Tolkien: Man and Myth

by Joseph Pearce

  The same melancholy in the face of loss of faith, symbolized in the myth of Father Christmas, was present in the final paragraph of the last of Tolkien’s Father Christmas Letters, written when his youngest child, Priscilla, was ten years old:

  I suppose after this year you will not be hanging your stocking any more. I shall have to say ‘goodbye’, more or less: I mean, I shall not forget you. We always keep the names of our old friends, and their letters,—and later on we hope to come back when they are grown up and have houses of their own and children. . .49

  This melancholy is the dominant characteristic of Smith of Wootton Major, written in 1965 and published in 1967. Yet it is not, as Richard Jeffery claimed in his talk to the Oxford C.S. Lewis Society, ‘unhappy and pessimistic’.50 Although the atmosphere throughout is heavy with a sense of wistful resignation, the same degrees of faith and hope are present in Smith of Wootton Major as are present in Tolkien’s other books. The whole story can be seen as a parable on, and as a reiteration of, Chesterton’s contrasting image of the Well of faith compared with the Shallows of scepticism. When Smith enters the realm of Fairy he sees everything far more clearly than is possible in the shadowlands of the ‘real’ world: ‘There the air is so lucid that eyes can see the red tongues of birds as they sing on the trees upon the far side of the valley, though that is very wide and the birds are no greater than wrens.’51 The theme of selflessness, so crucial to The Lord of the Rings, is present in Smith’s relinquishing of his possession of the fay-star, the gift which allows him to visit the realm of Fairy where these lucid visions are possible.

  In stark contrast to the figure of Smith is the character of Nokes, the Master Cook. Nokes is an arch-sceptic whose motto should be ‘seeing is believing’, to which Tolkien’s riposte in the telling of the tale is that ‘there are none so blind as those who will not see’. Alf the Prentice says to Nokes: ‘Well, if you won’t believe it was Smith, I can’t help you.’52 This simple statement is more potent and poignant than it may at first appear. Alf, cast in a role which parallels that of Gandalf in certain respects, has many powers but he is not able to over-ride Nokes’s free will. If Nokes remains obstinate in his refusal of the gift of faith there is nothing that can be done. Nokes does remain obstinate and it is this obstinacy, even in the face of magical or miraculous evidence, that gives potency to the final parts of the story. When Nokes’s wish to become slim is granted by Alf he explains it away; and when Alf finally leaves, Nokes is more pleased than anyone to see him go. If Tolkien’s tale is ‘unhappy and pessimistic’ in any sense at all, it is not about truth or ultimate reality but about the inability of people to see it. This is paralleled in ‘Chestertonian Fantasy’ in both The Ball and the Cross and Manalive, and is the crux of many of Chesterton’s ‘Father Brown’ stories.

  There are similarities between Smith of Wootton Major and Tolkien’s short story, Leaf by Niggle, written more than twenty years earlier. Whereas in Smith of Wootton Major things can be seen more clearly in the realm of Fairy, in Leaf by Niggle things become more real in the ‘purgatorial’ realm after death. Tolkien himself used the word ‘purgatorial’ with reference to Leaf by Niggle53, and it is perhaps the closest he came to writing an overtly Christian allegory. Perhaps Leaf by Niggle was discussed most perceptively by Paul H. Kocher in Master of Middle Earth, his literary study of Tolkien published in 1972. In Kocher’s view, Leaf by Niggle was an effort on Tolkien’s part ‘to find some underlying meaning for all his labours, if not in this life then in the next’:

  Along this line of interpretation we notice that Niggle’s world, like Tolkien’s, is unmistakably Christian. It is governed by very strict laws (moral and religious in nature) requiring each man to help his needy neighbour, even at painful cost to himself and even in the absence of both gratitude and desert. These laws are enforced externally by an inspector. Internally their sanction lies in Niggle’s own conscience and his imperfectly generous heart. He was ‘kind-hearted in a way. You know the sort of kind heart: it made him uncomfortable more often than it made him do anything; and even when he did anything it did not prevent him from grumbling, losing his temper, and swearing. . . All the same it did land him in a good many odd jobs for his neighbour, Mr Parish, a man with a lame leg.’ Other interruptions to Niggle’s painting, however, come from his own idleness, failure of concentration, and lack of firmness. Meantime he neglects to prepare for the long journey he has been told is imminent, and he is taken unawares by the coming of the Black Driver to take him through the dark tunnel. The situation inevitably recalls that in the medieval drama Everyman, to which Tolkien is giving a modern adaptation.

