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

by Tom Shippey

  One reason, no doubt, was that he had little tolerance for real pagan myths or for naive mythicizers. In his YWES chapter for 1924 (p. 58), he remarked that ‘it will be a grievous shock to many an innocent sentimentalist, accustomed to see the one-eyed and red-bearded deities everywhere, to learn that Þórr and Oðin cannot be found in any Scandinavian placename in England’.* Tolkien did not believe in ‘old religions’ or ‘witchcults’; C. S. Lewis wrote a paper called ‘The Anthropological Approach’ which damned the learned variety of that error beyond redemption. Probably a major cause for their intolerance was that both, but especially Tolkien, had some idea of what genuine old paganism was like. The earliest account of the English (Tacitus’s Germania, AD 97–8) remarks on their habit of drowning sacrificial victims in bogs. Many such have been recovered from the preserving peat of Denmark and of ‘the Angle’. It would be surprising if Tolkien had not looked at the calm face of Tollund Man, or the hideously frightened one of ‘Queen Gunhild’ (all too obviously still struggling as she was pinned down alive), and reflected that these were the true lineaments of his pagan ancestors.15 ‘There, but for the grace of God, go I.’ No statement could be more apposite. Tolkien had grounds to suspect simple views of ‘the noble pagan’.

  Virtuous pagans, however, were quite another matter. Indeed it is not too much to say that the Inklings were preoccupied with them. C. S. Lewis offered the most daring statement in the final volume of the ‘Narnia’ series, The Last Battle (1956), in which we come across a young (dead) virtuous pagan, Emeth, who explains that all his life he has served Tash and scorned Aslan the Lion – earlier on it has been made clear that Tash is a bloody demon, Aslan, one might as well say, the Narnian Christ. But once he is dead Emeth meets Aslan and falls at his feet in instinctive adoration, as in terror, ‘for the Lion … will know that I have served Tash all my days and not him’. But Emeth is saved, for good deeds done for Tash belong to Aslan, and bad deeds for Aslan to Tash; as if to say that God and Allah are different, but yet that virtuous Mohammedans will be saved rather than murderous Christians. Later on each of the souls pouring out of Narnia on Doomsday looks at Aslan as it comes through the Doorway of Death – to be saved if it loves, destroyed if it hates. Lewis here repeats the belief of the fourteenth-century friar Uhtred of Boldon, that each dying person has a ‘clear vision’ or clara visio of God, on his reaction to which depends his ultimate fate.16 Uhtred’s opinion was denounced as heretical at Oxford in 1367 – it tends to suggest no man needs the Christian Church to be saved. But Lewis, a Protestant, might have agreed with that.

  Tolkien, a determined Catholic, would not. Still, he was doubtless interested. Uhtred after all was an Englishman, only one of a list of would-be savers of righteous pagans from the British Isles. Pelagius, the great opponent of St Augustine, was a Welshman, his real name probably ‘Morgan’. The story of the salvation of Trajan, the virtuous pagan Emperor, was first told by an Anglo-Saxon from Whitby about the year 710. The poem St Erkenwald is a variant of that tale; some people have argued it is by the author of Sir Gawain and Pearl. Above all, to Tolkien’s mind, there must have been present the problem of Beowulf. This is certainly the work of a Christian writing after the conversion of England. However the author got through 3182 lines without mentioning Christ, or salvation, and yet without saying specifically that his heroes, including the kind and honest figure of Beowulf himself, were damned – though he must have known that historically and in reality they were all pagans, ignorant even of the name of Christ. Could the Christian author have thought his pagan heroes were saved? He had the opinion of the Church against him if he did. Could he on the other hand have borne to consign them all to Hell for ever, like Alcuin, the deacon of York, in a now notorious letter to the abbot of Lindisfarne, written about AD 797: ‘What has Ingeld to do with Christ?’ he asked scornfully – Ingeld being a minor character in Beowulf. ‘The King of Heaven wishes to have no fellowship with lost and pagan so-called Kings; for the eternal King reigns in Heaven, the lost pagan laments in Hell’.17 The Beowulf-poet’s dilemma was also Tolkien’s. His whole professional life brought him into contact with the stories of pagan heroes, Englishmen or Norsemen or Goths; more than anyone he could appreciate their sterling qualities. At the same time he had no doubt that paganism itself was weak and cruel. Uhtred’s and Lewis’s individualistic beliefs did not appeal to him, any more than Alcuin’s smugly intolerant one. If there was anyone in the twentieth century to resolve the dilemma, repeat the Beowulf-poet’s masterpiece of compromise, and preserve ‘the permanent value of that pietas which treasures the memory of man’s struggles in the dark past, man fallen and not yet saved, disgraced but not dethroned’ (‘Monsters’, p. 266), Tolkien must have thought it should be himself. Such activity was for one thing ‘part of the English temper’. The Lord of the Rings is quite clearly, then, a story of virtuous pagans in the darkest of dark pasts, before all but the faintest premonitions of dawn and revelation.

  Yet there is at least one moment at which Revelation seems very close and allegory does all but break through – naturally enough, a moment of ‘eucatastrophe’, to use Tolkien’s term for sudden moments of fairy-tale salvation. This appears to different characters in different ways. As has been said, Sam and Frodo experience it as thinking for a moment they have died and gone to Heaven, when they wake up on the field of Cormallen. Faramir, however, in the next chapter feels it more physically. He and Éowyn sense the earthquake that is the fall of Barad-dûr, and for a moment Faramir thinks of Númenor drowning. But then like the father in Pearl an irrational joy comes over him, to be explained by the eagle-messenger in a song:

  ‘Sing now, ye people of the Tower of Anor,

  for the Realm of Sauron is ended for ever,

  and the Dark Tower is thrown down.

  Sing and rejoice, ye people of the Tower of Guard,

  for your watch hath not been in vain,

  and the Black Gate is broken,

  and your King hath passed through,

  and he is victorious.

  Sing and be glad, all ye children of the West,

  for your King shall come again,

  and he shall dwell among you

  all the days of your life.’ (p. 942)

  There is no doubt here about Tolkien’s stylistic model, which is the Bible and particularly the Psalms. The use of ‘ye’ and ‘hath’ is enough to indicate that to most English readers, familiar with those words only from the Authorised Version. But ‘Sing and rejoice’ echoes Psalm 33, ‘Rejoice in the Lord’, while the whole of the poem is strongly reminiscent of Psalm 24, ‘Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, for the King of glory shall come in.’ ‘Who is the King of glory?’ asks the Psalm, and one traditional answer is Christ, crucified but not yet ascended, come to the city of Hell to rescue from it those especially virtuous pre-Christians, Moses and Isaiah and the patriarchs and prophets. Of course the eagle’s song is not about that. When it says ‘the Black Gate is broken’ it means the Morannon, a place in Middle-earth described on pp. 622–3; when it says ‘your King shall come again’, it means Aragorn. Yet the first statement could very easily apply to Death and Hell (Matthew xvi, 18, ‘and the gates of hell shall not prevail’), the second to Christ and the Second Coming. This is a layer of double meaning beyond that even of ‘East or west all woods must fail’ or ‘The Road goes ever on and on’.

  Approach to the edge of Christian reference was here deliberate, as one can tell from the date Gandalf so carefully gives for the fall of Sauron (p. 931), ‘the twenty-fifth of March’. In Anglo-Saxon belief, and in European popular tradition both before and after that, 25 March is the date of the Crucifixion; also of the Annunciation (nine months before Christmas); also of the last day of Creation.18 By mentioning the date Tolkien was presenting his ‘eucatastrophe’ as a forerunner or ‘type’ of the greater one of Christian myth. It is possible to doubt whether this was a good idea. Almost no one notices the significance of 25 March, or
of the Company setting out from Rivendell on 25 December; the high style of the eagle’s song has not had much appeal; though Tolkien himself wept over the grandeur of the Field of Cormallen (Letters, p. 321), many other readers have found the delight, tears and laughter (of Sam especially) unconvincing. Tolkien did right normally to avoid such allusions, to keep like the author of Beowulf to a middle path between Ingeld and Christ, between the Bible and pagan myth. The care with which he maintained this position (highly artificial, though usually passed over without mention) is evident, with hindsight, on practically every page of The Lord of the Rings.

  Consider for instance the Riders. As has been said, they resemble the ancient English down to minute detail – with the admitted partial exception of their devotion to horses. However the real ancient English had some belief in divine beings, the *ósas or ‘gods’ analogous to the Norse æsir, Gothic *ansós, whose names survive in our days of the week (Tíw’s day, Wóden’s day, Thunor’s day, Frige day). To this the Riders have no counterpart, or almost none. Their place-names sometimes suggest ancient belief in something or other: thus ‘Dunharrow’ in Common Speech presumably represents Rohirric dún-harg, ‘the dark sanctuary’, just as ‘Halifirien’ on the borders of Gondor must be hálig-fyrgen, ‘the holy mountain’. In ‘Drúadan Forest’ the second element is Gondorian -adan,‘man’, the first probably drú-, ‘magic’. In the same way the Anglo-Saxons borrowed the Celtic element of ‘Druid’ to create the term dry-cræft, ‘magic art’. The Riders, one may say, have a sense of awe or of the supernatural; but they do nothing about it. No religious rites are performed at Théoden’s burial. His followers sing a dirge and ride round his barrow, as indeed do Beowulf’s. The only real-life burial where this combination of song and cavalcade is reported is that of Attila the Hun, in Jordanes’s Gothic History. But there the mourners also gash their faces so their king will be lamented properly in human blood, and when he is in his tomb they sacrifice (i.e. murder) the slaves who dug it. That kind of thing seems very out of place in Middle-earth. The Riders, like most of the characters of Beowulf but unlike all we can guess of the real pre-Christian English, do not worship pagan gods; they also do not hold slaves, commit incest, practise polygamy.19 Their society has in a word been bowdlerised. They are so virtuous that one can hardly call them pagans at all.

  Certainly Tolkien never does. As has been noted before, he followed the Beowulf-poet in being very loath to use the word ‘heathen’, reserving it twice for Denethor and by implication the Black Númenóreans.20 Nevertheless his characters are heathens, strictly speaking, and Tolkien, having pondered for so long on the Beowulf-poet’s careful balances, was as aware of this fact as he was aware of the opposing images of open Christianity poised at many moments to take over his story. The pagan counterpart of the eagle’s song may be the death of Aragorn, relegated as it is to an Appendix. Aragorn is a remarkably virtuous character, without even the faults of Théoden, and he foreknows his death like a saint. Nevertheless he is not a Christian and nor is Arwen. He has to say then to her, ‘I speak no comfort to you, for there is no comfort for such pain within the circles of the world’ (p. 1037). When she still laments her fate he can only add ‘We are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory. Farewell!’ Arwen is not comforted. She dies under the ‘fading trees’ of a Lórien gone ‘silent’, and the end of her tale is oblivion, ‘and elanor and niphredil bloom no more east of the Sea’. Aragorn, then, has some hope of the future and of something outside ‘the circles of the world’ that may come to heal their sorrow, but he does not know what it is. This is a deathbed strikingly devoid of the sacraments, of Extreme Unction, of ‘the consolations of religion’. It is impossible to think of Aragorn as irretrievably damned for his ignorance of Christianity (though it is a view some have tried to foist on Beowulf). Still, he has not fulfilled the requirements for salvation either. Perhaps the best one can say is that when such heroes die they go, in Tolkien’s opinion, neither to Hell nor Heaven, but to Limbo: ‘to my fathers’, as Théoden says, ‘to sit beside my fathers, until the world is renewed’, to quote Thorin Oakenshield from The Hobbit, perhaps at worst to wait with the barrow-wight ‘Where gates stand for ever shut, till the world is mended’. The whole of Middle-earth, in a sense, is Limbo: there the innocent unbaptised wait for Doomsday (when, we may hope, they will join their saved and baptised descendants).

  Tolkien took different views of his own work’s religious content at different times. In 1953 he wrote to a Jesuit friend:

  The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like ‘religion’, to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism. (Letters, p. 172)

  Tolkien perhaps found difficulty in explaining to a Jesuit why a ‘fundamentally’ Catholic work should cut out references to religion, but the reason is clear: he thought, or hoped, that God had a plan for pre-Catholics too. Later in life Tolkien may have become more uncertain about his own originality, and wrote that the elvish song of Rivendell was a ‘hymn’, that ‘these [invocations of Elbereth] and other references to religion in The Lord of the Rings are frequently overlooked’ (Road, p. 73). On the whole the earlier statement that references have been cut out seems truer than the later one that they are in but ‘overlooked’. The elvish song is only analogous to a hymn as Gandalf is analogous to an angel; Elbereth too is unlike (say) the Holy Ghost in remaining visible, to elves, and rememberable as a being by those elves like Galadriel who have been across the Sea and met her. Tolkien did best when he kept mythic invention on the borderline between literal story and a wider suggestiveness (Fangorn, Bombadil, Lúthien, Roads and Rings); too conscious an approach to ‘mythopoeia’ would have ended only in allegory. To repeat a philological point made already in this study, the Old English translation of Greek euangelion was gód spell, modern ‘Gospel’, the ‘good news’ of salvation. Besides ‘news’, however, spell meant ‘spell’ and also ‘story’. The foundation of Gospel lies then in ‘good story’, though ‘good story’ ought to generate a spell (or glamour) of its own.

  Fróda and Frodo: a myth reconstructed

  If one thinks that a ‘myth’ is an ‘old story containing within itself vestiges of some earlier state of religious belief’ – like the Grail-legend with its hints of sacrificed kings and vegetation-rituals – then The Lord of the Rings definitely is not one. Tolkien was alert to all such echoes and did his best to eradicate them. If one thinks that a ‘myth’ should be a ‘story repeating in veiled form the truth of Christ Crucified’, then The Lord of the Rings does not qualify either. There is an evil Power in both stories, and a glorious Tree, but Frodo, to make only three of the most obvious points, is not sacrificed, is not the Son of God, and buys for his people only a limited, worldly and temporary happiness. Nevertheless there is at least one sense in which The Lord of the Rings can claim ‘mythic’ status, which is as ‘a story embodying the deepest feelings of a particular society at a particular time’. If one can speak of Robinson Crusoe as a ‘myth of capitalism’ and of Frankenstein or Dr Faustus as ‘myths of scientific man’, then The Lord of the Rings could be claimed as a ‘myth against discouragement’, a ‘myth of the Deconversion’. In 1936 Tolkien had warned the British Academy that the Ragnarök spirit had survived Thórr and Óthinn, could revive ‘even in our own times … martial heroism as its own end’. He was quite literally correct in this, as he was also in his further prophecy that it would not succeed, since ‘the wages of heroism is death’. Still, he wanted to keep something of that spirit, if only its dauntlessness in what looked like a hopeless future; for similarly contemporary reasons he wanted to offer his readers a model of elementary virtue existing without the support of religion. Perhaps most of all he wanted to answer Alcuin’s scornful question, relevant agai
n after 1150 years: ‘What has Ingeld to do with Christ?’

  To his intentions here Tolkien left two very strong clues. One is the name of the ‘hero’ of The Lord of the Rings, Frodo. The other is the note in Appendix F, which says that some hobbit-names have been retained by Tolkien without translation, ‘though I have usually anglicized them by altering their endings, since in Hobbit-names a was a masculine ending, and o and e were feminine’ (p. 1109). ‘Frodo’, in other words, is an English form of original ‘Froda’. But what kind of a name is that? Most readers probably take it as explained by Tolkien’s preceding remark, ‘To their man-children [hobbits] usually gave names that had no meaning at all in their daily language … Of this kind are Bilbo, Bungo, Polo, Lotho … and so on. There are many inevitable but accidental resemblances to names that we now have or know …’ If ‘Frodo’ strikes any chords, then, it could be accident. On the other hand ‘Frodo’, surprisingly, is never mentioned in the name-discussion of that Appendix. Maybe his name is not a Bilbo-type, but a Meriadoc-Peregrin-Fredegar-type. As Tolkien goes on to say: