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

CHAPTER 1

‘LIT. AND LANG.’ Old Antipathies

‘This is not a work that many adults will read right through more than once.’ With these words the anonymous reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement (25 November 1955) summed up his judgement of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.¹ It must have seemed a pretty safe prophecy at the time, for of course very few adults (or children) read anything right through more than once, still less anything as long as The Lord of the Rings. However it could not have been more wrong. This did not stop critics continuing to say the same thing. Six years later, after the three separate volumes had gone through eight or nine hardback impressions each, Philip Toynbee in the Observer (6 August 1961) voiced delight at the way sales, he thought, were dropping. Most of Professor Tolkien’s more ardent supporters, he declared, were beginning to ‘sell out their shares’ in him, so that ‘today these books have passed into a merciful oblivion’. Five years afterwards the authorised American paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings was moving rapidly past its first million copies, starting a wave which never receded even to the more-than-respectable levels of 1961; and which has been revived in the 21st century to levels Toynbee could not have dreamed of.

The point is not that reviewers make mistakes (something which happens too often to deserve comment). It is that they should insist so perversely in making statements not about literary merit, where their opinions could rest undisprovable, but about popular appeal, where they can be shown up beyond all possibility of doubt. Matters are not much better with those critics who have been able to bring themselves to recognise the fact that some people do like Tolkien. Why was this ‘balderdash’ so popular, Edmund Wilson asked himself, in The Nation (14 April 1956). Well, he concluded, it was because ‘certain people – especially, perhaps, in Britain – have a life-long appetite for juvenile trash’. Some twenty-five years before the same critic had delivered a little homily on the subject of intolerant responses to new fictions, in his book Axel’s Castle:

it is well to remember the mysteriousness of the states with which we respond to the stimulus of works of literature and the primarily suggestive character of the language in which these works are written, on any occasion when we may be tempted to characterise as ‘nonsense’ ‘balderdash’ or ‘gibberish’ some new and outlandish-looking piece of writing to which we do not happen to respond. If other persons say they do respond, and derive from doing so pleasure or profit, we must take them at their word.²

A good rule, one must admit! But Mr Wilson had evidently forgotten it by the time he came to read The Lord of the Rings: or perhaps every time he said ‘we’ in the passage just quoted, he really meant ‘you’.

Very similar play is made with pronouns in C. N. Manlove’s Modern Fantasy (1975), a book dedicated to the thesis that no work of modern fantasy has remained ‘true to its original vision’ but one which like Edmund Wilson’s review does at least confront the problem of Tolkienian popularity – of course much more evident in 1975 than 1956. Dr Manlove also thinks that the whole thing might be mere national aberration, though he prefers to blame the United States and ‘the perennial American longing for roots’. Or could it all be due to mere length?

Doubtless there is such a thing as the sheer number of pages the reader has had to turn that can add poignancy to the story – one almost feels this is the case as we come to the great close of Malory’s epic. But not with Tolkien’s book, for we have never been very much involved anyway.³

Who are ‘we’? Readers of Modern Fantasy? Readers of The Lord of the Rings? There is no sensible answer to the question. For all the display of scholarly reflection this is, just like the bits from Messrs Toynbee and Wilson and the TLS reviewer, once more the criticism of blank denial. Some people may like reading Tolkien – after fifty years and scores of millions of readers the point is nowadays usually grudgingly conceded – but they are wrong to do so, and whoever they are, they are not ‘us’! Tolkien’s ‘mission as a literary preservationist’ declared Judith Shulevitz in the New York Times Book Review (22nd April, 2001, p. 35) has turned out to be ‘death to literature itself’.

In an exasperated kind of way Tolkien would, I think, have been particularly delighted to read Dr Manlove’s essay, and probably (see below) Ms. Shulevitz’s review as well. He had run into criticism like Manlove’s before, indeed it is a major theme of his tauntingly-titled British Academy lecture of 1936, ‘Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics’. The critics he had in mind were critics of Beowulf, but they were saying pretty much the same thing as Manlove on Tolkien: Beowulf didn’t work, just like The Lord of the Rings, it was intrinsically silly, and ‘we’ weren’t involved with it. ‘Correct and sober taste’ Tolkien wrote, ‘may refuse to admit that there can be an interest for us – the proud we that includes all intelligent living people – in ogres and dragons; we then perceive its puzzlement in face of the odd fact that it has derived great pleasure from a poem that is actually about these unfashionable creatures’ (‘Monsters’ p. 257). Tolkien had not, in 1936, realised how quickly ‘correct and sober taste’ could stamp ‘puzzlement’ out, and ‘pleasure’ along with it. However, for the rest he might just as well have been writing about responses to his own fiction. No doubt he would have felt honoured, in a way, to find himself as well as the Beowulf-poet driving critics to take refuge in threadbare and hopeless ‘we’s’.

The similarities between responses to Beowulf (as analysed by Tolkien) and to The Lord of the Rings do not end there. If one looks at Tolkien’s remarks about the Beowulf critics, one can see that the thing he found worst about them was their monoglottery: they seemed able to read only one language, and even if they knew a bit of French or some other modern tongue they were quite incapable of reading ancient texts, ancient English texts, with anything like the degree of detailed verbal insight that was required. They relied on translations and summaries, they did not pay close attention to particular words. ‘This is an age of potted criticism and predigested literary opinion’ Tolkien wrote in 1940 in apologetic preface to a translation of Beowulf which he hoped would only be used as a crib; ‘in the making of these cheap substitutes for food translations unfortunately are too often used’ (p. ix). Now this could hardly be said about The Lord of the Rings, which is after all mostly in modern English. Or could it? Were people really paying close attention to words, Tolkien must have wondered as he read through the reviews? Or were they just skipping through for the plot again?

His irritation surfaced in the 1966 Foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, where he wrote, rather cattily:

Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer. (LOTR, p. xvi)

Probably this was, strictly speaking, unfair. All the reviewers I have come across do seem to have read the book right through with no more than a normal run of first-reading miscomprehensions. However it is a surprising fact that Edmund Wilson, who declared that he had not only read the book but had read the whole thousand pages out loud to his seven-year-old daughter, nevertheless managed consistently to spell the name of a central character wrong: ‘Gandalph’ for ‘Gandalf’. Edwin Muir in the Observer preferred ‘Gandolf’. This may seem purely trivial; but Tolkien would not have looked at it that way. He knew that ‘ph’ for ‘f’ was a learned spelling, introduced sporadically into English from Latin from about the fourteenth century, mostly in words of Greek origin like ‘physics’ or ‘philosophy’. It is not used for native words like ‘foot’ or ‘fire’. Now in the rather similar linguistic correspondences of Middle-earth (they are laid out in Appendices E and F of The Lord of the Rings, for those who haven’t already noticed) it is clear that ‘Gandalf’ belongs to the latter set rather than the former. ‘Gandalph’ would accordingly have seemed to Tolkien as intrinsically ludicrous as ‘phat’ or ‘phool’ or come to that ‘elph’ or ‘dwarph’. He could hardly have conceived of the state of mind that would regard such variations as meaningless, or beneath notice. As for ‘Gandolf’, that is an Italian miscomprehension, familiar from Browning’s poem ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb’ but wildly inappropriate to a work which does its best to avoid Latinisms.

