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

by Tom Shippey

  In fact one can often feel Tolkien, between these ‘low’ and ‘high’ stylistic poles, breaking with complete success out of all the categories into which he should have been put, rising again from the edge of romance to what almost anyone might call ‘myth’. Perhaps the best example occurs at the end of Book V, chapter 4, ‘The Siege of Gondor’. Here many of the story’s threads are about to intersect. Faramir lies critically ill within the walls. Pippin is rushing to fetch Gandalf to save him, while Merry and Théoden are simultaneously approaching from Anórien; but at the Great Gate the chief Nazgûl, the ‘haggard king’ himself to whom Frodo had almost surrendered in the vale of Minas Morgul, leads the assault. All this is presented simply as story, even as history, but supra-realistic suggestions keep crowding in. The battering-ram of Mordor has a ‘hideous head, founded of black steel … shaped in the likeness of a ravening wolf; on it spells of ruin lay. Grond they called it, in memory of the Hammer of the Underworld of old’ – as if to recreate some earlier unstated triumph of the chthonic powers. Meanwhile the Nazgûl himself goes even more than usual beyond the boundaries of even ‘romantic’ humanity: he looks like a man, and carries a sword, but it is a ‘pale’ or insubstantial one; he bursts the Gate not only by Grond but by a projection of fear and dread, ‘words of power and terror to rend both heart and stone’, which work like ‘searing lightning’. On the one hand he turns almost to abstraction, ‘a vast menace of despair’, as also to an image of the unexistence of evil, a ‘huge shadow’ which Gandalf tries to send back to ‘nothingness’. But though the Nazgûl ironically proves Boethius right by throwing back his hood – ‘and behold! he had a kingly crown; and yet upon no head visible was it set’ – his deadly laughter shows that ‘nothingness’ can still have power and control. At this moment he calls himself Death:

  ‘Old fool!’ he said. ‘Old fool! This is my hour. Do you not know Death when you see it? Die now and curse in vain!’ And with that he lifted high his sword and flames ran down the blade.

  Gandalf did not move. And in that very moment, away behind in some courtyard of the City, a cock crowed. Shrill and clear he crowed, recking nothing of wizardry or war, welcoming only the morning that in the sky far above the shadows of death was coming with the dawn.

  And as if in answer there came from far away another note. Horns, horns, horns. In dark Mindolluin’s sides they dimly echoed. Great horns of the North wildly blowing. Rohan had come at last.

  In this passage the key words are perhaps ‘as if’. Within the world of romance everything that happens here is literally ‘coincidence’. The cock means nothing by crowing, that he crows at this moment is mere happenstance. Nor are the horns replying – they only seem to. Nevertheless no reader takes the passage like that. The cockcrow itself is too laden with old significance to be just a motif. In a Christian society one cannot avoid the memory of the cock that crowed to Simon Peter just as he denied Christ the third time. What did that cockcrow mean? Surely, that there was a Resurrection, that from now on Simon’s despair and fear of death would be overcome. But then again, what of Comus and the cockcrow the Younger Brother wishes for? ‘Twould be some solace yet, some little cheering / In this close dungeon of innumerous boughs.’ It would show there is a world elsewhere. Tolkien too might think of the Norse legend of the ‘Undying Lands’, the Odáinsakr: when King Hadding reached its boundary the witch who guided him killed a cock and threw it over the wall – a moment later he heard the cock crow before he himself had to turn away and go back to mortality.24 Cockcrow means dawn, means day after night, life after death; it asserts a greater cycle above a lesser one.

  And what of the horns? They too are just the horns the Riders happen to be blowing, but they carry meaning in a more complicated way as well. Their meaning is bravado and recklessness. When he sets out from Rivendell Boromir blows his horn, the family heirloom, and is rebuked by Elrond for doing so; but he takes no notice. ‘Always I have let my horn cry at setting forth, and though thereafter we may walk in the shadows, I will not go forth as a thief in the night.’ He means that good is stronger than evil, and even if it is not, that makes no difference to him. Challenging horns echo through Northern stories, from the trumpets of Hygelac, Beowulf’s uncle, coming to rescue his dispirited compatriots from death by torture, to the war-horns of the ‘Forest Cantons’, the ‘Bull’ of Uri and the ‘Cow’ of Unterwalden, lowing to each other across the field of Marignano, as the Swiss pikemen rallied in the night for a second suicidal assault on overwhelming numbers of French cavalry and cannon. Horns go back to an older world where surrenders were not accepted, to the dead defiant Roland rather than the brave, polite, compromise-creating Sir Gawain, whose dinner is served to ‘nwe nakryn noyse’ – the sound of chivalric kettledrums. Nor are these the ‘horns of Elfland dimly blowing’ of late Romanticism; their echoes may be ‘dim’, but they themselves are ‘wild’, uncontrolled, immune to the fear and calculation on which the Nazgûl is counting. The combination of horncall and cockcrow means, if one listens, that he who fears for his life shall lose it, but that dying undaunted is no defeat; furthermore that this was true before the Christian myth that came to explain why.

  The implications of that scene are more than realistic, and more than romantic. Nevertheless the style of the passage is deliberately neutral.25 There are touches of alliteration in ‘wizardry’ and ‘war’, ‘death’ and ‘dawn’, ‘dark’ and ‘dim’, while the verb ‘recking’ is old-fashioned. However the vocabulary as a whole could hardly be simpler, largely monosyllabic, mostly words from Old English or Old Norse, but with an admixture of French words taken into the language many centuries ago, and even one Classical one in ‘echoed’. Like Bilbo’s and Shakespeare’s winter songs, the ‘breaking of the Gate’ would take little rewriting to seem comprehensible and even colloquial at any time over the last half-millennium. The power of the passage lies not in mots justes but in the evocation of ideas at once old and new, familiar in outline but strongly redefined in context: like ‘stocks and stones’.

  The way this works has been once more illuminated by Mr Frye, who notes that though the line from Charles Kingsley’s ballad about the ‘cruel, crawling foam’ (which swallows a girl drowned by accident) could be censured by rationalistic critics as the ‘pathetic fallacy’ – thinking nature is alive – what the phrase actually does is to let realism aspire for a second to higher modes, to give to the drowned Mary ‘a faint coloring of the myth of Andromeda’. That aspiration is true of Tolkien in many places. It seems only apposite that he should hover so often on the edge of the ‘pathetic fallacy’, as for instance in the assault on Caradhras, where Aragorn and Boromir insist the wind has ‘fell voices’ and that stone-slips are aimed, or on the bridge at Khazad-dûm, where Gandalf is ‘like a wizened tree’, but the Balrog a mixture of fire and shadow, a ‘flame of Udûn’ – checked only for a moment by Boromir’s horn. A good example of open discussion of such ambiguities within the trilogy is Frodo’s passage of the Dead Marshes in pp. 613–5. It is Sam who falls with his face to the mud and cries out ‘There are dead things, dead faces in the water’. Gollum explains them as materialistically as possible. The dead are from the great battle long ago; the marsh-lights are exhalations from rotting corpses; he dug down once to eat them, though he found them beyond reach. Frodo sees more in them than that, though he cannot explain what:

  ‘They lie in all the pools, pale faces deep deep under the dark water. I saw them: grim faces and evil, and noble faces and sad. Many faces proud and fair, and weeds in their silver hair. But all foul, all rotting, all dead. A fell light is in them.’

  He does not say that ‘fair is foul’, like the witches in Macbeth. But the fear of the vision comes from the way that all, elves and orcs, evil and noble, are reduced to weeds and foulness in the end. The image picks up Merry’s awakening from the barrow pages earlier, with its unexplained juxtaposition of the noble dead in the barrow with the wight itself. Does all glory decompose? That is what makes Frodo stand �
��lost in thought’. Later on Faramir is to dismiss the whole thing as a sending of the Enemy. But there remains a feeling that the Enemy is not telling absolute untruth, even so. The landscape itself reinforces that belief. ‘Far above the rot and vapours of the world the sun was riding high and golden’, but all the hobbits can see and hear is ‘the faint quiver of empty seed-plumes, and broken grass-blades trembling in small air-movements that they could not feel’. The discharged seed, the breathless air are images of the discouragement and sterility the Enemy projects. Mordor-flies have red eyes on them; all Mordor-bushes have thorns.

