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

by Tom Shippey

  13 Tolkien’s notes on this passage in Road, pp. 66–70, make it clear that Galadriel is making a wish for Frodo (one that comes true). Tolkien there refined his translation of the Quenya to ‘May it be that’ (thou shalt find Valinor) …

  14 His poem ‘The Nameless Land’, printed in Realities, ed. G. S. Tancred, 1927, is however in a close imitation of the Pearl stanza-form.

  15 There is an account of the finds, with photographs, in P. V. Glob, The Bog People (London: Faber and Faber, 1969).

  16 Lewis’s attention may have been drawn to Uhtred by M. D. Knowles, ‘The Censured Opinions of Uthred [sic] of Boldon’, Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 37 (1951), pp. 305–42.

  17 The most convenient excerpt from this is in Beowulf and its Analogues, trans.G. Garmonsway and J. Simpson (London and New York: Dent and Dutton, 1968).

  18 All these are asserted in Byrhtferth’s Manual, ed. S. J. Crawford, Early English Text Society, Original Series 177 (London: Oxford U.P., 1929), pp. 82–5.

  19 There is similarly no reference (or almost none) to any of these things in Beowulf. The person who steals the dragon’s cup may have been a slave – the word is blurred in the manuscript. Two characters known from other sources to have had incestuous births pass without comment in Beowulf. These seem clear cases of the poet saying the best he could, or not saying the worst he could, of characters he knew had been pagan, slave-owning, ignorant of Christian sexual ethics. All this gave a lead to Tolkien.

  20 Once again, a point much easier to check with the help of Richard Blackwelder’s Tolkien Thesaurus.

  21 There is an extensive ‘reconstructed’ account of this thesis in Carpenter, Inklings, Part One, section 3, especially pp. 42–5. See also Verlyn Flieger, Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World (1983; rev. edn. Kent, Ohio: Kent State U.P., 2002).

  22 The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, ed. F. J. Child (5 vols., Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1882–98), vol. II, p. 230, ‘Sweet William’s Ghost’.

  23 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: four essays (Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1957), p. 33. The material cited here is from pp. 33–43 of the first essay, but see also p. 117 (on C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams), p. 186 (on Gothic revivals), p. 187 (on ‘middle’ worlds); and further N. Frye, The Secular Scripture: a study of the structure of romance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U.P., 1976), where some remarks on Tolkien are made.

  24 See Saxo Grammaticus, The Danish History, Books I-IX, trans. O. Elton with intro, by F. York Powell (London: David Nutt, 1894), p. 38.

  25 Tolkien’s ‘neutral’ style is well analysed and defended by Brian Rosebury, Tolkien: A Critical Assessment, pp. 65–71.

  CHAPTER 7

  1 I am most grateful to Mr Noad for showing me the full text of his essay, which had to be cut down considerably in its published form for reasons of space.

  2 See John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War: the Threshold of Middle-earth (London: HarperCollins, 2003). Mr Garth’s study, using documents only released to the public in 1998, amplifies or corrects the account given in Humphrey Carpenter’s Biography in many places. I am most grateful to Mr Garth also for showing me an early draft of this work.

  3 In the first and second editions I expanded ‘the undertaking’ with the words ‘[to write The Silmarillion]’. This was clearly wrong, for ‘the Silmarillion’, at least, already existed. Perhaps ‘the undertaking’ here should be seen as ‘the task of putting in order some or all of the legends of the earlier ages, referred to in the Appendices’ of The Lord of the Rings, which is what is written earlier in the letter. The problem was one of presentation, see again Lost Tales 1, pp. 2–4.

  4 Dates of parts of the Unfinished Tales given here and subsequently are deductions from Christopher Tolkien’s notes, UT, pp. 4–13.

  5 This is the opinion, for instance, of Robert Foster in The Complete Guide to Middle-Earth (London: George Allen & Unwin, 2nd ed., 1978), who argues in the ‘Introduction’ that the human conflicts of The Lord of the Rings gain force from their relation to the greater ones of The Silmarillion.

  6 In the first version of ‘The Passing of the Grey Company’ (The Return of the King, 1st edn., 1955, p. 53), Gimli learns that Aragorn has looked in the palantir, and expresses astonishment. ‘“You forget to whom you speak,” said Aragorn sternly, and his eyes glinted. “What do you fear that I should say: that I had a rascal of a rebel dwarf here that I would gladly exchange for a serviceable orc?”’ (In the second edition and subsequently this last sarcastic question is eliminated).

  7 For Tolkien’s last word on the subject, see note 14 to chapter 5.

  8 I am thinking of Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy, see my article ‘The Magic Art and the Evolution of Words’ in Mosaic, vol. 10, no. 2 (1977), pp. 147–64.

  9 I discuss the inconsistencies, and the consistencies, in ‘Alias Oves Habeo: the Elves as a Category Problem’, in The Shadow-walkers, see note 16 to ch. 2; with further reference to Tolkien in my ‘Introduction’ to the volume, ‘A Revolution Reconsidered: Mythology and Mythography in the Nineteenth Century’.

  10 See J. F. Campbell’s Popular Tales of the Western Highlands (4 vols., Paisley and London: Alexander Gardner, 1890–3), vol. 2, p. 75. Tolkien refers to this collection in the notes to ‘On Fairy-Stories’ (Tree, pp. 16, 67).

  11 This quotation is from the legend of St Michael in The Early South English Legendary, ed. C. Horstmann, Early English Text Society, Original Series 87 (London: Trübner, 1887), lines 253–8.

  12 To labour this point further: Gandalf is a Maia, was called by Tolkien ‘an angel’, yet is perceived by Men – as his name indicates – as some sort of ‘elf’. Conversely an ignorant Man, looking at Galadriel (an elf), might well think she was an ‘angel’, or of the same order as the Maia Melian. Both ladies would be so superior to him as to make fine distinction impossible.

  13 Tolkien kept changing his mind about this: the strong implication of LOTR, p. 369 (confirmed by Road, p. 68), is that Galadriel, as last survivor of the leaders of the Noldorian revolt, was banned from returning to Valimar. In The Silmarillion, pp. 83–4, Galadriel acquiesces in the revolt out of the motive (surely not entirely a good one) ‘to rule a realm [in Middle-earth] at her own will’. There is an echo of this when Frodo offers her the Ring at LOTR, p. 356, and she sees herself as ‘a Queen’. In his later years, however, after 1968, Tolkien suggested that she was not banned, but self-exiled, having refused pardon (UT, pp. 230–1). And in ‘the last month of his life’ he wrote a more complicated account (UT, pp. 231–2), exculpating her entirely. This, I feel, was another example of the ‘soft-heartedness’ discussed above here and here.

  14 By Paul H. Kocher, A Reader’s Guide to The Silmarillion (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1980), p. 56.

  15 For older theories, see Kaarle Krohn, Kalevalastudien (Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Sciences, 1924–5). The modern remark quoted is from Finnish Folk Poetry, Epic: An Anthology in Finnish and English, ed. and trans. Matti Kuusi, Keith Bosley and Michael Branch (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 1977), p. 526. This book however gives an excellent introduction to the sampo concept.

  16 ‘Having the same mother, having different mothers’: the terms are taken from the Eddic poem Hamðismál (about the death of the king of the Goths).

  17 Kalevala: the land of the heroes, trans. W. F. Kirby (London and New York: Dent and Dutton, 1907, repr. 1977), vol. 2, p. 124. This is the translation Tolkien used. He no doubt read on and may have relished the moral at the end of the runo warning men against sending children to be fostered by strangers.

  CHAPTER 8

  1 The circumstances of its composition are explained in Bibliography, pp. 200–201. It began as a brief illustration of a point to be made in the ‘Preface’ to a George Macdonald story, ‘but the story grew and took on a life if its own, and the preface was abandoned.’

  2 See David Doughan, ‘In Search of the Bounce: Tolkien seen through Smith’, in Leaves from the Tree: J.R.R. Tolkie
n’s Shorter Fiction, ed. Alex Lewis (London: Tolkien Society, 1991), pp. 17–22; and Verlyn Flieger, A Question of Time: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Road to Faërie (Kent, Ohio and London: Kent State U.P., 1997), ch. 11, ‘Pitfalls in Faërie’; and Flieger, ‘Allegory versus Bounce,’ see note 6 below.

  3 Flieger, A Question of Time, p. 232.

  4 Compare ‘the skin o’ my nuncle Tim’ in Sam’s ‘Rhyme of the Troll’, LOTR, p. 201. Many years before Tolkien had noted ‘naunt’ for ‘aunt’ in Sir Gawain; and Haigh’s Huddersfield glossary of 1928 (see above) showed that saying ‘aunt’ instead of ‘nont’ was considered affected by his older informants. As often, old English survived only as vulgar modern English.

  5 It is interesting, with hindsight, to read Tolkien’s June 27th 1925 letter of application from Leeds for the Chair of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, Letters, pp. 11–12. Tolkien was clearly advertising himself as someone who could draw students into traditionally difficult and unpopular subjects, encourage ‘friendly rivalry and open debate’ between the literature and the language specialists, and cultivate ‘the growing neighbourliness of linguistic and literary studies’. Any ‘neighbourliness’ there was – Tolkien no doubt exaggerated it for effect – soon stopped growing. This was unfortunate, to say the least, for both sides.

  6 I discuss the mechanics of solving an allegory like Smith in Author, pp. 297–304, and further in my half of an exchange with Dr Flieger, ‘Allegory versus Bounce: Tolkien’s Smith of Wootton Major,’ Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 12/2 (2001), 186–200 (191–200).

  7 I discuss the importance to Tolkien of the difficult word ‘lay’ in Author, pp. 233–6, 293.

  8 In ‘The Source of “The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun”’, in Leaves from the Tree: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Shorter Fiction, ed. Alex Lewis (London: Tolkien Society, 1991), pp. 63–71, Jessica Yates discusses the poem’s ‘kernel’ extensively. T. Keightley’s The Fairy Mythology of 1878 is indeed a probable source for Tolkien, and for Wimberly.

  9 This is ‘The Hoard’, which had begun in 1923 as ‘Iumonna Gold Galdre Bewunden’, see note 15 to chapter 2. In the 1962 version the passing of the gold from elf to dwarf, in stanzas 1 to 2, could be seen as a part of the events of The Silmarillion ch. 22, the death of Elu Thingol and the fall of Doriath.

  10 I am grateful to John D. Rateliff for telling me about the poem ‘Firiel’, published first on pp. 30–2 of the 1934 volume (no. 4) of The Chronicle of the Convents of the Sacred Heart, produced by the convent at Roehampton. Sister Joan Loveday, the convent’s archivist, provided Mr Rateliff with a copy, which he very kindly passed to me. I should add that Mr Rateliff is of the opinion that few of the poems in TB are entirely new, though early versions may still be extant only in obscure periodicals or hidden under pseudonyms – as was the case with “The Clerkes Compleint’, see ‘Preface’ to this volume.

  11 The best account of this theory is in Inklings, pp. 42–5, but see also ‘On Fairy-Stories’ (Tree, pp. 46–56, 70–73).

  12 Early South English Legendary, ed. Horstmann, ‘Life of St. Brendan’, lines 55–6.

  CHAPTER 9

  1 Sir George Webbe Dasent, Popular Tales from the Norse (Edinburgh: David Douglas, revised edition 1903), p. xx. Dasent’s first edition came out in 1851.

  2 The essay began as a lecture given to the University of St Andrews in March 1939, but was expanded for publication in 1947, and further revised later, see Bibliography p. 301.

  3 See John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson, Dickens at Work (London: Methuen paperback, 1968), p. 116.

  4 The origin of both works in Tolkien’s agreement with C. S. Lewis to write, respectively, a time-travel and a space-travel story is discussed by John D. Rateliff, ‘The Lost Road, The Dark Tower, and The Notion Club Papers: Tolkien and Lewis’s Time Travel Triad’, in Legendarium, pp. 199–218. The article is revealing also about the dates of composition, and about the two authors’ mutual co-operation.

  5 Anders Stenström points out, in ‘A Mythology? For England?’ in Proceedings of the Tolkien Centenary Conference, ed. Patricia Reynolds and Glen H. Good-Knight (Milton Keynes: Tolkien Society; Altadena, CA: Mythopoeic Press, 1995), pp. 310–14, that Tolkien does not seem actually to have used the phrase. The general intention, however, is clear.

  6 See for instance R. M. Wilson, The Lost Literature of Medieval England, pp. 14–16.

  7 It is impossible to even sketch a coverage of the – often highly derivative – Tolkien imitations. A mere glance round a bookshop will show titles like C.D. Simak, The Fellowship of the Talisman (1978), James Blaylock, The Elfin Ship (1982), David Eddings, Guardians of the West Book One of the Malloreon (1987), R.A. Salvatore, The Halfling’s Gem (1990). I would guess that at least fifty authors, many of them highly successful in their own right, show evident debt to Tolkien; and this is ignoring his deep influence on ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ motifs, and on electronic games. His example created a genre almost single-handed: I note some signs of a non-Tolkienian but analogous tradition in my introduction to William Morris, The Wood Beyond the World (London: Oxford U.P., World’s Classics reprint, 1980), p. xvii.

  8 In this discussion I use the Norse forms Sigurthr, Brynhildr, for characters in Old Norse texts; Sifrit, Prünhild, for the characters in the Middle High German Nibelungenlied; and the anglicised Sigurd, Brynhild, for ‘composite’ characters, characters outside any particular text or group of texts. The variety does help to explain why Tolkien thought it normal for his elvish names to have several different forms.

  9 I am grateful to Johann Schimanski, of the Tolkien Society of Norway, for inviting me to give a lecture including some of this material in 1987. His criticisms and those of others present, including Anders Stenström, editor of Arda, sharpened my thoughts considerably. The lecture appeared eventually in Arda, the journal of the Swedish Tolkien Society, vol. 7 (1987), pp. 18–39, under the title ‘Long Evolution: “The History of Middle-earth” and its merits.’

  10 A point made strongly by C. S. Lewis, see his essay ‘It All Began with a Picture …’ in Of Other Worlds, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: Harcourt, Brace, World, 1967).

  11 See the references given in note 14 to chapter 5.

  12 ‘And other’ is a favourite carelessness: ‘wizards and other powers’, ‘runic and other messages’, ‘Old Norse and other materials’. The distinction I make between the ‘tough-minded’ and the ‘tender-minded’ above is relevant.

  13 Calling the War of the Ring a ‘largely racial war’ seems to me an anachronism. It is of course very largely a war between species; and to people nowadays, acutely sensitive to racial politics, this may seem to be a metaphor for race. There is no sign, however, that Tolkien thought that way. The Corsairs of Umbar have the same racial origin as the Gondorians, LOTR, pp. 1022–3. When Tolkien encountered racial politics in person, he reacted angrily and contemptuously, regardless of cost, see Letters, pp. 37–8.

  14 It is interesting (to philologists) to note that, just like ‘addictive’, the words ‘racism’ and ‘genocide’ remained missing from the OED as late as 1979. This is not to say that such things did not exist in the Victorian mind or in the nineteenth century. In the rural Worcestershire of Tolkien’s youth, however, peaceful and racially entirely homogeneous, they would have taken a good deal of explaining, just as they would in the fictional Shire.

  15 See Golding’s essay ‘Fable’, in The Hot Gates (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), p. 87.

  16 See for instance the speech of Egeus in Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’, lines 1984–90. The topos is also used by C. S. Lewis’s character, the Greek slave-philosopher Fox, in Lewis’s 1956 novel Till We Have Faces.

  17 See Swanwick, ‘A Changeling Returns’, in Karen Haber, ed., Meditations on Middle-earth (New York: Byron Preiss, 2001), pp. 33–46 (45). This volume contains valuable responses by, among other major contemporary writers of fantasy, George Martin, Poul Anderson, Terry Pratchett, Ursula Le Guin.

  18 For the quotation, see the last page of T. H. White, The Book
of Merlyn (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977).

  AFTERWORD

  1 For thorough analyses of the two deficiencies mentioned, see respectively Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (New Haven and London: Yale U.P., 1979), and C. S. Ferns, Aldous Huxley: Novelist (London: Athlone Press, 1980). Tolkien liked science fiction, and had some (not very obvious) similarities to Huxley.

  2 See William James, The Will to Believe and other essays (New York: Longmans Green, 1896), pp. 65–6, and further Pragmatism (same imprint, 1907), pp. 11–14.

  3 I am referring in the paragraph above to such works as Ruth S. Noel, The Mythology of Middle-Earth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), Timothy R. O’Neill, The Individuated Hobbit: Jung, Tolkien and the Archetypes of Middle Earth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), Anne C. Petty, One Ring to Bind them All: Tolkien’s Mythology (University, Al.: University of Alabama Press, 1979), especially p. 103. But see also the books cited in note 28 to chapter 1. For a detailed critique of one particular work, see my review of Jane Chance Nitzsche, Tolkien’s Art: A Mythology for England (London: Macmillan, 1979), in Notes and Queries N.S. vol. 27 (1980), pp. 570–2.

  4 Four Quartets, ‘East Coker’, lines 174–81, quoted here from The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1969).

  5 All of these have been discussed above, except ‘worship’. If one re-reads the line from Milton’s sonnet quoted above, one can see that Milton meant ‘worship’ to mean ‘honour or revere as a supernatural being … or as a holy thing’. But that idolatrous sense vanishes if one gives ‘worship’ its older sense (derived from ‘worth’) of ‘regard … with honour or respect’. Tolkien surely appreciated the way an insult to ‘our fathers’ could be read as a compliment.

  6 Tolkien was perhaps amused by the proverb ‘Where there’s a will there’s a way’. It is not recorded till 1822, but would have sounded much the same in Old English. He made it into a line of alliterative poetry, accordingly, in LOTR, p. 787, ‘Where will wants not, a way opens’. ‘Where there’s a whip there’s a will’, say the orcs, LOTR, p. 910. In the Old Norse Hamðismál there is a discouraging variant, Illt er blauðom hal brautir kenna, ‘It’s no good showing a coward the road’, or as I would put it, ‘Where there’s no will there’s no way’. This often seems more appropriate.