  In the workhouse on the other side (an updated version of Dante’s Purgatorio) Niggle is assigned hard labours aimed at correcting his sins and weaknesses. He learns to work at set intervals, to be prompt, to finish every task, to plan, to think in orderly fashion, to serve without grumbling. He is then ready to hear a dialogue between two voices, discussing what is to be done with him, one voice insisting on justice, the other pleading for mercy. Here the resemblance is to the debate between the four daughters of God—Righteousness and Truth against Mercy and Peace—at the judging of souls, a favourite theme in medieval drama and poetry. . . That Tolkien should employ techniques and ideas drawn from the literature of a period he knew so well is not surprising. But his success in acclimatizing them to our times is remarkable. Again we are justified in stressing that they were, and still are, Catholic.54

  There would seem little to add to this lucid exposition of Niggle’s journey from earthly life to purgatorial life, but there is another theme within the story which was equally important to Tolkien’s conception of his life’s purpose. Above all, Leaf by Niggle was Tolkien’s effort to put the conclusion of his essay ‘On Fairy Stories’ into a fairy story. It was an effort to practise what he preached.

  In the conclusion to his essay Tolkien had suggested that the sub-creativity of man was capable of being a true reflection of the Primary Creation of God:

  . . . in God’s kingdom the presence of the greatest does not depress the small. Redeemed Man is still man. Story, fantasy, still goes on, and should go on. The Evangelium has not abrogated legends,—it has hallowed them, especially the ‘happy ending’. The Christian has still to work, with mind as well as body, to suffer, hope, and die; but he may now perceive that all his bents and faculties have a purpose, which can be redeemed. So great is the bounty with which he has been treated that he may now, perhaps, fairly dare to guess that in Fantasy he may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation. All tales may come true; and yet, at the last, redeemed, they may be as like and as unlike the forms that we give them as Man, finally redeemed, will be like and unlike the fallen that we know.55

  This paragraph was the inspiration for Leaf by Niggle and the reason why Priscilla Tolkien believed this story to be the ‘most autobiographical’ of all her father’s work.56

  Niggle was a painter, not a writer, but the parallels with Tolkien are obvious. Niggle’s ‘Tree’ is clearly a euphemism for Tolkien’s own sub-creation, principally The Lord of the Rings but also The Silmarillion on which he laboured all his life and which, like Niggle’s Tree, would ultimately remain uncompleted at his death. Priscilla Tolkien quotes the following passage from Leaf by Niggle as an illustration of the autobiographical element in the story:

  Niggle pushed open the gate, jumped on the bicycle, and went bowling downhill in the spring sunshine. Before long he found that the path on which he had started had disappeared, and the bicycle was rolling along over a marvellous turf. It was green and close,—and yet he could see every blade distinctly. He seemed to remember having seen or dreamed of that sweep of grass somewhere or other. The curves of the land were familiar somehow. Yes: the ground was becoming level, as it should, and now, of course, it was beginning to rise again. A great green shadow came between him and the sun. Niggle looked up, and fell off his bicycle.

  Before him stood the Tre
e, his Tree, finished. If you could say that of a Tree that was alive, its leaves opening, its branches growing and bending in the wind that Niggle had so often felt or guessed, and had so often failed to catch. He gazed at the Tree, and slowly he lifted his arms and opened them wide.

  ‘It’s a gift!’ he said. He was referring to his art, and also to the result; but he was using the word quite literally.57

  This episode occurs after Niggle had heard the two Voices discussing his purgatorial destiny and the bicycle ride was part of the ‘gentle treatment’ which the Voices had prescribed for the continued recovery of his soul. The fact that Niggle is able to see every blade of grass distinctly is reminiscent of the enhanced vision in Fairy depicted in Smith of Wootton Major, and the open-armed joy at the gift of Creation reflects the joy of Quickbeam in The Lord of the Rings. A further parallel between Smith of Wootton Major and Leaf by Niggle is the similarity between the sceptic, Nokes, and Niggle’s neighbour, Parish, who is cast in the role of a ‘realist’ critic who fails to see the underlying truth in myth. Now, after his own death, Parish is able to see reality as it truly is. Accompanied by Niggle in the incarnated world of Niggle’s painting, though not knowing it, he asks a shepherd to tell him the name of the country in which he finds himself:

  ‘Don’t you know?’ said the man. ‘It is Niggle’s Country. It is Niggle’s Picture, or most of it; a little of it is now Parish’s Garden.’

  ‘Niggle’s Picture!’ said Parish in astonishment. ‘Did you think of all this, Niggle? I never knew you were so clever. Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘He tried to tell you long ago,’ said the man,—‘but you would not look. He had only got canvas and paint in those days, and you wanted to mend your roof with them. This is what you and your wife used to call Niggle’s Nonsense, or That Daubing.’

  ‘But it did not look like this then, not real,’ said Parish.

  ‘No, it was only a glimpse then,’ said the man,—‘but you might have caught the glimpse, if you had ever thought it worth while to try.’58

  It was indeed apt that Tolkien’s publishers should publish Leaf by Niggle in a combined volume with the essay ‘On Fairy Stories’ under the collective title Tree and Leaf, especially as the one had given birth to the other. Both, however, were developments from the philosophy of myth which Tolkien had expressed most eloquently in his poem ‘Mythopoeia’. It was also apt, therefore, that this was added to later editions of Tree and Leaf. The final lines of ‘Mythopoeia’, as well as being Tolkien’s highest achievement in verse, offer a glimpse of the vision of Paradise which Tolkien saw beyond the purgatorial vision in Leaf by Niggle:

  In Paradise perchance the eye may stray

  from gazing upon everlasting Day

  to see the day-illumined, and renew

  from mirrored truth the likeness of the True.

  Then looking on the Blessed Land ‘twill see

  that all is as it is, and yet made free:

  Salvation changes not, nor yet destroys,

  garden nor gardener, children nor their toys.

  Evil it will not see, for evil lies

  not in God’s picture but in crooked eyes,

  not in the source but in malicious choice,

  and not in sound but in the tuneless voice.

  In Paradise they look no more awry;

  and though they make anew, they make no lie.

  Be sure they still will make, not being dead,

  and poets shall have flames upon their head,

  and harps whereon their faultless fingers fall:

  there each shall choose for ever from the All.59

  If, as Paul Kocher maintains, there are parts of Leaf by Niggle which resemble ‘an updated version of Dante’s Purgatorio’, this part of ‘Mythopoeia’ certainly resembles Dante’s Paiadiso. Like Dante, Tolkien was concerned with what the critic Lin Carter described in her study of The Lord of the Rings as ‘the eternal verities of human nature’.60 What was important to both Tolkien and Dante was not the accidental trappings of everyday life but the essential nature of everlasting life, not what human society was becoming but what humanity was being, not the peripheral but the perennial. The same concerns were central to Chesterton. Robert J. Reilly, in his essay on ‘Tolkien and the Fairy Story’, links Chesterton and Tolkien as modern inheritors of a long history of related ideas:

  Why such a position as Tolkien’s should exist now is a question for the historian of ideas to answer. That Tolkien’s Christian romanticism is not unique is, of course, obvious by reference to such people as C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams. The historian will in turn find back of all three the face of Chesterton, and behind him one of Lewis and Chesterton’s longtime favourites, George Macdonald.61

  These, in turn, were only relatively recent beneficiaries of a Christian tradition stretching back almost two thousand years to the Gospels themselves. ‘Chesterton’s romances of Being, such as Manalive, follow on and are part of his Thomistic-mystical religious view,’ Reilly wrote.62 This shared religious vision may in itself explain the links of affinity between Chesterton and Tolkien, but a letter Tolkien wrote to his son on 14 May 1944 suggests that Chesterton’s influence may on occasions have been more direct:

