Master of Middle Earth

by Paul H. Kocher

  But to return to Middle-earth. One region of it is so far outside our experience that Tolkien can only ask us to take it completely on faith. This region contains the Undying Lands situated far out in the ocean west of the continental land mass, home of the Guardian Valar and their pupils, the immortal elves. Eldamar of the elves is definitely an island, but nearby Valinor seems to be attached to a "mighty Mountain Wall" encircling the whole of Middle-earth. Both places are therefore at World's End, the Uttermost West, beyond which living beings cannot go. Early in the First Age and before, access to the Undying Lands was by an arduous though otherwise ordinary sea voyage, but elves were the only race permitted to make it. After their rebellion and self-exile in that Age, Elbereth Starkindler, Queen of the Valar, cast a deep belt of shadow across its ocean approaches, through which the exiles could return only when forgiven, as most of them were after Morgoth's defeat at the end of the Age.8 When this barrier proved insufficient in the Second Age to keep out the armadas of Númenor sailing in to seize immortality by force, the One made the Undying Lands forever inaccessible to men.

  Because of the integral place these lands have in the geography and spiritual history of Middle-earth they are not strictly an other-world. Their closest counterpart in literature is in those early medieval Celtic tales known as imrama, about voyages made by Irish explorers to the western Atlantic in search of the Land of Promise. That Tolkien knew these tales is clear, for he wrote a poem which he entitled "Imram" narrating such a voyage by St. Brendan, which takes him after seven years of adventure to an island of refuge set aside by God for his Saints. In the Latin prose version of the Brendan search, almost certainly read and used by Tolkien for his poem,9 the Land of Promise has many elements in common with the Undying Lands of The Lord of the Rings, raising the possibility that it also provided Tolkien with ideas for his epic.

  For instance, Brendan's Land of Promise is screened by a miraculous circle of darkness through which all comers must pass, as the Undying Lands are walled off by Elbereth's belt of shadow. The saint and his monks are allowed to walk only to a river where an angel in the form of a shining man forbids them to advance farther and sends them back to Ireland. Similarly, the Valar are demiurgic spirits in human or elfin form, radiant in appearance, and they not only exile the elves at one time but also impose the Ban against all mankind which precipitates so much tragedy in the epic. The angel tells Brendan that the Land of Promises is being reserved by God for a refuge at a future time when Christians will be persecuted. Likewise, the Valar have occupied the Undying Lands "because of their love and desire for the Children of God (Erusén) for whom they were to prepare the 'realm'" against the day when elves and men shall have attained "their future forms."10 Most important for our present purposes, both lands are at the extreme western limit of the physical world but still a geographical part of it.

  If the navigable sea has any such boundaries Middle-earth cannot be a rounded sphere as we now conceive Earth. In the imrama tales this point posed no difficulty to the wonder-oriented Celtic mind of the Dark Ages, which popularly accepted the world as bounded and flat anyway, or, when it did not, was quite willing to forget roundness under the spell of a good story. But is such a prescientific cosmology intended by Tolkien for Middle-earth? He never discusses the question explicitly one way or the other. He leaves us to survey the text of the epic and its Appendices for ourselves. Quite possibly he considers the question to be of no real importance to the story, and so is indifferent whether it is raised or not. Those who wish to raise it will find, I think, that none of the astronomical passages are incompatible with a geocentric view of a flat, saucerlike Middle-earth. Since such a view is implicit in the conception of Valinor as being at World's End, consistency would require its acceptance as representing the beliefs of the inhabitants of Middle-earth.

  But does the divine act of the One in removing the Undying Lands "for ever from the circles of the world" at the end of the Second Age signal a change to a more advanced astronomy? Possibly so, if that cryptic phrase means that they were taken out of the physical continuum of Middle-earth, which then becomes free to be spherical. However, one difficulty is that the encircling mountains may still be there (the text is silent). Also, Tolkien continues to allow the elves still on Middle-earth during the Third Age to act as if the Undying Lands are visible and reachable. In the Palantír at the Grey Havens Gildor and his company still can see Valinor, where the white figure of Elbereth stands gazing out and listening to their prayers. And, returning home when the Fourth Age begins, the great elves have only to take ships from the Havens, though these have been specially built by Cfrdan for the journey, to be sure. On the whole it seems wise not to inquire too curiously into a question that Tolkien himself chooses to ignore.

