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

by Tom Shippey

  5 This point is also made by Paula Marmor, ‘An Etymological Excursion among the Shire-Folk’, in An Introduction to Elvish, ed. Jim Allan (Hayes: Bran’s Head Books, 1978), pp. 181–4.

  6 A point seen, of course, by Peter Jackson in his direction of the 2001 movie version, which skips from crossing the Brandywine to arriving in Bree. Tolkien noted that ‘Tom Bombadil is not an important person – to the narrative’ in Letters, p. 178, and again that he was put in because ‘I … wanted an “adventure” on the way’, Letters, p. 192. Both letters however then qualify what appears to be a dismissive view.

  7 C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength once again offers a close parallel in the idea of language with meanings ‘inherent in [its syllables] as the shape of the great Sun is inherent in the little waterdrop’, p. 281. Later it appears that this is a language even beyond ‘Numinor’, as Lewis spells it.

  8 The two towns from Giles and LOTR are linked in traditional rhyme: ‘Brill on the hill, Oakley in the hole, dirty Ickford and stinking Worminghall.’

  9 The point is taken further by Brian Rosebury, who remarks in his Tolkien: A Critical Assessment (Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke and New York, 1992), first that ‘the circumstantial expansiveness of Middle-earth itself is central to the work’s aesthetic power’, and then that ‘Middle-earth, rather than any of the characters, is the hero of The Lord of the Rings’, see pp. 8, 29.

  10 In two letters written in 1954 Tolkien both conceded that Bombadil entered because ‘I had “invented” him independently … and wanted an “adventure” on the way’, and insisted that he nevertheless had a part to play as presenting ‘a natural pacifist view’, something ‘excellent’ in itself but incapable of surviving unprotected, see once more Letters pp. 192, 179.

  11 It is interesting that the first version of this song, ‘Light as Leaf on Lindentree’ in The Gryphon for 1925, does not use the word ‘shadow’: Tolkien rewrote it to bring it into line with his developing myth. The 1925 version is reprinted in Lays pp. 108–10, supplemented by notes on pp. 121–2.

  12 Road, p. 72. Even there it is not entirely clear. Tolkien gave first a word-for-word translation of the Sindarin and then a connected English one, but the two are not altogether consistent with each other. I have combined them.

  13 It is perhaps worth noting that all the names in Théoden’s pedigree from Thengel back to Brego are Old English words for ‘king’, except for Déor and Gram, for reasons I do not understand, and excepting Eorl the Young, founder of the line, who looks back to a time before kings were created and when all men, as in the Old Norse poem Rigsþula, were ‘earl’, ‘churl’ or ‘thrall’.

  14 Though Tolkien did not know from the beginning where, or if, he was going to fit them in. A vital moment in the development of The Lord of the Rings is when Tolkien suddenly sketched out a note about language-relationships, see Treason, p. 424.

  15 A phrase notoriously used by W.H. Auden in his 1937 poem, ‘Spain’. George Orwell commented scornfully that people who wrote like that had never encountered murder: they were playing with fire without realising it was hot, see his 1940 essay ‘Inside the Whale’.

  16 This even has an effect on Merry the hobbit. On p. 786 he begs Théoden to let him come with the Riders: ‘I would not have it said of me in song only that I was always left behind!’ The phrasing is ironic, but it is an attempt to find an argument that Théoden will accept. For remarks on how styles shape thoughts, see especially Letters, pp. 225–6.

  17 See Nigel Barley, ‘Old English colour classification: where do matters stand?’ Anglo-Saxon England, vol. 3 (1974), pp. 15–28.

  18 It is mentioned by C. L. Wrenn, ‘The Word “Goths”’, Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society (Lit.-Hist. Class), vol. 2 (1928–32), pp. 126–8.

  19 Though there are such unobservant minds around, see for instance note 12 to chapter 9.

  20 See Arthur J. Evans, ‘The Rollright Stones and their Folk-lore’, Folklore, vol. 6 (1895), pp. 6–51.

  CHAPTER 5

  1 Amusingly, in view of later events, he was Terry Pratchett, whose ‘Discworld’ comic fantasies have since made him Britain’s best-selling domestic author. These began, at least, as part-parodies of Tolkien, and continue to include Tolkienian in-jokes.

  2 These opinions are taken from the anonymous review in the Times Literary Supplement (25 November 1955); C. N. Manlove’s Modern Fantasy, p. 183; an anonymous review in Punch (16 November 1966); a review by Mark Roberts in Essays in Criticism, vol. 6 (1956), p. 459. But the list could easily be extended.

  3 See Louise Creighton, The Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton (2 vols., London: Longmans Green & Co., 1904), vol. 1, p. 372.

  4 It is no. 14 of The Durham Proverbs, ed. O. S. Arngart (Lund: Lunds Universitets Arsskrift, 1956), vol. 52, no. 2.

  5 These accusations are made most clearly in C. N. Manlove’s Modern Fantasy, pp. 173–84 – a book I find often imperceptive and almost always unreflective, but certainly written with energy.

  6 It is worth noting that not even the Ringwraiths were originally evil, though they have become absolutely so. The word ‘haggard’, used on p. 691, implies how this happened. It was first used as a noun, to indicate a hawk caught when fully fledged; later it came to mean ‘wild, untamed’, and to be applied with special reference to a look in the eyes, ‘afterwards to the injurious effect upon the countenance of privation, want of rest, fatigue, anxiety, terror or worry’. At this stage it was influenced by ‘hag’, an old word for witch, and implied also gaunt or fleshless. The Ringwraiths are fleshless and ‘faded’ from addiction, and privation, and from being caught by Sauron. They are also witches, simultaneously victims of evil within and agents of evil without. Their leader is ‘helmed and crowned with fear’, i.e. he wears an ægishjálmr or ‘fear-helm’ like Fáfnir the dragon; dragons too were in some opinions misers transformed by their own wickedness, see above.

  7 The singular past tense of rídan is rád. The long -a- in standard English was rounded to -o-, so both ‘rode’ and ‘road’. In Northern English and Scottish it remained unrounded, but was changed by the early modern Great Vowel Shift to -ai-, so ‘raid’. The same processes give us the old adjective ‘wroth’ = ‘angry’, and the noun ‘wraith’. See further Author pp. 121–8, and my article ‘Orcs, Wraiths, Wights: Tolkien’s Images of Evil’, in George Clark and Daniel Timmons, eds., J.R.R. Tolkien and his Literary Resonances (Greenwood: Westport, Conn, and London, 2000), 183–98.

  8 See the entry in Richard Blackwelder’s A Tolkien Thesaurus (Garland: New York and London, 1990) – a most invaluable work for checking points like this.

  9 Dan Timmons has pointed out to me a piece by Robert Harris in the Canadian National Post for Jan. 24th, 2002, p. A 16. In this Harris notes the anniversary of the Wannsee conference, Jan. 20th, 1942, where fifteen senior civil servants, eight of them with doctorates, had lunch, conducted a meeting ‘very quietly and with much courtesy’, organised the Holocaust, and then circulated the minutes for approval. Tolkien of course could not have known about the meeting, but the bureaucratisation of evil was already clear, as one can see from C. S. Lewis’s strongly Tolkien-influenced novel That Hideous Strength (1945).

  10 In the passage quoted above one might note the phrase, said of Frodo feeling the pressure of Sauron’s Eye, ‘he writhed, tormented’. At the death of Saruman, his spirit seems to look to the West (for forgiveness?), ‘but out of the West came a cold wind, and it bent away, and with a sigh dissolved into nothing’. One might paraphrase that Frodo is still writhing, and so not yet a wraith, but Saruman has been bent past recovery.

  11 Edmund Fuller says that Tolkien said this to him in a conversation in June 1962, see ‘The Lord of the Hobbits: J. R. R. Tolkien’, in Tolkien and the Critics, ed. Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo, p. 35. I am sure Tolkien did say this; but he had perhaps grown accustomed to suiting his conversation to his interviewers’ understanding. ‘Angel’ is anyway derived from Greek angelos, ‘messenge
r’; in that (recondite) sense Gandalf is ‘an angel’.

  12 King Alfred’s Old English Version of Boethius, ed. W. J. Sedgefield (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899), p. 128, my translation.

  13 I have discussed this work more extensively in an essay called ‘Tolkien and “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth”’, in Leaves from the Tree: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Shorter Fiction, ed. Alex Lewis (London: Tolkien Society, 1991), pp. 5–16. Tolkien began working on it more than twenty years before it was published, see Bibliography, p. 303, and Treason, pp. 106–7, where a fragment of an early version is quoted.

  14 It is only fair to say that the orcs are great jokers too. What their humour seems to show, though, is that while the orcs at bottom have a sense of morality not dissimilar to our own – for evil cannot make, only mock – they are comically unable to apply it to themselves. In both Author pp. 131–3 and the article ‘Orcs, Wraiths, Wights’ cited in note 7 above, I discuss the orcs with particular reference to the scene centred on ‘old Ufthak’ at the very end of The Two Towers. The theological status of the orcs continued to give Tolkien anxiety after publication of LOTR, see Morgoth’s Ring pp. 408–24.

  15 The two concepts are distinguished with special sharpness by Aragorn in his death-scene in Appendix A 1, p. 1038. It is not clear that Arwen appreciates the distinction.

  16 Richard C. West, in ‘The Interlace Structure of The Lord of the Rings’, A Tolkien Compass, ed. Jared Lobdell (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1975), pp. 77–94, also asks why Tolkien should for once follow Old French models, but gives a more abstract answer.

  17 The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. E. Vinaver, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd edn. 1967), vol. I, pp. lxiv-lxv. The passage is a description of one ‘Vulgate’ romance specifically, but can be applied readily to others.

  18 I discuss the ironies surrounding Denethor at greater length in Author, pp. 172–3. They become visible only if one follows Tolkien’s very careful but unobtrusive cross-referencing of dates, but briefly, one may be fairly sure that Denethor despairs because he has seen, in the palantír, a vision of the captured Ring-bearer, and has concluded, wrongly, that Sauron now possesses the Ring.

  19 Thus Galadriel’s piece of advice to Legolas on p. 492, ‘Legolas Greenleaf, long under tree / In joy thou hast lived. Beware of the Sea! …’ echoes in rhythm and syntax one of R.M. Wilson’s scraps of The Lost Literature of Medieval England, p. 99:

  In clento cou bache kenelm kynebearn

  lith under [haze] thorne hæuedes bereaved.

  ‘In Clent by the cow-stream Kenelm the king’s child

  lies under hawthorn, robbed of his head.’

  I think Tolkien put this in only because the model came from the depths of the Mark, indeed from Clent, five miles from his boyhood home in Rednal. Wilson’s book came out in 1952, but the section on Kenelm had come out separately as an article in 1941.

  20 If the War of the Ring had been World War II, ‘then certainly the Ring would have been seized and used against Sauron; he would not have been annihilated but enslaved, and Barad-dûr would not have been destroyed but occupied. Saruman, failing to get possession of the Ring, would in the confusion and treacheries of the time have found in Mordor the missing links in his own researches into Ring-lore, and before long he would have made a Great Ring of his own with which to challenge the self-styled Ruler of Middle-earth.’ One sees that the Ring = the A-bomb; Sauron = the Axis powers; the parties at the Council of Elrond = the Western Allies; Saruman = the U.S.S.R.; ‘treacheries’ and ‘in Mordor’ = the role of Anglo-American traitors and of German scientists in creating the Russian A-bomb. This is a proper allegory, exact in all parallels; but it is not The Lord of the Rings.

  21 It is entirely appropriate that the Peter Jackson film of 2001 should have picked this sequence out and used it twice: once in the Mines of Moria, Gandalf and Frodo talking quietly, again in the Gandalf voice-over at the end. The pronouns are significantly altered, however. First it is ‘not for us to decide’, then ‘not for you to decide’. Both alterations make sense in their new contexts, but remove Tolkien’s note of criticism.

  22 See pp. 807, 835. ‘Heathen’ of course is a word used normally only by Christians and so out of place in Middle-earth. In Appendix (c) to his British Academy lecture Tolkien had remarked on the one place where the Beowulf-poet used this word of men, thinking it a mistake or an interpolation. By the 1950s he may have changed his mind, accepting stronger Christian and anti-heroic elements in Beowulf, Maldon and his own fiction.

  23 The TLS reviewer Alfred Duggan was convinced of this, see above. But compare Aragorn, p. 763: right does not give might, nor vice versa. The ‘theory of courage’ and Beorhtwold of course say unmistakably ‘right is weak and might is wrong’, though Tolkien did not believe that either.

  24 Fair and uncommitted views of these concepts may be found in Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History (London: George Bell, 1931), and C. B. Cox’s The Free Spirit (London: Oxford U.P., 1963). The former discusses Lord Acton (and his maxim) in some detail.

  25 This comes in a reply to Mr David I. Masson’s letter in the TLS (9 December 1955), remarking on several factual and thematic inaccuracies in the earlier review. The reviewer flatly denied them all. ‘Hoity-toity’, observed Tolkien. Further differences between good and evil characters are well set out by Brian Rosebury, in Tolkien: A Critical Assessment, pp. 36–47. Good qualities include acceptance of diversity, moderation even in virtue, awareness of context, and intellectual curiosity, this latter opposed in several ways to the lack of imagination and incessant self-regard picked out by Auden as the essential defining quality of the corrupted.

