by Tom Shippey
Part One of ‘The Notion Club Papers’ opens with a rejection of C. S. Lewis’s device of using mere machinery (a spaceship, an eldil-powered coffin) to get his characters to Mars or Venus. The right way to explore other worlds, says Ramer, the main speaker at this point, is via dreams and via the languages you hear in them. But then in a strange switch, one of the most sceptical and persistent of his hearers, Lowdham, starts to speak with tongues and to see visions even during the course of the Club’s own meetings, while he also starts to record snatches of languages very similar to those of Alboin in ‘The Lost Road’. Further, an undergraduate member of the Club, John Jethro Rashbold, begins to speak with tongues as well; while a fourth member, Wilfrid Trewin Jeremy, somehow joins Lowdham inside one of Lowdham’s own dreams – a vision of Anglo-Saxon England in King Alfred’s time – as Tréo-wine (another -wine name, this time ‘pledge-friend’).
All the characters who speak are, rather evidently, reflections of Tolkien himself. Ramer is a professor of philology, Lowdham a lecturer on English language; Rashbold’s last name is a ‘calque’ of Tolkien’s (from German toll-kühn = ‘crazy-bold’), while his middle name, ‘Jethro’ is linked with Tolkien’s third name ‘Reuel’ in the Old Testament; and though Christopher Tolkien regards the theory as ‘unlikely’ (Sauron Defeated, p. 189), it seems plausible that ‘ramer’ is in fact meant to be the dialect word ‘raver, babbler’, and so to fit Tolkien’s repeated self-image as one who sees visions and dreams and is accordingly stigmatised by others as a ‘looney’ (see his poem of that name from 1934 and its later revision, above). As for Alwin Arundel Lowdham and Wilfred Trewin Jeremy, Alwin and Trewin are variants on the ‘x-friend’ series with which this discussion started, while Arundel – normal English surname that it is – is also a modernised version of Anglo-Saxon Éarendel, or Eärendil, the great Intercessor between gods and Middle-earth of Tolkien’s mythology. What these two fictional ‘phases’ tell us about the way Tolkien’s creativity worked – or the way he thought it worked – is surely this: he thought that ideas were sent to him in dreams, and through the hidden resonances of names and languages. He thought that the dreams and the ideas did not come from his own mind but might – like the names, after all – be the record or memory of something that once might have had an objective existence. A sceptic would naturally say that this belief is just another illusion, that the conviction that a dream ‘comes from outside’ comes from the inside, just like the dream. In reply to this (or possibly in agreement with it) I would point only to my remarks above about the disorienting effects of studying the history of early literature philologically, so that ‘the thing which was perhaps eroded most of all was the philologists’ sense of a line between imagination and reality’. Once one had got used to tracing linguistic correspondences with absolute confidence that they did represent reality, it was a rather easy step to assuming that the guide to reality was one’s own sense of linguistic correspondences. Tolkien’s creativity, as this book has said many times, came from somewhere between the two positions expressed in the last sentence.
But if his playing with words and names tells us something of how he worked, what was he working on? What do all these varied relationships between people mean, and what was the ‘something’ that pulled him on, whether he had a Grand Design or not? A major theme, at least, is signalled by the two separate fragments of Old English which Tolkien wrote, rewrote, and worked into both ‘Lost Road’ and ‘Notion Club Papers’ as genuine ‘transmissions’ from the past. The first of these is genuine: that is to say, it comes from a real, surviving Old English poem, The Seafarer, though adapted by Tolkien in both versions he gave. In ‘The Lost Road’ the lines come to an Old English poet, Ælfwine, as he chants them to a crowded hall:
Monað modes lust mid mereflode
forð to feran, þæt ic feor heonan
ofer hean holmas, ofer hwæles eðel
elþeodigra eard gesece.
Nis me to hearpan hyge ne to hringþege
ne to wife wyn ne to worulde hyht
ne ymb owiht elles nefne ymb yða gewealc.
