CHAPTER 9
‘THE COURSE OF ACTUAL COMPOSITION’ The bones of the ox
In the introduction to his 1851 translation of Asbjörnsen and Moe’s collection of Norse fairy-tales, Sir George Dasent wrote that the reader ‘must be satisfied with the soup that is set before him, and not desire to see the bones of the ox out of which it has been boiled’.1 Dasent’s introduction was in fact one of the 19th-century classics of popularising philology, a highly revealing response to the situation described above; it is full of laudatory references to Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, of cross-connections between Norse and Scottish, or Norse and Sanskrit, and it makes a determined attempt to press on from comparative philology to comparative mythology. In this setting, what Dasent meant by his image was that he wanted his reader to accept his conclusions, and not demand to see the philological ‘workings’ on which they were based. Tolkien did not approve. Nevertheless, he was struck by the image, and repeated it in his essay ‘On Fairy-Stories’. Only what he meant by it, he said, was this:
By ‘the soup’ I mean the story as it is served up by the author or teller, and by ‘the bones’ its sources or material – even when (by rare luck) those can be with certainty discovered. (‘OFS’, in Tree, p. 20)
In other words, critics should study stories in their final forms, as ‘served up’ or published, not in their intermediate stages. At the time Tolkien wrote these words,2 much of ‘the Silmarillion’ at least had been written several times over, as The Lord of the Rings eventually would be. If Tolkien had had foresight into the future, one may wonder, would he have felt that his ban on wanting to see ‘the bones of the ox’ should have been extended from fairy-tale collections (which of course may well have had an especially complex history) to his own fictional works?
There are reasons why he might. A major danger must be that too much study of ‘the bones’ makes ‘the soup’ lose its savour. In other words again, it could destroy the appeal, or charm, or ‘glamour’ of a finished work to know that some particularly cherished feature of it was in fact only an authorial accident; while too much awareness of wrong turnings the author might have taken could blur one’s final sense of the right turning he did take. The risks are manifold. In the case of The Lord of the Rings, one might fear that too much looking at intermediate stages (in this case volumes VI–IX of ‘The History of Middle-earth’) could blur the edges of one’s perception of the final stage, or of the work as published (for even after publication Tolkien continued to have afterthoughts, as one sees from both the Unfinished Tales and volume XII of ‘The History of Middle-earth’); while in the case of The Silmarillion –which in a real sense never reached a final stage at all – over-careful picking over of volumes I–V and X–XI of ‘The History’ could easily lead to the loss of any sense of structure whatsoever.
If that were all that could happen, this chapter would have remained unwritten. Nevertheless one has to face the fact that much of ‘The History of Middle-earth’ demands to be taken as ‘ox-bones’ – though a proportion of it is unpublished original work and some at least of the ‘bones’, like the Book of Lost Tales, are easy to read in their own right – and furthermore that the kind of reaction I have just suggested is at least a possibility, or, some of the time, a certainty. Yet one may reflect that much of the trouble (and here one loses contact with Dasent’s image and with Tolkien’s application of it) lies with the reader, and not with the author at all.
Other authors than Tolkien have for example created amazement in their readers by their seeming utter inability to understand the logic of what they were doing. Charles Dickens was upset and alarmed when it was called to his attention that many of his heroes or hero/villain pairs had names beginning with his own initials, C.D.; while his surviving worksheets for David Copperfield (this time D.C.) show that he got even the totally transparent name Murdstone – for the murderous stepfather who replaces the dead father under the gravestone – simply by writing a string of names across a page till he got one that felt right: Hasden Murdle Murden Murdstone.3 Dickens never asked himself, seemingly, why ‘Murdstone’ felt right. In exactly the same way Tolkien dealt with several important queries by writing out a string of names, like ‘Marhad Marhath Marhelm Marhun Marhyse Marulf’ (Treason, p. 390), or – these are for Aragorn – ‘Elfstone … Elfstan, Eledon, Aragorn, Eldakar, Eldamir, Qendemir’ (Treason, p. 276), or – these are for Shadowfax – ‘Narothal, Fairfax, Snowfax, Firefoot [,] Arod? Aragorn?’ (Shadow, p. 351). It is a surprise to learn that Aragorn could ever have been a name for a horse; even more surprising, given what is said about the meaning of the name, above, that Saruman could have been the meaningless ‘Saramond’ (Treason, p. 70). I do not think there is any doubt that Murdstone in David Copperfield does ‘mean’ what is said above, and there is even less doubt about Saruman, whose name is a philological crux. But neither Dickens nor Tolkien seems to have started off with meaning; rather with sound.
All this comes as a shock. It may also prove an irritation. At one point (Lost Road, p. 217) Christopher Tolkien remarks of a passage in the carefully prepared 1937 ‘Quenta Silmarillion’, ‘Elwë here, confusingly, is nor Thingol’, with a paragraph of explanation to follow. ‘Confusingly’ is putting it rather mildly. It seems unlikely that anyone at all could ever keep in mind all the variations and permutations which Tolkien carried out on his elvish characters for The Silmarillion. Finrod becomes Finarfin; Inglor becomes Finrod; besides the Ellu/Elwë/Olwë alternatives, one finds Elwë ‘Thingol’ (more accurately Elu Thingol in Sindarin, Elwë Singollo in Quenya) at different times as Ellon, Tinthellon, Tinto’ellon, Tinwelint, Tintaglin. Some of these changes are there to show the processes of language-change which were a major part of Tolkien’s creativity from the beginning (see BLT 1, p. 48, a passage written c.1919). But there are also signs of a continuous and seemingly-random fiddling, which generates for instance diagram after diagram of the relations between the various tribes, groupings or languages of the elves, see BLT 1, p. 50, Shaping, p. 44, Lost Road pp. 181–3, etc. Just as with Finrod or Thingol, it is at best confusing, at worst irritating, to discover that the Teleri were at one time the senior, at another the junior branch of the ‘Light-elves’; and that the change really does not seem to make much difference! I have used the term ‘fiddling’. But Tolkien commented more accurately on this tendency in himself in an interesting passage in Part 2 of ‘The Notion Club Papers’, in Sauron Defeated, pp. 239–40. There the character Lowdham criticises the very activity of inventing languages, that ‘secret vice’ of which Tolkien accused himself in Essays, pp. 198–223. Lowdham says:
‘Anyone who has ever spent (or wasted) any time on composing a language will understand me. Others perhaps won’t. But in making up a language you are free: too free … When you’re just inventing, the pleasure or fun is in the moment of invention; but as you are the master your whim is law, and you may want to have the fun all over again, fresh. You’re liable to be for ever niggling, altering, refining, wavering, according to your linguistic mood and to your changes of taste.’
Lowdham goes on to say that the languages he finds coming to him are not like that, and I have also omitted a section in which Lowdham says there are constraints on any conscientious inventor. Yet the word italicised above – the italics are mine – is a significant one. Tolkien used it elsewhere as the name of the character in his self-descriptive allegory ‘Leaf by Niggle’ (see above). He knew that one of his temptations was ‘to niggle’ i.e. (OED) ‘to spend work or time unnecessarily on petty details; to be over-elaborate in minor points’. He could not do this (so much) with real philology, because there the data were available to others. But where ‘his whim was law’, in inventing his own languages (geographies, genealogies), he was likely to give in to temptation. Of course we should never have known it if we did not have, in this case, ‘the bones of the ox’. But the revelation could create unease.
There are other surprising criticisms of Tolkien latent in ‘The History of Middle-earth’. Sometimes, and in contrast to the ‘niggling’ just discussed, he was stubborn to the point of pig-headedness about sticking to names, apparently in total incomprehension of their likely effect on contemporary readers. He kept using the term ‘Gnomes’ for the Noldor till at least 1937, in confidence that ‘to some “Gnome” will still suggest knowledge’, through its connection with Greek gnome, ‘intelligence’ (see BLT 1, pp. 43–4). To some, possibly. However to all but a vanishingly small proportion of English speakers, ‘gnome’ has lost all connection with its Greek root, and means instead a small, vulgar, garden ornament, very hard to take seriously. Similarly, as remarked above, Tolkien stuck to the name ‘Trotter’ while the character who bore it changed from a wandering hobbit to a hobbit-Ranger to a human Ranger to the last descendant of the kings of old. Very late in the construction of The Lord of the Rings Aragorn, or ‘Strider’ as he eventually became, is still declaring (War, p. 390), ‘But Trotter shall be the name of my house, if ever that be established; yet perhaps in the same high tongue it shall not sound so ill …’ Wrong! For ‘trot’, as the OED rightly says, implies ‘short, quick motion in a limited area’, and is quite inconsonant with dignity when applied to a tall Man. Tolkien (we can see with hindsight) should have dropped the idea much earlier, along with much else: his preference for ‘hobbit-talk’ over action (see Shadow, p. 108), his strangely hostile picture of Farmer Maggot (Shadow, p. 291), his inhibiting confusions over the number and names of the hobbits with the Ring-bearer, over Gandalf’s letter via Butterbur, and the general ‘spider’s web’ of argumentation near the start of Lord of the Rings (see Treason, p. 52).
Meanwhile and conversely, it is almost dismaying – at least to the critic – to see what seem to be absolutely essential elements both of The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings excluded sometimes till virtually the last moment. The Ring is ‘Not very dangerous, when used for good purpose’, says a naïve note in Shadow, p. 42, and cp. above; ‘it is indeed a remarkable feature of the original mythology’, says Christopher Tolkien, ‘that though the Silmarils were present they were of such relatively small importance’ (BLT 1, p. 156, and cp. above). A harmless Ring, meaningless Silmarils: as one reads through ‘The History of Middle-earth’ it is possible to feel – and this applies especially to a reader who knows the finished works well – that Tolkien did not know what he was doing. Tolkien himself once imagined summoning the scribes of the Ancrene Wisse from the dead, to indicate silently to them minor errors of grammar (see above). If we were to do this to the shade of Tolkien, it would be hard not to put one’s finger on Aragorn’s ‘Trotter’ sentence just quoted without, perhaps, a look of quizzical reproach.
Yet having said all this – and it has been said with deliberately unmitigated bluntness – one has to consider in the end exactly what one’s criticism may be. It seems hardly fair to criticise an author for not writing the book one would have liked; even less fair to complain that he did write the book one would have liked, but failed to manage it on the first try! Perhaps the real danger in picking over ‘the bones of the ox’ is no more than this: it comes as a threat to our general notion of creativity. In our often dimly-perceived ‘model’ of the author at work, there is a tendency to think of him or her as following a Grand Design to which only the author is privy, and which is both central inspiration and guiding star. Critics often search for this – certainly that is what I was doing in 1970 when Tolkien wrote me the letter referred to in my ‘Preface’ to this volume, and from which the title for this chapter is taken. Discovering that the author does not have a guiding star, and is trying things out at random, can be a disillusionment; as can the realisation that the Grand Design (the Silmarils, the nature of the Ring) was in fact one of the last things to be noticed. Yet such disillusionment is in a sense only in the reader’s head, nothing to do with the work or indeed the author. And one thing that following the progress of a work through ‘the course of actual composition’ can do is provide one with a more truthful model of the way that authors work – Tolkien being in this case (one may well suspect) more representative of authors in general than one might suppose, except in two respects: the very long gestation period of all his works, and his deep reluctance ever to discard a draft.
Nor need one abandon absolutely the notions of guiding star or Grand Design. For all the many surprises, false roads or spiders’ webs of ‘The History of Middle-earth’, it still demonstrates very conclusively that Tolkien did have an overpowering urge towards expressing something, something which kept on pulling him even if he had lost (or not yet gained) clear sight of it. Do we now have a better image of the something? And can we find a better ‘model’ of the way Tolkien’s creativity worked? These questions are considered in the rest of this chapter. Lost road, waste land
Tolkien had a theory, at least, about the second of the two questions above, which he expressed in a repeated fiction, or fictional debate – one hesitates to call it a story. This exists in two main forms, ‘The Lost Road’, from c. 1937, printed in The Lost Road pp. 36–104; and, written some eight or nine years later, at a time when he might have been expected to be fully occupied with The Lord of the Rings, ‘The Notion Club Papers’, printed in Sauron Defeated, pp. 145–327.4 The fictions are close enough to each other almost to be described in Christopher Tolkien’s term (see Shadow, p. 3) as ‘phases’. They have at least strong common elements, if not a common root.
The most obvious of these, not at all surprisingly, is continuous playing with names. In ‘The Lost Road’ the key names are two from an ancient Germanic legend, written down by Paul the Deacon in the eighth century, but dealing with events of the sixth. This germinal story tells of a king of the Lombards – for their importance to Tolkien see below – called Audoin. He refused as it were to ‘knight’ his son Alboin after a battle, because Alboin had not yet received arms from a neighbouring king, as was the custom of this people, evidently and rightly designed to avoid favouritism. Alboin accordingly went to the king he had just defeated, and whose son he had just killed, and asked him to grant him arms, with a kind of noble or quixotic confidence in King Thurisind’s magnanimity. His confidence was not misplaced; Alboin received his arms and his ‘knighthood’; though he repaid the favour only with a series of brutalities leading to his own later murder, for forcing his wife to drink a toast from her father’s skull, accompanied by what one can only call the orcish pleasantry of inviting her ‘to drink merrily with her father’.
What caught Tolkien’s eye in this was evidently not the story but the names: Alb-oin = Old English Ælf-wine = ‘elf-friend’, Aud-oin = Old English Ead-wine = ‘friend of prosperity, bliss-friend’. ‘Elf-friend’: why should people be given names like that, consistently, over many centuries from the sixth to the eleventh, and from countries as far apart as Italy and England, if there had not been some original conception behind it? Audoin meanwhile had survived even into modern times, via Ead-wine, as the modern English Edwin. Did this not suggest that there was still some form of living tradition in the names and their meanings? Another element was the Old English name Os-wine, or ‘god-friend’, also surviving, if not very often, in the name Oswin (cp. Oswald). From these survivals and indications of continuity Tolkien began to sketch out a story about progression: from a modern day three-generation family tree (which ran Oswin – Alboin – Audoin, all of its members philologically conscious of the forms and meanings of their own names), back to the Lombardic son and father, and then back further to the mythic Germanic past, to Irish legend, to the unrecorded men of the Ice Age, and through them to Númenor. But in Númenor the names would be of different form, though identical meaning: Elenchi = ‘elf-friend’ = Alboin, Herendil = ‘bliss-friend’ = Audoin, Valandil = ‘god-friend, friend of the Valar’ = Oswin. Moreover in Númenor the meanings of the names would be much more pointed, even incipiently antithetic: for in Númenor just before its fall to be a friend of the elves, or even worse a friend of the Valar, was to risk death by sacrifice to Morgoth. Elendil and his son Herendil are indeed in Tolkien’s story of ‘The Lost Road’ almost on the brink of separation, for the son, less wise than his father, seeks ‘bliss’ rather than truth, and bliss seems to his generation to be best achieved by obedience to their rulers and rebellion against the gods.
Yet Tolkien never achieved a full story on this theme. ‘The Lost Road’ is, even in outline, only a sequence of oppositions; plus a thesis about how events of the past might come to be known, through dreams and through a sort of linguistic vision. A great part of ‘The Lost Road’ in fact consists of detailing how Alboin, the modern English son, later to become a professor, finds coming to him from outside – not via his own invention – snatches of languages, including the ‘Elf-Latin’ Quenya, as well as Old English and even Old Germanic (the *-ancestor of Old English, Gothic, and Lombardic as well). This trail soon petered out, with Tolkien sending his narrativeless ‘Lost Road’ fragment to Stanley Unwin in 1937, after the success of The Hobbit, having it rejected (no doubt with utter incomprehension), and dropping the idea for eight years, during which he was writing the bulk of The Lord of the Rings. Yet when he revived it, as ‘The Notion Club Papers’, with an apology to Sir Stanley for ever having troubled him with ‘The Lost Road’, what he did, with remarkable stubbornness, was to persist in not inventing a story, and instead to expand on what one might now call his obsessive playing with names and brooding on the question of transmission.
Part One of ‘The Notion Club Papers’ opens with a rejection of C. S. Lewis’s device of using mere machinery (a spaceship, an eldil-powered coffin) to get his characters to Mars or Venus. The right way to explore other worlds, says Ramer, the main speaker at this point, is via dreams and via the languages you hear in them. But then in a strange switch, one of the most sceptical and persistent of his hearers, Lowdham, starts to speak with tongues and to see visions even during the course of the Club’s own meetings, while he also starts to record snatches of languages very similar to those of Alboin in ‘The Lost Road’. Further, an undergraduate member of the Club, John Jethro Rashbold, begins to speak with tongues as well; while a fourth member, Wilfrid Trewin Jeremy, somehow joins Lowdham inside one of Lowdham’s own dreams – a vision of Anglo-Saxon England in King Alfred’s time – as Tréo-wine (another -wine name, this time ‘pledge-friend’).
All the characters who speak are, rather evidently, reflections of Tolkien himself. Ramer is a professor of philology, Lowdham a lecturer on English language; Rashbold’s last name is a ‘calque’ of Tolkien’s (from German toll-kühn = ‘crazy-bold’), while his middle name, ‘Jethro’ is linked with Tolkien’s third name ‘Reuel’ in the Old Testament; and though Christopher Tolkien regards the theory as ‘unlikely’ (Sauron Defeated, p. 189), it seems plausible that ‘ramer’ is in fact meant to be the dialect word ‘raver, babbler’, and so to fit Tolkien’s repeated self-image as one who sees visions and dreams and is accordingly stigmatised by others as a ‘looney’ (see his poem of that name from 1934 and its later revision, above). As for Alwin Arundel Lowdham and Wilfred Trewin Jeremy, Alwin and Trewin are variants on the ‘x-friend’ series with which this discussion started, while Arundel – normal English surname that it is – is also a modernised version of Anglo-Saxon Éarendel, or Eärendil, the great Intercessor between gods and Middle-earth of Tolkien’s mythology. What these two fictional ‘phases’ tell us about the way Tolkien’s creativity worked – or the way he thought it worked – is surely this: he thought that ideas were sent to him in dreams, and through the hidden resonances of names and languages. He thought that the dreams and the ideas did not come from his own mind but might – like the names, after all – be the record or memory of something that once might have had an objective existence. A sceptic would naturally say that this belief is just another illusion, that the conviction that a dream ‘comes from outside’ comes from the inside, just like the dream. In reply to this (or possibly in agreement with it) I would point only to my remarks above about the disorienting effects of studying the history of early literature philologically, so that ‘the thing which was perhaps eroded most of all was the philologists’ sense of a line between imagination and reality’. Once one had got used to tracing linguistic correspondences with absolute confidence that they did represent reality, it was a rather easy step to assuming that the guide to reality was one’s own sense of linguistic correspondences. Tolkien’s creativity, as this book has said many times, came from somewhere between the two positions expressed in the last sentence.
But if his playing with words and names tells us something of how he worked, what was he working on? What do all these varied relationships between people mean, and what was the ‘something’ that pulled him on, whether he had a Grand Design or not? A major theme, at least, is signalled by the two separate fragments of Old English which Tolkien wrote, rewrote, and worked into both ‘Lost Road’ and ‘Notion Club Papers’ as genuine ‘transmissions’ from the past. The first of these is genuine: that is to say, it comes from a real, surviving Old English poem, The Seafarer, though adapted by Tolkien in both versions he gave. In ‘The Lost Road’ the lines come to an Old English poet, Ælfwine, as he chants them to a crowded hall:
Monað modes lust mid mereflode
forð to feran, þæt ic feor heonan
ofer hean holmas, ofer hwæles eðel
elþeodigra eard gesece.
Nis me to hearpan hyge ne to hringþege
ne to wife wyn ne to worulde hyht
ne ymb owiht elles nefne ymb yða gewealc.
‘The desire of my spirit urges me to journey forth over the flowing sea, that far hence across the hills of water and the whale’s country I may seek the land of strangers. No mind have I for harp, nor gift of ring, nor delight in women, nor joy in the world, nor concern with aught else save the rolling of the waves.’ (Lost Road, p. 84)
The moment Ælfwine chooses to chant this is highly inappropriate. He is in a king’s hall, full of Dane-hunters and experienced warriors. Their view is that if Ælfwine would rather go to sea than receive gifts in the hall, let him get on with it! His yearning for the rolling waves leaves him socially isolated, a ‘raver’, a ‘looney’. In ‘The Notion Club Papers’ Alwin Lowdham the linguist appears to be Ælfwine come again. One windy evening in 1954 he ‘picks up’ the seven lines just quoted, except that (a) they are in the Old Mercian dialect, not Old West Saxon, and (b) lines 3 and 4 have become:
obaer gaarseggaes grimmae holmas
aelbuuina eard uut gisoecae
‘that I seek over the ancient water’s awful mountains Elf-friends’ island in the Outer-world.’ (SD, p. 243)
The other repeated passage of Old English verse in these two works – this time one entirely original to Tolkien – runs as follows:
Thus cwæth Ælfwine Wídlást:
Fela bith on Westwegum werum uncúthra
wundra and wihta, wlitescéne land,
eardgeard elfa, and ésa bliss.
