Master of Middle Earth

by Paul H. Kocher

  The story opens with the incursion of Faery into the village by the agency of the then Master Cook, who brings back with him from a visit to that land a small "fay-star" looking like tarnished silver and an apprentice named Alf, in appearance only a boy "barely in his teens" but actually the King of the "Fairies" (a name here used interchangeably for "elves").20 The King's immediate purpose is to see that the star, perennial symbol of the elves, is given at the next Twenty-four Feast to a child fitted to wear it on voyages of exploration into Faery, and, long range, to stir up in all the children of the village their aptitudes for wonder. His efforts are opposed and derided by his master, Nokes, the newly appointed Master Cook, a sly ignoramus who holds the common view that a delight in fairies, and what they stand for, is not for adults but only for the very young: "Fairies he thought one grew out of." In this way Tolkien broaches one of his favorite themes, the incessant war waged against fantasy and all its works by the dullard and the skeptic who understand them superficially or not at all.

  Fairies and childhood candy are forever associated in Nokes' mind. So he covers with sugar-icing the Great Cake he bakes for the Feast because "that will make it pretty and fairylike." And he trivializes the whole concept of what a fairy is by perching on top of the cake to represent the Fairy Queen "a little doll . . . dressed all in white, with a little wand in her hand ending in a tinsel star, and Fairy Queen written in pink icing round her feet." Naturally such a man snickers at Alf's solemn assurance that the fay-star truly comes from Faery. Nokes will pop it into the cake batter with other gift "trinkets" to be found by the children when they eat their slices of cake. At the Feast he makes a hoary joke about the trickiness often attributed to fairies in folklore, telling the youngsters that the cake contains one present for each of them "if the Fairy Queen plays fair. But she doesn't always do so: she's a tricky little creature. You ask Mr. Prentice." When no child finds the fay-star in his slice, Nokes laughingly suggests that the Queen has magically taken it back to Fairyland, "Not a nice trick to play, I don't think." As elsewhere noted, against all such vulgar errors—that elves are tiny, toylike, mischievous, busy with magic tricks credible only in the nursery—Tolkien protests long and earnestly in "On Fairy-stories."21 These are the misconceptions, he says, that blind adult minds to the great range and power of their proper heritage of creative fantasy.

  Despite Nokes, the King contrives to have the fay-star swallowed by the son of the village blacksmith. It begins its transforming work on him six months later on his tenth birthday, when for the first time in his life he really hears the dawn song of the birds sweeping westward as the sun rises. Tolkien portrays this experience as not merely an awaking to something new but as a sudden remembering of something once known but since forgotten. Young Smith exclaims, "It reminds me of Faery . . . but in Faery the people sing too," although he has never been there. He then sings "in strange words that he seemed to know by heart." Years later, when he brings back three flowers that chime like bells as a gift from Faery, his son, Ned, who has never been there either, (and has no star to admit him), finds he remembers them: "there is a scent in the bells: a scent that reminds me of, reminds me, well, of something I've forgotten." And the Fairy Queen herself implies to Smith, when he at last meets her, that the sight of her image on the cake has given all who saw it a "glimpse," which is a memory, of her country —and theirs. Tolkien seems Wordsworthian in his belief that recollections of Faery are among those clouds of glory which the newborn human soul trails into the world, only too often to be erased or stunted in later life.

  As Smith matures his voice grows "ever more beautiful" until passersby stop to listen to him sing as he works in the village smithy. This music he has learned from the elves during the excursions he is beginning to make into their country. His products at the forge also come to bear their stamp, for as he hammers out all the usual articles of iron needed by the villagers for daily life they "had a grace about them, being shapely in their kinds, good to handle and look at." The traveler in the realms of fantasy, as Tolkien insists in his doctrine of Recovery, is no mere dreamer but brings back a freshness of vision, which brightens and beautifies everything he sets his hand to. This beauty is even more apparent in the ironwork which Smith shapes for pure delight "into wonderful forms that looked as light and delicate as a spray of leaves and blossom," yet stern with the strength of iron. The allusion here to leaf and blossom immediately connects Smith with the Tree that runs through many of Tolkien's writings, his prime symbol for the subcreative art of fantasy. Smith is adapting that art to his own particular mediums of song and metalwork, as Niggle did to painting and as writers do in telling fairy stories.

  How he learns the art in Faery becomes clear in the description of the visits he often spends there "looking only at one tree or one flower" in its outer marches. At a late stage, nearer the heart of the kingdom, he is allowed to discover "the King's Tree springing up, tower upon tower, into the sky, and its light was like the sun at noon; and it bore at once leaves and flowers and fruits uncounted, and not one was the same as any other that grew on the Tree." Surely this is the Tree of Tales, whose interwoven branches and foliage represent all story, which Tolkien depicts in "On Fairy-stories" and which Niggle tries to paint. Smith's quest for it is the journey of the spirit that precedes art. His success in finding it is the final vision that validates the art itself.

  But Faery in the present story is more than just a vague terrain from which to derive allegories about art. Tolkien asks us to accept it as a solidly physical area closely adjacent to Wootton Major, though the villagers never go there and few of them are even willing to be told that it exists. It has a life of its own into which even Smith, with his star glowing brightly on his forehead, ventures at his peril. Far from being the toyland which Nokes dismisses, it is, he finds, a region of beauty and terror not altogether hospitable to mortals. Trying to get around its Outer Mountains, he comes to the Sea of Windless Storm where elven warriors disembark singing on their return from battles in the Dead Marshes against the armies of Unlight.22 They pass over his prostrate body as if he were not there. Evidently a mysterious struggle against nameless evils is taking place inside Faery itself, but among these evils Smith "was as safe as a mortal can be in that perilous country. The Lesser Evils avoided the star, and from the Greater Evils he was guarded." Guarded by whom against what exactly? Tolkien prefers not to say. He intimates only that the issues at stake are moral, aligning the forces of good against evil. He has always believed that fairy stories should be inherently moral (thought not didactic), and his own versions of Faery are always governed by moral laws.23

  The lesson Smith learns from observing these wars going on is peculiarly personal. He sees that "many of the Evils cannot be challenged without weapons of power too great for any mortal to wield." So impressed is he by the magnitude of the contending hosts and their weapons and by his own impotence to take any share in the struggle that he resolves never to make any weapon of war in the village smithy: . . among all the things that he made it is not remembered that he ever forged a sword or a spear or an arrow-head." Since the elves continue to make and use such weapons, though more potently, the logic of Smith's resolve is not altogether clear. Weapons can still be needed in defense of justice in the world of Wootton Major. Psychologically, Smith seems to have concluded that all struggles are basically moral and cannot be settled by swords and spears. Consequently he will make none as a matter of principle. In any case a powerful aversion to physical combat is obscurely at work here. One is reminded of Frodo throwing away his war gear on the plains of Mordor, never to resume it again.

  Because of Tolkien's unvarying idea that the paths of elves and men are sundered, in none of his fairy lands or elven homes can a mortal man be more than a temporary guest. Smith is broken-hearted to learn that Faery cannot be his permanent home. He realizes this when he saves himself from a Wild Wind hunting him by clinging to a birch tree, which weeps when stripped of its leaves and which begs
him to go back to his own land: "You do not belong here. Go away and never return!" Presuming to penetrate the Inner Mountains without invitation to the lucid Vale of Evermorn, he is informed by one of the maidens dancing there that his star is not "a passport to go wherever he wished." Much is concealed from him by mists, much is wiped out of his memory after he has seen it. But Smith is not at home in Wootton Major either, although he has wife and children there. Only to them and a few others can he confide those excursions across the border which make up so great a part of his life. He is cut off from most of the population, since "too many had become like Nokes" and would have ridiculed him. Such, then, Tolkien seems to say, is the tragic homelessness of the man who lives and creates fantasy in a rationalistic age.

  Smith meets the Fairy Queen only twice, but these encounters provide the supreme moments of his life. On the first occasion he dances with her, not knowing who she is, in the Vale of Evermorn, and is lifted up to five above himself, as is the subcreator of secondary worlds of fantasy at the height of his inspiration. Smith sees her for the second and last time by her express summons on a peak in Faery by night, surrounded by a host of elven spearmen but herself taller than their spears. Recognizing the awesome being he faces and comparing her in his mind with the tawdry image mounted by Nokes on his cake, he is ashamed for mankind. The Queen laughs and tells him not to be: "Better a little doll, maybe, than no memory of Faery at all. For some only the glimpse. For some the awaking." This "glimpse," which is all that most people (as also in "Leaf by Niggle") ever remember of the enchanted lands, is at least better than no memory at all. Tasteless vulgarizations of Faery, in spite of the damage they do in driving away discriminating minds, have their uses for those who sleep most of their lives away. But in those who can wake up, memory may be set ablaze by even the most wrong-headed, most unpromising imitations.

  The Queen has given Smith his heart's desire, which is to see her, dance with her, and learn her thoughts, "some of which gave him joy, and others filled him with grief," for the greatest of the elves have sorrows and joys, and Faery has its dark places as well as its light. Now by an inexorable law, which she has no power to change, he must leave Faery forever. "The time has come. Let him choose" is the message she gives him to deliver to the unknown King. Since he must give up the star anyway, it may not strike us as much of a choice to let him decide whether to surrender it voluntarily. But in any moral choice—and this is moral—the assent of the chooser's will is all-important. Often we do what we must, but it makes all the difference whether we agree to do it or have to be dragged by the heels. Tolkien regards the option offered to Smith as conferring real freedom, in keeping with his ruling principle that all moral decisions must be free. When Smith, with dizziness and pain, tears the star from his brow and returns it to Alf, the King, he is rewarded by being allowed to name his "heir," the child who is to be fed the star at the next approaching Twenty-four Feast.

  Smith returns to his house sadly enough but strengthened by the gift given him by the Queen on parting. This is a comprehensive vision of the primary world of the village side by side with the secondary world of Faery, and of himself in relation to both: ". . . he seemed to be both in the World and in Faery, and also outside them and surveying them, so that at once he was in bereavement, and in ownership, and in peace." Standing outside the two worlds, he is able to see that he belongs partly in each and wholly in neither, and to feel for them taken together a sense both of owning and not owning, which resolves itself finally into peace. Smith comes back to Wootton Major "a giant" in spiritual growth, accepting the loss of Faery and ready to take up his domestic duties and his work at the smithy, which he has neglected of late during his long journeys away. His bereavement of past wonders is to be compensated for, especially, by teaching his son the secrets of his art at the forge and much else he has learned, not "only the working of iron." Yet a residue of sadness persists. The child who is to get his star will not know that Smith once owned it, he remarks ruefully. "That's the way with such gifts ... I have handed it on and come back to hammer and tongs."

  By what law was Smith obliged to leave Faery, never to return? And why? By the law of time, it seems: "The time has come." The time referred to is Smith's age. Tolkien very precisely keeps count of the passage of the years during the story. The boy of nine who first eats the star in his cake at the Twenty-four Feast that opens the narrative is fifty-seven years old at the second return of the Feast that closes the story forty-eight years later. Tolkien apparently is saying that a man can become too old for wanderings in Faery. His powers of apprehending its marvels and translating them into art decay with age. Younger people of talent wait to take his place. Not that literally only one writer of fantasy can hold the field at any given time, of course. But it is fitting for an established master of the genre as he feels his genius dying to accept an obligation to withdraw in favor of fresh pens.

  Reading "Smith of Wootton Major" as Tolkien's personal farewell to his art is tempting, and has at least as good an argument to support it as reading Shakespeare's The Tempest in the same autobiographical light. Is it mere chance that Tolkien was fifty-seven years old in 1949, when he completed The Lord of the Rings? At that age, and after so arduous an effort he would have been only human in concluding, either then or at some time in the years soon after, that his career as a writer of fiction was substantially over. He was not to know that he would five on for many years longer and resume work on the still unfinished Silmarillion. This is not to say, either, that he necessarily wrote the Smith story in 1949. He may have, or he may have waited some years until the autumnal mood was on him again. We do not yet know its date of composition. As for its late publication in 1967, when Tolkien was seventy-five, an autobiographical threnodic interpretation would help to explain why he wanted to keep it private until his closing years.

  Such, at least in outline, is the case for holding that in "Smith of Wootton Major" Tolkien broke his wand and drowned his magic books. We are not required to go all the way toward autobiography, however. Smith can be any practitioner of the White Art who travels far "from Daybreak to Evening" and in his old age comes home, tired, to hand on his passport to his successors. There is no denying the elegiac tone of the ending, with its falling leaves and sunset, its pain, its attempt to find in homely things comfort for a youthful intensity of life never to be reached again. This melancholy is enhanced by the departure of the Fairy Kong from the village, sneered at by Nokes and unregretted by all save a few of its inhabitants: "Most people . . . were content. They had had him for a very long time and were not sorry to have a change." The indirect reference to us of the twentieth century is clear enough. Tolkien is not hopeful about our age. The elves have left us, and we have not mourned to see them go.

  6. "Imram" 24

  By this title (Celtic for "voyage") Tolkien purposely associates his poem with that group of tales of early Irish seafaring into the western Atlantic which were popular throughout Europe from about the eighth century on and are now called imrama by modern scholars. By selecting Saint Brendan's voyage as his subject he also almost inevitably turns our eyes to that example of the type much more widely circulated than any other, the Latin prose Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis, surviving today in at least 120 manuscripts and translated during the Middle Ages into nearly every European vernacular.25 Since "Imram" is a short poem of 132 lines and the Navigatio is 35 pages long in its most recent English translation, Tolkien obviously has to select what he regards as a few central incidents from the welter of marvelous events which the Latin prose narrates with so much gusto. On the other hand, it is fair to say that almost everything in the poem exists in some form or other in the Navigatio. Watching how Tolkien selects, omits, and alters gives an unparalleled view of the artist at work.

  Both the poem and the prose tale begin at Brendan's monastery of Clonfert in Galway, his "Meadow of miracles," whose Celtic name is Cluain-ferta. Tolkien uses the Celtic form, which modern translations of the Lat
in prose likewise call attention to.26 Both versions describe the voyage as taking seven years. In both, the Saint and his crew of monks sail westward for a very long time (forty days in the Navigatio, over a year in "Imram")27 before they see anything but ocean. A divergence between the poem and the prose begins, however, in the account of the first unusual phenomenon the travelers meet with. In the Navigatio it is an island where they are fed by unseen hands and one monk succumbs to demonic possession. In "Imram" their currach sails under a dark cloud covering the sky overhead, which they find is being spewed out by a volcano in eruption. Now the cloud and the volcano are both in the Navigatio, but there Brendan encounters them at different times and only near the end of his quest. There the cloud, in fact, is not volcanic smoke but a supernatural barrier across the surface of the sea protecting the Land of Promise of the Saints, so thickly that the monks can scarcely see one another while in it.

  Tolkien's combining the two episodes and bringing them forward early into the voyage have the effect of giving the cloud a physical cause and a more inclusive function in "Imram." It is no longer a screen around the single island of the saints but a boundary between the normal Atlantic and that paranormal area of it in which the ensuing strangeness of the poem occurs. The Navigatio needs no such boundary. There the entire Atlantic from Ireland westward is dotted with islands no one of which is ordinary. Its marvels have no geographical beginning. At least to the modern mind, Tolkien's repositioning of the cloud and his giving it a natural volcanic origin enhance the voyage's credibility, as well as its orderly structure.