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

by Tom Shippey

  To me, this does not seem to be a difficult piece. I take it that, as with ‘Leaf by Niggle’ quite certainly, and as with Farmer Giles more partially, its mode is allegorical, and its subject is the author himself, especially the relations between his job and his private sources of ‘inspiration’. This assumption of mine has, however, been the one which has drawn the most determined rebuttals from other commentators, especially Mr David Doughan and (twice) Dr Verlyn Flieger,2 and it is only fair, then, to restate the arguments for and against it. Against taking Smith allegorically, we have Tolkien’s own endorsement, Letters, p. 388, of a review by Roger Lancelyn Green which stated firmly that the meaning of Smith should be left alone: ‘To seek for the meaning is to cut open the ball in search of its bounce’. This can be backed up by Tolkien’s own stated dislike of allegory, discussed above, and indeed by an even firmer statement of his own specifically about Smith, ‘This short tale is not “allegory”’. That would seem to settle the matter (for in cases like this I would scorn to fall back on the well-known critical get-out, ‘you cannot trust what an author says about his own work’) – if Tolkien had not gone on immediately to add ‘though it is capable of course of allegorical interpretation at certain points’. Tolkien furthermore gave a lead for any such allegorical interpretation by saying, ‘The Great Hall is evidently in a way an “allegory” of the village church; the Master Cook with his house adjacent, and his office that is not hereditary … is plainly the Parson and the priesthood’. Tolkien’s own surviving commentary on his own story, from which these statements, cited by Dr Flieger, are taken is indeed, again according to Dr Flieger, ‘a running argument with himself on the question of whether the story is or is not an allegory’.3 If Tolkien himself could not decide, then, the question can fairly be taken as open.

  There is furthermore one element which seems to me a clear case of Tolkienian private symbolism, and that is the name of Smith’s main antagonist throughout the work, the rude and incompetent Master Cook, Nokes. As I have said repeatedly, Tolkien was for some time perhaps the one person in the world who knew most about names, especially English names, and was most deeply interested in them. He wrote about them, commented on them, brought them up in conversation. With all the names in the telephone book to draw on, Tolkien is unlikely to have picked out just one name without considering what it meant: and ‘Nokes’ contains two clues as to its meaning. One is reinforced by the names of Smith’s wife and son and daughter, Nell and Nan and Ned, all of them marked by ‘nunnation’, the English habit of putting an ‘n’ in front of a word, and especially a name, which originally did not have one, like Eleanor and Ann and Edward.4 In Nokes’s case one can go further and observe place-names, as for instance Noke – a town in Oxfordshire not far from Brill – whose name is known to have been derived from Old English æt þam ácum, ‘at the oaks’. This became in Middle English *atten okes, and in Modern English, by mistake, ‘at Noke’ or ‘at Nokes’. There is no doubt that Tolkien knew all this, for there is a character called ‘old Noakes’ in the Shire, and Tolkien commented on his name, giving very much the explanation above, in his ‘Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings’, written probably in the late 1950s. Tolkien there wrote off the meaning of ‘Noakes’ as ‘unimportant’, as indeed it is for The Lord of the Rings, but it would be entirely characteristic of him to remember an unimportant philological point and turn it into an important one later.

  The second clue lies in the derivation from ‘oak’. ‘Oak’ had a special meaning for Tolkien, pointed out by Christopher Tolkien in his footnote to Shadow, p. 145.* In his early career as Professor at the University of Leeds, Tolkien had devised a system of splitting the curriculum of English studies into two separate groups or ‘schemes’, the ‘A-scheme’ and the ‘B-scheme’. The ‘A-scheme was for students of literature, the B-scheme for the philologists. Tolkien clearly liked this system, and tried unsuccessfully to introduce it to Oxford in 1930 with similar nomenclature (see ‘OES’, p. 780). But in his private symbolism ‘A’ was represented by the Old English rune-name ác, ‘oak’, ‘B’ by Old English beorc, ‘birch’. Oaks were critics and birches philologists, and Tolkien made the point perfectly clear in Songs for the Philologists, for which see below. As must surely be obvious from chapters 1 and 2 of this work, oaks were furthermore the enemy: the enemy of philology, the enemy of imagination, the enemy of dragons. I do not think that Tolkien could ever have forgotten this. Furthermore it makes sense within Smith, and is not inconsistent with Tolkien’s own equation of the Master Cook with the Parson and the priesthood.

