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

by Tom Shippey

  One was the strong temptation towards explicitness and over-clarity. In Letters, p. 348, Tolkien noted the comic case of a Mr Shorthouse, who produced by accident a strange, queer, debatable book called John Inglesant. Slowly it caught on, became a bestseller, ‘the subject of public discussion from the Prime Minister downwards’. Success, however, ruined its author, who took to strange clothes and beliefs and ‘never wrote any more, but wasted the rest of his time trying to explain what he had and what he had not meant in John Inglesant’. ‘I have always tried to take him as a melancholy warning’ (wrote Tolkien in 1964), so the danger was seen. Still, it was there.

  It emerges, for instance, if one considers water. No scene, perhaps, in The Lord of the Rings is more moving or more suggestive than the one in which Sam and Frodo, in Mordor, see the wind changing and the darkness driven back, and then as if in answer to prayer come upon a trickle of water: ‘ill-fated’ and ‘fruitless’ in appearance, but at that moment seemingly a message from the world outside, beyond the Shadow. In The Silmarillion we learn that water is the province of the Vala Ulmo, and that from it (sea or river) there often comes assistance; the incident with Sam and Frodo begins to seem less and less like chance, more and more of a ‘sending’. If this went too far, of course, the sense of supernatural assistance would destroy one’s awareness of the companions’ courage, as also the deeply-felt implicit moral that this is the way to behave. None of us can expect assistance from a Vala; nevertheless in any kind of Mordor it is one’s duty to go on. By the time The Lord of the Rings was finished, Tolkien was beginning to think of taking matters further. He had shown inspiration coming from Ulmo to Tuor, as the hero sat by a trickling stream, both in The Silmarillion (p. 238), and in ‘Of Tuor and his Coming to Gondolin’ (written c. 1951),4 in the Unfinished Tales, p. 20. Clearly the idea of water as a sanctity and an unfailing refuge from the Dark Lord had started to appeal to him; and in ‘The Hunt for the Ring’, accordingly, a sort of coda to The Lord of the Rings written c. 1955, he wrote that all the Nazgûl save their chief ‘feared water, and were unwilling, except in dire need, to enter it or to cross streams unless dryshod by a bridge’ (UT, p. 343). How then had they crossed Wilderland to the Shire? Christopher Tolkien notes that his father saw ‘the idea was difficult to sustain’. Besides that, it would have brought the Valar too far forward; at many points it would have destroyed the hobbits’ highly realistic sense of loneliness and confusion.

  One may think that Tolkien was rightly pushing towards a clarification of his ‘mythology’.5 Yet at the same time he was edging back from his long concern with heroic valour, or hobbitic moral courage. It has been remarked already that he was in minor matters kind-hearted. As The Lord of the Rings came to an end this temptation, too, grew upon him. Bill the pony is saved in The Return of the King. In the ‘Epilogue’ to that work, eventually printed in SD pp. 114–35, we learn that Shadowfax will be saved too, to be taken on the last ship from the Havens to Aman, simply because Gandalf could not bear the parting. This would be a failure of nerve in a work which had sacrificed Lórien, and Tolkien, having written it, wisely decided to leave it out. Still, the second edition of The Lord of the Rings cuts out some minor, but convincing, asperity on the part of a strained Aragorn; it seemed too tough.6 More seriously, in the ‘late’ narrative of ‘The Disaster of the Gladden Fields’ (UT, pp. 271–87), one can see Tolkien reconsidering Isildur. His use of the ominous word ‘precious’ in The Fellowship of the Ring (p. 246) had been quite enough to suggest that he was already becoming ‘addicted’, that his death was in a way a mercy. In the later narrative, though, Isildur uses the Ring painfully and reluctantly, with much excuse and apology. The Ring seems to find no answer in him to its call. But this again is running against a crucial point in The Lord of the Rings, namely that no one can be trusted, not even ‘the Keepers of the Three’. Tolkien, no doubt, would have seen this point and dealt with it somehow if he had published a full account. Still, one can see him becoming more loath to accept the evil in the good: and while this is charitable, it does not make for powerful story.

  A final straw in the wind may be Tolkien’s increasing desire to pull strands together. The Middle-earth of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is full of chaotic half-glimpsed independent lives, ears in the forest, fell voices on the wind, enemy powers older than Sauron and unconnected with him. In a letter of 1955 Tolkien had rather laughed at the idea that Willow-man and the wights were agents of the Dark Lord: ‘Cannot people imagine things hostile to men and hobbits who prey on them without being in league with the Devil!’ (Letters, p. 228). But in manuscript B of ‘The Hunt for the Ring’ (written at much the same time) just this idea is being entertained. The Chief Ringwraith stays on the Barrow-downs for some while before Frodo sets out, ‘and the Barrow-wights were roused, and all things of evil spirit, hostile to Elves and Men, were on the watch with malice in the Old Forest and on the Barrow-downs’ (UT, p. 348).

  None of the points just mentioned is of any great significance in itself. As a whole, though, they do suggest an author looking back over his own work and trying to reduce it to order. The menace in that, as everyone knows, is that with system comes rationalisation and loss of vitality. There are moments when one fears that Tolkien, in the Unfinished Tales – and in fairness one must repeat that they are unfinished, were never finally ‘passed’ by their author – was turning against the sources of his inspiration. He tried to realign retrospectively things he had written many years before, for what at the time had been entirely adequate reasons. The point of making Bilbo both ‘bourgeois’ and ‘burglar’ has been explained above; and the scene in Bag End in chapter 1 of The Hobbit is completely successful as comedy. But by the time he wrote ‘The Quest of Erebor’ (perhaps around 1950), Tolkien had come to think it undignified. In repeated versions he explains laboriously that Gandalf forced Bilbo on Thorin out of some Valinorean ‘foresight’; or because he knew hobbits were stealthy; or because he thought Bilbo had the right ‘mix’ of Took and Baggins; while as for the word ‘burglar’, it was all a dwarvish misunderstanding. The very multiplicity of reasons suggests doubt; and in romance it is a good rule that not everything should be explained.

  In any case one may well think that the sheer effort of dotting ‘i’s and crossing ‘t’s was draining. On one issue – the nature of the orcs – Tolkien seems very nearly to have arrived at a solution without quite being able to grasp it, a sign, perhaps, of exhaustion. There can be little doubt that the orcs entered Middle-earth originally just because the story needed a continual supply of enemies over whom one need feel no compunction, ‘the infantry of the old war’, to use Tolkien’s phrase from ‘Monsters’ (p. 264). But several readers had pointed out that if evil could not create, was only good perverted, then presumably the orcs had been by nature good and might in some way be saved; Tolkien certainly balked at calling them ‘irredeemable’, see Letters, pp. 195, 355. The Silmarillion accordingly expresses more than once the theory that orcs were in fact captured elves ‘by slow arts of cruelty … corrupted and enslaved’ (S, p. 50). One can only say that in that case there are an awful lot of them – ‘the pits of Angband seemed to hold store inexhaustible and ever-renewed’ (S, p. 157). They must have been bred, one thinks, and indeed we are told they multiplied ‘after the manner of the children of Ilúvatar’, i.e. sexually. But in that case one wonders (a) why what we would call ‘brainwashed’ creatures should breed true, and (b) why we never come upon female orcs. Tolkien shrank from that last, and recorded (UT, p. 385) a rival theory that the orcs were bred from something like the Drúedain, the Pûkel-men. I suspect that at the back of his mind there lurked a phrase from Beowulf, about those very similar monsters Grendel and his mother: no híe fæder cunnon, ‘men know of no father for them’. It would be a good solution to see the orcs as multiplying ‘like flies’, as if by some manufacturing process in hatcheries in Barad-dûr or Moria or the pits of Angband – maybe they ‘quickened in the earth like maggots’, as Snorri St
urluson had written centuries before (see above). Such beings would be ‘creatures’ of evil in a special sense, made and animated by their master in a way which falls just short of the heresy that evil can itself create. As Ilúvatar says of Aulë’s dwarves, they would have no being of their own, ‘moving when [he thinks] to move them, and if [his] thought is elsewhere, standing idle’. Tolkien saw the problem, and collected the parts of a solution. He did not, however, assemble the parts – perhaps because it would have involved, to be consistent, a complete revision of all his earlier work.7

  The word underlying these last few pages is ‘thrift’. All minds possess a drive towards consistency, towards reducing data, events, characters to some smaller set of principles or categories. Much of Tolkien’s writing in Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales shows that urge, a strong and honourable one. It is fair to say, though, that against this basic drive all minds also possess a wish to ignore principles and concentrate instead on single entities regardless of their place in larger systems, to appreciate them simply for themselves. For most of his career Tolkien was a most extreme example of a man with this second urge strongly developed: he was fascinated by names, to give only one example, part of whose nature is that they are for one thing and one thing alone, very hard to reduce to system! Hence the supreme lavishness of Middle-earth in The Lord of the Rings, with its vast store of plants and races, names and languages and individuals and landscapes. As he turned towards thrift, consistency, classification, Tolkien forfeited much of what he had valued before; he was contracting, not expanding. In a way the very success of The Lord of the Rings, founded on its immense solidity and scope, made life difficult for him afterwards. Not only would The Silmarillion have to achieve the ‘depth’ it had already been used to create, it would have to do so without contradicting, and while if possible reinforcing, all the millions of details Tolkien had handed over to his readership already. For these two reasons it is hardly any wonder that Tolkien balked, and that the Unfinished Tales in particular show a mind searching in different directions. After 1955 many ways forward were blocked. The question was, whether the vitality of his original conceptions and compositions of the period before The Lord of the Rings, indeed from the 1910s on, could survive.

  Here one must concentrate, not on those explanations of the Second and Third Ages which Tolkien wrote as background for The Lord of the Rings, but on his labour and preoccupation for nearly sixty years, the legends of the First Age: Tuor and Túrin in the Unfinished Tales, but beyond and around them the whole ‘narrative structure’ of The Silmarillion. To repeat questions posed earlier: what have these to say, and how did they come to be?

  Philosophical Inquiries

  The most obvious fact about the design of The Silmarillion is that, like the Shire, it is a ‘calque’, though on the history of Genesis rather than the history of England. In chapter X of A Preface to Paradise Lost (London: Oxford University Press, 1942), C. S. Lewis gave a summary list of doctrines of the Fall of Man common to Milton, to St Augustine, and to ‘the Church as a whole’. Most of them reappear with little change in the Ainulindalë’ or “Valaquenta’. Thus Lewis asserts that ‘God created all things without exception good’; in Tolkien even Melkor begins with good intentions (S, p. 18). ‘What we call bad things are good things perverted … This perversion arises when a conscious creature becomes more interested in itself than in God … the sin of Pride’; compare Melkor in the music of the Ainur seeking ‘to increase the power and glory of the part assigned to himself’. Lewis again, ‘whoever tries to rebel against God produces the result opposite to his intention … Those who will not be God’s sons become his tools’; and Ilúvatar to Melkor, ‘no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me … he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined’ (my italics). It seems very likely that Lewis and Tolkien co-operated in their analysis of Christian essentials; The Silmarillion, with its exile from paradise, its ages of misery, and its Intercessor, is a calque on Christian story, an answer to Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained.

  Is it a rival to Christian story? The thought clearly occurred to Tolkien, if only to be repudiated. Significantly he left a gap in The Silmarillion, or designed a dovetail, for the Fall of Man as described in the Old Testament. In his work the human race does not originate ‘on stage’ in Beleriand, but drifts into it, already sundered in speech, from the East. There something terrible has happened to them of which they will not speak: ‘A darkness lies behind us … and we have turned our backs upon it’ (S, p. 141). Furthermore they have met ‘the Lord of the Dark’ before they meet the Elves; Morgoth went to them as soon as they were created, to ‘corrupt or destroy’. Clearly one can, if one wishes, assume that the exploit of Morgoth of which the Eldar never learnt was the traditional seduction of Adam and Eve by the serpent, while the incoming Edain and Easterlings are all descendants of Adam flying from Eden and subject to the curse of Babel. The Silmarillion, then, tells the story of the fall and partial redemption of the elves, without contradicting the story of the Fall and Redemption of Man.

  There is no point, though, in merely repeating a known pattern. Tolkien, in his history of the elves, would not wish to go against what he accepted as doctrine universally true. He did however want to say something different: as with a linguistic ‘calque’, familiar structure has to join with strange or novel material. The alienness of Tolkien’s elves, the thing which makes their whole history different from that of humanity, is obviously that (in the natural course of things) they do not die. Accordingly they do not have to be rescued from death by a Saviour; nor from Hell, for they are not judged at death to Hell or Heaven, but sent to ‘the Halls of Mandos’, from which they may in time return. Orthodox correspondents of Tolkien worried about this, and thought he was overstepping the mark (see especially Letters no. 153). To their doubts Tolkien could only reply that he was writing fiction, he had a right to use his imagination, and that after all his elves were only ‘certain aspects of Men and their talents and desires, incarnated in my little world’. Romance, as Professor Kermode said (see above), is a stripped-down form which enables one to concentrate.

  What Tolkien wanted to concentrate on, obviously, was death: more precisely perhaps on why people love this world and want so strongly to stay in it when it is an inescapable part of their nature ‘to die and go we know not where’. His imagination centred again on a kind of calque, a diagrammatic reversal. Since we die, he invented a race which did not. Since our ‘fairy-stories’ are full of the escape from death (as he remarked near the end of ‘On Fairy-Stories’, Tree p. 68), ‘the Human-stories of the elves are doubtless full of the Escape from Deathlessness’. Certainly one was, his own tale of Beren and Lúthien as embodied in his ‘Lay of Leithian, Release from Bondage’, in which Lúthien alone of the elves is allowed as a favour to ‘die indeed’ and leave the world like a mortal. Paradise Lost, one might say, exists to tell us that death is a just punishment, and anyway (see Paradise Regained) not final. The Silmarillion by contrast seems to be trying to persuade us to see death potentially as a gift or reward – an attitude to which other authors in this sceptical age have felt drawn.8 While the legends of the First Age are a ‘calque’, then, their resemblance to a known pattern directs us primarily to difference from that pattern; the elvishness of the elves is meant to reflect back on the humanity of man.

  That seems, anyway, to be what Tolkien came to think. There must however be at least a suspicion that – as with the languages of Middle-earth – he created a structure of thought to justify a more primary urge, delight in language, delight in ancient story. Elves, like dragons, are embedded deeply in several different traditions of North-West Europe, and the inconsistencies of those traditions9 may only have made Tolkien itch to create a Zusammenhang. Did elves have souls, for instance? Could they be saved? Anyone who had read Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’ would know that they did not
and could not – not unless they married a mortal, as with Lúthien. Tolkien did know ‘The Little Mermaid’, though he did not like it (Letters, p. 311), probably because he thought it too sentimental. Older and tougher belief on the same issue is embodied in another tale Tolkien had probably read, the Scottish story of ‘The Woman of Peace and the Bible’10: in this an elf-woman approaches an old man reading his Bible and asks ‘if there was any hope given in holy Scripture for such as she’. The old man replies kindly, but says there is no mention of salvation in the Good Book ‘for any but the sinful sons of Adam’ – at which the lady gives a cry of despair and hurls herself into the sea. The old man’s answer is strict and orthodox but (as with the view that preconversion heroes like Beowulf or Aragorn could not be saved) hardly seems fair. Why should only the ‘sinful’ be saved? However it was not Tolkien’s way to deny orthodoxy: nor to abjure equally old and traditional belief in the allure of elves and their separation from evil. He looked for a middle path. And in this activity he had at least one model.

  This is not, for once, the Beowulf-poet, who took a strong line on ylfe or elves, putting them into a list with ‘ettens’ and indeed with ‘orcs’ – a very stern view of all non-human and un-Christian species. But at least one other English poet preceded Tolkien in being less sure, the author of the legend of St Michael in The Early South English Legendary, written about 1250. Tolkien never mentions reading this, but it is unlikely that as a medievalist he did not. What the Middle English poet has to say, in essence, is that in the war between God and Satan for men’s souls, there may perhaps be neutrals. In the War in Heaven not all the angels were whole-heartedly for God or for Lucifer. The ones who inclined toward the devils without actually joining them are accordingly confined in tempests till Doomsday, when they will go to Hell. Correspondingly, those who wavered towards God have been sent from Heaven to Earth, where ‘they will be in a certain pain up to the end of the world, but at Doomsday they shall return to Heaven. Others are still in the Earthly Paradise, and in other places on Earth, doing their penance.’ Both good and evil spirits come to Earth to protect or corrupt men, but these neutrals can be seen too: