The Road to Middle-Earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology
Page 24
‘Apple, thorn, and nut and sloe,
Let them go! Let them go!
Sand and stone and pool and dell,
Fare you well! Fare you well!’ (p. 76)
Are the hobbits, even in their good humour, ‘half in love with easeful death’? A better answer perhaps is that in some inherited way they carry the ‘tune’ of an ancient grief, lulled by earthly beauty but capable of being woken in Frodo in the end, as in Legolas by the cry of the gulls.
The elvish song which follows immediately on the ‘Walking Song’ indeed says just that, though probably few readers make the connection straight away. All it contains, apart from its invocations to ‘Elbereth’, are the two opposed images of the stars, seen as the flowers of the ‘Queen beyond the Western Seas’, and the wood in which the elves ‘wander’. Of course the elves are in a wood at that moment, and they are looking at the early evening stars, but that is not what they mean. Their song is of regret and exile, its core the oxymoron of ‘this far land’ – ‘this’ land is the real land, Middle-earth, ‘far land’ ought to be the one Elbereth is in beyond the Seas. But the elves refuse to accept the fact, seeing themselves as strangers whose highest function is memory:
‘We still remember, we who dwell
In this far land beneath the trees,
Thy starlight on the Western Seas.’
As for the wood, its beauty is a net and a barrier; starlight and memory alone pierce through ‘to us that wander here / Amid the world of woven trees’.
The myth behind the song remains obscure in The Lord of the Rings, just as the Sindarin song of Rivendell remains untranslated, merging only with the Quenya one just quoted in the story’s last few pages (p. 1005)10. However the image of the Wood of Life breaks through to hobbit consciousness with increasing clarity. Frodo uses it in the Old Forest:
‘O! Wanderers in the shadowed land
despair not! For though dark they stand,
all woods there be must end at last,
and see the open sun go past:
the setting sun, the rising sun,
the day’s end, or the day begun.
For east or west all woods must fail …’ (p. 110)
As usual we take the immediate point – Frodo and the others want to get out of the forest – while reading through to a kind of universality: the ‘shadowed land’ is life, life’s delusions of despair are the ‘woods’, despair will end in some vision of cosmic order which can only be hinted at in stars or ‘sun’. What does Frodo mean by the repeated contrasts of setting / rising, west / east, day’s end / day begun? They can hardly avoid suggesting death and life; in that case his song says there can be no defeat – even if the wanderers die in the dark wood, the real Old Forest, they will in death break through to sunlight and out of a hampering shade. ‘East or west all woods must fail’ is then a statement of exactly the same class as ‘The Road goes ever on and on’: literally true, literally unhelpful or even banal, but in its literal truth making a symbolic promise. Sam Gamgee hits on the same thought when he takes up the ‘Blondin’ role of faithful minstrel in Minas Morgul, and sings ‘words of his own’ fitted to another old Shire tune:
‘Though here at journey’s end I lie
in darkness buried deep,
beyond all towers strong and high,
beyond all mountains steep,
above all shadows rides the Sun
and Stars for ever dwell:
I will not say the Day is done,
nor bid the Stars farewell.’ (p. 888)
‘Day is done’ is of course another Shakespearean echo, like the Dark Tower: ‘The bright day is done’, says Iras to Cleopatra, ‘and we are for the dark’. But Tolkien would no doubt instantly have felt that Shakespeare had no copyright on the phrase, which must be of immemorial antiquity in English, ‘as old as the hills’. Sam’s song is simple and obvious, coming from ‘the voice of a forlorn and weary hobbit that no listening orc could possibly have mistaken for the clear song of an Elven-lord’. Still, it has the characteristic qualities of the Shire’s ‘high style’: plain language, proverbial sentiment, a closeness to immediate context reaching out simultaneously to myth, a brave suggestiveness at once hopeful and sad.
As has been said, the Shire is a calque on England. Where then is the source in English poetry for the poetry of the Shire? One might point to Spenser, whose Faerie Queene (regarded by Tolkien with disapproving interest) often uses the image of the wandering knight lost in trackless woods, and whose Merlin-vision of Britain reviving underlies Bilbo’s ‘Riddle of Strider’.11 An even closer parallel is John Milton’s masque of Comus, which Tolkien must have admired partly for its theme – it is an analogue of ‘Childe Rowland’, a tale of a maiden lost in a dark wood and imprisoned by a wizard, till her brothers and her guardian angel come to the rescue – but even more for its hovering between fact and symbol. A herb will protect them, says the disguised angel to the brothers; a shepherd gave it to him:
‘The leaf was darkish, and had prickles on it,
But in another country, as he said,
Bore a bright golden flower, but not in this soil;
Unknown, and like esteemed, and the dull swain
Treads on it daily with his clouted shoon …’
Ugly, prickly, much-trampled, flowering only in ‘another country’: it sounds like Virtue. Maybe the shepherd lad was the Good Shepherd himself. As for the wood, the Younger Brother wishes he could hear something from outside it, bleat or whistle or cockcrow:
‘Twould be some solace yet, some little cheering
in this close dungeon of innumerous boughs.’
His Elder Brother would prefer a glimmer from moon or lamp or candle, to ‘visit us / With thy long levelled rule of streaming light’. Again the wood sounds like life, the ‘levelled rule’ from the world outside like Conscience. But as Tolkien said of Beowulf, the ‘large symbolism … does not break through, nor become allegory’. The plain, even rustic language appeals to everyday experience. Everyone has been lost and found again, everyone is lost, will be found again. The maiden who is the soul will be taken in the end from ‘the perplexed paths of this drear wood … the blind mazes of this tangled wood … this close dungeon of innumerous boughs’, or as the elves would say galadhremmin ennorath, ‘the world of woven trees’.
The elvish tradition
Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton: the list could be spun out, to include for instance Yeats, whose poem ‘The Man Who Dreamed of Faery-land’ could stand as a Tolkienian epigraph. However the point should be clear. Tolkien was not by any means cut off from the mainstream of English poetry, though the qualities he valued were not surprise, the mot juste, verbal complexity, but rather a slow probing of the familiar. That was not, however, the end of his ambition or of his thoughts on style: there is an elvish streak too in the poetry of The Lord of the Rings, signalled in complete contrast by barely-precedented intricacies of line and stanza.
The best example of this is the ‘Song of Eärendil’ composed and sung in Rivendell by Bilbo (pp. 227–30). What the song means and what story lies behind it are typically not explained in The Lord of the Rings, but remain in suggestiveness till The Silmarillion. That suggestiveness, though, is much aided by devices not of sense but of sound. Bilbo uses some five of these: one is rhyme, which everyone recognises, but the others are less familiar – internal half-rhyme, alliteration (i.e. beginning words with the same sound or letter), alliterative assonance (the Macbeth device), and a frequent if irregular variation of syntax. All appear in the first eight lines:
‘Eärendil was a mariner
that tarried in Arvernien;
he built a boat of timber felled
In Nimbrethil to journey in;
her sails he wove of silver fair,
of silver were her lanterns made,
her prow was fashioned like a swan,
and light upon her banners laid.’
The rhymes are obvious, on lines 2 and 4, 6 and 8 – ‘-ni
en / -ney in’, ‘made / laid’. The internal rhymes however operate not between even lines but between odd and even, 1 and 2, 3 and 4, and so on. They are furthermore not on the ends of words but in the middle: ‘mariner / tarried in’, ‘timber felled / Nimbrethil’, ‘silver fair / silver were’, ‘like a swan / light upon’. Nor are they always complete. One might note that the full rhymes are similarly not always exact, some of them being ‘masculine’, i.e. on one syllable only, but some ‘feminine’, on more than one syllable, and tending towards similarity rather than identity, as in ‘Arvernien / journey in’, ‘armoured him / harm from him’, ‘helmet tall / emerald’, etc. These are too common to be the result of incapacity, and they are furthermore reinforced by the unpredictable but frequent use of the other devices of sound: alliteration in ‘light laid’, ‘shining shield’, ‘ward all wounds’, etc., alliterative assonance in ‘sails of silver’, ‘Night of Naught’, ‘sight … he sought’ and ‘boat it bore with biting breath’. Typically, in between there are such doubtful cases as ‘built a boat’ – just alliteration, or assonance as well? – while over the whole poem there lies a web of grammatical repetitions and variations, also never quite exact – ‘her sails (he wove) of silver fair, / of silver (were) her lanterns (made)’, or later ‘his sword (of steel) was valiant, / (of adamant) his helmet tall’.
Describing the technique is difficult, but its result is obvious: rich and continuous uncertainty, a pattern forever being glimpsed but never quite grasped. In this way sound very clearly echoes or perhaps rather gives the lead to sense. Just as the rhymes, assonances and phrasal structures hover at the edge of identification, so the poem as a whole offers romantic glimpses of ‘old unhappy far-off things’ (to cite Wordsworth), or ‘magic casements opening on the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn’ (to remember Keats). Frodo indeed finds himself listening in highly Keatsian style:
Almost it seemed that the words took shape, and visions of far lands and bright things that he had never yet imagined opened out before him; and the firelit hall became like a golden mist above seas of foam that sighed upon the margins of the world. Then the enchantment became more and more dreamlike, until he felt that an endless river of swelling gold and silver was flowing over him, too multitudinous for its pattern to be comprehended … (p. 227)
Romanticism, multitudinousness, imperfect comprehension: these are the poem’s goals, achieved stylistically much more than semantically.
Yet the ‘Song of Eärendil’ does of course tell a story as well: how Eärendil tried to sail out of this world to a kind of Paradise, how he succeeded in the end by virtue of the ‘Silmaril’, how this in turn led to his becoming a star, or rather the helmsman of a celestial boat in which the burning Silmaril appears to Middle-earth as a star. Still, more questions are raised than answered. Why did Eärendil go, why was he kept, what is a Silmaril? More acutely, what is the relationship in the story between success and failure? Eärendil’s star appears to be a victory-emblem, ‘the Flammifer of Westernesse’, and yet is associated with loss and homelessness, with the weeping of women on the ‘Hither Shore’. The ‘paths that seldom mortal goes’ may recall fleetingly the ‘hidden paths’ of the hobbits’ walking-song, and its similar oscillation between adventure and homesickness; in this sense the two stylistically quite different poems relate to each other like elvish assonances, hinting at a pattern but stressing change as much as identity. The overall effect of the song in Rivendell is perhaps to show Bilbo approaching a body of lore and of poetry higher than the normal hobbitic vein, higher indeed than mortals can normally comprehend. Aragorn sings his song of Beren and Lúthien some forty pages earlier with a certain reluctance, explaining that it is ‘in the mode that is called ann-thennath among the Elves, but is hard to render in our Common Speech, and this is but a rough echo of it’. ‘Echo’ is a useful word, for that in a way is what the poem’s metric is based on; there is no immediate similarity of stanza-form to Bilbo’s song, but once again the ‘elvish’ idea of poetry comes through in an unexpected subtlety.
Briefly, one can say that each stanza is in eight lines, rhyming abac / babc; and that the fourth and eighth lines at once interrupt the flow of each stanza and hold the two halves together by their strong ‘feminine’ three-syllable rhymes, on ‘glimmering / shimmering’, ‘sorrowing / following’, etc. More significant is the fact that the actual rhyming words in each first half are repeated once or more in each second half, as for instance ‘seen’ in the first stanza, ‘leaves’ in the second, ‘feet’ and ‘roam’ in the third, and so on. The device is somehow congruous with the repeated images of hair like a shadow, beauty flying, leaves and years falling, through it all the hemlock-leaves of death. But the last stanza of nine breaks the pattern. Its rhyme words are all different: ‘bare / grey / door / morrowless / lay / more / away / sorrowless’. What does this fact mean? All one can say is that the story being told (or hinted at) is also one of gloom, death and parting, like that between Eärendil and Elwing, the mariner and the weeping women of Middle-earth. The last words of the song, ‘singing sorrowless’, stand out against this current, but still wherever the lovers go it is ‘away’, ‘in the forest’, maybe the forest of mortality and final death. Aragorn indeed confirms this thought with his gloss that not only has Lúthien died (as many elves do), but ‘died indeed and left the world’. Further explanation has to wait till The Silmarillion, but in a sense is not needed. A point has been made by a sudden (if barely perceptible) breaking of pattem, an absence of echoes. Perhaps that is the essence of ann-thennath.12
Further stylistic and thematic variations could easily be listed. Gimli’s ‘Song of Durin’ on pp. 308–9 is dwarvishly plain and active, but still carries on the sense of decay in Middle-earth opposed to ultimate hope; Legolas’s ‘Song of Nimrodel’ a little later makes similar oppositions but ends on an opposite note, of faltering and ultimate defeat on the ‘Hither Shore’. Frodo’s elegy for Gandalf ends on the word ‘died’; but Sam’s coda prefers ‘flowers’, and turns out to be truer in the end. Galadriel’s song in the Common Speech ends with regret and a question, ‘What ship would bear me ever back across so wide a Sea?’, but her Quenya one on hope and an assertion, ‘Maybe thou shalt find Valinor. Maybe even thou shaft find it.’13 As with the hobbit-songs, behind all these there lies some story of a Sentence and a Great Escape, but an escape forever hindered by loving involvement with Middle-earth itself; that is the root of the disagreement between Fangorn, Celeborn and Galadriel when the Ent half-voices his lament for the stocks and the stones. However the surprise in this ‘elvish tradition’ of mythic poetry is how much of its stories is conveyed by purely formal devices, by verbal patterns with meaning as apparently inherent in them as elsewhere in place-names, in untranslated fragments, or in Bombadil. Tolkien’s idea of poetry mirrored his ideas on language; in neither did he think sound should be divorced from sense.
In reality this ‘elvish tradition’ was an English tradition too. The ultimate source for much that has been discussed must certainly be Pearl, with its story of the (failed) escape from mortality, its heavily traditional phrasing, and its fantastically complex metrical scheme, of twelve-line cross-rhymed stanzas with alliteration, assonance, syntax-variation and (even Tolkien did not attempt this) stanza-linking and refrains.14 However the Pearl tradition did not last till Shakespeare and Milton and the Romantics, who are accordingly and to that extent impoverished. Tolkien obviously hoped in one way to recreate it. More generally, the link between the last three sections of this book is Tolkien’s perception, from Pearl and from poems like it, that poetry does not reduce to plain sense (so far most critics would agree with him), but furthermore that this is because words have over the centuries acquired meanings not easily traced in dictionaries, available however to many native speakers, and (this is where many critics part company) at times breaking through the immediate intentions of even poetic users. ‘Loose fit’, in a word, works better in poetry than ‘tight fit’; there are ro
ads to wisdom besides the painstaking perverse originality of twentieth-century writers.
Middle-earth and Limbo: mythic analogues
What has been said about Tolkien’s poetry has an immediate bearing on that most attractive but least tractable subject, ‘Tolkien’s mythology’. In a sense the problems and intentions were the same. Tolkien wanted his poems to make good sense in their dramatic context, as part of the story of The Lord of the Rings; he also wanted them to suggest a truth independent of their context. ‘East or west all woods must fail’ therefore applies both to the Old Forest and to the symbolic woods of Life and Error. In the same way his legends of Eärendil and Lúthien, his central fable of Frodo and the Ring, must firstly and continually work as fiction, but also reach out towards non-fictional truths about humanity – and perhaps about salvation. Yet in this latter ambition there lies a danger. If The Lord of the Rings should approach too close to ‘Gospel-truth’, to the Christian myth in which Tolkien himself believed, it might forfeit its status as a story and become at worst a blasphemy, an ‘Apocryphal gospel’, at best a dull allegory rehearsing in admittedly novel form what everyone ought to know already. In that case The Lord of the Rings would look like one of Bilbo’s poems removed from context and put without explanation in The Oxford Book of English Verse – fictionless and unhappy. Tolkien had to take a rather strict line over ‘myth’.