  I suddenly got an idea for a new story (of about length of Niggle)—in church yesterday, I fear. A man sitting at a high window and seeing not the fortunes of a man or of people, but of one small piece of land (about the size of a garden) all down the ages. He just sees it illumined, in borders of mist, and things, animals and men just walk on and off, and the plants and trees grow and die and change. One of the points would be that plants and animals change from one fantastic shape to another but men (in spite of different dress) don’t change at all. At intervals all down the ages from Palaeolithic to Today a couple of women (or men) would stroll across scene saying exactly the same thing (e.g. It oughtn’t to be allowed. They ought to stop it. Or, I said to her, I’m not one to make a fuss, I said, but. . .)63

  Sadly this story never appears to have come to fruition but the idea bears a remarkable similarity to the central premise of Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man, the non-fictional work which had been so instrumental in C.S. Lewis’s conversion to Christianity.

  Five years after this letter to his son was written, Tolkien’s Farmer Giles of Ham was published. This children’s book serves as a living refutation of the charge of gloom or pessimism which is all too often, and wrongly, levelled against Tolkien. Like so much of his other lighter work, Farmer Giles of Ham shares an affinity with ‘Chestertonian Fantasy’, perhaps more so than any of his other books. Whereas Tolkien’s other works exhibit the Chestertonian sense of wonder, the ‘Manalive’, and include images of Everyman and the ‘Everlasting Man’, Farmer Giles of Ham exhibits the Chestertonian sense of fun. It is a lighthearted and riotous romp in the tradition of Chesterton’s The Flying Inn and The Napoleon of Notting Hill. Links with the latter work are all too obvious on the very first page when Tolkien sets his story in an idyllic Merrie England, reminiscent of the Mediaeval vision which inspires Adam Wayne, Chesterton’s ‘Napoleon’:

  Aegidius de Hammo was a man who lived in the midmost parts of the Island of Britain. In full his name was Aegidius Ahenobarbus Julius Agricola de Hammo; for people were richly endowed with names in those days, now long ago, when this island was still happily divided into many kingdoms. There was more time then, and folk were fewer, so that most men were distinguished. However, those days are now over, so I will in what follows give the man his name shortly, and in the vulgar form: he was Farmer Giles of Ham, and he had a red beard. Ham was only a village, but villages were proud and independent still in those days.64

  The plot unfolds as Farmer Giles, a reluctant hero, tames the dragon and gains fame as a result. The villagers gain their freedom from a covetous King and his decadent court who are more interested in the latest fashion in hats or in ‘discussing points of precedence and etiquette’65 than with acts of heroism. There are many amusing charact
ers, such as the village blacksmith who is cast in the role of a comic Wormtongue, and the story’s chronology is given in Saints’ Days, placing it solidly in a Christian context. Farmer Giles’s dog reminds one of Quoodle, the lovably excitable dog in The Flying Inn, but the most notable similarity between Farmer Giles of Ham and The Flying Inn is the eulogizing of good English ale. There are no rumbustious drinking songs in Tolkien’s tale, as there are in Chesterton’s novel, but the praise and celebration of ale is the same in both works:

  They sat round in the kitchen drinking his health and loudly praising him. He made no effort to hide his yawns, but as long as the drink lasted they took no notice. By the time they had all had one or two (and the farmer two or three), he began to feel quite bold; when they had all had two or three (and he himself five or six), he felt as bold as his dog thought him. They parted good friends; and he slapped their backs heartily.66

  There are similar allusions to the qualities of ale, and of village inns, in The Lord of the Rings. Pippin regrets that the route they are taking out of the Shire does not go via the Golden Perch at Stock: ‘The best beer in the Eastfarthing, or used to be: it is a long time since I tasted it.’67 Most memorably there is the sojourn of the hobbits at the Prancing Pony at Bree where Sam is ‘much relieved by the excellence of the beer’.68 In fact, the beer is so excellent that Frodo ends up singing a drinking song with near disastrous consequences. Such frivolities are soon lost in the seriousness of the Quest, but upon their return to the Shire they are horrified to discover that the evil of Mordor has even invaded their own homeland with dire results, not least of which is the closing of all the inns: ‘They’re all closed,’ said Robin. ‘The Chief doesn’t hold with beer. Leastways that is how it started. But now I reckon it’s his Men that has it all.’69