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

by Tom Shippey

  Tolkien’s other main source for his image of ‘the shadow’ was probably Beowulf, lines 705–7. Here Beowulf and his men are waiting (the latter without hope) for the appearance of Grendel the man-eater. They did not expect to get home, says the poet; still, they went to sleep. Then he adds with sudden confidence, ‘It was known to men that the demon-enemy could not draw them under shadow (under sceadu bregdan), as long as God did not wish it.’ This is a tough thought, for all its confidence. ‘Draw them under shadow’ may mean no more than ‘pull them out of the hall and into the dark’, but it implies also ‘going we know not where’, dying and being handed over for ever to the powers of evil. As for the phrase about God not wishing it, that seems on the whole a benevolent assertion of divine power. But what if God does wish it? Notoriously He does sometimes wish things like that, for even in Beowulf they have happened before. Tolkien was perhaps attracted by the phrase under sceadu, and also by the tableau of silent, rather sullen Anglo-Saxon courage. He would not have disagreed either with the implications about the unfairness of Providence; we should note that a recurrent prospect in The Lord of the Rings is for Frodo to be taken by Sauron and tormented till he too goes ‘under the shadow’, worn out by addiction and privation and torture and fear to a state of nothingness like that of ‘the haggard king’ of Minas Morgul.6 This doesn’t happen, but no one says it can’t. Indeed Gandalf says explicitly that it can. If the Morgul knife had reached its mark, ‘You would have become a wraith under the dominion of the Dark Lord’ (p. 216). And Tolkien’s second word for expressing his concept of the ambiguity of evil is ‘wraith’.

  As so often, this may well take its source from a philological puzzle, and an uncertain entry in the OED. If one looks up the word ‘wraith’ in that dictionary – it may be remembered that Tolkien worked on its ‘w’ entries in his youth, see Biography p. 140 – one finds a striking contradiction. First the OED says that ‘wraiths’ are ghosts, are dead, sense 1, ‘An apparition or spectre of a dead person: a phantom or ghost’. Then it says that they may be alive, sense lb, ‘An immaterial or spectral appearance of a living being’. These apparently irreconcilable opinions are backed up, even more surprisingly, by quotations from the same author, Gavin Douglas, the sixteenth-century Scottish translator of Virgil’s Aeneid: for sense 1, entirely unambiguously, ‘In diuers placis The wraithis walkis of goistis that are deyd’, but for sense lb, and note the alternative word offered, my emphasis, ‘Thidder went this wrath or schaddo of Ene’, (i.e. Virgil’s hero Aeneas, who may be walking through the underworld but is definitely himself alive). According to Gavin Douglas and the OED, then, wraiths may be alive or dead, just as, in Tolkien, the chief Ringwraith is ‘undead’, while all the wraiths seems to be, like shadows, both material presences and immaterial absences: under their hoods and cloaks there is nothing, or at least nothing visible, but just the same they can wield weapons, ride horses, be pierced by blades or swept away by flood. Meanwhile, if there was one thing more stimulating to Tolkien than a modern authority failing to make sense of an early text, it was perhaps a modern authority confessing itself baffled by a problem in etymology; and for ‘wraith’ the OED can do no better than the phrase ‘Of obscure origin’. This is, frankly, weak. The word’s early Scottish associations should have suggested that it has gone through similar sound-changes to the word ‘raid’, a Scottish word whose standard English equivalent is ‘road’. And just as ‘raid / road’ derive from the Old English verb rídan, so ‘wraith’ presumably derives from Old English wríðan, ‘to writhe’.7 But why should ‘writhing’ create a ‘wraith’?

  One may detect here something of a crux in the thinking of the Inklings generally, for the word and the idea are common to both Tolkien and Lewis, and to some extent Charles Williams as well: one wonders which of them thought of it first. Tolkien, at least, is the most likely to have noted the words derived from wríðan: ‘wreath’ (a twisted thing, but also an immaterial twisted thing, see his phrase ‘a wreath of snow’ p. 285); ‘wrath’, a twisted emotion; ‘wroth’, the adjective from ‘wrath’, and the regular past participle ‘writhen’, a very rare word but nevertheless used twice in LOTR.8 One underlying meaning in all this is ‘bent’, and ‘bent’ is the word which C. S. Lewis used in his 1938 novel Out of the Silent Planet to describe the Devil, Satan, Lucifer, who is the ‘bent’ Oyarsa or demiurge of Earth, the ‘silent planet’ itself. At very much the same time, and indeed, according to Christopher Tolkien (see Lost Road, p. 9) ‘in the actual context of [Tolkien’s] discussions with C. S. Lewis in 1936’, Tolkien was using the word wraithas, by now translated back to its ‘reconstructed’ or ‘asterisk’ form in Proto-Germanic, to express his myth of the ‘Lost Straight Road’ to the Undying Lands, now lost precisely because the world has become ‘bent’. Westra lage wegas rehtas, nu isti sa wraithas is the sentence which keeps recurring, ‘a straight road lay westward, now it is bent’ (Lost Road, p. 43). To return to the Ringwraiths, they are in origin ‘bent’ people, and people who have been bent, perhaps, into a perfect self-regarding ‘wreath’, ‘wraith’, or Ring.

  The psychological observation which underlies this puzzle in etymology seems to me to be both acute and highly contemporary. One of the strange features of the twentieth century has been the curious bloodlessness of its major demonic figures, and the repeated origin of disaster in loudly proclaimed good intentions – reform and revolution turning again and again to terror and mass murder, and throwing up leaders who for all their cruelties seem to have gained little or nothing in the way of personal satisfaction from them. By comparison with the warlords of the past, Attila or Alaric or Genghis Khan, Hitler and Stalin and their henchmen do appear as wraith-like figures, dreadful shadows, bureaucrats of genocide:9 their original impulses (to rescue their people? to throw off oppression?) as lost as Boromir’s would be, or Denethor’s, or Gandalf’s, if any of these were to take the Ring. There is a terrible ‘applicability’ about the idea of the wraiths, which many if not most of Tolkien’s readers have been well able to follow. Boethius, with his view that evil is above all an absence, and that the first victim of the evil person is himself, would have been well able to follow it too; and might also have noted Tolkien’s occasional suggestions of the ‘wraithing’ process starting even in the most well-intentioned characters, and signalled by careful choice of words.10 At the same time there is no doubt that the wraiths have to be fought physically as well as psychologically, as in the Manichaean world of Tolkien’s own war experience. The Boethian and Manichaean views of evil appear incompatible, but in Tolkien’s work neither can be entirely discounted.

  The opposing forces: luck and chance

  Tolkien’s image of good is as complex as his image of evil, but often appears on the surface to be weaker and more limited. Once more he pulled a hint for his fiction from an ancient Beowulfian mystery. That poem opens with the funeral of the ancestor of one of its characters – Scyld, the king of the Danes, who according to legend came drifting to land as a baby, naked on a wooden shield. Now at the end of his life the Danes send him back to the sea in an unmanned funeral barge laden with treasure. ‘By no means did [the Danes] provide him with less gifts, less national treasure’, says the poet with proud understatement, ‘than those did (þonne þá dydon) who sent him out at his beginning, alone over the waves, being a child.’ Who are ‘those’? The line is a very odd one, both technically* and ideologically. The Beowulf-poet was a Christian. There should have been no room in his universe for sub-divine but superhuman powers, other than devils or angels; however the senders of Scyld seem supernatural in knowledge and purpose, while showing no interest in the inhabitants of Denmark’s souls. One might put Scyld down to divine Providence, except that the word is þá, ‘those’, not he, ‘He’. In Beowulf the matter is then dropped for good, but it leaves behind the implication that there are powers at work in the world, possibly beneficent ones, which human beings are not equipped to understand.

  The same is true of The Lord of the
Rings, though there as in Beowulf, the lurking powers are never allowed to intervene openly. From The Silmarillion we can infer that Gandalf is a Maia, a spiritual creature in human shape sent for the relief of humanity; much later than he finished the trilogy Tolkien indeed reportedly said ‘Gandalf is an angel’.11 During the action of The Lord of the Rings, though, Gandalf never looks very much like an angel, or at least not one of the normal iconographic kind. He is too short-tempered, for one thing, and also capable of doubt, anxiety, weariness, fear. Obviously too strong a flurry of angelic wings, too ready recourse to miracles or to Omnipotence, would instantly diminish the stature of the characters, devalue their decisions and their courage. How then does beneficence operate; and has Gandalf superiors? ‘Naked I was sent back’, he says at one point (recalling the story of Scyld), but he does not say who sent him. ‘May the Valar turn him aside!’ shout the Gondorians as the ‘oliphaunt’ charges. But the Valar don’t. Or perhaps they do, for the beast does swerve aside, though this could be only chance. Can ‘chance’ and ‘the Valar’ be equated? Is ‘chance’ the word which people use for their perception of the operations of ‘those’, the mysterious senders of Scyld and of Gandalf too?

  Tolkien had, probably, been developing some such thought as this for many years. He uses the word ‘chance’ quite often in a suggestive way in The Lord of the Rings. ‘Just chance brought me then, if chance you call it’, says Tom Bombadil when he rescues the hobbits from Willow-man; ruin was averted in the Northlands, says Gandalf in Appendix A III, ‘because I met Thorin Oakenshield one evening on the edge of spring in Bree. A chance-meeting, as we say in Middle-earth.’ Obviously chance is sometimes meant, as Gandalf says of Bilbo’s finding of the Ring, though even Gandalf can only recognise such ‘meanings’ retrospectively. However ‘chance’ was not the word which for Tolkien best expressed his feelings about randomness and design. The word that did is probably ‘luck’.

  This is, of course, an extremely common English word. It is also rather odd, in that no etymology of it is known. The OED suggests, without conviction, that it might come from words like Old English (ge)lingan, ‘to happen’, giving then a basic meaning of ‘happenstance, whatever turns up’. Tolkien would have liked that, for it would make ‘luck’ a close modern equivalent of the Old English word usually translated ‘fate’ and derived in exactly the same way from the verb (ge)weorþan, ‘to become, to happen’. The Beowulf-poet often ascribes events to wyrd, and treats it in a way as a supernatural force. King Alfred brought it into his translation of Boethius too, to explain why divine Providence does not affect free will: ‘What we call God’s fore-thought and his Providence’, he wrote, ‘is while it is there in His mind, before it gets done, while it’s still being thought; but once it’s done, then we call it wyrd. This way anyone can tell that there are two things and two names, forethought and wyrd’.12 A highly important corollary is that people are not under the domination of wyrd, which is why ‘fate’ is not a good translation of it. People can ‘change their luck’, and can in a way say ‘No’ to divine Providence, though of course if they do they have to stand by the consequences of their decision. In Middle-earth, one may say, Providence or the Valar sent the dream that took Boromir to Rivendell (p. 240). But they sent it first and most often to Faramir, who would no doubt have been a better choice. It was human decision, or human perversity, which led to Boromir claiming the journey, with what chain of ill-effects and casualties no one can tell. ‘Luck’, then, is a continuous interplay of providence and free will, a blending of so many factors that the mind cannot disentangle them, a word encapsulating ancient philosophical problems over which wars have been fought and men burnt alive.

  As important to Tolkien, though, was that it is a word (like ‘shadow’) which people use every day, and with exactly the right shade of uncertainty over whether they mean something completely humdrum and practical or something mysterious and supernatural. When Farmer Giles of Ham fires his blunderbuss at the giant he hits him ‘by luck’, indeed ‘by chance and no choice of the farmer’s’: thoughts of the Valar enter no one’s mind. On the other hand his advantageous position at the rear of the knightly column which Chrysophylax decimates came about when his grey mare went lame, ‘As luck (or the grey mare herself) would have it’. It is not providence, but it may have been meant just the same. The browbeating of the dragon outside its den, however, is something even the grey mare’s prudence would not stretch to. ‘Farmer Giles was backing his luck’, as people often do; and it is common knowledge that while this is irrational it works much more often than mere ‘chance’ would dictate. People in short do in sober reality recognise a strongly patterning force in the world around them, and both in modern and in Old English have a word to express their recognition. This force, however, does not affect free will and cannot be distinguished from the ordinary operations of nature. Most of all it does not decrease in the slightest the need for heroic endeavour. ‘God helps those who help themselves’, says the proverb. ‘Wyrd often spares the man who isn’t doomed, as long as his courage holds’, agrees Beowulf. ‘Luck served you there,’ says Gimli to Merry and Pippin (p. 550); ‘but you seized your chance with both hands, one might say.’ If they hadn’t, ‘luck’ would no doubt by that time have looked very different.

  In Middle-earth, then, both good and evil function as external powers and as inner impulses from the psyche. It is perhaps fair to say that while the balances are maintained, we are on the whole more conscious of evil as an objective power and of good as a subjective impulse; Mordor and ‘the Shadow’ are nearer and more visible than the Valar or ‘luck’. This lack of symmetry is moreover part of a basic denial of security throughout The Lord of the Rings. Repeatedly we are told that if its characters fail to resist the Shadow, they will be taken over, but if they do resist they may get killed; similarly if they reject the vagaries of chance (if Frodo for instance had refused to leave the Shire with the Ring), it’s likely something highly unpleasant will happen, but if they accept and obey things could grow even worse. The benevolent powers offer no guarantees. The best recommendation Gandalf can make is not to think about such things. ‘But let us not darken our hearts by imagining the trial of their gentle loyalty in the Dark Tower. For the Enemy has failed – so far’ (p. 486). Since it hasn’t happened, in other words, it isn’t wyrd, and so need not be explained. Still, it is essential to the story that such thoughts be entertained, as indeed Gandalf also says to Pippin: ‘If you will meddle in the affairs of Wizards, you must be prepared to think of such things’ (p. 580). Without them the characters’ courage would look smaller; and courage is perhaps the strongest element in the Tolkienian synthesis of virtue.

  Apparent paradoxes: happy sadness and hopeless cheer

  This has been both resented and denied: resented, simply because courage is no longer a very fashionable part of virtue; denied, in that some have said things are too easy for Frodo and his companions all through. They do escape, after all. Only Boromir of the Nine dies during the course of the action, and he deserves it. Gandalf is resurrected. Pathos is created only by the sacrifice of a few members of the virtuous side, mostly old ones like Théoden or Dáin, or peripheral ones like Háma and Halbarad and the list of mere names in the Rohan dirge after the Pelennor Fields. In a review in the Observer (27 November 1955) – one which Tolkien very much resented, see Biography, p. 297 – Edwin Muir propounded a thesis that the non-adulthood of the romance was shown by its painlessness: ‘The good boys, having fought a deadly battle, emerge at the end of it well, triumphant and happy, as boys would naturally expect to do. There are only one or two minor casualties.’ In this there is a kind of truth (for Tolkien was kind-hearted about things like the ‘evacuation’ of Minas Tirith and the survival of Bill the pony), but also an evident falsehood. When all is over Frodo for one is neither ‘well’, ‘triumphant’ nor even ‘happy’. And he only exemplifies a much stronger theme in the work as a whole: the failure of the good, one might even say a sense of ‘defeat
ism’. In the strict or dictionary sense The Lord of the Rings evades that concept totally, for according to the OED ‘defeatism’ is a straight borrowing from French défaitisme, recorded in English for the first time in 1918 and meaning ‘Conduct tending to bring about acceptance of defeat, esp. by action on civilian opinion’. With his best friends dead in Flanders Tolkien had cause to hate that idea like poison, and indeed no one in Middle-earth is allowed to voice it. Even Denethor’s reaction to defeat is to commit ceremonial suicide, not negotiate for some ‘Vichy’ status though that is what Sauron’s mouthpiece offers on p. 872, in a speech full of the Middle-earth analogues of ‘reparations’, ‘demilitarised zones’ and ‘puppet governments’. Gandalf rejects that proposal with particular violence, and at all times discussion of odds or probabilities turns him hard and obstinate: ‘“Still,” he said, standing suddenly up and sticking out his chin, while his beard went stiff and straight like bristling wire, “we must keep up our courage. You will soon be well, if I do not talk you to death. You are in Rivendell, and you need not worry about anything for the present.”’ ‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof’ seems to be his motto. Yet Gandalf also on occasion, together with the other wise men and women of the story, accepts defeat as a long-term prospect, a prospect which The Lord of the Rings as a whole does not deny.

  Thus Galadriel says of her life, ‘Through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat’. Elrond agrees, ‘I have seen three ages in the West of the world, and many defeats and many fruitless victories’. Later he queries his own adjective ‘fruitless’, but still repeats that the victory long ago in which Sauron was overthrown but not destroyed ‘did not achieve its end’. The whole history of Middle-earth seems to show that good is attained only at vast expense while evil recuperates almost at will. Thangorodrim is broken without evil being at all ‘ended for ever’, as the elves had thought. Númenor is drowned without getting rid of Sauron. Sauron is defeated and his Ring taken by Isildur, only to set in motion the crisis at the end of the Third Age. And even if that crisis is surmounted, it is made extremely clear that this success too will conform to the general pattern of ‘fruitlessness’ – or maybe one should say its fruit will be bitter. Destruction of the Ring, says Galadriel, will mean that her ring and Gandalf’s and Elrond’s will also lose their power, so that Lothlórien ‘fades’ and the elves ‘dwindle’. Along with them will go the ents and the dwarves, indeed the whole imagined world of Middle-earth, to be replaced by modernity and the domination of men; all the characters and their story, one might say, will shrink to poetic ‘rigmaroles’ and misunderstood snatches in plays and ballads. Beauty especially will be a casualty. ‘However the fortunes of war shall go …’, asks Théoden, ‘may it not so end that much that was fair and wonderful shall pass for ever out of Middle-earth?’ ‘The evil of Sauron cannot be wholly cured’, replies Gandalf, ‘nor made as if it had not been.’ Fangorn agrees when he says of his own dying species, ‘songs like trees bear fruit only in their own time and their own way, and sometimes they are withered untimely’. The collective opinion of Middle-earth is summed up in Gandalf’s aphoristic statement: ‘I am Gandalf, Gandalf the White, but Black is mightier still.’