A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien

A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien

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Edited by Paul Lauter Edited by Gene Jarrett Edited by Julia M. Wright Edited by Charles Mahoney Edited by Nicolas S. Witschi Edited by Pamela K. Gilbert Edited by Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas Edited by Erik Martiny Edited by Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine Edited by David Punter Edited by Alfred Bendixen Edited by Deborah Cartmell Edited by Amanda Anderson and Harry E. Shaw Edited by Graeme Harper Edited by Robert DeMaria, Jr., Heesok Chang, and Samantha Zacher Edited by Charles L. Crow Edited by Sandra Bermann and Catherine Porter Edited by Herbert F. Tucker Edited by David E. Chinitz and Gail McDonald Edited by Stuart D. Lee

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C O M P A N I O N

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J. R. R. TOLKIEN EDITED BY S T UA R T D. L E E

This edition first published 2014 © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Registered Office John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK Editorial Offices 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our web site at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell. The right of Stuart D. Lee to be identified as the author of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services and neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising herefrom. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for Hardback ISBN: 978-0-470-65982-3 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Cover image: Photograph of J. R. R. Tolkien by Pamela Chandler, © Diana Willson. Cover design by Richard Boxall Design Associates Set in 11/13 pt Garamond 3 LT Std by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited 1  2014

For Conaire (“Con”) Lee

Contents

Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors Editorial Practices and Abbreviations Brief Chronology of the Life and Works of J. R. R. Tolkien

xi xiii xiv xxii

Introduction

1

Part I:  Life

5

  1  A Brief Biography John Garth

7

Part II:  The Academic

25

  2  Academic Writings Thomas Honegger

27

  3  Tolkien as Editor Tom Shippey

41

  4  Manuscripts: Use, and Using Stuart D. Lee

56

Part III:  The Legendarium

77

  5  Myth-making and Sub-creation Carl Phelpstead

79

  6  Middle-earth Mythology: An Overview Leslie A. Donovan

92

viii

Contents

  7  The Silmarillion: Tolkien’s Theory of Myth, Text, and Culture Gergely Nagy

107

  8  The Hobbit: A Turning Point John D. Rateliff

119

  9  The Lord of the Rings John R. Holmes

133

10  Unfinished Tales and the History of Middle-earth: A Lifetime of Imagination Elizabeth A. Whittingham

146

11  “The Lost Road” and “The Notion Club Papers”: Myth, History, and Time-travel Verlyn Flieger

161

12  Poetry Corey Olsen

173

13  “Minor” Works Maria Artamonova

189

14  Invented Languages and Writing Systems Arden R. Smith

202

Part IV:  Context

215

15  Old English Mark Atherton

217

16  Middle English Elizabeth Solopova

230

17  Old Norse Tom Birkett

244

18  Finnish: The Land and Language of Heroes Leena Kahlas-Tarkka

259

19  Celtic: “Celtic Things” and “Things Celtic” – Identity, Language, and Mythology J. S. Lyman-Thomas

272

20  The English Literary Tradition: Shakespeare to the Gothic Nick Groom

286

21  Earlier Fantasy Fiction: Morris, Dunsany, and Lindsay Rachel Falconer

303



Contents

ix

22  The Inklings and Others: Tolkien and His Contemporaries David Bratman

317

23  Later Fantasy Fiction: Tolkien’s Legacy Dimitra Fimi

335

24  Modernity: Tolkien and His Contemporaries Anna Vaninskaya

350

Part V:  Critical Approaches

367

25  The Critical Response to Tolkien’s Fiction Patrick Curry

369

26  Style and Intertextual Echoes Allan Turner

389

27  The Hero’s Journey Anna Caughey

404

28  Evil Christopher Garbowski

418

29  Nature Liam Campbell

431

30  Religion: An Implicit Catholicism Pat Pinsent

446

31  War Janet Brennan Croft

461

32  Women Adam Roberts

473

33  Art Christopher Tuthill

487

34  Music Bradford Lee Eden

501

35  Film Adaptations: Theatrical and Television Versions Kristin Thompson

514

36  Games and Gaming: Quantasy Péter Kristóf Makai

530

General Bibliography Index

545 555

Acknowledgments

I am extremely grateful to several people for providing the inspiration for this volume, and for assisting in its production. I am particularly grateful to Catherine Parker at the Bodleian Library, Cathleen Blackburn of Maier Blackburn, and William Fliss of Marquette University for their assistance in key areas of this project. My thanks also to Emma Bennett of Wiley Blackwell for supporting the venture. Personally I would also like to thank my wife, Sarah, for putting up with the countless hours I had to spend editing; my family for their support and insights into Tolkien; Nick Gleeson and Tim Jones, my inspirational English teachers; Barbara Raw for allowing me to do my first extended undergraduate essay on Tolkien; and all the members of the Bancroft’s School Games Club (1981–1983) who led me down this path in the first place. My thanks also go to the Tolkien Literary Estate and HarperCollins Publishers Ltd for allowing material to be reproduced from the following works: The Hobbit © The J. R. R. Tolkien Estate Limited 1937, 1965; The Fellowship of the Ring © Fourth Age Limited 1954, 1955, 1966; The Two Towers © Fourth Age Limited 1954, 1955, 1966; The Return of the King © Fourth Age Limited 1954, 1955, 1966; Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien © The J. R. R. Tolkien Copyright Trust 1981; The Silmarillion © The J. R. R. Tolkien Estate Limited and C. R. Tolkien 1977; The History of Middle-earth © The J. R. R. Tolkien Copyright Trust and C. R. Tolkien 1983–1996; On Fairy-Stories © The Tolkien Trust 1964; A Secret Vice © The J. R. R. Tolkien Copyright Trust 1983; Mr. Bliss © The J. R. R. Tolkien Estate Limited 1982; Letters from Father Christmas © The J. R. R. Tolkien Estate Limited 1976; Roverandom © The Tolkien Trust 1998; Farmer Giles of Ham © The J. R. R. Tolkien Estate Limited 1949; Leaf by Niggle © The Tolkien Trust 1964; Smith of Wootton Major © The Tolkien Trust 1967; The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son © The J. R. R. Tolkien Estate Limited 1953, 1966; Unfinished Tales © The J. R. R. Tolkien Estate Limited and C. R. Tolkien 1980; Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics © The J. R. R. Tolkien Copyright Trust

xii

Acknowledgments

1983; The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún © The Tolkien Trust 2009 for writings by JRRT, Foreword, Introduction, Commentaries, Appendices, and all other materials © C. R. Tolkien 2009; English and Welsh © The J. R. R. Tolkien Copyright Trust 1983; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo © The J. R. R. Tolkien Copyright Trust 1975; Finn and Hengest: The Fragment and the Episode © The J. R. R. Tolkien Copyright Trust and Professor Alan Bliss 1982; Progress in Bimble Town © The J. R. R. Tolkien Copyright Trust 1931. Stuart D. Lee Oxford University

Notes on Contributors

Maria Artamonova, D.Phil. (Oxon.), has taught Old and Middle English as well as courses on Tolkien at the Oxford University’s Department of Continuing Education and a number of summer schools. Her publications include “Writing for an Anglo-Saxon Audience in the Twentieth Century: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Old English Chronicles,” in Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination (2010), and translations of Tolkien’s scholarly articles into Russian. Mark Atherton, D.Phil., teaches English language and literature at Oxford University and specializes in medieval literature. He has published on Hildegard of Bingen, the study of language in the nineteenth century, and late Anglo-Saxon literature; his recent publications include Teach Yourself Old English (2006/2010) and There and Back Again: J. R. R. Tolkien and the Origins of The Hobbit (2012). Tom Birkett is a Lecturer in Old English at the School of English, University College Cork (UCC). He gained a D.Phil. in Old Norse and Old English from Oxford, and has written essays on the Old English riddles, manuscript marginalia, and the use of the runic script in early medieval poetry, as well as working as research assistant on a study looking at the influence of Old Norse myth on poets writing in English. He teaches on the undergraduate and MA programs at UCC, and is continuing research into medieval textual culture and the reception of Old Norse literature. David Bratman is co-editor of Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review, and edited The Masques of Amen House by Charles Williams. His articles include studies of Tolkien, the Inklings, Mervyn Peake, and Neil Gaiman. Formerly a librarian at Stanford University, he works as a classical music critic. Liam Campbell is an independent writer and scholar from Northern Ireland who has lectured in English literature for the University of Ulster. He is the author of The Ecological Augury in the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien (2011) and has published previously

xiv

Notes on Contributors

on Tolkien and environmentalism, as well as given many talks across Europe and America on Tolkien, ecocriticism, and contemporary literature. Anna Caughey D.Phil. (Oxon.), teaches Old and Middle English at Keble College, Oxford. Her primary research interests are in the representation of masculinity, knighthood, and chivalry in both medieval and contemporary literature. Her most recently published articles are on conciliation in fifteenth-century Scottish romance, the Alexander the Great and adaptations of Arthurian literature for children. Janet Brennan Croft is Head of Access Services and Delivery Services and Associate Professor at the University of Oklahoma Libraries. She is the author of War and the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien (2004; Mythopoeic Award for Inklings Studies). She has also written on the Peter Jackson films, J. K. Rowling, Terry Pratchett, Lois McMaster Bujold, and other authors, and is editor or co-editor of four collections of literary essays, including Tolkien on Film (2004), Tolkien and Shakespeare (2007). She edits the scholarly journal Mythlore. Patrick Curry is a writer and scholar living in London. He is the author of several books, including Defending Middle-earth: Tolkien, Myth and Modernity, 2nd edn. (2004) and, most recently, Ecological Ethics: An Introduction, 2nd edn. (2011), as well as many papers in collections on Tolkien. He has been a Lecturer at Bath Spa University and the University of Kent. Leslie A. Donovan teaches interdisciplinary undergraduate courses as an Associate Professor in the Honors College at the University of New Mexico. Her Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington emphasized Old and Middle English literature. Among her publications are studies of valkyries in The Lord of the Rings, women saints in Old English prose, the character of Hunferth in Beowulf, and various pedagogical topics. Bradford Lee Eden is Dean of Library Services at Valparaiso University. He has a masters and Ph.D. degrees in musicology and an MS in library science. He publishes in the areas of librarianship, medieval music and liturgy, and J. R. R. Tolkien. His most recent book is Middle-earth Minstrel: Essays on Music in Tolkien (2010). He is also the editor of The Journal of Tolkien Research. Rachel Falconer is Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Lausanne. Her publications include Orpheus Dis(re)membered: Milton and the Myth of the Poet-Hero (1996), Hell in Contemporary Literature (2005), and The Crossover Novel: Contemporary Children’s Fiction and Its Adult Readership (2009). She is currently working on contemporary nature writing, and editing a collection of essays on the poet Kathleen Jamie. Dimitra Fimi is a Lecturer in English at Cardiff Metropolitan University. She is the author of Tolkien, Race and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits (2008), which won the Mythopoeic Scholarship award in Inklings Studies. She has also published articles



Notes on Contributors

xv

and essays in journals (including Folklore and Tolkien Studies) and in edited collections (including Picturing Tolkien, 2011, and Critical Insights: The Fantastic, 2013). She lectures on Tolkien and fantasy literature at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Verlyn Flieger is Professor Emerita, Department of English, University of Maryland. Her books on Tolkien include Splintered Light, A Question of Time, Interrupted Music, and Green Suns and Faërie. She edited the Extended Edition of Tolkien’s Smith of Wootton Major, and with Douglas A. Anderson the Expanded Edition of On Fairy-stories. With Carl Hostetter she edited Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth. She is co-editor of the journal Tolkien Studies. Christopher Garbowski is an Associate Professor at the Department of English at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Poland. He is the author of a number of books, including Recovery and Transcendence for the Contemporary Mythmaker: The Spiritual Dimension in the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien (2000) and Spiritual Values in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings (2005). John Garth is the author of Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth (2003), winner of the Mythopoeic Award for Scholarship in Inklings Studies. He has reviewed books by and about Tolkien in The Times, The Sunday Telegraph, The Daily Beast, The Times Literary Supplement, The London Evening Standard, and Tolkien Studies, and he contributed key articles to the Routledge J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia. He lives in Oxford and has spoken on Tolkien to general and specialist audiences in Britain, mainland Europe, and the United States. Nick Groom is Professor in English at the University of Exeter. He has written extensively on eighteenth-century and Romantic literature and culture, and on national identity. Among his books are The Forger’s Shadow (2002), The Union Jack (2006), The Gothic (2012), and The Seasons (2013). He is currently writing a cultural history of British saints’ days, a polemic on the English landscape, and a study of Tolkien and the Gothic. John R. Holmes has been teaching English at Franciscan University of Steubenville (Ohio) since 1985. He has published numerous articles on Tolkien, including several in the Routledge J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia. Thomas Honegger holds a Ph.D. from the University of Zurich (Switzerland) where he taught Old and Middle English. He is, since 2002, Professor for English Medieval Studies at the Friedrich Schiller University, Jena (Germany). Leena Kahlas-Tarkka is a University Lecturer in English Philology in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Her main research interests lie within the area of historical linguistics, especially syntax from Old to Early Modern English. She has also published an article on Beowulf and Tolkien in Finnish.

xvi

Notes on Contributors

Stuart D. Lee is a member of the University of Oxford’s English Faculty, and Merton College. His Ph.D. was in Old English and he lectures on Old English, Tolkien, and the Poetry of World War I. He co-authored The Keys of Middle-earth: Discovering Medieval Literature through the Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien (2005) and Key Concepts in Medieval Literature (2006), both with Elizabeth Solopova. He has published in Tolkien Studies, and also numerous articles on Old English, War Poetry, and Digital Humanities. Jaquelyn S. Lyman-Thomas is a Professor of English, Gender & Sexuality Studies, and Humanities at Anne Arundel Community College (Arnold, MD). She is a freelance writer, an advanced student of the Welsh language, and a member of the Board of Cymdeithas Madog, the Welsh Studies Institute in North America. Péter Kristóf Makai is a Ph.D. candidate at the Doctoral School of Literary Studies at the University of Szeged, Hungary, investigating the representation of mental functioning in novels about autism. He has published articles about the relationship between the fantastic and games in Tolkien Studies and in Postmodern Reinterpretations of Fairy Tales (ed. Anna Kérchy, 2011). His research interests include game studies and ludology, narratology, cognitive literary and cultural studies, science fiction, and fantasy studies. Gergely Nagy is a Junior Assistant Professor at the University of Szeged, Hungary, where he teaches contemporary popular culture (including Tolkien) and medieval cultural history and literature. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on The Silmarillion, and has published articles on Tolkien, Malory, and Chaucer. Corey Olsen is the President of Signum University and the founder of the Mythgard Institute, an online teaching center for the study of Tolkien and other works of imaginative literature. He received his Ph.D. in medieval English literature from Columbia University, and his first book, Exploring J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, was published in 2012. Carl Phelpstead is a Professor of English Literature at Cardiff University in Wales. He has published extensively on Old Norse and medieval English literature and on modern medievalism, including Tolkien. His book Tolkien and Wales: Language, Literature and Identity won the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Inklings Studies in 2012. Pat Pinsent is Senior Research Fellow at Roehampton University, London, specializing in Children’s Literature, the subject matter of most of her 15 books, and supervising research students. She researches the current development of children’s literature, and the relationship between it and spirituality/religion; she also edits two journals. John D. Rateliff, an independent scholar, holds a Ph.D. from Marquette University. His major contribution to Tolkien studies is The History of The Hobbit, an edition, with extensive commentary, of the manuscripts of The Hobbit. He has contributed to volumes such as Tolkien’s Legendarium and journals such as Tolkien Studies.



Notes on Contributors

xvii

Adam Roberts is Professor of Nineteenth-century Literature and Culture at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of various books, including several books of and on science fiction and fantasy. His latest critical work is The Riddles of the Hobbit (2013). Tom Shippey has taught medieval studies at several universities, including Oxford and Harvard, and for many years held the Chair at Leeds which Tolkien held in the 1920s. His The Road to Middle-earth was published in 1982, and has appeared in successive revised and expanded editions to 2005. It was followed by Tolkien: Author of the Century (2000) and Roots and Branches: Selected Papers on Tolkien (2007). He has also published extensively on Old and Middle English, and Old Norse. Arden R. Smith holds a Ph.D. in Germanic Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, and has published numerous articles on Tolkien, particularly on Tolkien’s invented writing systems and translations of Tolkien’s works. He is a member of a project to edit Tolkien’s unpublished linguistic papers. Elizabeth Solopova is a Research Fellow at the Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford and William Golding Research Fellow at Brasenose College, Oxford. She researches on Old and Middle English literature, historical linguistics, book history, and medieval liturgical and biblical manuscripts. She is the author, with Dr Stuart Lee, of The Keys of Middle-earth: Discovering Medieval Literature through the Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien (2005). Kristin Thompson received her Ph.D. in cinema studies in 1977 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she has been an Honorary Fellow since 1982. With husband David Bordwell, she is the co-author of two widely used textbooks: Film Art and Film History. She has published ten other books on cinema, most recently The Frodo Franchise: The Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood and, with Bordwell, Minding Movies: Observations on the Art, Craft, and Business of Filmmaking. She has also published a study of P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves/Wooster series and is at work on a book closely analyzing narrative technique in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings novels. Allan Turner is a Lecturer in English at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany. His main areas of research are translation studies and stylistics, particularly in relation to the works of Tolkien. Christopher Tuthill is Assistant Professor and Information Services Librarian at Baruch College, The City University of New York. He has recently published articles on Tolkien and on Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea novels. Anna Vaniskaya D.Phil. (Oxon.) is a Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History, and Propaganda, 1880–1914 (2010), and has published over 20 articles and chapters on topics ranging from Chesterton, Orwell, and Tolkien to

xviii

Notes on Contributors

socialism, popular reading, education, historiography, and Anglo-Russian literary relations. Elizabeth A. Whittingham teaches English at the College at Brockport State University of New York and at Monroe Community College in Rochester, New York. Her book, The Evolution of Tolkien’s Mythology: A Study of the History of Middle-earth (2008), examines nearly six decades of Tolkien’s writings. She has been published in the Routledge J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia (2006), The Mythic Fantasy of Robert Holdstock (2011), and in various journals. In 2009 she was a guest lecturer at the NEH Tolkien Summer Institute at Texas A&M University. She has presented at various conferences, most frequently at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts.

Editorial Practices and Abbreviations

This section lists the editorial practices and main abbreviations used in this volume, which for the most part are in keeping with those established in the journal Tolkien Studies. Titles of Tolkien’s works are always notoriously difficult. Those that have been published in their own single volume are italicized, such as The Hobbit. Other titles of chapters, poems, or texts that are contained within other volumes are given in inverted commas, such as “Errantry,” “Leaf by Niggle,” “The Notion Club Papers,” or “A Secret Vice.” Three particular instances deserve special mention. “On Fairy-stories” refers to the lecture/essay of that name, whereas On Fairy-stories or OFS refers to the edition by Flieger and Anderson. “Narn i Hîn Húrin” or “Tale of the Children of Húrin” or “Narn” refers to either the chapter in Unfinished Tales or the text in The History of Middleearth, The Children of Húrin is the edition published by Christopher Tolkien in 2007. “The Silmarillion” or “Silmarillion” refers to the collection of papers and tales assembled by Tolkien during his lifetime, The Silmarillion to the version published in 1977. Similarly one must confront the issue of the races of Middle-earth. Elves, Men, Dwarves, etc., are capitalized (as are Hobbits, though Tolkien himself was inconsistent here). Foreign or unfamiliar words are italicized and then translated: for example, sigel “sun.” Tolkien’s use of diacritics (macrons, circumflexes, accents), usually denoting length marks in vowels (or in the case of diaeresis, e.g. “ë” separate enforced pronunciation of the vowel), was not consistent. They have been retained in keeping with the authoritative printed edition.

Bibliography Each essay has a list of non-Tolkien References specific to that chapter, and occasionally specific Further Reading. The General Bibliography at the end of the volume

xx

Editorial Practices and Abbreviations

contains details of texts by Tolkien, suggested Further Reading, and web sites. A list of Tolkien’s academic publications can be found at the end of ch. 2.

Abbreviations A&U AW “Beowulf” Beowulf Chronology Companion EETS Exodus f. FG FH FR

H HoH Jewels l. or ll. Lays Letters Lost Tales I Lost Tales II Lost Road MC MED MEV Morgoth OED OFS

Allen & Unwin (Publishers). Ancrene Riwle: Ancrene Wisse (Tolkien 1962a). “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” (MC 5–48). The Old English poem of the same name. Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond. 2006. The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide. Vol. 1: Chronology. London: HarperCollins. Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, eds. 2005. The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion. London: HarperCollins. Early English Text Society. The Old English Exodus (Tolkien 1981). folio. Farmer Giles of Ham (Tolkien 2008a). Finn and Hengest (Tolkien 1982). The Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien 2004a). For The Lord of the Rings, citations are by book, chapter, and page number. For example, “RK, V, i, 977” is The Return of the King, Book Five, chapter 1, page 977. The Hobbit (Tolkien 1995). John Rateliff. 2012. The History of The Hobbit. 2nd edn. London: HarperCollins. The War of the Jewels (Tolkien 1994). line(s). The Lays of Beleriand (Tolkien 1985). The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (Tolkien 1995b). Citations are by page number. The Book of Lost Tales, Part One (Tolkien 1983b). The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two (Tolkien 1984). The Lost Road and Other Writings (Tolkien 1987). The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (Tolkien 1983a). R. E. Lewis, ed. 2001. Middle English Dictionary. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. A Middle English Vocabulary (Tolkien 1922). Morgoth’s Ring: The Later Silmarillion (Tolkien 1993). The Oxford English Dictionary. “On Fairy-stories” (Tolkien 2008b).

“Papers” PDE Peoples Reader’s Guide RK S Sauron SG SGGK SGPSO Shaping Sir Gawain Smith TL Treason TT UT War YWES

Editorial Practices and Abbreviations “The Notion Club Papers” (in Tolkien 1992a). Present Day English. The Peoples of Middle-earth (Tolkien 1996). Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond. 2006. The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide. Vol. 2: Reader’s Guide. London: HarperCollins. The Return of the King (Tolkien 2004a). Cited by book number, chapter, and page. The Silmarillion (Tolkien 1977). Sauron Defeated: The End of the Third Age (Tolkien 1992a). The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún (Tolkien 2009a). Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Tolkien and Gordon 1967). Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Sir Orfeo (Tolkien 1995d). The Shaping of Middle-earth (Tolkien 1986). The Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Smith of Wootton Major (Tolkien 1990a). Tree and Leaf (Tolkien 2001a). The Treason of Isengard (Tolkien 1989). The Two Towers (Tolkien 2004a). Cited by book number, chapter, and page. Unfinished Tales (Tolkien 1998c). The War of the Ring (Tolkien 1990b). The Year’s Work in English Studies.

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Brief Chronology of the Life and Works of J. R. R. Tolkien

Date

Significant Events1

1892

Born January 3, Bloemfontein, South Africa to Mabel and Arthur Tolkien. Brother Hilary is born.

1894

1895

1896

Returns to England with Mother and Brother. Father dies. Moves to Sarehole.

1897 1899 1900

1901 1902

Selected Publications of Note (for indication of when Tolkien started work on individual pieces of work see chs. 1–3)2

Selected Historical Events

Oxford University English School established (Faculty of English Language and Literature).

William Morris dies. Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. Start of 2nd Boer War.

Attends King Edward’s School, Moseley, Birmingham. Enters St Philip’s Grammar School.

Queen Victoria dies. Coronation of Edward VII. End of Boer War

Date

Significant Events1

1903

Awarded scholarship and returns to King Edward’s School. Mother dies. Meets Edith Bratt. Moves to Edgbaston. Passes Oxford Entrance exam. Enters Exeter College, Oxford.

1904 1908 1910

1911 1913

Awarded Second Class degree in Honour Moderations, begins Honours School of English Language and Literature.

Selected Publications of Note (for indication of when Tolkien started work on individual pieces of work see chs. 1–3)2

1916

1917

1918

Selected Historical Events

Barrie’s Peter Pan. Edward VII dies. George V crowned. “The Battle of Eastern Field” published in The King Edward’s School Chronicle. “From the many-willow’d margin of the immemorial Thames” in The Stapledon Magazine, 4.20: 11.

1914

1915

xxiii

Brief Chronology

Awarded First Class Honours. Commissioned into the Lancashire Fusiliers. Marries Edith Bratt. Sees action on the Somme. Invalided home. Son John is born.

“Goblin Feet” in Oxford Poetry 1915, reprinted in 1917 and 1920.

Joins staff of New Oxford English Dictionary. Works on letter W.

Introduction to G. B. Smith’s A Spring Harvest.

Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers.

Start of World War I. August 4, Britain declares war on Germany. Oxford English Faculty Library opens. Dardanelles Campaign.

Battle of Jutland. July 1, start of the Battle of the Somme. United States enters War. 3rd Battle of Ypres. Women over 30 get the vote. World War I armistice. (Continued)

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Brief Chronology

Date

Significant Events1

Selected Publications of Note (for indication of when Tolkien started work on individual pieces of work see chs. 1–3)2

Selected Historical Events

1920

Appointed as Reader in English Language, Leeds University. Son Michael is born. E. V. Gordon joins Leeds University.

“The Happy Mariners” in The Stapledon Magazine, 5.26: 69–70.

Oxford University admits women. Ancient Greek no longer required for Oxford entrance. BBC formed. Joyce’s Ulysses. Eliot’s The Waste Land.

1922

1923

1924

Appointed Professor of English Language, Leeds University. Son Christopher is born.

A Middle English Vocabulary for K. Sisam’s Fourteenth Century Prose and Verse. Issued separately at first then included as glossary. “Iúmonna Gold Galdre Bewunden” in The Gryphon, N.S. 4.4: 130. “Holy Maidenhood” in Times Literary Supplement, April 26: 281. “The City of the Gods” in The Microcosm, 8.1: 8. “Obituary: Henry Bradley” in Bulletin of the Modern Humanities Research Association, 20: 4–5. “Tha Eadigan Saelidan (The Happy Mariners),” “Why the Man in the Moon Came Down too Soon,” and “Enigmata Saxonica Nuper Inventa Duo” in A Northern Venture: Verses by Members of the Leeds University English Association, 15–20. “The Cat and the Fiddle: A Nursery Rhyme Undone and its Scandalous Secret Unlocked” in Yorkshire Poetry, 2.19: 1–3. “An Evening in Tavrobel,” “The Lonely Isle,” and “The Princess Ni” in Leeds University Verse 1914–24. “Philology, General Works” in The Year’s Work in English Studies, 4: 20–37.

First Labour Government.



Brief Chronology

xxv

Date

Significant Events1

Selected Publications of Note (for indication of when Tolkien started work on individual pieces of work see chs. 1–3)2

Selected Historical Events

1925

Appointed Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of AngloSaxon, Pembroke College, Oxford.

Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.

1926

Moves to 22 Northmoor Road, Oxford. Forms “Coalbiters” club. Meets C. S. Lewis.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (edited with E. V. Gordon). “Some Contributions to MiddleEnglish Lexicography” in Review of English Studies, 1.2: 210–215. “Light as leaf on Lindentree” in The Gryphon, N.S. 6.6: 217. “The Devil’s Coach-Horses” in Review of English Studies, 1.3: 331–336. “Tinfang Warble” and “The Grey Bridge of Tavrobel” in the Inter-University Magazine (1925? 1927?). Contributes translation to Rhys Roberts’s “Gerald of Wales and the Survival of Welsh.” “Philology, General Works” in The Year’s Work in English Studies, 5: 26–65.

1927

1928

1929

Daughter Priscilla is born.

The General Strike.

“The Nameless Land” in G. S. Tancred (ed.), Realities: An Anthology of Verse, 24. “Philology, General Works” in The Year’s Work in English Studies, 6: 32–66. “Adventures in Unnatural History and the Medieval Metres, being the Freaks of Fisiologus” in The Stapledon Magazine, 7: 40. “Foreword” to W. E. Haigh’s A New Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District. “Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meithhad” in Essays and Studies, 14: 104–126. (Continued)

xxvi

Brief Chronology

Date

Significant Events1

Selected Publications of Note (for indication of when Tolkien started work on individual pieces of work see chs. 1–3)2

1930

Whilst marking exam scripts writes “In the hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” Moves to 20 Northmoor Road. Conversation with Dyson and Lewis possibly leads to theory of sub-creation and “Mythopoeia.”

“The Oxford English School” in The Oxford Magazine, 48.21: 778–782.

1931

1932

1933 1934

“Progress in Bimble Town” in The Oxford Magazine, 50.1: 22.

“Sigelwara Land” Pt 1 in Medium Ævum, 1.3: 183–196. “The Name ‘Nodens’ ” in Report of the Excavation of the Prehistoric, Roman, and Post-Roman Sites in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire, 132–137. “A Philologist on Esperanto” in The British Esperantist, 28. “Errantry” in The Oxford Magazine, 52.5: 180. “Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve’s Tale” in Transactions of the Philological Society, 1–70, see also Tolkien Studies, 5 (2008): 109–171. “Looney” in The Oxford Magazine, 52.9: 340. “The Adventures of Tom Bombadil” in The Oxford Magazine, 52.13: 464–465. “Sigelwara Land” Pt 2 in Medium Æevum, 3.2: 95–111. “Firiel” in The Chronicle of the Covenants of the Sacred Heart, 4.

Selected Historical Events



xxvii

Brief Chronology

Date

Significant Events1

Selected Publications of Note (for indication of when Tolkien started work on individual pieces of work see chs. 1–3)2

Selected Historical Events

1936

Delivers Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture on “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” (London)

Songs for the Philologists with E. V. Gordon and others. Tolkien has 13 poems in the volume including “Ofer Widne Garsecg.” “The Shadow Man” and “Noel” in Annual of Our Lady’s School. The Hobbit: or There and Back Again. “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” in Proceedings of the British Academy, 22: 245–295. “The Dragon Visit” in The Oxford Magazine, 55.11: 342. “Knocking at the Door” in The Oxford Magazine, 55.13: 403. “Iúmonna Gold Galdre Bewunden” in The Oxford Magazine, 55.15: 473. Contributions to E. V. Gordon’s The Battle of Maldon. Letter in The Observer, February 20.

George V dies. Abdication crisis.

1937

1938

1939

1940

Delivers Andrew Lang Lecture “On Fairy-stories” (St Andrews). “Prefatory Remarks on Prose Translation of Beowulf” in J. R. Clark Hall, Beowulf and the Finnsburg Fragment: A Translation (revised by C. L. Wrenn).

1941 1942 1944

George VI crowned.

Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet. T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone. World War II begins. Britain declares war on Germany, September 3. The Battle of Britain.

Pearl Harbor. United States enters war. Introductory note in A Philological Miscellany. Sir Orfeo [booklet].

D-Day. (Continued)

xxviii

Brief Chronology

Date

Significant Events1

Selected Publications of Note (for indication of when Tolkien started work on individual pieces of work see chs. 1–3)2

Selected Historical Events

1945

Elected Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, Oxford.

“Leaf by Niggle” in The Dublin Review, 432: 46–61. “The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun” in The Welsh Review, 4.4: 254–266. Letter on “The Name Coventry” in The Catholic Herald, February 23. Letter on “Research v Literature” in The Sunday Times, April 14. “ ‘Iþþlen’ in Sawles Warde” in English Studies, 28.6: 168–170. “On Fairy-stories” in C. S. Lewis (ed.), Essays Presented to Charles Williams, 38–89. “MS. Bodley 34: A Re-collation of a Collation” in Studia Neophilologica, 20.1–2: 65–72. Farmer Giles of Ham.

Germany surrenders. Atomic bombs exploded over Japan.

1946 1947

Moves to 3 Manor Road.

1948 1949 1950 1951 1952

1953

Finishes The Lord of the Rings. Moves to 99 Holywell Street.

Peake’s Titus Groan.

Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Revised edition of The Hobbit. Tolkien is interviewed and recorded reading several extracts from his works by George Sayer. Delivers W. Ker Memorial Lecture on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Glasgow). Move to 76 Sandfield Road, Headington.

George VI dies. Queen Elizabeth II crowned.

“The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorthelm’s Son” in Essays and Studies, N.S. 6: 1–18. “Middle English ‘Losenger’ ” in Essais de Philologie Moderne (1951), 63–76. “A Fourteenth-Century Romance” in Radio Times, December 4. Contributions to E. V. Gordon’s Pearl.

Date

Significant Events1

1954 1955

xxix

Brief Chronology

Delivers O’Donnell Lecture “English and Welsh” (Oxford). “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth” dramatized for BBC radio.

1958

Selected Publications of Note (for indication of when Tolkien started work on individual pieces of work see chs. 1–3)2

Selected Historical Events

The Fellowship of the Ring. The Two Towers. The Return of the King. “Imram” in Time and Tide, 1561. “Preface” in M. B. Salu’s The Ancrene Riwle.

“Preface” to Gooden’s The Old English Apollonius of Tyre.

Pinter’s The Birthday Party performed.

1960

Letter in Triode, 18.

1962

The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. Ancrene Wisse: The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle. “English and Welsh” in Angles and Britons: O’Donnell Lectures, 1–41. Tree and Leaf. “Once Upon a Time” and “The Dragon’s Visit” in C. Hillier (ed.), Winter’s Tales for Children: 1, 44–45 and 84–87.

Latin no longer required to be admitted to Oxford University. Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. “Love Me Do” by The Beatles reaches no. 1.

1959

1963 1964 1965

Retires from Oxford Professorship. Delivers Valedictory Address.

C. S. Lewis dies.

Ballantine Books in New York issue second edition of FR with new foreword, TT and RK to follow (1966). Ace Books scandal in United States.

Cooper’s Over Sea, Under Stone.

(Continued)

xxx

Brief Chronology

Date

Significant Events1

Selected Publications of Note (for indication of when Tolkien started work on individual pieces of work see chs. 1–3)2

1966

Deitch makes 12-minute animation of The Hobbit.

“Tolkien on Tolkien” in Diplomat, 18.197: 39. Contributed to The Jerusalem Bible. The Tolkien Reader. “A Elbereth Gilthoniel” and translation in Tolkien Journal, 2.1. Smith of Wootton Major “For W. H. A.” in Shenandoah: The Washington and Lee University Review, 18.2: 96–97. The Road Goes Ever On: A Song Cycle.

1967

1968

BBC Radio adaptation of The Hobbit. Interviewed by BBC TV for Tolkien in Oxford. Moves to Bournemouth.

1969

1971 1972

1973

Edith Tolkien dies. Tolkien is awarded CBE. Returns to Merton College rooms. Receives Honorary Degree of Letters from Oxford. Dies September 2. Posthumous Events Related to Tolkien

1974

Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea.

Letter in W. L. White’s The Image of Man in C. S. Lewis. Smith of Wootton Major and Farmer Giles of Ham. “The Hoard” in R. L. Green (ed.), The Hamish Hamilton Book of Dragons.

1970

Selected Historical Events

Letter in The Daily Telegraph, July 4.

Posthumous Publications Bilbo’s Last Song.

Moon landing.

Date

Brief Chronology Significant Events1

1975

1976 1977

1978

Carpenter’s Biography. Rankin/Bass release TV animation of The Hobbit. Carpenter’s The Inklings. Ralph Bakshi releases animated version of The Lord of the Rings.

1979

1980 1981

1982

1983 1984 1985 1986

Rankin/Bass release The Return of the King for TV. BBC produce full dramatization for radio of The Lord of the Rings. Tom Shippey publishes The Road to Middle-earth.

Selected Publications of Note (for indication of when Tolkien started work on individual pieces of work see chs. 1–3)2

xxxi Selected Historical Events

Translations of Sir Gawain, Sir Orfeo, and Pearl. “Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings” in J. Lobdell (ed.), A Tolkien Compass. Letter in Mythlore, 3.2: 10. The Father Christmas Letters. Drawings by Tolkien. The Silmarillion.

The Tolkien Scrapbook.

“Valedictory Address” in M. Salu and R. T. Farrell (eds.), J. R. R. Tolkien: Scholar and Storyteller. Pictures by J. R. R. Tolkien. Poems and Stories. Unfinished Tales. Carpenter publishes The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien.

The Old English Exodus. Mr Bliss. Finn and Hengest: The Fragment and the Episode. The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. Lost Tales I. Lost Tales II. Lays. Shaping. (Continued)

xxxii Date

Brief Chronology Significant Events1

1987

Lost Road. The Hobbit (50th Anniversary). J. R. R. Tolkien: The Hobbit: Drawings, Watercolors, and Manuscripts. Return. “Mythopoeia” in Tree and Leaf (reprint). Treason. Oliphaunt. War. The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth. Bilbo’s Last Song. Sauron. The End of the Third Age. The Tolkien Family Album. Morgoth. Poems by J. R. R. Tolkien: I–III. Jewels. J. R. R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator. Peoples. Tales from the Perilous Realm.

1988

1989 1990 1991 1992

1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999

Roverandom. Farmer Giles of Ham (50th Anniversary). The End of the Third Age (The History of The Lord of the Rings, Part 4).

2000 2001 2002 2003

Selected Publications of Note (for indication of when Tolkien started work on individual pieces of work see chs. 1–3)2

Peter Jackson releases film of The Fellowship of the Ring. Jackson releases film of The Two Towers. Garth publishes Tolkien and the Great War. Jackson releases film of The Return of the King.

The Annotated Hobbit. Beowulf and the Critics. A Tolkien Miscellany.

Selected Historical Events

Pullman’s Northern Lights. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.



Brief Chronology

Date

Significant Events1

Selected Publications of Note (for indication of when Tolkien started work on individual pieces of work see chs. 1–3)2

2004

Tolkien Studies launched. Lee and Solopova publish The Keys of Middle-earth. Hammond and Scull publish The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion. Hammond and Scull publish the two volumes Reader’s Guide and Chronology. Gilliver et al. publish The Ring of Words. Rateliff publishes The History of The Hobbit.

Sir Orfeo in Tolkien Studies.

2005

2006

2007 2008

2009 2010 2011 2012

2013

Phelpstead publishes Tolkien and Wales. Jackson releases film version of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Jackson releases film version of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.

Smith of Wootton Major (Critical Edition). “Gerald of Wales” in Tolkien Studies.

The Children of Húrin. The Silmarillion (30th Anniversary) On Fairy-stories. “Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve’s Tale” and “The Reeve’s Tale” in Tolkien Studies. The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún. “Fate and Free Will” in Tolkien Studies. “The Story of Kullervo” and “On the Kalevala” in Tolkien Studies. The Art of the Hobbit. Letters from Father Christmas.

The Fall of Arthur.

xxxiii Selected Historical Events

xxxiv

Brief Chronology Notes

1  See also Chronology. 2  Does not include interviews or extracts of publications. Note also numerous writings by Tolkien on his invented languages have appeared in the journals Quettar, Vinyar Tengwar,

and Parma Eldalamberon (see chs. 1 and 14; and http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Index:Manu scripts_by_J.R.R._Tolkien, accessed September 2, 2013.)

Introduction Stuart D. Lee

Everyone has their own Tolkien story. Mine began with the early 1980s BBC Radio dramatization of The Lord of the Rings lent to me at school. This was followed by the book itself, and then The Hobbit (a common experience). Enthused by what I had read I approached my English teacher to discuss the merits of both books, and having listened sympathetically to my arguments, he then presented me with another book he suggested I might like – it was a translation of Beowulf. Tolkien led me then to my future academic discipline of Old English which was to be such an important part of my life as it was of his. Yet every now and then our paths continued to cross. At University I chose to do an extended essay on the links between what I was studying as a student and Tolkien’s fiction. I innocently assumed that I was the first to notice this, but then I found Tom Shippey’s The Road to Middle-earth. This book opened my eyes to what could be possible, probably more so than any other book I had read. Anyone who studies Medieval Literature is never far from Tolkien, and his essay on “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” is still essential discussion material in any course. However, that was not the end of it for me. I found myself at the Faculty of English at Oxford – Tolkien’s own department; Northmoor Road, Manor Road, Holywell Street were all places I came across daily; and eventually I became affiliated to Merton College – Tolkien’s last college at Oxford. Academically I also specialized in the literature of World War I, an event that occasionally brought Tolkien across my path again. Finally, at a time when the future of Old English was being discussed, enthusiasm for all things medieval soared with the release of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films. Tolkien’s work was introducing millions of people indirectly to medieval languages and literature – a driving factor also in my joint publication with A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

2

Introduction

Elizabeth Solopova of The Keys of Middle-earth: Discovering Medieval Literature through the Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien. However, ever present during all of this was the recognition that Tolkien could be very divisive. As Patrick Curry notes (ch. 25) the critical reaction to his works has not always been favorable (or fair). When I first opted to run a lecture series on Tolkien at Oxford, possibly the first ever, it was met with some disdain from other Faculty members. Partly this resulted from a dislike of his fiction, or a view that it was not worthy of a University literature course, but also because the wounds still ran deep in the Faculty over the prominence of medieval studies in the English syllabus which many felt originated with Lewis and Tolkien (“the Germanic wedge” as one colleague called them). To those, and to the people who no doubt will fulminate at the mere thought that Tolkien has been allowed a Companion in a literary series by such a respected publisher, I can only suggest they put their prejudices to one side and begin by looking at the table of contents for this volume. Presented here are 36 essays focusing on a single man who was a soldier, academic, lexicographer, but at the same time created a mythology that in itself was interwoven with the legends of medieval Europe, drew on the English literary tradition, and took forward (or possibly created) an entire genre. His works subsequently led to a film series that has broken box office records, controversially regularly topped polls as the best books of the twentieth century, inspired musicians as diverse as Led Zeppelin, and heavily influenced the direction of the computer-based gaming industry. Starting with John Garth’s brief account of Tolkien’s life in Part I, the temptation to dive directly into his mythology has been avoided, and instead Part II devotes its attention to exploring Tolkien’s career and impact as an academic – not only through his lectures and publications (Tom Honegger), but also in his excellent work as an editor (Tom Shippey). With this in mind one can then have a more balanced view of Tolkien’s fictional work which is clearly what he is best known for world-wide. Carl Phelpstead lays the foundations of Part III by exploring Tolkien’s own theories on fantasy (ch. 5), followed by an overview of the legendarium (the common term used to encapsulate Tolkien’s mythology) by Leslie Donovan. The key texts in Tolkien’s corpus are then taken in turn – The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings (chs. 7–9 by Nagy, Rateliff, and Holmes respectively) – but as became clear with the work in the 1980s and 1990s by Tolkien’s son, Christopher, these were only a fragment of what was there. Tolkien had spent an entire lifetime creating his Middle-earth and the stories most people know seem to only skim the surface. Elizabeth Whittingham takes us through the extraordinary complexity of the 12-volume History of Middle-earth series; Verlyn Flieger then explores in detail his “time travel” stories (ch. 11); Corey Olsen looks at the extensive corpus of Tolkien’s often overlooked poetry; Maria Artamonova brings his so-called minor works to the fore; and the picture is completed by Arden Smith who details the invented languages of Middle-earth and Tolkien’s “secret vice.” What came before, what came after, and what might have influenced Tolkien is explored in Part IV. As a student and lecturer he studied and researched Old English,



Introduction

3

Middle English, and Old Norse, and was enthused (or not) by Finnish and Celtic Literature. Mark Atherton, Elizabeth Solopova, Tom Birkett, Leena Kahlas-Tarkka, and Jackie Lyman-Thomas consider each of these in turn (chs. 15–19), looking at Tolkien’s engagement with them, and how they may (or may not) have influenced his writing. Nick Groom then looks at the contentious area of post-medieval literature, often overlooked in part due to Tolkien’s own apparent dismissal of the period. The next essays consider Middle-earth against the range of fantasy writers from those who preceded Tolkien (ch. 21 by Falconer), through his contemporaries and especially the role of the Inklings (ch. 22 by Bratman), to Tolkien’s legacy among later fantasy writers (ch. 23 by Fimi). Running through these essays is the common question – where do we place Tolkien? Is, as was once said, The Lord of the Rings the last literary masterpiece of the Middle Ages (Blisset 1959, 449) or is it a modernist novel dealing with themes core to the twentieth century as Anna Vaninskaya argues (ch. 24)? The final Part V includes a series of cross-cutting thematic explorations drawing from examples in all of Tolkien’s work – his fiction, his essays, his lectures, and his academic publications. Such an endeavor could run to several volumes in itself so the focus has had to be on the most widely discussed topics. Allan Turner considers Tolkien’s style, often used by critics to attack his writing (ch. 26); Anna Caughey looks at the recurring theme of the Quest as highlighted by W. H. Auden (1956) and then elaborated (1962) (ch. 27); and Tolkien’s depiction of evil (is it too simplistic as many say, or actually a finely tuned study?) is explored by Christopher Garbowski (ch. 28). In such a light how might we consider his own devout Catholicism with the seemingly pagan world he created – is there a Christian message there (ch. 30 by Pinsent)? Similarly, does Tolkien revel in warfare or is he more realistic in reflecting the attitudes of his time and personal experiences (ch. 31 by Croft)? And how should we react to his depiction of women (or lack of), an issue which has vexed many readers for some time (ch. 32 by Roberts)? What cannot be denied even by his staunchest of critics is the powerful afterlife of Tolkien’s work. An observer and supporter of the natural world, Tolkien’s depictions of the flora and fauna of Middle-earth and their destruction are seen by Liam Campbell as pioneering in their environmental attitudes (ch. 29). Similarly, while Tolkien himself engaged with the creative arts and wove them into his mythology, we also explore the creative industry that Tolkien’s imagination has engendered. From the various artists (ch. 33 by Tuthill), musicians (ch. 34 by Eden), and film-makers (ch. 35 by Thompson) who have tried to engage with his work, to the virtual representations of Middle-earth in the online world (ch. 36 by Makai), the Tolkien industry shows no sign of abating. A Companion is a guide, a vade mecum (“walk with me”), which can only hope to take the reader through the preliminary paths of discovery. Each essay will do just that, introduce the reader to the topic, but then point them in the direction of further study through the select bibliography after each chapter, and the further reading at the end of the volume. Wes þu hal!

4

Introduction References

Auden, W. H. 1956. “At the End of the Quest, Victory.” New York Times Book Review, January 22: 5. Auden, W. H. 1962. “The Quest Hero.” Texas Quarterly, 4: 81–93.

Blisset, William. 1959. “The Despots of the Rings.” South Atlantic Quarterly, 58: 448–456.

Part I

Life

1

A Brief Biography John Garth

Famous photographs have frozen J. R. R. Tolkien in his seventies. This is ironic: the photographers only came calling when fame was actively distracting him from writing. He wrote The Hobbit during his forties and most of The Lord of the Rings in his fifties; his most productive periods were between 23 and 58. Even the idea of the family man and professor, distilling his medievalist expertise into fiction, gives only half the picture. His grand creative project, the Middle-earth legendarium, was begun in his early twenties, during formative years marked by shocks and griefs, and by the violent advent of the modern age.1 The painful collisions between his faith and the fragility of life were highly productive. So was the encounter between his medievalism and the modern age, the violent birth throes of which engulfed his generation. Middle-earth emerged during World War I, which exposed Tolkien to almost unspeakable horror and killed most of his friends. No wonder he then pursued a life of calm, solid security. When a further World War threatened everything Tolkien held dear, it powered and colored The Lord of the Rings, partly by reawakening memories of the earlier war.

Ancestry and Childhood: 1892–1904 Imaginative and conflicting family legends emerged to explain why Tolkien’s German paternal ancestors left Saxony in the mid-eighteenth century; and to the origins of the surname Tollkühn, meaning “foolhardy.” An ancestor was said to have fought

A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

8

John Garth

the Turks at the Siege of Vienna and captured the Sultan’s standard. Anyway, in nineteenth-century London and then Birmingham the family trade had been music: teaching, making pianos, or selling sheet music. However, Arthur Reuel Tolkien (b. 1857) left Birmingham in 1889 to work for the Bank of Africa; in 1890 he became branch manager in Bloemfontein, capital of the Orange Free State, a Boer republic. His Birmingham fiancée Mabel Suffield (b. 1870) married him in Cape Town in April 1891. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on January 3, 1892 in Bloemfontein, where he was baptized in the Anglican cathedral (for a detailed chronology of his life, see Scull and Hammond 2006). He became known to friends as Ronald, John Ronald, JRRT, Tollers, or just Tolkien. In 1894 a brother was born, Hilary Arthur Reuel (d. 1976). But the stovetop climate did not suit Ronald, so in 1895 Mabel took the boys to visit her parents in King’s Heath near Birmingham. That autumn Arthur contracted rheumatic fever and in February 1896 he died, so the single-parent family stayed in England. Even this early on, Middle-earth was perhaps brewing: giant spiders engendered by the tarantula bite he suffered in Bloemfontein, the recurrent sea awe awakened by seeing the Indian Ocean while not yet two years old, and the pivotal voyages of Eärendil and others prefigured by his own voyage to England. The Shire was shaped by his “particular love of central Midlands English countryside, based on good water, stones and elm trees and small quiet rivers”2 – and especially by Sarehole, a village outside Birmingham where Mabel and the boys moved in summer 1896. In stories told to Hilary, Ronald made ogres out of the big people in their little world – the miller’s son and the local farmer (see Hilary Tolkien 2009). Ronald came to identify closely with his mother’s Suffield family and their roots in the West Midlands – so closely that he even felt he had inherited an aptitude for the English dialect of the region, from the Old English of Mercia to the language of the fourteenth-century Sir Gawain poet (see chs. 15 and 16). Living frugally and supplemented by aid from relatives, Mabel taught the boys at home, introducing Ronald to drawing, calligraphy, botany, French, and Latin. She fueled his imagination with children’s literature including George MacDonald, as well as mythology and Arthuriana. He enjoyed fairy-stories (notably the Andrew Lang fairy books) but they were not his favorites. He particularly “desired dragons” but when he wrote about “a green great dragon” at the age of seven, and was told “green great” was bad English, it led to an interest in language which distracted him for years from further attempts at fiction (Carpenter 1977, 30–31; Letters 221). School began in fits and starts. Ronald enrolled in September 1900 at King Edward’s, and they moved into Birmingham to be nearer the school. Here, behind the new house in King’s Heath, he observed names on coal trucks which kindled his love for Welsh. But after Mabel embraced Catholicism and instructed the boys in the faith, most of the family distanced themselves, including the uncle who had been paying Ronald’s school fees. In 1902 the boys started at St Philip’s Grammar School, attached to the Catholic Oratory; but Ronald quickly outstripped his peers and Mabel resumed teaching the boys at home. By the age of ten Ronald was learning Greek, reading



A Brief Biography

9

Chaucer, and imbibing Mabel’s interest in etymology. A scholarship enabled him to return to King Edward’s in spring 1903. The following year Mabel fell ill from diabetes and they moved to Rednal in rural Worcestershire so she could convalesce. When she died in November 1904, Ronald felt she had martyred herself to keep her sons in the faith. He remembered “vainly waving a hand at the sky saying ‘it is so empty and cold’ ” (Letters 416). Yet he remained a lifelong Catholic, and later used Middle-earth to explore the consolations of mortality.

Youth: 1904–1911 The Oratory’s Father Francis Morgan (1857–1935), who had arranged and subsidized the cottage, now became the boys’ legal guardian. A strict but flamboyant and kind man, he spent his own money supplementing the returns from Mabel’s invested capital to provide for Ronald and Hilary. He moved them into a rented room in the Edgbaston home of their mother’s sister Beatrice. They spent much time at the Oratory and Father Francis took them for holidays at Lyme Regis, where Ronald found a fossilized jawbone and pretended it was a dragon’s. At King Edward’s Tolkien started German; but the headmaster and classics tutor Robert Cary Gilson also encouraged him to look at the history of Latin and Greek, while another teacher lent him an Anglo-Saxon primer, and in 1908 he discovered Joseph Wright’s grammar of Gothic. And as if the world did not hold enough languages to learn, he started inventing new ones. Nevbosh or “new nonsense” was a hodgepodge of mostly classical words.3 In due course he began devising codes and learning the artificial language Esperanto, creating the Spanish-influenced Naffarin, and supplementing the slim vocabulary of long-dead Gothic by reconstructing lost words from cognates in its kindred Germanic languages. Translating classical verse also awoke a taste for poetry: it was Homer that first gave him “the sensation of literary pleasure” (Letters 172). He acquired a taste for the Catholic mystic poet Francis Thompson and the verse and prose romances of medieval revivalist William Morris. By now he was reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in Middle English, Beowulf in Old English, and the story of Sigurd in Old Norse. The boys were unhappy with Aunt Beatrice so in early 1908 Father Francis moved them to nearby Duchess Road. It was a fateful move. Here they befriended a fellow lodger and orphan, Edith Mary Bratt (b. 1889), who hoped to be a piano teacher; she and Ronald fell in love, reckless of differences. She was three years older than him, and an Anglican. By autumn 1909, when Father Francis got wind of the secret romance and forbade it, Ronald had neglected his studies, and in December he failed the Oxford University entrance exam. In January 1910 he was moved with Hilary to new Edgbaston lodgings and banned from all contact with Edith. She quickly moved to Cheltenham to stay with family friends.

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The loss of his mother and the forced break with Edith led to periodic introspection and despair which clashed with Ronald’s natural energy and geniality. It eventually proved a fertile brew. He turned in on himself, writing an unhappy diary but also a smattering of poetry that shows for the first time some interest in Faërie – perhaps due to seeing J. M. Barrie’s play Peter Pan in April 1910. Another building block of Middle-earth fell into place during the next school year – his last – when he discovered W. H. Kirby’s translation of the Kalevala, Finland’s mythological verse cycle (see ch. 18). But Ronald was not instantly turned into a mythmaker. His first published verse, “The Battle of the Eastern Field” (King Edward’s School Chronicle, March 1911), is not as epic as it sounds: it is a parody of epic, about a rugby match. Rugby proved important, nevertheless. It was on the school rugby pitch that he befriended Christopher Luke Wiseman (1893–1987) and Vincent Trought (b. 1893). The school debating, literary, and dramatic societies were soon dominated by their larger circle, including the headmaster’s son Robert Quilter Gilson (b. 1893). When Ronald was school librarian in his final term, the circle would meet for tea in the library office and at Barrow’s department store. They called themselves the Tea Club or Barrovian Society, soon simply the T.C.B.S.

Oxford Undergraduate: 1911–1915 After a summer hiking holiday in the Swiss Alps in October 1911 with his Aunt Jane Neave and others – material he later wove into The Hobbit – Tolkien began reading Classics at Exeter College, Oxford, having passed the entrance exam second time round and won an annual £60 exhibition (financial award lower than a scholarship). Here he formed new clubs, the Apolausticks and the Chequers, and involved himself in the college undergraduates’ Stapeldon Society and Essay Club. As was expected of Exonians born overseas, he also enrolled in the King Edward’s Horse, a territorial regiment. Meanwhile the thriving T.C.B.S. led a production of Sheridan’s The Rivals at King Edward’s that Christmas, in which Tolkien appeared as Mrs Malaprop, but a month later suffered its first loss when illness claimed Trought’s life. Further distractions included a rekindling of Tolkien’s love of Finnish, which blossomed after he discovered C. N. E. Eliot’s Finnish Grammar in the college library. But he wrote to Edith to renew his courtship the minute he turned 21 in January 1913. Her reply would have been a devastating blow to anyone less single-minded than Tolkien – she was engaged to another man – but Tolkien was undeterred. He took the train to Cheltenham and in the course of a long afternoon’s conversation he won her over. Telling no one but Father Francis (who now accepted the inevitable) the two became engaged. Tolkien’s classical studies reached their ignominious end with Honour Moderations, the February 1913 mid-course exams. He only achieved a Second, despite an alpha in comparative philology. The problem was sheer boredom with Classics. It was the Northern world of the Germanic and Celtic peoples that drew him. So he switched



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to English Language and Literature, specifically the language course, which included very little literature later than Geoffrey Chaucer but covered Old and Middle English, Gothic and Germanic Philology, as well as Old Norse. This, together with his engagement, set Tolkien squarely on his future road, academically and personally. But his creativity still ran no further than drawing landscapes or occasional symbolist pictures he called “Ishnesses” (Hammond and Scull 1995, 40), inventing languages and scripts that were rudimentary by his later standards, and writing a very few poems. The outbreak of World War I in summer 1914 was a profound shock – “the collapse of all my world” (Letters 393) – but Tolkien needed his degree for an academic career and delayed enlistment (on the war and its creative impact, see Garth 2003). It was also a creative turning point. Staying with Aunt Jane in Gedling, Nottinghamshire, in September he wrote “The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star.” In method (it extrapolates from an obscure Old English reference to earendel) and imaginative specifics (it describes the mariner Éarendel sailing over the earth’s rim into the stars), the poem counts as the first Middle-earth text. Tolkien worked also on “The Story of Kullervo,” a retelling from the Kalevala, and enthused about the latter in a talk to college societies (see Flieger 2010; Tolkien 2010a, 2010b, 2010c). As he later wrote, he now “made the discovery that ‘legends’ depend on the language to which they belong; but a living language depends equally on the ‘legends’ which it conveys by tradition” (Letters 231). In other words, all this inventing of language was empty without a mythology to go with it. After a T.C.B.S. “Council of London” at the Wiseman home in December, Tolkien experienced “a tremendous opening up” of creative energy and ideas (Letters 10). Poems poured out, fluent and diverse (including “Goblin Feet,” 1915). Tolkien also began crafting a new language, Qenya, with its own linguistic history but inspired by the sounds of Finnish.4 More importantly, it would have its own stories. In the poems and in the Qenya lexicon, Tolkien first described the Elves, Eldar or “fairies” living with the divine Valar westward across the ocean from mortal Men.5 Britain was visualized in some ancient era as the Lonely Isle of the Elves, with Warwick (Edith’s new home) as its capital. Later Tolkien said his taste for fairy-stories was “quickened to full life by war” (OFS 56). Amazed by his poetry, the T.C.B.S., now reduced to Tolkien, Wiseman, Gilson, and Geoffrey Bache Smith (b. 1894), began to believe they had “been granted some spark of fire . . . that was destined to kindle a new light” in the world (Letters 10).

Soldier and Mythographer: 1915–1918 Tolkien achieved a First in his June 1915 final exams and immediately joined the Lancashire Fusiliers as a second lieutenant. A short officers’ course in Bedford was followed by training with the regiment’s 13th Battalion near Lichfield, and then on Cannock Chase. The outdoor life among men of all classes, and the darkness of the times, prompted him to write now not just of Elves but of mortals, wandering benighted in a world of fleeting enchantment. Urged on by the T.C.B.S. – with Smith

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and Gilson now at the Western Front – in early 1916 Tolkien submitted a collection of poems, “The Trumpets of Faërie,” to Sidgwick & Jackson, but the publishers turned it down. He married Edith in Warwick on March 22, 1916. The next month she moved with her cousin Jennie Grove to Great Haywood, Staffordshire, to be near him, but soon after that his embarkation orders came. After a final night with Edith, on June 6 he took ship to France. Transferred to the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers, Tolkien was fortunate to be five miles from the front when the Somme offensive was launched on July 1, but he witnessed the “animal horror” of the trenches (Letters 72) on July 14–16, when his battalion seized Ovillers-la-Boisselle from the Germans. On return to base he learned that Gilson had been killed, one of 21,000 British deaths on the first day of battle. It seemed to call into question the T.C.B.S. “spark of fire,” but new duties as battalion signals officer gave Tolkien scant time to ponder. During three months in and out of the trenches, as the Somme became a mire, he wrote little except a handful of poems. Days after the battalion seized Regina Trench on an icy October 21, Tolkien succumbed to trench fever, a potentially fatal louse-borne virus. His battalion was sent on to Ypres, but the hospital ship Asturias returned him to England. The Somme dealt a final blow to the T.C.B.S. even after the battle was over. Smith was hit by a stray shellburst while organizing a football match several miles behind the lines; he died on December 3 (his poetry was edited by Tolkien and Wiseman as A Spring Harvest, published in 1918). Many other friends from school, University, and army died in the Great War, but from late 1916 Tolkien’s ill health kept him in England. At this point Tolkien achieved a new creative breakthrough, and Middle-earth assumed its lasting moral dimensions: a scene of desperate heroism in a war against tyrannical and demonic evil (see ch. 28). In Birmingham University’s wartime hospital and then convalescing at Great Haywood, Tolkien wrote the prose “Fall of Gondolin,” in which mortal Tuor joins the Elves fighting the forces of Melko (later Melkor Morgoth). In the winter of 1916–1917 he also wrote “The Cottage of Lost Play,” in which a Germanic mariner called Eriol meets the Elves of the Lonely Isle, whose histories were to form The Book of Lost Tales, the prose mythological cycle first adumbrated in Tolkien’s lexicon and poems (see ch. 10). In April 1917 Tolkien was posted to the 3rd Lancashire Fusiliers, which trained recruits while guarding Yorkshire’s Holderness coast. Here he began a lexicon of a Welsh-inspired Elvish language, called Gnomish or Goldogrin6 – the prototype of the Sindarin of The Lord of the Rings. Edith moved to be with him; and a walk at Roos in which she danced among flowers of Queen Anne’s lace inspired “The Tale of Tinúviel,” written in hospital at Hull that summer: the enduring “kernel of the mythology” (Letters 221). However, tired of repeated moves, Edith returned to Cheltenham, and on November 16 gave birth to their first son John Francis Reuel Tolkien (d. 2003). Promoted to lieutenant, Tolkien wintered with the 9th Royal Defence Corps at Easington; returned to the 3rd Lancashire Fusiliers at Cannock Chase in the spring of 1918, when he was reunited with his family; but spent much of that summer



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in hospital with gastritis. He may have written the Kullervo-inspired story of Túrin Turambar there.

Lexicography and “Lost Tales”: 1918–1920 Released from military duties in October 1918, Tolkien spent almost the next two years immersed in words. His former tutor William Craigie, one of the editors of the then incomplete Oxford English Dictionary, had him made an assistant lexicographer, dealing primarily with the etymologies of w- words under co-editor Henry Bradley. Supplementing his income with private tutorials to English undergraduates, in summer 1919 Tolkien began a Middle English glossary for Kenneth Sisam’s student anthology Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose. He recalled that he “learned more in those two years than in any other equal period” (Carpenter 1977, 108). From 1919 Tolkien kept diaries using invented scripts which became linked to his legendarium. The latter acquired an overarching structure, opening with the cosmogonical “Music of the Ainur” and continuing with the earthly contest between the Valar and Melko, who suborns the Elves in Elvenhome. Revised stories of Tinúviel, Turambar, and Tuor became key episodes in the Elves’ hopeless war against Melko in exile. A climactic “Tale of Eärendil” was never begun. Instead in 1920 Tolkien began a revision of the frame-story, no longer equating the Lonely Isle with Britain, and recasting Eriol as an Anglo-Saxon named Ælfwine. It was the first of a series of revisions which endlessly postponed the completion of his legendarium.

Leeds: 1920–1925 On October 22 Edith had a second son, Michael Hilary Reuel Tolkien (d. 1984). That same month Ronald took up the post of Reader in English Language at Leeds University – one step below professor, and a testament to the reputation he had already achieved. With E. V. Gordon (1896–1938), who became a close friend, Tolkien popularized the language course by such innovations as a Viking Club to read sagas in Icelandic. He knew how to engage his audience as equals, with neither condescension nor compromise. His lectures were always popular, though his words might deteriorate drastically in a race with his thoughts. He once cited an observation that “I talk in shorthand and then smudge it” (Chronology 499). Tolkien’s academic output at this point is documented elsewhere in this book (see chs. 3 and 16) but includes his glossary to Sisam’s Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose entitled A Middle English Vocabulary (1922); an edition with Gordon of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1925); and two papers on Middle English dialect (1925), “The Devil’s Coach-Horses” and “Some Contributions to Middle-English Lexicography.” The Sisam and Gawain have remained standard texts ever since. However, Tolkien’s academic

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projects tended to progress slowly and several were never completed. His standards were exacting; he lavished precious time on the work of colleagues and pupils; and with the arrival of a third son, Christopher John Reuel Tolkien, on November 21, 1924 he now had a considerable family competing for his attention. While at Leeds, Tolkien set aside The Book of Lost Tales to focus on a long alliterative version of the Túrin Turambar narrative, “The Children of Húrin” (Lays 3–130). A fresh, vital element in Tolkien’s creative output appeared in the annual letters he wrote to his children from Father Christmas (Tolkien 2009d) and the bedtime stories he made up. Some were written down, including an ambitious and whimsical adventure story, Roverandom (Tolkien 1998a), inspired by the loss of Michael’s toy dog on Filey beach (see ch. 13). In July 1924 a Professorship of English Language was created for Tolkien at Leeds. But a year later he was appointed Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford.

Oxford and the Road to “The Silmarillion”: 1926–1930 In January 1926, in the middle of a period spent juggling duties at both Universities, the family moved to 22 Northmoor Road, Oxford. Tolkien, who was soon made a Fellow of Pembroke College, founded another club to read Icelandic sagas, the Kolbítar or Coalbiters. Into this he pressed a new friend and powerful ally: Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963), recently appointed to teach English at Magdalen College. Over the next decades, “Jack” Lewis picked up the fallen mantle of the T.C.B.S. in encouraging his creative work, all the better because his interests were closer to Tolkien’s and his energies irrepressible. The two were also allies on the conservative side of battles over English teaching at Oxford. Each was to have a profound impact on the other, although Lewis admitted: “No one ever influenced Tolkien. You might as well try to influence a bandersnatch” (Lewis 2007, 1049). The ideas of Lewis’s friend Owen Barfield (particularly his Poetic Diction of 1928) were also to prove a significant influence on his thinking. Tolkien meanwhile produced a landmark analysis “Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad” (1929; see ch. 13) and for three years he contributed the survey of “Philology: General Works” for The Year’s Work in English Studies (vols. 5–7). The return to Oxford heralded two of the three central works of Tolkien’s legendarium. First, “The Silmarillion” came about almost incidentally. Tolkien started a long version of the Lúthien Tinúviel story in rhyming couplets, “The Lay of Leithian” (Lays 150–367). When in 1926 Tolkien sent parts of these poems to his former English teacher R. W. Reynolds (1867–1948), the response was disappointing, but Tolkien had also written a précis or sketch of the mythology as background (Shaping 11–75). This became the basis for the 1930 “Qenta Noldorinwa” or “History of the Gnomes,” (Shaping 199–338), a completely fresh telling of the events of The Book of Lost Tales and the first true version of what Tolkien later came to call “The Silmarillion.”



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Writings outside the legendarium included a long narrative poem in the form of a Breton lay, “The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun,” about a childless lord who strikes a desperate pact with a witch (Tolkien 1945). Tolkien also continued to write stories and poems for his children, which were well developed by the time Priscilla Mary Reuel Tolkien, the youngest and the only daughter, was born on June 18, 1929. A character called Tom Bombadil, inspired by their Dutch doll, had probably already appeared, and the “Father Christmas Letters” had grown in ambition. A series of “Tales and Songs of Bimble Bay,” set in an imaginary seaside town, notably included “Glip” (Tolkien 2002a, 119), about a Gollum-like cave-dweller. Farmer Giles of Ham (Tolkien 2008a) told of a dragon and dragon tamer set among the villages to the east of Oxford. Mr Bliss (Tolkien 2007a) was prompted by Tolkien’s purchase of a family car, and was richly illustrated with examples of his artwork. However, one story proved truly momentous, and became the second central work of Tolkien’s legendarium. It originated – quite characteristically – in a moment of boredom. Perhaps in 1930, Tolkien idly wrote the words “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit” on a student’s paper while marking summer exams, and soon he was telling the story of Bilbo Baggins to his children (see ch. 8).

20 Northmoor Road and The Hobbit: 1931–1937 The Tolkiens moved next door in January 1931 into a bigger house, 20 Northmoor Road, Oxford, where most of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were to be written. Tolkien’s academic output during these years was steady (see chs. 2 and 3; especially his articles on “The Name ‘Nodens’ ” (1932), “Sigelwara land” (1932 and 1934), and “Chaucer as a Philologist” (1934),7 the offshoot of a projected “Clarendon Chaucer” collection of annotated texts which was never completed). His deeply influential paper on medieval literature, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” argued for the Old English poem to be examined as a work of art in its own right rather than merely as a “quarry of fact” for archaeologists and historians. It was delivered to the British Academy in London in December 1936 and published the year after.8 Tolkien also made translations of Beowulf and Pearl (for BBC radio 1936, later to become his Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo (Tolkien 1995d). However, much of his academic work was submerged in that of other authors. His assistance was vital to E. V. Gordon’s 1937 edition of the Old English The Battle of Maldon (as it had been to Gordon’s An Introduction to Old Norse a decade earlier). An edition of the Middle English Liflade ant te Passiun of Seinte Julien was published in 1936 as the doctoral thesis of his Belgian pupil and friend Simonne d’Ardenne (1899–1986), but in her own estimation it was a collaboration with Tolkien. Tolkien’s academic work was never wholly separate from his creativity. Using the difficult meter of the Norse Elder Edda, he composed two narrative poems in English to retell its Sigurd element and to fill a gap in the surviving story. These “new lays” of the Völsungs and of Gudrún (Tolkien 2009a) were probably written in the early

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1930s. Tolkien also dealt with “the matter of Britain” in The Fall of Arthur (Tolkien 2013), but notes for unfinished portions of the poem indicate that he planned to link it, tangentially or otherwise, with his legendarium. An unusual foray into philosophical poetry was “Mythopoeia” (TL 83–90; see also ch. 5), inspired by a discussion with C. S. Lewis and their friend Hugo Dyson one night in September 1931 during which Lewis became convinced of the truth of Christian belief. It developed Tolkien’s theory of sub-creation, by which the human capacity to create myths and stories is testimony to the greater creative powers of God. Despite encouragement from Lewis, Tolkien decided to set aside “The Lay of Leithian” still unfinished in 1931. The ensuing years were ones of deep development and dramatic extension in the legendarium. A revised version of the main narrative sequence, “Quenta Silmarillion,” was carried as far as the story of Beren and Lúthien by 1937 (Lost Road 199–338; see ch. 7). An elegant cosmography was mapped out in the “Ambarkanta” (Shaping 235–261), while the “Lhammas” recounted the history and interrelations of Middle-earth’s languages and “The Etymologies” provided an extensive lexicon of Elvish roots and derivations (Lost Road 167–198, 341–400). This was accompanied by other thorough analyses of the languages, especially Quenya (e.g., morphology and phonology, see Parma Eldalamberon, 18 and 19 (2009 and 2010)). Tolkien also gave an eloquent justification of language invention in “A Secret Vice,” a paper delivered to a philological society around 1931, including the world’s first public performance of Elvish poetry (MC 198–223). The major extension of the legendarium was elsewhere, however, and Lewis played a key part. Around 1936, he and Tolkien made a pact to write science-fiction stories because, as Lewis said, “there is too little of what we really like in stories.” The first volume of Lewis’s resultant “cosmic trilogy,” Out of the Silent Planet (1938), was read at meetings of the Inklings, a group of like-minded drinking, talking, and reading men who (from as early as the latter part of 1933) met weekly in The Eagle and Child pub in Oxford or in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen (see ch. 22 and Carpenter 1979). Tolkien’s side of the pact was “The Lost Road,” a “time-travel” adventure which introduced the Atlantis-story of Númenor (Lost Road 36–104; see ch. 11). Though “The Lost Road” was abandoned, along with its transparent references to the tyrannies and remilitarization of the 1930s, an accompanying account of “The Fall of Númenor” (Lost Road 11–35) began the extension of Tolkien’s legendarium beyond the fall of Morgoth. The Hobbit represented another new dimension: the entry of a quasi-modern (or at least Edwardian) Everyman figure, Bilbo Baggins, into the world of wizards, dragons, and Edda-inspired Dwarves. It allowed Tolkien considerable latitude to undercut or heighten the drama at will; and increasingly, as the story went on, to draw upon his own experiences as an ordinary man who had gone “There and Back Again” to war in his youth (see ch. 8 for a full exploration of the novel’s phases). By chance, news of the story’s existence reached publisher Stanley Unwin (1884–1968), of George Allen & Unwin, and it was accepted after his 10-year-old son Rayner Unwin gave it the thumbs-up.



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The Hobbit was published on September 21, 1937 to enthusiastic reviews, prompting a request from Stanley Unwin for “more from you about Hobbits” (Letters 23). Tolkien had already suggested “Roverandom,” “Mr Bliss,” and “Farmer Giles of Ham,” and now offered some items for a distinctly unjuvenile audience: unfinished “Silmarillion” materials including “The Lay of Leithian,” as well as “The Lost Road.” He resumed the “Quenta Silmarillion” while awaiting a response, which turned out to be severe. But work on the “Silmarillion” material was about to be delayed again, for more than a decade. Just before Christmas 1937 Tolkien told Unwin he had begun a new Hobbit story, with a chapter titled “A Long-expected Party.”

A “New Hobbit” and a New War: 1938–1945 Very quickly the sequel acquired a depth, detail, and complexity far greater than The Hobbit, affected both by increasingly liberal injections of “Silmarillion” elements and by the darkening European situation. The clarity of Tolkien’s thought on his “subcreation” is evident from “On Fairy-stories” (OFS), a paper presented at St Andrew’s University in Scotland in March 1939 which may be read as a manifesto for The Lord of the Rings. In World War II, Tolkien was exempt from conscription thanks to his age and University work, and Oxford was spared by German bombers. He had agreed to work in cryptography but was not required. However, by the start of 1941 he was an air raid warden, staying at post in Oxford on night duties. The war also drew off many colleagues and meant extra University duties for Tolkien. For a while he was examiner for Allied PoWs in German and Italian camps as well as the director of an English course for cadets from the RAF and Royal Navy (for whom he prepared an edition of the fourteenth-century Sir Orfeo; see Tolkien 1995d and 2004b). Tolkien’s sons were more directly affected by the war. When hostilities began in September 1939, John was in Rome training for the priesthood and had to flee in civilian clothes, finally reaching England on the last boat to leave Le Havre, France. Michael earned the George Medal as an anti-aircraft gunner defending aerodromes during the Battle of Britain in 1940, but transferred to the RAF and served as a reargunner on bombers over France and Germany until 1944, when he was found medically unfit (“virtually a shell-shock case” wrote his father; Reader’s Guide 1021). Christopher, the closest to Tolkien in spirit, was called up to join the RAF in July 1943 and was sent to South Africa in 1944 to train as a fighter pilot. Work progressed in fits and starts on The Lord of the Rings, which Tolkien read in stages to the Inklings, now with the vital addition for a few years of Charles Williams (1886–1945), author of mystical Christian novels and a long narrative poem, Taliesin through Logres. By war’s outbreak Tolkien had produced drafts of what is now Book I, and by the end of 1939 had reached Moria. He resumed in August–September 1940, and in 1942 he probably reached the first pages of what became Book IV, but then became “dead stuck” (Letters 321). His anxieties about the fate of his unfinished

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work on Middle-earth are reflected in “Leaf by Niggle” written that spring (published in the Dublin Review 1945 and Tree and Leaf 1964; see Tolkien 2001a and 2008e). However, two inspired months in 1944 produced Book IV (sent in installments to Christopher in South Africa). Tolkien began Book V in October but soon halted again.

The Lord of the Rings Completed, The Silmarillion Resumed: 1945–1955 In June 1945 Tolkien was elected Professor of English Language and Literature at Merton College, Oxford. Soon, disquisitions on Númenórean history in Book IV doubtless led to the diversion Tolkien took between Christmas 1945 and August 1946, when he wrote “The Notion Club Papers” (Sauron 145–327; see ch. 11), featuring an Oxford cabal very like the Inklings and using dream and time-travel to connect with ancient Númenor. This unfinished story included a poem within it about the voyage of St Brendan which was later revised as “Imram” (published in Time and Tide December 1955; see Sauron 296–299). The related “Drowning of Anadûnê” gave a new account of the Atlantean downfall (Sauron 340–413), and Tolkien even created a new language, Adunaic, for the Númenóreans. In a version of the cosmogonic “Ainulindalë” from same period (Morgoth 199–205), Tolkien experimented with the idea that the world was created round – a scientific concept radically undermining his mythological concepts so far. He returned to the chapter “Minas Tirith” in autumn 1946 and over the next year managed to complete Book V of The Lord of the Rings. After moving to the smaller 3 Manor Road with Edith and Priscilla in summer 1947, Tolkien first planned several revisions to The Hobbit to match The Lord of the Rings, notably in the “Riddles in the Dark” chapter. “Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age” (S 339–366), created from substantial historical material initially devised for “The Council of Elrond” chapter in The Lord of the Rings, was written by summer 1948. Tolkien finally completed The Lord of the Rings in draft by mid-September 1948, including an Epilogue later excised (Sauron 114–135). Typing, revising, and work on the appendices went on until August 1950. Allen & Unwin had been eager for a stopgap while the Hobbit sequel gestated, and Tolkien began a productive working relationship with the artist Pauline Baynes in 1948 when he selected her to illustrate Farmer Giles of Ham (which first appeared in 1949; see Tolkien 2008a). On his recommendation, she was later commissioned to illustrate Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. The Lord of the Rings nearly fell at the final hurdle. Motivated by his publisher’s earlier rejection of “The Silmarillion,” by late 1949 Tolkien entered into discussions with Milton Waldman of Collins over the idea of publishing both books simultaneously. In April 1950, just ahead of a move to 99 Holywell Street in Oxford with Edith and Priscilla, he freed himself from Allen & Unwin by handing them the impractical ultimatum: two books or none. But Waldman promptly demanded cuts to The Lord of the Rings, then fell ill, and discussions progressed little.



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Nevertheless, Tolkien turned back to “The Silmarillion,” writing with vastly greater confidence and maturity thanks to the long honing of his craft on The Lord of the Rings. New revisions and expansions included a sprawling prose “Narn i Chîn Húrin” (UT 75–209 and Tolkien 2007b). And he reassigned the Welsh-inspired Noldorin language, first devised in 1917, from the High-elves to the Grey, a fundamental change with complex ramifications. To this phase also belongs “Akallabêth,” a new account of Númenor (S 307–338). What was to prove a decisive blow to “The Silmarillion” came in April 1952 when Collins told Tolkien that joint publication with The Lord of the Rings was prohibitively expensive. He reopened negotiations with Allen & Unwin over The Lord of the Rings in June and was welcomed back, with a 50:50 profit-sharing deal (though nothing until costs were covered). During the summer break, on holiday in Malvern as guest of his friend George Sayer (1914–2005), he was tape-recorded reading from both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.9 That autumn his projects included work on “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorhthelm’s Son” (appearing in Essays and Studies 1953, dramatized for BBC radio in 1955; see TL 119–150), a verse drama begun in the early 1930s as a sequel of sorts to The Battle of Maldon, questioning the Old English poem’s Northern heroic ethic. Shortly after a move with Edith to 76 Sandfield Road in Headington, Oxford, in March 1953, Tolkien gave the W. P. Ker Lecture at the University of Glasgow, speaking about the Middle English Sir Gawain (MC 72–108) and quoting from his own translation. A 1955 paper on “English and Welsh” reveals many of his views on language in general and striking insights into the position of Britons in Anglo-Saxon England (first published in Angles and Britons: O’Donnell Lectures, 1963; see MC 162–197). The first volume of The Lord of the Rings was published as The Fellowship of the Ring in July 1954, with maps by Christopher Tolkien. Tolkien completed the appendices but not a glossarial index (excised appendix material appears in Peoples 19–289, and as “The Hunt for the Ring” in UT 436–459 and “The Quest of Erebor” in UT 415–435 and Tolkien 2002a, 367–377, while the index appears in Parma Eldalamberon, 17 (2007)). Publication of The Lord of the Rings was completed (again with maps by Christopher Tolkien) with The Two Towers in November 1954 and The Return of the King in October 1955.

Success and Retirement: 1955–1964 The Lord of the Rings earned Tolkien £3000 in royalties in 1955 alone – equal to more than £64,000 today. It meant demand for “The Silmarillion” at last, but Tolkien was stressed and often ill. For years, he had been writing in the interstices between University and domestic duties, and he confessed, “I am rather tired, and no longer young enough to pillage the night to make up for the deficit of hours in the day” (Letters 228). Eventually he retained a secretary to type up his manuscripts. Now that he no

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longer needed the money, Tolkien regretted having taken on two further years’ academic tenure. At the same time he suspected colleagues resented him for devoting such energies to “trivial literature” (Letters 238). The business of The Lord of the Rings brought pleasures but also distractions. In 1957 he won the International Fantasy Award and made a substantial £1500 from the sale of manuscripts of his published fiction (plus Mr Bliss) to Marquette University, Milwaukee (see ch. 4). He wrote extensive advice to translators (“Guide to Words and Names in The Lord of the Rings”; see Companion 750–782). A BBC radio version and Forrest J. Ackerman’s 1957 proposals for an animated film distressed him (see ch. 35). What he saw as misrepresentation of his character and misunderstanding of his works led to vituperations against biographical criticism, though at the same time he drew attention to his kinship with his creations: I am in fact a Hobbit (in all but size). I like gardens, trees and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking; I like, and even dare to wear in these dull days, ornamental waistcoats. I am fond of mushrooms (out of a field); have a very simple sense of humour (which even my appreciative critics find tiresome); I go to bed late and get up late (when possible). I do not travel much.10

Probably in 1958 a sequel to The Lord of the Rings, “A New Shadow,” was quickly abandoned as “not worth doing” (Peoples 409–421). Tolkien’s final term teaching at Oxford was Trinity (Summer) 1959, and he gave his valedictory address on June 5 (MC 224–240). In his final years with the University, and the first of his retirement, Tolkien revised the story of the fall of the Noldor (Morgoth 141–300), and produced the separate “Valaquenta” (Morgoth 199–205), as well as “The Wanderings of Húrin” (unfinished; see Jewels 251–310). But much attention was given to ancillary or underlying matters at the expense of actual story. He experimented with the radical revision of Middle-earth’s cosmos, considered the moral nature and influence of Melkor, discussed “Laws and Customs among the Eldar,” and in “Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth” meditated on immortality (all in Morgoth 369–431, 207–253, and 303–366). Often overlapping with these philosophical concerns, work continued on the Elvish languages (e.g., “Ósanwe-kenta, or Enquiry into the Communication of Thought” in the journal Vinyar Tengwar, 39 (1998)). Númenor was not neglected, with “A Description of the Isle of Númenor,” “The Line of Elros,” and an unfinished story of unhappy marriage, “Aldarion and Erendis” (UT 212–293). Everywhere, there were the signs of a desire to give close attention to too many matters. After this burst of activity it appears that Tolkien quickly floundered. In July 1960 he confessed to Rayner Unwin that he was “utterly stuck – lost in a bottomless bog” (Letters 301). Professional duties had provided a rhythm and regular outside contact to energize him. He lost his Merton College rooms and had to move his books and papers to a garage-cum-study at Sandfield Road. He dealt with a growing postbag including letters from fans – some in runic or the Elvish script tengwar – and requests



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for interviews or for permission for adaptations, amateur and professional, artistic, dramatic, and musical. Further delays came from his health problems, including worsening fibrositis and arthritis, as well as from Edith’s. The Vatican II reforms to Catholic worship depressed him (he continued to use the Latin liturgy, loudly, while those around him used English). He also now lacked effective encouragement from any close, understanding, powerful personality. C. S. Lewis’s intense involvement with Charles Williams and with Christian apologetics, as well as his Chronicles of Narnia (1950–1956) seem to have opened a gap which Tolkien’s sympathies struggled to bridge. Lewis’s secret 1956 marriage to divorcée Joy Gresham (1915–1960) widened it further. After Lewis’s death in 1963, Tolkien resumed keeping a diary, largely when depressed. He completed an edition of Ancrene Wisse for the Early English Text Society in 1962 – long overdue, it had originally been commissioned in 1935. Allen & Unwin, while breathing regular encouragement over “The Silmarillion,” were happy to accept other Tolkien material, and he had plenty to offer from among his papers; but polishing for publication inevitably distracted him from the larger task. At the suggestion of his Aunt Jane Neave, he compiled his poems (new or revised) in 1962 as The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, illustrated again by Pauline Baynes. Christopher Tolkien was suggested by Rayner Unwin as a possible editor for his unfinished works in 1963, but then became a Fellow of New College, Oxford.

Final Years: 1965–1973 The last story J. R. R. Tolkien saw published in his lifetime, Smith of Wootton Major (1967), was characteristically unplanned, originating in a 1965 attempt to write a preface to George Macdonald’s The Golden Key. In 1961 the critic Philip Toynbee had said of The Lord of the Rings, “today these books have passed into a merciful oblivion” (see ch. 25). He could not have been more wrong. Sales of Tolkien’s books continued to rise and rise through the decade, and a piracy row took his fame into the stratosphere. The American publisher, Ace Books, exploited a legal loophole to release an unauthorized paperback of The Lord of the Rings in 1965. To counter this, Tolkien prepared an authorized second edition, with new “Foreword,” emendations, and index, published in October by Ballantine. In his letters to fans he promoted a widespread boycott of Ace, who backed down. The furore made Tolkien a cult figure in America. Even in Oxford he was plagued with phone calls and knocks at the door from unannounced strangers. However, not all visits were unsolicited. Tolkien gave time to journalists, photographers, and even a BBC film crew (Tolkien in Oxford, 1968). In 1966 Clyde S. Kilby (1902–1986) of Wheaton College, Illinois, came to Oxford and spent several months trying (with little success) to assist Tolkien in preparing “The Silmarillion” for completion. Donald Swann (1923–1994), of Flanders and Swann, set several songs and

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poems from The Lord of the Rings to music; the sheet music was published as The Road Goes Ever On: A Song Cycle (Tolkien and Swann 2002) with extensive notes from Tolkien on the Elvish of “Namárië” and “A Elbereth Gilthoniel.” Swann also performed at the Tolkiens’ Golden Wedding celebrations in 1966. The marriage, though firmly rooted, had not always been easy. Catholic observance had been a source of occasional friction, while Tolkien’s decades of University work and world-building had often left Edith – never academically minded – feeling isolated in Oxford. Needing a smaller home, and hoping that a new address would be a refuge from interruption, they moved in July 1968 to Bournemouth, the retirement backwater on the South Coast. Since arriving in England as a child, and with the notable exception of his war service, Tolkien had rarely traveled far. He had shared walking holidays with the Lewis brothers, traveled to Ireland (mostly as an external examiner), to Venice and Assisi with Priscilla in 1955, and to Rotterdam as a guest of Dutch fans in 1958. A Mediterranean cruise in 1966 had been marred when Edith was injured in a fall on the first day. Otherwise, a staple had been holidays in seaside towns. The couple had stayed in Bournemouth many times – so frequently in recent years that the Hotel Miramar had become a home from home. Now they bought a bungalow in Lakeside Road, where Tolkien set up a study in the garage. But the move was disruptive and he found conservative, unintellectual Bournemouth little more congenial than Edith had found Oxford. Middle-earth did not thrive here. Progress on “The Silmarillion” narratives was piecemeal and minimal, and Tolkien mostly steered back into his comfort zone, tinkering with his languages (mingled with glimpses of story, e.g., “The Problem of Ros” in Peoples 367–376, and “The Rivers and Beacon-hills of Gondor” in Vinyar Tengwar, 42 (2001)). Edith died in hospital on November 29, 1971, following inflammation of the gallbladder. Tolkien, awarded a CBE in the New Year’s Honours List for 1972, no longer wanted to stay in Bournemouth, and Merton College invited him to become a Residential Fellow with rooms in Merton Street, where he moved in March. Oxford awarded him an Honorary Doctorate of Letters in June. Again he engaged a secretary; again he made scant progress on his legendarium. During a visit to Bournemouth in August 1973, Tolkien fell ill. Diagnosed with an acute bleeding gastric ulcer, he died in hospital there on September 2, 1973. He was buried alongside Edith at Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford, and along with their names the headstone carried the names Beren and Lúthien. Despite the epic scale of The Lord of the Rings, what Tolkien published in his lifetime does not suggest a productive writer. However, as will already be clear from this sketch, his posthumous publications vastly outnumber what he published in his lifetime. In 1977 The Silmarillion was published, edited and compiled as a continuous, consistent text by Christopher Tolkien. His Unfinished Tales and 12-volume History of Middle-earth series (1983–1996, see ch. 10) trace through its many stages the unique creative project begun in 1914–1917. Academic notes edited by others include Finn and Hengest: The Fragment and the Episode (Tolkien 1982), The Old English Exodus



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(Tolkien 1981), and Beowulf and the Critics (Tolkien 2002b). At the time of writing, further unpublished items include poems from as early as 1910; “The Orgog,” a Leeds-era children’s story; “The Sellic Spell,” an early 1940s story based on folklore in Beowulf; “The Bovadium Fragments,” an early 1960s satire on Oxford and the car; and many writings about his invented languages (on-going publication in Parma Eldalamberon and Vinyar Tengwar). It remains true that Tolkien’s success is generally measured by the impact of a few works, yet he is a prime example of an artist whose visible genius is a function of vast invisible labor. As the efficient Lewis observed, he worked “like a coral insect” (Lewis 2007, 1579). Tolkien was a perfectionist, and the vitality of his creation was bound up with its breadth and depth. Notes

  1  The term Middle-earth is used here for convenience. Tolkien did not use the term until the late 1930s (Gilliver, Marshall, and Weiner 2006, 164).   2  Interview with Dennis Gerrolt, January 1971, BBC Radio 4, “Now Read On . . .”   3  His previous interest at inventing languages stemmed from his cousins’ “Animalic” code (Carpenter 1977, 43).   4  Qenya was so spelt at first, later Quenya; Éarendel became Eärendil.   5  See Parma Eldalamberon, 12 (1998, revised 2011).

  6  See Parma Eldalamberon, 11 (1995).   7  The “Chaucer” article is reprinted in 2008 alongside his version of The Reeve’s Tale in Tolkien Studies, 5: 109–183 (see Tolkien 2008c and 2008d, and ch. 3).   8  See MC 5–48, which also includes Tolkien’s useful preface to the 1940 revised John R. Clark Hall translation of Beowulf (MC 49–71).   9  Released as LPs by Caedmon, now available on CD as The Tolkien Audio Collection (HarperCollins, 2002). 10  Interview with Dennis Gerrolt (see n. 2).

References Carpenter, Humphrey. 1977. J. R. R. Tolkien – A Biography. London: Allen & Unwin. Carpenter, Humphrey. 1979. The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and their Friends. London: Allen & Unwin. Flieger, Verlyn. 2010. “Introduction to ‘The Story of Kullervo’.” Tolkien Studies, 7: 211–214. Garth, John. 2003. Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth. London: HarperCollins. Gilliver, Peter, Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner. 2006. The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hammond, Wayne G. and Christina Scull. 1995. J. R. R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator. London: HarperCollins.

Lewis, C. S. 2007. The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis. Vol. 3: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy 1950–1963. Edited by Walter Hooper. London: HarperCollins. Scull, Christina and Wayne G. Hammond. 2006. The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide. London: HarperCollins. Tolkien, Hilary. 2009. Black and White Ogre Country: The Lost Tales of Hilary Tolkien. Edited by Angela Gardner. Moreton-in-Marsh: ADC Publications. Tolkien, J. R. R. and Donald Swann. 2002. The Road Goes Ever On: A Song Cycle. 3rd edn. London: HarperCollins.

Part II

The Academic

2

Academic Writings Thomas Honegger

During most of his lifetime, J. R. R. Tolkien was primarily known as an Oxford professor and philologist specializing in Old and Middle English language and literature. This fact has to be stressed since the gap between the appreciation or mere knowledge of his works of fiction, most prominently The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and of his non-fiction publications, notably his academic essays and editions, has greatly increased over the decades. Tolkien may have started out as an Oxford don writing a book or two for children, but by now he is perceived mostly and often uniquely as an author of fantasy who also published a few academic essays. These are read, if at all, only in order to gain insight into the way his literary creative process developed, so that we have an at first implicit subdivision into, on the one hand, essays considered of “general interest” and, on the other, papers thought to be too specialized to appeal to anyone but a few philologists. Such a categorization has (unwittingly) received support from the publication of The Monsters and the Critics, edited by Christopher Tolkien in 1983 (Tolkien 1983a). Christopher’s main criteria for the inclusion of a text in this volume seem to have been its general appeal and comprehension for a lay audience. Not surprisingly the seven papers that constitute The Monster and the Critics have by now achieved canonical status among Tolkien scholars, whereas most of the other academic essays have sunk into oblivion. The current status of an essay need therefore not reflect its original importance and impact. “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” has been recognized as a landmark in Beowulf criticism ever since its publication in 1937, but “On Fairy-stories” (delivered in 1939, and first published 1947, see Tolkien 2008b), by contrast, seems to

A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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have had little impact whatsoever before it was republished in Tree and Leaf in 1964 and discovered as a possible authorial commentary on the principles behind Tolkien’s works of fiction. It is very difficult to assess objectively the influence of Tolkien’s academic publications on the field, and Tom Shippey’s (2007b) and Michael Drout’s (2007) studies remain the only attempts so far. The published academic lectures and essays, which are the focus of this chapter, represent only a fraction of Tolkien’s academic writings. The Department of Special Collections and Western Manuscripts at the Bodleian library holds – among other documents – thousands of pages of Tolkien’s lecture and research notes and drafts (see also ch. 4). These include polished, much revised, and frequently used texts of standard lectures, extensive research notes on the language and style of a text (e.g., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), or drafts for his published articles. This stupendous treasure trove of notes and drafts is the product of a long and busy academic life and a close examination has shown that they contain material – in various degrees of refinement – for many a publication. The posthumous edition of Tolkien’s notes and comments on Finn and Hengest by his pupil Alan Bliss (Tolkien 1982) are just one example. The relatively few essays that Tolkien saw into print during his lifetime constitute thus the proverbial tip of the iceberg and are witnesses to a time when the demands of the recurrent research assessment exercise had not yet forced academics to publish as much as possible. As a consequence, Tolkien’s influence was as much (if not even more) indirect by means of his actual teaching and thesis supervision, where he must have discussed and shared his research with his students,1 inspiring them to start their own explorations in the field. This attitude of sharing and especially of inspiring students comes to the fore in his “Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford” (given June 5, 1959) where he attacks the practice of severely limiting the students’ academic freedom so that, as a consequence, they are no longer able to follow their own intellectual curiosity (MC 227). The motivation for any genuine research must not be the desire to attain a degree, but “the desire for knowledge” (MC 227) pure and simple, and not limited by any departmental ideology. Thus, Tolkien argues, the division into Lit and Lang2 at Oxford University is not only artificial and unfortunate but also downright detrimental for the entire subject and its students precisely because it creates a distinction where none actually exists, because anyone with a general interest in English will necessarily be concerned with both. Tolkien’s own papers are often products of the holistic approach he favored, combining philological expertise with historical knowledge and literary sensibility. The prime example of such a successful collaboration is arguably his “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth” (published in 1953, see Tolkien 2001a) in which he combines historical information with philological analysis and literary co-creation (see Honegger 2007). His philological interpretation of ofermo¯ d has provided the starting point for a fruitful and extensive debate about the poet’s stance towards the “heroism” of the Anglo-Saxon leader Beorhtnoth (see Shippey 2007c). Moreover, Tolkien scholars have taken up his arguments for the evaluation of leader-figures in his own works of fiction



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(Ferré 2008). This practice of applying Tolkien’s comments on (mostly medieval) texts to his own works of fiction has gained increasing currency among Tolkien scholars so that his essays on Beowulf, Sir Gawain, and fairy-stories have been repeatedly used in an attempt to establish an ‘intertextual’ framework for an exploration of his authorial intentions. As mentioned above, Tolkien frequently uses a holistic approach and his essays are therefore often difficult to categorize. Nevertheless, they can be grouped according to their main focus into three categories: (1) Tolkien on words (comprising those papers that center on the philological analysis of a word); (2) Tolkien on language (essays dealing with more general aspects of language); and (3) Tolkien on (medieval) literature (where one or several literary works stand in the foreground).

Tolkien on Words Almost all of Tolkien’s early scholarly publications focus on a hard word or difficult and obscure expression (e.g., Sigelwara land or the name Nodens). They were written for a specialized readership and published in renowned and venerable academic journals such as Medium Ævum or Review of English Studies. Tolkien brings to bear the full weight of his Oxford English Dictionary-trained philological scholarship, which had been expanded and honed by his work on A Middle English Vocabulary (1922), on the glossary to the edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1925; see Tolkien and Gordon, 1967), by his dialect studies (cf. his foreword to A New Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District (1928)), and by his wide reading for the review essays for The Year’s Work in English Studies. The foundation for his argument is invariably the thorough and comprehensive etymological analysis of the word in question, a consideration of its occurrence in the known texts, and its possible historical references. His two-part article (published in 1932 and 1934 in Medium Ævum) on the Old English word Sigelwara is a good example of this approach (see also ch. 3). The term Sigelwara was used in Old English times to translate the Latin Æthiops, “Ethiopian,” yet Tolkien argues that it must have existed before literate Anglo-Saxons used it to refer to the inhabitants of Ethiopia. He regards the manuscript form as deviating from the original correct form, which he establishes as Sigelhearwan (nom./acc. plural of Sigelhearwa). In the following part, he adduces a plethora of textual evidence for the use and meaning of the two forms sigel and hearwa throughout the centuries and comes to the conclusion that sigel meant originally both “sun” and “jewel,” whereas hearwa is the Germanic form of an Indo-European root related to Latin carbo, “soot.” He then argues that before the term was applied to the sun-scorched people of Africa, it had referred to “the sons of Múspell [. . .],3 the ancestors of the Silhearwan with red-hot eyes that emitted sparks, with faces black as soot” (Tolkien 1934, 110), allowing us some glimpses of a lost heathen mythology. Although Tolkien the philologist-scholar judiciously hedges his conclusions and is anxious to remain within the narrow limits of the philological method, we can, in hindsight, see that the argument had an impact

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on his legendarium. As Tom Shippey (2005, 49) has pointed out, it may have helped Tolkien to achieve an indirect naturalization of the Balrog in the traditions of the North and “to create (or corroborate) the image of the silmaril, that fusion of ‘sun’ and ‘jewel’ in physical form.” It is furthermore an example of what Tolkien, in his lecture “A Secret Vice,” termed “mythology concomitant” (MC 210) for any language, whether invented, rediscovered, or living. It must have irked Tolkien greatly that philology was more and more considered a nasty “pill” (MC 225) to be pushed down the throat of unwilling students. He lived long enough to witness (and to mourn) the fading of the great philological tradition (see Shippey 2007a), of which he had been a typical representative in the early decades of his academic work. Considering the general trend in academia towards a greater differentiation in and focus on synchronic linguistic studies and the concomitant loss of importance of philology (especially the historical dimension of language), it comes as no surprise that Tolkien’s essays in this field had only a limited impact and are little known nowadays (see ch. 3). His legacy to the generations after him lies not so much in his contributions to philology itself, but in the way he made it fruitful for the study and production of literature.

Tolkien on Language Tolkien’s philological papers discussed in the preceding section are, of course, also on language, yet what they contain of more general observations on the topic is rooted in and developed from a close analysis of individual words. The two papers treated in this section, by contrast, focus primarily on general aspects of language and language philosophy, though the philological foundation is discernible throughout. The first essay, published for the first time in The Monsters and the Critics in 1983 under the title “A Secret Vice,” goes back to the 1930s. The notes and minor revisions on the typescript suggest that it was presented twice, once in 1931, and then again two decades later. The topic is the possible origin, status, use, and aesthetics of invented languages – a subject that caught the interest of a larger public when the first specimens of (sometimes untranslated) Elvish appeared in The Lord of the Rings and later texts, which led to the foundation of study-groups and publications on these languages (see ch. 14). Later, the advent of the Internet made it easier for creators and aficionados of created languages to get into contact and to share their passion. This has not always been so, and as Tolkien points out right at the beginning of his lecture, creating languages was usually a private affair kept secret, and any discussion of the topic had to make do with a very limited and personal set of languages. The lecture, as a consequence, develops into a commented linguistic biography which describes Tolkien’s earliest encounters with created languages in the form of codes and nursery languages, such as Animalic and Nevbosh, both of which remain heavily indebted to traditional languages in phonetics and grammar. The primary motivation for inventing such languages is the desire for secrecy in communication. Yet, as Tolkien is eager



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to point out, the creative freedom gives rise to a new quality that goes beyond the aspect of mere practicality: the phonaesthetic pleasure derived from the beautiful sound-form of a word and the way it expresses the semantic content in a suitable and fitting manner. The English word “doom” with its dark long vowel, final nasal sound, and its connotations of judgment and catastrophe may serve as an example. This artistic aspect grows in importance as the number of speakers of a language decreases. Thus a created language neither shared with nor developed in exchange with other speakers is bound to reflect the linguistic and phonetic predilections of its creator; he is likely to choose those forms that meet his subjective aesthetic criteria and thus give him pleasure. This pleasure can, of course, also be found in existing languages, and Tolkien, quite fittingly for a student of medieval and classical languages, stresses the aesthetic appeal scholars find in languages long extinct. The criteria determining the aesthetic appeal of a language remain necessarily vague: in the end, it is a matter of individual linguistic character that determines a language-creator’s choices (MC 211).4 This seems to link up with Tolkien’s views on the concept of “native language” first proposed in his lecture “English and Welsh” (see below), though he does not yet use the terms “native language” and “cradle tongue” to express his ideas. The specimens used to illustrate the aesthetic appeal of an advanced created language are all taken from Tolkien’s own hoard of Elvish (Quenya and Sindarin) poems, referring to persons and events from his legendarium, and one may wonder what the original audience’s reaction was. Tolkien obviously relied on the poems’ aesthetic appeal and poetic qualities – aspects he could expect his listeners to appreciate in spite of their complete ignorance of either language. A second point of importance is Tolkien’s claim that for the “perfect construction of an art-language it is found necessary to construct at least in outline a mythology concomitant” (MC 210). This is echoed in his later claim in the foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings that his legendarium “was basically linguistic in inspiration” (FR xxiii) and the result of a wish to provide a world, history, mythology, and people for his languages.5 The other paper of relevance for this section was given at Oxford on October 21, 1955 as the O’Donnell Lecture and published under the title “English and Welsh” (see also ch. 19). Although Tolkien’s lecture was aimed at an obviously philologically educated audience – as can be deduced from his remarks directed to his listeners as well as from some of his rather detailed comments on linguistic aspects, such as the shared phenomenon of i-mutation or the possible influence of Celtic forms on the Old English verbal forms of the verb “to be” – he makes some more general points that are of interest for the study of his literary texts. First, he discusses the complex and often confusing relationship between language and race, pointing out that although language plays a central role for the cultural and political identity of a people, it can be easily transferred from one race to another. This is to some extent reflected in Tolkien’s fictional texts where we find peoples adopting languages other than their own (e.g., the Men of Númenor speaking Elvish, or the Hobbits abandoning their original tongue after entering the Shire and using Westron instead). Developing his

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argument about race and language further, Tolkien then explodes the myth of the “typical Teuton” and the “typical Celt” by means of textual passages from their respective literatures. The picture Tolkien paints of the language contact situation in Britain during the first century after the Anglo-Saxon invasion is detailed and nuanced, avoiding the usual clichés and simplifications, and could be seen as one possible source of inspiration for the similarly complex contact-situation in Middle-earth. The greater part of the lecture focuses upon the relationship between the two British languages and their speakers, as the title suggests. Towards the end, however, Tolkien introduces a new topic, which has only a tenuous relationship to the overall theme. He takes the (subjectively felt) beauty of Welsh as the starting point for an inquiry into the foundations of personal linguistic aesthetic preferences. Tolkien proposes that every person has a “native language” (MC 190), which seems to be a hereditary and thus genetically transmitted linguistic predisposition (if not indeed a genetically inherited full language) that is ultimately responsible for his or her individual and otherwise inexplicable linguistic aesthetic preferences. This “native language” need not be (and probably is not) identical with what Tolkien calls the “cradle tongue” or “the first-learned language of custom” (MC 190). Tolkien never published his ideas in a more developed and explicit form, though the question of individual aesthetic linguistic predilections was addressed in his lecture “A Secret Vice” too. These ideas, taken together with his notes on his created languages, the few instances of genetically transmitted knowledge (cf. “The Lost Road” and “The Notion Club Papers”; see chs. 10 and 11), and the presentation of invented-language texts in his literary works, provide the reader with tantalizing glimpses of a theory of language that would stand in opposition to the dominant linguistic theories.6

Tolkien on Literature Even if Tolkien had never published The Lord of the Rings or anything else, he would still be remembered among medievalists for his one paper that effected a radical change in Beowulf studies: “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” (delivered in 1936, published in 1937, MC 5–48). The number of publications on the poem was already high back in Tolkien’s day and has increased ever since so that there is probably no scholar alive who can claim to have an overview of the field in its entirety. Yet almost all publications that were written after Tolkien’s lecture acknowledge, in one way or another, the importance of his 1936 contribution in which he argued for the re-evaluation of the Old English epic as a piece of literature and according to an aesthetic proper to the work.7 It does not lack a certain irony that it took a philologist (and thus a representative of Lang) to establish the literary credentials of what has since then been labeled (somewhat erroneously or at least for the wrong reasons) the national epic of England. We must not think that Tolkien had changed sides and gone over to the Lit faction. On the contrary, his masterful interpretation of the poem is rooted in his continuous and intimate study of its language, and



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a demonstration of the fundamental unity of the study of English. Tolkien’s knowl­ edge of Beowulf was deep and detailed,8 yet he carries it lightly in the main part of the text, which is almost completely free from philological analyses in the narrower sense of the word. What there is of technical philological discussion has been banished to the appendix so that it does not disturb the flow of the argument. Thus the success of Tolkien’s argument and the overwhelming influence of his lecture are as much due to his skilled rhetoric as to the originality of his approach (cf. Tolkien 2002b, and Drout 2006). Tolkien begins his lecture by briefly sketching the contemporary scholarly approach, which he sees as dominated by the historical discourse that treats Beowulf not so much as a poem but rather as a historical document. Analyzed from such a point of view, there are of course major deficiencies to be noted. The author, according to those critics, has put the marginal elements such as the fantastic monsters in the center and neglected the development of the narrative potential of those numerous historical episodes and digressions. Tolkien, by contrast, argues that the poem’s structure is not to be compared to that of a narrative epic such as the Aeneid, but that it is rather based on the static contrast between the three episodes with the fights against the monsters at their center. They depict three crucial moments in a heroic life. The first two fights against Grendel and his mother, respectively, are the deeds of a young warrior on the rise. The last and final confrontation with the dragon provides the fitting conclusion to a long, successful reign. The balance is between these elements, and Beowulf’s death in his fight against the (mythical) dragon is tragic but nevertheless much more fitting than would be an end by a (historical) Swedish sword. Tolkien identified the poet’s intention as wanting to compose a heroic-elegiac poem (MC 31), and he therefore “expended his art in making keen that touch upon the heart which sorrows have that are both poignant and remote” (MC 33). The tone of the Old English epic is one that evokes the sympathetic sorrow of the audience and the whole “must have succeeded admirably in creating in the minds of the poet’s contemporaries the illusion of surveying a past, pagan but noble and fraught with deep significance – a past that itself had depth and reached backward into a dark antiquity of sorrow” (MC 27) – which could be as well a characterization of Tolkien’s own epic The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s analysis of Beowulf thus not only influenced all later scholarly work on the Old English poem, but became likewise a metatext for the interpretation of his own legendarium, to which he himself seems to have created a link by identifying the Beowulf poet as one Heorrenda,9 half-brother of Hengest and Horsa, the semihistorical leaders of the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain in his planned frame narrative for The Book of Lost Tales. He made Eriol their father and thus linked his legendarium with the prehistory of the English as it appears in both primary-world history and the poetry of the Anglo-Saxons (e.g., in poems such as Beowulf or Deor; see ch. 15). Beowulf, ever since its availability in scholarly editions from the second half of the nineteenth century onward, has been generally considered the epitome of Anglo-Saxon

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literature. It was (and still is) a canonical work to be studied by every serious-minded student of Germanic languages and literatures. So when Tolkien chose Beowulf as the topic for his Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture to the British Academy in 1936, he could be sure that his audience was familiar with the poem. Almost two decades later, when invited to give the W. P. Ker Memorial Lecture, which was delivered on April 15, 1953, he opted for another canonical text: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Tolkien was doubly qualified for talking about this late fourteenth-century Middle English romance. First, he had prepared an edition of the poem (together with E. V. Gordon) in 1925 (Tolkien and Gordon, 1967), the scholarship and accessibility of which helped greatly to establish it as a set text. Furthermore, Tolkien had repeatedly lectured on the poem during his long academic career. Thus, the fact that Sir Gawain was considered one of the canonical works of Middle English literature was, to a great extent, due to Tolkien’s own work. Second, his lecture coincided with the conclusion and slightly later (December 1953) broadcasting of his translation of the Middle English poem. He had prepared a translation of the poem that faithfully imitates the complex verse-pattern of the original while at the same time remaining as close to the original wording of the text as possible, yet with special consideration for the requirements of its overall comprehension and enjoyment as a poem – a translation that could be seen as a practical illustration of his ideas set forth in his “Prefatory Remarks” on Clark Hall’s translation of Beowulf in 1940. The lecture was thus to be, as Christopher Tolkien believes, his father’s “principal pronouncement on the poem to which he devoted so much thought and study” (MC 1). It may come therefore as a surprise that it was not available in print until its inclusion in The Monsters and the Critics in 1983, and its impact on the scholarship of the poem has, as a consequence, been very small. In his lecture, Tolkien explicitly forgoes any investigation into the sources and analogues of the story and instead concentrates on the narrative skill of the poet in his re-arranging of traditional plot elements (e.g., the “Perilous Host” motif) – a strategy that had been so successful in his 1936 Beowulf lecture. Tolkien locates the nub of the poem in the third fit, the temptation of Gawain by the beautiful lady in Castle Hautdesert and the confession on the day before his departure. By means of a close reading of central passages Tolkien identifies the main aim of the poet as an exploration of “the problems that so much occupied the English mind: the relations of Courtesy and Love with morality and Christian morals and the Eternal Law” (MC 105). He argues that the testing of Gawain took place on three distinct (and hierarchically differing) levels. On the lowest plane we find jesting pastimes, such as the “exchange of winnings” compact with his host. On the next higher level we have the rules of courtesy “as a code of ‘gentle’ or polite manners” (MC 95), which comprise the morally dangerous game of courtly lovemaking. Last and highest are the “real morals, virtues and sins” (MC 95). The central problem is thus how to deal with the advances of the lady on the one hand, and how to treat the gift of the (allegedly magical) girdle on the other. Tolkien’s answer is clear: Gawain is bound to follow the



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moral precepts in all cases, which is why his “breach of courtesy” when rejecting the explicit sexual advances of the lady is not only pardonable but the only morally correct solution. Keeping the girdle for himself and not even mentioning it is, by contrast, merely a breach of the compact with his host and thus preferable to a breach of courtesy towards the lady (see also chs. 16 and 27). This brief outline of Tolkien’s argument makes clear that a direct exploitation of his lecture for an interpretation of his fictional work is difficult, and there exist to date few scholarly publications that try and use his ideas on Sir Gawain as an inter- or metatext for the study of The Lord of the Rings (e.g., Schlobin 2000). The moral dilemma identified as the central element of the Middle English romance may have parallels in similar situations in Tolkien’s own epic romance, so that his thoughts prove illuminating for them, too, yet they are not as obviously relevant for or applicable to his work as the observations in his “On Fairy-stories” (see ch. 5). The subject of Tolkien’s Andrew Lang Lecture, delivered at the University of St Andrews on March 8, 1939, is not another recognized masterpiece of medieval literature but a literary genre that many people would have considered sub-literary: fairystories. The theme was to some extent suggested by the fact that the lecture was expected to have a connection with the work of Andrew Lang, who was widely known for his scholarly and literary interest in fairy-tales. Taking Andrew Lang’s volumes of collected fairy-stories as his starting point of research, Tolkien must often have felt irritated by what was included under this heading in Lang’s and also in other similar collections. Thus, instead of commenting on the literary value and qualities of the tales found in Lang’s volumes, Tolkien decides to use the opportunity for an exploration of the origins, nature, characteristics, and key functions of fairy-stories, and ends up writing a text that provides insights into his thoughts on mythopoeia and literary sub-creation in general rather than into Lang’s fairy-stories proper.10 For a long time the lecture itself had virtually no impact. Delivered shortly before the outbreak of World War II, its publication was delayed until 1947 when it was included in a volume commemorating his fellow Inkling Charles Williams, which must have been read by relatively few people and quite soon went out of print. In addition, Tolkien had camouflaged the true theme of his essay so well that it was read merely by those who wanted to find out more about fairy-stories – and probably came away somewhat mystified. The reception was therefore very slow and the discovery of the essay’s true potential began only with its republication (together with the short story “Leaf by Niggle”) in Tree and Leaf in 1964. From then onwards it moved into view of an audience that knew its author primarily as the creator of a fantasy epic, and the way was open for making connections between the Tolkien who was talking about Sub-creation, Fantasy, and Escape, and the Tolkien who, during the same period, had been busy writing what would become The Lord of the Rings. In hindsight and with many of Tolkien’s sub-creative texts now available, it is of course easier to recognize and assess the importance of the concepts he presented for the first time to an audience that was expecting to hear a paper (primarily) on Lang’s traditional fairy-stories.

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The argument of the lecture is somewhat meandering, which is due to Tolkien’s endeavor to keep up the pretence of talking, at least intermittently, about Lang’s fairy-stories. The following discussion lays therefore no claim to completeness or to following the sequence of his arguments, but merely tries to present the most important ideas and concepts. The first part of “On Fairy-stories” is an extensive and critical exploration of the semantics and etymology of the key-term “fairy” and some of its compounds, such as “fairy-story.” Tolkien comes to the conclusion that “[m]ost good ‘fairy-stories’ are about the aventures of men in the Perilous Realm11 or upon its shadowy marches” (OFS 32), which implies that most of the tales that are traditionally labeled “fairy-stories” fall short of the ideal. At the heart of Faërie lies the desire to “survey the depths of space and time [. . . and] to hold communion with other living things” (OFS 35). Yet fairystories must not grant the fulfillment of these desires by means of narrative mechanisms such as spaceships, time-machines, or the machinery of dream since these are incompatible with the artistic enchantment wrought by Faërie, whose power resides in the ability “of making immediately effective by the will the visions of ‘fantasy’ ” (OFS 42).12 Tolkien furthermore points out that children are neither more credulous than adults nor necessarily the ideal audience for these tales, which have ended up in the nursery by misfortune and accident rather than due to any intrinsic qualities of their own. The story-maker’s task, whether writing for children or adults, or both, is to create “a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside” (OFS 52). It is towards this enchanted state that Fantasy as a natural human activity aspires. In a later section Tolkien discusses the purpose of fairy-stories and identifies three further key characteristics in addition to that of Fantasy, namely Recovery, Escape, and Consolation. Recovery in the Tolkienian sense implies the “regaining of a clear view” that frees us “from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity” (OFS 67) which has its origin in our possessiveness. The products of Fantasy, such as centaurs or a green sun, help us to see our own horses and sun with renewed clarity – maybe not as what they are, but certainly as how they were meant to be seen. Recovery thus designates the restorative aspect of fairy-stories and is closely linked to Escape. Tolkien avoids giving a clear-cut, one-sentence definition for this term, yet his discussion (OFS 69–76) makes clear that one important function of Escape is to leave behind the limitations of normal life. Again, Fantasy provides the means to overcome the (mental) obstacles and boundaries imposed by society and the primary world. Thus, next to offering escape from such real-world threats as hunger, thirst, poverty, etc., it even holds out the promise of the Escape from Death – after all, fairy-stories are “not primarily concerned with possibility, but with desirability” (OFS 55). Consolation, finally, is achieved by the happy ending – especially in the form of the eucatastrophe, the “sudden joyous ‘turn’ ” which shows the working of “a sudden and miraculous grace” (OFS 75). In the “Epilogue” this specific understanding of the happy ending is then related to the gospels: the evangelium is the divine fairy-story come true in our



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primary world, with the incarnation as the eucatastrophic turn that frees mankind from the bondage of original sin. It is of interest that some key concepts such as “sub-creation” or the specific connection between the happy ending of the fairy-story and the Christian gospel were not yet in existence in the original lecture and the early drafts. Also, we can see how Tolkien was developing and refining his critical vocabulary and concepts which, in the end, would comprise the central terms Fantasy, Enchantment, Escape, Recovery, and Consolation. And, as Heidi Krüger’s (2008) discussion of the development of “On Fairy-stories” has made clear, the documents show that the final product, the 1947 essay and its later reprints, is not so much a harmoniously unified whole, but rather a text that still harbors many of the contradictions, tensions, and unresolved issues as the heritage of its long germination and diversified scope. Its rise to fame and popularity among critics must be seen as largely due to the overwhelming popular success of The Lord of the Rings – a text that has irritated many a literary critic who found that his or her toolbox of criticism does not contain many suitable instruments to come to terms with it (see ch. 25). Tolkien’s essay has helped to provide some critical concepts and terminology to fill this gap and, as a consequence, The Lord of the Rings with its elements of Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, and Consolation has often been interpreted as a (somewhat oversized) fairy-story in the Tolkienian sense of the term.13 Since it also constitutes a prime example of the art of sub-creation, and has served as a model for many of the later works in the genre, Tolkien’s essay has indirectly become the theoretical cornerstone for the secondaryworld tradition within fantasy (vs. the Todorovian framework). Nevertheless, it would be pushing things a bit too far to put it into the same category as Aristotle, Sidney, Wordsworth, and Coleridge’s texts on imaginative writing (cf. Flieger and Anderson in Tolkien 2008b, 20).

Conclusion Most of Tolkien’s lectures and essays have for a long time suffered the fate of neglect and oblivion among their primary audiences – not least since some of them were published decades after he had delivered them orally. There are, however, a few exceptions, such as “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” or his ideas on ofermo¯ d as part of “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Son of Beorhthelm.” Both caused a sea change in the critical reception of the poems in question and have been part of the critical discourse ever since their publication. Yet the greater number of Tolkien’s lectures gained in importance only due to a shift away from reading them in their original context towards applying their ideas to “Tolkien the author.” Thus his essays on medieval literature, fairy-stories, or philology have become increasingly inter- and metatexts for the interpretation of Tolkien’s works of fiction and thus gained a new lease of life.

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List of Academic Essays and Other Relevant Academic Publications by J. R. R. Tolkien 1922. A Middle English Vocabulary. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1924. “Philology: General Works.” In The Year’s Work in English Studies, 4: 20–37. (London: Oxford University Press for The English Association.) 1925. “Some Contributions to Middle-English Lexicography.” Review of English Studies, 1.2: 210–215. 1925. “The Devil’s Coach-Horses.” Review of English Studies, 1.3: 331–336. 1925. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Edited by J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1926. “Philology: General Works.” In The Year’s Work in English Studies, 5: 26–65. (London: Oxford University Press for The English Association.) 1927. “Philology: General Works.” In The Year’s Work in English Studies, 6: 32–66. (London: Oxford University Press for The English Association.) 1928. “Foreword.” In Walter E. Haigh, A New Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District, xiii–xviii. London: Oxford University Press. 1929. “Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad.” In Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, 14: 104–126. (London: Oxford University Press.) 1930. “The Oxford English School.” Oxford Magazine, 48.21: 778–780, 782. 1932. “Appendix I: The Name ‘Nodens’.” In R. E. M. Wheeler and T. V. Wheeler, Report on the Excavation of the Prehistoric, Roman, and Post-Roman Site in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire, 132–137. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1932. “Sigelwara Land [Part 1].” Medium Ævum, 1.3: 183–196. 1934. “Sigelwara Land [Part 2].” Medium Ævum, 3.2: 95–111. 1934. “Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve’s Tale.” In Transactions of the Philological Society, 1–70. 1937. Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics. London: Humphrey Milford. 1940. “Prefatory Remarks on Prose Translation of Beowulf.” In Beowulf and the Finnesburg Fragment: A Translation into Modern English Prose by John R. Clark Hall, viii–xli. London: George Allen & Unwin. 1947. “Iþþlen in Sawles Warde.” Written together with S. R. T. O. d’Ardenne. English Studies, 27.6: 168–170. 1947. “On Fairy-Stories.” In Essays Presented to Charles Williams, 38–89. London: Oxford University Press. 1948. “MS Bodley 34: A Re-Collation of a Collation.” Written together with S. R. T. O. d’Ardenne. Studia Neophilologica, 20.1–2: 65–72. 1953. “Middle English ‘Losenger’: Sketch of an Etymological and Semantic Enquiry.” In Essais de philologie moderne (1951), 63–76. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. 1953. “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorhthelm’s Son.” In Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, N.S. 6: 1–18. (London: John Murray.) 1963. “English and Welsh.” In Angles and Britons: O’Donnell Lectures, 1–41. Oxford: Oxford University Press.



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1975. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo. Translated by J. R. R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien. London: George Allen & Unwin. 1982. Finn and Hengest: The Fragment and the Episode. Edited by Alan Bliss. London: George Allen & Unwin. 1983. The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. Contains “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” “On Translating Beowulf,” “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” “On Fairy-Stories,” “English and Welsh,” “A Secret Vice,” and “Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford.” London: George Allen & Unwin. 2008. On Fairy-stories. Expanded edition, with commentary and notes. Edited by Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson. London: HarperCollins. Notes   1  See discussion of Tolkien’s collaboration with his students M. B. Salu and S. R. T. O. d’Ardenne in ch. 3.   2  Lit[erature] referring to the courses focusing on the study of the literary texts beginning with Chaucer, whereas Lang[uage] denotes the study of Old and Middle English and the literature of these periods.   3  Múspell, also called Muspellsheimr, is one of the nine worlds in the Old Norse mythology of the Edda. It is the land of fire and home of the fire-giants, the “sons of Múspell,” who will be led to Ragnarök by the fire-giant Surtr.   4  See Ross Smith (2007) and Fimi (2009, 69– 115) for an in-depth discussion of these aspects.   5  This is, however, too radical and simplifying a claim. See Fimi (2009) for a nuanced and comprehensive analysis of the development of Tolkien’s languages on the one hand, and his legendarium on the other.   6  See the respective chapters in Smith (2007) and Fimi (2009).   7  See Drout (2010) and Shippey (2010) for discussions of the lecture’s/essay’s impact.

  8  There exist two (partial) translations of Beowulf among Tolkien’s academic papers in the Bodleian, one into alliterative verse, the other into prose.   9  The Old English poem Deor mentions Heorrenda as the scop (court-poet) who usurped Deor’s place. 10  The recent critical edition of Tolkien’s lecture text, notes, and preliminary sketches by Douglas A. Anderson and Verlyn Flieger (Tolkien 2008b) allows us to study the development of Tolkien’s ideas in some detail. 11  The Perilous Realm is “Faërie, the realm or state in which fairies have their being [.  .  . and which] holds [also . . .] mortal men, when we are enchanted” (OFS 32). 12  Fantasy refers to the sub-creation by means of the “magic” of language which allows “the making of glimpsing of Other-worlds” (OFS 55) and presupposes the “freedom from the domination of observed ‘fact’ ” (OFS 60). 13  The one work by Tolkien that comes closest to his ideal of a fairy-story is Smith of Wootton Major (Tolkien 2008e).

References Drout, Michael. 2006. “The Rhetorical Evolution of ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’.” In The Lord of the Rings 1954–2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder, edited by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, 183–215. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press.

Drout, Michael. 2007. “J. R. R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and its Significance.” Tolkien Studies, 4: 113–176. Drout, Michael. 2010. “ ‘Beowulf, the Monsters and the Critics’: The Brilliant Essay that Broke Beowulf Studies.” Available at Scholars’ Forum,

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http://www.lotrplaza.com/forum/forum_posts .asp?TID=237825, accessed November 21, 2013. Ferré, Vincent. 2008. “The Rout of the King: Tolkien’s Readings on Arthurian Kingship – Farmer Giles of Ham and The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth.” In Tolkien’s Shorter Works: Essays of the Jena Conference 2007, edited by Margaret Hiley and Frank Weinreich, 59–76. Zurich and Bern: Walking Tree Publishers. Fimi, Dimitra. 2009. Tolkien, Race and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits. New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan. Honegger, Thomas. 2007. “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth: Philology and the Literary Muse.” Tolkien Studies, 4: 189–199. Krüger, Heidi. 2008. “Eine Neuberwertung der theoretischen Konzeption von ‘Faërie’ und ‘fairy-story’ auf Basis der 2008 erschienenen erweiterten Ausgabe Tolkien On Fairy-stories.” Hither Shore, 5: 197–217. Schlobin, Roger C. 2000. “The Monsters are Talismans and Transgressions: Tolkien and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” In J. R. R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances, edited by George Clark and Daniel Timmons, 71–81. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Shippey, Tom. 2005. The Road to Middle-earth. Rev. and expanded edn. London: HarperCollins. Shippey, Tom. 2007a. “Fighting the Long Defeat: Philology in Tolkien’s Life and Fiction.” In Roots and Branches: Selected Papers on Tolkien, 139–156. Zurich and Bern: Walking Tree Publishers. Shippey, Tom. 2007b. “Tolkien’s Academic Reputation Now.” In Roots and Branches, 203–212. Zurich and Bern: Walking Tree Publishers. Shippey, Tom. 2007c. “Tolkien and ‘The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth’.” In Roots and Branches, 323–339. Zurich and Bern: Walking Tree Publishers. Shippey, Tom. 2010. “Tolkien’s Two Views of Beowulf, One Hailed, One Ignored: But Did We Get This One Right?” Available at Scholars’ Forum, http://www.lotrplaza.com/forum/forum _posts.asp?TID=238598&PN=1, accessed No­ vember 21, 2013. Smith, Ross. 2007. Inside Language: Linguistic and Aesthetic Theory in Tolkien. Zurich and Bern: Walking Tree Publishers. Tolkien, J. R. R. and E. V. Gordon, eds. 1967. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Rev. edn. by N. Davis. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Further Reading Flieger, Verlyn. 1993. “The Green Man, the Green Knight, and Treebeard: Scholarship and Invention in Tolkien’s Fiction.” In Scholarship and Fantasy: Proceedings of the Tolkien Phenomenon (May 1992, Turku, Finland), edited by K. J. Battarbee, 85–98. Turku: University of Turku.

Miller, Miriam Youngerman. 1991. “ ‘Of sum mayn meruayle, that he myht trawe’: The Lord of the Rings and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” Studies in Medievalism, 3.3: 345–365.

3

Tolkien as Editor Tom Shippey

As far as we know, it was never in Tolkien’s mind to write a critical monograph, a work of literary criticism or literary history such as W. P. Ker’s Epic and Romance (1897) or H. M. Chadwick’s The Heroic Age (1912). Tolkien would have been the ideal author for an account (none has ever been written) of the medieval literature of his favorite counties in the West Midlands, but the thought seems not to have occurred to him. Such critical articles as he did write are mostly either discussions of single words and phrases, or else responses to special invitations: both categories are carefully discussed by Michael Drout (2007, 115–120, 134–145). For whatever reason, however, Tolkien’s conception of his professional role centered, not on criticism and interpretation, but on editing, with translation as a more personal by-product of his editorial work. In the modern academic world, editing is often regarded as a low-prestige occupation, not requiring the literary skills for a successful monograph. Tolkien would not have agreed. He might well have replied that mere critics can side-step difficult places, especially in ancient texts in little-known languages. Editors, however, especially if they are also glossators, have to come to a conclusion about the meaning of every word. And it is only through this that one may hope – to use Tolkien and Gordon’s phrase – to come to “an appreciation [of a text] as far as possible of the sort which its author may be supposed to have desired” (SGGK v). Editing is the foundation, the most important part of bringing ancient works and forgotten authors back to life. All the rest is merely superstructure.

A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Tolkien accordingly committed himself to 11 editorial projects during his professional career, which are dealt with individually below. One has to admit that his success rate in these endeavors was not high. Two of the 11 appeared only posthumously (Exodus and Finn and Hengest). Two more had only a limited aim and limited circulation (see Tolkien 2004b, 2008c, and 2008d). Two were completed and published under the names of E. V. Gordon (1953) and his widow Ida L. Gordon (1960). A further two proved abortive. Although Tolkien worked on them, sometimes for years, and may have come close to completion on both (see Lee 2009 and further comment below), both projects were abandoned and his work on both appeared to be lost (once again, see further comment below). Of the remaining three, although Tolkien’s edition of an important manuscript of Ancrene Wisse was awaited for over 30 years, when it did appear in 1962 (AW) it proved an anti-climax. The bright spot in the list is certainly the 1925 joint edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, produced in collaboration with Tolkien’s Leeds colleague E. V. Gordon (SGGK). Although Sir Gawain had been edited previously, it remained little known. Tolkien and Gordon’s edition, by contrast, immediately made what many would call the greatest English poem of the Middle Ages accessible to generations of students. Although there have been several later editions, Tolkien and Gordon’s, updated by Tolkien’s Oxford successor Norman Davis in 1967, is still widely used. One may well think that it was this edition which clinched Tolkien’s election to the Chair of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford the year it was published (see ch. 1). At that point, in 1925, Tolkien, rather than his former tutor Kenneth Sisam, appeared to be the up-and-coming young man of English philological studies. This was a striking reversal, given that the first of Tolkien’s 11 editorial projects had been A Middle English Vocabulary, printed separately in 1922, but originally intended to be (as it eventually became) the “Glossary” to the texts edited by Sisam for his 1921 anthology, or “Reader,” Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose.1 It was the graduate assistant of 1919, however, who became the Oxford Professor of 1925. Nevertheless, the seeds of much trouble might well be seen in this first collaboration. It is obvious that a “Reader,” a selection of texts to be used by undergraduates, is not much use without a glossary, but that is what Oxford University Press initially had to publish, because of Tolkien’s delay in delivering the work he had been assigned. Late or non-delivery was to become a pattern. It was especially infuriating to Sisam, who had been passed over for his former pupil, and who then, as an employee of Oxford University Press, had to deal for many years with Tolkien’s missed deadlines and complex excuses. His annoyance was expressed in several letters, and it was shared.2 The ill-feeling created no doubt had a part in making Tolkien unpopular among sections of the Oxford community, an unpopularity of which he was himself aware.3 One has to ask, rather bluntly, what was Tolkien’s problem? What were his intentions? And, with rather more discrimination, and some hope of answering the questions just raised, what accounts for his very different editorial practices in those works which he did complete?



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The Task of a Glossator Much can be deduced from the “Note” with which Tolkien prefaced his Middle English Vocabulary (MEV).4 It should be said first that the whole point of Sisam’s “Reader” was to introduce undergraduate students to as wide a range of Middle English texts as possible. There was no such thing as Standard English in the fourteenth century, and dialect divisions were far deeper than in later periods. Even common pronouns like “she” and “them” might appear, for instance, as “ho” or “hem.” An undergraduate reading any of Sisam’s 17 different texts, then, might be looking up different forms of the same word again and again. Tolkien’s MEV dealt with this by coding word-meanings to Sisam’s texts by item and line number. Some words appeared in only one text. Thus the entry for “gryndel” (which occurred only in Sir Gawain, text no. 5 in Sisam), read: Gryndel, adj. wrathful, V 270; Gryndelly, adv. wrathfully, V 231. [? Back-formation from *grindlaik (gryndellayk Sir Gaw. 312), O[ld] N[orse] grimmd + leik-r; cf. ON grimm-leikr.]

The entry not only gave the meaning of the word, it also suggested a derivation from one of the languages which contributed to or provided evidence for Middle English (Old English, Old Norse, Old French, Middle Dutch, etc.). In this way the student was also given some sense of the developing history of the language. But while gryndel was a hard word in one way (not found in modern English), it was an easy one in another sense, for it occurred only twice in the “Reader.” How should one deal with far more common words, words still familiar? Tolkien expressed his conviction very firmly in his prefatory “Note” (unpaginated): This glossary does not aim at completeness, and is not primarily a glossary of rare or ‘hard’ words. A good working knowledge of Middle English depends less on the possession of an abstruse vocabulary than on familiarity with the ordinary machinery of expression – with the precise forms and meanings that common words may assume; with the uses of such innocent-looking little words as the prepositions of and for; with idiomatic phrases . . . These are the features of the language which an English reader is predisposed to pass over . . . [So] I have given exceptionally full treatment to what may be called the backbone of the language.

It is, as always, hard to argue with Tolkien, but sometimes the effort of resisting the argumentative flow has to be made. Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner, claiming that the charge of “dilatoriness” leveled against Tolkien is in this case “entirely mistaken,” note that Tolkien’s glossary contains some 4740 entries, nearly 6800 definitions, almost 15,000 text references, “every one of which would have to be individually identified,” and 1900 cross-references (2006, 35). In those pre-computer days, it must have taken a lot of index cards.

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So much is true. But what happens if one moves away from words like, for instance, “Fairi, -y, Feyré, Faierie (XII), n. faery. Fairyland . . .” – seven citations from two different texts, with an alternative meaning “magic” – to a word like “Ȝe, pron. 2 pl. nom. you . . .”? For this Tolkien gives 35 citations to most of Sisam’s texts, taking up 24 close-set half-lines (the “Glossary” was printed in double columns). There is potentially valuable information in the remark about differentiation from þou, but just the same, few students would have needed to recognize that “ȝe = ye = you” more than once. The entry on Do(n), Doo makes the point even more clearly: 64 half-lines, ending with the note that the word derives from Old English dón. Nearly all of this is obvious. It is true that idioms might catch one out. Tolkien notes that ded come means “fetched” (not “did come”), that I haue at do means “I have something to do.” Especially useful (and explaining his remark about “innocent-looking” prepositions) is his comment, under Ȝou, that ȝou to means “for yourselves”: so that John Ball’s warning to the rebellious peasants of Essex, loke schappe ȝou to on heued, and no mo means “see you set up one chief for yourselves and no more.” These are exceptions, however. Most uses of these common words needed only one translation plus much more selective citation.5 My guess is that in its many decades of use, a high proportion of Tolkien’s thousands of text references have never been looked at once. Tolkien may or may not have been dilatory, but his own self-accusation was that he was a “niggler,” someone who spends (wastes) time on unnecessary detail. This was the problem with his next follow-up project, the disastrous “Clarendon Chaucer.” The idea here was simple: to provide an anthology of selections from Chaucer for use in schools, along the lines of Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose, with no more introduction and annotation than would enable the works to be read in Middle English. Sisam’s view was that the texts would be taken from W. W. Skeat’s already existing Oxford edition, so they would require no work at all. The notes would be explanatory, not scholarly. What we thought we knew of the sad results has been set out by Christina Scull and Wayne Hammond, rather defensively (Reader’s Guide 153–156), and more neutrally by Gilliver (2008, 64–70), but in brief Tolkien was coopted into the project as glossator in 1922; was thought by Sisam to have given up in 1924; continued to receive deadlines and letters from the Press for many years; and eventually pulled out in 1951, offering his notes to anyone who could use them, after which (as far as anyone knew) they disappeared. But while this present volume was in preparation, and thanks to the persistence of John M. Bowers, all Tolkien’s materials for this project have been rediscovered: page proofs corrected by Tolkien, notes by Tolkien, proofs of Tolkien’s glossary and notes on language, and testimonials for the “Introduction” by Tolkien’s co-editor George Gordon. Further search by Peter Gilliver uncovered George Gordon’s long, handwritten “Introduction” itself.6 Much of this material will no doubt eventually be published, but it will now inevitably function as a coda to Tolkien studies, not, as intended, a stimulus to Chaucer studies. Without being unduly censorious, one has to concede that Tolkien could have handled the project better. Clarendon successfully published several school editions of Chaucer tales without Tolkien’s involvement, two of them from Sisam in



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1923 and 1927, while in 1979 Norman Davis once again continued Tolkien’s work by bringing out his Chaucer Glossary. It is hard to resist Gilliver’s still-valid conclusion that “when Tolkien started to write, he couldn’t help writing about what he thought was worth writing about, rather than writing what he had been asked to write” (2008, 70). While this was proceeding, Tolkien was working on the edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, not a selection but the whole poem, and this time he had what seems to have been an ideal collaborator in E. V. Gordon, described by Tolkien as “an industrious little devil” (see Anderson 2003). Whatever the relationship between the two men (see ch. 1), they did succeed in driving the project to a successful completion. It is thought that the division of labor was for Gordon to provide the bulk of the explanatory notes, and probably of the “Introduction,” while Tolkien took care of establishing the text, providing (once again) the glossary, and probably writing the commentary on the poem’s language.7 These latter tasks were ideally suited to Tolkien’s talents; they were in some respects easy, in others engagingly challenging. Establishing the text cannot have given Tolkien much difficulty. Sir Gawain exists in only one manuscript, so different readings did not have to be checked and decided between. The manuscript was written by a scribe who seems to have been close to the poet in time and space, and so to have understood the poem and the dialect of the poem. Tolkien made about 170 corrections to the poem’s 2530 lines, including some added in reprints after 1925, but the majority are trivial, doing no more than correcting slips of the pen. So, in line 629 emdeleȝ was altered to endeleȝ, “endless”; in lines 705 and 930 clapel and claplayneȝ were corrected to chapel, chaplayneȝ; doublets like þy þy in line 2247 and he he in line 2305 were reduced to þy and he. Sometimes a larger change was indicated by a failure to maintain alliteration: at line 958 the scribe wrote that the old lady, Morgan le Fay, was Chymbled ouer hir blake chyn with mylkquyte vayles, but this gives only two alliterating syllables, not three, and Tolkien emended to chalkquyte. Similarly he corrected the in-context meaningless tag in erde, in line 881, to inurnde, “adorned.” Elsewhere Tolkien straightened out some confusions: the man who copied the poem seems, not unreasonably, to have been deceived several times by the scenes of marked gender-reversal, with the large and bearded host kissing Gawain publicly, while the beautiful hostess makes unladylike sexual advances to him privately. In lines 1389, 1770, 1872, Tolkien changed ho, “she,” to he, prynce to pryncece, and conversely he to ho, thus saving the joke each time. Even these brief examples, however, show also the difficult part of Tolkien’s assignment. Chymbled is not a common word. Tolkien’s glossary entry, which follows precisely the format of his 1922 MEV, reads “chymbled, pp. bound, wrapped up, 958. [Cf. ON. kimbla.]” By contrast *inurnde is treated as a variant form of enn(o)urned, with three line references and three meanings offered, while the word originates, Tolkien suggested, from “OFr. aourner, with altered prefix.” One of the charms of the poem has been, ever since Tolkien and Gordon brought it back into English cultural life, its mixture of high-status French words, often to do with dress, or armor, or the aristocratic sports of hunting and flirtation, with words which (if they survived) would

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now be lower-class Northernisms excluded from Standard English and often derived from Norse:8 words like snart, “bitterly,” from Old Norse snarr + neuter ending, or snitered, “came shivering down, 2003. Cf. Norw[egian] dial[ect] snitra, shiver with cold.” The poet seems to have had no sense of the “cultural cringe” with respect to French found in the fourteenth century as in the twentieth; he used French, Norse, and English words just as he found them convenient. As he would do with Ancrene Wisse, Tolkien very much appreciated such signs that gentility could still be a native quality, had not been entirely erased by the Norman Conquest and the imposition of a French ruling class. One final advantage for Tolkien was that while the poem’s vocabulary was “rich . . . approximately as many distinct individual words as there are lines in the poem: a new word for every line,” there was no call for him to save space. He could declare – in direct contrast with his “Note” to the 1922 MEV – that “In the Glossary completeness is aimed at” (SGGK 133). He could look at every word and inject all his linguistic learning into the etymological derivations. For this generations of students and scholars have been grateful.

False Starts and Dialect Studies The natural follow-up to this success would have been an edition of the poem Pearl, found in the same manuscript as Sir Gawain, and surely written by the same man. Tolkien’s admiration for the poem was signaled by his 1924 poem “The Nameless Land” (published in 1927), which imitates the otherwise unique meter and stanzaic structure of Pearl, and also draws on its vision of a strange paradisaical land. We do not exactly know what went wrong. While Gordon and Tolkien remained in contact, after Tolkien’s move to Oxford they were no longer in daily contact, which Tolkien seems to have needed; and Gordon died young in 1938. The edition did appear, under E. V. Gordon’s name, in 1953. In it Gordon’s widow Ida states that it was Tolkien’s idea, once “he found himself unable to give sufficient time to it,” that Gordon “should continue the work alone. This he did, and at the time of his death in 1938 the edition was complete.” Publication was delayed, however, and when it eventually appeared 15 years later Ida Gordon had made “extensive alterations . . . considerable rewriting.” She adds on the same page: “My warmest thanks must go to Professor Tolkien, who had the original typescript for some time and added valuable notes and corrections; he has also responded generously to queries” (Gordon 1953, iii). Further acts of generosity by Tolkien will be noted below, but one wonders quite what was meant by “for some time.” Years? A decade? Be that as it may, it is no longer usually possible to separate out Tolkien’s contribution from that of E. V. or Ida L. Gordon, although pp. xi–xix of the 1953 “Introduction,” on the poem’s “Form and Purpose,” were reprinted as Tolkien’s work alone in the “Introduction” to his 1975 volume of translations (see Tolkien 1995d). I have suggested elsewhere that the long note on line 115, stroþe-men, sounds very Tolkienian (Shippey 2000, 204), as do several



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detailed notes on Northern and other dialect forms, see those on lines 51, 107, 358, 609–610, etc., but this can only be speculation. Another project associated with the Gordons was to provide a joint edition of two Old English poems, The Wanderer and The Seafarer, found close together in the Exeter Book, one of the most important manuscripts of Old English poetry. It would be a joint project, but Tolkien would take the lead role for The Wanderer and Gordon for The Seafarer. Both poems were already well known, for they had been printed in Henry Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader (many editions from 1876), and were staples of the Oxford English course, partly because they appealed directly even to a modern taste (see chs. 2 and 15). The poems are, however, extremely difficult lexically and grammatically. Tolkien’s projected edition might then have been original and valuable if it had appeared in the 1930s. It is thought that Tolkien was close to finishing it, and may have sent his materials to Gordon, but if so, they have disappeared (Anderson 2003, 19). His extensive unpublished notes on the poem survive, but as Stuart Lee comments, “Simply collating these does not an edition make” (2009, 197). The poem continued to be personally important to him. Lee notes his reading of five lines from it at the close of his 1959 “Valedictory Address” to Oxford; the same lines formed a model for the Rohirric poem quoted by Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings (see also ch. 12). The Seafarer was also deeply significant personally to Tolkien. The seven lines of Old English verse in Lost Road (84) are a collage of Seafarer lines, and Ælfwine’s five Old English lines are also reminiscent of the poem (Lost Road 44, 103, 203). As with Pearl, an edition of The Seafarer did eventually appear, completed by Ida Gordon in 1960. This time, however, she noted that while her “first intention” had been “to bring into final form” the “uncompleted draft” of the joint edition of both poems, matters changed so quickly that in the end she decided only to edit The Seafarer and to revise it much more thoroughly. Significantly, she published this edition under her own name, not her husband’s. She noted that her edition “incorporates much of the original material, esp. in the Notes,” and thanked Tolkien “for some notes given to me with his usual generosity” (Ida L. Gordon 1960, vii). Her heavy revision has however left no clear trace of Tolkien’s influence: unless it be the notes on Anglian/Mercian forms for words in lines 52 and 69, close to the focus of Tolkien’s personal interest. In contrast with these abortive collaborative projects, in 1929 Tolkien did make a solo breakthrough in academic studies with his article on two early medieval texts, Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad. This was in effect a statement about dialect purity (see also ch. 16). What Tolkien had noticed, and then proved to the hilt, was that two manuscripts, one of Ancrene Wisse and one of Hali Meiðhad (and several associated female saints’ lives), were written in exactly the same dialect but in different handwriting. In medieval conditions, this could not have come about by accident or coincidence. The two scribes had been taught to write the same way. There was, then, even in the era of Norman-French dominance, a holdout area of England where English was still not just spoken, but written, and written as taught in a school of some kind. This holdout area – one has to say, a model for “the Shire” – was moreover in the

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West Midlands, very close to what Tolkien regarded as home, and was linguistically continuous with Old English from the same area. All this was, for Tolkien, particularly exciting, personally but also philologically: for if there was one thing which got philologists of Tolkien’s time excited, it was a manuscript which gave a form of one particular dialect, preferably written by the author himself, but in this unique case copied out by scribes using a fixed form of what might very well have been the authors’ dialect as well – that fixed form being labeled, by Tolkien, as “AB language” (see further Zettersten 2006). Tolkien’s article led the EETS to establish as a priority editions of the many manuscripts of the Ancrene Riwle, or “Rule for Anchoresses,” which in Tolkien’s manuscript was more accurately called Ancrene Wisse, “Guide for Anchoresses.” Remarkably, this English work had been translated into both Latin and French – translations then nearly always went the other way – and two editions of such versions appeared from the EETS in 1944. English texts appeared in 1952, 1954, and 1956, with another French one in 1958.9 Tolkien’s edition (AW) did not appear, however, until 1962, 33 years after his initial breakthrough; and when it did appear it was out of line with EETS policy. With just one exception, all other editions in this series of texts, including six more published after 1962, contain introductions by the editors. Tolkien’s has only a brief “Preparatory Note,” with a ten-page “Introduction” by N. P. Ker. Why did Tolkien not publish the results of what must have been by this time his extensive study of the manuscript and its language? The next EETS edition of the Riwle, E. J. Dobson’s 1972 edition of what he thought (disagreeing with Tolkien) was probably the oldest copy of the work, has an editorial introduction 165 pages long. Why did Tolkien not produce something on a similar scale? One might say, “because he was writing The Lord of the Rings,” and to that there is no answer. Tolkien was also, however, “niggling” again. In his “Prefatory Note” to the 1962 edition he states that, “Owing to the regularity of the hand it has been possible to preserve the lineation of the manuscript” (AW vi). In other words, Tolkien’s printed edition follows the manuscript line by line. The textual notes at the bottom of each page are moreover all but entirely concerned with detail about initials, underlinings, capital letters, marginalia. There are virtually no emendations or corrections in what is a long text, far longer than Sir Gawain. Tolkien clearly thought that this particular scribe knew what he was doing, so that his work was best left alone; while he also wanted to come as close as he could to reproducing in print the appearance of his manuscript. The EETS did not agree with him. Tolkien was creating a lot of extra work, not only for himself. Scull and Hammond’s long account of the to-and-fro of correspondence (Reader’s Guide 44–49) takes Tolkien’s part and claims that his arguments were “strongly worded, eloquent and logical” (47), but as said above one sometimes has to dig in one’s heels against Tolkien’s argumentative tide. His letters of 1936 and 1958, defending line-by-line transcription, could well have been answered – had Tolkien not been an Oxford Professor. This is exactly what did soon happen, with reference to Tolkien’s hitherto unchallenged 1929 opinions. Just after Tolkien’s edition came out, Angus McIntosh (1963)



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tacitly dismissed Tolkien’s views on the importance of dialect purity, while in 1986 McIntosh quoted Tolkien’s 1929 paper at some length and, respectfully but firmly, answered its claims point by point.10 That is the way academic study is supposed to work, but Tolkien would have had more academic impact if he had produced his edition earlier, without unnecessary detail, and with a substantial supporting apparatus, as found for instance in G. T. Shepherd’s partial edition of the same manuscript (1959). Possibly, however, such a supporting apparatus has been hidden from us by Tolkien’s characteristic “generosity,” mentioned twice above. In 1936 one of his graduate students, Simonne d’Ardenne, brought out an edition of one of the female saints’ lives written in “AB language” and from the same manuscript as Hali Meiðhad. This is, Gordon wrote in his review, “the ideal treatment of a Middle English text” (1937, 134). It contains text, translation, emended text, a complete account of “AB language,” a glossary, and etymological notes on many words. Although it was published first as her thesis by the University of Liège, so that her name alone appeared, as likewise in the subsequent EETS edition, d’Ardenne herself agreed that the edition was a joint product by herself and Tolkien.11 Gordon must have known this when he wrote his almost ecstatic review. Among the things he says which went to the heart of what Tolkien would have aimed at are: “The editor is above all a critic . . . who knows the right use of scholarship” (Gordon 1937, 134). He quotes d’Ardenne (or possibly Tolkien, see Drout 2007, 127–128) as declaring: “We can indeed get from AB a very good idea of what Anglo-Saxon would have become, had none of the invasions and dynastic changes of the preceding three centuries ever occurred” (1937, 134). Gordon went on to add, surely cheered on by Tolkien: And it is a good form of language, neater, more careful, and weightier than the English we have now. It is the chief attraction of this group [of “AB” texts] that it preserves the pure tradition of Anglo-Saxon England. (135–136)

Gordon ended his review with the question, perhaps intended hopefully, “When can we look for more of such work?” Not, alas, from Tolkien. One should add that he no doubt also gave a great deal of assistance to another work by one of his graduate students, Mary Salu, who published a translation of Ancrene Wisse, based on the Cambridge manuscript, with a “Preface” by Tolkien which states his conviction that this was “possibly the oldest surviving copy” and made by a scribe “perfectly at home with the language.”12 Tolkien’s other two editorial projects of the 1930s were both also concerned with issues of dialect consistency. Chaucer’s The Reeve’s Tale is set in Trumpington near Cambridge, but has among its characters two Northern students, whose dialect forms part of the tale’s comedy (see also ch. 16). In 1931 Tolkien read a paper to the Philological Society, printed in 1934, centered on the issue of dialect; while in July 1939 he recited his own version of the tale, which was issued as a pamphlet, as an Oxford

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“Summer Diversion,” in which the students’ dialect had been “corrected” to what Tolkien thought Chaucer had intended.13 One simple example of the dialect comedy is that one of the students says, of their college administrator, “Our manciple, I hope he wil be deed / swa werkis ay the wangis in his heed” (Tolkien 2008d, 177). In Southern English, the first line would be rude. In Northern English, however, hope just meant “suppose, expect”; werkis also did not mean “works” but “hurt,” for to the Northerners the -is verbal ending is a plural form. No-one knows now what wangis are: “back-teeth”? In his 1934 article Tolkien argued that only true philologists could appreciate the joke and with it Chaucer’s artistry; the “father of English literature” was on the side of “lang.” not “lit.” (see Tolkien 2008c). But the joke had been spoiled, Tolkien argued, by scribes who had not understood it and had replaced accurate dialect Northern features by more familiar Southernisms. Tolkien accordingly rewrote sections of the tale with the aim of restoring philological accuracy, thus creating a kind of partial edition. The changes, to a non-philological eye, are not substantial – the major one being that Tolkien omits a total of some 29 lines which describe or allude to the students’ sexual assaults on the miller’s wife and daughter, writing in or adapting a couple of lines to save rhyme. That apart, Tolkien deleted terminal -e endings which he thought would not have been pronounced, both in Chaucer’s own English and in the students’; marked those he thought would have been pronounced with ë; and often replaced y by i, assuming that the former is a mere spelling convention. One Northernism he marked more regularly than Chaucer was the use of long a, not rounded, as in Chaucer’s English and ours, to o. Chaucer noted this as a characteristic Northernism, for early on in the students’ speech we have na swayn, meaning “no servant,” as well as ham (changed by Tolkien to haam) for “home.” But elsewhere Chaucer (or his scribes) forgot, so that we have in various places geen, neen, for “gone, none,” altered by Tolkien to gaan, naan. Tolkien also altered to to til (though not consistently, see line 174). He changed some verbal forms, so that are we dryve becomes er we dreuen; I wil becomes I sal; and man sal becomes man suld. One standard test for Middle English dialect is present tense verb endings. John’s men sayth is clearly wrong, for -th endings are Southern, but is confirmed by the rhyme word fayth: Tolkien changed to by my fay . . . men say, though even that should arguably be sayis. He also kept clerkis sain, where the Midland -n ending is confirmed by the rhyme with swain. It was easier to be consistent over another standard test, changing the Southern/Midland form hem to thaim. The past participle lorn was emended to lost at line 137 of Tolkien’s text, but retained two lines later, where lorn has to rhyme with corn. Simon Horobin (2001) has concluded that Tolkien was wrong to think that Chaucer was even aiming at complete consistency, though he also notes (2002) that Chaucer may have deliberately included forms designed to imitate the Reeve’s own Norfolk dialect. Tolkien was also wrong about the scribes, for while the scribes of some manuscripts “Southernized” Chaucer’s text, others “Northernized” it. The inconsistencies were probably original to Chaucer.



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To end this section, Carl Hostetter’s exceptionally full reediting of Tolkien’s 1944 pamphlet edition of Sir Orfeo makes it possible to summarize the work relatively briefly (Tolkien 2004b). Though the poem has been preserved in three manuscripts, Hostetter shows that “Tolkien’s Middle English version .  .  . was based on Kenneth Sisam’s edition” in the “Reader” which Tolkien had glossed 20 years before. The germ of it may indeed have been a speculative note by Sisam in which he restored a number of cases of final -e, as belonging to an earlier form of English, thus improving the poem’s meter. In a brief “editorial note” Tolkien stated that the poem was originally composed “in the South-East of England (that is probably in Essex)” but had been “infected” by forms from other areas (Tolkien 2004b, 89, 88, 104). This differs only slightly from the conclusion of A. J. Bliss’s later detailed study, which is that the original dialect was that of Westminster-Middlesex (Bliss 1966, xx). Tolkien seems in fact to have made little effort to return the language of his edition to the suggested Essex origin. Though he thought that “the original appears to have used the old native form hye or he for sche and they (thai)” (Tolkien 2004b, 104) he did not reintroduce them to his text. Most of the 400+ alterations from Sisam’s text recorded by Hostetter are either: replacements of y by i (merely a spelling change); additions of final -e (as opposed to the frequent deletions in The Reeve’s Tale); or changes made for the sake of a more regular meter, though these are often justified by readings from the two manuscripts other than the one used as a base by Sisam, see lines 64, 180, 194, 419, etc. Tolkien’s mini-edition was a teaching text only, designed perhaps to make the poem slightly more accessible for the naval cadets who (for some reason) had been assigned to study it. Hostetter notes that Tolkien’s modern English translation was based on this Middle English version, citing several cases where the former agrees only with the latter, not with Sisam (Tolkien 2004b, 86–88). Both were probably written at the same time, in 1944.

Imaginative Reconstructions The last two works to be considered are Tolkien’s edition of the Old English poem Exodus, and his edition of the Old English Finnsburg Fragment together with lines 1063–1159 of Beowulf, which give an elliptical account of the same event, the so-called “Finnsburg Episode.”. Both were published posthumously, Exodus being put together from Tolkien’s notes by Joan Turville-Petre, Finn and Hengest (FH) by A. J. Bliss.14 Though Tolkien never saw them into print himself, he worked on both projects for many years. Between 1928 and 1937 he gave six full lecture courses at Oxford on the problems of Finnsburg, coming out of retirement to give his lectures again in 1963. Tolkien started lecturing on Exodus even earlier, in 1926; in 1932 he mentioned in a letter that he would very much like “to tackle a proper edition” of it (Reader’s Guide 681). The posthumous editions preserve many years of thought.

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They are also Tolkien’s most ambitious editions. In editing the text of Sir Gawain he made few changes, virtually none to the text of Ancrene Wisse. With the three Old English poems, however, he made scores of changes (especially to Exodus), amounting sometimes to rewrites. The reason for this different approach is obvious. Tolkien thought that the scribes of Sir Gawain and Ancrene Wisse were close to the authors in place and time, and understood the languages of the works they were copying. By contrast, Tolkien regarded it as established fact that Beowulf was written in “the age of Bede,” the early eighth century (see MC 20). But the one copy we have was made about the year 1000, nearly three centuries later: plenty of time for mistakes and misunderstandings to arise. He thought it likely that Exodus was of similar date (see Shippey 2000, 161–163). The case of the Finnsburg Fragment was even worse, for there we have no manuscript copy at all, only a transcript made by George Hickes some time before 1705, a time when knowledge of Old English had all but vanished: Hickes barely understood what he was writing. Tolkien accordingly treated all three works with great freedom, as well as learning and imagination – something which has not appealed to conservative scholars (see Reader’s Guide 681–682; Drout 2007, 124–125). There is moreover an irony in the general lack of academic response to Finn and Hengest. The essence of Tolkien’s “Reconstruction” of the event recorded in the poems is that it was a historical event, remembered because it was an important one, part of the movement which brought the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes to Britain in the fifth century, and led to the creation of England. In 1936, however, Tolkien had argued so persuasively against taking Beowulf as a historical document that by the 1980s it had become an article of scholarly faith that it was useless as history. As remarked twice already, sometimes one has to dig in one’s heels against Tolkien’s argumentative flow, which (very obviously in 1936) may have had an immediate and personal motive – proclaiming creative autonomy for the writers of fantasy. The fight at Finnsburg, nevertheless, tells the story in its two versions of a fight in Frisia, in which a group of Danes, or “Half-Danes,” are treacherously attacked at night by Frisians and Jutes, though it is the Jutes, in Beowulf, who are given the major part of the blame. What caused the attack, what the Jutes are doing in Frisia, what are the details of the deal eventually made between the Frisian king Finn and the surviving Danish leader Hengest – all these have been given multiple and contradictory solutions over the years. Tolkien’s solution, very briefly, was that there were Jutes on both sides, attackers and defenders. In World War II terms, Hengest (in English tradition, a Jute not a Dane) is what one might call a “collaborator Jute,” who has accepted the Danish take-over of Jutland. The treacherous attackers are “Free Jutes in exile,” taking shelter in Frisia while planning a come-back. Though these two groups meet on neutral territory, there is naturally bad blood between them. The vital event, Tolkien suggested – in the long “Glossary of Names” and the even longer “Textual Commentary” which formed main parts of his edition – was the death of Garulf recorded in the Fragment, for he was the last relic of the old Jutish royal dynasty.



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Tolkien supported this view with many emendations. He thought the meter of the Fragment was so irregular that words and phrases had to be added to fill out defective lines: his version of the poem is three lines longer than anyone else’s. He added a line to Beowulf also, to deal with what seems a grammatical failure. His editing is often daring: in the Fragment he suggested the rare words hlencan and þindað for Hickes’s landa, windað. It is sometimes peremptory: after a bold rehandling of a difficult passage in the Episode, Tolkien wrote “I do not see the value of discussing any other view” (FH 98). As in 1936, one may sometimes suspect a personal motive. Tolkien suggested that the name of the Danish chief, Hnæf, would have been Hnefi in Old Norse, that this might be related to the form Hniflungar, and that this was the original form of what became the “Nibelungs,” in which case Hnefi “must once have been a figure of importance in legend” (FH 52). Tolkien also noted, however, that the name might have become the modern surname “Neave,” borne of course by his own Aunt Jane! So Tolkien was related, if remotely, to ancient heroes himself. Tolkien’s overall view of events is most easily recovered from the ten pages of text-and-translation and the four-page “Reconstruction” which close the edition. The whole story has also been told along strongly Tolkienian lines in a “young adult” novel, Hengest’s Tale (1966), by Jill Paton Walsh, who read English at Oxford, though apparently not when Tolkien was giving his Finnsburg lecture courses.15 When it came to Exodus Tolkien was even bolder (see also ch. 2). He swapped two sections in the poem over, so that lines 93–107 in the manuscript in his text follow lines 108–124: not his own idea, but bold nonetheless. Elsewhere he repeatedly altered words so that they became more foreboding, more suggestive of pre-Christian mythology. One example on which he had already expended great erudition was the Sigelwara land of line 69, which Tolkien emended in his text to Sigelwarena, and noted in his commentary could well be Sigelhearw(en)a, the land not of “the Sundwellers” but of the fire-demons. In line 46 most would read hergas on helle as “hellish armies,” but Tolkien thought the scribe had misread the whole line, writing in both “Hell” and “Heaven” because they were words he was familiar with; Tolkien saw the hergas as “heathen fanes” (as in modern place-names like Harrow), changed on helle to onheldon, “toppled,” and replaced heofon by heof, “lamentation.” At line 488 (487 in Tolkien) most editors see no need to change the word pað, meaning “path,” but Tolkien wrote “certainly an error” (Exodus 73), corrected to wað, noted that the Devil a bið on waðe, is always on the prowl, and translated “onrush.” His most daring solution may have been at line 202, where the poet appears to be describing the Israelite dismay at the approach of the Egyptian army. The manuscript reads here wælnet weredon, which would ordinarily mean “deadly nets defended.” Defended what? And how is that dismaying? Could wælnet mean “battle-nets,” that is, mail shirts? Tolkien decided that the words did not make sense however they were glossed. Weredon was just wrong: read wyrgdon, from the rare verb wyrgan = Latin strangulare, and translate “deadly toils cut off escape” (24). As with the word wælceasega, with its hints of “the necromantic practices of the female followers of Odinic magicians” (50), wyrgdon has a pagan history behind it.

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This the eighth-century poet might well have known, living as he did not long after the peaceful overthrow of paganism in England. Nearly three centuries later, most of them filled with warfare against violently pagan Vikings, the manuscript scribe not only did not know but had every reason not to want to know. Tolkien valued the Exodus poem, then, both for its memories of a vanished mythology, and as a sign of the entirely successful triumph of Anglo-Saxon Christianity. A good idea of the effect of Tolkien’s changes can be gained by reading his translation of the poem, and then a more conservative translation such as S. A. J. Bradley’s (1982). A final point is this. As is rare among editors, Tolkien habitually translated what he edited. He did it in the two editions just discussed, he did it also for Sir Gawain and Sir Orfeo, as also for Pearl, in SGPSO, and for poems whose translations are still unpublished (Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon among them). Tolkien saw this activity as an integral part of the editor’s task. If a glossator has to consider every word, a translator has to translate every line, every sentence. One may then think that the poem meant something different, but at least one knows what the translator thought it meant. Space forbids any consideration here of the aesthetic qualities of Tolkien’s translations (always into the same meter as the originals), but they can be a valuable guide to his editorial opinions. Translating, like glossing, keeps an editor honest.

Notes   1  See further Hammond and Anderson (1993, 1–2, 281–282).   2  See the 1924 and 1953 letters from Sisam quoted by Peter Gilliver (2008, 65–66, 69); Eugène Vinaver’s 1967 comment quoted in Anderson (2003, 24); Ida L. Gordon’s letter of 1982 likewise quoted by Anderson (2003, 16).   3  He hints at it in his 1944 story “Leaf by Niggle” (see Shippey, 2000, 265–273).   4  For further discussions of Tolkien’s work in Middle English see ch. 16.   5  Tolkien seems to have been aware of this, see his 1921 letter complaining about “recording forms that could be eliminated” quoted by Gilliver (2008, 64).   6  I owe this information to a private communication from Dr Bowers, in which he also acknowledges the very material assistance given by the Oxford University Press archivist Martin Maw, and by Peter Gilliver.   7  Hammond and Anderson (1993, 285). Douglas Anderson kindly informs me (private communication) that the ultimate source for this

  8 

  9 

10  11  12 

13 

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15 

is an unpublished letter of 1967 from Tolkien to N. R. Ker. Tolkien commented appreciatively on several such examples in his 1928 “Foreword” to Haigh, xiii–xviii. Zettersten (2006, 18–19) lists 12 EETS editions, to which one should add a thirteenth, published 2009. McIntosh (1986, 30) quotes and answers Tolkien (1929, 111). Scull and Hammond note several acknowledgements of the fact (Reader’s Guide 202). Tolkien (1955a, v). Salu must presumably have had access to Tolkien’s then unpublished transcript to make her translation. Both the 1934 paper and the 1939 pamphlet have now been reprinted in Tolkien Studies (see Tolkien 2008c and 2008d). The two volumes are discussed more extensively than is possible here in Shippey (2007), 175–186. Her maiden name, however, was Bliss. I do not know if she was related to Tolkien’s editor Alan Bliss.



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References Anderson, Douglas A. 2003. “ ‘An industrious little devil’: E. V. Gordon as Friend and Collaborator with Tolkien.” In Tolkien the Medievalist, edited by Jane Chance, 15–25. London: Routledge. Bliss, A. J., ed. 1966. Sir Orfeo. 2nd edn. London: Oxford University Press. Bradley, S. A. J., ed. and trans. 1982. Anglo-Saxon Poetry. London: Dent. d’Ardenne, S. R. T. O., ed. 1936. Þe Liflade ant te Passiun of Seinte Iuliene. Liège. Reprinted in 1961 by EETS, Original Series 248. London: Oxford University Press. Drout, Michael. 2007. “J. R. R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and its Significance.” Tolkien Studies, 4: 113–176. Gilliver, Peter. 2008. “The Word as Leaf: Tolkien as Lexicographer and Philologist.” In Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: Sources of Inspiration, edited by Stratford Caldecott and Thomas Honegger, 57–84. Zurich and Bern: Walking Tree Publishers. [Gilliver’s “Part 1” is 59–70.] Gilliver, Peter, Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner. 2006. The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gordon, E. V. 1937. “Review of d’Ardenne, 1936.” Medium Ævum, 6: 134–143. Gordon, E. V., ed. 1953. Pearl. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gordon, Ida L., ed. 1960. The Seafarer. London: Methuen. Hammond, Wayne G. and Douglas A. Anderson. 1993. J. R. R. Tolkien: A Descriptive Bibliography. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press.

Horobin, Simon. 2001. “J. R. R. Tolkien as a Philologist: A Reconsideration of the Northernisms in Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale.” English Studies, 82: 97–105. Horobin, Simon. 2002. “Chaucer’s Norfolk Reeve.” Neophilologus, 86: 609–612. Lee, Stuart D. 2009. “J. R. R. Tolkien and The Wanderer: From Edition to Application.” Tolkien Studies, 6: 189–211. McIntosh, Angus. 1963. “A New Approach to Middle English Dialectology.” English Studies, 44: 1–11. McIntosh, Angus. 1986. “General Introduction.” In Angus McIntosh, M. L. Samuels, and Michael Benskin, A Linguistic Atlas of Later Middle English, vol. 1, 2–36. 4 vols. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. Shepherd, G. T., ed. 1959. Ancrene Wisse, Parts Six and Seven. London: Nelson. Shippey, Tom. 2000. J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. London: HarperCollins. Shippey, Tom. 2007. “A Look at Exodus and Finn and Hengest.” In Roots and Branches: Selected Papers on Tolkien, 175–186. Zurich and Bern: Walking Tree Publishers. Zettersten, Arne. 2006. “The AB Language Lives.” In The Lord of the Rings 1954–2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder, edited by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, 13– 24. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press.

4

Manuscripts: Use, and Using Stuart D. Lee

Introduction Every medieval manuscript is unique . . . The immediacy of personal contact with the artefact brings a thrill which cannot be over-emphasised . . . In addition, for the imaginative, there is the frisson that comes from knowing that one is following the hands of all those who have worked with the manuscript before . . . the scribe(s) and Anglo-Saxon owners; later medieval scholars who have read, glossed, added to or erased text, learning, borrowing and teaching from it; early modern collectors like Archbishop Matthew Parker; and recent giants in the field of scholarship such as J. R. R. Tolkien. (OwenCrocker and Cesario 2009, 7) .  .  . but beside the shattered lid of one there lay the remains of a book. It had been slashed and stabbed and partly burned, and it was so stained with black and other dark marks like old blood that little of it could be read. Gandalf lifted it carefully, but the leaves crackled and broke as he laid it on the slab. (FR, II, v, 419)

A running theme throughout this companion is the interrelationship between two dominating aspects of Tolkien’s life – his career as a medievalist, and his legendarium. The two opening extracts continue this by focusing on a key component of any medieval scholarship, the primary source document or manuscript. The term “manuscript” is used in its true definition here – a handwritten document that records the text or illustration one is studying, be it the codex, inscription, scroll, or fragment. In the first quote one is presented with a glimpse of the thrill one encounters when handling

A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.



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a medieval manuscript itself; in the latter this enjoyment of discovery and connection with the past is transformed to the dread that Gandalf experiences in the Chamber of Mazarbul as he realizes the manuscript they have discovered is the last record of the doomed colony of Moria. Tolkien and manuscripts is an often overlooked topic, but it is also a multi-headed beast. Not only does it cover how Tolkien the medievalist worked with manuscripts (and which ones), but also how his professional experience filtered into his creative work (as illustrated by the extract from The Lord of the Rings above). It also spans Tolkien’s own manuscripts, the drafts of his lectures and novels, and how these can be used to provide further insight into Tolkien’s creative processes.1

An Introduction to Medieval Manuscripts It is a fair assumption that at some point in their career, medievalists will have to engage with what is called the “primary source document” – the manuscript itself. Whereas in modern literature the starting point is usually the published editions of the text, in the pre-print age (as most of the medieval period is defined to be), this is not the case. A text may survive in only one manuscript (as with most Old English poetry such as Beowulf) which in turn may be incomplete, fragmentary, or damaged. It will be undated, anonymous, and for the most part its provenance will be unknown, and the scholar will have to assemble a range of clues before any conclusion can be reached. The manuscript also has to be viewed solely as a record of the text at the time of writing it down. It is possible, indeed highly probable, that the original version (especially in the case of Old English poetry) had its origins centuries before and was presumably passed down orally, possibly changing on each handover, and it is only by chance that it survives to us because someone at some point wrote down the version they had heard. Indeed it is very rare to find anyone suggesting that the hand that wrote the text on the page was the hand of the author. We also have the example of multiple copies of the same text surviving (such as The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle). But whilst they are clearly the same text at their core there may be numerous differences within them where scribes have made alterations. To complicate matters further many manuscripts are damaged, have been dismembered and reside in different physical locations, or are in fragments. Scholarly printed editions of medieval texts do attempt to capture as much information as possible about their manuscript sources, but in the end there is no substitute for looking at the original documents. Armed with a training in paleography (the study of handwriting) and codicology (the study of the composition of the codex) scholars will pore over these documents, transcribing what they see, noting peculiarities, seeing if there is any evidence in the physical object that up to now has been overlooked, and finally making their own decisions as to what they can see and what they cannot. Tolkien, as a medievalist of considerable note, was no exception to this, and we know that he worked directly with manuscripts.

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However, the physical handling of a manuscript is not to be taken lightly. Written on vellum (animal skin), gummed into their bindings or loose-leaf, these are often unique documents, centuries old, and very fragile. For the most part they will be held in the great libraries of the world, under strict preservation conditions and restrictions. Getting access to them is often very difficult and only allowed under special conditions. To assist with this, and to provide greater access, advances in photographic technology throughout the twentieth century allowed many scholars to work with facsimiles of the manuscripts, albeit in a watered-down way. Although Tolkien was not alive to see the benefits of digitization that appeared in the 1990s he did witness the advent of high-quality facsimile editions of manuscripts, and from the 1930s onwards the availability of microfilm reproductions. Again we can assume that he worked with facsimiles also. The key question is – which ones? Although the Early English Manuscript in Facsimile series did not start until 1951 (with Kemp Malone’s Beowulf edition), as far back as the mid-nineteenth century there were attempts to reproduce manuscripts through photographic means.2 When Tolkien was a young academic he would have seen E. G. Millar’s 1923 facsimile (mixed color and monochrome) of the great Anglo-Saxon codex known as the Lindisfarne Gospels. Other highlights that would have clearly attracted his attention were Sir Israel Gollancz’s 1927 edition of the so-called Junius manuscript. This notably contained the Old English poem Exodus that Tolkien was to work on extensively, although he would also have had access to the manuscript itself after his arrival in Oxford (it is held in the Bodleian Library: see chs. 1, 2, and 3, and Bratman 2007, 68). To this list one could also add R. W. Chambers’s 1933 edition of The Exeter Book, one of four major collections of Old English poems from the period.3 By then a new technology was coming to the fore – microfilm. In 1927–1935 the Library of Congress began to microfilm the manuscripts in the British Library, and in 1938 University Microfilms International was formed. In addition the great libraries were setting up reprographic studios to photograph their collections and Tolkien noted in his preface to his edition of Ancrene Wisse (AW viii) that he had worked from photographs of a manuscript in the British Library.4 Whatever the means of access we can be certain that Tolkien was engaged with manuscript studies throughout his career. Michael Drout suggests two instances of known direct contact with manuscripts. First he notes that “Tolkien did work very closely with at least one Oxford manuscript: Oxford Bodleian Library, Bodley 34” (2007, 404) along with his student Simonne d’Ardenne, which led to the work on the Hali Meiðhad and Sawles Warde (see chs. 2, 3, and 16). Drout also observes that Tolkien engaged with Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 402 (Ancrene Wisse) which led to his 1962 edition for the Early English Text Society. This is also attested to by the title of the edition which indicates he is working from the manuscript itself. We can also assume that either Tolkien or Gordon must have consulted British Library, Cotton Nero A. x for their work on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; but Drout sees no evidence that Tolkien ever actually handled the Beowulf manuscript (British Library, Cotton Vitellius A. xv) probably relying instead on the facsimile edition by Julius Zupitza.



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In addition to this we also know that Tolkien was acutely aware of the problems medieval manuscripts presented to scholars, as can be seen in his unpublished lecture on “O.E. [Old English] Textual Criticism.” This is available in Oxford’s Bodleian Library (Tolkien MS A15/1), and runs to 50 pages. Ostensibly looking at the pitfalls of manuscripts and textual history, Tolkien begins by explaining how the nature of manuscript transmission can inevitably lead to errors being introduced. Using the terms A(uthor), R(eproducer), and C(ritic) he notes that “C only knows A through R” (f. 2v) – or to put it another way we (in the modern day) are working with a text that is at least once removed from the author. He recognizes that “R” could be careless or misrepresent “A” by exceeding basic “mechanical functions” (i.e., copying), and could “alter text.” “A” may also have produced multiple versions of the same text, or could have written the text then delivered it orally (and it is the latter which survives through the copy). Moreover the chain of reproducing/copying could be much longer (e.g., “A – R – R – R – C”). Using examples from a variety of Old English poems Tolkien argues then that manuscripts must be approached with caution, but nevertheless are crucial to any medievalist.

Manuscripts in Tolkien’s Fiction Either through direct access, photographs, facsimile editions, or film surrogates, Tolkien would have built up considerable knowledge of medieval manuscripts – how they were constructed, how they were disseminated and collected, and how they appeared and felt. It is not surprising therefore that these experiences were to find their way into his legendarium. It is an interesting point to note though that Middle-earth is not homogeneous, and could be said to be a mixture of oral and literate cultures. For example in The Silmarillion the Elves seem to be a predominantly oral culture. Possibly due to their “immortality” they did not need to rely on the written word to pass on their stories and records as such, which in the case of the fall of Doriath led to a loss of much information as it had all been held in memory. That said we do know they invented writing systems in Valinor and in Doriath (see ch. 14), but use was sporadic. It was more the race of Men who really embraced literacy (S 313) leading ultimately to the great collections of Númenor and then Gondor. But even in Men there was a divide between oral and literate cultures. Whilst Gondor had its scrolls and books (FR, II, ii, 328) we are also told that the men of Rohan wrote “no books” but sang “many songs” (TT, III, ii, 560). This mixed development and attitude towards the written word runs throughout Tolkien’s legendarium. In Lost Tales I “The Cottage of Lost Play” and subsequent stories seem firmly rooted in an oral culture with Vairë, Rúmil, and Meril telling tales to Eriol as a performance. However in Lost Tales II we have mention of the “colored” manuscripts and “The Golden Book of Heorrenda” (290–291) as part of the Eriol/ Ælfwine saga, and undoubtedly the Annals, especially their Old English versions, are

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written down by Eriol/Ælfwine (a “literate” Englishman). Next, in The Lord of the Rings we are told that it is only after the Hobbits are part of the “Reunited Kingdom” that they shift to a literate society, writing down their stories (FR, Prologue, 18). It can be assumed that any written record referred to in the legendarium is a handwritten document – a manuscript scroll or codex. Even by the Third Age of Middleearth (despite the anachronisms in The Hobbit) we are still in a pre-industrial world to all effects, and most importantly a pre-print one. Even the official notices the Hobbits encounter at the end of The Lord of the Rings and the “Rules” Sharkey has imposed are not printed, nor is there any mention of paper mills or printing presses in Sharkey’s Shire. As control of the printed word and its mass production are key facets of a dictatorship, it can be assumed that if this technology was available to them both Sauron and Saruman would have utilized it. Having considered this curious state of the written word in Middle-earth, it is worth now considering a few examples of how Tolkien does inject his knowledge of early manuscripts into his fiction – sometimes in a quite playful manner. The Hobbit opens with Thror’s hand-drawn map, described later as “a piece of parchment” (H 20), and in a nice symmetry the story ends with a manuscript, this time Bilbo “sitting in his study writing his memoirs – he thought of calling them ‘There and Back Again, a Hobbit’s Holiday’ ” (H 278). Maps (which are manuscripts also of course) were extremely important to Tolkien and he devoted a lot of attention to them (“I wisely started with a map, and made the story fit”: Letters 177). Campbell (2007) discusses the two maps in The Hobbit, the three in The Lord of the Rings, and the two in The Silmarillion, suggesting they are akin to an Arts and Crafts style after William Morris, with the handwriting referring back to both medieval Irish half-uncial and runic inscriptions. With Thror’s map Tolkien also produced a second draft and noted on it “copied by Bilbo Baggins” in a nod towards the practice of recording provenance and scribal hands. As Campbell says this is “consistent with Tolkien’s experience with medieval manuscripts which were often rewritten, copied, annotated, or expurgated” (406). The Hobbit also touches, in a roundabout way, on the issue common in medieval literature of the authority of the text. Medieval attitudes to the author, and the fixed text, were not akin to modern attitudes and scribes felt completely at ease in altering material when copying to suit their needs. Consequently different versions of the same text can survive. As described elsewhere (see ch. 8) there are two versions of The Hobbit in existence – the 1937 and 1951 editions – and they vary notably in the chapter containing Gollum and the finding of the Ring. Necessitated by the development of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien had to then make changes to the text of The Hobbit to match the new story, but this left him with the “real world” problem of two versions in circulation. To explain this he used his knowledge of manuscript variances, by explaining that the 1937 edition was Bilbo’s original text (where the author (A) misreports the incident with Gollum to gloss over his own dishonesty in obtaining the Ring) but the 1951 edition is the version written down by Frodo and Sam, reproducers (R) who in effect make scribal changes, this time telling the true version of events. In The Lord of the Rings there are three noteworthy “manuscript” episodes. First in “The Council of Elrond” Gandalf recounts how he entered the libraries in Gondor



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looking at the “hoarded scrolls and books” (FR, II, ii, 328), and found Isildur’s scroll describing the One Ring. Second, in “The Bridge of Khazad-Dûm” Gandalf discovers the so-called Book of Mazarbul noted at the beginning of this essay. Gimli helpfully informs him that “Mazarbul” is Dwarvish for “Records” and that the Chamber of Mazarbul was seemingly an archive or library of the Dwarves. It is noticeable how the manuscript is described as damaged, and burned, so that when Gandalf lifts it some of the leaves crackle and break. Tolkien went so far as to produce several versions of folios from the book for possible inclusion in printed editions.5 Several initial attempts survive in Marquette (MSS–2/1/10, 3/4/11–13) and some more finalized versions in Oxford’s Bodleian Library (MS Tolkien Drawings 69–75) and the attention to detail is quite extraordinary with holes cut out of the paper, watercolor paint and ink utilized to imitate burn marks, and smearing of the ink to show water/blood damage (see the sample reproduction in Hammond and Scull 1995, 175). Similarities here can obviously be drawn with the damage inflicted on manuscripts in the great fire at Ashburnham House in 1731, the most noticeable victim being the Beowulf manuscript.6 In Moria it is also worth noting how practiced a scholar Gandalf appears to be. He observes that pages are missing (FR, II, v, 418–420), and when he reads from the manuscript aloud he notes, quite properly, where the text is damaged or obscure. He is also able to quickly detect section breaks, changes in script, and changes in scribes. Finally, the main manuscript mentioned in The Lord of the Rings (which contains the novel of course) is the “Red Book of Westmarch” recounting the entire Hobbits’ story.7 It gains its name from the fact that the library at Undertowers was home to the Fairbairns, the Wardens of Westmarch and it was contained in a “red case.” The title also delivers a nod to a real manuscript of the late fourteenth century, the “Red Book of Hergest” (containing the great Welsh myth cycle, known as The Mabinogion),8 and possibly also the Andrew Lang fairy-tale books identified by their color which Tolkien read as a child. Bilbo presents the original manuscripts to Frodo, but it is Frodo and Sam who conclude the final entries and thus complete the record of the whole saga (RK, VI, ix, 1344–1345).9 However, Tolkien, always with an eye for detail, also provides a full history of the manuscript. We know its origin (the core text) was “Bilbo’s private diary,” but this was expanded with three further volumes (FR, Prologue, 19). Although the original no longer survives, copies do and we even have the names of scribes and dates (ibid.). Some versions were so important that they even had their own name (as is common with real medieval manuscripts) such as “The Thain’s Book,” and later scribes annotated the pages, added extra stories, and so on, but some material was omitted in copies. This is also alluded to in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil where Tolkien notes that the verses in the Red Book are “found on loose leaves . . . written in margins and blank spaces” (Tolkien 2008e, 169). We are also told that the manuscripts were held in libraries (in Gondor and the Shire),10 and as happened in later times with medieval manuscripts were collected by antiquarians – in this case Pippin and his successors (FR, Prologue, 20). Outside of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, there are several other links between Tolkien’s fiction and medieval manuscripts. For example, Drout (2007, 405) notes

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that “the letter forms of the Codex Argentus [sixth-century Gothic manuscript] are strikingly similar to some of those of the Goblin Alphabet that Tolkien discussed in his 1932 and 1936 letters from Father Christmas to his children.”11 The entire context for “The Notion Club Papers” (see ch. 11) is based on the discovery of a manuscript of “205 foolscap pages, all written in one hand, in a careful and usually legible script” (Sauron 156), and Farmer Giles of Ham opens playfully with hints of a lost medieval manuscript of which only a “few fragments survive” in “insular Latin” and a mock Latin title (Tolkien 2008e, 99–102). These are but a few examples of Tolkien using his knowledge of medieval manuscripts in his fiction, but the question one may ask is why did he do this? An interesting suggestion is that he was imitating the practices of the antiquarians (see ch. 20) but the answer must also lie in his theory of “sub-creation” (see ch. 5). Drawing on his knowledge of manuscripts and scribal practices was the same as drawing on his knowledge of languages, medieval themes, texts, and cultures. It made his Middleearth feel real because this is how manuscripts are in the real world.

Tolkien’s Own Manuscripts Tolkien’s own manuscripts created by himself (mainly handwritten but occasionally typed with annotations) contain his lectures, notes, talks, letters, illustrations, and fiction. They are extensive, dispersed, and both problematic and rewarding to deal with, collectively demonstrating an “extraordinarily meticulous process of writing, revising, and rewriting” (Fisher 2007). Before beginning to consider the documents themselves, and exploring in detail an example from The Lord of the Rings, one could ask what is the value of consulting his manuscripts? The reasons are similar to those behind studying a medieval manuscript. First, although a lot of scholarly work is available which acts as a good intermediary, one may wish to see if there is more information in the primary source document (e.g., what did he originally write and reject, how did the plot develop, and so on). Second, despite the best efforts of successive scholars things may have been missed. Third, although a lot of work has been done on certain manuscripts there is still a wealth of material left relatively unexplored, and in these documents there may still be important discoveries, such as with “The Story of Kullervo” which remained relatively unknown until Flieger’s edition (Tolkien 2010a). For the most part the manuscripts reside in two collections: Marquette University and the Bodleian Library, Oxford University. There are also important documents at HarperCollins (the present publishers of Tolkien’s works), Oxford University Press, and with the family estate itself. In addition there are minor manuscripts (mainly letters) that are dispersed across the world, not to mention correspondences directly to individuals which remain their private possession. By way of example all the following are strictly speaking Tolkien “manuscripts”: 2 x letters to Rev. Claude Jenkins, 1947 (Lambeth Palace Library, MS 1634, ff. 273–274);



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1 x signed typescript letter and 8 x letters, 1957–1967 (CUL, Royal Society of Literature Papers); 8 x letters to the Bursar, 1932–1945 (Pembroke College, Oxford); 37 x letters to BBC staff, 1937–1962 (BBC Written Archives Centre, Radio Contributors file 1); letter re The Manchester Guardian, 1948 (John Rylands Library, Guardian B/ T140/1–5); 1 x letter to Arthur Ransome plus notes on The Hobbit, 1937 (Brotherton Library, BC Ransome); 1 x letter to Miss Duncan of Somerville College on Old English, 1920 (BL, RP5971(i)); 1 x letter to R. W. Chambers, 1937 (UCL, Chambers papers file 101); 1 x letter to Roger Sharrock, 1945 (BL, RP 6698(ii)); 1 x letter to Sir Thomas Knox, 1947 (University of St Andrews, MS 37525/512); letters to Gwyn Jones, 1944–1947 (NLW, Gwyn Jones papers 1 & 41–42); letters to grandson Michael G. D. R. Tolkien, 1942–72 (BL, MS Add. 71657); letters to Naomi Mitchison, dates unknown (NLS, Accs. 10489, 10502, 10503, 10506, 10522); letter to Elizabeth Jennings, 1955–1957 (BL, MS Add. 52599(8)); 1 x postcard to W. A. Craigie, 1926 (UCD, MS UCD.L.1). Nevertheless, undoubtedly it is the material held at Marquette and Oxford that draw the most attention and forms the bulk of the surviving material. Beginning with Marquette University, Milwaukee, in the Special Collections and University Archives are the manuscripts of the J. R. R. Tolkien Collection12 (dated circa 1930–1955), plus printed and secondary material from 1910 onwards. The finding aids note that this collection contains original drafts and holographs of The Hobbit, Farmer Giles of Ham, The Lord of the Rings (and additions), Mr Bliss, other Tolkien writings (e.g., poems published by Tolkien), and various other supporting material. Collected into “series” these are then divided into boxes and folders, thus Series 1, Box 1, Folder 5 (1/1/5) has a manuscript copy of Chapter 5 of The Hobbit (“Riddles in the Dark”), and 1/1/36 contains a typescript with corrections by Tolkien of the same chapter. In total the collection contains 11,000 pages of manuscripts and was sold to the University by Tolkien himself in 1957 for about £1500 (or at the time $5000). It has been supplemented by further donations from Christopher Tolkien during the period of compiling the History of Middle-earth series. In Oxford, the Bodleian Library holds an extensive collection given to the University by the family in 1979. This contains Tolkien’s academic papers (given the shelfmark “Tolkien A”), as well as some of his literary papers ( “Tolkien 1–25”), his drawings (“Tolkien Drawings 1–102”), and books from his personal library (“Tolkien E). The papers are collected into folders (e.g., Tolkien A 33) and held in boxes, and consist of single leaves, exercise books, reused exam scripts, and so on. There is also a large collection of restricted papers which are not accessible without prior permission from the literary estate. In addition the English Faculty Library at Oxford holds Tolkien’s collection of books related to Celtic and Old Norse literature. The papers in Bodley have formed the basis for the recent publications of Tolkien’s versions of Sigurd and Gudrún (Tolkien 2009a) and The Fall of Arthur (Tolkien 2013) by way of example. Bodley also holds various drafts of the early tales that were to form The Silmarillion (fragments are also found at Marquette). With reference to all these Verlyn Flieger’s astute observation of the problems she encountered in her study of the “Kullervo” manuscript is illustrative:

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“The Story of Kullervo” exists in a single manuscript, Bodleian Library MS Tolkien B 64/6. This is a legible but rough draft, with many crossings-out, marginal and aboveline additions, corrections, and emendations. The text is written in pencil . . . The main narrative breaks off abruptly halfway down the recto of folio 13, at a point about three quarters through the story. It is followed on the same page by notes and outlines for the remainder, which fill the rest of the space and continue onto the top portion of the verso. There are in addition several loose sheets of variable size containing what are clearly preliminary plot outlines, jotted notes, lists of names, lists of rhyming words, and several drafts of one verse section of the story, “Now in sooth a man I deem me.” If, as appears likely, Tolkien B 64/6 contains the earliest and (aside from the note pages) the only draft of the story, Tolkien’s revisions on this manuscript must stand as his final ones. (Flieger 2010, 212)

As Flieger notes, the manuscript is in an incomplete state, more a draft with numerous alterations, but it is the best we have. This is not uncommon. Indeed, the problems facing anyone who wishes to engage with Tolkien’s manuscripts are considerable including: 1. Illegibility. Tolkien’s handwriting varies between very neat to extremely cursive, making some of the material completely unreadable. This seems to reflect the different stages of writing, and presumably the different contexts. He heavily annotates, makes use of all writing space on the page (including margins), and employs his own (sometimes inconsistent) abbreviations. 2. Reworkings. Tolkien was an obsessive rewriter constantly reworking material, sometimes on the same page, but more often than not in a series of successive drafts. 3. Reuse. Documents are reused taking on the form of palimpsests (possibly due to paper shortages, especially in World War II). He would reuse exam scripts, old lecture notes, spaces on newspaper cuttings, etc. He would also rub out or write over earlier drafts of the same work (e.g., in ink over pencil). 4. Lost material. We know that Tolkien was a ferocious rewriter and threw away drafts (HoH 3–4). This particularly affects the latter parts of The Return of the King (see War ix). 5. Dating. Nearly all of his manuscripts are undated. Christopher Tolkien has attempted to remedy this but even he found the task impossible in places. Sometimes dating can be found by references within the text,13 by seeing the progression of successive drafts, or by the fact that the text is written on a piece of paper that contains other information (e.g., a dated newspaper cutting). 6. Pagination/foliation. There are often two or three pagination schemes in place making it difficult to refer to or cite the manuscripts. 7. Catalogues. Whilst considerable work is under way to tackle this in the holding libraries the cataloguing available to scholars is still at a preliminary stage. 8. Inconsistent collections. Whilst Tolkien’s retention of his own manuscripts was admirable his own collections were often in a disorganized state, and while he was at Oxford were split between his house and college. Pages from the same manuscripts have then occasionally become separated.



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Whilst this list may seem off-putting at first, assistance is provided in the form of secondary studies. For his fiction there is Christopher Tolkien’s work that manifested itself in The History of Middle-earth series (see ch. 10). This is an invaluable study and one which is indispensable to anyone working with the manuscripts related to Tolkien’s legendarium. Containing transcripts, notes, and editorial comments, the scale of the achievement across all 12 volumes is astonishing. In addition to this there is John Rateliff’s equally scholarly History of The Hobbit (HoH, see ch. 8), while for The Silmarillion one is indebted to Charles Kane’s painstaking work (2009),14 and for dating purposes across the board to Scull and Hammond’s Chronology. Yet the task is still considerable. By way of example what follows is a brief study of the manuscripts surrounding “Shelob’s Lair” which serves as a good example of some of the issues one can encounter but is also illustrative of Tolkien’s creative writing process.

“Shelob’s Lair” At first glance the manuscripts that contain what was to evolve into “Shelob’s Lair” (TT, IV, ix) are daunting. Although the vast majority are held at Marquette there are pages that also need to be consulted in Oxford. They represent everything from fragmentary workings on a few paragraphs, outlines or notes about the plot, questions Tolkien was pondering over, rough drafts, and eventually final drafts and typescripts. Some are written neatly on clean paper in ink, some are ink copies written over pencil, some pages are true palimpsests, or are single leaves from small notepads. As Flieger also encountered there are numerous crossings out, alterations, additions (often in the margins), and the handwriting ranges from legible to indiscernible. Help is at hand, of course, with Christopher Tolkien’s painstaking work on the surviving material15 in The History of Middle-earth chapter “Kirith Ungol” (War 183–226). This provides transcripts of some (though not all) of the manuscripts, and discusses the major issues. Christopher could not refer to any shelfmarks for the manuscripts though, as by that time they had not found their way to the libraries. This needs addressing. Looking at the manuscripts that survive one can discern 14 distinct variants, of varying length and quality (not all of these are noted in War). In Table 4.1 these are listed with new sigla for each manuscript, their location, contents (beginning and end lines), pagination (how they are numbered), their relation to the text in The Lord of the Rings, and further notes. With the latter there is also information about the state of the manuscript itself, and the link to notes in War. All the manuscripts seem to date from 1944 (and the evidence in H and I substantiates this). They reside in two physical locations: Oxford’s Bodleian Library (Dii and L), and Marquette (all the rest). In Marquette they are in three folders 3/6/8 (i.e., Series 3, Box 6, Folder 8), 3/6/9, and 3/2/17. The former contains J and K, and the latter A, B, C, Di, Diii, E, F, G, H, and I. Trying to be more exact when referring to them is difficult as there are two Marquette pagination schemes at work on the same page, one detailing the page number within the folder, the other continuing from the number scheme in the previous folder, as well as Christopher Tolkien’s own scheme. In addition to the

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manuscripts noted here there are two typescript versions, one known as the “Printer’s typescript” (3/6/35) which supersedes a more general typescript (MSS–3/2/25).16 As discussed earlier we can begin, from these manuscripts, to identify Tolkien’s creative methodology. He often started with an attempt to outline the plot in skeletal form. In “The Story Foreseen from Lórien” (Treason 330ff., cited in part in War 184–186) the general details of what was to happen as the Hobbits and Gollum attempt to enter Mordor are covered. Manuscript (MS) C detailed in Table 4.1 follows this by providing a more detailed synopsis (Christopher’s “new” or second outline). By looking at these we can see Tolkien employing a rather terse and succinct style, with major questions still unresolved about the plot: “Will Faramir be across? Will army slay them? . . . They pass unto the tunnel. Halfway through they find it blocked with webs. Gollum refuses to say what they are” (War 187). A closer look at MS C in comparison with the transcriptions in War (187–190) is informative. First, despite his lengthy familiarity with his father’s handwriting even Christopher found it difficult to read many words (the script is extremely cursive, and often uses abbreviations). Understandably the transcription omits minor alterations (corrections, deletions, additions, etc.), though in some cases these are of interest (e.g., the transcription in War (187) fails to note that after “through a [?narrow] cleft” Tolkien had also drawn a quick illustration of the mountain peaks). Further plot outlines survive in other manuscripts for the events around Cirith Ungol. At times the manuscripts contain more fuller drafts but then tail off as Tolkien struggles with the development of the plot and reverts back to outline form (i.e., MS B presents an outline of part of the plot, as do MSS H and L, but MS E begins as a draft version of the text very much in tune with the final version but on page 20 reverts again to notes and outlines as Tolkien struggles with what was to come next). We should also note that the exact breakdown of the chapters only began to form later on, in this case into what was to become “The Stairs of Cirith Ungol” (SCU), “Shelob’s Lair” (SL), and “The Choices of Master Samwise” (CMS, see TT VIII, IX, and X respectively). As Christopher Tolkien notes, the plot also changed. The numbers of spiders differ (first there are many, then a single one – Ungoliant – and then finally Shelob), Gollum’s movements alter (for example he originally is captured by Orcs and brings them to Frodo), and the geographical layout is reworked (which explains why MS B and MS L, which includes a hand-drawn map of the lair, firmly state that it has to be “Stair – stair – tunnel” as opposed to the original idea of stair – tunnel – stair). Finally the chronology of events surrounding the use of the star-glass, the barrier of the webs, and the eventual escape from the tunnel changes. But in all examples what we can see is an author making changes to things which were unrealistic, improbable, or less effective. MSS G, H, and I provide examples of two other things that are common to Tolkien’s manuscripts. First, they are, in effect, jotted notes on the odd paragraph here and there. Second, they show Tolkien reusing any bit of paper he could (in this case exam regulations and candidate lists, but see also MS A which is written over notes on Old English and Old Norse grammar).



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67

The first attempted draft at a proper version of the chapter is contained in MSS Di–iii (“version 1” as Christopher terms it). This uses three sigla (Di, Dii, and Diii) to note that the manuscript has now been physically separated. Di and Diii are in Marquette, but Dii (the middle section) is in Oxford’s Bodleian collection because it contained an illustration by Tolkien (though it is worth noting that Marquette also holds several original illustrations as well). The style of this initial draft though is quite different from the outlines noted earlier, with the prose being far more developed, and characters are given direct speech. Tolkien also adopted his common practice (which Christopher terms “frustrating,” War 192) of writing first in pencil, and then writing a fair copy in ink over it. This indicates that he was, at least for the time being, more confident of the text he had written. MS A moves forward to a second draft (or “version 2”) and the prose is developed further from “version 1” in MS D. Next there is what we could term a final draft (or “fair copy”) which would then lead to the typescripts that would have been sent to the publisher. Three manuscripts – E, J, and K – should be considered here but a question remains as to their order of composition. In War (208) Christopher Tolkien suggests that MS J (his “second text of the episode in the tunnel”) came after MS E (the “rejected draft”) before the production of the “fair copy” in MS K. That MS K is the final extant version is not in question, it clearly is nearest to the text as it appears in the published version of The Lord of the Rings. But a question remains about the ordering of the other two manuscripts. For example in The Two Towers, we have the following final text: “ ‘Stand! Stand!’ he cried desperately. ‘Running is no use.’ Slowly the eyes crept nearer” (TT, IV, ix, 943). The “fair copy” MS K has: “Stand, stand!” \he/ cried [del. Frodo] desperately. “Running is no use”. [del. “Galadriel!” he called, and gathering courage lifted up the phial once more] Slowly the eyes crept nearer.

Which is clearly very similar to the published text. MS E, however, has: “Stand! Said Frodo desperately. [del. Its no good running] \Running is no use/ /The eyes crept slowly forward\ “Galadriel!” he cried, and gathering courage lifted the phial once more.

Notable here is the phrase “Its [sic] no good running” which Tolkien deletes and replaces with “Running is no use” as in MS K. This clearly indicates MS E came before MS K, or more importantly MS K follows on from MS E. However, in MS J, which Christopher suggests came after MS E in the writing stages, the text reads: “Stand!” said Frodo. “It’s no use struggling. \We’re caught/ [del. And] He hurried to face the [del. Trapped! Said Sam] eyes, and as he did so, he drew his sword. Sting flashed out, and about the edges of the sharp elven-blade a blue fire flickered.

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Which is very different from both the final version, MS K, and importantly MS E. Analysis of other examples across the manuscripts suggests therefore that the correct chronology should instead read MS J led to MS E led to MS K.

Conclusion The brief analysis of “Shelob’s Lair” hopefully shows the value of manuscript study when it comes to Tolkien’s work. More importantly this whole essay has demonstrated Tolkien’s engagement with manuscripts, how this experience filtered into his fiction, and how we, using the skills of manuscript studies, can begin to get further insights into his own creative processes.

Notes   1  Due to space this study has had to forgo an analysis of Tolkien’s letters and artwork.   2  In 1861 John Earle produced the Facsimile of Some Leaves in Saxon Handwriting on Saint Swidhun (London: Longman, Green, Longman & Roberts) using photozincography; in 1878–1884 W. Sanders edited his Facsimiles of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts Photozincographed by Command of Her Majesty Queen Victoria (Southampton: Ordnance Survey). Copies of both were held at Oxford when Tolkien was a student.   3  In Tolkien’s lecture on “O.E. Textual Criticism” (Oxford, Bodleian Library Tolkien MS A15/1) he suggests that any scholar of Old English criticism should have a range of “Materials for Study” (f. 56v) including “O.E. variant mss” and more importantly “facsimiles. Junius XI. Beowulf. Vercelli. Waldere. (Exeter Book)”.   4  British Library, MS Cotton Cleopatra C. vii.   5  See also the mocked-up maps (e.g., HoH plates I and II), “King’s Letter” (Sauron 130– 131), and “Leaves from the Notion Club Papers, edited by Howard Green, second edition, MMXIV” (Sauron 154).   6  Drout (2007) also sees links to the damaged eighth-century Ragyndrudis Codex (Fulda, Dombibliothek, Bonifatianus 2).

  7  Other manuscripts are mentioned with nods towards medieval texts, e.g., Herblore of the Shire and Reckoning of Years (FR, Prologue, 20).   8  The Red Book of Hergest is so called because it came into the possession of the Vaughans of Hergest Court (as opposed to the Westmarch wardens), though it now resides in the Bodleian Library (Oxford, Bodley MS 111).   9  Also in the abandoned “Epilogues” to The Lord of the Rings Sam reads from the Red Book to his children (Sauron 114). 10  The three great libraries of the Hobbits were at Undertowers, Great Smials, and Brandy Hall (FR, Prologue, 13–15). 11  From 1927 onwards a facsimile edition of the manuscript was available to Tolkien to consult. 12  See http://www.marquette.edu/library/archives/ Mss/JRRT/JRRT-main.shtml, accessed November 21, 2013. 13  See the example in Lee (2009). 14  Although Kane himself was working from the texts presented in The History of Middleearth series. 15  We know (War 183) that Tolkien “wrote and tore up and rewrote most of it a good many times.” 16  The author is indebted to William Fliss, Archivist at Marquette, for his assistance in this essay.

Marquette 3/2/17 A

Sigla

Five pages paginated 16–19, with the last page unnumbered.

Pagination Page 16 Ll. 1–24 “You’ve done what you promised . . . Terch Ungol. This is the way in. // Description of [?]?” . . . Page 19 Ll. 1–27 “malice and purpose . . . worst dreams.” As Christopher Tolkien notes, from l. 4 onwards the prose returns to outline form (although his transcription on War 205 misses the opening). All of this has a single line crossed through it. Unnumbered Page Ll. 1–6 are very difficult to read but ll. 7–16 are a working of the description of Sauron’s relationship with Shelob. Ll. 7–16 “And Sauron! It pleased him that she should dwell there hungry . . . play she made.”

Contents

Table 4.1  The manuscript variants of “Shelob’s Lair.”

TT, IV, viii, 937, and then TT, IV, ix, 938–948.

Reference

(Continued)

Christopher Tolkien’s “Version 2,” War 200–205 Written in ink. On the pages Christopher Tolkien has noted these relate to SCU 325, then SL 326 to 333. He also uses the numbering system (26)–(30). The text is written over old notes on Old English and Old Norse. Transcriptions and notes on these pages appear in War 200–205, but the last page (not paginated) is not mentioned by Christopher. The nature of the writing is of continuous prose initially, but suddenly stops with Tolkien asking questions of the plot and whether descriptions are needed. It then moves into outline form.

Notes

Four pages paginated a, b, c, and d. Note “c” was originally paginated “d” and vice versa.

C

Paginated 4 and 5

One page, not paginated.

B

Marquette 3/6/8 Di

Pagination

Sigla

Table 4.1  (Continued)

“a strange odour came out of it . . . nor Sam gave him heed”

Page a Ll. 1–30 “Description of the endless . . . down into a” . . . Page d Ll. 1–28 (separated by two solid lines after l. 3) “Frodo cries – or is . . . and Mt. Doom”

In two distinct sections of 4 lines and 16 lines. Ll. 1–4 “a strange odour came out of the place . . . a repellant taint in the air” Ll. 5–20 “Must be stair – stair // tunnel. Tunnel is Ungoliant’s lair . . . out of tunnel.”

Contents

TT, IV, ix, 940–942.

Outline of SCU, SL, CMS.

TT, IV, ix, 940? Possibly source of “and out of it came a reek so foul . . .”

Reference

Christopher Tolkien’s “Version 1,” Part 1, War 192–193 The opening lines are similar to MSS B.

Christopher Tolkien’s “new” or second outline, War 187–190 Christopher Tolkien notes this as a “Preliminary outline for SCU – SL – CMS (5) (–8) 4 pages”.

Christopher Tolkien’s “Additional Outline,” War 221 n. 8 Christopher provides a note on the manuscript of “Outline for S. L. (11)” This is quite a small page, more notebook in size. Again it is a reuse of paper as it is written in ink but over notes on sound changes in Old English, but crossed through. A very brief outline of the plot progression across SCU and SL.

Notes

Marquette 3/2/17 Diii

Bodley, MSS Tolkien Drawings Dii

Two pages, paginated 20, 21 (and 8 and 9).

One folio, 81r–v (also paginated 6 and 7).

Page 20 Ll. 1–44 “ – it had a comfortable feel . . . and the blow” Page 21 Ll. 1–41 “fell not on his head as S. intended, but across his back. But it was enough for G! . . . the glass of Galadriel. And held it up.”

81r Ll. 1–34 “Before them was a greyness which the lights . . . no sign of them could they find. /[?] make Gollum come shouting [?] back.\” 81v Ll. 1–45 “ ‘That’s that!’ said Sam . . . He was soon to learn.”

TT, IV, ix, 949–954

TT, IV, ix, 934 (81v) and 944–946 (81r).

(Continued)

Christopher Tolkien’s “Version 1,” Part 3, War 196–198 Christopher Tolkien notes for page 20 “SL 334–5 (9) & (31)”. For page 21 he includes the note “(335–bottom) – SL 336 (10) and (32)” and also “end of SL (336) CMS 337–8”. This is in pen overwritten on an original pencil draft. These two pages follow directly from MS Dii in Bodley noted above.

Christopher Tolkien’s “Version 1,” Part 2, War 194–195 The manuscript is reversed in the Bodley folder to show the illustration (coloured pencil and ink). Entitled “SHELOB’S LAIR” it indents into ll. 19–45 of 81v. There is also a minor illustration of the cliff peaks on l. 14 of 81v. The text on 81v is more akin to that of Frodo’s and Sam’s at the end of SCU, before they enter the tunnel. The folio is reproduced as the “First frontpiece” in War.

Marquette 3/2/17 E

Sigla

Four pages paginated 18–20, last page not numbered.

Pagination

Table 4.1  (Continued)

Page 18 Four additions in the margin (one in pencil). Ll. 1–37 “no answer, not [del. ?] an echo . . . and knew not what he had spoken.” Ll. 38–9 [deleted] “And now the way was clear . . . was not their path, for it” . . . Page 20 Ll. 1–11 in ink then in pencil and script becomes more cursive. One addition in margin in pencil. L.1 mainly illegible, seems to be jottings of phrases related to Sam’s later declaration. Ll. 2–42 “Galadriel \Glory/!” said \ and/ Sam. \He was close/ at Frodo’s side . . . Give me yours” Unnumbered Page Ll. 1–37 “Sam obeyed and took Sting . . . Then the spider attacks // and Gollum!”

Contents TT, IV, ix, 942– 944?

Reference

Christopher Tolkien’s “rejected draft of fair copy,” War 206–208 Christopher Tolkien notes on page 18 “SL 328–329 (53)” (a later hand notes “Repl by 3/6/9 p-c p.5”. For page 19 Christopher adds “SL 329–330 (54)”; page 20 “SL 330–1 (55)”; and the unnumbered page “SL 331 (56)”. Written in ink with signs of heavy reworking and crossings through and then in pencil. This is a first attempt at a fair draft but has considerable reworking. It reverts to pencil and then more of a plot outline.

Notes

One page, not paginated.

Not paginated.

F

G Page 1 Crossed through. Ll. 1–25 “[Partially obscured by CRRT’s note] only a thought came into . . . Gollum he had been ahead . . . they had not going [?] when from behind [?]” Page 2 Nine lines mainly illegible but ends “ . . . Even as Frodo spoke he felt [del. the presence of] a great malice [?] and a \fell/ [del. ?] regard. He was aware of eyes [illegible].”

In four sections written in reverse vertically. Reworkings of short paragraphs. i) Paragraph of 5 lines in ink Ll. 1–5 “unless perhaps the sullen \?/ sky was less deeply black . . . a veil shrouded the starry world around about them. They passed on. // Gollums [?]” ii) Ll. 1–4 [del. and now they] and now they [?] seemed . . . [illegible]” iii) and iv) From SCU, i.e., TT, IV, viii TT, IV, ix, 939– 940?

TT, IV, ix, 940?

(Continued)

Christopher Tolkien notes “SL 328 ‘Fork + tunnel’ passage 43” on page 1, and “SL 329 44” on page 2. Written in ink on list of RN and RAF English Collections candidates.

Section “i” noted by Christopher as “SL 326 41”; “ii” as “[SL] 327”; “iii” as “Passage in SCU 321 41”; and “iv” as “[SCU] 323”.

One page not paginated.

I

Two pages both unpaginated.

One page not paginated.

H

Marquette 3/6/9 J

Pagination

Sigla

Table 4.1  (Continued)

41 and 12 lines respectively with two additions in margin of 9 and 3 lines on page 1. Page 1 Ll. 1–41 “[del. Other version] // Still as stones they stood . . . darkness of his // [illegible deletion] may the curse” Page 2 Ll. 1–12 “mind, almost unbearably . . . [underlined] A light when all other lights go out.”

Ll. 1–43 “Suddenly a little way ahead and to his left . . . [last lines illegible]”

Ll. 1–34 “A soulless [?] place . . . There’s orcs about, and realizing [?] quickly he”

Contents

TT, IV, ix, 941–944 (page 1).

Reference

Christopher Tolkien’s “second text of the episode in the tunnel” War 208–209 Written in ink, this in effect is a reworking of the episode in the tunnel marked “other version”. Page 2 is not fully transcribed in War.

Christopher Tolkien notes “SL 334–5 47”. Written in pencil with additional lines in ink in margin and at footer. Written on reverse of typed list of University candidates dated “October 1943”.

Christopher notes “SL 330 – pencil SL 332 – SL 334–5”. Ll. 1–15 in ink then reverts to pencil. Outlines and notes, with one addition in margin of 6 lines. Mainly illegible, written on back of University typed regulations dated “Jan. 6. 1944”.

Notes

Bodley, MSS Tolkien Drawings 90 L

K

One folio, 16r.

Twelve pages paginated 14–25 (but also 1a, 1b, 2–11) 14.

Ll. 1–23 “Must be Stair – stair – tunnel . . . Web at end of tunnel?”

Page 14 Includes 4 additions in margin, mostly in ink. At ll. 1–23 are end of SCU. At l. 24 there is “XXXIX Shelob’s Lair i(a)” Ll. 25–38 “It may indeed have been [del. morning] day-time now . . . getting stronger and stronger.” . . . Page 25 Ll. 1–38 “the light, and fixed all her intent . . . hurled himself backwards. [del. He fell]”

TT, IV, x, 938–950.

Christopher Tolkien’s “Fuller Note,” War 199–201 Written in ink with illustration of a map of Shelob’s Lair. A series of plot outlines entitled “Plan of Shelob’s Lair”. Reproduced in War 201.

Christopher Tolkien’s “Fair Copy” This is not transcribed in War but alluded to throughout, as this was the final stage before the typescript.

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Bratman, David. 2007. “Bodleian Library, Oxford.” In J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopaedia, edited by Michael Drout, 68. London: Routledge. Campbell, Alice. 2007. “Maps.” In J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopaedia, edited by Michael Drout, 405– 408. London: Routledge. Drout, Michael C. 2007. “Medieval Manuscripts.” In J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopaedia, edited by Michael Drout, 404–405. London: Routledge. Fisher, J. 2007. “Manuscripts by Tolkien.” In J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopaedia, edited by Michael Drout, 402–403. London: Routledge. Hammond, Wayne G. and Christina Scull. 1995. J. R. R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator. London: HarperCollins.

Kane, Charles. 2009. Arda Reconstructed: The Creation of the Published Silmarillion. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press. Lee, Stuart D. 2009. “Tolkien and The Wanderer: From Translation to Adaptation.” Tolkien Studies, 6: 189–211. Owen-Crocker, Gale R. and Maria Cesario. 2009. “Handling Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts.” In Work­ ing with Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts, edited by Gale R. Owen-Crocker, 7–27. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.

Further Reading Chambers, R. W., ed. 1933. The Exeter Book of Old English Poetry. London: Lund, Humphries. Gollancz, I., ed. 1927. The Cædmon Manuscript of Anglo-Saxon Biblical Poetry: Junius XI in the Bodleian Library. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Malone, Kemp, ed. 1951. The Thorkelin Transcripts of Beowulf in Facsimile. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger.

Millar, E. G., ed. 1923. The Lindisfarne Gospels: Three Plates in Colour and Thirty-six in Monochrome from Cotton Ms. Nero D. IV in the British Museum with Pages from Two Related Manuscripts. London: British Museum.

Part III

The Legendarium

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Myth-making and Sub-creation Carl Phelpstead

In a much-quoted letter that J. R. R. Tolkien wrote to Milton Waldman in 1951 he described his desire to create “a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story” (Letters 144). Though this corpus was never to appear in print in the form in which he hoped Waldman would publish it, Tolkien’s writings on Middle-earth – The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, together with the posthumously published The Silmarillion and associated texts in the History of Middle-earth series – comprise an interconnected body of myths, legends, and fairy-tales of a richness and complexity one might imagine to have been created by a whole people rather than a single individual. Tolkien has been described as “perhaps the quintessential contemporary mythmaker” (Garbowski 2004, 5), yet he was not only a maker, but also a theorist of myth. Tolkien’s intellectual development as a professional philologist and literary critic was nurtured by a scholarly tradition stretching back at least as far as the early nineteenth century in which mythology and philology, the study of myth and of language, had been pursued together by scholars who saw the two as intimately related. This chapter explores the biographical and intellectual context for Tolkien’s thinking about mythopoesis (myth-making), drawing on his letters, his poem “Mythopoeia,” and his essay “On Fairy-stories.”

Myth, Fantasy, and Fairy-story The term “myth” resists a definition capable of commanding universal consent. A narrow definition of myth would limit it to a story primarily about divine beings. A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Though common, such a definition would exclude very nearly all of Tolkien’s writing and is clearly not what he meant when he wrote of creating a mythology and not what readers and scholars of his work have meant by referring to “Tolkien’s mythology” (if one were to accept a definition of myth as stories of the gods, then the alternative designation of Tolkien’s creative work as a legendarium might be thought more appropriate). Many definitions of myth require that the story must once have been believed to have happened: this too would exclude Tolkien’s work, although Tolkien did write in a letter that “I had the sense of recording what was already ‘there’ somewhere: not of ‘inventing’ ” (Letters 145). Other associations of myth prove more apposite to Tolkien’s major creative writings: they are narratives set in the far distant past; they involve supernatural beings; and they convey or embody understandings of the nature of reality in narrative form. Greek muthos means simply “story” and if the definition of modern English “myth” is problematic, its demarcation from the cognate narrative genres of fairy-story and fantasy is no less so. Garbowski writes that “according to Tolkien there exists a continuum between high myth and fairy story” (2004, 11). One sees that Tolkien slips easily between myth, legend, fairy-story, and fantasy more generally both in his letters and in his essay “On Fairy-stories”: while ostensibly limited by its title to one specific type of fantasy that essay makes much larger claims about imaginative literature, including myth.

Tolkien’s Myth-making As we shall see below, Tolkien’s scholarly approach to myth grew out of philological and anthropological work of the nineteenth century; the mythological focus of his creative writing, on the other hand, can be related to both Romantic and modernist strands of English literary tradition. The preeminent inventor of a “private mythology” before Tolkien was William Blake (1757–1827), though as Verlyn Flieger points out, Blake’s mythology has very much remained private and has never engaged anything like Tolkien’s readership (Flieger 2002, xv). Blake took refuge from industrial modernity and its “dark satanic mills” in the invention of mythology; in the early twentieth century modernist writers including James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and David Jones looked to mythologies of the past for ways to bring order to the chaos presented to them by their experience of modernity. Like these writers, Tolkien responded to modernity by turning to mythological and legendary narratives from the past, but he went beyond using such narratives to organize representations of contemporary reality and instead created from them and from his imagination a new world and a new mythology (cf. Hiley 2004, 841–847). In the connected series of works comprising The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings Tolkien takes motifs and patterns from classical, medieval, and later mythological traditions, but transforms them in combination with a wealth of wholly original material into a comprehensive new mythology of his own.



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Tolkien claims in a letter written in 1955 that the original impulse behind his myth-making was a desire to provide narrative contexts for the languages he had begun to invent: “The invention of languages is the foundation. The ‘stories’ were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse” (Letters 219). In his 1951 letter to Milton Waldman he reflects on an early desire to create a mythology he could dedicate to his country. Explaining that he had long regretted that England possessed no mythology of its own comparable to those of the Greeks, Celts, Scandinavians, Finns and other peoples, Tolkien writes that: . . . once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story [.  .  .] which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country. It should possess the tone and quality I desired, somewhat cool and clear, be redolent of our “air” (the clime and soil of the North West, meaning Britain and the hither parts of Europe: not Italy or the Aegean, still less the East). (Letters 144)

Five years later Tolkien drafted a letter to a Mr Thompson in which he similarly recalled setting himself “to restore to the English an epic tradition and present them with a mythology of their own” (Letters 231). Tolkien’s biographer Humphrey Carpenter was inspired by such statements to write of Tolkien’s “desire to create a mythology for England” (Carpenter 1977, 97–98). Although Tolkien’s published writings do not use precisely that phrase, talking instead of dedicating or restoring a mythology to England, Carpenter’s formulation has proved popular with later writers.1 Tolkien’s determination to make good England’s lack of a mythology has been compared to the work of the Brothers Grimm in Germany and to Elias Lönnrot’s creation of the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, in the nineteenth century (ch. 18). In both cases, national mythologies were created from existing materials but those materials were given shape and coherence by individuals motivated by patriotism or nationalism.2 Tolkien’s patriotic impulse, and its gradual waning as his crest fell, explains the importance of the evolving frame narrative with which Tolkien attempted to link his Elvish mythology with England: very early drafts of material later incorporated into The Silmarillion feature Eriol the Mariner as a reteller of tales heard on Tol Eressëa; in later versions he is transformed into Ælfwine, an Anglo-Saxon translator of annalistic material from Elvish into Old English and later still Tolkien experiments with a time-traveling link between modern England and the legendary past (on these frame narratives and their development see Flieger 2005, 87–118, and ch. 11). Each of these narrative devices can be seen as an attempt by Tolkien to link his creative work with the particular country for which it was at that time intended. When Tolkien writes in letters of his original desire to dedicate a mythology to England he claims to have renounced such a grand plan, implying that the patriotic motive may no longer be primary. The composition of his poem “Mythopoeia” and the connection established there, and subsequently reinforced in his essay “On Fairy-stories,” between imaginative writing and Christian anthropology and theology

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appear to have led Tolkien to the realization that his work might aspire to a universal rather than merely national resonance: he came to believe that myths and related forms of story-telling can, to a degree, embody the truths revealed in Christianity. This conviction provides him with both a kind of skeleton key to pagan myths of the past, a means of recuperating them for Christianity by seeing them as prophetic of the Gospel, and also the starting-point for a justification for the making of new myths. Indeed, when Tolkien goes on in his study of fairy-stories to develop ideas of more general scope about the relationship between primary and secondary worlds as part of a theory of sub-creation, he develops an explicitly theological imperative for mythopoesis: as God is a creator, so human beings, made in his image, are sub-creators. One of Tolkien’s clearest statements of his view of the relation between myth and reality is in the long letter to Milton Waldman, noted above, from 1951: I believe that legends and myths are largely made of “truth,” and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode; and long ago certain truths and modes of this kind were discovered and must always reappear. (Letters 147)

Several years previously this view of the relationship between myth and truth had been developed in a poem published in full only posthumously, “Mythopoeia.”

“Mythopoeia” Tolkien not only made myths; he also defended myth-making, a defense which broadened into an apologia for fantasy, or non-realistic imaginative writing more generally. This defense is mounted primarily in his poem “Mythopoeia” and in the essay “On Fairy-stories,” described by Clive Tolley (2002, 93) as an expansion of the poem, though perhaps it is truer to say that part of the essay expands on and clarifies the ideas expressed in the poem. In “Mythopoeia” Tolkien gives sustained expression to his understanding of the relationship between non-Christian myth and Christian truth. In doing so, he creates a permanent record of the arguments he and Hugo Dyson had deployed against C. S. Lewis on the evening of September 19, 1931, during a momentous perambulation of Addison’s Walk in the grounds of Lewis’s Oxford college and later in his college rooms. The circumstances of this peripatetic debate have been retold many times by biographers of both Tolkien and Lewis; Humphrey Carpenter imaginatively reconstructed the discussion in his biography of Tolkien (1977, 150–152) and in his book on The Inklings (2006, 42–45). Lewis gives his own accounts in letters to his friend Arthur Greeves written on September 22 and October 18, 1931 (see Lewis 2000, 970, 976–977). In his letter of October 18 Lewis writes that Tolkien and Dyson had helped him to see that:



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. . . the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with the tremendous difference that it really happened [. . .] it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths. (Lewis 2000, 977)

Besides its immediate role in removing an obstacle to Lewis’s conversion, this discussion went on to inform the understanding of (pagan) myth and its relationship to Christian truth to which Lewis gave expression in several of his popular theological writings. “Mythopoeia” was first published posthumously in the second edition of Tree and Leaf in 1988 (see Tolkien 2001a), edited by Christopher Tolkien. This edition added the poem to the combination of “On Fairy-stories” and “Leaf by Niggle” which Christopher’s father had issued together in 1964. The fifth manuscript version of the poem carries the dedication “J. R. R. T. for C. S. L.”; in the sixth version this becomes “Philomythus Misomytho” (“Lover of Myth to Hater of Myth”) and in the final, published text there is the dedication “To one who said that myths were lies and therefore worthless, even though ‘breathed through silver’,” with the speaker of the poem identified as “Philomythus to Misomythus” (TL 85). Christopher Tolkien explains that the revision of the poem through seven drafts was mainly a process of expansion. The final text is 148 lines long, rhyming couplets organized into 12 verse paragraphs and occupying nearly five pages of Tree and Leaf (TL 85–90). According to John R. Holmes (2007, 450) much of the poem was written “within weeks” of the debate with Lewis, but Scull and Hammond (Reader’s Guide 621) say that “It can only be guessed when Tolkien first composed Mythopoeia”; clearly it must have been begun after September 19, 1931 and marginal notes to the final version have been dated by Christopher Tolkien to November 1935 or later; the statement in those notes that the poem was “Written mainly in the Examination Schools during Invigilation” (TL ix) suggests to Scull and Hammond a likely date between June 1932 and June 1933, as Tolkien served as an examiner in the Oxford English School between 1931 and 1935. The poem begins by introducing Misomythus’s materialist-scientific view of the cosmos, against which Philomythus will speak. Misomythus is said to view the cosmos as “cold” (TL 85). Of all the cosmic phenomena Philomythus might choose as an example, he begins with trees. The walk in Magdalen grounds would have taken place surrounded by trees, but Tolkien had a particular affinity with trees: the inventor of the Ents wrote in a letter that “In all my works I take the part of trees as against all their enemies” (Letters 419) and recognized in a marginal note to the manuscript of “Mythopoeia” that: Trees are chosen because they are at once easily classifiable and innumerably individual; but as this may be said of other things, then I will say because I notice them more than most other things (far more than people). In any case the mental scenic background of these lines is the Grove and Walks of Magdalen at night. (TL viii)

The poem proceeds to enumerate some more of the “endless multitude of forms” created by God (memorably including “the large slow oddity of cows,” TL 86): there

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may be a faint echo in these lines of the Benedicite, a canticle used regularly in Catholic liturgy which exhorts numerous aspects of creation to praise God. Emphasis is put on the fact that these endlessly numerous phenomena are individual, each printing the brain “with a separate dint” (TL 86), but they have in common that they are all created by God. Misomythus’s view of reality is inadequate because “trees are not ‘trees’, until so named and seen” (TL 86). Knowledge is impossible without language. Moreover, language and myth are interrelated. Tolkien’s thinking here and elsewhere on this topic is profoundly influenced by the work of his fellow Inkling, Owen Barfield (on Barfield’s influence on Tolkien see especially Medcalf 1999, Flieger 2002, Tolley 2002). Verlyn Flieger indeed goes so far as to claim that with the exception of the Old English poem Beowulf “Barfield’s theory of the interdependence of myth and language is the primary influence on Tolkien’s mythos” (Flieger 2002, xxi). Building on earlier accounts of the connections between myth and language, Barfield argues in his Poetic Diction (originally published in 1928) that the historical separation of literal and metaphorical meanings of words divided what had been an original semantic unity: words had originally themselves been mini-myths, embodying a view of reality in which experienced phenomena were at one and the same time physical and spiritual (Barfield 1988, 77–92).3 Tolkien alluded to the impact of Barfield’s idea of “ancient semantic unity” on a passage in The Hobbit in a letter written shortly after its publication (Letters 22). His sense that myth conveyed truths will have been reinforced by Barfield’s hypothesis of an age when concrete and abstract meanings had not yet been differentiated and words were used “mythically” to convey the truth. Barfield’s conception of the primordial unity of physical and spiritual, concrete and abstract, is evident in Tolkien’s “Mythopoeia” in the claim that phenomena are named only by humans “digging the foreknown from experience / and panning the vein of spirit out of sense” (TL 86). The epistemology implicit here is a Platonic conception of knowledge as recovery or recollection (anamnesis) of the foreknown. “Mythopoeia” goes on to claim that one does not truly perceive physical phenomena, such as the stars or the earth, if one sees them only in objective, scientific terms: the firmament is “only a void, unless a jewelled tent / myth-woven and elf-patterned” (TL 87). Far from being a deviation from reality, myth enables a truer perception; Tolley (2002, 81) argues that Tolkien’s Platonic concept of “discoverable ideas behind nature” echoes the final section of Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism, a model for the heroic couplet form of Tolkien’s poem. It is because myth is too essentially human that it cannot be “lies”: The heart of man is not compound of lies but draws some wisdom from the only Wise, and still recalls him. Though now long estranged, man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed. Dis-graced he may be, yet is not dethroned,



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and keeps the rags of lordship on[c]e he owned, his world-dominion by creative act. (TL 87)

Humans still “recall” God (in another instance of anamnesis), even if their knowledge of him is imperfect (“some wisdom”) and they are “long estranged” from him and have forfeited his grace (being “Dis-graced”). What ensures (and indicates) man is “not wholly lost nor wholly changed,” that he still possesses “rags” of his former lordship, is his creativity: he is “man, sub-creator,” through whom the single white light of truth is “splintered [. . .] to many hues” (TL 87). The poem explains that because humans are sub-creators it is “our right” to fill the world with Elves and goblins and to invent gods and “sow the seeds of dragons” (TL 87). Tolkien attacks the idea that myth-making is wishful dreaming, suggesting that the capacity for such creativity is proof of its rightness and noting that “All wishes are not idle” (TL 88). Declaring in an echo of the Beatitudes in Matthew 5 that: Blessed are the legend-makers with their rhyme of things not found within recorded time (TL 88)

the poem asserts that myth provides solace, support, and strength for those who defy evil: They have seen Death and ultimate defeat, and yet they would not in despair retreat, but oft to victory have turned the lyre and kindled hearts with legendary fire. (TL 88–89)

Philomythus wishes to associate himself with this attitude: I would that I might with the minstrels sing and stir the unseen with a throbbing string. (TL 89)

As for Misomythus’s “progressive apes” on the other hand, those materialist humans who deny themselves the consolations of mythology, “Before them gapes / the dark abyss to which their progress tends” (TL 89). As the poem ends, a Platonic conception of the relationship between perceived and ultimate reality again comes to the fore with the hope that Paradise may “renew / from mirrored truth the likeness of the True” (TL 90): this world is derivative from the ultimate reality to be experienced in heaven. The speaker foresees that creativity will, moreover, continue to have a function in Paradise: and poets shall have flames upon their head and harps whereon their faultless fingers fall. (TL 90)

In these lines the biblical figure of the Holy Spirit descending on the apostles in the form of flames at Pentecost (Acts 2:1–4) and the celestial choirs of musical angels

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are linked with the imagery of the minstrel with his lyre employed earlier in the poem.

Sub-creation Lines from “Mythopoeia” first appeared in print as a quotation in Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-stories” and the two texts are closely related. “On Fairy-stories” was delivered as the Andrew Lang Lecture at the University of St Andrews on March 8, 1939 and later published in expanded form in 1947 in Essays Presented to Charles Williams. It was reprinted in Tree and Leaf with minor alterations; a new edition by Douglas Anderson and Verlyn Flieger including draft texts was published in 2008 (OFS, Tolkien 2008b). In the essay Tolkien reports having written a (verse-)letter to a man who described myths and fairy-stories as lies, though “he was kind enough to call fairy-story making ‘Breathing a lie through Silver’,” and goes on to quote from “Mythopoeia.” In fact, none of the seven manuscript versions of “Mythopoeia” has the epistolary beginning attached to the opening lines as quoted in “On Fairy-stories” and Christopher Tolkien concludes that the letter was “a device” (TL vii). Tolkien has also extended the subject of his poem from the original myth to encompass also fairy-stories. Tolkien suggested in a letter that his essay “On Fairy-stories” was “quite an important work” for anyone wanting to understand his creative writing (Letters 220) and Anderson and Flieger describe it as “the theoretical basis for [Tolkien’s] fiction” (OFS 9). Composed after The Hobbit and while he was working on The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien’s essay develops a theory of fantasy that has been influential not only in Inklings scholarship and broader studies of fantasy fiction, but also more widely in literary critical discourse.4 Tolkien’s “On Fairy-stories” sets out to address three questions: “What are fairystories? What is their origin? What is the use of them?” (OFS 27). In answering the last of these questions Tolkien introduces the ideas that connect the essay with his poem “Mythopoeia”: that poem had referred to the idea of Man as a “sub-creator” and, after introducing this term in the section of “On Fairy-stories” entitled “Origins” (OFS 42), Tolkien then proceeds to explore the idea in more detail later in the essay. The section on “Origins” concludes that the explanations put forward by comparative philologists and scholars of mythology are not sufficient to determine whether similarities between myths are the result of independent invention, diffusion, or inheritance (OFS 11). Tolkien’s discussion of the views of philologists, however, leads into his consideration of language, perception, and imagination. Rejecting both Max Müller’s theory of the origins of mythology as arising from the misunderstanding of names for celestial phenomena as personifications and Andrew Lang’s opposing anthropological approach, which dismissed myths as “primitive” and “savage,” Tolkien puts forward an alternative theory of the relationship between reality and imaginative sub-creation, including myth.5 In contradiction of Müller’s



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understanding of mythology as a “disease of language,” Tolkien writes that “It would be more near the truth to say that languages, especially modern European languages, are a disease of mythology” (OFS 41) and that “To ask what is the origin of stories [...] is to ask what is the origin of language and of the mind” (OFS 38). In opposition to anthropological approaches to myth (exemplified by Andrew Lang) which saw myths and fairy-stories as products of the “childhood of man” appropriate now for a readership only of children, Tolkien maintains in “On Fairy-stories” that these literary forms are neither childish nor escapist, offering personal experience as evidence: he says that in his case “A real taste for fairy-stories was wakened by philology on the threshold of manhood, and quickened to full life by war” (OFS 56). The section headed “Fantasy” is the part of the essay most closely related to the poem “Mythopoeia.” Tolkien states that the faculty of conceiving images of things not present is “or was” known as Imagination, but recognizes that in more recent technical language Imagination is used of a higher faculty than mere image-making, to which the name Fancy (abbreviated from Fantasy) is given. In this higher sense Imagination is “the power of giving to ideal creations the inner consistency of reality” (OFS 59). Tolkien’s reference to more recent technical language alludes to the specialized sense in which Samuel Taylor Coleridge used the term “Imagination” in his Biographia Literaria (Coleridge 1983, 82–88, 304–306). Coleridge had reversed the traditional meanings of imaginatio (the power of recalling images no longer present to the senses) and phantasia (the more active and creative free play of the mind) and inverted their importance (see Coleridge 1983, xcvii; Medcalf 1981, 9), but Tolkien argues that Coleridge’s distinction is philologically and analytically mistaken: the difference between these powers is one of degree of Imagination, not a difference of kind; the inner consistency achieved by Art is the “operative link between Imagination and the final result, Sub-creation” (OFS 59); in other words, sub-creation is Imagination given inner consistency by art. Tolkien calls the sub-creative art which commands or induces Secondary Belief “Fantasy.” Sub-creation, then, is the inducing of Secondary Belief through Imagination allied to the inner consistency achieved by Fantasy. Tolkien argues that rather than the “willing suspension of disbelief” which Coleridge famously described in the fourteenth chapter of his Biographia Literaria, successful sub-creation produces an involuntary suspension of disbelief: What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful ‘sub-creator’. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. [. . .] The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken [. . .] You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. (OFS 52)

It is only at that point that a deliberate and willing – or willed – suspension of disbelief is required. Tolkien’s prolific creation of the languages, peoples, genealogies, and history that give Middle-earth an unprecedented (and unmatched) sense of reality is calculated to prevent such a moment of disbelief by providing the kind of inner consistency which commands Secondary Belief.

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Tolkien argues that Fantasy, in his sense, is best achieved in literature (rather than in other arts), and that to create a world that commands Secondary Belief in this way is difficult and requires much labor, so that Fantasy is a rare achievement. Tolkien recognizes that to many the sub-creative art of Fantasy “has seemed suspect, if not illegitimate” (OFS 64), but he defends its legitimacy by quoting from his own poem “Mythopoeia” (OFS 65), pointing out that Fantasy is founded on a recognition of fact: humans sub-create with materials derived from God’s primary creation. Towards the end of this section of his essay Tolkien makes a link between literary theory and theology; this informs his final section on “Recovery, Escape, Consolation” in which he argues that the uses of fantasy include the regaining of clear sight (recovery), escape (including the escape from death), and the eucatastrophic “sudden joyous turn” which offers consolation (OFS 75).6 In the “Epilogue” to the essay, Tolkien develops the idea that this eucatastrophic sudden joyous turn of fairy-story provides an insight into the nature of reality, as understood in the Christian tradition: “The peculiar quality of the ‘joy’ in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth” (OFS 77). As Tolkien points out, this underlying structure of the sudden joyous turn is found also at the climax of the Christian Gospels, where the Crucifixion is followed at the turning point of human history by the Resurrection, with its promise of a new creation. But for Tolkien the Gospels, unlike fairy-stories and myths, record a eucatastrophic moment that has actually happened; fairy-story has entered history: “Legend and History have met and fused” (OFS 78). Pre-Christian pagan myths foreshadowed the truth that would be revealed in Christ’s death and resurrection; subsequent myths and fairy-tales have mirrored that truth in imaginative form. Tolkien nevertheless maintains that even after the revelation of the Gospel there is still a need for imaginative versions of the Truth because sub-creation is fundamental to what it is to be human: Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker [. . .] Redeemed Man is still man. Story, fantasy, still go on, and should go on. (OFS 66, 78)

In “Mythopoeia,” as we have seen, Tolkien envisaged that story-making will go on even after death, and so fundamental to human nature is the telling of stories that he claims in a letter that “There is a place called ‘heaven’ where the good here unfinished is completed; and where the stories unwritten, and the hopes unfulfilled, are continued” (Letters 55).

Tolkien’s Theory in Context The theory of myth-making and sub-creation developed in “Mythopoeia” and “On Fairy-stories” draws on a very long tradition of reflection upon the connections between



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language and mythology and the ways in which both relate to experienced and ultimate reality. The profound influence of Barfield on Tolkien’s thinking has been discussed already. Among other things, Barfield was an expositor of the philosophy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (see Barfield 1971) and Coleridge’s critical terminology is also echoed, but also significantly adapted, by Tolkien. Gary K. Wolfe (2012, 7) points out that a critical debate over the terms “imagination” and “fancy” had been going on since Joseph Addison’s discussion of the relationship between the reader’s imagination and the poet’s fancy in The Spectator in 1712. The fragmentary chapter XIII of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, published in 1817, makes a highly influential intervention in this debate by distinguishing between primary and secondary imagination, further distinguishing both from mere fancy. Tolkien, as we have seen, argues contra Coleridge that Imagination and Fantasy differ in degree rather than kind and transfers Coleridge’s primary and secondary distinction from types of imagination to types of world. However, Medcalf (1981, 56) points out that Coleridge makes a link between human and divine creativity, similar to that made by Tolkien, when he writes in chapter XIII of Biographia Literaria that: “the secondary or poet’s imagination is an echo of the primary imagination or consciousness, which in its turn is a ‘repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’ ” (Coleridge 1983, 304). Tolkien’s theory of myth-making and sub-creation has roots much further back than Coleridge, however. His conception of the world of physical phenomena as bearing witness to spiritual realities is ultimately Platonic, though whereas for Plato imaginative literature was suspect because it peddled imitations of imitations, the Neoplatonists who inherited and modified his views saw imaginative literature as offering valuable insights into truth. Whereas the dominant literary theoretical tradition up to the eighteenth century conceived of literature as a mirror that reflected reality, the Romantic movement recovered something of the Neoplatonic understanding, rejecting the imitative view of art and introducing a new understanding of imagination as a lamp illuminating worlds beyond perceived reality (see the classic account of the transition between these two conceptions of the relationship between literature and reality in Abrams 1953). Owen Barfield (1988, 128) draws attention to Ancient Greek Neoplatonic texts that anticipate Coleridge, and Medcalf quotes a striking passage from On the Gods and the World (circa AD 362) by the late pagan Saturninus Sallustius Secundus, a close friend of the Emperor Julian the Apostate: “For one can call the Universe a myth, since in it bodies and things are apparent, spirits and understandings hidden” (Medcalf 1981, 60). This might almost be Tolkien’s Philomythus speaking. Tolkien’s theory thus draws both on a Platonic understanding of the primary world of perceived reality as secondary to a more fundamental reality and on a NeoplatonicRomantic conviction that the human imagination is capable of shedding light on that ultimate reality. His divergences from Coleridge’s theory and terminology demonstrate that Tolkien saw reason to be critical of the Romantic legacy, but his theory of myth-making and sub-creation develops organically from a venerable intellectual

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tradition that stretches back from Barfield through Coleridge and other Romantics to the Neoplatonists and thence to the very beginnings of Western philosophy. Notes 1  This in turn has prompted extensive critical discussion about whether it is an appropriate or adequate description of Tolkien’s undertaking: for a brief summary of the debate with further references see Fisher (2007). 2  On parallels between Tolkien and Lönnrot see, for example, Petty (2004), Flieger (2005, 27–31), Flieger (2012, 179–184), and ch. 18. 3  Barfield’s views strongly echo ideas put forward by the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer in his Language and Myth, a book Tolkien could have read in German, though it was not translated into English until 1946 (see further Garbowski 2004, 23). Barfield himself knew nothing of Cassirer’s work when developing his own ideas (and could not then read German), though he remarked in the “Afterword” to the second edition of Poetic Diction that he had since read Cassirer with “admiration, pleasure and profit” (Barfield 1984, 214–215).

4  As, for example, when Tolkien’s friend W. H. Auden called his T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures of 1967 Secondary Worlds, thus echoing the terminology employed in Tolkien’s essay and drawing attention to the Tolkienian origin of his lectures’ theoretical framework (Auden 1968). 5  Flieger (2003) provides a useful analysis of Tolkien’s engagement with the theories of Müller and Lang. Barfield’s Poetic Diction is an extended refutation of Müller’s conception of mythology as a “disease of language.” 6  Anderson and Flieger have drawn attention to the fact that newspaper reports of the Andrew Lang lecture suggest that the actual lecture did not include the theological material on eucatastrophe and the Gospel that later appeared in the published essay (OFS 130, 135).

References Abrams, M. H. 1953. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and Critical Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Auden, W. H. 1968. Secondary Worlds. London: Faber. Barfield, Owen. 1971. What Coleridge Thought. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Barfield, Owen. 1984. Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning. 2nd edn. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Barfield, Owen. 1988. Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry. 2nd edn. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Carpenter, Humphrey. 1977. J. R. R. Tolkien – A Biography. London: Allen & Unwin. Carpenter, Humphrey. 2006. The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and their Friends. London: HarperCollins. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1983. Biographia Literaria or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opin-

ions. In The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 7, edited by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Fisher, Jason. 2007. “Mythology for England.” In J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopaedia, edited by Michael Drout, 445–447. London: Routledge. Flieger, Verlyn. 2002. Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World. Revised edn. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Flieger, Verlyn. 2003. “ ‘There Would Always Be a Fairy-tale’: J. R. R. Tolkien and the Folklore Controversy.” In Tolkien the Medievalist, edited by Jane Chance, 26–35. London: Routledge. Flieger, Verlyn. 2005. Interrupted Music: The Making of Tolkien’s Mythology. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Flieger, Verlyn. 2012. Green Suns and Faërie: Essays on J. R. R. Tolkien. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press.



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Garbowski, Christopher. 2004. Recovery and Transcendence for the Contemporary Mythmaker: The Spiritual Dimension in the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien. 2nd edn. Zurich and Bern: Walking Tree Publishers. Hiley, Margaret. 2004. “Stolen Language, Cosmic Models: Myth and Mythology in Tolkien.” Modern Fiction Studies, 40.4: 838–860. Holmes, John R. 2007. “Mythopoeia.” In J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopaedia, edited by Michael Drout, 450–451. London: Routledge. Lewis, C. S. 2000. The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis. Vol. 1: Family Letters 1905–1931. Edited by Walter Hooper. London: HarperCollins. Medcalf, Stephen. 1981. “The Coincidence of Myth and Fact.” In Ways of Reading the Bible,

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edited by Michael Wadsworth, 55–78. Brighton: Harvester Press. Medcalf, Stephen. 1999. “ ‘The Learned Language of Elves’: Owen Barfield, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.” Seven, 16: 31–53. Petty, Anne C. 2004. “Identifying England’s Lönnrot.” Tolkien Studies, 1: 69–84. Tolley, Clive. 2002. “Tolkien’s ‘Essay on Man’: A Look at Mythopoeia.” The Chesterton Review, 28: 79–95. Wolfe, Gary K. 2012. “Fantasy from Dryden to Dunsany.” In The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn, 7–20. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

6

Middle-earth Mythology: An Overview Leslie A. Donovan

Tolkien’s Middle-earth is built not only on stories of heroes performing brave deeds and battling evil, but also on a vast mythology that explains its cultures, landscapes, and attitudes. Early in the writing of his works, Tolkien intended to compose a group of interrelated stories that honored the lost mythic heritage of England as he imagined it might have been. Yet, as he spent much of his life writing, revising, and even completely rethinking these myths, his works outgrew their original purpose to become the mythology of an entire world, rather than of a single country or people. Although never published during his lifetime, texts such as The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The Children of Húrin, and The History of Middle-earth series document the scope and details of the mythological background for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.1 In a now famous 1951 letter to Milton Waldman,2 Tolkien outlines the scope and overall intentions of his mythology, which later became most fully realized in the posthumously published The Silmarillion. In this letter, Tolkien not only summarizes the origins, development, and history of the world he names Arda, but he also identifies the central aspects of the mythology as “Fall, Mortality, and the Machine” (Letters 145). Similar to Judeo-Christian concepts of a fall from grace (see ch. 30), Tolkien perceives that a Fall occurs in his sub-created world when possessiveness leads characters to “rebel against the laws of the Creator” (Letters 145). His notion of Mortality arises from the desire of the creative impulse to surpass “the satisfactions of plain ordinary biological life,” while he perceives the Machine as the “use of external plans or devices . . . instead of inherent inner powers or talents” (Letters 145–146). Along with these overarching themes, Tolkien further explains that these myths and legends A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.



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stress how “frightful evil can and does arise from an apparently good root, the desire to benefit the world and others” and how “the great policies of world history, ‘the wheels of the world’, are often turned not by the Lords and Governors, even gods, but by the seemingly unknown and weak” (Letters 146). Forming the background for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, such concerns enable Tolkien to construct his mythology as consonant with, yet nevertheless distinct from, the myths and legends of our own world.

Outline of the Mythology Like most mythologies, Tolkien’s begins with a cosmogonical myth relating the creation of Eä, the universe, and Arda, the Earth within it, of which Middle-earth is a part. Eä is created through music by a single, supreme deity, Eru or Ilúvatar, with the help of the Ainur, “angelic powers, whose function is to exercise delegated authority in their spheres” and whom Tolkien conceives as “of the same order of beauty, power, and majesty as the ‘gods’ of higher mythology” (Letters 146). When one of the Ainur, Melkor, attempts “to increase the power and glory of the part assigned to himself” (S 16), conflict arises, even though Ilúvatar turns the discord into a pattern of overall unity and purpose. Ilúvatar then allows some of the Ainur to dwell within Arda, where they become the Valar, immortal beings who govern Arda’s natural elements and aid its inhabitants against Melkor’s malice. Arda’s inhabitants are the immortal Elves (the First-Born) and mortal Men (the Followers), and later also the Dwarves and other races such as the Hobbits. At first, Arda consists of two main continents, the Undying Lands and Middleearth.3 In the west, the Undying Lands contain all the regions inhabited by the Valar and connect to Middle-earth only by a land bridge at its most northeastern point. As the mythic conflict between Melkor and the Valar and their wards rages and subsides, Tolkien describes how the geography of Arda undergoes similarly mythic shifts: cataclysms thrust up new mountains, fissures carve deep into plains, and entire landmasses are annihilated. Especially in the region of Middle-earth, continents, as well as kingdoms, rise and fall because of mythological events. By the time portrayed in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, the northwest portion of Middle-earth has become an area similar in shape to the northwest portion of Europe, with Mordor extending into the east and the land of Harad into the far south. Tolkien presents the mythological evolution of his world in terms of chronological Ages, as recorded from the perspective of the Elves.4 While events occur in more and more historically definable time as these Ages progress, mythic talismans and acts of heroism remain crucial elements of the narratives. Alongside battles and the building of kingdoms and political alliances, the First Age witnesses the Elf-lord Fëanor’s construction of the three jewels known as the Silmarils to capture the light cast by the silver and gold Trees precious to the Valar. It also encompasses the mythically rendered Fall of Fëanor and his kindred, their Exile from the paradise in which they

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dwelt with the Valar, and the final loss of the Silmarils, “one in the sea, one in the deeps of earth, and one as a star of heaven” (Letters 148–149). Throughout the countless deaths and ruined cities recorded in dramas of the First Age, Tolkien weaves myths that relate the history of the Silmarils, tales such as the heroic romance of the mortal Man Beren and the Elf-maiden Lúthien, and the daring voyage of Elwing and Eärendil to plead with the Valar for aid against Morgoth. By the end of the First Age, Tolkien has battles taking place in a semi-historical time period, but with consequences that remain mythological, as when Morgoth is banished into the Void beyond the confines of Eä. Tolkien continues to incorporate mythic themes into events of the Second Age as well as later Ages. Stories from the Second Age feature the rise of Morgoth’s former captain Sauron, the creation of the Rings of Power (including the One Ring), and the achievements and downfall of Númenor, a great kingdom of Men. Yet, as realistically as Tolkien presents the arrogant choices and hubristic motivations of the Númenórean kings, the end of the Second Age also highlights mythological themes. When ArPharazôn ignores the Ban forbidding Men to sail to the lands inhabited by the Valar, a cataclysm causes their island paradise of Númenor to sink Atlantis-like into the Sea. In addition, the Fall of Númenor results in the mythic sundering of the Undying Lands from the mortal world, so that only the immortal Elves “may still if they will, wearying of the circle of the world, take ship and find the ‘straight way’, and come to the ancient or True West” (Letters 156). While Tolkien fashions the Third Age and the beginning of the Fourth Age told in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings as historical time periods, the events of these Ages build upon the same mythological themes that characterize the earlier Ages. The stories of these later Ages relate the mythically based machinations of Sauron to dominate Middle-earth, the destruction of the One Ring, and the final sailing of the Elves to the Undying Lands of the West. Thus, Tolkien continues to promote the concepts of Fall, Mortality, and Machine as the foundation of his mythology from its earliest cosmological myths through its latest, but no less mythic stories.

Mythology for England Initially, Tolkien planned to create a work that would “restore to the English an epic tradition and present them with a mythology of their own” that he “could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country” (Letters 144). Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien’s foremost biographer, explained such intentions as founded in Tolkien’s desire to shape a “mythology for England” (1977, 100), a term that has become commonplace in modern Tolkien scholarship (see also ch. 5). Tolkien hoped such a mythology might redress the “poverty of [his] own beloved country,” which he perceived “had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil),” especially not of the “quality .  .  . [he] sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands” (Letters 144). He deeply appreciated the qualities of Greek, Celtic, Romance, Germanic, and



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Scandinavian legends and myths that he understood as integral to the spirit of those cultures, and he wanted to construct a parallel body of works that would be similarly evocative of English culture. In particular, Tolkien admired Elias Lönnrot’s reconstruction of the Kalevala from fragments of Finnish folktales and regretted the lack of English stories imbued with similar cultural identity and impact (see ch. 18). However, folktales and national epics taking place on the island of Britain, in languages recognized as English, had not survived the various migrations and conquests of earlier peoples. As much as Tolkien studied and valued the Old English epic poem Beowulf, it could not meet his criteria for a work of English myth because it is set in Scandinavia rather than England. As a result, Tolkien’s myth-making, like Lönnrot’s, was founded on what Anne C. Petty describes as his desire “to render a service to the literary heritage” of his nation and “to provide historic continuity with the past through an epic that would serve as a mirror of the national soul expressed in its folk poetry” (2004, 71). Yet, as Tolkien’s network of tales that he called a legendarium grew to include multiple versions of stories with complex literary histories and relationships to each other, Middle-earth’s mythology also outgrew its author’s original intention to focus his stories on a purely English tone and temperament. Instead, over the course of his lifetime, the ever-expanding scale of Tolkien’s legendarium developed from themes and concepts centering primarily on Germanic, Finnish, and Scandinavian myths and legends to the integration of mythic materials and fragments from many other cultures. As Verlyn Flieger comments, “the entire structure came to resemble real-world mythologies in the cumulative process and temporal span of its composition, as well as in the scope of its subject matter” (2005, xiv). Indeed, the city of Minas Tirith incorporates elements from Troy’s legend, while Beren and Lúthien’s romance echoes narrative patterns from the Greek tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. To cite other examples, the history of Númenor recalls the Greek myth of Atlantis and the Mûmakil of the Haradrim are only barely disguised Indian elephants, which feature prominently in some Hindu myths. Nevertheless, at its core, Middle-earth’s immense mythic history consistently highlights particularly English and Germanic material. Not only do the Rohirrim speak the language of Beowulf, but as Carl F. Hostetter and Arden R. Smith note: Erman and Elmir, the first Men . . . and Ingwe, both the Lord of the Light-elves and the King of Luthany – are all derived from English and Germanic mythology, so that Tolkien could in some measure satisfy his desire for a mythology for England. (1996, 289)

In another case, the word “earendel,” which Tolkien discovered in an Old English poem from the Exeter Book (Letters 385), became the kernel that inspired the story of Eärendel, the heroic mortal seafarer who marries an Elf woman, sails to Valinor to save Elves and Men, and bears a Silmaril through the firmament of the stars. The character of Eriol/Ælfwine, “the Anglo-Saxon chronicler of Elvish mythology,” also

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retains the Germanic influence on Tolkien’s mythology (Hostetter and Smith 1996, 289). Appearing only in unfinished material published in The History of Middle-earth series, Eriol/Ælfwine travels between Middle-earth and England “as an ambassador between Tolkien’s mythology and English legend” (Hostetter and Smith 1996, 286). Such characters remain emblematic of Tolkien’s early wish to integrate England’s lands and language, soil and tongue, into a mythology representing the national identity of its people.

Structures and Layers Set within an alternate, primeval timeline and geography that predates the recordable chronologies of our own world, Tolkien’s sub-created mythology, like other primary myths in the real world, offers: . . . a system of hereditary stories of ancient origin which were once believed to be true by a particular cultural group, and which served to explain (in terms of the intentions and actions of deities and other supernatural beings) why the world is as it is and things happen as they do. (Abrams 1999, 170)

While definitions vary, world myths typically: 1) are regarded as accounts of a remote past; 2) explain origins of life, the universe, and the natural world by means of logic and design; 3) evolve from the actions of supernatural or superhuman figures; 4) establish authority for social and cultural institutions, such as governing structures, racial divisions among people, and religious practices; 5) reflect basic behavioral structures related to values, morals, or attitudes, such as good vs. evil, light vs. dark, and rich vs. poor; and 6) evoke the contemplation of the sacred through mystery, ritual, or transcendent experience.5 Even though the world from which it draws its stories is fantastical in nature, Tolkien’s legendarium is built upon these same characteristics. Along with these common conventions, most world mythologies are further organized according to clearly defined hierarchies, and the structure of Tolkien’s mythology is no different. Tolkien constructs his world along a vertical configuration highly reminiscent of the Great Chain of Being, a metaphor by which ancient through Renaissance peoples perceived the order of their world.6 In Tolkien’s cosmos, Ilúvatar is the supreme being at the top of the chain, the Ainur are lesser beings below him, and those Ainur who choose to dwell in Arda occupy places below those who remain with Ilúvatar outside the world. The Maiar are also deities, but placed in the chain beneath the Valar. Within each category is a similarly organized structure. As “the first of all Kings” and “lord of the realm of Arda” (S 26), Manwë holds the highest position among the Valar, followed by Ulmo, then Aulë, and the rest ranked below these. While it is debatable whether Elves and Men are placed together on the same level



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in Tolkien’s order, it is clear that the Dwarves, beings created by Aulë, are considered lower on the chain than both Elves and Men. Such rankings imply a moral hierarchy organized according to a being’s closeness in nature and spirit to Ilúvatar. Yet Tolkien takes great care to counterbalance the vertical, hierarchical structure of his mythos with an equally important, horizontal cosmic order based on the cooperative union of differing forces. Each Vala generally is paired with another who is equally ranked and who has taken the shape of the opposite gender. These genderbalanced couples exercise complementary functions or spheres of influence. Thus, through their union, Tolkien explains that “When Manwë there ascends his throne and looks forth, if Varda is beside him, he sees further than all other eyes . . . And if Manwë is with her, Varda hears more clearly than all other ears” (S 26). Not only does Tolkien establish the societal and moral order of the supernatural beings responsible for the design and origins of Middle-earth, but he also develops the cultural divisions and behavioral patterns of the other beings who populate his world. Unlike early cultural mythologies from the real world that are centered on narrowly defined climates, geographies, genetic characteristics, and ritual behaviors, Middle-earth myths incorporate wide variance among peoples, languages, cultures, and landscapes. The mythic history of the Elves and Men, for example, encompasses wide-ranging migrations that lead to differences in living habits as well as cultural heritage. Detailed descriptions of geographical landscapes and rationales for why different groups of peoples inhabit or leave those places form a crucial part of Tolkien’s mythology. In addition to structuring his “immense complex of stories” (Shippey 2005, 253) from patterns common to legends and myths from our own world’s ancient and medieval cultures, Tolkien also composes Middle-earth’s historic present to include layers of its fictional ancient past. By layering his fictional world’s past and present, Tolkien provides those texts of Middle-earth’s later history with a narrative “ ‘depth,’ the literary quality Tolkien valued most of all” (Shippey 2005, 351). Such internal layering of mythology and history connects events from Middle-earth’s past directly to its later circumstances. As Flieger remarks, “The chief function of any mythology, real or feigned, is to mirror a culture to itself, giving it a history and identity as well as a connection to the supernatural or transcendent” (2005, 139). In Tolkien’s world, the authenticity of Middle-earth’s mythic history and identity is realized frequently in characters as in events. Among those who embody both Middle-earth’s mythic past and its historical present are such figures as: Galadriel, who dwells in Valinor during the mythic time before the First Age, returns to Middle-earth during the First Age, and harbors the Fellowship’s quest at the end of the Third Age; Elrond, who is the son of the First Age’s mythic lovers Eärendil and Elwing, builds Rivendell and fights in the Last Alliance when the One Ring is taken from Sauron in the Second Age, and outfits the Fellowship in the Third Age; and Aragorn, a mortal Man of the Third Age whose lineage traces to Beren and Lúthien, the First Age’s most heroic lovers.

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Origins in Sound The words, sounds, and even simple syllables of the languages Tolkien learned in school and cherished throughout his life provide the central aesthetic qualities for his invented languages and their associated mythology (see chs. 1 and 14). Captivated by the aural patterns of a wide variety of languages, most especially Welsh, Finnish, Old English, and Old Norse, Tolkien began early in his life to construct his own languages and then stories to explain both the content and the register of the words and phonemes in these languages. In a letter, Tolkien commented that his earliest stories developed from his languages, that his fictional world was “fundamentally linguistic in inspiration . . . The invention of languages is the foundation. The ‘stories’ were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse” (Letters 219, Tolkien’s emphasis). To lend his mythology “a consistency of linguistic style, and an illusion of historicity” (Letters 143), he carefully assessed and crafted the sounds of his languages. Generally, Tolkien was most interested in promoting sounds he perceived as organically related to the cultural history of his characters, sounds that resonated throughout his world’s mythic past. Not only is Tolkien’s mythology based in the evolution of his invented languages, but the style of his narrative language is often rooted in historical prototypes. Especially in the story of Arda’s creation, his narrative style echoes the elevated, formal, distanced language of Genesis in the Bible. His expression of such language style was intentional, consciously designed to: . . . give his creation story a strength and authority similar to that of the Creation in the Bible. The register of biblical language has for centuries carried a power and influence greater than that of any other. Tolkien is exploiting the reader’s associations with this kind of language to give his own narrative, language, and myth greater resonance. (Hiley 2004, 848)

Along with the inspiration and affective expression of style afforded him by language, Tolkien’s mythology reflects overall the power of sound, especially through music. Noting the close connections between music and mythology, Bradford Lee Eden explains that “Tolkien knew and recognized the importance of music as an anthropomorphic reality and creational material in many mythologies” (2003, 183; see also ch. 34). While in Genesis the Word is the original source of inspiration, Tolkien intensifies the aural force of the Word in his creation myth by turning it into music. Myth, music, and history connect through the “fundamental mythical conception, the world as a Great Music made visible, its history a fulfillment of creative purposes” (Rosebury 2003, 107). A source of mythic invocation, evolution, and propagation, music becomes the initiating power as well as an engaged constant that establishes and further promotes the foundational aspects of Arda and its development through time and space.



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Arda is created through celestial music that Ilúvatar initiates and is added to by the Ainur. As Tolkien describes the act of original creation in his mythology: Then the voices of the Ainur, like unto harps and lutes, and pipes and trumpets, and viols and organs, and like unto countless choirs singing with words, began to fashion the theme of Ilúvatar to a great music . . . And as they looked and wondered this World began to unfold its history, and it seemed to them that it lived and grew. (S 15)

The Ainur participate in the song begun by Ilúvatar, and the music they create is both uniquely their own and a unified force grown beyond their individuated selves. Nevertheless, individually, they are not privy to all parts at once, and the music “contained things which they had not thought” (S 18). The multiplicity and incomplete nature of their perceptions adds to the layering effect of Tolkien’s mythology. The Ainur’s personal investment in and comprehension of only a portion of Ilúvatar’s overall composition separates them from each other and elicits attentiveness to selfinterests. By opening new possibilities for self-expression, the motives that evolve from the combined musical efforts of the Ainur and Ilúvatar enrich the mythological landscape of Arda. Despite the myriad voices, motivations, yearnings, and experiences within the music, the whole fits and builds together a unity of its own. Yet, Arda’s creation is only one means by which Tolkien uses music as a mythic force. As Cami Agan argues, song is also presented as a compelling “mythic conduit” (2008, 50) in the legends of Middle-earth. To illustrate such use of song in The Lord of the Rings, Agan reminds us of the Hobbits’ first encounter with Elves en route to Woodhall: “the hobbits recall the experience as a kind of essence of numinous joy; Sam later describes the experience in terms of song: ‘it was the singing that went to my heart, if you know what I mean’ ” (2008, 50). Steeped in the otherworldly origins and histories of Tolkien’s legendarium, the songs of these Elves resonate beyond personal experience to link Sam’s emotions with memory. In a similar way, as morning dawns on the Pelennor Fields and Théoden calls the charge of the Rohirrim, a grimmer connection between music, mythology, and history occurs: . . . the battle-fury of his fathers ran like new fire in his veins, and he was borne up on Snowmane like a god of old, even as Oromë the Great in the battle of the Valar when the world was young . . . And then all the host of Rohan burst into song, and they sang as they slew, for the joy of battle was on them, and the sound of their singing that was fair and terrible came even to the City. (RK, V, v, 1097)

With scenes like this, Tolkien provides readers with “visionary” moments “wherein the actions of the ‘now’ resonate fully with the actions of the ancient myth” (Agan 2008, 61). Just so, near the end of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien confirms the power of music to form connections between the historical present and the mythic past. The minstrel sings of Frodo and Sam’s Quest to the crowd gathered upon the Field of Cormallen “until their hearts, wounded with sweet words, overflowed, and their joy

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was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together” (RK, VI, iv, 1249–1250).

Collaboration and Cooperation Unlike many epic narratives that recount the activities of solitary, idealized heroes who succeed at supremely difficult challenges without the aid of others, Tolkien’s myths and legends often privilege heroes who collaborate to achieve common goals. Tolkien insists over and over again that when characters join together and cooperate with each other, they succeed; but when they reject cooperation, tragedy ensues. While readers are perhaps most familiar with the example of cooperation set by the Fellowship in The Lord of the Rings, characters from throughout the legendarium display this practice. For example, when the Elves and Men set aside their differences to form alliances, they gain victory over Morgoth. Only by collaborating with each other can Beren and Lúthien prevail in their quest to take a Silmaril from Morgoth. The great sea-faring hero Eärendil and his wife Elwing, both of whom are the children of cooperative unions between an immortal Elf and a mortal Man, achieve more by working together and with others than if they had worked alone. With Cirdan’s aid, Eärendil is able to build the ship Vingilot. With Elwing’s aid, Eärendil sails Vingilot to become the first mortal to find Valinor. Because Eärendil makes the journey not for his own sake, but for the sake of others who need the Valar’s aid, the Valar accept his request for their collaboration. Echoing these same mythic lessons about the power of collaboration and incapacity of selfish isolation, The Lord of the Rings makes it clear that Frodo would not have gotten far in his quest without Sam, nor would the people of Minas Tirith have been victorious without the aid of their Rohirrim allies, who in turn were aided by the joined efforts of Legolas, Gimli, and Aragorn, who themselves sought their own fearful collaboration with the legendary oathbreakers bound to the Paths of the Dead. Further, the redemption of the oathbreakers is possible only through their cooperation with Aragorn to defeat the armies of the Corsairs. Such acts reinforce Tolkien’s mythic theme that collaboration offers the greatest possibility for political, cultural, and personal progress. In contrast, when characters in Tolkien’s world act out of selfishness and fail to understand the centrality of cooperation with and on behalf of others, disaster follows. Fëanor’s insistence on keeping the Silmarils for himself alone instead of using them to restore the Light of the Two Trees to benefit all of Valinor causes his doom, as well as that of his brothers and sons and many others. Similarly, Túrin’s unwillingness to serve as part of a community or to coordinate his efforts for the benefit of others causes the death of his friends, his sister, and ultimately himself. In Tolkien’s mythology, selfishness is never valued or rewarded. As William Provost (1990) argues, the tension between selflessness and selfishness in Tolkien’s works is based on the struggle between power and love that rests at the heart of the struggle between evil and good.



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In tandem with the themes of collaboration and selflessness, the mythology of Middle-earth promotes love as the highest form of personal and political motivation and collaboration. Tolkien makes it plain that the Ainur’s works and deeds are motivated by a love not only of Ilúvatar, but also of those beings whom he creates, especially the Elves. When the Ainur “beheld them, the more did they love them, being things other than themselves, strange and free, wherein they saw the mind of Ilúvatar reflected anew, and learned yet a little more of his wisdom” (S 18). In fact, Tolkien ties the Ainur’s love to Middle-earth when he writes that it is a “necessity of their love, that their power should thenceforward be contained and bounded in the World, to be within it for ever, until it is complete, so that they are its life and it is theirs” (S 20). Tolkien emphasizes the need for similar loving stewardship of beings or places throughout his mythology. The Elf-lord Thingol and his Maia wife Melian offer a model that emphasizes the political and societal benefits of loving care for a physical realm and its people, while Denethor’s rule of Gondor provides a negative example for how stewardship separated from love can go awry. Further exploring the importance of love in the mythic context, Tolkien demonstrates how love can lead not only to rarified emotional capacities, but also to heightened achievements. Melian and Thingol, and Beren and Lúthien, become the mythic patterns for possibilities available to Aragorn and Arwen, and even to Faramir and Éowyn. That such love is presented as romantic and unified, rather than sexual and conflicting, works in concord with other characteristics of collaboration in Tolkien’s mythology. No less important than Tolkien’s insistence on male-female love as essential to the mythological order of his world is the vital power of friendship. The oath of “abiding friendship” that Finrod swears to Barahir and all his kin (S 152) typifies the love between friends that supports and defends powerful alliances against later evils. Similarly, friendship compels Fingon to search for and ultimately free Maedhros from his imprisonment on a precipice of Thangorodrim. Such patterns from myth and legend provide cues for friendships such as Legolas’s and Gimli’s, which exemplify the kinds of personal growth that lead to substantive forms of cultural, social, and political progress.

Endings Fated and Chosen In addition to cosmological stories about the origins of the world, many mythologies also present sequences of mythic history in terms of the nature of human behavior and how such behavior progresses from the action of either fate or free will. Although the larger cosmic plan of Tolkien’s mythology advances often through the choices afforded by free will, events governed by fate also play key roles. Even Melkor’s efforts to sow discord and achieve dominion over Arda suggest that Tolkien viewed his role as fated and inevitable, without hope for redemption. In another case, the tragedy of Túrin seems to be a lesson on the inexorability of fate. No matter how much Túrin

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tries to isolate himself from others, he cannot avoid the fate demanded by the curse on his family that Morgoth’s “hate shall pursue them to the ends of the world . . . they shall die without hope, cursing both life and death” (UT 87–88). In the end, Túrin unwittingly causes the death of all his family and friends; his efforts to do otherwise are futile before fate. Nevertheless, although fate clearly operates in Tolkien’s mythology, the function of free will provides options for choice that are particularly central to his stories and their themes. In his works, Tolkien presents choice as linked closely to the eucatastrophic impulse to find hope even in final defeat, hope for a new world to arise as the result of the old world’s failure. Choice is the means by which independent free will makes possible unexpected results in the cosmic design. Characters who understand that their own free will gives them the authority to enact good or evil are less limited than other characters. For example, as Keith W. Jensen explains: [much of Túrin’s] misfortune could have been avoided if he had not trusted so much to fate. Túrin never understands that humans make their own choices and can decide their own fate. He has no hope of redemption, and that lack of hope causes him to make poor, and often rash, choices. Nevertheless, they are choices, and while the life of this man ends in tragedy, he is the one who ultimately causes it. (2010, 110)

Túrin’s extreme focus on the cursed state of himself and his family compels him to make choices as an individual without attention to the needs or good of others. His free will becomes more and more constrained by his poor choices until he becomes trapped by a fate that no longer allows the operation of free will. One of the central lessons about the function of free will in Tolkien’s mythology is that choices made on behalf of good lead to “good results, while evil intentions are self defeating” (Loy and Goodhew 2004, 8). Early in The Silmarillion, the music of Ilúvatar is disrupted when: it came into the heart of Melkor to interweave matters of his own imagining that were not in accord with the theme of Ilúvatar; for he sought therein to increase the power and glory of the part assigned to himself. (S 16)

As Janet Brennan Croft explains, the decisions Sauron and Melkor make suggest that “free will is something the side of evil can’t control, understand, or plan for” (2010, 134). When Melkor seeks dominion over all of Middle-earth, it is not his free will that causes grievous results, but rather the choices he makes with that free will. Despite the choices Melkor makes for destruction and discord, Tolkien’s mythology asserts that individual will must always be given free rein in order to allow the possibility of unexpected good. The opportunity for Ilúvatar to shape Melkor’s theme to be “but a part of the whole and tributary to its glory” (S 17) would not have arisen had Melkor’s free will been denied or limited to inevitable fate. The roles fate and free will play in Middle-earth are also relevant to the eschatological features of its mythology. Middle-earth’s initial paradisial state hints at an



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afterlife, while its End of Days seems to be fated, if not always foreseeable. Although the incomplete nature of the legendarium at the time of Tolkien’s death leaves these crucial elements of his mythology outlined only in part, both the provident choices of individuals and a destined plan for a cosmos disinterested in the random possibilities offered by free will are evident in his mythic narratives. In terms of a paradisial place or state, Tolkien repeatedly identifies Valinor as “an actual Earthly Paradise” (Letters 237), “a kind of Paradise, the home of the Gods” (Letters 148), “an earthly Elvish paradise” (Letters 198), and “ ‘Arda Unmarred,’ the Earth unspoiled by evil” (Letters 328). Melkor’s choice to seek dominion over others brings evil into Arda that mars its Edenic state, causing geographical and astronomical upheaval, strife between races and kindred, and spiritual devastation. Choices made by Melkor lead to choices made by Fëanor and his people, which then lead to the Valar’s decision to detach the Undying Lands from the paths of ordinary physical space in Middle-earth. While Tolkien implies that the discordant nature of Melkor’s will in relation to Ilúvatar’s impetus for concord and harmony makes such a decision inevitable, the fact that the legendarium indicates that other choices were and may still be possible allows hope for one day reunifying the Undying Lands with Middle-earth. A. Keith Kelly and Michael Livingston (2009) note that Tolkien’s mythology refers to Aman (which contains Valinor) as an earthly paradise, recalling an Edenic location within the world, rather than a heavenly or celestial paradise characters enter after death. While Elves do not die utterly from the world, Men and other non-Elven peoples such as Hobbits and Dwarves are mortal and fated to die. Regardless of the impact of free will in other aspects of their lives, they have no choice in this matter. While Frodo and Bilbo choose to leave Middle-earth at the end of The Lord of the Rings to journey by sea to the “far green country” (RK, VI, ix, 1348) beyond the white shores, their choice allows them to dwell only for a time in the Undying Lands of Aman, rather than to escape their mortality or to choose a different destination for their afterlife. Tolkien insists that all mortals eventually will die in Aman, for it exists on earth (albeit in a removed location) and within time: Frodo was sent or was allowed to pass over Sea to heal him– if that could be done, before he died. He would have eventually to ‘pass away’: no mortal could, or can, abide for ever on earth, or within Time. (Letters 328, Tolkien’s emphasis)

Although Tolkien’s mythology establishes the Halls of Mandos as the site in which Elves wait in the afterlife, no parallel location is mentioned for Men to enter when they die; even “the Eldar wondered much at the strange fate of Men, for in all their lore there was no account of it, and its end was hidden from them” (S 149). Similarly, Tolkien remains as cryptic about whether the End of Days in Middleearth is fated or open to the choices of free will as he is about the afterlife of Men. However, as Elizabeth A. Whittingham (2007) details, the glimpses he gives of his world’s eschatology focus on three alternative mythic visions, which sometimes seem

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to be wholly separate options and at other times may be interrelated. Although the End of Days is briefly referenced at the end of the “Quenta Silmarillion” (S 255), most of Tolkien’s work exploring these possibilities occurs only in fragments from The History of Middle-earth series. One of Tolkien’s possible ends for Middle-earth results from fulfilling the Second Music theme that was motivated originally by Ilúvatar, but spoiled by Melkor. In this scenario, the music would be performed in its full perfection, as it ought to have been without Melkor’s intervention. Another alternative Tolkien considered for his world’s mythic ending was a cataclysmic Last Battle, drawing heavily on the inevitable doom and complete annihilation of the world described in Old Norse mythology as Ragnarök. Interestingly, Túrin, Tolkien’s most tragic and ill-fated character, is presented in several of Tolkien’s notes in The History of Middle-earth series versions as the hero in the Last Battle who will be responsible for vanquishing Morgoth for all time. Tolkien’s third possible ending for Middle-earth involves the concept of restoring Arda to what it should have been, resulting in Arda Unmarred or Arda Healed. The Arda Unmarred or Healed scenario presents the possibility that the final doom of Middle-earth is not catastrophic, but ultimately eucatastrophic in that Ilúvatar makes “it possible that even the most malicious of actions ‘shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful’ ” (Whitt 2010, 127). Whittingham further attaches such a vision as Arda Healed to Tolkien’s increasing desire as he aged to bring his world into even stronger accord with his religious faith. She writes that “the eschatology of Middle-earth demonstrates Tolkien’s move away from the Norse Doom of the Gods to a closer alignment with the Christian theology and images of trust and future vindication despite present defeat” (2007, 200).

Beyond England to Synthesis One of Tolkien’s most persistent efforts in constructing his mythology was to synthesize those aspects of our own world’s stories that mattered most to him. Thus, his mythology’s reworkings of both classical and medieval themes speaks to his love of those narratives that inspired his early thoughts and imagination. Shippey notes that Tolkien was “deeply conscious of the strong continuity between the heroic world and the modern one” (2000, xxviii). His Middle-earth mythology reflects this continuity by joining our world’s myths with his own and his world’s mythic past with its historical present. Tolkien populates Middle-earth’s history with myths of dragons and stars, of an ever-present eye of fire and a white horse with a lineage beyond time itself, and of lovers who change their shapes but never the yearning of their hearts to work together. Through mythic images like these, Tolkien evokes the heritage of our own world’s western culture, yet draws them with new outlines rendered for modern sensibilities.



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Beyond such literary intentions, Tolkien seeks a synthesis for his mythology that unites his readers, no less than his characters, in a collaborative effort to recognize and partake of the “sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur,” which he calls “eucatastrophe” (OFS 75, see ch. 5). Central to his mythic vision of Middle-earth, the possibility of eucatastrophe “is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies . . . universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief” (OFS 75). Frodo expects to die on Mount Doom, a place of mythic origins and deeds, but wakes instead in a bright sunlit room to the laughter of friends. From the darkest pit of Angband, Beren hears Lúthien’s answering song and knows hope where before despair was inevitable. Armor-clad Éowyn knows joy as she fulfills prophecy by killing the Witch-King on a blood-drenched field beside a white horse and her beloved lord. By drawing together such extraordinary images, Tolkien seeks a synthesis not only of literary materials, but also of those immeasurable qualities of heart and spirit that respond to stories of fantasy and mythology. For all his readers, that mythic convergence of image and word, of sound and story, creates the sudden “turn” which leaves “a piercing glimpse of joy, and heart’s desire, that for a moment passes outside the frame, rends indeed the very web of story, and lets a gleam come through” (OFS 76).

Notes 1  The internal timeline of Tolkien’s Middleearth is complicated by the fact that the majority of the history and mythology of his world was published posthumously. While most readers generally engage Tolkien’s world first through The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, some may welcome suggestions for reading the various parts of the history of Middle-earth in chronological order. For such readers, the approach proposed by David Bratman (2003) offers a straightforward and easily managed reading order, while Larry King’s more complex Chronological Tolkien system (2011) features a Reading Order Calculator that provides highly detailed information for determining the chronological order for a multitude of editions and formats of Tolkien’s works. 2  Milton Waldman was an editor at Collins publishers who briefly considered publishing The Silmarillion together with The Lord of the Rings after Allen & Unwin’s initial rejection of the work. This letter is published in both Letters and in the front matter to the second edition

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of The Silmarillion, although both sources omit a portion that summarizes the events of The Lord of the Rings. The omitted portion may be found in Companion (742–749). Especially useful sources for extensive and detailed maps of the geographical changes of Tolkien’s world over time are Karen Wynn Fonstad (1991) and the LOTR Project’s (2013) online interactive map of Middle-earth. For those wishing a complete historical timeline of Tolkien’s world, the interactive online timeline at the LOTR Project (2013) is most helpful. This summary is my own, taken from such sources as Roland Barthes (1993); Joseph Campbell (1968); William Doty (2004); Alan Dundes (1984); Mircea Eliade (1963); G. S. Kirk (1973); Margaret Hiley (2004); Claude Lévi-Strauss (1995); Robert Segal (2004); and Marta Weigle (1982). Classic discussions of the Great Chain of Being in history and literature are Lovejoy (1964) and Tillyard (1959).

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Abrams, M. H. 1999. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 7th edn. Orlando, FL: Harcourt. Agan, Cami. 2008. “Song as Mythic Conduit in The Fellowship of the Ring.” Mythlore, 26.3/4: 41–63. Barthes, Roland. 1993. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. London: Vintage. Bratman, David. 2003. “The Order to Read Tolkien’s Books.” Available at http://home.earthlink .net/∼dbratman/tolkien_order.html, accessed May 15, 2013. Campbell, Joseph. 1968. The Masks of God. Vol. 4: Creative Mythology. New York: Viking. Carpenter, Humphrey. 1977. J. R. R. Tolkien – A Biography. London: Allen & Unwin. Croft, Janet Brennan. 2010. “The Thread on Which Doom Hangs: Free Will, Disobedience, and Eucatastrophe in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth.” Mythlore, 29.1–2: 131–150. Doty, William. 2004. Myth: A Handbook. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Dundes, Alan, ed. 1984. Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth. Berkeley: University of California Press. Eden, Bradford Lee. 2003. “The ‘Music of the Spheres’: Relationships between Tolkien’s The Silmarillion and Medieval Cosmological and Religious Theory.” In Tolkien the Medievalist, edited by Jane Chance, 183–193. London: Routledge. Eliade, Mircea. 1963. Myth and Reality. Trans. Willard R. Trask. New York: Harper & Row. Flieger, Verlyn. 2005. Interrupted Music: The Making of Tolkien’s Mythology. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Fonstad, Karen Wynn. 1991. The Atlas of Middleearth. Rev. edn. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Hiley, Margaret. 2004. “Stolen Language, Cosmic Models: Myth and Mythology in Tolkien.” Modern Fiction Studies, 50.4: 838–858. Hostetter, Carl F. and Arden R. Smith. 1996. “A Mythology for England.” Mythlore, 21.2: 281– 290. Jensen, Keith W. 2010. “Dissonance in the Divine Theme: The Issue of Free Will in Tolkien’s Silmarillion.” In Middle-earth Minstrel: Essays on Music in Tolkien, edited by Bradford Lee Eden, 102–113. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Kelly, A. Keith and Michael Livingston. 2009. “ ‘A Far Green Country’: Tolkien, Paradise, and the End of All Things in Medieval Literature.” Mythlore, 27.3/4: 83–102. King, Larry. 2011. “The Chronological Tolkien Page.” http://www.chronology.org/tolkien, accessed May 15, 2013. Kirk, G. S. 1973. Myth: Its Meaning and Functions in Ancient and Other Cultures. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1995. Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture. New York: Schocken Books. LOTR Project. 2013. http://lotrproject.com, accessed May 22, 2013. Lovejoy, Arthur O. 1964. The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Loy, David R. and Linda Goodhew. 2004. The Dharma of Dragons and Daemons: Buddhist Themes in Modern Fantasy. Boston: Wisdom Publications. Petty, Anne C. 2004. “Identifying England’s Lönnrot.” Tolkien Studies, 1: 69–84. Provost, William. 1990. “Language and Myth in the Fantasy Writings of J. R. R. Tolkien.” Modern Age, 33.1: 42–52. Rosebury, Brian. 2003. Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Segal, Robert. 2004. Myth: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shippey, Tom. 2000. J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. London: HarperCollins. Shippey, Tom. 2005. The Road to Middle-earth. Rev. and expanded edn. London: HarperCollins. Tillyard, E. M. W. 1959. The Elizabethan World Picture. New York: Vintage Books. Weigle, Marta. 1982. Spiders & Spinsters: Women and Mythology. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Whitt, Richard J. 2010. “Germanic Fate and Doom in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion.” Mythlore, 29.1/2: 115–129. Whittingham, Elizabeth A. 2007. The Evolution of Tolkien’s Mythology: A Study of the History of Middle-earth. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

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The Silmarillion: Tolkien’s Theory of Myth, Text, and Culture Gergely Nagy

There is no question that the “Silmarillion” is the greatest “great narrative” within Tolkien’s legendarium, and this is so in more than one sense. Firstly and most literally, it is a long narrative of the whole history of Middle-earth, from creation to (hints of) an eschatology. It is long both in terms of the Ages of the fictional world (although those took their time to evolve), and in terms of the stretch of time through which Tolkien was occupied with it. Slightly less literally, it is the background narrative supplying much of the famous quality of “depth” to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, in effect the mythology that allows those texts to become “mythopoeic.” The way Tolkien’s most famous works are “productive of myth” is best explored and appreciated with reference to the “Silmarillion” and the complex relationship between the texts. But thirdly and more theoretically, the “Silmarillion” serves as a “master narrative,” something that readers and critics of Tolkien always return and refer to: a veritably Lyotardian “great narrative” (see Lyotard 1984, xxiii–xxiv) that governs and explains everything (or the adherents of which claim it does). All of these are true in a certain sense: Tolkien himself saw the “Silmarillion” as his most important work, central to understanding the entirety of his fiction. But at the same time it is clear that it is immensely problematic: most importantly because it is not a “work” in the usual sense. The title “Silmarillion” is used in two senses in Tolkien criticism, and their difference offers the main guidelines with which one needs to approach it. (The) “Silmarillion” (corpus) refers to the products of Tolkien’s practically lifelong creative process, while The Silmarillion (in italics) means the book of this title, edited by Christopher Tolkien (with the assistance of Guy Kay), and published in 1977 – the A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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first posthumous Tolkien publication. The former is not a “work” but a collection of versions (available now in The History of Middle-earth series, see ch. 10), while the latter is often regarded as not an authentic “Tolkien text.” But even the “Silmarillion” corpus consists of texts (and their versions, with variations documented in the notes): it is now as Tolkien always wanted it – a collection of sometimes inconsistent texts, tracing a relatively stable narrative over a very long period of time, involving a huge cast of characters. And in a sense also quite consonant with Tolkien’s thinking, the 1977 Silmarillion is an excellent representation of that textual corpus. What one needs to keep in mind about the “Silmarillion,” thus, is (1) that it is not a “work” and not even a “(single) text,” but a textual corpus; (2) that we will most certainly never know exactly how Tolkien “intended it” to stand; but (3) that complete with the 1977 Silmarillion, this whole textual complex can in good faith be taken to represent Tolkien’s intentions rather authentically.

The Creation of the “Silmarillion” Corpus: The Writing and Publishing Process In a book tracing the evolution of Tolkien’s mythological themes, Elizabeth Whittingham divided the writer’s long creative career into six periods, and her outline is useful in tracing the stages of the composition (2007, 6–7). The starting points were some of Tolkien’s earlier poems (written in 1914 and 1915), containing the germs of the magnificent tales of the later mythology, but it was really in 1916–1917, while convalescing after his period of service in the war, that the ideas started to cohere to produce what he wanted to call the “Book of Lost Tales.” He continued writing when he worked on the staff of the Oxford English Dictionary (1918–1920). These “Lost Tales” were more or less separate stories, kept together by an ever-changing frame narrative, and abandoned before the whole cycle was completed and worked together. In Whittingham’s second period, the 1920s, Tolkien turned towards poetry and summary. He started casting two of his oldest stories, those of Beren and Lúthien and of Túrin, into verse: producing the “Alliterative Children of Húrin” and the “Lay of Leithian,” and then revising them (even though both were incomplete). He lent these to his old schoolmaster, R. W. Reynolds, in 1926, and he wrote a quick-paced, compressed summary of the whole mythology (“Sketch of the Mythology”) to contextualize them. This he enlarged in 1930 as the “Quenta Noldorinwa”: these were the first largely comprehensive accounts of the “great narrative.” In the 1930s he also started two annalistic accounts, the (earlier) “Annals of Valinor” and the (earlier) “Annals of Beleriand.” The next period, the late 1930s (when Tolkien completed and published The Hobbit) saw the revision of the 1930 “Quenta” (as the “Quenta Silmarillion,” perhaps in 1937) and the two Annals, producing the (later) “Annals of Valinor” and “Annals of Beleriand.” At this time Tolkien also went back to his “Lost Tale” about the creation of the world, and rehandled it as the “Ainulindalë,” separating it from the “Quenta”



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tradition. He also wrote the first version of “The Fall of Númenor” (along with its proposed frame, “The Lost Road,” an unfinished time-travel narrative; see ch. 11). Whittingham divided the next 20 or so years into two distinct periods (during and after the writing of The Lord of the Rings). Before, during, and after the writing of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien also worked on the “Silmarillion”: his desire to finish it and publish it together with The Lord of the Rings caused some delay in the publication of the trilogy. Even when his inability to finish work and publishers’ reluctance made it clear that joint publication was impossible, he kept revising his mythology in the hope that eventually he would produce a publishable version. A new version of the Númenor story, “The Drowning of Anadûnê” (as well the beginnings of a new frame, “The Notion Club Papers”) was created in a break in the writing (1945–1946) of The Lord of the Rings; and even though little is known about the beginnings of “On the Rings of Power,” this was also in existence by 1948. He could only return “full-time” to the “Silmarillion,” however, when he had already finished The Lord of the Rings and was looking for a publisher. In the late 1940s and early 1950s (Whittingham’s fifth period) he revised the “Ainulindalë” (late 1940s), and returned to the “Quenta Silmarillion” too: the result was “Phase I” of the “Later Quenta” (1950–1952) and the emergence of the separate “Valaquenta” (split off from the first section of the “Quenta”). Tolkien also reconsidered the annalistic material: he wrote the “Annals of Aman” first (evolved from the (later) “Annals of Valinor,” early 1950s), then the “Grey Annals” (from the (later) “Annals of Beleriand,” 1958–1959). Roughly at the same time, “Phase II” of the “Later Quenta” (circa 1958) was written. By 1958, he again returned to the “Fall of Númenor” (eventually to become the “Akallabêth”), and then produced several shorter, more conceptually than narratively focused texts, grappling with aspects of his more and more complex and entangled fictional world. In the last (sixth) period, Tolkien did not do any major rewriting, but continued to struggle with the internal consistency of his fictional world. The shorter essays on separate problems he wrote before his death signal his awareness of the questions the existence of (more or less) fixed texts (The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings) and the more fluid “Silmarillion” narrative brought up. A frequently highlighted crux to illustrate this is the “flat earth” vs. “round earth” question: in the late 1950s, Tolkien felt that his earlier idea about an originally flat world made round at the end of the Second Age by Ilúvatar cannot possibly stand, since even the earlier Elves would have enough astronomical knowledge to know the world is round. While writing extensively about such problems, he did not eventually undertake to revise the whole of the mythology along these lines; and so these remain valuable insights, without much effect on the narrative. After Tolkien’s death, the “Silmarillion” complex thus remained unfinished and unpublished. Two shorter books dealing with the (possible) contents of the mythology signaled interest: Jim Allen’s An Extrapolation on The Silmarillion (1975) collected allusions and hints as well as some interview material, and Clyde S. Kilby’s Tolkien and The Silmarillion (1976) relied on Kilby’s own experience while working with Tolkien in the 1960s. Tolkien’s voluminous correspondence about his mythology with

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a number of friends and readers who wrote to him after the publication of The Lord of the Rings is ample evidence that there was a reading public clamoring for more. His youngest son and literary executive, Christopher Tolkien, soon undertook to edit The Silmarillion, combing through the manuscripts available to him and painstakingly piecing together a text that would be authentic to the best of his knowledge. For a long time, this volume, published in 1977, and the selection of letters which came out in 1981 (Carpenter 1981), were the only indicators of what Tolkien’s mythology really meant. Christopher Tolkien brought out The Silmarillion in one volume, with only a short “Foreword” to discuss its difficulties; the 1977 publication also set down the “canon” of texts as the “Ainulindalë,” the “Valaquenta,” the “Quenta Silmarillion,” the “Akallabêth,” and “Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age.” Genealogical tables, maps, and a linguistic “Elements in Quenya and Sindarin Names” were added. However, the huge amount of manuscripts Tolkien accumulated over his lifetime, forming the basis of the 1977 Silmarillion, was eventually not left unpublished. Christopher Tolkien’s editing work yielded Unfinished Tales (1980) even before the selection of Letters came out (in 1981); and from 1984, he started systematically to edit and publish his father’s writings in what became the 12-volume The History of Middleearth series. Volumes 1–5 and 9–12 of this contain the material of the evolving “Silmarillion” corpus, in editions that are less accessible, but much more informative, than the 1977 text. After the conclusion of the series in 1996, it was for the first time possible to form a more or less complete idea about what exactly the “Silmarillion” was, and how exactly the 1977 text related to it. One inevitable conclusion was the principle formulated above: that the “Silmarillion” is neither a single “work” nor a single “text,” but a complex of texts written over a long period of time and variously related to each other.

The Problems of the “Silmarillion”: Tolkien’s “Intentions” and Criticism In the “Foreword” to the 1977 Silmarillion, Christopher Tolkien stated that his purpose was to produce a “coherent and internally self-consistent narrative” (vi), but since the “Silmarillion” was “a continuing and evolving creation” (vi), this inevitably meant heavy editorial tasks. With the conclusion of The History of Middle-earth, a number of problems in the construction of the 1977 text were uncovered, and critics started to focus on the relationship of the two “Silmarillions.” It has always been problematic, for example, that the 1977 text was, strictly speaking, not Tolkien’s: even though edited from his manuscripts, he never actually wrote or authorized this particular text, and the extent of editorial intervention, as well as the canonical constituent parts, were questions that occupied critics. To this was added the difficult problem of the presentation frame that Tolkien intended for the mythology. The ultimate question always seemed to be “what exactly is the ‘Silmarillion’?”



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Douglas Charles Kane’s book, Arda Reconstructed (2009), answered at least what exactly the 1977 Silmarillion is. Kane painstakingly documents what manuscript version underlies exactly which passage of the published text, and summarizes the primary and supplementary sources in detailed and useful tables. Accurate as his collations are, they rely only on the texts published in The History of Middle-earth, and not the manuscripts themselves; and they often do not note how the source texts themselves relate to each other and their own sources (so it cannot be seen, for instance, how poetic fragments from Tolkien’s 1920s poems end up in the 1977 text). Kane, however, identifies where exactly editorial intervention can be localized (Christopher Tolkien himself often remarked upon these in his notes in the various History of Middle-earth volumes), and only very few passages are left without an identified source. Kane’s book is a hugely important resource, an invaluable companion to the 1977 text, clearing up the question of exactly from what sources, variants, and with what methods The Silmarillion was constructed. The problems of the “Silmarillion canon” were comprehensively discussed in an article by Charles Noad (2000). Before following Tolkien’s changes of mind about exactly what belongs to the “Silmarillion,” he remarks about the characteristic Tolkienian emphasis on texts: “to Tolkien,” Noad writes, “the nature of ‘The Silmarillion’ was highly distinctive: an assemblage of texts, each with its own history and provenance” (2000, 32). The following discussion attempts to establish what Tolkien might have intended to be the constituent parts of this work, but naturally, Noad came to no certain conclusion about the “latest intentions.” This article collects and evaluates very valuable evidence, gathering together what we know about Tolkien’s earlier ideas. Much of the criticism leveled at the 1977 text is based on Tolkien’s known intention to finish the work: this is taken to mean that the “Silmarillion” is supposed to be a final, finished, “great narrative.” But the very fact that Tolkien was unable to produce such a final version shows us that his “intentions” about what the desire to produce the “great narrative” entails might have been less than clear; Noad’s argument is also important because he handles the “Silmarillion” as a collection of texts, and not as a hypothetical “intended narrative,” and shows that the first task of “Silmarillion” criticism is to evolve approaches to this textual complex as it is, including Christopher Tolkien’s 1977 Silmarillion. One cardinal point about Tolkien’s intentions is how he wanted to present the “Silmarillion.” From the Lost Tales on, he apparently thought of his own mythology in terms of texts and their collections: his versions always incorporated the element of “presented-ness,” “written-ness,” as Verlyn Flieger discusses in great detail (2005, 87–118). Noad gives a very thorough account of Tolkien’s conceptions about who wrote and transmitted the fictionalized text of his stories: in the Lost Tales period (and indeed long after), it was the figure of Eriol/Ælfwine, a fictional English mariner, who either writes down what the “fairies” (the predecessors of the Elves) told him in the island identified at some time with Britain, or translates it from the “Golden Book” variously credited to the sages Rúmil or Pengoloð. One or the other of these nearly always appeared in the headings Tolkien occasionally wrote for the “Quenta” revisions;

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and only in the late 1950s did he start hesitating about abandoning this device: “up to about 1958, Ælfwine and Pengoloð are still the originators or transmitters of the ancient lore” (Noad 2000, 65; see also 57). After this, however, Tolkien turned towards another solution: making the “Silmarillion” the work of Bilbo Baggins, collecting and translating Elvish texts in Elrond’s house in Rivendell. Although in letters, notes, and even interviews he discussed the possible provenance of the “Silmarillion” texts in the fictional world (concluding, mostly, that transmission must have happened through the Mannish kingdom of Númenor, thus also accounting for Mannish misunderstandings and misconceptions of all things and stories Elvish), he sometimes also mentioned Bilbo’s possible role (Agøy 2007, 144–145), and in the second edition of The Lord of the Rings (1966) he modified the text so as to mention the “three books of lore that [Bilbo] had made at various times, written in his spidery hand, and labeled on their red backs: Translations from the Elvish, by B.B.” (RK, VI, vi, 1292). With this, “the whole mythology finally devolved into the single ‘vehicle’ of the Red Book [of Westmarch]” (Noad 2000, 65). It is evident that Tolkien more and more emphatically thought of his works as texts within the fictional world, and that he regarded this “duplication of texts” as centrally important to the effect he wished to achieve. This shift towards a more and more complex double textuality is evidenced in the 1930s, when Tolkien started to translate the (earlier) “Annals” to Old English to stand in for Eriol/ Ælfwine’s “original translations”; later, he even produced actual documents for The Lord of the Rings (two leaves from the Book of Mazarbul, or the King’s Letter). At least some early readers clearly recognized this intention: C. S. Lewis, when given “The Lay of Leithian” to read, produced an elaborate pseudo-scholarly commentary in response, complete with fictitious scholars’ names, variant readings, conjectures, jokingly treating the task of criticizing his friend’s work as a philological task. Lewis probably realized Tolkien’s intention easily because he himself was a medieval scholar; and so were many of Tolkien’s role models, all of whom worked with textual complexes, molding their variation into some form of an epitome. Many critics (among them, Shippey, Flieger, Anne C. Petty, and Jason Fisher) have pointed out the importance of the editor of the Finnish Kalevala, Elias Lönnrot, for the “Silmarillion” (see ch. 18); but other such role models have also been suggested. St Jerome made “an entirely fresh translation of the Bible from what were then believed to be the earliest extant texts in their original languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek)” (Fisher 2007, 125). Snorri Sturluson, the Icelandic scholar responsible for what is known today as the Prose Edda, also offers a parallel: “[t]he air of summarizing much more extensive knowledge is [a] feature of Snorri’s work which Tolkien spent great effort in trying to recapture, in many versions of The Silmarillion” (Shippey 2007, 30). Tolkien’s very own discipline, philology, supplies further models: Jacob Grimm and Nikolai Grundtvig were certainly philologists whose work Tolkien saw as emblematic of what he was doing not only professionally (as himself a philologist) but also creatively (as a writer: Shippey 2007, 79–96). From the earliest Lost Tales on, he moved towards recreating the work of such figures in his fictional world, and present his mythology as an epitome based on a corpus of texts philologically conceived. The



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familiar concept of “depth” would mean that “a real traditional tale gained much of its power from being filtered down to us through many minds, many disagreements, many rejections” (Shippey 2007, 161–162; Shippey 2005, 313–317); but Tolkien also thought of depth in philological terms: “changes prove a tale’s antiquity/authenticity” (Shippey 2007, 100 n. 20). Grimm and other nineteenth-century philologists also appealed to Tolkien because one of their aims was “recovery and reclassification of ancient mythology” (Shippey 2007, 83), which thus established a very close link between ancient languages, texts, and mythology. He clearly saw that all remains of ancient mythologies survive in texts and philological corpora made up of texts: this is what he most missed in his own England. Tolkien once wrote to Milton Waldman (in about 1951) that he originally set out to create a “body of connected legend” that he could “dedicate” (Letters 144) to his country: the connection to England was a central aspect of the framework he imagined for the Lost Tales, and its disappearance marked an important shift in his thinking about the entire fictional world. This also marks his awareness of the fact that mythologies cannot be written by single authors, since a myth is a myth because people look at it, use it, and understand it in specific ways: mythologies depend on history and the cultures that use them. Tolkien learned from his profession and his professional role models how important history and the cultural context around stories and texts were, and used this to a very great effect in the “Silmarillion.” Tolkien’s continuing emphasis on the “doubled textuality” of his writings can be the key to his supposed intention about the “Silmarillion” too. His efforts to make both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings part of this imagined textual corpus from Middle-earth (as Bilbo’s and Frodo’s memoirs, respectively) show that he used this conception of textuality to integrate the newer books into the world of his older works; and this, in turn, gave rise to his final presentation frame for the “Silmarillion.” The Bilbo frame, as fixed in the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, “can hardly be called into question” (Noad 2000, 65); some critics, however, have voiced concerns about this conception. Flieger claims that on closer consideration of some details (narrative voice, the distribution of knowledge and authorial roles among the characters), “the whole concept falls apart” in The Lord of the Rings (2005, 79); and Agøy lists very similar aspects about The Silmarillion as Bilbo’s “translations from the Elvish” (2007, 156–161). Brljak (2010) also contends that the vehicle of the Red Book of Westmarch is not entirely unproblematic as a fictional source for Tolkien’s major texts. But with Tolkien’s death, life came to imitate art, and in the absence of a final “Silmarillion” text, his innumerable manuscripts were transfigured into another philological corpus – one that to a certain extent parallels the fictional one he imagined. Thus, the 1977 Silmarillion completes Tolkien’s known intention wonderfully as the epitome he certainly intended to show Bilbo producing. Christopher Tolkien’s “Foreword” said his father imagined the work to be “a compilation, a compendious narrative, made long afterwards from sources of great diversity” (S vi): in the event, the book became “a compendium in fact and not only in theory” (S vi). And this is where the authenticity of the 1977 Silmarillion can be seen to be grounded.

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Tolkien’s conception of textuality thus “came out of the fiction” and (maybe ironically) produced a solution evidently conforming to his own intentions: an epitome based on a philological corpus. Both Petty and Fisher note how, in the construction of the published Silmarillion, Christopher Tolkien practically doubled his father’s work, and “took on a role analogous to that adopted by Elias Lönnrot in Finland during the middle of the 19th century and by Jerome at the end of the fourth century” (Fisher 2007, 126; Petty 2004, 70). But in terms of Tolkien’s own fictional world, Christopher Tolkien inserted himself in the functional place of Bilbo, thus reinforcing the mythopoeic effect with the keystone that locks the whole into place. The 1977 Silmarillion does everything Bilbo’s work is supposed to do, and ultimately in conception conforms to Tolkien’s governing “intention.”

The “Silmarillion” and the Critics: Themes and Interpretation Maybe because of its problematic nature, critics reacted slowly to the 1977 Silmarillion. It certainly did not have The Lord of the Rings’s popular appeal: Tolkien himself saw very clearly that the lack of an overriding narrative (eliciting the same enthusiasm from readers), and the fact that it had “no hobbits” (Letters 238; lacking the easy identification point) might be problematic. Its style poses another obstacle: in Shippey’s phrase, The Silmarillion’s “refusal to accept novelistic convention” (Shippey 2005, 305) is at least surprising to readers reared on The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Fimi claims that after his successful novels, Tolkien could not find a way back to the “elvishness, and all that ‘heigh stile’ ” (Letters 238), the style he evolved for the mythology: what Tolkien “could not finish was the post-Lord of the Rings ‘Silmarillion’ ” (Fimi 2009, 194; see also 118–119 and 190–191). The 1977 Silmarillion (relying on various manuscript versions) only aggravated problems critics occasionally indicated about Tolkien’s prose style. Even though Christopher Tolkien tried to unify at least the larger textual units of the book stylistically, the result is still a mixture of styles David Bratman classified (in an approach to the texts in The History of Middle-earth) as “Annalistic,” “Antique,” and “Appendical” (Bratman 2000, 72–75), prompting one reader to remark (clearly with indignation): “It’s like the Old Testament!” (Lost Tales I ix). Flieger’s Splintered Light (2002) certainly deserves mention as the first full-length monograph on The Silmarillion. In this book, published initially in 1983, Flieger expanded an interpretation based on Owen Barfield’s views about mythology and language (published in his Poetic Diction, 1928), which Tolkien apparently also espoused. The successive divisions of Elvish languages and cultures, Flieger argues, reflected the fragmentation of light: light, in its turn, served as a metaphor for Ilúvatar’s knowledge and power. The more and more indirect access to light and the original unity of meaning symbolizes an ever-increasing distance between origin and differentiating meanings. This very sensitive interpretation singles out language and myth, culture and knowledge, as central concepts of Tolkien’s stories: they remain central



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even when The Silmarillion is placed in the context of The History of Middle-earth series (which, of course, was not available to Flieger at the time of writing). But Barfield’s speculations about language, its early development, and its relation to mythology would certainly not be taken seriously today either by linguists or cultural (or religious) historians: one has to keep in mind that the argument is not about “how language really developed or relates to mythology”, but about how Barfield (and Tolkien) believed it did. Mythology, language, and art are also connected in Tolkien’s famous essay, “On Fairy-stories.” Here he derives the human creative impulse from the fact that we are made in “the image and likeness of a Maker” (OFS 66): what he calls “Secondary World” (OFS 52), the fictional world of literary art, is aesthetic exactly because it mirrors God’s “aesthetic” creation. This finds a beautiful parallel in the “Ainulindalë,” one of the best-discussed units of The Silmarillion: here the creation of the world is shown as a specifically artistic, aesthetic process. The Music of the Ainur is anticipated as “great beauty [. . .] wakened into song” (S 3), and when Ilúvatar shows them the Vision, the Ainur realize that they did not know “[the Music] had any purpose beyond its own beauty” (S 7). Robert A. Collins (2001) discusses in detail the philosophical and theological implications of this important motif; and several other critics including Flieger (1986), Houghton (2003), and Whittingham (2007) deal with the philosophical or cultural historical parallels implied. Most approaches to The Silmarillion, however, crystallized only after the publica­ tion of its source corpus in The History of Middle-earth series opened up the possi­ bility of a diachronic examination. The development of Tolkien’s legendarium became one of the most interesting and rewarding themes in Tolkien criticism, eventually yielding such works as Whittingham’s The Evolution of Tolkien’s Mythology (2007) or Fimi’s Tolkien, Race and Cultural History (2009). Whittingham tracks Tolkien through the long construction process to see how elements in his mythology changed over time: combining source study with philosophical and theological context, her book is a concise overview of Tolkien’s ever-changing handling of individual mythological themes. Fimi places the “Silmarillion” in the framework of Victorian cultural history, and shows how Tolkien’s interest in the central concepts of his work were influ­ enced and to some extent conditioned by this context. Shippey stresses philological parallels in the chapter he devotes to “the course of actual composition” in the third edition of The Road to Middle-earth: he argues that the well-known effect of “depth” in Tolkien is “a quality which may exist in one text, but it is more likely to be produced by a complex of them” (Shippey 2005, 313). The overwhelming importance Tolkien attached to texts and their relations is indeed one of the most important conclusions of a reading of the “Silmarillion” corpus. Tolkien could thus approximate the effects of real-world mythologies (and ground the mythopoeic effect of his other books, most notably The Lord of the Rings), handle questions of theology and philosophy, and deal sensitively with how tradition and culture work. Flieger’s Interrupted Music (2005) approaches these questions: starting from the fact that the idea of “the book tradition” never failed to inspire Tolkien (55–77),

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Flieger offers a detailed account of the innumerable stages of the mythology, which always rely on the device of texts and their collections, and author figures responsible for those. My own “The Great Chain of Reading” (Nagy 2003) took the various real and fictitious relationships between the constituents of the textual complex as the basis for a methodology of interpretation, in which individual narratives and their details can be shown to gather (layers of) meaning through the (real or supposed) textual connections. Tolkien’s textual complex can also be profitably approached through more recent, more theorized philological stances. In a book that became one of the groundworks of the “New Philology” in the 1980s, Bernard Cerquiglini claimed that “medieval writing does not produce variants; it is variance” (1999, 77–78): the “New Philologists” pointed attention to the fact that the unavoidable variation of medieval manuscript corpora essentially locates meaning everywhere, in the process of writing and reading, rendering the (traditional) philological emphasis on the (critical) edition problematic. Much the same can go for the “Silmarillion,” by parallel radically decreasing the problematic nature of the 1977 text. Even that, however, can be seen as a triumphant representation of how Tolkien showed the operations of culture in the historical layering of texts, the creation and transmission of which always run through author figures. By the device of Bilbo’s compendium, Tolkien highlights the various functions authors play in the maintenance of tradition: they write, translate, select, summarize, compress, transfer verse to prose (or vice versa), edit, copy, promote or exclude. All these textual operations appear in the fictional layers of The Silmarillion, making visible various (types of) texts in the background, lying behind the currently read one. Tolkien’s very professional notion of “philological depth” is a supremely effective way of producing a textual complex imitating the effect of mythology. Further, the element of play and variation embedded in Tolkien’s endless revisions finds parallels in medieval manuscript textuality that allow us to examine meaning as always unfinished, emergent, never fixed or monolithic. With such complexity, even the above-mentioned stylistic unevenness acquires meaning. As Kane’s work shows, Christopher Tolkien constructed the 1977 Silmarillion using both the “Quenta” and the “Annals” traditions; but what remains undetectable is how the poetic style and phraseology of Tolkien’s 1920s poems (taken up in some version of these two traditions) finally ended up in the 1977 text. In my “The Adapted Text” (Nagy 2004), I argued that this produces a very important effect in The Silmarillion: by its claims of poetic sources, it creates fictional poetic texts in Middle-earth, but with the actual poetic fragments, it substantiates these claims, and offers a glimpse into not only the poems themselves, but poetic traditions and specific poetic discourses. An effect not possible without the interplay of the various versions in the “Silmarillion” corpus, this defines the ways culture transmits knowledge as a major theme of Tolkien’s writing. Finally, the theme of the cultural construction and transmission of knowledge and meaning also highlights the concept of power and its contexts. One sort of “power” in Middle-earth is inherent, deriving from one’s position in a strictly hierarchical order



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of beings: thus, it is fundamentally theologically defined power (coming to be complemented by various other aspects: political, military, cultural, etc.). It is important to note, though, that this theological hierarchy can be seen clearly and explicitly only in the “Silmarillion”: functioning yet again as the context of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, the “Silmarillion” helps the reader understand exactly what stature and power Sauron, Gandalf, or the Elves have in the hierarchy of the imagined world. But the “Silmarillion,” especially in its “epitome” form, adds to this another, very significant aspect: the power of remembrance. The knowledge constituted in the fictional layers of the “Silmarillion” (texts that go into Bilbo’s compendium, and those forming the sources of those texts) illustrates different degrees of authenticity, and with this, persons, events, things are constructed as certain or uncertain, friendly or dangerous (and so on). Knowledge is power, and while Tolkien’s theological hierarchy sets up the concept of (true) knowledge derived from Ilúvatar as one strand of its representation, it also stresses the knowledge gained and stored in a philological system, a more “secular” sort of knowledge available for most of the Children. The first strand of this conception uses light as a metaphor; the second, the book. With the emphasis on the “written-ness” of even the “Ainulindalë” and the accounts of the Valar, however, Tolkien effectively places the very cultural constitution of the theological in the context of the textual. Mythologies are not necessarily true (Catholics like Tolkien believe Old Norse myths, for example, are not), but they are certainly held to be in their cultural use, the use of narratives (one such use is writing them down and handing them on).

Conclusion When it came out in 1977, it was easy to look at The Silmarillion as an all-explaining “great narrative” of Tolkien’s work. It gave answers, it gave context, it gave the stories that The Lord of the Rings constantly referred to but never told. When more of the “Silmarillion” corpus became available, Tolkien studies necessarily entered its own “postmodern condition”: questioning, interrogating the “great narrative,” critics realized that this supposed all-explaining back-story needed its own explanations. Answers to the most pressing question – what exactly is the “Silmarillion”? – could finally be given, and it could be seen how Tolkien’s conception of his fiction as a philological corpus was in fact not hindered but completed, literalized with his failure to produce a final version. The “Silmarillion” represents everything Tolkien strove to talk about, professionally and creatively: it is grand stories of heroism, good and evil, tragic division and eucatastrophic coming-together; but it is also something much larger: a veritable theory of how cultures work to maintain and transmit their traditions, to remember, understand, and continually reconstruct their past. In his representation of these workings of culture Tolkien puts forward many insights about language, mythology, the operations of ideology in societies, that are decidedly twentiethcentury notions, and can easily be accommodated in the framework of contemporary

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theoretical discussions. The “Silmarillion” complex (including the 1977 Silmarillion, of course) is Tolkien’s great statement about culture, and perhaps the most complex, sensitive, and at the same time theoretically feasible and historically based literary representation of how it works. References Agøy, Nils Ivar. 2007. “Viewpoints, Audiences and Lost Texts in The Silmarillion.” In Turner (2007), 139–163. Allen, Jim. 1975. An Extrapolation on The Silmarillion. Liverpool: Tolkien Society Publications. Bratman, David. 2000. “The Literary Value of The History of Middle-earth.” In Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth, edited by Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter, 69–91. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Brljak, Vladimir. 2010. “The Book of Lost Tales: Tolkien as Metafictionist.” Tolkien Studies, 7: 1–34. Carpenter, Humphrey. 1977. J. R. R. Tolkien – A Biography. London: Allen & Unwin. Cerquiglini, Bernard. 1999. In Praise of the Variant: A Critical History of Philology. Trans. Betsy Wing. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Collins, Robert A. 2001. “ ‘Ainulindale’: Tolkien’s Commitment to an Aesthetic Ontology.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 11.2: 257–265. Fimi, Dimitra. 2009. Tolkien, Race and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits. New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan. Fisher, Jason. 2007. “From Mythopoeia to Mythography: Tolkien, Lönnrot, and Jerome.” In Turner (2007), 111–138. Flieger, Verlyn. 1986. “Naming the Unnamable: The Neoplatonic ‘One’ in Tolkien’s Silmarillion.” In Diakonia: Studies in Honor of Robert T. Meyer, edited by Thomas Halton and Joseph P. Williman, 127–132. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Flieger, Verlyn. 2002. Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World. Revised edn. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Flieger, Verlyn. 2005. Interrupted Music: The Making of Tolkien’s Mythology. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press.

Houghton, John William. 2003. “Augustine in the Cottage of Lost Play: The Ainulindalë as Asterisk Cosmogony.” In Tolkien the Medievalist, edited by Jane Chance, 171–182. London: Routledge. Kane, Douglas Charles. 2009. Arda Reconstructed: The Creation of the Published Silmarillion. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press. Kilby, Clyde S. 1976. Tolkien and The Silmarillion. Wheaton, IL: Harold Shaw Publishers. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Nagy, Gergely. 2003. “The Great Chain of Reading: (Inter-)textual Relations and the Technique of Mythopoesis in the Túrin Story.” In Tolkien the Medievalist, edited by Jane Chance, 239–258. London: Routledge. Nagy, Gergely. 2004. “The Adapted Text: The Lost Poetry of Beleriand.” Tolkien Studies, 1: 21–41. Noad, Charles. 2000. “On the Construction of The Silmarillion.” In Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth, edited by Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter, 31–68. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Petty, Anne C. 2004. “Identifying England’s Lönnrot.” Tolkien Studies, 1: 69–84. Shippey, Tom. 2005. The Road to Middle-earth. Rev. and expanded edn. London: HarperCollins. Shippey, Tom. 2007. Roots and Branches: Selected Papers on Tolkien. Zurich and Bern: Walking Tree Publishers. Turner, Allan, ed. 2007. The Silmarillion: Thirty Years On. Zurich and Bern: Walking Tree Publishers. Whittingham, Elizabeth A. 2007. The Evolution of Tolkien’s Mythology: A Study of the History of Middle-earth. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

8

The Hobbit: A Turning Point John D. Rateliff

[H]e . . . groped about . . . far from certain even of the direction they had been going . . . He guessed as well as he could . . . [S]uddenly his hand met what felt like a tiny ring of cold metal lying on the floor of the tunnel. It was the turning point in his career, but he did not know that. He put the ring in his pocket almost without thinking . . . (“Riddles in the Dark,” H 66) I had an enormous pile of exam papers . . . I remember picking up a paper and actually finding . . . there was one page . . . that was left blank . . . So I scribbled on it, I can’t think why, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” (J. R. R. Tolkien, BBC 2 1968)

First writing, and then publishing, The Hobbit was the turning point in Tolkien’s career. It marks the point at which he “found his voice” and produced what we can now recognize, looking back, as a distinctively, characteristically Tolkienian work. It was his first published work of fiction, and a substantial one at that, over 300 pages long. And, aside from fugitive poems that had appeared in little magazines and obscure collections, the first among his published works to be set in what came to be called Middle-earth.

When Tolkien Wrote The Hobbit The story of how Tolkien came to write his masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings, is well known and reasonably well documented (see ch. 9): we even know such details as A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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when the first draft of the first chapter was written (between December 16 and 19, 1937), the various phases into which work on that massive book fell, and where breaks occurred when Tolkien turned to other work (e.g., stories like “The Notion Club Papers” or his academic duties, which were greatly increased by the war); many of its later chapters can be dated to within a week or two. Against this mass of information, the murkiness of The Hobbit’s origins is striking, and much misinformation has been put forth over the years as a result. None of the surviving manuscripts are dated, and though Tolkien remembered the moment of inspiration that sparked the book, he was unable afterwards to put a firm date on exactly when that event occurred. The simple truth is that this momentous event made very little impact at the time, to Tolkien or anyone else; rather like Rev. Dodgson’s decision to make up an impromptu narrative during a picnic that later turned into Alice’s Adventures Underground.1 What mattered, in retrospect, was Dodgson’s and Tolkien’s later decision to try to set down that story. Despite this, enough external evidence exists that, combined with what the different layers of the original manuscripts and typescripts tell us, we can reconstruct a timeline for the book’s composition. To begin with, we have Tolkien’s memory, repeated in several later reminiscences, of the eureka moment: that he wrote the book’s opening line out of the blue one summer’s day, inspired by an empty page he unexpectedly encountered while grading a pile of student exams. Since he was certain that this had taken place in the new house he’d moved to in early 1930,2 he could have begun the book no earlier than the summer of 1930. We know from other evidence that the story took him two or three years to write3 and that the draft was completed by the start of the Hilary (spring) Term in early 1933.4 Thus the story’s origin can reasonably be dated to the summer of 1930 and its conclusion to either December 1932 or January 1933.5 In addition to these start and stop dates, we know something about the phases into which work on the book fell. Tolkien stated, in a letter written a few months after the book’s publication, that he paused twice, for about a year each time, in the course of writing it.6 In fact, we could infer these pauses even without Tolkien drawing our attention to them, thanks to points in the manuscript where changes in paper, pagination, and characters’ names coincide. In addition, Tolkien sometimes stopped and sketched out plot-notes describing events in the still-unwritten chapters, and these help mark where pauses and hesitations took place. First, he expanded upon that famous opening line7 to create a draft of the opening chapter, including a rough sketch of the Lonely Mountain map (complete with secret door and moon-runes), before the initial impetus spun out, but not before he’d made a typescript of what he’d written so far; perhaps already a sign that he sensed what he’d begun had potential. Then when he returned to the work some time later, he picked up where it left off with a handwritten manuscript that ran all the way from Bag-End to the scene on Ravenhill just as the Siege of the Mountain begins, all in continuous pagination with no chapter breaks. There were certainly pauses and hesitations in the course of writing, but remarkably enough the bulk



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of the book – some five-sixths of the whole – was written more or less in one sustained burst. Having nearly reached the end, with less than five chapters to go (many among the shortest in the book), Tolkien then went back to the beginning and created a careful typescript (now divided into the familiar chapters) which, with a fair-copy handwritten text of one chapter, preserved most of what he’d written so far in legible form. He then completed the tale with a rough handwritten draft of the final chapters: everything from the point where Bard steps out of the dark lake to claim his heritage as Heir of Girion to Bilbo’s reunion with Gandalf and Balin.

Changes Before Publication For the most part, the story as first drafted closely resembles the familiar published text, but there are startling exceptions. In that first rough draft of the opening chapter, Tolkien had named the dragon “Pryftan,” the goal of the Dwarves’ quest was “The Black Mountain,” the creator of the treasure map “Fimbulfambi,” and the goblin-king killed by Bullroarer Took “Fingolfin.” These proved ephemeral enough, but for most of the manuscript that followed the name of the chief Dwarf was “Gandalf,”8 while the wizard is named “Bladorthin” and the werebear “Medwed”; the names Thorin Oakenshield, Gandalf the wizard, and Beorn were relatively late changes only incorporated into the story once the Dwarves and Hobbit reach Lake Town. Indeed Gandalf the Dwarf goes into a barrel in the Elvenking’s dungeon and Thorin the Dwarf (son of Thrain, son of Thror)9 comes out of that same barrel on the shores of the Long Lake, while the wizard is still Bladorthin as late as the group’s arrival at the Lonely Mountain. As with names, so with plot: while the draft corresponds to the published story in general, one sequence was cut from the Mirkwood chapter (the longest in the book) and another added. The cut sequence casts Bilbo as a kind of Hobbit Theseus, finding his way through Mirkwood using a ball of spider-thread he collected from the giant spider he killed. The added sequence, which first appears in the typescript, is the introduction of the enchanted stream whose touch brings sleep, and all the complications it entails. Briefer, but perhaps more important, changes abound. For example, Bard is introduced, only to be killed off again in the same scene, perishing when the stricken dragon falls upon the burning city, before Tolkien changes his mind and decides to keep the character around to play a role in the events following Smaug’s demise. Another significant change is Tolkien’s decision to reverse the order in which two chapters appear: “Fire and Water” (describing Smaug’s attack on Lake Town) originally preceded “Not at Home” (in which Bilbo and the Dwarves explore the dragon’s empty lair). By far the most interesting departures come in the plot-notes, representing as they do an earlier layer of Tolkien’s thoughts about where the book was going and what

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would be in the still-unwritten chapters. For example, the Arkenstone is originally introduced (as “the Gem of Girion”) to provide Bilbo with a easily portable onefourteenth portion of the hoard; ironically it transmogrifies from the piece of treasure the Dwarves explicitly promise Bilbo as his reward to become the one item in all that hoard which they would never part with. There is no hint of Dwarves succumbing to the dragon-sickness in the original outlines, nor any indication that some of Bilbo’s friends would perish in the Siege of the Mountain. Most startling of all was Tolkien’s plan to have Bilbo kill the dragon, stabbing Smaug with his little knife while the dragon slept, exhausted after the assault on Lake Town, thus fulfilling Smaug’s prophetic dream of being menaced by “a small warrior altogether insignificant in size, but provided with a bitter sword, and great courage” (HoH 507; cf. H 199). In one such set of notes, Tolkien writes of Bilbo being swept away by a steaming river of the dragon’s blood, riding in a golden cup until he is able to wade to safety, and becoming “hard & brave” as a result of his contact with the dragon-blood; an interesting echo of the Sigurd legend. In the end Tolkien decided such great deeds are not for Bilbo, who behaves heroically when he must but also remains pragmatic and essentially humble. Instead, Tolkien devised the extraordinary knot of conflicting claims, motives, and betrayals that makes up the story’s climax, ending the whole on a grand heroic note and yet still allowing Bilbo to remain Bilbo, a sensible fellow in a chivalric world. Along with the encounter with Gollum, it is the epic tone of the final chapters, developed by careful degrees, and the quiet dénouement of the “and back again” that makes The Hobbit so memorable.

The Road to Publication Another of the myths associated with The Hobbit claims that, having carried the story as far as the death of Smaug, Tolkien abandoned the tale, consigning it to a drawer to languish alongside all his other unfinished projects. In fact, the available evidence shows that Tolkien completed the work within a relatively short time. And he at once began to loan the “Home Manuscript” (as the typescript with handwritten conclusion,10 plus maps, came to be called) to friends, circulating it among a wide array of acquaintances. Among those known to have read it during this period are his friend C. S. Lewis, a neighbor’s daughter(s), a nun, the poet W. R. Childe, and at least one of his students; there were probably more who have gone unrecorded (Tolkien himself observed that “the manuscript certainly wandered”; Letters 21).11 And all this took place in a period of a little over three years, by the end of which he had been approached by a publisher and asked to submit it. The details of how Tolkien first came into contact with Allen & Unwin, who were to be his publishers for the next half-century or so, are impossible to recover at this distance in time, but it seems to have come about through A&U’s desire to release an updated edition of John R. Clark Hall’s 1901 translation of Beowulf, to which they



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owned the copyright. Since Tolkien was one of the world’s leading Old English scholars,12 it is unsurprising that they might have approached him to undertake the task, or at least recommend someone who might. Although Tolkien had a habit of taking on new projects without first completing those he already had undertaken (at that time his works in progress included editions of Pearl, Sir Orfeo, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, the “Clarendon Chaucer,” and Ancrene Wisse, the last of which he had just committed to at the beginning of that same year; see chs. 1 and 3, and Chronology 181), in this case he turned down the job but suggested a graduate student of his, Elaine Griffiths, be given the project, agreeing to himself contribute a Preface on Old English prosody. Later, when Susan Dagnall, a representative of the publisher, called on Griffiths to see how the work was going, rather than confess that it was languishing Griffiths urged Dagnall to borrow Professor Tolkien’s “frightfully good story.”13 Rather than depart empty-handed back to London, Dagnall did so, and thought highly enough of what she read that A&U asked Tolkien to formally submit the work. All this seems to have occurred in the spring of 1936; that summer Tolkien was working to finalize the text, and by early October a completed and carefully revised typescript had arrived at A&U and was soon formally accepted. Published a year later, in late September 1937, while not a bestseller it was immediately judged a success, and A&U at once began urging Tolkien to write a follow-up book, which ultimately resulted in The Lord of the Rings.

The Influence of Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship That Tolkien’s initial connection with those who would become the publishers of The Hobbit came through a Beowulf project is wholly fitting, given that Tolkien’s scholarly work had a great influence on his legendarium,14 as Tolkien himself gladly acknowledged. Only a few months after publication of The Hobbit, he was asked if Beowulf had inspired the cup-stealing scene, and he replied, “Beowulf is among my most valued sources, though it was not consciously present to the mind in the process of writing” (HoH 856). In fact, although the cup-stealing scene offers the most obvious example of the Old English epic’s direct influence on Tolkien’s story – compare “Inside Information” (H 198–199) with Beowulf lines 2210b–2234 – this is far from the only such case. Consider, for example, the parallels between Grendel and Gollum: both outcasts and cannibals, living in dark caves in lairs surrounded by water, yet each possessing some precious treasure that seems entirely out of keeping with its setting. And yet Gollum is not Grendel but a grendel, so to speak: a creature of the same type, another of the Children of Cain living out a lonely exile, but with a distinct personality (and speech-pattern) all his own. What at first glance look like borrowings turn out, on closer scrutiny, to be sources of inspiration freely adapted to serve some new purpose. This is not the place to explore the influence of Beowulf on The Hobbit in detail15

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– Tom Shippey, after all, called it “The single work which influenced Tolkien most” (2005, 389), emphasizing the point with an “obviously” – but one more point is worth making before we move on: it is surely significant that the cup-stealing scene in Beowulf is itself at least in part a scholarly reconstruction, that folio being the most badly damaged part of the Beowulf manuscript. As Shippey has pointed out (2005, 23), Tolkien was drawn to “asterisk words” – hypothetical reconstructions of unattested forms. And, what is more, he was clearly drawn to what we might call asterisk texts: cruxes and damaged or debatable passages in surviving medieval manuscripts. Of course, Tolkien’s medieval sources ranged far wider than just Beowulf, important as that work was, or even beyond Old English (see chs. 15–21). Just for The Hobbit, his sources included the Elder Edda, Sir Orfeo, Icelandic folktales, Heiðreks Saga, Marie de France, “Lord Nann and the Korrigan,” Hrólfr Kraki’s Saga, and the Sigurd legend as reflected in both the Edda and Völsunga saga, just to name the more obvious and readily identifiable sources; there were many more in which the borrowings were more elusive and subtle. Foremost among the Old Norse sources is the Dvergatal, a list of Dwarven names that somehow came to be interpolated into the mythological poem Völuspá, one of the most interesting and cryptic parts of the Elder (Poetic) Edda. From this Tolkien derived all the Dwarf-names in The Hobbit, with the exception of Balin, whose outlier status has never been satisfactorily explained. Or take the case of Gollum’s fish-riddle: Alive without breath, As cold as death, Never-thirsty, ever-drinking, All in mail never clinking. (H 73)

This clearly derives (like the riddle-contest itself)16 from a riddle-contest in Heiðreks Saga: What lives on high fells? What falls in deep dales? What lives without breath? What is never silent? This riddle ponder, O prince Heidrek! (C. Tolkien 1960, 80; emphasis mine)

And then there is the curious case of Beorn, who clearly owes something to the elusive figure of Böðvar Bjarki, the most valiant of all the companions of King Hrólfr Kraki in Hrólfr Kraki’s Saga who at times is able to project a magical bear-form that lays low all foes. The link is confirmed by the illustration of Beorn’s Hall that Tolkien drew for The Hobbit, which turns out to be based on an illustration of Hrólfr Kraki’s hall in E. V. Gordon’s An Introduction to Old Norse (Gordon 1956, 28), which is also the hall known in Old English tradition as Heorot, the council-seat of King Hrothgar



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in which Beowulf’s great battle with Grendel takes place. It is no wonder that Bilbo feels uneasy lying in that dark hall surrounded by his sleeping companions and listening to the noises outside, just as Beowulf did when waiting for Grendel.17 In fact, Tolkien included so many medieval themes and motifs in The Hobbit (and, of course, The Lord of the Rings) that his work now serves as a gateway into medieval literature for many readers; many, perhaps most, modern medievalists were first introduced to Beowulf or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or the Elder Edda by Tolkien’s adaptations from, or known interest in, these works. Tolkien was able to breathe new life into medieval motifs, from reviving a fourteenth-century proverb (“third time pays for all”; cf. HoH, 516–517) to reclaiming traditional Faërie creatures like the Wood-elves from the sillification they had undergone in Elizabethan and Edwardian hands, harkening back instead to the “true tradition,” as Shippey calls it, depicted in works such as Sir Orfeo (Shippey 2005, 388ff.).18 Most of all, perhaps, he revived the ideal of dragons as truly terrible foes, not the whimsical creatures of Kenneth Grahame nor the easily slain obstacles of too many fairy-tales of the Victorian age: forever replacing the latter with the Fáfniresque Smaug, the Chiefest and Greatest of Calamities (H 207).

The Hobbit and the Legendarium When Tolkien came to write that suggestive first line, he had already been creating fantasy works for a decade and a half, starting in a many-faceted burst of creative energy in late 1914/early 1915 that manifested itself with the “Earendel” poems (September 1914), the creation of the first of his Elven languages (1915), the launching of his first prose effort, the “Kullervo” story (late 1914 to early 1915), and the painting of several scenes from his imaged world (early to mid-1915), culminating in the start of work on The Book of Lost Tales (late 1916 to 1917). Indeed, if our reconstructed timeline is right, composition of The Hobbit either overlapped with or began immediately following the completion of the “Quenta” (the “1930 Silmarillion”) and its associated “Annals,” the earliest “Annals of Valinor” and the earliest “Annals of Beleriand” (all circa 1930). And it definitely overlapped with work on the “Lay of Leithian,” which had been started as far back as 1925 but was carried on concurrently for roughly halfway through the drafting of Mr Baggins’s story (through about September 1931; Lays 150). Tolkien once said, apropos of the abandoned sequel to Farmer Giles, that The Silmarillion “and all that” had worked its way into virtually everything else he’d written.19 It would therefore be strange if the “Silmarillion” tales Tolkien was working on at the same time had not influenced the new tale he had just undertaken and was working on concurrently. Nonetheless, the relationship between The Silmarillion and The Hobbit has vexed Tolkien scholars for years, confused no doubt by Tolkien’s attempts at various times and in varying contexts to explain the rather complicated relationship between The Silmarillion (which was written first but was to be published last), The Hobbit (which

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was written after The Silmarillion but published before it), and The Lord of the Rings (which was in a sense a sequel to them both, published after the one but before the other). On the one hand, we have Tolkien’s confident assertion that The Hobbit “was not intended to have anything to do with [the legendarium] . . . It had no necessary connexion with the ‘mythology’, but naturally became attracted towards this dominant construction in my mind .  .  . (Letters 346). On the other hand, we have his cheerful statement that “My tale is not consciously based on any other book – save one, and that is unpublished: the ‘Silmarillion’, a history of the Elves, to which frequent allusion is made” (Letters 31). If we look not at Tolkien’s comments but at the work itself, especially its manuscript form, we may find it easier to resolve this issue. For one thing, Bilbo’s world is almost entirely populated by creatures Tolkien had already written about in various “Silmarillion” texts: Elves, Dwarves, Humans, the Half-elven, Goblins, giant Eagles, evil wolves, giant spiders, blood-sucking bats, and fiery dragons.20 And his borrowings from this earlier material are not just general but highly specific. Thus we are told that the Wood-elves Bilbo meets in Mirkwood: descended from the ancient tribes that never went to Faerie in the West. There the Light-elves and the Deep-elves and the Sea-elves [i.e., the Vanyar, Noldor, and Teleri] went and lived for ages . . . before some came back into the Wide World. (H 156)

All this derives directly from Tolkien’s private mythology. Orcrist and Glamdring (and Sting) are not just Elven swords but “made in Gondolin for the Goblin-wars . . . dragons and goblins destroyed that city many ages ago” (H 50). We are later told Bilbo had grown up listening to tales of Gondolin and the goblin-wars “of which so many songs had sung” (H 67); it seems almost as if the events of the “Quenta” and “Annals of Beleriand” might be of a piece with the “wonderful tales . . . about dragons and goblins and giants” that Bilbo used to listen to at the Old Took’s parties (H 7). Be that as it may, it’s hard to argue that the Elrond whose human and Elven ancestors fought together in “the wars of the evil goblins and the elves and the first men in the North” – which we are told are recorded in “the strange stories before the beginning of History” (H 49), i.e., The Silmarillion – is not the same Elrond the Half-elfin with the identical background described in the 1926 “Sketch of the Mythology” (Shaping 38) and the 1930 Quenta (Shaping 158). And Tolkien himself identifies the Elvenking’s quarrel with the Dwarves – alluded to but never satisfactorily explained in The Hobbit (157) – with King Thingol’s dispute (Letters 346), explicitly making the connection; this strongly suggested that it is the same historical event retold in two different tales taking place in the same world, The Hobbit and the 1930 “Quenta” (Shaping 132–133). Perhaps most revealing of all is a brief reference in the original Hobbit manuscript to Beren and Lúthien. When Gandalf the Dwarf (the later Thorin Oakenshield) says there must be a reckoning with the Necromancer for his father’s death, Bladorthin the wizard says:



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That is a job quite beyond the powers of all the dwarves .  .  . And anyway his castle stands no more and he is flown to another darker place – Beren and Tinúviel broke his power, but that is quite another story. (HoH 73)

This is extraordinary, in that it reveals that Tolkien knew, even as he was writing this early draft of the first chapter, that the Necromancer in whose dungeon the Dwarvenking’s father had perished was the same Thû who had imprisoned Beren and Finrod (or “Felagund” as he was then called; Shaping 110–111), as described at length in “The Lay of Leithian” (Cantos VII and IX; Lays 227–232, 248–255), just as he knew when continuing Bilbo’s story into the sequel, The Lord of the Rings, that the “Sauron” whose strongholds Frodo must penetrate was the same Necromancer whose lair Bilbo had avoided (H 130). Thus we see that the parallels and borrowings are too many to be casually dismissed. The question is how are we to take them. If we think of all these as one-way borrowings, light-hearted and consequence free, then we can align ourselves with Tolkien’s statement about there being “no necessary connexion” between the two. But that does not accord with Tolkien’s earlier statement that he consciously based The Hobbit on The Silmarillion. One reason Tolkien scholars have had so much resistance to accepting this latter statement and the evidence of the manuscript is that they are looking backwards from the gravitas of the 1977 Silmarillion and Tolkien’s other late works in the legendarium (e.g., “The Grey Annals”) and forgetting that the earlier writings were more light-hearted and in flux than they now seem. Even if Tolkien started by borrowing elements from the earlier legendarium without concern for how their re-use in The Hobbit might affect the original stories,21 publishing The Hobbit had the effect of fixing certain elements in the mythos, leading to Tolkien’s eventual decision to have the two stories take place in the same world at different times in its history. And just as Tolkien changed what he took from medieval works like Beowulf to fit the purposes of his new story, so too he adapted freely at times in borrowing from his own earlier work.

Children’s Literature and The Hobbit Alongside inspiration from medieval literature and borrowings from his own earlier stories, a third important strand must be taken into account when considering the mix that made up The Hobbit: Tolkien’s immediate audience, his four children, who ranged in age from 13 to a toddler of one when he began the story. He had been making up stories for his children, both oral and written, at least since the first Father Christmas Letter of 1920; by 1930 this included not just the ongoing Father Christmas series (which continued until 1943) but also Roverandom (1925–1927) and probably the first two drafts of Farmer Giles of Ham (sometime between 1926 and 1930); soon to follow were Mr. Bliss (circa 1932/33) and the rewritten and expanded Farmer Giles (“The Lord of Thame,” early 1938; see ch. 13). And yet among all these

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works The Hobbit stands out for sheer ambition. It is more than twice the length of Roverandom, and much more complex. The total text of all of the Father Christmas letters, written over the course of more than two decades, could be fitted into just a chapter or two of The Hobbit. Simply put, The Hobbit is the longest work Tolkien had completed up until that time, a distinction it held until eventually succeeded by its own sequel, The Lord of the Rings. It is important to note that in addition to his own tales for his children, Tolkien also read to them books by others, some of which contributed recognizable elements to Bilbo’s tale. Tolkien openly acknowledged the influence of George MacDonald (“George Macdonald . . . has depicted what will always be to me the classic goblin. By that standard I judge all goblins, old or new”; OFS 250, see also HoH 856) and suggested that his Hobbits might owe something to E. A. Wyke-Smith’s Marvellous Land of the Snergs (OFS 249–250). In addition, Tolkien is known to have been very fond of the work of Lewis Carroll (particularly his verse), and of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (whose Mole End and its inhabitant seem to have helped inspire not just Bag End but probably contributed to Bilbo himself). Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle books, sharing with The Hobbit many examples of talking with animals in their own languages, were also favorites in the Tolkien household (HoH 286). And, beyond such modern works, Tolkien also drew heavily if unobtrusively upon fairy-tale and folk tale, as noted by the great British folklorist Katharine Briggs (Briggs 1977, 401). The most important thing The Hobbit shares with the classics of the golden age of children’s literature is that, like them, it is meant to appeal to a wide audience of both young and adult readers. Humphrey Carpenter, writing in the mid-1980, believed that Tolkien’s book harkened back to that golden age but came too late to belong to it (1985, 210–213). I would argue that The Hobbit was both inspired by, and won itself a place in, the classics of children’s literature. It was, in its own right, a milestone marking the transition between the classics of the Victorian, Edwardian, and Georgian era on one hand and the modern masters on the other (e.g., Briggs herself, Mary Norton, Lloyd Alexander, Susan Cooper, Neil Gaiman, Philip Pullman). As C. S. Lewis noted in the first published review of The Hobbit, back in October 1937: “Prediction is dangerous: but The Hobbit may well prove a classic.” How right he was. The Hobbit is as much a classic as The House on Pooh Corner or The Golden Compass.

The Lord of the Rings’ Influence on The Hobbit No sooner had The Hobbit been published than Tolkien came under pressure to write a sequel, the book that would ultimately become The Lord of the Rings. And no sooner had Tolkien begun that sequel than the new story began to exert pressure upon the earlier book, most significantly in the rewriting of the crucial Gollum chapter to bring



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The Hobbit in line with Tolkien’s evolving concept of the One Ring’s power.22 This revision was followed in turn by a short piece known as “The Quest of Erebor” in which Gandalf retells events of “An Unexpected Party” (the opening chapter of The Hobbit) from his own point of view; originally written as part of Appendix A in The Lord of the Rings, it was excluded for reasons of length.23 Then finally around 1960 Tolkien undertook to rewrite The Hobbit entirely in the style of The Lord of the Rings, but abandoned the project when the story reached Rivendell.24 Ultimately, aside from the crucial Gollum chapter, Tolkien decided to respect The Hobbit’s autonomy – it had, after all, originally been written as a stand-alone book – keeping such changes to a minimum. For example, he did not add material affirming the Necromancer’s identity as Sauron, or bring the events with the White Council and Dol Guldur from their place on the fringe of the story. More importantly, he did not alter the Ring itself, allowing it to remain a simple ring of invisibility, such as are told of “in old old tales” (H 81), rather than prefiguring within the earlier book its sinister aspects. Just as he earlier decided to let The Lord of the Rings develop beyond the style and mode of The Hobbit, so that it transcended its origins as “The New Hobbit” now he chose to refrain from rewriting Bilbo’s tale into the style of The Lord of the Rings, which would have reduced The Hobbit into a mere prelude to larger work.

Conclusion: Tolkien’s Other Masterpiece The Lord of the Rings is widely recognized as a masterpiece. It is less often acknowledged that Tolkien wrote not one but two masterpieces, and that The Hobbit also deserves that designation. In it he achieved his mature, characteristic style, and its deft, evocative, and sometimes amusingly breezy prose (“since you are sitting comfortably at home, and have not the danger of being eaten to disturb your thinking”; H 73) opened up the mode and style he was to use to such good effect in the sequel. Like Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, or Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, we have here a pair of novels by the same author in which the earlier, shorter work in each case deserves recognition in its own right, not just in light of its even greater successor. Even notorious Tolkien-bashers such as Edmund Wilson, Catharine Stimpson, and Harold Bloom conceded that The Hobbit had a charm of its own.

Notes   1  Although in Dodgson’s case we do know the exact date of that picnic, thanks to his being an obsessive diarist: July 4, 1862.

  2  “I can still see the corner of my house in 20 Northmoor Road where it happened” (BBC 2 1968; HoH xii). Incidentally, the 1930 date

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is confirmed by an interview with Arndis Þorjarnardóttir (1999), an Icelandic au pair girl who joined the Tolkien household in 1930. She recalled that when she arrived they had just moved into the new house and that Tolkien started writing The Hobbit while she was there. I am grateful to Nancy Marie Walker’s blog, God of Wednesday, for drawing this interview to my attention. Stanley Unwin memo, made after a meeting with Tolkien on October 27, 1937 to discuss future publications following The Hobbit: “He mentioned that THE HOBBIT took him two or three years to write because he works very slowly” (A&U archive; HoH xviii, xxxviii). C. S. Lewis, letter of February 4, 1933 to Arthur Greeves: “Since term began I have had a delightful time reading a children’s story which Tolkien has just written” (HoH xv, xvii). Note that Lewis specifies the work has just been written. Much later, Tolkien’s two eldest sons asserted that they remembered their father telling them the story of The Hobbit while still in their previous house (i.e., no later than 1929). However, their accounts not only contradict Tolkien’s own statements about the book’s origins but include elements that contradict other well-documented facts (see HoH xiii–xv). It seems likely that, nearly a halfcentury after the events in question, their memories had conflated the stories Tolkien made up and told his children from their earliest childhood (Carpenter 1977, 161ff.) with The Hobbit. See Tolkien’s letter to The Observer, printed in the February 20, 1938 issue (HoH xviii). As Doug Anderson points out, it’s been featured in Bartlett’s Quotations since 1980 (Anderson 2002, 29). Note that Gandalf is actually more consistent as a Dwarf-name, since like almost all the other Dwarf-names in The Hobbit it derives from the Old Norse name-list known as the Dvergatal, whereas Bladorthin is Elven (specifically, Noldorin, the language that came to be called Sindarin), as might be thought more appropriate to a wizardly type. Or son of Thror, son of Thrain; Tolkien went back and forth as to which was the right

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sequence, right up until the point when the story was in page proofs. That the “Home Manuscript” Tolkien circulated in the early/mid-1930s was a complete text is indicated by the fact that none of those known to have read it at this stage make any mention of it being unfinished in their later recollections; Lewis, in fact, specifically critiques the conclusion in his letter to Greeves (HoH xvii–xviii). A 13-year-old Christopher Tolkien described the composite work in 1937 thus: “He wrote it ages ago . . . but the ending chapters were rather roughly done, and not typed out at all; he finished it about a year ago” (HoH xix); this is an admirably accurate description of the composite “Home Manuscript.” The book was also read aloud to the Inklings (Letters 28), but this probably occurred in the summer or early fall of 1936, as he was completing the typescript and preparing the text for official submission to the publisher. He was listed in Who’s Who as far back as 1924, before he had even taken up the Rawlinson and Bosworth professorship at Oxford. Most of our information regarding this sequence comes from an Elaine Griffiths interview, broadcast as part of a 1974 BBC Radio Oxford program on Tolkien, produced by Humphrey Carpenter (Griffiths 2001). Tolkien’s legendarium also had an impact on his scholarship: his great contribution to Old English studies in “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” (see ch. 2) came about from his treating the Beowulf-poet as a fellow author and examining his aesthetic choices accordingly, which resulted in shifting the focus on the poem from historical document to literary work. Among the many works exploring Beowulf’s influence on Tolkien’s work, see Adams (1978) for a detailed setting-out of the Grendel/Gollum parallels. For a sustained argument investigating Beowulf’s influence specifically on The Hobbit, see Christensen (1969). Although it was not his sole source: the riddle-games in two Edda poems, Vafþrúðnismál and Alvíssmál, no doubt also played a part. It was Tolkien’s own innovation, and a brilliant one at that, to make the contest an



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exchange of riddles, rather than strictly following his Old Norse model in having one character ask all the riddles and the other answer them. It is probably also significant that this particular riddle is found in only one manuscript, being absent from all other surviving copies of the saga. 17  Incidently, this same saga was translated in English by Tolkien’s friend and former student Stella Mills; her translation, dedicated to Tolkien, Gordon, and OED lexicographer C. T. Onions, appeared in 1933. It thus seems very likely she was working on it during the period Tolkien was writing The Hobbit. 18  That is, the most direct outside source for the Wood-elves in The Hobbit was probably Sir Orfeo, just as the older and wiser Elves of The Lord of the Rings owe a lot to The Mabinogion and the fierce warlike elves of The Silmarillion tradition most resemble the Tuatha dé Danaan of the Cath Maige Tuired. 19  “though shelved . . . the Silmarillion and all that has refused to be suppressed. It has bubbled up, infiltrated, and probably spoiled everything (that even remotely approached ‘Faery’) which I have tried to write since. It was kept out of Farmer Giles with an effort, but stopped the continuation. Its shadow was deep on the later parts of The Hobbit. It has captured The Lord of the Rings, so that that has

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become simply its continuation and completion, requiring the Silmarillion to be fully intelligible . . .” (Letters 136–137). The exceptions are notable, though few: Beorn, Gollum, and the Hobbit himself. For example, the Elvenking’s quarrel with the Dwarves seems to be set in the period between when Thingol drives forth the Dwarven craftsmen from his halls and the Dwarves’ return with an army to slay Thingol and despoil Doriath. These events occur in sequential paragraphs in the 1930 “Quenta” (Shaping 133), but in The Hobbit the first has already happened quite some time since (it is referred to as an “old quarrel” at H 157) while the next has not yet happened – and, given the events of The Battle of Five Armies, will never now come to pass. For an account of the series of fortunate events that led to this revision being published as the “second edition” of The Hobbit, see “The 1947 Hobbit” (HoH 760–762). Various drafts of this work have since been published. It is most readily available in Unfinished Tales but another draft appears as an appendix in Anderson (2002, 367–377); for its origin and development, see Peoples (282ff.). For the complete text of this curtailed rewriting, see “The 1960 Hobbit” (HoH 763–838).

References Adams, Roberta Albrecht. 1978. “Gollum and Grendel as Cain’s Kinsmen.” M.A. thesis, Stetson University. Anderson, Douglas A., ed. 2002. The Annotated Hobbit. Rev. edn. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. BBC 2. 1968. Tolkien in Oxford, half-hour documentary. Available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/ writers/12237.shtml, accessed August 28, 2013. Briggs, Katharine. 1977. A Dictionary of Fairies: Hobgoblins, Brownies, Bogies and Other Supernatural Creatures. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Carpenter, Humphrey. 1977. J. R. R. Tolkien – A Biography. London: Allen & Unwin. Carpenter, Humphrey. 1985. Secret Gardens: The Golden Age of Children’s Literature. London: Unwin Paperbacks.

Christensen, Bonniejean. 1969. “Beowulf and The Hobbit: Elegy into Fantasy in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Creative Technique.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Southern California. Gordon, Eric V. 1956. An Introduction to Old Norse. 2nd edn. Revised by A. R. Taylor. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Griffiths, Elaine. 2001. Interview. Re-issue. Track 12 in J. R. R. Tolkien: An Audio Portrait, by Brian Sibley. BBC Radio Collection. Shippey, Tom. 2005. The Road to Middle-earth. Rev. and expanded edn. London: HarperCollins. Þorjarnardóttir, Arndis. 1999. “Barnfóstran frá Íslandi og Tolkien-fjölskyldan.” Interviewed by Linda Ásdísardóttir. Morganbladid, February 28, Section A, 26. Available at http://timarit.is/

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view_page_init.jsp?issId=131485&pageId=19 28715&lang=is&q=Tolkien and an English translation/synopsis at http://svanurg.blog.is/ blog/svanurg/entry/1065767/. Both accessed November 24, 2013.

Tolkien, Christopher, ed. 1960. The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise. London and New York: Thomas Nelson & Sons.

Further Reading Chickering, Howell D., trans. and ed. 1977. Beowulf. New York: Anchor Books.

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The Lord of the Rings John R. Holmes

Synopsis and Structural Analysis The Lord of the Rings is a big book. At nearly 516,000 words, it sits in the connoisseur’s list of lengthy novels parked between David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (484,000 words) and Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (531,000). Tolkien’s own estimate was “about 600,000 words” (Letters 136). The novel was big enough that the publisher, Sir Stanley Unwin, felt constrained to publish it in three volumes. While the importance of a fantasy novel may dwell for most readers in its emotional, psychological, or even spiritual effect, it may be well to begin discussion also with some empirical realities about the work, beginning with its massive dimensions. In the physical world, objects of great mass take a great deal of energy, and usually a great deal of time, to get moving. While the same generalization does not always apply to large novels, it does seem to hold in the case of The Lord of the Rings. Many a reader who has come to the novel out of enthusiasm for the Peter Jackson films (Tolkien fans call such readers “film firsters”), or the excitement of childhood memories of The Hobbit, or even the borrowed enthusiasm of friends who have recommended the book, has found it hard to get past the early chapters of background, introduction, and exposition. In those early chapters lurks none, or very little, of the action the reader may have heard about from friends or seen in the movies. For such readers, a “companion” of this nature should offer a hint at the rewards that await the patient reader for persevering through the seemingly slower first chapters, and even a way of looking at those first chapters that reveal their own excellences, which may be easily missed. A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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While the three-volume structure was an accident of publication, the six-book division of the novel arose organically from Tolkien’s piecemeal composition over nearly two decades. When the success of The Hobbit prompted Unwin to ask its author for similar material, Tolkien at first responded by sending the massive mythological background to Middle-earth, the material now known as The Silmarillion (and more completely as several volumes of The History of Middle-earth, see chs. 7 and 10). When Unwin’s readers rejected that material, Tolkien attempted to write a sequel to The Hobbit. Tolkien’s “Foreword” to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings outlines the 18-year history of its composition, but his son Christopher offers an exquisitely detailed account in volumes 6 through 10 of The History of Middle-earth. Tolkien began the first chapter in December 1937. It took the next three years to complete Book One, which went through several changes of plot and character in that time (most strikingly Frodo being named Bingo, and Aragorn starting out as a Hobbit named Trotter). By the end of 1941 Tolkien had substantially completed Book Two, again with extensive revisions. In another year he had completed Book Three, but began to despair of ever finishing, virtually abandoning the project for nearly two years. In April 1944 he returned to the narrative, and sent installments as he wrote them to his son Christopher, stationed in Africa with the RAF; this was mostly Book Four. Book Five, which Tolkien imagined would be the conclusion, took the better part of two years. Adding a sixth book in 1948 necessitated a total revision of the novel, which was completed in 1949. Then it languished while Tolkien held out for the publication of The Silmarillion. When he came back to it three years later, Tolkien saw the need for more revisions, which he completed by spring of 1953, along with a Foreword and suggestions for appendices. The first volume appeared July 29, 1954, the second November 11, and the third October 20, 1955. Of the volume titles, only the last, The Return of the King, was suggested by Tolkien. A synopsis of The Lord of the Rings would not only offer a view of the whole (as the Greek word implies) but also help point to one of Tolkien’s technical achievements in the novel, a brilliant and intricate “interlace” structure. The Lord of the Rings begins with a young Hobbit named Frodo. Frodo is a cousin of Bilbo Baggins, the hero of Tolkien’s first novel, The Hobbit. Frodo inherits a ring from Bilbo that proves to be a Ring of Power capable of making its holder more or less master of the world. The Ring’s creator, a malignant and powerful being named Sauron, is bent on seizing the Ring and reclaiming its power. The many benevolent folk who oppose Sauron consider a number of options before deciding that the only viable one is to destroy the Ring in the fires of Mount Doom, a volcano which happens to be in the center of Sauron’s stronghold in Mordor. Frodo agrees to the dangerous mission, supported by “The Fellowship of the Ring”: the wizard Gandalf; the ranger Strider (Aragorn); Hobbits Sam, Pippin, and Merry; an Elf named Legolas; a Dwarf, Gimli; and a man named Boromir. Unable to cross the treacherous Mount Caradhras, the company goes beneath it, into the Mines of Moria, a deserted underground citadel of the Dwarves. There they



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are attacked by Orcs, and Gandalf is killed by a fiery monster known as a Balrog. After a healing rest in the Elvish retreat of Lórien, Boromir tries to seize the Ring from Frodo, who runs off alone. Repentant, Boromir dies defending the Hobbits, but his momentary treachery divides the Fellowship. Searching for the scattered Hobbits, Legolas, Gimli, and Strider meet the Rohirrim, fierce mounted warriors who defend their land, Rohan, on the frontiers of Gondor. Meanwhile, Pippin and Merry narrowly escape Orcs and run into the kindly Ents, giant creatures who care for the forests; some, called Huorns, have begun to look like the trees they tend. When they learn from the Hobbits the danger they face from an evil white-clad wizard named Saruman, the peaceful Ents go to war. When a whiterobed figure appears, however, it turns out to be the resurrected form of Gandalf, now in glistening white. Gandalf rides with Strider (Aragorn), Legolas, and Gimli to Edoras, releases Théoden, King of Rohan from the spell of Gríma Wormtongue (who serves Saruman), and leads the Riders of Rohan into battle against a host of Orcs and wild hill men known as Dunlendings. The enemies prove too strong, and the riders must retreat to their stronghold at Helm’s Deep. The Ents, meanwhile, unleash waters that destroy Saruman’s citadel at Isengard. Meanwhile, Sam and Frodo are being pursued by Gollum, a creature who seems a wretched monster, but in reality is the remains of a Hobbit who had once held Sauron’s Ring and is in its power. Wandering into domains patrolled by Faramir, Boromir’s younger brother, Frodo learns of Boromir’s death. As they continue toward Mordor, Sam and Frodo are betrayed again as Gollum leads them to the lair of a giant (and hungry) spider named Shelob. Rescued from the flooded ruins of Isengard, Pippin rides with Gandalf to the fortified capital of Gondor, the splendid city of Minas Tirith. Meeting Denethor, father of Boromir, and Steward of Gondor (not king – the kings are in exile until the sword of their ancestor can be reforged), Pippin solemnly offers Denethor service. Back in Rohan, Merry pledges the same to King Théoden. Strider enters the Paths of the Dead to summon the spirits who had broken an oath to Strider’s ancestor, the King of Gondor – for Strider is the exiled king, his real name being Aragorn. The spirits join the fight. In Rohan, Théoden leaves the defense of Rohan to his niece Éowyn while he leads the armies. Disguising herself in armor, Éowyn grabs Merry and rides into battle. In the seige of Gondor, despairing Denethor throws himself and his son Faramir on the funeral pyre; Faramir is rescued, but Denethor burns. The three armies converge on the Orcish hosts at Pelennor Fields, where the least likely warriors – the woman Éowyn and the Hobbit Merry – defeat the King of the Nazgûl. In Mordor, Sam rescues Frodo, gives him back the Ring, and leads him to the summit of Mount Doom, an active volcano. Poised on the fiery brink, Frodo suddenly refuses to destroy the Ring, and announces his intention to use its power himself. But Gollum jumps Frodo, bites off his ring-finger, and dances in triumph with the Ring, only to topple into the volcano and fulfill the quest by accident. In Gondor, Aragorn reclaims his ancestral throne. The Hobbits return to the Shire only to find it overrun by exploiters who oppressed the Shire folk. The Fellows of the

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Ring easily defeat the bullies, but the Shire is scorched by the war. The last of the Elves depart for the Undying Lands, and Frodo and Bilbo join them, leaving the Shire forever. Sam, however, stays, marries Rosie Cotton, and becomes a prominent citizen of the Shire. In this broad outline, several features of the novel can be seen more clearly than a first reading might reveal. One is that it can be considered, as poet W. H. Auden did, a Quest Romance, a tale type with six elements: a precious object or person, a long journey to find it, a hero, a test, guardians of the object, and helpers with knowledge or magical powers (Auden 2004, 44). A second structural observation is that Tolkien followed the practice he established in The Hobbit of building in periods of rest for his protagonists. Frodo and company confront a series of increasingly more perilous situations, but in between them Tolkien creates moments of (relative) safety. These havens are not just moments in time, but also regions in space. The maps at the end of the book remind the reader that Tolkien’s imagination is not just mythopoeic, but also geographic. Frequent consultations of the maps are a great aid to following what Tom Shippey called Tolkien’s “cartographic plot” (Shippey 2005, see ch. 4). The dozen or so safety zones in The Lord of the Rings include: a clearing in the woods where Gildor and other Elves feted the Hobbits (FR, I, iii); Farmer Maggot’s house (I, iv); Frodo’s new house at Crickhollow (I, v); Tom Bombadil’s house (I, vii); the Prancing Pony Inn (I, ix); Rivendell (II, i); Lothlórien (II, vi–viii); Fangorn Forest (TT, III, iv); Faramir’s secret lair (IV, v); Minas Tirith (RK, V, i); the Houses of Healing (V, viii); the Grey Havens (VI, ix). A third structural feature of Tolkien’s plot is the most complex, and gave the author a great deal of difficulty in the revision process: the “interlace” structure familiar to readers of medieval romance. George H. Thomson (1967) first suggested the pattern, but Richard C. West’s fuller analysis (1967) the same year remains the definitive study, updated by Shippey’s comments in “Interlacements and the Ring” (2005, Chapter 5). An interlace plot is a structural device as old as the genre of romance. The word “interlace” is an analogy to braiding several strands, and goes back to Aristotle’s discussion of a “double thread” of plot (Poetics 13), though Aristotle disapproved of double plots for tragedy. Because the romance began in late antiquity as a love story in which the heroine is captured and the hero pursues her (hence the popular association of the word “romance” with love stories), the narrative must follow the adventures of the heroine separately from those of the hero, until the reunion of the pair (which ends the tale). Tolkien complicates the two-fold interlace of the typical ancient or medieval romance by giving Frodo the Ring-bearer nine companions, and breaking up the Fellowship several times. The Fellowship is not fully formed until the third chapter of Book Two. It remains intact for only two more chapters, when in Chapter 5 Gandalf dies. Then Frodo leaves the company in the final chapter of Book Two (FR, II, x), followed by Sam. Frodo and Sam will not be heard from again until Book Four.



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Book Three fragments the remaining Fellows even further. Boromir dies in the opening chapter, and when the Hobbits Merry and Pippin are captured, their adventures alternate with those of the remaining company (Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas), the two captive Hobbits occupying Chapters 1 and 4, and the other three Fellows Chapters 2 and 5–7. The two threads are united in Chapter 8 when all of the Fellows meet at Isengard. Book Four catches up on the subsequent actions of Sam and Frodo. Book Five separates the Fellows again when Pippin pledges his service to Denethor in Chapter 1, and Merry to Théoden in Chapter 2. Book Six reunites the whole Fellowship, only to see them depart for their respective homes (the title of VI, vi “Many Partings” echoing and inverting II, i’s “Many Meetings”). While interlace narrative is thought of as a medieval form, modern writers, such as Virginia Woolf in To the Lighthouse and William Faulkner in As I Lay Dying, turn to something like it to describe single events from multiple perspectives. Tolkien uses this medieval technique in a decidedly modern way, closer to Woolf and Faulkner than to Thomas Mallory or Chrétien de Troyes. But while the fragmentation of action as the novel unfolds may be disconcerting, understanding it as part of an interlace pattern may minimize the reader’s bewilderment. Tolkien does not leave the reader helpless in lacing the plot strands: he offers key narrative “landmarks” to help readers “synchronize” events in separate chapters, even when we read them out of sequence. For example, Aragorn, pursuing the captive Hobbits in III, ii, finds a Hobbit brooch; it is not until the following chapter that we see Pippin drop it. Other synchronizing events are more widely separated: the darkness out of Mordor that obscures the sun is seen by Pippin in V, i, and Merry in V, iii; the shifting wind that clears it away is noticed by Ghân-buri-Ghân in V, v, and by Sam in VI, ii. Tolkien’s calendar in the appendices marks the first event as March 10, the second March 15.

The Novel through the New Line Cinema Films Readers encountering Tolkien’s novel only after seeing Peter Jackson’s film trilogy should be prepared for some differences, as is to be expected when any novel is adapted to a different medium (see also ch. 35). Since the heart of The Lord of the Rings is a truly cosmic conflict – light against darkness – and since the film was made at a time when video-game-style computer-generated imaging was driving the film industry, it is perhaps only natural that any film version in the first decade of the twenty-first century would become an action-adventure film, muting or even excising the philosophical depth that made the novel a modern classic. The first-time reader familiar with the film, then, would do well to expect less action, and particularly less immediate action. The action is there in the novel, but not all of it is overtly described, and very little of it is in the first few Books. Tolkien uses several quite deliberate narrative techniques to demote the status of physical action (especially warfare) that is by the nature of things more prominent in

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the visual medium of film. First, by making the least warlike folk the point-of-view characters in the battle scenes, Tolkien effectively displaces the action. At the end of IV, iv, the battle of Faramir’s men against the Southrons, with their giant mounts, is first heard, and only later fitfully seen, by Sam, who is emerging from sleep. Also, Sam has deliberately sought a “deeper shade” among the trees, so that his view is obscured until one of the giant elephantine Mûmak crashes through the trees, at first just “a vast shape” (TT, IV, iv, 864). Even after the beast can be clearly seen, its role in the action is displaced again by Sam’s subsuming of the image into its literary role in his poem about the “oliphaunt.” Similarly, the picture of the climactic battle against the King of the Nazgûl is obscured by Merry’s shrinking from the horror of battle, despite his willing heart – in fact, he closes his eyes at a key moment, and our information is limited to what the Hobbit can hear. A second narrative technique that shunts the action offstage is a trope that the ancient scholiasts who commented on Book Four of The Iliad called teichoskopoeia, or “looking over the wall.” Homer was able to introduce the major warriors of the Achaian coalition by having Helen, who knew them all, identify them from her position on the battlements of Troy. Twice in Book Five Pippin reenacts Helen’s teichoskopoeia, first in Chapter 1 looking at the lines of refugees fleeing the advanc­ ing orcish army, and again in Chapter 4 where Pippin looks on the battle and Beregond (who, like Helen, knows the combatants) describes the action. “But look! They hold on. They will make the Gate. No! the horses are running mad” (RK, V, iv, 1058). Specific differences between the films and the novel are exhaustively detailed on the Tolkien fan web site The One-Ring (the list at http://www.theonering.com/complete -list-of-film-changes, with arguments both supporting and refuting each, runs to over 28,000 words); a more manageable scholarly summary appears in Jane Chance (2002), on the first film only, and there are two volumes of essays on the entire trilogy, Jane Brennan Croft (2005) and Ernest Matthijs and Murray Pomerance (2006). Among the most significant differences are: • Elimination of all Tolkien’s songs and poems. • Elimination of the character of Tom Bombadil (as well as lesser but significant characters such as the Barrow Wights), and reduction in the roles of others, such as Barliman Butterbur, and Farmer Maggot (reduced to a voice off camera). • Elimination of the “Scouring of the Shire.” • Enlarging the roles of Arwen and Gollum. • Reducing the Dwarf Gimli and the Hobbits Merry and Pippin to comic relief.

“Primarily Linguistic in Inspiration” In his Foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien asserted that his stories were “primarily linguistic in inspiration” (FR, xxiii). The claim was treated



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skeptically by some early critics (a summary of their arguments can be found in the opening paragraph of Shippey’s (1979) essay “Creation from Philology”), but is simply the logical product of a mind steeped in the philological principle that words and stories develop out of the same stuff. Or, as Tolkien put it in his lecture “On Fairy-Stories,” the “incarnate mind, the tongue, and the tale are in our world coeval” (OFS 41). The reader of The Lord of the Rings can still see (and perhaps hear) Tolkien’s linguistic inspiration in several ways: (1) phrases and sometimes whole poems in Tolkien’s invented Middle-earth languages; (2) Tolkien’s genius in creating names for people and places that seem to fit their characters, even if the reader may not understand a given character’s language; (3) a fitness of oratorical style to specific characters, sometimes misunderstood as a false or literary archaism; (4) underlying all the above, a linguistic theory Tolkien called Lautphonetik (see below), “a phonology of sounds,” the belief that there may be a connection, beyond mere convention, of the sound of a word to the thing the word names, or at least an aesthetic pleasure in the sounds for their own sake. The first item, Tolkien’s invented languages, reveals what the author had in mind when he reported, quite simply and accurately, that the languages generated the story, and not vice versa, as he told his American publisher when The Lord of the Rings was in press (Letters 219). Long before even The Hobbit, Tolkien worked at crafting languages he referred to as “Elvish,” in two distinct dialects, Quenya, the earlier or “classical” form spoken by Light-elves, and Sindarin, spoken by Wood-elves (see ch. 14). Tolkien’s skill at creating names is universally stipulated, even by critics who otherwise dislike The Lord of the Rings. Like Tolkien’s invented languages, his invented names precede the plot. “To me,” he told Houghton Mifflin, “a name comes first and the story follows” (Letters 219). In Appendix F Tolkien explains how he fashioned character and place-names to reflect linguistic properties he expected his readers to intuit, such as the “Northern (Mannish) origin” (RK, Appendix F, 1488) of the names of Gimli’s family (the Dwarf names in The Hobbit found as they are in the Old Norse Völuspá in the Poetic Edda); the Old English – and, as Tom Shippey has pointed out, particularly Mercian (2005, 140) – sound of Rohirric names; and the place-names around Buckland and Bree which “resembled the survival of Celtic elements in Britain” (RK, Appendix F, 1492). The uncanny fitness of words to the things they name in Tolkien’s novel reflects an attitude toward language that ran counter to majority opinion in his day. In his earliest reference to the idea, in The Year’s Work in English Studies for 1926, he coined a German term for it, Lautphonetik. In a 1954 letter to Naomi Mitchison he called it “phonaesthetic” (Letters 176). The concept is simply what most philosophers of language seemed to believe before the Enlightenment: that there is, or can be, an inherent connection between the nature of a thing and the sound of the word that names it. The notion explains the rather dreamy experience of Sam and Frodo as they listen to songs in Elvish and feel they somehow understand them; Tom Bombadil’s renaming the Hobbit ponies with “true” names to which they will always answer; Treebeard’s

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admonishment to Pippin for revealing his name, for “Real names tell you the story of the things they belong to in my language” (TT, IV, iv, 606); similarly, Tolkien told Mitchison that Dwarves “never reveal their own ‘true’ personal names in their own tongue” (Letters 175). The dream of a word that carries the essence of the thing it names may be a universal human desire, and if so, it is appropriate to fantasy. Alertness to “phonaesthetic” values in the many names and other words in Middle-earth languages in The Lord of the Rings will provide an important entry into Tolkien’s novel even for those readers who lack the interest or the patience to work out their meanings. For those who do take the time to learn Elvish or work out the Old English meanings of names in Rohan, there is no denying that Tolkien’s fiction is “primarily linguistic in inspiration.”

“I Cordially Dislike Allegory” For a professor of medieval languages and literature – a literature that embraced the allegorical mode in a way puzzling to the modern mind – Tolkien displayed an unusually vehement rejection of allegory. If a twentieth-century writer could be expected to show a tolerance to a form that the modern world had unfairly rejected, surely it would be someone like Tolkien, whose fellow Inklings C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams had used it extensively. Many Christian readers of Tolkien, knowing of his Inkling connection and the importance of his Catholic faith in his personal life, look for Christian themes in The Lord of the Rings. Some of the more successful studies of religious elements in the novel include books by Bradley Birzer (2002), Ralph Wood (2003), and Stratford Caldecott (2005). Yet Tolkien’s denial of any allegory in his stories began almost as soon as his fiction was published. As early as 1938 he was complaining to his publisher about allegorical readings of The Hobbit and saying, perhaps for the first time, that his work in progress (The Lord of the Rings) was not allegorical, though with war looming in Europe, “the darkness of the present days has had some effect on it” (Letters 41). Two years earlier, in his best-known scholarly work, the 1936 Gollancz Memorial Lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” Tolkien had just as stiffly denied the classification of Beowulf as an allegory (MC 7). Then his essay proceeded to explain the history of Beowulf criticism allegorically. The provocation for Tolkien’s irritation over allegorical readings – probably best known from his statement in his “Foreword to the Second Edition” in The Lord of the Rings, “I cordially dislike allegory” (FR, xxvi) – was certainly substantial. Critics and other readers insisted on turning the novel into a roman à clef, a substitution code in which every item or character in Middle-earth has a conscious analogue in the modern reader’s world. It is this type of allegory, the one-to-one correspondence, that Tolkien denied. “To ask if the Orcs ‘are’ Communists,” he explained, “is to me as sensible as asking if Communists are Orcs” (Letters 262).



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Tolkien’s corrective to the problem of finding allegory where it never was is to replace it with “applicability.” The concept of application (as well as the word) echoes medieval theories of literary interpretation. Medieval sermons applied two manners of interpretation to scripture, usually in two discrete sections of the sermon: explicatio, which typically explored the doctrinal implications of the text, and applicatio, which helped the faithful find insights into their own lives in the scripture text. Any author of serious fiction, no matter how realist in manner, should expect, even desire, the reader to find an applicatio to the reader’s world, even his or her private world. But the reader should not imagine that the writer intended all of the infinite applications possible.

“Lead Us Not into Temptation” In one of his many letters to readers denying allegory in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien employs particular caution in addressing its religious implications. In 1956 a reader had asked if Frodo’s climactic scene on Mount Doom made the book “about” grace and the power of forgiveness. Tolkien responded with his usual rejection of allegory, but then added: But, of course, if you wish for more reflection, I should say that within the mode of the story the ‘catastrophe’ exemplifies (an aspect of) the familiar words: ‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.’ (Letters 233)

Aside from the daily familiarity most Christians have with those closing phrases of the most recognizable Christian prayer, the Pater Noster, Tolkien had been brooding over them all the while he had been composing The Lord of the Rings. Starting in the spring of 1936, but continuing over the next three decades (in three distinct redactions, 1936, mid-1940s, and 1966), Tolkien had worked and reworked a history of the Lord’s Prayer which, it is likely, was never delivered as a lecture, and in the event never published (Bodleian Library, Tolkien A 18). It offers, however, some insight into why Tolkien thought “Lead us not into temptation” something of motto for the novel, or at least for its catastrophe. Tolkien observes that πειρασμός, the Greek word translated as “temptation,” more properly refers to, as Tolkien glosses it, “a test or trial (of strength or worth)” (Bodleian Library, Tolkien A 18/1, f. 9). Frodo’s suffering on Mount Doom, then, certainly has Christian implications (or, to use Tolkien’s term, “applicability,” FR, xxvi), but is prevented from being a direct allegory of Christ’s passion because Frodo is “doomed to failure, doomed to fall to temptation or be broken by pressure against his ‘will’ ” (Letters 233). Frodo’s passion on Mount Doom certainly was temptation, in the original sense of “trial,” as the Ring and its power were “temptations” in the modern sense of

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“enticement.” “Lead us not into temptation,” then, is a useful motif for understanding the novel, and “as we forgive” is connected to it. Tolkien insisted that Frodo’s forbearance toward Gollum was a grace that led to his own survival.

“Fall, Mortality, and The Machine” In an earlier letter, also in the context of denying allegory, Tolkien told Milton Waldman, an editor who had expressed an interest in The Lord of the Rings, that he considered “Fall, Mortality, and The Machine” to be the three major concerns of the novel (Letters 145). The word “Fall” has obvious Christian resonances, but Tolkien has many kinds of fallenness in mind, and by placing (at least at first) the events of the novel in Northern Europe some 4000 years before Christ, Tolkien pointed out to readers that the characters could not be conscious of any Judeo-Christian notions of the fall. Yet the loss of a primal connectedness with creation and a creator is certainly common to many mythological systems, and it is clearly part of Tolkien’s Middleearth. And all three of Tolkien’s terms, Fall, Mortality, and The Machine, are interconnected. Evidence of Fall in Tolkien’s novel is both universal and personal. Greatness appears as a thing of the past, only fitfully glimpsed in the Third Age, the time in which the novel is set. The great kings of the North, descendants of Eorl, appear only as “Rangers” like Strider, seemingly uncouth vagabonds who roam the borderlands, suspected by “respectable” folk of shady doings, but in reality keeping Middle-earth from harm. Legolas similarly reports, on arriving at the Elvish realm of Lórien, that “there is a secret power here that holds evil from the land” (FR, II, vi, 440) and so masks the results of a fall. Even the natural image of the fall in the falling of leaves is unknown in Lórien, where “in the autumn their leaves fall not, but turn to gold” (II, vi, 435). Legolas and Aragorn tell the Hobbits tales of a bright Middle-earth “before the world was grey” (II, vi, 441). Everything good in Middle-earth is described in the novel as “fading,” “dwindling,” or “waning.” Even Lórien cannot remain unfallen forever; the novel ends with Elves and Ring-bearers leaving Middle-earth for the Undying Lands across the sea in the west. A falling off is seen in a number of individual characters. Denethor, scion of the noble race of the stewards of Gondor, laments the darkness into which his land has descended, and succumbs to despair and suicide. His son Boromir is in many ways nobler, but he betrays the Fellowship and attacks Frodo in an attempt to seize the Ring. The fall of the Hobbit Sméagol is perhaps the most striking: he becomes such a wretched, “gangrel” creature that Frodo and Sam do not even recognize him as a Hobbit, and his name becomes Gollum. Similarly, even the great Saruman, chief of Gandalf’s order of wizards, falls from wisdom to become the cheap gangster Sharkey in “The Scouring of the Shire” (RK, VI, viii).



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The connection between Fall and Mortality is familiar enough to Christian thought, but it also prevails in Tolkien’s novel. Knowledge of death leads short-lived characters such as Hobbits and Men, as Tolkien told Waldman in the letter cited above, “to a passionate love of the real primary world,” which, because of “Fall,” can lead mortal creatures to “become possessive, clinging to the things made as ‘its own’ ” (Letters 145). It is the mortal creature’s inability to accept death that leads to a desire for power, and that in turn to the third element, The Machine. Tolkien’s aversion to mechanization is often mistaken for a sort of unthinking Luddite rejection of technology, an Amish-like retreat from the twentieth century. But that is not what Tolkien meant by “The Machine.” In fact, the Amish response to technology, if rightly understood, is not far from Tolkien’s way of thinking. Machines are morally neutral to Amish farmers, or they could not use even the horsedrawn plow or the windmill. What makes a machine potentially evil is, in Tolkien’s phrase, an improper desire “to make the will more immediately effective” (Letters 145). Machinery just happens to be the means of effecting the fallen individual’s will to power most familiar to the modern mind, but another, Tolkien explained to Waldman, is Magic, which is misunderstood both by Tolkien’s readers and by some of his characters. As Galadriel observes, the word “magic” is equivocal in Hobbit usage, and so it is in the novel (FR, II, vii, 471). Sauron’s Ring is identified when it first appears as “magic,” but so are the Dwarf-made toys that entertain Hobbit children; the malignancy of the Ring’s magic is not made clear at first. Calling Gandalf a “wizard” obscures the benign quality of his magic also. In Tolkien’s mythology, Istari, the class of beings called wizards, are actually Maiar, angelic beings serving the creator. “This is what your folk would call magic,” Galadriel told Sam, “though I do not understand clearly what they mean; and they seem also to use the same word of the deceits of the Enemy” (FR, II, vii, 471). In the following chapter Pippin asks another Elf if the cloaks the Elves offer are magic, and the reply is simply, “I do not know what you mean by that” (FR, II, viii, 482). In a draft of a letter to Naomi Mitchison, Tolkien explains the equivocation in terms of an early modern (seventeenth-century) distinction between two Latinized Greek words, magia, the power of causing physical change in the real world, and goetia, deceiving the subject into believing such a change had taken place. In general, Tolkien says, magia was “good” and goetia “bad,” but in the world of his novel, both are used for good and for bad purposes: the moral value of the “magic” must be determined by motive. Sauron’s motive in making and using the Rings was “domination of other ‘free’ wills” (Letters 200). The connection between magia and machine is inherent in the Indo-European roots; the Greeks may have borrowed the word mekhane/makhana, the source of our word machine, from the Old Persian maghush, from Proto-IndoEuropean *magh, “to have power.” Thus, Tolkien’s connecting (1) a perverted will to power with (2) the love of machines we see in Isengard is not a matter of mere whimsy, but a long-standing cultural association revealed by philology.

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“Inside a Song” Tolkien’s first writings about Middle-earth were in verse, and about 75 poems wreathe themselves around the narrative within The Lord of the Rings. The exact number depends on one’s definition of verse, and how multiple versions of a song are reckoned. Some are as short as four lines; some as long as 128. Some were previously published, but Tolkien reshaped them to fit the dramatic context of the narrative (see also ch. 12). Many readers who love Tolkien’s fiction dislike or are indifferent to the verse. That is to be expected. Some widely respected critics of Tolkien confess (with various degrees of openness) to skipping through the poetry, evidence that embracing the verse is not an absolute requirement for an appreciation of the novel. But even if the reader cannot appreciate the verse as verse (and it is just as out of synch with modernist verse as the novel is out of synch with modernist fiction), a sympathetic reader should at least appreciate its effectiveness at (1) reflecting a society and an era in which oral poetry and song was a major carrier of tradition; (2) heightening emotional moments in ways unavailable or unsuitable to prose; (3) characterizing both the singer and the singer’s culture. Scholarly appreciation of the poems has been slow in coming, but at least two volumes dealing exclusively with verse are in preparation; an excellent study by a major theorist of prosody is Jeffrey Russom’s “Tolkien’s Versecraft” (2000), and Verlyn Flieger’s “Poems By Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings” (2007) offers much more detail than can be given here; see also the recent collection of studies in Eilmann and Turner 2013. In his lifetime Tolkien lamented critics’ inability (or unwillingness) to understand the poems in their dramatic context. “It seems hardly ever recognized,” he wrote his son Michael, “that the verses in The L.R. are all dramatic: they do not express the poor old professor’s soul-searchings, but are fitted in style and contents to the characters in the story that sing or recite them, and to the situations in it” (Letters 396). For example, Tom Bombadil’s speeches are all in a verse form unique to him, even when he is not singing, and a preponderance of feminine endings (unstressed syllables) to the lines give it an upbeat bounce that fits his sunny character – a welcome contrast to the danger from which he saves the company. Hobbit songs such as “Ho! Ho! Ho! To the bottle I go” (FR, I, iv, 118) and “Sing hey! For the bath at the end of day” (FR, I, v, 132) express the Hobbits’ love of comfort. The fact that Hobbit songs admit such a category as “bath songs” tells us a great deal about them. Another side of Hobbit culture is seen in “wandering” songs like “The Road Goes Ever On” (FR, I, i, 46–47, repeated iii, 96, and RK, VI, ix, 1345), and “Upon the Hearth” (FR, I, iii, 101–102). Narrative songs of Elvish history, such as “Gil-galad was an Elven King” (FR, I, xi, 242–243) or “Eärendil was a Mariner” (FR, II, i, 304–308) take on the nobility and long memory of the Elves; their songs presented in Elvish, A Elbereth Gilthoniel (FR, II, i, 309) and A! laurië lantar lassi súrinen (FR, II, viii, 492) are haunting: the first leaves Frodo “enchanted” (310), and the second leaves its



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words “graven in its memory,” though it “spoke of things little known on Middleearth” (492). The verse in The Lord of the Rings is more than ornament; it helps to create (or change) mood, to characterize individuals or cultures, and to delight – which, in the end, was one of the author’s prime goals in writing the novel. References Auden, W. H. 2004. “The Quest Hero.” In Understanding the Lord of the Rings: The Best of Tolkien Criticism, edited by Neil Isaacs and Rose Zimbardo, 31–51. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Originally published in 1961 in Texas Quarterly, 4: 81–93. Birzer, Bradley. 2002. J. R. R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-earth. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books. Caldecott, Stratford. 2005. The Power of the Ring: The Spiritual Vision Behind the Lord of the Rings. New York: Crossroad Publishing. Chance, Jane. 2002. “Is There a Text in This Hobbit? Peter Jackson’s Fellowship of the Ring.” Literature Film Quarterly, 30: 79–85. Croft, Jane Brennan. 2005. Tolkien on Film: Essays on Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings. Altadena, CA: Mythopoeic Press. Eilmann, Julie and Allan Turner, eds. 2013. Tolkien’s Poetry. Zurich and Jena: Walking Tree Publishers. Flieger, Verlyn. 2007. “Poems by Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings.” In J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopaedia, edited by Michael Drout, 522–532. London: Routledge.

Matthijs, Ernest and Murray Pomerance. 2006. From Hobbits to Hollywood: Essays on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Russom, Geoffrey. 2000. “Tolkien’s Versecraft in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.” In J. R. R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances, edited by George Clark and Daniel Timmons, 53–69. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Shippey, Tom. 1979. “Creation from Philology.” In J. R. R. Tolkien, Scholar and Storyteller: Essays In Memoriam, edited by Mary Salu and Robert T. Farrell, 286–316. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Shippey, Tom. 2005. The Road to Middle-earth. Rev. and expanded edn. London: HarperCollins. Thomson, George H. 1967. “The Lord of the Rings: The Novel as Traditional Romance.” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 8: 43–59. West, Richard C. 1967. “The Interlace and Professor Tolkien: Medieval Narrative Technique in The Lord of the Rings.” Orcrist, 1: 26–47. Wood, Ralph. 2003. The Gospel According to Tolkien. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.

Further Reading Helms, Randel. 1974. Tolkien’s World. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

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Unfinished Tales and the History of Middle-earth: A Lifetime of Imagination Elizabeth A. Whittingham

Tolkien’s Process The wonderful aspect of Unfinished Tales (Tolkien 1998c; first published 1980) and of the History of Middle-earth series (1983–1996) is that they contain works by Tolkien that many readers still have not discovered. Evident in these tales as in his well-known works are Tolkien’s facility with turning a phrase, his sense of humor, and his ability to tell a good story. Tolkien’s first works related to the secondary world of Middleearth were written during World War I, during the years 1914–1917, but he continued to work on these stories for the rest of his life, right up until his death in 1973 at the age of 81. Many of these stories are ones that Tolkien wrote and rewrote many times. In the summer of 1967, Clyde Kilby, a professor at Wheaton College in Illinois, went to Oxford hoping to assist Tolkien in any way that would further the completion and publication of the long-awaited Silmarillion. Visiting Tolkien’s home, Kilby saw numerous boxes of written material, which he anticipated would fill 12 volumes if published – a close estimate (Kilby 1976). Christopher Tolkien, after his father’s death, edited and published The Silmarillion (1977), Unfinished Tales, but also the 12 volumes of The History of Middle-earth, a total of 14 books. Unfinished Tales and The History of Middle-earth include a variety of previously unpublished works: unfinished stories and poems, author’s notes, essays, and maps. Christopher Tolkien took on the monumental task of reading and organizing those texts, and supplementing them with textual and editorial notes and commentaries. He worked directly from his

A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.



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father’s manuscripts (some hastily penned first versions and some beautiful calligraphic fair copies) and typescripts that were often heavily annotated. Indeed throughout The History of Middle-earth are occasional photocopies of these pages mixed together with the texts that remain unknown to many readers.

Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth When Christopher Tolkien published The Silmarillion, it was as a novel without notes and commentaries, but Unfinished Tales was the first book of unpublished texts presented in the form that his father left them. Most of the material is divided into the First, Second, and Third Ages of Men and includes information that fans of The Lord of the Rings may be eager to learn: accounts concerning Celeborn and Galadriel, the Rings of Power, and most especially the Istari/Wizards. The section on the First Age consists of lengthy versions of the separate tales concerning Tuor and Túrin. Many details missing from The Silmarillion are part of the stories of these two heroic cousins. Described are Tuor’s youth among the Eldar after the death of both parents, for example, and his extended journey to the gates of Gondolin. Also included are “Narn i Hîn Húrin, The Tale of the Children of Húrin,” which though it contains some gaps, is still the fullest version written. The account does not vary from The Silmarillion’s in any dramatic way but contains details and conversations that are missing from other versions, including those later published in The History of Middle-earth. “Aldarion and Erendis,” a tale from the Second Age, tells the story of a prince of Númenor and the woman who eventually becomes his queen. Although this mariner king is a courageous man, dealing with a growing shadow in Middle-earth, his pride and temperament prevent him from being an understanding and accommodating husband and father. The stormy relationship is far different from other love stories in Tolkien’s writings, those relationships between noble and self-sacrificing characters such as Lúthien and Beren or Arwen and Aragorn. Following this tale, “The History of Celeborn and Galadriel” provides many details about the lives of these two Eldar over three Ages of Man. Interestingly, Tolkien wrote many versions of their history together, and Christopher Tolkien includes these varying accounts in this volume. The section on the Third Age has a number of stories that supplement The Lord of the Rings itself and the information in the Appendices. One tale describes Isildur’s journey north with the One Ring when he was killed and the Ring lost during an Orc attack near the Gladden Fields. The fight and Isildur’s efforts to safeguard the Ring are described along with the corresponding conversations. A brief document, “The sources of the legend of Isildur’s death,” reveals surprising information about a secret compartment in Orthanc being discovered by King Elessar with Gimli’s help. The account gives details about their finding personal possessions of Isildur’s including the container in which Isildur carried the One Ring and also the Elendilmir, the symbol of the royal house of Arnor.

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The Third Age section also contains a history of the Northmen revealing the events that led to Eorl’s remarkable ride to aid Cirion, Steward of Gondor, and Cirion’s granting the lands that became the kingdom of Rohan. The ceremony on Amon Anwar, the Holy Hill and the secret site of Elendil’s tomb, includes the profound oaths of Cirion and Eorl. Perhaps more widely known is “The Quest of Erebor,” which relates in a much fuller fashion than in Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings, how an unexpected meeting between Gandalf and Thorin Oakenshield led to the quest to the Lonely Mountain and how Gandalf had to pester Thorin before the Dwarf would consider taking a silly Hobbit along (see also ch. 8). “The Hunt for the Ring” details the Ringwraiths’ search along with accounts of Saruman’s visits to and early dealings with the Shire. A brief scene from the White Council of 2851 includes Saruman mocking Gandalf for his use of pipe-weed, despite his own secret use. The fourth and final section of Unfinished Tales contains writings regarding the Drúedain (Woses), the Istari, and the Palantíri. These texts expand on those in The Lord of the Rings, the Appendices, and The Silmarillion. Noteworthy accounts describe the Drúedain’s brief sojourn in Númenor, their escape before the island kingdom’s downfall, the identification of Queen Beruthiel and her creepy cats, and the uses and eventual fates of the palantíri. One text contains the debate among the Valar concerning which Maiar to include in the Istari and Olórin/Gandalf’s reluctance to volunteer. An author’s note reveals that the single surviving palantír of the North Kingdom, which resides in the Tower Hills west of the Shire, is a seeing stone not used for communication but looks into the far West to Eressëa. For the reader who wants more particulars about the above-mentioned characters and events, Unfinished Tales is a goldmine.

The History of Middle-earth: Twelve Captivating Volumes After Tolkien’s death, his son Christopher sorted through his unpublished writings, organizing them largely chronologically, and after publishing The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales, issued the 12 volumes of The History of Middle-earth between 1983 and 1996. The works in The History of Middle-earth include many versions of some stories in both prose and verse forms, and for the most part, the material is arranged in the order that they were written with detailed notes and commentary by Christopher. For example, Tolkien’s creation myth first appears in The Book of Lost Tales I as “The Music of the Ainur,” a text composed sometime between the fall of 1918 and the spring of 1920. Tolkien wrote another version of that myth in the 1930s, entitled “Ainulindalë,” which is published in The Lost Road and Other Writings. A final version of the “Ainulindalë” completed sometime about 1948 is printed in Morgoth’s Ring. This version is the one on which Christopher based the creation story in the 1977 Silmarillion. Besides such revisions over the years, there are also examples of multiple versions of tales written within a short period of time. For example, during the late 1930s, the “Quenta Silmarillion” was composed in four



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different stages (A, B, C, and D) and in longer and shorter versions, QS I and QS II respectively.

The Book of Lost Tales I (1983) and II (1984) These first two volumes of The History of Middle-earth series cover primarily the same time period of Tolkien’s writing, the stories being arranged in accordance with the “Silmarillion”s overall exposition. The poem “Tinfang Warble” was first penned in 1914, but most of the stories were written between 1917 and 1920. These early versions of the stories whose later revisions appear in The Silmarillion have many interesting elements missing from the 1977 text. The stories are set in the framework of a larger story: Eriol, a traveler, comes to the Cottage of Lost Play on the Lonely Island, Tol Eressëa. While he visits there, he hears the lost tales mainly related by various Eldar in the Room of the Log Fire, and the links that connect the various stories include characters and circumstances that were eliminated from the later works when the framework was abandoned. In these early tales, many names and details differ from their later forms. Eriol is told about the creation of the universe in “The Music of the Ainur,” a tale that already contains most of the elements of the later “Ainulindalë.” “The Coming of the Valar and the Building of Valinor” introduces the Valar and the array of lesser spirits that enter the world and describes the spectacular palaces built by Aulë for his fellow divinities, though these fanciful dwellings disappear from later versions. Within the pages of this tale is also an early visual representation of Arda’s cosmology, fashioned like a ship. “The Tale of the Sun and Moon” explains how the ships that bore the Sun and Moon came to be built and set in the heavens and includes an early published version of the poem “Why the Man in the Moon came down too soon.” Attached to the Sun and Moon, according to “The Hiding of Valinor,” are heavy cables and slender cords that measure the years as time passes. Book I concludes with “Gilfanon’s Tale,” a brief account of Tû the Wizard and Nuin, the Dark Elf. Book II contains intriguing tales from this early period: “The Tale of Tinúviel,” “Turambar and the Foalókë,” and “The Nauglafring.” The story about Tinúviel is different from later versions in that Beren’s name is left out of the title and he is also one of the Eldar. As a result of this difference in status, much of Beren’s background and the tensions between Beren and Lúthien’s father because of his being a mortal are altered or missing. There is no great wolf guarding Melko’s gates and no reference to Sauron, but instead Tevildo Prince of Cats occupies great halls, and Melko gives Beren into the great cat’s keeping. In “Turambar and the Foalókë,” certain elements found in later versions are missing, such as Túrin’s involvement with Mîm and the Pettydwarves, but this early tale includes a conversation between Mavwin/Morwen and Glorund/Glaurung that is later omitted. Túrin’s parents are admitted into the halls of Mandos, a fate denied all Men in future versions, and initially Túrin and his sister are rejected because of their incest. “The Fall of Gondolin,” the first tale to be written,

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is fully developed and in a form that already contains many elements of the final version.

The Lays of Beleriand (1985) The third volume of the series contains primarily verse works from the 1920s. The two major works are “The Lay of the Children of Húrin,” written in alliterative verse, and “The Lay of Leithian.” “The Lay of the Children of Húrin” explores the early events in the lives of Húrin and his children, Túrin Turambar and Nienor/Níniel; the alliterative form seems well suited to these dark episodes in their family history and is particularly effective in the dialogue between Húrin and Morgoth. “The Lay of Leithian,” which relates the story of Beren and Lúthien, provides one of many versions of that tale. Among poems that were set aside after only limited development are “The Flight of the Noldoli from Valinor,” “The Lay of Eärendel,” and “The Lay of the Fall of Gondolin.” Readers of Humphrey Carpenter’s 1977 authorized biography, aware of the humorous commentary by C. S. Lewis concerning “The Lay of Leithian,” can now read the scholarly examination of the poem voiced by Peabody, Pumpernickel, and Bentley.

The Shaping of Middle-earth (1986) The fourth volume of the series contains works from the early 1930s. Besides a few annals, the one major work, the “Quenta Noldorinwa,” is the only complete version of the “Silmarillion” ever finished by Tolkien. It is also the version of the “Silmarillion” that was in existence when Tolkien was writing The Hobbit. The annals divide the material into two sections: “The Annals of Valinor,” which covers the time in Valinor before the awakening of the Elves and while the Eldar dwelt in the Undying Lands, and “The Annals of Beleriand,” which covers the events in Beleriand and the war between Melkor and Elves and Men during the First Age. This collection also contains early maps and “The Ambarkanta,” a description of the cosmology of the lands and universe of Middle-earth as conceived by Tolkien during the early 1930s.

The Lost Road and Other Writings (1987) The fifth volume of the series contains works from the mid-to-late 1930s including later versions of the annals and the last version of the “Silmarillion” before Tolkien began writing The Lord of the Rings. “The Fall of Númenor” and “The Lost Road” include references to Tolkien’s recurring Atlantis dream. “The Fall of Númenor” is fully set in Middle-earth and later evolves into the “Akallabêth” in The Silmarillion. Though brief, it is the earliest account of Númenor and the Edain during the Second



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Age. “The Lost Road,” a tale of time-travel, is the result of the agreement between Tolkien and C. S. Lewis to write stories that they would enjoy and connects the Primary World in the twentieth century to Tolkien’s Secondary World, Middle-earth, through Númenor. Etymological works also comprise a significant portion of the book.

The Return of the Shadow (1988) In the sixth volume of the series, the beginning of The Lord of the Rings emerges in its various versions. The work, begun in December of 1937, continued through the next two years and tracks the Hobbits and their companions as far as the Mines of Moria. These early versions and numerous rewritings focus on events in the Shire and on Tolkien’s first concepts of the Ring’s history. These accounts contain many elements that never survived into the tale’s final form: Bingo Baggins instead of Frodo, Odo as a companion on the journey instead of Sam, and Trotter the Hobbit as a precursor to Strider the Dúnedain. This last aspect grew out of the idea suggested in The Hobbit that from time to time Gandalf had spirited away young Hobbit boys and girls on adventures. Reading these early concepts and seeing the tales evolve are intriguing for those who appreciate the published The Lord of the Rings.

The Treason of Isengard (1989) The seventh volume of the series includes continuing revisions of early sections of The Lord of the Rings as well as further development of the story beyond the Mines of Moria. As in the previous volume, many characters and events from these writings disappear or take on a completely different incarnation in Tolkien’s revisions: Hamilcar Bolger, Tarkil the Dúnedan, Saramund the Grey, Treebeard the evil giant, and Gandalf’s rescue of Hamilcar from the Black Riders on his swift horse Galeroc. Also included is the tale as it progresses, describing the journey of the company from the Mines of Moria, through Lothlórien, down the Great River to the breaking of the Fellowship. In the final section are chapters on the Riders of Rohan, the Uruk-Hai, Treebeard the Ent – no longer a fell foe – and other elements that eventually appeared in The Two Towers.

The War of the Ring (1990) The story of the war against Sauron continues in the eighth volume of the series, and contains material from 1942, before the break from writing that Tolkien took during 1943 and 1944, and the material he wrote after his return. The text picks up with the journey from Edoras to Helms Deep and continues through a chapter in which Gandalf contemplates the significance of the palantír, Pippin’s involvement being

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eventually included. The second section of this volume takes up Frodo and Sam trying to find their way into Mordor, which was begun in the spring of 1944, and continues through the carrying away of Frodo’s body into the tower of Kirith Ungol. The third section begins with Gandalf’s and Pippin’s arrival in Minas Tirith, “The Muster of Rohan,” “The Seige of Gondor,” and subsequent events through to and including the opening of the Black Gate. Though there are fewer major differences between these early versions and the published text, a few significant differences are evident: Faramir is originally named Falborn; Éowyn dies in the attack by the Witch King of the Nazgûl; there are many spiders instead of only Shelob in Kirith Ungol; and the projected ending tells of Sam wrapping up many loose ends for the reader by reading to his children from his book.

Sauron Defeated (1992) The ninth volume of the series includes texts largely from the mid-1940s beginning with the final chapters of The Lord of the Rings in their preliminary form, which picks up with Frodo and Sam in Mordor. In these chapters, the original Sharkey was not Saruman but Cosimo Sackville-Baggins – later named Lotho – and Frodo is lively, aggressive, and determined, unlike the weary, wounded character of the published text. The most interesting difference is an Epilogue, similar to the one previously anticipated, that focuses on Sam and his numerous children and provides an opportunity to inform the reader about the future adventures of the members of the Fellowship. Also included in the ninth volume are the intriguing “Notion Club Papers,” the minutes of a group similar to the Inklings, of which Tolkien was a member. This tale, which is one of the treasures of the entire series, presents the mysteries found in the twenty-first century among discarded papers. “The Drowning of Anadûnê,” the third section of the book, is a later version of “The Fall of Númenor,” surprising in the major alterations and deletions made to the earlier text. Christopher Tolkien attributes these changes to the amount of time that had elapsed since the writing of the previous version and the growing significance of Númenor as The Lord of the Rings developed.

Morgoth’s Ring (1993) The series’ tenth volume has the most intriguing title of all the volumes: Morgoth has, in the creation process, put himself and his discordant elements into the universe, and the World, corrupted from creation, is Morgoth’s Ring. As Sauron cannot fully be destroyed while the One Ring exists, the Dark Lord cannot be destroyed while the World exists. This volume contains many works that resulted from the popularity of The Lord of the Rings. Following the book’s publication in 1954 and 1955, Tolkien was inundated with questions from readers about his characters and their world, which



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resulted in much of Tolkien’s writing in the late 1950s as he considered those questions. Consequently, this volume contains details concerning the lives of Elves, reincarnation, and body/spirit relationships for both Elves and Men. The story of “Finwë & Míriel” includes a debate among the Valar, and the conversation in the “Athrabeth Finrod Ah Andreth” centers on the metaphysical differences between Elves and Men, a philosophical discussion with a personal slant. The book also incorporates versions of the “Silmarillion” from both the early and late 1950s as well as a final section entitled “Myths Transformed” that contains some interesting notes on cosmology, Melkor, Orcs, and Aman.

The War of the Jewels (1994) In the eleventh volume, the “Silmarillion” of the 1950s continues. Also included are a number of significant texts such as “The Grey Annals,” a revision of “The Annals of Beleriand,” and “The Later Quenta Silmarillion.” “Quendi and Eldar” is a significant linguistic work, and “The Tale of Years” is useful for understanding the chronology of the later Elder Days. Among this volume’s most interesting texts are stories and notes about Húrin, Ælfwine, Maeglin, and the Ents and Eagles. The most fully developed of these texts, “The Wanderings of Húrin,” describes the release of Húrin from Angband following 28 years of captivity and his journeys that include an attack on the Easterlings of Hithlum, his gathering of men around him, the sorrowful reunion with Morwen just before her death, and his trial by the Haladin. The chapter “Maeglin” examines variations and expansions of the text that appears in The Silmarillion.

The Peoples of Middle-earth (1996) Most of the twelfth volume focuses on the last of The Lord of the Rings writings, in particular, Tolkien’s preliminary work on the Appendices. The rest of the book brings together short pieces generally from the last years of Tolkien’s life. “Of Dwarves and Men” reflects on the Book of Mazarbul and informs about the Longbeard Dwarves. “The Shibboleth of Fëanor,” “The Problem of Ros,” and “Dangweth Pengoloð” are linguistic in focus but include various facts about the family of Finwë and the lives of Elves and Men. “Last Writings,” from the last year of the author’s life, tells briefly of “The Five Wizards,” “Círdan,” and “Glorfindel,” Tolkien’s one example of a reincarnated Elf. Another short piece, “Of Lembas,” explains that waybread came from the Valar and is followed by two noteworthy unfinished works. “The New Shadow” picks up a century after the events of The Lord of the Rings and looks ahead into the Fourth Age and what happens after Aragorn’s reign ends. “Tal-Elmar” describes the Second Age arrival of Númenóreans in Middle-earth from the per­ spective of those who already live there.

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The 12 volumes of The History of Middle-earth undoubtedly represent the prolific nature of Tolkien’s writing throughout his life and contain some wonderful treasures. Different people will be attracted by varying works, and some may see the volumes as an interesting resource for information, while others will want to read piecemeal, picking through to choose only favorite tidbits, and a few will want to devour them in their entirety – a feast to be savored over an extended period of time. One of the many pleasures of enjoying all these books is to observe the evolution of individual tales over many decades of the author’s life.

Tolkien’s “Great Saga”: A “Long Defeat” That May or May Not Include a “Final Victory” Of all the heroes’ tales of The Silmarillion, although the tale of Beren and Lúthien has received much attention and is closely associated with Tolkien’s own life, the tales about Húrin and his children came to be the author’s “great saga” (Jewels ix). In the Foreword of The War of the Jewels, the eleventh volume of The History of Middle-earth, Christopher Tolkien explains that the abandonment of many of the tales of the “Silmarillion” in 1930 was due largely to “the centrality that my father accorded to the story of Húrin and Morwen and their children, Túrin Turambar and Niënor Níniel. This became for him, I believe, the dominant and absorbing story of the end of the Elder Days” (Jewels viii–ix). Christopher attributes this focus to the “complexity of motive and character, trapped in the mysterious workings of Morgoth’s curse, [which] sets it altogether apart” (ix). As Christopher notes, this intricate tale is entangled with the end of the People of Haleth, the fall of Doriath, and the ruin of the Havens of Sirion (ix). Additionally, Túrin plays a significant role in the destruction of Nargothrond, and Húrin’s search for Gondolin alerts Morgoth to the general location of Turgon’s realm, contributing to the fall of the third hidden kingdom, Gondolin, and thereby to the ultimate destruction of Beleriand. Furthermore, the tale is intertwined with the other great heroes’ tales of the First Age – Beren and Lúthien, Tuor, and Eärendil – for Beren opens the way for Men to be allowed to enter Doriath where Túrin is fostered; Tuor is Túrin’s first cousin, and their fathers together entered Gondolin, married cousins, and fought side by side in the Nirnaeth Arnoediad; and Eärendil and Elwing meet in the Havens and marry as a result of their escape from Gondolin and Doriath respectively. Elements of this tale are spread throughout several chapters, and ultimately, this tale draws together numerous narrative strands within the “Silmarillion” and is, indeed, the “great saga” of Tolkien’s legendarium. Christopher’s description of his father’s writing process in regards to “The Wanderings of Húrin” is true of this entire tale and many of his stories about Middle-earth: “the story grew and changed as he wrote” (Jewels 260). The tale of Túrin Turambar, which encompasses all the members of his family and their individual deeds and



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experiences, is a good example of the evolution of many of Tolkien’s works both in the moment as he was working on any one tale and then further over nearly six decades of writing and revision. The History of Middle-earth series allows a reader to follow this evolution. In the 1919 “Turambar and the Foalókë” from The Book of Lost Tales II, Tolkien uses many names that appear in different forms in later versions as his stories and languages evolve: Úrin becomes Húrin; Mavwin becomes Morwen; Tinwelint becomes Thingol, and Glorund becomes Glaurung. The tale is told by Eltas in the framework of the storytelling of the two volumes of Lost Tales. Some elements of the later versions are missing, such as Morwen residing for a lengthy time in Doriath with Thingol’s people and Túrin taking refuge in Amon Rûdh with Mîm and the Petty-dwarves. Other elements of the tale apparently exist from the beginning, such as Túrin’s mistakenly slaying his friend Beleg, Nienóri’s loss of memory because of the dragons’ spell, and Nienóri/Níniel’s pregnancy as a result of her unwittingly incestuous relationship with her brother. One of the most unusual aspects of this early version is in the final paragraph, which describes Úrin and Mavwin praying for Manwë to take pity on their children: “Túrin and Nienóri entered into Fôs’Almir, the bath of flame . . . and so were all their sorrows and stains washed away, and they dwelt as shining Valar among the blessed ones” (Lost Tales II 115–116). The idea of two humans living as Valar is incredible and inconsistent with the developing metaphysics of Middle-earth, so it is not surprising that it disappears from the tale in the very next telling. Also averred in the tale’s last paragraph is Túrin’s role at the end of Arda in what is later referred to as the Last Battle: “Turambar indeed shall stand beside Fionwë in the Great Wrack, and Melko and his drakes shall curse the sword of Mormakil” (Lost Tales II 116). Some version of this final role for Túrin survives at least until the late 1950s and perhaps until the author’s death. A contemporary version of the story, “The Lay of the Children of Húrin,” is in verse form, a task possibly begun as early as 1918 (Lays 3), though not com­ pleted until some years after “Turambar and the Foalókë” (West 2000, 240–241). Although Tolkien wrote many poems about Middle-earth, only the tales of Túrin Turambar and of Beren and Lúthien are developed into lengthy works, which are contained in The Lays of Beleriand, volume three of the History of Middle-earth. As a scholar of medieval literature, Tolkien had a special appreciation for allit­ erative verse and chose that form to relate the earliest elements of Túrin’s tale. The poem begins with the capture of Húrin, but the two versions of the poem cover little of the story: the fostering of Túrin by Thingol, Túrin’s partnership with Beleg, Beleg’s death, Túrin’s time in Nargothrond, and the love of Finduilas for Túrin. The poems break off before the appearance of the dragon, the events involving Níniel, the death of Glaurung, and the tale’s tragic ending. Noteworthy in this work is the conversation between Húrin and Morgoth, which is recounted in detail. The alliterative form with its harsh and percussive consonant sounds highlights the malice of this exchange:

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This excerpt from the second version (IIA) of the “Lay” presents a weighty moment told in commanding images and powerful language. Two versions of Túrin’s tale are found in The Shaping of Middle-earth, the fourth volume. The full title of “The Earliest ‘Silmarillion’ ” as it appears on the actual manuscript is “Sketch of the mythology with especial reference to the ‘Children of Húrin’ ” and was written 1926–1930. Christopher characterizes this concise text as “a new starting-point in the history of ‘The Silmarillion’ ” and the basis for versions that followed (Shaping 11). The next such text, the early 1930s “Quenta Noldorinwa,” is only about a third as long as the earliest version, “Turambar and the Foalókë.” In this later text, many elements of the final version exist but in an extremely reduced form. Mîm the Dwarf appears, though not until after Túrin’s death, and his role is quite limited in comparison to its final form in the 1977 Silmarillion. Though brief, Túrin’s story is complete in the “Quenta Noldorinwa,” but it is the last whole version. The “Quenta Silmarillion” from the mid-to-late 1930s, contained in The Lost Road and Other Writings, the last version of the “Silmarillion” before Tolkien set his mythology aside to work on The Lord of the Rings, breaks off at the point at which Túrin flees from Menegroth and becomes an outlaw. Most of Túrin’s tale, all of Tuor’s tale, and the beginning of Eärendel’s tale are omitted. The final section picks up with Eärendel’s appeal to the Valar, the subsequent battle against Morgoth at the end of the First Age, and the prophecy concerning the Last Battle at the End of Days, which still mentions Túrin’s triumphant return and places Túrin “among the sons of the Valar” (Lost Road 333), slightly altering his estate but maintaining some connection to the Powers.



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Tolkien picks up the story again in the 1950s in a variety of texts published in The War of the Jewels: “The Grey Annals,” the “Later Quenta Silmarillion,” “The Wanderings of Húrin,” “Ælfwine and Dírhaval,” and “The Tale of Years.” The 1951 “Grey Annals,” organized by years of the First Age in annalistic fashion, includes some new elements in brief form. These changes are significant because they are a reduction of the latter section of the “Narn i Hîn Húrin” that Christopher published in the 1980 Unfinished Tales. Initially, Christopher believed that “The Grey Annals” was the earlier text, but specific alterations to names and to the narrative prove the reverse, and certain changes indicate that at times Tolkien may have been working on both the “Narn” and the “Annals” simultaneously. In these two texts, Sador Labadal appears as a character, though unnamed in the “Annals,” and Túrin saves the Haladin of Brethil from Orcs upon their first meeting. Mablung’s role in the fortunes of Húrin’s family is developed, and the changing account of Túrin and certain companions stalking the dragon moves toward its final form. Also, Brandir learns of the sibling relationship between Túrin and Nienor/Níniel from overhearing Glaurung himself rather than Níniel’s “last lament” as in the “Quenta Noldorinwa” (Shaping 130), another example of being able to follow such developments of the narrative over the decades of Tolkien’s writing and revision through the History of Middle-earth series. Also included in War of the Jewels is the second part of the “Later Quenta Silmarillion,” the first part of which was published in Morgoth’s Ring. This text does not progress as far as the chapter on Túrin but picks up with the conclusion, which tells of the Valar’s decision concerning the fate of Eärendel and Elwing, the Great Battle between the Valar and Morgoth, the final fate of the Silmarils, and the Second Prophecy of Mandos. The description of the Last Battle and Túrin’s return to slay Morgoth is reworded to read that instead of “coming from the Halls of Mandos” (Lost Road 333), Túrin Turambar is “returning from the Doom of Men at the ending of the world” (Jewels 247). This text concludes Tolkien’s work on the “Quenta Silmarillion” as a discrete text. The eleventh volume advances and develops the story of Húrin and Túrin more fully in “The Wanderings of Húrin” and in “Ælfwine and Dírhaval.” Furthermore, “The Tale of Years” changes and adds some aspects of the story. “The Wanderings of Húrin” relates in detail the events that follow Húrin’s release by Morgoth after 28 years of captivity: his seeking for the entrance to Gondolin, his travels in Hithlum where he gathers some men around him, his finding Morwen only in time to hold her as she dies, and an extensive account of his trial before the Halad of Brethil and of the eradication of the third house of the Edain. From this work, Christopher borrowed only “Húrin’s vain attempt to reach Gondolin” and Morwen’s death for the published Silmarillion (Jewels 298). “Ælfwine and Dírhaval” exists in two versions that form “an introductory note” to the “Narn i Hîn Húrin” (UT 187). This text explains that the “Narn” was “the work of a Mannish poet, Dírhavel” and “composed in that mode of verse which was called Minlamad thent / estent” (Jewels 311), the word Narn indicating “a tale that is told in verse to be spoken and not sung” (313). It further elucidates the means by which the poet became privy to some of the details of Túrin’s life among the outlaws,

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interviewing the aged son of the only survivor of the battle on Amon Rudh, and his gathering of “tidings and lore” from “fugitives of Dorlómin, . . . Nargothrond, [and] . . . Doriath” (311). The “Narn” was “prized by the Elves and remembered by them” (311), in part because of the great deeds and profound sorrow of the tale and in part because “Dírhaval used the Grey-elven tongue” (313), Sindarin. Furthermore, according to this text, Ælfwine then, at great labor, translated the “Narn” into English, but as he explains, “rendered it in prose, judging my skill too small to be at once scop and walhstod” (313), “poet” and “interpreter” (315). These statements emphasize the fact that it is a tale by Men and about Men, this explanation of the tale’s history providing a protracted introduction to the longest and most detailed form of the tale. The text of the “Narn i Hîn Húrin” published in Unfinished Tales also appears in a separate volume, The Children of Húrin (2007). The “Narn” is by far the most fully developed and polished version and appears to provide evidence of the “centrality” of focus mentioned by Christopher. It seems, as Richard West (2000, 241) confirms, that Tolkien may have worked on the “Narn” throughout the 1920s and perhaps well into the 1930s. Particular conversations and events are related in far greater detail than in other versions, and there are references to “doom” and “fate” that do not exist in the other versions: Sador tells a young Túrin about “the fate of Men” and suggests that when the Edain associate with the Eldar “[Men’s] doom lies the heavier on [them]” (UT 81). When Morwen delays and does not flee Dor-lómin as her husband advised, the text foretells, “Therefore the voice of Húrin . . . was denied, and the first strand of the fate of Túrin was woven” (92). Melian tells Túrin upon his arrival in Doriath, “Your fate is twined with that of the Elven-folk, for good or for ill” (102), and Brandir, of the People of Haleth, laments, “Doom willed it not so” (144). All of these references and many more appear in the “Narn” in Unfinished Tales, a recurring theme in this dark tale. Túrin’s tale took a long time to evolve into its final form, one form of which was edited and presented by Christopher in The Silmarillion. Being able to examine this evolution step-by-step and in detail is the greatest benefit of the History of Middleearth series. One of the changes that is evident is the progression from the fanciful to the moral. It is not surprising that Tolkien eliminates such strange ideas as the purifying fire, Fôs’Almir, which cleanses Túrin Turambar and his sister Nienor of their incestuous sin, and the deification of the two mortals, since Tolkien also deletes other fanciful ideas found in early texts. For instance, from the contemporary story “The Coming of the Valar” a host of lesser beings such as ‘brownies, fays, pixies, [and] leprawns” (Lost Tales I 66) vanish before the next version. Certainly, the concept of Húrin’s offspring becoming Valar or the children of Valar is completely inconsistent with the metaphysics of Arda as Tolkien’s Secondary World progressed. There is one alteration in the 1977 text that does not seem to have been the author’s choice. Túrin’s victory in the Last Battle, by which “the children of Húrin and all Men [will] be avenged” (Lost Road 333), disappears from the published Silmarillion along with the entire second prophecy of Mandos, and there is no vengeance for



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Húrin’s family or mankind as a whole. Douglas Kane (2009) discusses this choice made in finalizing the “Quenta Silmarillion” and suggests that Christopher placed “too much weight” on the statement that originally appeared at the end of the “Valaquenta” (236) claiming that Manwë and Varda have not “revealed” what they may know of “the fate of Arda Marred” and that “it is not declared in the dooms of Mandos” (S 306). Indeed, Kane claims that there is every indication that Tolkien intended the prophecy of Mandos concerning the Last Battle and Arda Healed to stand. The Silmarillion as published, and as first read by most people, omits the Second Prophecy, and the absence of Túrin’s ultimate victory over Morgoth and the corresponding loss of any vengeance or justice for “the children of Húrin and all Men” seriously increase the darkness of the tale. As West writes, “It is a tragic story of almost unrelieved gloom” (2009, 244). In its final version, it is no longer consistent with Tolkien’s statement, “I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’ – though it contains . . . some samples or glimpses of final victory” (Letters 255). The hero has been denied his moment of victory. No tale of Middle-earth is as dark as that of Túrin Turambar and his family, and in the published Silmarillion the “glimpses of final victory” have been lost and all glimmer of hope has been extinguished. Furthermore, this last change seems to underscore the pervasiveness of evil, which is woven into the very fabric of the created world since, as is told in the “Ainulindalë,” Melkor participated in creation, and seems in conflict with Eru’s declaration of his sovereignty and his ongoing intention to bring good out of evil. Accordingly, Verlyn Flieger (2009, 173) in an article on “Fate and Free Will in Middle-earth” notes Tolkien’s intention as stated in a letter of 1951 to conclude the legendarium with “a vision of the end of the world, its breaking and remaking, and the recovery of the Silmarilli” (Letters 149). Certainly, this letter supports the retention of the second prophecy of Mandos. Flieger develops the idea that Men have a special “task,” a particular part to play in making right the evil caused by Morgoth so that they may take their appointed role in the performance of the Second Music (173). The “Later Quenta Silmarillion” of the late 1950s still retains the prophecy, and in fact Tolkien makes one addition to the eschatological account, writing “and Beren Camlost” in a marginal note (Jewels 247), which suggests that Tolkien intended that Beren would join Túrin in avenging humanity. Though Tolkien never finalized his text of the “Silmarillion,” the tale of the Last Battle and the regathering of the light of Valinor as preserved in Fëanor’s gems seems not only consistent but also necessary to the resolution of the “Quenta Silmarillion” and to Tolkien’s image of hope and confidence in a final victory. Christopher’s thorough and excellent work in the compilation, organization, and presentation of his father’s unpublished works with his own editorial notes and commentary allows readers to examine these texts in the legendarium and come to their own conclusions. Without Unfinished Tales and the 12 volumes of The History of Middle-earth, readers would be denied dozens of fascinating texts and their evolving portrayal of Tolkien’s incredible world.

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Flieger, Verlyn. 2009. “The Music and the Task: Fate and Free Will in Middle-earth.” Tolkien Studies, 6: 151–181. Kane, Douglas Charles. 2009. Arda Reconstructed: The Creation of the Published Silmarillion. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press. Kilby, Clyde S. 1976. “The World of C. S. Lewis.” Lecture at Roberts Wesleyan College, Rochester, NY, March 12.

West, Richard C. 2000. “Túrin’s Ofermod.” In Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middleearth, edited by Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter, 233–245. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

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“The Lost Road” and “The Notion Club Papers”: Myth, History, and Time-travel Verlyn Flieger

Although they are usually regarded as secondary works, lesser addenda to his legendarium and therefore relatively little studied, J. R. R. Tolkien’s two unfinished timetravel stories, “The Notion Club Papers” and its precursor “The Lost Road,” occupy a unique and important place in his canon. This is not just because they are science fiction rather than the fantasy for which he is known, but also because they cross boundaries of time and space, their action taking place half in the present and half in the past, half in the “real” and half in the fantasy world. While “The Notion Club Papers” is so drastic a revision of “The Lost Road” as to be in effect a completely new story, nevertheless, the two are in some ways interdependent, expressing the same ideas, and following in intention if not in execution the same concepts of serial identity and inherited memory. Both stories, together with their accompanying notes and outlines, have been edited and published by Christopher Tolkien in his History of Middle-earth series, “The Lost Road” in 1987 in Volume Five and the “Papers” in 1992 in Volume Nine. The stories are important for several interrelated reasons. First, they mark the introduction into his legendarium of the downfall of the island nation of Númenor, Tolkien’s Atlantis. The drowning of Númenor altered the geology, politics, and history of Tolkien’s imaginary world, changing its shape from flat to round, and giving its history a line of kings culminating in Aragorn son of Arathorn Isildur’s son, heir of Elendil. A second point of importance about the stories is that they connect Tolkien’s mythology for England to aspects of his personal life. Third but far from least, between the two of them the stories supply an elaborate, highly structured framing mechanism to account for the transmission of his storied history from the deep past A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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of his legendarium to his own time and place. The web of relationships among these elements is complex, and over the years he worked on his so-called mythology for England the strands crossed and recrossed in often confusing ways as Tolkien’s ideas developed and proliferated.

Númenor: The Missing Link The whole enterprise began with a friendly yet challenging bargain between two old friends and colleagues. As recounted by Tolkien (Letters 209, 342, 347, 378), the genesis of the time-travel idea was a coin-toss between himself and C. S. Lewis, conjecturally dated by Christopher Tolkien to circa 1936–1937 (Lost Road 7–8). Agreeing that there was not enough of their favorite kind of reading (fantasy and science fiction), Tolkien and Lewis decided to write more themselves and did a heads-or-tails to see which should take space-travel and which time-travel. Lewis got space-travel, promptly packed his hero into a spaceship and sent him off to Mars, and a scant two years after the bargain published his story as Out of the Silent Planet, the first book of his so-called Space Trilogy. Tolkien got time-travel and found a more psychological and credible way to take his protagonists from one time to another. He wrote four chapters in which a present-day English father and son called Alboin and Audoin Errol dreamed their way back through time from modern-day Cornwall to his newly invented prehistoric Númenor, where they reappeared as Elendil and Herendil. Tolkien intended Númenor to be the “missing link” between the Elder Days of his mythology and the Age of Men (Letters 232). He described it as his “personal alteration of the Atlantis myth and/or tradition, and accommodation of it to my general mythology” (Letters 361). The idea was by a regression through receding time of ever-earlier dreams to bridge the gap between the England of Tolkien’s own time and the Middle-earth of his imaginary past. Simple enough in synopsis, the idea was complex in its concept and would have been (had Tolkien ever finished it) equally complex in execution. As he described “The Lost Road” in 1964: The thread was to be the occurrence time and again in human families . . . of a father and son called by names that could be interpreted as Bliss-friend and Elf-friend. . . . It started with a father-son affinity between Edwin and Elwin of the present, and was supposed to go back into legendary time by way of an Eädwine and Ælfwine of circa A.D. 918, and Audoin and Alboin of Lombardic legend, and so to the traditions of the North Sea concerning the coming of corn and culture heroes. . . . In my tale we were to come at last to Amandil and Elendil leaders of the loyal party in Númenor . . . (Letters 347)

While the notion of a sequence of dreams seems to have been Tolkien’s own, his use of dream as a vehicle for time-travel was in a literary tradition popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Salient examples are Charles Dickens’s 1843



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A Christmas Carol, Edward Bellamy’s 1887 Looking Backward, William Morris’s 1888 A Dream of John Ball and his 1890 News From Nowhere, and Mark Twain’s 1889 A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court. In 1891, the year before Tolkien was born, George Du Maurier’s Peter Ibbetson told a story of lovers separated in real life who travel together through time in their dreams. In the year just preceding the coin-toss, 1935, Tolkien had read with interest J. W. Dunne’s An Experiment With Time, a nonfiction work which proposed time as a field-like space where an observer in a dream state can move in any direction. Dunne’s ideas influenced a generation of English writers from J. B. Priestley to Rumer Godden to Tolkien. The elaborateness of Tolkien’s “thread” concept may be one reason the story was abandoned, but another reason must surely have been the looming publication of The Hobbit followed almost immediately by Tolkien’s start on the “new Hobbit” that turned into the time-consuming The Lord of the Rings. Whatever his reasons for breaking off work on the project, it lay fallow for another eight years. Tolkien picked it up again in late 1944, writing to his publisher that he had in a fortnight of comparative leisure round about last Christmas written three parts of another book, taking up in an entirely different frame and setting what little had any value in the inchoate “Lost Road”. (Letters 118)

Thus the time-travel idea got a new lease on life as the “Papers,” with the same purpose of bridging the gap between Tolkien’s imaginary past and his own time. But after a promising start, it too was abandoned, probably because as Tolkien wrote to his publisher, he was “putting The Lord of the Rings . . . before all else” (Sauron 145). The plots of both stories (in so far as they are written) seem simple enough. In each, a pair of modern-day Englishmen deeply interested in both myth and travel through time experience increasingly intense flashes of extra-personal memory connected to their long-ago Middle-earth avatars and ancestors. These flashes of memory contain scattered bits of information, scraps of unknown languages, incomplete accounts of some great disaster. Narrative style differs from story to story. “The Lost Road” is related through straightforward third-person narrative. The “Papers” are couched as the minutes of Notion Club meetings reported in the first person by the Club’s recorder, and thereby acquire an immediacy which “The Lost Road” lacks. The fact that both stories break off just as the main action, the time-journey, gets under way makes it difficult to imagine just how Tolkien might have planned to bring either story to a satisfactory close. While the dream mechanism is less overt in the “Papers” than in “The Lost Road,” in both stories modern Englishmen were to enter Tolkien’s imaginary world. As Tolkien handles it, the time-travel device moves characters and readers, often violently, between his twentieth-century England and the fictional prehistoric world of his mythology with no advance notice and with no perceptible transition. His use of serial memory to achieve this seems more psychological or even psychic than science fictional.

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The opening two chapters of “The Lost Road” take place in an unspecified present which is clearly Tolkien’s own time, and a specific place, Cornwall, which is unabashedly Tolkien’s own Britain, where live Oswin and Alboin Errol, a father and son with a strong interest in history, languages, and the history of languages. Opportunity for confusion arises here, as having introduced one father and son pair, Tolkien then passes the torch to the following generation. Oswin dies and the new father-son pair, Alboin Errol and his son Audoin, take over, as in Tolkien’s description cited above. As both Alboin and Audoin fall asleep, the story jumps from the Errols in modern Cornwall to Elendil and Herendil (not Amandil as in Tolkien’s description) in Tolkien’s Númenor. There are hints that the times overlap. We are told that Alboin has had since childhood the desire “to go back. To walk in Time, perhaps, as men walk on long roads” (Lost Road 45). But the connection between past and present seems narratively remote. Alboin has dream conversations with a shadowy figure who reminds him of his father, but who announces himself as Elendil, and who tells him he may have his desire “to go back” (Lost Road 48). The closest the story gets to what is clearly intended as the denouement, the Downfall of Númenor, is when Alboin falls asleep saying “There is storm over Númenor” (Lost Road 51), and the closest to actual time-travel when he says later “We start when the summons comes” (Lost Road 53). Although “The Lost Road” must be credited with getting Tolkien started on timetravel, he later apologized to his publisher for sending him a draft, noting, “I hope it is forgotten” (Sauron 145). He was probably right, in that the playing out of the thread would have resulted in an overlong series of flashbacks, a cumbersome, step by step transition such as is handled more efficiently in films by dissolve. In the “Papers” Tolkien went further, making his real-world events take place in his own Oxford but at two specific periods in the future of his own time, 1980–1990 and 2012. Nevertheless, “The Lost Road” is important for contributing to the concept of the “Papers” (Englishmen traveling into a fictive past) and mechanism (dream as a vehicle). Tolkien’s interim writing experience – he was “on the last chapters of The Lord of the Rings” (Sauron 12–13) – materially improved his craft, so that “Papers” is a more skillful piece of work than its predecessor. While the “The Lost Road” father-son thread is not wholly abandoned in the “Papers,” it is relegated to the back-story, and the reclusive, philologically inclined Errols in Cornwall are replaced by a larger, more variegated cast of characters. The Notion Club members are friends and colleagues who drink, joke, argue, carouse (occasionally breaking furniture), and give no quarter in debate. They are voluble, opinionated, analytical, passionate, fond of wordplay and given to outrageous puns. In their own scholarly way they are a rowdy bunch. Their dialogue, caught on the hoof as it were, has the immediacy, the energetic give-and-take, the bite of actual speech. While they are presented as contemporary Englishmen, the major characters are, like those of “The Lost Road,” avatars of their Númenorean forebears as well. But more so than in “The Lost Road,” the balance between the periods is uneven. The energy of the story and the force of the narrative lie far more in the modern characters and their interactions than in their Númenorean avatars. This is partly because the



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Númenorean episodes are barely sketched, hardly more than intrusions into the present-day narrative, but also because the modern Englishmen are livelier and more interesting than their Middle-earth counterparts. As in “The Lost Road,” the island nation of Númenor is the terminus of the timetravel, and its drowning in a geological catastrophe is the event which was to change the direction of Tolkien’s mythology, reshape his world from flat to round, alter its relationship to its god-figures the Valar, and provide the quasi-theological concept of the Straight Road to Valinor, best known as the path taken by Frodo’s ship as it sails down the Firth of Lune. Coincident with each time-travel story is a separately written account of this catastrophe. For “The Lost Road” it is “The Fall of Númenor”; for the “Papers” it is “The Drowning of Anadûnë.” Both stand in a similar relationship to the better known “Akallabêth” published in Unfinished Tales. “The Drowning of Anadûnë” also introduced a new language, Adûnaic,1 which apparently entered the legendarium with Part Two of the “Papers” comparatively late in the development of the mythology.

Strongly Biographical Elements Christopher Tolkien has noted the presence of “strongly biographical” elements in “The Lost Road” which were “closely modelled” on his father’s own life (Lost Road 53). These include the academic career and linguistic interests of one of the characters, Alboin. There are also biographical elements in the “Papers,” but the references are on two different planes, one social and one psychological. The Notion Club is modeled on Tolkien’s own informal Oxford club of the Inklings (Inkling = Notion). Early drafts of the “Papers” show Tolkien assigning (and reassigning) specific Inklings identities to specific Notion Club characters. C. S. Lewis was first “Ramer” and then “Frankley.” Tolkien also was “Ramer” at one point but he too was changed, in this case to “Latimer,” before finally emerging as “Guildford,” who not by accident is the Club’s recorder, and thus the author of the minutes of the meetings which make up the “Papers.” Hugo Dyson seems consistently to have been the model for “Lowdham,” and Humphrey Havard was “Dolbear.” But this preliminary casting was almost certainly modified and ultimately receded as the fictional characters developed a life of their own. In any case, in the earliest draft, what Christopher Tolkien calls manuscript A, Tolkien addressed a “Preface to the Inklings” in which he both acknowledged and disclaimed intended resemblances to real persons, for “the mirror is cracked,” and the countenances “distorted,” with “noses and other features” distributed without attribution (Sauron 148–149). And it may be that what Tolkien was drawing on was as much a dynamic of speech and social interaction as of specific character per se. It is through the concept of the destruction of Númenor that more autobiographical reference enters the story. Unsurprisingly for Tolkien, this is conveyed through names and the meanings of names. It begins in “The Lost Road,” whose father and son pairings – Alboin (Ælfwine, “Elf-friend”) and Audoin (Eädwine, “Bliss-friend”) –

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include grandfather Oswin (Anglo-Saxon “God-friend”). The “friend” component is the chief autobiographical clue, for it is echoed in the names in Tolkien’s own family. Tolkien’s father Arthur, Tolkien himself, and all four of his children have as a middle name Reuel, a Hebrew name which means “friend” or “God-friend.” The parallel between Tolkien’s fictive grandfather-father-son thread with names containing the “friend” element – God-friend, Elf-friend, Bliss-friend – and a similar “friend” name passed from grandfather to father to son in his own family is too striking to be accidental. The destruction of Númenor also carries an autobiographical reference, this one more deeply personal and psychological, perhaps even psychic. In several of his letters Tolkien describes a recurrent dream, which he called his “Atlantis complex,” or “Atlantis-haunting,” and which he characterized as a “dim memory of some ancient history” (Letters 347). This was of being inundated by a Great Wave which swept over him and threatened to drown him and from which he awoke “gasping, out of deep water” (Letters 347). It was the inspiration for his island nation of Númenor, which exists (apparently) only so it can be destroyed in an oceanic cataclysm that changes the shape of the world. The dream was “Possibly inherited,” he wrote to W. H. Auden, “though my parents died too young to transfer such things by words. Inherited from me (I suppose) by only one of my children [his second son, Michael, Letters 445 n.], though I did not know that about my son until recently, and he did not know it about me” (Letters 213). In a draft of a letter to a “Mr. Thompson” he repeated the story. “That vision and dream has been ever with me – and has been inherited (as I only discovered recently) by one of my children” (Letters 232). Possibly inherited by Tolkien from his parents. Inherited from him by one of his children. Two instances for certain and a conjectural third of inherited memory in one family, memory across (perhaps) three generations of an event that none of the dreamers, apparently, had experienced in real life. It is no great stretch to imagine that Tolkien might have wanted to believe not only that he had inherited as well as passed on the dream, but that it was in fact “the dim memory of some ancient history,” an actual event.2 If this were indeed the case, it would underpin his structural concept of the familial father-son thread by which he proposed to bring his prehistoric mythology into his modern-day England. In any event, he seems to have got it out of his mind by writing it into his fiction, releasing, as he wrote in a letter, “some hidden ‘complex’ ” (Letters 232), “now exorcised by writing about it” (Letters 347). “I don’t think I have had it [the dream],” he wrote to Auden in 1944, “since I wrote the ‘Downfall of Númenor’ as the last of the legends of the First and Second Age” (Letters 213). While this is persuasive evidence for the link between life and art, it is circumstantial evidence, and raises questions about just how to connect the dots. The letters in which Tolkien talks about the dream are obviously later than the time of the discovery itself, but how much later is unknown, and “recently” is too vague a term on which to posit a coherent sequence. Tolkien’s discovery that his son had the same dream may have come before or after he introduced Atlantis and the dreaming fathers



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and sons into the story. There is no way to know. His speculation that he may have inherited it from his father is just that, which may be why the first generation figures in both stories, Oswin in “The Lost Road” and Edwin in the “Papers,” have little or no role in the actual time-travel. Autobiographical reference does not stop here. “The Lost Road” grandfather Oswin is replaced in the “Papers” by father Edwin (Eädwine, Audoin) who is Alwyn (Ælfwine, Elendil) Lowdham’s father. (The pattern of proliferating and overlapping names is part of what makes Tolkien’s underlying concept so difficult to sort out.) Edwin Lowdham, a voyager who disappears at sea, and who has no role in the action, is the apparent source for a mysterious page in “Númenorean script” dropped by Lowdham at the end of one meeting. It turns out to be a translation of the Adûnaic account of the Fall of Númenor. To compound the autobiographical references, the translation is identified by “old Professor Rashbold at Pembroke” as “Old English of a strongly Mercian (West Midland) colour” (Sauron 256). Now Rashbold, as Tolkien trivia experts know, was Tolkien’s translation of the German form of his own surname, toll, “rash, foolhardy,” kühn, “keen, eager, bold,” while his first faculty position at Oxford, Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, was attached to Pembroke College. He has allowed himself a cameo appearance in his own fiction, no doubt thoroughly enjoying the inside joke.

The Frame is Part of the Picture Part One of the “Papers,” subtitled “The Ramblings of Ramer,” is a largely theoretical discussion of framing devices for space-travel, a topic of lively debate. How you get to the unknown planet must be of a piece with the rest of the story, and indeed an integral part of the story. H. G. Wells’s time-machine and gravitation-insulator, David Lindsay’s “back-rays,” and C. S. Lewis’s crystal torpedo are all roundly criticized as being poorly integrated, unbelievable contraptions, ill-fitting frames for the story they contain. Guildford actually says at one point in the argument that in “normal probability” the only means for landing on a new planet is “by being born” (Sauron 170). In view of the transmission of the “Great Wave” memory from generation to generation to generation already discussed, it does not take a great leap of imagination to suppose that Tolkien might have thought “being born” would work just as well for landing in a new time. In addition to drawing on actual characters to provide verisimilitude, Tolkien gave the story an elaborate, multi-frame design to impart a sense of reality to what is in fact fantasy. The central and most fantastic episode, the actual travel backward in time, is nested within the minutes, kept by Nicholas Guildford, of the fictive but realistic Notion Club. These minutes in turn are framed as a bundle of papers discovered in the basement of the Oxford Examination Schools by a Mr Howard Green and edited by him. The whole is then presented as published in a “Second Edition” with history, notes, and editorial commentary by J. R. Titmass, an historian,

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W. W. Wormald, a “Bibliopolist,” and D. N. Borrow, a linguist. The “Papers” thus belong to the found manuscript genre of fantasy and science fiction, a tradition that stretches from H. Rider Haggard’s She to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The fact that the “Papers” are the minutes of fictitious meetings, and thus spread over a sequence of numbered nights, gives Tolkien some leeway. He has less to develop a plot than to chart the progress of an argument. As edited by Christopher Tolkien, the narrative falls into two parts. Part One is dominated by Michael Ramer, Part Two by Arundel Lowdham and Wilfred Jeremy. All three are well-realized personalities, psychologically and psychically complex, with hidden and largely unsuspected depths. There are supporting characters Philip Frankley and Rufus Dolbear, plus a cast of minor club members, bit players who complicate discussion but do not affect the action. The story opens with discussion of Ramer’s just-read (but not included) story. This provokes a discussion of “frame,” the device by which a story is carried from one place or time to another, specifi­ cally in this context, how science fiction (their word is “scientifiction,” a term introduced in 1926 by Hugo Gernsback, publisher of Amazing Stories, “The Magazine of Scientifiction”) manages travel from one planet to another. Forced by the club to defend himself, Ramer acknowledges the clumsiness of his framing device (it is this that brings on the discussion of vehicles for both time and space-travel, and results in the Club’s criticism of Wells’s time machine). Commanded by Dolbear to “come clean” Ramer reveals that the story is an account of his actual, self-induced and controlled dream wanderings to other, apparently extra-terrestrial worlds. This sets the stage for Part Two of the “Papers,” subtitled “The Strange Case of Arundel Lowdham.” Here Tolkien gets down to business and the conversation turns from space-travel to time-travel. Time-travel leads to history and history leads to myth and the point where they intersect. Lowdham has increasingly intense flashbacks to what appears to be Númenor in which he curses “Zigūr” (the Adûnaic name for Sauron). He also has dreams of Númenor, and more particularly of strange languages, which he calls A and B, or Avallonian (Quenya) and Adûnaic. In the course of one night’s discussion Jeremy raises the question. “If you went back [in time] would you find myth dissolving into history or history into myth? . . . Perhaps,” he suggests, “the Atlantis catastrophe was the dividing line?” (Sauron 249). The “Papers” suggest that Tolkien’s answer is “yes.” With the “Atlantis catastrophe” his dream of the great wave as an inherited “dim memory” enters the story and his fictive mythology joins his personal, therefore his contemporary history. Lowdham and Jeremy are gradually revealed (first to the reader and then to themselves) as avatars, direct descendants and psychic and psychological reincarnations of Númenorean figures in Tolkien’s own mythology. In the course of one night’s discussion they are overtaken and engulfed by a sudden, unexpected storm of terrifying proportions, and we are to understand that it is happening simultaneously in Oxford and Númenor, and that it is in fact the Drowning of Anadûnë. They are possessed by their Númenorean identities of Nimruzīr (the Adûnaic form of Anglo-Saxon Ælfwine) and Abrazān (the Adûnaic form of Anglo-Saxon Tréowine).



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It is this night’s discussion, storm, and crisis of identity that precipitate the actual time-travel. Interestingly, however, Tolkien inverts the process, and instead of the characters moving into past time, a past event (the destruction of Númenor) erupts into their present lives, and their past identities take charge of their present selves. In a sort of waking dream, the two men go on an extended search for more information, relying for guidance on their dreams. When they return, Lowdham narrates one such dream experience to the Club, a first-person account in the persona of Ælfwine, of the mythic story of King Sheave. So powerful is the spell Tolkien casts that when Lowdham ends the story by returning to his Oxford self with the words “And with that, I think I must end for tonight,” (Sauron 276) the reader is startled by the abrupt transition, pulled suddenly out of the world of myth into the everyday. Unfortunately, it is here that all too soon and all too frustratingly the narrative breaks off, forcing the reader to make another abrupt transition from the world of the Notion Club to the realization that this too is a story. We are left hanging, wondering, guessing, unable to be sure of where the story is going or what is meant to happen. Fortunately, as with “The Lost Road,” Tolkien left a number of rough drafts, notes, tantalizing hints of what the story might have looked like if he had finished it. Two projected continuations (carried over and fleshed out from “The Lost Road”) of the “King Sheave” episode close the last recorded meeting of the Club. Lowdham/ Ælfwine and Jeremy/Tréowine set out to sea and sail West. Both continuations bring the voyagers to the Straight Road, but their ship is driven back by storm. The sketches break off there, with an outline following: Tréowine [Jeremy] sees the straight Road and the world plunging down. Ælfwine’s [Lowdham’s] vessel seems to be taking the straight Road and falls [sic] in a swoon of fear and exhaustion. Ælfwine gets view of the Book of Stories; and writes down what he can remember. Later fleeting visions. Beleriand tale. Sojourn in Númenor before and during the fall ends with Elendil [Lowdham] and Voronwë [Jeremy] fleeing on a hill of water into the dark with Eagles and lightning pursuing them. Elendil has a book which he has written. His descendants get glimpses of it. Ælfwine has one. (Sauron 279)

Also among Tolkien’s notes is a single enigmatic note, a scrap of paper which reads simply, “Do the Atlantis story and abandon Eriol-Saga, with Loudham, Jeremy, Guildford and Ramer taking part” (Sauron 281). Cryptic though it is, the note may be the best clue to what Tolkien intended for the “Papers,” which is clearly “the Atlantis story” in which “Loudham, Jeremy, Guildford and Ramer” are principal characters. The “Eriol-Saga” was the “Silmarillion” mythology “for England,” a work in progress from 1917 until The Hobbit interrupted it in the mid-1930s and then The Lord of the Rings in the late 1930s and 1940s. Tolkien’s mythology was framed as tales told by the Elves (at first called “Fairies”) to a voyager (compare Edwin Lowdham) named

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Eriol or Ælfwine who carries them from Valinor back to what will become England. Christopher Tolkien has proposed that “the Eriol-Saga had been, up to this time, what my father had in mind for the further course of the meetings of the Notion Club, but was now rejecting in favour of ‘Atlantis’ ” (Sauron 282). Another possibility is that Tolkien was not rejecting the Eriol-Saga outright, but was considering attaching one frame story to another, joining the Eriol-Saga to the Atlantis story (the drowning of Númenor) by way of the “Papers” much as Jeremy suggested that myth might blend into history with “Atlantis as the dividing line.” There is no way to know just how Tolkien might have planned for Lowdham, Jeremy, Guildford, and Ramer to “take part,” though we may speculate that he intended some sort of time-travel for all of them. Nevertheless, in the context of this note, the outline cited above, the “Book of Stories,” Elendil’s book, and the fact that “Ælfwine has” a copy of it, must be seen not just as Tolkien’s description of an imaginative concept, but as his envisioning of the prototype credibility device for the whole mythological conceit, making the “Papers” the bridge by which his imagined prehistoric mythology, connected by time-travel to the Notion Club, would be brought forward in time by the discovery and publication of its minutes by Mr Howard Green.

A Mythology for England Dreaming fathers and sons, inherited memory, Atlantis turned into Númenor, a story passed down through time. All this does much to explain Tolkien’s otherwise seemingly arbitrary choice of Atlantis-Númenor. He was basing this part of his mythology directly on his own experience. And although the execution may be over-complex, the basic idea is clear enough. Thus these time-travel stories, first “The Lost Road” and second and more significantly the “Papers,” have a formative role in Tolkien’s mythology, and are crucial to our understanding of it. In his commentary on “The Lost Road” Christopher Tolkien has written: With the entry at this time [the 1936 “Lost Road”] of the cardinal ideas of the Downfall of Númenor, the World Made Round, and the Straight Road, into the conception of ‘Middle-earth’, and the thought of a ‘time-travel’ story in which the very significant figure of the Anglo-Saxon Ælfwine would be both ‘extended’ into the future, into the twentieth century, and ‘extended’ also into a many-layered past, my father was envisaging a massive and explicit linking of his own legends with those of many other places and times: all concerned with the stories and dreams of peoples who dwelt by the coasts of the great Western Sea. All this was set aside during the period of the writing of The Lord of the Rings, but not abandoned: for in 1945, before indeed The Lord of the Rings was completed, he returned to these themes in the unfinished Notion Club Papers. (Lost Road 98)

Tolkien’s proposal to “do the Atlantis story” would not just bring his mythology into the present, it would in effect start it off there.



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The contemporary time-travel stories, written in a style closer to that of modern novel than mythic history, were to be the frame for his whole mythology for England, which would then be English because its modern English protagonists were connected by inherited memory to their Númenorean ancestors. It would cross the “dividing line” between myth and history by means of the “book” of which Elendil’s “descendants get glimpses” and of which Ælfwine has a copy, and which, if the conceit of transmission via time-travel had been carried through to its conclusion, would have become part of the Notion Club Papers which the modern reader would then have in hand. The page of West Mercian Anglo-Saxon transcribed (from Elendil’s book?) in Númenorean script and narrating the drowning of Númenor would be evidence of the transition from myth to history. It is clear, therefore, that although they stand a little to one side, as it were, of Tolkien’s major mythological works The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings, nonetheless “The Lost Road” and the “Papers” deserve serious attention as significant elements in Tolkien’s Middle-earth canon. They changed the shape of his world, and without them there would be no Elendil, no Isildur, and no Aragorn as we know him. “The Lost Road” notes and outlines give us the clearest view of Tolkien’s overall vision, while the “Papers” contain some of Tolkien’s most vigorous writing as well as some of his most deeply felt insights into the workings of the human psyche. That both stories, but most especially the “Papers,” stopped short of final resolution may turn out to be one of the greater losses, not just to the reader pulled so unexpectedly out of “King Sheave” but also to Tolkien’s whole vision. Had the “Papers” been completed it would have provided a rounding out and summing up that might have successfully brought up to date the mythology for England he began in 1917. This was not to be. After The Lord of the Rings the overarching concept of stories told, heard, written down, and carried forward was transferred to the “Red Book” and its attendant volumes of Elvish lore. These were then conceived as a compendium of the “Silmarillion” tales, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings as collected by Bilbo, completed by Sam and Frodo, passed from Brandybuck father to son, carried to Gondor, transcribed by “Findegil King’s Writer,” stored in Minas Tirith (FR, “Prologue”, 19–20), and finally – as the Cirth and Tengwar running header and footer to the title-page of The Lord of the Rings tell us – translated into English by J. R. R. Tolkien. His identification of himself with Guildford as recorder in the early draft of the “Papers” is replaced by his identification of himself in his own persona not in the text but hidden in plain sight in the runes and script of his invented writing systems. Gone are all the Elf-friends and Bliss-friends, the Ælfwines and Treowines and Alboins and Audoins. Gone too are Guildford, Lowdham, old Rashbold of Pembroke, and Mr Howard Green, all replaced by J. R. R. Tolkien in his own identity. It may well have been the elaborate framing superstructure of the “Papers” that caused the whole edifice to collapse under its own weight. Christopher Tolkien has commented that “the whole conception [had] now developed a disturbing complexity” (Sauron 280), one “so intricate that one need perhaps look no further for an answer to the question, why were The Notion Club Papers abandoned?” (Sauron 282). He may

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be right. It is difficult to imagine how such an intertangled pattern could have been sorted out, and its complexities made plain. This notwithstanding, the existence of the “Papers” and the insight the story gives into the workings of Tolkien’s mind are valuable in their own right. The “Papers” may be a failed or at least an abortive attempt, but they are valuable as much for what they suggest as for what they do or do not accomplish. It is Tolkien’s reach, not his grasp, that serious students of his work should pay attention to here. Notes 1  Adûnaic, from all accounts the last of Tolkien’s invented languages to be developed, is part of the strongly linguistic course of thought which runs through Part Two of the “Papers” and which is almost entirely miss­ ing from “The Lost Road.” The concept of memory of unknown language is derived from Tolkien’s idea of native language, by which he means language inherited through birth, as opposed to cradle tongue, by which he means language learned in infancy. In Part One of the “Papers” Ramer voices this theory, explaining to the Club that everyone has a native language (Sauron 201). Tolkien returned to the idea in his 1962 O’Donnell Lecture “English and Welsh” (published in 1963) where he maintained that “We each have .  .  . a native language. But that is not the language that we speak, our cradle-tongue.” He went on to emphasize, in words very like Ramer’s, “the difference between the first-learned language, the language of custom, and an individual’s native language, his inherent linguistic predilection” (MC 190). This is the premise behind Alboin Errol’s dreams of what he calls Eresseän or Elf-Latin (the few quoted words of which are Quenya and Sindarin). In similar fashion, Lowdham in the “Papers” first dreams of individual words, and then gets fragments of a text in two languages and makes copies which he

shares with the Club, shouting “More than mere words. Verbs! Syntax at last” (Sauron 246). These fragments he identifies as Avallonian (Quenya) and Adûnaic, which he speculates are “passages out of some book” (Sauron 248). For a further information on Adûnaic, see “Lowdham’s report on the Adûnaic Language” and Christopher’s following note (Sauron 413–440). 2  While Atlantis is the best known, it is far from the only mythic account of the drowning of a land mass Tolkien might have encountered. The country of Lyonesse, locale of some of the Arthurian Tristan material, was said to have sunk beneath the sea near what are now the Scilly Isles. The Kingdom of Ys in Brittany, ruled over by King Gradlon, was submerged under sea when the King’s daughter, Dahut, stole the key to the city and gave it to the devil. A violent storm sent waves over the city, entirely submerging it. Ireland, too his its tradition of a great wave, the tonn, which periodically sweeps over the shore and far inland. The latter portions of Part Two of the “Papers” has Lowdham and Jeremy in Ireland, where they hear stories of a ghostly black wave that swept over the land on the night of the Oxford storm, reaching as far inland as Clonfert, traditional home of St Brendan.

References Dunne, J. W. 1934. An Experiment With Time. London: Faber & Faber.

Lewis, C. S. 1938. Out of the Silent Planet. London: The Bodley Head.

12

Poetry Corey Olsen

Introduction Readers of Tolkien often overlook the importance of his poetry. Thousands of dedicated readers and admirers of The Lord of the Rings skip right past the poems with little thought about the role that they play in the story. The poems, often intricate and complex even when they seem rustic, crude, or merely comic, are often skimmed through quickly, or even overlooked entirely. Upon any careful consideration, however, Tolkien’s poetry is worth attention. The poems themselves are usually very clever and intricate works of art, employing subtle techniques of meter and rhyme that interact with and amplify the sense of the lines in remarkable ways.1 Readers who marginalize the poems Tolkien included in his prose works, however, have not only missed out on the poems themselves, but they have undervalued one of the prevailing passions of Tolkien’s intellectual life. A glance back over Tolkien’s literary career helps to illustrate the point. Early on, Tolkien’s creative energy was largely focused on poetry. His first publication of any significance was the short poem “Goblin Feet,” printed in Oxford Poetry in 1915, when Tolkien was 23. Although Tolkien later famously wished that this early poem could be “buried for ever” (Lost Tales I 32), it actually sits more comfortably than it might at first appear among Tolkien’s other, more widely read works. Although “Goblin Feet” does unabashedly revel in the rather cloying cuteness of the modern diminutive fairies that Tolkien worked so hard to distance himself from in his later career, it also shows many of the elements which were to become some of the mainstays of his later and more famous creative works. In its style and poetic construction, “Goblin Feet” shows a whimsical A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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playfulness of sound and rhythm throughout and employs quick shifts in metrical form that amplify tonal shifts in the content of the lines, a poetic technique Tolkien would go on to employ frequently. Moreover, behind the effusiveness of its language, the subject matter of the poem is a very familiar one: a mortal’s fleeting encounter with Faërie and the longing and sorrow that it engenders. Tolkien’s contemplations of Faërie took poetic form on several other occasions in this same period, such as in the spritely short poem “Princess Ni” (Leeds University Verse 1914–24, 1924), and in the much longer and more stately “Kortirion Among the Trees” (written in 1915, published in Lost Tales I 33–36). Tolkien was writing his first major work of prose fiction in the late 1910s with The Book of Lost Tales and it was tied up with his poetic work from this era. The frame narrative of Eriol at the Cottage of Lost Play, for instance, seems to have grown from a poetic seed: “You and Me and the Cottage of Lost Play,” written in 1915 (Lost Tales I 27–32). By the early 1920s, Tolkien had redirected his work on the development of his mythology into thoroughly poetic channels: “The Lay of the Children of Húrin” and “The Lay of Leithian” date from the first and second halves of that decade respectively. Years later, in the wake of The Hobbit’s success, it would be the poetic “The Lay of Leithian” rather than the earlier Book of Lost Tales or the prose “Quenta” of the early 1930s that Tolkien would attempt to convince Allen & Unwin to publish. Although many Tolkien fans might think of the 1920s and 1930s merely as the build-up period to The Hobbit’s publication in 1937, it is important to recognize that these years were a very fertile era of poetic composition for Tolkien. Many of these poems were never published in their original forms; others appeared in magazines or book collections. His poems from this period were numerous and highly varied in form, subject, and tone. His two light-hearted rhymes about the Man in the Moon were published in 1923, and even without reading their musical lines and playful diction, their titles bear sufficient testimony to their spirit. The first was originally titled “The Cat and the Fiddle, or A Nursery Rhyme Undone and its Scandalous Secret Unlocked” (published in Yorkshire Poetry), and the second was “Why the Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon: An East Anglian Phantasy” (published in A Northern Venture: Verses by Members of the Leeds University English School Association). Combining scholarship with humor, he wrote a short series of poems in the style of the medieval bestiary titled “Adventures in Unnatural History and Medieval Metres, being the Freaks of Fisiologus.” Two of these, “Reginhardus, the Fox” and “Monoceros, the Unicorn,” were never published, but “Fastitocalon” and “Iumbo, or ye Kinde of Oliphaunt” did see print in the Stapeldon Magazine in 1927 (see also Tolkien 2008e, 220–223). For Tolkien, poetry was clearly a mode in which he would indulge in play, and in which his delight in language could be given free range. He contributed more than a dozen poems for the eclectic collection Songs for the Philologists, which he published with his colleague and friend E. V. Gordon in 1936. Most of these poems were verses in Old English, Gothic, and Old Norse, set to traditional melodies, such as “Éadig



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Béo Þu!” set to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” The most significant piece in this collection is “The Root of the Boot,” the precursor to Sam’s troll song. Comical and at times even silly though many of the poems from this period in Tolkien’s career might be, his choice to return to these poems years later and incorporate several of them into The Lord of the Rings points clearly to his abiding attachment to them. Some of the comical verses Tolkien wrote in this era also bore a sharper, more satirical edge. Foremost among these are the series of poems called “Tales and Songs of Bimble Bay,” probably composed in the late 1920s (see also ch. 24). Most conspicuous is the harsh and cacophonous “Progress in Bimbletown,” a scathing lampoon of modern civilization which provides a somewhat glaring backdrop for the other, slightly more whimsical pieces in the series, such as “The Dragon’s Visit,” “Glip,” and “The Bumpus.” “Progress” and “The Dragon’s Visit” were both published in the Oxford Magazine, the former in 1931 and the latter in 1937. Equally cutting though more comical is the academic satire “Knocking at the Door,” subtitled in mockRomantic style “Lines Induced by Sensations when Waiting for an Answer at the Door of an Exalted Academic Person,” also printed in the Oxford Magazine in 1937. Two of the most significant of Tolkien’s comical poems from this period are “The Adventures of Tom Bombadil” and “Errantry,” both also published in the Oxford Magazine in 1934 and 1933 respectively. Tom Bombadil, of course, was to become an iconic figure in Tolkien’s fiction, and the meter and style of the original poem would be enshrined as Tom’s characteristic song pattern which he retains in The Lord of the Rings, audible even in most of his prose dialogue passages. “Errantry” is a wild experiment with rhyme and a pure indulgence of Tolkien’s delight in the sound of words. The growth and meaning of Tom Bombadil in Tolkien’s works, from the early poem to Tom’s incorporation into The Fellowship of the Ring and his impact on that story, to Tolkien’s composition of the follow-up poem “Bombadil Goes Boating” years later, is a fascinating study in its own right and beyond the scope of this essay. The career of the silly poem “Errantry,” though, will be looked at later on, for it provides an altogether remarkable glimpse into the interrelationship between Tolkien’s poetry and his stories. Tolkien also found poetry to be a useful and satisfying tool of his scholarly craft as well. Although Tolkien wrote several important and influential critical essays and delivered a great many learned lectures on Old English and Old Norse legends and poetics, his primary response to his studies seems to have been creative rather than critical. In addition to the alliterative “The Lay of the Children of Húrin” and the playful poems in Songs for the Philologists, he spent much time in the early 1930s writing serious poetry which was directly connected to his areas of scholarly interest. Both the two poems later collected and published by Christopher Tolkien as The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún (Tolkien 2009a) and the unfinished The Fall of Arthur (Tolkien 2013) are good examples. Just as his passion for languages and philology expressed itself in his devising of his own created languages (see ch. 14), so too his study of Germanic poetry and meter led him repeatedly to try his own hand at traditional alliterative poems.

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Finally, the idea of Faërie and the Elves, never far from his mind, again received poetic attention in this period, though in a much different register than in “Goblin Feet” or “You and Me and the Cottage of Lost Play.” The poignant “Fíriel” and the grim “Looney,” both contemplating the distance between mortal life and Faërie, were published in 1934. This brief survey of Tolkien’s poetic works in the 1920s and 1930s, by no means exhaustive, should provide at least a sense of the breadth and the extent of Tolkien’s poetic activity in these years famous for their production of Tolkien’s first famous work of prose, The Hobbit. Writing poetry was not merely something Tolkien did intermittently; it formed, in several ways, the backbone of his creative work for much of his life. Even after the long process of writing and revising The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien’s abiding interest in and affection for his early poetic works is clear. When in 1961 his aunt, Jane Neave, suggested that he publish a “small book with Tom Bombadil at the heart of it” (Letters 308) Tolkien seized the chance to immerse himself again in poems written half a lifetime before, revising them for publication in 1962 in the volume The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (Tolkien 1962b and 2008e). In addition to the poem that gave the book its name, Tolkien revised (and often renamed) several of his earlier pieces. The very early “Princess Ni” makes as appearance under an altered name, “Princess Mee,” as does a revised version of “Errantry.” Both of the Man in the Moon poems are included, under the (comparatively tame) titles “The Man in the Moon Stayed up Too Late” and “The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon.” “The Root of the Boot” is revised yet again and included as “The Stone Troll,” and the previously unpublished “The Bumpus” from the “Tales and Songs from Bimble Bay” series is brought in under the title “Perry-the-Winkle.” Two of his bestiary poems, “Oliphaunt” and “Fastitocalon” make the volume, along with a very playful poem “Cat” that he wrote in the mid-1950s. “Looney” (renamed “The Sea-Bell”) and “Fíriel” (changed to “The Last Ship”) are included, and the academic satire “Knocking at the Door” is rendered both less cutting and more fantastical in its presentation as “The Mewlips.” “The Hoard” is a further revision of a poem published twice before, dating all the way back in 1923. To these, Tolkien added two new pieces, “Bombadil Goes Boating” and “The Shadow-Bride.” Although Tolkien had turned to prose as his primary vehicle in his later career, propelled by the success of The Hobbit into The Lord of the Rings and his revisions of the prose Silmarillion texts, poetry, the literary mode so central to his creative and intellectual expression for many years, remained a conspicuous element of his work. The Hobbit, of course, is full of songs and poems, to which a great deal of the spirit and depth of that work are owing. In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien not only continued to compose poems and songs which punctuate, emphasize, and anticipate elements of the narrative, but he also attached some portions of this new narrative to poems from the previous decades. Frodo originally lost his head and his footing in a rendition of the “Root of the Boot” (reenacting the hapless hero’s ill-fated kick), but in the end the discerning ear of the crowd at The Prancing Pony preferred “The Cat and the



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Fiddle.” “The Root of the Boot,” in return, found more congenial company in the ossified bodies of Bert, William, and Tom, the story of whose petrification it predated by many years. Called upon to explain what an Oliphaunt was, Sam naturally had recourse to the work of the learned Fisiologus, whose Freaks had apparently been circulated as far as the Shire. And in the most complex and fascinating of these cohabitations, the rollicking old poem “Errantry” ends up meeting Bilbo in Rivendell, to the great enrichment of both parties. The remainder of this essay will look closely at a couple of the interactions between Tolkien’s poetry and his prose narrative in The Lord of the Rings, examining Tolkien’s poetry itself, especially the characteristic sensitivity to the sound and rhythm of words and how they can be manipulated in verse, and the dynamic relationship between the poems and the prose that surrounds it. It will be demonstrated that Tolkien’s poems are not mere ornaments on his prose, acting simply as a kind of literary filigree work on his prose craftsmanship. Rather, poetry is near the very heart of Tolkien’s subcreative expression, and the poems within his prose works are more like arteries within the body of the story than jewels on its surface.

“Where Now the Horse and the Rider?” Tolkien’s inset poems will, at times, bring us into contact with themes and ideas that the prose narrative scarcely touches on. Aragorn’s recitation of “Where now the horse and the rider?” as he and his companions approach Meduseld is a good example.2 We might at first think that these lines are provided to give readers a taste of the culture of the Rohirrim. Aragorn has already accomplished that in prose, however, in response to Gimli’s request for information before he, Aragorn, and Legolas meet Éomer’s troop for the first time. “They are proud and wilful,” Aragorn explains, “but they are truehearted, generous in thought and deed; bold but not cruel; wise but unlearned, writing no books but singing many songs, after the manner of the children of Men before the Dark Years” (TT, III, ii, 560). Gimli and the reader are thus given an admirably succinct account which provides both with the context they need for the forthcoming encounters with the Men of Rohan. The emphasis of Aragorn’s chanted poem, on the other hand, is quite different: Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing? Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing? Where is the hand on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing? Where is the spring and harvest and the tall corn growing? They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow; The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow. Who shall gather the smoke of the dead wood burning, Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning? (TT, III, vi, 662–663)

Aragorn immediately provides an explanation of the song, declaring:

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Thus spoke a forgotten poet long ago in Rohan, recalling how tall and fair was Eorl the Young, who rode down out of the North; and there were wings upon the feet of his steed, Felaróf, father of horses. (ibid.)

When we look carefully at the poem, however, Aragorn’s explication seems quite incomplete. The first two lines do indeed seem to recall a hero of old, a great rider, horn blowing, hair streaming as he charges, brightly armed, into battle. But even these lines raise the images not to celebrate or commemorate the figure, but to contemplate his mortality, asking repeatedly where he is now. Line three continues asking the same question, but it leaves Eorl the Young behind entirely, noting that not only the warrior and his glory, but also the poet and singer and the warm hearth have gone away and been lost. The fragmentary images with which the warrior (“the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing”) and the poet (“the hand on the harpstring”) are recalled serve also to impose a sense of distance, making the figures so recalled remote and impersonal. The fourth line broadens the view much farther, noting the passing of the seasons. The move from spring to harvest to the growing of the tall corn (presumably in the following spring) speaks of the rapid passage of the years, the seasons tumbling over one another. This dilation outward, from the initial warrior figure through the fragmentary images of peace and comfort to the passing of the seasons serves not to illustrate the culture of the Rohirrim and their values, but to point to their tenuousness and their transience. The second quatrain of the poem shows that the repeated questions of the first lines are not merely rhetorical; lines five and six give the answer. The warrior, the bard, and the glowing fire of fellowship have all passed away; they have proven ephemeral. They are like rainwater pouring down the side of an unfeeling mountain which has shrugged off innumerable other rain showers, like a breeze ruffling a meadow which has felt the air of thousands of other breezes. Like the sunset day after day, the past and present alike of the Rohirrim is sinking behind the remote and inaccessible horizon and falling into shadow. The answer to those first questions thus inspires another and even bleaker question, which plainly implies its own answer. Just as no one can gather the dispersed smoke of burning wood, so no one will ever see the years returning, like a river reversed and flowing back up out of the Sea. The song may well recall Eorl the Young, but only to reflect that he will never return, nor the days of old, nor even our own time, when our days in turn go down in the West. Legolas might not have understood the language when Aragorn first chanted it in the tongue of Rohan (in effect Old English), but he did get right to the heart of the song when he observed that “it is laden with the sadness of Mortal Men” (TT, III, vi, 662). As he does so often, Tolkien echoes the meaning of the poem in the structure of its lines. The first four lines, repeating the “Where is” questions, are closely bound together with one single end rhyme. Their metrical structure appears to follow the mode of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse rather than a regular syllabic meter, featuring two main stresses on either side of a caesura, bound together with alliteration. The



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first three lines not only share the same end rhyme, but they also alliterate on the letter h. The poem’s beginning is thus highly structured and very tightly interconnected. The structure begins to unravel as the poem proceeds, however. The fourth line does contain an h-word, “harvest,” which links it back to the previous lines, but it has no internal alliteration at all. The last four lines retain end rhyme, breaking into two couplets rather than a unified quatrain, but their meter deteriorates. Lines five and six still have a weak alliterative structure, alliterating on “mountain” and “meadow” and on “days” and “down,” but the poem’s last two lines lose all but the memory of the verse’s former shape. It is as if the song itself, like the hand of the scarcely remembered bard on its harpstring, is passing like rain on the mountain, dispersing like smoke rising from dead wood. What, then, is the role of this poem? Why does Tolkien interrupt his narrative with these verses, which surely do nothing to move the plot along? Why intrude this rather gloomy remembrance of mortality? When we look more carefully at its context, we can see that the poem is not a digression, but an expansion of an idea already under discussion. Gandalf, Gimli, Aragorn, and Legolas are approaching Edoras, and they are passing by the burial mounds of the old Kings of the Mark. As Aragorn points out, these mounds demonstrate the glory and antiquity of the kingdom, measuring it by the lives of its many and famous kings. “Many long lives of men it is since the Golden Hall was built,” he remarks (ibid., 662). Legolas, however, views things quite differently as an immortal Elf, pointing out that a mere 500 changes of the seasons seems “but a little while” to Elves. It is Legolas’s comment that prompts Aragorn’s chanting of this poem, which serves as a kind of response to the Elf, a brief poetic immersion in the perspective of mortal Men. The journey of the Fellowship has brought the reader of The Lord of the Rings into contact with strange places and alien peoples, from the Elf-haven at Rivendell, through the abandoned Elven Hollin and the desolate Khazad-dûm, to the isolated beauty of Lothlórien, where time flows differently and where guests feel themselves removed from the fears and pains of the mortal world. The story shifts at this moment to the lands of Men, where it will mostly remain from this point on. The passage into Edoras is, in a sense, the crossing of a threshold, a threshold marked by the tombs of the dead, which are covered in flowers called Evermind. The Age of Men is coming, and the story brings us out of the regions filled with the memories of the elder days and into the new world that shall pass, as all mortal things do, like the rustling of a breeze in the meadow. A long discourse upon this theme, of the shift in the world which Treebeard can feel in the water and the air, would indeed be a digression. Instead of belaboring the point in prose, Tolkien inserts eight lines of poetry into his narrative which bring us, through their imagery and their music, into the world of mortal men and provide us a poignant context both for the memory of Eorl the Young and for the heroic deeds which are to follow.

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Here and in other of his inset poems, therefore, Tolkien interacts with his readers on a different level than he does in his prose. Tolkien uses the poetic form to connect his prose narrative to large, powerful, and mythic ideas, to give his readers a vantagepoint from which they can perceive and connect with primal themes. The poem, therefore, far from distracting from the story Tolkien is telling, bring us into contact with the ideas at its very heart.

“Errantry” The relationship between Tolkien’s prose narratives and his poetry is complex. Tolkien himself seems almost to suggest that stories should emerge from poetry, as the prosaic unfolding of history within time originates in the Music of the Ainur. In The Silmarillion, for instance, Tolkien repeatedly suggests that his prose narrative is merely an impoverished rendering of unknown (and frequently unwritten) Elvish poems. There are a few cases, however, when we can see one of Tolkien’s poems putting out shoots and branches and growing a story around it. “The Adventures of Tom Bombadil” is one interesting example of this phenomenon, but an even more intricate and fascinating instance surrounds the remarkable life of Tolkien’s poem “Errantry.” As we look at the development of “Errantry” through its many revisions, it should be stated that there are three main versions of the poem. The first of these is the version published in the Oxford Magazine in 1933, which can be found in The Treason of Isengard (Treason 86–89), a text slightly but significantly different from the revised text of “Errantry” published in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil in 1962. References to “Errantry,” therefore, are to this 1933 version. The second text is one of the intermediate stages Christopher Tolkien gives, the links between the early “Errantry” and the final “Eärendil was a mariner” poem. This intermediate version (Treason 91–94) has been revised for Bilbo’s recitation in Rivendell, and will be termed the “Rivendell” poem. The third version is the song that Bilbo sings in The Lord of the Rings (FR, II, i, 304–308), and will be termed the “Eärendil” poem. “Errantry” was published in 1933, a short time after it had first been recited to the Oxford student group known as the Inklings (before C. S. Lewis borrowed the name). The poem’s insistent and ambitious rhyme scheme is immediately remarkable. “Errantry” abounds with verbal playfulness; a barrage of rhyming word sounds that strike one far more quickly and forcibly than the poem’s plot or substance. The poem’s meter is iambic tetrameter, a bouncy and even jangling meter. The basic structural unit of the poem is a quatrain intricately connected with rhyme: He called the winds of argosies with cargoes in to carry him across the rivers seventeen that lay between to tarry him. (Treason 87)



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The first two and last two lines in the quatrain are bound by internal rhyme or near rhyme (“argosies”/“cargoes in” and “seventeen”/“lay between”), and the two paired lines are linked in turn by an end rhyme on lines two and four (“carry him” and “tarry him”). To make the whole system more complicated, almost all of the rhymes are trisyllabic, adding another level of whimsy to the poem’s amusements. The extraordinary intricacy of this rhyming structure allows for a wide range of word play. Many of the internal rhymes, which are nearly adjacent and thus function like a kind of echo, are so close as to be comical, as when the mariner “begged a pretty butterfly/ that fluttered by to marry him” (Treason 87) or when we hear of his javelins “of malachite/ and stalactite” (Treason 88). Other pairings show great cleverness and ingenuity, cunningly utilizing the echoing effect of the internal rhyme. Thus the speaker conveys the desolation of the mariner’s early wanderings by pairing “loneliness” with “stonily,” mirroring the connection between the protagonist’s surroundings and his internal state (Treason 87). Similarly, he emphasizes the endlessness of the journey by noting that he is “under hill and over hill,/ a rover still to weariness” (ibid.). At other times, the rhymes are not so close, such as the poignantly assonant non-rhyme between “quarreling” and “sorrowing” in the description of the mariner’s estrangement from his butterfly mate (ibid.). Although the manipulation of word-sounds to achieve a wide array of effects may be very typical of Tolkien’s verse, the subject matter of the poem may seem quite surprising to readers of Tolkien’s later fiction. The poem is a light-hearted account of the adventures of an elfin sprite.3 The little mariner is obviously diminutive. He slays dragonflies, woos a butterfly, battles bumblebees, and cuts his way through spider webs with a sword made from an emerald. For all of Tolkien’s oft-cited rejection of “flower-fairies and fluttering sprites with antennae,” he is plainly describing a figure of a very similar sort in this poem, with little trace of self-consciousness (OFS 29). The story is not, however, entirely frivolous, and it contains glimpses of motifs that Tolkien develops further elsewhere in his writings. The solitary wanderer who travels wearily through the “shadow-land” will appear many times in the history of Middleearth, for instance,4 and the mariner who sails past a remote frontier to find mountains “of fairy-gold” and “countless silver fountains” is also familiar (Treason 88). Although the narrative remains light and playful, the seeds of a heroic or tragic story are definitely present. Within his own scale, the merry messenger does also strike some grander notes. His armament may be small, but it is quite marvelous, and his battles are no lark. His “rivalry/ with all the knights of Aerie/ and Faërie and Thellamie” is described as “terrible,” and the “dragon-flies/ of Paradise” presumably take a lot of vanquishing (Treason 88). He even wins “the Golden Honeycomb” before he turns for home, like a miniature Jason who has achieved a scaled-down version of the Golden Fleece, but also recalling Daedalus’s gift to Aphrodite’s temple on Mount Eryx. Remember that in denigrating Michael Drayton’s Nymphidia in “On Fairy-stories,” Tolkien’s primary objection is that the actual story Drayton’s fairies are involved in “is a dull story of intrigue and sly go-betweens” (OFS 30). “Errantry,” while delightedly reveling in what

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Tolkien slightingly calls “flower-and-butterfly minuteness,” remains emphatically a fairy-story (OFS 29). The focus of the poem, however, is comedy. In a ridiculous anti-climax to all the mariner’s “derring-do and glamoury,” he realizes just as he finally returns home that he has forgotten the errand and message that had been the whole point of his journey in the first place (Treason 88). The “weather-driven mariner” is doomed in the end to be “forever still a messenger,” but this is due not to a weighty doom placed upon him, but to his own flighty and distractible character. If he weren’t such a “tarrier,” he might one day complete his journeying, but as it is, his story has no real prospect of an ending. Tolkien revealed in a letter that the joke at the end of the poem was to include the poem’s reciter and audience as well as its narrator and protagonist. Tolkien explained that upon reaching the end of the poem, “the reciter was supposed at once to begin repeating (at even higher speed) the beginning, unless somebody cried ‘Once is enough’ ” (Treason 85), participating in what he describes as “the well-known pastime of the never-ending Tale” (Treason 106 n. 7). Once again, as we’ve seen before in Tolkien’s poetry, the form parallels or elaborates the subject. Christopher Tolkien relates the story of the unexpectedly haunting effect “Errantry” had on many readers (Treason 90). The poem apparently circulated widely by oral transmission, and a few enquiries about it filtered back to Tolkien from readers upon whom the poem had made “a deep impression.” Tolkien too seems to have had a hard time getting the poem out of his head. Despite all its merriment and frivolity, or perhaps because of them, “Errantry” lingered in Tolkien’s mind, and when he wanted a song for Bilbo to sing in Rivendell in The Lord of the Rings, he turned back to it (Treason 90–91). The scheme and structure of the revised “Rivendell” poem, the midpoint in the poem’s journey from “Errantry” to the published “Eärendil” poem, is largely the same as the poem Tolkien published a decade before. The chief difference is the tone; the later version has almost none of the mere silliness of “Errantry.” Even before we look at the poem’s content, we can perceive the difference in the choices of rhyming words, especially in the internal rhymes. Gone are the overtly forced and comical pairings in which Tolkien invents a nonsense name such as “Derrilyn” in order for it to stand as a rhyming pair with “merrily” (Treason 87). Tolkien retains some of the strong pairings he used in “Errantry,” such as “meadow-land” and “shadow-land” or “sigaldry” and “wizardry,” but he shifts them from internal rhyme pairings to the end-rhyme position. Instead of jangling internal repetition of sound (which is often very funny in “Errantry”), he uses the close long rhymes to give a stately finality to the ends of the quatrains (Treason 92). In the “Rivendell” version, Tolkien generally shuns closeness in the internal rhymes for a more distant echoing effect. In the first two lines of the second stanza, for instance, he matches “haven fair” with “maiden hair,” repeating all the vowel sounds and the terminal consonant (Treason 91). He then follows this with “everfern” at the end of the second line, altering the vowel sounds but repeating the v-f consonant



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combination from “haven fair.” The aural effect is like a repeated but diminishing echo. Some of the echoes Tolkien thus builds into his lines are close and strong, tying together two concepts through intricately interlocked sounds. The “poisoned neb” and “noisesome webs” of Ungoliant are tangled together like a tongue-twister (Treason 93). The potency of “elven-runes” is registered in their effect, that “never wound did harm to him” (Treason 92). In the first two lines of the third stanza, he connects “whispering” to the “windy reeds” and “mists” to the “meadow-land” through alliteration, then joins the two ideas with the faint and distant echo of “whispering” and “mists were in” (Treason 92). The linking of “roaming star” back to “home afar” conveys a wistful inevitability, as does the even more melancholy juxtaposition of “never more” and “hither shore” (Treason 93–94). When we turn to the poem’s narrative, we quickly find that the elfin diminutiveness has disappeared along with the comedic rhymes. There is still an echo of the old butterfly-wooing sprite in the first stanza, when we learn that the sails of his ship are woven from gossamer and cherry blossoms, but his boat is probably not literally as light as feather (Treason 91). He fights no bees nor dragonflies, and although he does still sunder spider webs, his foe is no little Attercop, but Ungoliant of Evernight who is attempting “the Sun and Moon in web to wind” (Treason 93). Our new mariner and his story are clearly several orders of magnitude greater than their predecessors. The story of the “Rivendell” poem is not merely larger, however; it is a totally different kind of story. The narrative of “Errantry” is fundamentally episodic. The mariner passes through distinct phases of his travels – a lonely wandering phase, a wooing phase, an exploration phase, a bellicose phase – but there is little sense of direction to his story. Indeed, the whole joke at the end of the poem hinges on the fact that the mariner’s journey was merely a series of distractions that prevented the accomplishment of anything. The “Rivendell” poem, by contrast, is a story with a very definite plot. This mariner is also adventurous and “on roving bent,” but his most important journey is not made under his own power (Treason 91). Early in his travels he lays his head “on pillow cool” and is carried by the River into Shadowland (Treason 91–92). When he reaches the sea, something odd and magical happens: “a wind arose and wafted him/ a castaway beyond the Moon” (Treason 92). Our intrepid mariner is swept away, asleep; like many mortals in fairy-stories, he finds himself whisked away into Faërie. When he awakes he finds himself “forlorn afar” by nameless shores. The poem recycles some of the language from “Errantry” as the mariner passes “the archipelagoes/ where yellow grows the marigold,” but this traveler has clearly crossed a sharper and more mystical boundary than his predecessor (Treason 92). He has passed from mortal lands to “Elven-strands,” a transition whose significance is confirmed when we learn that he has arrived at “Elven Tirion” (ibid.). Having crossed this boundary, the mariner himself undergoes a transformation. The “Errantry” mariner takes it upon himself to pick up a little “sigaldry” when he sees it will be useful in his butterflywooing, and he arms himself when he is in the mood for dragonfly-slaying. The “Rivendell” mariner is given both instruction and arms by the Elves, and both are

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part of the complete makeover he receives when he arrives in Faërie. Both he and his boat are built anew. He is taught melodies and armored in “panoply of Elvenkings” while his ship is adorned with a star and given swan wings. This mariner is not just having adventures; he has undergone a kind of apotheosis which culminates in his ascension into the heavens. The purpose of his elevation quickly becomes clear. He is made, apparently, the champion of the Elves, sailing the skies and passing “beyond the mighty Mountainwall” from Evereven to Evernight and falling into the darkness like blazing fire (Treason 93). The monstrous Ungoliant is seeking to entrap the Sun and Moon in her webs of gloom, and he has been sent as the champion of light to combat the darkness. The poem doesn’t say he slays Ungoliant, but he clearly succeeds in his mission, severing her “poisoned neb” and breaking the webs which she had been spinning for “endless years” (ibid.). Having conquered darkness, he is received into the light of Evernoon, where he undergoes a further alteration, his eyes now ablaze with fire and his face “lit with levin-light” – that is, lightning (ibid.). We are now very far removed from the feckless mariner of “Errantry” who forgot to complete his assigned errand (whatever it was). The “Rivendell” mariner, taken from the Shadow-land into Faërie, has now been elevated to the heavens themselves, beyond and above even the Elvenstrands. Having accomplished his quest, he is literally radiant in glory. But his story doesn’t end in Evernoon. The “Rivendell” poem also ends with an unexpected turn, but it replaces “Errantry”s humorous anti-climax with tragedy. The victorious hero tries to retrace his path and return home, but he finds he cannot. The “mighty doom” which elevated him to the skies and made him the champion of light has also permanently banished him from the “hither shore where mortals are” (Treason 94). Having been first abducted and then transformed, he can now never go back. The “Rivendell” poem has shifted a great deal from “Errantry,” but it has not yet become the story of Eärendil. In the attack on Ungoliant, it imports an element frequently associated with Eärendil’s tale in the early stages of the “Silmarillion” material, but this connection cannot itself cannot justify an identification between the tragic mariner of the “Rivendell” poem and Earendil. It shares some of the shape of Eärendil’s story – the departure from mortal lands to Valinor, the elevation to the heavens to become a star, the prevention of his return – but almost all of the details that define Eärendil’s character are missing. There is no link to Beleriand and its history, there is no Silmaril, and there is no message to the Valar; despite the mariner being identified as a “messenger” in the opening lines, he never delivers any message to anyone. His is a story not of self-sacrifice and presumption, but of abduction. This first “Rivendell” poem is a very distinct intermediate step between “Errantry” and the later “Eärendil was a mariner.” The shift from “Errantry” to the “Rivendell” poem, from the often frivolous recounting of the wild escapades of an irresponsible sprite to the relating of a tale from the Perilous Realm, is not merely the reflection of a shift in literary taste on Tolkien’s part. After all, he did still like “Errantry” enough in its original form to



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publish it in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil in 1962. Rather, the change in tone and theme is due to the fact that the poem has now been brought into The Lord of the Rings. When the poem ceases to be “a piece of verbal acrobatics and metrical highjinks” with a practical joke on the audience at the end (Treason 85), and is put in the mouth of Bilbo Baggins in the house of Elrond, neither the original tone nor subject matter is any longer appropriate. The poem doesn’t become linked explicitly to the history of the First Age, but it does get rooted in the legendarium, with glimpses of Valinor. It becomes a poem quite appropriate to a Hobbit who is now on permanent holiday among Elves, a story of a mortal inalterably changed by contact with immortals, a story glimpsing high things but cognizant of their distance from mortal experience and of the dangers inherent in crossing that divide. The “Rivendell” poem may recount neither the story of Eärendil nor any other incident from the history of Beleriand, but it does come into contact with Middleearth. Having come so close to that gravitational center of Tolkien’s imagination, it seems almost inevitable that it will succumb to its pull and enter its orbit. After a gap of time, Tolkien revises the poem again. No longer does Bilbo’s song in Rivendell merely echo Eärendil’s story like one of its trisyllabic internal echoes; now it is a historical narrative relating the tale of Elrond’s father. In its metrical and rhyme structure, the Eärendil poem finally published in The Lord of the Rings is much like the previous “Rivendell” poem, perhaps taking one small step further away from “Errantry,” in the same direction its predecessor had been moving. The trisyllabic near-rhymes are now less near even at the alternate lineending positions, and the echoes in the internal pairings are still perceptible, but generally even more distant. The “archipelagoes/ where yellow grows the marigold” which survived unaltered from “Errantry” into the “Rivendell” poem becomes the “strands of pearl/ where ends the world” and “where ever-foaming billows roll/ the yellow gold and jewels wan” (FR, II, i, 306). Neither of those internal pairings contains even one cleanly rhyming word pair, though the trisyllable echoing is plainly audible in both cases. When the Eärendil poem does rhyme more closely internally, it is in stately repetition (“upon his crest,/ upon his breast”) or for dramatic emphasis (“with biting breath/ as might of death,” 228), rather than in playfulness (“butterfly/ that fluttered by,” Treason 87). Although the poem retains the bouncy meter and intricate rhyme scheme that made “Errantry” so remarkable, all vestiges of its former silliness are gone. Where the “Rivendell” poem took the jumbled episodes of “Errantry” and imposed a narrative upon them, the Eärendil poem introduces only a few alterations in narrative structure, though to profound effect. Eärendil arms himself in the “panoply of ancient kings” at the beginning, before his departure, rather than after his arrival at Tirion (as the “Rivendell” mariner does), for instance. Eärendil, of course, is no bewildered mortal mysteriously transported “beyond the Moon” (Treason 92), but a resolute captain girding himself for a desperate and purposeful voyage across a magical frontier. His transformation into a star, as well, is not something merely done to him, a transformation wrought on him by the Elves. If “Elbereth herself” sets the Silmaril upon

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his new ship and makes for him “wings immortal,” that seems only a repetition and perfection of the act the winged Elwing already performed earlier in binding the Silmaril upon his brow (FR, II, i, 305). Having taken up the Silmaril to cross a forbidden boundary, he now has an “undying doom” laid upon him to cross another boundary and continue bearing the Silmaril perpetually. This is not abduction, but self-sacrifice. Like the mariner in the “Rivendell” poem, Eärendil “yearned again to find afar/ his home,” but he cannot, being doomed to “tarry never more/ on Hither Shores where mortals are” (ibid., 307–308). This moment is the most important alteration between the narratives of the two poems, however. The unbridgeable gulf that the “Rivendell” mariner finds has opened between himself and other mortals, preventing his return, is purely tragic, an unforeseen (by him) consequence of his successful championing of light against darkness. Eärendil not only goes into this perpetual exile more knowingly, but that exile is connected to the fulfillment of his ultimate mission. The Eärendil poem, interestingly, says nothing at all about Eärendil’s return to the skies of Middle-earth to strike the blow that turns the tide of the War of Wrath and the overthrow of Morgoth. It doesn’t even mention the reason he has sought Valinor so desperately in the first place, and the poem gives no account of his appeal to Manwë on behalf of Elves and Men. But the poem does describe a purpose for his final status as a “wandering light,” and it gives new meaning to his desire to see his home again. Eärendil’s passing backwards over Valinor and “home through shadows journeying” leads not to mere frustration and longing and pointless wandering. Eärendil has been made: for ever still a herald on an errand that should never rest to bear his shining lamp afar the Flammifer of Westernesse. (ibid., 308)

His appearance in the skies over Middle-earth, where he can hear “the weeping sore/ of women and of elven-maids,” serves to deliver the message of hope from the Valar to his people. His errand never rests and his travels never end because his message is still ongoing; it is to all people at all times. In The Lord of the Rings, Sam will receive that message while surrounded by the gloom of Mordor, just as the oppressed of Beleriand once received it (RK, VI, ii, 1206). The mariners of the first two versions of the poem were both called messengers, but though both end up voyaging indefinitely, neither ever delivers a message to anyone. Eärendil’s ultimate message is delivered through his final, endless voyaging, and thus his purpose is continuously achieved. The Eärendil poem, in short, is not a poem describing the separation between mortals and Faërie, a cautionary tale of the Perilous Realm, as the “Rivendell” poem is. Eärendil’s version of the poem speaks rather of a link between heaven and earthly affairs, between the suffering of mortals and the pity of the immortals; between Westernesse and the Hither Shores.



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The shift from “Errantry” to the “Rivendell” poem is a product of the poem’s placement within the story of The Lord of the Rings. The prose narrative in which it was being embedded would seem to have contributed to the poem’s overhaul. The subsequent choice to change the poem again, transforming the story of the original mariner into an account of the voyage of Eärendil, appears to have a complimentary effect. Now, the poem is influencing the story, especially the depiction of its author, Bilbo. The originator of the “Rivendell” poem would seem to be a mortal with a healthy respect both for the transformation that Elves can work upon one of mortal race and for the potential consequences of such an association. The Eärendil poem says something different about its author. This poem, dealing as it does with history (and history with personal relevance to members of the poem’s listening audience), implies a higher level of learning and of familiarity with the Elves. But it is also a poem about the connection between mortals and immortals. Bilbo, living among the Elves for many years, has in this conception learned not only to respect and fear the Elves, but to understand them and their devotion to Middle-earth. As the author of the Eärendil poem, Bilbo has grown both in stature and in wisdom. As it happens, the questions of Bilbo’s authorship of the poem receives peculiar emphasis within its immediate narrative context, even in the earlier drafts. Bilbo, of course, has asked his Elven audience to guess how much he has written and how much was written by Tarkil, as his friend is named at that stage of the story’s development. In the draft in which the “Rivendell” poem was set, the Elves guess that Bilbo wrote “the first two lines and Tarkil did all the rest” (Treason 84). The first two lines, of course (“There was a gallant passenger/ a messenger, a mariner”) are almost identical to “Errantry,” and in the earliest versions of the “Rivendell” stage were exactly the same. Bilbo says that they are “stone cold” in their guess, though he does confess to Frodo that “quite a lot of it was Tarkil’s.” By the time of publication, when Bilbo is reciting “Eärendil was a mariner,” the Elves tender no guess, and Bilbo privately takes credit for the whole poem, with the sole exception of the reference to the emerald on Eärendil’s breast. The poem comes closer to the Elves, but Bilbo’s claims to authorship are increased rather than decreased. Aragorn may think Bilbo’s poem shows presumption and “cheek,” but Frodo feels that it fits, that it melded perfectly with the enchanted state into which the Elvish singing had already put him. Bilbo too, it appears, has had melodies taught to him. More important than the light it shines on Bilbo’s character, however, is the way in which the poem anticipates one of the major themes that The Lord of the Rings will eventually build to. At the end of the story, Frodo explains to Sam that it often happens that, when things are in danger, “some one has to give them up, lose them, so others may keep them” (RK, VI, ix, 1346–1347). Frodo may have once thought, as he says, that he would retire happily to the Shire when all was over, but if we are paying attention, we are first confronted by this hard truth in Bilbo’s Eärendil poem. The complex evolution of the “Errantry” poem into the “Rivendell” poem and “Eärendil was a mariner” allows us unusual insight into the complex interaction

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between the prose narrative and poetry in Tolkien’s stories. The poems that so frequently bubble up through Tolkien’s prose are not mere ornament. In Tolkien’s poetry, we see more than just a more evocative expression of the ideas that the prose narrative is already developing. The poems are not afterthoughts; rather, they seem to stimulate or even anticipate the development of the stories’ larger themes. The poems not only express these themes, they often provide the first glimpses of them. In a sense, Tolkien’s prose stories flow out of his poetic expression. It is in his poetry, the “song of words” (S 33), that we come nearest to the wellspring of Tolkien’s sub-creation. Notes 1  For a full list of all of Tolkien’s poetry see Chronology 841–873, and Flieger (2007). 2  This poem is, of course, an adaptation of the Old English poem The Wanderer, with which Tolkien was intimately familiar. This poem, therefore, could be seen as another example of Tolkien exploring in a creative context ideas that he had been working through in a scholarly context. A comparison of this poem with the parallel text in The Wanderer in the context of Tolkien’s own published work on Old English poetics is, however, beyond the scope of this essay. For more information, see Lee (2009).

3  The word “elfin,” a word foresworn by Tolkien in his later writings, is used deliberately. Although Tolkien frequently used the word “elfin” in his early work, he shifted to “elven” and “elvish” in part, it seems, as a conscious attempt to distance himself from the associations with smallness, cuteness, and spriteliness that are inescapably attached to the more traditional adjective “elfin.” But the argument here is precisely that the mariner of “Errantry” in fact fits the profile of the traditional, diminutive, “elfin” fairy. 4  Beren, Tuor, Aragorn, and even Gandalf come immediately to mind.

References Flieger, Verlyn. 2007. “Poems by Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings. In J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopaedia, edited by Michael Drout, 522–532. London: Routledge.

Lee, Stuart. 2009. “J. R. R. Tolkien and ‘The Wanderer’: From Edition to Application.” Tolkien Studies, 6: 189–211.

Further Reading Eilman, Julian and Allen Turner, eds. 2013. Tolkien’s Poetry. Zollikofen, Switzerland: Walking Tree Publishers. Olsen, Corey. 2012. Exploring J. R. R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit.” Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Shippey, Tom. 2007. Roots and Branches. Zurich and Bern: Walking Tree Publishers.

13

“Minor” Works Maria Artamonova

The umbrella terms “minor” works or “shorter fiction” are used of necessity to refer to those of Tolkien’s writings whose only claim to belonging to a single group or collection is their short size and the absence of a straightforward relationship to Tolkien’s main oeuvre (usually described as his “mythology” or “legendarium”). This apparent lack of connection is misleading: what the “minor” works demonstrate very clearly is that any story Tolkien wrote was bound to be drawn into the orbit of his mythology by way of allusion, comment, analogue, or borrowing. In exploring the relationship between the “minor” works and the main legendarium, we have to be mindful of the fact that only a few of the former were published during Tolkien’s lifetime or considered by him to be finished literary products. This means that we have to treat them as “work in progress,” with all the restrictions and insights that this concept entails. The prose minor works fall into two rough categories: children’s stories (The Father Christmas Letters, Roverandom, Mr. Bliss), and stand-alone short stories for adults (Farmer Giles of Ham, “Leaf by Niggle,” Smith of Wootton Major). Most Tolkien readers would be more familiar with the second category: the three offshoots of Tolkien’s imagination which could be said to reflect its “academic” / “humorous,” “allegorical” / “Christian,” and “Faërie” / “visionary” aspects respectively. “Leaf by Niggle” and Smith of Wootton Major can also be viewed as Tolkien’s attempts to present, in figurative, allegorical, or mythological form, an evaluation of his own work and, to an extent, of his own life. Although many Tolkien readers are first introduced to him in their childhood by reading The Hobbit, his other children’s tales, though admittedly few and far between and sometimes left unfinished (and some of which have never been written down, let

A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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alone published, and are only known to us from reports), often tend to go unnoticed or are dismissed as minor in terms of their significance and generally below par in terms of their literary merits. Nevertheless, they possess charm and character that enable them to stand on their own; moreover, they allow us some important insights into Tolkien’s working methods and shed some light on the genesis and progress of his legendarium. There are three different angles from which we can approach the minor works. First and foremost, they can be viewed as independent pieces of writing, that represent, as Tom Shippey put it, “the pictures Niggle did not tack to the edges of his great picture” (Tolkien 2008e, xii–xiii). There are few of them: unlike many sci-fi and fantasy authors, he did not find the short story a useful vehicle, either for testing ideas which could be later elaborated in a more extensive form, or for offering snapshot-like glimpses or brief sketches of new worlds. At the same time, as Tolkien himself acknowledged, both directly (Letters 136) and indirectly (in the allegorical language of “Leaf by Niggle”), his mythology refused to be kept at bay even from stories seemingly as remote from it as The Father Christmas Letters and Roverandom. The second approach, then, would look for parallels and references to the legendarium in the most unlikely places – from the cave-walls of the North Pole to the Dark Side of the Moon. Finally, the minor works can be very profitably explored as chips off the same block that produced The Hobbit. Tolkien famously referred to his Arda legendarium as “the world into which Mr Baggins strayed” (HoH 874). It is through the minor works that we can glimpse the world that he strayed into Middle-earth from. The anecdote about Tolkien coining the phrase “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit” one day while marking exam papers has been worn with use (see ch. 8), but Bilbo Baggins did not spring out of his head fully formed, complete with pipe and furry feet. The literary antecedents of The Hobbit (and Hobbits) have been discussed in detail (see, inter alia, Tolkien 2002a, HoH, Atherton 2012). It is not surprising that sources and analogues can also be readily found among Tolkien’s own short stories, all of which (except “Leaf by Niggle” and Smith of Wootton Major) were written in the 1920s and 1930s, more or less simultaneously with the composition of The Hobbit. All of them were submitted by Tolkien to Allen & Unwin for consideration after the success of the latter book, and all were judged promising but insufficient to stand on their own merit, therefore prompting Tolkien to embark on the composition of a sequel, “the new Hobbit.” Many critics over the years have commented on the “golden formula” of success achieved in The Lord of the Rings by fusing the remote, noble, and austere beauty of the “Silmarillion” legends with the more homely, familiar, and “human” touch represented by the Hobbit characters. Humphrey Carpenter describes the minor works as the original source of that second theme: So it was that during the nineteen-twenties and thirties Tolkien’s imagination was running along two distinct courses that did not meet. On one side were the stories



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composed for mere amusement, often specifically for the entertainment of his children. On the other were the grander themes, sometimes Arthurian or Celtic, but usually associated with his own legends. .  .  . Something was lacking, something that would bind the two sides of his imagination together and produce a story that was at once heroic and mythical and at the same time tuned to the popular imagination. He was not aware of this lack, of course; nor did it seem particularly significant to him when suddenly the missing piece fell into place. (1977, 174–175)

Other classifications of Tolkien’s shorter fiction are, of course, possible. The collection incorporating most of the works discussed in this chapter, tellingly entitled Tales from the Perilous Realm, is discussed in Tom Shippey’s introduction as illustrations of Tolkien’s “Faërie mythology” (Tolkien 2008e, ix–xii). Elsewhere, Shippey has repeatedly presented Farmer Giles of Ham, Smith of Wootton Major, and “Leaf by Niggle” as “autobiographical allegories” (Shippey 2000, Chapter VI; see also n. 10 below). Yet another dividing line would separate the posthumously published works (The Father Christmas Letters, Mr. Bliss, Roverandom, and some of the poems) from those prepared for print by the author himself, whether before or after the watershed marked by the publication of The Hobbit in 1937. What follows is a short overview of individual stories in rough chronological order, inasmuch as one can be established in view of complex textual histories which even the shortest of Tolkien’s writings tend to have. The individual nature of each work will be considered in brief, while their shared features, already outlined above, will be discussed in greater detail at the end of the chapter. Tolkien composed many stories while his own children were growing up: the spur-of-the-moment tales we only know by hearsay such as the adventures of Major Road Ahead and the villain Bill Stickers, the hitherto unpublished stories like “Orgog” (see Carpenter 1977, Chapter 6; Chronology 160–167; Drout 2007, 95–97 for useful summaries), the illustrated “comic books” like The Father Christmas Letters and Mr. Bliss, the story of the adventures of Roverandom, told to Tolkien’s son after he had lost his favorite toy, Farmer Giles of Ham, originally composed to while away the time and to explain a few local names – and, last but by no means least, The Hobbit itself.

The Father Christmas Letters1 The peculiarity of these yearly installments posted to the Tolkien children between 1920 and 1943 and published posthumously in 1976 lies in their private nature: they were not meant for publication and in a way represent a chronicle of the Tolkien family’s concerns and interests almost as revealing as his “proper” letters. In fact, sometimes the similarity becomes uncanny; cf. this excerpt from a 1925 letter from Father Christmas: I am dreadfully busy this year – it makes my hand more shaky than ever when I think of it – and not very rich. In fact, awful things have been happening, and some of the

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presents have got spoilt and I haven’t got the North Polar Bear to help me and I have had to move house just before Christmas, so you can imagine what a state everything is in, and you will see why I have a new address. (Tolkien 2009d, 8)

Many other letters, especially those written during the war years, betray the very real anxieties that Tolkien had during that time. The more light-hearted entries can be enjoyed for themselves but also work as a quarry of “analogues” for his better-known fiction. Here, we find a kindly but irritable wizard who can do wonders with fireworks: “You have no idea what the old man can do! Litening [sic] and fireworks and thunder of guns!” (31), hordes of evil Goblins, and a secretary with an appropriately Elvish name of Ilbereth. Characteristically, even the traditional Christmas Elves are introduced into the story in 1932 in a rather dramatic fashion, not so much “Santa’s little helpers” as the warrior race of the Red Gnomes, Father Christmas’s military allies who come to the rescue and repel a Goblin invasion (25). Very tellingly, although the terms “Elves” and “Gnomes” (for slightly different creatures) were both used early on, the latter term eventually disappeared after 1936, probably reflecting Tolkien’s growing dislike of the name’s unwelcome associations with beings very different from his own Elves – whether the Noldor of his mythology or the fairy warriors and present-packers from Norway and the North Pole.2 We tend to think of Tolkien’s Elves as tall and stern immortals – he himself was keen to register his dislike of the Victorian diminutive fairies. But many critical studies have shown, over and again, that it took Tolkien quite a while to part from the image of mischievous and delicate creatures and move, as it were, from “Elfin” to “Elven” (cf. Tolkien 2002a, 112–114). A comparison of Tolkien’s drawings of the Red Gnomes and their ilk in The Father Christmas Letters (e.g., the years 1933 or 1935) to his nearly contemporaneous picture “Beleg finds Gwindor in the forest of Taur-nuFuin” (Tolkien 1992b, 37) reveals certain similarities – astonishing perhaps if we consider the apparently unbridgeable chasm between Beleg and Ilbereth. Thus, The Father Christmas Letters may be viewed as a link (or an offshoot) in the evolution of the idea of Elves, which proceeded from the playful and diminutive Fairies and Gnomes of the Lost Tales and the early poems to the mischievous Elves of The Hobbit and thence to the wise, immortal, and stern Elves of the later “Silmarillion” and The Lord of the Rings.

Roverandom While The Father Christmas Letters, were generally well received, the reaction to Roverandom, written in 1925–1927 but published as late as 1998, was more mixed. Even sympathetic reviewers found the story a little underwhelming.3 There are obvious reasons for this: Tolkien himself had not considered Roverandom for publication after the initial attempt to submit it to Allen & Unwin in 1936. Moreover, any new Tolkien material published in 1998 was, understandably, eagerly anticipated by scholars and fans



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as well as heralded by the press as “a new Hobbit.” For a short story about the adventures of a little toy dog, this may well have proved too much to live up to. From Scull and Hammond’s heavily annotated edition, Roverandom has been cited by many critics because of the insights into the origins of The Hobbit and the development of Tolkien’s mythology it provides. While these will be addressed later, it is worthwhile to take a step back and consider the story for what it is – a children’s tale of adventure which uses an archetypal motif: the protagonist annoys a wizard, is put under a spell and then has to learn new things about the world, forge friendships and eventually return to his old home and original shape.4 Such tales tend to be moralistic, but Tolkien’s is very far from it, leaning instead toward humor and a very characteristic delight in the little dog’s journey. Roverandom does find out a lot about the world, leaving the familiar English seaside behind to discover a flat Earth that contains an undersea kingdom, the Light and Dark sides of the Moon haunted by dragons and spiders, and – a fact which is easy to miss in the tale itself but impossible to overlook when one considers the Roverandom criticism – a curious intrusion of the “other” mythology: . . . they passed the Shadowy Seas and reached the great Bay of Fairyland (as we call it) beyond the Magic Isles; and saw far off in the last West the Mountains of Elvenhome and the light of Faery upon the waves. Roverandom thought he caught a glimpse of the city of the Elves on the green hill beneath the Mountains, a glint of white far away; but Uin dived again so suddenly that he could not be sure. If he was right, he is one of the very few creatures, on two legs or four, who can walk about our own lands and say they have glimpsed that other land, however far away. ‘I should catch it, if this was found out!’ said Uin. ‘No one from the Outer Lands is supposed ever to come here; and few ever do now. Mum’s the word!’ What did I say about dogs? They don’t forget ill-tempered lumps of rock . . . (Tolkien 1998a, 73–74)

As this excerpt illustrates, Roverandom is written in a peculiarly inconsistent style, ranging from very childish asides, exclamations, and addresses to the reader to haunting, evocative passages laden with a sadness and longing which would not be out of place in The Silmarillion or The Lord of the Rings. A reader may be excused for thinking that the idea of two little talking dogs sailing to the Uttermost West on the back of a whale is rather ridiculous.5 But it is worth remembering that the world of Tolkien’s legends was never set in stone, or cast in marble. A little furry-footed man who enjoys smoking and second breakfasts seems equally out of place in the world of Fëanor and the Children of Húrin. However, the Hobbits did eventually enter the legendarium, with momentous consequences – as did another seemingly incongruous intruder, Tom Bombadil. Moreover, it is easy to see from the changing concept of the Elves that the idea of the “indigenous” inhabitants of the world of The Silmarillion was by no means immutable either. In The Book of Lost Tales, written only about eight years before Michael Tolkien lost his toy dog on the beach in 1925, even the central tale of Beren and Tinúviel plays out as a catand-dog story. With this in view, Roverandom’s journey to Elfland no longer seems

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as far-fetched, especially since the idea of adventurous Hobbits (possibly even Bilbo Baggins) sailing away to “the Other Side” remained in The Hobbit for a long time after its publication (HoH 52). What Roverandom exemplifies, sometimes in a more clear-cut way than The Hobbit, is the tension between two modes of writing, the two sides to Tolkien’s imagination described by Carpenter, and given that Tolkien was moving towards a more “grown-up” and less playful vision of the mythology which eventually even led him to reconsider the style of The Hobbit, it is perhaps unsurprising that he did not return to Roverandom in later years.

Mr. Bliss Mr. Bliss is a picture book inspired by Tolkien’s children and their toys, like Roverandom, and abundantly illustrated by the author, like The Father Christmas Letters. It was also written in the late 1920s or early 1930s and published posthumously in 1982 (see Tolkien 2007a). It is a satirical and humorous tale involving a little man in a tall hat, a mysterious creature called the Girabbit, a little town populated by a number of characters, some roguish bears, an uncouth family of gluttons called the Dorkinses, a temperamental motor-car, and a donkey. Just like Roverandom, Mr. Bliss has had its share of critics and proponents. The story can appear charming or absurd, depending on the point of view. It has echoes of The Wind in the Willows and Beatrix Potter, but contains hardly any references to Tolkien’s legendarium – although just like Tolkien’s other children’s stories, it has important parallels with The Hobbit and the Shire characters from The Lord of the Rings.6 Shippey (2007, 363) reads it as an audacious tale of anarchy and vulgar language that refuses to date. It has certainly not disappeared from the attention of Tolkien fans: a short animated film was privately made in 2004 featuring the original drawings.

Farmer Giles of Ham The famous story of Tolkien reading Farmer Giles of Ham aloud at a meeting of an Oxford society in 1938 (Letters 39) tends to overshadow the fact that the scholarly humor for which the tale is so much admired was added during a rewriting in preparation for this reading, and that Farmer Giles had begun life in the late 1920s as yet another children’s story, complete with the figure of Daddy the narrator who often interrupts himself to explain things and answer questions (see Tolkien 2008a for an exhaustive history and commentary by Scull and Hammond). Although Farmer Giles is among Tolkien’s most popular stories, it has a special appeal for medievalists and philologists. There are elements in it which cry out for comment and annotation, from veiled allusions to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Arthurian legends, and Tolkien’s own essay on Beowulf, to local lore and Oxfordshire toponymy. The latter is doubly ironic as the joke has been inevitably turned on



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Tolkien himself; his fictional editor examining Farmer Giles as the work of an equally fictional medieval scribe cites “the light that it throws on the origin of some difficult place-names” among the excuses “for presenting a translation of its curious tale.” Even though most readers “find the character and adventures of its hero attractive in themselves” (Tolkien 2008e, xvi), an appreciation of Farmer Giles of Ham seems incomplete without locating the villages of Worminghall and Oakley, the Rollright Stones, and the town of Thame itself on the map of modern Oxfordshire. Tolkien does not include many references to the real Oxford or the surrounding area in his fiction (with some notable exceptions such as “The Notion Club Papers”), so his deep interest in placenames and local histories has to be gleaned from his academic works and from the rich toponymy of The Lord of the Rings. Philological methods are often unable to determine the original reason why, deep in time, a certain name was given to a certain place. Therefore, from the point of view of etymology, the stories derived from a modern version of a place-name are strictly speaking just as justified – or no more justified – than the ones that evolve around an early recorded version of the same place-name. And that is exactly what Tolkien is doing in Farmer Giles, by offering the story as an explanation of names such as Worminghall and Thame. The “philological gest,” of course, in no way overshadows the story itself, which is proven by its textual history. It was the original shorter version, lacking most of the scholarly humor and placing less of an emphasis on the quasi-medieval setting, which was offered for publication in 1936 and enthusiastically received by the publishers (and the young Rayner Unwin); but it was the now-familiar second version that saw light in 1949. The comic tone of the story sets it apart from the others, although the humor is very much the same as in his other writings. Its medieval setting – the Little Kingdom – seems unique (if one discounts the abandoned draft for a Farmer Giles sequel), but the idea of a fictionalized period in the history of what is essentially our own world is, after all, the underlying concept behind Tolkien’s mythology as a whole. Giles the reluctant hero comes from the same stock as Tolkien’s Hobbit characters including Farmer Maggot, and his failure to kill a dragon but success in finding its weak spot offers a close parallel to Bilbo’s story. The presentation of the story is a mockery of medievalist textual criticism and editorial practices, and has suggested to Shippey an allegorical reading (2000, 289–292; 2005, 111–114), which would argue for a closer tie between the story and Tolkien’s other two important short tales, “Leaf by Niggle” and Smith of Wootton Major.

“Leaf by Niggle” Much has been made of the “allegory vs. applicability” conundrum with regard to “Leaf by Niggle,” a story which was written in the early 1940s, after the publication of The Hobbit, and in many ways reflects the problems and anxieties involved in the ongoing composition of The Lord of the Rings.

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In view of Tolkien’s clearly expressed dislike of allegory, are we entitled to treat his short story as one? He himself is ambiguous on the matter: “the better and more consistent an allegory is the more easily can it be read ‘just as a story’ ” (Letters 121).7 Nearly every analysis of “Leaf by Niggle,” starting with Tolkien’s own assessment of his story in a letter to his aunt Jane Neave (Letters 320–322), has unfailingly picked up on the Christian allegory: the plot is interpreted as a man’s journey from earthly life to Purgatory and thence to Heaven.8 On the other hand, it can be read as an allegorical interpretation of Tolkien’s own life: his “niggling” perfectionist attitude to work, the slow emergence of the Great Tales that grow in the telling after starting from a single “leaf,” the uncertainties of a man beset by everyday cares which prevent him from finishing the work that is so dear to his heart; and finally, the hope of a deeply religious man, expressed much more confidently in the last lines of his earlier poem “Mythopoeia,” that his imagination would somehow be given tangible form in the next life. Despite its allegorical nature, “Leaf by Niggle” can clearly be read just as a story, a counterpart to The Pilgrim’s Regress, the allegorical autobiography written by Tolkien’s closest friend C. S. Lewis which highlights the differences between the two men. The world that Niggle inhabits is described in tones remarkably reminiscent of twentieth-century social satire. In the first line of the story, he is called a “little man” (Tolkien 2008e, 285), a term which in the context of world literature is often applied to an unremarkable “everyman” who has to face the hostile and impersonal power of the state, or fate, or some other overbearing odds which either crush him or reveal his hidden strengths. He lives in a world which is almost Orwellian in its austerity, with clear echoes of wartime Britain, in which the society is represented by rather Big-Brotherish Councillors and Inspectors whose very language suggests an image of a machine-like world so abhorrent to Tolkien: “I dare say he could have been made into a serviceable cog of some sort” (Tolkien 2008e, 309). This presentation of Niggle as a man whose fate is decided by “the Others” persists even in the “Purgatorial” chapters where he undergoes “treatment” dished out in a very matter-of-fact and perhaps even brusque fashion. Even Niggle’s dreams and fantasies before his journey are presented in a similar way: his idea of happiness is someone giving him a “public pension” to finish his Picture. He does not come into his own until he literally “comes into his own” and becomes master of the country brought to life by his imagination. In “Leaf by Niggle” it seems that Tolkien’s deeply-rooted Catholic notions of a fallen world and a fallen man within that world are expressed in a language peculiarly reminiscent of the dystopian fiction of his time, despite his ostensible lack of interest in contemporary literature.

Smith of Wootton Major Smith of Wootton Major is different from all the other stories previously discussed in that it postdates them by at least 20 years. It was written in 1964, after The Hobbit



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and The Lord of the Rings had already been published and established. Smith’s journeys into Faërie have sometimes been seen as yet another allegory, Tolkien’s attempt to step outside the boundaries of his legendarium and present an evaluation of his own life in mythological terms. The metaphor of the special-occasion Cake shared between the children of the village can be read in different ways. It can be dismissed as “the popular misunderstanding of Faërie as saccharine and meant only for children” (Tolkien 2005, 61). It could also be interpreted as an apology for fairy-stories, which, though imperfect and often wrong-footed, still preserve some vestige of memory of the Perilous Realm. “Better a little doll, maybe, than no memory of Faery at all. For some the only glimpse. For some the awaking,” says the Queen in Smith of Wootton Major (38), and this sentiment echoes Tolkien’s attitudes to his own work expressed elsewhere directly and indirectly. In almost the last lines of “Leaf by Niggle” the “Second Voice” says of his country: “It is proving very useful indeed . . . As a holiday, and a refreshment. It is splendid for convalescence; and not only for that, for many it is the best introduction to the Mountains” (Tolkien 2008e, 143). After the publication of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien was receiving numerous grateful comments from people for whom his works opened a door into Faërie, which prompted him to muse: What thousands of grains of good human corn must fall on barren stony ground, if such a very small drop of water should be so intoxicating! But I suppose one should be grateful for the grace and fortune that have allowed me to provide even the drop. (Letters 98)

The allegorical nature of Smith of Wootton Major has been a controversial issue, debated at length by major Tolkien scholars such as Tom Shippey, Verlyn Flieger, and David Doughan.9 Tolkien himself, despite praising Roger Lancelyn Green for saying that “to seek for the meaning is to cut open the ball in search of its bounce” (Letters 388), provided an allegorical reading in a long essay he wrote on his own story: “[P] lainly enough the Master Cook and the Great Hall etc are a (somewhat satirical) allegory of the village-church, and village parson: its functions steadily decaying and losing all touch with the ‘arts’, into mere eating and drinking” (Tolkien 2005, 70). Indeed, the first paragraphs of Smith of Wootton Major read like the beginning of one of C. S. Lewis’s allegorical illustrations to a religious argument. But this is not a Lewis story, and the arithmetic fails to work; Alf Prentice, the King of Faërie who forsakes his realm to work as a village Cook, is not a Christ figure, and the “deep magic” he invokes is not equated with God’s power. Whatever approach is adopted, it is important to note two facts about Smith of Wootton Major. First, there is the much-cited circumstance that the story grew out of a never-written preface to George MacDonald’s The Golden Key. In genesis, if not anywhere else, it was intended to be a metaphorical illustration of the concept of “Faërie,” also discussed in Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-stories.” Second, we have to consider the ways in which Tolkien’s mind worked. He was aware of allegorical elements

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in his work, but as he progressed, he was more and more immersed in it just as a “story.” Wootton itself is located “between Far Easton and the Westwood” (Tolkien 2008e, 255), that is, between East and West, somewhere in this “middle-earth.” However, Tolkien typically provided a follow-up for the story in his explanatory essay and notes, offering both his own evaluation of its meaning and an elaboration of the geography and economics of Wootton and its relationship with Faërie. This is yet another step away from allegory and into the realm of applicability, that is, the infinite opportunities for interpretation provided by people and places, real or imaginary.

The Minor Works as Backdrop for The Hobbit Whenever the affinities between the minor works and The Hobbit are discussed, much store is set by textual similarities and plot details. The Father Christmas Letters and Roverandom contain passages which might have been lifted straight from The Hobbit, and in fact are very close in date to the composition of the latter book (such as the Polar Bear’s adventure in the Goblin cave in the 1932 letter or the White Dragon chasing after Rover and Roverandom on the Moon in Roverandom). But the connections go far beyond textual echoes. One feature shared by The Father Christmas Letters, Roverandom, the early version of Farmer Giles of Ham, and The Hobbit is the presence of an implied narrator figure. This concept, originally suggested by the real situation (Tolkien telling stories to his children), is inevitable in the epistolary genre represented by The Father Christmas Letters but becomes a more formal device in the other stories, especially in the original Farmer Giles, where the narrator is identified as “Daddy” and provides both an introduction and a moral at the end.10 It is significant that Tolkien gradually became dissatisfied with this device in The Hobbit and removed many of the original asides and addresses to the reader from later editions of the book. However, a vestige of it is retained in the famous passage in The Lord of the Rings, when Sam Gamgee imagines the story of their adventures as a book that is read aloud by a father to his children (TT, IV, viii, 932). What really brings the children’s stories together and provides an important backdrop and parallel to The Hobbit is their setting. At first glance, it may seem that there is little similarity between the Shire, the fairy-tale North Pole, the Moon, the undersea kingdom, the quaint home of Mr Bliss, the pseudo-medieval Little Kingdom, the dystopian suburbia of Niggle’s home, and the imaginary pre-industrial countryside around Wootton. John Rateliff remarks in The History of The Hobbit that “modern settings are relatively rare in Tolkien and are generally confined to single indoor locations: Mr. Bliss is a significant exception” (HoH 462). Nevertheless, nearly all the minor works have a setting (if only as an initial point) that can be tentatively described as “contemporary”: Father Christmas is clearly writing to the children “here and now,” Roverandom’s adventures start and end in what is essentially the real world as Tolkien’s sons knew it, and Mr Bliss lives in a village which belongs to the twentieth



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century. Niggle’s town, albeit deliberately non-specific, is also firmly rooted in Tolkien’s own time. But modern or not, all the settings in the minor works seem to represent different facets of an image which may be labeled “The Shire,” “the Little Kingdom,” or perhaps even “Little England.”11 To the prose works that are the focus of this chapter can be added some poems from the cycles “Tales and Songs of Bimble Bay” (see Tolkien 2002a) and The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (see Tolkien 2008e). From the fanciful “Dragon’s Visit” to the viciously satirical “Progress in Bimble Town,” we encounter the tell-tale signs that we are still in the same country. It is decidedly non-urban: at best a small market town, but usually a village at the heart of “an imaginary (but English) country-side” (Tolkien 2005, 84). It is populated by “little people,” not yet literally small in size as the Hobbits, but ordinary people preoccupied with their everyday concerns. Even their names have the same slightly comic and rustic ring to them; the following illustrative selection is taken, in no particular order, from all the works here described: Atkins, Tompkins, Perkins, Mr Bliss, Mr Binks, the Dorkinses (Albert, Herbert, Egbert), Mrs Simkins, Mrs Biggins (the dragon-slayer!), Nokes and Noakes, Bill Huggins, Grubb and Burrows, Tom Bombadil and John Pompador, and Bingo Bolger-Baggins.12 There are also “Sam, Sergeant Boffin’s eldest boy,” Sunny Sam, and, of course, Sam Gamgee, the son of “Gaffer Gamgee” who first makes his appearance in Mr. Bliss – literally, as he is depicted in the illustration (Tolkien 2007a, 36). One is inevitably reminded of the roll-call from Bilbo’s famous address to his guests in the first chapter of The Lord of the Rings. Sometimes the names can be incongruously grand: we are now used to Peregrin Took and Meriadoc Brandybuck, but we are still mindful of the effect produced by Hamilcar (later Belisarius) Bolger and Bellomarius; we chuckle at Augustus Bonifacius Ambrosius Aurelianus Antoninus and Psamathos Psamathides, let alone Artaxerxes, the Pacific and Atlantic Magician, and those aware of the origins and meaning of the names chuckle twice. Rather than having names in Tolkien’s invented languages, what the characters in the minor works share with the Hobbits is a combination of the homely traditional or mocktraditional English names and the grand-sounding names of the celebrities of the medieval and Classical world. The inhabitants of the generic “Little England” (which has its pseudo-medieval or fairy-tale counterparts in the Little Kingdom and both the Woottons), although more than a little absurd and comical, can be presented as embodiments of traditional values and a deep love of home (see also ch. 24). At their worst, they are images of “bourgeois smugness” and a narrow-minded, bigoted outlook that refuses to accept anything outside their “limited world” (Tolkien cited by Rateliff, HoH xiii). Again, the similarities are apparent although the range is vast: from Mr Binks the car seller in Mr. Bliss (“He ought to be in prison he ought, sending home a nice car bent and all, and full of a parcel of bears and strange folk”; Tolkien 2007a, 37), Councillor Tompkins’s sneery dismissal of Niggle as “silly little man, . . . no use to Society at all” (Tolkien 2008e, 309), Nokes’s haughty and mistrustful treatment of Alf in Smith of Wootton Major, to Bilbo’s neighbors who gossip about “mad Baggins” and yet turn up in force

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for his parties and Barliman Butterbur the barman who doesn’t have a kind word to say about the man he calls Strider the Ranger. It is precisely the fact that they do something “queer” that separates the protagonists of the stories from their parochial if idyllic environment: whether it is going on a car ride to visit some bears or embarking on a long journey to reclaim gold from a dragon, painting a picture or venturing into Faërie; indeed, as Bilbo Baggins himself put it, “anything from climbing trees to visiting elves – or sailing in ships, sailing to other shores” (H 7).

Conclusion Although few readers nowadays have the chance to subject them to this test, Tolkien’s minor works can be evaluated and appreciated independently from his mythology, which tends to overshadow them by creating false expectations. But even when viewed within the context of the mythology, their relevance is far greater than that of something “tacked on the side,” a quarry of sources and analogues – a fate which Tolkien would not have wished on any of his works. Perhaps most importantly, the minor works offer samples of the same fertile ground that produced The Hobbit, after which Middle-earth was never the same again, in either the primary or the secondary world. Notes   1  This title refers to the abridged edition by Baillie Tolkien, first published in 1976. The more extensive collection, Letters from Father Christmas, appeared in 1999.   2  For a discussion of the word “Gnome” and its fate in Tolkien’s writings, see Lost Tales I (38) as well as Letters (318). Note Shippey’s remark in The Road to Middle-earth: “He kept using the term ‘Gnomes’ for the Noldor till at least 1937” (Shippey 2005, 333).   3  “Roverandom lacks the sense of realism and serious purpose of The Lord of the Rings and even The Hobbit . . . It is whimsical and ‘miniaturized’ in a way Tolkien later came to dislike” (Croft 2004, 68); “The invention in Roverandom is short-winded and the characterisation rudimentary” (Mars-Jones 1998); “I find it hard to believe that he [Tolkien] would have tolerated Roverandom in its present state” (Asaro 1998).   4  One parallel would be Selma Lagerlöf’s 1907 Swedish book The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, in which a wicked boy is unkind to an

  5 

  6 

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Elf, is turned into a tiny creature himself, and has to learn a lot about the world during his travels with wild geese before he is deemed worthy of regaining his original shape and returning home. See Mark Atherton’s recent discussion of Roverandom in the context of the origins of The Hobbit: “The myths sit a little uneasily with a story set in a modern world” (Atherton 2012, 21). See an excellent exploration of the bear characters and other aspects of Mr. Bliss in Tolkien’s tales in Rateliff (HoH 253–256). A similar sentiment was also expressed in Letter 131 to Milton Waldman (Letters 145). “In the middle of the morning they gave Niggle a biscuit and a glass of wine; and then they gave him a ticket” (Tolkien 2008e, 301). To follow the debate, see Shippey (2007, 351–362); Shippey (2000, 296–304); Shippey (2005, 308–318); Doughan (1991); and Flieger (1997, Chapter 11).



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10  The narrator is also present in Mr. Bliss, if only as the figure of the artist who is occasionally given a voice (cf. the caption on p. 26: “The car is just here (and the ponies and donkey) but I am tired of drawing it”). 11  See ch. 24 for a thorough discussion of the concept of “Little England” and its reflections in Tolkien’s work.

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12  “Bingo Bolger-Baggins” sounds like a P. G. Wodehouse character but in fact owes his name to a family of toy bears owned by Priscilla Tolkien; it took Tolkien a long time to drop this name in favor of “Frodo Baggins” (Tolkien 1988).

References Asaro, Vincent. 1998. “Roverandom: Let Sleeping (Toy) Dogs Lie.” Available at http://www.spiral sea.com/ports/arkoftitan/titanzine/octnov98/ tolkien.html, accessed November 29, 2013. Atherton, Mark. 2012. There and Back Again: J. R. R. Tolkien and the Origins of The Hobbit. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Carpenter, Humphrey. 1977. J. R. R. Tolkien – A Biography. London: Allen & Unwin. Croft, Jane Brennan. 2004. “Beyond The Hobbit: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Other Works for Children.” World Literature Today, 78.1: 67–70. Doughan, David. 1991. “In Search of the Bounce: Tolkien Seen Through Smith.” In Lewis (1991), 17–22. Drout, Michael C., ed. 2007. J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopaedia. London: Routledge.

Flieger, Verlyn. 1997. A Question of Time: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Road to Faërie. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Mars-Jones, Adam. 1998. “Hobbit Forming.” The Observer, January 1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/ books/1998/jan/01/jrrtolkien.classics, accessed November 29, 2013. Shippey, Tom. 2000. J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. London: HarperCollins. Shippey, Tom. 2005. The Road to Middle-earth. Rev. and expanded edn. London: HarperCollins. Shippey, Tom. 2007. Roots and Branches: Selected Papers on Tolkien. Zurich and Bern: Walking Tree Publishers.

Further Reading Hiley, Margaret, and Frank Weinreich, eds. 2008. Tolkien’s Shorter Works: Essays of the Jena Con­ference 2007. Zurich and Bern: Walking Tree Publishers.

Lewis, Alex, ed. 1991. Leaves from the Tree: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Shorter Fiction. The Tolkien Society.

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Invented Languages and Writing Systems Arden R. Smith

Tolkien’s “Secret Vice” and Linguistic Aesthetic An important element in J. R. R. Tolkien’s legendarium is the complex of strange languages that appear in the stories, either in names of characters, places, and things, or in snippets of poetry and dialogue. These languages, some of which are genuine, historical languages, but most of which are Tolkien’s own creations, add a certain flavor to the stories and a consistency to the nomenclature. Furthermore, many readers of Tolkien’s works feel the aesthetic appeal of these languages, and the scripts used to write them, as artistic creations in their own right. Tolkien did not create these languages merely as set dressing for his fiction, to give it color, detail, and depth. In a 1955 letter to the Houghton Mifflin Company, Tolkien describes his work as “all of a piece, and fundamentally linguistic in inspiration,” explaining further: The invention of languages is the foundation. The ‘stories’ were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. To me a name comes first and the story follows. . . . [The Lord of the Rings] is to me, anyway, largely an essay in ‘linguistic aesthetic’, as I sometimes say to people who ask me ‘what is it all about?’ (Letters 219–220)

In addition to letters such as the one cited above, the primary source for Tolkien’s thoughts on language invention and his linguistic aesthetic is an essay from 1931,

A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.



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entitled “A Secret Vice” (MC 198–223). Here Tolkien discusses the “hobby” of creating what he calls “art-languages”: languages devised for one’s own pleasure as an expression of one’s own personal aesthetic, providing specimens of his own creations, none of which had yet been published, or even intended for publication. He also expresses his view that “for perfect construction of an art-language it is found necessary to construct at least in outline a mythology concomitant. . . . The converse indeed is true, your language construction will breed a mythology” (MC 210–211). In this essay Tolkien also tells of his earliest attempts at language creation: Animalic, a word-substitution code created by Tolkien and his cousins, comprised primarily of English animal names; Nevbosh, another simple code with a vocabulary derived unsystematically from English, Latin, and French; and Naffarin, which was influenced by Latin and Spanish. As Tolkien discovered other languages that appealed to him, these also influenced his linguistic inventions. Gothic, for example, inspired Tolkien to “attempt to invent an ‘unrecorded’ Germanic language” (Letters 214), which may be what Tolkien elsewhere calls Gautisk (Tolkien 1998b, iv, x–xi; see Smith 2006, 274–277). Years later, Gothic would also serve as the stylistic basis for Tolkien’s Taliska language (Tolkien 2010d, 22). Tolkien’s discovery of a Finnish grammar led to the creation of a language that “became heavily Finnicized in phonetic pattern and structure” (Letters 214). Tolkien described this language, originally called Qenya but later rendered as Quenya, as “composed on a Latin basis with two other (main) ingredients that happen to give me ‘phonaesthetic’ pleasure: Finnish and Greek” (Letters 176). This was the language that first sparked the creation of Tolkien’s Elvish mythology. The other main language (or series of languages) in Tolkien’s legendarium began as Goldogrin or Gnomish, later called Noldorin, and ultimately became the language known as Sindarin or Grey-elven. “This is derived from an origin common to it and Quenya,” Tolkien explains, “but the changes have been deliberately devised to give it a linguistic character very like (though not identical with) British-Welsh” (Letters 176).

Tolkien’s Method As the previous quotation demonstrates, a key component of Tolkien’s linguistic creation is the illusion of historical development. Tolkien not only devised Elvish languages, but also elaborated in great detail the historical relationships between them and the changes, phonological or otherwise, peculiar to the individual languages and distinguishing them from one another. For example, Tolkien tells us that the Primitive Quendian name of the Elves was *kwendıˉ, which developed into Quendi in Quenya and Pendi in Telerin. The word was not found in Sindarin, except in the compounds Celbin (plural of Calben) and Moerbin, Morbin (plural of Morben), corresponding to Quenya Kalaquendi “Light-elves” and Moriquendi “Dark-elves” (Jewels 360–362). These correspondences of Primitive Quendian *kw to Quenya qu, Telerin p, and Sindarin p (mutated to b in certain environments, as above) are completely regular

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within Tolkien’s system, as we see also in Quenya quetta and Sindarin peth “word,” the latter appearing in mutated form in Gandalf’s “lasto beth lammen” “listen to the words of my tongue” (FR, II, iv, 400; Tolkien 2007c, 46). Even the non-Elvish languages connect with the Elvish tongues to varying degrees, as shown by Quenya Kasar and Sindarin Hadhod “Dwarf,” both of which Tolkien devised as loanwords from the Dwarves’ own name for themselves in Khuzdul, Khazaˉd (Jewels 387–388). Such philological detail was a hallmark of Tolkien’s complex of art-languages, as it was in his professional work in Old and Middle English and the older Germanic dialects. In fact, it is the core of his invention, since his languages might be better described as outlines of historical development than as languages per se. The fact of the matter is that many of the “languages” created by Tolkien consist of no more than a handful of words and a few grammatical devices, and in the case of the minor Elvish dialects, detailed material on the sound shifts that distinguish them from their sister dialects. The Danian language of the Green-elves, for example, consists of some two dozen attested words and some material on its phonological development, but this is enough to demonstrate clearly that the development of its sound structure was based on that of Old English (see Smith 1999). Documentation of Quenya and Sindarin is far more extensive, of course, but even so, it is still somewhat limited in scope. A considerable amount of work on the grammars of these languages survives (examples can be found in Tolkien 1995c, 1998b, 2003a, 2009b, and 2010d). These manuscripts clearly reflect Tolkien’s philological interests. He generally began with very detailed material on historical phonology, after which he would move on to the morphology section, before the end of which the manuscript would generally degenerate into a mass of incomplete notes in a virtually illegible scrawl. He rarely got around to writing anything about syntax. By that time he would have already started revising everything from the beginning. Much of what is known of the vocabularies of these languages has been gleaned from names and brief snippets of text in Tolkien’s fiction, as well as from illustrative words in the grammatical texts mentioned above. A number of brief word-lists also exist, but extensive dictionaries are rare. Two of these date from the inception of the Elvish tongues: “Qenyaqetsa,” also known as the “Qenya Lexicon,” from circa 1915 (Tolkien 1998b), and “I‧Lam na‧Ngoldathon,” a 1917 dictionary of Goldogrin also known as the Gnomish Lexicon (Tolkien 1995c). The most valuable source of Elvish vocabulary, however, is an etymological dictionary from the late 1930s, known simply as “The Etymologies,” which contains specimens from about a dozen different Elvish languages (Lost Road 339–400, with addenda and corrigenda in Hostetter and Wynne 2003 and 2004). Unfortunately, all this material does not fit together into one coherent whole. Tolkien was constantly tinkering with his linguistic invention and changing his mind about words, their meanings, their etymologies, and various linguistic processes. In the case of the change of Noldorin to Sindarin, he overhauled the entire historical framework. This causes difficulties for the practical use of the Elvish languages, since a word or grammatical device from one phase of invention may not be a viable sub-



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stitute for a word or grammatical device missing from the documentation of another phase. Although the Goldogrin of the Lost Tales eventually developed into the Sindarin of The Lord of the Rings, for example, a Goldogrin word like cweth “word” does not conform to the phonological constraints of Sindarin, even though a considerable amount of Goldogrin vocabulary did survive into Sindarin (see Gilson 2000). Tolkien constructed his languages in such a way that someone versed in the methodology of linguistic reconstruction can reasonably postulate a missing word in one Elvish language based on the form of that word in another Elvish language. Reconstruction and extrapolation are necessary to fill in the gaps in Tolkien’s descriptions of these languages in order to make them adequate for practical use, and enthusiasts desiring to write and speak in Elvish have used such methods for decades. It should be stressed, however, that even the best of the solutions arrived at by these methods may not necessarily match what Tolkien has written in yet unpublished documents or what he would have written, and many of the non-Tolkienian attempts at Elvish poetry and prose employ paraphrases that would certainly never pass for genuine Elvish. Indeed, Hostetter characterizes the circumlocutions often used in this sort of “Neo-Elvish” as “clumsy and alien when compared with Tolkien’s own compositions and derivational techniques” (2006, 248). Similarly, reference works that have attempted to fill in the gaps in the current knowledge of Elvish grammar, such as Noel (1980) and Salo (2004), should be approached with caution, since they often fail to distinguish their authors’ hypothetical reconstructions from forms actually attested in Tolkien’s writing (see Gates 2000 and Hostetter 2006 for more detailed criticisms of these works).

The Linguistic World of The Lord of the Rings In Appendices E and F of The Lord of the Rings (RK 1461–1496), Tolkien describes the complex of languages spoken in Middle-earth, according to the conception current when that work was published (see ch. 9). The general information in this section derives from that source. One of the two main Elvish tongues appearing in The Lord of the Rings is Quenya (High-elven), which Tolkien describes as having become by the time of the War of the Ring “an ‘Elven-latin’, still used for ceremony, and for high matters of lore and song, by the High Elves, who had returned in exile to Middle-earth” (RK, Appendix F, 1481). The names of most of the Kings of Númenor are Quenya in form, as are those of the Kings of Arnor and Gondor (RK, Appendix A, 1354–1355, 1358–1359). Brief passages of Quenya appear in The Lord of the Rings in Frodo’s greeting to Gildor (FR, I, iii, 105), Aragorn’s farewell to Arwen (FR, II, vi, 458), Treebeard’s descriptions of Lothlórien and Fangorn Forest (TT, III, iv, 608), Frodo’s exclamation in Shelob’s Lair (TT, IV, ix, 942), some of the praises on the Field of Cormallen (RK, VI, iv, 1248), Elessar’s coronation oath (RK, VI, v, 1268), Elessar’s exclamation upon finding the sapling of the White Tree (RK, VI, v, 1273), and Treebeard’s farewell to Galadriel

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(RK, VI, vi, 1285). The most extensive passage in Quenya is the poem “Namárië,” also known as “Galadriel’s Lament” (FR, II, viii, 492; detailed analysis in Tolkien and Swann 2002, 66–70). The other main Elvish tongue in The Lord of the Rings is Sindarin (Grey-elven), originally the language of the Eldar of Beleriand in the First Age, ruled by Thingol of Doriath. The Noldorin Exiles adopted Sindarin for daily use, and it remained the usual tongue of the High Elves of Middle-earth through the Third Age. As a result of this, nearly all of the Elves mentioned in The Lord of the Rings have Sindarin (or Sindarized) names, as do the Kings of Arthedain, the Chieftains of the Dúnedain, and the Ruling Stewards of Gondor after Mardil (RK, Appendix A, 1360). Sindarin also appears in The Lord of the Rings in Glorfindel’s greeting to Strider and his cry to Asfaloth (FR, I, xii, 273, 278), Gandalf’s spells on Caradhras and at the West-gate of Moria (FR, II, iv, 389, 400, 401), the inscription on the West-gate of Moria (398), Sam’s invocation to Elbereth (TT, IV, x, 954), some of the praises on the Field of Cormallen (see above), Gilraen’s linnod (RK, Appendix A, 1392), and especially the hymn to Elbereth in Rivendell, “A Elbereth Gilthoniel” (FR, II, i, 309; detailed analysis in Tolkien and Swann 2002, 71–75). In Appendix F, Tolkien describes the Elves of Middle-earth as belonging to two groups, the West-elves (Eldar) and the East-elves. Most of the Elves of Mirkwood and Lórien were Silvan Elves of the latter category, though their rulers were Eldar. Sindarin was spoken in Lórien at the time of the War of the Ring, but many of its people spoke it with a Silvan accent, and the names “Lórien, Caras Galadhon, Amroth, Nimrodel are probably of Silvan origin, adapted to Sindarin” (RK, Appendix F, 1481). The main Mannish language at the time of the War of the Ring is the Westron, which is represented by modern English in the text of The Lord of the Rings. Derived from the tongue of the Edain, which later became the language of Númenor, and enriched with words from the Elven-tongues, the Westron became the “Common Speech” of the West-lands of Middle-earth. In the Third Age it was “the native language of nearly all the speaking-peoples (save the Elves) who dwelt within the bounds of the old kingdoms of Arnor and Gondor” and was used as a second language by all races living in that region and beyond (RK, Appendix F, 1480). The Hobbits of the Shire and Bree used it “freely and carelessly” (1484), whereas in Gondor “the Westron kept still a more gracious and antique style” (1484). The language of the Mark of Rohan, usually called Rohirric in the secondary literature, though Tolkien never uses this name, was closely related to the Westron. In order to preserve a semblance of relationship between the two, the language of Rohan is represented by Old English. Tolkien has extended this fictional translation scheme even further, so that the names of early chieftains of the Northmen are Gothic in form (UT 402–403), and the outer names of the Dwarves, purportedly in the language of Dale, are taken from the Old Norse Völuspá (Peoples 70–71). In Appendix F II, and even more in the published drafts of “The Appendix on Language” (Peoples 19–84), Tolkien provides numerous examples of the “untranslated” versions of these languages. The speakers of the Common Speech, for example, called



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their language So¯ val Phaˉrë (Peoples 32). The word that the Hobbits used to refer to themselves was kuduk, and the more ancient form of the word used by Théoden, given as holbytla in the main text, was kûd-dûkan in “authentic” Rohirric (RK, Appendix F, 1496). The language of Númenor, from which the Westron was derived, does not receive the same “translation” treatment, however. Adûnaic names, such as those of the later Kings of Númenor (RK, Appendix A, 1355), always appear in Adûnaic form. Further specimens of the language appear in writings more intimately concerned with Númenor, such as “Aldarion and Erendis” (UT 223–280), “The Drowning of Anadûnê” (Sauron 331–413), and Tolkien’s unfinished novel, “The Notion Club Papers” (Sauron 145–327). Connected with the last two is the most detailed exposition of the language and its grammar, “Lowdham’s Report on the Adunaic [sic] Language” (Sauron 413–440). Tolkien mentions other Mannish languages, unrelated to Adûnaic, but virtually nothing appears of them in the books. One of these is the tongue of the Woses, the Wild Men of Drúadan Forest. Related to this were the original language of the Men of Bree, long since abandoned for the Common Speech, and that of the Dunlendings. Khuzdul is the secret tongue of the Dwarves, which they used among themselves and rarely taught to any of alien race. Examples in The Lord of the Rings are found mainly in place-names such as Khazad-dûm, but part of Balin’s tomb inscription is in Khuzdul (FR, II, iv, 416), as is the Dwarvish battle-cry: “Baruk Khazâd! Khazâd aimênu!” “Axes of the Dwarves! The Dwarves are upon you!” (TT, III, vii, 697; RK, Appendix F, 1488). Small amounts of etymological and grammatical information have been published elsewhere (e.g., Treason 174; Tolkien 2007c, 35–37, 47), and as Tolkien explains: “It is Semitic in cast, leaning phonetically to Hebrew (as suits the Dwarvish character), but it evidently has some ‘broken’ plurals, more in Arabic style,” such as Khazâd, the plural of Khuzd “Dwarf” (Tolkien 2007c, 85). Tolkien describes the language of the Ents as “slow, sonorous, agglomerated, repetitive, indeed long-winded; formed of a multiplicity of vowel-shades and distinctions of tone and quantity” (RK, Appendix F, 1485). As Treebeard states, “It is a lovely language, but it takes a very long time to say anything in it” (TT, III, iv, 606). Treebeard’s a-lalla-lalla-rumba-kamanda-lindor-burúme, part of the name of a certain hill, is described as a “probably very inaccurate” attempt to represent a sample of actual Entish (RK, Appendix F, 1486). The Black Speech was devised by Sauron to be the language of all his servants, and words from it, such as ghâsh “fire,” were widely used by the Orcs. Ancient Black Speech appears in the inscription on the One Ring (FR, I, ii, 66; II, ii, 331). The more debased form of the language used by Sauron’s soldiers is exemplified by the Mordor-orc’s curse (TT, III, iii, 579; see Tolkien 2007c, 78–79 for Tolkien’s various translations). The language of the Valar is not mentioned in The Lord of the Rings, but it is nevertheless clear that it exists in that linguistic conception. The linguistic essay entitled

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“Quendi and Eldar,” dating from 1959–1960, ends with a “Note on the ‘Language of the Valar’ ” (Jewels 397–407). Here Pengolodh comments: ‘Plainly the effect of Valarin upon Elvish ears was not pleasing.’ It was, he adds, as may be seen or guessed from what survives, filled with many consonants unfamiliar to the Eldar and alien to their system of speech. (Jewels 398)

As examples of what survives, Pengolodh provides lists of Valarin words and names used by the Eldar, Valarin words and names known to but not adopted by the Eldar, and Eldarin names that are translations of Valarin forms.