  26 The Tempest, ed. Frank Kermode (Arden edition of the Works of Shakespeare, London: Methuen, 5th ed., 1954), p. liv.

  CHAPTER 6

  1 See Biography, pp. 46, 184, 220.

  2 The quotations above are taken from reviews in the Sunday Times (30 October 1955) and Daily Telegraph (27 August 1954), from Mark Roberts’s long account already cited in Essays in Criticism (1956), and from Edwin Muir’s review in the Observer (22 August 1954).

  3 C. N. Manlove, Modem Fantasy, p. 189.

  4 Works of Sir Thomas Malory, ed. Vinaver, vol. III, p. 1259.

  5 In Letters, p. 308, Tolkien said the phrase means ‘O beautiful ones, parents of beautiful children’. This has a significance in context, for Fangorn’s tragedy is to be childless; however even untranslated it attains its main effect, of ceremoniousness.

  6 I am thinking of Vera Lynn’s famous rendering of ‘We’ll meet again, / Don’t know where, don’t know when, / But I know we’ll meet again / Some sunny day’. No critic would ever argue that this is a great poem. However in the context of wartime separations it may well have said something, very powerfully, for people ordinarily unaffected by poetry of any description.

  7 C. S. Lewis makes a point similar to this in ch. 12 of his 1938 novel Out of the Silent Planet (for whose connection with Tolkien see note 4 to chapter 9). There the Martian hross Hyoi explains that the most splendid line of poetry only becomes splendid by virtue of the lines that follow it. The importance of context as against ‘tight semantic fit’ had perhaps been a topic of Inkling conversation.

  8 There is a modern version of it in Joseph Jacobs’s collection of English Fairy Tales, first published in London by David Nutt, 1890, but reprinted by the Bodley Head Press in 1968. Jacobs’s source, however, goes back to 1814 and beyond. The fairy-tale makes it clear that Shakespeare had got the story right, and had not confused it, as modern editors usually assert, with ‘Jack the Giant-killer’.

  9 There is a confusion here in all indexes to LOTR. ‘The Old Walking Song’ i.e. the one sung twice by Bilbo and once by Frodo – is at pp. 35, 72, and 965 (but not 1005). Though the song Frodo sings on p. 1005 is there called ‘the old walking-song’ it is in fact a variant of the verse indexed as ‘A Walking Song’, first seen on p. 76. Fluidity is however an element of all these verses. The elvish song on p. 1
005 is a mixture of English and Sindarin variants from pp. 78 and 231, all three indexed as ‘Elbereth … Elven hymns to’.

  10 If the song is in Quenya, a point queried by Carl F. Hostetter, to whom I am grateful for bringing the matter up, and for much linguistic information. Gildor introduces himself as being ‘of the house of Finrod’, which suggests he is a native speaker of Quenya, who however would speak Sindarin in exile in Middle-earth. Frodo greets him with a studied phrase in Quenya, described as ‘the high-elven speech’, and this is compatible with the song being ‘in the fair elven-tongue, of which Frodo knew only a little’. On the other hand, when Frodo says, ‘These are High Elves! They spoke the name of Elbereth!’, it sounds like a non sequitur, for ‘Elbereth’ (and ‘Gilthoniel’) are definitely Sindarin, the former cognate with Quenya ‘Varda’. Meanwhile, in Book II, ch. 1, ‘Many Meetings’, some seven lines of a poem in Sindarin are quoted, though not translated. These contain the phrase o galadhremmin ennorath, translated many years later by Tolkien as ‘from tree-tangled middle-lands’ (Road, p. 72), and this sounds like the ‘world of woven trees’ in the first stanza of Gildor’s song. Fragments of a similar poem, or poems, appear in Book IV, ch. 10, ‘The Choices of Master Samwise’, and in Book VI, ch. 9, ‘The Grey Havens’, but there is continuous variation, and other issues too complex to disentangle here. Perhaps the correct conclusion is that elvish poetry is as fluid as hobbit poetry, and the fluidity may include translation between the elvish languages. See further note 12 below.

  11 See The Faerie Queene Book III canto III stanza 48, ‘There shall a sparke of fire, which hath long-while / Bene in his ashes raked up and hid, / Be freshly kindled …’ ‘From the ashes a fire shall be woken,’ says Bilbo.

  12 The nature of elvish poetry is considered in much more detail by Patrick Wynne and Carl F. Hostetter in ‘Three Elvish Verse Modes: Ann-thennath, Minlamad thent / estent, and Linnod’, Legendarium pp. 113–39.