lost at sea, H.M.S. Beverley

‘LIT. AND LANG.’ Old Antipathies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PHILOLOGICAL INQUIRIES Roads and Butterflies

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

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

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

THE BOURGEOIS BURGLAR The word and the thing: elves and dwarves

Sigelhearwan, Nodens, Fawler, fancy, glamour: stripped of its layers of scholarly guardedness, the essence of Tolkien’s belief was that ‘the word authenticates the thing’. This was a belief grounded on philology. Tolkien thought, indeed he knew, that he could distinguish many words and word-forms into two classes, one ‘old-traditional-genuine’, the other ‘new-unhistorical-mistaken’. From this he went on to form the opinion, less certain but still highly plausible, that the first group was not only more correct but also more interesting than the second; it had compelled assent over the millennia, it had a definite ‘inner consistency’, whether or not that was the ‘inner consistency of reality’ or merely of Secondary Art.

These beliefs go a long way towards explaining Tolkien’s sudden displays of scrupulosity. In 1954 he was ‘infuriated’ to find that the printers of the first edition of The Lord of the Rings had gone through it, with the best will in the world and in conformity with standard English practice, changing ‘dwarves’ to ‘dwarfs’, ‘dwarvish’ to ‘dwarfish’, ‘elven’ to ‘elfin’, and so on. Considering the hundreds of changes involved (and the cost of proof correction) many authors might have let the matter ride; but Tolkien had all the original forms restored (see Biography, p. 290). In 1961 Puffin Books did much the same thing to a reprint of The Hobbit, and Tolkien complained to his publishers (Letters, p. 313) at greater length. His point was that even in modern English many old words ending in -f can still be told from new ones by their plural forms: old words (or at least old words of one particular class in Old English) behave like ‘hoof’ or ‘loaf’ and become ‘hooves’, ‘loaves’, while new ones (unaffected by sound-changes in the Old English period) simply add -s, as in ‘proofs’, ‘tiffs’, ‘rebuffs’. Writing ‘dwarfs’ was then, to Tolkien’s acute and trained sensibility, the equivalent of denying the word its age and its roots. Much the same reasoning had led Jacob Grimm, many years before, to leave the word Elfen out of his dictionary altogether, as an English import, replacing it with the native form Elben (which no one actually used any more) – his argument is repeated almost verbatim in the advice to German translators in Tolkien’s ‘Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings’, p. 164. Even more than ‘dwarfs’ Tolkien disliked the word ‘elfin’, since this was a personal and pseudo-medieval coinage by Edmund Spenser – the poet hailed by the OED’s citations as the dawn of modern literature, and also the man whose first poem, The Shepheardes Calendar of 1579, was ornamented by the most offensive gloss that Tolkien probably ever encountered. In quick succession this declared that for all its age ‘that rancke opinion of Elfes’ [sic] should be rooted ‘oute of mens hearts’ as being a mistaken form of the Italian faction the ‘Guelfes’, and was in any case a Papistical notion spread by ‘bald Friers and knauish shauelings’.¹ Tolkien would not have known whether to be offended most as philologist, as patriot, or as Roman Catholic! All round, the gloss no doubt confirmed him in the belief that modern and erroneous spellings went with stupid and self-opinionated people.

Belief was reinforced further by the history of the word ‘fairy’. The OED, true to form, said that this was the word that should be used: ‘In mod. literature, elf is a mere synonym of FAIRY, which has to a great extent superseded it even in dialects.’ But whether this particular fact was true or not, Tolkien knew that much else of the OED’s information on such points was wrong. Its first citation for ‘fairy’ in its present sense is from John Gower, 1393, ‘And as he were a fairie’; but as Tolkien remarked in ‘On Fairy-Stories’ (Tree p. 8), what Gower really wrote was ‘as he were of faierie’, ‘as if he had come from (the land of) Faërie’. Just above the OED cites the earlier poem of Sir Orfeo as evidence for the belief that ‘the fairy’ could be a collective noun, ‘the fairy-folk’: ‘Awey with the fayré sche was ynome’, i.e. presumably ‘she was taken away by the fairy-people’. Tolkien made no overt remark on the matter, but his translation of Sir Orfeo, published in 1975, has the line correctly translated, ‘By magic was she from them caught’. ‘Fayré’ in that context means ‘glamour’, the deceptio visus of the inhabitants of Fairyland. The gist of these observations for Tolkien must have been that ‘fairy’ in its modern sense was a newer word than the OED realised; that it was furthermore a foreign word derived from French fée; and had been throughout its history a source of delusion and error for English people, ending in the compound words ‘fairy-tale’ and ‘fairy-story’ which as Tolkien observed in ‘On Fairy-Stories’ were badly defined, uninformed, and associated with literary works (like Drayton’s Nymphidia) bereft of the slightest trace of sub-creation or any other respectable literary art.

Good writing began with right words. Tolkien accordingly schooled himself to drop forms like ‘elfin’, ‘dwarfish’, ‘fairy’, ‘gnome’, and eventually ‘goblin’, though he had used all of them in early works up to and including The Hobbit.² More importantly he began to work out their replacements, and to ponder what concepts lay behind the words and uses which he recognised as linguistically authentic. This activity of re-creation – creation from philology – lies at the heart of Tolkien’s ‘invention’ (though maybe not of his ‘inspiration’); it was an activity which he kept up throughout his life, and one which is relatively easy to trace, or to ‘reconstruct’. Thus there can be little doubt what Tolkien thought of the ‘elves’ of English and Germanic tradition. He knew to begin with that Old English ælf was the ancestor of the modern word, was cognate with Old Norse álfr, Old High German alp, and for that matter, had it survived, Gothic *albs. It was used in Beowulf, where the descendants of Cain include eotenas ond ylfe ond orcnéas, ‘ettens and elves and demon-corpses’, and in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, where the seven-foot green giant with his monstrous axe is described nervously by bystanders as an aluisch mon or uncanny creature. The wide distribution of the word in space and time proves that belief in such creatures, whatever they were, was once both normal and immemorially old, going back to the times when the ancestors of Englishmen and Germans and Norwegians still spoke the same tongue. Yet what did the belief involve? Considering concept rather than word, Tolkien must soon have come to the conclusion that all linguistically authentic accounts of the elves, from whichever country they came, agreed on one thing: that the elves were in several ways paradoxical.

For one thing, people did not know where to place them between the polarities of good and evil. They were the descendants of Cain, the primal murderer, said the Beowulf-poet. They weren’t as bad as that, imply the characters in Sir Gawain – actually the green giant plays fair and even lets Sir Gawain off – but they were certainly very frightening. It was wrong to offer sacrifice to them (álfa-blót) concurred all post-Christian Icelanders. On the other hand it might have seemed a good idea to propitiate them; if you didn’t, Anglo-Saxons perhaps reminded each other, you might get wæterælfádl, the ‘water-elf disease’, maybe dropsy, or ælfsogoða, lunacy. There was a widespread belief in ‘elf-shot’, associated on the one hand with the flint arrows of prehistoric man and on the other with the metaphorical arrows of diabolic temptation. The consensus of these references is fear.

Simultaneous with that, though, is allure. Ælfscýne is an approbatory Anglo-Saxon adjective for a woman, ‘elf-beautiful’. Fríð sem álfkona, said the Icelanders, ‘fair as an elf-woman’. The standing and much-repeated story about the elves stresses their mesmeric charm. It may be ‘True Thomas’ on Huntly bank who sees ‘the queen of fair Elfland’, or a young woman who hears the elf-horn blowing, but either way the immediate reaction is of desire. True Thomas disregards all warnings to make off with the elf-queen, does not return to earth for seven years, and (in Walter Scott’s version) leaves immediately again as soon as he is called. The medieval romance of Sir Launfal ends with the same glad desertion. For women to run off with elves was regarded with more suspicion. ‘Lady Isabel’ in the Scottish ballad saves her maidenhood and her life from the treacherous elf-knight she herself has summoned, and at the start of The Wife of Bath’s Tale Chaucer makes a series of jokes about elves and friars, the burden of which is that the latter are sexually more rapacious than the former, though the former had a bad reputation with young women as well. The allure and the danger are mixed. Indeed a common variant of the ‘young man/elf-queen’ story ends with him in despair, not at having been seduced but at being deserted. It is the memory of former happiness, the ‘disillusionment’ of loss of ‘glamour’, which leaves Keats’s character ‘Alone and palely loitering’.

Now one can see very easily how such an apparent discrepancy of fear and attraction might in sober reality arise. Beauty is itself dangerous: this is what Sam Gamgee tries to explain to Faramir in The Two Towers, when interrogated on the nature of Galadriel, the elf-queen herself. ‘I don’t know about perilous’ says Sam (pp. 664–5), replying to Faramir’s highly accurate remark that she must be ‘perilously fair’:

‘It strikes me that folk takes their peril with them into Lórien, and finds it there because they’ve brought it. But perhaps you could call her perilous, because she’s so strong in herself. You, you could dash yourself to pieces on her, like a ship on a rock; or drownd yourself, like a hobbit in a river. But neither rock nor river would be to blame.’

One could say the same of Sir Launfal’s lady, or True Thomas’s. One can also see how the rejected wives and fiancées, or husbands and fathers of people under elvish allure would concoct a very different story! Before long they would have the ylfe in exactly the same category as Cain – or Moloch. But this would be a second-hand opinion, and a prejudiced one (like those of Boromir, or Éomer and the Riders, LOTR p. 329 or p. 422).

It is in fact the strong point of Tolkien’s ‘re-creations’ that they take in all available evidence, trying to explain both good and bad sides of popular story; the sense of inquiry, prejudice, hearsay and conflicting opinion often gives the elves (and other races) depth. In Lothlórien we can see Tolkien exploiting, for instance, variant ideas about the elves and time. Most stories agreed that humans returning from Elf-land were temporally confused. Usually they thought time outside had speeded up: three nights in Elf-land might be three years outside, or a century. But sometimes they thought it had stood still. When the elf-maid sings in the Danish ballad of ‘Elverhøj’, or ‘Elf-hill’, time stops:

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

INTERLACEMENTS AND THE RING A problem in corruption

Lothlórien has won many hearts, and even the most censorious of Tolkien’s critics have accordingly been ready to grant him the ability to create nice settings. ‘What is outstanding, though, is the scenery’, declared the kindly reviewer for the Bath and West Evening Chronicle (7 December 1974).¹ However good scenery is not one of the major virtues on the critical scale; many published opinions throw it in as a sop, a makeweight to balance what they see as much more serious flaws deep in the heart of the Tolkienian ‘fable’, in the essential story of The Lord of the Rings. The characters, it is often alleged, are flat; there is not enough awareness of sexuality; good and evil are presented as absolutes, without a proper sense of inner conflict within individuals; there is something incoherent in the ‘main pattern’ of the story, which prevents one from reading it as ‘a connected allegory with a clear message for the modern world’. Most of all, The Lord of the Rings is felt not to be true to ‘the fundamental character of reality’, not to mirror ‘an adult experience of the world’, not to portray ‘an emotional truth about humanity’. Professor Mark Roberts, speaking from the centre of the critical consensus, declared: ‘It doesn’t issue from an understanding of reality which is not to be denied, it is not moulded by some controlling vision of things which is at the same time its raison d’être.’ The archaism of the settings, in short, goes along with an escapism of intention, a deliberate turning away from real life and from present-day experience.²

Now it is evident that some of these statements have gone beyond compromise. When people start appealing to ‘truth’, ‘experience’ and ‘reality’, still more to ‘the fundamental character of reality’, they imply very strongly that they know what these things are, an insight not likely to be shaken by argument. Probably at the bottom of the confrontation between The Lord of the Rings and its critics there lies some total disagreement over the nature of the universe, a disagreement surfacing in strong, instinctive, mutual antipathy. Nothing will cure this. However it ought to be possible to bring the reasons for it out into the light, and by doing so to show that whatever may be said of Tolkien’s view of reality, it was neither escapist nor thoughtless. A sensible place to begin this endeavour is with the mainspring of the story’s action, the Ring (here capitalised to distinguish it from the relatively insignificant stage-prop or ‘Equalizer’ of The Hobbit).

The most evident fact to note about the Ring is that it is in conception strikingly anachronistic, totally modern. In the vital chapter ‘The Shadow of the Past’ Gandalf says a great deal about it, but his information boils down to three basic data: (1) the Ring is immensely powerful, in right or wrong hands; (2) it is dangerous and ultimately fatal to all its possessors – in a sense there are no right hands; (3) it cannot simply be left unused or put aside, but must be destroyed, something which can happen only in the place of its origin, Orodruin, Mount Doom. ‘There is only one way’, he says to Frodo, and it is essential to the story that this should be accepted as true: the Ring cannot be kept, it has power over everybody, it has to be destroyed. Spread over sixteen pages (45–60) these remarks function as part of a story, but as soon as they are put together it is a dull mind which does not reflect, ‘Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’. That maxim, one could say, is the core of The Lord of the Rings, and it is reinforced from the start by all that Gandalf says about the way Ringbearers fade, regardless of all their ‘strength’ or ‘good purpose’, and further by his violent refusal to take the Ring himself:

‘Do not tempt me! For I do not wish to become like the Dark Lord himself. Yet the way of the Ring to my heart is by pity, pity for weakness and the desire of strength to do good. Do not tempt me! I dare not take it, not even to keep it safe, unused. The wish to wield it would be too great for my strength …’ (p. 60)

His renunciation makes sense in an age which has seen many pigs become farmers; no reviewer has ever balked at this basic opening move of Tolkien’s.

Yet the opinion that ‘power corrupts’ is a distinctively modern one. Lord Acton gave it expression for the first time in 1887, in a letter which Tolkien might have been interested enough to read – it is in a strongly anti-Papal context.³ William Pitt had said something similar a hundred years before, ‘Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it’, but before that the idea does not seem to have been attractive. It might even have been thought perverse. Lord Acton’s actual words were: ‘Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men …’, and with this latter opinion no medieval chronicler, romancer or hagiographer would have been likely to concur. There is as it happens an Anglo-Saxon proverb analogous to Lord Acton’s, but still significantly different. What it says is Man deþ swá hé byþ þonne hé mót swá hé wile, ‘Man does as he is when he may do as he wishes’, or more colloquially ‘you show what you’re like when you can do what you like’.⁴ This is certainly cynical about the ill-effects of power, but what it implies is ‘power exposes’, not ‘power corrupts’. The idea that a person once genuinely good could be made bad merely by the removal of restraints is not yet present. Tolkien is certain to have felt the modernity of his primary statement about the Ring. One has to wonder then why he made it and how he related it to the archaic world of his plot. Does Lord Acton’s Victorian proverb, in Middle-earth, ring true?

There is at least a plausible argument to say that it does not. Thus Gandalf says at the start that the Ring will ‘possess’ and ‘devour’ any creature who uses it, while Elrond later goes further and says ‘The very desire of it corrupts the heart’ (p. 261). As has been said, these are essential data for the story, and some of the time they seem to be confirmed. Gollum, for instance, is presented throughout as very nearly enslaved to the Ring, with only fleeting traces of free will left, and those dependent on keeping away from it. Much higher up the moral scale Boromir bears out Elrond’s words. He never touches the Ring, but desire to have it still makes him turn to violence. Obviously his original motive is patriotism and love of Gondor, but when this leads him to exalt ‘strength to defend ourselves, strength in a just cause’, our modern experience of dictators immediately tells us that matters would not stay there. Kind as he is, one can imagine Boromir as a Ringwraith; his never-quite-stated opinion that ‘the end justifies the means’ adds a credible perspective to corruption. The same could be said of his father Denethor, to whom Gandalf again makes the point that even unhandled the Ring can be dangerous: ‘if you had received this thing, it would have overthrown you. Were it buried beneath the roots of Mindolluin, still it would burn your mind away.’ With examples like these, it is easy to go further and accept, for the purposes of the story, that even Gandalf’s good intentions would not resist the Ring, and that Galadriel too does right to refuse it at p. 357. While the Ring stays a veiled menace, one may conclude, it works perfectly well.

The problem comes from the apparent immunity of so many other characters. Frodo, after all, is in contact with the Ring nearly all the time, but shows little sign of being corrupted. He goes through great labours to get rid of it. Furthermore when he does give way and claim it for his own, he loses it almost immediately to Gollum, who bites off Ring and finger with it. Gandalf had said much earlier that ‘Already you too, Frodo, cannot easily let it go, nor will to damage it. And I could not “make” you – except by force, which would break your mind.’ But in the Sammath Naur we have force being used very strongly, in the shape of Gollum’s teeth; yet Frodo’s mind remains unaffected. Anyway, what about Sam, who takes the Ring but hands it back with only momentary delay, Pippin and Merry, who show no desire for it at all, Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli, who display the same indifference without the excuse of ignorance, and Boromir’s brother Faramir, who realises the Ring is in his power but refuses to take it, with no more sign of mental turmoil than a ‘strange smile’ and a glint in the eye? One sees the beginnings of a serious criticism of the very basis of The Lord of the Rings here: the author appears to have presented a set of rules and then observed them only partially, reserving as it were the right to exceptions and miracles. This is what has made some people think that in this work the distinction between good and bad is simply arbitrary, residing not in the nature of the characters but in the needs of the plot.⁵

Actually all the doubts just mentioned can be cleared up by the use of one word, though it is a word never used in The Lord of the Rings. The Ring is ‘addictive’. All readers probably assimilate Gollum early on to the now-familiar image of a ‘drug-addict’, craving desperately for a ‘fix’ even though he knows it will kill him. For the same reason they understand why Gandalf tells Frodo not to use the Ring (use always causes addiction); why Sam, Bilbo and Frodo nevertheless survive their use of it (addiction in early stages is curable); why Boromir succumbs to the Ring without handling it (use has to be preceded by desire); and why Faramir can shrug it off (a wise person is capable of stifling the desire to become addicted, though no wisdom will stifle addiction once contracted). As for the scene in the Sammath Naur, it is even more Providential than it looks. What Gandalf said to Frodo at the start, we should realise, was that he might be able to give the Ring away or destroy it, though only with a struggle; he could not however be made to want to do so (except by some kind of dangerous thought-control). In the end Frodo does want to destroy the Ring but has not the strength. Gollum is accordingly necessary after all – a striking irony. Extending the parallel with heroin one may say that addicts can be cured by the use of external force, and often they have to be, though their co-operation certainly helps. To expect them to break their syringes and throw away their drugs by will-power alone, though, is to confuse an addiction, which is physical, with a habit, which is moral. In this aspect of the Ring as in others Tolkien is totally consistent.

He is, however, once again being distinctively modern. The phrase ‘drug addict’ is not recorded by the OED till 1920; probably the concept was created by the synthesis of heroin in 1898. As for the term ‘addictive’, by some oversight the full OED did not recognise its existence till after Tolkien’s death. Still, during Tolkien’s lifetime the words and the realities behind them were becoming more and more familiar, bringing with them, one should note, entirely new ideas about the nature and limitations of human will. As with ‘power corrupting’, Tolkien was during the 1930s and 1940s reacting quite evidently to the issues of his time. These deliberate modernities should clear him of any charge of merely insulated ‘ivory tower’ escapism. They ought to suggest also that he thought more deeply than his critics have ever recognised about just those issues he is commonly alleged to ignore: the processes of temptation, the complex nature of good and evil, the relationship between reality and our fallible perception of it. Nothing can prevent people from saying that the answers he gave were not ‘adult’ or ‘fundamental’, but it should be obvious that such adjectives are as culture-biased as Saruman’s ‘real’: by themselves they express only the prejudices of the user. Tolkien was, in short, trying to make Middle-earth say something, as well as conducting his readers on a tour of it. Decision on whether the message is right or wrong should at least come after working out what the message is. But proper understanding of that, as often, depends on comparing ancient things and modern ones, checking old texts against new understandings, and against timeless realities. Views of evil: Boethian and Manichaean

A good way to understand The Lord of the Rings in its full complexity is to see it as an attempt to reconcile two views of evil, both old, both authoritative, both living, each seemingly contradicted by the other. One of these is in essence the orthodox Christian one, expounded by St Augustine and then by Catholic and Protestant teaching alike, but finding its clearest expression in a book which does not mention Christ at all: Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae, a short tract written c. AD 522–5 by a Roman senator shortly before his execution by *Thiudoreiks (or Theodoric), king of the Goths. This says that there is no such thing as evil: ‘evil is nothing’, is the absence of good, is possibly even an unappreciated good – Omnem bonam prorsus esse fortunam, wrote Boethius, ‘all fortune is certainly good’. Corollaries of this belief are, that evil cannot itself create, that it was not in itself created (but sprang from a voluntary exercise of free will by Satan, Adam and Eve, to separate themselves from God), that it will in the long run be annulled or eliminated, as the Fall of Man was redressed by the Incarnation and Death of Christ. Views like these are strongly present in The Lord of the Rings. Even in Mordor Frodo asserts that ‘the Shadow … can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own’ (p. 893), and Fangorn has already corroborated him, ‘Trolls are only counterfeits, made by the Enemy in the Great Darkness, in mockery of Ents, as Orcs were of Elves’ (p. 474). What the difference is between a real thing and a ‘counterfeit’, one cannot tell, but anyway the idea of perversion as opposed to creation comes over. It goes with Elrond’s firm statement even earlier that ‘nothing is evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so’ (p. 261). On these ultimate points Tolkien was not prepared to compromise.

Still, there is an alternative tradition in Western thought, one which has never become ‘official’ but which nevertheless arises spontaneously from experience. This says that while it may be all very well to make philosophical statements about evil, evil nevertheless is real, and not merely an absence; and what’s more it can be resisted, and what’s more still, not resisting it (in the belief that one day Omnipotence will cure all ills) is a dereliction of duty. The danger of this opinion is that it tends towards Manichaeanism, the heresy which says that Good and Evil are equal and opposite and the universe is a battlefield; however the Inklings may have had a certain tolerance for that (see C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, Book 2, section 2). Furthermore one can imagine statements about the nature of evil which would go past Boethius but stop short of Manichaeus. Tolkien perhaps found such opinions in a work he knew well, King Alfred the Great’s personal translation of Boethius into Old English.

This is a remarkable book, mainly because while King Alfred showed a decent regard for the philosopher he was translating, he was not too modest to add bits of his own. He had moreover, unlike Boethius, had the experience of seeing what Viking pirates did to his defenceless subjects; and again unlike Boethius had taken such drastic measures against evil as hanging Viking prisoners, and rebellious monks, and in all probability cutting the throats of any wounded pirates so unlucky as to be left on the battlefield. All this did not stop Alfred from being a Christian king; indeed some of his recorded behaviour seems almost Quixotically forgiving. Nevertheless his career reveals the strong point of a ‘heroic’ view of evil, the weak point of a Boethian one: if you regard evil as something internal, to be pitied, more harmful to the malefactor than the victim, you may be philosophically consistent but you may also be exposing others to sacrifices to which they have not consented (like being murdered by Viking ravagers or, as The Lord of the Rings was being written, being herded into gas-chambers). In the 1930s and 1940s Boethius was especially hard to believe. Still, his view could not just be set aside.

Tolkien’s way of presenting this philosophical duality was through the Ring. It seems in several ways inconsistent. For one thing it is notoriously elastic, and not entirely passive. It ‘betrayed’ Isildur to the arrows of the orcs; it ‘abandoned’ Gollum, says Gandalf, in response to the ‘dark thought from Mirkwood’ of its master; it all but betrays Frodo in the Prancing Pony when it slips on to his finger and proves his invisibility to the spies for the Nazgûl then present. ‘Perhaps it had tried to reveal itself in response to some wish or command that was felt in the room’, thinks Frodo, and he is clearly right. For all that it remains an object which cannot move itself or save itself from destruction. It has to work through the agency of its possessors, and especially by picking out the weak points of their characters – possessiveness in Bilbo, fear in Frodo, patriotism in Boromir, pity in Gandalf. When Frodo passes it to Gandalf so that its identity can be confirmed, ‘It felt suddenly very heavy, as if either it or Frodo himself was in some way reluctant for Gandalf to touch it’ (p. 48, my italics). Maybe the Ring is magically conscious of Gandalf’s power: maybe, though, Frodo is already afraid that he will lose it. These two possible views of the Ring are kept up throughout the three volumes: sentient creature, or psychic amplifier. They correspond respectively to the ‘heroic’ view of evil as something external to be resisted and the Boethian opinion that evil is essentially internal, psychological, negative.

The point is repeated in several scenes of temptation. Frodo puts on the Ring six times during The Lord of the Rings: once in the house of Tom Bombadil (which does not seem to count), once by accident in the Prancing Pony, once on Weathertop, twice on Amon Hen, once in the final scene in the Sammath Naur. On several other occasions he feels an urge to, most strongly in the valley below Minas Morgul, as the Ringwraith leads out his army. Four of these scenes at least are highly significant. Thus on Amon Hen Frodo puts on the Ring, contrary to Gandalf’s injunction, simply to escape from Boromir, and the narrator ratifies his decision: ‘There was only one thing to do’. He keeps it on, though, goes to the summit of Amon Hen and sits on the Seat of Seeing. There the Eye of Sauron becomes aware of him and leaps towards him like a searchlight:

Very soon it would nail him down, know just exactly where he was. Amon Lhaw it touched. It glanced upon Tol Brandir – he threw himself from the seat, crouching, covering his head with his grey hood.

He heard himself crying out: Never, Never! Or was it: Verily I come, I come to you? He could not tell. Then as a flash from some other point of power there came to his mind another thought: Take it off! Take it off! Fool, take it off! Take off the Ring!

The two powers strove in him. For a moment, perfectly balanced between their piercing points, he writhed, tormented. Suddenly he was aware of himself again. Frodo, neither the Voice nor the Eye: free to choose, and with one remaining instant in which to do so. He took the Ring off his finger. (p. 392)

This is a scene which has puzzled and irritated critics. Dr C. N. Manlove writes ‘the Voice’ off as ‘providential’, and clearly thinks it one more example of the ‘biased fortune’ which in his opinion makes it impossible to take the story seriously. Actually the Voice is Gandalf’s, as we might have guessed from its asperity, and as is anyway confirmed on p. 484: it may seem fair enough to let a wizard oppose a necromancer. More remarkable is the opposition between Never! and I come to you. Is this a struggle inside Frodo’s soul, between his conscious will and his unconscious wickedness (the sort of wickedness which might earlier have made him reluctant to hand over the Ring to Gandalf)? Or is I come to you the voice of the Ring itself – or even a projection from the voice of the Enemy, saying to Frodo what he wants to hear, putting words in the mouth but not in the heart, creating ugly fictions as he does later with the phantasmal corpses of the Dead Marshes? Either view is possible. Both are suggested. Evil may accordingly be an inner temptation or an external power.

Similar uncertainty dramatises other scenes when Frodo puts on the Ring, or tries to, or is ordered to. In the valley of Minas Morgul the Ringwraith sends out a command for him to put it on, but Frodo finds no response to it in his own will, feeling only ‘the beating upon him of a great power from outside’. The power moves his hand, as if by magnetism, but he forces it back, to touch the phial of Galadriel and be momentarily relieved. Perhaps the same thing happened to him on Weathertop, where he put the Ring on as the Ringwraiths closed in, but the words used there are ‘temptation’ and ‘desire’ – ‘his terror was swallowed up in a sudden temptation to put on the Ring. The desire to do this laid hold of him, and he could think of nothing else.’ He had felt a similar urge in the Barrow, as the wight’s fingers came towards him, and there the temptation offered was to abandon his friends and use the Ring to escape. On Weathertop we are told he had no such conscious and immoral thought. Nevertheless it seems that there the external power is abetted by some inner weakness, some potentially wicked impulse towards the wrong side. In the chambers of Sammath Naur one’s judgement must also be suspended. Frodo makes a clear and active statement of his own evil intention: ‘I will not do this deed. The Ring is mine!’ But at the same time we have been told that even the phial of Galadriel loses its virtue on Mount Doom, for there Frodo is at ‘the heart of the realm of Sauron … all other powers were here subdued’. Are Frodo’s will, and his virtue, among those powers? To say so would be Manichaean. It would deny that men are responsible for their actions, make evil into a positive force. On the other hand to put the whole blame on Frodo would seem (to use a distinctively English ethical term) ‘unfair’; if he had been an entirely wicked person he would never have reached the Sammath Naur in the first place. There seems to be a mixed judgement on him. Frodo is saved from his sin by his own earlier repeated acts of forgiveness to Gollum, but in a sense punished by the loss of his finger. ‘If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out …’ As it happens the quotation that ran in Tolkien’s mind when he considered this scene very much implies the dual nature of wickedness, but comes from the Lord’s Prayer: ‘And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil.’^* Succumbing to temptation is our business, one might paraphrase, but delivering us from evil is God’s. As for the questions of how far responsibility is to be allocated between us and our tempters, how much temptation human beings can ‘reasonably’ be expected to stand – these are obviously not to be answered by mere mortals. Tolkien saw the problem of evil in books as in realities, and he told his story at least in part to dramatise that problem; he did not however claim to know the answer to it.

One can see, then, a philosophical crux in the very nature of the Ring, one that was certainly apparent and deeply interesting to Tolkien, and one which he furthermore expressed with great care and deliberation. This is not important just for Frodo. The uncertainty over evil in a way dominates the entire structure of The Lord of the Rings. All the characters would find decisions much easier if evil were unquestionably either just Boethian or else just Manichaean. If evil were only the absence of good, for instance, then the Ring could never be anything other than a psychic amplifier; it would not ‘betray’ its possessors, and all they would need do is put it aside and think pure thoughts. In Middle-earth we are assured that would be fatal. However if evil were merely a hateful and external power without echo in the hearts of the good, then someone might have to take the Ring to the Cracks of Doom, but it need not be Frodo: Gandalf could be trusted with it, while whoever went would have only to distrust his enemies, not his friends and not himself. As it is the nature of the Ring is integral to the story.

The story also repeatedly reflects back on the nature of temptation and of the Ring. When Gandalf says to Frodo of his wound on Weathertop, ‘your heart was not touched, and only your shoulder was pierced; and that was because you resisted to the last’, he may be making a moral statement (Frodo was rewarded) or a practical one (he dodged, called out, struck back, put off the Ringwraith’s aim). When he says of Bilbo that he gave up the Ring ‘of his own accord: an important point’, he may be saying only that Bilbo can’t have become too badly addicted, or more moralistically that Bilbo’s good impulse will help his cure. When Glóin describes the dwarves’ urge to revisit Moria we cannot be sure whether this is the prompting of Sauron from outside or dwarvish greed and ambition from inside. All one need say is that this is how things often are. Maybe all sins need some combination of external prompting and inner weakness. At any rate, on the level of narrative one can say that The Lord of the Rings is neither a saint’s life, all about temptation, nor a complicated wargame, all about tactics. It would be a much lesser work if it had swerved towards either extreme. Conceptions of evil: shadows and wraiths

One word which for Tolkien expressed this distinctive image of evil was ‘shadow’. Do shadows exist or not? It is an ancient opinion that they do and they don’t. In the Old English poem Solomon and Saturn II^* the pagan Saturn asks the Christian Solomon (he is a Christian in this text) ‘what things were that were not?’ The answer is oblique, but it contains the word besceadeð, ‘shadows’. Shadows are the absence of light and so don’t exist in themselves, but they are still visible and palpable just as if they did. That is exactly Tolkien’s view of evil. Accordingly Mordor is ‘Black-Land’, ‘where the shadows lie’, or even more ominously ‘where the shadows are’ (my italics), Aragorn reports that ‘Gandalf the Grey fell into shadow’, Gandalf himself says that if his side loses ‘many lands will pass under the shadow’. At times ‘the Shadow’ becomes a personification of Sauron, as in Frodo’s remark about mocking and making quoted earlier, at times it seems no more than cloud and mirk, as when the Riders’ hearts ‘quailed under the shadow’. At times one does not know what to think: Balin goes off to Moria and disaster after ‘a shadow of disquiet’ fell upon the dwarves, and when Glóin says this it appears only a metaphor for mundane discontent. It is an ominous metaphor, though. Maybe the ‘shadow’ was a Mordor-spell, maybe Balin simultaneously fell and was pushed. In such phrases one sees a characteristic Tolkienian strength: his ideas were often paradoxical and had deep intellectual roots, but they appealed at the same time to simple things and to everyday experience. Tolkien could be learned and practical at once, a style common enough in Old English but (he probably reflected) less and less so as the Norman Conquest and the Renaissance wore on, seeing to it that ‘education’ meant increasingly ‘education in Latin’ and the creation of a distinctive literary caste.

Tolkien’s other main source for his image of ‘the shadow’ was probably Beowulf, lines 705–7. Here Beowulf and his men are waiting (the latter without hope) for the appearance of Grendel the man-eater. They did not expect to get home, says the poet; still, they went to sleep. Then he adds with sudden confidence, ‘It was known to men that the demon-enemy could not draw them under shadow (under sceadu bregdan), as long as God did not wish it.’ This is a tough thought, for all its confidence. ‘Draw them under shadow’ may mean no more than ‘pull them out of the hall and into the dark’, but it implies also ‘going we know not where’, dying and being handed over for ever to the powers of evil. As for the phrase about God not wishing it, that seems on the whole a benevolent assertion of divine power. But what if God does wish it? Notoriously He does sometimes wish things like that, for even in Beowulf they have happened before. Tolkien was perhaps attracted by the phrase under sceadu, and also by the tableau of silent, rather sullen Anglo-Saxon courage. He would not have disagreed either with the implications about the unfairness of Providence; we should note that a recurrent prospect in The Lord of the Rings is for Frodo to be taken by Sauron and tormented till he too goes ‘under the shadow’, worn out by addiction and privation and torture and fear to a state of nothingness like that of ‘the haggard king’ of Minas Morgul.⁶ This doesn’t happen, but no one says it can’t. Indeed Gandalf says explicitly that it can. If the Morgul knife had reached its mark, ‘You would have become a wraith under the dominion of the Dark Lord’ (p. 216). And Tolkien’s second word for expressing his concept of the ambiguity of evil is ‘wraith’.

As so often, this may well take its source from a philological puzzle, and an uncertain entry in the OED. If one looks up the word ‘wraith’ in that dictionary – it may be remembered that Tolkien worked on its ‘w’ entries in his youth, see Biography p. 140 – one finds a striking contradiction. First the OED says that ‘wraiths’ are ghosts, are dead, sense 1, ‘An apparition or spectre of a dead person: a phantom or ghost’. Then it says that they may be alive, sense lb, ‘An immaterial or spectral appearance of a living being’. These apparently irreconcilable opinions are backed up, even more surprisingly, by quotations from the same author, Gavin Douglas, the sixteenth-century Scottish translator of Virgil’s Aeneid: for sense 1, entirely unambiguously, ‘In diuers placis The wraithis walkis of goistis that are deyd’, but for sense lb, and note the alternative word offered, my emphasis, ‘Thidder went this wrath or schaddo of Ene’, (i.e. Virgil’s hero Aeneas, who may be walking through the underworld but is definitely himself alive). According to Gavin Douglas and the OED, then, wraiths may be alive or dead, just as, in Tolkien, the chief Ringwraith is ‘undead’, while all the wraiths seems to be, like shadows, both material presences and immaterial absences: under their hoods and cloaks there is nothing, or at least nothing visible, but just the same they can wield weapons, ride horses, be pierced by blades or swept away by flood. Meanwhile, if there was one thing more stimulating to Tolkien than a modern authority failing to make sense of an early text, it was perhaps a modern authority confessing itself baffled by a problem in etymology; and for ‘wraith’ the OED can do no better than the phrase ‘Of obscure origin’. This is, frankly, weak. The word’s early Scottish associations should have suggested that it has gone through similar sound-changes to the word ‘raid’, a Scottish word whose standard English equivalent is ‘road’. And just as ‘raid / road’ derive from the Old English verb rídan, so ‘wraith’ presumably derives from Old English wríðan, ‘to writhe’.⁷ But why should ‘writhing’ create a ‘wraith’?

One may detect here something of a crux in the thinking of the Inklings generally, for the word and the idea are common to both Tolkien and Lewis, and to some extent Charles Williams as well: one wonders which of them thought of it first. Tolkien, at least, is the most likely to have noted the words derived from wríðan: ‘wreath’ (a twisted thing, but also an immaterial twisted thing, see his phrase ‘a wreath of snow’ p. 285); ‘wrath’, a twisted emotion; ‘wroth’, the adjective from ‘wrath’, and the regular past participle ‘writhen’, a very rare word but nevertheless used twice in LOTR.⁸ One underlying meaning in all this is ‘bent’, and ‘bent’ is the word which C. S. Lewis used in his 1938 novel Out of the Silent Planet to describe the Devil, Satan, Lucifer, who is the ‘bent’ Oyarsa or demiurge of Earth, the ‘silent planet’ itself. At very much the same time, and indeed, according to Christopher Tolkien (see Lost Road, p. 9) ‘in the actual context of [Tolkien’s] discussions with C. S. Lewis in 1936’, Tolkien was using the word wraithas, by now translated back to its ‘reconstructed’ or ‘asterisk’ form in Proto-Germanic, to express his myth of the ‘Lost Straight Road’ to the Undying Lands, now lost precisely because the world has become ‘bent’. Westra lage wegas rehtas, nu isti sa wraithas is the sentence which keeps recurring, ‘a straight road lay westward, now it is bent’ (Lost Road, p. 43). To return to the Ringwraiths, they are in origin ‘bent’ people, and people who have been bent, perhaps, into a perfect self-regarding ‘wreath’, ‘wraith’, or Ring.

The psychological observation which underlies this puzzle in etymology seems to me to be both acute and highly contemporary. One of the strange features of the twentieth century has been the curious bloodlessness of its major demonic figures, and the repeated origin of disaster in loudly proclaimed good intentions – reform and revolution turning again and again to terror and mass murder, and throwing up leaders who for all their cruelties seem to have gained little or nothing in the way of personal satisfaction from them. By comparison with the warlords of the past, Attila or Alaric or Genghis Khan, Hitler and Stalin and their henchmen do appear as wraith-like figures, dreadful shadows, bureaucrats of genocide:⁹ their original impulses (to rescue their people? to throw off oppression?) as lost as Boromir’s would be, or Denethor’s, or Gandalf’s, if any of these were to take the Ring. There is a terrible ‘applicability’ about the idea of the wraiths, which many if not most of Tolkien’s readers have been well able to follow. Boethius, with his view that evil is above all an absence, and that the first victim of the evil person is himself, would have been well able to follow it too; and might also have noted Tolkien’s occasional suggestions of the ‘wraithing’ process starting even in the most well-intentioned characters, and signalled by careful choice of words.¹⁰ At the same time there is no doubt that the wraiths have to be fought physically as well as psychologically, as in the Manichaean world of Tolkien’s own war experience. The Boethian and Manichaean views of evil appear incompatible, but in Tolkien’s work neither can be entirely discounted. The opposing forces: luck and chance

Tolkien’s image of good is as complex as his image of evil, but often appears on the surface to be weaker and more limited. Once more he pulled a hint for his fiction from an ancient Beowulfian mystery. That poem opens with the funeral of the ancestor of one of its characters – Scyld, the king of the Danes, who according to legend came drifting to land as a baby, naked on a wooden shield. Now at the end of his life the Danes send him back to the sea in an unmanned funeral barge laden with treasure. ‘By no means did [the Danes] provide him with less gifts, less national treasure’, says the poet with proud understatement, ‘than those did (þonne þá dydon) who sent him out at his beginning, alone over the waves, being a child.’ Who are ‘those’? The line is a very odd one, both technically^* and ideologically. The Beowulf-poet was a Christian. There should have been no room in his universe for sub-divine but superhuman powers, other than devils or angels; however the senders of Scyld seem supernatural in knowledge and purpose, while showing no interest in the inhabitants of Denmark’s souls. One might put Scyld down to divine Providence, except that the word is þá, ‘those’, not he, ‘He’. In Beowulf the matter is then dropped for good, but it leaves behind the implication that there are powers at work in the world, possibly beneficent ones, which human beings are not equipped to understand.

The same is true of The Lord of the Rings, though there as in Beowulf, the lurking powers are never allowed to intervene openly. From The Silmarillion we can infer that Gandalf is a Maia, a spiritual creature in human shape sent for the relief of humanity; much later than he finished the trilogy Tolkien indeed reportedly said ‘Gandalf is an angel’.¹¹ During the action of The Lord of the Rings, though, Gandalf never looks very much like an angel, or at least not one of the normal iconographic kind. He is too short-tempered, for one thing, and also capable of doubt, anxiety, weariness, fear. Obviously too strong a flurry of angelic wings, too ready recourse to miracles or to Omnipotence, would instantly diminish the stature of the characters, devalue their decisions and their courage. How then does beneficence operate; and has Gandalf superiors? ‘Naked I was sent back’, he says at one point (recalling the story of Scyld), but he does not say who sent him. ‘May the Valar turn him aside!’ shout the Gondorians as the ‘oliphaunt’ charges. But the Valar don’t. Or perhaps they do, for the beast does swerve aside, though this could be only chance. Can ‘chance’ and ‘the Valar’ be equated? Is ‘chance’ the word which people use for their perception of the operations of ‘those’, the mysterious senders of Scyld and of Gandalf too?

Tolkien had, probably, been developing some such thought as this for many years. He uses the word ‘chance’ quite often in a suggestive way in The Lord of the Rings. ‘Just chance brought me then, if chance you call it’, says Tom Bombadil when he rescues the hobbits from Willow-man; ruin was averted in the Northlands, says Gandalf in Appendix A III, ‘because I met Thorin Oakenshield one evening on the edge of spring in Bree. A chance-meeting, as we say in Middle-earth.’ Obviously chance is sometimes meant, as Gandalf says of Bilbo’s finding of the Ring, though even Gandalf can only recognise such ‘meanings’ retrospectively. However ‘chance’ was not the word which for Tolkien best expressed his feelings about randomness and design. The word that did is probably ‘luck’.

This is, of course, an extremely common English word. It is also rather odd, in that no etymology of it is known. The OED suggests, without conviction, that it might come from words like Old English (ge)lingan, ‘to happen’, giving then a basic meaning of ‘happenstance, whatever turns up’. Tolkien would have liked that, for it would make ‘luck’ a close modern equivalent of the Old English word usually translated ‘fate’ and derived in exactly the same way from the verb (ge)weorþan, ‘to become, to happen’. The Beowulf-poet often ascribes events to wyrd, and treats it in a way as a supernatural force. King Alfred brought it into his translation of Boethius too, to explain why divine Providence does not affect free will: ‘What we call God’s fore-thought and his Providence’, he wrote, ‘is while it is there in His mind, before it gets done, while it’s still being thought; but once it’s done, then we call it wyrd. This way anyone can tell that there are two things and two names, forethought and wyrd’.¹² A highly important corollary is that people are not under the domination of wyrd, which is why ‘fate’ is not a good translation of it. People can ‘change their luck’, and can in a way say ‘No’ to divine Providence, though of course if they do they have to stand by the consequences of their decision. In Middle-earth, one may say, Providence or the Valar sent the dream that took Boromir to Rivendell (p. 240). But they sent it first and most often to Faramir, who would no doubt have been a better choice. It was human decision, or human perversity, which led to Boromir claiming the journey, with what chain of ill-effects and casualties no one can tell. ‘Luck’, then, is a continuous interplay of providence and free will, a blending of so many factors that the mind cannot disentangle them, a word encapsulating ancient philosophical problems over which wars have been fought and men burnt alive.

As important to Tolkien, though, was that it is a word (like ‘shadow’) which people use every day, and with exactly the right shade of uncertainty over whether they mean something completely humdrum and practical or something mysterious and supernatural. When Farmer Giles of Ham fires his blunderbuss at the giant he hits him ‘by luck’, indeed ‘by chance and no choice of the farmer’s’: thoughts of the Valar enter no one’s mind. On the other hand his advantageous position at the rear of the knightly column which Chrysophylax decimates came about when his grey mare went lame, ‘As luck (or the grey mare herself) would have it’. It is not providence, but it may have been meant just the same. The browbeating of the dragon outside its den, however, is something even the grey mare’s prudence would not stretch to. ‘Farmer Giles was backing his luck’, as people often do; and it is common knowledge that while this is irrational it works much more often than mere ‘chance’ would dictate. People in short do in sober reality recognise a strongly patterning force in the world around them, and both in modern and in Old English have a word to express their recognition. This force, however, does not affect free will and cannot be distinguished from the ordinary operations of nature. Most of all it does not decrease in the slightest the need for heroic endeavour. ‘God helps those who help themselves’, says the proverb. ‘Wyrd often spares the man who isn’t doomed, as long as his courage holds’, agrees Beowulf. ‘Luck served you there,’ says Gimli to Merry and Pippin (p. 550); ‘but you seized your chance with both hands, one might say.’ If they hadn’t, ‘luck’ would no doubt by that time have looked very different.

In Middle-earth, then, both good and evil function as external powers and as inner impulses from the psyche. It is perhaps fair to say that while the balances are maintained, we are on the whole more conscious of evil as an objective power and of good as a subjective impulse; Mordor and ‘the Shadow’ are nearer and more visible than the Valar or ‘luck’. This lack of symmetry is moreover part of a basic denial of security throughout The Lord of the Rings. Repeatedly we are told that if its characters fail to resist the Shadow, they will be taken over, but if they do resist they may get killed; similarly if they reject the vagaries of chance (if Frodo for instance had refused to leave the Shire with the Ring), it’s likely something highly unpleasant will happen, but if they accept and obey things could grow even worse. The benevolent powers offer no guarantees. The best recommendation Gandalf can make is not to think about such things. ‘But let us not darken our hearts by imagining the trial of their gentle loyalty in the Dark Tower. For the Enemy has failed – so far’ (p. 486). Since it hasn’t happened, in other words, it isn’t wyrd, and so need not be explained. Still, it is essential to the story that such thoughts be entertained, as indeed Gandalf also says to Pippin: ‘If you will meddle in the affairs of Wizards, you must be prepared to think of such things’ (p. 580). Without them the characters’ courage would look smaller; and courage is perhaps the strongest element in the Tolkienian synthesis of virtue. Apparent paradoxes: happy sadness and hopeless cheer

This has been both resented and denied: resented, simply because courage is no longer a very fashionable part of virtue; denied, in that some have said things are too easy for Frodo and his companions all through. They do escape, after all. Only Boromir of the Nine dies during the course of the action, and he deserves it. Gandalf is resurrected. Pathos is created only by the sacrifice of a few members of the virtuous side, mostly old ones like Théoden or Dáin, or peripheral ones like Háma and Halbarad and the list of mere names in the Rohan dirge after the Pelennor Fields. In a review in the Observer (27 November 1955) – one which Tolkien very much resented, see Biography, p. 297 – Edwin Muir propounded a thesis that the non-adulthood of the romance was shown by its painlessness: ‘The good boys, having fought a deadly battle, emerge at the end of it well, triumphant and happy, as boys would naturally expect to do. There are only one or two minor casualties.’ In this there is a kind of truth (for Tolkien was kind-hearted about things like the ‘evacuation’ of Minas Tirith and the survival of Bill the pony), but also an evident falsehood. When all is over Frodo for one is neither ‘well’, ‘triumphant’ nor even ‘happy’. And he only exemplifies a much stronger theme in the work as a whole: the failure of the good, one might even say a sense of ‘defeatism’. In the strict or dictionary sense The Lord of the Rings evades that concept totally, for according to the OED ‘defeatism’ is a straight borrowing from French défaitisme, recorded in English for the first time in 1918 and meaning ‘Conduct tending to bring about acceptance of defeat, esp. by action on civilian opinion’. With his best friends dead in Flanders Tolkien had cause to hate that idea like poison, and indeed no one in Middle-earth is allowed to voice it. Even Denethor’s reaction to defeat is to commit ceremonial suicide, not negotiate for some ‘Vichy’ status though that is what Sauron’s mouthpiece offers on p. 872, in a speech full of the Middle-earth analogues of ‘reparations’, ‘demilitarised zones’ and ‘puppet governments’. Gandalf rejects that proposal with particular violence, and at all times discussion of odds or probabilities turns him hard and obstinate: ‘“Still,” he said, standing suddenly up and sticking out his chin, while his beard went stiff and straight like bristling wire, “we must keep up our courage. You will soon be well, if I do not talk you to death. You are in Rivendell, and you need not worry about anything for the present.”’ ‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof’ seems to be his motto. Yet Gandalf also on occasion, together with the other wise men and women of the story, accepts defeat as a long-term prospect, a prospect which The Lord of the Rings as a whole does not deny.

Thus Galadriel says of her life, ‘Through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat’. Elrond agrees, ‘I have seen three ages in the West of the world, and many defeats and many fruitless victories’. Later he queries his own adjective ‘fruitless’, but still repeats that the victory long ago in which Sauron was overthrown but not destroyed ‘did not achieve its end’. The whole history of Middle-earth seems to show that good is attained only at vast expense while evil recuperates almost at will. Thangorodrim is broken without evil being at all ‘ended for ever’, as the elves had thought. Númenor is drowned without getting rid of Sauron. Sauron is defeated and his Ring taken by Isildur, only to set in motion the crisis at the end of the Third Age. And even if that crisis is surmounted, it is made extremely clear that this success too will conform to the general pattern of ‘fruitlessness’ – or maybe one should say its fruit will be bitter. Destruction of the Ring, says Galadriel, will mean that her ring and Gandalf’s and Elrond’s will also lose their power, so that Lothlórien ‘fades’ and the elves ‘dwindle’. Along with them will go the ents and the dwarves, indeed the whole imagined world of Middle-earth, to be replaced by modernity and the domination of men; all the characters and their story, one might say, will shrink to poetic ‘rigmaroles’ and misunderstood snatches in plays and ballads. Beauty especially will be a casualty. ‘However the fortunes of war shall go …’, asks Théoden, ‘may it not so end that much that was fair and wonderful shall pass for ever out of Middle-earth?’ ‘The evil of Sauron cannot be wholly cured’, replies Gandalf, ‘nor made as if it had not been.’ Fangorn agrees when he says of his own dying species, ‘songs like trees bear fruit only in their own time and their own way, and sometimes they are withered untimely’. The collective opinion of Middle-earth is summed up in Gandalf’s aphoristic statement: ‘I am Gandalf, Gandalf the White, but Black is mightier still.’

The implications of that could be alarming. It sounds Manichaean. However as has already been seen Tolkien was careful to voice rebuttals of Manichaeanism and assertions of the nonentity of evil many times throughout. Why then the continuing pessimistic expectations of defeat? The answer, obviously enough, is that a major goal of The Lord of the Rings was to dramatise that ‘theory of courage’ which Tolkien had said in his British Academy lecture was the ‘great contribution’ to humanity of the old literature of the North. The central pillar of that theory was Ragnarök – the day when gods and men would fight evil and the giants, and inevitably be defeated. Its great statement was that defeat is no refutation. The right side remains right even if it has no ultimate hope at all. In a sense this Northern mythology asks more of men, even makes more of them, than does Christianity, for it offers them no heaven, no salvation, no reward for virtue except the sombre satisfaction of having done what is right. Tolkien wanted his characters in The Lord of the Rings to live up to the same high standard. He was careful therefore to remove easy hope from them, even to make them conscious of long-term defeat and doom.

Nevertheless Tolkien was himself a Christian, and he faced a problem in the ‘theory of courage’ he so much admired: its mainspring is despair, its spirit often heathen ferocity. One can see him grappling with the difficulty in his poem-cum-essay ‘The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son’, published in 1953, the year before The Fellowship of the Ring.¹³ This is a coda to the Old English poem The Battle of Maldon, which commemorates an English defeat by the Vikings in AD 991, and celebrates especially the unyielding courage of the English bodyguard who refused to retreat when their leader was killed, but fought round his body till all were dead. The very core of the sentiment is expressed by an old retainer called Beorhtwold: ‘Heart shall be bolder, harder be purpose, / more proud the spirit, as our power lessens …’ These lines, said Tolkien, ‘have been held to be the finest expression of the northern heroic spirit, Norse or English; the clearest statement of the doctrine of uttermost endurance in the service of indomitable will’. Nevertheless he felt uneasy about them. He thought they were old already in 991; he saw they could be said as well by a heathen as a Christian; he thought the fierce spirit they expressed was one of the reasons for Beorhtnoth’s rash decision to let the Vikings cross the river and fight on level ground; they had led to defeat and the death of the innocent.

