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

by Tom Shippey

  And ofte in fourme of wommane: In many derne weye

  grete compaygnie men i-seoth of heom: boþe hoppie and pleize,

  Þat Eluene beoth i-cleopede: and ofte heo comiez to toune,

  And bi daye muche in wodes heo beoth: and bi nizte ope heize dounes.

  Þat beoth þe wrechche gostes: Þat out of heuene weren i-nome,

  And manie of heom a-domesday: zeot schullen to reste come.

  And often men see great numbers of them, shaped like women, dancing and sporting on many dark paths. These are called Elves (my italics), and often they come to town, and by day they are usually in the woods, by night on high hills. Those are the wretched spirits that were taken from Heaven. And at Doomsday many of them shall still come to rest.11

  It is surprising how much of these few lines finds an echo in The Silmarillion. Of course Tolkien could not accept the basic postulate that elves were angels; like the story of the fairy and the Bible-reader, that is the product of a strict Christianity with very little space for outsiders. However, his elves are very like fallen angels, quite similar enough for confusion in the minds of fallible men. They seem part of a hierarchy which goes from Valar (good and bad) to Maiar (good and bad) to Eldar; they are ‘like in nature to the Ainur, though less in might and stature’, close enough in one case (Melian and Elwë or Elu Thingol) to intermarry. For a man to say that Galadriel was an angel, for instance, might then seem natural enough.12 Would she be a fallen angel? In a way the answer is ‘No’, for certainly the elves play no part in Tolkien’s War in Heaven, when Melkor is shut out. On the other hand Galadriel has been expelled from a kind of Heaven, the Deathless land of Valinor, and has been forbidden to return.13 One can imagine the expulsion to Earth (of Melkor) and the expulsion to Middle-earth (of Galadriel) coming, in a mind like Éomer’s, to seem much the same thing. Furthermore one notes the South English Legendary’s interesting conviction that some ‘neutrals’, or elves, are still on Earth, and others in the ‘Earthly Paradise’. In a way this too is made true by The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings combined; for the latter predicts that some elves will refuse to leave Middle-earth, however much they may ‘dwindle’, while the former shows that others remain in Valinor, once part of the Earth, though now in some mysterious way sundered from it. What Tolkien took from that passage (and others) was, in short, the ideas that elves were like angels; that they had however been involved in a ‘Fall’; that their fate at Doomsday is not clear (for men ‘shall join in the Second Music of the Ainur’, elves perhaps not, S, p. 42), that they are associated with the Earthly Paradise, and cannot die till the end of the world. No earlier source puts forward the idea of the Halls of Mandos, but that half-way house, like Limbo, seems almost to be demanded by the terms of the problem. Have elves souls? No, in that they are not free to leave the world; so far the Ross-shire Bible reader was right. Yes, in that they do not go out like a candle on death; so far natural justice is satisfied. One sees that, as well as Genesis, Northern folk-tradition has helped to frame The Silmarillion. Its story has a root in the puzzles of ancient texts.

  Pride and Possessiveness: another view

  None of the foregoing says anything about the ‘Silmarils’ themselves, the jewels which give their name to The Silmarillion, and whose fate determines its plot. However they do in a way fit the scheme already outlined. The Silmarillion was based on the Christian story of Fall and Redemption, whether one took it from Genesis or Paradise Lost. It was different from the Christian story in being about a race which had not been punished by death, rather by weariness of life (see especially Letters, p. 236). A natural question is, what was their sin? To keep the pattern consistent, it ought not to be the same as that of Adam and Eve, by tradition Pride, the moment when, as Lewis said, ‘a conscious creature’ became ‘more interested in itself than in God’. In fact the elves seem much more susceptible to a specialised variety of pride not at all present in Paradise Lost, not quite Avarice or ‘possessiveness’ or wanting to own things (as has been suggested),14 but rather a restless desire to make things which will forever reflect or incarnate their own personality. So Melkor has the desire ‘to bring into Being things of his own’; Aulë, though subjecting himself to Ilúvatar, creates the dwarves without authority; Fëanor forges the Silmarils. One might rewrite Lewis’s phrase to say that in Valinor, as opposed to Eden, the Fall came when conscious creatures became ‘more interested in their own creations than in God’s’. The aspect of humanity which the elves represent most fully – both for good and ill – is the creative one.

  There could be several reasons why Tolkien chose to write about fascination with the artefact (a theme present in his work since chapter 1 of The Hobbit). The most obvious is that he felt it himself: to him his fictions were what the Silmarils were to Fëanor or their ships to the Teleri, ‘the work of our hearts, whose like we shall not make again’. Significantly Fëanor learns not from Manwë, nor Ulmo, but from Aulë, the smith of the Valar and the most similar of them to Melkor; Aulë too is responsible for the despatch of Saruman to Middle-earth, see UT, p. 393; Aulë is the patron of all craftsmen, including ‘those that make not, but seek only for the understanding of what is’ – the philologists, one might say, but also the scopas, the ‘makers’, the fabbri, the poets. Tolkien could not help seeing a part of himself in Fëanor and Saruman, sharing their perhaps licit, perhaps illicit desire to ‘sub-create’. He wrote about his own temptations, and came close to presenting the revolt of the Noldor as a felix culpa, a ‘fortunate sin’, when Manwë accepts that their deeds will live in song, so that ‘beauty not before conceived [shall] be brought into Eä’; fiction, poetry, craftsmanship are seen as carrying their own justification and as all being much the same thing. Rightly, Tolkien must have thought, did the poet of Pearl call himself a ‘jeweller’.

  A more wide-ranging reason is that love of things, especially artificial things, could be seen as the besetting sin of modern civilisation, and in a way a new one, not quite Avarice and not quite Pride, but somehow attached to both. In that view The Silmarillion would have something like the distinctively modern ‘applicability’ of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, for all its archaic setting. Yet Tolkien believed, to repeat a point made already, that modern sins had ancient origins. The fall of the Noldor (S, p. 69) repeats a phrase from the Old English poem Maxims I about ‘inventing and tempering wounding swords’: the Anglo-Saxon poet seems to have looked back to Cain and Abel for the origin of evil, rather than Adam and Eve, and to have seen evil’s symptom in metallurgy. More deeply the Silmarils themselves seem to stem from yet one more philological crux, this time from Finnish.

  The influence of that language and literature on The Silmarillion is undoubted. Finnish was ‘the original germ of The Silmarillion’, Tolkien wrote in 1944 (Letters, p. 87), and he repeated the assertion twenty years later (Letters, p. 345). Quenya itself is similar to Finnish in linguistic ‘style’; names like Ilúvatar and Ulmo recall the Ilmatar and Ilmo of the Kalevala; the Valar are the powers who have agreed to be ‘bounded in the world’, and vala in Finnish means ‘bond’; many more connections can be made.* It is therefore almost inevitable that the great mystery of the epic of Finland, the Kalevala, should irresistibly recall the Silmarils: it is the riddle of the sampo. This object is described repeatedly in the Kalevala as the work of the master-smith Ilmarinen, handed over as payment for a bride, but then stolen back, broken in the pursuit, surviving only in fragments; yet no one knows what it is – or rather, what it was, for its loss is irrevocable. The singers themselves are uncertain, often replacing sampo (a word without a referent) by some other nonsense-word like sammas. Meanwhile the philologists, putting together the various clues inside the Kalevala – it is bright, it was forged, it is a kind of mill, it brings luck, it made the sea salt – have come up with innumerable solutions, at once vague and pedantic: the sampo was the Golden Fleece, some fertility-cult object, a Lappish pillar-idol, an allegory of the sky. In recent years, despondently,
they have concluded ‘that questions about what the sampo was can never be satisfactorily answered and that even if they could, an answer would probably make little contribution to the understanding of the poems’.15 Nothing could be more provocative to Tolkien than a word without a referent (emnet, wodwos, Gandálfr, ent), except perhaps an ancient poem written off by modern scholars as hopelessly irrational. In this case he clearly decided that the sampo was at once a thing and an allegory, like the Silmarils: a jewel, bright, hypnotic, intrinsically valuable, but also the quintessence of the creative powers, provoking both good and evil, the maker’s personality itself. Some Finnish singers thought the sampo was their own poetry; all agreed that its fragments were the true prosperity of Suomi.