The Linguistic World of the Lexicons and The Book of Lost Tales In contrast to the elaborate linguistic milieu of The Lord of the Rings, we find far fewer languages represented in the earliest version of Tolkien’s mythology. As in the later works, two Elvish languages are the main linguistic representatives in The Book of Lost Tales, but here they are virtually the only representatives. That is to say, they are virtually the only languages for which we see actual specimens; conceptually, the linguistic world is just as complex. As the sage Rúmil complains to the mariner Eriol: Know you that the Noldoli grow old astounding slow, and yet have I grey hairs in the study of all the tongues of the Valar and of Eldar. . . . I lightened my thraldom under Melko in learning the speech of all monsters and goblins – have I not conned even the speeches of beasts ..? Nay, I have worried at whiles even over the tongues of Men, but Melko take them! they shift and change, change and shift, and when you have them are but a hard stuff whereof to labour songs or tales. (Lost Tales I 47)

Rúmil explains that the “Gnome-speech” of the Noldoli is related to the “Elfin of the Eldar,” and that the Teleri, the Solosimpi, and the Inwir formerly spoke distinct dialects. He also tells of “the secret tongue in which the Eldar wrote many poesies and books of wisdom and histories of old and earliest things,” which the Valar also use (Lost Tales I 48). The “Elfin of the Eldar,” which Littleheart calls Eldarissa (Lost Tales II 148), is the Qenya language described in “Qenyaqetsa: The Qenya Phonology and Lexicon” (Tolkien 1998b), also known as the Qenya Lexicon, written around 1915. The vocabulary of the language already bears a close affinity to that of later Quenya; the use of q instead of qu and k instead of c is merely a matter of transcription. The grammar appears to differ in some respects, however. For example, the extensive declensional system of later Quenya, one of the elements often cited as a mark of Finnish influence, is not yet in evidence. Whereas the declensions of nouns in Book Quenya from circa 1966 list ten case-forms (nominative, accusative, genitive, instrumental,



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allative, locative, and ablative, as well as short forms of the allative and locative and an unlabeled case employing a suffix identified elsewhere as “adjectival”), the earliest extant Qenya poem, “Narqelion,” has very few signs of case inflection at all, with most nouns appearing in the unmarked nominative (Gilson and Wynne 1995; see also Jewels 368). Gnomish, the tongue of the Noldoli (later called Noldor), is also referred to as Goldogrin and Noldorissa, these being the Goldogrin and Qenya names respectively. This is the language described in “I‧Lam na‧Ngoldathon: The Grammar and Lexicon of the Gnomish Tongue” of 1917, also known as the Gnomish Lexicon (Tolkien 1995c). Although much of Goldogrin survived into later Sindarin (see Gilson 2000), the two languages differ significantly more than the Lost Tales’ Qenya and The Lord of the Rings’ Quenya. One particularly salient example of this is the large number of words beginning in cw- in the Gnomish Lexicon. Such forms are impossible in Sindarin, where initial Primitive Quendian *kw- became p-, mirroring the development of Proto-Indo-European *kw to p in Welsh. According to one of the outlines for The Book of Lost Tales, an Ilkorin Elf named Nuin awakened Ermon and Elmir, two of the sleeping mortals at Murmenalda, and “taught them much of the Ilkorin tongue” (Lost Tales I 236). This idea that Men first learned language from the Ilkorin/Avarin Elves survived into the later Silmarillion: It is said also that these Men had long had dealings with the Dark Elves east of the mountains, and from them had learned much of their speech; and since all the languages of the Quendi were of one origin, the language of Bëor and his folk resembled the Elven-tongue in many words and devices. (S 163)

The Linguistic World of “The Etymologies” and “The Lhammas” Moving forward about 20 years from the Lexicons and The Book of Lost Tales, we come to substantial descriptions of the linguistic world of Tolkien’s legendarium as it stood in the late 1930s. The relevant texts from this period include “The Etymologies,” an extensive etymological dictionary of the Elvish dialects (see above); three versions of the “Lhammas” (“Lhammas A,” “Lhammas B,” and a shorter version called “Lammasethen”), a prose account of the languages of Valinor and Middle-earth and how they are related to one another (Lost Road 167–198); and associated with these texts are three versions of “The Tree of Tongues,” a genealogical chart illustrating these relationships (Lost Road 169–170 and 196). In these documents we find a conception elaborated in greater detail than the vague statements of The Book of Lost Tales, but still substantially different from the conception outlined in the Appendices to The Lord of the Rings. At the top of each version of “The Tree of Tongues” we find Valarin, the language of the Valar and the ultimate source of all languages of Valinor and Middle-earth.

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According to the “Lhammas,” the Vala Oromë found the Qendi (Elves) after they had awakened beside Kuiviénen, “and of him they learned after their capacity the speech of the Valar; and all the tongues that have been derived thence may be called Oromian or Quendian.” Quendian then diverged from Valarin, for the language of the Valar changes little, whereas the Elves “softened” the sounds of the language and “added many words to it of their own liking.” Anticipating the question of why the languages of the virtually immortal Elves should change so much, Tolkien (through Pengoloð, the fictional author of the “Lhammas”) states that it is their love for creating new words that “has ever been the chief cause of the change and variety of their tongues” (Lost Road 168). The further development of the Quendian tongues is complex, and the various versions of the “Lhammas” and “The Tree of Tongues” differ in a number of specifics, not all of which are taken into account in the following summary. The Elves who refused the westward march and remained in Middle-earth, mostly of Telerian race, were called the Lembi “those that lingered,” and their language, which later split into many dialects, was called Lemberin or Lembian. Those Elves who made the journey westward were called the Eldar “star-folk” and their language Eldarin. A group of Noldorin Elves called the Danas or Laiqendi (Green-elves) became separated from the Eldar on the westward march and centuries later came into eastern Beleriand. Among the dialects of their Danian language are Ossiriandic (or Ossiriandeb) and Leikvian (East Danian). The Eldarin tongue split into three branches, corresponding to the three tribes of the Elves: Lindarin, Noldorin, and Telerin. According to the “Lhammas,” from the first of these branches came the Lindarin language as it was spoken in Valinor, but an ancient form of Lindarin “became early fixed . . . as a language of high speech and of writing” and was called Qenya (Elf-latin), or Ingwiqenya, “especially in its purest and highest form” (Lost Road 172). The “Lammasethen,” however, derives Ingwiqenya and Qenya from Valinorian, a separate offshoot from Valarin, which the Lindar “took afresh from the Valar themselves in Valmar” (Lost Road 193). From the Noldorin branch of Eldarin came the Korolambë or Kornoldorin, the language of the Gnomes of Kôr, the Old Noldorin of “The Etymologies”. Derived from this was the Noldorin spoken by the Exiles in Beleriand, also called Exilic Noldorin or Goloðrin, which split into several dialects, from the archaic speech of Gondolin to the mólanoldorin of the thralls of Morgoth. Noldorin underwent extensive changes, for “in the invention of language the Noldor were the chief” (Lost Road 174). Telerin (Telerian, Telerya) split into two main branches, one spoken by the Teleri in Toleressea and Valinor and the other by the Ilkorindi in Beleriand. The latter branch is represented by Doriathrin, spoken in the realm of Thingol, and Falassian (Falathrin), spoken by the Elves of Brithombar and Eglorest. A number of Elvish dialects are marked in the second version of the “The Tree of Tongues” as being yet spoken in the time of Pengoloð. In addition to Qenya, we find Eldarin and Telerin as spoken in Valinor, with the Eldarin dialect being a merger of Lindarin and the speech of the Noldorin folk of Finrod (Finarfin in the later



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conception). Derived from the Ancient Goloðrin of Gondolin are “Noldorin as it is yet spoken in Toleressea” and the “Gnome-tongue of those that linger in MiddleEarth.” There is also the “Speech of the few descendants of the Teleri & Laiqendi on Earth,” influenced by Doriathrin and Ossiriandeb (Lost Road 170). It is worth noting that this general conception of the Elvish dialects was still largely valid while Tolkien was writing The Lord of the Rings. Noldorin was still called Noldorin until 1951, when Tolkien reworked the linguistic conception and turned Noldorin into Sindarin. This can be seen, for example, in the drafts of “The Appendix on Languages” (e.g., Peoples 30–31, but contrast 78–79). Specific details about the languages of Men at this stage of Tolkien’s invention differ in the various sources, but according to the “Lhammas”: The languages of Men were from their beginning diverse and various; yet they were for the most part derived remotely from the language of the Valar. For the Dark-elves, various folk of the Lembi, befriended wandering Men in sundry times and places in the most ancient days, and taught them such things as they knew. But other Men learned also wholly or in part of the Orcs and of the Dwarves. (Lost Road 179)

This text goes on to say that the language of the people of Bëor, Haleth, and Hádor, which had been greatly influenced by the tongue of the Green-elves, was called Taliska. Though the Men of the Three Houses eventually abandoned this language in favor of Noldorin, their kin east of Eredlindon retained their speech, “and from this, closely akin to Taliska, are come after many ages of change languages that live still in the North of the earth” (Lost Road 179). There is not yet any trace of either the Westron of Middle-earth or the Adûnaic of Númenor in this conception; Tolkien states in later writings that Adûnaic was derived from the tongue of the House of Hador (S 172; Peoples 368). In addition to Oromian, two other main branches of linguistic development from Valian are present in this conception, though neither is discussed in detail. One of these is the Aulian or Nauglian branch, consisting of the language that Aulë invented for the Dwarves, as well as its descendants “surviving yet here & there in the mountains” (Lost Road 169). Although Dwarvish is already characterized here as “harsh and intricate” (Lost Road 178), the name Khuzdul has not yet been invented. The other main branch is Melkian or Orquian, consisting of the tongues of Orcs, Balrogs, and other creatures of Morgoth. These languages Morgoth derived from the Valian but “perverted to evil, as he did all things, and the language of the Orcs was hideous and foul and utterly unlike the languages of the Qendi” (Lost Road 178). Although this linguistic scheme seems to differ greatly from that of The Lord of the Rings, many of the differences between the “Lhammas” and Appendix F are not due to differences in conception, but rather differences in focus. These earlier works examine the linguistic world of the “Quenta Silmarillion” in what would later be called the First Age, whereas Appendix F is concerned with the languages of Middleearth at the end of the Third Age. When Tolkien wrote the “Lhammas,” the links

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between The Hobbit and the unpublished Elvish mythology were still quite tenuous, and the Third Age per se did not yet exist.

Writing Systems Tolkien also created a variety of writing systems for the representation of his languages. As with the languages themselves, the scripts are for the most part associated with the Elves, and even those used for the representation of other Middle-earth languages are of Eldarin origin within the fictional history. Tolkien discusses the two main script types in Appendix E II (RK 1467–1479); more in-depth analyses of their multifarious varieties may be found in Allan (1978, 231–289) and Björkman (2012). The letters of the older type of script are called Tengwar in Quenya and Tîw in Sindarin. The Tengwar were invented by Fëanor in Valinor and brought to Middleearth by the exiled Noldor. Their use spread to other races, and they came to be used over much the same area where the Common Speech was spoken (RK 1467). The Tengwar were designed to be written with brush or pen. Tolkien writes that the script was originally “a system of consonantal signs, of similar shapes and style, which could be adapted at choice or convenience to represent the consonants of languages observed (or devised) by the Eldar” (RK 1468–1469). The system contains 24 primary letters, arranged in a grid of four columns (témar “series”) and six rows (tyeller “grades”). Each of these primary letters is comprised of a stem (telco) and at least one bow (lúva) attached to the stem. Whether the bow is attached to the left or the right of the stem and whether it is open or closed depends upon the series. Whether the bow is doubled or not and whether the stem is raised, lowered, or reduced depends upon the grade. Roughly speaking, the series and the grades correspond to certain phonetic features of the sounds represented by the letters in a specific application of the script, which Tolkien calls a mode. For example, Series I, in which an open lúva is attached to the right of the telco, is used in all known modes for the representation of dental consonants (consonants pronounced with the tongue against the teeth). Grade 1, in which the telco extends below the line of writing and the lúva is not doubled, is universally used for the representation of voiceless stops and affricates (combinations of a stop and a fricative). Thus the letter in Series I, Grade 1 represents the voiceless dental stop [t] in all known modes. The specific application of the témar and tyeller, however, may vary from mode to mode, depending on the phonology of the language being represented, so a letter with the value [mp] in a mode for Quenya, for example, may have the value [v] in a mode for Sindarin. In addition to the primary letters, the system also makes use of a variable number of additional letters, in origin mostly modifications of the primary letters, as well as a number of tehtar “signs,” diacritical marks with various functions. The Tengwar inscriptions in and associated with The Lord of the Rings demonstrate a variety of modes and will serve to illustrate some of the differences between them.



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The calligraphic text of “Namárie” (Tolkien and Swann 2002, 65) exhibits a mode for Quenya, in which consonants are represented by tengwar and vowels by tehtar placed above the preceding consonant. In the modes used for the Black Speech inscription on the One Ring (FR, I, ii, 66) and the English inscription on the title page of The Lord of The Rings, however, the vowel tehtar are placed above the following consonant. The “Mode of Beleriand,” used for the representation of Sindarin on the Westgate of Moria (FR, II, iv, 398) and in the text of “A Elbereth Gilthoniel” (Tolkien and Swann 2002, 70), uses full tengwar rather than tehtar for vowels. Ori’s page of the Book of Mazarbul is written in English “in the later or Westron convention, in its northern variety,” which likewise uses full letters for vowels, but with the tengwar applied quite differently (Tolkien 1992b, no. 24). The letters of the other main type of script are called Cirth in Sindarin, Certar in Quenya, and translated as “runes.” They were invented by the Sindar of Beleriand, and in their older form spread to Men, Dwarves, and even Orcs. The Angerthas Daeron “Long Rune-rows of Daeron” was the fullest elaboration of the alphabet among the Elves, attributed by tradition to Daeron, the minstrel of King Thingol of Doriath. The Dwarves of Moria learned the alphabet from the Elves of Eregion, and their modified version was called the Angerthas Moria. The Dwarves of Erebor made further changes to the system (RK, Appendix E, 1468ff.). Like the runes of Germanic antiquity, cirth are angular in shape, as they were devised for inscriptions incised into wood or stone. As in the Fëanorian system, certain structural features reflect certain phonological features: “(1) adding a stroke to a branch added ‘voice’; (2) reversing the certh indicated opening to a ‘spirant’; (3) placing the branch on both sides of the stem added voice and nasality” (RK, Appendix E, 1475–1476). Inscriptions in Angerthas Moria appear on the title page to The Lord of the Rings and on Balin’s tomb (FR, II, iv, 416), but the usage of the runes deviates slightly from the table in Appendix E II (RK 1478–1479). The runic texts in the Book of Mazarbul (Tolkien 1992b, no. 24) are written in the Mode of Erebor, making use of several cirth that are not listed in Appendix E II. Earlier versions of the cirth, including pen-written forms, have been published in the “Appendix on Runes” (Treason 452–465). The runes used in The Hobbit, however, are not cirth, but rather an adaptation of the historical runes used in Anglo-Saxon England (see Allan 1978, 280–282). In 1919 Tolkien invented the earliest Elvish writing system, the Alphabet of Rúmil, as a code in which to write his diary, but it soon became associated with his Elvish mythology. Several characteristics of the Tengwar are already present in Rúmilian, such as structural similarities reflecting phonological similarities and vowels represented by diacritics, but unlike the later Elvish scripts, Rúmilian could be written vertically. Although Tolkien stopped writing specimens of Rúmilian in the mid-1920s, the idea of the script as a predecessor to the Tengwar survives in Appendix E (RK 1467). The available Rúmilian corpus was published in Tolkien 2001b. Unlike Rúmilian, such scripts as Valmaric, Qenyatic, Falassin, Noriac, Banyaric, and Sinyatic did not survive into the later conception, but they and others do show

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the real-world evolution of the Tengwar during the 1920s (see Tolkien 2003b, 2006, 2009c, and 2012). Like Rúmilian, Tolkien created at least some of these other predecessors of the Tengwar primarily to encode his private diary (see especially Tolkien 2012, 52). Tolkien did not originally intend to publish either his invented alphabets or his invented languages, but today his “secret vice” is known throughout the world. References Allan, Jim, ed. 1978. An Introduction to Elvish. Frome, Somerset: Bran’s Head. Björkman, Måns. 2012. “Amanye Tenceli: The Writing Systems of Aman.” http://at.mansb jorkman.net/, accessed November 29, 2013. Gates, Irene. 2000. “Ruth S. Noel’s The Languages of Tolkien’s Middle Earth.” http://www.elvish.org/ articles/LRH.html, accessed November 29, 2013. Gilson, Christopher. 2000. “Gnomish Is Sindarin: The Conceptual Evolution of an Elvish Language.” In Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth, edited by Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter, 95–104. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Gilson, Christopher and Patrick Wynne. 1995. “The Growth of Grammar in the Elven Tongues.” In Proceedings of the J. R. R. Tolkien Centenary Conference, edited by Patricia Reynolds and Glen H. GoodKnight, 187–194. (Mallorn 33 and Mythlore 80.) Milton Keynes and Altadena, CA: Tolkien Society/Mythopoeic Press. Hostetter, Carl F. 2006. “Elvish as She Is Spoke.” In The Lord of the Rings 1954–2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder, edited by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, 231– 255. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press.

Hostetter, Carl F. and Patrick H. Wynne. 2003. “Addenda and Corrigenda to the Etymologies – Part One.” Vinyar Tengwar, 45: 3–38. Hostetter, Carl F. and Patrick H. Wynne. 2004. “Addenda and Corrigenda to the Etymologies – Part Two.” Vinyar Tengwar, 46: 3–34. Noel, Ruth S. 1980. The Languages of Tolkien’s Middle-earth. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Salo, David. 2004. A Gateway to Sindarin: A Grammar of an Elvish Language from J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Smith, Arden R. 1999. “Old English Influence on the Danian Language of J. R. R. Tolkien.” In Interdigitations: Essays for Irmengard Rauch, edited by Gerald F. Carr, Wayne Harbert, and Lihua Zhang, 231–237. New York: Peter Lang. Smith, Arden R. 2006. “Tolkienian Gothic.” In The Lord of the Rings 1954–2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder, edited by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, 267–281. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press. Tolkien, J. R. R. and Donald Swann. 2002. The Road Goes Ever On: A Song Cycle. 3rd edn. London: HarperCollins.

Part IV

Context

15

Old English Mark Atherton

J. R. R. Tolkien took his first steps in Old English at an appropriately early age. George Brewerton, one of his teachers at King Edward’s School in Birmingham, noticed his budding interest in Anglo-Saxon, as this language is sometimes still called, and presented him with an introductory Primer (most likely either Sweet 1882 or Sweet 1897). The young Ronald Tolkien took to the language with remarkable speed. He was fascinated by the sounds and syllables, the words and phrases, the grammatical forms and the whole texture of Old English. As well as enjoying it for its own sake as “beautifully co-ordinated and patterned” (Letters 214) – an instance of his famous “phonaesthetic” feeling for language – he came to appreciate the connections with the language of the present day; this was English, but English in an earlier form, familiar but distant. This love of the language shaped Tolkien’s career: after teaching Old and Middle English for five years at Leeds University he was appointed in 1925 to the Rawlinson and Bosworth Chair of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University, in which he remained for 20 years before moving to the Merton Chair of English Language and Literature in 1945 (see ch. 1). Old English therefore was a major focus of his University teaching and of his philological research, although in the end his published writings were few. They include editions of the biblical poem Exodus (Tolkien 1981) and of the legendary Finn and Hengest (Tolkien 1982; see ch. 3). He also published a verse drama serving as a sequel to the heroic Old English poem The Battle of Maldon. Other poems also attracted him: he loved the evocation of the lost splendor of the heroic hall in The Wanderer and The Ruin and the yearning for the wide ocean of The Seafarer and he

A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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responded to these in his published fiction (Lee and Solopova 2005, 133–138, 194– 198, 250–257). In addition, most importantly, he wrote on Beowulf, a heroic poem divided into two halves, as he later argued in his 1936 British Academy Lecture (see MC, and also ch. 2): in the first half a young man’s fight with the monster Grendel, in the second the same man, now an aged king, facing a threat to his kingdom in the shape of a marauding dragon. The mythic treatment of youth and age and of light versus dark attracted Tolkien, but it was the style as much as the story that drew him, a world-view built into the way the poet fashioned his words and phrases. There is no doubt that Old English informed his imaginative writing significantly. It influenced his early poetry, early versions of The Silmarillion, plot structures in The Hobbit, and concrete themes in The Lord of the Rings. In using Old English Tolkien began with names and locations, single words and personal names, out of which he wove his larger stories and themes; and it is clear that he divined in Old English ways of thought that chimed, at least in part, with his own.

The Making of English What and when is Old English? A good place to start is another book that Tolkien had read at school. Its author was Henry Bradley, one of the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary project (OED) on which Tolkien was to be employed in 1919 and 1920. As an undergraduate having dinner, Tolkien first saw Bradley at a distance sitting with the dons at high table (Bradley had membership and dining rights at Exeter College). On this occasion Tolkien recalled reading for the first time The Making of English (1904), a masterly introduction to the history of the language, from Anglo-Saxon times to the present. In its modest way Bradley’s short book is a measure of the achievements of the nineteenth century in historical philology, for it was the scholars of the Victorian period who developed rigorous methods for accurately editing the texts of medieval manuscripts. On this basis the history of the English language could be accurately reconstructed; and massive dictionary projects like the OED could be set up to record all the details. Moreover, as the labors of the Victorian philologists and editors bore fruit, many medieval texts, even what are now famous poems like Beowulf, came to light once more after lying unread for centuries. Bradley summarizes the standard view at the beginning of his book. Old English is the language that developed in southern Britain in the post-Roman period, when it was settled by incomers from what is today northern Germany and southern Denmark, in particular the areas known as Jutland, Saxony, and Angeln. This group of nations came to be called Angelcynn “the Angle kin” and then later (with the unification of England in the tenth century) Engle “the English.” The englisc (pronounced “Enn-glish”) that they spoke was an inflected language in which the words changed shape – took inflections or endings – according to their meaning and use in the sentence. Characteristic of this Old English was a two-tense morphology of the verb, three genders in the noun, and four grammatical cases; as such it continued in use



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until about 1150. By that time grammatical changes had accumulated so much that historical linguists refer to the language of England from 1150 to 1500 as Middle English, and thereafter Modern English. Recently, since Bradley’s time, linguists have distinguished Modern English from Present Day English, in recognition of the fact that this world language is broadening its range and variety, and is markedly different of course from the Early Modern English used by Shakespeare. Bradley’s definition of Old English is based on linguistic criteria. But it is also possible to define the language politically, as the vernacular used in Anglo-Saxon England – in other words, the written language that was used (alongside medieval Latin) for the governance of the country, for literature and poetry, and for religious devotion – when the country was ruled by the Anglo-Saxon kings. After the Norman Conquest the royal court switched to French, and official documents were written in Latin (in the Middle Ages French also became an influential language of written record, from which later Middle English borrowed a good deal of its vocabulary). However, this political definition of Old English ignores the fact that the language continued in use after the Norman takeover in 1066: the majority of ordinary people still spoke the colloquial englisc of the day, now in various spellings such as ennglissh or engliss, and as a literary language English was used outside the Francophone corridors of power, for example in writing sermons and chronicles. At Peterborough, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle continued until 1154, while English sermons were copied and composed for the bishop of Worcester until the late eleventh century. It was one of Tolkien’s contentions in his study of the Early Middle English Ancrene Wisse (“The Guide for Anchoresses”) that a tradition of teaching and writing in English had continued in the west of England despite the political changes and upheavals elsewhere (see ch. 16). As we shall see, and as many have noted, there is an element of local patriotism in Tolkien’s interest in the medieval literature of the West Midlands.

English and the Germanic Languages From his learning of Old English, Tolkien became enormously interested in comparative philology, and his study of sound change (German Lautverschiebung) in the family copy of Chambers’s Etymological Dictionary was so diligent that the relevant pages became detached and lost (Priestman 1992, 16). At school Tolkien set about studying the other classic Germanic languages from the available Primers and Readers. It is interesting to note that once he reached Oxford as a young scholar, Tolkien already knew many of that University’s famous philologists from their books. He had read Bradley and Sweet, as well as the Gothic Primer of Joseph Wright, the professor who was to become one of his tutors. Decades later he recalled “the vastness of Joe Wright’s dining-room table” where the tutorials took place, himself “alone at one end learning the elements of Greek philology from glinting glasses in the further gloom” (Salu and Farrell 1979, 31). This atmospheric description of “glinting glasses” and “further

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gloom” is evocative of both the rigor and the heady exhilaration that Tolkien experienced in such studies. What is comparative philology? Again it is profitable to turn to Bradley, where Tolkien probably first encountered this branch of linguistic science. In The Making of English, Bradley highlights the links to be made between Present Day English (PDE) and German. This is seen if we take one of his themes, the countryside, and consider some of the lexical equivalents in English and German, then comparing them with Old English (OE): PDE land stone house field grass cow calf ox

German Land Stein Haus Feld Gras Kuh Kalb Ochse

OE land stan hus feld græs cu cealf oxa

These words are cognates, for they are recognizably the same, though sometimes the spelling and pronunciation differ, thus OE hus would have rhymed with “mousse” rather than “mouse.” As well as lexical connections, there are many similarities in the structure (morphology and syntax) of English and German: Bradley’s example is the possessive ’s on king and the genitive -s on König in the English and German phrases the king’s house and des Königs Haus. In fact this is very similar to OE thæs kyninges hus, spelt more usually as þæs cyninges hus (with the symbol þ marking the th sound and the c pronounced hard). One might compare also the tenses in English I see, I saw, I have seen with German ich sehe, ich sah, ich habe gesehen and OE ic seo, ic seah, ic hæbbe gesewen. Sometimes OE had features that are still retained in German but lost in PDE, an example being oxa, which has two syllables, like German Ochse. Old English also shares with German a set of inflectional endings that modern English has now lost. Thus the OE verbs habban, gan, brecan, bringan, dælan mark their infinitive (“to have, to go, to break, to bring, to deal”) by the ending -an on the stem of the verb, similar to the -en ending in German. Bradley’s comparative approach can be taken further. OE nouns were grouped into three grammatical genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter, as in German. And at the level of the sentence, OE word order is clearly Germanic. For example, in the poem Maxims II, which Tolkien knew well, a poetic proverb runs as follows (ll. 28a–29b): Cyning sceal on healle beagas dælan (King in hall must distribute rings)



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Note here that the sceal was pronounced roughly like its modern cognate “shall” while the first vowel in dælan is similar to that in PDE “air.” Word-for-word the sentence would translate “king must in hall rings deal,” a sequence that would exactly fit the rules of German syntax with the verb “must” (a modal auxiliary) in second position and the infinitive dælan “to deal out, distribute” placed at the end of the sentence. Old English is not, however, German. Most importantly, Bradley goes on to dispel one or two misconceptions that can arise about the relationship between English and German: The explanation of these facts is not that English is derived from German or German from English, but that both have descended, with gradual divergent changes, from a pre-historic language which scholars have called Primitive Germanic or Primitive Teutonic. (1904, 3–4)

To continue with Bradley’s implicit family metaphor, English and German are sister languages with the same parent; they share a common lexical core and grammatical structure. This is the attraction of comparative philology (nowadays usually called historical linguistics), which uncovers the family connections between, say, Low German, Dutch, Frisian, and English, or between their slightly more distant relatives the Scandinavian languages Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Icelandic, along with their ancestor Old Norse, which produced another rich medieval literature that Tolkien studied and taught. Then there was the more distant connection between all these languages and Gothic: this language was another fascination for Tolkien, the tongue spoken by the ancient Goths and recorded only in a translation of the Gospels and in the names of its kings during the heroic age of the post-Roman period. All the hours spent learning the languages were worthwhile for the results. It is the foundation for etymology and lexicology, for the study of place-names (many go back to the Old English period) and of dialects (regional varieties of English sometimes preserve older words that have become obsolete in the standard language), as well as ancient poetry, history, and myth, to name but a few of the subject areas covered by the broad hat of philology. And Tolkien drew on all this linguistic knowledge when it came to writing his own fiction and poetry and inventing his own languages. Certainly the Germanic languages became a strong source of inspiration alongside Finnish and Welsh, and within the Germanic group Old English probably was the strongest influence alongside Old Norse, though Gothic, German, and some other Germanic languages also feature.

Names and Locations In 1923 Tolkien became a member of the newly founded English Place-Name Society, which undertook the huge task of publishing a multi-volume survey of England’s place-names, county by county. While at Leeds he published briefly in this area (e.g.,

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Tolkien 1924, 30–32), and he encouraged others to take up the work. His student Hugh Smith, for instance, became a pioneer in this area of English philology; Smith also worked creatively with this interest, publishing poems in Yorkshire dialect, and one small collection of his dialect poems (1923) had the very Tolkienian title The Merry Shire. Smith (1928) later acknowledged his debt to his former professor. It is clear that the study of place-names was dear to Tolkien’s heart, for the interest spilled over into his novels. In 1937, starting on The Lord of the Rings at the request of his publisher Stanley Unwin, Tolkien hit upon the name the Shire, a word not used in The Hobbit. Its origin was Old English, as Tolkien well knew. The element -shire in names of counties derives from OE scir (pronounced “sheer”), a unit of land management that was used in the early kingdom of Wessex (in the south and west) and then spread further to the various regions of England (Mercia, East Anglia, Northumbria) after the Wessex dynasty united the country in the tenth century. Gradually, as Tolkien wrote the early chapters of The Lord of the Rings he added more and more OE place-names; some are named in the story, while others occur in the map “A Part of the Shire” at the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring (FR, 24). A great deal of thought has gone into the making of the names on this map, and the attention to detail creates a sense of authenticity, even if the casual reader of the novel only half apprehends the distinctions. In the west of the map for example is the name Delving with the common OE toponymic suffix -ing (Ekwall 1923) and a playful pun on OE delfan “to dig” (for that is what Hobbits do). And like Little Tew and Great Tew near Tolkien’s Oxford, the name is shared between Little Delving and Michel Delving. The larger of the two places – in fact large enough, as the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings informs us, to boast a museum or mathom-house (OE mathm-hus a treasure-house) – derives its name from OE micel, pronounced “mitchell,” meaning “large, great” and related to PDE much. Tuckborough in the centre of the map is the long-established seat of the Took clan, the preeminent Shire family to which Bilbo Baggins is related on his mother’s side. It is appropriately named, from OE burg, derived from a verb beorgan “to save, deliver, preserve, guard, defend, fortify, spare” (Clark Hall 1960, 42); accordingly one meaning of burg or borough is “fortified place” (Sweet 1922, 239). Following a philological rule, the vowel in the stressed syllable of Tuckborough has become shortened from Took- to Tuck-. Evidently the name has aged over time, just as White is shortened to Whit- in regular English place-names like Whitchurch or Whitstable, and just as the vowel in know is shortened in the everyday word knowledge that rhymes with college (Skeat 1924, 25). By contrast there is Tookbank, shown on the map to the west of the main settlement; clearly a more recent offshoot, it preserves the long vowel in its appropriately more modern-sounding name. To the east, between the river Brandywine and the Old Forest is Buckland, the home region of the Brandybuck clan, with their seat at Brandy Hall (from OE heall “hall,” the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of a lordly palace, as we shall see). The name of the river follows another Anglo-Saxon pattern: the early English settlers in Britain often took over the established names of important rivers and anglicized them; in



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origin Avon, Dart, Derwent, Exe, Hodder, Humber, Nene, Ouse, and Thames are British-Celtic or even pre-Celtic river names. And as the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings tells us, the Hobbits were incomers rather like the Anglo-Saxons, so that when they stumbled upon the river Baranduin they reworked its name (FR, Prologue, 6). By the same process of folk etymology that turns the foreign asparagus into the familiar-sounding sparrow-grass, the newcomers called it “the Brandywine” after a much-loved commodity in their wine-cellars. As for the first element in the name Buckland, this relates to Book-, just as Tuck- related to Took- in Tuckborough. Again there is an Anglo-Saxon explanation, since “book-land” was an estate or area of land granted by royal charter or boc (literally a “book” or written document), and Buckland is a common English place-name (Cameron 1996, 137). In The Lord of the Rings, the Shire is represented as a kind of autonomous commonwealth at the time of the principal events of the story, but the name Buckland perhaps recalls a golden age when there was a King in the south, who granted land and protection. A more archaic version of the Shire is the Mark, the land of the Riders of Rohan in The Two Towers, which resembles very closely the cultural world of Anglo-Saxon literature, as Shippey (2005) has shown. The episode “The King of the Golden Hall” (TT, III, vi) in which Gandalf and his three companions visit king Théoden in his hall Meduseld is modeled very closely on the protagonist’s visit to king Hrothgar in Beowulf (ll. 320–404), in which the hero and his companions are met by the coastguard, and are shown the way to the great hall Heorot, described as geatolic and gold-fah (l. 308a) “splendid and golden-hued,” its light shining over many lands (l. 311). The company pile their weapons by the door of the hall and then negotiate with the doorward Wulfgar until the king agrees to welcome them to his presence. All these features are mirrored in Tolkien’s text even down to the detail of Legolas’s description of the golden hall, the light of it shining “far over the land.” Hrothgar’s Denmark and Théoden’s the Mark are analogues; both are heroic societies in which men are assessed by the quality of their weapons and their ability to weigh their words (Shippey 2005, 132–133). Like the Shire, “the Mark” is Old English in origin. It means “the border country” or “the Marches,” this in fact being the original name of the Midland region of AngloSaxon England, ruled as an independent kingdom in the eighth century by the famous king Offa, who gave his name to Offa’s Dyke on the border with Wales (OE wealas “the foreigners”). In modern historical parlance Offa’s country is known as Mercia, from the OE name Mierce “the borderers,” ultimately from a noun spelt marc in the Mercian variety of Old English. Appropriately, Tolkien’s place-names in the Mark seem more archaic than the names in the Shire and much closer to their OE originals. The Riders’ capital is Edoras (the Mercian form of OE eodoras “the dwellings”), their royal hall or palace is Meduseld (OE medu-seld “mead-hall,” as used in Beowulf, l. 3065); their citadel is the Hornburg, in which burg is the older form of borough, as in Tuckborough. Their land is bordered by the White Mountains, at one end of which are “three jagged horns staring at the sunset” (TT, III, vii, 687). Appropriately the mountain is named in their language Thrihyrne (cf. OE thri “three” + OE hyrne

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“angle, horn”) analogous to the name Redhorn for the peak of Caradhras in the Misty Mountains. Both Thrihyrne and Redhorn are modeled on Swiss German mountain names like Matterhorn and Silberhorn, which Tolkien saw as a young man on his hiking tour of Switzerland in the summer of 1911 (see ch. 1). Tolkien here shows himself to be quite capable of inventing English cognates for German names; if England had also had alpine mountains this is how they would have been named, either in Old or in modern English. In all this nomenclature, the Mercian forms are of course deliberate: Tolkien was privately and deliberately making connections with his own Mercian roots in the West Midlands. In origin, this is a kind of covert local patriotism; in practice, the detail and consistency provide a palpable authenticity to the world that he is seeking to create.

Single Words and Personal Names Not only places but also people have significant names. In Tolkien’s world, as generally in the medieval literature that inspired him, names are important for the way they function as an index of status or character. Following a suggestion first made by Henry Sweet (1879), Tolkien regarded the name Beowulf, meaning literally “beewolf,” as a riddle in miniature with “bear” as its solution (Lost Road 94); the wolf that is interested in bees is really a bear, and the legend of the Bear’s Son is a traditional folk-tale that arguably bears a number of resemblances to the poem Beowulf. Certainly the protagonist Beowulf is larger than life, the strongest man alive; he can win a swimming race on the high seas that lasts for five days (l. 545); he can dive to the bottom of Grendel’s Mere and fight the she-troll in a submarine cave (ll. 1492–1512). He is a terrible enemy: the “unfriendly grasp” of his bare hands kills Grendel (l. 765), as it also kills Dæghrefn (“Dayraven”), champion of the Hugas (l. 2507). Beowulf’s arguably bear-like character perhaps inspired Tolkien in his creation of the bear-man Beorn in The Hobbit. Again the name is a pointer and perhaps also the spark of an idea, for OE beorn is one of many synonyms for a man or warrior; the word appears only in poetry and seems to have its origins in an old word for a bear (the more usual OE word was bera). Old Norse being a cognate language with a similar literature to Old English, it also provided a source in the figure of Bothvar Bjarki the shapechanger in the Saga of Hrolf Kraki, but the name Beorn itself is clearly Old English (see also ch. 17). One way Tolkien drew on Old English, then, was for the invention of personal names, and here invention is appropriate in its original etymological meaning of “finding” or “discovery.” On a number of occasions Tolkien invented a word: he found it in OE poetry and converted it into a name, which he then brought to life as of one of the characters in his own writing. So theoden means “chief of a tribe, ruler, prince, king” in OE poetry, and Tolkien turns it into the personal name Théoden, and he even uses the phrase “Théoden King” (TT, II, vi, 685), imitating the normal OE word order in which the name preceded the title or profession, as in Ælfred cyning for King



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Alfred or Wulfstan arcebiscop for Archbishop Wulfstan. Théoden is son of Thengel, another OE poetic term for prince or ruler, with the common alliterating connection in the names of father and son, as found in the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy. The names are the basis, but clearly the whole culture of the Riders of Rohan is based on heroic society as portrayed in Old English poetry. The exploitation of OE names began quite early. As a student in 1914 studying the famous Exeter Book anthology of Old English poems, Tolkien found the phrase Eala earendel engla beorhtost (“Hail Morningstar brightest of angels”) in the poem Christ I, from which he drew the name Eärendel and invented a whole mythology about a legendary mariner in his ship of the air sailing over the western seas and through the starry heavens, whose role it is to reconcile gods and men. And Eärendel is the progeny of two races, Elves and Men. He is also the grandson of Turgon king of Gondolin, the great hidden city (Tolkien’s equivalent of Rome or Byzantium), the subject of another significant chapter in The Silmarillion. Tolkien’s first mythological poem “The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star” has been studied in depth (see Lost Tales II 267–268; Carpenter 1977, 71–77; Hostetter 1991; Shippey 2005, 277–281) and little need be added here, save to point out that Tolkien moves far beyond the bounds of his normal scholarship when he rewrites OE poetry in this way. At first sight, the religious poem Christ I and Tolkien’s Eärendel myth would appear to have nothing in common. Sometimes called Advent Verses, the poem Christ I takes a series of Latin antiphons sung during the Advent season of the Church calendar and turns them into meditations on the meaning of time and salvation history (Burlin 1968). But Tolkien reinvented this mysterious and evocative name, and out of it emerged a very different kind of myth of a Savior- or Reconciler-figure. Tolkien discovered yet another text rich in associations in the Exeter Book. Widsith (“the Far-traveler”) is a catalogue poem, arguably containing some of the oldest poetry in the language, in which an archetypal bard lists all the courts and kings that he has visited and tells brief stories about some of their achievements. The Langobards, for instance, were a Germanic tribe who settled in Italy in the post-Roman period and gave their name to the region Lombardy; their leader Alboin son of Audoin was remembered by some writers as fierce and warlike. But the Widsith poet instead remembers the generosity of “Ælfwine son of Eadwine” as he calls him, using OE names cognate with the Langobardic forms. This type of name is characteristically dithematic in structure, Ælf + wine and Ead + wine, with both elements significant: the first means “Elf-friend,” the second “bliss-friend.” Names of this type were common among the later kings of England, from Ælfred (“elven counsel”), Eadward (“bliss guardian”), Æthelstan (“noble rock”), Eadgar (“bliss spear”) to Æthelred (“noble counsel”). Tolkien was clearly fascinated by the underlying narratives hidden in these names. What myths or stories had led in particular to the name “Elf-friend”? In a sense, the plot of The Hobbit provides an answer to that question. At the end, the Elvenking accepts a generous leaving gift from Bilbo with the solemn words “I name you elf-friend and blessed” (H 270). The two OE personal names Ælfwine and Eadwine are of course implied in this farewell and benediction.

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Tolkien had already explored the concept in his earlier writing. What surfaced quite early was Tolkien’s story of the man Eriol, also known as Ælfwine, the traveler to the Lonely Isle of Tol Eressëa in the frame tale of The Book of Lost Tales, the very early version of The Silmarillion (Lost Tales I and II). Ælfwine stays on the Lonely Isle as a guest in the hall of Lindo, lord of the Elves, listening to their myths and stories and writing them down in his native Old English (see chs. 7 and 10). This seems to be the reason why many of the shorter poems that Tolkien wrote in the period 1914–1930 have Old English titles; they are conceived as poems written by Eriol the elf-friend. Similarly the “translation” of the “Quenta Silmarillion” is attributed to him, as also are the versions of the “Annals of Beleriand” written in the style of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (Shaping; Artamonova 2010). In the unfinished “Lost Road” and “The Notion Club Papers” (see ch. 11) the Eriol story is revisited in ideas of ancestral memory, dreams, and time-travel as experienced by two father and son characters throughout history. As a mysterious recurrent theme down the centuries these fathers and sons all have names meaning Elf-friend and Bliss-friend. And their dreams and memories take them back to Tolkien’s Atlantis myth of the Great Wave that brings about the Fall of Númenor (Atalantë). In this calamity the world is made round, and the direct route, the straight road or path to the Lonely Isle is lost, or granted only to the very few, such as Eriol. What the characters in these stories have in common is their experience of an intense desire to travel out onto the ocean in search of the Lost Island. There is for example a fragmentary chapter in “The Lost Road” where the character named Ælfwine is now a minstrel in the time of King Edward the Elder, son of King Alfred. In a scene set in a mead hall, his sea-fever is expressed as a short mysterious poem composed apparently in the heat of the moment about the urge of his heart to set out on a voyage in search of “the land of strangers” (Lost Road 84). The text is given in Old English and turns out to be a rewriting and recombination of phrases and verses mostly from the Old English elegiac poem The Seafarer (ll. 36a, 59b, 37, 60a, 38, 44–46; Lee and Solopova 2005, 250–265). Now this passage in the poem (ll. 33a–46) had long been a favorite of Victorian critics and philologists such as Stopford Brooke and Henry Sweet, who interpreted it in terms of Romantic longings. And the well-known twentieth-century AngloSaxonist Dorothy Whitelock (1950) famously interpreted the desire to seek out the land of strangers as an Irish practice of penance and pilgrimage in the manner of St Brendan (the subject, incidentally, of Tolkien’s poem “Imram” of 1955; Sauron 296– 299). In a professional context Tolkien might well have agreed with Whitelock, but in his spare time, when he was writing fiction, he also saw the passage as an echo or memory of an archaic myth or legend that had somehow been preserved in a traditional Old English poem (Atherton 2012, 119–129). Another such echo is the legend of Sheave, who arrives on the shore as a child in a small boat and ends up as a great king of the nation, before he returns at his appointed time, the way he had come, back into the ocean in the West. A version of this occurs in the legend of Scyld Scefing (Shield Sheafing) at the beginning of Beowulf, and Tolkien retells the story in prose



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and verse in “The Lost Road” (Lost Road 85–6, 87–91). One of the reasons for involving Anglo-Saxon characters in these stories was Tolkien’s attempt to keep his mythology connected with a historical England. What he then saw as his task in his fictional or imaginative writing was to offer explanations for puzzling and mysterious names, phrases, concepts or themes in the Old English poetry that he knew so well.

Anglo-Saxon Attitudes and the Poem Maxims II Of undoubted relevance here is the poem already cited above, the Old English Maxims II, entitled “Gnomic Verses” in Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader (1876), the standard textbook in Tolkien’s day. The poem is a set of “gnomes” – here not in the folkloric sense but in the Greek sense of “wisdom” – in other words a series of traditional-style proverbs or maxims, arranged into metrical form, not unlike the Book of Proverbs in the Bible. The poem is available in a number of parallel text translations (Lee and Solopova 2005, 188–191; Rodrigues 1995, 190–193), and is well worth reading for its insights into Anglo-Saxon attitudes and ways of thinking, as well as its Tolkienrelated interest. It themes include kingship, government, man and woman and their role in the world; the natural world and its flora and fauna; and the cosmos and the place of humanity within the cosmos. For example, cities in the landscape (the OE word is ceastra, from Latin castra) are described as “the cunning work of giants,” probably a metaphorical allusion to the Romans as master-builders, whose cities Winchester, Cirencester, Worcester, and others were rebuilt in later Anglo-Saxon times but given ceaster-type names in homage to their origins. But the actual OE phrase used is orthanc enta geweorc: one of many Tolkienian resonances in the poem (cf. Lee and Solopova 2005, 133–138; Shippey 2005, 149). In general the world presented in the poem could almost be that of Middle-earth in Tolkien’s fiction; this is the kind of poetry that seized Tolkien’s imagination. One of the characteristic effects of Maxims II is cumulative. A whole set of topics are dealt with, and as the poem proceeds these gather to form a picture: they conjure up a world of many aspects. For example in ll. 16–35 we hear of the following: courage and a sword; a hawk, a wolf, and a bear; the reputation of a good man; a spear; a ring, and its gemstone; a stream, a ship’s mast, a sword; a dragon and a fish; a king in hall and a bear on a heath; a mountain stream; an army; loyalty and wisdom in a man; a forest on the land and a hill on the earth; God in the heavens. As the catalogue continues, so each subject is given a location, which is then usually combined further, with either an action or a quality. “A king in hall must distribute rings” is the example we have already heard; it is followed in the poem by a maxim of location and quality, “a bear must [live] on a heath, old and terrible” and one of location and action, “a river from a mountain must flow flood-grey to the sea.” It is preceded two lines earlier by the gnomic saying that a dragon must remain in his barrow, wise and proud of his treasures (ll. 26–31).

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Ellen sceal on eorle one of these maxims declares, “courage belongs” (or “must reside”) “in a nobleman.” Note the word eorl used here, Tolkien’s choice of name for the ancestor of the kings of Rohan. And in the chapter “Treebeard” (TT, III, iv), where Tolkien writes his own Maxims in a similar style, Treebeard declares that such verses are “right and proper.” In other words maxims are useful, applied wisdom; they depict a world in which everything has a place to which it belongs, whether it is a quality like courage, a member of society, an animal, or a fierce creature like a bear, or even a dragon. And just as each maxim has a similar structure, so the reader is forced to place in parallel a whole series of active agents and lively phenomena (men, women, creatures, natural objects) that normally would not be felt to belong together, such as a king, a bear, a river, and a dragon. When reading Maxims II it is difficult to avoid thinking of The Hobbit: the Woodland King in his hall, Beorn in his hall, the Lonely Mountain and its river, and Smaug in his cave, wise and proud of his treasures. The Anglo-Saxon world of Maxims II is one in which all of creation is connected and interrelated.

Writing Old English Tolkien had a profound knowledge of Old English place-names, personal names, myths and legends, cosmological concepts: all these were grist to his mill, for they helped him to create – or perhaps better recreate – a whole world. One of his motivations when writing his novels was to explore Old English words and ideas imaginatively; for where philological scholarship was cautious, imaginative fiction could venture much further. His reuse of lines from The Seafarer mentioned above is an example of this ludic, or seriously playful, approach to Old English. And there are more examples to explore of Tolkien either composing in Old English, as in the poems he wrote for Songs for the Philologists (available in print in Appendix B of Shippey 2005), or writing modern English verse in an Old English style and meter, as in the long narrative poem The Lay of the Children of Húrin (Tolkien 2007b). And when he came to write The Lord of the Rings he created the Mark and the Shire, rooted in the Old English past. In addition, as any reader who takes a moment to dwell on the matter will see, Tolkien based his writing style on his familiarity with the language, and was constantly aware of the tone and texture, the origin and history of the words and phrases that he wove into the sentences of his fiction. References Artamonova, Maria. 2010. “Writing for an Anglo-Saxon Audience in the Twentieth Century: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Old English Chron­ icles.” In Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination, ed. David Clark and

Nicholas Perkins (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer), 71–88. Atherton, Mark. 2012. There and Back Again: J. R. R. Tolkien and the Origins of The Hobbit. London: I.B. Tauris.



Old English

Bradley, Henry. 1904. The Making of English. London: Macmillan. Burlin, Robert B. 1968. The Old English Advent: A Typological Commentary. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Cameron, Kenneth. 1996. English Place Names. New edn. London: Batsford. Carpenter, Humphrey. 1977. J. R. R. Tolkien – A Biography. London: Allen & Unwin. Clark Hall, J. R. 1960. A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. 4th edn. With a supplement by Herbert D. Merritt. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Ekwall, Eilert. 1923. English Place-Names in -ing. Lund: C.W.K. Gleerup. Hostetter, Carl F. 1991. “Over Middle-earth Sent unto Men: On the Philological Origins of Tolkien’s Eärendel Myth.” Mythlore, 17.3 (65): 5–10. Lee, Stuart D. and Elizabeth Solopova. 2005. The Keys of Middle-earth: Discovering Medieval Literature through the Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Priestman, Judith, ed. 1992. J. R. R. Tolkien, Life and Legend: An Exhibition to Commemorate the Centenary of the Birth of J. R. R. Tolkien (1892– 1973). Oxford: Bodleian Library. Rodrigues, Louis J., ed. 1995. Anglo-Saxon Didactic Verse. Felinfach: Llanerch Press.

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Salu, Mary and Robert T. Farrell. 1979. J.R.R. Tolkien, Scholar and Storyteller: Essays in Memoriam. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Shippey, Tom. 2005. The Road to Middle-earth. Rev. and expanded edn. London: HarperCollins. Skeat, W. W. 1924. A Primer of English Etymology. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Smith, Albert Hugh. 1923. The Merry Shire: Poems in the Yorkshire Dialect. Leeds: At the Swan Press. Smith, Albert Hugh. 1928. The Place-Names of the North Riding of Yorkshire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sweet, Henry, ed. 1876. An Anglo-Saxon Reader in Prose and Verse. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Revised edition by C. T. Onions in 1922. Sweet, Henry. 1879. “Old English Etymologies.” Englische Studien, 2: 312–316. Sweet, Henry. 1882. An Anglo-Saxon Primer. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sweet, Henry. 1897. First Steps in Anglo-Saxon. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Whitelock, Dorothy. 1950. “The Interpretation of The Seafarer.” In The Early Cultures of North-West Europe (H.M. Chadwick Memorial Studies), edited by C. Fox and B. Dickins, 259–272. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

16

Middle English Elizabeth Solopova

Scholarship Tolkien’s academic career started with his employment in 1918 as a lexicographer working for the Oxford English Dictionary in Oxford (see ch. 1). As part of his job he researched the history and etymology of various words beginning with w- (the work focused on the final letters of the alphabet at the time when he joined the team). In 1920 he applied for a post at the University of Leeds and was appointed as Reader, and then from 1924 as Professor, of English Language. In 1925 he was elected to the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford and in 1945 accepted a more senior Chair of English Language and Literature at Merton College. Both at Leeds and at Oxford he taught and conducted research on Middle English literature. One of Tolkien’s earliest contributions to the study of Middle English was A Middle English Vocabulary published in May 1922 as the glossary to Kenneth Sisam’s anthology, Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose (1921, see ch. 3). The glossary was originally published separately, but was combined with the anthology in a single volume in June 1922. In an introductory note Tolkien wrote that “a good working knowledge of Middle English depends less on the possession of an abstruse vocabulary, but on familiarity with the ordinary machinery of expression” (Tolkien 1922, 295). His aim, therefore, was to give “exceptionally full treatment” to common rather than rare words, including uses of frequently occurring prepositions and idioms, all that a

A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.



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modern reader “is predisposed to pass over, satisfied with a half-recognition” (1922, 295). The result was a detailed glossary, recording different spellings, describing multiple meanings of words, listing common expressions with translations and references to texts, and providing brief indications of etymology of each word. A year later, in 1923, Tolkien published his first piece of work on a group of Middle English texts that interested him throughout his career. These texts, written in the West Midlands, probably in the second quarter of the thirteenth century, include Ancrene Wisse (“The Guide for Anchoresses”), a book of instruction addressed to three sisters of noble birth who were anchoresses somewhere in the West Midlands, and the so-called Katherine Group of texts. This comprises five closely related prose religious texts: the lives of three virgin martyrs (Saints Juliana, Katherine, and Margaret), a treatise on virginity known as Hali Meiðhad (“Holy Maidenhood”), and a treatise on the protection and guardianship of the soul, Sawles Warde (“Custody of the Soul”). The texts share themes and numerous similarities in vocabulary, phraseology, and style, though they are not thought to be the work of a single author (Millett and Wogan-Browne 1990; Wada, 2003). Tolkien’s first printed contribution to the study of these texts was an unsigned review in The Times Literary Supplement of an edition of Hali Meiðhad by F. J. Furnivall, published posthumously in 1922 by the Early English Text Society. The review introduced many of Tolkien’s ideas about this text which he developed in later publications. In 1925 he published in the Review of English Studies an article “Some Contributions to Middle-English Lexicography,” partly based on his study of Hali Meiðhad. It contained notes on the glossary of Furnivall’s edition, proposing revisions to his interpretation of several words and phrases. Tolkien argued that some of Furnivall’s interpretations were implausible, because the forms found in Hali Meiðhad, with its consistent spelling and phonology, could not go back to Old English forms suggested by Furnivall. Tolkien proposed new identifications for such words, citing parallels among words recorded in Old English, Old Norse, and Gothic. He argued, for example, that suti in Hali Meiðhad should not be glossed as “sooty” or “filth,” because “neither context nor phonology allows of this,” but is in fact a different word, suˉt/sıˉt, meaning “grief” and related to Old Norse sút (“grief”) and sýta (“lament”). In the same article he comments on some Middle English words outside Hali Meiðhad, proposing, for example, new etymology for Middle English burde (“lady, damsel”), the origin of which is unclear. Tolkien discusses it with reference to synonyms for “man” and “woman” within the tradition of Old and Middle English alliterative poetry and suggests that burde is an agent noun related to Old English borde (“embroidery”) and that the original meaning may have been “embroideress.” He supports this view with examples of Old English and Old Norse poetic formulas, where a woman is referred to as a “weaver” or “embroideress.” Interestingly, chapter 6 of The Silmarillion describes Míriel, the first wife of Finwë, king of the Noldor, and mother of Fëanor, as the most skilled of all the Noldor at weaving and needlework. She is also called Serindnë (in early drafts Byrde), translated in the Index of Names as “the Broideress.”

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Tolkien’s other contribution to Middle English lexicology is an article “The Devil’s Coach-Horses” also published in 1925 in the Review of English Studies. The entire article is devoted to a single word in Hali Meiðhad, eaueres. Tolkien argues that this is not a survival of Old English eofor (“boar”), which is implausible phonologically and makes poor sense, but a word that developed into now obsolete aver, meaning “property, estate,” but also “a cart-horse.” He discusses how such a range of meanings could have originated. A short article “ ‘Iþþlen’ in Sawles Warde” which Tolkien published in 1947 in collaboration with Simonne d’Ardenne, also focused on a single, partially unreadable word in Sawles Warde, proposing a tentative solution to a notoriously difficult textual puzzle. Perhaps Tolkien’s most important article on the West Midland texts is concerned with their language (Tolkien 1929). He made a detailed analysis of the language shared by two early manuscripts containing Ancrene Wisse (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS. 402) and the Katherine Group of texts (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Bodl. 34). He called it the “AB language,” a term still used today. A and B are short identifiers (used by editors for convenience and known as sigla) of the two manuscripts, Corpus Christi College MS. 402 (A) and MS. Bodl. 34 (B). Tolkien pointed out the close similarity between their language, emphasizing the unusual (for this period) consistency of its phonology, grammar, and spelling. He suggested that it was not simply a local dialect, but a shared written language of a literary community, descended in part from late literary Old English. He placed the AB language in Herefordshire and argued that it must have been the language in which the texts were originally composed. Tolkien’s argument, refined and modified by later scholars, stood the test of time. The AB language is currently believed to have developed in the late twelfth century within a local scribal tradition. It underwent standardization of spelling and possibly morphology, and remained in some aspects close to written Old English, perhaps as a result of unbroken development (see “A Note on the Language” in Millett and Wogan-Browne 1990; Dance 2003). Tolkien’s view that it was the original language of the texts was strengthened by E. J. Dobson’s identification of one of the scribes of the British Library’s Cleopatra manuscript of Ancrene Wisse as the author (Dobson 1972, xciii–cxl). “Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve’s Tale” is an article based on a paper that Tolkien read at a meeting of the Philological Society in Oxford in 1931 (published in 1934 but see Tolkien 2008c, and also chs. 2 and 3). This lengthy work (70 pages in all) is a detailed study of what Tolkien calls Chaucer’s “linguistic joke” – the representation of northern dialect in the speech of clerks in The Reeve’s Tale. Tolkien points out that this is unparalleled in Chaucer’s other writings and other Middle English texts. He assumed that Chaucer gave his clerks consistent northern accent, and that deviations from this consistency found in surviving manuscripts of The Reeve’s Tale are due to alterations introduced by the fifteenth-century scribes who had a tendency to “southernize the original.” To reconstruct Chaucer’s hypothetical original text Tolkien produced a critical edition of the relevant passage from The Reeve’s Tale, where he included all northern forms found in the manuscripts he studied (even if they occurred only in a minority of



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his sources) and further regularized the text using northern forms throughout even if they occurred in the manuscripts only in certain lines (published in 1939, see Tolkien 2008d). Tolkien admitted that this was a controversial decision and apologized at the beginning of the article for being able to consult only a small number of the surviving manuscripts. He almost certainly exaggerated Chaucer’s consistency, generally not supported by the surviving manuscripts, though later scholarship confirmed his view of Chaucer’s good knowledge of northern speech (Horobin 2001). Tolkien’s critical text usefully contains notes declaring manuscript authority behind all his adopted northern readings. The article also contains an analysis of northern linguistic features divided into sections “Sounds and Forms” and “Vocabulary.” Another article concerned with Chaucer’s and more broadly Middle English vocabulary is his “Middle English ‘Losenger’ ” paper of 1951 (published in 1953). It is a study of the etymology of the word losenger borrowed from French into Middle English. Tolkien argued that it was unrelated to losenger which survives in modern English and means “a diamond-shaped figure,” “a small cake or tablet” (Tolkien 1953a, 64). His primary interest was the word losengeour found in Chaucer and other Middle English texts, usually translated as “flatterer” or “liar” (MED). Tolkien interprets it as a word with complex history, resulting from mutual influences of two lexical roots, one Romance, represented by Latin laudare (“to praise”) and Old French los (“praise”), and another Germanic, represented by Old English leˉasung (“falsehood, deception”). Tolkien also published several editions and translations of Middle English texts (see ch. 3). In 1925 in collaboration with E. V. Gordon, his colleague at the University of Leeds, he produced an edition of the famous alliterative poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a romance set at King Arthur’s court. This poem survives in a single manuscript written around 1400. Its author is unknown, but the poem displays superior literary skill and sophistication in ideas, structure, and style. Tolkien and Gordon’s edition came out at a time when there was no other edition of the poem in print. In the preface the editors wrote that their intention was to produce a scholarly and at the same time accessible text (Tolkien and Gordon 1967, vii). The text of the poem is accompanied by an introduction, notes containing historical and linguistic commentary, an account of language and meter, bibliography, glossary, and an index of names. The edition was revised by Norman Davis in 1967, Tolkien’s successor as Professor at Merton, and until recently remained a standard text for university-level study of the poem. Tolkien began work in collaboration with Gordon on an edition of Pearl, another poem from the same manuscript and probably by the same author. When Tolkien left Leeds, Gordon continued work on the edition, but it remained unfinished at the time of his death in 1938. The edition was eventually revised and published in 1953 by Gordon’s wife Ida, who acknowledged Tolkien’s assistance in her preface. During World War II Tolkien also produced an edition of another Middle English romance, Sir Orfeo, which was printed in a small number of copies in 1944 by the Academic Copying Office in Oxford and published in 2004 by C. F. Hostetter (Tolkien 2004b).

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Tolkien’s translations of three Middle English poems that he edited, Sir Gawain, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo, were published posthumously by his son Christopher in 1975 (see Tolkien 1995d). As explained in the preface, Tolkien wanted to reach an audience without any knowledge of the original poems, but also thought that “a translation may be a useful form of commentary” interesting to scholars (1995d, v). The difficulty of providing interpretative aids suitable for both types of readers was partly responsible for the delay with publication of the translations. The translations imitate the highly complex metrical form of the poems and are based on careful study of the originals and much “unshown editorial labour,” because as Tolkien wrote “a translator must first try to discover as precisely as he can what his original means” (ibid.). Tolkien’s interest in publishing the translations and reaching a wide audience is evident in his radio work. Stanzas from Pearl were broadcast in August 1936 and the translation of Sir Gawain in December 1953 on the BBC’s Third Programme. The last broadcast was accompanied by the publication in the Radio Times of a short article by Tolkien, entitled “A Fourteenth-Century Romance” (a version of the article appeared as part of the introduction to Christopher Tolkien’s edition of the translations). In the article Tolkien argues that Sir Gawain is a “romance, a fairy-tale for adults” dependent on earlier Celtic and French sources, but reflecting late fourteenth-century concerns. Tolkien also contributed to efforts to make Ancrene Wisse and the Katherine Group of texts available in modern editions. Ancrene Wisse survives in 17 manuscripts, comprising versions in English, Latin, and French. In 1944 the Early English Text Society embarked on a project to publish all the existing versions, starting with the French text and finishing in 2000 with the publication of the version preserved in the Vernon manuscript (Herbert 1944; Zettersten, Diensberg, and Spencer 2000). As part of this project Tolkien published in 1962 an edition of Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS. 402, one of the earliest and most important copies of Ancrene Wisse. Tolkien also was supervisor in Oxford of the Belgian scholar Simonne d’Ardenne, whose edition of Seinte Juliene (1936), taking into account Tolkien’s work on the AB language, received praise from reviewers. The edition contains diplomatic texts of two manuscripts of Seinte Juliene, a critical edition, a text of the Latin source, a full glossary, and a detailed description of the language which remains a standard resource for the study of the AB language. Tolkien and d’Ardenne collaborated on an edition of Seinte Katerine and their joint article “MS Bodley 34: A Re-collation of a Collation” (Tolkien and d’Ardenne 1948) includes a discussion of editorial methods appropriate for this manuscript. The edition was not finished during Tolkien’s life-time and was completed and published by E. J. Dobson and d’Ardenne in 1981. Tolkien’s contribution to the study of Middle English can be described as meticulous and usually highly technical, aimed at making texts accessible and intelligible to both professional and non-professional readers. Tolkien contributed to Middle English scholarship primarily as a textual critic and historical linguist, but first of all as a historical lexicologist. When he started his academic career many of the most important Middle English texts were not available in modern editions. Tolkien saw the task of editing as a pressing requirement for medieval studies. In “Some Contribu-



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tions to Middle-English Lexicography” he also commented on the urgent need for “the compilation of the Middle English dictionaries” (1925a, 210). His articles on Middle English typically offer detailed studies of etymology and semantic development of words considered difficult and in some cases dismissed by scholars as presenting unsolvable problems. His knowledge of philology (the study of historical development of languages or language families) was most commonly employed to discover the origin and therefore earlier meanings of words in order to understand more correctly their use in surviving texts. As evident from Tolkien’s translations and broadcasts he also wanted Middle English texts to be accessible to the “lovers of English poetry” outside academia (Tolkien 1995d, v).

Themes and Plot Elements Tolkien’s fiction and literary-critical writing were also influenced by his study of Middle English language and literature. This is evident already in his use of words. Some words appear in his works in their Middle English spellings and their meaning is influenced by their Middle English usage. Examples of this are aventures, Realm, and Faërie. In the essay “On Fairy-stories” Tolkien pointed out that such stories were about “the aventures of men in the Perilous Realm” (OFS 32). He used the Middle English spelling (Anglo-Norman aventur) of this word which acquired a more “correct” Latinized form in early modern English (Latin advenıˉre “to happen”). The purpose of this is almost certainly to distinguish it from modern adventure. Middle English aventure could mean “fate,” “destiny,” “danger,” “dangerous enterprise” as well as “a knightly quest” (MED), whereas in modern English such meanings are weakened, partially giving way to a lighter “novel or exciting experience” (OED). The word Realm occurs in Tolkien’s literary works. The “Blessed Realm” in The Silmarillion refers to the continent Aman and particularly Valinor which lay in its center. As pointed out by Flieger, the reason for Tolkien’s choice of the word Realm over “region” or “territory” is probably its meaning – “the sphere which something affects or controls” (OED; Flieger 2007, “Faërie”). This implication of “dominion,” “sovereignty” as well as a “community comprising a kingdom” was much stronger in Middle English where the word could also denote “God’s kingdom, the church, the body of followers of God” (MED). Aman in Tolkien’s mythology is indeed not a geographical region, for it was removed from the physical world of Arda, the earth, and made inaccessible by Ilúvatar, but a dominion, an area of influence of the Valar. Finally, Tolkien used the spelling Faërie (in Middle English in a variety of spellings, including fairie, faierie, feirie, farie, etc.) to differentiate this term from modern fairy. As is well known, he employed it to refer to a place, activity, or condition, rather than a supernatural creature, which is consistent with its Middle English meanings “the country or home of supernatural or legendary creatures,” “enchantment, magic, illusion” (MED; Shippey 2005, 65).

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Middle English texts contributed themes and plot elements to Tolkien’s fiction, influencing in particular his descriptions of the Elves. Similarly to Old English and Old Norse texts (see chs. 15 and 17), Middle English literature reflects beliefs that humans share the earth with other races. The hero of Sir Gawain encounters in his travels a whole range of supernatural beings, including dragons, giants, and wodwos (Old English wudu waˉsa “wood man”; Tolkien and Gordon 1967, ll. 720–723). Encounters of humans with fairies or Elves are referred to or described in several Middle English texts, including Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and romances Sir Gawain, Sir Launfal, a late fourteenth-century reworking of Anglo-Norman Lanval of Marie de France, and Sir Orfeo, composed early in the fourteenth century in the South Midlands, or possibly London, and based on the classical story of Orpheus and Eurydice. As is well known, Tolkien’s earliest portrayal of supernatural beings, such as in his poem “Goblin Feet” published in 1915, relied on conventions developed in Renaissance and Victorian literature which represented fairies and Elves as minute and childish creatures (Shippey 2005, 34–35). His later writing, however, was inspired primarily by their very different portrayal in medieval literature. Elves and fairie in Middle English literature are powerful beings, that live in another world, but come into contact with humans. They are depicted as strange, beautiful, and dangerous. Sir Orfeo, for example, is a story about a king and a very skillful harper whose wife is abducted by the fairies. Devastated, Orfeo leaves his kingdom to his steward and goes to live in the woods, until by chance he finds a way to travel to the fairy kingdom, charms the King with his music, and is allowed to leave with his wife. The poem contains a striking paradoxical description of what Orfeo sees when he enters through the rock the country of the Fairy King. The land is bright and green, the king’s castle is “rich, regal and wonderfully high,” decorated with gold and precious stones, and its walls “shine as crystal” (Shepherd 1994, ll. 351–358). This description has parallels in Middle English depictions of Paradise, such as, for example, in Pearl (Shippey 2005, 203ff., 247–248; Lee and Solopova 2005, 164–176; Patch 1950). And indeed, at first Orfeo thinks that what he sees is the “court of Paradise” (Shepherd 1994, l. 376), but when he goes inside the castle he notices the humans abducted by the King. He sees dismembered, strangled, wounded, burned, and drowned bodies and wives lying on their “child-bed,” reflecting various medieval beliefs about fairies (Shepherd 1994, ll. 386–404). The theme of power and beauty, and of the fairies’ ability to greatly hurt or reward the humans, continues throughout the poem. Orfeo’s wife, Heroudis, says that she has never seen “such fair and exceptional beings” (Shepherd 1994, ll. 147–148), but at the same time there is a feeling that Orfeo and Heroudis become victims of a merciless and irrational force: their sufferings are undeserved, the reasons for the abduction of Heroudis are not explained, and the actions of the Fairy King are willful and cruel. Medieval beliefs that fairies are irrational and dangerous in spite of their great beauty, wealth, and supernatural abilities influenced in particular Tolkien’s representation of the Elves in The Hobbit. The fact that the Dwarves are taken prisoners by the Elf-king and kept in a dungeon in his palace evokes medieval stories about abductions,



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such as Sir Orfeo. The character of the king of the Wood-elves has similarities with the King in the poem: he is proud, easily angered, and would not tolerate any challenge to his power; but he is honorable and just in his treatment of Thorin and Bilbo at the end of the story (“The Return Journey”; Shippey 2005, 73). The Wood-elves are described in The Hobbit as different from the High-elves of the West, being “more dangerous and less wise” (H 156). It seems that there was a change in Tolkien’s portrayal of the Elves between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, supported by a change in vocabulary. Shippey observes that Tolkien employed the word “fairy” in his earlier works, up to and including The Hobbit, but then abandoned it as a foreign word with a confused history in favor of the Germanic word “elf” (2005, 63ff.). Tolkien appears to have further distanced himself not only from the later tradition of representing fairies and Elves as childish creatures, but also from the medieval tradition of portraying them as irrational, and sometimes cruel or evil. Very little is known about the Germanic Elves, though they seem to have been supernatural beings, worshiped alongside the gods, believed to be skillful craftsmen and associated with light (Dronke 1997, 261–263). The word “elf” occurs not only in Old Norse and Old English, but also in Middle English literature. The beginning of Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath’s Tale, for example, describes the Elfqueen dancing on green meadows: In th’olde dayes of the King Arthour, Of which that Britons speken greet honour, All was this land fulfild of fayerye. The elf-queene, with hir joly compaignye, Daunced ful ofte in many a grene mede. (Benson 1987, ll. 857–861)

The “fairy dance”, also found in Sir Orfeo, is one of many motives shared by Tolkien’s depictions of the Elves and the descriptions of fairies and Elves in Middle English literature. Another shared motif is the “fairy hunt.” Tolkien mentions hunting as one of the occupations of the Wood-elves in The Hobbit (H 156), and while living in the wilderness Orfeo watches the Fairy King coming to hunt and hears “dim” shouts, the blowing of horns, and the barking of hounds (Shepherd 1994, ll. 281–288). He sees his abducted wife for the first time in a retinue of 60 “gentle and merry” ladies hunting with their hawks (Shepherd 1994, ll. 303–313). When Bilbo and his companions see the Elves in Mirkwood there is some uncertainty as to whether they are real or not: when the Dwarves try to approach, the Elves disappear. The same theme is present in Middle English texts – the fairy hunt watched by Orfeo never takes any catch and the ladies with their hawks disappear through the rock. In The Wife of Bath’s Tale when the knight tries to approach ladies dancing “under a forest syde,” they vanish without a trace (Benson 1987, ll. 989–996). Yet another shared motive is the “fairy army”: Orfeo sees a “great host” of armed knights passing him by, or knights and ladies dancing, accompanied by musicians (Shepherd 1994, ll. 289–302).

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In both Tolkien’s fiction and Middle English literature the Elves have a strong connection with music and craftsmanship, as well as a love of precious metals and gemstones. In The Silmarillion Fëanor learns to make gems that surpassed natural stones. The three Silmarils he creates capture the light of the Two Trees of Valinor and become his most precious possession. In Sir Orfeo the land of the Fairy King is always full of light, because at night precious stones shine as brightly as the sun (Shepherd 1994, ll. 369–372), whereas the King’s crown is made of a single precious stone that also shines like the sun (Shepherd 1994, ll. 149–152). As can be seen from previous discussions, in both Tolkien and Middle English literature the Elves have a connection with woods and trees. This motive is present not only in The Hobbit, but in all Tolkien’s novels. Lothlórien in The Lord of the Rings is covered by the forests of mallorn trees, that have silver trunks, gold leaves in autumn that do not fall until later, and green foliage and yellow blossom in spring (FR, II, vi). In Middle English texts fairies are often seen in or near the woods, and in Sir Orfeo Heroudis sees the Fairy King for the first time when she falls asleep in her orchard under what is described as the ympe-tre, probably a tree with grafted branches (Shepherd 1994, ll. 63–76; Lee and Solopova 2005, 123–132). Orfeo sees the same tree again when he travels to the castle of the Fairy King, which implies that it exists in both worlds. Several scholars of Sir Orfeo have also observed that some of these motives may hark back to Celtic mythology and folklore (Bliss 1966, xxxv–xxxvi; see also Smithers 1953; Patch 1950, 52–53). Perhaps the most important plot element shared by Tolkien’s fiction and Middle English texts is the love between a human and an Elf. In Tolkien this is exemplified by the stories of Lúthien and Beren, Aragorn and Arwen, in Middle English by Sir Launfal (Shepherd 1994) and The Wife of Bath’s Tale. Tolkien also borrowed several motives and plot elements from Middle English Arthurian literature, though as Shippey observes he might have been expected not to like it as an “originally non-English” tradition, whose “commemoration in English verse was merely a final consequence of the stamping-out of native culture after Hastings” (2005, 44; see also Flieger 2000). In spite of some negative remarks by Tolkien, such as “Of course there was and is all the Arthurian world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalised, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English” (Letters 144), the influence of Arthurian texts is undeniable (see ch. 27). Arthurian legends became popular in England in the second half of the twelfth century as a way of celebrating a heroic national past and the ideal of kingship, and enjoyed popularity and royal patronage throughout the medieval period (see Barron 1987 and 2001; Cooper 2004). The first vernacular work to use Arthurian legends, probably composed in the first quarter of the thirteenth century, was Brut, a chronicle in alliterative verse by Laȝamon, who states at the beginning that he is a parish priest from Areley (probably Arely Kings, Worcestershire) and that he decided to write a history of England’s noblemen (Barron and Weinberg 2001). Laȝamon’s most immediate source, which he freely adapted, was the French Roman de Brut, written by the court poet Wace during the reign of Henry II.



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Arthurian legends are also the subject-matter of the largest group of surviving Middle English romances, many dating from the fourteenth century and influenced by the great tradition of the French Arthurian romance. These include the alliterative poem Morte Arthure (“The Death of Arthur”), which deals with Mordred’s betrayal of Arthur and Arthur’s death (Benson 1986), and several romances, which focus on the adventures of Arthur’s knights, such as Gawain, Lancelot, Perceval, and Tristram. Arthurian literature inspired, of course, Tolkien’s poem The Fall of Arthur published by Christopher Tolkien in 2013. But there are other parallels between his novels and Arthurian legends that have been pointed out by scholars. These include Frodo’s journey to the undying lands at the end of The Lord of the Rings which is reminiscent of Laȝamon’s account of King Arthur’s departure in a boat to the Isle of Avalon to be healed of his wounds after the battle with Mordred at Camelford (Shippey, 2005, 69n.; Barron and Weinberg 2001, 252–255). There are also similarities between Gandalf and the Arthurian magician Merlin; and the emergence of a hidden king and a powerful sword that comes into possession of a king are both plot elements shared between The Lord of the Rings and Arthurian legends (see Flieger 2000 and 2007; Reader’s Guide 56–60).

Narrative Models and Fictionality Tolkien also used narrative models that were favored by Middle English authors. Perhaps most famously in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings he employed as an organizing principle the concept of the quest, widely attested in Middle English romance (see ch. 27). Another device used by Tolkien, which has a medieval counterpart, is a frame narrative, or a story within a story. As shown by Flieger (2007), this device is present in all his major works, including The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings. In The Hobbit Tolkien presents himself as a compiler or editor of Bilbo’s memoirs rather than the author of the story, leaving some uncertainty as to whether it is fictional or real. The Lord of the Rings has a prologue by an invented editor with references to a fictional source, the “Red Book of Westmarch,” the “most important source for the history of the War of the Ring” (FR, Prologue, 18). In a “Note on the Shire Records” at the end of the prologue Tolkien tells about the composition of the “Red Book of Westmarch,” the making and location of its copies, and gives an account of other contemporary and later manuscripts describing the War of the Ring (see ch. 4). Particularly elaborate frames, connecting narratives with Tolkien’s contemporary Oxford, are found in his time-travel stories “The Lost Road” and “The Notion Club Papers” (see ch. 11). Frame narratives flourished in Middle English literature. Perhaps the best known is the dream-vision, as in Pearl, one of the most popular medieval literary genres (see Spearing 1976; Phillips and Havely 1997; Boffey 2003). The dream-vision is used by Tolkien notably in “The Notion Club Papers.” Most medieval works which belong to this genre are stories written in the first person singular which present their events

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as seen in a vision or dream by a narrator. They usually have an introductory scene or a prologue describing the circumstances of the vision. Dream-vision narratives often depict journeys to the other world, frequently inward as in Pearl, where the narrator undergoes emotional and mental change; or similarly in Piers Plowman, a fourteenthcentury alliterative poem, which consists of a series of dreams focused on the narrator’s spiritual quest. Dream-vision was valued by writers for a number of reasons, but perhaps most importantly because it provided an authoritative framework for fictional narratives. As is well known, medieval writers were not always happy to admit that they were writing new fiction. For medieval audiences, in order to be taken seriously texts had to be true in a historical or theological sense, or morally edifying (see Minnis 1988; Minnis and Scott 1991; Minnis 1997). Fictional narratives or “fables” were treated with distrust, and often dismissed as lies. Minnis and Scott (1991, 114–115) observe that even Homer, Ovid, and Virgil were criticized by many medieval writers “for having mingled historical truths with poetic fictions of various kinds.” The most common defense of fiction during the Middle Ages was that truths could be expressed in the disguise of “fables” and that fictional stories, though untrue, could serve didactic purposes, and illustrate religious and moral principles.1 Such a mode of representing the truth, however, was usually seen as inferior, and many authors, even if only by way of paying tribute to tradition, preferred to claim that their narratives were not fiction, but accurate reporting of real events. Such claims were supported by references to ancient authorities and in turn relied on their reputations as trustworthy narrators. “Fictionalization” of sources is widely attested to in Middle English literature, such as the authors’ claims that they had used ancient historical texts when their sources were modern and literary. Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde, for example, partly based on a poem Il Filostrato by his older contemporary Boccaccio, presents himself as a translator of a work by an invented ancient authority, Lollius. Such attitudes reflect shifts in the perception of fiction, and changing views on its ability to act as an adequate vehicle for important ideas. Realistic fiction did not become established until the early modern period, and in the late Middle Ages its potential to represent real human experience (in spite of being an invention) had not yet been fully tested or recognized. Though fiction becomes more established by the end of the period (as can be seen in Chaucer’s works), for most medieval writers and readers a story had to be either literally true, or true in a symbolic and allegorical way as an illustration of moral and spiritual realities, in order to be taken seriously. Frame-narratives therefore provided clearly fictional stories with a context which, even if only as a literary convention, presented them as something that could be at least potentially true. It removed the difficulty of explaining and justifying their origin as an invention or new fiction. It also presented them as part of an essentially didactic tradition; that is as narratives that require interpretation (as appropriate for a vision) and can be understood as a symbolic or allegorical revelation of a moral or spiritual truth. When justifying fiction became less of an issue for authors such as Chaucer, frame-narrative continued to be valued for its wealth of technical possibilities. It allowed the author to combine narrative with instruction and meditation, realism



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with allegory, and to bring together multiple stories and episodes as in Piers Plowman or Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women. Frame-narratives in Tolkien’s works perform a similar function of masking the fictionality of his stories by providing an explanation of how they could have survived as contemporary accounts of real events. Tolkien used a number of other devices which disguised the fictional nature of works, most borrowed from medieval literature. These include his use of genealogies; elaborate geography; numerous place and personal names not necessarily essential for the main story-line; references to events external to the main plot (often expanded in appendices or requiring familiarity with his other published and unpublished works); and the use of the “chronicle” as in The Silmarillion (see Solopova 2009, 20–24, 31–36). All these appear to the modern reader as appropriate to historical rather than literary writing. Many conventions of a modern novel reveal to the reader its nature as fiction, that is to say a deliberate invention. Tolkien’s approach was often to avoid or subvert such conventions. It appears that his narrative techniques confused some of his readers, possibly because they were unfamiliar, and differed from the recognizable paradigm of a modern novel. Tolkien wrote that his work was taken “too seriously” by several readers and that several of his correspondents treated it “as if it were a report of ‘real’ times and places” which his own “ignorance or carelessness” failed to represent properly (Letters 188). His success in creating an illusion of historical truth may be partly responsible for a persistent suspicion that he actually believed in the legends and mythology which he invented. The same question is sometimes asked about him, as is asked about medieval writers whose work appears to a modern reader to be somewhere on the borderline between history and fiction: is it a deliberate invention or did they think that they were writing history? Did they make such a distinction, and if yes, where did they draw the line? In a letter to Amy Ronald (November 16, 1969) Tolkien wrote that The Lord of the Rings “ ‘feels’ like history” partly because: It was written slowly and with great care for detail, & finally emerged as a Frameless Picture: a searchlight, as it were, on a brief episode in History, and on a small part of our Middle-earth, surrounded by the glimmer of limitless extensions in time and space. (Letters 412)2

Tolkien’s Middle English scholarship undoubtedly provided some of the tools that made successful this “experiment in the arts of long narrative, and of inducing ‘Secondary Belief’ ” (Letters 412). Notes 1  See “Poetic Fiction and Truth: William of Conches, ‘Bernard Silvester’, Arnulf of Orléans, and Ralph of Longchamps” in Minnis and Scott

(1991), 113–164. Minnis and Scott demonstrate that medieval commentators overwhelmingly believed that literature should be concerned

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with truth and ethics, and observe that “Historical accuracy and exemplification may be regarded as two kinds of literal truth.” Other kinds of truth include, firstly, “the outspoken, unveiled reprehension of actual vices” by satirists who “according to their medieval readers – tore aside falsehoods and disguise to reveal facts about society which were unadulterated by poetic invention,” and secondly, “veiled truth” or “philosophy covered with fiction.” 2  Tolkien made similar comments about Beowulf: “The whole must have succeeded admirably in

creating in the minds of the poet’s contemporaries the illusion of surveying a past . . . a past that itself had depth and reached backward into a dark antiquity of sorrow” (MC 27). He also wrote that the so-called “digressions” – references to various historical events and stories, external to the main plot, and particularly frequent towards the end of Beowulf – are a stylistic and narrative device deliberately used by the poet “to give that sense of perspective, of antiquity with a greater and yet darker antiquity behind” (MC 31).

References Barron, W. R. J. 1987. English Medieval Romance. London: Longman. Barron, W. R. J., ed. 2001. The Arthur of the English: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval English Life and Literature. Rev. edn. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Barron, W. R. J. and S. C. Weinberg, eds. 2001. Layamon’s Arthur: The Arthurian Section of Layamon’s Brut (Lines 9229–14297). Rev. edn. Exeter: Exeter University Press. Benson, L. D., ed. 1986. King Arthur’s Death: The Middle English Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Alliterative Morte Arthure. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Benson, L. D., ed. 1987. The Riverside Chaucer. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Bliss, A. J., ed. 1966. Sir Orfeo. 2nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Boffey, Julia. 2003. Fifteenth-century English Dream Visions: An Anthology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cooper, H. 2004. The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dance, R. 2003. “The AB Language: The Recluse, the Gossip and the Language Historian.” In Wada 2003, 57–82. d’Ardenne, S. R. T. O., ed. 1936. Þe Liflade ant te Passiun of Seinte Iuliene. Liège. Reprinted in 1961 by EETS, Original Series 248. London: Oxford University Press.

d’Ardenne, S. R. T. O. and E. J. Dobson, eds. 1981. Seinte Katerine. EETS, Supplementary Series 7. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dobson, E. J. 1972. The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle edited from B.M. Cotton Ms. Cleopatra C. vi. EETS, Original Series 267. London: Oxford University Press. Dronke, U., ed. 1997. The Poetic Edda. Vol. II: Mythological Poems. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Flieger, V. 2000. “J. R. R. Tolkien and the Matter of Britain.” Mythlore, 23: 47–59. Flieger, V. 2007. “Arthurian Romance,” “Faërie,” and “Frame Narrative.” In J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopaedia, edited by Michael Drout. London: Routledge. Furnivall, F. J., ed. 1922. Hali Meidenhad: An Alliterative Homily of the Thirteenth Century. Rev. edn. of EETS, Original Series 18. London: Oxford University Press. Gordon, E. V., ed. 1953. Pearl. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Herbert, J. A., ed. 1944. The French Text of the Ancrene Riwle edited from British Museum Ms. Cotton Vitellius F vii. EETS, Original Series 219. London: Oxford University Press. Horobin, S. 2001. “J. R. R. Tolkien as a Philologist: A Reconsideration of the Northernisms in Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale.” English Studies, 82: 97–105. Lee, Stuart D. and Elizabeth Solopova. 2005. The Keys of Middle-earth: Discovering Medieval Litera-



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ture through the Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Millett, B. and J. Wogan-Browne. 1990. Medieval English Prose for Women: Selections from the Katherine Group and Ancrene Wisse. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Minnis, A. J. 1988. Medieval Theory of Authorship. 2nd edn. Aldershot: Scolar Press. Minnis, A. J. 1997. “The Author’s Two Bodies? Authority and Fallibility in Late-Medieval Textual Theory.” In Of the Making of Books: Medieval Manuscripts, their Scribes and Readers. Essays presented to M. B. Parkes, edited by P. R. Robinson and Rivkah Zim, 259–279. Aldershot: Scolar Press. Minnis, A. J. and A. B. Scott, eds. 1991. Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism c.1100–c.1375: The Commentary Tradition. Rev. edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Patch, H. R. 1950. The Other World, According to Descriptions in Medieval Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Phillips, H. and N. Havely, eds. 1997. Chaucer’s Dream Poetry. London and New York: Longman. Shepherd, S. H. A., ed. 1994. Middle English Romances: Authoritative Texts, Sources and Backgrounds, Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton.

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Shippey, Tom. 2005. The Road to Middle-earth. Rev. and expanded edn. London: HarperCollins. Sisam, K. 1921. Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Smithers, G. V. 1953. “Story-Patterns in Some Breton Lays.” Medium Ævum, 22: 61–92. Solopova, E. 2009. Languages, Myths and History: An Introduction to the Linguistic and Literary Background of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Fiction. New York: North Landing Books. Spearing, A. C. 1976. Medieval Dream-Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tolkien, J. R. R. and S. R. T. O. d’Ardenne. 1948. “MS Bodley 34: A Re-collation of a Collation.” Studia Neophilologica, 20: 65–72. Tolkien, J. R. R. and E. V. Gordon, eds. 1967. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Revised edn. by N. Davis. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wada, Y. 2003. A Companion to Ancrene Wisse. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer. Zettersten, A., B. Diensberg, and H. L. Spencer, eds. 2000. The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle: The “Vernon” Text. EETS, Original Series 310. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

17

Old Norse Tom Birkett

Þar kømr inn dimmi dreki fliúgandi, naðr fránn, neðan frá Niðafjöllom There the veiled dragon, gleaming serpent, comes flying from beneath dark mountains. (Völuspá, Stanza 62)

Tolkien’s scholarly interest in Old Norse is well attested, and the imprint on his fiction ranges from borrowed names, to entire species of supernatural creature extracted from the mythology and reimagined in a heroic landscape of Myrkviðr and Niðafjöll. In fact, a detailed study of the many rumors and inflections of Old Norse literature in Tolkien’s Middle-earth could very well fill the pages of this entire volume, and there have been a number of recent articles touching on the subject, as well as several book-length studies.1 Some critics have argued robustly that Old Norse sources constitute “the greatest single influence” (Moorman 1968, 212) or that “the bulk of [Tolkien’s] imaginative enterprise is based upon a lifetime’s intimate acquaintance with the literature of the ancient north” (Fenwick 1996, 17), and while this is something of a moot point, it is certainly true to say that the literature “had a profound appeal to Tolkien’s imagination” (Carpenter 1977, 65), and that the Poetic Edda “remained a deep if submerged force in his later life’s work” (Tolkien 2009a, 3).

A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.



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It is only natural for the attentive reader to want to know more about these submerged forces, and to turn in particular to those medieval sources that lie closest to the surface of Tolkien’s work. However, it is also all too easy to get caught up in what West refers to as the “skein of almost-correspondences” (2003, 264), and the worst of the source criticism can read like an extended genealogy of borrowed types, stretching off into abstraction. This is an approach that Tolkien himself explicitly warns against, stating in “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” that “myth is alive at once and in all its parts, and dies before it can be dissected” (MC 15). One way to negotiate the criticism leveled at the anatomizing of imagined worlds might be to widen the lens somewhat, remaining conscious of the myriad of resonances that Risden refers to as the “background noise” (2011, 17), though talking in broad thematic terms can also fail to account for just how meticulous Tolkien was himself, both as a writer and as a philologist trained to engage critically with the minutiae of medieval texts. For this reason, perhaps the most valuable studies of recent years have been those that attempt to trace a development in the use of a discrete group of sources, but also use the imaginative realm of Tolkien’s Middle-earth to open up a less familiar space for the reader – in this case the Miðgarðr or “middle-enclosure” of the Norse imagination. There can be no substitute, of course, for reading works such as the Poetic Edda or the Icelandic family sagas on their own terms.2 However, despite the existence of several excellent introductions to the literature,3 the sheer variety of texts that fall under the heading of Old Norse – and some variation in the way the subject has been defined over the years – can be bewildering for the reader. The situation is further confused in Tolkien’s own writing by allusions not just to medieval Scandinavia, but to the more emotive concept of a northern spirit originating in the “nameless North” (OFS 55). The first step, then, must be to give this particular North a name.

Naming the North Old Norse was the language of Viking Age and medieval Scandinavia, and the ancestor of modern Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish. When we talk about Old Norse literature, however, we are generally referring to a body of writing from a specific place within this cultural milieu, as the vast majority of the surviving texts were written down in Iceland, in the Old West Norse dialect. Iceland was first colonized in the late ninth century, predominantly by settlers from western Norway, and while it maintained close linguistic and cultural ties with Scandinavia, it developed in distinctive ways, not least in the formation of a radically decentralized political structure. Before the introduction of a manuscript culture to Iceland following the conversion to Christianity around the year 1000, poetry and stories were circulated orally, with the native runic script only used for very limited purposes. However, the Icelanders came to embrace the inherited technology of book production with great alacrity, the law codes being among the first texts to be written down and following this a truly astounding variety of texts in the Icelandic vernacular.

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The Icelanders were masters of both the extended prose narratives known as sagas – the Íslendingasögur or “Sagas of Icelanders” in particular being noteworthy for their pithy, realistic style and concern with local events – and the complex meters of skaldic verse, often written to commemorate the exceptional deeds of important figures and usually recorded within prose works. The aspiring Icelandic skald, or “poet,” often served time in the court of a foreign king, and the poetic arts were an important cultural commodity. Even after the conversion, poetry retained many of its traditional forms of expression, and there was a continued interest in the mythology and in stories of legendary figures, both the ancestors involved in the settlement and the ancient heroes of the Migration Age. Most important for our knowledge of these stories is the systematic reworking of the mythology by the the prolific thirteenthcentury mythographer, politician, and man of letters Snorri Sturluson in his Prose Edda, a compendious work which includes a prologue euhemerizing the ascendancy of the Norse gods; a sweeping account of the mythology, presented as answers to the questioning of a king named Gylfi; an extended dialogue on poetic language known as Skáldskaparmál; and a collection of verse forms illustrated by Snorri’s own compositions.4 Snorri was a Christian, and his aim was certainly not to engineer a return to the old ways, but rather to educate poets still writing in the traditional forms about the stories that underlie the complex referents of skaldic verse. Snorri was himself drawing on, and quoting extensively from, preexisting poetry, and anonymous poems similar to those he references have also survived, most of them collected in a single manuscript. This collection, known as the Poetic Edda, includes poems about creation and the fate of the world, the exploits and misfortunes of the gods in their conflict with the giants, and a heroic sequence that deals with legendary figures such as the Valkyrie Brynhildr, and Sigurðr, of dragon-slaying fame. Following the rediscovery of the Codex Regius manuscript of the Poetic Edda in the seventeenth century and translation of Snorri’s Prose Edda, there has been a long tradition of writers and artists outside Iceland drawing on this literature – particularly the mythical and heroic legendary material – as a source of inspiration, as well as a parallel tradition of laying claim to the literature as an expression of völkisch sentiment and racial identity (see O’Donoghue 2007, 128–162). There were few who were more intimately acquainted with both the material itself, and the specter of “this ‘Nordic’ nonsense” (Letters 55), than Tolkien, a professor of medieval languages and literature at the height of the cultural arms race.

Fiction and Philology: Tolkien as Old Norse Scholar Tolkien first came into contact with Norse legendary material as a schoolboy, and in later life professed to being particularly moved by the “nameless North of Sigurd of the Völsungs, and the prince of all dragons” as encountered in Lang’s Red Fairy Book, beginning an enduring fascination with this “pre-eminently desirable” legendary landscape (OFS 55). While a student at King Edward’s School, Tolkien used the Skeat



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Prize for English to buy a copy of William Morris’s translation of Völsunga saga, and began to translate Old Norse under his own direction (Carpenter 1977, 46 and 49; and ch. 1). At Oxford he chose Scandinavian Philology as his special subject, reading similar texts to those studied on the Old Norse option papers today. It was at Leeds, though, that Tolkien consolidated his academic interest in the subject, setting up the Viking Club alongside the renowned Norse philologist E. V. Gordon, an important influence in his academic career (Anderson 2003a; and chs. 1–3). After transferring to his post at the University of Oxford, and mentioning in his application to the chair that during his time at Leeds “Old Icelandic has been a point of special development” (Letters 13), Tolkien founded a reading group called the Kolbítar, a name used in the sagas to describe idle folk who spend so much time huddled next to the fire that they appear to bite the coals. This aptly-named group, which “combined friendship with intellectual exploration of a much-loved subject,” was responsible for introducing C. S. Lewis to the study of Icelandic (Lazo 2004, 205), and the fact that the more famous Inklings club only began to meet once the Kólbitar group had exhausted its reading material (Carpenter 1977, 199) itself says something about the degree to which the fictional worlds of Tolkien and Lewis are rooted in their reading of Old Norse literature. Tolkien was largely responsible for the subject within the Faculty at this time, offering lectures on a slightly eclectic mix of texts.5 Both E. O. G. Turville-Petre, who became the first Reader in Old Norse at Oxford in 1941, and the distinguished Old Norse scholar Ursula Dronke, were among Tolkien’s students. Even if his own contribution to Old Norse criticism was slight – consisting of a few extremely stylized references to the Norse gods in his essay “On Fairy-stories” and the occasional unpublished club paper – he certainly had a profound influence on the next generation of scholars, and was elected as an honorary member of The Icelandic Literary Society in 1933.6 Rather than characterizing Tolkien’s scholarly relationship to Old Norse as that of perennial coal-biter, we can appreciate that his expertise in the subject was being channeled in different directions, towards teaching, certainly, but also towards creative translation and adaptation. In a letter to Auden (who dedicated his own rendition of the Poetic Edda to Tolkien), he mentions that he had worked on a poem which would bring together the heroic Völsung material (Letters 379). This project eventually came to be published as The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún in 2009, along with notes by Christopher Tolkien and samples of a lecture on Old Norse given at Oxford, and is fascinating not only as a work of academic devotion, but as a study of Tolkien’s creative relationship to a well-known source.

Filling the Gaps: The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún Völsunga saga is a thirteenth-century retelling of the legend of the Völsungs and Niflungs (Nibelungs in German), and includes the story of the founding and decline of the Völsung dynasty, Sigurðr’s slaying of the dragon Fáfnir and tragic love

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entanglement with Brynhildr, the heroic deaths of Gunnarr and Högni in the court of the Huns, and Guðrún’s terrible exacting of revenge. It deals with the same legendary Germanic material found in a sequence of heroic poems in the Poetic Edda, and though probably compiled in Iceland, both the poetry and the saga treat a distant society in which the shadows of historical figures such as Attila the Hun and the fifth-century Burgundian king Gundahar move in a world of dragon-slaying, shapeshifting, and talking birds. The poet of Hamðismál beautifully captures the remoteness of this deep heroic past, musing that “there are few things older, that this was not twice as old again” (St. 2). The poems of the Poetic Edda are themselves of varying date and provenance, and although the prose saga doesn’t do justice to the complexities of poems such as Hamðismál and Atlakviða, its appeal for modern readers lies in the fact that it brings together the somewhat disjointed poetic cycle, imposing narrative structure on the older material. In particular, it fills in for a gap in the cycle of heroic poems – a missing gathering of eight leaves physically removed from the Codex Regius manuscript. This break in the poetic sequence is particularly tantalizing as it relates to key events in the Völsung legend relating to Sigurðr’s vows to the Valkyrie Sigrdrifa and eventual marriage to Guðrún, a confusing sequence that the author of Völsunga saga simplifies in the most unsatisfactory way. Speculating on the content of this lost sequence, or the Königsproblem, had been a mainstay of Eddic criticism since the rediscovery of the manuscript, and it is to this gap that Tolkien’s The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún is directed. Tolkien approached the Königsproblem as a developing author as well as a critic, and his response is an intriguing fusion of academic erudition and creative wish-fulfillment. By Tolkien’s own admission, his poems represent “an attempt to unify the lays about the Völsungs” (Letters 379); the names of these “New Lays” are given in Old Norse, and Tolkien even attempts “the old eight-line fornyrðislag stanza” (Letters 379), discussed by Christopher Tolkien in his introduction to the poems (SG 45–50), interspersing the verse with prose divisions,7 and approximating the poetic language with a rather rarefied English idiom. However, as his comments suggest, this project was not about slavish imitation: Tolkien saw the flaws and contradictions in the surviving poems as well, and used the opening in the poetic cycle as a space for repairing contradictions and “improving” the legend that has come down to us. Some of these improvements are largely editorial, such as his removal of sensational details found in the saga but not in the poems – including Sigmund’s serial murder of his young nephews when they fail to deal with a snake hidden in a barrel of flour. Other alterations are more authorial, Tolkien redacting the entire Gothic sequence involving Jörmunrekkr (Ermanaric) from the story of the Niflungs, presumably with the aim of teasing out distinct legends that had fused together over time (see Christopher Tolkien’s notes, SG 334). He also adds new material, prefacing his first poem with an Upphaf or “opening,” that imitates the mythological narrative in the poem Völuspá, and linking together the mythological and heroic cycles that are largely distinct in the Poetic Edda. Many of the characters we piece together from the surviving mythology are as amorphous as the poetic sequence itself, sometimes noble, sometimes



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conniving or ridiculous, sometimes barely realized at all, yet there is an orderliness to the characterization of the gods in Tolkien’s Upphaf – Þórr in his chariot, Freyja planting fair things, Óðinn overseeing – that perhaps betrays both the philologist’s desire for clarity, and the author’s desire for consistency of characterization. Academics are generally wary of such attempts to recreate medieval works, particularly as the imaginative reconstruction of early translators has left us with an unwelcome legacy of horned helmets and runic odes. On the other hand, it is worth remembering that these were never stable texts, and that even the Poetic Edda represents a reconstructive ordering of earlier legendary material, interspersing sections of verse with explanatory prose. The issue with Tolkien’s own twentieth-century recasting of the Völsung legend is not so much his creative response to the material as the very closeness of the sub-creation to its source; its imitative and semi-scholarly quality. Perhaps his meager academic output in a field in which he had uncommon expertise was partly a result of an emotive response to Old Norse – a fascination with what survives, but also a desire to rewrite, expand, and to complete this “pre-eminently desirable” landscape. This same impulse towards tying up loose ends is a reoccurring feature of Tolkien’s relationship to his Norse sources, but these gaps would eventually come to accommodate a world the author had created for himself.

Until the Dragon Comes: Old Norse and The Hobbit Tolkien was singularly reluctant to acknowledge direct overlaps between his academic career and writing (see Letters 21–22 and 30–32), and although the famous anecdote about inventing The Hobbit on an empty sheet of an exam paper he was marking is compelling (Letters 215, see ch. 8), we should not be misled into thinking that the work as a whole arrived as a creative spark on a blank white page. The heroic material treated in Sigurd and Gudrún clearly finds its way into The Hobbit,8 and Tolkien explicitly acknowledged the use of one particular Old Norse source, stating that he preferred his own mythology to “this rabble of Eddaic-named dwarves out of Völuspá” (SG 4; see also Letters 383). The text referred to – Völuspá (The Prophecy of the Seeress) – is a sweeping, evocative, and disturbing poem in which the god Óðinn interrogates the mysterio us Völva about the history and fate of the world. The seeress’s response ranges through the most important events in the mythology, from the creation of the cosmos to its inevitable destruction and rebirth, at times making allusions to stories about which little is known. The list of Dwarf names, sometimes referred to as Dvergatal, “The Catalogue of Dwarves,” is one such allusion, and is often considered to be an awkward interpolation of material that belonged elsewhere, though also quoted with some variations by Snorri. Some of the names are adapted slightly in The Hobbit – Dvalinn to Dwalin, Óin and Glóin seemingly both derived from Gloinn, Balin perhaps inspired by Bláinn or introduced from elsewhere (see Shippey 2000, 16) – but are otherwise simply excerpted from the list. After several stanzas listing the names of the Dwarves,

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Dvergatal ends with a statement that encapsulates the importance of naming in a predominantly oral culture: Þat mun uppi meðan öld lifir, langniðia tal Lofars hafat. That will be upheld in the memory for as long as mankind lives; the long list of Lofar’s lineage. (St. 16, 5–8)9

It has often been recognized that in Tolkien’s process of creation “words came first,” but here the aphorism is crystallized. Not only does Tolkien model his race of mastercraftsmen on the Norse Dwarves, and use this catalogue as a ready list of titles for his characters, he also plays on the meaning of these personal names, most of which are descriptive (see Simek 1993, 67–69). Þorinn (Thorin in The Hobbit) might be translated as “Darer,” from ON þora (“to dare”), an appropriate name for the leader of the enterprise, while his cognomen “Oakenshield” is a direct translation of a nickname in the same list. Bömburr, on the other hand, may be related to the ON noun bumba (“drum”) which Dronke renders as “tubby” in her edition of the Edda (1969, St. 11) – we may remember that Bombur plays a drum at the unexpected party, and the corpulent associations may have inspired his characterization as the fat Dwarf. Even the name Gandálfr, used in early drafts as the name for the chief of the Dwarves (Shippey 2000, 17), is borrowed from the same list. ON gandr means “magic” or possibly “wand/ staff,” and álfr is the Old Norse for “elf” – a rather peculiar name for a Dwarf. It may be this problematic etymology that provided the inspiration for introducing a staffbearing wizard, and close friend of the Elves, to the story, and we might even wonder if another unused name in the list, Alþiófr (“great-thief”), provided a further inspiration for Bilbo’s role in this expedition. In short, a linguist’s sensitivity to the nuances of this misplaced catalogue may have provided not just the names of the company, but also the embryonic story itself – as an attempt to make sense of a neglected piece of poetry. Within this framing narrative for The Hobbit there are a series of episodes which together constitute a patchwork of Norse characters and themes, often placed in dialogue with the original literature. The “Riddles in the Dark” exchange between Bilbo and Gollum is one such episode, clearly having a great deal in common with the so-called “neck-riddles” of the Old Norse tradition, where the playful conceit of riddling is elevated to the level of a deadly contest. Perhaps the best example of such a high-stakes game takes place in The Saga of King Heiðrek the Wise (edited and translated by Christopher Tolkien, 1960), and begins with Óðinn arriving at the court of King Heiðrekr disguised as Gestumblindi, an enemy of the king seeking reconciliation. They



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enter into a riddle contest, as is “right and fitting” (Chapter 9), but the shrewd king is able to fathom out riddles with the most obtuse answers, such as the depiction of a goose nesting in the jawbones of an ox. Eventually, the god presents the king with a game-changer – a riddle that only he could possibly know the answer to: Hvat mælti Óðinn i eyra Baldri áðr hann væri á bál hafðr? What did Óðinn say into the ear of Baldr before he was carried to the fire?

Baldr was the son of Óðinn, and is described by Snorri in unequivocal terms as the wisest and most courteous of the gods. It is his death which receives the most attention in the literature – a dart of mistletoe fashioned by the god Loki ends his life and begins the cycle of events that lead to Ragnarök. It is Baldr’s funeral pyre to which Óðinn is referring in the riddle, and the words of a father spoken to a dead son.10 This is clearly a somewhat “tricksy” maneuver, to use Gollum’s words, and when the king recognizes the identity of his opponent he attacks Óðinn, who escapes in the form of a hawk. According to Snorri, the parting slash of the King’s sword serves to explain the short tail feathers of the hawk, but it is clear that this is more than a straightforward myth of origins for a bird of prey. The riddles – more sacred trial than children’s game – test human knowledge of divinity to the very limits, before resolving that there are some things that must always remain unknown. It is one of a number of unsettling moments in Old Norse mythology, a moment when the cosmic balance is challenged in some way and must be reasserted, even if this involves outright deceit, or the “unmanly” practice of seiðr (“witchcraft”). In Tolkien’s story, the neck-riddle contest is played out on a local rather than a cosmic scale, but Bilbo similarly upsets the rules of the sacred competition to which both divine agents and “wicked creatures” are bound (H 76), inadvertently revealing the true stakes of the game by asking Gollum “What have I got in my pocket?”, and provoking a violent reaction from his adversary (H 75). Bilbo is well aware that the question “had not been a genuine riddle according to the ancient laws” (H 76), but Tolkien mitigates his hero’s questionable behavior by granting Gollum three guesses, reinforcing the sporting decency of the Hobbit caught up in a heroic world in which he feels singularly out of place. What is more, while Óðinn enacts revenge by cursing his opponent to be killed by slaves, Bilbo chooses (at least in the redrafted edition of The Hobbit, see ch. 8) to spare his opponent’s life. In this way the Hobbit escapes the traditional paradigm of the neck-riddle contest, Christian compassion prevailing over the “ancient laws.” If the riddle contest represents a movement beyond the moral framework of its source, Tolkien’s dragon might be seen as a symbol of destructive heroic values taken to their logical extreme.11 In a letter to Auden, we learn that Tolkien wrote his first

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story about a dragon at the tender age of seven (Letters 214), and it is an image of elemental malevolence that he would return to, drawing particularly on the two “significant” dragons of northern literature: the unnamed wyrm fought by Beowulf, and Fáfnir of the Sigurðr cycle (MC 12). This latter tale was clearly popular throughout Northern Europe – it is itself referenced in Beowulf; appears in the Middle High German poem Nibelungenlied, and is represented pictorially on Viking Age runestones – yet a poetic depiction of the dragon-slaying has not survived in Old Norse. The poem Fáfnismál begins after Sigurðr has already dealt a mortal blow to Fáfnir (delivered from below while hiding in a pit, the prose introduction tells us) and the majority of the poem is taken up with the exchange between the dying creature and his killer. By Tolkien’s own admission, “Smaug and his conversation is obviously in debt” to the story of Sigurðr (Letters 134). Shippey has suggested a number of interesting plot details expanded from the poem (2000, 36–37), while Jakobsson suggests that Tolkien also translates the subtext of the uncanny that pervades the encounter, particularly the dragon’s “unnervingly human” characteristics (2009, 31). In The Hobbit, Tolkien had the opportunity to build on the suggestive but unexplained elements of the Fáfnir exchange – particularly Sigurðr’s reluctance to tell the dragon his name, his attempts to turn the hero against his companion (the Dwarf Reginn), and the use of seductive “riddling talk” (H 208). Tolkien also creates a voice to match this great foe’s reputation, a voice which Shippey memorably describes as akin to “a colonel in a railway carriage” (2000, 37), and which brings the creature of the medieval imagination very much into the modern age. Smaug is not the only memorable dragon in Tolkien’s legendarium, and the influence of the Norse dragon on Glaurung – the “Great Worm” who features in The Children of Húrin – is also apparent (Tolkien 2007b). Glaurung weaves a powerful deception with his words, and the hero Túrin Turambar, like Sigurðr, kills the dragon by using a famous reforged sword to pierce its belly from below. Perhaps in an effort to write back at the rather ambivalent description of the hero Sigurðr hiding in a pit to dispatch his enemy, Tolkien makes the killing of Glaurung a momentous feat involving scaling a gorge and withstanding the monster’s poisonous reek. In fact, we might read this legendary tale as Tolkien’s archetype for the Sigurðr story, the “ur-dragon” in relation to whom Fáfnir, “prince of dragons,” and Smaug – whose name is itself “a low philological jest” (Letters 31) – are both to be regarded as debased descendants. The relationships between source and creation in this tale are already complex, layered here upon Tolkien’s existing mythology, and drawing on his own creative reappraisal in The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún. Though Fáfnir clearly haunts the Lonely Mountain, Tolkien’s dragon speaks for itself.

Echoes in the Dark: The Lord of the Rings The Hobbit “was never intended to have a sequel” (Letters 38), and Tolkien now faced the difficulty of harmonizing a children’s tale that was predominantly Norse in



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character with an increasingly complex and varigated legendarium, itself influenced to some degree by the Norse pantheon (see Burns 2005). In making this transition from children’s tale to epic, the echoes of Norse literature become progressively muted: there are comparable tropes and symbols, of course – a reflex of Óðinn’s one all-seeing eye in the Great Eye, a resonance of the flame-wreathed giant Surtr in the Balrog, a reforged sword in both narratives – but these overlays are rarely straightforward. As a demonstration of this process, and the generic blending that results, we might consider Theodén’s speech on the Pelennor Fields, a passage Tolkien professed to writing in “the strictest form of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse” (Letters 187): Fell deeds awake, fire and slaughter! spear shall be shaken, shield be splintered, a sword-day, a red day, ere the sun rises! Ride now, ride now! Ride to ruin, and the world’s ending! (RK, V, v, 1096)

This poem is clearly reminiscent of a passage in Völuspá, relating to the “fell deeds” that are a precursor to Ragnarök: skeggöld, skálmöld, skildir ro klofnir vindöld, vargöld, áðr veröld steypiz. An axe age, a sword age, shields will be cloven a storm age, a wolf age, before the world sinks. (Völuspá, St. 44, 7–10)

Though written in imitation of Old English verse, the mental imprint of this memorable piece of Old Norse poetry can also clearly be discerned. The value of recognizing this imprint, however faint, is that it suggests the associations Tolkien may have had in mind when writing about the battle: as hopeless an endeavor to the Rohirrim as the final battle on the plains of Vígríðr, when gods and men were destined to meet the giants and to suffer an inevitable and world-shattering defeat. It adds pathos to the encounter, and also provides an additional nuance to the doctrine of hope in hopeless circumstances that in many ways defines the moral tenor of The Lord of the Rings. Of course, the stoic fatalism of a world view in which a final battle must be fought, and lost, is particularly difficult to reconcile with Christian belief. Tolkien elsewhere wrote admiringly about the “theory of courage,” particularly the willingness of Old Norse myth to face up to the monsters that are sidelined elsewhere and to contemplate annihilation (see “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” essay in particular). It is tempting, in fact, to read the War of the Ring as an extended meditation on the

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theory of courage, and the possibility of reconciling Christian values of compassion, forgiveness, and hope with the heroic fatalism of the northern heroes – and through this to observe a devout Catholic taking on monsters closer to home, particularly the issue of how a preeminently desirable landscape could be resurrected and still have relevance in a Christian world. Of course, Tolkien’s was not the first creative mind to be troubled by this question – it was certainly a difficulty that the medieval mythographer Snorri had to negotiate – though it may have been given additional urgency at the time Tolkien was writing by the misappropriation of the same heroic legendary material in the service of nationalistic ideologies and fascist propaganda. Indeed, perhaps the most famous adaptation of the Völsung material is Wagner’s Ring Cycle, and there has been much discussion about whether the opera itself influenced Tolkien’s conception of the One Ring. Despite Tolkien’s statement that “both rings are round, and there the resemblance ceases” (Letters 306), it is certainly remarkable that both should place what is a rather minor symbol in the Völsung legend at the very center of their works. In the Old Norse sources, the ring in question is the final item in a ransom paid by the gods to a certain Hreiðmarr, after they unknowingly kill his second son, who had taken the form of an otter to go fishing.12 Loki is compelled to find the ransom, and apprehends the Dwarf Andvari, who possesses a hoard of gold. The following passage is from Völsunga saga: Loki saw the gold that Andvari owned. But when he had given up the gold, he kept back one ring, and so Loki took it off him. The dwarf passed into the rock and said that the gold-ring and all the gold would cause the death of whoever owned it. The Æsir carried the treasure to Hreiðmarr, and filled up the otter-skin and stood it on its feet. Then the Æsir had to pile up gold alongside it and cover the outside. But when they had done that, Hreiðmarr came up and saw a single whisker-hair and ordered it to be covered up. Then Oðinn took the ring called Andvaranaut off his hand, and covered up the hair. (Chapter 14)

The “one ring” that Andvari keeps back is related to Oðinn’s ring Draupnir (the dripper) in that it is capable of producing more rings, a perverse reproductive quality that may have given rise to the idea of a master ring. The malevolence and corrupting attraction of the cursed gold is also evident in the saga, Fáfnir only turning into a dragon after killing his father Hreiðmarr, and carrying off his “precious” hoard into the wilderness. Of course, the magic symbol in Wagner’s opera does more than hint at the qualities of a master ring; it explicitly grants the owner the power to rule the world, and it is likely that Tolkien had both the source and the operatic reworking in mind when he conceived of his own Ring of Power. Indeed, his work may have been a “purposeful countering” of Wagner (O’Donoghue 2007, 184–185), and the ideology of racial supremacism that attended such appropriations of the legend. In a rather heated letter,



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Tolkien refers to his “burning private grudge” against “that ruddy little ignoramus Hitler” for “ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit . . . that I have ever loved” (Letters 55–56; see also Chism 2003). We should also note that in The Lord of the Rings not only is the thirst for power inverted into a quest for the destruction of the One Ring, but that the cold and steely heroics of Wagner’s re-creation are undermined by placing the diminutive Hobbits at the centre of the story, and injecting both humor and diversity back into the narrative. In this latter respect Tolkien is closer in tone to the Norse – not only did he write against the drumbeat of anti-semitism and nationalistic fervor, he quite simply had a better understanding of his sources. We can glimpse both Tolkien’s continued attention to the intricacies of Old Norse literature, and his willingness to counter the glorification of martial heroics, in the etymology of Frodo’s name. Like Gandalf, whose name has already been discussed, and whom Tolkien once described as an “Odinic wanderer” (Letters 119), Frodo’s name also appears to have a precedent in Norse literature.13 Fróði means “wise” in Old Norse, and several rather shadowy characters named Fróði are mentioned in Snorri’s Ynglinga saga, one of whom is identified with an extended reign of peace. In Skáldskaparmál, the origin of the kenning “Fróði’s meal” (meaning “gold”) is explained, and more detail about the legend emerges. Not only is Fróði’s reign contemporary with the birth of Christ, but the source of the extended period of concord in the kingdom lies with a pair of prodigious millstones that grind out peace, happiness, and gold for the king. Shippey recognizes the irony that the story of this peacemaker has been all but lost, while it is the name of martial heroes such as Sigurðr and Beowulf that survive, allowing for the possibility that there was once a Norse hero of a rather different – and non-martial – kind (2000, 184). A desire to write the man of peace back into heroic legend may therefore be discernible in Tolkien’s choice of name for his reluctant protagonist – a hero “more praiseworthy than the professionals” (Letters 215). But there is also something more – a detail in the story that it is all too easy to overlook. Snorri’s short account mentions that the peace in Fróði’s reign was so enduring that no man injured another and “there was also no thief or robber, to the extent that a gold ring lay a long time on Jalangr’s heath” (Skáldskaparmál, Chapter 52). We have cursed rings in Norse legend, but here we also have a faint precedent for resisting the temptation of this most desirable of material possessions. It is no more than a tantalizing suggestion, however, and for that reason perhaps best left lying where it is.

Conclusions Old Norse literature was one of a great many influences on Tolkien’s fiction, important both for the richness of its characters and settings, and for its tone, particularly the characteristic mixture of gravity and irreverence – the “extreme stylistic indecorum” (Shippey 2000) – with which the mythical world is treated in the poetry. Indeed, the

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literature is far more diverse than any short survey can hope to do justice, at times poking fun at the traits of gods and men, unsettling generic expectations, and humanizing the profane. This might be something that readers of Tolkien, who are prepared to invest in its many dimensions and to think into the gaps, will find less unsettling than those introduced to Old Norse through the unsmiling, iron-edge of Wagner, or Morris’s romantic image of the North. It is also a visceral landscape in which the gods are as flawed as the human heroes, where blood, spit, and mead becomes poetry, and where monsters are not something dreamed up for children, but encircle the sea and walk the world with Men.14 Where the fantastic is, for the most part, taken seriously. In this sense, the mythology of the North provides a precedent that is not easily quantifiable in terms of the sum total of specific borrowings, but speaks to the whole enterprise of world-creation. If Tolkien did ever conceive of his mythology as serving to recreate a story-world that England had all but lost, in Old Norse he had a glimpse at what it might have been, in all its ragged detail. In his much-maligned review for Time and Tide Lewis refers to The Fellowship of the Ring as arriving “like a bolt of lightning from a clear sky,” representing not a return to heroic romance, but “the conquest of new territory” (Lewis 1954). It is certainly true that in The Lord of the Rings, written against the background of the extensive mythology of The Silmarillion, the motifs and imagery of Old Norse are most restrained. The fact that Tolkien was still drawing on, and criticizing, both the heroic material itself and his own close engagement with the sources in earlier works, does not belittle the supreme creative effort, but makes the idea of a bolt from a clear sky seem simplistic, and even misleading. Recognizing the backdrop of Old Norse is not necessary for our appreciation of Tolkien’s fiction, but approached in the right way, studies of these important sources can perhaps help us to contextualize the act of creation itself. The chapter opened with a quote from the final strophe of the poem Völuspá, in which the dragon Níðhöggr returns once more to the vision of the seeress, and to the eternally-green fields of a reborn world. As the Völva’s prophecy builds inexorably towards Ragnarök, revealing more and more detail about the cataclysm to come, she begins to utter a sinister refrain: Vitoð ér enn, eða hvat? Do you still desire to know? And what else?

There is a clear challenge issued in the seeress’s words, which suggest the true scope of what remains to be made known, as well as the potential for this knowledge to unsettle without obvious benefit to the listener. In our desire to understand Tolkien’s relationship to the Eddas and sagas, we must be sure to respond with the right questions, so as not to lose our appreciation for the creative mind that turned them into something else entirely – something neither dependent on, nor a substitute for the extraordinary imaginative potency of Old Norse literature.



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  1  Overviews of the Norse influence on Tolkien’s work are provided in articles by Bryce (1983) and St. Clair (1995), and covered alongside other medieval sources in Shippey (2000) and (2005) and Lee and Solopova (2005), while Burns (2005) considers the influence of Northern myth and “Northernness.” Articles dealing with more specific thematic and formal parallels are referred to in the chapter itself, and in the references below.   2  Suggestions for reliable translations and language aids are provided in the Further Reading section of the General Bibliography at the end of the volume.   3  See in particular, O’Donoghue (2004) and the collected essays in McTurk (2005).   4  Snorri was also responsible for Heimskringla, a history of the kings of Norway, and may have been the author of Egils saga.   5  One lecture series timetabled in Oxford University Gazette, 60 (1930) has listed “Baldrs draumar, Atlakviða, Bandamana saga, Hænsnaþóris saga, Hávarðs saga Halta.”   6  For a more complete discussion of Tolkien’s scholarly output, see Drout (2007).   7  See Phelpstead (2008) on Tolkien’s use of the prosimetrum style elsewhere in his fiction.   8  Tolkien would also “auto-plagiarize” these early poems in his fiction – Shippey (2010) points out some of the expressions that bear

  9 

10  11 

12 

13 

14 

a great similarity to lines in The Lord of the Rings in his review of Sigurd and Gudrún. Dronke’s edition (1969) includes detailed notes on Dvergatal, expressing a contrary opinion to Tolkien on the interpolated nature of this list. For an extended discussion of naming in Tolkien’s fiction, see Lee and Solopova (2005). Óðinn also resorts to this particular question in Vafþrúðnismál (see Lee and Solopova 2005). For an informed discussion of the central significance of dragons in Tolkien’s fiction, see Evans (2000). This semi-aquatic creature, greedily devouring fish in a mountain pool, has a clear affinity with Gollum. The fact that Gandalf is called by many names by the peoples of Middle-earth may also be a reflex of Óðinn’s numerous epithets: over 170, according to Simek (1993). Burns suggests further links, including Gandalf’s association with the beasts of battle, suggesting that Tolkien borrowed only the god’s more attractive character traits (2005, 474). This is a major thrust of Tolkien’s argument for the rehabilitation of Beowulf, where he refers to the strength of the “northern mythological imagination” which “put the monsters in the centre” (MC 25).

References Anderson, Douglas A. 2003. “ ‘An Industrious Little Devil’: E. V. Gordon as Friend and Collaborator with Tolkien.” In Tolkien the Medievalist, edited by Jane Chance, 15–25. London: Routledge. Bryce, Lynn. 1983. “The Influence of Scandinavian Mythology on the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien.” Edda: Nordisk Tidsskrift for Literaturforskning, 2: 113–119. Burns, Marjorie. 2005. Perilous Realms: Celtic and Norse in Tolkien’s Middle-earth. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Carpenter, Humphrey. 1977. J. R. R. Tolkien – A Biography. London: Allen & Unwin. Chism, Christine. 2003. “Middle-Earth, the Middle Ages, and the Aryan Nation: Myth and History during World War II.” In Tolkien the Medievalist, edited by Jane Chance, 106–132. London: Routledge. Dronke, Ursula, ed. 1969–2011. The Poetic Edda. 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Drout, Michael D. C. 2007. “J. R. R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and its Significance.” Tolkien Studies, 4: 113–176.

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Evans, Jonathan. 2000. “The Dragon-lore of Middle-earth: Tolkien and Old English and Old Norse Tradition.” In J. R. R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances, edited by George Clark and Daniel Timmons, 21–38. New York: Greenwood. Fenwick, Mac. 1996. “Breastplates of Silk: Homeric Women in The Lord of the Rings.” Mythlore, 81: 17–23. Jakobsson, Ármann. 2009. “Talk to the Dragon: Tolkien as Translator.” Tolkien Studies, 6: 27–39. Lazo, Andrew. 2004. “Gathered Around Northern Fires: The Imaginative Impact of the Kolbítar.” In Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader, edited by Jane Chance, 191–226. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. Lee, Stuart D. and Elizabeth Solopova. 2005. The Keys of Middle-earth: Discovering Medieval Literature through the Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lewis, C. S. 1954. “The Gods Return to Earth.” Time and Tide, August 14: 1082. McTurk, Rory, ed. 2005. A Companion to Old NorseIcelandic Literature and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell. Moorman, Charles. 1968. “The Shire, Mordor and Minas Tirith.” In Tolkien and the Critics, edited by Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo, 201– 217. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. O’Donoghue, Heather. 2004. Old Norse-Icelandic Literature: A Short Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.

O’Donoghue, Heather. 2007. From Asgard to Valhalla: The Remarkable History of the Norse Myths. London: I.B. Tauris. Phelpstead, Carl. 2008. “ ‘With chunks of poetry in between’: The Lord of the Rings and Saga Poetics.” Tolkien Studies, 5: 23–38. Risden, E. L. 2011. “Source Criticism: Background and Applications.” In Tolkien and the Study of His Sources: Critical Essays, edited by Jason Fisher, 17–28. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Shippey, Tom. 2000. J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. London: HarperCollins. Shippey, Tom. 2005. The Road to Middle-earth. Rev. and expanded edn. London: HarperCollins. Shippey, Tom. 2010. “Review of The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún.” Tolkien Studies, 7: 291–324. Simek, Rudolf. 1993. Dictionary of Northern Mythology. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer. St. Clair, Gloriana. 1995. “An Overview of the Northern Influences on Tolkien’s Works.” In Proceedings of the J. R. R. Tolkien Centenary Conference, Keble College, Oxford, 1992, edited by Patricia Reynolds and Glen GoodKnight, 63–67. (Mallorn 33 and Mythlore 80.) Milton Keynes and Altadena, CA: Tolkien Society/Mythopoeic Press. Tolkien, Christopher, ed. and trans. 1960. The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise. London: Thomas Nelson & Sons. West, Richard C. 2003. “Real World Myth in a Secondary World: Mythological Aspects in the Story of Beren and Lúthien.” In Tolkien the Medievalist, edited by Jane Chance, 106–132. London: Routledge.

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Finnish: The Land and Language of Heroes Leena Kahlas-Tarkka

One repeatedly hears the “Land of Heroes” described as the Finnish National Epic – as if it was of the nature of the universe that every nation (dreary word), besides a national bank, and government, should before qualifying for membership of the League,1 show lawful possession also of a National Epic, hall-remark of respectability, evidence indeed of national existence. But Finland does not possess one. The Kalevala certainly is not one. It is a mass of conceivably epic material (I can conceive of the epic that should grow with difficulty from it, I must confess); but – and I think this is the main point – it would lose all that is its greatest delight, if ever it were one unhappy day to be epically handled. The mere stories, bare events, alone could remain; all that undergrowth, that rich profusion and luxuriance, which clothe them would have to be stripped away. (Tolkien 2010c, 264)

Notwithstanding the above outburst of Tolkien’s, the Kalevala is generally described as the national epic of Finland. We may assume that it was especially the word “national” that aroused strong feelings in Tolkien, as he was fascinated by the idea of a primitive culture which had preserved a close contact with its mythological past but was still open to fantasy and all the “undergrowth” that the literature of Europe had been cutting away. Tolkien was obviously aware of the fact that the Kalevala is a poetic work, a fantasy that tells about a completely fictive ancient world and universe and that the work as a whole is a creation of one man – Elias Lönnrot – who drew all his material from oral folk poetry. In a way, Tolkien looked into the pre-literate period, beyond the artistic work of Lönnrot and his “post-oral” epic, and found delight in the wild, uncivilized world of the Kalevala where “there is often no attempt at even the A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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limited plausibility of the fairy-tale[,] no cunning concealment of the impossible. . . . Its delight depends on the dawning perception . . . of the limitless power of movement and of creation of the human fancy and imagination” (Tolkien 2010c, 266). It is no wonder, then, that Tolkien wrote fondly about his feelings about the ballads and their language in his letters and talks. He claimed that he felt tempted not to go home for a long while, if at all, after reading the Kalevala for the first time, when he had witnessed the clear gulf between speakers of Indo-European languages and those “who cling in queer corners and want to speak unrelated archaic languages and revere old habits ” (ibid., 247). The further away from the civilized world, the present day and its reality, the freer was the creative imagination of these ancient singers. The following brief account will focus on the role and importance of the Kalevala, its origins, mythology, characters, language, and atmosphere for Tolkien and his work.

Earlier Studies Tolkien’s interest in and fascination with the Finnish language and the Kalevala is well recorded. By way of introduction, de Anna (1993) provides a deep survey of his interests in Finland, the Finnish language, and the Kalevala; and this can be supplemented by references in Tolkien’s own letters (Letters 87, 176, 214, 345, 429), in Carpenter (1977), and Shippey (2000 and 2005). Solopova (2009, 44–50) also provides a very informative brief summary of the Finnish elements in Tolkien’s thinking and works as detected by different scholars, as well as the role of the Finnish language as a source of inspiration for Tolkien’s invented languages. By way of a single example, it has often been noted that the character of Kul­ lervo inspired Tolkien particularly, and the tragic hero can be recognized especially in the character of Túrin in “The Tale of Túrin Turambar” (in The Silmarillion), the “Narn i Hîn Húrin” (Unfinished Tales), and in “The Lay of the Children of Húrin” (The Lays of Beleriand; see also Tolkien 2007b). The problem of evil, predestination, and free will, as well as the nature of heroism and courage are taken up as central themes that connect Túrin with Kullervo (Solopova 2009, 46). A very insightful discussion on the Kalevala’s influence over Tolkien’s writing is by Petty (2004), who approaches the topic from three perspectives, those of intention, language, and content. Chance (2004) provides a particularly fascinating collection of essays, many of which deal with Tolkien’s desire to create a “mythology for England,” to use Carpenter’s phrase, and a direct link to matters Finnish is provided by the contributions in that volume of Shippey, Flieger, West, and Gay (all 2004). Shippey focuses on the myths of northern paganism with reference to both the Edda and Kalevala and thus detects the sources of Tolkien’s ideas about a possible legendarium. The Finnish connection is further illustrated by the other three essays, which concentrate on the hapless hero Kullervo and his role in Tolkien’s dream of a legendarium. A more unusual direction is taken by Gay who finds seeds of Väinämöinen in the characters of Tom Bombadil and Treebeard in particular.



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Lönnrot and the Kalevala Anne Petty (2004, 70) has pertinently compared Christopher Tolkien’s role of mediator, the scholar-scribe working on his father’s writings, with the role that Lönnrot played in the creation of the Kalevala, and gives the label of “England’s Lönnrot” to both father and son. It is worthwhile saying a few words about Elias Lönnrot (1802–1884) by way of introduction. He was a district physician who later became a professor in Finnish language and literature. According to Lönnrot, folk poems could not be said to have been “made”: . . . they make themselves, they are born, they grow and take shape without any special care on the part of the maker. . . . The moment they are said to be made by some particular person, they lose their value as folk poetry. (Foreword to the Kanteletar, as quoted in Honko 1990b, 213)

The Kalevala can be seen, therefore, as the terminal point at the end of a long development that led to the transformation of folklore into literature (Honko 1990b, 22; see also Honko 1990a). It constitutes a cycle of 50 “runos”/runes/poems without a continuous plot, even though the epic has been structured so that the various elements and episodes form an artistic whole. As Kaukonen says: The Kalevala is an autonomous entity, a poetic world of its own, in which everything is fictitious. It is the poetry of poetry in the sense that in it Lönnrot set out to provide a picture of the remote period in history that is in his opinion described in pre-literate poetry, but which in reality never existed. (1990, 165)

In summarizing the origins and background of the Kalevala, Raimo Jussila (2009, 6–7) refers to a common misconception that in the ancient past there would have been a connected poetic work whose last pieces Lönnrot somehow rescued from the mouths of the rune singers and put them together in their right places as if assembling a beautiful jigsaw puzzle. In fact the Kalevala has actually been created from three kinds of people: (1) rune singers who performed the poems orally, (2) collectors of folk poetry, and (3) the editor-collector-compiler-author Lönnrot (ibid.). Many scholars still seem to have different opinions about the relationships between these contributors. In the preface to the Kalevala, Lönnrot does not mention any rune singer by name, only the most important localities where material had been collected, but he is very conscientious in listing the names of the collectors. He is also very modest about his own contribution, as he wanted to give the impression of a genuine folkepic, even though he made as many as ten collecting trips to the Karelia region. The Kalevala is indeed a folk-epic, as the majority of its verses go back to folk poetry. At the same time it has to be emphasized that Lönnrot’s role in the composition of the Kalevala was decisive, as he:

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1. caught the idea about a national epic, which was already in the air, and carried it through; 2. collected most of the folk poetry himself; 3. gave the epic its name; 4. created the plot and structure of the whole as well as the dramatic tension; 5. selected the material and inserted a lot of incantations and charms in between the narrative poetry; 6. unified the dialectal features of the original poems into a “Kalevala” language; 7. combined several characters of the original poems and reduced their number; 8. combined and reduced the number of various localities in the original poems and formed Kalevala and Pohjola as the two main opposite forces; 9. fixed the timeframe; 10. eliminated certain elements from the original poems (e.g., sexuality, Christian elements and symbols, historical events); 11. bound different parts together by adding, for example, introductory verses for direct speech; and 12. composed his own verses (3% of the whole, according to Väinö Kaukonen; see Jussila 2009, 7). The Kalevala, as we know it today, took about 20 years to take its final shape. There were several shorter versions based on the collected folk poetry material, to which more material was added. Then there was the so-called Old Kalevala of 1835, containing 32 cantos and 12,078 verses, all collected by Lönnrot himself. And finally the Kalevala of 1849, the New Kalevala, containing 50 cantos and 22,795 verses. For the new version Lönnrot was able to draw on thousands of recordings made by the other folklore collectors he lists in the preface. The Kalevala has been translated into at least 55 languages, which is probably the best evidence for claiming that it is a living piece of literature.

Tolkien and the Kalevala An interesting and crucial addition to our knowledge about Tolkien’s acquaintance and study of the Kalevala, which fascinated him particularly, has been provided by Verlyn Flieger’s recent edition of texts by Tolkien (Tolkien 2010a–c). That gives us a direct view into Tolkien’s vision of the Kalevala, and the story of Kullervo that he found particularly tragic and moving. Bodleian Library MS Tolkien 61 contains two drafts of talks on the Kalevala, one in pencil and the other a typescript. The first talk was probably given by Tolkien twice in Oxford in late 1914 and early 1915. The latter, a somewhat revised version, may be a few years later, written during the war in about 1918 but never delivered. In both talks Tolkien is fasci­nated by the



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un-European character of the poems which can nevertheless only come from Europe (Tolkien 2010b, 246). He notes how other literary influences, for example from the East, can seem alien at first but then pale in comparison to the impact of the Kalevala or “Land of Heroes” which is almost like discovering a new continent (247). At first this unfamiliarity may be perturbing but eventually the reader will “find it rather jolly to live with this strange people and these new gods awhile, with this race of unhypocritical scandalous heroes and sadly unsentimental lovers” (ibid.). Tolkien shows concern for the possibility that there may be people around who do not find any special attraction in the undignified, sometimes even indecent behavior of these heroes who show readiness for tears and dirty dealings (2010c, 263). He admits that even his own experience was wonder and a little bewilderment, when he first came upon the Kalevala. But once he made his first acquaintance, he felt at home with the poetry. He is also against the ballads becoming “the playground of anthropologists and comparative mythologists” (265). Recognizing that they are “unhellenic” and “barbarous” he also delights in their discovery and wishes that “something of the same sort that belonged to the English” would still be left (ibid.). This ties in, of course, with the lengthy discussions sparked by Carpenter’s slight misrepresentation of Tolkien’s desire to provide a mythology “for England” (see ch. 5, and Carpenter 1977, 97–98). But what was most important for Tolkien was enjoying the ballads as such, tasting and finding pleasure in their primitiveness. The barbarousness, the paganism, and the sudden poetic turns seem to have appealed to Tolkien in particular: The fairy-tale’s own plausibility is respected; if a man slays an impossible monster, the story holds firm to its lie. In the Land of Heroes a man may kill a gigantic elk in one line and find it more poetic to call it a she-bear in the next. (2010c, 266)

For him there did not seem to be any background of literary or artistic tradition in the Kalevala poems, whereas Celtic tales show, for example, such traditions. They displayed a feeling of suddenness “splashed onto a clean bare canvas” that is both immediate and at times startling, for example when the reader comes across without any prior warning the idea of the earth being made of a teal’s egg, or of the impris­ onment of the sun and the moon inside a mountain (2010c, 267). Tolkien seems to experience the poems even visually, so that the whole world of Kalevala opens up in front of his eyes in one brief moment. This “nowness” is illustrated by a few verses from the last “runo” from Kirby’s 1907 translation of the Kalevala that Tolkien had read and also quoted for his audience when giving his talks. The end of the Kalevala does not mean an end to the singing, which will go on as the endless stream of water even in the future, but a good singer knows where to stop for the moment (Kirby 1985, Runo 50: 531–534). The original Finnish text is added here to give the feel of the sound of Finnish and the Kalevala dialect, which represents a kind of poetic convention:

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It was mentioned earlier that Tolkien was possibly so fond of the idea of genuine folk poetry without any interference of an artistic hand that he did not say very much about Lönnrot and his share in the composition. He does, however, acknowledge the fact that Lönnrot wrote down the poems, but only after many centuries of oral transfer and without any outside influence, including political or religious pressure. He claims that the Finns were one of the last acknowledged pagan peoples of Medieval Europe and that the compilation of the Kalevala “did not kill the minstrelsy; the balladsinging still goes on . . . and still undergo[es], a thousand variations” (2010c, 268– 269). One could claim that his view is somewhat romantic or idealistic as to the “reality” of the world of the Kalevala in his own time. Tolkien quite aptly notes that what makes the Kalevala different from oral poetry is that it is more connected, even without consisting of only one story, and is thus more approachable and readable. There is enough external evidence to support the faith in the genuineness of the poems themselves. They have survived relatively untouched (for example, by religious intervention) even after their availability in print, but Tolkien recognizes that reaching the true meaning of the tales without the inherent belief of the original composers in the “old gods” is very difficult (269). Tolkien’s essays on the Kalevala are from the earlier part of his career. Therefore he does not yet lead us to find connections between the text and his own mythology, for example between the Silmarils and the mysterious Sampo of the Kalevala. His main focus, at that point in his career, lies in the whole world of the epic as well as its pagan past and the primitive language and behavior of its people. He seems to find pure joy in the poems themselves, their sound, the unexpected turns of their stories, the feel of a lost world, without making us think that he would have any other desire than being able to plunge into that lost world.

Tolkien and Kullervo The story of Kullervo deserves a brief discussion of its own, both with reference to the Kalevala and to Tolkien. The story was not included in the Old Kalevala at all, but was added to the new version of 1849.



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As regards the outward events, the Kullervo episode (cantos 31–36) has less connection with the rest of the epic than the other episodes: neither Kullervo nor his people feature in the other events. Nevertheless the death of Ilmarinen’s wife, the maiden of Pohjola, at Kullervo’s hand marks the beginning of the enmity between Kalevala and Pohjola leading to the theft of the Sampo. (Kaukonen 1990, 169)

Kaukonen also claims that of “all the tragic fates that befall the characters in the Kalevala the most tragic, being predetermined, is that of Kullervo: born a hero, he is destroyed by the pitiless strokes of fate and his own inner conflicts” (1990, 175). According to a nineteenth-century view the story was about a “battle of a free spirit against slavery” (quoted in Alhoniemi 1990, 240). It is a well-known fact that Tolkien was particularly moved by the tragic story of Kullervo (see Solopova 2009, also Petty 2004). Even though many links between Tolkien’s writings and the Kalevala are easily hidden from a general reader, the story and character of Túrin shows very clear parallels to Kullervo, including predestination, unintended incest, and the death of the tragic hero. Bearing in mind the popularity of Kullervo, it is slightly surprising therefore that the “Story of Kullervo” by Tolkien remained unedited until 2010. Verlyn Flieger’s meticulous edition of the single manuscript containing the unfinished story (Bodleian Library MS Tolkien B 64/6) is a valuable addition to our knowledge of Tolkien’s special interests. The text covers 13 folios, written on both sides, but the story breaks off abruptly at a point about three-quarters through the story (Tolkien 2010a, 212). Flieger has included in the edition very helpful clarifying notes and commentary to make the text more approachable for a reader with less knowledge about the Kalevala, pointing out similarities and differences as well as some slips of Tolkien’s pen, such as confusions of the names of some of the characters. Tolkien’s “Story of Kullervo”/“The Story of Honto Taltewenlen” is an interesting mixture of a prose retelling of the story interspersed with verses of his own composition, all following the story of the Kalevala. Magic and myth are very much on the fore; and names are of particular interest, as some of the names invented by Tolkien echo or prefigure his earliest known efforts at his invented language Quenya (Tolkien 2010a, 213; information provided by Carl Hostetter; see also ch. 14). Tolkien introduces many invented terms for the characters (though the faithful dog Musti with some magic power has preserved his original name). As magic was something that particularly fascinated Tolkien, he probably wanted to give objects names as in the incantation of Ilmarinen’s/Āsemo’s wife who prayed to Ilu the God of Heaven for the protection of her cattle and used such names as Palikki, Telenda, Kaltuse, Pulu, Kuru, Sampi – all of Tolkien’s invention. These have no correspondence in the Kalevala. Similarly the naming of the great knife of Kullervo as “Sikki” by Tolkien serves as an illustrative example:

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Tolkien (2010a, 228) And Sari fell first into wrath and then into tears for he treasured that heirloom before silver and gold, and said [continues in verse] O my Sikki O my comrade O thou iron of Kalervo Which that hero wore and wielded Nought I had to lose in sorrow But my knife the picture graver And against a stone ’tis broken By the spite of that ill woman. O my Sikki O my Sikki O thou iron of Kalervo.

Kirby (1985, Runo 33: 87–98) Kullervo, Kalervo’s offspring, Looked, and saw the knife was broken And at length he burst out weeping, And he said the words which follow: “Save this knife I’d no companion, Nought to love except this iron, ’Twas an heirloom from my father, And the aged man had used it. Now against a stone ’tis broken, ’Gainst a piece of rock ’tis shattered In the cake of that vile mistress, Baked there by that wicked woman!”

Even though the tragic end of Kullervo provides a very dramatic scene in the Kalevala (36: 329–342), as it does in the story of Túrin, with the sword having a conversation with Kullervo, Tolkien’s scene is described in straightforward prose: Tolkien (2010a, 235) The sword says if it had joy in the death of Untamo how much in death of even wickeder Kullervoinen. And it had slaid [sic] many an innocent person, even his mother, so it would not boggle over Kullervo. He kills himself and finds the death he sought for.

Kirby (1985, Rune 36: 329–342) And it answered him as follows: “Wherfore at thy heart’s desire Should I not thy flesh devour, And drink up thy blood so evil? I who guiltless flesh have eaten, Drunk the blood of those who sinned not?” Kullervo, Kalervo’s offspring, With the very bluest stockings, On the ground the haft set firmly, On the heath the hilt pressed tightly, Turned the point against his bosom, And upon the point he threw him, Thus he found the death he sought for, Cast himself into destruction.

But later this laconic prose was to change to a much more dramatic tone in his story of Túrin: And from the blade rang a cold voice in answer: “Yea, I will drink thy blood gladly, that so I may forget the blood of Beleg my master, and the blood of Brandir slain unjustly. I will slay thee swiftly.” Then Túrin set the hilts upon the ground, and cast himself upon the point of Guthrang, and the black blade took his life. (S 270)

There is no clear evidence for what Tolkien had in mind when writing his “Story of Kullervo,” but we can assume that it is a draft for a more dramatic whole, written in his early years, when his acquaintance with the Kalevala was only relatively newly



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established. It is not surprising that a particularly dramatic and tragic character would appeal to him, as did the themes of predestination and the strong emotions that characterize the whole story. It has also been suggested that in Kullervo’s character Tolkien might have seen parallels to his own childhood with the loss of his parents, for example. On the other hand, Tolkien also felt that pathos was common in the Kalevala, and both very true and keen. He claimed even that in the “Death of Kullervo” this pathos is enhanced not hindered by what might appear to us as the almost humorous naivety in the mythological and fabulous surroundings (Tolkien 2010c, 272). If we follow Hostetter’s line of thinking in that some of the names in “The Story of Kullervo” echo or prefigure Tolkien’s earliest known efforts at his invented language Quenya, we could suggest that this story can also be seen as a testing ground for his own legendarium.

Tolkien and the Finnish Language In his essays on the Kalevala Tolkien talks also about the Finnish language, which he greatly admired (see Letters 87 and 214). It went without saying, he felt, that language and mythology go hand in hand – the language itself is as unfamiliar to readers as the tales are. Tolkien claimed that when dealing with Finnish “we are dealing with a language that is separated by a quite immeasurable gulf in method and expression from English . . . and for Englishmen at any rate, near the top of the list of the very difficult languages of Europe” (Tolkien 2010b, 247). Whilst admiring its beauty, especially the beauty of its sound, Tolkien also recognized its isolation in Europe (it is classified as Finno-Ugric alongside Estonian and Hungarian). As a philologist, Tolkien obviously knew about the early borrowings and contact between languages across Europe, but he very bluntly claims that Finnish remains a language far more primitive than most of the other languages in Europe and seemingly in a permanent “flexible fluid unfixed state,” citing the invention inherent in the lines: Enkä lähe Inkerelle Penkerelle Pänkerelle – or Ihveniä ahvenia Tuimenia taimenia (2010c, 271)2

Tolkien notes here the uncommon flexibility within the language to allow insertions of words such as “Pänkerelle” or “Ihveniä” and “tuimenia” to merely echo or offset “Penkerelle,” “ahvenia,” and “taimenia.” This was not something that Tolkien had encountered before, certainly to this extent, outside of nonsense rhyme in English, but he was at pains to say this did not in any way reduce the effectiveness of the poems. As is noted elsewhere (see ch. 14) a fascinating and intriguing area within Tolkien studies is his invented languages. In summary we can safely state that he was interested

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in linguistic innovation and found enormous pleasure in it, as noted in his essay “A Secret Vice”: “This idea of using the linguistic faculty for amusement is however deeply interesting to me. . . . In these invented languages the pleasure is more keen than it can be even in learning a new language” (MC 206). Carpenter (1977) refers to Tolkien’s “intoxication” when he found Finnish and started studying it with the help of C. N. E. Eliot’s A Finnish Grammar of 1890. He liked the sound of Finnish, in particular. Even at a superficial level, we can easily discern features of Finnish and especially the language of the Kalevala in some words of Tolkien’s Quenya. Rautala (1993) lists four types of similarity between Finnish and Quenyan words: 1. those that are identifiably Finnish, having both a phonological and a semantic resemblance (e.g., anta- “give,” rauta “iron,” tie “path, course, etc.”); 2. those that are identical with Finnish words but where meanings differ in the two languages (e.g., caita, calma, yulma, lanta, lassi, lintu, vala); 3. those that phonologically could be Finnish, although until now no need for them has been felt (e.g., hiruva, lasselanta, parma, silima, silmarilli); 4. those whose phonological structure is incompatible with Finnish (e.g., frequency of dentals and voiced stops in Quenya). Syntactic similarities are far more difficult to detect. Though this kind of hypothesizing can only be taken half-seriously, it does seem that Tolkien was sensitive to the sound of Finnish and other languages that he was influenced by, and he happily absorbed elements from what he heard or read. Tolkien’s deep admiration of the Kalevala is also shown in his description of the Kalevala meter and especially in his way of talking about the imitation of this in Hiawatha, which he does not consider “a genuine storehouse of Indian folklore, but a mild and gentle bowdlerizing of the Kalevala coloured with disconnected bits of Indian lore” (Tolkien 2010c, 272).

Conclusion In his “Valedictory Address” Tolkien recalled some of the salient moments in his academic past. One of them was “Seeing Henry Cecil Wyld wreck a table in the Cadena Café with the vigour of his representation of Finnish minstrels chanting the Kalevala” (MC 238). This little memory probably tells us also how thrilled these Oxford scholars were about the ancient poems of an isolated pagan nation that passed their oral poetry from generation to generation until it was finally collected and written down by Elias Lönnrot. This kind of enthusiasm is difficult for us today to understand, even if we acknowledge the value and admire the originality of the Kalevala. For a Finn though, living in the twenty-first century, the Kalevala does not now speak as powerfully as it did for Tolkien and some of his friends and colleagues. But Jussila (2009) does claim that the work is now at least better known by every Finn



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than when it was solely for the educated Finnish-speaking population of the 1850s. Every Finn would recognize it as part of the “Finnish identity,” belonging to the core of Finnish literature, and would have a general idea of what it is about, its main content, and the names of the main characters. But the 150 years since its publication have distanced people from the origins of the Kalevala. Whilst most will have a copy at home, only a few will have read the work from cover to cover. Its language and its mythological world are foreign to a modern reader. But for Tolkien the ancient past of the Kalevala and most importantly its wealth of mythology, ballads, and free imagination were the real attractions. And whilst the division between the offspring of nymphs, sprites, and other beings and the human characters is not elaborated at all in the Kalevala, this was something he took over and built into his own legendarium. People of today may be divided in their opinions about the filmed adaptations of The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit, but if they attract people into Tolkien’s mythological world, they will have fulfilled one benefit and opened the doors to Tolkien’s “real” Middle-earth. In a similar vein, it is hoped that Tolkien’s fiction could then provide an opening into the world of the Kalevala, something which he would have undoubtedly approved of. When Tolkien talks about his “secret vice” of linguistic invention and his poetry composed in his invented languages, he addresses his audience saying: You must remember that these things were constructed deliberately to be personal, and give private satisfaction – not for scientific experiment, nor yet in expectation of any audience. A consequent weakness is therefore their tendency, too free as they were from cold exterior criticism, to be “over-pretty”, to be phonetically and semantically sentimental (MC 213)

He very openly confesses his attachment to his creations, a very intimate relationship indeed, and he shuns the idea of detailed scholarly analysis of them. They were part of his own personal life and joy, composed for his own pleasure. Tolkien continues by quoting his poem “Oilima Markirya” or “The Last Ark” in his invented language, and in this again you can hear echoes of Finnish, both phonetic and semantic: lanta-ránar, ve kaivo-kalma; húro ulmula, mandu túma? in the moon falling a corpse-candle; the storm mumbling, the abyss moving?

This kind of poetry in an invented language based at least partly on existing languages and drawing themes from ancient poetry offered Tolkien perhaps his awaited holiday,

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away from the traditional structures and concepts of verse most people were accustomed to. And if on such a holiday or break from tradition: we half hear the voice of Ahto in the noises of the sea, half shudder at the thought of Pohja, gloomy land of witchcraft, or Tuonela yet darker region of the dead, it is nonetheless with quite another part of our minds that we do this than that which we reserve for our real beliefs and religion. (Tolkien 2010c, 270)

Notes 1  The reference is presumably to the League of Nations formed in 1919–1920 (Tolkien 2010a, 213). 2  The same wordplay is quoted in Tolkien’s “A Secret Vice”: “For us departed are the unsophisticated days, when even Homer could pervert a word to suit sound-music; or such merry freedom as one sees in the Kalevala, when a line can be adorned by phonetic trills

– as in Enkä lähe Inkerelle, Penkerelle, pänkerelle (Kal. xi.55), or Ihveniä ahvenia, tuimenia, taimenia (Kal. xlviii.100), where pänkerelle, ihveniä, taimenia are ‘non-significant’, mere notes in a phonetic tune struck to harmonize with pen­ kerelle, or tuimenia which do ‘mean’ something” (MC 218). An editorial slip may explain the confusion between tuimenia and taimenia, as it is taimenia that “means something.”

References Alhoniemi, Pirkko.1990. “The Reception of the Kalevala and Its Impact on the Arts.” In Honko (1990b), 231–244. Battarbee, Keith J., ed. 1993. Scholarship and Fantasy: Proceedings of the Tolkien Phenomenon, May 1992, Turku, Finland. Turku: University of Turku. Carpenter, Humphrey. 1977. J. R. R. Tolkien – A Biography. London: Allen & Unwin. Chance, Jane, ed. 2004. Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. de Anna, Luigi. 1993. “The Magic of Words: J. R. R. Tolkien and Finland.” In Battarbee (1993), 7–19. Flieger, Verlyn. 2004. “A Mythology for Finland: Tolkien and Lönnrot as Mythmakers.” In Chance (2004), 277–283. Gay, David Elton. 2004. “J. R. R. Tolkien and the Kalevala: Some Thoughts on the Finnish Origins of Tom Bombadil and Treebeard.” In Chance (2004), 295–304. Honko, Lauri. 1990a. “The Kalevala: The Processual View.” In Honko (1990b), 181–229.

Honko, Lauri, ed. 1990b. Religion, Myth, and Folklore in the World’s Epics: The Kalevala and its Predecessors. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Jussila, Raimo. 2009. Kalevalan Sanakirja [Kalevala Dictionary]. Helsinki: Otava. Kalevala. 1964. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjalli­ suuden Seura. Kaukonen, Väinö. 1990. “The Kalevala as Epic”. In Honko (1990b), 157–179. Kirby, W. F., trans. and ed. 1985. Kalevala: The Land of the Heroes. London and Dover, NH: The Athlone Press. Petty, Anne C. 2004. “Identifying England’s Lönnrot.” Tolkien Studies, 1: 69–84. Rautala, Helena. 1993. “Familiarity and Distance: Quenya’s Relation to Finnish.” In Battarbee (1993), 21–31. Shippey, Tom. 2000. J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. London: HarperCollins. Shippey, Tom. 2004. “Tolkien and the Appeal of the Pagan: Edda and Kalevala.” In Chance (2004), 145–161. Shippey, Tom. 2005. The Road to Middle-earth. Rev. and expanded edn. London: HarperCollins.



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Solopova, Elizabeth. 2009. Languages, Myths and History: An Introduction to the Linguistic and Literary Background of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Fiction. New York: North Landing Books.

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West, Richard C. 2004. “Setting the Rocket Off in Story: The Kalevala as the Germ of Tolkien’s Legendarium.” In Chance (2004), 285–294.

Further Reading Honko, Lauri, ed. 2002. The Kalevala and the World’s Traditional Epics. Studia Fennica Folk-

loristica 12. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society.

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Celtic: “Celtic Things” and “Things Celtic” – Identity, Language, and Mythology J. S. Lyman-Thomas

In a 1937 letter to his publisher Stanley Unwin, just after The Hobbit was released, Tolkien expressed “a certain distaste” for “Celtic things” (Letters 26). Eighteen years later, after the third volume of The Lord of the Rings had appeared, he referred in his O’Donnell Trust Lecture “English and Welsh” to his “large work . . . which contains . . . much of what I personally have received from the study of things Celtic” (MC 162). In light of the earlier remark, it is not surprising that very little attention had been devoted to Tolkien’s use of “things Celtic” until relatively recently. But these two comments do not, in fact, bookend a period during which Tolkien’s views evolved from despising “Celtic things” to respecting “things Celtic.” Over the span of his life, his letters and works reflect a consistent interest in and affection for “things Celtic,” particularly Welsh. Scholarship in this area has grown considerably in the past few years, shedding new light on Tolkien’s relationship with Celtic literatures and languages;1 in the process, there has also been necessary reconsideration of just what he meant in that 1937 letter. The same visionary who was arguably able to fulfill his dream “to restore to the English an epic tradition” (Letters 231) also loved Wales (Letters 289). In a time when the British Empire was waning and England itself was going through an identity crisis, Tolkien demonstrated a complex understanding of the interplay of personal, regional, and national identity and was profoundly influenced by Celtic languages and literature.

A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.



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Identity Tolkien’s relationship with “things Celtic” was intimately bound up in his own professional and ethnic identity. Rather than offering a definitive view of his attitude toward them, the comment in the 1937 letter to Unwin was actually more the rebuke of a layman by a professional scholar. Tolkien identified himself again and again as a philologist, which was reflected in how he referred to himself, in points he chose to respond to, and in the quality of his explanations. In 1955, for Harvey Breit’s weekly “In and Out of Books” in The New York Times Book Review, Tolkien was quoted as saying: My work did not “evolve” into a serious work. It started like that. . . . I am a philologist, and all my work is philological. I avoid hobbies because I am a very serious person and cannot distinguish between private amusement and duty. (Letters 218)

His identification as a philologist was complete: he saw it reflected in everything he did, whether it was “private amusement” or “duty,” scholarship or fiction. He subsequently felt it necessary to elaborate on his answers to Breit in a letter to Houghton Mifflin, his American publisher, explaining that “the remark about ‘philology’ was intended to allude to what is I think a primary ‘fact’ about my work, that it is all of a piece, and fundamentally linguistic in inspiration” (Letters 219; emphasis Tolkien’s). In 1964, in a letter to Christopher Bretherton, he wrote, “I began the construction of languages in early boyhood: I am primarily a scientific philologist. My interests were, and remain, largely scientific” (Letters 345). The emphasis on the scientific quality of his approach is crucial to understanding his remarks in that 1937 letter. He was reacting to a reader for his publisher who had complained about the “eye splitting Celtic names” in the “Quenta Silmarillion” and had said that the work had “something of that mad, bright-eyed beauty that perplexes all Anglo-Saxons in the face of Celtic art” (Letters 25). Tolkien responded as a professional philologist: I am sorry the names split his eyes – personally I believe (and here believe I am a good judge) they are good, and a large part of the effect. They are coherent and consistent and made upon two related linguistic formulae, so that they achieve a reality not fully achieved to my feeling by other name-inventors . . . Needless to say they are not Celtic! Neither are the tales. I do know Celtic things (many in their original languages Irish and Welsh), and feel for them a certain distaste: largely for their fundamental unreason. They have bright colour, but are like a broken stained glass window reassembled without design. They are in fact “mad” as your reader says – but I don’t believe I am. (Letters 26)

He first explains the rationale for the names – they are based on “two related linguistic formulae” – then addresses the use of the word “Celtic,” which the reader was clearly applying in its general, popular sense, based on stereotypes that were the legacy of Matthew Arnold. But “Tolkien’s sense of what is Celtic derived from first-hand

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knowledge of Celtic material in the original languages” (Phelpstead 2011, 11): he rejects popular misconception in favor of academic accuracy, both in the indiscriminate use of the word “Celtic” (his invented words are not semantically derived from any of the Celtic languages, of which he specifies first-hand knowledge by mentioning Irish and Welsh) and in its application in the Arnoldian sense (his tales are not of the fanciful, romantic ilk that had come to be widely accepted as “Celtic” because of Arnold’s lectures on Celtic literature in 1865 and 1866).2 The “Celtic things” that are “mad” are those of Arnold’s legacy – not things genuine – notions to which Tolkien does not subscribe. His letters abound with his insistence on linguistic specificity.3 There seems no reason to assume he would not demand the same specificity in use of the word “Celtic.” Carl Phelpstead’s analysis of the 1929 lecture “Celts and Teutons in the Early World” demonstrates that Tolkien clearly understood the tension between the Arnoldian stereotypes and historical reality, and actually anticipated later scholarly conclusions. Tolkien argues “against the idea of the ‘two races and their perennial incompatibility and unceasing conflict’ . . . later he claims that although there is no evidence of racial differences between Celt and Teuton there is much contrary evidence that ‘they were indistinguishably alike’ ” (Phelpstead 2011, 15). There is no doubt that Tolkien’s thinking probably evolved over his career, like any committed scholar’s. However, given that his fascination with Welsh began early (MC 192), his personal “Celtic” library turned out to be quite extensive,4 and he refers to himself as a “Celtophile” as early as 1929 (Phelpstead 2011, 15), it seems the disparagement of “Celtic things” that for so long discouraged scholars from investigating his use of Irish, Welsh, and other so-called Celtic material was based on a fundamental misinterpretation. In fact, the recently published “Essays on Kalevala” contains references to the Mabinogion that seem on the surface to directly contradict his remarks in the 1937 letter but which actually reinforce his distinction between the “Celtic” of Arnoldian stereotype and “Celtic” as applied in the science of philology. In both the manuscript and typescript versions, Tolkien compares the Kalevala to the Mabinogion (Tolkien 2010b, 248–249 and 266–267); in the manuscript version, he observes: The Mabinogion has such a background [of literary tradition]: a feeling of a great amount of development which has resulted in a field of the most excellently harmonized and subtly varied colours against which the figures of the actors of the stories stand out. (Tolkien 2010b, 249; emphasis added)

This is consistent with the 1937 letter not contradictory: here Tolkien is clearly not discussing one of the “Celtic things” of “bright colour . . . like a broken stained glass window reassembled without design” (Letters 26) but rather genuine Celtic material of a particular culture. He presented this version of the essay in November, 1914, 13 years before the letter to Unwin (Flieger in Tolkien 2010a, 213). Tolkien’s fondness



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for and interest in “things Celtic” – particularly things Welsh – actually remained fairly consistent throughout his career and life. Two other identity factors clearly important to Tolkien were his nationality and, of course, language, and these are both inextricably linked to each other and to “things Celtic.” He identified strongly as English and vehemently rejected identification as part of the larger empire, writing in a 1943 letter to his son Christopher, “I love England (not Great Britain and certainly not the British Commonwealth (grr!))” (Letters 65). His insistence on specificity remains consistent: he narrows his ethnicity to a particular region in England, calling his family “Mercian” (Letters 108), meaning someone who hails from the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia, which is “the Latin adaptation of (West Saxon) Old English Mierce, the equivalent of Marc in the dialect of Mercia itself, and means ‘border or boundary people’ (as in the Welsh Marches)” (Phelpstead 2011, 110–111). In the 1955 letter to Houghton Mifflin referred to above, he wrote, “I am indeed in English terms a West-midlander at home only in the counties upon the Welsh Marches” (Letters 218) and called himself a “Saxon in Welsh terms, or in our own one of the English of Mercia” in his “English and Welsh” lecture (MC 162). That he himself would include a reference to the Welsh border in his definition of “home” is clearly significant and relates directly to his life-long fascination with the language. In “English and Welsh” he tells of the “call” of the Welsh language: I heard it coming out of the west. It struck at me in the names on coal-trucks; and drawing nearer, it flickered past on station-signs, a flash of strange spelling and a hint of a language old and yet alive; even in an adeiladwyd 1887, ill-cut on a stone-slab, it pierced my linguistic heart. (MC 192)

He discusses the “seniority” of the “British” (Brythonic) language in Britain, which would become Welsh – “It had become already virtually ‘indigenous’ when the English first came to disturb its possession” (MC 177) – and he suggests that “there is a difference between the first-learned language, the language of custom, and an individual’s native language, his inherent linguistic predilections” (190). He identifies in his own – and others’ – predilection for Welsh, “the native language to which in unexplored desire we would still go home” (194; emphasis added). According to Yoko Hemmi, Tolkien “is arguing that many of the inhabitants of Britain, including himself . . . are, metaphorically speaking, still British or ancient Britons deep down” (2010, 155), “British” in the ancient sense, not the modern. Tolkien’s English identity originated in the geography of Mercia5 and was cultivated by his passion for, and training in, philology (specifically Old English and things Anglo-Saxon and Germanic, see ch. 15), but it was also profoundly influenced by the notion of a shared heritage and ancestral language with his “Briton” (Celtic) neighbors, the Welsh. This identification with “things Celtic” had deep roots for Tolkien and had major implications for his language invention and for his fiction in general.

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Language The main Celtic language that influenced Tolkien was clearly Welsh, not surprisingly, considering that he enjoyed Arthurian literature as a boy. He was fascinated by the language from an early age, and spent the money from the only prize he ever won on Welsh books (MC 192). He loved Wales itself (Letters 289), he owned many books in Welsh and pertaining to Welsh, including “the so-called ‘Mabinogion’ from both the Red Book of Hergest and the White Book of Rhydderch in four editions” (Fimi 2007, 51), and he engaged in serious study of the Welsh language.6 It is impossible to separate discussions of Tolkien’s invented languages from discussions of his fiction, and the modeling of the Elvish language Sindarin on Welsh undoubtedly constitutes “the most profound impact made by Tolkien’s love of Wales and Welsh on his creative writing” (Phelpstead 2011, 50). As Tolkien said of his invented languages in general, “The stories were made . . . to provide a world for the languages” (Letters 219, see also ch. 14). He also understood that languages were inextricably linked to the cultures that used them, noting “that ‘legends’ depend on the language to which they belong; but a living language depends equally on the ‘legends’ which it conveys by tradition” (Letters 231). He described Sindarin as having a “linguistic character very like .  .  . British-Welsh” and believed it appropriate to “the rather ‘Celtic’ type of legends and stories told of its speakers” (Letters 176), such as the Grey-elves. Tolkien understood language as a dimension of identity, integral to the way stories are told and inextricable from the culture the stories are about. While Sindarin is not Welsh, and the Grey-elves are not analogues to the Welsh people, there are resonances that cannot be overlooked. Sindarin sounds like Welsh and often looks like Welsh, an effect achieved through similar consonant and vowel sounds and combinations and similarities in grammar but not in lexical content. Drawing on Jim Allan’s 1978 An Introduction to Elvish, Carl Phelpstead offers a useful summary of the similarities between Welsh and Sindarin, among which are a similar phonology, including certain sound changes in Sindarin that “resemble the initial mutations so characteristic of Welsh” (Phelpstead 2011, 46–47); similar creation of plurals (47); and similar placement of adjectives and genitive nouns after nouns being modified (48). But while Sindarin may seem like a variant of Welsh, it does not share vocabulary, and words that might look the same are totally different in meaning. “Amon hen” in Sindarin means “hill of the eye” (48) or “the eye’s hill,” adhering to the pattern of showing possession by putting the genitive noun after the noun it modifies. But “amon” is not a Welsh word, and while “hen” means “old” in Welsh, it is actually one of the few Welsh adjectives that are placed before the noun they modify (unless “hen” itself is modified, when it reverts to the usual order, as in “ci hen iawn,” “very old dog”). Sindarin may look Welsh to an English speaker, but to a Welsh speaker, it is a foreign language. Tolkien not only modeled Sindarin on Welsh but he created a comprehensive language history, in which languages evolved in precisely the way he knew happened in



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the real world. Sindarin and Quenya, which is modeled on Finnish (another of Tolkien’s language loves, see ch. 18), both evolved from the parent language Eldarin. Tolkien explained his rationale in a letter to Naomi Mitchison: . . . I have composed them in some completeness, as well as their history and account of their relationship. They are intended (a) to be definitely of a European kind in style and structure (not in detail); and (b) to be specially pleasant. The former is not difficult to achieve; but the latter is more difficult, since individuals’ personal predilections, especially in the phonetic structure of languages, varies widely, even when modified by the imposed languages (including their so-called “native” tongue). (Letters 175)

He goes on to describe Quenya as “[t]he archaic language of lore” meant to be a kind of “Elven-latin” and Sindarin as the “living language of the Western Elves” (176). In other words, Quenya and Sindarin have roughly the same relationship to Eldarin that Latin and Welsh do, respectively, to Indo-European. As Phelpstead notes, this is particularly interesting because Finnish (upon which Quenya is based) “is one of the few European languages not part of that family, belonging with Hungarian and Estonian to the Finno-Ugric language family” (2011, 43). But while Welsh and Finnish have very different roots, Tolkien may have seen connections between them besides his aesthetic pleasure in both. They did share a common historical crisis, which Tolkien surely would have known about;7 both languages were under threat and underwent significant turning points in the sixteenth century, thanks to the printing press. S. H. Steinberg credits the survival of the Welsh language specifically “to the fact that from 1546 books were printed in Cymric” (1959, 85), a view later endorsed by Elizabeth Eisenstein (2005, 91–92). Steinberg and many other historians have noted the decline of Irish, Cornish, and Scots Gaelic (and other minor and/or non-state European languages): the dearth of early printed material (sixteenth century specifically) clearly seems to have handicapped the chances of the languages’ survival. Welsh was in danger of marginalization as a result of various pieces of legislation: the so-called Act of Union of 1536,8 which made English the official language of administration and law in Wales and barred monoglot Welsh speakers from holding public office (Jenkins, Suggett, and White 1997, 62); and the Act of Uniformity under Edward VI in 1549, “which decreed public worship was to be conducted only in English” (Roberts 1997, 139). The Act for the Translation of the Scriptures of 1563 that authorized the translation into Welsh of both the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer paved the way for the printing of William Salesbury’s New Testament in Welsh in 1567 (Roberts 1997, 142).9 William Morgan then both revised Salesbury’s translation and finished the work for publication in September 1588 (Williams 1997, 217). The Bible provided both a sense of legitimacy and a model of literary style for the language, and thus helped ensure the survival of the language. Finnish was at risk for different reasons: it actually had no written form at all before Bishop Mikael Agricola composed a primer in the language, which was printed in

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Stockholm in 1542 (Steinberg 1959, 87). Subsequent works by Bishop Agricola followed, including a New Testament in 1548 (though the Finnish did not get a full Bible until 1642; Steinberg 1959, 88). That Welsh and Finnish were special to Tolkien is obvious, and while he referred most often to their aesthetic attractions,10 he had to have been aware of their relative political and sociological situations on the world stage. The Welsh language had suffered greatly in the nineteenth century: the so-called Blue Books11 questioned the legitimacy of the language; Welsh-Not campaigns abounded (Roberts 1998, 33); and there was “a lamentable erosion of confidence [in the Welsh language] among the Welsh cultural élite” (Jenkins 1998, 12). While the number of Welsh speakers rose “to a maximum of 977,366 in 1911,” over the century “the percentage of Welsh speakers declined from around 95 per cent to 44.6 per cent,” and “the number of monoglot Welsh speakers declined sharply between 1891 and 1911” (Jenkins 1998, 3) – the same year Tolkien entered Oxford (Phelpstead 2011, xix). While twenty-first-century ideas about sociolinguistics and postcolonial concerns about language extinction cannot be ascribed to Tolkien, he did apparently value multiplicity. Even though his main professional interest was in forms of English, and he identified strongly as English, he objected to the hegemony of the English language. In 1943, he reacted to being told that one eighth of the population of the world spoke English and that it was the biggest language group: If true, damn shame – say I. May the curse of Babel strike all their tongues till they can only say “baa baa.” It would mean much the same. I think I shall have to refuse to speak anything but Old Mercian. (Letters 65)

And while he wasn’t fond of Irish, as an academic he still valued it: “I have no liking at all for Gaelic from Old Irish downwards, as a language, but it is of course of great historical and philological interest, and I have at various times studied it” (Letters 385). Tolkien established a connection between the languages he created from Welsh and Finnish that was different from what their models had in reality but which was appropriate and even prophetic in its own way: the once endangered Finnish, the basis for Quenya – the “Elven-latin” – went on to become a state language when Finland declared independence in 1917. Welsh, on the other hand, took longer to come into its own. Tolkien did not live to see the political equality of Welsh in Wales, established by the Welsh Language Act of 1993, but there is no doubt that Welsh, and everything he knew about it, influenced various aspects of his work. Yoko Hemmi (2010) contends that, “[using] ‘English and Welsh’ as a main ‘epitext,’ we can determine how [Tolkien’s] original theory of native language expounded in the essay is reflected in his imagined linguistic landscape of The Lord of the Rings” (148). To jump to the bottom line of a rather complicated argument, using textual evidence, including the repeated instances when the Hobbits are moved by or spontaneously speak Sindarin (a language they presumably don’t know), Hemmi demonstrates that “[t]he relationship between Sindarin and the Hobbits could be considered as



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analogous to British and the people ‘who today live in Lloegr and speak Saesneg’ ” (2010, 168); in other words that Sindarin is to the Hobbits what Tolkien feels Welsh is to many English: a native language that they don’t necessarily speak but of which they seem to have an “inherited memory” (159) that represents “home” (168). When Tolkien suggests that there are many others who share his predilection for Welsh as an inherited “native language” (MC 194), he is perhaps being optimistic. He himself referred to English discomfort with the Welsh language when he acknowledged that the predilection for Welsh among English may lie “dormant . . . shown only in uneasy jokes about Welsh spelling and place-names” (ibid.). It has always been viewed by many English at best with suspicion, at worst with outright ridicule and hostility.12 It was somewhat unusual for an Englishman in the early twentieth century to be as fond of Welsh as Tolkien was. He was, as so often happened, ahead of his time.

