding.’

She takes a step towards them, but her feet sink ‘deep in clay’; she takes this as a sign.

‘I cannot come!’ they heard her cry.

‘I was born Earth’s daughter!’

She turns back to her home, but the life of the morning – cockcrow, sunlight, jewels of dew on her gown – has gone. She goes through the ‘dark door, / under the house-shadow’, puts on dull clothes, starts work. The last word of both the two last stanzas is ‘faded’, and in the last stanza Fíriel herself has disappeared. Clearly she is dead, and she condemned herself to it when she stopped with her feet in the clay. ‘Earth to earth, ashes to ashes’, says the Funeral Service, and in this poem ‘Earth-maiden’, ‘Middle-earth’ and death are all equated. The poem takes on even more point if one remembers the ballad-genre which Tolkien knew so well and imitated in his two early Songs just mentioned – the one in which the elves steal away a human man or woman to live with them in delight in ‘elf-hill’. ‘The Last Ship’ is an unprecedented reversal of that genre, in which the maiden refuses to go. It is true that she then avoids the risk of returning ‘disenchanted’ like Keats’s lover from ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’. She also turns from glamour to dullness and oblivion. The cockcrow at the start of the poem may hint at resurrection, but it does not carry the bravura of the cockcrow and the horns of Rohan in The Return of the King.¹⁰ The sense of loss is only increased if one compares the poem with its earlier and little-known version of 1934, when it had the title ‘Firiel’. The tone of ‘Firiel’ is much more optimistic than that of ‘The Last Ship’. Firiel here (I use the form with no accent to distinguish her from Fíriel in the later poem) is called to by the elves, fears to go with them, and turns back to the ‘dark door’, just as in the later poem, but the fleeting sense of regret and lost opportunity is rapidly buried by bustle. It is ‘a vision’ which fades, not ‘sunlight’; the last two stanzas are not of resignation but of cheerful activity; the last words are not ‘their song has faded’ but ‘please pass the honey’. There is a strong sense that Firiel has made the right decision, not, as in ‘The Last Ship’, an inevitable decision.

Other poems in the Bombadil collection also end with emptiness. No. 2, ‘Tom Bombadil Goes Boating’ (written 1962), seems to have very much the same outline as no. 1, ‘The Adventures of Tom Bombadil’ (rewritten with only minor changes from the version of 1934): in it Tom good-humouredly browbeats a succession of creatures, wren, kingfisher, otter, swan, hobbits and finally Farmer Maggot. In the end all help him, with a central scene of merry-making. Just the same, there is a suggestion that the whole thing is a dream:

Ere dawn Tom was gone: as dreams one half remembers,

some merry, some sad, and some of hidden warning.

Even his footprints are washed away, his boat vanishes, and all that is left is a pair of forgotten oars, which by themselves mean nothing. It is as if Tom has gone back to his natural world, leaving Maggot and his mortal friends to meet their own fate, separate from his. Certainly ‘Long they lay at Grindwall hythe for Tom to come and find them’ is a more ‘downbeat’ ending than ‘While fair Goldberry combed her tresses yellow’: Grindr in the Poetic Edda is the name of the gate that separates the living from the dead.

An even more striking revision comes in poem 15, titled ‘The Sea-Bell’, but in the editorial ‘fiction’ at the start given another title and a highly suggestive placing within the world of The Lord of the Rings. ‘It is the latest piece [in the collection]’, surmises Tolkien’s imaginary ‘editor’:

and belongs to the Fourth Age; but it is included here, because a hand has scrawled at its head Frodos Dreme. That is remarkable, and though the piece is most unlikely to have been written by Frodo himself, the title shows that it was associated with the dark and despairing dreams which visited him in March and October during his last three years. But there were certainly other traditions concerning Hobbits that were taken by the ‘wandering-madness’, and if they ever returned, were afterwards queer and uncommunicable. The thought of the Sea was ever-present in the background of hobbit imagination; but fear of it and distrust of all Elvish lore, was the prevailing mood in the Shire at the end of the Third Age, and that mood was certainly not entirely dispelled by the events and changes with which that Age ended. (TB, in Tales p. 64)

So the hobbits, like Fíriel, turned Earth-fast and Sea-shy. Meanwhile the remark that the piece could not have been by or about Frodo, but was about some other hobbit, is Tolkien’s bow to the fact that ‘The Sea-Bell’ is a thorough reworking of a piece he had written and published in 1934, before Frodo was thought of, called ‘Looney’.

Close comparison of the two shows, as with ‘Firiel’ and ‘The Last Ship’, an increasing darkness. Both are poems of ‘disenchantment’ (as ‘The Last Ship’ was not), and in both the speaker, who has been in a magic boat to a far land, finds himself hunted out of it by a ‘dark cloud’, and returned to lonely and ragged craziness, scorned by others. In ‘The Sea-Bell’, though, a whole series of significant changes has been made. For one thing the boat is much more like the boat of Fíriel, the last boat; when he sees it the voyager calls out ‘It is later than late!’, and leaps into it with a new haste. For another the menacing elements in the far country have been much expanded, with ‘glooming caves’ seen beneath the cliffs as soon as the speaker lands; in ‘Looney’ the impression of paradise lasted for a couple of stanzas. The ‘Sea-Bell’ landscape also includes ‘gladdon-swords’ (i.e. of wild iris) and ‘puffballs’ in the mould. One may remember that it was in the Gladden Fields that Isildur died, and that ‘puffballs’ were associated by Tolkien – since his ‘Preface’ to Walter Haigh’s Huddersfield Glossary of 1928, p. xviii – with ‘Dead Sea apples’ and the bitter fruit of the Cities of the Plain.

A more important change, though, is that in the later version the speaker seems in a way guilty, as ‘Looney’ did not. In both poems the ‘black cloud’ comes, but in the earlier it is for no reason, while in the later it appears to be called, or provoked, by the speaker presumptuously naming himself ‘king’. It casts him down, turns him into a kind of Orfeo-in-the-wilderness, till eventually he realises he must find the sea: ‘I have lost myself, and I know not the way, / but let me be gone!’ And seemingly as a result of that guilt the end is different. In ‘Looney’ the man returned from Paradise still had a shell in which he could hear the voice of the sea, as a kind of witness to what he had seen. In ‘The Sea-Bell’ the shell is there at the beginning, and it contains a call from across the seas; but at the end it is ‘silent and dead’:

Never will my ear that bell hear,

never my feet that shore tread,

never again, as in sad lane,

in blind alley and in long street

ragged I walk. To myself I talk;

for still they speak not, men that I meet.

In the later poem – as in Smith – the return to Faërie, even in memory, is banned. As for the mistaken title Frodos Dreme, what it suggests with great economy is, first of all, an age in which only the sacrifices of the War of the Ring are remembered (for some scribe has associated gloom with Frodo); and second, more indirectly, a sense of ultimate defeat and loss in the hero of The Lord of the Rings. Frodo doubted his own salvation. This could be seen as a dark illusion born of losing the ‘addictive’ Ring, but one senses that Tolkien was doubtful too: not of salvation, but of the legitimacy of his own mental wanderings. For many years he had held to his theory of ‘sub-creation’, which declared that since the human imagination came from God, then its products must come from God too, must be fragments of some genuine if other-worldly truth, guaranteed by their own ‘inner consistency’ and no more the artist’s own property than the star from Elfland was Smith’s.¹¹ But by the 1960s he was not so sure. It is hard not to think that by then he saw himself (perhaps only at times) as Fíriel, Farmer Maggot, Frodo, ‘Looney’ and eventually Smith – a mortal deserted by the immortals and barred from their company. He no longer imagined himself rejoining his own creations after death, like Niggle; he felt they were lost, like the Silmarils. The Lost Straight Road

Tolkien of course asked more than he had a right to. No one can expect fantasy to turn real, and all hopes for a star or shell or supernatural guarantee are bound to be disappointed. In any case these late and gloomy reactions have no bearing on The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings or The Silmarillion, which keep their own purely literary justification; the theory of ‘sub-creation’ is not needed. If it is the function of works of literature to enlarge their readers’ sympathies and help them understand what their own experience may not have taught them, then Tolkien’s fictions qualify on all counts. Certainly they are about ‘creatures who never existed’. Most novels are about ‘people who never existed’. The cry that ‘fantasy is escapist’ compared to the novel is only an echo of the older cry that novels are ‘escapist’ compared with biography, and to both cries one should make the same answer: that freedom to invent outweighs loyalty to mere happenstance, the accidents of history; and good readers should know how to filter a general applicability from a particular story. So Tolkien need not have yearned so much for a justification in fact and truth, nor felt such a sense of loss as ‘inspiration’ receded. Nevertheless the burden of his loss becomes greater if one realises how consistent and long-lasting Tolkien’s visions had been, especially his visions of that ‘earthly Paradise’ from which ‘Looney’ is returned and which Fíriel never reaches.

He remarked in later life (Letters, pp. 213, 347) that he had a ‘terrible recurrent dream’ of Atlantis and ‘the Great Wave, towering up, and coming in ineluctably over the trees and green fields’. He seems to have been haunted also by other visions which had to be expressed in narrative: of cities sculptured in lifeless stone (see the poem ‘The City of the Gods’, 1923, a forerunner of Pippin’s sight of Gondor in LOTR, pp. 734–5), of towers overlooking the sea (everywhere from ‘Monsters’ to the Tower Hills), most of all of beautiful unreachable countries across the ocean. Fascination with this may explain why the poem Pearl so appealed to him: it contains a land where grief is washed away, and in his poem of 1927, ‘The Nameless Land’, Tolkien wrote 60 lines in the complex Pearl-stanza describing a country further ‘Than Paradise’, and fairer ‘Than Tir-nan-Og’, the Irish land of the deathless. In ‘The Happy Mariners’ seven years before – also translated into Old English as ‘Tha Éadigan Sǽlidan’ – he saw himself looking out from ‘a western tower’ to the sea and the ‘fairy boats’ going through ‘the shadows and the dangerous seas’ to ‘islands blest’, from which a wind returns to murmur of ‘golden rains’. The longing for a Paradise on Earth, a paradise of natural beauty, was compelling and repeated and there before Tolkien took to fiction. But in the last poems the murmuring wind has ceased, and the sense of a barrier is much stronger.

There is a resolution of hope and prohibition, finally, in an extremely private poem by Tolkien, ‘Imram’, from 1955. This is based on the famous voyage by St Brendan (‘the Navigator’) from Ireland to the unknown countries of the West, found in many medieval versions and related to a whole Irish genre of imrama which includes the famous Imram Brain mac Febail or ‘Voyage of Bran son of Febal to the Land of the Living’. In the heavily Christianised Brendan-story, the saint hears of a Land of Promise in the West, and sets sail, to find islands of sheep and birds, a whale-island (like ‘Fastitocalon’, poem 11 in TB), islands of monks and sinners, till in the end they reach the Land of Promise – from which Brendan is sent back, to lay his bones in Ireland. In ‘Imram’ Tolkien assimilates this story very closely to his own fiction. His St Brendan can remember only three things from his journeys, a Cloud over ‘the foundered land’ (of Númenor), a Tree (full of voices neither human nor angelic but of a third ‘fair kindred’), and a Star, which marks the ‘old road’ leading out of Middle-earth ‘as an unseen bridge that on arches runs / to coasts that no man knows’. Brendan says he can remember these things, but never reach them; at the end of the poem he is dead, like Fíriel.

However there is in this poem an image of possible escape, drawn out further in The Silmarillion. There, at the end of ‘Akallabêth’, Tolkien records the Numenorean belief that once mariners had been able to sail from Middle-earth to Aman, but that with the drowning of Númenor the deathless lands were removed and the earth made round; though since ships still came and went from the Grey Havens:

the loremasters of Men said that a Straight Road must still be, for those that were permitted to find it. And they taught that, while the new world fell away, the old road and the path of the memory of the West still went on, as it were a mighty bridge invisible that passed through the air of breath and of flight (which were bent now as the world was bent), and traversed Ilmer which flesh unaided cannot endure, until it came to Tol Eressëa, the Lonely Isle, and maybe even beyond, to Valinor, where the Valar still dwell and watch the unfolding of the story of the world. And tales and rumours arose along the shores of the sea concerning mariners and men forlorn upon the water who, by some fate or grace or favour of the Valar, had entered in upon the Straight Way and seen the face of the world sink below them, and so had come to the lamplit quays of Avallónë, or verily to the last beaches on the margin of Aman, and there had looked upon the White Mountain, dreadful and beautiful, before they died.

For those that were permitted … by some fate or grace or favour. Tolkien was deeply attached to Middle-earth, and knew that his bones must lie in England as St Brendan’s in Ireland. His last works are full of resignation and bereavement. Still, if he had an inner hope, it might possibly have been that he too could take ‘the secret gate’, ‘the hidden paths’, ‘the Lost Straight Road’, and find the Land of Promise which was still within ‘the circles of the world’. It had happened to others. In the South English Legendary version of the ‘Life of St Brendan’, a maiden tells Abbot Beryn that he ought to thank Jesus Christ for leading him to the Paradise in the West, for:

‘Þis is þat lond þat he wole: zuyt are þe worldes ende

his dernelinges an erþe zyue: & hyder heo schulle wende.’

‘This is the country that [Christ] will give, before the end of the world, to his secret favourites on earth, and this is where they will come.’¹² That land would be both sanctified and earthly, an ideal ‘mediation’ for Tolkien. It must have increased his hope and longing to observe that the last line, about the ‘dernelinges’, is not in the text but (like ‘Frodos Dreme’) has been added in the margin by a later hand –as if some early but forgotten scribe had received a mysterious promise of his own. The promise lay in the philological detail; and the philology was true, even if the promise could not be expected to ‘come true’.

^* As often, I am amazed that I did not at first recognise this myself, for at the time of my first comments on Smith I was still holding Tolkien’s former position at the University of Leeds, and was in charge of the B-scheme, still in existence (though now no more). The B = birch equation, however, was no longer current.