  The name ‘Nokes’, then, is my main reason for seeing a professional element in the fable’s allegory, which I would develop as follows. First, Tolkien liked to bring ‘philologist-figures’ into his fiction: the parson of Farmer Giles, the Master of the Houses of Healing, even Gollum as Sméagol with his head turned down and his fascination with ‘roots and beginnings’. There is then something faintly recognisable in the first Master Cook, whose retirement prompts the rest of the story: ‘He had been a kind man who liked to see other people enjoying themselves, but he was himself serious, and said very little’. His sojourn in Faërie made him merrier. Nevertheless one might say that the man who knows a lot, but does not communicate it, and gives a false and unfortunate impression of gravity, is a good image of the nineteenth-century philologist – the type of man who turned the subject into a bogy, see chapter 1. By contrast Nokes seems very clearly to be an unsympathetic picture of the propounders of ‘lit.’. He has no idea of the charms of fantasy. He equates the supernatural with the childish, and both with what is sweet and sticky. His idea of elvish allure has dwindled to a doll with a wand, labelled ‘Fairy Queen’. In particularly annoying fashion, having set up a feeble image of the charms of Faërie, he takes it for granted that the feebleness of the whole concept has been demonstrated: he behaves, in fact, exactly like the critics of Beowulf whom Tolkien had excoriated thirty years before, who, having pushed over the tower of the poem, ‘said (after pushing it over), “What a muddle it is in!”’; or like the Oxford colleagues of whom Tolkien had said, in his somewhat embittered ‘Valedictory Address’, that he ‘felt it a grievance that certain professional persons should suppose their dullness and ignorance [over philology] to be a human norm’; or, one may as well add, like so many of Tolkien’s own critics in later years. As for what Nokes has to offer, his Great Cake is good enough, with no particular faults (Tolkien had nothing against literary study per se), ‘except that it was no bigger than was needed … nothing left over: no coming again’. Not much food for the imagination, one might paraphrase. In any case much of the cake’s goodness seems derived from the sly watch Nokes keeps on Alf Prentice, and from the ‘old books of recipes left behind by previous cooks’, which Nokes cannot understand, but from which he scrapes a few ideas. Literary criticism in England (one might translate) leapt forward from a springboard of old philology, without which even readings of Shakespeare would not get very far. But once it took over the Mastership from the old serious philologists it refused to give credit; this thwarted its own development and left great areas of its proper subject misunderstood.

  The ‘professional’ interpretation given above, meanwhile, seems readily compatible with Tolkien’s own equation of Cook with Parson. Nokes is, one should note, married. This is one of the reasons given for selecting him as a stop-gap after the departure of the first Master Cook: he was ‘a solid sort of man with a wife and children, and careful with money’. But if he is married he must surely represent a Protestant parson, in England probably an Anglican, whose house (the vicarage) would indeed stand next to the Great Hall (the village church). Tolkien, however, was a Catholic. He might well have felt that just as Nokes represented a degradation, a decline, from philologist to critic, so he also represented a dwindling from Catholic priest with the power to celebrate the Mass to Anglican vicar capable only of holding a communion. In each case, one could argue on Tolkien’s behalf, something had got l
ost, something vital if undefinable. Within the story, this mysterious element, ‘not [quite] invisible to attentive eyes’, is represented by the fay-star: left behind by the old Master Cook, baked into a cake by Nokes, swallowed by Smith, for whom it becomes the passport into Faërie, returned reluctantly to Alf Prentice, destined in the end for Nokes’s great-grandson Tim. Whatever wording one chooses, this object must surely stand for, and be understood by all readers to stand for, something like: vision, receptiveness to fantasy, mythopoeic power, ability to pass outside Wootton Major, Wootton being, of course, wudu-tún, ‘the town in the wood’, the ‘wood of the world’ in which so many of Tolkien’s characters, elves, men and hobbits, wander temporarily or permanently ‘bewildered’.

  There are two further strange features in the story which seem to call for an explanation, and which should be noted before trying to come to a conclusion. One is, as mentioned above, that the fay-star will go in the end to Nokes’s kin, not Smith’s. Smith is the central character, the bearer of the vision, he has a much-loved son, Ned, it would be a natural and satisfying ending for the star to go to him when Smith has finally to relinquish it. But this comfortable conclusion is rejected. Though Nokes is, at almost the very end, satisfactorily squashed, it might be said that his family, at least, will have the last laugh over Smith’s, as Nokes has the last word – rather like Councillor Tompkins’s final and crushing victory over Niggle, in this world, in ‘Leaf by Niggle’. The other strange feature is a kind of duality in the supporters of Faërie. Smith is the central character and the bearer of the star, but the real controller of the star is Alf Prentice, and he too is in a way a dual character. One of his names, Prentice, is a trade-name just like Smith, but the other is Alf. And while Alf is common English short-for-Alfred (and so looks like Ned or Nan or Tim) it is also the modern spelling of Old English ælf, ‘elf’, which is what Alf is. He disguises himself as an ordinary person, but is revealed at the end as King of Faërie, to whom the Queen sends her cryptic message, ‘The time has come. Let him choose.’ Alf/Prentice, Smith/Prentice: what did Tolkien mean by this (for him) novel double duality?

  I would suggest that, if the old Cook is a philologist-figure, and Nokes a critic-figure, the suspicion must be that Smith is a Tolkien-figure. Smith himself never becomes Cook, never bakes a Great Cake. It is perhaps fair to remark that Tolkien never produced a major full-length work on medieval literature. Against that Smith’s life is one of useful activity: pots, pans, bars, bolts, hinges, fire-dogs – or, one might say, lectures, tutorials, scripts, pupils. Furthermore Smith has the ability to pass into Faërie, and the mark of his strangeness is not only on his brow but in his song: he brings back visions for others. These visions furthermore expand. The doll ‘on one foot like a snow-maiden dancing’, the maiden ‘with flowing hair and kilted skirt’ who drags Smith into the dance, the Queen ‘in her majesty and her glory’ – all three are avatars of the Queen of Faërie, representing successively the tawdry images of former fantasy which are all the modern world has left, Tolkien’s own first attempts to produce something truer and better, his final awareness that what he had attempted had grown under his hand, from Hobbit to Silmarillion. The image of Smith apologising for his people, and being forgiven – ‘Better a little doll, maybe, than no memory of Faery at all. For some the only glimpse. For some the awaking’ – might be taken without too much strain as Tolkien forgiving himself for ‘Goblin Feet’. But still one is left with Alf.

  He, perhaps, is born of a kind of weakness. Defeat hangs heavy in Smith of Wootton Major. Smith has to hand over his star, and return to Faërie no more; though he gains the right to say who shall have the star, his choice falls on Nokes’s blood, not his own. These points are hard to read except as a kind of valedictory, an admission of retirement – Smith is ‘An old man’s book’, as Tolkien said in Letters, p. 389. But Alf is there to put Smith into a longer history. There were men who wore the star of inspiration before Smith; in a later age there will be others; in any case that star, that inspiration, is only a fragment of a greater world, a world outside the little clearing of Wootton. Alf is there to reassure. His ‘message’, to put it with deliberate bathos, is that if stories have a particular quality of conviction or ‘inner consistency’, then they must (as Tolkien had said before) in some sense be true. The star on Smith’s brow that makes him sing is a guarantee of the existence of Faërie; by the same reasoning Tolkien’s drive to create a world came not from within him but from some world outside.

  Of course Tolkien had no ‘Alf’ to reassure him or to ease his retirement. No doubt he wished very much that he had. Yet there is one further oddity to keep Smith of Wootton Major from being just a fable of self-justification. This comes from the story’s centre, i.e. the sequence of Smith’s Faërie visions. First he sees the great warship returning from the Dark Marches; then the Great Tree; then the lake of glass and firecreatures; then the maidens dancing; finally the Faërie Queen. In the third of these visions, though, we find an odd sequence of events. When Smith touches the lake he falls, while a great ‘boom’ raises a wild wind to sweep him away. He is saved by clinging to a birch:

  and the Wind wrestled fiercely with them, trying to tear him away; but the birch was bent down to the ground by the blast and enclosed him in its branches. When at last the Wind passed on he rose and saw that the birch was naked. It was stripped of every leaf, and it wept, and tears fell from its branches like rain. He set his hand upon its white bark saying: ‘Blessed be the birch! What can I do to make amends, or give thanks?’ He felt the answer of the tree pass up from his hand: ‘Nothing’, it said. ‘Go away! The Wind is hunting you. You do not belong here. Go away and never return!’ (Tales, p. 159)

  What is the birch that saves, the wind that threatens?