‘The desire of my spirit urges me to journey forth over the flowing sea, that far hence across the hills of water and the whale’s country I may seek the land of strangers. No mind have I for harp, nor gift of ring, nor delight in women, nor joy in the world, nor concern with aught else save the rolling of the waves.’ (Lost Road, p. 84)
The moment Ælfwine chooses to chant this is highly inappropriate. He is in a king’s hall, full of Dane-hunters and experienced warriors. Their view is that if Ælfwine would rather go to sea than receive gifts in the hall, let him get on with it! His yearning for the rolling waves leaves him socially isolated, a ‘raver’, a ‘looney’. In ‘The Notion Club Papers’ Alwin Lowdham the linguist appears to be Ælfwine come again. One windy evening in 1954 he ‘picks up’ the seven lines just quoted, except that (a) they are in the Old Mercian dialect, not Old West Saxon, and (b) lines 3 and 4 have become:
obaer gaarseggaes grimmae holmas
aelbuuina eard uut gisoecae
‘that I seek over the ancient water’s awful mountains Elf-friends’ island in the Outer-world.’ (SD, p. 243)
The other repeated passage of Old English verse in these two works – this time one entirely original to Tolkien – runs as follows:
Thus cwæth Ælfwine Wídlást:
Fela bith on Westwegum werum uncúthra
wundra and wihta, wlitescéne land,
eardgeard elfa, and ésa bliss.
Lyt ǽnig wát hwylc his longath síe
thám the eftsíthes eldo getwǽfeth.
‘Thus said Ælfwine the far-travelled: “there is many a thing in the West-regions unknown to men, marvels and strange beings, a land fair and lovely, the homeland of the Elves, and the bliss of the Gods. Little doth any man know what longing is his whom old age cutteth off from return”.’
This time the lines come in ‘The Lost Road’ (p. 44) to Alboin, a twentieth-century teenager, again in a dream, and he tells them to his father. Yet doing so is still socially inappropriate. The last two lines sound insolent when said by a young man to an old one – to one who is in fact about to die – and as soon as Alboin quotes them, ‘He suddenly regretted translating them.’ His father indeed remarks that he did not need to be told: for him there will only be a forthsith, the compelled journey of Death which both Bede and Niggle were sent on (see above), no eftsith, no going back. Once again these lines recur to Lowdham in ‘The Notion Club Papers’, with only two words added: Ælfwine Wídlást is now Eadwines sunu, Edwin’s (or Audoin’s) son. But on this occasion Alwin Lowdham cannot wound his father: his father did not wait for eldo, old age, but put to sea in 1947 in his boat The Eärendel and was never seen again. Drowned, or killed by a floating mine? Or did he succeed, perhaps, in finding the aelbuuina eard, the eardgeard elfa which is the common theme of both poems, the ‘Elf-friends’ island, the homeland of the elves’?
The recurrent motifs in these repeated passages are: the existence of an Earthly Paradise somewhere in the West; it being known to a select body of ‘Elf-friends’, whether in Old or modern England; the knowledge leading to a state of baffled yearning, or langoth; but return to the Paradise being irrevocably cut off, whether by old age (as for the ‘Lost Road’ father), or by physical impossibility (the theme, in a way, of the long ‘Notion Club’ discussion of the devices of C. S. Lewis). Nor is it hard to interpret the motifs. No one could avoid the thought that the frustrated visionaries (Ælfwine, Alboin, Alwin Lowdham) represent Tolkien himself. But to this one should surely add the reflection that so do the visionaries’ fathers: the missing father of Lowdham, the father-about-to-die of Alboin. The repeated father-son pairings in these debates all attempt to convey a kind of dialogue within Tolkien himself, as indeed does the whole ‘Notion Club’ scenario with its revealingly-named members. One half of Tolkien, one might say, was urging his spirit out across the sea, to visions of Paradise and discontent with the wo
rld; another half was telling him this was a waste of time. And, surprisingly, was threatening him with the shadow of eldo, old age, before he himself had passed his forties. A further indication of a kind of ‘split personality’ surfaces in ‘The Lost Road’, when Elendil in Númenor hears a song sung by one Fíriel, and feels his heart sink. It is odd that this should be his reaction, for Fíriel is the name of the mortal maiden who, in another poem by Tolkien from 1934 (see above) rejected passage into the West, with the words ‘I was born Earth’s daughter’. It seems as if Fíriel has changed her mind and accepted passage to the West; though, it is true, only to Númenor, not to Valinor and the lands of true immortality. Fíriel, one should add (see Lost Road p. 382), is also a name of Lúthien: the maiden who chose mortality.
The total significance of this complex of splits, doublings, transmissions and reincarnations cannot perhaps be grasped. Still, it is clear that Tolkien’s major theme – or so it seemed to him in these self-reflective fictions – was Death: its pain and its necessity, the urge to escape from it, the duty and the impossibility of resignation. And Tolkien saw this theme not only in fiction or in dream, but also in history and archaeology. Lowdham’s father tried to escape from Death physically in his boat The Eärendel; possibly he succeeded, but probably not. Tolkien suggested repeatedly that the well-known ship-burials of England and Scandinavia, real burials like the ones at Sutton Hoo or at Vendel in Sweden, were motivated by some similar urge to escape. The custom went back, he said, to a belief in – or memory of – a land ruled by the gods in the West to which:
in shadow the dead should come … bearing with them the shadows of their possessions, who could in the body find the True West no more. Therefore in after days many would bury their dead in ships, setting them forth in pomp upon the sea by the west coasts of the ancient world. (SD, p. 338)
Yet even then this belief can have seemed little more satisfying than the Númenórean success in achieving, not immortality, but the art of preserving corpses. To those who remained the wrong side of the ‘Sundering Sea’, the world came to be like the dreary land, the waste land, of Tréowine’s song in SD pp. 273–6, identical, except in being set out as prose rather than alliterative verse, with the poem of ‘King Sheave’ attached to ‘The Lost Road’ (pp. 87–90):
‘No lord they had, no king, nor counsel, but the cold terror that dwelt in the desert, the dark shadow that haunted the hills and the hoar forest: Dread was their master. Dark and silent, long years forlorn, lonely waited the hall of kings, house forsaken without fire or food.’
For Tolkien there was no ‘eucatastrophe’ (to use his own term, ‘OFS’, Tree p. 68). The sense of age and exclusion seems to have grown on him more and more strongly (see chapter 8 above, passim). Yet those feelings seem now to have been with him from the very beginning, while he was still a young man in his early twenties. Another phrase common to both ‘Lost Road’ and ‘Notion Club Papers’ is (in various languages) westra lage wegas rehtas, nu isti sa wraithas, ‘a straight way lay westward, now it is bent’. But this thought, if not the geography behind it, had been with Tolkien since 1916. The Book of Lost Tales opens with ‘The Cottage of Lost Play’. In the cottage, though, Eriol the wanderer is told of another cottage, in the past, in Valinor, to which the children of men could come by the Path of Dreams. Vairë, explaining this, says ‘It has been said to me, though the truth I know not, that that lane ran by devious routes to the homes of Men’. The routes are ‘devious’; they were not then ‘bent’. But even then taking the path was dangerous, for according to old tradition human children who had once seen Elfland were liable on return to become ‘strange and wild’. That lane is blocked now, says Vairë. Yet it seems that the children of his cottage are able to travel the other way, to find lonely children in the Great Lands, i.e. our world, Middle-earth, or ‘those that are punished or chidden’, and comfort them.
