The Road to Middle-Earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology

by Tom Shippey

  The horses of the Mark

  This virtue is easily missed by critics or reviewers skimming through for the plot; and perhaps we have now reached one reason for the enormous difference of opinion between Tolkien’s admirers and his detractors. The whole of The Lord of the Rings is on its larger scale like ‘The Council of Elrond’. Through both there runs a narrative thread, but just as the single chapter relies for a great part of its effect on the relishing of stylistic variation, so the work as a whole depends very largely on tableaux: separate images of places, peoples, societies, all in some way furthering the story, but sometimes (as with Bombadil or Willowman) not furthering it very much, there mostly or largely for their own sake. Someone not prepared to read slowly enough – Tolkien thought his books were best read aloud – might paradoxically write off the story as ‘slow’ or ‘nerveless’; and there would be a basis of truth for the observation as long as it confined itself to the story. But this is a poor way to appreciate the whole.

  Any one of Tolkien’s tableaux would stand analysis, and the obvious one to choose is perhaps Gondor. However I prefer to start with the Riders of Rohan, not the first children of Tolkien’s imagination but the ones he regarded with most affection and also in a sense the most central. In creating them Tolkien was once again playing with his own background and his home in ‘the Little Kingdom’. Thus ‘Rohan’ is only the Gondorian word for the Riders’ country; they themselves call it ‘the Mark’. Now there is no English county called ‘the Mark’, but the Anglo-Saxon kingdom which included both Tolkien’s home-town Birmingham and his alma mater Oxford was ‘Mercia’ – a Latinism now adopted by historians mainly because the native term was never recorded. However the West Saxons called their neighbours the Mierce, clearly a derivation (by ‘i-mutation’) from Mearc; the Mercians’ own pronunciation of that would certainly have been the ‘Mark’, and that was no doubt once the everyday term for central England. As for the ‘white horse on the green field’ which is the emblem of the Mark, you can see it cut into the chalk fifteen miles from Tolkien’s study, two miles from “Wayland’s Smithy’ and just about on the borders of ‘Mercia’ and Wessex, as if to mark the kingdom’s end. All the Riders’ names and language are Old English, as many have noted;* but they were homely to Tolkien in an even deeper sense than that.

  As has already been remarked, though, the Riders according to Tolkien did not resemble the ‘ancient English … except in a general way due to their circumstances: a simpler and more primitive people living in contact with a higher and more venerable culture, and occupying lands that had once been part of its domain’. Tolkien was stretching the truth a long way in asserting that, to say the least! But there is one obvious difference between the people of Rohan and the ‘ancient English’, and that is horses. The Rohirrim call themselves the Éothéod (Old English eoh = ‘horse’ + þéod = ‘people’); this translates into Common Speech as ‘the Riders’; Rohan itself is Sindarin for ‘horse-country’. Prominent Riders call themselves after horses (Éomund, Éomer, Éowyn), and their most important title after ‘King’ is ‘marshall’, borrowed into English from French but going back to an unrecorded Germanic *marho-skalkoz, ‘horse-servant’ (and cp. the name of the hobbits’ Hengest). The Rohirrim are nothing if not cavalry. By contrast the Anglo-Saxons’ reluctance to have anything militarily to do with horses is notorious. The Battle of Maldon begins, significantly enough, with the horses being sent to the rear. Hastings was lost, along with Anglo-Saxon independence, largely because the English heavy infantry could not (quite) hold off the combination of archers and mounted knights. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 1055 remarks sourly that at Hereford ‘before a spear was thrown the English fled, because they had been made to fight on horseback’. How then can Anglo-Saxons and Rohirrim ever, culturally, be equated?

  A part of the answer is that the Rohirrim are not to be equated with the Anglo-Saxons of history, but with those of poetry, or legend. The chapter ‘The King of the Golden Hall’ is straightforwardly calqued on Beowulf. When Legolas says of Meduseld, ‘The light of it shines far over the land’, he is translating line 311 of Beowulf, lixte se léoma ofer landa fela. ‘Meduseld’ is indeed a Beowulfian word (line 3065) for ‘hall’. More importantly the poem and the chapter agree, down to minute detail, on the procedure for approaching kings. In Beowulf the hero is stopped first by a coastguard, then by a doorward, and only after two challenges is allowed to approach the Danish King; he and his men have to ‘pile arms’ outside as well. Tolkien follows this dignified, step-by-step ceremonial progress exactly. Thus in ‘The King of the Golden Hall’ Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli are checked first by the guards at the gates of Edoras (= ‘enclosures’), and then by the doorward of Meduseld, Háma. He too insists on the ceremony of piling arms, though Tolkien’s characters object more than Beowulf does, largely because he is a volunteer and in any case fights by choice barehanded. There is a crisis over Gandalf’s staff, indeed, and Háma broods, reflecting rightly that ‘The staff in the hand of a wizard may be more than a prop for age’; he settles his doubts with the maxim ‘Yet in doubt a man of worth will trust to his own wisdom. I believe you are friends and folk of honour, who have no evil purpose. You may go in.’ In saying so he echoes the maxim of the coastguard of Beowulf (lines 287–92), ‘a sharp shield-warrior must know how to tell good from bad in every case, from words as well as deeds. I hear [from your words] that this warband is friendly … I will guide you.’

  The point is not, though, that Tolkien is once more writing a ‘calqued’ narrative, but that he is taking advantage of a modern expansive style to spell out things that would have been obvious to Anglo-Saxons – in particular, the truths that freedom is not a prerogative of democracies, and that in free societies orders give way to discretion. Háma takes a risk with Gandalf; so does the coastguard with Beowulf. So does Éomer with Aragorn, letting him go free and lending him horses. He is under arrest when Aragorn re-appears, and Théoden notes Háma’s dereliction of duty too. Still, the nice thing about the Riders, one might say, is that though ‘a stern people, loyal to their lord’, they wear duty and loyalty lightly. Háma and Éomer make their own decisions, and even the suspicious gate-ward wishes Gandalf luck. ‘I was only obeying orders’, we can see, would not be accepted as an excuse in the Riddermark. Nor would it in Beowulf. The wisdom of ancient epic is translated by Tolkien into a whole sequence of doubts, decisions, sayings, rituals.

  One could go further and say that the Riders spring from poetry not history in that the whole of their culture is based on song. Almost the first thing Gandalf and the others see, nearing Meduseld, are the mounds covered in simbelmynë either side of the way. Simbelmynë is a little white flower, but also means ‘ever-mind’, ‘ever-memory’, ‘forget-me-not’. Like the barrows it stands for the preservation of the memory of ancient deeds and heroes in the expanse of years. The Riders are fascinated by memorial verse and oblivion, by deaths and by epitaphs. They show it in their list of kingly pedigrees, from Théoden back to Eorl the Young, in the suicidal urges of Éomer and Éowyn to do ‘deeds of song’,16 in the song that Aragorn sings to set the tone of the culture he is visiting:

  ‘Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing? Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?’

  Most of all it comes over in the alliterative dirges made for Théoden by Gléowine, for the dead of Pelennor by an anonymous ‘maker’, even in the rhyming couplet made for the horse Snowmane. These preserve the sonority, the sadness, the feeling for violent opposites (‘death’ and ‘day’, ‘lords’ and ‘lowly’, ‘halls’ and ‘pastures’) integrated in the Riders’ language and culture. Their visual correlatives, one might say, are the spears planted in burial-mounds by Fangorn and at the Fords of Isen; or perhaps the spears are the men and the mounds are poems, for Éomer says of one burial, ‘when their spears have rotted and rusted, long still may their mounds stand and guard the Fords of Isen!’ The men die and their
weapons rust. But their memory remains, passes into simbelmynë, ‘evermind’, the oral heritage of the race.

  One should see at this point how far Tolkien’s imagination surpasses that of most fantasy-writers. Proud barbarians are ten a penny in modern fantasy. Hardly one of their creators grasps the fact that barbarians are sensitive too: that a heroic way of life preoccupies men with death and with the feeble, much-prized resistances to death which their cultures can offer. Of course Tolkien drew his knowledge from Old English, from that literature whose greatest monument is not an epic but the ‘dirge’ of Beowulf; ‘The King of the Golden Hall’ echoes that poem as closely as Aragorn’s song above echoes the Old English Wanderer. However Tolkien was trying to go beyond translation to ‘reconstruction’. And this is what explains the horses. The feeling of Anglo-Saxon poetry for these was markedly different from that of Anglo-Saxon history. Thus the retainers of Beowulf joyfully race their mearas back from the monsters’ lake as they sing their praise songs; the ancient gnomic poem Maxims I observes enthusiastically that ‘a good man will keep in mind a good, well-broken horse, familiar, well-tried, and round-hoofed’; it has already been noted that the same poem declared that ‘an earl goes on the arched back of a war-horse, a mounted troop (éored) must ride in a body’, only for a historical Anglo-Saxon scribe to rewrite éored foolishly as worod or ‘(foot) body guard’. Tolkien may have known that the confusing Anglo-Saxon words for colour were once words for the colour of horses’ coats, like Hasufel = ‘grey coat’, suggesting an early society as observant of horses as modern African tribes of cows.17 Maybe the infantry-fixation of historical periods was the result of living on an island. Maybe the Anglo-Saxons before they migrated to England were different. What would have happened had they turned East, not West, to the German plains and the steppes beyond?

  In creating the Riddermark Tolkien thought of his own ‘Mercia’. He also certainly remembered the great lost romance of ‘Gothia’ (see above), of the close kin of the English turning to disaster and oblivion on the plains of Russia. No doubt he knew the dim tradition that the word ‘Goths’ itself meant ‘Horse-folk’.18 This is what adds ‘reconstruction’ to ‘calquing’ and produces fantasy, a people and a culture that never were, but that press closer and closer to the edge of might-have-been. The Riders gain life from their mixture of homely, almost hobbitic familiarity with a strong dash of something completely alien. Éomer is a nice young man, but there is a streak of nomad ferocity in the way he and his men taunt Aragorn and company with their narrowing circle of horses and Éomer’s silent advance ‘until the point of his spear was within a foot of Aragorn’s breast’. They behave like mail-shirted Sioux or Cheyenne. And like a Middle-earth Deerslayer Aragorn ‘did not stir’, recognising the nomad appreciation of impassivity. A certain craziness shows itself in the Rohirric psychology at other points, as Éowyn rides in search of death and Éomer, sure he is doomed to die, laughs out loud for joy. The Dunlendings have heard that the Riders ‘burned their prisoners alive’. Tolkien denies it, but there is something in his description that keeps the image alive.

  For all this there is, once more, a visual correlative, and it is the first flash of individuality Éomer is given; he is (p. 421) ‘taller than all the rest; from his helm as a crest a white horsetail flowed’. A horsetail plume is the traditional prerogative of the Huns and the Tartars and the steppe-folk, a most un-English decoration, at least by tradition.* Yet it comes to prominence several times. Across the chaotic battlefield of Pelennor it is ‘the white crest of Éomer’ that Merry picks out from the ‘great front of the Rohirrim’, and when Théoden charges at last, opposing hornblast and poetry to horror and despair, behind him come his knights and his banner, ‘white horse upon a field of green’, and Éomer, ‘the white horsetail on his helm floating in his speed’. As it happens, there is a word for both Éomer’s decoration and the Riders’ collective quality, but it is not an English word: it is panache, the crest on the knight’s helmet, but also the virtue of sudden onset, the dash that sweeps away resistance. This is exactly the opposite of English ‘doggedness’, and is a virtue traditionally regarded with massive suspicion by English generals. However panache in both the abstract and concrete senses help to define the Riders, to present them as simultaneously English and alien, to offer a glimpse of the way land shapes people. Théoden’s kindly interest in herbs and hobbits (they would have had him smoking a pipe, given time) co-exists with his peremptory decisions and sudden furies. It is a strange mixture but not an implausible one. There must have been people like that once, if we only knew.

  The edges of the Mark

  The Mark works on a system of contrasts and similarities. This is rationally based and even has a sort of historical integrity; but as with place-names and elvish songs no one can tell how much of the author’s system is apprehended unconsciously by the unstudious reader. The evidence suggests, though, that it is quite a lot: that the difference between Tolkien and Robert E. Howard, say, or E. R. Eddison or James Branch Cabell, lies precisely in his intense and brooding systematisation, never analytically presented but always deliberately nurtured (if not deliberately conceived). The planning behind Tolkien’s cultural tableaux shows in the further set of contrasts and similarities round the Mark – contrasts which work, it should be noted, both inside the story (i.e. contrasts between Rohan and Gondor, Rohan and the Shire, Éomer and Gimli, etc.) and outside it (i.e. the running inevitable comparison of all those societies and the real one, the one we ourselves live in). Tolkien obviously worked at these just as he worked at the stylistic clashes of ‘The Council of Elrond’, and for the same reason, to provide cultural solidity.

  Thus there are three scenes at least where the men of the Mark are opposed to the men of Gondor. These are the two ‘meetings in the wilderness’, of Éomer and his men with Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli (pp. 419–28), and of Faramir and his men with Frodo and Sam (pp. 642–67); the two set-piece ‘building descriptions’ of Meduseld (pp. 500–1) and the great hall of Minas Tirith (pp. 737–8); the longer comparisons of the dotage, cure and death of Théoden with the corruption, relapse and suicide of Denethor – two old men who have both lost their sons. All these characterise cultures as much as people. To take the first one first, there are all manner of similarities between Éomer’s position and Faramir’s, for both men come upon lonely trespassers, both have orders to detain such people, both would gain something by doing so, whether Narsil or the Ring, and both in the end make their own minds up, let the strangers go and offer them assistance. Yet in the end difference is perhaps more prominent than likeness.

  Éomer for one thing is compulsively truculent. It is compulsive, for when his men move away he becomes much easier, but he takes little care to be polite. A large part of the reason is ignorance, signalled by almost his first speech, ‘Are you elvish folk?’ The answer that one of them is surprises him, for ‘elvish’ to him as to the Gawain-poet just means ‘uncanny’. Éomer and his men are sceptics, about the Golden Wood, about elves, about halflings; they are also in a way superstitious (a combination Tolkien thought common enough), for Éomer says Saruman is ‘dwimmer-crafty’, using an old word for ‘nightmare’ or ‘illusion’ to say that wizards are ‘skinturners’ like Beorn, which as far as we know they are not. By contrast Faramir comes over as wiser, deeper, older; but this is a function of his society not himself. He keeps using the post-Anglo-Saxon word ‘courtesy’, which like ‘civilisation’ or ‘urbanity’ implies a post-nomadic and settled state of culture. Frodo’s courteous speech is one reason why Faramir recognises in him ‘an elvish air’, the word used this time in a sense exactly opposite to Éomer’s disapprobation. Faramir is patient, too, and though both he and Éomer assert strongly their hatred of lies it is fair to say that Faramir allows himself a relatively oblique approach to truth. He asks fewer direct questions; he hides the fact that he knows Boromir is dead; he lets Sam change the subject when they get too close to Isildur’s Bane and the Ring. He smiles, as well
. While the Gondorians are dignified and even say a kind of ‘grace’, they are not as much on their dignity as the Riders, or as stiffly ceremonious as Shire-hobbits. Faramir is self-assured, in a word, and he explains why in his account of the Kings and Stewards and Northmen, the High and Middle peoples. Both he and Éomer think Boromir was nearer the Middle than the High, but Éomer thinks that is all to the good while Faramir does not. The two contrasted scenes are making a very strong assertion about cultural evolution.

  The balance is redressed, maybe, by Théoden and Denethor. If one looks at their houses the latter’s is the greater achievement, but it is lifeless. ‘No hangings nor storied webs, nor any things of woven stuff or of wood, were to be seen in that long solemn hall; but between the pillars there stood a silent company of tall images graven in cold stone.’ In this sentence the word that stands out is ‘web’, for it is Old English, the normal Anglo-Saxon word for ‘tapestry’ (cp. the name ‘Webster’). The criticism of lifelessness is one a Rider might have made. By contrast the corresponding scene in Meduseld is dominated by the fág flór, the floor ‘paved with stones of many hues’, and by the sunlit image of the young man on the white horse, blowing a great horn, with yellow hair flying and the horse’s red nostrils displayed as it smells ‘battle afar’. Yet the bravura of the Riders’ culture is also complemented by one odd word, the ‘louver’ in the roof that lets the smoke out and the sunbeams in. This is a late word, French-derived, not recorded till 1393. If the Anglo-Saxons had such things they called them something else. One might say that the Riders have learnt from Gondor, but not vice versa. If that is too much to build on two words, one can certainly say that the behaviour of Denethor, indeed the very self-assuredness he shares with his son, points to the weaknesses of civilised cultures: over-subtlety, selfishness, abandonment of the ‘theory of courage’, a calculation that turns suicidal. Gandalf can cure Théoden; but Denethor almost makes me use the word ‘neurotic’ (first recorded in the modern sense five years before Tolkien was born).