The Road to Middle-Earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology
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‘We’ll drink to him like friends in excellent booze,
and our sweet lady will sit right next to him.
When he’s as drunk as a drowned mouse,
we’ll go to the bailiff and redeem your pledge.’
And without this evidence, clearly, the indictment will be quashed! It all sounds a most plausible way to work, and one which casts an unexpected light on the downtrodden serfs of medieval England – not as downtrodden as all that, obviously. Their good-natured resourcefulness seems to be an element in the make-up of Tolkien’s hobbits. More significantly, the poem makes one wonder about the unofficial elements of early literary culture. Were there other ‘Man in the Moon’ poems? Was there a whole genre of sophisticated play on folk-belief? There could have been. Tolkien’s 1923 poems attempt to revive it, or invent it, fitting into the gaps between modern doggerel and medieval lyric, creating something that might have existed and would, if it had, account for the jumble and litter of later periods – very like Gothic and ‘i-mutation’.
One sees that the thing which attracted Tolkien most was darkness: the blank spaces, much bigger than most people realise, on the literary and historical map, especially those after the Romans left in AD 419, or after Harold died at Hastings in 1066. The post-Roman era produced ‘King Arthur’, to whose cycle King Lear and King Cole and the rest became eventual tributaries. Tolkien knew this tradition well and used it for Farmer Giles of Ham (published 1949, but written much earlier), the opening paragraphs of which play jokingly with the first few lines of Sir Gawain. However he also knew that whatever the author of Sir Gawain thought, the Arthurian tradition was originally non-English, indeed dedicated to the overthrow of England; its commemoration in English verse was merely a final consequence of the stamping-out of native culture after Hastings, a literary ‘defoliation’ which had also led to the meaninglessness of English names like ‘Fawler’ and the near-total loss of all Old English heroic tradition, apart from Beowulf. What, then, had happened to England and the English during those ‘Norman centuries’ when, it might be said, ‘language’ and ‘literature’ had first and lastingly separated?
Tolkien had been interested in that question for some time. Not much was known about Early Middle English, and indeed several of its major texts remain without satisfactory editions today. However, one important work was evidently the Ancrene Wisse, a ‘guide for anchoresses (or female hermits)’, existing in several manuscripts from different times and places, but one of few Middle English works to be translated into French rather than out of it. With this were associated several other texts with a ‘feminist’ bias, the tract on virginity Hali Meiðhad, the saints’ lives Seinte Juliene, Seinte Marherete, Seinte Katherine, the little allegory Sawles Warde. All looked similar in dialect, and in sophistication of phrase; on the other hand their subject-matter meant they were unlikely ever to take the ‘literature’ side by storm. What could be said about them?
Tolkien began with a review of F. J. Furnivall’s edition of Hali Meiðhad, in 1923; he went on to make ‘Some Contributions to Middle English Lexicography’ in Review of English Studies (1925), most of them drawn from Ancrene Wisse, and some of them incidentally interesting, like the remark that medi wið wicchen must mean, not ‘meddle with witches’ but ‘bribe, purchase the service of witches’, apparently a known practice to the author of the ‘Rule’. In ‘The Devil’s Coach-Horses’ in the same periodical that year he spent enormous effort on the single word eaueres from Hali Meiðhad, arguing that it did not mean ‘boars’ as the OED had said, but ‘heavy horses, draft horses’. Philologically this was interesting as showing a Germanic root *abra-z, meaning ‘work’ and connected with Latin opus. 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. All very well, but still, some would have said, distinctly peripheral.
The breakthrough came with Tolkien’s article for Essays and Studies (1929), ‘Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad’, the most perfect though not the best-known of his academic pieces. This rested in classic philological style on an observation of the utmost tininess. In Old English a distinction was regularly made between verbs like hé hiereð, híe híerað, ‘he hears, they hear’, and hé lócað, híe lóciað ‘he looks, they look’. An -að ending could be singular or plural, depending on what sort of a verb it was attached to. This clear but to outsiders utterly unmemorable distinction was, after Hastings, rapidly dropped. Two manuscripts, however, one of Ancrene Wisse, the other of its five associated texts, not only preserved the distinction but went on to make another new one, between verbs within the lócian class: they distinguished e.g. between ha polieð, ‘they endure’, O.E. híe poliað, and ha fondið, ‘they inquire’, O.E. híe fondiað. The distinction had a sound phonological basis and was not the result of mere whim. Furthermore the two manuscripts could not have been by the same man for they were in different handwriting. Evidently – I summarise the chain of logic – they were the product of a ‘school’; so were the works themselves, composed in the same dialect by another man or men; and this ‘school’ was one that operated in English, and in an English descended without interruption from Old English, owing words certainly to the Norse and the French but not affected by the confusion their invasions had caused. To put it Tolkien’s way:
There is an English older than Dan Michel’s and richer, as regular in spelling as Orm’s [these are two other relatively consistent writers of Middle English] but less queer; one that has preserved something of its former cultivation. It is not a language long relegated to the ‘uplands’ struggling once more for expression in apologetic emulation of its betters or out of compassion for the lewd, but rather one that has never fallen back into ‘lewdness’, and has contrived in troublous times to maintain the air of a gentleman, if a country gentleman. It has traditions and some acquaintance with books and the pen, but it is also in close touch with a good living speech – a soil somewhere in England. (‘AW’, p. 106)
It is in short a language which had defied conquest and the Conqueror.
There are several signs here of Tolkien’s underlying preoccupations. One is the power of philology: the regularity and rigour of its observations can resurrect from the dead a society long since vanished of which no other trace remains than the nature of dialect forms in a few old manuscripts. These observations are incontestable. They are also suggestive, permitting us to make informed guesses at, say, the level of independence of western shires in the twelfth century and the nature of their race-relations. They pleased Tolkien further because their implication was so clearly patriotic, that there had been an England beyond England even in the days when anyone who was anyone spoke French. In that way they also corroborated the impression of self-confidence made by the ‘Man in the Moon’ poem, itself an example of what Tolkien in that article (p. 116) called ‘the westerly lyric, whose little world lay between Wirral and the Wye’. As for the Ancrene Wisse itself, Tolkien had little doubt that the ‘soil somewhere in England’ to which it should be ascribed was Herefordshire, a decision confirmed by later research. All in all the picture these inquiries gave was of a far-West shire, cut off from and undisturbed by foreigners, adhering to the English traditions elsewhere in ruins. If only such a civilisation had endured to be the ancestor of ours! Tolkien, with his family connections in and nostalgic memories of Worcestershire, the next most-western county to Hereford and like it a storehouse of Old English tradition, felt the pull of this ‘might have been’ strongly and personally. In a revealing passage at the end of the article (p. 122), he noted a few exceptions to his general rule and remarked:
Personally I have no doubt that if we could call the scribes of A and B before us and silently point to these forms, they would thank us, pick up a pen, and immediately substitute the -in forms, as certainly as one of the present day would emend a minor aberration from standard spelling or accidence, if it was pointed to.
The gho
sts would be gentlemen, scholars, Englishmen too. Tolkien felt at home with them.
This sentiment may have been misguided: if we really had the ‘lays’ on which Beowulf was based we might not think much of them, and if we had to deal with the scribes of Ancrene Wisse we might find them difficult people. There is a streak of wishful thinking in Tolkien’s remark near the beginning of this article that if his argument was sound, English in the west at that time must have been ‘at once more alive, and more traditional and organized as a written form, than anywhere else’. He was used to having ‘traditional’ literature viewed as dead: it was nice to think of a time when tradition was rated higher than modern fashion. Still, it is hard to say his sentiment was wrong. It was based on rational argument, and the whole theory integrated (as theories should) many thousands of separate facts which had been needing explanation already. With hindsight one can see that this philological vision of ancient Herefordshire was a strong component of Tolkien’s later conception of the hobbits’ ‘Shire’, also cut-off, dimly remembering former empires, but effectively turned in on itself to preserve an idealised ‘English’ way of life. But ‘the Shire’ is fiction, and philology fact. The questions which begin to show themselves in Tolkien’s work from about this time on are: how far did he distinguish the two states? And how much of his later success was caused by reluctance to admit a distinction?
Connections are exemplified in Tolkien’s article ‘Sigelwara land’, published in two parts in Medium Aevum 1932 and 1934. Typically this considers a single Old English word, Sigelware, and typically corrects that briskly to Sigelhearwan. What were these? Literate Anglo-Saxons used the word to translate Æthiops, ‘Ethiopian’, but, Tolkien argued, the word must have been older than English knowledge of Latin, let alone Ethiopians, and must have had some other and earlier referent. Pursuing sigel and hearwa separately through many examples and analogues, he emerged with two thoughts and an image: (1) that sigel meant originally both ‘sun’ and ‘jewel’, (2) that hearwa was related to Latin carbo, ‘soot’, (3) that when an Anglo-Saxon of the preliterate Dark Age said sigelhearwan, what he had in mind was ‘rather the sons of Múspell [the Norse fire-giant] than of Ham, the ancestors of the Silhearwan with red-hot eyes that emitted sparks, with faces black as soot’. What was the point of the speculation, admittedly ‘guess-work’, admittedly ‘inconclusive’? It offers some glimpses of a lost mythology, suggested Tolkien with academic caution, something ‘which has coloured the verse-treatment of Scripture and determined the diction of poems’.10 A good deal less boringly, one might say, it had helped to naturalise the ‘Balrog’ in the traditions of the North, and it had helped to create (or corroborate) the image of the silmaril, that fusion of ‘sun’ and ‘jewel’ in physical form. Tolkien was already thinking along these lines. His scholarly rigour was not ‘put-on’, but it was no longer only being directed to academic, uncreative ends.
Allegories, Potatoes, Fantasy and Glamour
One may now see in rather a different light the four minor prose works written by Tolkien in the late 1930s and early 1940s, those years in which The Hobbit came to term and The Lord of the Rings began to get under way – the years, one may say, when Tolkien turned away from pursuing his trade and began instead to use it. He knew he was doing this, as one can see from the little allegory ‘Leaf by Niggle’ (published 1945, but written c. 1943). Since Tolkien said in later years that he ‘cordially disliked’ allegory, it is perhaps worth repeating that ‘Leaf by Niggle’ quite certainly is one.11 The story’s first words are, ‘There was once a little man called Niggle, who had a long journey to make’, and to any Anglo-Saxonist this is bound to recall the Old Northumbrian poem known as Bede’s Death-Song, memorable (a) for being in Old Northumbrian, (b) for being so clearly the true, last words of the Venerable Bede, England’s greatest churchman, all of whose other works are in Latin. This goes: ‘Before that compelled journey (néidfáerae) no man is wiser than he needs to be, in considering, before his departure, what will be judged to his soul after his deathday, good or evil.’ Obviously someone should have said this to Niggle! But the lines also give a good and ancient reason for carrying out the basic operation of allegory, which is to start making equations.
Thus journey = death. Niggle the painter further = Tolkien the writer. One can see as much from the accusation of being ‘just idle’, softened later to being ‘the sort of painter who can paint leaves better than trees’, or to being unable to organise his time; Tolkien was sensitive to accusations of laziness, but it is clear enough that he was a perfectionist, and also easily distracted.12 Niggle’s ‘leaf = The Hobbit, his ‘Tree’ = The Lord of the Rings, the ‘country’ that opens from it = Middle-earth, and the ‘other pictures … tacked on to the edges of his great picture’ = the poems and other works which Tolkien kept on fitting into his own greater one.13 Meanwhile the garden which Niggle does not keep up looks ominously like Tolkien’s professorial duties; the visitors who hinted ‘that he might get a visit from an Inspector’ remind one of that discourteous colleague of Tolkien’s, who even after The Lord of the Rings came out snapped ungraciously ‘He ought to have been teaching!’14 One can go on making these equations, and one is supposed to; the essence of an allegory, Tolkien thought, was that it should be ‘just’, i.e. that all the bits should fit exactly together, compelling assent (and amusement) by their minuteness. If one realises that, there is a certain bite in the place where Niggle does his painting. He keeps his great canvas ‘in the tall shed that had been built for it out in his garden (on a plot where once he had grown potatoes)’. Niggle sacrificed potatoes to paint. What did Tolkien sacrifice to The Lord of the Rings? The real answer is, articles like those on Ancrene Wisse and the Sigelware; after 1940 (when he was only 48) Tolkien wrote only five more, and two of these were collaborations and two others not entirely academic in style. Still, Tolkien never went over to despising the advancement of learning. It is Niggle’s expressed gratitude for Parish’s ‘excellent potatoes’ which persuades the First Voice to let him out of the Workhouse (= Purgatory). One could say that the whole tale expresses both Tolkien’s self-accusation and self-justification, and that its solution in Heaven lies in Niggle and Parish, the creative and the practical aspects of Tolkien himself, learning to work together – though what they work on, you notice, is very definitely Niggle’s Tree and Country, not Parish’s potatoes at all.
Tolkien was giving up the academic cursus honorum in the late 1930s, and he knew it. How did he justify this to himself, and how far could he reconcile the claims of ‘potatoes’ and ‘Trees’ (= scholarship and fantasy)? These questions underlie, often unsuspectedly, the three critical works roughly contemporary with ‘Leaf by Niggle’, i.e. ‘Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics’ (published 1936), ‘On Fairy-Stories’ (first version 1939), and the ‘Preface’ to C. L. Wrenn’s revision of the Clark Hall translation of Beowulf (1940). None of these contains very much philology in the narrow sense of sound-changes or verb-paradigms, and they have accordingly been fallen on gratefully by commentators who never wanted to learn any. However, philology still remains their essential guts; while they lead forward to fantasy they also look back to and rest always on an intensely rigorous study of ‘the word’.
So, to take the last piece first, the ‘Clark Hall’ introduction has only one main point to make, and that is that words mean more than their dictionary entries. What happens if you look up Sigelware in the standard Old English dictionary of J. Bosworth and T. N. Toller? It says ‘the Ethiopians’, and that’s all. What of éacen, a word in Beowulf? The dictionary says ‘Increased, great, vast, powerful’. To ‘the enquirer into ancient beliefs’, wrote Tolkien, only the first was right, for éacen meant not ‘large’ but ‘enlarged’ and denoted a supernatural addition of power. As for runes, Bosworth-Toller translated the Beowulfian phrase onband bead-urúne (meaninglessly) as ‘unbound the war-secret’, while Clark Hall tried ‘gave vent to secret thoughts of strife’. ‘It means “unbound a battle rune”�
��, declared Tolkien. ‘What exactly is implied is not clear. The expression has an antique air, as if it had descended from an older time to our poet: a suggestion lingers of the spells by which men of wizardry could stir up storms in a clear sky’ (pp. xiii-xiv). Fanciful, the shades of Bosworth and Toller might have said. If the facts point to fantasy, Tolkien could have retorted, fantasy is what we must have! The ‘Preface’ is in a wider sense a protest against translating Beowulf only into polite modern English, a plea for listening to the vision contained, not in plots, but in words – words like flæsc-homa, bán-hús, hreðer-loca, ellor-síð (‘flesh-raiment’, ‘bone-house’, ‘heart-prison’, ‘elsewhere-journey’). The poet who used these words, Tolkien wrote, did not see the world like us, but:
saw in his thought the brave men of old walking under the vault of heaven upon the island earth (middangeard) beleaguered by the Shoreless Seas (gársecg) and the outer darkness, enduring with stern courage the brief days of life (læne líf), until the hour of fate (metodsceaft), when all things should perish, léoht ond lif samod [light and life together]. (p. xxvii)
He ‘did not say all this fully or explicitly’. Nevertheless, the insistence ran, it was there. You didn’t need a mythological handbook of Old English if you paid attention to the words; like place-names or Roman roads or Gothic vowels, they carried quite enough information all by themselves.
The same insistence on ‘the reality of language’ permeates the British Academy lecture of 1936. There, however, it is further intertwined with beliefs about ‘the reality of history’ – rather curious beliefs which Tolkien does not seem to have wanted to express directly. The general flow of the lecture is in fact extremely sinuous, causing great trouble to the many later Beowulfians who have tried to paraphrase it; it abounds in asides, in hilarious images like the Babel of conflicting critics and the ‘jabberwocks of historical and antiquarian research’, in wildernesses of dragons and shrewdnesses of apes. However a vital point about it, never directly stated or defended, is Tolkien’s conviction that he knew exactly when and under what circumstances the poem was written. ‘At a given point’, he says (his italics, p. 262), there was a fusion, reflected in the poem; at this ‘precise point’ (p. 269) an imagination was kindled. Since there is no unquestioned evidence at all for the date and place when Beowulf was composed (it could be anywhere from Tyne to Severn, from AD 650 to 1000), one wonders what Tolkien meant. But the nearest he approaches to an answer is via allegory once more, in his little story of the man and the tower, on pp. 248–9.