  Both characters and readers become aware of the extent and nature of Tolkien’s moralisations from landscape in such passages. In the thematic opposite to Mordor and the Marshes, however, in and around Lothlórien, old poems, old beliefs, and fictional geography are much more closely intertwined, with the combination much less readily identified as fallacious. The word associated with Lórien most often is ‘stain’ – an odd word, both French and Norse in origin, with an early meaning of ‘to lose lustre’ as well as ‘to discolour’. Frodo perceives the colours of Cerin Amroth accordingly as at once ‘fresh’ and familiar, with a light on them he cannot identify: ‘On the land of Lórien there was no stain.’ A few pages earlier he had felt that ‘on the land of Lórien no shadow lay’. Much later Gandalf in the ‘Song of Lórien’ confirms, ‘Unmarred, unstained is leaf and land’. With this mysterious absence of ‘stain’ goes a forgetting of grief; though the Fellowship has just lost Gandalf in Moria, the fact is not mentioned for close on twenty pages (330–46), and indeed we are told that ‘In winter here no heart could mourn for summer or for spring’. This is very like Pearl, where the visionary landscape he wakes in makes the dreamer-father forget even his bereavement, ‘Garten my goste al greffe forzete’. It should be noted though that the dreamer crosses one boundary, from graveyard to dream, but not the next; when he tries to swim the river to Heaven at the end of the poem he is halted and woken before he reaches the water. Frodo and the Fellowship, however, cross two rivers, deliberately described and distinguished. One is the Nimrodel, which consoles their grief and promises them partial security; as Frodo wades it ‘he felt that the stain of travel and all weariness was washed from his limbs’. The next is Celebrant, the Silverlode which they cannot ford but have to cross on ropes. Here they are totally secure, for, though the orcs can splash across the Nimrodel – ‘curse their foul feet in its clean water!’ says Haldir – it seems they cannot wade or swim the Silverlode. Even Gollum, though seen by the elves, vanishes ‘down the Silverlode southward’, i.e. on the far bank, and according to Aragorn has followed the Fellowship only ‘right down to Nimrodel’.

  With Pearl in mind, one might easily conclude that the stretch between the two rivers is a sort of ‘earthly Paradise’ for Frodo and the others, though one still capable of violation and invasion from the outside world. The ‘Naith’ of Lórien, though, across the second river, is Heaven; the company undergoes a kind of death in getting there, while there is a feeling of significance in the fact that they may not touch the water, not even to have their ‘stains’ washed away. A determined allegorist (or mythiciser) might go on to identify the Nimrodel with baptism, the Silverlode with death. A force which holds one powerfully back from such opinions is however Sam Gamgee, who counterpoints the most solemn moments of crossing with banalities like ‘Live and learn!’ and chatter about his uncle Andy (who used to have a rope-walk at Tighfield). He, and Gimli and Gollum and Haldir, keep even Lórien tied down to the level of story, in which rivers are tactical obstacles and not symbols for something else. Nevertheless, even though the Pearl analogue may occur to few, the references to absence of ‘stain’ and grief and blemish, the assertion that Lórien is a place apart, have their effect and keep one finally uncertain about the section’s proper mode. The best one can say is that in those chapters, as in The Lord of the Rings more generally, a work essentially of ‘romance’ manages to rise at times towards ‘myth’, and also to sink towards ‘high’ or even ‘low mimesis’.

  Even ‘irony’ is not always out of place, though it is beneficent. As Sam and Frodo struggle on in Mordor, they come on a streamlet, ‘the last remains, maybe, of some sweet rain gathered from sunlit seas, but ill-fated to fall at last upon the walls of the Black Land and wander fruitless down into the dust’. ‘Fruitless’ (a significant adjective elsewhere)? The water seemed so, but turns out not to be. By refreshing the Ringbearer it does the best that any water could. The ‘streamlet’, in its apparent failure and eventual success, becomes a kind of analogue to Frodo’s pity for Gollum, say, to all appearances useless, in the end decisive. It is hard to say what mode such scenes are in. They could be (by themselves) anywhere in Northrop Frye’s stylistic hierarchy. This resonance of passages which can be read with different levels of suggestion at once, with ‘myth’ and ‘low mimesis’ and ‘irony’ all embedded deeply in ‘romance’, is perhaps the major and least-considered cause for the appeal of The Lord of the Rings.

  Some contradictions mediated

  If the three volumes had a thematic heart (in fact their whole method defies centralisation) one might like to see it in the dialogue of Legolas and Gimli, walking through Minas Tirith on p. 855, and looking at the masonry. Gimli is critical:

  ‘It is ever so with the things that Men begin: there is a frost in Spring, or a blight in Summer, and they fail of their promise.’

  ‘Yet seldom do they fail of their seed,’ said Legolas. ‘And that will lie in the dust and rot to spring up again in times and places unlooked-for. The deeds of Men will outlast us, Gimli.’

  ‘And yet come to naught in the end but might-have-beens, I guess,’ said the Dwarf.

  ‘To that the Elves know not the answer,’ said Legolas.

  The exchange makes a point about Gondorian history. It also brings out further one character’s idée fixe (stonework), and develops the theme of racial tension / personal harmony which has been a feature of this relationship in the story for some time. Yet the characters’ speech here reaches out from its immediate context to timelessness and universality. Their sentences sound like proverbs. The idea of seed lying in the dust is furthermore likely to arouse memory of the parable (Matthew xiii, 18–23) of the seed that fell on stony ground. With a shock one may wonder whether these proverbially soulless creatures, Elf and Dwarf, are here – all unwittingly – talking about the Son of Man. It would be like the elves to know a Saviour would come to men, without having the slightest or remotest idea of the mingled horror and beauty with which that event would come about. We get a glimpse of how history might seem to the most virtuous, and most pagan, of virtuous pagans – an odd effect in, but not at all a contradiction to ‘a fundamentally religious and Catholic work’. In this way The Lord of the Rings can be seen mediating between Christian and pagan, Christ and Ingeld and Frodo, as between myth and romance, large pattern and immediate context.

  It is at the same time hovering between styles. There is no archaic word in the passage, except perhaps ‘naught’. Nevertheless a strong archaic effect is produced, by inversion of nouns and adjectives, careful selection of adverbs of time like ‘yet’ and ‘seldom’, and other less obvious linguistic features. Tolkien could have given a lecture about all these at any time. It would have been no trouble to him to write the exchange in modern English: ‘It’s always like that with the things men start off on … But they don’t often fail to propagate … They’ll still come to nothing in the end … The elves don’t know the answer to that one …’ The Lord of the Rings would have offered fewer hostages to criticism if it had been written like that. But would it have been better? It seems very unlikely. The discrepancy between modern usage and archaic thought would simply have sounded bogus, leading to a deep ‘disunion of word and meaning’ (as Tolkien showed by rewriting a similar passage, see Letters, pp. 225–6). His prose style was carefully calculated, and had its proper effect, in the long run, and for those not too provoked to read caref
ully. One might say, in Aristotelian terms, that the trilogy succeeded in harmonising its ethos, its mythos, and its lexis – the subjects, roughly speaking, of the last three chapters respectively.

  By those three words Aristotle would have meant ‘setting’, ‘plot’ and ‘style’, all meanings intended in the sentence above. However semantic change often gives an unexpected bonus, which one should accept in this case as in others. The sentence above would still be true if the Greek words meant ‘ethics’, ‘myth’ and ‘lexis’ (the technical term for what one gets from dictionaries or lexicons). Tolkien thought there was a truth in the vagaries of words independent of their users. He probably did not, for instance, personally admire either Milton or Wordsworth: the one was a Protestant, a divorcer, and a spokesman for regicides, the other a tinkerer with medievalism and a linguistic critic of the most ignorant type. But both were English poets, and the language spoke through them. How nearly Wordsworth echoed Pearl in his famous elegy on ‘Lucy’:

  No motion has she now, no force,

  She neither hears nor sees,

  Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course