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

by Tom Shippey

God forbede we be now wrothe,

  We meten so selden by stok other ston …’

  The quotation here is based on the edition of Pearl by E. V. Gordon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), originally meant to be a cooperative venture with Tolkien; and I would translate it as follows:

  ‘You have been both joy and grief to me, but so far sorrow has been much the greater; I never knew, once you were removed from earthly dangers, where my pearl had gone. But now I see it, my sadness is assuaged. And when we were separated, there was no strife between us. God forbid we should now be angry with each other – we meet so seldom by stock or by stone …’

  In his version of Pearl published in 1975 Tolkien translated that last line as ‘We meet on our roads by chance so rare’, but probably ‘We meet so seldom by stock or by stone’ is better. The pathos lies in the characteristic early English understatement – ‘so seldom’ means ‘never’ or worse still ‘just this once’ – and also in the last phrase’s suspense between precision and vagueness. ‘Stok other ston’ could mean nothing, be just a line-filler, like ‘erly and late’ a few lines afterwards. On the other hand it implies very strongly ‘on earth’, ‘in reality’, ‘in flesh and blood’. Where is the dreamer-father? At the end of the poem he will realise that the water was Death, his daughter in Heaven, the strange land a premonition of Paradise. If at the moment he speaks he thinks he is meeting his child in a land of real stones and tree-stumps, he is sadly mistaken; if he realises he is not, then already a touch of grief is creeping back into consolation.

  ‘By stok other ston’ is great poetry, one should see; not a great phrase, but great poetry, in its context.7 Could the same effect be reached in modern English, with its much fiercer attitude towards phrasal looseness? Tolkien tried the experiment in Treebeard’s farewell, and maybe he failed; though one might say that the image behind the phrase works well for Fangorn, whose sense of ultimate loss naturally centres on felled trees and barren ground. However the real point is that Tolkien was trying continually to extend the frontiers of style beyond the barbed wire of modern opinion. In this endeavour he thought he had the backing of the great poets and romancers, like Sir Thomas Malory or the anonymous authors of Pearl and Beowulf and The Wanderer. It was true that they had mostly been forgotten, left unappreciated. The tradition they stood for, though, had not. You could see it, thought Tolkien, even in Shakespeare, here and there.

  It is thus quite clear that whatever he said about Shakespeare’s plays, Tolkien read some of them with keen attention: most of all, Macbeth. Motifs from this play are repeated prominently in The Lord of the Rings. The march of the Ents to Isengard makes true the report of the frightened messenger to the incredulous Macbeth in Act V Scene 5: ‘As I did stand my watch upon the hill / I looked toward Birnam and anon methought / The wood began to move.’ The prophecy that the chief Ringwraith will not fall ‘by the hand of man’, and his check when he realises Dernhelm is a woman, similarly parallels the Witches’ assurance to Macbeth and his disconcertment when told ‘Macduff was from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripped.’ There is a more complicated echo of Shakespeare in the scene when Aragorn, as the true king, revives the sick in the Houses of Healing with his touch and the herb athelas. In Macbeth too there is a healing king, but offstage – it is Edward the Confessor, the last legitimate Anglo-Saxon king, who sends Siward Earl of Northumbria to assist the rebels. This seems to be a deliberate compliment by Shakespeare to James the First (of England) and Sixth (of Scotland), who had begun to touch for the ‘king’s evil’ or scrofula by 1606. Tolkien probably did not approve, thinking this mere flattery. After all James was of the Stewart dynasty, so called because his ancestor Robert had been High Steward of Scotland, and had succeeded to the throne on the death of David II in 1371. When Denethor says that stewards do not come to be kings by the lapse of a few centuries in Gondor, but only ‘in other places of less royalty’, the remark is true of Scotland, and of Britain – though not of Anglo-Saxon England, ruled from the legendary past of King Cerdic to 1065 by kings descended in paternal line from one ancestor. The Return of the King is in a way a parallel, in another a reproach, to Macbeth.

  Tolkien however used the play for both more and less than motifs. There is a flash of minute observation in chapter 6 of The Two Towers. What shall we do about Saruman, asks Théoden. ‘Do the deed at hand’, replies Gandalf, send every man against him at once. ‘If we fail, we fall. If we succeed – then we will face the next task.’ The jingle of ‘fail-fall’ echoes a famous crux in Macbeth, where the hero falters in front of his wife. ‘If we should fail?’, he asks. ‘We fail?’ replies she – in the Folio punctuation. Actresses have tried the line different ways: as a sarcastic question, a flat dismissal, a verbal slap. They were all wrong, implies Tolkien; it was a misprint, the word was ‘fall’ meaning ‘die’ and is a straight answer to a straight question. The reading might not seem very good, except for one thing. ‘Alliterative assonances’ such as ‘fail’ and ‘fall’ are very common in Old English poetry, and indeed in Middle English in the tradition which includes Pearl. Macbeth is the only one of Shakespeare’s plays to include Anglo-Saxon characters; and by some odd stylistic response it too is full of this ancient (but still popular) rhetorical device. ‘My way of life / Is fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf’, says Macbeth; ‘why do you start, and seem to fear / Things that do sound so fair?’ asks Banquo; ‘I see thee still’, says Macbeth to the imaginary dagger, ‘And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood, which was not so before.’ ‘Fail’ and ‘fall’ would then be one in a set of nearly forty – a part of the play’s poetic texture. How strange that critics should not have remarked the possibility! Or how typical, thought Tolkien. Modern critics were not good at Anglo-Saxon echoes, especially at ones which hung on into modern times in phrases like ‘mock’ and ‘make’, ‘chance’ and ‘choice’, ‘bullet’ and ‘billet’, all mentioned already in this study.

  Gandalf’s adaptation of Macbeth also, of course, restates the idea of aggressive courage, a quality very strong in the play and expressed very much in Tolkienian style by Old Siward, ‘Why then, God’s soldier be he … And so his knell is knolled’; by Malcolm, ‘The night is long that never finds the day’; by Macbeth himself, ‘Send out more horses, skirr the country round, / Hang those that talk of fear.’ To this Tolkien could not remain immune. However the final and strongest influence of Macbeth on The Lord of the Rings is quite obviously in theme. If there is one moral in the interlacements of the latter it is that you must do your duty regardless of what you think is going to happen. This is exactly what Macbeth does not realise. He believes the Witches’ prophecy about his own kingship, and tries to fulfil it; he believes their warning about Macduff and tries to cancel it. If he had not tried to cancel it (and so murdered Macduff’s family), Macduff might not have killed him; if he had not killed Duncan, he might conceivably have become king some other way. Macbeth is a classic case of a man who does not understand about the cooperation between free will and luck. Galadriel’s warning about the events in her mirror, ‘Some never come to be, unless those that behold the visions turn aside from their path to prevent them’, would have been well said to him. But he had no Galadriel. The only mirror he sees is controlled (Act IV Scene 1) by the Witches.

  Tolkien was trying, then, to make Shakespeare more positive – a bold venture, but based on a clear insight itself based on very minute reading. If he disliked Shakespeare, other than in joke, it was because he thought Shakespeare (a true poet with a deep tap-root into old English stories and traditions) had too often neglected that root for later and sillier interests. King Lear stems from the gaudy fictions of Geoffrey of Monmouth, laughed at in Farmer Giles, and yet it contains one ancient and resonant line in the mad scene of ‘poor Tom’:

  ‘Child Roland to the Dark Tower came.’

  The line obviously comes from some lost ballad telling the story of how Child Roland went to Elfland to rescue his sister from the wicked King, a monster-legend, a Th
eodoric-story.8 Now why couldn’t Shakespeare have told that, Tolkien must have reflected, instead of bothering with King Lear! As things were, Tolkien had to tell the ‘Dark Tower’ story himself. Still, there was no doubt that Shakespeare knew something. Besides Macbeth and Lear Tolkien was probably struck by The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (the two ‘fairy’ plays and the two whose plots were not borrowed but made up by Shakespeare). But he remembered less likely plays too. As the Fellowship leaves Rivendell Bilbo says:

  ‘When winter first begins to bite

  and stones crack in the frosty night,

  when pools are black and trees are bare,

  ’tis evil in the Wild to fare.’

  In rhythm and theme he echoes the magnificent coda to Love’s Labour’s Lost:

  When icicles hang by the wall,

  And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,

  And Tom bears logs into the hall,

  And milk comes frozen home in pail,

  When blood is nipped, and ways be foul,

  Then nightly sings the staring owl,

  Tu-who …

  Shakespeare’s piece is better, but Bilbo’s is good enough. Remarkably, every single word in both is ordinary if colloquial English; every single word is also (with the doubtful exceptions of ‘logs’ and ‘nipped’) rooted in Old English. Both poems would require little change to make sense at any time between AD 600 and now. Yet they are representatives of a tradition Tolkien thought, if not too short, very much too scanty.

  The poetry of the Shire

  One can see Tolkien’s attempt to extend that tradition in the hobbit-poems scattered through The Lord of the Rings – or to be more accurate, in the new hobbit-poems. Near the start there are a couple of pieces which Tolkien had written up to thirty years before, both rewritten a little for their new context: Frodo’s ‘Man in the Moon’ song in the Prancing Pony, Sam’s ‘Rhyme of the Troll’ near Weathertop. Take these away and one is left with a little body of poems from the Shire, mostly in quatrains with alternate lines rhyming, in plain language and metre and with for the most part a gently proverbial quality. They look unambitious. They were all written for The Lord of the Rings alone. It is tempting to say that they have no function besides advancing the story or embellishing the characters, no value outside their immediate context. However one check to this theory should be that, although the poems all do fit their settings in the story very tightly, there is a strong sense even so that the same words can mean different things in different places. As in Pearl, a stock phrase or cliché can at any moment be given new point.

  Bilbo’s ‘Old Walking Song’, for instance, is repeated three times in different versions. The first or basic text is this, sung by Bilbo as he leaves Bag End for the last time:

  ‘The Road goes ever on and on

  Down from the door where it began.

  Now far ahead the Road has gone,

  And I must follow, if I can,

  Pursuing it with eager feet,

  Until it joins some larger way

  Where many paths and errands meet.

  And whither then? I cannot say.’ (p. 35)

  Many years later, as The Return of the King draws to an end, Bilbo gives a markedly different version sitting in Rivendell, having heard Frodo tell the story of the destruction of the Ring and, in his advanced old age, having failed to understand most of it:

  ‘The Road goes ever on and on

  Out from the door where it began.

  Now far ahead the Road has gone,

  Let others follow it who can!

  Let them a journey new begin.

  But I at last with weary feet

  Will turn towards the lighted inn,

  My evening rest and sleep to meet.’ (p. 965)

  And with these words, we are told, ‘his head dropped on his chest and he slept soundly’. This seems to be an obvious case of context determining words. The first time he sang the poem Bilbo had just handed over the Ring and was off to Rivendell; the words accordingly express a sense of abdication, of having been left behind, along with determination to accept this and make a new life somewhere as yet unknown. ‘I must subordinate my own wishes to the larger world’ would be a fair summary, highly appropriate to Bilbo at that time. By contrast the second version – almost a mirror-image of the first – expresses only justified weariness. Bilbo is no longer even interested in the Ring. He thinks the ‘lighted inn’ is Rivendell, as indeed it is in immediate context. All readers however perceive that it could as easily mean death.

  In between these two variants Frodo has sung the song (p. 72). His version is identical with Bilbo’s first one, except that it makes the significant change, in line 5, of ‘weary feet’ for ‘eager feet’. ‘That sounds like a bit of old Bilbo’s rhyming’, says Pippin. ‘Or is it one of your imitations? It does not sound altogether encouraging.’ Frodo says he doesn’t know. He thinks he was ‘making it up’, but ‘may have heard it long ago’. This uncertainty (over an issue to which the reader knows the answer) points to the great difference between Bilbo’s position and Frodo’s. Both are leaving Bag End, but the former cheerfully, without the Ring, without responsibility, for Rivendell, the latter with a growing sense of unwished involvement, carrying the Ring and heading in the end for Mordor. Naturally the poem does not mean the same thing for him as for Bilbo. But can the same words carry different meanings?

  It depends on how one sees ‘the Road’. The most obvious thought is that if the ‘lighted inn’ means death, then ‘the Road’ must mean life. It need not be individual life, since in Bilbo’s second version others can take it up and follow it in their turn; however in Frodo’s and Bilbo’s first version the image of the traveller pursuing the Road looks very like a symbol of the individual pursuing his moment of consciousness down the unknown road which is everyone’s future life, to an end which no one can predict. There is a further point to add, made by Frodo but repeating Bilbo:

  ‘He used often to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary. “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,” he used to say. “You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to. Do you realize that this is the very path that goes through Mirkwood, and that if you let it, it might take you to the Lonely Mountain or even further and to worse places?”’ (p. 72)

  In context this is just a reply to Pippin’s remark that the song ‘does not sound altogether encouraging’. Frodo does not know he is going to Mordor yet, and Pippin shrugs the whole thing off. However, looking back, and especially looking back after all the interlacements of Volumes Two and Three, one might well think that besides an image of life ‘the Road’ has crept up to being an image of Providence. After all, Bilbo is right about the road outside Bag End leading all the way to Mordor. On the other hand there are on that road, which Frodo takes, thousands of intersections, as also thousands of choices to be made or rejected. The traveller can always stop or turn aside. Only will-power makes the road seem straight. Accordingly when Bilbo and Frodo say they will pursue it, eagerly or wearily, till it is intersected by other roads, lives, wishes, and will then continue into the unknown, if they can, they are expressing a mixture of doubt and determination – exactly the qualities Gandalf so often recommends. This has become much stronger and clearer with Frodo. Indeed it is not too much to say that the traveller walking down the branching road becomes in the end an image of ‘the Good’ in Tolkien, and one opposed to the endless self-regarding circuits of the Ring. By the time one comes to that opinion the immediate dramatic contexts of the poem – leaving Bag End, leaving the Shire – have not been dropped, any more than ‘the Road’ has lost its obvious literal quality, but they have come to seem only particular instances of a much more general truth.

  The ‘tight fit’ of poems to characters and situations is accordingly illusory. There is a sense that the lines mean more t
han their composers know, may indeed not be their personal compositions at all; they may also be brooded upon, to be repeated with new understanding much later. Thus at the very end of Volume Three Frodo sings again ‘the old walking-song, but the words were not quite the same’; he says not ‘we may … take the hidden paths that run, / Towards the Moon or to the Sun’, but ‘I shall’.9 And he does, leaving Middle-earth the next day. The song he is refashioning is another of Bilbo’s, though it is ‘to a tune that was as old as the hills’. Even in its innocent context near the start of Volume One, when the hobbits are using it only to help themselves along, it has an odd ring. ‘Upon the hearth the fire is red,’ they sing, ‘But not yet weary are our feet’. If one goes by the ‘inn and weariness’ symbolism of Bilbo’s Rivendell song, that means they still have a zest for life. Still, what the song celebrates are ‘hidden paths’, ‘sudden tree[s]’, ‘A new road or a secret gate’ – things which seem to be or to lead out of this world. The refrain of each stanza addresses the familiar sights of the landscape, the little homely trees of English hedgerows, but bids farewell to them: