Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review (Volume IV, 2007)

Editors’ Introduction This is the fourth issue of Tolkien Studies, a refereed journal dedicated to the scholarly study of the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. Tolkien Studies is the first academic journal solely devoted to Tolkien. As editors, our goal is to publish excellent scholarship on Tolkien as well as to gather useful research information, reviews, notes, documents, and bibliographical material. In this issue we are pleased to re-publish “The Name Nodens,” an essay by Tolkien that served as an appendix to Report on the Excavation of the Prehistoric, Roman and Post-Roman Site in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire (1932), by R.E.M. Wheeler and T. V. Wheeler, which comprised No. IX of the Reports of the Research Committee of the Society of Antiquaries of London. With this exception, and that of the lead article (which was solicited from an expert in the field), all articles have been subject to anonymous, external review. All required a positive judgment from the Editors before being sent to reviewers, and had to receive at least one positive evaluation from an external referee to qualify for publication. In the cases of articles by individuals associated with the journal in any way, each article had to receive at least two positive evaluations from two different outside reviewers. All identifying information was removed from the articles before they were sent to the reviewers, and all reviewer comments were likewise anonymously conveyed to the authors of the articles. The Editors agreed to be bound by the recommendations of the outside referees. Douglas A. Anderson Michael D. C. Drout Verlyn Flieger

Notes on Submissions Tolkien Studies seeks works of scholarly quality and depth. Substantial essays and shorter, "Notes and Documents" pieces are both welcome. Submissions should be double-spaced throughout and use parenthetical citations in the (Author page) form. A Works Cited page should conform to the Chicago Manual of Style, 14th ed. All citations to Tolkien’s works should follow the “Conventions and Abbreviations” of Tolkien Studies. Self-addressed, stamped envelopes should accompany all correspondence unless the author wishes to communicate via email and does not wish the hard-copy manuscript to be returned, in which case this requirement is waived. Copyright © West Virginia University Press

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Conventions and Abbreviations Because there are so many editions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, citations will be by book and chapter as well as by page-number (referenced to the editions listed below). Thus a citation from The Fellowship of the Ring, book two, chapter four, page 318 is written (FR, II, iv, 318). References to the Appendices of The Lord of the Rings are abbreviated by Appendix, Section and subsection. Thus subsection iii of section I of Appendix A is written (RK, Appendix A, I, iii, 321). The “Silmarillion” indicates the body of stories and poems developed over many years by Tolkien; The Silmarillion indicates the volume first published in 1977.

Abbreviations B&C

Beowulf and the Critics. Michael D. C. Drout, ed. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 248. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2002.

Bombadil

The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963.

FR

The Fellowship of the Ring. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1954; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954. Second edition, revised impression, Boston: Houghton Mifflin,1987.

H

The Hobbit. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1937. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1938. The Annotated Hobbit, ed. Douglas A. Anderson. Second edition, revised. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002.

Jewels

The War of the Jewels. Christopher Tolkien, ed. London: HarperCollins; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.

Lays

The Lays of Beleriand. Christopher Tolkien, ed. London: George Allen & Unwin; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985.

Letters

The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Humphrey Carpenter, ed. with the assistance of Christopher Tolkien. London: George Allen & Unwin; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981.

Lost Road

The Lost Road and Other Writings. Christopher Tolkien, ed. London: Unwin Hyman; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

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Lost Tales I

The Book of Lost Tales, Part One. Christopher Tolkien, ed. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983; Boston: HoughtonMifflin, 1984.

Lost Tales II The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two. Christopher Tolkien, ed. London: George Allen & Unwin; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984. LotR

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien; the work itself irrespective of edition.

MC

The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984.

Morgoth

Morgoth’s Ring. Christopher Tolkien, ed. London: HarperCollins; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993.

PS

Poems and Stories. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1980; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.

Peoples

The Peoples of Middle-earth. Christopher Tolkien, ed. London: HarperCollins; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996.

RK

The Return of the King. London: George Allen & Unwin 1955; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956. Second edition, revised impression, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

S

The Silmarillion. Christopher Tolkien, ed. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1977. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977. Second edition. London:HarperCollins, 1999; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001.

Sauron

Sauron Defeated. Christopher Tolkien, ed. London: HarperCollins; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992.

Shadow

The Return of the Shadow. Christopher Tolkien, ed. London: Unwin Hyman; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988.

Shaping

The Shaping of Middle-earth. Christopher Tolkien, ed. London: George Allen & Unwin; Boston Houghton Mifflin, 1986.

TL

Tree and Leaf. London: Unwin Books, 1964; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965. Expanded as Tree and Leaf, including the Poem Mythpoeia [and] The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son. London: HarperCollins, 2001.

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TT

The Two Towers. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1954; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955. Second edition, revised impression. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

Treason

The Treason of Isengard. Christopher Tolkien, ed. London: Unwin Hyman; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989.

UT

Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-Earth. Christopher Tolkien, ed. London: George Allen & Unwin; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980.

War

The War of the Ring. Christopher Tolkien, ed. London: Unwin Hyman; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990.

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Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years CARL F. HOSTETTER First Stage—Readers and Correspondents

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olkienian linguistics, defined broadly as the study of the languages invented by J.R.R. Tolkien, began no doubt almost immediately upon publication of The Fellowship of the Ring in July, 1954, at the moment that the first reader to notice the rows of tengwar (Quenya ‘letters’) and cirth (Sindarin ‘runes’) that border the title page wondered, “what does that say?” Which is indeed the way that most did and (at least until recently) still do enter into Tolkienian linguistics.1 And thus it is, or at any rate used to be, Tolkien himself who first introduces the reader to the linguistics of Middle-earth, for the diligent or curious reader will sooner or later discover Appendix E of The Lord of the Rings, with its two prominent charts of the tengwar and cirth, together with Tolkien’s own explanations of the nature and values of these writing systems, with the aid of which a linguistically-minded reader can soon decipher those enigmatic characters. It is noteworthy that Tolkien does not seek to make this decipherment too easy: he does not, for instance, choose simply to tell the reader what those border inscriptions say; nor in the case of the tengwar does he even provide a simple glyph-to-roman-value chart as he does for the cirth. This in part is due to the use of the tengwar in the book not only for the English on the title-page, but also for the Black-speech inscription on the One Ring and the Sindarin inscription on the West-gate of Moria, both of which are reproduced in the book, and in both of which the tengwar are adapted to different systems of values; so that, had Tolkien provided a chart of roman values for the tengwar as they are applied to English on the title-page, it would have confused the reader attempting to apply the same values to the two inscriptions given in the text.2 It is however mostly due to the inherently and deliberately non-alphabetic nature of the tengwar, the arrangement and shapes of which were devised (by Tolkien, and within the fiction as by Fëanor) to exhibit a systematic correspondence with the chief physical points (labial, dental, etc.) and modes (voiceless, voiced, etc.) of articulation, and the values of which were not fixed by their creator (real or fictive), but were determined for each language to which they were applied by the phonetic inventory of the language itself. It was this nature that Tolkien was chiefly concerned to convey in his notes accompanying the chart of the tengwar, and so it is that deciphering the tengwar on the title-page requires first mastering some basic concepts Copyright © West Virginia University Press

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Carl F. Hostetter of phonetics and articulation. Which is to say, that it requires familiarity with and application of some linguistic knowledge, and provides what will often be the first hint to the reader that there is something deeper and wider beyond the glimpses of unknown tongues that Tolkien provides in The Lord of the Rings. Throughout the story itself the reader encounters numerous elements from and examples of Tolkien’s invented languages. By far the greatest such element is the extensive Elvish nomenclature, drawn chiefly from Sindarin, but with a smaller presence of names in Quenya, these two being the chief Elvish languages and by far the most fully developed of Tolkien’s inventions. A smaller but to the linguistically-minded reader perhaps more readily compelling element is the occurrence of actual Elvish dialogue, chiefly in the form of poems, songs, spells, and formal greetings and utterances in both Quenya and Sindarin: for example, and earliest, Frodo’s Quenya greeting of Gildor and his company in Woodyend; the Sindarin hymn to Elbereth that Frodo hears on the eve of the Council of Elrond in Rivendell; the Sindarin inscription on the Westgate of Moria and Gandalf ’s spell of opening in that language; Galadriel’s Quenya lament and farewell to Frodo at the Fellowship’s departure from Lórien; Sam’s Sindarin invocation of Elbereth at Cirith Ungol; the Quenya and Sindarin praises of Sam and Frodo on the field of Cormallen; and Aragorn’s Quenya coronation oath. While Tolkien does address this invented-language element in The Lord of the Rings directly in the appendices (particularly E and F), he does so only by way of a general and greatly compressed historical sketch, sufficient to establish, for example, that the Elvish languages are all related to one another, and to delineate the chief phonetic characteristics of Quenya and Sindarin by which it is possible (usually) to distinguish forms in one language from those of the other.3 Tolkien also provides, in the text itself, translations for most (though not all) of the actual Elvish dialogue encountered there, usually by way of a paraphrase of what has just been said by one of the characters. The Elvish nomenclature is not infrequently given in conjunction with an alternative English rendering of the name, and Tolkien’s index gives here and there a translation for some names. Thus, Tolkien put quite a lot of information concerning his languages into the story and its appendices and index, but it is scattered about and must be gathered up and correlated to make full use of it. Further, Tolkien provided directly, in The Lord of the Rings itself, very little by way of detail of phonological development and nothing concerning morphology or the other departments of descriptive grammar. These fundamental linguistic features instead must be inferred by analysis of Elvish texts and forms according to such translations as Tolkien does provide, and by comparison of forms in related languages to determine what 2

Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years systematic correspondences of sound and meaning can be deduced. And so naturally, and even before the completion of the publication of The Lord of the Rings in 1955, as Tolkien’s published letters show, the linguistically-minded of Tolkien’s readers set about to do just these things. Already in September 1955 Richard Jeffery, writing to ask for information concerning some elements of Quenya and Sindarin nomenclature,4 could use the tengwar (at least as applied to English) passably well (Letters 223); and Tolkien’s remarks in April 1956 (Letters 248) show that already many were asking him for more phonological and grammatical detail on Elvish and specimens thereof, implying that there was already a considerable effort being undertaken at correlating and analyzing the information already given by Tolkien. In the first decade, however, this effort appears for the most part to have been done privately, by individuals in isolation—although already by late 1958 Rhona Beare began to write to Tolkien on behalf of a group of fellow enthusiasts with various linguistic questions. It was not until after the explosion of popularity of Tolkien in the mid–1960s, particularly in America, with the publication of an inexpensive paperback version of The Lord of the Rings, and the consequent formation of various Tolkien fan groups and societies,5 that Tolkienian linguistics fully emerged as a shared endeavor with published studies. First Interlude—Decoders Before following the development of Tolkienian linguistics, proper, further, it should be noted that there was also another, pseudo-linguistic response to the invented-language element in The Lord of the Rings that seems unfortunately incorrigible and indeed persists to this day: namely, treating the languages, particularly the nomenclature, as essentially a code formed from and containing deliberate references to words and elements from various real-world languages, the identification of which the decoders believe provide “the key” to understanding what Tolkien’s names “really mean,” who and what his characters and places “really are,” and so (in the extreme application of this methodology) what his story is “really about.”6 Thus, such decoders have variously claimed that Tolkien’s languages are “really” composed from elements of Old English, Hebrew, Sumerian, and so forth. Tolkien addressed and refuted such “decoding” of his nomenclature directly in a long reply to a “Mr. Rang” (who attempted to “explain” Tolkien’s Elvish and Black Speech nomenclature as composed of elements from Old English and Gaelic, respectively), which was published in his selected letters in 1981 (Letters 379–87). Yet twenty-five years after the publication of Tolkien’s own dismissal of such approaches as having any bearing on his intentions or procedure, we still find the same 3

Carl F. Hostetter approach employed, as for example in a recent essay that interprets a number of Elvish names as being composed of Old English elements, so that, for example, the Sindarin (hereafter S.) name Sauron is “explained” as derived from O.E. sar ‘sickness, wound, affliction’ and Silvan Elvish Legolas as containing O.E. lego ‘elder race, ancestor’ and a diminutive ending las, læs;7 both decodings in complete disregard of Tolkien’s own explanations of these name given in the very same letter to Mr. Rang: Sauron being an masculine form of the Common Eldarin adjective *thaura ‘detestable’ (Letters 380), and Legolas ‘Greenleaves’ composed of leg ‘viridis, fresh and green’ + go-las ‘collection of leaves, foliage’ (Letters 382).8 This is not to say that Tolkien did not “reuse” elements from real languages in his own, or that names and characters from real-world history, myth, and legend are not found in Tolkien’s story: Tolkien himself allowed as much to Mr. Rang, citing the example of Earendel; but as Tolkien himself also explains in that letter, the incidence of this sort of reuse is much, much less, and the nature and significance of it quite different, than the decoders think. And so it is to say that Tolkien’s nomenclature, and his languages in general, are not simply an echoic hodgepodge of adopted and adapted words and names: rather, they are linguistic systems, each element of which (e.g. constituent sounds, root meanings, derivation and inflectional markers, etc.) stands in abstract, systematic relation to the other elements both within an individual language and across its cognates in other languages; and thus it is further to say that each word and name in Tolkien’s invented languages, by Tolkien’s own procedure and intent, as illustrated by his own explanations, can (in principle) and must be explained within those linguistic systems; that is, in terms of his languages, not from outside.9 Second Stage—Journals and Books It is beyond the scope of this essay to attempt to chronicle completely the contributors and publications of the earliest days of Tolkienian linguistics as a shared endeavor.10 In lieu of a more detailed history, we can take as representative what stands as the fullest and most lasting record and synthesis of the best results of those first efforts, the 1978 book An Introduction to Elvish, which Jim Allan edited from his own contributions and those of other scholars, such as Christopher Gilson, Laurence J. Krieg, Paula Marmor, and Bill Welden. These were drawn largely from the two early journals: Parma Eldalamberon (Quenya, ‘Book of Elven-tongues’), founded in 1971 by the Mythopoeic Linguistic Fellowship (itself a special interest group of the Mythopoeic Society) and edited by Paula Marmor; and Tolkien Language Notes, first issued by its editor, Jim Allan, in 1974. It should be noted that although published in 1978, An Introduction to Elvish was completed before the 1977 publication of The Silmarillion, 4

Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years and so does not take into account the wealth of new data that volume provided. It was, however, able to make use of four additional primary sources beyond The Lord of the Rings: first, Tolkien’s detailed glosses and concise etymological and grammatical notes on three examples of Elvish dialogue found in The Lord of the Rings—namely the long Quenya poem known as “Galadriel’s Lament” (“Ai! laurië lantar lassi súrinen . . .”), the Sindarin hymn to Elbereth sung on the eve of the Council of Elrond (“A Elbereth Gilthoniel . . .”), and Sam’s Sindarin invocation of Elbereth at Cirith Ungol—which were published together with Tolkien’s own tengwar transcriptions of the Elvish as an appendix to Donald Swann’s 1967 songbook, The Road Goes Ever On.11 Second is a circa 1967 chart giving the declension of two nouns in Classical (or Book) Quenya that Tolkien sent in response to a query by Richard Plotz, then president of the nascent Tolkien Society of America. Third is Tolkien’s own notes on nomenclature, written as an aid for translators of his work, which were published by Jared Lobdell as the “Guide to Names in The Lord of the Rings” in the 1975 collection A Tolkien Compass.12 And fourth, notes taken by Jim Allan from the Tolkien manuscript archive at Marquette University, which houses the complete manuscript, typescript, and galley versions of The Lord of the Rings. It is further noteworthy that none of these additional sources provide any extensive or detailed phonological discussion of Quenya or Sindarin, nor do they directly address the history and relationship of these two chief Elvish languages. Thus even with this additional information, most of the phonology, morphology, and other departments of the grammar of Quenya and Sindarin had to be inferred by collecting and correlating all the available data and comparing forms in each language both with related forms in the same language and with (at least potential) cognate forms in the other language, and determining from this what systematic correspondences can be observed in the data. For example: by comparing the Sindarin words adan ‘man,’ pl. edain, with the obviously cognate Quenya word Atani ‘Men’ (all three forms attested in The Lord of the Rings), it can be seen that intervocalic t in Quenya corresponds to intervocalic d in Sindarin; and from this and many other such correspondences of intervocalic sounds observable in the data, a phonological rule can be inferred: that original voiceless stops (e.g. p, t, k) in intervocalic position remain voiceless in Quenya but are voiced in Sindarin (to become b, d, g, respectively). It was also deduced from this and from other such singular versus plural comparisons in Sindarin and Quenya that the vowel variation seen in singular adan vs. plural edain is caused by an original plural ending that was retained as final -i in Quenya, but which was lost in Sindarin (as, it turns out, were all original final vowels), though not before it caused a change in the vowels of the syllables that preceded it: namely, 5

Carl F. Hostetter in this case, raising and fronting the first a to e, and diphthongizing the second a to ai.13 It was also further observed by the contributors to An Introduction to Elvish that the changes of consonants in intervocalic position identified for Sindarin also occur in the initial consonant of words in certain grammatical situations: for example, the element per- ‘half,’ isolated by comparison of such words as perian ‘halfling, hobbit’ and Peredhil ‘Half-elven,’ occurs as ber- in the Sindarin phrase, “Daur a Berhael . . . . Eglerio!,” where Daur and Berhael translate the names of Frodo and Samwise (that is, ‘halfwise’) respectively; and therefore the initial p- of per- has been voiced to b-, just as it would be in intervocalic position. It was recognized that this and similar changes were strongly reminiscent of the similar phenomenon in Welsh that is often called lenition, by which initial consonants in certain grammatical situations (e.g., as the direct object of a verb) undergo the same change that the consonant underwent historically in intervocalic position; and so it was further deduced (correctly, as it turned out) that the patterns of initial consonant mutation were modeled after (though not in all details precisely the same as) those of Welsh, both in the phonology of the change and in the grammatical usages.14 By rigorously applying this empirical approach to the data, in conjunction with the principles, methodologies, and scholarly practices of descriptive and historical linguistics as developed by philologists in analyzing and describing the Indo-European languages and their histories, the contributors to An Introduction to Elvish were able, despite what we now view as a severely limited data set,15 to develop remarkably detailed and accurate linguistic descriptions of Quenya and Sindarin. These encompassed not just complete lexicons of the two languages as they were then evidenced, together with pronunciation, glosses, and etymological notes, but also a detailed and still largely accurate inventory of the chief set of systematic phonological changes by which each of these two languages developed and diverged from the parent Common Eldarin tongue, together with a presentation that has yet to be superseded of the different modes of the tengwar as applied to various languages. They also established the essential scholarly practices of Tolkienian linguistics, adopted from the historical linguistics of “real” languages: in particular, the citation in Tolkien’s writings of evidence and of phonological justifications for proposed etymologies and reconstructions, and the maintenance of a clear distinction between forms actually attested in Tolkien’s writings, and proposed, reconstructed, or otherwise hypothetical forms, which were and are still usually marked with a prefixed asterisk, in accordance with a convention of historical linguistics. A sketch of at least parts of the main grammatical categories of each language was achieved. This includes, for both languages, a recognition 6

Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years of the ultimate historical and phonological relatedness, and of the fundamental (prefix) + root + (suffix) structure that underlay them in the parent Common Eldarin language. For Quenya, there is an inventory of the rich set of derivational endings inherited from Common Eldarin; a large set of case endings in the noun (e.g., nominative, old accusative, genitive, instrumental), including a variety of adverbial cases (e.g., locative, allative, ablative), in four numbers (singular, a remnant dual, and two plurals), indicating the influence of Latin and Finnish on this highlyinflected language. There is a list of adjectives showing number agreement; an incomplete personal pronominal system (with well-attested first singular and plural, the latter with both inclusive and exclusive forms, but sketchy second and third persons), with both independent (emphatic) and verb-suffixed forms, subject, object, and possessive (the verb-suffixed pronouns contributing to the agglutinative aspect of Quenya), as well as interrogative and deictic pronouns. There are verbs in two moods, active and imperative, with at least four tenses (present, past, past perfect, and future). For Sindarin, there was considerable evidence showing the influence of Welsh, particularly in its phonological development, in its i-affection plural formations (e.g. adan ‘man,’ pl. edain; annon ‘gate, door,’ pl. ennyn, etc.), and in the role of lenition not only in the formation of compounds and after certain grammatical forms of the definite article, but also in the suspicion (if not then demonstrable from the meager evidence) of its playing a function in grammar. It was recognized that Sindarin was also like Welsh in being considerably less inflected and more prepositional that Quenya. The definite article exhibited distinct singular and plural forms as well as case inflection. Nouns exhibited both singular and i-affection plural forms, as well as group plurals with various endings; adjectives also exhibited i-affection plural forms. The pronominal system was even more sketchy than that for Quenya, confined to first singular (with various propositional forms, again à la Welsh), a second singular form obviously borrowed from Quenya, and tentative (though in the event correct) third plural demonstrative forms. The syntactic role of word-order in genitival/possessive constructions (e.g. Ennyn Durin ‘Doors [of] Durin,’ Aran Moria ‘Lord [of] Moria’) was recognized. Verbs were evidenced in two moods, active and imperative, and three tenses, present, past, and future, with participial forms in the present and past. In addition to this strictly linguistic approach to studying and describing Tolkien’s languages, both An Introduction to Elvish and the journals of the time featured occasional examples of what might be considered applied Tolkienian linguistics, by way of original translations into Quenya and Sindarin—or, more accurately, and necessarily given the paucity of actual data, into theoretical or outright speculative forms of those languages, supplemented in lexicon and grammar by extrapolation from 7

Carl F. Hostetter attested forms and grammar. It is noteworthy and laudable that there was then and is still a strong resistance to employing outright invention of new roots and grammatical markers, and a strong expectation that the elements of any coined forms must all have some discernible connection with attested elements, however tenuous.16 Considering the severe paucity of data and information from which its contributors had to draw, An Introduction to Elvish represents a truly remarkable achievement, unrivalled in its originality and impact on the field before or since, a testament to the scholarly rigor, practices, and linguistic knowledge brought and applied by its contributors to the study of Tolkien’s languages, and, because of this, still standing as the model of and best introduction to the principles, methodologies, and sound scholarly practices of Tolkienian linguistics. While much more detail, scope and refinement has since been added to our knowledge of Tolkien’s languages, this has mostly supplemented rather than supplanted the phonological and grammatical categories and descriptions in the book, and this new knowledge has all been added to the core theoretical, methodological, historical and linguistic framework discerned and erected by all those whose work contributed to the achievement of An Introduction to Elvish. Second Interlude—The Languages of Tolkien’s Middle-earth Alas, nothing of the kind can be said of the book that appeared two years later, in 1980, and that remains to date the far more well-known and readily available of the two: Ruth S. Noel’s The Languages of Tolkien’s Middle-earth. Unlike An Introduction to Elvish, Ms. Noel was able to make use of the extensive additional information found in The Silmarillion, but her book derives no benefit from this additional material, nor indeed from most of the information provided by Tolkien in earlier published works. There is in fact virtually no discernible linguistic methodology in the book, and only the briefest mention of the phonological development of the two main Elvish languages or of their phonological relationship to each other. Ms. Noel was unable even to reliably distinguish between Quenya and Sindarin words in the book’s “Tolkien Dictionary.” The brief grammar of the two chief Elvish languages is facile and error-ridden: for example, in the treatment of the Quenya verb, present and perfect tenses are lumped together (despite obvious structural differences), and an unattested imperative formation in -e is invented for the language, while actual imperative forms are misidentified as present tense. To give the book its due, it should be noted that Ms. Noel’s discussion of the Old English element in Hobbit and Rohanese names is good, and her discussion of the tengwar is serviceable (though not nearly as thorough or complete as that in the earlier volume). Still, the best thing that can be said about the book is that, being put out by a major publisher (unlike 8

Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years An Introduction to Elvish), it was in the pre-Internet era by far the most readily accessible means by which new Tolkien-language enthusiasts and scholars could learn that there were like-minded others out there, and so nurture the interest. But no one should rely on this book for information concerning the Elvish languages. Third Stage—Conceptionists and Unifists The years immediately following the publication of An Introduction to Elvish were, at least so far as can be judged by publication of the principle journals of Tolkienian linguistics, a time of pause and reflection. Jim Allan’s Tolkien Language Notes ceased publication, having fulfilled its purpose, and Parma Eldalamberon would not appear again until 1983. Apparently, having made the seminal contribution to the scholarly study of Tolkien’s languages, and established its theoretical framework, the group of American scholars that brought it to fruition needed to take a break. In Britain, however, the publication in rapid succession of both The Silmarillion and An Introduction to Elvish sparked sufficient interest in linguistically minded members of the Tolkien Society for them to found their own Linguistic Fellowship, and inaugurate their own linguistic bulletin, Quettar (Quenya, ‘Words’), in 1980, originally edited by Susan Rule, subsequently by others, including David Doughan, and most recently by Julian Bradfield. In general, Quettar became for a time the de facto heir of the first stage of Tolkienian linguistics that culminated in An Introduction to Elvish and of the scholarly practices established by it and Parma Eldalamberon: namely, citation of evidence, attention to phonological detail, justification of phonological and morphological claims by examples from attested evidence, and so forth. A particular focus in the early years on the tengwar, especially with regard to phonemic modes thereof, soon won for it the honor of publishing the first known charts by Tolkien of the tengwar numerals, which were transcribed and sent to the editor by Christopher Tolkien.17 Also of note in the first years of Quettar is the ease with which the new linguistic data and information provided by, first, The Silmarillion, and then Unfinished Tales (1980) and The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (1981) were worked into the descriptive and methodological framework that had been established. There was no grand revision or recapitulation of An Introduction to Elvish, nor was one necessary, since the new information in those volumes tended mostly to fit within the framework it had established, and to support, refine, or expand upon the inferences drawn from the earlier information, rather than to supplant them. In part, this was due to the empirical and descriptive framework, which of its nature included the flexibility to accommodate new information and to refine previous theories; but it was also due to the fact that the Elvish language element in these new publications was in or taken from 9

Carl F. Hostetter writings post-dating the completion of The Lord of the Rings, and so was apparently, or at any rate arguably, of a piece with the material in The Lord of the Rings. Indeed, there had long since arisen and still persisted at that time the implicit notion that Quenya and Sindarin were essentially sprung fully-formed from Tolkien’s mind: that is, that the phonology, grammar, and lexicon of Tolkien’s languages were fixed by him at whatever time they were first invented, and that the glimpses of them afforded by his writings as then published showed the languages as they were at their invention and had been ever since.18 But in fact, already by this time there had been several indications that Tolkien’s languages were far from fixed, at any time, either before or after the publication of The Lord of the Rings. For example, changes were made by Tolkien to some of the Quenya speech in the revised edition of The Lord of the Rings that appeared in 1965: thus, where in the first edition Frodo’s greeting of Gildor in Woody-end reads: “Elen síla lúmenn’ omentielmo” (‘A star shines on the hour of our meeting’), in the second edition the last word was revised to omentielvo. Tolkien offered a storyinternal explanation for this change as correcting a mistake on Frodo’s part, who had failed to correctly observe the Elvish distinction in the first person plural pronominal ending between “we” inclusive of the person addressed, i.e., ‘you and I’ (-lve, here in genitive form -lvo ‘of our’) and “we” exclusive of the person addressed, i.e., ‘these others and I’ (-lme, gen. -lmo); a mistake that Tolkien further explained as “generally made by mortals,” for whom Quenya was both a foreign and a dead tongue.19 But as we now know, the external explanation lies in the fact that in the years after the publication of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien had continued to change his languages, even in ways that conflicted with the published exemplars of those languages. Thus, when the first edition was published, -lme was indeed the first plural inclusive ending, and so was the correct ending at that time (the corresponding exclusive ending at that time was -mme). But in the course of Tolkien’s unceasing revisions of Quenya even after publication, -lme eventually came to be first plural exclusive, and -lve the inclusive form. Other early indications of the mutability of Tolkien’s languages appeared with the beginning of posthumous publications by and about Tolkien. For example, the 1976 publication of a selection from Tolkien’s Father Christmas Letters included a phrase in the “Arctic” language, which was in fact an example of Quenya (or, as it was then spelled, Qenya) as it stood in 1929; and Humphrey Carpenter’s 1977 Biography of Tolkien quotes four lines from what appears to be the very first Quenya poem Tolkien wrote, “Narqelion” (‘Autumn’), dated 1915.20 At the time, however, it was impossible to say with any certainty whether or how much of the apparent strangeness of these earlier examples of Quenya was due to 10

Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years changes in the language itself, or simply to the known-to-be-incomplete state of knowledge of Quenya afforded by the limited nature of the published evidence. A seemingly even starker display of the degree to which later Quenya differed from earlier Qenya came in 1983, with the publication of Tolkien’s circa 1931 essay “A Secret Vice.” In this address Tolkien provided numerous examples of poems in each of the two main Elvish languages as they stood at that time, then called Qenya and Noldorin (though not named as such in the essay). Most notably here, in his editorial notes to the essay Christopher Tolkien provides two alternate versions of the Qenya poem “Oilima Markirya” (‘The Last Ark’) that occurs in the body of the essay. Thus, for the first time, Tolkienian linguists could compare three distinct versions of a Q(u)enya poem, two dating from circa 1931, and the third dating from much later, possibly as late as circa 1970, and thus from roughly twenty years before and twenty years after the completion of The Lord of the Rings, respectively; and it was obvious that the later version was indeed quite different from the two earlier versions. Some thereupon took the view that the two earlier versions demonstrated that earlier Qenya was essentially incompatible with later Quenya, and thus divided Quenya into two broad, distinct, and incompatible conceptual eras. The later version of “Oilima Markirya” and all Quenya material found in or written after The Lord of the Rings were grouped together as representing “Lord of the Rings-era Quenya,” and the two earlier versions, together with all the other poems in the essay and all Qenya material written before The Lord of the Rings, were assigned to “pre-Lord of the Rings Quenya.” Implicit in this division was the stance that “Lord of the Rings-era Quenya” was all of a piece, that Quenya had achieved a fixed, final form by the time Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings and was not thereafter subject to any substantial alteration; and the further stance that “pre-Lord of the Rings Qenya” was still experimental and imperfect by comparison, and had essentially no bearing on or importance to the features or understanding of later Quenya.21 Others however, noting that in matters of language difference does not necessarily equate to incompatibility, took the view that many of the differences among the three versions of “Oilima Markirya” could (and in the case of differences between the two earlier versions should) be explained as due, for example, to the differing narratorial perspectives (varying among present, past, and future tenses), differing poetical modes and constraints, and differing choices from among at least potentially co-existent synonyms and grammatical markers: in short, that the differences among these poems were not necessarily any more indicative of linguistic incompatibility than would be, say, variations among three different English translations or retellings of The Iliad. 11

Carl F. Hostetter The first viewpoint came eventually to be called “Conceptionist,” for its presumption that apparent differences of “pre-Lord of the Rings” Qenya, Noldorin, and Goldogrin with what was known (or thought to be known) of “Lord of the Rings-era” Quenya and Sindarin represented a fundamental change in and revision of Tolkien’s conception of those languages—in the extreme formulation, an irreconcilable conceptual rift and discontinuity, such that the earlier material had been completely rejected by Tolkien and had essentially no bearing on “final-form” Quenya and Sindarin of the later era. The second, contrary, viewpoint came to be called “Unifist,” for its insistence that while Q(u)enya and Goldogrin/ Noldorin/Sindarin undoubtedly underwent changes over the nearly sixty years that Tolkien thought and wrote about them, nonetheless the presumption should be that earlier exemplars could at least theoretically be unified with and thus have bearing on later exemplars, 22 in the absence of compelling evidence of incompatibility.23 Also in 1983, on the eve of the publication of “A Secret Vice” and so of the beginning of the “Conceptionist” vs. “Unifist” division in approach to Tolkien’s languages, Parma Eldalamberon resumed publication, under the new editorship of Christopher Gilson, a member of the first generation of Tolkienian linguists and a prominent contributor to An Introduction to Elvish and to the preceding scholarship from which it drew. Gilson soon established himself and eventually Parma Eldalamberon as the chief proponent of the “Unifist” viewpoint, while Quettar and its contributors tended to promote the “Conceptionist” viewpoint. This division established and defined itself, and then deepened, beginning with the publication of the first substantial materials from the very earliest stages of Tolkien’s creation of the two chief Elvish languages (then called Qenya and Goldogrin or Gnomish) in the two parts of The Book of Lost Tales (1983, 1984); continuing and strengthening through the publication of The Lost Road (1987), which featured Tolkien’s own extensive Elvish Etymologies of circa 1937, and the three-and-a-half volumes of the sub-series of “The History of The Lord of the Rings” (1988–90), which contained variant versions of much of the Elvish language element in The Lord of the Rings itself. So it was that in 1988, in respective issues of Quettar and Parma Eldalamberon, a chief “Conceptionist” could declare the grammar of Qenya as exhibited in the materials published in The Lost Road to be impossible to reconcile with “Lord of the Rings-era” Quenya, and that the best that could be done with Tolkien’s Etymologies was to mine it for new vocabulary (Quettar 33, p. 12); while the chief “Unifist” offered a poem composed of a deliberate and enthusiastic admixture of forms from the Goldogrin of the “Gnomish Lexicon” of 1917, the Noldorin of The Etymologies of circa 1937, and the Sindarin of The Lord of the Rings and beyond, set into Sindarin grammar, imagined as representing what a 12

Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years Sindarin poet who had sojourned with speakers of both Goldogrin and Noldorin might compose, and cast on the linguistic model of a Middle English poem with native forms in admixture with Danish and French borrowings (“Im Naitho,” Parma Eldalamberon 7, pp. 3–12, 31).24 The debate reached its peak in a series of exchanges in Quettar through 1990, chiefly between Christopher Gilson and Tom Loback for the “Unifists” and Craig Marnock for the “Conceptionists.” At this point, Tolkienian linguistics (at least for a time) settled into the consensus attitude that, while it was clear that Tolkien’s languages had indeed changed over time, certainly in the details of their phonological development and doubtless in their grammar, it was important not to decide hastily that every (apparent) difference in grammar necessarily represented an incompatibility, nor to declare that every earlier form or feature not evidenced in later writings had been rejected. It was recognized that grammatical differences might in fact only be apparent, due to the inherently multiexpressive nature of natural languages, and to the inherently limited and selective nature of the grammar of the languages as derivable and inferable from the fundamentally literary works that contained the bulk of the data for the later forms of the languages. In short, it was established that the mere fact that a form or feature is not evidenced in later writings does not in itself establish that it did not persist into later conceptual stages, if only implicitly (the absence of evidence logically not being equivalent to proof of absence).25 While this debate still raged, in 1988, the resumption of publication of Parma Eldalamberon spurred Jorge Quiñónez, a newcomer to Tolkienian linguistics, to propose to the Mythopoeic Society that its linguistic special interest group be reconstituted, and the first, impromptu meeting of the newly-minted Elvish Linguistic Fellowship was held at Mythcon XIX in August of that year. The inaugural issue of Vinyar Tengwar (Quenya, ‘News Letters’), edited by Quiñónez, was published for the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship the following month. Among the founding members listed in that first issue (all eight of them) were: Arden Smith, another newcomer, who brought a particular focus on the tengwar and the cirth;26 Christopher Gilson and Bill Welden, both members of the first generation of Tolkienian linguists and contributors to An Introduction to Elvish; Tom Loback, whose particular interest lay in nomenclature;27 Patrick Wynne, who had been contributing linguistic commentary to Mythlore and to Nancy Martsch’s Beyond Bree for five years; and Paul Nolan Hyde, who was compiling a computer index and database of Elvish, and had been writing a column on Middle-earth linguistics for Mythlore for six years.

13

Carl F. Hostetter Third Interlude—Courses, Columns, and Lexicons In March 1981 appeared the first issue of Beyond Bree, the monthly newsletter of Mensa’s Tolkien Special Interest Group, founded, edited, and published by Nancy Martsch. Martsch had at that time already made a long study of Tolkien’s invented languages, and her interest in this study was brought to the fore in Beyond Bree in the second issue (April, 1981), which features her own Sindarin translation, in tengwar transliteration and set to music, of Thomas Moore’s “Bendemeer’s Stream.”28 While remaining a generalist Tolkien newsletter, Beyond Bree would thereafter feature occasional articles on Tolkien’s languages, and became, due to the hiatus in Parma Eldalamberon, the chief American publication to offer a forum for discussion of Tolkienian linguistics, with contributions not only from Martsch but from such other notables of the field as Patrick Wynne, Taum Santoski, Tom Loback, and Christopher Gilson. The most important legacy of Beyond Bree for Tolkienian linguistics, though, is unquestionably Nancy Martsch’s own Basic Quenya, a graded course of tutorial self-instruction in Quenya that began in the August, 1988 issue of Beyond Bree and was serialized thereafter in 21 installments through June, 1990 (and was later collected), and in conjunction with which the aforementioned “Plotz Declension” was first officially published, in the March, 1989 issue. The Quenya presented in this primer is, however, very much, and admittedly, a selective and simplified version,29 a natural result of Martsch’s policy of basing the grammar she presents solely on the material Tolkien published in his lifetime. It is interesting to note that Basic Quenya (by choice) and An Introduction to Elvish (by necessity) together provide a solid summary of the forms and grammar of Quenya and Sindarin that can be directly deduced or inferred solely from The Lord of the Rings and the handful of contemporary publications: a perspective that can in turn be compared with what has subsequently been deduced, or at any rate claimed, about Quenya and Sindarin “of The Lord of the Rings era” on the basis of posthumous publications. Meanwhile, in Mythlore 33, published in the autumn of 1982, Paul Nolan Hyde inaugurated Quenti Lambardillion (Quenya, apparently for ‘Tales of the Language Enthusiasts’), a column on Middle-earth linguistics that ran through 1992. Hyde carried out this column in conjunction with the compilation of a large, detailed database and index of all attested Eldarin words in the corpus, which itself was begun in conjunction with his doctoral dissertation. Hyde continued this work through the publication of The Return of the Shadow in 1988, thereby incorporating within his database the whole lexical content of what were then the fullest presentations of Tolkien’s own lexicons of his Elvish languages, from the earliest Qenya and Gnomish Lexicons through the circa 1937 Etymologies, 14

Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years as presented by Christopher Tolkien in the two-part Book of Lost Tales and The Lost Road and Other Writings in his History of Middle-earth series. From this database was derived a massive, privately published series of comprehensive glossaries and indices, including the seven-volume Working Tolkien Glossary (1989), and the startlingly useful Working Reverse Dictionary (also 1989).30 All of these works were especially valuable to scholars as a means of navigating the vastly increased corpus of Tolkien’s languages provided by the first half of The History of Middle-earth series, which arose and was largely completed before widespread access to and use of the World Wide Web as a means of compiling and sharing computersearchable wordlists of Tolkien’s languages.31 Hyde also put this database to use in the service of—at times highly unlikely—explications of Tolkien’s invented lexicon and Elvish compositions, particularly of the published exemplars of Elvish poetry. This database-driven analysis was based upon a highly idiosyncratic approach that analyzed each Elvish word as a sequence of semantic units that were not infrequently isolated without regard to actual morpheme boundaries as determined by a word’s actual etymology, and in which sounds could be freely added to or subtracted from to match other attested words and morphemes, sometimes with the same sounds counted as simultaneously belonging to two of these supposed morphemes. By searching for these sequences with his database, Hyde would find and list the meanings associated in that database with these putative morphemes and then collect and correlate these meanings together to form a putative “literal” translation for the word (often having little or nothing in common with Tolkien’s own glosses, where available). Thus, for example, Hyde analyzed the word omentie, glossed by Tolkien as ‘meeting,’ as containing the morphemes om(a) ‘voice’ + (m)en ‘region’ + tie ‘road’—all indeed independently attested as such in their unelided form, but clearly requiring a linguistically absurd level of mutability and compaction to fit them into Hyde’s scheme—and gave it the “literal” translation ‘region of the voice-road’: a far cry from Tolkien’s own gloss.32 The word is in fact far more readily and plausibly analyzable, in accordance with Tolkien’s own translation and with attested morphemes, stem-structure, and patterns of derivation in Quenya, as containing prefix o- ‘together’ + men- ‘go’ + tie ‘path, road’; or even o- + ment- ‘go’ + gerundial/infinitival -ie ‘-ing’; thus, ‘going together (of paths), meeting.’ Hyde defended this approach with an appeal to polysemy, claiming that Tolkien’s words could and did have multiple meanings, and were intended to convey those meanings by juxtaposition and impressionistic agglomeration of sometimes quite disparate units of sub-meaning; but both the frequently strained results of this approach and its inherently subjective nature failed to convince others of its validity. 15

Carl F. Hostetter Despite this methodology, many of Hyde’s analyses were nonetheless sound, and the column served as an additional forum for the discussion of Tolkien’s languages, eliciting comments from a number of other scholars of the day. Hyde also published therein, for the first time, the complete text of the earliest extant Qenya poem, “Narqelion” (Mythlore 56, Winter 1988),33 and (in facsimile) an early chart of the “Gondolinic Runes” (Mythlore 69, Summer 1992), both provided to him by Christopher Tolkien. Fourth Interlude—VT, Myself, and I When Jorge Quiñónez launched the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship and Vinyar Tengwar, and when I (effectively) took over as editor with issue 8 (November 1989), Tolkienian linguistics, at least as represented in published writings, was largely divided among two groups, distributed both geographically and according to “side” in the Conceptionist/Unifist debate. In America, the Unifist cause was firmly represented by Christopher Gilson as editor of Parma Eldalamberon, and in correspondence to Quettar, together with prominent contributors Tom Loback, Bill Welden, and Patrick Wynne. In Britain, Quettar, under the new editorship of Julian Bradfield, who took over the reins from David Doughan with issue 38 (December 1989), presided over the final grappling and resolution of that debate, with Craig Marnock carrying the Conceptionist banner. Vinyar Tengwar, and thus in short order I, entered into this situation rather tangentially, initially because Vinyar Tengwar began chiefly as a society newsletter (hence its name) rather than as a journal, and then because I had not myself participated in the debate, and so was quite content to let the matter play out elsewhere.34 For my own part, both before becoming editor, and increasingly after, my interest in Tolkien’s languages was primarily analytical. It lay chiefly in the phonological development of and relationships among the languages, and in the etymology of individual forms, so far as those could be determined or inferred from Tolkien’s own writings; as well as in exploring the possible fictive relationships Tolkien intended the words and grammatical devices of his languages of Middle-earth to exhibit or suggest with those of primary-world (particularly Indo-European) languages.35 I have also attempted to present detailed etymological and grammatical analyses of Tolkien’s own compositions in his languages,36 as they appeared in successive volumes of The History of Middle-earth and then in Parma Eldalamberon and in Vinyar Tengwar itself as my colleagues and I began to present new, previously unpublished linguistic writings collected from the various Tolkien archives.37 I (and thus Vinyar Tengwar) became more concerned with simply analyzing and describing Tolkien’s languages, through all the stages of their internal and external development, and far less concerned with attempts to use 16

Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years them in writing, and not at all concerned to unify or systematize them; and so remained largely unconcerned with the matters at the heart of the “Conceptionist” vs. “Unifist” debate. Fifth Interlude—Elves in Cyberspace In November 1990, Tolkienian linguistics (broadly speaking) made its first substantial foray into the then-still-fledgling Internet, with the launch by Quettar editor Julian Bradfield of TolkLang, the first e-mail list devoted to the discussion of Tolkien’s languages. For nearly eight years TolkLang would remain by far the most active on-line forum for discussion of Tolkien’s languages, serving as an important adjunct to Quettar and the other print journals, as a forum for commentary on the ongoing publication of The History of Middle-earth, and as a vehicle for publication of original scholarship in its own right. Particularly in its earlier years, TolkLang continued the sorts of linguistic discussions that had been featured in Quettar, tending towards focused discussions of particular points of phonology and grammar, and tending to continue the essential scholarly practices of Tolkienian linguistics that had been established over the previous decades. As an e-mail based forum, TolkLang offered an immediacy of discussion that print publications could never hope to provide; and as the reach and availability of the Internet expanded exponentially, it served increasingly as the chief means by which people around the world discovered and joined the larger community of fellow scholars and enthusiasts of Tolkien’s languages. Indeed, the immediacy and widening accessibility of TolkLang as a discussion forum, and the consequent attraction of much activity to itself, appears to account for the fact that Quettar began to appear less frequently, as its readers and contributors came more and more to focus their activity on TolkLang, until, following the publication of issue 49 in March 1995, Quettar went into a suspension that persists today.38 Fourth Stage—Scholars and Speakers; or, Elvish and Neo-Elvish TolkLang also served as the staging ground, in February 1992, for the first comprehensive attempt, made by Anthony Appleyard, to systematize Quenya grammar in light of the new information published in The History of Middle-earth, particularly The Etymologies, in his article “Quenya Grammar Reexamined.” This work is chiefly a summation of the published evidence for Quenya grammar (at various conceptual stages) up to that time, and a presentation of the various grammatical categories in Quenya as Appleyard delineated them, in the form of paradigms assembled both from forms taken from sometimes widely separated conceptual

17

Carl F. Hostetter stages of Quenya and from his own hypothetical constructions, together with not a few attempts to explain attested forms not fitting into these paradigms as errors on Tolkien’s part. This work is now chiefly noteworthy as an early exemplification and useful summation of a set of attitudes and approaches to Tolkien’s languages arising at that time and in many ways still dominating the discussion of Tolkien’s languages in various Internet forums. First, there is a concern to assign a label and (single) function to all attested (or supposed) grammatical inflections (resulting, e.g., in such names as “respective” and “dedative” being applied, and still today, to noun cases nowhere so named by Tolkien himself). Second, there is a concomitant concern to “fill in gaps” in the grammar (real or supposed, and often arising ultimately from expectations due to English or Latin grammar, not Elvish). Third is a preoccupation with avoiding (supposed) “clashes” and “ambiguities” in forms and functions.39 Fourth is a ready willingness to reject or even ascribe to authorial error forms not fitting with preconceived notions of phonology and grammar, or with personal judgments as to linguistic logic and parsimony. Fifth is a promotion of the “completion,” “extension,” and use of Tolkien’s languages through the creation of new forms from existing materials; combined with, sixth, ready rejection, as “obsolete,” of words and formations attested only in earlier writings, in favor of different forms in later writings having the same or similar meanings. This is accompanied nonetheless by, seventh, a marked conflativeness, that is, the ready incorporation of forms, from whatever conceptual stage (though very frequently from the 1930s), deemed “needed” or “useful.” The impetus behind all these attitudes and approaches is the desire to be able to “speak Elvish,” that is, to so define and “complete” Tolkien’s invented Elvish languages as to make them usable in translations and in conversation. The application of these approaches, however, results in synthesized forms of Quenya and Sindarin not actually found anywhere in Tolkien’s own writings, and defined ultimately not by Tolkien’s own linguistic and aesthetic views, but rather by the synthesizer’s own selection from across the decades of Tolkien’s linguistic writings and conceptions, and so ultimately by his own—not Tolkien’s—notions of linguistic expedience, completeness, compatibility, clarity, and utility. These synthetic, conflative, utilitarian, and idiosyncratic attitudes and approaches to Tolkien’s languages would achieve their fullest and most influential expression later and elsewhere on the Internet, in the work of two other prominent members of TolkLang, Helge Fauskanger and David Salo, beginning with the launch of Fauskanger’s web site, Ardalambion (‘Of the Tongues of Arda’), in May 1997.40 The stated intent of Ardalambion was to provide “updated standard descriptions of Tolkien’s languages,” particularly of Quenya and Sindarin. The great obstacle to 18

Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years this intent is that Tolkien himself never settled upon a single, “standard” form of any of his languages, least of all of Quenya and Sindarin, both of which he continued to alter remarkably freely long after the publication of The Lord of the Rings. Moreover, the amount of data attested for Quenya and Sindarin, proper, even when joining that found in The Lord of the Rings with that found in all of Tolkien’s subsequent writings, pales in comparison with that attested for Qenya and Noldorin of The Etymologies from nearly two decades earlier (circa 1937). Entire formation classes, even of such basic categories as verb tenses, found in Qenya and Noldorin are barely, and sometimes not at all, attested in those later writings, and to a lesser extent vice versa. A descriptive linguistic approach to this situation would be to provide a separate account and linguistic description of each of the various conceptual stages of the languages, derived only from the evidence attested for each stage: so, for example, a linguistic description of Goldogrin as attested in the “Gnomish Lexicon” (circa 1917), and one of Noldorin as attested in The Etymologies (circa 1937), and one of Sindarin as attested in The Lord of the Rings (1954–55), and another still of Sindarin as attested in, say, the essay “Quendi and Eldar” (circa 1960). Such descriptions would make use of and account for all of the evidence attested at each stage (and only that evidence), and would provide a sound basis for exploration of both the similarities and the differences among all these stages, providing insight both into what features of the language, and thus of Tolkien’s particular aesthetic in that language, stayed more or less constant, and which reflect changes in Tolkien’s aesthetic over time. Fauskanger and Salo, however, opted instead for a continuation of the synthetic and conflative approach to Quenya and Sindarin, which quite apart from producing descriptions of Quenya and Sindarin as Tolkien himself conceived of them at any point, instead seeks to cobble together a single, synthetic version of each of those languages from materials spanning more than thirty years of conceptual shifts in the languages. To the extent they achieve this on Ardalambion, they do so only by imposing consistency on those materials through selecting, renaming, and even silently altering large numbers of forms and grammatical devices attested only in the earlier conceptual stages (chiefly in the Qenya and Noldorin of The Etymologies), and combining these with similar selections of materials from the later stages that Tolkien himself called Quenya and Sindarin, while ignoring, or even dismissing as erroneous, words and grammatical devices attested in those same stages that do not agree with their “standard descriptions” of Quenya and Sindarin. They even invent for their “standard descriptions” large numbers of forms and even entire formation classes that are not actually attested in Tolkien’s own writings, and in some cases contradict what Tolkien actually did write. 19

Carl F. Hostetter Indeed, one of the striking characteristics of Ardalambion is the large proportion of forms it gives, as supposed examples of various grammatical categories, that are in fact unattested in Tolkien’s own writings. Thus, for example, the account on Ardalambion of the Sindarin past tense verb41—which in fact rests almost entirely on Noldorin evidence, there being only four past-tense verbs as yet attested for Sindarin proper—not only makes no mention of fully one fourth of the actual Noldorin pasttense forms given in The Etymologies, but provides two lists of “Sindarin” past-tense verb forms42 in which there is only one actually attested form listed, the rest being entirely unattested, hypothetical forms constructed by Fauskanger or Salo. As another example, Ardalambion also at this writing still gives a form mudant as the past tense of the “Sindarin” verb-stem muda- ‘labor, toil.’ Now, one will not in fact find any verb-stem muda- in the attested evidence for Sindarin proper; instead, this form is, once again, taken from Etymologies, from the actually attested Noldorin form mudo. What is particularly noteworthy here, though, is that when looking at that entry in Etymologies, one sees that the past tense form of this verb is not in fact given as mudant, but instead as mudas; that is, with a past-tense marked by final -s instead of final -nt. Both Fauskanger and Salo originally justified this alteration by asserting that mudas was an obvious error (authorial or editorial), since there were no other attested past-tense verbs in -s,43 and moreover that if there were any such past-tense ending it would “obviously” cause “significant confusion” with the ending -s used (in part) to derive nouns from verb stems.44 However, the publication of a complete “Addenda and Corrigenda to The Etymologies”45 has since confirmed the reading mudas and provided several other examples of Noldorin pasttense verbs in -s, demonstrating not only that mudas was no error, but that Tolkien himself did not think such an ending caused “significant confusion” with the abstract noun formation. Fauskanger’s and Salo’s presentations of Quenya and Sindarin on Ardalambion thus do not derive solely from attempts to formulate theoretical descriptions that account for the entirety of existing data sets; rather, the evidence that they admit (or construct) for their “Quenya” and “Sindarin” is selected, altered, rejected, and even invented, in accordance with their preconceptions of “mature” Quenya and Sindarin and their notions of linguistic utility and acceptability. The controlling concern of Ardalambion (as of Appleyard’s work before it) is thus not simply to describe Tolkien’s languages, either at each conceptual stage or at any particular stage, nor to do so only as exemplified in Tolkien’s own writings: rather, it is to synthesize and provide single, “standard” versions of Quenya and Sindarin for use in writing and speaking. It is thus above all in pursuit of utilitarian, not descriptive, goals, and this overarching 20

Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years concern for utility, coupled with the noted tendency to explain away or otherwise discount (seemingly) unusual forms, has resulted in presentations of Quenya and Sindarin on Ardalambion that make Tolkien’s languages appear to be more regular, more rigid in forcing a one-to-one relation of form and function, less rich and complex in character and (apparent) history, in short, more artificial, than Tolkien ever constructed his languages to be. To be sure, Ardalambion is, despite these methodological shortcomings, a remarkable and impressive work, reflecting immense learning, labor, and passion for Tolkien’s languages. In its scope, detail, and presentation it is without question and by far the best and most comprehensive single introduction to Tolkien’s languages available today, in any form. But given its shortcomings, it must only be used as an introduction, not as a substitute for study and citation of Tolkien’s own writings, which in many places it fails to reflect accurately.46 The rise of such methodological practices as these, particularly in such works of deliberately scholarly form and presentation as Ardalambion, represented a marked departure from previous standards of scholarly practice in Tolkienian linguistics. Although it had not been uncommon to treat Qenya and Noldorin of The Etymologies as evidence for Quenya and Sindarin without remark on their actual status,47 it had not before been accepted practice to employ such wholesale (and all-too-often silent) invention of forms and entire paradigms and present them as though they were actual evidence for a linguistic description of Quenya and Sindarin. To be sure, some hypothesizing of forms had occurred, as for example in the discussion of Quenya pronouns in An Introduction to Elvish; but these were limited to a small number and to individual forms (not extending to the invention of entire formation classes), and carefully marked as hypothetical forms not actually attested. Such is not the case with Ardalambion, where it is often impossible for a reader not already intimately acquainted with the actual evidence in Tolkien’s writings to distinguish between attested forms and those supplied instead by Fauskanger and Salo. Prior practice had distinguished between Tolkien’s own creations and those of the theorist, and cited the sources for forms under discussion so that the reader could check them, and thus kept the reader in close contact with Tolkien’s own writings and linguistic views. Ardalambion however has had the effect of insinuating the views of its authors between Tolkien and the reader, as can readily be seen from the various Internet-based courses and forums that now routinely cite Ardalambion, rather than Tolkien’s own works, as their source and basis of evidence. Furthermore, Ardalambion appeared at a time when the publication of new, primary materials from Tolkien’s linguistic papers in Parma Eldalamberon and Vinyar Tengwar, including his own linguistic descriptions of 21

Carl F. Hostetter the various successive conceptual stages of his languages, had begun in earnest. With this it has become—and will continue to become—increasingly untenable to regard what Fauskanger has referred to as “mature” Quenya and “mature” Sindarin “of the Lord of the Rings era” either as fixed and monolithic, or as quite so completely equatable with Qenya and Noldorin of The Etymologies, as is assumed in the conflative stance, methodology and presentation adopted by Ardalambion. It has also become untenable to regard still earlier forms of Qenya, Goldogrin, and Noldorin as either inherently inferior, incomplete, or linguistically less sophisticated or interesting, or as having no relevance to the elucidation of the later conceptual stages—attitudes nonetheless (and still at this writing) quite strongly in evidence on Ardalambion and in numerous Internet forums following its lead. Thus it was that, with the increasing amount of utilitarian and “standardizing” activity on the Internet, particularly on TolkLang and the Ardalambion web site, in conjunction with (and increasingly in contradistinction to) the ongoing publication of new primary materials in and on Tolkien’s languages from numerous conceptual stages, there emerged a division among Tolkien language scholars and enthusiasts on even more fundamental “problems” presented by Tolkien’s languages than had concerned the “Conceptionists” and “Unifists”: namely, what are they, and what are we to do with them? That is, what is the nature of Tolkien’s linguistic invention, as a whole and in all its parts, and what is the purpose and end of studying it at all? This division was (and still is) framed by two related yet fundamentally different responses to these questions. On the one hand, there is the primarily descriptive and analytical response which views all of Tolkien’s languages, through all their conceptual versions and at each successive stage of their internal and external developments, as objects worthy of study and analysis in their own right, being each a product and exemplar of Tolkien’s own linguistic views, creativity, and shifting aesthetic; and maintains that the purpose of their study is to examine, understand, and explain, as fully as possible, just what it is that Tolkien created in his languages, the linguistic views and aesthetic that each stage represents, and the processes by which he created them, throughout and in consideration of the whole of both their primary- and secondary-world histories, and in relation to one another. On the other hand, there is the primarily utilitarian and synthetic response that the purpose is to take what Tolkien wrote and synthesize from all these more or less disparate materials—but with particular focus and emphasis on the later writings, as representing Tolkien’s “mature,” “final,” or “perfected” vision of his languages—a single, consistent, and “completed” form of (at least) the two chief Elvish tongues, so that it might one day be possible to use (these versions of) 22

Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years Quenya and Sindarin, or extensions of them, in something like casual and diurnal writing and speech.48 In short, those who concern themselves with Tolkien’s languages have come to fall into two main groups that can be characterized succinctly as scholars and speakers. One of the first practical effects of this division was the separation from TolkLang of such prominent would-be speakers of Quenya and Sindarin as Helge Fauskanger and David Salo, and others of like mind, to form their own Internet mailing list forum, Elfling, in September of 1998. Although the stated purpose of Elfling is scholarly and technical,49 and although it has indeed presented scholarly and technical posts at times, it has from the start been concerned greatly with promoting and facilitating the use of “mature” Quenya and Sindarin in writing and speech, specifically on the basis of the synthetic forms of Quenya and Sindarin presented on Ardalambion, which in the course of the debate have eventually come to be called “Neo-Quenya” and “Neo-Sindarin” (collectively, “Neo-Elvish”) in an effort to convey their status as deliberate post-Tolkien creations and to distinguish them from Tolkien’s own particular conceptions of those languages as actually attested. Indeed, historically Elfling has come increasingly to be dominated by would-be speakers and their attempts at translating into “Neo-Quenya” and “NeoSindarin,”50 particularly as the forum grew dramatically in membership and activity with the attention attracted to it by David Salo’s association with the Peter Jackson films. This is not however to say that the membership of the two groups, scholars and speakers, is or must be mutually exclusive. There has always been, and no doubt always will be, a very strong desire to “speak Elvish” among most of those who take more than a passing interest in the languages, and naturally so: both the scholarly and the utilitarian responses ultimately spring from the same motivation, namely, a sincere appreciation of Tolkien’s languages as both aesthetic and intellectual achievements; and so both responses ultimately entail both aesthetic and intellectual appreciation (if not in the same proportions). Certainly most of those who prefer to pursue a rigorously descriptive and analytical approach to Tolkien’s languages have at times offered their own translations into Elvish that inevitably rely on synthesis of and additions to Tolkien’s own conceptions and constructions;51 and certainly, the chief proponents of making “standard” and “usable” versions of Quenya and Sindarin are adept in historical and comparative linguistics, and (necessarily) build upon the results of the scholarship of Tolkien’s languages, to which they have themselves made contributions. Nonetheless, it is a fact that Tolkien himself was not concerned to make Quenya and Sindarin into either “complete” or “final” languages, or thus to make them usable by anyone other than himself for his own artistic purposes;52 and so any desire to 23

Carl F. Hostetter “complete” or to “speak Elvish” is certainly neither an intended nor a necessary response to Tolkien’s languages; nor is there any compelling reason to think that either “completion” or “usability” of these languages is even achievable.53 Nor is this to say that there is anything wrong, per se, with selecting and favoring one stage or another of Tolkien’s languages, or even multiple stages, as the basis for synthesizing “complete” or “usable” versions of Quenya and Sindarin. Anyone wishing to create such “post-Tolkien” versions of his languages is obviously free to decide what materials to use and how to use them in this effort. But I also hasten to note that such an endeavor, while (necessarily) not entirely disconnected from the scholarship on Tolkien’s languages, and while not without potential interest for the scholar, is nonetheless not itself part of scholarship, strictly speaking, any more than attempts to create a “complete” and “usable” form of, say, Gothic (or any other poorly-attested, dead language), would be counted as scholarship of that language, strictly speaking, for the simple reason that such exercises, no matter how clever or informed or elaborate, do not add to the body of knowledge of the language. The endeavor is entertaining, yes, and intellectually stimulating, certainly, and can even serve as an instructive exercise for students of the languages proper, if done with full care and consideration not to confuse the construct with the actually attested evidence and to keep in mind the limitations of translation into any poorly-attested, dead language.54 But it is not, strictly speaking, scholarship. The purpose of Tolkienian linguistics, proper, as a scholarly endeavor is, or at any rate in my mind should be, to understand and describe Tolkien’s languages, and his writings in and about those languages, in their own terms and as they actually are: namely, a large collection of successive historical grammars, lexicons, essays, and compositions presenting Tolkien’s own linguistic views and descriptions of the long series of conceptually differing yet contiguous and, throughout, thematically unified languages he produced, each stage of which represents a unique and individual language (and internal language history) as worthy of study as any other stage; and yet each of which grew from, maintains, and exhibits a continuity of form, theme, and context with preceding stages that far outweighs the differences among them, 55 and that, considered in relation to the whole history of these conceptual shifts, and particularly when considered in chronological sequence, exhibits areas of both remarkable stability and remarkable dynamics within and across the various flavors of Tolkien’s linguistic aesthetic, throughout his life. Unfortunately, the desire to “speak Elvish” has historically gone hand-in-hand with several attitudes that seek to diminish, blur, neglect, or even dismiss the individual character, nature, and worthiness for study of 24

Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years more than half of the records of Tolkien’s linguistic inventions,56 namely that preceding the publication of The Lord of the Rings.57 First is the attitude that anything written before the circa 1937 Etymologies is inherently inferior and essentially if not entirely alien to and has no bearing on what is labeled as “mature,” “perfected,” and/or “final form” Quenya and Sindarin “of the Lord of the Rings era,” and that anything in those materials, including not only the phonologies and grammatical devices but also the lexicons, that disagrees (or appears to disagree) with what is known (or thought to be known) of “mature” Quenya and Sindarin was simply rejected by Tolkien: that is, the extreme formulation of the “Conceptionist” view. Second is the attitude that the Qenya and Noldorin attested in The Etymologies are, save for a renaming and some minor tweaks here and there of phonology, for all practical purposes identical with “mature” Quenya and Sindarin, and can summarily be cited and referred to as Quenya and Sindarin: that is, that the (inferred) phonology and (attested) vocabulary and grammar of Qenya and Noldorin of the circa 1937 Etymologies can safely be regarded as essentially identical to, and silently conflated with, Quenya and Sindarin as conceived of by Tolkien some twenty years later in The Lord of the Rings and beyond. Third is the corollary attitude that Tolkien’s own writings on his languages, and even his own particular statements about their phonology and grammar, are worthy of consideration and evidentiary status only to the extent that they accord with what is already “known” about “mature” Quenya and Sindarin, or to the extent that they can be appropriated from, with any necessary (and all too often silent) manipulation or alteration, to supply or supplement the lexicon and grammar of “Neo-Quenya” and “NeoSindarin”—again, echoing some aspects of the extreme form of the “Conceptionist” view. In other words, Quenya and Sindarin, as thought of by would-be speakers, have become separate constructs, abstracted from Tolkien’s own constructions, intentions, and statements, to which can be added whatever parts of Tolkien’s numerous conceptualizations of those language flavors are deemed useful and/or can be manipulated to be made “compatible” with this new, separate, “post-Tolkien” construct. In response to this encouraged neglect of the earlier stages of Tolkien’s own languages in favor of discussion and promotion of “Neo-Elvish,” and in an effort to encourage a return to more descriptive and analytical discussion of Tolkien’s languages, at all their stages, on the Internet, I launched a new e-mail discussion group, called Lambengolmor (Quenya, ‘Loremasters of Tongues’) at the end of May, 2002. Lambengolmor is by design and moderation strictly scholarly and much more rigorous, considered, and technical than Elfling, but nonetheless has at this writing attracted a membership of over 900 and logged nearly 1000 posts, virtu25

Carl F. Hostetter ally every one of which is focused on some descriptive or analytical point or problem of Tolkienian linguistics, strictly as exemplified in Tolkien’s own writings. Encouraged by the success of Lambengolmor, and in recognition of the need for an adjunct forum of the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship in which longer analytical works unsuited to the e-mail format of Lambengolmor could be published (such as had formerly appeared in Parma Eldalamberon and Vinyar Tengwar, which had of necessity become reserved for the publication of new, primary materials from Tolkien’s manuscripts), and in order to further encourage the scholarly and linguistic discussion of Tolkien’s languages at all their conceptual stages, in December 2003 Patrick Wynne and I launched Tengwestië (Quenya, ‘Language’) as a new, online journal of the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship. Tengwestië has seen the publication of considerable descriptive work on aspects of both Goldogrin and of the Noldorin of The Etymologies that had previously been either wholly neglected (in the case of Goldogrin) or (in the case of Noldorin) presented only partially and in forms assimilated to and represented as Sindarin; and it has encouraged similarly precise, scholarly, and more purely descriptive approaches to Tolkien’s languages elsewhere on the Internet,58 resulting even in a widening recognition of the true nature of Tolkien’s languages in forums previously focused solely on “Neo-Elvish” and engaging Elvish only through the mediation of Ardalambion. Sixth Interlude—A Gateway to Sindarin Late in 2004, David Salo published his long-expected book, A Gateway to Sindarin. As with his previous work on Sindarin presented in Ardalambion, Salo’s Gateway clearly reflects long study and immense labor, all presented in an even more impressively technical and scholarly form, in the tradition of detailed historical grammars: an opening historical sketch, followed by a lengthy and seemingly exhaustive historical phonology, giving Salo’s sequenced account of each and every systematic sound change over the course of the development of Sindarin from its Common Eldarin source, and then his discussion of the morphology and derivation of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, compounds, etc., followed by a syntax of the (all too few) attested sentence types of Sindarin, an analysis of the grammar of the extant Sindarin texts, and extensive etymological glossaries of the forms encountered in the text. Unfortunately, while Gateway thus certainly has the appearance of a strictly scholarly and descriptive grammar of Tolkien’s Sindarin (and is described as such in the opening sentence of the book), to anyone with an intimate acquaintance with Tolkien’s own linguistic writings, it quickly becomes obvious—again, as with Salo’s previous work in Ardalambion—that this appearance is deceiving. As expected, Salo’s presentation 26

Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years of Sindarin relies heavily on materials taken and sometimes altered in form from their true source in the Noldorin of The Etymologies, but Salo makes the fact of this plain in the introduction, so (arguably at least) fair enough from a theoretical standpoint. What was not expected in such a deliberately scholarly work is the degree to which Salo alters—most often completely silently—Tolkien’s own glosses and explanations of the Noldorin and Sindarin forms Salo cites,59 and even the forms and grammar of the actual Sindarin exemplars he quotes from Tolkien’s writings. A particularly telling example occurs in Salo’s analysis of Tolkien’s partial translation of the Lord’s Prayer into Sindarin (proper).60 Where Tolkien’s text reads: caro den i innas lin bo Ceven (translating ‘thy will be done on Earth’), Salo gives (p. 231): caro den i innas lín bo Geven; that is, Salo has altered the word Ceven to Geven. Nor is this alteration simply an innocent typographical error: Salo writes (231) that his bo Geven ‘on Earth’ “actually seems to be written bo Ceven in the text, but since the preposition [bo ‘on’] seems to have originally ended in a vowel . . . a soft mutation c > g is to be expected here.”61 What is so remarkable here is Salo’s plain willingness to alter what Tolkien actually wrote, i.e., the actual data for Sindarin, solely in order to make it fit his theories. A work of purely descriptive linguistic scholarship, such as Salo presents his Gateway as being, could (and would) note, first, that Ceven is a concrete noun (‘earth’) capitalized as a proper name (‘Earth’); and second, that elsewhere in the same text, indeed in the same line, we have another example of a concrete noun (menel ‘the heavens’) likewise capitalized as a proper name (‘Heaven’) and following a preposition ending in a vowel, that also does not show lenition: sui vi Menel ‘as it is in Heaven.’ This should immediately suggest that even if it is true as theorized that, in general, objects immediately following prepositions ending in vowels show lenition, it may well be that such concrete nouns used as proper names resist this mutation, and further that the resulting markedness of such concrete nouns in this syntactic position may have been selected and maintained in the historical development of Sindarin precisely because it marked them as proper names.62 Salo’s Gateway to Sindarin, however, despite its appearance and his assurances, is not such a work, and this is not an isolated example: throughout, Salo repeatedly demonstrates a willingness to set the theoretical cart before the evidentiary horse, even to the extent of altering the data to fit his theories. As such, A Gateway to Sindarin is thoroughly unreliable, and effectively unusable, either as a work of scholarship or of reference, which probably accounts for the almost complete lack of citation of the work, even in such Internet forums as Elfling and works like Ardalambion already heavily inclined towards the synthetic approach to Tolkien’s languages.63

27

Carl F. Hostetter Conclusion—Fifty Years On and Onward In Stockholm in August 2005 was held Omentielva Minya (Quenya, ‘Our First Meeting’), the first of a new biennial series of International Conferences on J.R.R. Tolkien’s Invented Languages, inaugurated by Bill Welden and Anders Stenström. It was a most fitting means of marking the conclusion of the first fifty years of Tolkienian linguistics, which had over the course of those five decades grown from an endeavor engaged in privately or in small correspondence to one that now attracts thousands of readers to numerous journals, publications, and discussion forums, both in print and online, in languages and with participants from around the globe. It had weathered and yet thrived through two major divisions of attitude and approach in response to continuing publication of new primary materials that challenged long and deeply held views of what Tolkien’s languages are, what he intended for them, and what our response to them should be. And it had been given the privilege of publishing still more new primary materials from Tolkien’s manuscript archives in its journals. Much of this history and activity was reflected in the programme of Omentielva Minya and in the discussions among its participants. With the promise of further Omentielvar, continued publication of several journals, numerous active Internet discussion forums and websites, and the ongoing publication Tolkien’s linguistic writings, interest in the study of Tolkien’s languages and opportunities to contribute to our knowledge of them abound. There is a huge amount of material already available that has yet to be analyzed or described systematically. The phonology, morphology, and grammar evidenced in and inferable from Tolkien’s two earliest lexicons, of Qenya and Goldogrin, which are also by far the largest lexicons of any of his invented languages at any stage, have only just begun to be described, having for years been subject to encouraged neglect. And even the much-regarded Etymologies have yet to be fully analyzed and described on their own terms (rather than as sources for materials to be fitted into “Neo-Quenya” and “Neo-Sindarin”). But already such work as has been done with these materials in a manner that respects their integrity and individual status—for example, Patrick Wynne’s formal classifications of the “Goldogrin Past Tense,” my own of “The Past-Tense Verb in the Noldorin of the Etymologies,” Bertrand Bellet’s of “Noldorin Plurals in the Etymologies” and Thorsten Renk’s analysis of “Instensifying Prefixes in the Etymologies” (all published in Tengwestië)— has not only added to our knowledge of those languages, but has shed new light even on later stages—for example, resulting in modifications to the “standard view” of the Sindarin verb, which had arisen on and been widely adopted from Ardalambion.64 And this just scratches the surface of 28

Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years material already available, some of it for nearly two decades now. In short, there is already a great deal of very interesting work to be done with already available materials—interesting, that is, to the linguistically minded. For my own part, I mean to continue to do what I can to encourage and facilitate such work, even as my fellow editors of Tolkien’s linguistic papers and I continue our work, creating ever more opportunities for study, exploration, and new scholarship on the nature, history, and conceptual development of all of Tolkien’s languages. NOTES 1

The recent movies now provide this entrée for many who saw the movie before reading the book—if in fact they read the book at all.

2

Worse, some printings of the immensely popular Ballantine paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings gave the Ring-inscription upsidedown. My colleague Nancy Martsch had one of these when she first attempted to decipher the tengwar. It is a testament to her ingenuity and tenacity that she actually worked out a system for inverted tengwar that corresponded to the Black-speech on the Ring.

3

This compression was necessitated, of course, first and foremost by the practical matter of available space in an already massive, threevolume book that threatened considerable financial loss to the publisher; and second, by the press of time, as the completion of the appendices was among the very last tasks undertaken by Tolkien prior to publication; and third, by the question of just how much linguistic detail a reader could be expected to be interested in.

4

Though Mr. Jeffery would not have known those names of the two chief Elvish languages, since they do not appear in the story at all, but occur only in the appendices, which were not published until October of that year. It may also be noticed that Mr. Jeffery deciphered the title-page tengwar without the aid of Appendix E.

5

In particular, the founding in 1967 of the Mythopoeic Society, which so far as I have been able to determine was the first society to foster and support a distinct group of scholars especially devoted to the study of Tolkien’s invented languages: namely, the Mythopoeic Linguistic Fellowship, and its journal, Parma Eldalamberon, founded in 1971. The Mythopoeic Linguistic Fellowship has since been reconstituted as the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship, which continues to publish Parma Eldalamberon now 35 years later.

6

The worst practitioners of this pseudo-etymological approach to date, by far, being Robert Giddings and Elizabeth Holland, who in 29

Carl F. Hostetter their book, J.R.R. Tolkien: The Shores of Middle-earth (London: Junction Books, 1981), proudly exhibit such classics of the form as (p. 159): Ash nazg, the One Ring . . . is Ashpenaz, the Babylonian master of the eunuchs, in the Book of Daniel, a fine comment on the Ring-wraiths, who appear to have lost their virility along with their will-power. Gorgoroth is the Greek gorgos, horrible, terrible, as in Gorgon; Ered Gorgoroth is translated in The Silmarillion as ‘The Mountains of Terror,’ than which nothing could be simpler (Ered coming from the German erde, earth, as also does the early name for Middle-earth, Arda, cf. Dutch aarde). Tolkien is not even trying to pretend—except as a game, a joke—that these are invented words. To be noticed here is a complete reliance on surface forms of words in which any chance similarity—and no matter how much the criteria of similarity must be stretched to make the connection fit—is sufficient to establish a connection; that is, this is a form of folk-etymology, and like it is practiced in complete ignorance of and/or disregard for the actual history of words. Thus for the claimed connection between Black Speech ash nazg ‘one ring’ and Ashpenaz, Giddings and Holland feel no compunction in jettisoning one third of the name claimed as a source and splitting it into two words, or in justifying the suitability of the meaning with a wholly invented claim about Nazgûl virility. Nor indeed do they explain how, if the phrase ash nazg ‘one ring’ owes its origin to this name, which has no connection with rings, the same element nazg also occurs with the meaning ‘ring’ in the name Nazgûl ‘Ringwraith.’ Giddings and Holland are probably right to connect Gorgoroth ‘Terror’ with Greek gorgos, though if so the connection entered Tolkien’s languages not at the level of this Sindarin mountain-name, but instead at the very root level of the common Eldarin parent language, in which indeed the selection of basic root forms do often seem to echo various elements of (particularly) Indo-European languages. Nor is this surprising, since Tolkien selected what he regarded as suitable pairings of root forms with meanings in accordance with his linguistic aesthetic, which was very much influenced by many Indo-European languages, in particular Greek, Latin, and the early Germanic languages. In fact, though, S. gorgoroth ‘terror’ is descended from the Common Eldarin base ÑGOROTH- ‘horror,’ which is itself a strengthened and extended form of two related bases, GOR- ‘violence, impetus, haste’ and GOS-, GOTH- ‘dread.’ The connection with Greek gorgos, if indeed that is the source of Tolkien’s aesthetic pairing of form and meaning in this case, thus lies behind 30

Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years and beneath the surface form Gorgoroth, and is distributed among a set of roots the forms and meanings of which relate to and vary from one another in abstract and systematic ways that are applied to other sets of roots as well, i.e., at the linguistic level. In a very similar way, Arda ‘Realm’ < GAR- ‘hold, possess’ probably does owe something to I.E. *gher- ‘grasp, enclose,’ whence garden and yard and Old English geard; but Giddings and Holland belie their real methods in claiming the same for S. ered ‘mountains,’ which in fact is the plural form of orod ‘mountain,’ and so has no connection with Erde/Earth whatsoever. Thus, as Tolkien said of another, similar attempt at decoding Tolkien’s nomenclature, Giddings and Holland’s claims “appear to be unauthentic embroideries on my work, throwing light only on the state of mind of their contrivers, not on me or on my actual intention and procedure” (Letters 380). 7

David Lyle Jeffrey, “Tolkien as Philologist.” In Tolkien and the Invention of Myth, edited by Jane Chance (University of Kentucky Press, 2004), p. 78.

8

Cf. also Letters 282, and note the occurrence of “Greenleaf ” as a byname of Legolas in The Lord of the Rings itself.

9

On the whole, the pseudo-linguistic “decoders” seem to have taken very much to heart the saying, attributed to Voltaire, that “etymology is a science in which the consonants count for very little, and the vowels for nothing at all.” Whereas in fact, in Tolkien’s languages as in all historical languages, every vowel and consonant is equally significant and must be accounted for and explained in terms of the phonological history and systematics of the language.

10 Nor am I particularly well-qualified to attempt such a chronicle, since I myself did not join the effort until the early 1980s, and my records of the earlier period are far from complete. This essay is also necessarily limited in scope to noting, not just the chief publications and major trends, but also only those in English, due both to the limitations of space and to my own limited ability in languages other than English, and not to any desire to slight the quality or importance of work carried out in other languages. In particular, the Scandinavian countries and Poland have a rich history of publications concerning Tolkien’s languages, most notably: in Angerthas, the journal of the Tolkien Society of Norway; Athelas, the journal of the Tolkien Society of Denmark; the publications of the Mellonath Daeron of the Swedish Tolkien Society Forodrim; and Little Gwaihir and Nyellinke Eldarin, both publications of the Polish Fantasy Club. A chronological

31

Carl F. Hostetter notice of these and other such publications ran for many years in the “Publications Received” department of Vinyar Tengwar, to which the reader is referred for a more complete bibliographic overview. 11 It may be noted that this appendix to The Road Goes Ever On, together with The Lord of the Rings, provides essentially all the information on his languages that Tolkien published in his lifetime. 12 Now superseded by the edition of this work by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, titled “Nomenclature of The Lord of the Rings,” in their Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), pp. 750–82. 13 The vowel mutation observed in S. orod ‘mountain,’ pl. ered (also eryd), alluded to above, is another example of this type of plural formation, also conditioned by a lost, original plural ending, deduced and eventually confirmed to be long *-ī. In Quenya, all original final long vowels were shortened; in Sindarin, they were lost entirely, though *-ī and *-ā both left traces of their former presence by affecting certain vowels in preceding syllables. 14 It is this type of modeling that is meant when Tolkien and others note that Sindarin is “based on” Welsh. The influence of Welsh on Sindarin is found in the systematics of its phonological development from Common Eldarin, and in the means by which it marks certain grammatical cases and functions, not in the lexicon of the language. 15 And despite the lack of e-mail and even of word processors. 16 This is, alas, not nearly so true of the syntax of these translations, which when not conforming strictly to one of the (all too few) patterns found in Tolkien’s own compositions, tends noticeably to hew rather slavishly to the syntax (and idiom) of the original text, or to that of the native language of the translator. 17 It will be easy for Tolkienian linguists of the Internet age to take access to such things for granted, but in 1982, the matter of tengwar numerals had been a topic of considerable speculation and interest, and so getting the answer directly from the source was very exciting, and quite the coup for a society bulletin. 18 This attitude was part and parcel with the corresponding one with regard to The Lord of the Rings and, later, The Silmarillion: that Tolkien had essentially produced them in their published forms ab initio. Just how wrong this view was, for both the legendarium and for the languages, became abundantly clearer with the publication of Tolkien’s drafts in each new volume of The History of Middle-earth. 32

Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years 19 See An Introduction to Elvish 20 and Letters 447. 20 Unfortunately, Carpenter misquoted the poem, inadvertently making it appear even more different from later forms of Quenya than it actually is. The four lines of “Narqelion” given on p. 83 should read: “Ai lintuilind(ov)a Lasselanta / Piliningwe súyer nalla qanta / Kuluvai ya karnevalinar / V’ematte sinqi Eldamar”. See Christopher Gilson’s edition and analysis of “Narqelion,” with facsimile of the holograph manuscript, in Vinyar Tengwar, no. 40 (April 1999). 21 This stance persists today, in the presumption of a “final-form” or “mature” Quenya and Sindarin (“of the Lord of the Rings era”) by Helge Fauskanger and David Salo and their followers, despite the mounting evidence of the changes undergone by Quenya and Sindarin following the publication of The Lord of the Rings, of considerable areas of stability of typological themes and derivational mechanisms, and of the prominent role of shifts of emphasis and selection among co-existent features and formations across conceptual stages, as opposed to outright rejection and replacement. 22 That is, in the lexicon and grammar. The fact of marked differences in the phonology of the respective languages, particularly between Goldogrin and Sindarin, was recognized and accepted from the first, and seems never to have entered the debate. Nonetheless, as Christopher Gilson has subsequently shown, despite the phonological differences, there remain a remarkable set of core forms and grammatical themes and elements that retained both their phonetic shape and meaning unchanged, or only very slightly altered, through the nearly sixty-year course of conceptual shifts from Goldogrin through Noldorin to Sindarin (see his essay “Gnomish is Sindarin” in Tolkien’s Legendarium). The grammatical differences, at least, among the various stages of Tolkien’s languages are often enough due to a change of prominence within the languages of particular derivational and grammatical devices (as for example of means of plural formation, or of marking, say, the past tense of verbs), not to a complete replacement of one set of grammatical devices with another from one stage to the next. 23 In Quettar the two “camps” were typically distinguished as “Ringites” vs. “Silmarillionists,” so called for the former’s preference of, even exclusive insistence upon, The Lord of the Rings as a source of linguistic data over that of any posthumous publications such as The Silmarillion, since it alone was published by Tolkien himself during his lifetime. For a succinct overview of the two “schools,” and of the

33

Carl F. Hostetter strengths and weaknesses of each, see Patrick Wynne’s article, “The Unified Field Theory of Elvish” in Parma Eldalamberon 8 (1989), 2. 24 The reader may have noted that the two positions here reached a similar view regarding the use of earlier material for vocabulary while favoring the later grammar. But it must also be noted that they come to this point from opposite directions, for different reasons, and with starkly different implications: in the first, Conceptionist, case, out of a conviction that the earlier forms of the grammar, to the extent that they appeared or were assumed to be incompatible with what was known, or thought to be known, of the later grammar, can and should be disregarded as having any independent value or bearing on the later language; but in the second, Unifist, case, out of a practical judgment that the earlier vocabulary provided authentic Tolkien-made forms, within the Celtic “flavor” or mode of the Elvish languages, broadly considered, having a desired meaning, but that the later, Sindarin exemplars provided a fuller and more usable grammar, there being in fact at that time almost no published examples of the grammar and syntax of Goldogrin and Noldorin. 25 The correctness of this at once more cautious and more open approach has subsequently been demonstrated time and again by continuing publications from Tolkien’s papers. For example, given the Eldarin base ES- ‘indicate, name,’ and its Q(u)enya derivatives, the noun esse ‘name’ and the verb esta ‘to name’; and given the Sindarin periphrastic verb estathar aen ‘should be called,’ transparently based on a verb-stem esta- ‘to call, name’; it was until quite recently widely taken as a given that the corresponding Sindarin noun, though (then) unattested, must be cognate with Quenya esse and so have the form *es(s). However, with the publication of Tolkien’s (partial) Sindarin translation of the Lord’s Prayer, we now have the (thus far, sole) actually attested noun, eneth ‘name,’ a form that clearly does not derive from ES- but instead hearkens back to various forms in en- from Gnomish, i.e., from the earliest, circa 1917, conceptual stage of the language that would eventually, circa 1952, become Sindarin: e.g., enu-, enwa- ‘am called, am named’ and entha ‘name, call, indicate, point out’ (Parma Eldalamberon 11:32, and cf. Vinyar Tengwar, no. 44, p. 24). Here, the underlying assumption that later bases and forms like ES- and esta- replaced corresponding elements of the earlier conceptual stages proved to be false, and Tolkien’s later conception proved to preserve (or perhaps to reintroduce, though the net effect is the same) a feature from a much earlier conceptual stage. 26 Smith also brought an abiding interest in the linguistic problems and 34

Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years strategies of translating Tolkien’s works, and particularly the nonModern English element therein, into other languages, which he explored in his long-running and (as seen from the correspondence it elicited) very popular column “Transitions in Translations” in Vinyar Tengwar. 27 An interest Loback would long explore in his column Essitalmar (Quenya, ‘Roots of Names’) in Vinyar Tengwar. It is a curious fact that names are often relegated to separate study (where not omitted entirely) in etymological indices and dictionaries, and in historical linguistics; especially curious as names often preserve forms that have disappeared from daily usage. Both of these facts are as true of Tolkienian as they are of primary-world linguistics; but it is particularly odd of Tolkienian linguistics as Tolkien himself seems to have had a particular interest in nomenclature. 28 Actually, an adaptation of that poem, one making it more readily fit both the Elvish milieu and the available vocabulary. In fact, the whole endeavor is set by Martsch amidst her plea that translations into Elvish must proceed from source material that is “suitable, both in vocabulary and in subject matter.” I agree wholeheartedly—see my essay “Elvish as She Is Spoke” in which I moreover suggest that it would most fruitfully proceed from thorough, considered study of Tolkien’s own Elvish vocabularies and attested grammar—and wish that more would-be translators of the present Internet age would take this plea to heart, sparing us the strained-beyond-breaking attempts at “translation” of, e.g., Death Metal songs, tattoo slogans, TV listings, and daily news reports. 29 For example, the system of verb tenses as presented in Basic Quenya omits the aorist, which we know from posthumously published writings was a fundamental tense in that language in all its conceptual stages, both before, during, and after the writing of The Lord of the Rings. 30 This last work listed all of the entries in the main Dictionary in order of its reversed spelling, so that, for example, periannath ‘hobbits’ is listed as htannairep. This allows one to quickly find and compare all words in the corpus that end with any given sequence of letters, and further groups word-final morphemes just as the normal order groups wordinitial morphemes: a great boon in particular for finding derivational and inflectional endings. 31 This brief examination of the chief pedagogy and lexicography of the time is by no means exhaustive. Other, smaller, and in the end 35

Carl F. Hostetter unsustained attempts at pedagogical courses in learning or even “speaking” Quenya also appeared, particularly in Quettar; and less ambitious lexicons were compiled and published in these years, most notably by Julian Bradfield and Anthony Appleyard. 32 See Mythlore 36 (Summer 1983), 20. 33 The text is presented in facsimile, with corrected readings, in Vinyar Tengwar, no. 40 (April 1999). 34 My own interest in and study of Tolkien’s languages had largely been pursued in limited spare time throughout high school and college, and although I had read each volume of The History of Middle-earth as they appeared, I had not made any serious attempts at forming my own synthesis or systematization of all the information contained therein, as various of the chief participants in the debate had (some, over the course of decades). In fact, I agreed to become the editor of Vinyar Tengwar, at Quiñónez’s invitation, largely as a means of forcing myself to keep up with all the discussions and to become more conversant with the accumulated scholarship of the previous three decades. Certainly, I had originally no intent to write articles or any expectation that I would or could contribute anything new to the scholarship. I remember that initially, and particularly as I grew more familiar with the scholarship in An Introduction to Elvish, Parma Eldalamberon, and Quettar, I felt that pretty much all that could be done, in terms of analysis, deduction, and inference from the available evidence, had been done: all that was left to do, it appeared to me (how wrong I was!), was simply to collect, collate, index, and annotate all the published materials. This was the goal of the project, first proposed by Quiñónez, to produce, as first conceived, a single volume, referred to in Quenya as I Parma ‘The Book,’ that would update and extend An Introduction to Elvish (and hopefully supplant Ruth Noel’s Languages of Middle-earth); and then, as the scope of such an omnium-gatherum became more apparent, as a series of society publications. Furthering work on I Parma was also the chief purpose of the series of annual conferences of the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship (“ELFcon”) that ran from 1991 to 1994. In hindsight, it is easy to see why this project, though announced, never came to fruition: first, the continuing publication of The History of Middle-earth (thankfully!) brought ever more new material into consideration, even as the previously-published material was still being digested; and second, the Conceptionist/Unifist debate had made it clear that whatever the degree of continuity or discontinuity, it would not do either to try to present all the material as of-a-piece, 36

Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years nor simply to ignore everything written before The Etymologies, nor even simply to divide the materials into pre- and post-Lord of the Rings piles and present all the materials in two large gatherings rather than one. Instead, it became more and more apparent that the material represented a continuum of conceptual stages, each differing from the others to greater or lesser degree, and each also representing a distinct Tolkienian invention, and thus a distinct Tolkienian language, that deserved to be treated of in its own right. It was coming to this realization, a sort of synthesis of the Conceptionist and Unifist positions—from the former, the fact of changes and developments in the languages over time; from the latter, the recognition that these changes were nonetheless within a continuum flowing from, connected, and thus essentially unified by Tolkien’s linguistic aesthetic, and that each stage of this continuum represented Tolkien linguistic aesthetic at that time, and was thus a language in its own right, as worthy of study as any other stage in the continuum—that made me see just how truly premature any attempt at collection and summation was, and further just how much analytical work remained to be done not only with The Etymologies, but particularly with the Lexicon materials given in The Book of Lost Tales (which were and are still all but entirely neglected save in the pages of Parma Eldalamberon and Vinyar Tengwar and in a handful of notable articles by a small number of authors on various web sites and forums). 35 An interest I shared and explored with Patrick Wynne in our erstwhile column “Words and Devices” in Vinyar Tengwar. 36 In a mode owing much to scholarly editions of medieval texts, a mode which came to be labeled the “Excruciatingly Thorough Analysis” and was formerly practiced by a number of Tolkienian linguists in various journals, and is still (as appropriate) in Parma Eldalamberon and (frequently) in Vinyar Tengwar. I will note here the phenomenon, at first glance seemingly paradoxical, that it is often the case that the shorter is the text, or complex of related texts or versions of texts, to be presented, the more apparatus is required from the editor for its proper explication. In part, this is because longer texts and especially complexes of related texts often are explicated chiefly by reference to themselves, or to translations and notes that Tolkien himself was more likely to provide for longer works, and less for shorter. Short texts, on the other hand, are often dislocated from any context, which must be discovered (where possible—it is not always) or hypothesized, and presented in notes supplied by the editor. Further, even when untranslated, longer texts lend themselves to interpretation more readily by having inherently more opportunities to guess ambiguous or 37

Carl F. Hostetter enigmatic meanings by surrounding context than do short texts. 37 This project began quite modestly, first with the correspondences I and Christopher Gilson maintained (independently) with Christopher Tolkien, as editors of our respective journals concerned to keep him and the Tolkien Estate aware of our publications, to ask questions about the linguistic materials already published, and in time to begin publishing some of the materials that had previously been collected from the Marquette archives. This early working relationship resulted in a proposal by Christopher Tolkien to Christopher Gilson to provide him with photocopies of the circa 1917 “Gnomish Lexicon” (from which Christopher Tolkien had quoted in the glossarial appendices to the two volumes of The Book of Lost Tales), to produce a complete edition of the work for publication in Parma Eldalamberon. Gilson subsequently approached each of us in turn—as an already established working group of like-minded colleagues (particularly with regard to interest in all stages of Tolkien’s linguistic conceptions), who had moreover already had some experience in working with Christopher Tolkien to publish materials from the archives— to participate in this publication, with the approval of Christopher Tolkien, who sent installments of the “GL” to us over the subsequent months. It was not until 1992 that Christopher Tolkien proposed expanding the scope of the project to include eventually all of his father’s linguistic writings, for (chiefly) chronological presentation in (chiefly) Parma Eldalamberon, with Vinyar Tengwar focusing on shorter, fragmentary, dislocated, and/or otherwise contextually more or less independent texts, such as those we ourselves collected from the Tolkien archives at Marquette University and the Bodleian Library. 38 For my own part, the availability of TolkLang and, later, other Internet discussion forums, has enabled me to focus Vinyar Tengwar more and more exclusively on the publication and analysis of new primary material from the Tolkien archives. 39 As though Tolkien’s languages, unlike natural languages, were strictly regular, strictly logical, eschewed homonyms and synonyms, and had a strict, one-to-one correspondence between formal categories and grammatical function. On the contrary, ambiguity, “irregularity,” and (from the standpoint of logic and necessity) superfluity are the hallmarks of natural languages, and the purposeful efforts at eliminating these from such constructed auxiliary languages as Esperanto and Loglan/Lojban are what impart to those languages their highly artificial character. Tolkien, on the other hand, was concerned specifically to construct languages that seemed to have arisen naturally, 38

Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years and thus he deliberately built in “irregularities,” multiplicities of form and function, and all the other supposed impediments that attempts to synthesize “usable” forms of Quenya and Sindarin have tended to reduce or remove. 40 Fauskanger’s first announcement of Ardalambion was made in a post to the TolkLang list on May 15, 1997; see: http://tolklang.quettar.org/ messages/Vol24/24.49. Although Ardalambion as a whole is under the authorship of Helge Fauskanger, he makes it plain that his presentation of Sindarin grammar, in particular, is based on and owes very much to work shared with him by David Salo, and represents Salo’s own conclusions. 41 http://www.uib.no/People/hnohf/sindarin.htm#Heading18. 42 One of which, of a supposed “mixed conjugation” class, is extrapolated on the basis of a single supposed past-tense form *dram, which is itself unattested. 43 This was true enough at that time, though it can be noted that there are numerous other cases of formations in Quenya and Sindarin that have only a single attestation that have nonetheless found their way into the accounts of those languages given on Ardalambion, sometimes even as the basis for generating whole new paradigms. 44 See http://groups.yahoo.com/group/elfling/message/27459. My pointing out at that time that English manages to avoid “significant confusion” despite the fact that -(e)d can be used to form both pasttense verbs and passive participles (e.g. “baked”), and that -(e)s can be used to form both plural nouns and present-tense verbs (e.g., “passes”), elicited no reply (see http://groups.yahoo.com/group/elflingd/message/88). Fauskanger has since removed his statement attributing mudas to an authorial or editorial error from Ardalambion, but the gist of it is quoted at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/elfling/message/27382. He still, however, lists the “Sindarin” past-tense form as mudant. 45 Compiled by myself and Patrick H. Wynne and published in two parts, Vinyar Tengwar, no. 45 (November 2003) and 46 (July 2004). 46 Fauskanger at least has taken steps over time to show more of the actual nature of the languages to his readers, and to make it clearer that Ardalambion presents only an approximation, intentionally simplified and regularized, of what in reality are much more complex linguistic and historical situations. Unfortunately, as is plainly evidenced from numerous internet discussion forums, these qualifiers are generally 39

Carl F. Hostetter not noticed, or at any rate not heeded, by the vast majority of Tolkien language enthusiasts or would-be speakers of Quenya or Sindarin. 47 And it had naturally not been uncommon to construct almost entirely hypothetical forms for use in Elvish translations and compositions; but that was as an essentially artistic, not scholarly, activity. 48 This is not to say that the “Conceptionist” and “Unifist” debate did not touch on these more fundamental issues of nature and purpose, but it seems to me that the crux of that debate—namely, how do the earlier materials relate to the later, and most importantly, how, if at all, can they be used to illuminate and expand our understanding and knowledge of the later forms of the languages—arises from a presumption that the point of studying Tolkien’s languages is in fact to discern somewhere in Tolkien’s writings a complete and consistent “final version” of Quenya and Sindarin, and from the corollary presumption that it was Tolkien’s own goal to achieve such completed versions of his languages. The “Conceptionist,” in the extreme formulation, would answer that the earlier materials described fundamentally and irreconcilably different languages from Quenya and Sindarin, and that those earlier versions, simply by being earlier and different, were wholly rejected by Tolkien and wholly supplanted by the later, “final” and “perfected” form, and so regard the earlier materials as essentially useless for understanding those languages. The “Unifist,” in the extreme formulation, would answer that in fact all of these materials and the forms of the languages they presented were at least theoretically reconcilable with one another as part of a conceptual whole, of which the various manuscripts and published writings afforded us glimpses of various parts. But both “camps” shared an underlying assumption that the materials—in part or in sum, whether in just the later writings, or through reconciliation of the whole corpus—contained, somewhere within them, a single, archetypal, “true” form of Tolkien’s Elvish languages, which it was for each “camp” the goal and purpose, whether explicit or implicit, to discern and to use. 49 See the announcement of the list at http://tolklang.quettar.org/messages/Vol32/32.48 and the “Purpose of List” at http://www.yariareth.net/David/elfing.html. 50 I have elsewhere characterized “Neo-Elvish,” and translation into “Neo-Elvish,” in some detail, in an essay titled “Elvish as She Is Spoke” to which this present work is very much a companion. See the Works Cited for the reference and for a link to an online version of the paper. 40

Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years 51 I have done so myself, most notably in the form of a “Quenya” translation of the Lord’s Prayer made with Patrick Wynne (Vinyar Tengwar, no. 32, November 1993: http://www.elvish.org/articles/Attolma. html). It proved to be an object lesson for us in the severe limitations of any attempt to “use Quenya,” when we afterwards received copies of Tolkien’s own translation of the same (published in Vinyar Tengwar 43, January 2002, and available at: http://www.elvish.org/VT/sample.html), and compared the two. Unlike Tolkien, but like everyone else who would attempt to write in Elvish, we necessarily relied on circumlocutions and paraphrase in the face of every want of vocabulary; and like everyone else we relied ultimately on our own native idiom and syntax to supply whatever was not evidenced in Tolkien’s own writings: both of which, naturally and inevitably, proved to be quite different in some key parts of the translation from Tolkien’s own conception of Quenya idiom and syntax. 52 Again, see my discussion of this matter in “Elvish as She is Spoke.” 53 In fact, there is very good reason to think otherwise. It is frequently asserted by the most ardent proponents of “Neo-Elvish” that the only real hindrance to being able to “speak Elvish” is that the bulk of Tolkien’s writings in and on his languages as yet remain unpublished. But as Bill Welden, my colleague in editing and publishing these writings, has shown in his article on “Negation in Quenya” (Vinyar Tengwar 42), further publication will actually tend (as it already has) to make the notion of Quenya and Sindarin as “known” languages less clear-cut, as it will increasingly provide in place of one or no “answer” to common grammatical questions, instead a multitude of different answers from Tolkien’s own pen, even in late and closely contemporary writings, as Tolkien tried out different ways of expressing various concepts, even such seemingly basic grammatical concepts and categories as the definite article or the pronominal system (both of which categories were in considerable flux even long after the publication of The Lord of the Rings), or in such seemingly simple functions as expressing “yes” and “no” (which in fact stand in intricate and systematic relation to the broader grammar and lexicon and so could not be simply replaced with different words without broader disruptions). Each such scheme is just as “authoritative” as another, yet differs in detail and at times fundamentally from each other; and at various times each could in turn be just as unsatisfactory as the others to Tolkien, for stated reasons fundamental to his aesthetic or to the systematics of the larger grammar of which each part stands in relationship; so that, as Welden concludes in his article, “the question of whether a word or grammatical construct is ‘proper Quenya’ 41

Carl F. Hostetter becomes, paradoxically, more uncertain the more we learn about how Tolkien worked” (34). Thus it is that, although often pressed to provide “the” paradigm for this or that department of grammar by the more vocal proponents of “Neo-Elvish,” it would be not only pointless but, worse, fundamentally misleading for us to do so, as there is very often not just one such paradigm to be found in Tolkien’s papers, even in the latest writings, but many differing versions, none of which is inherently or obviously better or more authoritative than (sometimes dozens of) others. Providing any one of these in response to such requests would inevitably cause it to be accorded a canonicity that would be wholly illusory and arbitrary (just as is that accorded to many of the “known” facts of “Neo-Elvish” now). 54 Yet again, please see my discussion of this matter in “Elvish as She is Spoke.” 55 For a particularly clear presentation of this fact of unifying thematic variation, rather than complete discontinuity, in Tolkien’s linguistic invention, see Christopher Gilson’s essay, “Gnomish is Sindarin,” in Tolkien’s Legendarium. Not coincidentally, thematic variation, and never-ceasing increase or decrease in emphasis (with or without subsequent loss) of various grammatical mechanisms and categories, and even some surprising resurgences of earlier themes, is fundamental not only to Tolkien’s external process of invention, but to the internal history of his invented languages (as indeed to the history of all natural languages as well). 56 Attitudes that are at this writing unfortunately still quite prominently in evidence on Ardalambion, and still emanating from it into the rest of the discussion of Tolkien’s languages on the Internet. 57 It is a curious fact that, as I write this, the whole of Tolkien’s writings on (and in) his Elvish languages from their inception through the mid-1920s having been published—including the two most extensive lexicons he ever made, by far (both in number and in scope of entries), and a succinct but more or less complete grammar of Qenya as it stood circa 1925—nonetheless almost nothing has been written either in or about those forms of the languages by anyone outside those engaged in the editing and publication of these materials, save for a very few, bright exceptions in the works of Ivan Derzhanski and Thorsten Renk. Instead, following the lead of the chief proponents of “Neo-Elvish,” these materials are quite studiously ignored save as sources of “needed vocabulary” for the neo-languages. This is especially ironic in that Tolkien’s earliest Qenya and Gnomish lexicons are both far larger and—for reasons having largely to do with increasing 42

Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years remoteness of the imagined time of the fictional milieu from our own as Tolkien developed and expanded the legendarium—endowed with a much broader and more quotidian vocabulary than The Etymologies. So it is that these two earliest lexicons not infrequently provide the only authentically Tolkienian form conveying a meaning desired for the sorts of translations now most commonly attempted by would-be speakers of Elvish—which are often quite mundane if not banal, and usually quite removed from the milieu (and thus the vocabulary) in which Tolkien set his languages. 58 Most notably at Thorsten Renk’s website, Parma Tyelpelassiva (Quenya, ‘Book of Silver Leaves’). 59 Nor are these alterations of Tolkien’s glosses minor matters, as they are used as the basis for most of Salo’s lengthy and seemingly descriptive account of compound types in Sindarin. See Patrick Wynne’s thorough account of this rather startling fact in his December 4, 2004 post, “Inaccurate translations in David Salo's A Gateway to Sindarin,” to the Lambengolmor mailing list at: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/ group/lambengolmor/message/765. 60 Edited, published, and first analyzed by Bill Welden (though Salo neglects to note or credit that fact) in Vinyar Tengwar 44 (June 2002): 21–30, 38. 61 Salo also continues with the unsupported assertion that “Tolkien’s handwritten capital C and capital G are very similar.” As someone who has been reading Tolkien’s manuscripts for almost two decades now, I must say this supposed feature of Tolkien’s handwriting comes as a surprise to me. In any event, as anyone who wishes to can plainly see from the facsimile of Ae Adar Nín that accompanies Welden’s presentation and analysis of the text, there is no question whatsoever that Tolkien in fact wrote bo Ceven, not bo Geven. See the cover of this volume. 62 See my elaboration of these points of Sindarin grammar in my post to the Lambengolmor list of November 26, 2004 at: http://tech.groups. yahoo.com/group/lambengolmor/message/761. 63 For a more thorough review of A Gateway to Sindarin by someone intimately familiar with Tolkien’s languages, I highly recommend that by Thorsten Renk at http://www.phy.duke.edu/~trenk/elvish/salo_ discussion.html. 64 See Thorsten Renk’s reconsideration of “The Sindarin Verb System” in light of this work at: http://www.phy.duke.edu/~trenk/elvish/verbs.html. 43

Carl F. Hostetter WORKS CITED Allan, Jim, ed. An Introduction to Elvish. Frome, Somerset, UK: Bran’s Head Books, 1978. Appleyard, Anthony. “Quenya Grammar Reexamined.” First version, in four parts, as TolkLang messages 3.01, 3.04, 3.06, and 3.08, February 24, 1992, archived at http://tolklang.quettar.org/ messages/Vol3/. Most recent version, 1995, archived at http:// tolklang.quettar.org/articles/Appleyard.Quenya. Beyond Bree. Newsletter edited by Nancy Martsch. http://www.cep.unt. edu/bree.html. Carpenter, Humphrey. J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977. Elfling. Internet mailing list. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/elfling. Fauskanger, Helge. Ardalambion. Web site. http://www.uib.no/People/ hnohf/. Giddings, Robert and Elizabeth Holland. J.R.R. Tolkien: The Shores of Middle-earth. London: Junction Books, 1981. Hostetter, Carl F. “Elvish as She Is Spoke.” In The Lord of the Rings 19542004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder, ed. Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2006: 231–55. Also available at http://www. elvish.org/articles/EASIS.pdf. Hyde, Paul Nolan. Linguistic Techniques Used in Character Development in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien. 3 vols. Dissertation. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University, 1982. ———. A Working Reverse Dictionary. Simi Valley, CA: n.p., 1989. ———. A Working Tolkien Glossary. 7 vols. Simi Valley, CA: n.p., 1989. Lambengolmor. Internet mailing list. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ lambengolmor/. Noel, Ruth S. The Languages of Tolkien’s Middle-earth. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980. Parma Eldalamberon. Journal currently edited by Christopher Gilson. http://www.eldalamberon.com/parma15.html. Quettar. Journal last edited by Julian Bradfield. http://tolklang.quettar. org/quetinfo. 44

Tolkienian Linguistics: The First Fifty Years Renk, Thorsten. Parma Tyelpelassiva. Web site. http://www.phy.duke. edu/~trenk/elvish/. Salo, David. A Gateway to Sindarin. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2004. Tengwestië. Online journal edited by Carl F. Hostetter and Patrick H. Wynne. http://www.elvish.org/Tengwestie/. TolkLang. Internet mailing list. http://tolklang.quettar.org/. Vinyar Tengwar. Journal currently edited by Carl F. Hostetter. http://www. elvish.org/VT/. RECOMMENDED ADDITIONAL READING Primary works This list is not exhaustive. Its purpose is to point to the chief texts available to provide the interested reader with an overview, in Tolkien’s own words, of the principal aspects and problems of his invented languages, their purpose and use, and their development (both internal and external). Tolkien, J.R.R. “Appendix E.” In LotR. ———. “Appendix F.” In LotR. ———. Dangweth Pengoloð. In Peoples. ———. “Drafts for a letter to ‘Mr Rang.’” In Letters 379–87. ———. “The Early Qenya Grammar.” In Parma Eldalamberon 14 (2003): 35–86. ———. The Etymologies. In Lost Rad. ———. The Lhammas. In Lost Road. ———. Lowdham’s Report on the Adunaic Language. In Sauron. ———. “Notes on Óre.” In Vinyar Tengwar 41 (July 2000):11–19. ———. Ósanwe-kenta: ‘Enquiry into the Communication of Thought.’ In Vinyar Tengwar 39 (July 1998): 21–34. ———. The Problem of Ros. In Peoples. ———. Quendi and Eldar. In War.

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Carl F. Hostetter ———. “From Quendi and Eldar, Appendix D.” In Vinyar Tengwar 39 (July 1998): 4–20. ———. “To Rhona Beare.” In Letters 277-84. ———. “To Richard Jeffery.” In Letters 424–28. ———. The Road Goes Ever On. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967. ———. “A Secret Vice.” In MC. ———. The Shibboleth of Fëanor. In Peoples. ———. “From The Shibboleth of Fëanor.” In Vinyar Tengwar 41 (July 2000): 7–10. Secondary works Articles Gilson, Christopher. “Gnomish Is Sindarin.” In Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on the History of Middle-earth, ed. Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000: 95–104. Hostetter, Carl F. “Elvish Compositions and Grammars.” In The J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, ed. Michael D. C. Drout .New York: Routledge, 2006: 155-59. ———. “Languages Invented by Tolkien.” In The J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, ed. Michael D. C. Drout .New York: Routledge, 2006: 332-43. Welden, Bill. “Negation in Quenya.” In Vinyar Tengwar 42 (July 2001): 32–34. See also his letter of comment in Vinyar Tengwar 44 (June 2002): 4, 38. WEB SITES Resources for Tolkienian Linguistics http://www.elvish.org/resources. html. CONFERENCE Omentielva. 2005–. Biennial international conference, with planned proceedings in the series Arda Philology (forthcoming). http://www. omentielva.com/.

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Carl F. Hostetter: A Checklist COMPILED BY

DOUGLAS A. ANDERSON

[Note: items are listed alphabetically in each of the three sections of this bibliography. Owing to the varieties of co-authorship and co-editorship, complete bylines are listed for each citation.] TEXTS BY J.R.R. TOLKIEN AS EDITED OR CO-EDITED BY CARL F. HOSTETTER, LISTED ALPHABETICALLY: Early Elvish Poetry and Pre-Fëanorian Alphabets, edited by Christopher Gilson, Arden R. Smith, Patrick Wynne, Carl F. Hostetter, and Bill Welden. Cupertino, CA: Parma Eldalamberon, 2006. Parma Eldalamberon no. 16. “Early Noldorin Fragments,” edited by Christopher Gilson, Bill Welden, Carl F. Hostetter, and Patrick Wynne. In The Alphabet of Rúmil & Early Noldorin Fragments. Cupertino, CA: Parma Eldalamberon, 2001: 91-175. Parma Eldalamberon no. 13. “Early Qenya Grammar,” edited by Carl F. Hostetter and Bill Welden. In Early Qenya & Valmaric. Cupertino, CA: Parma Eldalamberon, 2003: 35-86. Parma Eldalamberon no. 14. “Etymological Notes on the Ósanwe-kenta,” edited with notes by Carl F. Hostetter, Vinyar Tengwar, no. 41 (July 2000): 5-6. “From Quendi and Eldar, Appendix D,” edited with introduction, glossaries, and additional notes by Carl F. Hostetter, Vinyar Tengwar, no. 39 (July 1998): 4-20. “From The Shibboleth of Fëanor,” edited with notes by Carl F. Hostetter, Vinyar Tengwar, no. 41 (July 2000): 7-10. 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. Walnut Creek, CA: Parma Eldalamberon, 1995. Parma Eldarlamberon no. 11. “Notes on Óre,” edited with notes by Carl F. Hostetter, Vinyar Tengwar, no. 41 (July 2000): 11-19. 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. Cupertino, CA: Parma Eldalamberon, 1998. Parma Eldalamberon no. 12. Copyright © West Virginia University Press

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Douglas A. Anderson “Ósanwe-kenta: ‘Enquiry into the Communication of Thought,’” edited with introduction, glossary, and additional notes by Carl F. Hostetter, Vinyar Tengwar, no. 39 (July 1998): 21-34. “The Rivers and Beacon-hills of Gondor,” edited by Carl F. Hostetter, Vinyar Tengwar, no. 42 (July 2001): 5-31. “Sir Orfeo: A Middle English Version by J.R.R. Tolkien,” edited, with introduction and notes by Carl F. Hostetter, Tolkien Studies 1 (2004): 85123. “‘Words of Joy’: Five Catholic Prayers in Quenya (Part One),” edited by Patrick Wynne, Arden R. Smith, and Carl F. Hostetter, Vinyar Tengwar, no. 43 (January 2002): 5-38; “‘Words of Joy’: Five Catholic Prayers in Quenya (Part Two),” no. 44 (June 2002): 5-20. CRITICAL WORK ON TOLKIEN BY CARL F. HOSTETTER: “Addenda and Corrigenda to the Etymologies—Part One,” by Carl F. Hostetter and Patrick H. Wynne, Vinyar Tengwar, no. 45 (November 2003): 3-38; “Addenda and Corrigenda to the Etymologies—Part Two,” no. 46 (July 2004): 3-34. “An Adunaic Dictionary,” compiled by Carl F. Hostetter and Patrick Wynne, Vinyar Tengwar, no. 25 (September 1992): 8-26. “‘Attolma’: The Lord’s Prayer in Quenya,” by Patrick Wynne and Carl F. Hostetter, Vinyar Tengwar, no. 32 (November 1993): 6-9. “The Bodleian Declensions,” analysis by Patrick Wynne, Christopher Gilson, and Carl F. Hostetter, Vinyar Tengwar, no. 28 (March 1993): 8-34. “Elvish Compositions and Grammars,” “I·Lam na·Ngoldathon: The Grammar and Lexicon of the Gnomish Tongue,” “Languages Invented by Tolkien,” “Middle English Vocabulary, A” “Orfeo, Sir,” and “Qenyaqetsa: The Qenya Phonology and Lexicon,” by Carl F. Hostetter. In J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment, edited by Michael D. C. Drout. New York: Routledge, 2007: 155-59; 291-92; 332-44; 421-22; 487-88; and 551-52. “Elvish as She Is Spoke,” by Carl F. Hostetter. In The Lord of the Rings 1954-2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder, edited by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull. Marquette: Marquette University Press, 2006: 231-55. “The ‘King’s Letter’: A Historical and Comparative Analysis,” by Carl F. Hostetter. Vinyar Tengwar, no. 31 (September 1993): 12-34.

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Carl Hostetter: A Checklist “Morgoth’s Ring: A Linguistic Review—Part I,” by Patrick Wynne and Carl F. Hostetter, Vinyar Tengwar, no. 34 (March 1994): 6-34; “Morgoth’s Ring: A Linguistic Review—Part II,” no. 35 (May 1994): 8-23. “A Mythology for England,” by Carl F. Hostetter and Arden R. Smith. In Proceedings of the J.R.R. Tolkien Centenary Conference 1992, edited by Patricia Reynolds and Glen GoodKnight. Milton Keynes, UK, and Altadena, CA: The Tolkien Society; The Mythopoeic Press, 1995: 281-90. “Over Middle-earth Sent unto Men: On the Philological Origins of Tolkien’s Eärendil Myth,” by Carl F. Hostetter. Mythlore 17 no. 3 (whole no. 65; Spring 1991): 5-10. “The Past-Tense Verb in the Noldorin of the Etymologies: A Formal Classification,” by Carl F. Hostetter. Tengwestië: The Online Journal of the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship, http://www.elvish.org/Tengwestie/articles/ Hostetter/sindll.phtml [Posted December 2003; accessed February 2007] “Sauron Defeated: A Linguistic Review,” by Carl F. Hostetter. Vinyar Tengwar, no. 24 (July 1992): 4-13. “‘Sí man i·yulmar n(g)win enquantuva’: A Newly-discovered Tengwar inscription,” by Carl F. Hostetter. Vinyar Tengwar, no. 21 (January 1992): 6-7, 10. “Stone Towers,” by Carl F. Hostetter and Patrick Wynne, Mythlore 19 no. 4 (whole no. 74; Autumn 1993): 47-55, 65. [Previously appeared as an installment of a column “Words and Devices,” Vinyar Tengwar, no. 30 (July 1993): 8-25.] “Three Elvish Verse Modes: Ann-thennath, Minlamad thent /estent, and Linnod,” by Patrick Wynne and Carl F. Hostetter. In Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth, edited by Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000: 113-39. “The Two Phonetic Values of ll in Elvish Sindarin in The Lord of the Rings,” by Carl F. Hostetter. Tengwestië: The Online Journal of the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship, http://www.elvish.org/Tengwestie/articles/Hostetter/ sindll.phtml [Posted December 2003; accessed February 2007]. “Uglúk to the Dung-pit,” by Carl F. Hostetter. Vinyar Tengwar, no. 26 (November 1992): 16. “‘Verbs, Syntax! Hooray!’: A Preliminary Assessment of Adunaic Grammar in The Notion Club Papers,” by Patrick Wynne and Carl F. Hostetter, Vinyar Tengwar, no. 24 (July 1992): 14-38. 49

Douglas A. Anderson “The War of the Ring: A Linguistic Review,” by Carl F. Hostetter. Vinyar Tengwar, no. 14 (November 1990): 3-4. “Words and Devices,” a column by Carl F. Hostetter and Patrick Wynne, Vinyar Tengwar, no. 17 (May 1991): 11-18; no. 18 (July 1991): 17-26; no. 19 (September 1991): 8-23; no. 20 (November 1991): 14-16; no. 21 (January 1992):14-20; no. 22 (March 1992): 12-18; no. 23 (May 1992): 18-22; no. 30 (July 1993): 8-25; no. 32 (November 1993): 10-17. TOLKIEN-RELATED BOOKS, CARL F. HOSTETTER:

PERIODICALS OR FORUMS EDITED OR CO-EDITED

BY

Lambengolmor, a list-serve designed to serve those interested in the scholarly study and discussion of the invented languages of J.R.R. Tolkien, founded and moderated by Carl F. Hostetter: http://tech.groups.yahoo. com/group/lambengolmor [Founded October 2001; accessed February 2007]. Tengwestië: The Online Journal of the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship, edited by Carl F. Hostetter and Patrick H. Wynne, http://www.elvish.org/Tengwestie/ [Founded December 2003; accessed February 2007]. Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth, ed. by Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000. Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Number 86. Vinyar Tengwar, co-edited by Carl F. Hostetter and Jorge Quiñónez, nos. 8-9 (November 1989-January 1990), edited by Carl F. Hostetter, nos. 10—current (i.e., March 1990-current, the most recent issue being no. 48, December 2005). Compilations of back issues are available as perfect bound or spiral bound paperbacks, via http://www.lulu.com/ELF [Details are also available at the website of the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship http://www.elvish.org].

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Tolkien’s “‘Celtic’ type of legends”: Merging Traditions DIMITRA FIMI 1. Tolkien’s Celtic Library

A

fter J.R.R. Tolkien’s death, a number of books from his personal collection ended up in two Oxford libraries. A small number are in the Bodleian Library, within the Tolkien manuscript collection, in the section “Tolkien E16.” A considerably larger number are to be found in the Library of the English Faculty. According to the library’s own classification system, the books are shelved in section V, which is described as “Tolkien’s Celtic Library.” An initial reaction to this description might be surprise. Tolkien’s dislike for “things Celtic,” strongly expressed in his much-quoted 1937 letter to Stanley Unwin (Letters 26), is well known and could be taken as a definitive discouragement to research in Tolkien’s Celtic sources. It is only recently that scholarship has attempted a serious evaluation of the Celtic elements of Tolkien’s inspiration (see Burns; Fimi; Flieger Interrupted Music). Nevertheless, Tolkien’s “Celtic Library” holds exciting revelations, if only for its sheer size. Over three hundred books originally owned by Tolkien are held in the Bodleian and the English Faculty Library, of which approximately a third belong to the discipline of Celtic Studies. It is, of course, not easy to determine what percentage of the whole body of Tolkien’s books they comprise. It is known that the bulk of Tolkien’s books passed initially to his son Christopher, and that only a small part of these were donated to the two Oxford libraries mentioned above, while others were sold through an Oxford bookseller (Anderson “Personal”). Still, this data is both valuable and significant for Tolkien scholarship, especially in terms of his involvement with Celtic Studies. Tolkien’s “Celtic Library” at the English Faculty Library consists of books on Celtic languages (including Welsh, Old and Middle Irish, Gaelic, and Breton), and also an important number on Irish and Welsh medieval literature, together with translations, editions and even facsimiles of manuscripts of original texts. An example of how specialized this collection can be is the so-called “Mabinogion” from both the Red Book of Hergest and the White Book of Rhydderch in four editions: those by Rhŷs and Evans (1887), by Evans (1907), by Edwards (1921) and by Mühlhausen (1925), as well as its famous translation by Lady Guest (1913). Tolkien also owned a copy of Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi, being a reduced reproduction Copyright © West Virginia University Press

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Dimitra Fimi of a part of the Rhŷs and Evans 1887 edition, bequeathed to him by his school friend G.B. Smith, who died in the Great War. This is the only Celtic book found within the Tolkien MS collection in the Bodleian library (Tolkien E16/20).1 Many of the books in Tolkien’s “Celtic library” are dated by him, and it is notable that one third of them were bought between 1920 and 1926, most of them in 1922. Of course, that could be a reflection of the book-buying zeal of a young academic who finds himself in his first fulltime job—in 1920 Tolkien was appointed Reader and four years later Professor in English Language at Leeds University, and many of his nonCeltic books are also dated within this period. But, revealingly, it was in 1922 that he started working with his colleague E. V. Gordon on the edition of the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which was finally published in 1925. During this period he also contributed to the “Philology: General Works” section of the Year’s Work in English Studies, for three consecutive years, presenting and reviewing academic works pertaining to philology. In his 1923 and 1924 articles he commented on publications of English place-names, including their Celtic elements, and he voiced his views on the ongoing debate on the adventus Saxonum and the role of the Celtic population of Britain (Tolkien “Philology 1923” 30-32; “Philology 1924” 58-59). His interest in Celtic Studies was, therefore, very much at the core of his academic work of this time. The contents of Tolkien’s “Celtic Library” not only add to our knowledge of what he was familiar with in Celtic Studies; they can also occasionally offer insights into his sources for specific works. An example is “The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun.” This long poem was written during the nineteen-thirties but not published until 1945 in the Welsh Review. The tragic story of the childless lord and his disastrous dealings with a Corrigan has long been recognised as inspired by the legends of Brittany (Carpenter 167-68). Jessica Yates has discussed in detail the origins of Tolkien’s poem, and has contested Tom Shippey’s claim that Tolkien’s main source was “Le Seigneur Nann et la Fée” from Wimberly’s collection of English and Scottish ballads (1928). Yates argues that Tolkien could have equally started from “Aotrou Nann hag ar Corrigan” from Child’s collection English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882) which Shippey also cites as one of the books that Tolkien certainly knew, although he does not associate it with “The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun” (65-66). Yates also refers to two translations of the folk poem mentioned by Wimberley (Keightley and Taylor) that Tolkien might have also known and Shippey, in his revised The Road to Middle-earth adds a note where he agrees that Keightley’s book could have also been a possible source of Tolkien’s poem (446). Yates, however, makes it clear that the ultimate source of the

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Tolkien’s “‘Celtic’ type of legends” folk poem in both Child’s and Wimberley’s collection is named as Villemarqué’s Barzas-Breis: Chants Populaires de la Bretagne. Villemarqué was the nineteenth-century folklorist who originally collected and recorded the poem. In an older article, Alexi Kondratiev had argued for Villemarqué as the source for Tolkien’s “Aotrou and Itroun,” although he admitted that there was no proof of Tolkien having read the Barzas-Breis and thus concluded that Tolkien must have known the story from another source. Yates refers briefly to Kondratiev’s article and claims that the lack of proof does not mean that Tolkien did not read Villemarqué (66). Tolkien’s “Celtic Library” proves her right: Tolkien owned his own copy of Villemarqué’s Barzas-Breis. He also owned the Lais of Marie de France, edited by Karl Warnke, which—according to Shippey—Tolkien imitated in “Aotrou and Itroun” (277). Both books, together with a few other volumes on Breton folklore and some books on the Breton language, are in “Tolkien’s Celtic Library” and most of them were bought between 1920-1922. The Book of Lost Tales, the earliest version of Tolkien’s early nationalistic project for a “mythology for England,” included Celtic elements which I have discussed in detail before (Fimi). What I wish to demonstrate in this article is how Tolkien’s continuous involvement in Celtic Studies can account for an unbroken sequence of Celtic elements sneaking into Middle-earth, whether intentionally or not. In The Book of Lost Tales the story of the Tuatha Dé Danann already played an important role as an inspiration for the tragic story of the Gnomes’s departure from Valinor, and the whole framework of the Irish “Book of Invasions” was used as a model for the pseudo-historic “Seven Invasions of Luthany” (Fimi 161-64). In the next stage of the evolution of the Lost Tales, c. 1920, the narrative of “Ælfwine of England” emerged. The story of Ælfwine, like its predecessor, the story of Eriol, was conceived as an integral part of the “framework” for presenting the Lost Tales and associated the Lost Tales with England, and especially Anglo-Saxon England.2 However, Tolkien introduced an unexpected change to Ælfwine’s pedigree. Instead of being a pure Anglo-Saxon, Ælfwine is portrayed as being the son of Déor, a man “of English blood” and Éadgifu, “a maiden from the West, from Lionesse as some have named it since” (Lost Tales II 313). Now, Lionesse (or “Lyonesse,” as it is usually spelt) brings to mind the Arthurian legend; Cornish and Breton folklore about sunken lands, and also evokes a certain air of the medieval romances. Given his well-publicized rejection of “things Celtic,” could all of this sound more Un-Tolkienian? Nevertheless, the character of Éadgifu from Lionesse can serve as the first missing piece of the legendarium jigsaw-puzzle as a merging of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic traditions, rather than a favoring of the former and a rejection of the latter as Tolkien would have us believe. In the following parts of 53

Dimitra Fimi the article I will explore Tolkien’s work after the Book of Lost Tales, notably his writings between the 1920s and 1940s, and I will attempt to provide further evidence that supports the importance of his “Celtic Library” to his work. This library was not merely a marginal academic interest, but demonstrates his continuous fascination with the mythic and legendary past of Britain. 2. Time-travel Stories and the Blending of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Traditions Ælfwine’s Anglo-Saxon and Celtic ancestry is indeed an important change to the original conception of the Book of Lost Tales. Lyonesse is one of those enchanted places of Arthurian romance, usually associated with Tristan or Galahad. It has been claimed to have been originally Leonais in Brittany or Lothian in Scotland, but it is most often linked to a part of Cornwall which in legend was sunk under the sea.3 It is probable that Tolkien had Cornwall in mind as Lionesse, since in The Lost Road, the next of his writings in which Æelfwine appears, his wife (rather than his mother) is said to be from Cornwall (Lost Road 84-85). The Lost Road began as part of an agreement between Tolkien and C. S. Lewis to write, respectively, a time-travel and a space-travel story (Letters 347, 378). In Lewis’s case the result was Out of the Silent Planet (1938). Tolkien’s very ambitious plan of time-travel, which remained unfinished, involved a series of fathers and a sons (always bearing names that could be translated as “Bliss-friend” and “Elf-friend”) re-living—by means of dreams—old myths and legends, concluding with the fall of Númenor. Tolkien only wrote two parts of the book: the “opening chapters,” concerning father and son of modern times, Alboin and Audoin, and the “Númenórean chapters,” concerning Elendil and Herendil of Númenor. Nevertheless, we have his notes and drafts of the “unwritten chapters” that would come between the “old” and the “modern” father-and-son stories. It is within these notes and drafts that one finds such Germanic myths and legends as the Lombard legend of Alboin, the semi-mythical semi-historical Norse story of the voyage to Vinland, and the legend of King Sheave. At the same time, the Anglo-Saxon poem The Seafarer would also become an integral part of one of the unfinished father-son stories, the “Anglo-Saxon” episode of the book, featuring Aelfwine and his son Eadwine. In the draft of that part, Ælfwine recites a slightly modified version of lines 36-38 and 44-46 of The Seafarer. In The Seafarer a mariner recounts his wretched experiences at sea, but he also expresses his urge to live the seaman’s life. Tolkien’s translation of, and intervention in, these six lines reads:

54

Tolkien’s “‘Celtic’ type of legends” The desire of my spirit urges me to journey forth over the flowing sea, that far hence across the hills of water and the whale’s country I may seek the land of strangers. No mind have I for harp, nor gift of ring, nor delight in women, nor joy in the world, nor concern with aught else save the rolling of the waves. (Lost Road 84) It seems that the way Tolkien was planning to use the poem would be as an expression of Ælfwine’s desire to sail upon the western sea and find the “Straight Road,” the “Lost Road” that leads to Valinor and the Elves even after the world is “bent.” What is surprising is that he seems to associate Ælfwine’s voyage to the West with the immram genre of Irish tradition and specifically with the voyage of St. Brendan, which Tolkien was to use again in his later writings. Already in the outlines he was drafting for the Lost Road, among Northern stories with a shared Germanic background that Tolkien regarded as part of England’s past, he had included “a Tuatha-de-Danaan story, or Tir-nan-Óg,” and in another outline “the Irish legend of Tuatha-de-Danaan—and oldest man in the world” (Lost Road 77, 78).4 The mention of Tir-nan-Óg, the otherworldly land of Irish tradition, is very significant here. The idea of the Western happy otherworld island and the geography and function of Valinor, are points of similarity between Tolkien’s mythos and Celtic legends that can hardly be missed. In the Lost Road, the title itself seems to refer to the lost road to the West, to Valinor where the Elves live. In other drafts and extracts of the Anglo-Saxon part of the story there are also references to the voyage of St. Brendan and of Maelduin and to the Insula Deliciarum (Lost Tales 80, 84-85). The location of the Celtic otherworld in overseas islands has been disputed in later scholarship (see Carey; Carney), and the generally accepted view today is that the concept is of ecclesiastical origin and goes back to the biblical earthly paradise (Dumville; Mac Mathúna 280-85). However, when Tolkien was writing The Lost Road this hypothesis had still not been vigorously challenged. From 1924, Tolkien was already thinking of parallels between the Celtic otherworld and Valinor when he wrote a poem entitled “The Nameless Land.” In it he talks about a heavenly overseas island, which he compares to Tír-nan Óg and to the Christian Paradise. Although no name is given to the island, nor Elves are mentioned, he was probably thinking of Valinor, the blissful land of the Elves. The poem includes the following lines: “Such loveliness to look upon / no Bran nor Brendan ever won” (Lost Road 99), which refers to the voyage of St. Brendan and to the journey of Bran (“Immram Brain”), another account of a sea expedition involving otherworld islands, also belonging to the immram tradition (see Mac Mathúna). 55

Dimitra Fimi Tolkien seems to have thought that there was an intriguing point of similarity between the Germanic legends of sea-voyages and the Irish immram tradition. The legend of King Sheave, especially as found in Beowulf, where the story is attached to Scyld, seems to have occupied a lot of his time and study (see Lost Road 92-98). In Beowulf, Scyld arrives as a child from the sea and his provenance remains mysterious. He becomes a renowned king of the Danes, and when he dies his body is placed in a ship, together with all of his treasures, and is given to the sea, sailing on its own accord to an unknown destination (see lines 26-52). In a quotation from an undated lecture by Tolkien on this subject, as given by his son Christopher, one can read that in Beowulf: the poet is not explicit, and the idea was probably not fully formed in his mind—that Scyld went back to some mysterious land whence he had come. He came out of the Unknown beyond the Great Sea, and returned into It . . . In the last lines ‘Men can give no certain account of the havens where that ship was unladed’ we catch an echo of the ‘mood’ of pagan times in which ship-burial was practised. A mood in which the symbolism (what we should call the ritual) of a departure over the sea whose further shore was unknown; and an actual belief in a magical land or otherworld located ‘over the sea’, can hardly be distinguished. (Lost Road 95-96) It seems that by incorporating in his legendarium the Celtic tradition, Tolkien was able to establish a pagan, pre-Christian otherworld that the Anglo-Saxons also knew, and that the poets of The Seafarer and Beowulf alluded to, a land where the real Elves were, a land that was central in his conception of “a mythology for England.” The Lost Road is the first instance in Tolkien’s writings in which the Irish tradition is clearly accepted as part of the same whole of Northern European myth and legend, and as part of what he was trying to “reconstruct” for England. Tolkien had started preparing an edition of The Seafarer with E. V. Gordon, which was left unfinished after he moved to Oxford.5 The notes they had kept were finally used by Gordon’s wife Ida in her 1960 edition of the poem (Gordon 17-18), and it is noteworthy that in the introductory remarks to that edition the Old English poem, along with other lyric-elegies, is compared with Celtic poetry of the same kind and is attributed to a “Celtic inspiration” (Gordon 17-18). Using The Seafarer in the same context with the story of St. Brendan and Tir-nan-Óg, and giving Ælfwine a wife from Cornwall—stating also that “the Welsh tongue is not strange to him” (Lost Road 84)—seems to confirm Tolkien’s acceptance of an unavoidable historical amalgamation of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon cultures. Later on, Tolkien elaborated on some of the ideas that first appeared 56

Tolkien’s “‘Celtic’ type of legends” in The Lost Road and included them in The Notion Club Papers, another abortive time-travel book very much along the same lines as the former (Sauron 145-237). This was written between 1945-46, but this time the dreamers that travel to the past are Oxford dons that belong to a literary group, the “Notion Club,” which is very reminiscent of the Inklings, the group that C. S. Lewis and Tolkien himself belonged to. In this work the dreamers travel back in time in the realm of myth and legend, although this time they mainly find themselves in places from Tolkien’s own mythology, like Númenor and Valinor. However, during a gathering of the Notion Club, one of the members, Frankley, reads a poem he has written, entitled “The Death of St. Brendan” (Sauron 261-64). Here, the Saint is portrayed as narrating the most memorable of his legendary voyages to a younger monk, before he dies. The younger monk is already interrogating him about “islands by deep spells beguiled /where dwell the Elven-kind,” asking if he found “the road to Heaven or the Living Land” (Sauron 261). St. Brendan talks about an island where he and his companions saw a tree with white leaves. Suddenly the leaves of the tree fell and flew to the sky, and coming from them they heard: a music not of bird, not voice of man, nor angel’s voice; but maybe there is a third fair kindred in the world yet lingers beyond the foundered land. (Sauron 263) This incident is strictly modelled upon one of the episodes in the Navigatio Sancti Brendani abbatis (The Voyage of Saint Brendan the abbot), an early tenth-century Latin prose version of St. Brendan’s legend, written by an Irish author and imitating the immram genre of Irish medieval literature. In this episode the Saint comes to the “Paradise of Birds,” where he encounters a magnificent tree with white birds. He learns from one of them that they are spirits that fell as a result of Lucifer’s rebellion, not being part of his followers, but not part of the “faithful” either (O’Meara and Wooding 34, 36). Indeed, Tolkien has the members of the “Notion Club” discussing the sources of Frankley’s poem. The poet himself admits that: “I read the Navigatio Sancti Brendani, of course, once upon a time, years ago, as well as that early Anglo-French thing, Benedeit's Vita” (Sauron 265), the latter being the early fourteenth century Anglo-Norman Voyage de Saint Brendan (see Burgess). Lowdham, another member of the Club, dismisses both sources as “rather dismal. Whatever merits they may have, any glimmer of a perception of what they are talking about is not one of them…” and he also adds for the latter source that “you won’t learn much about the West from that.” However, he refers to the actual episode of the tree and the birds in the Navigatio, by saying: 57

Dimitra Fimi And the Tree in St. Brendan was covered with white birds that were fallen angels. The one really interesting idea in the whole thing, I thought: they were angels that lived in a kind of limbo, because they were only lesser spirits that followed Satan only as their feudal overlord, and had no real part, by will or design, in the Great Rebellion. But you make them a third fair race. (Sauron 265) Indeed, in Frankley’s poem of St. Brendan’s voyages, the fallen angels have been transformed to Tolkien’s own Elves, and that makes the poem a good source of information about the “true West,” in contrast with the Navigatio. What should also be pointed out here is that in Irish folklore, in many occasions elves and fairies were considered to be actually fallen angels, a view that originated in an effort to impose biblical exegesis onto folk belief that was supposed to be a remnant of “pagan” religions of the past (Ó hógain 187-88). Verlyn Flieger has added one more element of Celtic inspiration in the canvas of The Lost Road and The Notion Club Papers: that of the legends of sunken lands in Celtic sources. As a parallel to Plato’s Atlantis, she cites the Welsh Cantref of Gwaelod, the Breton Ker-Ys, the Irish HyBrasil, and the Cornish Lyonesse (Interrupted Music 125-30). Tolkien was certainly familiar with such legends, and indeed they might have played an important role in contextualizing his “Atlantis complex” within British (rather than Classical) tradition. The inclusion of the “new version of the Atlantis legend” in his mythology would, thus, be justified as an integral part of Britain’s past. The mention of Lyonesse or Lionesse brings to mind the Arthurian legend, and especially its French versions. The next two sections of this essay will explore Tolkien and the Arthurian legend as a continuation of the blending of traditions of the British Isles in Tolkien’s work. 3. The Continuing Fascination of the Arthurian Legend Tolkien’s views on the Arthurian legend and the reasons why—for him—it did not qualify as “English” mythology were expressed in his 1951 letter to Milton Waldman (Letters 144). Flieger has discussed Tolkien’s charges against the Matter of Britain: its Christian elements, incoherence, lavish fantasy, and repetitiveness, and its “Britishness” rather than “Englishness” (“Matter of Britain”). Still, Tolkien’s fascination with the Arthurian legend persisted from his childhood to his mature years. Carpenter notes Tolkien’s enthusiasm for the Arthurian legend in his childhood (22). This enthusiasm might have been further enhanced by his school friend G. B. Smith and the latter’s keen interest in the Celtic—and particularly Welsh—tradition. Smith was an admirer of the 58

Tolkien’s “‘Celtic’ type of legends” “Mabinogion” tales, which he was re-reading while in the trenches of World War I, and of the Arthurian legend, particularly its Welsh origins rather than its more famous French versions. He was an aspiring poet, one of his longest poems, entitled “Glastonbury,” having an Arthurian subject. He also seemed to know the Welsh triads, he showed an interest for the Welsh language itself, and he esteemed the poetry of W.B. Yeats (Garth 7, 32, 55, 67, 82, 122, 195).6 During 1925-27, Tolkien composed a story for his son Michael entitled “Roverandom,” which was published posthumously (1998). In that story Tolkien included as a character a white dragon, who turns out to be a familiar one in Arthurian tradition: All the white dragons originally come from the moon, as you probably know; but this one had been to the world and back, so he had learned a thing or two. He fought the Red Dragon in Caerdragon in Merlin’s time, as you will find in all the more up-to-date history books; after which the other dragon was Very Red. Later he did lots more damage in the Three Islands, and went to live on the top of Snowdon for a time. People did not bother to climb up while that lasted—except for one man, and the dragon caught him drinking out of a bottle. That man finished in such a hurry that he left the bottle on the top, and his example has been followed by many people since. A long time since, and not until the dragon had flown off to Gwynfa, some time after King Arthur’s disappearance, at a time when dragons’ tails were esteemed a great delicacy by the Saxon Kings. (33) Although humorous and light-hearted, this passage alludes to the famous story of the White and Red Dragons, symbolizing the Anglo-Saxons and the Welsh respectively, which is mostly known from Merlin’s prophecy in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (Book VII, Chapter III). Tolkien also alludes to the earlier version of the legend, recorded in the “Mabinogion” story “Lludd and Llefelys,” in which the two dragons end up at mount Snowdon in Wales. 7 At some point in the 1930s Tolkien started working on a long poem entitled “The Fall of Arthur.” The poem remained unfinished, and it has never been published or made available to consult in its entirety. As a result, the only noteworthy information about it can be traced in Tolkien’s own letters as well as in his authorized biography by Humphrey Carpenter, who had access to Tolkien’s manuscript. Carpenter describes the poem as “an individual rendering of the Morte d’Arthur,” and provides a very brief outline of the work, concentrating rather on the characters of Mordred and Guinever (Carpenter 168-69). Carpenter seems to be 59

Dimitra Fimi pointing to Malory’s Morte D’Arthur as an immediate source for Tolkien’s poem. However, Tolkien’s poem was written in alliterative metre, while Malory’s is in prose. There are actually two very short fragments, of no more than fortyfive lines in total, from the unpublished “Fall of Arthur” available to the researcher within Tolkien’s manuscripts at the Bodleian (Tolkien A 30/1, Folios 90-91). Although they constitute too small a sample for any valuable judgment of the poem, and some of the lines are very difficult to decipher due to Tolkien’s notoriously difficult handwriting, it is significant that Christopher Tolkien’s note on the Folio refers to the poem as “Morte Arthure.” This title would not point to Malory’s poem but rather to the Middle-English text known as the Alliterative Morte Arthure.8 This is a late fourteenth-century Arthurian romance, which, together with the almost contemporary Stanzaic Morte Arthur, forms the main English Arthurian tradition before Malory (Benson 2). Tolkien might have showed a preference for this poem rather than for Malory’s work because of it being part of the alliterative revival, a literary movement which began in the mid-fourteenth century and included such works as the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which Tolkien co-edited with his colleague E. V. Gordon and also translated into Modern English alliterative verse. Carl Phelpstead has discussed in detail the importance of the alliterative form for the Inklings, and its associations with Englishness and English identity, and has suggested that they attempted a “second alliterative revival” in the twentieth-century (457).9 In addition, in his 1935 essay “The Alliterative Metre,” C.S. Lewis talks about “a return to our own ancient system, the alliterative line,” “against the long reign of foreign, syllabic metres in English.” He goes on to refer to the alliterative poetry of Auden, adding that “Professor Tolkien will soon, I hope, be ready to publish an alliterative poem” (Rehabilitations 119). The Tolkien poem that Lewis refers to can definitely be identified as the unfinished “Fall of Arthur” (Selected Literary Essays 15). It is known that the poem was read and praised by E. V. Gordon and R. W. Chambers, the latter describing it as: “great stuff—really heroic, quite apart from its value as showing how the Beowulf metre can be used in modern English” (Carpenter 168). In this context, Tolkien’s desire to finish the poem as late as 1955 (Letters 219) can be justified. Apart from a tribute to the alliterative form, though, the poem could also be a tribute to the Arthur of the English, to the English Arthurian tradition. Unfortunately, Tolkien’s “Fall of Arthur” is not available to consult and compare with either Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, or the Alliterative Morte Arthure, but both works would qualify as depicting an English Arthur, as opposed to a Welsh, or even worse for Tolkien, a French one. In an article written around the same time when Tolkien’s Arthurian poem 60

Tolkien’s “‘Celtic’ type of legends” was being composed, E. V. Gordon published an article (together with E. Vinaver) on the Alliterative Morte Arthure, discussing the new light thrown on it by the discovery of the Winchester manuscript of Malory’s Morte Arthure. This discovery had caused excitement in the academic world and might have contributed to Tolkien’s Arthurian venture. After the 1930s and “The Fall of Arthur” Tolkien’s next engagement with the Arthurian legend was in his unfinished work The Notion Club Papers, in which discussions held by the members of the Notion Club reveal once more Tolkien’s continuous fascination with the story of Arthur. In the record of Night 65, after a missing leaf in the account, Jeremy and Frankley start a conversation about myth and reality, about mythical and historical truth. Jeremy argues that there is truth in myths, although this would not necessarily be the conventional “scientific” truth we think of today. He also argues that “real details,” “facts.” like real historical personalities, are “caught up” in myth: the example he uses is that “There was a man called Arthur at the centre of the cycle” (Sauron 227). Frankley is quick to respond and reject the Arthurian romances as “real” but Jeremy insists that they might be “real” in a different way than “true past events” are. This argument about a historical Arthur being “caught up” in myth had been explored previously by Tolkien in his 1939 Andre Lang lecture “On Fairy-stories.” Talking about “the Pot of Soup, the Cauldron of Story,” and on how folk stories are born and developed, he writes: It seems fairly plain that Arthur, once historical (but perhaps as such not of great importance), was also put into the Pot. There he was boiled for a long time, together with many other older figures and devices, of mythology and Faerie, and even some other stray bones of history (such as Alfred’s defence against the Danes), until he emerged as a King of Faerie. (MC 126) This seems like a conclusive view, following the model of folklore theory. Still, the historicity of Arthur, and the lack of enough documents for the study of the origins of the Arthurian legend seemed to concern Tolkien later on, when he was writing the Notion Club Papers. The record of the Notion Club for Night 61 includes a dream scene that Ramer narrates to the rest of the members. This is the image of an old librarian looking through “a volume made up of various manuscript-fragments bound together, probably in the sixteenth century.” Ramer continues: In the remembered bit of the dream I knew I had been able to read the page before he turned over, and that it was not English; but I could remember no more than that—except that I was delighted, or he was. Actually it was a leaf, a 61

Dimitra Fimi unique fragment of a MS. in very early Welsh, before Geoffrey, about the death of Arthur. (Sauron 192) Even the hint of the existence of such a manuscript would not only be “of superlative importance in the study of the Arthurian legend” as Christopher Tolkien notes (Sauron 216), but would re-open heated debates about the historicity of Arthur and thorny issues about national identity and culture. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britannie has always been considered as the work that popularized Arthur and made him an internationally recognized hero, but also as a work that gave Arthur a mythical aura, thus obscuring the origins of the legend, which might point to the historical Arthur. Indeed, most academic work on the historicity of Arthur concentrates by default on the pre-Galfridian material. Tolkien’s rejection of the Arthurian legend as an authentic part of England’s heritage must be taken with a pinch of salt, and the same is valid for his whole reaction to “things Celtic,” as I have argued elsewhere (Fimi 156-70). Tolkien’s Anglo-Saxonism was a major strand of his mythology, indeed instrumental in the creation of the Middle-earth saga, but after the Lost Tales he seems to have started thinking in more “British” terms. After the Anglo-Saxon material that Tolkien looked up to and used in his legendarium, the Middle English literature followed. Middle English literature was under the shadow of French cultural influence, which was becoming dominant in the rest of Europe at the time. The French form of the romance was introduced in England, and the Arthurian legend was re-introduced in its French guise, notably through Chrétien de Troyes’s romances. Some of the most important texts of that period were either translated or adapted from French sources. Tolkien held in great esteem such Middle English texts as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Sir Orfeo, two works that he had studied extensively. His own edition of Sir Gawain (with E. V. Gordon) recognizes the French influence on the poem (Tolkien and Gordon xii-v), while in his editorial notes to his “Middle English Version” of Sir Orfeo he seems to subscribe to the theory that the poem is a translation or adaptation of a lost Old French original (Hostetter 104). The Arthur of the English was a fusion of its Celtic origins, its French re-working, and its Middle-English context. Tolkien’s attempt for an Arthurian poem modelled—at least in terms of metre—upon the Alliterative Morte Arhure was an acknowledgment of the Arthurian legend as an integral part of England’s cultural and mythical heritage, whatever its historical origin. 4. Middle-English, French and Celtic: “The Lay of Leithian” As briefly referred to above, in the early 1920s Tolkien gave his key character Ælfwine a mother from Lionesse, the romance country 62

Tolkien’s “‘Celtic’ type of legends” of Lyonesse of the Arthurian legend. In the period 1925-1927, before the Lost Road venture, Tolkien began a long poem on the story of Beren and Lúthien, a story already told in the Book of Lost Tales. The poem was called “The Lay of Leithian,” its extended title being “The Gest of Beren son of Barahir and Lúthien the Fay called Tinúviel the Nightingale, or the Lay of Leithian Release from Bondage.” The poem seems to have a Middle-English atmosphere. The word “gest” used in its title would allude to the French chansons de geste, mainly associated with the “matter of France.” However, the term has also been used for accounts of the Arthurian legend in France and Britain. As Christopher Tolkien notes, lines 2298-9 and 2348-9 of the Lay come more or less directly from lines 285-6 of Sir Orfeo and seem also to echo Tolkien’s translation of these lines (Lays 237, 238, 248). In addition to that, Tolkien also uses in the Lay two archaic words he also used in his translation of the Middle-English poem Pearl: “ruel-bone” for “some kind of ivory,” and “stared” for “shone,” the latter coming straight from the original (Lays 236, 266, 371; Tolkien Sir Gawain 92, 94). But probably the most striking French-cum-Arthurian reference in the Lay is the location of Thingol’s kingdom, which is initially called Broceliand, and in a later draft Broseliand (Lays 158, 159, 160). The forest of Brocéliande is one of the most famous Arthurian locations associated with Brittany. It features in Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain, it is mentioned in the writings of Giraldus Cambrensis, and its marvels are described by Wace, an Anglo-Norman poet who wrote the Geste des Bretuns, today better known as the Roman de Brut.10 The Roman de Brut was based on Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia and of course covered the story of Arthur, which was becoming more and more popular at that time. Tolkien’s term Broceliand/Broseliand underwent much consideration and change and ended up in the much more familiar Tolkienian name Beleriand, but if the poem is read with the reader substituting Beleriand for Broceliand/Broseliand, as it was initially, then its Arthurian/Celtic ambience becomes immediately discernible. The most telling sign is the motif of the relationship of a fairy woman with a mortal man, which had always been a favorite Celtic theme.11 Indeed, such “fay” women are also frequently encountered in French Arthurian romances. In the Lay, both Lúthien and her mother Melian are referred to as “fays” (Lays 153, 172, 229), and their stories follow that motif: Lúthien is an elf or fairy who gives her love to a mortal man, while in the case of Thingol and Melian we have an analogue of the same idea: Thingol is an elf himself, but Melian is a Maia, a higher being than Thingol and closer to the Valar. Marjorie Burns has also noted Melian’s “Arthurian heritage,” remarking that the various names that Tolkien considered for her in The Book of Lost Tales, including Wendelin, Gwendeling, 63

Dimitra Fimi Gwenniel, Gwenethlin, Gwendhiling, Gwendelin, and Gwedhelin, have “a clear Arthurian ring” (196). Especially the initial g or w of the name brings to mind the names “Waynor” and “Gaynor,” used interchangeably for Guinevere in the alliterative Morte Arthure (see for example l. 84 and l. 233). In a 1954 letter to Naomi Mitchison Tolkien seems to openly contradict his 1937 letter to Allen and Unwin, in which he refutes the characterisation of his works as “Celtic.” He writes: The living language of the Western Elves (Sindarin or Greyelven) is the one usually met, especially in names. This is derived from an origin common to it and Quenya; but the changes have been deliberately devised to give it a linguistic character very like (though not identical with) British-Welsh: because that character is one that I find, in some linguistic moods, very attractive; and because it seems to fit the rather “Celtic” type of legends and stories told of its speakers. (Letters 176) Which are these “‘Celtic’ type of legends” that the Grey Elves, the Sindar, seem to have? I would argue that it is exactly the story of the “Lay of Leithian,” the story of Beren and Lúthien, and the previous parallel story of Melian and Thingol. Indeed, this seems to be the main “legend” of the Sindar, who speak a language much like Welsh in its phonetic structure. Melian is referred to as a “fay” throughout the Book of Lost Tales (Lost Tales I 120; Lost Tales II 9, 10, 43, 76, 96, 233) and there are further Celtic elements in the original “Tale of Tinúviel,” elements that were later further developed in “The Lay of Leithian.” The original idea of the “Girdle of Melian” seems to be very much like the enchanted forests of the Arthurian romances, so that the name Broceliand/Broseliand used in the Lay seems to fit very well: Hidden was his dwelling from the vision and knowledge of Melko by the magics of Gwendeling the fay, and she wove spells about the paths thereto that none but the Eldar might tread them easily, and so was the king secured from all dangers save it be treachery alone. (Lost Tales II 9; my emphasis) Also, both the Tale and the Lay make use of a triad, which seems to work as a mnemonic device, exactly in the same way as the Welsh triads were used. By arranging names, place-names or storylines in groups of three, the bards could recall more easily a major part of the body of orally preserved Welsh repertoire of myths and legends (Bromwich lxv). Both in the Tale and the Lay, the triad concern Lúthien’s brother, Dairon, who was one of “the three most magic players of the Elves,” listing Tinfang 64

Tolkien’s “‘Celtic’ type of legends” Warble and “Ivárë who plays beside the sea” as the other two (Lost Tales II 10). The triad in the Lay runs thus: Such players have there only been thrice in all Elfinesse, I ween: Tinfang Gelion who still the moon enchants on summer nights of 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) The use of triads in Tolkien’s legendarium is quite rare, and it cannot be accidental that two of them appear in the most famous legend of the Sindar. Finally, some later evidence that Tolkien was still thinking of the story of Beren and Lúthien as Celtic/Arthurian, can be found in “The Etymologies,” written in the late 1930s, and in the map that accompanied the “Later Quenta Silmarillion,” written in the 1950s. In the “Etymologies,” under the stems GAT(H)-, GARAT- and THUR-, the word “Garthurian” appears, explained as “Fenced Realm,” and is used to refer to Doriath (Lost Road 358, 360, 393). In the map associated with the “Later Quenta Silmarillion,” we find the place-name “Garthurian” at the edges of Doriath (Morgoth 183). In his commentary on the map Christopher Tolkien adds his father note that “the Noldor often used the name Arthurien for Doriath, though this is but an alteration of the Sindarin Garthurian ‘hidden realm’” (Morgoth 189). Tolkien’s linguistic invention was a serious philological venture, which simulated the process through which real languages develop. For example, when composing his Elvish languages, Tolkien would establish first the common Proto-Elvish root and then modify it to fit its development into words in Quenya and Sindarin, following the phonetic rules he had established for these languages.12 However, “inventing” the root first was not always the case. As Christopher Tolkien notes, already from the period of the Lost Tales, in some cases the word was “already there” and its etymology was worked out backwards (Lost Tales I 246). In the early documents of the “Qenya” and the “Gnomish” Lexicons, it seems that some sort of “historical punning” was present as Christopher Tolkien notes on his introduction.13 I would suggest that “Arthurien” and “Garthurien” for Doriath is such a “historical punning,” linking this Middle-earth location with its original conception as Broseliand/Broceliand, and alluding to the “Celtic” type of legends of its people. 65

Dimitra Fimi 5. Merging Traditions In his 1955 O’Donnell lecture “English and Welsh,” Tolkien referred to the appeal of Welsh as a “native language,” noting that “for satisfaction and therefore for delight . . . we are still ‘British’ at heart” (MC 194). This acceptance of the term “British” is remarkable. As late as 1943 Tolkien still insisted on the distinction of English and British when talking about patriotism: “For I love England (not Great Britain and certainly not the British Commonwealth (grr!)” (Letters 65).14 However, the transition from English (which would have primarily meant Anglo-Saxon), to British (which would include the merging of different traditions, including Celtic and French, and would start with the Middle English period) was gradual in Tolkien’s mind and was also reflected as a gradual process in his creative writings. As discussed above, the Book of Lost Tales already included Celtic elements, and the Lost Road made an explicit declaration of the blending of Irish and Anglo-Saxon traditions. At the same time the Sindar were always associated with a language very similar to Welsh, and their most famous legend, the story of Beren and Lúthien, was, from early on, conceived as a “‘Celtic’ type of legend,” very close to medieval Arthurian romances. Finally, Arthur as a historical and mythical figure was always present in Tolkien’s imagination, leading to the writing of one more unfinished work. It seems that by the end of his life Tolkien explicitly acknowledged what is true for many nation-states and their history: that purity of tradition is not a realistic part of the process of nation-building, and that significant merging of peoples, languages, and cultural elements occurs. Especially in the case of the British Isles, a long troubled history of invasions, conquests, and linguistic amalgamations created the modern state of the United Kingdom, and the mythology of Middle-earth, either consciously or not, reflects this process right from its original conception. Tolkien’s 1954 letter to Naomi Mitchison quoted above, together with his conclusion of his 1955 O’Donnell lecture, seem to be the reflections of a more “mature” Tolkien upon his own work, perhaps realising that his “mythology for England” eventually became a “mythology for Britain.” NOTES 1

The collection also includes a separate edition of one of the “Mabinogion” tales, Peredur Ab Efrawc (Meyer).

2

The role of Eriol and Ælfwine as mediators in the “Lost Tales” and their role in linking Tolkien’s mythology with England have been discussed by Verlyn Flieger (“Footsteps”) and Michael Drout.

3

For an overview see The New Arthurian Encyclopedia (Lacy 287-88). 66

Tolkien’s “‘Celtic’ type of legends” 4

Norma Roche has explored the significance of the story of St. Brendan and the idea of a Western Otherworld island in Tolkien’s work. Her article was published before the ninth volume of the History of Middle-earth was released (1992), which contained The Notion Club Papers, and so her discussion is restricted to the evidence in The Lost Road. More recently, Verlyn Flieger has also discussed Tolkien’s debt to the story of St. Brendan, including how the poem “Imram” is now recognised as part of The Notion Club Papers (Interrupted Music 130-34).

5

The projects of academic collaboration, fruitful or not, between Tolkien and Gordon, including the edition of The Seafarer, have been discussed by Anderson (“Industrious”). Wilcox has also referred to their collaboration on The Seafarer in her discussion of that poem’s impact on Tolkien’s literature.

6

Apart from Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi, Tolkien’s Celtic Library includes five more books bequeathed to him by G.B. Smith. These are An English-Welsh Pronouncing Dictionary (Spurrell), Hanes A Chan (Edwards 1908), Essai sur La Composition du Roman Gallois de Peredur (Williams), Gwaith Samuel Roberts (Roberts), and Gwaith Twm o'r Nant (Edwards 1909).

7

Tolkien also refers to the story of “Lludd and Llefelys” in his O’Donnell lecture “English and Welsh” (MC 189). For a commentary on the extract quoted see also Scull’s and Hammond’s notes in their edition of Roverandom (101-3).

8

For an introduction to the poem see Johnson.

9

Phelpstead also refers to the alliterative verses contained in The Lord of the Rings, and claims that “The enormous popularity of this book means that these verses must be the most widely read alliterative poetry of the twentieth century, if not of any period” (444).

10 For the forest of Brocéliande see The New Arthurian Encyclopedia (Lacy 55). 11 It seems that Tolkien was undecided for a while whether Beren would be a man or an elf. Christopher Tolkien refers to the lost original of the “Tale of Tinúviel” where Beren was a man, in contrast to Beren being an elf in the extant version of the Tale (Lost Tales II 52, 139). However, from “The Lay of Leithien” and on Beren’s identity is securely fixed as that of a man. 12 This process can be attested in the fact that when he attempted to record his languages in a “dictionary form” he often listed the Proto-El-

67

Dimitra Fimi vish roots alphabetically, with derived words under every entry. This is how, for example, the “Qenya Lexicon” and the “Etymologies” work. This account of Tolkien’s creation of languages is, of course, an over-simplified one that does not reflect the successive layers of revisions and alterations. 13 For example, the root SAHA, meaning “be hot” produces (apart from saiwa, “hot” or sara “fiery”) the word Sahora, “the South.” This “historical punning” seems also to be true of the word Atalantie meaning “Downfall” in Quenya. Tolkien himself seems to be making a semi-humorous note on this “coincidence,” by writing: “It is a curious chance that the stem √talat used in Q[uenya] for ‘slipping, sliding, falling down’, of which atalantie is a normal (in Q) noun-formation, should so much resemble Atlantis” (Letters 347). 14 For Tolkien’s conception of the English vs. British identity and the historical background of how these terms were used at the time see my discussion (Fimi 159-61). WORKS CITED Anderson, Douglas A. “‘An Industrious Little Devil’: E. V. Gordon as friend and collaborator with Tolkien.” In Tolkien the Medievalist, edited by Jane Chance. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Anderson, Douglas A. “Personal Library.” In The J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment, ed. Michael D. C. Drout. New York: Routledge, 2006. Benson, Larry D. “Introduction.” In King Arthur's Death: The Middle English Stanzaic Morte Arthur and Alliterative Morte Arthure, edited by Larry D. Benson, revised by Edward E. Foster. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 1994. Bromwich, Rachel, ed. and trans. Trioedd Ynys Prydein: The Welsh Triads. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1961. Burgess, Glyn S., trans. “The Anglo-Norman Version.” In The Voyage of Saint Brendan: Representative Versions of the Legend in English Translation, edited by W.R.J. Barron and Glyn S. Burgess. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002. Burns, Marjorie. Perilous Realms: Celtic and Norse in Tolkien's Middle-earth. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. Carey, J. “Time, Space and the Otherworld.” Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 7 (1982): 1-27. 68

Tolkien’s “‘Celtic’ type of legends” Carney, J. “Review of Carl Selmer's Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis.” Medium Aevum 32 (1963): 42-43. Carpenter, Humphrey. Tolkien: A Biography. London: Allen and Unwin, 1977. Child, Francis James, ed. English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1882. Drout, Michael D. C. “A Mythology for Anglo-Saxon England.” In J.R.R. Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader, edited by Jane Chance. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2004. Dumville, David N. “Echtrae and Immram: Some Problems of Definition.” Ériu 27 (1976): 73-94. Edwards, J. M. Hanes A Chan. Newport: Southall, 1908. ———, ed. Mabinogion (o Lyfr Coch Hergest). Wrecsam: Hughes & Son, 1921. Edwards, Thomas. Gwaith Twm o'r Nant. Llanuwchllyn: Ab Owen, 1909. Evans, J. G., ed. White Book Mabinogion. Pwllheli: Evans, 1907. Fimi, Dimitra. “‘Mad Elves’ and ‘Elusive Beauty’: Some Celtic Strands of Tolkien’s Mythology.” Folklore 117, no. 2 (2006):156-70. Flieger, Verlyn. “J. R. R. Tolkien and the Matter of Britain.” Mythlore 23 (2000): 47-59. _____. “The Footsteps of Ælfwine.” In Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth, edited by Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter. Westport, Connecticut; London: Greenwood Press, 2000. _____. Interrupted Music: The Making of Tolkien’s Mythology. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2005. Garth, John. Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. Gordon, E. V. and Eugène Vinaver. “New light on the text of the alliterative ‘Morte Arthure.’” Medium Ævum 6 (1937): 81-98. Gordon, I. L.. ed. The Seafarer. London: Methuen, 1960. Guest, C. (Lady), trans. The Mabinogion. London: Dent, 1913. Hersart de la Villemarqué, Théodore Claude Henri. Barzas-Breis: Chants Populaires de la Bretagne, Tome I and II. Paris: Franck, 1846. 69

Dimitra Fimi Hostetter, Carl. F. “Sir Orfeo: A Middle English Version By J.R.R. Tolkien.” Tolkien Studies 1 (2004): 85-123. Johnson, Lesley. “The Alliterative Morte Arthure.” In The Arthur of the English: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval English Life and Literature, edited by W.R.J. Barron. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999. Keightley, Thomas. The Fairy Mythology, Illustrative of the Romance and Superstition of Various Countries. London: Bell & Daldy, 1873. Kondratiev, Alexi. “New Myths for Old: The Legacy of Iolo Morgannwg and Hersard de le Villemarque.” Mythlore 36 (1984): 43-46. Lacy, Norris J., ed. The New Arthurian Encyclopedia. London, Chicago: St. James Press, 1991. Lewis, C. S. Rehabilitations and Other Essays. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1939. ________. Out of the Silent Planet. London: Bodley Head, 1938. ________. Selected Literary Essays, ed. Walter Hooper. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1969. Mac Mathúna, Séamus, ed. and trans. Immram Brain: Bran’s Journey to the Land of the Women. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1985. Meyer, K., ed. Peredur Ab Efrawc. Leipzig: Hirzel, 1887. Mühlhausen, L., ed. Die vier Zweige des Mabinogi. Halle: Niemeyer, 1925. Ó hógáin, Dáithí. Myth, Legend and Romance: An Encyclopaedia of the Irish Folk Tradition. London: Ryan, 1990. O’ Meara, John J. and Wooding, Jonathan M., trans. “The Latin Version.” In The Voyage of Saint Brendan: Representative Versions of the Legend in English Translation, edited by W.R.J. Barron and Glyn S. Burgess. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002. Phelpstead, Carl. “Auden and the Inklings: An Alliterative Revival.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 23, no. 4 (2004): 433-57. Rhŷs, J. and Evans J.G., eds. Red Book of Hergest, Vol. I. (Mabinogion). Oxford: Evans, 1887. Roche, Norma. “Sailing West: Tolkien, the Saint Brendan Story, and the Idea of Paradise in the West.” Mythlore 66 (1991): 16-20. Roberts, Samuel. Gwaith Samuel Roberts (S.R.), edited by Owen M. Edwards. Llanuwchllyn: Ab Owen, 1906. 70

Tolkien’s “‘Celtic’ type of legends” Shippey, T. A. J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. London: HarperCollins, 2001. ________. The Road to Middle-earth: Revised Edition. London: HarperCollins, 2005. Spurrell, William. An English-Welsh Pronouncing Dictionary. Caerfyrddin: W. Spurrell, 1909. Taylor, Tom, trans. Ballads and Songs of Brittany. London: Macmillan, 1865. Tolkien, J.R.R. “Philology: General Works.” The Year's Work in English Studies IV (1923): 20-37. ________. “Philology: General Works.” The Year's Work in English Studies V (1924): 26-65. ________. “The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun.” The Welsh Review 4:4 (1945): 254-66. ________, trans. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1975. ________. Roverandom, edited by Christina Scull and Waynne G. Hammond. London: HarperCollins, 1998. Tolkien, J.R.R. and Gordon, E. V., eds. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925. Warnke, Karl, ed. Die Lais der Marie de France. Halle: M. Niemeyer, 1900. Wilcox, Miranda. “Exilic Imagining in The Seafarer and The Lord of the Rings.” In Tolkien the Medievalist, edited by Jane Chance. London; New York: Routledge, 2003. Williams, Mary Rhiannon. Essai sur la Composition du Roman Gallois de Peredur. Paris : H. Champion, 1909. Wimberly, Lowry Charles. Folklore in the English and Scottish Ballads. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1928. Villemarqué (Hersart de la), Théodore Claude Henri. Barzas-Breis: Chants Populaires de la Bretagne. Tome I and II. Paris: Franck, 1846. Yates, Jessica. “The Source of ‘The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun.’” In Leaves from the Tree: J.R.R. Tolkien's Shorter Fiction, edited by T. A. Shippey, et al. 63-71. London: Tolkien Society, 1991.

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Greek and Latin Amatory Motifs in Éowyn’s Portrayal MIRYAM LIBRÁN-MORENO

T

he composite nature of the character of Éowyn suggests that Tolkien drew his sources of inspiration from several periods, languages, and cultures. A study of Éowyn’s portrait as drawn by Tolkien reveals the surprising appearance of a tightly-interwoven cluster of well-known amatory motifs (topoi) worded in the “sermo amatorius”1 that Greek and Latin poetry created, codified, and then transferred to Medieval and Renaissance poetry. Although Éowyn’s immediate literary lineage is undeniably and predominantly Northern, it will be the purpose of this paper to demonstrate the existence of a strong admixture of Greek and Latin citations in the shaping of her figure. Tolkien started to study Latin and Greek at age eleven, at King Edward’s School in Birmingham, the backbone of whose curriculum was formed by both Classical languages.2 The education he received in Classics was extensive, thorough, and intense; as a result of his proficiency in and command of both Greek and Latin, he was awarded an Open Classical Exhibition at Exeter College, Oxford.3 Furthermore, Ancient Greek was precisely the language that awakened Tolkien’s appetite for devising invented tongues as an adolescent (Carpenter 36). Therefore, Tolkien’s Classical education was far from being sketchy or superficial, and it would be surprising if none of it were ever apparent in his subsequent writings. While it is true that Tolkien formally abandoned reading for Classics in 1913 and changed focus to English (Carpenter 63), he never truly left Greek and Latin literature behind. As time passed, without abandoning his love of Old English, Gothic, and Old Norse, he returned to the Classical languages.4 Throughout his letters he continued to dispel notions that his only sources of inspiration were Northern ones and to make assurances about the influence of Classical literature on his work.5 At least four amatory motifs Classical in origin and highly popular in Medieval and Renaissance literature may be clearly discerned in Tolkien’s description of Éowyn:6 (1) florida-puella, or the beloved seen as a flower; (2) ἔρως γλυκύπικρος, bittersweet love; (3) dura puella, or flinty girl; (4) hiemps amoris, or the winter of love, together with ver erat, or spring as the season of love. As the following discussion will make frequent use of the same Tolkien passages in the analysis of the four selected topoi, it will be necessary to quote all the relevant material in full in section one. Copyright © West Virginia University Press

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Miryam Librán-Moreno 1. Tolkien’s portrait of Éowyn On describing Éowyn for the first time in Théoden’s court, the narrator records Aragorn’s impression and assessment of her bearing, her behavior, and her character: “Grave and thoughtful was her glance, and she looked on the king with cool pity . . . strong she seemed and stern as steel . . . fair and cold, like a morning of pale spring that is not yet come to womanhood” (TT, III, vi, 119). A fortnight passes. Aragorn finds Éowyn lying, near death, in the Houses of Healing, crushed by her shattering confrontation wih the Lord of the Nazgûl. He is full of grief for the near-despair that, according to his insight, has been preying on Éowyn’s mind for a time: “When I first looked on her and perceived her unhappiness, it seemed to me that I saw a white flower standing straight and proud, shapely as a lily, and yet knew that it was hard, as if wrought by elf-wrights out of steel. Or was it, maybe, a frost that had turned its sap to ice, and so it stood, bittersweet, still fair to see, but stricken, soon to fall and die?” (RK, V, viii, 142-43) Aragorn does all he can for Éowyn, fully aware that the healing of her mind and soul, as opposed to the cure of her ailing body, is beyond his medical skills. Her destined healer, Faramir, notices that Éowyn’s coldness is starting to subside, and that her loveliness surpasses that of all the flowers and the women in Gondor: As he looked at her it seemed to him that something in her softened, as though a bitter frost were yielding at the first faint presage of spring. . . . “In the valleys of our hills there are flowers fair and bright, and maidens fairer still; but neither flower nor lady have I seen till now in Gondor so lovely, and so sorrowful.” (RK, VI, v, 238-39) Éowyn’s change of heart is compared with the passing of winter, and her acceptance of Faramir’s more real and mature love is assimilated to the coming of spring: “And suddenly her winter passed, and the sun shone on her” (RK, VI, v, 243). Aragorn had previously declared that Éowyn was like a flower made of steel and ice. No longer frozen at the core, Éowyn will become a healer and a gardener now. Her future life will be devoted to the task of promoting fertility, growth, and wellness, in the guise of helping plants and flowers grow in the company of her husband: [Éowyn] “I will be a shieldmaiden no longer . . . I will be a healer, and love all things that grow and are not barren. . . .” 74

Greek and Latin Amatory Motifs in Éowyn’s Portrayal [Faramir] “Let us dwell in fair Ithilien and there make a garden. All things will grow with joy there, if the White Lady comes.” (RK, VI, v, 243) 2. Greek and Latin amatory motifs: analysis and sources As can be seen in the passages listed above, Éowyn’s state of mind is revealed through vegetal (white flower), seasonal (winter, spring), and metallic (steel) imagery arranged in a closely interlinked thematic cluster. The origin of each element in that thematic cluster, and its verbal echos in Tolkien’s own imaginative reworking, will be considered now. 2.1. Florida-puella (the beloved seen as a flower)7 As shown above, for both Aragorn and Faramir Éowyn is like a white lily far surpassing all other flowers in beauty. The fairness of the beloved (candida puella, “shining-white girl”) and the notion that flowers cannot compare with her are Hellenistic motifs frequently rehearsed in Latin elegiac poetry. Compare the following lines: “I saw a white flower standing straight and proud, shapely as a lily” (RK, V, viii, 142-43) and “In the valleys of our hills there are flowers fair and bright, and maidens fairer still; but neither flower nor lady have I seen till now in Gondor so lovely” (RK, V, viii, 238-39) with Catullus 61.193-4 uxor in thalamo tibi est, ore floridulo nitens, alba parthenice velut your wife is in the marriage chamber, shining with her flowery face, like to the white virgin-flower (A.S. Kline tr.) and Propertius 2.3.10 nec me tam facies, quamvis sit candida, cepit (lilia non domina sunt magis alba mea) It was not her face, bright as it is, that won me (lilies are not more white than my lady). Although the comparison of the beloved with a flower is a common75

Miryam Librán-Moreno place image to be found in all ages and places,8 several details seem to indicate that Tolkien aimed at a more specific and restricted subset within this ample and popular motif. Éowyn is like a flower not only in beauty and purity, but also in fragility and in transience (“stricken, soon to fall and die;” RK V, viii, 143). In Greek and Latin epithalamic poetry, the literary presence of flowers highlights the sexual charm of virgins before they are assimilated by culture through marriage.9 As in the English term “to deflower,” the loss of a girl’s virginity came to be associated with violently plucking a flower.10 As the bloom of a flower is transient and quick to fade and decay, the flower-metaphor aimed to persuade remiss virginal girls to yield to love: their charms are as transitory and frail as blooming flowers, and similarly doomed to disappear.11 A virgin’s flower-like life must be brought to and end, through deflowering, if the girl must become a wife and a mother and take her adult place in society (Thornton 147-9, 159). This is the famous motif called “collige virgo rosas” (“gather ye rosebuds while ye may”), so favored in all later Western poetry.12 Therefore, the premature death of a young person (male or female) is seen as similar to the cutting down of a flower.13 The topos gained its widest later currency thanks to two passages from Vergil, Aen. 9.433-7 (Euryalus’ death) and 11.68-71 (Pallas’ death)14 (Reed 32). Particularly relevant is the latter passage. Éowyn, seemingly on her death-bed after sustaining a wound in combat, is “a white flower . . . still fair to see, but stricken, soon to fall and die” (RK, V, viii, 143). Pallas’ youthful body, carried out for his funeral, resembles a flower cut down by a girl, still shining and beautiful to see, but soon to wither away completely (Aen. 11.68-71): qualem virgineo demessum pollice florem seu mollis violae, seu languentis hyacinthi, cui neque fulgor adhuc, nec dum sua forma recessit; non iam mater alit tellus, virisque ministrat.15 like a flower plucked by a young girl’s fingers, a sweet violet or a drooping hyacinth, whose brightness and beauty have not yet faded, but whose native earth no longer nourishes it, or gives it strength. (A.S. Kline tr.) Tolkien must have been particularly struck by these celebrated Vergilian lines, in so far as he reworked them again in the sentences that describe Lúthien’s death-like swoon: “and her body lay like a flower that is suddenly cut off and lies for a while unwithered on the grass” (S 227). Éowyn lies “white as a lily, cold as frost”16 in Aragorn’s eyes as he “stooped and looked in her face.” Having assessed the gravity of her condition, he “bent and kissed her on the brow, and called her softly,

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Greek and Latin Amatory Motifs in Éowyn’s Portrayal saying . . .” (RK V, viii, 144.) When Aeneas leans over the corpse of dead Pallas to lament his fate, the youth’s face appears snow-white to him (Aen. 11.39-41): ipse caput niuei fultum Pallantis et ora ut uidit leuique patens in pectore uulnus cuspidis Ausoniae, lacrimis ita fatur obortis. When he saw the pillowed face and head of Pallas, white as snow, and the open wound of the Ausonian spear in his slender chest, he spoke, his tears rising. (A.S. Kline tr.) Why should Tolkien hint at Pallas’ death at all, instead of citing the other, more celebrated flower-simile from the fall of Euryalus at Aen. 9.433-7? It may not be idle to note that the relationship between Pallas and Aeneas may throw some light on Aragorn’s own heart as well, in such a way as an allusion to Aen. 9.433-7 would not allow. Pallas’ feelings for Aeneas were those of a star-struck young soldier for his glamorous hero-commander,17 while Aeneas’ heart harbored a very deep affection for the valiant boy.18 Like Éowyn, Pallas is a very young foreigner (the son of Aeneas’ main ally against his Italian enemies) who goes to war to support Aeneas’ cause and is unexpectedly killed in battle. At the first sight of Pallas’ fallen body, Aeneas, like Aragorn, is overcome with grief, guilt, and anguish over his part in Pallas’ death.19 The mythic association of plucked flowers with lost virginity and violent death20 led Hellenistic poets to transfer this motif from an epic context to the realm of eros, morbidly superimposing love, defloration, and death (Reed 32). Vergil brought this imagery back to epic by comparing the violent fall of a youthful (Euryalus) or virginal warrior (Lausus, Pallas, Camilla) with a flower that has been plucked but still keeps its loveliness, intimating all the while that the virgin’s bloody, premature death in combat is in actual fact the consummation of his or her wedding with Death.21 Similarly, by assimilating Éowyn to a flower, and by appealing to the Vergilian passage, Tolkien calls the reader’s attention to virginal Éowyn’s wounded beauty, all the more visible, desirable and pitiful when in danger of disappearing forever. Thus Aragorn’s speech serves to lay out all the thematic nuances present in the florida-puella topos in classical poetry: on one hand, Éowyn is closely connected with the lovely virginal youth who, on the threshold of womanhood (TT, III, vi, 119), will not reach full maturity as long as she does not learn to accept real, adult love.22 On the other hand, Tolkien uses the Vergilian hypotext to reveal to the reader Aragorn’s insight into the true source of Éowyn’s spiritual illness (RK, V, viii, 142-43): Éowyn’s

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Miryam Librán-Moreno fall in battle will be the erotic consummation of her marriage to Death, a “sterile bridegroom” (Gransden 76) after whom she, trapped in her desperation, had yearned and longed.23 Her prognosis and her fate are grim, unless some other comes who has more power than Aragorn has at present to heal her, and tear her away from the embrace of Death.24 On the specific question of the wording “flower . . . wrought . . . out of steel,” there is a surprisingly close parallel in Proclus, On Plato’s Timaeus (166.24), where another warrior virgin, the goddess Athena, is called “a flower of bronze in appearance,25 shining bright with her weapons” (ὅπλοις λαµποµέµην χαλκήϊον ἄνθος ἰδέσθαι).26 2.2. ἔρως γλυκύπικρος (bitter-sweet love)27 Éowyn is a paradox for Aragorn, who does not know how to speak of her. She is beautiful and deserving, and yet hard and doomed, a bittersweet creature “a . . . flower . . . bitter-sweet, still fair to see, but stricken.” (RK, V, viii, 143) The oxymoron “bitter-sweet” was first coined by Sappho (fr. 130 PMG): Ἔρως δηὖτέ ὀ λυσιµέλης δόνει, γλυκύπικρον, ἀµάχανον ὄρπετον.

Eros, again now, the loosener of limbs troubles me, Bittersweet, uncontrollable creature. (A.S. Kline tr.) Sappho’s expression soon became a favourite with Greek and Latin love poets,28 who saw in it the perfect epithet to describe the paradoxical course of love: love is a pleasurable torture which the lover cannot bring himself to give up.29 Thus, the sweeter the expectation of ideal happiness in love, the bitterer the actual experience and trial of it (Gutzwiller 169.) In associating flowers with the bitter and the sweet of Éowyn, Tolkien may be citing from “an unforgettable couplet” (Brown 264) by Lucretius (De rerum natura 4.1134-5), in which the poet compares the essence of love with a bitterness that surges suddenly from a sweet stream and chokes the lover among the flowers: nequiquam, quoniam medio in fonte leporum surgit amare aliquid, quod in ipsis floribus angat. Since from amid the well-spring of delights Bubbles some drop of bitter to suffocate Among the very flowers. (W.E. Leonard tr.) The sweet beginnings of an idealistic love lead unavoidably to the

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Greek and Latin Amatory Motifs in Éowyn’s Portrayal cruel reality of suffering. Thus, Lucretius makes the natural symbols of beauty and generation clash with the ugly physical ideas of bitterness and constriction (Brown 265). For Éowyn, flower-like and bitter-sweet, the idealised anticipation of Aragorn’s love30 represents a chance to fly away from the “prison” that is her passive and thwarted life.31 The actual disappointment of her fruitless hope leaves death, in her perception, as sole remedy.32 2.3 Dura puella (flinty girl) Éowyn’s character, in Aragorn’s words, is stern and hard, “as if wrought . . . out of steel” (RK V, viii, 143). Her voice is described as “like the ring of steel” (RK, V, vi, 116), and her figure in battle is “slender but as of steel-blade, fair yet terrible” (RK, V, vi, 117).33 Lying in her sick bed, her face appears to Aragorn “white as a lily, cold as frost, and hard as graven stone” (RK, V, viii, 144). To have a heart made of iron (σιδήρειος) or stone (στερεωτέρη λίθοιο) is a frequent term of abuse levelled against grim, merciless, and unrelenting persons in epic poetry.34 One of the most common complaints in Latin elegy is precisely the fact that the harsh beloved (dura puella) refuses to smile kindly on love and thus spurns her lovers’ suit.35 From Homer onwards, poets invariably charge such cold disdainful creatures with being made of stone or iron.36 Two famous classical passages that compare an unresponsive person to iron and stone are especially close to Tolkien’s usage in both spirit and wording. In the first of those, Pindar (fr. 123.4-6 M) would have the unyielding breast of someone not touched by love be made of iron, steel and cold flame:37 ὃς µὴ πόθῳ κυµαίνεται, ἐξ ἀδάµαντος ἢ σιδάρου κεχάλκευται µέλαιναν καρδίαν ψυχρᾷ φλογὶ.

But whoever is not tossed on the waves of desire, he has a black heart forged of adamant or of iron in cold flame. The second passage that may have helped inspire Tolkien is located in Dido’s and Aeneas’ last encounter in the world of the dead. Vergil (Aen. 6. 469-71) famously compares ghostly Dido’s unresponsiveness in the face of Aeneas’ heartfelt entreaties to the lifelessness of hard stone or Parian marble:38 illa solo fixos oculos auersa tenebat nec magis incepto uultum sermone mouetur quam si dura silex aut stet Marpesia cautes. 79

Miryam Librán-Moreno She turned away, her eyes fixed on the ground, no more altered in expression by the speech he had begun than if hard flint stood there, or a cliff of Parian marble. (A.S. Kline tr.) Compare with the last glimpse of Éowyn after her rejection by Aragorn: But Éowyn stood still as a figure carven in stone. (RK V, ii, 59) And with his impression of her when he finds her lying near death: Then Aragorn stooped and looked in her face, and it was indeed white as a lily, cold as frost, and hard as graven stone. (RK V, viii, 144) Parian marble was the whitest, glossiest, and most translucid stone Greece and Rome knew (Nisbet-Hubbard 240). Roman poets expressed the composite idea of fair complexion, beauty, and hardness through comparisons with Parian marble.39 Thus, Éowyn seems to have turned to steel or stone by virtue of excessive suffering and constant frustration of her heart’s wishes.40 As was the case with Dido (Austin Aeneidos liber quartus 100), the words of the man who was forced to reject her love are in danger of no longer reaching her. 2.4 Hiemps amoris (“the winter of love”) and ver erat (“it was spring”)41 Repeatedly, Tolkien draws the reader’s attention towards Éowyn’s frozen core. She is “fair and cold, like a morning of pale spring that is not yet come to womanhood.” A frost “had turned its sap to ice,” according to Aragorn’s accurate diagnosis of her spiritual malady. The “winter of her discontent” made her, as was seen in the previous section, steelhard, withdrawn, frozen in her status as a despairing, caged person who sees no viable way out of her acute sense of unfulfillment.42 Her prideful desperation43 and imperfect self-awareness44 lead her initially to refuse the chance for happiness Faramir offers her. And yet, Faramir’s constant attention and patient care gradually teach her to warm to and bask in his affection. Thus, “something in her softened, as though a bitter frost were yielding at the first faint presage of spring” (RK, VI, v, 238), and, eventually, “her winter passed, and the sun shone on her” (RK VI, v, 243) as soon as she recognizes that she loves and is loved in return. Two Classical motifs are present in the happy dénouement of Éowyn’s plight. It was apparently Ovid (Her. 5.34) who first coined the expression “winter of love” (amoris hiemps) to describe the feelings of a spurned girl for whom love had turned sour (Knox 149). However, in this particular 80

Greek and Latin Amatory Motifs in Éowyn’s Portrayal case Tolkien seemingly sought inspiration, more than in Classical poetry, in the copious medieval reelaborations of the Ovidian motif, in which the warming of a girl’s heart is linked metaphorically to the melting of ice and snow. This conceit became an oft-repeated commonplace in Medieval love poetry (see e.g. Dronke 602 ss.uu. “spring,” “winter”).45 The Carmina Burana, to mention but one corpus of Medieval lyric poetry, contains several examples of this topos that might parallel Tolkien’s wording and intention.46 The most relevant usage of this motif is, perhaps, the one contained in Carmen Buranum 140: Terra iam pandit gremium vernali lenitate, quod gelu triste clauserat brumali feritate ... modo ferro durior est, quem non mollit Venus et saxo frigidior, qui non est igne plenus ... si friget, in qua ardeo, nec michi vult calere, ... quid tunc veris presentia? Iam hiems est vere! Earth opens out her bosom with primaveral kindness that grim ice had closed down with chilly hardness ... harder than iron is he whom Venus does not soften and colder than stone he who is not full of fire ... if the girl for whom I burn is frozen with ice, and does not want to burn for me, ... what use then is spring’s coming? It is truly winter now! Notice the parallel wording: like Éowyn, the medieval girl who refuses to welcome love has a chilled iron heart surrounded by perpetual winter that has not learned to yield to spring. However, the seasons’ eternal, yearly wheeling cannot be interrupted or stopped. Thus, when winter passes and spring time comes, love must be reborn in all hearts. Greek and Latin poets alike saw in the coming of spring an incentive to seize the day and enjoy the bloom of youth before it withers away in winter again.47 Compare these Horatian passages: Horace’s famous and often-imitated formulation of the motif is faithfully echoed in the simple but highly charged sentences with which Tolkien describes Éowyn’s gradual change of heart. Compare: carm. 1.4.1-5 solvitur acris hiems grata vice veris et Favoni 81

Miryam Librán-Moreno ... nec prata canis albicant pruinis iam Cytherea choros ducit Venus imminente Luna Winter’s fists unclench at the touch of spring and western breezes, ... meadows are no longer white with frost. Under a hovering moon come dancers led by fair Aphrodite (A.S. Kline tr.) and carm. 4.7.1-2, 9-10 Diffugere nives, redeunt iam gramina campis arboribusque comae ... frigora mitescunt Zephyris, ver proterit aestas interitura simul The snows are fled away, leaves on the shaws And grasses in the mead renew their birth, ... Thaw follows frost; hard on the heel of spring Treads summer sure to die (A.E. Housman tr.) with Something in her softened, as if though a bitter frost were yielding at the first faint presage of spring (RK, VI, v, 238) and: Her winter passed, and the sun shone on her (RK VI, v, 243). Éowyn used to be a frozen flower,48 but lately her frost has begun to thaw thanks to Faramir’s warmth. This conception belongs in the pruinaros theme within the hiemps amoris and ver erat motifs: love is like the spring sun that melts into dew (ros) the film of frost (pruina) that covers flowers. Dew, being a fertility agent under the jurisdiction of Venus herself, foreshadows and heralds marriage.49 By highlighting the thawing process that takes place in Éowyn’s frost-covered heart through allusion to the pruinaros theme, Tolkien might be hinting indirectly at the coming wedding of Éowyn, as the late elegy known as Pervigilium Veneris50 11-22 spelled out: ipsa surgentes papillas de Favoni spiritu urget in nodos tepentes; ipsa roris lucidi, 82

Greek and Latin Amatory Motifs in Éowyn’s Portrayal noctis aura quem relinquit, spargit umentis aquas. ... Umor ille, quem serenis astra rorant noctibus, mane virgineas papillas solvit umenti peplo. Ipsa iussit mane nudae virgines nubant rosae; She herself (sc. Venus) urges the wakening rose buds into lukewarm bands of the West Wind’s breath. She herself sprinkles moist waters of clear dew-drops, which the breeze leaves behind. ... That moisture, which the stars drip on clear nights, in the morning it loosens maiden rose buds from their moist robe. She herself ordered, so that in the morning, the nude rose virgins might marry. (Kieffer tr.) Should Éowyn consent to come to Ithilien, Faramir enthusiastically predicts, “all things will grow with joy there” (RK, VI, v, 243). Another motif, connected with that of ver erat, is a subset within the so-called “pathetic fallacy,” in which the beloved’s presence causes flowers spontaneously to spring forth and blossom in her trail. This is a pastoral topos that, while conjoined initially with the power of such vegetal and fertility divinities as Aphrodite or Venus, was soon assigned to the province of the bucolic poet’s mortal beloved as well (Coleman 5-6, 9). Although the topos was first attested in Greek lyric and bucolic poetry,51 its most successful and influential formulation must be found, once again, in Vergil (ecl. 5.38-9, 7.59). The theme soon became a clichéd element to be included in every self-respecting pastoral or panegyric composition.52 Tolkien’s actual wording of the topos is, in all likehood, a mixture of Vergil and one of his late imitators, Nemesianus. Compare: all things will grow with joy there, if the White Lady comes (RK, VI, v, 243) with Verg. ecl. 7.59 Phyllidis adventu nostrae nemus omne virebit But all the groves will be green when my Phyllis comes and Nemes. ecl. 2.47 at si tu venias, et candida lilia fient But if you come, lilies will grow white once more.

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Miryam Librán-Moreno 3. De rosis nascentibus as original inspiration for Éowyn’s portrait The portrayal of Éowyn may be analyzed as a highly coherent whole composed of four discrete amatory motifs for which thematical as well as verbal parallels have been traced back to different (and disparate) Greek and Latin authors, such as Sappho, Pindar, Lucretius, Catullus, Horace, Proclus, and, primarily, Vergil. However, is there a single specific, unitary hypotext that may be presumed to underlie Éowyn’s similarly unified portrait? This hypotext must include the motifs of the flower-like maiden not yet open to an adult rôle as a wife and mother, who lives in perpetual winter, and is admonished to let her frost become dew and not lose her bloom. Fortunately, all those requisite references may be found together in one of the most famous pieces of poetry in the history of Classical literature, the pseudo-Vergilian elegy De rosis nascentibus (On the Birth of Roses).53 This elegy succeeded in agglutinating, in a sole composition, all the traditional elements that were part of this particular motif and had been previously transmitted in discrete and separate poems (Cupaiuolo 68.) For that reason, De rosis nascentibus became a privileged vehicle to transfer to medieval and Renaissance readers the amatory themes discussed in section 2 (Cupaiuolo 68.) As Tolkien himself confessed, and as section 2 of this article attests, Vergil was never very far from Tolkien’s mind.54 Although De rosis nascentibus is clearly the work of a later anonymous poet, it was intermittently transmitted in the Appendix Vergiliana as part of the vergilian corpus.55 The poem’s protagonist takes a stroll through a garden in a chilly spring morning (1-2 Ver erat et blando mordentia frigora sensu / spirabat croceo mane revecta dies, “It was spring, and in the saffron morning the returning day / breathed forth biting cold mixed with a gentle touch”). Herbs and flowers are still dripping with frost and ice (7-8 vidi concretas per gramina flexa pruinas / pendere aut holerum stare cacuminibus, “I saw congealed frost hang from the bent grass blades”). Roses are white with frost (10-3 vidi . . . rosaria . . . / exoriente novo roscida Lucifero. / rara pruinosis canebat gemma frutectis, “I saw the rose-beds . . . / covered in dew under the newborn morning star. / Here and there a gem of ice shone white in the frost-covered shrubs”), although the poet can tell that the frost will thaw and become dew with the first rays of the sun (14 ad primi radios interitura die, “sure to die with the first rays of daylight”). He takes stock of the matutine loveliness of the roses (25-30) and reflects on the fact that their blossoms will fade that very evening (35-47). Thus the brief life of Venus’ flowers must be set as an example to all young girls: they must allow the spring sun to melt ice and frost into fertilizing dew (Cupaiuolo 24, 61-2), and they must make much of their time and seize happiness while they may (49-50 collige, virgo, rosas 84

Greek and Latin Amatory Motifs in Éowyn’s Portrayal dum flos novus et nova pubes, / et memor esto aevum sic properare tuum, “Gather your roses, virgin girl, while flower and youth are fresh, / and remember that your years are similarly hurrying away”). The contemplation of nature (flowers, frost, dew) and of seasonal change (winter, spring), together with the invitation to love and to fertility, guarantee the preservation of the rhythm and balance of Life (Cupaioulo 64). Therefore, a reading of De rosis nascentibus, an elegy which, as was said above, collected and transmitted in a single vehicle the main themes present in the florida-puella, dura puella, hiemps amoris, and ver erat motifs, may have aided in giving birth to the amatorial part of Éowyn’s story, a part Tolkien then fleshed out in more fullness with the aid of associated motifs culled from several classical poets. 4. Purpose and meaning of the amatory motifs in Éowyn’s portrait As is well known, Tolkien altered dramatically Éowyn’s story and fate in successive re-writings of the story (Drout 142-3). She started life paired up with the mysterious Idis, Théoden’s short-lived daughter. Originally drawn as a gentle, rather colourless young girl, wholly unlike the severe Éowyn of the latest drafts and final version, she was designed to be Aragorn’s promised bride. Tolkien, though, soon realizing that this love story was not in keeping with the grim character of Aragorn and the shape of his tale, decided to eliminate that part of the narrative entirely (Treason 447-8). Éowyn became thus “a stern Amazon woman” who would be killed in battle after defeating gloriously the Lord of the Nazgûl (War 256). Did the introduction of echoes from Greek and Latin amatory motifs achieve any artistic effect in Éowyn’s definitive portrait?56 It is interesting to note that, in the first draft description of Éowyn, there is not a single mention of any of the love topoi that later found their way to the published version: there is no mention of steel flowers or chilly spring mornings. Compare the wording of the first draft: very fair and slender she seemed. Her face was filled with gentle pity, and her eyes shone with unshed tears (Treason 445) with the published version: Grave and thoughtful was her glance, and she looked on the king with cool pity. Very fair was her face . . . slender and tall she was . . . but strong she seemed and stern as steel . . . fair and cold, like a morning of pale spring that is not yet come to womanhood. (TT, III, vi, 119)

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Miryam Librán-Moreno The material discrepancy between both versions and the development of new motifs would seem to suggest that Tolkien consciously decided to employ the cluster of amatory motifs and the instances of “sermo amatorius” discussed above only after he altered Éowyn’s fate and character, the better to motivate and describe her unrequited love for Aragorn, her despairing bid for death, and her successful wooing by Faramir. The striking contrast between the many false starts, changes of direction, alternative endings, and corrections in the early narrative of Éowyn’s story on one hand, and the “remarkable fluency” (War 393) and very minor changes (Sauron 54) that were necessary in the two central chapters (“The Houses of Healing” and “The Steward and the King”) where the erotic motifs of Éowyn’s portrait are gathered, on the other, seem to bear this idea out. Although it is impossible to prove it definitively, it may be plausible to suggest that Tolkien brought the superstructure of Greco-Roman amatory allusions to bear only after envisaging the wedding of Faramir and Éowyn, first attested in a pencilled outline written on the back of a rejected draft for the chapter “The Field of Kormallen” (Sauron 52). As Vergil did before him (Reed 40), Tolkien transposed amatory themes back to a martial and epic context: once he abandoned his first conception of Éowyn as a gentle and brave Wealhtheow-like princess (cf. Beowulf 612-41), he chose such literary references as suited her transformation into an Amazon-like virgin marked initially for death, but healed by love in the end.57 In doing so, Tolkien interwove all these separate topoi into a coherent and unified portrait which he employed indirectly to announce in advance, with greater nuance and as though in an echo-chamber, Éowyn’s oft-criticized transition from fey ice maiden to full grown woman enjoying the fulfillment brought by marriage.58 By touching on a well known, classical frame of reference as explanation of the causes of Éowyn’s change, Tolkien successfully avoided encumbering the already-long main narrative with marginal and extraneous content. But why choose specifically Greek and Latin motifs for such a prototypically Northern/Anglo-Saxon figure as Éowyn? It must be conceded that the evidence at our disposal does not guarantee a definitive answer to such a question, although plausible conjectures may still be made. In Appendix A, Tolkien chose to highlight Éowyn’s slight physical and mental differences that set her apart from the rest of her countrymen. Éomer, Tolkien explains, was “like his fathers before him, but Éowyn was slender and tall, with a grace and pride that came her out of the South from Morwen of Lossarnach, whom the Rohirrim had called Steelsheen” (RK, Appendix A, II, 351). In this context, it seems reasonable that Tolkien should decide to call the reader’s attention to the important fact of Éowyn’s Southern heritage59 through the usage of motifs explicitly derived from “Southern” literature.60 Tolkien himself dated the 86

Greek and Latin Amatory Motifs in Éowyn’s Portrayal spiritual atmosphere of Faramir’s and Éowyn’s love story to a period earlier than the advent of the Courtly Love movement (s. XII):61 that is, either late antiquity or early Middle Ages. Further evidence for this hypothesis is offered by the fact that one of the most important literary influences over the creation of Éowyn is also “Southern” in nature: the Vergilian warrior princess Camilla, herself modelled by Vergil on the amazon queen Penthesilea (Austin 165-6.) The Camilla hypotext underpinning such a Northern figure as Éowyn goes in parallel with the influence of Homeric heroes over the characterization and description of the fully Anglo-Saxon Rohirric riders, an inspiration which Tolkien explicitly (although somewhat perversely) acknowledged (Letters 159.) Unlike Penthesilea, Camilla and Éowyn, while sharing Amazon-like traits, are not fully Amazons stricto sensu,62 in as much as both have close ties to a fatherfigure, which Amazons as a rule and by definition lack.63 Furthermore, a few verbal echoes from Camilla’s portrait reappear almost verbatim in Éowyn’s. Compare Verg. Aen. 7.804: agens . . . florentis aere catervas leading (sc. Camilla) squadrons petalled with bronze (C. Day Lewis tr.) with white flower . . . as if wrought out of steel (RK, V, viii, 142-43) and Verg. Aen. 7.805-7 bellatrix, non illa colo calathisve Minervae femineas adsueta manus, sed proelia virgo dura pati a warrior-woman, her woman’s hands not used to the spindle and yarn-basket of Minerva, but a maiden hardy enough to stand battle with I am a shieldmaiden and my hand is ungentle (RK, VI, v, 239)64 and but I am of the House of Eorl and not a serving-woman. I can ride and wield blade, and I do not fear either pain or death (RK, V, ii, 58). As was seen in sections two to four, Tolkien drew on four Classical amatory topics to characterize his new Éowyn and indirectly to illuminate the unfolding of her tale. His initial inspiration may have been sparked by 87

Miryam Librán-Moreno consideration of the pseudo-vergilian elegy De rosis nascentibus, a text that gathers three of the four topoi discussed in section two, but closer analysis of Tolkien’s usage of the motifs seems to suggest that the incardination of those amatory themes in three scenes from Vergil’s Aeneid played a not negligible part in establishing the definitive shape of Éowyn’s story.65 Like Pallas and Camilla, Éowyn is a virginal, flower-like warrior, doomed to consummate her bloody wedding with death in combat. Like Pallas, the main character (Aeneas/Aragorn), bending over the fallen, white and flower-like figure of an ally and friend (Pallas/Éowyn), is shown as having ambivalent, guilty, and anguished feelings in his breast. Like Dido, the main female character is stone-like and beyond the help of the man (Aeneas/Aragorn) whom Fate compelled to refuse her love and who tries now gently to mollify her, feeling both guilty and blameless in the process (Aen. 6.456-76). Tolkien gathered together these episodes and figures only to transform them in his own manner and fit them to his own creative interests. Thus, the cluster of amatory motifs in Éowyn’s portrayal serves a dual purpose: on one hand, they throw light on the state of her mind and soul and herald her transformation and happiness ever after. On the other hand, by pointing to the “road not taken” by Éowyn, they glance at an alternate future that may have taken place if Éowyn’s life had not turned out as it did: either a bloody, premature, but glorious death, like Pallas and Camilla, or, like Dido, stony, irreconcilable silence against the man who spurned her love. Another conclusion that may be drawn from the intricately composite nature of Éowyn is that it may not be the wisest course to confine our explorations and analyses of Tolkien’s sources to a single period, language, or culture. NOTES This article reworks part of the material contributed by the present author to Diccionario de Motivos Amatorios en la Literatura Latina (ss. III a.C.-II d.C.), edited by L. Rivero, G. Laguna, M. Librán, and R. Moreno, forthcoming. This article is a part of a research project (HUM 2005-04375) financed by the M.E.C of Spain. The author wishes to thank in particular the anonymous outside reviewer for Tolkien Studies for helpful suggestions and very useful and detailed criticisms. 1

“Sermo amatorius” (“love-speech”) is the linguistic register specifically devoted to express amatory motifs in Greek and Latin poetry. See this heading in the 1902 monography by Pichon.

2

Letters (172; written in 1953). Also “I was brought up in the Classics, and first discovered the sensation of literary pleasure in Homer,” Letters (213; written in 1955.) Cf. Carpenter (27, 34), Librán-Moreno (28-29). 88

Greek and Latin Amatory Motifs in Éowyn’s Portrayal 3

Carpenter (48-49). See “On Fairy-stories” “(sc. English) poetry I discovered much later in Latin and Greek, and especially through being made to try and translate English verse into classical verse” (MC 135).

4

“When English and its kindred became my job (sc. in 1925), I turned to other tongues, even to Latin and Greek” (MC 231.) See also Letters 213 (written in 1955).

5

“Auden has asserted that for me ‘the North is a sacred direction.’ That is not true. The North-West of Europe, where I … have lived, has my affection, as a man’s home should. . . . But it is not ‘sacred’, nor does it exhaust my affection. I have, for instance, a particular love for the Latin language” (Letters 376). “Linguistic taste changes like everything else, as time goes on; or oscillates between poles. Latin and the British type of Celtic have it now, with Anglo Saxon near at hand and further off the Old Norse with . . . Finnish” (Letters 214). See also Librán-Moreno (28-29, 50).

6

The complete catalog of amatory motifs in Greek and Latin poetry may be consulted in the monographs by Lier and Müller.

7

On this motif see Pichon 151 s.u. “flos,” Thornton (158-59).

8

See Dronke ss.uu. “rose,” “lily,” “violet.” It was also one of the rhetorical points insisted upon by Medieval preceptive: see e.g. Boncompagno, Rota Veneris 6.1 transumitur enim mulier . . . quandoquam in rosam, quandoquam in lilium, quandoquam in violam.

9

Müller (45-53), Thornton (141, 158-59), Cupaiuolo (16-18, 64).

10 Flos was an euphemism for “maidenhead” (Pichon 151, s.u. “flos,” Dronke 134). See especially Sappho fr. 105c PMG, Euripides, Hipp. 806-7, Theocritus 7.120, Anthologia Palatina 5.194, 7.217, Catullus 62.39-47 ut flos in saeptis secretus nascitur hortis / . . . / idem cum tenui carptus defloruit ungui, / nulli illum pueri, nullae optaverunt puellae: / sic virgo, dum intacta manet, dum cara suis est; / dum castum amisit polluto corpore florem, / nec pueris iucunda manet nec cara puellis, 17.14, 61.56-59, 193-95, Ovid, met. 10.83-85, Columella 10.102. 11 Thornton (141-42), Calame (167-69), Nisbet-Hubbard (135, 14142). 12 Dronke (364-65), Cupaiuolo (95-105). See also Mimnermus fr. 1.4 W., Theognis 1017-22, Theocritus 23.28-29, 27.10-11, Anthologia Palatina 12.32, 195, 234, Horace, carm. 2.3.13-16, 11.14-17, Tibullus 89

Miryam Librán-Moreno 1.4.27-30, 8.47-48, Propertius 2.15.49-54, Ovid met. 14.763-64, Ars 2.115-16, 3.79-80, Seneca, Phaedr. 764-76, Martial 2.59, 8.77, and especially De rosis nascentibus 49-50 collige, virgo, rosas dum flos novus et nova pubes, / et memor esto aevum sic properare tuum. 13 Lattimore (195-97), Vérhilac (340-45, 419-34), Coleman (12-13). 14 See also Bion 1.76, Catullus 11.22-24 cecidit velut prati / ultimi flos, praetereunte postquam / tactus aratro est, Ovid, met. 10.190-93, Statius, Theb. 9.877-85, silv. 2.1.106-9, 3.3.128-30, Silius Italicus 4.203-5, 12.225-50. 15 On the erotic undercurrents of this passage see Gransden (76), Reed (31). 16 Compare also Martial 1.115.2-3 loto candidior puella cycno / argento nive lilio ligustro, Claudian, carm. 25.125-27 superatque nives ac lilia candor / et patrium flavis testatur crinibus Histrum. 17 Aen. 8.514-17, cf. 8.160-64. Compare with RK, V, viii, 142-44; RK, VI, v, 243 (see below n.22). 18 Compare with “I have wished thee joy ever since first I saw thee” (RK, VI, vi, 256). 19 Compare Aen. 10.517-17, 11.42-55, and especially 8.520-22 with “And no fear upon that way was so present as the fear for what might befall her” (RK, V, viii, 143). In fact, Vergil employed intertextual allusions and amatory language (“sermo amatorius”) to signal that the relationship between Aeneas and Pallas, while entirely chaste, was erotically charged as well (Putnam 1-21). Although Tolkien entertained the possibility that Aragorn truly loved Éowyn and never married after her death (Treason 448), it would be far-fetched to posit that he might have adopted the Pallas/Aeneas subtext obliquely to reveal the existence of tenderer feelings on Aragorn’s part in the published version of the book. 20 Motte (38-47), Lattimore (38-47), Calame (167-68). 21 Fowler (185-98), Gillis (77-79), Reed (32). On a virgin’s premature death conceived of as a wedding with Hades see Vermeule (54-56). 22 As opposed to youthful hero-worship: “In me she loves only a shadow and a thought: a hope for glory and great deeds, and lands far from the fields of Rohan” (RK, V, viii, 143); “As a great captain may to a

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Greek and Latin Amatory Motifs in Éowyn’s Portrayal young soldier he seemed to you admirable” (RK, VI, v, 242). 23 “Then you desired to have nothing, unless a brave death in battle” (RK, VI, v, 242). 24 “I have, maybe, the power to heal her body, and to recall her from the dark valley. But to what she will wake, to hope, or forgetfulness, or despair, I do not know. And if to despair, then she will die, unless other healing comes which I cannot bring” (RK, V, viii, 143-44). It will be revealed later that the cure is honest, true love, and the healer, Faramir: “Here is the Lady Éowyn of Rohan, and now she is healed” (RK, vi, v, 243). 25 Literally, “a flower of bronze to see” (ἰδέσθαι). Compare with the syntactic construction “a flower . . . still fair to see” in Tolkien’s passage. 26 There is also a similar constellation of motifs (brightness, metal, and beauty surpassing that of flowers) in the Carolingian lyric “Deus amet puellam” (Dronke 264-65): constans gemmis similis / atque claris metallis /. . . / candidior nivis . . . / . . . / cedunt illi rosae / simulque atque lilia. 27 On this motif see especially Müller (99-101, 142), Carson (1-9), Calame (19-20). 28 See especially Theognis 1353-54, Euripides Hipp. 347-48, Anthologia Palatina 5.134, 136, 12.81, 99, 109, 132, 153-54, Catullus 68.17-18, 99.13-14, Vergil, ecl. 3.109-10, Apuleius met. 3.10.2, 4.31.2, Achilles Tatius 2.7.6, Longus 1.8.1, Aristaenetus 2.5, Nonnus Dion. 42.153, Musaeus 166. 29 Garrison (30), Gutzwiller (147), Nussbaum (439-83), Dronke s.u. “bitter-sweet nature of love.” 30 See above n. 22. 31 “And you wished to have renown and glory and to be lifted far above the mean things that crawl on the Earth” (RK, VI, v, 242). See also Gandalf ’s comments (RK, V, viii, 143) and Éowyn’s own confession (RK, V, ii, 57-58). 32 “But when he gave you only understanding and pity, then you decided to have nothing, unless a brave death in battle” (RK, VI, v, 242). 33 Compare the phrasing of this idea with Sophocles’ explanation of queen Sidero’s name (fr. 658 R. αὕτη δὲ µάχιµός ἐστιν ὡς κεχρηµένη / σαφῶς σιδήρῳ καὶ φοροῦσά τοὔνοµα, “she is warlike as indeed a 91

Miryam Librán-Moreno wielder of the sword, whose name she bears”). 34 See Il. 5.191, 16.33-34, 20.372, 22.357, 24.205, 521, Od. 12.280, 23.103, Hesiod, Th. 239, Op. 147 and Liddell-Scott-Jones ss.uu. σιδήρεος I.2, πέτρα II, λίθος I.2. Compare with Erasmus, Colloquia familiaria 18, “salve crudelis, salve ferrea, salve adamantina.” 35 See Pichon s.u. “durus.” 36 Pichon s.u. “ferreus,” McKeown 312-13, Laguna 178. See Theocritus 3.17, Catullus 60.1-3, 64.154-57, Vergil, Aen. 4.366,447-49, Horace, carm. 3.7.21-22, Tibullus 3.4.85, Ovid, Her. 3.133, 7.35-40, 10.131-32, 15.189-90, met. 7.32-33, 8.120-21, 131-33, 13.798-804, 14.711-13, Achilles Tatius 5.25.7, and especially Ovid, met. 9.614-15 rigidas silices solidumve in pectore ferrum / aut adamanta gerit. 37 Is it plausible to suggest that Tolkien was aware of two lines from a fragmentary homoerotic dithyramb by Pindar? Certainly it is, in as much as these particular lines were very celebrated in antiquity and, as such, were quoted in such unobjectionable authors as Athenaeus (13.564E) and Plutarch (De inim. util. 90F). 38 On the meaning of this simile see Norden (256-57). 39 e.g. Horace, carm. 1.19.5-6 nitor / splendentis Pario marmore purius, “(Glycera’s) glow, far outshining the blaze Parian marble casts” (S. Willett tr.). 40 Cf. Cicero, Lael. 13.48 “Quid enim interest motu animi sublato non dico inter pecudem et hominem, sed inter hominem et truncum aut saxum aut quidvis generis eiusdem? Neque enim sunt isti audiendi, qui virtutem duram et quasi ferream esse quandam volunt” (For take away the emotions of the mind, and what difference is there, I do not say between a beast and a man, but between a man and a log or a stone, or anything of the same kind? We must not listen to those men, who want to make out that virtue is a certain hard and, as it were, iron quality.) 41 There is no definite, agreed-upon Latin name for the topos of the coming of spring. “Ver erat” are merely the first two words from the Ps. Vergilian elegy De rosis nascentibus (see below section 3), a composition that became the prototype text for this motif during the Renaissance (see e.g. Morros 127-40). 42 “I cannot lie in sloth, idle, caged. I looked for death in battle” (RK VI, v, 237). C.f. RK, V, ii, 57-59; RK, V, viii, 143-44. 92

Greek and Latin Amatory Motifs in Éowyn’s Portrayal 43 “To health? It may be so. At least while there is an empty saddle of some fallen Rider that I can fill, and there are deeds to do. But to hope? I do not know” (RK, V, viii, 145). 44 “Then the heart of Éowyn changed, or else at last she understood” (RK, VI, v, 243). 45 These medieval reelaborations were heavily influenced by Cantica canticorum 2.11-2 iam hiemps transit, imber abit et recessit, / flores apparuerunt, as well. Tolkien’s wording in RK V, viii, 142-44 has a close parallel in Archilocus, fr. 188 W. (οὐκέ θ’ ὁµῶς θάλλεις ἁπαλὸν χρόα . . . / . . . / ἦ γὰρ πολλὰ δή σ᾿ ἐπῆιξεν πνεύµ]ατα χειµερίων ἀνέµων, “The flower of your skin is not as tender as it used to be . . . / the wintry winds’s blasts rushed upon you”). However, as this particular fragment was not published until 1974, Tolkien could not possibly have been aware of it. 46 The anonymous reviewer for Tolkien Studies suggests C.B. 17, 113 (Transit nix et glacies), 118 (Pectus habet glacies) as further examples of this topic. 47 On the connection of spring time with love, see Alcaeus fr. 286 L-P., Mimnermus fr. 2.1-5 W., Theognis 1275-58, Pindar, Nem. 8.3, Anthologia Palatina 5.85.1-2, 10.1, 2-6, Catullus 96, Lucretius 1.6-11, Vergil, georg. 1.43, Horace, carm. 1.9, Ovid, fast. 1.151, 4.125, Columella 10.212-14, Achilles Tatius 2.1.2, Menander Rhetor 408.8 – 415, Pervigilium Veneris 2-7, 88-90, Claudian, De rapt. 2.125. See also NisbetHubbard (58-60), Cupaiuolo (23, 177-78). 48 For the image of flowers frozen with frost and ice set in a panegyric context see Claudian, carm. 30.5-6, Sidonius Apollinaris, carm. 2.41011. 49 Cupeiuolo 24, 61-62. See Sappho fr. 96.12-14 PMG, Aeschylus fr. 44.6 R., Vergil, georg. 2.201-2, 218, Claudian, De rapt. 2.119-22, Pervigilium Veneris 14-18, De rosis nascentibus 17-18. 50 This is the Latin elegy quoted in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land 428. 51 Ibycus 286 PMG, Theocritus 8.45-48, Moschus 3.30-35. 52 Persius 2.38, Calpurnus Siculus, ecl. 3.51-53, 79-80, Nemesianus, ecl. 2.44-45, Claudian, carm. 30.89-93. 53 Cupaiuolo (95-105). 54 E.g. “Beowulf : The Monsters and the Critics” (MC 24-25, 27-28), Lost 93

Miryam Librán-Moreno Road (41-42). For additional material see Morse. 55 De rosis nascentibus was falsely attributed to Ausonius during the Renaissance as well. 56 Compare these potential echoes with the documented effect that the introduction of echoes from King Lear had in the final shape of Éowyn’s story (traced by Drout 134-44). 57 Certainly, as the outside reader for Tolkien Studies points out, there are royal women in Beowulf who are warlike and stern, such as Hildeburh, or the remarkable Thryth, who used to have men killed in her halls for looking her in the eye until love and marriage softened her savage disposition (ll. 1932-55). However, the parallel needed here is a character who is a virgin as much as an Amazon or warrior-maiden, whose death is linked to issues of virginity, love, and marriage. That particular constellation of traits seems to point to a Camilla- or Penthesilea-like figure. This should not be taken to imply, of course, that Tolkien drew his inspiration for the composite and complex figure of Éowyn solely from Classical characters: doubtless several Northern female characters form the background against which the Classical figures are projected. 58 Cf. Letters (49-50). Whether Tolkien’s ideas of female self-realization agree, or ought to agree, with modern ones lies outside the scope of this paper. 59 It is important because her wedding to Faramir may be interpreted typologically as the fulfillment and recapitulation of a series of Northern-Southern intermarriages such as Eldacar/Vidumavi (RK, Appendix A, I, iv, 326) and Thengel/Morwen (RK, Appendix A, II, 350-51). See the discussion of this theme in Ford 59-60. 60 On the distinction between “Northern” and “Southern” (that is, Classical) literature see Letters (375-76). Gondor’s “Southern” character reflects Rome in the last stages of her empire: Aragorn’s reunified kingdom is “an effective Holy Roman Empire with its seat in Rome” (Letters 376) while Gondor itself was “a kind of proud, venerable, but increasingly impotent Byzantium” (Letters 157). On the motif of Minas Tirith as the capital city of the restored Roman Empire see Ford. 61 “This tale does not deal with a period of ‘Courtly Love’ and its pretences; but with a culture more primitive (sc. less corrupt) and nobler” (Letters 324). See above n. 60. 94

Greek and Latin Amatory Motifs in Éowyn’s Portrayal 62 Both are swift, hardy, cool, and excellent warriors who battle on horseback, although they are not soldierly in the slightest, or part of any regular army. Compare Gransden 22-24, and “though not a ‘dry nurse’ in temper, she [Éowyn] was also not really a soldier or ‘amazon’” (Letters 323). 63 See Camilla’s backstory (Aen. 11.539-75) and “an old man, whom she loved as a father” (RK, V, viii, 143). 64 Add also the whole exchange between Aragorn and Éowyn (RK, V, ii, 57-59). 65 As can be seen easily in section 2, Vergil is by far the main influence in the conglomerate of amatory references that follow Éowyn from her first scene to her last. The final version of Éowyn’s tale was probably written between 1944-1946 (re-write and revision of books IV and V) and 1948 (creation of book VI; see the chronological discussion in Sauron 12-3.) It may or may not be coincidental that Tolkien had heard and discussed in detail C. S. Lewis’ unpublished translation of the Aeneid in rhymed alexandrines at least during the years 1943-1944 (Letters 440). WORKS CITED Austin, R. G. Aeneidos liber quartus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963. _____. Aeneidos liber primus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971. Brown, Robert D. Lucretius on Love and Sex. Leiden and New York: Brill, 1987. Calame, Claude. Eros en la antigua Grecia. Madrid: Akal, 2002. [Spanish trans. Originally published in Berlin, 2002.] Carpenter, Humphrey. Tolkien: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977. Carson, Anne. Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. Coleman, Robert. Virgil: Eclogues. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Cupaiuolo, Giovanni. Il “De rosis nascentibus”: Introduzione, testo critico, traduzione e commento. Rome: Edizioni dell’ Ateneo, 1992. Dronke, Peter. Medieval Latin and the Rise of European Love-Lyric. 2nd ed. 95

Miryam Librán-Moreno Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968. Drout, Michael D. C. “Tolkien’s prose style and its literary and rhetorical effects.” Tolkien Studies 1 (2004): 137-63. Ford, Judy A. “The White City: The Lord of the Rings as an Early Medieval Myth of the Restoration of the Roman Empire.” Tolkien Studies 2 (2005): 53-73. Fowler, Don P. “Vergil on Killing Virgins.” In Homo Viator: Classical Essays for John Bramble, edited by Michael Whitby, Philip R. Hardie, and Mary Whitby. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1987. 185-98. Garrison, Daniel H. Mild Frenzy: A Reading of the Hellenistic Love Epigram. Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1978. Gillis, D. J. Eros and Death in the Aeneid. Rome: L’Erma, 1983. Gransden, Karl W. Virgil, Aeneid Book XI. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Gutzwiller, Kathryn J. Poetic Garlands: Hellenistic Epigrams in Context. Berkeley: California University Press, 1998. Knox, Peter E. Ovid, Heroides: Select Epistles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Laguna, Gabriel. “Recepción de Ovidio amatorio en la antigüedad tardía.” In La obra amatoria de Ovidio. Aspectos textuales, interpretación literaria y pervivencia, edited by J. L. Arcaz, G. Laguna, and A. Ramírez de Verger. Madrid: Ediciones Clásicas, 1996. 163-84. Lattimore, Richard. Themes in Greek and Latin Epitaphs. Urbana: Illinois University Press, 1962. Librán-Moreno, Miryam. “Parallel Lives: The Sons of Denethor and the Sons of Telamon.” Tolkien Studies 2 (2005): 15-52. Lier, Bruno. Ad topica carminum amatorium symbolae. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1978. [Originally published in 1914.] McKeown, James C. Ovid: Amores. Text, Prolegomena and Commentary, III: a Commentary on Book Two. Leeds: Francis Cairns, 1998. Morros, Bienvenido. “Fernando de Herrera, Giulio Camillo Dalminio y Elías Vineto: a propósito de Ausonio y la elegía ‘Ver erat.’” Archivo Hispalense 213 (1987): 127-40. Morse, Robert E. Evocation of Virgil in Tolkien’s Art: Geritol for the Classics.

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Greek and Latin Amatory Motifs in Éowyn’s Portrayal Oak Park: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, 1986. Motte, Alain. Prairies et jardins de la Grèce antique: De la religion à la philosophie. Bruxelles: Académie Royale de Belgique, 1973. Müller, Heinz Martin. Erotische Motive in der griechische Dichtung bis auf Euripides. Hamburg: Buske, 1980. Norden, Edward. P. Vergilius Maro: Aeneis Buch VI. 3rd ed. Stuttgart: Teubner, 1957. Nussbaum, Martha. The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Pichon, René. Index verborum amatoriorum. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1966. [Originally published in 1902.] Putnam, Michael C. “Possessiveness, sexuality and heroism in the Aeneid.” Vergilius 31 (1985): 1-21. [Repr. in Vergil’s Aeneid: Interpretation and Influence. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. 27-49.] Reed, J. D. “A Hellenistic Influence in Aeneid IX.” Faventia 26 (2004): 27-42. Thornton, Bruce. Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality. Boulder: Colorado University Press, 1997. Vérilhac, Anne-Marie. Παῖδες ἄωροι. Póesie Funéraire II. Commentaire. Athens: Γραφείον Δηµοσιευµάτων της Ακαδηµίας Αθηνών, 1982. Vermeule, Emily. Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.

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The Curious Incident of the Dream at the Barrow: Memory and Reincarnation in Middle-earth VERLYN FLIEGER

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id J.R.R. Tolkien believe in reincarnation? Based on his avowed Catholic faith, the answer to that question would have to be “no,” for such belief is not congruent with orthodox Catholic doctrine. Yet there are elements in his work which suggest the possibility of a different answer. These explicitly concern the inhabitation of a living individual by the perceptions, actions, and memory of a past persona—a circumstance generally characterized as reincarnation. To be sure, such episodes are fiction not fact, and caution should be exercised in extrapolating from one to the other. Nevertheless, the products of a man’s imagination can be clearer indicators of his natural inclination than his day-to-day observances, albeit with occasional unanticipated results for both his audience and himself. For example, some sharp theological questions from a concerned Catholic reader about reincarnation among Tolkien’s Elves elicited a surprisingly unorthodox answer, while the most anomalous example of re-inhabitation of the present by the past, Merry Brandybuck’s dream at the barrow, goes un-remarked by most readers. The principle of reincarnation can be linked to a larger theme running through Tolkien’s major works, that the past is not just tributary to the present, but also inhabits and immediately affects it. His fiction itself is the largest example, making the recent past of The Hobbit a recurrent part of The Lord of the Rings, and interweaving both works as well as his two unfinished time-travel stories into the present, past and even the future of the “Silmarillion.” Tolkien repeatedly underscores the immediacy of time past in time present and time future by introducing prophecies, old songs and legends into his narrative, as well as characters’ recollections of events in history both near and distant. Since from a literary perspective these are standard narrative devices, it is worthy of notice that Tolkien also carried the concept to its extreme to introduce not just old songs in new situations, but old memories in new bodies, recollections of extra-personal past experiences that motivate and direct present actions. In imagining these episodes, he borrowed from the psychological and metaphysical speculation of his own time, which explored the possibility of memory as a direct channel to extra-personal experience through the operations of the unconscious mind in dreams. Drawing on such concepts as Carl Jung’s theory of archetypes and the collective unconscious, and J. W. Dunne’s notion of serial memory, Tolkien in three separate Copyright © West Virginia University Press

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Verlyn Flieger examples used the concept of dream-memory as the psychic or psychological connector/channel between characters in the narrative present and a distant past beyond their waking memory.1 Two of these examples are his unfinished science fiction stories, “The Lost Road” and “The Notion Club Papers,” written nearly ten years apart but making use of the same concept and method. This treats timetravel as a psychic or psychological mode whereby two modern-day Englishmen travel back to Númenor through the unconscious memories of a succession of ever more ancient forebears. The third example, and by all odds the most extreme and puzzling, involves the anomalous experience of Merry Brandybuck at the barrow in The Lord of the Rings. In the context of one another, these three examples show Tolkien’s varying treatments of the matter, and his exploration into the problematic (for a devout Catholic) area of human reincarnation. Two elements of Tolkien’s own personal experience found their way into his treatment of time-travel, and have some bearing on his perspective. The first is what he called his “Atlantis haunting,” his own recurrent dream of the “Great Wave” towering above him, from which he said he awoke “gasping out of deep water” (Letters 213, 347). In both “The Lost Road” and “The Notion Club Papers” he transferred that experience to his time-traveling Englishmen, characters who witness (in their dreams) the drowning of Númenor in a great wave that overwhelms that land. The second, also bestowed on his fictive time-travelers, is the inherited memory of language. In both stories, the time-travel is triggered by words from unfamiliar languages, words that are “remembered” in dreams. This phenomenon unambiguously replicates Tolkien’s statement in a letter to W. H. Auden that he “took” to West Midland Middle English as a “known tongue” as soon as he saw it (213). In the same letter, he made the notable suggestion that linguistic tastes might be as good a test of ancestry as blood groups (214), a sort of language-coded DNA. It is worth noting that Tolkien’s letter to Auden postdates the discovery of DNA, first proposed by Watson and Crick in 1953 in the British Journal Nature. Indeed, in an explicitly autobiographical allusion, Tolkien had his character Alwyn Arundel Lowdham of “The Notion Club Papers” duplicate his own experience by reporting knowledge of a real-world language, Anglo-Saxon, before he learned it from books. He (Tolkien) amplified the concept by having another of his characters in the same story, Ramer, draw attention to the “native” (or inherited, first-learned) language (Sauron 201). Both Alboin Errol in the 1936 “Lost Road” and Arry Lowdham in the 1945-46 “Notion Club Papers”’ experience direct memory of hitherto unknown languages which Tolkien variously calls Elven-Latin, Avallonian, and Adunaic and which his characters could 100

The Curious Episode of the Dream at the Barrow not have encountered in waking life (Lost Road, 47; Sauron 241).2 Such autobiographical references woven into the stories suggest a more-thanfictional interest in the notion of past lives or extra-personal memory. The structure of “The Notion Club Papers” must stand as one of Tolkien’s most complex and sophisticated treatments of time. The story takes place within a nest of three interlocking time-frames. Writing in the nineteen-forties of the twentieth century, he set the narrative present of the story forward to the nineteen-eighties from which his time-travelers were to go back to the pre-history of Númenor. He then further advanced the time by placing the whole complex in a twenty-first century frame, the year 2012.3 This is the year when a bundle of papers is discovered in the basement of the Examination Schools at Oxford. The papers turn out to be the minutes of a twentieth-century Oxford club, the Notion Club. They are, in Tolkien’s fictive twenty-first century, “edited” and “published” by their fictional discoverer, “Mr. Howard Green.” Tolkien links the separate times not just by concentric framing, but also by flashback, his most contemporary, psychological use of memory. In this context, flashback is not simply the ordinary literary technique by which the reader is switched from the narrative present to the narrative past to fill in a gap or to supply part of the back-story. Rather, it is his authentic treatment of a psychological phenomenon, the actual re-living of a past incident such as is frequently experienced by people who have undergone violent trauma. By its very nature as the re-living or re-experiencing of an event, flashback also functions as the bridge or channel between the present and the past. In the climactic episode of the story, Night 67 of the Club minutes’ chronology, Tolkien’s protagonists Lowdham and Jeremy, in their everyday lives two modern Oxford scholars, are overtaken and possessed by memories of the destruction of Númenor as experienced by their remote ancestors, memories which violently erupt into, and materially and psychologically alter the two men’s present experience. For a brief space of time, while they are physically and observably in a college room in Oxford, they also have the sensation of being in Númenor at the time of its destruction. In this time-doubling mode, they address one another by their Númenorean names Abrazàn and Nimruzìr, and give the impression to others in the room of being aboard a ship in a violent storm—the storm that destroys Númenor. So powerful is this flashback that it brings the reality of ancient Númenor irrupting not just into the individual experiences of the two protagonists, but those of their confreres and all of modern-day Oxford as well, for the same storm and tidal wave simultaneously sweeps over both locations in both times. This is memory with a vengeance, for unlike modern trauma victims, Lowdham and Jeremy are not repossessed 101

Verlyn Flieger by memories of their personal experiences but by those of their remote Númenorean ancestors. It is here that a phrase much-used by Tolkien, “waking thought” (see for example FR 1, vii, 128), becomes operative through its opposite, dreaming thought, the operation of the unconscious mind in the sleeping/dreaming state Outline sketches for time-travel sequences appended to both “The Lost Road” and “The Notion Club Papers” make it clear that Tolkien intended travel backward in time to be travel backward in memory, accomplished through dreams that accessed or tapped into the recurring identities of two men carrying some form of names having the meanings “Elf-friend” and “Bliss-friend.” As Ælfwine (Anglo-Saxon ælf, “elf,” Anglo-Saxon wine, “friend”) and Tréowine (Anglo-Saxon tréow, “truth, troth”)4 Alwyn Lowdham and Trewin Jeremy of “The Notion Club Papers” were to dream their way back to Númenor, where they were to experience that island’s destruction. More than witnesses of the cataclysm, they were to arrive on the scene in time to get a glimpse of (or actual possession of—the notes are not clear) the Book of Stories that is the mythology of Middle-earth, a body of lore which they were then to transmit in some fashion to present-day England. It is in his treatment of identity recurring over serial lives that Tolkien modified the theologically difficult question of reincarnation to the lessproblematic concept of inherited memory. At first glance, they would seem to be the same, or nearly so, but Tolkien was at pains to differentiate them. A note attached to “The Notion Club Papers” suggests that he found a way around the difficulty that enabled him to retain the mechanism without theological unorthodoxy by substituting genetics for metaphysics. Here he states unequivocally that “the theory is that the sight and memory goes [sic] on with descendants of Elendil and Voronwë (=Tréowine) but not reincarnation: they are different people even if they still resemble one another in some ways even after a lapse of many generations” (Sauron 278). His terms for this process were “serial longevity” and “hoarding memory” (Letters 284), and he worked out the idea in some detail, at the same time carefully working around any mention of reincarnation. Nevertheless, the distinction he draws is a fine one, and open to interrogation. Transmitted memory may be defensible as genetic inheritance, but sight, the actual alteration of physical experience would seem to call for some further process. It is not improbable that Tolkien was trying to have it both ways; to be theologically orthodox and yet retain his timetravel device using the idea of an ancestral unconscious that could irrupt into and alter present identity. Although this could conceivably be explained by the presence of some genetic trigger which released or called up neurologically encoded experience, the fact is that it takes over the 102

The Curious Episode of the Dream at the Barrow bodies and identities as well as the minds of Lowdham and Jeremy, controlling present experience by past memory. In his later writings, however, notably in the section “Of Death and the Severance of Fëa [spirit] and Hrondo [bodily form]” in Morgoth’s Ring, Tolkien dealt at some length with Elven reincarnation, going so far as to employ the terms rebirth and re-born, with the rationale that by this process, “the evil and grief that they [Elves] had suffered in the curtailment of their natural course might be redressed” (Morgoth 219). It is hard to ignore the likeness of this concept to that of karma, the working out in one life of actions or relationships left unfinished in a previous life. Nevertheless, this is applied to Elves, not Men. The concept is safely confined to imaginary beings, avoiding the apparent heresy of proposing it, albeit in fiction, for actual human beings. Even so, Tolkien was on theological thin ice here, for Catholic doctrine, which upholds the immortality of the soul and its resurrection in the body at the Last Judgment, does not therefore admit of the soul’s transference through time or its residence in more than one body. It may be for this reason that although he did address it, the concept of reincarnation as applied to humans was a subject about which Tolkien expressed such conflicting viewpoints, sometimes within the same work. Part One of “The Notion Club Papers” presents a viewpoint at odds with that contained in the Note. During a theoretical argument (as among writers) about how believably to accomplish space travel in science fiction, the Club’s minutes-keeper, Guildford, in early drafts identified as Tolkien (Sauron 150), maintains that ‘For landing on a new planet, you’ve got your choice: miracle; magic; or sticking to normal probability, the only known or likely way in which any one has ever landed on a world.’ ‘Oh! So you’ve got a private recipe all the time, have you?’ said Ramer sharply. ‘No, it’s not private, though I’ve used it once.’ ‘Well? Come on! What is it?’ ‘Incarnation. By being born,’ said Guildford. At that point Dolbear woke up. (Sauron 170) Commenting on this exchange, Christopher Tolkien’s Note # 15 to Part One adds that “In the original text A (still followed in B) Dolbear, waking up, says with reference to these words of Guildford’s (‘Incarnation. By being born’): ‘Then try reincarnation, or perhaps transcarnation without loss of memory’” (Sauron 213). That neither reincarnation nor the nonce-term transcarnation made it into his D text, the final typescript published as Part One of the “Papers,” 103

Verlyn Flieger suggests that Tolkien had second thoughts about using either word, and substituted the less problematic incarnation as Guildford’s “private recipe for landing on a world,” which he defines as “being born.” This seems safely uncontroversial, although the fact that Guildford says he has used it “once” suggests (albeit obliquely) the possibility that it could be used more than once. It seems clear that Tolkien was of several minds about espousing, even in fiction, a concept so radically opposed to his Catholic belief. The notion of hereditary memory offered an alternative. This concept was part of a climate of fictional thought in the 1920s, most probably fostered by Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious as a repository of universally shared memories. Such notions were widespread in the early twentieth century. Freud argued for the transmission of memories in several works (e.g. Totem and Taboo and Civilization and its Discontents) and the concept can be found in the writings on fairy-tales by R. G. Collingwood, who like Tolkien was at Pembroke College. E. R. Eddison also made the idea central to his novels, most notably in his Zimiamvian trilogy. Tolkien had met Eddison, who came to an Inklings meeting in 1944, and had read his works (Letters 258). A prime American example from about the same time is Leonard Cline's 1927 novel, The Dark Chamber.4 Moreover, Cline's novel was the impetus for a series of “hereditary memory” stories among writers of speculative fiction in the late 20s and 30s, most notably H. P. Lovecraft. It is not demonstrable that Tolkien knew any of these, though his reading in contemporary science fiction was wide. In a letter to Charlotte and Denis Plimmer, who in 1967 had interviewed him for an article published in the Daily Telegraph Magazine, he mentioned reading “many books (notably so-called Science Fiction and Fantasy)” (Letters 377). The concept behind Cline's novel comes out of a recognized branch of literary thought and practice with which Tolkien was undoubtedly familiar, and may well have been behind the note about Elendil and Voronwë. Nevertheless, the distinction there made between reincarnation and hereditary memory seems a fine one. That the sight and memory of an ancestor can be transmitted to a descendent so that the descendent not only remembers them in another life but re-enacts them as well, appears to be little different in its effects from reincarnation. Nonetheless, the preponderance of evidence so far for Tolkien’s belief or non-belief in reincarnation seems to come down on the side of non-belief or at least extreme caution. His “Notion Club” note was written sometime in 1945-46, and was addressed to himself alone. It is worth noting, however, that he spoke of reincarnation more boldly and in less equivocal terms at a later time and in an even more direct context. An unsent letter addressed to a fellow Catholic who protested the concept 104

The Curious Episode of the Dream at the Barrow on specifically theological grounds shows Tolkien thinking more radically. In 1954, Peter Hastings, manager of the Newman Bookshop in Oxford, wrote expressing concern that Tolkien might have “overstepped the mark in metaphysical matters,” particularly in the case of the concept of reincarnation of the Elves, which Tolkien had mentioned to him in a conversation. Hastings’s letter argued: God has not used that device [reincarnation] in any of the creations of which we have knowledge, and it seems to me to be stepping beyond the position of a sub-creator to produce it as an actual working thing, because a sub-creator, when dealing with the relations between creator and created, should use those channels which he knows the creator to have used already. (Letters 187-88). The draft of Tolkien’s letter of reply makes his opposing position clear. Here he wrote to Hastings that, “We differ entirely about the relation of creation to sub-creation. . . . I should have thought it a curious metaphysic . . . that declared the channels known (in such a finite corner as we have any inkling of) to have been used, are the only possible ones, or efficacious, or possibly acceptable to and by Him!” He went on to declare that, ‘Reincarnation’ may be bad theology (that surely, rather than metaphysics) as applied to Humanity; and my legendarium, especially the “Downfall of Númenor” which lies immediately behind The Lord of the Rings, is based on my view: that Men are essentially mortal and must not try to become “immortal” in the flesh. But I do not see how even in the Primary World any theologian or philosopher, unless very much better informed about the relation of spirit and body than I believe anyone to be, could deny the possibility of re-incarnation as a mode of existence prescribed for certain kinds of rational incarnate creatures. (Letters 188-89) The draft is marked in Tolkien’s hand “Not sent,” with the addition, “It seemed to be taking myself too importantly.” The self-deprecating phrase, “too importantly” notwithstanding, he certainly took the metaphysics of The Lord of the Rings importantly. After reminding Hastings of the obvious, that his story is “a tale, a piece of literature, intended to have literary effect, and not real history,” Tolkien went on to write a lengthy response to Hastings’s criticisms that runs to seven single-spaced printed pages in the published Letters. The fact that the letter was never sent leaves the question open. It is tempting to speculate that beyond his professed modesty, Tolkien might 105

Verlyn Flieger have had the same kind of second thoughts about opening so unorthodox an argument with the manager of a Catholic bookstore that also made him eliminate the words reincarnation and transcarnation from the D typescript of “The Notion Club Papers.” Certainly the views expressed in the unsent letter are explicit, and make it plain that by 1954 Tolkien himself would not and did not deny the possibility of reincarnation “for certain kinds of rational incarnate creatures.” Other, more oblique references in his work would seem to support this position. In his 1939 lecture-essay “On Fairy-stories” Tolkien had declared (without further elucidation) that “[i]n dreams strange powers of the mind may be unlocked” (MC 116). The references to “dream” and the “strange powers,” I suggest, are powers of recall by the unconscious mind capable of taking memory beyond personal experience and history into a realm which Tolkien clearly saw as metaphysical, and just as clearly believed to be possible. Indeed, he had one of his characters in “The Notion Club Papers,” Ramer, declare that “a pretty good case had been made out for the view that in dream a mind can and sometimes does, move in Time” (Sauron 175). Call it inherited memory or reincarnation or both, the process is the central mechanism of both the time-travel stories, without which their action cannot occur. However, the same idea hardly seems necessary to the structure or the plot of Tolkien’s more serious endeavor, The Lord of the Rings. It is true that dream experiences are used as foreshadowing throughout that narrative, dreams in which Frodo’s perceiving mind can move laterally in space, as in his vision of Gandalf at Orthanc, or forward in time, as in his vision in the house of Tom Bombadil of the green country he sees in reality at the end of the book. One dream experience, however, assigned to a less plot-driven part of the story, foreshadows nothing but itself. In this singular instance, Tolkien went out of his way to introduce into his story a dream and memory episode entirely unconnected to plot or character. Not surprisingly the episode occurs in a landscape already haunted by history and oral tradition, the Barrow-downs. In the preliminary to this episode, Frodo, waking to find himself captive in the Barrow, realizes that he is “probably under the dreadful spells of the Barrow-wights about which whispered tales spoke” (FR, I, viii, 151). Frodo’s “waking thought” connects the Barrow to oral tradition, folklore and “whispered tales,” but a subsequent incident will explicitly connect it to both history and dreaming memory as well. This incident is the extraordinary and to all appearances anomalous episode involving Merry Brandybuck, who, on awakening after his rescue by Tom Bombadil, undergoes much the same kind of flashback as that experienced by Tolkien’s science fiction time-travellers, but without the rationale of their serial link to ancestral memory. 106

The Curious Episode of the Dream at the Barrow The chronology of composition is worth noting here, for the Barrow-wight chapter was first drafted near the end of 1938, not long after the abortive 1936 “Lost Road” but before the equally unfinished 194546 “Notion Club Papers,” both of which deal explicitly with inherited memory and reincarnation (Shadow 112), and may well have influenced the Barrow episode both in retrospect and anticipation. In the context of The Lord of the Rings, it would be hard to imagine any race less likely to experience a para-normal memory than the earthy, workaday Hobbits, or any individual less metaphysically inclined than the steady, practical, responsible Merry Brandybuck. Yet precisely the same kind of para-psychological memory that possesses Tolkien’s time-travelling Englishmen in his science fiction stories overtakes the hobbit Merry at the Barrow when, awakening after his rescue to find himself dressed in rags and crowned with gold, he undergoes a sudden, unexpected experience of what can only be read as extra-personal memory. “What in the name of wonder?” began Merry, feeling the golden circlet that had slipped over one eye. Then he stopped, and a shadow came over his face, and he closed his eyes. “Of course, I remember!” he said. “The men of Carn Dûm came on us at night and we were worsted. Ah! The spear in my heart!” He clutched at his breast. “‘No! No!” he said, opening his eyes. “What am I saying? I have been dreaming.” (FR, I, ix, 154). An earlier draft of the incident is even more explicit. After Merry’s “What in the name of wonder,” this version continues, “Then he stopped, and a shadow came over his face. ‘I begin to remember,’ he said. ‘I thought I was dead—but don’t let us speak of it’” (Shadow 128). The question of just who it is who “begins to remember,” is confused here; whether the “I” is Merry or some past individual is not made clear, perhaps deliberately. Christopher Tolkien notes that in this draft there is “no mention of the Men of Carn Dûm.” The published version adds the specific details of the battle, the manner of death, the physical experience of pain, and Merry’s conclusion that he has “been dreaming,” a significant addition to the metaphysics of the episode. This explicit, intentional reference to extra-personal knowledge is directly connected to, indeed is apparently caused first by the landscape in which Merry finds himself—the Barrow, and second by his tactile experience of the “golden circlet” on his head. Tolkien’s (or Merry’s) wordchoice signals the change of identity, shifting from the colloquial “What in the name of wonder?” to the archaic, formal “we were worsted.” It cannot be doubted that Tolkien’s final version intended Merry to experience and express the actuality of some long-ago battle, to relive (or redie) some unknown person’s last moments down to the final detail of the spear going into his heart. Opening his eyes on his own present, Merry 107

Verlyn Flieger concludes that he has been dreaming. And that is precisely Tolkien’s point. He has not made Merry’s allusion to dream lightly, and he seems plainly to be drawing on the same dream mechanism used in “The Lost Road” and “The Notion Club Papers.” But where did the memory or the dream come from? Who is the fallen warrior? What is the link to the barrow? Neither “hoarding memory” nor “serial longevity” will answer here, for there are no descendants to hoard recollection, no series of ancestors through which to transmit it. Tom Shippey discusses the episode in The Road to Middle-earth, suggesting that Merry “seems to have taken on the personality of the body in the barrow” (99). Nevertheless, he does not explore the metaphysics of the incident, which is not surprising, as his subject here is Barrow-wights, not Merry. Shippey does not speculate on who “the body in the barrow” might be except to observe that it “can hardly be the wight.” Tom Bombadil bears this out in his account to the hobbits of the Barrows as the biers of dead kings and queens covered by mounds. “Soon the hills were empty again. A shadow came out of dark places far away, and the bones were stirred in the mounds. Barrow-wights walked in the hollow places with a clink of rings on cold fingers and gold chains in the wind” (FR, I, vii, 141). The wights are transient squatters, later inhabitants of the burial mounds of kings and queens. A back story identifying the mound’s original occupant can be pieced together from scattered references in Appendix A. Here we find that Carn Dûm was the chief city of Angmar, the kingdom ruled by the Witch-king, later known as the Lord of the Nazgûl. He and his host were defeated by the forces of Círdan and Glorfindel at the Battle of Fornost, after which the Witch king “fled northwards, seeking his own land of Angmar. Before he could gain the shelter of Carn Dûm the cavalry of Gondor overtook him” (RK, Appendix A, I, iv, 331). The Appendices also tell us that the barrows, many of which were built in the First Age as grave mounds for the Dúnedain (cf. Tom Bombadil above), came to be haunted by “evil spirits out of Angmar” who “entered into the deserted mounds and dwelt there” (RK, Appendix A, I, iii, 321). We now have a direct link from Angmar and “the men of Carn Dûm” to the barrow and the Wight. But this does not answer the questions nor solve the mystery. The memory that overtakes Merry is neither that of a Barrow-wight nor of a man of Carn Dûm, but rather someone who was “worsted,” indeed, slain, by a man of Carn Dûm, stabbed through his heart with a spear. However, when the Appendices further inform us that hobbits from the Shire were actually at “the battle in which Angmar was overthrown” (RK, Appendix A, I, iii, 322-23), we can imagine a link from Merry to a possible ancestor who could have been at the battle and been killed by the men of Carn Dûm. But this turns out to be not a real clue 108

The Curious Episode of the Dream at the Barrow but a red herring, for that battle was not at the site of the barrow, but a hundred or so miles farther north, at Fornost on the North Downs. Something else, then, must account for the memory at the barrow. We turn back to the Appendices again, which tell us in good oral style that, “Some say [my emphasis] the mound in which the Ring-bearer was imprisoned had been the grave of the last prince of Cardolan, [a Dunedan] who fell in the war of 1409” [against Angmar] (RK, Appendix A, I, iii, 321). To further refine the picture, Appendix A tells us that, “A remnant of the faithful among the Dúnedain of Cardolan also held out in Tyrn Gorthad 6 (the Barrow-downs)” (RK, Appendix A, I, iii, 321). We now have someone (though not a hobbit) who was killed by the men of Carn Dûm and buried in the barrow. Could it be his memory that invaded Merry’s dream and the pain of his death that Merry experienced? There seems no other ready explanation. The possibility is strengthened by Tolkien’s insistence that hobbits are a sub-species of Men, which makes the transference more believable than if Merry had re-lived the experience of an Elf. Nevertheless, there can be no mistake about the nature of this episode. Merry is not reliving the genetically transmitted memory of some remote ancestor, for there is no demonstrable connection among hobbits, the barrow, and the battle with the men of Carn Dûm. Someone else’s long past experience has, if only momentarily, overtaken and overpowered him, and he has identified with it. Finally, however, the question remains, why is the episode included in the story? What is its purpose? It is not followed up in any way, and has no apparent bearing on the further conduct or character of Merry. It adds nothing to plot and seems to have no explicit relationship to the theme. The immediate influences, I suggest, were the two science fiction stories that bracket this portion of the book, the first written in 1936, the year before he began work on The Lord of the Rings, and the second composed in 1945-46, after Tolkien’s writing of the Barrow-downs chapters. Time-travel and dream-memory were still in his mind as he wrote. Beyond that, the episode has much the same general function as the poems, oral stories, wise sayings and old saws that are sprinkled throughout the book: to insist on and underscore the immediacy of the past in the present, and (in this case) to do so through one of the narrative’s least metaphysical characters—the hobbit Merry Brandybuck.7 In his daylong disquisition on the ancient history of Middle-earth, Tom Bombadil had told the hobbits that the blades they carried were forged by the Men of Westernesse, foes of the Dark Lord who were “overcome by the evil king of Carn Dûm in the Land of Angmar. Few now remember them,” Tom continued, “yet some still go wandering, sons of forgotten kings walking in loneliness” (FR, I, ix, 157). The hob109

Verlyn Flieger bits do not understand him, but they have a vision of “a great expanse of years behind them, like a vast shadowy plain over which there strode shapes of Men, tall and grim with bright swords. . . . [T]hen the vision faded and they were back in the sunlit world” (FR, I, ix, 157). Up until this episode the hobbits have experienced chiefly that sunlit world, but Tom’s words now carry them back into the “great expanse of years” that is the past. Part of that past is contained in the barrow. It is in direct relationship to the barrow that Merry enters in his dream the older world of the “shadowy plain,” only to die there with a spear in his heart. What most clearly distinguishes this episode from the two time-travel sequences is the absence of any overt connection, either in the narrative itself or in any of the ancillary documents in the Appendices, between Merry and that sequence of the past that touches him at the barrow. The story carries no thread of repeated Ælfwine-like names, there is no pattern of lineal descent, no link through language, no indication whatsoever of any special circumstance that would associate Merry Brandybuck with the prince of Cardolan or with the barrow. Only the gold crown on Merry’s head ties his physical presence to the dream-memory of that earlier event and un-ancestral person. In the re-experience of death, the prince of Cardolan actually, if only momentarily, inhabits Merry. This cannot be Merry’s inherited memory, for there is no genealogy through which he can inherit, no genetic pathway along which such memory could be transmitted. The episode of Merry’s dream at the Barrow remains, then, the most irregular, least explicable and least historically prepared for event in the entire book, singular in its mystery, and significant in its power to bridge past and present. It is surely no accident or random choice on Tolkien’s part that this re-inhabitation occurs where it does. Like so much of the landscape of Middle-earth, the Barrow-downs are more than mere scenery or topography, more than human-made relics become monuments of history. They are at once repositories of the past and gateways to it, portals through which old memory can touch the present, and the present can connect back to the past. Memory is alive and active and always with us, Tolkien seems to be saying, not just in our eyes and in our ears, not just in our languages and the stories we tell and the books we read, but embedded in the deepest recesses of the world we live in and the deepest recesses of our minds which are at all times and in all circumstances that world’s mirror. In light of this, and returning now to the opening question, I would say that while the evidence is not unequivocal, the final answer must be a qualified “yes, probably.” It seems safe to say that at some level and in his own particular fashion, Tolkien did at least not disbelieve in reincarnation.

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The Curious Episode of the Dream at the Barrow NOTES 1

Since I have discussed the time-travel elements in both stories at greater length in A Question of Time, Chapters 5 and 6. I will confine my observations here to those aspects having a direct bearing on Tolkien’s handling of reincarnation.

2

As well as fictional treatment in the “Papers,” Tolkien gave this idea of inherited memory of language a more scholarly handling in his 1955 O’Donnell lecture, “English and Welsh.” Here he drew an even sharper distinction between a “native language” or inherent linguistic predilection, and a “cradle-tongue,” the first-learned [my emphasis] language of custom (MC 190).

3

This date is one of two possible oblique and tantalizing allusions in the text to a New World mythology, the Maya creation story, Popol Vuh. In addition to marking the fictive discovery of the Notion Club Papers, the date 2012 A.D. marks the end of the pre-Columbian Maya Calendar Long Count. This is a cycle of days so vast as to appear linear, beginning on 13 August 3114 B.C. and running until 23 December, 2012. At that time a new era will begin, and with it a new Long Count. Whether Tolkien knew of this is un-demonstrable, but it is certainly true that he had read widely in scholarly studies in myth and folklore, and was familiar with the major names in this comparatively new discipline, such as Max Müller and Andrew Lang. Lang, at least, knew something of Maya mythology and mentions Popol Vuh in his Introduction to the 1884 edition of Grimm’s Household Tales, with which, it is safe to assume, Tolkien was familiar. The second allusion, even more oblique, occurs in a rejected, early version of the minutes for Night 66. The subject under discussion here is false, sometimes called “folk” etymology, the dangerous amateur practice of assuming that because two words in two different languages have the same shape and sound they must also have the same meaning. The example given by Lowdham is “that popol means ‘people’ or ‘popular assembly’ in Tamil, but has no connexion whatever with populus and its derivatives, and is really derived, they say, from a Tamil word for a mat for the councilors to squat on” (Sauron 300). Popol is, in fact Quiché, a meso-American Maya language in which the word for “mat” is indeed pop, and the word for “council” is popol, meaning those who sit on the mat. Hence the title of the abovementioned Maya Quiché text, Popol Vuh, translated as The Book of Council. Two translations of Popol Vuh were available at the time Tolkien was working on “The Notion Club Papers,” a Spanish translation by Carl Scherzer published in 1857, and a French translation by 111

Verlyn Flieger the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg published in 1861. I can find no evidence that Tolkien had read either translation though given his wide-ranging interest in and curiosity about myth it seems a reasonable possibility. 4

Republished in 2005 by Cold Spring Press with an Introduction by Douglas A. Anderson.

5

No explanation is offered for the switch from “bliss” to “truth,” and Tolkien’s intention here is unclear. The Ælfwine name is more or less continuous in form between the two time-travel stories, changing from Lombardic Alboin in “The Lost Road” to modern English Alwyn in “The Notion Club Papers” but retaining a recognizable shape and spelling. Likewise, in “The Lost Road,” the Bliss-friend name shifts from Anglo-Saxon Eadwine (ead, “prosperity, happiness, bliss) to Lombardic Audoin. The change to Tréowine in “The Notion Club Papers” is ill provided-for, and thus seems arbitrary.

6

Tyrn Gorthad. Tentative etymology: tyrn-TUN=hill, mound, gorGOS=dread, terror), thus Dread Mound. The old name for the Barrow-downs, many built in the First Age.

7

This is in no way intended as a criticism of Merry’s sensitivity or his intelligence. But Tolkien clearly presents him as the steadier, soberer hobbit—for example in his lack of curiosity about the palantír—in contrast to the impulsive, intuitive Pippin, who is not only mysteriously drawn to that crystal ball, but also on a different occasion able to read Grishnakh’s mind (TT, III, iii, 59 ). That Merry is the less likely of the two to have a psychic experience makes the episode at the barrow all the more effective.

WORKS CITED Cline, Leonard. The Dark Chamber. New York: Viking Press, 1927. Dunne, J. W. An Experiment With Time. 3rd edition. London: Faber and Faber, 1935. Flieger, Verlyn. A Question of Time: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Road to Faërie. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1997. Lang, Andrew. Introduction to Grimm’s Household Tales, trans. Margaret Hunt. 2 vols. London: G. Bell and Sons, Ltd., 1884. Shippey, Tom. The Road to Middle-earth. London: HarperCollins, 1992.

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J.R.R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and its Significance MICHAEL D. C. DROUT

J

. R. R. Tolkien is almost certainly the most famous professor of medieval literature of the twentieth century and perhaps the most wellrecognized literature professor in Anglo-American history. Obviously the extent of this fame is due to Tolkien’s authorship of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, but Tolkien’s academic reputation rests upon some very secure foundations: even if he had only ever written “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” and no other papers, he would have been among the most cited medievalists of the twentieth century. But there is also a sense among medievalists—first given voice in Humphrey Carpenter’s biography and in Tom Shippey’s The Road to Middle-earth—that Tolkien failed in his promise and in the end had a somewhat disappointing academic career. Shippey, in discussing Tolkien’s academic reputation in 1989, gives a brief, evaluative survey of Tolkien’s scholarship, concluding that “Tolkien was the most talented philologist of his generation” (22) but that he failed to advance additional research in his field. This essay seeks to update and expand Shippey’s work by evaluating the significance of Tolkien’s scholarship in somewhat more detail and in the context of current scholarship (this context has changed somewhat in the eighteen years since the publication of Shippey’s essay). “Significance” can be measured in several ways. Some of Tolkien’s scholarship is significant because it influenced a great many later scholars. Other pieces are ground-breaking or particularly original even if they have not been widely influential. Still other pieces are significant because of their influence beyond Tolkien’s technical fields. The Appendices to this essay provide complete lists of Tolkien’s academic publications (including posthumous material up through 2006).1 But what seems simple at first reveals new levels of complexity when examined in detail. It is difficult even to count Tolkien’s published works of scholarship. Work by other scholars, most significantly Simonne d’Ardenne, is often credited to Tolkien.2 D’Ardenne’s Þe Liflade ant te Passiun of Seinte Iuliene, for example, has been said to represent Tolkien’s most fully articulated thoughts on Middle English (Carpenter 140-41), and her edition of Seinte Katerine was begun with Tolkien’s collaboration.3 A few other pieces are even more difficult to categorize. E. V. Gordon’s edition of Pearl includes some material by Tolkien (Carpenter 140 n.1), but Gordon’s widow Ida (who completed the edition) stated that she had to rework the Pearl Copyright © West Virginia University Press

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Michael D. C. Drout edition thoroughly in order to bring it into line with modern scholarship (E. Gordon, Pearl iii-iv). Additionally, Mary Salu’s edition of The Ancrene Riwle has been on occasion, probably unfairly, credited to Tolkien. I gather from Prof. Arne Zettersten that Tolkien could produce important scholarly insights in the midst of conversations—C. S. Lewis once called him “an inspired speaker of footnotes” (Sayer 21). Some of these insights may have ended up in the published record of Tolkien’s students, such as Zettersten or Bruce Mitchell (who entitled one of his first important articles “Until the Dragon Comes” and sent an offprint to Tolkien, which he saved).4 Even this somewhat expanded canon leaves out the hundreds and hundreds of pages of unpublished, unfinished material in the Bodleian Library at Oxford.5 The difficulty of attributing this material illuminates a more important philosophical problem. Even scholars who might live the romantic ideal of lonely writing and research are influenced by others, and active scholars who teach a great deal, particularly at elite institutions, are often far more influential than their published records might show. Tolkien taught several decades worth of students at Oxford, and many of his ideas that never found their way into his own published works have nevertheless circulated through the field of medieval studies. Ideas and insights can have complicated pedigrees involving many people. Alan Bliss’s experience with the lecture notes eventually published in Finn and Hengest, my examination of much unpublished scholarly writings at Oxford, and the citation of unpublished scholarly materials by Stuart D. Lee and Elizabeth Solopova all suggest that Tolkien had done much more scholarly work than can ever be attributed to him through counts of publications alone. There are three obvious ways in which to arrange an assessment of Tolkien’s scholarship: in strict chronological order (given in Appendix A), by medieval texts that Tolkien discusses (Appendix B), or by the kind of approach taken by Tolkien (Appendix C). The first arrangement is not particularly useful, as it requires the reader to go back and place the works into their proper intellectual contexts (an effort that properly belongs to the writer, not the reader of this essay). The second approach certainly has some appeal. Tolkien’s published corpus focuses on just a few major medieval texts or groups of texts: the Old English poems Beowulf, Exodus, and The Battle of Maldon; the Middle English anonymous poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer’s The Reeve’s Tale, and the AB Language texts (Ancrene Wisse and the “Katherine Group”). Other publications can often be linked to these (for example, “‘Iþþlen’ in Sawles Warde” and “MS. Bodley 34: A re-collation of a collation” both arose from the more substantial work on the AB Language texts). However, this approach has already been taken (in general) by 114

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and its Significance Shippey in The Road to Middle-earth, and in this essay I want to provide contextualization of a different kind. I will therefore arrange Tolkien’s work in categories based on the types of studies Tolkien published. Taking such an approach, we can classify Tolkien’s works of scholarship into five major categories: (1) studies of single words, (2) studies of dialects, (3) editions and (closely related) translations, (4) literary criticism, (5) essays and ‘meta-scholarship’ (reviews, scholarship about scholarship, pedagogy/syllabus and other engagements with scholarship). 6 These categories are somewhat arbitrary.7 For example, the larger-scale studies of dialects of necessity discuss individual words and, particularly in the case of “Chaucer as a Philologist,” engage in literary criticism.8 The editions and translations are closely interconnected because, for Tolkien, making a translation required deep analysis (and thus editing) of the original text: he never simply translated a received edition. But even the somewhat arbitrary taxonomy that I use above is useful in analyzing Tolkien’s efforts and accomplishments as it shows the different ways in which he approached linguistic or literary problems. Word Studies We begin with word studies, for that is where Tolkien began. His first publications, both anonymous at the Oxford English Dictionary and his later, signed articles, were focused on the philological analysis of individual words. Tolkien’s scholarly career began when he worked at the OED in late 1918 through 1920, compiling entries on words beginning with “W,” including “wain,” “wallop,” and “walrus” (Gilliver “Wordface” 174-84).9 Soon after this work on the Dictionary, Tolkien took the position of Reader in the English Department at Leeds, where he developed a syllabus for Old and Middle English studies (Carpenter 102-103). It was at Leeds that Tolkien completed the first piece of scholarship published under his name, A Middle English Vocabulary, for use with Kenneth Sisam’s FourteenthCentury Verse and Prose.10 A Middle English Vocabulary was created by Tolkien’s writing entries for each of the approximately 4,700 significant words in the Middle English texts selected by Sisam.11 Each entry includes the part of speech of the word, a translation into Modern English and—a significant innovation—a brief etymological note given in square brackets and usually only providing the barest minimum of information (the Old English, Old French, Latin or Old Norse antecedent of the Middle English word with no explanation or development) although carefully pointing out variant forms. This sort of project requires attention to detail and wide-ranging knowledge, but it does not easily allow someone to develop breakthrough insights. A Middle English Vocabulary does illustrate Tolkien’s great facility with the interpretation of individual words (a skill he had polished at the OED), and his thoroughgoing knowledge of Old 115

Michael D. C. Drout English, Old French, and Old Norse, but the structure of the entries precludes much detailed scholarly work on any given word. Thus even words that Tolkien later examined in detail are not specially treated in A Middle English Vocabulary. For example, “losengerye” is simply defined as “lying flattery (of a parasite),” giving no indication that Tolkien would later put a great deal of effort into understanding this word’s etymology. A Middle English Vocabulary also may have laid the groundwork for Tolkien’s editions of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Sir Orfeo. Both texts are included in Sisam’s Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose (although Gawain is severely abridged), so Tolkien would have at an early stage dealt with their vocabularies, at the very least. Shippey notes that A Middle English Vocabulary was a standard teaching text for several scholarly generations over the course of sixty years (“Academic Reputation” 19), and thus it influenced the development of many scholars and the understanding of many students. But this influence must have been mainly on small-scale matters of interpretation of individual words (though the cumulative effect of those many, many individual interpretations could still be significant).12 Tolkien was able to develop further his ideas about the interpretation of words or phrases in “Some Contributions to Middle English Lexicography,” which appeared in The Review of English Studies in 1925.13 “Some Contributions” provides evidence of the same scholarly processes (and abilities) manifested in A Middle English Vocabulary, but in the RES piece Tolkien is able to explain his arguments for interpretation in much more detail, demonstrating the depth of his knowledge of Germanic languages and illustrating the strong emphasis on phonological analysis that would continue to characterize Tolkien’s philological work.14 The second word that Tolkien analyzes, “burde,” he cites from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Tolkien and Gordon’s edition of which was published in 1925, the same year as “Some Contributions.” It is clear from the second part of “Some Contributions” that Tolkien had already begun his work on the “Katherine Group” texts, which would later blossom into the “Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðad” article. Shippey’s description of some of Tolkien’s other articles as “extended footnotes” could equally well be applied to “Some Contributions”: it is a series of word-study footnotes to words in the Middle English texts that Tolkien had most considered in the 1920s. “The Devil’s Coach-Horses” examines the Middle English word “eaueres,” which appears in Hali Meiðhad.15 Paying very close attention to spelling, Tolkien demonstrated that the word should not be linked to Anglo-Saxon “eofor” (boar) but instead to “eafor” (draught-horse). As Shippey notes, “mythologically it was interesting too as showing an image of the devil galloping away not on fire-breathing steeds, but on ‘heavy old dobbins’—a contemptuous barnyard image of evil” (Road 31). 116

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and its Significance Shippey’s assessment of this essay as “distinctly peripheral” (Road 31) still stands.16 Tolkien provided some insight into medieval envisionings of the devil, but otherwise the article has not been of influence. However, “The Devil’s Coach-horses” does illuminate Tolkien’s methods of working: he is far, far more attentive to spellings than many scholars of Middle English, refusing simply to rationalize them as the inconsistent productions of scribes but rather taking them as strong evidence for dialects and language relationships. In this case, the “eo” diphthong in Old English “eofor” would have produced a Middle English word “eoueres” rather than the “eaueres” found in Hali Meiðhad. That sensitivity to spellings (and particularly to vowels) and the confidence to interpret them as including significant linguistic information would form the foundation for Tolkien’s work on dialects. The two-part essay “Sigelwara Land” has attracted somewhat more comment than Tolkien’s other word studies because most critics see the “Sigelwara” as the origin of Tolkien’s balrogs and perhaps a medieval source for the silmarils (Shippey, Road, 39), although of course Tolkien made no such explicit link in the academic publication.17 His argument attempts to determine the meaning of the word “Sigelhearwan,” the Anglo-Saxon translation for forms of the Latin word (with Greek root) “Ethiopians.” Nearly every time the words “Æthiopes” or “Æthiopia” appear in Old English, they are rendered by “Sigelwaran” or “Sigelhearwan”; Tolkien notes that it is very rare for Classical or biblical proper names to be so translated by a word having no obvious connection to the original.18 Tolkien then examines all the appearances of “Sigelhearwan” throughout the Old English corpus, giving special weight to the Vespasian Psalter Gloss.19 He concludes that “sigel” is the oldest form of the first element of the compound and “hearwa” the most authoritative form of the second. “Sigelhearwa” must have existed before the AngloSaxons ever heard of “Æthiops,” Tolkien argues, as it cannot be taken as a learned etymologization of the Greek word. “Sigelhearwa” most likely comes from “the vanished native mythology or its borderland of halfmythical geography. . . . Ethiopia was hot and its people black. That Hell was similar in both respects would occur to many” (192). But the verbal puzzle of “wara” instead of “hearwa” still remained. If “sigel” was taken as “sun,” “wara” would not make sense as “dwellers”: the Ethiopians did not live in the sun. Tolkien determines that “wara” is not a corruption “but an explanatory perversion (aided by a similarity of letters) which under given circumstances might be produced more than once independently.” Further analysis of “sigel” leads him to conclude that this word probably meant “sun-jewel” and was thus attached to Ethiopia in two ways (the land of the hot sun and the land of jewels). “Hearwa” is more difficult, but Tolkien eventually traces it through a variety of color words 117

Michael D. C. Drout back to Gothic “haúri” (coal), Old Norse “hyr-r” (fire), and Old English “heorþ” (hearth) and “hierstan” (to roast) and maybe even more remotely to Latin “carbo” (soot). “If this guess is worth considering we perceive rather the sons of Múspell” (the Norse fire-giant) instead of “the sons of Ham,20 the ancestors of the Silhearwan with red-hot eyes that emitted sparks, with faces black as soot” (110). Tolkien has thus ‘recovered’ a lost mythology of the north and linked it up with a word in Old English, the surface meaning of which is obvious (it glosses well-understood Greek and Latin words), but the etymology and interpretation of which is far more complicated. That this word was found in the Old English Exodus allows Tolkien to assert, at the very end of the article, that this particular poem is one of the “earliest documents” (although “Sigelhearwan” was part of a past that was “probably faded” before these documents were written). In this particular case, the philology is relatively straightforward, but the creativity with which Tolkien approaches the problem (and the creativity required to identify it) illustrates another important aspect of his scholarship. “‘Iþþlen’ in Sawles Warde,” also demonstrates the application of Tolkien’s creativity as mediated through philology.21 Tolkien and his co-author, S.R.T.O. d’Ardenne, argued that a passage containing the apparent word “iþþlen” in Sawles Warde, one of the Katherine Group texts, should be re-translated. This is a complex emendation, based on philological principles, careful attention to the text, and a close examination of the manuscript, which allows Tolkien and d’Ardenne to note that the third letter in the word (the second þ) is actually not a thorn, but some other letter partially confused with the high stroke of a letter on the line below. Tolkien and d’Ardenne correct the text and interpretation and, in a characteristically Tolkienian touch, criticize the original author as well as the inattentive scribe, who was a “blunderer,” but the author here must bear some of the blame. This is a bad beginning. Nothing could be more destructive of his allegory, or more confusing, than to introduce we at this point, the real persons, who are being allegorically analyzed. þah we ne here nawt [though we do not hear this] is indeed nothing more than a weak apology for his allegory, almost before it has begun, an ‘aside’ to the reader that it would have been better not to make. (170) This is literary criticism in what begins as a word study, and it demonstrates Tolkien’s ability to understand a medieval text deeply enough to explain the possible effects it would have had on its readers (which include the scribe who copied it). Like the “iþþlen” essay, “Middle English Losenger: Sketch of an 118

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and its Significance Etymological and Semantic Enquiry” is focused on a single word, though in this case one that appears more than once in Middle English: “losenger,” which Tolkien knew from Chaucer and which he encountered as far back as his time at King Edward’s School. “Losenger” is usually defined as “flatterer,” but in the article Tolkien argues that it is more properly rendered a bit more negatively: “slanderer, backbiter, liar.” Tolkien argues that the word was borrowed into early Old French from Anglo-Saxon; then from French it was subsequently re-borrowed by English. The key to the argument is again spelling: the ending –ung or –ing (for example, in leasung, “lying”) as a feminine ending for verbal abstract nouns is distinctively Old English, and the spellings in Old French would not be consistent with a borrowing from other Germanic languages.22 The “Losenger” essay and Tolkien’s piece on “The Name ‘Nodens’” (Appendix 1 of the Report on the Excavation of the Prehistoric, Roman and PostRoman Site in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire) demonstrate how deeply Tolkien had internalized the sound-systems of the Indo-European languages (not only the Germanic branch, which was his special field, but the Celtic, Italic, and Hellenic branches as well).23 “The Name ‘Nodens’” was an almost completely obscure essay until Shippey discussed it in detail in The Road to Middle-earth (27-29). Tolkien connected the various forms of “nodens” found on inscriptions at an archeological site to the Irish hero Núadu Argat-lám and then to the Welsh Lludd Llaw Ereint, both of whom are called “silverhand.” He then follows the figure and the word on a wild ride through Celtic and Germanic language and mythology, eventually suggesting that an ancient supernatural figure of a hunter might lie behind all the various words and stories: “Even in the dimmed memories of Welsh legend in llaw ereint we hear still an echo of the ancient fame of the magic hand of Nodens the Catcher” (137).24 Shippey has rightly focused on the ways that this essay combines Tolkien’s interest in and ability to recover lost English history through philology with a deep knowledge of myth and legend in a variety of northern European traditions. It is also important to emphasize just how much of the article arises out of phonology. Tolkien had an almost uncanny understanding of the sound-systems of European languages, focusing not so much on consonant shifts, but on regular vowel changes. This focus is significant because, particularly in Germanic, consonant shifts are easier to follow and much less controversial among students of language than are vowel shifts.25 It is not easy for the non-specialist to understand how difficult this kind of work is, particularly when Tolkien was doing it, in the days before computerized corpora and exhaustive dictionaries and concordances.26 Tolkien had to move freely through multiple languages, which are littered with borrowings and false cognates, and somehow pick out those words that were most likely to have been related to one an119

Michael D. C. Drout other. He then had to examine those putative relationships through the lens of regular phonological rules and philological principles in order to determine which correspondences were real and which were illusory. Although there are others who can do such work (and the two subsequent academic generations of scientific philologists contained individuals who were just as adept as Tolkien), the combination of learning and insight required for such work is rare; few, if any, scholars possess it today. It is this internalization of a complete phonological system, along with the changes required to convert it from one language into another, that separates Tolkien from his contemporaries and successors. It is not possible to determine whether this ability was developed via Tolkien’s work on his invented languages or if it was this particular talent that allowed him to build those languages, but it is apparent that Tolkien’s amazing facility with phonological systems allowed him to engage in word study with an unsurpassed combination of rigor and creativity. Dialect Studies There is a natural transition between word studies and dialect studies. Dialects in medieval manuscripts are identified through the recognition of patterns of spelling and word use, so the skills required for word study are the foundation of dialect study. But dialect study is something more: it is one thing to notice subtleties of spelling in order to identify a specific word in Old English as being the antecedent of a Middle English word; it is quite another to generalize this approach across a large number of words and to identify a dialect.27 In medieval manuscripts we perceive dialects through a glass darkly: scribes’ idiosyncratic spellings can become layered on top of, and then confuse, original dialects, and it can be very difficult to separate out legitimate patterns from the accretion of different scribal variants. However, dialects are identified not only by their spellings, which can indicate pronunciation, but also through the use of a non-standard lexicon. A dialectologist attempts to separate out scribal variation and dialectal variation and consistent word-choice from accidents of preservation; it is an art, not an exact science, despite the developments of scientific philology. Tolkien was an exceptionally knowledgeable dialectologist of Middle English,28 particularly focusing on the speech of the north and west of England, a “region of great interest,” as he noted in his “Foreword” to Walter Haigh’s A New Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District: it has been the field of dialectal competition and mingling at a particularly important boundary, the borders of the Northern and the (Western) Midland, and the scene of the swaying fortunes of different types of English since very early times, 120

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and its Significance indeed since ‘Anglo-Saxon’ days. Here, later, the development of English acquired an increased interest, if increased complexity also, from the Scandinavian invasions of the East (Yorkshire and Lincolnshire) and the West (Lancashire). (xv) Tolkien’s deep knowledge of Old English and Old Norse and his close attention to sound-patterns as represented by spelling systems, as well as his work on his and E. V. Gordon’s edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (discussed below), gave him particular insight into the complexities of language- and dialect-change and cross-influence, particularly in the West Midlands. A focus on west-midlands’ English led to what Shippey calls the “most perfect” of Tolkien’s academic publications, the 1929 article “Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad ” (Road 31). In this article, Tolkien examined the language of the Katherine Group (a collection of early Middle English texts that includes the lives of Saints Katherine, Margaret, and Juliana, a text about virginity called Holy Maidenhood, and an allegory, Sawles Warde) with Ancrene Wisse, a guide for anchoresses. The Katherine Group texts are found in MS. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 34 (which has traditionally been labeled “B”), and Ancrene Wisse appears in MS. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 401 (traditionally labeled “A”).29 Tolkien argued that the two manuscripts, which were copied by two different scribes, were written in the same standardized, literary dialect, which he called the “AB Language.” The AB Language texts are usually considered to have been composed some time after 1224 (because the Dominicans and Franciscans are mentioned, and these two orders did not arrive in England until, respectively, 1221 and 1224). AB Language was significant because it was standardized and sophisticated at a time and place very distant from the main currents of Middle English development, because it indicated a literary ‘school’ or ‘standard,’ and also because it demonstrated some fundamental continuity between Old English and Middle English even across the boundary of the Norman Conquest of 1066. Tolkien noticed idiosyncrasies in the spellings of verbs which, in Old English, had been weak verbs of class II.30 In the AB texts the ending –eth marks the third person singular, but verbs in the present tense with plural subjects use –ith or -ieth. It is a subtle distinction, but Tolkien used it to show how there must have been a school of early Middle English in the West Midlands in the very early thirteenth century and that this Middle English had been largely untroubled by French and the Norman Conquest.31 The identification of the AB Language was one of the great triumphs of English philology in the twentieth century (although it was philology’s last gasp).32 As Shippey has noted, “Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad ” “convinced everyone immediately” when it appeared (“Academic Reputation” 121

Michael D. C. Drout 21). Tolkien had tabulated thousands of appearances of key verbs in the texts and found only very few mistakes (i.e., variations) by the scribes, and this mountain of evidence, combined with Tolkien’s rhetorical gifts, led to the massive influence of the essay; Richard Dance recently called it “an article which has attained essential status for those interested in AB ‘language’” (58). Subsequent researchers further localized the AB Language (to Wigmore abbey in north-west Herefordshire)33 and reconstructed more of the background of the early West Midlands (for example, by linking the ‘Wooing Group’ of texts to the AB language.34 Some of Tolkien’s discussion of the AB language has come in for criticism (see Dance 61-62), and there is less confidence in contemporary scholarship about the complete regularity of the AB standard; in particular, there is now some argument that the A and B texts actually do differ from each other (Dance 62), challenging some of Tolkien’s conclusions. However, the broader argument about the persistence of Old English in the West Midlands remains accepted even if all of Tolkien’s conclusions about the AB texts are not. Shippey is correct in noting that after “Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad” “the study of Middle English dialects paused for a generation” (“Academic Reputation” 21), but that pause is now over, due in great part to scholars arguing that scribal ‘normalization’ provides evidence of dialects (evidence that had been thought to be inferior to that provided by the scribes of A and B).35 Tolkien’s significance and influence in this area nevertheless remains secure: even if he was not correct in the particulars of AB language, his conclusion—that a kind of Old English remained spoken and written in the West Midlands long after the Norman Conquest—is still accepted and seems likely to endure. Tolkien’s 1934 essay, “Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve’s Tale,” published in Transactions of the Philological Society, has had much less influence than “Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad.”36 This is surprising, because Tolkien was writing on Chaucer, for whom there is a much larger scholarly audience, rather than on obscure (at least to non-medievalists) religious texts, but although “Chaucer as a Philologist” is cited in such major sources as The Riverside Chaucer, it has not been seen as the beginning of a research program or even been particularly influential in criticism of “The Reeve’s Tale.” Tolkien set out to demonstrate that in “The Reeve’s Tale,” Chaucer is making a “linguistic joke”: the ‘accents’ of the two main characters are not just a generic northern dialect, but can be localized to the specific region around Durham.37 Chaucer was a philologist because he was capable of making such a joke, not merely altering vowels in a haphazard way, but instead adopting exactly those variations that would be used by a speaker from Durham. Chaucer, Tolkien concluded, “took a 122

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and its Significance private pleasure in acute observation” which he displayed in this manner in “The Reeve’s Tale.” To support this thesis, Tolkien made a close examination of “The Reeve’s Tale” in the seven earliest manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales and created a critical edition of the text. He assumed that subsequent scribes would be likely to alter Chaucer’s deliberately northern spellings, and managed to reconstruct a text in a “very nearly and correctly northern” dialect. Shippey noted in 1989 that “Chaucer as a Philologist” is “fascinating in its detail, and still completely convincing in its demonstration that Chaucer was trying to make a joke by close, careful imitation of the dialect of Durham: but it’s a joke about language and now has no market” (“Academic Reputation” 21). It is also a joke that seems to have been accepted as proven for the past seventy years, although scholars have apparently not found much to build upon in Tolkien’s work: he is frequently cited in surveys of scholarship, but I have been unable to identify any sort of research program that extends or even continues Tolkien’s argument. In part, as Shippey notes, this lack occurs because there is not much of a “market” for the philological approach. Wendy Scase’s recent essay, given the misleading title of “Tolkien, Philology, and The Reeve’s Tale: Towards the Cultural Move in Middle English Studies,”38 demonstrates exactly this problem, refusing to engage at all with the details of Tolkien’s argument but accepting (apparently; it is difficult to tell) that it is basically correct. However, linguistically minded scholars have perhaps begun to question some of Tolkien’s conclusions. Simon Horobin, for instance, believes that Tolkien biased his critical text by selecting all possible northern variants out of his seven manuscripts. Several of these manuscripts were copied by scribes using northern dialects, and these scribes added northern forms of their own to Chaucer’s, thus making the text appear far more consistently northern than Chaucer’s original. Horobin follows most contemporary scholarship in assuming that the Hengwrt manuscript, in which the northern spellings are far less consistent than Tolkien’s edited text, is closest to Chaucer’s original and was copied by an accurate scribe. The same developments in dialectology noted above in relation to AB Language—that scribes methodically translated their productions into their own dialects despite the dialects of their exemplars—have led scholars to accept more scribal intervention in copied manuscripts. Thus Tolkien’s conclusions about Chaucer’s creation of an accurate, localizable northern dialect become suspect: Tolkien was able to create such a perfect dialect out of the potpourri of variants in his seven manuscripts. His philological skill, and the existence of so many variants, made him a better dialectologist than Chaucer. The significance of “Chaucer as a Philologist” is thus difficult to determine. “Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad” is an essential foundation 123

Michael D. C. Drout for an ongoing research program; “Chaucer as a Philologist” has been widely accepted by scholars who do not examine its particulars and is being questioned by at least some who specialize in Middle English dialects. And recognizing Chaucer as a proto-philologist, although it perhaps illuminated one of Chaucer’s jokes and provided a better understanding of the most canonical author in Middle English, did not open up a new research program for others to follow the way “Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad” did. Furthermore, both of Tolkien’s major works in dialect studies are open to the same criticism—he was too confident of the power of scientific philology and thus did not take manuscript transmission and scribal practice enough into consideration. There is surely something to be said for this critique, and I am loath to question those whose knowledge of Middle English dialects is so superior to my own; however, I am at least somewhat suspicious of these criticisms because they recapitulate, in minute detail, the broader currents of thought in the medieval studies of the 1980s and 1990s.39 There is a decreased confidence in philology and an increased confidence in the significance and authority of manuscripts that now, with hindsight, seems to be composed partly of legitimate doubts and partly of cant. I think that there is no doubt that medievalists today know much less philology than did Tolkien and his contemporaries, and they have more access to manuscripts via inexpensive air travel, electronic reproductions, and microfilms; thus it is certainly possible to read the development of the criticism as a way of shifting the debate onto grounds in which the newer generation of scholars is more comfortable. Large, theoretical objections to philology (scribes are more accurate, manuscript-readings are sacrosanct, emendations are suspect) have gone hand in hand with a diminution in the ability to do philology. To be fair, some of this reduction of confidence in philological practice may simply be reasonable (if seemingly pusillanimous) caution; Richard Dance, for instance, writes that “few engaged now upon the study of medieval copying habits and textual transmission would be prepared to countenance [opinions like Tolkien’s] so unguardedly” (61; my emphasis). Dance argues that “it has been copiously proven . . . that scribes could and in fact did ‘translate’ between one written dialect and another, often leaving little or no residue from the forms of their exemplar that would tend to illustrate the fact” (61).40 A change in the accepted critical view of the practices of medieval scribes generated by additional editions (such as those published by the Early English Text Society of all manuscripts of the Ancrene Wisse) would indeed tend to cause scholars to interpret materials differently from the way Tolkien did: the cumulative work of many can overturn the conclusions of the single genius. But Scase’s discussion of “Chaucer as a Philologist” makes me far less sanguine: the welter of stock verbiage41 only partially obscures the author’s apparent inability to 124

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and its Significance even evaluate Tolkien’s philological reconstruction on its own terms, much less perform philological analysis of her own in order to challenge Tolkien’s conclusions. Tolkien and the generation of philologists of which he was a member must bear some of the blame here—a large portion of “Chaucer as a Philologist” is difficult reading even for someone with philological training and must be nearly impenetrable for scholars who focus much more strongly on the “lit.” side of the language/literature divide. It is possible to write about philology in a more accessible manner,42 and such writing should be strongly encouraged. Nevertheless, it is still the responsibility of subsequent generations of scholars to make the effort to understand what their predecessors were saying. This responsibility is not eliminated by the emergence of new theoretical paradigms that purport to overturn the epistemological foundations of previous disciplines: if these paradigms (historicization and contextualization, for instance) are a critique of the over-confidence of previous generations in philological precision, they must not themselves be over-confidently accepted. Editions and Translations Middle English Tolkien’s first major published work was his and E. V. Gordon’s 1925 edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.43 The Tolkien and Gordon edition remained in print in its original form for forty-two years and then was updated in 1967 by Tolkien’s student Norman Davis, whose revision is still in print, although it is probably no longer the standard edition of the poem.44 This was, in Shippey’s words, “an enormously successful book, which altered the whole current of English medieval studies—til then heavily Southern and Chaucerian in basis, at least at non-specialist level” (“Gawain-poet” 213). Tolkien and Gordon produced a readable edition that was free “from the litter of italics, asterisks, and brackets, the trail of the passing editor” (Tolkien and Gordon v)—which is why it was so successful as a student text—but the notes and the glossary were very detailed and interpretive. Tolkien and Gordon proposed many emendations that have been adopted by subsequent critics.45 The Tolkien and Gordon edition is generally taken to be more closely focused on the technical problems posed by the poem than on literary or cultural interpretation. Derek Brewer recalls that Tolkien: lectured on the poem to a small group of devotees, confining himself entirely to textual cruces (often forgetting to tell us which line he was discussing) and doing obscure (to me) battle with some mysterious entity, prophetically as it now may seem, called something like ‘Gollancz.’ (2)

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Michael D. C. Drout It is probably fair to say that this is the received view: Tolkien and Gordon were more concerned with the creation of a good text, built up through careful philology applied to a very difficult manuscript. I think this interpretation gives short shrift to the deep influence of Tolkien and Gordon on interpretation of the poem itself. Glossaries are enormously influential in their shaping of the interpretation of poems, for, unlike notes, which are obviously interpretive, the glossary of a text silently influences every aspect of its interpretation.46 However, Tolkien’s more literary (as opposed to linguistic) interpretations of the poem were not articulated until long after the publication of the Tolkien and Gordon edition. The radio broadcasts of his Modern English translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight on the BBC Third Programme in 1953 surely did much to shape the popular understanding of the poem, as perhaps did the brief essay “A Fourteenth-century Romance,” published in Radio Times in 1953.47 Tolkien’s complete Modern English translation of Sir Gawain was much-delayed and only eventually published in the 1975 volume edited by Christopher Tolkien, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo. This collection of translations has been used very frequently in teaching Sir Gawain, although Marie Boroff ’s 1967 translation remains the standard for undergraduates.48 My own assessment is that the Boroff translation is better than Tolkien’s, whose strict attention to meter and alliteration is often accomplished here (although not in the Pearl translation discussed below) at the expense of sense and clarity. In Middle English, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is an exciting, fast-moving poem; Tolkien’s translation is somewhat heavy and slow, and some words are not merely archaic in feel but entirely unknown to even the best contemporary students (graduate as well as undergraduate).49 Nevertheless, many, many people have been influenced by Tolkien’s interpretation of Sir Gawain, probably without their being able to say what that interpretation was, as the many small points of interpretation are spread throughout the Glossary and have been communicated to Tolkien’s students through his lectures at Oxford and to the general public through the radio broadcasts.50 A clear view of Tolkien’s more general interpretation of the poem would not be widely published until 1983.51 Although Tolkien began his career with a flurry of editing (the Gawain edition with Gordon and an edition of Pearl, also with Gordon, that was begun but not finished until many years later by Ida Gordon, and his posthumously published edition of Exodus), for most of his life his only published edition was that of Gawain.52 Finally, in 1962, his long-awaited edition of Ancrene Wisse was published by the Early English Text Society.53 This edition remains the standard for manuscript A of Ancrene Wisse (MS. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 402),54 but, as Shippey notes, it is only “a sort of printed transcript, with no opinions in it at all” (“Academic 126

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and its Significance Reputation” 22, Shippey’s emphasis).55 It is a useful research tool, but it demonstrates only Tolkien’s considerable skill in puzzling out manuscript readings, and his enormous philological abilities can only be barely glimpsed by examining the complexities of the Corpus manuscript56 and realizing that Tolkien was not merely scrutinizing marks on a page but was analyzing them in terms of language and sense. For Tolkien’s opinions on early Middle English, then, we need to turn to an edition that does not have his name on the cover. In 1936, Tolkien’s student S.R.T.O. d’Ardenne published Þe liflade ant te Passiun of Seinte Iuliene, an edition of the Life of St Juliana from MS. Bodley 34 and thus one of the major Katherine Group Texts. As noted above, according to Humphrey Carpenter, “Tolkien contributed much” to this edition; “indeed the d’Ardenne Juliene paradoxically contains more of his views on early Middle English than anything he ever published under his own name” (Carpenter 140-41). Hammond goes further, arguing that d’Ardenne “admitted privately” that the edition was in fact co-written with Tolkien; however, having it appear only under her name allowed her to secure a university professorship (278).57 Arne Zettersten notes that “this edition received considerable praise by reviewers at the time and was even considered the best edition of a Middle English text so far.”58 Þe liflade ant te Passiun of Seinte Iuliene is indeed a very good edition and remains the standard to this day (this staying power is made all the more remarkable by the extreme difficulty of the manuscript and thus the likelihood of errors in transcription or interpretation). The discussion in the introduction follows the tradition of philological scholarship in the 1930s (which makes it somewhat difficult to read compared to today’s editions, the introductions to which are generally focused on both explaining the text to the general reader and engaging in the debates among experts), diving immediately into subtleties of paleography and spelling and quickly noting disagreement with previous work. It is, of course, impossible to be certain which language is Tolkien’s and which is d’Ardenne’s in Seinte Iuliene. The more times one reads it, the more “Tolkienian” passages begin to jump out, but then a scholar notes that Tolkien’s style was likely to rub off a bit on his collaborator, who had been his student and furthermore was not writing in her native language. Certainly the fronting of the prepositional phrase in “For the name and the author of Iuliene there is no evidence” (xl) feels quite like “of pagan ‘belief ’ we have little or nothing in Old English” in “Beowulf : The Monsters and the Critics” (MC 36). Likewise the following passage, in which d’Ardenne discusses AB Language, seems consistent with Tolkien’s writing in other contexts, both “Beowulf : The Monsters and the Critics” and “Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad ” :

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Michael D. C. Drout It was a language preserved by the English gentry impoverished by the Norman Conquest, until by the slow revolutions of time it came for a while into its own again, while the temporary power of the West lasted, and until the commercial supremacy of the East, after Chaucer’s day, relegated it finally to the background of dialect. (xxvii-xxviii) But even if we are willing to credit these passages to Tolkien, attributing more of the argument of Þe liflade ant te Passiun of Seinte Iuliene is, to say the least, problematic. For example, d’Ardenne writes “the view of Professor Tolkien that ‘translation’ (from one ME. dialect into another) is an unlikely event in the ultimate history of these texts probably needs modification” (xxxiv-xxxv). As noted above, Dance takes this statement as an early indication by d’Ardenne that Tolkien’s view in “Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad” was not entirely tenable (61 n. 9), but if the d’Ardenne edition is really a close collaboration, then this passage is just as likely an example of Tolkien revising his own thoughts as he worked closely with d’Ardenne on the Bodley 34 manuscript.59 However, I think we are safe in attributing one overarching idea expressed in Þe liflade ant te Passiun of Seinte Iuliene to Tolkien, and that is the idea of the continuity of the English tradition. Certainly he had this idea before he began to work with d’Ardenne, and of course he was not the first: R. W. Chambers had published On the Continuity of English Prose in 1932,60 but there had long been discussion of the relationship between Old English and Middle English after the Conquest. Tolkien firmly believed that there was a great deal of continuity between later Old English and Middle English, though he thought that linkage was to be found in texts written in the North and West of England.61 Now this argument, that there was more continuity in language in those areas of England more distant from London than many scholars have accepted, is not the kind of debate than can ever be resolved, hinging, as it does, on unarticulated principles of what ‘more’ or ‘less’ continuity might mean. One cannot point to any particular work today and say that it proves or disproves Tolkien’s contentions;62 different scholars and different approaches emphasize different aspects of the data. However, Tolkien’s approach can be interpreted as being somewhat vindicated: his assumptions of continuity were productive: by following them, he was able to uncover overlooked relationships and explain words that were otherwise opaque or confusing. Tolkien linked Middle English words to their Old English and Old Norse antecedents to a degree not demonstrated in the Oxford English Dictionary or the later Middle English Dictionary (for Tolkien the subtleties of spelling were indicative of linguistic relationships; you could not discount continuity just because the Norman Conquest had 128

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and its Significance come between Old and Middle English). Both the glossaries of the Gawain edition and d’Ardenne’s edition of Seinte Iuliene 63 are characterized by their readiness to delve very deeply into Old English and Old Norse rather than merely relying upon other, similar Middle English words to develop definitions and etymologies. Tolkien’s extreme sensitivity to spelling and his internalization of the vowel changes that characterize dialects allowed him to notice Old English and Old Norse antecedents that had escaped other editors. The discourse conventions of editions in the earlier part of the twentieth century worked against Tolkien bringing to bear his literary imagination on the texts he studied, and he himself separated large-scale interpretation from textual puzzles, yet in the glossaries and notes of his co-edited editions we can glimpse his mind at work in a way that blended literary and linguistic approaches more thoroughly than had been done before or has been since. Since his death, several others of Tolkien’s editions have been published, as have his translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo.64 The 1944 edition of the Middle English poem Sir Orfeo (printed specifically for a wartime cadet’s course) was not widely seen until 2004, so it is difficult to determine if it will be of influence. Because one of Tolkien’s students, Alan Bliss, published what is now the standard edition of Sir Orfeo, it is likely that many of Tolkien’s interpretations may have already entered into published scholarship without being attached directly to his name (likewise, Mary Salu’s edition of The Ancrene Riwle is thought to incorporate many of Tolkien’s ideas). Tolkien has also influenced scholarship about and the general impression of Sir Orfeo through the translation published in 1975: many teachers end up teaching Sir Orfeo because it is in the same volume as Tolkien’s translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl, both much more canonical Middle English poems. Tolkien’s edition and translation are close and careful readings and interpretations of the manuscript, but, like the Ancrene Wisse edition, the work on Sir Orfeo does not give Tolkien’s literary interpretation of the text. Tolkien also worked with E. V. Gordon on an edition of Pearl, a poem found in the same manuscript as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and usually thought to be written by the same author.65 Tolkien had begun the edition with Gordon, but it was not completed until many years later, after Gordon’s death, by his widow, Ida. If we try to determine where Tolkien’s contributions to this edition lie, we are faced with the problem of separating out work by E. V. Gordon, later work by Ida Gordon (a philologist in her own right), and other contributions by Tolkien. Shippey calls some of the notes in the Pearl edition “resonantly Tolkienian” (“Gawain-poet” 211), and I agree with this assessment, but other notes are difficult to judge, and it is not certain how much of the edition—which has 129

Michael D. C. Drout long been well-regarded, although it is now superseded by the Andrew and Waldron edition—should be credited to him. Tolkien did, however, complete a translation of Pearl, and this, by near consensus opinion among medievalists, is the most successful Modern English translation of that poem. My own opinion is that it is the best Modern English translation of any Middle English poem, but that is of course a matter of personal judgment. Pearl is the most structurally complex poem in Middle English: it follows a rhyme scheme of a b a b a b a b b c b c in each of its 101 stanzas, which are further arranged in twenty groups of five twelveline stanzas (except for group 15, which has six stanzas) that are linked through the use of repetition: the last word (and often the entire last line) in each of the five stanzas is the same, and that key word is then used in the first line of the subsequent stanza. The poet also uses alliteration to further ornament the lines, but this use is not as consistent as his practice in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Tolkien managed to replicate all of these formal qualities in his translation, which is remarkably similar in ‘feel’ to the Middle English original. His use of archaic vocabulary and grammatical inversions here works in a way it does not in the Gawain translation, reproducing the tightly inter-connected qualities of Pearl (a teaching commonplace is to describe the form of the poem as being like pearls on a string) in a way that no other translator has come close to achieving and demonstrating that Tolkien’s poetic and literary gifts could be manifested in translation as well as in original composition. Old English It is ironic that Tolkien is known in the popular culture (if his academic specialty is even discussed) as an expert on Beowulf and thus an Anglo-Saxonist, because he published very few pages of scholarship on Anglo-Saxon literature during his lifetime. Tolkien certainly lavished a great deal of time and energy on Old English, but although this was manifested in lectures at Oxford, it did not translate into print. His editions of the Old English poems Exodus and the Finnsburg Fragment were both published after his death and, although some of the ideas in Exodus have influenced the subsequent criticism of the poem, neither edition has had a substantial impact on Old English studies. Tolkien’s edition of Exodus (1981) was edited by Joan Turville-Petre from Tolkien’s mostly completed edition (which was begun in 1925) and from lecture notes dating to the 1930s and 1940s.66 Tolkien’s partial translation of the poem (lines 1-505 out of 590 lines) is also included in the edition. Like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Exodus raises an enormous number of difficult textual puzzles due to the scribe’s apparent unfamiliarity with the language of his exemplar. Tolkien’s commentary is thus almost entirely textual, with many emendations proposed or rejected on 130

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and its Significance philological grounds. Many of these have been adopted in what is now the standard edition of Exodus, by P. J. Lucas (1977).67 But Tolkien’s ideas about Exodus never received wider circulation in part because the edition is so relentlessly textual in focus. One can find opinions on the matter of the poem only by detailed reading of the notes; there is no sustained development of an interpretive argument, a lack which is very unfortunate for Old English studies. Soon after the publication of the Exodus edition, Alan Bliss edited Finn and Hengest,68 which gathers Tolkien’s lectures on the Finn Episode in Beowulf (lines 1063-1159a) and a now-lost poetic fragment, often called The Fight at Finnsburg, that appears to treat the same material.69 From what scholars can piece together from the two texts, as well as hints and gleanings from other sources, the plot of the episode is this: Hoc was the king of the Danes. His daughter Hildeburh was married to Finn, king of the Frisians, in an attempt to heal a feud between the two tribes. Hnaef was the son of Hoc and the brother of Hildeburh. He traveled to Frisia with his troop of warriors to visit his sister. For some reason, a quarrel broke out between the Danes and Frisians. The Danes occupied a building in Frisia and were able to defend it for five days against the forces of the Frisians, but eventually Hnaef was killed, as was Hildeburh’s and Finn’s unnamed son. With neither side able to overcome the other, and with winter weather preventing the Danes from leaving Frisia, there was an attempt to broker peace. Finn agreed to treat the Danes as well as he treated his own men, giving gifts to both sides equally. This truce held throughout the winter, although Hengest, who had become the leader of the Danes after Hnaef ’s death, was plotting revenge. When spring came, fighting broke out again, and this time the Danes were completely victorious, killing Finn, taking all of his treasure, and carrying the nowwidowed Hildeburh back to Denmark. Tolkien’s major contribution to study of the Finn material is to add in the wrinkle of “Jutes on both sides” of the conflict. In his reconstruction (pages 159-62 of Finn and Hengest) he argues that the Jutes had been displaced by the expansion of the Danes. Some of these Jutes were part of the warrior troop of the Frisian king, Finn. Other Jutes were in the service of the Danish king Hnaef, and these two sets of Jutes had a longrunning quarrel that jeopardized exactly the peace that Finn was trying to create by marrying the Danish princess Hildeburh. At some point the Jutes who were with the Danes were attacked by the Jutes who were with Finn. The Danes defended the hall for five days, and eventually Hnaef (on the Danish side) and the son of Finn were slain. Hengest held together his own Jutish men and the remnant of the Danes and was able to strike the bargain with Finn that allowed both tribes to remain in the hall throughout the winter. But Hengest eventually decided that his own oath 131

Michael D. C. Drout to the now-dead Hnaef was more important than his new relationship with Finn, and so he eventually avenged his lord.70 Tolkien also thought that the Hengest of the fragment might very well be the Hengest who, according to Bede, led the invasion of England by the Jutes. The Jutes on the continent were being squeezed between the expanding power of the Danes and the resisting powers of the Frisians and Franks. After Finnsburg, which Tolkien believed should be more accurately labeled the “Freswæl” or Frisian slaughter (Beowulf line 1070a), Hengest may have taken his motley band of survivors and mercenaries and headed for greener pastures in England. The support for this reconstruction is an exceedingly complex argument, based on the combination of sophisticated philological analysis and wide reading in the orts and scraps of history and legend found throughout a very large number of medieval texts. In fact, it depends very much on the piecing together of history out of the repetition of names, some forms of which needed to be reconstructed by philology. This argument is then presented mostly in the form of textual notes, and the combined effect is to make Finn and Hengest so difficult to follow that Bliss, in his Editor’s Introduction, must direct readers to the commentary on specific lines of text in order for them to find “the most important arguments.”71 This presentation is almost certainly in great part (though not entirely) to blame for Tolkien’s essay having, as Shippey notes, “no academic impact at all—no one ever cites it” (Author 267). This state of affairs is unfortunate, because fewer and fewer Beowulf scholars have the capability of ranging widely through the fragments of northern-European history and literature to piece together what background we can for Beowulf, and as such skills have atrophied, more skepticism has arisen about the value of such study. If Tolkien had made his argument more accessible in form, or if Bliss had re-worked it to make the argument clearer, we might be further advanced today in Beowulf studies. Shippey also notes that Tolkien obviously thought Exodus and Beowulf to be closely related, and that some of the implications of this recognized relationship would be very significant indeed for Old English studies had Tolkien made them earlier and more explicitly (“Academic Reputation” 22). Possibly the biggest question in Beowulf studies today is the date of the poem. Scholarship since the 1980s has tended to place the date of the composition of the poem closer to the copying of the manuscript (the latter dates from the end of the tenth century or the very beginning of the eleventh).72 Tolkien believed in the older consensus position that Beowulf was written in “the Age of Bede” (thus at the very end of the seventh century or the first half of the eighth), and he had a strong case on philological grounds. Shippey notes that Tolkien “did not express himself clearly on the reasons for early dating” and thus his views have been superseded 132

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and its Significance “largely by default and the pressure of organized academic consensus” (“Academic Reputation” 22, his emphasis). Shippey is correct, although the pendulum may by now have swung somewhat back towards an early rather than a late date for Beowulf.73 But it is noteworthy that most of the major arguments for a late date do not discuss the possible relationship of Beowulf and Exodus as support for an early date. This is unfortunate, because I believe that Tolkien’s argument, as best I can reconstruct it, is robust. There are, of course, many additional philological arguments about individual words that Tolkien could have (and would have) made, but at least one part of the larger argument would, I think, run something like what follows. The poem Exodus was copied in the tenth century. The scribe in that century could not understand much of his exemplar and made a muddle of it, suggesting strongly that the language of the poem was archaic in the tenth century. Thus Exodus must be significantly older than its manuscript copy. This would place its composition somewhere in the eighth century. Beowulf is closer in language to Exodus than it is to any other Old English poem74—Tolkien believed that although Andreas contains lines identical to Beowulf, in Andreas these lines were “dragged in” from their “natural atmosphere” (Exodus 35). If Exodus is old (i.e., significantly older than its tenth-century manuscript) and Beowulf is closest in style to Exodus, then Beowulf must also be old; the scribes of Beowulf, however, had a better understanding of the archaic language that they were copying, and so they made fewer mistakes than did the Exodus scribe. This argument would certainly be a contribution to Beowulf (and Exodus) studies, but as yet it really has not been made with the kind of philological precision, enormous learning, and poetic sensibility that Tolkien could have brought to bear on the problem, and those details make all the difference in whether or not the argument is convincing. Or they would have made all the difference had Tolkien employed them fifty years ago, if he had, in Shippey’s words “fought his corner” in the 1940s and 1950s (“Academic Reputation”). As matters stand, even if all of Tolkien’s work on Beowulf were to be put in order and published (a massive undertaking), it is not clear that the field itself is capable of engaging with his ideas. Some may indeed be technically out of date, but that is not the real problem, which rather lies in the networked skill-set of the profession of medieval studies: there may not be enough working scholars who could follow Tolkien’s argument, much less critique it on its own terms or extend it. Again, this is exceedingly unfortunate, for Tolkien had a very deep understanding of Old English language and literature and his work would greatly enrich the scholarly discussion of these poems. To summarize, then, Tolkien’s editions of Old English texts are interesting and valuable in themselves and even more so for their subtle interpretations of the 133

Michael D. C. Drout texts. Unfortunately, these interpretations are deeply embedded in notes and scattered commentary, thus making them very difficult to follow and not very influential in the field of Anglo-Saxon studies.75 Literary Criticism “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” Scholars (philologists or merely literary critics) could follow Tolkien’s arguments in the next works to be discussed, his two massively influential essays on the Old English poems Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon. Unlike the AB Language texts, which were and are still mostly the province of specialists, or the edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which began as a work for specialists and only became more widely spread as it became a student edition (and which is focused more on language than on interpretation), Tolkien’s works on Beowulf and Maldon directly engaged with the most frequently studied and discussed poems in the canon of Old English literature: Beowulf and Maldon are both syllabus texts, albeit for different reasons, Beowulf as a demonstration of epic, Maldon to illustrate battle poetry and “Northern Courage.” These works of literary criticism are Tolkien’s most famous and influential publications, and they are still read and discussed today, more than fifty years after the most recent appeared. Tolkien’s 1936 British Academy lecture “Beowulf : The Monsters and the Critics” is not just the most important single essay written on Beowulf, but also one of the most influential and widely quoted literary essays of the twentieth century. According to received literary history, it opened the door for modern Beowulf criticism and, like a bolt from Olympus, convinced generations of scholars henceforth to consider Beowulf as a significant piece of literature.76 There is some truth even to that exaggerated formulation, and there is certainly no doubting the subsequent and even the immediate influence of the essay. However, the claims of its novelty are somewhat overstated.77 Many scholars—going back all the way to Grundtvig in the early nineteenth century and continuing through Tolkien’s immediate predecessors and contemporaries—had thought of Beowulf as a great poem before Tolkien came along, so it is important to avoid exaggerating the revolutionary nature of Tolkien’s essay.78 There is in fact some disagreement as to why “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” is so influential. Some scholars have argued that Tolkien was the first New Critic to approach Beowulf, but this interpretation is untenable.79 Although, post-Tolkien, scholars applied New Critical methodology to Beowulf with some success,80 it is highly likely that the New Criticism would have turned its attention to Beowulf even if Tolkien had never written “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” But regardless of which 134

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and its Significance critical approach was adopted by subsequent critics, there is no gainsaying the fact that nearly all of them refer back to Tolkien’s essay as some kind of fons et origo. It may be the case that Tolkien’s rhetorical criticism of the history of the discipline of Beowulf studies (expressed as the allegories of the fairy-godmothers, the Babel of voices and the tower) has been taken as a factual history of the discipline. It is not. It is tendentious and somewhat misleading, which is perhaps exactly as it should be for a polemical essay like “The Monsters and the Critics.” But too many literary scholars have made Tolkien’s essay a convenient breaking point that allows the scholarship before 1936 to be safely discounted. I have a bit of sympathy for this approach, because the thicket of Beowulf scholarship can be nearly impenetrable and the debates of previous eras are not always useful for contemporary scholarship,81 but Tolkien’s potted version of the history of Beowulf (cribbed from John Earle in Beowulf and the Critics and only later put into Tolkien’s own formulation) has had entirely too much influence on the assumed critical history of the poem. But although “Beowulf : The Monsters and the Critics” does not represent a clean break with all that came before, and even though Tolkien was not the first person to consider Beowulf as a work of literary art rather than a quarry for more interesting linguistic or historical or mythological materials, the essay is nevertheless really as influential, powerful, and important as everyone claims. Furthermore, if everyone in a field believes that a single essay utterly re-shaped Beowulf-criticism, then that essay is quite obviously very influential. Influence, however, is not everything. Is there a technical breakthrough, a discovery of new knowledge in “The Monsters and the Critics” as there is in “Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad” ? Some critics seem to believe that there is. R. D. Fulk, for example, says that Tolkien was the first critic to describe successfully the poem’s macrostructure in terms of its microstructure: the Anglo-Saxon line, with its ‘breath-pause’ (as Tolkien called it in “On Translating Beowulf ”; we usually apply the term caesura), the two balanced parts of the line marking two balanced parts of the poem (Beowulf in Denmark as a young man, then Beowulf in Geatland as an Old Man; the contrast of youth and age; the fights with the two Grendel-kin and the dragon).82 But at least some critics who appear to agree with the proposition that “Beowulf : The Monsters and the Critics” is the single most important essay in the history of Beowulf-criticism reject Tolkien’s two-part division of the poem (there are a number of three-part analyses and some newer four-part ones).83 If the most important thing about “Monsters” is Tolkien’s macrostructure/microstructure analysis, yet that analysis is rejected by critics who nonetheless acknowledge Tolkien’s importance, we should perhaps be skeptical of 135

Michael D. C. Drout the importance of this particular technical contribution. Another argument for the significance of Tolkien’s essay is that “Beowulf : The Monsters and the Critics” legitimized study of the monsters. Before Tolkien, the argument goes, scholars were embarrassed by the monsters and wished that the poem were about, say, the hapless warrior Ingeld.84 After Tolkien people were free to study the monsters and see the real significance of the poem.85 It is true that a lot of criticism pre-Tolkien (and a lot post-Tolkien, such as the very influential criticism of John Hill)86 focused on the dynastic feuds in Beowulf rather than monsters, but it is a whitewash of literary history to say that no one talked about the importance of the monsters, or thought they were legitimate, before Tolkien. Although there is indeed a particular kind of blindness about literary criticism that focuses laser-like on the presumed historical identities of various tribes and kings and ignores Grendel, Grendel’s mother and the dragon, such criticism has in fact given us essential data without which we could not understand Beowulf (for example, the Finnsburg episode is mostly incomprehensible without the importation of knowledge gained from other sources). Furthermore, the supposed critical embarrassment at the monsters is itself reconstructed from Tolkien’s essay. Tolkien writes as if R. W. Chambers’s and W. P. Ker’s somewhat embarrassed apologia for Beowulf were the universal opinions of all critics, and they were not.87 It is true that many critics had spent a great deal of effort on individual names and allusions, but these were by and large technical papers attempting to add a brick or two to the edifice of knowledge. Of the critics who actually discussed the poem as a whole, many, if not most, took the monsters very seriously, even if they were taken as symbols. And Tolkien himself wanted the monsters to be read as symbolic of order versus chaos and light versus dark, even at the same time he was saying that they were not merely symbols and that Beowulf was not a simple allegory in which the hero stood for the sun and Grendel the sea, or Beowulf for Christ and the dragon for Satan.88 He thought that the monsters were important as representations, but not as one-to-one allegories. Tolkien insisted that allegories only work when there are one-to-one correspondences between the allegory and the allegorized elements and thus rejected the more expansive allegorical interpretations of Beowulf.89 But for all his talk about how he disliked allegory, Tolkien was a past master at creating it. “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” contains several allegories, the most significant of which is the allegory of the tower: A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually 136

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and its Significance lived, not far from the old house of his fathers. Of the rest he took some and built a tower. But his friends coming perceived at once (without troubling to climb the steps) that these stones had formerly belonged to a more ancient building. So they pushed the tower over, with no little labour, in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions, or to discover whence the man's distant forefathers had obtained their building material. Some suspecting a deposit of coal under the soil began to dig for it, and forgot even the stones. They all said: ‘This tower is most interesting.’ But they also said (after pushing it over): ‘What a muddle it is in!’ And even the man's own descendants, who might have been expected to consider what he had been about, were heard to murmur: ‘He is such an odd fellow! Imagine his using these old stones just to build a nonsensical tower! Why did not he restore the old house? He had no sense of proportion.’ But from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea. (7-8) This allegory, because there is some freedom for critics to interpret it, is the heart of the enduring popularity and influence of “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” Shippey has already explicated it: Beowulf is the tower, the stones are the older stories that Beowulf had been made of, the people who push the tower over are the subsequent critics (Road 43-44).90 The allegory of the tower works so well for two reasons. First, because it is right. Whatever else the author of Beowulf may have accomplished, the poem does give readers the feeling that they have glimpsed a world wider and more important than a mundane existence. The identity of the sea that the builder (and, by implication, the right readers of the poem) can view, is not explicitly identified by Tolkien. Thus the allegory is also successful because every subsequent critic sees him- or herself as the one following in the Beowulf-poet’s footsteps, climbing the tower and seeing the sea. This effect occurs even when the critics could never agree on what the sea is, or even what exactly the tower is—Beowulf as we have it? Beowulf as it might have existed before some meddling Christian monks got their hands on it? A nature myth? An examination of heroism? An always-applicable political allegory? Regardless of his or her preferred interpretation, the post-Tolkienian critic is cast in the kind of romantic role (standing on a tower, gazing out upon the sea) that flatters the critic. No wonder all of them have been quick to identify with the importance of Tolkien’s essay even if they disagree with its specific claims. Those specific claims have in fact been quite controversial (and often appear to be overlooked in the enthusiasm for the essay). Those about the structure are noted above. That Beowulf has a two-part structure is 137

Michael D. C. Drout probably the consensus position among contemporary scholars (arguments about three- and four-part structures are generally interpreted as clever but not convincing), but whether or not that structure replicates the properties of the poetic line, and whether or not such replication would demonstrate virtuosity or cultural predilections91 or mere happenstance is not so much an open question as one that is no longer of interest to critics. Even more controversial is Tolkien’s assertion that Beowulf belongs to the Age of Bede (also discussed above), which treats the gigantic problem of the date of the poem in one sentence. But as Tolkien never published his argument for an early date for the poem, his view has not been cited (since the opinion is given without argumentative support, although Tolkien surely could have supported his contentions with a great deal of data). Much more influential has been Tolkien’s view of the Beowulf-poet as a Christian writer writing about an age that he knew was pre-Christian. This antiquarian or historical-fiction perspective allowed the poet to treat his heroes without irony but at the same time understand that “within time, the monsters would win”; that no eventual victory over chaos, death, and night was possible without the power of the Christian God (worked through the Incarnation and Resurrection). Tolkien’s interpretation of the poem as demonstrating a fusion of the ‘Northern’ view (symbolized by the eventual defeat of the Norse gods at Ragnarok) with the Christian belief in redemption and salvation has been very popular, as has his notion that the poet was a deliberate archaiser. Although this was not Tolkien’s intent, his interpretation of the poet as someone writing about a somewhat distant past has allowed critics who want to date Beowulf to the ninth or tenth centuries to do so while still maintaining a close connection to the Conversion era or to more ancient Germanic legend and myth. But there are no technical breakthroughs in “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” the way there are in “Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad ” or “Chaucer as a Philologist” or even Finn and Hengest. Even Tolkien’s attempts at a more technical contribution in the appendices to the essay (on Grendel’s names and the names for God, and on the famous questionable lines of 175-88), turn out to be not particularly new or noteworthy.92 Such a lack has not diminished the essay’s influence, but it indicates all the more poignantly what Old English studies lost by Tolkien’s failure to write down and publish all that he knew and had deduced about Beowulf. 93 “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorhthelm’s Son” Tolkien’s anomalous “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorhthelm’s Son,” published in Essays and Studies in 1953, has not been as influential 138

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and its Significance outside of medieval studies as has “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” but for some time it was possibly more significant within AngloSaxon studies.94 Although there was universal acclimation for one of Tolkien’s major points in “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”—that Beowulf was worthy of being studied as literature—Tolkien’s specific interpretations were more controversial, so much so that in 1989 Shippey could summarize that “the modern consensus” was that Tolkien was wrong about the date and context of the poem. Tolkien’s interpretation of “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth,” on the other hand, had “been swallowed absolutely whole” by scholars up through 1989 (“Academic Reputation” 21). The Battle of Maldon is one of the most-discussed poems in Old English. Although the manuscript in which it was written, British Library, Cotton Otho A. xii, was destroyed in the 1731 Cotton fire at Ashburnham House, Maldon was transcribed and printed before this destruction. The poem is damaged at both ends, beginning and ending in the middle of sentences. It tells of a historical event, a battle between invading Vikings (who were probably Norwegians) and English defenders at Maldon in Essex on August 10 or 11, 991. The Vikings were located on an island in the estuary of the river Pante (now the Blackwater) that was attached to the shore by a narrow causeway, accessible only at low tide and even then only wide enough for one man to pass at a time. The English, led by Ealdorman Byrhtnoth,95 are able to hold off the Viking attack by defending the causeway. But the Vikings challenge Byrhtnoth to allow them to come across so that the fight may be more evenly joined. Byrhtnoth agrees, the Vikings cross, and the battle is joined. Byrhtnoth soon falls, but his close companions resolve to remain and fight to the death rather than retreat. The English are slaughtered and the Vikings victorious. The Battle of Maldon has traditionally been taken to be the supreme example of “Northern Courage,” the idea, described by the Roman historian Tacitus, that if a lord died in battle his men would fight to their own deaths to avenge him (“Homecoming” 20).96 Maldon is really the only place in Old English literature where we have any firm evidence for this idea, and it has been celebrated by generations of critics, including Tolkien’s friend and collaborator E. V. Gordon, whose edition of the poem was a standard for more than forty years after its publication in 1937. Tolkien’s scholarly work on Maldon is unique in structure, being comprised of two essays (“Beorhtnoth’s Death” and “Ofermod”) surrounding a poetic dialogue written in alliterative verse. In the first essay Tolkien sets forth the facts of the battle of Maldon and its background (drawn from Gordon’s edition) and prepares his readers for his poem, in which an old man, Tídwald, and Torhthelm, a youth, travel to the battlefield 139

Michael D. C. Drout to collect the corpse (minus its head) of Byrhtnoth and bring it back to the monastery at Ely. The poem itself, as Shippey explains, depicts the young man Torhthelm as cowardly, boastful, and murderous, and “in some sense addled by Old English verse” (“Tolkien and ‘The Homecoming’” 9). This point is then developed on a larger scale in the subsequent “Ofermod” essay, in which Tolkien argues that Byrhtnoth allowed the Vikings to cross over the causeway onto the shore out of an excess of heroic pride that was inspired by wishing to “give minstrels matter for mighty songs” (“Homecoming” 20-21). Byrhtnoth had no right to do this, Tolkien argues, because he was a leader and thus responsible for the lives of his men. Tolkien also asserts that Beowulf should not have attacked the dragon for similar reasons: as a king he had a responsibility to those who served him and thus was not free to indulge a desire for glory the way he was able to in his youth. Shippey calls this interpretation “tendentious and personal to a marked degree” (“Boar and Badger” 233), and I agree. But he is also correct in noting that subsequent critics, although they never cite the poetic part of “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth” have nevertheless followed Tolkien in attributing a “largely bogus ‘ironic/Christianizing’ approach to the poem” (“Academic Reputation” 21). As is so often the case with Tolkien, it comes down to words, in this case the word ofermod in line 89: Þa se eorl ongan for his ofermod alyfan landes to fela laþere þeode (89-90). 97 Then the earl began, on account of his ofermod, to allow too much land to the hateful troop. Tolkien translated these lines as “then the earl, in his overmastering pride actually yielded ground to the enemy as he should not have done,” and interpreted them as “severe criticism” of Beorhtnoth on the part of the poet (“Homecoming” 22; Tolkien’s emphasis). Ofer is “over,” “above” and mod is “mind” or “spirit.” The compound could mean anything from “elevated spirits” to “overbearing pride” (the sin of superbia)98 to, maybe, “battle intensity,” and the standard interpretation, as Tolkien notes, was probably W. P. Ker’s “overboldness.” But Tolkien noted that ofermod is used elsewhere only one other time in the Old English corpus, where the compound describes Lucifer, and he concluded that the poet of Maldon was finding a way to criticize the older, presumed ideal of “Northern Courage,” which is celebrated by the words of the old retainer Byrhtwold in lines 312-13 of the poem, where he raises his shield and declaims: Hige sceal þe heardra heorte þe cenre mod sceal þe mare þe ure mægen lytlað. 140

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and its Significance The spirit must be harder, the heart the keener the mind must be more resolute, while our strength lessens.99 These were certainly the most quoted and discussed lines of Maldon before Tolkien published “The Homecoming,” and critics were universal in seeing the poem as a celebration of the Germanic warrior ethos. After “The Homecoming” the poem has been re-interpreted, following Tolkien, as a criticism of that ethos, particularly when it is applied to kings, and the key to the poem has been seen to be lines 89-90. As Shippey notes, Tolkien’s view of the poem was accepted by critics almost universally; most discussions of Maldon up through 1991 took the poem as a criticism of Byrhtnoth and of the heroic ethos—the debate was over how much of a criticism Maldon was. Things have changed somewhat since Shippey’s 1989 and 1991 assessments; Donald Scragg and Simon Keynes, for example, argue that Maldon was composed for a celebration and thus the criticism of Beorhtnoth would not be appropriate in context, and more recent work examines Maldon in a legalistic rather than moralistic framework. So if Tolkien did lead scholars astray, as Shippey argues (“Academic Reputation” 21; “Tolkien and ‘The Homecoming’” 6-7), they have begun to find their way back, and the overall critical reading can be seen as having been significantly enriched by the journey. The greatest long-term benefit of Tolkien’s study of Maldon is that he ended up convincing many readers that the poem was far more subtle than a simple celebration of “Northern Courage” but was instead an examination of some of the complexities—political, moral, legal, and emotional—of battle and loss.100 Tolkien’s “Ofermod” essay is also significant for its engagement with literary interpretation of Beowulf (it is the only place other than “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” where Tolkien published his thoughts on the meaning of the Old English epic). In “Ofermod,” Tolkien criticizes Beowulf for going to fight against the dragon alone, arguing that Beowulf did so from overbearing pride, which became not only his downfall, but the downfall of his people. Tolkien takes the final word of the poem, “lofgeornost” (most eager for glory/praise) as an “ominous note” (“The Homecoming” 22). Tolkien thus reads criticism of the lord into the poem: “the lord may indeed receive credit from the deeds of his knights, but he must not use their loyalty or imperil them simply for that purpose” (“The Homecoming” 23-24)—the king cannot use the lives of his men to bring about glory for himself. This dictum is certainly applicable to Byrhtnoth if (and this is an important if) the ealdorman of Essex really did allow the Vikings to cross the causeway in the attempt to create new matter for glorious songs. But the poet only gives us the ambiguous “ofermod” as an explanation, and thus we do not know if Byrhtnoth had 141

Michael D. C. Drout other reasons: his actions certainly turned out to be a tactical blunder, but whether they were a moral failing as well is not made very clear by the poet.101 Thus the whole interpretation of the poem, as Tolkien noted and as was likewise unnoticed by previous scholars, hangs on the interpretation of “ofermod.” But even if we accept this argument about Byrhtnoth, it is not applicable in the same way to Beowulf. Although Tolkien invokes lines 307683 of Beowulf as indicating that the Geats and Wiglaf regarded an attack on the dragon as rash, the case is not so clear cut. There is no evidence, for example, that the presence of additional retainers at the dragon fight would have led to an earlier death for the beast (Wiglaf, after all, does not overwhelm the dragon with superior strength but rather strikes it opportunistically while sheltering behind Beowulf ’s iron shield). If a dozen men had been fighting, that tactical situation would likely be different and the dragon perhaps not as vulnerable as it was after extending itself and biting Beowulf in the neck.102 The poem does not seem to suggest that leaving the dragon alone once its anger had been aroused was a tenable situation. And Beowulf was an old king, having ruled for fifty winters. He would have died of something else eventually, as indeed Hrothgar notes in lines 1761b-1768. To attribute failure in this case to Beowulf is to engage in a long line of difficult-to-support speculations: that additional eorls would have made the dragon fight a success without Beowulf ’s death and then that Beowulf would have continued to lead the Geats indefinitely, postponing forever the day when their enemies, no longer in fear of Beowulf, would attack them in revenge. Thus it is not so much his engagement with the dragon that dooms his people (in fact, for this brief moment, he saves them) but rather his death, which was inevitable. As Tolkien had noted in “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” “a man can but die upon his death-day” (MC 114). Beowulf ’s real failure is his lack of a successor, but the poet does not discuss this problem head on, only approaching it allusively in the scene where Beowulf bequeaths his armor (but not his kingdom) to Wiglaf. Unlike his approach to Maldon, which was novel, Tolkien’s analysis of Beowulf had some antecedents in the criticism. Nevertheless this interpretation has become very widely spread and influential: I have done battle with it in many classes, and Tolkien’s views here seem very much in keeping with the reigning zeitgeist of the post-war era. But Tolkien’s arguments, though obviously convincing to many, cannot bear the weight loaded upon them: there are too many complexities in Beowulf for this particular problem to be solved so easily. Shippey suggests that in “The Homecoming,” Tolkien may have been in effect giving himself permission to finish The Lord of the Rings or to justify it after it was finished.103 On the one hand Tolkien was working 142

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and its Significance to create a new heroic style and on the other (in “The Homecoming”) to tear down the old one. That he accomplished this second goal by attributing his interpretation of the pitfalls of the heroism of leaders and kings to the authors of Maldon and Beowulf rather than to the interpreters of the poems (he himself and, subsequently, many critics) illustrates some of the pitfalls of the unfairly maligned author-intent model of interpretation. Like Shippey, I think it is highly unlikely that the author of Maldon intended to criticize Byrhtnoth or call into question elements of “Northern Courage.” The author-intent approach to interpretation would thus force us to reject Tolkien’s argument. But I think that the actions depicted in the poem are complex and significant enough that they can be interpreted Tolkien’s way (even against the grain of what the author intended). I feel certain that this approach would be rejected by Tolkien, who wanted to know what the original author wanted the poem to mean, but it is the only way, I think, to salvage his argument. The great significance of “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth,” then, is not that it was immensely successful in promoting Tolkien’s view of the poem for nearly forty years (although that is certainly important). Rather, “The Homecoming” caused scholars to pay much more attention to the subtleties of the poem and the complexities of the cultures in which “Northern Courage” developed. Maldon and Beowulf arose from the culture of “a people challenged by war, hunger, and internecine rivalries of nearly unimaginable complexity, not to mention sickness, old age, treachery, and long winter nights” (Frantzen “Hrothgar” 33). Tolkien’s work has led scholars to take the details of that culture, its tensions and contradictions, much more seriously. That is enormously significant. “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”: 1953 W. P. Ker Lecture I would use these same words to describe the final major piece of Tolkien’s published literary criticism, his W. P. Ker Lecture on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which was published in 1983 in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, edited by Christopher Tolkien. Tolkien had been working on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for over thirty years when he gave this lecture but, apart from the much-simplified arguments given in the BBC radio talk and published for a popular rather than a scholarly audience in “A Fourteenth-Century Romance,” his understanding of the poem was not put into an interpretive argument until this lecture. Unfortunately, the Ker lecture has been almost entirely without influence; I can find no evidence of its arguments being taken up by Gawain scholars. Derek Brewer’s 1997 A Companion to the Gawain Poet, for example, makes no mention of the Ker lecture even though Brewer, as quoted above, remembers Tolkien’s lectures on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

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Michael D. C. Drout And although David Aers’s essay is directly focused on the problems of Gawain’s confession, he never cites Tolkien, even though Tolkien’s interpretation of this key scene is directly relevant to Aers’s argument. This lack of attention is deeply to be regretted, as the lecture is a provocative reinterpretation of critical commonplaces and, I think, more successful in argument than “The Homecoming” in accomplishing this reinterpretation. Tolkien states that “the temptations of Sir Gawain, his behavior under them, and criticism of his code, were for our author his story, to which all else was subservient” (MC 83). As Shippey notes, Tolkien is asserting that Gawain’s reaction to the temptations is more important than many of the most dramatic and mythically-suggestive scenes in the poem: the appearance of the fearsome Green Knight with axe and holly branch at Arthur’s court, his beheading by Sir Gawain, his instant resurrection, the long journey of the knight into the wilderness . . . and the ‘trial-and-repayment’ scene in the midwinter snow at the eerie Green Chapel. (“Gawain-poet” 216-17) This is, to say the least, an unconventional interpretation. Yet I think Tolkien is correct in putting his finger exactly on what separates Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from conventional fourteenth-century (and thirteenth-century and fifteenth-century, for that matter) Middle English romances. The author of the poem had a real concern to examine “the relation of all these rules of behavior, these games and courtesies, to sin, morals and the saving of souls, to what the author would have held to be universal values” (MC 89; Tolkien’s emphasis). Thus the Gawain-poet (who, remember, also wrote the much more overtly pious Pearl, Patience and Cleanness in the same manuscript), contrasts Gawain’s test of “lewté” (loyalty or keeping faith) in the matter of the gift-exchange game and the green girdle with the much more serious matter of Gawain’s temptation to adultery. This temptation, Tolkien argues, is very real (he quotes the lines emphasizing the knight’s strong attraction to the lady) and very dangerous. In the end, the poet is showing that there are two sets of rules and that one, which deals with immortal souls and moral problems, is more significant than the other.104 Tolkien’s Ker lecture is important because the critical mainstream mostly avoids these issues, focusing on other aspects of the poem105 or, if contemporary scholars consider the confession scene, they take it, as does Aers, as an example of the aristocracy’s usurpation of the sacrament of confession and penance from the Church.106 This critical move allows scholars to talk about estates and classes and power (topics which have been, for the past two decades, very popular), but it diverts attention 144

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and its Significance from what seems to be the main matter of the poem itself, the reaction of a knight to ethical conflicts and temptations. Tolkien’s view is almost directly opposed107 to that of the critical mainstream (and is thus perhaps all the more likely to be correct). But it is unlikely, absent some kind of major intervention by a new generation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight scholars, that the criticism will return to Tolkien’s focus. Thus his Ker lecture is likely to remain, regrettably, a rather significant achievement with very little influence. Essays, Reviews and ‘Meta-Scholarship’ We now move from those works that were, or should be, profoundly influential to the remaining, ephemeral pieces of Tolkien’s scholarship, his brief essays and notes, his reviews and scholarship on scholarship. In a few of these works, Tolkien did try to “fight his corner” (to use Shippey’s words; “Academic Reputation” 21) for philology and the integrated linguistic and literary-critical approach to literature. This argument is most famously (and, in concrete matters of syllabus and course of study, most successfully) made in “The Oxford English School,” published in The Oxford Magazine in May of 1930, in which Tolkien advocates the creation of another course of study at Oxford that would emphasize Scandinavian languages and literature as well as philological study. Tolkien also defends philology thus: “the student who follows” the poems of the Northern tongues “is expected not only to know the results of this [philological] work, but to understand the methods, even to share in the labour. Bereft of an ancient tradition, he has the advantage of building a new” (780). His proposed course of study provides a “fairly solid block of balanced literary and linguistic” interest and would train new scholars in the essentials of the field. Unfortunately (readers will by this time note a recurring theme), Tolkien’s argument, as tangled up with technical Oxford syllabus terms as it is, could not make much of an impact outside of Oxford.108 Tolkien also promoted philology in his three contributions to The Year’s Work in English Studies, where he summarized the year’s scholarship in “Philology: General Works” for 1923, 1924 and 1925.109 Shippey has noted how Tolkien enthusiastically “hailed” an etymology for the town Fawler that linked that place-name back to a Roman tessellated pavement (Road 26). Tolkien saw the work of philology as reconstructing a history of England that had not been formally recorded (or if it had, had been lost) but was still able to be discovered in names and language relationships. This same sort of continuity of the past with the present (particularly the rural, northern and western present in England) is celebrated in his Foreword to Walter E. Haigh’s A New Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District, where Tolkien discusses the connections between present-day dialect and the writing of the Gawain-poet. “Homely 145

Michael D. C. Drout survivals in dialect are often of ancient lineage, and not the chance mutilations of literary English by the unlettered,” Tolkien asserts; it is the philologist who can recognize the ancientry of the dialect forms, explain their specific characteristics, and recover some of the lost language.110 Tolkien’s 1940 Introduction to C. L. Wrenn’s revisions of John R. Clark Hall’s translation of Beowulf (republished as “On Translating Beowulf”) also makes a case for ancient or archaic forms as having a particular literary value (and although Tolkien does not make this argument explicitly, one could add that this value is only to be recognized through the contributions of philology). Tolkien criticizes Clark Hall’s original translation as giving an impression of “false modernity” and he defends “archaic diction” when it is used properly, to convey the “high” style that he saw in Beowulf (and which no one doubts). The essay is useful in giving a glimpse of Tolkien’s views on translation, but it is more significant for its explanation of Old English verse. It remains the clearest and most useful introduction to Old English meter that has ever been written, the more so because Tolkien illustrated it with Modern English verse written in the various Old English metrical types. It is my experience that, upon reading Tolkien’s Modern English examples, students immediately grasp at least some of the metrical rules behind Old English. More significantly, “On Translating Beowulf ” shows that Tolkien could make himself clear about complex, technical matters (discussions of meter are notoriously difficult in Old English pedagogy) when he felt the need—the Clark Hall translation was aimed at students rather than at other philologists. One cannot blame Tolkien entirely for his lack of clarity in other matters; the conventions of scholars at the time did not encourage simple and clear explanations, and for this we are all the poorer. But always in reading or in teaching from “On Translating Beowulf ” I am struck by how much more influential Tolkien would have been had he been forced—as most medievalists are today—to consider the needs of a wider audience. It is not as if Tolkien kept all of his professional writing on the elevated plane of pure philology, either. His and Simonne d’Ardenne’s “MS. Bodley 34: A re-collation of a collation” is an abrasive bit of academic territory-marking intended to preserve his and d’Ardenne’s scholarly ownership of the Katherine Group texts in MS. Bodley 34. Tolkien and d’Ardenne attack the edition of these texts by R. Furuskog, pointing out errors (some significant, some more trivial) and insinuating all along that their edition will be better. There is, however, some solid criticism in this article, however nastily it was done. Furuskog was in essence creating a printed facsimile in which he transcribed every questionable or mal-formed letter and slip of the pen. Tolkien and d’Ardenne argue that an editor should either produce a full edition or arrange to have a facsimile printed: splitting the difference, as it were, was not to them a useful 146

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and its Significance endeavor. There is something to be said for this argument, particularly in light of calls in the 1980s and 1990s for medievalists to return to the manuscripts that were taken up perhaps with too much enthusiasm for the avoidance of emendation and philological judgment. However, as anyone who has examined the EETS facsimile of Bodley 34 can attest, an accurate transcript of that very difficult manuscript is indeed of some use, particularly for those scholars who do not have the Bodleian Library just outside their office doors. Tolkien and d’Ardenne’s critique of Furuskog demonstrates again the confidence Tolkien had in his philology—a confidence sadly lacking in many of today’s practitioners. Tolkien’s unsigned review of F. J. Furnivall’s edition of Holy Maidenhood likewise makes the case for the editorial practice of confident philology rather than simple transcription. Tolkien asserts that Furnivall would not have wanted the book (a revision of Oswald Cockayne’s 1872 edition) to go to press in the state in which it was published. Tolkien notes incorrect etymologies and inconsistent use of Old English spellings (some are normalized to Late West Saxon, some to Early West Saxon) and argues that a great scholar like Furnivall would not appreciate an imperfect book published as a tribute to him. He also asserts the point that he would make in much greater detail in “Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad ” and which is consistent in his Foreword to the Huddersfield glossary: that the texts are written in a language that was “in closest touch with the living colloquial speech.” Here we see that Tolkien consistently linked good philological practice (which he was certain that he could identify) with the ability to reconnect with the colloquial speech, the real lives and histories, of the English tradition. Tolkien was also severely critical in his signed review of Volume II, Part 2 of E. K. Chambers’ English Literature at the Close of the Middle Ages, taking Chambers to task for failing to find a balance between the marshalling of facts and the interpretation of literature. This review is also interesting for Tolkien’s seeming rejection of biographical criticism. Chambers suggests that there is a “discrepancy” between the nobility of sentiment in Le Morte d’Arthur and the life of a certain Thomas Malory, whom Tolkien describes as a “ruffian of Monk’s Kirby.” Tolkien does not believe that this particular Malory is the author of the Arthurian work and chastises Chambers for recording “the findings of such mole-work” that brought to light this possible identity for Malory. It is “the beauty and virtue of the book, which alone make the name of Malory interesting, were he recreant or true.”111 From these pieces we see that, when he wanted to, Tolkien was able to argue convincingly for the value of both philology and literary sensibility, making a rhetorically compelling case for the value of philology

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Michael D. C. Drout and the importance of its correct application. He would not have been at home in today’s medieval studies, in which biographical criticism and its offshoots in the analysis of class and gender are so ascendant, and had his ideas about a medieval literature been more widely disseminated beyond his work on Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon, medieval literary studies might be significantly different than it is today. Conclusions Shippey’s 1989 verdict on Tolkien’s scholarship still largely stands: “Primary citations: low. Secondary citations: amazingly high. Was that caused by his fictional success? No. It was purely on academic merit. . . . Tolkien certainly had a lot of influence” (“Academic Reputation” 22). But there is a distinction to be made between influence and significance: one can be widely known, respected, even famous, but, if wrong, not significant. Likewise, it is possible to make significant contributions to scholarship that are not widely recognized. Technical breakthroughs that do not seem important to outsiders can form foundations upon which other work is built and can thus be very significant. My first criterion for significance is whether or not the claim made in the scholarship is factually correct (as best we can determine). But I also judge the scholarship based on whether or not it aided a continuing and productive research program, if other scholars were able to use ideas or insights in Tolkien’s scholarship in order to develop additional ideas or insights. Based on all of the individual reviews above, we can conclude without controversy that Tolkien did very good work, but much of it, like the entire discipline of philology is, as Shippey notes, “now all but dead—not defeated in argument, but bypassed and allowed to wither on the vine.” And in those cases in which Tolkien’s work is influential, his pieces “tend to be looked up to, rather than answered” (“Academic Reputation” 22). I mostly agree with this assessment, though I would modify the judgment slightly in light of subsequent scholarly developments. Among Tolkien’s major pieces, his “Ofermod” essay is still taken very seriously, but unfortunately not in the context of the rest of the article. “Beowulf : The Monsters and the Critics” is a touchstone; its deeper arguments are rarely engaged. “Chaucer as a Philologist” is mostly ignored. Tolkien’s word studies have not been incorporated into dictionaries and glossaries. The posthumously published works have not been read by enough scholars to have made an impact. But “Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad ” is the foundation of a contemporary scholarly program, to which Simonne d’Ardenne’s edition of Þe Liflade ant te Passiun of Seinte Iuliene is a major contribution. I would also slightly disagree with Shippey about the ways in which Tolkien might be seen as being correct or, to use my own terms, significant, 148

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and its Significance though I am afraid that this disagreement might put me on one side of a divide with Shippey and Tolkien together occupying the other. Absolute factual accuracy must be a major part of significance. If Tolkien thought that the poet of Maldon was condemning Byrhtnoth, and the poet was not (as both Shippey and I think), then Tolkien is wrong. But I am less concerned with attempting to figure out what an individual (if unnamed) author thought than what the possible effects of his poem were on various audiences. There is a potential problem of solipsism inherent in this interpretive paradigm: one can end up saying “ofermod means X to me” (and what other scholar would care?), but before reaching this point there is some space on the continuum between authorial intention and original (or nearly original) audience reception that should rightly interest us. I think Tolkien’s argument can work in this way: some readers or hearers of the poem, even in the Anglo-Saxon period, were likely to take the word “ofermod” as a criticism (the word is, after all, applied to Satan elsewhere in the Old English corpus). Tolkien’s argument served to point out to critics that “ofermod” is actually the major interpretive crux of the poem, and thus his article has done a major service: it may have sent criticism down one garden path, but it also extricated criticism from the rut that was the celebration of “Northern Courage.” Likewise I am at least somewhat convinced by Simon Horobin’s criticism of Tolkien’s “Chaucer as a Philologist” (that Tolkien’s text manufactures too many “northernisms”). Yet I am also convinced that Tolkien was correct in the broad outline of his argument, that Chaucer was a more acute observer of Northern dialects than had previously been recognized (however, Tolkien’s work on Chaucer did not lead to a subsequent research program). Although Tolkien may not have been correct about the exact scribal predilections of the AB Language texts, his technical contribution is undoubtedly significant: there is no denying the consistency of the variants in spelling of the words that derive from the second Old English weak conjugation. It is tempting to continue in this vein, but in the end I would simply be rehearsing the arguments given above in relation to each work. As a general summation, we can conclude that Tolkien was almost always right when he discussed individual words, and he was more right than wrong (but sometimes he over-generalized or over-applied his interpretation) when he discussed dialects. Assessing purely literary criticism is even more difficult, but we can conclude that Tolkien’s approaches to both Beowulf and Maldon led to significant new developments in the criticism of those poems even if Tolkien’s specific interpretations were not themselves universally accepted. Scholars have built entire research programs atop Tolkien’s insights into Beowulf, Maldon, and the AB Language Texts. We understand more about medieval literature than we did before he published those works. 149

Michael D. C. Drout I have deliberately avoided bringing Middle-earth into the discussions above for several reasons. First, because that ground has already been very well trodden, most significantly in Shippey’s The Road to Middleearth, which makes the strongest possible argument for recognizing the genesis of Middle-earth in Tolkien’s medieval scholarship and for reading his literature in light of his scholarship. That point needs no additional belaboring. But there is another aspect of the connection between Middle-earth and medieval scholarship that should be emphasized. There has certainly been much prejudice against Tolkien in academia for the past fifty years because of The Lord of the Rings. But one scholarly generation comes and another passes away, and any lingering prejudice about Tolkien’s fantasy has probably by now been overwhelmed by the many younger scholars (myself among them) who have entered medieval studies exactly because they first encountered Old English through the Rohirrim or manuscript studies via the Book of Mazarbul. Most working, teaching scholars in the profession outside the rarified heights of a few ancient and wealthy universities recognize that the survival of medieval studies will have to rely very much on the enthusiasm generated by works of fantasy literature, foremost among them The Lord of the Rings. In the past, medievalists had for many years been able to rely upon having captive audiences for their teaching and scholarship. Those days are gone. The utter separation of literary study from language study (and the complete victory of “lit.” over “lang.” in the battle) means that medievalists and philologists must recruit new students, and nothing is as successful a recruiting tool as The Lord of the Rings. Whether or not this phenomenon will bring about new consideration of Tolkien’s scholarship and the development of additional research programs is unclear. Tolkien’s style can be his own worst enemy: his enormous rhetorical gifts could, in a piece like “Beowulf : The Monsters and the Critics,” bring about near-universal assent for his larger points and move the criticism into new and productive directions, but his many points of detail end up being swept away by the flow of the argument. Even worse, the exceedingly technical, uncompromising style of his philological writing ensures that even very important insights (such as those in Finn and Hengest or the Exodus edition) will remain inaccessible to all but the very most traditionally trained philologists. There are fewer of these with each passing year. It is not a very risky extrapolation to guess that in another two decades Tolkien will still be invoked and read, but that only his broadest literary-critical statements will be understood (and without their philological foundation, they are likely to be misunderstood), for philology, if it is to be internalized the way it was in Tolkien, needs to be learned young. Not only is “The lyf so short, the craft so longe to lerne / Th’assay so hard, so sharp the conquerynge,” but also it is simply the 150

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and its Significance case that the kind of mental work necessary for effective philology—like that for language acquisition—is much more easily accomplished with a young brain. Yet opportunities for philological training before advanced graduate study are few indeed in the English-speaking world. As the example of “Chaucer as a Philologist” shows, Tolkien’s work was not as influential—and significant—as it could have and should have been. Part of the blame lies in the continuing atrophy of philological skills in English departments. Both English and Linguistics were severely damaged by the separation of the two disciplines, and this divide has led to the loss of literary sensibility in Linguistics departments and the loss of knowledge about language in English departments. This separation of lit. and lang. (to use Tolkien’s terms) has only gotten worse since the Valedictory Address in which he rued the apartheid between the two disciplines. He himself had the ability to integrate lit. and lang. almost as has no other philologist, previous or subsequent. He could bring to bear a literary sensibility that was informed by philological knowledge and at the same time use the detail and rigor of philology to understand literary works. This brings us to what could be the greatest (potential) significance of Tolkien’s medieval scholarship: his influence as a model. If new generations recognize Tolkien’s unique blending of literary and philological study as a way by which difficult and interesting problems might be approached, if new generations of scholars see in this balance an opportunity to develop Tolkien’s sort of literary and linguistic scholarship, and if they train themselves to take this approach, the fruits of their labor could be very great. Bereft of an ancient tradition, they would have the advantage of building a new. Philology unlocks hidden information about human continuity, and it can lead (as it did for Tolkien) to a deep emotional engagement with literary texts of previous eras. It should not be denigrated as a dry and tedious science, nor should it avoid the major questions of interpretation or emotion or politics or philosophy until some never-to-come day in which all the ducks are in a row, all the encyclopedias and dictionaries completed and all the manuscripts catalogued. If instead we follow Tolkien’s path, embracing both language and literature, using this conjoined approach to give new life to old texts and old questions, then indeed the significance of Tolkien’s medieval scholarship will be enormous. For it is said, though the fruit of the Tree comes seldom to ripeness, yet the life within may then lie sleeping through many long years, and none can foretell the time in which it will awake (RK, VI, v, 250).

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Michael D. C. Drout NOTES An antecedent of this paper was first presented at the September 2005 Seminar, “C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and the Inklings,” held at Hillsdale College’s Center for Constructive Alternatives. I would like to express my gratitude to Timothy Caspar, Brad Birzer, and Andrew Cuneo for hospitality and stimulating discussion. My thanks to Rebecca Epstein, Marilyn Todesco, Stephen J. Harris, Douglas A. Anderson, Verlyn Flieger, Tom Shippey, Kathryn Paar, Lauren Provost, and Jason Rea for generous assistance. 1

This collation is based upon Wayne Hammond’s Bibliography (passim) and Humphrey Carpenter’s Biography (268-75).

2

When I write “credited to Tolkien,” I do not mean that the other scholars mentioned do not deserve credit for their published work. Instead, I wish to raise the question of what aspects of these works, from the point of view of an analysis of Tolkien, should be understood as representative of his ideas.

3

In Letter #98, circa 18 March 1945 to Stanley Unwin, Tolkien notes that “my lost friend Mlle. Simonne d’Ardenne, . . . has suddenly reappeared, having miraculously survived the German occupation, and the Rundstedt offensive (which rolled over her) waving the MSS. of a large work we began together and promised to the Early English Text Soc. Which has not forgotten it” (Letters 113-14).

4

The offprint may be found along with the carbon typescript of “Beowulf : The Monsters and the Critics” in MS Oxford, Bodleian Library, Tolkien A 26 / A. Note that neither Zettersten nor Mitchell is listed by J. S. Ryan, as Tolkien did not direct their theses. Nevertheless, Tolkien’s influence on the study of Anglo-Saxon literature is probably just as strong via Mitchell, whose thesis he did not direct, as it is through Alan Bliss, whose thesis he did (Ryan 57-58).

5

Some of this material is referred to and quoted (in a disappointingly disjointed fashion) in Lee and Solopova.

6

An additional category might be created for works significantly influenced by Tolkien but not influenced enough for him to be given credit for them (these would include d’Ardenne’s Seinte Katerine and “Two Words in Ancrene Wisse and the Katherine Group” as well as Mary B. Salu’s edition of The Ancrene Riwle and Ida Gordon’s editions of Pearl and The Seafarer), but we will attend to these more debatable materials in passing and as they are relevant to specific arguments.

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J.R.R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and its Significance Likewise, Tolkien’s influence upon his students and through nonacademic channels (such as radio broadcasts) will be treated in passing. 7

I will not be discussing “On Fairy-Stories” or the somewhat similar “English and Welsh”; these essays are certainly not medieval scholarship, and they are perhaps not even scholarship in the manner of the other pieces discussed here. I therefore bracket these two essays in my appendix and do not discuss them in detail in the text. I also exclude “A Secret Vice” and Tolkien’s “Valedictory Address,” but these last two works are not usually, as far as I know, considered to be scholarly. They are, tellingly, more similar to “On Fairy-Stories” and “English and Welsh” than any of Tolkien’s undoubted scholarly works.

8

I could thus fit them into category four (literary criticism) or, in the case of “Chaucer as a Philologist,” into category three (editions).

9

Unfortunately, Gilliver, Marshall, and Weiner, in their The Ring of Words, do not add very much to Gilliver’s Centenary Conference essay.

10 Tolkien’s delay in producing the glossary led to the publication of Sisam’s volume without it, in 1921. The glossary was then published on its own in 1922. This stand-alone volume continued to be published even after the combined Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose and A Middle English Vocabulary were published as one volume in 1922 (Hammond 281-82). 11 See Hostetter. 12 For a discussion of the power of glossaries and dictionaries to shape interpretation, see Frantzen, Desire for Origins (172-73). 13 Only one of the words, the phrase, “long home,” appears in A Middle English Vocabulary. 14 This may be an obvious point, but I belabor it because even among those scholars today who do some philological discussion, the emphasis is almost always placed on etymology rather than phonology, which, sadly, has become mostly the special province of linguists. 15 See Lobdell. 16 Tolkien’s interpretation is not taken up by the Middle English Dictionary, which still glosses “eaueres” as “boars.” 17 See McFadden. 153

Michael D. C. Drout 18 Standard practice in the early Anglo-Saxon period was to render important foreign words by descriptive translation of their individual elements; for example, “Evangelist,” becomes “godspellere” (teller of good stories), Trinity becomes “þrynnes” (three-ness), patriarch becomes “ealdfæder” (old father) or “heahfæder” (high father), baptize becomes “dyppan” (to dip) or “fulwihan” (to consecrate completely). Later, as Latinity become more widespread in England, the Latin terms replaced the earlier Old English translations. At no point was the process Tolkien describes—the translation of a word for Ethiopians or Ethiopia with a dedicated native word—standard practice. See Jesperson (37-41). 19 MS. London, British Library, Cotton Vespasian A. i. 20 Ham is one of the sons of Noah, from whom the dark-skinned races of the world were supposed to have been descended. 21 See Kleinman. 22 See Swain. 23 See Anger. 24 An additional tiny glimpse of Tolkien’s knowledge of Celtic mythology and languages can be found in a footnote to R. G. Collingwood’s and J.N.L. Myers’s Roman Britain and the English Settlements, where the authors note that Sulis, the goddess of the hot springs at Bath, “is traditionally called Sul; but Professor Tolkien points out to me that the Celtic nominative can only be Sulis, and our authority for believing that even the Romans made a nominative Sul on the analogy of their own word sol—perhaps meaning the same—is not good. The Celtic sulis may mean ‘the eye’, and this again may mean the sun” (264 n.1). 25 Jakob Grimm, for instance, was never able to develop a system for describing vowel changes in the Germanic languages the way that he was able to explain consonant shifts. 26 There was no complete concordance to Anglo-Saxon available to Tolkien in 1932, nor was there a Dictionary of Old English corpus or a complete Middle English Dictionary. 27 Tolkien’s application for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship lists a forthcoming publication as “The Second Weak Conjugation in the Ancrene Riwle and the Katherine Group” (Hammond 291).

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J.R.R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and its Significance 28 I would speculate that Tolkien was such an able dialectologist because he heard the dialect forms of Middle and Old English texts when reading them. I myself mostly see dialect forms (such as the spelling of diphthongs) and so am reduced to recognizing patterns with only one sense. For some possible support for this theory, see Tolkien’s letter to W. H. Auden in1955: “I am a West-midlander by blood (and took to early west-midland Middle English as a known tongue as soon as I set eyes on it)” (Letters 213). 29 Joseph Hall in his Early Middle English used the A and B nomenclature, which Tolkien adopted. Although Tolkien’s original usage was “Language (AB),” scholars now use “AB Language” (Dance 60 n.8). 30 In class II weak verbs the infinitive ends in -ian rather than the more common -an; “locian” is a class II while “deman” is a class I. 31 MS Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 34. Tolkien thought that the life of St. Juliana in Bodley 34 was lineally descended from Cynewulf, the Anglo-Saxon poet whose Juliana is contained in the Exeter Book (B&C 129 n. 2). 32 It is not as enormous as Eduard Sievers’s demonstration that the poem Genesis B had an Old Saxon source (later proven by the discovery of a fragment of an Old Saxon manuscript in the Vatican library), but a significant triumph all the same. 33 This localization was proposed by E. J. Dobson in 1976, who bases this identification on the characteristics of the dialect as well as on a putative pun on the word “meþful” (‘moderate’; which would be “bria” in Latin) and an anagram of “linthehum” (‘of Lingen’); the pun and anagram (if they exist) suggest the secular canon Brian of Lingen of Wigmore as the author (349-53). This interpretation has since been doubted, and the current view puts the AB language in North Herefordshire or the southern tip of Shropshire (Smith 11 n.7). 34 See Zettersten “AB Language Lives” (13-34). 35 Shippey (“Academic Reputation” 21-22) gives a good short description of the problem: No other Middle English scribes were as perfect as Tolkien’s interpretation of the two men who inscribed A and B (though in “‘Iþþlen’ in Sawles Warde” he calls the B-scribe a “blunderer”), so dialect studies was crippled by an understanding that nearly all other Middle English texts (which were not as consistent as the AB texts) could not provide compelling evidence for dialects. More 155

Michael D. C. Drout recent acceptance of scribal “normalization”—the idea that scribes somewhat consistently adapted texts into their own dialects, regardless of the dialect of the source—has revitalized Middle English dialect studies: we now look to the dialect of the scribe rather than that of the putative source. 36 See Horobin (“Chaucer as”). 37 Chaucer says that the two clerks come from the town of “Strother.” Tolkien notes several Strothers in England and links the name to a Middle English dialect word, strother, meaning “marsh,” suggesting that “the existence of this native word should be added to the recent note by Onions and Gordon on strothe in Pearl 115 (Med. Ævum, i, 2, p. 128); it probably disturbed the development of the imported Norse storþ, similar in meaning, but only remotely related etymologically, if at all” (56-57). Tolkien’s suggestion is taken up in the Gordon edition of Pearl, indicating that, as Shippey speculated (“Gawain-poet” 218), Tolkien deserves the credit for it. 38 I call the title “misleading” because the article discusses Tolkien very little; it rather invokes him without investigating a single particular of his argument. 39 For examples see Pasternack (who seems to equate manuscript layout with authorial intent) and Irvine. I am not suggesting that focus on manuscripts cannot bear fruit (see, for example, O’Brien-O’Keeffe) but that the fetishization of manuscript reading and the neglect of philology-based emendations can lead to less-than-ideal results. 40 Dance here cites Benskin and Laing (87-97) and, intriguingly, d’Ardenne, whom he claims “already doubted Tolkien’s certainty in the case of AB.” I say “intriguingly” because it is widely held that d’Ardenne’s edition of St Juliana was a joint work between her and Tolkien (n.b., I believe Dance’s citation for d’Ardenne, xxxiv-xxxiv, is a misprint and should in fact be xxxiv-xxxv). See below for further discussion of d’Ardenne. 41 “Historicization,” “reconfiguration,” “deconstruction,” “the contours of the field,” “methodologies and paradigms” are merely the first few encountered. 42 Shippey’s The Road to Middle-earth is but one example. The work of Michael Lapidge—as technical as it is—and Andy Orchard is likewise clearly presented and comprehensible to non-specialists. 43 See Seaman. 156

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and its Significance 44 Shippey notes that Davis’s edition was the standard in 1993, but this monopoly was then starting to crumble. I was in graduate school at the time, and we used the Andrew and Waldron edition, Poems of the Pearl Manuscript. My personal copy of the Tolkien edition does demonstrate his influence: it was apparently used at Yale University in 1953 in a class taught by the great medievalist E. Talbot Donaldson. A few penciled glosses in the early pages of the edition suggest that Donaldson may have disagreed with a few minor points in Tolkien’s glossary. 45 Many of these were even adopted by Israel Gollancz in his last edition, posthumously published in 1940 (Tolkien and Gordon’s edition had superseded Gollancz’s 1912 edition of Sir Gawain). 46 Frantzen (Desire 172-73). 47 See Kisor. 48 Word of mouth suggests that most medievalists prefer the Boroff to the Tolkien translation, but use the Tolkien volume because it also includes the Pearl translation, which remains the best Modern English version of this poem. See below. 49 Not that graduate students should be using a translation, archaic or not. 50 For Tolkien’s considerable lecturing on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight at Oxford, see Ryan (52). 51 Tolkien gave his W. P. Ker lecture at St Andrews in 1953, but it was not published until 1983. See below for more discussion. 52 As early as 1923 Tolkien began work, with George S. Gordon, on a book of selections from Chaucer (focused on works exclusive of the Canterbury Tales). This “Clarendon Chaucer” was delayed by one problem after another and, after more than fifteen years, eventually abandoned. The text has not been published. Scull and Hammond provide a detailed discussion (II 153-56). 53 See Zettersten (“Ancrene Wisse”). 54 Bella Millett’s two-volume edition of Corpus 402 should appear in late 2006 and may eventually replace Tolkien’s edition. 55 Tolkien in fact hand-lettered all of the initial capitals in the manuscript that he finally delivered (Hammond 309).

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Michael D. C. Drout 56 These complexities are trivial compared to the difficulty of simply reading and transcribing Bodley 34 (c.f. the Early English Text Society’s facsimile edition of this manuscript). 57 This admission came in a letter to Humphrey Carpenter. My thanks to Douglas A. Anderson for this information. 58 Zettersten, entry for “AB Language” in The J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia. 59 That idea that Tolkien brooked no disagreement and never changed his mind (symbolized by the famous quote by C. S. Lewis, “No one ever influenced Tolkien—you might as well try to influence a bandersnatch” [Carpenter 201]) seems to be less than completely true. Carpenter notes that “Tolkien would in later years entertain his audience at lectures by making disparaging references to some point of interpretation in the edition, as if he himself had nothing to do with it: ‘Tolkien and Gordon were quite wrong, quite wrong, when they said that! Can’t imagine what they were thinking of !’” (Carpenter 105). 60 Chambers is cited by d’Ardenne (xxv). 61 See Shippey, “Gawain-poet” (214-15). 62 See, for example, Christine Franzen’s The Tremulous Hand of Worcester. Dance implies that it would be wrong to “overplay the role of AB language as a latter-day native hero striving, like some linguistic Hereward the Wake, to uphold the pre-Conquest virtues of honestto-goodness English culture” (60). 63 D’Ardenne’s edition of Seinte Katerine includes a glossary that is likewise as fulsome. 64 See Phelpstead (“Sir Gawain”). 65 See Tubbs. 66 Tolkien’s edition was nearly complete but, according to Carpenter, “never finished to his satisfaction” (139). He made some revisions to his notes in the 1950s in preparation for the edition. 67 The Lucas edition was published before Turville-Petre’s edition of Tolkien’s text, but it nevertheless adopts many of the emendations that Tolkien proposed because Lucas had access to Tolkien’s notes. He acknowledges these and states that Tolkien’s lectures inspired many of his textual decisions; however, he does not adopt some of 158

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and its Significance the more creative readings that Tolkien proposed. See Shippey (“A Look at Exodus” 73). 68 See Honegger. 69 The text was first printed in 1705; the manuscript leaf that it was taken from has been lost. 70 I have gone into such detail here because I believe that Tolkien’s reconstruction has remained exceptionally obscure to Tolkienists. 71 He notes the commentary on lines 8-9 of the Fragment and lines 1084, 1087, 1095ff, 1102, 1124 and 1140ff (6). I would like to suggest, although with some hesitation, that Bliss might have helped both Tolkien’s reputation and the study of Beowulf a great deal more if he could have brought himself to explain these arguments and gather them into one place in his edition. 72 See the essays in the Colin Chase collection, Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript. For the strongest case for the late date, see Kiernan. 73 I base this conclusion about contemporary scholarly consensus on the admittedly flimsy grounds of my general impression of the balance of papers at conferences, responses to those papers, and word of mouth among graduate students and new assistant professors. 74 Having read the entire Old English poetic corpus aloud, working through the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, I have no doubt that Beowulf and Exodus are most alike in language and style. I admit that this approach is unscientific and subjective. 75 I have not here discussed Ida Gordon’s edition of The Seafarer. It is exceedingly difficult to find specific interpretations that should be attributed to Tolkien, and as I tried to do so I found myself attributing all of what seemed to me to be the most insightful emendations and suggestions to him. This is not only churlish in the extreme, and lacking in respect to E. V. and Ida Gordon, but almost certainly wrong: both Gordons were excellent philologists and would have produced a good edition whether or not they ever worked with Tolkien. 76 For a critical history and discussion, see my introduction to Beowulf and the Critics, my “How the Monsters Became Important,” and also “The Rhetorical Evolution of ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.’” 77 See Shippey and Haarder.

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Michael D. C. Drout 78 I cannot recommend Beowulf: The Critical Heritage strongly enough. Had it appeared before Beowulf and the Critics was in press, I would have been saved much unnecessary work and avoided many infelicities. 79 Clare Lees makes this argument (134). I refute it in Beowulf and the Critics (20-21). The New Criticism is stereotypically characterized as an approach that focused on the text on the page as an individual artistic object. New Criticism famously wanted to see the literary text as it existed rather than view it in historical or political contexts. Hardly any medievalists were actually pure New Critics. New Criticism was the bogeyman and all-purpose ‘other’ of the post-modernist critics who came of academic age in the 1980s. 80 The best of these, in my opinion, was the late Ted Irving. 81 The relationship of Beowulf to the Schleswig-Holstein controversy is only relevant to a history of scholarship, not to the reading of Beowulf itself. But see Shippey and Haarder (16-18). 82 Fulk says that this analysis “has never been bettered” (xi-xii). 83 Summarized in Orchard (91-97). 84 In his edition and historical study of Widsith, Chambers had suggested that the situation of Ingeld (reconstructed from Saxo Grammaticus) would have been a more fitting topic for the Beowulf-poet than the monsters (79). Tolkien strongly rejected this view in Beowulf and the Critics (53), though he tones down his criticism of Chambers in the published “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” (11-12). 85 See my “How the Monsters Became Important.” 86 The Cultural World in Beowulf. 87 I think Ker was reacting to Arthur Quiller-Couch and Chambers was following his old teacher, Ker. For a more detailed discussion, see my “The Rhetorical Evolution of ‘Beowulf : The Monsters and the Critics.’” 88 The folktale/nature myth approach was made most famously by Karl Müllenhoff in “Sceaf und seine Nachkommen” and “Der Mythus von Beowulf ”; see Shippey and Haarder (280-91; also 448-49). For the Christian symbolic reading see Margaret Goldsmith. 89 Tolkien discusses his requirement of one-to-one correspondence for allegory in the posthumously published introduction to Pearl. This insistence has caused no end of problems for critics who do not follow 160

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and its Significance such a strict definition (it is at the heart of Tolkien’s rejection of the Lord of the Rings = World War II allegory that he disparages in the Foreword to The Lord of the Rings). 90 The allegory was originally constructed to be about a man with a rock garden rather than a tower (B&C 32). For discussion, see B&C (11). 91 See, for example, John Leyerle’s “The Interlace Structure of Beowulf. ” 92 Tolkien’s method here, particularly noticeable if you read through the various drafts discussed in Beowulf and the Critics, was tabulation: a good choice for beginning scholars or scholars working with a very large text or corpus or one that has been inadequately studied. But with Beowulf, a poem that had been worked over by the best Germanic philologists in the world for over a century by the time Tolkien got to it, this is not the approach most likely to be fruitful. If you find a pattern in Beowulf you can be sure some nineteenth century German scholar already recognized it and published it in Zeitschrift für deutsch Philologie. 93 It is unlikely that another critic will arise with comparable skills, particularly given the state of philological education in both England and America. 94 See Phelpstead (“Homecoming”). 95 The manuscript reading of the name is “Byrhtnoth.” Tolkien emended the “y” to the diphthong “eo” in “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth,” indicating his understanding of the poet’s likely pronunciation of the name in the Eastern dialect in which most scholars believe it was written. The poem as we have it is in West Saxon. 96 See E. V. Gordon’s edition of Maldon (26). Maldon is in fact the only evidence for that custom outside of the writings of Tacitus, a Roman who wrote in the first century of the “Germans” but who never encountered any Anglo-Saxons (who likely did not exist as a separate tribe at this point). For additional discussion see Harris (157-84). 97 Old English text is taken from Dobbie, The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems; translations are my own. 98 For a discussion of ofermod and superbia, see Gneuss. 99 Tolkien’s translation in “The Homecoming” is “Heart shall be bolder, harder be purpose, more proud the spirit as our power lessens” 161

Michael D. C. Drout (17). In Beowulf and the Critics he translated the lines as “the spirit shall be more inflexible, the heart more bold, the courage greater, as our strength grows less” (B&C 114). 100 My thanks to Stephen Harris for his elucidation of these developments in Maldon scholarship. 101 Byrhtnoth may have been trying to make the best of a bad situation: if he had refused to allow them to pass over the causeway, the Vikings could have simply sailed down the coast and ravaged a defenseless town or city rather than engaging directly with the English warriors. Byrhtnoth may have concluded that the best interests of those he was charged to protect (rather than those warriors who served with him) and the best chance at winning any battle at all might have been to engage the enemy at this point. 102 I acknowledge that this sort of criticism runs the serious risk of treating the actions in the poem as having actually occurred rather than having been created in the imagination of a poet. However, Tolkien did in fact think that Old English poems such as Beowulf and Exodus preserved memories of actual warfare in the Germanic past (see the Exodus edition and Shippey’s comments in “A Look at Exodus” 7576). To follow this line of argument past Tolkien and perhaps to the ridiculous, I wonder what size the dragon’s head must have been that it could bite Beowulf in the neck without removing his entire head. 103 Hammond notes that “The Homecoming” was complete by 1945 (303). 104 Other critics disagree. Shippey, for example, believes that the poet tries to reconcile the two codes rather than subordinate the courtly code to the moral code (“Gawain-poet” 217). 105 Compare the focus of Tolkien’s lecture with the table of contents of the Brewer A Companion to the Gawain-Poet. 106 In this line of argument, Gawain confesses the possession of the girdle to the Green Knight (although he already knows) and undergoes both penance through the cut from the axe and from the wearing of the girdle as a mark of shame. This is how I was trained to interpret the scene. 107 Of that of Aers or of Nicholas Watson, who argues that the Gawainpoet is attempting to make lay readers equal to the status of contemplatives (311).

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J.R.R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and its Significance 108 Tolkien and Lewis and the Oxford syllabus campaign is beyond the scope of this essay. 109 The person responsible for compiling the Year’s Work reads every article and book in that subfield and then puts them into a narrative. Preparing to write and writing the Year’s Work is extremely timeconsuming, but it makes a scholar as up-to-date as possible in a field. Being given the assignment also shows that powerful individuals in your scholarly field see a promising future for your work. Tolkien’s authorship of a Year’s Work section shows that someone (perhaps C. T. Onions or R. W. Chambers, both of whom thought highly of Tolkien) had already marked him as an up-and-coming scholar. 110 And here Tolkien was once again very interested in vowels and diphthongs. 111 Contemporary scholarship now generally accepts the “ruffian of Monk’s Kirby” as the author of Morte d’Arthur. WORKS CITED Facsimile of MS. Bodley 34: St Katherine, St Margaret, St Juliana, Hali Mei[th]ad, Sawles Warde. Introd. N. R. Ker. London: Oxford University Press, 1960. Aers, David. “Christianity for Courtly Subjects: Reflections on the Gawain-Poet.” In Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson, eds. A Companion to the Gawain-Poet. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997. 91-101. Anderson, Douglas A. “‘An industrious little devil’: E. V. Gordon as Friend and Collaborator with Tolkien.” In Jane Chance, ed. Tolkien the Medievalist. London: Routledge, 2003. 15-25. Andrew, Malcolm and Ronald Waldron, eds. The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. 4th ed. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, (1987) 2002. Anger, Don N. “Report on the Excavation of the Prehistoric, Roman and Post-Roman Site in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire.” In Drout, ed. 563-64. Benskin, Michael and Margaret Laing. “Translations and Mischsprachen in Middle English Manuscripts.” In Michael Benskin and M. L. Samuels, eds. So Meny People, Longages and Tonges: Philological Essays in Scots and Mediaeval English Presented to Angus McIntosh. Edinburgh: Middle English Dialect Project, 1981. 55-106. 163

Michael D. C. Drout Bliss, Alan J., ed. Sir Orfeo. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966. Boroff, Marie, trans. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. New York: W. W. Norton, 1967. Brewer, Derek. “Introduction.” In Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson, eds. A Companion to the Gawain-Poet. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997. 1-21. Carpenter, Humphrey. Tolkien: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977. Chambers, R. W. Widsith: A Study in Old English Heroic Legend. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912. ———. “On the Continuity of English Prose from Alfred to More and His School” (An Extract from the Introduction to Nicholas Harpsfield’s Life of Sir Thomas More, ed. E. V. Hitchcock and R. W. Chambers). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932. Chase, Colin, ed. The Dating of Beowulf. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, (1981) 1997. Collingwood, R. G. and J.N.L. Myres. Roman Britain and the English Settlements. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937. d’Ardenne, S.R.T.O., ed. Þe Liflade ant te Passiun of Seinte Iuliene. London: Oxford University Press, 1961. ———. “Two Words from Ancrene Wisse and the Katherine Group.” Notes and Queries 29 (1982): 3. d’Ardenne, S.R.T.O and E. J. Dobson, eds. Seinte Katerine: Re-edited from MS Bodley 34 and the Other Manuscripts. London: Oxford University Press, 1981. Dance, Richard. “The AB Language: The Recluse, the Gossip and the Language Historian.” In Yoko Wada, ed. A Companion to Ancrene Wisse. Woodbridge, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 2003. 57-82. Davis, Norman, ed. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967 [revision of Tolkien and Gordon edition]. Dobbie, Eliot van Kirk, ed. The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems. Vol 6 of The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records. New York: Columbia University Press, 1942. Dobson, E. J. The Origins of Ancrene Wisse. Oxford: Clarendon, 1976. 164

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and its Significance Drout, Michael D. C. “A Mythology for Anglo-Saxon England.” In Jane Chance, ed. J.R.R. Tolkien and the Invention of Myth. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2004. 335-62. ———. “How the Monsters Became Important: The logical and rhetorical development of ‘The Monsters and the Critics.’” In Carmela Rizzo, ed., Fabelwesen, mostri e portenti nell’immaginario occidentale. Torino: Edizione dell’Orso, 2004. 1-23. ———. “The Rhetorical Evolution of ‘Beowulf : The Monsters and the Critics.’” In Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull, eds. Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2006. ———., ed. J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment. New York: Routledge, 2006. Earle, John. The Deeds of Beowulf: An English Epic of the Eighth Century Done into Modern Prose. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892. Frantzen, Allen J. Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990. ———. “‘Hrothgar Built Roads’: Grendel's Ride in LA.” Old English Newsletter 39 (2006): 27-35. Franzen, Christine. The Tremulous Hand of Worcester: A Study of Old English in the Thirteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Fulk, R. D. “Preface.” In Interpretations of Beowulf, ed. idem. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991. ix-xix Gilliver, Peter M. “‘At the Wordface’: J.R.R. Tolkien's Work on the Oxford English Dictionary.” In Patricia Reynolds and Glen H. GoodKnight, eds. Proceedings of the J.R.R. Tolkien Centenary Conference. Milton Keynes: Tolkien Society, and Altadena, CA: Mythopoeic Press, 1995. 173-86. Gilliver, Peter, Jeremy Marshall and Edmund Weiner. The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Gneuss, Helmut. “The Battle of Maldon 89: Byrhtnoth's ofermod Once Again.” Studies in Philology 73 (1976): 117-37. Goldsmith, Margaret. “The Christian Theme of Beowulf. ” Medium Ævum 29 (1960): 81-101.

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Michael D. C. Drout Gollancz, Israel, ed. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. London: Early English Text Society, (1912) 1940. Gordon, E. V., ed. Pearl. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953. ———, ed. The Battle of Maldon. London: Methuen, (1937) 1966. Gordon, Ida, ed. The Seafarer. London: Methuen, 1960. Hall, Joseph. Selections from Early Middle English, 1130-1250. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1920. Hammond, Wayne G. J.R.R. Tolkien: A Descriptive Bibliography. With the assistance of Douglas A. Anderson. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll, 1993. Harris, Stephen J. Race and Ethnicity in Anglo-Saxon Literature. New York: Routledge, 2003. Honegger, Thomas. “Finn and Hengest.” In Drout, ed. 209-11. Horobin, Simon. “J.R.R. Tolkien as a Philologist: A Reconsideration of the Northernisms in Chaucer's Reeve's Tale.” English Studies 82 (2001): 97-105. ———. “Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve’s Tale.” In Drout, ed. 9394. Hostetter, Carl F. “A Middle English Vocabulary.” In Drout, ed. 209-11. Irvine, Martin. “Medieval Textuality and the Archæology of Textual Culture.” In Allen J. Frantzen, ed. Speaking Two Languages: Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. Jesperson, Otto. Growth and Structure of the English Language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. London: Basil Blackwell, 1938. O’Brien O’Keeffe, Katherine. Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Keynes, Simon. “The Historical Context of the Battle of Maldon.” In Donald Scragg, ed. The Battle of Maldon, AD 991. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991. Kiernan, Kevin S. Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, (1981) 1996. Kisor, Yvette. “A Fourteen-century Romance.” In Drout, ed. 215-16. 166

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and its Significance Kleinman, Scott. “‘Iþþlen’ in Sawles Warde.” In Drout, ed. 300-1. Lee, Stuart D. and Elizabeth Solopova, eds. The Keys of Middle-earth. London: Palgrave, 2005. Lees, Clare A. “Men and Beowulf. ” In Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages. Ed. Clare Lees. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. 129-48. Leyerle, John. “The Interlace Structure of Beowulf. ” University of Toronto Quarterly 37 (1967): 1-17. Lobdell, Jared. “The Devil’s Coach-Horses.” In Drout, ed. 125-26. McFadden, Brian. “Fear of Difference, Fear of Death: The Sigelwara, Tolkien’s Swertings, and Racial Difference.” In Jane Chance and Alfred Siewers, eds. Tolkien’s Modern Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Mitchell, Bruce. “‘Until the Dragon Comes…’: Some Thoughts on Beowulf. ” Neophilologus 47 (1963): 126-38. Müllenhoff, Karl. “Sceaf und seine Nachkommen.” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur 7 (1849): 410-19. ———. “Der Mythus von Beowulf. ” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur 7 (1849): 419-41. Orchard, Andy. A Critical Companion to Beowulf. Woodbridge, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 2003. Pasternack, Carol Braun. The Textuality of Old English Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Phelpstead, Carl. “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Sir Orfeo, Edited by Christopher Tolkien.” In Drout, ed. 614-15. ———. “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorhthelm’s Son.” In Drout, ed. 283-84. Ryan, John S. “J.R.R. Tolkien’s Formal Lecturing and Teaching at the University of Oxford, 1925-1959.” Seven: An Anglo-American Literary Review 19 (2002): 45-62. Salu, Mary, ed. and trans. The Ancrene Riwle. London: Burns and Oates, 1955. Sayer, George. “Recollections of J.R.R. Tolkien.” In Patricia Reynolds and Glen H. GoodKnight, eds. Proceedings of the J.R.R. Tolkien

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Michael D. C. Drout Centenary Conference. Milton Keynes: Tolkien Society, and Altadena, CA: Mythopoeic Press, 1995. 21-25. Scase, Wendy. “Tolkien, Philology and The Reeve’s Tale: Towards the Cultural Move in Middle English Studies.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 24 (2002): 325-34. Scragg, Donald. “The Battle of Maldon: Fact or Fiction.” In Janet Cooper, ed. The Battle of Maldon: Fiction and Fact. London: Hambledon Press, 1993. Scull, Christina and Wayne G. Hammond. The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide. 2 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Seaman, Gerald. “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Edition with E. V. Gordon.” In Drout, ed. 615-17. Shippey, Tom. “A Look at Exodus and Finn and Hengest.” Arda (1982-83): 72-80. ———. “Boar and Badger: An Old English Heroic Antithesis?” Leeds Studies in English 16 (1985): 220-39. ———. “Tolkien’s Academic Reputation Today.” Amon Hen 100 (1989): 18-22. ———. “Tolkien and ‘The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth.’” In Shippey et al., eds. Leaves from the Tree: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Shorter Fiction. London: The Tolkien Society, 1991. 5-16. ———. “Tolkien and the Gawain-poet.” In Patricia Reynolds and Glen H. GoodKnight, eds. Proceedings of the J.R.R. Tolkien Centenary Conference. Milton Keynes: Tolkien Society, and Altadena, CA: Mythopoeic Press, 1995. 213-19. ———. The Road to Middle-earth. Revised ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. Shippey, Tom and Andreas Haarder, eds. Beowulf: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1998. Smith, Jeremy. J. “A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English: Tradition and Typology.” In Matti Rissanen et al., eds. History of Englishes: New Methods and Interpretations. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1992. 582-91. Swain, L. J. “Middle English ‘Losenger’: A Sketch of an Etymological and Semantic Inquiry.” In Drout, ed. 420-21.

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J.R.R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and its Significance Tolkien, J.R.R. A Middle English Vocabulary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922. ———, [unsigned]. “Holy Maidenhood.” Times Literary Supplement, London, April 26, 1923. Review of Hali Meidenhad: An Alliterative Prose Homily of the Thirteenth Century, ed. F. J. Furnivall, Early English Text Society, 1923. ———. “Philology: General Works.” The Year’s Work in English Studies [1923] 4 (1924): 20-37. ———. “Foreword.” In Walter E. Haigh, ed. A New Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District. London: Oxford University Press, 1928. ———. “Philology: General Works.” The Year’s Work in English Studies [1924] 5 (1925): 26-65. ———. “Philology: General Works.” The Year’s Work in English Studies [1925] 6 (1927): 32-66. ———. “Some contributions to Middle English Lexicography.” Review of English Studies 1 (1925): 210-15. ———. “The Devil’s Coach-Horses.” Review of English Studies 1 (1925): 331-36. ———. “Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad.” Essays and Studies by members of the English Association 14 (1929): 104-26. ———. “The Oxford English School.” The Oxford Magazine 48 (29 May 1930): 778-82. ———. Appendix I: “The Name ‘Nodens.’” Report on the Excavation of the Prehistoric, Roman, and Post-Roman Sites in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire. Reports of the Research Committee of the Society of Antiquaries of London 9. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932. 132-37. ———. “Sigelwara Land”: Part 1. Medium Ævum 1 (1932): 183-96. ———. “Sigelwara Land”: Part 2. Medium Ævum 3 (1934): 95-111. ———. “Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve’s Tale.” Transactions of the Philological Society (1934): 1-70. ———. “Research v. Literature.” The Sunday Times, 14 April 1946; review of English Literature at the Close of the Middle Ages by E. K. Chambers, Volume II, Part 2. 169

Michael D. C. Drout ———. “Middle English ‘Losenger’: Sketch of an Etymological and Semantic Enquiry.” Essais de Philologie Moderne, 1951. Bibliothèque de la Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres de l’Université de Liège, fasc. 129: 63-76. ———. “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorhthelm’s Son.” Essays and Studies by members of the English Association. New Series 6 (1953): 1-18. ———. Ancrene Wisse : The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle edited from MS. Corpus Christi College 402. Early English Text Society 249. London: Oxford University Press, 1962. ———. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Sir Orfeo. ed. Christopher Tolkien. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1975. ———.The Old English Exodus, ed. Joan Turville-Petre. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981. ———. Finn and Hengest, ed. Alan Bliss. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1982. ———. Sir Orfeo: A Middle English Version by J.R.R. Tolkien. ed Carl F. Hostetter. Tolkien Studies 1 (2004): 85-123. Tolkien, J.R.R. and S.R.T.O. d’Ardenne. “‘Iþþlen’ in Sawles Warde.” English Studies 28 (1947): 168-70. Tolkien, J.R.R. and E. V. Gordon, eds. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925. ———. “MS. Bodley 34: A re-collation of a collation.” Studia Neophilologica 20 (1947-48): 65-72. Tubbs, Patricia. “Pearl: Edition by E. V. Gordon.” In Drout, ed. 504. Watson, Nicholas. “The Gawain-Poet as Vernacular Theologian.” In Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson, eds. A Companion to the Gawain-Poet. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997. 293-313. Zettersten, Arne. “The AB Language Lives.” In Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, eds. The Lord of the Rings 1954-2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2006. 13-24. ———. “Ancrene Wisse.” In Drout, ed. 15-17.

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Appendices Appendix A J.R.R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship Publications in Chronological Order {items in curled brackets are attributed to other scholars but are held to be heavily influenced by Tolkien} 1919-1920 Entries (some words beginning with W) for the Oxford English Dictionary 1922 A Middle English Vocabulary 1923 Review of Furnivall’s EETS edition of Hali Meidenhad 1924 The Year’s Work in English Studies 1923, “Philology: General Works” 1925 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight [Tolkien text and glossary; E. V. Gordon most of the notes] 1925 “Some contributions to Middle English Lexicography” 1925 “The Devil’s Coach-Horses” 1925 The Year’s Work in English Studies 1924, “Philology: General Works” 1927 The Year’s Work in English Studies 1925, “Philology: General Works” 1928 Foreword to A New Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District [5 page introduction] 1929 “Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad” 1930 “The Oxford English School” 1932 Appendix I: “The Name ‘Nodens’” Report on the Excavation of the Prehistoric, Roman, and Post-Roman Sites in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire 1932 “Sigelwara Land” [Part 1] 1934 “Sigelwara Land” [Part 2] 1934 “Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve’s Tale” 1936 “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” {1936 Þe Liflade ant te Passiun of Seinte Iuliene, ed. S.R.T.O. d’Ardenne} 1940 “On Translating Beowulf ” 171

Michael D. C. Drout 1944 1946 1947 1948 1953 1953 1953 {1953 1958 {1960 1962

Sir Orfeo [not published or widely circulated until 2004] Review of E. K. Chambers, English Literature at the Close of the Middle Ages, Vol II, part 2 “‘Iþþlen’ in Sawles Warde” “MS. Bodley 34: A re-collation of a collation” “Middle English ‘Losenger’: Sketch of an Etymological and Semantic Enquiry” “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorhthelm’s Son” “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” W. P. Ker lecture [not published until 1983] Pearl, ed. E. V. Gordon [substantially re-worked by Ida Gordon]} The Ancrene Riwle, by Mary B. Salu, with preface by J.R.R.T. The Seafarer ed. Ida Gordon } Ancrene Wisse : The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle

Posthumous Publications 1975 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Sir Orfeo, [translations] ed. Christopher Tolkien 1981 The Old English Exodus, ed. Joan Turville-Petre {1981 Seinte Katerine, by S.R.T.O. d’Ardenne} 1982 Finn and Hengest, ed. Alan Bliss {1982 “Two Words in Ancrene Wisse and the Katherine Group,” by S.R.T.O. d’Ardenne} 2002 Beowulf and the Critics, ed. M. D. C. Drout 2006 Excerpts from various unpublished lectures and notes in The Keys of Middle-earth, ed. Stuart D. Lee and Elizabeth Solopova

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Appendix B J.R.R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship Publications by Medieval Text OLD ENGLISH Beowulf 1936 1940 1982 2002

“Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” “On Translating Beowulf ” Finn and Hengest, ed. Alan Bliss Beowulf and the Critics, ed. M. D. C. Drout

The Battle of Maldon 1953 “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorhthelm’s Son” Exodus 1932 1934 1981

“Sigelwara Land” [Part 1] “Sigelwara Land” [Part 2] The Old English Exodus, ed. Joan Turville-Petre

Other {1960

The Seafarer ed. Ida Gordon }

MIDDLE ENGLISH Works of the Gawain-poet 1925 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight [Tolkien text and glossary; E. V. Gordon most of the notes] 1925 “Some contributions to Middle English Lexicography” 1953 “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” W. P. Ker lecture [not published until 1983] {1953 Pearl, ed. E. V. Gordon [substantially re-worked by Ida Gordon]} 1975 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Sir Orfeo, [translations] ed. Christopher Tolkien Chaucer (The Reeve’s Tale) 1934 “Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve’s Tale” 1953 “Middle English ‘Losenger’: Sketch of an Etymological and Semantic Enquiry” 173

Michael D. C. Drout Sir Orfeo 1944 1975

Sir Orfeo [not published or widely circulated until 2004] Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Sir Orfeo, [translations] ed. Christopher Tolkien

AB Language Texts (Ancrene Wisse and the Katherine Group) 1923 Review of Furnivall’s EETS edition of Hali Meidenhad 1925 “Some contributions to Middle English Lexicography” 1925 “The Devil’s Coach-Horses” 1929 “Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad” {1936 Þe Liflade ant te Passiun of Seinte Iuliene, ed. S.R.T.O. d’Ardenne} 1947 “‘Iþþlen’ in Sawles Warde” 1948 “S. Bodley 34: A re-collation of a collation” 1958 The Ancrene Riwle, by Mary B. Salu, with preface by J.R.R.T. 1962 Ancrene Wisse : The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle {1981 Seinte Katerine, by S.R.T.O. d’Ardenne} {1982 “Two Words in Ancrene Wisse and the Katherine Group”}

Appendix C J.R.R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship Publications Arranged by Type WORD STUDIES 1919-1920 Entries (some words beginning with W) for the Oxford English Dictionary 1922 A Middle English Vocabulary 1925 “Some contributions to Middle English Lexicography” 1925 “The Devil’s Coach-Horses” 1932 Appendix I: “The Name ‘Nodens’” Report on the Excavation of the Prehistoric, Roman, and Post-Roman Sites in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire 1932 “Sigelwara Land” [Part 1] 1934 “Sigelwara Land” [Part 2] 1947 “‘Iþþlen’ in Sawles Warde” 1953 “Middle English ‘Losenger’: Sketch of an Etymological and Semantic Enquiry” {1982 “Two Words in Ancrene Wisse and the Katherine Group.”} 174

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Medieval Scholarship and its Significance DIALECT STUDIES 1929 1934

“Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad” “Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve’s Tale”

EDITIONS AND TRANSLATIONS 1925 {1936 1944 {1953 1958 {1960 1962 1975 1981 {1981 1982

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight [Tolkien text and glossary; E. V. Gordon most of the notes] Þe Liflade ant te Passiun of Seinte Iuliene, ed. S.R.T.O. d’Ardenne} Sir Orfeo [not published or widely circulated until 2004] Pearl, ed. E. V. Gordon [substantially re-worked by Ida Gordon] } The Ancrene Riwle, by Mary B. Salu, with preface by J.R.R.T. The Seafarer, ed. Ida Gordon. } Ancrene Wisse : The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Sir Orfeo, [translations] ed. Christopher Tolkien The Old English Exodus, ed. Joan Turville-Petre Seinte Katerine, by S.R.T.O. d’Ardenne } Finn and Hengest, ed. Alan Bliss

LITERARY CRITICISM 1936 *2002 1953 1953

“Beowulf : The Monsters and the Critics” Beowulf and the Critics, ed. M.D.C. Drout “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorhthelm’s Son” “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” W. P. Ker lecture [not published until 1983]

ESSAYS, REVIEWS AND META-CRITICISM 1923 1924 1925 1927 1930 1928

Review of Furnivall’s EETS edition of Hali Meidenhad The Year’s Work in English Studies 1923, “Philology: General Works” The Year’s Work in English Studies 1924, “Philology: General Works” The Year’s Work in English Studies 1925, “Philology: General Works” “The Oxford English School” Foreword to A New Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District [5 page introduction] 175

Michael D. C. Drout 1940 1946 1948

“On Translating Beowulf ” Review of E. K. Chambers, English Literature at the Close of the Middle Ages, Vol II, part 2 “MS. Bodley 34: A re-collation of a collation”

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Notes and Documents The Name “Nodens”† J. R. R. TOLKIEN This name occurs in three inscriptions: C.I.L. vii, 138 d(eo) M(arti?) Nodonti, C.I.L. vii, 139 deo Nudente, C.I.L. vii, 140 devo Nodenti . . . donavit Nodenti . . . templum [No]dentis. It may also have occurred in the mosaic C.I.L. vii, 137. Apart from these inscriptions, from the same place and presumably roughly contemporary, there is in early Keltic material no trace of any such name or stem.1 The variation o/u is probably due to divergent attempts at representing in Latin letters a non-Latin sound; the variation ont/ent is probably due to (correct) equation of Keltic -ont with Latin participial -ent.2 The former variation enables us to fix with fair probability the quantity, and hence the prehistoric forms, of the stem vowel. The vowel intended was, almost certainly, long: ō (ü). Native Keltic words had no ö. Already in the very distant period common to all branches of that group of languages ö had become ä in stem-syllables, and ü at the end of words. The three older diphthongs, au (Latin au), eu, and ou (both old Latin ou, later ü), had, however, coalesced in some common sound which may be represented ou. This sound in British approached ö, and was equated with Latin ö in the British pronunciation of Latin and vice versa; so that o would be a natural early choice of symbol. The sound was later, but during the Roman period, shifted towards ü, becoming possibly before A.D. 400 identical with British ü (from Keltic oi) and (the British pronunciation of) Latin ü; so that u would be a natural later spelling. Spelling alone does not, however, prove the Nudente inscription later than all the others. Before the completion of the shift a period of hesitation in the choice of symbol might well occur. Later again this ü shifted towards ǖ (French ü in lune), the sound in medieval Welsh of u, which appears as the descendant of Keltic oi (un one, Old Irish óin-), ou (tud, Gallic touto-), and Latin ö (sul, Sölis), ü (pur, pürus). In Goidelic Keltic ou probably became ö. This is at any rate its form in earlier Old Irish (later ua appears). Even if ö was the Goidelic form at such an early period as that of the inscriptions, it is natural to assume that it would be treated on British soil in the same way as Latin ö, and be “The Name Nodens” reprinted by permission of the Tolkien Estate and the Society of Antiquaries of London. Copyright © The J.R.R. Tolkien Copyright Trust 1932, 2007. Copyright © West Virginia University Press

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J.R.R. Tolkien identified with the British ou sound, which in this case was ultimately of the same Indo-European origin. The inscriptions most probably represent, therefore, a Keltic stem *noudont- (*noudent- ?), provided with Latin case-endings. Now *noudont(nom. *noudons>noudös>noudüs, gen. noudontos, dat. noudonti or noudontai) is precisely the form required as the older stage of the (Old and Middle) Irish mythological and heroic name Núadu (later Núada), gen. Núadat, dat. Núadait. The same name also appears in Mog-Núadat, ‘slave or servant of Nuada’; see below. The same stem may also lie behind the Welsh name Nudd (Breton nuz in the place-name Ker-nuz = Welsh *Caer-Nudd). Núadu (Argat-lám ‘of the Silver Hand’) was the king of the Túatha dé Danann, the possessors of Ireland before the Milesians. The Túatha dé Danann may with some probability, amid the wild welter of medieval Irish legend, be regarded as in great measure the reduced form of ancient gods and goddesses. Although it is perhaps vain to try and disentangle from the things told of Nuada any of the features of Nodens of the Silures in Gloucestershire, it is at least highly probable that the two were originally the same. This is borne out by the isolation of the name in Keltic material, the importance of Nuada (and of Nodens), and not least by the exact phonological equation of Nödont- with later Nuadat. That figures of British origin could intrude into Ireland is not impossible. Cuchulinn (Setanta) himself is suspect. But the fact that outside Ireland (where the name figures largely) Nodons-Nuada occurs only in Britain, in the west, in one place, and nowhere else in the Keltic area, never in Gaul, has led to the more likely conjecture that Nodens is a Goidelic god,3 probably introduced eastward into Britain, unless one can believe that the Goidels reached Ireland by way of Britain and left his cult behind them. It is possible to see a memory of this figure in the medieval Welsh Lludd Llaw Ereint (‘of the Silver Hand’)—the ultimate original of King Lear—whose daughter Creiddylad (Cordelia) was carried off, after her betrothal to Gwythyr vab Greiddawl, by Gwynn vab Nudd, a figure having connexions with the underworld.4 Concerning Creiddylad there appears anciently to have been told a tale of an everlasting fight, which has often been cited as a parallel to the legend in Old Norse of the endless battle of Heðinn Hjarrandason and King Högni over Högni’s daughter Hildr whom Heðinn carried off. Gwynn vab Nudd and Gwythyr are to fight for Creiddylad every first of May until doomsday, when the final conqueror shall win her. It is conceivable that Lludd (father) and Gwynn vab Nudd (suitor) both owe something, in the late confusion of traditions, to a common ancestor. Certainly the normal Welsh form of Nuada-Nodens would be Nudd. The fixing of the father’s name as Lludd may have owed something to alliteration with his

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The Name “Nodens” surname. In the Scandinavian story, the father (Högni) is one of the pair of everlasting combatants. But even if this is true, and Lludd Llaw Ereint is related to Nuada Argat-lám, it of course proves nothing concerning the place from which this legendary figure came ultimately into Britain. Of Nuada Argat-lám it is told that he was at war with both Firbolg and Fomorians.5 He lost his hand in the first battle, and the royalty passed with it for seven years to Bress, chief of the Fomorians. The Túatha dé Danann made a new hand ‘with full motions of a hand’ for him. Hence his surname. For twenty years he regained his royalty, but finally perished in battle against the Fomorians. Other Nuadas appear in Irish. These may be in part scattered memories of an originally single mythological figure, though this is not a necessary conclusion, since in other cases ‘divine’ names are found later surviving as ordinary personal names. There was Nuada son of Tadg (Teague), supreme druid of Cathair the Great, king of Ireland in the second Irish epic cycle, and ancestor of the Ossianic line of heroes. This cycle purports to refer to events of the second century A.D., when Nodens was already, presumably, worshipped in Britain; but the cycles are not reliable history. There was also Nuada Derg (son of Loegaire, king of Ireland) the assailant of St. Patrick. The Cóir Anmann (‘Fitness of Names’; ed. Stokes, Leipzig, 1897, in Irische Texte, 3 Serie, 2 Heft) is a MS. of circa A.D. 1500 in Middle Irish, but it is some centuries older linguistically than its hand, and contains much ancient tradition. It mentions seven Nuadas: N. Deglám (‘fair-hand’), N. Find Fáil, N. Find Feimin, N. Fullón, N. Necht, and N. Sálfota (‘long-heel’), in addition to Nuada Airgetlám. Many of these may be due to disconnected memories of different things concerning a single figure. Of N. Airgetlám it says: ‘Sreng mac Senghainn cut off Nuada’s right hand in a combat at the battle of Mag Tured Cunga, when the Túatha dé Danann invaded Erin. The leeches of the Túatha dé Danann put on Nuada a hand of silver with the complete motion of every hand.’ N. Sálfota is regarded as a ‘slave’, a famous builder of forts. A story, which has every appearance of being invented or altered to explain a name of forgotten significance, is told to account for the title Mog Nuadat (‘Servant of Nuada’) possessed by the hero Eogan son of Mog Neit (‘Servant of Nantos’).6 For helping the slave Nuada to dig a trench the nickname ‘Servant of Nuada’ is said to have been given to Eogan. But it is more likely that he had it originally as a devotee of a divine Nuada (cf. later Gaelic use of gille ‘servant’ in conjunction with a divine name or saint’s name, as in Gillies, Gilchrist, Gilfillan, &c.). Eogan’s father had, it may be noted, a similar sort of name, for which no explanation is offered. Piety is perhaps more likely to have run in a heroic family than the serving of servants. 179

J.R.R. Tolkien If not an established certainty, it is, then, at least a probable theory that there was a divine personage of whom the chief later representative is the Nuada of the Silver Hand in Irish tradition, and that this Nuada, whose name c. A.D. 100 to A.D. 300 probably had both in Goidelic and British forms of Keltic (irrespective of borrowings) the form Noudüs, Noudont-, is the same as the Nödont- and its variations of the inscriptions, which occur in curious and suggestive isolation in Britain. Linguistic considerations unaided by other data can do little, usually, to recall forgotten gods from their twilight. The form of this name, however, is favourable. The ending -ont (-ent) is a well-known one in IndoEuropean languages; its function is everywhere chiefly that of forming participles. Its presence in this name, therefore, makes it extremely probable that the preceding stem was originally a verbal one. Other probable deductions (of some importance) are: (a) that the stem noud- is a later form of neud-, since participles of this form are made usually from the eu-grade of such verbal stems; (b) that this stem neudnoud- was Indo-European, or at least fully naturalized in a language of Indo-European structure when the name was coined—the name is not pre-Keltic, whatever may be true of the god; but (c) that the name was probably in origin adjectival, a title of a god whose remoter proper name is lost. Certainly adjectives formed with this suffix often become nouns. In Germanic this suffix became the normal one for forming agent-nouns (e.g. Gothic Nasjand-s ‘Saviour’). But neither gods nor humans usually possess such agental names as their sole title, until taboo, reverence, or desuetude has obliterated an older less etymologizable name. However that may be, such a form as *noudont-, *neudont-, is most likely to contain a once intelligible verbal stem. None the less in Keltic as it is preserved—either scantily, or not until medieval times—there is no trace of such a verb. But we do find such a verb in Germanic. In Germanic the special peculiarities of vowel and consonant development require us to look for neut (neot, niut), naut, as the cognate of the Keltic neud-, noud-. It is easy to find, for it is a common verb with many derivatives: the stem of the Old Norse participle niótandi corresponds exactly with the stem *neudont-, with Nodont- or with Nuadat. Certainly, if we assume that Keltic once had a verbal stem *neud- cognate with this Germanic neut-, but that it has otherwise left no trace in our meagre early material, and had disappeared alike from medieval Irish and Welsh, we shall be assuming nothing unparalleled, nothing which our miserably small knowledge of ancient Keltic can impugn. There is a considerable underlying community of vocabulary between the two great north-western and neighbouring branches of Indo-European. This would not be the only instance in which the common features of one serve to explain the isolated forms of the other. And 180

The Name “Nodens” there is no other etymology which satisfies phonology.7 The Germanic stem *neut- and its derivatives deserve scrutiny, therefore, as the only serious claimants in the field. Only with their help, if at all, is Nodens likely to be explained linguistically. The stem is extremely common in Germanic. In addition to a number of derived nouns and adjectives of divergently developed meanings, there is in each of the chief older dialects a verb *neutan, in Gothic niutan (and ga-niutan), Old English nëotan, Old Saxon niotan, Old High German nio3an (German geniessen), Old Norse nióta. In all these languages, and therefore perhaps in common Germanic, the secondary senses ‘acquire, have the use of ’ are the usual ones. This is also usually the meaning represented by derivatives, and seems also to appear in Lithuanian naudà ‘profit, property’, Lettish nauda ‘money’ (the only forms outside Germanic, other than Nodens, that can be plausibly connected etymologically). These senses are none the less probably not original. In Gothic, the earliest recorded of the Germanic group and preserved in a form spoken at a time when Nodens’ temple possibly still had votaries, clear traces remain of an older sense. There ga-niutan means ‘to catch, entrap (as a hunter)’; it is the word used in the extremely careful version of the Scriptures to translate ἵνα αὐτòν ἀγρεύσωσιν λόγῳ, Mark xii, 13. In Gothic, too, the derived noun nuta means ‘fisherman’; it is used of St. Peter. Of this hunting, catching sense a trace is conceivably preserved in Germanic *naut- (OE. nëat ‘neat’, OHG. nöõ ON. naut) a head of cattle. But in ON. naut-r means any piece of valuable personal property, a sword, a ring, and we must probably compare the sense-development of ‘cattle’ and ‘chattel’, both derived from late Latin capitäle, principal property. For the development ‘acquire, take possession of, have usufruct of ’ from ‘catch, bring home from the hunt or field’ many parallels may be cited.8 The very form of this Germanic group, isolated as it is if we disallow its slender connexions with Keltic on the one side and the Baltic languages on the other, shows that it is a fairly old ‘northern’ word; if not a common Indo-European word, one early adapted to a thoroughly IndoEuropean form of speech, and revealing all the characteristic vowel-gradations of Indo-European. There is nothing improbable in the assumption that Keltic once shared in the possession of such a word. Accepting then Nodens’ connexion with *neutan, as the best which unaided etymology can offer, we have still to decide on the precise significance of the name. The description of Nodens as a ‘Meergottheit’9 appears to have nothing (purely linguistic) to support it, unless it be the Gothic sense of nuta, and the plausible emendation of the Nuithones of the Germania to Nut(h)iones (Germanic *nutjoniz) ‘fishermen’, to consort with the Anglii ‘anglers’. But this specific sense ‘fishing’ is probably a specialization, perhaps due originally to Baltic conditions as the sense of the 181

J.R.R. Tolkien Norse derivative nyt ‘milk’ was due to the Scandinavian mountainside dairies. Nor is it very likely, if the etymology is good, that Nodens was a god of usufruct, usury, or wealth, or of agriculture and cattle. Far more probably the older sense of Gothic ga-niutan, ‘to catch, ensnare’, was the one shared by Keltic with old Germanic. Whether the god was called the ‘snarer’ or the ‘catcher’ or the ‘hunter’ in some sinister sense, or merely as being a lord of venery, mere etymology can hardly say. It is suggestive, however, in this connexion that the most remarkable thing about Nuada was his hand, and that without his hand his power was lost. Even in the dimmed memories of Welsh legend in llaw ereint we hear still an echo of the ancient fame of the magic hand of Nodens the Catcher. NOTES †

Editors’ note: We have reprinted this piece exactly as originally published save in two instances, which we note here. We have added a missing accent to “Túatha dé Danann“ in the eighth paragraph (it appears with the accent in other places), and we have also similarly added an accent to “Argat-lám” in the fifth paragraph, following Tolkien's usage elsewhere in the piece.

1

Nodi (gen.) from Tarragona is of little help. Nudi Dumnogeni (I.B.Ch. 209, Selkirkshire) might be a Latinized form of the same name in later shape (Welsh Nudd).

2

This is not certain. The participial ending originally in Indo-European varied in inflected forms between ent, ont, nt. Traces of such variations remain in Old Irish; and it may be noted that one ent form occurs above in conjunction with the Keltic devo. We should, however, expect at this period a fixed name to have a fixed stem in the native languages.

3

Cf. A. de Jubainville, Les Celtes, p. 33.

4

Mabinogion, Kulhwch and Olwen, in Red Book of Hergest, Oxford, 1887, vol. i, pp. 131 and 134.

5

‘Comme Zeus en guerre contre les Titans dans la mythologie grecque’, A. de Jubainville. A specially grievous imprisonment of Lludd is referred to in Kulhwch and Olwen (p. 131).

6

Nantos is also probably originally a divine name.

7

In any case it often happens that names and surnames once of obvious meaning and current formation after only a century or so cease to be intelligible to their users, or at least become obscure in form: 182

The Name “Nodens”

Hunts, Webbs, Milners, Fletchers, Walkers, Pindars, Crowthers, and others. 8

e.g. ‘gain’, OF. gaägnier, Ital. guadagnare, OHG. weidenen, with their ultimate derivation from Germanic *waiþ-, OHG. weida ‘hunting, fishing, pasturing’, ON. veiðr ‘game, fish-catch’. Germanic fanhan, fang- seize (with hands); ON. fang, grasp, grappling, fishing, baggage, or means; fengr haul, take booty, gain, stores; OE. feng, grasp, booty.

9

Falk u. Torp, Wortschatz der Germanischen Spracheinheit, s. v. nut.

183

Notes and Documents Walter E. Haigh, Author of A New Glossary of the Huddersfield Dialect JANET BRENNAN CROFT

I

n 1928, J.R.R. Tolkien published a six-page Foreword to A New Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District, written by Walter Edward Haigh, a long-time resident of that area. This dialect was of great interest to Tolkien as a philologist, since it comes from an area where the speech of the North and of the western Midlands overlap, and bears the linguistic marks of invasions from the Scandinavian countries, the fourteenth-century revival of Anglo-Saxon literature, and the Norman conquest. Tolkien is full of praise for the wide range of the glossary, its inclusion of both rare and common words, and the “excellence, humour, and idiomatic raciness of its illustrative quotations” (xiv). He surely must have nodded in agreement with Haigh's own unequivocal statement that a local dialect “is as worthy of our care and pride as are our ancient buildings, and more than as intimately useful,” and his encouragement of bilingualism in standard English and one's ancestral dialect (Glossary viii). Huddersfield, located in West Yorkshire, is a fairly young town born during the Industrial Revolution out of a cluster of older, smaller villages. In 1890, its population was over 90,000, and it was considered one of the wealthier cities in the country, being a center for the engineering, brewing, cotton, and wool industries (Jackson and Marsden 18). Tolkien considers the dialect preserved in this glossary to be rather “conservative,” retaining elements long abandoned in other regions, because of its isolation “out of the main way of such traffic as there was” before this time (xvii). Walter Haigh was born in 1856, sometime in the April-June quarter (Anderson), and brought up in what he described as “the geographical basin, measuring some ten to fifteen miles across, which lies in the south-west corner of the West Riding, close under the main ridges of the Pennines” (Glossary vii). He married fairly late in life, in the third quarter of 1905 (Anderson). Haigh was and is a common surname in the town of Huddersfield, which is located in the north-west portion of this basin. Haigh was Head of the English and History Department of the Huddersfield Technical College (which is still in existence) from 1890 through 1918, and was Emeritus Lecturer in English there until his death Copyright © West Virginia University Press

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Walter E. Haigh in 1931. The Technical College grew out of the earlier Young Men’s Improvement Society (founded 1841) and Huddersfield Mechanics’ Institute (1843), taking its current name in 1896, and concentrated on courses of instruction useful to the industry of the town, with the object of encouraging the trained graduates to stay in Huddersfield (Jackson and Marsden 21; Brook 203). At various times Haigh taught English, English literature, English history 1558-1714, and possibly Latin and commercial geography. His department also taught modern history and English literature, elocution, and composition for the young ladies who were “domestic economy students” (Morgan). The department Haigh headed was expected primarily to train teachers, which the college did from 1904 to 1920, and help any students going to university to pass their examinations (O’Connell).1 Haigh’s first book, An Analytical Outline of English History, was published by Oxford University Press in 1917, shortly before his retirement. Designed for use in school examinations, the book aims to “teach clearly the evolutionary character of English history” (Outline v), focusing on connections between events. To that end the book is laid out, as the title suggests, as an analytical outline, with brief paragraphs about key events, trends, and concepts. The book was successful enough that there was a second printing in 1929. Haigh was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Historical Society in October 1912 and remained a member until his death in 1931. He was obviously proud of this honor, which entitled him to use the initials F.R.H.S. after his name on the title page of his books and on his tombstone. Applicants to the F.R.H.S. must prove “an original contribution to historical scholarship in the form of significant published work,” but the current records of the society do not include information on Haigh's qualifications (How to Join; McCarthy). His obituary, however, refers to “many widely-read and interesting articles [in] the [Huddersfield] ‘Examiner’ on dialect and historical subjects” (“Death of W.E. Haigh”). Tolkien most likely met Haigh through the Yorkshire Dialect Society, which was founded in 1897 by Tolkien’s Oxford mentor Joseph Wright. Early officers, council members, life members, and contributors include names familiar to Tolkien scholars: James Murray of The Oxford English Dictionary fame; Arthur Napier, Professor of English Language and Literature while Tolkien was a student at Oxford; William Craigie, his tutor in Icelandic; E. V. Gordon, his collaborator on Sir Gawain and Pearl; Walter Skeat, namesake of the Skeat Prize Tolkien won while a student at Exeter in 1914; and Israel Gollancz, in whose honor the British Academy lecture series (of which Tolkien’s 1936 lecture Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics was a part) was named. Haigh was a member from 1899 until his death in 1931; from 1929 until his death he was a Council member. Tolk185

Janet Brennan Croft ien joined in 1920, around the time he was appointed Reader in English Language at Leeds, and kept up his membership through 1938. Haigh’s 1928 book, A New Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District, was a labor of love he worked on for six years. In part it was an expansion of Alfred Easther's A Glossary of the Dialect of Almondbury and Huddersfield, published in 1883 by the English Dialect Society. Haigh had also planned an accompanying Grammar and a Conspectus-Table of vowel sounds in neighboring dialects, but this was never completed. The Glossary includes about 4000 words, with several dozen more in an appendix. Most of the entries include derivations, which Tolkien diplomatically notes would be unlikely to pass muster with professional philologists but are sufficient to spark the interest of the general reader in further study (xiv-xv). An introductory chapter includes information on spelling, pronunciation, phonology, and the historical derivation of the vocabulary in general. In his “Foreword,” Tolkien states that he first saw the manuscript in 1923 and encouraged Haigh to complete and publish the work (xiii). He is also listed as a subscriber, meaning he paid in advance to purchase at least one copy when the book was printed. Haigh read a paper on his work-in-progress at the Sheffield University meeting of the Yorkshire Dialect Society in November 1925, as noted in the secretary's report in the April 1927 issue of the Transactions. Tolkien most likely wrote the “Foreword” in 1927, since the book was published in January 1928 (Anderson). A review in the Times Literary Supplement calls it “a valuable piece of work” and mentions Tolkien’s “Foreword” prominently (“New Glossary”). It is also noted favorably in The Year’s Work in English Studies as a work of descriptive linguistics, capturing an endangered dialect before it disappeared (Murray). However, a reviewer in the Transactions of the Yorkshire Dialect Society was not so kind, taking Haigh to task for using an idiosyncratic and inaccurate method of transcribing pronunciation and missing a number of important words; the review could almost serve as a supplement to the book. Yet the reviewer does admit that the spirit of the book, its love of local language, is sound and could serve as an inspiration to both linguistics students and the general public (Taylor). Haigh was moved to respond to this review in the next year’s issue, complaining of the effect on sales of his books, the reviewer’s “youthful eagerness to reveal himself as a real philologist,” and the lack of editorial oversight of the review (Haigh, “Reply” 27). He proceeds to answer the reviewer's complaints point by point, putting Taylor firmly in his place as an inexperienced writer and linguist (yet expressing his gratitude for the additional vocabulary words mentioned in the review).2 A number of the words in the Glossary can be found in the Common Speech of Middle-earth as spoken by the hobbits. Some appear as 186

Walter E. Haigh elements in place-names like Bree (breę, bru, the brow of a hill), Staddle (stæddl, staddle, a timber stand or base for a stack), or the element Brock(brok, a badger) in Brockenborings. Others are used in family names like Baggins (bæggin, a meal, particularly a brown-bag lunch). However, several are used in exactly the same way as in the Huddersfield dialect: gaffer (gæffer), a corruption of grandfather, for an old man; vittles (vittlz) for food, nowt (nout) for nothing, nosey (nuęzi), of one who pries into things, or nuncle (nunkl) for uncle. Haigh died at the age of 74 on January 24, 1931, and is buried in the Honley Cemetery just south of Huddersfield (Honley Cemetery). His obituary notes that his funeral was attended by representatives from the Holme Sunday School and that he was a member of the Huddersfield Liberal Club, but it gives few additional details about Haigh as a person. He was survived by a widow (unnamed in the newspaper accounts)3 and left no descendants. NOTES 1

I have not been able to discover what college or university Haigh himself attended. He did not graduate from Oxford, Cambridge, or Leeds.

2

I have been unable to ascertain what may have happened to George Taylor after this scathing rebuttal. There are a number of George Taylors listed in the Modern Language Association Bibliography database, the OCLC WorldCat database, and the Dictionary of National Biography, but none quite fits the impression we get of a young man just starting his academic career in the late 1920s.

3

Among the family mourners were a Mr. and Mrs. George Hirst of Manchester and Miss Hirst of London; this might be the family name of his wife.

My thanks to Douglas Anderson for pointing me in the direction of some of the following resources. WORKS CITED “Death of Mr. W.E. Haigh.” Obituary. Huddersfield Examiner 24 January 1931: page unknown. How to Join the Royal Historical Society. 2005. Royal Historical Society. http://www.rhs.ac.uk/howtojoin.htm (accessed November 4, 2005).

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Janet Brennan Croft Review of “A New Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District.” The Times Literary Supplement 23 February 1928: 133. Anderson, Douglas A. “Re Haigh.” E-mail to Janet Brennan Croft. 9 June 2006. Brook, Roy. The Story of Huddersfield. London: Macgibbon and Kee, 1968. Croft, Janet Brennan. “Haigh, Walter E.” In The Tolkien Encyclopedia. Ed. Michael D. C. Drout. New York: Routledge, 2006. 265. Haigh, Walter Edward. An Analytical Outline of English History. London: Oxford University Press, 1917. Reprinted 1929. ———. “A Glossary of the Huddersfield Dialect: Mr. Haigh’s Reply.” Transactions of the Yorkshire Dialect Society 5.30 (1929): 27-30. ———. A New Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District. London: Oxford University Press, 1928. Honley Cemetery Monumental Inscriptions. 2003. http://www.honley.ukf.net/ cemetery.htm (accessed January 28, 2005). Jackson, Brian, and Dennis Marsden. Education and the Working Class. rev. ed. London: Routledge, 1966. McCarthy, Joy. “Looking for Info on Former F.R.Hist.S.” E-mail to Janet Brennan Croft. 31 March 2005. Morgan, Jenny. “Looking for Info, Walter E. Haigh.” E-mail to Janet Brennan Croft. 7 November 2005. Murray, Hilda M.R. “Philology: General Works.” Year’s Work in English Studies 8 (1927): 41-73. O'Connell, John. “From Mechanic's Institution to Polytechnic: Further and Higher Education, 1841-1970.” Huddersfield: A Most Handsome Town. Ed. E.A. Hilary Haigh. Huddersfield: Kirklees Cultural Services, 1992. 561-96. Taylor, George. “A New Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District.” Review. Transactions of the Yorkshire Dialect Society 5.29 (1928): 33-37. Tolkien, J. R. R. “Foreword.” A New Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District. By Walter E. Haigh. London: Oxford University Press, 1928. xiii-xviii.

188

Notes and Documents The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth: Philology and the Literary Muse THOMAS HONEGGER

T

he Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son, first published in volume six of Essays and Studies in 1953, was—and still is—an oddity.1 The dramatic dialogue2 in alliterative long lines, which constitutes the centerpiece of the essay, is a work of (informed) literary fiction rather than a philological or scholarly study. Its inclusion in a scholarly journal was thus most likely due to the fact that Tolkien had added a prefatory note (headed “(I) Beorhtnoth’s Death”) on the historical and literary background of his poem, and, most importantly, an endnote (headed “(III) Ofermod”), discussing the Old English term ofermod (“pride”)3 and what the poet of the Old English The Battle of Maldon might have implied by its use in his characterization of Beorhtnoth. Tolkien’s acquaintance with The Battle of Maldon, to which Homecoming is a “sequel,” must go back to his days as an undergraduate, if not to his time at grammar school. However, the first clear indication for his indepth study of this poem is provided by the Oxford University Gazette (LIX 1928-29, 55) which lists Tolkien as lecturing on “The Battle of Maldon, Brunanburh, and verse from the Chronicle” during Michaelmas Term 1928 (beginning October 16).4 He was also involved in E. V. Gordon’s edition of the poem, published in 1937. Gordon specifically mentions Tolkien in his “Preface” as one of the two readers “who read the proofs of my edition and made many corrections and contributions. [. . .] and Professor Tolkien, with characteristic generosity, gave me the solution to many of the textual and philological problems discussed in the following pages” (Gordon vi).5 The earliest drafts connected with what would eventually become The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth are dated to circa 1930-33 (Hammond 303), and part of an early precursor has been published in The Treason of Isengard (106-107). Numerous early drafts, together with close-to-finished versions and the final typescript that was sent to the printers, are kept among the Tolkien Papers at the Bodleian Library (MS Tolkien 5; all references and quotations are to the Bodleian folio-pagination). However, the notes and drafts for Part III of Homecoming (i.e. the “endnote” on OE ofermod) are not among these materials. It is very unlikely, in view of what we know about Tolkien’s way of working, that the text was typed with189

Thomas Honegger out prior drafts, and it is to be hoped that they may eventually surface. Yet in spite of this arguable “missing link,” we can re-construct some of Tolkien’s chain of thought from the extant materials. The notes and drafts in the Bodleian have been filed in chronological order, although the individual pieces cannot be dated definitively. I will refer to the individual drafts by letters of the alphabet, i.e. version ‘A’ being the oldest extant draft,6 ‘B’ the second oldest, etc., and ‘I’ the most recent complete draft.7 ‘K’ refers to the final typescript sent to the printers. To this I have added ‘α’ referring to a brief dramatic dialogue featuring Pudda and Tibba that is not included among the manuscripts in the Bodleian, but which has been published in Treason (106-107). Christopher Tolkien dates it to the late 1920s or early 1930s (Treason 106). I cannot go into a detailed description and discussion of all the ten (or, if one counts the fragment J, eleven) drafts and typescripts (A to K) in the Bodleian since the focus of this paper is on Tolkien’s use of “pride” only. Suffice it to say that the drafts present a continuous elaboration of the text, without sudden breaks or gaps,8 from a short dialogic core piece, to which later versions add scene settings, to the full dramatic text with historical and interpretative commentaries. How came they thus to win over the Bridge? The earliest drafts are relatively short (four pages) and consist of the dialogue between the two Anglo-Saxons who have come to search for their lord’s body among the dead on the battlefield. The two speakers are, in the versions up to fol. 61, called Totta and Tudda (vs. Pudda and Tibba in version α).9 The earliest version of the dialogue between Totta and Tudda consists merely of dramatic speech (version A, fols. 1-4), but in the second version (B) we find “scene settings” added in pencil (fols. 58). These two earliest versions are still very close to the Pudda and Tibba piece (version α) and they all share an important characteristic: When the two protagonists reach the bridge/causeway, Totta/Pudda wonders: Tudda, How came they thus to10 How did they win Over the bridge, think you? There’s little sign here of hard fight, and yet just here the brine11 should have been choked with them. But on the planks there’s only one12 lying? (quoted from version A, fol. 3, lines 23-27)13 Tudda/Tibba, however, does not respond to this question in any of the earliest versions (α, A, B), but merely gives a comment on their own progress across the bridge/causeway with the body of Beorhtnoth. Tudda/ Tibba’s non-answer is significant in hindsight since the corresponding

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The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth passage in the published version contains the crucial reference to Beorhtnoth’s pride. Tudda’s (> Tida) reference to pride occurs for the first time in version C (fols. 9-12) where Totta (the preceding question is now ascribed to Tudda) gives the following explanation: They’ve him to thank Alas! Or some say already now in the town. Too bold, too proud! But he is fallen down, made fool of by great heart. So we’ll not chide. He let them cross to taste his sword—and died, (version C, fol. 11r) The reference to pride is made even more prominent from version E (fols. 23-30) onwards, where Beorhtnoth is “Too bold too proud—but he’s beaten down / and his pride cheated, [. . .]” (fol. 27r). “Proud/ pride” need not be, in the context of a warrior society, a negative quality per se,14 but Beorhtnoth was “too proud”15 and too eager to “give minstrels matter for mighty songs” (fol. 27r) and thus brought about their disastrous defeat. Version H (fols. 62-73), then, is even more outspoken and adds the lines “Needlessly noble. It should never have been—/ bidding bows be still and the bridge opening, / matching more with few in mad handstrokes!” (fol. 69v, lines written in the lower margin in blue ink as additions to existing text, which is in black ink). These changes can be seen as evidence for Tolkien’s interest in the Old English term ofermod (pride)—an interest that finds its full and explicit form in the (much later?) endnote only extant in version K.16 Tolkien also makes a point about pride in his “prefatory note,” a first version of which occurs in version D (on fols. 13r-v), where he jots down “Beorhtnoth w his too pride allowed this,” i.e. the crossing of the Northmen (fol. 13r). Later, in the “preface” of version H (on fol. 63r), he becomes even more explicit and condemns Beorhtnoth’s deed as an “act [. . .] of (misplaced) chivalry, or of pride” (fol. 63r). This condemnation of Beorhtnoth’s pride, which Tolkien bases on his interpretation of OE ofermod as a negative term, brings a new aspect to the interpretation of The Battle of Maldon as a whole.17 Although it can still be seen as one of the few surviving literary examples for the “glorification of the military ideals of the comitatus” in which “the heroic attitude is fully realized and described” (Gordon 23), Tolkien correctly points out that the object of this praise is not Beorhtnoth himself but his faithful and loyal retainers. Gordon does not comment on Beorhtnoth’s decision to let the Vikings come across the causeway and the glossary of his edition translates OE ofermod simply with “great pride, over-confidence” (Gordon 76).18 Tolkien’s endnote, as well as the preceding dramatic poem, can thus be seen as a reassessment of Gordon’s view19 by 191

Thomas Honegger putting the focus on Beorhtnoth’s moral and strategic failure as a military leader and protector of his people.20 By endeavouring to drive his point home, Tolkien gives a more than liberal translation of the key-lines on which his argument is based. At the beginning of his endnote, he quotes lines 89 and 90 of The Battle of Maldon (“ða se eorl ongan for his ofermode / alyfan landes to fela laþere ðeode”) and provides the following translation: “then the earl in his overmastering pride actually yielded ground to the enemy, as he should not have done” (TL 143). The point here is not so much the rendering of OE ofermod with “overmastering pride,” a choice Tolkien is trying to justify in his article, but the (additional and interpretative) “as he should not have done,” which has no explicit equivalent in the Old English text.21 Tolkien was, of course, aware of this and defends his rendering some pages later (TL 146) as “accurate in representing the force and implications of his words” and thus anticipating the conclusion reached by his discussion of the central term OE ofermod. The introduction of the new element of “(excessive) pride” in the dialogue by means of Tida’s “Too bold, too proud” (version C, fol. 11r) has consequences not only for Tolkien’s discussion of Beorhtnoth’s motives in the “prefatory note” and later in the “endnote,”22 but also for his use of “proud/pride” in the rest of the poem—which is most clearly seen in the changes in what I call “the praise of Ælfwine.” During their search for Beorhtnoth’s body, the two protagonists come across the lifeless form of Ælfwine, a young nobleman. In version A, Tudda speaks the following lines: He was a stout one. His knees never shook. Proud heart, proud tongue, like Offa. (version A, fol. 2, lines 6-7) “Proud” is obviously intended to carry positive connotations. Yet when revising and expanding the dialogue, Tolkien seems to deem it no longer appropriate to call Ælfwine “proud.” Thus, in version E (fols. 23-30; passage fol. 24r), a text that starts out in black ink but then changes to pencil and blue pencil, only to revert to blue ink later on, we find “the praise of Ælfwine” recast in a form similar to the one published in 1953 (TL 128). I give the version found in F (in blue ink), which seems to be a fair copy of E (in blue pencil): That’s bad, Totta! He was a brave fellow, and we need his like—a new weapon of the old metal. As eager as fire, and as staunch as steel; stern-tongued at times, and outspoken after Offa’s sort. (version F, fol. 33, lines 23-27) 192

The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth There is no longer any mention of “proud,” which may be due to Tolkien’s wish to stress the negative aspects of “pride” as they are associated with Beorhtnoth from version C onwards. Let heart be prouder The assumption that Tolkien became more and more interested in the multiple semantic layers and cultural connotations of the concept of “pride” receives additional support from his different renderings of the Old English lines Hige sceal þe heardra heorte þe cenre mod sceal þe mare þa ure maegen lytla#. (quoted from version C, fol. 12r) They are ascribed to Beorhtnoth’s old retainer Beorhtwold, who utters them when he and the remaining retainers are readying themselves for a last stand. Tolkien does not give a translation of these lines the first time they occur (i.e. in version C). He attempts a Modern English rendering only in version D (fols. 13-22) in the first extant draft of his “prefatory note” (fols. 13r-13v): heart shall be the prouder more harder the purpose more stern the will as our strength weakens. (version D, fol. 13r, lines 23-24) “Prouder” is used to translate “cenre” (comparative form of “cene” = 1. bold, brave, daring; 1.a. of mind and spirit: bold, valiant [here the line from The Battle of Maldon is quoted]; 1.b. of animals: bold, full of spirit; 1.c. figurative, of the tongue: bold; 1.d. glossing belliger “warlike” [Dictionary of Old English (DOE)]) which, as the range of possible translations shows, carries no negative connotations in Old English. We can thus assume that Tolkien used “prouder” in a positive sense. In the dramatic-poetic dialogue proper, the Old English lines occur, as we have seen above, for the first time in version C (fol. 12r) as part of Totta’s dream-vision, and are retained without a modern English rendering also in version D (fol. 21). A translation within the dramatic-poetic dialogue is given only in version E (fols. 23-30) where it replaces the Old English original: Let heart be prouder, harder be purpose, more stern the will, as our strength weakens! (version E, fol. 29r) The Modern English version occurs for the first time in the dramaticpoetic dialogue after Tolkien altered it from iambic pentameter with 193

Thomas Honegger rhyming couplets (versions α, A, B, C, and D) to the alliterative line (versions E to K). “Let heart be prouder” survives until version I (fols. 74-88) where (fol. 86) the lines are crossed out and, at the bottom of the page, we find the following corrections (in blue ink, whereas the main text is in black ink): Heart shall be bolder, harder be purpose, More proud our spirit as our power lessens. (version I, fol. 86, bottom margin of the page) Interestingly, Tolkien seems also to have played with the idea of getting rid of “proud” altogether, since he pencilled an alternative rendering of the second line next to the primary corrections: more strong the spirit as our strength lessens (version I, fol. 86, pencil note to correction above) Yet the “endnote” of this version (fol. 88), which would later become incorporated into the “prefatory note,” still gives the “Heart shall be prouder” rendering. This is remedied in version K (fols. 100-117), i.e. the typescript that, with some corrections, was sent to the printers for publication in Essays and Studies. This version gives the Old English lines and the translation “Heart shall be prouder, harder be purpose, more stern the will as our strength weakens.” (fol. 102) as part of the “prefatory note.” They are crossed out with blue ink and, at the end of the page, the following translation (in blue ink) is proposed: “Will shall be ^ the sterner, heart the bolder, spirit the greater as our strength lessens.” Tolkien also discussed Beorhtwold’s lines in his lecture notes to “Anglo-Saxon Verse” (MS Tolkien A 30/1; probably from the late 1920s or early 1930s) and “The tradition of versification in Old English, with special reference to the Battle of Maldon and its alliteration” (MS Tolkien 30/2; probably of the late 1920s) and gives the following renderings respectively: “heart shall be bolder, harder be purpose, / more stern the will as our strength faileth” (MS Tolkien A 30/1, fol. 3r) and “Each mind shall be the / sterner, heart the bolder, each spirit greater / as our strength lessens!” (MS Tolkien A 30/2, fol. 135r).23 Furthermore, the two extant translations in his notes to Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics (lecture delivered 1937) both do without “proud/pride”: “The spirit shall be more resolute, the heart more bold, the courage greater as our strength grows less” (B&C 59) and “The spirit shall be more inflexible, the heart more bold, the courage greater, as our strength grows less” (B&C 114). It is telling that he seems to eschew “proud/pride” when his translation is not influenced by considerations of the alliterative line. The choice of words here is based on conveying a precise modern meaning in a lecture

194

The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth rather than literary re-creation, otherwise Tolkien would probably have avoided the Romance words “spirit,” “courage,” and “inflexible.” The lines in Totta’s vision, too, show signs of heavy corrections. The typed text Let heart be prouder, harder be purpose, more stern the will, as our strength weakens! (version K, fol. 111, lines 335-336 in Tolkien’s continuous numbering of the dialogue) is partially crossed out and the new (half-)lines are given in blue ink in the margins so that we get the published version Heart shall be bolder, harder be purpose, more proud the spirit as our power lessens! (TL 141) The survival of “proud” in the final version of Totta’s vision, even though relegated from its original position, seems, at first sight, to run counter to my argument. It also differs from the translation given in the “prefatory note,”24 but the care with which Tolkien entered the corrections makes a simple copying-mistake unlikely. The explanation, I surmise, lies in the fact that the lines are not connected with Beorhtnoth’s pride, but rather with the “keen spirit” of (unspecified) retainers. As pointed out before, “proud heart” or “proud spirit” need not be seen negatively, especially if one keeps in mind that the Old English word translated by “proud” is “cene” and if this quality occurs in its proper place and context. It is only the “misplaced” (and excessive) pride that is condemned—and rightly so. Conclusion The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth is one of the rare (known) instances where Tolkien’s literary muse ostensibly inspired his scholarly genius— or, at least, helped him to develop and clarify his ideas. The exceptional nature of the text is, of course, mainly due to the “hybrid” nature of the piece itself. My discussion of the revisions in connection with Tolkien’s use of “pride/proud” has illustrated how two modes of thinking are intertwined, and how they influenced each other. NOTES I would like to thank Dr. Allan Turner, who has read several versions of this paper, for his numerous helpful and perceptive comments and suggestions.

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Thomas Honegger 1

This is true not only for its immediate context in Essays and Studies (see Tolkien’s explicit reference to this problem in the second sentence of his “endnote” on ofermod [TL 143]) but also for its (non-)reception in the scholarly discourse on The Battle of Maldon (see Shippey, “Reputation”) and in Tolkien studies in general. The only scholarly article on Homecoming known to me, apart from Paul H. Kocher’s chapter in his Master of Middle-earth (Kocher 184-193), is Shippey’s “Tolkien and ‘The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth.’”

2

A radio production of Homecoming was broadcast on the BBC Third Programme in 1954 (cf. Hammond 303). A cassette version recorded by Tolkien himself reading the dialogue (with sound effects) and with the added commentary read by Christopher Tolkien was given to attendees of the 1992 Centenary Conference, courtesy of the Estate and HarperCollins.

3

The exact meaning of OE ofermod has been a matter of debate for decades. Gneuss provides a useful and learned overview of the discussion up to 1976.

4

MS Tolkien A21/5, a notebook containing Old English-Modern English word-lists dating from around 1920, contains words from The Battle of Maldon (7r). MS Tolkien 30/2 (no date indicated) contains extensive notes on the poem (with special reference to its meter) together with a translation and may constitute the notes for Tolkien’s lecture.

5

See also Anderson (19-21).

6

A note in pencil on the right-hand corner of the first page identifies version A as the “earliest copy” (fol. 1).

7

Version J is a fragmentary typescript comprising four pages (fols. 9497), of which the first two pages (fols. 94 and 95) have the same text.

8

The one prominent change in meter takes place between version D and E when Tolkien rewrites the entire dialogue, which has been given in iambic pentameter with rhyming couplets (versions α, A, B, C, and D), in alliterative lines (versions E to K).

9

Tolkien does not provide the full original names for the early hypocoristic forms Tudda, Pudda, or Tibba. Old English dithematic names form hypocorisms by making the first element into a weak masculine noun (ending in –a), i.e. Tída < Tídwald or Totta < Torhthelm.

10 “Tudda, How came they thus to” is added in pencil but not extant in version B (fol. 7). 196

The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth 11 Correction (?) in pencil: “by the shore” (?) for “brine,” which is, however, not crossed out. Version B (fol. 7) retains the original reading with “brine,” but C (fol. 11) has “shore,” which is crossed out and overwritten by “bank.” 12 Correction/alternative reading added in pencil: “there.” Version B (fol. 7), however, retains the original reading “there’s only one lying,” but C (fol. 11) has “there’s only one there lying.” 13 All quotations from the manuscripts are printed with the permission of the Tolkien Estate. 14 See also Tolkien’s use of “proud” in The Lord of the Rings (Blackwelder 182). It frequently occurs in combination with a second adjective and often carries positive connotations. The same is, however, not true for “pride” (Blackwelder 181) where the negative examples are more numerous. 15 Tolkien (TL 147, footnote 1), in connection with his discussion of the meaning of Old English ofermod, points out the English aversion to “excess”—which is not only reflected in the “too” but is also visible, in a different and earlier context (ca. 1930), in Tolkien’s description of Melkor in the Old English versions of The Annals of Valinor: “ Melko 7 béah to firenlustum and úpahæfennesse and oferméttum” (Shaping 285). (Translation: And Melko turned towards sinful desires and arrogance and pride [plural].) 16 The material that has been, in the preceding versions, included in the “endnotes” is now relegated to the “introductory note.” 17 Tolkien thus finds elements of “severe criticism” (TL 147) in a poem that he, in the fictional framework of Homecoming, once ascribed to Totta (version H, fol. 63v): “For the purpose of this modern poem, it is suggested that Torhthelm (Totta) afterwards composes, when the duke’s body has been brought to its long home at Ely, composes the poem, The Battle of Maldon.” This ascription is crossed out diagonally with black ink and did not make it into the final typescript because it would make Totta, who is presented in the poem as cowardly, boastful, murderous (cf. Shippey, “Homecoming” 326-27), and naïve, into a poet who is subtly critical of misplaced heroism. 18 See Gneuss for a summary of the scholarly discussion of the meaning(s) of OE ofermod and the implications for the interpretation of the poem. 19 Tolkien (TL 144), without indicating his source, quotes Gordon’s (24) 197

Thomas Honegger assessment of the poem only to present his differing view on the poem’s “heroism.” See also Busse and Holtei on “heroism” in The Battle of Maldon. 20 See Shippey (“Homecoming”) for a more extensive discussion of this aspect. 21 He may have “mis-remembered” line 190b where the narrator of The Battle of Maldon expresses his disapproval in similar terms (“þe hit riht ne wæs”). 22 Tida’s comment reads almost like Tolkien’s own rejection (cf. footnote 1 to his “endnote,” TL 147) of the translation of OE ofermod as “overboldness” in favour of “excessive pride.” 23 Tolkien corrected this passage several times, yet never used “proud/ pride.” I give the final version. 24 “Will shall be the sterner, heart the bolder, spirit the greater as our strength lessens.” (TL 124). WORKS CITED Anderson, Douglas A. “‘An industrious little devil’: E.V. Gordon as friend and collaborator with Tolkien.” In Tolkien the Medievalist, edited by Jane Chance. London and New York: Routledge, 2003, 1625. Blackwelder, Richard E. A Tolkien Thesaurus. New York and London: Garland, 1990. Busse, W.G. and R. Holtei. “The Battle of Maldon: A Historical, Heroic and Political Poem.” In Old English Shorter Poems: Basic Readings, edited by Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe. New York and London: Garland, 1994, 185-97. [First published in Neophilologus 65 (1981): 614-21] Carpenter, Humphrey. J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography. London: Allen & Unwin, 1977. Dictionary of Old English [DOE]. Centre for Medieval Studies: University of Toronto [www.doe.utoronto.ca]. Gneuss, Helmut. “The Battle of Maldon 89: Byrhtnoð’s ofermod Once Again.” In Old English Shorter Poems: Basic Readings, edited by Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe. New York and London: Garland 198

The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Publishing, 1994, 149-72. [First published in Studies in Philology 73 (1976): 117-37] Gordon, E[ric] V[alentine], ed. The Battle of Maldon, London: Methuen, 1968. [Reprint, first published 1937] Hammond, Wayne G. (with the assistance of Douglas Anderson). J.R.R. Tolkien: A Descriptive Bibliography. Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1993. Kocher, Paul H. Master of Middle-earth: The Fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien, New York: Del Rey, 1977. [First published 1972] Shippey, Tom A. “Tolkien’s Academic Reputation Now.” In Roots and Branches: Selected Papers on Tolkien by Tom Shippey. Cormarë Series 11. Zurich and Berne: Walking Tree Publishers, 2007. 203-12. _____. “Tolkien and ‘The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth.’” In Roots and Branches: Selected Papers on Tolkien by Tom Shippey. Cormarë Series 11. Zurich and Berne: Walking Tree Publishers, 2007. 323-39. Tolkien, J.R.R. MS. Tolkien 5. In Tolkien Papers. Oxford: Bodleian Library. _____. Tolkien A 21/5. In Tolkien Papers. Oxford: Bodleian Library. _____. Tolkien A 30/1. In Tolkien Papers. Oxford: Bodleian Library. _____. Tolkien A 30/2. In Tolkien Papers. Oxford: Bodleian Library. _____. Tree and Leaf / The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, London: HarperCollins, 2001.

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Notes and Documents Tracking the Elusive Hobbit (In Its Pre-Shire Den) MARJORIE BURNS

A

short way into The Hobbit, the narrator—as though suddenly aware of reader ignorance—pauses to fill the audience in on hobbits and hobbit traits. What we learn, in essence, is that hobbits are “a little people, about half our height, and smaller than the bearded dwarves”; hobbits themselves have no beards. There is “little or no magic” about hobbits. They tend to be “fat in the stomach”; they “dress in bright colors”; they “wear no shoes” (having leathery, hairy feet), and they have “long clever brown fingers, good-natured faces, and deep fruity laughs” (H, I, 30). This, as the narrator claims, may be “enough to go on with,” but it has not been enough to satisfy Tolkien fans. Not even the additional material offered in the Prologue to The Fellowship of the Ring (facts about hobbit history and hobbit society) has ever seemed enough. What remains unanswered, what has continued to intrigue Tolkien enthusiasts, are uncertainties about hobbit origins—both the very idea of hobbits and the word hobbit itself. We know how Tolkien came to write the opening sentence of The Hobbit, how he came upon a blank sheet while correcting School Certificate papers and found himself scribbling: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” “I did not and do not know why,” he wrote to W. H. Auden in 1955 (Letters 215). Tolkien at first believed he had invented hobbit. Before long, however, other possibilities emerged, possibilities that Tolkien could not always ignore. “One cannot exclude,” Tolkien admitted to Roger Lancelyn Green, “the possibility that buried childhood memories might suddenly rise to the surface long after (in my case after 35-40 years), though they might be quite differently applied” (Letters 407). Archaic words, dialect words, and names for various folklore beings—all of them similar in sound to hobbit—were suggested as Tolkien’s source, words such as hobbity-hoy, hobgoblin, hobyah, or the Scottish hubbit, hubbet, and hobbet. Words outside of folklore were offered up as well: rabbit (a possibility Tolkien forcefully rejected) and even Babbitt,1 (offhandedly mentioned by Tolkien himself during in a 1968 interview).2 All this and much more can be found in Donald O’Brien’s 1989 essay “On the Origin of the Name ‘Hobbit.’” And to O’Brien’s list should be added Lady Charlotte Guest’s 1849 reference to an Arthurian figure called the “HalfCopyright © West Virginia University Press

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Tracking the Elusive Hobbit (In Its Pre-Shire Den) man (Habit),” a name that comes surprisingly close to Tolkien’s Halfling hobbits.3 It was only later, long after hobbits had gained a firm cultural footing, that Tolkien came up with his own linguistic explanation of their name as a “worn-down form” of the Old English holbytla, or hole-builder (RK, Appendix F, II, 416),4 but even this inventive philological theory failed to close the matter. In 1977 (four years after Tolkien’s death), an earlier use of hobbit—as a name for a supernatural being—was discovered in The Denham Tracts, a two-volume collection of folklore material published in 1892 and 1895.5 There is no proof, however, that Tolkien read The Denham Tracts. He therefore may or may not have been influenced by them, just as he may or may not have been influenced by any number of other similar sounding names and words suggested by researchers and fans. So what do we have? One linguistic explanation created by the author long after the fact, some word associations (rabbit and Babbitt, for instance), and an extensive collection of archaic words or names that existed in the language and lore of Britain long before Tolkien wrote his hobbit sentence on that blank sheet of paper. Among these possibilities, only rabbits (with their timidity), Babbitt (with his middleclass associations), and Tolkien’s hole-builder suggest anything of hobbit nature, and even they fall far short of depicting the amiable, comfort-loving Shiredwellers of Tolkien’s created world. Moreover, not one of the numerous proposed connections suggests scenes or events that occur in Tolkien’s stories. Nonetheless, parallels to Bilbo’s adventures (and to a lesser extent Frodo’s adventures) do exist, not in folklore or older English forms but in three modern works—in an autobiographical account from the late nineteenth century (William Morris’s Icelandic Journals), in a children’s fantasy from the early twentieth century (E. A. Wyke-Smith’s The Marvellous Land of Snergs), and in another early twentieth century work (John Buchan’s Huntingtower). We know Tolkien was familiar with Morris’s literature and with Wyke-Smith’s story of Snergs; and according to Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien—though he claimed to read little contemporary fiction—“liked the stories of John Buchan” (165). Morris’s Icelandic Journals (1871, 1873) and Wyke-Smith’s book (1927) have already received critical attention, the first in “Two Who Loved the North” from Perilous Realms: Celtic and Norse in Tolkien’s Middle-earth by Marjorie Burns,6 the second in Douglas Anderson’s introductions to The Annotated Hobbit and to the 1996 reissuing of The Marvellous Land of Snergs.7 What has not yet been closely analyzed, however, is the influence of Buchan’s main character, Dickson McCunn, particularly in Huntingtower (1921), the first of Dickson’s three adventures.8 (Castle Gay and The House of the Four Winds followed Huntingtower in 1930 and 1935.) In both 201

Marjorie Burns Huntingtower and The Hobbit (1937), a sheltered, untried, and somewhat incompetent individual leaves home and security behind and heads off into a rougher, more dangerous, less civilized world. In both accounts this individual grows into a wiser, more confident member of a heroic inner group. In itself this may not seem like much. Tales of personal improvement under the hardships of adventure are common enough. The soft and spoiled Harvey Cheyne in Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous becomes a far better, far more competent young man after serving for a season on a Grand Banks fishing schooner. The least experienced and most naïve of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s explorers in The Lost World becomes a hero in his own right as the story unfolds. What is most notable about Huntingtower, however, are the high number of parallels between Tolkien’s Bilbo Baggins and Buchan’s Dickson McCunn, a retired grocer of more than moderate success in the supplier line. At the age of fifty-five Dickson McCunn heads off on a walking tour. His wife is away enjoying herself at a “hydropathic” (at what we would today call a spa). Their only child died young. Like Dickson, Bilbo is well off, free of immediate familial or community duties, and has a comfortable home waiting his return. Dickson is fifty-five, Bilbo fifty-one. Both are short and rotund; both are initially looked upon as comically ineffectual. Both have slightly ridiculous names. “Golly, what a name!” John Heritage exclaims when he first hears Dickson’s name; and when Heritage learns McCunn is a “very old Highland” name, meaning “the son of a dog,” he pointedly begins calling him “Dogson” instead of McCunn (35). Both Dickson and Bilbo are greatly cheered by food, and what each enjoys most are plain, homey meals. Dickson “rapaciously” devours “a second breakfast” (211); and Bilbo, who has just finished breakfast when Gandalf appears, believes “a cake or two and a drink of something” might help him recover from the wizard’s disturbing visit (H, I, 36 ). Both love flowers and gardens; both are affected by language. Dickson has a “passion for words and cadences” and a shelf “of spirited poetry” (19); he loves old traditional tunes. The same is true of Bilbo, who loves song and poetry, as well as tales “about dragons and goblins and giants and the rescue of princesses and the unexpected luck of widow’s sons” (H, I, 35). And where Bilbo is partial to stories of princesses being rescued, Dickson rescues a princess in fact. Dickson keeps a holiday diary, and Bilbo will later write up his adventures, calling them “There and Back Again, A Hobbit’s Holiday.” Both are inspired by maps. Both bring a bourgeois practicality into the world of adventure and romance. Both fall into adventure rather than seek it. Both are initially out of their depth when adventure begins. Both long to return to their comfortable hearths 202

Tracking the Elusive Hobbit (In Its Pre-Shire Den) and homes. Dickson pictures a “luxurious tea by his own fireside” and yearns for his old “humdrum” life (126 and 120); Bilbo time and again wishes he were back in his “nice hole by the fire, with the kettle just beginning to sing” (H, II, 66). Both have moments of feeling—in Buchan’s words—“small, lonely, and forlorn” (119). Each, however, has an inner romantic soul. Bilbo, “although he looked and behaved exactly like a second edition of his solid and comfortable father” (H, I, 31) has a Tookish, adventurous side. And Dickson, though he has “never strayed a yard from his sober rut” in the grocery trade, “voyaged among books” as a boy. His mind “like the Dying Gladiator’s” remains “far away”: “Sir Walter Scott had been his first guide, but he read the novels not for their insight into human character or for the historical pageantry, but because they gave him material wherewith to construct fantastic journeys” (18-19). To passers-by, Dickson appears as nothing more than “a common little man on a prosaic errand.” But those who see him so do not “see into the heart”; they do not see that the “plump citizen” is “the eternal pilgrim,” that he is “Jason, Ulysses, Eric the Red, Albuquerque, Cortez—starting out to discover new worlds” (23). Dickson’s story takes place in early twentieth-century Scotland, where the weather matches both the May-time glory of Bilbo’s first days on the road and the misery of wet and chill that soon follows after. An “unrelenting drizzle” leaves Dickson soaked like a “sponge.” His “waterproof was not water-proof, and the rain penetrated to his most intimate garments” (23). In The Hobbit, rain drips from Bilbo’s hood into his eyes and his cloak is “full of water” (H, II, 66). Initially both need considerable help from others. Bilbo must be carried through the goblin tunnels and helped up a tree. Dickson, “who stuck fast on the second stone,” has to be rescued in the middle of a stream (89). Still, those who question Dickson’s or Bilbo’s abilities serve only to spur them on. When a companion doubts Dickson is capable of scaling a wall (adding that his “hinder end” would “be a grand mark for a gun”), Dickson, who had been about to quit, insists on going on (88). When Gloin makes a disparaging comment about Bilbo’s burglar skills, Bilbo decides on the spot he will join the quest. Both experience skirmishes in the dark. Both have culminating battles that are somewhat disjointed affairs. Like the elves, men, and dwarves who join forces in the Battle of the Five Armies, Buchan’s heroes do not start out organized and unified but draw together as the fighting begins. In both stories, a garrison is further fortified; in both, reinforcement arrives just in time—sending goblins fleeing in all directions in The Hobbit (H, XVIII, 349-50) and villains “tumbling” in “rapid retreat” in Huntingtower (298). In time, both Bilbo and Dickson take on larger roles, even 203

Marjorie Burns violent roles, though each tends to remain on the outskirts when heavy battle occurs. Bilbo lies unconscious during the Battle of the Five Armies; Dickson is elsewhere occupied during the Second Battle of the Cruives. These are the bones of the comparison, but a closer look shows more. Early in his story, before his adventures begin, Dickson sweeps aside his “business garments” and replaces them with his faded and stained but well-loved “holiday wear,” a “disreputable” outfit smelling strongly of “camphor” (16-17). In much the same way Bilbo—at the start of The Lord of the Rings—puts his party clothes away before dressing himself in “some old untidy garments” that include a “cloak and hood” taken from a “locked drawer, smelling of moth-balls” (FR, I, i, 40). There is even an intriguing Buchan echo in the hobbits’ lack of beards. We first meet Dickson McCunn just as he is finishing shaving. Buchan describes Dickson’s rosy cheeks and clear skin and informs the reader that Dickson, when “shaved clean,” looks “uncommonly like a wise, plump school boy” (16). But there is more going on in this whole matter of shaving than Dickson’s and Bilbo’s smooth-cheeked, child-like looks. Dickson has just taken to using a safety razor, and he speculates that such a razor—had he owned one earlier—would have saved him a total of “three thousand three hundred and seventy hours” (14). Buchan (through Dickson’s speculation) intends only to celebrate a time-saving razor. Tolkien goes further yet and frees his hobbits from the whole troublesome business of having to shave at all.9 In doing so, Tolkien creates a fictional solution to one of modern’s life’s minor daily frustrations— much as he does by giving Old Took “magic diamond studs that fastened themselves and never came undone till ordered” (H, I, 33). More interesting yet, however, are the inclusion of grocer and burglar in both authors’ works. “As soon as I clapped eyes on the little fellow bobbing and puffing on the mat, I had my doubts,” Gloin says about Bilbo early in The Hobbit. “He looks more like a grocer than a burglar” (H, I, 48). This insult is long remembered by Bilbo. “More like a grocer than a burglar, indeed!” he says to himself in Smaug’s den, while triumphantly stealing a cup. Though the label of grocer may initially seem appropriate enough for a food-loving hobbit, the term has a particular history and a particular significance. Since they were first incorporated in the fourteenth century, grocers have been wholesale merchants dealing in spices and foreign produce. Such a level of sophistication and endeavor seems unlikely in the Shire, and this means Tolkien’s use of the term must be seen as slightly odd—unless, that is, we have met Mr. Dickson McCunn, a grocer who becomes a burglar or who at least sees himself as someone breaking the “laws against burglary” or committing “burglary” or acting in a “burglarious” manner (94, 86, 200). Even the word burglarious, a fittingly comic one, is echoed in The Hobbit. “Of the various burglarious 204

Tracking the Elusive Hobbit (In Its Pre-Shire Den) proceedings [Bilbo] had heard of, picking the trolls’ pockets seemed the least difficult” (H, II, 73).10 Burglary, it turns out, is a perfectly appropriate term for both authors to use. As T. A. Shippey points out in “The Bourgeois Burglar” from The Road to Middle-earth, burglar comes from the same root as bourgeois: “(burh = ‘town’ or ‘stockade house’).” The two related words are therefore “eternal opposites.” They are, however, “opposites on the same level” (67), making burglar a considerably more appropriately expression for someone with a Bilbo’s background than the more romantic thief. The same is true of Dickson, who, like Bilbo, is as bourgeois as they get. What is equally important, however, is the excellent way in which bourgeois traits serve both characters. In a scene fraught with references to “interest,” “shares,” “claims,” and “profits,” Bilbo uncovers the Arkenstone and hands it over to Bard, well aware of the negotiating powers the Arkenstone will bring (H, XVI, 329-31). In this, Bilbo resembles his literary ancestor, Dickson McCunn, who slips away with the jewels of a Russian princess and who negotiates their safekeeping with a banker friend. All three of the Dickson McCunn adventures are resolved—at least in part—by Dickson’s “business head” (240). In the last two adventures (Castle Gay and The House of the Four Winds), Dickson is specifically brought into the action because of his business practicality and negotiating skills. In the words of the Princess Saskia, Dickson “is the petit bourgeois, the épicier, the class which the world ridicules.” She then goes on to say: “You will not find him in Russia. He is what we call the middleclass, which we who were foolish used to laugh at. But he is the stuff which above all others makes a great people. He will endure when aristocracies crack and proletariats crumble” (321).11 Where Bilbo has his dwarves, Dickson has the Gorbals Die-Hards, a ratty group of idealistic slum boys, determined to form their own “unauthorized and unofficial” band of Boy Scouts “without uniform or badge” (24). The fit between Tolkien’s Dwarves and Buchan’s Die-hards is by no means exact. A collection of ragged, “stunted,” homeless boys is not the same as a band of treasure-seeking dwarves. Both, however, have been hardened by difficulty and rough experience, and both are undersized. Dougal, the leader of the Die-Hards, has the face of a fifteen-year-old but “the stature of a child of twelve” (72). And where Bilbo encounters the dangerous and frightening trolls, Dickson has his run-in with rough and threatening tinkers. Dickson “thought he had never seen such ruffianly-looking customers” (90). Like Tolkien’s trolls, the tinkers are lumbering in their movements and comically low in speech. When Dickson is captured and knocked unconscious, three voices speak:

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Marjorie Burns “Are ye sure it’s the richt man, Ecky?” said a voice which he did not hear. “Sure. It’s the Glesca body Dobson telled us to look for yesterday. It’s a pund note atween us for this job. We’ll tie him up in the wud till we’ve time to attend to him.” “Is he bad?” “It doesna maitter,” said the one called Ecky. “He’ll be deid onyway long afore the morn.” (220) Making allowances for Buchan’s Scotticisms, Tolkien’s trolls talk much the same. “Blimey, Bert, look what I’ve copped!” said William. “What is it?” said the others coming up. “Lumme, if I knows! What are yer?” (H, II, 73) And further on: “I won’t have it,” said William. “I caught him anyway.” “You’re a fat fool, William, “said Bert, “as I’ve said afore this evening.” (H, II, 76) Again like the trolls, the tinkers are first seen deep within the woods, clustered around a fire; from here they head out on destructive raids. But Buchan’s tinkers also have parallels with Mirkwood’s entrapping spiders. When Dickson comes to his senses, “alone” within “the gloom of dense pines,” he realizes he is thoroughly bound. Like Bilbo, who has lost the dwarves and who suddenly finds a spider has been “tying him up while he dozed” (H, VIII, 207), Dickson is caught against a tree. And like the dangling, spider-wrapped dwarves of The Hobbit, Dickson can breathe “freely enough” though he cannot move his head (227).12 There is no wizard in Buchan’s story, though Dickson, in a moment of self disgust, imagines a tall, judgmental “stranger with a wand” looking at him and “pointing” (127). Nonetheless, something of Gandalf ’s role is filled by John Heritage, whose name, says Dickson, “is like a name out of a book” (35). Heritage is an ex-soldier and would-be poet who has information Dickson is lacking. He is the one who brings Dickson into adventure; and he serves, as Gandalf does, as a sporadic guide.13 Connections between Buchan and Tolkien, however, go well beyond their use of similar characters. What is also striking about both writers are their shared attitudes. Though both greatly value the small and the lowly, both also respect and acknowledge the high. “The business Scot does not usually revere wealth, though he may pursue it earnestly, nor does he specially admire rank in the common sense. But for ancient race he has respect in his bones, though it may happen that in public he denies 206

Tracking the Elusive Hobbit (In Its Pre-Shire Den) it, and the laird has for him a secular association with good family” (219). The hobbits too have an innate respect for the high. Though hobbits are essentially an egalitarian people with little “government,” and though there has been “no king for nearly a thousand years,” hobbits respect the kingly tradition and live by kingly law (FR, Prologue, 18). Similarly, Buchan’s and Tolkien’s characters are touched by the past and by the effect of the past on the present. “The old lords of Huntingtower had once quarrelled and revelled and plotted here,” thinks Dickson, when he first arrives at the old keep, and “now here he was at the same game. Present and past joined hands over the gulf of years. The saga of Huntingtower was not ended” (172).14 Bilbo too is caught up in a story that began long ago. “Then the prophecies of the old songs have turned out to be true, after a fashion,” Bilbo says to Gandalf on the last page of The Hobbit. “Of course!” Gandalf responds, “And why should not they prove true? Surely you don’t disbelieve the prophecies, because you had a hand in bringing them about yourself ?” (H, XIX, 362).15 But of all the similarities between Huntingtower and The Hobbit (or The Lord of the Rings), the strongest lies in the bond between Mr. Bilbo Baggins and Mr. Dickson McCunn. In the middle of the book, at a moment of rising danger, Dickson looks back over the last few days and comes to a sudden, epiphanic awareness, an awareness that could almost be Bilbo’s too: On their right the House rose like a dark cloud, but Dickson had lost his terror of it. There were three angry men inside it, he remembered: long let them stay there. He marvelled at his mood, and also rejoiced, for his worst fear had always been that he might prove a coward. Now he was puzzled to think how he could ever be frightened again, for his one object was to succeed, and in that absorption fear seemed to him merely a waste of time. “It all comes of treating the thing as a business proposition,” he told himself. But there was far more in his heart than this sober resolution. He was intoxicated with the resurgence of youth and felt a rapture of audacity which he never remembered in his decorous boyhood. “I haven’t been doing badly for an old man,” he reflected with glee. What, oh what had become of the pillar of commerce, the man who might have been a Bailie had he sought municipal honours, the elder in the Guthrie Memorial Kirk, the instructor of literary young men? In the past three days he had levanted with jewels which had once been an Emperor’s and certainly were not his; he had burglariously entered and made free of a stranger’s house; 207

Marjorie Burns he had played hide-and-seek at the risk of his neck and he had wrestled in the dark with a foreign miscreant; he had shot at an eminent solicitor with intent to kill; and he was now engaged in tramping the world with a fairy-tale Princess. I blush to confess that of each of his doings he was unashamedly proud and thirsted for many more in the same line. “Gosh, but I’m seeing life,” was his unregenerate conclusion. (199-200) NOTES 1

From the hopelessly middleclass Babbitt of Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 novel by the same name.

2

Interview by Charlotte and Denis Plimmer, published in The Daily Telegraph Magazine, 22 March, 1968.

3

From a note appearing in Lady Charlotte Guest’s translation of the Mabinogion (a translation Tolkien owned). See Marjorie Burns’s Perilous Realms: Celtic and Norse in Tolkien’s Middle-earth (21-2 and 183n 33) for further commentary.

4

See T. A. Shippey’s commentary on “hol-bytla” in The Road to Middleearth (61-2).

5

Collected by Michael Aislabie Denham and edited by Dr. James Hardy. See Douglas A. Anderson’s The Annotated Hobbit (9) for the list in question and further information about the Tracts.

6

Morris’s Icelandic Journals are rich in Hobbit similarities, not only in the trolls, eagles, ravens, ponies, goblin caves, rushing rivers, and burial mounds Morris encounters (particularly on his journey to the sequestered valley of Water-dale), but also in the bumbling persona Morris creates for himself in his journal accounts.

7

Influence from The Marvellous Land of Snergs was openly acknowledged by Tolkien: the Snergs (short, gregarious, long-living, and feast-loving) were “probably an unconscious source-book! for the Hobbits, not of anything else” (Letters 215n).

8

The first to notice a similarity between Bilbo Baggins and Dickson McCunn was Jared Lobdell in England and Always and again in The Rise of Tolkienian Fantasy. Though Lobdell does not elaborate, he correctly points to Huntingtower as having “the most Hobbit-like of heroes” (Rise 77).

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Tracking the Elusive Hobbit (In Its Pre-Shire Den) 9

The same beardlessness is found among Tolkien’s Elves—with small exceptions: Cirdan the Shipwright has a beard (See RK, VI, ix, 310). Among papers associated with The Shibboleth of Fëanor (written by Tolkien in the late 1960’s) is one claiming “Elves did not have beards until they entered their third cycle of life.” See Hostetter (7-10).

10 The Oxford English Dictionary cites 1769 for the first appearance of burglarious. Though not a common word, burglarious also appears in nineteenth-century novels by both William Makepeace Thackeray and Charles Dickens. 11 In a parallel to Arwen in The Lord of the Rings, Saskia is the longsought princess to be won by a wandering prince. Saskia, however, is far more like Galadriel than Arwen, and scenes with Saskia recall both Galadriel and other characters in The Lord of the Rings. Saskia’s calling out from a high windy ridge, for example, brings to mind both Galadriel’s farewell to the Fellowship and Goldberry’s to the hobbits. 12 There is a The Lord of the Rings echo in this scene as well. Like Frodo in the Barrow-wight’s tomb, the captured and bound Dickson feels “cold and sick” and defeated. He has “no strength in his limbs” (229). Suddenly, however—just as with Frodo—something “stiff and indomitable” in Dickson rises up and his determination returns (230). Again, much like Frodo, who asks, “Why did [the Ring] come to me? Why was I chosen?” (FR, I, ii, 70), Dickson wonders why “Providence” picked him “out of the great crowd of sedentary folk for this sore ordeal” (127). 13 Heritage’s role has further echoes in The Lord of the Rings. At the start of his adventure, Dickson comes upon two young men during an evening at an inn. One is the dark-haired, ex-soldier John Heritage. The other is Alexis Nicolaevitch, an exiled prince seeking the Princess Saskia, from whom he has long been separated and with whom he has long been in love. Hints of Aragorn linger about both men. Each is in love with the Princess; each has proved his courage. Alexis, however, presents a closer match. He too is traveling in disguise; he too is initially regarded with suspicion; and he too ends up the most heroic figure of all. 14 It is worth noting that the Huntingtower house, Dalquharter, is referred to as the “Dark Tower,” the same term used by Tolkien for Barad-dûr in The Lord of the Rings. Moreover, Dalquharter is rendered into “Darkwater” by those unfamiliar with the name. Both Dalquhar-

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Marjorie Burns ter and its slippage into “Darkwater” would certainly have appealed to Tolkien’s linguist’s ear. 15 In The Lord of the Rings, Sam comes to a similar understanding. For him the present and the past join hands through the light of the Silmaril. “I never thought of that before! We’ve got—you’ve got some of the light of it in that star-glass that the Lady gave you! Why, to think of it, we’re in the same tale still! It’s going on” (TT, IV, viii, 321). WORKS CITED Anderson, Douglas A. The Annotated Hobbit. Rev. ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002. Buchan, John. Huntingtower. London, Toronto, New York: Hodder and Stoughton, 1922. Burns, Marjorie. Perilous Realms: Celtic and Norse in Tolkien’s Middle-earth. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. Carpenter, Humphrey. Tolkien: A Biography. London: George Allen and Unwin; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1977. Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. The Lost World. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1912. Guest, Lady Charlotte. Note, p. 322 in The Mabinogion. Edited and translated by Lady Charlotte Guest. London: J.M. Dent and Company; New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1906. Hostetter, Carl F. “From The Shibboleth of Fëanor.” Vinyar Tengwar 41 (July 2000): 7-10. Kipling, Rudyard. Captains Courageous. New York: The Century Co., 1897. Lobdell, Jared. England and Always: Tolkien’s World of the Rings. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1981. ———. The Rise of Tolkienian Fantasy. Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing Company, 2005. O’Brien, Donald. “On the Origin of the Name ‘Hobbit.’” Mythlore 16, no. 2 (Winter 1989): 32-38. Shippey, T. A. The Road to Middle-earth. 2nd ed. London: Grafton, 1992.

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Tracking the Elusive Hobbit (In Its Pre-Shire Den) Tolkien, J.R.R. “The Man Who Understands Hobbits.” Interview by Charlotte and Denis Plimmer. The Daily Telegraph Magazine 181 (22 March 1968): 31-33. Wyke-Smith, E. A. The Marvellous Land of Snergs. Edited with an introduction by Douglas A. Anderson. Baltimore, MD: Old Earth Books, 1996.

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Yvette L. Kisor

Notes and Documents “Elves (and Hobbits) always refer to the Sun as She”: Some Notes on a Note in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings YVETTE L. KISOR

I

n Chapter Nine of the first book of The Fellowship of the Ring, “At the Sign of the Prancing Pony,” Frodo sings a song recounting the Man of the Moon’s adventures at an inn, what T. A. Shippey might refer to as an asterisk-song,1 a reconstructed original of which the English nursery rhyme The Cat and the Fiddle2 is a surviving fragment.3 In the last stanza of Frodo’s song the Sun is referred to as female, and Tolkien provides a note of explanation: “Elves (and Hobbits) always refer to the Sun as She” (FR, I, ix, 172). 4 This note tells us something about Elvish (and Hobbitish) practice, but it also reveals much more, functioning as a key to Tolkien’s creative process, his sources, and the way philology informs his myth-making. The note is necessary, of course, because the reference to the sun as female is surprising, at least to the modern reader. In the western world the sun is usually conceived of as masculine—it is the moon that is more commonly seen as feminine, and this association goes back a long way. The Romans associated Apollo with the sun and his sister Diana (Artemis in the Greek pantheon) with the moon, and in the classical tradition the other deities associated with sun and moon similarly fall along gender lines: the male gods Helios and Sol with the sun; the female goddesses Luna and Selene with the moon. The association of sun with male and moon with female is a strong one in the western tradition. Tolkien was well aware of this tradition and his subversion of it, hinted at in FR, is given a larger explanation in The Silmarillion. Chapter Eleven of the Quenta Silmarillion, “Of the Sun and Moon and the Hiding of Valinor,” explains how the sun and moon were created after the destruction of the Two Trees. In response to Yavanna’s singing, Telperion bore one final flower of silver and Laurelin one last fruit of gold before they died, and for these Aulë fashioned vessels to be guided by two Maiar: a maiden Arien for the Sun and the youth Tilion for the Moon. Arien, a spirit of fire, had tended the gardens of golden flowers and Tilion had been a hunter with a silver bow (S 98-102). The switch of gender in these guardians of the sun and moon is all the more noticeable because otherwise Tolkien keeps to familiar 212

“Elves (and Hobbits) always refer to the Sun as She” tradition—Tilion is a hunter associated with the bow just as is Diana/ Artemis, and the supremacy of the sun is clear. While Arien is chosen by the Valar, Tilion must beg for the task of guiding the moon, and “Arien the maiden was mightier than he” (100); Morgoth assails Tilion but dares not attack Arien (101). Tilion is not only weaker but has other qualities normally associated with the “feminine” moon, particularly changeableness; further he is drawn towards Arien: “But Tilion was wayward and uncertain in speed, and held not to his appointed path; and he sought to come near to Arien, being drawn by her splendour . . . Tilion went with uncertain pace, as yet he goes, and was still drawn towards Arien, as he shall ever be” (100, 101). Thus Tolkien maintains the essential qualities familiar from classical western tradition: the guardian of the moon is a hunter, lesser and more wayward than the guardian of the sun, being drawn towards the sun; the guardian of the sun is fiery and strong: “she was as a naked flame, terrible in the fullness of her splendour” (100). The main associations of sun and moon, largely a function of the innate characteristics of the astronomical bodies themselves (the brightness of the sun, the phases of the moon, etc.), remain intact but the traditional gender binary opposition is reversed.5 But Tolkien is working not only with a mythological tradition, he is working with a philological one, and as is so often the case with Tolkien his mythological innovations can be traced to philology. In most IndoEuropean languages nouns have grammatical gender, so the words for “sun” and “moon” are designated as grammatically masculine or feminine. Thus the Latin and Greek words for “sun” and “moon” are designated as masculine and feminine respectively: sol (masculine) and luna (feminine) in Latin and ὁ ἥλιος (masculine) and ἡ σελήνη (feminine) in Greek. This gendering is reflected in the Romance languages that descend from Latin: le soleil (masculine) and la luna (feminine) in French, il sole (masculine) and la lune (feminine) in Italian, el sol (masculine) and la luna (feminine) in Spanish, etc. But the Germanic tradition is different. In the Germanic languages the words for “sun” are feminine while the words for “moon” are masculine: die Sonne (feminine) and der Mond (masculine) in modern German, for instance. Modern English nouns no longer have grammatical gender, but Old English did, as did Old Norse. The Old English word for “moon” is se mona, grammatically masculine, and the Old English word for “sun” is seo sunne, grammatically feminine; their Old Norse counterparts are máni (“moon,” masculine) and sól (“sun,” feminine). Grammatical gender should not be taken for actual gender, but in the case of the sun and moon, two entities that are frequently personified, the grammatical gender makes for a curious circumstance when it comes to pronouns. When referring back to a masculine noun like se mona, languages with grammatical gender like Old English must use a 213

Yvette L. Kisor masculine pronoun, and when referring to a feminine antecedent like seo sunne, they require a feminine pronoun. These pronouns should not necessarily be conceived of as “him” and “her”; a careful translation might render them both as “it.” But the tendency to personify the sun and moon specifically is so strong that this is sometimes not what happens. The Old English Martyrology is a case in point. A martyrology is a reference work identifying important days in the church calendar, most frequently saints’ days. The Old English Martyrology includes a narrative component for each day, generally giving an abbreviated version of a saint’s life. The entry for the twenty-first of March narrates the Fourth Day of Creation—the creation of the sun and moon. The last part of the narrative describes the sun and moon after the fulfillment of the second coming; for ease of reference I place the words for sun and moon and the pronouns referring to them in boldface type: þonne scineð seo sunne seofon siðum beorhtor þonne heo nu do, ond heo næfre on setl ne gangeð, ond se mona scineð swa swa nu seo sunne do, ond he næfre ma wonað ne ne weaxeð, ac he standeð á on his endebyrdnesse, þenden þa tunglu her lyhtað on þysse deadlican worolde. symble þonne se mona gangeð æfter þære sunnan, þonne weaxeð his leoht, ond swa he bið þære sunnan neár swa bið his leoht læsse, ond swa he bið hyre fyrr swa bið his leoht máre, ond hwæðre he bið symble þurh þa sunnan onlyhted. (Herzfeld 42, l. 23; 44, l.3) Here the pronouns are entirely as expected: the masculine pronouns he and his (“he” and “his”) refer back to the grammatically masculine se mona “the moon”; the feminine pronouns heo and her (“she” and “her”) refer back to the grammatically feminine seo sunne “the sun.” The standard edition of the Old English Martyrology is the EETS (Early English Text Society) edition of 1900, containing an edition with a facing page translation by George Herzfeld. It was the standard edition in Tolkien’s day as it is today,6 and it is entirely likely that Tolkien would have known it.7 There is a curious oddity in the facing page translation. I reproduce Herzfeld’s translation of the same passage quoted in Old English above, again placing the words for sun and moon and the pronouns referring to them in boldface type: then the sun will shine seven times brighter than he does now, and he will never set, and the moon will shine as the sun does now, and she will never wane nor wax, but she will always remain in her course, as long as the stars shine on this fleeting world. Always when the moon follows the sun, her light increases, and the nearer she is to the sun, 214

“Elves (and Hobbits) always refer to the Sun as She” the less is her light, and the farther she is from him, the greater is her light, and yet she is always illumined by the sun. (Herzfeld 43, l.24; 45, l.3) Herzfeld has completely reversed the grammatical gender. The sun is consistently referred to as “he” and “him”; the moon is always referred to as “she” and “her.” There is absolutely no justification for this in the Old English text. No gendered pronoun is necessary at all, but if personification is desired, surely a translation of the Old English requires the opposite gender.8 Herzfeld’s insistence on maintaining the “expected” gender of the sun and moon at the expense of accuracy speaks to the strength of assumptions regarding gender, even in a passage with minimal mythological content at best.9 In a text with a stronger mythological component, the relationship between philology and mythology becomes more pronounced. In the first poem of the Old Norse Poetic Edda, Völuspá, a seeress relates to Odin the story of the creation of the universe and prophesies its end. In her visionary speech she describes the creation of sun and moon. I quote from the standard edition by Ursula Dronke, once again placing the words for sun and moon and the pronouns referring back to them in boldface type: Sól varp sunnan, sinni mána, hendi inni hœgri um himiniöður. Sól þat né vissi, hvar hón sali átti, stiörnur þat né visso, hvar þær staði átto, máni þat né vissi, hvat hann megins átti. Sun flung from the south —moon’s partner in travel— her right hand10 round the rim of the sky. Sun did not know where she had mansions, stars did not know where they had stations, moon did not know what might he had. (Dronke 8)

215

Yvette L. Kisor The Old Norse word for “sun” is sól (feminine); the word for “moon” is máni (masculine) and the pronouns are declined accordingly: hón “she” refers back to sól “sun” and hann “he” refers back to máni “moon.” Here, however, the translator is willing to allow personification to fall along the lines of grammatical gender. This text is more plainly mythological than the Old English Martyrology and personification is clearly intended—the sun has a hand and both sun and moon are figured as rational creatures. And indeed philology is in accord with mythology, as Sól is goddess of the sun and Máni god of the moon;11 this is reflected in the translation in a way Herzfeld obscures in his edition and translation of the Old English Matyrology. This confluence between mythology and philology was a point of interest to Tolkien. Associated with his unfinished The Notion Club Papers and his account of the drowning of Anadûnê (Númenór), Tolkien wrote a description of the Adunaic (Númenórean) language. In a section concerning the grammatical gender of nouns, there is a discussion of exactly this issue, the relation of grammatical gender to actual gender in the case of bodies subject to personification: “In such cases, however, as nīlō n. ‘moon’, and ūrē n. ‘sun’, beside the personalized forms Nīlū m. and Ūrī f., we have not so much mere personification but the naming of real persons, or what the Adünäim regarded as real persons: the guardian spirits of the Moon and the Sun, in fact ‘The Man in the Moon’ and ‘The Lady of the Sun’” (Sauron 426).12 The converging of grammatical and actual gender observed here in the language of the Númenóreans reflects the same confluence of language and mythology in the Germanic tradition Tolkien drew on in creating his Sun and Moon. Translation practices such as Herzfeld’s that “restore” the mythology of the Romance tradition dominant in Western culture obscure this confluence of language and mythology. In the common expectation of a masculine sun and a feminine moon lies another consequence of the Norman Conquest—the subsuming of a native English tradition by continental French ones. It is a supplanting Tolkien wishes to reverse. For in LotR it is not just “Elves (and Hobbits) [who] always refer to the Sun as She” (FR, I, ix, 172) and the Moon as He. Every sentient being does so, from Men, whether those of Gondor, like Faramir; those of Rohan, like Éomer13; the wild men, like Ghân-buri-Ghân;14 or the Dúnedain, like Aragorn; to Dwarves, like Gimli,15 wizards, like Gandalf,16 and whatever Tom Bombadil is.17 And of course, as the note declares, Elves, like Legolas,18 and Hobbits, like Merry,19 Sam, and Frodo.20 As might be expected, it is a man of Gondor, descended from the Númenóreans, who gives the mythology its fullest articulation; Faramir not only personifies the moon as male he names him: ‘Moonset over Gondor. Fair Ithil, as he goes from Middle-earth, glances upon the white locks of old Mindolluin.’ (TT, IV, 216

“Elves (and Hobbits) always refer to the Sun as She” vi, 293) The authorial voice (that of a hobbit, if we accept the construction of the origins of the Red Book of Westmarch) also participates in this tradition, though not consistently.21 In fact, there is only one character completely left out of this gendering of Sun and Moon, and that is the character who most strongly engages them—Gollum. Gollum refers not to Sun and Moon but Yellow Face and White Face, and he speaks of them as personified entities—malevolent ones, in his construction of the world. Yet he never assigns them a gender. He curses the White Face (TT, IV, i, 220; ii, 237) and hides from the Yellow Face (TT, IV, ii, 228; iii, 249, 255; iv, 259), but unlike every other creature, including the hobbits with whom he originally shared a culture, he does not assign them a gender but constructs them as “it”: “Not under the White Face, not yet. It will go behind the hills soon, yess.” (TT, IV, i, 223) While as translation practice use of “it” tends to work against personification by removing indications of gender, Gollum is not translating. When he assigns the non-gendered pronoun to beings everyone else sees as gendered, while at the same time cursing them, hiding from them, and calling them “Faces,” it constructs them as active forces, ones he perceives as working against him. His peculiar pronoun use reflects Gollum’s worldview—one need only think of his last cry in The Hobbit as Bilbo leaped over him in the dark: “Thief ! Thief, Baggins! We hates it forever!” (H, V 134). His tendency to figure almost everything outside of himself as an “it” functions as a sign of his exclusion from the cultures of Middle-earth and his sense of himself as fundamentally separate. In fact, there are only two circumstances in which Gollum consistently uses the gendered third person pronouns: his construction of Sauron as He (TT, IV, i, 223; ii, 233, 237, 240-41) and Shelob as She (TT, IV, ii, 241). While his practice is to construct almost every other being as an “it,” these two figures are part of his world. It is a sad commentary on Gollum’s state that whereas for the other characters of Middle-earth Sun and Moon are gendered and constructed as familiar, for him they become Yellow Face and White Face, each a malevolent “it”; it is Shelob and Sauron who people his psychological world. As is so frequently the case with Tolkien, what on the surface appears a simple note reveals much more. For those concerned with exploring Tolkien’s interest in strong female figures the reversal of expectations he engages in here could be placed alongside a character like Galadriel. The note also provides yet another key into Gollum, whose construction of Sun and Moon as Yellow Face and White Face excludes him from the shared mythology of Middle-earth, further differentiating him from other characters. As well, Tolkien’s resurrection of a submerged Germanic tradition offers a corrective not only to the Norman Conquest (assuming one sees that as an event requiring a corrective), but to the way 217

Yvette L. Kisor assumptions can rob us of perspective, and cloud our ability to see something in a new way. And finally, it speaks to the tendency for language to play the primary role in Tolkien’s creative process, as here a fact of grammatical gender in the Germanic languages can be seen to suggest a reality later fulfilled in character and mythology. As Tolkien said, “my work [is] . . . fundamentally linguistic in inspiration. . . . [T]here is a great deal of linguistic matter . . . included or mythologically expressed” (Letters 219-220). NOTES 1

Much as he asserts Tolkien’s “Enigmata Saxonica Nuper Inventa Duo” is an asterisk-riddle (Shippey, Author xv, 26; Road 36-38).

2

Also known as Hey Diddle Diddle; number 213 in Opie and Opie (203-5).

3

This poem is a revised version of one of Tolkien’s earliest poems, “The Cat and the Fiddle: A Nursery Rhyme Undone and its Scandalous Secret Unlocked,” which was first printed in Yorkshire Poetry, Leeds, vol. 2, no. 19 (Oct-Nov 1923): [1]-[3]. It was reprinted in Shadow (145-47); the revised version used in FR was reprinted as “The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon” in Bombadil (63, [1]).

4

There are ten notes in LotR proper (I am excluding the Prologue, which contains four notes, and the Appendices, which include numerous references): five in FR (four in Book I), two in TT (both in Book III), and three in RK (all in Book VI). Four refer the reader to the Appendices, three to Appendix F on languages and one to Appendix D on the calendar. All of the notes concern questions of nomenclature, language, or dating. So, for example, on two occasions when characters mention dates the reader is reminded that in the Shire calendar months have thirty days (TT, III, ix, 168; RK, VI, iv, 230) and when Frodo’s rendition of Bilbo’s Man in the Moon song mentions particular days of the week, the reader is referred to a note in Appendix D explaining the names of the days in the Hobbit week (FR, I, ix, 171). Other notes concern issues of translation and naming practices. Thus Glorfindel’s reference to the Baranduin is annotated as the Brandywine River (FR, I, xii, 222) and at Snaga’s reference to tarks the reader is referred to Appendix F (RK, VI, i, 182), as again at a reference to Legolas’ use of an elven-tongue unfamiliar to Frodo (FR, II, vi, 356) and at Treebeard’s use of Elvish (TT, III, iv, 70). Similar is the note on Saruman’s account of his “other” name Sharkey as a “sign of affection, possibly”; the note observes the probable origin of 218

“Elves (and Hobbits) always refer to the Sun as She” the name in the Orkish “sharkû, ‘old man’.” (RK, VI, viii, 298) The remaining two notes, while not concerned with language or translation per se, do concern naming practices—one specifying the Sickle as the Hobbit term for the Plough or Great Bear (FR, I, x, 187) and the other, the one under consideration here, dealing with the practice of referring to the Sun as She. 5

Throughout his construction of the mythology of Middle-earth, these basic characteristics have remained consistent in spite of numerous other changes of detail. See “The Tale of the Sun and Moon,” chap. 8 in Lost Tales I (174-206); “The History of Eriol or Ælfwine and the End of the Tales,” chap. 6 in Lost Tales II (281-89); “The Earliest ‘Silmarillion,’” “The Quenta,” and “The Ambarkanta,” chap. 2, 3, and 5 in Shaping (20-21, 49-50, 97-99, 170-72, 237, 254); “Of the Sun and Moon and the Hiding of Valinor,” part 2, chap. 6, sect. 6 of Lost Road (239-45); “Sixth and last section of the Annals of Aman 1495-1500 Of the Moon and the Sun. The Lighting of Endar, and the Hiding of Valinor” and “Of the Sun and Moon and the Hiding of Valinor,” part 2, sect. 6 and part 3, chap. 1, sect. 8 of Morgoth (129-38, 197-99). In the most radical departure from the account of the origins of Sun and Moon given in the published Silmarillion, Tolkien considered a “round world version” in which the Sun was present from the beginning and the Moon was created to reflect its light, possibly out of the ruins of Morgoth’s fortress, both in existence before the Two Trees. However, even in this version, Tolkien included guardians of the Sun and Moon, and he maintained the gender associations: “But the Sun is feminine; and it is better that the Vala should be Áren, a maiden” Morgoth (376-77). See “Ainulindalë,” Part 1 of Morgoth, 3-5, 40-44 and “Myths Transformed,” Part 5 of Morgoth (367-431, esp. texts I, II, III, and V, 367-90).

6

EETS o.s. 116; this text was most recently reprinted by Boydell and Brewer in 2005.

7

Tolkien could also have had access to an edition of this text in Oswald Cockayne’s The Shrine: A Collection of Occasional Papers on Dry Subjects (46-156). It should also be noted that Tolkien’s former tutor and colleague W. A. Craigie put out a reader in 1923, the same year Tolkien published the first version of his Man in the Moon poem, that included this passage from the Old English Martyrology.

8

Michael Swanton’s translation of this passage in Anglo-Saxon Prose (75-76) does preserve the gendered pronouns indicated in the Old English—the sun is “she” and “her” while the moon is “he” and 219

Yvette L. Kisor “his”; obviously this translation was not available to Tolkien, but it does speak to a different possible translation practice. The Old English Martyrology is not the only Old English text that has been subject to a variety of different translation practices regarding expectations of gender. Riddle 27 (Williamson’s numbering) or 29 (Krapp and Dobbie’s numbering) of the Exeter book also features a personified Sun and Moon and gendered pronouns. While Williamson carefully translates both sun and moon as “it,” Crossley-Holland insists on the same gender reversal as Herzfeld, making the moon feminine and the sun masculine in spite of gendered pronouns in the Old English that clearly mark the sun as “she” (seo). See Craig Williamson, A Feast of Creatures: Anglo-Saxon Riddle-Songs and Kevin Crossley-Holland, tr. and Bruce Mitchell, ed., The Battle of Maldon and Other Old English Poems (60-61). 9

It is not necessary to assume that Tolkien must have known Herzfeld’s edition, though the characterizations of the moon as “following” the sun and its light increasing and decreasing in response to proximity with the sun are certainly suggestive and given the nature of the EETS series as providing standard editions, it is at least possible. Even without the example of Herzfeld’s edition and translation, Tolkien’s knowledge of the grammatical gender of the Old English words for sun and moon could suggest the gender reversal he was clearly playing with as early as 1923. If he did know Herzfeld’s edition and translation, then his mythology offers a corrective to a “mis”-translation.

10 Literally “hendi inni hœgri” is “the right hand” as “inni” is the definite article not the pronoun; Dronke translates this as “her right hand” to avoid a phrase that would be awkward in modern English. 11 These are clearly mythological beings in Norse mythology; besides the passage quoted from Völuspá, see for example Vafthruthnismál 22-23 and 46-47, Grímnísmál 37-40, Alvísmál 13-16, Sigrdrifumál 15, and Gylfaginning 11-12. 12 “Lowdham’s Report on the Adunaic Language,” Part 3, Sect. 6 of Sauron, 413-40, at 426. 13 “The Moon will then be one night past his full …” (RK, V, ii, 52). 14 “When Sun comes we feel her, even when she is hidden. Already she climbs over East-mountains. It is the opening of day in the skyfields.” (RK, V, v, 107). 15 Aragorn: “‘If the Moon gave enough light, we would use it, but alas! he sets early and is yet young and pale.’ ‘And tonight he is shrouded 220

“Elves (and Hobbits) always refer to the Sun as She” anyway,’ Gimli murmured.” (TT, III, ii, 28). 16 Gandalf about Gollum: “One day it was very hot, and as he was bending over a pool, he felt a burning on the back of his head, and a dazzling light from the water pained his wet eyes. He wondered at it, for he had almost forgotten about the Sun. Then for the last time he looked up and shook his fist at her.” (FR, I, ii, 63). 17 “‘Sun won’t show her face much today, I’m thinking.’” (FR, I, vii, 139). 18 “‘I have not brought the Sun. She is walking in the blue fields of the South, and a little wreath of snow on this Redhorn hillock troubles her not at all.’” (FR, II, iii, 306). 19 “‘The Sun must have run into a cloud while we’ve been under these trees, and now she has run out again; or else she has climbed high enough to look down through some opening.’” (TT, III, iv, 65). 20 Sam: “‘And the Moon’s growing. We haven’t seen him for a night or two in this cloudy weather. He’s beginning to give quite a light.’ ‘Yes,’ said Frodo; ‘but he won’t be full for some days’” (TT, IV, i, 218). 21 For example, at one point: “Far above the rot and vapours of the world the Sun was riding high and golden now in a serene country with floors of dazzling foam, but only a passing ghost of her could they see below, bleared, pale, giving no colour and no warmth. But even at this faint reminder of her presence Gollum scowled and flinched.” (TT, IV, ii, 233-34) but at another: “At that moment he saw the sun rise out of the reek, or haze, or dark shadow, or whatever it was, that lay ever to the east, and it sent its golden beams down upon the trees and glades about him.” (TT, IV, iv, 264) Other instances are numerous. WORKS CITED Cockayne, Oswald ed. The Shrine: A Collection of Occasional Papers on Dry Subjects. London: Williams and Norgate, 1864-70. Craigie, W. A., ed. Easy Readings in Anglo-Saxon. Edinburgh: I. B. Hutchen, 1923. Crossley-Holland, Kevin, tr. and Bruce Mitchell, ed. The Battle of Maldon and Other Old English Poems. London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965.

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Yvette L. Kisor Dronke, Ursula ed. The Poetic Edda: Volume II Mythological Poems. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Herzfeld, George, ed. An Old English Martyrology. EETS o.s. 116. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2005 [1900]. Opie, Iona and Peter Opie, eds. The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951. Shippey, Tom. The Road to Middle-earth: How J.R.R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology, rev. ed. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. Shippey, Tom. J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. Swanton, Michael. Anglo-Saxon Prose. Everyman’s Library. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1975; 1993. Williamson, Craig. A Feast of Creatures: Anglo-Saxon Riddle-Songs. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982.

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Notes and Documents SAURON, Mount Doom, and Elvish Moths: The Influence of Tolkien on Modern Science KRISTINE LARSEN

J

.R.R. Tolkien once explained that Middle-earth was based on his “wonder and delight in the Earth as it is, particularly the natural Earth” (New York Times 18). Numerous authors have analyzed the influence of real-world science on Middle-earth, including Flieger, Quiñónez and Raggett, Manning, and Larsen. In turn, Tolkien’s works have influenced a number of distinct disciplines, the most obvious being fantasy writing. In 1980, Attebery noted that “No important work of fantasy written After Tolkien is free of his influence, and many are merely halting imitations of his style and substance” (10). Even the most cursory examination of the voluminous Tolkien Music List demonstrates the impact Tolkien’s subcreation has had on myriad musical genres. Less well-known is Middle-earth’s influence on the teaching of composition, literature, and even astronomy (Stanton; Nelson; Larsen “Teaching”). This paper will examine a surprisingly rich yet largely neglected area of Tolkien’s influence, namely that on real-world science and scientists. It has been documented that Middle-earth caught the attention of students and practitioners of science from the early days of Tolkien fandom. For example, in the 1960s, the Tolkien Society members were said to mainly consist of “students, teachers, scientists or psychologists” (Resnik 94). A decade later, the printer at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) was adapted to handle a Tengwar font (Davis 124). Not surprisingly, scientists from such varied disciplines as paleontology and astronomy began honoring their favorite author through the naming of discoveries after Tolkien himself and various characters of Middle-earth. Nowhere has this been more evident and widespread than in the taxonomy of living and extinct species. Bee specialist Doug Yanega explains that in taxonomy, “most names are descriptive, and a big chunk of the rest of them are honorific” (Milius 330). As Henry Gee notes, Given Tolkien’s passion for nomenclature, his coinage, over decades, of enormous numbers of euphonious names—not to mention scientists’ fondness for Tolkien—it is perhaps inevitable that Tolkien has been accorded formal taxonomic commemoration like no other author (54). 223

Kristine Larsen As one of the central characters in the Third Age of Middle-earth, Gollum/Sméagol is an obvious choice for such scientific immortality. In 1973, K. J. Hedqvist named a new species of Swedish wasp Smeagolia perplexa, while in 1980 F. M. Climo dubbed a new order of “enigmatic New Zealand slug” Smeagolida (514). The corresponding new genus Smeagol was named for the pallid, sometimes subterranean Tolkien character Smeagol (whose alternative name is Gollum), a pitiable humanoid who ultimately played a very important role in saving ‘Middle Earth’ from evil forces. The slug below is far more significant, phylogenetically, than its drab exterior indicates—hence the analogy. (515) New Zealand is also home to two other Gollums, the first being Galaxias gollumoides, a freshwater fish with large eyes, named after the “dark little fellow with big round eyes who sometimes frequents a swamp, a character in J. R. Tolkien’s ‘The Hobbit’ and ‘Lord of the Rings’, hence gollumoides meaning Gollum-like” (McDowall and Chadderton 85). The other “Kiwi” Gollum is Gollum attenuatus, “a bizarre-looking longnosed deepwater shark” first recognized by L.J.V. Compagno (192) in 1973. This original Gollumshark was recently joined in the subfamily Golluminae by two other still unnamed species, temporarily dubbed Gollum A and B (Compagno, Dando, and Fowler 258-9). Hobbits are also honored in the taxonomical system. Terry Erwin named a species of Central American ground-beetle Pericompsus bilbo due its short, fat stature and hairy feet (470). Syconycteris hobbit, the moss-forest blossom bat indigenous to Indonesia and New Guinea identified by Ziegler in 1982, is currently listed as a vulnerable species. Juan Morrone named three new species of Andean weevils after Tolkien characters (Macrostyphlus bilbo, Macrostyphlus gandalf, and Macrostyphlus Frodo) in 1994. Other familiar names that appear in the taxonomy of living creatures include Gwaihiria naumann, an Australian wasp discovered by I. D. Naumann in 1982 and named after the great eagle; Sauron, a genus of spiders from the Saur Mountains of Kazakhstan, discovered by K.Y. Eskov in 1995 (Eskov and Marusik); and Leucothoe tolkieni, a new species of crustacean identified by G. Vinogradov in 1990 (Vader 52). Moths and butterflies make several appearances in Tolkien’s world. Wilwarin, the butterfly, was one of the constellations created by Varda in anticipation of the coming of the Elves (S 48). While traveling through Mirkwood, Bilbo and the twelve dwarves were troubled by “thousands of dark-grey and black moths, some nearly as big as your hands, flapping and whirring round their ears” (H, VIII, 194). After climbing a large oak tree in hopes of spying the end of the forest, Bilbo found the tree 224

SAURON, Mount Doom, and Elvish Moths canopy populated by butterflies described as “black emperors” (H, VIII, 201). Gee notes in The Science of Middle-earth that “there are no fewer that thirteen tiny moths of genus Elachista that are named after Elves” (54). However, a careful reading of the original scientific paper by Lauri Kaila (preferably with one’s dog-eared copy of Foster’s The Complete Guide to Middle-earth close at hand) shows that thirty-eight of the forty-six “newly described species are derived from the mythology of J.R.R. Tolkien” (Kaila 4). Thirteen of these (E. finarfinella, E. indisella, E. curufinella, E. maglorella, E. caranthirella, E. turgonella, E. celegormella, E. daeronella, E. miriella, E. serindella, E. guilinella, E. amrodella, and E. aredhella) indeed do arise from “the ancient Elves, which one after the other sailed over the waters to the West, and were later difficult to see with Human eyes” (Kaila 4). Two species are named after dwarves (E. ibunella and E. telcharella), and seventeen honor human characters (E. morwenella, E. marachella, E. haldarella, E. dagnirella, E. aerinella, E. gildorella, E. bregorella, E. arthadella, E. turinella, E. nienorella, E. tuorella, E. rianella, E. neithanella, E. beorella, E. eilinella, E. gorlimella, and E. ragnorella). E. olorinella recognizes Gandalf ’s name in Valinor, E. diorella is named for the son of Beren and Lúthien, and E. taurnonella honors the Vala Oromë. E. telerella appears to be named for the Teleri, the third kindred of the Eldar, while E. galadella derives its name from the Galadrim of Lothlórien (or perhaps Galadriel or Gil-galad). Finally, E. aranella seems to owe its name to aran-, the “royal prefix used by the Kings of Arthedain after Malvegil and by the Chieftains of the Dúnedain of the North to indicate their claim to all of Arnor” (Foster 23). Kaila explained in his seminal paper that “phonetic attributes of the names were emphasized over the actual deeds of the characters in their world” (4). However, it appears that there are several thematic strands present within the paper. One obvious strand is the House of Finwë. Both of his wives, Indis and Miriel, are named among the moths, with Miriel named twice (once under her epithet Serindë). Finarfin, son of Finwë and Indis, appears, as do five of the seven sons of Fëanor, son of Finwë (Curufin, Maglor, Amrod, Celegorm, and Caranthir). A second thematic strand involves the court of Gondolin, with Turgon, his sister Aredhel, son-in-law Tuor, and Tuor’s mother, Rían, named among the moth species. Five of the last dozen outlaws to stand with Barahir in Dorthonion are honored (Dagnir, Gildor, Arthad, Ragnor, and Gorlim), along with Gorlim’s wife, Eilinel, and Bregor, father of Barahir. Finally, the tragic tale of Túrin is reflected in Kaila’s paper, with species named for Túrin (and his pseudonym Neithan), his mother, Morwen, and his sister/wife, Nienor, along with the dwarf Ibun, who was captured by Túrin, and Aerin, wife of Brodda, who aided Morwen and her young son. In addition, three of the species have distinguishing characteristics 225

Kristine Larsen reminiscent of the characters after whom they were named. E. finarfinella is “characterized by the yellowish head” and E. indisella is “characterized in particular by its pale yellow head and neck tuft” (Kaila 30-1). Similarly, Indis and her son Finarfin were known for their blonde hair. E. olorinella is a “pale silvery grey species” which can be distinguished “by its shining wings,” an apt description for Gandalf as he was in Valinor (Kaila 46). Fossil species have also afforded ample opportunities for honoring Tolkien and his works. In 1964, Kenneth Cooper identified the first fossil species of tardigrade from Canadian amber dating to the late Cretaceous Period (60-80 million years ago). Commonly referred to as water-bears, tardigrades are tiny invertebrates commonly 1 mm in size. Cooper named his extinct species Beorn leggi, after what he explained is “the now storied magical bear of the Wilderland in the Third Age of Middle-earth” (44). Simon Conway Morris named a genus of fossil priapulid worm from the Cambrian Period (circa 500-570 million years ago) Ancalagon in 1977, while Peter Wagner reclassified a genus of extinct Silurian gastropod mollusks (dating 421-428 million years ago) and named them Frodospira. Naming the genus after a hobbit is especially fitting, as “all known species are known only from very small shells” (Wagner 31). In 1969, Webb identified a new species of fossil canid from Florida dating to the Pliocene epoch (5-9 million years ago) and named it Osteoborus orc. It was reclassified by Wang, Tedford, and Taylor in 1999 to Borophagus orc (278). Gee has opined that “the prize for Tolkien-related obsession in taxonomy must go to paleontologist Leigh Van Valen, who in a single paper named virtually an entire fauna of fossil mammals after Tolkien characters” (55). In the aforementioned 1978 paper in Evolutionary Theory, Van Valen named twenty three new species of primitive mammals (most of a type known as condylarths). In addition, ten new genera or subgenera honor Middle-earth. One such new genus, Ancalagon, was renamed Ankalagon by Van Valen in 1980 when he became aware that Conway Morris had already used the name for his new priapulid genus in 1977 (Van Valen “Ankalagon” 266). Unlike Kaili, Van Valen openly tied the names chosen for his new species and genera to the properties of Tolkien’s characters. Mithrandir became the name of a subgenus of Anisonchus, named for the “wisest of the Istari.” Van Valen chose the name in reference to “the subtleness of the differences between the subgenera” (Van Valen “Beginning” 64). Two of the new species of Anisonchus Van Valen identified were named A. athelas and A. eowynae, noting that Eowyn was cured of the poison of the Witch King with the aid of the athelas plant (64). Earendil undomiel, a new species of the genus Earendil, was named for the Quenya term for the “evening star, which Eärendil with his Silmaril became” (63). The new genus Fimbrethil was named for the “entwife loved by Fangorn” due to the 226

SAURON, Mount Doom, and Elvish Moths “partly primate-like morphology” of the genus and “the disappearance of both Fimbrethils” (62). F. ambaronae was named for one of “Fangorn’s shorter names for his forest,” relating the “dimness of the forest and of the affinities of this species” (62). Protoselene bombadili was named for the “simple, powerful, and very old being,” whose traits Van Valen believed relevant to the new species (60). Van Valen designated several of the species in reference to their appearance. The new genus Bomburia, was named for the “fat dwarf ” in The Hobbit, which Van Valen felt reflected the “size and morphology” of this particular genus (59). Arctocyonides mumak was named after the “large elephant” because it was the largest known species in its genus (55). Likewise, Deltatherium durini was named after the dwarf king because this new species was “two thirds the size of D. fundaminis” (53). Thangorodrim thalion, a new species of the new genus Thangorodrim, was named for the Sindarin word for strong, in reference to the species’ “massive morphology” (55). Other species were named after terms in Sindarin and Quenya. Chriacus calenancus received its name from the Sindarin for green jaws, a reference to the species’ “inferred herbivory” (53). Litaletes ondolinde was named for Gondolin, the hidden city carved from rock, a reference to the fossil collection site Rock Bench, whose specimens “were formerly as hidden (and unsorted)” (59). Litomylus alphamon was named in Sindarin for Swan Hill, the location of this species’ fossils (60). Deuterogondon noletil owes its name to the Quenya for knowledge and horn, referring to the “apparent relationship of D. noletil to Uintatheres,” a horned fossil mammal (57). Platymastus palantir related the palantírs’ ability to give “visions through spacetime” to the “long duration of the genus” (56). P. mellon was named for the Elvish password to Khazad-dûm due to the species’ “similarity to P. palantir, presumptive diet of plants, and obliquely to the English word melon” (56). Van Valen therefore sometimes mixed Elvish with words from other traditions in crafting his new genus and species names. The new genus Mimatuta owes its name to mir, the Sindarin term for jewel, combined with the name of the Roman dawn goddess, Matuta, and was also a reference to the dwarf Mîm (62). The new species Mimatuta minuial was named after the Sindarin word for “the time at dawn when the stars fade,” referring to the “dawn of the Cenezoic [era] and the fading of the Mesozoic stars,” namely the dinosaurs (62). Tinuviel eurydice, a new species of the new genus Tinuviel, was named in honor of both Tinúviel and the Greek mythological character Eurydice, and referenced Lúthien’s rescue of her husband from the Hades-like subterranean domains of both Morgoth and Sauron (61). Other examples that require no further explanation are the new genera Niphredil and Maiorana, and the new species 227

Kristine Larsen Mimatuta morgoth, Niphredil radagasti, Oxyprimus galadrielae, Mimotricentes mirielae, Protungulatum gorgun, and Desmatoclaenus mearae. Clearly the most important example of an extinct species bearing a Middle-earth name (albeit an unofficial one) is the so-called Hobbit of Indonesia. In 2004, Peter Brown and colleagues published what they believed to be evidence of a new and radically small human species. The 18,000 year old fossils were named Homo floresiensis, after the Indonesian island on which they were found (Brown et al. 1055). When it became known that Michael Morwood, one of the scientists on the discovery team, had nicknamed the original skeleton “Hobbit,” the press ran with the side story, and the term became synonymous with the new species in most media reports (Fullagar 68). For example, Time announced the proposed species as the “Hobbits of the South Pacific” (Lemonick et al., 2004). The name began to appear in more scientific outlets, as in the 2005 article “Bone Collection Backs Up ‘Hobbit’ Theory” in New Scientist. Even the august journal Science succumbed to the nickname in its coverage of the continuing controversy surrounding whether or not the fossils represent a separate species of humans. In “How the Hobbit Shrugged: Tiny Hominid’s Story Takes New Turn,” it was revealed that a newly found fossil foot was quite large, leading to the pithy comment that “Indonesia’s hobbits, like J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional creatures, may have trekked about on big hairy feet” (Culotta 984). If it is finally determined that H. floresiensis does indeed represent a new species of humans, it appears that “hobbits” will become firmly entrenched in archaeology textbooks. The personal impact of Tolkien and his subcreation on biologists and paleontologists has clearly resulted in a respectful repayment through the naming of numerous species and genera. But Middle-earth has also played an important role in the imagination of geologists and astronomers as well. In 1972-3, a team of geologists working for the Australian government first mapped an area near Alice Springs dubbed Spring Pound by the locals. Based on his observations of the area’s geology and geography, team member Alan Langworthy proposed the official name Mordor Pound, which he spearheaded by utilizing it in scientific publications (Langworthy and Black). Also termed the Mordor Igneous Complex, the roughly rectangular plane was formed when its relatively soft rocks eroded more quickly than those comprising the ring of surrounding cliffs (Huston). Like its Middle-earth equivalent, Mordor Pound is only accessible through a small gap in the surrounding ridge, called Wild Dog Pass, compared to “Cirith Gorgor in Tolkien’s tale” (Aus Geo News, 15). Within Mordor Pound are a number of “dark conical hills of ultramafic intrusive rocks” (Hoatson and Stewart, 41), with one of the largest now bearing the name Mount Doom, courtesy of Alan Langworthy. 228

SAURON, Mount Doom, and Elvish Moths The rocks which form the floor of Mordor Pound contain phlogopite, a type of mica rich in magnesium which has a “bronze, shimmering effect.” Huston further explained that “the combination of the dark colour along with the shimmering effect gives the rocks of Mordor Pound the feel of a ‘dark land where the shadows lie’.” Although no economically feasible mineral resources have so-far been mined from Mordor Pound, private companies have successfully developed other mineral resources in Australia. One such company, Mithril Resources Ltd, was first listed on the Australian Stock Exchange in 2002 and “is committed to creating shareholder value through the discovery and development of nickel-copper sulphide deposits in Australia” (Mithril Resources). In the astronomical community, one of the most common expressions of respect and admiration is the naming of asteroids. Asteroid 2675 was discovered by M. Watt on April 14, 1982, and asteroid 2991 was first seen by the same observer on April 21, 1982. Watt suggested “Tolkien” as the official name for his first discovery, with G. V. Williams proposing “Bilbo” for the second (Schmadel 346, 388). To date, these are the only two asteroids officially named for Tolkien or his works. Radegast (asteroid 2581) is named for the Slavic fertility god, while Underhill (asteroid 2581) is named for woman astronomer Anne B. Underhill (Schmadel 333, 277). Astronomers have continually made a game out of creating experiment names with humorous acronyms. A well-known example is the series of experiments which searched for microlensing events bearing acronyms of MACHO, EROS, DUO, and OGLE. In 2001, Roger Bacon and colleagues published the first results of their study of the motion of gas and dust in galaxies utilizing a special spectrograph named the Spectroscopic Areal Unit for Research on Optical Nebulae, or SAURON (24). The team also developed a special computer system for analyzing the data, which they named Palantir (33). An area of ongoing theoretical and observational research in astronomy is the so-called dark energy, a mysterious, pervasive background that currently appears to be dominating the expansion of the universe. Various models of dark energy have been proposed, each in turn making testable predictions for the values of a number of cosmological parameters (when coupled with the standard inflationary big bang scenario). Likewise, observations of various cosmological parameters (such as the rate of change of the expansion of the universe and the fine structure in the cosmic microwave background) put constraints on viable dark energy candidates. Analysis of these constraints and their predictions for future experiments is the goal of the Analysis and Resolution of Dark-sector Attributes project, or ARDA, introduced in a preprint by Greg Huey in 2005 (1). Interested scientists were directed to contact the program at 229

Kristine Larsen the University of Illinois through email, with the address located on the server isildur.astro.uiuc.edu (Huey 11). Astronomers have also borrowed lines from The Lord of the Rings and even the title of the work itself in describing astronomical phenomena. For example, a 2006 preprint on rings and disks of material surrounding hot Be-type stars, entitled “Be Stars: One Ring to Rule Them All?” described a project to “probe whether the ring scenario is the one to rule the Be phenomenon” (Meilland et al. 1). In February 2002, several articles on Saturn appeared on popular astronomy websites in connection with the anniversary of Galileo’s birth and Saturn’s occultation by the moon. The Astronomy Picture of the Day site picture for February 15 was entitled “Saturn: Lord of the Rings” (Nemiroff and Bonnell), while the February 12 Science@NASA page proclaimed Saturn to be “The Real Lord of the Rings” (Phillips, “Real”) Not even the mighty fire-demon of Khazad-dûm is safe from appropriation by imaginative astronomers. On April 30, 2006, a particularly striking bipolar sunspot and magnetic filament was visible to backyard observers using hydrogen alpha filters on their telescopes. A photograph taken by Jeff Barton of the Texas Astronomical Society was afterwards featured on the SpaceWeather website. Barton drew a connection between the sunspot and the Balrog, stating “I can see the monster's terrible eyes and flaming whip curling over its right shoulder as it readies to strike Gandalf from the rock bridge in the Mines of Moria” (Phillips, “Beware”). In a draft to a letter to Carole Batten-Phelps from 1971, Tolkien acknowledged that The Lord of the Rings “does not belong to me. It has been brought forth and must now go its appointed way in the world” (Letters 413). From spectrographs to sea slugs, sunspots to spiders, scientists from varied disciplines have, in their own small way, gladly taken ownership of Middle-earth and brought it a little closer to reality. A 1978 note in Chemical and Engineering News (Reese 52) even pondered the sagacity of officially adopting the Shire Calendar (RK, Appendix D, 384). It appears that Tolkien was most certainly correct when he asserted that “the theatre of my tale is this earth,” but he could not possible have predicted to the extent to which scientists are continuing in the telling of the tale (Letters 239). WORKS CITED Attebery, Brian. The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1980.

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Kristine Larsen Schmadel, Lutz D. Dictionary of Minor Planet Names, 3rd ed. Berlin: SpringVerlag, 1997. Seeman, Chris. The Tolkien Music List. http://www.tolkien-music. com. Stanton, Michael N. “Teaching Tolkien.” Exercise Exchange 18, no.1 (1973): 2-5. Vader, Wim. “New Amphipod Species and Subspecies Described in the Years 1974-2004.” Amphipod Newsletter 28, July 13, 2005. http:// www.imv.uit.no/amphipod/AN28.pdf Van Valen, Leigh. “Ankalagon, New Name (Mammalia: Condylartha).” Journal of Paleontology 54, no. 1 (1980): 266. ———. “The Beginning of the Age of Mammals.” Evolutionary Theory 4, no. 1 (1978): 45-80. Wagner, Peter J. “The Utility of Fossil Data in Phylogenetic Analyses.” American Malacological Bulletin 15 (1999): 1-31. Wang, Xiao Ming, Richard H. Tedford, and Beryl E. Taylor. “Phylogenetic Systematics of the Borophaginae (Carnivora: Canidae).” Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History no. 243 (1999): 1-391. Ziegler, A. C. “The Australo-Papuan Genus Synconycteris (Chiroptera: Pteropodidae) with the Description of a New Papua New Guinea Species.” Occasional Papers of the Bishop Museum 25, no. 5 (1982): 1-22.

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Book Reviews The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J.R R. Tolkien as Writers in Community, by Diana Pavlac Glyer. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2007. xix, 270 pp. $45.00 (hardcover) ISBN 08733888909. The Inklings were C. S. Lewis and his brother Warren, Lewis’s doctor R. E. Havard, J.R.R. Tolkien, and other men who met in Lewis’s Magdalen College rooms on Thursday evenings and in the Eagle and Child pub on Tuesday mornings during the 1930s and well into the 1940s. Humphrey Carpenter and others assume that the Inklings met above all for “discussion and conversation” (22). However, Glyer contends that the Inklings “were members of a writing group, knowledgeable peers who met on a regular basis to discuss written works in progress” (42, my italics). If the matter is to be settled by quantitative estimates, Glyer probably would not be able to sustain her contention, since approximately half of the Inklings gatherings—on Tuesday mornings—were devoted to freely ranging conversation. She concedes that the Tuesday sessions may be “accurately described as just a gathering of friends” (19). But her statement that the Inklings did indeed meet on Thursday evenings “as a writing group for about seventeen years” (27) appears to be true, and Glyer convinces the reader that certain statements made by Tolkien, Lewis, Owen Barfield, and others (xvii), minimizing or denying influence, should not be taken at face value or have been oversimplified. Lewis and Tolkien became friends as men who enjoyed medieval Norse literature and met in the late 1920s to discuss it in the Coalbiters group at Oxford. The Coalbiters did not survive, but what was to become the Inklings, a more long-lived association, “grew in the transactional space between Lewis and Tolkien as they shared their original drafts” with one another (43). Tolkien had taken the initiative, giving Lewis the manuscript of “The Lay of Leithian.” He must have trusted Lewis already, since not only was this work a chief element in his developing mythology, but because it is a version of the story of Beren and Lúthien, one of his writings closest to his heart, relating to his romance with Edith Bratt. Lewis commented enthusiastically right away and soon responded with constructive criticism, and offered some of his own poetry for Tolkien’s consideration. “Much of the early history of [the Inklings] is uncertain,”and Glyer does not pretend to be able to trace just exactly how and when the Lewis-Tolkien friendship, by the accretion of other men, had coalesced into something that could definitively be called The Inklings. The first references, from 1936 on, to the name for this group “occur some five Copyright © West Virginia University Press

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Book Reviews or six years after they had been meeting regularly” (10). Although approximately twenty men could be regarded as Inklings, usually only half a dozen or so attended a given Thursday session. Lewis,his brother, Tolkien and Dr. Havard are regarded by Glyer as the most faithful attendees (11). The Inklings lasted for almost twenty years as a writing group because they possessed a “diversity of perspectives within a unity of interests” (33). Most of them were Christians who were conservative as regards politics, but they did not perceive themselves as a “movement” and never had a manifesto. Glyer introduces a fivefold scheme for talking about the dynamics of a writing group. The first four terms are drawn from the work of Karen Burke LeFevre. Resonators encourage writers with praise of specific works and urgings to keep writing; they may even help with money needs or provide space for writers to write. Resonators may function as promoters, whether by buying and giving away copies of an author’s work or by writing favorable reviews. By opponents Glyer means writing group members who provide “healthy criticism” or who provoke increased commitment from a writer to his or her own work when it is defended. Editors provide suggestions for minor changes, as the verb to edit often suggests, or may take an author’s work and rewrite large portions of it. Collaborators are co-authors. Glyer adds a fifth term of her own, referents, for writing group members who incorporate one another in their writings (40-42). In her discussion of resonators, Glyer’s best example of a major work owing much to a “friendly, interested, supportive audience” is The Lord of the Rings. She argues not only that Tolkien’s great work would not have been finished without encouragement from Inklings (especially C. S. Lewis), but that its accessible style (in contrast to that of The Silmarillion) shows the “humanizing” influence of the group. Warren Lewis, Glyer believes, began and sustained his career as a chronicler of seventeenth-century France largely because of the stimulus of the Inklings. She notes that Warren was much better able to write in Lewis’s Oxford rooms than in the often tense atmosphere of the Kilns, the home that the Lewis brothers shared with the demanding Mrs. Moore; resonators sometimes help by providing a workplace for writers. Lewis promoted Charles Williams’s books even after Williams’s death. Owen Barfield received the subject for his verse-play Orpheus from Lewis. The famous “Great War” between Barfield and Lewis (largely or entirely predating the Inklings) is a choice example of how opponents help authors. While Warren Lewis said that “praise for good work was unstinted” (49), on the other hand reading one’s work to the Inklings could be a “formidable ordeal” (76). Tolkien said that Inklings sessions could sound like the verbal warfare of “fell enemies” (77). He dropped an epilogue to The Lord of the Rings (and was well advised to do so, in 236

Book Reviews this reviewer’s opinion). Lewis was helped, in the writing of works of religious apologetics by tough-minded comments. Williams abandoned The Noises That Weren’t There and wrote the much better All Hallows’ Eve. Some of Glyer’s material relating to “opposition,” however, such as Tolkienian commentary on works by Lewis, does not qualify as “opposition” because it was never submitted to the author whose work was being criticized. She acknowledges that some opposition—Hugo Dyson’s dislike of The Lord of the Rings—was not helpful. In her discussion of writing group members as editors, Glyer summarizes the influence of Lewis and others on Tolkien’s composition of The Lord of the Rings thus: “Less dialogue, more narrative. Less hobbit talk, more danger” (107). Several pages outline Lewis’s suggestions for changes to Tolkien’s earlier work “The Lay of Leithian,” some of which Tolkien adopted. Lewis himself changed elements of Narnian books and other works in response to Inkling advice (and the advice of persons who were not Inklings such as Roger Lancelyn Green or Lewis’s wife). Editors may become collaborators if the writing project and credit for it are shared. Glyer discusses a couple of Lewis-Barfield collaborations that were not intended by their authors for publication and which few readers will have seen. More noteworthy is her account of Christopher Tolkien as collaborator with his father, as the son designed maps for The Lord of the Rings and, of course, brought The Silmarillion into publishable shape as a continuous narrative. Glyer observes, in her discussion of referents, that the Inklings sometimes introduced versions of one another into their stories, and promoted one another’s works in print. Seventeen books by Inklings are dedicated to Inklings (188), and Inklings reviewed Inklings more than forty times (192). The Tolkienian works discussed in this chapter include The Notion Club Papers and “Mythopoeia.” Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet features a protagonist whose portrait owes something to Tolkien. Not just individual Inklings, but meetings of the Inklings, contribute to some fiction by group members: “The Notion Club Papers may be seen as an idealized Inklings meeting from Tolkien’s point of view; [Barfield’s] Worlds Apart may be seen as an idealized Inklings meeting from Barfield’s point of view” (203). Glyer concludes with an eloquent defense of the writer-in-community as opposed to the historically recent and dubious view of the writer as solitary genius. The view she urges aligns well with Charles Williams’s emphasis on coinherence and exchange (224). David Bratman contributes a biographical appendix on the Inklings. The thesis of this book is not revolutionary; one does not suppose that most authorities really do seriously contend that the Inklings did not influence one another’s writings. To enhance her claim that a significant 237

Book Reviews biographical-critical tradition contends just that, she cites not only Humphrey Carpenter, but as negligible an authority as Lin Carter. To characterize the Thursday sessions as those of a group of writers, she strains to include Dr. Havard as a writer; however, his numerous medical papers presumably owed nothing to comments from the Inklings. And some of the evidence in the penumbra of the argument is not specifically that of Inklings sessions, as when she refers to the Lewis-Barfield “Great War” or Tolkien’s written comments—never shown to Lewis—on Lewis’s Letters to Malcolm. Glyer is to be commended for restrained use of jargon despite writing about a subject that must have offered much opportunity for displays of literary theory. A few uses of impact as a verb (155, 189, 204) are regrettable. Glyer shows incontrovertibly that the Thursday evening sessions did function as a writers’ group, as such groups have been anatomized by recent theorists. She is thorough. The Company They Keep is a must for university libraries with strong Inklings collections or that serve institutions with creative writing programs. Dale Nelson Mayville State University Mayville, North Dakota Ents, Elves, and Eriador: The Environmental Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien, by Matthew Dickerson and Jonathan Evans. Foreword by John Elder. Afterword by Tom Shippey. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2006. xxvi, 316 pp. $35 (hardcover) ISBN 0813124182. This book is a major new contribution to the subject of Tolkien’s work in relation to the natural world and environmentalism. Whether it is a good one, however, is much less clear. Let me start by sketching out some of the context necessary to understand and evaluate it. Much of that context comprises what is now called “green studies” or, more narrowly but increasingly, “ecocriticism.” Inspired by the environmental and ecological movements, this new field in the humanities is concerned with the relationships between human culture and non-human nature in all possible respects, including the political, social, religious, aesthetic and ethical. It can thus be seen as a major new addition to the slightly earlier critical perspectives of socialism (class), feminism (gender) and post-colonialism (race). Ecocriticism as a discipline began in the late 1980s in the U.S.A. and slightly later in the U.K. Its leading American scholars include Cheryll 238

Book Reviews Glotfelty, William Howarth, Karl Kroeber, and Laurence Buell; in Britain the work of Jonathan Bate has been especially influential. The principal academic organization is ASLE: the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. Traditions of ecologically-oriented literature, of course, are much older. Major figures include William Wordsworth, John Ruskin, William Morris, Edward Thomas, and D. H. Lawrence. In America, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau are central. And, to bring matters somewhat closer to home, in a collection edited by Laurence Coupe entitled The Green Studies Reader (2000), I argued that J.R.R. Tolkien deserves a place in such a context and company. Turning to the volume under review, then, what is indisputably good? The authors have devised an ingenious and useful distinction between agriculture for food (the domain of Hobbits), horticulture for aesthetic beauty (that of Elves), and feraculture—from Latin ferus/fera, wild—for wilderness preservation (Ents). Also original is the application of certain concepts from the interface of ecology and literary studies: liminality, ecotones and thick margins. More generally, the thorough discussion of Christian stewardship as an environmental ethic, and especially its central role in Tolkien’s thought and writings (including his lesser work) is lovingly detailed and well-supported by a good grasp of Catholic theology. However, the central hope of the authors is to provide “a good introduction . . . to the whole environment of Middle-earth.” Here there are serious problems about which readers must be warned, lest they are tempted to accept the book in such terms. To begin with, novices (who will probably form the majority of readers) are given almost no idea of just such a context as I have outlined. Further serious problems follow from the authors’ three subsidiary and closely-linked positions: (1) that a Christian environmental ethic is the best one; (2) that Tolkien’s attitude to nature as found in his books is fundamentally Christian; and (3) that no non-Christian work on the subject is worth discussing. I shall take these in order. “In our view,” the authors write, “the best foundation for an environmental consciousness is a Christian one identical with, or at least comparable to, Tolkien’s” (26). In practice, however, “best” translates in this case as something quite different, namely “only.” (Later on they aver that “Christianity is by no means the only religion that recognizes the spiritual significance of nature” [253] but this is a purely token gesture.) In a book with ambitions to join the ranks of contemporary ecocriticism (as mentioned in John Elder’s Foreword), such exclusivity is unacceptable. No one judging by this book would realize that Christian stewardship is but one of several kinds of environmental ethics, the others being very 239

Book Reviews different and at least equally important and influential. The reader of this review is referred to my recent introduction to the subject; suffice it to say that these authors omit any mention whatsoever of Deep Ecology or its variants (e.g., Transpersonal Ecology, Deep Green Theory, Left Biocentrism), ecofeminism, Gaia Theory or the Land Ethic. By the same token, Arne Naess, George Sessions, Richard Sylvan, Edward Abbey, James Loveleock and Val Plumwood make no appearance. (The Land Ethic is mentioned once (47) but associated solely with Gandalf; Aldo Leopold’s name also shows up elsewhere in a list of contemporary environmental writers (259) which borders on the eccentrically selective.) “Pagan animism” is also mentioned only once (53), and that in context of a quotation from Lynn White. There is no suggestion that pagan animism might offer a powerful, still surviving (despite violent suppression by monotheists) and much older alternative—not necessarily as a fringe religion but also as an articulation and refinement of common feelings about, and experiences of, nature. The authors’ unbalanced discussion of White’s famous essay “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” is of a piece with their approach as a whole. Despite the obvious implication of Christianity, as a matter of historical record, in environmental despoliation—if not as a direct cause, then as useful ideological justification—they are unwilling to concede to White any significant degree of truth. So too with their discussion of the notorious injunctions of Genesis 1:26 and 1:28, giving humans “dominion” over the Earth and ordering them to “subdue” and “rule over” all other inhabitants. The authors’ interpretation is as idealistic (in both senses) as the common understanding of those passages, which they skate over, has been otherwise. Consequently, when they assert that exploitation of nature is “radically at odds with Christian faith,” it is comparable to maintaining that Islam is a religion of peace and Marxism is a philosophy of liberation. They may be, metaphysically; and perhaps they should be, in earthly reality; but in effect, on the ground—where, I would say, it matters most—the truth of all three assertions should be radically doubted. The authors’ extol “the special place humans have in creation” (52), since apparently “humankind is not merely part of the natural order” (65): all part of the all-too-familiar story of humans deciding they are special (read, as it has been read: superior): To an animal—a squirrel, for example—a tree is nothing more than a source of nuts, a place to escape from predators, and a nesting site. But if humans are more than mere animals, if their being transcends mere physical existence in some way, they can see a tree as something more. (63; my emphases) 240

Book Reviews Such dispiriting contempt for nature (not to mention presumption: how do they know this about squirrels, I wonder?) hardly seem part of a promising environmental ethic; and it is not improved by religious legitimation. Great stress is laid on the “transcendent” character of Christian stewardship, beginning with the principle that “The universe is the work of a divine creator” (24). But this may be the heart of the problem; the natural world does not have any intrinsic value but is valued only as an instance of something else greater, that is, as the handiwork of God. To make matters still worse, it is profoundly anthropocentric: “Arda is brought into being for the Children of Ilúvatar—for Elves and Men” (51). Hence it has no value or purpose in itself. Contrast that with Sean Kane’s point: “all the work that various peoples have done—all the work that peoples must do—to live with the Earth on the Earth’s terms is pre-empted by the dream of transcendence” (255). Or Ronald Hepburn’s: values and experiences are essentially the result of a cooperation of man and nonhuman nature: the universe would not contain them, were it not for our perceptual-creative efforts, and were it not equally for the contribution of the non-human world that both sustains and sets limits to our lives. To realize that . . . [shows] our earth-rootedness even in our aspirations. There is no wholly-other paradise from which we are excluded; the only transcendence that can be real to us is an “immanent” one (181-82). I do not cite this alternative view to show that the authors are necessarily mistaken. The point is that there is no such discussion in Ents, Elves, and Eriador. Rather, Christian stewardship is misleadingly presented as constituting the whole of environmental ethics. (On other religions—which themselves do not exhaust that subject—see the excellent series published by Harvard University Press on “Religions of the World and Ecology”.) Turning to Tolkien’s work, the same problem persists. It is taken as self-evident that since “Tolkien’s environmental ethic was firmly rooted in a deeply Christian, Catholic understanding of the world and its creator” (xxii), it follows that his “environmental vision is a profoundly meaningful outgrowth of his Catholicism and is therefore, at bottom, Christian” (24). The trouble is two-fold. 1): Tolkien certainly wrote as a Christian, but not only as a Christian. (They apparently recognize this—“The Lord of the Rings is a philological novel inspired by philological principles” (129) and “Tolkien wanted above all to tell a good story” (139)—but once again, these are gestures with no weight.) And in keeping with the authors’ narrowly Christian programme, the fact that Tolkien also had a passionate 241

Book Reviews interest in pagan Northern European mythology is ignored, along with its significant environmental implications. 2): It does not actually follow that because Tolkien was Christian, his work is. No more does it follow that “In a book whose subject is Tolkien’s environmental ethic . . . stewardship is the appropriate term [because] it is the term Tolkien used in his writing . . . with full awareness of its implications for Christian belief ” (40). Here the authors manage to combine both genetic and intentional fallacies. Nor will it do to invoke transcendent principles “in the sense that they are based on something beyond the personal preference of the author or of any one character or group of characters inside or outside the story in any particular time or culture” (25) This is essentialism with a vengeance, placing any “transcendent” assertions beyond meaningful criticism. The attempt to fit Bombadil and Beorn into the box of Christian stewardship is also, significantly, highly unconvincing. Even in Tolkien’s own assessment, Bombadil is a nature spirit (not something Christianity has been all that keen about, on the whole) whose ethos, as described by Goldberry to Frodo— “The trees and the grasses and all things growing or living in the land belong each to themselves”—is an encapsulation not of theistic stewardship (which is, after all, a kind of ownership, even if in someone else’s stead) but of precisely animistic and, to that extent, pagan intrinsic value, as well as a pointer to the other presences in Tolkien’s complex work which these authors have chosen to ignore. As for Beorn, he is first and foremost a shamanistic shape-shifter and if a steward, decidedly a ruthless Machiavellian, not a forgiving Christian one. Crucially, in addition to the fallacies and errors just noted, the authors show no awareness that the meaning of a book is a highly complex amalgam of what the author has put into it plus what readers are finding in it—a very different matter. (This lacuna corresponds exactly to their determination that since a religion “is” only what it was purportedly intended to be, there is no need to take into account what it has been taken to be). In short, the authors’ exegesis of Tolkien’s environmentalism is both uncritical and unself-critical. In relation to ecocriticism generally and Tolkien studies in particular, it is therefore decidedly regressive. Finally, 3): the authors of this book are equally selective, not to say sectarian, about which prior work they choose to acknowledge and discuss. Setting aside the lack of discussion of ecocriticism as a whole, perhaps the most egregious example concerns my own. I write this in no spirit of proprietorship nor pique; what is at stake is scholarly standards. Thus, several scholars, including myself, are politely dismissed as having “addressed in a more specific, even narrowly academic manner, [what] we address on a broader and more thorough popular level” (xviii). This 242

Book Reviews is highly misleading. Defending Middle-earth: Tolkien, Myth and Modernity was (so far as I know) not only the first full-length work to concentrate on Tolkien’s environmental vision but one written precisely for the general reader rather than the academic specialist. (It has received some sharp criticism, even dismissal, on both accounts). So, for example, there is a section here, entitled “Myth and Wonder,” in which the authors discuss how, by bringing “readers into contact with the mythical dimension of reality, and by showing the transcendent, even sacred, spiritual dimensions of nature in everyday life, Tolkien’s story engenders a similar appreciation of the real world among his readers” (233). Yet unmentioned is the fact that a decade ago, in the same book about the meaning of The Lord of the Rings in this world—to which, I argued, it returns us—and which includes chapters specifically on myth and wonder, I defined Tolkien’s literary project as “the resacralization (or re-enchantment) of experienced and living nature, including human nature, in the local cultural idiom” (29). Why this lack of common academic courtesy or, for that matter, charity? The answer is surely plain: because my book was not written from a Christian perspective. But is that sufficient reason not even to mention previous work (in a field where there is little enough of it), and in such an obviously related context (even if only to go on to disagree with it)? No, it is not; this is simply poor practice. (I would also like to reassure readers that despite this book’s bibliography, page 273, Joseph Pearce did not write my essay “Tolkien and the Critics: A Critique.) This has been a severe review, and some may be tempted to reach for an easy explanation. But I have been equally sharp about dogmatic secular Tolkien criticism (in the same essay). Dogmatic religious criticism, however—of any kind—is no better. Let me be quite clear: if the authors of Ents, Elves, and Eriador had described their subject as Christian stewardship, Tolkien’s commitment to that ideal and its presence in his work, without pretending that there is no other significant kind of environmental ethics, that Tolkien had no other significant commitments which affected his work in this respect (never mind how that work has been taken up), and that no earlier work on this subject is worth considering, then it would be a very different matter, and this would be a very different review. Regrettably, they chose otherwise. The result is both disingenuous and tendentious. Patrick Curry London, England WORKS CITED Coupe, Laurence, ed. The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism. London, Routledge, 2000. 243

Book Reviews Curry, Patrick. Ecological Ethics: An Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006. ———. Defending Middle-Earth: Tolkien, Myth and Modernity, second ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004 [First published 1997]. ———. “Tolkien and the Critics: A Critique.” In Root and Branch, second ed.Thomas Honegger, ed. Zurich: Walking Tree Publishers, 2005 [First published 1999]. Kane, Sean. Wisdom of the Mythtellers, second ed. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1998. Hepburn, Ronald W. “Wonder” and Other Essays. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984. From Hobbits to Hollywood: Essays on Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings”, edited by Ernest Mathijs and Murray Pomerance. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006. xviii, 403 pp. € 85.00 / $115.00 (hardcover) ISBN 9042016825; € 40.00 / $54.00 (trade paperback) ISBN 9042020627. Contemporary Cinema 3. The Lord of the Rings: Popular Culture in Global Context, edited by Ernest Mathijs. Foreword by Brian Sibley. London: Wallflower Press, 2006. xviii, 341 pp. £45.00 / $75.00 (hardback) ISBN 1904764835; £16.99 / $25.00 (trade paperback) ISBN 1904764827. In May of 2003, news circulated on the internet that Professors Ernest Mathijs and Martin Barker, both then based at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, were launching an international study of the media coverage of and fan reactions to the third part of Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. The results, culled from over twenty thousand questionnaires, have been announced as forthcoming in 2007 under the title Watching “The Lord of the Rings.” At the time of that study’s inception, Mathijs planned an anthology of essays about the film trilogy. Instead, two anthologies containing a total of nearly forty essays have appeared. From Hobbits to Hollywood (hereafter From Hobbits) focuses on interpretive studies of the film itself; The Lord of the Rings: Popular Culture in Global Context (hereafter Popular Culture) turns to examinations of the historical background of the franchise and of fan reactions. (Some of the essay-authors worked on the international study). The purpose in these books is to bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to cover the various aspects of a multifaceted phenomenon. The result is a profoundly disappointing pair of collections 244

Book Reviews of essays. The contributions do not cohere into an overview of the subject. Many of the authors apparently have relatively little knowledge of or even interest in Peter Jackson’s trilogy of films; they seem more concerned with their own methodologies than with the subject. Clichés of interpretation abound, and inaccuracies crop up frequently. Although ostensibly the books are linked to a reception-studies approach, most of the authors focus on the “myths” or “discourse” around the film, its distribution, and its ancillary products. The result is that they do not discuss (or need to research) actual historical causes and circumstances. They talk primarily about the ways in which these factors are represented in the culture. Nearly all of the essays follow a familiar path. The author discusses a method, citing a number of theorists, from Walter Benjamin and Frederic Jameson to some less familiar media scholars. This takes up a few pages, followed by a brief look at the topic at hand before a return to the methodological conclusions. All this discussion of theory and method tends to make the ideas about Rings that the essays put forth sound far more complex than they are. The result is a frequent formulation something like this: “Here we have an example of what So-and-so called ‘X.’” For example, in “Fixing a Heritage: Inscribing Middle Earth [sic] onto New Zealand,” Stan Jones remarks, “This process is related to what David Morley called ‘indigenisation’” (Popular Culture 290), as if simply labeling a phenomenon on the authority of another author illuminates or strengthens it. The stress on discourse leads to precious little factual information being put forth. For example, Jonathan Gray’s “Bonus Material: The DVD Layering of The Lord of the Rings” (in the Popular Culture volume) expends much verbiage to make the fairly evident point that the supplements to the extended editions transfer the film’s quest and fellowship imagery onto the filmmakers. He never, however, mentions Michael Pellerin, the producer and director of the supplements, or how he and his team created the individual documentaries and galleries. Similarly, he is not interested in New Line Home Entertainment’s and other companies’ roles in making the DVDs or in DVDs’ significance in the film industry, which changed considerably during the years Rings was being released. Gray is more concerned to suggest that somehow the supplements have a deceptive and calculating quality than to examine the considerable impact that the Rings DVDs had on the way other DVD packages are put together. In some cases one gets the distinct impression that an author has taken a pet method and hastily injected Rings into it. The resulting essays betray a decidedly casual familiarity with the films. Tom Conley’s “The Lord of the Rings and the Fellowship of the Map” (in From Hobbits) has something abstruse to do with maps, a subject on which he has written 245

Book Reviews a book. Conley clearly has not read Tolkien, and he must have napped through parts of the films. He persists in calling Bilbo “the Writer” or “the small man”; he states that near the end of Fellowship “one of the heroes” (i.e., Boromir) blows a horn; and he refers to the Orcs as “monsters” and, of all things, “infidels.” Conley may not even have seen Towers or Return, since he deals only with Fellowship. He claims that the map of Wilderland that Gandalf examines in Bilbo’s house near the beginning shows the places which “will figure in the voyage to come,” mistaking the Lonely Mountain for Mount Doom and not realizing that the map comes from The Hobbit. To cap all this, in referring to the scene after the Fellowship escapes from the Mines of Moria, Conley quotes Aragorn as saying, “Get the map, Legolas.” Wishful thinking from a map-obsessed author, since the line is actually “Get them up, Legolas,” referring to the grief-stricken hobbits. Obviously if a scholar is more interested in theory than the film at hand, he may hear things the way he wants to. Mathijs, dealing with the discourse of the British press in his "Reviews, Previews and Premieres: The Critical Reception of The Lord of the Rings in the United Kingdom,” twists what he assumes to be facts to fit his argument. He notes that the Times published its review of Return on December 9, 2003, a day before the Daily Mirror ran what it touted as the “first review.” A footnote in the Times revealed that its review had already been run in the New Zealand Herald. “This admission,” Mathijs states, “devalues” this review (in the eyes of Times readers, presumably), since it was “only a re-hash, not a scoop” (Popular Culture 132). Later, the author stresses that of all the non-tabloid reviews of Return, the one in the Times was the most flamboyant in its language, stressing the “bravura and grandeur” of the film, comparing it to Shakespeare, and so on. The result, for Mathijs, carries “an inference of imperialism and empire. Ironically since it was originally published in New Zealand (but heavily edited), this seems a very empire-establishment preview, quite happy to use the ‘epic’ trope to put forward what could be seen as aristocratic (dare I say despotic?) and feudal-sounding claims about ‘loyalty’ and ‘blood ties’—there is no mention of the ‘little man’ here” (136). True, Russell Baillie’s review is highly enthusiastic, beginning, “We come to it at last, the great film of our time,” a sentence quoted in the Times ad for Return reproduced in Mathijs’s essay. Baillie’s motives, however, were far from imperialistic. Mathijs seems unaware that he is the Entertainment Editor of the New Zealand Herald and covered all three premieres in Wellington. Baillie saw the press preview of Return on December 1, 2003, the day of the film’s world premiere, but as he wrote later that day, the local press were not allowed to publish their reviews yet. “It was a stipulation by the film’s distributors that to see the film, you were not allowed to review it just yet—mainly because it wouldn’t do for 246

Book Reviews New Zealand critics to have their say before the really important ones in the Northern Hemisphere got a chance to see it during the coming week. So we can’t actually say whether it was the single most amazing cinema experience of our recent memory or not.” Baillie’s review appeared in the Herald on December 8, and its tone echoes the enormous pride many Kiwis felt in what they perceived as a national achievement. What is imperialistic about this? Perhaps the Times perceived having a review written by an authority present at the world premiere as a scoop. Certainly the newspaper gave a New Zealand reviewer a chance to appear among “the really important ones in the Northern Hemisphere.” I may seem to belabor this example, but it displays the dangers, all too commonly present in these anthologies, of carving out a small, self-contained subject (in Mathijs’s case British press coverage in the last three months of 2003) and then delving deeply into it, and only it, and finally interpreting the limited data in a way that suits the author’s polemical bent. Given that From Hobbits deals with readings of the films rather than historical background, the authors can wander far and follow occasionally bizarre paths. In Steven Woodward and Kostis Kourelis’s “Urban Legend: Architecture in The Lord of the Rings,” the argument seems to be that Jackson and his designers should have introduced some sort of new style of set design similar to that of German Expressionist films like Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari. Instead, they claim, he opted to base all the sets on the work of Alan Lee, whose work, they further claim, “dates back to the 1960s popular culture associated with the psychedelic and the pastoral romanticism of the hippies” (193). Lee is directly compared to Peter Max! I cannot imagine anything less like Max’s gaudy designs than Lee’s pale, restrained watercolors (deriving mainly from children’s book illustration of the Arthur Rackham era). On a more mundane note, the authors credit Lee with all the architectural designs in the film, ignoring the fact that John Howe was responsible for the look of Bag End, the Dark Tower, and others. With depressing frequency the readings fall into stereotyped tropes. Several authors in both books claim that the military ideology of the film supports the Bush administration’s War on Terror. Not hampered by the fact that principal photography ended almost nine months before 9/11, the authors can blithely claim that audiences interpreted the film in that light or that the general imagery of war simply fits in with the mindset of the nation. Douglas Kellner’s “The Lord of the Rings as Allegory: A Multiperspectivist Reading” goes the farthest in this direction, and although I never thought I would use this term in a review, it is a perfectly vile essay. After paying lip service to the desirability of multiple readings, he declares that the film “should be read” as being conservative and militarist, as fostering the War on Terror, and even of having Nazi motifs. (Towers is 247

Book Reviews like Nazi-era director’s Leni Riefenstahl’s mountain films because it has, well, mountains). The film’s (and Tolkien’s) dislike of industrialization is deemed a conservative attack on modernity, despite the fact that green concerns are now of immense importance to progressive politics—and environmentalists often adopt Middle-earth imagery. Kellner’s contempt for the film is so great that he constantly describes the action inaccurately (as when Théoden buries his dead “son” Boromir), and he manages to attach all the imperialist, warmongering, racist notions to the forces opposed to Sauron rather than to Sauron himself. Another motif that crops up is that the film is racist because the Orcs have dark skins and the main Maori actors involved played Sauron, Lurtz, and other villainous figures. Yet there is a considerable variety of physical types among the Orcs, and some of the prominent ones are white. Interestingly, in one of the few essays where actual movie spectators are quoted, the interviewees did not find the lack of racial diversity significant or offensive—much though the researcher seems to have pushed them toward such a conclusion. As one rightly said, “I don’t think you can compare it, I mean, it’s a totally different world” (Popular Culture 198). Finally, there is a frequent reading of simple sexual imagery: swords are phallic, caves vaginal. (Who knew?) One would think this sort of thing was by now the province of giggling teenagers who have just learned about Freud, but sadly it still seems possible to publish academic essays based on such tired methodology. Ruth Goldberg and Krin Gabbard’s “‘What Does the Eye Demand’: Sexuality, Forbidden Vision and Embodiment in The Lord of the Rings” (From Hobbits) is only the most dogged of such endeavors in the two books. It is notable that in all this repetitive analysis of phallic militarist imagery, the frequent association of the male characters with plant and especially floral imagery goes unnoticed. Presumably it just does not fit the story these commentators are determined to tell. We might expect that of the two books Popular Culture, more oriented toward the historical context of the films, their reception, and the related franchise components, would provide more solid material. Yet the coverage provided often seems thinly researched. There are remarkably few references in either volume to film trade papers like Variety or The Hollywood Reporter. The single most extensive print source specifically on the film, the eighteen issues of the excellent Lord of the Rings Fan Club Official Movie Magazine, is cited only once (in Jerry Mosher’s “Morphing Sean Astin: ‘Playing Fat’ in the Age of Digital Animation,” From Hobbits). The magazine would seem a rich resource for reception studies, since it contains interviews, coverage of fan activities, and articles on the companies licensed to make the ancillary products. Similarly, only a few authors 248

Book Reviews conducted interviews with the film’s makers or facilitators. Stan Jones, for example, talked to people involved in New Zealand products (Ian Brodie about his bestselling locations guidebook) and events (officials at Te Papa, concerning its touring museum exhibition). Admittedly access for interviews with film-industry figures is often difficult or impossible, but few of the authors draw upon the huge number of published interviews for information. Kirsten Pullen, in her “The Lord of the Rings Online Blockbuster Fandom,” pays no attention to the extensive online and print sources by and concerning Gordon Paddison, the New Line executive in charge of the film’s internet campaign. She simply assumes that Paddison modeled his Rings web campaign on the innovative websites for The Blair Witch Project (1999). But Paddison had already gained a reputation for creating cutting-edge websites for New Line films since 1995. Pullen also assumes that New Line simply used fan sites by feeding them information, ignoring the considerable tension and negotiation between such sites and the studio over the years. In dealing with TheOneRing.net, Pullen perpetuates the myth that Erica Challis, one of the site’s co-founders, was given regular access to Rings sets and wrote reports on what she saw; in fact Challis was allowed to report only on one such visit. Finally, Pullen declares that all Rings slash fiction (homoerotic fan stories based on existing characters) is film-based. This is patently not true, as the existence of such Yahoo! slash groups as Glorfindel of Imladris (a character who figures in the book but not the film) demonstrates. Although each author has undertaken a limited or local study, the “global context” theme of the collection demands that they be able to view their subjects in relation to the franchise as a whole. Few of the authors do that successfully. In “Blockbusters and/as Events: Distributing and Launching The Lord of the Rings” (Popular Culture), for example, Daniel Biltereyst and Philippe Meers’s case study of the Belgian distribution and marketing of The Return of the King, the authors consider it “surprising” that New Line chose to release the film through a small independent Belgian distribution firm, Cinéart, rather than one of the local branches of the big U.S. studios. Yet it is far from surprising if one considers global patterns of distribution for Hollywood films. New Line is an independent producer/distributor that finances its films in the standard way used by such companies, through pre-sales of distribution rights to firms in various foreign countries. New Line had output deals with such independent distributors as Metropolitan in France and SF Film in Denmark; that is, they contracted for a series of films rather than by individual title. In most countries, the company stuck with the small firms that it had regularly dealt with. Cinéart was one of the few Rings distributors that did not have an output deal with New Line when the negotiations concerning 249

Book Reviews the trilogy started, but it was approached at the Cannes Film Festival of 1999 about investing in the film. Like many such local firms, Cinéart survives by mixing art-house and popular releases, the latter including Chicken Run in 2000. Biltereyst and Meers interviewed an executive at Cinéart, but they seem not to have asked exactly how and why the firm obtained Rings. Ian Conrich’s “A Land of Make Believe: Merchandising and Consumption of The Lord of the Rings” writes as though the film-based products exist in vacuum. Every tie-in item comes as a surprise. Conrich marvels that Rings products have been “aimed at adult consumers and connoisseurs” (Popular Culture 127), showing no awareness that Sideshow, Noble Collection, United Cutlery and other Rings licensees routinely manufacture high-end collectibles derived from film franchises and television series. He finds it “interesting” that Rings costumes were sold “as intended for Halloween” (129), as if such film-derived costumes have not been standard for decades. Conrich claims that all pre-Jackson franchise products were linked to the 1978 animated version by Ralph Bakshi, ignoring all the games, calendars, and other products licensed as tie-ins to the novel. Janet Wasko and Govind Shanadi are given the difficult task of including a brief production history of the film at the beginning of their essay on merchandising, “More than Just Rings: Merchandise for The All,” which opens Section 1 of Popular Culture. Wasko is an accomplished industry historian, but this account, with its scattershot mentions of various Rings products, does not have much shape. The essay’s brief summary of the sales of the adaptation rights to Tolkien’s novel leaves out one of the key components. After mentioning Bakshi’s version, Wasko and Shanadi claim, “Hollywood’s reintroduction to The Lord of the Rings began in 1998, when the Saul Zaentz Company, doing business as Tolkien Enterprises, granted a license to film the trilogy to New Line Cinema” (Popular Culture 25). In fact Zaentz sold the rights to Miramax at the beginning of 1997, and the company had a two-film version in pre-production at Jackson’s New Zealand facilities for eighteen months, a period during which much of the design work and digital R and D that ended up in the final film was accomplished. The tale of how Miramax lost the rights when Jackson was able to convince New Line to take over the project—and produce it as three features—is one of the most dramatic and oft-recounted episodes in the film’s production history. Indeed, none of the authors seems aware of the Miramax connection. In the introduction to Popular Culture, Mathijs remarks in passing that “interestingly, the Weinstein Brothers (of Miramax) were said to be involved with a 2.5% stake, while the Disney company held another 2.5%” (3). Research into this curious fact might seem in order, but 250

Book Reviews Mathijs simply assumes that these two companies just invested a bit of money in the project. Actually, part of the terms of the production’s sale to New Line gave Miramax 5% of the film’s gross, and Michael Eisner, head of Miramax’s parent company Disney, was so convinced that Rings would flop that he split its share with the Weinsteins. This omission of Miramax is no small matter. Davinia Thornley’s “‘Wellywood’ and Peter Jackson: The Local Reception of The Lord of the Rings in Wellington, New Zealand” (Popular Culture), starts her examination of Kiwi press coverage with the New Line’s August 24, 1998 announcement that it was producing Rings—despite the fact that the film had already been in pre-production in the New Zealand capital for a year and a half. More localized inaccuracies appear in nearly all the essays. Wasko and Shanandi, trying to keep abreast of an ongoing franchise, state that Vivendi Universal Games was collaborating with Turbine Entertainment Software to develop a MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game), “Middle Earth Online,” which, the authors state, “was launched in 2005” (33). Actually, VU lost its Rings licenses, and Turbine alone is developing “The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar,” which is approaching the beta (user-testing) stage at the end of 2006. In “‘On the Brink of a New Threshold of Opportunity’: The Lord of the Rings and New Zealand Cultural Policy,” Jennifer Lawn and Bronwyn Beatty give a fairly useful rundown of government policy relating to the film, but they don’t distinguish between the very different and crucial technologies, the “Fatpipe” and the “video village,” both systems enabled by Telecom, the national phone service, and both discussed on the DVD supplements. Given how focused these books are on “myths” and “discourse,” it might be appropriate to take a look at their own discourse. Most of the authors adopt a remarkably similar set of methodological and rhetorical tactics. Despite the emphasis on discourse, these authors seldom refer except in passing to the institutions that create that discourse, such as the recent growth of the infotainment industry. Citations of secondary sources, often non-film-related “cultural” critics’ theoretical work, outweigh those of primary sources. Possibly the authors see the latter sources, coming as they do from within the entertainment industry, as being compromised and not trustworthy, or possibly they do not know how to find them or cannot be bothered. With some exceptions, these essays are couched in a faintly (or not so faintly) disdainful tone. The authors seem perpetually surprised and indignant that governments and companies act the way they do. Such a testy reaction to the film industry’s widespread practices serves to signal that the writers have a critical attitude toward capitalist society, whether explicitly or implicitly. The authors also adopt a distance from their 251

Book Reviews subject, giving an air of indifference to the film and of imperviousness to the wiles of the film industry and its publicity machine. Presumably any display of enthusiasm would make the author appear to fall under the deceptive sway of late-capitalist society. The only author who admits to being a fan of the film is Eric Hedling (“Framing Tolkien: Trailers, High Concept and the Ring,” Popular Culture). This attitude of sophisticated skepticism implies that the millions of fans who enjoy the film, the tours of New Zealand, the DVD supplements, the video games, the replica swords, and all the other components of the franchise are somehow deluded, naïve, and pitiable. Such disdain underpinning books linked to a project on fan reception is disturbing. Many of the authors cite the work of Henry Jenkins, whose 1992 book Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture has been a seminal text within the growing study of fan culture. Yet these authors have missed the basic attitude of Jenkins and others who have undertaken similar research: they respect the fans and proudly admit to being fans themselves. Jenkins also has an enormous knowledge of the media industries, which allows him to revel in popular culture without being sucked in by its hype. His recent book, Convergence Culture, only touches on the Rings films, but it provides an exciting model for studying a broad range of the issues relating to franchises and the fans who love them—much the same range of topics that the two anthologies at hand struggle to cover. The disdain for fans so frequently hinted at in these two books comes to the surface in Judith E. Rosenbaum’s “‘This is What it Must Look Like’: The Lord of the Rings Fandom and Media Literacy.” Using what seem fragile tools for determining a person’s “media literacy,” Rosenbaum questioned four small groups of viewers, two made up of “fans” of the film and two made up of “non-fans.” She confidently dubs their various responses “correct” or not, but Rosenbaum does not display enough knowledge about the film’s background to warrant such judgments. She quotes one non-fan’s answer to a question about the film’s production. This person supposes that the script was completed and then designers and other crew members were brought in to work on it (Popular Culture, 194). On the basis of a single question-and-answer session that Jackson held on the fan site Ain’t It Cool News on August 30, 1998, Rosenbaum judges the respondent correct about “how the idea of the movie originated.” Yet in reality the design process and scripting went on in parallel and “originated,” as I have mentioned, in early 1997. Jackson’s hastily arranged answers to fan questions took place at a time when New Line and Miramax lawyers had just finished scrambling to transfer the production, and they do not even attempt to summarize the film’s making. Jackson and his collaborators subsequently scrapped the two-part script they had been writing and started afresh to create a three-part script, even while 252

Book Reviews retaining the design work already done. Apart from such dubious calls on the “correct” responses, judging the media literacy of a few viewers on the basis of their knowledge of one film seems impossible. After all, the non-fans in this small survey are fans of something else and presumably know more about that. Anyone who observes fans in their natural habitat, such as on Yahoo! chat groups, at conventions, and in the mail pages of the fan-club magazine, knows that most of them are well aware of how Hollywood and the makers of licensed products try to manipulate them. In most cases they are happy to have access to movies, their tie-in products, and information about both. When they are not happy, they complain in no uncertain terms—as happened with the brand partnership New Line formed with Burger King for Fellowship. Apart from problems of content, the editorial process of the books leaves much to be desired. The illustrations in From Hobbits are reproduced in a muddy gray, rendering in particular the frame enlargements of the maps in Conley’s essay illegible. The name “Middle-earth” is written “Middle Earth” throughout, apart from one “Middle-Earth.” A number of authors are clearly non-native English speakers but bravely tackled writing in that language, and no one has given their prose a final polish to remove occasional awkward constructions. Typos are not uncommon, and in some instances the brief bibliographies at the ends of essays have entries out of alphabetical order. The covers are reasonably attractive, however, especially that for Popular Culture. To end on a happier note, there are some thoughtful and informative essays in the two anthologies. In From Hobbits, Sarah Kozloff offers an informed, clearly argued, and mercifully polemic-free analysis of “The Lord of the Rings as Melodrama,” pointing out that both the novel and film consistently use such nineteenth-century stage conventions as the rescue in the nick of time. Tom Gunning’s “Gollum and Golem: Special Effects and the Technology of Artificial Bodies,” while overlong in its theoretical ruminations, knowledgeably fits the digital creation of an artificial character into the long tradition of automatons, an area where science and illusionism meet. Mosher’s “Morphing Sean Astin” is not another plaint about negative body image but assesses the special value accorded to performances where actors voluntarily gain weight for their roles. In Popular Culture, Jonathan Dovey and Helen W. Kennedy’s “Playing the Ring: Intermediality and Ludic Narratives in the Lord of the Rings Games,” spends the usual preliminaries on the current debates in current video-game studies between the “narratologists” versus the “ludologists.” Still, after bringing in a group of young people to play Rings video and board games, they pay attention to and respect the responses of their interviewees. The quoted passages, however, demonstrate the degree of 253

Book Reviews inarticulateness that the researchers must be facing in interpreting the responses to the international Rings surveys and interviews. Half the time I read these quotations and cannot figure out what these kids are talking about. Warren Buckland and Christopher Long usefully explain how to trace the income of Rings in their “Following the Money: The Lord of the Rings and the Culture of Box Office Figures.” Like Biltereyst and Meers, however, they misunderstand the nature of New Line’s financing of the trilogy by assuming that it “was forced to rely on a ‘guerilla campaign’ of sorts to distribute the film abroad” (96). Martin Hills reflects in an intriguing way on the apparent contradiction in the notion of a cult film being a blockbuster in “Realising the Cult Blockbuster: The Lord of the Rings Fandom and Residual-Emergent Cult Statue in ‘the Mainsteam.’” These and a few other essays offer ideas or information, but they mostly deal with quite specific and peripheral aspects of the Rings franchise. Sadly, they can do little to pull these two hodgepodges of books into anything resembling an overview of this important phenomenon. Kristin Thompson University of Wisconsin-Madison WORKS CITED Baillie, Russell. “The Return of the King: Jackson’s crowning glory,” The New Zealand Herald (December 8, 2003). http://www. nzherald.co.nz/search/story.cfm?storyid=75838590-39E011DA-8E1B-A5B353C55561. _______. “The Return of the King too precious for words.” The New Zealand Herald (December 1, 2003). http://www.nzherald. co.nz/search/story.cfm?storyid=66BDA8CE-39E0-11DA8E1B-A5B353C55561. Barker, Martin, and Mathijs, Ernest, eds. Watching “The Lord of the Rings.” New York: Peter Lang, forthcoming 2007. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006. _______. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992. “Peter Jackson Answers THE GEEKS!!! 20 Questions About Lord Of The Rings!!!” Ain’t It Cool News (August 31, 1998): http:// www.aint-it-cool-news.com/lordoftherings.html. 254

Book Reviews The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide, by Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond. London: HarperCollins, 2006. Volume I: Chronology. xviii, 1,002 pp. £30.00 (hardcover) ISBN 0261103814. Volume II: Reader’s Guide. xviii, 1262 pp. £30.00 (hardcover) ISBN 0007149182. Slip-cased two-volume set: £50.00 ISBN 0007169728. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Volume I: Chronology. xviii, 1,002 pp. $50.00 (hardcover) ISBN 0618391029. Volume II: Reader’s Guide. xviii, 1262 pp. $50.00 (hardcover) ISBN 0618291010. Slip-cased two-volume set: $100.00 ISBN 0618391134. Autumn 2006 brought a bumper harvest of reference works on Tolkien, with the near-simultaneous publication of Michael D.C. Drout’s heavyweight J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, pooling the work of one hundred twenty-eight scholars, and this super-heavyweight contribution by two highly regarded veterans of Tolkien studies. While Professor Drout’s book has the edge in its coverage of issues in criticism, Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond’s magnum opus excels in its treatment of biographical matters. Like the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, the Companion and Guide provides an encyclopedia of matters relating to Tolkien, although it rightly eschews entries about the fictitious places, characters, and totems which have been the primary focus of older reference books such as J.E.A. Tyler’s Tolkien Companion and Robert Foster’s Complete Guide to Middle-earth. Uniquely, Scull and Hammond also provide an extraordinarily detailed chronology of Tolkien’s life that runs to 800 pages. The Chronology volume ambitiously attempts to provide for Tolkien’s entire lifespan what his letters to Christopher Tolkien furnish for 1944. These diary-like reports of day-to-day life, written when his son was serving in South Africa in the Royal Air Force, form one of the most satisfying sections of The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Their value lies in showing the epic of Frodo and Sam’s journey to Mordor unfold, with amazingly speed, amid the stew of mundane events on the home front, in the Tolkien household, within Oxford University, and on the international stage. Reading these letters, an initial sense of disconnection between the life and the creative writings is soon jostled aside by thoughts of possible connection. Most striking of all, to my mind, is the realization that Tolkien wrote “The Passage of the Marshes” a matter of days after revisiting Birmingham, his childhood home, and seeing “ghosts that rose from the pavements” (Letters, 70)—the shades of old friends, many of them lost on the battlefields of the First World War. Readers, researchers and biographers who are concerned with the why of writing can construe from an abundance of suggestive detail presented in the Chronology. Those concerned with the how of writing, too, can learn much from the ordinary and extraordinary rhythms of the 255

Book Reviews writer’s life. Read in sequence, this many-threaded account of Tolkien’s life—the consequential and the inconsequential, the fascinating and the dull—makes for a long read. The stretch spanning the writing of The Lord of the Rings occupies more than 250 pages, a significant proportion of which is concerned with other matters. The effect is to underline not only the sheer labor involved in writing the book, but also Tolkien’s remarkable facility for keeping its complexities clear in his mind over such a long period. Not unjustly did C. S. Lewis comment in 1947—ten years into the process—that Tolkien “works like a coral insect” (Lewis, Letters, III, 1,579). We can now see for the first time just how much of Tolkien’s life was spent not only in tutoring and lecturing but also in committee meetings. The potted biographies of other members of the Oxford English faculty in the Reader’s Guide may put some flesh on these dry bones, but not much. A further keynote is struck by the prolonged labor of marking examination papers; and another still by Tolkien’s health: a veritable plague of complaints is gleaned from his letters, wheezily punctuating the Chronology and constituting an entire entry in the Reader’s Guide: a catalogue of lumbago, influenza, fibrositis, and dental problems. Scull and Hammond explain at the outset that they provide these details of work, health and other matters partly in order to demonstrate how “extraordinarily busy” Tolkien was—countering both his academic detractors, who felt he squandered his time on fairy-tales, and his fans, who tend to be frustrated that he did not finish and publish more (I, ix). Yet the function of literary biography is surely not to excuse a writer his failings, but to shed light on his creative processes. What the ebb and flow of university work and the ups and downs of Tolkien’s health combined to form was a pattern of obstacles and opportunities, now mapped in full for the first time. It becomes abundantly clear why Tolkien had to squeeze the construction of Middle-earth into the small hours of the night, or else into those parts of the vacation when academic duties had finally been cleared away. The long periods of standstill, when lack of momentum amounted to writer’s block (by Balin’s tomb in 1939–40, at Isengard in 1943–4) become all the more understandable, the bursts of ab nihilo creativity all the more amazing. Such external influences on productivity are not unique to Tolkien, of course: what he wrote after the Battle of the Somme was remarkably unlike what other soldier-writers produced in 1917 and 1918, but he was only one of many who used convalescence at that time to exorcise the demons of war through writing. The ignominious fate of the “Clarendon Chaucer,” gleaned from letters and other papers in the Oxford University Press archive, proves that Tolkien did indeed sacrifice academic work which he might have completed had he made it his sole priority. Tolkien became involved in 256

Book Reviews this projected collection of Chaucerian texts for students in 1923 but it was finally abandoned, after vast labor by a changing cast of academics, in the 1950s. The story has hitherto been known only to those who heard Peter Gilliver of the Oxford English Dictionary speak at the Oxford Tolkien Conference, Exeter College, on 21 August 2006 (and Gilliver’s account, which quotes more copiously from the entertaining correspondence of Tolkien’s increasingly irate collaborators, will be worth reading when it appears in the conference proceedings). For those wishing for a clear chronology of composition, the timeline affords a clearer view than can be immediately gained from the History of Middle-earth, where texts are presented in logical order rather than according to strict chronology (the Lost Tales in narrative sequence rather than in order of composition; 1960s revisions of poems nestled within commentaries on 1919 texts; the appendices of The Lord of the Rings reached after the completion of the account of the writing of The Silmarillion). In the Chronology, each version of “Kortirion among the trees” or “The Nameless Land” appears in its proper era, surrounded by the ephemera of Tolkien’s life. We can now see more clearly how completion of The Lord of the Rings jostled with development of The Notion Club Papers, the history of Númenor, the stories of Túrin and Tuor, all of this pushing aside rather than bringing forward completion of the synoptic “Silmarillion.” Summaries of the annual “Father Christmas letter” provide some breezy moments—a light-hearted parallel to Tolkien’s own round of academic duties. It is a shame not to see other items summarized, such as the sections of the “Lay of Leithian” that were being written in the late 1920s, and for which Tolkien occasionally even provided dates. His far more frequent failure to do so presents a fundamental problem for the chronologist. Scull and Hammond’s solution is to mention each undated event at the earliest point that it may have happened, just as they describe each phase of Tolkien’s activities (his school rugby career, a term’s lecture schedule, etc.) at its beginning. The extensive use of the future tense, together with the annalistic present tense, can sound portentous and even bathetic when applied to the trivial or personal (a phenomenon that Woody Allen exploits in mockumentaries such as Zelig): “During one game his tongue will be badly damaged, an accident he will sometimes blame when people complain that they find his speech difficult to understand. On another occasion he will damage his nose” (I, 14). But it is hard to see how the authors could have avoided this, and the reader soon gets used to it. As I know from experience, anyone embarking on serious biographical research about Tolkien should have such a chronology in front of them, in which the many facts and facets of his life are marshalled in 257

Book Reviews plain sequence. Indeed, the chronological portion that Scull and Hammond publish here for the years 1914 to 1918 is almost comparable in scale and detail with the exhaustive working timeline I compiled from a multitude of unpublished and published sources in the course of writing Tolkien and the Great War. With the arrival of the Companion and Guide there ought now to be no excuse, beyond sheer laziness, for other biographers to use Humphrey Carpenter’s 1977 J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography as virtually the sole source of information about Tolkien’s life, as too many have done. The Chronology gathers from many disparate publications, ranging from the History of Middle-earth and The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien down to snippets of the British Tolkien Society bulletin Amon Hen, the auction catalogues of Sotheby’s, and contemporary newspaper reports of Tolkien’s public appearances. It also makes use of previously unpublished material from a variety of archives, including most notably the Tolkien papers at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and at Marquette University, Milwaukee; the papers of Oxford University and the Oxford University Press; and the correspondence files of the publishers George Allen & Unwin. Unlike Carpenter, Scull and Hammond have not been given access to the entire Tolkien family archive, or indeed to the majority of it; but they have certainly been to a few places therein that no one has visited since Carpenter, and they have made extensive use of what they have seen there. The Chronology volume can hardly be read without the Reader’s Guide to hand. In Volume I, references abound to hard-to-find posthumous publications and other items, bare of explanation: “Tolkien draws up a synoptic table of the Alphabet of Rúmil he has used in his diary” (I, 115). Elucidation, for those unfamiliar with the Alphabet of Rúmil, will be found (with the help of the very comprehensive index) under “Writing Systems” in Volume II (though it is to be hoped that the truly interested reader will go further and read Parma Eldalamberon 13, in which Arden R. Smith has edited Tolkien’s work on this Devanagari-style script, an early forerunner of the tengwar). The two volumes form twin pillars of a single edifice. What new materials have Scull and Hammond brought to light? The first appears right at the start of the Chronology, where Edith Bratt’s father (who did not appear on her birth certificate) is named as Arthur Frederick Warrilow of Handsworth, near Birmingham. A section of family trees provides a considerably more extensive genealogy for Tolkien than has previously been available. The most substantial non-literary additions to our knowledge of Tolkien’s life comprise day-by-day accounts of his inspiring 1911 walking tour in the Alps (largely from an unpublished memoir by one of his companions, Colin Brookes-Smith), his 1913 258

Book Reviews trip to France as chaperone to two Mexican boys (taken from his letters to Edith and the boys’ guardian), and his holiday in Italy in 1955 with daughter Priscilla (from Tolkien’s diary). Throughout, a rich peppering of Tolkien’s own opinions, either voiced by him or reported by others, goes some way towards matching the value of his 1944 letters to Christopher. On that disastrous French trip, during which an aunt of his protégés was killed by a car, the 21-yearold Ronald struggles manfully to take care of his charges: Rushing about sight-seeing or any obvious form of enjoyment is of course out of the question for a while so I have tried to find out what of the best, most readable, and least palpably ‘instructive’ of boys books they haven’t read. Many of these I have got in cheap editions . . . such as King Solomon’s Mines, Kim and so forth. José, the most thoughtful of the three, was very anxious to have a huge tome that he caught sight of . . . ‘Mexico the Land of Unrest’ a meticulous history (by an Englishman I think) of the revolution—but I thought it a little too hard for his digestion yet. . . . There is no accommodation in this hotel for children so at their earnest entreaties I also got them some draughts of which they are very fond. (I, 45) One wonders whether his hunt for books that are not “palpably ‘instructive’” was motivated solely by a desire to brighten the boys’ moods or also by a more long-standing distaste for didacticism in literature. About to leave Venice, Tolkien writes, “I wandered in the palace, and looked out from the western arcade over the piazza and the lagoon and the Giudecca. Everything glittering. Heartrendingly lovely after so short a stay, so soon to end. Still no hard or deep colors. Clear but pale sky, glass-grey glinting water, light olive-greenness.” (I, 467) Elsewhere, readers whose passions span the Beatles as well as Tolkien (a sizable constituency) will be particularly interested to learn, for the first time, Tolkien’s reaction to the band’s abortive plan to film The Lord of the Rings: as the George Allen & Unwin secretary Joy Hill conveyed to Rayner Unwin in 1969, “Professor Tolkien is getting more and more furious about this. . . . He is livid that the Beatles have done this and loathes them anyway. . . . Particularly . . . he seem to have a thing against John Lennon” (II, 617). Compiling their work while Tolkien and the Great War was also in preparation, Scull and Hammond examined for themselves many of the primary sources I used, particularly the letters of the T.C.B.S. among the Tolkien papers at the Bodleian Library in Oxford and various service records and war diaries at the British National Archive in Kew. Their

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Book Reviews coverage of First World War topics is briefer and less widely sourced, though there is rather more on the pre-war history of the Lancashire Fusiliers, as well as verbatim transcripts of G.B. Smith’s advice on buying military gear and of battalion orders for one of the attacks in which Tolkien took part. The characterization of Tolkien, Christopher Wiseman, Robert Gilson and Geoffrey Smith as “the most important members” of the T.C.B.S., “who will remain closely associated when other members drift away” (I, 25) runs quite contrary to the evidence of Tolkien and Wiseman’s letters, and other material previously adduced in Tolkien and the Great War: the clique’s center of gravity followed Wiseman and Gilson to Cambridge, where the dominating members appear to have been Wilfrid Payton and Sidney Barrowclough, and if anyone drifted away between 1911 and 1914 it was Tolkien; the T.C.B.S. only became four because Wiseman and Tolkien enacted a purge which spared only Gilson and Smith. On other points, Scull and Hammond draw different conclusions on points of detail (such as the dates of Smith’s letters) and have occasionally unearthed information that was unavailable to me, including the tantalizing titles and dates of several unpublished poems by Tolkien. In view of his own unique response to the First World War, it is intriguing to see that he presented a paper to his undergraduate club on the poems of H. R. Freston, a fellow Exeter College student who wrote about the war and had died in it. Battalion activities noted in the Chronology are delivered more or less raw in the clipped language of its war diary, which tends to obliterate the human dimension of the front line, its atmosphere of mud, blood, and smoke. Synoptic descriptions of the T.C.B.S. letters cannot capture the spirit of the young men, or the full tragedy of their story. To an extent, this simply demonstrates the limitations of a strictly chronological account compared with a fully fledged biographical narrative. But the Somme, like Oxford University, is a world unto itself; yet the kind of apparatus usefully provided in the Reader’s Guide for an understanding of the structure and dynamics of Oxford is relatively lacking in Scull and Hammond’s treatment of Tolkien’s soldiering experience. Perhaps the authors felt that my book obviated the need for a lengthy apparatus on military matters, just as I judged that their Chronology would make redundant any similarly detailed timeline in Tolkien and the Great War. By and large, the two works complement one another. In the Companion and Guide, we see further evidence of how tenuous the beginnings of Middle-earth actually were. We already knew that Tolkien conceived the first character and situation of his legendarium in the seminal 1914 poem “The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star.” Now we learn that in one early revision he threw out the Anglo-Saxon name for his hero and renamed him Phosphorus, effectively recasting the poem in a classical setting and cutting it adrift from its Northern moorings. 260

Book Reviews From a literary standpoint perhaps the most valuable new contribution is a description and summary of the “Story of Kullervo,” Tolkien’s adaptation of part of the Finnish Kalevala that served as a prototype for his own “Tale of Turambar.” Closely related to this are quotations from the talk on the “Finnish national epic” first presented in 1914 to a college society, although it turns out that the line quoted by Carpenter which has given rise to the idea that Tolkien explicitly anticipated his own “mythology for England” came from a later revision, probably written after most of his work on The Book of Lost Tales. Later still, extensive citations from the drafts to Tolkien’s 1939 Andrew Lang Lecture, “On Fairy-stories,” offer tantalizing glimpses of what is to come in the edition currently being prepared by Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson. Described in detail for the first time is a lecture about dragons, delivered on New Year’s Day 1938 to an audience of children in Oxford. By misfortune, navigating the Reader’s Guide is irksome. The 11thhour disaster of Christina Scull's heart attack when the Companion and Guide was being finalized, together with the fact that Volume II had hit the upper limit for pages, has left it bereft of a planned list of entries and of headwords on each page. Shorter articles are hard to locate between the behemoths concerned with Tolkien’s major writings. I actually find myself contemplating adding headwords by hand—to 1,135 pages! Since publication, the authors have posted a list of entries on their website (http://mysite.verizon.net/wghammond/Guide topic list.doc); just as useful would be a list divided according to category. The original plan had been to follow the example of Walter Hooper in his C. S. Lewis Companion and Guide—the model for the present work—by corralling the disparate materials into a “Who’s Who,” a “Where’s Where,” and a “What’s What” (at least); and some may feel this programme should have been pursued. In fact, entries may be divided roughly into six categories: people, places, organisations, biographical topics, literary topics, and writings. Among the geographical entries, those on Birmingham, Leeds, Oxford, and Oxfordshire, are especially dense with information, highlighting not only Tolkien’s addresses but also the institutions, parks, pubs, and villages he frequented. The 150-plus entries about people cover family members; teachers and mentors; close friends and fellow members of clubs and societies such as the T.C.B.S. and the Inklings; colleagues and fellow members of academic organisations such as the English faculties at Leeds and Oxford; major correspondents; and the more obvious latter-day literary influences on Tolkien. The criteria for inclusion are necessarily arbitrary. There is neither entry nor index reference for J. W. Dunne, a man whose influence on Tolkien has formed the basis of an entire book, Verlyn Flieger’s A Question of Time. Nor is there an entry for 261

Book Reviews Humphrey Carpenter, who not only had dealings with Tolkien but also exercised a major influence on his posthumous reception. The heterogeneity of interests inside the Oxford English School was highly relevant to Tolkien in his committee battles, but does not justify mini-biographies for so many fellow faculty members; their influence on him as individuals is moot, and they might more wisely have been described in a unitary overview. Such tangential items make browsing the Reader’s Guide less rewarding than might be hoped. Far more valuable are the informative entries on literary influences including G. K. Chesterton, E. R. Eddison, H. Rider Haggard, Andrew Lang, William Morris, and E. Nesbit; though it is disappointing to find none for J. M Barrie, Lewis Carroll, or Lord Dunsany. One the other hand, Barrie appears in the entry on drama, while Carroll and Dunsany are among the many writers mentioned in the exemplary entry on reading—a thoroughly satisfying overview of Tolkien’s literary habits as they may be ascertained from widely disparate sources. In addition to health, biographical topics include appearance (reminiscent of Carpenter’s chapter “Photographs observed”), domestic duties, food and drink, languages (which attempts to gather available evidence for Tolkien’s expertise in ancient and modern tongues), political thought, and smoking. An entry on names discusses not only Tolkien’s Christian names and surname but also what he was called by friends and family, and even the evolution of the modes of address used in correspondence between Tolkien and the Unwins. A long item on societies demonstrates the range of Tolkien’s interests and activities, encompassing not only Icelandic sagas, beer, and literary talk but also educational reform, Dante, Arthuriana, Esperanto, place names, Catholic company, and oyster eating. The literary topics have been selected with restraint and good sense, largely avoiding the degree of overlapping that rather mars the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia. Several entries cover key areas of influence on Tolkien’s writings (Arthurian, Celtic, classical, Northern); others deal with narrative motifs (Atlantis, light, the road, spiders); others with literary modes (allegory, drama, poetry); others still with thematic abstractions (mortality and immortality, environment, pity, possessiveness). Such entries, useful though they are, suggest that Scull and Hammond’s strengths lie in biographical and bibliographical matters, rather than in literary interpretation. The entry on England cites a visitors’ book from Stonyhurst, Lancashire, in which Tolkien defined his nationality not as “British” (like everyone else on the page) but as “English”: evidence of impressive efforts in the name of research. The more purely literary entries are also valuable, so far as they go, but they do not do justice to the complexity and protean quality of Tolkien’s creative methods and ideas, or to the 262

Book Reviews variety and energy of five decades of Tolkien studies, in the way that the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia does. Generous quotation from various commentators can only go so far in conveying the range and interrelationships of views in any given critical debate; a more detailed summary of each debate would often have been more helpful. Scull and Hammond’s selection from Tolkienian criticism is conservative, and their own critical views tend to err on the side of caution. The entry on dragons makes no mention of those in “The Fall of Gondolin,” with their striking resemblance to the tank that had made its début on the Somme when Tolkien was there a few months earlier. Erasing these quasi-mechanical monsters from the creative evolution of the Tolkienian dragon removes a sense of connection between the created world and lived experience. In the same entry, Scull and Hammond’s comments on Glaurung are unenlightening: he “conveys an impression of malice without any redeeming feature” (II, 216); as painted by Tolkien, “his frontal pose, strong legs ending in claws, and mask-like face suggest strength and ferocity” (II, 217). There is much more to be said about this particular dragon, who functions, from “The Tale of Turambar” onwards, as the master ironist in a story devoted to the theme of ironic fate. Most of the entries on Tolkien’s writings may be sub-divided into published books; chapters of The Silmarillion; prose collected or excerpted in Unfinished Tales, The History of Middle-earth, and elsewhere; poems other than those published in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit; primarily linguistic items; and primarily academic papers. Each entry describing a text is divided into a summary, a textual history, and where appropriate a section on background and criticism. The entry for The Book of Lost Tales includes a list of the tales in order of composition: not new information, but particularly handy as an aide mémoire when reading The History of Middle-earth. Entries for each Silmarillion chapter comprise a plot summary; a history of the story through its various metamorphoses (drawn from the commentaries in The History of Middle-earth); and useful analysis of how Christopher Tolkien compiled the 1977 edition, outlining which passages were derived from which version of the story. Naturally, the space devoted to Tolkien’s academic output will provide an important counterweight to the entries devoted to writings from the legendarium, already familiar to far more readers. Among other topics, Tolkien’s contribution to the Jerusalem Bible, his co-edition and translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and his work on The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorthelm’s Son are thoroughly anatomized. Scull and Hammond make much use of biographical information previously gathered and published by the authors themselves and by other researchers, notably Douglas A. Anderson, John D. Rateliff, David Bratman, J. S. Ryan, Nancy Martsch, Joe R. Christopher, René van 263

Book Reviews Rossenberg, and myself. Many entries draw mostly or wholly on the British Dictionary of National Biography, obituaries in The Times, or the Proceedings of the British Academy; or from the existing, well known core of books about Tolkien’s life. The entry on Father Vincent Reade, the Birmingham Oratory priest with whom Tolkien holidayed in Cornwall at the outbreak of the Great War, gathers together everything said about Fr. Vincent in Letters and by Carpenter, and adds an interesting reminiscence from Christopher Tolkien (about how the priest visited Northmoor Road shortly before the Second World War and gave “an eyewitness account of the maltreatment of Jews in Germany” [II, 814]). However, no further biographical details are given—not even a year of birth (1874) or death (1958). In the era of the internet, of library CD-rom archives, of online catalogues, of Google’s Book Search facility, it is by no means impossible to find out more: the door will yield quite easily to further inquiry. The compendiousness of the Reader’s Guide will save the reader a deal of legwork when energy or time is wanting; one is reminded of the statement (FR, I, Prologue) on the genealogical tables at the end of the Red Book of Westmarch: “Hobbits delighted in such things, if they were accurate: they liked to have books filled with things that they already knew, set out fair and square with no contradictions.” However, even though the authors have ploughed extensive new fields, elsewhere the level of biographical and literary detail in the Reader’s Guide tends to reflect the availability or otherwise of previously published works (including Scull and Hammond’s own). Thus it is regrettable that there is no list of sources for each entry, such as the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia provides—especially considering how much effort and space is lavished in the Reader’s Guide on providing information that will be useful to readers and researchers who wish to interpret and explore Tolkien’s writings and his life. (Among other helpful items are a long entry on libraries and archives and another on source-hunting). Sources are noted throughout for quotations, but not necessarily otherwise. For the researcher frustrated by the lack of references in Carpenter’s biography, more extensive source citations would have been a relief indeed: an essential means to cross-check facts and to identify areas not covered in the Companion and Guide. For the general reader, such citations would have carried out more effectively the authors’ pledge (in the opening paragraph of their introduction) “to point to other resources in which a subject is more fully considered or differing points of view are expressed” (I, ix). There are regular directions to “see also” another work, but that is not the same as a source statement, and there are oversights. On the credit side, along with the copious index in each of the two volumes appears a very extensive list of works consulted—from guides 264

Book Reviews to Oxford and histories of George Allen & Unwin down to articles in the Tolkien Society bulletin Amon Hen or funeral announcements in The Times. Scull and Hammond’s listing of Tolkien’s published writings and art at the back of the Volume I is, of course, much more up-to-date than the 1993 J.R.R. Tolkien: A Descriptive Bibliography prepared by Hammond with Anderson, though naturally it is in no way “descriptive.” Tolkien’s poetry and artwork are also catalogued, as well as translations of his works. And to the delight of this reviewer, in the course of the two volumes the authors turn up many of the sources for Carpenter’s unattributed facts, for example John Brett-Smith as the originator of the anecdote about Tolkien dressing in a bearskin hearth-rug and chasing the children around the room at his Christmas parties (II, 140). The sheer ambition of the Companion and Guide makes it a hostage to fortune. Scull and Hammond rarely fall short of their own high standards of accuracy, but errors will inevitably crop up in such a large work, and a list of errata appears on their website at http://mysite.verizon.net/wghammond/addenda/companion.html. The apparent comprehensiveness of the Companion and Guide obscures a few surprising omissions or oversights. From material available to ordinary Bodleian readers, there is no reference, for example, to Tolkien’s undergraduate exercise books, even though these provide primary evidence of what he was studying in the years from 1913 to 1915, and would have complemented the official university syllabuses and lecture lists that Scull and Hammond do provide. Sources considered unreliable are ignored: more reference might have been made to Daniel Grotta’s deeply flawed biography of Tolkien, notably on matters where Grotta (and no one since) had access to the letters of Tolkien’s American undergraduate friend Allen Barnett. Also omitted are points of fact mentioned in more reputable published sources, such as Walter Hooper’s exhaustive and exhaustively indexed Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, where (II, 75) Lewis recommends Tolkien’s translation of the Middle English Owl and the Nightingale in the early 1930s: Scull and Hammond mention only that Tolkien had an incomplete translation up his sleeve in the 1960s. In the Lewis Letters, but not here, we can also read Tolkien’s letter to Sir Henry Willink, master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, on 18 May 1954, reassuring Willink that Lewis, despite his reluctance, would benefit from a Cambridge fellowship. But with a wealth of new detail to absorb, the vast majority of readers will not notice such absences, and in any case the authors deserve considerable sympathy: their position in such a lively arena of research as Tolkien studies is like that of a warrior battling the many-headed hydra. The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide will stand for many years as an indispensable aid to the study and appreciation of Tolkien. Such an imposing and largely meticulous work of reference cannot fail to give 265

Book Reviews an impression of magisterial authority, and some will call it definitive. In their opening words, Scull and Hammond state that this book “has been designed to serve as a reference of (at least) first resort” for study and appreciation of Tolkien’s works. They deserve our thanks for their prodigious and scrupulous labors, but it is to be hoped that those who are truly interested will disregard that tell-tale phrase “at least” and look further afield, going directly to Scull and Hammond’s sources where they are available, and exploring sources that the authors have not tapped. The best compliment that may be paid to the Companion and Guide is that it should stimulate much further critical and biographical research into J.R.R. Tolkien, continually helping to expand the territory that it has valiantly attempted to map. John Garth London, England WORKS CITED Lewis, C. S. Collected Letters Volume II: Books, Broadcasts and War 1931-1949, ed. Walter Hooper. London: HarperCollins, 2004. _______. Collected Letters Volume III: Narnia, Cambridge and Joy 1950-1963, ed. Walter Hooper. London: HarperCollins, 2006. Tolkien, J.R.R. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter with the assistance of Christopher Tolkien. Repr. with expanded index by Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond. London: HarperCollins, 1999. J.R R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment, edited by Michael D. C. Drout. Associate editors: Douglas A. Anderson, Marjorie Burns, Verlyn Flieger, and Thomas Shippey. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2007. xxxiv, 774 pp. $175.00 (hardcover) ISBN 0415969425. This encyclopedia project is ambitious for its serious attempt at internationally diverse coverage of scholarship and critical assessment of Tolkien, of his scholarly and literary writings, and of the historical and literary contexts and influences involved. It seems fair to judge the success of the encyclopedia by the stated aims of its editor. Michael Drout’s introduction makes it clear that he saw this encyclopedia as an effort to be if not all things to all people, as close as he could manage. He aimed to appeal to and include work by “varied and interconnected communities and individuals” to “bridge gaps and bring together separate branches 266

Book Reviews of knowledge” (xxix), including within Tolkien scholarship the study of Tolkien and his works (Tolkien Studies) and analysis of specifics in such inventions as worlds, peoples, and tongues (Middle-earth Studies) but also bringing in a wider range of interests and writers. Knowing such a task might be endless, Drout made his editorial choices with an eye to “connections outside of Middle-earth” (for example, discussing the Haradrim within Tolkien’s history but also in connections to medieval texts) and in terms of “reception and significance” including contemporary literary criticism and theory (xxix). While acknowledging that Tolkien scholarship is yet a young field the world over, he made a case for including analysis and interpretation here though critical views may change. He wanted Tolkien’s scholarship covered “by experts in the individual specialities” (a British phrase though Drout is American), in particular as it “is not always accessible or understandable to the lay reader” (xxx), an attitude somewhat patronizing, especially given his willingness as an academic to open this project (rightly) to knowledgeable writers who are not. To counter “incorrect or merely trendy viewpoints,” he sought over “120 contributors, from various countries” and asked them to approach issues “without tendentiousness and to attempt to explain the various sides of difficult issues” (xxx). He also added entries so that Tolkien could be seen within his own historical contexts, and, having to limit the range of such inquiry, he tried “to err on the side of explanation.” These parameters seem laudable and reasonable, and the volume often surprises and rewards a reader. Thanks to an advisory board comprised of associate editors who also produce this journal, an impressive collection of contributors labored on it. Their work, however, was badly served by Taylor and Francis Group, who bought out Routledge, discontinued their encyclopedia division, and let its editors go while this volume was in production, publishing it only because of how far along it was in the process. Drout’s online discussion of difficulties with the publisher lists major problems: bounced emails, not contact from Taylor and Francis, led to his discovery that the press had let his editors go; the initial sections of proofs arrived with errors “from citation format to layout to basic copy-editing mistakes” which he then corrected himself; no proofs were sent to contributors; one hundred illustrations were summarily dropped; blind entries were omitted; some contributors failed to submit their promised work; and finally, the press seems to have printed only 800 of a proposed 2500 copies, though perhaps the numbers were meant to be split between the U.K. and the U.S. In fairness, while Drout may find it odd that the press did not contact the over 125 contributors for corrections, that is not uncommon and usually considered part of an editor’s work whether for an anthology or for an encyclopedia unless otherwise agreed in writing, so his efforts to gather 267

Book Reviews corrections from his writers should be seen as outside his own previous experience but not unusual. He did receive a second set of proofs which coincided with a bout of pneumonia, but in any case, the book went to press without another once-over by anyone but seemingly incompetent copy-editors. Drout comments that “contributors should not be blamed” as they did not proof final articles and his efforts to protect them from undeserved criticism is admirable. The press should bear the blame for not committing to a quality product—at the least it will bear its name, and given the popularity of all things Tolkien, they should perhaps have fired the marketing board instead of the encyclopedia editors if they truly reduced production numbers. Most readers will neither know nor care that Taylor and Francis Group does not want to deal in encyclopedias; they will simply see a useful but shoddy product and blame those whose names appear in it. But before a reader decides not to purchase or use this text given these problems, read on: a wealth of serious and perceptive material makes this flawed volume an important step in assessing the works and influences of Tolkien. One of the greatest strengths of the encyclopedia is the sheer diversity of scholarship represented. Contributors come from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Canada, England, Germany, France, Finland, Poland, Scotland, Spain, Hungary, Wales, New Zealand, the Netherlands, and all over the United States, a remarkable range. They represent academics, independent scholars, librarians, lawyers, publishers, computer experts, and a variety of serious amateurs, members often of Tolkien societies. The entries on the reception of Tolkien’s work in various countries show how the coloring of national character further diversifies Tolkien studies. Often, Tolkien is fairly new, as many countries waited for translations or improved translations until relatively recently. For example, in Italy, Tolkien’s complete work was published in translation (1970) by the right-wing Rusconi press with a new foreword of similar bent, causing Tolkien’s work to be seen as serving such political purposes even now, with a new translation in 2003. In Russia, censorship and attempts to recreate it as science fiction initially deformed efforts to publish the text, but its more recent recasting as “the personal experience of someone doing battle with the Soviet power structure” (581) has the same result, and an accurate translation has yet to be published. The political agendas in these examples help illuminate the Neo-Nazi approval of Tolkien for those of us who find such connections not only abhorrent but unfathomable. Cultural Studies practitioners should also be glad of the scholarly range, as entries on fandom, merchandising, fan art and fiction, gaming, popular music, Peter Jackson’s movies, and technoculture track popular culture and its versions of Tolkien’s influence. Especially noteworthy are “Fandom” (Anthony S. Burdge and Jessica Burke), with its history of societies, 268

Book Reviews publications, terminology and elaborations on Tolkien’s work; “Jackson, Peter” (Daniel Timmons), a solid assessment of his work with especially balanced and thorough coverage on adapting The Lord of the Rings, focusing on abridgment, compression, transformation, and additions, and the reception of the movies; “Popular Music” (Burdge and Burke), detailing international productions from symphonies through progressive rock and heavy metal; and “Technological Subcultures: Reception of Tolkien” (Lisa L. Spangenberg), a delightful entry on how hackers/crackers and engineers took Tolkien to heart, creating SAIL fonts based on the Tengwar and Cirth, terms for The Jargon File, and modules for Unix and Mac OS X systems. The format of the encyclopedia profits greatly from an analytical index, less usefully from alphabetical and thematic listings of entries at the beginning. The alphabetical listing in fact seems superfluous, and I found the list of writers and their entries provided by this journal’s reviews editor much more helpful. The main need for any of these tools stems from the interconnectedness of entries (an occupational hazard in Tolkien studies) and idiosyncratic entries or alphabetization, where one must look under T for Tom Bombadil or under S for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight but under O for Orfeo, Sir and the “Old English Apollonius of Tyre.” Would anyone look first under T for “Tolkien Scholarship” entries instead of S, or “Tour in the Alps, 1911" instead of “Alps, Tour of ” without a clue to do so? (Actually, many of us might have tried something more like “Hiking” or “Walking Tours” for the latter.) The omitted blind entries (redirecting a reader from a presumed entry to the one actually appearing) would have helped, of course, as would completed cross-references, but so would following common practices such as alphabetizing names by surnames and all titles by the first word after an article. Combining entries, something Drout mentions as requested by the press, could have proceeded even further. The difference between a character in a work and a work named for the character is a clear one, but separating them into two entries (as in Farmer Giles of Ham and the text of that name), often immediately next to each other, creates unnecessary overlap and at times unfavorable comparisons between them. The entries for “Shire” and “Hobbits” (Michael N. Stanton) repeat verbatim material from one to the other on Shire reckoning, important events, and hobbit families, and should have been edited. In the volume as a whole, one notices the frequent repetition of such details as Tolkien’s childhood, his mother’s conversion, his fascination with Finnish, and Christian significance for March 25 in multiple places, and problematic arbitrariness in some entries. Included in the latter category are “Aquinas, Thomas” (Bradley J. Birzer) and “Law” (Jeniffer G. Hargroves). The argument for including Aquinas seems to be that no Catholic would have escaped his 269

Book Reviews influence in Tolkien’s day. Though one can at least imagine suggesting that Tolkien’s imagined world is a type of Summa, the entry suggests only implicit Thomism. “Law” arbitrarily emphasizes a theological meaning to the term, as in natural law or God’s law, which distorts other uses in the text, as in the King’s law or the rules or laws instituted in the Shire under Saruman. Theoretical and critical approaches are represented in individual entries on eco-criticism, Marxist and class issues, race issues, feminist, gender and sexuality issues, Jungian theory, and subject theory and semiotics. The volume is sometimes less successful in presenting such approaches. The list itself shows some idiosyncrasies, as Jungian theory is singled out in the much broader field of psychoanalytic readings and homosexuality quite problematically appears under “Theological/Philosophical Concepts” in the thematic list instead of being considered a “Theoretical Concern” along with gender and sexuality, each a separate entry. To be more accurate, “Queer Theory,” with which author Christopher Vaccaro rightly begins, should be the entry. More positively, Gergely Nagy’s entries consistently show how sophisticated analysis and applied theory enrich Tolkien studies. Entries such as “Fictionality” and “Textuality” combine clarity with perception and range widely over multiple theoretical approaches, while his entry on The Silmarillion offers stimulating observations: The Silmarillion “negotiates between the modern and postmodern novel, and the genres of literary history that inspired Tolkien [i.e. medieval sources],” which yields an “extremely refined texture” of both historical depth and twentieth century modern attitudes. This text becomes “Tolkien’s ultimate emphasis on the importance of texts, textual variants, and textual activities in the course of processes of cultural history” and multiple frames open up its “compendious nature” to include interpretation by readers but also by those within the text: “in all their (textual) actions of shaping, representation and preservation [they] really interpret Eru’s intentions, and make the story of Middle-earth into a model of how cultures deal with traditionally meaningful stories” (611). “Environmentalism and Eco-Criticism” (Patrick Curry) provides a short overview but “Environmentalist Readings of Tolkien” (Alfred K. Siewers) provides more detail and excellent contextualization of this aspect and is the better entry. Similarly useful are “Feminist Readings of Tolkien” (Aline Ripley), which covers a balanced range of critical views and fruitful suggestions for future work, and “Gender in Tolkien’s Works” (Anna Smol), which presents an argument for the “interdependence of masculine and feminine rather than fixed boundaries between them” while recording critical views that see Tolkien’s work as more essentialist and traditional (234).

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Book Reviews Staying on gender theory for a moment, though, and in contrast, the entry on “Éowyn” (Katherine Hesser) thwarts Drout’s urging to represent multiple views without tendentiousness; it strongly argues for the forced transformation of Éowyn from aspiring male to trophy wife (a defensible reading) but takes no account of other possibilities as viable. (“Shieldmaiden” is not as claimed an exclusionary term but one claimed by such figures as valkyries. Brynhild, who wished only to fight and swore not to marry, called herself a shieldmaiden.) Similarly, while few but editors and reviewers will probably read the volume in its entirety, by doing so, one notices especially how “one-note” many entries on Christian readings of the texts are. Perhaps this effect comes in part from their having applicability rather than theoretical grounding: matching beliefs or doctrines to textual elements becomes akin to allegorical equations, and measuring whether a detail fits theological doctrine has at best a compare-and-contrast flavor. Such applications amass data but too often advance narrowness rather than insight, confirming a view rather than opening others, and robbing the text of the very newness and eucatastrophe Tolkien celebrated. If such were the only entries sampled, they might well cause a reader to reject the whole: force-feeding often causes the stomach to rebel. Thus, entries by Joseph Pearce here seem unfortunately reductive or dogmatic in the contexts of Tolkien’s work, such as “Christ,” “Church of England,” “Incarnation,” or “Redemption.” “Redemption” comments that Tom Bombadil is “older than the Fall,” which is an anthropocentric but not elf- or dwarf-centric view—that is, man’s fall is not the fall of every kindred. His point that Tom and Goldberry resemble Adam and Eve in their “primal Innocence” does suggest an interesting consideration for their authority over their “garden.” But “Morgoth and Melkor” uses the Bible and Judeo-Christian myth as sole sources. Marjorie Burns’s extensive entry on “Old Norse Mythology” with its lengthy specifics gives the lie to such restriction. Serving Christian readings better, Bradley J. Birzer covers a range of “Christian Readings of Tolkien” complete with critical assessment and trends, and his “Christianity” entry is also balanced. “Resurrection” blends Tolkien’s thoughts on soul and body, fëa and hröa, with a sensitive discussion of implications for elves vs. men and reincarnation. Birzer notes that Tolkien, accused by a fellow Catholic of overstepping, “rejected the necessity of being theologically consistent” in a piece of literature (564), and added that he did not see how “any theologian or philosopher, unless very much better informed about the relation of the spirit and body than I believe anyone to be, could deny the possibility of re-incarnation as a mode of existence” (565, quoting Letters 180). This recalls Douglas Anderson’s comment in “Tolkien, John” that Father John “had a passion for ecumenism, which he attributed to his father” (667). By implication, he allows a place for 271

Book Reviews non-Western religious attitudes on reincarnation, a further counter to accusations of racism in Tolkien’s work. My training as a medievalist in literature and archaeology often had me turning to relevant entries with delight, and those discussing Tolkien’s scholarly publications were particularly appreciated. While medieval sources and languages have been well connected to Tolkien’s work thanks mainly to Shippey, much remains to illuminate our reading. Tolkien’s contribution to Sir Mortimer Wheeler’s report on excavations at Lydney Park is known to many through Shippey’s comments in The Road to Middle-earth, but Don N. Anger does a lovely job both of updating the archaeological assessments and of incorporating Tolkien’s blend of Celtic religion, myth, and poetic inspiration when considering Nodens in “Report on the Excavation . . . in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire.” I did miss having an entry on the Old English Judith, not least because she serves as a precursor to Éowyn as warrior and is described by the term ælfsciene, a rare occurrence related to modern “sheen” that means “bright/shining like an elf.” Leslie A. Donovan’s entries on “Elf-Shot,” “Exile,” “Seafarer” and “Wanderer” are well done and provide well-chosen selections for further reading. “Exile,” as one example, contextualizes the concept in Anglo-Saxon political and poetic cultures before applying it and gesturing towards the “eternal permanence” beyond earthly exile that texts such as Seafarer and Wanderer share with Tolkienian works. Arne Zettersten’s exemplary and meticulous coverage shines in entries on “AB Language” and those texts to which this concept relates, Ancrene Wisse and the Katherine Group. “Battle of Maldon”(John R. Holmes) locates the poem in the contexts of Tolkien’s missed opportunity to work on its edition with E. V. Gordon and discusses the poem’s details and relevance to Aragorn’s treatment of terrified recruits. References should include at least Donald Scragg’s more recent work. The bridge of “hardened earth” mentioned is a tidal causeway, exposed and covered twice daily; useful photographs appear at http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~hanly/oe/503.html and http://www. airflow.net/maldon/appendix.htm.“Runes” (Arden R. Smith) omits the premier expert, R. I. Page, and emphasizes the term as related to magic more than is warranted. Besides “mystery, secret,” “rune” exists in Old and Middle English as “counsel,” and despite popular assumptions, evidence for magical use outside of a few sagas is slim. Runes can be found in inscriptions on crosses and memorial stones or on shipping labels of wood such as those found in excavations of medieval Scandinavian trading centers. An Old English “Runic Poem” rehearses the alphabet with its names, each letter being a word also and hence capable of coded use. “Charms” (Carol A. Leibiger) covers its topic with thorough accuracy and a fine reference list. “Caedmon” (Amelia Harper) ably reports the basics, but Bede and Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe’s work on this most 272

Book Reviews represented Old English text should have been listed in the perfunctory bibliography, not an online encyclopedia. “Langland, William”(James I. McNelis III) is adequate but fails to mention class issues as central while omitting key work by Penn Szittya and Katherine Kerby-Fulton as well as The Yearbook of Langland Studies. “Genesis” (Yvette L. Kisor) could list Catherine Karkov’s book on this uniquely illustrated poem as well as current scholarship (and while Kennedy’s translations are excellent, ascribing this poem and others to Caedmon is no longer accepted). Missing scholarship is also a fault of the “Brut by Layamon” (Carl Phelpstead), as is the choice to list the work by its generic title instead of by author (a brut is a history of Britain, and many exist) and to replicate the form Layamon eschewed by scholars since the 1990s instead of Middle English Laʒamon (with a yogh, not a “z”) or the translated “Lawman.” Laʒamon resided at Areley (not Arley) Kings. Phelpstead usefully echoes Shippey’s point that Tolkien saw this poet as the final one of the Anglo-Saxon tradition despite his c.1200 date. While now debatable, that view should be seen in the context of the surging interest in Laʒamon (references follow this review). Finally, Éowyn’s use of Laʒamon’s dwimmerlaik also echoes in Dwimordene, both referring to powers of illusion or sorcery and descended from Old English dwimor, a ghost, illusion or error. The quality of entries can run the gamut from masterful to pedestrian. Many of the most trustworthy and rewarding entries are by well-known names in Tolkien studies. Verlyn Flieger writes always with elegance and clarity on complex topics: “Barfield, Owen,” “Faërie,” “Frame Narrative,” “Memory,” and “Time” draw upon her excellent book-length studies, and her detailed overview of each poem in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is both readable and useful. Its detail is masterfully matched by Carl F. Hostetter’s list of linguistic publications, “Elvish Compositions and Grammars”—those who were unfamiliar with his work and that of other linguists in Parma Eldalamberon and Vinyar Tengwar will be gobsmacked, as they say in the north. Tom Shippey’s entries, as always, concisely show the value of medieval literatures as well as his learnèd and readable insights. Richard C. West marshals exemplary concision and documentation in his eight entries, ranging from Finnish Language, through W. H. Lewis, Fr. Gervase Mathew and Dorothy Sayers, to Túrin and early Tolkien scholarship. Gergely Nagy consistently ranges across multiple theoretical approaches with perception and clarity, yielding suggestive and sophisticated results. David Bratman’s thirteen entries are equally direct and informative, with his overview of the History of Middleearth and Peoples of Middle-earth especially useful as summaries but as with nearly all of his entries entirely without bibliography. The exception is “Publications, Posthumous” for Tolkien’s work, with seven citations. John Garth’s ten entries provide ample references for further study, whether 273

Book Reviews on “Artists’ and Illustrators’ Influence on Tolkien” or a range of early friends and contexts that coincide with Garth’s published work on WWI. Garth’s coverage of both Tolkien’s “English and Welsh” and his early piece on the poet Francis Thompson are fine contributions towards the editor’s goal of presenting Tolkien’s scholarship in context and in detail. Jared Lobdell’s best entries showcase his original perspectives and detailed erudition. He wrote twenty-three entries, far more than anyone else, in a consistently perceptive and lively manner. Some especially notable include what Tolkien gleaned from the literary group “The Cave,” Tolkien’s note on the phrase “The Devil’s Coach-Horses,” “England, Twentieth Century” which places Tolkien in context as a man of two centuries, excellent and allusive entries on the Gothic, Lombardic, and Welsh languages, coverage of Tolkien’s Mr. Bliss and Roverandom, and “Sin” with Lobdell’s puns on Origen and Original Sin. His “Angels” (the Greek term is misspelled, omitting an epsilon) and “Pilgrimage” are less successful. The latter begins with a post-Reformation sense and context—the term pilgrim meant “traveller, wanderer” in the Middle Ages also, as well as “foreigner” and “one on a pilgrimage to a site,” and one need not turn to Lydgate or Bunyan as a starting point. Conflating pilgrimage and quest also seems a false step, though it has some interest. “Saint Oswald,” unlike the spare and useful “Saint Brendan” entry, misses the ideological point of Oswald at Heavenfield as analogous to Constantine’s famous Milvian Bridge victory. And in an otherwise wideranging and ambitious “Literary Influences, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” Dale J. Nelson errs in linking the metaphor of life to a bird’s flight in and out of a hall in King Solomon’s Mines to King Alfred. It appears in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History when a counselor tells it to King Edwin of Northumbria as he contemplates conversion. Douglas A. Anderson’s continued attention to minute details of biography enriches his entries on Tolkien family members, Tolkien’s publishing colleagues (Dagnall, d’Ardenne, Gordon) and the T.C.B.S., and that attention continues in his entries on Tolkien’s library and “Publishing History” for The Lord of the Rings. The last made me notice a pattern of women instrumental in some of Tolkien’s publishing, from Susan Dagnall of Allen and Unwin to Elaine Griffiths to Tolkien’s aunt Jane Neave to Caroline Hillier, editor of Winter’s Tale for Children 1. Christine Chism’s work on “Race and Ethnicity” and “Racism, Charges of ” in particular deserves notice for its smart, direct discussion. But alongside excellent or responsible entries are things less good. Whether one cites the press, the writer, or the editor, it is clear that even if errors were not edited out, some corrections were incorporated. For example, in Verlyn Flieger’s entry on Owen Barfield, his age at death is described both as “a month into his hundredth year” (50) and “just 274

Book Reviews eleven months short of his hundredth year” (51)—the latter is correct. So how do we evaluate the multitude of errors in word omission, grammar, spelling, spacing, word division, and bibliographic format, given that certain authors seem to have consistently clean, correct, and detailed entries while others have embarassing mistakes, such as confusions of prophecy/prophesy in an entry on the former (Julaire Andelin) or a sentence that begins “The imagines in the 1932 letter also depict have a pair of Elvish symbols” (John Walsh, “Prehistory: ‘Cavemen’” 542)? One might assume that the press should have caught entries out of alphabetical order (Farmer Giles after Farmer Giles of Ham, Northern Venture before “Northern Courage,” Tolkien family members John, Priscilla, etc. listed after Tolkien Scholarship entries) or a mistaken header (614) or bibliographic format errors. Even more egregious is the omission of any bibliography whatsoever from a large number of entries, which does seem an editorial fault. Contributors should have been urged especially to provide thorough and complete references from the start (Drout says that “necessary bibliography is included in each entry,” xxxi, but clearly not). The lack is felt in otherwise enlightening entries about Tolkien’s reception in Denmark, Hungary, Norway, and Russia, especially set against an excellent example such as the entry on Finland, or in the absence of editions, such as Flieger’s own in her entry on “Smith of Wooton Major.” (This last example pointed up some errors in the mainly indispensable index. In trying to find a citation for the edition, I found it listed in her “Faërie” entry and in “Publications, Posthumous,” but neither was cross-listed nor did page 185 appear in the index under Smith.) Or compare the quirky if enjoyable “America in the 1960s: Reception of Tolkien” (Mike Foster) with its single bibliographic citation of a book on the Beatles (in reference to their idea to make a film and soundtrack for The Lord of the Rings) to Richard C. West’s very thorough listing for “Tolkien Scholarship; First Decades: 1954-1980.” Some entries had blurry boundaries: listed under stylistic elements; “Comedy” (Christopher Garbowski) overlaps the entry on “Humor” (Michael N. Stanton) and might have benefited by discussing the literary sense of comedy which Tolkien would have known from Aristotle and the title given to Dante’s work. Comedy here would mean a tale that begins badly and ends well, in contrast to tragedy; considering it with eucatastrophe could be fruitful. Arguably some omissions occur because topics have no scholarship published on them. In some cases, the material breaks new ground, as in a theoretical approach not previously applied, but in many, it seems the writer wrote based on general and easily available knowledge, something not appropriate to a work of “scholarship and critical assessment,” or delayed putting bibliography in until too late. Thus, “Augustine of Canterbury” (Bradford Lee Eden) suffers against the entry on “Augustine of 275

Book Reviews Hippo” (John William Houghton) as do “Missions from Anglo-Saxon England” (Eden) and “Rivendell” (Matthew Dickerson), not least because they apparently rely solely on general or online secondary sources, often descriptive encyclopedias, for their summary, while “Augustine of Hippo” gives primary and secondary published sources and discusses aspects of Augustine’s thought such as free will, predestination, and grace. “Descent” (John Walsh) simply lists instances of descent into the underworld, comparing them to The Aeneid without yielding insights. Similarly, entries on Tolkien’s characters at times displace critical assessment with advocacy. “Merry” and “Pippin” (Janet Brennan Croft) and “Gimli” (L. J. Swain) all contain useful information, mainly summaries, but end with hearty endorsements of their characters while important aspects do not appear. One can certainly argue whether medieval romance and Gimli’s love for Galadriel are “asexual,” but the claim that his friendship with Legolas starts on the hunt for the hobbits ignores what occurs between them in Lorien, and the larger healing of elves and dwarves it represents. The names of the hobbits are also significant, not least to a philologist. While Merry’s name supposedly translates the “real” Hobbit name, it is also a diminutive of Meriadoc, a Celtic name (pace Jared Lobdell 85—see The Lord of the Rings Appendix F) with Welsh and Breton variants. Cynan/Conan Meriadauc was the king of Brittany, called Armorica, recorded in various medieval histories such as Laʒamon’s and the Historia Meriadoci, Regis Cambrie. Pippin’s is even more suggestive, as a diminutive of Peregrin, from the Latin for “pilgrim.” For characters in particular, entries that rehearse attributes and deeds suffer in comparison to more sophisticated analysis where we learn something or are graced with a perceptive insight or new direction of enquiry. A great difference exists between critical assessment and the admittedly useful guides to Tolkien and Middle-earth that give descriptive information. While Middle-earth studies, in looking at that world’s “ingredients,” might seem predisposed to such summaries, there is no reason why critical thought need go missing. Reviewing an encyclopedia can be unsatisfying for both a reviewer and her readers. For every entry discussed, many more might be omitted despite equal claims to praise or correction, so comments and stopping points can seem arbitrarily applied. The added difficulties with the press complicate any review here. But this volume represents one place where those outside as well as within Tolkien studies and interests can indeed connect across communities, and at its best, offers suggestive richness and new directions for further work. If the editors hoped to help strengthen legitimation of Tolkien scholarship, the volume as it stands will not do so. Despite a title suggesting scholarship and critical assessment as central, execution was marred by a failure to delineate expectations and apply 276

Book Reviews standards of quality across any type of entry, independent of failings by the press. But its successes and flaws become equally useful as signposts, aiding those who engage in critical assessment as further enrichment of Tolkien’s legacies. Kelley M. Wickham-Crowley Georgetown University Washington, D.C. WORKS CITED Bryan, Elizabeth J. Collaborative Meaning in Medieval Scribal Culture: The Otho Laʒamon. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1999. Editorial Theory and Literary Criticism Series. Drout, Michael D.C. “J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia.” November 2, 2006. Wormtalk and Slugspeak: my life among the invertebrates. http://wormtalk.blogspot.com/2006/11/j.html (accessed November 8, 2006). Judith. Edited by Mark Griffith. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997. Karkov, Catherine E. Text and Picture in Anglo-Saxon England: Narrative Strategies in the Junius 11 Manuscript. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon 31. Koch, John T. and John Carey. The Celtic Heroic Age: Literary Sources for Ancient Celtic Europe & Early Ireland & Wales. Fourth ed. Oakville: David Brown Book Co., 2003. Le Saux, Françoise. Layamon’s “Brut”: The Poem and its Sources. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1989. Arthurian Studies XIX. O’Brien O’Keeffe, Katherine. Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Page, R. I. Runes and Runic Inscriptions: Collected Essays on Anglo-Saxon and Viking Runes. Edited by David Parsons. Rochester: Boydell Press, 1995. Schach, Paul. “Some Thoughts on Voluspá.” In Edda: A Collection of Essays, edited by Robert J. Glendinning and Haraldur Bessason. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1983. 88-113. Scragg, D. G. The Battle of Maldon. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981. Old and Middle English Texts. Szittya, Penn. The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. 277

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Tiller, Kenneth. Laʒamon’s “Brut” and the Anglo-Norman Vision of History. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007. Wickham-Crowley, Kelley M. Writing the Future: Laʒamon’s Prophetic History. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002. The Keys of Middle-earth: Discovering Medieval Literature through the Fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien, by Stuart D. Lee and Elizabeth Solopova. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. xii, 284 pp. $90.00 (hardcover) ISBN 1403946728; $26.95 (trade paperback) ISBN 140394671X. Ever since 1982, when Tom Shippey concluded the first edition of his Road to Middle-earth with an appendix listing works medieval and modern that influenced Tolkien, one itinerary for traveling that road became clear: read everything on Shippey’s list. The trouble is, it is a big list, and many of the items are hard to find. In recent years, however, a few editors have responded to the need in Tolkien studies for usable editions of the most influential predecessors of Tolkien’s fiction. For the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century predecessors in fantasy fiction there is Douglas Anderson’s Tales before Tolkien (2003); for medieval influences there is Turgon’s The Tolkien Fan’s Medieval Reader (2004). The latest effort in the struggle to fill the gap between Beowulf and The Hobbit is an anthology of medieval works edited and translated by Stuart D. Lee and Elizabeth Solopova under the title of The Keys of Middle-earth. Its focus is somewhat narrower than that of Turgon’s Medieval Reader—for one thing, it excludes the Irish, Welsh and Finnish sources prominent in the Reader. What it lacks in breadth, however, it makes up in depth: excerpts in original languages (Old English, Middle English, Old Norse), with fresh, literal translations, and minute examination of parallels to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. Even here the scope is intentionally limited: no sources for The Silmarillion (else the omission of the Finnish Kalevala would have been intolerable), no medieval echoes for Farmer Giles. All Tolkien works are alluded to, however, including Christopher Tolkien’s History of Middle-earth volumes, where appropriate. Even if there are other anthologies, The Keys of Middle-earth is still a much-needed book. So manifest is the need for a good anthology of the medieval works that most influenced Tolkien that the Tolkien reader is puzzled by the apologetic question posed on page 2, “Why another book about Tolkien?” Perhaps an index of how far the project of legitimizing Tolkien studies still needs to go is the persistence of such disclaimers in 278

Book Reviews recent Tolkien monographs (Peter Kreeft’s The Philosophy of Tolkien comes to mind). When was the last time you heard an apology for “Yet Another Book On Yeats,” “One More Monograph on Milton”? Perhaps it is this dithering about what the rest of the academic world thinks of Tolkien studies that gives The Keys of Middle-earth something of a split personality. As an anthology of medieval texts it is first rate. The texts, in Old English, Old Norse, and Middle English, are faithfully presented—and despite the authors’ modest disclaimer that their book cannot accommodate a “full discussion of textual issues” (55), textual notes are remarkably thorough. With equal modesty they call their textual notes “highly selective,” but their selection is impeccable. Commentary is just as painstaking: major critical controversies are fully represented. And as an encouragement to further study in three medieval languages, which the authors identify as its main purpose (19), the book is eminently successful. But as a guidebook to Tolkien’s works, this volume seems to look nervously over its shoulder for the reaction of academe, both in terms of medieval studies and Tolkien studies. The first sign is another sectional disclaimer on page 3 “This is not a source book” (there is no exclamation point, but there might as well be). Aversion to source criticism (or at least to the accusation of source criticism) even, it seems, influences the prepositionally-correct choice of the book’s title. We are told that if this were a book of source-criticism the title would be “The Keys to Middleearth” rather than of Middle-earth (3). Come again? How is it that the keys to a door open it up (without even having to speak “friend” or mellon) and the keys of a door do not? If not for that shadow of academe hovering over, with its fear of medievalism, source studies, and that other anti-Tolkien chestnut, “archaism,” we might be better off with The Keys Unto Middle-earth. Is source criticism really as onerous as our authors suggest? Probably not. But the warnings do not stop there. Not even medievalism as a discipline is safe from the withering glance of the potential reader: we are told authoritatively that the very word medieval “now has a derogatory connotation” (13). Really? In the cultural backwaters of Oxford, maybe, but here in the American Midwest “medieval” is doin’ jes’ fine. One wonders who the audience of this book is perceived to be if they require an apologia for source study and medievalism. What but a concern for academic vogue could have justified basing a discussion on epic in general, and the genre’s concepts of “heroic past” and “epic distance” in particular, on the comments of M. M. Bakhtin rather than the classicists who said the same thing with more authority (though with less Marxism) before Bakhtin? Tolkien would have encountered the ideas in H. M. Chadwick, The Heroic Age (1912), while he was an 279

Book Reviews undergraduate at Oxford; the ideas were expressed earlier—with a specious connection between Greco-Roman and Germanic poetics to which Tolkien reacted in his lecture “Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics” (1936)—in W. P. Ker’s Epic and Romance (1897). At the risk of pushing the bogey of source criticism into the scholarly realm as well, perhaps links to such as Chadwick and Ker would be more helpful (if less fashionable) than those to Bakhtin. When it comes to controversies involving Tolkien alone, Lee and Solopova seem even more skittish. The introduction continually stirs up issues only to dance away from them with the already-cited cliché of “beyond the scope of this book” (10), “the limits of space” (12) “the present volume does not give scope” (55). Three examples will suffice. The first involves Tolkien’s paradigm-shifting lecture on Beowulf. While admitting that it “had a major effect on Beowulfian studies,” Lee and Solopova maintain scholarly objectivity by admitting that “present-day scholarship does not accept everything Tolkien outlined in his argument” (108). Even conceding that a consensus of present-day (or any-day) scholarship were possible, who would expect any scholarly lecture to pass muster nearly three-quarters of a century after it was written? The second example involves Tolkien’s scholarly reputation in general. To counter Tolkien fandom’s exaggerations of the professor’s contributions to Old English scholarship, by citing his colleague’s grumbles about its sparseness (equally exaggerated) is laudable. But to follow that with unnecessary (however true) references to Tolkien’s mumbling speech patterns in his lectures, and then to top that off with the preteritio dismissal “Yet this is not our concern here” (7), urges the question, “then why bring it up?” The whole gesture recalls the more vainglorious preteritio of Boromir in “The Mirror of Galadriel” chapter of The Lord of the Rings: “It need not be said that I refused to listen” (FR II, vii, 373). A good rule of thumb, both in Middle-earth and in the far less real world of academe, is that what “need not be said” need not be said. A third example invokes the much-debated concept of Tolkien’s dream of a “mythology for England” (4, 9). The introduction cites Tolkien’s early references to the ambition in his letters, then raises the question of whether Tolkien later repudiated it, and finally replies, “This is very difficult to answer and beyond the scope of this book” (10). And even that is not the last word on the subject: two sentences later Tolkien is accused of “withdrawing from the brink of committing himself to anything.” Whenever Lee and Solopova withdraw from that brink, however, they cite a wealth of secondary criticism, always appropriately and always well digested. If the chief limitation of this book is the “split personality” mentioned above, there is nevertheless another type of binocular vision in it 280

Book Reviews that constitutes its greatest asset. While the authors tell us that the main purpose of the book is to be “to expose [the reader] to medieval literature in its original form and invite [the reader] to study it further,” they add, “Yet at the same time we must recognize the profound influence it had on Tolkien and his fiction” (19). Both goals are admirably met in The Keys of Middle-earth. The presentation of original text and translation is about as close to any book can come to giving the reader the tools to appreciate Tolkien’s influences, short of mastering Old and Middle English and Old Norse. And the book encourages the reader to do just that, offering a bibliography, web addresses, and practical advice on following Tolkien’s footsteps in these languages. Even the translations go further than previous dual-language editions, such as Norton’s facing-page version of Seamus Heaney’s masterful Beowulf, because they do not strive to sing as stand-alone verse. In service to the original text, the translations follow Tolkien’s own principles of translation, following the syntax of the original as far as possible, and preserving the integrity of the line to a remarkable degree. Middle English sources are not translated as such, but heavily glossed in the margins. Even readers encountering Middle English for the first time should be able to work through the texts of Sir Orfeo, Pearl, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in this volume with no inordinate trouble. The second goal, tracing the permutations of these medieval works in Tolkien’s own fiction, is likewise well met. The interrelation of Tolkien’s scholarly work and his fiction is a commonplace in Tolkien criticism, but more critics allude to it than utilize it. Lee and Solopova do both. “Tolkien’s critical analysis of medieval literature is found in his academic work,” they say, “but his own fiction also represents his response to its conventions and the way of thinking. This book is very much an attempt to draw the readers’ attention to this last point” (16). There are medieval influences beyond plot in Tolkien’s fiction, however, and The Keys of Middle-earth explores them as well: Tolkien’s use of runes, and his adaptation of medieval Germanic metrical patterns to modern English in the verse that permeates both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. This section (31-49) is particularly good, and quite helpful, though at times all such linguistic material sounds as if it aspires to be an Old English or Old Norse Primer. The tone could afford a little less pedantry in spots: a book bearing the legend “How to Use This Book” on page one does not assure the Tolkien reader of being treated like a grown-up. Yet though The Keys of Middle-earth is directed toward readers of Tolkien not yet familiar with his medieval influences, one feature that will prove attractive even to seasoned Tolkienists and medievalists is liberal quotation (some seventy-five citations) from the mass of Tolkien 281

Book Reviews manuscripts and typescripts in the Modern Papers division of the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Most Tolkien scholars will not be in a position to visit this collection, and the ability of the authors to fit a telling quotation from Tolkien’s lecture notes or unpublished essays to most of their major points suggests a long familiarity with it. These quotations alone are worth the price of the book, unless perhaps the tantalizing glimpse of a Tolkien wordhord offered in it prove too exquisite a torture to the envious scholar who demands more. John R. Holmes Franciscan University of Steubenville Steubenville, Ohio The Lord of the Rings 1954–2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder, edited by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2006. 387 pp. $32 .00 (hardcover) ISBN 087462018X. This collection of essays derived from the 2004 Marquette conference bears comparison in its scope to the 1995 Proceedings of the J.R.R. Tolkien Centenary Conference, edited by Patricia Reynolds and Glen H. GoodKnight. The contributions range across the whole of Tolkien’s work, though, as the title implies, there is a predominant focus on The Lord of the Rings. If we compare it to the 1995 collection, one of its most striking features is its uniform confidence and maturity of tone, the absence of any hint of defensiveness or apologetic amateurishness. It is the work of a community of scholars who have no doubt of the importance of their theme or the comprehensiveness of their sources. There is also a sense, in most of the essays, that fairly gentle adjustments and additions are now being made to a generally accepted understanding of Tolkien’s art and thought. We are on the putting green of scholarship, as it were, rather than the fairway. In “Elvish as She Is Spoke,” for example, Carl Hostetter offers some deft and perhaps overdue correctives to enthusiastic misconceptions. Though he invented them, Tolkien was not “fluent” in Quenya or Sindarin. The languages were not finished products, designed like Esperanto to be usable by others for narrative or speech, but the expression, in the essentially dynamic form of historical grammar, of his “own, personal linguistic aesthetic” (234)—which itself changed over time. Attempts to translate into and out of these tongues (generating what Hostetter calls “Neo-Elvish”) can lead to gross and potentially comic semantic mismatches. Does all this need saying? Yes, and Hostetter’s essay is exceptionally incisive and lucid, but the most remarkable thing is that we have reached the point at which 282

Book Reviews these correctives are called for and can be widely understood. Following Charles B. Elston’s tribute to Richard E. Blackwelder as “Scholar, Collector, Benefactor and Friend,” Tom Shippey cites Blackwelder’s Tolkien Thesaurus (1990) in his “History in Words: Tolkien’s Ruling Passion.” It prompts him not only to characteristically searching inquiries into individual words—dwimmerlaik, ninny-hammer, and noodles (where he draws a blank)—but to a wider reflection on grammar and grammarians in Tolkien’s life and work, and a brief polemic against the continuing ascendancy of “misologists” in the humanities. Arne Zettersten in “The AB Language Lives” uses light-hearted allusions to two of Tolkien’s less developed languages—Nevbosh and Arctic—to frame a serious discussion of the prospects for future research on the Ancrene Riwle manuscripts and their linguistic context. Arden R. Smith’s “Tolkienian Gothic” looks at the Gothic names appropriated or adapted in The Lord of the Rings, and provides etymologies for the “reconstructed” (as opposed to authentic) words in Tolkien’s “Gothic” poem, “Bagme Bloma.” Much in Zettersten and in Smith is at the limit of this reviewer’s competence, if not well beyond it, but neither scholar entirely loses sight of the “humanity,” the creativity and historical awareness, that illuminates Tolkien’s philological inquiries. Michael D. C. Drout’s study of “The Rhetorical Evolution of ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’” similarly emphasizes that the lecture “reaches beyond scholarship” (191) in its concluding pages. For Drout, this critical text, especially in its final version, achieves rhetorical power for reasons we can recognize from the fiction: it suggests great resources of knowledge behind what is expressly stated; and it retains and refines “tableaux” which sprang into being quite early in the composition (such as the allegory of the tower) while repeatedly rethinking their position and weighting in the overall structure. In “What Did He Know and When Did He Know It?: Planning, Inspiration and The Lord of the Rings,” Christina Scull renews our gratitude that in 1937 George Allen & Unwin did not, like a well-managed present-day publisher, hold Tolkien to a synopsis, a contract and a deadline, but “let him get on with it” (110). Fluently summarising developments that must otherwise be pieced together from Christopher Tolkien’s edited volumes, Scull shows how numerous “unanticipated ingredients” (103) transformed the narrative. The emergence of the Trotter/Strider/Aragorn figure has been traced before, but never with such astute awareness of the compositional choices and imperatives in which it is embedded: Scull demonstrates that almost the whole course of post-Moria events, West of the Anduin, as we now have it is contingent on the decision that the new leader of the Company should be no hobbit, however exceptional, but the heir of Elendil. Richard C. West’s essay on the “Tale of Aragorn and Arwen” brings out the literary tact and plausibility with 283

Book Reviews which the relationship between the lovers is built up, and suggests how prudent was the abandonment of a contemplated love-match between Aragorn and Éowyn. As West shows, the Númenórean ancestry being woven for Aragorn made Arwen emerge as the more appropriate Queen, while the need for Aragorn to be seen to focus on the war against Sauron must militate against his being distracted by simultaneously falling in love. (It is better for the love-commitment to have been fixed in the past. Aragorn can suffer from his awareness of Éowyn’s infatuation with him, but only to the degree that is consistent with his sternly persevering on the Paths of the Dead). Paul Edmund Thomas’s title, “Towards Quite Unforeseen Goals” nicely summarizes the theme of Scull’s and West’s pieces, as well as of his own, which is a skilful though not especially original exposition of the slow convergence of Tolkien’s domestic story-telling with his mythology. Of the essays concerned with Tolkien’s processes of composition, the most closely attentive to textual detail is David Bratman’s “The Artistry of Omissions and Revisions in The Lord of the Rings.” Bratman notes that Tolkien sometimes remained silent about editorial errors or amendments, leaving us to wonder whether he consciously acquiesced in, or simply overlooked, them. The reader can enjoy testing his own intuitions against Bratman’s. I myself, for example, have never been shocked by Aragorn’s saying (when tracking the orcs and their captives) that Pippin “is smaller than the other,” this “remote” allusion to Merry seeming to accord with Aragorn’s slightly de haut en bas affection towards the hobbits, and to suggest an understandable momentary slip into the discourse of a hunter of nameless wild creatures. (However, the evidence, reinforced by Christopher Tolkien’s judgement, is that Tolkien intended “others”). A more general point of Bratman’s is that the revisions show Tolkien overcoming a certain initial modesty, which led him to play down the literary claims of his text by posing as a mere editor, and whimsically linking the narrative to the present day, as in his suggestion in the first edition’s Foreword that the Inklings might “have hobbit-blood in their venerable ancestry.” By the time of the second edition’s Foreword, says Bratman, Tolkien is writing as a “conscious literary artist who has attempted a work of literature” (132), and the jokes linking Middle-earth to the living present have gone for ever. In contrast to this almost Joycean conception of the autonomy of the art-work, John D. Rateliff ’s essay on “The Lord of the Rings as Mythic Prehistory” argues that we should attach greater importance to Tolkien’s occasional suggestions that the events of The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings are to be thought of as located, not merely on this planet, but in pre-historical time and Western European space. Why should this matter, and indeed what exactly does it mean? Rateliff ’s discussion is rather diffuse, but I take him to be saying that Tolkien wanted 284

Book Reviews us to imagine modern England as, so to speak, a surviving portion of Beleriand, still capable of evoking its memory. That this was a profound early desire of Tolkien the “Kortirion” poems demonstrate, but we need to explain why, as Rateliff admits, his later writing plays down the idea. The most obvious explanation is that once hobbits, with their pipes and seed-cakes and postal service, had been integrated into the history of Middle-earth, its end could not credibly seem to pre-date human history: it would have to be conceived as representing our world on a different imaginative plane, rather than at an earlier time. Still within the general theme of changing compositional conceptions, Verlyn Flieger’s “Tolkien and the Idea of the Book” traces the evolution of the “conceit” that the written records mentioned within the fiction correspond—through intermediate stages of copying, recopying, compilation and translation—to the book that we hold in our hands. Flieger convincingly suggests that the discovery in 1934 of the manuscript Morte d’Arthur, and the publication in 1947 of Eugene Vinaver’s three-volume edition of Malory’s work, provided models for, respectively, Bilbo’s “work of great learning” in Rivendell, and Tolkien’s reluctantly abandoned scheme of publishing The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings together. Two essays reflect in different ways the reception and afterlife of Tolkien’s work. Mike Foster’s “Teaching Tolkien” documents a rare success in establishing a college course on Tolkien alone as early as 1977. It is an appropriately anecdotal piece in which the warmth of Foster’s commitment and the inventiveness of his pedagogy both come through strongly. Douglas A. Anderson’s “The Mainstreaming of Fantasy and the Legacy of The Lord of the Rings” is informative and funny, not least in its extensive footnotes: it traces the early and enthusiastic response to Tolkien in the science fiction community, and the emergence therefrom, thanks at first to opportunistic individuals but soon to the relentless “engines of commerce,” of the distinct publishing genre of fantasy. Mainly by juxtaposing apt but familiar quotations, Matthew A. Fisher in “Working at the Crossroads; Tolkien, St. Augustine and the Beowulfpoet” has no difficulty in correcting Joseph Pearce’s tendency to read into Tolkien’s fiction an allegorically didactic Catholicism. Fisher shows Tolkien compounding elements from Augustine and from the Northern “theory of courage” in his own vision of fallible heroism confronting unbearable temptation. Sumner Gary Hunnewell’s “Naysayers in the Works of Tolkien” identifies a promising character-type and analyses a range of examples, from “Sunny Sam” (the smith in Farmer Giles of Ham) to Boromir. The analysis is interesting, but could perhaps be refined by distinguishing among (i) sincere but myopic unbelievers in what is “highest,” such as Nokes, (ii) tactical and therefore insincere skeptics, such as Gríma Wormtongue, or the pseudo-Amlach (S 145), and (iii) rational 285

Book Reviews but persuadable skeptics, such as Glóin when he voices his initial doubts about Bilbo. I have left until nearly the end the more boldly interpretative contributions. John Garth’s “Frodo and the Great War” reinforces the insights of his recent monograph. Though we are used to the idea that imagery from the War pervades certain chapters of The Lord of the Rings, Garth presses this claim further than ever before, finding suggestions of poison gas in the fog that closes round the hobbits on the Barrow-downs, or the fear like a “grey vapour” that flows from the Paths of the Dead; while the cackling, sobbing, flinching and cringing of Gollum recall war trauma victims (46–49). Into the “wheel of fire” that Frodo comes to see in Mordor are packed, according to Garth, not only Christian and classical allusions, but “the wheels and furnaces of industry,” and the wheel of an artillery-piece on which punished soldiers were spread-eagled (50). Such attributions of conscious or unconscious allusion remain speculative, but they are plausible, especially cumulatively: one wants them to be true, because they do not deprive the fictional imagery of its autonomous effectiveness, yet they enhance our respect for the alertness and compassion of Tolkien’s imagination. In “Subversive Fantasist: Tolkien on Class Difference,” Jane Chance offers a sophisticated assessment of Tolkien’s liability to charges of “classism,” “sexism” and “racial stereotyping.” We can be fairly sure that Tolkien himself did not think in terms of these concepts, and while this does not, of course, mean that nothing of his invention can be captured by them, their use should put us on our guard for signs of gratuitous confusion. As Chance acknowledges, in Tolkien’s fiction suspicion of other tribes and “races” is, at best, gently mocked (“‘Folk are queer up there’”) and, at worst, presented as a damaging obstacle to co-operation against the Enemy. There is ample evidence from his letters that he thought much the same about the xenophobia of real-world tribes. This might seem like a common sense position, emerging transparently enough in both fiction and letters; but since Chance is bound by the view that “fantasy . . . is a subversive mode” (154), she is obliged to show that Tolkien has communicated it by subverting something the early twenty-first century can recognize as a prejudice, which the critic must first locate and then deconstruct in his work. As a result, one is unsure at moments whether Tolkien is being accused or exculpated. A further problem is that, both sociologically and linguistically, some of Chance’s characterizations seem wide of the mark—unless I am missing a significant level of irony in her text. She suggests, for example, that the Maggots belong to the “uneducated underclass” (159). But “underclass” derives from a socio-economic model quite alien to the settled and prosperous rural society of the Hobbits, which until the arrival of Sharkey’s “ruffians” seems 286

Book Reviews to lack even the social stratum to which it might be applicable: the casual laborers, itinerant traders, fruminty-sellers and the like who populate the not wholly dissimilar world of Thomas Hardy’s novels. And if Farmer Maggot, Tom Bombadil’s acquaintance, is “uneducated,” it is only by the criteria of a modern, graphocentric culture. This notion of the “uneducated” may reflect Chance’s surprising claim that many of the hobbits speak “ungrammatically” or in a “near-illiterate way”—an example of the latter being Sam’s use of “ain’t.” But Sam is not in any sense illiterate (Mr Bilbo, we recall, has learned him his letters). His style is merely colloquial—a description which, as Shippey points out (37), belongs to the “highly democratic tradition” of philology. Marjorie Burns’s essay, “King and Hobbit: The Exalted and Lowly in Tolkien’s Created Worlds” identifies, with exemplary clarity and comprehensiveness, hierarchies from Eru downward which might seem to defy any interpretation in a democratic spirit. Burns perhaps stretches an occasional point: Tom Bombadil’s being “the Master” does not make him the “highest-ranking of [his] individual kind” (141), since it is not of others of his kind that he is the Master. But she is right to detect “a world rich with superiority” (143), whether it is hierarchy in the strict sense (involving the exercise of authority) or just a matter of some people being “higher”—in some still-to-be-explained way—than others, as the Númenóreans are “higher” than the Rohirrim. She is equally right to link this model to the emphasis in Tolkien’s work on the value of humility, the dangers inherent in rank, power and such natural advantages as longevity, and the supreme poignancy he associated with “ennoblement.” Indeed these emphases do not contradict the hierarchical model, they presuppose it. One of her best insights is that, as the legendarium progresses, the highest-ranking groups move out of it, allowing the “lower” to ascend without disturbance to the hierarchical order. At the end of The Lord of the Rings, Men achieve dominance of Middle-earth simply because the elder “races” of High Elves and Wizards have departed. What, I believe, needs adding to Burns’s analysis is that the hierarchies she identifies are not moral hierarchies, and are not even, strictly speaking, hierarchies of intrinsic value. Melkor is “greater than,” say, Radagast the Brown, and Fëanor is “greater than” Legolas, but these are plainly not cases of moral superiority. Rather, the hierarchies we find in The Silmarillion are those ascribed to the Elves, who (within the story) are its authors, and for whom the criterion for being “high” is, except for immortal spirits, a historically contingent one: nearness to Aman, and to the Valar. The Vanyar achieve the highest level of reverence because they reach Aman and never leave; the Moriquendi attract only limited reverence because they failed to make the journey West at all. These hierarchies are then taken as valid by all in Middle-earth who revere the 287

Book Reviews Elves; and closeness to the Elves, whether by heredity or by friendship or alliance, becomes itself a criterion for being revered. (This is connected, incidentally, to an important aesthetic point. The blessedness of Aman cannot be effectively represented directly, as the early chapters of The Silmarillion, whatever their other merits, show all too clearly, but is felt in countless reverberations of reverence through the later narratives of Middle-earth, in such episodes as Frodo’s encounter with Gildor, or Beren’s meeting with Lúthien). Frodo’s warning to the enraged hobbits that the fallen Saruman “‘was great once, of a noble kind that we would not dare to raise our hands against’” (RK, VI, viii, 299) shows how the hierarchical vision is independent of, yet tested against, moral choice and moral judgment. This is an accessible collection, in which the contributions seem to have benefited stylistically from their origin: as conference papers, at the kind of conference where intelligibility is appreciated. Most represent modest but genuine advances in our understanding. The volume closes with Wayne G. Hammond’s encouraging survey of available, and still incompletely utilized, research materials—a reproach to superficial scholarship, and a promise of further advances to come. Brian Rosebury University of Central Lancashire Preston, England The Philosophy of Tolkien: The Worldview behind “The Lord of the Rings”, by Peter J. Kreeft. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005. 237 pp. $15.99 (trade paperback) ISBN 1586170252 Peter Kreeft, a professor of philosophy at Boston College and wellknown Catholic apologist, has written a book that focuses on “Tolkien’s worldview, Tolkien’s philosophy” (10). To do this, he has structured the book around what he sees as fifty of the greatest questions in philosophy. These include such questions as “is the supernatural real?”, “does God exist?”, “are we both fated and free?”, “are angels real?”, “is knowledge always good?”, “why is music so powerful?”, “how does evil work?”, and “are promises sacred?” As even this brief list makes clear, the questions that Kreeft focuses on are as much theological as philosophical. Kreeft’s approach to addressing each question is the same. He provides an explanation of the question—what it means and why it is important to address. He includes what he views as a key quotation from The Lord of the Rings to illustrate Tolkien’s “answer” to the question, as well as at least one quotation from another writing by Tolkien that he sees as 288

Book Reviews relevant. Finally, Kreeft includes a quotation from C. S. Lewis, which he views as “showing the same philosophy directly stated” (11). The inclusion of quotes from Lewis is not completely surprising, as Kreeft identifies on his faculty web page at Boston College the writings of Lewis as a professional research interest. But the inclusion of the quotations of Lewis turns out to be a major weakness in the book. Kreeft’s approach implies that the two men were of extraordinarily similar minds; in fact he writes in the Introduction that “G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc were so close in personal friendship, in philosophical and religious belief, and in the common vocation of fighting a common jihad against the modern world that they were called the ‘Chesterbelloc monster’. We could with equal reason speak of ‘the Tolkielewis monster.’” (12) But such an approach ignores Tolkien’s own words; he wrote in a 1964 letter to David Kolb, S.J., that “It is sad that ‘Narnia’ and all that part of C.S.L.’s work should remain outside the range of my sympathy, as much of my work was outside his. Also, I personally found Letters to Malcolm a distressing and in parts horrifying work” (Letters 352). Yet several of the Lewis quotes that Kreeft uses to show “the same philosophy directly stated” come from several of the Narnia books as well as Letters to Malcolm. From my perspective, such a contradiction serves only to undermine the validity of Kreeft’s analysis. That undermining is a shame, since Kreeft makes some interesting points. The early sections that focus on metaphysics and what is referred to as “angelology” are weak and do not provide much insight into Tolkien’s worldview. But in later sections Kreeft looks at anthropology, epistemology, aesthetics, philosophy of language, political philosophy, and ethics; it is in these sections that I found myself intrigued by some of his comments. But that led to me realize a second major weakness in the book. What Kreeft writes in response to any single question is rarely more than five or six pages. Sections that address questions such as “is knowledge always good?”, “what is truth?”, “is the past (tradition) a prison or a lighthouse?”, “can words have real power?”, are only two to three pages in length. And the total length of each section includes the use of quotations from The Lord of the Rings, other writings by Tolkien (often from his letters or the essay “On Fairy-stories”), and quotations from Lewis. The result is that an interesting point by Kreeft is barely mentioned before the section ends and he moves on to another question. A third weakness of this book is that Kreeft makes almost no reference to the Northern traditions—particularly the theory of courage—that so strongly influenced Tolkien. That influence has been examined at great length by other scholars including Tom Shippey and Marjorie Burns. Tolkien himself wrote in a 1964 letter to Anne Barrett of Houghton Mifflin that he had “for some time vaguely thought of the reprint together of 289

Book Reviews three things that to my mind really do flow together: Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics; the essay On Fairy-stories; and The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth. The first deals with the contact of the ‘heroic’ with fairy-story; the second primarily with fairy-story; and the last with ‘heroism and chivalry’ (Letters 350). Yet Kreeft’s examination of Tolkien’s worldview and philosophy makes far more references to Plato than it does to Beowulf. This omission seriously limits the utility of the analysis presented in this book. Kreeft writes in the Introduction that “this book is not about The Lord of the Rings but only its philosophy. It therefore leaves out far more than it leaves in” (20). While Kreeft was referring to the omission of characters, plot, and setting, his words serve as an apt criticism of this book. Far more is left out than Kreeft includes, and consequently this work makes for a somewhat interesting but ultimately unsatisfying analysis. Matthew A. Fisher Saint Vincent College Latrobe, Pennsylvania The Plants of Middle-earth: Botany and Sub-creation, by Dinah Hazell. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006. x, 124 pp. $22.95 (hardcover) ISBN 0873388836. One of the many delights of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is that it offers something for everyone. Historians can delve into its mythical past; economists can analyze the economies of Gondor or the Shire; sociologists can plunder its geopolitical ramifications. And, of course, anyone who loves gardening can delight in the plant life of Middle-earth, from the homey daisy to the mystical mallorn. Such is the intended audience of Dinah Hazell’s The Plants of Middle-earth: Botany and Sub-creation. Adorned with bits of medieval herblore, sprinklings of horticultural history, and the occasional venture into Tolkien criticism, the book takes a wandering journey through Middle-earth, beginning and ending in the Shire, with stops along the way to examine its indigenous plants. The book opens by gathering a “bouquet” of flower-names found in the Shire, mostly drawn from the genealogies that appear in Appendix C of The Lord of the Rings. Since we know very little of the women who bear these names, any link between the folkloric traits of the flowers and the characters of the women named for them must necessarily be limited to speculation. When offered, those speculations are interesting, but more often than not Hazell prefers to stay within the safer territory of established lore. The rest of the book departs from the pattern established in the first 290

Book Reviews chapter in favor of a more wandering path. The second chapter travels from the Shire to Mordor, but the journey is not linear: it quickly outlines the entire progression, then returns to the Shire and strolls through the same territory at a more leisurely pace. The chapter skims over the Old Forest to reach Bree in a timely fashion, then digresses into Tolkien’s famous description of Edith dancing in the grove before plunging into the wilderness. Rivendell gets only a cursory glance, but the holly of Eregion is studied at some length. And so the journey continues, stopping to examine an interesting specimen here and there, traveling rapidly through terrain that interests the author less, until Frodo and Sam reach Mordor. Chapter three backtracks again, devoting itself to the plants found in Ithilien. Here, the author sticks closer to the hobbits’ path, though not without further digressions into medieval verse and a bit more about Tolkien’s well-known love of trees. The fourth chapter returns to the topic of trees in more depth, spending some time examining the allegorical significance of Niggle’s tree before turning its full attention to the forests of Middle-earth. Mirkwood, the Old Forest, and Fangorn are all explored at some length, but Lothlórien gets a bare two paragraphs because the author feels that the magic of Lórien cannot be captured or enriched through analysis (though Galadriel’s garden was visited for three paragraphs in chapter two). Finally, we return to the devastated Shire, which Hazell reads conventionally as an indictment of industrialization and an assertion of the recuperative powers of nature. Chapter five is simply a brief expansion of this theme, using the White Tree of Gondor as a metaphor for the earth’s power to regenerate itself. Although the title of the book suggests a methodical approach to the ways in which Tolkien shaped the plants of Middle-earth by a series of deliberate choices, the book is really about the folkloric properties of real plants found in Tolkien’s imaginary world. As such, it is more about herblore than botany, and more about Creation than Sub-creation. The title further implies a preoccupation with the process by which Tolkien derived imaginary plants using his knowledge of real ones, but such is not the case. The mallorn, niphredil, and athelas get almost no attention whatsoever. Ironically, these plants are not discussed precisely because they are imaginary: the author repeatedly states that she has no wish to infringe on the readers’ imagined re-creations of these magnificent plants. Throughout the book, Hazell’s style is casual and welcoming, almost like sharing afternoon tea with a fellow garden enthusiast instead of reading a scholarly work. But, like most conversations, the text is prone to wander. So, for instance, chapter four’s section on Fangorn Forest includes paragraphs on the derivation of “ent,” parallels between The Wanderer and the “Lament of the Rohirrim,” the complexities of male/fe291

Book Reviews male relationships in Tolkien’s works, and, finally, a bit of lore regarding the rowan. All of this—and more—takes roughly two and a half pages. In at least one case, the ambling nature of the text results in a confusion of characters, too; for instance, the discussion of the Old Forest asserts that Treebeard is a crack willow (74), though Tolkien’s description categorizes him as an oak or a beech. Old Man Willow might well be a crack willow, but Treebeard is not. Also, there is a startling paucity of Tolkien criticism, though several of the parallels she draws suggest the author has read, at the very least, Tom Shippey’s Author of the Century. That is not to say that two independent authors cannot arrive at the same conclusion; quite clearly, they can and do. But it is always rewarding to find one’s own ideas echoed in the minds of others. Besides Carpenter’s biography, the only pieces of Tolkien-specific criticism cited are Ruth Noel’s The Mythology of Middle-earth (1977), Robert Foster’s Guide to Middle-earth (1971), and two collections of Tolkien’s artwork. Given all the attention that Tolkien’s trees have recently garnered, this is a surprising omission. She might have found Beth Russell’s “Botanical notes on the Mallorn” helpful, or, more broadly, Michael J. Brisbois’s “Tolkien’s Imaginary Nature.” Even if the author did not have access to these sources, Patrick Curry’s Defending Middle-earth is widely available, and contains material on Tolkien’s ecology. None of these works is as lengthy or difficult as the books of medieval horticulture the author did consult, each pertains to issues raised in Hazell’s work, and all have the added advantage of building on twenty years of intervening scholarship. That said, the idea behind this book is essentially a good one; the connections between Tolkien’s knowledge of medieval herblore and the plants incorporated into his work have not, to my knowledge, been previously explored. The illustrations are lovely, too. The problem with this book is that it is not really one thing or another; it wavers between medieval herblore and horticulture on the one hand, and commentary on Tolkien’s text on the other. While the plants might provide a living link between the two worlds, in effect they often fall into the background as the text meanders. Though the book does offer its readers a journey through Middle-earth, too often it loses sight of its own destination. Had it been slightly more focused, the book might have been a genuine contribution to Tolkien scholarship. As it is, the book resides well within welltrodden ground, offering no new insights into the world of Middle-earth besides a few interesting tidbits of medieval herblore. However, no one who loves green and growing things, medieval literature, and The Lord of the Rings can fault Hazell for wanting to play in the garden. Amy Amendt-Raduege Marquette University Milwaukee, Wisconsin 292

Book Reviews WORKS CITED Curry, Patrick. Defending Middle-earth. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. Brisbois, Michael J. “Tolkien’s Imaginary Nature: An Analysis of the Structure of Middle-earth,” Tolkien Studies 2 (2005): 197-216. Russell, Beth. “Botanical Notes on the Mallorn,” Mallorn 43 (July 2005): 20-26. Shippey, T. A. J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. The Power of the Ring: The Spiritual Vision Behind the Lord of the Rings by Stratford Caldecott. New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 2005. viii, 151 pp. $16.95 (trade paperback) ISBN 082452277X. A revised and expanded version of the author’s Secret Fire: The Spiritual Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien, published in England in 2003, this self-described search for “Tolkien’s secret fire” finds it in the author’s devout Catholicism. The first 113 pages develop Caldecott’s interpretation of the familiar fact that Tolkien was a religious man who subsumed his faith in his fiction. He cites, as seemingly every writer on the topic does, Tolkien’s famous December, 1953, letter to family friend Fr. Robert Murray, S.J.: “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously at first but consciously in the revision . . . the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism” (48). Few thoughtful readers will disagree that Tolkien was a devoted Catholic; the relative importance of his Catholicism in his creative scheme is, however, debatable. Many other elements are incorporated in the making of Middle-earth; faith is but one. Caldecott’s style mingles personality with scholarship: “I sometimes think of the Inklings (not to mention the ‘Coalbiters’!) when I read the description of Elrond’s ‘Hall of Fire’ in Rivendell, for it is there they would have been most at home” (11). Such authorial intrusion may seem more like casual conversation than cogent criticism to some readers. After a while, Caldecott’s use of “I” to introduce his views seems both redundant—who else could it be?—and distracting, rather like Tolkien’s own authorial intrusions in The Hobbit, wisely excised from The Lord of the Rings.

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Book Reviews Similarly, some passages seem to veer from criticism into moralizing, such as this judgment of Niggle: “Many of us have delusions of self-importance, and by contrast view the needs of others as less weighty than our own” (25). True enough, but examination of conscience is not the same as examination of the text. Therein lies the problem with books of this sort. The reader perforce has two subjects to weigh and balance: literary scholarship and theological interpretation. Chapter one’s further examination of “Leaf by Niggle” illustrates this dilemma. When Caldecott describes Niggle’s time in the Workhouse as “a bit of a joke against the popular notion of ‘time in purgatory,’ which as a well-informed Catholic he knew to be false” (26), some Catholic readers may disagree even as non-Catholics are left in the dark. Caldecott continues: “There follows an examination of his [Niggle’s] conscience by the Holy Trinity (three mysterious Voices overheard in the dark)” (26). But there are only two Voices in the text. Such an error early in the book cannot help but prompt a misgiving: caveat lector. In the second chapter, Caldecott declares that “Frodo emerges as a very ‘Christian’ type of hero. . . . He allows himself to be humiliated and crucified. He refuses earthly respect and glory for the sake of something much greater; not merely his own integrity, but the will of the Father in heaven” (33). But Frodo fails his last temptation. The Ring is destroyed not by Frodo’s willing act but by Gollum’s fatal deed. Caldecott says: “Thus in the end it is not Frodo who saves Middle-earth at all, though he bore the Ring to the Mountain, nor Gollum, who took the Ring into the Fire. It can only be God himself, working through the love and freedom of his creatures, using even our mistakes and the designs of the Enemy (as The Silmarillion hints he will do) to bring about our good. The scene is a triumph of providence over fate, but also a triumph of mercy, in which free will, supported by grace, is fully vindicated” (36). This interpretation is simply too forgiving of Frodo, whose will fails him. “I do not choose now to do what I came to do” is, after all, what he says at the Cracks of Doom; he does not say, as Jesus did in Gethsemane, “Not my will, but thine be done.” To Caldecott’s credit, references to The History of Middle-earth, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, and other critical texts on Tolkien, especially Verlyn Flieger’s, are incorporated in this study. On the other hand, references to non-Tolkien writers as varied as St. Thomas Aquinas, Jacques Maritain, Dwight Longnecker, St. Therese of Lisieux, Charles Peguy, and Catechism of the Catholic Church underscore the Procrustean aspect of this book. “I do not know how closely Tolkien had studied the life of St. Phillip Neri,

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Book Reviews the founder of the Oratory” (66), he writes at one point, noting nonetheless the “Oratorian resonances” in the professor’s life. There may indeed be similarities to the Virgin Mary in the depiction of Galadriel, as other scholars have noted. Longnecker’s 2003 paean to a Raphael Madonna, “a kind of purity that was both as soft as moonlight and as hard as diamonds” suggests that writer was familiar with Sam’s description of Galadriel to Faramir: “Hard as di’monds, soft as moonlight.” (56), as Caldecott observes. Sometimes, on the other hand, Caldecott misses a Catholic element that seems transparent. Indeed lembas is analogous to the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist, which makes the long Lent of fasting and privation that Sam and Frodo endure in Books Four and Six leading up to March 25, an Easter of sorts in Middle-earth, worth noting. The fourth chapter, “Let These Things Be,” compares Biblical accounts of Creation with Tolkien’s. Reincarnation, an element in Tolkien’s legendarium, contradicts “the clear teaching of the saints, and assumes that the Gospels (in which Christ speaks of an eternal hell as a real possibility) must at some point have been deliberately falsified. Reincarnation is therefore incompatible with Catholic, Orthodox, or Evangelical Christianity. . . . Tolkien did not, however, see anything wrong with exploring the idea in the world of his imagination, and made good use of it constructing the drama of the Elves” (85). Here, Tolkien’s non-orthodoxy is absolved. “Behind the Stars,” the fifth chapter, presents Caldecott’s view of Elvishness, “a kind of beauty or even the sense of beauty . . . a sense of freedom, of a yearned-for infinity. It is something like coming home, but only at the end of a long journey. In a word, I suppose, it is the glimpse of transcendence, of what it might mean to go beyond all limitation, outside time itself perhaps, into a place where beauty converges and commingles with goodness and truth.” (94). Elves “are artists, but also scientists and nature-mystics” (91). Caldecott links this notion to the unions of Beren and Lúthien and Aragorn and Arwen, adding “if I am right, it is also echoed in the longpostponed marriage of Samwise to Rosie Cotton, which represents the ‘earthing’ of the more distant epic marriages of Men and Elves. Of course, Rosie Cotton is not an Elven princess, any more than Tolkien’s own Edith Bratt was. . . . For Tolkien the male-female dynamic is not, finally, a matter of a couple only, uniting in harmony the human with the Elvish elements in our nature, but of a fruitful couple; that is to say, of a couple that is open to being blessed with new life. It is not simply with his marriage to Rosie that Sam’s eros—his love and longing for the Elves, the motivation of his journey—is fulfilled and blessed, but with the birth and growth within his home of Elanor and the other children” (98-99). 295

Book Reviews In his conclusion, Caldecott again evokes Sam as a paradigm for the reader’s experience: “We find, like him, that once we are inside such a tale, it is difficult to escape, for our lives have been changed. . . . We realize that we are called to some sort of service, so that the light may not perish from the earth” (112). Finally, Caldecott aptly cites Sam’s vision of Eärendil above Mordor: “the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing; there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach” (113). Seventeen pages of appendices fill out the rest of this slim book with five short essays on other non-Catholic topics: Tolkien and Jung, Tolkien’s social philosophy, King Arthur, and the author’s changing conception of a hitherto flat earth rounding into a globe after the fall of Númenor. The longest of these, at seven pages, is Caldecott’s commentary on the Peter Jackson film trilogy. Present here are many of the usual quibbles, which need not be reprised. But when Caldecott writes that the Ring “is destroyed by apparent ‘accident,’ an accident that Jackson makes clear would not have occurred but for the many sacrifices that had been made along the way by Frodo and by each of the members of the fellowship” (130), it was Tolkien, not the screenwriters, who conceived that moment. One footnote buried on the penultimate page would be more at home in the text proper. Caldecott writes: In this book, I have tended to stress the Catholic inspiration behind The Lord of the Rings. Only a small proportion of Tolken’s admirers, however, are Christian. Wherever he derived his ideas and images, they have an appeal and a resonance well beyond any single religious tradition. This is as it should be. Tolkien was reaching back to a time long before Christ, and before the great ‘axial period’ of the world religions five centuries before that. As we have seen, he did not hold with Max Müller’s view that religion evolves from a primitive stage of mythology and superstition to a more conscious and scientific apprehension of the world. That view, expressed in the best-selling Outline of History by H. G. Wells and effectively demolished by G. K. Chesterton in The Everlasting Man, was anathema to the Inklings. Tolkien believed that paganism contained much that anticipated and pointed toward the full truth that had been revealed in Jesus Christ. If he is correct, we would expect to find echoes of the concept of ‘secret fire’ in many cultures and religions—and so we do. (142)

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Book Reviews Regarding the book itself, the font employed (Calligraphic 421), while attractive and airy, lacks a certain typographical gravitas. The text seems more carefully edited than some other recent works on Tolkien; this reader found only one typo, and that in the notes (“tee” for “tree”). The bibliography’s list of twenty-four letters in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien provides suggestions on further reading, but perhaps commentary on these could have been woven into this slim volume. An afterword by editor Roy M. Carlisle proclaims: “Your spiritual life will be increased and your appreciation for this staggering work by Tolkien will be forever enhanced by Stratford’s wise guidance. May the fellowship of the Ring be always with you” (147). This passage illustrates the bifurcated nature of this book. While one of the better such works, The Power of the Ring makes assertions that Tolkien scholars will find arguable and even deniable. Catholic readers, including this one, may likewise quibble with some of Caldecott’s ex cathedra declarations. A successful compromise, it is said, leaves neither side particularly happy. By that criterion, The Power of the Ring succeeds. Reducing The Lord of the Rings to a Christian allegory similar to C.S. Lewis’ Narnian tales is mistaking a crucial part for the whole. As critics as diverse as Tom Shippey and Joseph Pearce point out, one need not share the author’s faith to cherish his tale. Many other things are at work in it: Tolkien’s love of trees and loathing of technology, his enjoyment of good food, good friends, good cheer, and good beer, his nostalgia for the “little England” of bygone days, his experiences in the trenches of World War One. Caldecott’s book is colored by viewing all these through the stained-glass lens of faith. While a pleasant, sometimes provocative, interpretation, it is a worthy, but perhaps not an essential, addition to the scholarly canon. Mike Foster Metamora, Illinois Reading “The Lord of the Rings”: New Writings on Tolkien’s Classic, edited by Robert Eaglestone. London and New York: Continuum, 2005. vi, 214 pp. £45.00 / $75.00 (hardcover) ISBN 082648459X; £12.99 / $24.95 (trade paperback) ISBN 0826484603. My first impression of this book evoked uncomfortable memories of an earlier effort: J.R.R. Tolkien: This Far Land (1984), edited by Robert Giddings. This deeply eccentric if pioneering collection included papers which verged on parody, evoking images of earnest young academics, mostly in polytechnics, for whom Tolkien functioned mostly as grist for new critical mills. It is clear from the present volume, however, that things 297

Book Reviews have moved on. Compared with two decades ago, there have been two signal improvements: Eaglestone and his contributors evince much greater theoretical sophistication, and they take Tolkien’s work more seriously. In short, Reading “The Lord of the Rings” realizes its goal—“to reintegrate The Lord of the Rings into the broad sweep of current literary critical and theoretical interests” (2) —with impressive success. Eaglestone’s introduction offers a useful supplement to Shippey’s analysis of The Lord of the Rings as a quintessentially twentieth-century work, including new insights into Tolkien’s rhetoric. His own chapter, “Invisibility,” draws on Emmanuel Levinas and Alasdair MacIntyre to reveal the integral connection between evil and invisibility. This point is ably contextualized in terms of the modernist and especially Cartesian valorization and project of instituting a freedom which is radically nonparticipative—and, as such, ontologically inauthentic if not impossible. Michael Drout’s offering, “Towards a Better Tolkien Criticism,” offers some valuable pointers in that regard although, being confined to chapter-length, it is unavoidably more programmatic than substantive. Even so, it is highly refreshing to encounter Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Stanley Fish, all skilfully handled, in the context of Tolkien studies. And one can only agree that “Tolkien Studies” (by scholars) and “Middle-earth Studies” (by fans), instead of indulging in mutual hostility, should be mutually enriching. Drout also criticizes some scholars as “over-invested in the truth of [Tolkien’s] Letters” as “a transparent, unambiguous guide to the ‘real meaning’ of Tolkien’s literature” (20). That would indeed be a mistake; however, is such a use of the Letters really that common? And surely it is defensible to use them as a guide to Tolkien’s own conscious intentions, beliefs and values, and how those affected what he wrote. That, at any rate, is my practice (which, in addition, does not extend to equally naïve assertions of “real meaning” of The Lord of the Rings). Certainly Barry Langford, in the following chapter on “Time,” has no hesitation in drawing on the Letters in order to break down the “narrative extension” of The Lord of the Rings into its linguistic, geographical and temporal components. He then uses this analysis to identify Jackson’s films as “relentlessly present-tense and ruthlessly goal-oriented,” the effect of which is to close down the possibility “for critical reflection or ethical engagement” that is such a distinctive mark of the book (43, 46). Again, it is hard to disagree. One bad academic habit is in evidence here, however, if not egregiously so: if specialist jargon such as “lisible” and “scriptable” is going to be used—neither of which appear in the Shorter OED—then it should also be explained. (True, one could infer the meaning; but with technical terms that is not always reliable.) Sue Zlosnik’s “Gothic Echoes” is one of the weaker papers in this 298

Book Reviews collection. In distinctively modernist manner, she refers to “those who find solace in Tolkien’s fake mythology” (58; a phrase repeated from page 50). Not only is this the sort of dismissively patronizing attitude we know too well from Germaine Greer and Auberon Waugh et al., it also betrays a curiously positivist attitude. What is “real” mythology, from which the contrast must draw its force? Even Homer and Herodotus were interpreters of myth. But in that case, what is “fake”? And her remark that The Lord of the Rings encourages “a willing suspension of disbelief in its readers” (50) might carry more conviction if it showed some awareness at least of Tolkien’s contrary point, in “On Fairy-stories” (37), that if disbelief must be suspended by an act of will then the fantasy has already failed. Zlosnik concludes by quoting, with implicit approval, Ken Gelder, who has attacked contemporary fantasy as a “literary form of fundamentalism that troubles secular ideals” and is “‘terroristic’ in its attack on the modern world” (58). This sort of unselfcritical literary modernism, with its crypto-religious secularism, was the reason why I once published an essay entitled “Tolkien and the Critics: A Critique” (1999). To judge by its reception, it filled a much-needed gap and now appears somewhat dated, not least in its over-enthusiastic embrace of postmodernism. But Gelder, and Zlosnik’s endorsement of Gelder, makes me think there might be a place for it still. Adam Roberts, in “The One Ring,” reveals a new dimension to Tolkien’s choice and use of a ring as the central symbol of his narrative. The result is a fascinating study of the way Tolkien’s Catholicism—specifically, the sacramental dimension of the One Ring—found literary expression which deepened that meaning for readers mostly quite unaware of its source. In “Home,” Simon Malpas makes a plausible and tantalizing connection between Martin Heidegger’s and Tolkien’s responses to what they both perceived (arguably with perspicacity) as the threat of runaway modernity and especially techno-science. This is potentially a rich vein but Malpas’s exploration contains an uneasy lacuna. He relies in particular upon Martin Heidegger’s lectures on Hölderlin. Does the fact that these were delivered in Germany in the summer of 1942 by a member of the Nazi Party signify nothing? Particularly when, to quote Roz Kaveney later in this collection, there are “attitudes in The Lord of the Rings that are sufficiently cognate with racism to have appealed to neo-Nazis” (174)? I myself have defended the book against the charge of racism, but it is worryingly selective to pretend there is no issue here to be discussed. Malpas also urges upon us the unavoidability of accommodating technological change, arguing that “Tolkien is quite explicit . . . that nothing can simply resist or ignore change” (88). But Tolkien’s reluctant 299

Book Reviews embrace of change was principally metaphysical; and metaphysics—as we ought to know from the case of Heidegger—is an unreliable guide to political and social actions. In any case, Malpas may be right, but he is rather too quick to dismiss resistance, if only as a vital part of any eventual positive compromise. Elrond, for one, held a contrary view: “There is nothing you can do, other than to resist, with hope or without it.” Jennifer Neville, on “Women,” shows convincingly that the relative marginality of women in Tolkien’s fiction is, to a very significant extent, a function not of the literary texts he drew upon but of nineteenth and twentieth-century literary scholarship. This argument includes both considerable specific detail in The Lord of the Rings and a nuanced conclusion regarding the implications for the dimension of gender in Tolkien studies. In “Masculinity,” Holly A. Crocker nearly succumbs to bad academic prose (the pernicious effects of one of her sources, Homi Bhabha on postcolonialism, seem evident), e.g.: “Functioning as an unlocated mode of becoming that subsumes all those who subscribe to its principles, this masculinity compels others to see it as invisible” (113). But this passage, like the paper itself, is far from meaningless; it is simply unnecessarily difficult to follow. And as a matter of fact, what Crocker reveals about masculinity as an organizing principle of, and in, The Lord of the Rings is acute and fruitful. My only caveats are that it surely also requires something to be said about the contrary pole, unexamined here, of femininity; and that the whole exercise would be greatly enriched by adding the political dimension—unremarked but unmistakably present—of hegemony. (That is, of hegemonic gendering, and gendered hegemony.) The best guides here are undoubtedly the post-Marxists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in their now-classic Hegemony and Socialist Strategy and subsequent work. Esther Saxey, in “Homoeroticism,” asks whether Frodo and Sam can and should be considered a sexual/romantic couple. There is, of course, no good reason why this should not be a matter for discussion. Unfortunately, however, Saxey falls back on some questionable tactics in order to answer in the affirmative. One is to maintain that the resistance among Tolkien fans to the idea of Frodo and Sam as sexually involved “is a good reason . . . for me to insist on the sexual nature of their relationship” (131). But is that alone sufficient reason? Even the most hardened critical theorist would think twice before asserting so. Another problem is castigating objections as “attempts to avoid homosexuality”—a notorious rhetorical ploy to problematize any disagreement. Thus, “the use of Elven language as a token of love between Aragorn and Arwen [in the film] adds a suggestive note to his exchanges with Legolas, at Helm’s Deep and elsewhere” (136). But if I reply, “Not necessarily; after all, Arwen and 300

Book Reviews Legolas are both elves,” then I open myself to the charge of engaging in a “heterosexualizing” strategy (with the added possibility of doing so for dubious psychosexual motives of my own). This is no way to enable or conduct intellectual dialogue. It is also curious that Saxey makes no historical allowances for the difficulty, since the early twentieth century, of understanding the hitherto more common reality of socially hierarchical and emotionally intense but non-sexual relationships between men, often Englishmen—without stretching the meaning of “sexual” beyond what makes it useful and meaningful. Scott Kleinman’s “Service” is a useful and original analysis of the confusing and confused intertwining of service (preferable to the more loaded and patronizing “servility”) and eroticism in the relationships between Éowyn and Aragorn and Sam and Frodo. The subject of Barry Atkins’s chapter is “Games”: that is, “the games of the films of the books” (155). He concludes by suggesting the possibility that computer games might “finally satisfy that desire to enter a fictional world that Tolkien’s text has always provoked” (161). Against this, it is worth at least noting Tolkien’s own opinion that the desire for fantasy “is only cheated by counterfeits, whether the innocent but clumsy devices of the human dramatist, or the malevolent frauds of the magicians. In this world it is for men unsatisfiable, and so imperishable” (TL 54). When it is ever-increasingly difficult to distinguish between those two elements in the games, and the entire industry is predicated on enormous amounts of money changing hands—a sure sign, to use Tolkien’s terminology, of Magic rather than Enchantment—then I know which outcome I would back. Roz Kaveney concludes the collection with “In the Tradition . . .” Kaveney once opined (in 1991) that Tolkien’s work deserves “intelligent reading but not passionate attention.” (I am indebted to her for this, since it was a major spur for my own writings, albeit in an attempt to prove her wrong.) Perhaps for that reason, she demonstrates a lack of the sure touch that one associates with Tolkien’s best critics. Is there, for example, really a “sense that all will, in the end, be well that pervades The Lord of the Rings” (164)? Or is not The Lord of the Rings pervaded by just the opposite: an unassuagable sense of loss, even in apparent victory? Perhaps both; but then a balanced assessment would address both. She also remarks that Tolkien’s success inaugurated fantasy as “a literature of comfort” (169). But is it not possible, borrowing from Geoffrey Grigson, to be comforted without being content? I persist in believing that the idea of “radical nostalgia,” which I discussed in Defending Middle-earth, remains a more promising and under-valued one for understanding much of Tolkien’s appeal. Regrettably, then, there is, in Kaveney’s contribution and elsewhere 301

Book Reviews here, a lingering sense of elitist modernism about which Tolkien’s pointed remark about critics “confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter” (TL 61) remains the aptest comment. Yet I would myself be guilty of ideological one-sidedness if I did not recognize the quality of Kaveney’s discussion of post-Tolkienian fantasy, especially the work of Terry Brooks, Stephen Donaldson, Robert Jordan, Terry Goodkind and Tad Williams. She is particularly acute on Ursula Le Guin’s complex relationship with and debts, both positive and reactive, to Tolkien. And the same general point applies to the collection as a whole. In short, then, it is indisputably a good thing, and a sign of the rude new health of Tolkien studies. Patrick Curry London, England

WORKS CITED

Curry, Patrick. Defending Middle-earth: Tolkien, Myth and Modernity. Second ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. ———. “Tolkien and the Critics: A Critique.” In Root and Branch, second ed., edited Thomas Honegger. Zurich: Walking Tree Publishers, 2005.[First published 1999.] Kaveney, Roz. “The Ring Recycled,” New Statesman and Society, 20 & 27 December 1991. Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. Second ed. London: Verso, 2001. The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary, by Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. xvi, 240 pp. £12.99 / $25.00 (hardcover) ISBN 0198610696. Tolkien worked on the staff of what would later be called the Oxford English Dictionary from January 1919 through the end of May 1920. In J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, Humphrey Carpenter quotes Tolkien as saying that “I learned more in those two years than in any other equal period of my life” (101). The present slim volume, by three staff editors at the OED, considers not only Tolkien’s time there but how that training as a working philologist, dealing in etymologies and the cognates of English words in various Germanic languages as well as in definitions and particular meanings, permeates his own writings—not just his academic

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Book Reviews work but, more significantly, the literary writings of his vast imagined world of Middle-earth. The result is a curious book in a number of ways, but still a valuable one. The Rings of Words is divided into three parts: the first, “Tolkien as a Lexicographer,” is a history of Tolkien’s work at the OED; part two, “Tolkien as Wordwright,” discusses the practice of philology in a broader and more historical sense, with Tolkien as the prime example; while part three, entitled “Word Studies,” is made up of short individual entries, arranged alphabetically, of about a hundred words used by Tolkien in his writings. The respective contributions made by the three writers of this book are nowhere differentiated, but the entire first section is closely based on Peter Gilliver’s lecture “At the Wordface: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Work on the Oxford English Dictionary,” published in the Proceedings of the J.R.R. Tolkien Centenary Conference 1992 (1995), edited by Patricia Reynolds and Glen H. GoodKnight. (Oddly, this previous publication is neither acknowledged nor cited.) Though the material added to the present version is not extensive, it is good to see this work reach a much larger audience than it had via its appearance in a volume of conference papers. This essay is based primarily on the OED’s own records, including the handwritten slips kept for each word. Some of these slips are reproduced in facsimile, showing instances of Tolkien’s etymologies being accepted or added to by Henry Bradley, his supervisor and one of the “Four Wise Clerks of Oxenford” (as Tolkien humorously described them in Farmer Giles of Ham—meaning the four successive editors of the OED). By the time of Tolkien’s arrival, the staff was working on the letter W—one with many words of Germanic origins, so Tolkien’s expertise was especially useful. For a few words not otherwise attested as Tolkien’s work in the OED archive, Humphrey Carpenter is quoted as saying that Tolkien “was given the job of researching the etymology of warm, wash, wasp, water, wick (lamp), and winter” (9). Though the source of this quotation is not cited (proper sourcing is an occasional problem in the book), it comes from page 101 of the 1977 edition of Carpenter’s biography. However, the quote is not reproduced accurately—Carpenter does not include the word wash. Fortunately, wash does not come up for any further discussion in The Ring of Words, and as it is not included in the authors’ list of over fifty “Entries in the OED worked on by Tolkien” (42), the addition of it to the quotation from Carpenter may be ascribed to a simple error. “Tolkien as Wordwright” is a discussion of philological erudition and literary usage, particularly in terms of word invention (besides Tolkien, W. H. Auden, James Joyce and E. R. Eddison are mentioned) and the use of archaism (as found not only in Tolkien but also, more extensively, in William Morris). Tolkien’s keen interest in the interrelationship of 303

Book Reviews language and history is described in terms of philological reconstruction (“the fundamental process in etymology” 51), an area previously explored by Tom Shippey in The Road to Middle-earth. The section “Word Studies” comprises more than half the book and consists of short essays on particular words, ranging from the expected (dwarf, elf, eucatastrophe, goblin, halfling, hobbit, legendarium, mathom, moot, middle-earth, sub-creation, wight, wraith) to the less expected: dumbledore (a dialect name for the bumblebee which appears in Tolkien’s poem “Errantry,” but which probably earns an entry here because of the familiarity of the word to readers of the Harry Potter books); staggerment (apparently Tolkien’s own coinage); and unlight (“Tolkien is credited in the OED as the first person to use this as a noun” 205). Hobbit gets the longest entry of all at ten pages (with five sub-groupings). Other entries that are substantial, listed in order of relative length, include dwarf; ent and etten; bee-hunter and skin-changer; elf; rune; sub-creation; and wight. One word I expected to find here but did not is prequel, a word whose invention is sometimes attributed to Tolkien, particularly in interviews he gave late in life (though the word appears in American science fiction criticism as early as the mid-1950s). An epilogue discusses how some of Tolkien’s usages have been taken up by other writers like Stephen R. Donaldson, Alan Garner, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Diana Wynne Jones. Overall, the three authors of The Ring of Words rarely stray beyond Tolkien’s texts and the OED itself, and they do not seem to have ventured very far into Tolkien scholarship. Tom Shippey is almost alone of cited Tolkien scholars. Still, while much of the discussion (particularly in the word studies) will be familiar to many Tolkien scholars, this book is a valuable assemblage of critical insights on Tolkien’s personal experiences of words and language. As devised and written, this book is aimed primarily towards the general reader who is also interested in Tolkien, and it serves this audience very well. Douglas A. Anderson Marcellus, Michigan The Rise of Tolkienian Fantasy, by Jared Lobdell. Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 2005. xvi, 188 pp. $21.95 (trade paperback) ISBN 0812694589. Jared Lobdell has been studying and writing about J.R.R. Tolkien for more than thirty years; not surprisingly, then, he has a wealth of interesting observations and insights into the shape and shaping of Tolkien’s entire oeuvre. His newest book, The Rise of Tolkienian Fantasy, accurately describes itself as a “series of reflections on the history of English literature 304

Book Reviews in the past several centuries . . . looking mostly at what went into The Lord of the Rings” (xi). The book especially asks “What, in English literary history, or indeed all the literary history we can bring to bear, helps explain why [The Lord of the Rings] turned out the way it did?” (19). Lobdell answers this question, exploring sources both obscure and famous. For the scholar willing to trace some esoteric paths, The Rise of Tolkienian Fantasy will provide a more thorough understanding of how Tolkien’s literary imagination was shaped, and in what ways it helped (and did not help) to shape what followed after. The first chapter, “Far from the Maddening Critics,” gives a rambling introduction to the book, with a focus on the English traditions of pastoral, pageant, and pilgrimage. The second chapter, “Children of Mona,” looks at feigned history and invented tradition in both the Augustan and Victorian ages, seeing it as one—or, rather, two—of the streams leading to Tolkienian fantasy. Indeed, Lobdell is careful not to lump these last two streams together, noting, “there is a distinction to be made in the eighteenth century between the imagining of the past and the feigning of the past, just as there is now” (27). For example, in contrasting the Brothers Grimm, Bishop Percy, and Blake as well as Shakespeare, Henry Rowlands, and many others, Lobdell is insightful in suggesting a wide variety of different purposes—but perhaps not such a wide variety in “the kind of pleasure involved”—on the part of these authors who attempt one or the other of the imagining versus the feigning of the past (25). The subtitle of Chapter 3 gives one of the central ideas to which Lobdell returns frequently throughout the book: “Breaking and Remaking of Reality.” It is also where I found his arguments—or perhaps his definitions—most difficult to follow, as he suggests that this breaking and remaking was of fundamental importance to Tolkien. Here the stream he follows includes Coleridge and the Pre-Raphaelites (such as William Morris) as well as the nonsense writers of the nineteenth century (Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll). By Chapter 4, “Pilgrimage to the Northward: Adventurers All,” the reader has begun to be used to, or to be utterly frustrated by, the frequent esoteric tangents, indirections, and leaps in flow of the argument. Yet here I also found one of more eye-opening of the insights afforded by Lobdell’s breadth and depth of study, in his pointing out one direct influence which I might not otherwise have discovered (though Tolkien’s own letters suggest it): that between S. R. Crockett’s The Black Douglas (1899) and The Lord of the Rings. The influence may be seen especially in the comparison of the closing lines of the former book with the passage describing the death of Arwen (RK, Appendix A, I, v, 344)—though Lobdell, who does not footnote his Tolkien sources, slightly alters the wording and punctuation of the Arwen passage. Chapter 5 moves on to explore the Comic and Fantastic streams, 305

Book Reviews while Chapter 6 follows the curious choice of exploring George MacDonald, a very important author to modern fairy tale and fantasy, but one which Lobdell himself distances from Tolkien in several ways. Chapter 7 explores (and contrasts) the Arcadian and Olympian streams. Here again, many of Lobdell’s arguments and connections are difficult to follow, because he often backtracks and sidetracks, and also takes back the very thing he gives—hinting at connections while protecting himself by simultaneously denying that they are really connections. For example, after discussing Kipling’s character Kadmiel in his “Song of the Fifth River” in Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), Lobdell then says, “I do not claim Kadmiel as an antecessor of Balin, though he is a prince separated from the greater part of his people. . . . But I do claim that Tolkien lived and read in the same England where Kipling lived and wrote, and that it is unlikely he escaped Kipling’s influence in those years” (133). So again the reader will continue to stumble into interesting connections. Or almostbut-not-quite connections. Which is not a criticism of Lobdell; we would probably blame him if he were to tie any one character of Tolkien’s too closely to any one literary influence, except in the most obvious of cases. One of Lobdell’s most quotable and lucid observations about the stream of fantasy comes in the final chapter, “A Scent of Old-World Roses: Tolkien and ‘Fantasy,’” which explores how that stream has flowed through Tolkien to more recent writers. “The past, and this includes the heroic past, is alive in the present; the Great Days do live on inside us, no matter how unheroic and Hobbit-like we may be, or seem; the green and pleasant land must outlast the dark Satanic mills, and we can call upon our hidden heroism to help; there is Right and there is Wrong, and we can know the difference between the two, and fight for the right—that is indeed a message of hope” (148). In presenting this book, Lobdell acknowledges that his “approach”— an approach which certainly includes a very broad range of influences to be explored—is “over-eclectic” (7). In Chapter 2, for example, the author suggests accurately (and perhaps with some pride, “the number of scholars—let alone others—who will recognize Akenside’s Hymn to the Naiads may be smaller even than the number that can recognize Ossian” (26). And in Chapter 4 he comments about Crockett’s Kit Kennedy (1899) and John Buchan’s John Burnet of Barns (1898), “I presume none of my readers have read both and few have read either” (69). Of course Lobdell has read them all, and they are quoted and discussed in the book. And that is both the strength of the work, and one of its weaknesses. In some ways, the approach is necessary. What Tolkien accomplished was so new that “classical criticism seems to tell us little that is particularly useful in discussing fantasy” (17). I am not aware of any work that has attempted what Lobdell has attempted. A weakness—which may or 306

Book Reviews may not be inherent in the approach—is that the style of the book is very rambling: at times raising one possibility and quickly jumping to another before the first is even partly digested; at times jumping into details and then jumping out without explaining the connections; and at times simultaneously hinting at connections and then suggesting they are only indirect. Ultimately, therefore, the (rhetorical) question that Lobdell asks in the Introduction captures how I often felt reading this book. “Now a reader might reasonably ask, How does all this come together?” (15). For all but the most academic of readers (and perhaps even for them), some of the leaps are difficult to follow and the connections elusive. But for the scholar with time and inclination to unravel tangled connections written in almost a stream-of-consciousness fashion—albeit the stream of a very knowledgeable and scholarly consciousness—it will illuminate influences the majority of readers have never considered. Matthew T. Dickerson Middlebury College Middlebury, Vermont The Roots of Tolkien’s Middle Earth [sic], by Robert S. Blackham. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Tempus Publishing, 2006. 144 pp. £10.99 (trade paperback) ISBN 0752438565. In his provocative and thoroughly contrarian book The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939 (1992), John Carey, formerly Merton Professor at Oxford, makes three socio-literary points directly relevant to Tolkien and to the book under review here. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, he points out, England underwent a massive suburbanization. H. G. Wells’s home town, Bromley in Kent, was linked by rail to London in 1858. Between 1861 and 1871—Wells was born exactly in the middle of this period, in 1866—the number of houses in the town almost doubled, and the population grew from 20,000 to 50,000 by 1881. The fields disappeared, the river filled up with rubbish, and by the time he was eleven, Wells wrote, “all the delight and beauty of it was destroyed.” The experience was a common one. George Orwell commemorates his version of the story in Coming Up for Air (1937), Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh wrote similar accounts, and suburbanization in southern England—now one of the most crowded areas on the globe—remains a common fear. The people for whom the suburbs were built were furthermore largely drawn from a new social class, created by universal education and the commercial need for large numbers of literate paper-workers: put briefly, the clerks. Their literacy, naturally, was not used just for business 307

Book Reviews purposes. They formed a market for new printed media, daily papers, weekly magazines, and printed books. Many writers, including some who have remained popular to this day, wrote deliberately for this class, for instance Wells himself, Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes makes it clear that he has a high opinion of clerks), Jerome K. Jerome, or Rider Haggard. Rudyard Kipling, as one might expect, took a more nuanced view—he had a market of his own among the “empire-builders”—but was by no means hostile. The people who were hostile, because frightened, and threatened, came from a rather higher social group, the upper middle classes, with their large houses comfortably distant from smoke and towns, their traditional expectations of going on (if male) to university at Oxford and Cambridge, and their claim to be sole and permanent arbiters of taste. Perhaps the paradigm story of this reaction is E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910). Howards End is a large comfortable house within reach of but pleasantly remote from London. The two upper middle class groups who dominate the story are the Schlegel sisters—tasteful, literary, idle— and the Wilcoxes, aggressive business-people. Their interaction is however complicated by the Schlegels’ well-meaning attempt to patronize a clerk with literary aspirations, Leonard Bast. Bast becomes involved with one of the sisters, proves to be physically feeble, intellectually limited and socially vulgar, and is eventually killed when a bookcase falls on him—thus symbolically terminating (as Forster presents it) his annoying attempt to join the hereditary literati. Carey’s major and most provocative argument is that as the old educated class found itself both literally and literarily “moved in on” by the new suburban clerisy, they responded by developing the ideal of “modernism”—the centerpiece of which was the insistence that true literature, high literature, must inevitably be difficult, recondite, and so appreciable only by those who had undergone the right kind of formal education and possessed the vital qualification of taste. Lest anyone should think, stereotypically, that all this is a matter for the stereotypically class-ridden English, it should be noted that American and Irish writers were well to the fore in demonstrations of aggressive elitism, as one can see all too readily from Henry James, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and James Joyce. And as modernism has become assimilated into general education, a further response has been to develop “postmodernism,” even more recondite, indeed incomprehensible without a Ph.D. in English from (usually these days) an approved American university. The relevance of these three developments to Tolkien is apparent. In reverse order, some part of the angry literary response to him is certainly caused by his violation of the canons of modernism—especially, of course, being popular with the masses. Tolkien has never been put into the context of “clerkly” writing, but nevertheless clearly sprang from 308

Book Reviews just the right kind of background (see further below on what distanced him from it). And finally the experience of lost pastoral idyll, as the town creeps out and swallows up the villages, is exactly Tolkien’s own childhood experience of living at Sarehole outside Birmingham, and then finding the city creeping out and building over the fields as he himself was drawn into the smoke. Robert Blackham’s The Roots of Tolkien’s Middle Earth is in essence a memorial to Sarehole and to old Birmingham, centered on more than 170 photographs, forty of them in color, and a dozen extracts from old maps. The chapters run from “King’s Heath,” to which Mabel Tolkien returned in 1895 with her two sons, and which “at that time was going through a major building boom,” to “Sarehole” and “Sarehole Mill,” which the Tolkiens reached in 1896, to “The Cole Valley,” now part of the Shire Country Park created in 2005, and on through the various suburbs of Birmingham in which the Tolkiens lived, with final chapters on the rural Worcestershire where Tolkien’s Aunt Jane went to live at Bag End, and a very brief comment on Oxford. It should be said straight away that this is an unparalleled guide for anyone wanting to reconstruct the Tolkien experience. Things have of course changed, but less in England than in many places. If you were to look for 5 Gracewell Cottages, where the Tolkiens lived in Sarehole, you would not find it; but it is still there, only now called 264 Wake Green Road. Tolkien’s grandparents’ house is still there too, in Ashfield Road, looking rather more opulent in the current photograph than in the old one Blackham has recovered from a hundred years ago. Bag End is still there, now called, again more grandly, Dormston Manor—I cannot forebear from noting, from Old English *Deormodestun: Tolkien argued in Finn and Hengest that the word deormod might well be a name, perhaps with personal memories. The photos provide strong motivation for tracing Tolkien’s paths, and the maps provide the means to do so. Blackham has done an outstanding job, a true labor of love, in identifying so many micro-locations and illustrating them so copiously. He has done the work on the ground, and incidentally convincingly rebutted the charge, often made, that Birmingham is just the English Detroit, a place without charm or history. There is only one area where his knowledge fails him somewhat, and that is to do with Tolkien’s school, which he calls King Edward’s Grammar School. King Edward’s (which I attended fifty years after Tolkien) was neither a grammar school nor a public school, nor yet a high school (KEHS, King Edward’s High School, was the girls’ school over the road). It was and is just a plain old school school, always abbreviated KES. It was founded, or possibly re-founded, 450 years ago by King Edward VI, in 1554. He handed over some land of no great value as an endowment for what must have been a small local school. The land, however, was in the 309

Book Reviews exact center of what became the major industrial center of Birmingham, and consequently increased prodigiously in value. This meant that the Foundation could in the first place charge very little to anyone and offer free scholarships on a generous scale—in my day I should think a third of the 700 boys attending paid no tuition—and in the second place run its own exams and set its own standards regardless of state regulation. It was highly selective academically, but remained a day school for those within commuting distance only, in both ways unlike the kind of “public school” (i.e. private boarding school) which C. S. Lewis for instance attended. The major result of this, as regards Tolkien, was that it made him effectively classless. As the orphaned son of a colonial bank manager, Tolkien might have been expected to fall into the class of clerks, with no money other than their pay, a limited education, and poor prospects. But Tolkien got a first-class education, which got him into Oxford, automatically made him an officer in the army, and led him on to his distinguished academic career—in which, however, he perhaps retained a certain sense of difference from the “E. M. Forster class” which must have formed a majority of any Senior Common Room. This was not the only reason for his lack of interest in fashionable literary modernism, but the snobbish element in it, the urge to keep the aspiring literates at a distance, can have had no appeal for him at all. Blackham has some excellent shots of the old school, of the chapel expensively removed to its new site, of Edgbaston Reservoir where the school used to do the annual half-mile swimming race, and of the towers of Edgbaston—there are more than two of them. This reviewer remembers them all fondly, but it is going to take a revisit to fix some of the places clearly in the mind. Despite living for years pretty much in the middle of the map on p. 101, at Cofton Hackett, I cannot square it with my memory. Probably the enormous car factory developed at Longbridge altered the roads. I would add that Tolkien might well have walked across Cofton Hackett and out past the lake which (he perhaps knew) was once called Tyesmere, i.e. the lake of the Anglo-Saxon god Tiw (of Tuesday), the one who put his hand in the wolf ’s mouth. If the Anglo-Saxons kept up their continental habit of making offerings to the war-god by lakedeposit, and if the lake is ever drained or dries up, it would be well worth checking its bed with a metal-detector. In brief, then: buy the book! Look at the photos! Then use it as a guide for any number of walking tours of what was once the Tolkien country, the basis for the Shire. One of the things Tolkien would most appreciate is the fact that the city fathers are now using Tolkien’s popularity as grounds for conservation, often surprisingly successful. On my last visit to Sarehole Mill I moved quietly up to the old pond and saw a heron standing in the pool. It was so motionless that I had just turned 310

Book Reviews to my companion (another Old Edwardian) and said “It’s not real, it’s a dummy,” when it flew away. “You always were useless at biology,” he remarked. Like the stonecrop round the old king’s head in Ithilien, nature is astonishingly tenacious, and perhaps especially so in rural, if now suburban England. Tom Shippey Saint Louis University St. Louis, Missouri A Tolkien Mathomium: A Collection of Articles about J.R.R. Tolkien and His Legendarium, by Mark T. Hooker. Foreword by James Dunning. Morrisville, NC: Llyfrawr [Lulu], 2006. xvi, 275 pp. $24.95 (trade paperback) ISBN 1411693708. This pleasantly eccentric volume is a collection of twenty-six mostly linguistics-oriented essays and notes by Mark T. Hooker, a retired professor of translation studies at the University of Indiana (Bloomington). Some of the entries are reprints from Beyond Bree, Translation Journal, and other Tolkienian and generalist venues; others are previously unpublished. Hooker’s professional activity has mostly involved the Slavic languages, but he has also studied Welsh, and speaks modern Dutch. Because this breadth of expertise is somewhat unusual for Tolkienian linguists, most of whom come from the Old English/Old Norse quadrant, Hooker has a wide variety of things to say that have not been heard before. (If he also knew Finnish, he would be too good to be true; but alas, he is as imperfect as most of us.) Comments below will apply to those articles which particularly caught my attention; others readers’ mileage will certainly vary. “What is a Mathom?”, which opens the volume, explores the range of meaning between Old English mathum (treasure, gift) and Hobbitish mathom (antique object of obscure utility), visiting Beowulfian and Rohirric royal gift-givings along the way. This is an example of well-applied cultural linguistics, because it illustrates, with examples, the links between world-view and lexical meaning—showing that when one changes, so must the other. “Esgaroth” argues for a double origin of the secondary name for Lake-town. Besides “Reedlake,” as attested in the “Etymologies” (published in Lost Road), Hooker suggests a Celtic-derived “water-enclosure.” (Since we already have an Old English-Sindarin pun [Orthanc] in the canon, why not a Celtic-Ilkorin one?) In another entry later on, he uses the “Etymologies” creatively to defend a parsing of “Estel” (unfortunately misspelled “Estell” elsewhere in the book) as literally “first star,” taking on the meaning of “hope” by connotation. 311

Book Reviews “The Linguistic Landscape of Bree” and “The Linguistic Landscape of Tolkien’s Shire” trace connections (Celtic and Germanic respectively, for the most part) between Tolkienian and current European placenames, mostly in the U.K. Sometimes an incomplete acquaintance with Scandinavian languages handicaps Hooker here, as when on pages 23, 59 and 60 he misconstrues the lexical ranges, and the multiple derivations, of –holm and –ey in English names. (Tolkien, who wrote of the “monks of Ely isle,” would certainly have known that Ely was derived from “eel island,” not “eel district.”) Hooker devotes an entire chapter to the Shire place-name “Stock,” which he connects to English place-names, and eventually (via Ælfric) to sacred trees (and St. Boniface and Owen Glendower), concluding that “Stocc would, therefore, appear to be the OE name applied in pre-Christian times to a religious site” (77-8). I find this too great a weight for such a little syllable to support. Granted that Ælfric’s “stocks and stones” were in fact sacred sites, it is also worth remembering that in more recent centuries “over stock and stone” (meaning the equivalent of something like: over hill and dale) is a folkloristic and literary commonplace found in the tales of the Grimms (“über Stock und Stein”) and in Asbjørnsen and Moe’s collection as well (“over stokk og stein”), and that Tolkien would have known it from both these sources. (Google also reveals the same couplet in nineteenth-century Swedish and Flemish poetry—in Gustav Schönberg’s “Barndomsminnen” and Jan van Droogenbroeck’s “De Brand,” where it appears as “stock och sten” and “stok en steen,” respectively.) “And why is it called the Carrock?” connects Beorn’s rock, amusingly if not conclusively, to Welsh carreg and Castell Carreg Cennen with its associated legend of sleeping warriors, which Hooker then links to the dead men of Dunharrow. But it can be pointed out that sleeping underground warrior-bands and their leaders are dotted all over the legendary European landscape (Barbarossa in the Harz mountains, Holger Danske at Elsinore, and Arthur himself under Cadbury or the Eildons), and not just in Wales. “Fractured Fairy-Tales from Middle-earth” convincingly connects the alliterative Buckland alarm, “Fear! Fire! Foes!” with the “Fee fi fo fum” of Anglophone giant-tales and of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Hooker subsequently shows how none of the translations he knows makes this connection in the target language, and how only the German and Dutch ones (at least) manage the alliteration. “Tolkien’s Use of the Word ‘Garn!’ to Typify a Motley Crew of Reprobates” and “Spit, Spat, Spittle: Those Whom Tolkien Wouldst [sic] Belittle” are sociolinguistic and cultural explorations of Tolkien’s use of class-connected speech and habits to nuance character—bad character, as a rule. 312

Book Reviews Not all of Hooker’s chapters are linguistically based. There are three excellent thematic articles on Tolkien’s debts to H. Rider Haggard (“Frodo Quatermain;” “Tolkien and Haggard: Immortality;” and “Tolkien and Haggard: The Dead Marshes”)—ground originally broken, I believe, by Robert Giddings and Elizabeth Holland (The Shores of Middleearth, 1981), but here cultivated much more expertly. The most entertaining article in the book, for this reviewer, was “The Feigned-Manuscript Topos: A Question of Authorship.” Hooker points out that Tolkien’s invention of a bogus intertextual manuscript, the Red Book of Westmarch, which is to be conceived of by the reader as underlying the entire Lord of the Rings narrative, is a tactic which has been used by many previous authors including Cervantes, Defoe, Swift, Cooper, Scott, Haggard, Dickens, Hawthorne, Conan Doyle, and Buchan; and continues to be used today, by Umberto Eco and others. This is certainly the case, although Hooker is hardly the first to notice it. (Perhaps the most nuanced and original examiner of Tolkien’s fictional manuscripts and their complex intertextualities has been Gergely Nagy, as has been seen in past issues of this journal.) It is still great fun to trace Hooker’s examples, and also to think of others. Wolfram von Eschenbach’s “Kyôt,” his supposed informant for Parzival, comes to mind (Umberto Eco made him a character in Baudolino), as does Malory’s “French book.” Tolkien’s contemporaries H. G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs also used the idea of letters or manuscripts underlying their narratives (The Island of Doctor Moreau; A Princess of Mars and Tarzan of the Apes, among others). Within the last decade, Arturo Pérez-Reverte has hidden behind the fictional Alférez Íñigo Balboa to bring us the tales of Capitán Diego Alatriste. In his use of the trope of an underlying Book, Tolkien truly has participated in a far-reaching community of authors, just as Hooker points out. “A Tale of Tolkien’s Woods” connects Tolkien’s tree-lore to Kipling (Puck of Pook’s Hill), to balladry (“Glasgerion”), and to Vergil and Juvenal, among others. It also includes a paragraph which would have given Tolkien apoplexy, which begins as follows: “Try as it may, the Christian Church failed to completely eradicate the old triplistic gods” (194). “The Cinematographer of Waverley,” a play script derived from Sir Walter Scott, cleverly connects debates from Scott’s time (novels vs. history) to recent debates on Peter Jackson’s films (films vs. novels). Hooker tells us that it was performed at Mythcon XXXV to general bafflement, and it may, in fact, be too subtle a joke for live performance. Hooker overuses two phrases throughout the book, both quotations from Tolkien: “low philological jest” (at least six times), and “leaf mold of Tolkien’s mind” (at least seven times). After a few chapters they begin to pop off the page distractingly. It should be remembered, though, that these essays were not intended in their original form to be read in each other’s close company. 313

Book Reviews Praise is also due to Hooker’s fellow Welsh scholar James Dunning, who not only encouraged Hooker to put this book together, but also has given the book a handful of bogus-antiquarian illustrations to accompany its genuine antiquarian reproductions. He has also written a Foreword for the book, and drawn a set of amusing bogus-runic banner divisions for the text. Dunning’s “runes” are in fact ordinary Roman-alphabet capitals, incorporating runic design elements, and actual Old English runes where possible. They are just different enough from standard fonts to generate a time gap between seeing and understanding, and the texts can raise a smile: “This is a Blank Page,” “Llyfr Coch Tref y Blodau [The Red Book of Bloomington]”, “A Belt-Maker By Any Other Name Would Not Be As Funny” (with reference to the name “Bracegirdle”). Dunning’s Foreword accurately (and with charming self-deprecation) describes the book as a “linguistic compendium for language nuts who love Tolkien” (vi). Soon after this passage, however, Dunning loses credibility with this reviewer when he attacks “a threatening body of scholarship notarized as orthodox by the fraternal order” (vii)—a hypothetical exclusive community of Tolkien scholars which does not welcome Hooker and Dunning and their work. In these days of unprecedented publishing opportunity and unprecedented interest in Tolkien, this straw man of Dunning’s is hard to believe in; one wonders even if Hooker (whose writing reveals no such resentment) believes in it. Finally, Dunning errs for certain when he speculates that Tolkien may have read Boys’ Life magazine (1911-current, U.S.A.). Perhaps he meant the Boy’s Own Paper (1879-1967, U.K.), which Tolkien almost certainly did read. Both publications had, or have, an affiliation with Scouting, but they are not the same. For readers who wish to acquire a copy, it should be noted that Hooker and Dunning’s book is not currently available via normal venues, but must be ordered from http://www.Lulu.com. Sandra Ballif Straubhaar The University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas Tolkien’s Modern Middle Ages, edited by Jane Chance and Alfred K. Siewers. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. xiv, 250 pp. $65.00 (hardcover) ISBN 1403969736. This anthology, containing fourteen essays and twelve illustrations, is part of a series edited by Bonnie Wheeler, “The New Middle Ages.” According to the statement of intent, this series is dedicated to “transdisciplinary studies of medieval cultures, with particular emphasis on 314

Book Reviews recuperating women’s history and gender analysis” (i). Despite the series’ stated emphasis on gender studies, most of the essays in this anthology do not deal with gender or feminist methodologies, and nine of the thirteen contributors are men. This anthology grew from a series of events in 2003-2004, beginning with a Symposium organized at Bucknell University which led to a series of sessions at the 2004 International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo. The essays came from scholars presenting at these events with one exception, an essay from a symposium at the University of Vermont. As a result, most of the scholars are medievalists and most seem to work in literary studies, with a few in comparative mythology, classics and humanities, and comparative literature. Only one, Gergely Nagy, is identified as working with a contemporary theory (post structuralism). While the thirteen contributors range from doctoral students to scholars well-known for multiple publications on Tolkien and include artist Ted Nasmith who has illustrated Tolkien’s work, the disciplinary field is fairly homogeneous. In the “Introduction: Tolkien’s Modern Medievalism” Jane Chance and Alfred K. Siewers summarize how the growing and global popularity of The Lord of the Rings has been supplemented by Peter Jackson’s films. The editors note that scholarship on Tolkien’s work has tended toward situating it primarily in the context of his profession as a medievalist. Recently, work has begun that considers his writing within the context of the modern period. Chance and Siewers’s anthology is part of that project, and they intend for it to extend the work begun in the 1983 collection edited by Robert Giddings (J.R.R. Tolkien: This Far Land). The Giddings anthology focused on contemporary issues rather than medieval sources, and Chance and Siewers see their work as building on that focus and incorporating later developments in the field of “global and multicultural” scholarship (5). Examining how Tolkien re-constructed the past, the introduction argues that his work anticipated issues in the “future” (the present of the anthology), that is, the postmodern period. According to the Introduction, the anthology’s four sections are organized around ways in which Tolkien can be considered postmodern (“Recontextualizing the Medieval in Postmodern Middle-earth”); Tolkien’s adaptations of 18th and 19th century Medievalisms (“Retreating to a Timeless Past: Middle-earth and Victorian Medievalism”); his incorporation and adaptation of “modern issues and ideologies” (5) (“Confronting Modern Ideologies in Middle-earth: War, Ecology, Race, and Gender”); and his influence on modern fantasy writers and artists (“Visualizing Medievalism: Middle-earth in Art and Film”). The questions are dealt with well in the first two sections, less so in the last two. Since there is no essay on Tolkien’s effect on modern fantasy writers, I am not sure why the introduction promises that topic. 315

Book Reviews Chance and Siewers do not clearly define the term “postmodern” in their introduction, seeming to use it inconsistently to mean a chronological period, namely the period following World War II, a set of values in referring to Tolkien’s ahistoricity as a reason for his appeal to readers from a wide range of political philosophies, or for rhetorical purposes (criticism of the modern). Citing Brian Rosebury’s claim that Tolkien celebrated “values with no specific historic valence” (2), the editors link this meaning of postmodernism to liberalism and diversity, terms which have very specific (and varied) cultural and historical meanings. Other elements assumed to be part of “post modernity” in this anthology include racism and feminism. While individual contributors specify clear and applicable definitions of postmodernism in their essays (most notably the three theoretical essays that introduce the collection), the Introduction’s lack of definition paired with usage of the term in formations such as “portmanteau postmodernism” is problematic. The anthology overall does an excellent job of supporting the important argument that the text of Tolkien’s legendarium, including The Lord of the Rings, can be read as postmodern. Nevertheless, the lack of a consistent definition of the term “postmodern” and the limited engagement with a range of contemporary theoretical works that are often grouped under the umbrella term of “post structuralism” is a weakness. Examples of this limited engagement are the two essays that focus on “race,” racism, and Tolkien’s themes of difference. Although they do an excellent job of examining the extent to which Tolkien personally opposed discrimination and imaginatively worked to oppose hatred based on difference, they ignore the large body of the postcolonial work done on racism as institution, as postcolonial artifact, and as economic and systemic social realities that operate to benefit certain groups and exclude others regardless of how individuals within such groups might feel about difference. These two essays default to the assumption that “racism” is an individual attitude, a feeling, and thus are not particularly contemporary in their theoretical approach. The Giddings anthology, claimed as the forerunner to this project, dealt specifically and primarily from a Marxist approach with Tolkien’s work in a cultural studies context; that perspective is lacking in this collection, as is any specifically feminist or queer discourse. The essays dealing with medievalisms and World War I are the strongest. The first group of three essays all consider, in different ways, the postmodern nature of Tolkien’s text, providing strong support for a claim that The Lord of the Rings (not Tolkien himself) can be categorized as postmodern. Verlyn Flieger’s “A Postmodern Medievalist” is a superb opening to the discussion, establishing a clear-sighted and informed analysis of the extent to which fifty years of popular and academic responses 316

Book Reviews have pigeonholed Tolkien’s work as “medieval.” Flieger’s argument is strengthened by her analysis of her own work. Deftly and unobtrusively establishing how reader-response shapes readings, Flieger is able to show how the many competing genres, themes, periods, and styles readers (popular and scholarly) have seen in Tolkien’s work can be read as layers, as multiple strands of a postmodern text. Flieger notes the extent to which self-reflexiveness, or metanarrative, is considered a hallmark of the postmodern novel, then compares a scene in John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman where the first-person narrator “ejects” the reader from the story to the scene between Sam and Frodo on the Stairs of Cirith Ungol, arguing that the discussion of tales, culminating in Sam’s hope that his and Frodo’s story be written down in a book, contained in the very book that the readers are reading, is a better example of postmodern indeterminacy, better handled, than Fowles’s, and then goes on to show that this narrative technique exists in Beowulf. Finishing with a discussion of Gollum, and John Gardner’s Grendel, Flieger shows us the road to future work on Tolkien which must avoid the overly simplistic binary of “medieval” and “modern.” “The Medievalist(s’) Fiction: Textuality and Historicity as Aspects of Tolkien’s Medievalist Cultural Theory in a Postmodern Context,” by Gergely Nagy, is an intriguing complement to Flieger’s work, making much the same argument but from a more theoretical poststructuralist approach. While Flieger questions how popular reception and much academic scholarship have relegated Tolkien’s work to an overly simplistic idea of “medieval,” Nagy uses Tolkien’s work to to read critically contemporary literary theory, arguing that Tolkien has been ignored by contemporary theorists because of “theoretically unpopular devices” such as the work’s focus on history, theology, and archaic language. Nagy performs a superb deconstruction of those same elements, arguing that Tolkien’s presentation of history as textually constructed, his problematizing of all explanations of the world through multiple and contradictory texts (constructed in ways that are historically true for medieval anthologies and collections yet fictionalized in ways that are postmodern) and his critical awareness of the fictionality of any historical narrative, are things that should make his work interesting to contemporary theorists. Drawing on a wide range of Tolkien’s writings, including the Beowulf essay, “On Fairy-stories,” The Silmarillion, The Lord of the Rings, and volumes of Christopher Tolkien’s History of Middle-earth, Nagy makes a compelling case for further work by scholars in fields other than the medieval. (Such work was already begun in the Winter 2004 “J.R.R. Tolkien Special Issue” of Modern Fiction Studies, which, given the time frame, was perhaps not available to the contributors of this anthology.)

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Book Reviews The final essay in this section, John R. Holmes’s “Tolkien, Dustsceawung, and the Gnomic Tense: Is Timelessness Medieval or Victorian,” focuses on Tolkien’s conception of time: past, present, and gnomic. He argues that the concept of “timelessness” that Tolkien strives for in his work may be attributed, variously, to Germanic or Victorian sources. Part of this sense of time is embodied in the form of a “lament for an irretrievable past” (44), a form identified as elegiac in Greek and Roman pagan cultures and as “dustsceawung” by Germanic cultures (Holmes translates the term as “the contemplation of dust”). Linking the classical and the Germanic, Holmes also considers the extent to which the Victorians theorized the concept as original to their time and culture. Besides the sense of the past, there is the question of the present and the future; here, Holmes considers the different teleologies of Christianity as well as Greco-Roman paganism. He concludes that the dustsceawung motif includes the future, but a future that includes the eternal as shown by the gnomic tense. The second group of four essays presents analysis of the elements of Victorian medievalism in Tolkien’s work, focusing on the discourses of historical narratives, war, pastoralism, and on the function of languages in cultures. In “The Reanimation of Antiquity and the Resistance to History: Macpherson-Scott-Tolkien,” John Hunter claims that The Lord of the Rings has been mistakenly removed from the origins and development of a major genre in the post-Enlightenment and modern West: historical fiction. The genre, as exemplified by James Macpherson’s Ossian poems and Sir Walter Scott’s historical novels, participates in the project of contemporary nation-building by associating national ideologies that developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to mythology to extend a “national” identity backwards into a mythic/historical past. Analyzing to great effect the content, structures, and rhetorical purposes and reception of Macpherson’s “recovered” works of Ossian, and of Scott’s novels, Ivanhoe in particular, Holmes makes a strong case for understanding Tolkien’s novel as part of a European tradition of the present’s use of the past in two competing ways: first, in Georg Lukács’s realistic tradition (individuals shaped by inescapable historical forces), and second, in fusing fantasy to “history” to make a vision of the past that allows readers to escape from the forces of history. Hunter argues that Tolkien’s novel, by drawing on both traditions, claiming a lost past which has a connection to but is not directly responsible for producing the conditions of the present, and by thus producing a simulacrum of history, shows “how fascinated postmodern Western culture is with historical change, even as it resists understanding itself in traditional historical terms” (71). Hunter’s work strongly complements Nagy’s arguments about Tolkien’s sense of history. 318

Book Reviews Andrew Lynch’s “Archaism, Nostalgia, and Tennysonian War in The Lord of the Rings” makes a fairly direct comparison between Tennyson’s and Tolkien’s construction of war; both authors construct a symbolic discourse that shapes the narrative of war by focusing on morality rather than politics or economics. Lynch stresses that the most noted similarities between Tennyson’s and Tolkien’s writings are the use of consciously archaic diction and the elegiac or nostalgic modes. Although Lynch acknowledges the medieval sources and elements in Tolkien’s work (weapons, styles of combat, named swords and horses, references to tales of war, and alliteration), he argues that Tolkien’s style, including syntax, specifically the use of paratactic construction, conscious use of archaic diction, are closer to Tennyson. By creating a discourse of war in which good is symbolically embedded in the more “medieval” characters and style of warfare and in which evil is assigned to the characters who convey a more modern sense of war, Tolkien’s view of war, gleaned from the Victorian nineteenth century, can still operate on contemporary readers. With an equally close and comparative focus, Chester N. Scoville focuses on common themes used for different rhetorical purposes in William Morris and Tolkien. In “Pastoralia and Perfectability in William Morris and J.R.R. Tolkien,” Scoville argues that Morris’s influence on Tolkien is established and important but not fully understood. Despite this documented influence, the two men’s political differences are necessary to understand the differing uses each made of the Middle Ages they both loved. Through a close reading and comparison between Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) and Tolkien’s Shire, Scoville argues that the differing uses of the “Arcadian” by Morris, who presented a utopian vision set in the future London where people had adapted and built on the Middle Ages while utterly rejecting the industrialism of the nineteenth century, and Tolkien, whose Shire, while pastoral, was neither utopian nor a vision of the future, shows completely different uses of the “Middle Ages.” Morris, a socialist, saw the Arcadian ideas as a model for building a “heaven on earth,” while Tolkien, a Catholic, saw the Shire as part of a fallen world, a world in which no human, material culture will endure forever. Scoville argues that the similarities many see in the two men’s work arise from their mutual opposition to modernism, a culture which disdained any use of the past or acknowledgement of it as valuable. Scoville does an excellent job of complicating the idea of “influence” (often read simplistically as something to be imitated) in this complex analysis of how two writers can start out at the same point and end up with completely oppositional conclusions. Focusing on similarities between Tolkien and James Macpherson in regard to the creation of languages, in “English, Welsh, and Elvish: 319

Book Reviews Language, Loss, and Cultural Recovery in J.R.R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings,” Deidre Dawson compares the life and what might be called the philosophy of philology of Macpherson (Ossian) and Tolkien. Both having experienced loss and war at an early age, the men shared the sense of the necessary relationship between ancient languages and the cultural identity of nations and grounded their work on that sense. Dawson develops an extended analysis of Tolkien’s own project in The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. Her analysis of Tolkien’s project in terms of recuperation also claims Tolkien’s Middle-earth, a multilingual universe, as a foundation for a contemporary English society that “is a multiethnic, multicultural and multilingual one” (118). Thus Dawson is able to see a direct link between Tolkien’s imagined past and today (while admitting the potential spread of English as a global “common tongue” can threaten the existence of languages) in a way that provides a contrast to Hunter’s earlier essay. The third group of four essays works on analyzing “modern” ideology in Middle-earth; surprisingly, three of the four draw primarily on medieval sources. The first essay, Rebekah Long’s “Fantastic Medievalism and the Great War in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings,” seems to speak directly to works in the previous section since it so deals with modern appropriation of Victorian medievalisms as war propaganda and the critique of such appropriation of the medieval. This essay is a complex, multi-layered argument that profitably engages with some of the same questions that Lynch does while considering a range of other texts and coming to different conclusions. Foregrounding the use of Victorian medievalist imagery for the purposes of war propaganda, Long reads Tolkien’s work against Welsh and fellow World War I veteran David Jones’s In Parenthesis (1937), a poem which examines war from the perspective of John Ball, fantastically moved from the fourteenth century and his war (the 1381 Peasant’s Revolt) into the trenches. The writers’ shared themes include the extent to which the “medieval” is shaped by contemporary perspectives and appropriated for a variety of purposes and the careful attention to “aesthetic and linguistic representation of violence . . . [and] the problems of associating it with the Middle Ages” (128). Long’s reading of Jones and Tolkien, triangulated with Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale, argues against reading Tolkien’s text as simplistically glorifying the chivalric, focusing on how violence is seen and represented within these complex texts. By contextualizing Tolkien’s work in the context of World War I war propaganda and war poetry, Long’s argument brilliantly answers too-easy dismissals of Tolkien’s constructions of war, medievalism, and the usages of the past. Moving back to medieval sources, Alfred K. Siewers analyzes the medieval Christian foundations for Tolkien’s environmentalism in “Tolkien’s 320

Book Reviews Cosmic-Christian Ecology: The Medieval Underpinnings.” Starting with the idea that Tolkien’s work appeals equally to “eco-pagan activists” and to conservative Christian students, Siewers argues that one reason may be the complex syncretic nature of his medieval source texts which “bridged” pagan, classical intellectual, and Christian traditions (140). Focusing on the “overlay landscape” of such texts in which the spiritual world is integrated with the physical world to provide a model for Tolkien’s fantasy landscapes, Siewers explores in detail the textual underpinnings of Tolkien’s ecocentricity. While exploration of medieval sources is a mainstay of Tolkien literary criticism, Siewers’ ability to deal both with Celtic and Christian, and the syncretism of early medieval texts, is praiseworthy. This essay is a stunning example of the model proposed in Flieger’s argument, namely bringing together elements of modern and medieval periods used by Tolkien and relating them to postmodern social movements. Engaging with a different body of medieval texts in “Fear of Difference, Fear of Death: The Sigelwara, Tolkien’s Swertings, and Racial Differences,” Brian McFadden argues that the racial constructions of the Swertings or Haradrim in the novel can be traced back to AngloLatin and Old English literature’s depictions of Ethiopians (sigelwara). Thus, Tolkien’s adaptation of the source material, which emphasized the Ethiopians as different because of unfamiliarity but as ultimately human, to the Haradrim can be read as part of a larger theme, namely that the problems created by differences may be overcome. McFadden argues that the greater structures of “Othering” in Tolkien’s world involve the binary or mortality/immortality, the differences between Elves and Humans, which shows the artificiality of human differences because all humans are mortal. He draws on The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, Tolkien’s letters and biography, to argue that Tolkien, while shaped by the cultural beliefs around him, spoke against racial prejudice, although Tolkien’s use of light/dark imagery (as one of many binaries), shown most clearly in the Orcs, has at times left his work open to criticisms of racism. Continuing with the project of analyzing race along with other cultural constructions of “apartness” in “Tolkien and the Other: Race and Gender in Middle-Earth,” Jane Chance draws on some of the same material as McFadden, in this case, specifically Tolkien’s philological note on the use of “Sigelwara” and “land” in the Old English poem Exodus and Tolkien’s sense of himself as an exile and a religious minority in England, to build an argument about Tolkien’s multicultural themes. Considering Tolkien’s scholarly work as well as his fiction, Chance argues that Tolkien’s text, by creating the Hobbits as anti-heroes, by showing the reconciliation between different types of Hobbits (specifically Frodo’s acceptance of Gollum), and by other characters and events involving all 321

Book Reviews and any differences based on race, nationality, gender, or class which require sensitivity to the feelings of the Other for successful resolution, is designed to teach readers how dangerous discrimination and selfishness are and how forgiveness and love can heal such problems. The final section has two essays dealing with visual elements: illustrations of Tolkien’s work and Peter Jackson’s film. The first essay shows clearly Tolkien’s influence on a modern artist, and the second is a critique of Peter Jackson’s film. In “Similar But Not Similar: Appropriate Anachronism in My Paintings of Middle-earth,” Ted Nasmith provides an autobiographical and analytical narrative of experiences and visual sources for his illustrations of Tolkien’s work, starting with early work done for the calendars and including The Silmarillion. Introduced to Tolkien’s novel by his sister when he was a young art student, Nasmith, at that point most interested in painting “shiny things” such as cars and space ships, was drawn to create other kinds of images. While working in the field of architectural rendering, he drew and painted the characters and lands of Middle-earth on his own time. This essay, lavishly illustrated, blends information about the artist’s own life and experiences, including three years in France as a child which led to his fascination with the images of the war mausoleum in Verdun, an image which shaped his later rendering of Barad-dûr. Nasmith’s work, visually blending elements of high realism, detailed landscape painting, and mythic and historical images from a variety of periods, supports the arguments made in the scholarly essays in this work concerning Tolkien’s conscious use of anachronism. The final essay of the collection is Michael N. Stanton’s “Tolkien in New Zealand: Man, Myth, and Movie.” Stanton’s essay is based on his experience as a film tourist in New Zealand, visiting sites where Peter Jackson’s film was shot, and learning about Samuel Butler’s life in New Zealand. The New Zealand that Stanton describes supports his view that the location was well chosen to represent Middle-earth in the film: the microclimates, the emptiness, the agricultural land. The connection between Butler, who was a wealthy sheep-farmer in New Zealand and author of Erewhon (1872), and Tolkien, is their shared critique of industrialism as described in their fantasies. Tolkien knew Butler’s work, mentioning it in a letter to his son Christopher. This detail leads Stanton to judge that Jackson’s omission of “The Scouring of the Shire” is a failure to be “true” to the major theme of anti-industrialism, commenting that Tolkien might have been uneasy with the heavy use of technology used in making the film. Neither Stanton’s text nor notes indicates any knowledge of other scholarship done on the film. In conclusion, although this collection is fairly expensive, I would recommend it as vital to any academic interested in working on Tolkien. However, I do not see it as a strong example of contemporary critical 322

Book Reviews theories (which are wider and more varied than post structuralism and “multiculturalism”) applied to Tolkien, nor an example of cultural criticism which might engage with Tolkien’s text as a postcolonial artifact, queer it, or examine the extent to which new media (such as video and computer games) and a strong fandom provide evidence of how popular it remains in multiple contexts. Scholarship drawing more strongly on contemporary critical theories can be found in the Winter 2004 Tolkien Special Issue of Modern Fiction Studies, which, of course, had its own gaps. The extent to which each of the two collections fills gaps in the other may reflect the boundaries based on disciplinary and period differences that exist between scholars, with MFS relying more on work by scholars trained in contemporary critical theories and dealing with later periods, and this anthology drawing more on medievalists using some contemporary critical theories. However, Tolkien’s Modern Middle Ages provides a strong challenge for contemporary theorists to address and as such is a valuable work for academics who are not medievalists, a rhetorical move which is necessary to move Tolkien beyond the “medieval box in which he has languished for too long” (Flieger 26), setting the foundation for the development of further work on such questions as how contemporary writers have addressed the challenge of Tolkien’s stature. Robin Anne Reid Texas A&M University-Commerce Commerce, Texas

Book Notes As of January 1st, 2007, the publishing industry switched from using 10-digit ISBNs to 13-digit ones. For book reviews in this issue, we have listed only the 10-digit forms, but beginning with the next volume of Tolkien Studies, only the 13-digit forms will be cited. The 13-digit ISBNs are nearly the same as the 10-digit ones, with a new prefix 978 and a different final check digit. Conversion utilities can be found at the Book Industry Study Group website, http://www.bisg.org. Among recent publications worth calling attention to is the Third Edition (2006) of The Longman Anthology of British Literature, Volume 1A: The Middle Ages, edited by David Damrosch, Christopher Baswell and Ann Howland Schotter (ISBN 0321333918), a popular university course book which now includes in full Tolkien’s translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

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Book Reviews Matthew Dickerson and David O’Hara’s From Homer to Harry Potter: A Handbook on Myth and Fantasy is a trade paperback from Brazos Press (ISBN 1587431335), which considers myth and modern fantasy particularly from the critical viewpoints of Tolkien and his friend C. S. Lewis. Valancourt Books has reprinted in trade paperback the 1825 translation by Robert Pearse Gillies of The Magic Ring by Baron de la Motte Fouqué (ISBN 0977784126). Though advertised by the publisher as “one of the inspirations for Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings,” the introduction by Amy H. Sturgis is much more cautious, claiming only that such works of German Romanticism as The Magic Ring influenced George MacDonald, and laid the foundation for Tolkien to follow afterward. Though Tolkien himself, in the printed record of his letters and essays, was oddly silent about works by the German Romantics, reprints of such neglected fantasies as The Magic Ring are welcome. Lindisfarne Books has reprinted in trade paperback R. J. Reilly’s Romantic Religion: A Study of Owen Barfield, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and J.R.R. Tolkien (ISBN 1584200472). The publisher seems to have desired to obscure the fact that this is a facsimile reprint of book published in 1971 (which itself was a revision of a 1960 dissertation), but the author in a new four-page Preface at least mentions that the book was first published thirty-five years before. The title of Gwendolyn A. Morgan’s The Invention of False Medieval Authorities as a Literary Device in Popular Fiction: From Tolkien to “The Da Vinci Code” (ISBN 0773459391) promises a lot more than this slim book delivers, as the Tolkien coverage consists of only two and a half pages of very general commentary. With this book the publisher, Edwin Mellen Press, has achieved a new low in terms of shoddy book production. Some publications forthcoming in 2007 are worth noting in advance, including The Children of Húrin by J.R.R. Tolkien, which is being billed by the publishers as the first completed narrative of Middle-earth published since The Silmarillion thirty years ago. John D. Rateliff ’s long-awaited study of the manuscripts of The Hobbit will appear in two volumes under the title The History of The Hobbit, Part One: Mr. Baggins and Part Two: Return to Bag-End. Also of considerable interest will be Kristin Thompson’s The Frodo Franchise: The Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood, coming this summer from University of California Press. Douglas A. Anderson

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The Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies 2004 DAVID BRATMAN

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olkien scholarship in 2004 was dominated by two themes. One, study of Tolkien’s oeuvre as a mythology and of its mythological source materials—principally but not entirely in Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader, edited by Jane Chance (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004)—demonstrates the continuing assimilation by scholars of the complex body of Tolkien’s posthumous work. The other theme, the beginnings of widespread literary study of the Peter Jackson film cycle of The Lord of the Rings, was due to the release in December 2003 of the final installment in that cycle. Comparison with Jackson permeates many articles on Tolkien, and a few writers begin to emerge who consider them interchangeable. Some articles comparing popular and critical receptions of The Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling were inspired by the presence of simultaneous film versions of both works. Some close analyses of Tolkien’s prose in The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion by Michael D. C. Drout and Gergely Nagy testify more, as the mythological studies do, to the continuing maturation of Tolkien studies. But though many scholars, following Tolkien’s own advice regarding Beowulf, treat his work as worthy of study without special pleading, some others feel obliged explicitly to disavow any personal taste for Tolkien or belief that his works have value before delving into studies whose mere existence tends to dispute this expressed conclusion. Nearly as many books on Tolkien (24) were published in 2004 as in 2003. The most significant single-author works are Fleming Rutledge’s religious-literary study, The Battle for Middle-earth, and Janet Brennan Croft’s War and the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien, a survey of a topic also touched on by other authors this year. Croft’s book received the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies in 2005. The Science of Middle-earth by Henry Gee is more a popular than a scholarly work, but it is also of considerable interest. Of the collections of original essays, Chance’s Tolkien and the Invention of Myth is the second volume on Tolkien to emerge from the International Congress on Medieval Studies. Many of the papers in this volume deal directly with the elusive topics of the conception and purpose of Tolkien’s legendarium, comparing his work with the creative scholarly projects that preserved Norse and Finnish mythology. The papers, though written separately, are often so close in subject as to form a kind of connected web. Translating Tolkien: Text and Film, edited by Thomas Honegger (Zurich: Walking Tree, 2004), yokes several Copyright © West Virginia University Press

