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

by Tom Shippey

  The implications of that could be alarming. It sounds Manichaean. However as has already been seen Tolkien was careful to voice rebuttals of Manichaeanism and assertions of the nonentity of evil many times throughout. Why then the continuing pessimistic expectations of defeat? The answer, obviously enough, is that a major goal of The Lord of the Rings was to dramatise that ‘theory of courage’ which Tolkien had said in his British Academy lecture was the ‘great contribution’ to humanity of the old literature of the North. The central pillar of that theory was Ragnarök – the day when gods and men would fight evil and the giants, and inevitably be defeated. Its great statement was that defeat is no refutation. The right side remains right even if it has no ultimate hope at all. In a sense this Northern mythology asks more of men, even makes more of them, than does Christianity, for it offers them no heaven, no salvation, no reward for virtue except the sombre satisfaction of having done what is right. Tolkien wanted his characters in The Lord of the Rings to live up to the same high standard. He was careful therefore to remove easy hope from them, even to make them conscious of long-term defeat and doom.

  Nevertheless Tolkien was himself a Christian, and he faced a problem in the ‘theory of courage’ he so much admired: its mainspring is despair, its spirit often heathen ferocity. One can see him grappling with the difficulty in his poem-cum-essay ‘The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son’, published in 1953, the year before The Fellowship of the Ring.13 This is a coda to the Old English poem The Battle of Maldon, which commemorates an English defeat by the Vikings in AD 991, and celebrates especially the unyielding courage of the English bodyguard who refused to retreat when their leader was killed, but fought round his body till all were dead. The very core of the sentiment is expressed by an old retainer called Beorhtwold: ‘Heart shall be bolder, harder be purpose, / more proud the spirit, as our power lessens …’ These lines, said Tolkien, ‘have been held to be the finest expression of the northern heroic spirit, Norse or English; the clearest statement of the doctrine of uttermost endurance in the service of indomitable will’. Nevertheless he felt uneasy about them. He thought they were old already in 991; he saw they could be said as well by a heathen as a Christian; he thought the fierce spirit they expressed was one of the reasons for Beorhtnoth’s rash decision to let the Vikings cross the river and fight on level ground; they had led to defeat and the death of the innocent.

  In Tolkien’s poem, accordingly, the words are not given to Beorhtwold but form part of a dream dreamt by the poet Torhthelm:

  ‘It’s dark! It’s dark, and doom coming!

  Is no light left us? A light kindle,

  and fan the flame! Lo! Fire now wakens,

  hearth is burning, house is lighted,

  men there gather. Out of the mists they come

  through darkling doors whereat doom waiteth.

  Hark! I hear them in the hall chanting:

  stern words they sing with strong voices.

  (He chants) “Heart shall be bolder, harder be purpose,

  more proud the spirit as our power lessens!

  Mind shall not falter nor mood waver,

  though doom shall come and dark conquer.”’ (Tree, p. 141)

  Tolkien himself did not think the dark would conquer. The voices Torhthelm hears are those of his pagan ancestors, no better than the Vikings ‘lying off London in their long vessels, / while they drink to Thor and drown the sorrow / of hell’s children’. They are as wrong as Gandalf, or even more so; Tídwald rebukes Torhthelm for being ‘heathenish’ when he wakes up, and the poem ends with the monks of Ely singing the Dirige or ‘dirge’ from the Office of the Dead. However, Tolkien admired the aesthetic impulse towards good beneath the pride and sorrow. In Middle-earth he wanted a similar ultimate courage undiluted by confidence – but at the same time untainted by rage and despair. One may say that the wise characters in The Lord of the Rings are often without hope and so near the edge of despair, but they do not succumb. That is left to Denethor, who will not fight to the last, but turns like a heathen to suicide and the sacrifice of his kin.

  Tolkien needed a new image for ultimate bravery, one milder but not weaker than Beorhtwold’s. He centred it, oddly enough, on laughter, cheerfulness, refusal to look into the future at all.14 There are hints of this in Middle English – the critical moment in Sir Orfeo comes when the king in his madness sees ladies at falconry, and laughs – while there is a modern analogue in Joseph Conrad’s The Shadow-Line (1917), where laughter is an exorcising force. In The Lord of the Rings it can be expressed by such high-status characters as Faramir, who says at one point that he does not hope to see Frodo ever again, but nevertheless invents a picture of them in an unknown future ‘sitting by a wall in the sun, laughing at grief’. However the true vehicle of the ‘theory of laughter’ is the hobbits; their behaviour is calqued on the traditional English humour in adversity, but has deeper semantic roots.

  Thus it is Pippin who looks up at the sun and the banners and offers comfort to Beregond, and Merry who never loses heart when even Théoden appears prey to ‘horror and doubt’. But Sam on the road to Mordor goes beyond both. He has less hope even than Faramir. Indeed, we are told, he had:

  never had any real hope in the affair from the beginning; but being a cheerful hobbit he had not needed hope, as long as despair could be postponed. Now they were come to the bitter end. But he had stuck to his master all the way; that was what he had chiefly come for, and he would still stick to him. (p. 624)

  Is it possible, one might wonder, to be ‘cheerful’ without any hope at all? Certainly it seems hardly sensible, but the idea rings true – it is corroborated by several first-hand accounts of the First World War, perhaps especially by Frank Richards’s Old Soldiers Never Die (published 1933, and written significantly enough by a ranker, not an officer). Sam’s twist on semantics is repeated by Pippin. He describes Fangorn and the last march of the Ents: was it ‘fruitless’? Evidently not, in the short term, but in the long term Fangorn knows his race and story are sterile. The realisation makes him, according to Pippin, ‘sad but not unhappy’, and to modern English semantics the phrase makes almost no sense, like hopeless cheer. However an early meaning of ‘sad’ is ‘settled, determined’; ‘cheer’ comes from Old French chair, ‘face’. The paradoxes put forward Tolkien’s theses that determination should survive the worst that can happen, that a stout pretence is more valuable than sincere despair.

  However the best delineation of Tolkien’s new model of courage is perhaps at the end of Book IV chapter 8, ‘The Stairs of Cirith Ungol’. Here Sam and Frodo, like Faramir, have little hope but still think of others in the future maybe ‘laughing at grief’. Frodo indeed laughs himself: ‘Such a sound had not been heard in those places since Sauron carne to Middle-earth. To Sam suddenly it seemed as if all the stones were listening and the tall rocks leaning over them.’ But then they fall asleep, and Gollum returns, to see and for a moment to love and aspire to the ‘peace’ he sees in their faces. It is characteristic of a kind of hardness in the fable that on this one occasion when Gollum’s heart is stirred and he makes a gesture of penitence, Sam should wake up, misunderstand, and accuse Gollum of ‘pawing’ and ‘sneaking’. Gollum gets no credit for his minor decency. But then he gave Frodo no credit earlier for his decency in saving Gollum from Faramir and the archers, preferring to spit, bear malice, and complain about ‘nice Master’s little trickses’. This is no excuse for Sam, but it shows maybe where criticisms like Edwin Muir’s break down. The good side in The Lord of the Rings does win, but its casualties include, besides Théoden and Boromir, beauty, Lothlórien, Middle-earth and even Gollum. Furthermore the characters are aware of their losses all the time, and bear a burden of regret. They just have to make the best of things and not confuse ‘sorrow’ with ‘despair’;15 even the hobbits’ schoolboy humour has a point. Tolkien after all put forward his theses about courage and about laughter fairly clearly. The critical inability to see them comes partly from mere id
eological reluctance; partly, though, from unfamiliarity with the basic structural mode of The Lord of the Rings, the ancient and pre-novelistic device of entrelacement.

  The ethics of interlace

  There is a minor mystery about this mode, for Tolkien might have been expected not to like it. Its greatest literary monuments are the sequence of French prose tales from the thirteenth century about King Arthur, known as the Vulgate Cycle and transposed into English only in highly compressed form by Sir Thomas Malory; and the later Italian epics about the knights of Charlemagne, Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato, ‘Roland in Love’, and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, ‘Roland Run Mad’, imitated in English by Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Hence, no doubt, the early reviewers’ comparisons of Tolkien with Malory, Spenser, Ariosto. However Tolkien disobligingly remarked that he hadn’t read Ariosto and wouldn’t have liked him if he had (Biography, p. 291), while Spenser exemplified much that he hated (see above). As for King Arthur, Tolkien might well have seen him as a symptom of English vagueness. Why should Englishmen take interest in a Welsh hero committed to their destruction, and known anyway via a French rehash? Still, the fact remains that Tolkien did produce a narrative of entrelacement. He had read a good deal of French romance for his Sir Gawain edition, and may have reflected further that even Beowulf has a kind of ‘interlace’ technique. He knew also that the Icelandic word for ‘short story’ is þáttr, ‘a thread’; sagas often consist of several þættir, strands woven together. The image is in Gandalf’s mind when he says to Théoden, ‘There are children in your land who, out of the twisted threads of story, could pick the answer to your question.’ To unravel entrelacement – that is at least one route to wisdom.16

  The narrative of the great ‘interlaced’ romances is, however, by no means famous for wisdom. Malory’s editor, Eugene Vinaver, comments:

  Adventures were piled up one upon the other without any apparent sequence or design, and innumerable personages, mostly anonymous, were introduced in a wild succession … The purpose of their encounters and pursuits was vague, and their tasks were seldom fulfilled: they met and parted and met again, each intent at first on following his particular ‘quest’, and yet prepared at any time to be diverted from it to other adventures and undertakings.17

  The result was meaningless confusion. This is very much not the case with Tolkien. The basic pattern of the centre of The Lord of the Rings is separations and encounters and wanderings, but these are controlled first by a map (something no Arthurian narrative possesses), and second by an extremely tight chronology of days and dates. Along with this goes a deliberate chronological ‘leapfrogging’.

  To particularise: the narrative of The Fellowship of the Ring is single-stranded, following Frodo, with the exceptions of the ‘flashback’ narratives embedded in ‘The Shadow of the Past’ and ‘The Council of Elrond’. The Nine Walkers themselves stick together from the leaving of Rivendell to the end of the volume, apart from losing Gandalf in Moria. But on Amon Hen, on the 26th February, the fellowship is dispersed. Boromir is killed. Frodo and Sam canoe away by themselves. Pippin and Merry are kidnapped by the Uruk-hai. Aragorn, left to choose between chasing the latter or following the Ring, decides to pursue the orcs, along with Legolas and Gimli. The fates of these three parties are then followed separately. Briefly, what happens is that chapters 1 and 2 of Book III take Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli from the 26th to the 28th February; chapters 3 and 4 lead Pippin and Merry from the 26th February to the 2nd March; chapters 5–7 return to Aragorn and his companions and ‘leapfrog’ them past Merry and Pippin again to the 4th March; while in chapter 8 these two sub-groups of the fellowship meet again on the 5th, for Merry and Pippin to bring their story up-to-date again in recounted narrative. By chapter 11 they are splitting up again, Gandalf (who had returned from Moria in chapter 5) riding off with Pippin, Merry setting off with Théoden, Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli going together once more towards the Paths of the Dead. They will not gather again till chapter 6 of Book V, ‘The Battle of the Pelennor Fields’. These, however, are not the only strands. All the time Frodo and Sam are spinning another, and doing it with the same chronological overlapping. They too depart on the 26th February, and have reached the 28th by the start of Book IV. By the end of that book, though, they have got to the 13th March, some eight days later than the last events of which we are told in Book III. Gandalf and the others do not ‘catch up’ with Frodo and Sam till chapter 5 of Book V, but then they continue once again to the 25th March, which the two hobbits do not reach for another three chapters.

  Now this unnatural form of presentation works well for surprise and suspense. It is a shock to have the battle of Helm’s Deep decided by the Ents and Huorns, who were last seen marching on Isengard, but whose powers have never come out in the open before. It is a good ‘cliffhanger’ scene at the end of Book V, as Pippin falls in the black blood of the troll, to have his fate decided by events of which we have no knowledge. But Tolkien meant more by entrelacement than that.

  One example of a retrospective connection has already been given. As Frodo feels the pressure of the Eye on Amon Hen, a Voice speaks to him and gives him a moment of freedom to act. This voice is Gandalf’s, though Frodo thinks he is dead and the reader does too. Gandalf says as much on p. 484, though he is laconic about it – ‘I sat in a high place [the great tree in Lothlórien?], and I strove with the Dark Tower’ – since Aragorn and the others he is addressing can have no idea what is being referred to. Gandalf remarks at the same time that he sent Gwaihir the eagle to watch the River; presumably he was the eagle Aragorn saw, but thought nothing of, as he stared out from Amon Hen on the first page of The Two Towers. Other cross-connections are frequent. Fangorn looks long at the two hobbits when they tell him Gandalf is dead; he does so because he doesn’t believe them, having seen Gandalf himself a couple of days before. But we do not realise this till Gandalf remarks on their near-meeting some thirty pages later. Across the whole breadth of the story, meanwhile, fly the Nazgûl. Frodo and Sam feel their presence three times as they wander across the Emyn Muil and the Dead Marshes, on pp. 593, 616, and 620, i.e. on the 29th February, 1st March and 4th March. Gollum feels sure this is no coincidence. ‘“Three times!” he whimpered. “Three times is a threat. They feel us here, they feel the Precious. The Precious is their master. We cannot go any further this way, no. It’s no use, no use!”’ What he says sounds plausible enough, but it’s wrong. Three times is a coincidence, and actually we can guess each time what the Nazgûl are doing. The first was coming back from a fruitless wait for Grishnákh the orc, dead and burnt that same day, with the smoke from his burning ‘seen by many watchful eyes’. The second was probing towards Rohan and Saruman. The third was heading for Isengard, to alarm Pippin on its way with the thought that it had somehow been despatched for him (p. 585). Meanwhile the body of Boromir establishes a similar transverse thread as it drifts down the Great River, to be seen by Faramir, to have the workmanship on its belt noted and compared with the broaches of Sam and Frodo eight days later. These references and allusions tie the story together, we would say, or to use Gandalf’s image show one thread twisting over another. They prove the author has the story under control, and are significant to any reader who has grasped the entire plot. However that is not how they appear to the characters, or to the reader whose attention has lapsed (as whose does not?). In this contrast between half- and full perception lies the point of interlacings.

  For to the characters the story appears, to repeat a term used already, as a ‘bewilderment’. They are lost in the woods and plains of Middle-earth. They also do not know what is going on or what to do next. Aragorn has to choose between going to Mordor or to Minas Tirith; delays, and then finds himself choosing between Sam and Frodo or Merry and Pippin; picks one quest, and then has to decide whether to rest or pursue by night. Neither decision nor delay seems to pay off. ‘All that I have done today has gone amiss’, he says (p. 404); ‘Since we passed through the Argonath my choices have
gone amiss’ (p. 415); ‘And now may I make a right choice, and change the evil fate of this unhappy day!’ (p. 409). Éomer’s intervention does not help him much, for he and his companions cannot decide at the end of chapter 2 whether they have seen Saruman or not. It appears they did (we learn later, p. 487), but the next time they think someone is Saruman it is Gandalf. Furthermore the appearance of Saruman to drive off the borrowed horses is coincidental with the arrival of Shadowfax – the note of joy in their whinnyings puzzles Legolas, though their eventual return with Shadowfax provides an equine equivalent for the unexpected return of Gandalf. Simultaneously, in Fangorn Forest, Gandalf, Saruman and Treebeard himself are wandering, meeting or not meeting seemingly at random. The effect as a whole is like that of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where pairs of lovers wander in another enchanted wood, their paths crossed and tangled by Puck, Oberon, Titania and the infatuating Bully Bottom. ‘Infatuation’ is indeed a word one might use as well as ‘bewilderment’. It means following the ignis fatuus, the ‘will o’ the wisp’ that traditionally leads travellers into bog or quicksand; an analogue to the multiple wanderings of Book III is Frodo staring at the corpse-candles in chapter 2 of Book IV, to be warned by Gollum not to heed them, or the dead, rotten, phantasmal faces in the marshes below: ‘Or hobbits go down to join the Dead ones and light little candles. Follow Sméagol! Don’t look at lights!’