  The Appendices are not mere barnacles on the epic as some critical opinion would have them. For example, Appendix D on the Calendars of Middle-earth and Appendices E and F on its languages so orient their specialized topics as to become facets of the cultural history of all the major races. By this method the basic traits of each are revealed. Elvish empathy for the gradations of growth and dormancy in vegetation is reflected in their division of the year into six, rather than four, seasons, and of unequal lengths. The Númenoreans' insensitivity to such gradations, and preoccupation rather with practical affairs, lead to their abandonment of those divisions and substitution of twelve mathematically equal months. The hobbit love of holidays and feasting multiples Lithedays in the summer and Yuledays in the winter, all given over to parties. That the elves are indeed "People of the Stars" and worshipers of the Valar could be known, if from no other source, from the objects and persons determining the names they give to the six days of their week: Stars, Sun, Moon, the Two Trees (of Valinor), the Heavens, and the Valar. They also have many special names for the hours of star-opening and star-fading. The experience of Númenoreans exclusively with the White Tree causes them to substitute its name for that of Two Trees and, being great mariners, they insert a Sea-day after Heavens' Day. Conservative by nature, the hobbits take over the Númenorean week but soon forget its meaning.

  Nothing tells more about a people than the language it speaks and writes. This is bound to be a product of its psychological peculiarities, its traditions, its institutions, its whole outlook on life. Well aware of this truth, Tolkien as a professional philologist makes of his Appendices E and F on the languages he has invented for the several races of Middle-earth not only a tour de force of philological analytic imagination but also one more revelation of the races themselves from a new direction. These Appendices have the added interest of being the adult equivalent of Tolkien's boyhood games with invented tongues. Aimed first at demonstrating the written alphabets, oral pronunciation, and to some extent the grammar of the two inflected, superbly melodious Elvish dialects, Quenya and Sindarin, their material evidently comes straight out of that "history of Elvish tongues" which Tolkien prepared in the 1930s before he came to write The Lord of the Rings. When this history proved unpublishable he set it aside in order to proceed with a narrative about the races who spoke these languages. So the epic was born.

  Nobody knows better than Tolkien that languages are not static but change continually. Hence part of the function of Appendix E is to trace some of the developments of the original Elvish spoken and written speech into Númenorean, and thence into Westron, the "Common Speech" of the West. Inevitably, I suppose, the laws of linguistic evolution which Tolkien sees at work on Middle-earth are the same as those discovered by modern philology to have governed the development of the Indo-European tongues in recent millennia on Earth. In this way another parallel is drawn, this time in the realm of philology, between events on ancient Middle-earth and those known to have taken place among us in our own era.

  The linguistic history of Middle-earth corroborates and fleshes out other aspects of its history, with a corresponding gain in the credibility of all. In language, as in much else, the Noldor elves who have crossed the s
ea to Valinor are the fountainhead of culture. They carry back with them to Middle-earth the noble Quenya speech and the first written alphabet, invented by their most brilliant genius, Fëanor, who also made the Silmarilli. Cultural contact with the Sindar elves, who have remained behind on the continent, enriches both groups, modifies their speech and writing, and spreads their influence eastward among the Edain of the north and the dwarves of Moria to the south. Even the ores are affected. When given the island of Númenor the Edain, too, abandon their former linguistic patterns in favor of the Elvish. It is a sign of the arrogance and rebellion to come that gradually they cast off all things Elvish and revert to a version of their former tongue. Out of this in later years after their destruction emerges in the Gondor lands they have settled the lingua franca of the west known as Westron, bearing the mark of influences of the more primitive human tribes already there as well as others from commerce with remaining colonies of elves. The rivalry between Westron and Sauron's Black Speech, spoken by all his servants, typifies the enmity of the two cultures, if Sauron's tyranny can be called a culture. This bald summary can give but a paltry idea of the profusion of detail poured in by Tolkien to show how the languages of Middle-earth both shape and reflect the destinies of those who use them.

