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

NOTES

CHAPTER 1

1 We now know that it was the historical novelist Alfred Duggan. Duggan, stepson of Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, and in his youth immensely rich and well-connected, was a contemporary of Evelyn Waugh and a member of his group at Oxford between the wars, as was Philip Toynbee mentioned below. For the literary allegiances and antipathies implied, see Afterword, and further Author, pp. 316–17.

2 Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle (New York and London: Scribners, 1931), p. 252.

3 C. N. Manlove, Modern Fantasy: Five Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1975), p. 206.

4 For further, if barely credible examples of the same phenomenon, see above, and in truly painful detail, Patrick Curry, ‘Tolkien’s Critics: A Critique’, in Thomas Honegger, ed., Root and Branch: Approaches Towards Understanding Tolkien (Zurich and Berne: Walking Tree Publishers, 1999), pp. 81–148.

5 See further note 5 to chapter 8, and the discussion above.

6 Holger Pedersen, The Discovery of Language: Linguistic Science in the Nineteenth Century, trans. J. W. Spargo, 1931 (reprinted ed. Bloomington: Indiana U.P., 1962), p. 79.

7 L. Bloomfield, ‘Why a Linguistic Society?’, Language vol. 1 (1925), p. 1.

8 J. C. Collins, The Study of English Literature, 1891, but quoted here from D. J. Palmer, The Rise of English Studies (London: Oxford U.P., 1965), pp. 83–4.

9 See L. Bloomfield, Language (London: George Allen & Unwin, rev. ed. 1935), p. 12 ff.

10 See Pedersen, op. cit., pp. 263–4.

11 See Pedersen, op. cit., especially chapters 1, 2 and 7.

12 Max Müller, ‘Comparative Mythology’, 1856, in Chips from a German Workshop (4 vols., London: Longmans, 1880), vol. 2, p. 26.

13 There is an account of the affair in Peter Ganz’s ‘Eduard Sievers’, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Deutschen Sprache und Literatur, vol. 100 (1978), pp. 76–8.

14 See D. J. Palmer, op. cit., p. 97.

15 R. W. Chambers, Man’s Unconquerable Mind (London: Jonathan Cape, 1939), pp. 342–3.

16 The phrase was coined by Sir Walter Raleigh, Professor of English Literature at Oxford 1904–29 and quoted as evidence in The Teaching of English in England (London: HMSO, 1921), p. 218.

17 Pedersen, op. cit., p. 108.

18 Wïdsith: a study in Old English Heroic Legend, ed. R. W. Chambers (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1912), pp. 1–2.

19 Die beiden ältesten Gedichte aus dem achten Jahrhundert, ed. W. and J. Grimm (Cassel: Thumeisen, 1812), p. 31.

20 Axel Olrik, The Heroic Legends of Denmark, trans. Lee Hollander (New York: American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1919), p. 85.

21 Corpus Poeticum Boreale, ed. G. Vigfusson and F. York Powell (2 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1883), vol. 1, p. xcvii.

22 See Pedersen, op. cit., pp. 277–92, and O. Jespersen, Language (London: George Allen 8c Unwin, 1922), pp. 80–3.

23 Text and translation are those of Thomas Jones, ‘The Black Book of Carmarthen “Stanzas of the Graves”’, Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 53 (1967), pp. 125–7.

24 See R. M. Wilson, The Lost Literature of Medieval England (London: Methuen, 1952), p. 15.

25 Palmer, op. cit., pp. 66–117.

26 Peter Ganz, ‘Jacob Grimm’s Conception of German Studies’, Inaugural Lecture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 7–9.

27 J. Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, trans. J. S. Stallybrass (4 vols., London: George Bell, 1882–8), vol. 3, p. lv.

28 Remarks quoted in the preceding paragraph come respectively from Edmund Wilson in the review already cited, p. 312; Lin Carter, Tolkien: A Look Behind The Lord of the Rings (New York: Ballantine, 1969), pp. 93–4; Neil D. Isaacs, On the Possibilities of Writing Tolkien Criticism’, in Tolkien and the Critics, ed. N. D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), p. 7; and Robert J. Reilly, ‘Tolkien and the Fairy Story’, Isaacs and Zimbardo anthology, p. 137.

CHAPTER 2

1 J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘For W.H.A.’, Shenandoah: The Washington and Lee University Review, vol. 18 no. 2 (Winter 1967), pp. 96–7.

2 See W. Grimm, Die deutsche Heldensage, 3rd ed. (Gütersloh: Bertelmann, 1889), p. 383, and ‘OFS’, Tree p.30. In conversation, Tolkien noted that his aunt Jane Neave’s surname might derive from the hero-name Hnæf, while that of Hnæf’s avenger, the hero Hengest, might survive in the Oxfordshire place-name Hinksey (Hengestes-ieg). Legend was still preserved in perfectly familiar everyday surroundings, if no longer consciously.

3 J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘Goblin Feet’, in Oxford Poetry 1915, ed. G. D. H. C[ole] and T. W. E[arp] (Oxford: B. H. Blackwell, 1915), pp. 64–5. I quote from this first published version, which differs slightly from that used by Humphrey Carpenter, Biography, pp. 106–7. It is most conveniently found in The Annotated Hobbit, ed. Douglas A. Anderson (2nd edition, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002) p. 113.

4 G. B. Smith, ‘Songs on the Downs’, Oxford Poetry 1915, p. 60.

5 See Biography, pp. 101–9, 125–33.

6 A list of published poems appears in Biography, p. 352 ff., though nothing in print has yet disclosed their serpentine intertwinings. Several poems were clearly rewritten several, or many, times.

7 J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘The Name “Nodens”’, Appendix I to Report on the Excavation … in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire, Reports of the Research Committee of the Society of Antiquaries, no. 9 (London: Oxford U.P., 1932), pp. 132–7.

8 Since writing this I have noticed that one of the Inklings, the Rev. Adam Fox, actually did write a narrative poem on Old King Coel (the proper spelling), which Tolkien knew, see Letters, p. 36.

9 There is an edition of it, with translation, in Medieval English Lyrics, ed. R. T. Davies (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), pp. 71–3.

10 J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘Sigelwara Land: Part II’, Medium Aevum vol. 3 (1934), pp. 110–11.

11 Tolkien used allegory several times in his academic articles, to make a point, always a comic or satirical one, as for instance in the story of the man and the tower cited just below – a clear case of the reductio ad absurdum. Strict allegory, the sort in which every item in the story corresponds exactly to an item in the hidden meaning, is however notoriously hard to keep up for long, while moral allegory rapidly becomes dreary, which probably accounts for Tolkien’s expressed dislike.

12 See Biography, pp. 186, 259–60, 318–21. He calls himself ‘a natural niggler, alas!’ in Letters, p. 313. See further Author, pp. 267–8, and above.

13 There is doubt about the details here. The first version of ‘Leaf by Niggle’ seems to have been written in 1939 (see Bibliography, p. 348), at which point The Lord of the Rings might not have been advanced enough to be a convincing ‘Tree’. Possibly the ‘Tree’ here should represent, as I remark in the ‘Preface’ to this book, ‘something much more extensive’ in Tolkien’s growing mythology, the whole developing story of First, Second, and Third Ages including the many stages of the ‘Silmarillion’. The idea of something growing unexpectedly as the artist works on it does sound, however, very like Tolkien’s own experience with the hobbits, so I have let the equation stand.

14 I have to admit no source for this other than Oxford gossip. There is however a highly characteristic anti-Tolkien conversation presented in fictional form in J. I. M. Stewart’s A Memorial Service (London: Methuen paperback, 1977), p. 176. In this a Regius Professor writes off ‘J. B. Timbermill’ – evidently Tolkien – as ‘A notable scholar’ who ‘ran off the rails’.

15 I discuss its repeated revisions and reprintings in ‘The Versions of “The Hoard”’, published in Lembas, newsletter of the Dutch Tolkien Society, no. 100 (2001). The earliest version, from 1923, is again most readily available in Douglas Anderson’s Annotated Hobbit, pp. 335–7. A revised version appears in TB as ‘The Hoard’.

16 There are extensive accounts of the dragon concept in Joyce Lionarons, The Medieval Dragon: the Nature of the Beast in Germanic Literature (Enfield Lock: Hisarlik Press, 1998), and in Jonathan Evans’s article ‘“As Rare as they are Dire”: Old Norse Dragons, Beowulf, and the Deutsche Mythologie,’ in The Shadow-Walkers: Jacob Grimm’s Mythology of the Monstrous, ed. Tom Shippey (Tempe: Arizona State U.P., forthcoming 2005).

17 For the quotations above, see The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise, ed. and trans. C. Tolkien (London: Nelson’s, 1960), pp. xxiii and 45.

CHAPTER 3

1 The gloss, to the poem ‘June’, was not written by Spenser himself, but by a friend known only as ‘E.K.’ – someone even prouder than Spenser of his Classical learning and so the more likely to make unbelievable errors over non-Classical matters.

2 ‘Elfin’ is in the poem ‘Light as Leaf on Lindentree’, but has become ‘elven’ in the revision given to Aragorn, LOTR, pp. 187–9; ‘fairy’ occurs once in all editions of The Hobbit, ‘gnome’ in the first edition only. ‘Goblin’, a Latin-derived word, is used throughout The Hobbit, but relatively rarely in LOTR. For ‘dwarfish’, see the letter cited above – another printer’s correction?

3 This is a modernised form of a ballad recorded in Danmarks Gamle Folkeviser (12 vols., Copenhagen: Thiele, 1853–1976), Vol. II, 105–9, by Svend Grundtvig – son of the Beowulfian scholar Nikolai Grundtvig.

4 C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (1940, London: Fontana Books reprint, 1957, p. 13). This was clearly an Inkling theory, cp. Tolkien’s ‘supremely convincing tone of Primary Art’ (‘OFS’, in Tree, p. 72).

5 See the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, Skáldskaparmál sections 35 and 39. There is a full translation by Anthony Faulkes in the Everyman series (London: Dent, 1987).

6 Preface to J. and W. Grimm, Haus- und Kindermärchen (3rd edn., Göttingen: Dieterichische Buchhandlung, 1849), p. xxviii.

7 Snorri, Prose Edda, Skáldskaparmál section 49.

8 As a youth (by dwarvish reckoning) he kills Azog in revenge for his father, and looks into Moria, LOTR p. 1049; as an old man he is killed fighting, p. 1053. In between he is seen bandying words with Sauron’s messenger, p. 235; and sticking to the letter of Thorin’s bargain in The Hobbit, p. 268.

9 Tolkien tells the same story in a letter to W.H. Auden, Letters, p. 215, and there is a more extensive account of what is known about the book’s genesis in Bibliography, pp. 7–8.

10 Quoted in Ganz, Inaugural Lecture, p. 5.

11 I am indebted for this point to an article by Jessica Kemball-Cook, in Amon Hen: the Bulletin of the Tolkien Society, no. 23 (December 1976), p. 11. See also Bibliography, pp. 29–33.

12 See Paul Kocher, Master of Middle-earth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972), Penguin Books edition, 1974, p. 24.

13 As remarked in the ‘Preface’, this was a mistake as originally written. We now know that Sauron had come into Tolkien’s fiction well before The Hobbit. However, The Hobbit does not make the equation between Sauron and ‘the Necromancer’ eventually made by Gandalf in ‘The Council of Elrond’, so once again I have let the comment stand.

14 See Bibliography, esp. pp. 21–4. It should be noted that The Hobbit continued to hold misprints and errors through many editions, caused sometimes by printers ‘corrections’ at an early stage, sometimes by incomplete revision. Till the 1990s, for instance, Durin’s Day had one definition at the end of chapter 3, ‘last moon’, and another at the start of chapter 4, ‘first moon’. See further Douglas A. Anderson’s Annotated Hobbit, pp. 384–6 and passim.

15 C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, p. 42.

16 See ‘The Wreck of the Birkenhead’, Annual Register 1852, pp. 470–3.

17 See The Vinland Sagas, trans. M. Magnusson and H. Pálsson (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965), p. 104.

18 Since this is a contentious piece, I have not given my own translation but that of Clark Hall and Wrenn, to which Tolkien wrote the ‘Prefatory Remarks’ in 1940.

19 Lewis, The Problem of Pain, p. 62.

20 As remarked in the text just above, the phrase had had special meaning for Tolkien since 1923, see further note 15 to chapter 2 and note 9 to chapter 8.

21 Gollum’s original name, Sméagol, comes from the same root, as does modern ‘smuggle’. Sméagol and Déagol could be translated as ‘Slinky’ and ‘Sneaky’.

CHAPTER 4

1 The best account of what happened is given by Christopher Tolkien in The Lays of Beleriand, pp. 364–7.

2 This is another late change in the text, see once more Bibliography, p. 29. But in all editions Gandalf’s staff appears in the first scene. He uses it to scratch the sign on Bilbo’s door.

3 Paul Kocher, Master of Middle-Earth, p. 161, notes that the definition of ‘blunderbuss’ ascribed in Farmer Giles to ‘the Four Wise Clerks of Oxenford’ is that of the OED, the Four Wise Clerks being the four editors, J. A. H. Murray, H. Bradley, W. A. Craigie and C. T. Onions. Giles’s blunderbuss, like Tolkien’s dwarves, does not fit the OED definition.

4 When I first thought of this, in my article ‘Creation from Philology in The Lord of the Rings’ in Memoriam Essays, I wrote it off as ‘entirely adventitious’. It has grown on me since, which may be no more than furor allegoricus or allegorist’s mania. However I did not at that time realise how well Farmer Giles fitted the other allegories of 1935–43.

5 This point is also made by Paula Marmor, ‘An Etymological Excursion among the Shire-Folk’, in An Introduction to Elvish, ed. Jim Allan (Hayes: Bran’s Head Books, 1978), pp. 181–4.

6 A point seen, of course, by Peter Jackson in his direction of the 2001 movie version, which skips from crossing the Brandywine to arriving in Bree. Tolkien noted that ‘Tom Bombadil is not an important person – to the narrative’ in Letters, p. 178, and again that he was put in because ‘I … wanted an “adventure” on the way’, Letters, p. 192. Both letters however then qualify what appears to be a dismissive view.

7 C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength once again offers a close parallel in the idea of language with meanings ‘inherent in [its syllables] as the shape of the great Sun is inherent in the little waterdrop’, p. 281. Later it appears that this is a language even beyond ‘Numinor’, as Lewis spells it.

8 The two towns from Giles and LOTR are linked in traditional rhyme: ‘Brill on the hill, Oakley in the hole, dirty Ickford and stinking Worminghall.’

9 The point is taken further by Brian Rosebury, who remarks in his Tolkien: A Critical Assessment (Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke and New York, 1992), first that ‘the circumstantial expansiveness of Middle-earth itself is central to the work’s aesthetic power’, and then that ‘Middle-earth, rather than any of the characters, is the hero of The Lord of the Rings’, see pp. 8, 29.

10 In two letters written in 1954 Tolkien both conceded that Bombadil entered because ‘I had “invented” him independently … and wanted an “adventure” on the way’, and insisted that he nevertheless had a part to play as presenting ‘a natural pacifist view’, something ‘excellent’ in itself but incapable of surviving unprotected, see once more Letters pp. 192, 179.

11 It is interesting that the first version of this song, ‘Light as Leaf on Lindentree’ in The Gryphon for 1925, does not use the word ‘shadow’: Tolkien rewrote it to bring it into line with his developing myth. The 1925 version is reprinted in Lays pp. 108–10, supplemented by notes on pp. 121–2.

12 Road, p. 72. Even there it is not entirely clear. Tolkien gave first a word-for-word translation of the Sindarin and then a connected English one, but the two are not altogether consistent with each other. I have combined them.

13 It is perhaps worth noting that all the names in Théoden’s pedigree from Thengel back to Brego are Old English words for ‘king’, except for Déor and Gram, for reasons I do not understand, and excepting Eorl the Young, founder of the line, who looks back to a time before kings were created and when all men, as in the Old Norse poem Rigsþula, were ‘earl’, ‘churl’ or ‘thrall’.

14 Though Tolkien did not know from the beginning where, or if, he was going to fit them in. A vital moment in the development of The Lord of the Rings is when Tolkien suddenly sketched out a note about language-relationships, see Treason, p. 424.

15 A phrase notoriously used by W.H. Auden in his 1937 poem, ‘Spain’. George Orwell commented scornfully that people who wrote like that had never encountered murder: they were playing with fire without realising it was hot, see his 1940 essay ‘Inside the Whale’.

16 This even has an effect on Merry the hobbit. On p. 786 he begs Théoden to let him come with the Riders: ‘I would not have it said of me in song only that I was always left behind!’ The phrasing is ironic, but it is an attempt to find an argument that Théoden will accept. For remarks on how styles shape thoughts, see especially Letters, pp. 225–6.

17 See Nigel Barley, ‘Old English colour classification: where do matters stand?’ Anglo-Saxon England, vol. 3 (1974), pp. 15–28.

18 It is mentioned by C. L. Wrenn, ‘The Word “Goths”’, Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society (Lit.-Hist. Class), vol. 2 (1928–32), pp. 126–8.

19 Though there are such unobservant minds around, see for instance note 12 to chapter 9.

20 See Arthur J. Evans, ‘The Rollright Stones and their Folk-lore’, Folklore, vol. 6 (1895), pp. 6–51.

CHAPTER 5

1 Amusingly, in view of later events, he was Terry Pratchett, whose ‘Discworld’ comic fantasies have since made him Britain’s best-selling domestic author. These began, at least, as part-parodies of Tolkien, and continue to include Tolkienian in-jokes.

2 These opinions are taken from the anonymous review in the Times Literary Supplement (25 November 1955); C. N. Manlove’s Modern Fantasy, p. 183; an anonymous review in Punch (16 November 1966); a review by Mark Roberts in Essays in Criticism, vol. 6 (1956), p. 459. But the list could easily be extended.

3 See Louise Creighton, The Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton (2 vols., London: Longmans Green & Co., 1904), vol. 1, p. 372.

4 It is no. 14 of The Durham Proverbs, ed. O. S. Arngart (Lund: Lunds Universitets Arsskrift, 1956), vol. 52, no. 2.

5 These accusations are made most clearly in C. N. Manlove’s Modern Fantasy, pp. 173–84 – a book I find often imperceptive and almost always unreflective, but certainly written with energy.

6 It is worth noting that not even the Ringwraiths were originally evil, though they have become absolutely so. The word ‘haggard’, used on p. 691, implies how this happened. It was first used as a noun, to indicate a hawk caught when fully fledged; later it came to mean ‘wild, untamed’, and to be applied with special reference to a look in the eyes, ‘afterwards to the injurious effect upon the countenance of privation, want of rest, fatigue, anxiety, terror or worry’. At this stage it was influenced by ‘hag’, an old word for witch, and implied also gaunt or fleshless. The Ringwraiths are fleshless and ‘faded’ from addiction, and privation, and from being caught by Sauron. They are also witches, simultaneously victims of evil within and agents of evil without. Their leader is ‘helmed and crowned with fear’, i.e. he wears an ægishjálmr or ‘fear-helm’ like Fáfnir the dragon; dragons too were in some opinions misers transformed by their own wickedness, see above.

7 The singular past tense of rídan is rád. The long -a- in standard English was rounded to -o-, so both ‘rode’ and ‘road’. In Northern English and Scottish it remained unrounded, but was changed by the early modern Great Vowel Shift to -ai-, so ‘raid’. The same processes give us the old adjective ‘wroth’ = ‘angry’, and the noun ‘wraith’. See further Author pp. 121–8, and my article ‘Orcs, Wraiths, Wights: Tolkien’s Images of Evil’, in George Clark and Daniel Timmons, eds., J.R.R. Tolkien and his Literary Resonances (Greenwood: Westport, Conn, and London, 2000), 183–98.

8 See the entry in Richard Blackwelder’s A Tolkien Thesaurus (Garland: New York and London, 1990) – a most invaluable work for checking points like this.

9 Dan Timmons has pointed out to me a piece by Robert Harris in the Canadian National Post for Jan. 24th, 2002, p. A 16. In this Harris notes the anniversary of the Wannsee conference, Jan. 20th, 1942, where fifteen senior civil servants, eight of them with doctorates, had lunch, conducted a meeting ‘very quietly and with much courtesy’, organised the Holocaust, and then circulated the minutes for approval. Tolkien of course could not have known about the meeting, but the bureaucratisation of evil was already clear, as one can see from C. S. Lewis’s strongly Tolkien-influenced novel That Hideous Strength (1945).

10 In the passage quoted above one might note the phrase, said of Frodo feeling the pressure of Sauron’s Eye, ‘he writhed, tormented’. At the death of Saruman, his spirit seems to look to the West (for forgiveness?), ‘but out of the West came a cold wind, and it bent away, and with a sigh dissolved into nothing’. One might paraphrase that Frodo is still writhing, and so not yet a wraith, but Saruman has been bent past recovery.

11 Edmund Fuller says that Tolkien said this to him in a conversation in June 1962, see ‘The Lord of the Hobbits: J. R. R. Tolkien’, in Tolkien and the Critics, ed. Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo, p. 35. I am sure Tolkien did say this; but he had perhaps grown accustomed to suiting his conversation to his interviewers’ understanding. ‘Angel’ is anyway derived from Greek angelos, ‘messenger’; in that (recondite) sense Gandalf is ‘an angel’.

12 King Alfred’s Old English Version of Boethius, ed. W. J. Sedgefield (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899), p. 128, my translation.

13 I have discussed this work more extensively in an essay called ‘Tolkien and “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth”’, in Leaves from the Tree: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Shorter Fiction, ed. Alex Lewis (London: Tolkien Society, 1991), pp. 5–16. Tolkien began working on it more than twenty years before it was published, see Bibliography, p. 303, and Treason, pp. 106–7, where a fragment of an early version is quoted.

14 It is only fair to say that the orcs are great jokers too. What their humour seems to show, though, is that while the orcs at bottom have a sense of morality not dissimilar to our own – for evil cannot make, only mock – they are comically unable to apply it to themselves. In both Author pp. 131–3 and the article ‘Orcs, Wraiths, Wights’ cited in note 7 above, I discuss the orcs with particular reference to the scene centred on ‘old Ufthak’ at the very end of The Two Towers. The theological status of the orcs continued to give Tolkien anxiety after publication of LOTR, see Morgoth’s Ring pp. 408–24.

15 The two concepts are distinguished with special sharpness by Aragorn in his death-scene in Appendix A 1, p. 1038. It is not clear that Arwen appreciates the distinction.

16 Richard C. West, in ‘The Interlace Structure of The Lord of the Rings’, A Tolkien Compass, ed. Jared Lobdell (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1975), pp. 77–94, also asks why Tolkien should for once follow Old French models, but gives a more abstract answer.

17 The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. E. Vinaver, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd edn. 1967), vol. I, pp. lxiv-lxv. The passage is a description of one ‘Vulgate’ romance specifically, but can be applied readily to others.

18 I discuss the ironies surrounding Denethor at greater length in Author, pp. 172–3. They become visible only if one follows Tolkien’s very careful but unobtrusive cross-referencing of dates, but briefly, one may be fairly sure that Denethor despairs because he has seen, in the palantír, a vision of the captured Ring-bearer, and has concluded, wrongly, that Sauron now possesses the Ring.

19 Thus Galadriel’s piece of advice to Legolas on p. 492, ‘Legolas Greenleaf, long under tree / In joy thou hast lived. Beware of the Sea! …’ echoes in rhythm and syntax one of R.M. Wilson’s scraps of The Lost Literature of Medieval England, p. 99:

In clento cou bache kenelm kynebearn

lith under [haze] thorne hæuedes bereaved.

‘In Clent by the cow-stream Kenelm the king’s child

lies under hawthorn, robbed of his head.’

I think Tolkien put this in only because the model came from the depths of the Mark, indeed from Clent, five miles from his boyhood home in Rednal. Wilson’s book came out in 1952, but the section on Kenelm had come out separately as an article in 1941.

20 If the War of the Ring had been World War II, ‘then certainly the Ring would have been seized and used against Sauron; he would not have been annihilated but enslaved, and Barad-dûr would not have been destroyed but occupied. Saruman, failing to get possession of the Ring, would in the confusion and treacheries of the time have found in Mordor the missing links in his own researches into Ring-lore, and before long he would have made a Great Ring of his own with which to challenge the self-styled Ruler of Middle-earth.’ One sees that the Ring = the A-bomb; Sauron = the Axis powers; the parties at the Council of Elrond = the Western Allies; Saruman = the U.S.S.R.; ‘treacheries’ and ‘in Mordor’ = the role of Anglo-American traitors and of German scientists in creating the Russian A-bomb. This is a proper allegory, exact in all parallels; but it is not The Lord of the Rings.

21 It is entirely appropriate that the Peter Jackson film of 2001 should have picked this sequence out and used it twice: once in the Mines of Moria, Gandalf and Frodo talking quietly, again in the Gandalf voice-over at the end. The pronouns are significantly altered, however. First it is ‘not for us to decide’, then ‘not for you to decide’. Both alterations make sense in their new contexts, but remove Tolkien’s note of criticism.

22 See pp. 807, 835. ‘Heathen’ of course is a word used normally only by Christians and so out of place in Middle-earth. In Appendix (c) to his British Academy lecture Tolkien had remarked on the one place where the Beowulf-poet used this word of men, thinking it a mistake or an interpolation. By the 1950s he may have changed his mind, accepting stronger Christian and anti-heroic elements in Beowulf, Maldon and his own fiction.

23 The TLS reviewer Alfred Duggan was convinced of this, see above. But compare Aragorn, p. 763: right does not give might, nor vice versa. The ‘theory of courage’ and Beorhtwold of course say unmistakably ‘right is weak and might is wrong’, though Tolkien did not believe that either.

24 Fair and uncommitted views of these concepts may be found in Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History (London: George Bell, 1931), and C. B. Cox’s The Free Spirit (London: Oxford U.P., 1963). The former discusses Lord Acton (and his maxim) in some detail.

25 This comes in a reply to Mr David I. Masson’s letter in the TLS (9 December 1955), remarking on several factual and thematic inaccuracies in the earlier review. The reviewer flatly denied them all. ‘Hoity-toity’, observed Tolkien. Further differences between good and evil characters are well set out by Brian Rosebury, in Tolkien: A Critical Assessment, pp. 36–47. Good qualities include acceptance of diversity, moderation even in virtue, awareness of context, and intellectual curiosity, this latter opposed in several ways to the lack of imagination and incessant self-regard picked out by Auden as the essential defining quality of the corrupted.

26 The Tempest, ed. Frank Kermode (Arden edition of the Works of Shakespeare, London: Methuen, 5th ed., 1954), p. liv.

CHAPTER 6

1 See Biography, pp. 46, 184, 220.

2 The quotations above are taken from reviews in the Sunday Times (30 October 1955) and Daily Telegraph (27 August 1954), from Mark Roberts’s long account already cited in Essays in Criticism (1956), and from Edwin Muir’s review in the Observer (22 August 1954).

3 C. N. Manlove, Modem Fantasy, p. 189.

4 Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. Vinaver, vol. III, p. 1259.

5 In Letters, p. 308, Tolkien said the phrase means ‘O beautiful ones, parents of beautiful children’. This has a significance in context, for Fangorn’s tragedy is to be childless; however even untranslated it attains its main effect, of ceremoniousness.

6 I am thinking of Vera Lynn’s famous rendering of ‘We’ll meet again, / Don’t know where, don’t know when, / But I know we’ll meet again / Some sunny day’. No critic would ever argue that this is a great poem. However in the context of wartime separations it may well have said something, very powerfully, for people ordinarily unaffected by poetry of any description.

7 C. S. Lewis makes a point similar to this in ch. 12 of his 1938 novel Out of the Silent Planet (for whose connection with Tolkien see note 4 to chapter 9). There the Martian hross Hyoi explains that the most splendid line of poetry only becomes splendid by virtue of the lines that follow it. The importance of context as against ‘tight semantic fit’ had perhaps been a topic of Inkling conversation.

8 There is a modern version of it in Joseph Jacobs’s collection of English Fairy Tales, first published in London by David Nutt, 1890, but reprinted by the Bodley Head Press in 1968. Jacobs’s source, however, goes back to 1814 and beyond. The fairy-tale makes it clear that Shakespeare had got the story right, and had not confused it, as modern editors usually assert, with ‘Jack the Giant-killer’.

9 There is a confusion here in all indexes to LOTR. ‘The Old Walking Song’ i.e. the one sung twice by Bilbo and once by Frodo – is at pp. 35, 72, and 965 (but not 1005). Though the song Frodo sings on p. 1005 is there called ‘the old walking-song’ it is in fact a variant of the verse indexed as ‘A Walking Song’, first seen on p. 76. Fluidity is however an element of all these verses. The elvish song on p. 1005 is a mixture of English and Sindarin variants from pp. 78 and 231, all three indexed as ‘Elbereth … Elven hymns to’.

10 If the song is in Quenya, a point queried by Carl F. Hostetter, to whom I am grateful for bringing the matter up, and for much linguistic information. Gildor introduces himself as being ‘of the house of Finrod’, which suggests he is a native speaker of Quenya, who however would speak Sindarin in exile in Middle-earth. Frodo greets him with a studied phrase in Quenya, described as ‘the high-elven speech’, and this is compatible with the song being ‘in the fair elven-tongue, of which Frodo knew only a little’. On the other hand, when Frodo says, ‘These are High Elves! They spoke the name of Elbereth!’, it sounds like a non sequitur, for ‘Elbereth’ (and ‘Gilthoniel’) are definitely Sindarin, the former cognate with Quenya ‘Varda’. Meanwhile, in Book II, ch. 1, ‘Many Meetings’, some seven lines of a poem in Sindarin are quoted, though not translated. These contain the phrase o galadhremmin ennorath, translated many years later by Tolkien as ‘from tree-tangled middle-lands’ (Road, p. 72), and this sounds like the ‘world of woven trees’ in the first stanza of Gildor’s song. Fragments of a similar poem, or poems, appear in Book IV, ch. 10, ‘The Choices of Master Samwise’, and in Book VI, ch. 9, ‘The Grey Havens’, but there is continuous variation, and other issues too complex to disentangle here. Perhaps the correct conclusion is that elvish poetry is as fluid as hobbit poetry, and the fluidity may include translation between the elvish languages. See further note 12 below.

11 See The Faerie Queene Book III canto III stanza 48, ‘There shall a sparke of fire, which hath long-while / Bene in his ashes raked up and hid, / Be freshly kindled …’ ‘From the ashes a fire shall be woken,’ says Bilbo.

12 The nature of elvish poetry is considered in much more detail by Patrick Wynne and Carl F. Hostetter in ‘Three Elvish Verse Modes: Ann-thennath, Minlamad thent / estent, and Linnod’, Legendarium pp. 113–39.

13 Tolkien’s notes on this passage in Road, pp. 66–70, make it clear that Galadriel is making a wish for Frodo (one that comes true). Tolkien there refined his translation of the Quenya to ‘May it be that’ (thou shalt find Valinor) …

14 His poem ‘The Nameless Land’, printed in Realities, ed. G. S. Tancred, 1927, is however in a close imitation of the Pearl stanza-form.

15 There is an account of the finds, with photographs, in P. V. Glob, The Bog People (London: Faber and Faber, 1969).

16 Lewis’s attention may have been drawn to Uhtred by M. D. Knowles, ‘The Censured Opinions of Uthred [sic] of Boldon’, Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 37 (1951), pp. 305–42.

17 The most convenient excerpt from this is in Beowulf and its Analogues, trans.G. Garmonsway and J. Simpson (London and New York: Dent and Dutton, 1968).

18 All these are asserted in Byrhtferth’s Manual, ed. S. J. Crawford, Early English Text Society, Original Series 177 (London: Oxford U.P., 1929), pp. 82–5.

19 There is similarly no reference (or almost none) to any of these things in Beowulf. The person who steals the dragon’s cup may have been a slave – the word is blurred in the manuscript. Two characters known from other sources to have had incestuous births pass without comment in Beowulf. These seem clear cases of the poet saying the best he could, or not saying the worst he could, of characters he knew had been pagan, slave-owning, ignorant of Christian sexual ethics. All this gave a lead to Tolkien.

20 Once again, a point much easier to check with the help of Richard Blackwelder’s Tolkien Thesaurus.

21 There is an extensive ‘reconstructed’ account of this thesis in Carpenter, Inklings, Part One, section 3, especially pp. 42–5. See also Verlyn Flieger, Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World (1983; rev. edn. Kent, Ohio: Kent State U.P., 2002).

22 The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, ed. F. J. Child (5 vols., Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1882–98), vol. II, p. 230, ‘Sweet William’s Ghost’.

23 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: four essays (Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1957), p. 33. The material cited here is from pp. 33–43 of the first essay, but see also p. 117 (on C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams), p. 186 (on Gothic revivals), p. 187 (on ‘middle’ worlds); and further N. Frye, The Secular Scripture: a study of the structure of romance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U.P., 1976), where some remarks on Tolkien are made.

24 See Saxo Grammaticus, The Danish History, Books I-IX, trans. O. Elton with intro, by F. York Powell (London: David Nutt, 1894), p. 38.

25 Tolkien’s ‘neutral’ style is well analysed and defended by Brian Rosebury, Tolkien: A Critical Assessment, pp. 65–71.

CHAPTER 7

1 I am most grateful to Mr Noad for showing me the full text of his essay, which had to be cut down considerably in its published form for reasons of space.

2 See John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War: the Threshold of Middle-earth (London: HarperCollins, 2003). Mr Garth’s study, using documents only released to the public in 1998, amplifies or corrects the account given in Humphrey Carpenter’s Biography in many places. I am most grateful to Mr Garth also for showing me an early draft of this work.

3 In the first and second editions I expanded ‘the undertaking’ with the words ‘[to write The Silmarillion]’. This was clearly wrong, for ‘the Silmarillion’, at least, already existed. Perhaps ‘the undertaking’ here should be seen as ‘the task of putting in order some or all of the legends of the earlier ages, referred to in the Appendices’ of The Lord of the Rings, which is what is written earlier in the letter. The problem was one of presentation, see again Lost Tales 1, pp. 2–4.

4 Dates of parts of the Unfinished Tales given here and subsequently are deductions from Christopher Tolkien’s notes, UT, pp. 4–13.

5 This is the opinion, for instance, of Robert Foster in The Complete Guide to Middle-Earth (London: George Allen & Unwin, 2nd ed., 1978), who argues in the ‘Introduction’ that the human conflicts of The Lord of the Rings gain force from their relation to the greater ones of The Silmarillion.

6 In the first version of ‘The Passing of the Grey Company’ (The Return of the King, 1st edn., 1955, p. 53), Gimli learns that Aragorn has looked in the palantir, and expresses astonishment. ‘“You forget to whom you speak,” said Aragorn sternly, and his eyes glinted. “What do you fear that I should say: that I had a rascal of a rebel dwarf here that I would gladly exchange for a serviceable orc?”’ (In the second edition and subsequently this last sarcastic question is eliminated).

7 For Tolkien’s last word on the subject, see note 14 to chapter 5.

8 I am thinking of Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy, see my article ‘The Magic Art and the Evolution of Words’ in Mosaic, vol. 10, no. 2 (1977), pp. 147–64.

9 I discuss the inconsistencies, and the consistencies, in ‘Alias Oves Habeo: the Elves as a Category Problem’, in The Shadow-walkers, see note 16 to ch. 2; with further reference to Tolkien in my ‘Introduction’ to the volume, ‘A Revolution Reconsidered: Mythology and Mythography in the Nineteenth Century’.

10 See J. F. Campbell’s Popular Tales of the Western Highlands (4 vols., Paisley and London: Alexander Gardner, 1890–3), vol. 2, p. 75. Tolkien refers to this collection in the notes to ‘On Fairy-Stories’ (Tree, pp. 16, 67).

11 This quotation is from the legend of St Michael in The Early South English Legendary, ed. C. Horstmann, Early English Text Society, Original Series 87 (London: Trübner, 1887), lines 253–8.

12 To labour this point further: Gandalf is a Maia, was called by Tolkien ‘an angel’, yet is perceived by Men – as his name indicates – as some sort of ‘elf’. Conversely an ignorant Man, looking at Galadriel (an elf), might well think she was an ‘angel’, or of the same order as the Maia Melian. Both ladies would be so superior to him as to make fine distinction impossible.

13 Tolkien kept changing his mind about this: the strong implication of LOTR, p. 369 (confirmed by Road, p. 68), is that Galadriel, as last survivor of the leaders of the Noldorian revolt, was banned from returning to Valimar. In The Silmarillion, pp. 83–4, Galadriel acquiesces in the revolt out of the motive (surely not entirely a good one) ‘to rule a realm [in Middle-earth] at her own will’. There is an echo of this when Frodo offers her the Ring at LOTR, p. 356, and she sees herself as ‘a Queen’. In his later years, however, after 1968, Tolkien suggested that she was not banned, but self-exiled, having refused pardon (UT, pp. 230–1). And in ‘the last month of his life’ he wrote a more complicated account (UT, pp. 231–2), exculpating her entirely. This, I feel, was another example of the ‘soft-heartedness’ discussed above here and here.

14 By Paul H. Kocher, A Reader’s Guide to The Silmarillion (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1980), p. 56.

15 For older theories, see Kaarle Krohn, Kalevalastudien (Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Sciences, 1924–5). The modern remark quoted is from Finnish Folk Poetry, Epic: An Anthology in Finnish and English, ed. and trans. Matti Kuusi, Keith Bosley and Michael Branch (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 1977), p. 526. This book however gives an excellent introduction to the sampo concept.

16 ‘Having the same mother, having different mothers’: the terms are taken from the Eddic poem Hamðismál (about the death of the king of the Goths).

17 Kalevala: the land of the heroes, trans. W. F. Kirby (London and New York: Dent and Dutton, 1907, repr. 1977), vol. 2, p. 124. This is the translation Tolkien used. He no doubt read on and may have relished the moral at the end of the runo warning men against sending children to be fostered by strangers.

CHAPTER 8

1 The circumstances of its composition are explained in Bibliography, pp. 200–201. It began as a brief illustration of a point to be made in the ‘Preface’ to a George Macdonald story, ‘but the story grew and took on a life if its own, and the preface was abandoned.’

2 See David Doughan, ‘In Search of the Bounce: Tolkien seen through Smith’, in Leaves from the Tree: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Shorter Fiction, ed. Alex Lewis (London: Tolkien Society, 1991), pp. 17–22; and Verlyn Flieger, A Question of Time: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Road to Faërie (Kent, Ohio and London: Kent State U.P., 1997), ch. 11, ‘Pitfalls in Faërie’; and Flieger, ‘Allegory versus Bounce,’ see note 6 below.

3 Flieger, A Question of Time, p. 232.

4 Compare ‘the skin o’ my nuncle Tim’ in Sam’s ‘Rhyme of the Troll’, LOTR, p. 201. Many years before Tolkien had noted ‘naunt’ for ‘aunt’ in Sir Gawain; and Haigh’s Huddersfield glossary of 1928 (see above) showed that saying ‘aunt’ instead of ‘nont’ was considered affected by his older informants. As often, old English survived only as vulgar modern English.

5 It is interesting, with hindsight, to read Tolkien’s June 27th 1925 letter of application from Leeds for the Chair of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, Letters, pp. 11–12. Tolkien was clearly advertising himself as someone who could draw students into traditionally difficult and unpopular subjects, encourage ‘friendly rivalry and open debate’ between the literature and the language specialists, and cultivate ‘the growing neighbourliness of linguistic and literary studies’. Any ‘neighbourliness’ there was – Tolkien no doubt exaggerated it for effect – soon stopped growing. This was unfortunate, to say the least, for both sides.

6 I discuss the mechanics of solving an allegory like Smith in Author, pp. 297–304, and further in my half of an exchange with Dr Flieger, ‘Allegory versus Bounce: Tolkien’s Smith of Wootton Major,’ Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 12/2 (2001), 186–200 (191–200).

7 I discuss the importance to Tolkien of the difficult word ‘lay’ in Author, pp. 233–6, 293.

8 In ‘The Source of “The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun”’, in Leaves from the Tree: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Shorter Fiction, ed. Alex Lewis (London: Tolkien Society, 1991), pp. 63–71, Jessica Yates discusses the poem’s ‘kernel’ extensively. T. Keightley’s The Fairy Mythology of 1878 is indeed a probable source for Tolkien, and for Wimberly.

9 This is ‘The Hoard’, which had begun in 1923 as ‘Iumonna Gold Galdre Bewunden’, see note 15 to chapter 2. In the 1962 version the passing of the gold from elf to dwarf, in stanzas 1 to 2, could be seen as a part of the events of The Silmarillion ch. 22, the death of Elu Thingol and the fall of Doriath.

10 I am grateful to John D. Rateliff for telling me about the poem ‘Firiel’, published first on pp. 30–2 of the 1934 volume (no. 4) of The Chronicle of the Convents of the Sacred Heart, produced by the convent at Roehampton. Sister Joan Loveday, the convent’s archivist, provided Mr Rateliff with a copy, which he very kindly passed to me. I should add that Mr Rateliff is of the opinion that few of the poems in TB are entirely new, though early versions may still be extant only in obscure periodicals or hidden under pseudonyms – as was the case with “The Clerkes Compleint’, see ‘Preface’ to this volume.

11 The best account of this theory is in Inklings, pp. 42–5, but see also ‘On Fairy-Stories’ (Tree, pp. 46–56, 70–73).

12 Early South English Legendary, ed. Horstmann, ‘Life of St. Brendan’, lines 55–6.

CHAPTER 9

1 Sir George Webbe Dasent, Popular Tales from the Norse (Edinburgh: David Douglas, revised edition 1903), p. xx. Dasent’s first edition came out in 1851.

2 The essay began as a lecture given to the University of St Andrews in March 1939, but was expanded for publication in 1947, and further revised later, see Bibliography p. 301.

3 See John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson, Dickens at Work (London: Methuen paperback, 1968), p. 116.

4 The origin of both works in Tolkien’s agreement with C. S. Lewis to write, respectively, a time-travel and a space-travel story is discussed by John D. Rateliff, ‘The Lost Road, The Dark Tower, and The Notion Club Papers: Tolkien and Lewis’s Time Travel Triad’, in Legendarium, pp. 199–218. The article is revealing also about the dates of composition, and about the two authors’ mutual co-operation.

5 Anders Stenström points out, in ‘A Mythology? For England?’ in Proceedings of the Tolkien Centenary Conference, ed. Patricia Reynolds and Glen H. Good-Knight (Milton Keynes: Tolkien Society; Altadena, CA: Mythopoeic Press, 1995), pp. 310–14, that Tolkien does not seem actually to have used the phrase. The general intention, however, is clear.

6 See for instance R. M. Wilson, The Lost Literature of Medieval England, pp. 14–16.

7 It is impossible to even sketch a coverage of the – often highly derivative – Tolkien imitations. A mere glance round a bookshop will show titles like C.D. Simak, The Fellowship of the Talisman (1978), James Blaylock, The Elfin Ship (1982), David Eddings, Guardians of the West Book One of the Malloreon (1987), R.A. Salvatore, The Halfling’s Gem (1990). I would guess that at least fifty authors, many of them highly successful in their own right, show evident debt to Tolkien; and this is ignoring his deep influence on ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ motifs, and on electronic games. His example created a genre almost single-handed: I note some signs of a non-Tolkienian but analogous tradition in my introduction to William Morris, The Wood Beyond the World (London: Oxford U.P., World’s Classics reprint, 1980), p. xvii.

8 In this discussion I use the Norse forms Sigurthr, Brynhildr, for characters in Old Norse texts; Sifrit, Prünhild, for the characters in the Middle High German Nibelungenlied; and the anglicised Sigurd, Brynhild, for ‘composite’ characters, characters outside any particular text or group of texts. The variety does help to explain why Tolkien thought it normal for his elvish names to have several different forms.

9 I am grateful to Johann Schimanski, of the Tolkien Society of Norway, for inviting me to give a lecture including some of this material in 1987. His criticisms and those of others present, including Anders Stenström, editor of Arda, sharpened my thoughts considerably. The lecture appeared eventually in Arda, the journal of the Swedish Tolkien Society, vol. 7 (1987), pp. 18–39, under the title ‘Long Evolution: “The History of Middle-earth” and its merits.’

10 A point made strongly by C. S. Lewis, see his essay ‘It All Began with a Picture …’ in Of Other Worlds, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Harcourt, Brace, World, 1967).

11 See the references given in note 14 to chapter 5.

12 ‘And other’ is a favourite carelessness: ‘wizards and other powers’, ‘runic and other messages’, ‘Old Norse and other materials’. The distinction I make between the ‘tough-minded’ and the ‘tender-minded’ above is relevant.

13 Calling the War of the Ring a ‘largely racial war’ seems to me an anachronism. It is of course very largely a war between species; and to people nowadays, acutely sensitive to racial politics, this may seem to be a metaphor for race. There is no sign, however, that Tolkien thought that way. The Corsairs of Umbar have the same racial origin as the Gondorians, LOTR, pp. 1022–3. When Tolkien encountered racial politics in person, he reacted angrily and contemptuously, regardless of cost, see Letters, pp. 37–8.

14 It is interesting (to philologists) to note that, just like ‘addictive’, the words ‘racism’ and ‘genocide’ remained missing from the OED as late as 1979. This is not to say that such things did not exist in the Victorian mind or in the nineteenth century. In the rural Worcestershire of Tolkien’s youth, however, peaceful and racially entirely homogeneous, they would have taken a good deal of explaining, just as they would in the fictional Shire.

15 See Golding’s essay ‘Fable’, in The Hot Gates (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), p. 87.

16 See for instance the speech of Egeus in Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’, lines 1984–90. The topos is also used by C. S. Lewis’s character, the Greek slave-philosopher Fox, in Lewis’s 1956 novel Till We Have Faces.

17 See Swanwick, ‘A Changeling Returns’, in Karen Haber, ed., Meditations on Middle-earth (New York: Byron Preiss, 2001), pp. 33–46 (45). This volume contains valuable responses by, among other major contemporary writers of fantasy, George Martin, Poul Anderson, Terry Pratchett, Ursula Le Guin.

18 For the quotation, see the last page of T. H. White, The Book of Merlyn (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977).

AFTERWORD

1 For thorough analyses of the two deficiencies mentioned, see respectively Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (New Haven and London: Yale U.P., 1979), and C. S. Ferns, Aldous Huxley: Novelist (London: Athlone Press, 1980). Tolkien liked science fiction, and had some (not very obvious) similarities to Huxley.

2 See William James, The Will to Believe and other essays (New York: Longmans Green, 1896), pp. 65–6, and further Pragmatism (same imprint, 1907), pp. 11–14.

3 I am referring in the paragraph above to such works as Ruth S. Noel, The Mythology of Middle-Earth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), Timothy R. O’Neill, The Individuated Hobbit: Jung, Tolkien and the Archetypes of Middle Earth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), Anne C. Petty, One Ring to Bind them All: Tolkien’s Mythology (University, Al.: University of Alabama Press, 1979), especially p. 103. But see also the books cited in note 28 to chapter 1. For a detailed critique of one particular work, see my review of Jane Chance Nitzsche, Tolkien’s Art: A Mythology for England (London: Macmillan, 1979), in Notes and Queries N.S. vol. 27 (1980), pp. 570–2.

4 Four Quartets, ‘East Coker’, lines 174–81, quoted here from The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1969).

5 All of these have been discussed above, except ‘worship’. If one re-reads the line from Milton’s sonnet quoted above, one can see that Milton meant ‘worship’ to mean ‘honour or revere as a supernatural being … or as a holy thing’. But that idolatrous sense vanishes if one gives ‘worship’ its older sense (derived from ‘worth’) of ‘regard … with honour or respect’. Tolkien surely appreciated the way an insult to ‘our fathers’ could be read as a compliment.

6 Tolkien was perhaps amused by the proverb ‘Where there’s a will there’s a way’. It is not recorded till 1822, but would have sounded much the same in Old English. He made it into a line of alliterative poetry, accordingly, in LOTR, p. 787, ‘Where will wants not, a way opens’. ‘Where there’s a whip there’s a will’, say the orcs, LOTR, p. 910. In the Old Norse Hamðismál there is a discouraging variant, Illt er blauðom hal brautir kenna, ‘It’s no good showing a coward the road’, or as I would put it, ‘Where there’s no will there’s no way’. This often seems more appropriate.

7 Two of these have been discussed above; for ‘fallow’ see Memoriam Essays, pp. 299–300; ‘Quickbeam’ is a dictionary joke. Cwicbéam, ‘live-tree’, is glossed in Anglo-Saxon dictionaries as ‘poplar’ or ‘aspen’, a decision Tolkien knew was wrong (a) because poplars were imports, like rabbits, (b) because in England ‘quicken’ or ‘wicken’ is still the common word for ‘mountain-ash’. Quickbeam accordingly is a rowan-Ent (LOTR, p. 471); but he has become a ‘quick-tree’ in the modern sense, not the old one.

8 I.J. L. Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (London: Constable, 1927), p. 44.

APPENDIX C

1 This Appendix is based on my article ‘Another Road to Middle-earth: Jackson’s Movie Trilogy’, in Neil D. Isaacs and Rose Zimbardo, eds., Understanding the Lord of the Rings (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 2004), pp. 233–54. I am grateful to the editors for allowing me to repeat sections of it.

2 Some figures for video/DVD sales are given by Kristin Thompson in her article ‘Fantasy, Franchises, and Frodo Baggins: The Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood’, in The Velvet Light Trap 32 (Fall 2003), 45–63. Though such figures are always out-of-date, it is clear that the Tolkien films have unusually high cassette/DVD sales, especially of DVDs, though relatively low rentals (people want to keep them). Even in 2003 the return on such sales was approaching the figure for box office takings.

3 Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens are credited with the screenplay, along with Jackson himself.

4 Possibly Frodo says the words four times. Only three are sub-titled, but Frodo appears to say ‘I will take the Ring’ completely inaudibly, as if to himself, before trying to say it out loud.

5 Arwen says to Elrond, her father, ‘There is still hope’ in JTT 38, ‘Arwen’s Fate’, and this conversation is what brings the Elvish army to the rescue at Helm’s Deep. There is a kind of symmetry, then, in three or four scenes: Arwen persuading her father in JTT 38, Aragorn encouraging Théoden in JTT 43 and Haleth in JTT 48, Sam re-motivating Frodo and at the same time convincing Faramir in JTT 60.

6 For the importance of the play to Tolkien, see above. There is an old theatrical tradition that the ‘glass’ which Macbeth sees in Act IV, Scene 1, line 118 ff. was, in the original first production, a mirror angled towards King James I in the audience so that the latter could see himself, as one of Banquo’s descendants.

7 To quote Hamlet’s famous ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy, from Act III, scene 1: ‘Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, / And thus the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, / And enterprises of great pitch and moment / With this regard their currents turn awry / And lose the name of action.’ For the importance of Macbeth to Tolkien, see the note above; Michael M.C. Drout points out clear debts to King Lear in his ‘Tolkien’s Prose Style and its Literary and Rhetorical Effects’, Tolkien Studies 1 (2004), 137–62.

8 Jackson’s own version of ‘interlace’ obviously deserves extended treatment of its own. Kristin Thompson’s article mentioned in note 2 above discusses his debt to cinematic tradition.

9 Against the 62 chapters of The Lord of the Rings (some ten of which are largely or completely cut out of the film versions), the extended version of JFR has 46 scenes, not counting credits, of JTT 66. No count is available as yet for the extended version of the third film, but the total number of scenes will probably be 170–180: three or four scenes, then, for every one of Tolkien’s chapters actually used.