by Tom Shippey
Responsibility for saying them, however, remains on Saeros, and Túrin’s reaction too is largely his own fault. There is a cruel and morbid streak in the stripping and hunting of his enemy, even if it was meant to end short of death. Túrin repeatedly strikes too soon, at Saeros, Forweg, Beleg, Brandir, in the end himself. Where does this element come from? The Narn offers two answers, one reaching towards a kind of ‘characterisation’, the other more simply genetic. Like so many others in The Silmarillion, Túrin is a hybrid, his father of the house of Hador – fair, masterful, ‘quick to anger and to laughter’ – his mother of the house of Bëor, dark, clever, inveterate, ‘moved sooner to pity than to laughter … most like to the Noldor and most loved by them’. One might use an ancient racial stereotype and say that the one line seems ‘Germanic’, the other ‘Celtic’. Túrin, dark, taciturn and slow to forget, clearly takes after his mother, though he has his father’s soft-heartedness. In a way his life is a struggle between two sets of impulses; and another fact clearer in Narn than Silmarillion is that the impulses that come from Morwen are wrong. If one starts to disentangle the threads of blame for the fate of Túrin, Morwen holds a considerable share. Her husband’s advice to her was ‘Do not wait!’ She remembers this after his defeat, but does not obey – partly from fear for her unborn child, partly from hope that Húrin will come back, but largely from pride: ‘she would not yet humble her pride to be an alms-guest, not even of a king. Therefore the voice of Húrin … was denied, and the first strand of the fate of Túrin was woven.’
So mother and son are separated. Pride keeps up the separation, and separation generates the fear that turns Túrin savage. The pride which Túrin inherits from his mother also makes him refuse pardon; and with it comes, not cowardice, but something less than the dauntlessness of his father. ‘My father is not afraid’, says Túrin, ‘and I will not be; or at least, as my mother, I will be afraid and not show it.’ But he does show it. Glaurung the dragon, like Saeros, strikes the hidden fear when he calls Túrin ‘deserter of thy kin’; and so Túrin abandons Finduilas to save Morwen, comes too late to do anything but doom Aerin, and then falls into despair, rejecting the obvious solution of following his mother and sister to safety. ‘I cast a shadow wherever I dwell. Let Melian keep them! And I will leave them in peace unshadowed for a while.’ ‘Shadow’ is an ominous word; it may not come from Túrin. Similarly Morwen falls into despair and rushes from security to her own death and her daughter’s abandonment. Pride and fear, then, combine in mother and son to separate them and keep them apart. The ‘thought of Morgoth’ may influence their ‘fates’ and ‘dooms’, but also they take after each other, they co-operate.
The other fatal element in Túrin’s character centres on the perception that in him something is missing: he is only half a man. This idea Tolkien clearly took from Norse sources, for instance from the famous Saga of Egill Skalfogrimsson. In that saga Egill’s grandfather is Kveld-Úlfr (‘Evening-Wolf’), not entirely human, ‘a great shape-changer’, very like Beorn in The Hobbit. Kveld-Úlfr has two sons, Thórólfr and Skalla-Grímr (‘Bald-Grim’), and the latter has two sons as well, Thórólfr junior and Egill himself. In each generation there is one fair, handsome, cheerful brother – these are the two Thórólfs – and one like Egill or Grimr who is big, bald, ugly, overbearing and greedy. As long as the handsome brother is alive the other can be kept in check, but when his own magnanimity kills him the brother who carries the marks of ogre descent becomes worse. So, in the saga, Egill sits silent and morose at the feast after Thórólfr’s death, half-drawing his sword and then slamming it back, alternately raising and lowering his eyebrows; his mood remains dangerous till the king of England quietly begins to load him with gold and silver. Túrin, admittedly, is not as bad as that. Nevertheless he has lost something – his sister Urwen or Lalaith, an analogue of Thórólfr, an image of Túrin’s paternal side in her fairness, her merriment, her ability to charm. Lalaith, we are told, means ‘laughter’. When she dies of the Evil Breath his nurse tells Túrin, ‘Speak no more of Lalaith … of your sister Urwen you must ask tidings of your mother’. Obviously the capital letter could be removed, and in that sense the sentence would still be true – ‘speak no more of laughter’ – and be obeyed. Túrin hardly ever laughs, and when he does it is ‘bitter’ or ‘shrill’: he is a fraction of a personality, bereft of ‘fairness’ or ability to see ‘the bright side’ (which is why his second sister Nienor, also golden-haired, has such fatal attraction for him). Filling out this sense of an imperfect humanity is Túrin’s affinity with evil, made concrete in his weapons – the Black Sword of Beleg, which kills him in the end, and even more the Dragon-helm of Dor-lómin.
This too is clearly based on a Norse idea, or word. In the Eddic poem Fáfnismál the dragon boasts of bearing an ægishjàlmr, a ‘helmet of fear’, over all the race of men. Is this a word for something intangible, awe or horror, or for some object that produces that effect, perhaps the ‘dragon-mask’ itself, the sight of the dragon’s face?* Certainly both Nienor and Túrin are bespelled when they stare into the dragon’s eyes and feel his ‘fell spirit’; it seems that Túrin’s heirloom is designed to counterfeit this effect, its image of Glaurung striking ‘fear into the hearts of all beholders’. But is it right for heroes to use an ægishjàlmr? Sigurthr in the Norse poem had thought not, insisting that one would be no protection against true courage. Húrin seems to agree, declaring ‘I would rather look on my foes with my true face’. Túrin, however, is prepared to use the tactics of the enemy, fear and ‘terrorism’, and by doing so plays into Morgoth’s hands. It seems clear (from p. 153 of the Unfinished Tales) that Tolkien meant the acceptance of the name Gorthol, ‘Dread Helm’, to mark a stage in Túrin’s corruption. Certainly the decision to reveal himself seems the last stage in a progress from pity to fear, to despair, to a compensating rashness and that ‘Ragnarök-spirit’ which Tolkien had condemned elsewhere, a sign of courage without self-confidence or that ultimate hope Húrin had expressed on top of the ‘Hill of Tears’.
Túrin’s tragedy is silently opposed by the actions and fate of his cousin Tuor, whose path intersects with Túrin’s at one point (see p. 239 of The Silmarillion, and pp. 37–8 of Unfinished Tales). The one relies on himself, the other on the Valar, the one brings hope to Middle-earth by his descendant Eärendil, the other leaves nothing behind. Yet the moral of the tale of Túrin remains uncertain in all versions: much is his fault, much the fault of the ‘malice’ that emanates from Morgoth – a word used repeatedly in the Narn, a word which the OED interestingly notes as having a sense in English law as ‘That kind of evil intent which constitutes the aggravation of guilt distinctive of certain offences’. Malice turns manslaughter into murder, turns accident into crime; in the same way one feels that the circumstances of Túrin’s life would have been similar in any case, but that his resentful attitude makes matters qualitatively worse. Had he any right to call himself Turambar, ‘Master of Doom’? In the sense that he had free will, that he could have changed his attitudes, Yes. However ‘Doom’ is equated in the Narn with ‘the Dark Shadow’, and that Shadow knows how to turn strength to weakness. That is why the ‘Master of Doom’ ends ‘by doom mastered’; it is an inextricably blended process of temptation and assault. The ironies of the tale of Túrin, one is meant to see, are constructed by Morgoth.
In places in this tale Tolkien comes close to supersitition – unlucky objects, inherited failings, changing one’s name to change one’s luck, and so on. To that extent the Narn i Hîn Húrin, like The Lord of the Rings, approaches fairy-tale. At the same time one ought to recognise that it is capable, in its most fully worked-up passages, of exposing exactly the type of subtle internal treachery which has been the staple of the English novel since its inception. ‘What is fate?’ asks Túrin as a child. He might as well have asked ‘How are the heroes betrayed?’, a question as applicable to him as to that other victim of ‘dark imaginings’, Othello. Finally one should note that, just as Hamlet peep
ed out of the tale of Eöl, so Macbeth was once more in Tolkien’s mind with Túrin. At the end Túrin comes to the gorge of Cabed-en-Anas, and sees ‘that all the trees near and far were withered, and their sere leaves fell mournfully’ (UT, p. 145, cp. S, p. 225). He might well have said, ‘My way of life / Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf’. Like Macbeth, he has been caught in a web of prophecy and inner weakness, has slid down the scale from ‘man’ to ‘monster’, and to murderer. The best epitaph he might have chosen for himself is Macbeth’s vaunt:
‘The mind I sway by, and the heart I bear,
Shall never sag with doubt nor shake with fear.’
Both tales are about the hardening of the heart.
Some Conclusions
The Silmarillion as a whole (and by this I mean as well those variants of its component parts printed in the Unfinished Tales) shows two of Tolkien’s great strengths. One is ‘inspiration’: he was capable of producing, from some recess of the mind, images, words, phrases, scenes in themselves irresistibly compelling – Lúthien watched among the hemlocks by Beren, Húrin calling to the cliffs, Thingol’s death in the dark while he looks at the captured Light. The other is ‘invention’: having seen the vision Tolkien was capable of brooding over it for decades, not altering it but making sense of it, fitting it into more and more extraordinary sequences of explanation. So the boat of Eärendil generates a disaster, a rescue, an explanation of why the rescue has had to be so long delayed. The processes are exactly the same as the generation of Bilbo Baggins from ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit …’, and the expansion of his story all the way to the last explanation of holbytla seventeen years and 1500 pages later.
Where The Silmarillion differs from Tolkien’s earlier works is in its refusal to accept novelistic convention. Most novels (including The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings) pick a character to put in the foreground, like Frodo and Bilbo, and then tell the story as it happens to him. The novelist of course is inventing the story, and so retains omniscience: he can explain, or show, what is ‘really’ happening and contrast it with the limited perception of his character, as Tolkien does with Frodo lamenting his ill choices in The Two Towers (we have seen that Aragorn’s similar laments were unfounded), or as Joseph Conrad does when his Dr Monygham tells Nostromo if he had the treasure he would give it to their enemies (we know Nostromo has the treasure, but is bitterly offended to have his efforts made vain). Novels work on a mixture of suspense and special knowledge: there is about them, one may as well say, something wildly unrealistic.
Against this The Silmarillion tries to preserve something much closer to the texture of reality, namely, that the full meaning of events can only ever be perceived retrospectively. Its stories are full of ironies only grasped on second reading. ‘False hopes are more dangerous than fears’, says Sador in the Narn. Once we have realised how Morwen ruined her life and her son’s by waiting for Húrin we see that Sador is, unwittingly, a ‘soothsayer’, and read all his remarks with much greater attention. At first reading, though, that point is invisible. So are most of the moments that lead to future disaster, like Aredhel’s turn southward outside Gondolin, or Finrod’s ignorance of the Noegyth Nibin (on S, p. 114). ‘Ominous’ statements are common enough – ‘Their swords and their counsels shall have two edges’ (Melian, S, p. 128), or ‘Not the first’ (Mandos, fifty pages before) – but for their immediate meaning one has to wait, and their full meaning often depends on unravelling the entire book. The Silmarillion could never be anything but hard to read: that is arguably because it is trying to say something about the relationship between events and their actors which could not be said through the omniscient selectiveness of the ordinary novel.
None of this, however, waves away the very nearly prophetic remark by Frodo sitting on ‘The Stairs of Cirith Ungol’ in The Two Towers. Sam Gamgee has just given a summary of the tale of Beren and Lúthien, and remarked that he and Frodo appear to be in the same tale: perhaps some hobbit-child in the future will demand the story of ‘Frodo and the Ring’. Yes, says Frodo, and he will demand ‘Samwise the stouthearted’ too: ‘I want to hear more about Sam, dad. Why didn’t they put in more of his talk, dad? That’s what I like, it makes me laugh.’ This embryonic piece of literary criticism does make a point about The Silmarillion, which is that it is all on the level of ‘high mimesis’ or ‘romance’, with no Gamgees in it. Not only children find that a lack. There is a reason for the decision once more, in that Tolkien was quite clearly, in the Silmarillion stories, recommending virtues to which most moderns no longer dare aspire: stoicism, nonchalance, piety, fidelity. In The Lord of the Rings he had learnt – by mixing hobbits in with heroes – to present them relatively unprovocatively. In The Silmarillion feelings of antagonism or doubt are often accidentally triggered, as when Fingon ‘dared a deed which is justly renowned’ or we are told the same of ‘the Leap of Beren’. ‘Don’t tell us, show us’, is the reply. ‘We are not impressed by scale so much as by effort – by Bilbo going on alone in the dark.’
But the debate between ancient and modern modes of presentation, and between ancient and modern theories of virtue, need not be protracted. In his maturity, from the scenes at the end of The Hobbit almost all the way through The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien was able to hold a balance between them. In youth he had not learnt it, and in his later years he was unable to recover it – especially as recovering that balance would have meant what is notoriously one of the hardest jobs in the literary world, namely making a radical revision of something which has already taken a fixed shape of its own. Tolkien did not solve the problem of ‘depth’; nor of ‘novelising’ romance; and in ignoring the one, as in brooding over the other, he showed himself out of step with his time, and exposed himself even more to lack of sympathy and careless reading. His decision to bring back the modes of the past was, however, not indefensible (as this chapter ought to show). It was also his last and boldest defiance of all the practitioners of ‘lit.’.
* The point is made much more explicitly in Jim Allan’s An Introduction to Elvish (Hayes: Bran’s Head, 1978): Quenya resembles Finnish in ‘style’, especially in its complex noun-declensions, Sindarin is close to Welsh in for instance its sound-changes. A philological point not made by Allan is that Finnish preserves several words borrowed from Early Germanic in their early (or *) form: kuningas for ‘king’, var(k)as for ‘warg’, jetanas for ‘etten’ or ‘giant’. Tulkas, the warlike Vala of The Silmarillion seems a similar formation, cp. the Norse word tulkr (‘tolke’ in Sir Gawain), ‘man, fighting man’.
* For some reason, several medieval words mean both ‘mask’ and ‘ghost’: Latin mascha, larva, but also the Old English word grima (as in Gríma Wormtongue). Grima, however, is also applied to helmets; the Anglo-Saxon helmet found at Sutton Hoo is a mask as well. In conjunctions the words suggest a buried memory of a fearsome, uncanny war-mask, linked with belief in dragons. See also the Nazgûl in The Two Towers, p. 691, ‘helmed and crowned with fear’, and note 6 to chapter 5.
CHAPTER 8
‘ON THE COLD HILL’S SIDE’
Of Birch Hats and Cold Potions
Writing twenty years ago, I began this chapter with the words, ‘There is, in a way, no more of “Middle-earth” to consider.’ This was tempting Providence with a vengeance, for there were twelve volumes of ‘The History of Middle-earth’ yet to appear, and to be considered. Nor can I correct myself at this stage by suggesting, ‘Tolkien wrote no more of Middle-earth’, for the last three volumes of ‘The History of Middle-earth’ in particular show, like much of the Unfinished Tales, that Tolkien’s creativity was indeed released by the completion of The Lord of the Rings, and that he continued writing within the framework of his Middle-earth mythology all through the last twenty years of his life. Some of this has been discussed already, and there is further comment throughout chapter 9. This chapter turns, however, to a more personal theme: ‘the road to Middle-earth’, or Tolkien’s own attitudes to his work, as the
y emerge especially from the short pieces and poems of his later years. Tolkien might not have approved of such a study, for he valued his privacy. Still, the inquiry has much to do with the major theme of this book, namely the interlocking of philology and fiction. And here I, at least, cannot help looking at what I see as the third in Tolkien’s triad of short stories about the sources of his invention, Farmer Giles (written 1938), ‘Leaf by Niggle’ (a few years later), and finally, written in 1965, Smith of Wootton Major.1