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

CHAPTER 2

PHILOLOGICAL INQUIRIES Roads and Butterflies

The Grimms and Tolkien prove that philological approaches to poetry did not have to exclude everything that would now be called ‘literary’. Still, their attitudes were sharply distinct from those now normal among literary critics. For one thing philologists were much more likely than critics to brood on the sense, the form, the other recorded uses (or unrecorded uses) of single words. They were not, on the whole, less likely to respect the original author’s intentions, but their training did make them prone to consider not only what a word was doing in its immediate contexts, but also its roots, its analogues in other languages, its descendants in modern languages, and all the processes of cultural change that might be hinted at by its history. It might be said that to Tolkien a word was not like a brick, a single delimitable unit, but like the top of a stalactite, interesting in itself but more so as part of something growing. It might also be said that he thought there was in this process something superhuman, certainly super-any-one-particular-human, for no one knew how words would change, even if he knew how they had. In one of his last published poems, a tribute in Old English to W. H. Auden, with facing page modern English translation, Tolkien begins by calling Auden a woðbora, and ends by promising him lasting praise from the searoþancle.¹ The first noun is translated ‘one [who] has poetry in him’, the second as ‘the word-lovers’. ‘Word-lovers’ is, however, etymologically parallel with ‘philologists’, while the first element of wóð-bora is also the word recorded in the god-name Woden, or Othinn, and in the archaic adjective ‘wood’, meaning ‘crazy’; it refers to the mystic rage of bard or shaman or (as we now say) berserker. Poets and philologists, Tolkien felt, were the ones to appreciate that.

An associated difference was that philologists were more likely than critics to believe in what one might call ‘the reality of history’. One good reason for this was that they tended to work with manuscripts rather than printed books, and the former are much more instructive than the latter. In some cases they have been physically written by the original poet or author; in others they have been corrected by him; in others they all too clearly have not, with incomprehension so thick on the page that one can visualise the author’s baffled rage were he ever to guess (as Chaucer did, occasionally) what had happened or was going to. The sense that ghosts cluster in old libraries is very strong. Another reason for the feeling of intimate involvement with history, though, lies in the philologists’ awareness of the shaping of present by past – the stalactites of words again, but also the creation of nation-states by language-separation (e.g. Dutch and German), the growth of national myth from forgotten history (as with the Finnish Kalevala), but perhaps as much as anything the fastening down of landscape to popular consciousness by the habit of naming places. Less than thirty miles from Tolkien’s study stands the prehistoric barrow known as ‘Wayland’s Smithy’. Its name is more than a thousand years old; perhaps it was in the mind of King Alfred (born at Wantage seven miles off) when he interjected into his translation of Boethius the outcry: Hwæt synt nú pæs foreméran ond pæs wisan goldsmiðes bán Wélondes? ‘What now are the bones of Wayland, the goldsmith pre-eminently wise?’ Alfred might also have thought of Wayland as the father of Widia, who in the lost poems released Theodoric from the power of the monsters; maybe Alfred had heard them sung. But though the poems had gone, and the monsters with them, and ‘Wayland’ no longer meant anything at all to English people, the name survived down the centuries and carried with it a hint of what once had been. Such chains of association littered the landscape for Tolkien; they did not have to be confined to books. When he said that ‘History often resembles “Myth”’, or when Wilhelm Grimm refused to segregate ‘Myth’ from ‘Heroic Legend’, both had entirely prosaic reasons for doing so.² They knew that legend often became a matter of everyday.

Something like these two awarenesses, of continuing history and continuing linguistic change, can be inferred (admittedly with the aid of vast quantities of hindsight) from the first thing Tolkien ever published, bar a few lines in school and college magazines: the poem ‘Goblin Feet’ in Oxford Poetry 1915.³ This begins:

I am off down the road

Where the fairy lanterns glowed

And the little pretty flittermice are flying:

A slender band of grey

It runs creepily away

And the hedges and the grasses are a-sighing.

The air is full of wings,

And of blundering beetle-things

That warn you with their whirring and their humming.

O! I hear the tiny horns

Of enchanted leprechauns

And the padding feet of many gnomes a-coming.

This is, admittedly, not very good. Indeed one can imagine the response to it of the literary ‘side’, full of armèd vision, not to mention critical temper. ‘Why’, it might ask, ‘do we have the past tense in line 2 and the present everywhere else? Does this mean the “fairy lanterns” have gone out and the “I-narrator” is pursuing them? Or could it be that the author is stuck for a rhyme to “road”? As for “a-sighing” and “a-coming”, these look like scansion devices, mere padding. But in any case there is nothing in nature to suggest that the hedges and the grasses were “sighing” at all, while the “creepiness” of the road is just something the poet has decided to project on to the landscape from himself. That’s why we don’t believe the “I-narrator” when he says he hears “tiny horns”! And what about “enchanted leprechauns”? Does that mean they’ve been enchanted by someone else; or that they’re enchanting; or are all leprechauns enchanted, i.e. magic, i.e. not-real? The poet gives himself away. This is an evasive poem, a self-indulgent one. “Off down the road” indeed! Road to nowhere!’

So the critical indictment might run, and it is hard to counter. Readers of The Lord of the Rings will have noted further the as yet undiscriminating use of ‘fairy’, ‘gnome’ and later ‘goblin’, not to mention the quite cross-cultural use of ‘leprechauns’ and the insistence (later to be most strongly abjured) on the little, the tiny, the insect-like. Still, there are hints of hope in the poem after all, and better questions to be asked than those which have been.

What is this ‘road’, for instance, the ‘slender band of grey’, the ‘crooked fairy lane’? It clearly is not a tarmac one; on another level it is to be a recurring Tolkienian image:

The Road goes ever on and on

Down from the door where it began …

And oddly, G. B. Smith – Tolkien’s school and college friend, killed the following year in Flanders, to have his poems posthumously published with a foreword by Tolkien – had addressed himself to the same theme in a poem four pages earlier in the Oxford Poetry collection:

This is the road the Romans made,

This track half lost in the green hills,

Or fading in a forest-glade

’Mid violets and daffodils.

The years have fallen like dead leaves,

Unwept, uncounted, and unstayed

(Such as the autumn tempest thieves),

Since first this road the Romans made.⁴

Now this theme of time is intensely Tolkienian (if one may be permitted to put it that way round). The last sight of Lórien in The Fellowship of the Ring published thirty-nine years later, is of Galadriel singing Ai! laurië lantar lassi súrinen! ‘Ah! like gold fall the leaves in the wind, long years numberless as the wings of trees …’ (LOTR p. 368, and see also Fangorn’s song, p. 458). In this case the hope which G. B. Smith expressed in his final letter to Tolkien before death – ‘May God bless you, my dear John Ronald, and may you say the things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them’ – appears against all probability to have been fulfilled (Biography, p. 121). However the clue to follow, for the moment, is ‘the road the Romans made’.

It may seem perverse to seek to identify this road, but on the other hand it isn’t very hard. There are only two Roman roads near Oxford, and the better-preserved is the old highway from Bath to Towcester, still visible as a straight line across the map but dwindled along much of its Oxford stretch to a footpath. It is now called ‘Akeman Street’, like ‘Wayland’s Smithy’ a name of some fascination for philologists. It implies for one thing an old and massive population change. No town in Roman Britain had a more simply descriptive name than Aquae Sulis, ‘the waters of Sul’, and so prominent were its mineral springs with the Roman spa around them that even the Anglo-Saxons began to call it æt baðum, ‘at the baths’, and later Bath. One of them wrote a poem about the site, now called The Ruin. However they also called the town Acemannesceaster, ‘Akeman’s chester’ or ‘Akeman’s (fortified) town’. That is why the Bath–Towcester road acquired the name ‘Akeman Street’; the people who called it that knew it went to Bath, but had forgotten that Bath was ever Aquae Sulis; they were invaders, of a lower cultural level than the Romans, and soon they ceased to use the road for anything like the traffic it had once carried. Its name and its decline in status from highway to footpath bear witness to the oblivion that can fall on a civilisation. But what was the reaction of these invaders to the historical monuments they could hardly help seeing in their new land, the stone roads, the villas, the great ruins which they (as in The Ruin) called vaguely the eald enta geweorc, ‘the old work of giants’? Place-names again give suggestive clues.

About nine miles north-west of Oxford and half a mile from Akeman Street across the river Evenlode stands a villa, excavated in 1865 and once the property of some Romano-British noble. It is distinguished by the remains of a fourth-century tessellated pavement in different colours. The village nearby is called Fawler. To most people, including its inhabitants, this name now means nothing. But once it was Fauflor, a spelling recorded in 1205, and before that, in Old English, fág flór ‘the coloured floor, the painted floor’. There can be little doubt that the village was called after the pavement; so the pavement was still visible when the invaders came. Why, then, did they not occupy the villa, but chose to live instead on an undeveloped site a few furlongs off? No one can tell, but perhaps they were afraid. A further twist in the story is that there is another fág flór in Anglo-Saxon record, in the great hall of Beowulf, haunted by Grendel the maneater:

on fágne flór féond treddode,

éode yrremód; him of éagum stód

ligge gelicost léoht unfæger.

‘The fiend stepped on to the painted floor, angrily he paced; from his eyes there stood an ugly light, like fire.’

So wrote the poet, in one of his classic passages of ‘Gothic’ suggestion. Could Beowulf have been sung in Fawler? What would its inhabitants have thought? Tolkien knew Beowulf, of course, virtually by heart, and he knew what ‘Fawler’ meant, for he hailed the etymology with delight in his 1926 review of the Introduction to the Survey of Place-Names; such work, he pointed out, is fired by ‘love of the land of England’, by ‘the allurement of the riddle of the past’, it leads to ‘the recapturing of fitful and tantalising glimpses in the dark’ (YWES 5, p. 64). He was interested in the names of roads, too, for he had argued the year before that ‘Watling Street’ was an old name for the Milky Way, ‘an old mythological term that was first applied to the eald enta geweorc [i.e. the Roman road from Dover to Chester] after the English invasion’ (YWES 4, p. 21). Nor did he forget Bath and The Ruin. Legolas’s ‘lament of the stones’ on page 276 of The Fellowship of the Ring is an adaptation of part of the poem. At some stage of his life Tolkien must certainly have noted all the strange implications and suggestions of ‘Akeman Street’.

Did he know them in 1915, and share them with his friend G. B. Smith? Is the quest for Fairyland in ‘Goblin Feet’ a kind of translation of the quest for the romantic realities of history? Probably the answer to both questions is ‘No’. However, disentangling fact from inference as carefully as possible, one can say first that Tolkien and Smith evidently shared a feeling for the ancient roads, the ‘old straight tracks’ and ‘crooked lanes’ of England; second that Smith even in 1915 appreciated the sadness of the relationship between what these are and what they were; third that before many years were out it would be certain that Tolkien appreciated the same thing much more fully, with a wealth of reference to history and poetry and present-day reality. Even in 1915, one might say, a road, a real road, could possess a ‘creepiness’ for him which was based on some factual knowledge, not entirely self-generated. Philology would reinforce this. But already one image in his poem drew on some historical force.

Further, Tolkien was already thinking of words as ‘stalactites’. ‘Flittermice’ in line 3 is not normal English. According to the OED it was introduced in the sixteenth century by analogy with German Fledermaus, for ‘bat’. However ‘bat’ is not recorded in Old English, and it is possible that some ancestor of ‘flittermouse’, e.g. *fleðer-mús, was natural to English all along, but never got written down. There is an apparently similar puzzle over ‘rabbit’ (for which see below), which Tolkien at least signals awareness of in the second stanza by using the odd term ‘coney-rabbits’. Finally ‘honey-flies’ in line 30 is elsewhere unrecorded. From context one would think he meant ‘butterflies’. Perhaps he was aware, though, of the unexpected scatological sense of that innocent-looking word in Old English – a language which has had many rudenesses pruned by educated usage. He could have found out by looking ‘butterfly’ up in the OED, and at least it had occurred to him to wonder why butterflies were always and for no apparent reason so called. These verbal creations admittedly do not add much to the overall effect of ‘Goblin Feet’, but they exemplify an attempt to combine philological insight with poetry. Both roads and words hint at the early complexity of Tolkien’s inner life, its unusual combination of emotion with inquiry. Survivals in the West

Such hints, of course, fizzle out immediately. The Silmarillion had begun its sixty-year gestation by 1914,⁵ but in 1915 Tolkien went off to the war in which G. B. Smith was to die. On demobilisation he was preoccupied with the problem of earning a living, first in Oxford with the OED, then in the English Department at Leeds University, finally, with secure status and no lure of further advancement, back in Oxford again in 1925. He published nothing (bar the note to Smith’s posthumous collection of poems) for five years after ‘Goblin Feet’, and a good deal of his subsequent work was written for simple motives – money, or to keep his name in front of the people who counted, who made appointments ‘with tenure’. Much of his inner life did find its way into the twenty or thirty poems contributed to various periodicals or collections between 1920 and 1937; Tolkien’s habit of thriftily rewriting them and using them in The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings or The Adventures of Tom Bombadil shows how important some of them were to him.⁶ Still, it is fair to say that these remain by themselves thin, or uncertain. The brew that was to become his fiction needed a good deal of thickening yet; and this could only come from the interaction of poetry with philology.

From this point of view one of Tolkien’s most revealing pre-Hobbit pieces is his almost unread comment on ‘The Name “Nodens”’ for the Society of Antiquaries in 1932.⁷ This virtually repeats the story of ‘Fawler’. In 1928 excavations on a site near Lydney in the west of England had revealed a temple devoted to some kind of mystery cult and still flourishing in the fourth century, i.e. well after the introduction of Christianity to England. The temple was eventually abandoned as a result of the barbarian and also non-Christian English, who however had their own cults. As with the villa at Fawler the Lydney temple fell into disuse – but not completely into oblivion. The iron-mines not far away were remembered: and whether because of them or from a continuing superstitious respect for the site, it was given a new Anglo-Saxon name, persisting to modern times — Dwarf’s Hill. The Society of Antiquaries made no comment on all this, but in the story and the place-name one can hear the echo of a hopeless resistance from the Darkest of Dark Ages, pagan to Christian, pagan to pagan, Welsh to English, all ending in forgetfulness with even the memory of the resisters blurred, till recovered by archaeology – and by philology. For Tolkien’s job was to comment on the name ‘Nodens’ found in an inscription on the site, and he did it with immense thoroughness.

His conclusion was that the name meant ‘snarer’ or ‘hunter’, from an Indo-European root surviving in English only in the archaic phrase ‘good neat’s leather’. More interesting was his tracing of the descent of Nodens from god to Irish hero (Núadu Argat-lam, ‘Silverhand’), then to Welsh hero (Lludd Llaw Ereint, also ‘Silverhand’), finally to Shakespearean hero – King Lear. Even Cordelia, Tolkien noted, was derived from the semi divine Creiddy-lad, of whom was told a version of the story of ‘the Everlasting Battle’, which interested Tolkien in other ways. Shakespeare can naturally have known nothing about ‘Nodens’, or about Beowulf (a poem in which some have seen the first dim stirrings of ‘Hamlet the Dane’). That did not mean that the old stories were not in some way working through him, present even in his much-altered version. Like ‘Akeman Street’ and ‘Wayland’s Smithy’, Tolkien might have concluded, even King Lear could bear witness to a sort of English, or British, continuity.

And one could say the same of Old King Cole. Tolkien never actually rewrote his saga in epic verse (though one can now see why he remarked casually of Milton, ‘Monsters’, p. 254, that he ‘might have done worse’ than recount ‘the story of Jack and the Beanstalk in noble verse’ – it would have been a monster-poem, like the lost ‘Rescue of Theodoric’). Still, he would certainly have recognised the ‘merry old soul’ as a figure similar in ultimate origin and final ‘vulgarisation’ to King Arthur or King Lear.⁸ This interest in the descent of fables probably explains why Tolkien did try his hand at two ‘Man in the Moon’ poems, ‘Why The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon’ (which appeared first in 1923 and was collected in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil thirty-nine years after), and ‘The Cat and the Fiddle: A Nursery Rhyme Undone and its Scandalous Secret Unlocked’ (also out first in 1923 but to achieve far wider circulation as sung by Frodo in Book I, chapter 9 of The Fellowship of the Ring, ‘At the Sign of the Prancing Pony’). No one would call either of these serious poems. But what they do is to provide a narrative and semi-rational frame for the string of totally irrational non-sequiturs which we now call ‘nursery rhymes’. How could ‘the cow jump over the moon’? Well, it might if the Moon were a kind of vehicle parked on the village green while its driver had a drink. How could the Man in the Moon have ‘come by the south And burnt his mouth With eating cold plum porridge’? Well, it doesn’t seem very likely, but perhaps it points to an ancient story of earthly disillusionment. If one assumes a long tradition of ‘idle children’ repeating ‘thoughtless tales’ in increasing confusion, one might think that poems like Tolkien’s were the remote ancestors of the modern rhymes. They are ‘asterisk-poems’, reconstructed like the attributes of Nodens. They also contain, at least in their early versions, hints of mythological significance – the Man in the Moon who fails to drive his chariot while mortals panic and his white horses champ their silver bits and the Sun comes up to overtake him is not totally unlike the Greek myth of Phaethon, who drove the horses of the Sun too close to Earth and scorched it. Finally, the reason why Tolkien picked ‘the Man in the Moon’ for treatment rather than ‘Old King Cole’ or ‘Little Bo-Peep’ is, no doubt, that he knew of the existence of a similar ‘Man in the Moon’ poem, in Middle English and from a time and place in which he took particular interest.

This is the lyric from Harley Manuscript no. 2253, now known generally as ‘The Man in the Moon’.⁹ It is perhaps the best medieval English lyric surviving, and certainly one of the hardest, prompting many learned articles and interpretations. However three points about it are clear, and all gave it especial charm for Tolkien. In the first place it is extremely bizarre; it is presented as a speech by an English villager about the Man in the Moon, asking why he doesn’t come down or move. It also has a very sharp and professional eye for English landscape; the villager concludes that the Man in the Moon is so stiff because he has been caught stealing thorns and carrying them home to mend his hedges with (an old image of the Moon’s markings is of a man with a lamp, a dog, and a thorn bush, see Starveling in A Midsummer Night’s Dream V i). Finally, for all the poem’s thick dialect and involvement with peasant life, it is full of self-confidence. ‘Never mind if the hayward has caught you pinching thorns’, calls the narrator to the Man in the Moon, ‘we’ll deal with that. We’ll ask him home’:

‘Drynke to hym deorly of fol god bous,

Ant oure dame douse shal sitten hym by.

When that he is dronke ase a dreynt mous,

Thenne we schule borewe the wed ate bayly.’

‘We’ll drink to him like friends in excellent booze,

and our sweet lady will sit right next to him.

When he’s as drunk as a drowned mouse,

we’ll go to the bailiff and redeem your pledge.’

And without this evidence, clearly, the indictment will be quashed! It all sounds a most plausible way to work, and one which casts an unexpected light on the downtrodden serfs of medieval England – not as downtrodden as all that, obviously. Their good-natured resourcefulness seems to be an element in the make-up of Tolkien’s hobbits. More significantly, the poem makes one wonder about the unofficial elements of early literary culture. Were there other ‘Man in the Moon’ poems? Was there a whole genre of sophisticated play on folk-belief? There could have been. Tolkien’s 1923 poems attempt to revive it, or invent it, fitting into the gaps between modern doggerel and medieval lyric, creating something that might have existed and would, if it had, account for the jumble and litter of later periods – very like Gothic and ‘i-mutation’.

One sees that the thing which attracted Tolkien most was darkness: the blank spaces, much bigger than most people realise, on the literary and historical map, especially those after the Romans left in AD 419, or after Harold died at Hastings in 1066. The post-Roman era produced ‘King Arthur’, to whose cycle King Lear and King Cole and the rest became eventual tributaries. Tolkien knew this tradition well and used it for Farmer Giles of Ham (published 1949, but written much earlier), the opening paragraphs of which play jokingly with the first few lines of Sir Gawain. However he also knew that whatever the author of Sir Gawain thought, the Arthurian tradition was originally non-English, indeed dedicated to the overthrow of England; its commemoration in English verse was merely a final consequence of the stamping-out of native culture after Hastings, a literary ‘defoliation’ which had also led to the meaninglessness of English names like ‘Fawler’ and the near-total loss of all Old English heroic tradition, apart from Beowulf. What, then, had happened to England and the English during those ‘Norman centuries’ when, it might be said, ‘language’ and ‘literature’ had first and lastingly separated?

Tolkien had been interested in that question for some time. Not much was known about Early Middle English, and indeed several of its major texts remain without satisfactory editions today. However, one important work was evidently the Ancrene Wisse, a ‘guide for anchoresses (or female hermits)’, existing in several manuscripts from different times and places, but one of few Middle English works to be translated into French rather than out of it. With this were associated several other texts with a ‘feminist’ bias, the tract on virginity Hali Meiðhad, the saints’ lives Seinte Juliene, Seinte Marherete, Seinte Katherine, the little allegory Sawles Warde. All looked similar in dialect, and in sophistication of phrase; on the other hand their subject-matter meant they were unlikely ever to take the ‘literature’ side by storm. What could be said about them?

Tolkien began with a review of F. J. Furnivall’s edition of Hali Meiðhad, in 1923; he went on to make ‘Some Contributions to Middle English Lexicography’ in Review of English Studies (1925), most of them drawn from Ancrene Wisse, and some of them incidentally interesting, like the remark that medi wið wicchen must mean, not ‘meddle with witches’ but ‘bribe, purchase the service of witches’, apparently a known practice to the author of the ‘Rule’. In ‘The Devil’s Coach-Horses’ in the same periodical that year he spent enormous effort on the single word eaueres from Hali Meiðhad, arguing that it did not mean ‘boars’ as the OED had said, but ‘heavy horses, draft horses’. Philologically this was interesting as showing a Germanic root *abra-z, meaning ‘work’ and connected with Latin opus. Mythologically it was interesting too as showing an image of the devil galloping away not on fire-breathing steeds, but on ‘heavy old dobbins’ – a contemptuous barnyard image of evil. All very well, but still, some would have said, distinctly peripheral.

The breakthrough came with Tolkien’s article for Essays and Studies (1929), ‘Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad’, the most perfect though not the best-known of his academic pieces. This rested in classic philological style on an observation of the utmost tininess. In Old English a distinction was regularly made between verbs like hé hiereð, híe híerað, ‘he hears, they hear’, and hé lócað, híe lóciað ‘he looks, they look’. An -að ending could be singular or plural, depending on what sort of a verb it was attached to. This clear but to outsiders utterly unmemorable distinction was, after Hastings, rapidly dropped. Two manuscripts, however, one of Ancrene Wisse, the other of its five associated texts, not only preserved the distinction but went on to make another new one, between verbs within the lócian class: they distinguished e.g. between ha polieð, ‘they endure’, O.E. híe poliað, and ha fondið, ‘they inquire’, O.E. híe fondiað. The distinction had a sound phonological basis and was not the result of mere whim. Furthermore the two manuscripts could not have been by the same man for they were in different handwriting. Evidently – I summarise the chain of logic – they were the product of a ‘school’; so were the works themselves, composed in the same dialect by another man or men; and this ‘school’ was one that operated in English, and in an English descended without interruption from Old English, owing words certainly to the Norse and the French but not affected by the confusion their invasions had caused. To put it Tolkien’s way:

There is an English older than Dan Michel’s and richer, as regular in spelling as Orm’s [these are two other relatively consistent writers of Middle English] but less queer; one that has preserved something of its former cultivation. It is not a language long relegated to the ‘uplands’ struggling once more for expression in apologetic emulation of its betters or out of compassion for the lewd, but rather one that has never fallen back into ‘lewdness’, and has contrived in troublous times to maintain the air of a gentleman, if a country gentleman. It has traditions and some acquaintance with books and the pen, but it is also in close touch with a good living speech – a soil somewhere in England. (‘AW’, p. 106)

It is in short a language which had defied conquest and the Conqueror.

There are several signs here of Tolkien’s underlying preoccupations. One is the power of philology: the regularity and rigour of its observations can resurrect from the dead a society long since vanished of which no other trace remains than the nature of dialect forms in a few old manuscripts. These observations are incontestable. They are also suggestive, permitting us to make informed guesses at, say, the level of independence of western shires in the twelfth century and the nature of their race-relations. They pleased Tolkien further because their implication was so clearly patriotic, that there had been an England beyond England even in the days when anyone who was anyone spoke French. In that way they also corroborated the impression of self-confidence made by the ‘Man in the Moon’ poem, itself an example of what Tolkien in that article (p. 116) called ‘the westerly lyric, whose little world lay between Wirral and the Wye’. As for the Ancrene Wisse itself, Tolkien had little doubt that the ‘soil somewhere in England’ to which it should be ascribed was Herefordshire, a decision confirmed by later research. All in all the picture these inquiries gave was of a far-West shire, cut off from and undisturbed by foreigners, adhering to the English traditions elsewhere in ruins. If only such a civilisation had endured to be the ancestor of ours! Tolkien, with his family connections in and nostalgic memories of Worcestershire, the next most-western county to Hereford and like it a storehouse of Old English tradition, felt the pull of this ‘might have been’ strongly and personally. In a revealing passage at the end of the article (p. 122), he noted a few exceptions to his general rule and remarked:

Personally I have no doubt that if we could call the scribes of A and B before us and silently point to these forms, they would thank us, pick up a pen, and immediately substitute the -in forms, as certainly as one of the present day would emend a minor aberration from standard spelling or accidence, if it was pointed to.

The ghosts would be gentlemen, scholars, Englishmen too. Tolkien felt at home with them.

This sentiment may have been misguided: if we really had the ‘lays’ on which Beowulf was based we might not think much of them, and if we had to deal with the scribes of Ancrene Wisse we might find them difficult people. There is a streak of wishful thinking in Tolkien’s remark near the beginning of this article that if his argument was sound, English in the west at that time must have been ‘at once more alive, and more traditional and organized as a written form, than anywhere else’. He was used to having ‘traditional’ literature viewed as dead: it was nice to think of a time when tradition was rated higher than modern fashion. Still, it is hard to say his sentiment was wrong. It was based on rational argument, and the whole theory integrated (as theories should) many thousands of separate facts which had been needing explanation already. With hindsight one can see that this philological vision of ancient Herefordshire was a strong component of Tolkien’s later conception of the hobbits’ ‘Shire’, also cut-off, dimly remembering former empires, but effectively turned in on itself to preserve an idealised ‘English’ way of life. But ‘the Shire’ is fiction, and philology fact. The questions which begin to show themselves in Tolkien’s work from about this time on are: how far did he distinguish the two states? And how much of his later success was caused by reluctance to admit a distinction?

Connections are exemplified in Tolkien’s article ‘Sigelwara land’, published in two parts in Medium Aevum 1932 and 1934. Typically this considers a single Old English word, Sigelware, and typically corrects that briskly to Sigelhearwan. What were these? Literate Anglo-Saxons used the word to translate Æthiops, ‘Ethiopian’, but, Tolkien argued, the word must have been older than English knowledge of Latin, let alone Ethiopians, and must have had some other and earlier referent. Pursuing sigel and hearwa separately through many examples and analogues, he emerged with two thoughts and an image: (1) that sigel meant originally both ‘sun’ and ‘jewel’, (2) that hearwa was related to Latin carbo, ‘soot’, (3) that when an Anglo-Saxon of the preliterate Dark Age said sigelhearwan, what he had in mind was ‘rather the sons of Múspell [the Norse fire-giant] than of Ham, the ancestors of the Silhearwan with red-hot eyes that emitted sparks, with faces black as soot’. What was the point of the speculation, admittedly ‘guess-work’, admittedly ‘inconclusive’? It offers some glimpses of a lost mythology, suggested Tolkien with academic caution, something ‘which has coloured the verse-treatment of Scripture and determined the diction of poems’.¹⁰ A good deal less boringly, one might say, it had helped to naturalise the ‘Balrog’ in the traditions of the North, and it had helped to create (or corroborate) the image of the silmaril, that fusion of ‘sun’ and ‘jewel’ in physical form. Tolkien was already thinking along these lines. His scholarly rigour was not ‘put-on’, but it was no longer only being directed to academic, uncreative ends. Allegories, Potatoes, Fantasy and Glamour

One may now see in rather a different light the four minor prose works written by Tolkien in the late 1930s and early 1940s, those years in which The Hobbit came to term and The Lord of the Rings began to get under way – the years, one may say, when Tolkien turned away from pursuing his trade and began instead to use it. He knew he was doing this, as one can see from the little allegory ‘Leaf by Niggle’ (published 1945, but written c. 1943). Since Tolkien said in later years that he ‘cordially disliked’ allegory, it is perhaps worth repeating that ‘Leaf by Niggle’ quite certainly is one.¹¹ The story’s first words are, ‘There was once a little man called Niggle, who had a long journey to make’, and to any Anglo-Saxonist this is bound to recall the Old Northumbrian poem known as Bede’s Death-Song, memorable (a) for being in Old Northumbrian, (b) for being so clearly the true, last words of the Venerable Bede, England’s greatest churchman, all of whose other works are in Latin. This goes: ‘Before that compelled journey (néidfáerae) no man is wiser than he needs to be, in considering, before his departure, what will be judged to his soul after his deathday, good or evil.’ Obviously someone should have said this to Niggle! But the lines also give a good and ancient reason for carrying out the basic operation of allegory, which is to start making equations.

Thus journey = death. Niggle the painter further = Tolkien the writer. One can see as much from the accusation of being ‘just idle’, softened later to being ‘the sort of painter who can paint leaves better than trees’, or to being unable to organise his time; Tolkien was sensitive to accusations of laziness, but it is clear enough that he was a perfectionist, and also easily distracted.¹² Niggle’s ‘leaf = The Hobbit, his ‘Tree’ = The Lord of the Rings, the ‘country’ that opens from it = Middle-earth, and the ‘other pictures … tacked on to the edges of his great picture’ = the poems and other works which Tolkien kept on fitting into his own greater one.¹³ Meanwhile the garden which Niggle does not keep up looks ominously like Tolkien’s professorial duties; the visitors who hinted ‘that he might get a visit from an Inspector’ remind one of that discourteous colleague of Tolkien’s, who even after The Lord of the Rings came out snapped ungraciously ‘He ought to have been teaching!’¹⁴ One can go on making these equations, and one is supposed to; the essence of an allegory, Tolkien thought, was that it should be ‘just’, i.e. that all the bits should fit exactly together, compelling assent (and amusement) by their minuteness. If one realises that, there is a certain bite in the place where Niggle does his painting. He keeps his great canvas ‘in the tall shed that had been built for it out in his garden (on a plot where once he had grown potatoes)’. Niggle sacrificed potatoes to paint. What did Tolkien sacrifice to The Lord of the Rings? The real answer is, articles like those on Ancrene Wisse and the Sigelware; after 1940 (when he was only 48) Tolkien wrote only five more, and two of these were collaborations and two others not entirely academic in style. Still, Tolkien never went over to despising the advancement of learning. It is Niggle’s expressed gratitude for Parish’s ‘excellent potatoes’ which persuades the First Voice to let him out of the Workhouse (= Purgatory). One could say that the whole tale expresses both Tolkien’s self-accusation and self-justification, and that its solution in Heaven lies in Niggle and Parish, the creative and the practical aspects of Tolkien himself, learning to work together – though what they work on, you notice, is very definitely Niggle’s Tree and Country, not Parish’s potatoes at all.

Tolkien was giving up the academic cursus honorum in the late 1930s, and he knew it. How did he justify this to himself, and how far could he reconcile the claims of ‘potatoes’ and ‘Trees’ (= scholarship and fantasy)? These questions underlie, often unsuspectedly, the three critical works roughly contemporary with ‘Leaf by Niggle’, i.e. ‘Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics’ (published 1936), ‘On Fairy-Stories’ (first version 1939), and the ‘Preface’ to C. L. Wrenn’s revision of the Clark Hall translation of Beowulf (1940). None of these contains very much philology in the narrow sense of sound-changes or verb-paradigms, and they have accordingly been fallen on gratefully by commentators who never wanted to learn any. However, philology still remains their essential guts; while they lead forward to fantasy they also look back to and rest always on an intensely rigorous study of ‘the word’.

So, to take the last piece first, the ‘Clark Hall’ introduction has only one main point to make, and that is that words mean more than their dictionary entries. What happens if you look up Sigelware in the standard Old English dictionary of J. Bosworth and T. N. Toller? It says ‘the Ethiopians’, and that’s all. What of éacen, a word in Beowulf? The dictionary says ‘Increased, great, vast, powerful’. To ‘the enquirer into ancient beliefs’, wrote Tolkien, only the first was right, for éacen meant not ‘large’ but ‘enlarged’ and denoted a supernatural addition of power. As for runes, Bosworth-Toller translated the Beowulfian phrase onband bead-urúne (meaninglessly) as ‘unbound the war-secret’, while Clark Hall tried ‘gave vent to secret thoughts of strife’. ‘It means “unbound a battle rune”’, declared Tolkien. ‘What exactly is implied is not clear. The expression has an antique air, as if it had descended from an older time to our poet: a suggestion lingers of the spells by which men of wizardry could stir up storms in a clear sky’ (pp. xiii-xiv). Fanciful, the shades of Bosworth and Toller might have said. If the facts point to fantasy, Tolkien could have retorted, fantasy is what we must have! The ‘Preface’ is in a wider sense a protest against translating Beowulf only into polite modern English, a plea for listening to the vision contained, not in plots, but in words – words like flæsc-homa, bán-hús, hreðer-loca, ellor-síð (‘flesh-raiment’, ‘bone-house’, ‘heart-prison’, ‘elsewhere-journey’). The poet who used these words, Tolkien wrote, did not see the world like us, but:

saw in his thought the brave men of old walking under the vault of heaven upon the island earth (middangeard) beleaguered by the Shoreless Seas (gársecg) and the outer darkness, enduring with stern courage the brief days of life (læne líf), until the hour of fate (metodsceaft), when all things should perish, léoht ond lif samod [light and life together]. (p. xxvii)

He ‘did not say all this fully or explicitly’. Nevertheless, the insistence ran, it was there. You didn’t need a mythological handbook of Old English if you paid attention to the words; like place-names or Roman roads or Gothic vowels, they carried quite enough information all by themselves.

The same insistence on ‘the reality of language’ permeates the British Academy lecture of 1936. There, however, it is further intertwined with beliefs about ‘the reality of history’ – rather curious beliefs which Tolkien does not seem to have wanted to express directly. The general flow of the lecture is in fact extremely sinuous, causing great trouble to the many later Beowulfians who have tried to paraphrase it; it abounds in asides, in hilarious images like the Babel of conflicting critics and the ‘jabberwocks of historical and antiquarian research’, in wildernesses of dragons and shrewdnesses of apes. However a vital point about it, never directly stated or defended, is Tolkien’s conviction that he knew exactly when and under what circumstances the poem was written. ‘At a given point’, he says (his italics, p. 262), there was a fusion, reflected in the poem; at this ‘precise point’ (p. 269) an imagination was kindled. Since there is no unquestioned evidence at all for the date and place when Beowulf was composed (it could be anywhere from Tyne to Severn, from AD 650 to 1000), one wonders what Tolkien meant. But the nearest he approaches to an answer is via allegory once more, in his little story of the man and the tower, on pp. 248–9.

This runs as follows:

A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually lived, not far from the old house of his fathers. Of the rest he took some and built a tower. But his friends coming perceived at once (without troubling to climb the steps) that these stones had formerly belonged to a more ancient building. So they pushed the tower over, with no little labour, in order to look for hidden carvings … They all said: ‘This tower is most interesting.’ But they also said (after pushing it over): ‘What a muddle it is in!’ And even the man’s own descendants, who might have been expected to consider what he had been about, were heard to murmur: ‘He is such an odd fellow! Imagine using these old stones just to build a nonsensical tower! Why did not he restore the old home? He had no sense of proportion.’ But from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea.

Now, as with ‘Leaf by Niggle’, everything in this story can be ‘equated’. ‘The man’ = the Beowulf-poet. The ‘friends’ looking for hidden carvings = the Beowulf-scholars trying to reconstruct history. The ‘tower’ with its view on the sea = Beowulf itself, with its non-scholarly impulse towards pure poetry. More difficult are ‘the accumulation of old stone’, the ‘older hall’ (also ‘the old house of his fathers’), and ‘the house in which he actually lived’. From this one can deduce that Tolkien thought that there had been older poems than Beowulf, pagan ones, in the time of the Christian past already abandoned; they are the ‘older hall’. However debris from them remained available, poetic formulas and indeed stray pagan concepts like the Sigelware; that is the ‘accumulation of old stone’. Some indeed of this was used for Biblical poems like Exodus, in which the Sigelware figure, part of the new civilisation of Christian Northumbria (or Mercia), the new civilisation being ‘the house’ in which the man ‘actually lived’. Rejected bits were nevertheless used by the poet to build his poem or ‘tower’; and they are pre-eminently the monsters, the dragon, the eotenas and ylfe, ‘elves’ and ‘giants’, words once common but used either not at all or very rarely in the rest of Old English literature.

The gist of this is that no one, friends or descendants or maybe even contemporaries, had understood Beowulf except Tolkien. The work had always been something personal, even freakish, and it took someone with the same instincts to explain it. Sympathy furthermore depended on being a descendant, on living in the same country and beneath the same sky, on speaking the same language – being ‘native to that tongue and land’. This is not the terminology of strict scholarship, though that does not prove the opinion wrong. What it does prove is that Tolkien felt more than continuity with the Beowulf-poet, he felt a virtual identity of motive and of technique.^* Nowhere was the identity stronger than over ‘the monsters and the critics’, the latter deeply antipathetic to both of them as Tolkien thought he had proved – the former deeply interesting. But what did the dragon, for instance, mean to the Beowulf-poet? For him, Tolkien argued, dragons might have been very close to the edge of reality; certainly the poet’s pagan ancestors could have thought of dragons as things they might one day have to face. Equally certainly dragons had to the poet not yet become allegorical, as they would to his descendants – the dragon as Leviathan, the devil, ‘that old serpent underground’, etc. Yet even to the poet a dragon could not be mere matter-of-fact. He was indeed phenomenally lucky in his freedom to balance exactly between ‘dragon-as-simple-beast’ and ‘dragon-as-just-allegory’, between pagan and Christian worlds, on a pinpoint of literary artifice and mythic suggestion. One sees why Tolkien insisted on a ‘precise’ kindling point of imagination, a ‘given point’ of ‘fusion’, a ‘pregnant moment of poise’. Knowing exactly when the poem was written was part of knowing its exact literary mode, and that literary mode was the one he himself wanted! But the circumstances of the modern literary world made things much harder for him than for his mighty predecessor and kindred spirit.

‘A dragon is no idle fancy’, wrote Tolkien. ‘Whatever may be his origins, in fact or invention, the dragon in legend is a potent creation of men’s imagination, richer in significance than his barrow is in gold. Even to-day (despite the critics) you may find men … who yet have been caught by the fascination of the worm’ (pp. 257–8). This last sentence is true mainly of Tolkien, whose 1923 poem ‘Iumonna Gold Galdre Bewunden’ is about a dragon-hoard and self-evidently Beowulf-derived.¹⁵ The one before is no doubt true as regards ‘significance’, but smacks of special pleading; Tolkien didn’t want dragons to be symbolic, he wanted them to have a claw still planted on fact (as well as ‘invention’). What did he mean by ‘no idle fancy’? The truth of it is, I think, that Tolkien was very used to scrutinising old texts and drawing from them surprising but rational conclusions about history and language and ancient belief. In the process he developed very strongly a sort of tracker-dog instinct for validity, one which enabled him to say that such and such a word, like éacen or beadurún or *hearwa or éored, was true, even if unrecorded, meaning by ‘true’ a genuine fragment of older civilisation consistent with the others. All his instincts told him that dragons were like that – widespread in Northern legend, found in related languages from Italy to Iceland, deeply embedded in ancient story.¹⁶ Could this mean nothing? He was bound to answer ‘No’, and hardly deterred by the thought that ‘intelligent living people’ would disagree with him. After all, what did they know about butterflies, let alone dragons! Still, though dragons, and balrogs, and Shires, and silmarils were all taking shape in his mind as fiction, and were all simultaneously related to philological fact, he had not at this stage evolved a theory to connect the two. Possibly he never quite managed to make the link.

He had a determined try in ‘On Fairy-Stories’ three years later. However this is Tolkien’s least successful if most discussed piece of argumentative prose. The main reason for its comparative failure, almost certainly, is its lack of a philological core or kernel; Tolkien was talking to, later writing for, an unspecialised audience, and there is some sign that he tried to ‘talk down’ to them. Repeatedly he plays the trick of pretending that fairies are real – they tell ‘human stories’ instead of ‘fairy stories’, they put on plays for men ‘according to abundant records’, and so on. This comes perilously close to whimsy, the pretence that something not true is true to create an air of comic innocence. However, beneath this, and beneath the very strong sense that Tolkien is ‘counterpunching’ to a whole string of modern theories which he did not like (fairies were small, only children liked fairies, Thórr was a nature-myth, etc. etc.), it is just about possible to make out the bones of an argument, or rather of a conviction.

The conviction is that fantasy is not entirely made up. Tolkien was not prepared to say this in so many words to other people, to sceptics, maybe not to himself. That is why he continually equivocated with words like ‘invention’ and ‘no idle fancy’, and also why a good deal of ‘On Fairy-Stories’ is a plea for the power of literary art; this is dignified with the form ‘Sub-Creation’, and to it are ascribed the continuing power of Grimms’ Fairy-Tales, the (partial) success of Macbeth, the very existence of ‘fantasy’ as an art-form – views Tolkien also expressed through yet another neologism, the word and poem ‘Mythopoeia’, eventually to be published in later editions of the collection Tree and Leaf (London: HarperCollins, 1988). Bobbing continually above the surface of these rational and literary opinions, however, are other, more puzzling statements. By ‘fantasy’ Tolkien declared (with a long haggle over the inadequacies of the OED and S. T. Coleridge), he meant first ‘the Sub-creative Art in itself’, but second ‘a quality of strangeness and wonder in the Expression, derived from the Image’. The last phrase is the critical one, for it implies that the ‘Image’ was there before anyone derived any expression from it at all. The same implication lurks in Tolkien’s own autobiographical statement, à propos of dragons, that ‘Fantasy, the making or glimpsing of Otherworlds, was the heart of the desire of Faërie’. Making up dragons is Art; ‘glimpsing’ them and the worlds they come from is not. Tolkien would not let ‘fantasy’ mean either the one (rational) or the other (mystic) activity, but kept hinting it was both. He does so particularly, through the whole of the essay, with the idea of ‘elves’: these, he insists, may be (1) ‘creations of Man’s mind’, which is what nearly everybody thinks, or (2) true, i.e. they ‘really exist independently of our tales about them’. But (3) the essence of their activity even as ‘creations of Man’s mind’ is that they are also creators, supreme illusionists, capable of luring mortals away, by their beauty, to the ‘elf-hills’ from which they will dazedly emerge centuries later, unaware of the passage of time. They form an image, a true image, of the ‘elvish craft’ of fantasy itself; stories about them are man-made fantasies about independent fantasts.

There is a strong sense of circularity in all these statements, as if Tolkien was hovering around some central point on which he dared not or could not land, and it is easy to dismiss that central point as mere personal delusion. We are back, indeed, with ‘creepiness’, that quality that ‘Goblin Feet’, in one view, thrusts subjectively on to something in reality perfectly ordinary; but which, in another view, stems from something still perfectly real and rational but which Tolkien was much better at detecting than most others. It seems to me that this ‘real centre’ was philological, and that Tolkien could not express it in ordinary literary terms. He came closest to it, in ‘On Fairy-Stories’, when he brushed past the edges of single words, especially spell and evangelium. These two words are related, historically, for the Old English translation of Greek evangelion, ‘good news’, was gód spell, ‘the good story’, now ‘Gospel’. Spell continued to mean, however, ‘a story, something said in formal style’, eventually ‘a formula of power’, a magic spell. The word embodies much of what Tolkien meant by ‘fantasy’, i.e. something unnaturally powerful (magic spell), something literary (a story), something in essence true (Gospel). At the very end of his essay he asserts that the Gospels have the ‘supremely convincing tone’ of Primary Art, of truth – a quality he would also like to assert, but could never hope to prove, of elves and dragons.

There is a better word, though, buried in Tolkien’s remarks, which I can only conclude he decided not to discuss as being too complicated for a non-philological piece; he would have done better to focus on it. This is ‘glamour’. Actually Tolkien may also have been too revolted by the semantic poisonings of modernity to want to discuss the word, for now in common parlance it means overwhelmingly the aura of female sexual attraction, or to be more exact female sexual attraction at a distance – a showbiz word, an advertiser’s word, false and meretricious, taking a part in such nasty compounds as ‘glamour-girl’, ‘glamour-puss’ and even ‘glamour-pants’. The 1972 Supplement to the OED concedes the point and adds the coinages ‘glamourize’, ‘glammed-up’, and even ‘glam’ (a word Tolkien would have especially hated as showing that the old word used in dialect and in Sir Gawain for ‘mirth, merriment’, glam, glaum, was so dead as to be no competitor). The main G volume, published in 1897, however tells a story not much happier. ‘Glamour’, it alleges, is a made-up word, ‘introduced into the literary language by Sir Walter Scott’. What it means is ‘Magic, enchantment, spell; esp. in the phrase to cast the glamour over one’; from this sense has evolved the idea of ‘A magical or fictitious beauty … a delusive or alluring charm’, and so, pretty obviously, the cardboard senses of today. Tolkien would have been more interested in the quotation cited from Scott, which says ‘This species of witchcraft is well known in Scotland as the glamour, or deceptio visus, and was supposed to be a special attribute of the race of Gipsies’. What he knew, and what the OED didn’t, was that exactly this phenomenon was at the centre of Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, which begins with the Gylfaginning or ‘Delusion of Gilfi’, and includes within that the highly prominent and amusing tale of the delusion of Thórr by sjónhverfing = ‘aversion of the sight’ = deceptio visus = ‘glamour’. ‘Glamour’ was then well exemplified in Norse tradition and never mind the gypsies.

Further, the word was evidently by origin a corruption of ‘grammar’, and paralleled in sense by ‘gramarye’ = ‘Occult learning, magic, necromancy’, says the OED, ‘Revived in literary use by Scott’. Cambridge University had indeed preserved for centuries the office of ‘Master of Glomerye’, whose job it was to teach the younger undergraduates Latin. Tolkien must have been amused at the thought of a University official combining instruction in language – his own job – with classes in magic and spell-binding – his own desire. He wrote of the parson in Farmer Giles of Ham (a figure underrated by critics, but having some of the good as well as the bad points of the professional philologist), ‘he was a grammarian, and could doubtless see further into the future than most’. But once again Tolkien knew more than the OED. The first citation it gives under ‘gramarye’ in the ‘magic’ sense is from the ballad of ‘King Estimere’, ‘My mother was a westerne woman, And learned in gramarye’. How right that a ‘western’ woman should know grammar, like the sages of Herefordshire! How pleasing if the study should turn out to have a few practical advantages. But besides, the vital facts about ‘King Estmere’, as Tolkien could have observed from a glance at the introduction to the poem in F. J. Child’s famous collection of English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–98), were that its closest analogues came from Faroese and Danish (which once again related ‘glamour’ to the ancient traditions of the North); and that the philologist Sophus Bugge had gone so far as to relate it to the Old Norse Hervarar saga. This itself is possibly the most romantically traditional of all the Norse ‘sagas of old times’; it contains fragments with a claim to being the oldest heroic poetry of the North; and it was edited and translated in 1960 by Tolkien’s son Christopher, under the title The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise.

Þess galt hon gedda

fyrir Grafár ósi,

er Heiðrekr var veginn

undir Harvaða fjöllum.

So writes the forgotten poet: ‘The pike has paid/by the pools of Grafá/for Heidrek’s slaying/under Harvad-fells’. But, Christopher Tolkien comments, ‘the view is not challenged … that Harvaða is the same name in origin as “Carpathians”. Since this name in its Germanic form is found nowhere else at all, and must be a relic of extremely ancient tradition, one can hardly conclude otherwise than that these few lines are a fragment of a lost poem … that preserved names at least going back to poetry sung in the halls of Germanic peoples in central or south-eastern Europe’. One could hardly have a more romantically suggestive comment, or a more rigorously philological one, for as Christopher Tolkien footnotes, ‘The stem karpat- was regularly transformed into xarfap- by the operation of the Germanic Consonant Shift (Grimm’s Law)’.¹⁷ ‘Glamour’, ‘gramarye’, grammar, philology – these were on several levels much the same thing.

One can see now why Tolkien used the same word for both the characteristic literary quality of Beowulf, a ‘glamour of Poesis’ (‘Monsters’, p. 248), and for the characteristic but maybe not literary quality of ‘fairy-stories’, the ‘glamour of Elfland’ (‘OFS’, Tree p. 6). He did not know quite what he was detecting, but he was in no doubt that he felt something consistent in many stories and poems which could not all be the work of the same man. It might after all only be the result of age and distance, the ‘elvish hone of antiquity’, or we might think the distorting glass of philology; it might point to some great lost truth in the areas of utter historical darkness of which he was so conscious; it might be a memory, or a prophecy, of Paradise, as in ‘Leaf by Niggle’; or, again as in ‘Leaf by Niggle’, it might be mankind’s one chance to create a vision of Paradise which would be true in the future if never in the past. Tolkien’s theories on all this never coalesced. Still, we can say that the quality he evidently valued more than anything in literature was that shimmer of suggestion which never quite becomes clear sight but always hints at something deeper further on, a quality shared by Beowulf, Hervarar saga, ‘Fawler’, ‘The Man in the Moon’, ‘Wayland’s Smithy’, and so much else. This was ‘glamour’, the opposite one may say of ‘shrewdness’ – for as the one had climbed into favour the other had been debased, in simultaneous proof of the superiority of ancient over modern world views. If Tolkien took ‘glamour’ too seriously, translating it into an entirely personal concept of fantasy, he had at any rate precedent and reason. As Jacob Grimm wrote (it is quoted under the definition of philologie in the Deutsches Wörterbuch):

You can divide all philologists into these groups, those who study words only for the sake of the things, or those who study things only for the sake of the words.

Grimm had no doubt that the former class was superior, the latter falling away into pedantry and dictionaries. Of that former class Tolkien was the preeminent example.

^* The tower looking out over the sea, for instance, is a strong and private image of Tolkien’s own for what he desired in literature. The 1920 poem ‘The Happy Mariners’ begins ‘I know a window in a western tower/That opens on celestial seas …’ In The Lord of the Rings (p. 7) the hobbits believe that you can see the sea from the top of the tallest elvish tower on the Tower Hills; but none of them has ever tried to climb it.