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

by Tom Shippey

  Such ramifications are almost inexhaustible, but their core is history – real history, but history philological-style, not in the footprints of Edward Gibbon. That is why it was said earlier that the Riders were in a sense central. Whether one thinks of them as Anglo-Saxons or as Goths, they represent the bit that Tolkien knew best. Against them Gondor is a kind of Rome, also a kind of mythical Wales of the sort that bred King Coel and King Arthur and King Lear. On their southern border are the ‘Woses’, an Old English word and an Anglo-Saxon bogey, surviving misunderstood into Sir Gawain like the word ‘elvish’ and enjoying a last flicker of life in the common English name ‘Woodhouse’ (see note). To the North are the Ents, another Old English word which had interested Tolkien since he first wrote on Roman roads in 1924, and identified them with the orþanc enta geweorc, the ‘skilful work of ents’ of the poem Maxims II. Anglo-Saxons believed in ents, as in woses. What were they? Clearly they were very large, great builders, and clearly they didn’t exist any more. From such hints Tolkien created his fable of a race running down to extinction.

  However the point that should be taken by now is not just that Tolkien worked by ‘reconstruction’ or from the premise that poetry is in essence true; rather it is that his continual play with calques and cruxes gave The Lord of the Rings a dinosaur-like vitality which cannot be conveyed in any synopsis, but reveals itself in so many thousands of details that only the most biased critical mind could miss them all.19 It is not a paradox to say further that this decentralised life is also at the same time ‘nuggety’, tending always to focus on names and words and the things or realities which lie behind them. The first Rohirric place-name we hear is ‘Eastemnet’, followed soon by ‘Westemnet’. An ‘emnet’ is a thing in Middle-earth, also a place in Norfolk, also an asterisk-word, *emnmæþ for ‘steppe’ or ‘prairie’, also the green grass which the Riders use as a touchstone for reality. Everything Tolkien wrote was based on fusions like that, on ‘woses’ and ‘emnets’ and éoreds, on ‘elvish’ or orþanc or panaches.

  ‘Magyk natureel’

  Like a goldfish in a weedy pool, the theme that flashes from much of Tolkien’s work is that of the identity of man and nature, of namer and named. It was probably his strongest belief, stronger even than his Catholicism (though of course he hoped the two were at some level reconciled). It was what drove Tolkien to write; he created Middle-earth before he had a plot to put in it, and at every delay or failure of ‘inspiration’ he went back to the map and to the landscape, for Bombadil and the Shire, the Mark and the ents. Through all his work moreover there runs an obsessive interest in plants and scenery, pipeweed and athelas, the crown of stonecrop round the overthrown king’s head in Ithilien, the staffs of lebethron-wood with a ‘virtue’ on them of finding and returning, given by Faramir to Sam and Frodo, the holly-tree outside Moria that marks the frontier of ‘Hollin’ as the White Horse of Uffington shows the boundary of the Mark, and over all the closely visualised images of dells and dingles and Wellinghalls, hollow trees and clumps of bracken and bramble-coverts for the hobbits to creep into. The simbelmynë, as has been said, is a kind of symbol for the Riders, and the mallorn does the same for Galadriel’s elves. The hobbits are only just separable from the Shire, and Tom Bombadil not at all from the Withywindle. Fangorn is a name for both character and forest, and as character he voices more strongly than anybody else the identity of name and namer and thing. ‘Real names tell you the story of the things they belong to in my language’, he says, but it seems unlikely that anyone but an ent could learn Old Entish. With Bombadil the identity of name and thing gives the namer a kind of magic. With the hobbits much the same effect is created by simple harmony. They don’t in fact practise magic, says the ‘Prologue’, but the impression that they do is derived from ‘close friendship with the earth’. Earth and magic and non-human species are all in differing proportions very closely combined. The voices that explain this to us, Fangorn’s and the narrator’s, are authoritative and indeed, especially Fangorn, ‘professorial’. They admit no denial.

  There is a sense, even, in which the non-human characters of The Lord of the Rings are natural objects: a tenuous sense but one deeply ingrained. On his first appearance Fangorn is seen by Pippin and Merry but categorised as ‘one old stump of a tree with only two bent branches left: it looked almost like the figure of some gnarled old man, standing there, blinking in the morning light’ (p. 451). Gandalf a little later speaks of his struggle with the Balrog and asks himself how it would have seemed to outside observers; just thunder and lightning, he replies. ‘Thunder, they heard, and lightning, they said, smote upon Celebdil, and leaped back broken into tongues of fire. Is not that enough?’ (p. 491). As for the elves and Elrond and Gandalf, how would they have seemed to mortal senses? Near the end Tolkien replies:

  If any wanderer had chanced to pass, little would he have seen or heard, and it would have seemed to him only that he saw grey figures, carved in stone, memorials of forgotten things now lost in unpeopled lands. For they did not move or speak with mouth, looking from mind to mind; and only their shining eyes stirred and kindled as their thoughts went to and fro. (p. 963)

  At the end they fade into the stones and the shadows.

  ‘Fade’, or ‘turn’? The future fate of the elves is often mentioned in The Lord of the Rings but never becomes quite clear. Some will leave Middle-earth, some will stay. Those who stay, says Galadriel, will ‘dwindle to a rustic folk of dell and cave, slowly to forget and to be forgotten’. ‘Dwindle’ could have a demographic meaning; there could be fewer of them. It could be physical too, looking forward to the ‘tiny elves’ of Shakespeare, and even moral, making one think of the detached, cruel, soulless elves of Scottish and Danish tradition. The best fate for the elves who stay, perhaps, would be to turn into landscape. There is a local legend of that kind attached to the Rollright Stones on the north edge of Oxfordshire, mentioned for a moment in Farmer Giles of Ham. These, says the story,20 were once an old king and his men. Challenged by a witch to take seven strides over the hill and look into the valley below, the king found his view blocked by a barrow and the witch’s curse fulfilled:

  ‘Rise up, stick, and stand still, stone,

  For king of England thou shalt be none.

  Thou and thy men hoar stones shall be

  And I myself an eldern-tree.’

  The stones are still there, mysterious and by tradition uncountable. And though it may seem hard-hearted to wish for people to be petrified, it does assure them a kind of existence, a kind of integrity with the land they come from.

  It’s hard to say, declares Sam Gamgee of the elves of Lothlórien, ‘Whether they’ve made the land, or the land’s made them’ (p. 351). And his perceptions are often deep, even if his education has been neglected. His further explanation may be taken to refer to The Lord of the Rings as well as to Lothlórien: ‘Nothing seems to be going on,’ he says, ‘and nobody seems to want it to. If there’s any magic about, it’s right down deep, where I can’t lay my hands on it, in a manner of speaking.’ Yes, agrees Frodo, complementing Sam’s style as often with his own. Still, ‘You can see and feel it everywhere’.

  * At the bridge Chrysophylax the dragon sticks his claw into the king’s white horse and roars, ‘There are knights lying cold in the mountain-pass and soon there will be more in the river. All the King’s horses and all the King’s men!’ (my italics). There is also passing reference to (old) King Coel, and to King Lear, who was responsible for the ‘partition under Locrin, Camber, and Albanac’. The world of the imagined ‘editor’ is that of the ‘Brutus books’, or fake history of Britain accepted as true in medieval times (and later). He treats the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as a ‘historian’, paraphrasing his “Where … oft bobe blysse and blunder/Ful skete hatz skyfted synne’ as, p. 7, ‘the years were filled with swift alternations of war and peace, of mirth and woe’.

  * Outsiders’ lead to one of Tolkien’s weakest jokes. In early English a ‘bou
nder’ was someone who set boundaries, and so kept out ‘outsiders’. However in the slang of his youth a ‘bounder’ was, OED post-1889, ‘A person who by his behaviour places himself outside the pale of well-bred society’, i.e. an ‘outsider’. Hence the joke in LOTR p. 147. It seems that Tolkien had not decided early on how funny the hobbits were to be. Some of the parodic element of The Hobbit persists for a couple of chapters: ‘eleventy-first’, ‘tweens’, ‘mathoms’, etc.

  * For all its age this was evidently still a vital belief for Tolkien, and for other Inklings too. In C. S. Lewis’s most Tolkienian work That Hideous Strength (1945), Mark Studdock for all his failings reinvents it spontaneously at the end of chapter 15, section IV. The book also contains some fine Saruman-style speeches.

  *Not many have noted that they are not in the ‘standard’ or ‘classical’ West Saxon dialect of Old English but in what is thought to have been its Mercian parallel: so Saruman, Hasufel, Herugrim for ‘standard’ Searuman, Heasufel, Heorugrim, and cp. Mearc and *Marc. In Letters p. 65 Tolkien threatens to speak nothing but ‘Old Mercian’.

  *The Assistant Curator of the Household Cavalry Museum, Mr C. W. Frearson, informs me that the now-familiar white horsetail plumes of the Life Guards are an innovation brought in by Prince Albert in 1842. The Prince was copying a Prussian style itself copied from Russian regiments.

  CHAPTER 5

  INTERLACEMENTS AND THE RING

  A problem in corruption

  Lothlórien has won many hearts, and even the most censorious of Tolkien’s critics have accordingly been ready to grant him the ability to create nice settings. ‘What is outstanding, though, is the scenery’, declared the kindly reviewer for the Bath and West Evening Chronicle (7 December 1974).1 However good scenery is not one of the major virtues on the critical scale; many published opinions throw it in as a sop, a makeweight to balance what they see as much more serious flaws deep in the heart of the Tolkienian ‘fable’, in the essential story of The Lord of the Rings. The characters, it is often alleged, are flat; there is not enough awareness of sexuality; good and evil are presented as absolutes, without a proper sense of inner conflict within individuals; there is something incoherent in the ‘main pattern’ of the story, which prevents one from reading it as ‘a connected allegory with a clear message for the modern world’. Most of all, The Lord of the Rings is felt not to be true to ‘the fundamental character of reality’, not to mirror ‘an adult experience of the world’, not to portray ‘an emotional truth about humanity’. Professor Mark Roberts, speaking from the centre of the critical consensus, declared: ‘It doesn’t issue from an understanding of reality which is not to be denied, it is not moulded by some controlling vision of things which is at the same time its raison d’être.’ The archaism of the settings, in short, goes along with an escapism of intention, a deliberate turning away from real life and from present-day experience.2

  Now it is evident that some of these statements have gone beyond compromise. When people start appealing to ‘truth’, ‘experience’ and ‘reality’, still more to ‘the fundamental character of reality’, they imply very strongly that they know what these things are, an insight not likely to be shaken by argument. Probably at the bottom of the confrontation between The Lord of the Rings and its critics there lies some total disagreement over the nature of the universe, a disagreement surfacing in strong, instinctive, mutual antipathy. Nothing will cure this. However it ought to be possible to bring the reasons for it out into the light, and by doing so to show that whatever may be said of Tolkien’s view of reality, it was neither escapist nor thoughtless. A sensible place to begin this endeavour is with the mainspring of the story’s action, the Ring (here capitalised to distinguish it from the relatively insignificant stage-prop or ‘Equalizer’ of The Hobbit).

  The most evident fact to note about the Ring is that it is in conception strikingly anachronistic, totally modern. In the vital chapter ‘The Shadow of the Past’ Gandalf says a great deal about it, but his information boils down to three basic data: (1) the Ring is immensely powerful, in right or wrong hands; (2) it is dangerous and ultimately fatal to all its possessors – in a sense there are no right hands; (3) it cannot simply be left unused or put aside, but must be destroyed, something which can happen only in the place of its origin, Orodruin, Mount Doom. ‘There is only one way’, he says to Frodo, and it is essential to the story that this should be accepted as true: the Ring cannot be kept, it has power over everybody, it has to be destroyed. Spread over sixteen pages (45–60) these remarks function as part of a story, but as soon as they are put together it is a dull mind which does not reflect, ‘Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’. That maxim, one could say, is the core of The Lord of the Rings, and it is reinforced from the start by all that Gandalf says about the way Ringbearers fade, regardless of all their ‘strength’ or ‘good purpose’, and further by his violent refusal to take the Ring himself:

  ‘Do not tempt me! For I do not wish to become like the Dark Lord himself. Yet the way of the Ring to my heart is by pity, pity for weakness and the desire of strength to do good. Do not tempt me! I dare not take it, not even to keep it safe, unused. The wish to wield it would be too great for my strength …’ (p. 60)

  His renunciation makes sense in an age which has seen many pigs become farmers; no reviewer has ever balked at this basic opening move of Tolkien’s.

  Yet the opinion that ‘power corrupts’ is a distinctively modern one. Lord Acton gave it expression for the first time in 1887, in a letter which Tolkien might have been interested enough to read – it is in a strongly anti-Papal context.3 William Pitt had said something similar a hundred years before, ‘Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it’, but before that the idea does not seem to have been attractive. It might even have been thought perverse. Lord Acton’s actual words were: ‘Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men …’, and with this latter opinion no medieval chronicler, romancer or hagiographer would have been likely to concur. There is as it happens an Anglo-Saxon proverb analogous to Lord Acton’s, but still significantly different. What it says is Man deþ swá hé byþ þonne hé mót swá hé wile, ‘Man does as he is when he may do as he wishes’, or more colloquially ‘you show what you’re like when you can do what you like’.4 This is certainly cynical about the ill-effects of power, but what it implies is ‘power exposes’, not ‘power corrupts’. The idea that a person once genuinely good could be made bad merely by the removal of restraints is not yet present. Tolkien is certain to have felt the modernity of his primary statement about the Ring. One has to wonder then why he made it and how he related it to the archaic world of his plot. Does Lord Acton’s Victorian proverb, in Middle-earth, ring true?

  There is at least a plausible argument to say that it does not. Thus Gandalf says at the start that the Ring will ‘possess’ and ‘devour’ any creature who uses it, while Elrond later goes further and says ‘The very desire of it corrupts the heart’ (p. 261). As has been said, these are essential data for the story, and some of the time they seem to be confirmed. Gollum, for instance, is presented throughout as very nearly enslaved to the Ring, with only fleeting traces of free will left, and those dependent on keeping away from it. Much higher up the moral scale Boromir bears out Elrond’s words. He never touches the Ring, but desire to have it still makes him turn to violence. Obviously his original motive is patriotism and love of Gondor, but when this leads him to exalt ‘strength to defend ourselves, strength in a just cause’, our modern experience of dictators immediately tells us that matters would not stay there. Kind as he is, one can imagine Boromir as a Ringwraith; his never-quite-stated opinion that ‘the end justifies the means’ adds a credible perspective to corruption. The same could be said of his father Denethor, to whom Gandalf again makes the point that even unhandled the Ring can be dangerous: ‘if you had received this thing, it would have overthrown you. Were it buried
beneath the roots of Mindolluin, still it would burn your mind away.’ With examples like these, it is easy to go further and accept, for the purposes of the story, that even Gandalf’s good intentions would not resist the Ring, and that Galadriel too does right to refuse it at p. 357. While the Ring stays a veiled menace, one may conclude, it works perfectly well.

  The problem comes from the apparent immunity of so many other characters. Frodo, after all, is in contact with the Ring nearly all the time, but shows little sign of being corrupted. He goes through great labours to get rid of it. Furthermore when he does give way and claim it for his own, he loses it almost immediately to Gollum, who bites off Ring and finger with it. Gandalf had said much earlier that ‘Already you too, Frodo, cannot easily let it go, nor will to damage it. And I could not “make” you – except by force, which would break your mind.’ But in the Sammath Naur we have force being used very strongly, in the shape of Gollum’s teeth; yet Frodo’s mind remains unaffected. Anyway, what about Sam, who takes the Ring but hands it back with only momentary delay, Pippin and Merry, who show no desire for it at all, Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli, who display the same indifference without the excuse of ignorance, and Boromir’s brother Faramir, who realises the Ring is in his power but refuses to take it, with no more sign of mental turmoil than a ‘strange smile’ and a glint in the eye? One sees the beginnings of a serious criticism of the very basis of The Lord of the Rings here: the author appears to have presented a set of rules and then observed them only partially, reserving as it were the right to exceptions and miracles. This is what has made some people think that in this work the distinction between good and bad is simply arbitrary, residing not in the nature of the characters but in the needs of the plot.5