  Already noticed in the foregoing pages are many instances of Tolkien's art in gaining credence for his history of Middle-earth by introducing episodes of various sorts that tease us with their resemblance to episodes that we know have actually occurred in our not too distant past. A few more parallels, which designedly are never quite parallel, deserve mention too because they skirt the edges of large events in the history of western civilization.11 Just as Earth has seen wave after wave of tribal migrations into Europe from east and north, so on Middle-earth the elves, the Edain, the Rohirrim, and the hobbits have drifted west at various periods from the same directions. Also, our Europe has warred from early times against Arabs from the south and Persians, Mongols, Turks from the near or far east. Similarly Gondor resists Easterlings and Southrons, who have pressed against its borders for millennia and have become natural allies of Sauron. The Haradrim of the south even recall Saracens in their swarthy hue, weapons, and armor, and suggest other non-European armies in their use of elephant ancestors, while the Wainriders from the east come in wagons rather like those of the Tartar hordes. The men of Gondor live and fight in a kind of legendary Arthurian, proto-medieval mode, and the Rohirrim differ from early Anglo-Saxons mainly in living by the horse, like Cossacks.

  The Tolkien style in creating secondary worlds did not spring full-blown but developed out of his experience in writing The Hobbit, his first attempt at narrative. In that story Bilbo travels from Shire to Rivendell, as Frodo does, and meets Gandalf, Elrond, Gollum, and other characters who appear also in the epic. But the world of The Hobbit is not called Middle-earth, its vegetation and creatures are not visualized in patient detail, and it has no larger geographical or historical context whatever. Nor are the characters the same, although they bear the same names. Gandalf is merely a funny old wizard, for instance. And in a mistaken attempt to please an audience of children Tolkien trivializes and ridicules his elves and dwarves in precisely the manner he later comes to deplore. To call The Lord of the Rings a sequel to this childhood tale, as Tolkien does for the sake of continuity in the Ring plot, is to disguise the immense progress in technique evident in his epic fantasy.

  Having once found his characteristic combination of the familiar with the unfamiliar, Tolkien never departed from it in any of the short verse and prose fiction he wrote after finishing the epic.12 "The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth" is an imagined sequel to the battle of Maldon between Vikings and Saxons in Essex in A.D. 991. "Farmer Giles of Ham" is set in the valley of the Thames in pre-Arthurian Britain. "Smith of Wootton Major" takes place in an essentially medieval English village, slightly hobbitized, which is a point of departure and return for excursions into a country called Faery. "Imram" tells of St. Brendan's sea voyage into the West in the sixth century. It starts and ends in Ireland. "The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun" is a Breton lay centering on the south coast of Britain in the chivalric age. "Leaf by Niggle" shows us a modern English village complete with neighbors, bicycles, housing regulations, a town council, and the rest, before taking off into a rather minutely pictured landscape where the soul after death goes through purgation.

  In his unfinished The Silmarillion Tolkien faces the same problem in naturalizing the potentially fabulous happenings of Middle-earth's First Age.

  Chapter II : The Hobbit

  THIS EARLIEST of Tolkien's prose fictions, published in 1937, was so popular that when he started writing The Lord of the Rings soon afterward he called the latter a sequel. Such a designation of the two works as prologue and sequel respectively is a pity for a number of reasons. For one thing, many potential readers approaching Tolkien for the first time have inferred that they must tackle The Hobbit first. Unfortunately that work often puzzles, sometimes repels outright. Those who managed to get past it are likely to go on to the later epic with preconceptions which they find they must rapidly discard. The result can be equally disconcerting for those who move in reverse order from the heights and depths of the War of the Ring to the unilinear simplicities of Bilbo's "adventure." Not that The Hobbit is by any means a bad book. It is a misunderstood book, misunderstood in its purpose and its execution. Despite its surface connections with The Lord of the Rings the two works are so unlike fundamentally as to be different in kind. The Hobbit is a story for children about the stealing of a dragon's hoard by some dwarves with the reluctant aid of a little hobbit. The Lord of the Rings, on the other hand, stretches the adult imagination with its account of a world in peril. Each work has virtues proper to its kind, but they had better be read independently of each other as contrasting, if related, specimens of the fantasy writer's art.

  The beginning of wisdom in understanding The Hobbit is to think of Tolkien, or another adult, in a chair by the fireside telling the story to a semicircle of children sitting on the floor facing him. From the opening paragraphs hardly a page goes by in which the narrator does not address the children directly in the first person singular. Since the breed of hobbits has just sprung freshly minted from his brain, he loses no time in telling his young listeners about how they look and behave, notably their shyness "when large stupid folk like you and me come blundering along," and he ends his description by, "Now you know enough to go on with. As I was saying . . ."1 Sometimes he uses the direct address technique to create anticipation, as in introducing Gandalf: "Gandalf! If you had heard only a quarter of what I have heard about him, and I have only heard very little of all there is to hear, you would be prepared for any sort of remarkable tale." Sometimes his remarks to the child audience take on a genial, joking tone, as in pointing out the flaw in Bilbo's plan for freeing the captive dwarves by putting them into barrels (his inability to put himself into one): "Most likely you saw it some time ago and have been laughing at him; but I don't suppose you would have done half as well yourselves in his place." Then, there are jocular interjections of no special moment, but aimed at maintaining a playful intimacy: "If you want to know what cram is, I can only say that I don't know the recipe; but it is biscuitish ..."

  Tolkien also makes the technique work for him expositorily in making clear to the youngsters important shifts in the plot sequence. Normally he describes every scene from Bilbo's point of view, and describes none in which Bilbo himself is not present. But Chapter XIV diverges to report what happened at Lake-town, while Bilbo and the dwarves were shut inside Erebor, when Smaug the dragon attacked the town and was killed by Bard the archer. So Tolkien opens the chapter with the sentence: "Now if you wish, like the dwarves, to hear news of Smaug, you must go back again to the evening when he smashed the door and flew off in a rage, two days before." Incidentally, this careful score-keeping of days elapsed at every stage of his tale is typical of Tolkien. Having narrated events at Lake-town he steers his young au
dience back to their hero with the words, "Now we will return to Bilbo and the dwarves." And, on occasion, in order to remind them of an important fact, already explained some time before, which they may have forgotten, he repeats it. Thus when the Master in Lake-town judges Thorin's claim to the treasure by inheritance to be a fraud Tolkien reiterates what Gandalf and Elrond acknowledged earlier: "He was wrong. Thorin, of course, was really the grandson of the king under the Mountain . . ." This care in keeping the plot crystal clear is adapted to the possible squirmings and short attentiveness of the children he is speaking to.

  Also for their benefit is Tolkien's method all through The Hobbit of prefacing the introduction into the story of each new race with a paragraph or so setting forth in plain words whatever needs to be known about its looks, its habits, its traits, and whether it is good or bad. He has started this practice off with the hobbits. He extends it to trolls, dwarves, goblins, eagles, elves, and lakemen as each of these makes its entry. These little capsules of racial qualities are enlivened usually with personal interjections: "Yes, I am afraid trolls do behave like that, even those with only one head each"; or "Eagles are not kindly birds," but they did come to the rescue of Bilbo's party, and "a very good thing too!" Goblins are wicked and bear a special grudge against dwarves "because of the war which you have heard mentioned, but which does not come into this tale." Elves are hunters by starlight at the edges of the wood and are "Good People." After such set pieces no small auditor will be in any doubt as to which people he should cheer for. The whole tale gives him a very firm moral framework by which to judge.2 Another minor but persistent device in the manner of its telling likewise is meant to delight childish ears. The prose is full of sound effects, which the eye of the reader might miss but the hearing of the listener would not. Bilbo's doorbell rings ding-dong-a-ling-dang; Gandalf's smoke rings go pop!; the fire from his wand explodes with a poof; Bombur falls out of a tree plop onto the ground; Bilbo falls splash! into the water, and so on at every turn. Nor are these sound effects limited to the prose. Many of the poems are designed more for onomatopoeic purposes than for content. One prime example is the song of the goblins underground after their capture of Bilbo and the dwarves, with its Clash! crash! Crush, smash! and Swish, smack! Whip crack and Ho, ho, my lad. The elves' barrel-rolling song has all the appropriate noises, from roll-roll-rolling to splash plump! and down they bump! Tolkien knows that up to a certain age children like their stories to be highly audible.3