Nor the rush of wings, not the brazen mirth
Of dragons young in their fiery lust;
His hope was in gold and in jewels his trust.
Yet a dragon found his dark cold hole,
And he lost the earth and the things he stole.
There was an old dragon under an old stone
Blinking with red eyes all alone.
The flames of his fiery heart burnt dim;
He was knobbed and wrinkled and bent of limb;
His joy was dead and his cruel youth,
But his lust still smouldered and he had no ruth.
To the slime of his belly the gems stuck thick
And his things of gold he would snuff and lick
As he lay thereon and dreamed of the woe
And grinding anguish thieves should know
That ever set finger on one small ring;
And dreaming uneasy he stirred a wing.
He heard not the step nor the harness clink
Till the fearless warrior at his cavern’s brink
Called him come out and fight for his gold,
Yet iron rent his heart with anguish cold.
There was an old king on a high throne;
His white beard was laid on his knees of bone,
And his mouth savoured nor meat nor drink,
Nor his ears song, he could only think
Of his huge chest with carven lid
Where the gold and jewels unseen lay hid
In a secret treasury in the dark ground,
Whose mighty doors were iron-bound.
The swords of his warriors did dull and rust,
His glory was tarnished and his rule unjust,
His halls hollow and his bowers cold,
But he was king of elfin gold.
He heard not the horns in the mountain pass,
He smelt not the blood on the trodden grass,
Yet his halls were burned and his kingdom lost,
In a grave unhonoured his bones were tossed.
There is an old hoard in a dark rock
Forgotten behind doors none can unlock.
The keys are lost and the path gone,
The mound unheeded that the grass grows on;
The sheep crop it and the larks rise
From its green mantle, and no man’s eyes
Shall find its secret, till those return
Who wrought the treasure, till again burn
The lights of Faery, and the woods shake,
And songs long silent once more awake.
‘Iúmonna gold galdre bewunden’ is line 3052 of the Old English poem Beowulf, a work with which Tolkien as a scholar was closely concerned. The words mean, in his own translation (included in a letter to Pauline Baynes, 6 December 1961, Letters, p. 312), ‘the gold of men of long ago enmeshed in enchantment’, and refer in Beowulf to a great hoard gathered in ancient days, around which has been wound a spell or curse against any who would disturb it. The title is apt for Tolkien’s poem, which explores through a series of episodes the ‘curse’ of greed and possessiveness.
All versions of the poem begin long ago, with elves singing as they work ‘under green hills’, making ‘many fair things’ (1937, 1962) with ‘gems and gold’ (1923). But greed brings (unnamed) foes to their wealth, and the elves are overthrown. Later, the treasure is held by ‘an old dwarf in a deep grot’ (cave), in the 1923 poem gained explicitly by theft: the dwarves have stolen ‘gold things’ and glimmering gems ‘from men and elves’. In the revision, the dwarf is no longer named as a thief, yet has come to have ‘silver and gold [to which] his fingers clave’ (cleaved, stuck fast); and he is said himself to make precious things, not (like the Elves) for their beauty, but ‘to buy the power of kings’. In the 1923 poem, his reclusion is only implied; in the later versions, it is made clear that when the dragon comes, he dies ‘alone in the red fire’ (1937, 1962).
The dragon of the third stanza, in turn, grows old and weak upon his hoard, while thinking ruthlessly (‘he had no ruth’, 1923), and to distraction, of what he would do to thieves. Figuratively chained to his treasure, like the old dwarf he cannot hold that for which ‘his lust still smouldered’ (1923). This, too, is the fate of the ‘old king’, obsessed with the wealth in ‘his huge chest with carven lid’, protecting it behind strong doors while fatally neglecting his kingdom. The swords of his warriors (thanes in 1937, 1962: in Anglo-Saxon England, men granted land in exchange for military service) are dull and rusted, if any remain to defend the king’s ‘hollow’ halls and cold bowers (dwellings).
The irony of this final episode, as Tom Shippey has remarked, is that the hoard lay ‘in secret treasury in the dark ground’, and when the old king dies it is forgotten ‘behind doors none can unlock’ (1937, 1962). In the first Iúmonna Gold Galdre Bewunden the hoard lies ‘unheeded’ beneath a green mound, ‘and no man’s eyes / Shall find its secret, till those return / Who wrought the treasure’. The 1923 poem looks ahead to that time as a return to golden days, ‘till again burn / The lights of Faery’, while the later versions foretell indefinite loss, ‘While gods wait and the elves sleep, / its old secret shall the earth keep’ (1937), amended to ‘The old hoard the Night shall keep, / while earth waits and the Elves sleep’ (1962).
The dragon of the poems, to whose belly ‘gems stuck thick’, and who in the 1937 and 1962 versions ‘knew the place of the least ring / beneath the shadow of his black wing’, is a close cousin to Smaug in The Hobbit (first published 1937), with his ‘waistcoat of fine diamonds’, as well as kin to the Beowulf dragon, which sat upon its hoard for three hundred years. In Chapter 12 of The Hobbit, Bilbo enters Smaug’s lair and steals a cup; Smaug soon misses it, though it is only the smallest part of a vast treasure. ‘Dragons’, Tolkien explains, ‘may not have much real use for all their wealth, but they know it to an ounce as a rule, especially after long possession; and Smaug was no exception.’ The dragon of the poems is also recalled in The Hobbit in Smaug’s ‘uneasy dream’, ‘in which a warrior, altogether insignificant in size but provided with a bitter sword and great courage, figured most unpleasantly’.
In the Bombadil preface, Tolkien writes of The Hoard, now imagined to have been written in the hobbits’ Red Book, that it depended ‘on the lore of Rivendell, Elvish and Númenórean, concerning the heroic days at the end of the First Age [of Middle-earth]; it seems to contain echoes of the Númenórean tale of Túrin and Mîm the Dwarf’. Rivendell, in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, is an Elvish stronghold, and in the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings is said to have been an important source of information for Hobbit historians. Númenor was an island kingdom of Men, founded after the fall of the dark lord, Morgoth; at the end of the Second Age, Númenóreans came to Middle-earth and founded the realms of Arnor and Gondor. Túrin (Túrin Turambar), a Man, was one of the greatest warriors of the First Age; in ‘The Silmarillion’ (as it developed in the 1950s) he spares the life of Mîm the Petty-Dwarf. Mîm also figures in the mythology from its earlier tales, in connection with a dragon’s hoard in the fortress of Nargothrond (though not at that time with Túrin): in the Quenta Noldorinwa (c. 1930), Mîm ‘sat there in joy fingering the gold and gems, and letting them run ever through his hands; and he bound them to himself with many spells’ (The Shaping of Middle-earth (1986), p. 132). Tolkien’s reference to Mîm in the Bombadil preface was the first published mention of a character whose story would not be told in any form until The Silmarillion appeared in 1977, fifteen years later.
A connection between The Hoard and ‘The Silmarillion’ was also pursued by Tolkien in a letter to Mrs Eileen Elgar, 5 March 1964, in which he discussed the poem almost as if it were an epitome of the mythology. He explained that the ‘gods’ of the first stanza are demiurgic powers (the Ainur) who aided Ilúvatar (God) in singing the world into being, including silver and gold among all matter; and that although Dwarves were not allied to evil, they were naturally disposed to pass from the love of making things to a fierce possessi
veness. One therefore could look at The Hoard (and its 1937 precursor only) for other elements of the mythology, such as Elvenhome, a name which typically refers to Eldamar, the home of the Elves in the distant West of Tolkien’s fictional world, but in this context must mean, more broadly, the lands in which the elves live, or the Elvish people themselves. (In particular, one may think of the Elven realm of Doriath, and of its downfall: see The Silmarillion, ch. 22.) Hell, meanwhile, could refer, as it does in drafts of the mythology, to the dungeon-fortress of Angband. And in the poem as in ‘The Silmarillion’, Elves are created first among peoples, ‘ere dwarf was bred’.
And yet, in ‘The Silmarillion’ as it stood in 1937 but not in the Oxford Magazine poem of that year (carried forward in 1962), the main labours of the Ainur took place long before the creation of the moon and sun; and it also must be said that ‘When the moon was new and the sun young’ is very much of a kind with ‘once upon a time, long ago’ as a traditional way to begin a story, whether or not it refers to an earlier conception. The Iúmonna Gold Galdre Bewunden of 1923, though with no reference to ‘gods’, also includes ‘Silmarillion’ echoes, for instance that the Elves sang under green hills (in Elfinesse, an earlier equivalent of Elvenhome) before ‘dwarves were spawned in dungeons rude’ (primitive). It is conceivable that the mythology – always a ‘dominant construction’ in Tolkien’s thoughts (Letters, p. 346) – had an influence on the earlier poem’s composition; but it need not have done. Literary treatments of hoards were abundant before 1923, if any were needed for inspiration, and the subjects of greed and power run like a thread through Tolkien’s fiction, most significantly in The Hobbit with its ‘dragon-sickness’, The Lord of the Rings with its overmastering Ring, and the story of Fëanor and the Silmarils in ‘The Silmarillion’.
On 6 December 1961, Tolkien wrote to Pauline Baynes that The Hoard should not be treated in her illustrations as ‘light-hearted’, but rather as a tale of the woes of ‘successive (nameless) inheritors’ of a treasure and ‘a tapestry of antiquity’ in which ‘individual pity’ is not to be deeply engaged. In response to Baynes having chosen The Hoard as her favourite among the Bombadil poems, Tolkien said that he ‘was most interested. … For it is the least fluid [of the poems], being written in [a] mode rather resembling the older English verse’ – that is, in the Anglo-Saxon manner, with a caesura or pause between each half-line (Letters, p. 312).
Tolkien approved Baynes’s pictures in the Bombadil collection except for her full-page illustration for The Hoard. In a letter to Rayner Unwin, he wrote that ‘in spite of the excellent Worm [dragon] [the picture] fails badly on the young warrior. This is an archaic and heroic theme …, but the young person, without helm or shield, looks like a Tudor lackey with some elements of late mediaeval armour on his legs. I understand the pictorial difficulties; but of course no dragon, however decrepit would lie with his head away from the entrance’ (29 August 1962, A&U archive; Chronology, p. 596). Despite Tolkien’s misgivings, the illustration was published, and continued to be reprinted; Baynes, however, took his criticism to heart and revised the picture for the Tolkien collection Poems and Stories (1980; reproduced in our introduction to the present book), improving in addition to the ‘young warrior’ and the dragon her rendering of the treasure, which in the 1962 volume is indistinct.
The 1923 and 1937 versions of Iúmonna Gold Galdre Bewunden were reprinted in Beowulf and the Critics (2002, revised edn. 2011), with analysis and alternate readings by editor Michael D.C. Drout. Tolkien included the poem as a ‘digression’ in an Oxford discussion of Beowulf in the early 1930s. The lecture, Beowulf and the Critics, revised and without the poem, became Tolkien’s 1936 British Academy lecture, Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.
THE SEA-BELL
The Sea-Bell is a revised and expanded version of the poem Looney, which Tolkien wrote probably in 1932 or 1933 and published in the Oxford Magazine for 18 January 1934:
‘Where have you been; what have you seen
Walking in rags down the street?’
‘I come from a land, where cold was the strand,
Where no men were me to greet.
I came on a boat empty afloat.
I sat me thereon; swift did it swim;
Sail-less it fled, oar-less it sped;
The stony beaches faded dim.
It bore me away, wetted with spray,
Wrapped in the mist, to another land;
Stars were glimmering; the shore was shimmering,
Moon on the foam, silver the sand.
I gathered me stones whiter than bones,
Pearls and crystals and glittering shells;
I climbed into meadows fluttered with shadows,
Culling there flowers with shivering bells,
Garnering leaves and grasses in sheaves.
I clad me in raiment jewel-green,
My body enfolded in purple and gold;
Stars were in my eyes, and the moonsheen.
There was many a song all the night long
Down in the valley, many a thing
Running to and fro: hares white as snow,
Voles out of holes, moths on the wing
With lantern eyes. In quiet surprise
Badgers were staring out of dark doors.
There was dancing there, wings in the air,
Feet going quick on the green floors.
There came a dark cloud. I shouted aloud;
Answer was none, as onward I went.
In my ears dinned a hurrying wind;
My hair was a-blowing, my back was bent.
I walked in a wood; silent it stood
And no leaf bore; bare were the boughs.
There did I sit wandering in wit;
Owls went by to their hollow house.
I journeyed away for a year and a day —
Shadows were on me, stones beneath —
Under the hills, over the hills,
And the wind a-whistling through the heath.
Birds there were flying, ceaselessly crying;
Voices I heard in the grey caves
Down by the shore. The water was frore,
Mist was there lying on the long waves.
There stood the boat, still did it float
In the tide spinning, on the water tossing.
I sat me therein; swift did it swim
The waves climbing, the seas crossing,
Passing old hulls clustered with gulls,
And the great ships laden with light,
Coming to haven, dark as a raven,
Silent as owl, deep in the night.
Houses were shuttered, wind round them muttered;
Roads were all empty. I sat by a door
In pattering rain, counting my gain:
Only withering leaves and pebbles I bore,
And a single shell, where I hear still the spell
Echoing far, as down the street
Ragged I walk. To myself I must talk,
For seldom they speak, men that I meet.’
The dialogue in Looney recalls that of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, except that Coleridge’s ‘grey-beard loon’ compels the wedding guest to hear his story, while the traveller in Looney tells his tale only after being asked to do so: ‘Where have you been, what have you seen’. Here there are two voices, and men ‘seldom’ speak to the traveller; in The Sea-Bell, there is only one, for the men the traveller meets ‘speak not’. Also in The Sea-Bell, a black cloud comes upon the traveller after he ‘proudly’ commands the unseen inhabitants to ‘come forth all’, whereas in Looney he ‘shout[s] aloud’ only after the dark cloud appears. The poems differ as well in regard to the ‘sea-bell’ itself: in Looney, the traveller returns with ‘a single shell, where I hear still the spell’; in the later poem, his journey is preceded by the finding of a shell, in which he hears the ‘call ringing / over endless seas’, as if a summons or invitation.
Both poems describe a visit to an Otherworld lasting ‘a year and a day
’, but only the later work includes an ‘elvish’ element in which those who live in the distant land are ever just out of reach. Tom Shippey has noted in The Road to Middle-earth that in Looney, the mysterious land is a vision of paradise for two stanzas before turning dark; in The Sea-Bell, however, menacing images – roaring breakers, ‘a perilous reef’, ‘cliffs of stone’, ‘glooming caves’ – occur at once, and the mood persists. ‘Faërie’, as Tolkien wrote, speaking of the realm of fairy-story, ‘is a perilous land, and in it are pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold. … [Its] very richness and strangeness tie the tongue of a traveller who would report them. And while he is there it is dangerous for him to ask too many questions, lest the gates should be shut and the keys be lost’ (On Fairy-Stories, in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, p. 109).
As more than one critic has said, the situation of the speaker in Looney and The Sea-Bell is common in fairy-stories: that of one who journeys to Faërie and finds himself changed. The travellers in both poems return ragged, the one in The Sea-Bell bent and grey, with years heavy upon his back. Also as in traditional fairy-stories, where those who try to take something from the fairy realm (or who are paid in fairy gold) find that little or nothing remains, the speaker in Looney counts his ‘gain’ as ‘only withering leaves and pebbles’ and ‘a single shell’, but at least the bell is still ‘echoing far’. For the traveller in The Sea-Bell, having claimed power in the ‘strange land’ – symbolized by ‘a tall wand to hold, and a flag of gold’, the sceptre and sword of royalty – his ‘clutching hand’ retains only ‘grains of sand, / and a sea-bell silent and dead’. For him, impatient to be carried away in the boat and then presumptuous in proclaiming kingship, even a distant echo of Faërie is denied: ‘Never will my ear that bell hear, / never my feet that shore tread, / never again’.
In the Bombadil preface, Tolkien describes The Sea-Bell as ‘certainly of hobbit origin’, a late work in the time scheme of Middle-earth, with a scrawled title, Frodos Dreme at the head of its (fictional) manuscript. ‘That’, he says, ‘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.’ In Book VI, Chapter 9 of The Lord of the Rings, and in Appendix B of that work (The Tale of Years), Frodo is said to fall ill on 13 March, the anniversary of his poisoning by Shelob, and on 6 October, the date he was wounded on Weathertop. ‘There were certainly other traditions’, Tolkien continues, ‘concerning Hobbits that were taken by the “wandering-madness”’ – a rare state first mentioned in Chapter 1 of The Hobbit (‘so many quiet lads and lasses going off into the Blue for mad adventures’) – ‘and if they ever returned, were afterwards queer and uncommunicable.’
The Adventures of Tom Bombadil Page 13