  If only the Silmarils could inspire a true prosperity for England! As is well known, Tolkien’s grand design, or desire, was to give back to his own country the legends that had been taken from it in the Dark Ages after the Conquest, when elves and woodwoses and sigelhearwan too had all been forced into oblivion. For that to be possible, the Silmarils and their chain of stories would have to be multi-faceted indeed, leaving scope for ‘other minds and hands’ to add their own significances. Certainly Tolkien’s own efforts to say what The Silmarillion was ‘about’ were never completely illuminating. Still, his borrowings and his changes do at least define his area of interest. In The Silmarillion Tolkien played through once more the drama of ‘Paradise lost’; but he added to it a hint of ‘paradise well lost’ (for many of the elves preferred Middle-earth even to immortal life, like Arwen); and through the story there runs a delight in mutability, as languages change and treasures pass from hand to hand; the deepest fable is of beauty forged, stolen, and lost forever in recovery. Though springing from Genesis, this is at once more ambiguous, more heroic, and more humane.

  Eärendil: a Lyric Core

  The preceding section (as Tolkien would have been the first to declare) probably falls into the perennial academic vice of neatness, over-valuing system and ‘invention’ instead of ‘inspiration’. To redress the balance, it is worth noting that Tolkien was capable of working in quite a different way. He said repeatedly and consistently (Letters, pp. 221, 345, 420) that the ‘kernel’ of his mythology in the story of Beren and Lúthien was not a thought, not a principle, not a calque, but the vision of ‘a small woodland glade filled with hemlocks at Roos in Yorkshire’, where he saw his wife dancing. Everything else might be changed by the demands of story and of ratiocination – there are clear differences, for instance, between the accounts of that scene in the 1925 poem ‘Light as Leaf on Lindentree’ and in Aragorn’s song on Weathertop – but to the vision itself he remained true, working out from it as from the detailed paintings of Lake Mithrim, Nargothrond, Gondolin, etc., which he made in the 1920s (see Pictures 32–6 and further Artist, chapter 2). Probably Tolkien would have accepted the thesis (not unfamiliar to medievalists) that all great works of fiction should contain a kernel scene or a ‘lyric core’: to use the terminology of Marie de France, whose ‘Breton lays’ Tolkien imitated in ‘Aotrou and Itroun’, 1945, every conte or story comes from a lai or song. There is one very striking example in the Unfinished Tales, namely the tale of ‘Aldarion and Erendis: the Mariner’s Wife’. This may have some root in Tolkien’s own experience, for it stresses the unwisdom of fathers leaving their children – Tolkien hardly knew his own father – and seems to be groping towards a statement about the incompatibility of men and women, users and providers, wasters and winners. However as a story it reaches no conclusion. What it does is to create an image of total separation expressed in understatement. Having been left by her husband in his urge for voyages abroad, Erendis retreats to the centre of Númenor, away from the sea, where she hears only the bleating of sheep. ‘“Sweeter it is to my ears than the mewing of gulls”, she said.’ Tolkien must have been thinking of Njörthr the sea-god and Skathi, daughter of the mountain-giant, in Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda. Obliged to marry, these two tried taking turns to live in each other’s homes. But the marriage was a failure, marked in Snorri’s account by sudden quotation from yet one more lost poem:

  ‘Leið erumk fjöll, vaska lengi á,

  nætr einar niu;

  ulfa þytr þóttumk illr vesa

  hjá söngvi svana.’

  ‘Hateful to me were the mountains, I was there no longer than nine nights; the howling of wolves seemed ugly to me against the song of the swans.’

  So Njörthr; his wife replies with a complaint about the noise of the sea-mews. Wolves and swans, gulls and sheep: the contrasts generate the Norse poem and Tolkien’s story by themselves.

  Other tales in The Silmarillion are better worked up into narrative, and yet seem to spring likewise from single scenes, single outcries. An obvious case is that of Eärendil, the first character to take shape in Tolkien’s mythology. His ‘invention’, like that of hobbits, has been well-chronicled by Humphrey Carpenter (Biography, pp. 92 and 230); the two cases are in several ways similar. With Eärendil, what happened is that Tolkien was initially struck by several lines from an Old English poem in the Exeter Book, now known as Christ I or The Advent Lyrics:

  Eala earendel, engla beorhtast,

  ofer middangeard monnum sended …

  ‘Oh, Earendel, brightest of angels, sent to men above Middle-earth …’

  These form the start of a speech by the prophets and patriachs in Hell, who appeal for an Ambassador – this is before Christ’s Advent – to bring them rescue from the deorc deaþes sceadu, the ‘dark shadow of death’. But the word earendel is strange, not ordinary Old English, and evidently predating its context; Tolkien was caught by a difference of texture, prompting his own verses on ‘The Voyage of Earendel’, in 1914, and the reply to G. B. Smith’s question as to what they were about, ‘I don’t know. I’ll try to find out.’

  But actually Tolkien had no doubt already started finding out, taking the two obvious courses of looking up ‘Earendel’ in A. S. Cook’s 1900 edition of Christ and in the index of Jacob Grimm’s Teutonic Mythology. From the latter he would have learnt that Earendel-references appear in several Germanic languages. In the Prose Edda, for instance, Aurvandill is a companion of the god Thórr, who loses a toe to frostbite only to have it thrown into the sky to become a star; as one might have guessed from Christ, ‘Earendel’ is the old name of a star or planet. Grimm also referred though to the German poem of Orendel, written about 1200. In this Orendel is a king’s son shipwrecked in the Holy Land, but rescued naked by a fisherman. He retrieves a grey robe from a whale they catch, and in it returns to his own land to convert his heathen countrymen. The grawe roc he wears is the seamless robe Christ wore to the Crucifixion; in the end Orendel becomes der Graurock, ‘Greycloak’, is identified with his garment. What this may have suggested to Tolkien is that if the Old English and Old Norse sources agreed that ‘Earendel’ was a star, the Old English and medieval German ones agreed he was a messenger of hope to the heathens. Perhaps the hope-association was as old as the star one; perhaps ‘Earendel’ had contained a presentiment of salvation even for the old heroes (like Beowulf) who lived before Christianity was brought to them. The notes in Cook’s edition would meanwhile have told Tolkien that the Old English lines were based on a Latin antiphon, ‘O Oriens …’ (‘O Rising Light, splendour of eternal light and sun of justice: come and shine on those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death’). In a Christian context this appeal is to Christ; in a pre-Christian context they could be a pagan’s appeal, to a forerunner of Christ, to a Saviour whose nature he did not know.

  These thoughts frame both the poem of 1914 and the Silmarillion account written many years later. In the latter Eärendil is, not a Redeemer, but an Intercessor, unlike the true Messiah in that it is not his own sacrifice which persuades the Valar to change the sad history of Middle-earth, but still ‘a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief’, hailed by Eönwë with eagle-like ambiguity as ‘the looked for that cometh at unawares, the longed for that cometh beyo
nd hope’. In the former, it is perhaps the inadequacy of Earendel that is more prominent than his partial success; at the end of the poem his light is blotted out by the greater light of dawn. However one image is common to all Tolkien’s versions and to the Old English poem too. This, one might say, is the ‘lyric core’, the flashpoint of the imagination. It is the vision of people looking up from the depths, de profundis, from the ‘dark shadow of death’ and of despair, and seeing a new light: ‘unlooked for, glittering and bright; and the people of Middle-earth beheld it from afar and wondered, and they took it for a sign, and called it Gil-Estel, the Star of High Hope’. What the star was, how it was connected to Eärendil, how the name could cover both star and man, from what danger it signalled deliverance, whether that deliverance was final for the soulless elves … all these questions, and others, could find answers in the inventions of later narrative, in the different viewpoints of The Silmarillion or Bilbo’s song in The Fellowship of the Ring. However the image and the emotions associated with it did not change. They were central; part of Tolkien’s ‘data’; of the same order of importance as those other early captured scenes of Tinúviel dancing in the woods, Túrin answered by the ‘cold voice’ of his own sword, Valinor beyond the ‘sunless lands’ and ‘dangerous seas’. If ‘philosophical inquiries’ provided material for Tolkien to brood on, these ‘lyric cores’ gave him the stimulus to go on brooding, to keep philosophy from aridness.