Lyt ǽnig wát hwylc his longath síe
thám the eftsíthes eldo getwǽfeth.
‘Thus said Ælfwine the far-travelled: “there is many a thing in the West-regions unknown to men, marvels and strange beings, a land fair and lovely, the homeland of the Elves, and the bliss of the Gods. Little doth any man know what longing is his whom old age cutteth off from return”.’
This time the lines come in ‘The Lost Road’ (p. 44) to Alboin, a twentieth-century teenager, again in a dream, and he tells them to his father. Yet doing so is still socially inappropriate. The last two lines sound insolent when said by a young man to an old one – to one who is in fact about to die – and as soon as Alboin quotes them, ‘He suddenly regretted translating them.’ His father indeed remarks that he did not need to be told: for him there will only be a forthsith, the compelled journey of Death which both Bede and Niggle were sent on (see above), no eftsith, no going back. Once again these lines recur to Lowdham in ‘The Notion Club Papers’, with only two words added: Ælfwine Wídlást is now Eadwines sunu, Edwin’s (or Audoin’s) son. But on this occasion Alwin Lowdham cannot wound his father: his father did not wait for eldo, old age, but put to sea in 1947 in his boat The Eärendel and was never seen again. Drowned, or killed by a floating mine? Or did he succeed, perhaps, in finding the aelbuuina eard, the eardgeard elfa which is the common theme of both poems, the ‘Elf-friends’ island, the homeland of the elves’?
The recurrent motifs in these repeated passages are: the existence of an Earthly Paradise somewhere in the West; it being known to a select body of ‘Elf-friends’, whether in Old or modern England; the knowledge leading to a state of baffled yearning, or langoth; but return to the Paradise being irrevocably cut off, whether by old age (as for the ‘Lost Road’ father), or by physical impossibility (the theme, in a way, of the long ‘Notion Club’ discussion of the devices of C. S. Lewis). Nor is it hard to interpret the motifs. No one could avoid the thought that the frustrated visionaries (Ælfwine, Alboin, Alwin Lowdham) represent Tolkien himself. But to this one should surely add the reflection that so do the visionaries’ fathers: the missing father of Lowdham, the father-about-to-die of Alboin. The repeated father-son pairings in these debates all attempt to convey a kind of dialogue within Tolkien himself, as indeed does the whole ‘Notion Club’ scenario with its revealingly-named members. One half of Tolkien, one might say, was urging his spirit out across the sea, to visions of Paradise and discontent with the world; another half was telling him this was a waste of time. And, surprisingly, was threatening him with the shadow of eldo, old age, before he himself had passed his forties. A further indication of a kind of ‘split personality’ surfaces in ‘The Lost Road’, when Elendil in Númenor hears a song sung by one Fíriel, and feels his heart sink. It is odd that this should be his reaction, for Fíriel is the name of the mortal maiden who, in another poem by Tolkien from 1934 (see above) rejected passage into the West, with the words ‘I was born Earth’s daughter’. It seems as if Fíriel has changed her mind and accepted passage to the West; though, it is true, only to Númenor, not to Valinor and the lands of true immortality. Fíriel, one should add (see Lost Road p. 382), is also a name of Lúthien: the maiden who chose mortality.
The total significance of this complex of splits, doublings, transmissions and reincarnations cannot perhaps be grasped. Still, it is clear that Tolkien’s major theme – or so it seemed to him in these self-reflective fictions – was Death: its pain and its necessity, the urge to escape from it, the duty and the impossibility of resignation. And Tolkien saw this theme not only in fiction or in dream, but also in history and archaeology. Lowdham’s father tried to escape from Death physically in his boat The Eärendel; possibly he succeeded, but probably not. Tolkien suggested repeatedly that the well-known ship-burials of England and Scandinavia, real burials like the ones at Sutton Hoo or at Vendel in Sweden, were motivated by some similar urge to escape. The custom went back, he said, to a belief in – or memory of – a land ruled by the gods in the West to which:
in shadow the dead should come … bearing with them the shadows of their possessions, who could in the body find the True West no more. Therefore in after days many would bury their dead in ships, setting them forth in pomp upon the sea by the west coasts of the ancient world. (SD, p. 338)
Yet even then this belief can have seemed little more satisfying than the Númenórean success in achieving, not immortality, but the art of preserving corpses. To those who remained the wrong side of the ‘Sundering Sea’, the world came to be like the dreary land, the waste land, of Tréowine’s song in SD pp. 273–6, identical, except in being set out as prose rather than alliterative verse, with the poem of ‘King Sheave’ attached to ‘The Lost Road’ (pp. 87–90):
‘No lord they had, no king, nor counsel, but the cold terror that dwelt in the desert, the dark shadow that haunted the hills and the hoar forest: Dread was their master. Dark and silent, long years forlorn, lonely waited the hall of kings, house forsaken without fire or food.’
For Tolkien there was no ‘eucatastrophe’ (to use his own term, ‘OFS’, Tree p. 68). The sense of age and exclusion seems to have grown on him more and more strongly (see chapter 8 above, passim). Yet those feelings seem now to have been with him from the very beginning, while he was still a young man in his early twenties. Another phrase common to both ‘Lost Road’ and ‘Notion Club Papers’ is (in various languages) westra lage wegas rehtas, nu isti sa wraithas, ‘a straight way lay westward, now it is bent’. But this thought, if not the geography behind it, had been with Tolkien since 1916. The Book of Lost Tales opens with ‘The Cottage of Lost Play’. In the cottage, though, Eriol the wanderer is told of another cottage, in the past, in Valinor, to which the children of men could come by the Path of Dreams. Vairë, explaining this, says ‘It has been said to me, though the truth I know not, that that lane ran by devious routes to the homes of Men’. The routes are ‘devious’; they were not then ‘bent’. But even then taking the path was dangerous, for according to old tradition human children who had once seen Elfland were liable on return to become ‘strange and wild’. That lane is blocked now, says Vairë. Yet it seems that the children of his cottage are able to travel the other way, to find lonely children in the Great Lands, i.e. our world, Middle-earth, or ‘those that are punished or chidden’, and comfort them.
There is a ‘Peter Pan’ element about all this which Tolkien almost immediately dropped and thereafter disliked, but one has to say that the Path of Dreams was one of the most stable elements of his thinking, from 1916 to at least 1946. It is easy enough to call it ‘escapist’, and indeed the idea of the Great Escape from Death surfaces in Tolkien’s mythology again and again. Yet one has to say (and see further below) that he never gave way to it. No doubt it was a temptation for a young man, in the middle of a great war, with no close living relatives and most of his friends dead, to lose himself in dreams of a world where none of this need be true; to construct a myth as context for the dreams; and then to rake together from his learning an elaborate self-justification for the myth. But if Tolkien did this, one has to admit that he also gave equal space, equal prominence to the loss and resignation. He had, moreover, more than purely personal motives in elaborating the complex stories which ‘The Lost Road’ and ‘The Notion Club Papers’ were attempting to authenticate. A mythology for England
A similar blend of fantasy and fact can be seen in Tolkien’s attempt, not so much to create a ‘mythology for England’ – an intention and a phrase which have often been ascribed to him5 – as a mythology of England. One extremely unexpected aspect of Tolkien’s early writings is his determined identification of England with Elfland. As soon as this phrase is used it sounds implausible, as Tolkien would have sensed as acutely as anyone. Nevertheless he persisted in trying to equate the two places. Tol Eressëa, the Lonely Isle, is England; Kortirion, the town of the exiles from Kôr, is Warwick; Tavrobel on Tol Eressëa ‘would afterwards be the Staffordshire village of Great Haywood’ (BLT 1, p. 25). How can these equations be made out, and what is the point of them?
At their heart, perhaps, is awareness of the paradoxical nature of a ‘mythology for England’. England must be the most demythologised country in Europe, partly as a result of 1066 (which led to near-total suppression of native English belief, see above), partly as a result of the early Industrial Revolution, which led to the extinction of what remained rather before the era of scholarly interest and folk-tale collectors like the Grimms. If Tolkien was to create an English mythology, he would first (given his scholarly instincts) have to create a context in which it might have been preserved.
His earliest attempts to do this centre on the figure of Ottor ‘Wǽfre’, Ottor the Wanderer, also known as Eriol: as it were a dual ancestral figure, a point from which two chains of transmission ran, the one authentic, the other invented, but both determinedly native and English. In Tolkien’s thinking, Ottor/Eriol was by his first wife the father of Hengest and Horsa, in early but authentic legend the invaders of Britain and the founders of England. But by his second wife he was to be the father of Heorrenda, a harper of English (and Norse) legend, about whom nothing else is known – an image, therefore, of the fantastic ‘lost’ tradition which Tolkien was about to invent. Tol Eressëa too, the place where Eriol learns this lost tradition – to become The Book of Lost Tales and in time The Silmarillion – is an image of similar duality. Tolkien changed his story about Tol Eressëa, the Lonely Isle, almost as often as he changed his views about elvish languages, but one stable thing about it is that it is unstable. It is the island drawn repeatedly eastward and westward across the sea to convey the elves to Valinor; it is drawn across the sea also to bring the elvish expedition of rescue to Middle-earth. Even when it is ‘in place’, so to speak, as when it is visited by Eriol, it is not quite a part of Valinor, and still ‘by devious ways’ in touch with the world of men. It is in short a ‘medial’ or ‘liminal’ place, a place ‘neither one thing nor the other’, just as Eriol is a ‘medial’ person. In Tolkien’s story, could one call Eriol an Englishman? Hardly. He was born in what is now Germany, just south of the Danish border. Yet he was the father of Englishmen, of the founders of England. He goes back to a time (just) before the beginnings of tradition. In the same way Tol Eressëa in Eriol’s time is still off the coast of Valinor, not off the coast of Europe, but is (just) about to shift and enter the real world of true history. Significantly it is seo unwemmede ieg, in Old English ‘the unstained land’, with ‘stain’ used in the same sense as in the description of Lothlórien, see above. It is a place before the Fall, so to speak, the Fall being in some way the start of English history. Tolkien was setting his tales in a context at once unaffected by the disappointments of English tradition (maimed and mangled for us by time and neglect), and yet with a clear channel into it.
There are many logical difficulties with this idea – where, for instance, could one fit in the Roman occupation of Britain? – and Tolkien did not try to follow it through. Indeed he showed his dissatisfaction with it before very long by converting Eriol to Ælfwine (with evident connection to the themes discussed above), and by setting the whole tale in a distinctly later period, not the fifth century of Hengest and Horsa, but at least four hundred years later. What advantage did Tolkien think he might gain from this? Arguably, the move was one of slight desperation. As has been said, almost nothing is known of native English tradition, especially pre-Christian tradition. There has accordingly long been an impulse among comparative mythologists, like Dasent, to seize on the cognate Norse tradition, and either to say that the English are really half-Norse, or else that they were really rather like the Norse, so that you can argue back from the one to the other. Sometimes Tolkien took the latter route: Christopher Tolkien notes in BLT 1, p. 245, that his father took an Old Norse mythological name, Askr, and ‘anglicised’ it philologically to Æsc. And while Tolkien senior was not much taken by the former route, he retained at least an awareness of the Norse contribution to England. Ælfwine is thus, in Tolkien’s second self-authenticating story, actually a slave of the Forodwaith, the Men of the North who have invaded England as they did in fact from the ninth century on, ‘and his boyhood knew evil days’ (BLT 2, 314). But after he has escaped, been wrecked, and been rescued by the strange, ancient, stone-shoed Man of the Sea, a further storm casts up on his island a wrecked dragon-ship, with in it the corpse of Ælfwine’s former master. Ælfwine says ‘he slew my father; and long was I his thrall, and Orm men called him, and little did I love him’. The Man of the Sea, with his greater knowledge, does not contradict Ælfwine, but he puts a different view: ‘And his ship shall it be that bears you from this Harbourless Isle … and a gallant ship it was of a brave man, for few folk have now so great a heart for the adventures of the sea as have these Forodwaith’. Norsemen, it seems, are at least ambiguous: enemies, but worthy of respect. Tolkien never lost this ambiguity about the Old Norse heathen tradition, as one can see from his manoeuvrings between English and Norse ascriptions in ‘The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth’, discussed above. Yet the post-Viking setting of the Ælfwine story may have been felt by him as an excuse for bringing that tradition in; and indeed much of The Book of Lost Tales consists of evident borrowings, more or less ‘anglicised’, from Norse mythology. The chaining of Melko (BLT 2, pp. 100–104) recalls the chaining of Loki by the gods of Ásgarthr; in the same passage Tulkas is teased very much as Thórr is in the Norse poem Þrymskviða; the three weavers on p. 217, though labelled with words for time in Old English, strongly resemble the Norse Norns with their names Urthr, Verthandi and Skuld (or ‘Past, Present, Future’); the dragon’s heart, dwarf’s curse and dwarvish necklace of BLT 2 all have evident analogues from the Eddas. Yet once again what all this shows most clearly is how difficult it has become to create a ‘mythology for England’ out of pure English material! Tolkien tried a pre-English story with Eriol and a part-English story with Ælfwine, and saw a prospect of repair or liberation in both: yet neither was entirely adequate for the claim he would so much have liked to make, that the Engle, the English, after all ‘have the true tradition of the fairies, of whom the Iras and the Wéalas (the Irish and Welsh) tell garbled things’ (BLT 2, p. 290).
Tolkien, it can be felt, was jealous of the much better-preserved Welsh and Irish folk-traditions, as of the Norse. He did his best with scraps of native lore that survived the post-Conquest ‘defoliation’. Who is the powerfully described ‘Man of the Sea’ in the passage discussed above? Clearly one answer is Ulmo, the sea-god of Tolkien’s mythology, as is hinted in BLT 2, 319–20. But another answer must be that he is ‘Wade’, the mythical sea-giant dimly mentioned in the furthest reaches of Old English tradition and still remembered by Chaucer, but otherwise entirely forgotten.6 Elsewhere Tolkien toyed with a brief scrap of Old English verse about ‘Ing’, quoted and translated by Christopher Tolkien in BLT 2, p. 305. His aim seems to have been to see Ing, like Eriol, as an eponymous founder of the English, who was ‘first seen by men among the East-Danes’ (i.e. near where the English originated), but then went away ‘eastwards over the waves’ (Tolkien would probably have preferred this to be ‘westwards’); but to make the semi-divine Ing, unlike Eriol, an elf and a lord of Valinor. Again, though Tolkien kept on flirting with elvish names like Ingwë, Ingil (lord of Tol Eressëa, BLT 1, p. 16), or Ingolondë (later to be Beleriand, Shaping, p. 174), he could not quite make a satisfactory connection. Yet it is clear enough what he was looking for, or groping for: a mighty patron for his country, a foundation-myth more far-reaching than Hengest and Horsa, one on to which he could graft his own stories.
In this aim Tolkien was not successful, usually discarding his own explanations, whether of Eriol or Ælfwine or Ing, before they reached anything like a final shape. He was unsuccessful indeed in a further way, almost a comic way when one considers his own concern for ‘ethnic’ tone, when he eventually did submit a version of his ‘mythology for England’ for publication in 1937. We know now that Tolkien sent in to Allen and Unwin a bundle of material including his ‘Lay of Leithian’ and the ‘Quenta Silmarillion’, a close descendant of The Book of Lost Tales. But when the Allen and Unwin reader read them – or read the bits he was shown, see Christopher Tolkien’s account in Lays, pp. 364–7, and further Bibliography pp. 216–18 – he was totally perplexed, unsure whether what he was reading was ‘authentic’ or not (so far Tolkien would have felt he had succeeded), but regrettably quite clear that whatever its authenticity it certainly could not be English! His comment, ‘It [sc. the Silmarillion section he was given] has something of that mad, bright-eyed beauty that perplexes all Anglo-Saxons in the face of Celtic art’, has been much quoted. Yet its irony has not been fully perceived. Tolkien had done his best to root his Silmarillion story in what little genuine Anglo-Saxon tradition he could find. But the first time it found a reader, that reader was sure (a) that he was Anglo-Saxon, as indeed his name was (Edward Crankshaw), but (b) that the Silmarillion was not: one more sad testimony, Tolkien may have felt, to the complete deafness of modern English people, especially educated English people, to their own linguistic roots.
What Tolkien was certainly doing through all his attempts to construct a historical frame for The Book of Lost Tales and The Silmarillion was, we would now say, trying to find a ‘space’ in which his imagination could feel free to work. In this he was in the end successful, and even his failures may have been necessary steps on the road. As for creating a ‘mythology for England’, one certain fact is that the Old English notions of elves, orcs, ents, ettens and woses have through Tolkien been re-released into the popular imagination, to join the much more familiar dwarves (stigmatised by Tolkien as a Grimms’ fairy-tale conception), trolls (a late Scandinavian import), and the wholly-invented hobbits.7 More than that could hardly be expected. And yet, one might say, it was a pity that Tolkien did not get on with telling more stories, that he was – in the material discussed both in this and the last section – so preoccupied not with what was told, but with how the telling came to be transmitted. Was he ever to gain any advantage from these professional tangles? Creating depth
There is a one-word answer to that question, which is ‘depth’, the literary quality Tolkien valued most of all. But since ‘depth’ is not commonly recognised, or even noticed, in the sense that he intended, more explanation is required. Tolkien’s views on the subject have also become a good deal clearer as a result of the publications of the last ten years.
In his essay on ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, for instance, delivered in 1953 but not published till thirty years later, Tolkien declared that the poem ‘belongs to that literary kind which has deep roots in the past, deeper even than its author was aware. It is made of tales often told before and elsewhere, and of elements that derive from remote times, beyond the vision or awareness of the poet’ – like Beowulf, Tolkien goes on to say, or like King Lear and Hamlet. Tolkien then paused, digressing consciously from his major theme in the essay, to consider further the idea of ‘deep roots’ and how one can detect them in a work (like Sir Gawain) of whose immediate sources we know, in fact, next to nothing:
It is an interesting question: what is this flavour, this atmosphere, this virtue that such rooted works have, and which compensates for the inevitable flaws and imperfect adjustments that must appear, when plots, motives, symbols, are rehandled and pressed into the service of the changed minds of a later time, used for the expression of ideas quite different from those which produced them. (Essays, p. 72)
Regrettably perhaps, Tolkien then caught himself digressing, said that ‘though Sir Gawain would be a very suitable text on which to base a discussion of this question’, it was not what he meant to discuss that day – or, alas, any other day. Tolkien turned in other words from the question of ‘ox-bones’ to the flavour of the soup, and went on to consider problems only in the surviving text itself. Yet he had made the point (using in fact the word ‘flavour’) that deep roots for a text are not just something incidental, to be studied by scholars: they also affect the nature of the text itself, and can be detected by the sympathetic ear, possibly even the naive or unscholarly ear. How they do this, as he said, is an interesting question, though one virtually never studied.
I considered the matter with reference to Tolkien’s own aims in writing The Silmarillion in a passage above, laying particular emphasis on a letter by Tolkien dated 20th September 1963, in which he discusses the ‘attraction’ of The Lord of the Rings, much of it created, one might say, by a skilful counterfeiting of the effect of ‘depth’. My arguments were replied to, in a thoughtful and courteous way, by Christopher Tolkien in his ‘Foreword’ to BLT 1, pp. 1–7. Some points of agreement can immediately be located, and other points now conceded. Thus both Christopher Tolkien and I agree on the critical role of the hobbits in ‘novelising’ Tolkien’s later narrative – the ‘collision’ Christopher Tolkien points to between Théoden King and Pippin and Merry being of very similar type to the one I discuss between Bard and Thorin on one side, and Bilbo on the other, in chapter 3 above. We both also agree entirely on the ill effects of too narrow a literary ‘habituation’; while our comments on Sam Gamgee as an instructor on how to read Tolkien (and a case of the naive hearer nevertheless responding immediately to the effect of ‘deep roots’) are virtually identical, see BLT 1, p. 3 and above. Meanwhile I concede freely, in note 3 to chapter 7, that I misunderstood Professor Tolkien’s letter of 1963, and I repeat the concession here. In the first two editions of this book I completed Tolkien’s sentence ‘I am doubtful myself about the undertaking’ with the clause ‘[to write The Silmarillion]’. As is now abundantly clear, it had already been written, and written several times over! I should have looked back at the antecedent sentences of the letter, and realised that what was meant was something more like: ‘I am doubtful myself about the undertaking [to make The Silmarillion consistent both internally and with the now-published Lord of the Rings, and above all to give it “some progressive shape”]’ – matters in a sense forced on Tolkien against his will. Yet with all that said, I still feel that Tolkien himself had recognised ‘the problem of depth’ and the difficulty of creating that quality (flavour, atmosphere, virtue) in The Silmarillion if published as a single book; while the solution Christopher Tolkien indicates, of providing the reader with a ‘point of vantage in the imagined time from which to look back’, while certainly right in theory, nevertheless does create striking problems of presentation and response. However we now have more than a single-book-Silmarillion. ‘The History of Middle-earth’ does make it possible to give a much more satisfying account of the nature and problems of ‘depth’.
To see this clearly, one might begin by making a comparison with a work which Tolkien knew well, the Old Norse Völsunga saga, or Saga of the Volsungs, mentioned as a source below. This is certainly a work with deep roots; and as is not the case with Sir Gawain, some of those roots still survive and can be traced. The saga is in fact part of a complex or tradition of texts, which may be laid out as follows. (I base the diagram below on the work of Professor Theodore Andersson, in his The Legend of Brynhild (Ithaca: Cornell U.P., 1980).)8
Among the things that this diagram means are the suggestions: (a) that the author of Völsunga had access to a text which has since been largely lost, ‘The Long Lay of Sigurthr’, though we know it existed because of a gap in one surviving manuscript, and because Snorri Sturluson seems to have read it before it was lost; (b) that both that ‘lost lay’ and three other works are nevertheless similar enough to suggest a further reconstructable or *-poem behind them; (c) that even a late and poor-grade poem like the Lied vom Hürnen Seyfrid may nevertheless have a kind of value as a witness to something greater than itself.
But one further point one can make about Völsunga, independently of its own merits, is that framed in a context like this even its demerits can create a kind of eerie charm. There is something very strange about a central aspect of the Brynhildr-story in Völsunga. Most of the texts above agree that Brynhild the valkyrie was married to Gunnar king of the Burgundians as a result of deceit: she had sworn to marry only the man who could best her, and Gunnar could not manage it. Sigurd did it in his place and in his shape, handing Brynhild over to Gunnar only once she had been won. How did he tame her? Did he take her virginity – so, in some way or other breaking a taboo and depriving her of her magic strength, as Delilah did by cutting Samson’s hair? The German Nibelungenlied, its courtly author perhaps embarrassed by this aspect of the story, tells a confused tale. He declares that Sifrit (as he is called in that tale – one sees why Tolkien early thought it acceptable or even necessary to keep changing the forms of his character’s names) did not deflower Prünhilt, though admitting that he was present in the marriage chamber. Yet later on Sifrit’s wife, terribly jealous of Prünhilt, calls her a kebse, a paramour, and declares that it was her husband who took Prünhilt’s maidenhead. For proof she has a ring which Sifrit took from Prünhilt when he overpowered her, and gave later to his wife. The accusation leads to Sifrit’s death.
In Völsunga the story is even more doubtful. There Sigurthr releases an enchanted Valkyrie from her sleep and her coat of mail at once (is she Brynhildr?); promises to marry her, but leaves her; two chapters later meets her again, again promises to marry her, and again leaves her; and is then given a potion of forgetfulness (which he hardly seems to need) and under its influence marries another woman. The story then goes on reasonably similarly to the Nibelungenlied: Sigurthr agrees to help Gunnarr win Brynhildr, rides through her magic wall of flame in Gunnarr’s shape, lies with her for three nights (though with a sword between them), takes a ring from her, and hands her over to Gunnarr. The ‘quarrel of the queens’ takes place, with the wife here telling Brynhildr that her husband was Brynhildr’s frumverr, ‘first man’. The ring is shown, Sigurthr is killed. Yet in this text there can hardly be any question of Brynhildr not knowing that it was really Sigurthr in disguise, and not her husband Gunnarr, who took her virginity – the obvious motive for her hatred and revenge – for Brynhildr herself declares that before she married Gunnarr she had already born a daughter to Sigurthr! It is impossible for this part of the Völsunga saga to make sense. If Brynhildr is to take offence, it can only be over the deceit, not over defloration. So how did she lose her strength? What is the significance of the ring? Why did Sigurthr put a sword between them, and if Brynhildr thought he was Gunnarr, why did she think he did it? One could imagine answers to these questions. But they lead you outside the saga, outside the text, into its complex frame of tradition.
Now this, I would suggest, is ‘depth’ as Tolkien understood it: to repeat his words on Sir Gawain, the quality ‘which compensates for the inevitable flaws and imperfect adjustments that must appear, when plots, motives, symbols, are rehandled and pressed into the service of the changed minds of a later time’ (my emphases added). It is a quality which may exist in one text, but is more likely to be produced by a complex of them. It is intensified by age, by loss, by reconstruction, by misunderstanding. A vital part of it is the sense that even the authors of texts like the Völsunga did not understand their own story, but were doing the best they could with it. And the charm of it, the sense of puzzlement, of a factual base, of a better and richer and truer story somewhere in the hinterland but never yet told, may in fact be created not by literary success but by literary failure. Even the ‘inevitable flaws and imperfect adjustments’ have an effect. For one thing, they may well urge later authors into retelling the story, to impose their own sense of how it should be told: sometime in the late 1920s or early 1930s Tolkien wrote a long poem called ‘The New Volsung-Lay’ (‘Volsun-gakviða En Nyja’), probably to fill in some of the gaps in the diagram above, or as he put it ‘to unify the lays about the Völsungs … to organise the Edda material dealing with Sigurd and Gunnar’ (see Letters, pp. 379, 452). It will be interesting, when it appears, to see how it deals with the problems indicated.
What the widely variant texts of ‘The Legend of Brynhild’ do between them (and this includes even the latest, most faulty and inadequate works like Þiðreks saga or the Lied vom Hürnen Seyfrid) is create once more an imaginative space in which later authors can work, a space moreover enriched by discrepancies, arguments, the sense of different opinions and different cultures, all in a way trying to interpret the same events. Perhaps the most important result of the publication of ‘The History of Middle-earth’ is that it has created, especially as regards the Silmarillion, a corpus in many respects similar to ‘The Legend of Brynhild’ and the diagram above. How many ancient versions of the Brynhild-story are there? Eight, with another hypothesised. How many extant versions are there of ‘The Legend of Beren and Lúthien’? At least nine, as follows:
1) ‘The Tale of Tinúviel’ (BLT 2. pp. 4–41)
2) ‘The Lay of Leithian’, incomplete (Lays, pp. 154–363)
3) The Silmarillion, ch. 19
4) ‘The Earliest Silmarillion’, ch. 10 (Shaping, pp. 24–5)
5) ‘The Quenta Silmarillion’, ch.10 (Shaping, pp. 109–15)
6) ‘The Earliest Annals of Beleriand’ (Shaping, pp. 300–301, 307)
7) ‘The Later Annals of Beleriand’ (Lost Road, pp. 134–5)
8) (a) Aragorn’s song in Fellowship of the Ring, Book I, ch.11, together with (b) its earliest version, published as ‘Light as Leaf on Lindentree’ in Leeds, 1925, and (c) its medial version, accompanied by a further paraphrase of the whole story, in Shadow, pp. 179–84.
9) ‘The Grey Annals’ (Jewels, pp. 61–71)
These versions vary very considerably in length (two pages to over two hundred), in completeness (the longest version is not the most complete), in intrinsic interest (the three ‘Annals’ versions are naturally annalistic), in literary merit and (not the same thing) in importance for understanding the development of the whole story. Yet the existence of all the versions together does more than merely provide one with more ‘ox-bones’ for study. It also radically alters the flavour of the soup, creating something of the ‘flavour of deep-rootedness’ which Tolkien so often detected and admired.
As with Völsunga saga, inconsistencies are a vital part of the new reading experience. Consider for instance the major versions of the critical event when Thingol, Lúthien’s father, first meets Beren, hears Beren’s demand for his daughter, and imposes on him the task of bringing a Silmaril as bride-price.9 If one had only the Silmarillion version of this scene, its logic and development would seem perfectly clear. One irreducible fact about Beren is that he becomes Ermabwed, or Elmavoitë, but anyway ‘the One-Handed’: he loses his hand to the wolf. Since this is an irreducible fact, surely it must all along have been part of the story that Beren, in the scene with Thingol, should find himself swearing an unknowingly ironic oath: in the words of the Silmarillion version, ‘when we meet again my hand shall hold a Silmaril’ – because of course when he and Thingol meet again his hand will be holding a Silmaril, but both will be in the belly of the wolf. With that established it would seem to be only plain sense for Thingol to have provoked the oath by setting up a hand for hand, jewel for jewel exchange, as again he so clearly does in the Silmarillion: bring me a jewel (the Silmaril) in your hand, and I will put in your hand a compensating jewel (Lúthien’s hand). All this seems, I repeat, to be virually dictated by the essential core of the story: Beren’s one-handedness, Thingol’s imposition of a quest, the motif of the Rash Promise.
Yet a glance at the BLT 2 version shows that in the beginning these connections were simply not there. Beren does say, in his second meeting with Thingol (there Tinwelint), ‘I have a Silmaril in my hand even now’, thus creating a kind of irony, but in the first meeting does not make the corresponding promise. His exact words are only ‘I … will fulfil thy small desire’: which, of course, at the time of their second meeting he has still not done. The tone of the first scene is also entirely different, almost that of a joke which goes too far, without the edge of murder which creeps in later and the edge of hidden greed to be added later still. Meanwhile in the medial version of ‘The Lay of Leithian’, the idea of ambiguous or ironic oaths has been brought very much into the foreground: Thingol swears to leave Beren free of ‘blade or chain’ but then tries unsuccessfully to make out that this oath need not apply to the mazes of Melian (Lays, pp. 188, 191). Yet even so there is still no sign of what one might have thought to be the critical phrase, ‘my hand shall hold a Silmaril’. Version 8(c) above – the paraphrase accompanying ‘Trotter’s’ poem in an early draft of Lord of the Rings – seems to have realised the potential of the ‘hand’ theme, for there Thingol at their second meeting reminds Beren that ‘he had vowed not to return save with a Silmaril in his hand’. But the first meeting in that version is hardly described at all, so that the ‘clear’, the ‘natural’ version of this scene is still so to speak in ‘imaginative space’, like the true account of Brynhild’s defloration.
An obvious point, once again, is that authors tend not to begin with Grand Designs which they then slowly flesh out, but with scenes and visions, for which they may eventually find intellectual justification.10 In ‘The Legend of Beren and Lúthien’ (and by this I mean the collective body of texts, not any particular one) one notes also that there are scenes and images which persist regardless of their intellectual justification, or even in the absence of it. Tolkien never altered very much the dance before Melko/Morgoth, though early versions are more sexually suggestive than later ones; or the ‘Alcestis’ motif by which Lúthien rescues Beren from death and Mandos, regardless of whether he is Elf or Man. And he seems to have introduced the motif of the ring of Felagund before he knew precisely what to do with it. This does not exist at all in the BLT 2 version, where the whole Nargothrond thread has yet to appear, but is fully developed in the Silmarillion account. Insulted by Thingol, Beren holds the ring on high, and says: ‘By the ring of Felagund … my house has not earned such names from any Elf, be he king or no’. He seems here to be swearing a formal oath to the truth of his words, and swearing it on the ring – as Gollum wishes to do on the One Ring in LOTR Book IV, ch. 1, though Frodo will only allow him to swear by it, see the phrase quoted above. The corresponding scene in ‘The Lay of Leithian’ is very close to the Silmarillion one, even verbally, but it does not seem to contain the suggestion of an oath. All Beren means when he holds the ring aloft is that his inheritance and possession of it prove that he cannot be ‘baseborn’, or a spy or thrall of Morgoth. It is only a token or certificate.
Christopher Tolkien remarks in another context (Shadow, p. 430) how in his father’s work material he had had on paper for years could nevertheless suddenly acquire ‘new resonance’ on being shifted to a new context, and this is evidently true of much of the Beren material. The ring of Felagund was there before its purpose was known – just as the ring of Sigurd keeps on appearing in all texts of the Brynhild-legend, even when its particular point seems to have vanished, or is actively denied. Similarly a web of oaths and word-twistings takes shape in the Beren/Thingol scene before the point of the central oath is realised. Even what one would have thought utterly essential bits of narrative remain unsure after multiple retellings. How, after all, did Beren lose his hand? Did he strike at the wolf with the Silmaril (an unsuitable weapon, but see BLT 2, p. 34, or Shaping, p. 113)? Did he try to daunt the wolf with the sight of it, as in Silmarillion, p. 181? Or is it just something the wolf happened to do, as in Shadow, p. 183? The fact that there is no answer is now part of the story. An effect Tolkien valued very highly is what one might call the ‘epicentric’ one: the sense that once upon a time there had been a shattering event, never fully understood, with which a whole sequence of story-tellers had tried to cope, their failures and their partial successes all alike recording the force of the central event, like the needles jumping on seismographs unguessably far from the centre of the earthquake itself.
Tolkien wrote something to that effect in a passage of ‘The Notion Club Papers’, where Ramer says:
‘I don’t think you realize, I don’t think any of us realize, the force, the daimonic force that the great myths and legends have. From the profundity of the emotions and perceptions that begot them, and from the multiplication of them in many minds – and each mind, mark you, an engine of obscure but unmeasured energy.’ (SD, p. 228)
What Tolkien could not provide, of course, was the ‘multiplication … in many minds’, an effect which genuinely has to be created by the passage of time and generations. He may well have realised, though, as time went by and as the variant versions of his stories accumulated, that he was, at first by chance and then perhaps by design, building up a corpus of texts like those he was professionally used to. The thought may well have struck him that variant versions were nearly as good as ‘many minds’. Certainly he was attracted by the thought of deepening what he had written by presenting it from an unfamiliar or half-comprehending perspective. That is what he was doing in the very late work of ‘The Drowning of Anadûnê’ (SD, pp. 329–440), a version of the Fall of Númenor clearly conceived of as being written by a Man of late date, sceptical temperament and limited information. He created the same effect, very successfully but on a much smaller scale, by putting his old poem of ‘Looney’ into a new context with ‘new resonance’ in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, see above. And there is a hint that Tolkien knew this was his chosen way of working in the essay on Sir Gawain quoted at the start of this section. Just after the passage quoted there, Tolkien says that his real subject in the lecture is not depth or rootedness, but ‘the movement of [the poet’s] mind, as he wrote and (I do not doubt) re-wrote the story, until it had the form that has come down to us’. ‘Mere “escapism” in literature’
It would be possible, even tempting, to repeat the same exercise of comparative reading with several aspects of the Tolkien legendarium: to examine, for instance, the development of draconitas from Glorund through Glaurung to Smaug; to consider the developing but never determined theme of the ‘dragon-helm’ and its corruptions through the many versions of ‘The Tale of Túrin’ (more complex even than ‘The Legend of Beren and Lúthien’); to see how the Silmarils and the Oath of the Sons of Fëanor develop from their early relative insignificance. And there are other topics which lead outside the Silmarillion corpus: the presentation of the nature of evil in the orcs (the ironies of which have never been pointed out, though the orcs have, interestingly, a concept of virtue);11 Tolkien’s development of his own poetic technique to something approaching Old English rigour, especially in his alliterative verse; or (a major theme and a major reason for his success) his surely in the end deliberate creation of a continuum of heroic figures ranging from the fierce and quasi-pagan (Helm Hammerhand, Túrin, Dáin) to the near-saintly, the almost-Christian (Tuor, Faramir, Aragorn). All these exercises would have their point, and could make interesting single studies. Yet I do not think any of them would alter anyone’s overall view of Tolkien. And since this book hopes to do more than merely ‘preach to the converted’, it seems more important to return to the two questions asked at the end of the first section of this chapter, and see how adequately they have been answered.
How did Tolkien’s creativity work? A good deal has been said above about self-reflection, ‘sleepwalking’, and creating ‘imaginative space’. Yet there is one further thought generated powerfully by reading Tolkien’s early drafts, though to elaborate it seems to concede advantage to some of his fiercest critics. This is – I put it candidly in the hope of an answering candour – that the drafts suggest his critics sometimes had the right idea; they detected in the finished work tendencies much more obvious in the medial stages, as also, on occasion and even more suggestively, motifs which remained forever buried to author and readers alike.
Thus Edwin Muir (see above) said that the non-adult nature of The Lord of the Rings was proven by its lack of genuine casualties. Théoden, Denethor, Boromir – these are the kind of characters who can be picked out in every Western as to-be-dispensed-with before the end. I have replied to Muir above. Yet in all candour one has to say that the early ‘phases’ of Lord of the Rings show Tolkien struggling hard to prove Muir right. He really did not like scenes of pain. So, in The Treason of Isengard, we find Frodo laboriously explaining to Sam that though the orc hit him with a whip, he was still wearing his mithril-coat and didn’t feel it (p. 336, but cp. LOTR, p. 889). Much more seriously, the same volume shows a long and thorough attempt to pardon even Saruman and bring him back into the fold, thrusting all responsibility for the pollution of the Shire on to a mere walk-on ‘baddie’, and in the process eliminating (or rather aborting) the eerie death and ghostly rejection of Saruman in Book VI, chapter 8. Earlier on, in The War of the Ring, it is strange to see Tolkien toning down Denethor, trying very hard not to write the scene in which the father rejects the dutiful son in love and admiration for the absent prodigal (see War, pp. 327–34, and note Christopher Tolkien’s comments on p. 332). And these last two cases are not just the kind-heartedness over minor matters which I conceded to Muir in the passage just mentioned, one written before ‘The History of Middle-earth’ began to appear. If persisted in, they would have led to major differences in the plot; to a story of much narrower emotional range, with far less sense of irrevocable loss; to a situation much closer to what Muir detected. And yet, of course, Tolkien did not persist with them. He wrote them in, and then he wrote them out. It may well have gone against his own personal grain: I note elsewhere (above) that as soon as Tolkien did reach a hard solution he was liable to begin to soften it, and we can see now that reaching it was for him a laborious business in the first place. Still, grain or no grain, labour or no labour, he did it. Comparison of The Lord of the Rings with its drafts shows that Muir detected a tendency; his criticism of the entire and finished work remains false.
In similar style, a more recent book, Christine Brooke-Rose’s A Rhetoric of the Unreal (Cambridge U.P, 1981), strangely wraps a true perception in error. It has to be said that most of the time Dr. Brooke-Rose merely continues the ‘criticism of denial’ already amply illustrated in the first few pages of this book; like so many professional critics, she resents her subject too much to read it fully. Thus on p. 247 she declares:
Clearly LR is overcoded in this way [sc. as ‘semiological compensation’], since the megatext, being wholly invented and unfamiliar, has to be constantly explained. Apart from the ‘hypertrophic’ redundancy in the text itself, the recapitulations and repetitions, there are long appendices, not only on the history and genealogy, but on the languages of elves, dwarves, wizards and other powers, together with their philological development, appendices which, though ostensibly given to create belief in the ‘reality’ of these societies, in fact and even frankly, playfully reflect the author’s private professional interest in this particular slice of knowledge, rather than narrative necessity, since all the examples of runic and other messages inside the narrative are both given in the ‘original’ and ‘translated’. Nor are the histories and genealogies in the least necessary to the narrative, but they have given much infantile happiness to the Tolkien clubs and societies, whose members apparently write to each other in Elvish, (op. cit., p. 247)
Much of this is so familiar as to be formulaic, the product of a small closed society of critics whose members too readily reach agreement with each other, not least by way of the ‘automatic snigger’ (to use Orwell’s phrase). Thus, if happiness is conceded, it has to be ‘infantile’; ‘professional interest’ in philology must ipso facto be playful (cp. above); the ‘megatext’, we are told, is ‘wholly invented and unfamiliar’ (a save-all footnote declares that even if there are sources in ‘Old Norse and other materials’, these have nothing to do with ‘ultimate “truth”’, a concept apparently securely in the critic’s possession, see again above). Much of the rest is just plain wrong, with the usual inference that the critic has been too angry or self-confident to read the book: wizards don’t have a language, as it happens; and though it must have seemed a pretty safe bet to complain about all the ‘runic and other messages’12 given in the narrative being translated – for ninety-nine authors out of a hundred would have felt obliged to do just that – Tolkien, as it happens, was the hundredth (see here and here, and notes 5 and 10 to chapter 6 below). As for ‘Nor are the histories and genealogies in the least necessary to the narrative’, that ignores the whole question of ‘depth’ – the one literary quality, to say no more, which most certainly distinguishes Tolkien from his many imitators.
And yet, and in spite of all this, Dr. Brooke-Rose has a point. She feels that The Lord of the Rings, viewed as fantasy, is weighed down by ‘hypertrophic’ realism, by ‘naive and gratuitous intrusions from the realistic novel’. Must genres always practice apartheid? Evidently not. Still, reading the drafts of Lord of the Rings does make it clear what a temptation it was for Tolkien to fall back on the familiar clichés of the realistic novel. Rayner Unwin, the young son of Tolkien’s publisher, noticed this at a very early stage indeed; his father wrote to Tolkien that he had said chapters 2 and 3 had ‘a little too much conversation and “hobbit-talk” which tends to make it lag a little’ (War, p. 108). Tolkien replied, ‘I must curb this severely’, and he did: not totally, but a great deal more than in his first intention. In general, one may say that especially in the earliest ‘phases’, whenever the hobbits become the central figures of the narration – the hobbits being obviously the most modernistic and novelistic characters in the book – Tolkien found himself getting bogged down in sometimes strikingly unnecessary webs of minor causation. How many hobbits set out with Frodo (originally Bingo), and what were their names and families? Why did Farmer Maggot dislike Frodo/Bingo? How did ‘Trotter’ authenticate himself, was he an eavesdropper, and how many letters did Gandalf write? Most of these questions would now appear to be easily soluble, but they were not easily solved. What Tolkien’s sometimes maddening hesitations show is exactly how difficult he found that blend of ancient and modern, realistic and fantastic, which in the end he developed so successfully, and so much to his critics’ disapproval. I repeat that Dr. Brooke-Rose’s comments on Tolkien mostly strike me as prejudiced to the point of wilful blindness. Like Muir, she is a guide often only to what Tolkien was not. Yet like Muir, she does see, with a certain insight, what he was tempted to be. The final point to make, obviously, is that while Tolkien might not have eradicated every trace of soft-heartedness (Muir) or ‘realistic hypertrophy’ (Brooke-Rose), he did nevertheless in the end and painfully fight off most of both temptations. Indeed one could go further and say this: it seems an inherent temptation in romance to produce what is now called a ‘cop-out’ ending, an ending which defies the narrative logic of the story in the interests of popular sentiment or intellectual rationalisation. So Dickens gave Great Expectations a last-minute reconciliation; while the author of Sir Gawain tried to pass off all the events of his story as a totally unsuccessful practical joke on Guenevere. Tolkien too felt this temptation. He even wrote the ending: i.e., the ‘Epilogue’ (SD, pp. 114–35), with its strange similarity to the ending of George Lucas’s Star Wars (medals, triumph, the gratifying elevation of the humble). But having written it, he rejected it. The rejection makes one realise that creativity involved for Tolkien not only invention, not only philological brooding and the discovery of self-licensing fictions: it also demanded self-knowledge and self-restraint.
The other question still ‘hanging over’ from above is the (perhaps unanswerable) one of what – if it was not a Grand Design – was the urge which kept pulling Tolkien on to write through decades of discouragement. Here again a hostile critic may have a point to make. The critic on this occasion is one for whom I have considerably more respect than I do for Muir and Brooke-Rose. His name is Leonard Jackson, and he is the author of a distinguished trilogy of works considering the modern masters of literary theory, de Saussure, Marx, and Freud, and the ways in which they have been continually distorted and misinterpreted. In the third of these works, Literature, Psychoanalysis, and the New Sciences of Mind (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2000), he makes the case for the Freudian argument that the power of literary works is created by their embodiment of unconscious fantasies: fantasy-patterns, unrecognised by the author, are present in the work and are transmitted to the readers, themselves unconscious of what it is they are receiving, but powerfully affected by them just the same. A textbook case of this, Jackson suggests, is The Lord of the Rings. Jackson remarks that all through the 1970s – and of course it must be happening again now – he found himself asking prospective students what they read, and being told ‘The Lord of the Rings’. These prospective students were ‘full of the fashionable opinions of the day: they lived in communes, were anti-racist, and were in favour of Marxist revolution and free love’. Jackson accordingly asked them ‘why their favourite reading should be a book about a largely racial war, favouring feudal politics, jam-full of father-figures, and entirely devoid of sex’, but ‘They never knew the answer’. One answer might have been, though it would have been a bold prospective student who told his interviewer this, that it was a bad question.13 However, Jackson is certainly right in pointing to the total discrepancy, still marked, between Tolkien’s own distinctly old-fashioned values and the radical attitudes of many of his admirers. Is it just the case that a powerful story overleaps political barriers? And even if it is, where does the power come from?
Jackson’s argument, set out on pp. 77–80 of the book just mentioned, is that The Lord of the Rings is a classic Freudian castration-fantasy. Its climactic scene, of course, is the biting off of Frodo’s finger with the Ring still on it, an image, says Jackson, ‘as clearly Freudian as one could ever hope to get. If this scene is not a reference to the castration complex, then there is no reference to castration anywhere in literature’ (apart from some entirely literal cases). To ensure that this option feels right, Jackson continues, ‘the book is stuffed with father-figures’, Gandalf, Fangorn, Bombadil, and especially Sauron: with the destruction of the Ring, the menacing father-figure is removed from the scene, and Frodo abandons all possibility of growing up to be like him, while ‘all the reassuring fathers are left behind’. One might add, pedantically, ‘except for Théoden’, and wonder how Denethor fits in, but these objections could easily be accommodated. Jackson’s main point is that his teenage readers felt that ‘the very lives they led … presented an enormous unconscious threat’, and the removal of that threat, beneath the surface of The Lord of the Rings, was what drew them to the book. ‘It was and is a very important part of the appeal of The Lord of the Rings that its greatest aficionados are quite incapable of noticing what it says.’ Jackson has the good grace to go on and add, ‘Come to think of it, what psychoanalysis suggests is that it is a very important part of the appeal of all literature that its aficionados are quite incapable of noticing what it says!’
There are several potential replies to Jackson’s argument, and one is that it does not account for the work’s strong appeal to groups outside his designated audience of young male students: women, children, and middle-aged men, all well-represented in fan groups and fan audiences. Bits of what Jackson has to say are furthermore, and as usual, just de haut en bas, as in his extraordinary belief that literary critics (!) are good judges of emotional maturity. Nevertheless I do feel he has a strong point, though I am not sure, whatever Freud may say, that it is solely and entirely to do with sex. One thing absolutely certain about The Lord of the Rings is that it is about renunciation: it inverts a very familiar narrative pattern, in that it is not a quest to obtain something, but an anti-quest, to get rid of it. The getting rid of it is furthermore something immensely difficult to do, perhaps in the very end impossible to achieve by will-power alone, because the Ring appeals to something deep in the fibre of everyone’s being: these are the very ground-rules of the whole work. Even in Frodo, even in Sam, there is a response to evil deep in the heart. And this is not a criticism – since we are all at least as bad, no one has the moral authority to make such a criticism – just a statement of fact. Where the scene in the Sammath Naur reminded Tolkien (consciously) of the Lord’s Prayer, however, see above, one might put the case that (unconsciously) it plays out another verse of the Bible, already mentioned by me in the same context without prompting from Jackson: ‘If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out’. There is something even in Frodo that responds positively to the Ring and to Sauron; to destroy the Ring he has to lose a part of himself; having lost it he is never the same again, nor can he be healed in Middle-earth.
But the ‘it’ that he loses does not have to be sex. If one considers the whole history of Tolkien’s youth and middle-age, from 1892 to 1954, a period marked not only by two world wars and the rise of Fascism, Nazism and Stalinism, but also by – I give them more or less in chronological order – the routine bombardment of civilian populations, the use of famine as a political measure, the revival of judicial torture, the ‘liquidation’ of whole classes of political opponents, extermination camps, deliberate genocide, and the continuing development of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ from chlorine gas to the hydrogen bomb, all of these absolutely unthinkable in the Victorian world of Tolkien’s childhood,14 then it would be a strange mind which did not reflect, as so many did, that something had gone wrong, something furthermore which could not be safely pushed off and blamed on other people. William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies, which came out in the same year as Lord of the Rings, and like Tolkien a war veteran, remarked à propos of the meaning of his own works, ‘I must say that anyone who passed through those years [of World War II] without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head’.15 Now, if the evil-producing organ in the human brain could be identified, or if less fancifully some evil-generating urge in the human psyche could be identified, and if something had to be sacrificed to destroy it: would the sacrifice not be worth while? That seems to me to be a question raised by The Lord of the Rings. The answer is certainly something analogous to castration. Do the power and appeal of the work derive from the unconscious analogy? Since the process, if it exists at all, is unconscious, one naturally cannot say.
Jackson’s argument furthermore brings into the foreground a major critical charge against Tolkien: that of ‘escapism’. Like several of those just mentioned, this is an interesting word. It did not find its way into the OED till the 1972 Supplement, the year before Tolkien died; and even when it did the editors could find no citation earlier than 1933 (cp. ‘defeatism’, discussed above). The OED says that it means: ‘The tendency to seek, or the practice of seeking, distraction from what normally has to be endured’. And the OED has yet to find a citation which is not pejorative. In 1933 someone was complaining about the ‘escapism’ of Anacreon’s ‘bibulous, aphrodisiac lyrics’ – at least the Songs for the Philologists were not aphrodisiac. Later on Louis MacNeice equated ‘escapism’ with ‘blasphemy’, while Joyce Cary informed his readers that ‘Amanda had a great contempt for escapism’. As for the phrase at the head of this section, it comes from Essays in Criticism: where else? But if the OED is to be taken literally on ‘escapism’, it is hard to see how Tolkien can be convicted of it. Though he could be convicted (like most of us) of feeling an urge towards it.
I have put the case elsewhere (Author, pp. xxix-xxxii) for saying that the traditional opposition between ‘escapist fantasy’ and ‘realist novel’ has been, throughout the twentieth century and beyond, 180 degrees in the wrong direction: it is the fantasists like Orwell or Golding or Vonnegut or Tolkien who have been confronting the fearful and horrible issues of political life, while the E. M. Forsters and John Updikes stayed within their sheltered Shires. However, there is a deeper, non-political, and still more universal sense in which Tolkien rejects escapism, to which I now turn. Going back to the OED definition above, the experience which above all ‘normally has to be endured’ is Death. It has been suggested already (above) that there would be no surprise in seeing Tolkien, the Lancashire Fusilier, survivor of the Somme, as deeply and early marked by fear of death, starting to write his fables of the Undying Lands and the potentially deathless elves in reaction or compensation. But did these distract him, and his readers? Or focus their attention? There is no doubt that Tolkien often dwelt on the langoth, the heartache endured by those who felt, or hoped, that there was an Undying Land at the other end of the Lost Road. If Tolkien was one of these (and if he was not, why write about it?), then the feeling itself might be called a search for ‘distraction’. Yet in all Tolkien’s fiction, from early to late, the point made again and again is that langoth has no power. No human reaches Valinor without at the least some major reservation or restriction: Frodo does, but it is not clear that he will be healed; he also loses Sam and the Shire. Eriol only reaches Tol Eressëa; Eärendil reaches Valinor, as a great exception, but is ‘stellified’; the Númenórean attempt to conquer immortality kills all those who even sympathise; Fíriel turns back to clay and shadow, work and fading; Beren is resurrected, but only for a time. On a more personal note, few scenes in children’s literature are more likely to make child-readers cry than the death of Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit. And death-scenes in Tolkien’s fiction are, if not as common, then at least as carefully-worked as those of Dickens. Perhaps the most multivalent is the scene of Aragorn’s death in one of the despised Appendices to The Lord of the Rings. It is true that one could say there is an element of romance, even of ‘escapist’ fantasy in Aragorn’s immensely-extended life and quasi-saintly ability to choose the moment of his death. But by contrast there is a reverse ‘anti-escapism’ in the figure of Arwen, an immortal for whom death is emphatically not something which ‘normally has to be endured’, but who now realises she will have to endure it without the partner for whom she chose it. Aragorn says to her (it is a familiar topos of consolation in medieval literature)16 that having accepted life one must accept death too, offering her also (not a familiar topos) a hint of escape: ‘to repent and go to the Havens and bear away into the West the memory of our days together’. Arwen rejects the option and also the possibility. She puts into this narrative context a thought Tolkien knew was also universally true: ‘There is now no ship that would bear me hence’. She speaks bitterly of her new sympathy for the ‘escapist’ Númenóreans, and all that Aragorn can say in reply is that sorrow need not be despair. Arwen does not believe him, and dies of despair herself.
Tolkien did not have a Grand Design, or a guiding star, or a single theme, but I would suggest that he was always a prey to two competing forces. One was the urge to escape mortality by some way other than Christian consolation: so far he was ‘escapist’. The other was the total conviction that that urge was impossible, even forbidden. Just as much of his fiction may be seen as a tension between kind-heartedness and narrative logic, or between ‘realistic hypertrophy’ and the demands of romance, so the impossible attempt to reconcile langoth and knowledge was for him an unfailing resource – the ‘something’ that kept on pulling him, but which of course he could never reach.
One final point may be made about ‘escapism’. Many a classic novel (Tom Jones, Emma, David Copperfield) has hanging over its ending the invisible words, ‘And so they all lived happily ever after’. This could be said of The Lord of the Rings as well – Bilbo has had it in mind as an ending from very nearly the start, see p. 32, and his wish does seem to come true. Sam gets married, Merry and Pippin become famous, the Shire enjoys a season of unnatural fertility, good weather and growth. But even inside the fiction many characters (Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli) know and say that all this is going to vanish, because such things always do. There is even a point in the deaths of Aragorn and Arwen being sent off to an Appendix. The Appendices prevent any sense of easy, happy closure, show the whole story fading into memory – and then, like the Third Age, into oblivion. Meanwhile, the actual ending is not the Field of Cormallen, nor in true cinematic cliché the ship sailing into the sunset, but the three companions riding home, along ‘the long grey road’ from the Grey Havens, where the ship sailed down ‘the long grey firth’ in ‘the grey rain-curtain’. Sam returns, like Fíriel, to ‘yellow light, and fire within’, but something has gone out of the world just the same. Michael Swanwick, himself a brilliant writer of the fantastic, calls Sam’s words, ‘Well, I’m back’, ‘the most heartbreaking line in all of modern fantasy’, and backs up his assertion with personal reminiscence.17 More philologically, I would say that what hangs over the end of all Tolkien’s fiction is not ‘And so they all lived happily ever after’, but the line from the Old English poem Déor, þæs ofereode, þisses swa mæg. This could be translated bluntly, ‘That passed, this can too’, but Tolkien translated it – see BLT 2, p. 323, for its importance to him and his writing – ‘Time has passed since then, this too can pass’. ‘So deeply stirred his generation’
As the OED so massively points out, words change meaning. They do so over the centuries, as a result of use, often as a result of error: from burg to ‘burglar’, from grammatica to ‘glamour’, from *hol-bytla to ‘hobbit’. But they can change also in another way, not shedding one meaning as they shift to another, but acquiring new meaning, ‘new resonance’ as Christopher Tolkien puts it, as a result of being placed in a new context. The poet of Déor could never have imagined his line of poetry being applied to a massive antiquarian romance a millennium or more after he had written it, by people who had all but forgotten his language and the stories he told. Nevertheless it has happened: and the line, with its two demonstrative pronouns, ‘that’ and ‘this’, available as I translate it for whichever referent we choose to give them, takes on a new force no weaker for one’s awareness that it was never intended.
I am sure this is the sort of fate Tolkien would have liked for his work: to be subsumed, to be taken into the unpredictabilities of tradition. For that to happen, its context would need to change; and already it is changing. As one looks at the development of Tolkien’s work from 1916 and The Book of Lost Tales to 1967 and Smith of Wootton Major, one fact appears, which would, perhaps, not need saying if his critics had not been so dead sure his writing could not possibly have any relevance to the century he and they lived in. This is, as I suggest above, that The Lord of The Rings in particular is a war-book, also a post-war book, framed by and responding to the crisis of Western civilisation, 1914–1945 (and beyond). It is not at all clear why the response of several English and American writers, themselves personally involved in war, and deeply anxious to write about it, should have been to communicate their thoughts and experience via fantasy. Yet that is what they did: as mentioned above, William Golding, the naval officer, in Lord of the Flies, and subsequently in another fable of a non-human race, The Inheritors (1955); T. H. White, the neutralist, in The Once and Future King, written at much the same time as The Lord of the Rings, nationibus diro in bello certantibus, ‘while the nations were striving in fearful war’, the whole work appearing in 1958, four years after Tolkien’s;18 George Orwell, shot through the neck in Spain, in the fable/allegory Animal Farm (1945), and then in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949); Kurt Vonnegut, the survivor of the bombing of Dresden, in Slaughterhouse-Five (1966). All these men were writing obviously, or even self-declaredly, about the nature of evil, which they thought had changed in their time, or about which the human race had gained new knowledge. Why did they have to write fantasy, or science fiction, if they had such an evidently realistic, serious, non-escapist, contemporary theme? No answer has been agreed, and the question has not often even been put. Still, one thing one can say is that Tolkien belongs in this group.
Or belonged. For books, like words, do not stay where they started. They may be put in new contexts, stir new feelings, have new results. I hope this is what happens to Tolkien, and think it is already happening, via his host of imitators, most of whom have no war experience and no clear sense of what he was writing about: what they get from him is different, not from what he put in, but from what he thought he put in. This is what happens to authors, if they are lucky. Tolkien evidently thought deeply about the story of the author Cædmon, not ‘the father of English poetry’ – Tolkien was quite sure, for reasons of his own, that he could not have been that – but allegedly the originator of Christian English poetry. His story begins near Whitby, near the year 680, when Cædmon, a North of England cowherd, went out to his byre to avoid having to sing at some festivity. There an angel appeared to him in a dream and told him what to sing. Fifty years later, his story was written down by the Venerable Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Bede wrote in Latin, and gave only a translation of a part of Cædmon’s first English poem. But at a very early subsequent stage someone else, not content with this, added to Bede’s Latin nine lines of Old English verse, in Old Northumbrian – either remembering Cædmon’s lines because they were famous, or else able to translate from Bede’s Latin prose to poetry in his own dialect. The lines wandered all over Europe, as far as Russia: a major manuscript is now in Leningrad, where no doubt the Latin has long been readable, but where the Old Northumbrian must for centuries have been totally impenetrable. They were translated also into West Saxon; and two centuries after Cædmon, King Alfred of the West Saxons ordered the whole of Bede’s Latin work to be translated into Old English – though he seems to have been unable to find a West Saxon to do it, the surviving translation showing signs of having been affected by Old Mercian. Probably the translator came from Worcester, very close to Tolkien. But then his translation too was forgotten for hundreds of years.
It has been rediscovered, and the whole story, from Whitby to Worcester, from Cædmon to Alfred, is once again made familiar to hundreds if not thousands of language students every year. In the process Cædmon’s work itself has been totally lost, all but the nine lines written in by an early devotee, and maybe not even that. Tolkien accepted this with slight reluctance in his edition of Exodus, p. 34, conceding that ‘None of this work [sc. what survives of Old English verse] can directly represent the moving poetry of the inspired peasant, which so deeply stirred his generation. Yet’ – he went on – ‘some of it evidently originated far back, not far from Cædmon’s day, preserving the school or fashion of Cædmonian composition, and something of its spirit.’ The words might have gone, but they stirred a generation, they transmitted a spirit.
Tolkien’s words have not gone, but the rest is as true of him as of Cædmon. He would, I am sure, have liked to have applied to him – though the ‘applicability’ of course ‘resides in the freedom of the reader’, to use his own words – the words of the Worcester Bede-translator: ‘whatever he learned from scholars, he brought forth adorned with the greatest sweetness and inspiration, in poetry and well-made in the English language. And by his songs the minds of many men were kindled to contempt for the world and to fellowship with the heavenly life. And many others following him began also to make songs of virtue among the English people.’ So far much of the Worcester translator’s rendering could be applied to Tolkien: learning from scholars, well-made in English, minds kindled, contempt for the powers of the world, many emulators in the English language if not all within the British state. But the conclusion of his comments is apt without qualification. At the end of it all the translator wrote, ac nǽnig hwǽðre him þæt gelíce dón meahte. ‘But just the same, none of them could do it like him.’
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