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

by Tom Shippey

  ‘Would every prayer were answered twice!

  the half or nought must oft suffice

  for humbler men, who wear their knees

  more bare than lords, as oft one sees.’

  The Tolkienian moral of the story is: be content; be resigned; we can’t all have everything. One might note, coincidentally, that in the OED’s 1972 Supplement, ‘escapism’ is defined for the first time as ‘the practice of seeking distraction from what normally has to be endured’ (my italics). A fear of barrenness, of leaving no descendants, and with it a fear that the escape from forge or castle into fantasy may not be permitted – these are the themes of ‘Aotrou’ and of Smith, like goblin doubts padding through Tolkien’s mind.

  An End to ‘Glamour’

  The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, which Tolkien put together with unusual speed in 1961–2, may seem to have little connection with the foregoing. It is one of his more light-hearted books, centring on a character essentially fearless and self-confident, and a good deal of it is evidently old material from a more cheerful period (poems 1, 3, 5–7 and 9–10), while more is in a similar mode and probably of similar age (poems 4, 8, 11–12). The collection did not however escape Tolkien’s ponderings over ‘depth’. A letter to Rayner Unwin (Letters, p. 315) shows him wondering how to create a ‘fiction’ which would enable him to draw early works into the world of The Lord of the Rings, and deciding to do it by means of a comic ‘editorial’ preface. He carried this out with great finesse, explaining for instance that the poem ‘Errantry’ (which he had really written in 1933, when he had no need to harmonise his rhymes with Quenya) was actually written by Bilbo after he had returned from the Lonely Mountain – and so had learnt something of elves – but before he retired to Rivendell and began to learn Elvish properly. Other poems are ascribed to Sam, or (no. 14,9 reworked from 1937) given a link with the still unpublished ‘Silmarillion’. But the collection also contains both old and new work which hints at a deep sadness in Tolkien, and at an old but growing uncertainty.

  The most obvious case is no. 16, the last poem, called ‘The Last Ship’. In this Fíriel – once more a name which is really a description, ‘mortal woman’, Everywoman – gets up in the morning to go to the river, hears ‘A sudden music’, and sees the vision of the last elvish ship leaving Gondor. Where are they going, she asks, to Arnor, to Númenor? No, the elves reply, they are leaving Middle-earth for ever to go to the Undying Lands. Come with them, they call, escape from the world:

  ‘One more only we may bear.

  Come! For your days are speeding.

  Come! Earth-maiden elven-fair,

  Our last call heeding.’

  She takes a step towards them, but her feet sink ‘deep in clay’; she takes this as a sign.

  ‘I cannot come!’ they heard her cry.

  ‘I was born Earth’s daughter!’

  She turns back to her home, but the life of the morning – cockcrow, sunlight, jewels of dew on her gown – has gone. She goes through the ‘dark door, / under the house-shadow’, puts on dull clothes, starts work. The last word of both the two last stanzas is ‘faded’, and in the last stanza Fíriel herself has disappeared. Clearly she is dead, and she condemned herself to it when she stopped with her feet in the clay. ‘Earth to earth, ashes to ashes’, says the Funeral Service, and in this poem ‘Earth-maiden’, ‘Middle-earth’ and death are all equated. The poem takes on even more point if one remembers the ballad-genre which Tolkien knew so well and imitated in his two early Songs just mentioned – the one in which the elves steal away a human man or woman to live with them in delight in ‘elf-hill’. ‘The Last Ship’ is an unprecedented reversal of that genre, in which the maiden refuses to go. It is true that she then avoids the risk of returning ‘disenchanted’ like Keats’s lover from ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’. She also turns from glamour to dullness and oblivion. The cockcrow at the start of the poem may hint at resurrection, but it does not carry the bravura of the cockcrow and the horns of Rohan in The Return of the King.10 The sense of loss is only increased if one compares the poem with its earlier and little-known version of 1934, when it had the title ‘Firiel’. The tone of ‘Firiel’ is much more optimistic than that of ‘The Last Ship’. Firiel here (I use the form with no accent to distinguish her from Fíriel in the later poem) is called to by the elves, fears to go with them, and turns back to the ‘dark door’, just as in the later poem, but the fleeting sense of regret and lost opportunity is rapidly buried by bustle. It is ‘a vision’ which fades, not ‘sunlight’; the last two stanzas are not of resignation but of cheerful activity; the last words are not ‘their song has faded’ but ‘please pass the honey’. There is a strong sense that Firiel has made the right decision, not, as in ‘The Last Ship’, an inevitable decision.

  Other poems in the Bombadil collection also end with emptiness. No. 2, ‘Tom Bombadil Goes Boating’ (written 1962), seems to have very much the same outline as no. 1, ‘The Adventures of Tom Bombadil’ (rewritten with only minor changes from the version of 1934): in it Tom good-humouredly browbeats a succession of creatures, wren, kingfisher, otter, swan, hobbits and finally Farmer Maggot. In the end all help him, with a central scene of merry-making. Just the same, there is a suggestion that the whole thing is a dream:

  Ere dawn Tom was gone: as dreams one half remembers,

  some merry, some sad, and some of hidden warning.

  Even his footprints are washed away, his boat vanishes, and all that is left is a pair of forgotten oars, which by themselves mean nothing. It is as if Tom has gone back to his natural world, leaving Maggot and his mortal friends to meet their own fate, separate from his. Certainly ‘Long they lay at Grindwall hythe for Tom to come and find them’ is a more ‘downbeat’ ending than ‘While fair Goldberry combed her tresses yellow’: Grindr in the Poetic Edda is the name of the gate that separates the living from the dead.

  An even more striking revision comes in poem 15, titled ‘The Sea-Bell’, but in the editorial ‘fiction’ at the start given another title and a highly suggestive placing within the world of The Lord of the Rings. ‘It is the latest piece [in the collection]’, surmises Tolkien’s imaginary ‘editor’:

  and belongs to the Fourth Age; but it is included here, because a hand has scrawled at its head Frodos Dreme. That is remarkable, and though the piece is most unlikely to have been written by Frodo himself, the title shows that it was associated with the dark and despairing dreams which visited him in March and October during his last three years. But there were certainly other traditions concerning Hobbits that were taken by the ‘wandering-madness’, and if they ever returned, were afterwards queer and uncommunicable. The thought of the Sea was ever-present in the background of hobbit imagination; but fear of it and distrust of all Elvish lore, was the prevailing mood in the Shire at the end of the Third Age, and that mood was certainly not entirely dispelled by the events and changes with which that Age ended. (TB, in Tales p. 64)

  So the hobbits, like Fíriel, turned Earth-fast and Sea-shy. Meanwhile the remark that the piece could not have been by or about Frodo, but was about some other hobbit, is Tolkien’s bow to the fact that ‘The Sea-Bell’ is a thorough reworking of a piece he had written and published in 1934, before Frodo was thought of, called ‘Looney’.

  Close comparison of the two shows, as with ‘Firiel’ and ‘The Last Ship’, an increasing darkness. Both are poems of ‘disenchantment’ (as ‘The Last Ship’ was not), and in both the speaker, who has been in a magic boat to a far land, finds himself hunted out of it by a ‘dark cloud’, and returned to lonely and ragged craziness, scorned by others. In ‘The Sea-Bell’, though, a whole series of significant changes has been made. For one thing the boat is much more like the boat of Fíriel, the last boat; when he sees it the voyager calls out ‘It is later than late!’, and leaps into it with a new haste. For another the menacing elements in the far country have been much expanded, with ‘glooming caves’ seen beneath the cliffs as soon as the speaker lands
; in ‘Looney’ the impression of paradise lasted for a couple of stanzas. The ‘Sea-Bell’ landscape also includes ‘gladdon-swords’ (i.e. of wild iris) and ‘puffballs’ in the mould. One may remember that it was in the Gladden Fields that Isildur died, and that ‘puffballs’ were associated by Tolkien – since his ‘Preface’ to Walter Haigh’s Huddersfield Glossary of 1928, p. xviii – with ‘Dead Sea apples’ and the bitter fruit of the Cities of the Plain.