Mythology As many critics have discussed, Tolkien, staunchly English, lamented the lack of a singularly English mythology, comparable to the accomplishments of the nineteenthcentury folklorists with their collections and recreations of national mythologies, like the Grimm brothers or Lönnrot, whose Kalevala Tolkien so admired. The seeming void in English literature may have been more keenly felt because of the political and social situation in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The England in which Tolkien was a child and young adult experienced the weakening of the British Empire (to which English identity, in particular, was inextricably bound) and increased immigration that played on xenophobic fears of disease and contamination. But also, much more local and often overlooked, was the rising nationalism uncomfortably close in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, all “Celtic” regions with their own long, unique mythological traditions. The Welsh Nonconformist majority managed to disestablish the Anglican Church in Wales in 1920; the Scottish Home Rule Association introduced a Scottish Home Rule Bill in 1919, 1920, 1921, 1924, and 1927 (Welsh 2002, 370); and the Republic of Ireland gained independence in 1922 (Welsh 2002, 352). The proximity of the growing nationalism of the so-called “Celtic fringe” placed those cultures in pages of The Times over tea tables. As has been demonstrated above, though Tolkien had no use for the Celtic stereotypes of the nineteenth century, he clearly felt lifelong fondness for genuine “Things Celtic” (particularly Welsh) that the English in general, and the British government in particular, did not share. The English attitude expressed in the Blue Books of 1847, in which highly prejudicial language associated Welsh Methodism with “moral, as well as sanitary, failure” and indicted the Welsh language as a major factor in Welsh backwardness and educational failings (Roberts 1998, 172), prevailed into the twentieth century. But at the same time as the English were vilifying the Welsh, they were also rehabilitating King Arthur as English. As Marjorie Burns puts it:

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By focusing on King Arthur and Arthur’s Round Table knights (and on Teutonic elements within these tales), the nineteenth-century English found a means of conferring respectability on Camelot and making it their own. What had once been Celtic was now Arthurian and therefore English – so fully and fittingly so (in the minds of some) that Arthur’s Celtic roots were as good as lost to view. (2005, 17)

Tolkien, however, was much more subtle and respectful of his source material: in “English and Welsh” he says: There is, of course, no doubt that the view of the process which established the English language in Britain as a simple case of “Teutons” driving out and dispossessing “Celts” is altogether too simple. There was fusion and confusion. (MC 169)

Tolkien’s use of source material is decidedly not simple: he weaves it into his mythology in a way that seems totally organic while at the same time creating complex resonances that make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. Because Tolkien attests that he began with the languages and created the mythological world as a vehicle for them, a logical place to start a discussion of his Celtic sources is with Sindarin (the language indebted to Welsh) and its speakers, the Elves. The Elves and their world are representative of Tolkien’s nuanced use of the source material. Before they were the Elves of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, they were the “fairies”/Elves of The Book of Lost Tales, written early on but published posthumously. Dimitra Fimi traces the development of Tolkien’s fairies from their beginnings as Victorian “fluttering sprites” into the Elves of The Lord of the Rings, who are “taller than an average Man and not winged” (2009, 14) and demonstrates that he was particularly concerned with creating an English fairy tradition separate from the Celtic, especially from the Irish (57). Between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, the Elves “have lost their frivolous side and are now capitalized” (Burns 2005, 48). But while the Elves’ fully realized culture in The Lord of the Rings has more connection with Celtic traditions than English, and it is deliberately contrasted with the Men of Gondor and the Rohirrim of The Mark, both with clear English associations (“The Mark” is from the Old English “mierce,” meaning Mercian – see above, also ch. 15, and Phelpstead 2011, 110–111), the formula is more complicated than The Elves = The Welsh simply because Sindarin shares ties with Welsh. Burns’s insightful analysis from her chapter “Bridges, Gates, and Doors” is representative: “In Tolkien’s stories the closest parallels to the Celtic Otherworld are Rivendell and Lothlórien” (2005, 54). She points out that “[e]ntrances into Tolkien’s Celtic settings are indicated by water crossings . . . or by archways of bending branches and trees or by shadowy descents into sequestered valleys” (52). To enter Lothlórien, the Fellowship must cross the Silverlode and Nimrodel, as well as be led blindfolded over water and other unknown perils in a “series of initiatory steps” (65). As tempting as it is to accept the Welsh analogue, the resonances here are of Irish origin, and Burns goes on to describe the role of the Tuatha Dé Danann in the Celtic Otherworld that Tolkien references in his descriptions of thresholds into Elven territories (66). Several



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scholars have noted the similarities between Tolkien’s Elves in “The Flight of Noldor” (in The Silmarillion) and stories of the Tuatha Dé Danann from Ireland. Fimi offers a particularly useful summary of basic parallels: “the Tuatha Dé Danann are not clearly defined as ‘demons’ or men, but appear as semi-divine beings” (like the Elves, who aren’t gods but who are “superior to men”); the Tuatha Dé Danann’s skills and roles echo those of the “High-Elves, who learn arts and crafts from the Valar”; and the Tuatha Dé Danann and Elves have similar reasons for making their respective journeys to Ireland and Middle-earth (Fimi 2006, 162–163). Tolkien appears to draw on source material appropriate for his characters in the same way he creates the languages that are appropriate for their speakers’ stories. The isolated, forested, other-worldly Lothlórien (as well as other Elven habitats) seems to play directly to the Victorian stereotype of the sensitive, mystical Celt in tune with nature that Tolkien disdained; however, the picture of Lothlórien is not so simple (and is, therefore, typically Tolkien): it is a place with a bad reputation. Boromir says, “of that perilous land we have heard in Gondor, and it is said that few come out who once go in; and of that few none have escaped unscathed,” but Aragorn counters, “Say not unscathed, but if you say unchanged, then maybe you will speak the truth. . . . But lore wanes in Gondor, Boromir, if in the city of those who once were wise they now speak evil of Lothlórien” (FR, II, vi, 440). He is chiding Boromir that belief in fanciful tales or rumor says more about Gondor than it does about Lothlórien, which echoed prevalent English tendencies toward the Welsh. Through Aragorn, Tolkien is making clear that Lothlórien isn’t a reflection of the nineteenth-century Celtic stereotype. The interplay of Welsh and Irish elements (genuine things Celtic) associated with the Elves in their various settings in his mythology suggests the “subtly varied colours” Tolkien found so appealing in the Mabinogion (Tolkien 2010b, 249). Phelpstead provides a Welsh connection for the Elves, linking them to “the tylwyth teg, the ‘fair folk’ or fairies, and from them back to the god Nodens, or at least to Gwynn vab Nudd (Gwyn ap Nudd), son of Nudd/Nodens and abductor of Creiddylad in Culhwch and Olwen” (2011, 65). In the same discussion, Phelpstead recalls Tolkien quoting from Pwyll (also in the Mabinogion) “in order to demonstrate that ‘Celtic’ narrative is seldom stereotypically Celtic: rather than a dreamy visionary, Pwyll emerges from this episode as a ‘very practical man,’ as is conventionally expected of the English or other Germanic peoples” (Phelpstead 2011, 65). This addresses the same stereotype that Tolkien had also challenged in his “Celts and Teutons” lecture in 1929 (ibid.).13 Tolkien had an early interest in Arthurian material, discovering Sir Gawain and the Green Knight while at King Edward’s school (Carpenter 1977, 38; see also chs. 1, 2, 3, and 16), but when he began developing his mythology, though he considered the Arthurian world “powerful,” he dismissed it as “imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English” and, further, it was “involved in . . . the Christian religion” (Letters 144). As a philologist, he knew well the origins of the material and, of course, had not subscribed to the nineteenth-century Anglicization of it, and while he ultimately considered his work “fundamentally religious and

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Catholic,” he had consciously avoided overt references in favor of working the “religious element . . . into the story and the symbolism” (Letters 172). But despite his rationale against borrowing from the Arthurian world, he was influenced by it, and he adapted and used things Arthurian in his characteristically nuanced way. Tolkien’s relationship with Arthurian material was, of course, grounded in scholarship. He turned his early interest in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight into an edition of the poem for University students with collaborator E. V. Gordon in 1925 (Carpenter 1977, 118).14 He did begin one creative Arthurian piece, a non-rhyming alliterative poem, “The Fall of Arthur,” which is notable because “it is one of the few pieces of writing in which Tolkien deals explicitly with sexual passion” (Carpenter 1977, 188; see also ch. 27). While it was never finished and is the only work in which he borrowed directly from Arthurian material, many scholars have observed his use of Arthurian motifs in his fiction (the text though was eventually published; see Tolkien 2013). Verlyn Flieger points out that Tolkien’s own work mirrors the body of Arthurian literature itself: his stories have been reworked and exist in multiple versions, and an integral part of his fictional world is predicated on the idea that it is being conveyed by multiple storytellers (2005, 41). A useful example of Tolkien’s use of things Arthurian concerns parallels between Arthur, Frodo, and Aragorn, and subsequent resolutions. While some similarities might seem quite straightforward – the sudden revelation of Aragorn’s identity as heir (FR, II, ii, 321; see Phelpstead 2011, 85); his “possession of (named) sword” (ibid.); his “return” to claim a throne (referred to in the volume title; Phelpstead 2011, 84) – there is really something much more complicated going on. Mirroring the Arthurian inflections of the Aragorn story is the saga of the other hero, Frodo, who also has a named sword, which he pulls out of a wooden box (as opposed to a stone, FR, II, iii, 361; and Flieger 2005, 42), and who is on a sort of reverse quest to dispose of the Ring. As with the resonances of multiple genuine Celtic influences on the Elves and the entrances to Elven territories, and those on Lothlórien, where Celtic stereotype is created and denied simultaneously, Tolkien establishes tension between a heroic epic (Aragorn, the hero who will be king) and a fairy-tale (Frodo, the ordinary hero). As Phelpstead puts it, “Rather than retell the Arthurian legend, Tolkien’s fiction gains resonance from echoing the characters and motifs of that tradition in a new imaginative setting” (2011, 86). But Tolkien may be going further than merely referencing old material to enrich his new world: Aragorn accomplishes what Arthur has not yet managed; he has fulfilled the “return” promised in “The Return of the King.” But while Phelpstead sees Frodo as being “unable to complete his anti-quest” (86), it can be argued that he does, in fact, succeed in a roundabout sort of way: it is true that he claims the Ring himself instead of casting it into the fire (RK, VI, iii, 1237), but not long before that, when Gollum tries to take the Ring, Frodo promises, “If you touch me ever again, you shall be cast yourself into the Fire of Doom” (1235), which is exactly what happens when he does, in fact, bite Frodo’s finger off at the climactic moment, and he takes the Ring with him. So Frodo’s curse is Gollum’s – and the Ring’s – undoing (which Gandalf apparently suspected would happen),15 but it is unclear whether it was the Ring’s



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influence or his own will which caused Frodo to make the curse, thereby unwittingly fulfilling the anti-quest. But it is certain that the destruction of the Ring makes possible Aragorn’s victory and ascension to the throne. The ambiguity of the ending is further enhanced by the characterization of the Hobbits in general as anachronistic “well-to-do” representatives of Edwardian England (Shippey 2000, 6–7) combined with Frodo’s departure by ship, “a deliberate echo of the departure of the wounded Arthur” (Flieger 2005, 42). Tolkien doesn’t simply suggest the Celtic Arthurian material in the intertwining adventures of his two heroes but rather he transcends it through Aragorn’s success in the “return,” Frodo’s Arthurian exit, not dead but “to be healed, if he can be” (Flieger 2005, 42), as if to suggest that he might return as well, and by having both of his heroes echo Englishness. Tolkien’s attitude toward Celtic things can no longer be summed up by that “certain distaste” expressed in the 1937 letter. His life’s work in philology, scholarship, and creative writing demonstrates the contrary, and his sense of a connection with the Celtic world, most pointedly through the Welsh language, underpins the respect with which he uses genuine Celtic elements and challenges rather than enforces the nineteenth-century stereotypes that he disliked. He set out to create a mythology for England, but his sense of identity in an ancient shared British heritage is reflected in the synthesis of “things Celtic” in his invented world. Scholars like Verlyn Flieger, Marjorie Burns, Dimitra Fimi, Carl Phelpstead, and others have laid a foundation in the exploration of this influence, but there is still much to be discovered, not only in terms of specific sources that influenced Tolkien but in how he used them. Postcolonial approaches to Tolkien are beginning to appear, and considering the history of the relationship between England and the British government, and its Celtic neighbors, this is important and necessary. But Tolkien was unusual for his time in his admitted fondness for the Welsh language and for Wales itself; as regards “things Celtic,” he did not appropriate source material wholesale but rather integrated it into his legendarium in a subtle and sophisticated way. Tom Shippey suggests “that Tolkien was the Chrétien de Troyes of the twentieth century” in that he didn’t invent material but rather “showed what could be done with it” (2000, xviii), a comparison with which Tolkien might have approved.

Notes   1  Verlyn Flieger, Dimitra Fimi, Marjorie Burns, and Carl Phelpstead have been at the forefront in exploring Tolkien’s Celtic influences.   2  Phelpstead refers to Matthew Arnold’s The Study of Celtic Literature, in Lectures and Essays in Criticism, vol. 3 of The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, edited by R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), 286–395.

  3  Examples of Tolkien’s insistence on “scientific” accuracy in philological matters abound: see, e.g., his draft response to a 1938 inquiry from a German publisher (during negotiations to publish The Hobbit in German) about his origins. He says, “I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke

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Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people” (Letters 37). See Fimi (2007, 51–53) for discussion of Tolkien’s use of Celtic materials as related to items in his “Celtic” library; Phelpstead (2011, appendix) also contains a list of Tolkien’s Welsh books. Specifically the part that had been the AngloSaxon kingdom of Hwicce, see Letters (108) and Phelpstead (2011, 112). By 1925, he had already taught Medieval Welsh at Leeds (Letters 12). As a philologist, he would have been well versed in language history, but obviously he was particularly interested in Welsh and Finnish and saw those histories as relevant to his work; he delves into the history of the Welsh Bible in “English and Welsh” and into the history of Finnish in “Essays on the Kalevala.” While this is the name commonly given to 27 Henry VIII c. 26, the term “Act of Union” was not actually coined until 1901, by Owen M. Edwards. Tolkien, in fact, owned an 1877 edition of Salesbury’s Dictionary, inscribed with the date “9 May 1907”(Phelpstead 2011, xix). His aesthetic responses to Welsh have been discussed. He wrote of his first encounter

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with a Finnish grammar, “It was like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me; and I gave up the attempt to invent an ‘unrecorded’ Germanic language, and my ‘own language’ – or series of invented languages – became heavily Finnicized in phonetic pattern and structure” (Letters 214). The official title was Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales. Mike Parker, in his amusing but thoughtful book Neighbours from Hell? English Attitudes to the Welsh (Talybont: Y Lolfa, 2007), discusses the many suspicions and prejudices the English have historically harbored, and often still seem to, about the Welsh, as evidenced in the media, political speech, legislation, etc. While the book is popular journalism rather than scholarship, under the surface lurk compelling issues that invite postcolonial investigation. Phelpstead (2011, 142 n. 63) references Tolkien’s “English and Welsh” lecture (MC 172– 173) and observes the connection with the “Celts and Teutons” lecture. See also Phelpstead (2011, 48 n. 62) for a list of scholars who argue that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight had “influence on Tolkien’s creative writing.” Frodo remembers Gandalf’s words: “Even Gollum may have something yet to do” (RK, VI, iii, 1239).

References Burns, Marjorie. 2005. Perilous Realms: Celtic and Norse in Tolkien’s Middle-earth. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Carpenter, Humphrey. 1977. J. R. R. Tolkien – A Biography. London: Allen & Unwin. Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. 2005. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fimi, Dimitra. 2006. “ ‘Mad’ Elves and ‘Elusive Beauty’: Some Celtic Strands of Tolkien’s Mythology [1].” Folklore, 117: 156–170.

Fimi, Dimitra. 2007. “Tolkien’s ‘ “Celtic” type of legends’: Merging Traditions.” Tolkien Studies, 4: 51–71. Fimi, Dimitra. 2009. Tolkien, Race and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Flieger, Verlyn. 2005. Interrupted Music: The Making of Tolkien’s Mythology. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Hemmi, Yoko. 2010. “Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and His Concept of Native Language:



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Sindarin and British-Welsh.” Tolkien Studies, 7: 147–174. Jenkins, Geraint H. 1998. “Introduction.” In Language and Community in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Geraint H. Jenkins, 1–20. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Jenkins, Geraint H., Richard Suggett, and Eryn M. White. 1997. “The Welsh Language in Early Modern Wales.” In The Welsh Language before the Industrial Revolution, edited by Geraint H. Jenkins, 45–122. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Phelpstead, Carl. 2011. Tolkien and Wales: Language, Literature and Identity. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Roberts, Gwyneth Tyson. 1998. The Language of the Blue Books: The Perfect Instrument of Empire. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

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Roberts, Peter R. 1997. “Tudor Legislation and the Political Status of ‘the British Tongue.’ ” In The Welsh Language before the Industrial Revolution, edited by Geraint H. Jenkins, 123–152. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Shippey, Tom. 2000. J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. London: HarperCollins. Steinberg, S. H. 1959. Five Hundred Years of Printing. New York: Criterion. Welsh, Frank. 2002. The Four Nations. London: HarperCollins. Williams, Glanmor. 1997. “Unity of Religion or Unity of Language? Protestants and Catholics and the Welsh Language 1536–1800.” In The Welsh Language before the Industrial Revolution, edited by Geraint H. Jenkins, 207–233. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

20

The English Literary Tradition: Shakespeare to the Gothic Nick Groom

Certainly I have not been nourished by English Literature . . . for the simple reason that I have never found much there in which to rest my heart (or heart and head together). I was brought up in the Classics, and first discovered the sensation of literary pleasure in Homer. Also being a philologist, getting a large part of any aesthetic pleasure that I am capable of from the form of words (and especially from the fresh association of wordform with word-sense), I have always best enjoyed things in a foreign language, or one so remote as to feel like it (such as Anglo-Saxon). (Letters 172)

So wrote Tolkien to his close friend Father Robert Murray, SJ, in December 1953. Having recently corrected galley proofs for The Fellowship of the Ring, he was deliberately resistant to placing The Lord of the Rings in the conventional literary canon. Instead, Tolkien drew on what he identified as a Northern tradition – Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon, the Völsunga Saga and the reconstructed Kalevala (see chs. 15, 17, and 18). Despite his acknowledgement of his early study of Classics, he almost completely avoided any ancient Greek or Roman sources – or for that matter French influence – in his Middle-earth writings. As for later English writers, he admitted enjoying William Morris and Rider Haggard (ch. 21). Consequently, Tolkien scholarship has tended to focus either on the texts on which Tolkien worked in his professional life – broadly Anglo-Saxon to late medieval – or on the loosely contemporary context of late Victorian to mid-twentieth-century culture and society. Tolkien is accordingly presented as a medievalist responding to industrialization, urbanization,

A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.



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technological warfare, and totalitarianism, and as William Blisset claimed, The Lord of the Rings is “perhaps the last literary masterpiece of the Middle Ages” (1959, 449). The period 1550–1800 therefore appears somewhat barren in Tolkien studies: too late to be properly medieval in language and thought, too early to engage meaningfully with the apocalyptic challenges of the twentieth century. George Clark and Daniel Timmons’s edited collection J. R. R. Tolkien and his Literary Resonances (2000), for example, offers very little on the literary heritage of the sixteenth, seventeenth, or eighteenth centuries, skipping from Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesy and John Milton straight to Rider Haggard. In any case, Tolkien was highly suspicious of sourcehunting, as outlined in the soup analogy in his lecture “On Fairy-stories” (OFS 39–40). C. S. Lewis declared with satisfaction, “no one ever influenced Tolkien – you might as well try to influence a bandersnatch” (and in doing so he disclosed his own debt to Lewis Carroll; see Lewis 2007, 1049). But Tolkien’s refusal to concede any more recent legacy than, say, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (his translation of which was being broadcast by the BBC in late 1953 and early 1954) was wholly calculated. His life was devoted to reshaping the English literary tradition by reviving and rewriting the neglected and lost Northern inheritance, a spirit barely apparent in the writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Yet as this chapter will argue, while Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, and Norse matter may appear in Tolkien’s work far more frequently, densely, and explicitly than later literary allusions, there are important strands of thought in the period 1550 to 1800 that profoundly affected Tolkien’s overall vision.

Post-Medieval Literature One of Tolkien’s chief complaints to literature after the Reformation was in its representation and repression of Faërie and the Elves. He dismissed Edmund Spenser’s Faërie Qveene (1590–1596) as unreadable, and held Spenser to blame for reducing the ancient and sinister figures of the Elves to domestic Fairies, a process that Michael Drayton quickly completed in Nimphidia (1627) (OFS 29–30). However, Tolkien himself was not immune from this tendency. One of his earliest poems is “Goblin Feet” which is very much in the degraded fairy mode, and his early Middle-earth writings show that he considered weaving the motif of the waning of the Elves into Fairies into his own mythology (Lost Tales II 283–285). Indeed, The Lord of the Rings retains a hint of this diminution in Galadriel’s suggestion that the Elves will “dwindle to a rustic folk of dell and cave, slowly to forget and to be forgotten” (FR, II, vii, 475). William Shakespeare was of course another chief culprit here in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Tolkien declaring “a murrain on Will Shakespeare and his damned cobwebs” (Letters 143n.). As he later wrote to W. H. Auden, he felt “bitter disappointment and disgust from schooldays with the shabby use made in Shakespeare of the coming of ‘Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill’ [in Macbeth]: I longed to devise a setting

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in which the trees might really march to war” (Letters 212n.), admitting that Shakespeare’s shortcomings had helped to inspire the march of the Ents on Isengard when the forest does indeed rouse itself to war. Tolkien had had to study Shakespeare as an Oxford undergraduate, primarily the plays Love’s Labour’s Lost, the two parts of Henry IV, Hamlet, and Antony and Cleopatra. In 1931, however, as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor at the University, he managed to remove compulsory Shakespeare from the English Language syllabus. Tolkien insisted he disliked Shakespeare “cordially” – interestingly using the same phrase with which he dismissed allegory in The Lord of the Rings (Letters 213; FR, Foreword, xxvi). But just as his avowed disdain for allegory is brought into question by the allegories he himself wrote (“Leaf by Niggle” and the opening of the lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”), so his opinion of Shakespeare needs qualifying. The OED’s definition of “cordial” is not simply pleasant or amiable but “hearty” and (of medicines, food, or beverages) “invigorating the heart; restorative, reviving.” His dislike for Shakespeare was, in other words, stimulating. Macbeth consequently exercised an antagonistic influence and inspired one of the most memorable set-pieces of The Lord of the Rings, provoking Tolkien to recast an opaque prophecy into the irresistible reality of a marching forest. The play’s influence in fact runs deep: the prediction that “none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth” (IV, i, 80–81) is adapted for the Lord of the Nazgûl (“No living man may hinder me!”; RK, V, vi, 1101), and the Witches’ oracular glass foreshadows the mirror of Galadriel. There are other links too, from the recognition of the true king as a healer to questions about stewardship, duty, and freewill to direct verbal echoes (see Shippey 2005, 205–208, 304). Elsewhere, Tolkien writes his own version of the Winter’s song at the end of Love’s Labour’s Lost (V, ii, 893–896) as Bilbo’s lyric “When winter first begins to bite” (FR, II, iii, 355), Othello’s verbal magic practiced on Desdemona may have influenced Saruman’s rhetoric, and there are echoes of other plays he studied as an undergraduate, such as Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra (Shippey 2005, 200–209, 215–216, and 2000, 192–196). King Lear too was an influence: the sovereign utters the line “Come not between the dragon and his wrath!” (I, i, 123), a phrase that would give a philologist pause. The language of Lear, a play set in ancient British history, is predominantly comprised of words derived from Anglo-Saxon roots, unlike the Latinate diction of, for example, Antony and Cleopatra, and the word “wrath” is typical of its style. “Wrath” derived from the Old English wræððu, and its obsolete form is wrethe, of which OED notes versions in Middle Low German, Old Norse, Norwegian, Middle Swedish, Swedish, Danish, and Icelandic. It was plainly an ancient Northern word, and Tolkien used it repeatedly in The Lord of the Rings. But he also adapted the whole line “come not between the dragon and his wrath” at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields when the Lord of the Nazgûl snarls, “Come not between the Nazgûl and his prey!” (RK, V, vi, 1100). In fact, as Tom Shippey argues, Tolkien was “guardedly respectful” of Shakespeare (2000, 194). Tolkien lectured on Hamlet in Hilary Term 1937, and saw the play performed twice in 1944 – an Oxford University Drama Society production he much



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enjoyed, and one starring John Gielgud (Letters 88). Hamlet was of course a revenge tragedy set in Denmark, characterized by northern doom rather than the classical model of tragedy, and had its origins in a twelfth-century Norse saga of honor and vengeance, Amleth. But Tolkien also took time to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Lewis (February 1940), as well as Twelfth Night and even Henry VIII (Letters 201). He later supervised a thesis covering Shakespeare’s late plays, plays in which eucatastrophe is one of the strongest and most typical features. In addition to studying Shakespeare, the undergraduate Tolkien was on July 9, 1915 advised to read Thomas Browne, Francis Bacon, and Philip Sidney, and later sat an examination on the history of English literature, covering writers such as Christopher Marlowe, John Milton, John Dryden, Samuel Johnson, Thomas Gray, Walter Scott, William Wordsworth, and John Keats. There may be some residual influence here: Tanya Caroline Wood, for instance, has argued that Sidney’s Defense of Poesy affected Tolkien’s thinking, Sidney’s approach being “counterfactual”: the poet creates “forms such as never were in nature, as the heroes, demigods, cyclops, chimeras, furies, and such like.” In this sense the poet is a maker, and perhaps looking forward to Tolkien’s notion of “sub-creation” (Wood 2000, 99). Likewise, Shippey has recognized the cadences of the King James Bible’s translations of the Psalms in the Eagle’s song that brings news to Minas Tirith (RK, VI, v, 1262; Shippey 2000, 209). In this period it is, however, probably Milton to whom Tolkien owes the most considerable debt. Tolkien quoted Milton in conversation (May 24, 1973), and critics have noticed possible parallels with Comus (1637) and “Lycidas” (Shippey 2000, 203–204, 251; Rosebury 2003, 91). Lewis of course wrote extensively on Milton, and in his last book, The Discarded Image (1964), describes Milton’s “Longaevi,” “the longlived ones.” These “faerie elves” bear more than a passing resemblance to the Elves of Mirkwood in The Hobbit: Whose midnight revels, by a forest side Or fountain some belated peasant sees, Or dreams he sees, while overhead the moon Sits arbitress, and nearer to the earth Wheels her pale course: they on their mirth and dance Intent, with jocund music charm his ear. (Paradise Lost, I, 782–787)

Paradise Lost does offer an analogous work to Tolkien’s legendarium, but there are important differences. Tolkien claimed that there could be no story without a fall – “all stories are ultimately about the fall” (Letters 147) – which eminently suits Paradise Lost (1667). Yet there is no Fall of Man in The Silmarillion, or rather the Fall is effectively offstage following Morgoth’s corruption of the Elves. And in any case for the Elves, theirs is a long, spiraling decline, a perpetual fall – the “long defeat” as Galadriel describes it (FR, II, vii, 464). Moreover, as Debbie Sly points out (2000, 107): Paradoxically, what Tolkien and Milton have most in common as artists, their devout Christianity, also divides them: Milton rewrites Genesis from a radically Protestant and

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Renaissance perspective, whereas Tolkien’s Roman Catholicism inspires a version of the universe that is at times distinctly medieval, although it also reflects the cataclysmic events of the twentieth century.

Milton is not a direct theological influence, but his imagery seeps into Tolkien’s work. Milton’s lurid depiction of Sin, for instance, whose womb kennels hell hounds, lies behind the abject corporeality of the female monster Shelob: She served none but herself, drinking the blood of Elves and Men, bloated and grown fat with endless brooding on her feasts, weaving webs of shadow; for all living things were her food, and her vomit darkness. Far and wide her lesser broods, bastards of the miserable mates, her own offspring, that she slew. (TT, IV, ix, 946; see Paradise Lost, II, 650–659)

Likewise, Milton’s account of the building of Pandemonium and the Devils’ invention of explosives and firearms is reminiscent of the industrialization of Isengard and the Orcs’ love of “wheels and engines and explosions” (Paradise Lost, I, 670–751; VI, 509–519, 484–491; H 60). The influence of Milton, and to a lesser extent Shakespeare, is tangible, if minor; in contrast, however, that of later writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century seems very slight indeed. There are a few links. Tolkien deployed a similar alphabetical model for Tengwar to that proposed by Francis Lodwick for his universal alphabet of 1686, following ideal language schemes proposed in 1647 and 1652, in which correspondences and modifications in sound are represented by matching changes to letters (see Fimi 2009, 112–113). This idealist model was still influencing mystic linguists a century later, who by then were arguing, for example, that Celtic was the Edenic language. There was, simultaneously, a rich vein of language satire: John Taylor wrote several poems “in the Utopian Tongue” and Jonathan Swift, with whom Tolkien was familiar, was an aficionado of invented languages, linguistic systems, and spelling reform, as well as appending false maps and pseudonymous authorship to Gulliver’s Travels. Tolkien, who mentions the Struldbrugs in an interview considering Elvish immortality in The Silmarillion (Curtis 1963), may be distant from Scriblerian satire, but nevertheless certain aspects of eighteenth-century satirical writing do become incorporated into Tolkien’s vision of Middle-Earth. Late eighteenth-century poets such as William Blake are, however, a different case. Tolkien had been recommended to read Blake’s lyrics for his own poetry in April 1915, and read Blake’s prophetic books on February 21, 1919, shortly after he was appointed to work on the OED. Unsurprisingly, he was struck by the names in Blake’s imagined mythology, and he must also have been impressed by Blake’s mix of writing and visual imagery in his illuminated pages, by the vast, cosmogonic scope of his work, and by the numinous commitment to Englishness. Despite Blake’s radical Christianity, influenced by mystics such as Emanuel Swedenborg, there are strong affinities between Tolkien and Blake. Lewis made these explicit in his review of The



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Fellowship of the Ring, which compared the volume to Blake’s work, and the mechanization of Isengard in The Two Towers is an irresistible reminder of Blake’s “dark Satanic Mills” (Milton, plate 2, line 8). As Blake wrote to Rev. John Trusler in 1799 in a passage resonant with Tolkienian environmentalism: The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way. Some See Nature all Ridicule and Deformity & by these I shall not regulate my proportions, & Some Scarce see Nature at all[.] But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination Nature is Imagination itself[.] (Bentley 1978, 1526–1527)

The ecological ideology that characterizes early nineteenth-century Romanticism, and which is rooted in environmental works such as John Evelyn’s Sylva (1664) is certainly present in Tolkien, if distilled through John Ruskin and later nineteenthcentury thinkers. Likewise, while attempts have been made to link Tolkien’s notion of “sub-creation” with Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s theory of the imagination, challengingly outlined in Biographia Literaria (1817) and elsewhere, Tolkien was also critical of Coleridge, whose neo-Platonic idealism is remote from the pragmatic morality of Tolkien’s narratives, driven as they are by perpetual contingency and everyday morality (Gray 2010, 84). There are some passing references to Romantic poetry, explicitly in “The Notion Club Papers” when Wilfred Jeremy and Alwin Lowdham travel to Porlock and Culbone church (the genius loci of Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan”), and more implicitly in the ominous poem “The Sea-Bell” from The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (Tolkien 2008e). “The Sea-Bell” has elements of the mysterious sea shell Wordsworth recalls in The Prelude, as well, like Tolkien’s “Shadow-Bride” in the same collection, of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” Keats’s account of Faërie bewitchment. But these verses are also part of a much older popular superstition in which Elfland is a perilous realm outside the earthly laws of time and space, as depicted in uncanny clarity in ballads such as “Thomas the Rhymer,” quoted by Tolkien in his lecture “On Fairy-stories” (OFS 28–29).

The Antiquarian Imagination Tolkien’s use of ballads in fact connects his writing more with the eighteenth century than with Romanticism – specifically with the work of eighteenth-century antiquarians, and it is in this area that the influence of literature 1550–1800 on Tolkien is most intriguing. At one level, there are coincidental overlaps: the rise of Anglo-Saxon and Norse studies in the mid-eighteenth century suggests affinities with the work of Tolkien through the Viking translations of Thomas Gray and Thomas Percy, and in the Arthurian revival which begins with Thomas Warton and, again, Percy. But while the classicist influence of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall has, for example, been noted, the antiquarian heritage has been neglected. Thomas Percy is a useful model here: among many works, mainly published in the 1760s, he edited the first collection of Runic poetry (1763); produced the first serious

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collection of old ballads, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765); translated Paul-Henri Mallet’s Northern Antiquities, which included the Edda (1770); and wrote a long and influential medievalist ballad, The Hermit of Warkworth (1771). Percy’s enduring fascination was with the figure of the minstrel, for whom in the Reliques he proposed a state function, rather like the minstrel of Gondor who sings of “Frodo of the Nine Fingers and the Ring of Doom” (RK, VI, iv, 1249). But aside from the prevalence of songs and singing in Percy’s collection, the Reliques is also significant for its profusion of paratexts (prefaces, notes, appendices, glossaries), fragmentary texts, philological speculations, and an emphasis on archival research, as well as giving glimpses of unfamiliar alphabets and a plan of the spectrum of English language and literary styles, from Anglo-Saxon to Middle English to the contemporary. It is an “unparodying” of the Scriblerian style of academic over-zealousness (Rawson 1999), focusing attention on indigenous literary forms. About the only elements of textual form missing from Percy for the reader of Tolkien are maps and genealogies, which are themselves prevalent in other antiquarian histories – most notably, perhaps, in William Stukeley’s Account of Richard of Cirencester, Monk of Westminster (1757). In this, Stukeley reprinted an “Antient Map of Roman Brittain” made in the fourteenth century which restored much lost information, including the name of the Pennines. The map was provided by Charles Bertram; it was, however, a forgery. The image of the eighteenth-century antiquarian searching through neglected archives is evoked by Gandalf in his account of discovering Isildur’s scroll: “there lie in [Denethor’s] hoards many records that few now can read, even of the lore-masters, for their scripts and tongues have become dark to later men” (FR, II, ii, 328). Eighteenth-century antiquarians were inclined to compare their grubbing about in libraries to the image of Virgil collecting gems from the dung-hill rhymes of the Roman poet Ennius; it is striking, then, that Déagol finds the Ring in a handful of mud: “And behold! when he washed the mud away, there in his hand lay a beautiful golden ring; and it shone and glittered in the sun, so that his heart was glad” (FR, I, ii, 70). Taken with Gandalf’s diligent work among forgotten manuscripts, The Lord of the Rings embraces the fables of antiquarian research. The highly textual and physical quality of antiquarianism was typified by books, manuscripts, libraries, and, occasionally, artefacts such as the relics of former writers. The antiquarian movement was a belated response to the vast destruction meted out during the Reformation, which had seen monastic archives ransacked, undoubtedly entailing the loss of many Anglo-Saxon and medieval texts – something that Tolkien never mentions but which must have pained him immeasurably. The restoration work of early antiquarians such as William Camden was cut short by the Civil Wars and the Interregnum – entailing further catastrophes for written records – and it was only with the relative stability of the eighteenth century and the decline of neo-classicism that interest in English and British antiquities subsequently developed. Antiquarians were renowned for being interested in any old apparent rubbish, such as folklore and ballads and even nursery rhymes. Again, this strikes a chord with Tolkien, who reworked old comic verses in “There is an inn, a merry old inn” and who was partial



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to ballad refrains in the songs of Tom Bombadil, “hey dol! merry dol!”, which are reminiscent of seventeenth-century nonsense verse. This circumstantial influence, however, is minor compared with what is best described as the editorial sensibility of eighteenth-century antiquarianism. Tolkien’s writings published in his lifetime are often presented as edited texts, sometimes collated from different sources. The second edition of The Hobbit begins with a pedantic note on language and alphabets; The Lord of the Rings has a lengthy and somewhat bewildering 20-page Prologue on Hobbitry, six appendices, and an index; The Adventures of Tom Bombadil has a footnoted Preface on stylistics; and Farmer Giles of Ham has a scholarly Foreword on translation. Moreover, the three lifetime Middle-earth texts make frequent reference to the Red Book of Westmarch, a text that actually appears in The Lord of the Rings as the book Bilbo is writing, which Frodo continues, and which Sam (and presumably anonymous others) complete. Inconsistencies between The Hobbit as it was originally published (see ch. 8) and The Lord of the Rings are incorporated into the plot when Bilbo gives his account of the finding of the Ring at the Council of Elrond: “I will now tell the true story, and if some here have heard me tell it otherwise” – he looked sidelong at Glóin [who stands for all readers of the first edition of The Hobbit] – “I ask them to forget it and forgive me” (FR, II, ii, 324).

Most remarkably, perhaps, the nonsense verse “Errantry,” the third poem in Tom Bombadil, is presented as the basis for the poem of Eärendel that Bilbo recites at Rivendell (FR, II, i, 304–308; see ch. 12). And of course behind all of this material published in Tolkien’s lifetime lay the innumerable pages and variant accounts of the First Age that were eventually published as The Silmarillion and in subsequent posthumous volumes. The tone of eighteenth-century antiquarianism directly informs these “paratexts.” In Farmer Giles of Ham, for example, Tolkien’s Foreword assumes a manner familiar in these pieces: An excuse for presenting a translation of this curious tale, out of its very insular Latin into the modern tongue of the United Kingdom, may be found in the glimpse that it affords of life in a dark period of the history of Britain, not to mention the light it throws on the origin of some difficult place-names. (Tolkien 2008e, 101)

This elaborate apology echoes Percy’s Reliques: [that] such specimens of ancient poetry have been selected as either shew the gradation of our language, exhibit the progress of popular opinions, display the peculiar manners and customs of former ages, or throw light on our earliest classical poets. (I, ix)

Although critics have commented on the interlaced structure of The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s fondness for foreshadowing narrative events, a device learnt from Norse saga, this technique goes beyond mere plot. Entire texts written by Tolkien,

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such as Tom Bombadil, are interlaced and intertextually related to other work, both analeptically and proleptically (using devices of flashback and flashforward). This vertiginous play of sources and variants, the love of libraries and of Anglo-Saxon, recalls the fictions of Jorge-Luis Borges, the twentieth-century Argentinean writer and a direct contemporary of Tolkien. But there are earlier writers for whom the aesthetics of antiquarianism also provided inspiration. The imaginative capaciousness that characterizes the antiquarian work of the eighteenth century – in which legends and folklore, maps and architecture, language and dialect, literature and history were all eagerly assimilated – was reflected in writers such as Thomas Chatterton and James Macpherson. Chatterton was entranced by the medieval, but found insufficient materials for his fertile mind. So he invented his own archaic language and calligraphy; produced his own complex medieval manuscripts, maps, sketches, and heraldry; loaded his pseudo-antique writings with prefaces, footnotes, appendices, and glossaries; and then wove authentic material into what was his predominantly imagined fifteenth-century world. Just as history merges into the contemporary in eighteenthcentury antiquarian poetry such as Gray’s “Elegy,” the shadow of the past is not only inescapable but motivates and defines the present in Chatterton’s work – and in Tolkien’s too. As Gildor points out to the Hobbits, the Shire is not a country retreat but is itself caught up in history: “The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot for ever fence it out” (FR, I, iii, 109). History is inexorable – after dismissing allegory in the Foreword to The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien maintained “I much prefer history, true or feigned” (FR, Foreword, xxvi). Not unlike Tolkien’s Elvish linguistics, Chatterton’s vision is not medievalism for the faint-hearted: The queene Gendolyne sente a gyaunte knyghte, Whose doughtie heade swepte the emmertleynge1 skies, To slea her wheresoever she shulde be pyghte2, Eke everychone who shulde her ele3 emprize4. Swefte as the roareynge wyndes the gyaunte flies, Stayde the loude wyndes, and shaded reaulmes yn nyghte, Stepte over cytties, on meint5 acres lies, Meeteynge the herehaughtes of morneynge lighte; Tyll mooveynge to the Weste, myschaunce hys gye,6 He thorowe warriours gratch fayre Elstrid did espie. (“Englysh Metamorphosis,” 71–80)

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glittering 2 settled 3 help 4 adventure 5 many 6 guide [Chatterton’s notes]

But for centuries Chatterton’s idiosyncratic and unique artistic vision has been condemned as literary forgery, and he has received little critical attention. Tolkien was obviously no literary forger, but it is nonetheless interesting that he adopts the techniques of literary forgery, not only in enlisting the aesthetics of antiquarianism in presenting the complexity and sophistication of the annals of Middle-earth, but also



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in producing several facsimile pages of the Book of Mazarbul, the journal that the Fellowship discover in Moria in which Balin’s failed attempt to recolonize the mines is documented. These slashed and burnt leaves, apparently stained with Dwarvish blood, were concocted to illustrate the first edition of The Lord of the Rings, and exhibit a yearning for authenticity and a willingness to test the conventions of literary (and editorial) legitimacy. Although it is not clear that Tolkien ever studied Chatterton, he was a colleague of the eighteenth-century expert David Nichol Smith at both the English Faculty and at Oxford University Press, and moreover supervised a thesis on Thomas Tyrwhitt. Tyrwhitt was an eighteenth-century scholar who produced not only the first reliable edition of the works of Chaucer (1775), but also the first edition of Thomas Chatterton’s Poems, Supposed to have been Written at Bristol, by Thomas Rowley, and Others, in the Fifteenth Century (1777). Tyrwhitt was therefore at the centre of the authenticity debate surrounding Chatterton’s “discoveries” known as the Rowley Controversy (1770–1782). In addition to the forensic fabrication of the Book of Mazarbul, Tolkien also deployed the classic Chattertonian device of incorporating authentic materials within his own work. Genuine Anglo-Saxon verse is introduced into The Lord of the Rings: the song that Aragorn sings of Rohan is an adaptation of the Anglo-Saxon poem The Wanderer, extant only in The Exeter Book:



Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing? Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing? Where is the hand on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing? They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow; The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow. (TT, III, vi, 662–663)

Yet Tolkien’s (or rather, Aragorn’s) version quickly departs from the original, and in fact lines such as “They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow” are more reminiscent of Macpherson’s elegiac Ossianic “translations” of 1760: He is fallen on the hill like a stream of light in a cloud. No more shall he hear thy voice like the sound of the string of music. The strength of the war is gone; the cheek of youth is pale. (“Fragment XIII,” 2nd edn.)

Both Macpherson and Chatterton felt that they were discovering rather than inventing their lines, again not unlike Tolkien’s sense of his work. Indeed, Tolkien’s continued claims that Middle-earth was not imaginary connect directly with Macpherson’s inspired and extemporized attempts to recover and recreate the original bardic voice of the Highlands (Gray 2010, 82). In contrast to Chatterton’s imagined medieval manuscript culture, Macpherson’s emphasis is on the oral tradition, which for Tolkien provides the cultural distinctiveness for Rohan: Aragorn remarks that the Rohirrim are “wise but unlearned, writing no books but singing many songs” (TT, III, ii, 560),

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a contrast with Gondor’s libraries filled with moldering scrolls and the elegant literacy of the Elves who nevertheless retain much poetry in memory. But it is of course highly ironic that some of Tolkien’s primary debts, consciously or accidentally, are to writers who have also been sidelined by the canon.

The Gothic The medievalism of eighteenth-century antiquarianism was in fact part of a broader intellectual and cultural movement: the Gothic. This was an historical and political theory that stretched far back into antiquity and concerned itself with migration and characteristics of early peoples. The now-familiar Gothic motifs of vampires and haunted castles that came later should accordingly be understood within this much wider context of Gothic thinking. Unfortunately, critical work thus far on Tolkien and the Gothic is, sadly, pitiful as it disentangles Gothic literature from the Goths themselves, yet this is precisely the way in which Tolkien’s use of the Gothic can be best understood. Most contemporary Gothic critics, then, fail to appreciate the history and longevity of the term Gothic, which derives from representations of the Sack of Rome and the Reformation – both perceived as rebellions against tyranny, and both extremely brutal. From these founding myths a distinctive imaginative response to the past developed in which the past was seen as haunted and ruinous – remote from modern society, yet responsible for it and indeed present everywhere. Hence the Gothic imagination is a reminder of progress and simultaneously a lament for the past: a guarded suppression of the carnage of history that has nevertheless led to the present day. So the Gothic goes far beyond the familiar themes of the macabre and the mysterious, beyond the monstrous and the magical. Rather, it is a way of coming to terms with the processes of English history, which is why in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries it had a strong social, political, and theological significance. The Goths and Gothic language pervade Tolkien’s writing. He acquired Joseph Wright’s Primer of the Gothic Language in 1908 or 1909, and by March 11, 1910 was speaking Gothic at a school debate. His first invented language was a supplement to Gothic – Gautisk, supposedly spoken by the Geats of Beowulf – after which he wrote a Gothic poem to evoke the lost literature of the Goths (see Smith 2006 and also ch. 14). While an undergraduate Tolkien attended Wright’s lectures on Gothic grammar before lecturing on it himself, admitting: Gothic was the first to take me by storm, to move my heart. It was the first of the old Germanic languages that I ever met. I have since mourned the loss of Gothic literature. I did not then. The contemplation of the vocabulary in A Primer of the Gothic Language was enough: a sensation at least as full of delight as first looking into Chapman’s Homer. Though I did not write a sonnet about it. I tried to invent Gothic words. (“English and Welsh,” MC 191–192)



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The allusion is to Keats’s sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”; while Tolkien did not write a sonnet about Gothic, ultimately he endeavored to recreate the entire culture. Early in his career in a translation of Beowulf made while at Leeds University, Tolkien equated the Geats of Beowulf with the Goths and lectured on “Legends of the Goths.” They became woven into his mythology: many commentators have pointed out that the people of Rhovanion have Gothic names, and there was a tradition that “Goths” meant ”Horse-folk”; Appendix F of The Lord of the Rings also gives Gothic names for Hobbits. Shippey points out that the Battle of Pelennor Fields is based on the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains fought in 451 between a combined force of Romans and Visigoths against the Huns supported by the Ostrogoths (Shippey 2005, 18). Names in “The Lost Road” are also taken from the Gothic, and the associated poem “King Sheave” is a Gothic myth. Most explicitly, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún assimilates the Gothic narrative poem apparent in Heiðreks saga ins vitra, “The Battle of the Goths and Huns” (see Shippey 2010, 308–314). The Goths sacked Rome in 410, an event seen variously as the start of the barbarian demolition of classical civilization, or as a spirited rebellion against imperialism and oppressive Roman authority that led to the flowering of a new culture with roots outside the Mediterranean. In an unpublished lecture, “The Goths,” Tolkien wrote: In vain we regret the past, or speculate on what might have been. Yet it is inevitable that we should regret. . . . In dealing with the Goths – regret cannot be avoided, if not regret for what might have been, at any rate regret for our altogether scanty records of what was .  .  . the vanishing of their tradition, literature, history, and most of their tongue. (Reader’s Guide 555)

So rather than seeing the Goths as the barbarians who had brought about the collapse of the Roman Empire, Tolkien argued that the Romans had brought about “the ruin of Gaul and the submergence of its native language (or languages) arts and traditions . . . dooming to obscurity and debate the history of perhaps the most remarkable of the Cymric speaking peoples” (quoted by Reader’s Guide 555). This view is consistent with much Gothic writing contemporary with the Gothic kingdoms of the sixth to the ninth centuries, and with later antiquarian hypotheses a thousand years later. The Goths were imagined by the Venerable Bede, for example, to be part of the genesis of the English nation: ancestors of the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes (the word may be a corruption of Goths) who had landed in England in 449, led by the horse-captains Hengist and Horsa. But there were also pejorative views: Italian Renaissance artists, for instance, perceived the Goths as barbaric, crude, and destructive, categorizing everything not built in a Roman or Classical style as “Gothic” – from Neolithic standing stones to Norman churches to medieval cathedrals. Thus two competing myths of the Goths developed in the sixteenth century: the Goths as barbarian saviors, and the Goths as savage destroyers. In this context,

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the Reformation was understood as a second rebellion against Roman tyranny – this time against Roman Catholicism, and the magnificent medieval architecture that had dominated England was gutted, the landscape was littered with decaying ecclesiastical buildings. Following the carnage of the Counter-Reformation, an aesthetic of Protestant martyrdom developed, exemplified by John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563–1583) and indelibly associated with medieval ruins. Violence was implacably tied to the nation’s past, and was reflected in the popular culture of ferocious and amoral ballads, and on the stage in Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedy. By the seventeenth century a political model of Gothic liberty was being advanced that ultimately develop into the Whig theory of history. Much political science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was antiquarian, seeking to chart the population migrations that had given rise to national origins, as well as analyzing later events such as the Norman Conquest of 1066 in order to assess whether this was an invasion by a tyrant or a dynastic change within the existing Saxon constitution. According to these Gothic theorists, Protestantism, parliament, and progress characterized English history, which could be seen as a succession of rebellions against tyranny: expressions of the instinctive Gothic love of freedom. Such liberty was also evident in an emerging Gothic culture that rejected classical constraints in favor of the passions and the imagination. Literature, art, and architecture evoked the Middle Ages as an alternative to classical models, and was often enthralled by medieval ruins and the ghosts of the past as a further reminder of the Reformation and the destiny of the nation – and also as an incentive to revive codes of chivalry and traditional masculine roles in contemporary manners. Indeed, texts such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) are very much about dealing with the past, most chillingly the hideous truth that social and constitutional progress had come at the bloody cost of regicide and the Civil Wars. Otranto has all the features we have come to associate with Gothic novels, much of which was taken from Elizabethan and Jacobean drama such as Hamlet: it is set in an ancient castle riddled with secret passages, haunted by old prophecies, subject to bizarre supernatural occurrences, and visited by the walking dead. These elements, now clichés, also appear in Tolkien’s work: the claim that the text is a translation of a lost, earlier work; the plot devices involving ancient architecture, secret passages, and old prophecies; and the appearance of the ghostly dead, and supernatural manifestations (though there is nothing in Tolkien quite so bizarre as Otranto) – all culminating in the restoration of lineage and order. Walpole himself was influenced by the architectural Gothic revival – he was a maverick who built the rambling confection Strawberry Hill – and by the aesthetic concept of the sublime, as defined by Edmund Burke in his Philosophical Enquiry in 1757. Burke embedded sublime experience in the English landscape and literature, arguing that it evoked terror and power through the mind’s encounter with the infinite, and was most effectively accomplished through forms of obscurity, suggestive of eternity. Burke notably quotes Milton’s description of Death from Paradise Lost (II, 666– 673) in his analysis of the sublime:



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The other shape, If shape it might be called that shape had none Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb, Or substance might be called that shadow seemed, For each seemed either; black it stood as night, . . . what seemed his head The likeness of a kingly crown had on.

The manifestation of Death in Paradise Lost has a horrid palpability immediately recognizable to the reader of Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings is a book suffused with shadows and the coming of the “Great Darkness,” in the pitiless gloom of Moria, and in the dreadful advent of the Ringwraiths – “So black were they that they seemed like black holes in the deep shade behind them” (FR, I, xi, 255). In the confrontation between Gandalf and the Lord of the Nazgûl, “a great black shape . . . grown to a vast menace of despair,” the Witch-King is a compound of shadows and nothingness, Miltonically personified: “This is my hour. Do you not know Death when you see it?” (RK, V, iv, 1085; see Shippey 2000, 129–130, 213–214). Tolkien’s depiction of the unnerving tangibility of darkness was eminently Burkean and mirrors Burke’s emphasis on obscurity. There is meteorological murkiness evident in the atrocious whether in the Misty Mountains, on Weathertop, or the Great Darkness on the Pelennor Fields; topographical impassability in the almost impenetrable forest of Mirkwood, the inaccessible mountain Caradhras, the blasted environment of the Dead Marshes or Thangorodrim; and the grim architectural gloom of the fortresses of Dol Guldur, Minas Morgul, Barad-Dûr, Angband, the Mines of Moria, and the Paths of the Dead. Moreover there are disguises and material inscrutability in the shrouding of the Nazgûl, the masquerade of the name “Mr Underhill,” Aragorn’s concealment as Strider the Ranger, and Éowyn’s masking herself as Dernhelm. The text repeatedly teeters on the brink of incomprehensibility in riddles, inscriptions, fragments, stories-within-stories, and unfamiliar alphabets, whether hidden within Thorin’s Map in The Hobbit or covertly inscribed on the Ring, or in unfinished and lost poems (not to mention whole volumes of Lost Tales), and of course in the different languages and dialects of Middle-Earth. Finally, psychological obscurity is characterized by dreams, split personalities, derangement, ghostly presences, forgetfulness, and hauntings: the visions of the palantíri and the Mirror of Galadriel, the hallucinatory shift in perception caused by the Ring, the split selves of Gollum and of multi-named characters, the Ringwraiths (both kings of men and Nazgûl), and the increasingly eroded memory and profound doubt of Frodo. All of these effects aim at sublimity through mystification in order to probe the consequences of history and the disclosure of secrets. On these terms, Tolkien would appear to be a Gothic writer. And of course since the late eighteenth century the Gothic has, through perpetual dealings with the obscurity, become a way of exploring taboo subjects from the violence of the French Revolution to fears of scientific advance, and to issues of race and slavery. Again

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Tolkien fits this model: his Middle-earth writings obliquely engage with anxieties over mechanized warfare, rural and industrial transformation, and the appropriation of national identity. Yet although he apparently adopts many Walpolean characteristics, Tolkien does not write novels of terror, still less of horror. Instead, his work investigates hospitality, chivalry, courage, masculinity, social responsibility, and the challenges of progress. Consequently, Tolkien’s work is really more in the tradition of the first Gothic novel: Longsword, by Thomas Leland (1762) – the earliest medieval historical romance. The Gothic was not simply a repressed cry of horror at social changes, it was also a systematic opposition to urbanization and industrial capitalism. By the nineteenth century, the Gothic revival was a deliberate return to medieval architecture and culture presented as a social and theological mission. Gothic architecture was proposed and enlisted in different ways by Augustus Welby Pugin and John Ruskin as the preferred style for state buildings, for churches, and for educational institutions. For Pugin in particular, the construction of Gothic buildings on the lines of medieval building practices was a way of reforging community relations in a Christian society. Moreover, as a Catholic Pugin decried the Reformation: for him, the architectural Gothic Revival reunited the country with its medieval past and created a continuity with the Catholic Middle Ages unbroken by the Reformation. Tolkien’s Middle-earth is therefore identifiably Puginian: The Lord of the Rings is in an important sense a work of the Victorian Gothic Revival. So Tolkien did not write as did Protestant Gothic writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who envisaged history as overcoming the Catholicism of the Middle Ages; rather he wrote as an active medievalist, seeking to reconnect with and revive archaic Northern identities. In this Tolkien is in a tradition of Catholic Gothicists that includes Pugin and Burke (a Catholic sympathizer), as well as much earlier antiquarians, primarily Richard Verstegan, whose A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities (1605), attempted to restore Germanic national origins and aboriginal Catholicism to the English through arguments based on philological and legendary evidence. The parallels with Tolkien are striking. Verstegan reinvented the Goths through ethnographic and etymological evidence, making Hengist and Horsa the founders of England and the “English-Saxon” tongue the deliverer of national character. Such a “Catholic Gothicism” is also perhaps the reason for Tolkien’s reluctance to engage with the spiritual and supernatural disorientations so beloved of thoroughgoing Gothic novelists – the superstitious ritual, mysticism, occultism, demonology, and witchcraft. Instead, Tolkien all but excised explicit religious ritual from his writings. The Goths were the primal Germanic Catholics, an alternative to classical paganism, to Roman (i.e., Mediterranean) Catholicism, and to Protestantism. For Tolkien, the Gothic language had “reached the eminence of liturgical use, but failed owing to the tragic history of the Goths to become one of the liturgical languages of the West” (Letters 357), which was the unfortunate consequence of their adherence to the Arian heresy (disputing the divinity of Christ). Robert Murray remembered that in August 1973:



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Ronald was maintaining with great vigour over the luncheon table that one of the greatest disasters of European history was the fact that the Goths turned Arian: but for that, their languages, just ready to become classical, would have been enriched not only with a great bible version but also, on Byzantine principles, with a vernacular liturgy, which would have served as a model for all the Germanic peoples and would have given them a native Catholicism which would never break apart. And with that he rose and in splendidly sonorous tones declaimed the Our Father in Gothic. (Chronology 773)

The Our Father in Gothic begins “Atta unsar þu in himinam, / Weihnai namo þein,” and in 1952 Tolkien had recited this into a tape recorder to cast any out devils lurking within. It is one of the very few properly Gothic texts that has survived. The poverty of this tradition was symptomatic of the tragedy of history – as Tolkien wrote shortly after the publication of The Return of the King: I am . . . a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect “history” to be anything but a “long defeat” – though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some examples or glimpses of final victory. (Letters 255)

The “long defeat” repeats the haunting phrase used by Galadriel: “together through the ages of the world we have fought the long defeat” (FR, II, vii, 464). The phrase binds together the Goths, the dissolution of English Catholic, and the fall of the Elves. But out of this defeat came the Gothic – imagined, created, and realized as a fundamental constituent of the English national identity in Tolkien’s literature of Middle-earth.

References Bentley, G. E. 1978. William Blake’s Writings. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Blisset, William. 1959. “The Despots of the Rings.” South Atlantic Quarterly, 58: 448–456. Curtis, Anthony. 1963. “Hobbits and Heroes.” The Sunday Telegraph, November 10: 16. Fimi, Dimitra. 2009. Tolkien, Race and Cultural Theory: From Fairies to Hobbits. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gray, William. 2010. Fantasy, Myth and the Measure of Truth: Tales of Pullman, Tolkien, MacDonald and Hoffmann. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lewis, C. S. 2007. The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis. Vol. 3: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy 1950–1963. Edited by Walter Hooper. New York: HarperCollins.

Rawson, Claude. 1999. “Unparodying and Forgery: The Augustan Chatterton.” In Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture, edited by Nick Groom, 15–31. London: Macmillan and New York: St Martin’s. Rosebury, Brian. 2003. Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Originally published in 1992 as Tolkien: A Critical Assessment. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Shippey, Tom. 2000. J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. London: HarperCollins. Shippey, Tom. 2005. The Road to Middle-earth. Rev. and expanded edn. London: HarperCollins. Shippey, Tom. 2010. “Review of J. R. R. Tolkien, The Legend Sigurd and Gudrún, ed. Christopher Tolkien.” Tolkien Studies, 7: 291–324.

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Sly, Debbie. 2000. “Weaving Nets of Gloom: ‘Darkness Profound’ in Tolkien and Milton.” In J. R. R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances, edited by George Clark and Daniel Timmons, 109–119. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Smith, Arden R. 2006. “Tolkienian Gothic.” In The Lord of the Rings, 1954–2004: Scholarship in Honour of Richard E. Blackwelder, edited by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, 267–

281. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2006. Wood, Tanya Caroline. 2000. “Is Tolkien a Renaissance Man? Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesy and J. R. R. Tolkien’s ‘On Fairy-stories’.” In J. R. R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances, edited by George Clark and Daniel Timmons, 95–108. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

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Earlier Fantasy Fiction: Morris, Dunsany, and Lindsay Rachel Falconer

Tolkien was scathing about the investigation of literary sources, which he likened to poking about amongst the bones that go into a soup.1 Most cooks are interested in soup-bones, however, and Tolkien specialists have largely ignored the author’s discouraging remarks about source-hunting. Since Tolkien is widely regarded as the founding father of modern fantasy, the question of where he drew his inspiration is a fascinating one, not only for Tolkien specialists but also for the millions of readers who spend a significant portion of their lives immersed in Tolkienesque fictional worlds. Questions relating to origins are always alluring, even if they so often disappear into a mise en abyme. And now that we live in such a fantastical age – an age of phantasmagoric shape-shifting and ceaseless surfing through virtual worlds, the question seems more pressing than ever: where does fantasy come from? As far as the genesis of Middle-earth is concerned, it is interesting, if also ultimately unsatisfying, to learn about Tolkien’s major literary influences. We know from his own statements, as well as scholarly criticism, that he was far more inspired by AngloSaxon and medieval texts than he was by the work of his immediate predecessors (see chs. 15–20), even if they too were drawn to what Joseph Addison in 1712 had dubbed “the fairy way of writing.”2 Still, when we assemble from various sources the names of nineteenth- to twentieth-century fantasists he read and to a greater or lesser degree admired, we end up with quite a sizeable heap of soup-bones. If everyone’s heap looks a little different, few would neglect to mention these predecessors to Tolkien (in order of birth-date): Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Dickens, George MacDonald, William Morris, Andrew Lang, Richard Jefferies, Henry Rider Haggard, Kenneth

A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Grahame, Samuel Rutherford Crockett, J. M. Barrie, Rudyard Kipling, Beatrix Potter, H. G. Wells, John Buchan, David Lindsay, William Hope Hodgson, and Lord Dunsany.3 With the exception of William Morris, Tolkien’s “debt” to these earlier writers is much less widely known than is his engagement with Old English, Old Norse, Old Icelandic, and other medieval sources. Even Morris is principally known as a writer who shared Tolkien’s love of things medieval. Tolkien is known to have owned a copy of Morris’s translation of the Icelandic Völsunga saga (1870; see Shippey 2005, 391), a work which Morris declared to be “the great story of the North, which should be to our race what the tale of Troy was to the Greeks” (1870, xliv–xlv). More is known of Tolkien’s engagement with Anglo-Saxon and medieval literature because these texts were at the heart of his professional life. His scattered remarks about nineteenth- and twentieth-century writing seem sketchy and lightweight by comparison, and understandably so, as these texts were his “off-duty” reading. It would appear that just two of Tolkien’s published letters make mention of William Morris’s work. In 1914, he tells his future wife that he is working on a retelling of a ballad from the Finnish Kalevala, and that his version will be “a short story somewhat on the lines of Morris’ romances with chunks of poetry in between” (Letters 7). And 46 years later, he writes that the Dead Marshes in The Lord of the Rings owe something to his experience of World War I trench warfare, but “they owe more to William Morris and his Huns and Romans, as in The House of the Wolfings or The Roots of the Mountains.”4 These few sentences are enough to suggest that Morris’s is one of the voices Tolkien internalized when he came to developing his own form of fantasy writing. But about the details of that engagement with Morris, these letters do not expound. His engagement with other turn-of-the-century fiction is even less substantiated by explicit authorial commentary. Scholars have collected Tolkien’s stray remarks about authors he read and liked, or disliked. Examples of the latter include Dunsany’s late fiction and the entire corpus of George MacDonald, which he rejected wholesale after initial enthusiasm (Shippey 2005, 397). But none of these remarks are fleshed out in any detail. Nevertheless, Tolkien scholars have scraped together evidence of possible borrowings from these later sources. Thus, Fangorn forest may be from Morris’s Wood at the World’s End, smithcraft and ideas of Englishness from Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill, the quest for undying lands from Morris’s The Glittering Plain, Gollum from Gagool in Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, Orcs from H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine and The Island of Dr Moreau, and the character of Sauron and Bilbo’s mithril coat from Crockett’s The Black Douglas, although the mithril coat could also have come from Morris’s The House of the Wolfings. All of this is interesting, even alluring, as the quest for origins often is. But it is also ultimately unsatisfying because, after we have sounded out the echo of Gollum’s name in a Rider Haggard novel, where does it leave us? Not much closer to the mystery of origins, because in looking for signs of Tolkien in his predecessors, that is exactly what we will find. Our discoveries will confirm the truth of Borges’s



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observation that writers invent their predecessors (Borges 1964, 47–65), and no one has invented fantasy writing for us more thoroughly than Tolkien. The problem with this approach is that it creates an image of fantasy as an overdetermined genre, one with a predestined historical development, and a fixed set of generic rules, topoi, story arcs, and character types. This is what much fantasy fiction has become since Tolkien, but previously the genre had quite a different horizon of expectation. Tolkien inherited from Romantic and Victorian writers the view that fantasy (the Romantics would have said, the imagination) should invent and originate (see ch. 20). As he writes in “On Fairy-stories,” “All three things: independent invention, inheritance and diffusion, have evidently played their part in producing the intricate web of Story .  .  . Of these three invention is the most important and fundamental” (OFS 40). Tolkien disliked Shakespeare, and had little time for the Romantics (see ch. 20), but the influence he absorbed from writers like William Morris and Lord Dunsany establishes a continuity of thought about the nature and function of imagemaking which flows directly back to nineteenth-century Romanticism (Kearney 1988, 155–188). For example, Dunsany’s elegy for the death of John Keats pictures the young Romantic poet as an Elvish figure who appears out of nowhere: On a magical morning, with twinkling feet And a song at his lips that was strange and sweet, Somebody new came down the street5

This image of Keats as a twinkly-toed, Shakespearean fancy’s child is certainly dated; most Keatsians would insist now on the rough vigor, even coarseness, that alternates with dreaminess in his work (see Stillinger 2001). In any case, the whimsical twinkliness of Shakespeare’s Elves in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a characteristic that Tolkien himself rejects (Letters 143). But Dunsany’s sense of the newness in Keats finds its echo in Tolkien’s insistence on the inventiveness of the fantasy writer. A true fantasist should not be type-cast, and in The John Keats Memorial Volume where Dunsany’s poem is first printed, this maxim is vividly apparent. Dunsany submitted the poem too late for it to be cast in type, so the editors inset the poem in Dunsany’s bold, ink-quilled manuscript hand. And there it leaps from the printed page like the sign of an archetypal fantasist, fresh and surprisingly new. Fantasy (as opposed to the looser category of imaginative writing) becomes recognized as a literary genre in the Victorian period (see Prickett 1979), which is, fascinatingly, the same period that witnessed the flourishing of realism, so the two genres are also twinned in their historical development. Victorian writers understood the appeal of both genres, and hybridized them liberally. Thus Dickens’s Great Expectations may be read as a fairy-tale worked out in the real world, while Carroll’s Alice books present realistic situations (being late, wearing a waistcoat and fob-watch) fantastically transmogrified (a rabbit, so doing). When Tolkien defines fantasy as sub-creation “with

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the inner consistency of reality” (OFS 59), he is continuing this tradition of generic hybridization. The same insistence on their mutual dependence can be seen, more recently, in Philip Pullman’s paradoxical claim that his fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials is a work of “stark realism” (Pullman 2002). But if they are interdependent genres, they also take their identity from what the other is not; if realism owes its most fundamental allegiance to material reality, fantasy owes its allegiance to invention, to ingenuity and experiment. The one rule for fantasy, up to and including Tolkien’s, is that it should be inventive; it should not follow anyone else’s rules. Tolkien himself unquestionably evolved his own rules in the creation of Middle-earth. In “On Fairy-stories” he enumerates a number of key elements that should be present in fairy or fantasy writing, some of which have been already mentioned: invention, or the sub-creation of internally consistent worlds; recovery; escape; and the consolation of a sudden joyous turn of events (eucatastrophe, see ch. 5). But these elements, however important to his thinking, do not constitute a schematic definition of fantasy, because the essence of the genre is that it should not follow existing definitions. It is ironic, then, that in terms of his influence on later writers, Tolkien became the blueprint for the kinds of fantasy (“sword-and-sorcery” and many other subgenres) that follow strict rules and narrow generic conventions.6 Thus contemporary fantasists have adopted Tolkien’s medievalism, his incorporation of the romance quest, the Titanic clash of good and evil, symbolic and magic weapons, and above all, his model of sub-creation: the creation of an independent, secondary world. In contemporary fantasy, secondary worlds come two-a-penny, and although often thinly realized, nevertheless they are peopled and animaled with an entertaining variety of races, and these worlds are generally poised on the edge of a planetary-scale disaster. Fantasy in our times seems to have absorbed as one of its essential functions the business of world-making and world-destroying. If narrative desire stems from the psychological desire to encounter and survive our own individual deaths, as Peter Brooks (1984) argues, then the narrative desire for apocalyptic fantasy may at some level connect to the desire to experience the death of the planet and survive it. What genre could be more appealing to a global society living on the edge of environmental disaster? But as psychologically understandable as it seems to be, it is not clear that the contemporary apocalyptic fantasy does much more for us beyond expanding our capacity for inertness in the face of disaster. On the other hand pre-Tolkienian fantasy, being less fixated on this question of world-destruction, can offer us richer thought-experiments. Of a plethora of possible examples, this discussion will be limited to three: William Morris’s The House of the Wolfings (1889), Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924), and David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus (1920). Tolkien is thought to have read and admired all three, and there are interesting contiguities with his own writing. Still more interesting, though, are their differences from Tolkien, for they suggest directions in which contemporary fantasy could develop, once it has ceased to imitate The Lord of the Rings.7



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William Morris (1834–1896) To enter the fantasy world of William Morris is not necessarily to be struck by an immediate sense of the author’s inventiveness. On the contrary, when one recalls the magnificent, heteroglossic symphonies of the novels that preceded Morris – Gaskell’s North and South (1855) or Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), for instance – one is tempted to think that he was pursuing a side-current of literature that was losing its life-force in the late nineteenth century. Reacting against the Victorian realists, he pursued a form of fiction that was in one sense consciously anti-original. His romances do not concern the origin and coming-of-age of a single individual (Beer 1970). His narrators do not present themselves as dramatic characters, each possessing a unique, original voice. On the contrary, as the opening phrase to The House of the Wolfings (“The tale tells . . .”) implies, in romance the tale preexists the individual teller and can almost tell itself without the aid of a human agent (Morris 2003). Moreover, as Florence Boos has shown (1984, 322), Morris’s The House of the Wolfings and its partner volume, The Roots of the Mountains (both published in 1889), borrow liberally from Edward Gibbon’s portraiture of the Gothic tribes of Europe, in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776). Like Gibbon and in contrast to Tolkien, Morris invents a quasi-historical narrative of communities who once inhabited Europe. His Germanic sagas include the presence of magic, which might have been part of the “consensual reality” of the time, but they do not take place in imaginary secondary worlds.8 Morris’s inventiveness here takes a different form, that of historical sideshadowing, or imagining a community that might have existed (see Morson 1994). While he borrows the quasi-historical framework from Gibbon, Morris everywhere reverses Gibbon’s ideological bias towards Roman culture, and replaces it with a medievalizing, Germanic bias (Boos 1984, 341). Furthermore, Morris’s aim is unwaveringly utopian: to project an ideal of community for the future. His fantasy world is inventive in the sense that it is shaped to express a coherent set of values, and an entire social vision which requires characters inhabiting this particular configuration of fantasy time and space to become articulated. Through use of a quasi-historical chronotope, Morris constructs a vision of community that combines what W. H. Auden referred to as the backward-looking nostalgia of an Edenic narrative with the dangerous idealism of a utopic one (on the chronotope see Bakhtin 1984a). The opening sentence of Wolfings (Morris 2003) gives several indications of the distinctive nature of this chronotope: “The tale tells that in times long past there was a dwelling of men beside a great wood.” The formulaic temporal marker, “in times long past,” makes a double claim of historicity (the setting is Europe on the eve of Roman conquest) and vagueness; for it is not known where or when we are precisely, and whether the main characters are based on historical or legendary figures or are purely fictional. Furthermore, “there was a dwelling” signals the value placed on the idea of a homestead in this utopic Eden: a place where one dwells in the Heideggerian sense of being integrated in a natural environment, taking

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part in a seasonal cycle of labor, as a member of a tribal community (Heidegger 1971). “Beside a great wood” elaborates on the importance of the contiguity between the human and natural community, as the narrator emphasizes later: “you must know that this great clearing in the woodland was not a matter of haphazard” (Morris 2003, 13). The clearing in the wood is a sign of the Goths’ mastering of nature, although unlike the Romans, they do not subjugate it into utter thralldom but learn to cohabit (see Harrison 1997, 6–11). Thus, the river, having been fished, dammed, and sieved for gold, “became their friend, and they loved it, and gave it a name” (Morris 2003, 13). And after the clearing of meadows, the wood remains as a boundary and mark of tribal identity and limit, so that forest and human dwellings nestle side by side as two subjects, each defining the other: the “habitations [of the Wolfings] were shouldered up nigh unto the wood” (13). Wood is the element from which they derive their identity. Their communal hall is made from it; they express their creativity in the decorative carving of wood; and they recede from their dwellings into the wood itself when it becomes time to dispense justice, and vote on matters such as going to war. Wood symbolizes the longevity and endurance of the community, but also its vulnerability; for unlike the retrospectively invincible Romans, the culture of the Gothic tribes can be decimated and destroyed. Thus from his opening sentence, formulaic and unoriginal as it seems, Morris manages to create a distinctive and densely meaningful time-space in which his characters discover what it is they most value. Not just an imaginary secondary world, he constructs an entire world-view for the reader to think in, and with, and through. In addition to conveying Morris’s vision of an ecological, integrated community, Wolfings also challenges and tests out this Morrisean ideal against other, opposing notions of human love and fellowship. This dialogic tension is all the more fascinating and surprising because it occurs in a text that presents itself as a seamless and harmonious whole. For example, Wolfings celebrates blood-kinship and communal identity, at the level of content as well as form; and yet its hero, Thiodolf, is of obscure, “alien” origin. And he only comes to appreciate the value of a tribal identity once he has been further alienated from it by the drugging effects of the armor he accepts from his lover, Wood-Sun. In casting off the languor-inducing hauberk, Thiodolf declares his allegiance to the life of the tribe even at the expense of his own life. He tells Wood-Sun he would rather die for them, than stay alive for their private love: I can see the kindred as they are, and their desire of life and scorn of death, and this is what they have made me myself . . . Well may they bid me die who have made me live! . . . they are mine and I am theirs; and through them am I of the whole earth, and all the kindreds of it. (Morris 2003, 80–81)

In this discovery, Thiodolf might be seen to embody the generous, warm-hearted, selfless virtues that Morris attributes to the Gothic tribes. On the other hand, we might take his words not as a descriptive statement but as a speech-act: “by this speech I claim I am theirs.” This would make Thiodolf a modern, individual subject



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rather than a medieval tribesman with no origin, no identity separate from his tribe’s. Indeed, one might see in him the progenitor of T. S. Eliot’s hollow men, who are similarly enchanted by paralysis and despair (“between the motion and the act falls the shadow”).9 The difference is of course that Thiodolf escapes paralysis, but he does reveal the constructedness of Morris’s ideal of community and fellowship. A stronger challenge to Morris’s socialist ideal comes from Wood-Sun, Thiodolf’s witch lover. In the speech quoted above, Thiodolf is clearly the mouthpiece for the authorial voice, and a monologic text would allow this authorial world-view to go unchallenged.10 But Wood-Sun is not persuaded by the speech at all, and she counters the ideology of the Folk with a stubborn insistence on the facts: if he goes into battle without her protective armor he will die. She admits the tribe has a claim on him, and she admits to having lied in order to get him to wear the enchanted armor. But her last words (2003, 81) reveal her persistently individualist, romantic world-view: I have loved, and I must sorrow; thou hast lived, and thou must die; Ah, wherefore were there others in the world than thou and I?

Nor does the narrator take sides with Thiodolf at this juncture, as we might expect. He bleakly reports “the bitterness of her woe and the anguish of the hour of sundering” (82). And he allows readers to decide for themselves how they might have chosen. Marriage is usually the symbol of achieved social utopia in Morris’s romances. So this image of lovers parting in asymmetric grief provides a strongly dissonant note in the text’s otherwise optimist celebration of undying human community. One might well find an echo of Morris’s notion of fellowship in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. But in Tolkien, fellowship is the means by which the romance quest is realized; for Morris, fellowship is itself the goal, the aim of the quest. And in The Lord of the Rings, while the Fellowship is tested and betrayed, Tolkien does not test the idea of fellowship against any other, comparably persuasive world-view. For him, the heart of the human drama is elsewhere. It is in Morris’s Germanic fantasy that we can experience and think through the idea of fellowship: as the dream of a quasihistorical past, as the vision of a socialist future, and as a nightmare for those whom fellowship excludes.

Lord Dunsany (1878–1957) In fantasy studies, much weight is given to Todorov’s (1973) distinction between the uncanny (where apparently supernatural things can be accounted for rationally), the marvelous (where supernatural elements are accepted as if real), and the fantastic (where we hesitate between rational explanation and belief in magic). For Tolkien, only one of these types of story (Todorov’s “marvelous”) can be classed as fantasy or “fairy,” since the secondary world should always “be presented as true” (OFS 35). Most contemporary fantasists follow Tolkien’s rule, and present fully fleshed out secondary

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worlds. But should the au-delà necessarily be given the “inner consistency of reality” in Tolkien’s phrase, or might it not – being unreal – have an entirely different consistency, or lack consistency altogether? Lord Dunsany’s 1924 novel, The King of Elfland’s Daughter, is one fantasy text that makes no attempt to present the secondary world in accord with the conventions of realism. The novel takes place in two different lands: Erl, which is a Morrisean, idealized medieval community of farmers and craftsmen, and Elfland, “the home of all fabulous things” (Dunsany 1999, 121). Both lands are “marvelous” in the sense that both sets of inhabitants accept the presence and reality of magic. But all magic derives from Elfland; and by “magic” Dunsany means not only events that have no rational explanation, but poetry, music, the memory of childhood, whatever escapes the passage of time, and “all but material things” (223). In effect, Erl embodies a materialist world-view while Elfland gives ghostly shape to an idealist one. The central debate of this text is whether to live life anchored to material things in the present, or whether to pursue the unknown lying over the spatial or temporal horizon. At first glance, the debate seems heavily weighted toward the idealist camp, as is often the case in fantastic or magic realist texts. For example, the way the novel is structured evinces a bias towards fantasy for it lacks the weight and density of realist fiction. The leitmotif of distant music that animates the narrative is inspired by Tennyson’s ballad, “The Princess,” to which Dunsany alludes directly: “O sweet and far, from cliff and scar/ The horns of elfland faintly blowing” (see Dunsany 1999, 93, and OFS 74). Music in this text (as in many others, including Tolkien’s) is nearly always associated with fantasy and the spiritual, and though not always benevolent in its effects, is always beautiful. And in terms of plot (such as there is), the Erl prince Alveric’s doomed love for the Elfin princess Lirazel recalls the melancholy fatalism of Keats’s ballad, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” Neither Alveric nor Lirazel, nor their half-magical son Orion, is realized in any psychological depth, and none of their actions is plausibly bound into a realist sequence of cause and effect. As to the fantasy world of Elfland itself, it is continually being described, but only in terms that accentuate its unrealizability. The Elf King’s palace is an archetypal one, familiar enough from fairy-tales, “with glittering portals all open wide to the lawns, with windows more blue than our sky on Summer’s nights; as though built of starlight; shone that palace that may be only told of in song” (Dunsany 1999, 20). But as the last stock-phrase indicates, this description is merely a sketch, standing in for the ideal palace, which lies beyond reach. When the King of Elfland wants to keep his daughter safe from the questing knight Alveric, he scoops up the entire mistywatery country and steers it, like a suspended lake, to a remote corner of the world. If initially weighted towards fantasy and magic, Dunsany’s novel soon reveals a much profounder restlessness at its core. Neither the characters, nor the authorial voice, seem to know where or how they want to live. The Parliament of Erl, which causes the trouble initially by demanding something magical, is represented satirically throughout. And the hero Alveric’s sad, Quixotic pursuit of Lirazel through deserted wastelands for years and years, seems testament enough to the folly of chasing unreal



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dreams. But equally, to refuse the presence of magic seems myopic. We have the extreme example of the Freer, the village priest of Erl, who walls himself up in a dark tower of negativity, declaring: “Cursed be all wandering things whose place is not upon Earth . . . all strange lights, strange songs, strange shadows” (215). And more ambiguously, there are the curious inhabitants of the borderlands, who recognize only three points of the compass. They mentally block out the East (where Elfland lies) because they know that from that direction comes the destabilizing desire for other realities than their own present, material existence. And whether they are myopic or sage, the text never allows us fully to decide. What is most striking about Dunsany’s conception of fantasy, in relation to the “real” world, is that the inhabitants of both worlds are equally fascinated and tempted by the other. When Alveric first crosses into Elfland, he does so at the command of his father and the leaders of Erl, who yearn for a touch of magic (“erl” being German for “elf” is a clear sign of kinship). When he loses the Elf princess, though, he falls prey to a deeper yearning than any of them, and for pages and pages the reader follows his sad, Quixotic quest for a blue-misty world that recedes forever from his grasp. And meanwhile, more surprisingly, we find trolls, unicorns, and the daughter of the Elf King, all succumbing to the sweet tastes of mortality: to shadows of evening and pigeon chatter, to meadow grasses and spring flowers. To Elfland’s inhabitants the contemplation of eternal beauty can pall a bit, even when it is stirred occasionally by the fish-ripple of kingly thought. On her return the princess is sat upon her father’s knee, and there she remains for the next 12 years – no wonder she longs for a mortal life! The dominant chronotopic image of the text is that of the threshold between worlds, which Dunsany describes (repeatedly and at length) as a physical barrier, “made by the massing of twilights from the ending of thousands of days . . . preserved by magic” (141). The threshold, in other words, is comprised of an impossible blend of time and timelessness. And, in a text which is sumptuously written throughout, the passages that stand out most radiantly are those which reach from a present mode of existence into an elsewhere, or another time. Thus, the witch Ziroonderel enchants an ordinary sword by invoking “such memories as lurk and hide along the edges of oblivion, now flashing from beautiful years of glimpse of some golden moment, now passing swiftly out of remembrance again” (6). The sword’s enchantment is woven out of memory as much as the imaginary, for both are realities of non-presence. What captures the imagination most about this text is the idea of a ceaseless traffic between the present and elsewhere, so that the texture of one mode of existence becomes inseparable from the other. If Dunsany appears at the outset to be making a plea for idealism, against a dominant ethos of materialism, he eventually intuits a more complex picture of matter resolving into spirit continually, and vice versa: . . . just as the glamour that brightens much of our lives, especially in early years, comes from rumours that reach us from Elfland . . . so there returns from our fields to Elfland again, to become a part of its mystery, all manner of little memories that we have lost

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. . . And this is part of the law of ebb and flow that science may trace in all things; thus light grew the forest of coal, and the coal gives back light; thus rivers fill the sea, and the sea sends back to the rivers; thus all things give that receive; even Death. (67–68)

Here too, the text’s superficially pro-poetry, anti-science bias yields to a world-view that accommodates both those forms of truth-seeking. Neither world being satisfying in itself, one comes to realize that the essence of fantasy, for Dunsany, lies not in an imaginary place, but in the sense of yearning itself. The passage that perhaps illustrates this circulation of desire best is that which describes the Elf King’s musical composition on the nature of dawn. His aim is to satisfy his daughter’s longing for an earthly passage of time, and in this he fails, because it only makes her longing worse. But Dunsany also uses this as an etiological or pourquoi story to explain how human music was invented: The flood of music beat with wonderful waves against the slopes of the grave blue Elfin Mountains. . . . And though it came to Earth, and though never our fields have heard the music of Efland, yet there were then . . . those that make songs for the need of our grief and our laughter . . . they felt in their minds the dance of those magical notes, and wrote them down and earthly instruments played them; then and never till then have we heard the music of Elfland. (175)

Dunsany thus suggests that earthly music derives its haunting quality from supernatural origins. But he further speculates that the “original” supernatural music is itself an attempt for an immortal being to understand human mortality, since the Elven king’s song of the dawn is an attempt to give form to his daughter’s desire for an earthly existence. Thus operates the “law of ebb and flow”: no point of origin but rather a continual circulation of longing and desire. This law, malleable as it is, turns out to be the governing principle of Dunsany’s concept of fantasy. In its resolution, The King of Elfland’s Daughter bears comparison with Tolkien’s notion of eucatastrophe, the sudden joyous turn which Tolkien regarded as essential to fantasy (see ch. 5). Uncomforted by her father’s music, Lirazel remains caught between two worlds: “What could she do who would not cast away magic and leave [her] home . . . whose heart was yet held by those little tendrils of Earth, which are strong enough, strong enough?” (219). Alveric’s situation is grimmer still, as he has lost both home and dream world. But Dunsany seems to resolve his endless, aporetic yearning with one stroke of his quill pen. “Was it impossible” to have both worlds? His response is, no, not impossible, since “we have to do with magic”; that is, anything is possible in fantasy (219). So the King of Elfland uses his last, most powerful rune to absorb Erl and all its inhabitants into Elfland permanently. In this way Lirazel, Alveric, and Orion are effortlessly reunited, and the princess gets to cultivate her earthly garden. A eucatastrophe of major proportions, it would seem. But if the main characters are united, there is no larger resolution of the worlds of matter and spirit, because Erl is simply engulfed by Elfland, “and so passed out of all remembrance of men” (240). It is as if the Elfin femme fatale of Keats’s ballad had



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abducted not only the pale knight, but his entire community, into the dream world. This is a severe come-uppance for the parliament of Erl, who had sought out magic for the express purpose of making Erl a famous place. The question whether one should be open to the supernatural, or shut one’s eyes firmly against it, is finally left open in this joyous, yet at the same time, strangely chilling ending.

David Lindsay (1876–1945) The King of Elfland’s Daughter provides one example of a secondary fantasy world that is the more enchanting and desirable because it is not presented “with the inner consistency of reality.” And yet Dunsany, Tolkien – as well as Morris, for that matter – are all in accord on this point (which again reveals their shared Romantic inheritance): that fantasy worlds should induce a sense of wonder.11 David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus (1920), by contrast, uses fantasy as a vehicle for dis-enchantment. In Lindsay’s case, the fantasy quest is driven not by wonder but by the hero’s self-loathing; what is more, the authorial voice and the implied reader share in his sense of alienation and disgust. While many contemporary fantasists depict brutality and violence, these characteristics are usually associated with evil otherness, and in any case, the violence is often glamorized. It is much rarer to find a fantasy hero who commits evil acts (Maskull murders several characters, sometimes for trivial reasons), and who becomes less and less likeable to himself and the reader. After Tolkien, a reader of fantasy is typically asked to believe a world of illusion, or at least to accept the fantasy as true, in fictional terms. Lindsay demands of his reader exactly the opposite mental attitude: to question everything. So much so that, in the final pages, Maskull’s guide jeeringly rebukes him: “You think you are thoroughly disillusioned, don’t you? Well, that may prove to be the last and strongest illusion of all” (Lindsay 2003, 258). In generic terms, Lindsay pushes fantasy in the direction of science fiction, since the hero, Maskull, voyages to a distant star system, Arcturus. The novel reputedly inspired C. S. Lewis in the writing of Perelandra (1943), whose other title is Voyage to Venus (see Moorcock 2002). In Arcturus, Maskull lands on a planet called Tormance where, as the name implies, he experiences (and inflicts) many torments, both physical and psychological. Being unconcerned with technology or futuristic modes of living, however, Arcturus is not quite a science fiction novel itself, but rather a fantasy in the tradition of Dante’s Commedia, where the quest is for eternal truth and the salvation of the sinner’s soul. As such, the true descendant of Lindsay’s novel is perhaps not Perelandra but Alasdair Gray’s hybrid realist-fantastical masterpiece, Lanark (1981). Both Lindsay and Gray create secondary worlds which are nightmares rather than golden dream worlds, yet to me at least, they are less depressing than contemporary apocalyptic fantasies, because they are clearly putting their characters through Hell in order to get somewhere – if not to Paradise, then to a juster world on the other side. Maskull’s Virgilian guide through Tormance is Krag, an ugly, sallow-faced, sarcastic creature who seems for much of the novel to be a devilish, anti-redemptive tempter.

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What Maskull thinks he is seeking is a divine Creator, the source of pure light and music, who goes by several names and guises: Crystalman, Shaping, Surtur, Muspel. Seeking this Creator, he voyages through multiple land- and seascapes (Sant, Wombflash Forest, Threal, Barey, and many others), encountering an array of peoples with strange appendages (extra eyes, arms, genitalia, ears or lungs, for example). Yet the narrative begins and ends with the hero climbing an unearthly, never-ending tower. And in a sense, the novel maintains this double sense of spatiality throughout: it is both the horizontal world of romance adventure which we find in The Lord of the Rings (where towers are mostly evil, but they stand at specific places on a horizontal plane) and the vertical world of Dante and vision literature (where the pilgrim journeys down towards evil, or up, towards beatitude).12 As in the lowest circle of Dante’s inferno, Maskull experiences a revelatory reversal of values at the end of his adventures, which allows him to recognize the Orc-like Krag as his true spiritual guide. Lindsay makes clear his anti-pleasure principle for fantasy in the final chapter, where he has Krag reveal his earthly name: “Pain” (280). And on many levels, the novel remains consistent to this principle that enlightenment comes from suffering. In stark contrast to Dunsany’s richly cadenced Biblical style, Lindsay’s style is abrupt, jaggedly unrhythmical, and unadorned by metaphor. Following Schopenhauer, Plato, and some aspects of Buddhist philosophy, Lindsay sees the goal of the fantasy quest as the suppression of the individual’s egotistical will. And yet paradoxically, and in sharp contrast to Morris and Tolkien, he sends his hero on a solitary, anti-social journey. In each region, Maskull makes friends or enemies with one or two characters, but none of these survive his exceptionally lethal journey for long enough to become traveling companions. Most abruptly of all, Lindsay even kills off his hero, an act of violence unthinkable in most contemporary, individual-centered fantasies. This is technically consistent with the Dantean model of a descent journey, in which the sinner must spiritually die to be reborn with a propensity for grace. The new embodiment of Maskull recognizes, and struggles with, this Dantean task: “I can’t face rebirth . . . the horror of death is nothing to it” (272). And yet the Dantean pilgrim remains one and the same person before and after his spiritual “death” in Hell. In Maskull’s case, we much more shockingly witness the character’s physical extinction, and see him replaced by someone with a different name (Nightspore) and personality. Lindsay turns out to be as stern a guide as Krag, which is no doubt why the novel has never attracted a wide readership, yet this stunningly challenging work is exactly the kind of thing we should be reading to recall how inventive fantasy can be.

Conclusion Fantasy exists, as Tolkien argued, to help us escape existing patterns of thought – “Creative fantasy . . . may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like cage-birds” (OFS 68). It is the pure product of imagination, which philosopher Edward Casey defines as the pays du possible, and thus it ought to be distinguished



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from the pays de la vie quotidienne (Casey 2000, 233). And yet, as Calvino’s image of the wing-footed Perseus (“fantasy”) holding the head of Medusa (“reality”) before him to defeat his enemies suggests, realism and fantasy are always closely bound together (Calvino 1996, 7). Realism appeals to the human desire for stories to reflect who we are, to make us feel known in the world, and to make the world more knowable to us. And fantasy appeals to the human desire for stories to take us beyond what we know of ourselves and nature, to experience metamorphosis, to come home changed after distant travels. Each of these late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century texts is a fantasy in that it constitutes a departure from consensual reality. Each takes us on a materially impossible journey through distant lands and times; and each brings us home changed. But best of all is unexpectedness of the journey, so that nothing is foreseen in each exploration of the boundless pays du possible.

Notes   1  OFS (39), where Tolkien quotes George Webbe Dasent: “We must be satisfied with the soup that is set before us.”   2  Joseph Addison, The Spectator, 419 (July 1, 1712).   3  Discussion of Tolkien’s possible nineteenthand twentieth-century influences can be found in Nelson (2007); Shippey (2005); Anderson (2002 and 2003); Fisher (2011); Garth (2003); Blackwelder (1990); Carpenter (1977); Clute and Grant (1997); Mathews (2012); Day (2011); Biemer (2010); Rogers and Underwood (2000).   4  Both letters are quoted by Michael Perry, in his Foreword to Morris (2003, 9).   5  Lord Dunsany, in Williamson and Wise (1921).   6  A similar view is expressed by Neil Gaiman in his introduction to Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter (Dunsany 1999, xiii).   7  I would like to thank the students in my “Fantasy before Tolkien” seminar at Lausanne

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University, for reading these works with me and sharing their insights. Deepest thanks, also, to Annabel Mills for her comments on several drafts of this chapter. Kathryn Hume defines fantasy as “the departure from consensual reality” in Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature (New York: Methuen, 1984). Morris’s late fantasies do take place in wholly imaginary secondary worlds, unlike these earlier, Germanic romances. T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men” (1925), ll. 74–76, in the Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Twentieth Century and After, 8th edn. (New York: Norton, 2006), 2311. On dialogic versus monologic texts, see Bakhtin (1984b). On “wonder” as the characteristic mood of Romanticism, see Holmes (2008). On the vertical, visionary chronotope in Dante, see Bakhtin (1984a, 157).

References Anderson, Douglas A., ed. 2002. The Annotated Hobbit. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Anderson, Douglas A., ed. 2003. Tales Before Tolkien: The Roots of Modern Fantasy. London: Random House.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984a. “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, edited by Michael Holquist, 84–258. Austin: University of Texas Press.

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Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984b. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Edited and translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Beer, Gillian. 1970. The Romance. London: Methuen. Biemer, Marie-Noëlle. 2010. “Disenchanted with Their Age: Keats’s, Morris’s, and Tolkien’s Great Escape.” Hither Shore, 7: 60–75. Blackwelder, Richard. 1990. A Tolkien Thesaurus. New York: Garland. Boos, Florence. 1984. “Morris’s German Romances as Socialist History.” Victorian Studies, 27.3: 321–342. Borges, Jorge Luis. 1964. Other Inquisitions: 1937– 1952. Translated by Ruth Simms. Austin: University of Texas Press. Brooks, Peter. 1984. Reading for the Plot. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Calvino, Italo. 1996. Six Memos for the Next Millennium: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 1985–86. Translated by Patrick Creagh. London: Vintage. Carpenter, Humphrey. 1977. J. R. R. Tolkien – A Biography. London: Allen & Unwin. Casey, Edward. 2000. Imagining: A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Clute, John and John Grant. 1997. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. London: Orbit Books. Day, David. 2011. Tolkien’s Ring. London: Pavilion. Dunsany, Lord. 1999. The King of Elfland’s Daughter. Introduction by Neil Gaiman. New York: Random House. Fisher, Jason, ed. 2011. Tolkien and the Study of His Sources. Jefferson, NC: MacFarland. Garth, John. 2003. Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth. London: HarperCollins. Harrison, Robert Pogue. 1997. Forests: The Shadow of Civilization. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1971. “Building Dwelling Thinking.” In Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper Colophon Books. Holmes, Richard. 2008. The Age of Wonder. London: HarperPress. Kearney, Richard. 1988. The Wake of Imagination: Ideas of Creativity in Western Culture. London: Hutchinson.

Lindsay, David. 2003. A Voyage to Arcturus. London: Gollancz. Mathews, Richard. 2012. Fantasy and the Liberation of the Imagination. London: Routledge. Moorcock, Michael. 2002. “The Alienness of Atmosphere.” The Guardian, August 31. Review of David Lindsay, A Voyage to Arcturus. Available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/aug/ 31/featuresreviews.guardianreview20, accessed December 10, 2013. Morris, William, trans. 1870. Völsunga Saga: The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs, with Certain Songs from the Elder Edda. London: F. S. Ellis. Morris, William. 2003. The House of the Wolfings. In More to William Morris, with Foreword by Michael Perry. Seattle, WA: Inkling Books. Morson, Gary Saul. 1994. Narrative and Freedom. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Nelson, Dale. 2007. “Literary Influences, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.” In J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopaedia, edited by Michael Drout, 367–378. London: Routledge. Prickett, Stephen. 1979. Victorian Fantasy. Hassocks: Harvester Press. Pullman, Philip. 2002. “Writing Fantasy Realistically.” Sea of Faith National Conference. Available at http://sofn.org.uk/conferences/pull man2002.html, accessed December 10, 2013. Rogers II, William and Michael Underwood. 2000. “Gagool and Gollum: Exemplars of Degeneration in King Solomon’s Mines and The Hobbit.” In J. R. s, edited by George Clark and Daniel Timmons, 121–132. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Shippey, Tom. 2005. The Road to Middle-earth. Rev. and expanded edn. London: HarperCollins. Stillinger, Jack. 2001. “The ‘Story’ of Keats.” In The Cambridge Companion to Keats, edited by Susan J. Wolfson, 246–260. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1973. The Fantastic. Translated by Richard Howard. Cleveland, OH: Case Western Reserve University Press. Williamson, George and Thomas Wise, eds. 1921. The John Keats Memorial Volume. London: John Lane, The Bodley Head. Available at http:// archive.org/details/johnkeatsmemoria00kea tuoft, accessed December 10, 2013.

22

The Inklings and Others: Tolkien and His Contemporaries David Bratman

The Inklings In 1954, when The Fellowship of the Ring was published, Tolkien’s readers found a Foreword including a dedication of the book to the author’s children and to an unidentified group, “my friends the Inklings.” The Inklings deserved the book’s dedication, the Foreword explained, “because they have already listened to it with a patience, and indeed with an interest, that almost leads me to suspect that they have hobbitblood in their venerable ancestry.”1 Who were these Inklings to whom Tolkien so blithely attributed possible kinship to his fictional Hobbits? Clearly they had heard The Lord of the Rings read aloud. Attentive readers might also have noticed the name of C. S. Lewis among the blurbwriters on the dust jacket, and thus been reminded that he and Tolkien were friends and colleagues at Oxford (see ch. 1), and further noticed that Lewis’s 1940 work of popular theology, The Problem of Pain, bore the unannotated dedication, “To the Inklings.” So did a more abstruse theological study of two years later, The Forgiveness of Sins by Charles Williams. But that was all that had yet appeared in print with the name “Inklings” on it that could possibly refer to the same group. It would have taken a bold spirit to connect that to the allusion, in C. S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics by Chad Walsh, the 1949 volume which was as yet the only book on any of them, to “a small circle of close friends” of Lewis which met “Thursday evenings in Lewis’s college rooms” and Tuesday mornings “at a certain small, sedate pub, which I have promised to leave

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nameless so that the ravenous public will not storm it for the delectable cider that is its specialty” (Walsh 1949, 15–16), even though both Williams (who had died in 1945) and Tolkien are named as members of this circle. Gradually, the nature and membership of the Inklings became clearer to the literary public. By 1966, W. H. Lewis, C. S. Lewis’s brother, could refer to the group as “a famous and heroic gathering, one that has already passed into literary legend,” in the course of describing it as what would now be called a writers’ circle, a forum for sharing orally one’s own writings and receiving “unbiased [and] brutally frank” critiques (Lewis 1966, 13). The establishment of Tolkien as a major writer for adults with the publication of The Lord of the Rings was probably a major impetus for the appearance, starting in the late 1950s, of a number of literary studies covering him, Lewis, Williams, and sometimes Owen Barfield together. By emphasizing the authors’ commonalities, they left the impression, consciously or otherwise, of a coterie engaged in a shared literary mission. The Inklings themselves objected to such a view: less, it seems, because it was actually unjustified than because it implied a conscious purpose and because it infringed on their literary autonomy. A group can be engaged in a campaign without having come together for the purpose of doing so. C. S. Lewis, before his death in 1963, had occasion specifically to deny the impression that he had been “forming a cabinet, or cell, or coven” (Lewis 2007, 1401), yet he elsewhere acknowledged forthrightly that his group’s purposes were at odds with the contemporary literary establishment, for instance noting that “the problems of narrative as such – seldom heard of in modern critical writings – were constantly before our minds” (Lewis 1947, v). W. H. Lewis, reacting to a particularly ambitious group study, The Precincts of Felicity by an American scholar, Charles Moorman (1966), which added in the nonInklings T. S. Eliot and Dorothy L. Sayers and dubbed them all “the Oxford Christians,” wrote that this name: strikes a wrong note at the outset by suggesting an organized group for the propagation of Christianity, whilst in fact the title is justified only in the most literal sense, i.e. that we nearly all lived in Oxford and were all believers. His thesis is that in the Inklings a kind of group mind was at work which influenced the writing of every Inkling, and this he supports by assertions which seem to me very shaky. (W. H. Lewis 1982, 268)

Of the Inklings, Tolkien particularly valued his autonomy as a creative artist, disliking seeing his own influence on other authors as much as he did having influences on himself descried. C. S. Lewis had tried to explain to Moorman that his search for mutual influences among the Inklings was “chasing after a fox that isn’t there,” and that, in particular, “No one ever influenced Tolkien – you might as well try to influence a bandersnatch. We listened to his work, but could affect it only by encouragement” (Lewis 2007, 1049). But the lesson to scholars didn’t seem to take, at least at first.



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In his later years, Tolkien distanced himself from the Inklings, particularly from Williams. Even during the years of his close friendship with Williams, during the 1940s, Tolkien cheerfully confessed that Williams’s work was often beyond his understanding (an incomprehension he put in light verse form; Carpenter 2006, 123–126). Tolkien later emphasized that the friendship was only personal, and at other points denied knowing Williams well at all and even described him as a pernicious influence on Lewis. John Rateliff has suggested that the advent of Inklings scholarship, tending to push the Inklings together, generated a counter-reaction by the Inklings themselves, pushing each other apart, and there is much evidence to support this (Rateliff 1986, 49–50). Later scholars, more sensitive to the Inklings’ corrective self-portrait, endorsed it, and it became the conventional wisdom with the publication of Humphrey Carpenter’s The Inklings in 1978 (see Carpenter 2006). As a detailed group biography based on extensive original research, it carried as much authority in its opinions as in its facts. Carpenter’s view that the Inklings were a circle of Lewis’s friends, nothing more (Carpenter 2006, 171), became accepted by later scholars. Verlyn Flieger’s declaration that Tolkien was “far more unlike than he was like” Lewis or Williams, sharing merely “superficial similarities” (2002, xix–xx) is typical, however much of a surprise such a view would have been to Charles Moorman, Robert J. Reilly, Gunnar Urang, or any other number of earlier scholars. A peculiar side effect of the separation of the Inklings in scholarly culture has been the rise in popular culture of a belief that they disliked each others’ fiction. There is more than a nugget of truth in this.2 But the common widespread factoid that Tolkien and Lewis were jealous of each other’s literary success, or that all the Inklings disliked Tolkien’s work, is completely untrue.3 A synthesis was achieved by Diana Pavlac Glyer in her book, The Company They Keep. Glyer made two clear observations: first, to note the implausibility of the members of a long-standing writers’ group having no influence on each other (2007, xvii–xviii); secondly, that influence need not take the form of borrowing ideas. Encouragement is one powerful form of influence; both Tolkien and Lewis testified that Lewis’s encouragement was a principal reason that Tolkien, who rarely completed any large literary projects, actually finished both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (55–58). Glyer also points out the existence of negative influence. Tolkien seems to have been particularly inspired by irritants: Smith of Wootton Major, for instance, was written as a “counterblast” to Lewis’s esteemed George MacDonald and, it appears, to Lewis himself. This is not easily discernible merely by reading the story; Tolkien’s intent is known only because he stated it (Reader’s Guide 943–945; Glyer 2007, 38–39). In the end, it may be best to view the placement of the Inklings in the literary field as that of a star cluster or a constellation, whose components may not actually be near each other, but which look close from a distance or from a particular viewing angle. Similarities like shared Christianity, a fantasy-oriented imagination, a fondness for narrative for its own sake, and a strong moral sense may be superficial from Flieger’s

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close view, but they’re worth a lot more in a literary context in which they are rare and often discounted (Bratman 2007, 303–304).

Tolkien and the Inklings: C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams An idea of the diversity, as well as the spread of styles and the interconnections, of the Inklings may be glimpsed by mapping their works against the taxonomy proposed by Farah Mendlesohn in Rhetorics of Fantasy. For Mendlesohn, Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is the type specimen of the “portal fantasy,” the journey through a gateway into a secondary world (2008, xix, 1). Most, though not all, of the other Narnian books fall into this category, as do the first two of Lewis’s Ransom trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. The Lord of the Rings was first described as a quest story by W. H. Auden (1954 and 1956, expanded on in 2004). Mendlesohn classes quest fantasies with portals in a hybrid “portal-quest fantasy” form, as she finds that portal fantasies tend to have quest plots and that all quests tend to bear similar rhetorical strategies regardless of whether the characters travel through a portal or not. She also, however, acknowledges that Tolkien’s Arda as a whole, manifested in the “Silmarillion” narratives, is a differing form that she calls the “immersive fantasy” (2–3, 67), written from a viewpoint inside a complete world without the tourist effect of a quest. And Charles Williams’s novels exemplify the “intrusion fantasy,” in which the fantastic invades a putatively normal world (115).4 So between them, the three major Inklings typify three of Mendlesohn’s four principal taxa, an impressive display of diversity. Though Tolkien did like to write quest stories – among his other works, Farmer Giles of Ham and Smith of Wootton Major may be seen as quests with a normative departure point of medieval England, and Roverandom is a tourist story par excellence – the immersive narratives of the Elder Days, the “Silmarillion” papers, were the purest and most basic expression of his story-telling impulse. There is, however, much more to it than that. Lewis, whom Tolkien called “a very impressionable, too impressionable, man” (Letters 349, 362) wrote works which often seem to bear the impression of the last author he had read. I have described his Ransom trilogy as “an astonishing anthology of an H. G. Wells style science fiction novel, a George MacDonald fantasy, and a Charles Williams contemporary weird fiction tale” (Bratman 2007, 305). In this context, it is volume three, That Hideous Strength, which is most interesting. In outline it’s a robust invasive fantasy in the Williams mode, an influence that Tolkien in later years considered baleful (Letters 342). Tolkien was also bothered by what he called a plagiarism of his own work (Letters 224), though Lewis surely considered it an homage. Picking up the Atlantean/Avalonian image of Númenor from Tolkien’s legendarium, Lewis cites it several times to provide a touch of the literary depth that came so naturally to Tolkien, as a mystic “true West” known, in the story, only to adepts such as the Pendragon and the wizard Merlin. Lewis spelled it “Numinor”



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because (Tolkien presumed) he had only heard Tolkien read the story aloud (Lewis 1996, 201, 265, 272; Letters 303, 361). In a further tantalizing reference, Lewis in a preface informs readers that “Those who would like to learn further about Numinor and the True West must (alas!) await the publication of much that still exists only in the MSS. of my friend, Professor J. R. R. Tolkien” (Lewis 1996, 7). This refers not to the then unfinished The Lord of the Rings (That Hideous Strength was completed in 1943 and published two years later) in which Númenor barely figures, but to “The Lost Road,” an unfinished (and destined never to be finished) story that Tolkien had begun in 1936–1937 in what he described as an agreement with Lewis, in which Lewis was to write a space-travel story and Tolkien a time-travel story (see ch. 11). Lewis quickly finished his entry, which (with Tolkien’s assistance and encouragement) was published as Out of the Silent Planet, but Tolkien’s soon drifted to a halt.5 “The Lost Road” is, or would be, had it been completed to Tolkien’s plan, a vertiginous time abyss of a story in which two present-day men, a father and son, experience, through dreams or visions of language (Tolkien’s distinctive method of expressing his artistic creativity) an awareness of pairs like themselves, and with names of the same meaning, stretching back through history as far as lost Númenor (Letters 347). The desire to take an ocean voyage in search of the lost road of the title, leading to Valinor, removed from the circles of the world, is a theme in this story that reappears throughout Tolkien’s legendarium. Tolkien only wrote a few chapters, but the outline is clear. This is a Williamsian type of story with distinctively Tolkienian content, and the motive of the ever-recurring myth foreshadows, among others, Alan Garner’s The Owl Service. The driving engine of Tolkien’s thought here comes not from Williams at all, but from Tolkien’s reading of the philosophical works of Owen Barfield and J. W. Dunne, as discussed and illuminated extensively in Flieger’s works of 2002 and 1997, respectively. Even more interesting, partly because it’s more accomplished and less sentimental in prose, is “The Notion Club Papers,” Tolkien’s 1945–1946 recasting of the linguisticmemory aspect of “The Lost Road” into the adventures of a literary club loosely inspired by the Inklings (see ch. 11). The air of Williams hangs over this also incomplete story as it does That Hideous Strength, suggesting that Tolkien, at this early date, was far more susceptible to Williams’s spell, if it may be so put, than he admitted to later on. “The Notion Club Papers” is more of an invasive fantasy than is “The Lost Road,” at least what we have of it, because the storm from out of the West (the true True West – Lewis was slightly confused about Tolkien’s cosmography), which in the “Silmarillion” legendarium drowns Númenor within the secondary world, in “The Notion Club Papers” overtakes Oxford while the members of the Notion Club take refuge in a member’s rooms in Jesus College (Sauron 251–253). The story is set in the future, in 1987, and its frisson of the uncanny extends beyond the borders of the story when one recalls that an enormous and memorable storm – which, among other things, knocked down much of A. A. Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood – did strike England that year.

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One element present in “The Lost Road” and positively dominating That Hideous Strength, but absent from “The Notion Club Papers,” is the miasma of totalitarian evil, expressed faintly in The Lord of the Rings in the realms of Mordor and Isengard. This reappeared as a whiff around the edges that flavors “The New Shadow,” a fragmentary sequel to The Lord of the Rings consisting of two scenes that Tolkien drafted in the 1950s about rumors of an outbreak of Sauron-worship, comparable to neoNazism, in postwar Gondor. After this promising opening, he dropped it, commenting later that “I could have written a ‘thriller’ about the plot and its discovery and overthrow – but it would be just that. Not worth doing” (Letters 344). It would indeed have been a thriller – a Charles Williams thriller. By this time, perhaps, Tolkien was beginning to reconsider his Williamsian side. He may still, however, have had a Lewisian side. Lewis’s The Horse and His Boy, an adventure tale set primarily among native Narnian characters, is immersive, and The Magician’s Nephew, the Narnian prequel, is invasive, as is Lewis’s later stand-alone novel Till We Have Faces, a retelling of Cupid and Psyche set in an ancient barbarian kingdom somewhere in the Greek-influenced hinterlands. But to Psyche, who accepts the cryptic magic she’s married into, it’s more of a “liminal fantasy,” Mendlesohn’s fourth major category, and it’s the conflict between this viewpoint and that of her sister Orual, the narrator, to whom the magic is repulsively invasive, that makes the story. Exemplified, among novels of this era, by Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees, to which one may perhaps add The King of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany (see ch. 21), liminal fantasy is something of an alien style to the Inklings, but a similar attitude towards Faërie – that it surrounds you, you may try to ignore it but you can’t keep it out – is found in Tolkien’s Smith of Wootton Major.

The Inklings and Their Contemporaries C. S. Lewis had an endearing habit of writing fan letters to living authors he admired, and occasionally he even invited them to visit a group of like-minded enthusiasts, by which he meant the Inklings. By far the most successful catch he made this way was Williams himself, to whom he wrote in 1936. Lewis had been introduced to Williams’s novel The Place of the Lion by fellow Inkling Nevill Coghill, and, finding it just the sort of spiritual thriller he was looking for, put it onto his brother, W. H. Lewis, and to Tolkien, whom he reported to be “all buzzing with excited admiration” – possibly, even then, an overestimate where Tolkien was concerned, and more a projection of his own response (Lewis 2004, 183). Even if that is so, Williams was clearly a welcome addition. Williams visited the Inklings, and Lewis came to see Williams in London, a few times before Williams’s offices (he was an editor with the London office of the Oxford University Press) were evacuated to Oxford at the start of the war in 1939, at which time Williams became a regular Inklings attendee. However, Williams was not the only notable fantasy author whom Lewis attempted to attract to the group.



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E. R. Eddison Another author who came to visit the Inklings – or at least members of the Inklings, for the group had no formal existence and the distinction between a regular meeting and a more private invitational gathering is not always clear – at Lewis’s invitation was E. R. Eddison. At the end of 1942, Lewis had found Eddison’s 1922 romance The Worm Ouroboros mentioned in a survey book on the novel (Eddison scholar Paul Edmund Thomas has recently identified this as Haines 1942, 203–205.) Despite what Lewis considered an extremely inept description, he realized The Worm Ouroboros was a story he’d enjoy, and before he had even finished reading it he wrote the author a fan letter imitating Eddison’s own archaic Elizabethan prose (Lewis 2004, 535–536). Eddison replied in kind, enclosing a copy of his subsequent book, Mistress of Mistresses, and he soon came to Oxford for an Inklings-sponsored dinner party. He later returned for another visit, reading from his work-in-progress The Mezentian Gate, and might have come yet again had he not died in 1945. Eddison was like Tolkien in having a mundane day job that did not reveal the grandiose creative imagination burning within him, which he indulged as a hobby.6 Also like Tolkien, Eddison had been nurturing his imaginary world since an early age. That explains the crude names like “Demons” and “Witches” that fit so oddly with the nations in The Worm Ouroboros: Eddison had attached them to his invention as a small boy and couldn’t bear to give them up (Thomas 1991, xix). Tolkien was present at both of Eddison’s visits, and his reaction to Eddison’s works is interesting, for it appears to be a grudging respect. He repeatedly expressed his admiration of Eddison’s narrative power, probably more than for any other writer of his own day. When Eddison read from The Mezentian Gate to the Inklings, Tolkien described it as “of undiminished power and felicity of expression” (Letters 84). There were aspects of Eddison’s work that Tolkien did not like, but – surprisingly for such a critical reader – he couched his criticisms in terms of praise. “I seldom find any modern books that hold my attention,” he wrote, but made an exception for Eddison, “in spite of his peculiarly bad nomenclature and personal philosophy” (Letters 377). And he used the same phrasing when writing that “in spite of all” of his criticisms, “I still think of [Eddison] as the greatest and most convincing writer of ‘invented worlds’ that I have read” (Letters 258).7 Tolkien admired in Eddison the factors most in common with his own work: the scope, the narrative power, the vividness and detail of invention, and the richness of the language and imagery. His qualms focused on Eddison’s admiration of “arrogance and cruelty” (Tolkien’s words; Letters 258) and his condemnation of Tolkien’s religious humanism as “soft.” The Worm Ouroboros takes its title from the fact that, when the conflict is over, the protagonists can think of no finer sequel than to be sent back in time to start it all over again. This reverence of combat for its own sake is likely to have been anathema to an author in whose works initiating war is always traumatic and usually foredoomed, and one of whose most noble warrior characters says, “I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor

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the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend” (TT, IV, v, 878). That is the opposite of the view of the heroic Demons of Eddison. As a result, Eddison stands as a cross between the method of Tolkienian high fantasy and the meaning of adventure-oriented Sword and Sorcery, as described below.

T. H. White A third writer Lewis wrote to was T. H. White, in 1947 (Lewis 2007, 1569–1570). In this case there is no record that the recipient took up the invitation to visit. Lewis’s impulse was reading White’s 1946 semi-humorous fantasy Mistress Masham’s Repose, a pastiche sequel to the Lilliput sequence of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Accordingly, as he’d written in Elizabethan English to Eddison, he wrote in Swiftian English to White. While Mistress Masham’s Repose is perhaps White’s finest novel, his magnum opus and best-known work is his Arthurian saga. Published in final form as The Once and Future King in 1958, it actually originated, like The Lord of the Rings, just before and during World War II, and it has an unusual publication history. It began as a sequence of three novels, The Sword in the Stone, The Witch in the Wood, and The Ill-Made Knight, published between 1938 and 1940. But not only did the 1958 volume include a whole additional book and other unpublished material written in 1938–1941, White also revised the previous volumes for the compilation. The second part, retitled The Queen of Air and Darkness, was almost entirely rewritten, and the others were also significantly changed.8 Many factors went into White’s decision to rewrite, but one of the most important was a desire to take the whole story more solemnly. The Sword in the Stone had been largely a humorous children’s fantasy, but the tone darkened as the series went on, rather as both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings had begun lightly and become more somber. But at least some of White’s revisions represent a failure of nerve on the author’s part. The sub-creation of The Sword in the Stone had been cheerfully and audaciously anachronistic. White’s Merlyn lives backwards and makes many references to future events, but the anachronisms go further than that. An example at the beginning of the book demonstrates this. The story begins with Sir Ector and a friend, depicted as stuffy post-Victorian gentry, having a conversation about sending the boys Kay and Arthur to Eton, rendered fantastic by musing on getting past the giant Galapas whose country lies on the way. This is gleefully silly. But in The Once and Future King, White vitiates it by adding, immediately after the reference to Eton, the caution, “It was not really Eton that he mentioned, for the College of Blessed Mary was not founded until 1440, but it was a place of the same sort” (White 1958, 10; compare White 1938, 9). This is both cowardly and awkward. Tolkien did something similar when explaining away the equally anachronistic names and English country gentry nature of his Hobbits by



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describing himself as having carefully translated it all, but he was more systematic, and he left this to the last appendix of his book (RK, Appendix F, 1489–1496), not inserting it into his text to undercut his own dialogue. The Once and Future King made an impression on the general literary audience far exceeding that of The Lord of the Rings four years earlier. Its importance in general culture may be measured by the fact that it was adapted into a professional stage musical almost immediately, in 1960, beating The Lord of the Rings by 46 years; meanwhile, The Sword in the Stone became a Disney movie in 1963, beating The Hobbit to animation by 14 years. White’s work has become a rock in the streambed of the Arthurian saga, as Malory was before him, and as Wagner’s Ring cycle is for the Völsunga saga. Subsequent authors in the field must either follow him or consciously reject him; they cannot ignore him.9 Like Tolkien in the field of quest fantasy epic romances, this status is both a tribute to greatness and a kind of curse.

Mervyn Peake What kind of curse it is may be seen by comparing Tolkien to one more major fantasist of his time, Mervyn Peake. Like Tolkien, Peake was also an artist: unlike Tolkien, Peake was a professional artist, who exhibited in galleries, taught at art schools, and made his living as one of the foremost book illustrators of his time. His visual sense influenced his prose as Tolkien’s did his, though their temperaments expressed it differently. Peake’s peculiar curse has been that he has come to be used as a stick to beat Tolkien with by writer/critics like Michael Moorcock, a personal friend of Peake who resents Tolkien’s pervasive influence on fantasy and wishes that it were Peake’s instead.10 But Tolkien’s influence and popularity are not his fault; he himself found them naïve, alarming, even deplorable (Carpenter 1977, 231). China Miéville, a novelist known for his strongly critical remarks about Tolkien, mentioned in an interview (2002) that: “Someone once described Perdido Street Station as reading like a fantasy written in a world where Gormenghast was the sacred text of fantasy, and not The Lord of the Rings, which I took as a huge compliment.” Considering how much abuse Miéville and others have poured on the epigones of Tolkien, and on Tolkien himself for being somehow responsible for them (see ch. 25), it should have occurred to Miéville that being compared to Peake in the same context might have been a hidden insult instead. Peake has shared more blows with Tolkien than that. His major novels, Titus Groan and Gormenghast, were greeted on publication in 1946 and 1950 with some of the same critical bewilderment that met The Lord of the Rings a few years later. Where Tolkien’s saga might be tentatively compared with William Morris or Eddison, Peake’s tended to be considered grotesquerie in perhaps a Dickensian mode. C. S. Lewis, in admiration, apparently coined the term “Gormenghastly” (Lewis 2007, 1061n.).

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The two Gormenghast books and their anomalous sequel, Titus Alone, have been instinctively claimed as fantasy at least since a 1968 edition by Tolkien’s American paperback publisher was packaged as a trilogy to appeal to Tolkien fans. The weirdness and nonspecificity of Peake’s settings, chaotic amalgams of implied periods in a giant, labyrinthine castle with no apparent geographic context outside its immediate environs, feel like fantasy although “there is little or no magic about them,” as Tolkien wrote of his Hobbits (H 4), who make the same point – they have about them an “art they have developed until to Men it may seem magical” (FR, Prologue, 2). Mendlesohn has no trouble assimilating the Gormenghast books into her survey on fantasy: she finds the saga both immersive and liminal (2008, 86–87, 190–191), and she has even attempted to argue the Moorcock case with greater rigor by postulating that Peake’s amorphous fantasy is more representative of the pre-genre era of fantasy than the Tolkien–Lewis hinge, an argument raising enormous questions of definition (Mendlesohn 2013). Joe Young argues that Peake, by providing more normative characters for the reader to view the uncanny along with, is actually in agreement with Tolkien’s stricture in “On Fairy-stories” with “Recovery” of aesthetic awe as one of the chief characteristics of fantasy (Young 2013). C. S. Lewis wrote his inevitable fan letter to Peake in 1958, again even before finishing reading the books (Lewis 2007, 918–919), although he did not invite Peake to the Inklings, probably because evening meetings had long ceased by then. Peake did reply (Lewis 2007, 1060–1061), but his developing illness probably precluded a fuller correspondence. Lewis recommended The Lord of the Rings to him, a suggestion not likely to have fallen on fertile ground, for Peake had already read at least the early chapters of The Fellowship of the Ring, which he found “rather twee” and “precious” (Yorke 2000, 221). The charitable interpretation of this would be that Peake, like Tolkien himself, was too absorbed in his own literary creativity to be receptive to a strongly differing one, but Peake’s added comment that Tolkien was still primarily a children’s writer suggests that Peake fell victim to the same misleading impression that struck Colin Wilson at the same time on his initial exposure to the same opening chapters, leaving him feeling that “this was too much like Enid Blyton,” a judgment he later recanted (Wilson 1974, 8).

High and heroic fantasy What Lewis recognized in Eddison that Helen Haines (the library educator whose book on the novel had brought Eddison to Lewis’s attention) had not was his kinship with William Morris. John Wain sarcastically names these two and George MacDonald as the Inklings’ “literary household gods” and discerns that what earned them this status was that “they invented” (Wain 1962, 182). In so classing them as romancers – narrators of imaginary worlds – and by placing Tolkien’s work in the same tradition, the Inklings were making the first pass at establishing a canon of adult fantasy, a



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project undertaken more systematically in the 1960s and 1970s by the American fantasy writers L. Sprague de Camp, who outlined the idea in some pioneering fantasy anthologies, and Lin Carter, who carried on de Camp’s work as editor of a paperback reprint line, the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, known as the “Unicorn’s Head” series for its emblem. This brought many an obscure classic to wide public attention among fantasy readers. Carter’s nonfiction survey, Imaginary Worlds (1973), laid out the case in full for the ancestral descent from Morris, through other writers discussed in the present volume, to the genre fantasy of recent decades, an outline accepted, more or less, by most writers on the history of adult fantasy since. There is room for reconsideration here, as Brian Attebery’s now-standard redefinition of genre fantasy as a fuzzy set built around The Lord of the Rings (Attebery 1992, 12–17) and Mendlesohn’s tentative suggestion of building a set around the Gormenghast books instead, to see what happens, show (Mendlesohn 2013). Carter claims that his remit is the invented other world, though he applies this loosely (Peake’s Gormenghast is not quite an other world, since Peake refuses to define it, and White’s Arthurian England is certainly not, yet he includes them), but it becomes clear on reading Carter’s canon that he is actually combining two quite distinct literary traditions that have only the imaginary world in common. Evidently he does not see a sharp difference in kind, though stylistically and in artistic purpose they are profoundly distinct. The one is the largely, though not entirely, English tradition of the literary imaginary world, what afterwards usually came to be called High Fantasy, a term popularized by the critics Robert Boyer and Kenneth Zahorski. They define it, somewhat amorphously, as having “an other-world setting . . . imposing figures who . . . inspire wonder or fear .  .  . recognizably archetypal themes and motives” and “the style is elevated, often figurative” (1977, 1–2).11 This tradition begins, in Carter’s telling, with William Morris, passes through Lord Dunsany and Eddison, with a side trip through the Americans James Branch Cabell and Austin Tappan Wright,12 to Tolkien and Lewis, through the outliers of White, Peake, William Hope Hodgson, and David Lindsay. Subsequently it becomes mostly American: writing before the boom of Tolclones, as they’re sometimes called, that began in 1977, Carter identifies a set of promising younger authors including Peter S. Beagle and Ursula K. Le Guin. The other tradition is primarily American, and centers on action-adventure stories of the kind dubbed “Sword and Sorcery,” published largely in pulp fiction magazines. Carter traces this tradition back to Edgar Rice Burroughs and A. Merritt (he could have gone further back to H. Rider Haggard, who offers a closer connection to Tolkien), and then on to writers for Weird Tales and subsequent American popular fiction magazines. Many of these are also known as writers of science fiction; the senior figures in that subcategory are Fritz Leiber and L. Sprague de Camp. What the differences between the traditions are depend on the individual High Fantasy author being considered, because one of the characteristics of High Fantasy is that, like the Inklings, the authors are all highly individual. But in Tolkien’s case,

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three characteristics seem clear, though they are often passed over by readers indifferent to them. One is Tolkien’s strong moral tone: his heroes make strenuous efforts not to use their label as “good guys” as excuse for expedient action, and when, as especially often in The Silmarillion, protagonists indulge in poorly-judged precipitate behavior, this is strongly condemned both by the narrative context and by the course of consequent events. In Sword and Sorcery, by contrast, acts tend not to be judged on a moral basis; this reaches its extreme in works like George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, where the complete absence of any moral compass is held as a literary virtue. Second is Tolkien’s literary style, which, though dismissed by some literary critics, has been adequately shown by Brian Rosebury (2003) and Steve Walker (2009) to be subtle and finely judged. With exceptions, Sword and Sorcery prose is workmanlike at best. Third is Tolkien’s rather surprising minimum of both swords and sorcery. Mendlesohn has fixed on the swords, noting that, though The Lord of the Rings is a story about action and adventure, it is not written like one: Tolkien focuses on landscape, atmosphere, style, and the delineation of character, usually depicting dramatic action briefly and with a formal, distancing effect. Close-up heroic action is rare (Mendlesohn 2008, 36–38). As for sorcery, in Tolkien, magic is largely imbued into the landscape. That his spells are rare and do not work in a rigid engineering manner, and that both spells and prophecies are prepared for and not pulled out of a hat to escape from plot holes, differentiates Tolkien from some subsequent High Fantasy writers as much as from anyone else. Carter’s critical tone is largely one of cheerful appreciation. Apart from some malapropos criticisms of the treatment of evil and of religion in The Lord of the Rings (1973, 117, 122–124), which basically accuse Tolkien – accurately, but irrelevantly – of not writing in the Sword and Sorcery adventure mode, and which Carter intends merely to cut Tolkien down to size from what he sees as the over-adulation of his admirers, he is generally not out to measure one author against another or even to fulminate against non-fantasy literature. The polemic defense of imaginary-world fantasy, and the revelation of the concomitant problems of its definition, may be found in de Camp’s definitive statement on the subject, his 1976 collection of essays on classic fantasy authors, Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers: The Makers of Heroic Fantasy. Half the authors included are high fantasists rather than Sword and Sorcery writers, and de Camp intends “Heroic Fantasy” to be a blanket term to cover both, but this term, and the assumption that the two fields belong together apart from other types of fantasy, tend to be associated with readers to whom Sword and Sorcery is the more appealing part.13 De Camp’s introductory chapter shows that he is one of them. He complains against modern sniveling heroes. He wants larger-than-life mighty-thewed warriors who don’t dwell on their own neuroses (1976, 5). This is an odd complaint coming from a writer whose own works, except for his Conan pastiches, are not like that at all, and it is even odder as part of a defense of Tolkien, who is one of the writers included. Those mighty-thewed warriors would consider even Aragorn a rather sniveling fellow, and would not grasp the concept of the non-violent Frodo as a hero at all.



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Lovecraft, Howard, and Smith Despite all of this, there is some value in considering Tolkien and the Inklings in relation to the three major writers connected with the pulp magazine Weird Tales. Despite vast differences in aesthetics and ethos, they have some interesting points in common. The Weird Tales triumvirate were of the same generation as the Inklings, though they were all Americans; like the Inklings, they were disparate writers within a broader similarity; like the Inklings, they were friends and mutually supportive colleagues, though by letter, as geographic distance meant they never met in person; they were all regionalists, influenced by the cultures of their home territories, as the Inklings were all deeply English; but, unlike the Inklings, they were professional pulp writers who supported themselves, sometimes barely, by grinding out stories at a penny a word. This necessity affected both the quantity and the nature of their writing. They were H. P. Lovecraft of Rhode Island, Robert E. Howard of Texas, and Clark Ashton Smith of California. Lovecraft was the only one of the three whose characteristic work is set in the present day. He injects into his stories what the critic John Clute has dubbed “time abyss,” defined as a dawning awareness that the matter of the tale, if not its setting, is of vast antiquity (Clute and Grant 1997, 946–947). This feature allies Lovecraft more closely with the Tolkien of “The Lost Road” and “The Notion Club Papers” than with Lewis or even Williams. In Lovecraft’s case, though, the time abyss takes the form of a yawning horror at the deeps of the uncaring universe, for his cosmology is a Morgothian one, ruled by at best disinterested and at worst malevolent beings of great power, with no benevolent Ilúvatar ultimately behind all sorrow. This cosmology, which became known as the “Cthulhu Mythos,” is expressed in Lovecraft’s stories in deliberately vague allusions that have been pieced together by readers, and referred to, expanded upon, and entirely reconstructed by a variety of acolytes and disciples. In this way, Lovecraft has achieved Tolkien’s dream of drafting a great cycle, telling some stories in full, while leaving “scope for other minds and hands” to contribute (Letters 145). Tolkien told de Camp that he “rather liked” Howard’s Conan stories (de Camp 1976, 244); this could have been mere politeness to the author who was effectively Howard’s executor, or something more. In either case, Howard is as interesting to compare to Tolkien as Lovecraft is. His stories, which are far more the prototypes of the action-adventure Sword and Sorcery to come than anything by Tolkien is, use a variety of settings, but many of them employ a strategy similar to Tolkien’s of creating a fictional semi-prehistoric era serving as an imagined back-story for historic times. Tolkien’s implied suggestions that the events and peoples of his imaginary world were the root of latter-day myths and legends are subtle and elusive. Howard is more open and robust with this, frequently adapting historical names to his fictional creation to imply that he is disclosing their “true” origin, in complete defiance, or

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ignorance, of their known historical etymologies. Nevertheless, few if any other fantasists of this period attempted this method of historical depth. Clark Ashton Smith used an even greater variety of settings, including lost continents, all of them decadent hothouse locales with little in common with Tolkien’s Númenor. His distinctive quality is his prose, an ornate, lapidary style; Smith was in some respects a fin de siècle writer born a little late. His style is unlike Tolkien’s, but it did make him one of the few real stylists in pulp fiction and thus allied him with authors far removed from that realm.

Children’s fantasy and mimetic literature This essay has made the post-Tolkien assumption that fantasy is for adult readers. But most fantasy is written for children, its past eras full of interesting books forgotten through the historical winnowing process. Because Tolkien’s first published novel was released as a children’s book, he has been pigeon-holed as a children’s author in a way that Lewis, whose Narnian books were not his first, has not. From Edmund Wilson calling The Lord of the Rings “a children’s book which has somehow got out of hand” (Wilson 1978, 51) to the public libraries in 1977 which shelved The Silmarillion in the children’s section because Tolkien was a children’s writer, he long had that label firmly affixed. The number of children’s fantasies contemporaneous with The Hobbit with which it can be interestingly compared is large, and the perspective gained by doing so is rewarding. Space does not permit that here; Scull (1987) is an extensive survey of its immediate precursors, but much work remains to be done here. Serious comparison of Tolkien with his non-fantasy-writing contemporaries in adult English literature was begun by Shippey 2000 (and see also ch. 24), but this is a largely unexplored realm, requiring deep sympathetic understanding of both the mode of high fantasy and the mode of high mimetics, qualities not often found in the same reader.

An Epilogue One final anecdote may illustrate something about the landscape of fantasy to which Tolkien contributed a monument. In the late 1930s, the American author Robert Nathan prepared an omnibus of five of his early novels from the 1920s, all of them gently fanciful and some with outright fantasy elements. For his reprint, Nathan wrote a short “Note to the Younger Generation,” showing himself an author who, even though his books are being reprinted, feels uneasily out of date. The Great Depression had darkened the literary climate from the carefree 1920s, and Nathan



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feels obliged to offer an apologia for not having produced fashionable relevant social realism. He likes “the hard, clear quality” of the young social realists’ prose, he says, but he insists that his own seemingly trivial topics are just as real and significant, and as heartfelt, as theirs. The social realists “have broad shoulders and a shaggy chest; but it is inside the chest that the heart beats and the blood moves” (Nathan 1938, xiii–xv). Nathan could not have known as he wrote that a long career in his chosen mode, including his most lasting success, Portrait of Jennie, still lay ahead of him. But what’s most significant about his note pleading for the acceptance of stories that appeal to the yen for imagination is the date with which he signs it, December 1937. It was a dark and threatening time in world history. But, in a small bedroom office far from the public stage, it was in that same month that a professor in Oxford set out on a 13-year literary journey that would produce an epic narrative as seemingly divorced from “the real world” as any ever written, and which would be condemned for that, yet which has become a classic because it burns with heartfelt meaningfulness, and bears moral significance, for millions of readers: J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

Notes   1  This first edition foreword vanished from general knowledge when replaced by the second edition foreword originally written for the US Ballantine Books paperback edition in 1965, and which appears in all current editions of the book. A reprint of the first edition foreword may now most easily be found in Companion lxviii–lxx. Differences in tone between the two forewords are discussed in Bratman (2006, 130–132).   2  “We were no mutual admiration society,” says W. H. Lewis, “praise for good work was unstinted, but censure for bad work – or even not-so-good work – was often brutally frank” (Lewis 1966, 13), and some of the Inklings disliked or at least did not understand The Lord of the Rings. Owen Barfield never finished reading it, and C. L. Wrenn believed Tolkien had been wasting his valuable professional time writing “trivial literature” (Letters 238). John Wain wins some sort of literary prize in lack of perception by saying that it “presents no picture of human life that I can recognize” (Wain 1986, 329). Tolkien himself had

notoriously narrow literary tastes. Besides finding Williams’s work baffling, he had a cryptic distaste for Lewis’s Narnia which has spawned numerous attempts at explanation; Long (2013) is a recent survey attempting to unravel this question.   3  Whatever Tolkien’s strictures on Lewis’s later works, he wholly approved of Out of the Silent Planet, recommending it to his own publisher in the words, “I at any rate would have bought this story at almost any price if I had found it in print” (Letters 34). Lewis was consistently enthusiastic for Tolkien’s work, from “The Lay of Leithian” (Carpenter 2006, 30) to The Hobbit, which he reviewed in highly favorable terms, twice (C. S. Lewis 1982, 81–82; Hooper 1996, 853), to The Lord of the Rings, which he also reviewed favorably twice (C. S. Lewis 1982, xx, 83–90) as well as contributing a publishing blurb so fervid even Tolkien was embarrassed (Companion lii–liii) and privately writing to Tolkien in the warmest terms (“I congratulate you. All the long years you

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have spent on it are justified,” Lewis 2004, 991; see also Lewis 2007, 384–385). W. H. Lewis was also greatly impressed with The Lord of the Rings (“Golly, what a book! The inexhaustible fertility of the man’s imagination amazes me,” W. H. Lewis 1982, 231, see also 195), and Charles Williams read drafts with keen appreciation (Letters 105–106). Gervase Mathew actually helped Tolkien find an alternative publisher when negotiations with Allen & Unwin temporarily broke down (Reader’s Guide 583). An anecdote of Hugo Dyson rudely interrupting Tolkien’s reading of the story has often been attributed to C. S. Lewis by readers who vaguely remember having come across it in A. N. Wilson’s biography of Lewis (Wilson 1990, 217). Wilson has been anxious to correct that error whenever he finds it (Wilson 2001); actually, although Wilson does not mention this, Dyson’s objection was less to the book than to formal readings, which prevented general conversation he could dominate (Bratman 1997, 28–29). Williams thought of himself as primarily a poet, and he was also distinguished as both dramatist and critic, but “Williamsian” has come to mean in the mode of his seven “populist” spiritual fantasy novels, of which The Place of the Lion, in which the invasive fantasy consists of Platonic archetypes, and War in Heaven, in which it is the rediscovery of the Holy Grail (resulting in a tale quite unlike later stories on that theme), are perhaps the best to begin with. The fullest account of the agreement and its consequences is Rateliff (2000). Like Richard Adams, another fantasist of epic scope, Eddison was a government civil servant. Preece (2003) is an otherwise perceptive article on Eddison that, akin to Michael Moorcock on Peake, used Eddison as a stick to beat Tolkien with. The article stated, without evidence, that Tolkien was “certainly envious” of Eddison (43), and that he showed this by adopting archaisms for The Lord of the Rings after hearing Eddison read. In fact, Tolkien had been using extreme archaisms in

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his writing since The Book of Lost Tales in 1916, and they grew in The Lord of the Rings as the story mutated from a sequel to The Hobbit into more of a sequel to the “Silmarillion.” He did not get the idea from Eddison, whom he described as “certainly not an ‘influence’ ” (Letters 258); nor, if he had, would it follow that envy was a motive, any more than Eddison was envious of the Elizabethan authors whom his style echoes. The citations here of Tolkien’s warm appreciation of Eddison are adapted from this writer’s reply, published in the next issue of the journal (Bratman 2004). The most extensive discussion, though still highly abbreviated, of the rewrites is in Brewer (1993); no variorum edition, akin to The Annotated Hobbit, has ever been published, and the original texts of The Witch in the Wood and The Ill-Made Knight are long out of print. Tolkien’s own contribution to Arthuriana, an unfinished narrative poem called The Fall of Arthur, unpublished until 2013, was written in the 1920s. That it long predates White’s work may be surmised merely from reading it. See his most extended rant (Moorcock 1987, 121ff). Eventually Moorcock revealed that he found reading The Lord of the Rings at all to be “a defeating struggle” (Moorcock 2005), which explains his misapprehensions of the work. It would be useful, though beyond the scope of this article, to consider the strictures on style in fantasy posed by Ursula K. Le Guin in her 1973 essay “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie” (Le Guin 1979). Wright is notable for Islandia, a utopian novel constructed as a life-long hobby by a law professor, only a fantasy in its most Tolkienian characteristic, that it is set in an imaginary land constructed in awesome detail. Gerald W. Page and Hank Reinhart in their anthology Heroic Fantasy (1979) trace their subject’s popularity to the 1960s booms in Tolkien and Howard, but their book’s contents are entirely Sword and Sorcery in the Howard tradition.



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References Attebery, Brian. 1992. Strategies of Fantasy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Auden, W. H. 1954. “The Hero is a Hobbit.” New York Times Book Review, October 31: 37. Auden, W. H. 1956. “At the End of the Quest, Victory.” New York Times Book Review, January 22: 5. Auden, W. H. 2004. “The Quest Hero.” In Understanding the Lord of the Rings: The Best of Tolkien Criticism, edited by Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo, 31–51. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Originally published in 1961 in Texas Quarterly, 4: 81–93. Boyer, Robert H. and Kenneth J. Zahorski, eds. 1977. The Fantastic Imagination: An Anthology of High Fantasy. New York: Avon. Bratman, David. 1997. “Hugo Dyson: Inkling, Teacher, Bon Vivant.” Mythlore, 21.4: 19–34. Bratman, David. 2004. Letter. Wormwood, 2, Spring. Bratman, David. 2006. “The Artistry of Omissions and Revisions in The Lord of the Rings.” In The Lord of the Rings, 1954–2004: Scholarship in Honour of Richard E. Blackwelder, edited by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, 113– 138. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press. Bratman, David. 2007. “ ‘Gifted Amateurs’: C. S. Lewis and the Inklings.” In C. S. Lewis: Life, Works, and Legacy, vol. 3: Apologist, Philosopher & Theologian, edited by Bruce L. Edwards, 279– 320. Westport, CT: Praeger. Brewer, Elisabeth. 1993. T. H. White’s The Once and Future King. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer. Carpenter, Humphrey. 1977. J. R. R. Tolkien – A Biography. London: Allen & Unwin. Carpenter, Humphrey. 2006. The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and their Friends. London: HarperCollins. Carter, Lin. 1973. Imaginary Worlds: The Art of Fantasy. New York: Ballantine. Clute, John and John Grant, eds. 1997. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. New York: St. Martin’s Press. de Camp, L. Sprague. 1976. Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers: The Makers of Heroic Fantasy. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House.

Flieger, Verlyn. 1997. A Question of Time: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Road to Faërie. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Flieger, Verlyn. 2002. Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World. Revised edn. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Glyer, Diana Pavlac. 2007. The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Haines, Helen E. 1942. What’s in a Novel. New York: Columbia University Press. Hooper, Walter. 1996. C. S. Lewis: A Companion & Guide. New York: HarperSanFrancisco. Le Guin, Ursula K. 1979. “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie.” In The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, 83–96. New York: Putnam. Lewis, C. S. 1947. Preface. In Essays Presented to Charles Williams, v–xiv. London: Oxford University Press. Lewis, C. S. 1982. On Stories and Other Essays on Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Lewis, C. S. 1996. That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-tale for Grown-ups. New York: Scribner. Lewis, C. S. 2004. The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis. Vol. 2: Books, Broadcasts and War 1931–1949. Edited by Walter Hooper. London: HarperCollins. Lewis, C. S. 2007. The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis. Vol. 3: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy 1950–1963. Edited by Walter Hooper. New York: HarperCollins. Lewis, W. H. 1966. “Memoir of C. S. Lewis.” In Letters of C. S. Lewis, edited by W. H. Lewis, 1–26. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Lewis, W. H. 1982. Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Long, Josh B. 2013. “Disparaging Narnia: Reconsidering Tolkien’s View of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” Mythlore, 31.3/4: 31–46. Mendlesohn, Farah. 2008. Rhetorics of Fantasy. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Mendlesohn, Farah. 2013. “Peake and the Fuzzy Set of Fantasy: Some Informal Thoughts.” In Miracle Enough: Papers on the Work of Mervyn

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Peake, edited by G. Peter Winnington, 61–74. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Miéville, China. 2002. Interview. Locus, March. Moorcock, Michael. 1987. Wizardry and Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy. London: Gollancz. Moorcock, Michael. 2005. Review of The Hopkins Manuscript by R. C. Sherriff. New York Review of Science Fiction, 18.1: 1, 6–10. Moorman, Charles. 1966. The Precincts of Felicity: The Augustinian City of the Oxford Christians. Gainesville: University of Florida Press. Nathan, Robert. 1938. The Barly Fields: A Collection of Five Novels. New York: Knopf. Page, Gerald W. and Hank Reinhart, eds. 1979. Heroic Fantasy. New York: Daw Books. Preece, Jonathan. 2003. “The Heroic Hereafter: Explaining Eddison.” Wormwood, 1, Autumn. Rateliff, John D. 1986. “ ‘And Something Yet Remains to Be Said’: Tolkien and Williams.” Mythlore, 12.3: 48–54. Rateliff, John D. 2000. “The Lost Road, The Dark Tower, and The Notion Club Papers: Tolkien and Lewis’s Time Travel Triad.” In Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth, edited by Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter, 199–218. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Rosebury, Brian. 2003. Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Scull, Christina. 1987. “The Hobbit Considered in Relation to Children’s Literature Contemporary with its Writing and Publication.” Mythlore, 14.2: 49–56. Shippey, Tom. 2000. J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. London: HarperCollins. Thomas, Paul Edmund. 1991. Introduction. In The Worm Ouroboros, by E. R. Eddison, xv–xlii. New York: Dell.

Wain, John. 1962. Sprightly Running: Part of an Autobiography. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Wain, John. 1986. “John Wain.” Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, 4: 315–332. Walker, Steve. 2009. The Power of Tolkien’s Prose: Middle-earth’s Magical Style. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Walsh, Chad. 1949. C. S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics. New York: Macmillan. White, T. H. 1938. The Sword in the Stone. London: Collins. White, T. H. 1958. The Once and Future King. New York: Dell. Wilson, A. N. 1990. C. S. Lewis: A Biography. New York: Norton. Wilson, A. N. 2001. “Tolkien Was Not a Writer.” The Telegraph, November 24. Available at http:// www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/4726760/Tolkien -was-not-a-writer.html, accessed December 11, 2013. Wilson, Colin. 1974. Tree by Tolkien. Santa Barbara, CA: Capra Press. Wilson, Edmund. 1978. “Oo, Those Awful Orcs.” Review of The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien. In The Tolkien Scrapbook, edited by Alida Becker, 50–55. Philadelphia: Running Press. Originally published in The Nation, April 14, 1956. Yorke, Malcolm. 2000. Mervyn Peake: My Eyes Mint Gold: A Life. London: John Murray. Young, Joe. 2013. “But Are They Fantasy? Categorizing the Titus Novels.” In Miracle Enough: Papers on the Work of Mervyn Peake, edited by G. Peter Winnington, 49–60. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

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Later Fantasy Fiction: Tolkien’s Legacy Dimitra Fimi

Fantasy After Tolkien: Actions and Reactions Terry Pratchett has eloquently encapsulated Tolkien’s all-pervasive effect on modern fantasy in a recent interview: Tolkien appears in the fantasy universe in the same way that Mount Fuji appeared in old Japanese prints. Sometimes small, in the distance, and sometimes big and close-to, and sometimes not there at all, and that’s because the artist is standing on Mount Fuji. (Pratchett 2010)

Indeed, despite the fact that there was fantasy before Tolkien – notably written by authors whom Tolkien himself read and admired such as William Morris (see ch. 21) – The Lord of the Rings has often been cited as the book that established modern fantasy literature as a genre, setting its mode and its formula, both used (and abused) by later writers. This “canonical” status of Tolkien as the “founder” has lead to two opposing positions in modern fantasy: either a desire to imitate (even ape) Tolkien, or the urge to react against his blueprint and create fantasy literature with its own distinct character and voice. For the first category of writers (and publishers), the potency of Tolkienian fantasy was too rich to escape, or the materialistic effort to match his sales figures was too attractive to pass by. Anderson (2006) has documented the history of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series (1969–1974), explaining that initially the series appeared to

A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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fulfill the desire for more fantasy by reprinting several older texts by Dunsany, Morris, MacDonald, and other late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fantasists. Later, after the del Reys took over the editorship from Lin Carter, they actively encouraged new writing, but this had to have an emphasis nearly exclusively on plot and action and which could be packaged and marketed as being similar to The Lord of the Rings. Perhaps the most straightforward example of this type of fantasy was Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara (1977), the first book of a fantasy series that slavishly imitated Tolkien, to such an extent that critics have not been able to resist the temptation of discussing this work by using equations, such as The Vale = The Shire, Allanon = Gandalf, and so on (e.g., Shippey 2000, 319–320; Mendlesohn and James 2009, 109–110). Brooks himself, in a recent reflective piece on his creative process, acknowledged this deliberate derivative nature of his work: [I]n 1965, I read J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and I thought that maybe I had found what I was looking for. I would set my adventure story in an imaginary world, a vast, sprawling, mythical world like that of Tolkien, filled with magic that had replaced science and races that had evolved from Man. But I was not Tolkien and did not share his background in academia or his interest in cultural study. So I would eliminate the poetry and songs, the digressions on the ways and habits of types of characters, and the appendices of language and backstory that characterized and informed Tolkien’s work. I would write the sort of straightforward adventure story that barreled ahead, picking up speed as it went, compelling a turning of pages until there were no more pages to be turned. (2003, 181)

Brooks’s honesty is refreshing, but the fact that The Sword of Shannara (and the many sequels and prequels that followed it) does not aspire to be much more than an exciting adventure story, is modeled upon very predictable motifs and characters, and uses a trite writing style for utilitarian purposes, makes it a very challenging read.1 Ursula Le Guin, for example, has voiced her opinion against this type of “mass-produced” fantasy: All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. .  .  . So people turn to the realms of fantasy for stability, ancient truths, immutable simplicities. And the mills of capitalism provide them. Supply meets demand. Fantasy becomes a commodity, an industry. Commodified fantasy takes no risks; it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action to violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth-telling to sentimental platitude. Heroes brandish their swords, lasers, wands, as mechanically as combine harvesters, reaping profits. Profoundly disturbing moral choices are sanitized, made cute, made safe. The passionately conceived ideas of the great story-tellers are copied . . . advertised, sold, broken, junked, replaceable, interchangeable. (Le Guin 2001, xiii–xiv)



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The second category of writers following Tolkien has often perceived him as a Freudian father-figure, looming large over modern fantasy and causing acute cases of Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” (1973). It has become a trend for successful postTolkienian fantasists to renounce Tolkien as an influence either by pointing out the use of common sources as the reason for potential similarities of ideas, plot elements, characters, or setting (e.g., Garner); or voicing their disagreement with his views on a level of politics, philosophy, or ideology (e.g., Pullman). Others, however, have also acknowledged their debt to Tolkien, at least on the level of opening a space (both in the world of publishing and in terms of literary criticism) for respectable fantasy. Such writers, who have succeeded in finding their own, independent voice, have created original fantasy works that have taken the genre into new, exciting territories. The remainder of this chapter will focus on a selection of those latter writers and their debt to Tolkien, not so much in terms of characters, motifs, or the grand structure of the plot, but in terms of their inventory of intertexts to draw upon (myth, legend, folklore, often as recorded in medieval literature) and the inward look (the tendency to theorize their own creative practice, following the example of Tolkien’s seminal essay “On Fairy-stories”). The discussion that follows is necessarily selective. This chapter is not meant to be a comprehensive overview of fantasy after Tolkien but an account of some important trends of post-Tolkienian fantasy, aiming to demonstrate some of the exciting ways fantasy has evolved in the late twentieth and twentyfirst centuries. For other attempts to document the development of the fantasy genre after Tolkien, see Shippey (2000, 318–326; 2007) and Anderson (2006).

British Fantasy after Tolkien: Myth, Legend and Medievalism (Cooper, Garner, Wynne Jones) A group of fantasy writers who can conveniently be considered together are Susan Cooper, Alan Garner, and Diana Wynne Jones. All three are British, were taught by Tolkien in Oxford (or at least attended some of his lectures), and have shown a fascination with British myth and folklore. Butler, who has recently examined their work in a monograph (together with that of Penelope Lively), has pointed out their biographical similarities: they were all children at the outbreak of World War II and they were all contemporaries at Oxford (2006, 7). This link of fantasy with the experience of war is one that Tolkien notes in his essay “On Fairy-stories,” claiming that: “A real taste for fairy-stories was wakened by philology on the threshold of manhood, and quickened to full life by war” (OFS 56). Garner, Cooper, and Wynne Jones make this connection too (though with World War II rather than the Great War) in their own self-reflective writing (see Garner 1997, 17; Cooper 1996, 10; Wynne Jones 2012, 111, 210). All three writers have acknowledged a debt to mythical or folkloric inspiration, and their sources in medieval literature. Wynne Jones and Cooper have explicitly linked this invaluable source to their Oxford English syllabus, which was designed

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by Tolkien and C. S. Lewis and put an emphasis on Old and Middle English (see Butler 2006, 15). Wynne Jones in a talk about “Inventing the Middle-Ages” reminisces: I went up to Oxford and read English, where a large part of the course concerned itself with what was called Middle English – and it is a very odd thing that there were quite a few women who were there at the same time as me – none of whom I met – who all went on to write successfully for children afterwards. I have never known what quite inspired them all, but with me I know it was suddenly being confronted with the way writers from the Middle Ages handled narratives. They were all so different, that was the amazing thing, and all so good at it. .  .  . I think the Middle Ages invented me, rather than the other way round. (2012, 165, 170)

Cooper has also made a similar point: We read The Fellowship of the Ring, the first book of The Lord of the Rings, with astonishment, and waited impatiently for its successors to come out. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, like his prose, was full of echoes of the Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Icelandic literature we were studying . . . (2002)

Such medieval texts are (often the only) records of British myth, legend, and folklore, from Beowulf and the Germanic past to the “Celtic”/Norman Arthurian legend. Tolkien’s reliance on Germanic myth and legend (primarily Old English and Old Norse) is well documented (see chs. 15–18) so it might be significant that Cooper and Garner turned to sources that Tolkien often renounced such as “Celtic” (Irish and Welsh) legend and folklore.2 Cooper’s brilliant series The Dark is Rising draws on the Arthurian legend, not just its post-Galfridian tradition with a recognizable Merlinfigure (Merriman Lyon) and a grail quest in Over Sea, Under Stone (1965), but also the Welsh origins of Arthur in the penultimate book, The Grey King (1975), which is set in the area around Aberdyfi. Alan Garner did draw upon Scandinavian mythological motifs and characters, such as Elves and Dwarves, in The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960) and its sequel, The Moon of Gomrath (1963), but the presence of Welsh names and Irish folklore is unmistakable in both books too, while his most praised novel, The Owl Service (1967), uses in a creative way the story of Blodeuwedd from the Medieval Welsh Mabinogion. Wynne Jones’s debt to British myth and folklore, and especially “Celtic” sources, is often quite explicit and identifiable, such as her reliance on the Scottish ballads “Tam Lin” and “Thomas the Rhymer” for the plot and ideas of Fire and Hemlock (1985). She had also family links with Wales, where she spent part of her childhood when sent away from London during World War II (2012, 210–211) and has used Welsh mythological motifs in her books, such as Dogsbody (1975) and The Merlin Conspiracy (2003). However, she has also reworked Norse legends and tales (e.g., Eight Days of Luke, 1975) while in her essays she has acknowledged a more subtle influence by



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medieval literature, on the level of narrative structure and style, claiming, for example, that the anonymous author of Beowulf taught her “more about how to orchestrate and shape a narrative than any writer of more recent date” (see Wynne Jones 2012, 49). However, Wynne Jones is also the most outspoken writer of the three against the clichéd medieval trappings of much modern fantasy. She has joined Le Guin in opposing “commodified” fantasy, but – instead of writing a “serious” essay – she has mocked mercilessly the pseudo-medieval setting and motifs of much mass-produced fantasy (as a bad imitation of Tolkien’s Middle-earth) in her hilarious book The Tough Guide to Fantasyland (1996), “a piece of literary criticism disguised as a guidebook” (Butler 2012, xvi). It should also be noted that out of these three British authors, Wynne Jones was the only one to write what fantasy theorists call “high” or “immersive” fantasy, in which an entire “secondary world” (in Tolkien’s own terminology) is invented, with its own history, cultures, and consistent rules of reality (whether this includes magic or not). Wynne Jones actually has relished inventing multiple parallel worlds which might, or might not, interact with our primary world, thus also contributing to the “portal” fantasy sub-category. Cooper and Garner, on the other hand, have written within the very un-Tolkienian category of “low” or “intrusion” fantasy, in which fantastical or supernatural occurrences “intrude” into our own, recognizable world. Cooper has made the observation that this type of fantasy seems to suit better British authors, claiming that: Fantasy writers born in America tend, for whatever reason, to be more direct than those born in Britain. They take you straight to their world apart: from the first page, you are not in our own world but in Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea, Anne McCaffrey’s Pern, Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain. Or for that matter, just to disprove my own generalisation about nationality, Professor Tolkien’s Middle-earth. This brand of fantasy could be said to be the ultimate in separation: how much further from reality can you get than to be in a different universe, a different time, belonging to different species? (1996, 112–113)

For Cooper, this “separation” is not the desired result. One of her main interests is the interrelationship between the landscape of Britain and its mythical past, especially in the way this past informs the present (see Cooper 1996, 8), and “intrusion” fantasy serves this main thematic concern in a direct way. Garner is also quite vocal about his preference of “intrusion” over “immersive” fantasy: [T]he modern, material world is the effective setting for Fantasy. An arbitrary time in a never-never land softens the punch. For example, if we are in Eldorado and we find a mandrake, then OK, so it’s a mandrake: in Eldorado anything goes. But, by force of imagination, compel the reader to believe that there is a mandrake in a garden in Mayfield Road, Ulverston, Lancashire, then when you pull up that mandrake it is really going to scream: and possibly the reader will, too. (1968, 591)

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Garner is also very much fascinated by the links between British myth, folklore, landscape, and ancient ruins and sees “low” fantasy as a way to express their interconnections. Still, this twin interest in myth and place was also one of Tolkien’s main creative impulses as in his early mythology the lands of the Elves (or fairies) was England itself, while later on he repeated his claim that Middle-earth was not an imaginary world but Europe in a mythical proto-prehistory (see Letters 239). Garner, Cooper, and Wynne Jones have contributed to the evolution of the fantasy genre by producing original, refreshing work that builds on some of Tolkien’s premises but also takes them a step further in different directions. The same feat has also been accomplished by one of the best American fantasists, whose long writing career has encompassed both fantasy and science fiction: Ursula K. Le Guin.

The Peak of American Fantasy: Responding to and Questioning Fantasy Conventions (Le Guin) Ursula Le Guin’s fantasy writing is often recognized as “the next best thing” after Tolkien, but the secondary world and mythology she weaves in the Earthsea cycle is very much un-Tolkienian. Earthsea is a fully-fledged secondary world, with its own history, languages, and traditions, but this is a very different world to the medieval “British” or even “European” flavor of Tolkien’s Middle-earth, and the similar landscapes of much other fantasy. Earthsea is an archipelago of islands, and most of the heroes of its tales are copper-brown in complexion. The spiritual undertones of the cultures of Earthsea are Eastern, reflecting Le Guin’s Taoist leanings. In contrast to Middle-earth, the peoples of Earthsea are not distinguished so much in terms of their linguistic and cultural history, but in terms of ethnographic and anthropological observation: they display elements and traditions of tribal societies rather than the strict hierarchies and politics of medieval society. Nevertheless, Le Guin has acknowledged Tolkien’s impact on her fantasy writing, including the original “germ” of her first Earthsea book. When she was commissioned to write a book for young adults in the 1960s, her imagination was drawn to one of the most familiar fantasy stock characters, as established by Tolkien: Serious consideration of magic, and of writing for kids, combined to make me wonder about wizards. Wizards are usually elderly or ageless Gandalfs, quite rightly and archetypically. But what were they before they had white beards? How did they learn what is obviously an erudite and dangerous art? Are there colleges for young wizards? And so on. (Le Guin 1979, 51)

Her response to these questions was the School of Magic on the island of Roke, and the story of young Ged in A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), a boy who will later on grow up to be the Archmage of Earthsea, a role analogous to Gandalf and a long line of other such figures in fantasy literature, including J. K. Rowling’s Dumbledore. At



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the same time, despite the Eastern/Taoist echoes in Earthsea and the anthropological approach to her invented cultures, Drout and Comoletti (2001) have argued convincingly that at least the first three books of the Earthsea series betray echoes of medievalism in Le Guin’s imaginary world. The mages of Earthsea resemble medieval priests who remain celibate and change the material world by performing “speech acts.” Le Guin also uses dragons, another staple character of fantasy. Dragons originate in myths and legends of medieval Europe and were popularized by Tolkien in modern fantasy, but Le Guin’s dragons “are not to be confused with the dragons of the Christian tradition, representatives of fallen nature” (Hunt and Lenz 2001, 52), as Tolkien describes them in his famous essay on Beowulf. Le Guin’s dragons are closer to “oriental lineage,” a symbol of “a nature in which savagery is a necessary part of the whole – something to be respected more than feared” (Patteson 1985, 246). They are the original speakers of the Old Speech and the more Le Guin reveals about their mysterious nature, the more she also explicates the cosmology of Earthsea. Le Guin has navigated her way around Tolkien’s legacy with care and a real creative flair. Some of the central concerns of Tolkien’s invented mythology are shared by Le Guin’s secondary world, including the importance of language (in Earthsea tied with the very existence of magic) and the significance of transmitting history and poetry via an oral tradition. Nevertheless, Le Guin has made a point of challenging a number of previous assumptions or givens of fantasy literature, often established by Tolkien. In her Earthsea books, issues of race and color are central. Contrary to Tolkien (and the mainstream of fantasy tradition), who follows medieval perceptions of race and presents the white peoples of the North-West as good and the dark-skinned people of the South-East as evil or disloyal, the wizard Ged, the main protagonist of the Earthsea cycle, is copper-brown (emulating the Native American population), while the white-skinned Kargs are the main antagonists for most of the series. In Le Guin’s words: My color scheme was conscious and deliberate from the start. I didn’t see why everybody in science fiction had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill. I didn’t see why everybody in heroic fantasy had to be white (and why all the leading women had “violet eyes”). It didn’t even make sense. Whites are a minority on Earth now – why wouldn’t they still be either a minority, or just swallowed up in the larger colored gene pool, in the future?   The fantasy tradition I was writing in came from Northern Europe, which is why it was about white people. I’m white, but not European. My people could be any color I liked, and I like red and brown and black. I was a little wily about my color scheme. I figured some white kids (the books were published for “young adults”) might not identify straight off with a brown kid, so I kind of eased the information about skin color in by degrees – hoping that the reader would get “into Ged’s skin” and only then discover it wasn’t a white one. (Le Guin 2004)

The same iconoclastic tendency is also present in Le Guin’s later treatment of gender in her Earthsea cycle. Her secondary world begins with a male protagonist and with magic as the patriarchal right of men, epitomized by the Earthsea saying

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“Weak as woman’s magic” or “Wicked as woman’s magic” (Le Guin 1968, 19). However, the introduction of Tenar in The Tombs of Atuan (1970) already showed a strong interest in gender roles and prejudices, which Le Guin revisited in perhaps the most difficult book in the series, Tehanu (1990). This latter “protest” novel can be read as a late reaction to the second wave of feminism, seeking to expose the fate of women in patriarchal societies and reveal the gender imbalance of traditional fantasy narratives. On the other hand, Le Guin’s last two additions to the Earthsea cycle (Tales from Earthsea, 2001 and The Other Wind, 2001) are much more attuned to what Elaine Showalter has called the “Female phase” in which “women reject both imitation and protest – two forms of dependency – and turn instead to female experience as the source of an autonomous art” (1985, 139). By bringing gender issues to the fore, Le Guin has challenged a strong set of fantasy stereotypes that present women as either damsels in distress or demonic enchantresses – both remnants of an ideology that continued from the Middle Ages to the Victorian era.

The Legacy of Tolkien’s “On Fairy-stories”: The Fantasy Author as Critic and (Self-)Theorist Apart from inspiring an entire generation of twentieth-century writers to work within the fantasy genre, Tolkien’s legacy also extends to the fields of literary criticism and theorizing of the genre. His essay “On Fairy-stories” has become one of the most influential theoretical explorations of fantasy literature. Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson note that: “On Fairy-stories” is . . . [Tolkien’s] most explicit analysis of his own art. . . . It is the template on which he shaped his idea of sub-creation, and the manifesto in which he declared his particular concept of what fantasy is and how it ought to work. (OFS 9)

Tolkien’s terms “primary world” and “secondary world,” “sub-creation” and “eucatastrophe,” have become important theoretical tools to explore and analyze fantasy literature (see ch. 5). For example, Clute and Grant’s widely used definition of fantasy refers to “this world” and the creation of an “otherworld,” while their three stages of the narrative structure of fantasy consist of “bondage,” “recognition,” and “healing” or “eucatastrophe” (1997, 338–339), mirroring the structure of The Lord of the Rings, but also echoing Tolkien’s insistence on the centrality of the happy ending in fairystories and fantasy. Most significantly, Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-stories” initiated a tradition of the fantasy writer as a critic and theorist of their own craft. It is notable that, for example, Le Guin and Wynne Jones have published critical analyses of The Lord of the Rings, but it is even more important that all fantasy authors explored in this chapter so far (and they are just some among many others) have published reflective essays on their own creative practice, attempting to define (and often defend) fantasy and discuss its



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function and techniques. Le Guin’s The Language of the Night (1979), Cooper’s Dreams and Wishes (1996), Garner’s The Voice that Thunders (1997), and Wynne Jones’s more recent Reflections on the Magic of Writing (2012) collect a number of essays that each writer delivered as talks or published in various periodicals, and converge with Tolkien’s themes and concerns in a number of ways. Le Guin comes very close to Tolkien’s idea of “sub-creation” by defining imagination as “play” of the mind, by which she means “recreation, re-creation, the recombination of what is known into what is new” (Le Guin 1979, 41). She also considers the fantasy setting (Tolkien calls it “Faërie” while Le Guin names it “Elfland”) as “a real wilderness” where travelers “should not feel too safe” (Le Guin 1979, 84), very much akin to Tolkien’s understanding of the same enchanted space as a “Perilous Realm” (OFS 32). For Le Guin, fantasy can be perilous as it touches on some fundamental human needs and concerns. Her Jungian approach to fantasy defines the main subject of the genre as the “spiritual journey” and the exploration of the psyche: The events of a voyage into the unconscious are not describable in the language of rational daily life: only the symbolic language of the deeper psyche will fit them without trivializing them . . . fantasy is the natural, the appropriate, language for the recounting of the spiritual journey and the struggle of good and evil in the soul . . . Fantasy is the language of the inner self. (Le Guin 1979, 65, 68, 70)

Susan Cooper follows Le Guin’s conception of the genre, claiming that fantasy allows the reader to move: out of time, out of space, into the unconscious, that dreamlike world which has in it all the images and emotions accumulated since the human race began. We aren’t escaping out, we’re escaping in, without any idea what they may encounter. Fantasy is the metaphor through which we discover ourselves. (1996, 45)

The connection of fantasy and dreaming is further reinforced by Le Guin’s and Cooper’s perception of myth and dreaming as having similar functions and uses. Garner concurs by defining “myth” as “the dream-thinking of the people” (1997, 150). But Wynne Jones also reminds us that dreaming as a literary device cannot be legitimately used as a “mechanism” for fantasy, agreeing with Tolkien that this would be akin to “cheating” the reader, after compelling them to believe in the imaginary world presented to them (Wynne Jones 2012, 62; OFS 35). In OFS Tolkien refers to fantasy in terms of Dasent’s great “soup” made up of “bones” that include myth, legend, and fairy-tale (OFS 39). Cooper, Wynne Jones, Garner, and Le Guin all share Tolkien’s understanding of fantasy as a genre that reuses and reshapes such traditional narratives. Garner comments especially on the way this material is used, insisting that fantasy should not just retell mythological tales, but make them belong to a new context (1968, 591). He thus comes very close to Tolkien’s metaphor of the traditional source material as “the bones,” but “the soup” being “the

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story as it is served up by its author or teller” (OFS 40), and ultimately being what really matters. Le Guin and Garner seem to agree with Tolkien on fantasy being a way of understanding reality, of removing the trite and familiar and experiencing reality in a different way. Le Guin maintains that fantasy is: a different approach to reality, an alternative technique for apprehending and coping with existence. It is not antirational, but pararational; not realistic, but surrealistic, superrealistic, heightening of reality. (1979, 84)

Garner seems to concur, adding that fantasy is “an intensification of reality” (1997, 62) and “an attempt to come to terms with the world, not avoid it” (1968, 591). Cooper’s way of verbalizing the fantasy author’s ability to approach reality from a different angle is to describe it as “seeing around corners” (1996, 6). Perhaps most importantly, all four writers – just like Tolkien – have been preoccupied with the function of fantasy, attempting to answer the question “what is fantasy for?” As discussed above, for Le Guin and Cooper, fantasy is about truth and the discovery of the inner self. For Garner it is about intensifying and illuminating reality. Wynne Jones comes closest to Tolkien’s own perception of the function of fantasy. She argues for the importance of what Tolkien has termed “Consolation of the Happy Ending” (OFS 75): Fantasy certainly does provide comfort – and who is not entitled to a little comfort if they can get it? (Wynne Jones 2012, 65) It is no accident that the majority of folk tales at least have a happy ending. Most of them are very deep-level blueprints of how to aim for the moon. The happy ending does not only give you gratification as you read it, but it also gives you hope that, just maybe, a fortunate outcome could be possible. Your brain likes that. It is built to want a solution. (Wynne Jones 2012, 142)

“And Wither Then?”: Fantasy in the Twenty-first Century (Pullman and Rowling) Fantasy has continued to thrive at the turn of the twenty-first century. Perhaps the best known contemporary fantasy writers are Philip Pullman and J. K. Rowling. Often perceived as representatives of “prestigious” and “popular” fantasy writing respectively, both fantasists have taken the genre to new territories. Philip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials attempts a complex, intertextual narrative, responding to such canonical texts as William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience and Milton’s Paradise Lost. Pullman also sees his fantasy world as a polemical reaction to the Christian undertones of Tolkien’s and C. S. Lewis’s fantasy, striving for



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a humanist (rather than religious) understanding of the world (but see Hatten 2005 on Pullman’s debt to Lewis and Tolkien). Like Tolkien’s, Pullman’s fantasy is concerned with ideas of morality (good vs. evil) and death and its aftermath, but his approach to these issues is that of humanist secularism rather than a religious or spiritual system. Pullman’s grand narrative unfolds in a multitude of alternative worlds, of which our primary world is just one. In the first book of the trilogy, Lyra’s secondary world is portrayed as very like, yet unlike, our primary world. The very opening of the book captures the “hesitation” between what we recognize as familiar and what we find new and unexplained: “Lyra and her daemon moved through the darkening hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen” (Pullman 1995, 3). The reader is confronted with the idea of a “daemon” right from the first line, and is left to work out its significance in the next few pages. Lyra’s world right from the start features a number of elements that we sort of recognize, but not quite: there is “ambaric” energy, “naphtha” lights, zeppelins and “chocolatl.” Pullman’s multiple worlds originate not only from Milton’s Paradise Lost and God’s potential capability to create more worlds out of the leftover matter of our universe (see Hatten 2005; Robinson 2004), but also from modern quantum physics and the theory of many worlds, according to which for every action in this universe a new universe is created with alternative actions. At the same time, Pullman’s many secondary worlds – just like Tolkien’s – are populated by a great variety of wondrous and magical beings, from witches, armored bears and Specters, to angels and the evolutionary imaginative mulefa. Many of these beings are used as metaphors (compare, for example, Pullman’s soul-eating Specters, and Rowling’s soul-sucking Dementors, both of which are associated with modern understandings and perceptions of mental illness). Perhaps the best of those metaphors is the idea of the daemon, an external (and very much physical) manifestation of a person’s soul or consciousness. Pullman, however, has used exactly this (perhaps his most inventive) creation, to argue that he does not write within the genre of fantasy literature at all. In an interview he has stated: I have said that His Dark Materials is not fantasy but stark realism, and my reason for this is to emphasise what I think is an important aspect of the story, namely the fact that it is realistic, in psychological terms. I deal with matters that might normally be encountered in works of realism, such as adolescence, sexuality, and so on; and they are the main subject matter of the story – the fantasy (which, of course, is there: no-one but a fool would think I meant there is no fantasy in the books at all) is there to support and embody them, not for its own sake. Daemons, for example, might otherwise be only a meaningless decoration, adding nothing to the story: but I use them to embody and picture some truths about human personality which I couldn’t picture so easily without them. I’m trying to write a book about what it means to be human, to grow up, to suffer and learn. My quarrel with much (not all) fantasy is it has this marvellous toolbox and does nothing with it except construct shoot-em-up games. Why shouldn’t a work of fantasy be as truthful and profound about becoming an adult human being as the work of George Eliot or Jane Austen? (Pullman, n.d.)

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In other interviews Pullman has voiced similar strong views against fantasy, but this is often coupled with qualifying what kind of fantasy works he finds interesting, enriching, worth reading, and writing. Pullman’s opinion is not unlike Ursula Le Guin’s view about “commodified” fantasy. It is intriguing that he prefers to align his work to realism, which is perceived as dealing with “serious” topics, and to assert that his work uses the “mechanisms” of fantasy to speak metaphorically about aspects of the human condition. J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books follow in the tradition of much previous fantasy by showing an interest in the origins of evil and the themes of death and immortality. Tolkien’s Melkor/Morgoth is a central character that allows an exploration of how evil originated in the world, and attempts to understand it. In the Harry Potter books, the figure of Lord Voldermort is originally taken for granted as a stereotypical villain or Dark Lord of fantasy literature, but the later books show a growing interest in his childhood and development. Just like Tolkien, Rowling addresses the question “where does evil come from?” This question is especially pertinent in the twenty-first century, when evil is becoming an increasingly difficult category to define and understand. Here we have a prime example of fantasy “mythologizing” contemporary anxieties and concerns, helping readers cope with fundamental questions of human existence. In the same vein, Rowling’s fantasy deals with metaphysical questions often left unaddressed by mainstream literature. As part of a recent interview with her, Geordie Greig claimed that “Death is the key to understanding J. K. Rowling. Her greatest fear – and she is completely unhesitant about this – is of someone she loves dying.” He quotes her saying: My books are largely about death. They open with the death of Harry’s parents. There is Voldemort’s obsession with conquering death and his quest for immortality at any price, the goal of anyone with magic. I so understand why Voldemort wants to conquer death. We’re all frightened of it. (Rowling quoted in Greig 2006)

Rowling’s statement is uncannily close to Tolkien’s claim that The Lord of the Rings “is about Death and the desire for deathlessness” (Letters 262), usually understood as referring to the Elves’ onerous immortality and the “sin” of the Men of Númenor. Rowling’s “message” of mastering death by accepting it also resonates with Ursula Le Guin’s The Farthest Shore, and the thinning of Earthsea’s magic due to one wizard’s desire for immortality. Nevertheless, Rowling has also moved away from the Tolkienian paradigm and her other British predecessors by avoiding both immersive (high) and intrusion (low) fantasy, creating instead “a world-within-a-world, marked off by physical boundaries” (Gamble and Yates 2002, 122). Gamble and Yates acknowledge this as a third, separate sub-genre of fantasy, noting that: Although there is an invisible barrier that Harry has to pass through in order to board the Hogwarts Express [platform 9¾], the school is still in our world. Muggles and



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wizards inhabit the same space, although there are some areas that muggles cannot access because they do not have the necessary powers. (2002, 122)

At the same time, the Harry Potter books may conform to the usual narrative structure of fantasy literature, as described by Clute and Grant (bondage-recognition-healing) but Rowling also borrows freely from a great number of recognizable literary genres such as the school story, detective fiction, and the gothic (see Alton 2009), blending them successfully to create a hybrid type of fantasy that is often postmodern in the ways it contradicts readers’ expectations. Tolkien’s legacy on modern fantasy continues to be strong, but his work is also slowly moving towards the position of a “canonical” author within the genre, with whom younger generations of fantasists have to grapple and write against. The best exemplars of fantasy after Tolkien, who include the writers explored in detail in this chapter, have managed to write within the fantasy tradition, as established by Tolkien, but also to critique, interrogate, and expand it. Garner, Cooper, and Wynne Jones have stayed within the framework of medieval intertexts, but have reused myth, legend, and folklore for their own purposes. Le Guin has excelled in immersive fantasy, but has challenged gender and race assumptions in Tolkienian fantasy. Pullman and Rowling have stayed away from the clear medieval trappings of previous fantasy by either using early modern or Romantic intertexts, or playing with a multitude of genres that are not traditionally part of the fantasy inventory. The best fantasy writers of the future will continue to pay homage to Tolkien, if only in their willingness to turn inwards and analyze their own creative practice, but will also continue to challenge what Tolkien has established as “canonical” and “traditional.”

Notes 1  Another fantasy author of the same period as Brooks, and also championed by the del Reys, was Stephen R. Donaldson, whose Chronicles of Thomas Covenant (initially a trilogy, later enlarged by further novels in an ongoing series) seems to attempt a deliberate break from Tolkien by introducing an unlikeable hero who doubts the reality of the secondary world he enters. Thomas Covenant is a leper who is transported to the Land following a car accident. He refuses to believe his experience is real, and one of his first actions in the secondary world is raping a young girl. Clute and Grant have argued that Covenant’s unbelief “is perhaps [Donaldson’s] most original single invention. .  .  . It thoroughly exposes the artifact of the

normal fantasy secondary world as a stage-set for the deeds of protagonists” (1997, 282). Nevertheless the Land, its characters, and its premises are very Tolkienian (see Shippey 2000 and 2007) while the focus on action and the trite writing style are very reminiscent of Brooks’s “commodified” fantasy. 2  The use of the term “Celtic” to signify a homogeneous culture that spans centuries and unites geographically diverse areas (from the Iron Age Danube basin to modern Ireland and Wales) has been called into question by archaeologists and other scholars. Still, the term remains useful in linguistics and is still popularly used for folklore material from the “Celtic” fringes of Britain and certain areas of

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the European continent. At the same time, Tolkien’s strong words against “things Celtic” should not be taken to signify a complete

absence of Irish, Welsh, and Breton motifs from his mythology (see ch. 19 for a detailed discussion).

References Alton, Annie Hiebert. 2009. “Playing the Genre Game: Generic Fusions of the Harry Potter Series.” In Critical Perspectives on Harry Potter, edited by Elizabeth E. Heilman, 199–223. New York: Routledge. Anderson, Douglas A. 2006. “The Mainstreaming of Fantasy and the Legacy of The Lord of the Rings.” In The Lord of the Rings, 1954–2004: Scholarship in Honour of Richard E. Blackwelder, edited by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, 301–315. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press. Bloom, Harold. 1973. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brooks, T. 2003. Sometimes the Magic Works: Lessons from a Writing Life. New York: Del Rey. Butler, Charles. 2006. Four British Fantasists: Place and Culture in the Children’s Fantasies of Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne Jones, and Susan Cooper. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Butler, Charles. 2012. “Reflecting on Reflections.” Introduction to Reflections on the Magic of Writing, by Diana Wynne Jones. Oxford: David Fickling Books. Clute, John and John Grant, eds. 1997. The Ency­ clopedia of Fantasy. London: Orbit Books. Cooper, Susan. 1996. Dreams and Wishes: Essays on Writing for Children. New York: Margaret K. McElderry Books. Cooper, Susan. 2002. “There and Back Again: Tolkien Reconsidered.” The Horn Book Magazine, March/April. Available at http://archive.hbook .com/magazine/articles/2002/mar02_cooper .asp, accessed December 12, 2013. Drout, Michael D. C. and Laura B. Comoletti. 2001. “How They Do Things with Words: Language, Power, Gender and the Priestly Wizards of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea Books.” Chil­ dren’s Literature, 29: 113–141. Gamble, Nikki and Sally Yates. 2002. Exploring Children’s Literature: Teaching the Language and Reading of Fiction. London: Paul Chapman.

Garner, Alan. 1968. “Children’s Books: Real Mandrakes in Real Gardens.” New Statesman, November 1: 591–592. Garner, Alan. 1997. The Voice That Thunders: Essays and Lectures. London: Harvill. Greig, Geordie. 2006. “There would be so much to tell her. . .” The Telegraph, January 10. Available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ uknews/1507438/There-would-be-so-much-totell-her....html, accessed December 12, 2013. Hatten, Burton. 2005. “His Dark Materials, a Challenge to Tolkien and Lewis.” In His Dark Materials Illuminated: Critical Essays on Phillip Pullman’s Trilogy, edited by Millicent Lenz and Carole Scott, 75–94. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Hunt, Peter and Millicent Lenz. 2001. Alter­ native Worlds in Fantasy Fiction. New York: Continuum. Le Guin, Ursula K. 1968. A Wizard of Earthsea. Berkeley, CA: Parnassus Press. Le Guin, Ursula K. 1979. The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Le Guin, Ursula K. 2001. Tales from Earthsea. London: Orion. Le Guin, Ursula K. 2004. “A Whitewashed Earthsea: How the Sci Fi Channel wrecked my books.” Slate.com. Available at http://www.slate .com/articles/arts/culturebox/2004/12/a_white washed_earthsea.html, accessed December 12, 2013. Mendlesohn, Farah and Edward James. 2009. A Short History of Fantasy. London: Middlesex University Press. Patteson, Richard F. 1985. “Le Guin’s Earthsea Trilogy: The Psychology of Fantasy.” In The Scope of the Fantastic: Culture, Biography, Themes, Children’s Literature, edited by Robert A. Collins and Howard D. Pearce III, 239–247. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Pratchett, Terry. 2010. “An Interview with Terry Pratchett.” Available at http://www.amazon.com/



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gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=35534, accessed December 12, 2013. Pullman, Philip. 1995. Northern Lights. London: Scholastic Children’s Books. Pullman, Philip. n.d. “Interview at Achuka Children’s Books.” Available at http://www .achuka.co.uk/archive/interviews/ppint.php, accessed December 12, 2013. Robinson, Karen D. 2004. “His Dark Materials: A Look into Pullman’s Interpretation of Milton’s Paradise Lost.” Mythlore, 24(2): 2–16.

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Shippey, Tom. 2000. J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. London: HarperCollins. Shippey, Tom. 2007. “Literature, Twentieth Century: Influence of Tolkien.” In J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopaedia, edited by Michael Drout, 378–382. London: Routledge. Showalter, Elaine, ed. 1985. New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory. New York: Pantheon Books. Wynne Jones, Diana. 2012. Reflections on the Magic of Writing. Oxford: David Fickling Books.

24

Modernity: Tolkien and His Contemporaries Anna Vaninskaya

Introduction1 Few authors are taken out of context as persistently as popular ones, or with more impunity. If, by the vagaries of literary fate, J. R. R. Tolkien had remained in the recollection of posterity as the author of the 1912 play “The Bloodhound, the Chef, and the Suffragette” featuring “Detective Sexton Q. Blake-Holmes” (Carpenter 1977, 59), or the 1931 verse satire “Progress in Bimble Town,” critics would have no trouble placing him in the context of modern literature. But instead, Tolkien is known the world over as the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and this fact entails several related difficulties. Like his near-contemporary George Orwell, whose collected works run to some 20 volumes, but whose nation- and generation-spanning popularity is built on two books alone, Tolkien is regarded by mainstream literary critics and by the public at large as a two-hit wonder. In actual fact, of course, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings represent just a portion of his extensive creative output, the greater part of which remained unpublished during his lifetime and only saw the light after his death. Tolkien’s status is therefore somewhat analogous to that of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Emily Dickinson, though unlike the fame of these two poets – which has been built entirely on the posthumous legacy squabbled over by generations of editors – Tolkien’s reputation continues to be based on the two texts which appeared in print and achieved popularity while he was still alive.2 And despite much illuminating recent criticism, it is still the case that no one outside the community of

A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.



