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

CHAPTER 4

A CARTOGRAPHIC PLOT Maps and Names

Seventeen years went by between the publication of The Hobbit and that of The Fellowship of the Ring. It is true that in the interim a World War was fought, and Tolkien’s family grew up, while Tolkien himself was committed to many professorial duties which, as he later insisted, he did not neglect. Nevertheless the main reason for the long hiatus was the pace and nature of Tolkien’s own creativity. He remained absorbed in Middle-earth, to it indeed he dedicated his ‘years of authority’ as a scholar; but he found the composition of The Lord of the Rings a matter which had to be allowed to obey its own laws. Thanks to the publication of (in particular) volumes VI to IX of ‘The History of Middle-earth’, we now know a good deal more about this process than we did when this book was first written.

To begin with, one can see that Tolkien was perhaps taken aback by, and was certainly not prepared for the success of The Hobbit and the very natural demand by his publishers for a sequel to it. As we again now know much more clearly, and as is discussed in chapter 7 below, he had been working on what was to become The Silmarillion for many years, and had a great deal of material available from that. He sent selections from this corpus to his publisher, Stanley Unwin, in November 1937 (The Hobbit had been published in September of that year), only to have them politely rejected, probably on the basis of a partial reading, a month later.¹ Stanley Unwin wanted a sequel, not a prequel, and more about hobbits, not about elves. Between 16th and 19th December 1937 Tolkien accordingly began to write on from the end of The Hobbit, calling his initial chapter, as it was to remain right through to final publication, ‘A long-expected party’. However, what is bound to surprise anyone familiar with The Lord of the Rings who then reads through Tolkien’s early drafts in The Return of the Shadow is quite how little Tolkien had in the way of a plan, or even of a conception.

Bilbo’s ring certainly came into the story. But it is (according to a note written perhaps a couple of months after starting) ‘Not very dangerous, when used for good purpose’, see Shadow p. 42. As Christopher Tolkien points out, the ring remains for some time no more than a ‘highly convenient magical device’, the ‘central conception of the Ruling Ring’ being ‘not yet present’; the moment when this ‘central idea’ came to Tolkien is still not clear, see Shadow pp. 70, 87, 227. Meanwhile the character who was to become Aragorn, or Strider, begins his career as ‘a queer-looking, brown-faced hobbit’ called Trotter, who always wears wooden shoes, first encountered just like Aragorn in The Prancing Pony in Bree. ‘Trotter’ gave Tolkien immense trouble: at least three times he wrote ‘Who is Trotter?’ as a note to himself, and came up with repeated discrepant guesses – he was a cousin of Bilbo, he was a hobbit who was also a Ranger, he was an elf in disguise – only to fix eventually on him as a human and descendant of the Men of the North. Even after the character had become fixed as the tall and long-legged Aragorn, though, Tolkien stuck determinedly to the increasingly inapposite name ‘Trotter’, even writing in the defence of it which was to survive into the finished version of The Lord of the Rings as the defence of ‘Telcontar’ (see respectively for the above Shadow pp. 137, 210, 214, 223; Treason p. 6; War p. 390; and LOTR p. 845). As Christopher Tolkien repeatedly notes, his father could be extremely tenacious in holding on to a scene through several revisions, while at the same time sharply altering its context and meaning. But in these early stages it would be truer to say that Tolkien was ‘sleeepwalking’ his way towards a plot than that he was proceeding according to a plan. I look back with some shame (see ‘Preface’ to this edition) on my early attempt to diagnose one from Tolkien’s finished product. No wonder the Professor would have liked to ‘talk more’ with me ‘about design as it appears or may be found’! He would have told me that the design I was anxious to find simply wasn’t there, not from the beginning and possibly not at all. Nevertheless, to quote Bilbo, ‘Not all those who wander are lost’. While Tolkien did not have a grand design or central conception, had made no plans for a sequel to The Hobbit, and could not directly use his ‘Silmarillion’ material, he was not entirely without pre-existing resources. Something of what was going on in his mind is revealed by one of the major differences between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings: their use of maps and names. Maps and Names

In The Hobbit names are astonishingly rare. There are of course the twelve dwarves, all taken from the Dvergatal poem, and apprehended I suspect by most readers as a homogeneous unit broken only by Fili and Kili, who are young, Bombur, who is fat, Balin, who is kindly, and Thorin, who is boss. There are few elf-names, and none of those which do occur – Bladorthin, Dominion, Girion, Galion, Moria, Esgaroth – is at all prominent in the story. The Elvenking remains anonymous in The Hobbit and is identified as Thranduil only in The Lord of the Rings p. 234. The only hobbit surnames given are Baggins, Took and Sackville-Baggins (this last to prove an anomaly in Middle-earth and a failure of tone), with ‘Messrs Grubb, Grubb and Burrowes’ the auctioneers at the very end. Elrond, Azog, Radagast, the ravens’ onomatopoeic Roäc and Carc – these all but complete The Hobbit’s list. A common practice for Tolkien at this stage was simply to make names out of capital letters. Thus Bilbo lives in a tunnel which goes ‘not quite straight into the side of the hill – The Hill, as all the people for many miles round called it’. The stream at the foot of The Hill is called The Water, the hobbits’ town on The Water is called Hobbiton (near Bywater), and so on into Wilderland, where we find the Misty Mountains, the Long Lake, the Lonely Mountain, a river called Running and a valley called Dale. Even ‘Gandalf’ is actually a name of this type. It also comes from the Dvergatal, where it is near Thráinn, Thorinn and Thrór, but Tolkien evidently regarded it with some suspicion since it contained the element -álfr, while it was his opinion that elves and dwarves cohabited only in the pages of the OED. So what was ‘Gandalf’ doing in a dwarves’ roster, and anyway what was a ‘gand-’? If Tolkien looked in the Icelandic Dictionary of R. Cleasby and Gudbrand Vigfusson he would have found the opinions that the meaning of gandr was ‘somewhat dubious’ but probably ‘anything enchanted or an object used by sorcerers’, while gandálfr was either ‘a wizard’ or maybe a ‘bewitched demon’. He concluded, clearly, that this dictionary definition was once again wrong, and that gandr meant ‘wand’ or ‘staff (the common property of wizards as one can tell even from Shakespeare’s Prospero or Milton’s Comus). Accordingly when Gandalf first appears ‘All that the unsuspecting Bilbo saw that morning was an old man with a staff’ (my italics).² He turns out not to be an elf, but by the end of The Lord of the Rings it is clear he comes from Elvenhome. ‘Gandalf’ is in fact, then, not a name but a description, as with Beorn, Gollum, the Necromancer, and other people, places and things in The Hobbit.

Since The Silmarillion, with its developed nomenclature, was already in existence, it would be wrong to say that Tolkien in the 1930s was not interested in names. It does look, though, as if he was not sure how to bring them into fiction, especially if they were English names. Yet the point had caught his attention. As The Hobbit neared completion he focused on the problem with sudden clarity – as one can see from Farmer Giles of Ham, not published till 1949, but composed apparently in the period 1935–8, i.e. overlapping with the final production of The Hobbit (see Bibliography, pp. 73–4). This throws many interesting sidelights on Tolkien’s fictional development. For one thing it is the only one of his stories set unmistakably in England, and while its history is that of nursery-rhyme^* its geography is remarkably clear. Ham is now Thame, a town in Buckinghamshire twelve miles east of Oxford. Worminghall is four miles away and Oakley, which had its parson eaten, five. The capital of the Middle Kingdom, ‘some twenty leagues distant from Ham’, sounds like Tamworth, the historical capital of the Mercian kings, sixty-eight miles from Thame as the crow flies (a league, NB, is three miles). Farthingho in Northamptonshire, where once ‘an outpost against the Middle Kingdom was maintained’, is on a direct line between those two places about a third of the way from Thame – proof of the ‘Little Kingdom’s’ lack of territorial ambition. Wales, where the giants live, and the (Pennine) mountains where the dragons live are on this parochial scale suitably far off. And when Farmer Giles refuses to listen to tales about the folk ‘North over the hills and far away, beyond the Standing Stones and all’, he means Warwickshire, probably, whose boundary with Oxfordshire runs by the Rollright Stones.

All in all it is extremely unfair of the imagined ‘editor’ of Farmer Giles to criticise its imagined ‘author’ for feeble geography; that ‘author’, like Tolkien, ‘lived himself in the lands of the Little Kingdom’ and knew what he was writing about. But what is the point of this sudden precision? Evidently, Tolkien wanted to recreate a timeless and idealised England (or rather Britain) in which the place and the people remained the same regardless of politics. The story of Farmer Giles is therefore largely the triumph of native over foreign (for in Giles’s court ‘the vulgar tongue came into fashion, and none of his speeches were in the Book–latin’), as simultaneously of worth over fashion and of heroic song and popular lay over pompous pernickety rationalistic scholarship. In all these ways Farmer Giles continues the vein of the ‘Man in the Moon’ poems and of The Hobbit – as it does also in its jibing at the OED with its arrogantly ‘civilised’ definition of ‘blunderbuss’.³ However at the same time the story can be seen as one of the several works Tolkien wrote around this time with reference to his own switch from academicism to creativity (see above). Is Farmer Giles, like ‘Leaf by Niggle’, an allegory?

The main reason for thinking so is Giles’s supporter the parson, ‘a grammarian’, note, who ‘could no doubt see further into the future than most men’. His vital act is to remind Giles to take a long rope with him when he goes to hunt the dragon. Without that rope, one may say, there would have been no treasure, no tame dragon, no Thame, no Little Kingdom. Moreover the parson is also in a sense responsible for Tailbiter, Giles’s sword. He guesses what the sword is while Giles and the Miller are still arguing, confirms the guess when it will not go into its scabbard with a dragon near, and in spite of his patter about ‘epigraphical signs’ and archaic characters does actually read the runes on the sword and declare its identity as Tailbiter (or as he prefers to call it, Caudimordax). By doing all this the parson puts heart into Giles. All round he deserves a lot of the credit – certainly much more than Augustus Bonifacius Ambrosius Aurelianus Antoninus, the proud tyrant who sent Giles the sword, though only because to him plain heavy things were out of fashion. It is very nearly irresistible to conclude that in his mixture of learning, bluff and sense the parson represents an idealised (Christian) philologist; in which case the proud tyrant of the Middle Kingdom who discards his most trenchant blade looks very like literary criticism taking no notice of historical language study! One could go on: Farmer Giles would be the creative instinct, the rope (like Tailbiter) philological science, the dragon the ancient world of the Northern imagination brooding on its treasure of lost lays, the Little Kingdom the fictional space which Tolkien hoped to carve out, make independent and inhabit. Of course such an allegory would be a joke;⁴ but a joke in Tolkienian style, an optimistic counter-part to ‘Leaf by Niggle’ a few years later.

In the whole story linguistic humour is paramount, from the gloomy proverbs of ‘Sunny Sam’ and his pigheaded misprision of Hilarius and Felix – ‘Ominous names … I don’t like the sound of them’ – to Giles’s own determined native errors of grammar. The real errors, though, Tolkien ends by remarking, come from later and more ‘learned’ history. Thus Thame should be Tame, ‘for Thame with an h is a folly without warrant’. In actuality, of course, the whole story that Tolkien tells to account for the names of Thame and Worminghall is based on nothing, is mere fiction. Still, even in actuality Thame-with-an-h remains a folly without warrant, part of the wave of Book-latinisms which have given us Thames and Thomas and could and debt and doubt and half the other non-sounded, unhistorical, un-English inserted letters that plague our spelling to this day. Tolkien would have liked them not to exist. He deplored the feeble modern understanding of English names, English places, English culture. In Farmer Giles of Ham one can see him brooding over problems of re-creation and of continuity – for names and places remain whatever people think about them. Though he joked about them, Thame and Worminghall are a long step on from The Hill and The Water. Farthingho set Tolkien thinking about the Farthings of ‘The Shire’.

The further development into The Lord of the Rings is obvious. Where The Hobbit had some forty or fifty rather perfunctory names, the indices of The Lord of the Rings list over 600 names of ‘Persons, Beasts and Monsters’, almost as many places, with a couple of hundred unclassifiable but named objects for good measure. In the same way Thror’s Map and the map of Wilderland in The Hobbit, which added nothing to the story but decoration and a ‘Here be tygers’ feel of quaintness, have ceded to the foldout map of Middle-earth in the first edition of The Fellowship of the Ring, the even more detailed map of the Marches of Gondor and Mordor in The Return of the King, the map of the Shire at the end of the ‘Prologue’, the still further elaborated map issued as a poster by Pauline Baynes in 1970: all of these based on Tolkien’s own maps, see Treason pp. 295–323, and all of them full of details never directly used in the text. Christopher Tolkien confirms the truth of his father’s words to Naomi Mitchison, ‘I wisely started with a map, and made the story fit’, see Letters p. 177 and Treason p. 315. But even the characters of The Lord of the Rings have a strong tendency to talk like maps, and historical ones at that. On p. 372 Aragorn begins ‘You are looking now south-west across the north plains of the Riddermark … Ere long we shall come to the mouth of the Limlight that runs down from Fangorn to join the Great River.’ A little before Celeborn had been tracing the course of Anduin ‘to the tall island of the Tindrock, that we call Tol Brandir’, where it falls ‘over the cataracts of Rauros down into the Nindalf, the Wetwang as it is called in your tongue. That is a wide region of sluggish fen … There the Entwash flows in … About that stream, on this side of the Great River, lies Rohan. On the further side are the bleak hills of the Emyn Muil.’ The flow of knowledge, and of names, seems irrepressible, and the habit is shared by Gimli, Gandalf, Fangorn, even Meriadoc. Why such elaboration?

The answer, oddly, lies as far back as The Hobbit. There Bilbo on one occasion screwed up his courage to ask why something was called ‘The Carrock’. Because it was, replied Gandalf nastily (pp. 108–9).

‘He called it the Carrock, because carrock is his word for it. He calls things like that carrocks, and this one is the Carrock because it is the only one near his home and he knows it well.’

This is unhelpful, and not even true, since carrecc is Old Welsh for ‘rock’, preserved in several modern names like Crickhowell in Brecon (or Crickhollow in the Buckland). However Gandalf has put his finger on one point about names, which is that they are arbitrary, even if they were not so in the beginning. Once upon a time all names were like ‘Gandalf’ or ‘the Hill’: thus (the) Frogmorton meant ‘the town in the marshy land where the frogs are’ (see ‘Guide’, p. 185), Tolkien was der tollkühne or ‘the foolhardy one’, Suffield, Tolkien’s mother’s name, ‘(the one from the) south field’, and so on. However, that is not how names are now perceived. In the modern world we take them as labels, as things accordingly in a very close one-to-one relationship with whatever they label. To use a pompous phrase, they are ‘isomorphic with reality’. And that means they are extraordinarily useful to fantasy, weighing it down as they do with repeated implicit assurances of the existence of the things they label, and of course of their nature and history too.

Tolkien’s new equation of fantasy with reality comes over most strongly in his map, account and history of ‘the Shire’, an extended ‘Little Kingdom’, one might say, transplanted to Middle-earth. The easiest way to describe it is to say that the Shire is ‘calqued’ on England, ‘calquing’ being a linguistic term to mean that process in which the elements of a compound word are translated bit by bit to make a new word in another language, as in French haut-parleur from ‘loudspeaker’ (parler haut = ‘speak loudly’), or Irish eachchumhacht from ‘horsepower’ (each = ‘horse’, like eoh, equus above). The point about calques is that the derivative does not sound anything like its original: nevertheless it betrays influence at every point. Thus historically the Shire is like / unlike England, the hobbits like / unlike English people. Hobbits live in the Shire as the English live in England, but like the English they come from somewhere else, indeed from the Angle (in Europe between Flensburg Fjord and the Schlei, in Middle-earth between Hoarwell and Loudwater). Both groups have forgotten this fact. Both emigrated in three tribes, Angles, Saxons and Jutes or Stoors, Harfoots and Fallohides, all since then largely mingled. The English were led by two brothers, Hengest and Horsa, i.e. ‘stallion’ and ‘horse’, the hobbits by Marcho and Blanco, cp. Old English *marh, ‘horse’, blanca (only in Beowulf) ‘white horse’.⁵ All four founded realms which evolved into uncharacteristic peace: there was no battle in the Shire between the Greenfields, 1147, and the Battle of Bywater, 1419, an interval of 272 years very like the 270 between publication of The Return of the King and the last battle fought on English soil, Sedgemoor, 1685. Organisationally too the Shire, with its mayors, musters, moots and Shirriffs, is an old-fashioned and idealised England, while the hobbits, in their plainness, greediness, frequent embarrassments, distrust of ‘outsiders’^* and most of all in their deceptive ability to endure rough handling form an easily recognisable if again old-fashioned self-image of the English. The calquing is most evident, however, on the map.

Here all that need be said is that Tolkien took most of his Shire-names from his own near surroundings. They sound funny but they ring true. Thus ‘Nobottle’ in the Northfarthing makes us think of glass containers, hardly plausible as features of the landscape, but the name comes from Old English niowe ‘new’, botl ‘house’ (as in bytla, cp. ‘hobbit’). There is a Nobottle in Northamptonshire thirty-five miles from Oxford (and not far from Farthingstone). It means much the same as Newbury, also a town in England twenty-five miles south of Oxford and also a place in the Shire, or rather in the Buckland. Buckland itself is an Oxfordshire placename, common all over England since it has the rather dull etymology of bócland, land ‘booked’ to the Church by charter, and so different from folcland or ‘folkland’ which was inalienable. That derivation was impossible in Middle-earth, so Tolkien constructed the more satisfactory one that the Buckland was where the Buck family lived, was indeed a ‘folkland’ centred on Bucklebury like the ‘Tookland’ centred on Tuckborough. As for ‘Took’, that too appears a faintly comic name in modern English (people prefer to respell it ‘Tooke’), but it is only the ordinary Northern pronunciation of the very common ‘Tuck’. Five minutes with the Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names, E. Ekwall’s English River Names or P. H. Reaney’s Dictionary of British Surnames will provide explanations for most hobbitic names of any sort, and the same is true, on a more learned scale, of the rest of Middle-earth. Thus Celeborn’s ‘Wetwang’ is also a place in Yorkshire, the Riders’ ‘Dunharrow’ has evident English parallels, the rivers Gladden, Silverlode, Limlight, etc., all have English roots or analogues, and so on outwards. The work that went into all these is immense. It also seems largely wasted, since for all the characters’ efforts half the names never get into the plot! Still, Tolkien certainly thought, and very probably he thought rightly, that all this effort was not wasted. The maps and the names give Middle-earth that air of solidity and extent both in space and time which its successors so conspicuously lack. They mark an ambition much increased from The Hobbit’s opening scenes of parody and close of detached appreciation. They also quite simply provided grist for Tolkien’s creative mill – one which like the mills of God ground slow but ground (in the end) exceeding small. Getting started

In a footnote to the ‘Epilogue’ of ‘On Fairy-Stories’, Tolkien noted, or confessed, that though every fantasy-writer aims at truth ‘it is seldom that the “inspiration” is so strong and lasting that it leavens all the lump, and does not leave much that is mere uninspired “invention”.’ One might think that authors start off with a flash of ‘inspiration’ and as it dies away keep things going with ‘invention’. In Tolkien’s case it looks very much as if he worked the other way round: he got started on relatively laborious ‘inventions’, and found as the story gathered way that the inevitable complications of these brought him ‘inspiration’. Thus The Hobbit does not quite take off till Bilbo finds the ring, and even then the sense of events gaining continuity is not strong till the company reaches Mirkwood, on the other side of the house of Beorn. The same is true of The Lord of the Rings.

It is for one thing remarkable that Frodo has to be dug out of no less than five ‘Homely Houses’ before his quest is properly launched: first Bag End, then the little house at Crickhollow with its redundant guardian Fredegar Bolger, then the house of Tom Bombadil, then the Prancing Pony, and finally Rivendell with its ‘last Homely House east of the Sea’. Each of these locations has of course its images and encounters to present, and some of them (like the meeting with Strider) turn out to be vital. Nevertheless there is a sense that the zest of the story goes not into the dangers but the recoveries – hot baths at Crickhollow, song and dancing at Bree, Goldberry’s water that seems like wine, and Butterbur’s ‘small and cosy room’ with its ‘hot soup, cold meats, a blackberry tart, new loaves, slab of butter, and half a ripe cheese’. And this is to take no account of meals en passant, like Gildor Inglorion’s pastoral elvish banquet and Farmer Maggot’s ‘mighty dish of bacon and mushrooms’! Meanwhile the Black Riders, for all their snuffling and deadly cries, are not the menace they later become, for though they may only be waiting for a better chance, as Aragorn insists, they could have saved themselves trouble several times in the Shire, in Bree and on Weathertop by pressing their attacks home. It seems likely that, as at the start of The Hobbit, Tolkien found the transit from familiar Shire to archaic Wilderland an inhibiting one. He broke through in The Hobbit with the trolls and then the ring. In The Lord of the Rings his invention came, to begin with, from a sort of self-plagiarism.

The hobbits’ first three real encounters are with the Willow-man and Tom Bombadil in the Old Forest, and with the Barrow-wight on the Downs outside. All three could almost be omitted without disturbing the rest of the plot.⁶ Willow-man is a forerunner of the Ents, or rather the Huorns, but Bombadil never comes back into the story at all: the Council of Elrond considers him for a moment, Gandalf stops for a chat when all serious work is over. The Barrow-wight does a little more in providing the sword that Merry uses on the chief-Ringwraith in Book V, a sword specifically designed for use against the Witch-king of Angmar, which is what that Nazgûl turns out to be. Still, that is a by-product. All three of these characters furthermore go a long way back in Tolkien’s mind, as far back as hobbits, probably, further than the Shire or the Ring; they are all in the poem ‘The Adventures of Tom Bombadil’, printed in the Oxford Magazine in 1934 (just as the song Frodo sings in the Prancing Pony is a revision from 1923). Tolkien was raiding his own larder, and one can in the end see why.

It is admittedly not so easy in the beginning. The thing we would like to know about Tom Bombadil is what he is, but this is never asked or answered directly. In chapter 7 Frodo raises the courage to ask instead who he is, only to receive the answers, from Goldberry, (1) ‘He is’, (2) ‘He is, as you have seen him’, (3) ‘He is the Master of wood, water and hill’, and from Tom himself (4) ‘Don’t you know my name yet? That’s the only answer.’ He seems in fact to be a lusus naturae, a one-member category; the hobbits are doubtful whether he can be called a man, though he looks like one apart from his size, which is intermediate between man and hobbit. More revealing is his main attribute, fearlessness, present in The Lord of the Rings but even clearer in the 1934 poem (and in its rewritten form as lead-poem of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil in 1962). The action of that is simply four clashes between Tom and potentially hostile creatures, Goldberry, ‘the Riverwoman’s daughter’, who pulls him into the river, Willow-man, who catches him in a crack, the Badgerfolk who drag him down their tunnel, and finally as Tom goes home the Barrow-wight behind the door:

‘You’ve forgotten Barrow-wight dwelling in the old mound

up there atop the hill with the ring of stones round.

He’s got loose to-night: under the earth he’ll take you!

Poor Tom Bombadil, pale and cold he’ll make you!’

But Tom reacts only with simple imperatives: ‘You let me out again … You show me out at once … Go back to grassy mound, on your stony pillow / lay down your bony head, like Old Man Willow.’ And once the threats have been dismissed Tom goes further, going back to seize Goldberry from her nameless mother ‘in her deep weedy pool’, taking her back to his house to be married. Their wedding-night is undisturbed by the hags and bogles murmuring outside, and the poem ends with Goldberry combing her hair and Tom chopping sticks of willow. As Goldberry says to Frodo, Tom is ‘the Master’. What he is may not be known, but what he does is dominate.

Tom’s other major quality is naturalness. Even his language has something unpremeditated about it. A lot of what he says is nonsense, the first thing indeed that the hobbits notice, even before they see him. When it is not ‘hey dol! merry dol!’ and the like, it tends to be strongly assertive or onomastic, mere lists of names and qualities. From time to time it breaks through to being ‘perhaps a strange language unknown to the hobbits, an ancient language whose words were mainly those of wonder and delight’. But though they may not know the language, the hobbits understand it, as they understand Goldberry’s rain-song without recognising the words; and when Tom names something (as he does with the hobbits’ ponies) the name sticks – the animals respond to nothing else the rest of their lives. There is an ancient myth in this feature, that of the ‘true language’, the tongue in which there is a thing for each word and a word for each thing, and in which signifier then naturally has power over signified – language ‘isomorphic with reality’ once again.⁷ It is this which seems to give Tom his power. He is the great singer; indeed he does not yet seem to have discovered, or sunk into, prose. Much of what he says is printed by Tolkien as verse, but almost all of what he says can be read as verse, falling into strongly-marked two-stress phrases, with or without rhyme and alliteration, usually with feminine or unstressed endings; see for instance his last ‘prose’ speech, ‘Tóm will give you góod advice, / tíll this day is óver / (áfter that your ówn luck / must gó with you and gúide you) /: fóur miles alóng the road / you’ll cóme upon a víllage, / Brée under Brée-hill, / with dóors looking wéstward.’ The scansion-system (more complicated than I have marked) is a little like that of the Old English verse Tolkien was later to reproduce in the songs of Rohan, but more like that of much Old English ‘prose’, over whose claim to being ‘verse’ editors still hesitate. The point is though that while we appreciate it as rhythmical (unlike prose), we also do not mark it as premeditated or artificial (unlike verse). The hobbits fall into song themselves, ‘as if it was easier and more natural than talking’.

Tom Bombadil, then, is fearless. In some way he antedates the corruptions of Art. According to Elrond he is ‘Iarwain Ben-adar … oldest and fatherless’. Like Adam, also fatherless, ‘whatsoever [he] called every living creature, that was the name thereof’. Unlike the descendants of Adam he does not suffer from the curse of Babel; everybody understands his language by instinct. It is odd, though, that Tom shares the adjective ‘oldest’ with another being in The Lord of the Rings, Fangorn the Ent, whom Gandalf calls ‘the oldest living thing that still walks beneath the Sun’ (p. 488). An inconsistency? It need not be so, if one accepts that Tom is not living – as the Nazgûl and the Barrow-wight are not dead. Unlike even the oldest living creatures he has no date of birth, but seems to have been there since before the Elves awoke, a part of Creation, an exhalation of the world. There are hints in old poems of such an idea. The Old English poem Genesis B, originally written in Old Saxon, at one point calls Adam selfsceafte guma, which could be translated calquishly as ‘self-shaped man’. Modern translations prefer to say ‘self-doomed’ or something of the sort, while the Bosworth-Toller Dictionary prefers ‘a man by spontaneous generation’. Adam of course wasn’t spontaneously generated. But Tolkien may have wondered what the thing behind such a word could be. He must have also reflected on the strange Green Knight who comes to challenge Sir Gawain in the poem he had edited in 1925, like Tom Bombadil unflappable, a lusus naturae in size and colour, conveying to many critics a sense of identification with the wild wintry landscape from which he appears, called by the poet in respectful but uncertain style an aghlich mayster, ‘a terrible Master’. The green man, the uncreated man, the man grown by ‘spontaneous generation’… From what? Obviously, from the land. Tom Bombadil is a genius loci. But the locus of which he is the genius is not the barren land of the Green Knight’s Pennine moors, but the river and willow country of the English midlands, or of the Thames Valley. He represents, as Tolkien said himself, ‘the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside’ (Letters, p. 26).

It is interesting that Tom’s adversary from 1934 on is Willowman. By The Fellowship of the Ring both have become attached to the River Withywindle, ‘withy’ of course being no more than the local word for ‘willow’, while ‘windle’ is O.E. *windol, ‘winding brook’. There is a Withybrook north of Oxford, in Warwickshire, while Windsor in Berkshire to the south could be derived from *windolsora, ‘the landing-place on the winding stream’, in this case the Thames. As for the sudden striking description of the Withywindle in chapter 6, with its drowsy late-afternoon sunshine and through it winding lazily ‘a dark river of brown water, bordered with ancient willows, arched over with willows, blocked with fallen willows, and flecked with thousands of faded willow-leaves’, it would not do badly as a description of the stream that runs down to join the Thames at Oxford, the Cherwell – a ‘very apt name’, says Ekwall’s English River-Names, meaning probably ‘the winding river’.

The hobbits, to be brief, have got outside the Shire but not outside the boundaries of ‘the Little Kingdom’. Tom is the spirit of pretty much their own land, and so like them in being slow, lavish, unbeautiful, but only stupid-seeming. Willowman is a narrower variant of the same idea, and Goldberry another in being ‘the River-daughter’, at first sight ‘enthroned in the midst of a pool’, with rippling hair and reed-green gown and flag-lilies round her waist and feet. Barrow-wight too springs from landscape, for barely fifteen miles from Oxford begins the greatest concentration of barrows in the country, where the green Berkshire downs rise from the plain. ‘Wayland’s Smithy’ and the others must have called to Tolkien’s mind the many Icelandic tales of the dwellers in the mounds, the haugbúar or ‘hogboys’ of dialect story. As for ‘Bree on Bree-hill’, it shows its conception in its name. Three miles from Worminghall and ten from Oxford the town of Brill sits on its hummock, betraying in its name a tale of ancient conquest.⁸ ‘Bree’ means ‘hill’ in Welsh and Brill (from ‘bree-hill’) is therefore in a way nonsense, exactly parallel with Chetwode (or ‘wood-wood’) in Berkshire close by, exactly opposite to the ‘capitalised’ names of The Hill, The Water or The Carrock. Tolkien borrowed the name for its faint Celtic ‘style’, to make subliminally the point that hobbits were immigrants too, that their land had had a history before them. But for their first hundred-odd pages the hobbits seem to be wandering through a very closely localised landscape, one even narrower than their own travels; and that landscape and the beings attached to it are in a way the heroes.⁹ They force themselves into the story. But while they slow its pace, appear strictly redundant, almost eliminate the plot centred on the Ring,¹⁰ they also do the same job as the maps and the names: they suggest very strongly a world which is more than imagined, whose supernatural qualities are close to entirely natural ones, one which has moreover been ‘worn down’, like ours, by time and by the process of lands and languages and people all growing up together over millennia. In sober daylight no linguist would care to admit that places exhale their own names any more than English counties exude Tom Bombadils. Many people however feel that names fit; and that places have a character of their own. On this not entirely irrational opinion much of Middle-earth is based.

What has just been argued naturally says little about the story in The Fellowship of the Ring chapters 1–10, except perhaps that it was not the author’s overriding interest. Still, much could be said about that too. Probably an analysis of the fantasy in those chapters would do well to start with the things that are not old in Tolkien’s imagination and do not appear to fit. It is a great moment for instance when Merry wakes from the wight’s spell and remembers only a death not his own. ‘The men of Carn Dûm came on us at night, and we were worsted. Ah! The spear in my heart!’ He seems to have taken on the personality of the body in the barrow, but that warrior can hardly be the wight, for Bombadil remembers the dead lords and ladies with affection. So what did the wight intend, and what is it itself, human ghost or alien ‘shadow’ or sediment of death attaching itself to gold like the dragon-spell of avarice in The Hobbit? The uncertainty and the glimpses of an alien world that defies understanding (white robes, wriggling hand, sword across neck), these offer the special thrill of fantasy beyond study. However that thrill is also related to the sense of solidity already mentioned. Without the feeling that he is at once independent, sui generis, and also related to a larger pattern that can take in the Ring and Farmer Maggot and the elves and the Dark Lord, even Bombadil would be a lesser creation. Stars, shadows, cellar-doors: patterns of language and of history

The basis of Tolkien’s invention is unexpectedly earthbound and factual. However he was also good at peripheral suggestion. ‘“Strider” I am’, says Aragorn, ‘to one fat man who lives within a day’s march of foes that would freeze his heart, or lay his little town in ruin, if he were not guarded ceaselessly.’ He does not say what the ‘foes’ are – wood-orcs? trolls? killer-Huorns? ettens from the high fells? – but the idea of glimpsed shapes in the sunless woods remains. In the same style Gandalf declares that ‘Far, far below the deepest delving of the Dwarves, the world is gnawed by nameless things’, but does not particularise. The ‘things’ include Durin’s Bane, the Balrog (maybe the same as the creature that replies to Pippin’s stone with faint knockings, but maybe not), and such beings as Shelob, Gollum, the ‘fell voices’ and maniac laughter of the elementals like mad Bombadils who haunt the Dimrill Stair. Sometimes a veil is lifted for a moment, as when Gandalf tells the story of Gollum and takes Frodo back for a moment to Sméagol and Déagol and their quiet empty world of pools and irises and little boats made of reeds. However more often stories are not told. Aragorn does not explain ‘the cats of queen Berúthiel’ (p. 303), he cuts off the tale of Gil-galad just before Frodo gets to the word ‘Mordor’ (p. 186), he offers only a selection from Beren and Tinúviel (pp. 187–90). Gandalf says similarly that if he were to tell Frodo all the story of the Ring ‘we should still be sitting here when Spring had passed into Winter’, and of Sauron’s loss of the Ring ‘That is a chapter of ancient history which it might be good to recall … One day, perhaps, I will tell you all the tale.’ Might and perhaps are the operative words. It is a mistake to think these matters are settled by Appendices, or later publications (even if some of them eventually are). Their job in context is to whet the appetite and provide perspective: they do this, perhaps, less powerfully as history than as ‘myth’.

The centre of Gandalf’s account in ‘The Shadow of the Past’ is thus the little verse about the rings, which acts as epigraph to the whole work and also as final confirmation of the nature of the Ring itself. It concludes:

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,

One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them

In the land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

The last line is a kind of internal refrain for the verse. It is echoed oddly in the snatch of song that Sam repeats a hundred and forty pages later, about Gil-galad, which ends:

But long ago he rode away

and where he dwelleth none can say;

for into darkness fell his star

in Mordor where the shadows are.

The stanza is yet another pause on the brink of a story, but it acts also as a corroboration. What is the relationship between the one poem and the other? Nobody says, but there must be some relationship, some body of lore that has acted as stimulus for both; and this is not Gandalf’s property alone, but something (once) widely dispersed in Middle-earth.

Bits of it keep turning up. Gildor and the other elves appear on p. 78 singing a ‘hymn’ to Elbereth which ends ‘We still remember, we who dwell / In this far land beneath the trees, / Thy starlight on the Western Seas.’ The implication is that the elves are exiles, themselves living in shadow though not in Mordor, looking up to a starlight from which they are now excluded. Bombadil evokes the same image of loss when he says sixty pages later ‘Few now remember them, yet still some go wandering, sons of forgotten kings walking in loneliness, guarding from evil things folk that are heedless’, and his words stir in the hobbits ‘a vision as it were of a great expanse of years behind them, like a vast shadowy plain over which there strode shapes of Men, tall and grim with bright swords, and last came one with a star on his brow’. We realise eventually that this last is Strider, or rather Elessar ‘the Elfstone’; but Bombadil’s words just before are paralleled by Bilbo’s gnomic and descriptive rhyme, heard before anything of Strider’s lineage is revealed:

All that is gold does not glitter,

Not all those who wander are lost …

The echoes run off in many directions, but through them run the words ‘remember’, ‘wander’, ‘dwell’, most of all ‘star’ and ‘shadow’. From all these references, together with others like Aragorn’s song of Beren and Tinúviel with its heavy but elusive use of ‘stars in shadow’, ‘trembling starlight’, ‘shadowy hair’, one could further construct a kind of repeated pattern, allegedly historical, in which stars and shadows are always at strife, the latter nearer and more powerful, the former persisting in memory and in resistance.¹¹ Probably no reader actually does this, but all readers nevertheless perceive something, to be confirmed, reinforced, but not supplanted later on by fuller accounts from Gandalf and Elrond, from Galadriel’s song on pp. 368–9, from the Appendices, eventually from The Silmarillion and the many versions of the latter in ‘The History of Middle-earth’. Few readers also can fail to have resonances struck from their own familiar myths: the ‘sons of Martha’ story, maybe, in the grim unthanked indispensable Rangers, the Harrowing of Hell in Bilbo’s ‘A light from the shadows shall spring’, Icarus or Prometheus or Balder Dead in the fall of Gil-galad. All these remain unfocused but not unfelt. Without extensive explanations they set the characters in a moral world as well as a geographical one, both of them like but not the same as our own.

‘Gil-galad’, then, has a function rather analogous to ‘Nobottle’. Both offer the assurance that there is more to Middle-earth than can immediately be communicated. Among the many differences between the two names, though, is the fact that ‘Gil-galad’ is clearly something from an unfamiliar language; the effect of languages in Tolkien’s world, as might be expected, is as great as those of maps or of myths. As might also be expected, Tolkien used them in an extremely peculiar, idiosyncratic and daring way, which takes no account at all of predictable reader-reaction. The ‘myth of stars and shadows’, for instance, is repeated in entirely characteristic style in a song sung in Rivendell (p. 231): ‘O Elbereth who lit the stars … I will sing to you after having looked into far lands from here in tree-tangled Middle-earth …’ However no reader of The Lord of the Rings can actually know that, since it is sung in the elvish language Sindarin and not offered in translation till p. 72 of The Road Goes Ever On, the song-cycle published in 1968.¹² As they stand in The Fellowship of the Ring they are nonsense syllables: A Elbereth Gilthoniel … Na-chaered palan-díriel o galadhremmin ennorath, Fanuilos, le linnathon. What could any reader be expected to make of that?

Tolkien of course had an answer to the question, a private theory. It had been on his mind since 1926, when in his ‘General Philology’ chapter for The Year’s Work in English Studies vol. 5 he had hinted there might be such a science as Lautphonetik, translatable as ‘a phonology of sounds’. But all phonology is about sounds. Tolkien seems to have meant ‘an aesthetics of sounds’, a science that would explain why certain sounds or combinations of sounds produced different effects from others. Thirty years later he came back to the same idea in his last major learned work, the O’Donnell lecture on ‘English and Welsh’ given in Oxford in 1954 just after The Fellowship of the Ring came out. It is a discursive piece which covers many points, but one of them is a considered though not scientific attempt to say what makes a language beautiful. There is a pleasure, insisted Tolkien, ‘in the phonetic elements of a language and in the style of their patterns’. More pleasure may come from ‘the association of these word-forms with meanings’, but that is a separate stage. Tolkien said that he had only needed to see a vocabulary-list of Gothic for his heart to be taken by storm. The same was true of Finnish; and all along something of the sort had flashed on him at the sight of Welsh names on English coal-trucks, or such simple inscriptions as adeiladwyd 1887 on Welsh chapels.

What kind of pleasure was this? At the age of 62 Tolkien felt no urge to found a new branch of learning, and fell back on the word ‘style’: the pleasure comes from ‘fitness … to a whole style’, is felt in ‘the reception (or imagination) of a word-form which is felt to have a certain style’. One feature of the Welsh ‘style’ might be ‘the fondness for nasal consonants … and the frequency with which word-patterns are made with the soft and less sonorous w and the voiced spirants f and dd contrasted with the nasals: nant, meddiant, afon, llawenydd, cenfigen, gwanwyn, gwenyn, crafanc, to set down a few at random’ (p. 40). The word and the theory were also in Tolkien’s head when he wrote Appendix F to The Lord of the Rings and declared that he had used names like Bree, Combe, Archet and Chetwood because they contained non-English elements and he needed words to sound ‘queer’, to imitate ‘a style that we should perhaps vaguely feel to be “Celtic”’. This was Tolkien’s major linguistic heresy. He thought that people could feel history in words, could recognise language ‘styles’, could extract sense (of sorts) from sound alone, could moreover make aesthetic judgements based on phonology. He said the sound of ‘cellar door’ was more beautiful than the sound of ‘beautiful’. He clearly believed that untranslated elvish would do a job that English could not.

Could he have been right? Tolkien’s heresy was against the belief that language is only in a very limited way onomatopoeic, that we just happen from long habit to think ‘pig’ sounds piggish, while Danes (presumably) think pige sounds girlish. It was like him to think, Bombadil-style, that beneath all this there might be a ‘true language’, one ‘isomorphic with reality’, and that in any case there might often be a close connection between thing-signified, person-signifying, and language-signified-in, especially if the person who spoke the language lived on the thing. Legolas puts this view strongly in The Two Towers when he listens to Aragorn singing in Rohirric, a language he does not know, and then remarks (pp. 496–7), ‘That, I guess, is the language of the Rohirrim … for it is like to this land itself, rich and rolling in part, and else hard and stern as the mountains. But I cannot guess what it means, save that it is laden with the sadness of Mortal Men.’ He is right, but his is only one of many correct appraisals in the trilogy. The hobbits hear Gildor and the elves singing, and even the ones who know no Quenya find that ‘the sound blending with the melody seemed to shape itself in their thought into words which they only partly understood’ (p. 78). The dirge of Gléowine for Théoden has the same effect on p. 954. Gandalf uses the Black Speech of Mordor in Rivendell on p. 247 and his voice turns ‘menacing, powerful, harsh as stone’, so that the elves cover their ears and Elrond rebukes him, not for what he says but for the language he says it in. Conversely Merry ‘felt his heart leap’ at the songs of the Muster of Rohan (p. 775); and when Gimli sings of Durin Sam Gamgee – not a learned character – responds simply and directly to the ring of elvish and dwarvish names. ‘“I like that!” said Sam. “I should like to learn it. In Moria, in Khazad-dûm!”’ Obviously his response is a model one.

One can see from all this why Tolkien made the seemingly wild assertion in 1955, that to him his work was ‘largely an essay in linguistic aesthetic’ (Letters, p. 220). One can also see that he was convinced his heresy had worked, for at the end of his remarks on ‘the Welsh linguistic style’ in ‘English and Welsh’ he brought forward The Lord of the Rings not as fiction but as evidence, declaring: ‘the names of persons and places in this story were mainly composed on patterns deliberately modelled on those of Welsh (closely similar but not identical). This element in the tale has given perhaps more pleasure to more readers than anything else in it.’ ‘Mainly’ is a bit of an exaggeration; the Welsh-modelled names in Middle-earth are only those of Gondor and of Elvish, or more accurately of Sindarin, and these are precisely the most doubtful cases. Many English readers, however, accustomed to the linguistic map of England with its varying Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse and Welsh components, might in all sobriety be able to say ‘Garstang sounds northern’ or ‘Tolpuddle sounds West Country’, and be able to go on from there to cope with the varying styles of the Shire, the Riddermark and the dwarves. There must be much more doubt over how many readers grasp first-hand that the Rivendell song on p. 231 is in Sindarin but Galadriel’s on p. 368 in Quenya, and that these two languages are furthermore related. Still, it would be as wrong to say that readers understand nothing of alien songs as to say they understand everything. As with place-names, landscapes, mythic fragments, ‘feel’ or ‘style’ is enough, however much it escapes a cerebral focus.

Tolkien’s linguistic map of Middle-earth furthermore shows exceptionally well the relation in his mind between ‘inspiration’ and ‘invention’. One could argue that much of what he decided was forced on him: mere ‘invention’ to get out of difficulty. Thus it was inevitable that the story should be in modern English, and from the start of The Hobbit it was clear that the Bagginses at least were English by temperament and turn of phrase. Now Tolkien knew (none better) that logically this was impossible. He was committed then to a fiction in which ‘hobbitic’ was an analogue of English, was in fact a ‘stylistically’ neutral variant of a Common Speech. What then of dwarvish? Dwarf-names were already there in The Hobbit, and were in Old Norse, a language whose relationship to modern English was to Tolkien all but tangible. The dwarves then must have spoken a language analogous to the Common Speech in exactly the same way as Old Norse is to modern English; and since that was hardly likely in the case of two totally different species (men and hobbits are not really different species, see LOTR p. 2), Tolkien found himself committed also to the notion that the dwarves spoke human languages and used human names for convenience, but had a secret language and secret names of their own, the latter not even to be carved on tombs (a belief which he no doubt enjoyed because of its corroboration in the Grimms’ ‘Rumpelstiltskin’). Having fitted in English and Norse, Old English could not be far behind: hence the Riders with their entirely Old English terminology, their names which are often Old English nouns capitalised (like Théoden King, a phrase of exactly the same type as Bree-hill),¹³ the sense the characters occasionally indicate that ‘hobbitic’ is a worn-down variant of Rohirric in which words are changed but sound (p. 544) ‘not unfitting’. But by this stage ‘invention’ has stopped and ‘inspiration’ taken over. In the conversation between Pippin, Merry and Théoden outside Isengard Tolkien is no longer trying to explain old inconsistencies from The Hobbit, but writing ever deeper into a world with a life of its own.

This led him, indeed, into yet further inconsistencies, or rather disingenuousnesses. Tolkien was obliged to pretend to be a ‘translator’. He developed the pose with predictable rigour, feigning not only a text to translate but behind it a whole manuscript tradition, from Bilbo’s diary to the Red Book of Westmarch to the Thain’s Book of Minas Tirith to the copy of the scribe Findegil. As time went on he also felt obliged to stress the autonomy of Middle-earth – the fact that he was only translating analogously, not writing down the names and places as they really had been, etc. Thus of the Riddermark and its relation to Old English he said eventually ‘This linguistic procedure [i.e. translating Rohirric into Old English] does not imply that the Rohirrim closely resembled the ancient English otherwise, in culture or art, in weapons or modes of warfare, except in a general way due to their circumstances …’ (note on p. 1110). But this claim is totally untrue. With one admitted exception, the Riders of Rohan resemble the Anglo-Saxons down to minute details. The fact is that the ancient languages came first.¹⁴ Tolkien did not draw them into a fiction he had already written because there they might be useful, though that is what he pretended. He wrote the fiction to present the languages, and he did that because he loved them and thought them intrinsically beautiful. Maps, names and languages came before plot. Elaborating them was in a sense Tolkien’s way of building up enough steam to get rolling; but they had also in a sense provided the motive to want to. They were ‘inspiration’ and ‘invention’ at once, or perhaps more accurately, by turns. ‘The Council of Elrond’

The gist of what has been said in this chapter is that The Lord of the Rings possesses unusual cultural depth. ‘Culture’ is not a word Tolkien used much; it changed meaning sharply during his lifetime, and not in a direction he approved. Still, one can see a deep understanding of its modern meaning of ‘the whole complex of learned behaviour … the material possessions, the language and other symbolism, of some body of people’ in chapter 2 of Book II of The Fellowship of the Ring. This marks a jump-off point for the characters, whose objective is disclosed within it. It was also I suspect a jump-off point for Tolkien, since after that he was no longer writing his way through landscapes he had travelled before. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that as with the house of Beorn in The Hobbit ‘The Council of Elrond’ should provide a sudden introduction to archaic and heroic worlds confronting and overwhelming modern, practical ones. The later work is, however, many degrees more complex than its earlier analogue, being indeed an interweaving of at least six major voices besides minor ones and reported ones; as well as telling a complex tale in complex fashion what all these voices do is present, in our language, a violent ‘culture-clash’.

This comes out most in the speeches and scripts impacted inside Gandalf’s interrupted monologue of pages 243–58, the fifth and longest from a major speaker (the others coming from Glóin, Elrond, Boromir, Aragorn, Legolas). Within that monologue Gaffer Gamgee functions as a kind of base-line of normality – and, concomitantly, of emptiness. ‘I had words with old Gamgee’, Gandalf reports, ‘Many words and few to the point’:

‘“I can’t abide changes,” said he, “not at my time of life, and least of all changes for the worst.” “Changes for the worst,” he repeated many times.

‘“Worst is a bad word,” I said to him, “and I hope you do not live to see it.”’

It is indeed a bad word, especially when all the Gaffer has to complain about is the Sackville-Bagginses; Denethor uses it as well, much later (p. 796), but again with ominous effect. As for ‘abide’, as used by Gaffer Gamgee it has almost no semantic content at all; in context it means ‘bear, tolerate, put up with’, but in that sense is simply untrue. The Gaffer can abide changes; he just has. He means only that he doesn’t like them. But there is a moral for him in the history of the word, which has the frequent early sense of ‘to await the issue of, to wait (stoically) for, to live to see’. In this last sense the Gaffer could ‘abide’ changes, and he does. Right at the end he moralises, stubborn as ever, ‘It’s an ill wind as blows nobody any good, as I always say’ (my italics), ‘And All’s well as ends Better’ (p. 999). At least he has learnt to eschew superlatives. But his language in Gandalf’s monologue conveys an unwelcome reminder of psychological unpreparedness.

His son Sam re-establishes the hobbits slightly with his terminal comment, ‘A nice pickle we have landed ourselves in, Mr Frodo’, for though he is as obtuse as his father – Sam got himself into trouble, but Frodo did not – this blindness does coexist with a thoughtless courage, a relish for gloom, and a refusal to see Doomsday as more than a ‘pickle’, all adding up to the notorious Anglo-hobbitic inability to know when they’re beaten. However there is another modern voice in Gandalf’s monologue to act as vehicle for cultural contrast: this is Saruman’s. He has hardly been mentioned before, and the question whether he is good or bad is more difficult to decide than with most. But when he is introduced by Gandalf, we know what to think very soon; the message is conveyed by style and lexis. Saruman talks like a politician. ‘We can bide our time’, he says, using a fossilised phrase:

‘we can keep our thoughts in our hearts, deploring maybe evils done by the way, but approving the high and ultimate purpose: Knowledge, Rule, Order; all the things that we have so far striven in vain to accomplish, hindered rather than helped by our weak or idle friends. There need not be, there would not be, any real change in our designs, only in our means.’ (p. 253)

What Saruman says encapsulates many of the things the modern world has learnt to dread most: the ditching of allies, the subordination of means to ends, the ‘conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder’.¹⁵ But the way he puts it is significant too. No other character in Middle-earth has Saruman’s trick of balancing phrases against each other so that incompatibles are resolved, and none comes out with words as empty as ‘deploring’, ‘ultimate’, worst of all, ‘real’. What is a ‘real change’? The OED’s three columns of definition offer nothing appropriate; the word has got below dictionary level. As we all know, ‘real’ is now a word like ‘sincere’ or ‘genuine’, a word whose meaning its speaker asks you to take for granted, a politician’s word, an advertiser’s word. ‘Real change’ shows Saruman up with even greater economy than ‘changes for the worst’ does Gaffer Gamgee.

By contrast with these familiar styles and voices several of the other participants in the Council come over as archaic, blunt, clear-sighted. Gandalf himself uses an older vocabulary than usual, as if to authenticate himself, and Elrond’s speech (pp. 237–9), as is only suitable for one so old, is full of old-fashioned inversions of syntax and words like ‘weregild’, ‘esquire’, ‘shards’. Its burden is to state the Northern ‘theory of courage’, as Tolkien called it in his British Academy lecture, whose central thesis is that even ultimate defeat does not turn right into wrong.^* Elrond has seen ‘many defeats, and many fruitless victories’, and in a way he has even given up hope, at least for his adopted people the elves (see p. 262 and further p. 1006); but this does not make him change his mind or look for easy options.

The heroic note is struck most firmly, however, by the dwarf Glóin, or rather by his report of the dialogue between Sauron’s messenger and that exemplar of stubbornness King Dáin. The messenger offers ‘great reward and lasting friendship’ in return for information about hobbits, or for the Ring. If Dáin refuses, he says:

‘ “… things will not seem so well.”

‘At that his breath came like the hiss of snakes, and all who stood by shuddered, but Dáin said: “I say neither yea nor nay. I must consider this message and what it means under its fair cloak.”

‘“Consider well, but not too long,” said he.

‘“The time of my thought is my own to spend,” answered Dáin.

‘“For the present,” said he, and rode into the darkness.’

We get exchanges like this several times in The Lord of the Rings, mostly involving dwarves: Elrond and Gimli swap grim proverbs in the next chapter, Théoden King silences Merry in similarly abrupt style in Book V chapter 2, and Appendix A offers several dwarvish dialogues around the battle of Azanulbizar. Their unifying feature is delight in the contrast between passionate interior and polite or rational expression; the weakness of the latter is an index of the strength of the former. Thus the messenger’s ‘things will not seem so well’ works as violent threat; ‘not too long’ means ‘extremely rapidly’. In reply Dáin’s ‘fair cloak’ implies ‘foul body’ and the obscure metaphor of spending the ‘time of my thought’ indicates refusal to negotiate under threat. Both participants seek to project a cool, ironic self-control. If Elrond’s recommendation was courage, and Gandalf’s hope, the dwarves’ contribution to the ethical mix of the Council is a kind of unyielding scepticism. This virtue is no longer much practised, swept away by the tide of salesmanship, winning friends and influencing people, the belief that all aggression is dissolved by smiles. We no longer even have a name for it – except perhaps that people who call their tea their ‘baggins’ might recognise it in their approving use of ‘bloody-mindedness’ (not recorded by the OED). Whatever it is, it comes over in Dáin’s speech as a force: words imply ethics, and the ethics of the spokesmen of Middle-earth fit together, beneath surface variation. None of them but Saruman pays any attention to expediency, practicality, Realpolitik, ‘political realism’.

Any one of the counsellors in this chapter would bear similar analysis. Gandalf’s account of Isildur makes a point through its combination of ancient words and endings (‘glede’, ‘fadeth’, ‘loseth’, etc.) with sudden recall of the words of Bilbo and Gollum. ‘It is precious to me, though I buy it with great pain’; the ‘reality of human nature’ persists. More subtly Aragorn and Boromir strike sparks off each other through their ways of speech as well as their claims, Aragorn’s language deceptively modern, even easy-going on occasion, but with greater range than Boromir’s slightly wooden magniloquence. There is even significance in Aragorn letting his rival have the last word in their debate, with a clause which is perfectly in line with modern speech – ‘we will put it to the test one day’ – but also relates easily to the vaunts of ancient heroes, like Ælfwine’s nú mæg cunnian hwá céne sy in The Battle of Maldon, ‘now who is bold can be put to the test’. Still, the overriding points are these: the ‘information content’ of ‘The Council of Elrond’ is very high, much higher than can be recorded by analyses like this; much of that information is carried by linguistic mode; nevertheless most readers assimilate the greater part of it; in the process they gain an image of the ‘life-styles’ of Middle-earth the solider for its occasional contrasts with modernity. Language variation gives Tolkien a thorough and economical way of dramatising ethical debate. The horses of the Mark

This virtue is easily missed by critics or reviewers skimming through for the plot; and perhaps we have now reached one reason for the enormous difference of opinion between Tolkien’s admirers and his detractors. The whole of The Lord of the Rings is on its larger scale like ‘The Council of Elrond’. Through both there runs a narrative thread, but just as the single chapter relies for a great part of its effect on the relishing of stylistic variation, so the work as a whole depends very largely on tableaux: separate images of places, peoples, societies, all in some way furthering the story, but sometimes (as with Bombadil or Willowman) not furthering it very much, there mostly or largely for their own sake. Someone not prepared to read slowly enough – Tolkien thought his books were best read aloud – might paradoxically write off the story as ‘slow’ or ‘nerveless’; and there would be a basis of truth for the observation as long as it confined itself to the story. But this is a poor way to appreciate the whole.

Any one of Tolkien’s tableaux would stand analysis, and the obvious one to choose is perhaps Gondor. However I prefer to start with the Riders of Rohan, not the first children of Tolkien’s imagination but the ones he regarded with most affection and also in a sense the most central. In creating them Tolkien was once again playing with his own background and his home in ‘the Little Kingdom’. Thus ‘Rohan’ is only the Gondorian word for the Riders’ country; they themselves call it ‘the Mark’. Now there is no English county called ‘the Mark’, but the Anglo-Saxon kingdom which included both Tolkien’s home-town Birmingham and his alma mater Oxford was ‘Mercia’ – a Latinism now adopted by historians mainly because the native term was never recorded. However the West Saxons called their neighbours the Mierce, clearly a derivation (by ‘i-mutation’) from Mearc; the Mercians’ own pronunciation of that would certainly have been the ‘Mark’, and that was no doubt once the everyday term for central England. As for the ‘white horse on the green field’ which is the emblem of the Mark, you can see it cut into the chalk fifteen miles from Tolkien’s study, two miles from “Wayland’s Smithy’ and just about on the borders of ‘Mercia’ and Wessex, as if to mark the kingdom’s end. All the Riders’ names and language are Old English, as many have noted;^* but they were homely to Tolkien in an even deeper sense than that.

As has already been remarked, though, the Riders according to Tolkien did not resemble the ‘ancient English … except in a general way due to their circumstances: a simpler and more primitive people living in contact with a higher and more venerable culture, and occupying lands that had once been part of its domain’. Tolkien was stretching the truth a long way in asserting that, to say the least! But there is one obvious difference between the people of Rohan and the ‘ancient English’, and that is horses. The Rohirrim call themselves the Éothéod (Old English eoh = ‘horse’ + þéod = ‘people’); this translates into Common Speech as ‘the Riders’; Rohan itself is Sindarin for ‘horse-country’. Prominent Riders call themselves after horses (Éomund, Éomer, Éowyn), and their most important title after ‘King’ is ‘marshall’, borrowed into English from French but going back to an unrecorded Germanic *marho-skalkoz, ‘horse-servant’ (and cp. the name of the hobbits’ Hengest). The Rohirrim are nothing if not cavalry. By contrast the Anglo-Saxons’ reluctance to have anything militarily to do with horses is notorious. The Battle of Maldon begins, significantly enough, with the horses being sent to the rear. Hastings was lost, along with Anglo-Saxon independence, largely because the English heavy infantry could not (quite) hold off the combination of archers and mounted knights. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 1055 remarks sourly that at Hereford ‘before a spear was thrown the English fled, because they had been made to fight on horseback’. How then can Anglo-Saxons and Rohirrim ever, culturally, be equated?

A part of the answer is that the Rohirrim are not to be equated with the Anglo-Saxons of history, but with those of poetry, or legend. The chapter ‘The King of the Golden Hall’ is straightforwardly calqued on Beowulf. When Legolas says of Meduseld, ‘The light of it shines far over the land’, he is translating line 311 of Beowulf, lixte se léoma ofer landa fela. ‘Meduseld’ is indeed a Beowulfian word (line 3065) for ‘hall’. More importantly the poem and the chapter agree, down to minute detail, on the procedure for approaching kings. In Beowulf the hero is stopped first by a coastguard, then by a doorward, and only after two challenges is allowed to approach the Danish King; he and his men have to ‘pile arms’ outside as well. Tolkien follows this dignified, step-by-step ceremonial progress exactly. Thus in ‘The King of the Golden Hall’ Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli are checked first by the guards at the gates of Edoras (= ‘enclosures’), and then by the doorward of Meduseld, Háma. He too insists on the ceremony of piling arms, though Tolkien’s characters object more than Beowulf does, largely because he is a volunteer and in any case fights by choice barehanded. There is a crisis over Gandalf’s staff, indeed, and Háma broods, reflecting rightly that ‘The staff in the hand of a wizard may be more than a prop for age’; he settles his doubts with the maxim ‘Yet in doubt a man of worth will trust to his own wisdom. I believe you are friends and folk of honour, who have no evil purpose. You may go in.’ In saying so he echoes the maxim of the coastguard of Beowulf (lines 287–92), ‘a sharp shield-warrior must know how to tell good from bad in every case, from words as well as deeds. I hear [from your words] that this warband is friendly … I will guide you.’

The point is not, though, that Tolkien is once more writing a ‘calqued’ narrative, but that he is taking advantage of a modern expansive style to spell out things that would have been obvious to Anglo-Saxons – in particular, the truths that freedom is not a prerogative of democracies, and that in free societies orders give way to discretion. Háma takes a risk with Gandalf; so does the coastguard with Beowulf. So does Éomer with Aragorn, letting him go free and lending him horses. He is under arrest when Aragorn re-appears, and Théoden notes Háma’s dereliction of duty too. Still, the nice thing about the Riders, one might say, is that though ‘a stern people, loyal to their lord’, they wear duty and loyalty lightly. Háma and Éomer make their own decisions, and even the suspicious gate-ward wishes Gandalf luck. ‘I was only obeying orders’, we can see, would not be accepted as an excuse in the Riddermark. Nor would it in Beowulf. The wisdom of ancient epic is translated by Tolkien into a whole sequence of doubts, decisions, sayings, rituals.

One could go further and say that the Riders spring from poetry not history in that the whole of their culture is based on song. Almost the first thing Gandalf and the others see, nearing Meduseld, are the mounds covered in simbelmynë either side of the way. Simbelmynë is a little white flower, but also means ‘ever-mind’, ‘ever-memory’, ‘forget-me-not’. Like the barrows it stands for the preservation of the memory of ancient deeds and heroes in the expanse of years. The Riders are fascinated by memorial verse and oblivion, by deaths and by epitaphs. They show it in their list of kingly pedigrees, from Théoden back to Eorl the Young, in the suicidal urges of Éomer and Éowyn to do ‘deeds of song’,¹⁶ in the song that Aragorn sings to set the tone of the culture he is visiting:

‘Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing? Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?’

Most of all it comes over in the alliterative dirges made for Théoden by Gléowine, for the dead of Pelennor by an anonymous ‘maker’, even in the rhyming couplet made for the horse Snowmane. These preserve the sonority, the sadness, the feeling for violent opposites (‘death’ and ‘day’, ‘lords’ and ‘lowly’, ‘halls’ and ‘pastures’) integrated in the Riders’ language and culture. Their visual correlatives, one might say, are the spears planted in burial-mounds by Fangorn and at the Fords of Isen; or perhaps the spears are the men and the mounds are poems, for Éomer says of one burial, ‘when their spears have rotted and rusted, long still may their mounds stand and guard the Fords of Isen!’ The men die and their weapons rust. But their memory remains, passes into simbelmynë, ‘evermind’, the oral heritage of the race.

One should see at this point how far Tolkien’s imagination surpasses that of most fantasy-writers. Proud barbarians are ten a penny in modern fantasy. Hardly one of their creators grasps the fact that barbarians are sensitive too: that a heroic way of life preoccupies men with death and with the feeble, much-prized resistances to death which their cultures can offer. Of course Tolkien drew his knowledge from Old English, from that literature whose greatest monument is not an epic but the ‘dirge’ of Beowulf; ‘The King of the Golden Hall’ echoes that poem as closely as Aragorn’s song above echoes the Old English Wanderer. However Tolkien was trying to go beyond translation to ‘reconstruction’. And this is what explains the horses. The feeling of Anglo-Saxon poetry for these was markedly different from that of Anglo-Saxon history. Thus the retainers of Beowulf joyfully race their mearas back from the monsters’ lake as they sing their praise songs; the ancient gnomic poem Maxims I observes enthusiastically that ‘a good man will keep in mind a good, well-broken horse, familiar, well-tried, and round-hoofed’; it has already been noted that the same poem declared that ‘an earl goes on the arched back of a war-horse, a mounted troop (éored) must ride in a body’, only for a historical Anglo-Saxon scribe to rewrite éored foolishly as worod or ‘(foot) body guard’. Tolkien may have known that the confusing Anglo-Saxon words for colour were once words for the colour of horses’ coats, like Hasufel = ‘grey coat’, suggesting an early society as observant of horses as modern African tribes of cows.¹⁷ Maybe the infantry-fixation of historical periods was the result of living on an island. Maybe the Anglo-Saxons before they migrated to England were different. What would have happened had they turned East, not West, to the German plains and the steppes beyond?

In creating the Riddermark Tolkien thought of his own ‘Mercia’. He also certainly remembered the great lost romance of ‘Gothia’ (see above), of the close kin of the English turning to disaster and oblivion on the plains of Russia. No doubt he knew the dim tradition that the word ‘Goths’ itself meant ‘Horse-folk’.¹⁸ This is what adds ‘reconstruction’ to ‘calquing’ and produces fantasy, a people and a culture that never were, but that press closer and closer to the edge of might-have-been. The Riders gain life from their mixture of homely, almost hobbitic familiarity with a strong dash of something completely alien. Éomer is a nice young man, but there is a streak of nomad ferocity in the way he and his men taunt Aragorn and company with their narrowing circle of horses and Éomer’s silent advance ‘until the point of his spear was within a foot of Aragorn’s breast’. They behave like mail-shirted Sioux or Cheyenne. And like a Middle-earth Deerslayer Aragorn ‘did not stir’, recognising the nomad appreciation of impassivity. A certain craziness shows itself in the Rohirric psychology at other points, as Éowyn rides in search of death and Éomer, sure he is doomed to die, laughs out loud for joy. The Dunlendings have heard that the Riders ‘burned their prisoners alive’. Tolkien denies it, but there is something in his description that keeps the image alive.

For all this there is, once more, a visual correlative, and it is the first flash of individuality Éomer is given; he is (p. 421) ‘taller than all the rest; from his helm as a crest a white horsetail flowed’. A horsetail plume is the traditional prerogative of the Huns and the Tartars and the steppe-folk, a most un-English decoration, at least by tradition.^* Yet it comes to prominence several times. Across the chaotic battlefield of Pelennor it is ‘the white crest of Éomer’ that Merry picks out from the ‘great front of the Rohirrim’, and when Théoden charges at last, opposing hornblast and poetry to horror and despair, behind him come his knights and his banner, ‘white horse upon a field of green’, and Éomer, ‘the white horsetail on his helm floating in his speed’. As it happens, there is a word for both Éomer’s decoration and the Riders’ collective quality, but it is not an English word: it is panache, the crest on the knight’s helmet, but also the virtue of sudden onset, the dash that sweeps away resistance. This is exactly the opposite of English ‘doggedness’, and is a virtue traditionally regarded with massive suspicion by English generals. However panache in both the abstract and concrete senses help to define the Riders, to present them as simultaneously English and alien, to offer a glimpse of the way land shapes people. Théoden’s kindly interest in herbs and hobbits (they would have had him smoking a pipe, given time) co-exists with his peremptory decisions and sudden furies. It is a strange mixture but not an implausible one. There must have been people like that once, if we only knew. The edges of the Mark

The Mark works on a system of contrasts and similarities. This is rationally based and even has a sort of historical integrity; but as with place-names and elvish songs no one can tell how much of the author’s system is apprehended unconsciously by the unstudious reader. The evidence suggests, though, that it is quite a lot: that the difference between Tolkien and Robert E. Howard, say, or E. R. Eddison or James Branch Cabell, lies precisely in his intense and brooding systematisation, never analytically presented but always deliberately nurtured (if not deliberately conceived). The planning behind Tolkien’s cultural tableaux shows in the further set of contrasts and similarities round the Mark – contrasts which work, it should be noted, both inside the story (i.e. contrasts between Rohan and Gondor, Rohan and the Shire, Éomer and Gimli, etc.) and outside it (i.e. the running inevitable comparison of all those societies and the real one, the one we ourselves live in). Tolkien obviously worked at these just as he worked at the stylistic clashes of ‘The Council of Elrond’, and for the same reason, to provide cultural solidity.

Thus there are three scenes at least where the men of the Mark are opposed to the men of Gondor. These are the two ‘meetings in the wilderness’, of Éomer and his men with Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli (pp. 419–28), and of Faramir and his men with Frodo and Sam (pp. 642–67); the two set-piece ‘building descriptions’ of Meduseld (pp. 500–1) and the great hall of Minas Tirith (pp. 737–8); the longer comparisons of the dotage, cure and death of Théoden with the corruption, relapse and suicide of Denethor – two old men who have both lost their sons. All these characterise cultures as much as people. To take the first one first, there are all manner of similarities between Éomer’s position and Faramir’s, for both men come upon lonely trespassers, both have orders to detain such people, both would gain something by doing so, whether Narsil or the Ring, and both in the end make their own minds up, let the strangers go and offer them assistance. Yet in the end difference is perhaps more prominent than likeness.

Éomer for one thing is compulsively truculent. It is compulsive, for when his men move away he becomes much easier, but he takes little care to be polite. A large part of the reason is ignorance, signalled by almost his first speech, ‘Are you elvish folk?’ The answer that one of them is surprises him, for ‘elvish’ to him as to the Gawain-poet just means ‘uncanny’. Éomer and his men are sceptics, about the Golden Wood, about elves, about halflings; they are also in a way superstitious (a combination Tolkien thought common enough), for Éomer says Saruman is ‘dwimmer-crafty’, using an old word for ‘nightmare’ or ‘illusion’ to say that wizards are ‘skinturners’ like Beorn, which as far as we know they are not. By contrast Faramir comes over as wiser, deeper, older; but this is a function of his society not himself. He keeps using the post-Anglo-Saxon word ‘courtesy’, which like ‘civilisation’ or ‘urbanity’ implies a post-nomadic and settled state of culture. Frodo’s courteous speech is one reason why Faramir recognises in him ‘an elvish air’, the word used this time in a sense exactly opposite to Éomer’s disapprobation. Faramir is patient, too, and though both he and Éomer assert strongly their hatred of lies it is fair to say that Faramir allows himself a relatively oblique approach to truth. He asks fewer direct questions; he hides the fact that he knows Boromir is dead; he lets Sam change the subject when they get too close to Isildur’s Bane and the Ring. He smiles, as well. While the Gondorians are dignified and even say a kind of ‘grace’, they are not as much on their dignity as the Riders, or as stiffly ceremonious as Shire-hobbits. Faramir is self-assured, in a word, and he explains why in his account of the Kings and Stewards and Northmen, the High and Middle peoples. Both he and Éomer think Boromir was nearer the Middle than the High, but Éomer thinks that is all to the good while Faramir does not. The two contrasted scenes are making a very strong assertion about cultural evolution.

The balance is redressed, maybe, by Théoden and Denethor. If one looks at their houses the latter’s is the greater achievement, but it is lifeless. ‘No hangings nor storied webs, nor any things of woven stuff or of wood, were to be seen in that long solemn hall; but between the pillars there stood a silent company of tall images graven in cold stone.’ In this sentence the word that stands out is ‘web’, for it is Old English, the normal Anglo-Saxon word for ‘tapestry’ (cp. the name ‘Webster’). The criticism of lifelessness is one a Rider might have made. By contrast the corresponding scene in Meduseld is dominated by the fág flór, the floor ‘paved with stones of many hues’, and by the sunlit image of the young man on the white horse, blowing a great horn, with yellow hair flying and the horse’s red nostrils displayed as it smells ‘battle afar’. Yet the bravura of the Riders’ culture is also complemented by one odd word, the ‘louver’ in the roof that lets the smoke out and the sunbeams in. This is a late word, French-derived, not recorded till 1393. If the Anglo-Saxons had such things they called them something else. One might say that the Riders have learnt from Gondor, but not vice versa. If that is too much to build on two words, one can certainly say that the behaviour of Denethor, indeed the very self-assuredness he shares with his son, points to the weaknesses of civilised cultures: over-subtlety, selfishness, abandonment of the ‘theory of courage’, a calculation that turns suicidal. Gandalf can cure Théoden; but Denethor almost makes me use the word ‘neurotic’ (first recorded in the modern sense five years before Tolkien was born).

Such ramifications are almost inexhaustible, but their core is history – real history, but history philological-style, not in the footprints of Edward Gibbon. That is why it was said earlier that the Riders were in a sense central. Whether one thinks of them as Anglo-Saxons or as Goths, they represent the bit that Tolkien knew best. Against them Gondor is a kind of Rome, also a kind of mythical Wales of the sort that bred King Coel and King Arthur and King Lear. On their southern border are the ‘Woses’, an Old English word and an Anglo-Saxon bogey, surviving misunderstood into Sir Gawain like the word ‘elvish’ and enjoying a last flicker of life in the common English name ‘Woodhouse’ (see note). To the North are the Ents, another Old English word which had interested Tolkien since he first wrote on Roman roads in 1924, and identified them with the orþanc enta geweorc, the ‘skilful work of ents’ of the poem Maxims II. Anglo-Saxons believed in ents, as in woses. What were they? Clearly they were very large, great builders, and clearly they didn’t exist any more. From such hints Tolkien created his fable of a race running down to extinction.

However the point that should be taken by now is not just that Tolkien worked by ‘reconstruction’ or from the premise that poetry is in essence true; rather it is that his continual play with calques and cruxes gave The Lord of the Rings a dinosaur-like vitality which cannot be conveyed in any synopsis, but reveals itself in so many thousands of details that only the most biased critical mind could miss them all.¹⁹ It is not a paradox to say further that this decentralised life is also at the same time ‘nuggety’, tending always to focus on names and words and the things or realities which lie behind them. The first Rohirric place-name we hear is ‘Eastemnet’, followed soon by ‘Westemnet’. An ‘emnet’ is a thing in Middle-earth, also a place in Norfolk, also an asterisk-word, *emnmæþ for ‘steppe’ or ‘prairie’, also the green grass which the Riders use as a touchstone for reality. Everything Tolkien wrote was based on fusions like that, on ‘woses’ and ‘emnets’ and éoreds, on ‘elvish’ or orþanc or panaches. ‘Magyk natureel’

Like a goldfish in a weedy pool, the theme that flashes from much of Tolkien’s work is that of the identity of man and nature, of namer and named. It was probably his strongest belief, stronger even than his Catholicism (though of course he hoped the two were at some level reconciled). It was what drove Tolkien to write; he created Middle-earth before he had a plot to put in it, and at every delay or failure of ‘inspiration’ he went back to the map and to the landscape, for Bombadil and the Shire, the Mark and the ents. Through all his work moreover there runs an obsessive interest in plants and scenery, pipeweed and athelas, the crown of stonecrop round the overthrown king’s head in Ithilien, the staffs of lebethron-wood with a ‘virtue’ on them of finding and returning, given by Faramir to Sam and Frodo, the holly-tree outside Moria that marks the frontier of ‘Hollin’ as the White Horse of Uffington shows the boundary of the Mark, and over all the closely visualised images of dells and dingles and Wellinghalls, hollow trees and clumps of bracken and bramble-coverts for the hobbits to creep into. The simbelmynë, as has been said, is a kind of symbol for the Riders, and the mallorn does the same for Galadriel’s elves. The hobbits are only just separable from the Shire, and Tom Bombadil not at all from the Withywindle. Fangorn is a name for both character and forest, and as character he voices more strongly than anybody else the identity of name and namer and thing. ‘Real names tell you the story of the things they belong to in my language’, he says, but it seems unlikely that anyone but an ent could learn Old Entish. With Bombadil the identity of name and thing gives the namer a kind of magic. With the hobbits much the same effect is created by simple harmony. They don’t in fact practise magic, says the ‘Prologue’, but the impression that they do is derived from ‘close friendship with the earth’. Earth and magic and non-human species are all in differing proportions very closely combined. The voices that explain this to us, Fangorn’s and the narrator’s, are authoritative and indeed, especially Fangorn, ‘professorial’. They admit no denial.

There is a sense, even, in which the non-human characters of The Lord of the Rings are natural objects: a tenuous sense but one deeply ingrained. On his first appearance Fangorn is seen by Pippin and Merry but categorised as ‘one old stump of a tree with only two bent branches left: it looked almost like the figure of some gnarled old man, standing there, blinking in the morning light’ (p. 451). Gandalf a little later speaks of his struggle with the Balrog and asks himself how it would have seemed to outside observers; just thunder and lightning, he replies. ‘Thunder, they heard, and lightning, they said, smote upon Celebdil, and leaped back broken into tongues of fire. Is not that enough?’ (p. 491). As for the elves and Elrond and Gandalf, how would they have seemed to mortal senses? Near the end Tolkien replies:

If any wanderer had chanced to pass, little would he have seen or heard, and it would have seemed to him only that he saw grey figures, carved in stone, memorials of forgotten things now lost in unpeopled lands. For they did not move or speak with mouth, looking from mind to mind; and only their shining eyes stirred and kindled as their thoughts went to and fro. (p. 963)

At the end they fade into the stones and the shadows.

‘Fade’, or ‘turn’? The future fate of the elves is often mentioned in The Lord of the Rings but never becomes quite clear. Some will leave Middle-earth, some will stay. Those who stay, says Galadriel, will ‘dwindle to a rustic folk of dell and cave, slowly to forget and to be forgotten’. ‘Dwindle’ could have a demographic meaning; there could be fewer of them. It could be physical too, looking forward to the ‘tiny elves’ of Shakespeare, and even moral, making one think of the detached, cruel, soulless elves of Scottish and Danish tradition. The best fate for the elves who stay, perhaps, would be to turn into landscape. There is a local legend of that kind attached to the Rollright Stones on the north edge of Oxfordshire, mentioned for a moment in Farmer Giles of Ham. These, says the story,²⁰ were once an old king and his men. Challenged by a witch to take seven strides over the hill and look into the valley below, the king found his view blocked by a barrow and the witch’s curse fulfilled:

‘Rise up, stick, and stand still, stone,

For king of England thou shalt be none.

Thou and thy men hoar stones shall be

And I myself an eldern-tree.’

The stones are still there, mysterious and by tradition uncountable. And though it may seem hard-hearted to wish for people to be petrified, it does assure them a kind of existence, a kind of integrity with the land they come from.

It’s hard to say, declares Sam Gamgee of the elves of Lothlórien, ‘Whether they’ve made the land, or the land’s made them’ (p. 351). And his perceptions are often deep, even if his education has been neglected. His further explanation may be taken to refer to The Lord of the Rings as well as to Lothlórien: ‘Nothing seems to be going on,’ he says, ‘and nobody seems to want it to. If there’s any magic about, it’s right down deep, where I can’t lay my hands on it, in a manner of speaking.’ Yes, agrees Frodo, complementing Sam’s style as often with his own. Still, ‘You can see and feel it everywhere’.

^* At the bridge Chrysophylax the dragon sticks his claw into the king’s white horse and roars, ‘There are knights lying cold in the mountain-pass and soon there will be more in the river. All the King’s horses and all the King’s men!’ (my italics). There is also passing reference to (old) King Coel, and to King Lear, who was responsible for the ‘partition under Locrin, Camber, and Albanac’. The world of the imagined ‘editor’ is that of the ‘Brutus books’, or fake history of Britain accepted as true in medieval times (and later). He treats the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as a ‘historian’, paraphrasing his “Where … oft bobe blysse and blunder/Ful skete hatz skyfted synne’ as, p. 7, ‘the years were filled with swift alternations of war and peace, of mirth and woe’.

^* Outsiders’ lead to one of Tolkien’s weakest jokes. In early English a ‘bounder’ was someone who set boundaries, and so kept out ‘outsiders’. However in the slang of his youth a ‘bounder’ was, OED post-1889, ‘A person who by his behaviour places himself outside the pale of well-bred society’, i.e. an ‘outsider’. Hence the joke in LOTR p. 147. It seems that Tolkien had not decided early on how funny the hobbits were to be. Some of the parodic element of The Hobbit persists for a couple of chapters: ‘eleventy-first’, ‘tweens’, ‘mathoms’, etc.

^* For all its age this was evidently still a vital belief for Tolkien, and for other Inklings too. In C. S. Lewis’s most Tolkienian work That Hideous Strength (1945), Mark Studdock for all his failings reinvents it spontaneously at the end of chapter 15, section IV. The book also contains some fine Saruman-style speeches.

^*Not many have noted that they are not in the ‘standard’ or ‘classical’ West Saxon dialect of Old English but in what is thought to have been its Mercian parallel: so Saruman, Hasufel, Herugrim for ‘standard’ Searuman, Heasufel, Heorugrim, and cp. Mearc and *Marc. In Letters p. 65 Tolkien threatens to speak nothing but ‘Old Mercian’.

^*The Assistant Curator of the Household Cavalry Museum, Mr C. W. Frearson, informs me that the now-familiar white horsetail plumes of the Life Guards are an innovation brought in by Prince Albert in 1842. The Prince was copying a Prussian style itself copied from Russian regiments.