  A more important change, though, is that in the later version the speaker seems in a way guilty, as ‘Looney’ did not. In both poems the ‘black cloud’ comes, but in the earlier it is for no reason, while in the later it appears to be called, or provoked, by the speaker presumptuously naming himself ‘king’. It casts him down, turns him into a kind of Orfeo-in-the-wilderness, till eventually he realises he must find the sea: ‘I have lost myself, and I know not the way, / but let me be gone!’ And seemingly as a result of that guilt the end is different. In ‘Looney’ the man returned from Paradise still had a shell in which he could hear the voice of the sea, as a kind of witness to what he had seen. In ‘The Sea-Bell’ the shell is there at the beginning, and it contains a call from across the seas; but at the end it is ‘silent and dead’:

  Never will my ear that bell hear,

  never my feet that shore tread,

  never again, as in sad lane,

  in blind alley and in long street

  ragged I walk. To myself I talk;

  for still they speak not, men that I meet.

  In the later poem – as in Smith – the return to Faërie, even in memory, is banned. As for the mistaken title Frodos Dreme, what it suggests with great economy is, first of all, an age in which only the sacrifices of the War of the Ring are remembered (for some scribe has associated gloom with Frodo); and second, more indirectly, a sense of ultimate defeat and loss in the hero of The Lord of the Rings. Frodo doubted his own salvation. This could be seen as a dark illusion born of losing the ‘addictive’ Ring, but one senses that Tolkien was doubtful too: not of salvation, but of the legitimacy of his own mental wanderings. For many years he had held to his theory of ‘sub-creation’, which declared that since the human imagination came from God, then its products must come from God too, must be fragments of some genuine if other-worldly truth, guaranteed by their own ‘inner consistency’ and no more the artist’s own property than the star from Elfland was Smith’s.11 But by the 1960s he was not so sure. It is hard not to think that by then he saw himself (perhaps only at times) as Fíriel, Farmer Maggot, Frodo, ‘Looney’ and eventually Smith – a mortal deserted by the immortals and barred from their company. He no longer imagined himself rejoining his own creations after death, like Niggle; he felt they were lost, like the Silmarils.

  The Lost Straight Road

  Tolkien of course asked more than he had a right to. No one can expect fantasy to turn real, and all hopes for a star or shell or supernatural guarantee are bound to be disappointed. In any case these late and gloomy reactions have no bearing on The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings or The Silmarillion, which keep their own purely literary justification; the theory of ‘sub-creation’ is not needed. If it is the function of works of literature to enlarge their readers’ sympathies and help them understand what their own experience may not have taught them, then Tolkien’s fictions qualify on all counts. Certainly they are about ‘creatures who never existed’. Most novels are about ‘people who never existed’. The cry that ‘fantasy is escapist’ compared to the novel is only an echo of the older cry that novels are ‘escapist’ compared with biography, and to both cries one should make the same answer: that freedom to invent outweighs loyalty to mere happenstance, the accidents of history; and good readers should know how to filter a general applicability from a particular story. So Tolkien need not have yearned so much for a justification in fact and truth, nor felt such a sense of loss as ‘inspiration’ receded. Nevertheless the burden of his loss becomes greater if one realises how consistent and long-lasting Tolkien’s visions had been, especially his visions of that ‘earthly Paradise’ from which ‘Looney’ is returned and which Fíriel never reaches.

  He remarked in later life (Letters, pp. 213, 347) that he had a ‘terrible recurrent dream’ of Atlantis and ‘the Great Wave, towering up, and coming in ineluctably over the trees and green fields’. He seems to have been haunted also by other visions which had to be expressed in narrative: of cities sculptured in lifeless stone (see the poem ‘The City of the Gods’, 1923, a forerunner of Pippin’s sight of Gondor in LOTR, pp. 734–5), of towers overlooking the sea (everywhere from ‘Monsters’ to the Tower Hills), most of all of beautiful unreachable countries across the ocean. Fascination with this may explain why the poem Pearl so appealed to him: it contains a land where grief is washed away, and in his poem of 1927, ‘The Nameless Land’, Tolkien wrote 60 lines in the complex Pearl-stanza describing a country further ‘Than Paradise’, and fairer ‘Than Tir-nan-Og’, the Irish land of the deathless. In ‘The Happy Mariners’ seven years before – also translated into Old English as ‘Tha Éadigan Sǽlidan’ – he saw himself looking out from ‘a western tower’ to the sea and the ‘fairy boats’ going through ‘the shadows and the dangerous seas’ to ‘islands blest’, from which a wind returns to murmur of ‘golden rains’. The longing for a Paradise on Earth, a paradise of natural beauty, was compelling and repeated and there before Tolkien took to fiction. But in the last poems the murmuring wind has ceased, and the sense of a barrier is much stronger.

  There is a resolution of hope and prohibition, finally, in an extremely private poem by Tolkien, ‘Imram’, from 1955. This is based on the famous voyage by St Brendan (‘the Navigator’) from Ireland to the unknown countries of the West, found in many medieval versions and related to a whole Irish genre of imrama which includes the famous Imram Brain mac Febail or ‘Voyage of Bran son of Febal to the Land of the Living’. In the heavily Christianised Brendan-story, the saint hears of a Land of Promise in the West, and sets sail, to find islands of sheep and birds, a whale-island (like ‘Fastitocalon’, poem 11 in TB), islands of monks and sinners, till in the end they reach the Land of Promise – from which Brendan is sent back, to lay his bones in Ireland. In ‘Imram’ Tolkien assimilates this story very closely to his own fiction. His St Brendan can remember only three things from his journeys, a Cloud over ‘the foundered land’ (of Númenor), a Tree (full of voices neither human nor angelic but of a third ‘fair kindred’), and a Star, which marks the ‘old road’ leading out of Middle-earth ‘as an unseen bridge that on arches runs / to coasts that no man knows’. Brendan says he can remember these things, but never reach them; at the end of the poem he is dead, like Fíriel.

  However there is in this poem an image of possible escape, drawn out further in The Silmarillion. There, at the end of ‘Akallabêth’, Tolkien records the Numenorean belief that once mariners had been able to sail from Middle-earth to Aman, but that with the drowning of Númenor the deathless lands were removed and the earth made round; though since ships still came and went from the Grey Havens:

  the loremasters of Men said that a Straight Road must still be, for those that were permitted to find it. And they taught that, while the new world fell away, the old road and the path of the memory of the West still went on, as it were a mighty bridge invisible that passed through the air of breath and of flight (which were bent now as the world was bent), and traversed Ilmer which flesh unaided cannot endure, until it came to Tol Eressëa, the Lonely Isle, and maybe even beyond, to Valinor, where the Valar still dwell and watch the unfolding of the story of the world. And tales and rumours arose along the shores of the sea concerning mariners and men forlorn upon the water who, by some fate or grace or favour of the Valar, had entered in upon the Straight Way and seen the face of the world sink below them, and so had come to the lamplit quays of Avallónë, or verily to the last beaches on the margin of Aman, and there had looked upon the White Mountain, dreadful and beautiful, before they died.

&nbs
p; For those that were permitted … by some fate or grace or favour. Tolkien was deeply attached to Middle-earth, and knew that his bones must lie in England as St Brendan’s in Ireland. His last works are full of resignation and bereavement. Still, if he had an inner hope, it might possibly have been that he too could take ‘the secret gate’, ‘the hidden paths’, ‘the Lost Straight Road’, and find the Land of Promise which was still within ‘the circles of the world’. It had happened to others. In the South English Legendary version of the ‘Life of St Brendan’, a maiden tells Abbot Beryn that he ought to thank Jesus Christ for leading him to the Paradise in the West, for: