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

by Tom Shippey

  What these words imply is in a sense illogical or self-contradictory. They indicate the presence of controlling powers, in whose toils the heroes are ‘caught’, ‘meshed’, ‘ensnared’; yet people can be told, as Túrin is, ‘the doom lies in yourself’. ‘Fate’ and ‘doom’ may be ‘wrought’ or ‘devised’ by people, and yet can take on a volition of their own; they ‘lie’ on characters, ‘fall’ on them, ‘lead’ them, but can at least in thought be ‘turned from’ or ‘denied’. Túrin calls himself ‘Turambar’, ‘Master of Doom’, only to have the boast thrown back in his epitaph A Túrin Turambar turún’ ambartanen, ‘Master of Doom, by doom mastered’. Are people free to determine their own fate, one might ask, or are they ‘the stars’ tennis-balls, struck and bandied / Which way please them’? To accept the second alternative would have been, for Tolkien, to go against an orthodox Christian doctrine; to state the first positively would have lost for him that sense of interlacing, of things working themselves out, of a poetic justice seen only in the large scale, to which he had been attached from near the start of his career.

  The denial of logic, it may be added, is an ancient one, found in Old English, but part of the fibre of the Norse ‘family sagas’, which Tolkien had imitated in other ways. In the Saga of Gísli Súrsson, Gísli sends a warning to his brother-in-law Vesteinn to say if he comes home he will be killed. But the messengers ride along the top of a sandhill while he rides below it, and so miss him. When they catch up he says: ‘I would have turned back if you had met me earlier, but now all the streams run towards Dyrafjord and I shall ride there. And in any case I want to.’ He goes on, and is killed. In his decision there is a strand of volition, for he says he wants to; one of pride, for he would not like to be seen turning back; one of chance in the way the messengers miss him. However the centre of his speech is the remark about watersheds, and while this could be taken as merely practical, expressing the difficulty of travel in mountainous Iceland, all readers automatically take it as a sign of surrender to some superior force of embroilment. ‘The words of fate will be said by someone’, Gísli had remarked earlier. Individual will and external force, in other words, notoriously cooperate.

  One sees in all this an echo of that dualism which had produced the Ring as hostile presence and psychic amplifier, or Sauron as enemy and as tempter. However it is enough to say that in his tales of heroes in The Silmarillion (and the Unfinished Tales), Tolkien was aiming at a tone, or perhaps better a ‘taste’ which he knew well but which had fallen outside the range of modern literature: a tone of stoicism, regret, inquiry, above all of awe moderated by complete refusal to be intimidated. The complexities of ‘fate’ and ‘doom’ show us the intention clearly enough. But, one must ask, how far is that intention realised: especially in those early and central tales of heroic mortals, ‘Of Beren and Lúthien’ in The Silmarillion and (in its two main prose versions in The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales) ‘Of Túrin Turambar’?

  The Tale of Beren

  Opinions here may vary: and I come now to one place where I feel that Tolkien would not have agreed with the opinions I express. He clearly valued the tale of Beren and Lúthien in some ways above anything else he wrote, and he wrote it many times over: in 1917, when it was ‘The Tale of Tinúviel’ (Lost Tales 2), in 1925, as the poem ‘Light as Leaf on Lindentree’, rewritten as Aragorn’s ‘Song of Beren and Lúthien’ in The Fellowship of the Ring, in the early 1930s as ‘The Lay of Leithian’ in Lays of Beleriand, and repeatedly (1926, 1930, 1937, and in the 1950s) in the earlier and later versions of ‘The Silmarillion’. If one adds in all the annals and epitomes, we have more than a dozen versions of the story besides chapter 19 of The Silmarillion, the only full rendering to become familiar – some of their complex inter-relations are discussed in chapter 9. The tale was furthermore one of Tolkien’s first inspirations, based (see Biography, pp. 135–6) on a vision of his own wife; to that vision he remained loyal all his life, for through all the rewritings he never changed some essential features; he remained loyal to it even after death, for his tombstone and his wife’s read ‘Beren’ and ‘Lúthien’, a striking identification. Yet the tale as it emerged eventually in The Silmarillion has several faults, perhaps indeed connected with its early conception and long incubation.

  It contains, to begin with, a strong element of duplication. Thus Beren, once he knows he has to win a Silmaril from the Iron Crown, goes to get help, only to fail, to be captured with Finrod, and to be rescued from the ‘Isle of the Werewolves’ by Lúthien and the hound Huan. He goes into the woods to spend an idyllic season with Lúthien. But then the pattern repeats itself. He leaves Lúthien again, to go into the enemy’s country, but is overtaken by her and Huan once more. They gain the Silmaril, lose it to the wolf, and then retire again to the woods and ‘houseless lands’, still with survival but without victory. The pattern is completed when Huan fights Carcharoth to recover the Silmaril, repeating his earlier battle against Carcharoth’s sire Draugluin. Two wolf-fights, three scenes of the power of song (including Sauron’s defeat of Finrod), three woodland idylls, two pursuits and rescues by Lúthien … Beren meanwhile is wounded three times, twice by Carcharoth, once by Celegorm, and interposes himself twice between dart and Lúthien, wolf’s teeth and Thingol. Three times Huan speaks, to advise Lúthien, to advise Beren, to bid farewell. Simultaneously the plot is traversed by the evil sons of Fëanor, Celegorm and Curufin: they capture Lúthien by coincidence on p. 173, and meet her and Beren by coincidence once again, after the rescue from Tol-in-Gaurhoth. Though they provide the knife Angrist that would cleave iron ‘as if it were green wood’, the scenes they contribute cost a good deal in contrivance. In ‘Beren and Lúthien’ as a whole there is too much plot.

  The other side of that criticism is that on occasion Tolkien has to be rather brisk with his own inventions. Celegorm wounds Beren, and the hound Huan turns on his master and pursues him: ‘returning he brought to Lúthien a herb out of the forest. With that leaf she staunched Beren’s wound, and by her arts and her love she healed him …’ The motif of the healing herb is a common one, the centre for instance of the Breton lai of Eliduc (turned into conte by Marie de France). But in that it occupies a whole scene, if not a whole poem. In The Silmarillion it appears only to be dismissed in two lines, while Beren’s wound is inflicted and healed in five. Repeatedly one has this sense of summary. Christopher Tolkien points out, indeed (BLT 2, p. 57) that ‘summary’ is exactly right, for The Silmarillion is a summary and was even designed to feel like a summary, a compilation made much later than the events by one looking back over a great gap of time. In ‘The Lay of Leithian’, by contrast, the scene of the healing herb takes up more than 60 lines and the best part of two pages, see Lays, pp. 266–7. Just the same, the sense of briskness remains, as does a feeling here and there (rather surprising in what is overall a gloomy tale) of easy victory. Carcharoth is the Red Maw and the Jaws of Thirst, but when Lúthien stands before him her inner power fells him ‘as though lightning had smitten him’. The blindness, anxiety and dark dreams of Morgoth are built up better, as is the thawing of Thingol’s heart when he sees Beren’s mutilation. However the scene in the Halls of Mandos, when Lúthien moves the Lord of the Dead to pity, was beyond attempting, as Tolkien realised. One might say that this tale, more than any other of The Silmarillion, depends for success on its ‘lyric core’, the songs of Finrod, Sauron, Beren, and of Lúthien before Morgoth and before Mandos. However these could not be provided. One has to take the will for the deed.

  A further criticism, and perhaps a connected one, is that in ‘Beren and Lúthien’ Tolkien had not yet freed himself from his many sources – as if trying to bring in all the bits of older literature that he liked instead of forging a story with an impetus of its own. The framework of the tale is the legend of Orpheus, the singer who challenges the power of the Underworld to rescue his wife. To this the Middle English ‘lay’ of Sir Orfeo had added the motif of the Rash Promise, by which the king of the Under
world – in Sir Orfeo the elf-king – has to stand by an undertaking carelessly worded. Tolkien picked this up too, converting it into the oath of Thingol (which provokes a corresponding oath from Beren). But around this we have the wizards’ singing-contests (from the Kalevala), the werewolves devouring bound men in the dark (from the Saga of the Volsungs), the rope of hair let down from a window (the Grimms’ ‘Rapunzel’), the ‘shadowy cloak’ of sleep and invisibility which recalls the *heoloðhelm of the Old English Genesis B. The hunting of the great wolf reminds one of the chase of the boar Twrch Trwyth in the Welsh Mabinogion, while the motif of ‘the hand in the wolf’s mouth’ is one of the most famous parts of the Prose Edda, told of Fenris Wolf and the god Tyr; Huan recalls several faithful hounds of legend, Garm, Gelert, Cafall. Of course old motifs often do their work, as when the Iron Crown rolls on the silent floor of Thangorodrim, or Lúthien’s rope of hair sways with more-than-elvish ‘glamour’ above the heads of her guards. However some of them could have been omitted. The effect is lavish where it ought to be spare.

  The strength of the tale lies perhaps in its interweavings around the central fable. Its heart – as the tale stands in The Silmarillion, but see further below – is the ‘rash promise’ of Thingol, ‘Bring to me in your hand a Silmaril from Morgoth’s crown; and then, if she will, Lúthien may set her hand in yours’, with the countervailing promise by Beren, to be fulfilled in letter only and not spirit, ‘when we meet again my hand shall hold a Silmaril’. The tale works through to the ironic fulfilment of both. However, as it works other strands are drawn in, to raise, increasingly, retrospective questions. Oaths are commonly regretted in this story. Finrod’s oath ‘of abiding friendship and aid in every need to Barahir and all his kin’ was made in gratitude and affection, but when it comes to redeeming it he is sad for others rather than himself. What makes matters worse is that he had foreseen his own rashness long before, saying to Galadriel, ‘An oath I too shall swear, and must be free to fulfil it, and go into darkness. Nor shall anything of my realm endure that a son should inherit.’ How great the gratitude to overcome that foreboding; how much greater the disaster to quench that gratitude! Spontaneous motivations come to seem weak, and by reflection from the case of Finrod one may begin to wonder about others. The reaction of the sons of Fëanor against Beren seems spontaneous, but the narrator adds as gloss, ‘the curse of Mandos came upon [them]’. If one looks back one sees that that curse dictates failure ‘by treason of kin unto kin’, and the sons of Fëanor plot treason against their cousin Finrod, grandson of another mother. They remember also that since the rescue of Maedhros they have been ‘the Dispossessed’. Jealousy of Finrod, then, creeps into their contempt for Beren. From that jealousy Doriath will fall, and the sons of Fëanor themselves die.

  But since motivations are so opaque one may look back at the offer of Thingol, the very heart of the story. To demand a Silmaril for Lúthien could be a fair offer: so Beren pretends to take it, calling it a ‘little price’. In fact, as everyone sees, it is an attempt to commit murder in circumvention of the earlier, regretted oath not to kill Beren himself. Beneath that, though, there may be a yet worse motive; the sudden ‘desire’ for a Silmaril could contain a genuine impulse of greed beneath a calculated impulse of hatred. In that case Beren’s insulting suggestion that Thingol values his daughter no more than a ‘thing made by craft’ would be true, if unconscious. The end of that strand is 65 pages later, when the dwarves in their turn seek ‘a pretext and fair cloak for their true intent’ in ‘desiring’ the Silmaril, and Thingol, like Beren before him, answers scornfully. His desire is like theirs, though, not like Beren’s. So his death ‘in the deep places of Menegroth’, far from the light which he alone of his kingdom had seen, becomes an analogue of his descent to greed and cunning.

  Words overpower intentions. In any case intentions are not always known to the intenders. This is the sense of ‘doom’ which Tolkien strives to create from oaths and curses and bargains, and from the interweaving of the fates of objects, people and kingdoms. At moments in the tale ‘Of Beren and Lúthien’ it comes through strongly.

  Túrin Turambar turún’ ambartanen

  For a successful striking of the note, however, one has to wait for the story ‘Of Túrin Turambar’ in The Silmarillion, or better still, for the longer version of it in the Unfinished Tales, the Narn i Hîn Húrin. The existence of these two variants immediately makes several points about Tolkien’s way of working. One is that ‘Of Túrin’ has been selectively compressed with regard to its major features; the interest in ‘doom’ is proclaimed by Túrin’s final nickname ‘Master of Doom’, yet in the Silmarillion version the word is used only some ten times in 29 pages, considerably less than in the slightly shorter chapter ‘Of Beren and Lúthien’. The Narn adds many more references, some of them prominent. It makes one wonder what the tale of Beren would be like if we had a full or final version, developed to the same extent as the Narn. A second point is that both accounts of Túrin seem to have digested their source much more fully than the Silmarillion account of Beren. The basic outline of the tale owes much to the ‘Story of Kullervo’ in the Kalevala, which Tolkien had begun to work on perhaps as early as 1912. In both a hero survives the ruin of his family to grow up with a cruel, wayward streak in fosterage; in both he marries (or seduces) a lost maiden, only for her to discover she is his sister and drown herself; in both the hero returns from his exploits to find his mother gone and home laid waste, and to be condemned by his own associates. Kullervo’s dog leads him only to the place where he met his sister, and like Túrin, when he asks his sword if it will drink his blood, it agrees scornfully:

  ‘Wherefore at thy heart’s desire

  Should I not thy flesh devour,

  And drink up thy blood so evil?

  I who guiltless flesh have eaten,

  Drank the blood of those who sinned not?’17

  But for all these points of derivation, ‘Túrin’ goes beyond ‘Beren’ in neatness of structure. It is striking, though, that its true point becomes clear (to all but extremely perceptive eyes) only in the Narn.

  The Narn i Hîn Húrin centres on Tolkien’s favourite question of how corruption worked, how far evil had power over the resisting mind. Possibly the most important scene added to the Narn, and not present in The Silmarillion, is the one in which Morgoth debates with his captive Húrin on top of the ‘Hill of Tears’, looking out over the kingdoms of the world like Christ and Satan in Paradise Regained. Morgoth’s temptation is perfunctory, however. His threat is that he will ruin Húrin’s family and break them on his will ‘though you all were made of steel’. He cannot do it, says Húrin, having no power to ‘govern them from afar’. He has a power of clouds and shadows, asserts Morgoth: ‘upon all whom you love my thought shall weigh as a cloud of Doom’. Húrin refuses to accept this last intangible, and claims that whatever happens Morgoth cannot pursue men beyond death and beyond ‘the Circles of the World’. This is not denied, any more than it is denied that Húrin’s family are free to resist. However the scene leaves a feeling that Morgoth is not entirely a liar, and that when he says Húrin does not understand the power of the Valar (including himself) he may be telling the truth. The power of the Valar, however, as one may remember from the ‘oliphaunt’ scene in The Two Towers, is to be equated with ‘chance’.

  Chance indeed seems to control the tragedy of Túrin. He takes the seat of Saeros (in the Narn) ‘by ill-luck’. This leads to Saeros’s taunting, Túrin’s violent reply, the death of Saeros and expulsion of Túrin; so, stage by stage, to the fall of Nargothrond and ruin of Doriath. It is likewise a coincidence that orcs come on Nienor as she is led back from meeting the dragon; ‘Ill chance’, says Melian. It is a further ill chance that Nienor meets her brother exactly on the spot where his sentiments are most stirred, the grave of the woman he betrayed. At the same place Túrin meets Mablung, the one person who can confirm the secret he has been told. ‘What a sweet grace of fortuner,’ he cries, with hys
terical irony. ‘Some strange and dreadful thing has chanced’, says Mablung. The plot of the Narn seems to work on coincidence.

  But what is a coincidence (a question traditional in Oxford philosophy examinations)? Throughout the Narn there is a strong tendency, just as in The Lord of the Rings, see above, to give double explanations of what happens. Thus Túrin’s boyhood friend Sador Lobadal has been lamed ‘by ill-luck or the mishandling of his axe’. It might seem hardly material which it was; but if it were the latter one might say his pain was his own fault, as Túrin’s mother Morwen claims: ‘He is self-maimed by his own want of skill, and he is slow with his tasks, for he spends much time on trifles unbidden.’ Túrin’s father puts in a plea for good intentions, ‘An honest hand and a true heart may hew amiss’. Character is fate, says one; accidents will happen, says the other. The narrator keeps on expressing no opinion. Túrin escapes from Dor-lómin ‘by fate and courage’, Túrin and Hunthor cross the Teiglin ‘by skill and hardihood, or by fate’, Túrin survives the illness that killed his sister, ‘for such was his fate and the strength of life that was in him’. ‘Fate’ can always be offered as an explanation, it seems; but the word may mean nothing, be just what people say when they cannot find a better one.

  There is a third possibility, which is that Morgoth was exactly what he said he was, ‘master of the fates of Arda’. He could have turned Sador’s axe. He did send the plague that carried off Lalaith. He could have had something to do with Saeros. The latter’s motivation is clearly largely his own, based on pride, jealousy, resentment of Beren and consequently all Beren’s kin. However after he has spoken the words that provoke Túrin’s outburst Mablung says, ‘I think that some shadow of the North has reached out to touch us tonight. Take heed, Saeros son of Ithilbor, lest you do the will of Morgoth in your pride’. The ‘shadow’ is not the jealousy, but Saeros’s accidental touching on Túrin’s sorest spot, his sense of having deserted mother and sister. ‘If the Men of Hithlum are so wild and fell, of what sort are the women of that land? Do they run like deer clad only in their hair?’ Being hunted with hounds was Sador’s explanation to Túrin of what it might be to be a thrall. It remains a possibility for Morwen and Nienor. The hunted woman with her clothes torn instantly sends Túrin into a fury among the Gaurwaith. And before the end Nienor does appear as a quarry, flying naked ‘as a beast that is hunted to heart-bursting’ – perhaps that is what stirs Túrin’s pity into love. One might say that this image, this fear, haunts the whole tale. For Saeros to pick on it unwittingly seems indeed more than chance. Morgoth put the words in his mouth; they are ‘the words of fate’, which will be spoken by someone, exactly as the Icelandic hero Gísli said.