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professional Tolkien scholars (and aficionados) takes the rest of his prose, poetry, art, and language invention into account when assessing his achievement. Yet some minor and academic titles aside, everything that Tolkien wrote over his lifetime should properly be considered part of one work – the “Silmarillion” – which drew to its strong magnetic core even those fictions that originated outside it, such as his comic children’s tales of the 1920s and 1930s. To treat any element in isolation from the whole is to misunderstand fundamentally the nature of Tolkien’s project. As Christopher Tolkien has written, “the ceaseless ‘making’ of his world extended from my father’s youth into his old age .  .  . [the posthumous publications are] in some sense also a record of his life, a form of biography, if of a very unusual kind” (Peoples x). The “Silmarillion” is “a literary entity of a singular nature” which “can only be defined in terms of its history . . . it was always ‘in progress’ ” (Jewels x). Or, as Verlyn Flieger has put it: Tolkien’s great mythological song, though it never wavered in intent, changed as it grew, inevitably reflecting the color, flavor, and mood of the changing world around it. Begun as one era was ending, it took shape in another and found its audience in yet a third. (2005, 139)

That last point is a crucial one. Tolkien was active as a writer from the 1910s, which may (arguably) be classified as the tail end of the nineteenth century, to the 1970s – the height of postmodernism. What exactly, then, was Tolkien’s period, and how can we periodize any author whose career spans over half a century? We think of Thomas Hardy as a Victorian even though he kept on writing into the time of Ezra Pound and Virginia Woolf, and we may similarly think of Tolkien as a turn-of-the-twentieth-century author who composed “adventure stories in the Edwardian mode” (Lobdell 2004, 19). Tolkien’s earliest aspirations were formulated with reference to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (still a presence, though a waning one, in the cultural imaginary of the 1900s), and hardly anyone who came to prominence after the 1920s features in the long list of Tolkien’s attested sources.3 All his modern influences (whether for emulation or rejection) were born before 1880: Morris, MacDonald, Lang, (Francis) Thompson, Rider Haggard, Chesterton, Barrie, and Buchan, and to a lesser extent, Dickens, R. S. Crockett, and (Algernon) Blackwood (see ch. 21). A reader of Tolkien’s “fairy poems” in 1915 also found echoes of Rudyard Kipling and Walter de la Mare (Chronology 71 and 72). There are clear genealogical connections with Victorian and Edwardian children’s literature – from MacDonald to Edith Nesbit and Kenneth Grahame – and with the work of visual artists such as Arthur Rackham and the practitioners of Art Nouveau. But was Tolkien not also a Great War-traumatized contemporary of David Jones, T. S. Eliot, and Joyce, who played with language and the fragments of ancient myths? Was he not a post-World War II author intensely concerned with the nature of evil, like Orwell, Golding, and Vonnegut?4 Was his period 1880–1918 (to which he owed his initial mental formation) or 1918–1945 (when the bulk of his work was written)? Or perhaps – when we

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remember that at least three volumes of The History of Middle-earth (not to mention Unfinished Tales) are dedicated to post-1950 writings, and that Tolkien was no stranger to metafiction, self-referentiality, and pastiche – we should class him with the postmodernists? Who exactly were his contemporaries?

1880–1918: Fairies and Wanderers The weight of evidence for the nineteenth century up to 1918 (with such outliers as Haggard’s and Buchan’s post-war romances and thrillers, and Edward Wyke-Smith’s 1927 The Marvellous Land of Snergs) is such that debate can only revolve around particulars. But though we may never have a definitive catalogue of Tolkien’s pre-1918 reading, there is no doubt that his work owes most to the legacy of nineteenth-century romanticism, as the first 1920 audience to hear “The Fall of Gondolin” immediately recognized (Mathews 2002, 86). Taking “romantic” in its narrowest sense first, we can point to echoes of S. T. Coleridge in “On Fairy-stories” and to John Keats’s “Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn” (Keats 2001, 287) for the keynote of much of Tolkien’s early poetry: “There are the shores of Faëry / With their moonlit pebbled strand / Whose foam is silver music .  .  .” (Lost Tales II 271–272). The first version of “The Shores of Faëry” was written in July 1915, just a few weeks after Tolkien borrowed an introduction to Keats from Exeter College library to cram for his final exams. “Magic,” “perilous,” and “forlorn” are all key words in the characterization of Faëry. Many of the original Tol Eressëa verses written in 1915 – “The Lonely Isle,” “Kortirion among the Trees” (“Down opal seas beyond the shadowy bar / Of cloudy ports forlorn . . .”), and “The Happy Mariners” (“I know a window in a western tower / That opens on celestial seas”) (Lost Tales I 35; Lost Tales II 273) – read like elaborations of that one couplet from “Ode to a Nightingale.” William Morris, a neo-romantic of a rather different hue from Keats (and a secondgeneration Pre-Raphaelite), was a much stronger and more direct influence: Tolkien owned most of his “poems, translations, and fantasies” (Mathews 2002, 87). The impact of the Victorian polymath’s works on Tolkien’s imagination is unmistakable, whether we look to The House of the Wolfings (1889), a romance Tolkien bought with his Skeat Prize money in 1914 and used as a model for the Kalevala-inspired “The Story of Kullervo” – “on the lines of Morris’ romances with chunks of poetry in between” (Letters 7) – or to the frame story of The Earthly Paradise, Morris’s long narrative poem of the 1860s that Tolkien carried with him on the Western Front (see ch. 21). In The Earthly Paradise, certain mariners of Norway, having considered all that they had heard of the Earthly Paradise, set sail to find it, and after many troubles and the lapse of many years came old men to some Western land, of which they had never before heard. (1910–1915, 3: 3)



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These “wanderers” arrive at “A nameless city in a distant sea, / White as the changing walls of faërie” (ibid.) and spend their time there listening to (and telling) classical and medieval legends, one of which is called “The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon.” Of course, “West of the Moon, east of the Sun” also “Lies the haven of the star, / The white town of the Wanderer / And the rock of Eglamar” (Lost Tales II 272) where Earendel (an early spelling of the name) comes in one of the poems from which the entire legendarium sprang. Tolkien’s other wandering mariner and central mediating human figure of the early writings – the tenth-century Anglo-Saxon Eriol/ Ælfwine – also sails westward to the city of the Elves to become the auditor of their cycle of mythological stories, providing not only a Morrisian frame for Tolkien’s “Silmarillion” tales, but the link between England and Faëry crucial to Tolkien’s original conception of his mythology. A full list of Morrisian echoes in Tolkien’s work, early and late, would fill an entire volume. The influence of the diction, syntax, imagery, narrative form, and plot elements of Morris’s late prose romances extended beyond “The Story of Kullervo” and the legends of Lost Tales to The Lord of the Rings and “The Wanderings of Húrin” (Jewels 252ff.). It has even been proposed that Morris’s description of his travels in the Icelandic Journals provided the template for the landscape and adventures of The Hobbit (Burns 2005). But the echoes were particularly strong in the 1910s, when Tolkien was reading Morris for the first time. Compare Morris’s “The Message of the March Wind” (1885) to Tolkien’s “The Bidding of the Minstrel” (1914 version): The singers have sung and the builders have builded, The painters have fashioned their tales of delight; For what and for whom hath the world’s book been gilded, When all is for these but the blackness of night?



How long and for what is their patience abiding? How oft and how oft shall their story be told, While the hope that none seeketh in darkness is hiding And in grief and in sorrow the world groweth old? (Morris 1910–1915, 24: 370)

and: But the music is broken, the words half-forgotten, The sunlight has faded, the moon is growing old, The fairy ships foundered or weed-swathed and rotten, The fire and the wonder of hearts is acold . . .



The song I can sing is but shreds one remembers Of golden imaginings fashioned in sleep, A whispered tale told by the withering embers Of old things far off that but few hearts keep. (Lost Tales II 270–271)

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It is not just the striking metrical similarity of the anapaestic lines, but the linked themes of transience, loss, and death that make Tolkien’s stanzas seem like a continuation of Morris’s. These themes were central to the work of both writers, but Morris was not the only mid-to-late nineteenth-century romantic to devote his thoughts to the grave matter of mortality. George MacDonald, a Christian fantasist and disciple of the German romantic Novalis, was an Oedipal father-figure for Tolkien, but in one respect at least Tolkien never deviated from the path MacDonald (and Morris) had set. “Death is the theme that most inspired George MacDonald,” Tolkien wrote in “On Fairystories.” This was true not only of MacDonald’s children’s books and fairy-tales, but especially of his final adult romance Lilith (1895), which grappled directly with the notions of the “Escape from Death” and the “Escape from Deathlessness” (OFS 74–75), as Tolkien did the same himself when developing the theory of sub-creation in his seminal lecture-essay: Death and Immortality: the mystery of the love of the world in the hearts of a race “doomed” to leave and seemingly lose it; the anguish in the hearts of a race “doomed” not to leave it, until its whole evil-aroused story is complete. (Letters 246)

This is what Tolkien called “the real theme” of The Lord of the Rings, and death and immortality were the real theme of much else besides, including the whole woe-filled history of the “Silmarillion” and the allegorical stories “Leaf By Niggle” and Smith of Wootton Major. The Morris-inspired W. B. Yeats, in his first, Celtic Twilight phase, provides another link in this chain. His 1894 play The Land of Heart’s Desire associates the passage to Faëry – the land of immortality where “time [is] an endless song” – with death (Yeats 1972, 69). The long poem The Wanderings of Oisin (1889) is a dialogue between a decrepit and dying Oisin – returned from his voyage west over the sea to the Celtic “faeryland,” which knows no change, death or time – and Saint Patrick, who listens to Oisin’s “memories and lamentations” (Yeats 2008, 377). Yeats’s poem takes the form of an imram, a type of medieval Irish voyage tale that often featured a trip to the otherworld. Tolkien’s poem “Imram” is also a dialogue between a dying Saint Brendan – newly returned from his voyage to the Otherworld – and an unnamed monk; and the parallels with Yeats (both poems, for instance, feature the Tree of Birds) may be due to more than similar source material. In Yeats’s depiction of the Western lands Oisin visits, with their “Immortals” who “danced like shadows on the mountains,” “wandered ever hand in hand; / Or sat in dreams on the pale strand, / Each forehead like an obscure star . . . And sang” (Yeats 1981, 421), we may easily perceive motifs Tolkien would make his own in early poems such as “A Song of Aryador,” “The Cottage of Lost Play,” or any of the recurring descriptions of the shores of Faërie. Along with his later adoption of the Irish imram form itself, such similarities not only give the lie to Tolkien’s notorious disavowal of “Celtic things” (Letters 26; see ch. 19), but place him firmly in the line of descent from the late-Victorian Celtic Revival.



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For all the differences of coloring between their respective mythical tapestries, Yeats’s and Tolkien’s “faëry” writings obviously inhabit the same discursive field. The likeness, as well as the unlikeness, of image and theme are readily seen in the famous stanza from Yeats’s “The Song of Wandering Aengus” (1899): Though I am old with wandering Through hollow lands and hilly lands, I will find out where she has gone, And kiss her lips and take her hands; And walk among long dappled grass, And pluck till time and times are done, The silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun. (2008, 30)

Wandering and wanderers recur with such frequency in Morris, Yeats, and Tolkien, that on this basis alone they may be classed together. It is true that Tolkien, in his legends of the Elder Days, made something entirely different of the fruit of the sun and moon and, except on occasion, did not pursue the fairy love motif (Smith’s encounters with the Fairy Queen and the story of Beren and Lúthien are perhaps the closest he came to it). But the longing, the wistfulness, the aging in the life-long search for the numinous are all recognizable and characteristic notes of his work, from the early “The Song of Eriol” (marked as it is by war) to “The Sea-bell.” But there is more to the analogy than mere verbal and thematic echoes. Yeats’s endorsement of the “Celtic movement” provides an interesting counterpart to Tolkien’s reflections on his own mythopoeic activities. While E. M. Forster’s famous lament in Howard’s End (1910) about the absence of an English mythology has received much attention in Tolkien scholarship, Yeats’s writings on the mythological renaissance heralded by the Irish literary revival constitute an equally fascinating (though less noticed) context for Tolkien’s decision, while still in his twenties, to provide “something of the same sort that belonged to the English” (quoted in Carpenter 1977, 59). Tolkien was talking about the Kalevala, and so was Yeats in “The Celtic Element in Literature” (1897), when he maintained that literature must be “constantly flooded with the passions and beliefs of ancient times,” in particular “the Finnish, the Scandinavian, and the Celtic” (2008, 376) – all three of which were, of course, the wellsprings of Tolkien’s legendarium: [E]very new fountain of legends is a new intoxication for the imagination of the world [which] is as ready, as it was at the coming of the tales of Arthur and of the Grail, for a new intoxication .  .  . The arts by brooding upon their own intensity have become religious, and are seeking . . . to create a sacred book. They must, as religious thought has always done, utter themselves through legends . . . (Yeats 2008, 377–378)

Tolkien’s “sacramental vision” and the crucial link between “religion” and “legend” in his work have been fully explored by many critics. It is no accident that in later

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life Tolkien turned increasingly from pure mythopoesis to explicit theology, directly addressing questions of the soul’s relation to the body, the nature of death, evil, the fall, and the incarnation – all within the confines of the sub-created world. But Yeats’s passage invokes yet another relevant context, for his mythologicalnationalist project was explicitly framed in terms of the Symbolist movement in the arts. The “sacred book” of which he speaks is not the Bible but the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, the synesthetic ideal to which Symbolist poets and painters aspired, the embodiment of the synthesis of all the arts. Tolkien’s desire to see his mythology filled out by “other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama” (Letters 145) would have resulted, if it had come to fruition, in just such a total work of art; and the close links between his own visual and literary creations all point to his affinity with Symbolist aims. Particularly notable are the direct correspondences between the early lyric poetry and the accompanying paintings (such as the poem-image pair “The Shores of Faëry” from 1915, see ch. 33), so different stylistically from the conventional landscapes that preceded them in Tolkien’s artistic oeuvre. Though no William Blake, Tolkien was the first person since to produce an original body of mythology via the integration of word and image. Indeed, Symbolism, in its Anglophone variety, was as much an outgrowth of romanticism – by way of the Pre-Raphaelites and the aesthetes – as a precursor of modernism. And it was in its Symbolist guise that the late Victorian and Edwardian “fairy” vogue of which Yeats is nowadays perhaps the only canonical representative (outside of children’s literature) fed through into the work of modernist authors. So unexpectedly, but perhaps fittingly, Tolkien’s practice touched that of his modernist contemporaries such as Katherine Mansfield precisely at the point where nineteenthcentury romanticism met twentieth-century modernism. Mansfield’s “Fairy Tale” (1919) is a close cousin of Tolkien’s lyrics of the same decade:



Now folds the Tree of Day its perfect flowers . . . Now a strain Wild and mournful blown from shadow towers, Echoed from shadow ships upon the foam . . . (Mansfield 1923, 56)

And Mansfield’s “The Sea Child” (1911) inevitably reminds one of the conclusion to Tolkien’s “The Sea-bell”: In the dark of the night she crept to the town And under a doorway she laid her down . . . She sold her corals; she sold her foam; Her rainbow heart like a singing shell Broke in her body: she crept back home.



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Peace, go back to the world, my daughter, Daughter, go back to the darkling land; There is nothing here but sad sea water, And a handful of sifting sand. (Mansfield 1923, 24)

A Few More Romantic Legacies There were other currents in the broad romantic stream that shaped Tolkien’s art in more recognizable ways and that have received a fair share of critical attention, especially from major Tolkien scholars such as Tom Shippey. No chapter on Tolkien and modernity can neglect to mention three in particular: one may call them, for short, the philological, the popular, and the Christian. The first is particularly significant for understanding what is often vaguely termed Tolkien’s medievalism. Medievalism is, by definition, a modern phenomenon, and Tolkien’s version of it was rooted in a very particular moment in time: the only moment in time when it would have been considered natural to compose original poetry and prose in Old English and Gothic, and to develop the study of place-names into a methodology for fictional invention. This was because, as Morris’s and Yeats’s writings demonstrate, a certain strain of romanticism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came to be indissolubly linked to the new disciplines of comparative philology, mythology, and folklore. And so it was Charles Eliot’s 1890 Finnish Grammar, Joseph Wright’s 1892 Primer of the Gothic Language, and W. F. Kirby’s 1907 Kalevala translation that sparked Tolkien’s imagination, and not, as was the case with the romantics of earlier generations, James Macpherson’s Ossian (1760 on) or Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1820). The form of medievalism found in Tolkien’s work fits naturally with Morris’s philologically inflected tales of Gothic kindreds, rather than, for instance, with the philologically ignorant pseudo-Chaucerianism of the eighteenth-century poet Thomas Chatterton. A very different, though beneath the surface related, current of the romantic stream issued at the end of the nineteenth century in the so-called “romance revival.” Led by authors such as R. L. Stevenson and H. Rider Haggard and favorably disposed critics such as the folklorist Andrew Lang, this anti-realist backlash saw cheaply published novels of exotic, and sometimes supernatural adventure in far-away times and places reach unprecedented levels of popularity. Tolkien source studies have uncovered numerous plot details borrowed and transmuted from Haggard (especially the series of books about Allan Quatermain, the immortal Ayesha, and the saga-romance Eric Brighteyes) and from the later practitioner of the adventure romance, John Buchan. Tolkien was, in fact, an avid reader of late Victorian and Edwardian popular romances, both historical (such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s) and supernatural (H. G. Wells, a founding father of the scientific romance, appears more than once in his oeuvre), and kept up throughout his life with the two twentieth-century genres of fantasy and science

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fiction that descended from them.5 Although Tolkien complained to his publisher in 1938 that “I know only too sadly from efforts to find anything to read . . . that my taste is not normal” (Letters 34), and many years later singled out the absence “of what we [he and Lewis] really like in stories” as the catalyst for trying to “write some ourselves” (Letters 378), he was certainly familiar with the otherworldly romances of his contemporaries E. R. Eddison and Lord Dunsany (see ch. 21). It is telling that he concluded his famous pact with C. S. Lewis to write “a Space-journey and a Timejourney (mine) each discovering Myth” (Letters 29) shortly after determining “that for what we meant by romance there must be at least the hint of another world – one must ‘hear the horns of elfland’ ” (Lewis quoted in Chronology 168), just like Orion in Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter. Christian romanticism, after the death of George MacDonald, found its most original early twentieth-century exponent in G. K. Chesterton: a writer as deeply concerned as Tolkien with the metaphysics of “Elfland” and the theological ramifications of fairy-story and fantasy. Chesterton’s writing directly contributed to Tolkien’s theory of sub-creation, and he provides a fascinating counterpart on a number of other levels, as critics such as Alison Milbank have shown at length. One such level was the political.

1918–1945: Patriots, Suburbanites, and Big Bosses There is nothing surprising in the confluence of romanticism with politics. William Morris was, after all, not only an arch-romantic but a founder of British socialism, while Yeats put his romanticism not just to nationalist but to conservative uses. In the realm of social thought British romanticism had from the early nineteenth century been closely allied to ruralism, anti-industrialism, anti-capitalism, and anti-statism; and by the first half of the twentieth century, representatives of these intersecting currents were especially numerous in the “Little Englander” camp. Since the Boer War, Little Englander had been the name allocated to the English patriot who condemned jingoism and imperial extension, and reserved his love and loyalty for the traditional English community rather than the cosmopolitan British Empire or – towards the middle of the century – the Soviet and American varieties of the centralized modern state. Chesterton, with his radical anti-imperial local patriotism and distributist belief in small peasant freeholdings was the prototypical Little Englander. The popular author J. B. Priestley, a critic of American mass society and bard of Edwardian Englishness, wrote in 1934 that “It is little England I love” (quoted in Samuel 1989, xxiii); and all signs point to Tolkien’s participation in the same tradition. He was neither a distributist like Chesterton, nor a socialist like Priestley, but it was Little Englander opposition to cosmopolitanism and globalization, in favor of a deeply rooted localism, that underlay Tolkien’s repeated avowals of his Mercian identity. Though the semi-mystical linguistic aspect of that conviction was unique to



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him, in all other respects it was entirely in tune with the times. “The bigger things get the smaller and duller or flatter the globe gets,” Tolkien wrote: It is getting to be all one blasted little provincial suburb . . . If true [that English is “the biggest language group”], damn shame – say I . . . I shall have to refuse to speak anything but Old Mercian. But seriously, I do find this Americo-cosmopolitanism very terrifying . . . I need to you hardly add that them’s the sentiments of a good many folk – and no indication of lack of patriotism. For I love England (not Great Britain and certainly not the British Commonwealth (grr!)). (Letters 65)

A little later he averred: I know nothing about British or American imperialism in the Far East that does not fill me with regret and disgust, I am afraid I am not even supported by a glimmer of patriotism in this remaining war . . . It can only benefit America or Russia. (Letters 115)

An important tributary of Little Englander romanticism was the rural nostalgia that reached its highest tide in the pre- and post-Great War years. Although Tolkien was not a straightforward ruralist in the Richard Jefferies and Edward Thomas vein, evocation of nature is one of his greatest strengths as a writer (see ch. 29). It is symptomatic that the most important tree of Tolkien’s early poetry – the elm – was at this time an “unofficial emblem of Englishness” (Lucas 1997, 16), and that Tom Bombadil, “the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside” (Letters 26), is a close relative of Thomas’s Lob, not to mention Kipling’s Puck and Hobden. Rural writing of all kinds proliferated during Tolkien’s lifetime – from the Georgian poetry of his youth6 to the regional fiction and domestic travel literature of the 1920s and 1930s – and it was just as often an expression of protest as of celebration. Horror at the threat to countryside and village life posed by the spreading of the town – what Kenneth Grahame called the “leprosy of suburbia” – was voiced by everyone from E. M. Forster to Edith Nesbit. Tolkien’s reaction to Birmingham’s absorption of Sarehole is well known. The enemy here was not so much industrialization (this was not the early nineteenth century after all) as suburbanization: after passing through Sarehole in 1933, Tolkien recorded in his diary that “his childhood landscape” had become “a huge tram-ridden meaningless suburb, where I actually lost my way” (quoted in Carpenter 1977, 124). Though the roots of the anxiety lay in the previous decades, it was in the interwar period that suburbia emerged as a prominent theme in literature, in tandem with satirical portrayals of the massification of leisure pursuits and the democratization of formerly rural space. A typical example of the preoccupation is George Orwell’s depiction in Coming Up for Air (1939) of his protagonist George Bowling’s return to the scene of his pre-Great War childhood, a former rural and small market town idyll on the Thames. Just like Tolkien, Bowling loses his way among the new streets of the now sprawling town, and in words that echo Tolkien’s diary entry almost uncannily,

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he describes the lanes and elm trees that are no longer there, the ruined ponds, old landmarks turned into petrol stations, and new red-brick houses everywhere: I don’t believe anyone who hadn’t happened to be born here would have believed that these streets were fields as little as twenty years ago. It was as though the countryside had been buried by a kind of volcanic eruption from the outer suburbs. (Orwell 1997– 1998, 7: 211)

Tolkien, with his ironic yet endearing portrayals in Mr. Bliss or “The Dragon’s Visit”of those pre-lapsarian market towns with their Mister Higginses, Old Tuppers, Sergeant Boffinses, and fire-brigades (Tolkien 1937, also in Tolkien 2002a, 309–311), was just as implacably opposed to the encroachment of “modernity” as Orwell’s everyman Bowling. Approaching his beloved river, Bowling notices that: . . . there seemed to be a lot of cars standing about . . . The place was black with people. And where the water-meadows used to be – tea-houses, penny-in-the-slot machines, sweet kiosks, and chaps selling Wall’s Ice-Cream . . . I remember the old towpath. You could walk along it for miles, and . . . you’d meet never a soul. . . . [But now] the river was crammed with boats . . . full of young fools with next to nothing on, all of them screaming and shouting and most of them with a gramophone aboard as well .  .  . I remember the Thames water as it used to be . . . You couldn’t see three inches into the water now. It’s all brown and dirty, with a film of oil on it from the motor-boats, not to mention the fag-ends and the paper bags. (7: 213–214)

Tolkien put the same sentiments into verse. His description of “Progress in BimbleTown,” an imaginary seaside resort, with all the attendant littering, pollution, noise, overcrowding, commercialization, and invasion of a formerly quaint scene by alien trippers, could have come from the pen of George Bowling himself. The image of “[a]n old, solid, / manywindowed inn where motors / make strong smells, and no horse goes / in cobbled yard” (Tolkien 2002a, 254), with its superimposition of the distasteful new on the still surviving old, is straight out of Orwell’s novel. Tolkien’s (rather clichéd and decidedly class-inflected) catalogue of the signs of modern vulgarity and despoliation escalates from garish “best-sellers / in yellow jackets” and “picture-cards” of “fat women” (a particularly Orwellian touch, this) to windows with: cigarettes, and gum one chews (wrapped in paper, cased in card, for folk to strew on grass and shore) . . . sometimes late, when motor-bikes are not passing with a screech, one hears faintly (if one likes) the sea still at it on the beach. at what? At churning orange-rind, piling up banana-skins, gnawing paper, trying to grind



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a broth of bottles, packets, tins . . . before next morning’s charabangs, stopping at the old inn-door with reek and rumble, hoots and clangs, bring more folk to Godknowswhere and Theydontcare, to Bimble Town . . . that once was fair . . . (ibid.)

This is the bathetic counterpart to the pathetic ruin of the Shire that occurs at the end of The Lord of the Rings: Sharkey’s men turned tourists. In nothing was Tolkien’s modernity more apparent than in this typically interwar portrayal of its ravages. But if what one might call the suburban predicament led to Saruman-like excesses, it could also, paradoxically, create Hobbit-like virtues. Certain national character stereotypes current in the twenties, thirties, and during World War II represented the English as a nation of private and decent suburban gardeners: law-abiding, gentle, commonsensical (a much older stereotype), and averse to continental regimentation, unwilling to fight but brave and sturdy when forced to. Cartoons in the Daily Mail and Daily Express from the 1920s to the 1950s featured stock figures like “The Little Man”: a self-caricature of the domesticated, middle-aged English everyman, put-upon but able to stand up for himself, sensible, pacifist, not concerned with foreigners or political nostrums, and above all small. Portrayed somewhat more self-critically, the little man could be slow, stupid, parochial, insular, and xenophobic, but always possessed of a strong attachment to home, locality, and his amateur hobbies (gardening foremost among them), which ensured his rejection of imported abstract theory and central state planning. This was the suburban and updated version of Tolkien’s rustic late Victorian Hobbits, and one should not forget that though intended to be denizens of rural England circa 1897 (Letters 230), the Hobbits were conceived and written in the era of “The Little Man.” In his correspondence and interviews, Tolkien often criticized Hobbit parochialism, their “mental myopia” and “self-satisfaction” (Letters 329): “Babbitt has the same bourgeois smugness that hobbits do. His world is the same limited place” (quoted in Carpenter 1977, 165). One only has to recall the Hobbits’ distrust of foreigners, their response to Sharkey’s regime of hybrid capitalist/communist expropriation, their hidden courage, and the pointed absence of crime and voluntary obedience to The Rules, to realize how perfectly in sync with the prevailing stereotypes Tolkien’s portrait of his fellow Englishmen was. If one also bears in mind the Little Englander aspect, the words spoken by Sam in response to the Ring’s temptation are seen to fit this influential version of the English mentality to a tee: . . . deep down in him lived still unconquered his plain hobbit-sense . . . The one small garden of a free gardener was all his need and due, not a garden swollen to a realm; his own hands to use, not the hands of others to command. (RK, VI, i, 1178)

The shift, or rather the broadening, of Tolkien’s focal type of Englishness from what Dimitra Fimi calls Victorian heroic Anglo-Saxonism and romantic melancholy

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associated with particular locales (Warwick, Great Haywood, Oxford) to the “suburban” “comedy” of garden-variety Hobbitry (Letters 26), was entirely symptomatic of the shift in the wider culture. The comic vein ran deep in Tolkien, as his minor works from Mr. Bliss to Farmer Giles especially attest, but even the type of humor he employed diversified over time, as he passed from the antics of the gods in Lost Tales to the Pickwickian, Three Men in a Boat-style humor of the Hobbits. The diversification in the type of humor, furthermore, was intimately related to the development of a greater variability in the type of evil which opposed it, and both were the result of Tolkien’s temporary generic shift, with the arrival of the Hobbits, from high to low, from mythopoesis to novel-writing. Melkor – the Lucifer figure of the mythology – had over the course of his interwar evolution become an almost metaphysical villain, but in the 1940s, in the midst of The Lord of the Rings’ composition, a new and recognizably modern enemy emerged. In a well-known 1943 letter to his son Christopher, Tolkien wrote: My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control . . .) – or to “unconstitutional” Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind) . . . If we could get back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so as to refer to people .  .  . it would go a long way to clearing thought, and reducing the frightful landslide into Theyocracy. (Letters 63)

The same year, George Orwell, once a self-proclaimed “Tory anarchist,” wrote in The English People: English political thinking is much governed by the word “They”. “They” are the higherups, the mysterious powers who do things to you against your will. (1997–1998, 16: 212) The word “They,” the universal feeling that “They” hold all the power and make all the decisions, and that “They” can only be influenced in indirect and uncertain ways, is a great handicap in England. (16: 224)

In 1957 Richard Hoggart, documenting working-class perceptions, was still writing about the world of “Them,” “the world of the bosses . . . a shadowy but . . . powerful group affecting [the workers’] lives at almost every point.” “They” are the officials, the authorities, “the people at the top,” “the higher-ups” (1957, 53–54). Enough has probably been said of the romantic distrust of the impersonal modern state to recognize the tradition to which Orwell and Tolkien belong. The unfortunate and pernicious slide into “Theyocracy,” whether of the capitalist or the communist variety, was a widespread concern during Tolkien’s lifetime, and one he incorporated into his work. Most Middle-earth societies of Elves, Men, Hobbits or Dwarves conform to one



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of the two alternatives Tolkien set out in his letter: they are either personal “unconstitutional” (and sometimes elected) monarchies or natural associations characterized by an “abolition of control” (the Shire is in some respects a model anarchist commune). It is only the evil societies – Saruman’s or Sauron’s totalitarian industrial empires with world-state ambitions – that are recognizably contemporary “Theyocracies,” despite, or perhaps because of, their basis in slavery. The Orcs that Frodo and Sam encounter in Mordor use the most modern idiom in the book: theirs is distinctly the speech of twentieth-century soldiers, but also of government or party functionaries, minor officials in a murderous bureaucracy. Shagrat and Gorbag talk of the “Big Bosses”: “ ‘It’s going well, they say.’ ‘They would,’ grunted Gorbag,” who is aware of the official propaganda (TT, IV, x, 965). There is a sense of frustration with headquarters: “they couldn’t get Lugbúrz to pay attention for a good while” (966), but the two “have [their] orders,” in the clipped language of army dispatches: “Prisoner is to be stripped. Full description of every article . . . to be sent to Lugbúrz at once . . . And the prisoner is to be kept safe and intact, under pain of death for every member of the guard” (968). The two tracker Orcs Frodo and Sam observe from afar speak just like the Nazis on trial at Nuremberg: “ ‘Whose blame’s that?’ said the soldier. ‘Not mine. That comes from Higher Up’ ” (RK, VI, ii, 1210). “Higher Up,” like “Big Bosses,” like all the impersonal structures or forces of a Theyocracy, is capitalized. The Orcs’ conversation conveys a definite sense of a hierarchical party structure: “They’ve lost their heads, that’s what it is. And some of the bosses are going to lose their skins too, I guess, if what I hear is true” (ibid.).   “You come back,” shouted the soldier, “or I’ll report you!”   “Who to? Not to your precious Shagrat. He won’t be captain any more.”   “I’ll give your name and number to the Nazgûl,” said the soldier lowering his voice to a hiss. (1211)

And the “slave-driver” of the column Frodo and Sam fall in with warns: “Deserting, eh? . . . Up you get and fall in, or I’ll have your numbers and report you” (1218). The idea of soldiers, like prisoners, having numbers, no less than the concept of reporting insubordination to superiors whose own situation is precariously dependent on the favor of the Big Bosses, is completely alien to the world of Middle-earth as originally conceived (and as eventually elaborated in the final writings). The glimpses of Orc life in Mordor are also at odds with the rest of the narrative, and the tone and atmosphere of these scenes remind us that the twentieth century sometimes obtruded rather roughly into the secondary world.

Conclusion: The Victorian Modernist The argument for Tolkien’s cultural modernity thus rests on very solid foundations. Though some of his contemporaries liked to maintain that “a modern fantasy might

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be a more or less truthful imitation of past fantasies, but it could not be . . . true to the life of our own time” (Upward 1937, 48), numerous scholars have demonstrated that Tolkien’s writing and ideas, like those of his more canonical peers, were a response to the historical and intellectual upheavals of the first half of the twentieth century. These included the reconceptualization of time, of memory, and of race, the proliferation of artificial and auxiliary languages (Tolkien’s interest in Esperanto is well documented), the continued destruction of rural England, and last but not least, both World Wars. The impact of the Great War upon Tolkien’s work and world-view can be seen both in the poetic elegies (“The Town of Dreams and The City of Present Sorrow”) and descriptions of “mechanized” warfare (“The Fall of Gondolin”) written during the conflict itself, and in the subsequent development of his mythology, which is from beginning to end the story of a millennia-long world war. In The Lord of the Rings the influence is pervasive. We can find it in the portrayals of the no-man’s land landscapes, of the passive suffering, endurance, and nostalgia for home of the common soldier, the surprisingly detailed evocation of the experience of shell-shock, and the class-breaking officer–batman relationship of Frodo and Sam (Carpenter 1977, 81), not to mention details like the Gondor civilian evacuations, which have more to do with the wartime realities that surrounded Tolkien at the time of writing in the 1940s than with memories of the first war of his youth. There is no question, then, that Tolkien was a modern writer, but was he also a modernist one – in other words, was he modern in literary as well as cultural terms? Unlike his friend C. S. Lewis, Tolkien did not engage with modernism publicly,7 but no consideration of his place among his contemporaries can conclude without addressing the possible connections with canonical modernists in a little more detail. Like Eliot’s and Pound’s, Tolkien’s work was supremely intertextual, full of allusions of varying degrees of complexity; his sources, though different in provenance, were also myriad and “endlessly combined” (OFS 65). Voices from different traditions, aspects of different styles, genres, and modes were interwoven and juxtaposed, especially in The Lord of the Rings. But if Eliot, Joyce, and Pound brought together fragments of past cultures to shore up the ruins of modernity, and left the fragments as fragments in a jagged-edged collage, Tolkien melted down the elements of his various sources and shaped them anew, creating an original unity out of the remnants and shards of the past, using the fragments as inspiration to mold an independent myth of his own. Nineteenth-century reconstruction, not twentieth-century deconstruction, was the keynote of Tolkien’s art. Like the Victorians, and unlike the modernists, Tolkien was interested in origins and wholes, in diachrony and the continuous development revealed by historical philology, not in the structuralist synchrony of Saussurian linguistics or inorganic palimpsests of past and present. Contemporaneous coexistence of past and present was indeed the subject of his time-travel tales, but the two were linked by an ascending (or descending) series, and the stories’ underlying conception had little in common with Joyce’s ironic superimposition of Leopold Bloom’s peregrinations in “present-day” Dublin upon the travels of Ulysses. Two very different kinds of “mythic method” were involved. Ultimately, Tolkien’s aim was to build a world, not write a novel, to approach as closely as possible “the primal desire at the heart of



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Faërie” “for a living, realized sub-creative art.” And though, not being God, he could not guarantee “the realization, independent of the conceiving mind, of imagined wonder,” he could at least exercise his “right,” as he put it in the poem “Mythopoeia,” to “make still by the law in which [he was] made” (OFS 35, 64, 65).

Notes 1  Portions of this chapter have been published in Vaninskaya (2006). 2  This was an accident of publication history: ever since he offered it as a sequel to The Hobbit (see ch. 9) Tolkien intended to publish the “Silmarillion,” and even tried to get it into print in conjunction with The Lord of the Rings as “a single work” (Jewels viii). The short stories and poems that did appear, “chips” from his Silmarillion “workshop,” as it were, did not contribute substantially to his fame. 3  Tolkien did keep up with contemporary literature: his reading ranged from Sinclair Lewis and Agatha Christie to Simone de Beauvoir. Contemporary (non-Inkling) writers such as Roy Campbell, Naomi Mitchison, Robert Graves, and W. H. Auden were all personal acquaintances, and during his time as a student at Oxford he was a friend of T. W. Earp, who hosted the “undergraduate poetry circle, the Coterie, which included Aldous Huxley . . . and which provided the first English audience for ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, read by

4 

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7 

T.S. Eliot.” Earp was also president of “the Psittakoi,” a group devoted to “French symbolist literature” and “modern English poetry” which Tolkien addressed in 1915 (Garth 2008, 39). Tom Shippey (2000) argues the latter point in Author of the Century, but the list of works that furnish evidence for the preceding statements and numerous other assertions throughout the chapter is too long to include here. The reader is advised to consult (in addition to the critics mentioned in the text) the Further Reading below and at the end of the volume. He did not always like what he read, but David Lindsay (see ch. 21), Isaac Asimov, E. R. Eddison, and Mary Renault all garnered praise (Letters 34, 377). Volumes of Rupert Brooke and Georgian Poetry passed through his hands in 1915 (Chronology 65, 70). He did, however, make notes on Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake – not as surprising a fact as it may appear, given his professional interest in language.

References Burns, Marjorie. 2005. Perilous Realms: Celtic and Norse in Tolkien’s Middle-earth. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Carpenter, Humphrey. 1977. J. R. R. Tolkien – A Biography. London: Allen & Unwin. Fimi, Dimitra. 2010. Tolkien, Race and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Flieger, Verlyn. 2005. Interrupted Music: The Making of Tolkien’s Mythology. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Garth, John. 2008. “Tolkien, Exeter College and the Great War.” In Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings:

Sources of Inspiration, edited by Stratford Caldecott and Thomas Honegger, 10–54. Zurich and Jena: Walking Tree Publishers. Hoggart, Richard. 1957. The Uses of Literacy. London: Penguin Books. Keats, John. 2001. The Major Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lobdell, Jared. 2004. The World of the Rings: Language, Religion, and Adventure in Tolkien. Chicago: Open Court. Lucas, John. 1997. The Radical Twenties: Aspects of Writing, Politics and Culture. Nottingham: Five Leaves Publications.

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Mansfield, Katherine. 1923. Poems. London: Constable. Mathews, Richard. 2002. Fantasy: The Liberation of the Imagination. New York: Routledge. Milbank, Alison. 2009. Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians: The Fantasy of the Real. London: T & T Clark. Morris, William. 1910–1915. The Collected Works of William Morris. Edited by May Morris. 24 vols. London: Longmans, Green, & Co. Orwell, George. 1997–1998. The Complete Works of George Orwell. Edited by Peter Davison. 20 vols. London: Secker & Warburg. Samuel, Raphael, ed. 1989. Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity. Vol. 1. London: Routledge. Scull, Christina and Wayne G. Hammond. 2006. The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Chronology. London: HarperCollins.

Shippey, Tom. 2000. J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. London: HarperCollins. Upward, Edward. 1937. “Sketch for a Marxist Interpretation of Literature.” In The Mind in Chains: Socialism and the Cultural Revolution, edited by C. Day Lewis, 39–55. London: Frederick Muller. Vaninskaya, Anna. 2006. “Tolkien: A Man of His Time?” In Tolkien and Modernity, edited by Thomas Honegger and Frank Weinreich, vol. 1, 1–30. Zurich and Bern: Walking Tree Publishers. Yeats, W. B. 1972. The Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats. London: Macmillan. Yeats, W. B. 1981. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. London: Macmillan. Yeats, W. B. 2008. The Major Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Further Reading Clark, George and Daniel Timmons, eds. 2000. J. R. R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Croft, Janet Brennan. 2004. War and the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien. Westport, CT: Praeger. Curry, Patrick. 1997. Defending Middle-Earth, Tolkien: Myth and Modernity. London: HarperCollins Publishers. Fisher, Jason, ed. 2011. Tolkien and the Study of His Sources: Critical Essays. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Flieger, Verlyn. 1997. A Question of Time: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Road to Faërie. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Garth, John. 2003. Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth. London: HarperCollins. Hammond, Wayne G. and Christina Scull, eds. 2006. The Lord of the Rings, 1954–2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press.

Hiley, Margaret. 2011. The Loss and the Silence: Aspects of Modernism in the Works of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and Charles Williams. Zurich and Jena: Walking Tree Publishers. Nelson, Dale. 2007. “Literary Influences: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.” In J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopaedia, edited by Michael Drout, 366–378. London: Routledge. Rosebury, Brian. 2003. Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Shippey, Tom. 2007. Roots and Branches: Selected Papers on Tolkien. Zollikofen: Walking Tree Publishers. Simonson, Martin. 2008. The Lord of the Rings and the Western Narrative Tradition. Zurich and Jena: Walking Tree Publishers. The journal Tolkien Studies. Wells, Sarah, ed. 2008. The Ring Goes Ever On: Proceedings of the Tolkien 2005 Conference. 2 vols. The Tolkien Society.

Part V

Critical Approaches

25

The Critical Response to Tolkien’s Fiction Patrick Curry

For the purposes of this essay, “Tolkien scholarship” is used as a generic term for all critical studies whose subject is Tolkien’s work. That scholarship comprises two parts. One, the main subject of this essay, is “Tolkien criticism,” in which the overwhelming majority of professional literary and cultural critics commenting on Tolkien’s work have made no specialized study of it. The other is “Tolkien studies,” undertaken by relative experts on his work, who themselves divide into professional critics on the one hand and informed “fans” on the other, with some qualifying as both. Drout (2005) describes work by the latter group as “Middle-earth studies.” The distinction between Tolkien criticism and Tolkien studies is not clear-cut, however, insofar as a few critical experts on Tolkien have had sufficient impact, both scholarly and popular, to affect mainstream critical opinion. The leading instance is Tom Shippey; others include Verlyn Flieger, Brian Rosebury, Michael Drout, and John Garth. In discussing Tolkien criticism, their work will be included, along with that of a few critics who, conversely, are not primarily Tolkien scholars but have nonetheless made a significant contribution to the field. Also, we are only concerned with the response to Tolkien’s fiction. It is not enough simply to describe the critical reaction to Tolkien. It is our intellectual responsibility to reflect on and try to understand that reaction and the reasons for it, so space must also be made for that. Furthermore, one of the factors that makes the critical reaction to Tolkien worth considering is his immense popular appeal. It is the combination of that and elite critical rejection that gives this subject much of its abiding interest. Tolkien’s popular reception therefore cannot be ignored when considering his critics. A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Any attempt to survey Tolkien criticism in a disinterested manner must conclude that the weight of critical opinion has been, and largely remains, negative. Indeed, the greater part seems not an attempt to understand Tolkien and his readers but rather to disqualify and humiliate them. In this context, Daniel Timmons’s assessment (2000, 1–10) is admirably irenic but misleading. True, for every critical attack on Tolkien one can find a positive opinion; but that means little without taking into account the relative status, perceived authority, and scholarly as well as public impact of the critics concerned. I therefore make no apology for concentrating overall on the critical hostility to Tolkien’s fiction.1 Finally, before we embark, it is vital to realize that we are all, public and professional critics alike, engaged in a common task, namely engaging with the meaning(s) of Tolkien’s fiction. That is to say: the meanings resulting from how his books, as they are written, are taken up by readers. So there are two elements to any such process, analytically distinguishable but seamless in practice: production, or what went into his fiction, both the materials and his creative uses of them; and reception: what the results signify to its readers. There is no escaping what Drout and Wynne (2000, 107) call “the vital epistemological fact that all texts must be interpreted”2 and questions of reception – what Tolkien (OFS, 48) called “the effect produced now by these old things in the stories as they are” – are arguably still the more challenging and therefore neglected of the two. Shippey (2000a) is a model in taking an integrated approach. The principal phases of critical response are these. The Hobbit was published in 1937 to some acclaim (see ch. 8), but Tolkien criticism started in earnest with publication of The Lord of the Rings, as a book for adults, in 1954–1955. It stepped up with the book’s spectacular success beginning in 1965, was given renewed impetus by the results of readers’ polls in 1996–1998, and again by Peter Jackson’s films in 2001–2003, and 2012–2013. Tolkien also received some critical notice with publication of The Silmarillion in 1977.

First Wave: The 1950s and 1960s In several ways, the initial critical response to The Lord of the Rings set precedents which have continued, with remarkable continuity, into the present. One was the observation by W. H. Auden, one of Tolkien’s staunchest defenders, that: I rarely remember a book about which I have had such violent arguments. Nobody seems to have a moderate opinion; either, like myself, people find it a masterpiece of its genre or they cannot abide it, and among the hostile there are some, I must confess, for whose judgement I have great respect. (Auden 1956)

Auden added, shrewdly, “I can only suppose that some people object to Heroic Quests and Imaginary Worlds on principle.” Praise was also forthcoming from Richard Hughes, Naomi Mitchison, and, effusively but perhaps predictably, C. S. Lewis (1954,



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1955), but others were less enthusiastic. Alfred Duggan (1954, 541), reviewing The Lord of the Rings anonymously in The Times Literary Supplement, opined that “This is not a work which many adults will read through more than once,” thus marking the start of a long series of patrician critical judgments on Tolkien subsequently perceptible as clearly wide of the mark. Similarly, Philip Toynbee, writing in The Observer on August 6, 1961 recorded his spectacularly premature relief that “today these books have passed into a merciful oblivion.” In the second of three reviews in 1954–1955, Edwin Muir, just appointed Norton Professor of English at Harvard University, declared that The Lord of the Rings disappointed because “all the characters are boys masquerading as adult heroes” (1955). In other words, they are (1) immature, as signaled by what Muir curiously described as an uncomplicatedly happy ending; (2) one-dimensional, the good ones being thoroughly good and the bad utterly bad; and (3) problematically masculine and/or sexually immature. To anyone who knows the books, it is obvious that the first two points are wrong, and they have been refuted more than once (e.g., Le Guin 1989, 57–58; Shippey 2000b); the third is more complex (see Clark 1997; Green 1998; Curry 2005, 85–87; and see ch. 32). What is more significant, however, is the durability of the charges. Probably the most influential single review from this period was by one of the leading American literary critics of his day, a Marxist modernist, Edmund Wilson (1956). Its significance is not so much its questionable judgments (the books show “poverty of invention” and their hero “has no serious temptations”) as its contemptuous mockery, extending from the title, “Oo, Those Awful Orcs!”, to the dismissal of The Lord of the Rings as “juvenile trash.” That tone remained a constant throughout the next half-century. In a little-known rejoinder a few years later though, Donald Davie argued that Wilson’s attack “quite fails to account for the seriousness of the undertaking, for the pressure that drove the author through these thousand or more pages, as it has driven many readers (this reader among them) to follow through the same pages eagerly” (1969, 90). Also in 1969, amid The Lord of the Rings’ popular success, Columbia University Press published a full-length academic critique by Catherine Stimpson. She excoriated Tolkien as “an incorrigible nationalist” (1969, 8, 13), celebrating a “bourgeois pastoral idyll” with one-dimensional characters who are “irritatingly, blandly, traditionally masculine.” The (in)justice of these specific charges has been discussed in detail by Colebatch (2003, Chapter 6) as well as Curry (2005, 83–85), so they need not detain us. They will serve here to underline the predominantly Marxist, feminist, and literary-modernist provenance of these attacks.

The Silmarillion: The 1970s Christopher Tolkien’s edited version of The Silmarillion was published in 1977. It was the first of Tolkien’s works of fiction to meet with public bafflement and

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disappointment (in which connection it may be relevant that it was published posthumously, i.e., without his approval). It was a response which largely coincided, for once, with the critical reception. John Gardner reviewed it sympathetically and insightfully, however, in The New York Times Book Review (October 12, 1977). It is true, and by now almost a truism, that Tolkien studies must now include Tolkien’s legendarium in understanding his work as a whole (see Flieger and Hofstetter 2000; Hammond and Anderson 1993, 229–230). In terms of Tolkien criticism, however, that importance does not turn The Silmarillion into an accessible or even particularly readable text. It isn’t, which has naturally served to sharply limit its impact on common apprehensions of Tolkien’s fiction, and critics are under no obligation to pretend otherwise. Tolkien himself (Letters 333) noted one insuperable problem that The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit depended for their sense of depth and antiquity on “glimpses of a large history in the background,” which was not possible when presenting that background itself.

Tolkien’s Fiction in the 1980s This decade began with two critiques of Tolkien in the mold of Stimpson but issuing from the new critical industries, recently ascendant within the academy, of structuralism and psychoanalysis respectively: Christine Brooke-Rose, A Rhetoric of the Unreal (1981), and Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (1981). BrookeRose, an eminent academic structuralist as well as author of “experimental” novels, turned the big guns of Theory on The Lord of the Rings, appropriating it as little more than grist to its preset mill (see Attebery 1992, 23–27; Curry 2005, 110–111). As with those of Wilson and Stimpson but even more so, Brooke-Rose’s account of Tolkien was littered with both spelling and factual mistakes, suggesting that the difficulty for these critics lay in reading Tolkien at all, let alone closely, and undermining confidence in her wider conclusions. Jackson, a Marxist and psychoanalytic critic, argued that Tolkien’s “sentimental” and “nostalgic” work functions as a conservative vehicle for repression supporting a ruling ideology. The remedy, in standard modernist (and crypto-Protestant) style, is demystification. Once again, as Attebery shows (1992, 20–23, 27, 31; see also Curry 2005, 106–108), Jackson was more concerned to dispose of Tolkien’s work than to comprehend it. Also in 1981, and again in 1983, Fred Inglis, a former student of F. R. Leavis, took Tolkien criticism to a new nadir, calling Tolkien a “fascist” (Inglis 1981, 197). I have discussed his critique elsewhere (Curry 2005, 104–106); here it is only needful to point out the same phenomenon that Shippey (2000a, 306–308) has noted of Toynbee and Edmund Wilson, namely gross inconsistency between their self-professed critical ideals and their practice when they encounter Tolkien. In Inglis’s case (1983, 3, 31–32), this takes the form of criticizing the metropolitan “irony-stereotypewriter” while shamelessly patronizing a “typical” Tolkien reader as the retired head of art in



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a market-town grammar school, reading The Lord of the Rings to his young sons in a pine-paneled flat, and so on. Inglis was the respectful biographer of Raymond Williams, the leading Marxist literary critic of his time and a major influence on the new academic discipline of cultural studies. In the course of a critique of pastoralism, Williams (1985, 258) casually counted Tolkien as a practitioner of “country-based fantasy” that is “suburban” and “half-educated.” Again, the most significant point is not that these criticisms, left unqualified, are mistaken, which can easily be shown; Tolkien was no more halfeducated than he was a fascist. It is rather how very mistaken they are, and how consistently. That suggests that there is (as Marxists like to say) a structural or systematic bias at work. Fortunately for Tolkien criticism, the early 1980s also saw publication of what is probably its most important single work, both in quality and (eventually) influence: Tom Shippey’s The Road to Middle-earth (1982, with revised and expanded editions in 1993 and 2005). A year later, Verlyn Flieger’s pioneering and insightful Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World (revised edition, 2002) appeared. Together, these books revealed the profound linguistic, cultural, and metaphysical dimensions of Tolkien’s work. It is doubtful that they significantly altered mainstream critical opinion upon publication, but less so that they have done so over time. Since space is severely limited, however, and both these books are still widely available as well as unmissable in both Tolkien studies and (it is to be hoped) criticism, I won’t discuss them directly here.3

The Polls: 1996–1998 In 1996, The Lord of the Rings topped the UK poll by Waterstone’s and Channel 4 (26,000 readers) of the greatest books of the century. Also that year, the Folio Society asked its members to decide upon their favorite books; in first place, with 10,000 votes, was The Lord of the Rings. The same finding emerged from follow-up polls in 1997 by the television program Bookworm (around 50,000 readers) and readers of the Daily Telegraph, and in 1999 by MORI, although in the last The Lord of the Rings was formally pushed into second place – by the Bible. That same year, The Lord of the Rings topped a poll conducted by Amazon.com as the book of the millennium. In several of these polls, Orwell was placed second, either directly or as the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four: an interesting fact to which we shall return. The critical response was explosively hostile. Auberon Waugh (editor of the Literary Review), Professor John Carey, and Mark Lawson (on the BBC Today program) all concurred that Tolkien fans had orchestrated the outcome. Tolkien, it seems, has “fans” rather than “readers.” This conspiracy theory was quietly dropped after the Folio Society poll. Susan Jeffreys, for The Sunday Times (January 26, 1997), recorded the dismay at the Waterstone’s/Channel 4 result “up and down the country wherever one or two literati gathered together.”4 The Times Literary Supplement (January 24, 1997)

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found it “horrifying” and Howard Jacobson opined that “It’s another black day for British culture” (see Pearce 1998, 2–3). Not to be outdone, Germaine Greer (1997, 4) described the result as a “nightmare,” adding that the books subsequently inspired by Tolkien “are more or less what you would expect; flight from reality is their dominating characteristic.” The charge of escapism, reiterating those of immaturity, nostalgia, and conservatism, is another hardy perennial to which we shall return. The same pattern persisted into the next decade. In 2003, The Lord of the Rings won the BBC’s The Big Read poll of readers’ favorite book, with 174,000 votes (23% of the total of nearly 750,000 readers): by now, surely an unsurprising result except, it seems, to the three critics live on TV on the night, two of whom had apparently been unable to read it beforehand. All in all, such instances, together with Tolkien’s critics’ repeated inability to get the details or narrative meaning of what they are attacking right, point to an irrational revulsion. This is not irrelevant; it throws a very interesting light on the dominant literary mindset and, as such, it should form part of any truly critical consideration thereof. Meanwhile, in contrast to the public critics, an authoritative work edited by John Clute and John Grant, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997) offered a measured and reasoned assessment of Tolkien’s work, especially concerning both his literary influences and his own influence.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The 2000s In Tolkien criticism, the new century and millennium opened with publication of Shippey’s J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (2000a). Its quality combined with the backing of a major trade publisher, and Shippey’s eminence in both Tolkien studies and criticism, makes it central in both, and only points made therein which directly concern the remit of this essay will be mentioned. Shippey defends the bold claim of his title on three grounds: democratic, generic, and qualitative (xvii–xx). These could be summarized by saying that for the last 50 years, Tolkien has found unignorable numbers of readers, many of whom have not only gone on to seek out similar works in the fantasy genre he unintentionally founded but “have been deeply and lastingly moved by Tolkien’s works, and even if one doesn’t share the feeling, one should be able to understand why.” Shippey also makes a convincing case that Tolkien should be considered a modern writer, in the company of Orwell, Golding, Vonnegut and others, with a thoroughly twentieth-century concern for and treatment of power and evil (see ch. 28). There are two qualifications: Tolkien’s understanding of them was often at variance with his contemporaries’, and his work being modern in some respects does not preclude it from being nonmodern in others. Finally, Shippey suggests (xxxiv) that “Very probably the reason for the dislike has a good deal to do with the reasons for the success. Tolkien has challenged the very authority of the literati, and this will never be forgiven.” In his “Afterword: The



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Followers and the Critics” (305–328), Shippey usefully considers the phenomenon of “intense critical hostility to Tolkien, the refusal to allow him to be even a part of ‘English literature’ ” (305). Despite the insights offered by Shippey, Flieger, and others working in Tolkien studies, the various charges laid against The Lord of the Rings over several decades by his detractors in Tolkien criticism were prominently revived in 2001 in perhaps the leading organ of the British literary establishment, the London Review of Books (LRB), in an article by one of its editors, Jenny Turner (for one of the few responses to Turner, see Galwey 2004). Entitled, with heavy irony, “Reasons for liking Tolkien,” Turner’s essay seeks not so much to understand Tolkien or his readers as to place them beyond serious consideration. Nonetheless, it is illuminating because of what it reveals about the gut reactions and critical mindset of Wilson, Muir, Stimpson, Jackson, and more recently Greer. It is thus invaluable as data. Turner repeats some of her predecessors’ elementary mistakes, describing the Hobbits of the story as subordinate and powerless, and portraying the message of the book as one of reassuring safety resulting from a “cosy little universe.” There is also the familiar snobbery according to which The Lord of the Rings isn’t literature but “junk fiction,” in the same relation to “literature and learning” as “astrology is to physics,” written by someone who, if he hadn’t been an Oxford scholar, might have been obsessed with “a model railway, or a record collection, or military history, or maps.” Turner’s principal subject, however, is her own reaction to the book. She writes as an apostate who once read it with “an intensity I now find scary.” She now finds it “silly and boring,” yet “it still locks with my psyche in a most alarming way. . . . It’s an infantile comfort that is also a black pit.”5 It seems The Lord of the Rings “has cubby-holes for all sorts of urges to hide in,” and “[a]ll sorts of visceral needs and desires are involved” which make it “not just anti-intellectual but a sort of anti-book” and even “a little sinister.” All Tolkien’s fans are “vulnerable people” smitten by “soggy, yearny nostalgia,” but “the swotty teenager” is particularly at risk. Turner mentions Tolkien’s “dreadful prose style” in passing (cf. Drout 2004), and takes it as read that “[o]bviously there are problems to do with women, and race and racism,” not to mention “with the elves and so on” (recall in this connection Auden’s point from 1956). But what she helpfully identifies as “the central problem” is that: It’s a whole world . . . You would expect elves to figure in Tolkien’s story – if they had to figure at all – as creatures within a sub-creation, characters in a story, fictions inside a frame. But actually, they are given much more credence, more constitutive importance, more ontological weight.

In consequence, “[y]ou find yourself thirsting for some nice sensible wipe-down concepts like ‘metaphor’ or ‘fiction.’ ” Why is this a serious problem for Turner and like-minded critics? Certainly the metaphysical realism and rationalism that dominates so much of mainstream Western

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culture are obvious in her response; although to apply a little of her hero Freud, why do we need constant reminders that Elves, say, are not real? In any case, there is clearly a program involved – in this case, rationalist, naturalist, and secularist – along the lines of what Barbara Herrnstein Smith (1988, 179) has anatomized as the enduring effort “to identify the presumptively universally compelling Truth and Way and to compel it universally.” When the Truth is at stake in this way, living and letting live is not a critical option, and anyone claiming to sincerely love, say, the work of Tolkien, Proust, and George Eliot, must be either deluded or dissembling. In more strictly literary terms, it seems that Turner – and given that she is on its editorial board, one wonders about the LRB too – fails to understand two of the most important things about art, literary or otherwise: that reality is (also) ineluctably fictional, and that fiction and its referents are (also) unavoidably real. Turner and her allies evidently want to keep reality and fiction on hermetically separate levels except for what they, the gatekeepers, will allow through.6 As for metaphor, Paul Ricoeur showed more than three decades ago that “There is no non-metaphorical standpoint. .  .  . metaphoricity is absolutely uncontrollable” (2003, 339). In other words, any critique of fiction has fiction at its heart, and any critique of metaphoricity can only draw upon metaphor. So much for a “sensible wipe-down.”

Modernism This review of the dominant critical reception of Tolkien’s fiction consistently shows two characteristics which seem especially significant: a visceral hostility and emotional animus, and a plethora of mistakes showing that the books had not been read closely (or in a few cases, at all). Taking these together suggests that the inability to really engage resulted from the loathing, although without inhibiting the same critics from pronouncing anathema. As the critic J. P. Stern once observed, contempt is a poor guide. We must go beyond that conclusion, however, in search of an explanation. Why such contempt for these particular books? Shippey (2000a, 316) argues that “at the heart of the critical rage, and fear, which Tolkien immediately and ever after provoked” is the fact that he “threatened the authority of the arbiters of taste, the critics, the educationalists, the literati. He was as educated as they were but in a different school.” Furthermore, The Lord of the Rings “showed an improper ambition, as if it had ideas above the proper station of popular trash.” The critics’ assumption is often actually that simple: it’s popular, so it must be trash. Shippey adds, “It was the combination that could not be forgiven”. This explanation undoubtedly goes far towards explaining the unusual critical response, but as it stands, it is an excellent summary that awaits more elaboration. This essay will attempt just that under the umbrella term (to be explained) of “modernism.” First, however, we need briefly to review other relevant factors which are not captured by even a broad definition of modernism, although they may well overlap with it.



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One is that The Lord of the Rings will never have universal appeal (properly so-called). That hardly marks it out from any other book, but in terms of content, you wouldn’t go to it, for example, for subtle insights into relationships between the sexes. Furthermore, there remain stubborn issues, potentially problematic, with the way it treats race and politics as well as sex-gender.7 Regarding style, Tolkien’s tone (not unlike that of Dickens) is sometimes sentimental, and its occasional archaic and “high” style will never be to some readers’ tastes. It is perfectly understandable that some would prefer other work (which differs from deploring anyone at all reading it).8 To some extent, a negative response to Tolkien’s fiction may be simply a function of personal disaffinity. Temperaments, even to the extent they are a matter of nurture as well as nature, vary widely, and with them, tastes: de gustibus non est disputandum. But taste alone won’t carry all the weight of the emotive reactions; alternatively, there must be more to “mere taste” than meets the eye. In this connection, another potential stumbling-block has been thoroughly explored by Shippey (2000a, 2005; see also Honegger 2005): the problems posed, perhaps particularly for intellectuals, by a literary artefact suffused with a philological concern for words and a particular understanding of language (strongly influenced by Owen Barfield: see Flieger 2002) as rooted in and indicative of corresponding worlds/mentalities, past and present. That understanding has almost vanished from the contemporary intellectual world. As a result, as Shippey (2005, 332) says, “there is an enormous ‘culture-gap’ between him and his critics” – admirers, often, as much as detractors. Among critics, Harold Bloom (2000) falls in this category; he evinces more bafflement than hatred.9 As a sign of this problem for literary critics, see the ongoing struggle to place The Lord of the Rings in a category: it is clearly not a novel, so is it a romance, an epic, mythopoeic fiction, or simply junk fiction? It has often proved easier to simply opine that whatever it is, to quote Humphrey Carpenter, it “doesn’t really belong to literature” (BBC Bookshelf, November 22, 1991; see Simonson 2008). Another consideration is simple snobbery, itself fed by fear (see Carey 1992). The power of this attitude, contributing to and fed by membership in a critical elite, particularly when institutionalized in an academic or media forum, should not be underestimated – particularly where popular success is also part of the mix. Auberon Waugh’s contempt for Tolkien was primarily a function of snobbery, and no doubt it also figured strongly in that of Wilson, Greer, Turner, and others. Nonetheless, more still seems needed to account for the sheer animus. For that, we need to invoke something like a worldview, ideology or set of values, relatively coherent and strongly held (if not necessarily consciously so). Such values are ultimate in two senses: they cannot be further grounded or justified, yet they are also what their bearer feels (more than thinks) is fundamental. They are therefore often defended with quasi-religious or, in the case of values which entail denying religion, crypto-religious fervor. They can change, of course, but any major shift amounts to a conversion experience. It is at this level, respecting the critical response to Tolkien’s fiction, that modernism enters the picture.

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What do we mean by “modernism”? In answering that question, we first need a working definition of “modernity” and “modern” (see also ch. 24). These embrace a sensibility and set of values which include, prominently: • A belief in the “right” and ability, in principle, of humanity to determine its own fate (rather than, say, God or nature), usually through science and technology. • Secularism and materialism. • Considerable confidence, if not indeed faith, in reason, and relatedly in modern science, conceived as the “highest” version of reason, along with efficient administration as its practical expression. • All of which coalesces into a narrative ideology of Progress and its enemies (chief among them, “superstition”, a.k.a. “tradition”) that bears a significant but unacknowledged debt to Christian eschatology. Modernity is also an historical period, albeit necessarily broadly construed, in which that sensibility and set of values finds dominant or preeminent expression and influence (the best single guide here is Toulmin 1990, but see also Latour 1993). “Modernism” and “modernist” refer to the valorization and advocacy of modern values – that is, the chief values of modernity – whether in politics, culture, literature, architecture, music, etc. They do not necessarily describe a particular school or movement within art, architecture, literature, etc. Thus, literary modernists need no longer hold up Joyce, Eliot, and Woolf as exemplars, although they may do so. As Veldman perceptively notes: “Not all the reviewers who stood outside Narnia and Middle-earth did so because they misunderstood what Lewis and Tolkien were about. Many did so precisely because they perceived the protest at the heart of these works” (1994, 107).10 It is my contention that the dominant ideology of the literati, as self-appointed guardians of literature, is modernism and that those most aggrieved by Tolkien are or were, personally as well as professionally, modernists. Given Tolkien’s uncompromising, erudite, and popularly received rejection of modernism, this makes sense not only of the most consistent charges – infantilism, nostalgia, escapism – but also of the casual vehemence with which they have been made.11 As Tolkien himself realized, his chief crime was not even “the Escape of the Prisoner”; it was encouraging “the Flight of the Deserter” (MC 148). In this connection, it makes perfect sense that the most frequent runners-up in the polls of readers were Orwell and Nineteen EightyFour: an author and a book equally agonized over pathological modernity, although from a socialist rather than conservative perspective. As evidence and elucidation of this contention, let us examine the issues, as they appear in the critical texts, of modernism itself and of irony. Starting with modernism, one can second Shippey’s firm placing of The Lord of the Rings as a work with characteristically modern concerns, particularly respecting power (see Shippey 2000a, 312– 318, for an analysis of “Tolkien and modernity”; Weinreich and Honegger 2006; and



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ch. 24). At the same time, one can also agree with Turner (2001) that “In form, in content, in everything about it, The Lord of the Rings is the most anti-Modernist of novels.” Andrew O’Hehir makes the same point: “the crux of the matter . . . lies in Tolkien’s wholehearted rejection of modernity and modernism. This is what so powerfully attracts some readers, and just as powerfully repels others” (2001). Anthony Lane (2001) sees the same dynamic in Tolkien’s “high” style: “Hardly anyone had used it unironically since Tennyson’s ‘Idylls of the King,’ and to revert to it with a straight face in the nineteen-fifties was to mount a head-on challenge to modernity.” Finally, as argued elsewhere (Curry 2004), it is The Lord of the Rings’ nonmodernism, presenting “a Europe that has not been ‘Europeanized’ ” (Luling 1995, 53), that has powerfully attracted many readers. There are no contradictions here if we recall the distinction between modernism and modernity. First, Tolkien himself was definitely anti-modernist; his deep reservations about advanced technology and industrialism, representative democracy and bureaucracy are well documented. It would be simple-minded, however, to assume that his books are therefore straightforwardly anti-modernist. Second, Tolkien’s fiction is certainly modern, but it is far from purely so. Both Shippey (2000) and Flieger (especially 1997) have enabled us to analytically disentangle the modern and nonmodern ingredients in the cauldron of Tolkien’s story. Third, that story is not modernist; no advocacy of modernity is present. In short, The Lord of the Rings is a modern book, much of the import of which is also nonmodern, written by an anti-modernist. Rosebury (2003, 149–154) also concludes that it “could not plausibly be called a modernist work, because it lacks a crucial quality universal within modernism: irony” (154). That brings us to our second key consideration. Preeminently, modernist irony functions as a signal that the writer subscribes to what Latour calls the Modern Constitution: 1st: . . . even though we construct Nature, Nature is as if we did not construct it. 2nd: even though we do not construct Society, Society is as if we did construct it. 3rd: Nature and Society must remain absolutely distinct. (1993, 22)

“Being ironic, especially about what one is writing oneself, says: being intelligent and highly educated, I know that what I am doing (cultural construction) isn’t real (natural) – even, indeed especially, if I am writing about nature – and that the two are completely different.” And anyone whose art is unselfconscious, thus ignoring (or disrespecting?) this convention, becomes fair game for mockery and contempt. Like Rosebury, Drout too (2007, 653) notes Tolkien’s failure, or refusal, to meet “the modernist expectation of pervasive irony.” Attebery (1992, 39) concurs that “The course of twentieth-century literature can be viewed as the gradual spread of irony into every phase of storytelling.” Moorcock, one of Tolkien’s bitterest critics (1987, Chapter 5, “Epic Pooh”), inadvertently confirms the point: “I think my own dislike

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of J. R. R. Tolkien lies primarily in the fact that in all those hundreds of pages, full of high ideals, sinister evil and noble deeds, there is scarcely a hint of irony anywhere” (1987, 107). (For a recent unconvincing attempt to enlist Tolkien as a “theorist of the ironic imagination” see Saler 2012.) Ironies abound within The Lord of the Rings, of course, not least that it turns out to be not Frodo or Sam who finally destroy the Ring, nor any of the great and good, but Gollum. But Tolkien is not ironic about The Lord of the Rings; nor does he offer the slightest opening or invitation to readers to be so. He and his readers are, so to say, post-ironic. That is not something that will endear them to critics who pride themselves on being the critical avant-garde and can’t stop using irony to signal it, or checking what they are reading for such signals. Infuriatingly for some, post-ironists – which, in Tolkien’s case, evidently comprise the majority of readers – simply don’t care. Taking Turner (2001) again as an unusually articulate but otherwise representative critic of Tolkien, recall, in this connection, what she identifies as “the central problem”: the “ontological weight” given by Tolkien to fictional creatures like Elves (as Shippey 2005, 286 points out, “Most novels are about ‘people who never existed,’ ” but let that pass). Turner’s cosmopolitan sophistication vanishes when realism, rationalism, and secularism are at stake. The only alternative, it seems, is “the vague warm surges of feeling associated with religion and religion substitutes.” Indeed, in a kind of modernist evocation of cold showers and mittens at night, she warns that “[t]hese responses can be touched off with a dangerous ease – every self-aware person finds that he has to train himself from adolescence in withstanding them.” As Galwey (2004, 10) comments, “Perhaps if one had staked one’s all on modernity, one would feel like that.” Turner writes, “When I was young . . . I really did believe that the world inside the book had taken over the world outside,” and such literature “plays on the reader’s desire to believe that the world Tolkien is writing about is in some way real.” When you grow up, however, “You know too much about how the world works to be so easily taken in.” Notice how she resorts to classical epistemology in order to disqualify and domesticate others’ as well as her own ontological experience of, and as, reality: they (“fans”; it used to be “natives”) believe, but we literati know. From there it is a short step to associate such “realism” with maturity, growing up, and Muir’s and Wilson’s anxious concern to be the Adult in the room. But that is pure rhetoric, not logic or universal experience; and swollen into an ideology of Progress, on both an individual and collective level, it encourages an all too familiar obligation to chastise heretics, apostates, backsliders, and “escapists.” It is hardly surprising, then, that “Tolkien’s perfectly sincere, perfectly impossible narrative” (Attebery 1992, 46) so provokes. As the Irish writer Nuala O’Faolain once remarked: The language of highbrow criticism can only cope with a certain kind of fiction. It has no vocabulary with which to discuss a world where neither the individual nor the society



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is self-conscious, and the author pretends not to be either. . . . The ordinary reader is far ahead of the critics in ease with such a world. (The Irish Times, November 7, 1992)

In another genuine irony, it was one of the heroes of modernism, Walter Benjamin (1969, 83, 102), who remarked on modern “embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed” and added approvingly that “[t]he first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales.” As Tolkien wrote in 1955, “the ‘fairy-story’ is really an adult genre” – that is, a genre for the ordinary reader – “and one for which a starving audience exists” (Letters 209). The Lord of the Rings is thus fundamentally not one but several things: a story told by a master storyteller; a story inspired by philology; a story suffused with Catholic values; and a mythic (or mythopoeic) story with a North European pagan inflection. It is also a story that enables the contemporary reader to imaginatively inhabit a nonmodern world, one that throws into question some central modern values and assumptions. There remains one important point to discuss in this connection. Le Guin has pointed to “a deep puritanical distrust of fantasy.” To such critics, fantasy “is escapism. . . . They confuse fantasy, which in the psychological sense is a universal and essential faculty of the human mind, with infantilism and pathological regression” (and not always by sincere error, one would add) “as if evil were a problem, something that can be solved, that has an answer.” “That” she adds, “is escapism” (Le Guin 1989, 58–59; emphasis in original). Laura Miller (2008, 101) recounts a conversation in which Tolkien asked Lewis rhetorically, “What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and most hostile to, the idea of escape?” The answer, of course, is jailers (OFS 69). Miéville (2002) has cited Moorcock to the effect that “this is precisely untrue. Jailers love escapism. What they hate is escape.” But that rejoinder turns on whether you think imaginatively inhabiting an essentially nonmodern world is already a form of escape, rather than mere escapism. Of course, any literature, or indeed art, could constitute escapism. Given the phenomenon of radical nostalgia, however (Curry 2004, 15–16) – which I take to be empirically confirmed in Tolkien’s case by The Lord of the Rings’ influence in various movements of political and environmental resistance – his fiction is certainly not necessarily escapist or even quietist, sometimes proving rather to be activist.

From Tolkien Studies This section is intended to bring attention to contributions to Tolkien scholarship from Tolkien studies, in addition to those already mentioned by Shippey, which have also figured in, and affected, Tolkien criticism. One can assume without discussion the importance of Douglas A. Anderson’s annotated edition of The Hobbit (Tolkien 2002a), the biography by Humphrey Carpenter (1977), Tolkien’s Letters and essays

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(MC), the posthumous Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth (UT), and the 12 volumes of the History of Middle-earth series (1983–1996). To these should be added two collections from major conferences, edited by Reynolds and GoodKnight (1995) and Wells (2008), and at least two edited collections: Salu and Farrell (1979) and Clark and Timmons (2000). First mention must be of the work of Verlyn Flieger (1997, 2002, 2005), and its sensitive analysis of the metaphysical and theological dimensions (which are vast and intricate) of Tolkien’s work, both fiction and nonfiction. In addition, Flieger has provided definitive editions of Smith of Wootton Major (Tolkien 2005), the landmark essay On Fairy-stories (Tolkien 2008b, with Douglas A. Anderson), and a collection of essays on The Silmarillion (2000, with Carl F. Hostetter). She is also the best guide to the vital place of Faërie or enchantment in Tolkien’s work. Brian Rosebury (1992) pioneered the first good study of Tolkien’s work as a cultural phenomenon, and the later edition (2003) is still more useful and insightful. For other recent work of good quality on Tolkien’s fiction in the light of contemporary literature and especially cultural studies, see Hughes (2004), Eaglestone (2005), and Fimi (2009).12 Also in 1992, Brian Attebery’s Strategies of Fantasy set the bar high for such studies. Starting from the premiss that “the task of literary theory is to provide a framework capable of accounting for the story’s success on its own terms, rather than denying that its aims are achievable or worth the attempt” (17), his discussion of Tolkien draws upon the unjustly neglected approach of Meeker (1974) and subsequently Elgin (1985) to show convincingly that Tolkien’s epic is lifeaffirmingly “comic” and ecological, as opposed to despairingly “tragic” and Promethean. As such, it is: neither nostalgic nor transcendental. Tolkien draws on the ancient magical worldview and the comic narrative structure because they offer something to the present. . . . an affirmative, integrative worldview, which is not necessarily naïve, escapist, or reactionary. (1992, 34)

The failure to follow through this insight is the biggest single lapse to date in Tolkien studies and criticism alike. Michael Drout is a critic and scholar in Tolkien studies whose comprehensive and acute metacritical essays (2005 and, with Wynne, 2000) should also be read by anyone engaged in Tolkien criticism. He has also edited a Tolkien encyclopedia (2007). His bibliography with Wynne and Higgins (2000) is another major resource, along with those of Johnson (1986), Hammond (1993, with Douglas A. Anderson), and West (1981, 2004; see also Wynne 2007, and Lobdell 2007). John Garth’s exemplary biography of the first part of Tolkien’s life (2003) overlaps both Tolkien studies and criticism, and it has been deservedly praised. One can only hope Garth will one day be able to give similar treatment to Tolkien’s entire life, superseding Humphrey Carpenter’s earlier and useful but flawed biography of 1977.13 Finally, mention must be made of the excellent series of books produced by Walking



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Tree Publishers, founded in 1997, under the direction of Thomas Honegger, and of the annual refereed journal Tolkien Studies, established in 2004.

Others This concluding section will mention contributions by writers not Tolkien scholars as such, nor all literary critics, which have nonetheless enriched Tolkien criticism. Pride of place here, on account of her unimpeachable status as both writer and critic and her close relationship, equally personal and professional, with Tolkien’s fiction, goes to Ursula Le Guin. Her reflections in the collection of her essays from 1989 on the vexed questions of fantasy and escapism, the complexity of the characters in The Lord of the Rings, and its treatment of the nature of evil, remain evergreen. The historian Ronald Hutton (2003, 2011) treats the pagan dimension of Tolkien’s work, an important but neglected topic, with originality and insight. The result throws an interesting light in turn on its Christian dimension, which has received considerably more (and sometimes uncritical) attention. Another social and cultural historian, Meredith Veldman, wrote an early consideration of Tolkien’s social and environmental commitments and influence that stands up very well and should be better known. She was the first to note that: Decades before the Greens, he denounced the exaltation of mechanization and the narrow definition of economic progress that resulted in the degradation of the natural environment, and he did so in romantic terms: in Tolkien’s Middle-earth, nature expressed a reality beyond human comprehension and worthy of human respect. (1994, 90)

In this context, The Lord of the Rings “could serve as a text of not only withdrawal but also engagement” (108), and the elective affinity between it and the countercultural movements of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1990s was far from an anomaly. Turning to other literature and literary criticism, we should be grateful to a critic for The Guardian (April 3, 2010), Nicholas Lezard, for finally admitting in print that “of all the means for professional suicide that are available to the writer, expressing affection for Tolkien is one of the most effective.” It is depressing (if you think Tolkien deserves better) that this should still be the case in 2010. On the other hand, there are signs that the wind is changing. Among the newer generations of contemporary writers, a few are evidently unafraid to include casual and favorable references to Tolkien in their own work. These include Junot Díaz, Michael Chabon, and, among literary critics, Anthony Lane (2001) in The New Yorker, Andrew O’Hehir (2001) in the online Salon, and another writer for Salon, Laura Miller (2008). China Miéville is an accomplished fantasy/science fiction writer himself. In 2002 he published a sharp critique of Tolkien in the Socialist Review, an internet journal, but followed this up with a lighter and more tolerant treatment in 2009, giving “Five

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Reasons Tolkien Rocks,” which is recommended. Among the acute and amusing points he makes is one that breaks through just the modernist barrier erected by Turner and others, which they see as Tolkien’s “central problem”: Tolkien refused the notion that a work of fiction is, in some reductive way, primarily, solely, or really “about” something else, narrowly and precisely. . . . his “cordial dislike” [of allegory] is utterly key for the project of creating a fantastic fiction that both means and is vividly and irreducibly itself, and is thereby fiction worthy of the name. (2009)

Miéville, Lane, O’Hehir, and Miller show that it is perfectly possible to subject Tolkien’s work to serious criticism and/or even poke fun at it while still recognizing its virtues, respecting its strengths and retaining affection for the old monster, as it were. In support of the best of the Tolkien criticism and studies discussed above, they offer hope for Tolkien scholarship continuing to put flesh on the bones of perhaps the most pithy and accurate critical judgment ever delivered on The Lord of the Rings, by its first publisher Rayner Unwin (quoted in Carpenter 1977, 210): “a very great book in its own curious way.”

Notes   1  Many of the critical attacks on The Lord of the Rings, up to 2000, are discussed in Shippey (2005, Chapter 1), and in Shippey (2000a, especially the “Afterword”); these should definitely be consulted. See also Hammond and Anderson (1993); Pearce (1998, 1–10); Curry (2004, Chapter 2, and 2005); and Lobdell (2007).   2  It is therefore odd that later in the same paper, they refer to the “intrinsic quality” of Tolkien’s fiction. “Intrinsic” here is an empty signifier which, to use William James’s blunt metaphor, can never be cashed in as such. There are only ever interpretations, better and worse, and any qualities are a function of the work plus its readers, including critics, which interface is therefore where the real work of criticism must take place. It follows that any good critical practice must include reflexive awareness (which is why ex cathedra denunciations are always a bad sign).   3  Also in 1981, Isaacs and Zimbardo published another collection of critical essays, Tolkien: New Critical Perspectives, which failed to add very much to their earlier and innovative one

of 1968, Tolkien and the Critics: Essays on J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.   4  Leading unavoidably to the thought, as Shippey (2000a, xxi) observes, that the literati sometimes talk to themselves.   5  I am vividly reminded of an incident in Vienna in 1910 when Sigmund Freud asked Carl Jung to promise that he would “never abandon the sexual theory.” When Jung asked why, Freud hesitated before replying that they had to make it a “dogma,” an “unshakeable bulwark” against the “black tide of mud, of occultism.” Interestingly, Turner makes it clear that Freud is exemplary for her, and she too finds in his particular theory of sexual maturity a bulwark, one against the “black pit” of Tolkien’s fiction.   6  Behind nearly all such efforts stands the ghost of Plato, that great advocate of a single and universal truth, and enemy of popular unlicensed fictions; and, at no great distance, Saint Paul. In terms of their mode, this applies to most modern Western secularists as much as to theists.



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  7  On the last, see the references already supplied when discussing Muir’s charges. On race and racism, see Luling (1995); Fimi (2009); and in general, Eaglestone (2005).   8  Respecting any defense of Tolkien here, however, Drout and Wynne (2000, 123) identify as “[t]he biggest failing in Tolkien criticism . . . its lack of discussion of Tolkien’s style, his sentence-level writing, his word choice and syntax.”   9  It is amusing to imagine Bloom trying to find any “anxiety of influence” in Tolkien. But did it never occur to him that Joyce’s Ulysses is a much better candidate than The Lord of the Rings for a work “fated to become only an intricate Period Piece” (Bloom 2000, 2)? 10  Lumping Tolkien and Lewis together should be done with care, as it can be quite misleading.

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11  Although he doesn’t discuss Tolkien specifically, Fredric Jameson, who dismisses all contemporary “magical narratives” as “archaic nostalgia” (1975, 61), will serve as a paradigmatic example of a dogmatic modernist literary and cultural critic. 12  For an interesting collection on The Lord of the Rings by philosophers, see Bassham and Bronson (2003). It is marred, however, by an annoyingly arch tone which seems to indicate a need to show that they are not taking Tolkien too seriously. 13  For interesting reflections on the relatively neglected topic of Tolkien and World War II, see also Manni and Bonechi (2008) and ch. 31.

References Attebery, Brian. 1992. Strategies of Fantasy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Auden, W. H. 1956. “At the End of the Quest, Victory.” New York Times Book Review, January 22: 5. Bassham, Gregory and Eric Bronson, eds. 2003. The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy: One Book to Rule Them All. La Salle, IL: Open Court. Benjamin, Walter. 1969. “The Storyteller.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, 83–109. New York: Schocken Books. Bloom, Harold, ed. 2000. J. R. R. Tolkien: Modern Critical Views. Philadelphia: Chelsea House. Brooke-Rose, Christine. 1981. A Rhetoric of the Unreal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carey, John. 1992. The Intellectuals and the Masses. London: Faber & Faber. Carpenter, Humphrey. 1977. J. R. R. Tolkien – A Biography. London: Allen & Unwin. Clark, Craig. 1997. “Problems of Good and Evil in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.” Mallorn, 35: 15–19. Clark, George and Daniel Timmons, eds. 2000. J. R. R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Clute, John and John Grant. 1997. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. London: Orbis.

Colebatch, Hal G. P. 2003. Return of the Heroes: The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Social Conflict. 2nd edn. Christchurch: Cybereditions. Curry, Patrick. 2004. Defending Middle-earth: Tolkien, Myth and Modernity. 2nd edn. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Curry, Patrick. 2005. “Tolkien and the Critics: A Critique.” In Root and Branch: Approaches Towards Understanding Tolkien, edited by Thomas Honegger, 75–146. 2nd edn. Zurich and Bern: Walking Tree Publishers. Davie, Donald. 1969. “On Hobbits and Intellectuals.” Encounter (October): 87–92. Drout, Michael D. C. 2004. “Tolkien’s Prose Style and its Literary and Rhetorical Effects.” Tolkien Studies, 1.1: 137–163. Drout, Michael D. C. 2005. “Towards a Better Tolkien Criticism.” In Eaglestone (2005), 15–28. Drout, Michael D. C., ed. 2007. J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopaedia. London: Routledge. Drout, Michael D. C. and Hilary Wynne. 2000. “Tom Shippey’s J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century and a Look Back at Tolkien Criticism since 1982.” Envoi, 9.2: 101–134. Drout, Michael, Hilary Wynne, and Melissa Higgins. 2000. “Scholarly Studies of J. R. R. Tolkien and His Works (in English): 1984– 2000.” Envoi, 9.2: 135–167.

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Duggan, Alfred. 1954. “Heroic Endeavour.” Times Literary Supplement, August 27: 541. Eaglestone, Robert, ed. 2005. Reading The Lord of the Rings: New Writings on Tolkien’s Classic. London: Continuum. Elgin, Don D. 1985. The Comedy of the Fantastic: Ecological Perspectives on the Fantasy Novel. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Fimi, Dimitra. 2009. Tolkien, Race and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits. New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan. Flieger, Verlyn. 1997. A Question of Time: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Road to Faërie. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Flieger, Verlyn. 2002. Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World. Revised edn. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Flieger, Verlyn. 2005. Interrupted Music: The Making of Tolkien’s Mythology. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Flieger, Verlyn and Carl F. Hostetter, eds. 2000. Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Galwey, Caroline. 2004. “Reasons for not Liking Tolkien.” Mallorn, 42: 5–10. Garth, John. 2003. Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth. London: HarperCollins. Green, William. 1998. “ ‘Where’s Mama?’ The Construction of the Feminine in The Hobbit.” The Lion and the Unicorn, 22: 188–195. Greer, Germaine. 1997. “The Book of the Century?” W: The Waterstone’s Magazine, 8: 2–9. Hammond, Wayne G. and Douglas A. Anderson. 1993. J. R. R. Tolkien: A Descriptive Bibliography. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press. Honegger, Thomas. 2005. “Tolkien Through the Eyes of a Mediaevalist.” In Reconsidering Tolkien, edited by Thomas Honegger, 45–66. Zurich and Bern: Walking Tree Publishers. Hughes, Shaun F. D. 2004. “Introduction: Postmodern Tolkien.” Modern Fiction Studies, 50.4: 807–813. Hutton, Ronald. 2003. Witches, Druids and King Arthur. London: Hambledon & London. Hutton, Ronald. 2011. “The Pagan Tolkien” and “Can We Still Have a Pagan Tolkien?” In The Ring and the Cross: Christianity and The Lord of the Rings, edited by Paul Kerry, 57–70 and 90–105. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

Inglis, Fred. 1981. The Promise of Happiness: Value and Meaning in Children’s Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Inglis, Fred. 1983. “Gentility and Powerlessness: Tolkien and the New Class.” In J. R. R. Tolkien: This Far Land, edited by Robert Giddings, 25–41. London: Vision Press. Jackson, Rosemary. 1981. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. London: Methuen. Jameson, Fredric. 1975. “Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre.” New Literary History, 7.1: 135–163. Johnson, Judith A. 1986. J. R. R. Tolkien: Six Decades of Criticism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Lane, Anthony. 2001. “The Hobbit Habit: Reading The Lord of the Rings.” The New Yorker, December 10. Available at http://www.newyorker.com/ archive/2001/12/10/011210crat_atlarge, accessed December 13, 2013. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Le Guin, Ursula K. 1989. The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. Rev. edn. London: The Women’s Press. Lewis, C. S. 1954. “The Gods Return to Earth.” Time and Tide, August 14: 1082. Lewis, C. S. 1955. “The Dethronement of Power.” Time and Tide, October 22: 1373. Lobdell, Jared. 2007. “Criticism of Tolkien, Twentieth Century.” In J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopaedia, edited by Michael Drout, 109–110. London: Routledge. Luling, Virginia. 1995. “An Anthropologist in Middle-earth.” In Reynolds and GoodKnight (1995), 53–57. Manni, Franco and Simone Bonechi. 2008. “The Complexity of Tolkien’s Attitude Towards the Second World War.” In The Ring Goes Ever On: Proceedings of the Tolkien 2005 Conference: 50 Years of The Lord of the Rings, edited by Sarah Wells, 33–51. The Tolkien Society. Meeker, Joseph. 1974. The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology. New York: Scribner’s. Miéville, China. 2002. “Tolkien – Middle Earth Meets Middle England.” Socialist Review (January). Available at http://www.socialist review.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=7813, accessed December 13, 2013.



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Miéville, China. 2009. “There and Back Again: Five Reasons Tolkien Rocks.” Omnivoracious. Available at http://www.omnivoracious.com/ 2009/06/there-and-back-again-five-reasons -tolkien-rocks.html, accessed December 13, 2013. Miller, Laura. 2008. The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia. New York: Little, Brown. Moorcock, Michael. 1987. Wizardry and Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy. London: Gollancz. Mortimer, Patchen. 2005. “Tolkien and Modernism.” Tolkien Studies, 2: 113–129. Muir, Edwin. 1955. “A Boy’s World.” The Observer, November 27: 11. O’Hehir, Andrew. 2001. “The Book of the Century.” Salon. Part 1 available at http://www .salon.com/books/feature/2001/06/04/tolkien and Part 2 at http://www.salon.com/books/fea ture/2001/06/05/tolkien2, both accessed December 13, 2013. Pearce, Joseph. 1998. Tolkien: Man and Myth. London: HarperCollins and San Francisco: Ignatius Press. Reynolds, Patricia and Glen H. GoodKnight, eds. 1995. Proceedings of the J. R. R. Tolkien Centenary Conference. Milton Keynes: The Tolkien Society and Altadena, CA: Mythopoeic Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 2003. The Rule of Metaphor. Translated by Robert Czerny. 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Rosebury, Brian. 2003. Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Originally published in 1992 as Tolkien: A Critical Assessment. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Saler, Michael. 2012. As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Salu, Mary and Robert T. Farrell, eds. 1979. J. R. R. Tolkien: Scholar and Story-teller. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Shippey, Tom. 2000a. J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. London: HarperCollins. Shippey, Tom. 2000b. “Orcs, Wraiths, Wights: Tolkien’s Images of Evil.” In J. R. R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances, edited by George Clark and Daniel Timmons, 183–198. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Shippey, Tom. 2005. The Road to Middle-earth. Rev. and expanded edn. London: HarperCollins.

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Simonson, Martin. 2008. The Lord of the Rings and the Western Narrative Tradition. Zurich and Jena: Walking Tree Publishers. Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. 1988. Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stimpson, Catherine R. 1969. J. R. R. Tolkien. New York: Columbia University Press. Timmons, Daniel. 2000. “Introduction.” In J. R. R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances, edited by George Clark and Daniel Timmons, 1–10. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Toulmin, Stephen. 1990. Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Toynbee, Philip. 1961. Review of The Lord of the Rings. The Observer, August 6. Turner, Jenny. 2001. “Reasons for Liking Tolkien.” London Review of Books, 23.22, November 15. Available at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n22/ jenny-turner/reasons-for-liking-tolkien, accessed December 13, 2013. Veldman, Meredith. 1994. Fantasy, the Bomb, and the Greening of Britain: Romantic Protest, 1945– 1980. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weinreich, Frank and Thomas Honegger, eds. 2006. Tolkien and Modernity. 2 vols. Zurich and Bern: Walking Tree Publishers. Wells, Sarah, ed. 2008. The Ring Goes Ever On: Proceedings of the Tolkien 2005 Conference: 50 Years of The Lord of the Rings. 2 vols. Coventry: The Tolkien Society. West, Richard C. 1981. Tolkien: An Annotated Checklist. 2nd edn. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. West, Richard C. 2004. “A Tolkien Checklist: Selected Criticism 1981–2004.” Modern Fiction Studies, 50.4: 1015–1028. Williams, Raymond. 1985. The Country and the City. London: Hogarth Press. Wilson, Edmund. 1956. “Oo, Those Awful Orcs!” The Nation, 182, April 14: 312–313. Reprint in The Bit Between My Teeth: A Literary Chronicle of 1950–1965, edited by Edmund Wilson, 326–332. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965. Wynne, Hilary. 2007. “Tolkien Scholarship: Since 1980.” In J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopaedia, edited by Michael Drout, 659–662. London: Routledge.

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Honegger, Thomas, ed. 2008. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: Sources of Inspiration. Zurich and Bern: Walking Tree Publishers. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor Adorno. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lewis, C. S., ed. 2003. A Tolkien Compass. Rev. edn. Chicago and La Salle: Open Court.

Shippey, Tom. 2003. “Foreword.” In A Tolkien Compass, edited by Jared Lobdell, vii–xi. Chicago and La Salle. Open Court. Shippey, Tom. 2007. “Literature, Twentieth Century: Influence of Tolkien.” In Drout (2007), 378–382.

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Style and Intertextual Echoes Allan Turner

When literary critics refer to an author’s style, they usually mean recognizable patterns, some conventional and some personal, in the selection of syntactic and lexical features, although they do not always agree on what counts as a good choice. In the case of Tolkien, his choices have come in for frequent and often contradictory criticism. Catharine Stimpson claims that “shunning ordinary diction, he also wrenches syntax” and even invents parodistic sentences such as “To an eyot he came,” which she thinks he would have written in preference to “He came to an island in the middle of the river” (Stimpson 1969, 29). Burton Raffel, on the other hand, believes that Tolkien’s style is so simple and lacking in conventional novelistic textures that The Lord of the Rings cannot be considered “literature” at all, even though he admits that it is a good adventure story (Raffel 1968). However, in spite of giving examples of writing that they find unsatisfactory, neither of these critics manages to explain clearly and concisely exactly what it is that they object to, but both seem to assume that the reason for their conclusions will be evident to the reader; that is to say, the stylistic criteria are implicit rather than explicit. In spite of the contrary reactions, there have been few critical works which have dealt with Tolkien’s style in depth, as opposed to offering passing comments in discussions of other literary aspects of his works. Two major studies which give insight into the topic are the monographs by Shippey (2000 and 2005), which are particularly concerned to show how Tolkien, the professional philologist, was able to bring to twentieth-century literary discourse the influences of over a thousand years of the history of the English language and its study. A typical example is his exegesis of how

A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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different persons are characterized by the differences between older and modern word order at the Council of Elrond (Shippey 2000, 69ff.). Another in-depth analysis is given by Rosebury (2003), who is concerned to show the aspects of Tolkien’s writing which are typical of the mid-twentieth century. Walker (2009) exposes many of the contradictions of previous critics, and also assembles a large collection of examples of how Tolkien gains his effect as the creator of a credible Secondary World through his use of language, although his analysis is not always linguistically rigorous. An insightful though rather impressionistic appraisal by a practicing novelist of the rhythmic quality of Tolkien’s prose can be found in Le Guin (2001). In a short overview such as this, there is no space for a stylistic analysis of all Tolkien’s output from first principles. Fortunately that is not necessary, since we can use as a starting point the small body of stylistic criticism mentioned above, together with Tolkien’s own statements about his writing. To avoid the trap of unclear or implicit criteria, we shall attempt to describe the chosen linguistic features as accurately as possible at the levels of phonology (the sounds of words), lexis (the choice of words), syntax (their grammatical arrangement to form sentences), and semantics (the meaning of the text that is produced). The most general level of analysis will be the sociolinguistic or cultural level, which places language in the context of the world view of a particular group of users. By looking at the interaction between these different levels, we can recognize different linguistic registers, that is subsets of language which are used in specific situations. At the same time we shall outline the rationale which seems to govern his choices. Given the wide range of posthumous publications, we shall restrict ourselves to the works which appeared in Tolkien’s lifetime and were therefore completed to his satisfaction, plus Roverandom, which was publishable with only minimal emendation, and The Silmarillion, which was edited by Christopher Tolkien but was nevertheless collated from his father’s actual texts. However, most consideration must be given to The Lord of the Rings, which displays Tolkien’s stylistic variety in its most developed form.

Simple Style and Word-play: The Shorter Works The early tales, which were originally told to Tolkien’s children, are characterized by the use of parataxis, that is predominantly main clauses, combined where necessary with coordinating conjunctions such as and and but, just as in informal everyday speech. For example, the first page of Roverandom contains 11 sentences, some of which extend over several lines and include direct speech, but there are only two subordinate clauses. The later stories “Leaf by Niggle” and Smith of Wootton Major, which each have a roughly similar proportion of parataxis in their first two paragraphs, were not composed for oral delivery to children but were nevertheless conceived as fairy-tales or parables, which are typical genres of oral literature. In Roverandom and the faux-naïf tale Farmer Giles of Ham, a typical feature is the frequent word-play, which introduces an element of semantic complexity to balance



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the lack of syntactic variety. This regularly consists of exploiting an obvious linguistic ambiguity, such as the tension between the meaning of a prepositional verb and the literal meaning of its parts, as in the comment of Giles’s wife: “There was no getting round Queen Agatha – at least it was a long walk” (Tolkien 2008e, 162). In Roverandom the word-play often takes the form of an oblique reference to a conventional expression, for example “The only thing he did like a fish was to drink,” which is a pseudo-cleft of the conventional simile “to drink like a fish,” as the editors do not quite point out in their endnote (Tolkien 1998a, 104). The word-play at the beginning of The Hobbit, which also had oral origins (Letters 215), includes references to children’s knowledge of the politeness formulae employed by adults, underlining the difference between the narrow semantic meaning and their conventionalized use as indirect speech acts. In the first chapter, Gandalf interrogates the different functions of the phatic phrase good morning as if it were a piece of meaningful information: “Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?” (H 15). He also exposes Bilbo’s unthinking use of the expression as an indirect speech act to indicate that he wants to end the conversation (H 16), just as he does a page later when Bilbo uses “I beg your pardon” as a similar conversation structuring device (for further examples, see Shippey 2005, 83ff.). A similar jocular exploitation of ambiguity can be seen in the early chapters of The Lord of the Rings, where Tolkien is again establishing the tone of bourgeois Hobbit banter. It is seldom seen as the narrative progresses, except as an occasional comic touch from Sam, as when he remarks while trying to fall asleep in the boughs of a tree, “And the less said, the sooner I’ll drop off, if you take my meaning” (FR, II, vi, 448), again with the mismatch between the phrasal meaning and the literal meaning. However, Gandalf is made to use word-play for a more serious purpose. When he deconstructs Frodo’s unconsidered conventional phrase regretting that Bilbo had spared Gollum’s life, it reveals the deeper significance underlying the surface form of the words, emphasized by the use of the capital: “What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature” . . . “It was Pity that stayed his hand” (FR, I, ii, 78). From being a mere source of humor, the uncovering of ambiguity makes a moral point, but it also shows Tolkien the historical linguist rescuing the “true” meaning of words from the encrustation of convention. Stylistic features are on their way to becoming a means of distinguishing not only between different characters but also different cultural and ethical outlooks. This will be seen in a more detailed analysis of Tolkien’s best-known books, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Contrasting Styles: The Hobbit The language of The Hobbit has attracted less critical notice, perhaps because of its status as a children’s book, in which the style is regarded as less important than the

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plot. Here we will consider it firstly as a work in its own right though in a somewhat different genre, but also as a significant forerunner of the later and much more complex sequel. Its oral origins noted above are reflected in the stylistic features to be examined here, namely narrative voice, and the contrast between colloquial and formal language, in addition to the word-play mentioned above. These derive from Tolkien’s own interest in language and are clearly designed to appeal to children’s delight in exploring and playing with its conventions, while the narrative voice exploits the interaction between the storyteller and his audience. The narrator regularly breaks off to address the assumed young reader directly, as in the description of Elrond’s house: “I wish I had time to tell you even a few of the tales or one or two of the things that they heard in that house” (H 50). There are also asides such as “trolls, as you probably know, must be underground before dawn, or they go back to the stuff of the mountains they are made of” (H 41). These have the effect of presenting the material of fantasy as if it were common knowledge in the primary world, and so increasing the sense of verisimilitude (cf. Shippey 2005, 84f.). On the cultural level, much humorous use is made of the incongruity of child-like characters cast in adult situations, particularly in the first half of the story. Bilbo, comically out of his depth in a world that is a size too big for him, is nevertheless regularly referred to as Mr. Baggins, while the Dwarves, in spite of their pompous language, are often depicted in a scarcely less ludicrous manner. There are also a number of verbal jokes intended to appeal to a childish sense of humour, such as the incongruous juxtaposition of civilized and savage values in “Trolls simply detest the very sight of dwarves (uncooked)” (H 37). It was noted above that The Hobbit creates humor by the deconstruction of adult language. Perhaps most significant for the development of Tolkien’s contrastive use of style is the parodying of a formal, public-speaking register such as Thorin’s address in Chapter I: Gandalf, dwarves and Mr. Baggins! We are met together in the house of our friend and fellow conspirator, this most excellent and audacious hobbit – may the hair on his toes never fall out! . . . We are met to discuss our plans, our ways, means, policy and devices. (H 17)

The comical honorific compliment to Bilbo and the redundant piling up of nearsynonyms which are so vague as to be practically meaningless are immediately undermined by the intrusive narrator’s comment: This was Thorin’s style. He was an important dwarf. If he had been allowed, he would probably have gone on like this until he was out of breath, without telling any one there anything that was not known already. (H 17)

Bilbo’s reply shortly afterwards is similarly deflated by the narrator: “[T]his is what he called being on his dignity” (H 19).



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This element of parody decreases as the story progresses, until it almost disappears in the final third of the book. This is part of a more fundamental shift of tone characterized thus by C. S. Lewis: “As the humour and homeliness of the early chapters, the sheer ‘Hobbitry’, dies away we pass insensibly into the world of the epic” (quoted in Ryan 2009). Ryan traces a linguistic feature which helps to underline this change, namely the increasing number of compound nouns which recreate the effect of literature from the age of Beowulf, when English made much greater use of this Germanic pattern of word-formation. Many of his examples are normal lexical items or coinings showing little originality, but others point to Tolkien’s increasing confidence in the creation of an epic secondary world different from our own: mountain-gates (H 179), lake-town (182), dwarf-lord (259), Elvenking (268) arrow-storm (230), as well as names like Arkenstone (253), Ravenhill (264), and the epithets Ringwinner, Luckwearer, and Barrelrider (208), made up for himself by Bilbo in his archaic riddling dialogue with the dragon Smaug. As Ryan (2009, 126) remarks, “The Beowulfian proper names or synonym names, if they are not as grand as in the epic, show well the origins and thought involved in their creation.” The contrast between informal and mock-formal is replaced by what is probably the most significant stylistic feature for the development of Tolkien’s prose style, his use of different linguistic registers to characterize different peoples. Bilbo usually speaks informal mid-twentieth-century English, whereas the Dwarves, these representatives of an epic, pre-modern society, speak in an elevated register. Gone is the comic pomposity of Thorin’s speech; Shippey (2005, 98, emphasis original) points out that by the end of the book “even the two linguistic styles have become invulnerable to each other’s ironies”: “Good-bye and good luck, wherever you fare!” said Balin at last. “If ever you visit us again, when our halls are made fair once more, then the feast shall indeed be splendid!” “If ever you are passing my way,” said Bilbo, “don’t wait to knock! Tea is at four; but any of you are welcome at any time!” (H 269)

This juxtaposition of registers becomes a salient feature in the depiction of the much more complex secondary world of The Lord of the Rings.

Complexity and Archaism: The Lord of the Rings Just as in The Hobbit the first part of the tale forms a gradual transition from the homely beginning to the epic world, so in its much longer and more serious sequel the first few chapters lead almost imperceptibly from the cozier world of The Hobbit to that of high romance. The intrusive narratorial voice is no longer used; Thomas (2000) traces the stages through Tolkien’s drafts for the first chapter in which this relic of the more juvenile concept is progressively eliminated, never to reappear.

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An outline of Tolkien’s use of linguistic styles can be found in the entry “Prose Style” in the J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopaedia (Turner 2007). To summarize an already compressed article, we may extract the following points: 1. The Lord of the Rings is written not in a single, unified style but in a number of different styles. 2. Different linguistic registers are used to characterize not only individuals but also whole peoples and cultures. 3. There is a deliberate contrast between the Hobbits, who are represented in a plain, modern style, and other, more archaic peoples (Elves, Dwarves, Rohirrim, etc.), for whom archaizing language is frequently used. 4. The narrative takes the form of an “asymmetrical stylistic arch” which reflects a shift in genre, from the normal everyday novelistic realism of the Shire, up to the climax in the high romance of the defeat of Sauron, and down again. 5. Where pre-modern cultures are depicted, language which expresses markedly modern concepts is deliberately avoided. Point 5 is an extremely important one which is fundamental in any attempt to explain why Tolkien’s world is for many readers more convincing than the secondary worlds invented by many of his imitators. However, since it is difficult to demonstrate a negative in the small space that is available here, we will leave it aside to focus on the remaining issues, concentrating on cultural differentiation and Tolkien’s use of archaizing language. The clearest explanation of contrastive styles in The Lord of the Rings is that of Shippey (2000, 48; 2005, 259), based on Tolkien’s comments in his letters and the hints given by the editor/translator persona in Appendix F. To a much greater degree than the simple contrast between Bilbo Baggins and the Dwarves as seen above, Tolkien’s special creation, the Hobbits, act as mediators between the modern, postEnlightenment world of the reader and its cultural-historical other, the more archaic world of heroic epic. With their postmen and umbrellas, Hobbits represent a cozy, idealized England of a pre-technological age (see ch. 24); Tolkien wrote to his publisher that the Shire “is more or less a Warwickshire village of about the period of the Diamond Jubilee” (the 60th anniversary of Queen Victoria’s accession to the throne, celebrated in 1897; Letters 230). Hobbits are stolidly unheroic, but they have a streak of deep-seated courage which enables them to take on responsibilities greater than their physical stature would suggest, allowing them to lead the modern reader into contact with traditional heroic attitudes and situations which might otherwise seem completely alien. This means that the author is faced with the problem of representing two types of culture, one of which is sufficiently familiar for the contemporary reader to identify with it to some extent, while the other has to appear noticeably unfamiliar. This is not peculiar to Tolkienian fantasy, but is a difficulty which frequently occurs when a story is set in a place or time which might not be well known to the current



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readership, such as an earlier historical period in the primary world. In Scott’s Rob Roy the unwitting hero, Francis Osbaldistone, represents the familiar English world of the reader, while the more archaic Scottish society, in which he finds himself embroiled and which has to be explained to him (and the reader), is characterized by the use of dialect. Tolkien’s approach is broadly similar: the presence of the inexperienced Hobbits allows for explicit lectures on the history of Middle-earth, while the unfamiliar, epic world is characterized linguistically by the use of a register of English often designated archaic or archaizing; that is to say, through the inclusion of lexical and syntactic features associated with an earlier period of English, it is distinguished from the everyday language of the present. As in any novel, individuals are characterized by their manner of speech; for example, the servant Sam is notable for his use of dialect forms. Characters also adapt their language to suit different situations just like in real life, as explained in Appendix F: It will be noticed that Hobbits such as Frodo, and other persons such as Gandalf and Aragorn, do not always use the same style. This is intentional. The more learned and able among the Hobbits . . . were quick to note and adopt the style of those whom they met. (RK, Appendix F, 1490).

For example, Pippin attempts a formal register when he meets Gildor and the Elves in the Woody End, addressing them as “O Wise People!” (FR, I, iii, 105), which is reminiscent of some of the honorifics in The Hobbit. But the fundamental contrast is between cultures and settings which appear recognizable to the reader and those which appear exotic. Tolkien claimed that his work represented “the theme of the relation of ordinary life (breathing, eating, working, begetting) and quests, sacrifices, causes” (Letters 161). The distinction noted above between the familiar outlook of the Hobbits and the archaic world into which Frodo’s quest takes them is conveyed as much by the language in which places and events are described as by those places and events themselves. Therefore it is to be expected that there will be considerable stylistic differences between Books I, IV, and a large part of VI, in which Hobbits are often alone together, and Books III and V, in which the majority of the actors are Men of Rohan and Gondor, or even more exotic beings such as Ents. The action is more epic, and the genre turns increasingly from the familiar one of the “realistic” novel to that of the heroic romance. It needs to be stressed that archaism is understood here purely from a linguistic point of view. The question of whether its use is appropriate in any given literary text is an aesthetic one that can be answered only by literary critics, who may disapprove because the indiscriminate use of language of this kind came to be a cliché of historical adventure stories in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. It is treated here as a register of the contemporary English language which can be understood and used by most native speakers with a conventional education, although individuals will naturally vary in experience and skill. This can be compared with the ability of

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most English people to imitate an Irish or Yorkshire accent when telling an anecdote; the result need not be dialectologically accurate, but it will display certain typical phonological, lexical, and syntactic features. Many components of a “standard” archaizing register are derived from Early Modern English, which is usually encountered in schools through the works of Shakespeare. Furthermore, until relatively recently most people would have become familiar in their childhood with the language of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer or other forms of religious language derived from them, so that they could attempt a short speech or prayer using this register. Tolkien described the version that he used as “moderated or watered archaism” and demonstrated that a more philologically accurate form could be produced while still using “only words that are still used or known to the educated” (Letters 225). This is the same principle that he advocated in his essay “On Translating Beowulf” as a means of preserving for this ancient poem a tone which would preserve it from trivialization through too many modern connotations, but would also avoid any antiquarian obscurity (MC 49–71). As an expert in the history of the English language he could probably have given an accurate reproduction of any period that he had chosen, but the question of historical accuracy is not of primary importance for our investigation of his literary style. The important thing is to recognize how this register can be used as a form of linguistic differentiation. The following illustrations from the text will give some very selective samples of how Tolkien used stylistic variation. We can start with an investigation of the overall narrative style. Rosebury, refuting Stimpson’s criticism, demonstrates that much of the narrative is written in a normal, straightforward style. He analyzes a substantial extract from the chapter “At the Sign of The Prancing Pony,” a description of Bree and the Hobbits’ arrival there. Bree is not far from the Shire, which acts as an indicator of normality. We can take a short section of Rosebury’s long quotation to show in greater linguistic detail how the straightforward narrative is constructed: The hobbits rode on up a gentle slope, passing a few detached houses, and drew up outside the inn. The houses looked dark and strange to them. Sam stared up at the inn with its three stories and many windows, and felt his heart sink. He had imagined himself meeting giants taller than trees, and other creatures even more terrifying, some time or other in the course of his journey; but at the moment he was finding his first sight of Men and their tall houses quite enough, indeed too much at the end of a tiring day. (FR, I, ix, 199)

This demonstrates Tolkien’s typical use of parataxis, as in the shorter works. There are two participial phrases (“passing a few detached houses,” “meeting giants”), but there are no subordinate clauses. Syntactically these three sentences are very simple and ordinary. The longest sentence, the last one looking into Sam’s private thoughts, contains several adverbial phrases and two postmodifying adjective phrases (“taller than trees,” “even more terrifying”), but essentially its length is made up by



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coordination. In many novels, passages dealing with the workings of the characters’ minds can involve a great deal of complexity, but it is a commonplace of Tolkien criticism that he shows characterization through actions rather than psychological introspection, which is borne out by the syntax here. The lexis is all of an everyday nature, with the possible exception of “giants,” which nevertheless belongs to a commonplace fairy-tale register. Not all of Tolkien’s structures are so syntactically simple; many sentences are varied with temporal and relative clauses. Nevertheless, on most pages, however intense the narrative, it is easy to find many sentences which are predominantly paratactic. The degree of coordination even increases in the romance sections as the stylistic arch reaches its height at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, with the eucatastrophe of Aragorn’s unexpected arrival: And then wonder took him, and a great joy, and he cast his sword up in the sunlight and sang as he caught it. And all eyes followed his gaze, and behold! upon the foremost ship a great standard broke, and the wind displayed it as she turned towards the Harlond. (RK, V, vi, 1109)

Passages such as this are stylistically marked, that is to say they are not perceived as ordinary; the language is drawing attention to itself. Since “and” simply joins ideas without showing a logical connection between them as is usual in modern analytical texts, its frequent use may be seen as representing a feature of medieval or pre-modern discourse, what Shippey (2005, 203) calls “loose semantic fit.” This parataxis is often associated with the language of the Bible: And they departed into a desert place by ship privately. And the people saw them departing, and many knew him, and ran afoot thither out of all cities, and outwent them, and came together unto him. And Jesus, when he came out, saw much people, and was moved with compassion toward them, because they were as sheep not having a shepherd: and he began to teach them many things. (Mark 6:32–34, King James Bible)

Note that there is only one conjunction here which shows a causal connection: “because.” Of course the New Testament was originally written in Greek, and the coordinating conjunctions are a means of translating Greek linking particles, but in practice most non-specialist readers treat the Bible as an original text with its own characteristic style. So even though it uses no words that could be considered archaic or even unusual, except possibly “cast” and “behold,” Tolkien’s language gains an impression of exalted register through its intertextual association with a high-status religious text. However, for Tolkien this would have been the syntax not only of the Bible, but also of the Old English and Old Norse texts which constituted his specialist study. The Old Norse sagas, which he knew well and which form one of the earliest and most extensive realistic literatures in Europe, are written in a terse style with lots of

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action and little analysis, and often in a paratactic style that resembles Tolkien’s heroic passages. The characters express themselves through short, laconic comments, similar to the veiled threat of Sauron’s messenger to the Dwarves, “Refuse, and things will not seem so well” and Dáin’s proverb-like reply, “The time of my thought is my own to spend” (FR, II, ii, 314). The syntactic structure of a lot of Old English prose is similar (e.g., The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle), while the poem Beowulf, on which Tolkien regularly lectured, is also constructed in balanced phrases with loose grammatical connections. For a more detailed examination of Tolkien’s archaizing style, we can take a part of the text portraying the Rohirrim, since they are intended to represent a simple heroic society with strong similarities to the historical Anglo-Saxons and the early Germanic world of Beowulf. Tolkien was an expert in this field, and therefore, as critics such as Tinkler (1968) and Shippey (2005) have pointed out, uniquely able to achieve local and temporal color by including a high proportion of intertextual references to older literatures. Although the full extent of it may not be clear to readers who have not studied at least some Old English or Old Norse, it is sufficiently differentiated from normal English to represent a very different, pre-modern culture. To keep our sample to a manageable size, we will concentrate on the chapter “The King of the Golden Hall” (TT, III, vi). We can divide our analysis into three different linguistic levels: lexis, syntax, and sociolinguistics/culture. Many readers immediately associate archaism with individual words, but in fact the amount of archaic lexis in our chapter is small. Just 11 words are marked in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as either archaic or obsolete in the way in which they are used in our text: doorward (666), louver (668), sooth (669), verily (674), helm (675), sister-son (676), ere (677), nigh (677), leechcraft (678), cunning (=skillful) (679), and behold! (683). Sister-daughter (672) does not have a separate entry but may be considered archaic on the analogy of sister-son. Finally there is witless (514), which is labeled “literary and somewhat archaic.” In addition there are eight words which have a stylistic marker such as “poetic or rhetorical”: fell (adj.) (664), hail (interjection) (666), slain (669), sundering (674), league (674), board (=table) (677), froward (681), and steed (681). Stair (683), used in the singular, is said to be very rare in England but normal in Scotland. There is one example of the use of the old pronoun thee (682), which is nowadays restricted to poetic and religious contexts. There are five further words which in the subjective opinion of this writer could be considered unusual, although they are not stylistically marked in the OED: blazoned (665), bade (666), wit (=skill) (674), aught (681), and hearken (685). Twenty-eight words, most of which occur only once, out of a chapter of 19 pages is not a high proportion. Several others refer to obsolete artifacts such as weapons, which will be familiar to anyone who has read something about medieval history. Here the OED is inconsistent, since although helm is marked as archaic, other terms such as corslet, mail, hauberk, and quiver are not. But the essential point is that there is relatively little here, with the possible exception of leechcraft and louver, which would not be found in the linguistic registers of a moderately well-read person. However, it



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will be noted that some of these words, such as leechcraft, doorward, and sister-son, are compounds, helping to confirm Ryan’s thesis that an increased use of compounding gives the impression of a more heroic culture (see above). On the syntactic level there is more to consider. The chapter affords many examples of fronting, the moving of an object, complement or adverbial to the beginning of the sentence. This is a perfectly usual structure in English in sentences such as “Round the corner came a big red bus” or “That much I know already.” In Tolkien it is a regular stylistic feature which presumably provoked Stimpson’s parodistic sentence “To an eyot they came,” where the adverbial “to an eyot” is moved forward from its normal position after the verb. Two examples similar to those given above are: “There dwells Théoden son of Thengel . . .” (661) and “Thus spoke a forgotten poet long ago in Rohan . . .” (663). This is simply a presentational device to put new information at the end of the sentence, creating a small amount of suspense in the reader. In the first example it avoids the imbalance that would be caused by a long subject followed by a short predicate, such as “Théoden son of Thengel, King of the Mark of Rohan lives there.” The structure is typical of narrative rather than conversation or explanation, but is otherwise not stylistically marked. Similar to this is the linking function of fronting, in which the fronted item refers back to a topic mentioned previously: “But on one form the sunlight fell” (668; the narrator is describing the interior of Meduseld) and “for better help you will not find (671; Gandalf has just offered assistance). Again this is not unusual in literary writing. However, our chapter contains many more examples which have a formulaic character, as in the following cases of naming: “Láthspell I name you, Ill-news” (669) and “Edoras those courts are called . . . and Meduseld is that golden hall” (661). Here the language draws attention to itself, in the first sentence because the insulting nickname Láthspell is separated from the explanation of its meaning, and in the second one by the parallelism that is produced by the two frontings one after another. A similar effect, though less concentrated, is found in Legolas’s comment on the time that has passed since the building of the hall: “Five hundred times have the red leaves fallen in Mirkwood .  .  . and but a little while does that seem to us” (662). Since the same stylistically marked structure is used several times in succession, it suggests that the author is attempting to achieve a particular effect. In fact on this one page there are no less than eight examples of stylistically marked fronting, in contrast to the first page of the chapter, which consists of a series of simple sentences straightforwardly recounting the stages of an overnight ride. It is as if the introduction of a new culture, that of Rohan, is stylistically underlined by the use of complex verbal patterning. In some cases there is a parallelism between fronting and the normal word order, forming a chiasmus, the crossing over of elements in parallel constructions: . . . it is thatched with gold. . . . Golden, too, are the posts of its doors. (661) Swords you do not need, but there are helms and coats of mail . . . (681–682)

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Although we can describe them as strongly stylistically marked, there is nothing about any of these structures that is specifically archaic. It would be more accurate to say that they belong to an elevated register which is perfectly accessible to modern authors and readers, although in the mid-twentieth century few writers made use of it as a reaction against what was seen as Victorian excess. It relies on the realization that in earlier periods English word order was more flexible than it is in the much more analytical modern language, so that the effect is rather of a distancing from ordinary, everyday language. When read in context with the untranslated words of Old English that occur in the chapter, such as Éomer’s salutation “Westu Théoden hál!” (676), these passages of verbal patterning can convey to the experienced reader a clear echo of the parallelisms of Old English alliterative verse. This is underlined on the phonological level by the frequent use of alliteration throughout the romance sections of the narrative, as in the description of Éowyn at her first meeting with Aragorn: “strong she seemed and stern as steel .  .  . still as stone she stood” (672). The similes may appear at first sight merely conventional, but the important feature is the heavy alliterating monosyllables. This, like the description of Edoras, works as an epic set piece, a short poem in prose set within the narrative. The sociolinguistic/cultural level is the one which is hardest to locate, and can be dealt with here only very briefly. It is best illustrated by an example which Tolkien himself chose (Letters 226) in replying to charges of “tushery,” that is, a clichéd use of bogus archaism. He points to the passage where Théoden says, “I myself will go to war, to fall in the front of the battle, if it must be. Thus shall I sleep better” (677). Tolkien points out that if he had wanted to use a more modern idiom, we would have written, “I shall go to the war in person, even if I have to be one of the first casualties.” His point, to bring it even more up to date, is that this would betray a sanitized, euphemistic way of talking about war in which “casualties” are synonymous with “collateral damage” and which would be totally foreign to the society of the Rohirrim as depicted here. Conversely, if a modern writer were to talk of sleeping in the grave, they could mean it only as a metaphor in view of modern beliefs about what happens to the body after death, so that it might sound like insincerity. However, the use of the expression by Théoden may remind the reader, even subconsciously, that in the pre-modern world a person might indeed have felt the “sleep” of death as a metaphor and a reality at the same time, so the phrase contributes to the local color of the passage. In this way the use of a linguistic form assists in the creation of a textual culture. Although this linguistic evocation of a pre-modern culture is carefully built up over long stretches, it is regularly balanced by more familiar and homely Hobbit style, as in the meeting of Théoden with Merry and Pippin at Isengard:



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“I will come with you,” said Théoden. “Farewell, my hobbits! May we meet again in my house! There you shall sit beside me and tell me all that your hearts desire: the deeds of your grandsires, as far as you can reckon them; and we will speak also of Tobold the Old and his herb-lore. Farewell.” The hobbits bowed low. “So that is the King of Rohan!” said Pippin in an undertone. “A fine old fellow. Very polite.” (TT, III, viii, 729)

As in the dialogue between Bilbo and Balin, the juxtaposition of discourse styles frames the effect of the more expansive archaizing speech with its echoes of a remote time, and brings the reader once more into contact with contemporary forms of thought and expression. It would not be an exaggeration to say that through the selective use of language, two different genres are brought into contact at this point. However, there is scope for much more research into the finer stylistic gradations which can be found throughout the work.

Annalistic Compression: The Silmarillion The Lord of the Rings consists not only of well over a thousand pages of main narrative, but also of a lengthy paratextual frame structure: a Foreword, a Prologue, and six Appendices. The longest part of this is Appendix A, “Annals of the Kings and Rulers,” which is stylistically distinct from the main narrative. In fact it has some variation in style since it is divided into sections with different narrative perspectives, but some common features can be established. The syntax is still largely paratactic, but the information structure is more compressed than in the main narrative: it consists of a densely packed series of events and facts covering a long time-span, with practically no lengthy descriptions or details conveying local and temporal color. Direct speech is seldom used, and then more as utterances in isolation than as protracted dialogue. The register can therefore be identified with that of factual texts such as histories or chronicles, which differentiates it from the more expansive, novelistic information structure of the main narrative. In short, it is clearly intended to give the impression of a set of documents. This style can be compared with that of The Silmarillion, which is a much longer and more complex work than the Appendix, but nevertheless also gives a sense of compression and documentation. In general there is a concentration on events rather than description, there is very little personal focalization, and dialogue is comparatively rare. Individual chapters vary in density of information; “Of Túrin Turambar” has a more extensive structure and there are regular passages of direct speech, so that individual characters appear more rounded (although it recounts events that are presented at several times the length in The Children of Húrin, while even there the narrative still appears taut and sparse), while “Of Tuor and the Fall of Gondolin” is reduced to little more than an outline. As in The Lord of the Rings, there is regular use

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of archaizing lexis and syntax which maintains an elevated register, but the sense of variation brought about by contrast with an everyday, informal register is lacking: there is no Hobbit point of view to give scope for the culturally based stylistic differentiation that we have seen above and which serves to mediate between the reader and an unfamiliar, more antique world. Consequently The Silmarillion is often felt to be a difficult book which requires a special effort from the reader; the deliberate avoidance of stylistic features associated with storytelling makes the text-world appear remote and difficult to approach.

Conclusion This brief stylistic analysis cannot possibly demonstrate the whole range of Tolkien’s lexical and syntactic usage, particularly as it appears in its most highly developed form in The Lord of the Rings; for example, nothing has been said about the linguistic characterization of Elves, Dwarves, or Men of Gondor. In particular it is important to add that in looking carefully about how Tolkien uses language for literary purposes we are not making a statement about quality; it is not the purpose of stylistics to say whether a text is good or bad, merely to analyze its characteristics. In establishing that some passages may be reminiscent of epic or biblical style, we cannot estimate its effect on the individual reader. There are certainly people who do not like the language of either epic poetry or the King James Bible, or find its use by Tolkien either inappropriate or excessive. It certainly would not be possible to claim that a trite expression never occurs; in a work of over 1100 pages, it would be strange if occasionally a particular turn of phrase was not felt to fall flat. However, the analysis should be sufficient to show that here at least there is nothing to suggest that Tolkien “wrenches” the syntax, whatever that is meant to mean. Nor is it possible to sustain Raffel’s objection that the narrative style is too ordinary and one-dimensional to be artistic; in fact it displays careful differentiation and poetic structure. So are we finally in a position to refute Raffel’s assertion that The Lord of the Rings is not literature? The answer to that is no, since it lies outside the range of questions that a stylistic analysis can answer. In particular it depends on a definition of literature, which is the province of literary theorists. However, any qualitative judgment about style needs to be based on a careful consideration of the details of the text as sketched out here, and not on the unsubstantiated prejudice of the critic.

References Le Guin, Ursula. 2001. “Rhythmic Pattern in The Lord of the Rings.” In Meditations on Middle-earth, edited by Karen Haber, 101–116. London: Simon & Schuster.

Raffel, Burton. 1968. “The Lord of the Rings as Literature.” In Tolkien and the Critics, edited by Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo, 218–246. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.



Style and Intertextual Echoes

Rosebury, Brian. 2003. Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ryan, J. S. 2009. Tolkien’s View: Windows into his World. Zurich and Jena: Walking Tree Publishers. Shippey, Tom. 2000. J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. London: HarperCollins. Shippey, Tom. 2005. The Road to Middle-earth. Rev. and expanded edn. London: HarperCollins. Stimpson, Catharine R. 1969. J. R. R. Tolkien. New York: Columbia University Press. Thomas, Paul Edmund. 2000. “Some of Tolkien’s Narrators.” In Tolkien’s Legendarium, edited by

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Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter, 161–181. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Tinkler, John. 1968. “Old English in Rohan.” In Tolkien and the Critics, edited by Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo, 164–169. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Turner, Allan. 2007. “Prose Style.” In J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopaedia, edited by Michael Drout, 545–546. London: Routledge. Walker, Steve. 2009. The Power of Tolkien’s Prose. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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After reading The Lord of the Rings to his young son in the 1990s, the author Michael Swanwick commented that: What he heard was the same book I had discovered [as a child] .  .  . the single best adventure story ever written. As an adult, however, I found that during my long absence it had transformed itself into something else entirely. It was now the saddest book in the world. (Swanwick 2003, 35)

Swanwick’s comment is profound in its simplicity. Of course, the text itself had not transformed since his first reading – at least, not in any sense other than the way in which every literary text is created with the collaboration of its reader. However, this shift in perception of the text from “adventure story” to emotionally affecting elegy is common to many former child and adolescent readers who revisit The Lord of the Rings as adults. One reason for this is that Tolkien crafts a narrative featuring the “eucatastrophic turn” to joy and deliverance which he describes as the “highest function” of the fairy-tale (OFS 75), but he also ensures that for many characters, this turn to joy is accompanied by loss and grief. The text works successfully in both the adventure-story and elegaic modes because The Lord of the Rings offers the reader not one quest-narrative or Hero’s Journey but several, which run simultaneously in a number of registers and at a number of levels. As Swanwick’s anecdote demonstrates, whether the narrative of loss or that of triumph dominates our impression of the text depends largely upon our own experiences, sympathies, and perspectives as readers.

A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.



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The Hero’s Journey The concept of the Hero’s Journey was identified by Joseph Campbell, who identified a “standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero” (Campbell 1971, 30) common to many pre-modern and pre-literary texts. This pattern, which Campbell identifies as “separation – initiation – return” (30) broadly recurs in texts as diverse as the classical epic, the fairytale, and the medieval romance.1 Northrop Frye expanded upon this concept in his Anatomy of Criticism, identifying the quest as a key feature in the sub-group of mythological narratives that he terms “the mythos of Summer”: chief of which is the romance. Frye proposes three typical stages through which the quest must progress, all of which can be found within The Lord of the Rings: 1. The first stage is identified as the agon or conflict, the stage of “preliminary minor adventures” (Frye 1957, 187), roughly corresponding in Tolkien’s work to the events of Books One and Two (FR). 2. The second is the pathos, “the crucial struggle, usually some kind of battle in which either the hero or his foe, or both, must die” (Frye 1957, 187), most obviously apparent in Frodo’s questionably successful struggle on Mount Doom (of which more below), but also present in other variations within the text. 3. The third and final stage is “the anagnorisis or discovery, the recognition of the hero” (Frye 1957, 187), which is perhaps the least conventional aspect of Tolkien’s text, as different levels of recognition – or lack of recognition – are meted out to different characters in the final chapters of Book Six, as discussed below. Within The Lord of the Rings, the Hero’s Journey – or multiple Heroes’ Journeys – becomes inextricably linked with the quest narrative, and reveals the extent to which Tolkien drew upon late medieval, and particularly Arthurian, literature in his work. As early as 1961, The Lord of the Rings had been formally recognized as a quest narrative by W. H. Auden (see Auden 2004). Auden argued, together with Campbell (and prefiguring Bruno Bettelheim’s later psychoanalytical deconstructions of European fairy-tales) that the purpose of the fantastical narrative is to provide a framework for thinking about some of the most unspeakable aspects of human experience (Auden 2004, 32). While Tolkien himself professed to “cordially dislike” allegory (FR, Foreword, xxvi), it is clear that some of the text’s popularity does derive from its use of the quest as a way of engaging with the universal human experiences of failure, sacrifice, redemption, and growth to maturity. However, critics writing after Auden have frequently debated the extent to which The Lord of the Rings can be considered a true quest-narrative. Brian Rosebury, for example, contends that “the purpose of most quests is to acquire” a sacred object, whereas “the purpose of this quest is to get rid of something unholy” (Rosebury 2003, 28). Carol Leibiger casts Frodo’s story as “a mythic antiquest or negative quest” rather than a genuine quest-narrative (Leibiger 2007, 552), and even Verlyn Flieger stated in 1981 that while “Aragorn’s is a true

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quest to win a kingdom and a princess . . . Frodo’s is rather an anti-quest” because “[h]e goes not to win something, but to throw something away” (Flieger 1981, 42). Rosebury also argues that Frodo’s journey cannot be considered a quest because he does not actively choose it, but has “an unwelcome responsibility thrust upon [him] by ill-fate” (Rosebury 2003, 28) – although this is undercut by Frodo’s clear assumption of responsibility at the Council of Elrond and later at the conclusion of Book Two. These critical refusals to read The Lord of the Rings as quest-narrative are problematic on two counts. First, they insist upon an overly narrow definition of what a quest actually is. Medieval quest-romances, for example, frequently include heroes with negative or destructive intentions – as Helen Cooper points out, “[t]here is a sense in which every knight who kills a dragon has destruction as his aim” (Cooper 2004, 80). Hopeless, or apparently hopeless, quest-missions are also a medieval staple, as seen in Palomides’ never-ending hunt for the uncatchable Questing Beast in Malory’s Morte Darthur, or Gawain’s journey towards what he perceives will be his own death in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. There is also a clear distinction to be made between the idea of the protagonist’s having a quest “thrust upon” him and the more resolute “willed acceptance” of one’s fated or God-given duty that Cooper identifies as integral to the romance quest (Cooper 2004, 53). Second, it is important to note that Frodo’s is not the only quest-narrative available in The Lord of the Rings. While it is true that his mission is essentially destructive in nature, Aragorn’s quest for kingship and the smaller quests for maturity and social identity made by Pippin, Merry, and Sam all provide alternative, and more conventionally positive, quest-narratives. Other critics have given more qualified acceptance of The Lord of the Rings as a flawed or modified quest-narrative. While accepting Frodo’s mission as a quest, George Thomson also suggests that it is an atypical one because the story brings “no reward of a bride for Frodo” (Thomson 1967, 46), thus ignoring the existence of multiple medieval quests, such as the Queste del Saint Graal, where the victorious hero is left deliberately unmarried at the story’s conclusion. Similarly, Roger Sale acknowledges that although “[t]echnically the central action of The Lord of the Rings is a quest . . . in fact the central action more closely resembles a descent into hell” (Sale 1973, 198–199), discounting the medieval Sir Orfeo, in which the hero’s quest is framed around precisely such a journey of katabasis. As will be discussed below, as a reader, editor, and translator of the conclusion of the Arthurian story and Sir Gawain, Tolkien was well aware that a compromised or unhappy ending by no means disqualifies a narrative from being considered as a quest.

Tolkien and Middle English While much critical and popular analysis exists on Tolkien’s work as a scholar, teacher, and translator of Old English (Anglo-Saxon, see chs. 3 and 15), less attention has so far been paid to the influence of Middle English, the literary language of England



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from the early twelfth century to the turn of the sixteenth, on his writing.2 Tolkien’s work on Middle English spanned much of his career, and indeed began before he encountered Old English – he first read the Middle English quest-romance of Sir Gawain as a teenager attending King Edward’s School in Birmingham (see ch. 16 for further discussion of Tolkien’s work on this text). Although his interest in Arthurianism is not as overtly obvious as, for example, his borrowings from Old English elegiac poetry, Tolkien does acknowledge an imaginative debt to “the land of Merlin and Arthur” (OFS 55). Arthurian echoes – from the motif of the foster-child whose kingly destiny is linked to the recovery of a damaged sword, to that of the unhealable yet undying wounded hero who must be transported across the sea – recur throughout The Lord of the Rings, and the recent publication of Tolkien’s own unfinished Arthurian work The Fall of Arthur (Tolkien 2013) has revealed the depth and extent of his interest in Middle English versions of the story.3 The Lord of the Rings is also informed by structural borrowings from the longer quest-romances of the French and English Middle Ages. One of the most important of these, as discussed by Thomson, Shippey, and Rosebury, is the technique of entrelacement, or interlacement: literally the narration of two or more interconnected stories that take place at different locations, but happen simultaneously in time. This is the format that dominates The Lord of the Rings for the majority of Books Three to Five as the adventures of the protagonists are split up into their various quests (Frodo and Sam’s mission to destroy the Ring; Aragorn’s quest to save the hobbits and bring aid to Gondor; Merry and Pippin’s attempts to be reunited with the Fellowship, etc. – see ch. 9). As Shippey points out, this is a predominantly French storytelling technique whose “greatest literary monuments” are found in the thirteenth-century Vulgate Cycle of Arthurian stories (Shippey 2005, 181). It is this technique that allows for connections between key plot events to be made by the reader on a second journey through the text and contributes to the variation in reading experience from first to subsquent readings. The Lord of the Rings has been criticized by those whose palates are attuned to the modern novel for its use of repetition: even Peter Jackson’s film version, which pares away “The Scouring of the Shire” episode, has been described as having “too many endings” (Woods 2005, 161). However, repetition is an essential technique in romance, providing incremental increases in emotional impact and giving the reader or listener an opportunity to “re-interpret earlier episodes as they recur” (Cooper 2004, 58). Thus, for example, it is essential to show the successful resistance of Faramir to the Ring following the failed testing of his brother Boromir, or for Sam’s arrival as a husband and proto-patriarch in “The Grey Havens” to follow Aragorn’s in “The Steward and the King” (RK). As Cooper suggests, “the outward journey tells a story” but “the return not only completes the story but comments on that first half” (Cooper 2004, 58), adding emotional richness and complexity. Similarly, medieval romances typically use the technique of doubling to provide psychological depth to what would otherwise be one-dimensional characters: the Scottish romance Golagros and Gawane, for example, uses the figures of Gawane and Kay as the “best and worst” of Arthur’s

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knights to demonstrate how to solve interpersonal conflict (Caughey 2013, 101–105), while in Chrétien’s Chevalier au Lion the wanderlust of the newly married young knight is displaced onto the friend who leads him astray. Tolkien uses a similar technique to give emotional veracity to the figure of Frodo: while conceivably a rather flat hero when read alone, he becomes far more convincing when read in conjunction with Gollum as his double, not merely an antagonist but an indication of Frodo’s own potential to be enslaved by the Ring. Again, Frodo’s relationship with Gollum reflects the medieval romance’s frequent sense that the hero possesses “in some sense the potential to become his or her double” (Bliss 2008, 42–43). The quest-narrative does not necessarily run evenly throughout The Lord of the Rings. Books One and Two remain largely stuck at Frye’s initial agon stage: a prelude to a quest rather than a true quest-narrative (although some episodes, such as the journey through Moria, may be considered as minor sub-quests). Frodo formally accepts his mission at the Council of Elrond, but reaffirms his commitment more convincingly at the conclusion of Book Two when he elects to shoulder the burden of questing alone, embodying Cooper’s “willed acceptance” (Cooper 2004, 53). It is after the chapter “The Breaking of the Fellowship” that The Lord of the Rings becomes a true quest-narrative – and when it does, it draws upon entrelacement, doubling and repetition to present multiple quests and multiple Heroes’ Journeys. However, the agon of Books One and Two provides the necessary moral education that Frodo must receive before embarking on the mission proper: as Chance suggests, he functions as a semi-successful quest hero in Books Four and Six only because, having heard Gollum’s story and witnessed the potential power of the Ring over Gandalf, Galadriel, and Boromir, he “understands he may, at any time, become a ‘monster’ ” himself (Chance 2001, 161). Auden was perhaps the first critic to argue that the novel features two heroes: one positioned on the level of the Epic and another, humbler hero whose talents are at first concealed (Auden 2004, 45). These are, of course, respectively embodied by Aragorn and Frodo, who are also easily placed on the spectrum of “Mimetic heroes” identified by Frye. Aragorn is the mythical or high mimetic figure of the leader, in possession of “authority, passions and powers of expression far greater” than those of normal people (Frye 1957, 34). Frodo, together with the other Hobbits, falls closer to Frye’s definition of the low mimetic hero: “superior neither to other men nor to his environment . . . we respond to a sense of his common humanity” (ibid.). However, the plot is complicated by Tolkien’s decision to give the truly epic quest to the more humble quester, while the more personal story of growth and maturity is given to the high mimetic hero. The second half of this chapter will expand Auden’s suggestion by arguing that in The Lord of the Rings Tolkien in fact gives us at least three separate Heroes’ Journeys (indeed, he gives us further journeys but space limitations do not permit discussion here). The first type of journey will be called the “There-and-Back-Again” adventure, a quest starring a low mimetic hero who begins in obscurity and embarks upon a journey to prove his worth, growing in courage and experience but remaining



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fundamentally unchanged in terms of character and personality. The second journey is that of the “Broken Hero” whose quest is sacrificial in nature, and who emerges from the adventure wounded, permanently traumatized, or does not return at all. The third, and potentially most complex, journey is the quest of the “Nascent Patriarch” – the young man whose quest brings him worldly recognition and reward but also alters him forever after. By creating an entrelacement of different types of Heroes’ Journeys, Tolkien vastly increases both the accessibility and the emotional appeal of his finished work.

There and Back Again: Bilbo, Merry, and Pippin In this form of quest, which corresponds to both Swanwick’s “best adventure story” (Swanwick 2003, 35) and the narrative of many conventional fairy-tales, the young hero sets out on a series of adventures which turn out to be much more challenging than expected. He faces obstacles, which are duly overcome by his own skill or with the assistance of various companions, and returns home, laden with treasure, to a life of significantly greater comfort and prestige. The “There and Back Again” quest is distinguished not only by its unambiguously happy ending, but by the fact that the hero himself reaches the end of the story fundamentally unaltered. He may well be richer, more respected, and more knowledgeable about the world, but he finds his home more or less as he left it, and is able to return to (an enhanced version of) his old way of life. The most obvious of Tolkien’s “There and Back Again” quests is that of Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit. While he does grow bolder and more experienced in the world beyond the Shire, Bilbo resumes (a more comfortable version of) his old life upon returning: he does not seek to trade in his bachelor life for a leadership role and remains happily detached from family responsibilities. Randel Helms categorizes The Hobbit as a “pure myth of maturation” reflected in both Bilbo’s growth as an adventurer and his renunciation of the Arkenstone (Helms 1974, 55), but this maturity seems to remain fixed at the point of his return to the Shire. While the post-Hobbit Bilbo successfully prevents his home from being misappropriated by the SackvilleBagginses, and is reported to travel beyond the Shire in between the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, we retain a sense that he has settled relatively comfortably into his old life. Moreover, while Bilbo’s affection for Frodo in The Lord of the Rings is plain, he does not adopt the position of paternal protector discussed in the final section of the chapter below. Slightly higher up Frye’s mimetic scale, the “There and Back Again” quest reappears in The Lord of the Rings connected to two characters whose stories are not typically considered as quest narratives – Merry and Pippin. While Frodo’s young kinsmen are not under a specific charge from the Council of Elrond, they are nevertheless engaged upon a quest – the typical untried hero’s quest for knightly identity which is the stuff of many medieval romances, such as King Horn, Havelok, and Malory’s “Tale of Sir

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Torre” and “Tale of Sir Gareth.” In particular, the first pathos section of their journey makes use of the motif of the “Wood of Error,” a traditional romance space in which the knight experiences temporary disorientation and confusion before his final triumph (Cooper 2004, 70). It is in Fangorn Forest that the young Hobbits begin to act as independent agents, rather than merely “piece[s] of luggage” (TT, III, iii, 579). Their encounter with Treebeard also, significantly, allows them to be recognized and inserted into “the old lists” as full members of the “free peoples” (TT, III, iv, 604) of Middleearth, a significant coded coming-of-age experience. Indeed, the young Hobbits do not merely survive the “Wood of Error” but end the adventure by literally mobilizing it in service of their quest. When this adventure is read in contrast with their earlier failures in the Shire’s Old Forest and Barrow-Downs, in which they required repeated rescues from Tom Bombadil, the value of doubling and repetition in the romance becomes clear. Both are also eventually knighted, and in Books Three and Five both are given specifically knightly tasks to accomplish. However, Merry and Pippin remain somewhat liminal figures who even at the journey’s end are still able to shift between boyhood and manhood as desired. This liminality is perhaps best encapsulated by Pippin’s adventures in Minas Tirith, where he is able to mix freely with both the boys of the City and the men of the Guard, one minute play-acting the role of “a Halfling – hard, bold and wicked!” (RK, V, I, 1007) and the next moment laughing at his own pretense. Similarly, for all his bravery Merry is never fully accepted within the homosocial community of Rohan, sharing Éowyn’s outsider status even as he shares her heroism. The two Hobbits are matured to some extent by the new capacities that they discover in Books Three to Six, and they do finally step forward in “The Scouring of the Shire” as authoritative figures of adult masculinity. However, particularly when contrasted with the serious and permanent changes undergone by Sam, Frodo, and Aragorn, Merry and Pippin’s anagnorisis seems largely superficial: when the battle is over our final image of them in the primary text is not of leaders, fathers or counselors, but of two carefree young knights singing as they ride along the road. As the narrator informs us a few pages earlier, “if they were now large and magnificent, they were unchanged otherwise” (RK, VI, ix, 1341, emphasis mine). In both cases, we feel that while the two Hobbits have learned and grown on their quests – in Gandalf’s play on words, “grown indeed very high” (RK, VI, vii, 1304) – they remain largely unaltered in spirit by their journeys.

The Broken Hero: Frodo As Frodo himself acknowledges, his adventure is very different, “no treasure-hunt, no there-and-back journey” (FR, I, v, 136). Miriam Youngerman Miller performs a simultaneous Campbellian reading of both Frodo’s journey and Gawain’s in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. She points out that both stories involve moving beyond “the normal primary worlds of Camelot and the Shire” (Youngerman Miller 1991, 348), that both heroes receive a “Call to Adventure,” that “both descend into what Campbell



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calls ‘the realm of night’: the Green Chapel and Shelob’s lair” (347), and that both suffer from difficulty in reintegrating into society following their adventures: Gawain is greeted by the uncomprehending laughter of Arthur’s court, which fails to understand the lessons that he has learned on his quest, while Shippey notes “the lack of respect and attention paid to [Frodo]” (Shippey 2000, 155) upon his return to the Shire. Significantly, Frodo is also like Gawain in that he ultimately fails to achieve the task with which he has been entrusted. At the crucial moment he is unable to destroy the Ring: “I have come,” he said. “But I do not choose now to do what I came to do. I will not do this deed. The Ring is mine!” And suddenly, as he set it on his finger, he vanished from Sam’s sight. (RK, VI, iii, 1237)

Our reading of this pathos scene differs significantly depending on whether Frodo and Gollum are read as separate characters. Flieger suggests that the key to this scene is to read Frodo not as a “monster-queller” but as a creature “tortured by growing evil in his own nature”: as she suggests, it is “those dark elements within himself,” externalized and given voice in the figure of Gollum, that form the most “powerful monster of all” (Flieger 1981, 59), and these dark elements overcome his resistance at the crucial moment, leading to a failure which ultimately destroys him. Alternatively, if we accept Swanwick’s reading of both Gollum and Sam as “aspects of Frodo” (Swanwick 2003, 43), apparently respectively playing the Freudian id and superego to Frodo’s ego, we can read Frodo’s quest as a successful one. This composite reading suggests that the task simply demanded that Frodo use the ugliest and most selfish part of his nature, as represented by Gollum, in addition to the noble and sacrificial elements represented by Sam, and that with the destruction of Gollum, his personality will never be wholly reintegrated again. What is certain is that Frodo’s success is a partial and compromised one at best. He draws towards the end of his journey wounded in a way that “will never really heal” (RK, VI, ix, 1342) and has (depending on our reading) either personally failed in his quest, or partially destroyed himself in achieving it. Yet this, too, is a valid variation on the medieval quest-narrative: as Cooper points out, while in some quests the “search for self-knowledge” leads to growth, in others it leads to “the discovery of limitation or fallibility” (Cooper 2004, 50). The quest hero who is tested and found wanting has his own medieval precedents. Both Gawain in Sir Gawain and Lancelot in the Queste del Saint Graal fail in their struggles to achieve perfect Christian knighthood, while in Malory’s version of the story the Arthurian narrative itself becomes fundamentally one of a failed attempt at creating the perfect courtly and chivalrous society. However, this does not mean that their quests are without value: what the broken quest hero acquires is not perfection, but “a tested virtue, acquired with dust and sweat” and “a genuine humility” (Cooper 2004, 52) that may ultimately be more worthwhile than easily won success. The

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conclusion of Frodo’s story also echoes other medieval romances and chansons de geste. His quietly retired life in the Shire evokes a number of questing knights such as Guy of Warwick, Renaud of Montaubon, Valentine of Valentine and Orson, and Malory’s Launcelot, all of whom who live out the remainder of their days as hermits, unrecognized and unappreciated by the communities that they formerly served (Cooper 2004, 89). Finally, Frodo’s embarkation on the ship to the Grey Havens also evokes the conclusion of the more mystical variants of the Arthurian story: too severely wounded both physically and emotionally to continue living in the primary world, the hero is instead transported to a quasi-mythical place beyond the sea, “equivalent,” as Michael Stanton points out, “if not to Eden then at least to Avalon” (Stanton 2007, 225). Diana Wynne Jones argues that in this scene, Tolkien blends the resonance of AngloSaxon/Norse ship-burial with the Arthurian journey-beyond-the-sea to create a scene of profound ambivalence in which the reader is left to interpret Frodo’s departure as either a geographical displacement or a true death, an “equivocal ending where winning and failing amount to the same” (Wynne Jones 1983, 107). As with Arthur after the Battle of Camlann, we can choose to believe in Frodo’s departure from the world or his attainment of a new life beyond the sea. The final word on the Broken Hero should perhaps belong to Tolkien himself, who suggested that the end of Frodo’s journey is “a more significant and real event than a mere ‘fairy-story’ ending in which the hero is indomitable”: reflecting the fact that “[i]t is possible for the good, even the saintly, to be subjected to a power of evil which is too great for them to overcome – in themselves” (Letters 252–253).

The Patriarch’s Quest: Aragorn and Sam The third, and arguably most transformative, form of Hero’s Journey in The Lord of the Rings is that of the nascent patriarch – the inexperienced young man who emerges from his adventure not merely glorified, but transformed; who moves forward into a state of social and emotional maturity that fits him for the role of husband and father. Medieval examples of this quest include Chrétien’s Chevalier au Lion (Yvain), in which the hero learns that knightly virtue lies in fulfilling one’s promises as well as one’s desire for adventure, and Malory’s “The Tale of Sir Gareth” in which the hero must learn sexual self-restraint after winning the hand of his much-desired bride. In The Lord of the Rings, the quest towards patriarch status is enacted on two levels at once: both the high mimetic hero Aragorn and the low mimetic hero Sam move from being self-doubting figures to powerful leaders whose protective instincts are channeled into the building and defense of the heterosexual family and the leadership of their respective communities. Alongside Frodo, Aragorn is the figure most commonly read as the hero of The Lord of the Rings. Aragorn also functions as the romance stock figure known as the “fair unknown”: the initially obscure, sheltered or unpromising youth whose worth



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is eventually proven. Aragorn grows in both physical prowess and kingly potential throughout the narrative: as Strider, he assumes leadership of a sort among the Hobbits from their first meeting, and this is reaffirmed after the death of Gandalf. However, throughout Books One and Two and the beginning of Book Three he shows moments of hesitation around the assumption of leadership: “I . . . have failed,” he admits after the breaking of the Fellowship, “Vain was Gandalf’s trust in me” (TT, III, i, 538). From this low point, he then grows in stature and leadership throughout Books Three and Five. As Holly Crocker points out, Aragorn’s “ability to forge a brotherhood with Legolas and Gimli ultimately allows them to save Pippin and Merry [and] recover an alliance with the Rohirrim” (Crocker 2006, 119), all vital elements in both Aragorn’s own quest narrative and the overarching quest to destroy the Ring. In particular, the unification of the group that he dubs “the Three Hunters” (546), arguably the three members of the Fellowship who have least in common and are least likely to operate in peaceful unison, speaks strongly to his potential to negotiate later cooperation between nations and peoples as King. Furthermore, the goal of the mission for which he unites them – to fulfill his responsibilities as a protector to the weakest members of the Fellowship while summoning the wisdom to “let Frodo go his own way” (Crocker 2006, 119) – demonstrates his ability to step successfully into the role of paternal protector. By uniting the diverse peoples of Middle-earth/the Fellowship to protect those (apparently) least capable of protecting themselves, Aragorn attains success in a life-affirming/creative quest that runs parallel to the destructive thanatos-seeking mission carried out by Frodo. Similarly, as Flieger points out, in the Houses of Healing Aragorn’s ability to heal the wounds of Éowyn and Merry reference both the Celtic mythology of the sacral king who possesses the ability to restore health to the land and its people and the Grail legend (Flieger 1981, 50), further linking his leadership with life and creation. Another important part of Aragorn’s quest is to acknowledge and act upon his love for Arwen, without whom he will be unable to fulfill his destined role as husband and father as well as ruler. Indeed, Aragorn’s role in the War of the Ring comes about partly in service to this aim: he has received an ultimatum from Elrond that “his daughter will marry no man but the king of Gondor and Arnor” (Armstrong 2007, 23). Aragorn’s long years of questing in service of a lady’s hand reflect the conventions of insular romances such as Sir Eglamour of Artois and Clariodus, as do many of Tolkien’s other works: the link to the quest of Beren in The Silmarillion (charged by Thingol to retrieve one of the Silmarils in order to win the hand of the Elven Lúthien) is obvious here, as is the parallel with Tolkien’s own life. Richard West points out that the figure of Arwen was not introduced into the draft of The Lord of the Rings until relatively late in the composition process (West 2006, 318). However, without her it appears unlikely that the finished text would have possessed the sense of balance that its final incarnation reveals: only by satisfying the demands of a representative of the previous generation of patriarchs can Aragorn achieve anagnorisis by proving himself worthy to take his place as the new patriarch-hero, and to usher in “the days of the king” (RK, VI, v, 1268).

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The pattern of Aragorn’s journey from bel inconnu to ruler, husband, and father is mirrored on the low mimetic scale by the character famously identified by Tolkien himself as the “chief hero” of the quest (Letters 161). Like a true fairy-tale hero, Samwise Gamgee begins the story as the youngest son of a humble family (FR, I, i, 28). His initial immaturity and lack of worldly knowledge are highlighted in his first encounter with Gandalf in which he begs not to be turned into “anything unnatural” (FR, I, ii, 83); he later marvels innocently at the faces and voices of the first Elves that he meets, but also appears to gain new resolve from the encounter: “Don’t you leave him! they said to me. Leave him! I said. I never mean to” (FR, I, iv, 113). Once the quest-narrative begins in earnest at the end of Book Two Sam grows in importance and strength as Frodo’s supporter and protector. Moreover, his heroism is, as Sale comments, of “a distinctly modern cast – a heroism based upon the refusal to yield to despair” (Sale 1968, 251). Although, like many other characters, Sam makes costly errors (most notably his nipping of Sméagol/Gollum’s potential reformation in the bud), his unswerving support of Frodo proves vital: like Aragorn, the most important task on his journey is to learn how to shelter and protect others. As Zimmer Bradley points out, Sam is also the only person who is able to take the Quest, however temporarily, from Frodo. Further, he is able to return the Ring of his own free will: a feat unparalleled by any other character (Zimmer Bradley 1968, 120–121). His talents as a Hobbit who is able to speak across class lines are put to use in “The Scouring of the Shire,” where he plays a vital role in negotiating with Robin Smallburrow and the other Shirriffs (RK, VI, viii, 1311–1312) and rousing the Cotton family (1318–1319). Sam is eventually elected Mayor of the Shire (RK, Appendix B, 1441), a position that, significantly, appears to carry more genuine political weight than Merry and Pippin’s ceremonial inherited titles. He concludes the narrative, as Chance suggests, effectively a “ ‘king’ who must continue to serve his ‘people’, his family, and his ‘kingdom,’ the Shire, by remaining in this world” (Chance 2001, 179). Finally, again like Aragorn, Sam’s heroic achievements are followed by his interpolation into heterosexual maturity with marriage to Rose Cotton. Frye suggests that “translated into ritual terms, the quest-romance is the victory of fertility over the waste land” (Frye 1957, 193), and the restoration of the land and its people is a particular concern of the patriarch-hero’s anagnorisis. Aragorn’s ability to heal his friends is repeated on a more humble scale in Sam’s use of the box of Lothlórien earth to repair the damage done to the Shire. Before he uses his gift, Sam expresses sorrow that “only his great-grandchildren . . . would see the Shire as it ought to be” (RK, VI, ix, 1338), further linking his drive to heal the land with his identity as a future patriarch. Moreover, his concern is not merely for his own family, but for the community as a whole: “I’m sure the Lady would not like me to keep it all for my own garden, now so many folk have suffered” (ibid.), and so he takes care to spread the earth throughout the Shire with successful results. These themes are further connected in the Appendices by Sam’s appropriation of the surname Gardener, and its subsequent use by his large population of descendants.



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However, as Swanwick’s adult reading of the novel attests, the patriarch-hero’s duty to remain anchored to the land in order to care for his descendants comes at a high price. While Tolkien explores this theme to its fullest extent in the short story Smith of Wootton Major, in which the hero must give up his passport to the realm of Faërie in order to pass its benefits on to the next generation, it also keenly informs the conclusion of The Lord of the Rings. For both Aragorn and Sam, the assumption of the role of patriarch entails loss and sacrifice as well as great joy. On the high mimetic level, Aragorn must rescind his former persona as Strider and prioritize kingship above travel and adventure (a sacrifice paralleled in Arwen’s reenactment of the Choice of Lúthien, electing marriage, motherhood, and mortality over sailing into the West). Our last glimpse of him is of a figure vanishing beyond the personal and into the epic: no longer Strider, he has become “the King of the West sitting upon his horse with his knights about him” (RK, VI, vi, 1286) and his last farewell to the Hobbits takes the form not of friendly words or embraces but of a flash of “green fire” from the jewel upon his hand. Similarly, Sam must give up the companionship of Frodo in order to cease feeling “torn in two” (RK, VI, ix, 1343) by conflicts between family responsibilities and the deeply-felt bonds of his relationship with his former master. While Chance refers to the novel’s closing line as “the cheery ‘Well, I’m back’ ” (Chance 2001, 115), this line could be read as deeply ambivalent and bitter-sweet. Although comforted by the presence of his friends and the lighted windows of his home, Sam does not share in Pippin and Merry’s carefree singing, and like Aragorn, his final actions represent a withdrawal from the space of story (here into the domestic and passive, rather than the epic): “And Rose drew him in, and set him in his chair, and put little Elanor upon his lap” (1349). There is a sense here that Rose is comforting Sam for all that he has lost with the passing of Frodo and of the Elves, and that the child is handed to him in token of both consolation and future responsibility. This finely-balanced moment forms a sharp contrast with the text’s original Epilogues,4 later abandoned, which featured Sam in unambiguously happy domestic settings. In the text as it stands, for both Sam and Aragorn the joy brought by the hero’s assumption of marriage and fatherhood is not necessarily lessened, but is made deeper and more complex by the accompanying loss of his former identity as adventurer. Throughout The Lord of the Rings Tolkien draws heavily upon multiple versions of the Hero’s Journey. One of the keys to the novel’s complexity and appeal as both a children’s book and a text for adults is its use of multiple quest narratives combined into a single story using the medieval romance technique of entrelacement. While the pattern of the “Broken Hero” laid out in Sir Gawain is particularly evident in the conclusion of Frodo’s journey, Tolkien also draws upon at least two other types of quest narrative; that of the relatively light-hearted and static “There and Back Again” adventure, and the narrative of the emerging patriarch whose quest is a life-changing journey towards marriage and fatherhood. Ultimately, the multiplicity of heroic journeys, characters, and modes that this combination makes available provide some of the greatest pleasures that the text has to offer, no matter the age of the reader.

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1  In medieval literature, the term romance refers simply to a narrative written in the vernacular, rather than one specifically concerned with sexual love. Indeed, the medieval romance, and its close relative the chanson de geste, is typically more concerned with battles, adventures, and deeds of chivalry than courtship, although the love of a lady may be provided as an excuse or reason for the carrying-out of great deeds. 2  With some recent exceptions, see for example ch. 16, and Chance (2003); Lee and Solopova (2005); Álvarez-Faedo (2007); Hanks (2011). 3  As Christopher Tolkien identifies in the notes to the poem’s 2013 edition, despite Tolkien’s

use of Anglo-Saxon verse form and poetic techniques, The Fall of Arthur draws elements of its plot from later Middle English poems, including the Alliterative Morte Arthure, the Stanzaic Morte Arthur and/or its French source, the Mort Artu, and Malory’s Morte Darthur (see Tolkien 2013, 73–122). Some influence from twelfthand thirteenth-century works such as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin Historia Regum Britanniae and Laȝamon’s Brut may also be present. 4  The rejected First and Second Epilogues were published in 1992 in Sauron (114–135).

References Álvarez-Faedo, María José. 2007. “Arthurian Reminiscences in Tolkien’s Trilogy The Lord of the Rings.” In Avalon Revisited, edited by María José Álvarez-Faedo, 185–209. Bern: Peter Lang. Armstrong, Helen. 2007. “Aragorn.” In J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopaedia, edited by Michael Drout, 22–24. London: Routledge. Auden, W. H. 2004. “The Quest Hero.” In Understanding the Lord of the Rings: The Best of Tolkien Criticism, edited by Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo, 31–51. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Originally published in 1961 in Texas Quarterly, 4: 81–93. Bliss, Jane. 2008. Naming and Namelessness in Medieval Romance. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer. Campbell, Joseph. 1971. The Hero With a Thousand Faces. 2nd edn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Caughey, Anna. 2013. “ ‘Methink It Grete Skill’: Conciliation, Negotiation and Forgiveness in Three Fifteenth-Century Scottish Romances.” In Fresche Fontanis: Studies in the Culture of Medieval and Early Modern Scotland, edited by J. Derrick McClure and Janet Hadley Williams, 97–111. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Chance, Jane. 2001. Tolkien’s Art: A Mythology for England. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

Chance, Jane, ed. 2003. Tolkien the Medievalist. London: Routledge. Cooper, Helen. 2004. The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crocker, Holly A. 2006. “Masculinity.” In Reading The Lord of the Rings: New Writing on Tolkien’s Classic, edited by Robert Eaglestone, 111–123. London: Continuum. Flieger, Verlyn. 1981. “Frodo and Aragorn: The Concept of the Hero.” In Tolkien: New Critical Perspectives, edited by Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo, 40–62. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Frye, Northrop. 1957. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays by Northrop Frye. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hanks, Thomas D. 2011. “ ‘A Far Green Country Under a Swift Sunrise’ – Tolkien’s Eucatastrophe and Malory’s Morte Darthur.” Fifteenth Century Studies 36: 49–64. Helms, Randel. 1974. Tolkien’s World. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Lee, Stuart D. and Elizabeth Solopova. 2005. The Keys of Middle-earth: Discovering Medieval Literature through the Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.



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Leibiger, Carol A. 2007. “Quest Narrative.” In J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopaedia, edited by Michael Drout, 552–553. London: Routledge. Rosebury, Brian. 2003. Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sale, Roger. 1968. “Tolkien and Frodo Baggins”. In Tolkien and the Critics: Essays on J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, edited by Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo, 247–288. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Sale, Roger. 1973. Modern Heroism: Essays on D. H. Lawrence, William Empson, & J. R. R. Tolkien. Berkeley: University of California Press. Shippey, Tom. 2000. J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. London: HarperCollins. Shippey, Tom. 2005. The Road to Middle-earth. Rev. and expanded edn. London: HarperCollins. Stanton, Michael N. 2007. “Frodo.” In J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopaedia, edited by Michael Drout, 223–225. London: Routledge. Swanwick, Michael. 2003. “A Changeling Returns.” In Meditations on Middle Earth, edited by Karen Haber, 33–36. London: Simon & Schuster. Thomson, George S. 1967. “The Lord of the Rings: The Novel as Traditional Romance.” Wisconsin

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Studies in Contemporary Literature, 8.1 (Winter): 43–59. West, Richard C. 2006. “Her Choice Was Made and Her Doom Appointed’: Tragedy and Divine Comedy in the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen.” In The Lord of the Rings, 1954–2004: Scholarship in Honour of Richard E. Blackwelder, edited by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, 318–329. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press. Woods, Paul A. 2005. Peter Jackson: From Gore to Mordor. London: Plexus. Wynne Jones, Diana. 1983. “The Shape of the Narrative in The Lord of the Rings.” In J. R. R. Tolkien: This Far Land, edited by Robert Giddings, 87–107. London: Vision Press. Youngerman Miller, Miriam. 1991. “Of sum mayn meruayle, þat he myȝt trawe’: The Lord of the Rings and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” Studies in Medievalism, 3.3: 345–366. Zimmer Bradley, Marion. 1968. “Men, Halflings and Hero Worship.” In Tolkien and the Critics: Essays on J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, edited by Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo, 109–127. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

Further Reading Benson, Larry and Edward Foster. 1994. King Arthur’s Death: The Middle English Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Alliterative Morte Arthure. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications. Chance, Jane. 2006. “Subversive Fantasist: Tolkien on Class Difference.” In The Lord of the Rings, 1954–2004: Scholarship in Honour of Richard E. Blackwelder, edited by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, 153–168. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press. Flieger, Verlyn. 1993. “The Green Man, the Green Knight and Treebeard.” In Scholarship and

Fantasy: Proceedings of the Tolkien Phenomenon, edited by K. J. Battarbee, 85–98. Turku: University of Turku. Seaman, Gerald. 2007. “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Edition with E. V. Gordon.” In J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopaedia, edited by Michael Drout, 615–616. London: Routledge. Shippey, Tom. 2004. “Another Road to MiddleEarth.” In Understanding the Lord of the Rings: The Best of Tolkien Criticism, edited by Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo, 233–254. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

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Evil Christopher Garbowski

One of the more striking features of Tolkien’s Middle-earth writings – from the novelistic The Lord of the Rings to the mythopoeic “Silmarillion” corpus in its various published editions – is the depiction of the earnest struggle between good and evil at various levels. On the one hand, this theme has likely been one of the reasons for the great popularity of Tolkien’s work; on the other, it is also a reason why his work has not been taken seriously by critics (see ch. 25). The literary embodiment of the conflict as “fantasy” has quite evidently been part of the problem: with its often highly externalized and overtly grotesque form the less sympathetic casual reader or less attentive critic can be forgiven for perceiving a seemingly simplistic Manichean world (the title of Edmund Wilson’s 1956 review is quite telling – “Oo, Those Awful Orcs!”). Even upon penetrating the form, literary critics have had problems because in the largely disenchanted world of criticism serious reflection upon evil has rarely been undertaken. This may seem odd considering the ubiquity of evil in the twentieth century. It is hardly a wonder that pondering the Holocaust upon the conclusion of World War II philosopher Hanna Arendt claimed, “the problem of evil will be the fundamental question of European post-war intellectual life” (Dews 2005, 51). For various reasons this was not to be the case – in Europe or elsewhere – and literary critics were not alone in side-tracking the weightier implications of the problem. It is only early in the twenty-first century that one of them, Terry Eagleton, wrote a somewhat longer essay on the topic (2010). Most serious Tolkien scholars have dealt with the problem of evil in his work, but these have had to draw upon philosophy or theology in a manner not typical for literary scholars.

A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.



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In this study of the theme of evil in Tolkien’s oeuvre, a number of issues will be of special concern. The question of genre is one key issue: how the fact that the author chose the mode of fantasy to present the theme impacted on its content and form will be examined. Fantasy is closely connected with what Tolkien himself called sub-creation. The term itself is significant, implying as it does theological concerns in which the artist as a Secondary Creator imitates God the Primary Creator (see ch. 5). Indeed, Tolkien’s religious worldview is partly implicit in the portrayal of evil in his fiction (see ch. 30). Another major influence on how the author understood evil was his experience of war, particularly World War I, in which he personally fought on the front (see ch. 31). War had a diverse impact on numerous writers and their understanding of evil during the twentieth century. Reflecting on World War II, for instance, Anthony Burgess felt the Augustinian view of fallen human nature had been vindicated; from this perspective he accused the Bloomsbury group of Pelagianism, that is, an overly optimistic view of human nature. Similarly, an Augustinian view of human nature in this pessimistic sense can be detected in Tolkien. However, as we will see, it is offset by his robust view of the good life, especially in The Lord of the Rings, and thus the struggle between good and evil gains all the more urgency.

Tolkien and War In the course of correspondence with his son Christopher during World War II Tolkien made a telling disclosure about his motivation for writing. He had been discussing his progress in writing The Lord of the Rings and now responded to an element of his son’s war experience by recommending writing as a kind of therapy: I sense amongst all your pains (some merely physical) the desire to express your feeling about good, evil, fair, foul in some way: to rationalize it, and prevent it just festering. In my case it generated Morgoth and the History of the Gnomes. (Letters 78)

Tolkien was referring to his experiences of World War I and how they motivated his mythopoeic writing thematically at the primal moral level that experiencing war forced him to deal with. Most specifically, he refers to the legendarium incorporated in The Book of Lost Tales, which would later evolve into his “Silmarillion” mythology. But it is not hard to discern how those themes engrossed much of his mature work. That the experience of war, in combination with his Catholicism, might have confirmed in him the largely Augustinian understanding of human nature evident in his work is quite possible, but is largely a matter of conjecture. Although it is generally accepted that the Great War affected Tolkien’s view of heroism and that this is perceptible within his work, a pertinent question is how the experience more specifically impacted on the development and depiction of evil. John Garth, the author of the near definitive study of Tolkien and World War I, persuasively points out that in

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his creative work the author was able to generalize the horror of war: “Orcs and Elves do not equate to the Germans and the British, they distil the cruelty and the courage he saw on both sides, as well as more general qualities of barbarism and civilisation” (2003, 299–300). The long-lasting nature of this feeling, expressed in his mythopoeic work initiated during the course of World War I, was unexpectedly expressed a couple of decades later when he published The Hobbit in 1937. During his narrative explanation about the Goblins he could not refrain from adding – quite an odd aside in a children’s book of the period – a literal description of such a sentiment: “It is not unlikely that they invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines always delighted them” (H 59). Garth cogently argues that a number of fantasy elements in Tolkien’s work can be understood as symbolic treatments of wartime experience: “The war imposed urgency and gravity, took him through terror, sorrow, and unexpected joy, and reinvented the real world in a strange, extreme form” (2003, 309). One could add to the list the counterpoints of the inner struggle against evil: despair and hope. A passage in The Lord of the Rings which illustrates the poignant transition from one to the other is Sam’s sight of a star breaking through the clouds during the dreary journey across Mordor: There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. (RK, VI, ii, 1206)

The experience is incorporated into the Middle-earth mythology – Sam is moved to reflect on the impermanence of the “Shadow” – but an existential perception is also captured in the passage. That an experience of the sublime in nature could give a ray of hope to people in the desperate circumstances of war is documented by psychiatrist Viktor E. Frankl, who describes similar situations in his memoir essay “Experiences in a Concentration Camp” (1984, 59–60). Among the conclusions of his study Garth asserts that “Without the war it is arguable whether his fictions would have focused on a conflict between good and evil; or if they had, whether good and evil would have taken the same shape” (2003, 309). It is the literary “shape” of this struggle that will be examined next.

Sub-creation and Evil As mentioned above, Tolkien understood fantasy as sub-creation. Before looking at this aspect more closely, we will examine fantasy and evil in more generic terms. Fantasy in its most common narrative mode consists in a combination of the romantic mode and elements of the fairy-tale. A critic like Northrop Frye may balk, but it is



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not an uncommon combination. Among its salient features, according to Lesley Brill, “As in dreams and nightmares, reality mixes with projections of desire and anxiety” (1988, 6). More in line with our theme, Brill adds, “Good and evil figures embody radically competing world views. Frye characterizes the conflict as a struggle to maintain ‘the integrity of the innocent world against the assault of experience.’ ” The latter is a succinct, if not particularly nuanced, description of the conflict in The Lord of the Rings. In keeping with the genre, in his rendition of evil figures or beings Tolkien often resorts to the grotesque or monstrous. He himself reflected on monsters in his celebrated 1936 British Academy lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” The monster serves various functions in the fantastic narrative, depending on the needs of the tale. In the case of Beowulf, the dragon acts as “a personification of malice, greed, destruction (the evil side of heroic life), and of the undiscriminating cruelty of fortune that distinguishes not good or bad (the evil aspect of all life)” (MC 17). Tolkien recognizes that at one level confronting the monster is an externalized version of an internal struggle for the hero. This meaning is further developed by the author in his own The Lord of the Rings, in which, as Jane Chance argues, “[t]he hero must realize that he can become a monster” (2004, 200). Frodo matures in the first part of the trilogy to the point where he realizes he himself can be a monster, before he can become a true hero. According to Alison Milbank, Tolkien’s monsters have another aspect: “the monsters of Tolkien’s art are facts of Middle-earth life that the reader does not fully comprehend; and in so acting, they dramatize the unknowability of its universe” (2009, 67). In this sense, she continues, one of their functions is evoking a sense of wonder. If accepted, the perception can be connected with an observation previously made by Ursula Le Guin: “Those who fault Tolkien on the Problem of Evil are usually those who have an answer to the Problem of Evil – which he did not” (Curry 1997, 101). The dark core of the problem of evil in the last century has proved most resilient to disenchantment, that is, to rational explanation (cf. Dews 2005): monsters in Tolkien’s fantasy are symbolic of the ultimate unknowability of evil in rational terms. To reiterate, for Tolkien fantasy was primarily the product of sub-creation, in which the artist as a Secondary Creator imitates God the Primary Creator. One of the features of this kind of fantasy is its evocation of the “inner consistency of reality” (OFS 59) in the created world. In order to achieve this quality, the sub-creator should avoid irony, which indicates the artificiality of the Secondary World. As he writes in his essay “On Fairy-Stories”: “if there is any satire present in the tale, one thing must not be made fun of, the magic itself. That must in that story be taken seriously, neither laughed at nor explained away” (OFS 33). The author quite evidently adhered to this rule in creating his Middle-earth fiction. It can also be noticed how this rule applies to the presentation of the conflict between good and evil in the sub-created world: it cannot be treated ironically or it dissipates, nor was Tolkien inclined to do so. Another issue connected with sub-creation is that of narrative form. Unquestionably its most successful instantiation for Tolkien is in the form of a novel, The Lord

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of the Rings. The theme of the struggle between good and evil is also most profoundly treated in the work, but it also works at a dramatic level. What makes it compelling for the reader, according to Brian Rosebury, is the delight which is evoked by Middleearth itself, in which sufficient empathy is aroused in order to deplore the thought of Sauron laying it to waste. “Vital to the achievement of this response is the contrast between the diversity of good and the sameness of evil,” argues the critic. “The benign societies of Middle-earth have few uniform features,” while “evil tends to homogeneity” (Rosebury 2003, 42, 45). This is also close to the core of the source of strength to overcome evil, as will be discussed later.

Power and Domination Power and domination is the theme of The Lord of the Rings most clearly linked with the conflict between good and evil. Before examining the theme’s instantiation in that work, it is useful to explore the link with Tolkien’s conception of sub-creation. This is best illustrated in one of the most theological of the author’s works incorporated in the “Silmarillion” mythology. The “Ainulindalë” is a creation myth that structurally resembles the Christian creation myth: Eru Ilúvatar is the godhead, the Ainur resemble the angels, while Melkor becomes a fallen angel like Lucifer. In Tolkien’s myth, as Rosebury observes, the angels are “sub-creators” that participate in the creation of the Middle-earth universe together with Ilúvatar, and Melkor’s rebellion is also as a sub-creator, who wishes to create outside of the godhead’s consent: Melkor begins as an impatient creative spirit; as the myth proceeds, his activity becomes progressively more destructive, because it has been tainted from the beginning with pride of power and self-glorification: his desire to create other beings for his glory rather than for delight in their independent life degenerates into the desire for servants of his will, and finally into hatred of all other wills and all products of others’ creativity. (Rosebury 2003, 189)

This process of the degeneration of sub-creation continues into The Lord of the Rings, where Sauron, the servant of Melkor/Morgoth, is the eponymous Lord of the Rings. Although his roots are supernatural, he is no sub-creator, but a mere craftsman, who forges Rings to dominate others. Power and domination are now the only aims, and what is left of creativity – craftsmanship of itself is a good that Tolkien regarded highly – is subordinated to that end. The One Ring is a fetish, in accordance with folklore traditions an object in which the eponymous Lord has incorporated something of himself (Milbank 2009, 81); in this case his power to dominate. Putting a fetish in the foreground also means the Dark Lord himself is never physically present. In this sense Bradley Birzer is partially correct when he asserts:



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By placing evil in the background of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien has created an evil that is outright ominous, for it seems to be everywhere, pervading the entire landscape of Middle-earth, surrounding the Fellowship of the Ring on all sides. (Birzer 2002, 91)

Sauron is only seen only once, indirectly – through the Palantir – otherwise his presence is felt through a disembodied eye or his agents: most monstrous, some initially disguised as benign. The Ring, however, throughout the entire novel until its climax is in the hands of the good characters and is the agent by which the hero can become a monster, if not worse, at any moment. Thus an essential plane of the conflict between good and evil is internal: either internal to the hero or his community. If drawing upon folklore and fairy-tale traditions together with the medievalism of the setting gives The Lord of the Rings a nostalgic feeling – part of its charm for many readers – critic Tom Shippey (2005, 154–157) notes a decidedly modern theme at its core: the conception behind the Ring’s danger to its user, no matter how benevolent, is that “power corrupts.” The theme is modern since before the eighteenth century it was believed the person of virtue can wield power, whereas in The Lord of the Rings virtue is no guarantee against the Ring’s corruption. Moreover, along the lines expressed in Lord Acton’s maxim, “Power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely,” the most powerful are even more susceptible to the Ring’s corruption. What is more, it is addictive when used, which is why Gandalf wisely advises Frodo against its use. The attitude toward power of a given character decides whether or not he or she is likely to come under the Ring’s sway or not: “The very desire of it corrupts the heart,” Elrond warns (FR, II, ii, 348), and this is demonstrated in the novel. The implication that power can corrode virtue is not far removed from a similar theme that Ralph Wood detects in The Lord of the Rings: “Over and over again, [Tolkien] demonstrates his fundamental conviction that evil preys on our virtues far more than our vices” (Wood 2003, 62). The possession of this knowledge, according to the critic, is the reason why Gandalf and Galadriel avoid the temptation of taking the Ring for themselves when it is offered to them. In contrast to the Rings of Power there are the Three Elven Rings. “[T]hey were not made as weapons of war and conquest,” Elrond informs Glóin at his council, “that is not their power. Those who made them did not desire strength or domination or hoarded wealth, but understanding, making, and healing, to preserve all things unstained” (FR, II, ii, 350). Nancy Enright points out that power described in the above passage is in distinct contrast to “traditional, male oriented power.” She further argues that what Tolkien attempts to illustrate in his work is not simply that the right spiritual qualities are necessary to combat evil, but that an alternative type of power exists: “If The Lord of the Rings shows anything about power, it makes clear the fact that true power for anyone comes from renouncing earthly dominance, and from giving oneself for the healing and love of others” (Enright 2007, 99, 106). Enright associates this with a Christian understanding of power implicit in Middle-earth; Douglas K. Blount makes a similar point, but also indicates a perhaps

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unconscious polemic on the part of Tolkien with Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power by offering a compelling picture of its opposite: Strength . . . manifests itself most clearly not in the exercise of power but rather in the willingness to give it up. . . . Abnegation, the subordination of one’s will for the sake of others – that, according to the portrait Tolkien presents, is what characterizes a life well lived; and, given its obvious beauty, such a portrait needs no argument to defend it. (Blount 2003, 98)

While there is a power or strength for the good that comes from a person’s ability for self-transcendence implied in the arguments above, Wood argues Tolkien recognized the need for the proper use of force to counter evil (2003, 95). He contrasts the brothers Faramir and Boromir; the latter relishes military engagement, the former makes clear he is willing to use force only when necessary: War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, not the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend: the city of the Men of Númenor; and I would have her loved for her memory, her ancientry, her beauty, and her present wisdom. Not feared, save as men may fear the dignity of a man, old and wise. (TT, IV, v, 878)

Active Evil vs. Evil as Privation Numerous critics focus on various aspects of the theme of power and domination in The Lord of the Rings; nevertheless, the theme itself is evident enough to evoke little controversy. Among the more debated questions is the actual nature of evil within the created world. The seminal arguments concerning the ontology of evil were forcefully laid out by Shippey (2005, 159ff.). The critic indicates the importance of the orthodox Christian, or Augustinian, view of evil for Tolkien, arguing the possible mediation of Boethius, an important author for medievalists, for whom “evil is nothing.” The implications of this philosophy are that evil cannot create, only imitate and pervert the good. Consistent with this perspective, Elrond proclaims: “nothing is evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so” (FR, II, ii, 349). Likewise Gandalf exhorts the Lord of the Nazgûl at the gates of Minis Tirith: “Go back to the abyss prepared for you! Go back! Fall into the nothingness that awaits you and your Master” (RK, V, iv, 1085). Significantly, evil is often referred to as a “Shadow.” On the other hand, another Christian view, proffered by King Alfred in Anglo-Saxon times, is that evil is real and must be actively resisted. King Alfred had the advantage of realism; as Shippey puts it, “In the 1930s and 1940s Boethius was especially hard to believe” (2005, 161). The danger with this view lies in its tendency to slip toward Manichean dualism, wherein evil is virtually an equal force to the good. For Shippey, the characteristics of the Ring



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portray the tensions between the view of active evil and evil as privation. “Tolkien saw the problem of evil as in realities,” concludes Shippey, “and he told his story at least in part to dramatise the problem; he did not however claim to know the answer to it” (2005, 164). Although not all his arguments were original, coming as they did in a seminal work of Tolkien criticism Shippey’s views have been the center of the ongoing polemic on the topic, with salient points presented below. Among later critics, Shippey has not been isolated in his dualist thesis, which he actually strengthened in another work (Shippey 2000). Some have claimed there is a strong dualistic tendency in Middle-earth, others simply agree with Shippey’s original claim that Tolkien’s work is not conclusive on the matter (cf. Kerry 2011, 28–29). It seems greater support has been garnered for the view of the primarily Augustinian underpinnings of Tolkien’s world, perhaps on account of the issue being of keen concern for authors of religious interpretations. Tim McKenzie (2008, 93), for instance, argues Shippey’s fundamental error lies in equating the Boethian view on evil with that of Augustine. For Boethius evil was indeed illusory, preying on our internal weaknesses; alternately for Augustine, although evil was a privation, “evil consequences and actions in the world are not illusory but very real.” Moreover, Augustine’s viewpoint attributed greater potential for evil to those with greater resources. Evil has gradations; consequently, “[t]he Augustinian viewpoint allows us to sympathise with Gollum and Boromir and Denethor.” A number of philosophers have examined Tolkien’s portrayal of evil in The Lord of the Rings and likewise tend toward an Augustinian conception of evil in the work. Scott A. Davison (2003, 101) refers specifically to Shippey and rejects his explanation that the Ring demonstrates active evil, “since it is animated by Sauron’s will and power.” He further explains that in Augustine’s view the source of evil is inordinate desire, concluding: “Sauron’s evil lies in his desire to usurp God. As St. Augustine would say, this kind of desire is the root of all evil.” Thomas Hibbs, on the other hand, studies the role of Providence in Middle-earth, and claims that according to the Augustinian conception, if evil were to be an independent force it would rule out Providence. Evil is first and foremost privation; nevertheless, the philosopher adds, “Augustine and Tolkien try to reconcile this teaching with the psychological experience of the seeming existence of evil” (Hibbs 2003, 174). In her analysis, Milbank (2009) argues that the evil as privation metaphysics applies to most of the monsters of Middle-earth, but admits the existence of Shelob, not to mention Ungoliant before her, is more problematic. Nihilism is evident elsewhere in the created world, but Shelob “represents it and embodies it as if she were an arachnic black hole” (78). Nevertheless, monstrous nihilism does have a positive function, in that it “serves to show up the goodness of being by contrast and vice versa” (80). In a similar manner, argues Milbank, as in the case of Gollum, Saruman, and Gríma Wormtongue: the evil and truly monstrous are spared by the forces of good so that they may go on to cause their own downfall. Both in their original monstrosity and power, and in the

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way that power draws upon itself its own destruction, they witness to the Good. (Millbank 2009, 71)

The critic also observes that some of the evil characters are Manicheans. This point can be extended into arguing that it matters what attitude the characters or heroes of the created world hold toward evil. The heroes who hold an Augustinian view are more apt to extend mercy to the evil characters, because they understand that the latter were not always evil, and that there is at least a chance of their redemption, as Gandalf famously argues on behalf of Gollum. Although Rosebury is among the critics against a Manichean interpretation of The Lord of the Rings, he nonetheless suggests that within Shippey’s depiction of the Ring lay the alternative methods for dealing with its threat: passive forbearance and active resistance. These tactics must be used together: Frodo and his friends must resist the temptation to use the Ring’s corrupting power; yet if they attempt to hide it, Sauron will recover it sooner or later. They must both renounce it and actively seek its destruction, using courage and guile to outwit its master. (Rosebury 2007, 250–251)

Summing up the ontological argument the critic also lays out its significance for the reader. Rosebury notes it is of secondary importance whether or not the reader is cognizant of the conceptual grounding: “the essential point is that the negativity of evil, and the intrinsic goodness of ‘the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation’ [a quote from OFS] are consistently and palpably maintained” (2003, 35). This contrast, among others, will now be discussed in its relation to the resources available on the side of the Good in confrontation with Evil.

Polyphonic Good vs. Monological Evil The creation story in The Silmarillion with its godhead implies the workings of providence in Middle-earth. Providence is even recognized by its characters at a number of junctures of The Lord of the Rings, such as when Gandalf suggests that Frodo was “meant” to have the Ring (FR, I, ii, 73). However, the subtlety of its operations and the fact that often providence can only be detected in hindsight has moral and dramatic significance in the narrative: “The mysterious, incomprehensible designs of providence underscore the importance of human effort, a sense that, in spite of the apparent odds, one must press on to do one’s duty in the fight against evil” (Hibbs 2003, 170). The strength for this struggle comes partly from within, developing the appropriate virtues, as Wood argues below, but also from resources outside the self. A key component of the resistance to evil comes from a genuine alternative existing within a robust conception of the good life more or less collectively evident in the free peoples



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of Middle-earth. A salient aspect of this is the fact that benign characters are embedded in community. In The Lord of the Rings, Hibbs points out, “Tolkien gives us characters who can only understand themselves and their duties as parts of larger wholes, as members of nations and races, as participants in alliances and friendships for the good, and ultimately as part of a natural cosmos” (Hibbs 2003, 173). In the quote above, Faramir draws strength for the war against Sauron through his love of Gondor, a particular place, and all it represents. Tolkien initially establishes the theme of community in the novel by presenting the Hobbits and their ways. These fundamentally simple people are full of joie de vivre. Patrick Curry observes that the sense of community is fostered by the Hobbits’ “decentralized parish or municipal democracy, their bioregionalism (living within an area defined by its natural characteristics, and its limits), and their enduring love of, and feeling for, place” (Curry 1997, 27). The Shire is relatively small, but even the more sophisticated and much larger kingdom of Gondor is essentially decentralized and quite diverse. Although a sizeable kingdom can hardly generate community spanning its width and breadth, its various regions are nevertheless held together by ties of reciprocity. As Rosebury observes: When the forces of the outlying regions [of Gondor] troop in to Minis Tirith in The Return of the King, they do so under their own captains, and are markedly differentiated from one another by their dress and gear: the people of the city hail them as friends, rather than taking their conscription for granted. (2003, 173)

If evil is a form of non-being, Good nurtures authentic being, which is diverse and polyphonic. The benign people have their various cultures, and these cultures tend to foster particular virtues. Among the intellectual virtues, the Hobbits possess a “capacity for disinterested curiosity” which makes them attractive (Rosebury 2003, 51). Morally, they are stoical in what seem to be hopeless circumstances. “They are determined simply to slog ahead,” observes Wood (2003, 105), “to trudge forward no matter what, to ‘see it through,’ as Sam says.” The peoples of Middle-earth are all fallible, but the good characters are guided by human virtues that are completed by grace: “Tolkien the Christian imbues The Lord of the Rings not only with pagan virtues as they are classically conceived,” Wood (2003, 77) argues, “but also with the conviction that, when completed and perfected, prudence issues in holy folly, justice in undeserved mercy, courage in unexpected endurance, and temperance in joyful self-denial.” These havens of virtues are largely in isolation from each other at the onset of the novel, and the different virtues are weakened on account of this. Part of the strategy of Sauron is to keep the different peoples and their strengths apart. The Dwarves and Elves are in enmity, for example. The Elf Haldir observes, that “in nothing is the power of the Dark Lord more clearly shown than in the estrangement that divides all those who still oppose him” (FR, II, vi, 453). Tolkien uses the motif of the journey, by individuals and fellowships, as a means of bringing these different moral resources

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together. Thus dialogue is a precondition for the survival of the free people who must overcome their isolation if they are to adequately deal with the danger facing them. This dialogue is a central feature of the Fellowship, with its diverse members, who develop a sense of purpose that unites them even when circumstances break up their physical proximity. That Frodo, one of the heroes of the novel, succumbs to the power of the Ring, is consistent with Tolkien’s oft expressed conviction that “the power of evil is too great to be resisted by incarnate creatures without divine aid” (Rutledge 2004, 10). The Augustinian sense of fallen humanity is not only apparent in Middle-earth peoples, but it is also a significant factor that elevates The Lord of the Rings above a binary good versus evil tale: the best characters either realize that evil is not only in the “other” but also a potential within themselves, or they learn this at some point in the narrative. Instead of leading to pessimism, however, it is one of their strengths. It gives them an advantage of moral imagination over monological evil: whereas the profoundly evil forces cannot conceive of an action that is not based on self-interest, in this case the disposal of the One Ring, the good characters can imagine themselves as evil, which influences their strategy. In a related manner we have a major paradox in the Middle-earth epic: “The most paradoxical of all the redemptive actions in The Lord of the Rings makes use of evil’s capacity to defeat itself,” Milbank (2009, 205) observes regarding the final destruction of the Ring, adding: “Again and again, evil fails because it is so strong, so extensive and so highly organized.” Sauron, for all his power and malicious intelligence, “cannot imagine selflessness” (Rutledge 2004, 162), and this ultimately leads to his downfall.

Evil and History in Middle-earth “One of Middle-earth’s cosmic conditions is the growth of legend into history,” claims Lionel Basey (2004, 192). Tolkien himself admits as much in the draft of a letter to Revd. Robert Murray concerning deeper themes of The Lord of the Rings: [T]his story exhibits “myth” passing into History or the Dominion of Men; for of course the Shadow will arise again in a sense (as is clearly foretold by Gandalf), but never again (unless it be before the great End) will an evil daemon be incarnate as a physical enemy. (Letters 207)

The conceit in the letter is the same as in the introduction to The Lord of the Rings, in which the narrator connects Middle-earth with our own world, where Hobbits “still linger” (FR, Prologue, 3). But the mythical nature of evil in Middle-earth is clearly indicated, as well as the ongoing struggle against it in history. Conversely, reference to evil in the non-fictional world history is only obliquely suggested once in the novel, when the Shire is most peaceful, during the “marvellous year” after the War of the Ring has concluded:



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The fruit was so plentiful that young hobbits very nearly bathed in strawberries and cream; and later they sat on the lawns under plum-trees and ate, until they made piles of stones like small pyramids or the heaped skulls of a conqueror, and then they moved on. (RK, VI, ix, 1339, emphasis added)

One of the rare instances the narrator engages in black humor. Meanwhile, the hero of the victory, Frodo, gains no rest nor glory, and spiritually exhausted eventually leaves Middle-earth. The impermanence of any possible victory over evil in history is best articulated by Gandalf at a crucial juncture of the novel: [I]t is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule. (RK, V, ix, 1150)

This sentiment expressed by a major character proves Tolkien’s world is anti-utopian: in the context of a twentieth century that wrought great evil in the name of various utopias, that is saying not a little. Alexandra Bolintineanu evokes the poignancy of Tolkien’s major work in its relation to the theme under discussion: The Ring is destroyed, and a great evil is banished from the world. The victory is neither permanent nor complete: much that is good and beautiful, not the least being the kingdom of Lothlórien, passes away with the destruction of the Rings of Power, and to some of the world’s troubles, like the plight of the Ents, the victory over Sauron brings no cure. But, though the achievement is alloyed with sorrow, its essential goodness abides. (2004, 270)

Returning to Tolkien’s own experience of history from which World War I casts its enormous shadow on his fiction: quite understandably in this personal context his early mythopoeic works are generally morose, and the good characters are wooden or overly somber. Aside from his children’s stories and some rare instances, it took decades for the author to portray evil without simultaneously at least partially devaluing the good. His major achievement, when it finally came in The Lord of the Rings, portrays a world in which the costs of confronting enormous evil are clearly evident, but – as the author quoted above puts it – the “essential goodness abides.”

References Birzer, Bradley J. 2002. J. R. R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-earth. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books.

Basey, Lionel. 2004. “Myth, History, and Time in The Lord of the Rings.” In Understanding The Lord of the Rings: The Best of Tolkien Criticism, edited

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by Rose A. Zimbardo and Neil D. Isaacs, 183– 194. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Blount, Douglas K. 2003. “Überhobbits: Tolkien, Nietzsche, and the Will to Power.” In The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy, edited by Gregory Bassham and Eric Bronson, 87–98. Chicago and La Salle: Open Court. Bolintineanu, Alexandra. 2004. “ ‘On the Borders of Old Stories’: Enacting the Past in Beowulf and The Lord of the Rings.” In Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader, edited by Jane Chance, 263– 273. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Brill, Lesley. 1988. The Hitchcock Romance: Love and Irony in Hitchcock’s Films. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chance, Jane. 2004. “The Lord of the Rings: Tolkien’s Epic.” In Understanding The Lord of the Rings: The Best of Tolkien Criticism, edited by Rose A. Zimbardo and Neil D. Isaacs, 195–232. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Curry, Patrick. 1997. Defending Middle-earth: Tolkien, Myth, and Modernity. Edinburgh: Floris Books. Davison, Scott A. 2003. “Tolkien and the Nature of Evil.” In The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy, edited by Gregory Bassham and Eric Bronson, 99–109. Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 2003. Dews, Peter. 2005. “Disenchantment and the Persistence of Evil: Habermas, Jonas, Badion.” In Modernity and the Problem of Evil, edited by Alan D. Schrift, 51–65. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Eagleton, Terry. 2010. On Evil. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Enright, Nancy. 2007. “Tolkien’s Females and the Defining of Power.” Renascence, 59.2: 93–108. Frankl, Viktor E. 1984. Man’s Search for Meaning. New York: Washington Square Press.

Garth, John. 2003. Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth. London: HarperCollins. Hibbs, Thomas. 2003. “Providence and the Dramatic Unity of The Lord of the Rings.” In The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy, edited by Gregory Bassham and Eric Bronson, 167–178. Chicago and La Salle: Open Court. Kerry, Paul E. 2011. “Introduction: A Historiography of Christian Approaches to Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.” In The Ring and the Cross: Christianity and The Lord of the Rings, edited by Paul E. Kerry, 17–53. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. McKenzie, Tim. 2008. “ ‘I Pity Even His Slaves’: Tolkien and the Theology of Evil.” In The Ring Goes Ever On: Proceedings of the Tolkien 2005 Conference: 50 Years of The Lord of the Rings, edited by Sarah Wells, vol. 2, 91–98. Coventry: The Tolkien Society. Milbank, Alison. 2009. Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians: The Fantasy of the Real. London: T&T Clark. Rosebury, Brian. 2003. Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rosebury, Brian. 2007. “Good and Evil.” In J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopaedia, edited by Michael Drout, 250–251. London: Routledge. Rutledge, Fleming. 2004. The Battle for Middleearth: Tolkien’s Divine Design in The Lord of the Rings. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Shippey, Tom. 2000. J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. London: HarperCollins. Shippey, Tom. 2005. The Road to Middle-earth. Rev. and expanded edn. London: HarperCollins. Wood, Ralph. 2003. The Gospel According to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in Middle-earth. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.

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Nature Liam Campbell

When visiting the writings of Tolkien, one is immediately struck by the sheer multiplicity of represented, reconceived, and imagined natural elements. These natural presentations gather to breathe a perceptible life force across Tolkien’s fictional works and secondary worlds: there are highly detailed and vibrant passages that focus on not only trees, flora, grasslands, and waterways, but also weather, phases of the moon, wilderness, unforgiving mountains, swamps, and passing seasons. Add to this the sweeping diversity of living beings, fauna, and creatures: from those who drive opposing sides in the War of the Ring to great eagles, horses, spiders, and much more besides. Such is the sheer depth and richness of perceived reality in Tolkien’s created landscapes, ecologies, and ecosystems, that readers, especially as regards Tolkien’s secondary world of Middle-earth, have reported feeling as if they are in a real place. This analysis seeks to the throw focus upon the prominent role nature and natural phenomena play in Tolkien’s work: conceptually, thematically, stylistically, and also in terms of how the presentation of nature in Tolkien’s fiction is almost always central to the narrative or poetic design. Key to this discourse also is an examination of how Tolkien’s love for the natural world, as well as his desire to defend the rights of natural things, fed into his creative imagination. Before traveling into Tolkien’s fiction and secondary world lands, however, perhaps we should first travel back to the roots of his affection for nature: back to his childhood. And although more detailed biographical material is to be found elsewhere in this volume, the importance of Tolkien’s formative years in the context of Tolkien and “Nature” requires a brief retelling here.

A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Roots of Affection As a young boy, and after the sudden death of his father Arthur in South Africa, Tolkien with his brother Hilary and mother Mabel, by necessity of emergency, spent some time in the urban and industrialized setting of Birmingham. After a while, however, Mabel secured a move for her and the boys from the metropolitan smog of Birmingham to the picturesque, pastoral hamlet of Sarehole a few miles from the south side of the city. It was here amid the bucolic beauty of the hamlet’s location, with encouragement, guidance, and instruction from his mother, that Tolkien first developed an appreciation for the world of nature. With the serene enclave of Sarehole as a classroom, Mabel instructed young Tolkien in aspects of botany, and fostered in him what was to become a lifelong love for growing things, especially trees. Under her tutelage Tolkien marveled with ever-growing wonder at the garden of nature that was all around him. At the same time as developing his interest in nature, of course, young Tolkien was also becoming interested in language and tales that offered strange new worlds and creatures (he was particularly fond of Andrew Lang’s Red Fairy Book), and these foundations of his own creative imagination were beginning to forge together in a process that would greatly impact his later fiction1 Humphrey Carpenter also draws attention to the importance of this forging of idyllic setting and creative development: “Just at an age when his imagination was opening out, [Tolkien] found himself in the English countryside” (Carpenter 1977, 20). It is worth taking a moment to underline that Tolkien’s appreciation for nature was much more than a commonplace fondness for the green face of the world. On many occasions Tolkien would unashamedly declare a love for natural phenomena (especially of trees): “I am (obviously) much in love with plants and above all trees and always have been; and I find human maltreatment of them as hard to bear as some find ill-treatment of animals” (Letters 220). What is of note here is the intensity of Tolkien’s sentiments, and also the fact that he is drawing attention to abuses against nature. Given that this is taken from a letter written in 1955, before any organized environmental movement, Tolkien’s anxieties for the welfare of natural things is particularly revelatory of his deep embrace of the natural world. Indeed again and again in letters and interviews Tolkien displayed and declared what we may now refer to as a visionary, ecocentric worldview that took account of, and by extension promoted, the “rights” of nature. As is made clear in this 1962 letter to his aunt Jane Neave, Tolkien had a propensity to actually worry about the fate of trees: There was a great tree – a huge poplar with vast limbs – visible through my window even as I lay in bed. I loved it, and was anxious about it. It had been savagely mutilated some years before, but had gallantly grown new limbs . . . now a foolish neighbour was agitating to have it felled. Every tree has its enemy, few have an advocate. (Letters 321)

In a further recollection from his childhood years Tolkien communicates the profound and lasting effect the felling of one particular tree had upon him:



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There was a willow hanging over the mill-pool and I learned to climb it. It belonged to a butcher on the Stratford Road, I think. One day they cut it down. They didn’t do anything with it: the log just lay there. I never forgot that. (Carpenter 1977, 22)

In this we may perhaps trace the first stirrings of apprehension in young Tolkien for the fate of trees and nature that would later find focus in literary manifestations such as the desolate landscapes of Isengard and the Shire under Sharkey. Indeed this particular account of needless destruction is echoed as Farmer Cotton relays to the returning Hobbits how Sharkey’s men conduct their business: “hack, burn, and ruin; and now it’s come to killing. There’s no longer even any bad sense in it. They cut down trees and let ’em lie” (RK, VI, viii,1325). Taken collectively we see here evidence of a boy, a man, and a writer who not only deeply loved and embraced trees and nature, but who also held extremely progressive views concerning the unwarranted destruction of natural phenomena.2 Tolkien in this regard was a visionary environmentalist, or as Ralph C. Wood puts it: “an unapologetic defender of nature before environmentalism had yet been made into a cause” (Wood 2003, 28).

Tree, Leaf, Wind, Rock, and Sky The imagined vistas and natural scenes we find in Tolkien’s fiction are presented unfailingly with a rich and striking graphic intensity, especially in Tolkien’s legendarium where they are given a wealth of narrative time, and the various descriptions and depictions of landscapes, creatures, and plants we meet in Middle-earth are meticulously delivered. Alongside recognizable natural inclusions such as grass, oak, or fox, we find the healing power of the “athelas,” the pale, snow-colored “niphredil,” the tree-like Ents and Huorns, the sapient Mearas steeds, or the Crebain crows that are drawn into service as spies of Saruman – the imagined and the actual coexist in Tolkien’s fiction to offer us a heightened and enchanted natural world. Yet also, with each differing focus and change of scene, each landscape, realm or environment is singularly memorable. When the Elf Haldir removes Frodo’s blindfold as the company arrives at Lothlórien for example, there is a shimmering magnificence that attends the “mallorn-trees of great height . . . arrayed in pale gold” and the outflow of the unfolding view that greets both Frodo and reader alike: At the feet of the trees, and all about the green hillsides the grass was studded with small golden flowers shaped like stars. Among them, nodding on slender stalks, were other flowers, white and palest green: they glimmered as a mist amid the rich hue of the grass. Over all the sky was blue and the sun of the afternoon glowed upon the hill and cast long green shadows beneath the trees. (FR, II, vi, 456)

Within the other Elven realm of Rivendell there is a comparable ethereal quality about the description, but the mountainous and river-run valley has its own distinctive mood:

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it is a land of “silver mist” where “the dew upon the yellow leaves was glimmering, and the woven nets of gossamer twinkled on every bush” (FR, II, ii, 311). Of note in the above descriptions is the manner in which Tolkien presents an interconnection between differing aspects of natural phenomena so that we have clusters of flowers and trees, delicate mist, the quiet work of spiders, the cover of mountains and sky, and the glimmer of sunbeams all uniting in harmony and beauty to paint the scene. When representation of nature in art becomes a theme in “Leaf by Niggle”3 Tolkien unfolds a panoramic interconnectedness of living nature as Niggle the artist comes face to face with the wonders he has been trying his entire life to capture: The birds were building in the Tree. Astonishing birds: how they sang! They were mating, hatching, growing wings, and flying away singing into the Forest, even while he looked at them. For now he saw that the Forest was there too, opening out on either side, and marching away into the distance. The Mountains were glimmering far away. (Tolkien 2008e, 303)

This coming together of aspects of nature is a recurring feature of Tolkien’s descriptive mode,4 and it is one that very much echoes previous literary celebrations of nature such as the gathering of lake, tree, flower, and gentle wind that adorns Wordsworth’s famous lyric poem (2004, 164): I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

As a writer Tolkien gave as much detail and passion to the bleak and unwelcoming places of his secondary world creations as he did to the glimmer of his green and vibrant lands. The Company of Nine Walkers’ first effort to pass over the torturous mountain of Caradhras is a case in point: The night grew deadly dark under great clouds. A bitter wind swirled among the rocks . . . the grim flanks of Caradhras towered up invisible in the gloom; on the right was a gulf of darkness where the land fell suddenly into a deep ravine. (FR, II, iii, 375)

Just as he afforded a luminosity of wonder to the Elven realms, so too Tolkien gives us the cold and grim rock face, and the hostile, harsh environment of wilderness. Tolkien, as we have noted, was a passionate defender of nature who held a deep affection for trees, flowers, glades, and gardens, and his detailed depictions of places such as Lothlórien derive, in part, from this, but what is perhaps less considered is that his striking presentations of mountainous and bleak regions also derive from a passion



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for rocky wilderness. He writes in 1944: “Much though I love and admire the little lanes and hedges and rustling trees . . . My heart still lingers among the high stony wastes among the morains and mountain-wreckage” (Letters 90–91). Tolkien was a man for whom the wild places of the world were as vital as the tree and flower-filled woodland regions – for him, the diversity of nature was the heartbeat of its wonder. Whether rich in floral beauty or ragged and wild, all across the wide panorama of his tales and verse Tolkien consistently foregrounded place and nature. Even in his earliest writings natural elements take center stage. In early poems as far back as “Wood-sunshine” (1910) or “Kortirion among the Trees” (1915) we find textual focus thrown onto the “green and brown carpet” (Carpenter 1977, 47) of the woods, and “The beech on hill, the willow in the fen / The rainy poplars, and the frowning yews,” with “Summer drowsing by the stream .  .  . / Foreseeing Winter through the leafy glade” (Lost Tales I 34). These descriptions of wood glades, varieties of trees, and the passing of seasons in early poems are offered with more fantastical elements such as the sprites or “holy Elves” that themselves are bound up with or reflect the ecology around them: “Their tender voices like wind-shaken bells / Of flowers, their gleaming hair like golden asphodels” (ibid.). This interaction between aspects of nature and character in early works offered glimpses of elements that would become characteristic of his more expansive and famed writings.5 In The Silmarillion for example, the creation of the Valar is, by definition, a binding of character and nature. In Tolkien’s creation myth Ilúvatar or the creator God brings forth the Ainur (the demi-gods of creation) from “the offspring of his thought” and through the harmony of their Music, the World comes into being, and some of the most powerful among the Ainur then commit their power to it. The narrator tells us: their power should thenceforth be contained and bounded in the World, to be within it for ever, until it is complete, so that they are its life and it theirs. And therefore they are named the Valar, the Powers of the World. (S 10)

The Valar, the angels of nature, then both create and become entwined with the power of the natural world, so that Ulmo is bound up with the power of flowing water, Manwë with the winds, Aulë with solid stone and rock, and Yavanna, who can be seen “standing like a tree under heaven” (S 18), with all that grows. In Tolkien’s cosmological design the Valar create, sustain, and are sourced in aspects of nature. Nature in Tolkien’s legendarium, in other words, is connected to the divine and is the province of angels. Certainly there is an unmistakable atmosphere of veneration that attends the bringing forth of The Two Trees of Valinor: . . . there was a green mound . . . and Yavanna hallowed it, and she sat there long upon the green grass and sang a song of power, in which was set all her thought of things that grow in the earth . . . upon the mound there came forth two slender shoots. (S 31)

It is no doubt indicative of Tolkien’s own views on trees that the emergence of “slender shoots” on a hillock should evoke such an ambience of reverence,6 and these

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holy trees become enduring symbols of the uplifting, enriching, and even recuperative power of nature in our world: “the light of the Trees was holy and of great power . . . and all that walked in that light were glad at heart” (Morgoth 55). In much the same way as the Valar are sourced in nature, Tolkien characteri­ zes many of his other key imagined races as being aligned with differing facets of the land: Dwarves with mountains, Hobbits with pastoral countryside, Elves with the woods and trees, and even Orcs with desolate places where nature is under siege. The Elves are presented as having a particular affinity with nature, and, as Sam muses in Lothlórien, “Whether they’ve made the land, or the land’s made them, it’s hard to say” (FR, II, vii, 469). The Elves’ love of nature, their desire to tend to the natural world rather than exploit it, is also compounded by the fact that metaphysically they are bound to the fate of the Earth. Due to their profound interrelationship with the natural world, and an immortality that, as Tolkien states, causes them to “endure with and within the created world, while its story lasts” (Letters 236), the Elves lament the Earth’s hurts intensely as they witness across the ages of time all the environmental damage that has ever been visited upon the land.

Letting Nature Speak for Itself Apart from the connections between races and natural elements, there are many further instances in Tolkien’s work where specific characters are portrayed as being interconnected with their natural environment. Tom Bombadil and Goldberry are, of course, key examples in this regard. If we read Tolkien’s portrayal of Goldberry it is clear that she is virtually interchangeable with the ecology around her: “About her feet in wide vessels of green and brown earthenware, white water-lilies were floating, so that she seemed to be enthroned in the midst of a pool” (FR, I, vii, 161). Goldberry in a very real sense is derived from the land – she and Tom both evoke the spirit of nature. Tom in particular has been described as “some primal nature spirit” (Fuller 2004, 18) and a “genius loci” (Shippey 2005, 123), and thus when he speaks, he gives nature a voice.7 Indeed after Tom rescues the Hobbits in the Old Forest, he opens the ears and minds of the Hobbits to the ways and diversity of nature: He told them tales of bees and flowers, the ways of trees, and the strange creatures of the Forest, about the evil things and good things, things friendly and unfriendly, cruel things and kind things, and secrets hidden under the brambles. As they listened, they began to understand the lives of the Forest. (FR, I, vii, 170)

Interestingly, Tom’s words, just like Tolkien’s presentation of nature in his fiction, offers more than the radiant beauty of flowers and trees, he speaks of “unfriendly” and “cruel” wild nature. Tom’s voice, however, betrays more than wisdom and guidance: it contains the power of elemental natural forces. In attempting to free the Company



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from Old Man Willow Tom declares: “I know the tune for him. Old grey Willowman! I’ll freeze his marrow cold, if he don’t behave himself. I’ll sing his roots off. I’ll sing a wind up and blow leaf and branch away” (FR, I, vi, 157). Bombadil, it seems, in the harmony of song, has command over the elemental powers of nature: he can summon frost, decay, and wind – the very fact that Old Man Willow releases the Hobbits under this threat is testimony to the fact that this is no bluff. Treebeard and the Ents also, of course, offer this binding of character and environment, and as Andrew Light comments they too “serve as a narrative device that allows part of nature to speak for itself” (Light 2003, 154). Even Pippin’s attempt to relay his first impression of the vastness behind Treebeard’s eyes adopts a natural frame of reference. He describes them as being “like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake” (TT, III, iv, 603). It is made clear in the narrative that Bombadil and Treebeard are both ancient. Tom tells Frodo that he “remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn” (FR, I, vii, 172) and Gandalf refers to Treebeard as “the oldest living thing that still walks beneath the Sun upon this Middle-earth” (TT, III, v, 651). Tolkien thus gives us voices of nature which have an authentically ageless perception; they speak with a deeper perspective: that of the Earth itself.

Nature Defiled: Tolkien’s Broken Landscapes Given that Tom and Treebeard, to some degree at least, are waking manifestations of nature, it is reflective of the wider narrative that, despite the echoing timescale which contextualizes them, they are both under threat in the Third Age. At the Council of Elrond Gandalf explains of Bombadil: “he is withdrawn into a little land, within boundaries he has set, though none can see them” (FR, II, ii, 346). Gandalf’s use of the word “withdrawn” is certainly highly suggestive of a force in retreat. Furthermore as the Council debate whether Tom should be given the One Ring in the hour of need, Glorfindel seems convinced that Bombadil could not resist the oncoming might of Sauron: the Lord of the Rings would learn of its hiding place and would bend all his power towards it. Could that power be defied by Bombadil alone? I think not. I think that in the end, if all else is conquered, Bombadil will fall. (FR, II, ii, 346)

Galdor, indicating Bombadil’s interconnection with the power of nature, adds: “Power to defy our Enemy is not in him, unless such power is in the earth itself” (ibid.) And as Sauron and his servants “torture and destroy the very hills” (ibid.) so too Bombadil, aligned with nature and the power of Earth, faces attack. Indeed this premise that Tom is under threat is underscored by Tolkien’s own remark that Bombadil was “the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside” (Letters 26). The parallels between Bombadil as the spirit of nature in Middle-earth under threat

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and in retreat, and Tolkien’s suggestion that the pastoral lands he so adored were “vanishing,” exemplifies how Tolkien’s environmental anxieties were reflected in his fiction. If we turn to Treebeard we likewise find a voice, and a representation of nature that faces environmental devastation in Middle-earth. Speaking to Pippin and Merry about the destruction that has been visited upon Fangorn by Saruman and his Orcs, Treebeard muses on the wizard’s machine-like mind and exploitative thirst for power: He is plotting to become a Power. He has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment . . . He and his foul folk are making havoc now. Down on the borders they are felling trees – good trees. Some of the trees they just cut down and leave to rot. (TT, III, iv, 616)

Saruman, however, threatens more than Fangorn and Treebeard. His assault on the land is characterized by Rutledge Fleming as “more than ordinary recklessness and savagery; the very foundations of the earth’s intricate network of living things is being attacked” (Fleming 2004, 152). Saruman has been corrupted by the allure of power, and as a symbol of industrialized power, pollutes and exploits all natural life around him. Tom Shippey states that “Saruman shows many signs of being equitable with industrialism, or technology” (Shippey 2005, 194) and as the corrupted realm of Isengard is revealed to us we see that it mirrors Treebeard’s description of Saruman’s mind: “No green thing grew there in the latter days of Saruman .  .  . Iron wheels revolved there endlessly, and hammers thudded. At night plumes of vapour steamed from the vents” (TT, III, viii, 723). Perhaps more so than any other aspect of his fiction, this presentation of an industrialized regime seems evocative of the real twentieth-century threat that Tolkien perceived hung over the natural landscapes he knew well.8 Of note, of course, is the stark contrast between the shimmering beauty of passages which unfold naturally sustained lands, and the barren harshness and miasma which characterizes Tolkien’s industrialized wastelands. Nowhere is this contrast as evident as it is when Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin return to the Shire under the domination of Sharkey in “The Scouring of the Shire”: . . . they saw the new mill in all its frowning and dirty ugliness: a great brick building straddling the stream, which it fouled with a steaming and stinking outflow. All along the Bywater Road every tree had been felled . . . The banks and hedgerows were broken. (RK, VI, viii, 1330)

Tolkien’s descriptions here certainly evoke an industrial wasteland in the process of exploiting, polluting, and feeding off the natural environment in which it operates. Indeed the sight of their native land in this blighted state, despite the other haunted and broken landscapes they have witnessed, causes the Hobbits to reflect upon what has been lost: “It was one of the saddest hours of their lives” (RK, VI, viii,



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1330). Sam and Frodo instantly recognize that this is an outreach of an evil they have already encountered: “This is worse than Mordor!” said Sam. “Much worse in a way. It comes home to you, as they say; because it is home, and you remember it before it was all ruined.” “Yes, this is Mordor,” said Frodo. (RK, VI, viii, 1332)

The deceiving simplicity of Frodo’s words reveals a central focus of the narrative design of The Lord of the Rings: the corruption and devastation of landscapes is on the move and it is tied to the pursuit of domination. Indeed the desolation we see in Fangorn, Isengard, and the Shire has all seeped forth from Barad-dûr: from the “dismal waste” and “the desert that [lies] at Sauron’s gate” (TT, IV, ii, 824). A self-serving desire for power at all costs has spread like pollution across the land, threatening, corrupting and destroying everything in its path, including the natural enclaves of the world. Sauron, who was once referred to by Tolkien as the “Lord of magic and machines” (Letters 146) is the architect of the assault on both the people and the landscapes of Middle-earth: he is the bringer of destructive machines and technology. Undoubtedly his most dangerous piece of technology is the One Ring itself. Indeed Gandalf tells Frodo, that should Sauron find the Ring he will “cover all the lands in a second darkness” (FR, I, ii, 67) and if we look at the crippled lands of Mordor we may see that Gandalf is not necessarily speaking metaphorically. Tolkien describes Sauron’s realm as an “obscene graveyard” haunted by “reluctant light” and paints a vision of a hellish landscape where the most elemental aspects of nature are dead or dying. Nature here is undone: this is “a land defiled, diseased beyond all healing.” We are told that “even the sunlight was defiled” and in its everdiminishing form casts only grey shadows on “the broken hills” (TT, IV, ii, 824). The descriptions of Mordor here are apocalyptic, and this is further accentuated by harrowing passages through the Dead Marshes where nature can make no sound: There was a deep silence, only scraped on its surfaces by the faint quiver of empty seedplumes, and broken grass blades trembling in small air-movements that they could not feel. “Not a bird!” said Sam mournfully. “No, no birds,” said Gollum. (TT, IV, ii, 818–819)

Although some of the environmental devastation we see in Mordor is a by-product of Sauron’s will to power, the apparatus of his regime nonetheless, as Galdor states, actively “torture[s] and destroy[s] the very hills” (FR, II, ii, 346). Sauron’s war on Middle-earth is a war on nature precisely because he does not share power, not even with natural forces. He is, as Tolkien asserts, “a thing lusting for Complete Power” (Letters 151). Furthermore, his attacks on Middle-earth are driven by a perversion of natural life; it is through the corruption of nature that he gathers his might. One need only think of the Ringwraiths: once heroic men of elder days who have been drawn into Sauron’s preternatural world of the undead.

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Sauron, a fallen Maia, is aware that the Valar are sourced in nature, and that those such as the Elves draw their power from the natural world, and so in attacking nature, in defiling the land, Sauron advances his war on his enemies, creation and Middleearth, simultaneously. This pattern of attacking the most elemental of natural forces, of defiling even sunlight in the pursuit of power also occurs in the First Age as eclipselike events are presented as portents that Morgoth has unleashed an assault on the cosmos. Morgoth, like Sauron, was an enemy of nature who tried to attack the sun and moon, and block out natural light by raising the volcanic peaks of Thangorodrim, so that the sky might fill with cloud and ash. Given all this, Gandalf’s reference to “darkness” can be taken as a literal warning of a possible consequence of Sauron’s subjugation of Middle-earth. Sauron, of course, comes in the shadow of Morgoth and is one in a line of agents of destruction who attack nature in the pursuit of dominion in Tolkien’s narrative design. In The Silmarillion we are told that Morgoth attacked The Two Trees of Valinor with the great spider Ungoliant who “sucked up all light that she could find, and spun it forth again in dark nets of strangling gloom” (S 77). Morgoth continually attacks nature in malice and envy, and the consequences of his assaults read like reports of environmental pollution: “Green things fell sick and rotted, and rivers were choked with weeds and slime, and fens were made, rank and poisonous . . . Then the Valar knew indeed that Morgoth was at work again” (S 29). Morgoth and his sorcerers also bring forth mechanically themed creations: winged dragons of iron and flame that devastate the land like Giant Bombers, and we are told that the “woods were haunted by [his] monsters and shapes of dread” (S 43). Morgoth, Sauron, and Saruman are portrayed as machine-wielding tormenters of nature who exploit and desolate the lands they inhabit or invade, and the appetite for totalitarian rule is presented as associated with a line of powerful machine-makers who meddle with nature (such as the genetic breeding we see in both the First and Third Ages) and subvert the natural order.

Nature Rediscovered and Closing Thoughts The expressive and dynamic, multi-sensory presentation of nature in Tolkien’s work is undoubtedly a prevailing feature. Tolkien offers us a depiction of landscapes, flora, fauna, moon,9 sky, water, and weather that breathes a primary world reality into his secondary world frame; yet, delivered through a prism of fantasy, Tolkien affords nature a heightened reality. In Tolkien’s fiction, especially perhaps in his tales of Middle-earth, nature is an animate presence. Middle-earth is much more than a backdrop against which a plot is played out: it is awake and sentient. Natural elements and features are given character, agency, and even personality: Fangorn Forest is described as “a brooding presence, full of secret purpose” (TT, III, ii, 574–575) and Gimli says of Mount Caradhras and the snowstorm that assails the Fellowship: “it is



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no ordinary storm. It is the ill will of Caradhras. He does not love Elves and Dwarves” (FR, II, iii, 381). Indeed one might say that Middle-earth is one of the key dramatis personae in Tolkien’s unfolding legendarium, or as Patrick Curry asserts: “It wouldn’t be stretching a point to say that Middle-earth itself appears as a character in its own right” (Curry, 1997, 61). When we consider Middle-earth as a character we perhaps become more attentive to the hurt being inflicted upon this character as the agents of destruction move against the land. Those such as Treebeard and Bombadil would understand this acutely, as did Tolkien, and we need only recall his anxieties over the fate of natural elements in the primary world. Indeed Tolkien uses the language of emotions in his elegiac portrayals of corrupted lands: of the Shire under Sharkey we are told: “The land looked rather sad and forlorn” (RK, VI, viii, 1309) and the desolation of Isengard is summed up with the rather poignant phrase, “It was a sad country” (TT, III, viii, 722). In terms of his visionary environmentalism, Tolkien’s foregrounding of nature as a sentient force, rather than a setting in his work, carries with it an ecocentric worldview that promotes environmental awareness. Cheryll Glotfelty determines that any serious consideration of the natural world that promotes “environmental restoration” should seek to present “nature not just as the stage upon which the human story is acted out, but as an actor in the drama” (Glotfelty and Fromm 1996, 12). Tolkien’s enchanted and sentient realms, his created and imagined natural phenomena complement and enrich the nature we know: the golden majesty of the mallorn tree, the sun-derived star flower of “elanor” or the elephant-like mûmakil share literary space with the more familiar willow, water-lily, or horse, to offer us not a mimesis but a rediscovery of and an ennoblement of nature. As a creative writer and theorist on fantasy literature Tolkien was very aware of the potential of fantasy to engender new wonder in a reader for that which had become banal. Tied to his thoughts on sub-creation (the creative art of imagination under the divine) Tolkien in “On Fairystories” underlines that “Fantasy is made out of the Primary World” (OFS 68), in other words the preternatural or fantastical components of a tale told are fashioned from that which exists in the world we know. The making of fantasy, however, enchants the familiar and presents it through a prism of fantastical design, so that we rediscover what we have conceptually taken for granted – which, as Tolkien stresses, includes: “the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone” (OFS 32). The “sub-creation” of nature in a secondary world can thus, according to Tolkien, lead us to look at nature anew, to see “things as we are (or were) meant to see them” (OFS 67). Tolkien calls this “recovery”: a defamiliarization process that compels us to look with fresh eyes at the marvel that is green grass or the evening sky because, as Tolkien suggests, “[w]e have laid hands on them, and locked them in our hoard, acquired them, and acquiring ceased to look at them” (ibid.). We have in other words taken possession of nature and in doing so have locked its wonder up in the prison of a familiar view. Tolkien, giving his own experience, underlines that this “triteness”

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by “appropriation” can be undone through fantasy: “It was in fairy-stories that I first divined the potency of the words, and the wonder of things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass” (OFS 68). The presentation of natural elements in fantasy, according to Tolkien, compels us to look again, with uncontaminated eyes, at the natural world that accompanies our everyday lives. These assertions become all the more noteworthy when we consider just how prominently nature is presented in Tolkien’s fiction. From the individualized wonder of sweeping landscapes (and all the natural phenomena within) to characters such as Radagast (or Aiwendil meaning “bird friend”) the Istari wizard (so suggestive of Saint Francis of Assisi) who becomes consumed by his devotion to the wildlife of Middleearth, or Beorn the shape-shifting man-bear, nature takes center stage in Tolkien’s creative works. Indeed across the ages of conflict in Middle-earth and the Undying Lands, weaved into a timeless battle of good against evil, betrayal and resistance, we have a struggle for the land itself. Tolkien gives us technocratic power lusts that, with premeditation, ravage and destroy the natural world, set against those who in the defense of their freedom also defend the land. Technological sorcery and destructive malice pollute, corrupt, and murder nature while those such as the Elves seek only, as Tolkien puts it, “the adornment of earth, and healing of its hurts” (Letters 151–152). Other naturally themed powers – the Valar and the Ents – also are bound up with or represent nature. Indeed when the Ents move against Saruman and the power of Orthanc it is nature fighting back against a force that is polluting and destroying the Earth.10 This enduring theme of the defense of nature as a central narrative driver in Tolkien’s work is further exemplified in the portrayal of characters such as Sam and Gandalf. Sam is the gardener, the cultivator of nature. He is the one who begins to draw the chronicle of the Third Age to an end by tending to the wounds inflicted on his beloved Shire by an industrialized regime: “Sam planted saplings in all the places where specially beautiful or beloved trees had been destroyed” (RK, VI, ix, 1338). Gandalf also, arguably more so than any other character, highlights the import of the defense of the natural world in Tolkien’s legendarium. While immense forces collide in the Third Age, and great seats of power such as Rohan and the glory of Gondor are at stake, Tolkien has Gandalf, his paragon of wisdom, tell the vainglorious Denethor: . . . all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, those are my care. And for my part, I shall not wholly fail of my task, though Gondor should perish, if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair or bear fruit and flower in the days to come. (RK, V, i, 992)

Gandalf here is taking account of all aspects of creation: he understands that all natural life is interconnected, and places focus on the worth of flowers, trees, and landscapes in the darkest hour of the World. He is aware that if the agents of darkness prevail then all of Middle-earth will become a vast desert – a Mordor.11 Moreover, in



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contrast to sinister forces that muster power in the perversion of nature, Gandalf, who uses his power sparingly, and almost always in the aid of others, gathers his strength by a process of harmoniously channeling natural power. Michael N. Staunton takes up the point: . . . magic, as practised by Gandalf, seems to consist of using language as a tool to gather and concentrate and focus the ambient energies of nature . . . Thus what seems to be magic may be only (only!) a powerful sympathy with nature. (Staunton 2002, 47)

Across all of Tolkien’s fiction we find detailed and captivating presentations of nature and natural phenomena. Delivered through the lens of fantasy and raised to a higher power, nature is the heartbeat of Tolkien’s tales and verse: the luminous landscapes of the Elves and the majestic wilderness of uncultivated lands, the fauna and flora of fantasy12 and the enchanted depictions of the familiar all gather in force to breathe a waking wonder across the pages of his work. Whether he presented nature resplendent, landscapes broken or forests waking, nature was never a trivial matter for Tolkien – indeed he would be much more likely to agree with Aragorn’s remark in response to Éomer’s rhetorical questioning of the real and the mythic: “the green earth, say you? That is a mighty matter of legend” (TT, III, ii, 565).

Notes   1  Primary world landscapes certainly influenced aspects of Tolkien’s fiction: Sarehole is part inspiration for Hobbiton and the barrows of the Berkshire plain appear in sinister form just beyond Bombadil’s lands. Tolkien also visited the west of Ireland many times as an external examiner from 1949 on. As a visitor he became fond of The Burren, a rocky, otherworldly region that may have played into his creative imagination, if not in his major works then perhaps in the Faëry headland wilds featured in Smith of Wootton Major.   2  Tolkien’s proclivity to afford the rights of life to the natural world, and trees in particular, is further underscored in a letter to the Daily Telegraph, where he speaks of the “torture and murder of trees” (Letters 420). These words convey the impassioned nature of Tolkien’s environmentally progressive views.   3  Many Tolkien commentators view the tale as autobiographical. See Shippey (2000, 266– 277) where he considers how the story of

Niggle reflects Tolkien’s anxiety regarding finishing his “tree”: his lifetime’s work.   4  As well as an interconnection of aspects of nature, Tolkien also often presented the sounds and smells of a natural scene to accompany his detailed, visual picture, offering a multi-sensory representation. Our first encounter with Rivendell in The Hobbit is an example in this regard: “[the Company] could hear the voice of hurrying water in a rocky bed at the bottom; the scent of trees was in the air” (H 46).   5  A recurring theme in Tolkien’s work even in these early poems was that the nature depicted always seemed to be stalked by danger; sometimes an obvious threat, but other times a vague nuance that natural beauty (interchangeable with Elves) was passing from the world.   6  Although nature is associated with angelic powers, there is no one clearly defined religious creed in evidence in Tolkien’s legendarium. As Brian Rosebury puts it, “Tolkien constructs a

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vision informed by what can only be called religious intuitions, yet does not begin from any foundation of assumed dogma” (Rosebury 2003, 138). In my own monograph study (2011) I have detailed a theory that Tom is a literary incarnation of the legend of the Green Man, a lore that Tolkien certainly studied. Tolkien, although not a Luddite, was nonetheless apprehensive that natural landscapes were too often becoming the victims of the unbridled march of technology in the modern machine age, and thematically the rise of “the Machine” was central to his work (see Letters 184, and “Rage Against the Machine” in Campbell 2011, 27–72). Tolkien was meticulous about accurately presenting the phases of the moon, and he writes of “requir[ing] to know how much later the moon gets up each night when nearing full” (Letters 74). The Ent attack on Isengard: a reaction to the relentless environmentally destructive activi-

ties of Saruman has distinct correspondence with modern ecological theories regarding the capacity of nature (or Earth imbalanced by pollution) to strike back at the human “agitator.” For more on these theories see my own book (2011), Lovelock (2006), and Commoner (1990). 11  Gandalf’s words to the Captains, on the doorstep of battle with Sauron’s might, are also replete with natural imagery as he talks of “uprooting the evils in the fields that we know, so that those who may live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule” (RK, V, ix, 1150). Although somewhat figurative, the natural references are nonetheless environmentally striking in terms of the allusion to looking after the Earth for future generations. 12  Tolkien (through Yavanna) uses the term “kelvar” to refer to aspects of nature that have the power of movement and “ovlar” for that which is rooted to the ground – these terms thus relate to fauna and flora respectively.

References Campbell, Liam. 2011. The Ecological Augury in the Works of JRR Tolkien. Zurich and Jena: Walking Tree Publishers. Carpenter, Humphrey. 1977. J. R. R. Tolkien – A Biography. London: Allen & Unwin. Commoner, Barry. 1990. Making Peace with the Planet. London: Gollancz. Curry, Patrick. 1997. Defending Middle-earth: Tolkien, Myth and Modernity. London: HarperCollins. Fleming, Rutledge, 2004. The Battle for Middleearth: Tolkien’s Divine Design in The Lord of the Rings. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Fuller, Edmund. 2004. “The Lord of the Hobbits: J. R. R. Tolkien.” In Understanding the Lord of the Rings: The Best of Tolkien Criticism, edited by Rose A. Zimbardo and Neil D. Isaacs, 16–30. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Glotfelty, Cheryll and Harold Fromm, eds. 1996. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Light, Andrew. 2003. “Tolkien’s Green Time: Environmental Themes in The Lord of the Rings.”

In The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy: One Book to Rule Them All, edited by Gregory Bassham and Eric Bronson, 155–160. La Salle, IL: Open Court. Lovelock, James. 2006. The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth Is Fighting Back. London: Penguin. Rosebury, Brian. 2003. Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Shippey, Tom. 2000. J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. London: HarperCollins. Shippey, Tom. 2005. The Road to Middle-earth. Rev. and expanded edn. London: HarperCollins. Staunton, Michael N. 2002. Hobbits, Elves and Wizards: Exploring the Wonders and Worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wood, Ralph C. 2003. The Gospel According to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in Middleearth. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Wordsworth, William. 2004. Selected Poems. Edited by Stephen Gill. London: Penguin.



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Further Reading Dickerson, Matthew and Jonathan Evans. 2006. Ents, Elves, and Eriador: The Environmental Vision of J. R. R. Tolkien. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Duriez, Colin. 2005. J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: The Story of a Friendship. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing.

Noel, Ruth S. 1977. The Mythology of Middle-earth. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

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Religion: An Implicit Catholicism Pat Pinsent

Introduction Perhaps because of the absence of explicitly Christian elements in his work, Tolkien’s name seldom seems to occur in lists of writers of religious fiction. Yet his own devout adherence to Catholicism is in fact reflected throughout his writing, to the extent that it would not be going too far to assert that his faith was the driving force behind his literary endeavors, though its expression never veered in the direction of explicit moralizing. Few subjects provoke more disagreement than that of religion. The very definition of the word is not the least controversial aspect, but for the purposes of the current essay, it will be taken to refer to a quest for the ultimate meaning of life, combined with the implications, as far as behavior (prayers, beliefs, morality, actions) is concerned, for the adherent. Even in the real world, such a definition embraces a vast range of beliefs and practices, though as far as Tolkien was concerned these were subsumed into his commitment to the Roman Catholic church – a commitment which is displayed implicitly in all his fictional works, even though the secondary worlds he creates have a theology quite distinct from Christianity.1 Unlike the Narnia books and the space trilogy of C. S. Lewis, Tolkien’s fantasy works are not generally regarded as allegorical, and in fact he expressed an intense dislike of allegory (Carpenter 1977, 92): his Hobbits are not simple Bunyanesque pilgrims, nor is it possible to see as a figure of Christ any individual character within the wide range available.

A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.



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Nevertheless, features of Tolkien’s writing and the behavior of his protagonists reflect many of the qualities displayed in the character of Jesus, whose life Tolkien would have seen not only as the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity and the supreme revelation of God’s wisdom and compassion, but also as an image of the way in which humanity can reach its highest potential and fulfillment. In particular, Jesus’ human relationships, as expressed in his companionship and sharing with his apostles, seem to have been inspirational to Tolkien. His writing can be seen as furthering his aim (explicitly avowed concerning The Lord of the Rings, but valid also for his other fiction) to “hold the attention of readers, amuse them, delight them, and at times excite them or deeply move them” (FR, Foreword, xxiv). While The Hobbit, with its implied youthful readership, is more explicitly didactic than his longer works (perhaps most obviously in its frequent direct address to the reader), none of his fiction suggests that Tolkien had any intention either of retelling the Christian story in an alternative form or of instructing his readers in the theology of redemption. Rather he seeks to portray the perennial Christian struggle between good and evil, with the hope of enrolling his readers on the side of good (see ch. 28). In this endeavor, it seems that Tolkien was inevitably influenced by the ideas of the eminent theorist about religion and the liberal arts, Cardinal John Henry Newman; the Birmingham Oratory which Newman had founded provided much warmth and hospitality to Tolkien’s family. The focus of this essay will be on The Hobbit, which in general has not received as much critical attention as The Lord of the Rings. In particular, the subject of religion,2 if discussed at all, is more often considered in relation to the longer work. Carpenter (1977) provides invaluable information about Tolkien’s Catholic background and debates about religion with Lewis, and this is supplemented by Colin Duriez’s account of the friendship of the two men (2003). By their nature, neither of these books provide analyses of Tolkien’s fiction. Paul Kocher’s Master of Middle-Earth (1972) comments on the absence of eschatology in the Ring trilogy, but his explicit consideration of religious elements is largely confined to Tolkien’s shorter works, especially “Leaf by Niggle” and the essay “On Fairy-stories.” Other critics also generally agree that this latter theoretical study, where the voice is Tolkien’s own rather than one masked by the invented characters, is the place where he treats religion most explicitly: it is discussed at some length, for instance, by Reilly (1968) and by Helms (1974). Several essays in Isaacs and Zimbardo (1968) are also of interest in the current context, notably Zimbardo’s on Tolkien’s moral vision and Raffel’s on the character of Gandalf, a topic explored a little later. In the present essay, a description of Tolkien’s own religious background precedes an analysis of the relevance of his beliefs to The Hobbit and, to a limited extent, his other fiction, together with his subsequent theorizing about fantasy in the light of his own experience of “sub-creation.” This formed the substance of a lecture given at the University of St Andrew’s in 1938 and was subsequently published as “On Fairy-stories” (see ch. 5). Much of Tolkien’s later fictional writing can be seen as an amplification of the moral, religious, and philosophical ideas implicit in his early work; this

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led to the narrative expansion in The Lord of the Rings and was supported by the elaborate mythological framework of The Silmarillion. These later, substantial, texts will only therefore be referred to briefly, together with some of the abundance of critical material, in so far as they either relate to the earlier works or extend their religious perspective by making explicit certain aspects related to the theology of Tolkien’s secondary world.

Tolkien’s Religious Background Tolkien’s lifelong commitment to the Roman Catholic church was mediated to him by his mother, Mabel, who became a Catholic in Birmingham not long after the premature death in South Africa of her husband, Arthur (see ch. 1). Particularly significant in view of her son Ronald’s religious faith was her association with the Birmingham Oratory, which had been founded by Newman. The great nineteenth-century theologian had died as recently as 1890, only 12 years before Ronald became (for a short time) a pupil at St Philip’s school, which was run from the Oratory. Before Mabel’s death in 1904, she had appointed an Oratorian priest, Fr. Francis Xavier Morgan, to be the guardian of her two sons, so it is in no way surprising that the effects of Newman’s influence should be detectable in Tolkien’s own approach to life and religion. Perhaps the most significant aspect of Newman’s thinking as far as Tolkien’s fiction is concerned is related to the potential for holiness of the ordinary person doing ordinary things. Gregory Winterton (2010, 3) states that: [Newman’s] teaching . . . is to urge everyone to surrender day-by-day and minute-byminute to the demands that conscience and his or her daily life make upon him. In his Meditations and Devotions this teaching . . . is summed up in what he entitles “A Short Road to Perfection.” . . . “He then is perfect who does the work of the day perfectly and we need not go beyond this to seek for perfection.”

The very ordinariness of the Hobbits, Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam, seems thus to fit Newman’s ideal. Another aspect of Newman’s teaching relevant to Tolkien’s sub-creation of a society untouched by revealed religion is also noted by Winterton: his insistence that “holiness and a supernatural destiny is God’s intention for everyone, Christians and non-Christians alike” (2010, 4). Thus the absence of any explicitly Christian aspects in Tolkien’s fantasy would not imply any lack of the potential for holiness in his characters. Tolkien’s experience of having an Oratorian priest as his guardian may have added an additional facet to his writing: an emphasis, in both literature and life, on the importance of friendship. Roderick Strange quotes Newman’s conviction, expressed in his Parochial and Plain Sermons, that “the best preparation for loving the world at large, and loving it duly and wisely, is to cultivate an intimate friendship and



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affection towards those who are immediately about us” (2008, 81). It is not difficult to see this sentiment reflected both in Tolkien’s own Oxford friendships, and in his portrayal of the conviviality of the Hobbits. Tolkien’s adherence to Catholicism went of course well beyond the influence of Newman and the Oratorian fathers; it was also shown in his particular devotion to the sacraments of confession and the eucharist (Carpenter 1977, 128), and the latter in particular can be seen as figuring in some of the ways in which food features in his fiction. His religious convictions are also displayed in his understanding about the “truth” of myth: the mythic qualities of events that really happened, such as those described in the gospels.3

The Hobbit and Beyond The first published fantasy work of Tolkien, without in any way being an allegory, nevertheless provides a simple yet effective image of the spiritual life as it can be lived by ordinary people who are sometimes called to perform actions that they might have deemed to be beyond their capabilities. The smallness and insignificance of Hobbits is emphasized throughout Tolkien’s fiction – they are only half as tall as human beings and there is “little or no magic about them” (H 4). By implication they are even more ordinary than humans. Bilbo’s situation at the beginning of the book – well-to-do, living in a substantial house, and preferring to remain undisturbed in his comfortable existence – could imply his unawareness of the more profound aspects of life; he is not yet awake either to what might be termed the spiritual dimension of existence or to his own latent qualities. Gandalf however has recognized his potential: Bilbo’s basic Hobbit traits of generosity and hospitality are the foundation for the deeper ones of courage and fidelity.

The importance of feasting The emphasis from the beginning on the Hobbit characteristics of warmth and conviviality suggests how significant these qualities are to Tolkien, not only because they engender good human relationships but also because they mirror the divine. The gospels indicate that Jesus enjoyed these very same aspects of life. Throughout his ministry he was reproached for eating and drinking with publicans (tax collectors) and sinners, and consequently was criticized for his readiness to consort with the lowest elements of society: no-one was excluded from his fellowship (see for instance, Mark 2:16). Questions were asked about why his behavior was different from the austerity of John the Baptist (Mark 2:17–18), and Jesus is quoted as saying of himself: “The son of man is come eating and drinking. And you say: Behold a man that is a glutton and a drinker of wine, a friend of publicans and sinners” (Luke 7:34).4 Jesus also frequently uses the notion of feasting as an image of the Kingdom

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of Heaven (notably in Matthew 22). Bilbo’s readiness (despite his initial reluctance) at the beginning of The Hobbit to cater for his unexpected guests not only reveals his goodness of heart but, because of its gospel affinities, also carries a deeper meaning about inclusiveness, alerting readers to his fidelity to the mission he reluctantly comes to undertake. That there is a negative side associated with feasting should not be overlooked, however. Charles W. Nelson, in his exploration of the relationship between the seven deadly sins and the various races of beings who inhabit Middle-earth, points out that Hobbits have a manifest tendency towards the vice of gluttony, and that, “as they shed their excess weight, the hobbits develop constancy, bravery and a sense of moral responsibility” (2000, 92). As ever, the quality of moderation, the balance involved in not over-indulging even in good things, is key. The consequence of the constant stress on the Hobbits’ enjoyment of food and of associated celebrations has a further, more specifically Catholic, meaning: references to food acquire something of a eucharistic quality. Not only is food seen as nourishing to the body, but, sometimes together with wine, it also strengthens the spirit for endeavors, as Bilbo’s stay in the House of Elrond (H 53–54) indicates. Probably the most explicit indication of this link between food and sacrament is to be found in The Lord of the Rings when the group setting out on their quest are given “lembas” by the Elves. The donors explain that these are normally provided to travelers going on a journey (FR, II, viii, 482). These food items are described at this point in the book as “very thin cakes” and later are termed “wafers” (RK, VI, ii, 1203). The similarity to the eucharistic host is very evident, while their other name of “waybread” (FR, II, viii, 481) recalls the last rites, in which the eucharist as administered to those in danger of death is called the viaticum, a word whose origins derive from the Latin for “provisions for a journey” (see OED).

The extraordinary potential of ordinary individuals We are told early in The Hobbit that Bilbo’s parents were Bungo Baggins, who was “solid and respectable,” and the “famous Belladonna Took,” a member of a family with the propensity “once in a while . . . to go off and have adventures” (H 4). When he hears the Dwarves dismissing him as a “little fellow bobbing on the mat” (18, italics original), it provokes his Took side rashly to indicate his willingness to go out on the adventure. The tension between caution and intrepidity characterizes his actions throughout the novel, but his loyalty to the Dwarves leads the brave part of his character to dominate on many occasions, such as the killing of the spiders (146 and 152) and his deliverance of the Dwarves from the bondage of the Goblins; in both of these situations his cunning is also manifest. Tolkien portrays him as displaying his greatest courage when, despite his fear, he ventures into the domain of the dragon Smaug: “Going on from there was the bravest thing he ever did. He fought the real battle in the tunnel alone, before he ever saw the vast danger that lay in wait” (200). No doubt



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Tolkien’s experience of the way in which, during World War I, ordinary people performed heroic deeds despite their fears beforehand is behind his description here. Bilbo also needs a fair amount of courage to stand up to the Dwarves’ frequent hostility and disdain, and also to assert better values than theirs, as revealed when their avarice drives them to hostile action against the Men who should be their friends. Bilbo strongly disapproves of their hostile action (246) and manages to provide a means to mediate between the hostile forces (250–252). In actions such as these, Bilbo shows not only courage but also a high degree of responsibility, qualities that it would have been unreasonable to expect from the somewhat self-centered Hobbit that he appears to be at the beginning of the tale. As Zimbardo states: The hobbits are the common man, who does not seek out the opportunity for great deeds, who prefers his bounded life in the Shire. Yet the hobbits are the heroes. .  .  . Their peculiar excellence is not heroic honour but love. (1968, 102)

The closest analogy to Bilbo’s development of character is the similar mental and spiritual growth of his younger cousin Frodo in The Lord of the Rings. In both texts, it is the apparently weak and certainly ordinary who are revealed as the real heroes, rather than the potential epic figures such as Aragorn or the powerful enchanters such as Gandalf. Additionally both Bilbo and Frodo display, to what might be termed an heroic level, charity towards those who deceive them, revile them, and even hate them, especially Gollum. This goodness towards the undeserving turns out to be a significant element in their final success, especially in the case of Frodo; his ultimate inability to rid himself of the Ring would mean that the whole venture would have been in vain but for the action of Gollum, who is only there because Frodo has taken pity on him; as Zimbardo observes: “Frodo is finally saved because he has pitied Smeagol” (ibid.).5 It certainly recalls the gospel admonition to “love your enemies, do good to them that hate you” (Matthew 5:43).6

Gandalf Since Tolkien strongly rejects any suggestion that his books are allegorical, it would be wrong to claim that any character stands for Christ in a way analogous to the figure of Aslan in Lewis’s Narnia chronicles. Yet in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings the behavior of some characters recalls incidents recorded in the gospels. The very companionship and conviviality of the Hobbits, as has been suggested above, recall how Jesus feasted with all who wanted to hear his message. In a different way, a figure whose behavior has analogies with some aspects of Christ is Gandalf. The wizard is of course far from being as ordinary as the Hobbits: his sometimes inexplicable behavior suggests the more transcendent or prophetic features of Jesus.7 Just as Jesus’ apostles are aware of his power, the Hobbit and the Dwarves believe Gandalf has the

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ability to help them whenever they are threatened. But, like Jesus, he is not always there when needed. Early in their journey, the travelers need food and shelter, but suddenly realize that Gandalf, who had been with them until a short time previously, is no longer there: “ ‘Just when a wizard would have been most useful, too,’ groaned Dori and Nori” (H 32). This scene recalls the gospel occasion when the apostles, in peril from a storm on the Sea of Galilee but sure that Jesus could help them in their need, are dismayed at his apparent insouciance: “Behold a great tempest arose in the sea, so that the boat was covered with waves: but he was asleep. And they came to him and awaked him, saying ‘Lord, save us, we perish’ ” (Luke 8:24–25). Just as Jesus is portrayed by Luke as having no difficulty in calming the wind and the sea, Gandalf is shown as being in charge of situations, sometimes even unbeknown to the travelers involved (for instance H 40–41). Like Jesus who later says “Other sheep I have who are not of this fold” (John 10:16), Gandalf is also shown as having wider concerns: once the Hobbits and Dwarves have been safely transported by the Eagles, Gandalf, relieved to see them safe, remarks, “Meanwhile I have some other pressing business to attend to” (H 107), reminding them of this a little later (H 129). Gandalf’s reappearances are equally unpredictable, perhaps recalling the way in which, after his resurrection, Jesus also appears unexpectedly, for instance to the travelers on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13–32) and to the apostles on the sea-shore (John 21).8 Similarly Gandalf, like Jesus, is not always immediately recognized. Early in the story, he assists the travelers when they fall into the hands of the Trolls, assuming voices that instigate a quarrel between their captors: Bilbo eventually understands: “It was the wizard’s voice that had kept the trolls bickering and quarrelling, until the light came and made an end of them” (H 41). A similar lack of recognition occurs later, after the defeat of Smaug. The party meet an old man carrying a casket which turns out to contain the treasured Arkenstone, which had been discovered by Bilbo after the battle. The Dwarves value it beyond any friendship with the Hobbit, and cursing Bilbo, Thorin shouts, “I wish I had Gandalf here! Curse him for his choice of you! May his beard wither.” As he prepares to throw Bilbo on to the rocks, the old man reveals himself to be Gandalf, and in a dramatic gesture throws aside his hood and cloak (H 254). The most striking parallel between Gandalf’s unexpected appearances and those of Christ is to be found in The Lord of the Rings, where he experiences what can only be seen as a form of resurrection. Earlier, as the company neared the exit from Moria, Gandalf had protected them from a fearsome Balrog (FR, II, v, 429–431); they had seen him fall into the depths as the bridge fell, and mourned him for dead. Later, however, they meet an old man whom they do not recognize: “They could not see his face .  .  . all his features were shadowed” (TT, III, v, 642); he eventually discloses his identity as Gandalf, his name now bearing the epithet “the white” (652). The affinities with the gospel narratives involving the post-Resurrection Christ, especially the Emmaus story cited above, are inescapable, but as Burton Raffel observes: “Gandalf is [not] to be taken as a Christ-figure pure and simple: ‘I am Gandalf, Gandalf the White, but Black [the Enemy] is mightier still’ ” (1968, 238). He remains limited



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in knowledge: “I have forgotten much that I thought I knew, and learned again much that I had forgotten. I can see many things far off, but many things that are close at hand I cannot see” (TT, III, v, 645). His words to the Hobbits, before he parts from them as they venture back into the Shire, begin “I am with you at present .  .  . but soon I shall not be” (RK, VI, vii, 1304), a note reminiscent of much of Jesus’ discourse to his disciples at the Last Supper (John 13–16), while Gandalf’s conviction that the Hobbits have “grown up” (ibid.) recalls how Jesus expresses his confidence in his apostles’ ability to perform their mission (Mark 16:15–18). The power and sense of mystery with which Tolkien endows the figure of Gandalf lend an extra depth to the narratives, and it is clear that many of the elements which are used in the construction of the character of the wizard owe much to the author’s reading of the gospels. Nevertheless, the fact that Gandalf’s power is limited is essential to the effect of the novels: if he were a divine figure who was able miraculously to ensure that the objectives of either Bilbo or Frodo were achieved, the element of suspense would be diminished. We also see that he is capable of weakness, for instance when he is described as being afraid of the Goblins (H 96).

Resisting temptation An essential part of Tolkien’s writing is his incorporation of elements which convey a moral dimension. This is done most powerfully through incidents which involve the characters in the need to resist temptation, particularly towards the possession of excessive riches or power. Tolkien’s model is undoubtedly the gospels, in which Jesus rejects the temptations to employ miraculous means to feed himself when he is hungry, to have control over all the kingdoms of the world, or to display his power by casting himself down from the temple pinnacle (Luke 4:1–13; Matthew 4:1–11). We have seen how, as Nelson suggests, the Hobbits can be tempted towards gluttony, and Gandalf towards pride, but probably a greater impact is made through Tolkien’s portrayal of the temptation of the Dwarves towards avarice, often regarded in medieval times as the most difficult vice for the ordinary person to resist. While their quest to regain their own possessions from the stereotypically covetous dragon, Smaug, is a legitimate one, the corrupting power of the untold riches, and in particular of the Arkenstone, is such that even Bilbo is not immune from it. When he discovers it in the dragon’s hoard, the force of attraction is almost as if the gem claimed him: “Suddenly Bilbo’s arm went towards it, drawn by its enchantment” (H 220), and he contemplates claiming it as his share of the treasure, even though he has an “uncomfortable feeling” (his conscience, perhaps) that this was not what was intended by the agreement. Rejecting the temptation to hang on to the stone, though “not without a shudder, not without a glance of longing” (H 251), he uses it as a means to bargain between the Dwarves and the men of Lake-town, in the quest for peace. Thorin’s reaction to Bilbo’s use of the Arkenstone, as noted above, indicates the extent to which

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he has been corrupted by the desire to possess the priceless gem, but when he is dying as a result of battle with the Goblins, he is reconciled with Bilbo, in words that endorse Hobbit values: “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world” (H 266). A more subtle source of temptation is that involving the Ring. Its possession not only allows the wearer to be invisible, but also makes him a prey of a hidden desire to dominate, one which is, Tolkien seems to be suggesting, latent in every heart. Bilbo falls prey to it in a minor way, magnifying his own cleverness by concealing the fact that the invisibility conferred by wearing the Ring has enabled him to escape from the Goblins (H 88–89), a harmless piece of vanity which recurs when he later comes to write his adventures. Much later, near the conclusion of The Lord of the Rings, we see the dreadful effect the Ring has on Frodo, so that he is unable to surrender it until Gollum snatches it, together with Frodo’s finger, and then hurtles to his own destruction. Even the faithful Sam, slightly before this, has experienced its power, engendering in him fantasies of himself as “Samwise the Strong, Hero of the Age” (RK, VI, i, 1178); his love of his master leads him to reject this powerful temptation. The temptation to keep the Ring is most dangerous to those who already have greater abilities, most notably to Gandalf. Fortunately for the well-being of everyone, Gandalf rejects the temptation, understanding that, if he were to possess the Ring, its powers, added to those he already possesses, would make him a fearsome danger to all creatures. He tells Frodo: With that power I should have power too great and terrible. And over me the Ring would gain a power still greater and more deadly . . . The way of the Ring to my heart is by pity, pity for weakness and 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. (FR, I, ii, 80–81)

This is an instance of rejecting the temptation to use evil means in order that good might ensue, and in effect acts as a commentary on the reasons why Jesus resisted the temptation to assert his power in order to achieve his mission in a way that would not have been the will of his Father.

Religious intertextuality In addition to the more explicit messages that Tolkien conveys throughout his fiction, the effect of his religious background is often evident in his use of imagery and halfsubmerged allusions which serve as a kind of enrichment of his text. It is impossible to say whether such instances are deliberate on his part, or, as often seems more likely, result from his being steeped in Catholic liturgical and devotional practices. Whatever the case, the effect is to generate an atmosphere which provides a textured background to the main themes.



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An interesting instance of this effect occurs early in The Hobbit, with the arrival of the Dwarves at Bilbo’s house. The dialogue that ensues recalls Catholic liturgy: as Bilbo somewhat reluctantly welcomes the ever-expanding party of Dwarves, there is this interchange: “What can I do for you, my dwarves?” he said. “Kili at your service!” said the one. “And Fili!” added the other; and they both swept off their blue hoods and bowed. “At yours and your family’s!” replied Bilbo, remembering his manners this time. (H 10)

Bilbo’s response here, displaying the formality that Hobbit courtesy evidently requires, is very reminiscent of the interchange of greetings that is repeated many times throughout the Catholic Mass (which at this stage would have been in Latin): Dominus vobiscum. Et cum spiritu tuo.

The mention of the color of the Dwarves’ hoods also suggests a liturgical connection: all but one (brown) of the colors mentioned as the Dwarves arrive (H 8–11) have specific associations of this kind (Addis and Arnold, 1954, 815–816). While it could well be that Tolkien is simply referring to colors in order to interest his young readers, the almost ritual-like way in which the hoods are hung up on Bilbo’s pegs suggests a formality associated with ceremony rather than a casual discarding of outdoor clothes. Even the gradual appearance of the Dwarves, culminating in that of Thorin and followed by Gandalf, suggests a procession into church, with the most important person bringing up the rear. A religious reference in The Lord of the Rings (surely not coincidental) is that to March 25, which is both the date of the final destruction of the Ring, thus marking the culmination of the quest (RK, VI, iv, 1247), and the date of birth of the first child of Sam and Rosie, Elanor (RK, VI, ix, 1342). The choice of the date of the feast of the Annunciation of the birth of Christ, which might be termed the first act of the Incarnation, must surely have been deliberate, because of the association he thus creates between it and the deliverance of Middle-earth from Sauron’s tyranny. Gandalf announces that this date has become New Year’s Day in Gondor, just as once it was in our world.9 Thus although there is no explicit mention of a creator in The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, there is no doubt that the beauty of the world Tolkien sub-creates implies an underlying principle of good. While this world is portrayed as fallen, in a way that is analogous in theological terms to our own, in both The Hobbit and the remainder of his fiction, Tolkien’s role as a story-teller acts out his belief, expressed a little later, in his essay “On Fairy-stories,” that all fantasy is a form of sub-creation, which, if undertaken as a sacred vocation, is a directly religious activity.

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Later Fiction Between the publication of The Hobbit in 1937 and his death in 1973, Tolkien spent much time developing the mythological system that to some extent was implicit in the shorter text. Amplified in The Lord of the Rings, it was further codified in The Silmarillion, a compendium on which he was still working in his final months, with the collaboration of his son Christopher (Carpenter 1977, 255). Consequently when this work appeared in 1977, it was in an edited form which is comprised not only of narratives but also an index supplying cross references and information about the identities of the multitudinous characters to be found in Tolkien’s pages. To relate the theology of this detailed mythology to the fiction would be too complex an undertaking here, but the mode in which both the invocations in The Lord of the Rings and the structured account of the pantheon provided in The Silmarillion relate to the argument put forward in the current paper requires some attention. The Silmarillion begins with an account of how Eru, otherwise known as Ilúvatar, begins creation by making “the Ainur, the Holy ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made” (S 3). While this description certainly differs from the more familiar “In the beginning, God created heaven and earth” (Genesis 1:1), it bears resemblances to the words put into the mouth of Wisdom in a book of the Apocrypha, found in the Catholic Douay-Rheims bible but not regarded as canonical by the compilers of the King James version: “I came out of the mouth of the most High, the firstborn before all creatures” (Ecclesiasticus 24:5). Such echoes suggest that while Tolkien wanted to avoid traditional JudeoChristian accounts of creation, he nevertheless sought to give his narrative a similar air of authority.10 The most powerful of the Ainur in Tolkien’s mythology are the Valar; their chief is Manwë, who is “dearest to Ilúvatar and understands most clearly his purposes” (S 16). Another figure of considerable significance is his spouse: With Manwë dwells Varda, Lady of the Stars, who knows all the regions of Eä [the universe]. Too great is her beauty to be declared in the words of Men or of Elves, for the light of Ilúvatar lives still in her face. (ibid.)

She it is whom the Elves “hold most in reverence and love. Elbereth they name her, and they call upon her name out of the shadows of Middle-earth, and uplift it in song at the rising of the stars” (ibid.). It is therefore significant that it is Elbereth, under her Elvish name, that Frodo, and on one occasion his companion the Elf Legolas, invoke when they are in most danger on their quest. In each instance, the prayer appears to be answered; since there is no miraculous intervention, Tolkien leaves the reader unsure as to whether the assistance they receive from Aragorn (FR, I, xi, 256) and Gandalf (FR, I, xii, 280), together with Legolas’s successful aim in killing an evil winged creature (FR, II, ix, 504), do indeed result from the invocations. Kocher observes:



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In The Road goes ever on, Tolkien remarks that the prayers to Elbereth “and other references to religion in The Lord of the Rings are frequently overlooked.” Despite the absence of churches, priests, formal liturgies and the like, Tolkien is not drawing a purely secular Middle-earth, as many critics prefer to believe. His cosmos in the epic may not be exactly Christian but it contains many of the transcendent elements of a more than pantheistic religion. (1972, 202–203)11

Fantasy and Sub-creation: “On Fairy-stories” The lecture which became Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-stories” was delivered at the University of St Andrew’s in 1938, though it was not published until 1947 (see ch. 5). In spite of its having been composed not long after the publication of The Hobbit, the ideas expressed about the nature of fantasy also underpin Tolkien’s later fiction and provide a theoretical commentary on all his endeavors in that genre. In it, his religious commitment is no longer veiled by the ostensibly non-Christian ethos of his stories; instead he is able to voice his belief in the God-given nature of the storyteller’s vocation as sub-creator: Fantasy is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific verity. On the contrary. The keener and the clearer is the reason, the better fantasy will it make. . . . For creative Fantasy is founded upon the hard recognition that things are so in the world as it appears under the sun; on a recognition of fact, but not a slavery to it. . . . Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker. (OFS 65–66)

R. J. Reilly comments on the significance of the fact that “a position so explicitly romantic and so explicitly Christian . . . should exist in our time . . . he has given [the creative imagination] specifically Christian implications which it has hardly had since Sidney’s Defense” (1968, 129). Tolkien also acknowledges that mythology may sometimes afford a glimpse of divinity, and thus of religion; although these elements have perhaps been “sundered” they remain “entangled” (OFS 44). Carpenter’s account of a significant conversation between Tolkien and Lewis throws further light on Tolkien’s understanding of the relationship between myth and truth: We have come from God (continued Tolkien), and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. . . . Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour . . . (1977, 147)

For Tolkien the most important aspect of this sub-creation, and the one which best mirrors the divine, is to be found in the term he invented, the final “eucatastrophe”

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or happy ending of the fairy-story (a genre to which he considered his own fantasy writings to belong): The sudden joyous “turn” . . . is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies . . . universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief. (OFS 75)

In the epilogue, Tolkien makes the religious significance of what he says here more explicit: It has long been my feeling . . . that God redeemed the corrupt making-creatures, men, in a way fitting to this aspect, as to others, of their strange nature. The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels . . . and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. But this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and inspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfilment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy . . . (OFS 77–78)

This supernatural Joy, while it transcends the natural pleasures of this world, is seen by Tolkien as that to which humanity has a divine calling. Throughout The Hobbit, Bilbo’s positive attitude, whatever trials he is facing, implies the Christian virtue of hope, a conviction of being called to this Joy; a similar quality is to be found in the hopeful perseverance of Frodo and Sam in The Lord of the Rings.

Conclusion There are many features in Tolkien’s work which reveal how he possessed what has more recently come to be termed a “Catholic sacramental imagination.” In a recent report on Catholic Education, this quality is described as being grounded in the Incarnation and refusing to let Creator and creation be portrayed as antagonistic opposites. This sacramental imagination is described as making us conscious of the beauty of God, and of art as the living out of this vision. The church’s liturgy has a function in this respect, to consecrate the ordinary and provide a way of seeing our own existence within the context of God’s love (“On the Way to Life,” Heythrop Institute 2005, Part 3). Tolkien evidently saw his own fantasy as having a similar function. This element of hope does not imply that evil will be easily overcome. Neither in The Hobbit nor The Lord of the Rings has the triumph of the protagonists been without cost, nor is evil finally vanquished. Bilbo is made to realize that he is a small agent in a bigger story, “a little fellow in a wide world” (H 280). Tolkien’s



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fiction could be described as Christian fairy-tales, involving a mythological framework which enables truths about the human condition to be discerned in a way that in a purely realistic mode would not be evident. As Lewis commented in 1955: “By dipping [good and evil] in myth we see them more clearly” (quoted in Isaacs and Zimbardo 1968, 16). It is more than likely that the lack of any explicit link with biblical religion or specially Christian elements may have been instrumental in rendering Tolkien’s fantasy accessible to people who do not have a familiarity with or sympathy for Christianity. Thus perhaps it goes some way towards achieving what Tolkien wanted as far as creating a sense of the goodness of God and the glory of creation. Certainly the love and awe of nature, and regret at its despoliation (as in the effect of the dragon Smaug on his environment)12 has increased its appeal to generations more conscious of environmental issues than was generally the case when Tolkien wrote. Despite his insistence that his stories are neither “allegorical nor topical” (FR, Foreword, xxv), Tolkien’s lofty view of the function of the story-teller (most convincingly fulfilled by Jesus himself) means that for himself, writing was a sacred vocation, and the religious aspects of his writing, while not always apparent, are amongst the most pervasive, coloring all his fiction. Here indeed is material for further research investigation. Notes   1  Carpenter (1977, 91) supports this point of view, for instance stating that The Silmarillion “does not contradict Christianity but complements it . . . Tolkien’s universe is ruled over by God.”   2  A topic which, when viewed in relation to fantasy literature, often generates more heat than light, as can be seen by controversies which have raged concerning books by such authors as Lewis, J. K. Rowling, and Philip Pullman. Tolkien’s work has not been immune from this attention, but the focus of many Internet contributions seems to be devotional rather than critical.   3  Carpenter (1977, 148) reports on a conversation significant in Lewis’s conversion to Christianity: Lewis said that Tolkien’s view of myth implied that “the story of Christ is simply a true myth, a myth that works on us in the same way as the others, but a myth that really happened” (italics in original), and Tolkien confirmed this interpretation.   4  Bible quotations are taken from the DouayRheims translation, which was used in Catholic churches at the date when Tolkien wrote.

  5  A similar point is made by Day (1984, 183).   6  A comparable moral about the importance of the ordinary and insignificant, and of charity to the undeserving, is conveyed in Tolkien’s short story, “Leaf by Niggle.”   7  A letter from Revd. Anne Haselhurst in the Catholic weekly, The Tablet (January 1, 2004), makes the point quite effectively; speaking about The Lord of the Rings she states “Certainly it is not explicitly Christian, nor is it an allegory . . . Neither is there one character who could be described as a Christ-figure. Nevertheless, I feel that the three principal characters, Gandalf, Frodo [Bilbo’s analogue in The Lord of the Rings] and Aragorn, seem to suggest Christ’s three roles as prophet, priest and king (in that order) . . .”   8  This element of unpredictability suggests that the divine is not to be controlled by human agency. Many parallels in the Hebrew scriptures could be cited, while in the gospels, in addition to incidents from Christ’s ministry, the behavior of the star leading the Magi, appearing without notice but vanishing when the Magi visit Herod, and only reappearing

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when they are again on the right track, comes to mind. In the Narnia books, Lewis represents the arbitrariness of the divine in the propensity of Aslan to appear and disappear without warning.   9  The significance of the date is also noted by Joseph Pearce, in “Why Tolkien Says” (http:// catholiceducation.org/articles/arts/al0161.html, accessed December 17, 2013), as he observes, this “will not have escaped the attention of Catholic scholars.” I would go so far as to say it would be impossible for a Catholic of Tolkien’s generation to have chosen this date by accident. 10  Such biblical echoes occur not infrequently in Tolkien’s fiction; a notable instance is where Frodo, confronted with the attack of the Riders, “felt his tongue cleave to his mouth” (FR, I, xii, 280), a usage indelibly associated with Psalm 137 (136 in Douay-Rheims bible):

“Let my tongue cleave to my jaws” (or “let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth” in King James bible). 11  Additionally, in his chapter “Seven Leaves,” Kocher (1972) draws attention to many explicitly Christian elements in Tolkien’s shorter fiction. 12  The references to the way in which the countryside has changed as a result of the dragon’s presence bring to mind some of the effects currently attributed to global warming: “Great floods and rains had swollen the waters that flowed east; and there had been an earthquake or two (which some were inclined to attribute to the dragon)” (H 177); and later, in another dragon-affected area, “The land about them grew bleak and barren, though once . . . it had been green and fair. . . . They were come to the Desolation of the Dragon” (H 189).

References Addis, William E. and Thomas Arnold. 1954. A Catholic Dictionary. London: Virtue & Co. Carpenter, Humphrey. 1977. J. R. R. Tolkien – A Biography. London: Allen & Unwin. Day, David, 1984. Tolkien’s Ring. London: HarperCollins. Duriez, Colin. 2003. J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: The Story of a Friendship. Stroud: Sutton. Helms, Randel. 1974. Tolkien’s World. London: Thames & Hudson. Heythrop Institute. 2005. On the Way to Life: Contemporary Culture and Theological Development as a Framework for Catholic Education, Catechesis and Formation. London: Catholic Education Service. Isaacs, Neil D. and Rose A. Zimbardo, eds. 1968. Tolkien and the Critics: Essays on J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

Kocher, Paul. 1972. Master of Middle-earth: The Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Nelson, Charles W. 2000. “The Sins of Middleearth: Tolkien’s Use of Medieval Allegory.” In J. R. R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances, edited by George Clark and Daniel Timmons, 83–94. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Raffel, Burton. 1968. “The Lord of the Rings as Literature.” In Isaacs and Zimbardo (1968), 218–246. Reilly, Robert J. 1968. “Tolkien and the Fairy Story.” In Isaacs and Zimbardo (1968), 128–150. Strange, Roderick. 2008. John Henry Newman: A Mind Alive. London: Darton, Longman & Todd. Winterton, Gregory. 2010. “Newman – the Father of Vatican II.” The Newman Journal, 81 (September): 2–6. Zimbardo, Rose A. 1968. “Moral Vision in The Lord of the Rings.” In Isaacs and Zimbardo (1968), 128–150.

Further Reading Honegger, Thomas, ed. 2005. Reconsidering Tolkien. Zurich and Bern: Walking Tree Publishers.

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War Janet Brennan Croft

Introduction War is a motif that runs through all of Tolkien’s books, especially The Lord of the Rings. Particular themes appear over and over again: the effects of war on individuals, families, and society; whether war can ever be justified, and if so, the proper conduct of war; close friendships among groups of men in the field; the glory and horror of battle. The depiction of war and its effects were drawn from his own life; he served in World War I at the Battle of the Somme, and two of his sons fought in World War II.

Early Life and World War I Tolkien was exposed to the ideals and concepts of military service at school, as were many young men in his age group and social class; he was involved with the Officer Training Corps (OTC), and possibly with the preceding, more loosely organized Cadet Corps program, while at King Edward’s School. He attended the nationwide OTC encampments in 1909 and 1910, and was chosen for the contingent of eight cadets from King Edward’s School who attended the 1911 coronation and royal progress of George V. He joined King Edward’s Horse a few months later, shortly after starting his first year at Oxford in November 1911. This long-term familiarity with military life under canvas lends an easy verisimilitude to his depictions of life on the open road and in military encampments in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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In August 1914, at the start of World War I, Tolkien was a student at Oxford, and most of his classmates joined up right away (see ch. 1). Tolkien enlisted in a program that allowed him to finish his BA while taking officers’ training, and when he completed his degree in 1915 he was assigned to the Lancashire Fusiliers as a second lieutenant. He had been under some pressure from his relatives; as he said, “in those days chaps joined up, or were scorned publicly” (Letters 53). In early 1916 he decided to specialize in signaling. Tolkien touches on his training experiences in several of his letters. Writing to Edith from Oxford in October and November 1914, he mentions marching in the rain and spending “ages” cleaning his rifle afterwards (Letters 7). In July 1915 he began officer training with the Lancashire Fusiliers and learned to drill recruits (Carpenter 1977, 77). Later he attended lectures on what he called “the dull backwaters of the art of killing” (77–78), and wrote about bomb-throwing practice with dummies and dealing with drill in extremes of heat and cold (Letters 8). Military life was not to Tolkien’s taste. He did not like the ragtime music many of his fellow officers played on their gramophones, and found the meals inedible and conditions uncomfortable (Carpenter 1977, 77). As Tolkien admitted in a 1944 letter to his son Christopher, “I was not a good officer”; he spent a good deal of time working on his Elvish languages and histories at meals, during lectures, and even (he claimed) in dugouts while under fire (Letters 78). Tolkien’s specialized training in signaling included “Morse code, flag and disc signalling, the transmission of messages by heliograph and lamp, the use of signalrockets and field-telephones, and even how to handle carrier-pigeons” (Carpenter 1977, 78). Map-making seems to have been one of the skills Tolkien most enjoyed learning, judging by the many maps of Middle-earth on which he lavished so much time and effort. Ronald and Edith knew it was only a matter of time before he was sent to the front, and that it was quite possible he might never come back, so they got married in March of 1916. Three months later his embarkation orders arrived, and his battalion was sent to France. After three weeks of additional training, his battalion was sent to the front, marching to the Somme in the pouring rain at the end of June. Tolkien survived a number of engagements, finding that the “neat orderly conditions” under which he’d trained had little in common with signaling in the field, where telephones and Morse code buzzers were forbidden because the Germans had tapped the lines, and signalers were reduced to using lights, flags, runners, and even carrierpigeons (Carpenter 1977, 83). Signaling officers were not expected to participate in much hand-to-hand combat, since they were taught that “the sole object of their existence is to keep the commander in touch with the various parts of his force and to enable his plans to be promptly and smoothly executed” (Solano 1914, 13). However, it was not by any means a safe job; signalers were a prime strategic target for the enemy. In any case there was no avoiding what Tolkien called the “animal horror” of the trenches (Letters 72), the dead bodies in the mud and the craters filled with water and rats.



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Tolkien was fortunate enough to escape serious injury, but two of his closest friends from King Edward’s School died in battle. As Tolkien said in the introduction to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings: [I]t seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead. (FR, Foreword, xxvi)

On October 27, 1916 Tolkien came down with trench fever. He spent the rest of the war in various infirmaries in England, becoming almost well and then succumbing to fever again, until he was finally declared fit for duty just before the war ended in November 1918. The war had a powerful effect on Tolkien’s imagination, and it was during this period of training, combat, and recovery that Tolkien started writing stories that provided a background for his imaginary languages. C.  S. Lewis, who had similar experiences during World War I, wrote in his review of The Lord of the Rings: [Tolkien’s] war has the very quality of the war my generation knew. It is all here: the endless, unintelligible movement, the sinister quiet of the front when “everything is now ready,” the flying civilians, the lively, vivid friendships, the background of something like despair and the merry foreground, and such heaven-sent windfalls as a cache of choice tobacco “salvaged” from a ruin. (Lewis 1954, 39–40)

Tolkien once commented: “My ‘Sam Gamgee’ is indeed a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself” (Carpenter 1977, 81). In a 1960 letter Tolkien wrote, “The Dead Marshes and the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme” (Letters 303). The dead faces floating just below the surface of the water were a standard image in Great War memoirs and fiction. And in “On Fairy-stories” Tolkien says, “A taste for fairy-stories was wakened by philology on the threshold of manhood, and quickened to full life by war” (OFS 56). It shows he was already thinking in terms of expressing himself through the means of the fairy-tale; Tolkien was predisposed to fit his war experiences into this framework from the start, rather than into the realistic and ironic form many other writers used. Tolkien came out of the war with a profound sense of respect for the courage of the ordinary soldier, and a deep understanding of the effects of the stress of war on the human soul. His short play “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son” is important for understanding the development of Tolkien’s ideas on courage and military leadership. Published in 1953 but written in 1945 or earlier, it is a dramatic verse play expanding on an episode from the Anglo-Saxon poem The Battle of Maldon. In it two men, the young son of a bard and an old farmer, debate the courage and deeds of Beorhtnoth, whose dead body they seek at night on the battlefield where he fell. Tolkien sees far more honor in the conduct of Beorhtnoth’s men than their leader:

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“Their part was to endure and die, and not to question . . . It is the heroism of obedience and love not of pride or willfulness that is the most heroic and the most moving” (TL 147–148). War made its presence known in some way in almost every work by Tolkien; even his charming Letters from Father Christmas reflect his concerns (Tolkien 2009d). Tolkien’s first known prose writing after his experiences on the battlefields of northern France, “The Fall of Gondolin,” is full of extended and terrifying scenes of battle. What Paul Fussell describes as the “bizarre inverse quest” (2000, 41) of the soldiers on their way to the front resonates throughout Frodo’s quest to destroy the Ring. The inevitable question arises: Why, when so many of his contemporaries, like Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, found the ironic mode the only appropriate means for remembering and communicating their war experiences and exploring these themes, did Tolkien choose the heroic? The war’s terrible new weapons stripped heroic associations from battle and led to disillusionment and the ironic response on the part of many writers. However, for some writers this became instead a challenge to somehow bring meaning and valor back to the act of war. In Tolkien’s work, we experience both the glory of the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, with the Rohirrim singing “for the joy of battle was on them” (RK, V, v, 1097), and a balancing view of the battle from Pippin in Minas Tirith and Merry with the Riders of Rohan. Like the experience of the common soldier in the trenches of World War I, their part is far from glorious; there is tedious waiting, a sense of uselessness and futility, terror and pain and ugliness. But instead of falling back on irony as the proper response, the Hobbits illustrate Tolkien’s ideal of courage, going on in spite of being without hope. The creation of a world in which both heroic deeds could be done and determination without hope might be rewarded might also have been “therapy for a mind wounded in war” (Brogan 1989, 358). W. H. R. Rivers, the psychiatrist who treated Siegfried Sassoon among others, commented on how his patients processed the war through their dreams, “transform[ing] reality into a more bearable nightmare” (Friedman 1982, 122). But while their dreams might be moving toward myth, their writing on the war was consciously realistic, ironic, and very personal. In contrast, Tolkien did not write The Lord of the Rings until many years after the war. But he had actually already started thinking about his experiences this way during the war; as he wrote later: “I took to ‘escapism’: or really transforming experience into another form and symbol . . . and it has stood me in good stead in many hard years since and I still draw on the conceptions then hammered out” (Letters 85). Transformed experience made “applicable” instead of “allegorical” creates forms and symbols that make a work relevant for a wide variety of readers by encouraging their own interpretations of the material. A work without specific allegorical referents is more universally applicable, so while there is a distinct imprint of World War I on the trilogy, this lack of one-on-one allegorical identification makes it applicable to any upheaval and dislocation in the reader’s life and at the same time increases the reader’s understanding of twentieth-century history.



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The intensity of war both reduces life to its essentials and creates a desire to understand and control experiences by fitting them into a structure that gives meaning to chaos. Soldiers of a literary bent saw their lives taking on the quest-pattern. The writers who came closest to mythologizing their experiences, like David Jones in In Parenthesis, used the quest-romance to structure their stories, as Tolkien did in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. But the chivalric ideal of war is questioned by Faramir, for one, who sees war as a means but not an end in itself, and thus finds another way to confront the issues of being a warrior. Siegfried Sassoon wrote: “The man who had really endured the war at its worst was everlastingly differentiated from everyone except his fellow soldiers” (Sassoon 1930, 280). He found it difficult to describe his experience to those who had not shared it. Interestingly, Verlyn Flieger compares this inability to communicate on the part of Great War veterans to that of travelers returning from Faërie (Flieger 1997, 219). She continues: In the way that extremes can sometimes meet, War and Faërie have a certain resemblance to one another. Both are set beyond the reach of ordinary human experience. Both are equally indifferent to the needs of ordinary humanity. Both can change those who return. .  .  . Perhaps worst of all, both war and Faërie can change out of all recognition the wanderer’s perception of the world to which he returns, so that never again can it be what it once was. (1997, 224)

World War II Tolkien wrote much of The Lord of the Rings during World War II, but insisted that: The crucial chapter . . . was written long before the foreshadow of 1939 had yet become a threat of inevitable disaster, and from that point the story would have developed along essentially the same lines, if that disaster had been averted. . . . little or nothing in it was modified by the war that began in 1939 or its sequels. The real war does not resemble the legendary war in its process or its conclusion. (FR, Foreword, xxv)

However, he admits later in the Foreword, “an author cannot remain wholly unaffected by his experience” (xxvi), and he said early in its writing that “[t]he darkness of the present days has had some effect on it” (Letters 41). Tolkien’s perspective as a veteran, as a “traumatized author” in Shippey’s phrase (Shippey 2000), gave him an outlook on World War II not shared by most of the young men and women then enlisting. A veteran’s point of view may be seen in The Hobbit, in Bilbo’s comment after the Battle of Five Armies: “Victory after all I suppose! . . . Well, it seems a very gloomy business” (H 264). We can see some of his insights on the retrospective futility of World War I in a speech by Elrond, who remembers the last great battle with Sauron and the years between the wars: “Sauron

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was diminished, but not destroyed. His Ring was lost but not unmade. The Dark Tower was broken, but its foundations were not removed” (FR, II, ii, 317). In Frodo’s plaintive yearning “I wish it need not have happened in my time” (FR, I, ii, 67) is an echo of Tolkien’s own feeling of darkening horizons. During this war, Tolkien was also the parent of two combatants. Michael became an anti-aircraft gunner and saw active duty defending aerodromes in Britain and France. Christopher joined the Royal Air Force and was sent to South Africa to train as a fighter pilot. Tolkien’s eldest son John, though not in the armed forces, was training for the priesthood in Rome and had to be evacuated from Italy shortly before the war broke out (Carpenter 1977, 193; Tolkien and Tolkien 1992, 70–71). This gave Tolkien an additional perspective on war to explore in his writing. It was not World War II itself, but the new and personal experience of being an anxious parent of grown children in active military service, that gave his writing on war an added poignancy. Losing a parent was sadly familiar to the orphaned Tolkien, but the possibility of losing a child was something frighteningly new and different. In fact, in one letter to Christopher he very pointedly comments that too many of the leaders of the war are childless and view the war from a safe “vantage point [in their] large motor-cars” (Letters 89). All of his letters to Christopher and Michael are full of a tender concern for their physical and spiritual safety and a longing to be able to share their danger. In The Hobbit (1937, see ch. 8), first published before World War II, there are no actual parent/child pairs. Gandalf may be parent-like, but he never seems worried about Bilbo in the same way he is concerned for Frodo’s physical and spiritual safety in The Lord of the Rings. There was no global war going on, and the thought of his own children ever serving in the military was probably not uppermost in Tolkien’s mind. The Shire is a peaceful country, and war is part of the distant past: “Swords in these parts are mostly blunt, and axes are used for trees, and shields as cradles or dish-covers” (H 21). Children never seem to die before their parents. However, there are many father/child pairs in The Lord of the Rings, and Tolkien explores a variety of parental reactions to the risks their children run in war. Consciously or not, Tolkien may have been examining all the ramifications of his possible reactions to what could happen to Michael and Christopher, and what might have happened to Priscilla if she could have served in combat, or to John if he hadn’t left Rome in time. Mothers also agonize over their children in wartime, but Tolkien was evidently far more comfortable writing about the relationships between fathers and sons. Tolkien could have cast his memory back to Edith’s experiences while he was a soldier for material, and it is possible that some of her unhappiness with life as a pregnant war bride is reflected in Éowyn. He ought to have been intimately familiar with Edith’s fears for Christopher and Michael during World War II, and it is somewhat surprising they are not reflected in his work. This is an unfortunate weakness in Tolkien’s writings about war; while Éowyn is a fully developed and sympathetic character, the other women affected by war are too sketchily drawn for their fears and motivations to be completely understandable.



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The Wounds That Will Not Heal One of the grimmest lessons The Lord of the Rings teaches about war is that some of the mental wounds it causes never heal in this world. Frodo is Tolkien’s prime example of the heartbreaking effects of war on certain minds. As Bruce Leonard has pointed out, Tolkien “described the chronic pain and ‘the memory of the fear’ that are characteristic of [posttraumatic stress disorder], before PTSD was widely recognized” (Leonard 1996). Shell shock was a new response to battle stress during World War I. Many of its symptoms sound like the effect of the Black Breath of the Nazgûl, or like Frodo’s sufferings after the attack with the Morgul-blade on Weathertop. One contemporary theory held that: modern warfare was more psychologically difficult than warfare in the past because the men had to “remain for days, weeks, even months, in a narrow trench or stuffy dugout, exposed to constant danger of the most fearful kind . . . which comes from some unseen source, and against which no personal agility or wit is of any avail.” . . . It was their enforced passivity that was emotionally incapacitating. (Bourke 2000, 58)

The definition of courage in war had to be revised: “it shifted from episodic physical heroism to stoical endurance, and adjustment to powerlessness” (May 1998, 97). This may help explain why Frodo is the only character who exhibits such a strong delayed reaction to his experiences: Frodo’s experience of the war was different from everyone else’s and more akin to modern war in its unrelieved stress. After entering Mordor, he was in effect threatened continually by an invisible enemy for ten days and nights without relief, and in fact, his sense of being under the constant observation of an unseen enemy dates back to the moment he put on the Ring on Amon Hen. All the other characters experienced a more traditional pattern of war, with battles lasting a day and a night at most and divided in space and time from other confrontations. Many who suffered from shell shock also experienced depression and survivor’s guilt. In a draft of a letter to a reader in 1963, Tolkien says that at first Frodo felt no guilt for his fall into temptation, as “he expected to die very soon. But he did not, and one can observe the disquiet growing in him.” He suffered from “unreasoning self-reproach: he saw himself and all that he [had] done as a broken failure.” Tolkien also felt that Frodo was tempted by two things: the prideful wish to be thought a hero, and regret and desire for the destroyed Ring (Letters 327–328). Hiding all this from his friends, it is no wonder he suffered. After Frodo’s return to Hobbiton, his behavior almost perfectly fits the modern diagnostic criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder. He “has been exposed to a traumatic event” and his response included “intense fear, helplessness, and terror.” The event is “persistently reexperienced” in several ways: “recurrent and intrusive distressing recollections of the event” and “recurrent distressing dreams of the event” (DSMIV 2000). On the anniversary of his wounding at Weathertop, Gandalf notices Frodo’s distress and says, “The wound aches, and the memory of darkness is heavy on me”

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(RK, VI, vii, 1295). On other anniversaries he is described as seeming “half in a dream” or seeing “things far away” (RK, VI, ix, 1340, 1342). Frodo shows a “markedly diminished interest or participation in significant activities”; he has a “feeling of detachment or estrangement from others” and a “sense of a foreshortened future” (DSM-IV 2000). In less than a year after the travelers’ return, he “dropped quietly out of all the doings of the Shire” (RK, VI, ix, 1342) and began putting his papers in order, as if he expected to die soon. Many of those who suffered from the stress of World War I were urged to try to forget their experiences and return to normal life. And many men managed to do so without any difficulty, of course. Of those who could not rest and forget, the more fortunate, like Siegfried Sassoon, found doctors like Rivers who encouraged them to examine and discuss their experiences rather than try to forget them, some during the war, some long after. Telling the tale grants the teller some control over and ownership of his memories. Bilbo certainly found this important in handling his memories of The Battle of Five Armies: It was a terrible battle. The most dreadful of all Bilbo’s experiences, and the one which at the time he hated most – which is to say it was the one he was most proud of, and most fond of recalling long afterwards, although he was quite unimportant in it. (H 260)

Frodo writes about his experiences in the Red Book he leaves to Sam, but does not talk to anyone directly about them, keeping his pain hidden. Leonard observes that “it is curious that Frodo did not seek support from Sam, his fellow Mordor vet” (Leonard 1996), but it was part of Frodo’s personality to avoid distressing his friends, and he would be unlikely to want to burden Sam with his troubles when his friend was fully occupied with the re-greening of the Shire and making a life with Rosie. Frodo only says privately to Gandalf, “I am wounded with knife, tooth, sting, and a long burden. Where shall I find rest?” (RK, VI, vii, 1295). Frodo bears his wounds silently, in private; he “undertook his quest out of love .  .  . and also in complete humility” (Letters 327), was wounded for the salvation of Middle-earth, and claims nothing in return; in fact he knows he must soon leave everything behind. What Frodo says in the end is: I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, so that others may keep them. (RK, VI, ix, 1346–1347)

War: Just or Unjust? Early review and criticism of Tolkien, particularly before his Letters and Carpenter’s biography were published, was often polarized on the issue of whether he took too great a delight in war or was too much of a pacifist. Most recent appreciations gener-



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ally take a more nuanced view and consider him to be, if not on a par with the World War I poets, at least as heavily influenced by the war as they were. Tolkien’s fiction, criticism, and letters make it clear that he greatly desired peace, but on the other hand felt that war was sometimes necessary, despite his disgust with modern military means. Tolkien was not a pacifist in the political sense, and he did not appear to agree with pacifists that their philosophy would ensure peace. Tom Bombadil lives a life of pure pacifism, but his existence might at any time depend entirely on the efforts of those willing to defend him, as Glorfindel implies in the chapter “The Council of Elrond.” Frodo’s rejection of the use of violence during “The Scouring of the Shire” is shown to be admirable but impractical, as the success of Merry and Pippin’s methods demonstrate. Éowyn’s response to the pacifistic philosophy of the Warden of the Houses of Healing is more convincingly written than her sudden conversion a few pages later: “It needs but one foe to breed a war, not two, Master Warden . . . And those who have not swords can still die upon them” (RK, VI, v, 1256). It is also clear that Tolkien did not see war as a splendid thing in and of itself. While Tolkien regarded war as something which on occasion was unavoidable, he did not glorify war as such; although there are glorious moments during the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, they are more than balanced by other passages on the evils of war. He was certainly well aware of the shortcomings of modern warfare in particular, and of the dangers of too much pride in military valor, a topic he examines in some detail in “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son” and the accompanying essay on the word ofermo¯ d. The philosophical system called “just war doctrine” provides a way to balance these positions; though Tolkien never mentions it specifically in his published writings, he is likely to have encountered it in his religious instruction or in his reading in medieval literature. Just war doctrine says that war should be conducted under certain strict moral rules, and avoided if this is not possible. Peace is always better than war, and war should only be conducted to bring about peace; but war should not be categorically condemned, because war can serve a good end. Simply put, just war doctrine states that “a war to be just must be initiated and led by a proper authority, must be fought for a just cause with right intentions, and must not use illicit means” (Teichman 1986, 46). The party declaring war should meet all of the appropriate standards at all times or the war becomes unjust. It must also believe that fighting the war will result in greater good than not fighting it. Does just war theory have room for the Rohirrim, who “sang as they slew” (RK, V, v, 1097)? Many readers, pacifist or not, are uncomfortable with this passage and point to it as an example of Tolkien’s supposed delight in war. This joy in battle seems to go against the just war tenets of right intentions and proportionality, but Dan Timmons points out that what Tolkien is showing us is that “some battles are worth fighting and one should take joy in defeating a wicked adversary” (Timmons 2007), in other words, that a warrior can rightly be proud of his ability to effect moral good.

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The whole subject of whether or not the Allies can use the Ring against Sauron is a just war issue. All internal dissension in the West hinges on whether it is right to use this fortuitously obtained weapon, and a character’s answer to this question is the key to his or her attitude on just war. Those who appear to adhere most strongly to the tenets of just war feel the least temptation to claim the Ring; Aragorn and Faramir, for example, see the moral dangers of using the Ring very clearly from the start. Even the strongest and most moral person who tried to use the Ring would find that he or she was not strong enough to refrain from the temptation to unjustly enslave the rest of the world. Those of a militaristic mind, like Boromir, or those who scorn ethics in war, like Saruman or Denethor, want the Ring for the power it would give them and think that they could control it. Those who desire peace above all else are tempted by the Ring’s power to allow them to impose their will on the world for good purpose, but the Wise, from Gandalf and Galadriel to Sam, see the trap of power for what it is. Only those who can remove themselves entirely from wanting to influence the outside world, like Tom Bombadil in his private nirvana, are completely unaffected by the Ring.

Conclusions and Suggestions for Future Developments Tolkien was a thoughtful observer of history and understood the unhappy balance between the occasional necessity for war and the price it exacts from the bodies and souls of participants. The key to his philosophy is just war theory, tempered by his understanding of what we now call posttraumatic stress disorder, his wide reading in history, his views on the art of leadership, and his distrust of modernity. Understanding Tolkien’s approach to war is crucial to fully understanding his works, particularly The Lord of the Rings, as a whole. During World War I, Tolkien witnessed incredible carnage and impossible heroism, and lost most of his best friends in battle. Yet the war did not turn him to despair and irony, as it did so many others of his generation; he retained a deep underlying sense of hope and trust in providence in spite of all the war could do. World War II taught him the frustrations of a parent, too old for active duty, forced to watch his sons risking their lives in a war that was, from the point of view of 1918, never supposed to happen. This second war in his lifetime was even more bitter than the first, as he helplessly observed the inexorable advance of modernity and the Machine culminating in the atomic bomb. Tolkien’s distaste for modern war can also be traced to his understanding of the causes and agonies of contemporary war neuroses. At the very simplest level, modern war technology erases the differences between night and day, summer and winter, that in primitive times limited war to particular seasons and supported a natural rhythm of “a time for war and a time for peace.” Trench warfare constrained and held back the fight-or-flight instinct, creating a disconnect between attacking and being attacked. Courage had to be redefined; heroic action was no longer paramount but



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was supplanted by dogged endurance, which Tolkien embodied in Frodo and Sam’s journey across Mordor. Tolkien warns us against the concentration of power and the will to dominate: Sauron, Saruman, and the Ring itself illustrate a soul-destroying addiction to the power of controlling others. Tolkien also reminds us of the eucatastrophic nature of mercy; that transcending the hard rules of just war and military law, and freely offering mercy and pity, is an act of grace that may rebound in unexpected ways. Where might the study of Tolkien and war go from here? In an online colloquy Michael Drout (2004) suggested teaching Tolkien alongside the World War I poets, which could lead to much fruitful comparison of themes and style. The fact that the Tolkien family had refugees living with them during World War II is an unexplored biographical incident which might have influenced depictions of the plight of refugees in his works; we know a similar situation influenced Lewis’s Narnia books. Tom Shippey suggested in a recent editorial in Mallorn (2008) and a talk on leadership at the 2012 “Return of the Ring” conference that it could be useful to investigate Tolkien’s interest in or contact with William Joseph Slim (Field Marshal during World War II among other achievements), his classmate at King Edward’s School and its Officer Training Corps. Tolkien stated in one of his letters that if he was “like” any character in the books, it was Faramir (Letters 232). It is these words, spoken by Faramir to Frodo in the woods of Ithilien, that best express the essence of Tolkien’s philosophy of war: War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour us all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend: the city of the Men of Númenor. (TT, IV, v, 878)

References Brogan, Hugh. 1989. “Tolkien’s Great War.” In Children and Their Books: A Celebration of the Work of Iona and Peter Opie, edited by Gillian Avery and Julia Briggs, 351–367. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bourke, Joanna. 2000. “Effeminacy, Ethnicity and the End of Trauma: The Sufferings of ‘Shellshocked’ Men in Great Britain and Ireland, 1914–39.” Journal of Contemporary History, 35.1: 57–69. Carpenter, Humphrey. 1977. J. R. R. Tolkien – A Biography. London: Allen & Unwin. Drout, Michael. 2004. “Reaching for the Ring.” The Chronicle of Higher Education online colloquy. Available at http://chronicle.com/article/

Reaching-for-the-Ring/24210, accessed December 17, 2013. DSM-IV. 2000. “Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.” In Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-IV, 463–468. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association. Flieger, Verlyn. 1997. A Question of Time: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Road to Faërie. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Friedman, Barton. 1982. “Tolkien and David Jones: The Great War and the War of the Ring.” Clio, 11.2: 115–136. Fussell, Paul. 2000. The Great War and Modern Memory. 25th anniversary edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Leonard, Bruce. 1996. “The Post Traumatic Stress Disorder of Frodo Baggins.” Paper read at Myth­ con XXVII, at Boulder, CO (unpublished). Lewis, C. S. 1954. “The Gods Return to Earth.” Time and Tide, August 14: 1082. May, Carl. 1998. “Lord Moran’s Memoir: Shellshock and the Pathology of Fear.” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 91.2: 95–100. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1930. Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. New York: Coward, McCann. Shippey, Tom. 2000. J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. London: HarperCollins. Shippey, Thomas A. 2008. “An Encyclopedia of Ignorance.” Mallorn, 45: 3–5.

Solano, E. John, ed. 1914. Signalling: Morse, Semaphore, Station Work, Despatch Riding, Telephone Cables, Map Reading. London: John Murray. Teichman, Jenny. 1986. Pacifism and the Just War: A Study in Applied Philosophy. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Timmons, Daniel. 2007. “We few, we happy few’: War and Glory in Henry V and The Lord of the Rings.” In Tolkien and Shakespeare: Essays on Shared Themes and Language, edited by Janet Brennan Croft, 81–90. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Tolkien, John and Priscilla Tolkien. 1992. The Tolkien Family Album. London: HarperCollins.

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Women Adam Roberts

“Tolkien and Women” might be thought an unpromising topic for critical inquiry. The truth is that Tolkien is little praised, and indeed is often actively deprecated, for the way women are represented in his writing. This essay will challenge the view that Tolkien’s treatment of women is fatally limited, but requires me first to sketch out the negative case against which my argument will have to construct itself.1 There are two main focuses of criticism. One is that there simply are very few female characters in Tolkien’s books, a paucity which informs a “Boy’s Own” masculinist adventure idiom that seems retrogressive today. The other, linked to this, is part of a larger critique of, to use a word Tolkien would surely have hated, the ideological assumptions of his body of writing: conservative, Catholic, traditional, a worldview in which women, however cherished (by men), play as it were second fiddle in the musical ensemble of life. The main players of The Hobbit are all male: Bilbo, Gandalf, Thorin and his eleven Dwarvish followers, Elrond, Bolg and his swarming Goblin soldiers, Gollum, Bjorn, the King of the Wood Elves, Bard of Dale, and of course, Smaug himself. There are female characters in The Hobbit, but they are referenced only in glancing. More, the larger trajectory of the novel is, in part, the education of Bilbo out of his comfortable, bourgeois, feminized existence of home comforts and softness (Thorin’s initial judgment of him: “he is soft, soft as the mud of the Shire, and silly,” a judgment with which Gandalf concurs, “You are quite right”, UT 420), into something more “manly,” outdoors, active, adventurous and, by the end, more soldierly. The scare quotes around “manly” are there for a reason, and we will return to the question of how far Tolkien’s

A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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writing collaborates with, or challenges, the assumptions implicit in traditional gender roles. But, to begin with, the main point seems unarguable: The Hobbit is an egregiously male book. The situation is a little less monogendered in The Lord of the Rings, although the overwhelming majority of the novel’s central characters are male (all nine of the Fellowship, for instance). Indeed, there is such a dearth of female characters that even Hollywood, not a place generally known for progressive gender politics, felt that intervention was necessary. In Peter Jackson’s movie trilogy Arwen is pulled from the novel’s appendices and made into a significant, though largely reactive, character.2 More, there is a case to answer that femaleness in The Lord of the Rings is more awkwardly rendered than its simple absence in The Hobbit. Absent female characters, though their absence itself is both problematic and symptomatic of larger cultural biases, cannot be in themselves offensively rendered, since they are not there. In The Lord of the Rings female presence is both rare enough to invoke many of the same cultural biases as complete absence would, while at the same time such presence as there is is liable to prove even more unpalatable to modern feminist sensibilities. To put the case briefly, there are three main female characters in the book of The Lord of the Rings, not counting minor, marginal or appendix-only figures. Those three are: Galadriel, the Elven queen; Éowyn, the maiden of Rohan who dresses in male armor and goes in disguise to war; and Shelob, the hideous, gigantic spider-monster who lurks in the Mountains of Mordor where she stings Frodo nearly to death. We will look at each of these in turn in more detail below, but for now it is enough to note that these three characters embody three distinct but equally unfortunate modes of how a “woman” can fit herself into a fundamentally masculine world. A woman can perhaps be conceived of as an unattainable, mystic queen, the sexually “pure” wielder of strange magic who otherwise takes no place in the action; or she can be the sort of woman who is, as it were, almost as good as a man: brave, battle-skilled, strong. Finally she can embody the Monstrous Feminine; an externalization of all the most grotesque and unreconstructed male fears about female fleshiness, malice, broodiness, and hostility to all masculine projects. One need not stand in the avant-garde of feminism to see this short list of female types represents something of a problem, both in itself and in its implied exhaustive taxonomy of the ways in which women have a place in a man’s world. There is, of course, a fourth role for women in this “masculinist” worldview: as wives, mothers, and healers. This traditionally framed category has its place in the novel too, although only at its margins: Sam marries Rosie at the end and has a family; Aragorn cements his dynasty by marrying Arwen; Éowyn is married, or indeed married off, to Faramir. Frodo never marries, though, nor does Gandalf, and the other four surviving members of the Fellowship of the Ring pair off with one another, into relationships that can best be categorized by invoking Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s discourse (1993) of the homosocial: Merry and Pippin making one couple, and Legolas and Gimli another. In all this, Tolkien was a product of his time generally, and of his literary peergroup the Inklings in particular (see chs. 1 and 22). Candice Fredrick and Sam McBride



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rightly note that the “underlying principle in the Inklings’ lives and works” is that women should know and accept their place in God’s hierarchy, subject to men (2001, 160). More, there is a sense, amplified especially during wartime, that the action of women in the world is actually liable to sap the strength of men. Elaine Good (2002, 285) notes: Lewis’s statement to friend Bede Griffith that “The decay of friendship, owing to the endless presence of women everywhere, is a thing I’m rather afraid of,” perhaps best exemplifies the fundamental feeling of the Inklings that the bonds between men are weakened by the presence of women.

This is not a prejudice invented by Tolkien and his friends, of course. The association of men with strength and women with weakness is woven deep into the fabric of what we may as well (though the word is problematic) refer to as “patriarchy.” One has no desire to make a meal of this negative critique of Tolkien’s women. Judging Tolkien according to a set of ideological criteria he himself would not have recognized runs the risk of more than anachronism; it tends to be actively distorting. Instead it is argued that something much more interesting than mere reactionary sexism is at work in Tolkien’s writing about women, not despite but because of the immanent conservative Catholic-religious cast of the whole. The intention is to do more than work through the various female characters in his writing, judging them approvingly or disapprovingly by modern standards. The argument goes to the heart of everything that Tolkien’s writing is about. To be clear, this essay does not assert that Tolkien’s representation of women can be redeemed for modern readers from within the ideological assumptions of modern Conservatism, although of course there are Conservative critics who suggest that it can. This is the argument (advanced for instance by American politician Christine O’Donnell) that women in Tolkien are celebrated as women rather than judged as men (Flood, 2010). It is the argument that Tolkien was drawn in particular to the portrayal of Elvish women like Galadriel, Arwen, and Lúthien because he had a higher regard for women than for men, because he saw them as existing on a higher, purer, more spiritual and beautiful plane. This appears to be a non-starter, a clunky iteration of the “feminine mystique” so brilliantly poignarded by Betty Friedan’s celebrated 1960s polemic.3 So where does that leave us? It is certainly a topic upon which even the best critics can appear defensive. As Charles Moseley states: No fiction can satisfy every orthodoxy, least of all those that are differently conditioned from those of its own time. Tolkien’s texts do reveal values that are Eurocentric, white, middle-class, patriarchal – those of the majority of his generation in England, in fact. (1997, 63)

This is, of course, true; and bears repeating. That said, one has reservations about the way Moseley seeks to bring Tolkien’s representation of women back into the fold. Moseley states the feminist critical case against Tolkien briskly:

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[T]he overwhelming majority of characters are male. Love between male and female is not a major feature. Love for things, and places, and for family and friends is important: but Beren and Lúthien, Celebrían and Eärendil, Turin and Niniel, Aragorn and Arwen are about the only couples whose love gets much space. Even with Beren and Lúthien, the depiction of Lúthien’s beauty is incomplete, indirect, the nature of their feelings is stated rather than explored. We are simply told of love: it is analysed neither physically nor psychologically . . . [it is] male fellowship and supposedly “male” values of heroism, courage, and endurance [that] are central. (1997, 64)

He thus concedes that “the overwhelming majority of characters are male,” but permits himself a “yet”: Yet Tolkien does give us glimpses of other possibilities. The Silmarillion tells of the heroic Haleth, first chief of the Haladrin, leading her people on the terrible journey through Nan Dungortheb. The Stoors, Gollum’s people, seem to have been matriarchal. In The Silmarillion it is Melian wife of Thingol whose power and wisdom guarded the realm of Doriath. In The Lord of the Rings, Galadriel is the only figure able to resist all enemies, save Sauron himself. In Rohan we meet Éowyn . . . a moving cameo of a woman who knows she is trapped. For her, though a “shieldmaiden”, the practice of heroism, the ultimate values of her society, is impossible unless she discards her identity and becomes Dernhelm. (1997, 64–65)

There is genuine pathos in the way Éowyn is forced to discard her identity in order to escape the confinements of her gender. But we can’t ignore the fact that the other women mentioned here – Haleth, Melian, Gollum’s unnamed grandmother – come with identities, as it were, conveniently pre-discarded. Moseley’s critique of Tolkien is in other respects sensitive and intelligent, but where gender is concerned it feels a little like special pleading. “It can be argued that Tolkien is interested less in the specific social than in the generic human,” he says, as if the latter can somehow be magically separated out from the former. It is one thing to say, as Moseley does, that the focus of Tolkien’s writing is “the predicament in which mankind, not just men and women, finds itself in a world of trouble and change” (1997, 63). But the crucial aspect of this larger existential drama is the choice we make – the choice we are given – how we encounter these troubles and this change: whether, specifically, we encounter it actively or passively. The problem with eliding the female experience into a generalized masculine one is that it ignores the extent to which passivity is forced upon women as the only socially acceptable way of behaving. This question of enforced female passivity is present in all three of the main female characters of The Lord of the Rings, inflected differently in each case. Shelob, for instance, functions as a kind of grotesque caricature of enforced passivity: a beast of prey who does not go out to hunt, like wolves or bears, but rather lurks in darkness waiting for prey to come to her, “lurking in her den” (TT, IV, ix, 947). She is all appetite, “drinking the blood of Elves and Men, bloated and grown fat with endless



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brooding on her feasts” (946), and her sexual desires are at one with her eating and drinking: knowing that the reader will connect her existence with the great spiders Bilbo encountered in Mirkwood, Tolkien adds: All living things were her food, and her vomit darkness. Far and wide her lesser broods, bastards of the miserable mates, her own offspring, that she slew, spread from glen to glen, from the Ephel Dúath to the eastern hills, to Dol Guldur and the fastnesses of Mirkwood. (TT, IV, ix, 946)

This grisly cameo may owe something to Milton’s Satan fathering Death upon his own daughter Sin in Paradise Lost. But the effect of it is not only to invoke the spiderish horror of “the black widow,” a common enough focus for male fearful desire. It is also to reduplicate precisely the claustrophobic passivity of Shelob’s evil. She breeds with herself, eats her own mates who are also her own offspring, and has no care for the outside world. This monstrous passivity, in other words, is death; the solipsistic death that swallows up all life. This, more than the clumsier descriptions of the feminized, though hideous “fleshiness” of Shelob (“behind her short stalk-like neck was her huge swollen body, a vast bloated bag, swaying and sagging between her legs . . . the belly underneath was pale and luminous and gave forth a stench,” TT, IV, ix, 949), speaks to the novel’s larger sense of “the female.” If, to appropriate Robert Graves’s laconically sexist apothegm, “woman is, man does,” then Shelob embodies a ghastly Gothicized parody of mere is-ness: waiting, brooding, devouring, killing. Éowyn is sharply differentiated from this parodic fleshly femaleness: no sagging, swaying female curves on her, and certainly no “stench” emanating from Tolkien’s euphemistically named between-legs lower “belly.” On the contrary, she is tall, straight and strong as a sword; as strong, in fact, as a boy. Moreover she is chilly-chaste where Shelob is all darkly repulsive sexual fecundity: “Very fair was her face, and her long hair was like a river of gold. Slender and tall she was in her white robe girt with silver; but strong she seemed and stern as steel, a daughter of kings” (TT, III, vi, 672). Gold and silver may be semantically connected with “beautiful women” in terms of preciousness; but when this passage moves to steel it makes clear that the gold and silver are invoked more fundamentally for their metallic qualities. Éowyn is metallic in the sense of being hard, and she is repeatedly linked with metal weapons: “the sword was set upright before her, and her hands were laid upon the hilt. She was clad now in mail, and shone like silver in the sun” (TT, III, vi, 683–684); “Éowyn saw the glitter of their spears, as she stood still” (ibid., 685); “she was clad to the waist like a warrior and girded with a sword” (RK, V, iii, 1041); “her clear voice was like the ring of steel” (RK, V, vi, 1101). The part she plays in the Battle of Pelennor Fields is, of course, decisive; a Macbeth-like twist to a supernatural charm that had seemed to preserve the villain from hurt (“No living man may hinder me!” RK, V, vi, 1101).

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Her strength is in what she is not – a man – but also in what she is: steely. “Maiden of the Rohirrim, child of kings, slender but as a steel-blade, fair but terrible” (ibid., 1101–1102). Killing the Witch King breaks the sword (“sparkling into many shards,” 1102) and seems to break Éowyn too. The juxtaposition is not forced, but it is hard to avoid: Éowyn’s femininity is slender and hard as a steel blade because she is herself a weapon, the means by which the Nazgûl is fated to be dispatched. Now of course any soldier is, in effect, a weapon wielded by his (or her) superiors. But the situation of Éowyn dramatizes the passivity of this situation in a double sense. Gandalf tells Aragorn that he has “horses and deeds of arms and the free fields” where she “born in the body of a maid” has “spirit and courage at least the match of yours. Yet she was doomed to wait upon an old man . . . and her part seemed to her more ignoble than that of the staff she leaned on” (RK, V, viii, 1134). This is precisely the passivity as female confinement and restriction that modern feminism has so exhaustively critiqued: “all her life seemed shrinking and the walls of her bower closing in about her, a hutch to trammel some wild thing in” (ibid., 1135). The situation is exacerbated by her unrequited love for Aragorn; another mode of imprisoning entrapment, a love that can go nowhere and find no release. “I cannot lie in sloth, idle, caged,” she tells Faramir (RK, VI, v, 1257). And the physical healing of Éowyn is accompanied by, as it were, an emotional or spiritual healing only when she gives up her love for Aragorn and switches her affections to Faramir.4 The scene in which this transference is described styles it as happening with a haste that looks at best unseemly, and at worst psychologically improbable. After many hundred pages in which Éowyn’s spirited nature and her understated but heartfelt, hopeless love for Aragorn is slowly developed, her whole personality swivels about in the space of a few paragraphs over a couple of pages. First Faramir informs her that her love for Aragorn was motivated by pride rather than affection: she wanted Aragorn’s admiration because it was “high and puissant” and because she wished the fame it would have brought her. Then he offers his own love in very different terms: “do not scorn pity that is the gift of a gentle heart, Éowyn! . . . I would love you. Éowyn, do you not love me?” (RK, VI, v, 1263–1264). Her reply constitutes a startlingly abrupt emotional volte face: Then the heart of Éowyn changed, or else at last she understood it. And suddenly her winter passed, and the sun shone on her . . . “I will be a shieldmaiden no longer, nor vie with the great Riders, nor take joy only in the songs of slaying. I will be a healer, and love all things that grow and are not barren.” And again she looked at Faramir. “No longer do I desire to be a queen,” she said. (ibid., 1264)

This presents the critic with problems. The change of heart is described in terms of the changing seasons, presumably to imply that it is a natural organic development of her emotional life, rather than an implausible psychological wrench. Yet psychological plausibility cannot simply be wished away in a novel, and this rings very false. Moreover it seems to undo all that Éowyn had previously stood for: rather than chafing



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at the social restrictions placed upon women she now, abruptly, accepts and even glories in them. Instead of demanding a place in the world, even at the price of disobeying her Lord and adopting a male disguise, she now falls back into the old stereotype that women are “naturally” healers and nurturers. But there’s more going on here than this reaction acknowledges. The key is, precisely, passivity, for the valences of passivity are absolutely central to Tolkien’s larger vision in this novel, and his other writings too. In a sense Éowyn here accepts, as part of her healing, life as a passive mode: subordinating herself to healing and nurturing others. But her previous being-in-the-world, as an unstereotypical female “sword,” a steely weapon deployed against the enemy, was also a life defined by a kind of passivity; commanded in battle, in the service of others. This comparison may look specious, or more actively reactionary, so I will dilate further. To do that requires the introduction of passivity’s gerund, “passion,” by way of suggesting that that is the logic under which we can most fruitfully read Tolkien’s elaborate fantasy of Catholic sacrifice and atonement. Éowyn’s words to Merry, after his offer of military service has been declined by Théoden, are: “where will wants not, a way opens” (RK, V, iii, 1052). This, it seems, is a proverb of Rohan (“so we say,” she adds); but it speaks to a larger theme of The Lord of the Rings as a whole. It is by surrendering one’s will that one finds one’s way. The will is the idiom of pride, and pride, that severe sin, is the root of the evils of Middle-earth, from the Luciferan pride of Melkor (and afterwards of his servant Sauron), to the wizardly pride of Saruman, discontented with his lot, and the mortal pride of Denethor and his son Boromir. It is the nature of pride to want to work its will, regardless of the desires, or the suffering, of others; and by the same token it is the antithesis of pride to surrender one’s will. Indeed, “will” in this novel is profoundly problematic, a state of affairs exemplified in the nature of the Ring at the book’s core, which not only functions as a sort of moral lens, magnifying characters’ destructive, willful possessiveness, but also somehow seems to possess a will of its own. Critics sometimes try to read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings as allegories of religious morals, but this is always a mistake. We have to take seriously Tolkien’s expression of cordial dislike for allegory (FR, Foreword, xxvi), responding to readers who assumed that novel was somehow an allegory for World War II, with the Ring as the atomic bomb. Tolkien’s legendarium was interested not in allegory but incarnation, not in schematic parallels but in what he called “sub-creation” (see ch. 5): the Coleridgean idea that God creates the world, and artists consciously or otherwise “imitate” God in creating a secondary world. To read Tolkien’s published letters is to be struck, time and again, how deeply he meditated the incarnation as the central mystery of Christianity. That God became man, that the immortal died (to be born again), that the divine realm and the material realm intersected in this unique occurrence; all this, for Tolkien, is a riddle of the profoundest and most reverent sort. It is in this context that we must read the novel’s fascination with “will,” “wilfulness,” “passivity,” and “passion.” To be too passive would be to surrender the action of free will, moral and practical choice, that is one of God’s gifts to us; but on the

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other hand to be too willful would arrogate the divine forms that shape the world, to set one’s individual desires against the will of God. For ordinary mortals this is hard enough: we are called upon freely to choose to do the right thing, but that is at least all. But for kings and generals it is harder, in part because the pressure to prioritize ends over means is stronger. Pressure is a modern word for something Tolkien would probably be more likely to describe as “temptation,” and throughout The Lord of the Rings characters in power are presented with moral dilemmas that tempt them to make the wrong decision. The most obvious example of this is how to deal with the Ring itself. Several key actors in the text urge that it be used against Sauron. Exactly what this would entail, practically speaking, is not spelled out; but it doesn’t need to be. The “right” decision is not to collaborate with the evil of the Ring, even though that particular repudiation looks, according to the short-term war-driven priorities in which characters find themselves, wrongheaded. Nevertheless, one of the “functions” of the One Ring in terms of this text is precisely to present key characters with this choice: use me and become powerful, or give me up and remain weak. Some, such as Boromir and Saruman, fail this test. Others pass it according to a kind of innate goodness: Sam and Tom Bombadil for instance. The case of Frodo is the most complicated, and there is not space to discuss it here. But it is worth dwelling briefly on the situation of Gandalf and of Galadriel. Bilbo accuses the wizard of wanting the Ring for himself, and in doing so irritates his temper: “It will be my turn to get angry soon,” he said. “If you say that again, I shall” . . . he took a step towards the hobbit, and he seemed to grow tall and menacing; his shadow filled the room. (FR, I, i, 44)

Frodo, however, offers him the Ring freely. Gandalf refuses the gift brusquely (“Do not tempt me!” FR, I, ii, 81). Later Frodo makes the same offer to Galadriel: “[Y]ou are wise and fearless and fair, Lady Galadriel. I will give you the One Ring, if you ask for it” (FR, II, vii, 475). Her struggle with temptation is more prolonged: “I do not deny that my heart has greatly desired to ask what you offer. For many long years I had pondered what I might do, should the Great Ring come into my hands . . . And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain. . . . All shall love me and despair!” (ibid., 476)

The slightly jarring capitalization in this passage marks the places where grandeur runs the risk of becoming grandiosity. But the point here is precisely that Galadriel knows better than to give in to temptation, and that this knowledge is, in its way, a rather grand thing. We get a glimpse of her as “tall beyond measurement and



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beautiful beyond enduring” and then “suddenly she laughed again, and lo! she was shrunken: a slender elf-woman.” “I pass the test,” she tells Frodo. “I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel” (ibid.). What is interesting about this is its contrast with the way Éowyn relinquishes her dreams of power: or more specifically, of the way Galadriel’s choice is not styled in terms of giving up masculine social roles and assuming feminine ones. It is, rather, an existential crisis that has been averted; Galadriel, by resisting temptation, is able to remain Galadriel. It is this that underlies some of the stranger shapes of decision-making in this novel. Aragorn, for instance, is rightful king, but has spent long decades precisely not seeking the throne but living as a ranger in the wilderness, in a kind of Asceticism of Courtly Power. When Merry and Pippin are captured by Orcs, he orders his band to go after them, on foot, diverting them from their quest. A different sort of commander might have made a different judgment at this point: he might for example say “the death of our friends, though grievous, is only the death of two Hobbits; to follow the Ring might be to safeguard the entire course of the war, saving perhaps thousands of lives.” A utilitarian view would be that the latter judgment outweighs the former. It would be, moreover, a more kingly role, more suited to the dignity of Aragorn’s bloodline – riding directly to confront the enemy, rather than chasing about the grasslands in a probably fruitless chase. And Tolkien is clear that Aragorn does not make his decision quickly. Gimli presses him (“we have already lost precious hours,” TT, III, i, 545) but he takes his time: “Let me think!” said Aragorn. “And now may I make the right choice, and change the evil fate of this unhappy day!” He stood silent for a moment. “I will follow the Orcs,” he said at last. “I would have guided Frodo to Mordor and gone with him to the end; but if I seek him now in the wilderness, I must abandon the captives to torment and death. My heart speaks clearly at last: the fate of the Bearer is in my hands no longer.” (ibid.)

This mode of relinquishing, Tolkien is saying, is as great an act of heroism as storming into battle brandishing your sword. “Where will wants not, a way opens,” says Éowyn; and it is a sentiment that resonates in the largest sense through the whole novel. This then is the light in which we are invited to read her change of heart with respect to Faramir: her love for Aragorn had been an act of will. The change in her, from winter to summer, could perhaps be described as the motion of grace within her; and central to that motion is the subsuming of individual agency into something larger. It is in this sense that the gender-politics of the novel (and how heartily Tolkien would have hated that term!) elide with the larger religious thematic. Passivity in this novel is a passion. This is the heart of the matter; for it might seem axiomatic that one of the major battles of feminism has been against the sense that passivity is a woman’s “natural” state, whilst activity and agency are reserved for men. Peta Tancred puts it neatly:

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Feminism makes it clear that women need to break out of conformity and passivity moulds. We can neither conform nor be passive, and, as we discover the extent of our oppression, we refuse to let patriarchy do the thinking, talking, and naming for us. (1988, 81)

This is hard to disagree with, of course; but there are some contexts of feminist thought that see the question of passivity as more complex, and one of those contexts is Christian feminism. To quote Rosemary Ruether: Some of the earlier ventures of feminist ethics suggested that women’s sins are primarily the sins of passivity, of failure to develop an autonomous self, leaving in place the assumption that men sin primarily through pride . . . But dividing it by gender is too simple. Although women have been directed to accept passivity, acquiescence and auxiliary existence to men as “feminine virtues” they also exist within class and race hierarchies where they can exercise exploitative hauteur toward those under their power.5 (1998, 72)

There is some point in theorizing Tolkien’s writing via Christian approaches to literary criticism and feminism, if only because The Lord of the Rings in particular is so immanently Christian (see also ch. 30). This brings us to passion, a word linked etymologically to concepts of passivity. We do not tend think of it this way anymore, perhaps: we think of passion as a positive force (a positive good, often): “I feel passionately about this . . .” “I feel passionately about you . . .” But in fact these expressions actually mean “I have surrendered the agency and activity of my feelings; I am in a merely reactive and passive state.” Dominos fall with exactly this passion. Most importantly this does not entail a Stoic or a Rational imperative to escape our passions. To attempt to be free of passions is to be seduced by a dream of perfect independence: power, active control, the ideally circulating Unaccommodated Man. It’s a false flicker. Passion is a relational term, and it is only our relations that define us as fully human. The original meaning of the word is now only recalled in archaic linguistic fossils. “The Passion of Christ” is not about the fury or the intense desire of Christ, but rather the period of agonizingly passive suffering of the Christ. There is no power in the universe that can compel God to lie there and be tortured to death; it is something he does of his own free will. And this, for a Catholic like Tolkien, is precisely the road to redemption. Éowyn’s “where will wants not, a way opens” means more than just “it’s only when we give up looking for something that we find it.” It means, more pointedly, “we must actively surrender our individual will and desires in order to gain what we desire, and get our will.” It is precisely the paradox of salvation. Another way of framing the thesis here would be to bring in Hegel’s “master–slave dialectic,” a philosophical framing that has been often used to interrogate the hierarchy of traditional gender roles. Indeed this “master–slave dialectic” (Herrschaft und Knechtschaft in German; sometimes translated “lordship and bondage”) from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit has been very widely interpreted. Hegel describes the encounter



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between two self-conscious beings, who engage in a “struggle to the death” before one enslaves the other, only to find that this does not give him the control over the world he had sought. Some critics extract a kind of abstract model of human subjectivity from this dynamic, but others argue that the social context of what Hegel is saying is vital. In Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason, Terry Pinkard argues that it is not enough to consider Hegel’s master–slave as a purely epistemological relationship between objectivity and subjectivity: it must be grasped as a social relationship, in which each party (let’s say: man and woman) discovers “that [s/]he cannot identify what is [her/] his own without reference to the other’s point of view – without, that is, reference to the sociality common to both” (Pinkard 1994, 62). The Lord of the Rings is clearly a book very much concerned with questions of mastery and slavery, a novel precisely about the proper and improper boundaries of power, about relationships between masters and servants (see also ch. 28). Sauron’s evil manifests predominantly in a desire for mastery; and the novel construes pairs in dialectical power-relationships that work through antithetical inversions, often violently, or in the larger context of violence and death: Frodo and Sam (consider the crucial scene where Sam thinks his master dead and takes the Ring, becoming the master at exactly the point where Frodo is becoming more and more like Gollum); Saruman and Gandalf; Saruman and Wormtongue; Frodo and Gollum; Aragorn and Boromir; Aragorn and Denethor. In each case, and to different degrees, consciousness becomes self-consciousness, partial knowledge is sublated into a higher, more coherent knowledge (wisdom, we might say, although it is rarely, in Tolkien, a thing of comfort). Indeed, part of the mode of the eucatastrophic writing Tolkien practiced is the delay of the getting of wisdom to the very end, as with Sauron when, moments before the destruction of the Ring, “all the magnitude of his own folly was revealed to him in a blinding flash” (RK, VI, iii, 1237). All of this takes place in the novel under the “higher” rubric (formally speaking) of the Ring, and the way its “serving” function – the usefulness of being able to make oneself invisible – necessarily turns about to the point where it is the Ring that is the master and the wearer who is the servant. The Ring, of course, stands as a sort of emblematization of the principle of master–servant domination, or oppression; and one of the memorable aspects of it is the way its domination becomes written on the body via a particular mode of Hegelian “death struggle” – an ageless withering, a nightmare-death-in-life existence, the “abstract negation” of life itself. Contradiction and resolution can only happen, in the novel, via a moment of what amounts to selfmutilation: Frodo becomes Gollum, the master the servant, or rather, a kind of conceptual short circuit is effected with Frodo and Gollum literally struggling (as master/servant) in order to discover who will become the servant of a higher master (the Ring). The contradiction is resolved not via a Hegelian negotiation and recognition of interdependence, but by the literal dissolution of (Gollum’s) body and the Ring in fire. Reading the text this way, it seems to me, opens a different perspective on the way the novel ends (something rather splendidly, if ludicrously, brought out by The

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Return of the King movie, with its interminable, groundhog-day-ish cycle of recirculating endings). That is to say: The Lord of the Rings is a book that ends its own history; it stages “the end of history” in its imaginative world in a more thoroughgoing way than possibly any other novel. The point of rehearsing all this here is to bring it to bear on the question of gender representation in Tolkien’s writing. This in turn opens the book to a much more radical reading (politically or ideologically speaking) than has often been the case with critics, fixated as they often have been on Tolkien’s personal traditionalist, Catholic, and conservative affiliations. Man/woman is more than one more example of a master/ slave; it is at the heart of human power relations. Read this way, Tolkien’s female characters no longer seem marginal, becoming rather crucial dramatizations of the way passivity and passion interrelate. It suggests a way in which what appear, on the surface, radically incompatible views (twenty-first-century feminism and twentiethcentury Catholic traditionalism) in fact approach similar insights in the complexity of hierarchized models of gender relation. Tolkien’s art is profoundly committed to an ethics and an aesthetics of renunciation, of the strength that can only be found via weakness. The creative agency of Tolkien’s world is divine, but where it was originally marred by a malign male agency, Melkor, it was also originally redeemed by a female, Nenna, who “dwells alone”: She is acquainted with grief, and mourns for every wound that Arda has suffered in the marring of Melkor. So great was her sorrow, as the Music unfolded, that her song turned to lamentation long before its end, and the song of mourning was woven into the themes of the World before it began. But she does not weep for herself; and those who hearken to her learn pity, and endurance in hope . . . for she brings strength to the spirit and turns sorrow to wisdom. The windows of her house look outward from the walls of the world. (S 19)

Joseph Pearce, who quotes this passage, connects it with a passage by “another Catholic writer, Maurice Baring”: One has to accept sorrow for it to be of any healing power, and that is the most difficult thing in the world. A Priest once said to me, “when you understand what accepted sorrow means, you will understand everything. It is the secret of life.” (from Darby and Joan (1935), quoted in Pearce 1998, 149)

This is the heart of the question of femaleness in Tolkien’s art; a complex repudiation of masculine values of “agency” and “action” in favor of what is, at root, a religiously informed concept of passionate passivity. The world, for Tolkien, is neither to be rejected nor conquered; instead we must somehow master it and surrender ourselves to it. Moreover, Tolkien’s “sub-creation” is a notionally “feminized” world-building, defined in relation to the notionally “masculine” divine creation of the actual world, yet at the same time existing in a way that unpicks precisely the supposed hierarchy between “real” and “fantasy.” Fantasy – the entire mode in which Tolkien worked – is



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in this sense not only the woman of literature (looked down upon by “masculine” highbrow literature, belittled by the academy and so on), but the woman of creation more generally. Fantasy (or “enchantment”), Tolkien noted in his celebrated essay “On Fairy-stories,” “produces a Secondary World into which both designer and spectator can enter, to the satisfaction of their senses when they are inside; but in its purity it is artistic in desire and purpose” (OFS 64). There’s no need here to labor the point about the valences of “purity” and “desire” in Tolkien’s larger legendarium; but it is worth noting that the consolation he saw as being one of the primary functions of Fantasy is not only necessary because he sees the mortal world as grievous, but conditioned by a feminized acceptance of grief as the ground of joy. “Fantasy (in this sense),” Tolkien continued, “is, I think, not a lower but a higher form of Art, indeed, the most nearly pure form” (OFS 60). Where will wants not, a way opens.

Notes 1  I would like to thank Jennifer Neville and Alan Jacobs for their helpful comments on the early drafts of this essay. 2  This has also happened with the introduction of the female Elf Tauriel into the second Hobbit film, The Desolation of Smaug. 3  “The feminine mystique says that the highest value and the only commitment for women is the fulfilment of their own femininity. It says the greatest mistake of Western culture through most of its history has been the undervaluation of this femininity. It says that this femininity is so mysterious and intuitive and close to the creation and origin of life that manmade science may never be able to understand it. But however special and different it is in no way inferior to the nature of man; it may even in certain respects be superior. The mistake, says the mystique, the root of women’s troubles in the past is that women envied men, women tried to be like men, instead of accepting their own nature, which can find fulfilment only in sexual passivity, male domination, and nurturing maternal love” (Friedan 1992, 38). 4  It is worth noting that this repudiation of activity takes its place in a long anti-feminist tradition. Discussing not Tolkien but rather two classics of children’s literature with female protagonists, Louisa M. Alcott’s Little Women (1869) and Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did

(1872), Camille Nightingale (see Sunderland 2010, 11) pinpoints the way even “feisty” female characters, loved by generations of readers, are written in order to embody a limiting ideological conception of what “woman” ought and could be. The female characters in these novels overcome their desires for adventure and feelings of rebellion (described as their capriciousness and willfulness) and transform them into acceptable feminine qualities like inner strength and imagination. 5  Christian feminism is not the only discourse to explore the range of feminist valences of “passivity.” Luce Irigaray, for instance, links passivity and community via a respect for differ­ence (Halsema 2011, 122): “For Irigaray, embodiment includes finiteness or pas­sivity. Her notion of passivity resembles Ricoeur’s passivity of the body in the sense that it allows us to participate in a community and that it calls for an ethical attitude toward the other that is different from us. Ricoeur considers the body in Oneself as Another as one of three passivities that constitute the cogito as broken cogito – the other ones are the relationship to other people and our conscience .  .  . Irigaray connects passivity to sexual difference: it includes respecting your body for what it is and respecting the other that is different from you.”

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Flood, Alison. 2010. “Christine O’Donnell Praises Tolkien’s Women: Tea Party Candidate O’Donnell says Modern Women should embrace JRR Tolkien’s Much-maligned Female Characters as Role Models.” The Guardian, September 16. Available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/ sep/16/christine-odonnell-tolkien-women, accessed December 17, 2013. Fredrick, Candice and Sam McBride. 2001. Women among the Inklings: Gender, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Friedan, Betty. 1992. The Feminine Mystique. London: Penguin. Good, Elaine. 2002. “Angels in the Inklings House.” Science Fiction Studies, 29: 285–287. Halsema, Annemie. 2011. “The Time of the Self.” In Time in Feminist Phenomenology, edited by Christina Schües, Dorothea E. Olkowski, and Helen Fielding, 111–131. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Moseley, Charles. 1997. J. R. R. Tolkien. Plymouth: Northcote House. Pearce, Joseph. 1998. Tolkien Man and Myth: A Literary Life. London: HarperCollins. Pinkard, Terry. 1994. Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ruether, Rosemary Radford. 1998. Introducing Redemption in Christian Feminism. London: Continuum. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1993. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press. Sunderland, Jane. 2010. Language, Gender and Children’s Fiction. London: Continuum. Tancred, Peta. 1988. Feminist Research: Prospect and Retrospect. Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press.

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Art Christopher Tuthill

“On Fairy-stories” J. R. R. Tolkien’s “On Fairy-stories” is one of the most popular non-fiction works he wrote, and with good reason. It’s the essay in which he describes his theories of mythmaking, and discusses the ways in which an author might construct fantasy stories, as well as the effect they have on an audience. In addition to writing, Tolkien also touches upon illustration in his essay, but gives writing a primary position in the world of arts: In human art Fantasy is a thing best left to words, to true literature. In painting, for instance, the visible presentation of the fantastic image is technically too easy; the hand tends to outrun the mind, even to overthrow it. Silliness or morbidity are frequent results. (OFS 61)

This quote would seem to suggest that Tolkien did not think much of Fantasy art. Yet, as Hammond and Scull demonstrate in their work J. R. R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator, Tolkien was no dilettante when it came to drawing and illustration. He spent a great deal of time illustrating his own stories, as is evidenced by the many volumes of his artwork. He was also less than enthusiastic about his own work, often complaining that he could not draw (Hammond and Scull 1995, 9). In his story “Leaf by Niggle,” Tolkien wrote of a painter working on a canvas of such enormous size that he feared he would never finish the work (see also ch. 13). The story is often seen as a metaphor for Tolkien’s own life as a writer, yet Tolkien was a prolific illustrator who worked many years at his craft (ibid.). After Niggle A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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passes from the knowledge of the story’s narrator, two councilors of his town discuss his work. One says Niggle was “a silly man, worthless . . . of no economic use” and expresses dismay that he was not turned into a “useful cog” by some schoolmaster. A second says Niggle was a “poor little man” who “never finished anything” (TL 116–117). The second man, Tompkins, had preserved and framed a tiny scrap of the giant canvas Niggle had worked on for most of his life, and placed it in a museum. Though we learn the museum had since burned down, the fragment survives. The story ends with two voices looking at the scrap of canvas, upon which is painted a beautiful leaf. One voice remarks to the other that “for many it is the best introduction to the mountains” (TL 118). One can imagine that Tolkien may have felt a bit like Niggle – he was working on the most enormous of canvases, Middle-earth. He worried about finishing what he had started, and the many posthumous volumes of his writing show that he continued working on his myths his entire life. The allegorical tale of Niggle can tell us much about Tolkien’s belief in his own work, and it is instructive that he uses the metaphor of a painter to illustrate his ideas of the writing life. In many ways his life’s work was the huge canvas upon which Niggle worked so ceaselessly, and Tolkien’s hope, one can infer from the story, was that if even a fragment of his work survived, it might prove beautiful and the “best introduction to the mountains” to those who encountered it. Doubtless this has been proven true since the publication of his work, even if The Lord of the Rings is no small fragment. In “On Fairy-stories,” Tolkien also writes of sub-creation, the process by which the fantasist creates a Secondary World from the “soup” of mythology (OFS 59). The artist or illustrator who is working in Faërie might also be considered a sub-creator, working with the same myths. Many visual artists have worked in the soup of Tolkien’s own mythology, creating work from their own imagination, inspired by the images of Middle-earth Tolkien evoked in his work. In writing of sub-creation, Tolkien meant of course that the artist has been created by another force, God. “Fantasy remains a human right,” he writes, “we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker” (OFS 66). Those working in Middle-earth have been inspired by Tolkien’s original vision to create their own versions of Tolkien’s world. There have been a great many artists who have worked as sub-creators within the mythology of Tolkien’s Secondary World. Tolkien’s own illustrations came first, of course, and are readily available in Hammond and Scull’s work as well as editions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Images of Tolkien’s world done by different artists have been seen in myriad contexts: in video games, in board and role-playing games, in comic books, in illustrations for different editions, on calendars, and in the films. The Peter Jackson films were a particularly vibrant example of sub-creators working in the mythology of Middle-earth. A veritable army of artists and craftsmen led by Alan Lee and John Howe captured the look of Middle-earth that was seen by millions. The Hobbit films continue in this vein, with artists mining Tolkien’s rich vision. The different styles of the various Tolkien-inspired artwork are staggering. Jef Murray’s images of Middle-earth, for example, are reminiscent of Fauvism, the early



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twentieth-century movement characterized by “exuberantly coloured paintings” and “a spontaneity of execution . . . and bold sense of surface design” (Pérez-Tibi n.d.). Ted Nasmith takes a more realistic approach in his work. Cor Blok’s work, which was approved of by Tolkien himself, would be recognized by few people who have only seen Peter Jackson’s films as they depict rather small and abstracted figures. On the other hand the work of Alan Lee, John Howe, as well as that of Nasmith, would be far more familiar because of their influence on Jackson’s films, but in turn bear little resemblance to the cartoonish Bilbo of the animated Hobbit film produced by Rankin/ Bass in 1977, or the Elves in the same film (see ch. 35). The works of Howe, Lee, and Nasmith have also appeared on calendars and in books for many years before the films were released. As actor Ian McKellen points out in his preface to The Lord of the Rings Sketchbook, this accounts for the familiarity many viewers who had seen the images before felt upon seeing the films for the first time (Lee 2005, 9). Nasmith has written of his formative years of artistic training, when he was influenced by Frederick Church of the Hudson River School. Interestingly, he writes that: I felt rightly at home in this era before realistic landscape painting became passé, replaced as it was by the fragmented, experimental, and often bleak visions of the mid twentieth century. Those with a love and value of realism were not valued in the fine arts anymore. It seemed I was born too late, I thought. (Nasmith 2005, 195)

Perhaps it is counterintuitive, but Nasmith brought his love of realism to Tolkien’s fantasy world, painting distinctive landscapes, figures, and architectural forms that vividly bring Middle-earth to life, as we will see. Nasmith also recalls that while other artists’ visions of Middle-earth were inspiring, he found certain drawings lacking in something; for example, he says that while he took inspiration in the work of Joan Wyatt and the Brothers Hildebrandt, he also felt the Hildebrandts “missed the mark” and had too much of “an affinity for Disney” (2005, 195). It is helpful to compare some specific images by Howe, Lee, Murray, and Nasmith, to see what kinds of variations and interpretations the artists have made to Tolkien’s texts. I have chosen several famous scenes from Tolkien’s work as focal points through which readers might be able to see these differences. Such comparison will help us see how the artists have achieved their different interpretations of Tolkien’s vision.

The Balrog Scene One of the most iconic scenes of Middle-earth familiar to every reader of The Lord of the Rings is Gandalf meeting the Balrog at the Bridge of Khazad-dȗ m. Even those who have not read the books but have seen the Peter Jackson film will recall this scene, in which Gandalf falls into the abyss, sacrificing himself for the survival of the Fellowship. In The Silmarillion, Tolkien describes Balrogs (meaning “Demons of Might,” S 382) as being “like [Melkor] in their corruption: their hearts were of fire, but they were cloaked in darkness, and terror went before them; they had whips of

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flame” (S 43). The artists have captured the essence of these creatures, but in notably different ways. The scene is described in vivid detail by Tolkien: Gandalf stood in the middle of the span, leaning on the staff in his left hand, but in the other hand Glamdring gleamed, cold and white. His enemy halted again, facing him, and the shadow about it reached out like two vast wings. It raised the whip, and the thongs whined and cracked. Fire came from its nostrils. But Gandalf stood firm. . . . The Balrog made no answer. The fire in it seemed to die, but the darkness grew. It stepped forward slowly onto the bridge, and suddenly it drew itself up to a great height, and its wings were spread from wall to wall; but still Gandalf could be seen, glimmering in the gloom; he seemed small, and altogether alone, grey and bent, like a wizened tree before the onset of a storm. From out of the shadow a red sword leaped flaming. Glamdring glittered white in answer. (FR, II, v, 430)

This pivotal scene is described with an economy of words. In a few short paragraphs we learn what the creature looks like, how it moves, and how Gandalf looks beside it. Illustrations of the Balrog have varied, naturally, but the creature’s appearance is vastly dissimilar depending on the artist. That so many artists have worked on depicting this scene is a testament to Tolkien’s vision and also to the power of Gandalf’s sacrifice. John Howe’s Balrog in “The Bridge of Khazad-dum” (Figure 33.1) is an

Figure 33.1  “The Bridge of Khazad-dum” by John Howe. Reproduced by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. © 1995 John Howe.



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enormous, winged, fiery creature that most who have seen the films will recognize immediately. There is a great feeling of movement in the painting. We can almost see the Balrog pounce on Gandalf as its vast wings beat against the bridge. The painting is quite dramatic, with everything converging on the focal point of the creature’s mouth. There is also a stark contrast in the intense reds and dark blue-grey colors. The Balrog in Alan Lee’s Sketchbook (Lee 2005, 64–65) expands on this version of the creature; it dwarfs Gandalf at the bridge. Since this is a sketch, the body is not present but the creature has the same fiery quality, and like Howe’s, its mouth is also open. Jef Murray’s Balrog in his painting “The Bridge at Khazad-dȗ m” (Figure 33.2) is likewise winged and monstrous, even as Murray’s style diverges from Lee’s and Howe’s intense realism; here we see flat, bold colors, with less focus on the open mouth of the Balrog compared to Howe’s and Lee’s. Yet all three compositions are similar. Murray’s work is just as effective in showing the fierce nature of the creature. Flames literally shoot from the creature’s sword and back, and it seems consumed by fire as it approaches the wizard. Murray gives particular emphasis to Gandalf’s staff “glimmering

Figure 33.2  “The Bridge at Khazad-dȗ m” by Jef Murray. Used by permission of the artist.

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Figure 33.3  “At the Bridge” by Ted Nasmith. Used by permission of the artist.

in the gloom,” as the text says. It shines out in the darkness, piercing it against the oncoming terror. Ted Nasmith’s “At the Bridge” (Figure 33.3) offers a somewhat different version of the scene. There is again a contrast of light and dark, with the light of Gandalf’s sword and staff against the blackness of the Balrog. Gandalf’s staff is striking the bridge, and the light of this impact is mirrored in the flames above the Balrog. The two are inches from one another, with the claw of the Balrog just above Gandalf’s back, creating much dramatic tension. The Balrog is again menacing and demonic, seemingly ready to destroy the slender bridge just by his outsized presence upon it. There is flame behind the eyes and mouth, illuminating the gloom around it. Another difference here, and one that is not immediately apparent, is that Nasmith’s creature has no wings. In the other paintings we see vast wings sprouting from the creature’s back, nearly enveloping the scene. Nasmith takes a different approach, and one that is warranted by the text. There is a question here of what Tolkien meant in his brief description of the creature. First he writes that “the shadow about it reached out like two vast wings,” which is precisely what Nasmith depicts in his painting,



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and in a subtle way. The flames behind the Balrog almost emulate wings fanning out from its immense form. These are not literally wings, but the painting emphasizes the vastness of the creature. Tolkien later writes of the Balrog that “its wings were spread from wall to wall” (FR, II, v, 430) and here may be why we have differing views of the creature. Does Tolkien mean the creature’s actual wings? Or the appearance of the same reaching out? Hammond and Scull write that Tolkien’s description of the creature “has led to much discussion among readers as to whether Balrogs have wings,” though they conclude that the wings “can generally be interpreted as figurative” (Hammond and Scull 2005, 296). Howe, Lee, and Murray apparently take Tolkien at his word when he says “its wings were spread,” while Nasmith interprets this to mean the shadow of the creature.

Éowyn and the Witch King Another example of the differing conceptions of a battle scene is Éowyn fighting the Lord of the Nazgȗ l at the Pelennor Fields. Tolkien describes the Nazgȗ l as “black mantled, huge and threatening. A crown of steel he bore, but between rim and robe there was naught to see, save only the deadly gleam of his eyes: the Lord of the Nazgȗ l” (RK, V, vi, 1100). Tolkien describes the monster on which it flies as “a winged creature: if bird, then greater than all the other birds, and it was naked, and neither quill nor feather did it bear, and its vast pinions were as webs of hide between horned fingers” (ibid., 1099). The Nazgȗ l’s mount also has a “long naked neck” (1100). Tolkien then gives a vivid description of Éowyn as she confronts the Nazgȗ l: “and her bright hair, released from its bonds, gleamed with pale gold upon her shoulders . . . A sword was in her hand, and she raised her shield against the horror of her enemy’s eyes” (1101). Ted Nasmith’s depiction of this scene, “Éowyn and the Nazgȗ l” (Figure 33.4), matches Tolkien’s words almost exactly. We see the raptor-like creature rising up on its long wings, its snake-like neck curling up, with its small head perched at its end and its long, barbed tail hanging beneath. The Nazgȗ l is cloaked in black, his face invisible, his crown atop the head. He wields the “great black mace” in his left hand, as described by Tolkien. Around the two figures we see the signs of the Battle of Pelennor Fields, during which this confrontation takes place. A body lays in the foreground, and Merry tries to come to his feet in the center: as Tolkien writes, he “crawled on all fours like a dazed beast, and such a horror was on him that he was blind and sick” (1100). Behind them the battle rages and in the distance are the besieged walls of Minas Tirith. Nasmith also uses a bright, fiery light in the painting, which originates from the battle going on around them. The Nazgȗ l overall has a very realistic appearance created through the texture of the wings, which are illuminated in the light.

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Figure 33.4  “Éowyn and the Nazgȗ l” by Ted Nasmith. Used by permission of the artist.

Jef Murray’s depiction of the same scene, “Éowyn and the Witch King” (Figure 33.5), takes a different perspective. The Nazgȗ l and the winged beast are now in the foreground. There is no sign of the battle raging around them; here we have just the dramatic moment when the Nazgȗ l confronts Éowyn. We do not see the blank space beneath the Witch King’s hood, since it is obscured as he turns, seemingly startled, toward the oncoming Éowyn. The Nazgȗ l holds his mace as well as the reins of the winged beast, the latter crying out in anger at her. The mount’s claws are sunk into Snowmane (Théoden’s horse) in the grisly way Tolkien suggests: “settled upon the body of Snowmane, digging in its claws, stooping its long naked neck” (1100). Murray’s painting also shows the foul nature of the creature as it feasts upon the white horse, whilst its rider turns his attention to Éowyn. It is also significant that here Éowyn is facing outward, toward the Nazgȗ l and the viewer, while Nasmith’s version described above showed Éowyn facing the Witch King but depicted her from behind. With Murray, Éowyn is wholly bathed in light, a clear contrast against the blackness of the Nazgȗ l. As in Murray’s “Bridge at Khazad-dȗ m,” we again see the use of light and darkness. This time, it is not Gandalf’s staff that pierces the gloomy scene, but a shaft of



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Figure 33.5  “Éowyn and the Witch King” by Jef Murray. Used by permission of the artist.

light coming from the heavens, illuminating Éowyn as she approaches the Nazgȗ l to do battle. The audience may be reminded of Joan of Arc; with the dead horse possibly recalling the Christian image of the sacrificial Lamb of God. Nasmith’s image, on the other hand, seems far more about movement and the action of the battle. The scene is effectively framed by the destruction of the Pelennor Fields. We can almost see the Nazgȗ l and his beast pouncing down upon the tiny form of Éowyn, who seems hopelessly undersized against them. Murray’s image, while also faithful to the text, evokes something very different. The dead white horse and the shining light call to mind religious images as noted above; but more importantly, the lack of the surrounding battle places the focus solely upon Éowyn, who goes to do battle against a seemingly impossible foe.

Minas Tirith Finally let us consider another scene from The Lord of the Rings, this time an altogether different kind of image. Since we have already discussed two famous scenes of battle,

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it will be helpful to look at some of the architecture of Middle-earth to see what artists have done to recreate it, taking the city of Minas Tirith by way of example. Tolkien wrote much about this city, and of course it figures prominently in the trilogy. The image that some artists have focused on is from The Lord of the Rings as Gandalf and Pippin ride towards it: For the tower of Ecthelion, standing high within the topmost wall, shone out against the sky, glimmering like a spike of pearl and silver, tall and fair and shapely, and its pinnacle glittered as if it were wrought of crystals; and white banners broke and fluttered from the battlements in the morning breeze . . . (RK, V, i, 982)

Tolkien further writes that “the fashion of Minas Tirith was such that it was built on seven levels, each delved into the hill, and about each was set a wall, and in each wall was a gate” (983). John Howe’s “Gandalf Approaches the Guarded City” (Figure 33.6) shows this approach, just as Gandalf is coming around a large rock formation. Pippin is seated in front of him, and we can glimpse the tower in the distance that caused Pippin to cry aloud (982) in amazement when he sees it. The painting has dramatic movement both of the horse and rider. The horse is going at a rapid pace toward the city while Gandalf’s robes flow behind them as Shadowfax races on. We see once again the use of light and dark, with the darkness of the rock played against the bright light of the

Figure 33.6  “Gandalf Approaches the Guarded City” by John Howe. Reproduced by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. © 1992 John Howe.



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city. Alan Lee chooses instead to depict the inside of the city,1 and does not cover the approach by Gandalf and Pippin. We see the same glimmering spires and white stone, with one of the walls bisected by rock. A guard stands in the foreground, facing away from the grandeur behind him. We get a sense of how massive the city is from inside its walls. There is a great attention to perspective and architectural detail in the painting; Emily Auger writes that Lee uses a “late Romanesque/early Gothic style architecture” (Auger 2008, 81). As in so much of Lee’s work, there is also a beautifully light, airy quality to the painting. Jef Murray’s composition in his “Road to Minas Tirith” (Figure 33.7) is more similar to Howe’s. Here, again, we return to Gandalf’s approach on Shadowfax, racing toward the city as clouds move overhead. The viewer gets a similar sense of urgency to that evoked by Howe’s work, though this painting has flat bold lines and a deep blue hue. Minas Tirith here looks more like the traditional walled castle one might see in any number of mythical tales, white and shining and with banners fluttering in the breeze. The painting, like Murray’s others, is highly reminiscent of Fauvism.

Figure 33.7  “Road to Minas Tirith” by Jef Murray. Used by permission of the artist.

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Figure 33.8  “Gandalf Rides to Minas Tirith” by Ted Nasmith. Used by permission of the artist.

Perhaps the most fully rendered and realistic-looking version of the city is Ted Nasmith’s “Gandalf Rides to Minas Tirith” (Figure 33.8). Here we have a wholly convincing city rising up before Gandalf as he races toward it, with his cloak flying out behind him. We see the spire at the top of the city and the seven walls of which Tolkien writes. To the right, Nasmith’s walls “blush faintly in the dawn,” but in the center of the painting they are also illuminated brightly by it, calling attention to the majesty of the city. Nasmith pays close attention to detail, particularly in the light and shadow of the rocks, and the shadow of the city against them. Their texture is contrasted against the smoothness of Minas Tirith’s walls. This city seems to grow out of the mountain itself, as if it were carved from it, and this vision of Minas Tirith is supported by the text. Tolkien described the city’s “seven walls of stone so strong and old that it seemed to have been not builded but carven by giants out of the bones of the earth” (RK, V, i, 982). Nasmith himself has written: “I take the trouble to find out what [Tolkien] said of a particular thing – like the aesthetics of Gondor, a culture comparable to ancient Egypt in certain respects, according to Tolkien” (Nasmith 2005, 196). With this in mind, some similarity between Nasmith’s Minas Tirith and ancient Egyptian architecture is evident. Compare the mortuary temple of Hatshepsut (Figure 33.9) at Deir el Bahari near the Valley of the Kings in Egypt, to his painting. The



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Figure 33.9  Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el Bahari.

temple was partly carved out of the rock, looking much like Minas Tirith in this regard. Minas Tirith has many differences, of course, but it does seem that Nasmith has used this type of Egyptian structure as an influence for his painting. Nasmith’s success is also due to his background as an architectural renderer. Where Lee and Howe take a small piece of the city and draw it in detail, Nasmith has painted it on a much larger scale. Within each wall we see stone houses, spires, and other structures. The Tower of Ecthelion stands up at the top of the city, almost like a beacon, “glimmering” as Tolkien describes. This looks to be a living, breathing city, inhabited by the folk of Gondor. Clearly there are many more examples of this kind of variation in images of Middle-earth, since there have been so many artists working within Middle-earth as sub-creators in Tolkien’s world. For other variations, one needs only look at artists such as Pauline Baynes, Cor Blok, or notably Jay Johnstone.2 Taking inspiration from the religious and mythical underpinnings of Middle-earth, Johnstone has painted various scenes and characters from the book as if they were religious icons, with many recreating the feel of ancient manuscripts. One often wonders what Tolkien would make of all these interpretations by various artists, but one can assume Johnstone’s images would have pleased him. Tolkien was known to draw runes and recreate manuscript

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pages himself,3 and Johnstone’s work in that sense is a perfect complement to Tolkien’s history of Middle-earth, presenting a different context from the many others who have attempted to illustrate Tolkien. A survey of many of the other artists who have worked in Middle-earth would be a welcome addition for Tolkien enthusiasts. In addition to Hammond and Scull’s work, illustrated books such as Realms of Tolkien (HarperCollins 1996) and Tolkien’s World (MJF Books 1992), as well as the various annual Tolkien calendars, are a good way to see how other artists have brought Middle-earth to life. It is now hard to imagine The Lord of the Rings or Middle-earth without the many sub-creators who have worked within it. The dreaded effects of “silliness and morbidity” to which Tolkien referred when writing of fantasy art (OFS 61) are nowhere in evidence when we look at the work of these artists. The new Hobbit films will continue the rich tradition of artists and craftspeople working to bring Middle-earth to life. For many, these visual representations of Middle-earth are indeed “the best introduction to the mountains” (TL 118). Notes 1  “Within Minas Tirith,” http://tolkiengateway.net/ wiki/File:Alan_Lee_-_The_White_City.jpg, accessed December 18, 2013. This image also appears in the 50th anniversary edition of The Lord of the Rings between pages 800 and 801. 2  To view examples of Johnstone’s work see http://www.jaystolkien.com/.

3  For instance, Hammond and Scull (1995) show two images of The Book of Mazarbul which are written in runes and illustrated as if they were crumbling pieces of the Dwarf book (160–161; see also ch. 4).

References Auger, Emily. 2008. “The Lord of the Rings Interlace: Tolkien’s Narrative and Lee’s Illustrations.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 19.1: 70–93. Hammond, Wayne G. and Christina Scull. 1995. J. R. R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator. London: HarperCollins. HarperCollins. 1996. Realms of Tolkien: Images of Middle-earth. New York: HarperCollins. Lee, Alan. 2005. The Lord of the Rings Sketchbook. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

MJF Books. 1992. Tolkien’s World: Paintings of Middle-earth. New York: MJF Books. Nasmith, Ted. 2005. “Similar But Not Similar: Appropriate Anachronism in My Paintings of Middle Earth.” In Tolkien’s Modern Middle Ages, edited by Jane Chance and Alfred K. Siewers, 189–204. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Pérez-Tibi, Dora. n.d. “Fauvism.” Available at http:// www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/ grove/art/T027678 (subscription service).

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Music Bradford Lee Eden

Introduction Tolkien indicated in his personal correspondence that he had no talent or skill in music: I have little musical knowledge. Though I come of a musical family, owing to defects of education and opportunity as an orphan, such music as was in me was submerged (until I married a musician), or transformed into linguistic terms. Music gives me great pleasure and sometimes inspiration, but I remain in the position in reverse of one who likes to read or hear poetry but knows little of its technique or tradition, or of linguistic structure. (Letters 350)

Humphrey Carpenter, in his authorized biography of Tolkien, mentions a number of musical facts related to Tolkien’s family background: his grandfather on his father’s side was a piano maker in Victorian England (the Tolkien piano firm went bankrupt well before his birth; Carpenter 1977, 8 and 20), as a boy Tolkien longed for a banjo (19), and his mother’s failed attempts to teach him piano (replaced by his intense interest in languages). Carpenter’s account of this latter fact is quite telling: “It seemed rather as if words took the place of music for him, and that he enjoyed listening to them, reading them, and reciting them, almost regardless of what they meant” (23). Even though Tolkien indicated that he had no talent in the performance of music (his recorded readings and recitations of Elvish would indicate otherwise), it is quite A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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apparent in his published letters that he draws a distinct parallel between his love of linguistics and languages and that of musical performance, as evidenced by these mentions in his Letters: * Letters 173: discussion about not having access to a cello, and how much Tolkien respects those who can play music, with a parallel drawn between his love of languages and difficulties with Slavonic languages; * Letters 196: Tolkien acknowledges his lack of expertise in a number of areas, music included; * Letters 247–248: links between Tolkien’s passion for linguistics includes mention of music (see also Letters 278 and 308); * Letters 345–346: Similarities between music and languages inferred from discussing meter; * Letters 350: Comment to letter writer regarding musical composition based on The Hobbit; * Letters 358: linguistic discussion of how Gothic word for “read” was ussiggwan “recite” (sing out). These are just a few paraphrases where Tolkien, either consciously or unconsciously, connects the subject of linguistics and languages with the art of music. One must also remember a second item of interest that Carpenter mentions and Tolkien implies: that he married a musician. His wife Edith was a very accomplished pianist, and Carpenter’s biography has many specific references to Edith’s musicianship. Tolkien met Edith at a musical soirée, where she was playing piano (a typical Victorian pastime). Edith’s older cousin Jennie Grove, with whom Edith lived for a number of years while Tolkien was in military service, was related to Sir George Grove (best known as the author of the premier research source in music, Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians). Edith’s talent was recognized early, such that she attended a specialized girl’s school in music. Carpenter often mentions Edith’s many moves to different boarding houses and apartments during her early years both before and after her marriage, where the major factor for moving was whether there was a piano available for her to practice on. This is an example of the strong Victorian attachment to music in the home and to women playing music that became such a strong element in Tolkien’s life. In fact, Carpenter specifically mentions in his biography the life of the Tolkiens during their early marriage, notably at Great Haywood during Tolkien’s recuperation from trench fever, and during the time when he was writing “The Fall of Gondolin”: “It was an interlude of rare contentment. In the evenings she played the piano and he recited his poetry or made sketches of her. At this time she conceived a child” (1977, 107). Carpenter again describes how Edith was set on the career path of piano teacher, perhaps even soloist, before she met and married Tolkien. He concludes that “piano playing was reduced to a mere hobby, although she continued to play regularly until old age, and her music delighted Ronald” (170).



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In the introduction to Middle-earth Minstrel: Essays on Music in Tolkien (Eden 2010a, 1–2), various drafts of Tolkien’s lecture (surviving at the Bodleian Library) on “The tradition of versification in Old English, with special reference to the ‘Battle of Maldon’ and its alliteration” are detailed. Tolkien makes the assumption, given the manner in which this poem has survived, that it could have been constructed by a bard whose purpose was to be both musical presenter and historical recorder, thus a “minstrel turned scholar” for future listeners. In the same sense Tolkien himself, given his affinity to compare his love of languages with musical allusions, could be termed a “scholar turned minstrel” when one considers the overall effect and construction of his mythology. Indeed, Tolkien illustrates an overall knowledge of Boethian philosophical musical theory related to the medieval “music of the spheres” concept in his thematic and compositional structure of Middle-earth history, apparent when examining the various power levels of music, song, and musical performance through time from the creation of Arda to the beginning of the Fourth Age (Eden 2003b). The “Ainulindalë” itself, the cornerstone creational essay (both musically and compositionally) of his legendarium, was one of Tolkien’s earliest writings and one on which he did a minimal amount of editing and revision throughout his life (unlike most of his mythological production). It should also be mentioned that the very earliest poems, stories, and versions of Tolkien’s legendarium, as recorded in The History of Middle-earth series, are replete with musical allusions, and specific mention is made of a number of musical songs of power that have not survived within the legendarium nor in Tolkien’s extensive revisions; indeed, a listing of these songs of power has already been compiled.1 When examining Tolkien’s literary roots, there is also an enormous amount of evidence within Victorian fiction and poetry for the use of musical allusion as a literary device (see Eden 2010b). Overall, despite Tolkien’s assertions that he had no musical talent, his knowledge of Boethian medieval music philosophy and Neoplatonism, especially of the third-century philosopher Plotinus; his use of musical allusion throughout his legendarium; and his masterful musical creational essay, “Ainulindalë” (“The Music of the Ainur”), are examples of Tolkien weaving music both consciously and unconsciously throughout his entire mythology.

“The Ainulindalë” (“The Music of the Ainur”) The most obvious musical reference in Tolkien’s works is the “Ainulindalë,” the great creation myth that begins The Silmarillion (see ch. 7). Elizabeth A. Whittingham does an excellent job of documenting Tolkien’s revisions on this early work within the legendarium (Whittingham 2007). There are three distinct versions: “The Music of the Ainur,” written between 1918 and 1920; the early version of “Ainulindalë” written in the late 1930s; and another version written in the late 1940s (Whittingham 2007, 37). She provides a concise and thorough account of biblical and mythological cosmogonies, the specific influence of the Finnish Kalevala and the “eternal singer”

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Väinämöinen, and the major changes which Tolkien incorporated in his revisions of the “Ainulindalë” from the 1920s through the late 1940s. The two most obvious revisions were an abandonment of the story framework in The Book of Lost Tales (from a story told in the garden of the Cottage of Lost Play, to a separate annalistic creation story); and the movement to a tripartite creation structure. Whittingham’s work provides the scholarly documentation for understanding the influences and the mindset behind Tolkien’s various revisions to the “Ainulindalë.”2 Verlyn Flieger was one of the first to document the use of musical allusion throughout Tolkien’s legendarium, both thematically and philosophically (2002 and 2005). Flieger encapsulates many of the quotes by Tolkien earlier in this chapter when she states: “Tolkien’s response to words, to their shape and sound and meaning, was closer to that of a musician than a grammarian, and his response to language was instinctive and intuitive as well as intellectual” (2002, 33). Flieger explores the many influences on Tolkien’s mythology, pointing to instances of how light, sound, and music change and diminish with each chronological event from the Great Music to the Fourth Age. She states that “the concept of sound, specifically music, as the ordering force of the universe” in Tolkien’s mythology is quite apparent (2002, 57). In Interrupted Music, Flieger continues the music analogy, documenting the sources for Tolkien’s mythology and exploring how he took all the primary material within the “Cauldron of Story” and wove and built his mythology. As she states in the Introduction: The Silmarillion is Tolkien’s own “Great Music,” his many-voiced, often interrupted, never finished song of the history of Middle-earth. Like Eru’s Music, Tolkien’s mythology is a magnificent but incomplete composition, a huge yet unconcluded chronicle of history and epic and romance, embodying in all its beauty and imperfection the breadth and depth of a remarkable vision never entirely fulfilled. That vision was both macroscopic and microscopic; it was symphonic in its scope, yet detailed in its note-by-note execution. (Flieger 2005, xiii)

Both of these books are must-reads for anyone researching Tolkien’s use of language, sound, and music in his writings. There are a number of scholarly works that have explored the “Ainulindalë” in various ways since Flieger’s scholarship. For example, there are my own works cited earlier, and the three essays under the section “Creation and Music” in Music in Middleearth (Steimel and Scheidewind 2010) which focus specifically on the creation of Arda. In these Kristine Larsen (2010) examines both Tolkien’s and C. S. Lewis’s creation mythologies besides the medieval music of the spheres philosophy, while Reuven Naveh (2010) compares late Romanticism and twentieth-century tonality and atonality with the “Ainulindalë” themes and musical structure. Finally, Jonathan McIntosh (2010) offers an alternative examination from previous authors about the musical background and religious theory behind the “Ainulindalë,” focusing on Saint Thomas Aquinas and his metaphysical theories.



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Musical References in Tolkien’s Works, and the Character of Tinfang Warble In his earliest versions of his legendarium from 1914 to 1935 (namely, the works found in Unfinished Tales, Lost Tales I and II, Lays of Beleriand, and The Shaping of Middle-earth; see ch. 10), Tolkien incorporated an enormous amount of musical allusion in his prose and poetic output.3 The numerous versions of “The Lay of Leithian,” “The Lay of the Children of Húrin,” “The Tale of Tinúviel,” “The Tale of Eärendel,” and “The Tale of Turambar,” along with Tolkien’s “The Cottage of Lost Play” as a background to tell these stories and tales, indicate a strong Victorian influence where musical symbolism and allusion are woven into the texture and structure of the drama.4 The song of Tuor for Eärendel, for instance, exists in three different versions and five different texts. Túrin’s abilities as a minstrel and musician made him probably the greatest musician among Men, and most of his training was from the Elves in Gondolin, from meeting Ulmo and hearing his many-faceted musical instrument, and from the creation music of the Ainur such as it still existed in the sound of the sea, where it was felt and heard by the strongest amongst the Elves. One character who appears very early in Tolkien’s legendarium and stands above all others in terms of his musical ability and prowess is Tinfang Warble (Eden 2011). Tinfang first makes his appearance in Lost Tales I, where the reader (and Eriol) are given an extensive introduction to this half-fay, half-Gnomish piper (Lost Tales I 46, 94–95, 108–110). This is not the first appearance of this character in Tolkien’s writings. In the Commentary section, Christopher Tolkien mentions that Tinfang existed in Tolkien’s mind for many years prior to 1916–1917 when the “Cottage of Lost Play” was written, and he appears in two early poems. The first poem, appropriately titled “Tinfang Warble,” was first written in 1914 in Oxford, revised in Leeds between 1920 and 1923, and published in 1927. It has been called by one of the authors in Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-Earth as “Tolkien’s most unfortunate poem” (Bratman 2000). The published version is given in Lost Tales I (108) and mentions that the early version of this poem calls Tinfang a leprawn, and that the early glossary of Gnomish speech calls him a fay. In Lost Tales I, he is half a fay, and either half a Gnome or a Shoreland Piper. The second poem, titled “Over Old Hills and Far Away,” exists in five versions, and was written sometime in 1915–1916. The latest version is included in Lost Tales I, with Christopher Tolkien providing some of the interesting alterations that exist between the different versions. For instance, he mentions that some text has been struck out of the early description of Tinfang: The truth is he is a son of Linwe Tinto King of the Pipers who was lost of old upon the great march from Palisor, and wandering in Hisilome found the lonely twilight spirit (Tindriel) Wendelin dancing in a glade of beeches. Loving her he was content to leave his folk and dance for ever in the shadows, but his children Timpinen and Tinuviel long after joined the Eldar again, and tales there are concerning them both, though they are seldom told. (Lost Tales I 108–110)

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According to Christopher, these are the first references to Thingol (Linwe Tinto), Hithlum (Hisilome), Melian (Tindriel, Wendelin), and Lúthien (Tinúviel). So here is Tolkien’s early idea that Tinfang Warble, a kind of mixed heritage creature among the Gnomes, is actually the son of Linwe Tinto King of the Pipers, who was an early iteration of Thingol, and hence the beginning of the Thingol/Melian/Lúthien Tinúviel theme. An examination of Tinfang’s musical prowess and powers as documented in Lost Tales I reveals the following. First, and most importantly, there is the connection between dreaming and music which Eriol experiences, a kind of dream-music state that extends through both unconscious thought (that is, Eriol’s sleep) and consciousness (Eriol’s waking time spent in the Cottage), so much so that its effect on Eriol is that he eventually (and continually, as the story develops) wants and needs to drink limpe (an entirely different and fascinating concept in early Tolkien writings). Then there are some other noticeable effects that Tinfang’s music has: stars come out when he plays, sometimes too soon, so he has powers over celestial events; his music makes one wish to follow him/jump out of windows (an oblique reference to the Pied Piper, which again links to Tinfang’s father who is the King of the Pipers); one needs limpe to take away the longing caused by his piping, which the other inhabitants of the Cottage must also drink for the same reason. Finally, the reason Eriol stays is because Tinfang has returned and seemingly is playing just for him, so that all of the stories and songs can be told. He is also shy and rarely seen, his music and the playing of his flute are what distinguishes his presence. The next time Tinfang appears is in Lost Tales II, in the version of “The Tale of Tinúviel.” In the first draft, written in 1917, Tolkien brings in some of the elements from Lost Tales I. Christopher Tolkien explains that Timpinen (i.e., Tinfang Warble), who is the son of Tinwelint (i.e., Thingol) and brother of Tinúviel, is abandoned in this first revision of the Tinúviel tale (Lost Tales II 59). Kapalen is now the brother of Tinuviel, and there are various emendations by Tolkien at this stage, so that the name of this character changes from Kapalen to Tinfanto and then to Dairon. Eventually Tolkien settled on Dairon, but at the end of this first version he replaces the name with Mablung. In any event, it is in this first Tinúviel version that the three greatest musicians among the Elves are first mentioned: Two children had Tinwelint then, Dairon and Tinúviel . . . but Dairon was then a boy strong and merry, and above all things he delighted to play upon a pipe of reeds or other woodland instruments, and he is named now among the three most magic players of the Elves, and the others are Tinfang Warble and Ivare who plays beside the sea. (Lost Tales II 10, 49–50, 59)

Unfortunately, there is no further information on Ivare, as this is the only mention of him in the legendarium. Notice also how Tinfang Warble as a character has now been taken out of the Thingol/Tinúviel lineage, and stands on his own outside that grouping of characters in the legendarium, and that Dairon now takes his place.



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The next time Tinfang Warble’s name appears in Tolkien’s early writings is around 1930, in “The Lay of Lúthien” 3rd Canto, recorded in the The Lays of Beleriand. Dairon has now become the lover from afar of Tinúviel, rather than her brother as recorded in the earlier prose version: Dairon the dark with ferny crown Played with bewildering wizard’s art Music for breaking of the heart. Such players have there only been Thrice in all Elfinesse, I ween: Tinfang Gelion, who still the moon Enchants on summer nights in June And kindles the pale firstling star; And he who harps upon the far Forgotten beaches and dark shores Where western foam for ever roars; Maglor whose voice is like the sea; And Dairon, mightiest of the three. (Lays 174, ll. 498–510).

As Christopher relates in the Commentary, Tinfang Warble reappears in line 503. He is given quite a bit of content and description over the other two great musicians, even though Dairon is now named as the greatest of the three. The change of the last name from Warble to “Gelion” is not explained, and Christopher notes in the Commentary that he does not know what that word means or where it comes from. He also mentions that in the rough draft of this passage, Ivare is written beside Maglor, but then Ivare is crossed out and disappears from the legendarium in the final version of the poem. The final mention in Tolkien’s writings of Tinfang Warble occurs in the “Quenta Silmarillion,” written in 1930 and recorded in The Shaping of Middle Earth. In the prose section where Dairon becomes lost in his wanderings and never returns to Doriath, it is recorded: “He was the greatest of the musicians of the Elves, save Maglor son of Fëanor, and Tinfang Warble” (Shaping 113). We are also told that the manuscript has the variant “and Maglor son of Fëanor and Tinfang Gelion alone are named with him.” When Tolkien rewrote/revised “The Lay of Luthien” in the 1950s, after The Lord of the Rings had been published, the 3rd Canto underwent an extensive amount of revision. The verse above from 1930 was changed considerably in the 1950s to: Daeron the dark with ferny crown Played on his pipes with elvish art Unbearable by mortal heart. No other player has there been, No other lips or fingers seen So skilled, ’tis said in elven-lore

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Note here that Daeron is now written with an e. Christopher records in the footnotes that both Maelor and Maglor appear in the draft manuscripts of this passage, and that the final typescript changes Maelor to Maglor, but “not I think by my father.” Finally, in The Silmarillion, we have the following regarding the three greatest minstrels: He [Daeron] it was that made music for the dance and song of Lúthien, before Beren came to Doriath; and he had loved her, and set all his thought of her in his music. He became the greatest of the minstrels of the Elves east of the Sea, named even before Maglor son of Feanor. (S 216)

And we have the passage where Maglor casts the Silmaril into the Sea: and thereafter he wandered ever upon the shores, singing in pain and regret beside the waves. For Maglor was mighty among the singers of old, named only after Daeron of Doriath. (S 305)

Notice that here Maglor did not end his life in the sea (as the revised 1950 poem indicates above), but that he cast the Silmaril into the sea, and thereafter he wandered ever upon the shores, singing in pain and regret beside the waves. What is interesting about both Daeron and Maglor is that they both end up wandering forever, spending the rest of their immortal lives singing of loss, Daeron for Lúthien and Maglor for the Silmaril. To summarize the various references to Tinfang Warble in Tolkien’s legendarium, we know he was a character who existed prior to 1916, given that he appears as a main character in two poems in early versions prior to the writing of The Book of Lost Tales in 1916. Early on he is also the son of Thingol and the brother of Tinúviel, but eventually he was separated from the Doriath saga, and Dairon took his place first as a brother and then as lover from afar of Lúthien, and also his musical powers and prowess as well. We also know that Tingfang was considered one of the three greatest Elven minstrels in Middle-earth, though not the greatest; but that eventually he drops out of the legendarium altogether around 1930. Tinfang’s early development included some major musical attributes, that strongly link him to other mythological and folk tale figures such as Väinämöinen in the Kalevala and the Pied Piper of Hamelin (recalling also Linwe Tinto, the early prototype of Thingol and Tinfang’s father, the King of the Pipers). His musical attributes (noted above) included the power to bring the stars out; the power to invoke a type of addictive dream-music satiated only by the potion limpe; the ability to make one want to leap



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out of windows and follow him; and that he is shy and rarely seen. An interesting character, indeed, and one that had a strong influence on one of Tolkien’s best-known stories, that of Beren and Lúthien. Mention needs to be made of the many songs and ditties that are contained in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (see also ch. 12) , many of which are included as different and/or full versions from Tolkien’s earlier legendarium and in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (Tolkien 1962b and 2008e).5 Detailed published research on this repertoire is limited so far, although many unpublished presentations and papers have been given in this area. A published book on this topic is sorely needed.

Scholarship on Music in Tolkien’s Works As indicated previously, the most important and influential book on both language and music in Tolkien’s works is Verlyn Flieger’s Splintered Light (2002). Flieger discusses and examines how both language and music are woven throughout Tolkien’s oeuvre, and considers the concept of Tolkien as a “musician of words” and how music and light are central themes and symbols throughout The Silmarillion. Boethian theory is linked into the mythology here, and how the splintering of both language and music throughout Middle-earth’s history ties into Tolkien’s world vision. Another book by David Harvey (1985) does not really deal with musical allusion in Tolkien’s works (despite the title), but instead examines many of the major themes and symbols in mythology, such as the tragic hero, the quest hero, good and evil, and death. One chapter, “The Music of Ilúvatar: Tolkien and the Major Mythic Themes,” fails to discuss the music in the “Ainulindalë,” concentrating only on how the major mythic themes in Tolkien’s legendarium are established in this creation story. Scull and Hammond (Reader’s Guide 615–620) contains a short essay titled “Music” with subheadings on “Music in Tolkien’s writings” and “Music inspired by Tolkien.” Searching the Internet produces a few essays on various aspects related to the use of music in some of Tolkien’s works: how music in Middle-earth might have sounded or the author thinks it might have sounded, some possible historical analogues to the song lyrics and music references in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and various other musings (Finnamore 1999; Hargrove 1995 and 2006; and Martinez 2000). With the publication of Tolkien the Medievalist in 2003, interest in a scholarly approach to music in Tolkien’s works began to appear, following on from Flieger’s seminal work in this area. Flieger then followed up with Interrupted Music (2005), which linked Tolkien’s legendarium with medieval and Victorian predecessors, and provided more information on the use of musical allusion in Tolkien’s works. With Whittingham’s The Evolution of Tolkien’s Mythology (2007), scholars finally had a detailed mapping and chronology of the various revisions and versions of Tolkien’s legendarium, and there are a number of references detailing the use of music allusions and music itself within and throughout the mythology. Stratford Caldecott approached

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Tolkien and his mythology from a Catholic viewpoint in Secret Fire: The Spiritual Vision of J. R. R. Tolkien (2003), and spends a great deal of time discussing Tolkien’s relationship with words and music, focusing on medieval concepts and philosophies of music, with the eventual statement that Tolkien’s writings are very much like a musical composition. One interesting link that Caldecott makes is to the artistic philosophy of Jacques Maritain (1882–1973), who proposes that we all have a musical unconsciousness; whether Tolkien ever read Maritain has not been established, but it would be interesting for further research to examine Maritain’s writings in light of Tolkien’s use of musical allusion. Scholarly interest in Tolkien’s use of musical allusion in his works encountered a surge in 2010 with the emergence of two books dedicated to this topic: Music in Middle-earth (Steimel and Schneidewind 2010) and Middle-earth Minstrel (Eden 2010a). Both books brought together a number of essays on the use of music, song, and musical allusion in Tolkien’s works, along with essays on various sub-creational influences of Tolkien’s works in various musical genres, styles, and cultures. Some of the topics researched in these two books include: comparisons between Tolkien’s and Lewis’s use of the “music of the spheres,” tonality and atonality in “Ainulindalë,” and the influence of Saint Thomas Aquinas (see earlier). But also a speculative history of the Music of Arda; instrumental music and the harp in Middle-earth; the influences of various eighteenth- and nineteenth-century movements on the construction of Tolkien’s legendarium; soldiers’ songs of World War I and II and in Tolkien’s works; alliterative verse in Rohan; Tolkien’s phonaesthetics; songs of exile in Middle-earth; comparisons between Tolkien’s “Lay of Luthien” and the Middle English Sir Orfeo; connections between Tolkien’s musical allusions and Victorian medievalism; dissonance and free will in The Silmarillion; and links between memory, mortality, and music. The journal Tolkien Studies, since its inception in 2004, has not had any articles that focus specifically on musical allusion in Tolkien’s works, but has published related articles that deal with linguistics and sound (see Smith 2006 and Flieger 2009).

Sub-creational Music Based on Tolkien’s Works There is a large body of music that has been created either based on Tolkien’s works or inspired by it. These musical compositions range across the entire gamut of musical genres, from classical to country-western, blues to heavy metal, new age to pop, jazz to psychedelic. The most exhaustive discography currently available is “The Tolkien Music List” (Seeman n.d.). According to the website, more than a thousand artists are represented on this list. In the alphabetical index, each entry provides the name of the band, their country, their musical genre (there are some interesting subgenres/ labels here: neofolk, black metal, jazz funk, etc.), the title of the CD(s), year that the CD appeared, record label, and then a listing of the song(s) that either use names from Tolkien’s works or are inspired by Tolkien’s mythology. Each song has a URL that



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links to the song lyrics, any comments, and a statement if it is an instrumental piece. Some of the links are broken though, and others indicate that no lyrics are available. Under the “Links” listed are numerous URLs to other resources, specifically related to other Tolkien-inspired music websites, general Tolkien resources, and other miscellaneous websites of interest. The “Exclusions” heading lists music that seems to be Tolkien-inspired, but in fact is not; while the “Marginalia” heading lists bands and CD titles that seem to be Tolkien-inspired but require more research and information. Nevertheless, it is a useful tool for those interested in discovery and knowledge about Tolkien-inspired music. Another popular website is “The Led Zeppelin and JRR Tolkien Relations Page” (Selisker n.d.). Given that Led Zeppelin was one of the most prominent and popular bands of the 1970s, their references to Tolkien are all that more noteworthy. This website provides the lyrics for the songs with Tolkien references, even noting that Robert Plant had a dog named Strider. There are a number of articles that document and discuss music inspired by Tolkien’s works. Amy H. Sturgis explores the educational value of Tolkien-inspired world music in her essay (Sturgis 2010), while David Bratman provides a fairly comprehensive exploration of music within Tolkien’s works and music inspired by Tolkien’s works following Sturgis’s contribution (Bratman 2010). There is also an interesting biography of a current musical sub-creator in the Middle-earth Minstrel volume as well (Burdge 2010). Four essays under the section “Interpretations of Tolkien’s music in our world” are included in the 2010 Music in Middle-earth volume (Steimel and Schneidewind 2010). Michael Cunningham’s chapter (2010) examines the fascinating phenomenon of Tolkien’s influence on black and heavy metal music, while Paul Smith’s essay (2010) discusses the music incorporated into the BBC radio play production of The Lord of the Rings. Mira Sommer explores the representation of Elven music in the Peter Jackson films and by musical groups such as the Tolkien Ensemble and Battlelore (Sommer 2010), while Fabian Geier (2010) reports on attempts to set Tolkien lyrics to music. For enthusiasts of the Peter Jackson films and the music of Howard Shore, a number of books are available, the most prominent being those by Doug Adams (2010) and Matthew Young (2007).

Conclusion Research on Tolkien’s musical references and use of musical allusion throughout his mythology is a vast topic waiting to be explored. Unpublished presentations by Tolkien scholars, along with recorded instances of Tolkien himself singing and reciting his poems and songs, indicate that Tolkien used folk tunes and Gregorian chant as his inspiration and preferred mode of musical performance for many of the songs in his legendarium. The richness of sub-created music inspired by Tolkien’s writings is also an area ripe for research and exploration. As Flieger states in her chapter “An Unfinished Symphony” in reference to Tolkien’s invented world:

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What we have is what we get, and what we get is an unfinished symphony whose implications outrun its execution. Fragmentary, uncompleted, a vision often interrupted by its own fictive branchings, and kept from total fulfillment at least as much by its author’s endless re-vision, the “Silmarillion” legendarium is at once a monument to one man’s imagination, and as close as any one author has come to a mythology that might be called English . . . Tracing an arc from the Song of Creation in the Ainulindale to the lay of Frodo of the Nine Fingers and the Ring of Doom and its aftermath in the Scouring of the Shire, the Music begins in imperfection and stops (for Tolkien never fully reached the end) with a decisive yet explicitly temporary defeat of the forces of evil and a healing of some but not all wounds. (Flieger 2005, 138–139).

Notes 1  See Eden (2003a). Some of these songs of power are: “Song of the Valar,” “Song of Aryador,” “Song of Light,” “Song of the Sleeper,” “Flight of the Gnomes,” “Song of the Sun and Moon,” “The Siege of Angband,” “The Bowman’s Friendship,” “Song of the Great Bow,” the “Song of Tuor for Eärendil” (which is in three versions and five different texts), and “Light as Leaf on Lindentree” (which Aragorn quotes from and sings on Weathertop). 2  See especially Whittingham (2007) Chapter 2, “Tolkien’s Mythology of Creation” and

Chapter 3, “Tolkien’s Mythology of Divine Beings.” 3  See Whittingham (2007, 10) for a chronolog­ ical chart documenting Tolkien’s various writing stages. 4  See Eden (2010b) for references to Tennyson, Swinburne, and Morris. For further work see Eden’s unpublished presentations (2003a, 2005, and 2011). 5  Some of these are available in The Tolkien Audio Collection CDs (HarperCollins 2002).

References Adams, Doug. 2010. The Music of The Lord of the Rings Films: A Comprehensive Account of Howard Shore’s Scores. Van Nuys, CA: Alfred Music. Bratman, David. 2000. “The Literary Value of The History of Middle-earth.” In Tolkien’s legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth, edited by Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter, 69–93. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Bratman, David. 2010. “Liquid Tolkien: Music, Tolkien, Middle-earth, and More Music.” In Eden (2010a), 140–170. Burdge, Anthony S. 2010. “Performance Art in a Tunnel: A Musical Sub-creator in the Tradition of Tolkien.” In Eden (2010a), 171–200. Carpenter, Humphrey. 1977. J. R. R. Tolkien – A Biography. London: Allen & Unwin.

Cunningham, Michael. 2010. “An Impenetrable Darkness: An Examination of the Influence of J. R. R. Tolkien on Black Metal Music.” In Steimel and Schneidewind (2010), 215–240. Eden, Bradford Lee. 2003a. “The Medieval Philosophy of Music in Tolkien’s Works.” Unpublished presentation, given at the 2003 International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Eden, Bradford Lee. 2003b. “The ‘Music of the Spheres’: Relationships Between Tolkien’s Silmarillion and Medieval Cosmological and Religious Theory.” In Tolkien the Medievalist, edited by Jane Chance, 183–193. London: Routledge. Eden, Bradford Lee. 2005. “Gregorian Chant as an Influence on Tolkien’s Development of Lyric and Song in his Written Works.” Unpublished



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presentation, given at the 2005 International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Eden, Bradford Lee, ed. 2010a. Middle-earth Minstrel: Essays on Music in Tolkien. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Eden, Bradford Lee. 2010b. “Strains of Elvish Song and Voices: Victorian Medievalism, Music, and Tolkien.” In Eden (2010a), 85–101. Eden, Bradford Lee. 2011. “The Three Greatest Minstrels in Middle-earth: Tolkien’s Early Thoughts on Music and Power (The Genesis of Daeron, Minstrel of Doriath).” Unpublished presentation, given at the 2011 International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Finnamore, David J. 1999. “Essay on the Development of Music for Middle-earth.” Available at http://www.elvenminstrel.com/tolkien/me music.htm, accessed December 20, 2013. Flieger, Verlyn. 2002. Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World. Revised edn. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Flieger, Verlyn. 2005. Interrupted Music: The Making of Tolkien’s Mythology. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Flieger, Verlyn. 2009. “The Music and the Task: Fate and Free Will in Middle-earth.” Tolkien Studies, 6: 151–181. Geier, Fabian. “Making Texts Audible: A Workshop Report on Setting Tolkien to Music.” Translated from German by Heidi Steimel. In Steimel and Schneidewind (2010), 283–300. Hargrove, Gene. 1995. “Music in Middle-earth.” Available at http://www.phil.unt.edu/∼hargrove/ music.html, accessed December 20, 2013. Hargrove, Gene. 2006. “About the Songs and Poems in The Lord of the Rings.” Available at http://www.cep.unt.edu/songs/tolkien.html, accessed December 20, 2013. Harvey, David. 1985. The Song of Middle-earth: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Themes, Symbols and Myths. London: George Allen & Unwin. Larsen, Kristine. 2010. “ ‘Behold your Music!’: The Themes of Ilúvatar, the Song of Aslan, and the

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Real Music of the Spheres.” In Steimel and Schneidewind (2010), 11–28. McIntosh, Jonathan. 2010. “Ainulindalë: Tolkien, St. Thomas, and the Metaphysics of the Music.” In Steimel and Schneidewind (2010), 53–72. Martinez, Michael. 2000. “The Magic of the Minstrels.” Available at http://middle-earth.xenite .org/2011/11/28/the-magic-of-the-minstrels/, accessed December 20, 2013. Naveh, Reuven. 2010. “Tonality, Atonality and the Ainulindale.” In Steimel and Schneidewind (2010), 29–52. Seeman, Chris. n.d. “The Tolkien Music List.” Available at http://www.tolkien-music.com/, accessed December 20, 2013. Selisker, Scott. n.d. “The Led Zeppelin and JRR Tolkien Relations Page.” Available at http:// www.reocities.com/athens/2406/, accessed December 20, 2013. Smith, Paul. 2010. “Microphones in Middle-earth: Music in the BBC Radio Play.” In Steimel and Schneidewind (2010), 241–254. Smith, Ross. 2006. “Fitting Sense to Sound: Linguistic Aesthetics and Phonosemantics in the Work of J. R. R. Tolkien.” Tolkien Studies, 5: 1–20. Sommer, Mira. 2010. “Elven Music in Our Times.” Translated from German by Marie-Noëlle Biemer. In Steimel and Schneidewind (2010), 255–282. Steimel, Heidi and Friedhelm Schneidewind, eds. 2010. Music in Middle-earth. Zurich and Jena: Walking Tree Publishers. Sturgis, Amy H. 2010. “ ‘Tolkien is the Wind and the Way’: The Educational Value of Tolkieninspired World Music.” In Eden (2010a), 126– 139. Whittingham, Elizabeth A. 2007. The Evolution of Tolkien’s Mythology: A Study of the History of Middle-earth. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Young, Matthew. 2007. Projecting Tolkien’s Musical Worlds: A Study of Musical Affect in Howard Shore’s Soundtrack to The Lord of the Rings. Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller.

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Film Adaptations: Theatrical and Television Versions Kristin Thompson

Background When the three volumes of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings appeared in 1954–1955 (see ch. 9), it seemed inevitable that someday someone would try to adapt them as films. Moviemaking during the decade had begun to favor special effects, costume epics, and the fantasy and science-fiction genres. After decades in which the boxy rectangle of the Academy ratio frame (1.33:1) had been the standard, CinemaScope was introduced in 1953. One of its early uses was in Disney’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1954), a glimpse of the future of epic fantasy. Other widescreen systems followed. Science-fiction films had been scarce prior to the 1950s, but now flying saucers and giant monsters became popular. At its best, the genre could create classics like The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). Fantasy was not as widespread, though it was more common than in the 1940s and earlier. Ray Harryhausen, who would inspire many later filmmakers, including Peter Jackson, began his series of spectacular stop-motion effects sequences with The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) and continued them into the early 1980s. Disney dominated the realm of fantasy, of course. His feature-length animated versions of fairy-tales (Cinderella, 1950; Sleeping Beauty, 1959) and children’s literature (Peter Pan, 1953; Lady and the Tramp, 1955) were among the biggest hits of their day. They annoyed Tolkien though (e.g., Letters 119), who considered them the epitome of what he did not want adaptations of his novels to resemble.

A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.



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An adaptation of either The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings would require one of two approaches: feature-length animation or live-action with elaborate special-effects scenes. Either way, the production would have to be expensive if it were to reflect anything of the grandeur of Tolkien’s books. Yet the books, though more successful in the United Kingdom than their publishers had expected, still did not have the broad readership, especially in the United States, that would justify a big-budget production. It would only be with the vast rise of interest in Tolkien created by the Ballantine paperbacks in the mid-1960s that serious interest in adaptations arose. In the meantime, there were two tentative, highly impractical overtures made to Tolkien and his British publisher, Allen & Unwin.

The Morton Grady Zimmerman Project of 1957–1959 Historians have described the Morton Grady Zimmerman proposed project as if it were a viable attempt to make an animated adaptation of The Lord of the Rings.1 Humphrey Carpenter’s biography states: The first overtures from the film world came at the end of 1957 when Tolkien was approached by three American business men who showed him drawings for a proposed animated motion-picture of The Lord of the Rings. These gentlemen (Mr Forrest J. Ackerman, Mr Morton Grady Zimmerman, and Mr Al Brodax) also delivered to him a scenario or “Story Line” for the proposed film. (Carpenter 1977, 226)

Christina Scull and Wayne Hammond (Reader’s Guide 16–17) accept this account, though they point out that the Allen & Unwin archive reveals that Brodax “enquired about the film rights in May or June 1957,” prior to the Zimmerman proposal. Carpenter characterizes the three people he mentions as “business men.” In fact, Brodax was the only one of them who was a successful businessman. In 1957 he was a developer of television programming for the William Morris Agency; in the 1960s he produced several animated children’s series and the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine. His enquiry concerning The Lord of the Rings, however, came to nothing. The Zimmerman project was originated by a young, inexperienced man from Arkansas apparently hoping to use Tolkien’s work as a way of breaking into the film industry. Zimmerman and the small team he assembled could never have obtained financing or attracted a Hollywood studio capable of undertaking such a film. The “project” is of interest for two reasons. First, Tolkien wrote an extensive commentary on Zimmerman’s treatment, revealing some of his views on adaptations and his financial situation. Second, the naïveté betrayed by both Tolkien and Unwin in handling the negotiations hint at why the eventual sale of the film rights in 1969 was so badly arranged. During the 1950s, the traditional Hollywood studio system, in which actors and other major talent were kept under multi-year contracts, was quickly breaking down.

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A new way of generating projects became more common. An agent, often working on behalf of a screenwriter, director, or star, would put together a package including a script and core talent and then try to sell it to a studio. This system remains the norm today. Clearly Zimmerman hoped that the minor independent agent Ackerman, who by his own description earned his living “from some of Hollywood’s more lurid products,”2 could put together a package whose main value stemmed from Tolkien’s participation. Zimmerman was only 20 years old in 1957, apparently with no publications and few contacts in Hollywood. Ackerman was 41. He primarily represented sciencefiction writers, notably Ray Bradbury. The third party of the putative package, artist Ron Cobb, though also only aged 20, had worked for a few years as a minor animator on Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. In the 1960s he would establish a significant career as a political cartoonist, film designer, and commercial artist. On September 4, 1957, Ackerman visited Tolkien in Oxford, presenting him with Zimmerman’s treatment and showing him some artwork by Cobb, as well as some models by Jon Lackey, a 19-year-old who subsequently had a minor career as a musician and occasional Hollywood designer. The artwork impressed Tolkien, though the treatment did not. On December 6 Ackerman wrote the letter cited above to Unwin. He vastly oversold Zimmerman’s talents: “Zimmerman may be a new Mike Todd or Orson Welles in embryonic form.” Cobb, who undoubtedly showed potential, “may be a future Arthur Rackham.” Zimmerman, he wrote, had “several thousand dollars” to make a sample reel to show to potential backers. Ackerman requested an unpaid six-month option to develop the film. He added wistfully, “It would be a pleasure to be associated with a prestigious production for a change.” Unwin pointed out to Tolkien that Zimmerman’s group was willing to take his advice on general matters and his comments on specific story points: the adaptation would “be under your care more than is usual” (Chronology 517).3 Despite Tolkien’s misgivings about the treatment, he reluctantly agreed. On December 14 Unwin wrote to Ackerman: As you realize an option normally presupposes some payment, but in view of the special Circumstances and our very real interest in your project we will undertake to give you an assurance that for the next six months we will not contract or undertake negotiations for the motion-picture rights of THE LORD OF THE RINGS except with yourself. By the end of that period we should expect matters to be sufficiently advanced to see whether Professor Tolkien and your script writer were achieving harmony of opinion, and we could then proceed to a more permanent arrangement.

The six-month period would begin upon Ackerman’s receipt of Tolkien’s comments on the treatment. Tolkien’s and Unwin’s willingness to give such a valuable option to a largely unqualified group of young men without consulting experts in filmindustry practice reflects a lack of expertise that would prove more damaging a decade later.



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On January 7, 1958 Ackerman replied, again exaggerating the deal’s viability. He described a meeting of “interested parties” to discuss “the pilot picture [i.e., the sample reel], musical scoring and a number of other pertinent elements.” He claimed that “Mr Zimmerman, his manager, a business associate and myself are all in daily contact with the studio and producers of Hollywood . . . Any one of us at any time might make an extremely valuable contact leading to financial backing for the proposed film.” He adds, “Mr Zimmerman is not merely interested in selling a screenplay based on LORD OF THE RINGS, but in carrying to fruition the not inconsiderable package that he has already created.” Ackerman’s vagueness about the “interested parties” hints that little additional talent had come on board. He asks that the sixmonth option be extended to a year and adds that “Before we are through with this great project it should have resulted in multifold more sales of the book for you.” Apparently Zimmerman’s group hoped to limit Tolkien’s income from the film to a flat fee, with enhanced book sales being the main financial incentive for him and Unwin. Perhaps Unwin had become dubious concerning the group’s intentions, for on February 7 he replied, refusing to extend the option without payment. He referred Ackerman to Allen & Unwin’s Hollywood agent, Edgar Carter of H. N. Swanson, Inc. On April 8 Tolkien, increasingly worried about the situation, wrote to Unwin: “But I need, and shall soon need very much indeed, money, and I am conscious of your rights and interests; so that I shall endeavour to restrain myself, and avoid all avoidable offense” (Letters 267). He agreed to send comments on the treatment as soon as possible. On April 16 Unwin passed along to Tolkien the Hollywood agent’s report that Ackerman had offered $500 if he decided to extend the option to a year (Chronology 524, no source cited). After a delay, on June 16 Tolkien sent his commentary on the treatment to Unwin, including a cover letter addressed to Ackerman and dated June 9.4 His cover letter to Unwin states: If you think the stuff is too stiff, and tantamount to saying NO; please do what you will with it. But . . . I think you will probably agree that we could not accept it as it stands without compensation in cash far beyond the means of these people! (Chronology 529)5

By then he and Unwin apparently had realized that the Zimmerman group lacked the wherewithal for the proposed film. Certainly the $500 offer was absurdly low. In his memoirs Unwin said of the project’s end, “killed it was, though whether because of Tolkien’s demolition of the story-line or for lack of backing one does not know” (Unwin 1999, 108). The six-month option began when Ackerman received the commentary, presumably in July. On February 14, 1959 Unwin wrote to Tolkien saying that their Hollywood agent had communicated the Zimmerman group’s decision to drop their option on the film rights of The Lord of the Rings (Chronology 539, no source cited).

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A deeply devoted fan of fantasy, science fiction, and horror literature and films, Ackerman founded the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland in 1958, while negotiating with Tolkien, essentially becoming a professional fan. The short obituary of Zimmerman on file in the Marquette University Archive declares that he lived in Yuba City, California, and “worked in sales his entire career.”

The 1967 Hobbit Short The second deal made by Tolkien and Unwin led to even worse consequences. In 1949, William L. Snyder had formed Rembrandt Films to import films from Europe, starting with The Emperor’s Nightingale (1949), by the Czech animator Jiří Trnka, and including the French children’s classic The Red Balloon. With Gene Deitch, former producer and animator at the major animation studio UPA, in 1959 he began producing animated films in Prague. According to Unwin, in 1962 Snyder inquired about the rights to make an animated version of The Hobbit: With suspicious ease William Snyder of Rembrandt Films agreed our main conditions, and early in 1962 a contract was sent to him for signature. Then he suddenly realised that American copyright in The Hobbit was even more equivocal than that of The Lord of the Rings, and re-negotiation had to commence. In the end only the advance of $15,000 and a share of any profits earned in countries that were signatories of Berne remained. But we were not in a strong position. (Unwin 1999, 109)

Unwin recalled that in late 1964 he received news that a screenplay was nearly complete: But little more seems to have happened. Presumably Rembrandt, like their predecessors, failed to raise the necessary funding, and ultimately they were bought out by United Artists as part of a complex deal that was eventually signed in 1969 for The Lord of the Rings, with an option on The Hobbit. (Unwin 1999, 109–110)

Apparently the contract with Rembrandt made no provision for Unwin or a representative to keep abreast of the film’s process. In fact considerable pre-production work was done on an animated feature film, though ultimately only a 12-minute short was actually made. For decades the existence of the short remained unknown. Then, on January 10, 2012, Deitch posted an account of the project’s history on his blog. There he dates the making of the short to early 1966, though documents subsequently added to the entry indicate that the year was actually 1967.6 The short had been kept by Snyder’s son, who uploaded it to YouTube to accompany Deitch’s text.7 According to Deitch, he had launched into pre-production on a feature-length version of The Hobbit, spending a year (presumably during 1963–1964) writing a script and having design work done by Trnka, one of the greatest puppet animators.8



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Deitch claims that in early 1966, Snyder negotiated with 20th Century-Fox for financing but that the deal fell through when Snyder asked for too much money. Snyder still held the production rights, but several months later the expiration date for the option was approaching. Again, however, it turned out that Allen & Unwin had lacked expertise in crafting the deal. As Deitch put it, “they left a million-dollarloop-hole in the contract.” It required only that Snyder “produce a full-color motion picture version” of the novel by June 30, 1966 [1967] in order for the production rights to be extended. Aided by prominent Czech illustrator Adolf Born, Deitch managed to concoct a 12-minute film in about a month. It contains little actual animation, consisting mainly of sliding cut-outs and camera movements over paintings. The plot is nearly unrecognizable, adding a princess who eventually marries Bilbo; renaming Smaug “Slag”; and having Gandalf stay prudently behind, leaving Bilbo to lead the quest. The visual design, however, is colorful and highly stylized in the fashion of 1960s Eastern European animation. Deitch describes how on June 30, 1966 [1967], the short film was screened a single time in a New York theatre, with around half a dozen spectators lured in from the street, each provided with a dime to pay for admission. They signed papers confirming that they had paid money to watch a full-color version of The Hobbit. Snyder’s purpose was not to go on and make the feature version. During the mid1960s, the Tolkien craze hit America, and Snyder apparently knew that Tolkien and Unwin had been offered a large sum for the rights to the two Hobbit novels. Snyder realized that the rights option he held had skyrocketed in value. Deitch claims that the publisher paid close to $100,000 to regain the rights. Unwin, however, recalls that Snyder sold them to United Artists in 1969, which seems more likely. In either case, Snyder profited from the deal. Slight though the 1967 Hobbit film is, it was the first screen adaptation of Tolkien’s work to be realized.

The 1969 United Artists Contracts and Projects By this point Tolkien adaptations were looking more desirable. In 1967 producers Gabe Katzka and Sam Gelfman contacted Allen & Unwin, intending to make a feature film for United Artists (UA). Unwin recalls “a negotiation of nearly two years’ duration that was eventually consummated in a fifty-page contract, the complexities and uncertainties of which have dogged the publishers and the author’s estate ever since” (Unwin 1999, 129). Although UA’s control over the rights did not result in a film, the terms of the 1969 contracts would govern all future adaptations of the two novels. During those two years, the Beatles conceived a desire to star in an adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. Their production company, Apple Films, already had a relationship with UA, which had distributed the group’s first two films, A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965) in the United States. Some negotiations apparently occurred,

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but Tolkien threatened to withdraw from the ongoing talks with UA, and the Beatles’ hopes were squelched. In October 1969 two contracts were signed, turning over the production and distribution rights to both novels. One contract between Allen & Unwin and UA covered The Fellowship of the Ring and The Return of the King. A second between Sassoon Trustee and Executor Corporation and UA covered The Two Towers and The Hobbit. The use of Sassoon, based in the Bahamas, may have related to lingering copyright questions. The terms of the contracts, as far as they granted filmmaking and distribution rights, were nearly identical. Those terms were extraordinary, reflecting little knowledge of film-industry practices, as Unwin acknowledged in his memoirs. Perhaps most damaging was the sale of the rights in perpetuity rather than for a limited period. As a result the film-related rights have been sold or licensed ever since, with the Tolkien Estate and Allen & Unwin (now HarperCollins) having no control over such deals. One crucial passage in the Fellowship/Return contract granted essentially unlimited rights to producers to make any number of films based on the novels’ characters and plots: The sole and exclusive right in connection with the making, exhibition and exploitation of said motion picture photoplays to translate into all languages, to freely adapt, change, transpose, revise, rearrange, add to and subtract from the Work or any part thereof and the title, theme, plot, sequence, incidents and characterizations thereof, to make interpolations in and substitutions for any part or parts thereof, to make sequels to and new versions or adaptations of the Work or any part thereof, to use any part or parts of the Work or of the theme thereof or any incidents, characters, character names, scenes, sequences or characterizations therein contained in conjunction with any other work or works . . .9

Such language presumably allowed Peter Jackson and Warner Bros.’ 2012 decision to adapt The Hobbit in three parts rather than the announced two. The payment for the contracts, flat sums that added up to about $160,000, is usually dismissed as an absurdly low flat sum. They specified, however, that five percent of the studio’s gross receipts from any films released theatrically was to be paid to Tolkien and his publisher, though the studio could deduct certain well-defined expenses. Creative accounting has become notorious in Hollywood, and the expenses being deducted are often given as the excuse for not paying the percentage. Years later, when the Tolkien Trust and HarperCollins sued New Line over non-payment of their percentage, the matter was settled out of court for an undisclosed sum rumored to be around $150 million. Thus the amount of money for which the film rights were sold in 1969, though relatively small in Tolkien’s lifetime, has become substantial and continues as the three parts of The Hobbit are released. UA’s only serious attempt to produce The Lord of the Rings began in 1970, when the studio commissioned young British director John Boorman to adapt the novel as



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a single feature. He had not yet achieved prominence with films like Deliverance (1972) and Hope and Glory (1987). Boorman spent a year writing a script, but according to him, UA decided the project was too expensive. Recalling his intention to cast tenyear-old boys, dubbed with adult voices, to play the Hobbits, Boorman recently said, “I think I did a great service to the world by not making that film. Peter Jackson might never have made his trilogy if I’d done it” (Mueller 2012).

Saul Zaentz and the Ralph Bakshi Version Since the film rights had been sold in perpetuity, they remained with UA. In 1976, Saul Zaentz purchased the contracts. Zaentz had made his money in popular music via his Fantasy Records but had recently expanded into film production with Fantasy Films. The critical and financial success of his first release, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), presumably encouraged the producer to seek other prestigious film projects. Unwin’s memoirs state that Zaentz acquired the rights and commissioned animator Ralph Bakshi to direct a two-part adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. Bakshi has claimed that since 1956 he had hoped to make the film and asked Zaentz to acquire the rights (Unwin 1999, 130; Zito 1978, 60). Bakshi was a highly experienced animator, having worked for a decade at Terrytoons, making such television fare as the Mighty Mouse series. Moving to Paramount, he made his most famous features, Fritz the Cat (1972), notorious as the first X-rated cartoon, and Heavy Traffic (1973); set in New York, both were crude and witty. Yet Bakshi was determined to remain faithful to Tolkien’s novel, and The Lord of the Rings bears little resemblance to his earlier films. The result was a 134-minute feature that ends after the Battle at Helm’s Deep. Working with a relatively low budget, Bakshi completed the production in about 18 months. He did so in part by employing rotoscoping, a labor-saving technique in which scenes are shot in live-action and then drawings or paintings are traced over enlarged images of the individual film frames. Disney’s features often employed it for human figures, such as Snow White and Cinderella. Bakshi’s rotoscoping later drew much criticism from reviewers and fans. Interviewed shortly before the film’s release, Bakshi claimed that the rotoscoped images created a realism appropriate to the project: This is live action with the design of animation. It’s like taking Ben-Hur and painting a realistic version of each scene. The thing about the movie – why the technique will be different – is that it’s not a cartoon but rather the first realistic painting in motion. (Zito 1978, 61)

The technique was used for groups of human figures, such as the patrons in The Prancing Pony, as well as for the Black Riders. It also renders the crowds in battle scenes.

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Taken by themselves, the rotoscoped scenes are impressive, with a mildly experimental look. The main characters, however, are all rendered in more stylized drawn animation. Not only do they look “cartoony” when juxtaposed with the rotoscoped figures, but they move in a jittery, less realistic fashion. Occasionally characters actually change appearance: in rotoscoped images of Gandalf in the Helm’s Deep battle, his face is distinctly different from cel-based renderings of him in the same scene. The film’s prologue sketches the making and loss of the Ring, as well as Sméagol’s murder of Déagol. It proceeds for some time in a choppy way that would probably confuse a viewer unfamiliar with the book. Once the Fellowship sets out from Rivendell, the scenes become longer and more dramatically interesting. The journey through Moria, the Bridge of Khadad-dûm, and the Helm’s Deep battle are, though severely compressed, fairly faithful to the book. But for all the flashy visuals, Middleearth itself is rather bland. Clearly the rotoscoped scenes were all shot in the same area of open plains with scattered small trees, which gives most of the landscapes a similar appearance. Although the film did reasonably well when it opened in November 1978, after the initial interest generated among fans its earnings soon fell off. It never expanded beyond 31 theatres and failed financially. Zaentz declined to produce the second part.

Rankin/Bass’s The Hobbit and The Return of the King In 1960, the production company formed by Arthur Rankin, Jr. and Jules Bass launched its first television series, based on Pinocchio. The pair quickly established themselves with such holiday animated TV-movies as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964). In 1972 Rankin/Bass began production on The Hobbit, which premiered on NBC on November 27, 1977. The budget for the 77-minute film was given as $3 million, at the time reportedly the most expensive animated television program ever. Apart from co-producing the film, Rankin designed the characters and backgrounds. Bass co-produced and also adapted Tolkien’s verses for the film’s many songs; he provided new lyrics for the theme song, “The Greatest Adventure.” The limited animation was accomplished in Japan by the Topcraft firm (the forerunner of the prestigious Studio Ghibli). An impressive vocal cast included Orson Bean as Bilbo, John Huston as Gandalf, Hans Conried as Thorin, and Cyril Ritchard as Elrond. Pop singer Glenn Yarborough portrayed The Balladeer and provided Bilbo’s singing voice.10 The film received positive but lukewarm reviews at the time. Variety noted that the action moved at too quick a pace but deemed it “otherwise up to the usual RankinBass production standards, with sharp animation, loving fidelity to the book’s incidents, and expertly cast voices.”11 Among fans, its reputation has been mixed, with some finding it appealing and others dismissing it as too compressed and cloying in tone. The film was clearly made for small children and may lack the appeal to other age groups that Tolkien’s novel has.



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While most filmmakers adapting Tolkien tend to jettison most of the poetry, the Rankin/Bass version stressed songs, using one for nearly every scene and letting the lyrics advance the plot. Dialogue is minimized, in part to avoid the expense of synchronizing dialogue with lip movements. The scenes in effect become montage sequences accompanying the songs. Given a young audience, this tactic works surprisingly well. The visuals, particularly the background paintings, are the film’s strongest point. There are some highly effective moments, notably Bilbo’s encounter with the black butterflies. There is a common assumption that Rankin and Bass chose to produce a sequel, The Return of the King, as a follow-up to Bakshi’s incomplete adaptation of The Lord of the Rings.12 In reality the pair had planned all along to adapt the third volume, believing it to be out of copyright in the United States.13 An advert in Variety for May 3, 1978 announced that Frodo, The Hobbit II was in production. This was half a year before the release of Bakshi’s film, the failure of which led to Zaentz’s decision against making the second part. Retitled The Return of the King, the Rankin/Bass sequel was broadcast on ABC on May 11, 1980. Inevitably the attempt to link the last third of Tolkien’s novel directly to The Hobbit created huge narrative problems. The main story is embedded as flashbacks in a frame situation set at Rivendell, where Gandalf and the four Hobbits from the Fellowship visit Bilbo. The quest has already been accomplished, which destroys much of the film’s suspense. Bilbo does not understand why the Ring had to be destroyed, so the other characters explain, aided by a minstrel. He and Gandalf narrate the flashbacks, providing minimal coherence to the choppy action. Gandalf’s voice patches over the lack of the first two volumes by declaring: “Frodo and his gallant companion, Samwise, had many brave adventures, until finally they reached the borders of Mordor.” Legolas and Gimli are eliminated, and Aragorn, despite being the title character, is absent for most of the film. By common consensus, The Return of the King is far inferior to its predecessor.

A Soviet Hobbit In 1985, as part of its “Tale after Tale” series, Lentelefilm produced an unauthorized adaptation of The Hobbit as a 71-minute television movie, Skazochnoye puteshestviya mistera Bilbo Begginsa Khobbita, or The Fabulous Journey of Mr. Bilbo Baggins the Hobbit. Aimed at children, the film was shot entirely indoors on a stage and makes little attempt to differentiate the heights of the Dwarves, Bilbo, and Gandalf, though the Dwarves wear variously colored hoods as described in the book. The story dramatizes a few scenes in detail, linked by shots of the group struggling through an artificial forest. The opening Bag End portion consumes 20 minutes, followed by a brief scene of the group in a blizzard leading to a lengthy dramatization of the “Riddles in the Dark” scene. This ends fully 44 minutes into the film. Some brief Lake-town scenes frame Bilbo’s discovery of the Arkenstone and conversation with a charming puppet

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version of Smaug. The entire story is framed by a narrator, “the Professor” (perhaps meant to be Tolkien) describing the scenes that are skipped over. The film was uploaded to YouTube on December 25, 2011, in a visually excellent but unsubtitled version, window-boxed to preserve the original television screen ratio.14

Finland Tackles The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings In 1993, Finland’s public broadcasting station, VLE (Yleisradio), adapted a successful play based on both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, using songs and many of the actors from the stage production. The title is simply Hobitit (“Hobbits”). The miniseries contained nine episodes with a total running time of 270 minutes. Despite incorporating material from The Hobbit in its early scenes, the setting and tone are much gloomier than in earlier adaptations, and clearly it is aimed at an older audience. Again there is a framing narration, in this case with an aged, despondent Sam Gamgee reluctantly telling the story to a group of children. The first episode (“Bilbo”) is devoted to Bilbo’s adventure, highly compressed by Sam’s narration; the dramatized portion is largely limited to the “Riddles in the Dark” scene. The next four (“The Road,” “The Old Forest,” “The Prancing Pony,” and “Strider”) are more leisurely and take the plot of The Lord of the Rings only up to the end of the Council of Elrond. The last four (“Lórien,” “Mordor,” “Mount Doom,” and “Liberation”) deal in a highly compressed fashion with the rest of the narrative, eliminating the Isengard, Helm’s Deep, Minas Tirith, and Black Gate battles in favor of following Sam and Frodo once they split from the rest of the Fellowship. Again the production is entirely confined to studio interiors, though the quasiexpressionistic stylized sets give a sense of brooding atmosphere appropriate to the filmmakers’ approach. The process of compressing the two novels creates a very uneven narrative. There are effective scenes, such as Bilbo’s long-expected party and departure from Hobbiton. Other scenes are ludicrously compressed, such as the sketchy passage through Moria and the strange treatment of Lothlórien entirely as a conversation with Galadriel as a disembodied head reflected in a pond.15 The entire series was uploaded on YouTube from May 8 to December 24, 2010 by JouninEnsio, who also added subtitles (each episode is broken up into parts, due to length limitations on YouTube.) The episodes are letterboxed to the appropriate television format but the versions currently online are visually quite dark.

Peter Jackson and New Line’s Epics The Lord of the Rings In 1995 Peter Jackson was a moderately successful director in a minor producing country, New Zealand. His early comic horror films, Bad Taste (1988) and Braindead



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(1992), had gained him a small international cult following. In 1993 he saw Jurassic Park (1993) and decided that computer-generated imagery (CGI) would become a major factor in filmmaking. He and partner Fran Walsh bought a computer and added a few CGI effects to their 1994 drama, Heavenly Creatures, distributed in the United States by Miramax. Its nomination for a screenplay Oscar gave Jackson and Walsh a more prestigious profile. In 1995 Jackson directed a comic horror film, The Frighteners, for Universal. His new Wellington-based design and effects house, Weta Ltd., produced a record number of effects shots for this mid-budget production. Despite its financial failure, Jackson sought an even larger CGI-based project, settling on The Lord of the Rings. Harvey Weinstein, head of Miramax, negotiated with Saul Zaentz for the rights. A contract was signed early in 1997. Jackson’s New Zealand team worked for 18 months on the design and on computer programs to generate huge crowds of extras and to render Gollum entirely with CGI. A script for a two-part adaptation budgeted at $140 million was written.16 In June, 1998, Michael Eisner, head of Miramax’s parent company, Disney, ordered Weinstein to cut the project to one part, to cost $75 million. Jackson and Walsh refused to participate and persuaded Weinstein to give them two weeks to find another studio to buy The Lord of the Rings. Jackson devised a 35-minute pitch video. The only studio head willing to watch it was Bob Shaye, co-founder of New Line Cinema, an independent subsidiary of Time Warner. New Line subsisted mainly on franchises like the “Nightmare on Elm Street” series, interspersed with prestigious releases like Boogie Nights (1997). In the market for a new franchise, Shaye bought The Lord of the Rings, deciding to make it in three parts. In August, New Line announced its new project. Widely perceived in the industry and press as taking a dangerous gamble, Shaye minimized risk by shooting all three parts simultaneously in New Zealand, where production costs were low. He also pre-sold international distribution rights and tie-in product licenses. Fourteen months of further pre-production followed, with the script being rewritten. Prestigious actors who were not yet big stars were cast, including Elijah Wood as Frodo, Ian McKellen as Gandalf, Sean Bean as Boromir, and Cate Blanchett as Galadriel. Principal photography for all three parts ran from October 1999 to December 2000. Pick-ups (additional shots and retakes of faulty shots) occupied several months during 2001, 2002, and 2003. The filmmaking facilities in Wellington, co-owned by Jackson and two partners, Weta designer Richard Taylor and supervising editor Jamie Selkirk, expanded enormously to accommodate the elaborate technical requirements of the epic film. A factory was converted into the Stone Street Studios. Weta Digital added hundreds of computers and large render farms. Weta Workshop built tens of thousands of costumes, props, and set miniatures. A miniatures photography unit was added, and an aging, government-owned editing and sound-mixing facilities, The Film Unit, was moved to a new, state-of-the art complex, Park Road Post. The film’s announced budget was $270 million, but the first part’s success led to more ambitious techniques, swelling the cost to a rumored $330 million.

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By early 2001, there was much skepticism within both the fan community and the industry about the potential success of the trilogy. In May 1999, New Line created an official website, then an uncommon tactic in publicizing movies; on April 7, 2001 the first trailer was posted, drawing a record 1.7 million hits within the first 24 hours. More importantly, on May 11, New Line showed a 26-minute preview of the film’s three parts at the Cannes Film Festival. For the first time, cast and crew members, New Line officials, several foreign distributors, and the press (including a few fan webmasters) were all seeing finished footage. Apart from brief clips from all three parts, a large portion of the Moria battle was the bulk of the preview. The overwhelming response to the preview, as well as the press interviews and party that followed, transformed international perception of the film, leading to a huge and largely positive publicity surge leading up to the release of The Fellowship of the Ring on December 19. It ultimately grossed $871 million internationally and won numerous awards, including four of the record 13 Oscars it was nominated for. The other two parts repeated its success. The Two Towers (December 18, 2002) grossed $926 million worldwide and won two Oscars from six nominations. The Return of the King (December 17, 2003) became only the second film, after Titanic, to gross over a billion dollars internationally, reaching $1.1 billion. Nominated for 11 Oscars, it won them all, becoming the first fantasy film to be dubbed Best Picture. On March 26, 2002, New Line announced that two versions of the first part would be released on DVD: the theatrical version (August 6) and an extended version (November 12). The same strategy was followed with the other two parts. In an era when DVDs occasionally included deleted scenes separately as supplements, Jackson’s innovative approach included editing in new scenes totaling 120 minutes across the three parts. Exceptionally elaborate making-of supplements were included in the extended-version DVD sets. The merchandising surrounding the trilogy was also innovative. The filmmaking team cooperated with the video-game designers at Electronic Arts to an unprecedented extent. Designs, actual props, and sound clips were provided, something unheard of with film-based games. The main actors provided new voice-over recordings, and stunt performers from the film also worked on the games. Weta Workshop designers created style guides provided to other merchandise licensees and created weapons, statuettes, and other products in collaboration with traditional collectibles manufacturers. The Internet campaign was similarly revolutionary. Aside from the official website, New Line allowed Ian McKellen, one of the first stars to have his own website, to post a lengthy production diary and a column to answer fans’ questions. Limited on-set access and other privileged information were offered to major fan sites Ain’t It Cool News and TheOneRing.net. News leaks and releases were provided to a few dozen fan sites and went viral through repostings on countless other sites. In a 2004 survey of nearly 25,000 fans around the world, 6,357 listed the Internet as their main sources of information about the film, with the trailers being second at 4,271 (Barker and Mathijs 2008, 51).



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Although some Tolkien scholars and fans deplored the Jackson film as unfaithful to the letter and spirit of the novel (see ch. 9), the overwhelming response was positive. The film substantially boosted the sales and readership of Tolkien’s books. His editor at HarperCollins, David Brawn, declared that sales during that period rose a thousand percent (Rérolle 2012).

The Hobbit The success of The Lord of the Rings trilogy made a follow-up adaptation of The Hobbit inevitable. Its production was, however, delayed by years. New Line’s attempt to create another prestigious fantasy franchise with Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy ended with the financial failure of The Golden Compass (2007). As a result, New Line was radically downsized and absorbed into Warner Bros. MGM, which owned the distribution rights to The Hobbit and was to co-produce a two-part film adaptation, went through bankruptcy proceedings in 2010. After further delays caused by labor disputes and Peter Jackson’s health problems, principal photography on The Hobbit began on March 27, 2011. Ian McKellen returned as Gandalf, and Martin Freeman played the younger Bilbo. The filmmakers were determined to differentiate the 13 Dwarves, whom Tolkien had left as a mostly indistinguishable group, and the design and casting of these characters received considerable attention. Improved motion-capture techniques permitted Andy Serkis to again transform into Gollum. Another technical change came with the decision to shoot the film digitally, as well as in 3D. Jackson innovated by filming 48 frames per second (fps) rather than the standard 24 fps; the goal was to eliminate strobing effects during camera movements and create a sharper image. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey became the first theatrical feature successfully released in 48 fps, though a minority of theaters were equipped for that speed. The studio had to supply it in various format combinations of 3D, 48 fps, 24 fps, Imax, and even 35mm (for theaters not yet converted to digital projection). In the summer of 2012, Jackson announced that The Hobbit would be extended to three parts, with relevant material from The Lord of the Rings’ appendices added to the story. This material would largely relate to the activities of the White Council and its attack on Sauron’s lesser fortress of Dol Guldur, sketchily described in Appendix B. The film’s first part, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, was released in the United States on December 17, 2012. It grossed slightly over a billion dollars internationally, although adjusted for inflation its success was comparable to that of the three parts of The Lord of the Rings. Although generally favorably received, it was not as enthusiastically reviewed as the earlier trilogy and won none of the three technical Academy Awards for which it was nominated. The film was not as innovative in its technology, marketing, and merchandising, though considerable use was made of YouTube, with a series of ten production vlogs being posted there.

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The second part, The Desolation of Smaug, was released on December 13, 2013, and the third part, There and Back Again, was scheduled for release on December 17, 2014.17 Notes   1  The film was intended to be primarily liveaction, with animated figures depicting some characters.   2  Letter, Forrest J. Ackerman to Raynor Unwin, December 6, 1957, Marquette University Archives, JRRT Series 8, Box 1, Folder 3. Letters concerning this project not otherwise attributed are from this same folder.   3  From a letter in the Tolkien-George Allen & Unwin Archive, HarperCollins.   4  Partially printed in Letters 270. The original is in the Marquette University Archives folder cited above.   5  Tolkien-George Allen & Unwin archive, HarperCollins.   6  Gene Deitch, “40. William Snyder,” genedeitchcredits.com (January 10, 2012). Available athttp://genedeitchcredits.com/roll-the-credits/40william-l-snyder/, accessed December 20, 2013. All quotations and information on the 1967 Hobbit film are from this site. At some point Deitch’s entry was revised, including the addition of reproductions of two letters from Deitch to Snyder, dated January 9, 1967 and March 4, 1967, referring to The Hobbit short as still in production. Thus Deitch’s dating of the completion of the short and its screening in New York must be off by a year, though as of the access date, he had not changed the year from 1966 to 1967 in the body of the essay. Despite the fact that the date on the YouTube film and all other references to the film in online sources list it as 1966, I have assumed a 1967 date for the film’s making and exhibition. Obviously Deitch’s account of the short’s production must be treated as tentative.   7  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m -t9OULNKlc, accessed December 20, 2013.   8  According to Deitch in “40. William Snyder,” he still possesses the feature-length script, as well as four of Trnka’s designs for characters from The Hobbit; the designs were posted in “43. Jiří Trnka” on Deitch’s website (around

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August, 2012): http://genedeitchcredits.com/ roll-the-credits/43-jiri-trnka/, accessed December 20, 2013. The two contracts became part of the public record when they were entered as Exhibits 1 and 2 in the case of Christopher Reuel Tolkien et al. vs. New Line Cinema Corporation et al., Case BC 385294 in the Superior Court of the State of California, County of Los Angeles. They were attached to New Line’s “Notice of Demurrer to First Amended Complaint of Plaintiffs Christopher Reuel Tolkien, et al.” and other documents, filed on August 4, 2008. The most informative account of the film’s production is Culhane (1977). “The Hobbit,” Variety, November 30, 1977: 36. See also O’Connor (1977). See, e.g., Croft (2007). Croft’s entry otherwise provides a useful summary and critique of the two Rankin/Bass films, with a bibliography. According to Scull and Hammond (Reader’s Guide 22), a legal dispute with Tolkien Enterprises and the Tolkien Estate was settled amicably. The film is at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=6m0l3Yr1B50, accessed December 21, 2013. For a review, see Tim Brayton, “Tolkien on Film: Child of the Kindly West,” Antagony & Ecstasy, December 2, 2012, http:// antagonie.blogspot.com/2012/12/tolkien -on-film-child-of-kindly-west.html, accessed December 21, 2013. For an episode by episode review, see Tim Brayton, “Tolkien on Film: I Feel All Thin, Sort of Stretched, If You Know What I Mean: Like Butter That Has Been Scraped Over Too Much Bread,” Antagony & Ecstasy, December 3, 2012, http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2012/ 12/tolkien-on-film-i-feel-all-thin-sort -of.html, accessed December 21, 2013. Except where noted, all information in this section derives from Thompson (2007). There has not been room here to discuss amateur adaptations of Tolkien’s work. Most



Film Adaptations such films are humorous and involve fans reediting and putting new sound tracks onto existing footage. There have so far been two more ambitious projects using costumed actors to film entirely new footage and presenting dramatic narratives faithfully based on action that either happens offstage in The Lord of the Rings or in the past. These are both available on YouTube and other websites: Born of Hope (2009, 71 minutes), a story of

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Aragorn’s early years, and The Hunt for Gollum (2009, 39 minutes), which follows the hunt as Gandalf describes it in “The Shadow of the Past.” These have both been shown at fan conventions and conferences, but copyright restrictions prevent them from having commercial releases. Saul Zaentz’s Tolkien Enterprises has evidently imposed other restrictions to discourage amateur productions, however respectful to the books.

References Barker, Martin and Ernest Mathijs, eds. 2008. Watching The Lord of the Rings: Tolkien’s World Audiences. New York: Peter Lang. Carpenter, Humphrey. 1977. J. R. R. Tolkien – A Biography. London: Allen & Unwin. Croft, Janet Brennan. 2007. “Rankin/Bass Productions, Inc.” In J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopaedia, edited by Michael Drout, 559. London: Routledge. Culhane, John. 1977. “Will the Video Version of Tolkien Be Hobbit Forming?” New York Times, November 27: 33. Available at http://www.nyti mes.com/1977/11/27/books/tolkien-hobbitani .html, accessed December 20, 2013. Mueller, Matt. 2012. “Cannes Interview: John and Katrine Boorman Talk ‘Me and Me Dad,’ ‘Excalibur,’ & ’70s ‘Lord of the Rings.’ ” Indiewire, May 22. Available at http://blogs.indiewire.com/tho mpsononhollywood/cannes-interview-john-and -katrine-boorman-talk-me-and-me-dad-exca

libur-70s-lord-of-the-rings, accessed Decem­ber 20, 2013. O’Connor, John J. 1977. “TV Weekend: The Hobbit.” New York Times, November 25. Available at www.nytimes.com/1977/11/25/books/ tolkien-hobbittv.html, accessed December 20, 2012. Rérolle, Raphaëlle. 2012. “Tolkien, l’anneau de la discorde.” Le Monde, July 9. Available at http:// www.lemonde.fr/culture/article/2012/07/05/tolkien -l-anneau-de-la-discorde_1729858_3246.html, accessed December 20, 2013. Thompson, Kristin. 2007. The Frodo Franchise: The Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood. Berkeley: University of California Press. Unwin, Raynor. 1999. George Allen & Unwin: A Remembrancer. Ludlow: Merlin Unwin Books. Zito, Stephen. 1978. “Bakshi among the Hobbits.” American Film, 3.10 (September): 60–61.

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In short, the Tolkien phenomenon paved the way for a new type of game, one that would allow fans to go beyond reading and actually enter exciting worlds of fantasy to play a role in their own adventures. (Barton 2008, 19) It’s worth noting that Tolkien’s project . . . is so vast, so unbounded in its aspirations, that we cannot even imagine its long-run consequences. . . . today, all we see is the fact that almost every synthetic world that’s been created has been modeled on Middle-Earth. (Castronova 2005, 298 n. 21)

The story of how Tolkien’s creations have made their way into material and virtual games is the story of regulating and calculating fantasy. What began as words on the printed page, set in type, designed for linear consumption, had to be transported into a realm where story gives way to rules allowing strategic decisions and numbers representing likelihood of success. To understand the changing meanings of fantasy and fun from the second half of the twentieth century onwards, we have to take a journey from the ars mythopoetica of Tolkien through tabletops and underground caverns of ones and zeros to the vast online universes of Norrath and Azeroth, aided by boards, dice, rulebooks, and video cards, meeting sub-creators, miniaturemakers, and programmers along the way. These virtual worlds or the numerous, growing lands and planes of RPGs, are spaces for collaborative storytelling and they are the closest equivalent of Tolkien’s idea of “Faërian drama” that we have today.

A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.



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The Roots of Enchantment: “On Fairy-stories” What is this elusive, nigh-mythical enchantment that captivated Tolkien so? In “On Fairy-stories” he describes the enchantment of fairies that “produces a Secondary World into which both the designer and spectator can enter, to the satisfaction of their senses while they are inside” (OFS 64). According to Tolkien’s interpretation of fairy-magic, “If you are present at a Faërian Drama you yourself are, or think that you are, bodily inside its Secondary World” (OFS 63). That secondary world is produced, in Tolkien’s terms, through the use of Art, and the product of Art is “Subcreation,” but he uses fantasy to denote “both the Sub-creative Art in itself and a quality of strangeness and wonder in the Expression” (OFS 59–60). He claims Faërian Drama instills Fantasy in its beholders “with a realism and immediacy beyond the compass of any human mechanism” (OFS 63). This is a satisfactory description of the ideal of a total medium which has permeated Western culture, one that is able to generate the materiality of an artificial scene and involves its audience not as passive spectators, but as active co-creators of the work of art, also known as total theatre, total cinema, or the Gesamtkunstwerk. What Tolkien calls Fantasy, Primary and Secondary Belief, new media theorists call immersion, the psychological phenomenon of immediately experiencing another world in the aesthetic mode. In his theory and history of the concept of sub-creation, Mark J. P. Wolf differentiates between physical, sensual, and conceptual immersion: On one end, there is the physical immersion of user [when she] is physically surrounded by the constructed experience [like in theme parks], thus the analogy with immersion in water. . . . there is the sensual immersion of the user, [where] the user’s entire body is not immersed, [but] everything the user sees and hears is part of the controlled experience; [in the case of a darkened theatre or a video game], the audience vicariously enters a world through a first-person point of view or an onscreen avatar. Finally, on the other end of the spectrum is conceptual immersion, which relies on the user’s imagination . . . (Wolf 2012, 48)

The concepts of physical, sensual, and conceptual imagination neatly line up with the categories Tolkien devised to talk about the different degrees of attunement to the fictional world. But the “elvish craft” of Tolkien is capable of more than the immersion of the human sensorium in another world of “arresting strangeness” (OFS 60): it does so within the frame of a narrative thread that takes the interactor through the sub-created world. It is not called Faërian Drama for nothing. Tolkien suggests that among the available media of his day, the verbal art of written narrative came closest to the magic of the Elves (OFS 61), so it is no surprise that when fantasy games migrate to the medium of the computer, it is first in textual adventure games that the enchantment of another world is woven. That is why these pieces came to be called Interactive Fiction amongst their most ardent practitioners and players. Tolkien never divulged just what the subject matter of a Faërian Drama

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is, and what the Elves who play with their human victims really do, but Verlyn Flieger suggests that they “are [not] the chief actors in fairy-stories; they are there simply to interact with . . . the human being who . . . wanders into the enchanted world” (2002, 23). If so, this means that they are both the designers and, to a lesser extent, bit players in a story enacted by the chief human agent, an idea that dovetails nicely with the ludic framework of interactive games. These fairy-plays go beyond the attempted illusion of material theatre, which Tolkien deemed unsuitable for their presentation. Owing to the rapid technological development of entertainment media, this vision has since then been made reality to a large extent, and our current virtual worlds in video games and online role-playing games are massively dependent on fantasy conventions as brought alive by Tolkien.

All Aboard: Wargaming and Board Games One cannot convincingly tell the tale of gamifying the imagination without recourse to the history of military simulation in general, and wargames in particular. In fact, it could be argued that, with its intent to run several different scenarios of various campaigns and its elaborate rules utilizing statistics and the element of luck, military simulation is the stern, disciplinarian grandfather of modern fantasy gaming. The first miniature wargame with ties to Tolkien was Tactical Studies Rules’ (TSR) Chainmail, created by Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren. Published in 1971, it was originally a rule-set for medieval warfare. It had a fairly well-developed system for simulating battles that took into account such aspects as movement rates on different terrains, morale, fatigue, range of fire, the effect of cover, weather, and so on. But it was the 15-page fantasy supplement which made it stand out from other wargaming compendiums. Gygax and Perren wrote that they included the supplement because: Most of the fantastic battles related in novels more closely resemble medieval warfare than they do earlier or later forms of combat. [The supplement allows the wargamer to] either refight the epic struggles related by J. R. R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, and other fantasy writers; or you can devise your own “world,” and conduct fantastic campaigns and conflicts based on it. (Gygax and Perren, 1976)

The appeal of recreating not just real historical battles, but the meeting of hosts from literature was immense and the supplement became an immediate success. It featured mythical creatures and races from Tolkien’s legendarium, such as Elves, Hobbits, Ents, and Balrogs, 16 magic spells ranked by complexity, and an alignment system that placed forces of good and evil along the axis of law and chaos, but included troops of neutral alignment too. Gygax later went on to create a game of fantasy with Dave Arneson, a fellow wargaming enthusiast he met at the second Lake Geneva Convention, Dungeons and Dragons, that would be the first of its kind: a role-playing game (RPG).



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Chainmail’s evident success created a need for other game systems representing fantasy battles, and the South Essex League of Wargamers’ (SELWG) Middle Earth [sic] rule-set was the first of its kind to “cover specifically the mythical world, Middle Earth, created by Professor J. R. R. Tolkien in his books The Hobbit, and trilogy, Lord of the Rings” (Johnson et al. 1976, 1). The SELWG positioned its creation as a custom-built system, since, in their eyes, other fantasy rule-sets were heavily dependent upon medieval/ancient era rules whose strong simulationist tendencies did not chime in well with players’ conception of epic fantasy battles fought on a massive scale. Curiously, the Middle Earth wargame left some iconic foes out, such as Balrogs, Saruman, and Dragons, for the designers felt that in battles between the forces of the West and Mordor, these characters would be “superfluous . . . and would only lengthen the rules” (1976, 1). An interesting design decision was to restrict neutral troop types to fight only if the forces of law were losing, hinting at a strategic design imbalance to steer conflict towards a eucatastrophic end. According to the designers, “it makes for more interesting wargames if the sides are ‘unfair’ ” (5). The SELWG’s product was also more charitable with charts and tables, which created nuanced differences in unit morale, so the effect of a hero killed in battle or a disorganized unit to such events as friendly units falling back or routing within specified distances, energy level depletion charts for spellcasters, success of siege weaponry or weather, were all controlled by a 20-sided die. The 1976 Middle Earth rule-set included eleven spells for Gandalf and nine for the Witch-King of Angmar, with common spells, such as talking to animals and casting bolts of defense, and spells exclusive to the two sides, like a “beam of good” or “rout” (19), respectively. Though in retrospect they seem an integral part of the history of how Tolkien’s writings have entered the realm of gaming, wargames were not at all obvious candidates for this process to start at. With its strong emphasis on recreating accuracy in probabilities of success, or natural/physical simulation in short, wargaming has introduced numbers for determining the outcome of just about any aspect of the fictional events and circumstances that can be calculated. They were instrumental not just in recreating but in replaying and thereby modifying Arda’s history on the miniature table as well. As generals, players were required to make important strategic decisions, inviting an element of role-play, but one that is crude by later RPG standards. Still, the conventions at Lake Geneva (Gen Cons) were also the birthplace for the conventions of modern fantasy gaming, where elements from The Lord of the Rings and other works of imaginative world-making were quantified for entertainment. Significantly, the Gen Cons featured another entertainment staple that would come to borrow from the ethos and tropes of the fantasy genre, namely board games (for an exhaustive list of Tolkien board games, see Watry and Kuo 2003–). During the early days, the International Federation of Wargaming mostly played with military board games from Avalon Hill and Simulation Publications, Inc. (Laws 2007, 9), but it did not take long for board gaming to embrace the world of The Lord of the Rings. One early herald was Conquest of the Ring by Hobbit Toy and Games (1970), a very schematic Ludo-alike that is poorly themed and only interesting for its primacy. A more

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noteworthy treatment of Tolkien’s world in board game form is Land of Legend’s Quest of the Magic Ring (QotMR, Hill 1975), the first fleshed-out tabletop game that does not intend to simulate battle realistically. Two to seven players can participate, who take the roles of The Lord of the Rings’ characters whose names were changed because of copyright issues, and in case of a shortage of players, the available ones control multiple positions. The gameplay progresses as the good characters try to destroy the Ring by taking it to the Crack of Fire, whereas the Dark Lord and the White Wizard seek to acquire the Ring for themselves and take it to their own towers. The gameboard is remarkable because it is comprised of interlocking roads and loops, so players can choose their path on the gameboard to victory. As in other capture-the-flag style games, there are separate rules for encounters, which determine what events take place and who gets the Ring when two game pieces meet. Its relatively simple rules and engaging gameplay made QotMR stand out as a ludic landmark in making Tolkien’s work playable. Chronologically speaking, in this early period of fantasy gaming, throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, the dividing line between military simulation and classic board games is more porous than later on, largely due to the small circle of gaming enthusiasts. A case in point is The Hobbit-inspired Battle of the Five Armies (published by Lore; Smith 1975)/The Battle of Five Armies (published by ICE; Smith 1984), a game originally designed by Larry Smith where players can enact the iconic Third Age battle. The board is the wargaming industry standard hexagonal map, but the game is much more streamlined, beginner-friendly, and omits a host of specialized rules that characterize simulationist wargames. At the same time, the original design embraced the theme of uneven conflict now familiar to us: the Free Peoples’ lack of troops are made up by improved statistics, encouraging conservative play, whereas the Dark forces’ superior numbers allow the player controlling them to attack more recklessly. In a similar vein, but with vastly greater complexity, we find ICE’s Fellowship of the Ring (Charlton and Neidlinger 1983), whose greatest innovation was to create a game of imperfect information, as players have no knowledge of distribution of the enemy combatants’ pieces. Furthermore, the inclusion of rumors about troop movements brings another element of uncertainty into play, so reconnaissance becomes the key to success. Finally, Simulation Publications, Inc.’s War of the Ring (Barasch and Berg 1977) is remarkable for making a hybrid game with several scenarios and two rule-sets, with one that plays as one would expect from a wargame, whereas the other enhances the play with spellcasting and mission objectives, and includes more of Middle-earth lore, making the game more flexible, suited to different styles of play. The next significant board game that moved away from wargaming was Riddle of the Ring by Fellowship Games Inc. (Califf and Walker 1982). Compared to QotMR, Riddle of the Ring is a fully licensed game, using the original names of Tolkien’s legendarium, in which two to eight players struggle in teams to take control of the Ring, one half of them playing Hobbits, the other the Black Riders. The game-board representing Middle-earth is still hexagonal in a nod to the genre’s roots. On the other hand, players’



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moves are decided by the throw of a die, and additional actions are taken using specific cards. Since players are grouped in two opposing camps, there is a degree of cooperation which was not present in previous games, fostered by “Friendly Exchanges” of cards and several types of “Power Play” moves. Battle is regulated by such Power Play cards, and so is taking a card from another player; players may use Clairvoyance to gain knowledge of other players’ hands and Riddles to acquire cards from another player by guessing its name, in a homage to Bilbo’s fondness for riddles. The pinnacle of Tolkienian board games is Reiner Knizia’s (2000) award-winning Lord of the Rings (Kosmos/Fantasy Flight Games). The game is renowned for Knizia’s thematic approach to game design: the themes of fellowship and corruption infuse the rules and the subsequent gameplay. During a session, two to five players become Hobbits, who must complete the well-known journey, but this time, the figure representing Sauron descends upon the master game-board, and travels towards them according to the rules to thwart the Hobbits’ quest. The master game-board is the stage where the corruption of the Hobbits and Sauron’s progress is represented; players must collect tokens during the scenarios in order to avoid corruption. The cooperative element comes to the fore in these scenarios, as players try to pass the Ring on to the least corrupted Hobbit by collecting Ring tokens. Even if a later expansion to the game adds Sauron as a playable role, thereby sowing the seeds of secrecy and intrigue among the players, the orchestration of moves as players devise the optimal strategy for completing the scenario gives the game a unique flavor among Middle-earth board games. In the wake of Richard Garfield’s (1993) wildly successful Magic: The Gathering (Wizards of the Coast), the market was well prepared for the eventual emergence of a Tolkien-inspired trading card game (TCG). The Middle-Earth Collectible Card Game (ICE 1995) and Decipher Inc.’s The Lord of the Rings Trading Card Game (Kallenbach, Lishke, and Reynolds 2001) were efforts to capitalize on this gaming phenomenon. In TCGs, players purchase decks of cards with different monsters, spells, and artefacts, building their unique deck that reinforces the effects and abilities of the other cards. However, not all cards are printed in equal numbers, as more powerful cards are uncommon or rare, and are sold randomized in packets, creating an artificial scarcity of certain cards. When there is scarcity and more-or-less random distribution, of course, a market economy immediately arises, and the greatest allure of playing these games is the trading of cards for strengthening one’s deck, their acquisition and loss through play. This mechanic would later play an integral part in the creation of game economies in MMOs. Following the release of Peter Jackson’s movies, dozens of rethemed games were published with The Lord of the Rings artwork, including strategos, Monopolies, checkers, backgammons, parcheesis, but by that time most ludic adaptations of Arda had migrated to the computer. Compared to video games, the media that profited most from the movies, original board and other table-top games have come few and far between in the new millennium. It appears that despite their diversity, most board games have satisfied themselves with the Third Age, as there are several concepts which travel well from the epic novels to board games. The journey story is easily

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mapped on the game-board, where navigating the terrain and managing its geography becomes paramount to victory. Even though The Lord of the Rings is a story of opposing forces, the wealth of characters allows for a fair few players to partake in a round, and the mechanics foster the forming of alliances forged by a common purpose, which is the heart of Tolkien boardgaming.

Rolls, Skills, and Action: Role-playing Games After fantasy wargaming started in earnest, it did not take long for a momentous offshoot to grow on the trunk of Chainmail and similar games. 1974 saw the appearance of Dungeons and Dragons, the first role-playing game (RPG), where the uniforms of field marshals are cast away in favor of the bodice and the doublet. Epic though the battles fought on the miniature layout table might have been, they nonetheless lacked a fundamental part of what makes us involved in fiction: human interaction on an individual level, motivations, personalities, and passions, in other words, the building blocks of stories. Role-playing games have set the camera of the fictional world at a lower angle, moved players away from the battlefield and into the cities and wildernesses where true adventure takes place. That being said, the history of RPGs is not discontinuous with that of wargames. Both Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax were avid wargamers and designers, and it is while getting bored of Chainmail that they conceived of a more character-oriented approach to fantasy. In this new genre, players would inhabit individual denizens of an imaginary, mostly pseudo-medieval world, roaming the face of the earth, encountering strange creatures, slaying monsters, and questing on behalf of powerful lords of the realm. Descending into the depths and besting beasts, the game was quite appropriately titled Dungeons and Dragons (D&D: Gygax and Arneson 1974). The most salient mechanic that made its way into RPGs from wargaming is that numbers represent skills, determining the success of actions in adventuring. Where wargamers were restricted to troop size, movement, morale, hit points, damage, and their modifying factors, RPGs have numbers representing everything. In D&D, the first order of the day was to determine the basic statistics for the player characters (PCs) in the six main skills: strength, intelligence, wisdom, constitution, dexterity, and charisma, which in turn modified other attributes ranging from the amount of weight one can carry to the number of hirelings they can take under their wings. Since these PCs were more likely to survive entire campaigns (another military term that was carried over) of adventuring, they needed more personalization and a greater development curve, which led to the mechanic of accumulating experience points (XP). Upon reaching a certain predetermined amount, players would “level up,” gaining a new title and new abilities, such as more powerful spells or more hit points. Looking at the level-up tables, it appears that one of the main draws of D&D must have been the added detail to the magic system, as the Wizard title required the most XP (Gygax and Arneson 1974, 16). The six-tiered magic spell system allowed



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Magic-Users to cast 54 new spells, and even Clerics could indulge themselves in 26 supporting spells, mostly unique to the class. The inspiration of The Lord of the Rings is clear in letting players role-play members of another race (Elves, Dwarves, or Halflings) and the rules state that “[t]here is no reason that players cannot be allowed to play as virtually anything, provided they begin relatively weak and work up to the top” (Gygax and Arneson 1974, 8). Progressive development is therefore one of the core ideologies of the genre. The initial rules of the original Dungeons and Dragons were thin, but would prove to be foundational, improved upon by later rulebooks and other role-playing systems following its footsteps, most notably the even more successful Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (1977–1979). ICE’s Rolemaster (Charlton et al. 1980–1982) is a later, more mature system that is significant because it was the basis of a dyed-in-the-wool Tolkienian RPG, Coleman Charlton’s Middle-earth Role Playing (1984). The RM/MERP system expanded upon the original six character attributes, giving their players 11: Strength, Agility, Constitution, Intelligence, Intuition, Presence, Appearance, Quickness, Reasoning, Memory, and Empathy. Additionally, players could become proficient at primary and hobby skills, including aptitude at different weapons classes, languages, skills of subterfuge, and activities like foraging, leather-working, public-speaking, caving, or sailing. They could play any of the Middle-earth races we know, including Dwarves, Noldor and Sindar Elves, Hobbits, Uruk-hai, Trolls, but also as different cultures of men, like Haradrim, Dûnedain, or Beornings. Characters could belong to one of the six available professions: scouts, warriors, rangers, bards, mages, or animists. Contrary to D&D, RM/MERP featured a percentage-based probability system, which meant that most stats would go up to 100. This and the evolution of game systems resulted in the mushrooming of tables and charts for everything from the effect of adolescence on stats, specific outcomes for fumbles and failures, differentiating between more than 70 ways of an action going wrong, through critical hits, resistance spells or pages of price charts for any piece of equipment that an adventurer might need. None of the fancy statistics and dice rolls above would mean anything, though, if it were not for the meaning behind the actions. The role of the impartial referee of the wargame, who adjudicated battles based on his own strategic experience before there was any mathematical simulation, turned into that of the game or dungeon master (GM/DM), the storyteller who described the fantastic world through rich sensory detail, play-acting the dozens of Non-Playing Characters and generally keeping track of everything relevant to the role-playing experience (Tresca 2011, 74–75). Fantasy RPGs tend to follow the tripartite carving up of the gameworld as inaugurated by D&D: the civilized world of humanoid races’ settlements, the wilderness beyond the city walls, and the underworld, the dungeons that players explore in search of treasure. Besides regulating the process of combat and reconnaissance, game masters make the world tick, they design every aspect of the fictional world. Before the game can commence, however, players must create characters, roll up the stats, sort out gear, and weave a back story which transform a Quickness 25 value into a childhood with an abusive parent who would cripple and scar the player, or a

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Reasoning 89 into a scholastic upbringing of a young player educated by monks via debating the more arcane aspects of theology. During the play session, players describe their actions in sufficient detail for the GM to make sense of it, and the GM responds by describing the effect of their actions on the environment. It is these interactions between players and the GM that constitute the unique charm of table-top roleplaying, allowing a greater degree of socializing and immersion into fantasy worlds than in any other media of ludic engagement.

Fantasy Envisioned and Enworlded: Sub-creation in Computer Games Computers offered a technological solution to the demand that designing dungeons, plot, and bearing all the rules and regulations in mind placed on a DM. Due to the participatory, procedural, spatial, and encyclopedic properties of the digital medium (Murray 1997, 71–89), computers could offer situations to which players could respond, where the flow of action was not interrupted by human calculation. Also, geographical features, architecture, and spatial relations could be represented more accurately in virtual space, and the sheer enormity of the fictional world could be displayed as naturalistic stimuli. In exchange, everything that is possible in a computer game has to be programmed and implemented in it first, to the loss of the vast freedom DMs and players had on their hands. We can count several Tolkien- and fantasy-based games among the earliest computer games. The most famous of them is ADVENT, or Adventure, created by Will Crowther and Don Woods (1975–1976), the first of its kind. Also called interactive fiction, these textual adventure games are designed like mazes the players have to find their way out of by combining the available commands, as there is only one “proper” method of progressing through the game (Juul 2005, 67–69). In Adventure, players explore a cavern system eerily reminiscent of the Bedquilt region of the Flint Mammoth Cave System in Kentucky, which Crowther himself has helped map (Jerz 2007). Navigation is made possible by typing short commands (such as “go north” or “get lamp”), which the game parser digests and provides a response to. The spelunking theme of the game takes a turn for the fantastic as players find magic beans, rogues, Dwarves, kill dragons, and collect treasure in the caverns. Because of the arresting strangeness the players experienced while interacting with the program, early game designers were yearning to recapture the effect their fantasy reading and playtime had on them. Adventure’s influence then ushered in more complex works that, like D&D sheets, stored characters, either a single one or an adventuring party, whose skills were developed by interacting with the game world. Drawing on Matt Barton’s history of computer-based RPGs (CRPGs; 2008, 32–36), we can see that there were legions of programs which pledged intellectual fealty to Tolkien from the earliest mainframe games onwards: Moria (1978), Orthanc (1978) for the PLATO, through Moria (1983)



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and Angband (1990) for UNIX, all the way to Richard Garriott’s Akalabeth: World of Doom (1979) in BASIC, and by the middle of the 1980s, the budding genre of computer adventure and role-playing games were established as the foremost vehicle for telling a story on the new medium. A classic text adventure game that epitomized the mid-1980s efforts to bring Tolkien’s world to video games was Philip Mitchell and Veronika Megler’s (1982) award-winning The Hobbit (Melbourne House). It is already surprising that the designers chose Bilbo’s tale over Frodo’s, as the common practice was to work with the trilogy’s material rather than any other bits of the legendarium. This game is also the first clear adaptation of a Tolkien book to the computer in the sense that the story the player has to actuate is recognizable as the plot of the book it is based on. It is renowned for featuring more and better drawn illustrations than other works of the era, but the greatest innovations consisted of a real-time environment, characters that acted autonomously without player input, and a capable text parser. These were enough to make a lasting impact on the text adventure community (Montfort 2005, 171). The developers have followed this game up with other adaptations of The Lord of the Rings, for example Lord of the Rings: Game One (Mitchell and Megler 1985) which relied on the widespread success of The Hobbit, but failed to replicate it. Some developers in the 1990s ventured further from the textual roots of adventure and traced their steps back to the tactical side of fantasy. Warcraft: Orcs and Humans (Blizzard Entertainment 1994) was a breakthrough among real-time strategies (RTS). Hearkening back to the wargaming era, instead of an individual adventurer, players became generals once more, but this time, leaders who were thinking on their feet. With no turns and no time to think, the conflict between the two races gave players an added sense of thrill as they had to shape the virtual world’s history at a far more frantic pace than before. Because Warcraft segmented the gameplay via the campaigns’ strategic maps, its mission briefings recounted a coherent backstory, objectives were varied, and dialogue was added in later installments, the Warcraft universe came alive. Through the missions of the game, and its sequels, Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (1995) and Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos (2002), the epic narrative of Azeroth and Lordaeron became more articulated, acquired a dense history, a spatial narrative of conquest, insurgence, heroes, and corrupted leaders that resonate well with the power struggle at the heart of Arda’s grand narrative. Its world-building was rich enough that it allowed the world of Azeroth to be properly represented in the World of Warcraft later on, in 2004. RTSs were also capable of remediating the wars of the Third Age under Electronic Arts’ wings, who produced The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth (Browder and EA Los Angeles 2004) which tied in to the narrative and visual realm of the films, while still managing to be an enjoyable and balanced game of its own right. The Elder Scrolls saga is the example of a series of video games that defined what Western CRPGs were capable of, and it is illustrative of the aspirations of the genre. Though not a clear adaptation of Tolkien’s work, it nonetheless carried on the tradition of exploration, adventure, and character development. The huge traversable maps

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Bethesda Softworks designed for TES: Arena (1994), TES II: Daggerfall (1996), and later additions to the series, the open-ended gameplay, the many factions the players could associate themselves with, and the multitude of skills player characters could learn ensured that gamers who were dedicated to the table-top RPG ideals of freedom and simulation would find plenty of lore and spatial, numeric, and narrative progress for their liking. In CRPGs like The Elder Scrolls, players begin with the creation of their characters, choosing the character’s name, sex, race, class, abilities, skills, and outward appearance, its reputation, alignment, and relationship to morals, all of which affect non-player character reactions. Later games in the TES series often resort to the device of captivity as a transformative environment where freed prisoners are able to redefine themselves as agents in the gameworld, which is frequently jeopardized or outright doomed to destruction by malevolent forces the player ends up opposing. In escaping from wrongful imprisonment, and saving the world from the corruption of power, the spirit of Tolkien lives on in computer games, but so do the myths of acquiring ever greater numbers of aptitude, bartering with merchants, amassing game gold, and defeating heaps upon heaps of monsters of increasing difficulty. By the use of randomly generated terrains, sublime quests, monsters lurking behind every tree, and clunky game economies that were easier broken than fine china, CRPGs have brought in an era where players accepted long hours of adventuring in rich pseudomedieval environments that nonetheless generated a more modern feeling of continuous development and exploration without a DM. Many solitary players have found these game mechanics engaging, but while graphics grew splendid and world-building immense, the old feeling of companionship that table-top RPGs encouraged was sorely lacking in single-player CRPGs, even when the player controlled a whole adventuring party. Solutions were just around the corner.

The Apotheosis of the Sub-created World: Massively Multiplayer Online RPGs The latest step in the evolution of Tolkien’s ideas and worlds into games took place when the Internet spread wide enough that a whole generation of players sought to reinstate this camaraderie that the RPG experience lost in migrating to the computer. The answer of game designers was to make the worlds of virtual fantasy persistent, so when one particular person stopped playing the game, the game-world would not go away. 24/7 adventuring gave us Multi-User Dungeons, or MUDs, which were by and large the Internet version of text adventure games, but with a more collaborative aesthetic. Their graphical versions, vast in scale, populated by more players than some countries, came to be called Massively Multiplayer Online RPGs, or MMOs. MMOs and other synthetic playspaces are worlds in progress. New game content is added on a regular basis, giving players previously undiscovered continents, dungeons, and cities to explore. Some of the MMOs allowed players to take a more creative part in shaping the geography and content of the game world (Dibbell 1998, 39–68),



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but most virtual worlds are more designer-dominant, where players mostly affect the game-worlds’ parameters via feedback (Bartle 2004, 653). Designers working on worldmaking in MMOs are like DMs in that they are responsible for the atmosphere of the world, they create the landscapes and the distinctive regions, conveying a sense of lived-inness to the players. But, being the massively populated environments they are, they also control people flow via imbuing the world with quests and infrastructure, such as travel systems, banks, and commercial hubs, they distribute resources and shape the ergonomics of the world. MMOs are unlike other forms of fantasy gaming in that people who partake in their adventures and explore their synthetic realms form a large community. Ethical norms and cultural assumptions arise from the interactions between fun-seeking individuals, although the most tangible way players have an effect upon one another is through the in-game economy. Because worlds like The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar (LotRO; Turbine Inc. 2007–) feature vocations and professions similar to the hobby skills of table-top RPGs (in LotRO, these would include, among others, being an Armorer, an Explorer, a Farmer, a Scholar, a Jeweler, or a Cook) that imply gathering raw materials, processing them, and selling them or using them up as aids in adventuring, lively game economies have sprung up. Since not all people like to spend their whole time in-game gathering wool or mining ores when they could be battling dragons, commercial areas and systems became important venues for player interaction. Trading posts also allow some players to earn their game gold solely from the buying and selling of goods. The game economies in MMOs mimic properties of real-world economies enough that journalists and economists have started investigating them as venues for research, a kind of “natural experiment” (Dibbell 2007, Castronova 2006). At their best, MMOs like RuneScape (Gower and Gower 2001) or Everquest (MqQuaid, Clover, and Trost 1999), both coming from the same fantasy stock as most synthetic worlds, are able to draw players into their fictional worlds by presenting their characters’ avatar in three-dimensional space and letting them wander around cities and the countryside, challenging their problem-solving skills in quests and combat, and establishing devoted gamer communities in clans, on official forums and fansites. Even if at this point in history, players are not projected physically into the fictional world, nor do they give Tolkien’s Primary Belief to the game’s universe, they nonetheless feel emotionally engaged by the opportunity to literally “build character” in these spaces. They are enchanting in the sense that the cybernetic feedback loop immediately displays how every action affects the game world, including other players, and the quest lines that prod characters to traverse the virtual space, as well as the emergent drama of defeating larger-than-life adversaries, the bosses, give players a sense of meaning for their actions. All this makes MMOs true to the ethos of the fairy-story and Faërian Drama that Tolkien envisaged. There are certain facets of the culture surrounding MMOs that go against this idealized image of the magical fairyland of escapist adventuring. For one thing, the player base of virtual worlds communicates anonymously through avatars, and anonymity in online environments is conducive to disruptive behavior, also known as

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grief play, which shatters the experience of immersion (Lin and Sun 2005; Chen, Duh, and Ng 2009). Griefers abuse other players verbally, steal their kills and loot, or in player vs. player situations, gang up on and kill other, usually lower-level players. One could say that, just like the One Ring, online invisibility corrupts by instilling a sense of social distance. Another issue that plagues MMOs, or their economies to be precise, is the large number of playing accounts created solely to collect game gold, which are later sold online to wealthy players looking for in-game advantages (Heeks 2008). These efforts are often aided by programs that control characters even when there is no actual human player clicking on the screen. So-called “bots” or macros undermine the game economy by devaluing tasks that legitimate players would do to earn money, and they sour player experience because bots are non-communicative and trained to perform repetitive behaviors, at which they toil away day and night (Consalvo 2007, 107–148; Hoglund and McGraw 2007). Seen from this angle, MMOs are less like a picturesque, medieval universe of dragon slaying and more like an early modern battleground for real people with commercial interests, where one’s fun is another’s livelihood, and play and production are inextricably linked. Yet, this image is also part of what makes online games and virtual worlds such vibrant spaces, inhabitable universes in miniature to which players flock to experience the strange and heady mixture of fantasy, technology, entrepreneurship, and social bonds.

Conclusion Having seen how analogue and digital entertainment have drawn on Tolkien’s world and his ethos of world-building, we can see a few general trends that are worth noting. First of all, Tolkien’s source material, the detailed, multi-layered representation of Middle-earth, was in and of itself inspirational: the encyclopedic quality of his work gave a texture to his imagined world previously unparalleled in the history of fiction, as Castronova astutely observes in the epigraph to the present chapter. The proliferation of games that grew out of this fictional soil owed much to the American reception of his novels, which reached cultural creatives and hobbyists who saw potential in reenacting and quantifying aspects of the fictional world. The game systems devised and adopted during the wargaming era were influential insofar as they made events in the books replayable, extending the life and altering the outcome of battles fought on Middle-earth. The idea of counterfactual martial narratives played out on Ardan soil, represented on the model layout table, paved the way to board games based on Tolkien’s novels, where a fertile process of cross-pollination began as age-old games were rethemed with Tolkienian motifs that eventually gave rise to games specifically designed to suit the central themes of the novels. Role-playing games were instrumental in exchanging a bird’s eye view of the strategist for the more personal, but also more intriguing heroics of individual adventurers, and they were a bona fide experimental laboratory for game mechanics that were complex but fun. As Dungeon Masters became sub-creators in conjuring up rich fantasy playgrounds for derring-do,



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intrigue, and simulated battles, college students and other misfits were faced with the magical, but onerous task of making a world work. The evolution of computing at the very same venues where Tolkien’s books and RPGs first lodged themselves into the public consciousness ensured that young off-duty programmers would yearn to recreate their days of adventuring in the digital realm. When the home computers and the Internet both penetrated average middle-class households in both the United States and the United Kingdom, the time was ripe to connect these players in larger communities that commercialized the genre and infused it with a work ethic that was unheard of prior to the advent of MMOs. Today, we are in a situation where these playful instances are actively intermingling with one another, creating hybrid forms, and knowing the rapid pace of media evolution we can look forward to ever new ways of employing the imagination to playful ends.

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Charlton, S. Coleman. 1984. Middle-earth Role Playing. Charlottesville, VA: Iron Crown Enterprises. Charlton, S. Coleman and Bruce Neidlinger. 1983. Fellowship of the Ring. Charlottesville, VA: Iron Crown Enterprises. Charlton, S. Coleman et al. 1980–1982. Rolemaster. Charlottesville, VA: Iron Crown Enterprises. Chen, Vivian Hsueh-Hua, Henry Been-Lirn Duh, and Chiew Woon Ng. 2009. “Players Who Play to Make Others Cry: The Influence of Anonymity and Immersion.” In Proceedings of the International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology, 341–344. New York: ACM. Consalvo, Mia. 2007. Cheating: Gaining Advantages in Videogames. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Crowther, William and Don Woods. 1975–1976. Adventure. Dibbell, Julian. 1998. My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World. New York: Henry Holt. Dibbell, Julian. 2007. Play Money: Or How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot. New York: Basic Books. Flieger, Verlyn. 2002. Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World. Revised edn. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Garfield, Richard. 1993. Magic: The Gathering. Renton, WA: Wizards of the Coast. Garriott, Richard. 1979. Akalabeth: World of Doom. Davis, CA: California Pacific Computer Company.

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Gower, Andrew and Paul Gower. 2001. RuneScape. Cambridge: Jagex Games Studio. Gygax, Gary and Dave Arneson. 1974. Men and Magic, vol. 1 of Dungeons & Dragons: Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures. Lake Geneva, WI: Tactical Studies Rules. Gygax, Gary and Jeff Perren. 1976. Chainmail: Rules for Medieval Miniatures. 3rd edn. Lake Geneva, WI: Tactical Studies Rules. Heeks, Richard. 2008. Current Analysis and Future Research Agenda on ‘Gold Farming’: Real-World Production in Developing Countries for the Virtual Economies of Online Games. Manchester: University of Manchester Development Informatics Group. Available at http://www.sed.manchester .ac.uk/idpm/research/publications/wp/di/ documents/di_wp32.pdf, accessed December 21, 2013. Hill, Wendell L. 1975. Quest of the Magic Ring. Land of Legend. Hoglund, Greg and Gary McGraw. 2007. Exploiting Online Games: Cheating Massively Distributed Systems. Menlo Park, CA: Addison-Wesley Professional. Hobbit Toy and Games. 1970. Conquest of the Ring. Kalamazoo, MI. Iron Crown Enterprises. 1995. Middle-earth Collectible Card Game. Charlottesville, VA: Iron Crown Enterprises. Jerz, Dennis G. 2007. “Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther’s Original ‘Adventure’ in Code and in Kentucky.” Digital Humanities Quarterly, 1.2 (Summer). Available at http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/1/2/ 000009/000009.html, accessed December 21, 2013. Johnson, S. et al. 1976. Middle Earth Wargames Rules: First Part – Mordor and the West. Loughborough: Skytrex Ltd. Juul, Jesper. 2005. Half-Real – Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Kallenbach, Chuck, Tom Lischke, and Mike Reynolds. 2001. The Lord of the Rings Trading Card Game. Norfolk, VA: Decipher Inc. Knizia, Reiner. 2000. Lord of the Rings. Stuttgart: Kosmos and Roseville, MN: Fantasy Flight Games. Laws, Robin D. 2007. 40 Years of GenCon. Saint Paul, MN: Atlas Games. Lin, Holin and Chuen-Tsai Sun. 2005. “The ‘White-eyed’ Player Culture: Grief Play and Construction of Deviance in MMORPGs.” Available at http://www.digra.org/dl/db/06278 .21161.pdf, accessed December 21, 2013. McQuaid, Brad, Steve Clover, and Bill Trost. 1999. Everquest. San Diego, CA: Sony Online Entertainment. Mitchell, Philip and Veronika Megler. 1982. The Hobbit. Melbourne: Melbourne House. Mitchell, Philip and Veronika Megler. 1985. Lord of the Rings: Game One. Melbourne: Melbourne House. Montfort, Nick. 2005. Twisty Little Passages – An Approach to Interactive Fiction. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Murray, Janet H. 1997. Hamlet on the Holodeck – The Future of Narrative in Cyber¬space. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Smith, Larry. 1975. Battle of the Five Armies. LORE/ JMJ Enterprises. Smith, Larry. 1984. The Battle of Five Armies. Charlottesville, VA: Iron Crown Enterprises. Tresca, Michael J. 2011. The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Turbine Inc. 2007. The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar. Needham, MA: Turbine Inc. Watry, David and Mike Kuo. 2003–. “Tolkien Boardgame Collecting.” Available at http:// w w w. f r e e w e b s . c o m / t o l k i e n b o a r d g a m e collecting/, accessed December 21, 2013. Wolf, Mark J. P. 2012. Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation. New York and London: Routledge.

Further Reading Gygax, Gary. 1977. Monster Manual. Lake Geneva, WI: Tactical Studies Rules. Gygax, Gary. 1978. Players Handbook. Lake Geneva, WI: Tactical Studies Rules.

Gygax, Gary. 1979. Dungeon Masters Guide. Lake Geneva, WI: Tactical Studies Rules.

General Bibliography

Works by J. R. R. Tolkien Many of Tolkien’s works have been reprinted or revised several times, or dispersed across several anthologies. Wherever possible citations are from the most recent new or revised edition. Indication is given as to the original publication date. See also the list of academic publications at the end of ch. 2; the list at http://tolkiengateway.net/ wiki/Index:Writings_by_J. R. R_Tolkien; the “Illustrated Tolkien Bibliography” at www.tolkienbooks.net; and the comprehensive bibliographies in Reader’s Guide 1137– 1189 and Chronology 813–873. 1915. “Goblin Feet.” In Oxford Poetry, edited by G. D. H. Cole and T. W. Earp, 64–65. Oxford: Blackwell. 1918. “Prefatory Note” and ed. of A Spring Harvest by G. B. Smith. London: Esrkine MacDonald. 1922. A Middle English Vocabulary. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Incorporated into later editions of Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose, edited by Kenneth Sisam, originally published in 1921 by Clarendon Press. 1923. “Holy Maidenhood.” Review of F. J. Furnivall, Hali Meidenhad (1922). Times Literary Supplement, April 26. London. 1924. “Philology: General Works.” The Year’s Work in English Studies, 4: 23–37. 1925a. “Some Contributions to Middle-English Lexicography.” Review of English Studies, 1.2: 210–215. 1925b. “The Devil’s Coach-Horses.” Review of English Studies, 1.3: 331–336. A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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1926. “Philology: General Works.” The Year’s Work in English Studies, 5: 26–65. 1927a. “The Nameless Land.” In Realities: An Anthology of Verse, edited by G. S. Tancred, 24–25. Leeds: At the Swan Press. London: Gay and Hancock. 1927b. “Philology: General Works.” The Year’s Work in English Studies, 6: 32–66. 1928. “Foreword.” In Walter E. Haigh, A New Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District, xiii–xviii. London: Oxford University Press. 1929. “Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad.” Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, 14: 104–126. 1932a. “Appendix I: The Name ‘Nodens’.” In R. E. M. Wheeler and T. V. Wheeler, Report on the Excavation of the Prehistoric, Roman, and Post-Roman Site in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire, 132–137. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1932b. “Sigelwara Land [Part 1].” Medium Ævum, 1.3: 183–196. 1934. “Sigelwara Land [Part 2].” Medium Ævum, 3.2: 95–111. 1937. “The Dragon’s Visit”. The Oxford Magazine, 55: 11. Also in Tolkien (2002a), 309–311. 1945. “The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun.” The Welsh Review, 4.4 (December): 254–266. 1953a. “Middle English ‘Losenger’. Sketch of an Etymological and Semantic Enquiry.” In Essais de philologie moderne (1951), 63–76. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. 1953b. “A Fourteenth-century Romance.” Radio Times, December 4. London. 1955a. “Preface.” In The Ancrene Riwle, trans. Mary Salu, v. London: Burns and Oates. 1955b. “Imram.” Time and Tide, December: 1561. 1962a. The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle: Ancrene Wisse, edited from MS. Corpus Christi College Cam­bridge 402. EETS Original Series 249. London: Oxford University Press. 1962b. The Adventures of Tom Bombadil: And Other Verses from the Red Book. London: Allen & Unwin. See also Tolkien 2008e. 1977. The Silmarillion. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. London: Allen & Unwin. 1981. The Old English Exodus: Text, Translation, and Commentary. Edited by Joan Turville-Petre. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1982. Finn and Hengest: The Fragment and the Episode. Edited by Alan Bliss. London: Allen & Unwin. 1983a. The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. London: Allen & Unwin. Contains “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” originally published in 1937 by Humphrey Milford, see also Tolkien 2002b; “On Translating Beowulf,” originally published in 1940 by Allen & Unwin; “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”; “On Fairy-stories,” originally published in 1947 by Oxford University Press, see also Tolkien 2001a and 2008b; “English and Welsh,” originally published in 1963 by Oxford University Press; “A Secret Vice”; and “Valedictory Address.” 1983b. The Book of Lost Tales, Part One. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. Vol. 1 in The History of Middle-earth series. London: Allen & Unwin. 1984. The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. Vol. 2 in The History of Middle-earth series. London: Allen & Unwin.



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1985. The Lays of Beleriand. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. Vol. 3 in The History of Middle-earth series. London: Allen & Unwin. 1986. The Shaping of Middle-earth. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. Vol. 4 in The History of Middle-earth series. London: Allen & Unwin. 1987. The Lost Road and Other Writings. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. Vol. 5 in The History of Middle-earth series. London: Unwin Hyman. 1988. The Return of the Shadow (The History of the Lord of the Rings, Part One). Edited by Christopher Tolkien. Vol. 6 in The History of Middle-earth series. London: Unwin Hyman. 1989. The Treason of Isengard (The History of the Lord of the Rings, Part Two). Edited by Christopher Tolkien. Vol. 7 in The History of Middle-earth series. London: Unwin Hyman. 1990a. Smith of Wootton Major. 2nd edn. London: Unwin Hyman. First published in 1967 by Allen & Unwin. See also Tolkien 2008e. 1990b. The War of the Ring (The History of the Lord of the Rings, Part Three). Edited by Christopher Tolkien. Vol. 8 in The History of Middle-earth series. London: Unwin Hyman. 1992a. Sauron Defeated: The End of the Third Age (The History of the Lord of the Rings, Part Four), The Notion Club Papers, and the Drowning of Anadûnê. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. Vol. 9 in The History of Middle-earth series. Published also as a separate shorter volume The End of the Third Age which omits the non-Lord of the Rings material. London: HarperCollins. 1992b. Pictures by J. R. R. Tolkien. 2nd edn. Foreword and notes by Christopher Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 1993. Morgoth’s Ring: The Later Silmarillion. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. Vol. 10 in The History of Middle-earth series. London: HarperCollins. 1994. The War of the Jewels. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. Vol. 11 in The History of Middle-earth series. London: HarperCollins. 1995a. The Hobbit. Rev. edn. London: HarperCollins. Originally published in 1937 (see ch. 8). See also Tolkien 2002a. 1995b. The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. New edn. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter. London: HarperCollins. Originally published in 1981 by Allen & Unwin. 1995c. “I∙Lam na∙Ngoldathon: The Grammar and Lexicon of the Gnomish Tongue.” Edited by Christopher Gilson, Patrick Wynne, Arden R. Smith, and Carl F. Hostetter. Parma Eldalamberon, 11: 1–76. 1995d. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo. New edn. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. London: HarperCollins. Originally published in 1975 by Allen & Unwin. 1996. The Peoples of Middle-earth. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. Vol. 12 in The History of Middle-earth series. London: HarperCollins. 1998a. Roverandom. Edited by Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond. London: HarperCollins. See also Tolkien 2008e. 1998b. “Qenyaqetsa: The Qenya Phonology and Lexicon Together with the Poetic and Mythologic Words of Eldarissa.” Edited by Christopher Gilson, Carl F. Hostetter, Patrick Wynne, and Arden R. Smith. Parma Eldalamberon, 12: 1–112.

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1998c. Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. London: HarperCollins. Originally published in 1980 by Allen & Unwin. 2001a. Tree and Leaf, including the Poem Mythopoeia [and] The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. London: HarperCollins. “On Fairystories” originally pub­lished in 1947 by Oxford University Press, see also Tolkien 1983a and 2008b. “Leaf by Niggle” originally published in 1945 in The Dublin Review (January): 46–61, see also Tolkien 2008e. “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son” originally published in 1953 in Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, N.S. 6: 1–18. Tree and Leaf first published in 1964 by Allen & Unwin; 2nd edition, edited by Christopher Tolkien, published in 1988 by Unwin Hyman included “Mythopoeia.” 2001b. “The Alphabet of Rúmil.” Edited by Arden R. Smith. Parma Eldalamberon, 13: 3–89. 2002a. The Annotated Hobbit. Edited by Douglas A. Anderson. Revised and expanded edn. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 2002b. Beowulf and the Critics. Edited by M. C. Drout. See also Tolkien 1983a. Tempe, AZ: Bagwyn Books (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies). 2003a. “Early Qenya Grammar.” Edited by Carl F. Hostetter and Bill Welden. Parma Eldalamberon, 14: 35–86. 2003b. “The Valmaric Script.” Edited by Arden R. Smith. Parma Eldalamberon, 14: 87–134. 2004a. The Lord of the Rings. 3 vols. 50th anniversary edn. London: HarperCollins. The Fellow­ship of the Ring. First published London: Allen & Unwin; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954. The Two Towers. First published London: Allen & Unwin; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955. The Return of the King. First published London: Allen & Unwin; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956. 2004b. “Sir Orfeo: A Middle English Version by J. R. R. Tolkien.” Edited by Carl F. Hostetter. Tolkien Studies, 1: 85–123. Tolkien’s text first published anonymously as a booklet. Oxford: The Academic Copying Office, 1944. 2005. Smith of Wootton Major. Extended edn. Edited by Verlyn Flieger. London: HarperCollins. See also Tolkien 2008e. 2006. “Pre-Fëanorian Alphabets, Part 1.” Edited by Arden R. Smith. Parma Eldalamberon, 16: 5–51. 2007a. Mr. Bliss. Rev. edn. London: HarperCollins. First published in 1982 by Allen & Unwin. 2007b. Narn i Chîn Húrin: The Tale of the Children of Húrin. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. London: HarperCollins. 2007c. “Words, Phrases and Passages in Various Tongues in The Lord of the Rings.” Edited by Christopher Gilson. Parma Eldalamberon, 17: 1–220. 2008a. Farmer Giles of Ham. 60th anniversary edn. Edited by Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond. London: HarperCollins. First published in 1949 by Allen & Unwin then in 1969 as Smith of Wootton Major and Farmer Giles of Ham by Ballantine (New York). See also Tolkien 2008e.



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2008b. On Fairy-stories. Expanded edn. Edited by Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson. London: HarperCollins. “On Fairy-stories” originally pub­lished in 1947 by Oxford University Press, see also Tolkien 1983a and 2001a. 2008c. “Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve’s Tale.” Edited by Carl F. Hostetter. Tolkien Studies, 5: 109–171. First published in 1934 in Transactions of the Philological Society, 1–70. 2008d. “The Reeve’s Tale.” Edited by Carl F. Hostetter. Tolkien Studies, 5: 173–181. First pub­lished privately in Oxford as a booklet in 1939. 2008e. Tales from the Perilous Realm. London: HarperCollins. Includes Farmer Giles of Ham, “Leaf by Niggle,” Smith of Wootton Major, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, and Roverandom. Originally published in 1997 by HarperCollins but without Roverandom. 2009a. The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. London: HarperCollins. 2009b. “Tengwesta Qenderinwa.” Edited by Christopher Gilson and Patrick H. Wynne. Parma Eldalamberon, 18: 5–108. 2009c. “Pre-Fëanorian Alphabets, Part 2.” Edited by Arden R. Smith. Parma Eldalamberon, 18: 109–148. 2009d. Letters from Father Christmas. Edited by Baillie Tolkien. London: HarperCollins. 2010a. “The Story of Kullervo: (Kalervonpoika).” Edited by Verlyn Flieger. Tolkien Studies, 7: 211–245. 2010b. “On ‘The Kalevala’ or Land of Heroes.” Tolkien Studies, 7: 246–262. 2010c. “The Kalevala.” Tolkien Studies, 7: 262–278. 2010d. “Quenya Phonology: Comparative Tables, Outline of Phonetic Development, Outline of Phonology.” Edited by Christopher Gilson. Parma Eldalamberon, 19: 1–108. 2012. “The Qenya Alphabet.” Edited by Arden R. Smith. Parma Eldalamberon, 20: 1–160. 2013. The Fall of Arthur. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. London: HarperCollins.

Joint Publications with J. R. R. Tolkien Tolkien, J. R. R. and S. R. T. O. d’Ardenne. 1947. “ ‘Iþþlen’ in Sawles Warde.” English Studies (Amsterdam), 27: 168–170. Tolkien, J. R. R. and S. R. T. O. d’Ardenne. 1948. “MS Bodley 34: A Re-collation of a Collation.” Studia Neophilologica, 20: 65–72. Tolkien, J. R. R. and E. V. Gordon, eds. 1936. Songs for the Philologists. London: English Department, University College. Tolkien, J. R. R. and E. V. Gordon, eds. 1967. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Revised edn. by N. Davis. Oxford: Clarendon Press. First published in 1925 by Clarendon Press.

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Tolkien, J. R. R. and Donald Swann. 2002. The Road Goes Ever On: A Song Cycle. 3rd edn. London: HarperCollins. Originally published in 1967 by Allen & Unwin.

Further Reading The following works supplement the individual bibliographies at the end of each chapter and are recommended to allow further explorations of the themes and topics in this volume. Agan, Cami. 2008. “Song as Mythic Conduit in The Fellowship of the Ring.” Mythlore, 26.3/4 (Spring/Summer 2008): 41–63. [A careful and thorough exploration of the role of song in The Fellowship of the Ring.] Anon. 2001. “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.” In National Geographic Beyond the Movie: The Lord of the Rings. [Explores the cultural forces that inspired the story and takes the audience to Karelia and “finds anew” the original home of the Karelian folk poetry.] Atherton, Mark. 2010. Teach Yourself Complete Old English. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Blackham, Robert S. 2011. Tolkien and the Peril of War. Stroud, Gloucestershire: The History Press. [A heavily illustrated book about Tolkien’s World War I experiences.] Blount, Douglas K. 2003. “Überhobbits: Tolkien, Nietzsche, and the Will to Power.” In The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy, edited by Gregory Bassham and Eric Bronson, 87–98. Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court. [As the title suggests, the author looks at power in Tolkien’s oeuvre from the perspective of an implicit polemic with perhaps its most influential conception in modern philosophy.] Boyd, Ian, ed. 2002. J. R. R. Tolkien: Mythos and Modernity in Middle-earth. The Chesterton Review, special edn., 28.1/2: 1–299. Bradley, S. A. J., ed. 1995. Anglo-Saxon Poetry. London: J. M. Dent. Byock, Jesse, trans. 1999. The Saga of the Volsungs. London: Penguin. [A recent translation of Völsunga saga, with an interesting introductory discussion of history and legend.] Cameron, Kenneth. 1996. English Place Names. New edn. London: Batsford. [The book offers a comprehensive account of the various types of names and their origins.] Campbell, Liam. 2011. The Ecological Augury in the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien. Zurich and Jena: Walking Tree Publishers. Clark, David and Carl Phelpstead, eds. 2007. Old Norse Made New: Essays on the PostMedieval Reception of Old Norse Literature and Culture. London: Viking Society for Northern Research. [Essays include Dimitra Fimi’s discussion of Tolkien’s use of Old Norse material culture, and provide an introduction to the many different forms of reception.] Clunies Ross, Margaret. 1994–1998. Prolonged Echoes: Old Norse Myths in Medieval Northern Society. 2 vols. Odense: Odense University Press. [A key reading of the myths as mediated by medieval Icelandic culture.]



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Croft, Janet Brennan. 2004. War and the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien: Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Westport, CT: Praeger. [A more detailed exploration of the themes of Tolkien and War by the same author of the essay in this volume.] Croft, Janet Brennan. 2011. “The Hen that Laid the Eggs: Tolkien and the Officers Training Corps.” Tolkien Studies, 8: 97–106. [Adds some details on the OTC and Tolkien’s experiences in it.] Davison, Scott A. 2003. “Tolkien and the Nature of Evil.” In The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy, edited by Gregory Bassham and Eric Bronson, 99–109. Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 2003. [The author provides a very accessible presentation of the nature of evil in Tolkien’s work from a philosophical perspective.] Enright, Nancy. 2007. “Tolkien’s Females and the Defining of Power.” Renascence, 59.2: 93–108. [With her point of departure Tolkien’s females in The Lord of the Rings, the author of the study gives a penetrating analysis of the nature of positive and negative power in the created world.] Fisher, Jason, ed. 2011. Tolkien and the Study of his Sources: Critical Essays. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Flieger, Verlyn. 2012. Green Suns and Faërie: Essays on J. R. R. Tolkien. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Fussell, Paul. 1989. Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [A companion to The Great War and Modern Memory, Fussell’s classic work on the literary response to the war; while neither mentions Tolkien, they provide the necessary background to understanding his contemporaries.] Garth, John. 2003. Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth. London: HarperCollins. Garth, John. 2006. “Frodo and the Great War.” In The Lord of the Rings, 1954–2004: Scholarship in Honour of Richard E. Blackwelder, edited by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, 41–56. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press. Garth, John. 2007. “ ‘As Under a Green Sea’: Visions of War in the Dead Marshes.” In Myth and Magic: Art According to the Inklings, edited by Eduardo Segura and Thomas Honegger, 285–313. Zurich and Bern: Walking Tree Publishers. Garth, John. 2008. “Tolkien, Exeter College and the Great War.” In Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings: Sources of Inspiration, edited by Stratford Caldecott and Thomas Honegger, 12–56. Zurich and Bern: Walking Tree Publishers. Garth, John. 2011. “Robert Quilter Gilson, T.C.B.S.: A Brief Life in Letters.” Tolkien Studies, 8: 67–96. [On Tolkien’s fellow TCBS member, who died early in World War I.] Gay, David E. 2002. “Renewing Old Poems: The 1849 Kalevala as Finnish Tradition in the English-speaking World.” In Honko (2002), 54–63. [Helps to place the Finnish folk poetry tradition outside Finland.] Gelling, Margaret. 1984. Place-names in the Landscape. London: Dent. Gordon, E. V. 1981. An Introduction to Old Norse. 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [The classic introduction to the language, by a contemporary of Tolkien’s at Leeds.]

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Hämäläinen, Niina. 2002. “Elias Lönnrot’s First Kullervo Poem and Its Folk-poem Models.” In Honko (2002), 364–387. [Gives a full account of the story of Kullervo within Finnish folklore.] Helms, Philip W., Kerry Elizabeth Thompson, and Paul Ritz, eds. 1994. Tolkien’s Peaceful War: A History and Explanation of Tolkien Fandom and War. 2nd edn. Highland, MI: American Tolkien Society. [An early interpretation of Tolkien as a pacifist.] Hemmi, Yoko. 2010. “Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and His Concept of Native Language: Sindarin and British-Welsh.” Tolkien Studies, 7: 147–174. [Examines the relationship between Tolkien’s linguistic aesthetic and his invented languages.] Hiley, Margaret. 2004. “Stolen Language, Cosmic Models: Myth and Mythology in Tolkien.” Modern Fiction Studies, 50.4 (Winter 2004): 838–858. [The author provides a useful overview of the study of mythology as well as its function in Tolkien’s works.] Hiley, Margaret. 2011. The Loss and the Silence: Aspects of Modernism in the Works of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and Charles Williams. Zurich and Jena: Walking Tree Publishers. Honko, Lauri. 2002. The Kalevala and the World’s Traditional Epics. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Hostetter, Carl F. 2006. “Resources for Tolkienian Linguistics: An Annotated Guide.” Available at: http://www.elvish.org/resources.html, accessed November 19, 2013. [Provides an extensive list of resources for the study of Tolkien’s languages, in print and online.] Hughes, Shaun F. D., ed. 2004. “J. R. R. Tolkien Special Issue.” Mfs: Modern Fiction Studies, 50.4: 807–1028. Kahlas-Tarkka, Leena. 2004. “Lohikäärmeitä ja sankareita” [Dragons and Heroes]. In Englannin aika: Elävän kielen kartoitusta [Time of English: Mapping a Living Language], edited by Terttu Nevalainen, Matti Rissanen, and Irma Taavitsainen, 224– 232. Helsinki: Werner Söderström. [Written in Finnish, looks at familiarity and distance in Beowulf and Tolkien’s writings from a Finnish perspective.] Kraus, Joe. 2003. “Tolkien, Modernism and the Importance of Tradition.” In The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy, edited by Gregory Bassham and Eric Bronson, 137–149. Chicago: Open Court. Larrington, Carolyne, trans. 1996. The Poetic Edda. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [A reliable and accessible translation of the poems, with short introductions and helpful notes.] Larrington, Carolyne and Diane Purkiss, eds. 2013. Magical Tales: Myth, Legend, and Enchantment in Children’s Books. Oxford: Bodleian Library. [Book to accompany 2013 exhibition, contains facsimiles of many Tolkien manuscripts.] Lobdell, Jared. 2005. The Rise of Tolkienian Fantasy. Chicago: Open Court. Mäkinen, Kirsti. 2009. The Kalevala: Tales of Magic and Adventure. Vancouver, BC: Simply Read Books. [An easily approachable prose retelling of the whole



General Bibliography

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original runic version, translated by Kaarina Brooks from the Finnish version by Mäkinen.] Manni, Franco and Simone Bonechi. 2008. “The Complexity of Tolkien’s Attitude Towards the Second World War.” In The Ring Goes Ever On: Proceedings of the Tolkien 2005 Conference: 50 Years of The Lord of the Rings, edited by Sarah Wells, 33–51. The Tolkien Society. Mathison, Phil. 2012. Tolkien in East Yorkshire 1917–1918. Brough: Deadgood Publications. McTurk, Rory, ed. 2005. A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell. [A survey of the central topics and debates in Old NorseIcelandic studies, with chapters written by experts in their respective fields.] Milbank, Alison. 2009. Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians: The Fantasy of the Real. London: T&T Clark. [The author’s treatment of the topic of evil uses the ontology of evil as privation as a point of departure, but her discussion is quite nuanced and sensitive to literary form; for instance in her analysis of the grotesque and monstrous in Tolkien.] Morton, Andrew H. 2009. Tolkien’s Bag End. Studley: Brewin Books. Morton, Andrew H. and John Hayes. 2008. Tolkien’s Gedling: The Birth of a Legend. Studley: Brewin Books. Muir, Bernard J. 1994. The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry: An Edition of Exeter Dean and Chapter Manuscript 3051. 2 vols. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Nelson, Dale. 2007. “Literary Influences: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.” In J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopaedia, edited by Michael Drout, 366–378. London: Routledge. O’Donoghue, Heather. 2004. Old Norse-Icelandic Literature: A Short Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. [A captivating introduction to both the literature and language, and its influence on later writers.] Phelpstead, Carl. 2004. “Auden and the Inklings: An Alliterative Revival.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 103.4: 433–457. Scott, Nan C. 1972. “War and Pacifism in The Lord of the Rings.” Tolkien Journal, 15: 23–25, 27–30. [Written before the Letters were available; valuable as an analysis based only on the texts available at the time.] Shippey, Tom. 1976. Poems of Wisdom and Learning in Old English. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer. [Explores poems like Maxims II and its analogues.] Simonson, Martin. 2008. The Lord of the Rings and the Western Narrative Tradition. Zurich and Jena: Walking Tree Publishers. Smith, Arden R. 2000. “Certhas, Skirditaila, Fuþark: A Feigned History of Runic Origins.” In Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth, edited by Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter, 105–111. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. [Examines the relationship between Tolkien’s invented runic characters and genuine Germanic runes.] Spencer, Andrew and Brandon Soule. 2001. “Not to Strike Without Need: Evaluation of the Dichotomy of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Views on War.” In Concerning Hobbits and

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Other Matters: Tolkien Across the Disciplines, edited by Tim Schindler, 61–65. St Paul, MN: University of St Thomas. Snorri Sturluson. 2005. Edda. Edited and translated by Anthony Faulkes. London: Everyman. [The standard translation of Snorri’s work, also edited by Faulkes in separate scholarly editions.] Tikka, Petri. 2006. “The Finnicization of Quenya.” Arda Philology, 1: 11–23. Available at: www.oocities.org/petristikka/elvish/tikka.pdf, accessed November 18, 2013. [A detailed description of the Finnish elements in the grammar of Quenya, including phonology]. Tolkien, Hilary. 2009. Black and White Ogre Country: The Lost Tales of Hilary Tolkien. Edited by Angela Gardner. Moreton-in-Marsh: ADC Publications. Turville-Petre, E. O. G. 1964. Myth and Religion of the North. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. [The standard scholarly survey of Old Norse myth, written by Tolkien’s former student.] Wells, Sarah, ed. 2008. The Ring Goes Ever On: Proceedings of the Tolkien 2005 Conference. 2 vols. The Tolkien Society. Wood, Ralph. 2003. The Gospel According to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in Middleearth. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. [Written by an accessible scholar who is equally comfortable in literary scholarship as in theology, it is one of the best books that deals with the problem of evil in Tolkien’s work from the religious perspective, treating both its nature as well as the resources that are marshaled in the resistance and confrontation with evil.]

Web Sites See also the list of web sites available at the Tolkien Gateway, http://tolkiengateway .net/wiki/Top_Tolkien_websites. The One Ring Net. Available at http://www.theonering.net/. [News and discussion forums.] The Tolkien Gateway. Available at http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Main_Page. [An indispensable resource for Tolkien references and explanations.] The Tolkien Library. Available at http://www.tolkienlibrary.com/. [Comprehensive news and reference site for Tolkien publications.] The Tolkien Society. Available at http://www.tolkiensociety.org/. [International society that lists news and events on Tolkien.]

Index

Ælfwine/Eriol 13, 47, 60, 81, 95, 111–112, 149, 153, 157, 158, 162, 165, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 225, 226, 353, 355, 505, 506 Aberdyfi 338 Abrazán 168 Ace Books 21 Ackerman, F. J. 20 Addison, Joseph 89 Adûnaic 165, 167, 168, 172, 207, 211 Aeneid, The 33 Ainur 93, 96, 101, 422, 435, 456, 505 allegory and applicability 140–142, 195–198, 241, 288, 294, 384, 405, 446, 449, 459, 479 Alvíssmál 130 n. 16 Anadunaic 18, 109, 152, 165, 168, 207, 547 Andersen, Hans Christian 303 Angband 105, 153, 299, 512, 539 Anglo-Saxons (people, culture, and history) 13, 19, 28, 29, 32, 33, 54, 56, 81, 95 170, 213, 217–228, 273, 275, 284 n. 5, 353, 398, 412, 424 see also Old English Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 57, 219, 226, 398

Animalic 23, 30, 203 Antony and Cleopatra 288 Aragorn 47, 97, 100–101, 134–137, 142, 147, 153, 161, 171–179, 187–188, 205, 238, 281–283, 295, 299, 328, 395, 397, 400–417, 443, 451–459, 470, 474–478, 481–483, 512, 523, 529 Arda 93, 96, 98, 98–99, 101, 103, 104, 111, 118, 149, 155, 158, 159, 160, 190, 235, 320, 484, 503–504, 510, 533, 535, 539, 554 d’Ardenne, Simonne 15, 39 n. 1, 49, 58, 232, 234, 242–243 Arian 300–301 Aristotle 37, 136 Arkenstone 122, 393, 409, 452, 453, 523 Arthur(ian) 40, 172, 191–194, 238–242, 276, 280–283, 291, 324–327, 338, 405–407, 411–412, 416 Arwen 101, 138, 147, 205, 238, 413–417, 474–476 Atlakviða 248, 257 n. 5 Atlantis 16, 18, 94–95, 150, 161–162, 166–172, 226

A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Index

Auden, W. H. 90 n. 4, 136, 145, 166, 247, 251, 287, 307, 320, 333, 365, 370, 375, 385, 405, 408, 416 Augustinian 419, 424–426, 428 Aulë 96, 97, 149, 211, 435 Baggins, Bilbo 15, 16, 60–61, 103, 112–117, 121–122, 125–129, 134, 136, 171, 177, 180–182, 185, 187, 190, 194–195, 199, 200, 222, 225, 237, 239, 250–251, 288, 293, 304, 391–394, 401, 409, 448–455, 458–459, 465–466, 468, 473, 477, 480, 489, 519, 522–524, 527, 535, 539 Baggins, Frodo 61, 67–75, 99–100, 113, 134–144, 151–152, 165, 171, 176, 187, 201, 205, 239, 255, 282–284, 292–293, 299, 328, 363–364, 380, 391, 395, 405–417, 421, 423, 426, 428–429, 433, 437–439, 448, 451, 453, 454, 456, 458, 459, 460, 464, 466, 467, 468, 469, 471, 472, 474, 480–481, 483, 512, 523, 524, 525, 529, 539 Bakhtin, Mikhail 307 Bakshi, Ralph 521, 523, 529 Balin 121, 124, 207, 213, 249, 295, 393, 401 Balrog 30, 135, 156, 211, 253, 452, 489, 490–493, 532–533 Barahir 101 Bard 121, 473 Barfield, Owen 14, 84, 89–90, 90 n. 3, 114–115, 318, 321, 331, 334, 377 Poetic Diction 84, 90 n. 5 Barrie, J. M. 10, 304, 351 Battle of Maldon, The 15, 19, 28, 54, 217, 286, 463, 503 Baynes, Pauline 21, 499 BBC 19, 20, 21, 23 n. 2, 63, 130, 131, 234, 287, 373, 374, 377, 511, 513 Tolkien in Oxford 21, 119, 129 n. 2 Beatles, The 515, 519–520 Bede 52, 297 Beleriand 118, 154, 155, 169, 184–186, 206, 210, 213, 260, 505, 507

Beorhtnoth, Byrhtnoth 28, 40 Beorn 121, 124, 131 n. 20, 228, 442 Beowulf 9, 15, 32–34, 51, 52, 54, 95, 123–125, 127, 130 n. 15, 218, 223, 224, 226, 242 n. 2, 252, 255, 257 n. 14, 286, 296, 338, 339, 341, 393, 398 see also Tolkien’s scholarship manuscript 57, 59, 124 Beren and Luthien 16, 22, 94–95, 97, 100–101, 105, 108, 126–127, 147, 149–150, 154–155, 159, 188, 193, 238, 258, 355, 413, 476, 508–509 see also Tolkien’s fiction and stories Bible 91, 98, 112, 227, 277–278, 284, 289, 356, 373, 396–397, 402, 459 Bjarki, Bothvar (Böđvar) 124, 224 Bladorthin 121, 126, 130 Blake, William 80, 290, 291, 344, 356 Bliss, Alan 28, 51 Bloemfontein, South Africa 8 Blyton, Enid 326 Boccaccio 240 Bodleian Library, Oxford 28, 58, 61, 62–64, 73–76, 141, 229, 232, 262, 265, 503 Boethius 424–425, 503, 509 Bombadil, Tom 15, 136, 138–139, 144, 175, 176, 193, 199, 260, 293, 359, 410, 436, 437, 441, 469, 470, 480 see also Tolkien’s poems Borges, Jorge-Luis 294, 304, 305, 316 Boromir 134, 135, 137, 142, 281, 407, 408, 424, 425, 470, 479, 480, 483, 525 Bournemouth 22 Branduin 223 Brandywine 222, 223 Bratt, Edith see Edith Tolkien Bree 139, 206, 207, 396 British Library 58 Brooks, Terry 336 Brut 238, 416 see also Laȝamon Brynhildr 246, 247 Buchan, John 304, 351, 352, 357 Buckland 139, 222, 223 Burke, Edmund 298–300 Butterbur, Barliman 138, 200



Index

Cædmon 23 Camelot 280, 410 Cannock Chase 11, 12 Caradhras 134, 206, 224, 299, 434, 440–441 Carpenter, Humphrey 81, 82, 94, 128, 130 n. 13, 150, 190, 194, 260, 263, 319, 377, 381–382, 432, 447, 457, 459 nn. 1 and 3, 468, 501–502, 515 Carroll, Lewis 120, 128, 287, 305 Carter, Lin 327–328, 336 Cassirer, Ernst 90 n. 3 Celeborn 147 Celtic studies 10, 272–282, 347 n. 2, 354–355, 413 language and literature 31, 64, 94, 139, 191, 223, 234, 238, 263, 272, 274, 276–282, 290, 338 see also Irish, Scottish, Welsh Tolkien’s attitude to 272–274, 284 n. 4, 354 Chadwick, H. M. 41 Chatterton, Thomas 294–295, 301, 357 Chaucer, Geoffrey 9, 11, 15, 23 n. 7, 49–50, 55, 123, 232–233, 236–237, 240–243, 295 Chesterton, G. K. 351, 358 Chrétien de Troyes 137, 283, 408, 412 Christ I 225 Cirdan 100, 153 cirth 171, 213 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 37, 87, 89, 90, 291, 352 computer games 538–542 Cooper, Susan 128, 337–340, 343, 344, 347–348 Cormallen, Field of 99, 205, 206 “Council of London” see T.C.B.S. Craigie, William 13, 63 Daeron 213, 506, 507, 508, 513 Danes 52 Dante 313–315 Dasent, George 315 n. 1, 343 Davis, Norman 42, 45, 233 Denethor 101, 135, 137, 142, 292, 425, 442, 470, 479, 483

557

Deor 33, 39 n. 9 Dickens, Charles 162, 303, 305, 325, 351, 377 Doriath 59, 131, 154, 155, 158, 206, 213, 476, 507, 508, 513 dragons 8, 9, 15, 16, 33, 85, 104, 121, 122, 125, 125, 155, 157, 193, 195, 198, 200, 217, 218, 236, 244–256, 288, 341, 393, 406, 421, 440, 450, 453, 533, 541, 542 Drayton, Michael (Nimphidia) 287 Dungeons and Dragons (Advanced) 532, 536, 537 Dunsany, Lord 304, 305, 306, 309–314, 322, 327, 336, 358 dwarves 16, 97, 121, 122, 124, 126, 127, 131 n. 21, 134, 236, 237, 249, 295, 338, 362, 392, 393, 394, 398, 402, 436, 441, 450–453, 455, 473, 523, 527, 537, 538 history 93, 153, 427 language 61, 140, 204, 206, 207, 211, 213 mortality 103 and Old Norse 249–250 petty-dwarves 149, 155 Dyson, Hugo 16, 82, 165, 332, 333 Eä 93–94, 456 Eagle and Child (public house) 16 Éarendel, Eärendïl 11, 13, 23 n. 4, 95, 97, 100, 144, 150, 154, 156, 157, 180, 182–187, 225, 229, 293, 476, 505, 512 Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile 58 Early English Text Society 48, 58 Eddison, E. R. 323–327, 332, 358, 365 n. 5 Edoras 135, 151, 179, 223, 399, 400 Eldar 11, 20, 103, 147, 149, 150, 153, 158, 206, 208, 210, 212, 505 Elder Edda 15, 124, 125 Eliot, T. S. 80, 309, 364, 365 n. 3, 378 Elrond 97, 112, 126, 185, 293, 390, 392, 406, 408–409, 413, 423–424, 437, 450, 465, 469, 473, 522, 524

558

Index

elves 85, 96, 101, 109, 117, 142, 143, 183, 200, 225, 226, 362, 375, 376, 380, 394, 395, 402, 414, 415, 420, 450, 473, 476, 489, 531, 532, 537 and Celtic 280–282 Christmas elves 192 and fairies 111, 176, 236–237, 287, 289, 290 history 11, 12, 13, 93–95, 97, 99, 100, 126, 136, 150, 153, 158, 301, 340, 427, 456 immortality 93, 103, 179, 346 language 139, 203, 205–206, 210–211, 276, 277 see also separate languages literacy 59, 212–213, 296 love of nature 436, 440, 441, 442, 443, 443 n. 5 and Middle English 236–238 and Old Norse 250 and post-Medieval literature 287, 289, 290, 305, 338 songs and tales of 99, 144, 169, 184–187, 353, 505–508 types of 19, 95, 115, 126, 131 n. 18, 139, 192, 193, 203, 204, 206, 209, 210, 237, 435 Elwing 97, 100, 154, 157, 186 English Place Name Society 221 entrelacement 408–409, 415 Ents 83, 135, 153–154, 207 (Entish), 288, 395, 429, 433, 437, 442, 444–445, 532 Eorl 142, 158, 178–179 Éowyn 101, 135, 152, 299, 400, 410, 413, 466, 469, 474, 476–482, 493–495 Erebor 19, 129, 148, 213 Eriol see Ælfwine escapism 87, 374, 378, 381–383, 464, 541 Esperanto 9, 364 Estonian 267, 277 Ethiopia 29 eucatastrophe 36, 88, 90 n. 6, 105, 289, 306, 312, 342, 397, 457, 458 evangelium 36, 105, 458 Exeter Book, the 58, 95, 295

Exeter College, Oxford 10, 218, 225 Exodus 58 see also Tolkien’s scholarship faërie, fairy-stories, fairies 35–36, 39 n. 11, 111, 118, 126, 131, 169, 173, 181–186, 192, 197–201, 236–238, 280, 281, 284, 287, 301, 322, 333, 340, 352, 365–366, 386, 531 Fáfnir 247, 252, 254 Fáfnismál 25 Fangorn 136, 205, 304, 410, 438, 439, 440 Faramir 73, 101, 135–138, 152, 407, 424, 427, 465, 470–474, 478, 481 Fëanor 93, 100, 103, 153, 159, 193, 212, 231, 238, 507 film adaptations 1, 133, 137, 145, 370, 407, 474, 488, 489, 511, 514–528 Fimbulfambi 121 Finnish 112, 203, 208, 221, 259, 260, 261, 263, 265, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 277, 278, 284, 304, 355, 357 Finnish Grammar (ed. C. Eliot) 10 Finnsburg Fragment and Episode 51–53 Finrod 101, 127, 153, 210 Finwë 153, 231 Frisia(ns) 52, 221 Frye, Northrop 405, 408–409, 414, 420, 421 Fussell, Paul 464, 471 Galadriel 66–75, 97, 143, 147, 205, 206, 287–289, 299, 301, 408, 423, 470, 474–476, 480–481, 524, 525 Galdor 437, 439 Gandalf 56, 61, 117, 121, 126, 129–130 n. 8, 134–136, 142–143, 148–152, 179, 188, 204, 206, 223, 239, 255, 257, 282, 284, 292, 299, 336, 340, 391–392, 395, 399, 408–414, 423–429, 437, 439, 440–444, 447, 449, 451–453 (as Christian figure), 456, 459, 466–468, 470, 473, 474, 478, 480, 483, 489, 490–498, 519, 522, 523, 525, 527, 529, 533 Gandálfr 250



Index

Gamgee, Gaffer 199 Gamgee, Samwise see Sam Garner, Alan 321, 337, 338, 339, 340, 343, 344, 347, 348 Gautisk 203 Genesis, Book of 98 German language 9, 139, 167, 221, 224, 311, 354 Germany 17, 420, 462, 482 Gerrolt, Dennis 23 n. 2 Ghân-buri-Ghân 137 Gielgud, John 289 Gildor 136, 205, 294, 395 Gilson, Robert Quilter 10, 11, 12 Gimli 100, 101, 134, 135, 137, 138, 139, 147, 177, 179, 413, 440, 474, 481, 523 Girabbit 194 Glamdring 126, 490 Glasgow University 19 Glaurung 149, 155, 157, 252 Glorfindel 153, 206, 437, 469 Gnomes 14, 192, 200, 208, 210, 211, 227, 419, 505–506, 512 Gnomish, Goldogrin 12, 203, 204, 209, 214, 505 goblins 11, 62, 121, 126, 128, 192, 198, 208, 236, 287, 420, 450, 453, 454, 473 Gollum 15, 60–61, 66–75, 122–124, 128–131, 135, 138, 142, 250–251, 257, 282, 284, 299, 304, 316, 380, 391, 408, 411, 414, 425–426, 439, 451, 454, 473, 476, 483, 525–529 Gondolin 12, 126, 147, 149, 150, 154, 157, 210, 211, 225, 352, 364, 401, 464, 502, 505 Gondor 59 Gordon, E. V. 13, 15, 41, 42, 46, 49, 58, 124, 174, 233, 247, 282 Gordon, I. L. 42, 46, 47, 54 n. 2 Gothic (genre) 296–302 Gothic (language) 9, 11, 62, 174, 203, 206, 214, 219, 221, 231, 248, 286, 307–308, 357, 497, 502 Goths 221, 296, 297, 300, 301, 308

559

Grahame, Kenneth 125, 128, 351, 359 Great Haywood 12 Greek 8, 9, 80, 94, 95, 134, 141, 203, 219, 227, 286, 304, 322 Grendel 33, 123, 125, 130, 131, 218, 224 Gresham, Joy 21 Gríma Wormtongue 135, 425 Gulliver’s Travels 290, 324 Gygax, Gary 532, 536, 537 Haggard, H. Rider 168, 286, 287, 303, 304, 327, 351, 352, 357 Haldir 427, 433 Hali Meiðhad see Tolkien’s scholarship Hamlet 288, 289, 298 Hamðismál 248 Harryhausen, Ray 514 Havelok the Dane 409 Heimskringla 257 Heiðreks Saga 124, 297 Hengest and Horsa 33, 52, 217, 297, 300, 546 see also Tolkien’s scholarship Heorot 124, 223 Hitler, Adolf 519 Hnæf 53 hobbits 16, 195, 255, 283, 297, 317, 326, 361–362, 395, 427, 436, 446, 448–450, 453–454, 532, 534, 537 heroism 408–415, 450–451, 464 history 60, 93, 193, 223 language 31, 206–207, 278–279 mortality 103, 143 songs 144, 185, 509 Tolkien’s views on 20, 293 Trotter 134, 151 Homer 9, 138, 240, 270, 286, 296, 297 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 350 Hostetter, Carl 51 Howard, Robert E. 329–330 Howe, John 488–496 Hrólfr Kraki’s Saga 124 Hrothgar 124, 223 Huorns 135, 433 Húrin 150, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 193 Huxley, Aldous 365

560

Index

Iceland(ic) 13, 14, 112, 124, 130, 221, 245, 246, 247, 258, 288, 304, 338, 353, 550, 553 Iliad, The 138 Ilúvatar 93, 96, 97, 99, 101–104, 109, 114, 115, 117, 235, 329, 422, 435, 456, 509, 513 Indo-European 29, 143, 209, 260, 277, 283 Inklings 16, 17, 18, 82, 86, 90, 130, 140, 152, 165, 180, 247, 317–333, 474, 475, 486 In Parenthesis 465 Ireland 22, 172, 279, 281, 347, 443, 471 Irish (Gaelic) 273, 274, 277, 278, 280, 281, 338, 354 (legends) Isengard 135, 137, 143, 151, 180, 288, 290, 291, 322, 400, 433, 438, 439, 441, 444, 524, 547 Ishnesses 11 Isildur 61, 147, 161, 171, 292 Íslendingasögur 246 Istari 143, 147, 148, 442 Ivanhoe 357 Jackson, Peter 1, 133, 137, 145, 370, 407, 474, 488, 489, 511, 514, 520, 521, 524–527, 535 Jones, David 80, 465 Joyce, James 80, 385 Jutes, Jutland 52, 218, 297 Kalevala 10, 11, 81, 95 112, 259–271, 274, 279, 286, 304, 352, 355, 357, 503, 508 see also Finnish Kay, Gordon 107 Keats, John 289, 291, 297, 305, 310, 312, 316, 352 Ker, W. P. 19, 41, 48, 54 Khuzdul 204, 207, 211 Kilby, Clyde S. 21, 109, 146 King Edward’s School 8 Kipling, Rudyard 304, 351 Kólbitar Club 14, 247 Kullervo 11, 13, 23, 62, 64, 125, 260, 262, 264–267, 352, 353

Lancashire Fusiliers 11, 12 Lang, Andrew 8, 35, 61, 86, 87, 90, 246, 303, 357, 432 Laȝamon 238, 239, 242, 416 Led Zeppelin 511 Leeds University 13–14, 23, 42, 174, 217, 221, 230, 233, 247, 284, 297, 505 Legolas 100, 101, 134, 135, 137, 142, 177, 178, 179, 223, 399, 413, 456, 474, 523 Le Guin, Ursula 27, 332–333, 336, 339, 340–344, 346–348, 371, 381, 383, 386, 390, 402, 421 Earthsea novels 339–342, 346, 348 Lewis, C. S. 14, 16, 21, 22, 23, 82–83, 112, 122, 128, 130 nn. 4 and 10, 140, 150, 151, 162, 165, 167, 180, 196, 197, 247, 256, 287, 289, 290, 317–332, 338, 344, 358, 364, 370, 378, 381, 385 n. 10, 393, 446, 447, 451, 457, 459 nn. 2 and 3, 463 Chronicles of Narnia 18, 21, 320, 322, 330, 331 n. 2, 446, 451, 460 n. 8, 471, 475, 504, 510 Out of the Silent Planet 16, 320, 331 n. 3 Perelandra 313, 320 That Hideous Strength 320–322, 333 Lewis, W. H. 318, 331 n. 2, 332 n. 3 Library of Congress 58 Lichfield 11 Lindsay, David 167, 313–314, 327, 365 Lofting, Hugh (Dr Dolittle) 128 Lonely Isle 11, 12, 13, 226, 352 see also Tol Eressëa Lönnrot, Elias 81, 95, 112, 114, 259, 261–262, 264, 268, 270 Lothlórien 3, 135–136, 142, 151, 179, 205, 238, 280, 281, 282, 414, 429, 433, 434, 436, 524 Lovecraft, H. P. 329 Mabinogion, The 61, 131, 274, 276, 281, 338 Macbeth 287, 288, 477 MacDonald, George 8, 21, 128, 197, 301, 303, 304, 319, 320, 326, 336, 351, 354, 358 The Golden Key 21



Index

Magdalen College, Oxford 14, 16, 82–83 Maiar 96, 101, 143, 148 Mallorn 214, 238, 258, 385, 386, 443, 471, 472 Malory, Thomas 325, 406, 409, 411, 412, 416 Mandos 103, 149, 157, 158, 159 Manichean 418, 424, 426 Manwë 96, 155, 159, 186, 435, 456 Marlowe, Christopher 289 Marquette University 20, 61, 62–64, 65 Marxism 366, 371–373 Mazarbul (Book and Chamber of) 61, 112, 153, 213, 295, 500 Maxims 220, 227, 228, 553 McIntosh, Angus 48–49 Meduseld 177, 223, 399 men (mortal) 97 see also Numenor creation of 93 Mannish 112, 139, 157, 206, 207 Melko, Melkor, Morgoth 12, 13, 20, 93, 99, 101–102, 104, 150, 152–159, 186, 210, 211, 289, 346, 362, 422, 440, 479, 484, 489, 547 Mercia 8, 222, 223, 275, 529 Merlin 239, 320, 338, 407, 529 Merry (Meriadoc Brandybuck) 134, 135, 137, 138, 199, 400, 406, 407, 409–410, 413–415, 438, 464, 469, 474, 479, 481, 493 Merry Shire, The 222 Merton College, Oxford 18, 20, 22, 217, 230, 233 Middle English (language and literature) 3, 9, 11, 13, 15, 19, 27, 29, 34–35, 39 n. 2, 42–44, 49–51, 204, 217, 219, 230–241, 292, 338, 406–409, 416 n. 3, 510 see also individual works Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 287, 289, 305 Milne, A. A. 128, 321 Milton, John 287, 289, 290, 291, 298, 302, 344, 345, 477 Minas Morgul 299, 467 Minas Tirith 18, 95, 100, 135, 136, 152, 171, 258, 289, 410, 424, 427, 464, 493, 495–500, 524

561

Mirkwood 121, 126, 206, 237, 289, 299, 399, 477 Moorcock, Michael 313, 316, 325, 326, 332, 334, 379, 381, 387 Mordor 73, 93, 134, 135, 137, 152, 186, 207, 258, 322, 363, 417, 420, 439, 442, 467, 468, 471, 474, 481, 523, 524, 533, 544 Morgan, Francis 9, 448 Moria 17, 56, 134, 151, 206, 213, 295, 299, 408, 452, 522, 524, 526, 538 Morris, William 9, 60, 163, 247, 256, 286, 303–310, 313, 314, 315 n. 4, 325, 326, 327, 335–336, 351–358, 512 n. 4, 515 Morwen 149, 153, 154, 155, 157, 158 Muir, Edwin 371, 375, 380, 385 Müller, Max 86–87 Murray, Jef 488, 489, 491, 493, 494, 495, 497 myth 79–80 Nargothrond 154, 155, 158 Narnia 18, 21, 23, 301, 331, 333, 378, 387, 446, 451, 460, 471 see also Lewis, C. S. Nasmith, Ted 489, 492–499 Nazgûl 135, 138, 148, 152, 288, 299, 363, 424, 439, 467, 478, 493, 494, 495 Nazis 363 Neave, Jane (JRRT’s aunt) 10, 11, 53, 176, 196, 432 Necromancer 126, 127, 129 Nesbit, Edith 351, 359 Nevbosh 9, 30, 203 New College, Oxford 21 Newman, Cardinal John 447–449, 460 Nibelung(s) 53, 53, 247, 248, 316 Niebelungenlied 252 Nimrodel 206, 280 Níniel 150, 154, 155, 157 Noldor(in) 19–20, 126, 130, 192, 200, 203–6, 209–212, 231, 281 Númenor(ean) 16, 18, 19, 20, 31 (and Elvish), 59, 94, 95, 109, 112, 147–153, 161–171, 205, 206–207 (language), 211 (language), 226, 320, 321, 330, 346, 424, 471

562

Index

ofermod 28, 37, 160, 469 Old English/Anglo-Saxon (language and literature) 8, 9, 11, 13, 14, 15, 19, 29, 31, 32, 33, 39 nn. 2 and 9, 43–44, 47–49, 51, 52, 57, 63, 75 nn. 2 and 3, 81, 84, 95, 98, 112, 123–124, 130 n. 14, 139, 140, 166–167, 168, 171, 174, 175, 178, 188 n. 2, 204, 206, 217–228, 231, 232, 236, 237, 253, 275, 280, 286–288, 291, 292, 294, 295, 303, 304, 338, 357, 361, 397, 398, 400, 406, 407, 416 n. 3, 463, 503 see also individual works Old Norse 15, 39 n. 3, 53, 104, 117, 124, 130, 131, 139, 174, 175, 206, 221, 224, 231, 236, 237, 244–258, 284, 287–293, 304, 338, 397, 398, 412 Oratory, Catholic School 8, 9, 447–448 orcs 74, 135, 140, 147, 153, 157, 207, 211, 213, 290, 304, 314, 334, 363, 371, 387, 418, 420, 436, 438, 481, 539, 543 Orpheus 95, 236 Orwell, George 196, 350, 351, 359, 360, 362, 366, 373, 374, 378 Ossiriandic 210–211 Othello 288 Ovillers-la-Boiselle 12 Oxford English Dictionary 13, 29, 108, 218, 230, 398 Oxford, University of 10, 28, 62, 217, 288 palantír 148, 151, 299, 423 Paradise Lost 289, 290, 298, 299, 344, 345, 477 Parker, Matthew (Archbishop) 56 Peake, Mervyn 325, 333, 334 Gormenghast 325–327 Pearl 15, 46 see also Tolkien’s scholarship Pelennor Fields, Battle of 99, 135, 253, 288, 297, 299, 397, 464, 469, 477, 493, 495 Pembroke College, Oxford 14, 63, 167, 171 Pengoloð 111, 112, 153, 210 Percy, Thomas 291–293

perilous realm 35–36, 39, 184, 186, 191, 197, 235, 291, 343 Peter Pan 10, 514 Piers Plowman 240, 241 Pippin (Peregrin Took) 62, 134–152, 395, 400, 401, 406, 407, 409, 410, 413, 414, 415, 437, 438, 464, 469, 474, 481, 496, 497, 498 platonic and neoplatonic reality 89 Poetic Edda 14, 124, 125, 139, 244–250, 260, 292 Post-traumatic stress 467, 470–471 Potter, Beatrix 194, 304 Pope, Alexander 84 Pound, Ezra 351, 364 Pre-Raphaelites 351, 352, 356 Prose Edda 112, 246 Pryftan 121 Pugin, Augustus 300 Pullman, Philip 128, 306, 316, 337, 344, 345, 346, 347, 348, 349, 459, 527 Q(u)enya 11, 16, 23 n. 4, 203, 204, 208, 209, 210, 547, 548, 549 Queste del Saint Graal 406, 411 Rankin/Bass film adapation 522–523 Ransome, Arthur 63 Rateliff, John 65 Reeve’s Tale, The see Tolkien’s scholarship Reynolds, R. W. 14, 108 (one) ring and the rings of power 60, 61, 94, 97, 119, 129, 134, 135, 141, 142, 147, 152, 207, 213, 254, 255, 282–283, 292, 407, 408, 413, 414, 422–429, 431, 437, 439, 447, 451, 454, 464, 467, 470, 471, 479–483, 512, 523, 534–535 Rivendell 97, 112, 129, 136, 177, 179, 180, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 206, 280, 293, 433, 443, 522, 523 Rohan, Rohirrim 47, 59, 99–100, 135, 139–140, 148, 151, 152, 177, 178, 206, 223, 225, 228, 295, 395, 399, 401, 403, 410, 442, 464, 474, 476, 479, 510



Index

Role-playing games 530, 536–538, 540, 541, 543 Roman de Brut 238 Rowling, J. K. 340, 344–347, 459 Rúmil 59, 111, 208, 213, 548 runes 120, 171, 183, 213, 261, 499, 500 Saint Andrew’s University 17, 447, 457 Saint Brendan 18 see also Tolkien “Poetry” “Imram” Saint Philip’s Grammar School 8, see also Oratory Salu, M. B. 39 n. 1, 54 n. 12, 145, 219, 229, 382, 387 Sam(wise) Gamgee 61, 66–75, 76, 99, 100, 134–143, 151, 152, 171, 175, 177, 186, 187, 198, 199, 206, 293, 361, 363, 364, 380, 391, 395, 396, 406, 407, 410–415, 420, 427, 436, 438, 439, 442, 448, 454, 455, 458, 463, 468, 470, 471, 474, 480, 483, 486, 519, 524 Sarehole 8, 359, 432, 443 Saruman 60, 135, 142, 148, 152, 288, 361, 363, 425, 433, 438, 440, 442, 444, 470, 471, 479, 480, 483, 533 Sassoon, Siegfried 464, 465, 468, 472, 520 Sauron 60, 69, 94, 97, 102, 117, 127, 129, 134, 135, 143, 149, 151, 152, 168, 207, 304, 322, 363, 394, 398, 422, 423, 424–429, 437, 439, 440 n. 11, 444, 455, 465, 470, 471, 476, 479, 480, 483, 527, 535 Sawles Warde see Tolkien’s scholarship Sayer, George 19 Scottish language and literature 277, 338, 399, 407 Seafarer, The 47, 55, 123, 217, 226, 228, 229 secondary belief/world 87–88, 90, 115, 151, 158, 241, 258, 390, 419, 421, 485, 488, 531 Shadowfax 496–498 Shakespeare, William 219, 242, 286–290, 305, 396, 416, 472 Sheave, King 169, 171, 226, 297

563

Shelob 65, 66–75, 135, 152, 205, 290, 411, 425, 474, 476, 477 Sidney, Philip 37, 287, 289, 302, 457 Sigurd 9, 15, 124, 246–255 Silmaril(s) 30, 93–94, 100, 118, 184, 185, 186, 508 Sindarin 12, 31, 110, 130, 139, 158, 172, 203–206, 209–214, 276, 277, 278, 279, 280, 285, 552 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Middle English poem) 9, 28, 34, 125, 194, 233, 234, 236, 281, 282, 284 n. 14, 287, 406, 407, 410, 411, 415 see also Tolkien’s scholarship manuscript 58 Sir Launfal 236, 238 Sir Orfeo 17, 54, 123, 124, 125, 131 n. 18, 233, 234, 236–238, 406, 510 see also Tolkien’s scholarship Sisam, K. 13, 42–44, 51, 54, 230 Skáldskaparmál 246, 255 Smaug 121, 122, 125, 228, 252, 393, 450, 452, 453, 459, 473, 485, 519, 524, 528 Smith, C. A. 329–330 Smith, Geoffrey Bache 11, 12 Snorri Sturluson 112, 246, 249, 251, 254, 255, 257, 554 Somme, Battle of the 12, 461–463 Spenser, Edmund (Faerie Queene) 287 spiders 8, 66, 126, 152, 193, 431, 434, 450, 477 Stukeley, William 292 Sub-creation, theory of 16, 17, 37, 39 n. 12, 62, 79–90, 188, 249, 289, 291, 305, 306, 324, 342, 343, 354, 358, 375, 419, 420–422, 441, 447, 448, 455, 457–458, 479, 484, 488, 510, 531, 538 Swann, Donald 21–22, 206 Sweet, Henry 47, 217, 219, 222, 224 Switzerland 10, 224 T.C.B.S. (Tea Club or Barrovian Society) 10–12 Teleri 126, 208, 210, 211

564

Index

tengwar 20, 22, 23, 171, 212, 213, 214, 290 Teuton 32, 221, 274, 280, 281, 284 Thangorodrim 101, 299, 440 Théoden 99, 137, 207, 223, 224, 225, 253, 308, 399, 400, 401, 479, 494 Thingol and Melian 101, 126, 131, 155, 206, 210, 213, 413, 476, 506, 508 Thorin Oakenshield 121, 126, 148, 237, 250, 299, 392, 393, 452, 453, 455, 473, 522 Tinfang Warble 149, 505, 506, 507, 508 Tinúviel, Lúthien see Beren Todorovian framework 37 Tol Eressëa 81, 148, 149, 226, 352 Tolkien, Arthur (JRRT’s father) 8 Tolkien, Christopher John Reuel (son) 13, 17, 21, 22, 27, 34, 63, 64, 65, 66, 83, 86, 107, 110, 113, 114, 116, 130, 134, 146–148, 152, 154, 156–159, 161, 162, 165, 168, 170, 171, 175, 180, 182, 234, 239, 247, 248, 250, 261, 273, 275, 301, 351, 362, 371, 390, 416, 419, 456, 462, 466, 505–508, 528 n. 9 Tolkien, Edith (née Bratt) 9, 12, 18, 22, 462, 466, 502 Tolkien, John Francis Reuel (son) 12, 17, 466 Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel academic career 13–20, 27, 38–39 (publications), 41–42, 167, 230, 288 birth and childhood 7–10 clubs and societies 10, 13 death 22 English syllabus at Oxford (Lit. and Lang.) 14, 28, 30, 32, 39 n. 2 fantasy, theory of 86–90 learning, invention, and love of languages see individual languages Leeds University 13–14 manuscripts, personal and study of 20, 28, 58, 60, 62–65 marriage 12, 22 mother’s death 9 “mythology for England” 81, 92, 94–96, 162, 163, 169, 170–172, 260, 263

name and nicknames 7, 8 outlines his mythology 79–82, 93–94 see also Milton Waldman Oxford 15–22, 46 see also Oxford University religion 9, 16, 21, 82–83, 85–88 (and theory of Fantasy), 448–449 school 8 soldier and war service 11–13, 17, 461–465 (WWI), 465–466 (WWII) student 10–11 Tolkien’s fiction and stories “Ainulindalë” 18, 108, 109, 110, 115, 117, 118, 148, 149, 159, 422, 503, 504, 509, 510, 512, 513 “Akallabêth” 19, 109, 110, 150, 165, 539, 543 “Aldarion and Erendis” 20, 147, 207 “Annals of Beleriand” 108, 109, 125, 126, 150, 153, 226 “Ambarkanta” 16, 150 “Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth” 20, 153 The Book of Lost Tales 12, 14, 33, 59–60, 108, 125, 148, 149–150, 155, 174, 193, 208, 209, 226, 280, 332, 419, 504, 508 “The Bovadium Fragments” 23 The Children of Húrin and “Narn i Chîn Húrin” 14, 19, 92, 108, 147, 150, 155, 156, 157, 158, 174, 175, 228, 252, 260, 401, 505 “The Cottage of Lost Play” 12, 59, 149, 174, 176, 354, 504, 505 “A Description of the Isle of Númenor” 20 “The Drowning of Anadûnê” 18 “The Etymologies” 16, 204, 209, 210, 214, 229 “The Fall of Gondolin” 12, 149, 150, 352, 364, 401, 464, 502 “The Fall of Númenor” 16, 109, 150, 152, 165, 166 Farmer Giles of Ham 15, 17, 62, 125, 127, 131, 136, 138, 189–195, 198, 293, 320, 362, 390, 433 The Father Christmas Letters 15, 62, 128, 189, 190, 191–192, 194



Index The History of Middle-earth series 63, 65, 72, 92, 96, 104, 107, 108, 110, 111, 114, 115, 134, 161, 352, 382, 503, 505: analysis of individual books 146–159; publication 22 The Hobbit: authorship 60; children’s literature 127–128, 330; composition and editions 63, 119–123, 130 nn. 2, 3, and 5, 150, 163, 190, 239, 319, 420, 466; critical response to 370; film adaptations 325, 489, 500, 515, 518–519, 520, 522–524, 527–528; History of The Hobbit 65; The Hobbit game 539; influences of Medieval literature 123–125; libraries 76 n. 10; and The Lord of the Rings 128–129, 133–134; manuscripts 63; maps 60, 299; and minor works 198–200; music 502, 509; myth-making and the legendarium 84, 92–93, 94, 107–108, 113, 125–127; and Old Norse 249–253; runes 213; structure 136, 225, 324; style 391–394, 447; women 473–474 “The Hunt for the Ring” 19, 148 “I∙Lam na∙Ngoldathon” 204, 209, 547 “Laws and Customs among the Eldar” 20 “Leaf by Niggle” 18, 35, 54 n. 3, 83, 189–191, 195–200, 288, 354, 390, 434, 443, 447, 459, 487, 488 “Lhammas” 16, 209, 210, 211 “The Line of Elros” 20 The Lord of the Rings 12, 27, 30, 33, 61, 100, 103, 131 n. 18, 138–140, 142–143, 186, 194, 195, 198, 199, 286, 292, 309, 314, 326, 327, 350, 353, 354, 361, 364, 437, 439, 466, 467, 488, 489, 495, 496, 533–537, 539, 541: and allegory 140–141, 294; and Celtic literature 280; and Christianity 141–142, 447–452, 454, 455–459; composition and publication 7, 15, 17–19, 21, 31 (ACE Books), 48, 74, 105 n. 2, 109, 110, 112, 119, 123, 126, 150, 151–152, 156, 164, 169, 170, 176, 197, 222, 293, 317, 318, 319, 321, 362, 464, 465, 500 n. 1;

565 critical reaction 20, 21, 37, 114, 190, 330, 331 n. 3, 338, 342, 365 n. 2, 370–385, 463; and evil 418–429; film adaptations 137–138, 269, 514–521, 523–527, 529 n. 17; and languages 202, 205–208, 209, 211–214, 278, 297; manuscripts 63; maps 60; and Medieval studies (in general) 125; and Middle English 35, 237, 238, 239; mythology and legendarium 60, 79, 80, 92, 93, 94, 107, 113, 115, 117, 147, 148, 171, 241; “A New Shadow” proposed sequel 20, 153, 322; and Old English 223, 226, 228, 295; and Old Norse 252–256, 257 n. 8; and “On Fairy–stories” 17, 86; and post-Medieval literature 287–288, 297, 300, 304, 306, 324, 325, 335, 336, 346; quest theory 320, 404–409, 412–415; relationship to The Hobbit 127, 128–129, 163, 293; songs and poems in 22, 47, 99, 144–145, 175, 176, 177–179, 180, 182, 185–187, 507, 509, 511; style 200 n. 3, 332 n. 7, 389, 390–391, 393, 394, 401, 402; synopsis and structure 133–137, 328; women 474, 476, 479–480, 482–484 “The Lost Road” 16, 17, 32, 47, 109, 148, 150–151, 161–172, 226, 227, 239, 297, 321, 322, 329 Mr Bliss 15, 17, 63, 127, 189, 191, 194, 198–199, 200 n. 6, 201 n. 10, 360, 362 “Music of the Ainur” 13, 115, 148, 149, 180, 503 “Narn i Chîn Húrin” see The Children of Húrin “The Notion Club Papers” 18, 32, 62, 109, 120, 152, 161–171, 195, 207, 226, 239, 291, 321, 322, 329, 334 “Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age” 18, 109, 110 “The Problems of Ros” 22 “Q(u)enta Noldorinwa” or “History of the Gnomes” 14, 108, 150, 156, 157 “The Quest of Erebor” 19, 129, 148

566

Index

Tolkien’s fiction and stories  (cont’d) “The Red Book of Westmarch” 61, 76 n. 9, 112, 113, 239, 293, 468 “The Rivers and Beacon-hills of Gondor” 22 The Road Goes Ever On: A Song Cycle 22 Roverandom 14, 17, 127, 128, 189–194, 198, 200, 201, 320, 390, 391 The Silmarillion (including “Silmarillion” papers) 59, 79, 107–118, 131 n. 18, 169, 171, 176, 180, 192, 193, 209, 218, 225, 231, 238, 239, 241, 260, 281, 290, 293, 320, 353, 413, 422, 426, 435, 440, 448, 456, 476, 503, 508, 509, 510, 512 see also distinct stories: composition 14–15, 16, 19, 21, 108–110, 114–117, 134, 146– 148, 184, 226, 330, 351, 354, 365 n. 2, 370, 418, 419; critical reaction 114–117, 371–372, 382, 390; manuscripts 64, 65; maps 60; mythology and legendarium 80–81, 92, 102, 105 n. 2, 125–127, 146–148, 150–159, 190, 256, 321; “Quenta Silmarillion” 16, 17, 104, 108, 109, 110, 111, 116, 125, 126, 131, 148, 150, 153, 156, 157, 159, 174, 211, 226, 273, 507; publication 17, 18, 22; style 401–402; written culture 59 Smith of Wootton Major 21, 39 n. 13, 189–191, 195–199, 319, 320, 322, 354, 382, 390, 415, 443 “The Story of Kullervo” 11, 64 “The Tale of Tinúviel” 12, 13, 267, 352, 353 “(The) Tale of Eärendil” 13 The Tolkien Audio Collection 23 n. 9 Tree and Leaf 18, 28, 35, 83, 86 Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middleearth 22, 92, 110, 131, 146, 147, 148, 149, 151, 153, 155, 157, 158, 159, 165, 260, 352, 382, 505, 511 see also individual tales “Valaquenta” 20, 109, 110, 159 “The Wanderings of Húrin” 20, 153, 154, 156, 157, 353

Tolkien’s poems “A Elbereth Gilthoniel” 22, 144, 206, 213 The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (and poem of same name) 21, 61–62, 175, 176, 180, 185, 199, 291, 293–294 “The Battle of Eastern Field” 10 “Bombadil goes Boating” 175, 176 “The Bumpus” 176 “Cat” 176 “The Children of Húrin” see Tolkien’s fiction and stories “The Dragon’s Visit” 175, 199, 360 “Errantry” 175–188, 293 The Fall of Arthur 16, 64, 175, 239, 282, 332, 407, 416 “Fastitocalon” 174, 176 “Fíriel” or “The Last Ship” 176 “Glip” 15, 175 “Goblin Feet” 11, 173, 176, 236, 287 “The Hoard” 176 “Imram” 18, 226, 354, 546 “Iumbo, or ye Kinde of Oliphaunt” 174, 176 “Knocking at the Door” 176 “Kortirion among the Trees” 174, 352, 435 “The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun” 15, 546 “The Lay of Leithian” 14, 16, 17, 108, 112, 125, 127, 150, 174, 331, 505 The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún 15, 64, 175, 247–249, 252, 257–258, 297, 301, 549 “Looney” 176 “The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon” 149, 176 “The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late” 176 “The Mewlips” 176 “Monoceros, the Unicorn” 174 “Mythopoeia” 16, 79, 82–86, 118, 196, 365, 548 “Namárië” 22, 206 “The Nameless Land” 46 “The Orgog” 23, 191 “Perry-the-Winkle” 176 “Princess Ni” 174, 176



Index

“Reginhardus, the Fox” 174 “The Root of the Boot” 176 “The Sea-Bell” 176, 291, 355, 356 “The Sellic Spell” 23 “The Shadow-Bride” 176, 291 “The Stone Troll” 176 “Tales and Songs of Bimble Bay” and “Progress in Bimble Town” 15, 175–176, 199, 350, 360–361 “There is an inn, a merry old inn” 292 “The Trumpets of Faërie” 12 “The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star” 11, 225 see also Earendel Tolkien’s scholarship AB language 48, 49, 55, 232, 234, 242 Ancrene Wisse (text) and “Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad” 14, 21, 38, 42, 46–49, 52, 55, 58, 123, 219, 231–232, 234, 242–243 “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” 15, 23, 27, 32–34, 130 n. 14, 140, 194, 218, 245, 255, 288, 421 see also Beowulf Beowulf translation (personal and “On Translating Beowulf”) 15, 39 n. 8, 122, 297, 396 see also Beowulf “Chaucer as a Philologist” 15, 38, 232 The Clarendon Chaucer 15, 44, 123 “The Devil’s Coach-Horses” 13, 232 “English and Welsh” 19, 31, 172 n. 1, 272, 275, 280, 284 nn. 7 and 15, 296 Finn and Hengest: The Fragment and the Episode 22, 28, 42, 51–53, 55, 129, 217, 268, 269 “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son” 19, 28, 37–38, 463, 469 “ ‘Iþþlen’ in Sawles Warde” 58, 38, 232, 549 The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún 15, 64, 122, 124, 175, 246, 247, 248, 249, 252, 257, 258, 297, 301 The Monsters and the Critics 27, 35 see also individual essays A Middle English Vocabulary 13, 29, 42–44, 230

567

“The Name ‘Nodens’ ” 15, 29, 38, 281 A New Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District 29 The Old English Exodus 22–23, 42, 51–54, 55, 58, 217 “Old English Textual Criticism” (lecture) 59 On Fairy-stories 17, 27, 35, 79, 80, 86–88, 139, 181, 197, 235, 247, 287, 291, 305, 306, 326, 337, 352, 354, 382, 421, 441, 447, 455, 457, 463, 485, 487, 488, 531–532 Pearl (translation and proposed edition) 15, 46, 47, 54, 123, 233, 234 “Philology: General Works” (editor) 14, 29 “Prefatory Remarks” to Clark Hall’s translation of Beowulf 23 n. 8, 34 The Reeve’s Tale 23 n. 7, 49, 51, 232 “A Secret Vice” 16, 30, 32, 39, 202, 203, 268, 270 “Sigelwara land” 15, 29, 53 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (edition) 13, 29, 42, 45–46, 52, 54, 233 see also Sir Gawain (Middle English poem) “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” (lecture) 19, 34–35 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo (translation) 15, 39, 54, 234, 282, 287 Sir Orfeo (edition) 17, 50–51, 54 see also Sir Orfeo (Middle English poem) “Some Contributions to Middle-English Lexicography” 13, 231, 235 “Valedictory Address” 20, 28, 47, 268 Tolkien, Mabel (née Suffield, JRRT’s mother) 8, 9 Tolkien, Michael Hilary Reuel (son) 13, 17, 144, 166, 193 Tolkien, Priscilla Mary Reuel (daughter) 15, 18, 201, 466 Took, Belladonna 450 Toynbee, Philip 21, 371, 372, 387 Treebeard 40, 139, 151, 179, 205, 207, 228, 260, 270, 410, 417, 437, 438, 441 Troilus and Criseyde 240

568

Index

trolls 175, 176, 224, 311, 392, 452, 537 Trought, Vincent 10 Tuatha Dé Danaan 131, 280, 281 Tuor 12, 12, 13, 147, 154, 156, 188, 401, 505, 512 Turgon 154, 225 Túrin Turambar 13, 14, 102, 150, 154– 159, 252, 260, 265, 266, 401, 505 Twain, Mark 129, 163 Ulmo 96, 435, 505 Ulysses 129, 364, 385 Ungoliant 67, 73, 183, 184, 425, 440 Unwin, Rayner 16, 20 Unwin, Stanley 17 Valar 1, 13, 93, 94, 96, 99, 100, 103, 117, 148, 149, 153, 155, 156, 157, 158, 165, 184, 186, 207–211, 235, 281, 435, 436, 440, 442, 456, 512 Valinor 59, 95, 97, 100, 103, 108, 109, 125, 149, 150, 159, 165, 170, 184, 185, 186, 209, 210, 212, 235, 238, 321, 435, 440 valkyries 246, 248 Viking Club 13, 247 Vingilot 100 Virgil 240, 292 Völsunga Saga, Völsungs 15, 124, 246–249, 254, 286, 304, 316, 325 Völuspá 124, 139, 206, 244, 248, 249, 253, 256 Vonnegut, Kurt 351, 374 Wace 238 Wagner 254, 255, 256, 325 Waldman, Milton, 18, 79, 81–82, 92, 105, 113, 142, 143, 200 Walsh, Jill Paton 53 Wanderer, The 47, 55, 76, 123, 177–179, 188, 217, 295, 353 war games 532–536 Warwick 11 Waugh, Auberon 373, 377 Weathertop 299, 467, 512

Weird Tales 327–329 Wells, H. G. 97, 167–168, 304, 320, 357 Welsh 12, 19, 221, 272, 279 language and literature 61, 98, 203, 209, 273, 274, 275, 276–279, 281–283, 338, see also The Mabinogion Tolkien’s attitude to 8, 32, 274, 275, 284 nn. 4, 6, 7, and 10 Westron 31, 206, 207, 211, 213 White, T. H. 324–325, 333 Widsith 225 Wife of Bath’s Tale, The 237–238 Williams, Charles 17, 21, 35, 86, 140, 317–322, 329, 331 n. 2, 332 nn. 3 and 4 Taliesin through Logres 17 Wilson, Colin 326 Wilson, Edmund 129, 371, 372, 375, 377, 380, 418 Wind in the Willows, The 128, 194 Wiseman, Christopher Luke 10, 12 Woolf, Virginia 137, 351, 378 Wordsworth, William 37, 289, 291, 434, 444 World of Warcraft 539, 543 World War I 11–13, 146, 304, 364, 419–420, 429, 451, 461, 462, 463, 464, 467–471, 510 World War II 17, 35, 52, 64, 233, 324, 337, 338, 351, 361, 385 n. 13, 418, 465, 466, 419–420, 472, 479 Wright, Joseph 9, 219, 296, 357 Wyke-Smith, E. A. (Marvellous Land of the Snergs) 128, 352 Wynne Jones, Diana 337–340, 342–344, 347, 348, 412 Year’s Work in English Studies, The 14, 29 Yeats, W. B. 354–358, 366 Ynglingasaga 255 Ypres 12 Zigûr 168 Zimmerman, Morton Grady 515–518 Zupitza, Julius 59