In Tolkien’s poem, accordingly, the words are not given to Beorhtwold but form part of a dream dreamt by the poet Torhthelm:

‘It’s dark! It’s dark, and doom coming!

Is no light left us?   A light kindle,

and fan the flame!   Lo!   Fire now wakens,

hearth is burning, house is lighted,

men there gather.   Out of the mists they come

through darkling doors whereat doom waiteth.

Hark!   I hear them in the hall chanting:

stern words they sing with strong voices.

(He chants) “Heart shall be bolder, harder be purpose,

more proud the spirit as our power lessens!

Mind shall not falter nor mood waver,

though doom shall come and dark conquer.”’ (Tree, p. 141)

Tolkien himself did not think the dark would conquer. The voices Torhthelm hears are those of his pagan ancestors, no better than the Vikings ‘lying off London in their long vessels, / while they drink to Thor and drown the sorrow / of hell’s children’. They are as wrong as Gandalf, or even more so; Tídwald rebukes Torhthelm for being ‘heathenish’ when he wakes up, and the poem ends with the monks of Ely singing the Dirige or ‘dirge’ from the Office of the Dead. However, Tolkien admired the aesthetic impulse towards good beneath the pride and sorrow. In Middle-earth he wanted a similar ultimate courage undiluted by confidence – but at the same time untainted by rage and despair. One may say that the wise characters in The Lord of the Rings are often without hope and so near the edge of despair, but they do not succumb. That is left to Denethor, who will not fight to the last, but turns like a heathen to suicide and the sacrifice of his kin.

Tolkien needed a new image for ultimate bravery, one milder but not weaker than Beorhtwold’s. He centred it, oddly enough, on laughter, cheerfulness, refusal to look into the future at all.¹⁴ There are hints of this in Middle English – the critical moment in Sir Orfeo comes when the king in his madness sees ladies at falconry, and laughs – while there is a modern analogue in Joseph Conrad’s The Shadow-Line (1917), where laughter is an exorcising force. In The Lord of the Rings it can be expressed by such high-status characters as Faramir, who says at one point that he does not hope to see Frodo ever again, but nevertheless invents a picture of them in an unknown future ‘sitting by a wall in the sun, laughing at grief’. However the true vehicle of the ‘theory of laughter’ is the hobbits; their behaviour is calqued on the traditional English humour in adversity, but has deeper semantic roots.

Thus it is Pippin who looks up at the sun and the banners and offers comfort to Beregond, and Merry who never loses heart when even Théoden appears prey to ‘horror and doubt’. But Sam on the road to Mordor goes beyond both. He has less hope even than Faramir. Indeed, we are told, he had:

never had any real hope in the affair from the beginning; but being a cheerful hobbit he had not needed hope, as long as despair could be postponed. Now they were come to the bitter end. But he had stuck to his master all the way; that was what he had chiefly come for, and he would still stick to him. (p. 624)

Is it possible, one might wonder, to be ‘cheerful’ without any hope at all? Certainly it seems hardly sensible, but the idea rings true – it is corroborated by several first-hand accounts of the First World War, perhaps especially by Frank Richards’s Old Soldiers Never Die (published 1933, and written significantly enough by a ranker, not an officer). Sam’s twist on semantics is repeated by Pippin. He describes Fangorn and the last march of the Ents: was it ‘fruitless’? Evidently not, in the short term, but in the long term Fangorn knows his race and story are sterile. The realisation makes him, according to Pippin, ‘sad but not unhappy’, and to modern English semantics the phrase makes almost no sense, like hopeless cheer. However an early meaning of ‘sad’ is ‘settled, determined’; ‘cheer’ comes from Old French chair, ‘face’. The paradoxes put forward Tolkien’s theses that determination should survive the worst that can happen, that a stout pretence is more valuable than sincere despair.

However the best delineation of Tolkien’s new model of courage is perhaps at the end of Book IV chapter 8, ‘The Stairs of Cirith Ungol’. Here Sam and Frodo, like Faramir, have little hope but still think of others in the future maybe ‘laughing at grief’. Frodo indeed laughs himself: ‘Such a sound had not been heard in those places since Sauron carne to Middle-earth. To Sam suddenly it seemed as if all the stones were listening and the tall rocks leaning over them.’ But then they fall asleep, and Gollum returns, to see and for a moment to love and aspire to the ‘peace’ he sees in their faces. It is characteristic of a kind of hardness in the fable that on this one occasion when Gollum’s heart is stirred and he makes a gesture of penitence, Sam should wake up, misunderstand, and accuse Gollum of ‘pawing’ and ‘sneaking’. Gollum gets no credit for his minor decency. But then he gave Frodo no credit earlier for his decency in saving Gollum from Faramir and the archers, preferring to spit, bear malice, and complain about ‘nice Master’s little trickses’. This is no excuse for Sam, but it shows maybe where criticisms like Edwin Muir’s break down. The good side in The Lord of the Rings does win, but its casualties include, besides Théoden and Boromir, beauty, Lothlórien, Middle-earth and even Gollum. Furthermore the characters are aware of their losses all the time, and bear a burden of regret. They just have to make the best of things and not confuse ‘sorrow’ with ‘despair’;¹⁵ even the hobbits’ schoolboy humour has a point. Tolkien after all put forward his theses about courage and about laughter fairly clearly. The critical inability to see them comes partly from mere ideological reluctance; partly, though, from unfamiliarity with the basic structural mode of The Lord of the Rings, the ancient and pre-novelistic device of entrelacement. The ethics of interlace

There is a minor mystery about this mode, for Tolkien might have been expected not to like it. Its greatest literary monuments are the sequence of French prose tales from the thirteenth century about King Arthur, known as the Vulgate Cycle and transposed into English only in highly compressed form by Sir Thomas Malory; and the later Italian epics about the knights of Charlemagne, Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato, ‘Roland in Love’, and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, ‘Roland Run Mad’, imitated in English by Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Hence, no doubt, the early reviewers’ comparisons of Tolkien with Malory, Spenser, Ariosto. However Tolkien disobligingly remarked that he hadn’t read Ariosto and wouldn’t have liked him if he had (Biography, p. 291), while Spenser exemplified much that he hated (see above). As for King Arthur, Tolkien might well have seen him as a symptom of English vagueness. Why should Englishmen take interest in a Welsh hero committed to their destruction, and known anyway via a French rehash? Still, the fact remains that Tolkien did produce a narrative of entrelacement. He had read a good deal of French romance for his Sir Gawain edition, and may have reflected further that even Beowulf has a kind of ‘interlace’ technique. He knew also that the Icelandic word for ‘short story’ is þáttr, ‘a thread’; sagas often consist of several þættir, strands woven together. The image is in Gandalf’s mind when he says to Théoden, ‘There are children in your land who, out of the twisted threads of story, could pick the answer to your question.’ To unravel entrelacement – that is at least one route to wisdom.¹⁶

The narrative of the great ‘interlaced’ romances is, however, by no means famous for wisdom. Malory’s editor, Eugene Vinaver, comments:

Adventures were piled up one upon the other without any apparent sequence or design, and innumerable personages, mostly anonymous, were introduced in a wild succession … The purpose of their encounters and pursuits was vague, and their tasks were seldom fulfilled: they met and parted and met again, each intent at first on following his particular ‘quest’, and yet prepared at any time to be diverted from it to other adventures and undertakings.¹⁷

The result was meaningless confusion. This is very much not the case with Tolkien. The basic pattern of the centre of The Lord of the Rings is separations and encounters and wanderings, but these are controlled first by a map (something no Arthurian narrative possesses), and second by an extremely tight chronology of days and dates. Along with this goes a deliberate chronological ‘leapfrogging’.

To particularise: the narrative of The Fellowship of the Ring is single-stranded, following Frodo, with the exceptions of the ‘flashback’ narratives embedded in ‘The Shadow of the Past’ and ‘The Council of Elrond’. The Nine Walkers themselves stick together from the leaving of Rivendell to the end of the volume, apart from losing Gandalf in Moria. But on Amon Hen, on the 26th February, the fellowship is dispersed. Boromir is killed. Frodo and Sam canoe away by themselves. Pippin and Merry are kidnapped by the Uruk-hai. Aragorn, left to choose between chasing the latter or following the Ring, decides to pursue the orcs, along with Legolas and Gimli. The fates of these three parties are then followed separately. Briefly, what happens is that chapters 1 and 2 of Book III take Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli from the 26th to the 28th February; chapters 3 and 4 lead Pippin and Merry from the 26th February to the 2nd March; chapters 5–7 return to Aragorn and his companions and ‘leapfrog’ them past Merry and Pippin again to the 4th March; while in chapter 8 these two sub-groups of the fellowship meet again on the 5th, for Merry and Pippin to bring their story up-to-date again in recounted narrative. By chapter 11 they are splitting up again, Gandalf (who had returned from Moria in chapter 5) riding off with Pippin, Merry setting off with Théoden, Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli going together once more towards the Paths of the Dead. They will not gather again till chapter 6 of Book V, ‘The Battle of the Pelennor Fields’. These, however, are not the only strands. All the time Frodo and Sam are spinning another, and doing it with the same chronological overlapping. They too depart on the 26th February, and have reached the 28th by the start of Book IV. By the end of that book, though, they have got to the 13th March, some eight days later than the last events of which we are told in Book III. Gandalf and the others do not ‘catch up’ with Frodo and Sam till chapter 5 of Book V, but then they continue once again to the 25th March, which the two hobbits do not reach for another three chapters.

Now this unnatural form of presentation works well for surprise and suspense. It is a shock to have the battle of Helm’s Deep decided by the Ents and Huorns, who were last seen marching on Isengard, but whose powers have never come out in the open before. It is a good ‘cliffhanger’ scene at the end of Book V, as Pippin falls in the black blood of the troll, to have his fate decided by events of which we have no knowledge. But Tolkien meant more by entrelacement than that.

One example of a retrospective connection has already been given. As Frodo feels the pressure of the Eye on Amon Hen, a Voice speaks to him and gives him a moment of freedom to act. This voice is Gandalf’s, though Frodo thinks he is dead and the reader does too. Gandalf says as much on p. 484, though he is laconic about it – ‘I sat in a high place [the great tree in Lothlórien?], and I strove with the Dark Tower’ – since Aragorn and the others he is addressing can have no idea what is being referred to. Gandalf remarks at the same time that he sent Gwaihir the eagle to watch the River; presumably he was the eagle Aragorn saw, but thought nothing of, as he stared out from Amon Hen on the first page of The Two Towers. Other cross-connections are frequent. Fangorn looks long at the two hobbits when they tell him Gandalf is dead; he does so because he doesn’t believe them, having seen Gandalf himself a couple of days before. But we do not realise this till Gandalf remarks on their near-meeting some thirty pages later. Across the whole breadth of the story, meanwhile, fly the Nazgûl. Frodo and Sam feel their presence three times as they wander across the Emyn Muil and the Dead Marshes, on pp. 593, 616, and 620, i.e. on the 29th February, 1st March and 4th March. Gollum feels sure this is no coincidence. ‘“Three times!” he whimpered. “Three times is a threat. They feel us here, they feel the Precious. The Precious is their master. We cannot go any further this way, no. It’s no use, no use!”’ What he says sounds plausible enough, but it’s wrong. Three times is a coincidence, and actually we can guess each time what the Nazgûl are doing. The first was coming back from a fruitless wait for Grishnákh the orc, dead and burnt that same day, with the smoke from his burning ‘seen by many watchful eyes’. The second was probing towards Rohan and Saruman. The third was heading for Isengard, to alarm Pippin on its way with the thought that it had somehow been despatched for him (p. 585). Meanwhile the body of Boromir establishes a similar transverse thread as it drifts down the Great River, to be seen by Faramir, to have the workmanship on its belt noted and compared with the broaches of Sam and Frodo eight days later. These references and allusions tie the story together, we would say, or to use Gandalf’s image show one thread twisting over another. They prove the author has the story under control, and are significant to any reader who has grasped the entire plot. However that is not how they appear to the characters, or to the reader whose attention has lapsed (as whose does not?). In this contrast between half- and full perception lies the point of interlacings.

For to the characters the story appears, to repeat a term used already, as a ‘bewilderment’. They are lost in the woods and plains of Middle-earth. They also do not know what is going on or what to do next. Aragorn has to choose between going to Mordor or to Minas Tirith; delays, and then finds himself choosing between Sam and Frodo or Merry and Pippin; picks one quest, and then has to decide whether to rest or pursue by night. Neither decision nor delay seems to pay off. ‘All that I have done today has gone amiss’, he says (p. 404); ‘Since we passed through the Argonath my choices have gone amiss’ (p. 415); ‘And now may I make a right choice, and change the evil fate of this unhappy day!’ (p. 409). Éomer’s intervention does not help him much, for he and his companions cannot decide at the end of chapter 2 whether they have seen Saruman or not. It appears they did (we learn later, p. 487), but the next time they think someone is Saruman it is Gandalf. Furthermore the appearance of Saruman to drive off the borrowed horses is coincidental with the arrival of Shadowfax – the note of joy in their whinnyings puzzles Legolas, though their eventual return with Shadowfax provides an equine equivalent for the unexpected return of Gandalf. Simultaneously, in Fangorn Forest, Gandalf, Saruman and Treebeard himself are wandering, meeting or not meeting seemingly at random. The effect as a whole is like that of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where pairs of lovers wander in another enchanted wood, their paths crossed and tangled by Puck, Oberon, Titania and the infatuating Bully Bottom. ‘Infatuation’ is indeed a word one might use as well as ‘bewilderment’. It means following the ignis fatuus, the ‘will o’ the wisp’ that traditionally leads travellers into bog or quicksand; an analogue to the multiple wanderings of Book III is Frodo staring at the corpse-candles in chapter 2 of Book IV, to be warned by Gollum not to heed them, or the dead, rotten, phantasmal faces in the marshes below: ‘Or hobbits go down to join the Dead ones and light little candles. Follow Sméagol! Don’t look at lights!’

Even though it comes from Gollum, this is good advice. For of course Aragorn and the others, including Frodo, are in their feelings of confusion and meaninglessness absolutely wrong – ‘infatuated’, ‘bewildered’, drowning in a bog of mere events, caught in a strangler’s net of wyrd. They have good apparent grounds for despair. But as it turns out (as it happens, as ‘chance’ or ‘luck’ would have it) there are things in the web of story to refute those grounds. As Gandalf points out, all Sauron and Saruman and the orcs have done between them is ‘bring Pippin and Merry with marvellous speed, and in the nick of time, to Fangorn, where otherwise they would never have come at all!’ – and so, one might say, though it is beyond Gandalf’s knowledge at the time, to rouse the Ents, overthrow Saruman, save Rohan, and free Théoden to make his decisive intervention at Minas Tirith. There are still several things one can not say: for instance, that Saruman’s treachery was accordingly a Good Thing, or that the rescue of Minas Tirith is a reward for Aragorn’s persistence. After all, if Saruman had stayed loyal things might have ended better; if Aragorn had abandoned the chase Merry and Pippin would have stirred up Fangorn just the same. What one can be absolutely sure about is that giving up does the other side’s work for them, and ruins all your own possible futures and other people’s as well. The despair of Denethor killed Théoden, as predicted by Gandalf on p. 832.¹⁸ While persistence offers no guarantees, it does give ‘luck’ a chance to operate, through unknown allies or unknown weaknesses in the opposition.

As a working theory this is impregnable, whether considered sceptically or superstitiously. To it the entrelacements contribute a recognisable attitude towards reality. Events in the world, they say, appear chaotic and unplanned, appear so all but unmistakably. But however strong that impression is, it is a subjective one founded on the inevitably limited view of any individual. If individuals could see more widely – as we can, by virtue of the narrative structure of The Lord of the Rings – they would realise that events have a cause-and-effect logic, though there are so many causes that perhaps no one but God can ever see them all at once. The world is a Persian carpet, then, and we are ants lumbering from one thread to the other and observing that there is no pattern in the colours. That is why one of Gandalf’s favourite sayings is ‘Even the wise cannot see all ends’, and why he often demonstrates its truth himself. Thus it is ironic that he more than once offers a cold-hearted appraisal of the junior hobbits’ utility. ‘If these hobbits understood the danger’, he says to Elrond, ‘they would not dare to go.’ But they would still want to, he concludes, and their wish should outweigh their ignorance. He says to Pippin later, ‘Generous deed should not be outweighed by cold counsel’. In the end he is proved both right and wrong: Merry and Pippin between them rouse the Ents, save Faramir, kill the Ringwraith. The last deed is caused by the sheer chance of finding a dagger ‘bound round with spells for the destruction of Mordor’ in the wight’s barrow. ‘Glad would he have been to know its fate who wrought it slowly long ago’, comments the narrator; and his comment shows that the ancient smith was not glad, did not know, was condemned to defeat and death and oblivion in the barrows. Still, even after thousands of years hope should not be lost: nor relied on.

It is Pippin too who looks in the palantír and so misleads Sauron into thinking Saruman may have the Ring. This may have helped draw on the Enemy’s hasty stroke, thinks Gandalf on p. 797. More important is the fact that Aragorn has the stone available to him, and that Sauron (having seen a hobbit in the same stone) thinks Aragorn also has the Ring: it is because Aragorn showed himself to Sauron in the palantír that Sauron neglects his guard. ‘The Eye turned inward, pondering tidings of doubt and danger: a bright sword, and a stern and kingly face it saw’ (p. 902). But once more ironically, it is what the Eye does not see that matters. The bright sword and kingly face turn out not to be critical. It is the two ants creeping along the Ephel Dúath who are going to change reality. Indeed Frodo and Sam provide perhaps the strongest effects of the entrelacement. Their bewilderments, infatuations, sense of being lost and abandoned, are much stronger than those of Aragorn or Gimli or anyone else in the more active half of the story. But by the time we come to following their strand along we know that these are not true. ‘All my choices have proved ill’, says Frodo within a couple of pages of the start of his quest. But his words echo unmistakably those of Aragorn nearly two hundred pages earlier; and we know Aragorn was wrong. What counts, then, is that Frodo should go on choosing. We perceive his doubt and weariness simultaneously as a natural reaction to circumstances, and as a temptation, even a phantasm or illusion of the Dark Tower. Evil works, we realise, by sapping the will with over-complication. Like ‘the Shadow’, this is in fiction an external force with physical effects of which sensitive characters like Legolas can be aware; it appeals to a recognition of truth outside fiction, however, in its buried statements that clouds have silver linings, that fortune favours the brave, that even in reality things are not always as they seem.

There is indeed a corpus of proverbs scattered through The Lord of the Rings, which add weight to the implications of interlace. ‘Oft the unbidden guest proves the best company’, says Éomer, and later ‘Twice blessed is hope unlooked-for’. ‘Where will wants not, a way opens’, says his sister, more solemnly but also more familiarly. ‘Oft hope is born, when all is forlorn’, says Legolas. He, Aragorn and Théoden also state proverbs about freshness, with respectively ‘Rede oft is found at the rising of the sun’, ‘None knows what the new day shall bring him’, and ‘In the morning counsels are best …’ Legolas adds a spatial metaphor with his ‘Few can foresee whither their road will lead them …’ It should be noted that most of these are neutral on the optimism / pessimism scale, while some of the characters’ proverbs approach the meaningless. ‘Strange are the turns of fortune’, says Gandalf (which could be good or bad depending on context), and ‘Hope oft deceives’, says Éomer (also so true as to be non-predictive). Still, most of those quoted so far are real proverbs as the place-names of the Shire are real place-names, and they have a similar function: to draw us in, to make connections between experience inside and outside the story. Within this continuum, however, other proverbs are planted, sounding much the same as the others but more original and so closer to Tolkien’s own intention. ‘Often does hatred hurt itself, says Gandalf; ‘Oft evil will shall evil mar’, says Théoden; ‘The hasty stroke goes oft astray’, says Aragorn; ‘A traitor may betray himself, Gandalf again. It takes the action of the whole of The Lord of the Rings to make these ring true and there is a vein of proverbial wisdom (about God being on the side of the big battalions) which would utterly deny them. These invented sayings show in miniature the ‘contrivance’ of which the trilogy has often been accused. Only a fool, though, would deny that the contrivances have a point; only a very careless reader would think that the entrelacements of this romance are purely for variety, and have nothing to say about ‘the fundamental character of reality’ at all. Just allegory and large symbolism

Tolkien’s proverbs edge, on the whole, towards the archaic. So does his use of omens and prophecies – a feature of The Lord of the Rings which may furthermore seem to deny the idea of free will being left intact by the forces of providence. Galadriel seems to know in advance that Aragorn will take the Paths of the Dead, Aragorn to know that he and Éomer will meet again, ‘though all the hosts of Mordor should stand between’. Someone (or something) foreknew that the Ringwraith would not fall ‘by the hand of man’. These cross-temporal flashes suggest, perhaps, that some things are bound to happen regardless of what people do or choose. Yet that would clearly be a false conclusion. The words of prophecies could be fulfilled after all in many different ways. We are left always at liberty to suppose that Aragorn and Éomer could have met once more as prisoners, say, that the Grey Company could have quailed and turned back. If Merry had failed to stab the Ringwraith, it might have died aeons later at the hands of some other woman, hobbit, elf-hero. As Galadriel says of her Mirror (p. 354): it ‘shows many things, and not all have yet come to pass. Some never come to be, unless those that behold the visions turn aside from their path to prevent them.’ She articulates a theory of compromise between fate and free will once more at least a millennium old: in the Solomon and Saturn poem Saturn asks which will be the stronger, wyrd ge warnung, ‘fated events or foresight’, and Solomon tells him that ‘Fate is hard to alter … And nevertheless an intelligent man can moderate all the things that fate causes, as long as he is clear in his mind’. It is important to realise though, that antiquarian as Tolkien’s motives often were,¹⁹ and ‘pre-scientific’ as the opinions of Galadriel and Solomon seem, what Tolkien was writing about is still in a way a live issue. ‘Every bullet has his billet’ is a distinctively modern saying, first recorded in that form in 1765, and in use up to the present day to indicate that sometimes no precautions work; yet saying the proverb, and believing it, probably never stopped anyone taking cover. ‘God helps those who help themselves’, to repeat a proverb mentioned earlier. Tolkien in other words never lost his belief in the reality and continuity, not only of language and of history, but of human nature and of some intellectual problems.

This should be kept in mind when considering the much vexed question of allegory, or symbolism, in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s opinions here are clear only up to a point. As is well known, he wrote in the ‘Foreword’ to the second edition: ‘I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.’ He went on, though: ‘I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse “applicability” with “allegory”; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.’ Some relation between fiction and fact might be perceived, then; and ‘The Scouring of the Shire’ had ‘some basis in experience’ though no ‘contemporary political reference whatsoever’, not even to Britain’s Socialist ‘austerity’ government of 1945–50. As Tolkien wrote of Beowulf, it was important to preserve a balance, to see that the ‘large symbolism is near the surface, but … does not break through, nor become allegory’. ‘Allegory’ would after all imply, to Tolkien (see above here and here), that The Lord of the Rings had only one meaning, which would have to remain constant all the way through; he toyed contemptuously with the notion in the ‘Foreword’ as he sketched out a plan for his work as a real allegory with the Ring itself as President Truman’s atomic bomb.²⁰ ‘Large symbolism’, however, should not be a matter of one imposed diagram, but of repeated offered hints. The hints would work only if they were true both in fact and in fiction. History, thought Tolkien, was varied in its applicability. But if you understood it properly, you saw it repeating itself.

Some of Tolkien’s hints have been glanced at already. The Riders of Rohan, and the Rangers of Gondor, will not offer the excuse that they were ‘Only obeying orders’; one cannot avoid the contrast with the Nazis. When Gandalf tells Frodo about the Ring, Frodo replies ‘I wish it need not have happened in my time’, but Gandalf reproves him: ‘So do I … and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide’ (p. 50). The rebuke is deserved by Frodo, but also by Neville Chamberlain with his now infamous promise that he brought ‘peace in our time’.²¹ Elrond, on p. 237, has learnt better. He remembers a moment when ‘the Elves deemed that evil was ended for ever’ but knows that ‘it was not so’. Tolkien himself fought in ‘the war to end all wars’, but saw his sons fighting in the one after that. Other ironies are not hard to discover. As Gandalf and Pippin ride from the Anórien towards Minas Tirith, they find their way blocked by men building a wall (p. 732). It is Denethor’s insistence on defending this (p. 798) that nearly kills Faramir, and all it does in practice is to obstruct the arrival of the Rohirrim (p. 819) by which time it is already a ‘ruin’, for all the ‘labour’ wasted on it at the start. Men of Tolkien’s generation could hardly avoid thinking of the Maginot Line. Gandalf’s advice, ‘But leave your trowels and sharpen your swords!’, has more than an immediate relevance. The hint is unmistakable, as are others in the trilogy, of Vichyism and quislings, of puppet governments and demilitarised zones. How well do they hang together, though? Did Tolkien go on from the exploitation of occasional scenes to the manipulation of plot, the creation of recognisably symbolic characters, the thing Alfred Duggan the TLS reviewer asked for so plaintively, ‘a clear message for the modern world’? Of course Tolkien would have scorned ‘message’ as much as ‘modern’. Still, he created two characters in The Lord of the Rings of particular suggestiveness, both of them originally on the right side but seduced or corroded by evil, and so especially likely to have analogues in the real world: these are Denethor and Saruman, each of them seen faintly satirically, almost politically.

To take the more obvious example first, Saruman shows many signs of being equatable with industrialism, or technology. His very name means something of the sort. Searu in Old English (the West Saxon form of Mercian *saru) means ‘Device, design, contrivance, art’. Bosworth-Toller’s Dictionary says cautiously that often you cannot tell ‘whether the word is used with a good or with a bad meaning’. When Beowulf walks into Hrothgar’s hall the poet says appreciatively that ‘on him his armour shone, the cunning net (searo-net) sewed by the crafts (orþancum) of the smith’. Jewellers are searo-cræftig, and wizards snottor searu-þancum, ‘wise in cunning thoughts’. The word stretches from wisdom to plot and treachery, though. Beowulf denies he ever sought out searo-niþas, ‘cunning malices’, Grendel’s corpse-holding glove is searo-bendum fœst, ‘fixed with cunning bands’. The word implies cleverness, but is nearly always linked with metal: iron in armour and clasps, but also silver and gold. The dragon’s treasure is a searu-gimma geþræc, ‘a heap of cunning jewels’, in the Riming Poem the poet says obscurely sinc searwade, ‘treasure played the traitor’. That means ‘left its possessor’, suggest Messrs Bosworth and Toller. To Tolkien, with his theory of dragonish ‘bewilderment’, it meant more likely ‘stayed with its possessor’, driving him insidiously to greed and cunning.

These cruxes all form part of Saruman’s character. He is learned, but his learning tends to the practical. ‘He has a mind of metal and wheels’, says Fangorn. His orcs use a kind of gunpowder at Helm’s Deep (p. 525); thirty pages later the Ents meet at Isengard, or ‘Irontown’, a kind of napalm – perhaps one should say with closer reference to Tolkien’s own experience, a Flammenwerfer. The implication is that Saruman has been led from ethically neutral researches into the kind of wanton pollution and love of dirt we see in ‘The Scouring of the Shire’ by something corrupting in the love of machines or in the very desire for control over the natural world. And for this there is a real-world connection, for Tolkien’s own childhood image of industrial ugliness in the midst of natural beauty was Sarehole Mill, with its literally bone-grinding owner ‘the White Ogre’, see Biography p. 36. The Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names takes the first element of this place to be a personal name Searu, or perhaps the word ‘sere, withered’; Tolkien would automatically have corrected to Mercian Saru, but might well have seen all the proposed meanings as relevant, ‘grey and withered’, but also ‘cunning and mechanical’. It is interesting, too, that Saruman’s Orc-men call him ‘Sharkey’ or ‘Old Man’. To a medievalist the name might well suggest the ‘Old Man of the Mountains’ or leader of the Assassins as described in Mandeville’s Travels. ‘Old Man’ is simply Arabic shaikh (cp. Orkish sharkú). And Mandeville’s Old Man ruled, of course, by feeding his followers hashish and deluding them with dreams of paradise. So, we might think, ‘cunning man’, or ‘machine man’, or ‘technological man’, keeps a Utopian carrot dangling in front of our noses, of a world of leisure and convenience where each new mill grinds faster than the one before. But as Ted Sandyman ought to have realised, ‘you’ve got to have grist before you can grind’; machine-masters end up machine-minders, and all for nothing, or rather for an insidious logic of expansion.

This may not be a totally convincing critique of modern society, but it has clear modern relevance and is more than mere dislike. There is something suggestive also in Saruman’s notorious ‘voice’, which always seems ‘wise and reasonable’, and wakes desire in others ‘by swift agreement to seem wise themselves’. Gandalf’s harshness represents denial of Utopias and insistence that nothing comes free. Even Lotho ‘Pimple’, Frodo’s relative, has a place in the argument because he is such an obvious Gradgrind – greedy and bossy to begin with, but staying within the law till his manipulators take over, to jail his mother, kill him and eat him too (if we can believe the hints about Gríma Wormtongue). Jeremy Bentham to Victorian capitalists? Old Bolshevik to new Stalinist? The progression is familiar enough, and it adds another modern dimension to Middle-earth or rather a timeless one, for though in the modern age we give Saruman a modern ‘applicability’, his name, and the evident uncertainty even in Anglo-Saxon times over mechanical cleverness and ‘machinations’, shows that his meaning was ancient too.

Saruman nevertheless does have one distinctively modern trait, which is his association with Socialism. His men say they are gathering things ‘for fair distribution’, though nobody believes them – a particularly strange compromise of evil with morality, for Middle-earth, where vice rarely troubles to be hypocritical. It is worth saying accordingly that Denethor, contrasted with Saruman as he is in other ways with Théoden, is an arch-conservative. In almost his last speech he declares:

‘I would have things as they were in all the days of my life … and in the days of my longfathers before me … But if doom denies this to me, then I will have naught: neither life diminished, nor love halved, nor honour abated.’ (p. 836)

‘I will have naught’ is a particularly ominous expression. As The Lord of the Rings was coming to the end of its gestation it became possible for the first time for political leaders to say they wanted nothing and make it come true. Denethor clearly will not submit to the Enemy, as Saruman did, but he also cares nothing in the end for his subjects, while his love even for his sons would take them both to death with him. ‘The West has failed’, he says. ‘It shall all go up in a great fire, and all shall be ended! Ash! Ash and smoke blown away on the wind!’ He does not say ‘nuclear fire’, but the thought fits. Denethor breaks his own staff of office as Saruman does not. He mingles an excess of heroic temper – the ancient Ragnarök spirit, one might say, which Tolkien with significant anachronism twice calls ‘heathen’²² – with a mean concern for his own sovereignty and his own boundaries: a combination that unusually and in this one particular case makes no sense at all before 1945 and the invention of the ‘great deterrent’.

It is a risky business finally to draw a Tolkienian ‘inner meaning’ from these various ‘applicabilities’. Tolkien himself insisted that he had not intended one; and finding one need not be the ultimate necessity for the critic, since after all political messages add nothing to Tom Bombadil, or the Ents, or the Riders of Rohan, or the entrelacements, or most of the things discussed in this chapter and the ones around it. The real point is that Tolkien’s theories about nature, evil, luck and our perception of the world generated as a sort of by-product modern applications and political ones. His attachment to the ‘theory of courage’ made him believe that the Western world in his lifetime had been short not of wit or of strength, but of will. His readings of heroic poems made him especially scornful of the notion that to say ‘evil must be fought’ is the same as saying ‘might is right’.²³ He thought that England, in forgetting her early literature, had fallen into liberal self-delusions. Naturally all these ‘morals’ or ‘meanings’ can in themselves be accepted or rejected, depending very much on the varied experience of readers. What cannot be denied is that they emerge from much experience in the author, and much original thought, that they are moreover integrated in a fiction which has a power independent of them. Tolkien was not writing to a thesis. A good deal of what he wrote may be taken as a rejection of the ‘liberal interpretation of history’, and indeed of the ‘liberal humanist tradition’ in literature;²⁴ nevertheless the centre of his story is the Ring and the maxim that ‘power corrupts’, a concept unimpeachably modern, democratic, anti- though not un-heroic. Eucatastrophe, realism, and romance

It should be clear by this time that if there is one critical statement entirely and absolutely wrong, it is the one quoted at the start of this chapter, about The Lord of the Rings not being ‘moulded by some controlling vision of things which is at the same time its raison d’être’. The ‘vision of things’ is there in the Ring, in the scenes of conflict and temptation, in the characters’ words and attitudes, in proverbs and in prophecies and in the very narrative mode itself. Naturally this ‘understanding of reality’ can be ‘denied’: so can they all. But not to see that it exists shows a surprising (and therefore interesting) blindness. It is matched only by Alfred Duggan’s insistence in the TLS that in The Lord of the Rings all the good and bad sides do is try to kill each other, so that they cannot be told apart: ‘Morally there seems nothing to choose between them.’²⁵ The difference is at the very heart of the plot. As W. H. Auden saw, in his piece for The New York Review of Books (22 January 1956), it is vital that Sauron does not guard the Cracks of Doom and discover Frodo because he is sure Aragorn will take the Ring:

Evil, that is, has every advantage but one – it is inferior in imagination. Good can imagine the possibility of becoming evil – hence the refusal of Gandalf and Aragorn to use the Ring – but Evil, defiantly chosen, can no longer imagine anything but itself.

Not to see points like that (and there are more obvious ones) is in a way shameful. The repeated blindnesses of critics can only be explained by a deep dissatisfaction in them with the very data of ‘fairy-story’, an inhibition against accepting the conventions of romance.

Of these the greatest must be the ‘happy ending’ (one brought about, more often than not, by ‘hap’ or ‘chance’ or ‘luck’). Tolkien, of course, being a Christian, did in absolute fact believe that in the end all things would end happily, that in a sense they already had – a belief he shared with Dante, and a matter of faith beyond argument. It needs to be said though that he was capable of envisaging a different belief and even bringing it into his story. Frodo and Sam debate it after they have destroyed the Ring and are caught in the fall of the Dark Tower:

‘I don’t want to give up yet’ [said Sam]. ‘It’s not like me, somehow, if you understand.’

‘Maybe not, Sam,’ said Frodo; ‘but it’s like things are in the world. Hopes fail. An end comes. We have only a little time to wait now. We are lost in ruin and downfall, and there is no escape.’ (p. 929)

He does not change his mind, nor his perception of how ‘things are in the world’. They are changed for him by the eagles who come and take him in his sleep to a new world – which Sam, with a resurrected Gandalf in front of him, very nearly perceives as Heaven. The difference between Earth and Middle-earth, one might say, is that in the latter faith can, just sometimes, be perceived as fact. And while this is an enormous difference, it is not the same as that between the adult and the child.

It cannot be denied that there is a streak of ‘wish-fulfilment’ in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien would have liked to hear the horns of Rohan blow, and watch the Black Breath of inertia dissolve from his own country. If his work has an image inside itself, it is I think the horn that Éomer gives to Merry, only a small one, but one from the hoard of Scatha the Worm and brought from the North by Eorl the Young. It is a magic one, though only modestly so: ‘He that blows it at need shall set fear in the hearts of his enemies and joy in the hearts of his friends, and they shall hear him and come to him.’ When Merry blows it in the Shire the revolution against sloth and shabbiness and Saruman-‘Sharkey’ is on: no doubt Tolkien would have liked to be able in his own person to do the same. He got closer to his goal than many, however, at least when it came to bringing ‘joy’. At the same time his portrayal of Frodo quietly sliding down to sleep, dismissal and an oblivion which would include ents, elves, dwarves and the whole of Middle-earth, shows that he recognised the limits of his own wishes and their non-correspondence with reality. The last word on the relationship between his literary mode and that of realism may perhaps go to Professor Frank Kermode, who wrote:

Romance could be defined as a means of exhibiting the action of magical and moral laws in a version of human life so selective as to obscure, for the special purpose of concentrating attention on these laws, the fact that in reality their force is intermittent and only fitfully glimpsed.

Professor Kermode made those remarks however à propos of Shakespeare’s Tempest.²⁶ And one has to say that while both Prospero and Gandalf are old men with staffs, Prospero brushes aside the oppositions of reality with an ease which Gandalf is never allowed to aspire to.

‘WHEN ALL OUR FATHERS WORSHIPPED STOCKS AND STONES’ Stylistic theories: Tolkien and Shakespeare

Mentioning Tolkien in the same breath with Shakespeare will seem to many rash, even perverse. If there is one image which biographical criticism has projected powerfully, it is that of Tolkien the Philistine, hater of literary mainstreams. He read little modern poetry and little modern fiction, taking ‘no serious notice’ even of what he read. He liked as much as anything the works of John Buchan. In 1931 he succeeded in eliminating Shakespeare from his part of the Oxford English syllabus. In childhood he found that he ‘disliked cordially’ Shakespeare’s plays, remembering especially an early ‘bitter disappointment and disgust … with the shabby use made in Shakespeare of the coming of “Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane hill”’.¹ Many critics have felt that these strongly anti-literary or anti-poetic attitudes have found suitable reflection in Tolkien’s own style, described variously as ‘Brewer’s Biblical’, ‘Boy’s Own’, irresistibly reminiscent of ‘the work of Mr Frank Richards’ (the creator of a sequence of school stories about a fat boy, Billy Bunter). It is a common critical stance to praise Tolkien’s conception, often somewhat vaguely, or with even more vagueness his ‘mythological’ or ‘mythopoeic’ powers; but then to declare that the words do not live up to the things, the style ‘is quite inadequate to the theme’.² There are however immediate reasons for thinking that this stance is imperceptive. Tolkien said that he ‘disliked’ Shakespeare ‘cordially’, but he used exactly the same phrase of allegory too, where it concealed an opinion of some subtlety. On a larger scale one might observe that his lifelong preoccupation with words gave him a kind of sensitivity to them, even if it was an unorthodox one; and further that it is strange that a myth should so make its way if enshrined and embodied in words as inappropriate as critics have made out. ‘Style’ and ‘mythology’ are in fact not to be separated, though they may be disentangled. A concept which helps one to see Tolkien’s view of both is that of ‘loose’ or ‘tight’ semantic and dramatic ‘fit’.

The beginnings of this idea emerge well from a passage in The Lord of the Rings which has been singled out for especially ferocious criticism: the parting of Treebeard from Celeborn and Galadriel in The Return of the King, p. 959:

Then Treebeard said farewell to each of them in turn, and he bowed three times slowly and with great reverence to Celeborn and Galadriel. ‘It is long, long since we met by stock or by stone, A vanimar, vanimálion nostari!’ he said. ‘It is sad that we should meet only thus at the ending. For the world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air. I do not think we shall meet again.’

And Celeborn said: ‘I do not know, Eldest.’ But Galadriel said: ‘Not in Middle-earth, nor until the lands that lie under the wave are lifted up again. Then in the willow-meads of Tasarinan we may meet in the Spring. Farewell!’

These two paragraphs are quoted in his book Modern Fantasy by Dr C. N. Manlove, who then goes straight on as usual to spearhead the critical assault and declare:

The overworked cadences, the droning, monotonous pitch, the sheer sense of hearts charged not with lead but gas, can offer only nervous sentimental indulgence or plain embarrassment to the reader.

Compare this with, say, Ector’s lament over Arthur in Malory, or the ‘Survivor’s Lament’ in Beowulf, or this from ‘The Wanderer’ …

and Dr Manlove goes on to cite a well-known Ubi sunt passage from the Old English poem and to observe that ‘This is real elegy, for it has something to be elegiac about’.³ Considered as criticism, much of this is mere rudeness, but it does have the merit of introducing medieval comparisons: not on the whole good ground for a Manlove to fight a Tolkien on.

Exactly that passage from The Wanderer, for instance, is paraphrased by Aragorn in chapter 6 of The Two Towers: a candid mind might have looked to see what Tolkien could make of it. As for Ector’s lament, it was in fact over Lancelot, not Arthur. If one reads even more attentively, one cannot help noting a curious stylistic feature not entirely dissociated from Treebeard. What Malory actually wrote was:

‘And now I dare say,’ sayd syr Ector, ‘thou sir Launcelot, there thou lyest, that thou were never matched of erthely knyghtes hande. And thou were the curtest [i.e. most courteous] knyght that ever bare shelde! And thou were the truest frende to thy lovar that ever bestrade hors, and thou were the trewest lover of a synful man that ever loved woman, and thou were the kyndest man that ever strake with swerde.⁴

The kindest man that ever struck with sword?, modern readers reflect. The truest lover that ever bestrode a horse? In modern contexts phrases like this could only be funny. Strong belief in the virtues of stylistic and semantic consistency urge us to keep kindness and sword-strokes, loved women and bestridden horses, in separate mental compartments. But clearly Malory did not feel this urge towards exactness at all. Did Tolkien? Tolkien furthermore no doubt noted that Malory’s insensitivity in this respect (a common thing in medieval writers) had not led necessarily to failure. His emulation of ‘loose semantic fit’ does however puzzle many modern readers – those especially who have been sophisticated by modern literary practice.

To go back to Dr Manlove and Treebeard: it is actually hard to make out what bits of the text have caused the irritation. It could be the boldly untranslated fragment of Quenya,⁵ or the triple repetition of ‘feel … feel … smell’, or the sudden change to less plain language in Galadriel’s speech, with its elvish place-name (and also its typical echo of wartime English popular song).⁶ However all these are easily defensible. If the paragraphs quoted do contain anything to gripe at seriously, it must be Treebeard’s opening sentence, with its oddly redundant phrase, ‘by stock or by stone’. What have stocks and stones got to do with the matter? Isn’t the phrase just meaningless, flung in for the rhythm, meaning no more than ‘by pillar or by post’, ‘by night or by day’, ‘by hook or by crook’? So one might feel. But it is exactly in phrases like this that one sees Tolkien playing with medieval notions of style, with ‘loose semantic fit’, with a personal view of poetry.

‘By stock or by stone’ is certainly a deliberate echo of the fourteenth century poem Pearl, written by the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and probably the most powerful of all medieval elegies. Under its image of the jeweller who has lost his pearl in an orchard, this describes a father lamenting his dead infant daughter in the graveyard where she is buried. He falls asleep with his head on her grave mound, to be taken away in spirit to a strange land where all his grief suddenly fades – and where to his utter delight he sees his lost child facing him, on the other side of a river. But she has grown up strangely, and she treats him with a cold formality, calling him ‘Sir’ but correcting him almost every time he speaks. How sad he has been, he says; he had no need to be, she replies. Quite right, he agrees, for (praise God) he has found her and will live with her in joy from now on; no, she says, she is not there, he cannot join her, he cannot cross the river. Don’t send me away again, he pleads, to ‘durande doel’. Why are you always talking about sorrow? she asks fiercely. At that the father gives up his attempt to take an active role, humbles himself, but repeats his grief in his apology:

VISIONS AND REVISIONS The Shaping of ‘The Silmarillion’

The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are the works which have made Tolkien’s reputation. They were not, however, ‘the work of his heart’, as I have called it elsewhere (Author, ch. 5). This was the immense complex of stories, repeatedly told and retold in quite different forms, which I call ‘the Silmarillion’, but distinguish from The Silmarillion: which is the selection from that immense complex made by Christopher Tolkien and published in 1977, arranged as the latter explains ‘in such a way as seemed to me to produce the most coherent and internally self-consistent narrative’. Tolkien worked on his hobbit-cycle for nearly thirty years, if one accepts that he began composing The Hobbit about 1929 and was still working on the Appendices to The Lord of the Rings in 1955 (see Bibliography, pp. 7, 96). He worked on ‘the Silmarillion’, however, for more than twice as long, for his unpublished ‘Story of Kullervo’, written in 1914, contains the seed of the story of Túrin Turambar, later to be one of the ‘Great Tales’ (Letters, pp. 7, 214–5), while he was still thinking and writing about these texts and their problems in the last year of his life, 1973 (see Peoples, pp. 377–92). These sixty years of development are now set out in Christopher Tolkien’s ‘History of Middle-earth’, most particularly in volumes I–V and IX–XII (VI–VIII being concerned for the most part with the four parts of ‘The History of The Lord of the Rings’).

The best short account of these sixty years is that of Charles Noad, in his essay ‘On the Construction of “The Silmarillion”’ in Legendarium pp. 31–68¹, now supplemented and extended by John Garth’s detailed and full-length study of Tolkien’s war years, Tolkien and the Great War² , works of which I can give only brief summary here. But briefly: the first glimmerings of Tolkien’s new mythology are contained in a series of poems, mostly unpublished at the time and written while Tolkien was an Oxford undergraduate, 1914–1916 (a collection of these poems was rejected by the publishers Sidgwick and Jackson in April 1916). For most of the rest of that year Tolkien was training as an officer or on active service at the Battle of the Somme. Late in October 1916, however, he was returned to hospital in England with ‘trench fever’, and remained a convalescent with recurrent bouts of fever for the next two years. During this time, and for the most part in 1917, Tolkien wrote the material eventually published as The Book of Lost Tales, Parts One and Two, the first two volumes of ‘The History of Middle-earth’. These sixteen chapters contain a great part of the material which was to become The Silmarillion, including (under different titles) the ‘Great Tales’ of Beren and Lúthien, of Túrin Turambar, the Fall of Gondolin and the Tale of Eärendil, as also the elvish tales of ‘The Darkening of Valinor’ and ‘The Coming of the Noldoli’, and the mythological tales of ‘The Music of the Ainur’, ‘The Coming of the Valar’ and ‘The Chaining of Melko’. It is not too much to say that the outline of The Silmarillion was visible by the end of 1917 – or would have been if it had found any readers. For some years thereafter Tolkien was no doubt preoccupied with earning a living, but once he had found stable employment at the University of Leeds and then the University of Oxford, he began to put the tale of Túrin into alliterative verse and the tale of Beren into rhymed verse as ‘The Lay of the Children of Húrin’ and ‘The Lay of Leithian’ respectively, both these now published as The Lays of Beleriand, volume III of ‘The History of Middle-earth’; the first task occupied him approximately 1920–25, the second 1926–31. In 1926, though, Tolkien decided to show some of his poems, including a part of ‘The Lay of the Children of Húrin’ to his former schoolteacher R. W. Reynolds, and wrote a brief epitome of the ‘Lost Tales’ to give him some necessary background. This ‘Earliest “Silmarillion”’ led on to a longer epitome, the ‘Quenta’ or ‘Qenta Noldorinwa … drawn from the Book of Lost Tales’, written in 1930, and to two sets of annals, the ‘Annals of Valinor’ and ‘of Beleriand’ written at roughly the same time. These would lead on in their turn to two later sets of annals and a further expanded epitome, the ‘Quenta Silmarillion’, written between 1930 and 1937. These two bodies of work, from 1926–30 and 1930–37, appear in volumes IV and V of ‘The History of Middle-earth’, respectively The Shaping of Middle-earth and The Lost Road. In 1937, furthermore, Tolkien was asked by Stanley Unwin, publisher of The Hobbit, if he had any other material suitable for publication, and he sent him several manuscripts including ‘The Lay of Leithian’ and ‘The Quenta Silmarillion’. The publisher’s reader, Edward Crankshaw, seems to have been given only the former to read and some pages of the latter as background, and seems also to have been quite baffled by both, and by how they related to each other. Stanley Unwin accordingly gave Tolkien a polite rejection and urged him to start working on a sequel to The Hobbit. Tolkien took the rejection as being a rejection of the ‘Silmarillion’ material – which had in fact hardly been read at all – and started work on the Hobbit-sequel which was to become The Lord of the Rings.

The ironies of this situation are well set out by Christopher Tolkien in The Lays of Beleriand, pp. 364–7, but one effect was that Tolkien ceased working on anything but the hobbit-cycle (with one significant exception discussed below, pp. 336–45) for more than a decade. Once The Lord of the Rings was effectively completed, however, he turned back with renewed energy to ‘the Silmarillion’, and in the early 1950s wrote two further sets of annals, ‘The Annals of Aman’ and ‘The Grey Annals’, along with a yet longer epitome, ‘The Later “Quenta Silmarillion”’, all these published along with much else in volumes X and XI of ‘The History of Middle-earth’, Morgoth’s Ring and The War of the Jewels. From this body of materials, dating from 1917, from the 1920s, the 1930s, and the 1950s, much of it written over and over again so as to become ‘a chaotic palimpsest, with layer upon layer of correction and wholesale rewriting, of riders and deletions’ (Lost Road, p. 199), Christopher Tolkien was eventually to extract the work published as The Silmarillion in 1977. In Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-earth three years later he went on to give significant expansions of some of the ‘Silmarillion’ material, including the longest and most developed account of the Túrin story, ‘The Narn i Hîn Húrin’ or ‘Tale of the Children of Húrin’, as well as of the Second Age (that of Númenor), and the Third Age, which ran from the first defeat of Sauron by Elendil, Gil-galad and Isildur to the destruction of the Ring and the departure of Frodo over sea.

These two works, The Silmarillion of 1977 and the Unfinished Tales of 1980, are the subject of the rest of this chapter. It is true, of course, and as should be clear from the paragraphs above, that these are posthumous works which never reached the final shape intended by their author. But in the first place their author never reached a final intention, so his wishes are not being flouted; in the second place, he clearly very deeply wished to see the materials on which he had worked for so long at last published, as his son records (Lost Tales 1, p. 5); and in the third place, The Silmarillion has by now found millions of readers to confirm its existence as a substantial text. Many of those readers have furthermore found it a difficult and challenging text: as I remark below, it ‘could never be anything but hard to read’, so that some account of it is not only called for but likely to be actually useful. Meanwhile, the main reason for deciding to treat it and the Unfinished Tales here, instead of where (some would say) they belong, i.e. before The Hobbit and along with the ‘Philological Inquiries’ of chapter 2, is that that is the way most readers experience them. Probably ninety-nine people out of a hundred come to The Silmarillion and the Unfinished Tales only after reading The Lord of the Rings, while because of the uncompromising nature of the posthumously-published works, it will probably always be hard for most readers to understand them except after reading The Lord of the Rings. In that work Tolkien had set himself to write a romance for an audience brought up on novels. In the others, whether we consider them as earlier or later, we are left with far less guidance. It is accordingly the main aim of this chapter to help people to read The Silmarillion (I use once again the phrase which Tolkien and Gordon used of their edition of Sir Gawain) ‘with an appreciation as far as possible of the sort which its author may be supposed to have desired’. Subsidiary to that, though still important, are the issues of what it has to say and how it came to be: ‘sources’ and ‘designs’ once more, both things Tolkien disliked, but useful if not essential to a proper reading.

I am grateful, however, for the opportunity to correct much of what I wrote twenty years ago in the light not only of the published material discussed above, but also of Christopher Tolkien’s comments on my initial version, for which see Lost Tales 1, pp. 1–4, 7, and Lost Tales 2, p. 57. The Dangers of Going On

Before beginning any commentary, though, there is one very obvious question to ask, which is why Tolkien never saw The Silmarillion into print himself, and why the Unfinished Tales remained unfinished. There were, after all, nearly eighteen years between the appearance of The Return of the King and Tolkien’s death on 2 September 1973 – as long an interval as that between The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring. During most of that period Tolkien was furthermore relieved of distracting academic duties, while he was not putting his energies into other creative work: almost all the sixteen poems in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (1962) had seen print before, his contribution to The Road Goes Ever On (1968) consisted mostly of explanation and footnote, and Smith of Wootton Major (1967) is on the same relatively small scale as ‘Leaf by Niggle’. Besides, to repeat the point made above, The Silmarillion was very largely in existence from 1937 on; was also known to be in existence, and very much in demand! Why, then, could Tolkien not finish his legends of the First Age off?