There is a ‘Peter Pan’ element about all this which Tolkien almost immediately dropped and thereafter disliked, but one has to say that the Path of Dreams was one of the most stable elements of his thinking, from 1916 to at least 1946. It is easy enough to call it ‘escapist’, and indeed the idea of the Great Escape from Death surfaces in Tolkien’s mythology again and again. Yet one has to say (and see further below) that he never gave way to it. No doubt it was a temptation for a young man, in the middle of a great war, with no close living relatives and most of his friends dead, to lose himself in dreams of a world where none of this need be true; to construct a myth as context for the dreams; and then to rake together from his learning an elaborate self-justification for the myth. But if Tolkien did this, one has to admit that he also gave equal space, equal prominence to the loss and resignation. He had, moreover, more than purely personal motives in elaborating the complex stories which ‘The Lost Road’ and ‘The Notion Club Papers’ were attempting to authenticate.
A mythology for England
A similar blend of fantasy and fact can be seen in Tolkien’s attempt, not so much to create a ‘mythology for England’ – an intention and a phrase which have often been ascribed to him5 – as a mythology of England. One extremely unexpected aspect of Tolkien’s early writings is his determined identification of England with Elfland. As soon as this phrase is used it sounds implausible, as Tolkien would have sensed as acutely as anyone. Nevertheless he persisted in trying to equate the two places. Tol Eressëa, the Lonely Isle, is England; Kortirion, the town of the exiles from Kôr, is Warwick; Tavrobel on Tol Eressëa ‘would afterwards be the Staffordshire village of Great Haywood’ (BLT 1, p. 25). How can these equations be made out, and what is the point of them?
At their heart, perhaps, is awareness of the paradoxical nature of a ‘mythology for England’. England must be the most demythologised country in Europe, partly as a result of 1066 (which led to near-total suppression of native English belief, see above), partly as a result of the early Industrial Revolution, which led to the extinction of what remained rather before the era of scholarly interest and folk-tale collectors like the Grimms. If Tolkien was to create an English mythology, he would first (given his scholarly instincts) have to create a context in which it might have been preserved.
His earliest attempts to do this centre on the figure of Ottor ‘Wǽfre’, Ottor the Wanderer, also known as Eriol: as it were a dual ancestral figure, a point from which two chains of transmission ran, the one authentic, the other invented, but both determinedly native and English. In Tolkien’s thinking, Ottor/Eriol was by his first wife the father of Hengest and Horsa, in early but authentic legend the invaders of Britain and the founders of England. But by his second wife he was to be the father of Heorrenda, a harper of English (and Norse) legend, about whom nothing else is known – an image, therefore, of the fantastic ‘lost’ tradition which Tolkien was about to invent. Tol Eressëa too, the place where Eriol learns this lost tradition – to become The Book of Lost Tales and in time The Silmarillion – is an image of similar duality. Tolkien changed his story about Tol Eressëa, the Lonely Isle, almost as often as he changed his views about elvish languages, but one stable thing about it is that it is unstable. It is the island drawn repeatedly eastward and westward across the sea to convey the elves to Valinor; it is drawn across the sea also to bring the elvish expedition of rescue to Middle-earth. Even when it is ‘in place’, so to speak, as when it is visited by Eriol, it is not quite a part of Valinor, and still ‘by devious ways’ in touch with the world of men. It is in short a ‘medial’ or ‘liminal’ place, a place ‘neither one thing nor the other’, just as Eriol is a ‘medial’ person. In Tolkien’s story, could one call Eriol an Englishman? Hardly. He was born in what is now Germany, just south of the Danish border. Yet he was the father of Englishmen, of the founders of England. He goes back to a time (just) before the beginnings of tradition. In the same way Tol Eressëa in Eriol’s time is still off the coast of Valinor, not off the coast of Europe, but is (just) about to shift and enter the real world of true history. Significantly it
is seo unwemmede ieg, in Old English ‘the unstained land’, with ‘stain’ used in the same sense as in the description of Lothlórien, see above. It is a place before the Fall, so to speak, the Fall being in some way the start of English history. Tolkien was setting his tales in a context at once unaffected by the disappointments of English tradition (maimed and mangled for us by time and neglect), and yet with a clear channel into it.