No compromise is possible between what one might call ‘the Gandalph mentality’ and Tolkien’s. Perhaps this is why The Lord of the Rings (and to a lesser extent Tolkien’s other writings as well) makes so many literary critics avert their eyes, get names wrong, write about things that aren’t there and miss the most obvious points of success.⁴ Tolkien thought this instinctive antipathy was an ancient one: people who couldn’t stand his books hadn’t been able to bear Beowulf, or Pearl, or Chaucer, or Sir Gawain, or Sir Orfeo either. For millennia they had been trying to impose their views on a recalcitrant succession of authors, who had fortunately taken no notice. In the rather steely ‘Preface’ to their edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (in which the word ‘criticism’ is conspicuously shunned), Tolkien and his colleague E. V. Gordon declared that they wanted to help people read the poem ‘with an appreciation as far as possible of the sort which its author may be supposed to have desired’ (p. v). Doing the same job for Tolkien ought to be easier, since he is so much more our contemporary than the Gawain-poet; on the other hand Tolkien’s mind was one of unmatchable subtlety, not without a streak of deliberate guile. However nothing is to be gained by applying to it the criteria of ‘correct and sober taste’ of the great but one-sided traditions of later English literature, of those ‘higher literary aspirations’ so haughtily opposed by Anthony Burgess to ‘allegories with animals or fairies’ (Observer, 26 November 1978). These lead only to the conclusion that there is nothing to be said and no phenomenon to consider. Still, something made Tolkien different, gave him the power so markedly to provoke these twin reactions of popular appeal and critical rage. The Nature of Philology

Whatever it was, it almost self-evidently had something to do with his job. For most of his active life Tolkien taught Old English, Middle English, the history of the English language; in doing so he was competing with teachers of English literature for time, funds and students, on the whole a thankless task since for all that Tolkien could do the current was setting firmly away from him and from his subjects. Tolkien was by all accounts as capable of keeping up a grudge as the next man, and his minor writings often show it. The anthology of Songs for the Philologists which he and E. V. Gordon compiled, later to be privately printed in 1936, contains at least two poems by Tolkien attacking teachers of ‘Lit.’; one of them, titled variously ‘Two Little Schemes’ and ‘Lit. and Lang.’ the worst he ever wrote; so bad indeed that it makes me think (or hope) that something must have gone wrong with it en route between poet and printer. Meanwhile he was from the start of his learned career barely able to use the word ‘literature’ at all without putting inverted commas round it to show he couldn’t take it seriously, which suggests that Ms Shulevitz’s ‘death to literature’ remark would not have disturbed him. Thus his famous article on ‘Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad’,^* published in 1929, opens with the remark that: ‘The Ancrene Wisse has already developed a “literature”, and it is very possible that nothing I can say about it will be either new or illuminating to the industrious or leisured that have kept up with it. I have not’ (‘AW’, p. 104). There are variants on the same innuendo at the start of the Beowulf lecture of 1936 and in the Sir Gawain ‘Preface’ of 1925. Of course there is a reason (of characteristic deviousness) for this repeated Tolkienian joke, and one which can easily be extracted from the pages of the Oxford English Dictionary, on which Tolkien had himself worked in youth. There one can find that the meaning which Tolkien foisted on to ‘literature’ is indeed recognised, under heading 3b: ‘The body of books and writings that treat of a particular subject’. But why should Tolkien insist on using that one when heading 3a is less narrow and much more generally pertinent: ‘Literature’ meaning ‘literary productions as a whole … Now also, in a more restricted sense, applied to writing which has claim to consideration on the ground of beauty of form or emotional effect’? The sting for Tolkien lay in the illustrative quotations which form the backbone of the definition, of which the sixth reads ‘The full glory of the new literature broke in England with Edmund Spenser’ i.e. in 1579. The true mordancy of that opinion may not appear till later. It is enough to note that if you took the OED seriously you could argue (a) that the valueless accumulation of books about Beowulf and the Ancrene Wisse and Sir Gawain were all ‘literature’ under heading 3b, but (b) the original and creative works themselves, all very much pre-1579, were not, under 3a. Naturally no one would be stupid enough to put forward such a proposition seriously and in so many words. Still, Tolkien did not think these semantic tangles entirely fortuitous; the OED might not mirror truth but it did represent orthodox learned opinion. It was typical of him to note the confusion and the slur it implied, to use the one to avenge the other – ‘literature’ was ‘books about books’ the dead Latin ‘letter’ opposed to the ancient English spirit.

Yet what this obsessive playing with words shows, better than anything, is that beneath the fog and fury of academic politics, Tolkien realised that all discussions of ‘language’ and ‘literature’ were irretrievably poisoned by the very terms they were bound to use. When he was not simply playing for his side, he accepted that ‘lang.’ was just as foolish a rallying-cry as ‘lit.’. In his manifesto of 1930, ‘The Oxford English School’ he even suggested that both terms should be scrapped in favour of ‘A’ and ‘B’ – thus attempting, with something very close to lèse majesté, to introduce the curriculum of a ‘redbrick’ university, Leeds, to the ivory towers of Oxford, with sad if entirely predictable lack of success.⁵ The same article makes it clear that he thought both ‘linguistic’ and ‘literary’ approaches too narrow for a full response to works of art, especially early works of art, and that furthermore what was needed was not some tame compromise between them (which is all most Schools of English usually manage to provide), but something as it were at right angles to both. This third dimension was the ‘philological’ one: it was from this that he trained himself to see things, from this too that he wrote his works of fiction. ‘Philology’ is indeed the only proper guide to a view of Middle-earth ‘of the sort which its author may be supposed to have desired’. It is not Tolkien’s fault that over the last hundred years ‘philology’ as a term and as a discipline, has been getting itself into even worse tangles than ‘English literature’.

Dictionary definitions are, symptomatically, unhelpful. The OED, though conceived and created by philologists and borne along by the subject’s nineteenth-century prestige, has almost nothing useful to offer. ‘Philology’ it suggests, is: ‘I. Love of learning and literature; the study of literature in a wide sense, including grammar, literary criticism and interpretation … polite learning. Now rare in general sense.’ Under 2 it offers ‘love of talk, speech or argument’ (this is an offensive sense in which philology is mere logic-chopping, the opposite of true philosophy); while 3 recovers any ground abandoned in 1 by saying it is ‘The study of the structure and development of language; the science of language; linguistics. (Really one branch of sense 1.)’ So ‘philology’ is ‘lang.’ and ‘lit.’ too, all very charitable but too vague to be any use. The Deutsches Wörterbuch set in motion by Jacob Grimm (himself perhaps the greatest of all philologists and responsible in true philological style for both ‘Grimm’s Law of Consonants’ and Grimms’ Fairy Tales) could do little better, defining philologie with similar inclusiveness as ‘the learned study of the (especially Classical) languages and literatures’. The illustrative quotation from Grimm’s own work is more interesting in its declaration that ‘none among all the sciences is prouder, nobler, more disputatious than philology, or less merciful to error’; this at least indicates the expectations the study had aroused. Still, if you didn’t know what ‘philology’ was already, the Grimm definition would not enlighten you.

The matter is not cleared up by Holger Pedersen’s assertion of 1924 that philology is ‘a study whose task is the interpretation of the literary monuments in which the spiritual life of a given period has found expression’⁶ (for this leaves you wondering why ‘spiritual’ has been put in and ‘language’ for once left out); nor by Leonard Bloomfield’s aside a year later, when, proposing the foundation of a Linguistic Society for America, he explicitly rejected the term ‘philological’ and noted that while British scholars tended to use it to mean ‘linguistic’, Americans would prefer to keep the latter term and to revere philology rather more from a distance as ‘that noblest of sciences … the study of national culture … something much greater than a misfit combination of language plus literature’.⁷ Anyway some Britons were very far removed from his position. John Churton Collins, nineteenth-century man of letters and candidate for an Oxford Chair, had written in 1891 (it was part of his campaign to keep men like Joseph Wright, Tolkien’s tutor, out of any prospective English School at Oxford):

it [i.e. philology] too often induces or confirms that peculiar woodenness and opacity, that singular coarseness of feeling and purblindness of moral and intellectual vision, which has in all ages been the characteristic of mere philologists … [it] too often resembles that rustic who, after listening for several hours to Cicero’s most brilliant conversation, noticed nothing and remembered nothing but the wart on the great orator’s nose.⁸

Opinions such as this clung on a long time in England. Tolkien wrote in 1924 ‘“Philology” is in some quarters treated as though it were one of the things that the late war was fought to end’ (YWES 4, p. 37). When I first read this I took it to be a joke. However just three years before the British Board of Education had printed a Report on The Teaching of English in England which declared, among much else, that philology ought not to be taught to undergraduates, that it was a ‘German-made’ science, and (this comes in a footnote on p. 286) that by contributing to German arrogance it had led in a direct way to the outbreak of World War I.

Philology was ‘the noblest of sciences’; it was literary; it was linguistic; it was German; it was Classical; it was different in America; it was about warts on noses; it was ‘the special burden of the Northern tongues’ (Tolkien speaking, ‘OES’ p. 780); also ‘the special advantage they possess as a discipline’ (Tolkien once again, in the same sentence). This begins to sound like the Babel of conflicting voices which Tolkien guyed so fiercely in his lecture on Beowulf, except that in this case the final universal chorus of all voices ‘it is worth studying!’ would clearly be somewhat ragged. If no single answer to the question ‘what is philology?’ can be found, at least few authorities would dissent from the view that the redefinition of philology – the moment when it stopped being used in the OED’s vaguest senses of ‘love of talk’ or ‘love of learning’ – came in 1786 when Sir William Jones informed the Bengal Society in Calcutta that Sanskrit resembled Greek and Latin too strongly for this to be the result of chance, but that all three, together with Germanic and Celtic, must have ‘sprung from some common source which, perhaps, no longer exists’.⁹

Obviously this thought must have crossed many minds before 1786, for even between English and Latin, say, there are enough similarities – one, two, three, unus, duo, tres – to make one think there may be some sort of a connection. But until the turn of the eighteenth century such speculations had foundered immediately on the great reefs of dissimilarity surrounding the occasional identical rocks. After all the main thing anyone knew about languages was that they were so different they had to be learnt one at a time. The great alteration Jones and his successors brought to the problem was the idea of looking not for chance resemblances – which had already been used to ‘prove’ relationships all over the map – but for regular change. Bad in modern Persian had the same sound and sense as ‘bad’ in English (remarked A. E. Pott in 1833), but that was just coincidence. On the other hand xvahar in Persian was originally the same word as xo in Ossetic, and both were related to English ‘sister’; furthermore the intermediate stages could be inferred and on occasion recovered.¹⁰ Like many mental revolutions, this linguistic one depended on being counterintuitive. It was also to an intense degree comparative, using many languages to explain and corroborate each other; and, since different stages of the same language could be used comparatively, by nature overwhelmingly historical. ‘Philology unfolds the genesis of those laws of speech which grammar contemplates as a finished result’ says a citation in the OED, dated 1852. Its author did not mean ‘philology’ in any of the senses quoted from the OED above; he meant comparative philology, the science inspired by Sir William and carried on through many inheritors to Professor Tolkien himself. One may remark that the confidence with which ‘genesis’ is approached was characteristic of the time.

By 1852, indeed, ‘the new philology’ had many triumphs to look back on, with several yet to come: one might pick out the prize-winning essay of Rasmus Rask in 1814, on Old Icelandic, and on the relationship of Scandinavian languages to Slavic, Celtic, Finnish and Classical ones; the enormous ‘Comparative Grammar’ or Vergleichende Grammatik of Franz Bopp in 1833–49, which covered Sanskrit, Zend, Armenian, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Old Slavic, Gothic and German; the Deutsche Grammatik (1819) of Jacob Grimm, and all their many successors.¹¹ The point which all these works brandished was the intensely systematic nature of discovery, expressed as time went on increasingly by the word ‘laws’ (see OED citation above), and on the analogy of physics or chemistry by the association of laws with discoverers: Grimm’s Law, Verner’s Law, Kuhn’s Law, Thomsen’s Law, etc. There was and still is something insidiously fascinating about the relationships these laws uncover, in such detail and such profusion. Latin pisces is the same word as Old English fisc, observed Jacob Grimm, or indeed modern English ‘fish’; pes is the same as ‘foot’ and pellis as ‘fell’ (the old word for ‘skin’). What about porcus and ‘pig’ though, where the p/f alternation breaks down? Well, there is an Old English word fearh which corresponds properly, noted Grimm, its modern descendant being ‘farrow’, again an old or dialectal word for a ‘birth’ of piglets. The mill of comparisons will not work on basic or standard or literary languages alone, but demands ever-increasing grist from older or localised or sub-standard forms. The reward it offers is first an increasing sense that everything can be worked out, given time and material, second an exciting tension between the modern meanings of words – words everyone has known all their lives – and what appear as the ancient meanings. ‘Daughter’ in modern Hindustani comes out as beti; yet there is a connection between the two languages in the word dudh, ‘milk’. In ancient days, it seems, a word like Sanskrit duhitar meant ‘the little milker’; but the job was so often given to daughters that task and relationship became fused. It ‘opens before our eyes a little idyll of the poetical and pastoral life of the early Aryans’ enthused Max Müller,¹² whose lectures on comparative philology bowled over not only (or not even) the learned world in the 1860s and after, but also London’s high society. Comparison was the rage: it didn’t tell you only about words, it told you about people.

But somewhere towards the end of the nineteenth century things had begun to go wrong. As is obvious from all that Tolkien ever said about literature and about philology, he felt that he had taken over (perhaps unfairly, but possibly not) a losing position in the academic game from his predecessors. Why – he could hardly have helped wondering – was that? Why had philology so ignominiously belied its promise?

Probably the short answer is that the essence of comparative philology was slog. There is something wistful in Tolkien’s astonished praise of the ‘dull stodges’ of Leeds University (Biography, p. 111), in his insistence that at Leeds anyway ‘Philology is making headway … and there is no trace of the press-gang!’ (Letters, p. 11). For matters were different elsewhere. No science, Jacob Grimm had said of philology, was ‘prouder, nobler, more disputatious, or less merciful to error’ (my italics). All its practitioners accepted, to a degree now incredible, a philosophy of rigid accuracy, total coverage, utter right and utter wrong: in 1919 the old and massively distinguished Eduard Sievers happily put his reputation on the line when he offered to dissect a text provided unseen by Hans Lietzmann, and to show from linguistic evidence how many authors had composed it (he had already done the same thing to the Epistles of Paul). He got Lietzmann’s specimen totally wrong. But no one said the idea of the test itself was unfair.¹³ Further down the scale, the discoveries of Grimm and his successors as far as Ferdinand de Saussure (now famous for inventing ‘structuralism’ but before that a student of Ablaut) were communicated increasingly to students as facts, systems of facts, systems divorced from the texts they had been found in. We must have philology within English Studies, wrote F. York Powell the Icelandicist in 1887, ‘or goodbye to accuracy’.¹⁴ The claim was false – you can be accurate about other things besides sound-shifts – but after seventy years of unbroken progress for the subject it was also damningly unambitious. Looking back many years later, R. W. Chambers (the man who turned down the Chair of Anglo-Saxon which eventually went to Tolkien in 1925) summed up success and failure by observing that in 1828 ‘the comparative philologist was like Ulysses’ but ‘Scoffers may say that my parallel is all too true – that students of comparative language, like [Dante’s] Ulysses, found only the mountain of Purgatory – Grimm’s Law, Verner’s Law, Grassmann’s Law – rising in successive terraces of horror – and then were overwhelmed …’ ¹⁵ Scoffers said exactly that; their viewpoint became dominant; comparative philology seen as ‘hypothetical sound-shiftings in the primeval German forests’¹⁶ went into a decline nearly as precipitate as its rise.

This is why ‘philology’ has first the old vague sense of ‘love of learning’; then the new nineteenth century one of ‘study of texts leading to comparative study of language leading to comprehension of its evolution’; and in the twentieth century the specialised meaning, within departments of English Studies, of ‘anti-literary science kept up by pedants (like Professor Tolkien) which ought to be stopped as soon as possible’. But these interesting semantic changes leave something out: the ‘spiritual life’ waved at by Holger Pedersen, the ‘national culture’ saluted by Leonard Bloomfield – or, to put it another way, the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Lost Romances

For philology, after the Rask-Bopp-Grimm breakthrough, had moved in other directions beside the phonological and morphological. The mill of historical comparison called increasingly for fresh material, and one natural effect, besides the study of language in general, was the study of languages in particular. Scholars became much more interested in unread texts; they also became spectacularly better at reading them, at producing dictionaries of stone-dead languages. As Tolkien noted himself (‘Preface’, p. xii), the word hós(e) in Beowulf was never found anywhere else in Old English, so that one would have to guess at its meaning from context, were it not for the fact that philology proved it was the ‘same’ word as Old High German hansa, as in ‘Hanseatic League’, with the meaning ‘retinue’ or possibly ‘band of people connected by mutual oaths’. The dead languages furnished comparative material; the comparative material illuminated dead languages. Men learnt to read Hittite, recognised as an Indo-European language in the 1920s (with marked effect on Old Testament studies), Tokharian (another Indo-European language once spoken by steppe-nomads but now represented mostly by texts preserved accidentally in an oasis in Turkestan), more recently to decipher ‘Linear B’ (an exploration of Cretan archaeology which would have been impossible in a pre-Bopp era). Much obscurer discoveries were made. A whole nation was theorised to lie behind the tiny fragment of Kottish, a language spoken when it was investigated by only five people. Holger Pedersen said of their relatives the Yenisei that they seem to be ‘the last remnants of a powerful folk who, with the Thibetan empire as their southern neighbour, ruled over a great part of Siberia, but were at length compelled to submit to the Turks’.¹⁷ Yet of their rule no traces remain other than linguistic ones. The romance of these investigations can still be felt. It is a large-scale analogue of Muller’s remarks on duhitar, of the awareness that some forms even of modern language took you back to the Stone Age (as in English ‘hammer’, cognate with Old Slavic kamy, ‘stone’). The romance became stronger, perversely, the closer it got to home.

Thus Old English itself looked very strikingly different after the philologists got hold of it – and it was they who insisted on calling it Old English instead of Anglo-Saxon to mark what they saw as an essential continuity. The story of Gothic, however, was even more dramatic. Some awareness of this language had been around from an early period. People knew that such texts as the Uppsala Codex Argenteus were in Gothic, that the Goths were an East Germanic tribe who had overrun parts of the Roman Empire from about AD 376, that they had been converted to literacy and Christianity, and become linguistically extinct some time round the eighth century. Philology shattered this picture. For one thing Gothic became suddenly more than comprehensible, it became vital: it was the earliest Germanic language recorded at any length, Germanic was the area of most philologists’ main interest (they were mostly Germans), and Gothic exhibited, in ways that Old English and Old High German did not, stages in the history of all the Germanic languages inferable from but not recorded in its cousins. So, modern English says ‘old’ but ‘elder’, Old English (in its Early West Saxon form) eald but ieldra, both say (more or less) ‘to heal’ but ‘hale (and hearty)’. For these Gothic offers respectively altheis, althiza, háiljan, háils. The common element deduced is that when an -i- or -j- followed a or ái in old Old English (this goes back to the time before Englishmen had learnt to write) speakers began to change the earlier vowel into e, ae – with similar changes affecting other vowels. Where there is a succeeding -i- in Gothic there is a change of vowel in Old (and often still in modern) English; not otherwise.

This phenomenon, known as ‘i-mutation’ became one of the most familiar horrors of university philology, but there is in it something both mysterious and satisfactory: a whole series of things which people said, and still say, without in the least knowing why, turn out to have one very old but clear, 100 per cent predictable reason. It is almost like genetics. No wonder that Grimm said Gothic was a ‘perfect’ language, Tolkien (‘EW’, p. 38) that it took him by storm. A further stage in the developing romance of ‘Gothia’ was the thought that the Goths might not be extinct. At some time in the 1560s one Ogier van Busbecq, a Fleming then acting as ambassador in Istanbul, had heard some foreigners whose speech sounded familiar. He recorded a list of words from them and printed it in 1589. They proved to be Gothic, nearly a thousand years out of place. Their interest aroused several centuries later, scholars could for a while entertain the hope that a living Gothic was still somewhere in existence, as a kind of Abominable Snowman of language. Alas, it wasn’t. But at least it became clearer how Gothic had survived, in the remote Crimea, and it became possible to piece together once again the history of a vanished people.

It is not too much to say that this language and this people haunted Tolkien all his life. As is noted by Christopher Tolkien (UT, p. 311), the names of the leaders of the Rohirrim before the dynasty of Eorl are not Old English, like everything else in the Riders’ culture, but Gothic, e.g. Vidugavia, Vidumavi, Marhwini, etc. (see LOTR, pp. 1021–2). They function there to suggest language behind language and age behind age, a phenomenon philologists so often detected. On a larger scale the Battle of the Pelennor Fields closely follows the account, in Jordanes’s Gothic History, of the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains, in which also the civilisation of the West was preserved from the ‘Easterlings’ and in which the Gothic king Theodorid was trampled by his own victorious cavalry with much the same mixture of grief and glory as Tolkien’s Théoden. Perhaps the most revealing remark, however, comes in a letter from Tolkien to his son Christopher after the latter had read a paper on the heroes of northern legend. In this he praised his son’s paper for the light it shed on men and on history, but added:

All the same, I suddenly realized that I am a pure philologist. I like history, and am moved by it, but its finest moments for me are those in which it throws light on words and names! Several people (and I agree) spoke to me of the art with which you made the beady-eyed Attila on his couch almost vividly present. Yet oddly, I find the thing that really thrills my nerves is the one you mentioned casually: atta, attila. Without those syllables the whole great drama both of history and legend loses savour for me. (Letters, p. 264)

The point is that Attila, though a Hun, an enemy of the Goths under Theodorid, and a byword for bloody ferocity, nevertheless does not appear to bear a barbarian name. ‘Attila’ is the diminutive form of the Gothic word for ‘father’, atta: it means ‘little father’ or even ‘dad’, and it suggests very strongly the presence of many Goths in Attila’s conquering armies who found loot and success much more attractive than any questions of saving the West, Rome or civilisation! As with duhitar, ‘little milker’, or kamy as a cognate for ‘hammer’, the word tells the story. Tolkien went on in his letter to say that in his mind that was exactly how The Lord of the Rings grew and worked. He had not constructed a design. Instead he had tried ‘to create a situation in which a common greeting would be elen síla lúmenn’ omentielmo’. Literary critics might not believe him, but philologists (if any were left) ought to know better.

Atta, Attila: what’s in a name? One answer is, a total revaluation of history. It is instructive to look at older and newer editions of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (first published 1776–88). Gibbon knew the Goths from many Roman and Greek historians, including Jordanes, but these were his only sources of information and he could not imagine another one. ‘The memory of past events’, he remarked with classically-educated superciliousness, ‘cannot long be preserved, in the frequent and remote emigrations of illiterate Barbarians’ (chapter 26). As for the great Gothic king of the fourth century, he said, ‘The name of Hermanric is almost buried in oblivion’. It did not stay buried. ‘Hermanric’ turned up in recognisable form in Beowulf (not printed till 1815) as Eormenric. The same name and man, with little stories attached, appeared also in the Old English poems Déor and Widsith. As Ermenrich he survived into the Middle High German romances of Dietrichs Flucht, Alpharts Tod, and many others. Most powerfully, Jörmunrekkr turned out to be a most prominent character in the Old Norse poems of the Elder Edda, which had lain unnoticed in an Icelandic farmhouse till the 1640s, and not been published in full till Rasmus Rask did the job in 1818. The ‘illiterate Barbarians’ were not as forgetful as Gibbon thought. They could at least remember names, and even if these had been affected by sound-changes in the same way as other words, no archaic poet produced anything as false as Gibbon’s ‘(H)ermanric’. From the joint evidence of old poems in English, Norse and German one could in fact deduce that the king’s name, though never recorded in Gothic, must have been *Aírmanareiks.

And, as with ‘Attila’, there is a thrill of old passion lurking in the name, buried though this may be in editors’ footnotes and the inferences of scholarly works. The tales of Ermanaric’s death vary. He committed suicide (round AD 375) for fear of the Huns, says an early Roman source. Jordanes tells a more complicated story of treachery, punishment and revenge. The Old Norse poems, more grisly and more personal, insist that Ermanaric was attacked by his brothers-in-law for murdering their sister, and was left after their death under a hail of Gothic stones – for on them no weapon would bite – to survive as a heimnár or ‘living corpse’, a trunk with both arms and legs cut off. This last tale seems totally unlikely. But it does preserve some agreement over names and incidents with Jordanes: maybe something peculiar and tragic did take place during the collapse of the Gothic Empire in the fourth century. To the philologist who compared these versions there was a further charm in guessing what strange chains of transmission and quirks of national bias had transformed king into villain. Had the defeated Goths cast him as a scapegoat? Had he been made a wife-murderer to gloss over the feelings of those Goths who changed sides and joined the ‘Easterlings’, calling the Hunnish king their ‘little father’? Had Crimean Goths sung lays of Ermanaric to Norsemen of the Varangian Guard in the courts of the Greek emperor? Tolkien followed these inquiries closely, buying for instance the volumes of Hermann Schneider’s Germanische Heldensage as they came out 1928–34,^* and claiming in 1930 (‘OES’, pp. 779–80) that Gothic was being studied under his direction not only for sound-laws but ‘as a main source of the poetic inspiration of ancient England and the North’. As he said in the letter quoted above, the legends of heroes had a fascination in themselves; they were also part of ‘a rational and exacting discipline’.

Philology illuminated the Dark Ages. Certainly, when it comes to Gothic chieftains, J. B. Bury’s revised edition of Gibbon (in 1896) proceeds with a new caution! But the essential point – it is a point which Tolkien’s academic predecessors had signally failed to grasp, with consequent ruin for their subject – lies in the immense stretch of the philological imagination. At one extreme scholars were drawing conclusions from the very letters of a language: they had little hesitation in ascribing texts to Gothic or Lombardic authors, to West Saxons or Kentishmen or Northumbrians, on the evidence of sound-changes recorded in spelling. At the other extreme they were prepared to pronounce categorically on the existence or otherwise of nations and empires on the basis of poetic tradition or linguistic spread. They found information, and romance, in songs and fragments everywhere. The Lex Burgundionum of King Gundobad opened, as had been known for centuries, with a list of royal ancestors, Gibica, Gundomar, Gislaharius, Gundaharius. It took philology to equate nos. 1, 3 and 4 with the Gifica, Gíslhere and Gúthhere of Old English poems, nos. 1 and 4 with the Gibeche and Gunther of the Germans’ epic, the Nibelungenlied. Simultaneously it became apparent that the epic had a kernel of truth: the Huns had wiped out a Burgundian king and army in the 430s (as Gibbon had vaguely noted), some of the names were authentic, there had been a continuing tradition of poetry from fifth to twelfth centuries, even if it had all vanished and never been written down. Sidonius Apollinaris, bishop of Clermont, indeed mentioned the Burgundians’ songs with distaste in a sixth-century lyric. ‘The learned and eloquent Sidonius’, Gibbon calls him. ‘How gladly would we now give all his verses for ten lines of the songs in which these “long-haired seven-foot high, onion-eating barbarians” celebrated, it may be, the open-handedness of Gibica, or perhaps told how, in that last terrible battle, their fathers had fallen fighting round Gundahari’, wrote R. W. Chambers more sourly.¹⁸ The change of viewpoint marks an enormous if temporary shift of poetic and literary interest from Classical to native. It also shows how philology could seem, to some, the ‘noblest of sciences’, the key to ‘spiritual life’, certainly ‘something much greater than a misfit combination of language plus literature’. ‘Asterisk-Reality’

Nevertheless Sidonius’s poems had survived, and the Burgundian epics hadn’t. There was an image forming in many men’s minds of the days when an enormous Germanic empire had stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea, only to go down before the Huns and disperse into settlements everywhere from Sweden to Spain – but the image remained tantalisingly on the edge of sight. ‘The ill-grace of fate has saved hardly anything … of the poetry possessed by the eighth, seventh and earlier centuries’, lamented Jacob Grimm and his brother Wilhelm.¹⁹ ‘It grieves me to say it’, said Axel Olrik, ‘the old Biarkamál, the most beloved and most honoured of songs in all the North, is not known to us in the form it had.’²⁰ ‘Alas for the lost lore, the annals and old poets’, wrote Tolkien, referring indeed to Virgil but by analogy to the sources of Beowulf (‘Monsters’, p. 271). Gudbrand Vigfusson and F. York Powell, editing the Corpus Poeticum Boreale, the whole poetry of the North, in the 1880s, might look back on past ages and see the ‘field of Northern scholarship’ as ‘a vast plain, filled with dry bones’, up and down which there walked ‘a company of men, doing their best to set these bones in order, skull by skull, thigh by thigh, with no hope or thought of the breath that was to shake this plain with the awakening of the immortal dead’.²¹ But though philology did come and breathe life into the dry bones of old poems, filling history with the reverberations of forgotten battles and empires, still there was a point beyond which it could not go; old languages could be understood, old stories edited and annotated, but living speakers could not be found. Nor were the poems left usually the poems most ardently desired.

That is why the characteristic activity of the philologist came, in the end, to be ‘reconstruction’. This might be no more than verbal. From the circumstance that English and German both change the vowel of ‘man’ in the plural to ‘men’ or Männer, you could infer that Primitive Germanic, of which not one word has ever been recorded, would have said *manniz, producing as usual ‘i-mutation’. The * is the sign of the reconstructed form, proposed by August Schleicher in the 1860s and used widely ever since. On a higher level you might reconstruct a language. Schleicher indeed wrote a little fable in ‘Indo-European’, that ‘common source’ for Sanskrit, Latin and Greek which Sir William Jones had suggested. Avis, jasmin varna na a ast, dadarka akvams, it began, ‘A sheep, which had no wool on it, saw a horse …’ Schleicher’s colleagues were not much impressed, and indeed the researches of Verner, Brugmann and de Saussure in the 1870s prompted H. Hirt to offer a corrected version of it some years later; no language changed as quickly in the 1870s as Primitive Indo-European, ran the philological joke.²² But the method itself was not seriously questioned, only the answer reached. In between these two extremes an editor might find himself rewriting a poem. Eorl sceal on éos boge, worod sceal getrume rídan, says the Old English poem Maxims I, ‘earl shall on horse’s back, warband (worod) ride in a body’. Most warbands in Old English history marched on their feet; and anyway worod fails to keep up the poetic alliteration. Éored is the proper word here, say the editors, and it means ‘a troop of cavalry’, being related to the word eoh, ‘horse’, cp. Latin equus. It’s true that the word is used by itself only twice elsewhere in Old English, and only once correctly – the word and idea must have become unfamiliar. But that is no deterrent. The post-philological editor can assume he knows more, indeed knows better than the native speaker or scribe, if not the original poet – another reason, be it said, for beliefs like Tolkien’s, that he had a cultivated sympathy with the authors of Beowulf or Sir Gawain or ‘The Reeve’s Tale’ which even the poet’s contemporaries had not and which would certainly never be reached by straight ‘literary criticism’.

Examples could be multiplied almost indefinitely: it is impossible to avoid mentioning the fact that the very core and kernel of Beowulf criticism in the last hundred years has been the story of ‘the fall of the house of the Scyldings’, which, as it happens, neither the poet nor any other ancient writer ever got round to explaining, but which was ‘reconstructed’ in great and (to my mind) totally convincing detail by a succession of scholars up to R. W. Chambers. But the vital points to grasp are these:

(1) The thousands of pages of ‘dry as dust’ theorems about language-change, sound-shifts and ablaut-gradations were, in the minds of most philologists, an essential and natural basis for the far more exciting speculations about the wide plains of ‘Gothia’ and the hidden, secret trade routes across the primitive forests of the North, Myrkviðr inn ókunni, ‘the pathless Mirkwood’ itself. You could not have, you would never have got the one without the other.

(2) In spite of the subject’s apparent schizophrenia and the determination of its practitioners to make nothing easy, philology was, for a time, the cutting edge of all the ‘soft’ or ‘behavioural’ sciences, literature, history, sociology and anthropology at once. That is why it attracted such a following and why Jacob Grimm, for instance, could hope to sell his dictionary, the Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, to a mass-audience as something designed for entertainment.

(3) In this entire process the thing which was perhaps eroded most of all was the philologists’ sense of a line between imagination and reality. The whole of their science conditioned them to the acceptance of what one might call ‘*-’ or ‘asterisk-reality’, that which no longer existed but could with 100 per cent certainty be inferred.

(4) In a sense, the non-existence of the most desired objects of study created a romance of its own. If we had the lost Gothic ‘Ermanaric-lays’ we might think little of them, but find them lame, crude or brutal; quite likely, the very first version of the Nibelungenlied (composed in the ashes of the Burgundian kingdom) was just an attempt by the poet to cheer himself up. But the fact that these things do not exist, hover forever on the fringe of sight, makes them more tantalising and the references to them more thrilling. There is a book by R. M. Wilson called The Lost Literature of Medieval England, which Tolkien must often have read – see note 24. The Lost Literature of Dark-Age Europe, however, would be a title almost too painful for words. Still, it would cover plenty of material. The best lines about King Arthur are not the long explicit descriptions of the later medieval romances, but those in the almost deliberately uninformative Welsh triads, e.g. from the Black Book of Carmarthen:

Bet y March, bet y Guythur,

bet y Gugaun Cledyfrut;

anoeth bid bet y Arthur

‘There is a grave for March, a grave for Gwythur,

a grave for Gwgawn Red-sword;

the world’s wonder a grave for Arthur.’²³

As for Old English, my guess is that the most stirring lines to Tolkien must have come, not even from Beowulf, but from the fragment Waldere, where an unknown speaker reminds the hero that his sword was given by Theodoric to Widia ‘because Wayland’s child let him out of captivity, hurried him out of the hands of the monsters’. Somewhere in the Dark Ages, this seems to suggest, there must have been a legend, a story of how the Gothic king *Thiudoreiks was stolen away to the land of giants, to be rescued after long adventures by his faithful retainers Widia and Hildebrand. Why did the giants take him, where and how did they live, what were their relations with humanity? Once upon a time many people must have known the answers: the story survives in a decadent form in the medieval German romances of Das Eckenlied, Sigenot, Laurin and others, while there is an intensely irritating scrap of a Middle English poem on the subject tucked into a dull sermon on humility:

Summe sende ylues, and summe sende nadderes:

summe sende nikeres, the bi den watere wunien.

Nister man nenne, bute Ildebrand onne.

‘Some sent elves, and some sent serpents,

some sent sea-monsters, that live by the water.

No one knew any of them, but Hildebrand alone.’²⁴

What must it have been like in Old English – a poem not about monsters erupting on humanity, as in Beowulf, but about men going into the heart of the monsterworld, for adventures in the ‘Ettenmoors’ themselves! But fate had snatched that prospect (almost) into utter oblivion. The wilderness of dragons, the shrewedness of apes

Probably the most disheartening conclusion to be drawn from this brief review of intellectual history is that the history of English studies in British and American universities has been forever marred by incomprehension and missed opportunities. Professor D. J. Palmer has shown how the birth of the Oxford English School in particular was accompanied by desperate struggles between language and literature, philologists and critics, ending not in mutual illumination but in a compromise demarcation of interests.²⁵ Quite possibly the philologists were most to blame in this. Peter Ganz, Professor of German at Oxford, has pointed out that Jacob Grimm’s chief intellectual defect was a refusal to generalise.²⁶ Indeed as he neared the end of his Teutonic Mythology (four volumes in the translation of J. S. Stallybrass, and 1887 pages) Grimm wrote a ‘Preface’ referring to himself as a gleaner, whose observations he left to ‘him who, standing on my shoulders, shall hereafter get into full swing the harvesting of this great field’.²⁷ But actually there was no field left to harvest; while few would relish the thought of spending a lifetime putting someone else’s observations in order, without the fun of first collecting them! So the impetus of philology ran out in a series of Primers and Readers and Grammars, endless academic brickmaking without any sign of an architect. No wonder the early critics got annoyed. On the other hand they showed little magnanimity, or even curiosity, once they got control.

The overt result for the young Tolkien must have been that, when he returned from World War I to Oxford University in 1919, he found himself once again in a battle being fought by two sides from deep entrenchments, and one whose stalemates were as unlikely to be broken as the greater ones of Ypres or the Somme by frontal offensives. Still, both sides kept trying them. Tolkien did his best to make peace. His 1930 ‘manifesto’ led at least to the elimination of some academic ‘No Man’s Land’, during the syllabus campaign of 1951 he even emerged from his trench to fraternise with the enemy (till C. S. Lewis stopped him, see Inklings, pp. 229–30). But a covert result may have been that he gave up hope, at least from time to time, of penetrating other people’s vested interests and making them understand the appeal of the subjects he would have liked to teach. His jokes on the subject get wryer, his gestures of rapprochement – ‘the boundary line between linguistic and literary history is as imaginary as the equator – a certain heat is observable, perhaps, as either is approached’ (YWES 6, p. 59) or ‘the “pure philologist who cannot do literature” … is as rare as the unicorn’ (‘OES’, p. 782) – these become more perfunctory and finally disappear. What was possibly a natural bent towards reserve became more pronounced; it is hard to escape the feeling that in some of the interviews given after celebrity had arrived Tolkien was still liable to give easy or unnoticedly ambiguous answers to save the trouble of explaining something which he knew had proved incomprehensible many times before. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings had made his point, whether it had been intellectually apprehended or not; and the hostile or even malignant reaction it evoked from so many on the ‘lit.’ side was only what he might have expected.

Indeed, to go back to the animus The Lord of the Rings created: it is striking that next to the books’ sheer success the thing that irritated reviewers most was their author’s obstinate insistence on talking about language as if it might be a subject of interest. ‘The invention of languages is the foundation’, Tolkien had said. ‘The “stories” were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse’ (Letters, p. 219). ‘Invention’ of course comes from Latin invenire, ‘to find’; its older sense, as Tolkien knew perfectly well, was ‘discovery’. If one were to say of nineteenth-century philology that ‘the discovery of languages was its foundation’, one would be stating literal truth; as often, probably, Tolkien was playing with words, juxtaposing the languages he had made up out of his own head with those that others had found or ‘reconstructed’ all over the world, so aligning himself yet again with his professional inheritance. Meanwhile the second sentence, though no doubt personally true again, might almost have been said of Ermanaric or Theodoric or the nineteenth-century vision of a ‘historical’ King Arthur. An element of generalisation underlay the particular application to Tolkien’s own case.

This remained completely unperceived by his critics. ‘He has explained that he began it to amuse himself, as a philological game’, translated Edmund Wilson. ‘An overgrown fairy story, a philological curiosity – that is, then, what The Lord of the Rings really is.’ Philology, you note, is peculiar but not serious. Lin Carter (who prepared for his commentary on Tolkien by looking up ‘philology’ in ‘the dictionary’, to little profit – maybe it was the wrong dictionary) professed the same opinion even more blankly, if kindly, by claiming that Tolkien was really interested in ‘the eternal verities of human nature’, and that the appendices of The Lord of the Rings needed to be seen that way and not just as ‘the outgrowth of a don’s scholarly hobbies’. The idea could be right, but the notion of ‘scholarly hobbies’ is singularly naive. Neil D. Isaacs, also writing in Tolkien’s defence, took the blunder on by asserting that ‘Tolkien’s own off-hand remarks about the importance of philology to the creative conception of the trilogy need not be taken too seriously’, and R. J. Reilly put the tin lid on the whole discussion by saying, in attempted refutation of Edmund Wilson, that The Lord of the Rings can’t have been a philological game because it’s too serious, and therefore, seemingly, cannot possibly be philology. ‘No one ever exposed the nerves and fibres of his being in order to make up a language; it is not only insane but unnecessary.’²⁸ Like the reviewers quoted at the start of this chapter, Mr Reilly here makes a factual statement about humanity which is factually wrong. The aberration he talks about may not be common, but is not unprecedented. August Schleicher exposed the nerves and fibres of his being to make up Primitive Indo-European, and had them shredded for his trouble. Willy Krogmann, of the University of Hamburg, not only came to the conclusion that the Old High German Hildebrandslied (the oldest German heroic poem) must originally have been composed in Lombardic, a West Germanic language surviving outside ‘*-reality’ only in a handful of names, but also reconstructed the language and rewrote the poem, publishing his new edition as late as 1959. No one, as far as I know, went so far as to reconstruct the Burgundian Nibelung-story, the first Ostrogothic Ermanaric-lay, or the Danish Ur-Beowulf, but such thoughts were in many minds. The only extant Gothic poem is by Tolkien, ‘Bagme Bloma’, in Songs for the Philologists, reprinted and translated in Appendix B below; nor was this his only attempt at poetic reconstruction, see Letters p. 379. The drives towards creativity do not all emanate from the little area already mapped by ‘literary’ criticism. Awareness of this fact should have aroused a certain humility, or anyway caution, in Tolkienian commentators.

As it is, some of Tolkien’s earliest writings seem to carry a certain foreboding truth. It has already been remarked that he tended to open learned articles with attacks on, or ripostes to, the ‘literature’ or the ‘criticism’ of his particular subject, whether this was Chaucer or the Ancrene Wisse or translators of Beowulf. Probably the sharpest and most revealing instance comes in the British Academy lecture on ‘The Monsters and the Critics’, as Tolkien moves on from the melancholy state of Beowulf criticism as a whole to the remarks of W. P. Ker and then of R. W. Chambers – philologists whom Tolkien respected but who he thought had given too much away to the other side. ‘In this conflict between plighted troth and the duty of revenge’, wrote Chambers, of a subject the Beowulf-poet had neglected for the sake of monsters, ‘we have a situation whichhol the old heroic poets loved, and would not have sold for a wilderness of dragons.’ ‘A wilderness of dragons!’ exploded Tolkien, repeating the phrase and grasping instantly its deliberate syntactic ambiguity (between phrases like ‘a field of cows’ and phrases like ‘a pride of lions’):

There is a sting in this Shylockian plural, the sharper for coming from a critic, who deserves the title of the poet’s best friend. It is in the tradition of the Book of St. Albans, from which the poet might retort upon his critics: ‘Yea, a desserte of lapwyngs, a shrewednes of apes, a raffull of knaues, and a gagle of gees.’ (‘Monsters’, p. 252)

Geese, knaves, apes, lapwings: these formed Tolkien’s image of the literary critic, and they are emblematic respectively of silliness, fraud, mindless imitation and (see Horatio in Hamlet V ii) immaturity. But there is a multiple barb on the second phrase, the ‘shrewednes of apes’. For ‘shrewednes’, like most words, has changed its meaning, and as with ‘literature’ Tolkien thought the changes themselves significant. Nowadays it means (OED again) ‘Sagacity or keenness of mental perception or discrimination; sagacity in practical affairs’. Once upon a time it meant ‘maliciousness’, with particular reference to feminine scolding or nagging. No doubt the transit came via such phrases as ‘a shrewd blow’, first a blow which was meant to hurt, then one that did hurt, then one that was accurately directed, and so on. In all these senses Tolkien’s remark was ‘shrewd’ itself. It creates a vivid if exaggerated picture of the merits and demerits of the literary profession seen en bloc: undeniably clever, active, dexterous (so exemplifying ‘shrewdness’ in the modern sense), but also bitter, negative and far too fond of ‘back-seat driving’ (see ‘shrewed’ in the old sense) – overall, too, apish, derivative, cut off from the full range of human interests. It would be a pity for his claim to ring true. But the history of reactions to Tolkien has tended to uphold it. One can sum up by saying that whether the hostile criticism directed at The Lord of the Rings was right or wrong – an issue still to be judged – it was demonstrably compulsive, rooted only just beneath the surface in ancient dogma and dispute.

^* The letter ð here is used in several Old English, Middle English, and Old Norse quotations throughout this book. Like the other (runic) letter retained almost into the modern era, ‘þ’, it stands for ‘th’. Thus Meiðhad = Meith-had = Maid(en)hood. The work mentioned is a treatise on ‘Holy Virginity'.

^* His signed copies are in the Taylorian Library at Oxford.