An answer to this, of a personal kind, has been given by Humphrey Carpenter on pp. 318–20 of his Biography. There was in Tolkien’s later life, he notes, ‘a perpetual discontinuity, a breaking of threads which delayed achievement and frustrated him more and more’. Partly the causes were external – loss of friends, hosts of visitors – but partly temperamental: Tolkien could not ‘discipline himself into adopting regular working methods’ (a fault of which he had been aware since the time of ‘Leaf by Niggle’). The Silmarillion was accordingly held up to a great extent, in Mr Carpenter’s view, by procrastination and bother over inessentials, by crosswords and games of Patience, by drawing heraldic doodles and answering readers’ letters – all compounded, one might add, by the failing energies of age (see Letters, p. 228). This is a convincing picture, and no doubt partly true. Yet it is not a picture of someone taking things easy: rather of continual, if misdirected, intellectual effort. One may remark that it is common experience to find that conscientious people who have a job to do that is too much for them (like writing a book) turn in their uncertainty to doing a succession of easier jobs instead (like answering their mail, drawing up syllabuses, or rationalising office organisation). Something like this seems to have been the case with Tolkien. He may have frittered his time away in constructing etymologies and writing kindly letters to strangers. But these activities occupied him, one may well think, because he could see he had painted himself into a corner: there were purely literary reasons for not finishing The Silmarillion, and these can be deduced not only from that work itself, but from almost the whole of Tolkien’s professional career. For one thing, both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings can be seen as primarily works of mediation. In the former Bilbo acts as the link between modern times and the archaic world of dwarves and dragons. In the latter Frodo and his Shire companions play a similar part, though the world they move in has also and in more complex ways been ‘mediated’, turned into a Limbo. Outside these works, though, hobbits are not to be met with, it would be almost impossible for them to exist in the much more rarefied air of the legends of the First Age, and without their existence modern readers lack guidance and a secure point of comparison. The very success of the hobbit-cycle was bound to make a work without hobbits a disappointment, or a puzzle.

But there may have been a more complex reason for Tolkien’s long hesitation. To go back to ‘Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics’: if this makes one thing clear it is that the literary quality Tolkien valued above all was the ‘impression of depth … effect of antiquity … illusion of historical truth and perspective’ which he found in Beowulf, in the Aeneid, or for that matter in Macbeth, Sir Orfeo, or the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. In all these works there was a sense that the author knew more than he was telling, that behind his immediate story there was a coherent, consistent, deeply fascinating world about which he had no time (then) to speak. Of course this sense, as Tolkien kept repeating, was largely an illusion, even a provocation to which a wise man should not respond. The ‘heroic lays’ which the Beowulf-poet knew and alluded to sound very fine from his allusions, but if we had them we might discover that the fascination came from his art, not theirs. ‘Alas for the lost lore, the annals and old poets that Virgil knew, and only used in the making of a new thing!’, wrote Tolkien, and he meant it. However he also meant everyone to realise that the ‘new thing’ was worth more than the ‘lost lore’.

The application of this to his own career must (once The Lord of the Rings was published) have seemed all too obvious. One quality which that work has in abundance is the Beowulfian ‘impression of depth’, created just as in the old epic by songs and digressions like Aragorn’s song of Beren and Lúthien, Sam Gamgee’s allusions to the Silmaril and the Iron Crown, Elrond’s account of Celebrimbor, and dozens more. This, however, is a quality of The Lord of the Rings, not of the inset stories. To tell these in their own right and expect them to retain the charm they got from their larger setting would be a terrible error, an error to which Tolkien would be more sensitive than any man alive – though as Christopher Tolkien points out (Lost Tales 1, p. 3) the error would be in the expectation, not in the telling. Tolkien saw the problem and expressed his sense of it in a revealing letter dated 20 September 1963. He had clearly been asked for a sequel to The Lord of the Rings, and replied that he could give ‘another volume (or many) about the same imaginary world’. But he had many other things to do, he feared ‘the presentation will need a lot of work’, and he saw that the legends had to be made consistent with each other and with what he had already published. He went on:

I am doubtful myself about the undertaking. Part of the attraction of The L.R. is, I think, due to the glimpses of a large history in the background: an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist. To go there is to destroy the magic, unless new unattainable vistas are again revealed. (Letters, p. 333)³

To go there is to destroy the magic. As for the revealing of ‘new unattainable vistas’, the problem there – as Tolkien must have thought many times – was that in The Lord of the Rings Middle-earth was already old, with a vast weight of history behind it. The Silmarillion, though, in its longer form, was bound to begin at the beginning. How could ‘depth’ be created when you had nothing to reach further back to?

The problem was not absolutely insoluble: Milton, after all, had managed to begin his epic very near the beginnings of time, in Paradise Lost. Furthermore one can perhaps see the solution to which Tolkien, in his philological way, was drawn, namely to present the First Age ‘as a complex of divergent texts interlinked by commentary’ (UT, p. 1), the texts themselves being supposedly written by Men, of different periods, looking back across the ages to vast rumours of whose truth they knew only part, like Sam Gamgee responding to Gimli’s song ‘Of mighty kings in Nargothrond / And Gondolin’ (see once more Lost Tales 1, p. 3). The Silmarillion might then have come to look like (for example) The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise, written late but preserving intensely moving fragments of verse from some much older time now lost; even the editorial matter would then reinforce the effect of age and darkness (a device Tolkien used on a much smaller scale for The Adventures of Tom Bombadil). However that avenue was never explored to its end; and if it had been, one may doubt whether many readers would have grasped the total effect. A Silmarillion on that plan could have ended as merely a pastime for scholars. It is better, no doubt, to see it as it is now, ‘a completed and cohesive entity’ (UT, p. 1 again). But in any case The Lord of the Rings had created other problems for its author besides the issue of ‘depth’: these affected The Silmarillion, but show up more strongly in the Unfinished Tales.

One was the strong temptation towards explicitness and over-clarity. In Letters, p. 348, Tolkien noted the comic case of a Mr Shorthouse, who produced by accident a strange, queer, debatable book called John Inglesant. Slowly it caught on, became a bestseller, ‘the subject of public discussion from the Prime Minister downwards’. Success, however, ruined its author, who took to strange clothes and beliefs and ‘never wrote any more, but wasted the rest of his time trying to explain what he had and what he had not meant in John Inglesant’. ‘I have always tried to take him as a melancholy warning’ (wrote Tolkien in 1964), so the danger was seen. Still, it was there.

It emerges, for instance, if one considers water. No scene, perhaps, in The Lord of the Rings is more moving or more suggestive than the one in which Sam and Frodo, in Mordor, see the wind changing and the darkness driven back, and then as if in answer to prayer come upon a trickle of water: ‘ill-fated’ and ‘fruitless’ in appearance, but at that moment seemingly a message from the world outside, beyond the Shadow. In The Silmarillion we learn that water is the province of the Vala Ulmo, and that from it (sea or river) there often comes assistance; the incident with Sam and Frodo begins to seem less and less like chance, more and more of a ‘sending’. If this went too far, of course, the sense of supernatural assistance would destroy one’s awareness of the companions’ courage, as also the deeply-felt implicit moral that this is the way to behave. None of us can expect assistance from a Vala; nevertheless in any kind of Mordor it is one’s duty to go on. By the time The Lord of the Rings was finished, Tolkien was beginning to think of taking matters further. He had shown inspiration coming from Ulmo to Tuor, as the hero sat by a trickling stream, both in The Silmarillion (p. 238), and in ‘Of Tuor and his Coming to Gondolin’ (written c. 1951),⁴ in the Unfinished Tales, p. 20. Clearly the idea of water as a sanctity and an unfailing refuge from the Dark Lord had started to appeal to him; and in ‘The Hunt for the Ring’, accordingly, a sort of coda to The Lord of the Rings written c. 1955, he wrote that all the Nazgûl save their chief ‘feared water, and were unwilling, except in dire need, to enter it or to cross streams unless dryshod by a bridge’ (UT, p. 343). How then had they crossed Wilderland to the Shire? Christopher Tolkien notes that his father saw ‘the idea was difficult to sustain’. Besides that, it would have brought the Valar too far forward; at many points it would have destroyed the hobbits’ highly realistic sense of loneliness and confusion.

One may think that Tolkien was rightly pushing towards a clarification of his ‘mythology’.⁵ Yet at the same time he was edging back from his long concern with heroic valour, or hobbitic moral courage. It has been remarked already that he was in minor matters kind-hearted. As The Lord of the Rings came to an end this temptation, too, grew upon him. Bill the pony is saved in The Return of the King. In the ‘Epilogue’ to that work, eventually printed in SD pp. 114–35, we learn that Shadowfax will be saved too, to be taken on the last ship from the Havens to Aman, simply because Gandalf could not bear the parting. This would be a failure of nerve in a work which had sacrificed Lórien, and Tolkien, having written it, wisely decided to leave it out. Still, the second edition of The Lord of the Rings cuts out some minor, but convincing, asperity on the part of a strained Aragorn; it seemed too tough.⁶ More seriously, in the ‘late’ narrative of ‘The Disaster of the Gladden Fields’ (UT, pp. 271–87), one can see Tolkien reconsidering Isildur. His use of the ominous word ‘precious’ in The Fellowship of the Ring (p. 246) had been quite enough to suggest that he was already becoming ‘addicted’, that his death was in a way a mercy. In the later narrative, though, Isildur uses the Ring painfully and reluctantly, with much excuse and apology. The Ring seems to find no answer in him to its call. But this again is running against a crucial point in The Lord of the Rings, namely that no one can be trusted, not even ‘the Keepers of the Three’. Tolkien, no doubt, would have seen this point and dealt with it somehow if he had published a full account. Still, one can see him becoming more loath to accept the evil in the good: and while this is charitable, it does not make for powerful story.

A final straw in the wind may be Tolkien’s increasing desire to pull strands together. The Middle-earth of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is full of chaotic half-glimpsed independent lives, ears in the forest, fell voices on the wind, enemy powers older than Sauron and unconnected with him. In a letter of 1955 Tolkien had rather laughed at the idea that Willow-man and the wights were agents of the Dark Lord: ‘Cannot people imagine things hostile to men and hobbits who prey on them without being in league with the Devil!’ (Letters, p. 228). But in manuscript B of ‘The Hunt for the Ring’ (written at much the same time) just this idea is being entertained. The Chief Ringwraith stays on the Barrow-downs for some while before Frodo sets out, ‘and the Barrow-wights were roused, and all things of evil spirit, hostile to Elves and Men, were on the watch with malice in the Old Forest and on the Barrow-downs’ (UT, p. 348).

None of the points just mentioned is of any great significance in itself. As a whole, though, they do suggest an author looking back over his own work and trying to reduce it to order. The menace in that, as everyone knows, is that with system comes rationalisation and loss of vitality. There are moments when one fears that Tolkien, in the Unfinished Tales – and in fairness one must repeat that they are unfinished, were never finally ‘passed’ by their author – was turning against the sources of his inspiration. He tried to realign retrospectively things he had written many years before, for what at the time had been entirely adequate reasons. The point of making Bilbo both ‘bourgeois’ and ‘burglar’ has been explained above; and the scene in Bag End in chapter 1 of The Hobbit is completely successful as comedy. But by the time he wrote ‘The Quest of Erebor’ (perhaps around 1950), Tolkien had come to think it undignified. In repeated versions he explains laboriously that Gandalf forced Bilbo on Thorin out of some Valinorean ‘foresight’; or because he knew hobbits were stealthy; or because he thought Bilbo had the right ‘mix’ of Took and Baggins; while as for the word ‘burglar’, it was all a dwarvish misunderstanding. The very multiplicity of reasons suggests doubt; and in romance it is a good rule that not everything should be explained.

In any case one may well think that the sheer effort of dotting ‘i’s and crossing ‘t’s was draining. On one issue – the nature of the orcs – Tolkien seems very nearly to have arrived at a solution without quite being able to grasp it, a sign, perhaps, of exhaustion. There can be little doubt that the orcs entered Middle-earth originally just because the story needed a continual supply of enemies over whom one need feel no compunction, ‘the infantry of the old war’, to use Tolkien’s phrase from ‘Monsters’ (p. 264). But several readers had pointed out that if evil could not create, was only good perverted, then presumably the orcs had been by nature good and might in some way be saved; Tolkien certainly balked at calling them ‘irredeemable’, see Letters, pp. 195, 355. The Silmarillion accordingly expresses more than once the theory that orcs were in fact captured elves ‘by slow arts of cruelty … corrupted and enslaved’ (S, p. 50). One can only say that in that case there are an awful lot of them – ‘the pits of Angband seemed to hold store inexhaustible and ever-renewed’ (S, p. 157). They must have been bred, one thinks, and indeed we are told they multiplied ‘after the manner of the children of Ilúvatar’, i.e. sexually. But in that case one wonders (a) why what we would call ‘brainwashed’ creatures should breed true, and (b) why we never come upon female orcs. Tolkien shrank from that last, and recorded (UT, p. 385) a rival theory that the orcs were bred from something like the Drúedain, the Pûkel-men. I suspect that at the back of his mind there lurked a phrase from Beowulf, about those very similar monsters Grendel and his mother: no híe fæder cunnon, ‘men know of no father for them’. It would be a good solution to see the orcs as multiplying ‘like flies’, as if by some manufacturing process in hatcheries in Barad-dûr or Moria or the pits of Angband – maybe they ‘quickened in the earth like maggots’, as Snorri Sturluson had written centuries before (see above). Such beings would be ‘creatures’ of evil in a special sense, made and animated by their master in a way which falls just short of the heresy that evil can itself create. As Ilúvatar says of Aulë’s dwarves, they would have no being of their own, ‘moving when [he thinks] to move them, and if [his] thought is elsewhere, standing idle’. Tolkien saw the problem, and collected the parts of a solution. He did not, however, assemble the parts – perhaps because it would have involved, to be consistent, a complete revision of all his earlier work.⁷

The word underlying these last few pages is ‘thrift’. All minds possess a drive towards consistency, towards reducing data, events, characters to some smaller set of principles or categories. Much of Tolkien’s writing in Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales shows that urge, a strong and honourable one. It is fair to say, though, that against this basic drive all minds also possess a wish to ignore principles and concentrate instead on single entities regardless of their place in larger systems, to appreciate them simply for themselves. For most of his career Tolkien was a most extreme example of a man with this second urge strongly developed: he was fascinated by names, to give only one example, part of whose nature is that they are for one thing and one thing alone, very hard to reduce to system! Hence the supreme lavishness of Middle-earth in The Lord of the Rings, with its vast store of plants and races, names and languages and individuals and landscapes. As he turned towards thrift, consistency, classification, Tolkien forfeited much of what he had valued before; he was contracting, not expanding. In a way the very success of The Lord of the Rings, founded on its immense solidity and scope, made life difficult for him afterwards. Not only would The Silmarillion have to achieve the ‘depth’ it had already been used to create, it would have to do so without contradicting, and while if possible reinforcing, all the millions of details Tolkien had handed over to his readership already. For these two reasons it is hardly any wonder that Tolkien balked, and that the Unfinished Tales in particular show a mind searching in different directions. After 1955 many ways forward were blocked. The question was, whether the vitality of his original conceptions and compositions of the period before The Lord of the Rings, indeed from the 1910s on, could survive.

Here one must concentrate, not on those explanations of the Second and Third Ages which Tolkien wrote as background for The Lord of the Rings, but on his labour and preoccupation for nearly sixty years, the legends of the First Age: Tuor and Túrin in the Unfinished Tales, but beyond and around them the whole ‘narrative structure’ of The Silmarillion. To repeat questions posed earlier: what have these to say, and how did they come to be? Philosophical Inquiries

The most obvious fact about the design of The Silmarillion is that, like the Shire, it is a ‘calque’, though on the history of Genesis rather than the history of England. In chapter X of A Preface to Paradise Lost (London: Oxford University Press, 1942), C. S. Lewis gave a summary list of doctrines of the Fall of Man common to Milton, to St Augustine, and to ‘the Church as a whole’. Most of them reappear with little change in the Ainulindalë’ or “Valaquenta’. Thus Lewis asserts that ‘God created all things without exception good’; in Tolkien even Melkor begins with good intentions (S, p. 18). ‘What we call bad things are good things perverted … This perversion arises when a conscious creature becomes more interested in itself than in God … the sin of Pride’; compare Melkor in the music of the Ainur seeking ‘to increase the power and glory of the part assigned to himself’. Lewis again, ‘whoever tries to rebel against God produces the result opposite to his intention … Those who will not be God’s sons become his tools’; and Ilúvatar to Melkor, ‘no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me … he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined’ (my italics). It seems very likely that Lewis and Tolkien co-operated in their analysis of Christian essentials; The Silmarillion, with its exile from paradise, its ages of misery, and its Intercessor, is a calque on Christian story, an answer to Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained.

Is it a rival to Christian story? The thought clearly occurred to Tolkien, if only to be repudiated. Significantly he left a gap in The Silmarillion, or designed a dovetail, for the Fall of Man as described in the Old Testament. In his work the human race does not originate ‘on stage’ in Beleriand, but drifts into it, already sundered in speech, from the East. There something terrible has happened to them of which they will not speak: ‘A darkness lies behind us … and we have turned our backs upon it’ (S, p. 141). Furthermore they have met ‘the Lord of the Dark’ before they meet the Elves; Morgoth went to them as soon as they were created, to ‘corrupt or destroy’. Clearly one can, if one wishes, assume that the exploit of Morgoth of which the Eldar never learnt was the traditional seduction of Adam and Eve by the serpent, while the incoming Edain and Easterlings are all descendants of Adam flying from Eden and subject to the curse of Babel. The Silmarillion, then, tells the story of the fall and partial redemption of the elves, without contradicting the story of the Fall and Redemption of Man.

There is no point, though, in merely repeating a known pattern. Tolkien, in his history of the elves, would not wish to go against what he accepted as doctrine universally true. He did however want to say something different: as with a linguistic ‘calque’, familiar structure has to join with strange or novel material. The alienness of Tolkien’s elves, the thing which makes their whole history different from that of humanity, is obviously that (in the natural course of things) they do not die. Accordingly they do not have to be rescued from death by a Saviour; nor from Hell, for they are not judged at death to Hell or Heaven, but sent to ‘the Halls of Mandos’, from which they may in time return. Orthodox correspondents of Tolkien worried about this, and thought he was overstepping the mark (see especially Letters no. 153). To their doubts Tolkien could only reply that he was writing fiction, he had a right to use his imagination, and that after all his elves were only ‘certain aspects of Men and their talents and desires, incarnated in my little world’. Romance, as Professor Kermode said (see above), is a stripped-down form which enables one to concentrate.

What Tolkien wanted to concentrate on, obviously, was death: more precisely perhaps on why people love this world and want so strongly to stay in it when it is an inescapable part of their nature ‘to die and go we know not where’. His imagination centred again on a kind of calque, a diagrammatic reversal. Since we die, he invented a race which did not. Since our ‘fairy-stories’ are full of the escape from death (as he remarked near the end of ‘On Fairy-Stories’, Tree p. 68), ‘the Human-stories of the elves are doubtless full of the Escape from Deathlessness’. Certainly one was, his own tale of Beren and Lúthien as embodied in his ‘Lay of Leithian, Release from Bondage’, in which Lúthien alone of the elves is allowed as a favour to ‘die indeed’ and leave the world like a mortal. Paradise Lost, one might say, exists to tell us that death is a just punishment, and anyway (see Paradise Regained) not final. The Silmarillion by contrast seems to be trying to persuade us to see death potentially as a gift or reward – an attitude to which other authors in this sceptical age have felt drawn.⁸ While the legends of the First Age are a ‘calque’, then, their resemblance to a known pattern directs us primarily to difference from that pattern; the elvishness of the elves is meant to reflect back on the humanity of man.

That seems, anyway, to be what Tolkien came to think. There must however be at least a suspicion that – as with the languages of Middle-earth – he created a structure of thought to justify a more primary urge, delight in language, delight in ancient story. Elves, like dragons, are embedded deeply in several different traditions of North-West Europe, and the inconsistencies of those traditions⁹ may only have made Tolkien itch to create a Zusammenhang. Did elves have souls, for instance? Could they be saved? Anyone who had read Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’ would know that they did not and could not – not unless they married a mortal, as with Lúthien. Tolkien did know ‘The Little Mermaid’, though he did not like it (Letters, p. 311), probably because he thought it too sentimental. Older and tougher belief on the same issue is embodied in another tale Tolkien had probably read, the Scottish story of ‘The Woman of Peace and the Bible’¹⁰: in this an elf-woman approaches an old man reading his Bible and asks ‘if there was any hope given in holy Scripture for such as she’. The old man replies kindly, but says there is no mention of salvation in the Good Book ‘for any but the sinful sons of Adam’ – at which the lady gives a cry of despair and hurls herself into the sea. The old man’s answer is strict and orthodox but (as with the view that preconversion heroes like Beowulf or Aragorn could not be saved) hardly seems fair. Why should only the ‘sinful’ be saved? However it was not Tolkien’s way to deny orthodoxy: nor to abjure equally old and traditional belief in the allure of elves and their separation from evil. He looked for a middle path. And in this activity he had at least one model.

This is not, for once, the Beowulf-poet, who took a strong line on ylfe or elves, putting them into a list with ‘ettens’ and indeed with ‘orcs’ – a very stern view of all non-human and un-Christian species. But at least one other English poet preceded Tolkien in being less sure, the author of the legend of St Michael in The Early South English Legendary, written about 1250. Tolkien never mentions reading this, but it is unlikely that as a medievalist he did not. What the Middle English poet has to say, in essence, is that in the war between God and Satan for men’s souls, there may perhaps be neutrals. In the War in Heaven not all the angels were whole-heartedly for God or for Lucifer. The ones who inclined toward the devils without actually joining them are accordingly confined in tempests till Doomsday, when they will go to Hell. Correspondingly, those who wavered towards God have been sent from Heaven to Earth, where ‘they will be in a certain pain up to the end of the world, but at Doomsday they shall return to Heaven. Others are still in the Earthly Paradise, and in other places on Earth, doing their penance.’ Both good and evil spirits come to Earth to protect or corrupt men, but these neutrals can be seen too:

And ofte in fourme of wommane: In many derne weye

grete compaygnie men i-seoth of heom: boþe hoppie and pleize,

Þat Eluene beoth i-cleopede: and ofte heo comiez to toune,

And bi daye muche in wodes heo beoth: and bi nizte ope heize dounes.

Þat beoth þe wrechche gostes: Þat out of heuene weren i-nome,

And manie of heom a-domesday: zeot schullen to reste come.

‘ON THE COLD HILL’S SIDE’ Of Birch Hats and Cold Potions

Writing twenty years ago, I began this chapter with the words, ‘There is, in a way, no more of “Middle-earth” to consider.’ This was tempting Providence with a vengeance, for there were twelve volumes of ‘The History of Middle-earth’ yet to appear, and to be considered. Nor can I correct myself at this stage by suggesting, ‘Tolkien wrote no more of Middle-earth’, for the last three volumes of ‘The History of Middle-earth’ in particular show, like much of the Unfinished Tales, that Tolkien’s creativity was indeed released by the completion of The Lord of the Rings, and that he continued writing within the framework of his Middle-earth mythology all through the last twenty years of his life. Some of this has been discussed already, and there is further comment throughout chapter 9. This chapter turns, however, to a more personal theme: ‘the road to Middle-earth’, or Tolkien’s own attitudes to his work, as they emerge especially from the short pieces and poems of his later years. Tolkien might not have approved of such a study, for he valued his privacy. Still, the inquiry has much to do with the major theme of this book, namely the interlocking of philology and fiction. And here I, at least, cannot help looking at what I see as the third in Tolkien’s triad of short stories about the sources of his invention, Farmer Giles (written 1938), ‘Leaf by Niggle’ (a few years later), and finally, written in 1965, Smith of Wootton Major.¹

To me, this does not seem to be a difficult piece. I take it that, as with ‘Leaf by Niggle’ quite certainly, and as with Farmer Giles more partially, its mode is allegorical, and its subject is the author himself, especially the relations between his job and his private sources of ‘inspiration’. This assumption of mine has, however, been the one which has drawn the most determined rebuttals from other commentators, especially Mr David Doughan and (twice) Dr Verlyn Flieger,² and it is only fair, then, to restate the arguments for and against it. Against taking Smith allegorically, we have Tolkien’s own endorsement, Letters, p. 388, of a review by Roger Lancelyn Green which stated firmly that the meaning of Smith should be left alone: ‘To seek for the meaning is to cut open the ball in search of its bounce’. This can be backed up by Tolkien’s own stated dislike of allegory, discussed above, and indeed by an even firmer statement of his own specifically about Smith, ‘This short tale is not “allegory”’. That would seem to settle the matter (for in cases like this I would scorn to fall back on the well-known critical get-out, ‘you cannot trust what an author says about his own work’) – if Tolkien had not gone on immediately to add ‘though it is capable of course of allegorical interpretation at certain points’. Tolkien furthermore gave a lead for any such allegorical interpretation by saying, ‘The Great Hall is evidently in a way an “allegory” of the village church; the Master Cook with his house adjacent, and his office that is not hereditary … is plainly the Parson and the priesthood’. Tolkien’s own surviving commentary on his own story, from which these statements, cited by Dr Flieger, are taken is indeed, again according to Dr Flieger, ‘a running argument with himself on the question of whether the story is or is not an allegory’.³ If Tolkien himself could not decide, then, the question can fairly be taken as open.

There is furthermore one element which seems to me a clear case of Tolkienian private symbolism, and that is the name of Smith’s main antagonist throughout the work, the rude and incompetent Master Cook, Nokes. As I have said repeatedly, Tolkien was for some time perhaps the one person in the world who knew most about names, especially English names, and was most deeply interested in them. He wrote about them, commented on them, brought them up in conversation. With all the names in the telephone book to draw on, Tolkien is unlikely to have picked out just one name without considering what it meant: and ‘Nokes’ contains two clues as to its meaning. One is reinforced by the names of Smith’s wife and son and daughter, Nell and Nan and Ned, all of them marked by ‘nunnation’, the English habit of putting an ‘n’ in front of a word, and especially a name, which originally did not have one, like Eleanor and Ann and Edward.⁴ In Nokes’s case one can go further and observe place-names, as for instance Noke – a town in Oxfordshire not far from Brill – whose name is known to have been derived from Old English æt þam ácum, ‘at the oaks’. This became in Middle English *atten okes, and in Modern English, by mistake, ‘at Noke’ or ‘at Nokes’. There is no doubt that Tolkien knew all this, for there is a character called ‘old Noakes’ in the Shire, and Tolkien commented on his name, giving very much the explanation above, in his ‘Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings’, written probably in the late 1950s. Tolkien there wrote off the meaning of ‘Noakes’ as ‘unimportant’, as indeed it is for The Lord of the Rings, but it would be entirely characteristic of him to remember an unimportant philological point and turn it into an important one later.

The second clue lies in the derivation from ‘oak’. ‘Oak’ had a special meaning for Tolkien, pointed out by Christopher Tolkien in his footnote to Shadow, p. 145.^* In his early career as Professor at the University of Leeds, Tolkien had devised a system of splitting the curriculum of English studies into two separate groups or ‘schemes’, the ‘A-scheme’ and the ‘B-scheme’. The ‘A-scheme was for students of literature, the B-scheme for the philologists. Tolkien clearly liked this system, and tried unsuccessfully to introduce it to Oxford in 1930 with similar nomenclature (see ‘OES’, p. 780). But in his private symbolism ‘A’ was represented by the Old English rune-name ác, ‘oak’, ‘B’ by Old English beorc, ‘birch’. Oaks were critics and birches philologists, and Tolkien made the point perfectly clear in Songs for the Philologists, for which see below. As must surely be obvious from chapters 1 and 2 of this work, oaks were furthermore the enemy: the enemy of philology, the enemy of imagination, the enemy of dragons. I do not think that Tolkien could ever have forgotten this. Furthermore it makes sense within Smith, and is not inconsistent with Tolkien’s own equation of the Master Cook with the Parson and the priesthood.

The name ‘Nokes’, then, is my main reason for seeing a professional element in the fable’s allegory, which I would develop as follows. First, Tolkien liked to bring ‘philologist-figures’ into his fiction: the parson of Farmer Giles, the Master of the Houses of Healing, even Gollum as Sméagol with his head turned down and his fascination with ‘roots and beginnings’. There is then something faintly recognisable in the first Master Cook, whose retirement prompts the rest of the story: ‘He had been a kind man who liked to see other people enjoying themselves, but he was himself serious, and said very little’. His sojourn in Faërie made him merrier. Nevertheless one might say that the man who knows a lot, but does not communicate it, and gives a false and unfortunate impression of gravity, is a good image of the nineteenth-century philologist – the type of man who turned the subject into a bogy, see chapter 1. By contrast Nokes seems very clearly to be an unsympathetic picture of the propounders of ‘lit.’. He has no idea of the charms of fantasy. He equates the supernatural with the childish, and both with what is sweet and sticky. His idea of elvish allure has dwindled to a doll with a wand, labelled ‘Fairy Queen’. In particularly annoying fashion, having set up a feeble image of the charms of Faërie, he takes it for granted that the feebleness of the whole concept has been demonstrated: he behaves, in fact, exactly like the critics of Beowulf whom Tolkien had excoriated thirty years before, who, having pushed over the tower of the poem, ‘said (after pushing it over), “What a muddle it is in!”’; or like the Oxford colleagues of whom Tolkien had said, in his somewhat embittered ‘Valedictory Address’, that he ‘felt it a grievance that certain professional persons should suppose their dullness and ignorance [over philology] to be a human norm’; or, one may as well add, like so many of Tolkien’s own critics in later years. As for what Nokes has to offer, his Great Cake is good enough, with no particular faults (Tolkien had nothing against literary study per se), ‘except that it was no bigger than was needed … nothing left over: no coming again’. Not much food for the imagination, one might paraphrase. In any case much of the cake’s goodness seems derived from the sly watch Nokes keeps on Alf Prentice, and from the ‘old books of recipes left behind by previous cooks’, which Nokes cannot understand, but from which he scrapes a few ideas. Literary criticism in England (one might translate) leapt forward from a springboard of old philology, without which even readings of Shakespeare would not get very far. But once it took over the Mastership from the old serious philologists it refused to give credit; this thwarted its own development and left great areas of its proper subject misunderstood.

The ‘professional’ interpretation given above, meanwhile, seems readily compatible with Tolkien’s own equation of Cook with Parson. Nokes is, one should note, married. This is one of the reasons given for selecting him as a stop-gap after the departure of the first Master Cook: he was ‘a solid sort of man with a wife and children, and careful with money’. But if he is married he must surely represent a Protestant parson, in England probably an Anglican, whose house (the vicarage) would indeed stand next to the Great Hall (the village church). Tolkien, however, was a Catholic. He might well have felt that just as Nokes represented a degradation, a decline, from philologist to critic, so he also represented a dwindling from Catholic priest with the power to celebrate the Mass to Anglican vicar capable only of holding a communion. In each case, one could argue on Tolkien’s behalf, something had got lost, something vital if undefinable. Within the story, this mysterious element, ‘not [quite] invisible to attentive eyes’, is represented by the fay-star: left behind by the old Master Cook, baked into a cake by Nokes, swallowed by Smith, for whom it becomes the passport into Faërie, returned reluctantly to Alf Prentice, destined in the end for Nokes’s great-grandson Tim. Whatever wording one chooses, this object must surely stand for, and be understood by all readers to stand for, something like: vision, receptiveness to fantasy, mythopoeic power, ability to pass outside Wootton Major, Wootton being, of course, wudu-tún, ‘the town in the wood’, the ‘wood of the world’ in which so many of Tolkien’s characters, elves, men and hobbits, wander temporarily or permanently ‘bewildered’.

There are two further strange features in the story which seem to call for an explanation, and which should be noted before trying to come to a conclusion. One is, as mentioned above, that the fay-star will go in the end to Nokes’s kin, not Smith’s. Smith is the central character, the bearer of the vision, he has a much-loved son, Ned, it would be a natural and satisfying ending for the star to go to him when Smith has finally to relinquish it. But this comfortable conclusion is rejected. Though Nokes is, at almost the very end, satisfactorily squashed, it might be said that his family, at least, will have the last laugh over Smith’s, as Nokes has the last word – rather like Councillor Tompkins’s final and crushing victory over Niggle, in this world, in ‘Leaf by Niggle’. The other strange feature is a kind of duality in the supporters of Faërie. Smith is the central character and the bearer of the star, but the real controller of the star is Alf Prentice, and he too is in a way a dual character. One of his names, Prentice, is a trade-name just like Smith, but the other is Alf. And while Alf is common English short-for-Alfred (and so looks like Ned or Nan or Tim) it is also the modern spelling of Old English ælf, ‘elf’, which is what Alf is. He disguises himself as an ordinary person, but is revealed at the end as King of Faërie, to whom the Queen sends her cryptic message, ‘The time has come. Let him choose.’ Alf/Prentice, Smith/Prentice: what did Tolkien mean by this (for him) novel double duality?

I would suggest that, if the old Cook is a philologist-figure, and Nokes a critic-figure, the suspicion must be that Smith is a Tolkien-figure. Smith himself never becomes Cook, never bakes a Great Cake. It is perhaps fair to remark that Tolkien never produced a major full-length work on medieval literature. Against that Smith’s life is one of useful activity: pots, pans, bars, bolts, hinges, fire-dogs – or, one might say, lectures, tutorials, scripts, pupils. Furthermore Smith has the ability to pass into Faërie, and the mark of his strangeness is not only on his brow but in his song: he brings back visions for others. These visions furthermore expand. The doll ‘on one foot like a snow-maiden dancing’, the maiden ‘with flowing hair and kilted skirt’ who drags Smith into the dance, the Queen ‘in her majesty and her glory’ – all three are avatars of the Queen of Faërie, representing successively the tawdry images of former fantasy which are all the modern world has left, Tolkien’s own first attempts to produce something truer and better, his final awareness that what he had attempted had grown under his hand, from Hobbit to Silmarillion. The image of Smith apologising for his people, and being forgiven – ‘Better a little doll, maybe, than no memory of Faery at all. For some the only glimpse. For some the awaking’ – might be taken without too much strain as Tolkien forgiving himself for ‘Goblin Feet’. But still one is left with Alf.

He, perhaps, is born of a kind of weakness. Defeat hangs heavy in Smith of Wootton Major. Smith has to hand over his star, and return to Faërie no more; though he gains the right to say who shall have the star, his choice falls on Nokes’s blood, not his own. These points are hard to read except as a kind of valedictory, an admission of retirement – Smith is ‘An old man’s book’, as Tolkien said in Letters, p. 389. But Alf is there to put Smith into a longer history. There were men who wore the star of inspiration before Smith; in a later age there will be others; in any case that star, that inspiration, is only a fragment of a greater world, a world outside the little clearing of Wootton. Alf is there to reassure. His ‘message’, to put it with deliberate bathos, is that if stories have a particular quality of conviction or ‘inner consistency’, then they must (as Tolkien had said before) in some sense be true. The star on Smith’s brow that makes him sing is a guarantee of the existence of Faërie; by the same reasoning Tolkien’s drive to create a world came not from within him but from some world outside.

Of course Tolkien had no ‘Alf’ to reassure him or to ease his retirement. No doubt he wished very much that he had. Yet there is one further oddity to keep Smith of Wootton Major from being just a fable of self-justification. This comes from the story’s centre, i.e. the sequence of Smith’s Faërie visions. First he sees the great warship returning from the Dark Marches; then the Great Tree; then the lake of glass and firecreatures; then the maidens dancing; finally the Faërie Queen. In the third of these visions, though, we find an odd sequence of events. When Smith touches the lake he falls, while a great ‘boom’ raises a wild wind to sweep him away. He is saved by clinging to a birch:

and the Wind wrestled fiercely with them, trying to tear him away; but the birch was bent down to the ground by the blast and enclosed him in its branches. When at last the Wind passed on he rose and saw that the birch was naked. It was stripped of every leaf, and it wept, and tears fell from its branches like rain. He set his hand upon its white bark saying: ‘Blessed be the birch! What can I do to make amends, or give thanks?’ He felt the answer of the tree pass up from his hand: ‘Nothing’, it said. ‘Go away! The Wind is hunting you. You do not belong here. Go away and never return!’ (Tales, p. 159)

What is the birch that saves, the wind that threatens?

I have already suggested that while ‘oak’ and ‘Nokes’ in Tolkien’s private symbolism stand for literature and literary critics, the birch stands for the ‘B’ scheme of study, for philology, for the defiance of mere ‘literature’; and this is confirmed by two poems about birches in the 1936 collection Songs for the Philologists, given in the original and in translation in Appendix B. One is in Gothic, ‘Bagme Bloma’, or ‘Flower of the Trees’: this hails the birch as defier of wind and lightning, bandwa bairhta, runa goda, þiuda meina þjuþjandei, ‘bright token, good mystery, blessing my people’. The other is in Old English, ‘Éadig béo þu’ or ‘Blessed be you’. Its last stanza, in translation, reads: ‘Let us sing a cheerful song, praise the birch and birch’s race, the teacher, the student and the subject – may we all have health, joy and happiness. The oak shall fall into the fire, losing joy and life and leaf. The birch shall keep its glory long, shine splendidly over the bright plain.’ The birch, it seems, represents learning, severe learning, even discipline. But those who subject themselves to serious study – the ‘dull stodges’ of the ‘B’-scheme at Leeds University, perhaps, see above – are under its protection.⁵

The birch has one further association Tolkien did not miss. He respected the English and Scottish Popular Ballads collected by F.J. Child as being (see above) the last living relic of Northern tradition; in what is perhaps the most famous ballad of all the birch takes on a special role. ‘The Wife of Usher’s Well’ is about a widow who calls her drowned sons back from the dead:

‘THE COURSE OF ACTUAL COMPOSITION’ The bones of the ox

In the introduction to his 1851 translation of Asbjörnsen and Moe’s collection of Norse fairy-tales, Sir George Dasent wrote that the reader ‘must be satisfied with the soup that is set before him, and not desire to see the bones of the ox out of which it has been boiled’.¹ Dasent’s introduction was in fact one of the 19th-century classics of popularising philology, a highly revealing response to the situation described above; it is full of laudatory references to Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, of cross-connections between Norse and Scottish, or Norse and Sanskrit, and it makes a determined attempt to press on from comparative philology to comparative mythology. In this setting, what Dasent meant by his image was that he wanted his reader to accept his conclusions, and not demand to see the philological ‘workings’ on which they were based. Tolkien did not approve. Nevertheless, he was struck by the image, and repeated it in his essay ‘On Fairy-Stories’. Only what he meant by it, he said, was this:

By ‘the soup’ I mean the story as it is served up by the author or teller, and by ‘the bones’ its sources or material – even when (by rare luck) those can be with certainty discovered. (‘OFS’, in Tree, p. 20)

In other words, critics should study stories in their final forms, as ‘served up’ or published, not in their intermediate stages. At the time Tolkien wrote these words,² much of ‘the Silmarillion’ at least had been written several times over, as The Lord of the Rings eventually would be. If Tolkien had had foresight into the future, one may wonder, would he have felt that his ban on wanting to see ‘the bones of the ox’ should have been extended from fairy-tale collections (which of course may well have had an especially complex history) to his own fictional works?

There are reasons why he might. A major danger must be that too much study of ‘the bones’ makes ‘the soup’ lose its savour. In other words again, it could destroy the appeal, or charm, or ‘glamour’ of a finished work to know that some particularly cherished feature of it was in fact only an authorial accident; while too much awareness of wrong turnings the author might have taken could blur one’s final sense of the right turning he did take. The risks are manifold. In the case of The Lord of the Rings, one might fear that too much looking at intermediate stages (in this case volumes VI–IX of ‘The History of Middle-earth’) could blur the edges of one’s perception of the final stage, or of the work as published (for even after publication Tolkien continued to have afterthoughts, as one sees from both the Unfinished Tales and volume XII of ‘The History of Middle-earth’); while in the case of The Silmarillion –which in a real sense never reached a final stage at all – over-careful picking over of volumes I–V and X–XI of ‘The History’ could easily lead to the loss of any sense of structure whatsoever.

If that were all that could happen, this chapter would have remained unwritten. Nevertheless one has to face the fact that much of ‘The History of Middle-earth’ demands to be taken as ‘ox-bones’ – though a proportion of it is unpublished original work and some at least of the ‘bones’, like the Book of Lost Tales, are easy to read in their own right – and furthermore that the kind of reaction I have just suggested is at least a possibility, or, some of the time, a certainty. Yet one may reflect that much of the trouble (and here one loses contact with Dasent’s image and with Tolkien’s application of it) lies with the reader, and not with the author at all.

Other authors than Tolkien have for example created amazement in their readers by their seeming utter inability to understand the logic of what they were doing. Charles Dickens was upset and alarmed when it was called to his attention that many of his heroes or hero/villain pairs had names beginning with his own initials, C.D.; while his surviving worksheets for David Copperfield (this time D.C.) show that he got even the totally transparent name Murdstone – for the murderous stepfather who replaces the dead father under the gravestone – simply by writing a string of names across a page till he got one that felt right: Hasden Murdle Murden Murdstone.³ Dickens never asked himself, seemingly, why ‘Murdstone’ felt right. In exactly the same way Tolkien dealt with several important queries by writing out a string of names, like ‘Marhad Marhath Marhelm Marhun Marhyse Marulf’ (Treason, p. 390), or – these are for Aragorn – ‘Elfstone … Elfstan, Eledon, Aragorn, Eldakar, Eldamir, Qendemir’ (Treason, p. 276), or – these are for Shadowfax – ‘Narothal, Fairfax, Snowfax, Firefoot [,] Arod? Aragorn?’ (Shadow, p. 351). It is a surprise to learn that Aragorn could ever have been a name for a horse; even more surprising, given what is said about the meaning of the name, above, that Saruman could have been the meaningless ‘Saramond’ (Treason, p. 70). I do not think there is any doubt that Murdstone in David Copperfield does ‘mean’ what is said above, and there is even less doubt about Saruman, whose name is a philological crux. But neither Dickens nor Tolkien seems to have started off with meaning; rather with sound.

All this comes as a shock. It may also prove an irritation. At one point (Lost Road, p. 217) Christopher Tolkien remarks of a passage in the carefully prepared 1937 ‘Quenta Silmarillion’, ‘Elwë here, confusingly, is nor Thingol’, with a paragraph of explanation to follow. ‘Confusingly’ is putting it rather mildly. It seems unlikely that anyone at all could ever keep in mind all the variations and permutations which Tolkien carried out on his elvish characters for The Silmarillion. Finrod becomes Finarfin; Inglor becomes Finrod; besides the Ellu/Elwë/Olwë alternatives, one finds Elwë ‘Thingol’ (more accurately Elu Thingol in Sindarin, Elwë Singollo in Quenya) at different times as Ellon, Tinthellon, Tinto’ellon, Tinwelint, Tintaglin. Some of these changes are there to show the processes of language-change which were a major part of Tolkien’s creativity from the beginning (see BLT 1, p. 48, a passage written c.1919). But there are also signs of a continuous and seemingly-random fiddling, which generates for instance diagram after diagram of the relations between the various tribes, groupings or languages of the elves, see BLT 1, p. 50, Shaping, p. 44, Lost Road pp. 181–3, etc. Just as with Finrod or Thingol, it is at best confusing, at worst irritating, to discover that the Teleri were at one time the senior, at another the junior branch of the ‘Light-elves’; and that the change really does not seem to make much difference! I have used the term ‘fiddling’. But Tolkien commented more accurately on this tendency in himself in an interesting passage in Part 2 of ‘The Notion Club Papers’, in Sauron Defeated, pp. 239–40. There the character Lowdham criticises the very activity of inventing languages, that ‘secret vice’ of which Tolkien accused himself in Essays, pp. 198–223. Lowdham says:

‘Anyone who has ever spent (or wasted) any time on composing a language will understand me. Others perhaps won’t. But in making up a language you are free: too free … When you’re just inventing, the pleasure or fun is in the moment of invention; but as you are the master your whim is law, and you may want to have the fun all over again, fresh. You’re liable to be for ever niggling, altering, refining, wavering, according to your linguistic mood and to your changes of taste.’

Lowdham goes on to say that the languages he finds coming to him are not like that, and I have also omitted a section in which Lowdham says there are constraints on any conscientious inventor. Yet the word italicised above – the italics are mine – is a significant one. Tolkien used it elsewhere as the name of the character in his self-descriptive allegory ‘Leaf by Niggle’ (see above). He knew that one of his temptations was ‘to niggle’ i.e. (OED) ‘to spend work or time unnecessarily on petty details; to be over-elaborate in minor points’. He could not do this (so much) with real philology, because there the data were available to others. But where ‘his whim was law’, in inventing his own languages (geographies, genealogies), he was likely to give in to temptation. Of course we should never have known it if we did not have, in this case, ‘the bones of the ox’. But the revelation could create unease.

There are other surprising criticisms of Tolkien latent in ‘The History of Middle-earth’. Sometimes, and in contrast to the ‘niggling’ just discussed, he was stubborn to the point of pig-headedness about sticking to names, apparently in total incomprehension of their likely effect on contemporary readers. He kept using the term ‘Gnomes’ for the Noldor till at least 1937, in confidence that ‘to some “Gnome” will still suggest knowledge’, through its connection with Greek gnome, ‘intelligence’ (see BLT 1, pp. 43–4). To some, possibly. However to all but a vanishingly small proportion of English speakers, ‘gnome’ has lost all connection with its Greek root, and means instead a small, vulgar, garden ornament, very hard to take seriously. Similarly, as remarked above, Tolkien stuck to the name ‘Trotter’ while the character who bore it changed from a wandering hobbit to a hobbit-Ranger to a human Ranger to the last descendant of the kings of old. Very late in the construction of The Lord of the Rings Aragorn, or ‘Strider’ as he eventually became, is still declaring (War, p. 390), ‘But Trotter shall be the name of my house, if ever that be established; yet perhaps in the same high tongue it shall not sound so ill …’ Wrong! For ‘trot’, as the OED rightly says, implies ‘short, quick motion in a limited area’, and is quite inconsonant with dignity when applied to a tall Man. Tolkien (we can see with hindsight) should have dropped the idea much earlier, along with much else: his preference for ‘hobbit-talk’ over action (see Shadow, p. 108), his strangely hostile picture of Farmer Maggot (Shadow, p. 291), his inhibiting confusions over the number and names of the hobbits with the Ring-bearer, over Gandalf’s letter via Butterbur, and the general ‘spider’s web’ of argumentation near the start of Lord of the Rings (see Treason, p. 52).

Meanwhile and conversely, it is almost dismaying – at least to the critic – to see what seem to be absolutely essential elements both of The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings excluded sometimes till virtually the last moment. The Ring is ‘Not very dangerous, when used for good purpose’, says a naïve note in Shadow, p. 42, and cp. above; ‘it is indeed a remarkable feature of the original mythology’, says Christopher Tolkien, ‘that though the Silmarils were present they were of such relatively small importance’ (BLT 1, p. 156, and cp. above). A harmless Ring, meaningless Silmarils: as one reads through ‘The History of Middle-earth’ it is possible to feel – and this applies especially to a reader who knows the finished works well – that Tolkien did not know what he was doing. Tolkien himself once imagined summoning the scribes of the Ancrene Wisse from the dead, to indicate silently to them minor errors of grammar (see above). If we were to do this to the shade of Tolkien, it would be hard not to put one’s finger on Aragorn’s ‘Trotter’ sentence just quoted without, perhaps, a look of quizzical reproach.

Yet having said all this – and it has been said with deliberately unmitigated bluntness – one has to consider in the end exactly what one’s criticism may be. It seems hardly fair to criticise an author for not writing the book one would have liked; even less fair to complain that he did write the book one would have liked, but failed to manage it on the first try! Perhaps the real danger in picking over ‘the bones of the ox’ is no more than this: it comes as a threat to our general notion of creativity. In our often dimly-perceived ‘model’ of the author at work, there is a tendency to think of him or her as following a Grand Design to which only the author is privy, and which is both central inspiration and guiding star. Critics often search for this – certainly that is what I was doing in 1970 when Tolkien wrote me the letter referred to in my ‘Preface’ to this volume, and from which the title for this chapter is taken. Discovering that the author does not have a guiding star, and is trying things out at random, can be a disillusionment; as can the realisation that the Grand Design (the Silmarils, the nature of the Ring) was in fact one of the last things to be noticed. Yet such disillusionment is in a sense only in the reader’s head, nothing to do with the work or indeed the author. And one thing that following the progress of a work through ‘the course of actual composition’ can do is provide one with a more truthful model of the way that authors work – Tolkien being in this case (one may well suspect) more representative of authors in general than one might suppose, except in two respects: the very long gestation period of all his works, and his deep reluctance ever to discard a draft.

Nor need one abandon absolutely the notions of guiding star or Grand Design. For all the many surprises, false roads or spiders’ webs of ‘The History of Middle-earth’, it still demonstrates very conclusively that Tolkien did have an overpowering urge towards expressing something, something which kept on pulling him even if he had lost (or not yet gained) clear sight of it. Do we now have a better image of the something? And can we find a better ‘model’ of the way Tolkien’s creativity worked? These questions are considered in the rest of this chapter. Lost road, waste land

Tolkien had a theory, at least, about the second of the two questions above, which he expressed in a repeated fiction, or fictional debate – one hesitates to call it a story. This exists in two main forms, ‘The Lost Road’, from c. 1937, printed in The Lost Road pp. 36–104; and, written some eight or nine years later, at a time when he might have been expected to be fully occupied with The Lord of the Rings, ‘The Notion Club Papers’, printed in Sauron Defeated, pp. 145–327.⁴ The fictions are close enough to each other almost to be described in Christopher Tolkien’s term (see Shadow, p. 3) as ‘phases’. They have at least strong common elements, if not a common root.

The most obvious of these, not at all surprisingly, is continuous playing with names. In ‘The Lost Road’ the key names are two from an ancient Germanic legend, written down by Paul the Deacon in the eighth century, but dealing with events of the sixth. This germinal story tells of a king of the Lombards – for their importance to Tolkien see below – called Audoin. He refused as it were to ‘knight’ his son Alboin after a battle, because Alboin had not yet received arms from a neighbouring king, as was the custom of this people, evidently and rightly designed to avoid favouritism. Alboin accordingly went to the king he had just defeated, and whose son he had just killed, and asked him to grant him arms, with a kind of noble or quixotic confidence in King Thurisind’s magnanimity. His confidence was not misplaced; Alboin received his arms and his ‘knighthood’; though he repaid the favour only with a series of brutalities leading to his own later murder, for forcing his wife to drink a toast from her father’s skull, accompanied by what one can only call the orcish pleasantry of inviting her ‘to drink merrily with her father’.

What caught Tolkien’s eye in this was evidently not the story but the names: Alb-oin = Old English Ælf-wine = ‘elf-friend’, Aud-oin = Old English Ead-wine = ‘friend of prosperity, bliss-friend’. ‘Elf-friend’: why should people be given names like that, consistently, over many centuries from the sixth to the eleventh, and from countries as far apart as Italy and England, if there had not been some original conception behind it? Audoin meanwhile had survived even into modern times, via Ead-wine, as the modern English Edwin. Did this not suggest that there was still some form of living tradition in the names and their meanings? Another element was the Old English name Os-wine, or ‘god-friend’, also surviving, if not very often, in the name Oswin (cp. Oswald). From these survivals and indications of continuity Tolkien began to sketch out a story about progression: from a modern day three-generation family tree (which ran Oswin – Alboin – Audoin, all of its members philologically conscious of the forms and meanings of their own names), back to the Lombardic son and father, and then back further to the mythic Germanic past, to Irish legend, to the unrecorded men of the Ice Age, and through them to Númenor. But in Númenor the names would be of different form, though identical meaning: Elenchi = ‘elf-friend’ = Alboin, Herendil = ‘bliss-friend’ = Audoin, Valandil = ‘god-friend, friend of the Valar’ = Oswin. Moreover in Númenor the meanings of the names would be much more pointed, even incipiently antithetic: for in Númenor just before its fall to be a friend of the elves, or even worse a friend of the Valar, was to risk death by sacrifice to Morgoth. Elendil and his son Herendil are indeed in Tolkien’s story of ‘The Lost Road’ almost on the brink of separation, for the son, less wise than his father, seeks ‘bliss’ rather than truth, and bliss seems to his generation to be best achieved by obedience to their rulers and rebellion against the gods.

Yet Tolkien never achieved a full story on this theme. ‘The Lost Road’ is, even in outline, only a sequence of oppositions; plus a thesis about how events of the past might come to be known, through dreams and through a sort of linguistic vision. A great part of ‘The Lost Road’ in fact consists of detailing how Alboin, the modern English son, later to become a professor, finds coming to him from outside – not via his own invention – snatches of languages, including the ‘Elf-Latin’ Quenya, as well as Old English and even Old Germanic (the *-ancestor of Old English, Gothic, and Lombardic as well). This trail soon petered out, with Tolkien sending his narrativeless ‘Lost Road’ fragment to Stanley Unwin in 1937, after the success of The Hobbit, having it rejected (no doubt with utter incomprehension), and dropping the idea for eight years, during which he was writing the bulk of The Lord of the Rings. Yet when he revived it, as ‘The Notion Club Papers’, with an apology to Sir Stanley for ever having troubled him with ‘The Lost Road’, what he did, with remarkable stubbornness, was to persist in not inventing a story, and instead to expand on what one might now call his obsessive playing with names and brooding on the question of transmission.

Part One of ‘The Notion Club Papers’ opens with a rejection of C. S. Lewis’s device of using mere machinery (a spaceship, an eldil-powered coffin) to get his characters to Mars or Venus. The right way to explore other worlds, says Ramer, the main speaker at this point, is via dreams and via the languages you hear in them. But then in a strange switch, one of the most sceptical and persistent of his hearers, Lowdham, starts to speak with tongues and to see visions even during the course of the Club’s own meetings, while he also starts to record snatches of languages very similar to those of Alboin in ‘The Lost Road’. Further, an undergraduate member of the Club, John Jethro Rashbold, begins to speak with tongues as well; while a fourth member, Wilfrid Trewin Jeremy, somehow joins Lowdham inside one of Lowdham’s own dreams – a vision of Anglo-Saxon England in King Alfred’s time – as Tréo-wine (another -wine name, this time ‘pledge-friend’).

All the characters who speak are, rather evidently, reflections of Tolkien himself. Ramer is a professor of philology, Lowdham a lecturer on English language; Rashbold’s last name is a ‘calque’ of Tolkien’s (from German toll-kühn = ‘crazy-bold’), while his middle name, ‘Jethro’ is linked with Tolkien’s third name ‘Reuel’ in the Old Testament; and though Christopher Tolkien regards the theory as ‘unlikely’ (Sauron Defeated, p. 189), it seems plausible that ‘ramer’ is in fact meant to be the dialect word ‘raver, babbler’, and so to fit Tolkien’s repeated self-image as one who sees visions and dreams and is accordingly stigmatised by others as a ‘looney’ (see his poem of that name from 1934 and its later revision, above). As for Alwin Arundel Lowdham and Wilfred Trewin Jeremy, Alwin and Trewin are variants on the ‘x-friend’ series with which this discussion started, while Arundel – normal English surname that it is – is also a modernised version of Anglo-Saxon Éarendel, or Eärendil, the great Intercessor between gods and Middle-earth of Tolkien’s mythology. What these two fictional ‘phases’ tell us about the way Tolkien’s creativity worked – or the way he thought it worked – is surely this: he thought that ideas were sent to him in dreams, and through the hidden resonances of names and languages. He thought that the dreams and the ideas did not come from his own mind but might – like the names, after all – be the record or memory of something that once might have had an objective existence. A sceptic would naturally say that this belief is just another illusion, that the conviction that a dream ‘comes from outside’ comes from the inside, just like the dream. In reply to this (or possibly in agreement with it) I would point only to my remarks above about the disorienting effects of studying the history of early literature philologically, so that ‘the thing which was perhaps eroded most of all was the philologists’ sense of a line between imagination and reality’. Once one had got used to tracing linguistic correspondences with absolute confidence that they did represent reality, it was a rather easy step to assuming that the guide to reality was one’s own sense of linguistic correspondences. Tolkien’s creativity, as this book has said many times, came from somewhere between the two positions expressed in the last sentence.

But if his playing with words and names tells us something of how he worked, what was he working on? What do all these varied relationships between people mean, and what was the ‘something’ that pulled him on, whether he had a Grand Design or not? A major theme, at least, is signalled by the two separate fragments of Old English which Tolkien wrote, rewrote, and worked into both ‘Lost Road’ and ‘Notion Club Papers’ as genuine ‘transmissions’ from the past. The first of these is genuine: that is to say, it comes from a real, surviving Old English poem, The Seafarer, though adapted by Tolkien in both versions he gave. In ‘The Lost Road’ the lines come to an Old English poet, Ælfwine, as he chants them to a crowded hall:

Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating

In the general mess of imprecision of feeling …⁴

With this one might compare Edmund Wilson’s opinion in Axel’s Castle (op. cit., p. 245) that the meaning of words depends on ‘a web of associations as intricate and in the last analysis as mysterious as our minds and bodies themselves’, while using words inevitably involves ‘pouring them full of suggestion by our inflections, our pauses, our tones’. Wholly new, shabby equipment, mystery, suggestion, empty words being topped up by individual willpower: what these passages share is a conviction that since language is very complicated it is beyond the reach of reason. Inflections are private and personal; what one person means can never be fully understood by another; as in the paradox of ‘Achilles and the Tortoise’, you can only get closer and closer to what you want to say, but never be exactly there.

I do not think Tolkien would have agreed with this. He knew better than Edmund Wilson how hard words were to trace, but he also knew there were techniques for doing so; at the foundation of his art there was the perception of Grimm and Verner and de Saussure and all the other old philologists, that in matters of phonology at least people were strictly controlled by laws of which they were not conscious. T. S. Eliot might not know why he said ‘whole’, ‘heal’, ‘old’, ‘elder’, but he did, and there was a reason for it which could be rendered (see above). Semantic associations, too, could be traced, used, and communicated: see ‘glamour’, spell’, ‘bewilderment’, ‘panache’, ‘worship’, ‘luck’, ‘doom’, and all the rest.⁵ Where ‘lit.’ quailed before English or felt discontented with it, in other words, ‘lang.’ could at least feel at home. Tolkien did not think his equipment was ‘shabby’, nor the Tree of Language leafless. As for modern English being ‘intractable’, that was a failure of education which had left its products historically deaf, deafer even than those uncorrupted ears which might be able to say – not knowing why – ‘Garstang sounds northern’ or ‘Bree-hill and Chetwood have the same sort of style’. All one can say is that this failure at least could be corrected. If there were a will, there would be a way.⁶

The problem remains ‘misology’, hatred of words, the opposite of philology. Tolkien used ‘misology’ and gave it this sense – it is in the OED under other senses – in his ‘Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford’: a technical piece, and addressed to a limited audience, but one which summed up much of his career experience. In 1959 he was looking back over thirty-nine years as a university teacher, all of it marked by the feuding between ‘lang.’ and ‘lit.’ which he had hoped to resolve, and his mood was not without a certain bitterness. He did not mind ‘misologists’ being dull or ignorant, he said, but he did feel:

a grievance that certain professional persons should suppose their dullness and ignorance to be a human norm, the measure of what is good; and anger when they have sought to impose the limitation of their minds upon younger minds, dissuading those with philological curiosity from their bent, encouraging those without this interest to believe that their lack marked them as minds of a superior order. (Essays, p. 225)

Philology, in short, was a natural state; but where the Powers That Be were ‘misologists’, putting forward the views of Eliot or Toynbee or Wilson with the authority and prestige of ‘modern literature’ behind them, nature could be deformed. From this both sides lost, falling into a state Tolkien labelled bluntly as ‘apartheid’. All he could do was go outside ‘proper channels’ and try to reach an unspoilt audience reading just to suit itself.

He did that successfully; his success goes far to proving his point about the naturalness of philology and the appeal of names, words and linguistic ‘styles’; and in the wider sense of philology as that branch of learning which ‘presented to lovers of poetry and history fragments of a noble past that without it would have remained for ever dead and dark’ (Essays, p. 235), he showed that its appeal too was not confined to antiquity. I do not see how Tolkien can be denied the tribute of having enlarged his readers’ apprehensions (of language), or their human sympathies (with the disciplined, or the heroic, or the addicted, or the self-sacrificing). But most of all I think his utility for the lover of literature lies in the way he showed creativity arising from the ramifications of words: unpredictable certainly, but not chaotic or senseless, and carrying within themselves very strong suggestions of ‘the reality of history’ and ‘the reality of human nature’, and how people react to their world. Fawler, *saru-man, fallow, Quickbeam: in each of these a word created a concept, and the concept helped to generate its own story.⁷ In The Road to Xanadu, John Livingston Lowes’s 1927 study of Coleridge and ‘the ways of the imagination’ (a book of a kind we need only one of, said T. S. Eliot stuffily), Lowes wrote that the ‘hooks and eyes’ of the memory ‘will lead us to the very alembic of the creative energy’.⁸ If he was wrong it was because he thought too passively. Words, ancient words, do not have to be hooked together to make something. They have their own energy and struggle towards their own connections. Observing this impulse and co-operating with it is as good a guide for the artist as turning within oneself to the inarticulate.

TOLKIEN’S SOURCES: THE TRUE TRADITION

Tolkien himself did not approve of the academic search for ‘sources’. He thought it tended to distract attention from the work of art itself, and to undervalue the artist by the suggestion that he had ‘got it all’ from somewhere else. This appendix accordingly does not attempt to match ‘source’ to ‘passage’ in Tolkien. It does however offer a brief guide to the works which nourished Tolkien’s imagination and to which he returned again and again; since many of them are not well known, this may give many people who have enjoyed Tolkien something else to enjoy. Whether that changes their reading of The Lord of the Rings or The Silmarillion is less important: though in fact comparison with ‘the sources’, in my experience, almost always brings out Tolkien’s extremely keen eye for the vital detail.

He was also very quick to detect the bogus and the anachronistic, which is why I use the phrase ‘true tradition’. Tolkien was irritated all his life by modern attempts to rewrite or interpret old material, almost all of which he thought led to failures of tone and spirit. Wagner is the most obvious example. People were always connecting The Lord of the Rings with Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Tolkien did not like it. ‘Both rings were round’, he snarled, ‘and there the resemblance ceases’ (Letters, p. 306). This is not entirely true. The motifs of the riddle-contest, the cleansing fire, the broken weapon preserved for an heir, all occur in both works, as of course does the theme of ‘the lord of the Ring as the slave of the Ring’, des Ringes Herr als des Ringes Knecht. But what upset Tolkien was the fact that Wagner was working, at second-hand, from material which he knew at first-hand, primarily the heroic poems of the Elder Edda and the later Middle High German Nibelungenlied. Once again he saw difference where other people saw similarity. Wagner was one of several authors with whom Tolkien had a relationship of intimate dislike: Shakespeare, Spenser, George MacDonald, Hans Christian Andersen. All, he thought, had got something very important not quite right. It is especially necessary, then, for followers of Tolkien to pick out the true from the heretical, and to avoid snatching at surface similarities.

The single work which influenced Tolkien most was obviously the Old English poem Beowulf, written in Tolkien’s opinion somewhere round the year 700. The best edition of this is by F. Klaeber (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1922, 3rd edn. 1950). There are many translations of it, including the one by J. R. Clark Hall and C. L. Wrenn to which Tolkien wrote the ‘Preface’ in 1940, and Tolkien’s own, as yet unpublished. The reasons for the poem’s appeal to him, however, seem to me to be expressed best in R. W. Chambers, Beowulf: an Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921, 3rd edn. with supplement by C. L. Wrenn, 1959). The first two chapters of this show with particular force and charm the way in which history and fairy-tale are in Beowulf intertwined. Other Old English poems which Tolkien used include The Ruin, The Wanderer and The Battle of Maldon, all edited and translated in Richard Hamer’s A Choice of Anglo-Saxon Verse (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), and the ‘Treebeard-style’ gnomic poems Maxims I and II, edited and translated, along with Solomon and Saturn II, in my Poems of Wisdom and Learning in Old English (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer and Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1976). Tolkien’s own editions of Exodus and Finn and Hengest (see ‘Abbreviations’ for publishing details) provide much insight into his views on history, heroic continuity, and the relationship between Christian and pagan thought. I have discussed both in my review ‘A Look at Exodus and Finn and Hengest’ in Arda (the journal of the Swedish Tolkien Society), no. 3, 1982–3, pp. 72–80. Very briefly one might say that Tolkien valued Exodus especially as an example of Christian material treated in an old-fashioned or heroic style: his own fiction being a similar mixture but the other way round.

The poem of Solomon and Saturn just referred to centres on a riddle-contest, a form with two other prominent examples, both in Old Norse. One is Vafðrúðnismál, one of twenty-nine poems in the Elder or Poetic Edda, a collection made in Iceland perhaps about AD 1200. Tolkien knew this collection well, drawing on the poem Völuspá for the names of the dwarves in The Hobbit, on Fáfnismál for the conversation with Smaug, and on Skirnismál for the ‘tribes of orcs’ and the ‘Misty Mountains’. More generally the whole collection gives a sharper edge than Beowulf to the ideal of heroism, and a stronger sense of a tumultuous history filtering down to echo and hearsay. Both points are well brought out in the old, now-superseded edition of the Corpus Poeticum Boreale, by Gudbrand Vigfusson and E York Powell (2 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1883), as also in Ursula Dronke’s much later partial editions, The Poetic Edda, Volume I: Heroic Poems and Volume II: Mythological Poems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969, 1997). The best translation of the whole of The Poetic Edda remains Norse Poems, by Paul B. Taylor and W. H. Auden (London: Athlone Press, 1981). An earlier version of this last was dedicated to Tolkien, and Auden and Tolkien in the end became friends and correspondents.

The other major riddle-contest in Old Norse appears in The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise, edited and translated by Christopher Tolkien (London: Nelson, 1960). The relevance of this to all Tolkien’s work, including The Silmarillion, should be obvious; the combination of pride, ferocity and sadness in the older poem of ‘The Battle of the Goths and Huns’ which has found its way into the saga seems to be the note that Tolkien often aimed at, and as often disapproved. Another fornaldarsaga or ‘saga of old times’ of much interest to Tolkien readers is the Völsunga Saga; William Morris’s translation of it in 1870 was reprinted with an introduction by Robert W. Putnam (London and New York: Collier Macmillan, 1962); it has also been edited and translated by R. G. Finch in the same series as Christopher Tolkien’s Heidrek (London: Nelson, 1965), while there is a recent translation by Jesse Byock, The Saga of the Volsungs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Meanwhile the other great work of Old Norse mythology, later and more ‘novelistic’ in tone than the poems, is the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, written in Iceland between 1225 and 1241. This too is a work of ‘mediation’, like Tolkien’s; Snorri was a Christian trying to preserve pagan material for his countrymen and for the cause of poetry. In several ways, especially its combination of respect for antiquity with a certain detached humour, Snorri prefigures Tolkien. One of the ‘lost’ poems known only by its quotations was a model for ‘Aldarion and Erendis’, see above; another poem added to a manuscript of Snorri’s Edda by some well-wisher is Rígsþula, for the relevance of which see note 13 to chapter 4. There is a good translation of the whole of this work in the Everyman Classics series, Snorri Sturluson, Edda, trans. Anthony Faulkes (London: Dent, 1987).

It is a jump of many centuries to the great ‘fairy-tale’ collections of the nineteenth, but, as mentioned above, Jacob Grimm at least thought the similarity between German fairy-tale and Scandinavian ‘Edda’ striking enough to prove that both were the debris of a greater unity. Whether this is so or not – the question is discussed intensively in the collection The Shadow-walkers, see note 16 to chapter 2 – the folk-tales of North-West Europe affected Tolkien profoundly. The major collections (from his point of view) certainly included that of the brothers Grimm, printed first in 1812, but expanded, revised and translated ever since: I have used The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales, no translator named, published in London by Routledge and Kegan Paul in 1975, but Tolkien no doubt read them in German – he relished the dialect forms of ‘Von dem Machandelboom’, quoting it in the original in ‘On Fairy-Stories’ (Tree, pp. 31–2). Another work he refers to is Popular Tales from the Norse, collected by P. C. Asbjörnsen and J. I. Moe and translated by Sir George Dasent, published first in English in Edinburgh, 1851, but reprinted in London by The Bodley Head, 1969. In the same modern series (1968) is English Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs, a reprint from 1890; No. 21, ‘Childe Rowland’ is a ‘Dark Tower’ story, see above. Tolkien also quoted from J. F. Campbell’s Popular Tales of the Western Highlands (4 vols., Paisley and London: Alexander Gardner, 1890–3).

Parallel to the fairy-tale tradition collected by the Grimms and others is the ballad tradition, also preserved by collectors of the nineteenth century and containing much similar, and similarly archaic material. The greatest collection of these is certainly F. J. Child’s The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, first published in five volumes by Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1882–98, and reprinted by Dover Publications, New York, 1965. Particularly vital to this are the philological introductions to each ballad, see especially no. 19, ‘King Orfeo’, no. 60, ‘King Estmere’, and others; while Tolkien also almost certainly read Lowry C. Wimberly’s commentary Folklore in the English and Scottish Ballads (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928). Tolkien probably also knew the Danish collection begun by Svend Grundtvig, Denmarks gamle Folkeviser, out in 12 volumes from 1853 onwards, and partly available to English readers in A Book of Danish Ballads, ed. Axel Olrik, trans. E. M. Smith-Dampier (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1939). The collection includes several elf-and-mortal or mermaid-and-mortal ballads like Tolkien’s own poems mentioned or reprinted and translated in Appendix B below. The collector’s father, Nicolai Grundtvig, was in my opinion the ‘Beowulfian’ whom Tolkien most respected – he appears in ‘Monsters’ as one of the ‘very old voices’ calling ‘“it is a mythical allegory” … generally shouted down, but not so far out as some of the newer cries’. Grundtvig senior was also remarkable for his efforts to reconcile his studies in pagan antiquity with his position as evangelistic reformer and ‘apostle of the North’, arguing for Óthinn as a ‘forerunner’, Earendel-like, of the Messiah, both ‘sons of the Universal Father’.

But Tolkien was also interested in later traditions, and even in American traditions: anyone who reads the ‘Introduction’ to English Folk-Songs from the Southern Appalachians, collected by Olive D. Campbell and Cecil I. Sharp (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1917) will be struck by the strange resemblance of the mountain country of North Carolina before the First World War to ‘the Shire’ as Tolkien described it. Nor is this accident. A piece by Mr Guy Davenport in the New York Times (23 February 1979) records Tolkien grilling an American classmate of his for ‘tales of Kentucky folk … family names like Barefoot and Boffin and Baggins and good country names like that’. Old country names, one might add: in Kentucky and its neighbours, Tolkien obviously thought, there had for a time been a place where English people and English traditions could flourish by themselves free of the chronic imperialism of Latin, Celtic and French. In the same way Fenimore Cooper’s hero Natty Bumppo prides himself on his English ancestry, while Tolkien recorded an early devotion to Red Indians, bows and arrows and forests (‘OFS’ in Tree, p. 41). The journey of the Fellowship from Lórien to Tol Brandir, with its canoes and portages, often recalls The Last of the Mohicans, and as the travellers move from forest to prairie, like the American pioneers, Aragorn and Éomer for a moment preserve faint traces of ‘the Deerslayer’ and the Sioux, see above. The complaint in one of the sillier reviews of The Lord of the Rings, that none of its characters (except Gimli) had ‘an even faintly American temperament’, is as imperceptive as irrelevant. The ‘American temperament’ has roots in many places, but England is not the least among them: caelum non animam mutant qui trans mare currunt.

The medieval or middle period between the high vernacular culture of North-West Europe and the collecting or ‘reconstructing’ era of Child and the Grimms was in several ways a disappointment to Tolkien, though of course he found much in its more traditional poems such as Pearl, Sir Gawain and Sir Orfeo. His translations of these must be recommended (see ‘Abbreviations’ under SGPO), as also the edition of Sir Gawain by himself and E. V. Gordon (SGGK), and of Pearl by E. V. Gordon alone (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953). Tolkien’s assistance to the latter is acknowledged. Tolkien also lived for many years with the Ancrene Riwle, or Ancrene Wisse, and those concerned to seek out an influence on him might read The Ancrene Riwle, translated by Mary Salu, a pupil of his (London: Burns & Oates, 1955). That work was written c. 1225, in Herefordshire. Close by in both place and time was the Brut, an Arthurian Chronicle-epic by one Lazamon. Tolkien certainly valued this as a repository of past tradition, borrowing from it, for instance, Éowyn’s word ‘dwimmerlaik’. At some stage he must also have noted that the stream by which the poet lived – it is a tributary of the Severn – was the River Gladdon. Part of the poem can be found in Selections from Lazamon’s Brut, ed. G. L. Brook with preface by C. S. Lewis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963, 2nd edn. 1983), or in Lazamon’s Arthur: the Arthurian Section of Lazamon’s Brut, eds. W.R.J. Barron and S. C. Weinberg (Harlow: Longman, 1989), while the whole work is translated by Rosamund Allen as Lawman’s Brut (London: J. M. Dent, 1992). I am also persuaded that Tolkien found stimulus in the slightly later legends of St Michael and St Brendan in The Early South English Legendary, edited by C. Horstmann for the Early English Text Society (London: Trübner, 1887).

Two other clear medieval English influences on Tolkien are Mandeville’s Travels, written about 1375, and available in a modern translation by M. C. Seymour (London: Oxford University Press, 1968); and the Lais of Marie de France, also available in translation by Glyn Burgess and Keith Busby (London: Penguin Classics, 1986). The latter is a clear source for ‘Aotrou and Itroun’, the former perhaps the best guide to Tolkien’s notions of the trees of Sun and Moon, the Paradis terrestre, and the road to it encumbered by enchantments like those of the Dead Marshes. Many phrases from this book seem to have stayed in Tolkien’s mind. One should add that for all their names and preferred languages, both Sir John Mandeville and Marie de France were certainly English by nationality.

Dealing with Tolkien’s knowledge of other languages could protract this essay interminably, but a source of the highest importance was clearly the Finnish epic Kalevala, which Tolkien knew in the translation of W. F. Kirby (London and New York: Dent and Dutton, 1907). For a more modern and scholarly treatment, see note 15 to chapter 7. I would like to take the opportunity here (prompted by Dr Osmo Pekonen) of correcting the remark made on Author, p. xxxiv, that ‘Lönnrot’s Kalevala is now viewed with suspicion by scholars because … you cannot tell what is by him and what is “authentic”’. Dr Pekonen informs me that Lönnrot kept such careful scholarly records that this distinction can readily be made, and is made throughout in ‘the flagship of Finnish philology’, the 34 volumes of Suomen Kansan Vanhat Runot, ‘The Ancient Runes of the Finnish People’ (1908–1999). Dr Pekonen further cites Lönnrot’s ‘Preface’ to the Kalevala, in which he declares that he felt he had ‘the right to arrange the poems [he had collected] in such a way that they formed the best possible combination’, just as the traditional singers did. This, perhaps, is a right Tolkien would also have wished to claim.

Also recommendable is the Irish Imram, The Voyage of Bran Son of Febal, ed. Kuno Meyer (2 vols., London: David Nutt, 1895–7). Tolkien’s wanderings in German romance, though probably considerable – see the remarks on Orendel and others above, here and here – are too complex for me to trace. Some guides through the wilderness of heroic legend can be found, however, in the philologists: and when it comes to it these were the men whom Tolkien probably followed with the keenest and most professional interest. Three major works may be cited, though they give the interested reader no more than a taste: Grimm’s Teutonic Mythology, trans. J. S. Stallybrass (4 vols., London: George Bell, 1882–8); R. W. Chambers, Widsith, A Study in Old English Heroic Legend (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912); and R. M. Wilson, The Lost Literature of Medieval England (London: Methuen, 1952). It should be noted that a vital part of this latter came out as early as 1941, in plenty of time for Tolkien to recall it in The Lord of the Rings, see note 19 to chapter 5.

The last major ‘old’ source for Tolkien which need be mentioned lies in history and chronicle. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire certainly stayed in Tolkien’s mind, though probably in the same compartment as Wagner; ‘Radagaisus’ may be found in its ‘Index’, if not ‘Radagast’, as also ‘Fredegarius’, though not ‘Frodo’. Of the Latin histories which Gibbon used the most interesting for Tolkien were probably Saxo Grammaticus’s History of the Danes, of which Books 1–9 were translated by Oliver Elton, with an introduction by F. York Powell (London: David Nutt, 1894), now superseded by Peter Fisher’s translation in two volumes, edited by Hilda Ellis Davidson (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, and Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1979–80); and The Gothic History of Jordanes, translated by C. C. Mierow (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2nd edn. 1915). One has to add that Mr Mierow’s grasp of Gothic, unlike his Latin, is feeble. The true opinions of Jordanes lie buried in Karl Müllenhoff’s notes to Mommsen’s edition of 1882. A final note on the Germanic tribes as they appealed to Tolkien’s imagination may be found in Sir Charles Oman’s classic, A History of the Art of War in the Middle Ages (London: Methuen, 1898). Its description on pp. 48–51 of the Lombards, that other Germanic ‘horse-folk’ par excellence, strongly recalls the Riders of the Mark.

When it comes to modern writers, Tolkien was notoriously beyond influence (though reports of his skimpy reading have been much exaggerated, see especially the start of Chapter 6 above). Three authors of his youth must remain prominent in any account. One is George MacDonald, whose influence Tolkien both admitted and minimised, see references in the ‘Index’ to Letters: besides The Princess and the Goblin of 1872 and The Princess and Curdie ten years later one should note especially Phantastes (1858) and Lilith (1895). Tolkien also read William Morris, probably with more appreciation: Morris after all knew a good deal of Icelandic and had been stirred by heroic story, trying to reproduce its effects in three of the romances of his last years, The House of the Wolfings (1888), The Roots of the Mountains (1889) and The Glittering Plain (1891). The first is clearly about Goths; the second gave a hint for Gollum, as for Brodda the Easterling in The Silmarillion; the last is about a quest for the Undying Lands. In my introduction to the World’s Classics 1980 reprint of Morris’s The Wood Beyond the World (1894) I suggest a slight connection between that and the bewilderments of Fangorn Forest. Finally – though Tolkien never mentions him in a letter – I cannot help thinking that Tolkien knew Kipling’s stories well, especially the collections Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910). In both the theme of an unchanging Englishness is strong, as is that of smithcraft; and Puck’s dislike for the word ‘fairies’ and the ‘sugar-and-shake-your-head’ Victorian concepts attached is exactly that of Tolkien (see especially the story ‘Weland’s Sword’).

I do not think Tolkien would have had much time for Kipling’s ‘Indian’ works. The centre of all that has been mentioned in this essay is English tradition, though Tolkien was prepared to accept connections by blood with Iceland or Saxony or America, and (in a more gingerly way) by old proximity with the Irish or even the Finns. However he was in some ways what would now be called an ‘ethnic’ writer, though the rule for ‘ethnicity’ nowadays seems to be that anyone can have it except Anglo-Saxons (Tolkien was not quite a WASP). Largely this restriction is a penalty of success; since English is international the language naturally ceases to carry strong national sentiment. Behind that success, though, Tolkien was conscious of many centuries of discouragement which had suppressed native tradition in England more quickly, perhaps, than in any other European country. He valued what was left the more highly. In much of what he wrote and read one can see him trying to return to the time before confusion set in, when the traditions of the Shire and the Mark were uncorrupted.

A final word should be said about Tolkien criticism. Much of it, especially that written by professional literary critics, is quite remarkably short-sighted or perverse, for reasons of inner antipathy repeatedly discussed above. The best and most useful works are referred to in the list of ‘Abbreviations’ at the start of this volume, and in the ‘Notes’ at the end. Three overall surveys may also be recommended: first, Richard C. West’s Tolkien: An Annotated Checklist, Revised Edition (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1981); second, Judith A. Johnson’s J.R.R. Tolkien: Six Decades of Criticism (Greenwood: Westport, Ct., and London, 1986); and bringing matters up to the present day, the long bibliography by Michael Drout, Hilary Wynne and Melissa Higgins, ‘Scholarly Studies of J.R.R. Tolkien and his Works (in English), 1984–2000) in Envoi vol. 9, no. 2 (Fall 2000), pp. 135–65.

FOUR ‘ASTERISK’ POEMS

Tolkien contributed some thirteen poems to Songs for the Philologists, according to Humphrey Carpenter in Biography, p. 357. Most are jeux d’esprit, either mildly satirical like ‘Lit. and Lang.’ (see above), or else remarkable only for their linguistic dexterity (like ‘Syx Mynet', an Old English rendering of ‘I’ve Got Sixpence', or ‘Ruddoc Hana', which is ‘Who Killed Cock Robin?'). Four of them, however, seem to have something more personal to say, and I accordingly reprint them here by kind permission of the executors of Tolkien’s estate. At some time after the production of Songs for the Philologists all four were furthermore carefully corrected and emended by Tolkien himself; I am grateful to Christopher Tolkien for showing me copies of the corrected texts, and have included, or noted, all such changes in the versions below. Since three of the poems are in Old English and one in Gothic, I have followed each text with a translation.

Two of the four may be described as ‘birch’ poems: for their relevance see above. The other two are poems in which a mortal is trapped in some way by an immortal. They are meant, I think, to appear as ‘ancestors’ for such ballads as ‘Tam Lin’ or ‘The Queen of Elfan’s Nourice’ in the Child collection, or ‘The Daemon Lover’ in Sharp’s, or ‘Agnes and the Merman’ in Svend Grundtvig’s (see Appendix A above). The corrected version of ‘Ofer Wídne Gársecg’ indeed includes the note, in Tolkien’s hand, ‘An OE version of ’Twas in the broad Atlantic in the equinoctial gales That a young fellow fell overboard among the sharks and whales’.

The Birch Poems

(a) BAGME BLOMA

Brunaim bairiþ Bairka bogum

PETER JACKSON’S FILM VERSIONS ¹

Fifty years after the first publication of The Lord of the Rings, the ironies pointed to in the first paragraph of this volume have only become more obvious. Far from passing into the ‘merciful oblivion’ predicted by Philip Toynbee, far from being a work few adults will look at twice, as declared by Alfred Duggan, The Lord of the Rings has found a new and even larger audience in a new medium, the three films directed by Peter Jackson and released in successive years 2001–2003. These are arguably the most successful films ever made. As of January 2004 the three between them had taken some 1,279 million pounds at the box office, a figure certainly multiplied by VHS and DVD sales, especially of the extended versions which will give a final total running time of close on twelve hours.² It is impossible to estimate how many viewers this will represent, since one DVD can be seen by many people, and conversely the box office takings are inflated by repeat viewers, but it is safe to say that hundreds of millions of people have seen or will see the films. There will almost certainly be more viewers than readers (though of course they are often the same people).

Yet, amazingly, the Toynbee/Duggan reaction continued to be powerful, even during the making of the films. I have to confess that for what immediately follows (as for what was said above about Tolkien’s local reputation, see above and note) I can acknowledge no source other than gossip, though this time it is the gossip of Los Angeles, not Oxford. Perhaps one day the full story will be revealed. But it is said that while Peter Jackson was making the films, the moguls of Hollywood, alarmed at the ever-increasing scale and cost of the production, sent to New Zealand a ‘script doctor’, whose job it was to get the films back on track. The ‘script doctor’ immediately saw the faults in the Tolkien plot. Having heroes riding (or in this case walking) to the rescue of a threatened people was of course perfectly familiar and acceptable, as in The Magnificent Seven: but there was no need to have two threatened peoples, Rohan and Gondor. One of them could be cut out, which meant that the battle of Helm’s Deep could be amalgamated with the battle of the Pelennor Fields. A love-interest for Aragorn was also clearly vital, but once again there was no need for two of them: either Arwen or Éowyn should go, preferably Arwen, and Aragorn should then marry Éowyn instead of politely dissuading her. One could then make a further saving by eliminating the figure of Faramir. Meanwhile, though there was some doubt about the wisdom of having such small and unheroic figures as hobbits as heroes, they might be retained as a gimmick: but four of them were one too many. And it was absolutely vital that one of the hobbits should die. With changes like these, the Lord of the Rings could be converted into a perfectly acceptable, run-of-the-mill movie script – at the expense, of course, of cultural contrast, originality, emotional depth, and a few other inessentials.

The script doctor’s advice was ignored, and Jackson’s films perhaps convinced even the moguls in the end that there was something they did not know about popular appeal. Nevertheless, the changes proposed do say something about the individual and even eccentric nature of Tolkien’s work. So often it does not do what one might expect. The thought occurs, indeed, that many of the criticisms made of it by Edwin Muir, or Christine Brooke-Rose, or even Leonard Jackson (see above, here and here) would be much more accurate if levelled at the stripped-down, dumbed-down version Hollywood would have preferred. As often, the critics were criticising what they pretended to have read, not engaging with the work itself. But the success of the films does raise a more important issue. For many people, The Lord of the Rings now means the film version, not the books. In what ways are the two versions different, and would Tolkien himself have approved of the difference?

It should be remembered that Tolkien did live long enough to see a film script and to comment on it – the script indeed survives, with Tolkien’s marginal notations, in the archive at Marquette University, Milwaukee, while there are extensive selections from his letters of protest in Letters, pp. 260–61, 266–67, 270–77. That 1957 script was beyond all question an extraordinarily bad one, unambitious and careless, and Tolkien’s comments are appropriately blistering. Still, three points deserve to be extracted from them. First, Tolkien had no objection to a film version per se. Second, he realised straight away that for a film version his book would have to be cut; and he was sure that in such circumstances outright cutting would be preferable to compression. Better to take out entirely such semi-independent sections as the involvement with Tom Bombadil, or the Scouring of the Shire, or (he noted particularly, see Letters, p. 277) the return of Saruman, than to try to squeeze everything in at racing speed. What would happen if one chose that alternative would be, all too likely, that the Prime Action – Tolkien’s term for Frodo and Sam making their way into Mordor – would be downgraded in favour of the Subsidiary Action, the wars and the battles and the heroes.

The third point is more debatable. Tolkien (writing it should be remembered with a degree of ‘resentment’ about a confessedly poor script) protested that:

The canons of narrative art in any medium cannot be wholly different; and the failure of poor films is often precisely in exaggeration, and in the intrusion of unwarranted matter owing to not perceiving where the core of the original lies. (Letters, p. 270)

Leaving aside for the moment the question of ‘the core of the original’, one could challenge Tolkien’s phrase ‘wholly different’. The ‘canons of narrative art’ may well not be wholly different, but in different media they could well be substantially different. But is this just a matter of a change of medium, or does it affect the nature of the entire work? In what follows I try to answer the question just put.

One very evident difference between writing a book and making a film is money. Someone like Tolkien, writing on his own in the spare time from his ‘day job’, had no one to consider but himself. All that he was investing was his spare time, and as Dáin says to the messenger of Mordor, ‘the time of my thought is my own to spend’ (LOTR, p. 235). Someone like Jackson, controlling a budget of many millions of dollars, had to think about producing a return on the investment, and so to consider popular appeal. Every now and then, accordingly, one can see him ‘playing to the gallery’. Legolas skateboards down a flight of steps on a shield at the battle of Helm’s Deep (JTT 51, ‘The Breach of the Deeping Wall’).^*

Gimli twice plays to a joke about ‘dwarf-tossing’, once in the scene with the Balrog, where Gimli refuses to be thrown across the chasm – ‘Nobody tosses a dwarf!’ (JFR 36, ‘The Bridge of Khazad-dûm’) – and once at Helm’s Deep again, where this time he accepts the indignity in the cause of duty – ‘Toss me … Don’t tell the Elf!’ (JTT 53, ‘The Retreat to the Hornburg’). Tolkien would have understood neither addition: they are there for a teenage audience. Something similar could be said about the extra role given to Arwen in the first film, where she replaces Glorfindel in the scenes after Frodo is stabbed on Weathertop. This makes her into a better example of the strong active female character now preferred, but the rewriting rings a little hollow. In Tolkien it is Frodo who turns to defy the Ringwraiths at the edge of the ford of the Loudwater, but his defiance is weary, lonely and unsuccessful. Jackson has Arwen turning and defying the Ringwraiths, ‘If you want him, come and claim him!’ (JFR 21, ‘The Flight to the Ford’). Of course they do want him, they have every intention of claiming him, and Arwen’s defiance actually makes no difference: not much is gained by introducing the stereotype of the ‘warrior princess’ – except that, as has been said, this is the kind of thing a modern audience expects, or may be thought to expect.

There are a number of insertions and alterations like this in the Jackson films, but their effect need not be exaggerated: they pass quickly. More serious is the question of ‘the canons of narrative art’, and here I cannot help thinking that there must have been several occasions where Jackson’s scriptwriters³ said, in effect, ‘but we can’t do that’ – occasions where Tolkien himself seems to forget, or ignore, some of the very basic axioms of narrative. One of these is ‘show, don’t tell’. Tolkien’s narrative is on occasion unusually talkative, ready to bypass major dramatic scenes, and quite ready to leave the reader, or viewer, ‘up in the air’ – as for instance with the Ring. The unquestioned ‘core of the original’, to use Tolkien’s term, is the Ring and what we are told about it: its effect is always corrupting, no one can be trusted with it, it cannot be hidden, it must be destroyed and it must be destroyed in the place of its forging. Without these data the story cannot proceed. But though much of this is told by Gandalf to Frodo in the early chapter ‘The Shadow of the Past’, full information and identification does not take place till twelve chapters later in ‘The Council of Elrond’, while there is a full six months between the two events (April 13th to October 25th) – and seventeen years between ‘The Shadow of the Past’ and Bilbo’s farewell party. This leisurely unrolling does not suit the narrative medium of film, and Jackson’s solution is clear, direct, and arresting: much of the history of the Ring as conveyed tortuously by Gandalf and other speakers in ‘The Council of Elrond’ is taken out and told at the start, with a cool, quiet voice-over accompanying scenes of extreme drama and violence on screen (JFR 1, ‘Prologue; One Ring to Rule them All’). Far fewer ‘talking heads’, and the viewer ‘put in the picture’ from the beginning. This change does indeed come with a price, as discussed further below, but it makes the action quicker and more visual.

Even more challenging for the scriptwriters, I would imagine, was Tolkien’s handling of the destruction of Orthanc by the Ents. In his narrative we have a markedly slow build-up to the Ents’ decision to march, broken by ‘a great ringing shout’ (LOTR p. 473) and rapid movement to the end of the chapter ‘Treebeard’, which closes with the Ents and the hobbits looking down into Nan Curunír, the Valley of Saruman. Attention then moves elsewhere for almost four full chapters, nearly seventy pages, and the next time Orthanc appears it is a ruin. What has happened in between? This is not explained for another ten pages, and then it is told in flashback by Merry and Pippin between them. Jackson’s scriptwriters clearly could not repeat this. They had a choice between a scene with people talking ruminatively about something that had happened already, or a major action scene in chronological order (JTT 59, ‘The Flooding of Isengard’). In a visual medium such a choice can only go one way. The same is true of Aragorn’s journey from the Paths of the Dead to Pelargir, his rout of the Corsairs, and his arrival in the nick of time at the Pelennor Fields. In the book the Grey Company disappears from sight on p. 773, and reappears almost sixty pages later, in a way which further remains unexplained until this time Legolas and Gimli tell the story, again in flashback, a further thirty pages later. Once more it is a choice between ‘talking heads’ and major action scenes with every opportunity for special effects, and the choice for a film-maker is just as inevitable, as one sees from the scenes in the film of The Return of the King. It is hard to protest about any of these changes. In such cases the ‘canons of narrative art’ are different as between visual and verbal media, and Jackson surely had to do what he did.

Does it lead, however, to Tolkien’s feared subordination of Prime Action to Subsidiary Action, taking one’s attention off the Ring and on to the special effects? I would suggest that in fact Jackson restores any balance lost, several times, with rather deft transpositions which foreground or bring back quiet but important scenes which might otherwise have been suppressed. ‘The Council of Elrond’ is a case in point. In the film, much of its material has already been used, while it is quite clear that no film-maker could afford to spend a significant proportion of his running time on what is in effect a committee meeting, and one which ends moreover in exhaustion and prolonged silence: ‘All the Council sat with downcast eyes, as if in deep thought’ (LOTR p. 263). In Jackson, by contrast, the much shorter meeting ends with all parties shouting and haranguing each other. Yet the vital words at the end are almost exactly the same in both versions, Frodo saying ‘I will take the Ring, though I do not know the way’ (LOTR p. 264). In Tolkien these are dropped into a silence, in Jackson they have to penetrate a hubbub of voices. What happens in the film is that Frodo says ‘I will take the Ring’, and is ignored. As he walks forward to say it a second time, Gandalf turns to listen. And as the others notice Gandalf listening and fall silent, he says it a third time⁴ this time completing it almost as in Tolkien: ‘I will take the Ring to Mordor. Though I do not know the way’. The scene in the film makes a point vital to the story, and to the Prime Action, which is that it is the small and physically insignificant characters, the hobbits, who dominate the plot, though this is completely unexpected by anyone except Gandalf, the only one among the wise who ever pays any attention to them. Jackson’s straightening and lightening of the plot finds a justification in just this moment.

Another transposition to which I would call attention comes from ‘The Shadow of the Past’. In this chapter, in Tolkien, there is an especially resonant exchange between Frodo and Gandalf. Slowly realising what Gandalf is telling him, Frodo says reluctantly, ‘I wish it need not have happened in my time’, and Gandalf answers:

Babbitt (Sinclair Lewis), 76

Babel, 11, 52, 122, 268

Bag End, 81, 82, 118, 211, 212, 213, 264

‘bagging’, 82, 105n

Balin, 88, 104, 109, 166

balrogs, 49, 56, 125, 151, 245

Barad-dûr, 226, 266, 383

Barahir, 295

Bard the Bowman, 94–7, 100, 352

Barrow-wights, 119, 120, 122, 264

Bath, 36–7

Bath and West Evening Chronicle, 153

The Battle of Maldon (Old English poem), 94, 138, 140, 178, 236, 389

‘The Battle of the Goths and Huns’, see Poetic Edda, 391

Baynes, Pauline, 114

Beare, Rhona, 401

Bede, 49, 342, 375–6

Bede’s Death-Song (Old English poem), 49

Beleg, 300

Beleriand, 255, 268, 283, 349

‘bent’, 344

Bentham, Jeremy, 195

Bëor, 300

Beorhtwold, 178, 179

Beorn, 77, 91, 92, 95, 97, 105, 110, 147

Beowulf, 3–4, 5, 7, 8, 11, 15, 19, 23, 24, 25, 26, 38, 47, 51, 52, 53, 61, 66, 80, 81, 86, 89, 91, 92, 99, 102, 104, 141, 142, 143, 167, 171, 174, 182, 192, 193, 202, 205, 217, 225, 228, 233–4, 236, 237, 239, 251, 259, 265, 270, 282, 312, 351, 389–90

Beowulf: An Introduction (Chambers), 389

Beregond, 180

Beren, 126, 128, 220, 254, 269, 277, 287, 289, 290, 292–7, 299, 305, 306,

358–9, 360, 372; see also ‘Legend of Beren and Luthien’

Beruthiel, 126

‘bewilderment’, 98–106, 185, 186, 188, 194, 313, 385, 397, 423, 427

Biarkamál (Old Norse poem), 22

Bible, the, 14, 227–8, 249, 267–70, 369; Old Testament, 268, 339; Genesis, 267, 273; Psalms 227; Matthew, 249; see also Christianity

Bilbo Baggins, 73, 77, 78, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93, 95–101, 102, 103, 104, 105–6, 108, 109, 110, 115, 127–8, 138, 157, 161, 165, 209, 210, 211–12, 213, 217–18, 240, 245, 259, 280, 305, 373, 393; Baggins, as name and word, 81–2; style associated with, 81, 132, 264, 352; Bilbo, as name, 83n, 232

Billy Bunter, 200, 240

Biography (of Tolkien, see ‘Abbreviations’), 13, 36, 63, 75, 81, 175, 182, 259, 278, 292, 399

birch (as symbol), 310n, 316–17

‘birch’ poems, 399, 400–3

Birkenhead disaster, 93

Black Book of Carmarthen, 25

Black Speech, 131

Bloomfield, Leonard, 10, 15

‘blunderbuss’, 112

Boethius, 38, 159, 160, 161, 170, 172, 243

Boiardo, 182

Bolger, Fredegar, 118

Bombadil, Tom, 118, 119–20, 121–3, 125, 127, 139, 150, 162, 172, 196, 222, 230, 321–2, 368; absence from film version, 417

Book of St Albans, 30

Bopp, Franz, 12

Boromir, 68, 147, 170, 175, 181, 183, 185, 237, 244, 245, 363; latent vices of, 138, 157, 161–2; opinions of, 147, 237; Valar’s message to, 173; virtue of, 244

Bosworth, J., and Toller, T.N., see Anglo-Saxon Dictionary

Böthvarr Bjarki, 91

‘bounder’, 116n

‘bourgeois’, 82, 104, 264

‘Boy’s Own’, 200, 240

Brandybuck, Meriadoc, see Merry

‘The Brave Little Tailor’, see Grimms’ Fairy Tales

Bree, Bree-hill, Brill, 108, 119, 121; as names 124, 130, 132, 385

Brendan, St, 326–7

Breton lays, 277 293, 318

‘Brewer’s Biblical’, 200

Brook, G. L., 394

Brooke-Rose, Christine, 364–7, 410

Brugmann, K., 23

Brut, see Lazamon

Brynhild(r), 354–7, 360

Buchan, John, 200

Bugge, Sophus, 60

Burgess, Anthony, 6

‘burglar’, 83–4, 89, 99, 104, 264–5, 374

Bury, J. B., 20

Busbecq, Ogier van, 17

Butterbur, 119, 334

‘butterflies’, 39, 56

Hobbit The Hobbit: or There and Back Again (1937; cited here from the corrected edition, with ‘Note on the Text’ by Douglas A. Anderson, London: HarperCollins, 2001). ‘Homecoming’ ‘The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son’, Essays and Studies N.S. vol. 6 (1953), pp. 1–18. Reprinted in and here cited from Tree. Inklings The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and their friends, by Humphrey Carpenter (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1978). Jewels The War of the Jewels: The Later Silmarillion, Part Two, The Legends of Beleriand, edited by Christopher Tolkien (London: HarperCollins, 1994). Lays The Lays of Beleriand, edited by Christopher Tolkien (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985). ‘Leaf’ ‘Leaf by Niggle’, first printed in Dublin Review for Jan. 1945, pp. 46–61. Reprinted in Tree as the second part of ‘Tree and Leaf’, and here cited from there. Legendarium Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth, edited by Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter (Greenwood: Westport, CT, 2000). Letters Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter with the assistance of Christopher Tolkien (1981; London: HarperCollins, 1999). Lost Road The Lost Road and other writings: Language and Legend before The Lord of the Rings, edited by Christopher Tolkien (London: Unwin Hyman, 1987). LOTR The Lord of the Rings (first printed in three vols., 1954–5, 2nd ed., 1966; cited here from the corrected one-volume edition, with ‘Note on the Text’ by Douglas A. Anderson, London: HarperCollins, 2001, by page, or by book and chapter). Memoriam Essays J.R.R. Tolkien, Scholar and Story-Teller: Essays in Memoriam, edited by Mary Salu and Robert T. Farrell (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1979). ‘Monsters’ ‘Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics’, Proceedings of the British Academy vol. 22 (1936), pp. 245–95. Reprinted in Essays. MR Morgoth’s Ring: The Later Silmarillion, Part One, The Legends of Aman, edited by Christopher Tolkien (London: HarperCollins, 1993). OED The Oxford English Dictionary (13 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933 and Supplement in 4 vols, 1972–86). Note that the 13 volumes of 1933 are a reprint of The New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, issued in 10 volumes, 1884–1928. ‘OES’ ‘The Oxford English School’, The Oxford Magazine vol. 48, no. 21, 29 May 1930, pp. 778–82. ‘OFS’ ‘On Fairy-Stories’, first printed in Essays presented to Charles Williams (London: Oxford University Press, 1947), pp. 38–89. Reprinted in Essays and, as the first part of ‘Tree and Leaf, in Tree, and here cited from the latter. Peoples The Peoples of Middle-earth, edited by Christopher Tolkien (London: HarperCollins, 1996). Pictures Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1979; repr. London: HarperCollins, 1991). ‘Preface’ ‘Prefatory Remarks’ to Beowulf and the Finnesburg Fragment: a Translation into Modern English by J.R. Clark Hall, revised by C.L. Wrenn (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1950), pp. ix-xliii. Reprinted in Essays as ‘On Translating Beowulf’. Road The Road Goes Ever On: a Song Cycle, poems by J.R.R. Tolkien set to music by Donald Swann (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1968; repr. London: HarperCollins, 2002). S The Silmarillion, edited by Christopher Tolkien (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1977; repr. London: HarperCollins, 1999). SD Sauron Defeated: The End of the Third Age (The History of The Lord of the Rings, Part Four), edited by Christopher Tolkien (London: HarperCollins, 1992). SGGK Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, edited by J.R.R. Tolkien and E.V. Gordon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925). SGPO Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo, translated by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited and with an introduction by Christopher Tolkien (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1975). Shadow The Return of the Shadow (The History of The Lord of the Rings, Part One), edited by Christopher Tolkien (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988). Shaping The Shaping of Middle-earth: The Quenta, the Ambarkanta and the Annals, edited by Christopher Tolkien (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1986). Smith Smith of Wootton Major (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1967). Reprinted in Tales, and here cited from there. Songs Songs for the Philologists, by J.R.R. Tolkien, E.V. Gordon and others (privately printed at the Dept. of English, University College, London, 1936). Tales Tales from the Perilous Realm (London: HarperCollins, 2002). Contains Giles, TB and Smith. TB The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and other verses from The Red Book (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962). Reprinted in and cited from Tales. Treason The Treason of lsengard (The History of The Lord of the Rings, Part Two), edited by Christopher Tolkien (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989). Tree Tree and Leaf (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964; repr. London: HarperCollins, 2001: expanded to include ‘Mythopoeia’ and ‘Homecoming’). Contains ‘Homecoming’, with ‘OFS’ and ‘Leaf’ together as ‘Tree and Leaf’. UT Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth, edited by Christopher Tolkien (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981; repr. London: HarperCollins, 2000). War The War of the Ring (The History of The Lord of the Rings, Part Three), edited by Christopher Tolkien (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990). YWES Chapters on ‘Philology, General Works’ in The Year’s Work in English Studies, vols 4–6 for 1923–5. Cited by volume number and page.

For fuller bibliographical details, especially of Tolkien’s many separately-printed poems and learned articles, one should consult the updated list of his published writings in Biography (2000), pp. 353–66, or in further detail in Bibliography.

J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

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