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David Bratman translation studies (in the mode of Honegger’s 2003 collection Tolkien in Translation) with critiques of Jackson’s films on the premise, more effective in theory than in practice, that film adaptations are a kind of translation. Further comparative studies of films and book appear in the remaining collection, Tolkien on Film: Essays on Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, edited by Janet Brennan Croft (Altadena, CA: Mythopoeic Press, 2004). The year brought the publication of Volume 1 of the journal in hand, Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review, plus three other full journal issues on Tolkien, Mallorn 42 from The Tolkien Society, Parma Eldalamberon 15 from The Elvish Linguistic Fellowship, and a special Tolkien issue of MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, volume 50 number 4. In his introduction to the MFS issue, editor Shaun F. D. Hughes declares that Tolkien’s work continues to flourish despite the dismissal of fantasy by Leavisite critics and the dismissal of Tolkien by some critics of the fantastic (“Postmodern Tolkien,” 807-13). Caroline Galwey (see below) addresses the same subject. Many of this year’s works discuss both mythological resonances and sources, or religion as both spiritual guidance and literary content, or both the text and its reception, or both Tolkien’s book and Jackson’s films, so classification is in some cases arbitrary. But categories in Tolkien studies exist even if individual works cross them, so classification may still be useful. WORKS BY TOLKIEN The 50th Anniversary Edition of The Lord of the Rings (London: Harper Collins; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004) is a major milestone in the book’s textual history. A large number of emendations have been made under the editorial supervision of Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, who provide a new textual note (xviii-xxi) on their work. They have standardized to Tolkien’s presumed preference many inconsistencies in spelling and capitalization (but not all, for many were deliberate, and some are unsolvable). They have also restored unauthorized changes made by the early typesetters who hastily re-set The Lord of the Rings for the second printing in 1954 without informing the publisher. The mere fact of the re-setting was not known for many years, and numerous accidental changes, particularly those to punctuation, have only recently been detected. More important are new emendations based on Christopher Tolkien’s discovery, through his study of the drafts in The History of The Lord of the Rings, of the ghosts of abandoned conceptions as well as corrections to typescript errors. All such possible changes were reviewed, and while some have been included in the new edition, some have not. Hammond and Scull’s The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion (London:

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The Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies 2004 HarperCollins; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005) includes glosses with the rationale for these choices, together with a list of additional changes made in the 2005 reprinting of the 50th Anniversary Edition. Tolkien prepared a textual edition of the Middle English poem Sir Orfeo for a cadets’ course at Oxford in 1943-44, printed in a small edition by the Academic Copying Office. This has now for the first time been reprinted, edited with introduction and notes by Carl F. Hostetter (Tolkien Studies 1: 85-123). Hostetter presents the external and internal evidence for Tolkien’s responsibility for the unsigned edition, noting editorial choices congruent with those in Tolkien’s translation of the poem, published in 1975, which appears to have been based on this edition. Finding that Tolkien’s edition is itself based on Kenneth Sisam’s edition in Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose, Hostetter notes places where Tolkien conspicuously follows Sisam’s editorial choices. He also enumerates all variants between Tolkien’s and Sisam’s editions, and lists some corrections to later printings of Sisam’s book for which Tolkien, in his Middle English Vocabulary, was immediately responsible. Two major works on Tolkien’s invented languages were published in 2004. Sí Qente Feanor and Other Elvish Writings (Cupertino, 2004) is Parma Eldalamberon 15, the fifth volume of a chronological survey of Tolkien’s linguistic texts with detailed commentary by their editors. This volume contains some short and fragmentary texts from the late 1910s and early 1920s, given roughly by chronology of composition. “Names and Required Alterations,” edited by Patrick H. Wynne (5-18), contains a table of Gnomish equivalents to Qenya names in The Cottage of Lost Play plus some other isolated linguistic notes for The Book of Lost Tales. “Namelist to The Fall of Gondolin,” edited by Christopher Gilson and Patrick H. Wynne (19-29), contains encyclopedic entries for persons, places, and things in that tale, written in the voice of Eriol the mariner. It covers the letters A-L. “Sí Qente Feanor,” edited by Christopher Gilson (31-40), may be translated “Thus Spake Feanor.” It is a thirteen-line text in Qenya, associated with the tale The Nauglafring, in which Feanor warns of the prevalence of evil. Studied with the Qenya Lexicon in hand it provides, for its length, an extensive sample of Qenya usage. “Early Qenya Pronouns,” edited by Christopher Gilson (41-58), is a group of slips containing incomplete tables of pronouns and pronominal prefixes and suffixes in this language. “Index of Names for The Lay of the Children of Húrin,” edited by Bill Welden and Christopher Gilson (59-64), is an annotated list that covers only names appearing in the first forty lines of the poem. It is of most interest for demonstrating Tolkien’s developing conception of the character of Turgon. “English-Qenya Dictionary,” edited by Arden R. Smith and Christopher Gilson (65-84), has about 120 entries in English alphabetical order. The Qenya translations are given in Valmaric 327

David Bratman script, sometimes with Latin transliteration. “Addendum to The Alphabet of Rúmil and The Valmaric Script,” edited by Arden R. Smith (85-88), reproduces a single sheet of paper with two short English language texts in these invented alphabets: a short prose text in Rúmilian and two lines of poetry, one in Rúmilian and one in Valmaric. “Early Runic Documents,” edited by Arden R. Smith (89-121), consists of eight tables of runes dating from throughout the volume’s time period. These include primary world runes and scripts, runes adapted for use with Modern English, Gondolinic runes, and the Gnomic letters (not strictly runes). One document briefly discusses incorporation of Old English names and myths into The Book of Lost Tales. The publication of part 2 (NEL-Y and appendices) of “Addenda and Corrigenda to the Etymologies,” by Carl F. Hostetter and Patrick H. Wynne (Vinyar Tengwar 46: 2-34), completes what was described in last year’s survey as “the long-awaited cataloging of the omitted variants and alternate readings, as well as the correction of simple typographical and editorial errors, from the 1937-38 Etymologies of Eldarin roots published by Christopher Tolkien in The Lost Road and Other Writings in 1987.” The Etymologies are one of the principal sources of Elvish language material, making the “Addenda and Corrigenda” of like importance. BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES Three brief book-length biographies of Tolkien appeared in 2004. J.R.R. Tolkien: Master of Imaginary Worlds by Edward Willett, in the series “Authors Teens Love” (Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enslow Publishers, 2004), is a biography for older children providing some cursory discussion of the significance of Tolkien’s work but not going into detail on his literary interests and inspirations. It is well-balanced chronologically. Willett begins with the story of the writing and publication of The Hobbit before backtracking to Tolkien’s childhood, and provides an entire chapter on posthumous events. The book is largely drawn from Carpenter’s and Grotta’s biographies (Willett cites the first edition of Grotta’s book but avoids its distinctive errors), with ventures largely into newspaper articles. Sometimes these serve him well, as with an interview with an attendee of Inklings pub meetings, but sometimes they cause him to perpetuate old factual errors. J.R.R. Tolkien by Stuart P. Levine (San Diego: Lucent, 2004) is in a series called “The Importance Of ” (given at the top of the title page, making the title appear to read The Importance of J.R.R. Tolkien). This is also a biography for older children largely drawn from Carpenter and other earlier books. Levine tells Tolkien’s life chronologically and briskly, devoting particular attention to Tolkien’s interest in languages and criticizing him for neglecting his wife. Tolkien’s work is not analyzed, but its origin 328

The Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies 2004 and development is discussed, with less detail for the Silmarillion than for some other writings. A brief epilogue covers Tolkien’s legacy. There are few errors, but Levine’s writing is sometimes notably awkward. In the epilogue, Levine calls Peter Jackson a Tolkien purist (95) and states that “modern fantasy for adults was unexplored before Tolkien” (96), both of which would be a surprise to most people. J.R.R. Tolkien by Neil Heims (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004) is in a series (“Great Writers”), is short (139 pages), and is bound in sturdy printed boards, so it looks like a children’s book, but it is unillustrated and is in fact a brief adult biography. Heims takes most of his facts directly from Carpenter, but the judgments of the significance of Tolkien’s work and life are his own. Like Levine, Heims is particularly concerned with accounting for Tolkien’s neglect, as he judges it, of his wife. Opening and closing sections are chronological, but the center of the book discusses themes in Tolkien’s life (“Family,” “Fellowship,” “Authorship”) without chronological frame. “Authorship” means almost entirely The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings; despite the emphasis on Tolkien’s authorial creativity, Heims says little about the Silmarillion and almost nothing about its development. Except for Tolkien’s Letters, his sources are entirely secondary works; he does not even refer to any posthumous fiction after the 1977 Silmarillion. Although published by a guidebook firm, There and Back Again: In the Footsteps of J.R.R. Tolkien by Mathew Lyons (London: Cadogan Guides, 2004) is not a guidebook to Lord of the Rings-related sites in England, but an account by the author of his experience visiting many of these sites, interweaved with musings on Tolkien’s life, English history, and his own reactions to Tolkien’s work. Lyons is anxious to convey that he is not a Tolkien fanatic or anything like that—that was an aberration of his adolescence—and he is now devoting all this time to tramping around England in search of Tolkien’s roots for some purer and loftier reason. He says he is only looking for places that “became charged with creative meaning” for Tolkien (14), but the urge to identify specific locales as the “real” origins of Middle-earth is not entirely absent. Besides numerous sites in the Oxfordshire area, Lyons visits Sarehole, Roos in Yorkshire, the Ribble Valley, Cheddar Gorge, Lydney Park (Tolkien once wrote a linguistic analysis of an inscription found there), and Fonthill in Wiltshire (whose name was used for Treebeard’s home in early drafts). For readers seeking an actual guidebook, this book’s usefulness lies mostly in its compactness and its devotion purely to the topic of geography. It contains little specific advice for the traveler and in this respect is mostly notable for Lyons’s conveyance of what he found it to be like to visit these places, down to pub rankings and accounts of getting lost. Andrew Lazo in “Gathered Round Northern Fires: the Imagina329

David Bratman tive Impact of the Kolbítar” (Chance 191-226) offers a comparison of Tolkien’s and C. S. Lewis’s love for and use of Norse myth in their work. He connects this to their shared membership in the Kolbítar, an Oxford club for reading Norse myths and sagas aloud, claiming that their friendship developed here and that it was a necessary precursor to the Inklings. Lazo provides a chronology and membership list of the club, stretching the available primary evidence to its limit. GENERAL LITERARY CRITICISM: THE LORD WORK AS A WHOLE

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War and the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien by Janet Brennan Croft (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004) is a detailed survey primarily focusing on the influence on The Lord of the Rings (and, to an extent, The Hobbit) of the two world wars that Tolkien lived through, with some consideration of how the morality of war is expressed in Tolkien’s fiction. The prose is sometimes stiff but the arguments are clear. The book begins with a summary of Tolkien’s war experience and a caution against some interpretations offered in the past, notably the mutually exclusive claims that he glorified war and that he was a pacifist. Croft finds that the themes Paul Fussell identifies (in The Great War and Modern Memory) as typical of World War I literature are distinctively employed by Tolkien, rendering The Lord of the Rings into a delayed literary reaction to that war. She finds much less employment of typical World War II literature themes, but does see reflections of the author’s parental concern for his sons who served in that war. Two chapters on military leadership and battle tactics explore Tolkien’s moral principles of war, such as the practice that a virtuous general always leads his troops personally. Croft draws some strong contrasts with Peter Jackson’s films here. The book concludes with a chapter on Tolkien’s attitudes towards war outside his fiction, including his acceptance of Christian “just war” doctrine and his experience with shell shock. Shorter versions of parts of the book appeared as journal articles, of which two were also published in 2004: chapter 4 as “‘The Young Perish and the Old Linger, Withering’: J.R.R. Tolkien on World War II” (Mythlore 24, no. 2: 58-71) and the first part of chapter 5 as “The Morality of Military Leadership” (Mallorn 42: 47-50). Deconstructing Tolkien: A Fundamental Analysis of The Lord of the Rings by Edward J. McFadden III (Farmingdale, NY: Padwolf Publishing, 2004) consists of half-a-dozen casual essays on various aspects of the book, including discussions of Gandalf ’s and Gollum’s characters. The chapter on languages is conspicuously the least accurate; McFadden apologizes for not really understanding the subject. A chapter running through plot changes in Peter Jackson’s films, praising clean excisions but lamenting larger changes, is the longest. Interspersed among the chapters are some 330

The Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies 2004 stories both pre- and post-dating Tolkien, including two by McFadden himself, intended to illustrate the kind of fiction that influenced Tolkien and on which Tolkien himself had influence. The World of the Ring: Language, Religion and Adventure in Tolkien by Jared Lobdell (Chicago: Open Court, 2004) is an expansion of his 1981 book England and Always: Tolkien’s World of the Rings. The original book contained three essays arguing that The Lord of the Rings is an adventure story in the Edwardian mode and that Tolkien’s philological learning and Catholic belief are deeply embedded in the story. A concluding essay used these propositions to explain the story’s continuing popularity. Lobdell’s arguments were pioneering, but his book had little influence, due partly to the obscurity of its publication, but also due to Lobdell’s tendency to consider his conclusions self-evident: this led to some skimming of the topics and a certain belligerent attitude, e.g. a claim that the story’s Edwardian influences were important but its medieval ones were not. The revised edition adds parenthetical comments and some larger additions to the existing chapters, such as S. R. Crockett to the list of Edwardian influences, and a speculation on Tolkien’s and C. S. Lewis’s unwritten book Language and Human Nature to the philological chapter. There are also three new chapters: one on the symbolism of geographical directions, an afterword on the Jackson films, and an appendix in the form of a short story which, though no names are used, is set in Minas Tirith long after the war and tells of evil still lingering in the chamber where Denethor used the palantír. Much has been written on the topics of the original book since its publication, but Lobdell cites virtually none of it, leaving unaltered his posture of a lone voice crying in the wilderness. Understanding The Lord of the Rings: The Best of Tolkien Criticism, edited by Rose A. Zimbardo and Neil D. Isaacs (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004) is a reprint collection with a misleading subtitle. What it’s the best of is the editors’ two previous collections of essays, Tolkien and the Critics (1968) and Tolkien: New Critical Perspectives (1981). The new book contains about half of each, and about half of those were already reprints; the new book does not indicate which are which. With contributions written over a period of nearly fifty years, the absence of informative context is a serious flaw. So is the reprinting, without updating or explanatory notes, of old essays by Verlyn Flieger and Lionel Basney written without the benefit of since-published drafts. Major early essays by C. S. Lewis, Edmund Fuller, W. H. Auden, and Marion Zimmer Bradley are useful to have in print, however. Isaacs’s introduction, “On the Pleasures of (Reading and Writing) Tolkien Criticism” (1-10) tells the story of the compilation of the three books and of Isaacs’s changing attitudes towards the project. The one new essay, by Tom Shippey, is listed under film criticism. Paul Bibire contributes an encyclopedic essay on “J.R.R. Tolkien’s 331

David Bratman The Lord of the Rings” (British Writers: Classics, Volume II, ed. Jay Parini (New York: Scribner’s, 2004): 155-75). Though necessarily abbreviated, this is deftly written. Bibire is particularly concerned with placing The Lord of the Rings in the context of The Hobbit and the history of Middle-earth, giving a quick internal account of the latter without identifying specific texts. He further discusses characterization, morality (particularly aesthetic ethics), the limits of symbolism, and literary style, paying special attention to humor. Despite its broad title, “Tolkien’s Prose Style and its Literary and Rhetorical Effects” by Michael D. C. Drout (Tolkien Studies 1: 137-62) is primarily a close analysis of the Battle of the Pelennor Fields in The Lord of the Rings. Drout finds echoes of King Lear here, both in plot and in diction. He suggests that Tolkien deliberately shaped the madness of Denethor to reflect that of Lear, and that this in turn sheds light on the corruption of the Lord of the Nazgûl. The syntactic parallels include the very striking one of the Lord of the Nazgûl’s “Come not between the Nazgûl and his prey” with Lear’s “Come not between the dragon and his wrath.” Drout goes so far as to diagram Tolkien’s sentence in alternative forms to defend Tolkien’s choice of diction. Drout’s larger point in doing all this is a demonstration that The Lord of the Rings is a work of value by Modernist critical standards, despite its reflexive dismissal by many critics. “Perspectives on Reality in The Lord of the Rings” by Gerardo Barajas Garrido (Mallorn 42: 51-59) is the first part of a two-part article, concluded in Mallorn 43 (2005): 53-59. The article begins by defining secondary reality as a primary reality within the secondary world, and tests questions of perception by Tolkien’s characters (e.g. the sense that Lothlórien feels different from the outside world) against Lockean realism. The article continues with a discussion of the goals and perceptions of power that differing characters have, contrasting Sauron, the hobbits, and Elves. Patrice Hannon in “The Lord of the Rings as Elegy” (Mythlore 24, no. 2: 36-42) discusses ways in which the story bears the weight of the past. Tolkien’s characters tell tales of old; they lament what is forgotten or is about to be lost. The narrator jumps out of the story’s limited viewpoint with pregnant lines like “Never did Frodo see that fair land again.” “Frodo: The Modern Medieval Hero” by Paula M. Persoleo (The Image of the Hero, ed. Will Wright and Steven Kaplan (Pueblo, CO: Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social History, 2004): 464-68) briefly cites a number of critics to show that Frodo’s character and situation draw on Beowulf and Sir Gawain while being displaced from them in a modern manner. Persoleo considers it important to study Tolkien’s Frodo because Jackson’s Frodo is too diminished to be a hero. Nicholas Boyle devotes chapter 15 (pages 248-66, titled “Rewards 332

The Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies 2004 and Fairies (2)”) of his Sacred and Secular Scriptures: A Catholic Approach to Literature (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004) to The Lord of the Rings. He begins by assuring his readers that he isn’t taken in by Tolkien, does not consider The Lord of the Rings to be good, or anything déclassé like that, and that the entire rest of the legendarium is meaningless jottings. He then presents an elaborate analogy in which the Shire and the Hobbits represent an idealized England and the English who reject Protestantism (i.e. the Ring). It is not clear whether he thinks Tolkien intended this reading. Margarita Carretero González in “When Nature Responds to Evil Practices: A Warning from the Ents of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth” (Truth, Reconciliation, and Evil, ed. Margaret Sönser Breen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004): 147-61) summarizes Tolkien’s sensitivity towards nature, objections to environmental destruction, and love of trees, as a tool in current public environmental education. A new “Afterword” by Patrick Curry to a new printing of his 1997 study, Defending Middle-earth: Tolkien, Myth and Modernity (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004: 151-59), discusses The Lord of the Rings’ continuing popularity in terms of its appeal to spiritual hunger. Curry’s concern in the main text is Tolkien’s love of nature; here Curry attempts a distinction among nature, wilderness, and civilization. A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England by Jed Esty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004 [not 2003 as stated in the Tolkien Studies bibliography]) is a literary-cultural study of the rise of insularity and a conscious local culture in twentieth-century English literature. Esty devotes two pages (121-22) to Tolkien’s “deep connection to archaic elements” and “romanticization of Englishness,” tying them to similar impulses in T. S. Eliot. Anderson Rearick III begins “Why Is the Only Good Orc a Dead Orc?: The Dark Face of Racism Examined in Tolkien’s World” (MFS 50: 861-74) with the assumption that The Lord of the Rings does indeed express racist attitudes, going so far as to claim inaccurately that Elrond and Arwen’s dark hair is “caused by them being part human” and “is considered extraordinary” (862). However, Rearick’s cursory survey of Tolkien’s life fails to find evidence of racism and does find evidence against it, and many critics have argued against calling Tolkien racist. So Rearick concludes that favoritism towards Elves is cultural rather than racial, and that the defined evil of Orcs reflects Tolkien’s religious rather than racial beliefs. Rearick also has a few sharp words for those who would charge Tolkien with racial stereotypes found only in the Jackson films. “Gazing Upon Sauron: Hobbits, Elves, and the Queering of the Postcolonial Optic” by Jes Battis (MFS 50: 908-28) employs postcolonial theory, feminist theory, and a lot of other theories to describe hobbits and 333

David Bratman elves considering each other and the reader considering the characters. Not all of this is clearly intelligible. A description of the relationship among Sam, Frodo, and Gollum makes some interesting points about Gollum desiring to have an unwithered hobbit body and Frodo desiring to have Sam’s freedom from the Ringbearer’s burden, but Battis cannot get away from the notion that there must be something sexual about it all, apparently being unable to imagine desire unconnected with the erotic. “Warm Beds Are Good: Sex and Libido in Tolkien’s Writing” by Ty Rosenthal (Mallorn 42: 35-42) attempts a broad survey of Tolkien’s views as expressed in his fiction, notably the clear association of sex with marriage. Comparing Tolkien with the most libidinally advanced writers of his day, Rosenthal declares that this makes him stodgy. Rosenthal is certain that Sam and Frodo’s relationship is not intended as sexual at all, but declares that the mythology is now out of Tolkien’s hands, and that some readers will choose to sexualize it. The most interesting part of the article is a detailed study of marital roles in Aldarion and Erendis, a story Rosenthal sees as verging almost on the risqué. Some speculations on the editing of references to sexuality in The Silmarillion seem unjustified. “On Fairy Stories” by Valerie Rohy (MFS 50: 927-48) is deliberately misleadingly titled: Rohy is playing off the word fairy as a synonym for homosexual. Her reading of The Lord of the Rings is one of homosexual relations inherent but deferred, apparently because while the Ring exists it subsumes all desire into itself. Rohy is one of those critics who believes that denial of homosexuality is proof that it is there. She also addresses heterosexuality in the story, noting the presence of courtly love and peculiarly arguing that the association of marriage with childbearing desexualizes heterosexual relationships. Despite its title, the first part of “‘Oh . . . oh . . . Frodo!’: Readings of Male Intimacy in The Lord of the Rings” by Anna Smol (MFS 50: 949-79) is a careful discussion of the hobbits on their quest as an example of males thrown into intimate, but not in this case sexual, relationships by the stress of war, akin to Tolkien’s own experience in World War I. Smol also addresses the perception that the story is unsexualized because it is juvenile, which she attributes to a modern cultural equation of medieval settings with children’s literature. By way of an observation that the physical contact between Frodo and Sam is more limited in the Jackson films than in the book but caused much sniggering in the audience, Smol then turns to a survey of Frodo/Sam “slash” fiction, fan fiction that depicts a sexual relationship between them. Such fiction tries to merge the homosocial into the homosexual, but Smol notes that the combining of these realms is a function of contemporary social perspective. “Frodo’s Batman” by Mark T. Hooker (Tolkien Studies 1: 125-36) 334

The Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies 2004 supplements the longer war studies of Croft, Smol, and others by providing a detailed comparison of Frodo and Sam’s relationship to accounts by World War I officers of their reliance on their batmen (officers’ valets). Hooker shows the parallels to be very close, and uses the real-life situation to shed light on Sam’s senses of class deference and of duty. Two disparate television documentaries, created by different production companies, are tied to episodes of the Jackson films and released with the title “National Geographic: Beyond the Movie.” The first, tied to The Fellowship of the Ring (2002), is written and produced by Kathleen Phelan, and narrated by Phil Crowley. It straightforwardly reviews some of Tolkien’s primary-world inspirations for The Lord of the Rings: the rural English countryside and its industrialization, the horrors and stresses of two world wars, Anglo-Saxon mythology and archaeology, and the language and themes of the Kalevala. A Finnish rune-singer is interviewed in connection with the last. Unsurprisingly for a National Geographic project, the documentary concludes that the main lesson of the book is ecological. Despite the film-heavy visuals, the contents are equally applicable to the book. Film-specific discussion is limited to efforts to make Hobbiton and armor look authentic. Jackson’s actors and crew, historians and folklorists, and a few Tolkien scholars are interviewed briefly. The second documentary, tied to The Return of the King (2004), is produced by Helen Fitzwilliam, written by her with John Bredar and Rachel Allen, and narrated by John Rhys-Davies. This seeks historical parallels for Aragorn’s leadership, Gandalf ’s and Wormtongue’s counsel, Sam’s and Frodo’s friendship, and Sam’s ordinary heroism. The parallels are variously unintentionally amusing (Gandalf as proverb-giver with Benjamin Franklin), historically inapt (Wormtongue with Rasputin), morally offensive (Faramir’s raid to Osgiliath with Pickett’s Charge), or bathetic (Aragorn’s wilderness journeys with Theodore Roosevelt on his Dakota ranch). Throughout, the parallels are drawn with Jackson’s characters, not Tolkien’s. “Aragorn’s reluctance [to seek the throne] is surprising,” says the narration, as indeed it is for anyone who’s read the book. Tolkien’s name is frequently invoked despite the fact that the film is not about his work, and Michael Drout, identified onscreen as a “Tolkien Expert,” is brought in to endorse the parallels, including the Tolkien-inappropriate ones of Aragorn with William Wallace (who seeks no power for himself) and Elizabeth I (who sacrifices personal love for duty). Jackson, his cast members, various historians, and descendants of the primary-world figures also comment on the themes and endorse the parallels. Besides separate release, this documentary is included as a special feature in the DVD of the film, in its theatrical release version only, not in the Extended Edition.

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David Bratman GENERAL LITERARY CRITICISM: OTHER WORKS The Invented Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien: Drawings and Original Manuscripts from the Marquette University Collection (Milwaukee: Haggerty Museum of Art, 2004) is the 44-page catalog for an exhibition held October 2004 to January 2005. It includes three articles. The first is “Ways of World Making: J.R.R. Tolkien” by museum director Curtis L. Carter (7-15), describing his artistic style and the vividness of his landscape drawing. The second, “A Masterpiece of the Future: A Brief History of Marquette’s J.R.R. Tolkien Collection” by librarian Matt Blessing (17-22), recounts the acquisition of Tolkien’s papers and subsequent additions to the collection. The third, “The AB Language Lives” by Arne Zettersten (2533), describes the AB literary standard of Middle English identified by Tolkien in 1929, recounting Tolkien’s research in its texts, and including a bibliography of publications of manuscripts of the Ancrene Riwle, one of the language’s principal sources. The publication also includes the exhibition catalog itself, a timeline of Tolkien’s life, a bibliography of primary and selected secondary works, and reproductions of ten manuscript pages and drawings from the Marquette and Bodleian collections. Anne C. Petty’s study, Dragons of Fantasy (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Press, 2004), contains a chapter titled “J.R.R. Tolkien: A Treacherous Twosome” (34-61). Petty’s subjects are Smaug from The Hobbit and Glaurung in the Narn i Hîn Húrin and The Silmarillion. Her interest is in the author’s portrayal of dragons through plotting and prose style as well as in the dragons’ physical appearance and personality. Petty finds these two to be supreme examples of draconic villainy in fantasy literature. Smaug is physically an archetypal Western dragon, with personality a terrifying mixture of urbanity and bestiality that makes him the story’s most memorable character. Glaurung is a cunning monster modeled, to a large degree, on Fáfnir from Völsunga Saga, and deftly portrayed by Tolkien. Clyde B. Northrop itemizes “The Qualities of a Tolkienian FairyStory” (MFS 50: 814-37) from the essay “On Fairy-Stories” and demonstrates their presence in The Hobbit. He traces the linguistic origin of Tolkienian terms such as “recovery” and “eucatastrophe,” and points out that Todorovian analysis of the fantastic leaves no place for a Tolkienian story. In “The Adapted Text: The Lost Poetry of Beleriand” (Tolkien Studies 1: 21-41), Gergely Nagy presents prose passages from The Silmarillion which use parataxis, alliteration, and rhythm in the manner of poetry, particularly to heighten important moments. These hint at the presence of poetic versions behind the tales, which may or may not actually exist, but heighten the sense of The Silmarillion as having a complex history of texts behind it within the secondary world. 336

The Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies 2004 Carl Phelpstead discusses “Auden and the Inklings: An Alliterative Revival” (Journal of English and Germanic Philology 103: 433-57), which he presents as a conscious literary movement comparable to the fourteenthcentury Alliterative Revival. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Nevill Coghill of the Inklings were all aware of Auden’s alliterative verse, and all wrote alliterative verse of their own in Modern English: as original verse, as translation of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse, or as a teaching tool. All their work in this form bears an antiquarian air in framing or in subject matter. Auden also had antiquarian aims, but his subjects are more modern and his alliteration freer and more idiomatic. Phelpstead describes several of Tolkien’s alliterative poems: brief translations from Beowulf, The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son, his poem for Auden “For W.H.A.,” Entish and Rohirric poetry in The Lord of the Rings, and The Lay of the Children of Húrin, and notes the existence of others (440-47). Michael D. C. Drout writes of “How the Monsters Became Important: The Logical and Rhetorical Development of ‘The Monsters and the Critics’” (Fabelwesen, mostri e portenti nell’immaginario occidentale, ed. Carmela Rizzo (Torino: Edizione dll’Orso, 2004): 1-23). This is a study of the drafts of Tolkien’s Beowulf essay (themselves edited by Drout in the volume Beowulf and the Critics) showing how he gradually realized in the course of composition how he had made his argument that the monsters are central to Beowulf and hence worthy of study. Richard Bodek in “Beowulf” (Explicator 62: 130-32) responds to Tolkien’s argument that Beowulf is a Christian poem on a pre-Christian path by citing Hrothgar’s sermon in the poem as saying that Beowulf ’s heroic violence is more praiseworthy in a pagan than in a Christian context. Topic: The Washington and Jefferson College Review published two articles defending J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books in a Tolkienian context. This reader has no animus against Rowling, but finds both articles weak. Miranda Maney Yaggi in “Harry Potter’s Heritage: Tolkien as Rowling’s Patronus Against the Critics” (Topic 54: 33-45) stoutly defends Rowling’s value as a fantasist by finding that she faithfully follows the criteria set forth in Tolkien’s “On Fairy-Stories,” it having evidently not occurred to her that this does not guarantee that the resulting work will be any good. Rowling’s derivation of words from Latin and French is cited as being in the tradition of Tolkien’s created languages, but only looks anemic in comparison. Yaggi’s charge of hypocrisy against critics who love Tolkien but dislike Rowling thus seems misplaced, especially when she lumps notorious Tolkien-hater Harold Bloom in with them. DawnEllen Jacobs in “Tolkien and Rowling: Reflections on Receptions” (Topic 54: 46-54) finds, apparently to her surprise, that The Lord of the Rings received as much negative criticism when new as Rowling’s books do today. She seems to find Rowling’s depiction of evil more subtle than Tolkien’s, and notes 337

David Bratman Rowling’s disadvantage of writing against a faster-paced, more intense critical environment than Tolkien did. Amy H. Sturgis applies Yaggi’s line of argument more appropriately in “Harry Potter Is a Hobbit: Rowling, Tolkien, and the Question of Readership” (CSL 35.3: 1-15). Her response is not to critics who accept Tolkien’s theory of fantasy but to those who are not aware of it. Disputing critics who find Rowling’s books inappropriate for both children and adults, Sturgis employs “On Fairy-Stories,” Smith of Wootton Major, and C. S. Lewis’s “On Three Ways of Writing for Children” to show that fantasy is a serious genre independent of age level. Rowling, like Lewis and Tolkien, is writing the story she feels she needs to write. A book review column by Robert Trexler in the same issue, titled “Tolkien, Lewis, Rowling & the Imagination” (CSL 35.3: 18-21), covers one study of Lewis and two of Rowling, one of which unconvincingly, in Trexler’s view, argues that Rowling lacks Tolkien’s moral sense. Paul Jordan-Smith reviews Riddles: Perspectives on the Use, Function, and Change in a Folklore Genre by Annikki Kaivola-Bregenhøj (Journal of American Folklore 117: 204-5), citing Bilbo’s “What have I got in my pocket?” as a problem in defining the limits of what counts as a riddle. MYTHOLOGICAL STUDIES A number of papers this year address Tolkien’s approach to myth in a general or theoretical way. Broadest of these is an essay by Verlyn Flieger, “‘Do the Atlantis story and abandon Eriol-Saga’” (Tolkien Studies 1: 43-68), its title taken from a note Tolkien made to himself around 1946. Flieger’s subject is Tolkien’s evolving ideas for framing his mythology. In the Eriol-Saga, as used in The Book of Lost Tales, stories are told to a medieval man; in what Tolkien called “the Atlantis story,” as used in The Notion Club Papers, stories come to modern men in dreams and reembodiment. Flieger observes psychological and stylistic distinctions in the differences between the two. Her argument was incorporated into chapter 5 of her book Interrupted Music: The Making of Tolkien’s Mythology (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2005). Michaela Baltasar in “J.R.R. Tolkien: A Rediscovery of Myth” (Chance 19-34) contrasts Tolkien’s story-centered approach to mythmaking with the more analytical and historical views of Max Müller and Andrew Lang. Tom Shippey demonstrates how this works in “Light-elves, Dark-elves, and Others: Tolkien’s Elvish Problem” (Tolkien Studies 1: 115). He shows Tolkien gradually developing a taxonomy of Elves that accounts for the varied uses of the words for elf in Germanic languages and the confusing classification of elves in Norse mythology. Tolkien’s aim was to create a system which not only made sense in itself, but which explained the inconsistencies in previous accounts. 338

The Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies 2004 In “The Problem of Transformation: The Use of Medieval Sources in Fantasy Literature” (Literature Compass 1: 1-22), Michael D. C. Drout addresses the impact on the reader of knowing that a modern fantasy text has inspirations in medieval literature. Tolkien tries to disguise the degree to which the Rohirrim are transformed Anglo-Saxons, but his rhetorical effect is to convey an even more vivid picture of Anglo-Saxon culture than other reconstructions give. Drout contrasts Tolkien’s style of transformation with the open homage to Malory in T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, the possibly accidental echoes of traveling wonderworking medieval priests in Ursula K. Le Guin’s wizards, and the second-hand imagery in Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising. In “A Mythology for Anglo-Saxon England” (Chance 229-47), Drout takes up in detail an incidental point from the previous article and tries to deduce exactly what was “for England” about Tolkien’s mythology. From Tolkien’s assorted allusions to Anglo-Saxons and Goths in his fiction, Drout pieces together evidence that Tolkien was attempting to establish a mythological connection among the English, the Geats and Danes of Beowulf, and the Goths of the East, despite the slim historical evidence for such a connection, because it was aesthetically satisfying to do so. “Stolen Language, Cosmic Models: Myth and Mythology in Tolkien” by Margaret Hiley (MFS 50: 838-60) is a semiotic study of Tolkien’s use of myth. Tolkien merges myth with history in his secondary world and makes both weigh heavily on his characters, pulls together mythic fragments to bring a similar tension and sense of truth to his readers (this is the point Drout discusses in detail in his articles), and appropriates King James English to give the story authority, especially in the Silmarillion tales. Hiley argues that in these practices Tolkien resembles canonical modernists in their use of myth, though she spends as much space contrasting him with them as comparing them. “Creating and Re-Creating Worlds with Words: The Religion and Magic of Language in The Lord of the Rings” by Mary E. Zimmer (Chance 49-60) was originally published in 1995. Zimmer discusses verbal magic in the book in a context of neo-Platonic belief in language as the ultimate reality. She reads a variety of imperative statements as spells of a kind, whether explicitly labeled so or not, and discusses names as signifiers of the true nature of their bearers. John R. Holmes takes a similar approach in “Oaths and Oath Breaking: Analogues of Old English Comitatus in Tolkien’s Myth” (Chance 249-61). Emphasizing the importance of even casual oaths in Anglo-Saxon culture, Holmes finds a similar respect for oaths in The Lord of the Rings. Characters apologize for breaking even implicit promises and go to elaborate lengths to release each other from undesirable responsibilities. Holmes also discusses boasting (bēot) in this

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context. Other papers on specific mythological influences are discussed below under “Sources.” SOURCES AND COMPARATIVE STUDIES The Tolkien Fan’s Medieval Reader, edited by Turgon (David E. Smith) (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Press, 2004), functions as a source study by being a collection in translation of Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, Welsh, Irish, Norse, and Finnish texts from the medieval period that inspired Tolkien. Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Pearl are given in full. Most of the texts are nineteenth-century or circa 1900 prose translations that Tolkien himself could have read. No samples of the originals are given, a particular loss when a lyric poem such as Pearl is represented in prose, and the now-aged translations might not be appealing or communicative to the modern casual reader. Although introductions discuss Tolkien’s own scholarly interests in the original works, the functions of conveying their character to the casual reader and of tying them to Tolkien’s own scholarship and creative work is better carried out by The Keys of Middle-earth: Discovering Medieval Literature Through the Fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien by Stuart D. Lee and Elizabeth Solopova (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), although its texts are much shorter extracts. Some comparative studies in Tolkien and the Invention of Myth compare subtle and elusive concepts rather than literary texts. “Saving the Myths: The Re-creation of Mythology in Plato and Tolkien” by Gergely Nagy (Chance 81-100) compares Tolkien’s theory of mythology to that of Plato. Nagy defends Plato from the charge of hostility to myth and creativity. His principal point is that both Plato and Tolkien viewed mythology as a process rather than an object. Tolkien’s mythology consists of the relationships among his stories and between the stories and the reader, not a collection of the stories themselves. “Myth, Late Roman History, and Multiculturalism in Tolkien’s Middle-earth” by Sandra Ballif Straubhaar (Chance 101-17) compares two relationships: the relationship between Gondor and the Northmen/Rohirrim in The Lord of the Rings and the relationship between the late Roman Empire and the Germanic tribes. Straubhaar notes parallels in the role of intermarriage, and in the way each older society viewed itself and outsiders. This gives her the opportunity to discuss racial perceptions in Tolkien’s characters that are sometimes mistaken for authorial racism. That Tolkien uses primary-world Gothic to represent the “real” language of the Northmen only makes the whole comparison more piquant, and ties this paper to Michael D. C. Drout’s in the same book (discussed above). 340

The Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies 2004 “‘On the Borders of Old Stories’: Enacting the Past in Beowulf and The Lord of the Rings” by Alexandra Bolintineanu (Chance 263-73) is a structural comparison of the two works, showing how historical atmosphere is created in each story by the telling of legends and old tales. Kathleen E. Dubs in “Providence, Fate, and Chance: Boethian Philosophy in The Lord of the Rings” (Chance 133-42) claims to be the first scholar to use Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy as a tool to study Tolkien. This may have been true in 1981, when the essay was originally published, but it should have been updated to reflect later research before reprinting. Still, Dubs uses Boethius to produce an interesting short demonstration that providential events in Tolkien are compatible with freedom of will. Two sections of Tolkien and the Invention of Myth contain tightly-related studies of the influence of the Norse Eddas and the Finnish Kalevala on Tolkien. Tom Shippey introduces the topic with “Tolkien and the Appeal of the Pagan: Edda and Kalevala” (Chance 145-61). Here he does not discuss Tolkien’s work at all, but uses Tolkien’s desire to create a firmly “rooted” mythology as a starting point to analyze exactly what literary characteristics of the Prose Edda and the Kalevala root them in their native cultures. Once identified, similar features of style may be created in deliberate art: and, indeed, the Prose Edda and Kalevala themselves are the artistic products of antiquarians. On the influence of Norse myth, Marjorie J. Burns in “Norse and Christian Gods: The Integrative Theology of J.R.R. Tolkien” (Chance 163-78) shows Tolkien tidying up and civilizing the rough and somewhat irregular pantheon of Norse gods to create his Valar. Andy Dimond’s “The Twilight of the Elves: Ragnarök and the End of the Third Age” (Chance 179-89) is more a comparison of Tolkien’s Fourth Age with the regeneration of the world after Ragnarök which enters Christian recensions of Norse myths. On the influence of the Kalevala, Verlyn Flieger writes “A Mythology for Finland: Tolkien and Lönnrot as Mythmakers” (Chance 277-83). She argues that Elias Lönnrot’s assemblage of the Kalevala offered Tolkien a model for an English mythology, and that a lament for absent myth in E.M. Forster’s Howards End suggested the opportunity for him to create one. This paper was incorporated into chapters 1 and 2 of Flieger’s book Interrupted Music. Richard C. West in “Setting the Rocket Off in Story: The Kalevala as the Germ of Tolkien’s Legendarium” (Chance 285-94) discusses the appeal of the Kalevala to Tolkien, and offers some thoughts on the transmutation of its Kullervo into Tolkien’s Túrin. David Elton Gay writes “J.R.R. Tolkien and the Kalevala: Some Thoughts on the Finnish Origins of Tom Bombadil and Treebeard” (Chance 295-304); the Finnish origin he has in mind for both characters is the Kalevala’s elusive Väinämöinen. 341

David Bratman A broader treatment of Tolkien’s use of the Kalevala appears in “Identifying England’s Lönnrot” by Anne C. Petty (Tolkien Studies 1: 69-84). Petty finds Tolkien’s creative style and use of high language to be similar to Lönnrot’s, observes a visual similarity between the Tengwar and written Finnish, and notes a connection between the Silmarils and the Sampo. Edward Pettit finds “Treebeard’s Roots in Medieval European Tradition” (Mallorn 42: 11-18) in various walking trees and tree-men in medieval Welsh and Old Norse literature. He explores the Old English word ent, meaning “giant,” and finds several connections with trees and Tolkien’s Ents, including a tenth-century homily associating entas with trees. Christopher T. Vaccaro in “‘And One White Tree’: The Cosmological Cross and the Arbor Vitae in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion” (Mallorn 42: 23-28) finds both these biblical symbols reflected in the White Tree of Gondor. The lone white tree, an important symbol of virtue to Tolkien as far back as Telperion and Nimloth in the Silmarillion, also reflects Yggdrasil in Norse mythology. Other brief articles suggesting possible sources include “A Note on Beren and Lúthien’s Disguise as Werewolf and Vampire-Bat” by Thomas Honegger (Tolkien Studies 1: 171-75)—a similarly disguised couple appear in the Middle English romance William of Palerne—and “Possible Echoes of Blackwood and Dunsany in Tolkien’s Fantasy” by Dale J. Nelson (Tolkien Studies 1: 177-81)—the Nazgûl resemble Blackwood’s Wendigo, and the Mewlips (in the poem of that title) resemble Dunsany’s Gibbelins. Jen Stevens in “From Catastrophe to Eucatastrophe: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Transformation of Ovid’s Mythic Pyramus and Thisbe into Beren and Lúthien” (Chance 119-32) demonstrates more differences between the stories than similarities, and does not offer any suggestion that Tolkien was actually influenced by Ovid. Ruth Morse begins “Lords of the Ring: Tolkien, Beowulf, and the Memory of Song” (The Medieval Book and a Modern Collector, ed. Takami Matsunda, Richard A. Linenthal, and John Scahill (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 2004): 481-96) by expressing an interest in the pervasive effect of The Lord of the Rings on contemporary readings of Beowulf, but the bulk of her essay is a critique of Tolkien’s balancing of pagan and Christian elements in the story in comparison to that in Beowulf. Tolkien used Beowulf as an exemplar to preserve and present medieval social behavior, but Morse finds that Tolkien’s Christianity gets in the way of his re-created pagan civilization. His treatment of heroic boasting and of moral questions such as fate and revenge are, in Morse’s view, muted, sentimentalized, and mixed with nostalgia for rural modern England. Janet Brennan Croft writes “‘Bid the Tree Unfix His Earth-Bound Root’: Motifs from Macbeth in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings” (Seven 21: 47-59), and finds a lot of them. Tolkien transforms several prophecies 342

The Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies 2004 from Macbeth and makes them more vivid. Tolkien’s trees literally march to war; Macduff ’s “none of woman born,” which feels like a cheat (you cannot tell that about Macduff by looking at him), is transformed into Éowyn being obviously “no living man.” Galadriel’s mirror and the hobbits’ vision of kings in the Barrow-mound also echo prophecies in Macbeth. The responsibility of stewardship is key to both works. Croft also notes some stylistic echoes. RELIGIOUS AND DEVOTIONAL In The Battle for Middle-earth: Tolkien’s Divine Design in The Lord of the Rings (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), Fleming Rutledge surveys the story scene by scene in search of what she calls Tolkien’s “deep narrative.” This refers to the moral and theological dimensions of the work. Rutledge misses some spots, and shows impatience with the parts of the book not relevant to her thesis, but makes strong and repeated points about Tolkien’s craft. Rutledge finds the chapter “The Shadow of the Past” to be vital to her arguments; most of her important points are expressed relatively early in the book, which becomes a bit repetitious later on. She emphasizes themes such as leadership and friendship as much as moral responsibility per se. In the context of the balance of providence and free will, she notes cues in Tolkien’s syntax indicating the placement of volition and responsibility regarding such matters as desire for and use of the Ring. She argues that by creating a world without formal religion, Tolkien emphasizes the importance of good works over faith. Many biblical parallels are drawn, but Rutledge emphasizes that these are parallels and echoes, not attempts to paint Tolkien’s characters as embodiments of Christ. Rutledge also draws applicability to recent world events in the course of arguing that while the protagonists always strive for moral behavior, neither they nor the author call themselves good or virtuous by definition. Rutledge’s book therefore serves as a strong antidote to recent attempts to enlist Tolkien in the self-definedly righteous War on Terror. “Holy Elven Light: A Religious Influence on The Lord of the Rings” by Aaron R. Davis (Studies in Fantasy Literature 1: 3-11) reads like a summary of Rutledge. Davis addresses sacraments, mercy, providence, and temptation, but where Rutledge seeks the roots of The Lord of the Rings in The Hobbit, Davis uses The Silmarillion, drawing from it a discussion of the nature of evil. David R. Loy and Linda Goodhew’s survey, The Dharma of Dragons and Daemons: Buddhist Themes in Modern Fantasy (Boston: Wisdom, 2004), devotes a chapter to “The Dharma of Engagement: J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings” (19-46). Beginning with the assumption that Tolkien’s story is a violent tale about killing all the bad guys, Loy and Goodhew appear surprised to find a nuanced sense of moral balance, a hesitation 343

David Bratman over violence, a theme of renunciation, and other values consistent with Buddhist teachings. Tolkien’s story demonstrates the workings of the theologically difficult concept of karma. Gandalf in particular may serve as an example for Buddhists on their own spiritual quests. “‘Light from an Invisible Lamp’: Natural Religion in The Lord of the Rings” by Catherine Madsen (Chance 35-47) was originally published in 1988. Madsen disputes the currently popular activity of finding Christian symbolism in the story. She argues that echoes of Catholic ritual and hierarchy do not form a Catholic ethos without Catholic doctrine, notably absent in a fictional world without revealed scripture or formal religion. As a non-believer, Madsen finds that Tolkien’s work speaks directly to her condition, and wishes not to so limit it. It takes some selective quotation to maintain this position in full, but Madsen makes an interesting argument of it. Jeffrey L. Morrow presents “J.R.R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis in Light of Hans Urs von Balthasar” (Renascence 56.3: 180-96). He discusses each author’s view of theological aesthetics, in Tolkien’s case the theory of sub-creation as an artistic expression of theological impulses. Tolkien and Lewis discussed the theology of fantasy in particular, while von Balthasar offers a broader perspective compatible with both of the others. “From The Lord of the Rings to the Table of the Lord: Reflections on Eucatastrophe and Eucharistic Community in J.R.R. Tolkien” by Annie Stevens (Tennessee Philological Bulletin 41: 6-13) is the presidential address of the Tennessee Philological Association. Stevens cites some points of Christian applicability in The Lord of the Rings, notably sacrificial love and benedictions. TOLKIEN’S SUB-CREATION The Science of Middle-earth by Henry Gee (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Press, 2004) is a collection of short, separable essays, in somewhat random order, in the service of a larger thesis. As a science writer, Gee is out to show how science is an approach to understanding the world rather than a collection of facts or a received dogma. He wishes to use the delicacy and enigma of Tolkien’s sub-creation to illustrate the same factors in science. The book begins with a description of Tolkien’s interest in science, shown by the discussions of science and science fiction in The Notion Club Papers and by describing Tolkien’s profession of philology as itself a science. The key chapter is chapter 17, “Indistinguishable from Magic,” summarizing evidence both in The Lord of the Rings and in supplementary material that the Elves are masters of advanced technology. What distinguishes them from typical primaryworld technophiles are the high level and hence unobtrusiveness of their technology and their distinct spiritual approach to it. Various chapters 344

The Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies 2004 analyze scientific aspects of Middle-earth, such as its botany, or postulate scientific explanations for Middle-earth’s natural history or technology, such as Galadriel’s phial or the palantíri. Many of Gee’s explanations are surprisingly effective, such as for dragons’ fire (they breathe ether, which is not only inflammable and hard to extinguish but, pre-ignition, intoxicates those who come near, explaining dragons’ glamour); others, such as a comparison of the resiliency of Frodo’s mithril coat to that of Silly Putty, may seem a bit irreverent. Where no serious explanation is possible, Gee often uses the subject as the start for an essay on science: thus, the chapter on oliphaunts discusses the square-cube law and that on Ents discusses species variation and forest ecology. Gee has no difficulty disposing of Balrogs’ wings, and finds the presence of New World plants to be perfectly explicable, but has to give up over the One Ring’s power of invisibility. The Culture of Middle-earth: Everyday Life in Tolkien’s World by F. MacDonald Kells (Carlton South, Victoria: Bread Street Press, 2004) attempts to extrapolate a variety of social customs in Middle-earth by combining clues from The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion with relevant primary-world material. The book has some occasional useful observations, such as one on the frequency of chess metaphors in Tolkien’s work. But the topics are scattered and random, are often derived from very slim, misread, or even facetious evidence, and the primary world material is often presented undigested. Kells alternates inexplicably between very hypothetical speculations on off-stage events and presumptions that if an action is not shown on-stage, it must not have happened at all. The former assumption leads to detailed descriptions of hobbits’ sporting activities; the latter leads to doubts about the existence of hobbit sexual reproduction or excretion. The third edition of J.E.A. Tyler’s Middle-earth encyclopedia is titled The Complete Tolkien Companion (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004). Like its first two, pre- and post-Silmarillion, versions, this is a fairly reliable source but distinctly a second choice for most Tolkienists to Robert Foster’s Complete Guide to Middle-earth. Tyler has more evaluative commentary than Foster but less detail, more omissions, and hardly any page references. The new edition includes entries from Unfinished Tales, twenty-four years after that book was published, but ignores almost everything else published since then, whether it fits into the Lord of the Rings iteration of the legendarium or not. Tyler claims he has dropped his earlier pretence that Middle-earth is real, but entries like that for Orcs, identifying them as the true origin of mythic goblins, are still written from that perspective. The greater part of Tolkien’s Mythology for England: A Middle-earth Companion by Edward Wainwright (Hockwold-cum-Wilton, Norfolk: AngloSaxon Books, 2004) is an alphabetical encyclopedia of people, places, 345

David Bratman things, and concepts in The Lord of the Rings, describing their function in the plot and providing suggested mythic analogues and analyses of the meanings of their names in Anglo-Saxon or Old Norse. A chart finds a resemblance between Tengwar and Anglo-Saxon bookhand letters. Wainwright’s principal interest is in the mythology, but he discusses its connection to England with no apparent knowledge of the posthumously-published Silmarillion frame stories. However, the tracing of Germanic names is quite skillful and in depth if not quite comprehensive, and this forms the book’s principal usefulness. A long list of fifty-four names of the Rohirrim with translations from the Mercian into both standard Anglo-Saxon elements and Modern English is particularly notable (7071). Many of the mythic analogues are also interesting. Unfortunately the book is confusingly organized: many of the entry name choices and categorizations into larger entries are arbitrary, and cross-references are not always given. There is no index. “Tolkien as Philologist” by David Lyle Jeffrey (Chance 61-78), originally published in 1980, is an exercise in speculative etymology. Noting that Tolkien evokes and refers to Germanic languages in some of his created names, Jeffrey dissects various names from The Lord of the Rings (some of them actually Germanic, some of them Elvish), finds Anglo-Saxon or Old Norse roots that sound similar to him, with much less skill or assurance than Wainwright (in part because he appears not to be aware that the Rohirrim use Mercian), and discusses the meaning of the names that he has deduced in this manner. Tony Steele in “The Chronology of Middle-earth” (Mallorn 42: 4346) reports his discovery that a new age in Theosophical doctrine began 6462 years after the date they assign to the sinking of Atlantis; as Tolkien’s Second and Third Ages also total to 6462 years, Steele considers this not attributable to coincidence. With sufficient fudging the Theosophical dates are compatible with Tolkien’s various estimates of The Lord of the Rings as occurring six to eight thousand years ago. Steele concludes that Tolkien was therefore interested in Theosophy; the Sun rose in 10,160 B.C., and the War of the Ring took place in 3105-3104 B.C., concluding the legendarium at roughly the date of the founding of the Egyptian Old Kingdom. “A Precious Case from Middle Earth” by Nadia Bashir et al (BMJ 329: 1435-36) is an entirely deadpan study by six medical students and a gerontological psychiatrist at University College London, briefly presenting Gollum’s case history (indiscriminately mixing characteristics from the books and films) and tentatively diagnosing him with schizoid personality disorder.

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The Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies 2004 TOLKIENIAN LINGUISTICS AND TRANSLATION STUDIES A Gateway to Sindarin: A Grammar of an Elvish Language from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings by David Salo (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2004) is a full-length grammar of a reconstructed form of this language. The text includes the language’s (internal Middle-earth) history, phonology, alphabets, and bilingual glossaries, as well as grammar in the narrower sense: vocabulary, word forms, compounds, syntax, and mutation. Some of this material is thorough, but some is fragmentary. Salo wishes to present Sindarin in the form appearing in The Lord of the Rings, but the relevant corpus is very small, so he has been forced to draw material from Tolkien’s related imaginary language conceptions, notably the Noldorin of the Etymologies. Salo attempts to normalize this and other sources into what he calls Classical Sindarin. But the problem with using laws of linguistic development to do this is that Noldorin is not a related language in the internal history of Middle-earth, as Salo treats it, but an earlier stage in the external history of Tolkien’s imagination, and their relationship in aspects Tolkien never made explicit is unknowable. Some extant information is omitted or changed for not fitting Salo’s theories; nor has Salo always marked his postulates and extrapolations, though he identifies his purely hypothesized forms. Other Elvish scholars maintain that presenting any Elvish language in a fixed form falsifies Tolkien’s ever-changing conceptions, and have dubbed Salo’s language “Neo-Sindarin.” Salo’s “Heroism and Alienation through Language in The Lord of the Rings” (The Medieval Hero on Screen: Representations from Beowulf to Buffy, ed. Martha W. Driver and Sid Ray [Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004]: 2337) describes Tolkien’s invented languages as providing a combination of an alien quality and—through their relationship with primary-world languages and history—a touch of familiarity. Their detailed development gives them a sense of being historically authentic. This article treats Tolkien and Jackson as co-equal creators, but Salo does not discuss his own work creating Elvish texts for Jackson. Alexandra Velten in “The Soundtrack Lyrics of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: A Legitimate ‘Translation’ of Tolkien?” (Honegger 21343) prints a large number of lyrics in Salo’s Neo-Sindarin and other languages, with English translations, noting their source material in the book and comparing the role of untranslated invented languages in book and films. In Tolkien translation studies, the major work this year was Translating Tolkien: Text and Film. Thomas Honegger, the volume’s editor, writes “The Westron Turned into Modern English: The Translator and Tolkien’s Web of Languages” (Honegger 1-20). He briefly describes Tolkien’s 347

David Bratman use of different registers of English and different languages related to English to represent the fictional Westron and its related languages in The Lord of the Rings. He points out the challenge to translators of finding analogous webs of language in their own tongues to represent this, but does not discuss how actual translators have approached the problem. Some of the papers compare different translations into the same language. Rainer Nagel in “‘The New One Wants to Assimilate the Alien’— Different Interpretations of a source Text as a Reason for Controversy: The ‘Old’ and the ‘New’ German Translations of The Lord of the Rings” (Honegger 21-52) and Danny Orbach in “The Israeli Translation Controversy: What About and Where To?” (Honegger 53-66) both describe situations in which translations are divided primarily by linguistic tone. Newer translations adopt a more contemporary style, easier to read and designed to attract younger readers, but losing the formal evocative diction which fans of the older translations consider more in Tolkien’s spirit even if the translation is less technically accurate. Orbach provides no examples, discussing tone in broad terms and including contributions by defenders of each of the two Hebrew translations stating their positions. Nagel provides examples without back-translation, requiring a command of German to fully understand his points. Nagel also writes “The Treatment of Proper Names in the German Edition(s) of The Lord of the Rings as an Example of Norms in Translation Practice” (Honegger 93113), discussing both the general problem of whether to translate proper names and the particular practice of both German translations. Mark T. Hooker’s “Dutch Samizdat: The Mensink-van Warmelo Translation of The Lord of the Rings” (Honegger 83-92) compares this with the standard Schuchart translation in terms of accuracy in detail and in small stylistic markers. In “Estne Tolkien Latine Reddendus?: A Light-Hearted Look at Some of the Challenges” (Honegger 67-82), Richard Sturch presents a speculative study, with some examples, of the difficulties of rendering The Lord of the Rings into Latin. In particular he notes the difficulties of choosing appropriate inflected endings for untranslated names and the wide difference between Tolkien’s rhetorical style and that of classical Latin. “Tolkien in Swedish Translation: from Hompen to Ringarnas herre” by Anders Stenström (Beregond) (Honegger 115-24) is a brief history of the subject, from a 1947 Hobbit through the many translations by the controversial Åke Ohlmarks to the preparation, in progress as the article was written, of a second translation of The Lord of the Rings. RECEPTION STUDIES, CRITICISM OF SECONDARY WORK, AND BIBLIOGRAPHY Marcel Bülles in “Tolkien Criticism—Reloaded” (Hither Shore 1: 15-23) directly addresses Tolkien criticism itself. His is essentially an argument 348

The Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies 2004 that The Lord of the Rings should be judged by standards appropriate to the work itself: knowledge of Tolkien’s life and the circumstances in which he worked, of his sources and how he viewed them, and of how he categorized and viewed his own work. Bülles also calls for thorough studies of Tolkien’s audience reception, considering this a largely untrodden field. “The Trouble with Tolkien” by Ethan Gilsdorf (Common Review 2.4: 12-19) is a journalistic article marshaling Tolkien scholars such as Tom Shippey, Jane Chance, and Michael Drout to argue that Tolkien is worth taking seriously: his audience is broad and diverse, his work tackles serious themes. Gilsdorf makes an interesting point by citing the detail of the sub-creation to show that Middle-earth “is not a fantasy vacuum” (15). “Reaching for the Ring” by Scott McLemee (Chronicle of Higher Education 4 June 2004: A11-A13) makes a similar journalistic argument to an academic audience. McLemee lets his interviewees, Chance and Drout, make the point that Tolkien is a legitimate and fruitful topic for serious literary research. “An Anglo-Saxonist Gets His Fifteen Minutes, or, What Happens When the Media Briefly Pay Attention” (Old English Newsletter 37.3: 34-37) is Drout’s personal account of the flurry arising over the announcement of his plans to edit Tolkien’s translations of Beowulf. Published reports distorted this into a false claim that Drout had discovered the translations, and as a result the project was put on hold. Caroline Galwey’s “Reasons for Not Liking Tolkien” (Mallorn 42: 510) is specifically a response to “Reasons for Liking Tolkien” by Jenny Turner (London Review of Books 15 Nov 2002: 15-24). Using Turner as an example, Galwey seeks the un-expressed reasons many literary critics detest Tolkien. She finds them in a distrust of Romanticism, a misapplication of Freudianism, and a hidden Puritan work ethic that requires literature to be useful and obviously relevant if it is to have value. “Byte-Sized Middle Ages: Tolkien, Film, and the Digital Imagination” by Courtney M. Booker (Comitatus 35: 145-74) is a limited but provocative study in the development of reader reception of The Lord of the Rings. Booker recounts in detail the history of how role-playing fantasy games and computer games were developed by Tolkien-reading wargamers and computer programmers. The popularity of these has led to younger readers perceiving the book through the imagery and plot structure of videogames. The Jackson films are made in this style, and Booker suggests that for this reason they seem faithful to the book’s spirit to videogame-oriented readers but not to older readers who grew up associating it with different imagery. As Tolkien’s book (and now the films) have become a principal lens through which to view the Middle Ages, Booker notes that student preconceptions about that period are derived 349

David Bratman from these sources as well. One of these preconceptions is specifically derived from Tolkien: a lack of awareness of “the deep corporate religiosity of the era” (148). Olga Markova’s “When Philology Becomes Ideology: The Russian Perspective of J.R.R. Tolkien” (Tolkien Studies 1: 163-70) is a brief history of Tolkien’s reception in Russia in the form of a translation study. Markova describes how early translators attempted to assimilate Tolkien’s works into the categories of science fiction or fairy tale to make them less politically dangerous, and notes the rise of Tolkien-based role-playing games. About forty pages of the collectors’ guide The Essential J.R.R. Tolkien Sourcebook by George Beahm (Franklin Lakes, NJ: New Page Books, 2004) cover books by and about Tolkien. Most of the rest describes medallions, chess sets, bookends, swords, and so forth. A whole chapter concerns replicas of the One Ring, and there are lengthy accounts of several Tolkien-inspired artists. The book is fairly reliable, much more accurate than Treasures from the Misty Mountains by James H. Gillam. Good beginners’ guides cover the essentials of book and autograph collecting, and copyright issues. But the book is sketchy, with inadequate descriptions, holes in its coverage (notably of recorded musical adaptations), and is already significantly obsolete. “Tolkien Worldwide” by Shaun F. D. Hughes (MFS 50: 980-1014) is a lengthy review article dealing with books on Tolkien from Iceland, France, Germany, and Poland (the first three of these in their countries’ native languages), as well as three books in English (Tolkien and the Great War by John Garth, plus two covered in this article, War and the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien by Janet Brennan Croft and Tolkien and the Invention of Myth edited by Jane Chance). Hughes sharply criticizes the German writer Guido Schwarz for charging Tolkien as fascist and racist, but otherwise finds the books mostly admirable. He concludes that Tolkien studies are in good shape and rapidly diversifying. “Letting the Catholic Out of the Baggins” by Joseph Pearce (Chronicles Jan. 2004: 26-27) is a review column noting the development of Christian studies of Tolkien, listing several, and praising three Catholic books in particular. Two articles on fan fiction inspired by The Lord of the Rings, both book and film, were published in the context of film studies. “Tales Around the Internet Campfire: Fan Fiction in Tolkien’s Universe” (Croft 259-82) by Susan Booker is a general discussion of the impulses that lead to the writing and reading of fan fiction, using The Lord of the Rings more as an example than discussing it specifically. “Make Mine ‘Movieverse’: How the Tolkien Fan Fiction Community Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Peter Jackson” by Amy H. Sturgis (Croft 283-305) is a detailed discussion of individual fan fiction writers, their choice of film or book context, and 350

The Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies 2004 their reaction to both. “A Tolkien Checklist: Selected Criticism 1981-2004” by Richard C. West (MFS 50: 1015-28) is an important supplement to West’s standard bibliography of Tolkien secondary literature, Tolkien Criticism: An Annotated Checklist (1970, rev. 1981). Unlike the earlier book, it is selective. It is an annotated evaluative list, divided into subject categories, of West’s choice of the best literature on Tolkien’s fiction from these dates: about forty books, including essay collections, and some twenty-seven additional essays and articles. “Tom Shippey on J.R.R. Tolkien: A Checklist” compiled by Douglas A. Anderson (Tolkien Studies 1: 17-20) lists two books, twenty-three critical articles, and twenty-two other items (reviews, forewords, interviews) by the most distinguished of Tolkien scholars. The present journal also published its first installment, covering two years, of recent Tolkien primary and secondary material, “Bibliography (in English) for 2001-2002,” compiled by Michael D. C. Drout with Laura Kalafarski and Stefanie Olsen (Tolkien Studies 1: 183-89). “The A-Z of Teaching Tolkien: Gollum as a Case Study” by Colin Gibson (English in Aotearoa 53: 57-60) was not seen by this reviewer. FILM STUDIES With the release of Peter Jackson’s Return of the King in December 2003, critics now have a full set of his Lord of the Rings films to study, and publications consequently flourished. Two and a half books, plus some separate articles, of comparative film-book studies were published in 2004. Evaluations varied, but many of the judgments were strongly averse to Jackson. The importance of this work was underlined by the many flailing, off-the-mark negative reviews these studies received from Jackson fans: bizarre claims that it was somehow illegitimate to study the films without waiting for the last Extended Edition (Jackson himself said that he wished his work to be judged by the theatrical releases), that only trained film scholars could evaluate the cinematic necessity of Jackson’s piquant additions to the story (much of the best Tolkien scholarship has come from amateurs rather than trained literature scholars), that there is no audience for a negative critique of Jackson (a thinly disguised demand that negative critics shut up), and so forth and so on. Despite the preference of Jackson fans that nobody say anything negative about their favorite movies, there are many articles here, both negative and positive in evaluation, some of them of only tangential relevance to Tolkien. Most valuable are direct comparisons of themes and characters in book and films, most of them perforce quite critical of Jackson, though some maintain that he succeeds on his own terms or tells a story close in character to the Silmarillion if not to The Lord of the Rings. 351

David Bratman Studies of Jackson’s films as independent works of art without reference to Tolkien have also begun to appear, but these are not covered here. Much of the material comparing Jackson and Tolkien is in the form of direct comparisons of elements in the films with elements in the book. Peter Jackson in Perspective: The Power Behind Cinema’s The Lord of the Rings by Greg Wright (Burien, WA: Hollywood Jesus Books, 2004) collects Wright’s online essays from 2001 to 2004 comparing various points, always trying to understand Jackson’s narrative goals and judging his moral effects in comparison to Tolkien’s. Many of the other articles also concentrate on the tone of the storytelling, such as Kayla McKinney Wiggins’s “The Art of the Story-Teller and the Person of the Hero” (Croft 103-22), which declares that Jackson “ignores character and story in favor of action and visuals” (104). Others of this kind include Janet Brennan Croft’s “Mithril Coats and Tin Ears: ‘Anticipation’ and ‘Flattening’ in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings Trilogy” (Croft 63-80) and Øystein Høgset’s “The Adaptation of The Lord of the Rings: A Critical Comment” (Honegger 165-80), which are also strongly critical, and Tom Shippey’s “Another Road to Middle-earth: Jackson’s Movie Trilogy” (Zimbardo and Isaacs 233-54), which attempts to find explanations and excuses for Jackson. Other critical articles concentrate on characterization, of which “Humiliated Heroes: Peter Jackson’s Interpretation of The Lord of the Rings” by Anthony S. Burdge and Jessica Burke (Honegger 135-64) is particularly notable for a detailed comparison of both Jackson’s and Tolkien’s characters against the template of Northrop Frye’s narrative modes. Burdge and Burke conclude that Jackson’s characters exist in a limited modern ironic mode in place of Tolkien’s variety of heroic modes. In “Frodo on Film: Peter Jackson’s Problematic Portrayal” (Croft 123-48), the late Daniel Timmons called that portrayal one of lack of initiative or strength of character. Christopher Garbowski’s “Life as a Journey: The Spiritual Dimension in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings” (Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 6, electronically published) specifically addresses that aspect of characterization in the films. Some authors offer a straight accounting of changes made by Jackson without really addressing whether they approve or discussing why the changes were made. These include three studies of particular themes in the story, all identified in the articles’ titles: Judith Kollmann’s “Elisions and Ellipses: Counsel and Council in Tolkien’s and Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings” (Croft 149-71), Cathy Akers-Jordan’s “Fairy Princess or Tragic Heroine?: The Metamorphosis of Arwen Undómiel in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings Films” (Croft 195-213), and James Dunning’s “The Professor and the Director and Good vs. Evil in Middle-earth” (Honegger 181-212).

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The Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies 2004 Jane Chance in “Tolkien’s Women (and Men): The Films and the Book” (Croft 175-93) finds that Jackson tells a story more characteristic of Tolkien’s broader mythology than the “hobbito-centric” (Tolkien’s word) book is. Similarly, Maureen Thum in “The ‘Sub-subcreation’ of Galadriel, Arwen, and Éowyn: Women of Power in Tolkien’s and Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings” (Croft 231-56) argues that these three women in Jackson reflect Tolkien’s view of women of power. Somewhat in contrast to these, Victoria Gaydosik in “‘Crimes Against the Book’?: The Transformation of Tolkien’s Arwen from Page to Screen and the Abandonment of the Psyche Archetype” (Croft 215-30) offers a theoretical discussion of the transformation of Arwen into a warrior woman and the difficulty of writing a less active heroine in today’s aesthetic. Diana Paxson in “Re-Vision: The Lord of the Rings in Print and on Screen” (Croft 81-99) gives a uniquely in-depth comparison of Tolkien’s and Jackson’s evolution of their stories. Vincent Ferré in “Tolkien, Our Judge of Peter Jackson” (Honegger 125-33) briefly considers Jackson and Bakshi in the light of Tolkien’s critique of the 1958 film treatment. “Summa Jacksonica: A Reply to Defenses of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings Films, after St. Thomas Aquinas” (Croft 27-62) by David Bratman emphasizes a meta-argument, not addressing the films directly so much as attempting to justify the legitimacy and relevance of criticism of the films for their departures from the book. Though published in the special Tolkien issue of MFS, “Beyond Black and White: Race and Postmodernism in The Lord of the Rings Films” by Sue Kim (MFS 50: 875-907) is, as its subtitle states, primarily concerned with Jackson’s films, though Tolkien’s book also falls under Kim’s sweeping condemnation of her perception of black versus white symbolism and good versus evil morality. Kim exercises herself a great deal over the socio-economics of the New Zealand film industry and the casting of minority actors to play evil characters. Despite its credit line, “Graham Fuller hails Peter Jackson’s monumental Tolkien triptych,” Fuller’s “Kingdom Come” (Film Comment 40: 24-29) is one of many journalistic articles purely about Jackson with only incidental reference to Tolkien. Noting that Tolkien’s story is a single narrative and not a trilogy, Fuller finds the films similarly cumulative and thus prefers to describe them as a triptych. Richard Alleva in “Peter Jackson’s Sorcery: ‘The Lord of the Rings’ Trilogy” (Commonweal 30 Jan. 2004: 20-21) uses Jackson’s fast-moving epic as a club to bash Tolkien’s boring old book, citing Éowyn’s challenge of the Nazgûl as an example of Jackson’s women being more commanding than Tolkien’s, despite the fact that here Jackson is following Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings: The Films, the Books, the Radio Series by Jim Smith and J. Clive Matthews (London: Virgin, 2004) stands apart from other 353

David Bratman film studies for, although more than half of it concerns Jackson’s films, it is a survey of all film and radio adaptations of Tolkien, even obscure ones, up to the time of writing. (Thus, like Tolkien on Film, this book omits discussion of the then-unreleased extended edition of Jackson’s third film, though since Smith and Matthews are largely favorable to Jackson, perhaps in this case it will not be considered a flaw by Jackson’s defenders.) Each adaptation is treated as an independent work, with descriptions of its creators, cast, and production values. Each work’s approach as an adaptation of Tolkien is also discussed in detail. Evaluation is mostly from a film critic’s perspective. Smith and Matthews hold Jackson’s to be by far the best adaptation, and though they show great sensitivity to Tolkien’s intent, they also tend to view Jackson’s plot and character changes as fixes for inherent flaws in the book. PARODIES Two Tolkien parodies in book form were published this year, both of The Silmarillion: The Sillymarillion by D. R. Lloyd (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Press, 2004) and The Sellamillion by Adam Roberts, under the byline “A.R.R.R. Roberts” (London: Gollancz, 2004). Roberts’s work follows the style of his earlier The Soddit, achieving humor in outsized digressions but often turning serious. A frame section of invented documents lampoons Tolkien’s relationships with his publishers and C. S. Lewis. It contains some pastiches cross-fertilizing Tolkien with other authors. Lloyd’s work is more in the style of Bored of the Rings by Henry N. Beard and Douglas C. Kenney, exaggerating The Silmarillion’s prose style with many references to American commercial brand names. One very short article, “The Lord of the Rings: A Source-Critical Analysis” by Mark Shea (Croft 309-11), is a parody of higher criticism in the form of a comparison of Tolkien and Jackson by postmodern source critics, presuming knowledge of their sources and hidden agendas.

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Bibliography (in English) for 2005 Compiled by Michael D. C. Drout, Rebecca Epstein, and Kathryn Paar PRIMARY SOURCES Sisam, Kenneth, and J.R.R. Tolkien. A Middle English Reader and Vocabulary. New York: Dover, 2005. [A reprint of Sisam’s Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose (1921), and Tolkien’s A Middle English Vocabulary (1922) as first combined in 1923]. Tolkien, J.R.R. “Eldarin Hands, Fingers & Numerals and Related Writings— Part One,” ed. Patrick H. Wynne. Vinyar Tengwar, no. 47 (Feb. 2005): 3-42. ———. “Eldarin Hands, Fingers & Numerals and Related Writings—Parts Two and Three,” ed. Patrick H. Wynne. Vinyar Tengwar, no. 48 (Dec. 2005): 4-34. ———. Smith of Wootton Major: Extended Edition, ed. Verlyn Flieger. London: HarperCollins, 2005. BOOKS Abanes, Richard. Harry Potter, Narnia, and “The Lord of the Rings.” Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 2005. Arthur, Sarah. Walking with Bilbo: A Devotional Adventure through “The Hobbit.” Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 2005. Burns, Marjorie. Perilous Realms: Celtic and Norse in Tolkien’s Middle-earth. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. Caldecott, Stratford. The Power of the Ring: The Spiritual Vision Behind “The Lord of the Rings.” New York: Crossroad, 2005. [Revised edition. Originally published as Secret Fire: The Spiritual Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien. London: Darton Longman & Todd, 2003.] Chance, Jane, and Alfred K. Siewers, eds. Tolkien’s Modern Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Collins, David R. J.R.R. Tolkien. Minneapolis: Lerner, 2005 [Revised edition of his 1992 book of the same title]. Crawshaw, Richard, Ian Collier, and Andrew Butler, eds. The Tolkien Society Guide to Oxford. Cheltenham: Tolkien Society, 2005. Copyright © West Virginia University Press

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Bibliography for 2005 Crum, C. N. Tolkien’s Mighty Pen: How God Rules Middle-earth. Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2005. Eaglestone, Robert, ed. Reading “The Lord of the Rings”: New Writings on Tolkien’s Classic. London and New York: Continuum, 2005. Flieger, Verlyn. Interrupted Music: The Making of Tolkien’s Mythology. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2005. Hammond, Wayne G. and Christina Scull. The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion. London: HarperCollins, 2005; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. Honegger, Thomas, ed. Reconsidering Tolkien. Zurich: Walking Tree Press, 2005. Kohman, Catherine, ed. Lembas for the Soul: How “The Lord of the Rings” Enriches Everyday Life. Yellville, AR: Whitehall Publishing, 2005. Kreeft, Peter. The Philosophy of Tolkien: The Worldview Behind “The Lord of the Rings.” San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005. Lee, Stuart D., and Elizabeth Solopova. The Keys of Middle-earth: Discovering Medieval Literature through the Fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien. Basingstoke, Hampshire, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Lewis, Alex, and Elizabeth Currie. The Forsaken Realms of Tolkien: Tolkien and the Medieval Tradition. [Oswestry]: Medea Publishing, 2005. Lobdell, Jared C. The Rise of Tolkienian Fantasy. LaSalle and Chicago: Open Court, 2005. McNew, Cynthia L., ed. More People’s Guide to J.R.R. Tolkien. Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Press, 2005. Mikkelsen, Nina. Powerful Magic: Learning from Children’s Responses to Fantasy Literature. New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 2005. Newsom, William Chad. Talking of Dragons: The Children’s Books of J.R.R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. Fearn, Ross-shire: Christian Focus, 2005. Pearce, Joseph. Literary Giants, Literary Catholics. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005. Porter, Lynnette R. Unsung Heroes of “The Lord of the Rings”: From the Page to the Screen. Westport, CT; London: Praeger, 2005. Turner, Allan. Translating Tolkien: Philological Elements in “The Lord of the Rings.” Frankfurt and New York: Peter Lang, 2005. Wrigley, Christopher. Return of the Hero. Lewes: Book Guild Publishing, 2005. 356

Bibliography for 2005 ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS Anderson, Douglas A. “J.R.R. Tolkien and W. Rhys Roberts’s ‘Gerald of Wales on the Survival of Welsh.’” Tolkien Studies 2 (2005): 230-34. ———. “Obituary: Humphrey Carpenter (1946-2005).” Tolkien Studies 2 (2005): 217-24. ———. “Richard C. West: A Checklist.” Tolkien Studies 2 (2005): 11-14. Ankeny, Rebecca. “Poem as Sign in The Lord of the Rings.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 16, no. 2 (2005): 86-95. Aronstein, Susan. “The Medieval Hero on Screen: Representations from Beowulf to Buffy.” Arthuriana 15, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 67-68. Atkins, Barry. “Games.” In Eaglestone, ed. 151-61. Barker, Martin J. “The Lord of the Rings and ‘Identification’: A Critical Encounter.” European Journal of Communication 20, no. 3 (2005): 353-78. Bratman, David. “The Year’s Work in Tolkien Studies: 2001-2002.” Tolkien Studies 2 (2005): 289-315. Brisbois, Michael J. “Tolkien’s Imaginary Nature: An Analysis of the Structure of Middle-earth.” Tolkien Studies 2 (2005): 197-216. Caldecott, Stratford. “Tolkien’s Elvish England.” Chesterton Review 31:3-4 (Fall-Winter 2005): 109-23. Chance, Jane. “Tolkien and the Other: Race and Gender in the Middle Earth.” In Chance and Siewers, eds. 171-86. ———. “Tolkien’s Women (and Men): The Films and the Book.” Mallorn: The Journal of the Tolkien Society 43 (2005): 30-37. Coffman, D. Franklin, Jr. “Moral Law, Secondary Worlds, and Crossed Planes: Some Thoughts upon the Nature of Fantasy.” Studies in Fantasy Literature 3 (2005): 13-18. Crocker, Holly A. “Masculinity.” In Eaglestone, ed. 111-23. Cunningham, Michael. “A History of Song: The Transmission of Memory in Middle-earth.” Mallorn: The Journal of the Tolkien Society 43 (2005): 27-29. Dawson, Deidre. “English, Welsh, and Elvish: Language, Loss, and Cultural Recovery in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.” In Chance and Siewers, eds. 105-20. de Goldi, Kate. “Blaming Tolkien.” New Zealand Books 15, no. 1 (2005): 22-23. 357

Bibliography for 2005 Drew, Bernard A. “Tolkien, J.R.R.” In Bernard A. Drew, ed. 100 Most Popular Genre Fiction Authors: Biographical Sketches and Bibliographies. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2005. 557-62. Drout, Michael D. C. “Towards a Better Tolkien Criticism.” In Eaglestone, ed. 15-29. Dufau, Jean-Christophe. “Mythic Space in Tolkien’s Work (The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and The Silmarillion).” In Honegger, ed. 107-28. Eaglestone, Robert. “Introduction.” In Eaglestone, ed. 1-11. ———. “Invisibility.” In Eaglestone, ed. 73-84. Ellison, John. “The Road Goes Ever On: Tolkien’s Use of the ‘Journey’ Motive in Constructing The Lord of the Rings.” Mallorn: The Journal of the Tolkien Society 43 (2005): 15-19. Finn, Richard J. “Arthur and Aragorn: Arthurian Influence in The Lord of the Rings.” Mallorn: The Journal of the Tolkien Society 43 (2005): 23-26. Fisher, Leona. “From Alice to Harry Potter: Children’s Fantasy in England.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 30, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 212-15. Flieger, Verlyn. “A Postmodern Medievalist?” In Chance and Siewers, eds. 17-28. ———. “What Good is Fantasy?” In Chesterton Review, 31:3-4 (Fall-Winter 2005): 217-21. Ford, Judy Ann. “The White City: The Lord of the Rings as an Early Medieval Myth of the Restoration of the Roman Empire.” Tolkien Studies 2 (2005): 53-73. Forest-Hill, Lynn. “Elves on the Avon: The Place of Medieval Warwick in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Vision of Middle-earth.” Times Literary Supplement (8 July 2005): 12-13. Fulk, R. D. “Six Cruces in the Finnsburg Fragment and Episode.” Medium Ævum 74, no. 2 (2005): 191-204. Garrido, Gerardo Barajas. “Perspectives on Reality in The Lord of the Rings.” Mallorn: The Journal of the Tolkien Society 43 (2005): 53-59. Goodwin, Jonathan. “A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 51, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 690-92. Greenwood, Linda. “Love: ‘The Gift of Death.’” Tolkien Studies 2 (2005): 171-95. 358

Bibliography for 2005 Gymnich, Marion. “Reconsidering the Linguistics of Middle-earth: Invented Languages and Other Linguistic Features in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.” In Honegger, ed. 7-30. Harries, Elizabeth Wanning. “A Companion to the Fairy Tale.” Marvels & Tales 19, no. 2 (2005): 319-22, 356. Hatlen, Burton. “Pullman’s His Dark Materials, A Challenge to the Fantasies of J.R.R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, with an Epilogue on Pullman’s Neo-Romantic Reading of Paradise Lost.” In Lenz, Millicent and Carole Scott, eds. His Dark Materials Illuminated: Critical Essays on Philip Pullman’s Trilogy. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005. 75-94. Hayles, N. Katherine. “Commentary: The Search for the Human.” New Literary History 36, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 327-33, 335. Heberle, Mark A. “An Inquiry into the Purposes of Speculative FictionFantasy and Truth.” Marvels & Tales 19, no. 1 (2005): 142-45, 154. Hoiem, Elizabeth Massa. “World Creation as Colonization: British Imperialism in ‘Aldarion and Erendis.’” Tolkien Studies 2 (2005): 75-92. Holmes, John R. “Tolkien, Dustsceawung, and the Gnomic Tense: Is Timelessness Medieval or Victorian?” In Chance and Siewers, eds. 43-58. Honegger, Thomas. “Tolkien Through the Eyes of a Mediaevalist.” In Honegger, ed. 45-66. Hoppenstand, Gary. “Editorial: Series(ous) SF Concerns.” Journal of Popular Culture 38, no. 4 (2005): 603-4. Houghton, John Wm., and Neal K. Keesee. “Tolkien, King Alfred, and Boethius: Platonist Views of Evil in The Lord of the Rings.” Tolkien Studies 2 (2005): 131-59. Hunter, John. “The Reanimation of Antiquity and the Resistance to History: Macpherson-Scott-Tolkien.” In Chance and Siewers, eds. 61-75. Jarman, Mark. “A Poem of Pure Enjoyment.” Hudson Review 57:4 (Winter 2005): 693-96, 698-99. Johansen, K.V. “J.R.R. Tolkien.” In Johansen, K. V., ed. Quests and Kingdoms: A Grown-Up’s Guide to Children’s Fantasy Literature. Sackville, New Brunswick: Sybertooth, 2005. 118-35. Kaveney, Roz. “In the Tradition . . .” In Eaglestone, ed. 162-75. Kerry, Paul E. “Thoughts on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and History.” In Honegger, ed. 67-85.

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Bibliography for 2005 Kleinman, Scott. “Service.” In Eaglestone, ed. 138-48. Langford, Barry. “Time.” In Eaglestone, ed. 29-46. Larsen, Kristine. “A Definitive Identification of Tolkien’s ‘Borgil’: An Astronomical and Literary Approach.” Tolkien Studies 2 (2005): 161-70. ———. “Tolkien’s Burning Briar—An Astronomical Explanation.” Mallorn: The Journal of the Tolkien Society 43 (2005): 49-52. Librán-Moreno, Miryam. “Parallel Lives: The Sons of Denethor and the Sons of Telamon.” Tolkien Studies 2 (2005): 15-52. Long, Rebekah. “Fantastic Medievalism and the Great War in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.” In Chance and Siewers, eds. 123-37. Longstaff, Hilary. “Merry in Focus: On Ring Fever, Having Adventure, Being Overlooked, and Not Getting Left Behind.” Mallorn: The Journal of the Tolkien Society 43 (2005): 43-48. Lynch, Andrew. “Archaism, Nostalgia, and Tennysonian War in The Lord of the Rings.” In Chance and Siewers, eds. 77-92. Malpas, Simon. “Home.” In Eaglestone, ed. 85-98. McFadden, Brian. “Fear of Difference, Fear of Death: The Sigelwara, Tolkien’s Swertings, and Racial Difference.” In Chance and Siewers, eds. 155-69. Morrison, Ronald D. “‘I Much Prefer History, True or Feigned’: Tolkien and Literary History.” Kentucky Philological Review 19 (2005): 36-42. Morrow, Jeffrey L. “J.R.R. Tolkien as a Christian for Our Times.” Evangelical Review of Theology 29 (2005): 164-77. Mortimer, Patchen. “Tolkien and Modernism.” Tolkien Studies 2 (2005): 113-29. Nagy, Gergely. “The Medievalist(‘s) Fiction: Textuality and Historicity as Aspects of Tolkien’s Medievalist Cultural Theory in a Postmodernist Context.” In Chance and Siewers, eds. 29-41. Nasmith, Ted. “Similar But Not Similar: Appropriate Anachronism in My Paintings of Middle-earth.” In Chance and Siewers, eds. 189204. Nelson, Dale. “Little Nell and Frodo the Halfling.” Tolkien Studies 2 (2005): 245-48. Nelson, Marie. “Beowulf ’s Boast Words.” Neophilologus 89, no. 2 (2005): 299-310.

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Bibliography for 2005 Neville, Jennifer. “Women.” In Eaglestone, ed. 101-10. Oser, Lee. “Tolkien and Coleridge: An Encounter.” ALSC Newsletter 11, no. 4 (2005): 14-15. Pearce, Joseph. “Narnia and Middle-earth: When Two Worlds Collide.” In Caughey, Shanna, ed. Revisiting Narnia: Fantasy, Myth, and Religion in C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles. Dallas: BenBella, 2005. 113-27. Persoleo, Paula. “Tolkien: The Road to Getting It Right.” In The Image of the Road in Literature, Media, and Society, edited by Will Wright and Steven Kaplan. Pueblo, CO: Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery, Colorado State University-Pueblo, 2005. 170-75. Puchner, Martin. “A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England.” Modernism/Modernity 12, no. 2 (2005): 352-53. Raiche, Donald. “Making the Darkness Conscious: J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.” Parabola 29, no. 3 (2005): 95-101. Ripp, Joseph. “Middle America Meets Middle-earth: American Discussion and Readership of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, 19651969.” Book History 8 (2005): 245-86. Roberts, Adam. “The One Ring.” In Eaglestone, ed. 59-70. Rosman, Adam. “Gandalf as Torturer: The Ticking Bomb Terrorist and Due Process in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.” Mallorn: The Journal of the Tolkien Society 43 (2005): 38-42. Rulyova, Natalia. “Piracy and Narrative Games: Dmitry Puchkov’s Translations of The Lord of the Rings.” Slavic and East European Journal 49, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 625-38. Russell, Beth. “Botanical Notes on the Mallorn.” Mallorn: The Journal of the Tolkien Society 43 (2005): 20-22. ———. “The Birthplace of J.R.R. Tolkien.” Tolkien Studies 2 (2005): 22529. Saxey, Esther. “Homoeroticism.” In Eaglestone, ed. 124-37. Schakel, Peter J. “The Oxford Fantasists: J.R.R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.” In Shaffer, Brian W., ed. A Companion to the British and Irish Novel, 1945-2000. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. 354-66. Schweitzer, Darrell. “The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (1954-1955)” In Gary Westfahl, ed. The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy: Themes, Works, and Wonders. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005. 1050-52.

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Bibliography for 2005 Scoville, Chester N. “Pastoralia and Perfectability in William Morris and J.R.R. Tolkien.” In Chance and Siewers, eds. 93-103. Segura, Eduardo, and Guillermo Peris. “Tolkien as Philo-Logist.” In Honegger, ed. 31-43. Sherman, Theodore J. “The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (1937)” In Gary Westfahl, ed. The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy: Themes, Works, and Wonders. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005. 1082-84. Siewers, Alfred K. “Tolkien’s Cosmic-Christian Ecology: The Medieval Underpinnings.” In Chance and Siewers, eds. 138-53. Simonson, Martin. “The Lord of the Rings in the Wake of the Great War: War, Poetry, Modernism, and Ironic Myth.” In Honegger, ed. 15370. Sinex, Margaret. “‘Tricksy Lights’: Literary and Folkloric Elements in Tolkien’s Passage of the Dead Marshes.” Tolkien Studies 2 (2005): 93112. Sinker, Mark. “Talking Tolkien: The Elvish Craft of CGI.” Children’s Literature in Education 36, no. 1 (March 2005): 41-54. Smith, Ross. “Timeless Tolkien, Part 2.” English Today 21, no. 4 (2005): 13-20. ———. “Why the Film Version of The Lord of the Rings Betrays Tolkien’s Novel, Part 1.” English Today 21, no. 3 (2005): 3-7. Stan, Susan. “Books and Boundaries: Writers and Their Audiences.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 30, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 22729. Stanton, Michael N. “Tolkien in New Zealand: Man, Myth, and Movie.” In Chance and Siewers, eds. 205-11. Stopfel, Susanne. “Traitors and Translators: Three German Versions of The Lord of the Rings.” Mallorn: The Journal of the Tolkien Society 43 (2005): 11-14. Straubhaar, Sandra Ballif. “Gilraen’s Linnod: Function, Genre, Prototypes.” Tolkien Studies 2 (2005): 235-44. Tucev, Natasa. “The Knife, the Sting and the Tooth: Manifestations of Shadow in The Lord of the Rings.” In Honegger, ed. 87-105. Vanderbeke, Dirk. “Language, Lore and Learning in The Lord of the Rings.” In Honegger, ed. 129-51.

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Bibliography for 2005 Veugen, Connie. “‘A Man, lean, dark, tall’: Aragorn Seen through Different Media.” In Honegger, ed. 171-209. Werber, Niels. “Geo- and Biopolitics of Middle-earth: A German Reading of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.” New Literary History 36, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 227-46. West, Richard C. “‘And She Named Her Own Name’: Being True To One’s Word in Tolkien’s Middle-earth.” Tolkien Studies 2 (2005): 110. Wilde, Dana. “This Moral Core: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Books and Peter Jackson’s Films.” Xavier Review 25, no. 1 (2005): 66-76. Willetts, Marjorie. “Arnor: The Númenórean Inheritance.” Mallorn: The Journal of the Tolkien Society 43 (2005): 3-10. Wood, Ralph C. “Following the Many Roads of Recent Tolkien Scholarship.” Christianity and Literature 54, no. 4 (Summer 2005): 587-608. Zlosnik, Sue. “Gothic Echoes.” In Eaglestone, ed. 47-58. SELECTED REVIEWS Anderson, Douglas A. Rev. of Myth and Middle-earth, by Leslie Ellen Jones. Seven 22 (2005): 114-16. ———. Rev. of Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon, by Brian Rosebury. Seven 22 (2005): 114-16. Beatty, Greg. Rev. of Understanding “The Lord of the Rings”: The Best of Tolkien Criticism, ed. Rose A. Zimbardo and Neil D. Issacs. New York Review of Science Fiction 17, no. 5 (2005): 6-7. Birzer, Bradley J. Rev. of Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middleearth, by John Garth. Seven 22 (2005): 110-12. Bolintineanu, Alexandra. Rev. of Tolkien in the Land of Heroes: Discovering the Human Spirit, by Anne C. Petty. Tolkien Studies 2 (2005): 273-77. Bratman, David. Rev. of War and the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien, by Janet Brennan Croft. Mythprint 42, no. 2 (2005): 10. ———. Rev. of “The Lord of the Rings”: A Reader’s Companion, by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull. Mythprint 42, no. 12 (2005): 11-13. ———. Rev. of Tolkien in Translation, ed. Thomas Honegger. Seven 22 (2005): 118-21. ———. Rev. of Four Christian Fantasists: A Study of the Fantastic Writings of

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Bibliography for 2005 George MacDonald, Charles Williams, C. S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien, by Richard Sturch. Seven 22 (2005): 118-21. Croft, Janet Brennan. Rev. of Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth, by John Garth. World Literature Today 79, no. 1 (2005): 93. Chance, Jane. Rev. of The Tolkien Fan’s Medieval Reader, ed. Turgon (David E. Smith). Tolkien Studies 2 (2005): 271-73. ———. Rev. of Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon, by Brian Rosebury. Tolkien Studies 2 (2005): 262-65. Christopher, Joe R. Rev. of Following Gandalf: Epic Battles and Moral Victory in “The Lord of the Rings,” by Matthew T. Dickerson. Tolkien Studies 2 (2005): 253-56. Croft, Janet Brennan. Rev. of Tolkien in Translation, ed. Thomas Honegger. Mythprint 42, no. 2 (2005): 12-13. Drollinger, Frank. Rev. of Tolkien’s Ordinary Virtues: Exploring the Spiritual Themes of “The Lord of the Rings,” by Mark Eddy Smith. CSL 36, no. 3 (2005): 7. Duriez, Colin. Rev. of The Power of the Ring: The Spiritual Vision Behind “The Lord of the Rings,” by Stratford Caldecott. Seven 22 (2005): 112-14. Eden, Brad. Rev. of “The Real Middle-earth: Exploring the Magic and Mystery of the Middle Ages, J.R.R.Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings,” by Brian Bates. Tolkien Studies 2 (2005): 256-57. Engbers, Chad. Rev of Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middleearth, by John Garth. Lion and the Unicorn 29, no. 1 (2005): 128-33. Flieger, Verlyn. Rev. of Tolkien’s Mythology for England: A Middle-earth Companion, by Edmund Wainwright. The Medieval Review (2005). Foster, Mike. Rev. of Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship, by Colin Duriez. Tolkien Studies 2 (2005): 266-67. Garth, John. Rev. of The Alphabet of Rúmil & Early Noldorin Fragments and Early Qenya & Valmaric, by J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien Studies 2 (2005): 24953. Hill, Thomas D. Rev. of Beowulf and the Critics, by J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Michael D. C. Drout. Speculum 80, no. 1 (2005): 342-44. Hughes, Shaun F. D. Rev. of Tolkien the Medievalist, ed. Jane Chance. Tolkien Studies 2 (2005): 277-85.

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Bibliography for 2005 Kertzer, Adrienne. Rev. of Boys and Girls Forever: Children’s Classics from Cinderella to Harry Potter, by Alison Lurie. Canadian Literature 186 (2005): 146-48. Kertzer, Adrienne. Rev. of Readers in Wonderland: The Liberating Worlds of Fantasy Fiction from Dorothy to Harry Potter, by Deborah O’Keefe. Canadian Literature 186 (2005): 146-48. Leibiger, Carol A. Rev. of Tolkien Studies: Volume I, ed. Douglas A. Anderson, Michael D. C. Drout, and Verlyn Flieger. Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 16, no. 1 (2005): 65-68. ———. Rev. of Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader, ed. Jane Chance. Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 16:2 (2005): 158-61. Minkel, Walter. Rev. of Understanding “The Lord of the Rings”: The Best of Tolkien Criticism, ed. Rose A. Zimbardo and Neil D. Isaacs. New York Review of Science Fiction 17, no. 5 (2005): 5-6. Murdoch, Brian. Rev. of The Battle for Middle-earth: Tolkien’s Divine Design in “The Lord of the Rings,” by Fleming Rutledge. Literature & Theology 19, no. 2 (2005): 192. Nagy, Gergely. Rev. of The Road to Middle-earth, by Tom Shippey, Rev. Ed. Tolkien Studies 2 (2005): 258-61. Noad, Charles E. Rev. of Tales before Tolkien: The Roots of Modern Fantasy, ed. Douglas A. Anderson. Tolkien Studies 2 (2005): 261-62. Rosebury, Brian. Rev. of Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middleearth, by John Garth. Tolkien Studies 2 (2005): 268-71. Siewers, Alf. Rev. of Beowulf and the Critics, by J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Michael D. C. Drout. Journal of English and Germanic Philology 104, no. 4 (2005): 555-59. Wickham-Crowley, Timothy P. Rev. of Tolkien Through Russian Eyes, by Mark T. Hooker. Tolkien Studies 2 (2005): 285-87. Wolfe, Gregory. Rev. of Sacred and Secular Scriptures: A Catholic Approach to Literature, by Nicholas Boyle. Commonweal 132, no. 14 (2005): 34-36.

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Notes on Contributors DOUGLAS A. ANDERSON is co-editor of Tolkien Studies. DAVID BRATMAN reviews books on Tolkien for Mythprint, the monthly bulletin of the Mythopoeic Society, for which he served as editor from 1980-1995. He has edited The Masques of Amen House by Charles Williams, compiled the authorized bibliography of Ursula K. Le Guin, and contributed articles on Tolkien to the journals Mallorn and Mythlore and the book Tolkien’s Legendarium (ed. Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter). His documentary chronology of the Inklings is an appendix to Diana Pavlac Glyer’s book The Company They Keep. He holds an M.L.S. from the University of Washington and has worked as a librarian at Stanford University and elsewhere. MARJORIE J. BURNS has been on the faculty of Portland State University for over thirty years and has lectured on Tolkien throughout the United States, as well as Australia, Norway, England, and The Netherlands. She has twice lived in Norway (once as a Fulbright professor). She teaches nineteenth-century British literature, Norse and Celtic mythology, and courses on J.R.R. Tolkien. Her publications on Tolkien include book chapters, journal articles, and essays in proceedings collections. Her book, Perilous Realms: Celtic and Norse in J.R.R. Tolkien (University of Toronto Press) appeared in 2005. She was a contributor and one of four assistant editors for the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment (Routledge, 2006); and along with Douglas A. Anderson, is completing a book of interviews and reminiscences (On Tolkien), to be published by Houghton Mifflin Company. JANET BRENNAN CROFT is Head of Access Services at the University of Oklahoma libraries. She is the author of War and the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien (Greenwood Press, 2004) which won the Mythopoeic Award in Inklings Scholarship in 2005, and the editor of Tolkien on Film: Essays on Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings (Mythopoeic Press, 2004). She has annotated The Travelling Rug by Dorothy L. Sayers (Mythopoeic Press, 2005) and is currently editing Tolkien and Shakespeare: Essays on Shared Themes and Language (McFarland, 2007). She is the editor of Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature. MICHAEL D. C. DROUT is co-editor of Tolkien Studies. DIMITRA FIMI has recently finished her Ph.D. on Tolkien’s fiction and is now teaching at Cardiff University, Wales. Her research interests in366

Notes on Contributors clude the relations of literature with folklore and popular culture, the adaptation of literary works for the screen and the mutual influences of literature and visual culture. She has presented numerous conference papers and published a series of articles on Tolkien’s fiction. She teaches an online course on Tolkien, open to students and adult learners all over the world. VERLYN FLIEGER is co-editor of Tolkien Studies. THOMAS HONEGGER holds a Ph.D. from the University of Zurich. He has published several articles on Tolkien, co-written a study on the moral dimension in Tolkien’s narrative work (Eine Grammatik der Ethik, 2005) and edited numerous volumes on Tolkien and medieval language and literature. He teaches as Professor for Mediaeval Studies at the FriedrichSchiller-University Jena (Germany). Homepage: http://www2.uni-jena. de/fsu/anglistik/homepage/Honegger3.htm CARL F. HOSTETTER (born 1965) is a computer scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. He is the author of numerous articles on Tolkienian linguistics, and is the editor of two scholarly journals on the subject for the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship, Vinyar Tengwar (print) and Tengwestië (with Patrick H. Wynne, online), as well as the founder and comoderator of the Lambengolmor mailing list. Together with Christopher Gilson, Arden R. Smith, Bill Welden, and Patrick H. Wynne, he has been engaged by Christopher Tolkien in the ordering, editing, and publishing of Tolkien's writings concerning his invented languages, on-going in the journal Parma Eldalamberon and in Vinyar Tengwar. Together with Verlyn Flieger, he is the editor of Tolkien's Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth (Greenwood Press, 2000), winner of the 2002 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Inklings Studies. YVETTE L. KISOR is an Assistant Professor of Literature at Ramapo College of New Jersey where she teaches courses on medieval literature and Tolkien, among others. She wrote a dissertation on structure in Beowulf under Prof. Marijane Osborn at University of California, Davis and has published on Chaucer, Beowulf, medieval romance, and (of course) Tolkien. KRISTINE LARSEN is Professor of Astronomy and Physics, and Director of the University Honors Program, at Central Connecticut State University. Her work on astronomical motifs and motivations in the work of Tolkien has been presented at numerous conferences and has appeared in print in Tolkien Studies, Mallorn, and Parma Nole. She has also presented and published work on the application of Tolkien's writings to the 367

Notes on Contributors teaching of astronomy. Other recent publications include a book-length scientific biography of physicist Stephen Hawking, and the upcoming volume Cosmology 101. MIRYAM LIBRÁN-MORENO is an assistant professor at the Universidad de Extremadura (Spain). She holds a doctorate in Ancient Greek Language and Literature and degrees in Arabic and English. She is a member of the Research Group Nicolaus Heinsius, specialized in textual criticism of Greek and Latin authors, and one of the editors of Exemplaria Classica: Journal of Classical Philology.

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