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

by Tom Shippey

  In some old families … it was, however, the custom to give high-sounding first-names. Since most of these seem to have been drawn from legends of the past, of Men as well as of Hobbits, and many while now meaningless to Hobbits closely resembled the names of Men in the Vale of Anduin, or in Dale, or in the Mark, I have turned them into those old names, largely of Frankish and Gothic origin, that are still used by us or are met in our histories.

  ‘Frodo’ could be one of these, like ‘Peregrin’. It could still and at the same time be an anglicisation of ‘Froda’, a name ‘meaningless’ to hobbits by the time of the War of the Ring, and accepted by them as just another chance disyllable like ‘Bilba, Bunga, Pola’, but actually preserving in oblivion the name of an ancient hero from the Dale or the Mark. That would make Frodo’s name something of a freak in hobbit-nomenclature. However this seems only appropriate for the central figure, especially since his name is so strikingly left uncategorised.

  ‘Froda’ actually is a name from the dimmest reaches of Northern legend. It is mentioned once in Beowulf (not in the main story), when the hero, discussing politics, says that the king of the Danes means to marry his daughter glædum suna Fródan, ‘to the fortunate son of Fróda’. By this means he hopes to heal the feud between the Danes and the ‘Bards’ over whom Fróda once ruled. His idea won’t work, says Beowulf, for the pressure on heroes to take blood-revenge is too strong – it seems, though this is speculation from other sources, that Ingeld’s father Fróda was killed by the Danish king who now wants to make alliance with his son. The likelihood is that in this as in other matters Beowulf is meant to appear a good prophet, since the unsuccessful, possibly treacherous, but in heroic terms entirely praiseworthy attack which Ingeld made on his father-in-law is repeatedly mentioned in Northern story. Probably it was the subject of the Northumbrian songs which so scandalised Alcuin. When he asked, then, ‘What has Ingeld to do with Christ?’, he was using Ingeld as an example of the most extreme gap between good ‘heroic’ behaviour and good Christian behaviour; Ingeld took unforgivingness as far as it could go. There is no need, however, to think the son was exactly like the father.

  Nothing else is ever heard of Fróda in Old English, but the Norse form of the word – it means literally ‘the wise one’ – is Fróthi, and round this there are several stories. The most persistent is that Fróthi was a contemporary of Christ, alleged by both Saxo Grammaticus (c. AD 1200) and Snorri Sturluson (c. 1230). During his reign there were no murders, no wars, no robberies, and gold rings lay untouched in the open, so that everyone referred to his age as the Frótha-frith, the ‘peace of Fróthi’. But it came to an end because of greed, or maybe over-altruism. The peace really came from Fróthi’s magic mill, turned eternally by two giantesses to grind out gold and peace and prosperity. Fróthi (perhaps fearing for his subjects’ security) would never let them rest – and so one day they ground out an army to kill Fróthi and take his gold. The viking army also would not let the giantesses rest, but sailed away with them and set them to grinding salt; they ground so much that the boat sank and the mill with it, though still (adds folk-tradition) in the Maelstrom the giantesses grind their magic quern. And that is why the sea is salt.

  This is a story, one can see, about the incurability of evil. Has it anything to do with Beowulf? There is no overt connection, but Tolkien was used to ‘reconstructing’ stories. The point that seems to have struck him is the total opposition between son and father, Ingeld / Ingjaldr and Fróda / Fróthi. The one is an example of the Ragnarök-spirit undiluted, of heroic conventionality at its worst; in the Beowulf lecture Tolkien called Ingeld ‘thrice faithless and easily persuaded’. The other has about him a ring of nostalgic failure; in his time everything was good, but it ended in failure both personally (for Fróthi was killed) and ideologically (for Fróda’s son returned to the bad old ways of revenge and hatred, scorning peace-initiatives and even apparently his own desires). Of course the Frótha-frith could have been just an accident, a result of the Incarnation which not even virtuous pagans knew about. For all these reasons the composite figure of Fróda / Fróthi became to Tolkien an image of the sad truth behind heroic illusions, a kind of ember glowing in the dark sorrow of heathen ages. In ‘The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth’ Tídwald says reprovingly to Torhthelm – who has just discovered his master’s headless body:

  ‘Aye, that’s battle for you,

  and no worse today than wars you sing of,

  when Fróda fell, and Finn was slain.

  The world wept then, as it weeps today:

  you can hear the tears through the harp’s twanging.’

  (Tree, p. 131)

  There is something grimly appropriate, further, in the fact that ‘Ingjaldr’ remained a common Norse name for centuries. ‘Fróthi’ however was quickly forgotten.

  All this sounds very much like Tolkien’s ‘Frodo’. He is a peacemaker, indeed in the end a pacifist. One can trace his progress from p. 316, when he stabs the Moria troll, to p. 600, when he threatens to but does not stab Gollum. On pp. 670–3 he saves Gollum’s life from the archers, against Sam’s strong inclination to keep quiet and let him die. He gives Sting away on p. 905, keeping an orc-blade but saying ‘I do not think it will be my part to strike any blow again.’ He throws even that away ten pages later, saying ‘I’ll bear no weapon, fair or foul’. In ‘The Scouring of the Shire’ his role is to forbid killing (pp. 983 and 986–7), and later, after a battle in which he has not ‘drawn sword’, to protect prisoners. He will not kill Saruman even after his mithril-coat has turned a treacherous stab. His self-control has been learnt, of course, while carrying the Ring; but there is a touch of witheredness about it. ‘“All the same,” said Frodo to all those who stood near, “I wish for no killing …”’ ‘Those who stood near’? One might have hoped Frodo would get up on a block and speak to everybody, impose his will. But Wit is the opposite of Will, and as a figure of increasing wisdom, Frodo (‘the wise one’) seems to lose all desire, even for good. Merry puts forward his plans for dealing with the ruffians by force. ‘“Very good,” said Frodo. “You make the arrangements.”’

  This sense of age perhaps motivates the general unconcern for Frodo shown by the Shire, his unfair though unintended supplanting by the large and ‘lordly’ hobbits Merry and Pippin, the rudeness or much-qualified respect shown to him by Sharkey’s men and Gaffer Gamgee too. Saruman knows better, and so do some others, but ‘Sam was pained to notice how little honour [Frodo] had in his own country’. It is prophets who proverbially have no honour in their own country, and Frodo is increasingly a prophet or a seer. However even in other countries the honour he gets is the wrong sort. One may remember Ioreth repeating to her cousin in Gondor that Frodo ‘went with only his esquire into the Black Country and fought with the Dark Lord all by himself, and set fire to his Tower, if you can believe it. At least that is the tale in the City.’ A wrong tale, naturally, but a heroic tale. In Gondor as in the Shire one sees how all achievement is assimilated to essentially active, violent, military patterns – ‘the better fortitude’, as Milton said in Paradise Lost, ‘Of patience and heroic martyrdom / Unsung’. The end of Frodo’s quest, in the memory of Middle-earth, is nothing. Bilbo turns into a figure of folklore (‘mad Baggins’), the elves and dwarves percolate through to our world as time-shifters and ring-makers, even ‘the Dark Tower’ remains as an image for ‘poor Tom’ in King Lear. Of Frodo, though, not a trace: except hints of an unlucky, well-meaning king eclipsed on the one hand by the fame of his vengeful son, on the other by the Coming of the true hero Christ.

  What has Ingeld to do with Christ? Nothing. But Fróda had something to do with both. He was a hinge, a mediation, like The Lord of the Rings in its suspension between pagan myth and Christian truth. He stood, in Tolkien’s view, for all that was good in the Dark Ages – for the heroic awareness of heroic fallibility which Tolkien thought he could detect in Beowulf and in Maldon, for the spark of virtue which had made Anglo-Saxon England ripe for conversion (
a process carried out without a single martyrdom). Maybe his story had been, in God’s plan, an evangelica praeparatio: a clearing of the ground for the good seed of the Gospel. It is possible that Tolkien thought of The Lord of the Rings in the same way. He knew his own country was falling back to heathenism again (if only on the model of Saruman, not Sauron), and while mere professorial preaching would make no difference, a story might. Frodo presents then an image of natural man in native decency, trying to find his way from inertia (the Shire) past mere furious dauntlessness (Boromir) to some limited success, and doing so without the inherited resources of the heroes and longaevi like Aragorn, Gandalf, Legolas, Gimli. He has to do so furthermore by destroying the Ring, which is merely-secular power and ambition, and with no certain faith in rescue from outside the géara hwyrftum, ‘the circles of the world’. ‘Myth is alive at once and in all its parts, and dies before it can be dissected’, declared Tolkien (‘Monsters’, p. 257), and his statement is more than usually true of The Lord of the Rings, as I have said above. Something like the last few sentences must however have been at least a part of Tolkien’s intention.

  The styles of romance

  One can see that ancient story is used very differently in The Lord of the Rings from the way it is in, say, James Joyce’s Ulysses. Not only is the relation in the latter between Homeric ‘myth’ and modern novel one of irony and transformation; in it the ‘myth’, oddly enough, is given a higher and more assured status as something less sophisticated, more archetypal, closer to the holy and the divine. Tolkien by contrast was pre-eminently aware of his source-texts, like Beowulf, or Snorri’s Edda, or Lazamon’s Brut, as the works of individuals like himself, who used old stories for contemporary purposes just as he did. In his view The Lord of the Rings was not a derivative or a metamorphosis of them and Pearl and Comus and Macbeth and all the other works I have mentioned of ‘mythic’ or near-‘mythic’ status: instead all of them, including The Lord of the Rings, were splinters of a truth, transformations on the same level of something never clearly expressed, not even (in entirety) in the Gospels.21 Human awareness of this truth, he may have concluded, was passed on with just the same loose and haunting persistence as the rhythms and phrases of English poetry, surviving from Anglo-Saxon times to Middle English and ‘The Man in the Moon’, and on again to Shakespeare and Milton and Yeats and nursery-rhyme, without intention as without a break. Middle-earth itself survived in song even after people had forgotten what it meant: ‘O cocks are crowing a merry midd-larf, / A wat the wilde foule boded day.’22 Should that ballad of 1776 be classified as a ‘myth’? It has old roots and is about a supra-rational world; but it was also sung for immediate pleasure without claims to any specially transmitted truth. In all these ways ‘Sweet William’s Ghost’ is analogous to The Lord of the Rings, and even more so to its embedded songs and verses.

  There is another way of approaching the question of the trilogy’s literary status, which has the further merit of concentrating attention on its prose style as well as on poetry. This is via Northrop Frye’s now-famous book, Anatomy of Criticism (1957), a work which never mentions The Lord of the Rings, but nevertheless creates a literary place for it with Sibylline accuracy. Mr Frye’s theory, in essence, is that there are five ‘modes’ of literature, all defined by the relationship between heroes, environments, and humanity. ‘If superior in kind both to other men and to the environment of other men’, declares Mr Frye, ‘the hero is a divine being and the story about him will be a myth.’23 One sees immediately that this does not apply to Gandalf or Aragorn, still less to Frodo: Gandalf can feel fear and cold, Aragorn age and discouragement, Frodo pain and weakness. Two steps down from ‘myth’, according to the Anatomy, we find ‘high mimesis’, the level of most epic and tragedy, in which heroes are ‘superior in degree to other men but not to [their] natural environment’. This looks more like The Lord of the Rings, where many of the characters – Éomer, Faramir, Aragorn again – are very much of the stamp of old Siward or Coriolanus or other Shakespearean heroes. But are they on a par with their natural environment? Aragorn can run 135 miles in three days; he lives in full vigour for 210 years, dying on his birthday. Around him cluster characters who are immortal, like Elrond or Legolas, who can make fire or ride on eagles, while he himself can summon the dead. Clearly the mode intended is the one below ‘myth’ but above ‘high mimesis’, the world of ‘romance’ whose heroes are characteristically ‘superior in degree [not kind] to other men and to [their] environments’.

  The main points of this mode are then displayed by Mr Frye in ways immediately applicable to The Lord of the Rings. In it, we are told, ‘the hero’s death or isolation has the effect of a spirit passing out of nature, and evokes a mood best described as elegiac’; ‘passing out of nature’ is of course the main theme of hobbit-poetry. Elegy is further accompanied ‘by a diffused, resigned, melancholy sense of the passing of time, of the old order changing and yielding to a new one’; while true of Beowulf and The Idylls of the King this is conspicuously truer of The Return of the King and its dissolution of the Third Age. However the main merit of Mr Frye’s analysis, at this moment, is that besides describing Tolkien’s literary category so well it further indicates, first, an inevitable problem associated with that category, and then, more indirectly, the terms in which to express a solution.

  To take the problem first: it is caused by the fact that there are literary modes beneath romance and beneath epic or tragedy, i.e. ‘low mimesis’, this being the mode of most novels, in which the hero is much on a level with us – and lower still ‘irony’, where heroes turn into anti-heroes like Sancho Panza or Good Soldier Schweik or Leopold Bloom. ‘Looking over this table’, Mr Frye observes, ‘we can see that European fiction, during the last fifteen centuries, has steadily moved its center of gravity down the list’ – so much so that, as has been remarked of The Hobbit, the co-existence of ‘romance’ characters like Thorin Oakenshield with ‘ironic heroes’ like Bilbo Baggins is immediately comic and only after many adventures rises to gravity. Tolkien’s problem all through his career lay in his readership’s ‘low mimetic’ or ‘ironic’ expectations. How could he present heroes to an audience trained to reject their very style?

  His immediate solution was to present in The Lord of the Rings a whole hierarchy of styles. In this the hobbits are, orcs apart, at the bottom. Their very pronouns are against them, for the Shire version of Common Speech, like English but unlike all other major European languages, fails to distinguish polite from familiar forms of ‘you’; Pippin, Merry and the others accordingly talk in a style which appears to Gondorians as unnaturally assured (though it is in fact almost ‘democratic’, see p. 1107). In a more obvious way they are prone to compulsive banter. Merry, in the Houses of Healing, asks immediately after his recall from death by the sacral king for ‘supper first, and after that a pipe’. The resultant memory of Théoden is dissolved by jokes about tobacco, about his pack, and by friendly abuse from Pippin. ‘It is the way of my people to use light words at such times’, says Merry apologetically, but just the same he cannot stop. One sees what causes the unkind critical remarks about Boy’s Own and Billy Bunter. However the emergence of anti-heroes like Billy Bunter, the demotion of romance to children’s literature, are obvious consequences of the Western world’s fifteen-hundred-year long climb down the ladder of literary modes. All the hobbitic jokes are doing, then, is to reflect and by intention deflect the modern inhibition over high styles which we and they share; if we were not embarrassed by the hobbits, in other words, we would be by the heroes.

  Many people indeed manage to be embarrassed by both, and for the latter reaction there is more excuse. As he climbed to the top of his stylistic hierarchy Tolkien on occasion wrote in the responses he wanted instead of evoking them. High style is accompanied by characters stepping back, swelling, shining. Aragorn puts down Andúril at the gate of the Golden Hall, and declares its name: ‘The guard stepped back and looked with amazement’. A few lines
earlier ‘wonder’ has come into his eyes at the mention of Lothlórien. In the same way the guards at the Great Gate of Gondor ‘fell back before the command of [Gandalf’s] voice’, while at the last embassy near the Morannon ‘before his upraised hand the foul Messenger recoiled’. At that moment ‘a white light shone forth like a sword’ from Gandalf, as many people see ‘the light that shone’ round Éowyn and Faramir as they come down to the Houses of Healing. Galadriel is ‘illumined’ by ‘a great light’ when Frodo offers her the Ring, and seems ‘tall beyond measurement’. All these images together are used when Aragorn draws Andúril and declares himself to Éomer (p. 423):

  Gimli and Legolas looked at their companion in amazement, for they had not seen him in this mood before. He seemed to have grown in stature while Éomer had shrunk; and in his living face they caught a brief vision of the power and majesty of the kings of stone. For a moment it seemed to the eyes of Legolas that a white flame flickered on the brows of Aragorn like a shining crown.

  Éomer stepped back …

  ]

  Obviously his reaction is meant to be ours. Equally obviously that reaction cannot be counted on, because of the surly distrust engendered in us (as in Éomer) by generations of realistic fiction. Nevertheless it is a mistake to think that the only literary modes which exist are those one period is familiar with. By his continual switching from one level of style to another, and his equally continual use of characters as ‘internal reflectors’ of embarrassment or suspicion, Tolkien showed at least that he was aware of that very predictable mistake, and ready to do what he could to help his readers round it. The worst one can fairly say is that in some scenes – the Andúril ones, the Field of Cormallen, the eagle’s song – Tolkien underestimated his audience’s resistance and reached too hastily for the sublime or the impressive. The real difficulty, though, is not his but ours: in ordinary modern ‘low mimetic’ novels such qualities are simply not allowed.