The Road to Middle-Earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology
Page 13
Since The Silmarillion, with its developed nomenclature, was already in existence, it would be wrong to say that Tolkien in the 1930s was not interested in names. It does look, though, as if he was not sure how to bring them into fiction, especially if they were English names. Yet the point had caught his attention. As The Hobbit neared completion he focused on the problem with sudden clarity – as one can see from Farmer Giles of Ham, not published till 1949, but composed apparently in the period 1935–8, i.e. overlapping with the final production of The Hobbit (see Bibliography, pp. 73–4). This throws many interesting sidelights on Tolkien’s fictional development. For one thing it is the only one of his stories set unmistakably in England, and while its history is that of nursery-rhyme* its geography is remarkably clear. Ham is now Thame, a town in Buckinghamshire twelve miles east of Oxford. Worminghall is four miles away and Oakley, which had its parson eaten, five. The capital of the Middle Kingdom, ‘some twenty leagues distant from Ham’, sounds like Tamworth, the historical capital of the Mercian kings, sixty-eight miles from Thame as the crow flies (a league, NB, is three miles). Farthingho in Northamptonshire, where once ‘an outpost against the Middle Kingdom was maintained’, is on a direct line between those two places about a third of the way from Thame – proof of the ‘Little Kingdom’s’ lack of territorial ambition. Wales, where the giants live, and the (Pennine) mountains where the dragons live are on this parochial scale suitably far off. And when Farmer Giles refuses to listen to tales about the folk ‘North over the hills and far away, beyond the Standing Stones and all’, he means Warwickshire, probably, whose boundary with Oxfordshire runs by the Rollright Stones.
All in all it is extremely unfair of the imagined ‘editor’ of Farmer Giles to criticise its imagined ‘author’ for feeble geography; that ‘author’, like Tolkien, ‘lived himself in the lands of the Little Kingdom’ and knew what he was writing about. But what is the point of this sudden precision? Evidently, Tolkien wanted to recreate a timeless and idealised England (or rather Britain) in which the place and the people remained the same regardless of politics. The story of Farmer Giles is therefore largely the triumph of native over foreign (for in Giles’s court ‘the vulgar tongue came into fashion, and none of his speeches were in the Book–latin’), as simultaneously of worth over fashion and of heroic song and popular lay over pompous pernickety rationalistic scholarship. In all these ways Farmer Giles continues the vein of the ‘Man in the Moon’ poems and of The Hobbit – as it does also in its jibing at the OED with its arrogantly ‘civilised’ definition of ‘blunderbuss’.3 However at the same time the story can be seen as one of the several works Tolkien wrote around this time with reference to his own switch from academicism to creativity (see above). Is Farmer Giles, like ‘Leaf by Niggle’, an allegory?
The main reason for thinking so is Giles’s supporter the parson, ‘a grammarian’, note, who ‘could no doubt see further into the future than most men’. His vital act is to remind Giles to take a long rope with him when he goes to hunt the dragon. Without that rope, one may say, there would have been no treasure, no tame dragon, no Thame, no Little Kingdom. Moreover the parson is also in a sense responsible for Tailbiter, Giles’s sword. He guesses what the sword is while Giles and the Miller are still arguing, confirms the guess when it will not go into its scabbard with a dragon near, and in spite of his patter about ‘epigraphical signs’ and archaic characters does actually read the runes on the sword and declare its identity as Tailbiter (or as he prefers to call it, Caudimordax). By doing all this the parson puts heart into Giles. All round he deserves a lot of the credit – certainly much more than Augustus Bonifacius Ambrosius Aurelianus Antoninus, the proud tyrant who sent Giles the sword, though only because to him plain heavy things were out of fashion. It is very nearly irresistible to conclude that in his mixture of learning, bluff and sense the parson represents an idealised (Christian) philologist; in which case the proud tyrant of the Middle Kingdom who discards his most trenchant blade looks very like literary criticism taking no notice of historical language study! One could go on: Farmer Giles would be the creative instinct, the rope (like Tailbiter) philological science, the dragon the ancient world of the Northern imagination brooding on its treasure of lost lays, the Little Kingdom the fictional space which Tolkien hoped to carve out, make independent and inhabit. Of course such an allegory would be a joke;4 but a joke in Tolkienian style, an optimistic counter-part to ‘Leaf by Niggle’ a few years later.
In the whole story linguistic humour is paramount, from the gloomy proverbs of ‘Sunny Sam’ and his pigheaded misprision of Hilarius and Felix – ‘Ominous names … I don’t like the sound of them’ – to Giles’s own determined native errors of grammar. The real errors, though, Tolkien ends by remarking, come from later and more ‘learned’ history. Thus Thame should be Tame, ‘for Thame with an h is a folly without warrant’. In actuality, of course, the whole story that Tolkien tells to account for the names of Thame and Worminghall is based on nothing, is mere fiction. Still, even in actuality Thame-with-an-h remains a folly without warrant, part of the wave of Book-latinisms which have given us Thames and Thomas and could and debt and doubt and half the other non-sounded, unhistorical, un-English inserted letters that plague our spelling to this day. Tolkien would have liked them not to exist. He deplored the feeble modern understanding of English names, English places, English culture. In Farmer Giles of Ham one can see him brooding over problems of re-creation and of continuity – for names and places remain whatever people think about them. Though he joked about them, Thame and Worminghall are a long step on from The Hill and The Water. Farthingho set Tolkien thinking about the Farthings of ‘The Shire’.
The further development into The Lord of the Rings is obvious. Where The Hobbit had some forty or fifty rather perfunctory names, the indices of The Lord of the Rings list over 600 names of ‘Persons, Beasts and Monsters’, almost as many places, with a couple of hundred unclassifiable but named objects for good measure. In the same way Thror’s Map and the map of Wilderland in The Hobbit, which added nothing to the story but decoration and a ‘Here be tygers’ feel of quaintness, have ceded to the foldout map of Middle-earth in the first edition of The Fellowship of the Ring, the even more detailed map of the Marches of Gondor and Mordor in The Return of the King, the map of the Shire at the end of the ‘Prologue’, the still further elaborated map issued as a poster by Pauline Baynes in 1970: all of these based on Tolkien’s own maps, see Treason pp. 295–323, and all of them full of details never directly used in the text. Christopher Tolkien confirms the truth of his father’s words to Naomi Mitchison, ‘I wisely started with a map, and made the story fit’, see Letters p. 177 and Treason p. 315. But even the characters of The Lord of the Rings have a strong tendency to talk like maps, and historical ones at that. On p. 372 Aragorn begins ‘You are looking now south-west across the north plains of the Riddermark … Ere long we shall come to the mouth of the Limlight that runs down from Fangorn to join the Great River.’ A little before Celeborn had been tracing the course of Anduin ‘to the tall island of the Tindrock, that we call Tol Brandir’, where it falls ‘over the cataracts of Rauros down into the Nindalf, the Wetwang as it is called in your tongue. That is a wide region of sluggish fen … There the Entwash flows in … About that stream, on this side of the Great River, lies Rohan. On the further side are the bleak hills of the Emyn Muil.’ The flow of knowledge, and of names, seems irrepressible, and the habit is shared by Gimli, Gandalf, Fangorn, even Meriadoc. Why such elaboration?
The answer, oddly, lies as far back as The Hobbit. There Bilbo on one occasion screwed up his courage to ask why something was called ‘The Carrock’. Because it was, replied Gandalf nastily (pp. 108–9).
‘He called it the Carrock, because carrock is his word for it. He calls things like that carrocks, and this one is the Carrock because it is the only one near his home and he knows it well.’
This is unhelpful, and not even true, since carrecc is Old Welsh f
or ‘rock’, preserved in several modern names like Crickhowell in Brecon (or Crickhollow in the Buckland). However Gandalf has put his finger on one point about names, which is that they are arbitrary, even if they were not so in the beginning. Once upon a time all names were like ‘Gandalf’ or ‘the Hill’: thus (the) Frogmorton meant ‘the town in the marshy land where the frogs are’ (see ‘Guide’, p. 185), Tolkien was der tollkühne or ‘the foolhardy one’, Suffield, Tolkien’s mother’s name, ‘(the one from the) south field’, and so on. However, that is not how names are now perceived. In the modern world we take them as labels, as things accordingly in a very close one-to-one relationship with whatever they label. To use a pompous phrase, they are ‘isomorphic with reality’. And that means they are extraordinarily useful to fantasy, weighing it down as they do with repeated implicit assurances of the existence of the things they label, and of course of their nature and history too.
Tolkien’s new equation of fantasy with reality comes over most strongly in his map, account and history of ‘the Shire’, an extended ‘Little Kingdom’, one might say, transplanted to Middle-earth. The easiest way to describe it is to say that the Shire is ‘calqued’ on England, ‘calquing’ being a linguistic term to mean that process in which the elements of a compound word are translated bit by bit to make a new word in another language, as in French haut-parleur from ‘loudspeaker’ (parler haut = ‘speak loudly’), or Irish eachchumhacht from ‘horsepower’ (each = ‘horse’, like eoh, equus above). The point about calques is that the derivative does not sound anything like its original: nevertheless it betrays influence at every point. Thus historically the Shire is like / unlike England, the hobbits like / unlike English people. Hobbits live in the Shire as the English live in England, but like the English they come from somewhere else, indeed from the Angle (in Europe between Flensburg Fjord and the Schlei, in Middle-earth between Hoarwell and Loudwater). Both groups have forgotten this fact. Both emigrated in three tribes, Angles, Saxons and Jutes or Stoors, Harfoots and Fallohides, all since then largely mingled. The English were led by two brothers, Hengest and Horsa, i.e. ‘stallion’ and ‘horse’, the hobbits by Marcho and Blanco, cp. Old English *marh, ‘horse’, blanca (only in Beowulf) ‘white horse’.5 All four founded realms which evolved into uncharacteristic peace: there was no battle in the Shire between the Greenfields, 1147, and the Battle of Bywater, 1419, an interval of 272 years very like the 270 between publication of The Return of the King and the last battle fought on English soil, Sedgemoor, 1685. Organisationally too the Shire, with its mayors, musters, moots and Shirriffs, is an old-fashioned and idealised England, while the hobbits, in their plainness, greediness, frequent embarrassments, distrust of ‘outsiders’* and most of all in their deceptive ability to endure rough handling form an easily recognisable if again old-fashioned self-image of the English. The calquing is most evident, however, on the map.
Here all that need be said is that Tolkien took most of his Shire-names from his own near surroundings. They sound funny but they ring true. Thus ‘Nobottle’ in the Northfarthing makes us think of glass containers, hardly plausible as features of the landscape, but the name comes from Old English niowe ‘new’, botl ‘house’ (as in bytla, cp. ‘hobbit’). There is a Nobottle in Northamptonshire thirty-five miles from Oxford (and not far from Farthingstone). It means much the same as Newbury, also a town in England twenty-five miles south of Oxford and also a place in the Shire, or rather in the Buckland. Buckland itself is an Oxfordshire placename, common all over England since it has the rather dull etymology of bócland, land ‘booked’ to the Church by charter, and so different from folcland or ‘folkland’ which was inalienable. That derivation was impossible in Middle-earth, so Tolkien constructed the more satisfactory one that the Buckland was where the Buck family lived, was indeed a ‘folkland’ centred on Bucklebury like the ‘Tookland’ centred on Tuckborough. As for ‘Took’, that too appears a faintly comic name in modern English (people prefer to respell it ‘Tooke’), but it is only the ordinary Northern pronunciation of the very common ‘Tuck’. Five minutes with the Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names, E. Ekwall’s English River Names or P. H. Reaney’s Dictionary of British Surnames will provide explanations for most hobbitic names of any sort, and the same is true, on a more learned scale, of the rest of Middle-earth. Thus Celeborn’s ‘Wetwang’ is also a place in Yorkshire, the Riders’ ‘Dunharrow’ has evident English parallels, the rivers Gladden, Silverlode, Limlight, etc., all have English roots or analogues, and so on outwards. The work that went into all these is immense. It also seems largely wasted, since for all the characters’ efforts half the names never get into the plot! Still, Tolkien certainly thought, and very probably he thought rightly, that all this effort was not wasted. The maps and the names give Middle-earth that air of solidity and extent both in space and time which its successors so conspicuously lack. They mark an ambition much increased from The Hobbit’s opening scenes of parody and close of detached appreciation. They also quite simply provided grist for Tolkien’s creative mill – one which like the mills of God ground slow but ground (in the end) exceeding small.
Getting started
In a footnote to the ‘Epilogue’ of ‘On Fairy-Stories’, Tolkien noted, or confessed, that though every fantasy-writer aims at truth ‘it is seldom that the “inspiration” is so strong and lasting that it leavens all the lump, and does not leave much that is mere uninspired “invention”.’ One might think that authors start off with a flash of ‘inspiration’ and as it dies away keep things going with ‘invention’. In Tolkien’s case it looks very much as if he worked the other way round: he got started on relatively laborious ‘inventions’, and found as the story gathered way that the inevitable complications of these brought him ‘inspiration’. Thus The Hobbit does not quite take off till Bilbo finds the ring, and even then the sense of events gaining continuity is not strong till the company reaches Mirkwood, on the other side of the house of Beorn. The same is true of The Lord of the Rings.
It is for one thing remarkable that Frodo has to be dug out of no less than five ‘Homely Houses’ before his quest is properly launched: first Bag End, then the little house at Crickhollow with its redundant guardian Fredegar Bolger, then the house of Tom Bombadil, then the Prancing Pony, and finally Rivendell with its ‘last Homely House east of the Sea’. Each of these locations has of course its images and encounters to present, and some of them (like the meeting with Strider) turn out to be vital. Nevertheless there is a sense that the zest of the story goes not into the dangers but the recoveries – hot baths at Crickhollow, song and dancing at Bree, Goldberry’s water that seems like wine, and Butterbur’s ‘small and cosy room’ with its ‘hot soup, cold meats, a blackberry tart, new loaves, slab of butter, and half a ripe cheese’. And this is to take no account of meals en passant, like Gildor Inglorion’s pastoral elvish banquet and Farmer Maggot’s ‘mighty dish of bacon and mushrooms’! Meanwhile the Black Riders, for all their snuffling and deadly cries, are not the menace they later become, for though they may only be waiting for a better chance, as Aragorn insists, they could have saved themselves trouble several times in the Shire, in Bree and on Weathertop by pressing their attacks home. It seems likely that, as at the start of The Hobbit, Tolkien found the transit from familiar Shire to archaic Wilderland an inhibiting one. He broke through in The Hobbit with the trolls and then the ring. In The Lord of the Rings his invention came, to begin with, from a sort of self-plagiarism.
The hobbits’ first three real encounters are with the Willow-man and Tom Bombadil in the Old Forest, and with the Barrow-wight on the Downs outside. All three could almost be omitted without disturbing the rest of the plot.6 Willow-man is a forerunner of the Ents, or rather the Huorns, but Bombadil never comes back into the story at all: the Council of Elrond considers him for a moment, Gandalf stops for a chat when all serious work is over. The Barrow-wight does a little more in providing the sword that Merry uses on the chief-Ringwraith in Book V,
a sword specifically designed for use against the Witch-king of Angmar, which is what that Nazgûl turns out to be. Still, that is a by-product. All three of these characters furthermore go a long way back in Tolkien’s mind, as far back as hobbits, probably, further than the Shire or the Ring; they are all in the poem ‘The Adventures of Tom Bombadil’, printed in the Oxford Magazine in 1934 (just as the song Frodo sings in the Prancing Pony is a revision from 1923). Tolkien was raiding his own larder, and one can in the end see why.