  I have already suggested that while ‘oak’ and ‘Nokes’ in Tolkien’s private symbolism stand for literature and literary critics, the birch stands for the ‘B’ scheme of study, for philology, for the defiance of mere ‘literature’; and this is confirmed by two poems about birches in the 1936 collection Songs for the Philologists, given in the original and in translation in Appendix B. One is in Gothic, ‘Bagme Bloma’, or ‘Flower of the Trees’: this hails the birch as defier of wind and lightning, bandwa bairhta, runa goda, þiuda meina þjuþjandei, ‘bright token, good mystery, blessing my people’. The other is in Old English, ‘Éadig béo þu’ or ‘Blessed be you’. Its last stanza, in translation, reads: ‘Let us sing a cheerful song, praise the birch and birch’s race, the teacher, the student and the subject – may we all have health, joy and happiness. The oak shall fall into the fire, losing joy and life and leaf. The birch shall keep its glory long, shine splendidly over the bright plain.’ The birch, it seems, represents learning, severe learning, even discipline. But those who subject themselves to serious study – the ‘dull stodges’ of the ‘B’-scheme at Leeds University, perhaps, see above – are under its protection.5

  The birch has one further association Tolkien did not miss. He respected the English and Scottish Popular Ballads collected by F.J. Child as being (see above) the last living relic of Northern tradition; in what is perhaps the most famous ballad of all the birch takes on a special role. ‘The Wife of Usher’s Well’ is about a widow who calls her drowned sons back from the dead:

  It fell about the Martinmass,

  When nights are lang and mirk,

  The carlin wife’s three sons came hame,

  And their hats were o the birk.

  It neither grew in syke nor ditch,

  Nor yet in any sheugh,

  But at the gates o Paradise,

  That birk grew fair eneugh.

  The ‘birk’ is the birch; its wearers come to Middle-earth from another world; but they are not allowed to remain past dawn. In Lowry C. Wimberly’s Folklore in the English and Scottish Ballads (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928), Sir Walter Scott is quoted as having found a story of an apparition who wore the birch ‘to the end the wind of the world m
ay not have power over me’. Smith’s Wind, then, could be the world; the birch is its traditional opponent, scholarly study; but that study, like the birch hats of the drowned sons, also acts as a passport, into and out of Middle-earth. It is a kind of Golden Bough; not between Earth and Hell, like Aeneas’s bough, but between Earth and Paradise.

  All this has a bearing on Tolkien’s fable, and on his state of mind. The birch protects Smith, but is left naked and weeping. Did Tolkien feel he had exploited philology for his fiction? It also tells Smith to ‘go away and never return’, a command he cannot obey. Why should he have included this embargo, from within Faërie, against revisiting it? Did he feel, perhaps, that in writing his fiction he was trespassing in a ‘perilous country’ against some unstated law? The Songs for the Philologists again contain two poems (in Old English, and again in Appendix B) about mortals who trespass in the Other World and suffer for it, ‘Ides Ælfscýne’, about the ‘elf-fair maiden’ who lures the young man away only to return him to a land where he is a stranger, and ‘Ofer Wídne Gársecg’, where a young man is lured away by a mermaid, to the sea-bottom and (traditional motif) the forfeit of his soul. It seems that at times, at least, Tolkien thought that getting involved with Faërie was deeply dangerous. Though Smith of Wootton Major offers a reassurance that imaginative visions are true, it also declares, in a concealed way, in private images, that mortal men cannot wander in these visions all the time, without danger. They must give up and make their peace with the world.6

  This thought is strengthened, if not confirmed, by Tolkien’s longest published poem, ‘The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun’ of 1945.7 Its kernel, interestingly, is also in Wimberly, who quotes the Breton song of ‘Le Seigneur Nann et la Fée’, about a childless lord who gets a fertility potion from a witch and promises her her own reward; later she leads him into the woods in the shape of a white hart, only to reveal herself and demand his love as payment. He refuses (unlike the young men in ‘Ides Ælfscýne’ and ‘Ofer Wídne Gársecg’), preferring death.8 To this story Tolkien has added a heavy weight of faith. The lord’s defiance of the Korrigan is associated explicitly with home and Christendom; but his sin has been to despair of Christianity in his childlessness, and take ‘cold counsel’, the grey and frozen potion of the witch. He would have done better to trust in ‘hope and prayer’, even if the prayer were unanswered. As an anonymous voice comments, when the potion brings Aotrou twins: